Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the British folk-rock singer’s 1976 album, a brilliant display of musicianship from a songwriter attuned to the mysteries of desire and heartbreak.

Joan Armatrading

Joan Armatrading will render interior mysteries with such forthright clarity, attuned so sensitively to the rhythms of feeling, that she makes the most terrible depths of heartbreak seem, to start, bearable. And then she’ll make you smile. “I am not in love,” Armatrading began her exalted 1976 hit, “Love and Affection,” “But I’m open to persuasion.” Where in pop do openings get better? Armatrading spent the 1970s affirming her status as one of the finest singer-songwriters of her generation: a woman of fierce intelligence and self-effacing wit who never stopped reading your mind or keeping you guessing.
In an industry inhospitable to opinionated women, Armatrading mastered the art of saying no. Speaking with the UK women’s liberation magazine Spare Rib in 1974, the singer-songwriter made this irrefutably clear. She had said no to men who suggested she change her androgynous look, no to men who told her to be nicer on stage, no to male producers who tried to control her sound. She said no to critics who argued that her lyrics must be drawn from personal experience (they were composites) and no to the male-prescribed dictum that women ought to “sing pretty.” With every “no,” Armatrading went with herself, and invited others to do the same. “I think it is possible to be yourself and get on in pop music,” she told The Guardian in 1976. “I intend to go on trying.”
Born on the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts, Armatrading was 7 years old when she boarded a plane alone from the West Indies to Birmingham, England, to reunite with her parents and two older brothers, from whom she’d been separated for four years. As one of six kids being raised in a small flat, she spent much of her time in the Midlands of England seeking solitude. She would hide at the library, reading Shakespeare and Dickens. “I was on my own a lot… I had a weird childhood,” she told Melody Maker, “and that’s probably been the strongest influence on my character.” Learning young that to be a loner does not necessarily mean being lonely, that in some cases being separate from a crowd brings you closer to yourself and then to everything, Armatrading became a keen observer of others.
She had started writing songs on a pawn shop acoustic guitar and the neglected household piano in her mid-teens. Her inquisitive vision of folk-rock was tinged with the music she grew up around—jazz and soul, gospel and rock’n’roll, Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding—especially in the depth of her smoky alto, which voiced the highest heavenly feeling of love as well as its lowest void. Like her idol, Van Morrison—still one of the few influences she’ll point to—her songs have unconventional structures, whether raving up into fiery epiphanies or floating on daydreams. Armatrading didn’t so much bring a Black British identity to the ’70s singer-songwriter tradition as offer proof that a Black British woman played an active role in its creation.
In 1970, after playing out in Birmingham folk clubs, Armatrading met a songwriting partner, the Guyana-born poet Pam Nestor, as stage actors in a traveling production of the hippie rock musical Hair. The cross between Armatrading’s shy introspection and Nestor’s outgoing drive was pivotal. While touring UK theaters, Armatrading set Nestor’s words to music, becoming a dramatist in song, too. “City girl, make life what it should be,” Armatrading sang on a soaring early song she wrote for and about Nestor, a beacon of camaraderie and resilience. In 1974, Armatrading told Spare Rib: “Black women don’t sing sweet because they haven’t been brainwashed so much into thinking they’ve got to be weak. The opposite, they’ve got to be strong. So they just get on with it.”
After their stint in Hair, Nestor and Armatrading headed for London. When Nestor attended the 1971 Glastonbury Festival—where she recalled seeing exactly one other Black person—a fellow festivalgoer encouraged her to take their demos to the publisher Essex Music, which then represented the likes of T. Rex and Black Sabbath. They signed with Essex, and then to Cube Records for Armatrading’s 1972 debut Whatever’s for Us—recorded with Elton John’s producer, Gus Dudgeon—but it soon became clear that the label wanted to market Armatrading as a solo artist, pressuring the partners to go separate ways. Their breakup casts their raw collaborations, like “Whatever’s for Us, for Us” and “Spend a Little Time,” as extraordinarily bittersweet. During the process of recording and promoting her follow-up, 1975’s Back to the Night—Armatrading’s first album for the easy listening establishment at A&M—she was so disillusioned by the process of navigating male egos in the studio that she basically checked out.
But Armatrading would find her footing yet. A year later, the grounded, self-contained energy of Joan Armatrading was hard-earned. It was the first album where Armatrading penned every song, her best by far, entirely alone. The immaculate Joan Armatrading was like her Tapestry: not a debut, but where her confidence caught up to her brilliance, where her nuanced singing and dextrous musicianship—baroque balladeering, burning blues guitar riffs, touches of funk—came alive, dissolving genre lines. In a bid to make her more commercial, A&M enlisted the rock producer Glyn Johns, who’d worked with the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Eagles, and most recently the folk-rock greats Fairport Convention, various members of which back Armatrading on the record. By Johns’ account, he simply stayed out of her way. She knew what she wanted.
Joan Armatrading contained biting personal revelations that you just don’t usually hear in pop songs. On “Somebody Who Loves You,” she punctuates her plaintive should-I-stay-or-go dilemma with a blunt reality check: “So tired of one night stands/Left with longing from misspent passion/With one more human to despise.” Clarifying the titular sentiment of “Tall in the Saddle,” she seethes: “One of these days you’re gonna have to dismount.” And Armatrading’s shining conviction that “I’ve got all the friends that I need” on “Love and Affection” could not be more delightfully transparent—she is not playing. More often, Armatrading’s shyness registered as romantic trepidation: people failing to connect, not having the words, misunderstandings. On three different Joan Armatrading tunes, she sings of “Love, love, love,” “Fun, fun, fun,” “People, people, people,” sounding like she is very much still trying to figure out how to relate to others, which is itself, of course, hugely relatable.
Her songs could be breathtakingly vulnerable. But what she left out said a lot. Few songs on Joan Armatrading are addressed from “I” to a gendered lover, leaving room for queer identity. (She didn’t come out for decades, though a 1978 Melody Maker profile did note that she had a copy of lesbian classic 1973 novel Rubyfruit Jungle on her bookshelf.) On “Down to Zero,” Armatrading lays bare a breakup that’s left brutally unexplained. She sings of a “brand new dandy” who “takes your man,” and later we hear a woman singing about another woman, who “took the worry from your head” and “put trouble in your heart instead.” Armatrading offers sage-like consolation not just in her lyrics, but in her resolute singing, in her hard strums, in the elegant steel guitar, the sound like Laurel Canyon folk-rock more syncopated. In the face of longing and lack that make no sense, it’s all a kind of armor.
Armatrading was constantly compared to Joni Mitchell, which, for 1976, made some sense. To borrow a phrase from Mitchell, they were “women of heart and mind,” writing the highest caliber of hypersensitive song, and both fought to manifest their musical identities. The comparison still wasn’t wholly accurate. Armatrading’s lyrics were broader in scope, while Mitchell tended toward the granular. If Mitchell’s brilliance was in her details, then Armatrading’s was in her angle, at a smart remove, like a caring friend watching on with the clarity of distance. It gives Armatrading’s writing a useful sweep. Two years prior, Mitchell sang, on her biggest single, “Help me.” Armatrading had another idea for floundering, inadequate, unthinking lovers: “It would help me more if you helped yourself.”
No wonder Armatrading was beloved by feminists: “Help Yourself” is the sound of a woman who will not have her time wasted, who will not be fooled. She calls out cowards who’d rather wait until the morning to tell the truth, who put convenience over compassion. There’s a comic perfection in how she uses her words to casually rebuke her subject, pitching her voice high to underscore that this person has got to get their shit together. Armatrading perfectly communicates the way that people—typically men—so often refuse to communicate. Anyone who has been on the receiving end of such emotional withholding from a supposedly addled person will hear the dry sarcasm that saturates her halting delivery: “Hold up, hold up, hold up/You’re trying to sort out your mind!” A breakdown makes way for a hollered breakthrough—“I’m going out to help myself!”—and it’s positively life-giving.
Armatrading was 25 when she opened “Love and Affection” with those 10 beguiling words about imagining a way out of loneliness. “Love and Affection” begins like a mystic English folk ballad and ends with a proclamation of “Love, love, love”—13 loves, all of them persuasive—that reaches gospel-sized grandeur. She said it was like two songs put together, which makes sense, because it’s about holding two conflicting truths: a desire for love and an inability to feel it. “If I can feel the sun in my eyes/And the rain on my face/Why can’t I feel love?” she sings. It’s tempting to read into the potential confusion underpinning such a lyric. But in 1976, it was a question with no answer. If Armatrading’s writing did share something with Mitchell, maybe it was her very willingness to look straight in the eye of the unresolvable, to hold uncertainty at the heart of her biggest song. Armatrading knew that the purpose of love was to feel changed as it took shape, and the song shape-shifts throughout, transforming like the moment of infatuation. The soulful bass vocal and sax affirm as much. It’s triumphant.
“Love and Affection” was a Top 10 hit in the UK. But in a 2019 BBC Four documentary, Armatrading spoke candidly about her label’s failure to successfully market her music. They didn’t know what to do with a Black woman wielding an acoustic Ovation guitar and singing songs that didn’t fit neatly into any single Black genre. Her music was tinged with flourishes of blues, jazz, funk, soul, but her approach, like many of her singer-songwriter contemporaries, was utterly personal. The Los Angeles label that successfully pushed the milquetoast Carpenters through the ’70s, it turns out, was not up to the task of selling a Black British original. A&M knew how to market music that slotted neatly onto the radio. Armatrading did not slot neatly onto the radio.
Joan Armatrading was still adoringly received: It went gold within a year, remained on the U.S. charts for 27 weeks, and the UK music paper Sounds named it the album of the year over Bob Dylan’s Desire and Joni Mitchell’s Hejira. That fall, when she sold out her first massive headlining date at the Hammersmith Odeon, an NME critic wrote that the audience included “more women than I've ever seen at a comparable gig anywhere.” But in the U.S., even by the time of her next great album, ’78’s To the Limit, Armatrading remained “vastly unknown” to young American listeners. An intensely private person, she never sought fame, even as she continued to record prolifically. As the decades progressed—no thanks to the star-making machinery—she gained increasingly greater control over her visionary pop music, turning towards new wave and reggae, producing her own albums, writing ever more daring songs, and eventually creating a recording studio in a barn where she works on her self-determined music independently. Already on Joan Armatrading, that agency resounded.

Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here.


Volcano Choir is Bon Iver's Justin Vernon with Wisconsin experimental post-rock outfits Collections of Colonies of Bees and All Tiny Creatures. On their second LP Repave, the sextet have created a grandiose record featuring arena-rock ambitions and ostentatious beauty.

