Half woozy Los Angeles beats and half lo-fi techno, Mount Kimbie’s new double album doesn’t sound much like anything they’ve done before. It’s also some of their least original work.

Mount Kimbie: MK 3.5: Die Cuts | City Planning

MK 3.5: Die Cuts | City Planning

As one of post-dubstep’s signature acts, Mount Kimbie were always more interested in the post than the dubstep. On early EPs, they swapped out sub-bass pressure for wheezing organs, broken music boxes, and the clatter of tilted pinball machines, and over the intervening 13 years, the UK duo’s sound has remained a moving target. First, on 2010’s Crooks & Lovers, they folded in feathery guitar and little curlicues of R&B, channeling a downbeat tradition running back through Mo Wax and Boards of Canada. With 2013’s Cold Spring Fault Less Youth, they further sidelined overt club aesthetics, fleshing out moody miniatures with slowcore guitar and mumbled vocals. They abruptly feinted into ’80s post-punk with 2017’s Love What Survives, working once again with King Krule’s Archy Marshall, along with James Blake and Mica Levi, and allowing the British singer’s gloopy, elastic tenor to shape the bruised outline of their own synths and guitars. But now, on MK 3.5 Die Cut / City Planning, the path doesn’t just twist; it forks.
While this is technically album number four, the title suggests that MK 3.5 may represent a stopgap measure or a detour. It is, in essence, Mount Kimbie’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, in that each of the duo’s members gets one disc apiece to run free. Dom Maker, who moved to California some five years ago and soon began racking up sessions with artists like JAY-Z and Travis Scott, delivers a record steeped in R&B and hip-hop and informed by L.A.’s collaborative spirit. Kai Campos, who remained in London, turns his back on Mount Kimbie’s habitual fusion and immerses himself in lo-fi techno purism. Though they share a common focus on mood, it’s striking how vast the gulf between the two men’s interests is.
Maker’s disc, subtitled Die Cuts, is the more outgoing of the two by a considerable margin. Stitched together from musical samples, bits of movie dialogue, and sessions recorded with friends and peers like Sampha and Duval Timothy, it plays out like a single, interconnected suite. The prevailing aesthetic descends from neo-soul and derivations of Dilla-esque boom bap, filtered through contemporary bass music’s molten sound design. No sound comes to us straight: Drum machines are muffled through cheesecloth, keys are reversed and repitched, stray voices are sped up or slowed down. Foreground and background are interchangeable; everything feels smeared into a suggestive haze.
Like Marshall, Maker’s guest rappers—slowthai, Danny Brown, Wiki—favor marble-mouthed flows that emphasize timbre over text. It’s not always pretty to listen to—the yelpy insistence of “in your eyes” undercuts the tenderness of the surrounding songs, though you can see why Maker gravitates toward these guests; he likes squawkers who can bend their voices like synthesizers. But singers like reggie, Nomi, and KeiyaA make a more satisfying fit for Maker’s whisper-soft textures; the most understated songs—the opening “dvd,” featuring Michigan’s Choker, and the trip-hop jazz of the closing “a deities encore,” featuring Liv.e—use his nuanced sound design as a foil for the singers’ own expression, elevating mood pieces into something more substantial.
If Maker’s Die Cuts represents a contemporary model of pop production as a creative free-for-all, Campos’ City Planning suggests a more hermetic vision: the techno producer locked in the studio, conjuring imaginary worlds into being. Where Die Cuts is lush and melodic, City Planning is a grayscale grid of fizzing hi-hats, muffled kicks, dusky squelch. Campos’ disc also plays out like a single piece of music: Tracks bleed together across index points, and while the tempo and beat patterns occasionally shift, most of the elements sound like they come from a single bank of machines. Campos’ touchstones are artists like Robert Hood and Drexciya, Detroit producers determined to cut their grooves as close to the bone as possible, along with his sometime collaborator Actress, who has fashioned an entire language out of static. The mood is resolutely wintry; the textures suggest an ice scraper dragged across a frosted windshield. There are no vocals. Titles like “Satellite 7,” “Satellite 9,” and “Satellite 6 (Corrupted)” offer a snapshot of work in progress—intensely private music that becomes public once pumped through a big system on a packed floor.
Like so many cultural products nowadays, Die Cuts / City Planning is presented as not just an album, but a multimedia arts project. Maker’s half is accompanied by a short and very NSFW film by Tyrone Lebon, a fashion photographer who directed the video for Frank Ocean’s “Nikes,” consisting largely of artfully blurred yet profoundly intimate scenes of couples having sex. City Planning, which Campos says was inspired by kinetic sculpture, received an actual urban footprint via an outdoor installation by sculptor Tom Shannon, who created a stack of giant silvery balls to represent the music’s eerie sheen. (That installation came to a premature end when high winds sent the orbs careening down the streets of Camden.)
Both art projects feel like overreach—attempts to lend gravitas to records whose ambitions end at their parallel articulations of contemporary mood music. Though neither side sounds much like anything that Mount Kimbie have done before, this is, paradoxically, their least original album; there’s little that we haven’t heard elsewhere. There are still worthwhile ideas here, but Die Cuts / City Planning doesn’t have the bolt-from-the-blue quality that Mount Kimbie’s music once did. There’s always been something vaguely anonymous about Mount Kimbie; their character and uniqueness lay in the way they took the sounds in circulation around them and made something new. What we learn here, mainly, is that Maker and Campos are into different things these days. In that sense, Die Cut / City Planning feels like a record without a center of gravity, no matter how enjoyable the drifting may be.


Recently diagnosed with Alzheimer's, this living legend of pop crafts a final, surprisingly upbeat retirement album, one that never stoops to self-pity and very modestly reminds you of past triumphs. The set includes new songs by Paul Westerberg and Robert Pollard and guest spots from Billy Corgan, the Dandy Warhols, and more.

Ghost on the Canvas

Recently, Glen Campbell received the kind of diagnosis that everyone of a certain age dreads: Alzheimer's. Before the disease grows worse, he decided to record one final album and launch one final tour, and while most celebrity retirements seem suspect (ahem, Jay-Z, Patrick Wolf, Ryan Adams, and on and on), this one really does feel permanent, which is tragic. Campbell has had one of those impossible careers that sound more like the stuff of outrageous fiction than rock biography: An Arkansas native and music prodigy of sorts, he moved to L.A. and played in a band called the Champs (Tequila!) and worked as a member of the infamous Wrecking Crew, a group of studio musicians who backed Elvis Presley and Simon & Garfunkel and played on Phil Spector's infamous wall-of-sound recordings. That's him laying down licks on Pet Sounds, while he was a touring Beach Boy. In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, he scored huge hits with "Wichita Lineman" and "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" (both by Jimmy Webb, long overdue for a retrospective). Often dismissed as a practitioner of slick country-pop, he favored florid strings, stately vocals, and an interpretive approach most likely informed by his experience as a sideman. "Rhinestone Cowboy" pretty much sums up the contradictions of his music, which is simultaneously country but urbane, slick but still soulful.
Perhaps because he was a Nashville outsider but not a Nashville outlaw, Ghost on the Canvas sidesteps all the current conventions of country farewell albums, a growing subgenre that found its apotheosis in Johnny Cash's later recordings and Kris Kristofferson's recent pair of affairs-settling records. This is no tastefully solemn acoustic affair, with a hushed tone communicating a kind of easy-read mortal gravity. Instead, Campbell conveys a certain nostalgia for that defining sound of his prime-- or at least a nostalgia for a time when that sound was popular. "It's Your Amazing Grace" and "A Thousand Lifetimes" deploy the same tricks he's been using for decades-- those ornate string arrangements and prominent guitar themes that recall fellow Wrecking Crew member Jack Nitzsche-- but they sound fresh on these tracks, even at times adventurous. The short, instrumental interstitials are distracting as Campbell tries to cover every corner of his history, but the the presence of Billy Corgan, Cheap Trick's Rick Nielsen, and all the Dandy Warhols on Ghost suggests that the influence of this style has been, at the very least, broad.
Campbell is still taking stock of his life and career ("Sometimes I get confused, Lord/ My past gets in my way"), and that sounds odd only because it's not something he has not historically been inclined to do: He's more renowned as a sensitive vocalist than as a confessional songwriter. So songs like "A Better Place" and "There's No Me… Without You", both co-penned with producer Julian Raymond, sound perhaps a bit too direct for Campbell, although his voice remains strong enough that he doesn't need your pity to put these songs across, no matter how silly some of their sentiments. Anchoring Ghost is a handful of covers that are perhaps only slightly less adventurous than those on his 2008 album, Meet Glen Campbell. The title track and "Any Trouble" are lesser Westerberg, but they fit the album's theme all too well. Likewise, "Hold on Hope" is an obvious GBV choice (what, you expected "Tractor Rape Chain"?), but Campbell owns its schmaltz as well as its simple optimism, suggesting that Bob Pollard wrote the line "there hides the cowboy" with Campbell in mind. Ghost is nowhere near his best, most consistent, or most durable album, but that's ultimately not even the right way to measure its modest accomplishment. Instead, it's a surprisingly upbeat retirement album, one that never stoops to self-pity and very modestly reminds you of past triumphs.


On With a Little Help From My Fwends, the Flaming Lips tackle the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with help from Miley Cyrus, Tegan and Sara, J. Mascis, Tool’s Maynard James Keenan, My Morning Jacket, Foxygen, Lightning Bolt's Brian Chippendale, and others. These aren’t so much revisions as disembowelments.