Repave

The music Justin Vernon creates as Bon Iver leaves itself wide open to interpretation, comically so at times. But almost no one interprets it as “fun.” Now consider Wisconsin experimental post-rock outfits Collections of Colonies of Bees and All Tiny Creatures and the fact that “experimental post-rock” never promises a load of laughs either. These are the parties that comprise Volcano Choir and on their second LP Repave, the sextet have created a grandiose record with arena-rock ambitions and ostentatious beauty that is mostly inscrutable on a lyrical level. And yet, here’s the way in: I think this is the sound of them having fun.
This may sound counterintuitive, but it was also the key to unlocking their 2009 debut Unmap. Lyrics such as “conserve it with an omelette/ and you’re on it with the carpet” from “Island, IS” would’ve been a dead giveaway if you could make them out in the slightest. But while all those beatless, free-time mbira excursions could have been interpreted as experimental artists indulging their least accessible ideas, let’s not forget that thumb pianos are really fun to play when you’re stoned.
Repave is a decidedly more extroverted affair-- “with enough kief/ you can really bore someone” is the most straightforward and sound advice you’ll get from Vernon, though he sings it with chesty zeal on “Byegone” like it’s a regal proclamation. Volcano Choir are less interested in getting high this time out as they are achieving spiritual uplift, or at least getting a rise out of the listener-- if you still are doubting the sincerity of Bon Iver’s Hornsby tribute “Beth/Rest”, Repave establishes that some things will never change with Vernon.
The near entirety of it could be described as “power balladry,” a comprehensive denomination that owes plenty to the 1980s’ most popular Bruces, but also those that stood at their periphery and the bands that would ultimately carry their lineage. Overdriven organ, booming drums, and Vernon’s multitracked falsetto push opener “Tiderays” to an elevated plane where post-prog Genesis and pre-Eno Coldplay meet. The magisterial orchestration of “Byegone” enrobes a grizzled folk tune; it’s a place where early Pearl Jam and Arcade Fire find common ground in their ability to reconcile the supposed incongruity of humility and bluster within a cohesive aesthetic. Those bands tended to make songs with “sea” or “ocean” in their title and you don’t need that damn album cover for Volcano Choir to drive the point home. All songs on Repave begin quietly and almost none stay that way for long, so when those crescendos hit, you’re supposed to envision waves crashing on cold, barren outcroppings, white mist spraying as seabirds take majestic flight.
That’s really what “power ballad” means on a literal level-- an intimate song blown out to widescreen proportions to the point where you have to call it epic and it can be shared with thousands of people who all think it was written for them. It’s worth acknowledging the mutual benefit that gets passed on to CoCoB and ATC here: let’s not forget, for all the ill will directed towards any of the influences here, their records were often the outcome of the most technically proficient musicians on earth given frightening sums of money and unlimited studio time with the express purpose of making "it sounds like a million bucks" feel tangible.
And the instrumental contingent of Volcano Choir gets to live out their hockey shed visions by isolating the most bombastic sections of Bon Iver albums and making entire songs out of them. They still fill out the margins playing tricky, off-kilter guitar lines that wouldn’t be out of place in their own work. Here, they’re polished, shellacked, and gilded to the point where you couldn’t imagine Vernon picking up one of their guitars and strumming out “Skinny Love”-- they sound more like harps. The depth of the drums evoke not just canyons and churches, but the Grand Canyon and Sistine Chapel. In short, Repave sounds amazing, almost intimidating in its clarity, so even when “Keel” and "Almanac" start to integrate the more free-form and abrasive sounds of Unmap towards the end, you’re more likely to hear the spirituals of later Talk Talk than anything truly confrontational.
Still, they never overpower Vernon, who focuses solely on his vocals here and anthologizes every mode he’s been in for the past half decade. His most quoted line by now is “I was not magnificent,” and Repave answers “like hell I wasn’t.” A couple of my colleagues noted the influence of Bruce Springsteen on this record, and while I concur, it’s more of a visual than a sound. On late-album lighter-waver “Alaskans”, you can sense a perspirant Vernon two hours into a cathartic, marathon show, toweling himself down, sitting at a piano bench. There’s a performative edge that might seem out of place in Bon Iver-- even though the band’s personnel exploded to over a dozen, you still have the expectation that Vernon’s singing his pain up there. As he explained to Ryan Dombal, Volcano Choir doesn’t just sound romantic or like make-out music, it’s distinctly sexual. When he sings "We're talkin’ real love” in a seductive lower register on “Alaskans”, it’s like the drums were removed so you can hear the adulation of the crowd in your mind. Vernon howls “I won’t beg for you on acetate” and it’s a knowing, self-referential barb from a guy whose music often gets characterized as doing just the opposite.
What Volcano Choir get out of this is the ability to indulge in extravagant power balladry without taking on the seemingly requisite overblown persona where all this heavy lifting is necessary when you're carrying the weight of the world. But just as often, the subtle levity gets a little too heightened. Had Vernon done away with lyrics completely and gone Wisconsin Hopelandic on us, Repave might be worthy of being called the third Bon Iver album, which it sorta is-- the majestic choruses of “Tiderays” and “Comrade” are way more in line with Bon Iver’s “Perth” or “Calgary” than anything on Unmap. But too often, Vernon’s lyrics range from puzzling to utterly too goofy to ignore, creating a discomfiting dissonance with the stone cold sobriety of the music.
Authenticity is always something of a bugaboo outside of Vernon’s main gig-- you use For Emma, Forever Ago and Bon Iver as standards and everything’s going to sound potentially insincere by comparison. Usually, skepticism is succesfully met head on-- the louche and lewd nature of Gayngs assured that while they weren’t winking, they were definitely leering. As far as the blue-collar, cheesehead rawk of Shouting Matches, the whole point is to remind you that Vernon is a Wisconsinite from Eau Claire, not just a dude who happened upon a cabin there. For all I know, Vernon might be entering his Ghostface Killah ca. Supreme Clientele phase-- simply toying with words for maximum surrealistic value. But while Repave's sounds trigger skygazing, googly-eyed emotion, lines like "tossin' off your compliments, wow/ sexin' all your Parliaments" and "that Ticonderoga shit/ made my mind and my heart/ all split up over/ the floor of the jackpot" can make you immediately question how much you should trust them.
Vernon explained Repave's carnality as damn near necessary in the indie rock discussion: "It's been built up so hard and so high that people are afraid...I'm talking about how what happens between people is so misunderstood even between the people who are having sex. Maybe some of the lyrics on this record are my way of cracking the egg." It's a noble cause, but indicative of the obfuscation and loopiness that undermines Repave; he uses a mixed metaphor to describe what might happen if people discuss the emotions that result from a physical act. But in the way its tremendously seductive and overwhelming overtures can be jeopardized by one embarrassing line or wrong move, Repave does become a realistically sexualized record. Just not exactly in the way it intended.


With a focus on the minutiae of grief and heartbreak, the latest album from songwriter Taylor Vick nestles wry, careful lyrics into quiet arrangements that reward close listening.

Wayfinder

Taylor Vick’s records as Boy Scouts are easy to enjoy and even easier to underrate. Her songs move at an ambling pace; the clean-toned guitars pulse gently and the snares are tapped, while her voice never rises above a murmur. If a song from her latest album, Wayfinder, suddenly began playing out loud in a library, no one would raise an eyebrow.
But her songs intensify under scrutiny. Look closer, and knotty emotions sprout from those placid surfaces. Vick pays near-fetishistic attention to the minutiae of grief and heartbreak: The lyric sheet for Wayfinder quotes exchanges with old lovers and friends in their entirety—“You’d say, ‘Do you even try to see how you took what’s mine’/And I’d say ‘I don’t think you’re right/But here, you can have your light’”—as if stating them for the record.
Vick is prolific—her Bandcamp holds five full-lengths and various EPs stretching back a decade. Like Car Seat Headrest’s Will Toledo, she sometimes recycles lyrics or ideas from her earlier work, not for lack of inspiration but to see what new truths they might yield. You sense she’s circling around her own songs, waiting to see where they might bring her if she just listens closely enough.
The meticulously spaced guitars, the sweet-sour snap of the chords, and the quiet discipline of the arrangements reveal a deep study of Elliott Smith, particularly the records he made once he migrated to a major label. Vick confirms the affinity on “That’s Life Honey” with the lyric “Bottle it up and you will surely explode,” a near-quote from a highlight of Smith’s 1998 album XO. Vick’s lyrics are more elemental than Smith’s, usually a few phrases boiled down to their essence, but she shares his care in word choice. Listen to her syllable placement in “I Get High”: “’Cause I exist/And I exert/I need a kiss/And some dessert.” The phonetics are as sticky as the melody.
Paying prolonged attention to Vick's music reveals that she is uncommonly spectacular at the art of lyric-setting, which is the kind of thankless gift that usually disappears beneath the song’s surface. But once you notice it, her intelligence is at work with every word. On “Lighter,” she sings, “I always wonder, what do you find,” breaking the word “find” into three chromatically ascending pitches, lifting the melody upward until its shape has become more noticeable than the word it conveys. Her melodies deftly bundle up even lyrics that might look heavy on the page: “The ocean needs no one to blame,” she sings on “That’s Life Honey.” “It’s the master of beautiful rage/I’m the master of inexplicable shame.”
Vick spaces her instruments far apart in the mix but keeps all the voicings close, as if her music is hugging itself for protection in a faraway corner. Every song is midtempo, chugging along with the dreaminess of everyday life. If you want to glean something deeper, you have to lean in. Vick’s truths, like her melodies, are bite-sized, pungent: “Being myself’s a lot to ask,” she shrugs on “A Lot To Ask.”
Under cover of her protective solitude, Vick’s writing is funny, wry, ironic: “Not Today” laughs gently at grief’s persistence. “Could I let it go? Guess today’s not the day, is it,” she sings on the chorus. It’s a diaristic gesture, a joke so small you would never even bother to verbalize it. Maybe someone would see you smile to yourself, faintly, at the thought. Maybe they’d wonder what you were thinking. If they could hear that thought, as it buzzed past, it might sound a lot like Vick’s music.

Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


Frequently pointed to as an underrated shoegaze gem, the debut EP by Pinkshinyultrablast provides an enjoyable (if brief) introduction to the band’s rapturous take on rock.

Pinkshinyultrablast: Happy Songs for Happy Zombies

Happy Songs for Happy Zombies

Pinkshinyultrablast have been together nearly a decade, but they’re still chasing the clock. The Russian outfit has been living on borrowed time since 2007, when four lifelong music nerds from Saint Petersburg decided to start a band, knowing full well that they’d have to part ways in a few months’ time to attend university. Determined to defy those temporal restraints, the quartet worked in fits and bursts, using every pocket of free time as a chance to commit their memories to wax.
Somehow, they've found ways to develop as a band even with this scattershot work schedule. Just this February, Pinkshinyultrablast released Grandfeathered, an underrated collection of sophisticated—and thunderous—pop songs. Several months after the band's most intricate release to date, London’s Club AC30 is taking a look back on their hurried early period with a reissue of Happy Songs for Happy Zombies, their debut EP. Frequently pointed to as an underrated gem by the modern shoegaze faithful, the four-track, 15-minute collection provides an enjoyable (if brief) introduction to the band’s rapturous take on rock.
Much like the Astrobrite album that inspired Pinkshinyultrablast's name, Happy Songs for Happy Zombies plays it maximalist. The aptly titled opening salvo “Blaster” spills forth in a rush of massive, fanning guitar riffs, whirring feedback, and bass throb. Guitarist Roman Parinov may not sing lead—that job belongs to frontwoman Lyubov Soloveva—but his screechy axe is the track’s strongest voice, easily engulfing her fragile melodies. Soloveva can’t be contained, however—just as Parinov seems to have her buried on “Blaster” or “Ode to Godzilla,” she phases through him, gently guiding the roar beneath her and preventing the music from dissolving into chaos.
Soloveva, Parinov, and company certainly take cues from amp-stackers like My Bloody Valentine and Swervedriver, but their biggest inspiration on Happy Songs for Happy Zombies arguably isn’t shoegaze, or even musical. In a 2015 interview with Indie is Not A Genre, Soloveva revealed the group’s fascination with the Russian custom of dacha: an annual exodus from city apartment to country cabin for a few months of hard-earned rest and reflection. The burbling “Honeybee,” certainly feels like the type of song inspired by a day of cloud-gazing; it sees Parinov loosening up and letting the notes unspool steadily atop a fluttering backbeat. Between the lurching, grunge-y verses on “Deerland” and “Blaster”’s aforementioned wind-tunnel arrangement, calling Happy Songs for Happy Zombies a relaxed effort is certainly a stretch, but the EP's dacha mentality endures: freedom, playfulness, childlike wonder—and most importantly, an appreciation of those rare moments where you’re not chasing time or fretting over its passage, but enjoying the time you do have with the people who matter. Fifteen minutes is no eternity, after all, but it’s ample time for an enjoyable escape—just like Happy Songs for Happy Zombies.


Led by singer Eno Williams, Uyai becomes a wildly diverse mix of global sounds whose focus this time has turned to themes of liberation, power, and beauty—specifically that of women.

Uyai

If you crossed ’70s Nigerian highlife with LCD Soundsystem, you might get something like the opening track of Uyai. On “Give Me a Reason,” highlife trumpets and talking drums punch through buzzy synth lines and metallic drum machine effects. Like most dance music, it seeks liberation. Unlike most, it also laments: “As the story goes, they got sent to a house of wisdom/To learn all that the world can offer/But on setting out, they got lost,” Eno Williams sings in Ibibio, a language of southeast Nigeria. The song speaks about the 276 Chibok girls who were abducted three years ago, the vast majority of whom are still missing.
Led by London-born, Lagos-raised singer Williams, Ibibio Sound Machine are an eight-piece band whose music draws on Nigerian highlife as much as new wave, South African jazz as much as techno, Cameroonian makossa as much as disco. Besides being a nod to the Ibibio language and region that Williams’ family comes from, the band’s name is also a wink at Miami Sound Machine, whose ’80s pop exuberance and cultural mash-up are approaches that Ibibio shares. The band’s new release, Uyai, meaning “Beauty,” is their first since their self-titled debut in 2014. Accompanying a switch from the more vintage-oriented Soundway Records to indie rock label Merge, their sound has expanded to include more electronic and rock influences but has also grown more introspective. They still incorporate the kind of Ibibio storytelling that was at the center of Ibibio Sound Machine, but their focus this time has turned to themes of liberation, power, and beauty—specifically that of women.
Throughout the album, Eno draws on the presence of the women in her life, highlighting the experiences and histories that link them. Her sister and friends join her on several tracks as backing vocalists. On “The Chant (Iquo Isang),” her mom even makes a cameo chanting an improvised prayer, whispering and growling over shakers and a four-on-the-floor thump. Williams too recounts a chant from her schoolgirl days—the chorus from “Zangalewa” (originally by Cameroonian makossa group Golden Sounds; a couple decades later lifted by Shakira for the 2010 World Cup anthem). In writing “Joy (Idaresit),” an experimental techno-rock track, Williams was inspired by an older woman she saw dancing who reminded her of her own mother. By contrast, “Lullaby” shows the singer as the mother figure. It’s one of the gentler tracks, colored by atmospheric reverb, tinkly EKG blips, and bubbling talking drum.
As grounded as Williams is in her own roots, her and Ibibio’s vision also taps into music across the African Diaspora. On “The Pot Is on Fire” and “Guide You (Edu Kpeme),” Ghanaian keyboardist Emmanuel Rentzos, of Osibisa fame, contributes playful synth-work. On tracks peppered with swiveling robot sounds and cowbells, percussionist Anselmo Netto plays Afro-Brazilian percussion, like the squeaky cuíca (as on “Guide You”) or the conga-like atabaque and boomy surdo (as on “Power of 3”). Meanwhile, “One That Lights Up (Andi Domo Ikang Uwem Mi)” is a love song that sounds like watercolors, where the horns reference South African jazz, and distorted mbiras recall Kinshasa’s Konono Nº1.
With all these musical influences and elements at play, Uyai could easily be a chaotic mess. For the most part, it's not, but every element doesn’t always feel necessary. On “Power of 3,” there’s a solid 30-second passage of laser gun sounds. The album as a whole has a lot of laser gun sounds. It also has frequent sudden shifts between high energy songs and mellower songs, so that even though the record has a unified sound, it sometimes feels disjointed. During the last two songs, however, that contrast works. On the tenderest moment of the album, “Cry (Eyed),” Eno intones the word “cry” over and over again over a muted balafon-esque pattern, as if by way of slow repetition we could find some release. On album closer “Trance Dance”—in a whirl of syncopated rhythms, chiptune blips, and guitar fuzz—we finally do.


A new collection of the late songwriter’s work celebrates the wit, range, and unpolished charm of his oddball pop.

Becoming Peter Ivers

The late songwriter Peter Ivers had a rich life long before he relocated to Southern California in the 1970s—as a Harvard student, a harmonica virtuoso, and a Van Dyke Parks-groomed solo artist—but his legacy wasn’t sealed until he made a home on the West Coast. It was there that Ivers composed “In Heaven” for David Lynch’s debut film Eraserhead, hosted the public access variety show New Wave Theatre, and recorded numerous demo cassettes and reel-to-reel tapes, leaving a mess of pop oddities at the time of his still-unsolved murder in 1983. On Becoming Peter Ivers, RVNG Intl. presents a collection of his bizarre and beautiful recordings, some of which have never before seen the light of day. It is an embarrassment of riches that crowns Ivers as the weirdo king of bedroom pop, decades before the genre existed.
“Demos are often better than records,” Ivers once wrote. “More energy, more soul, more guts.” Becoming Peter Ivers is a testament to that doctrine. The compilation presents 25 tracks culled from over 500 recordings that Ivers laid down at his Laurel Canyon home and studios in L.A. in the mid-to-late ’70s (four songs that appear on Ivers’ earlier albums are absent from the digital edition). Lovingly compiled by RVNG’s Matt Werth with Matthew Sanders, Ivers’ friend Steve Martin, and Ivers’ longtime girlfriend Lucy Fisher, the songs feel close and warm. Opener “Take Your Chances With Me” is one of the record’s most intimate and modern offerings. Ivers’ small voice is pinched into an airy whisper, supported by a scaffold of acoustic guitar and the cry of a distant siren. It’s such a spare piece of music that any additional arrangement would threaten to crush its delicate bones. “Even Stephen Foster” takes a similar approach, uniting subdued piano and Ivers’ half-sung confessions.
Not every song on Becoming is so stripped down, but they all possess an unpolished charm. “I’m Sorry Alice” is a disco-funk romp with horns, harmonica, and back-up singers. “Miraculous Weekend” is even more decadent; Ivers takes a page from Marc Bolan’s book and slips into a trembling falsetto, rhyming “fabulous” and “miraculous” with tossed-off elegance. These tracks are some of the most decorated entries on Becoming, but they sound loose and spontaneous, as if performed live at a house party. At the opposite side of the spectrum, the brief “Untitled” is among the album’s best songs, with a simple keyboard progression and wordless melody that, though written prior to the band’s debut, sound oddly like the Cure. Tracks like “Alpha Centauri” present a middle ground in Ivers’ work—the production is pared back, but the combination of skronking sax and Ivers’ shrill voice lends it an air of absurdity. Comfortably transitioning between lo-fi love songs and full-band glam rock, Ivers’ chameleonic songwriting reflects his professional life: He hosted punk bands like Fear and Dead Kennedys on New Wave Theatre while also befriending Hollywood mainstays like Harold Ramis and composing the theme for Ron Howard’s 1977 film Grand Theft Auto.
Becoming feels assembled from an endless bag of Ivers’ tricks, as delightful and deceptive as Mary Poppins’ suitcase. Just when you think you’ve seen the bottom, Ivers pulls out an umbrella. One such surprise is late-album gem “Happy on the Grill,” a tender track sung from the perspective of a frankfurter. “I’m a little hot dog on the grill,” Ivers sings. “Your love is hot, but there’s the thrill.” No matter how sweetly it’s sung, the line is quite masochistic and strange. Ivers’ dark sense of humor is present throughout, particularly in “Conference Call at Four,” a snide send-up of corporate culture that details a very important phone meeting. “Suppose a baby’s born tonight, or a flood hits, or a gun,” Ivers lilts. “You can bet your bottom dollar, Jack, that they’ll all still be on.” It is the spiritual sibling of Harry Nilsson’s “Good Old Desk,” a cheeky reprimand of those who live to work as opposed to the other way around. One gets the sense that Ivers understood both modes of living—and that he knew where his true allegiance lay.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)


The New York guitarist and his longtime collaborators spend a rollicking, leisurely hour imagining rock music’s role in a world more invested in social justice than commerce.