The Flaming Lips: With a Little Help From My Fwends

With a Little Help From My Fwends

Back in the mid-1980s, the easiest way for underground bands to draw ideological battlelines separating themselves from their 1970s arena-rock antecedents was to appropriate their most hallowed songs for devious ends. And so we got J. Mascis moaning his way through Peter Frampton’s “Show Me the Way”, the Minutemen chopping Van Halen songs in half, Pussy Galore licking the burnt spoons littered throughout the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, Sonic Youth swiping the title of CCR’s “Bad Moon Rising” for their Reagan-era state-of-the-union address, and the Butthole Surfers grinding Black Sabbath’s “Sweet Leaf” into skunk weed. In this context, what made the early, garage-punk iteration of the Flaming Lips so strange was not their sordid subject matter, disturbing cover art, or 23-minute acid-rock jams. It was their contrarian reverence for tradition, with the band dropping straight-faced covers of Led Zeppelin’s “Thank You” and Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” into their repertoire for no other reason than they loved the songs.
As the Lips scored sudden mainstream success in the early '90s with a fluke MTV hit, their cover choices turned decidedly more esoteric, as the band used their modicum of celebrity to shine a light on known artists’ lesser-known work, reclaim new-wave novelties, or to promote then-unheralded underground peers. But in the post-Soft Bulletin era—during which the Lips’ music became both more tonally serious and relentlessly experimental—cover songs have become a necessary salve through which the band can reassert their playful side and maintain the circus-like atmosphere at their concerts even when touring behind decidedly more downcast material.
And ever since they trotted out old warhorses like “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “War Pigs” on their 2006 At War With the Mystics tour, the Lips have seemingly been on a mission to modernize the entire classic-rock canon, by curating full-album, collaboration-heavy reconstructions of Pink Floyd and King Crimson milestones (with a Stone Roses debut-album redux thrown in to show they’re still fond of music made after 1980). But while such recurring retro-gazing exercises may seem antithetical to the adventurous, boundary-pushing ethos the Lips displayed on 2009’s Embryonic and last year’s The Terror, the mere task of making the most totemic (and, by extension, contemptuously overplayed) rock songs of all time seem fresh presents its own formidable challenge, one they’ve answered by gradually shifting their cover-song approach from faithfully sacred to kill-yer-idols profane. Now comes the greatest challenge of all: tackling the Beatles’ Summer-of-Love soundtrack Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a generation-defining achievement so masterful that its very title has become the official shorthand descriptor for masterful achievements.
The Lips aren’t the first to give Pepper a shake, but even the post-punk/new pop makeover the album received on the 1988 NME-curated comp Sgt. Pepper Knew My Father—complete with Mark E. Smith warbling “A Day in the Life”—feels overly staid and deferential compared to what transpires here. And even by the standards of the Lips’ previous tribute-album overhauls, With a Little From My Fwends is a colossal, chaotic undertaking, its 27-collaborator guest list bringing together pop singers (Miley Cyrus, Tegan & Sara), fellow alt-rock veterans (J. Mascis, Tool’s Maynard James Keenan), Bonnaroo royalty (My Morning Jacket, Dr. Dog), indie phenoms (Foxygen, Phantogram), and maverick MCs (Cool Kid Chuck Inglish), alongside the usual army of Lips affiliates like New Fumes and Stardeath & White Dwarfs. And where previous experiments were limited to Record Store Day releases or iTunes exclusives, this one is a more widely publicized benefit album for the Bella Foundation, an Oklahoma City-based animal shelter that provides crucial veterinary services to low-income pet owners. But while the charitable component lends With a Little From My Fwends a noble purpose beyond just being another Wayne Coyne-commandeered, clown-car-filling amusement, the end result occasionally suggests your time might be better spent revisiting the original album and making a direct donation.
One of the great breakthroughs of Sgt. Pepper was how it used the recording studio to create a vivid, three-dimensional sense of space and place, bringing the lyrics to life in audio-storybook form. (Think of the live-concert ambience of the opening title-track “With a Little Help From My Friends” suite, or the carnival-esque clamor of “Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite!”; even the clarinet refrain of “When I’m Sixty Four” gives off the musty scent of a grandparent’s house.) But the Lips and Fwends go to town on these songs with little regard for thematic resonance or big-picture atmosphere. In the spirit of the aforementioned 80s-era indie cover-song desecrations, these aren’t so much revisions as disembowelments that replace the guts of the originals with a tangle of short-circuiting exposed wires. And given that the Lips weren’t even around to supervise all of their guest contributions (Coyne and co. actually only appear on a handful of tracks), things undoubtedly get messy quick, if not downright hazardous. With its scatterbrained, kinder-pop take on the title track (which climaxes with an arrhythmic, atonal guitar solo from J. Mascis), and a strangulated call-and-response between Wilco offshoot the Autumn Defense and Lightning Bolt’s Brian Chippendale (aka Black Pus) on “With a Little Help From My Friends”, the project effectively gives Sgt. Pepper the shreds treatment.
Of course, even the most successful cover songs in pop history are inherently blasphemous—in that they suggest unexplored avenues that the original could’ve taken, coax lurking undercurrents to the fore, and cast the source material in an entirely new light. But the problem with a lot of these versions is that they’re unruly on just a surface level. Whether it’s the wobbly-kneed Dr. Dog/Morgan Delt/Chuck Inglish gang-up on “Getting Better”, Maynard James Keenan’s inert, industrialized “Mr. Kite!”, or Def Rain and Pitchwafuzz’s vocoderized, static-swirled “When I’m Sixty Four”, the Lips’ Fwends are so intent on tripping up the songs’ rhythmic momentum and weirding up the basic melodies with hammy vocals that they ultimately reinforce their sturdiness. They’re trashing all the furniture in the house, but not bulldozing any walls to open up new vantages.
It’s the simple revisions that yield the greatest revelations. The Electric Würms—aka the Lips alter-ego aggregate that promotes Steven Drozd to lead vocalist—recast “Fixing a Hole” as a charmingly low-key psych-folk reverie that amplifies the song’s slow-percolating existential ennui; Stardeath’s stuttering synth-funk take on “Lovely Rita” is given a sly queer spin by guests Tegan and Sara (while their robotic delivery —coupled with the song’s mechanistic motion—craftily adapts the song to a modern world where parking enforcement is largely an automated process). And while Foxygen—with the help of MGMT’s Ben Goldwasser—stretch out the Sgt. Pepper title-track reprise to nearly triple the original’s length (making it even longer than the song it’s supposed to set up, “A Day in the Life”), it’s transformed into precisely the sort of wiggy organ-pumped workout Billy Shears and the boys might have used to close down some imaginary festival set on the Isle of Wight.
Ironically, the seemingly most outrageous aspect of this entire endeavour—i.e., the mere presence of Miley Cyrus—proves to be its grounding force. On an album where everyone is trying way too hard to out-freak one another, Cyrus—much like the Led Zep-loving Lips of the '80s—stands out by simply playing it straight (which feels strange in and of itself). Tellingly, she’s entrusted with the album’s two most celebrated songs, turning in effective duets with Coyne on a splendorous, slow-motion surge through “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” and a suitably mournful “A Day in the Life”, where she handles an electro-ticked, space-age update of Paul McCartney’s middle eight (and really does sound like she just woke up, fell out of bed, and dragged a comb across her head). Curiously, the relatively reverential reading of the latter song leaves out its most notorious feature—that dramatic, sustained piano-pounded finale. The omission is both intentionally heretical (how can you end that song any other way?) yet oddly reverential, suggesting that, even if you’re subjecting one of the most revered albums of all time to sadistic sonic surgery, some things are sacred. According to the eternally loopy logic of the Flaming Lips, reinforcing a spiritual connection to your greatest influence means cutting the chord.


Justin Vernon and Aaron Dessner’s expansive side project embraces new guests and familiar sounds, but sometimes feels lost in its own pleasant fog.

Big Red Machine: How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?

How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?

Outside of their main bands, Justin Vernon of Bon Iver and Aaron Dessner of the National share a vast extracurricular network: Through collaborations, festivals, and charity compilations, they’ve built a musical universe populated with the indie singer-songwriters and mainstream stars who’ve made their way through Vernon’s April Base and Dessner’s Long Pond studios. Big Red Machine is a project borne of those collaborations, a chance to roam in familiar terrain; its 2018 debut was a natural synthesis of the pair’s electroacoustic comfort zones. Their new record, How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last, builds on the presence of alternating voices from the National’s 2019 record I Am Easy to Find, with frequent Dessner cohorts like Taylor Swift and Sharon Van Etten taking the lead. The heads of the project don’t stretch themselves much, but the best moments provide a solid foundation for their guests and, eventually, Dessner himself.
For the most part, everyone here is doing what they do best. Dessner’s cozy and languid upright piano chords lead nearly every song, a signature sound that’s lovely in a vacuum but repetitive across 15 tracks. Vernon’s characteristically cryptic musings work to particularly inscrutable ends: “So I beg on knees/Can we share IDs?” James Krivchenia of Big Thief contributes live drums on several tracks, competing for attention with drum machines and Dessner and Vernon’s own programmed beats. Most of the guests contribute either lead or backing vocals: Over a decade after Vernon played Orpheus on folk-singer-turned-Tony-winner Anaïs Mitchell’s concept album Hadestown, Mitchell returns the favor on “Latter Days.” She pens some of the best lyrics on the record, evocative instead of impenetrable: “Stacked yourself against the odds/Talkin’ back to an act of God.” Pop songwriter Ilsey has fewer obvious connections to the National/Bon Iver organization, but she naturally fits into the tumbling “Mimi.”
When Dessner, Vernon, and co. drop the murkiness and craft proper songs, the album soars. The lightly swung piano and sentimental chorus of “Phoenix” are endearingly reminiscent of 1960s and ’70s AOR, a sound the pre-chorus winks at with the line, “How do you bear the full weight?” On “Renegade,” Swift swaps the wistful storytelling of her folklore era for some startlingly direct lines: “You fire off missiles cause you hate yourself/But do you know you’re demolishing me?” Dessner’s frenetic acoustic guitar and Vernon’s counterpoint intensify Swift’s lyrics until they threaten to drown her out. On the other end of the dynamic spectrum, the sparse “Hutch” mourns the loss of Frightened Rabbit frontman Scott Hutchison with a choir of Van Etten, My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Nova, and Lisa Hannigan: “You were unafraid/Of how much the world could take from you/So how did you lose your way?” Nothing more is needed; it’s just a brutally honest snapshot of losing a friend to suicide.
The best National songs build controlled, quiet tension—riffs and backing vocals bubbling under the surface as if the calm could break at any moment. How Long is content to bubble away indefinitely, without the threatening aura of a song like “I’ll Still Destroy You.” The album is strongest at its most simple, as evidenced in Dessner’s excellent stripped-back solo songs, where the topics are refreshingly specific: “The Ghost of Cincinnati” is a folksy evocation of emotional  burnout, “Magnolia” a sympathetic ode to a woman isolating herself after an abusive relationship. “Brycie” stands out for its intimacy: Named for Aaron Dessner’s twin brother and lifelong collaborator Bryce, it’s an honest, endearing appreciation spiked with guilt: “You watched my back when we were young/You stick around when we’re old,” Aaron sings, acknowledging the selflessness it takes to support a sibling struggling with depression.
The moments of emotional truth leave a stronger impression than the duo’s meandering if pretty first record, but even with the addition of guests, nothing much about the Dessner/Vernon empire is surprising anymore: It’s not that these songs feel homogenized, it’s that they’re all different in the same way. “Easy to Sabotage” is genuinely weird in its formlessness, but it takes Naeem Juwan’s sing-rapping to truly differentiate the track. In contrast to the National’s infamous competing tastes and personalities, Big Red Machine’s instrumentals feel like the work of several people toiling in one soundbed. There are glimpses of new sounds, like the heavily manipulated acoustic guitar on “Hoping Then,” or the faintly hip-hop influenced beats on “8:22am,” though it takes multiple listens to pick these out. How Long is frequently gorgeous, but even on a deliberately messy side project, Dessner and Vernon still feel like they’re holding back.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The indie rock quintet’s second album is more spacious, folksy, and adroit, centering on the evocative voice of lead singer Alex Menne.