Connection

Marc Ribot keeps watering the roots of no wave. The New York genre, while it seemed to wither 40 years ago, is a key ingredient in his gloriously messy alchemy, which mixes flippant interpretation, heavy feedback, and agit-prop vocals with lofty traditions. The guitarist and composer has layered his scrappy voice over improvisatory jazz, crafted collections of celebratory Cuban montuno (on one track, Ribot sings in Spanish with a self-consciously bad accent), and recorded a volume of compositions by his mentor, Haitian classical guitarist Frantz Casseus. He’s been most consistent as leader of Ceramic Dog, a power trio of jazz geniuses who inflect literate rock with formidable chops. The synthesis is frenetic, potent, and at odds with the zeitgeist, even if Ribot’s lyrics decry today’s political oppression: Musically, he rejects both the voguish and the virtuosic in favor of his own whims.
The band hitches Ribot with bassist Shahzad Ismaily and drummer Ches Smith, musicians known for artfully changing horses midstream. Famously omnivorous, Ismaily is fresh off Love in Exile, a trio collaboration whose gorgeous, glacial changes are the polar opposite of Ceramic Dog. Smith, once the drummer for indie mainstays Xiu Xiu, has carved out a parallel practice as a composer and percussionist whose outsider immersion in Haitian music rivals Ribot’s. Mercurial tendencies can divide groups; they’ve kept Ceramic Dog together for 18 years, guiding the band as it skirts trendiness in favor of conviction. The three-piece offers a playfully naive idea of how rock might be in a world more invested in social justice than commerce: rambling and trenchant, like the dinnertime rant of a pissed-off family member.
Connection, Ceramic Dog’s fifth LP, stretches these abundant qualities into a rollicking, leisurely hour. Ribot and co. roll through rock, free jazz, boogaloo, son cubano, and, on their thrilling cover of “That’s Entertainment,” the popular songbook as filtered through post-punk. Along the way, they bludgeon us with the most direct rock song of their career, the title track and opener, which sacrifices charming bookishness for bruising force. Later, they proffer soul-stirring free jazz on “Swan,” abandoning the irony Ribot once honed as a member of the Lounge Lizards in favor of unambiguous beauty. Aided by James Brandon Lewis’ saxophone, the track is a gem at the record’s center, its prismatic light brightening the rest of Connection’s longform improvisations.
Ceramic Dog’s undersung last album, Hope, was a marvel of structure: Split along a line of symmetry, it separated Ribot’s talky concoctions from the band’s jams, a duality that felt almost spiritual. Connection dispenses with its predecessor’s deliberate formatting and, relatedly, a sense of tension. Ribot’s stylistic fascinations each get a moment in the sun: Hard-rockin’ singles adjoin conga rhythms, which bump shoulders with the political screed of “Soldiers in the Army of Love” and the dadaist babble of “Heart Attack.” Ribot previously complicated his leftist declamations with caustic zigzags, flitting between lucid indignation and cracked reasoning. “Muslim Jewish Resistance,” from 2018’s YRU Still Here, is a surprising, martial plea for the two faiths to unite against bigotry. “Hippies Are Not Nice Anymore,” from 2020’s Bandcamp-only EP What I Did on My ‘Long’ Vacation, hilariously logs the crowded road linking Woodstock idealism and cynical Silicon Valley riches.
On Connection, Ribot makes calls to action without the balancing weights of humor or self-consciousness. His progressive sentiments are welcome, and unfortunately more relevant than ever: “Fascists beat up on our brothers/Take the choice from our sisters/Hurt our non-binary siblings,” he barks on “Soldiers in the Army of Love.” But for the first time, he sounds wrapped so tightly in the Ceramic Dog flag that it muffles his commentary, obscuring his once skeptically raised eyebrow. “I don’t want you to give me nothing/Unless you give me ecstasy,” he announces on the louche “Ecstasy.” Its groove is sexy, rife with infectious syncopation and cool-as-a-cucumber sprechstimme. Ribot’s lyrics, though, are one-dimensional, which is surprising for a singer whose past outings have revealed so many surprises that straightforward passages served as necessary relief from the chaos.
Soaring peaks rise up from Connection’s expanse, such as the slippery transition between verse and chorus on “Soldiers in the Army of Love,” the bluesy build of “No Name,” or the 3/4 riff on “Connection,” which cuts against Smith’s common-time rhythm like a blade through tender beef. But the record can feel like a repository of quality ideas and B-side larks that don’t quite fit into a cohesive album. Last month, Ribot told a reporter that many of his current songs he once hoped other artists would record, before he realized that they were “much too weird.” He continued, “I decided I might as well put them out myself. And that’s what I’m in the process of trying to do now. Only there are so many of them that it’s been difficult to figure out how to put them together.” He’s still dirtying his would-be hits with no-wave scuzz, wearing his outré status as a deserved badge of honor. But Connection is the first time that Ceramic Dog has made dissent sound like just a collection of recordings, instead of a prickly, teeming world of its own.


Unpretentious Midwestern blues-rock duo delivers its sophomore Fat Possum release.

All This Time

All This Time, the Heartless Bastards' sophomore album, begins with a gentle and determined piano line, a melody by no means delicate but genuinely hopeful when it hits those higher notes. Such a subtle start is a little unexpected after the full-on blues-rock assault of their debut, Stairs & Elevators. But you know what those Heartless Bastards do to that little piano part on "Into the Open"? Erika Wennerstrom's guitar starts churning, drummer Kevin Vaughn chomps his teeth, and Mike Lamping's bass sneaks up on it and they devour it whole. Why? ‘Cause they're a rock band and that's what rock bands do. And when they belch it back out for the second verse, that little melody has changed considerably, becoming more fuel for the engine that powers the band along.
Like that digested piano theme, the Bastards have changed considerably since Stairs introduced the band's unpretentious Midwestern blues-rock and Wennerstrom's much-ballyhooed vocals. They still sound heavy enough to level a small city, but they've refined their sonic tonnage to make it tighter and more agile, able to move more quickly even as they incorporate new styles into the mix. With its marching pace, swirling vocals, and cut-loose chorus, "Finding Solutions" sounds soupily psychedelic, like heyday Jefferson Airplane, and "Brazen" fiercely lives up to its title. Best of all, the band actually pull off some quiet moments, like the cooing "I Swallowed a Dragonfly" and the closing "Came a Long Way".
At the center of this maelstrom stands Wennerstrom, who plays a capably muddy blues guitar but commands more attention for her enormous vocals. Perfectly suited for the Bastards' brand of bar rock, her voice is a distinctive and forceful instrument, howling through these songs like a tornado through a trailer park. Furthermore, the gale force of her delivery makes her lyrics sound truly conflicted as she balances self-loathing with self-assurance. On the title track, her declaration of loyalty and affection sounds all the more convincing for being so forcefully stated, and on "Blue Day" you can hear the desperation in her voice when she sings "I get no motivation/ Need some inspiration/ Try to get motivation/to help me get through this day."
Wennerstrom's voice, however, is both a blessing and a curse. Its power demands bold accompaniment, which Lamping and Vaughn are more than capable of providing, but because she doesn't have a tremendous amount of range, the band can't move with much agility or dynamic. For the most part, they've worked around this handicap on All This Time, hitting the big notes with scary ease and sounding bruised and tender on quieter sections—usually within the same song. But there's not much in between these extremes-- no building up or quelling down, just relentless horizontal jamming. As a result, they hit the same emotional notes in every song. Those notes may be distinctive to the band, but the Heartless Bastards nevertheless sound like giants tied to the earth.


Like predecessor American Idiot, 21st Century Breakdown is another hour-plus slab of jumped-up alt-rock as political/musical theater.

21st Century Breakdown

I wanted to like American Idiot. Really. Mostly because I was a Green Day fan, but also because of the soul-numbing run-up to the 2004 U.S. presidential election, one of those rare moments when even those wary of politicized art wouldn't mind some big-time act addressing the evils of those pissing on us from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Any pop cultural port in a liberty-eroding shitstorm, and all.
Two listens in, though, and it was clear: American Idiot was musically dodgy and politically empty. Political pop has its place, at least when didacticism doesn't drain the wit and life from a band's songwriting. But American Idiot failed utterly as coherent propaganda and as rock invigorating enough to agitate the pleasure centers. Have you tried to parse the lyrics to "Holiday" or "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" lately? This wasn't anti-imperialist dissent set to kick-ass. It was gaudy, way-too-impressionistic, self-congratulatory garbage warbled over lumbering AOR dressed in strings and conceptual malarkey.
The fact that American Idiot had an undercurrent of lukewarm liberal backslapping, and was released during the blackest days of the W. era, certainly gave it a big contextual profile boost at the time. But what really assured its success was the fact that the band had smartly made a grab-bag of proven gestures swiped from the ignoble history of Big Rock, along with some earnest, commercially canny self-cannibalization. And then there was the icky transparency of the band's attempt to shuck their lingering entry-level pop-punk rep, the last of the slack-and-proud generation to reveal their sad, predictable need for "boomer respect."
When a record like that sells a bazillion copies, you can be assured that the band won't be scaling back its ambitions on the follow-up. And 21st Century Breakdown is indeed another hour-plus slab of jumped-up alt-rock as political/musical theater-- overlong, exhausting, and corny as hell.
If American Idiot was an aesthetic failure, you certainly never doubted the band's conviction. Sure, you might cringe when you realized all that effort was in service of fulfilling Billie Joe Armstrong's dreams of merging boneheaded pogo-pop with Broadway shlock. You might have lamented that no one pointed out the inanity of many of the album's creative choices, like naming a protagonist "Jesus of Suburbia", perhaps because Armstrong was a grown-ass millionaire with carte blanche from his corporate masters. Nonetheless, the band really put its backs into that vapid, humorless trash.
21st Century Breakdown is just as pompous and dumb, but it lacks even that old misguided passion. It's a slog, but not the kind that results when a band forgets the importance of editing when in the throes of "trying to say something." Its sprawl feels entirely unearned, three men worried about meeting expectations rather than driven by urgency. The performances are blandly professional, because any major-label rock band of Green Day's abilities could shit this stuff out in their sleep, and emotionally inert. This is the crafting of a modern epic as a dreary day-job routine.
Tré Cool-- a drummer who's never really progressed beyond "fast with a lot of rolls" and "mid-tempo militaristic oompah"-- flaunts his competence level with a metronomic anti-creativity. Mike Dirnt's bass playing, once reliably adding needed punch to band's flimsier tunes, is often buried under Armstrong's claustrophobic, monochromatic guitar. As a songwriter, Armstrong was always juicing the platonic pop-punk tune at best. Listening to him try classic rock moves is cringe-y in the way you'd expect when a guy with a limited skill set pines for stadium godhood. Having exhausted his new tricks on American Idiot, he's descended into repetition, almost self-parody. And what he's recycling wasn't much worth hearing in the first place.
Just count the number of times he falls back on the lame bait-and-switch of the pretty acoustic intro, setting the listener up to expect one of Green Day's oft-regrettable ballads, only to kick in with a faceless blast of ur-mall-punk. Or the lifeless Frankensteins of songs from International Superhits, the sound of man stitching his past hits together out of desperation or callowness or both. It's kind of amazing an album with so many multi-genre suites and deliberate mid-song shifts in mood can also feel so maddeningly static for long stretches. You start to cling to the novelties and experiments, however bad: the way "Peacemaker" sounds like a cutting-room leftover from some ersatz American International Pictures surf/spy movie, or the more-Wings-than-Fabs McCartney bite of "Last Night on Earth".
As for the album's storyline, I plead the most willful kind of ignorance. It seems to be another loosely sketched state-of-the-union about how far up shit creek we are as a nation/planet, with a slight positivist tinge given this weird pause we seem to be in between reconstruction and total collapse. So "desperate, but not hopeless" is about as close as Armstrong gets to a memorably bite-sized universalist sentiment. The lyrics are otherwise another do-you-really-have-the-time-to-unpack-this jumble of inscrutable storytelling, pseudo-profundities, and just-add-bile anti-authoritarianism. Which means I could be mistaking plain ol' love songs for Major Statements. Or it could be that Armstrong's pretensions now completely obscure any remaining bubblegum charmers. You can listen only so long for something catchy and human-scaled while being consistently rewarded with lines like, "When your mind breaks the spirit of your soul, your faith walks on broken glass."
Green Day had been augmenting the three-chords-or-less thrashing since the trad power-pop touches of Nimrod, taking it further with the Brit Invasion homages that peppered Warning. Musically, a self-consciously eclectic and ambitious Green Day had been a reality long before Armstrong began gorging on Headline News and the Springsteenian mythos. But Green Day's late-decade addiction to scale, and reinforcing their own stature, has drained all the immediacy and pleasure from their music. Without some sort of attitude-correcting flop, the band will probably continue to abuse your tolerance for ego-driven padding. And if the CD format finally expires between now and the next one, watch out when Billie Joe convinces Reprise to disseminate his next Economist-meets-Vegas horrorshow on snappily branded external hard drives.


On his reflective four-song EP, the Atlanta rapper’s hallmark frivolity and infinite swag keep it short and sweet.

2 Chainz: The Play Don’t Care Who Makes It EP

The Play Don’t Care Who Makes It EP

With more and more artists milking their own streaming numbers by releasing absurdly long albums, there’s something to be said for concision. 2 Chainz knows about getting to the point: He’s changed the dynamics of countless songs with little more than a quick one-liner, or a well-placed ad-lib, or a four-word bar. And of late, the Atlanta rapper has perfected the art of the EP. Freebase from 2014 and Felt Like Cappin and Hibachi for Lunch from 2016 featured some of his best songs before they found homes on albums. They function like reps ahead of the main event and a way to flood the streets without oversaturating them.
On his latest and most excellently titled EP, The Play Don’t Care Who Makes It, 2 Chainz basks in the fruits of the plays he’s made. It lands well in the aftermath of last year’s phenomenal Pretty Girls Like Trap Music to display an artist who has fully stepped up and into his moment (again) without becoming too self-serious. There’s a sense of reflective appreciation throughout The Play, but his hallmark frivolity keeps the EP from becoming suffocating.
Rap flutes continue their contemporary reign on the trappy “Ok Bitch,” where his flow rides perfectly over an ominous piano loop, the syllables adding their own percussive element. “Proud,” which features the EP’s only guest verses, courtesy of YG and Offset, arrives to give all the flexing a higher purpose than simple egoism. The trio celebrates mothers in a way that only they can, and the result is both tender and cautionary at the same time; on some level, who doesn’t know that feeling of “I ain’t trying to let my mama down,” even if it is by any means necessary. “Land of the Freaks” surges with energy spilling out through lyrical dexterity and infinite swag. Only 2 Chainz can rhyme, “Yeah, I’m a misfit, dipshit, fish sticks, six whips/Times two, I’m cold, swine flu, must I remind you?” and make it work.
The EP’s anchor, “Lamborghini Truck (Atlanta Shit),” reveals a more sentimental side of the rapper whose lightheartedness has been a calling card for the better part of a decade. Over the pillowy vocals of Sitara Kanhai, he crafts an ode to his Georgia hometown. It’s genuinely touching without over-exaggerating the emotion or the subject matter. As the EP’s longest song, it offers a brief history lesson of the city’s legendary and oft-understated rappers—a monument erected in honor of Atlanta, the names of his friends etched in the stones. Everyone from late rappers Shawty Lo and Bankroll Fresh to unsung heroes like Baby D and legends like the Dungeon Family get their love.
In some ways, 2 Chainz is the ultimate embodiment of Atlanta rap. At age 40, he’s old enough to have witnessed the forging of its building blocks but maintains the youthful spirit of an ever-changing genre. His success is the product of a city and—and of an artist—that fundamentally understands the EP’s leading statement: “The play don’t care who makes it.” It’s a quote about the mechanics of football by Texas A&M football coach Jimbo Fisher, but when applied to the music of 2 Chainz, it’s like he’s holding aloft the key to the city because that’s just how it’s done.


The South London band’s third album combines subtle garage-pop grooves and clanging noise-rock for the most full and refined version of the Goat Girl experience.

Below the Waste

Goat Girl are a balancing act, really. The London art rock trio tempered references to cyanide with wry melodies on their eponymous 2018 debut album, and they used cool synths to make having scabies sound more chill on 2021’s On All Fours. Their third album, Below the Waste, once more pilfers the garbage can for inspiration—entrails and mud are some featured lyrics—but they’re not as explicit as they used to be. Now, the band’s mastery of balance lies mostly in their production. Below the Waste welds Goat Girl’s scrap-metal clanging to the more subtle garage-pop groove of On All Fours, creating a more refined version of the band’s music. They’re jumping into filth, and doing it with style.
To commemorate the occasion, the band seems to have dropped their Throbbing Gristle-type monikers. Singer Clottie Cream has turned back into Lottie Pendlebury, bassist Holly Hole has closed and formed Holly Mullineaux, and drummer Rosy Bones welcomes Rosy Jones. Shedding even this thin layer of artifice, with co-production help from black midi engineer John “Spud” Murphy, reflects the band’s fresh interest in analog sounds.
Some of Below the Waste’s most exhilarating moments come from a textural mishmash of orchestral arrangements and the steely glam of synths. A plucked guitar continually cracks the TV static surface of “words fell out” like a faraway bird popping through the clouds, and it softens Pendlebury’s vocal delivery, which has some Tori Amos or red-wine dryness. “perhaps” thickens her voice with a drunken clarinet melody, deepening the phone anxiety she sings about. The flute that comes later is beautiful, but no match for a drooling guitar line’s growing darkness. All of these sounds fight for space in the songs and build an infectious tension throughout the record.
Through these exciting layers, Goat Girl pad Below The Waste with luxurious fullness, occasionally to the album’s detriment. At 16 songs, Below the Waste returns Goat Girl to 2018, when their debut album floundered in its 19-song bloat. Two of Below the Waste’s instrumental interludes, “s.m.o.g.” and “prelude,” sound like lo-fi guitar tuning, and they don’t counter or contribute much to the album’s lithe energy. But, for the rest of its runtime, Below the Waste’s decadent production holds your attention. We hear Pendlebury sigh in infinity circles on “pretty faces,” as if she’s continuously collapsing on the song’s decadent mattress of strings, and it builds our suspense for the coming breakdown: a small windstorm of groaning, chorus pads, and stuttering violin.
While most of Below the Waste’s songs value symmetry in their lush instrumentation and vocal harmonies, it’s thrilling when one overtakes the other. Most of the frantic and fed-up “tcnc” sounds completely swallowed by an earthquake, with synth buzzing through everything like a passing train. On the opposite end, a stabby, brassy keyboard hook guides us down the listless “motorway” like a row of buttons, but Pendlebury’s sleep-deprived vignettes—“Called out shotgun/Motion sickness/Road to nowhere”—make it careful and romantic. This ability to summon intensity without a lyrical shock factor is new for Goat Girl, and they’re better for it.


As he returns to the intricate polyrhythms and hypnotic vocal chops of footwork, the Chicago producer’s approach remains almost single-minded in its focus.

Take Off Mode

The first thing that many outside Chicago’s footworking community ever heard from its native son DJ Nate was “Hatas Our Motivation,” a dizzying track in which the titular phrase, gravelly and defiant, looped ad nauseum over rapid-fire drum machine as brooding synths and pitched-down vocal samples churned ominously underneath. It was 2010, and Nate, just 20 years old, was the first footwork artist to sign to Planet Mu, a UK label better known for jewel-toned IDM. To outsiders, it sounded like a hole had opened in the earth’s crust, exposing some heretofore undiscovered gyroscopic contraption swiveling below. Four months before Planet Mu’s compilation Bangs & Works Vol. 1 shone an international spotlight on the Chicago footwork scene, it was Nate’s intricate polyrhythms and hypnotic vocal chops that first captured the radical strangeness of the style’s kinetic essence.
Not long after, Nate released his debut full-length, Da Trak Genious, extending the tightly coiled repetitions of his debut EP across 70 delirious minutes. But while DJ Rashad, Traxman, DJ Spinn, RP Boo, and other Teklife affiliates were taking footwork worldwide, Nate largely left the style behind, trying his hand at rap and R&B production—he scored a regional hit with the 2012 bop anthem “Gucci Goggles”—before a back injury in 2016 left him hospitalized and, for a time, paralyzed from the waist down.
Take Off Mode represents his pivot back to footwork. He’s been teasing one for a while, with occasional tweets promising the imminent arrival of Da Trak Genious 2, though, until now, he’d never followed up. The return to his original style may come as some surprise, given that his YouTube channel remains largely devoted to rap productions reliant on syrupy synths and Auto-Tuned vocals. But on Take Off Mode, he sounds as brittle as ever. Its 17 tracks are a mixture of new and old productions; some date back to the 2010 batch that first got him signed, though nothing in the sound makes obvious which are recent and which archival.
DJ Nate’s approach to footwork remains almost single-minded in its focus. He’s a minimalist at heart. His tracks are unsteady balancing acts between programmed drums, cut-up vocal samples, and the occasional smear of synthesizer, dissonant and unsettling. Again and again, his drum sequences are built around tuned toms that tumble forward, an endless succession of three-note somersaults; around these propulsive dotted-eighth rhythms, he wraps tangled hi-hat patterns, whizzing fast then slowing to triplets, like crisscrossing zippers.
It’s the vocals that provide the color. Nate chops them like confetti, stretches them like taffy, explores every crevice of their contours. On “Bring Your Best Crack,” he runs the titular phrase at regular speed, playing its spoken-word intonation against a chipmunked R&B a cappella, then begins playing with the pitch of each vocal track, unlocking the musicality of looped speech—the same principle Steve Reich explored with Come Out and It’s Gonna Rain—and making the most of the accidental harmonies created by his layered voices.
It sounds complicated—from a technical standpoint, it is complicated—but the results are surprisingly easy on the ear. “Get Rid of Em,” with its acoustic guitars and pristine digital synths, is particularly gratifying; it sounds almost like a collision between footwork and vaporwave. The ultra-minimalist “Fuck Dat” hammers its stuttering refusal over queasy synths that wouldn’t sound out of place on Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II. Occasionally, as on “Just Be Truu,” a sample of vintage soul floods in like light from a stained-glass window. Ultimately, though, these songs’ differences are less important than what they share in common: eerie frequencies and seemingly impossible rhythms, drums and vocals slicing angles in the air like hummingbirds. Just as he did in the very beginning, DJ Nate makes the most convoluted movements feel intuitive.