Four of Arrows

Two years ago, Great Grandpa were a different band. The Seattle quintet’s 2017 debut album, Plastic Cough, nestled right into the wave of anxious, quippy rock bands like Charly Bliss, Diet Cig, Dude York, and many more that still roam the indie landscape. But there was something about lead singer Alex Menne’s voice, their clear and emotional delivery on casual lines like “Always killin’ it” that was particularly striking. But when bassist and vocalist Carrie Goodwin and her husband and primary songwriter Pat Goodwin relocated to Milwaukee from Seattle last year, the move left the band in flux while they wrote their second album, Four of Arrows. With 2,000 miles between them, Great Grandpa’s songs became more spacious, folksy, and adroit, losing almost all of the grunge that characterized Plastic Cough. They taped a paper sign on the studio wall that said, “Go slow, big choices.”
On Four of Arrows, the band takes a step back and thrives in more deliberate songwriting. Great Grandpa retain their tweemo sensibilities on songs like the two-chorus single “Mono no Aware,” whose almost-cloying pop-rock sound, lines about pathos, dead birds, and grandma fading from Alzheimer’s like a “lifeless steak in that empty diner” recall the best of Rilo Kiley. They lean into more adventurous arrangements throughout, especially on “English Garden,” a song about dreams and fears on which Pat plays banjo and piano, and Abby Gunderson is on the violin and cello. (Mellotrons, synths, and harmoniums also make welcome appearances on this record.)
Menne’s vocals—all their many croons and yelps—are truly front and center this time. Songs like the bursting opener “Dark Green Water,” hold the kind of emotional urgency of the best Hop Along songs; Menne’s springy voice carries a similar power and effect as Frances Quinlan's. “Digger,” the record’s tarot-inspired centerpiece, pierces the veil of mannered indie rock when Menne wails, “That’s why I hate you” four times in a row.
Plastic Cough’s mid-point was a particularly cacophonous track called “Expert Eraser.” But the interlude on Four of Arrows is the piano instrumental “Endling,” composed and played by Pat Goodwin and recorded on the piano from Death Cab For Cutie’s 2003 album, Transatlanticism. The album doesn’t really benefit from this soundscape, except to tie them to their emotional indie-rock forbears, and to make their shift in sound unmistakable. There’s a lot more piano and there’s a lot more death on this record—“Rosalie” and “Split Up The Kids,” both songs penned by Carrie Goodwin, deal with the “relentless regress” of growing old and how she only ever saw her grandparents together at her grandfather’s funeral, respectively.
Four of Arrows’ best songs are ones Menne co-wrote, ones that keep the energy up and the ideas simple. On “Treat Jar,” which wouldn’t sound out of place on ‘90s alt radio, Menne sings daggers to the heart: “I can’t help you if I can’t help myself,” and, “Everything is hard this time of year.” And “Bloom,” an ecstatic track about letting your spirit bloom and being “young enough to change” is one of their strongest yet. “I get anxious on the weekends, when I feel I’m wasting time,” Menne croons, “But then I think about Tom Petty and how he wrote his best songs when he was 39.” Time is on their side.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Christopher Owens, formerly of Girls, calls Curls—a trio with drummer Cody Rhodes and bassist Luke Baće—his first “real band.” Their new EP contains some of the most lavish-sounding music he has released.

Vante EP

Christopher Owens formed Curls in 2005 with his then-girlfriend Liza Thorn, not long after he’d moved to San Francisco. The early version of Curls never quite took off—Owens soon found himself busy alongside Ariel Pink in the band Holy Shit—and once Owens and Thorn split, so did Curls. Owens, not one to rest on his laurels, took the songs he’d meant for Curls to new pal Chet “JR” White, revamped a lyric or three, and Girls was born. Late last year, after two LPs with Girls and three of his very own, Owens—joined by drummer Cody Rhodes and bassist Luke Baće—dusted off the Curls moniker and decided to give it another go. Owens has taken to calling this second iteration of Curls his “first… real band,” which is a somewhat curious distinction for a guy who’s been in one band or another for most of his adult life.
Still, Curls have got something distinctive on the four-song, 13-minute Vante. The EP makes for a brief reintroduction: two sweeping instrumentals and two stately pop-rockers, over and done in the time it takes to put the coffee on. Instrumentally, Vante is the most lavish-sounding Owens offering since the last gasps of Girls, brimming with rippling percussion and smears of sunset-pink synth. Owens’ solo works have veered wildly between the rinky-dink to the ornate, leaving cohesion by the wayside, but the lush, farsighted sound of Vante—with producer Shane Stoneback at the helm—is a real mark in its favor. Even with the small sample size, these four tunes really do feel like the work of a proper band: expansive, serene, unruffled.
The regal opener “Dynamite” draws back the curtain, revealing a spacious, sun-bleached city on the hill somewhere between Buck Owens’ Bakersfield and Ry Cooder’s Paris, Texas. “Dynamite” manages to set a scene without saying a word, pushed along by the Rhodes’ slippery percussion and the glint and glare of those silvery synths. Next to the three-men alchemy of “Dynamite,” the jazz-inflected curlicues of “Golden Gate” feel a touch tentative. A little Grant Green here, a pinch of Lawn Boy-era Phish there, “Golden Gate” takes a beat too long to get where it’s going, and doesn’t seem to know quite what to do once it gets there. But it’s telling that Owens would spend half of Vante with the mic in a drawer. For the first time in a long time, he is putting himself and his bandmates on roughly equal footing, pushing the idea that Curls is a full-on musical unit and not simply another vehicle for Owens’ bohemian rhapsodies.
“Emotion,” the first of Vante’s two proper pop tunes, is textbook Owens: a riff you’ll swear you’ve heard before (and you have; it’s “Sweet Jane”), matched to a lyric so free of guile, you’ll want to reach out and shake its hand. The impossibly earnest, noontime-sunshine of “Emotion” presents the not-so-radical notion that feelings are meant to be felt, not avoided or otherwise blotted out. For almost any other songwriter, these gee-whiz tactics would come off like a daily affirmations desk calendar. But in Owens’ hands, it becomes a kind of hard-fought mantra, a lesson worth repeating, a return to innocence spray-painted across a wall of sound.
Lilting and luxuriant, closer “Gentle and Kind” is the best of the bunch; judiciously adorned by the pocket-orchestra of Baće and Rhodes, it floats along on a nimble melody in the neighborhood of John Lennon’s “Watching the Wheels.” Owens, a little ache in his voice and his heart fastened to his sleeve, has wisdom to impart: “Please remain open in mind/Let your spirit show and grow/Let it glow,” a particularly swoony Owens sings, beaming instant karma into the universe in the hopes that a little might come back his way.
Owens hasn’t always seemed too sure of himself as a solo artist: too ambitious one minute, too scattered the next. The swift ending of Girls seemed necessary for Owens, but his music’s lacked a certain purpose without “JR” White at his side. Vante, brief as it is, suggests a course-correction; the mild meanderings of “Golden Gate” aside, the rest of Vante is sharply written, sumptuously produced, and almost totally devoid of the nervy, strewn-together energy riddling his lesser solo work. Vante doesn’t give us a lot to go on, but what’s here is promising: for the first time in years, with Rhodes and Baće at his side, Owens sounds at ease.


Grandaddy's sad, quaint, low-key Y2K-era classic, which captured the point where the deflated myth of the American West met the deflated myth of technological salvation, gets the deluxe reissue treatment.

The Sophtware Slump

I remember the year 2000. I remember how we called it Y2K, which sounds more like the name of a virus than a year, like something that might make you rethink where you get your meats and produce. I remember a global panic about data that might be lost on computers programmed to interpret years as only two digits instead of four. When we hit 2000, they would just read "00," as if God's finger slipped on the reset button. Ironically (and of course), it was all our fault. But then January 1, 2000 came, and I remember it being like every other day. Some slot machines at a racetrack in Delaware stopped working, and a little after midnight, an alarm at a nuclear power plant in Onagawa, Japan went off in the dark.
I remember how in 1999 Grandaddy were like a lot of other decent underdog indie bands that I had an indefensible soft spot for: mopey and withdrawn, with a few mixtape-worthy songs. Then they released The Sophtware Slump in early 2000, and all of a sudden they sounded like they had a particular perspective, a particular substance. Their gift is that they still managed to sound insubstantial. The sadness that sounded like passivity on 1997's Under the Western Freeway turned into philosophy on The Sophtware Slump: nonchalance as a way of isolating yourself from what bothers you. Not that The Sophtware Slump is in any way major-- being major is the work of artistes, and part of Grandaddy's appeal was that they just seemed like low-key guys from central California tooling around in the basement.
Most of the album sounds like countryish Neil Young songs coated in synthesizer gloss-- a style that borrows a little of Young's earthy tenderness, a little of Pavement's studied indifference, and a little of the switched-on melancholy of an ELO ballad. They sang about national forests filled with broken appliances and robot friends who woke up drunk in parks. The text on the cover of the CD booklet was spelled out in letters from an old PC keyboard over a grassy meadow with mountains in the background. Flip through to the last page, and you'll see a cowboy walking into the sunset with a Casio under his arm.
Basically, The Sophtware Slump is the point where the deflated myth of the American West met the deflated myth of technological salvation. The fear isn't that computers would destroy us, it's that we'd end up living in a futuristic world but still have the same old problems. It's like how David Bowie released "Space Oddity" 10 days before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon: Somehow, he knew people would get lonely up there, because people get lonely no matter where they go. If Radiohead captured a feeling of pre-millenial tension, The Sophtware Slump captured the feeling of disappointment that came afterward-- the feeling that life was going to be more or less the same as it had been, only now we'd have to live with the fact that we once thought it'd be so different: the feeling of January 2, 2000.
At the time, Grandaddy weren't the only band that played sparkly, cinematic indie music: Mercury Rev's Deserter's Songs had come out in 1998, and the Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin came out in 1999. The difference is in both scale and character: Unlike the Flaming Lips or Mercury Rev, Grandaddy were a five-person band that sounded like five people playing together in a room, not five people using the studio to make the sound of a hundred. Even when they use synthesizers to replicate orchestral instruments, it has a miniaturistic quality, like the grandeur of early Hollywood trapped inside a snowglobe.
Lyrically, the album is just as contained. Instead of singing about the grand and tearful breakup between man and nature, Jason Lytle sings about wanting to lie down and sleep under a single tree. Fluffy, abstract lyrics like, "I dream at night of going home some day," are grounded by concrete ones: "Tire scraps on federal roads look like crash-landed crows," a metaphor that uses one tactile, breakable thing to describe another.
Does the album sound quaint now? Sure. It sounded quaint then, too. Grandaddy's image-- crunchy guys with trucker hats and beards-- was instantly rustic. Their sound was irrelevant. Blowing minds and challenging conventions takes hard work and ego, and Grandaddy never seemed like they had a real capacity for either. But being as essentially easygoing as they are is also what makes all the thematic material here so approachable, if you buy into it at all: Most of the time, it just doesn't sound like they're trying to prove a point-- a sense of modesty that made them feel more seductive and appealing to me than artists who showed up with grand statement in hand.
It's funny to me that this album is being given the deluxe reissue treatment only 10 years after first being released, but I guess nostalgia is kicking in sooner these days. Deserter's Songs was reissued recently too, along with records by Sebadoh and Archers of Loaf-- records that don't feel like they were gone all that long. The sound is clearer and better delineated here than it was on the initial release, and the bonus material-- which includes demos and a couple of EPs released around the same time-- is interesting to listen to once or twice but never gives me the feeling that they could've made The Sophtware Slump any more focused and consistent than it is.
And sad, too. What a sad, sad album. There's not a happy song on it, really. But there's no angst or despair either, because angst and despair are exhausting emotions. Most of the time, Lytle sounds like the archetypal 90s slacker: observant, slow-moving, dulled by a suburban kind of pain he can't shake. Beck in 1994, without panache or a flair for Art. Beck comes up once, actually, in "Jed's Other Poem (Beautiful Ground)", a lyric supposedly written by their robot friend, Jed: "I try to sing it funny like Beck/ But it's bringin' me down." Cheer up: It didn't get better, but it didn't get much worse, either.


Following his 2022 collaboration with Charlotte Adigéry, the Belgian-born producer examines his Hong Kong heritage on an album of clean-lined synth pop and invigorating club tracks.

Letter to Yu

On 2022’s Topical Dancer, producer Bolis Pupul and frequent collaborator Charlotte Adigéry examined xenophobia and misogyny by transmuting them into discursive electro pop with a cheeky sense of humor. On his debut solo album, the Belgian-born producer takes a more personal turn. Pupul lost his mother, Yu Wei Wun, suddenly in 2008, a death that shaped his life from that day on. Yet it’s one he says he couldn’t grasp fully until nearly a decade later, when he first traveled to his mother’s native Hong Kong. There, he discovered a connection to his roots that diasporic people often feel upon visiting a familial homeland, forming an elemental bond even without an ancestor to guide him. The life-changing experience informs Letter to Yu, a shapeshifting ode to both his mother and Hong Kong that darts between sawtoothed club songs and more languid comedowns. Pupul’s music is at once contemplative and exuberant, moving with a rhythm similar to navigating the teeming crowds of a new city.
While Pupul was making trips to Hong Kong, visiting landmarks like the bustling Ma Tau Wai Road or traversing the city subway, he recorded every day, even if just capturing snippets of found sound. Those recordings give Letter to Yu a distinct sense of place, like the din of a train platform that courses through the background of “Completely Half.” Over a tugging synth melody, Pupul grapples with the language barrier that deepens the split in his identity: “People talk to me like I’m a local/A sense of shame is my part,” he sings in a halting melody; “I wish I spoke what they speak/So I could blend in easily.” Many of Letter to Yu’s best songs dip into that pondering register—like the brooding, hypnotic title track, on which Pupul pitch-shifts his voice down as he reads a letter to his mother. “This is where you were born 59 years ago/And I’m finally here,” he intones as chimes echo around him. “Why did it take me so long?”
Pupul’s productions alternate between pensive moments and out-and-out floor-fillers. Letter to Yu’s most energized songs recall his limber production on Topical Dancer while ratcheting up the intensity: The martial stomp of “Doctor Says” builds to a jagged synth freakout, while the turbo-charged “Kowloon” folds droning keys into a sauntering drum beat for a madcap French rave-up. It’s a fresh and invigorating take on electro pop, twisting and buckling into different shapes with each surprising beat switch. Pupul puts his foot on the gas on the bracing standout “Spicy Crab,” where crinkled synths clamor for attention over a dizzying spiral of electro riffs; its kaleidoscopic climax is one of the album’s high points.
Through all of its stomping, head-banging turns, the album often circles back to its emotional core. “Mau Tau Wai Road” features vocals performed by Pupul’s sister Salah, adding another layer of intimacy to the project. Over tolling bells and a bouncing, midtempo beat, she sings about forming a connection to their mother simply by walking the titular street: “The sound of the city/The color of the sea/Don’t know what I’m after/… a soft embrace,” she sings, her voice growing more yearning with each verse. On the twilit “Cosmic Rendez-vous,” Pupul puts a finer point on the sense of loss, combining delicate piano arpeggios and a sidewinding bassline as he sings about coming to terms with the finite nature of life. “You will be able to contribute to the creative pool of the universe,” he sings in Dutch, sounding comforted by the thought. “Something permanent will remain after you leave this planet.”
On Letter to Yu, Pupul’s path through grief radiates outward; it is both an expression of acceptance in the face of bereavement and a declaration of enduring optimism. The album also offers ample proof of his singular voice as a deft producer and idiosyncratic musician. Drawing on a sumptuous palette of classic synth pop and leftfield electronic music, Pupul imbues his songs with personality and soul, unearthing complicated truths about his relationship to his heritage while finding welcome release on the dancefloor.


Dan Auerbach and Pat Carney say goodbye to their longtime home, blues staple Fat Possum, with a salute to deceased former labelmate Junior Kimbrough.

The Black Keys: Chulahoma: The Songs of Junior Kimbrough EP

The Black Keys are now well beyond obvious blues-rock duo comparisons, having carved out three of the best head-in-the-past, riffs-in-the-future albums of the past decade. Before ditching the only home they'd known, blues staple Fat Possum, for the NPRarified air of Nonesuch, Dan Auerbach and Pat Carney threw together this fitting farewell, saluting deceased labelmate Junior Kimbrough. In the process, they avoid the hammy recreations that cover albums often bring: This is no Encomium or Radiodread, but rather an acknowledgement of a hero and a simple cap-tip.
Working from the same modal electric blues that Kimbrough plied for decades, Black Keys take these songs and apply the swinging rollick and bended notes for which they've become known. Each track is a yearning, often flagellating ballad of sorts (titles: "Have Mercy On Me", "Work Me", "My Mind Is Ramblin'", etc.), and that's what Auerbach seems to have in common with Kimbrough-- a desperate wail coupled with subtly sophisticated guitar playing. But the songs sound completely different from the originals, sometimes distorting lyrical structure but mostly throwing a hazy, almost psychedelic trip onto what were once melodically downtuned blues arrangements.
The Keys have covered Kimbrough twice before and each of those other approaches was more straightforward and amped. "Do the Rump", from their debut The Big Come Up, is pretty ferocious rawk stuff. The aching "Meet Me in the City"-- perhaps Kimbrough's best ever-- is a nice contrast to some of the liberties they take elsewhere. For a guy who sired 36 kids and died with a common-law wife, Kimbrough seems pretty screwed romantically, yowling "Please don't leave me right now, girl, right now, oh no..." Like his inspiration, Auerbach sings in an unclear mumble that adds a lived-in weight to the music. The white-boy imitators from Ohio jacking a Mississippi Delta shaman's style is an idea fraught with unmanageable questions. The Black Keys, however, have been graceful and more than honoring in the past about their muses, so there doesn't seem to be a lot of culture-transmogrification, other than the occasional ripped-off riff. That much is testified to by Kimbrough's widow, Mildred, on the last track via answering machine, where she notes that Auerbach and Carney are "the only ones that really really played like Junior played his records." The track is a bit of a shameless pat-on-the-back to round out a classy six-song affair, but I doubt Kimbrough would have a hard time jamming with these two.