Following 2002's killer Suicide Invoice, former Drive Like Jehu frontmen John Reis and Rick Froberg replace Hot Snakes' original drummer Jason Kourkounis with Mario Rubalcaba of Rocket from the Crypt and Black Heart Procession.

Audit in Progress

Let it never be said that the Swami doesn't love the rock. When the turbaned one isn't disinterring forgotten gems from the lightless mines of classic punk, to reissue them with bonus tracks and modern production values, he's seeking out new bands that replicate the glory of '77 with striking fidelity and a rigid perma-sneer. Thus has it come to pass that Swami has reissued infamous San Fran garage-punks Crime twice in 2004-- first, the Crime CD San Francisco's Still Doomed, and again, in the guise of the third Hot Snakes LP of heat-seeking proto-punk, Audit in Progress.
Hot Snakes is the latest chapter in a long-running partnership between John Reis and Rick Froberg, who began grinding out antic, gasoline-doused rock together in the band Pitchfork, then attained indie immortality with their math-punk band Drive Like Jehu. The duo parted ways for a while in the mid-to-late-90s, as Reis attempted to capitalize upon the temporary commercial viability of his other band, Rocket from the Crypt, and Froberg pursued his visual art, the distinctive, stylized line work that now adorns Hot Snakes CDs.
Reis and Froberg reunited around the turn of the millennium, with Delta 72 drummer Jason Kourkounis providing the robust rhythmic chassis. Unexpectedly, the spirit of Jehu was revived, to the enduring elation of fans still lamenting their break-up after their seminal swan song, Yank Crime. There are numerous, comparative ways of understanding Hot Snakes-- a more concise, streamlined version of Jehu, or RFTC without the greaser sensibility and wailing saxes. But they're best discerned on their own terms: a desire to carry on the legacy of classic punk bands like Crime (roiling, distressed rock riffs) and Suicide (menacing, propulsive rhythms) with a minimum of modern revision.
Reviews of familiar bands often deal predominantly with progressions, a tactic that fails to find purchase in music that seems resistant to change and intent on holding its ground. Hot Snakes have staked out their sonic territory like a lion guarding the carcass of a slain gazelle, snarling in an unassailable splay-legged stance. As such, we'll examine their scanty alterations straightaway. The most glaring is the replacement of Kourkounis by RFTC/Black Heart Procession drummer Mario Rubalcaba, and if Audit in Progress evinces a slight decline in raw power, this embryonic dynamic is the likely cause. While Rubalcaba is a proficient percussionist possessed of a distinct style, his crisper, more rigid drumming simply doesn't mesh as well with Hot Snakes' metallic doom-rock guitars and monotone shout-alongs as Kourkounis's rumbling, primal pounding did. Audit in Progress remains sufficiently fierce, but sounds a little tinny when compared to the rippling muscles of 2002's Suicide Invoice.
Besides this foundational shift, Hot Snakes pick up right where they left off-- perhaps the songs are a little shorter, a bit more compressed, but are still of a piece with anything from Suicide Invoice and Automatic Midnight. The new album opens with "Braintrust". A rapid-fire rhythm guitar recalling Black Flag paves the way for a cyclical, trebly lead, frantic drums, and the locked groove of Gar Wood's fleet bass. Froberg takes on the role of misanthropic sloganeer or street-corner proselytizer, belting out his apocalyptic aphorisms over furiously oscillating punk rock. Like many a Hot Snakes song, it's a runaway bus that drags the listener in its wake like a loose muffler, bouncing and sparking on asphalt. The chorus manifests an immediately recognizable Hot Snakes' tactic: the relentless momentum accordion-wrecks into ominous, anthemic chords that are sustained like a held breath before the panting exhalations of the verses kick in again.
Other standout tracks include "Hi-Lites", "Think About Carbs", and album closer "Plenty for All". "Hi-Lites" attains a hysterically seesawing balance, pivoting violently on the fulcrum of Froberg's hollered non-sequiturs. "Think About Carbs" is one of a couple tracks that break the album's hypnotic drive, forfeiting it for a starker sound: Sparse, staccato guitars allow the muted bassline to shine, and both collude to create a platform for the record's most polychromatic singing. Froberg's more variegated vocal inflections and unusual prolixity border on a hoarse, punk version of rap, and strategic phrase repetitions ("boxes boxes boxes boxes") grace the song with a mounting urgency akin to Richard Hell's "New Pleasure" ("automatic automatic automatic automatic"). And "Plenty for All", which one would have expected to find sequenced earlier in the album for its instant appeal, kicks off with a gleaming lead cribbed from GnR's "Sweet Child o' Mine", harmonically twinned with chugging power chords. It's as close as Hot Snakes come to fashionable, limpid indie rock, a concession to the power of melody amid a brutal homage to scorched ozone and ruinous riffage.
For those familiar with Hot Snakes' back-catalog, there are few surprises to be found on Audit in Progress, but Jehu is so beloved that fans tend to adore anything Reis and Froberg touch, as long as it doesn't stray too far from their established dynamic. Their third Hot Snakes album finds them hunkering down inside it, and should find favor with those who don't understand why such a high premium is placed on newness in rock, a genre that once consisted of barre chords and simple fury. I don't know if Aesop had any fables about snakes; if not, Reis and Froberg are writing one for him. The ostensive moral: Revision is for pussies, and reinvention the last refuge of the depleted and uninspired.


Swans close their current chapter on a subdued but powerful note.

The Glowing Man

Musical careers rarely end with clean resolutions, which makes sense given that bands usually don’t get to plan their own exits. And even when they do, farewell gestures tend to leave a lingering taste of anticlimax. The Glowing Man, the final album by the current lineup of Swans, marks an exception to this rule, much as Swans have broken pretty much all modern rock norms.
From 1982 to 1997, and then again from 2010 until now, Swans leader Michael Gira has charted a fiercely uncompromising path. Not unlike King Crimson mastermind Robert Fripp, he has re-invented Swans several times, with new iterations bearing little resemblance to previous ones. Along the way, Swans have drawn from no wave, art-rock, industrial, sludge, drone, folk, and more while flagrantly disregarding genre boundaries. Gira built Swans by subjecting audiences to unrelenting torrents of abrasion, but latter-day Swans tunes are built like spiderwebs: delicate enough to blow on, yet surprisingly durable against wind and rain, elegant but dotted with gruesome shapes in a complex, shifting geometry. Who knows what they will become next; Gira says he plans to continue under the Swans name “with a revolving cast of collaborators” and with far less emphasis on touring.
On The Glowing Man, for almost two hours, Swans say again with whispers what they once roared. However, while their previous albums The Seer and To Be Kind merged groove, intensity and riffs into a new form of orchestral rock, The Glowing Man is more slight, constantly on the verge of fading into the ether. Gira and co. spend much of the album suspended in a kind of ambient trance, scarcely growing louder even as their parts grow denser and hint at more emotional volatility. The sum is deceptively sedate but far from an easy listen—at times, it’s akin to sitting next to a still pool and watching for ripples on the surface.
On this album (as in real life), love grows like an ivy that entwines with suffering. On “When Will I Return?,” for example, Gira's spouse Jennifer sings about her assault experience: “His hands are on my throat/My key is in his eye/I’m splayed here on some curb/Shards of glass—a starry night.” Gira wrote the song well before assault allegations against him surfaced earlier this year, but hearing it in the episode's wake amplifies the song's unsettling effect and provokes a slew of difficult questions. On the 25-minute “Cloud of Unknowing,” he denounces a “Jesus feeler, zombie sucker, zombie healer, monster eater,” a post-traumatic residue lingering in the air like a static charge. About five minutes in, a Mellotron bubbles up courtesy of regular collaborator Bill Rieflin as droning strings bob, weave, and disappear like firefly lights. The resemblance to Led Zeppelin’s “No Quarter” is uncanny but passing. (Rieflin, a onetime drummer for Nine Inch Nails and King Crimson, plays multiple instruments on the record, including bastardized jazz piano on the opening track “Cloud of Forgetting.”)
Likewise Gira’s vocals on “Unknowing” vaguely recall an Arabic call to prayer while percussionist Thor Harris’ church bells ring in panic and the noise-improvisational cellist Okkyung Lee contributes a sharp solo with anxious overtones. In her own career, Lee has arguably done for the cello what Jimi Hendrix did for the guitar, turning unexpected sound patterns into graceful forms we can understand. It’s a testament to how flexible Swans have become that a force of nature like Lee simply blends into the music rather than disrupting it.
When Gira announced this Swans incarnation would end, he referred to “LOVE” (in all caps) as his reason for working with the musicians on The Glowing Man. Of course, Gira was not talking about the over-sweetened form we often get in pop music. The love in his music is as terrible as it is beautiful, a wrenching act of spiritual determination. Swans make this sound effortless, though, in a fitting end to a remarkable chapter of their career.


Neither rawboned nor ramshackle, the New York group’s elegantly composed brand of ambient country stands as tall and clean as a brand-new pair of cowboy boots.