Only the mind of Meg Remy can take the trauma inflicted on Earth and our childhoods and create something as wonderful as Heavy Light, another vivid and highly affecting album of experimental pop music.

Heavy Light

In her long career as a sound collagist and pop music obsessive, Meg Remy has thrived in moments of feminized vitriol. The women of Remy’s songs are so often threatening to asphyxiate themselves, on the verge of suicide, and mad as hell. For much of her career, U.S. Girls has been an exploration of female violence and rage. But Heavy Light, Remy’s seventh album, lives in that period of emptiness that comes after.
Like 2018’s In a Poem Unlimited, Heavy Light is a sideways look at the history of pop music and the capitalist world in which it thrives. What’s different here is how it sounds, and how it feels. These songs capture the watershed moment when your throat closes up, your head cools off, and your tears run dry: It is when you enter what can only be described as a zone of weightless grief. It’s dense, heady, hard to grasp, but that’s what makes her music so rich. Remy casts herself as a pop star and reflects on the traumas of childhood and earth through parables and the music we grew up on.
Heavy Light taps into a deep well of pop music, the product of someone who listens to ’60s girl groups and Bruce Springsteen records with equal passion. The slick disco song “4 American Dollars,” with all of its vocal harmonies and synthesizer freakouts, feels indebted to the plastic soul of David Bowie’s Young Americans. Remy includes words of advice that she lifts from a Martin Luther King Jr. quote: “You gotta have boots/If you wanna lift those bootstraps.” “State House (It’s a Man’s World),” is a soured reimagining of the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby,” with a hallucinatory kick drum and a layer of dense noise that feels like watching the third rail on the subway catch fire in half-time. “But it’s just a man’s world, we just breed here,” Remy and her backing choir sing. Heavy Light thrives in this sort of dissociative blaze where gender politics, grief, and deeply fucked-up pop hooks slam into one another.
So much of Heavy Light exists in this emotional space that feels like an exquisite freefall. Listening to “Born to Lose”—with its surreal nod to Sam the Sham’s “Wooly Bully”—feels like walking out of your body; a vibraphone solo spirals into dissonance and congas float like debris after a hurricane. Remy’s mezzo-soprano is emotive and clear, like someone doing Patti Smith karaoke to an empty room. On the emotional heavyweight “IOU,” she muses about the idea that no one chooses to be born. She is art-pop’s own Orpheus, singing about the end of the world as she watches everyone she knew and loved disappear from her field of vision.
The album reaches its highest altitudes on “The Quiver to the Bomb,” a sweeping anthem about the birth of humanity and the environmental disaster that has followed. The pain you hear in Remy’s voice is drawn from the terror humanity has inflicted upon the earth. We are not just killing one another through our bottomless hunger for violence: we are mutilating our planet, too. “Accretion speaks louder than words,” she sings, flatly, banging the gavel on the trial of our species.
Peppered through the record are three potent sound collages, fugues of overlapping voices that speak about the experiences they had when they were young and malleable. “I would tell her that I loved her, and that life is long,” one voice says on “Advice to Teenage Self.” “The Most Hurtful Thing” takes a headlong dive into the pain of being young, reminiscing about a parent who tells you that they fucked up raising you, and the sensation of being called insane to your face. So much of being alive is an exercise in denying the existence of personal trauma. Collective trauma, Remy seems to suggest, is the reason for the fracturing of our society. We carry our pain everywhere; it molds and destroys our environment. If so much of living with trauma is about needing to find a path ahead, Heavy Light shines the way.


Chicago instrumental trio Russian Circles' fifth album, Memorial, builds off 2010's Empros, but these songs, one featuring Chelsea Wolfe, feel bigger and more polished, and somehow more intimate.

Memorial

It's impressive what Russian Circles can do with a basic guitar, bass, and drum setup. There are plenty of metal-leaning instrumental bands who dial up big climaxes, but you'd be hard-pressed to find one that creates such an array of textures and emotions with so little. Bassist Brian Cook also uses keyboards, and on the Chicago trio's excellent fifth album, Memorial, they bring in guest cello and violin. But the core, buttressed by imaginative arrangements and strong compositional skills, is strong enough that there would be more than enough chills without these add-ons.
The collection follows 2011's Empros. That was a strong effort, too; the eight tracks here, though, feel more polished and fluid, bigger and yet somehow more intimate—even though the pristine recording, again by longtime producer Brandon Curtis, also fits well with the vast, mountainous cover art. Empros had a swing to it, a groove that bled between tracks even when they got darker or heavier. Memorial offers more pronounced dynamics in both directions—the metal moments frenzied, the quiet parts somber and restrained—and instead of offering a push or pull, it goes for higher star-melting theatrics. In that regard, you'd have to place them in the company of Explosions in the Sky, another band that can create compelling narratives without words.
Russian Circles do seem to be telling a story here. The clean guitars and strings on brief opener "Memoriam" make it feel like a eulogy, and the remaining songs offer the various emotions that come with loss (anger, panic, nostalgia, pain). "Memoriam" is an airy piece that jarringly shifts into the heavy, lurching "Deficit", an almost seven-minute track that, like "Mladek" on Empros, shows you that they have no trouble breaking into a black metal blur. They conjure the Fucking Champs and go explosion-for-explosion with the aforementioned post-rock titans.
It's followed by the longest and best song on the album, the seven-and-a-half minute "1777". This piece opens with loud, crisp drums that are reminiscent of early Tortoise—John McEntire locking into a groove for a snare-drunk 20 minutes. Cascading guitars and a steady bass circle it, adding a sense of flight to the grounded beats. The dynamics here are reminiscent of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, who also balance darkness and muck with a sense of the sublime. The slow-motion crescendo at the five-and-a-half-minute mark, the additional layers of spiraling guitars, and chaotically controlled drums could build for another hour and not get boring.
You don't get anything that great on the rest of the album; that said, it's an emotional peak you only need to reach once on a collection like this, and the restraint on the following tracks helps with the overall thematic. For instance, the somber, melancholic "Cheyenne" is a doomier, more spacious and cinematic song, like 2013 Earth collaborating with Mogwai. The mathy "Burial" is heavier, angrier, and complete with pick slides. This may be the album's real climax, at least mentally—during it, you're thinking about the suffocation in death, and not the release. It feeds into the romantic, ethereal "Ethel" and the rocker, "Lebaron". On Memorial, the more they move away from the straight-up rock moments and into more ambitious constructions, the stronger it feels.
The collection closes with vocals from labelmate Chelsea Wolfe on "Memorial". It's a chilly, pretty piece that, like the opener, adds a softness to the record, along with a sonic and thematic echo. Wolfe, whispering and layered, sounds great per usual, but her vocal turn confirms something important: Unlike a bunch of bands who opt to go it without a singer, these guys really don't need one.


Welsh songwriter Polly Mackey expands her bedroom-pop sound on her intimate and adventurous second album.

Soft Landing

As Art School Girlfriend, Polly Mackey blends her experience in the shoegaze band Deaf Club with her love of electronica: Guitars are processed to sound like synths, synths function like lead guitars, and drums flip between electronic and acoustic. Mackey’s voice—a grainy, yearning alto with a muted intensity—sets her apart further. In 2017, producer Paul Epworth signed Mackey to his Wolf Tone label, and she spent the next few years developing her sound at his Church Studios. For her full-length debut, 2021’s Is It Light Where You Are, she enlisted several producers to flesh out a breakup narrative with a vast array of electronic sounds. For her follow-up, Soft Landing, she works with a tighter pair of collaborators: longtime co-producer Riley MacIntyre and fellow songwriter Marika Hackman, Mackey’s partner.
Despite the skeleton crew, Landing is a dramatic expansion of Mackey’s sound that still retains the intimacy of her early work. Its songs share a newfound sense of focus, building to satisfying payoffs that never lose their thrill even when you see them coming. “The Weeks” and “Heaven Hanging Low” open in low-key arrangements before boiling over with post-punk and drum ’n’ bass twists, respectively. In the studio, Mackey sought a “roomy” sound with live guitars and strings accompanying the complex synth programming. The mysterious plucks on opener “A Place to Lie,” for example, are actually heavily processed nylon strings. Even the more basic tracks have some surprising textures, like the glitchy mush within “Blue Sky” or the warping synths of “How Do You Do It.”
The lyrics don’t always match the intricacy and confidence of the music: Songs called “Blue Sky” and “Waves” lean on predictable imagery about skies and waves. The complexity of the music helps to make up for the comparatively placid lyrics, but Mackey’s writing is most interesting when she zooms in on domestic bliss. On “The Weeks,” she writes about getting to know a partner better after the honeymoon phase, when the “halo slips away.” This nuance makes the full-on love songs land harder: “Heaven Hanging Low” is an ode to queer love with imagery that’s both Biblical and absurdist (“Slide through paradise, I was caught in the light/Pulling planets out the sky, taking a bite”). It’s her best song to date, intimate and thoughtful yet still magnetic. On Soft Landing, Art School Girlfriend are less focused on ecstatic joy than quiet contentment, shedding light on the abiding peace—and the creeping anxiety—that may await you at your destination.


The dreamlike performances at the Roadhouse in Twin Peaks: The Return are collected on a new soundtrack, celebrating a triumph of musical programming, mood, and David Lynch’s strange reality.