SUSS

When their self-released 2018 debut blew up—at least by ambient standards—the New York City quartet SUSS seemed to have appeared from out of nowhere, seasoned with secret history. Gray-maned and black-jacketed, they looked like the kinds of downtown art-rock trenchers who live in the depths of John Zorn liner notes, yet they sounded how a Ry Cooder film score might if heard upon waking from light medical sedation to a beautiful sunrise. In fact, their background was both more predictive and more offbeat than could have been guessed: Two of the four multi-instrumentalists, Bob Holmes and Gary Leib, had origins in Rubber Rodeo, a lively bronco in the 1980s cowpunk pen, before they galloped off into careers in cartooning and children’s shows.
As SUSS, with Jonathan Gregg and Pat Irwin, instead of chicken-frying new wave’s theatrics, they would cast the holy relics of country and bluegrass—pedal steel, mandolin, dobro, harmonica—into a sonorous desert where concepts like slow and fast and then and now become meaningless. Their music dilates the world to a high-lonesome point, a pastoral quintessence that doesn’t change so much as it gradually opens and closes, telescopes and recedes. That city boys are conjuring these mythic plains and wide Western skies makes it a double-glazed dream—the sort of outside that exists only in the cinema of the mind. They call it “ambient country,” which they claim to have pioneered.
It was savvy to embrace this term, whose “rise” was duly touted by The Guardian in a 2020 piece on SUSS, the pedal-steel experimenter Chuck Johnson, and a few others. No doubt the stifling early days of the pandemic were the perfect time for such a genre to rear its head, though it’s puzzling that no one had really tried out the framing before. After all, the distance between Brian Eno and Ennio Morricone, the two brightest lodestars of SUSS’s music, is not so great—not with the likes of Daniel Lanois already waiting patiently at the midpoint. Americana itself is full of droning instruments and atmospheric minimalism, and feeding it into ambient music’s gentle jaws is nothing new. If anyone has ever pulled off the inverse, it’s probably Richard Buckner.
So if you enter SUSS’s new, self-titled double LP primed for the revelation of a new genre hybrid, you might be let down. Much of it is more like contemporary concert music, of the adventurous yet rigorous type you’d hear at the Big Ears Festival, than either ambient or country. The sound design is sculpted, structural, and gorgeous. The music is not rawboned or ramshackle; it stands as tall and clean as a brand-new pair of cowboy boots. But it undoubtedly does brim with strikingly recontextualized country tropes, and it pulses with dolor, power, inspiration, and consolation, no matter what you call it.
If you missed the band’s first few records for Northern Spy and need a starting point, SUSS serves as a relatively foldable roadmap of everywhere they’ve been, even as it charts an unexpected new course. The double LP collects four recent digital EPs, the first of which appeared in 2021. Gary Leib passed away that year, as the initial EP took shape, and they forged on as a trio for the rest. As the hollow of a resonator guitar gathers and amplifies sound, Leib’s absence concentrates the mortal profundity already present in the music.
SUSS feels almost as if the band is replaying its brief yet busy career without him as a way to both mourn and move on. Ghost Box, the band’s twangy 2018 debut, was sunbaked and simmering, which correlates with the orange, cactus-dotted landscape of Heat Haze, the second side of the new LP. Their second album, 2020’s High Line, was set under a hissing desert moon, the same nocturnal environment in which this LP begins, with Night Suite. Third album Promise and third side Winter Was Hard are well-matched in how they extend the pastoral into the cosmic. And Across the Horizon, the final side, sounds like a digest of them all, in which SUSS solidifies itself as a trio for the next foray.
Of course, these divisions seem suspiciously neat, but it’s only human to find shapes in shadows when confronted with such a dwarfing scale. Taken as a whole, the LP’s tonal divisions are as long and liquid as day melting into night in the absence of electric light, though sharply seared leads rise and fall in Gregg’s pedal steel and Holmes’ baritone guitar. Irwin’s autoharp is a pleasure whenever it ripples across stereo space, so numinous yet so physical that you can almost reach out and touch it, feeling its ridges. That, more than anything conceptual, is the thrust of SUSS: This is weighty, enveloping music that somehow fits in the palm of your hand and the scope of your heart.


Satirizing the mindset of the alt-right internet troll requires more gravitas than these Swedish punks can pull off consistently. But what Cave World lacks in bite, it tends to make up for in groove.

Cave World

Shocking listeners with punk-rock satire about humans turning back into monkeys used to be as simple as donning an energy dome and a yellow jumpsuit and refusing to get off the stage until the audience was appropriately repulsed. These days, when cultural and political devolution feel like the starting point rather than a bleak warning, Stockholm’s forehead-tatted Viagra Boys have their work cut out for them.
Their latest LP, Cave World, is fascinated by the conspiracy theories and regressive tendencies of an increasingly visible subset of the online right, following its obsession with traditional values and gender roles to an only somewhat less logical conclusion: a full-on reversion to the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey. After last year’s well-received Welfare Jazz, the Boys re-recorded a cache of existing material while American-born vocalist Sebastian Murphy rewrote the lyrics from scratch, stewing on the buzzwords and crises of summer 2021: anti-vaxxers, adrenochrome, mental health, gun violence. Howling loudly and often that “they’re putting little creepy crawlies in the vaccines” (“Creepy Crawlers”), or that a dose might turn you into a computer (“Return to Monke”), Murphy nails the talking points with humor and near zero gravity.
Try as they might to curry offense by embodying the mindset of the alt-right internet troll, Cave World’s weaker moments recall a late-night television monologue: toothless, expendable, and not particularly interested in convincing the uninitiated. The opening lines of “Creepy Crawlers”—“I can’t believe what I read last night/Man, there’s little kids growing up with animal hair/Some of ’em are growing up with tails, maybe even two tails, man”—lays it on too thick to be dangerous. If the merits of Capital-S Satire might be judged by locating it on a spectrum ranging from prescience to disposability, one might ask: Will this project continue to engage (or enrage) audiences 25 years from now? What about five? Viagra Boys’ ripped-from-the-headlines caricature sketches are better timed to get you through the afternoon.
Luckily, what Cave World lacks in bite, it tends to make up for in groove. The production is cleaner than Viagra Boys’ first two albums, bringing their ever-present drive to the fore. The interplay of the rhythm section, vocal layering, and the occasional sax tear elides some of the weaker lyrics, and the album’s bass-forward gloss recalls Danger Mouse’s back catalog of rock-oriented production work (Parquet Courts’ Wide Awake, the Black Keys’ El Camino, Portugal. The Man’s Woodstock). Sieving out the grit from the arrangements introduces crossover potential. Take “Troglodyte,” a Fun House-era Stooges song squeezed through the discourse ringer. Over bouncing bass, Murphy’s verses introduce a WFH-addled gun nut before gleefully asserting that, even in prehistoric times, he’d be as much of an outcast as he is today: “You ain’t no ape/You’re a troglodyte.” It’s their silliest and most salient point on the record: Turning back the clock might not be the salvation that the song’s subject imagines.
Other cuts, like opener “Baby Criminal” and “Punk Rock Loser,” ditch the Trevor Noah-level satire for the band’s inexhaustible pet subject: the 21st-century manchild. Ever since their debut single, “Sports,” Viagra Boys have been intimately acquainted with the half-drunk, half-stoned, laptop-scrolling ex-boyfriend type. He’s a doofus, and a dick, but ultimately harmless. Write what you know, they say, and on their less explicitly political songs, the Boys’ perspective feels more fully and compassionately realized. The digressions from Cave World’s primary theme are welcome reprieves, fun and dumb in equal measure. They bring to mind Viagra Boys’ Swedish rock predecessors, the Hives: Both bands are at their best when they aren’t taking their output too seriously, maybe even when they’re having a little too much fun for what they’re saying to matter.
In press materials, Murphy opines that, while the world feels weird and “stupid” right now, “I kind of like when stuff is a little stupid.” The big-time stupid stuff—the kind of stupid more accurately described as frightening, disturbing, or unnerving—requires a defter, steadier touch than Viagra Boys’ hops-stained hands can manage. Not every punk band in the world needs to ponder the big picture, though; there’s room on the dial both for those who warn of impending devolution, and those who are content to just monkey around.


Terminal Redux, from the Philadelphia outfit Vektor, is one of the most thrilling, forward-thinking metal albums of the year.

Terminal Redux

It seemed like only a matter of time before Vektor made their first full-blown concept album. The Philadelphia four-piece has, since its inception, been compared endlessly to Voivod (thanks in no small part to their nearly identical logo, made even more conspicuous when placed side-by-side on a tour poster), but there’s always been more to their music than pure '80s revivalism. Of course, there’s plenty of that – particularly on their crushing debut Black Future. But, on their 2011 follow-up Outer Isolation, Vektor garnished their speedy, pummeling metal with proggier flirtations: lengthy, knotty compositions about space and alternate universes. Terminal Redux, their third and finest album, takes the band’s cerebral tendencies to the next level: over the course of the album’s ten songs, vocalist and guitarist David DiSanto tells the fairly elaborate story of a military general astronaut who rises to political power among the intergalactic Cygnus regime after finding an interstellar mineral that just might be the key to immortality. Even if you choose to ignore a few minor plot points, Terminal Redux stands as one of the most thrilling, forward-thinking metal albums of the year: one that should finally shed any remaining detractors who find the band’s music to be at all derivative.
In the first track alone, Vektor manages to invoke something like an entire discography's worth of ideas. Ranging from black metal riffage to harmonic chanting to an anthemic closing guitar solo straight out of Rush’s Hemispheres, "Charging the Void" showcases a revitalized band bursting with energy and creativity. "A sky that once brought hope and light," sings DiSanto, "now brings me desolation," as his screech reaches throat-shredding levels to convey his desperation. As the song progresses, the band is intent on matching the intensity of the lyrics: setting the stage for what’s to come like an overture before an opera. While the following tracks are not all quite as virtuosic and dazzling as that opener, there are hardly any dull moments.
With its seventy-plus minute runtime, Terminal Redux occasionally threatens to become Vektor’s Tales from Topographic Oceans – a moment where their pretensions reach a head and alienate all but the already initiated. Their intensity, however, makes even the headier moments feel like breakthroughs. Tracks like "Ultimate Artificer" and "LCD (Liquid Crystal Disease)" should appease fans of the band’s more straightforward thrash material, while much of the album’s second half seems aimed at breaking the band to a larger, non-metal audience. Indeed, with this release marking the band’s upgrade to Earache Records, there are a few moments that hint at modern rock radio and festival audiences, calling to mind Baroness’ similarly expansive Yellow & Green. In the album’s most divisive moments, DiSanto sings in a surprisingly pretty, shoegaze whisper. The crawling intro to "Collapse," for example, would not sound out of place on either of Red House Painter’s self-titled albums (that is, of course, until it launches into its galloping, duel-guitar-soaked second half).
And then there’s "Recharging the Void," a song that mimics the album opener both in title and ambition. In thirteen-and-a-half minutes, it is burdened with the task of closing the album and tying the loose ends of the story (incidentally, it also seems to be where 75% of the narrative takes place). In an almost ambient middle section, DiSanto sings as melodically and sweetly as he can, while psychedelic falsetto vocals swiped from a Pentangle record float in the background like bits of meteoric dust hurtling through the cosmos. "All we ask is our story to be told," DiSanto sings, "To young, beckoning, yearning worlds." You can practically see the intergalactic cast of characters returning to the stage, swaying back and forth in solidarity.
Like most prog albums – and, hell, a good deal of metal – it’s a lot to handle all at once, and maybe a bit silly, but Vektor plays it with the straight-faced intensity of a big-budget sci-fi movie. In that sense, the album calls to mind a few wider-scope metal breakthroughs from the genre’s golden era – the raising-the-stakes intensity of Death’s Human or the laser-beam focus of Kreator’s Pleasure to Kill. In fact, if there’s anything Vektor has prominently coopted from '80s metal, it’s that specific fearlessness: a devotion to their craft and an insistence on evolving clearly from album to album. Terminal Redux presents their most fully-formed evolution yet and offers more proof that they are beholden to no one’s artistic path but their own. In fact, more bands should be following their lead.


Released shortly before his group Yellow Magic Orchestra’s historic debut, the Japanese synthesizer icon’s first solo LP balances kitsch, complexity, and a critical geopolitical perspective.