Various Artists: Twin Peaks (Music From the Limited Event Series)

The talent booker at the Roadhouse is an enigmatic figure in the town of Twin Peaks. Unseen, unnamed, and unmentioned, the bar’s curatorial mastermind secures acts to play this small-town dive bar, acts who wouldn’t ordinarily pass within 30 miles of the place. Fashionable English indie rock bands appear as a matter of course, synth-pop trios descend upon the stage from Brooklyn, Latin jazz singers perform alongside Moby, Nine Inch Nails premiere a new single—even Eddie Vedder turns up in an oversized fedora. How do they do it? It’s a triumph of musical programming. Not since Modest Mouse graced the Bait Shop in Orange County has a minor concert venue been so ambitiously booked.
Of course much about Twin Peaks: The Return seems governed by the logic of a dream. Nightmares have always been David Lynch’s metier, and he and Mark Frost’s long-awaited 18-part revival series is thoroughly, obstinately phantasmagorical. But while the efforts of Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) to shake off a quarter-decade slumber and thwart his nefarious doppelganger sometimes seemed fantastic, they still retained the shape and momentum of narrative television: However strange, there was a plot. The same can’t quite be said of our time at the Roadhouse. The nightly shows felt ethereal, hallucinatory—unreal somehow, even by Lynch’s standards. Did these concerts really happen? Does the Roadhouse exist inside a dream?
More readily apparent is how these scenes function as episodic punctuation. Our arrival at the Roadhouse toward the end of an installment nearly always heralded its conclusion, and therefore seemed a kind of reprieve from the terror and tumult outside its doors. Lynch has said that he considers The Return not a serial but one coherent feature, or an 18-hour film. In this respect, the Roadhouse may be his concession to the demands of TV: The performances cleave the drama along hour-long grains, dividing its unwieldy sprawl into manageable, broadcast-ready chunks. This also accounts for their restorative effect. Amid a series that is staunchly unpredictable, the Roadhouse is one of the only things we know to expect.
”We’re watching all the streetlights fade,” sings Ruth Radelet, of the Chromatics, at the end of the show’s two-part premiere. “And now you’re just a stranger’s dream.” The sentiment is certainly appropriate. By virtue of inaugurating the Roadhouse-band ritual, “Shadow” set the tone for the music of the series to come: delicate, atmospheric, utterly hypnotic. It helps that the song’s performance, bathed in cobalt and relished with the patience of a concert film, lands so indelibly. These may amount to little more than end-credits music videos, but rarely have end credits been as moving when the words “Starring Kyle MacLachlan” appear. It’s the moment where you feel like you can breathe again.
At the Roadhouse, the familiar often collides with the new. It’s the sempiternal haunt of Peaks regulars, where we find James Hurley (James Marshall) longing for Shelly Briggs (Madchen Amick) again, and where Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn) dances in a reverie from which she can’t seem to wake. But it’s also home to a host of fresh faces: We’re introduced to slimeball Richard Horne (Eamon Farren), where Megan (Shane Lynch) and Sophie (Emily Stofle) discuss a curious incident over drinks, and where Ruby (Charlyne Yi) crawls across the floor and screams. The procession of talent on stage reflects this generational diversity. The music is a testament to how much things have changed over the course of 25 years—and how little.
Some nights, the Roadhouse plunged us deep into the past: James reprised “Just You”, the distinctly Deerhunter-esque song he performed long ago with Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle) and Maddie (Sheryl Lee), while the penultimate episode culminated with “The World Spins”, a song Julee Cruise hadn’t sung at the Roadhouse since the evening Maddie was murdered. (You may remember that this song was interrupted the first time by a supernatural warning: “It is happening again.” It still is.) Elsewhere, acts from Lynch’s other work surfaced as if from a subconscious shared with the Peaks universe. Rebekah Del Rio materialized from Mulholland Drive with a song written by Lynch himself, one that would hardly be out of place at Club Silencio. And Trent Reznor reunites with Lynch for the first time since 1997, when he produced the soundtrack for Lost Highway.
Other evenings keep us firmly in the present. Some of these artists Lynch has professed his affection for frequently: Au Revoir Simone, who twice take the Roadhouse stage, have counted the director among their fans for years, while Illinois-based singer-songwriter Lissie was hailed by Lynch as “incredible” as far back as 2010. Others are conspicuously the product of Lynch’s influence—which tends to make their presence in Twin Peaks fascinatingly strange.
Johnny Jewel, in particular, is so indebted to the aesthetic Lynch developed with Angelo Badalamenti that his involvement with The Return—he performs three times throughout the series, twice with Chromatics and once with Julee Cruise, and contributes two instrumental cuts to the soundtrack—is both a vindication and a sort of joke. Twin Peaks is all about doubles and doppelgangers. Is Johnny Jewel one? This opposition between old and new, in any case, is clearly present by design—another reminder from Lynch and Frost of the distance between 2017 and 1992, between Twin Peaks and The Return.
Enjoyed in isolation—severed from the series on the soundtrack album Music from the Limited Event Series—the Roadhouse hit parade loses the interstitial quality it had parceled out one episode at a time. And yet the collection is peculiarly compelling. This is, foremost, an anthology of largely excellent songs, selected for their artistic merit rather than merely for their usefulness to the drama or their connection to some arcane Lynchian lore. And furthermore, it’s an impressive cross-section of the listening habits of a filmmaker with plainly discriminating tastes.
Things remain the same as ever at the Roadhouse. Young punks and romantics still flail through adolescent turbulence; hearts long-since broken still haven’t been repaired. Like the unfamiliar citizens of the town these Roadhouse scenes often introduce us to, the indie bands that hit the stage each night carry on a legacy they may not even be aware of. Their elders, meanwhile, simply keep enduring—and some of these performances are graphic proof of their endurance. This dive bar is like so much of The Return: irreconcilable. People appear only to disappear soon after. Stray threads of plot are picked up and summarily abandoned. Is that how the implausible booking may be accounted for? None of this is reality. It’s just a stranger’s dream.


With spruced-up production highlighting new subtleties in their sound, yet never abandoning their melodic fundamentals, the Cleveland indie rockers’ latest radiates a renewed sense of purpose.

Final Summer

For someone who’s spent nearly half his young life as a professional musician, Dylan Baldi still has solid work-life boundaries: The free jazz, ambient instrumentals, and acoustic experiments he’s posted to Bandcamp have yet to leach into the bottle-rocket pop-punk of Cloud Nothings. But the first single off their new album, Final Summer, has finally allowed one of Baldi’s extracurricular activities to infiltrate the band’s creative process. “I’m trying to [run] a marathon in every state,” he recently boasted, and while countless time trials and deadlifts have been set to “Stay Useless” and “Psychic Trauma,” “Running Through the Campus” suggests a more focused sort of cardiovascular exercise. “It’s just a thing I do for myself,” Baldi rasps, sounding like someone in tune with the discipline of physical and mental upkeep, and the usefulness of tracking incremental progress and pragmatic goals. That’s really where Cloud Nothings find themselves on their latest album, the first since Baldi entered his thirties. It’s a satisfying series of sprints from a band committed for the long haul.
Final Summer radiates a renewed sense of purpose for a band that had begun to feel like they were spinning their wheels. Up until the remotely recorded The Black Hole Understands, Cloud Nothings switched up producers on every album, lending a distinct character to records that otherwise work within a fairly narrow sound. Reuniting with Steve Albini on The Shadow I Remember drew on the goodwill generated by their most beloved album, yet it felt like a cheat code on a set of songs that lacked the frothing urgency of Attack on Memory. Just about everything leading up to Final Summer seemed to acknowledge the opportunity for a retooling, if not a total reboot: unexpected yet sensible new tourmates, new producer, new label, all signifying security in their status as a legacy band in 2024.
But you’d never guess any of that from the title track. A synth twinkles for a minute, and then another one, before the vocals enter. The mesmeric, three-note riff is more like amped-up Krautrock than spiky pop-punk. If the instrumental bridge doesn’t quite approximate Baldi’s alto sax recordings, it at least sounds like MIDI horns. Jayson Gerycz eases up on his typically runaway locomotion and propels “Final Summer” forward like a bullet train. At once instantly recognizable as Cloud Nothings and having no precedent in their catalog, “Final Summer” marks the first time in years that an entirely new lane has opened up for the band.
They quickly swerve back, yet “Daggers of Light” is a subtle reconfiguration of their past work, grafting the triumphal melodies of their singles to the ornery plod they typically reserve for the deep cuts. Meanwhile, “I’d Get Along” is Cloud Nothings concentrate, creating verse and chorus, tension and release, out of a single line. For all of its boneheaded brilliance, “I’d Get Along” can’t help but poke at a concern raised by the last few Cloud Nothings albums: Do they sound effortless because they’ve mastered their craft, or is it because they’re not pushing themselves?
“Silence,” or “Mouse Policy,” or, really, take your pick—they’re all melodic without being cloying, expressive without pandering, true believers in the enduring relevance of Hüsker Dü and the Replacements without devolving into “dudes rock” cliche. That was also true of The Shadow I Remember and The Black Hole Understands, which occasionally felt marooned between Cloud Nothings’ more bracing earlier work and a more considered, robust sound they had yet to achieve.
In the past, “ambition” on a Cloud Nothings song meant playing faster, stretching out for seven minutes, or doing both. That doesn’t happen on Final Summer. But the spiffier production sharpens the edge rather than dulling it, highlighting subtle flourishes that distinguish the deeper cuts from any random track six from a previous Cloud Nothings album: the harmonized punctuations on “Daggers of Light” balancing out the bile with psychedelic sweetness; the aural illusion of the title track’s endlessly repeating riff set against Chris Brown’s bass melodies; a melancholy piano line underscoring Baldi’s State of the Universe address on “Silence.”
“You can make any heaven you want/Why do you blow out every little light/And live in the dark?” Baldi asks on that song, ostensibly to the assorted bigots, fundamentalists, and climate-change deniers he addresses earlier on. His query might also be aimed, just a little, at the mirror—a challenge to make a Cloud Nothings album that meets the standards set by the ones with the black-and-white covers. In both its brighter sound and sentiment, Final Summer can be taken as a do-over of 2017’s underappreciated Life Without Sound, a shiny, sunny pop-rock album that led Baldi to claim, “I don’t want to feel like I’ve wasted my life anymore.” Certainly a change in outlook over “Wasted Days,” but not the same thing as welcoming serenity. “I need to be happy with what I got for me,” Baldi yells on Final Summer’s title track, realizing something that would have been frankly inconceivable on previous Cloud Nothings albums—that happiness is work, but it’s worth it. While passing through a quad full of college kids the same age he was when he started the project, Baldi muses, “Can you believe how far I have come?” Anyone who’s been listening since Turning On won’t either. Cloud Nothings have never sounded so committed to going the distance.