Ryuichi Sakamoto: Thousand Knives of Ryuichi Sakamoto

Thousand Knives of Ryuichi Sakamoto

By the time 1978 rolled around, electronic music was old hat. Switched On Bach had hit shelves a decade earlier, Tangerine Dream had already made their best work, and Kraftwerk had cruised the Trans Europe Express. The Minimoog, released in 1971, no longer sounded so novel, and genre-defining pieces of gear like the TR-808, SP-1200, and DX7 were still a few years off. Punk rock, meanwhile, was laying waste to prog rock’s noodly, keyboard-augmented excesses. One could be forgiven, nearing the dawn of the 1980s, for dismissing all the bleeps and bloops as just a fad. “I really don’t see it” said Lester Bangs. “A lot of these synthesizer groups… Kraftwek did it a lot better a half decade ago.”
Perhaps not seeing it was the point: Many of electronic music’s greatest innovations occurred in the shadows, through misuse, amateurism, or accident. Phuture invented acid house when they stumbled upon design quirks in Roland’s TB-303; hip-hop was born at a block party; and, in 1978, one of electronic music’s most distinctive voices got his start in a parody group. At the time, Ryuichi Sakamoto was a respected session musician in Japan, working his way through the industry, when he was recruited by Haruomi Hosono for a one-off album of electronic exotica. The point was to send up the ridiculous orientalism peddled by artists like Les Baxter, reclaiming a fanciful Western take on the far East. The result was the historic self-titled debut album from Yellow Magic Orchestra. But before it was released, Sakamoto slipped out an album of his own: Thousand Knives of Ryuichi Sakamoto. Though the record was quickly eclipsed by his band’s smash success, this reissue serves to reintroduce the world to an overlooked gem by a now canonical voice.
As with all of Sakamoto’s work, there’s no distinction between pop and experimentalism. Nearly a decade into his career as a sideman, Sakamoto’s musical fluency is in full effect here. Each of Thousand Knives’ six pieces swerves with a deft touch through complex arrangements, playful voicings, and cheeky key changes. The title track opens with a reading of a poem through a haunting vocoder, drifting with gentle restraint in a field of silence. The mood is somber and yearning, but then the music locks in, and it’s a fusion-tinged instrumental whose main theme is just a little too heavy for an elevator ride. One can imagine the cosmic-disco DJ Daniele Baldelli’s ears perking up—the chugging tempo and twisting atmosphere were a perfect match for the sound he was pioneering in Italy at that time. And, perhaps responding to the disco craze well underway, Sakamoto also lets the track run long. At nearly 10 minutes, his opening salvo is a slo-mo barnburner soaked in guitar solos, breezy melodic flourishes, and gloopy drums. It’s wonderful.
But then “Island of Woods” changes course. A collage of nature sounds, atonal synthesizer squiggles, and new-age flourishes, it answers the ebullient fizz of “Thousand Knives” with a funky take on musique concrete. What stands out is how well the two songs mesh. One senses an intuitive bond—Sakamoto works less in contrasts than in connections. As with Can before him, there’s no friction between dancefloor groove and laboratory explorations. YMO’s exotica remains in full effect on Thousand Knives; listeners with an allergy to kitsch perhaps need not waste their time. But it’s a winking kitsch, a garish beauty. “Plastic Bamboo” takes supreme delight in a melody that seems best serves for a farcical chase scene. Though exquisitely crafted, it’s silly as hell.
The closing song’s title, “The End of Asia,” evokes a number of interpretations: Japan had not so long ago been devastated by the atomic bomb. The influx of the West was radically changing society, and in Japan the economy was exploding, thanks to the surge of technological production that provided many of the instruments Sakamoto used on Thousand Knives. Then again, in line with YMO’s inversion of exotica, perhaps “The End of Asia” refers to the death of a hazy, romantic dream of the Orient. The song, syrupy and effervescent, reprises the shredding guitar from the album’s opening. Is it serious work or a sweet confection? Sakamoto gets to have it both ways. In a recent interview, he says, “At that time, my view of technology was still very positive —I believed in technology, even though I was looking for a dark future.” Thousand Knives foregrounds blinding light, but it’s the subtly traced shadows that give the album its enduring depth.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)


Hellfyre Club associate milo's debut LP does just as much to play up the commonalities milo has with his labelmates (and his place in the underground hip-hop world) as it does to show off just who he is himself. He possesses a heavy-lidded deadpan flow that calmly lets the punchlines deliver themselves.

a toothpaste suburb

Less than 12 months after the Dorner vs. Tookie compilation proved just how thorough an assbeating the Hellfyre Club is capable of, the crew members have spent 2014 releasing a quartet of albums to back that promise up. The first three—Nocando's spirited battler-turned-grown-man study Jimmy the Burnout, the melancholy, melodic humor of Open Mike Eagle's Dark Comedy, and Busdriver's slippery virtuoso poetry on Perfect Hair—were valuable reinforcements of the three names at the group's nucleus, a chance for them to gain a following outside their core constituency of L.A.-geared Project Blowed rap-nerd connoisseurs. milo isn't a total unknown by comparison, but with a couple scattered EPs and personality-switching alter ego side project Scallops Hotel providing most of his background on record, the Kenosha, Wisconsin-grown vet needs a bigger context to grow into.
His debut album, a toothpaste suburb, does just as much to play up the commonalities milo has with his labelmates (and his place in the underground hip-hop world) as it does to show off just who he is himself. milo's own qualities are obvious from his first 16 bars: a heavy-lidded deadpan whose flow calmly lets the punchlines deliver themselves, whether they're references to Arthur Schopenhauer (this album has a few) or shameless fart jokes (ditto). Those aren't rare qualities—you get similar approaches on this very album from guests like Open Mike Eagle, who pulls Shel Silverstein wordplay ("Call me tiger 'cause I tige for a living") on "objectifying rabbits", and Kool A.D., who is dementedly meta with a thinking-aloud verse on "in gaol". With the burbling, usually mellow digitalisms of producers iglooghost, Riley Lake, Greyhat, and Tastenothing giving his voice both gravity and lightness where it's needed, there's a feeling that milo's been able to get in where he fit in, not just got in 'cause he fought in.
But the realm of the West Coast art-wiseass black intellectual is neither one to take for granted or one to set a low barrier of entry for, and milo's place in and radiating outside of it is well earned off his own synthesis of experience. His referential eclecticism might otherwise seem random for its own sake in isolation, a string of phrases hammered into place; the second verse of "sanssouci palace" alone drops references to Avril Lavigne, Clerks, "Squidbillies", and the self-descriptor "Rap messiah agitator/ Chronic bathroom masturbator," but the track starts cohering to depict a more complete identity the further it knits together.
And when it does, there's some deep rumination and staring into the void that exists beneath all the jokes. "salladhor saan, smuggler" is a stark autobio alluding to isolation and suicidal thoughts staved off by a steady diet of Jean Genet, Office Space, and the subsequent realization that milo was capable of total artistic freedom. And a recurring throughline, the too-soon passing of his friend Rob, is both alluded to and directly addressed with a mixture of survivor's guilt ("Now kids write me about being their favorite rapper/ And I'm the asshole who gets to live forever after"), yearning ("Ought implies can and I cannot"), and resignation (from "Yafet's song": "Death is where we all go/ It can't be that bad"). So milo's voice acts fairly slow to reveal the intentions beneath the words' surface, trusting listeners to connect the dots. That's one way of staking a claim on curious ears, a connection to someone who, per "a day trip to the nightosphere," doesn't dabble in secret societies. milo's society is far more open.


Brooklyn indie rock outfit Widowspeak's new The Swamps EP was inspired by a tour itinerary through the Southern United States, a region whose hazy, bluesy music proves to be a tangible and versatile anchor for Widowspeak’s songwriting.

The Swamps EP

Spanish moss, brass beds, overgrown yards, burning sage. To Widowspeak, these artifacts represent the hazy, lazy birthplace of swamp rock and Delta blues, which singer Molly Hamilton and multi-instrumentalist Robert Earl Thomas fell in love with last year after touring their sophomore LP Almanac across the American Southeast. The duo incorporated these sights, sounds, and smoke into a six-note guitar riff they had been sitting on for awhile. That became the motif for The Swamps, a stopgap EP between Widowspeak’s last full-length and their next one. After hopscotching across the country from the Pacific Northwest and Chicago to Brooklyn and exploring that wanderlust in Almanac, Widowspeak have settled on a thematically consistent aesthetic that suits them.
“True Believer” is the first song Widowspeak recorded for The Swamps, and fittingly it’s the one that sounds closest to Almanac. (Thomas has said this EP, which Kevin McMahon also produced, leans more toward Widowspeak’s last record than their putative third LP). It opens much like “Locusts”, with a similarly note-bent but lower-pitched bloom from Thomas’ Fender Telecaster. Where the latter track was tightly coiled like a tense calm before the plague, on “True Believer” Hamilton literally lets her hair down (“tangled sheets, tangled hair”) and swoons into the romanticized slide guitar. The religious imagery on Almanac’s “Dyed in the Wool” can also be found in "True Believer"–“speak in tongues,” “shake off that devil fever,” “pilgrim lips”–but this time Hamilton tinges her turns of phrase with the vivid mysticism of the South’s voodoo culture rather than falling back on idiomatic poetry in the vein of “cut from the cloth."
Hamilton’s lyrics “The house was a good one, but the yard was overgrown” on “Calico” are actually a good metaphor for Almanac, a fine record that still occasionally got lost on its forays into Western and Latin themes. Most of The Swamps, by contrast, rides on opening instrumental “Theme From the Swamps”, obviously a kind of mission statement for the EP. Those six creaky, twangy, back-porch rocking-chair notes prove to be a tangible yet versatile anchor for Widowspeak’s songwriting. This time, most of the genre-specific accents–the castanet rolls on “Smoke and Mirrors”, shakers rattling in the background of “The Swamps”, tambourines stalking through “Calico” like spurs on a cowboy boot–enhance what’s already there instead of distracting from it. The only weak spot on The Swamps might be “Brass Bed”, a lovely track that suffers from simply too much going on–multi-part harmonies, twinkling pianos, and “That’s Amore”-esque guitar stylings, and awkward lyrical syntax (“Find me underneath the linen/ Trying hard to get forgiven”).
Widowspeak do their best work when they take a minute to smell the sage, not necessarily when they forge ahead into new territories; and to a certain extent the band recognizes this and embraces it on The Swamps. In a recent interview, Thomas suggested that Almanac, with its big, brassy arrangements and relatively quick tempos, was an exercise in nostalgia “backlash” while their latest collection of songs takes the opposite tack. “You can’t be too nostalgic, you can’t get caught in something like that,” he said, referring to the former. “In the swamps, you feel sticky, and slowed down, and caught. And in terms of our music, we’re never like a really fast, loud band.” He’s right: Hamilton’s languorous croon will never be able to fully escape Hope Sandoval’s shadow–nor should she try–and Thomas’ arrangements will probably always owe a fair piece to the 60s' gun-slinging theme songs of the Wild West, which have been the band's bread and butter since Widowspeak's album cover re-imagined the giant spiders from Wild Wild West. Widowspeak seem to have found a home in the swamps, and now they're inviting us in to set awhile.