On her debut solo album, the Dama Scout singer explores her heritage and grapples with otherness in knotty electro-pop shot through with field recordings and traditional Chinese instruments.

mui zyu: *Rotten Bun for an Eggless Century *

Rotten Bun for an Eggless Century

Reconciling otherness with selfhood is at the heart of Eva Liu’s work as vocalist of indie-rock trio Dama Scout and in her solo project mui zyu. On her debut EP as mui zyu, 2021’s a wonderful thing vomits, the London-based artist reckoned with feelings of alienation by building an immersive dreamworld of shapeshifting soundscapes. Liu, who was born in Northern Ireland to a family of Hong Kong immigrants, was more confrontational on Dama Scout’s debut album: Traversing the turbulent, psychedelic art rock of gen wo lai (come with me), she worked towards healing by piecing together fragmented memories of her childhood.
mui zyu’s debut album, Rotten Bun for an Eggless Century, glides between mystical portal fantasy and fragmented reality in pursuit of self-acceptance. Liu delves deeper into her Chinese heritage, emulating the eerie folklore of Qing dynasty writer Pu Songling and his uncanny ability to cast the everyday in the realm of the supernatural. Envisioning herself as a lonesome warrior on a quest for liberation, she offers a mutated take on bedroom pop: Her yearning vocals are cocooned in a cacophony of bounding instrumental melodies, muggy synths, and bursts of fuzz. It is an unsettling world where feelings of cultural displacement manifest as demons.
A dense, tumultuous mixture of contorted electronics and discordant keyboard melodies forms the bulk of the album’s arrangements. Occasionally, Liu hides fragments of her childhood in the mix: 8-bit synths are reminiscent of video-game soundtracks, and field recordings of Chinese restaurants buried in the background mimic the noise of living above her father’s restaurant. mui zyu’s abstract lyrics match the warped dissonance with grotesque imagery. “We could cry blood in our eyes, we can’t breathe/We laugh so hard we could die,” she sings on “Dusty.” As the guitar melts, she’s caught somewhere between torturous anguish and bliss.
Some of mui zyu’s most interesting experiments are built with traditional Chinese instrumentation. On “Ghost With a Peach Skin,” a guzheng—a type of zither—is digitally distorted and folded into a danceable beat without losing its rich character, mimicking the transformative process of renewal. Liu uses the image of a peach—a symbol of longevity in Chinese culture, despite the fruit’s fragility—to remind herself of the trauma she must carry even in rebirth. Liu joined several local cultural groups as part of her exploration of her Hong Kong roots, and that sense of community emerges as revitalizing support in her fight against ghouls on “Demon 01.”
Repairing familial relationships is central to Rotten Bun for an Eggless Century’s drift between dimensions. Interlude “Ho Bao Daan” features her father reciting a recipe for the titular Hong Kong egg dish before it whisks mui zyu back into the otherworldly setting. The album’s most poignant moment arrives on “Mother’s Tongue.” Across glistening washes of dream-pop guitar, Liu sings, “Don’t need to forgive you for something you don’t mean to do.” It’s her most direct statement here, her voice filled with empathetic understanding as she relinquishes old resentments. She seems to recognize that love sometimes entails letting go, yet leaving a path open for the loved one’s return. A voice note from her mother cuts through the tense air: “Eva, I’m so proud of you,” she commends, before she’s swallowed by the ambient swell.
mui zyu’s crusade culminates in an open-ended resolution. A world away from the daunting vortex of the opening “Rotten Bun” and its guzheng, arpeggiated piano, and haunting erhu solo, the closing “Sore Bear” is little more than an ominous, sinewy piano line. The song dampens into an acrid hiss as its melody sidesteps a tidy conclusion, trailing to a ghostly calm. “I dismember words/You won’t believe/How much they can hurt,” Liu sings, but she resists yielding to despondency. Instead, she softly delivers commands across the commotion in what feels like a moment of restoration, a quiet yet self-assured reclamation of personal agency.


On her debut EP, the Kazakh/British violinist, likely most familiar from work with Radiohead, creates teeming and imagistic environments with four strings and electronics.

EP ONE

Even if you have never heard her name, you might have heard violinist Galya Bisengalieva. In the past few years, she’s played on Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool, Thom Yorke’s Suspiria soundtrack, and several of Jonny Greenwood’s scores—Frank Ocean’s Blonde and Justice’s Woman, too. Many of these appearances owe to her leadership role in the London Contemporary Orchestra, the new-music ensemble that also collaborated with the electronic musician Actress on the post-classical LAGEOS earlier this year, for which she co-wrote “Galya Beat.” The Kazakh/British violinist is part of a vital community of contemporary composers and players; now, on her EP ONE, she presents commissions from Claire M. Singer and Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch, along with a new piece of her own.
All three works, written for violin and electronics, take a timbral approach to minimalism, focusing their attentions not on melody but on long drones, scraped strings, and glistening harmonics. The music director of the 1877 Henry Willis organ at London’s Union Chapel, Singer wrote “Tús” after being inspired by Glen Coe, a valley in the Scottish Highlands with a stunningly primeval aspect. Singer’s 2016 album, Solas, concentrated on a shimmering mixture of organ, cello, and electronics; likewise, “Tús,” whose title translates as “beginnings” in Scottish Gaelic, zeroes in on a narrow field of tone. It opens with nearly two minutes of a long open fifth—the sound of wholeness, of concord—before the notes begin to slide across minor sevenths, major thirds, and major seconds, the different intervals piling up in a shifting matrix of tension and release. As the faintest candle flicker of high notes gradually gives way to a bassy rumble, an entire universe comes into being. There is a palpable sense of immanence in its deeply soothing movements, a sense of divinity flickering all around us.
Bisengalieva’s “TULPAR,” the shortest selection, is just as imagistic. The title refers to a winged horse in Turkic mythology and the state emblem of her native Kazakhstan. Lightning-fast string plucks thrum against great sheets of drone, suggesting galloping horses taking flight across the steppes. As with the LCO’s work for Yorke and Greenwood, Bisengalieva’s bowing saws across the spectrum, harmonics periodically flashing up like a river catching afternoon light. For all its simplicity, it’s a tense, electrifying sound.
“Oparin,” written by French pianist and composer Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch, closes out EP ONE. The title references Soviet biochemist Alexander Oparin, whose book The Origin of Life introduced the concept of the “primordial soup”—the fog of carbon-based molecules from which, he theorized, all life arose. You can hear an approximation of that cauldron in Bisengalieva’s looped violin lines. For two, three, four minutes, she saws and plucks, trembling drones and hiccupping pizzicato layered into a hazy miasma. It’s alien and hypnotic, the high notes hissing like steam from volcanic fissures. Finally, a bold glissando bolts through the murk, dives, and rises again. A tentative melody takes shape—searching, dissonant, almost breathtakingly lyrical. If what has come before is the soup, then this, surely, is life itself. Against the restrained backdrop of the rest of the EP, it’s a remarkable development and a keen demonstration of Bisengalieva’s interpretive instincts.


The British house producer’s contribution to the longstanding series offers a broad cross-section of his tastes, mostly letting his selections, and not his mixing, do the heavy lifting.

DJ-Kicks

In this bountiful age for DJ mixes, where even the most avid fan struggles to keep up with the digital deluge that falls upon Soundcloud daily, the DJ-Kicks name still stands for something. The venerable mix series is now onto its 67th edition: It’s a run that stretches back to 1995 and has come to be seen as both an arbiter of taste and a sign that an electronic act has arrived. Putting your name to a DJ-Kicks is still a big deal in 2019, even as over-familiarity has robbed the DJ mix of its currency.
Leon Vynehall sits well within these hallowed surroundings. His most recent album, 2018’s Nothing Is Still, marked a significant development in both profile and sound for the British producer, shifting his deep-house style to incorporate traces of modern classical and ambient music. That restlessness suits the series, which has never been as closely allied to the dancefloor as many mix franchises. With that in mind, Vynehall says, “To me, compiling a DJ-Kicks is a significant statement of intent and representation, so with that in mind, I thought more about the selection than the mix.”
Vynehall has certainly dug deep: the 26-track mix includes previously unreleased songs from UK bass musician Ploy, rising house producer Peach, and Pavilion, alongside a handful of tracks that make their official digital debut. The best known of those, by some distance, is Richard D. James’ impish “Children Talking,” from AFX’s 1995 EP Hangable Auto Bulb, while the fiercely open-minded tracklist takes in everything from dancehall to footwork, passing by Mancunian street soul and classical piano. The house sound for which Vynehall is known doesn’t get a look in until track 17, Crinan’s wonderfully spring-loaded and loose-limbed “Kilimanjaro,” and then only hangs around for another 15 minutes before giving way to warped drum ’n’ bass.
A well-paced, thoughtful running order facilitates these potentially difficult transitions. One of the most enlightening things about DJ-Kicks is the way the British producer joins the dots between different eras of music. Bourbonese Qualk's clank-ridden and angsty 1980s industrial number “Moving Forward” flows effortlessly into Shamos’ 2017 lo-fi electro track “Nuws,” while Etch’s modern drum ’n’ bass oddity “Unsung Hero of Irrelevance” combines beautifully with Mirage’s fearsome 1990s jungle roller “Deep Rage.”
But it’s hard to shake the feeling that Vynehall is trying a little bit too hard to impress. At times, DJ-Kicks comes across like an overworked aux cable in somebody’s living room—you want to tell the DJ to slow down a little with the relentless genre switching, lest the party be done and dusted by 10pm. The range is impressive but there’s something vaguely unsatisfying about the depth of it all, or rather the lack thereof: a couple of d’n’b tracks is enough to pique your interest in Vynehall’s love of the genre without coming close to quenching your thirst.
The traditional mix-album format doesn’t really help. Cramming 26 tracks into the length of a CD means we only get to hear about three minutes of each song, which would be understandable if Vynehall mixed them up inventively. But with the focus firmly on selection, his mixes tend to be brief, functional transitions that seem in awe of their source material. The digital release, which includes full-length downloads of all 26 tracks as well as the original mix—a format also adopted by Fabric’s new mix series—probably serves listeners better.
That might sound perverse for a mix series whose name promises turntablist thrills. But DJ-Kicks has long given reign to both dedicated DJs (Nina Kraviz, Seth Troxler) and artists who are better known as producers than disc jockeys (Nicolette, Erlend Øye), with frequently brilliant results. Vynehall’s mix sits firmly within the latter territory: more selector sensation than DJ spotlight, but still an impressive showcase of the producer’s ear.


This series of five vinyls (or one CD) is techno guru Ricardo Villalobos' most substantial solo release in five years. Over the course of its 80 minutes, naturalistic sounds blend into synthesized ones and synthetic elements imitate the natural world.

Dependent and Happy

Inside the world of contemporary techno, Ricardo Villalobos is a guru: Fans worship him, skeptics think he's a crackpot, and he doesn't seem to care much either way. Parts of his discography read like Spinal Tap for dance music: In 2006 he released a track that looped Serbian brass bands for about 37 minutes, and a year later, he made a mix for the London club Fabric consisting entirely of new Ricardo Villalobos productions, which is like giving a toast at someone's else's wedding about your own marriage. Halfway through the mix, a woman starts angrily delivering her opinions on how to deal with chicken giblets. Then the big Japanese drums come in. From where, it's unclear. In Villalobos tracks, all doors are trap doors. The music he makes is loose, chaotic, and highly detailed, but the overall effect of it is like watching traffic: In the end, nothing really happens. His gift, though-- and this is where the worshipers start to worship-- is that a different kind of nothing seems to happen every time.
His output from 2006 to 2012-- which is basically the moment he waded into the deep end-- is a catalog of extremes: On the one hand, you get these long, linear, endlessly unfolding pieces of music like his Fabric mix; on the other, you get 37 absurdly repetitive minutes of Serbian brass bands. Dependent and Happy-- a series of five vinyls or one CD that picks up where the Fabric mix left off-- is his most substantial solo release in five years, and basically an extension of the kind of music he started making on the Fabric mix. Over the course of its 80 minutes, we hear people talking, cars honking in the street, and someone playing the bongos. Naturalistic sounds blend into synthesized ones, and synthesized sounds imitate the natural world. Villalobos wanders in to play a few notes and then disappears again.
There comes a point in listening to his music that almost any sound feels like it might belong. That's the exciting thing about it. That's the disorienting thing about it, too. Dependent cements a slow evolution from left-field house music to something like sound collage or electroacoustic composition pinned to a house beat. Every element is carefully managed, but the outcome mimics that haphazard feeling of real life. And like life, Dependent moves in a straight line. Whatever repetitions are there feel accidental, like a trick of perception. (Your brain, after all, craves patterns, and will make them whether you like it or not.) Even drums-- techno's anchor-- can vary from bar to bar, sprouting weird extraneous noises as they go.
Given the open nature of the music, the tracks that seem easily excerpted from Dependent are also the ones that feel most out of place while listening to it as a whole. "Put Your Lips", for example, is as good a place as any to sample what it is Villalobos sounds like in 2012, but when it comes up int he course of the album it feels self-contained-- a strange quality when the beauty of the music is how radically open it sounds. In the end, it's the looser tracks that form the album's backbone. When I first put the needle down on "Tu Actitud", I thought the record had been cut wrong. The music seems to start in medias res-- like it's always been there, but you, the listener, just fell into it.
I hesitate to be prescriptive about these things, but both the vinyl and digital experiences are great in their own ways: Digitally, you can just let the music run, which can be more hypnotic; on vinyl, having to change sides every 12 minutes or so is a constant reminder of just how substantial the set is. Over the past few years, Villalobos has become almost mystically preoccupied with sound. "There is a fairly strictly limited range of frequencies available for the production of electronic music," he mused in a 2011 interview, surrounded by very nice-looking speakers that resemble the bells of trombones. "When you 'marry' these with all these acoustic recordings that have all these atmospheric spaces, it is in some ways a complementation of the things that electronic music lacks."
In other interviews, he's talked down software like Ableton, which offers pre-programmed instruments at affordable prices that Villalobos, with his impossible ears, can identify in "two seconds." Instead, he uses modular synthesizers, building each electronic element from raw wave forms. Bar soap? No. He makes his own. (Maybe now is the time to mention that the vinyl edition-- i.e., the one for the hardcores-- has three extra tracks, all of comparable quality to anything else on the CD version. Villalobos, of course, encourages attentive listening; most of the vinyl only has one track on each side, which is a very different experience from listening to it as an almost continuous block of sound.)
Basically, he's a snob. He's monkish in his austerity. There's also nobody making the kind of music he's making right now. Like last year's collaboration with Max Loderbauer re-imagining tracks from the catalog of German jazz label ECM, Dependent breaks down genre and expectations, but does it with a polite kind of confidence. It recalibrates the ear. Maybe it's appropriate to assess it like a drug: Side effects may include a heightening of sensitivity to the sound of the world around you. Call his tracks "environments"-- my guess is, he would. In them, even melody-- one of the most basic components of music-- can sound totally foreign. It's true that destruction can be an act of creation, but the same goes the other way around: In building, Villalobos, with his big ideas and cheerful disposition, tears down.


While not as egregiously baffling as Indie Cindy, the latest from the ’90s indie icons is nonetheless a middling effort missing all kinds of dynamics the Pixies used to offer.

Head Carrier

The Pixies weren’t the only band that blazed the trail for alternative rock’s mainstream takeover in the ’90s, but they were the rare band that got to be trailblazers twice. When they regrouped at Coachella in 2004 after an 11-year breakup, they effectively ushered in another musical phenomenon: the indie-icon reunion-tour circuit. It granted the Massachusetts misfits a long overdue opportunity to play for the sort of massive crowds that their famous fans—Nirvana, Radiohead, and Weezer among them—had built on their influence. But what was once a valorous underdog-victory narrative has slowly turned into a cautionary tale about pissing away all the goodwill you’ve accrued.
For the rest of the 2000s, the Pixies toured and toured as if they were on a mission to perform for every last person on Earth who longed to hear “Debaser” in the flesh. By the time they finally decided to release new music again in 2013, not only was bassist Kim Deal gone, so too was any lingering excitement about the prospect of new Pixies music. What’s more, the three scatterbrained EPs they issued between 2013 and 2014—later compiled and reshuffled in album form as Indie Cindy—only served to answer those deflated expectations with a collection of songs that overcompensated for their lack of vigor and volatility by amping up the egregious eccentricity.
And yet despite that misfire, not to mention an aborted attempt to replace Deal with another Kim, the Pixies are giving it another go. With bassist Paz Lenchantin (A Perfect Circle, the Entrance Band) now officially sworn in, Head Carrier feels like an attempt to stabilize their course. The Pixies are no longer the legends resurfacing with their first album in 20 years; they’re just a steady-as-she-goes rock band cranking out another record. With Head Carrier, they’re essentially in their Voodoo Lounge phase, turning in the sort of middling, late-career album that will clog up the Pixies bin at your local record store when you’re looking to upgrade your worn-out copy of Surfer Rosa.
If Head Carrier has no ambitions to be a return to a form, it at least doesn’t incite the same sort of facepalm incredulity as Indie Cindy. (Seriously: what the fuck was “Bagboy”?) On tuneful songs like “Classic Masher” and “Might As Well Be Gone,” you can hear traces of the band that made “Here Comes Your Man” and “Velouria.” But there’s scant evidence of the band that made “Vamos” or “Gouge Away”—the volcanic outbursts that made their more melodic songs shine like diamonds in the coal.
The tension points that once made the Pixies so singular and striking—tiki-torched calm vs. eyeball-slicing chaos, sweetness vs. psychosis, American mythology vs. Spanish surrealism—have been thoroughly massaged out by this point. Yes, Kim Deal is missed, but so are Black Francis’ frightening mood swings, Joey Santiago’s blazing grease-rag guitars, and Dave Lovering’s concrete-cracking stomps. These Pixies are happy to just twang and jangle instead of slash and burn; on those rare occasions when they do try to rip up the asphalt (“Baal’s Back,” “Um Chagga Laga”), they sound less like ticking time-bomb terrors drunk on Dali and David Lynch than a mildly cranky Tex-Mex bar band.
As futile as it may be to hold the current Pixies up to the standard of records they made nearly 30 years ago, the comparisons are unavoidable given that they’re still executing the same playbook, only with less enthusiasm. Lenchantin is called on to do everything Kim Deal used to do, but while her plainspoken delivery is genial enough, it doesn’t exude the mischievous glee that made her predecessor such an effective balm to Francis’ tonsil-shredding howls. And given that Francis doesn’t get all that worked up about much here, the contrast between the two is muted—she’s more harmonic support than a full-on foil.
As such, Lenchantin’s lead vocal debut as a Pixie, “All I Think About Now,” is less notable for her performance than the lyrics Francis gave her to sing. Opening with an unsubtle echo of “Where Is My Mind?,” the song serves as Francis’ thank-you note to Deal, a fond remembrance of their working relationship to dispel the long-rumored animosity between the two. That sort of candor and poignancy are rare qualities in the Pixies canon—and credit Lenchantin, who came up with the lyrical concept, for nudging Francis into this uncharted terrain. But the singing-telegram approach feels sort of like, well, quitting your band by fax.
The truth is, if Head Carrier had arrived as the umpteenth Frank Black solo album, little about it would seem amiss. But coming from a band whose legacy was built on shock-and-awe transgression, Head Carrier feels overly pleasant and pedestrian. I’m reminded of that infamous Steve Albini interview from the early ’90s where the Surfer Rosa producer called his former clients “a band who, at their top-dollar best, are blandly entertaining college rock.” At the time, the quote seemed like blasphemy. Now, it feels like prophecy.