This collaboration between the junkshop-pop group and a London orchestral ensemble is conceptually fascinating but sporadically engaging.

Micachu and the Shapes: Chopped & Screwed

Chopped & Screwed

With their terrifically engaging 2009 deubt album, Jewellery, London-based Micachu and the Shapes superficially came off as a trio of gleefully amateurish kids bashing out a noisily tuneful brand of junkshop-pop, breaking rules because they didn't know any better. In truth, the group's lead singer and mastermind, Mica Levi, studied violin from a young age (her mother is a cellist) and received a classical indoctrination at music school. As you spend more time with Jewellery, you begin to realize that even its roughest-hewn, seemingly random elements carry such a concentrated punch that they could only be the product of an artist who was extremely focused and in control of her materials.
Given her history, it makes perfect sense that Levi would gravitate toward a project like Chopped & Screwed, a one-off collaboration (performed in May 2010 at Kings Place in London) between the Shapes and the London Sinfonietta, an orchestral ensemble made up of strings and woodwinds. It also makes sense, knowing the breadth of Levi's sonic interests and her hunger for experimentation, that sooner or later she'd bite off a bit more than she could readily chew. And so it is with Chopped & Screwed, which is conceptually fascinating and occasionally hits on something really compelling and fresh, but is also only sporadically engaging. Of course, even when things feel aimless, it's still intriguing to hear Levi and the other musicans working through their ideas.
As its title suggets, Chopped & Screwed draws inspiration from the Houston-born hip-hop practice of manipulating beats and slowing down tempos to mimic (and cultivate) a drugged, disoriented sensation in the listener. Don't expect to hear molasses-thick male voices drawling about candy paint over slow beat claps here, however. The Shapes' and Sinfonietta's kinship with the likes of DJ Screw is all about aiming for that same feel of dislocation. The way they go about attempting to achieve it is certainly creative-- basically, the ensemble saws or trills away on their instruments while the Shapes pluck and hammer at homemade stringed or percussive contraptions (the rotating doohickey Levi plays is particularly nifty), alternating between frantic and syrupy-slow tempos seemingly at a whim. Above the maelstrom, Levi slowly and lowly intones lyrics that are frequently incomprehensible.
More important are her melodies, which make "Everything" and "Low Dogg" the album's standouts, as Levi's arty appetites contend with the razor-sharp pop sense she displayed throughout Jewellery and that I hope she always retains. The likes of "Unlucky", "Fall", and "Not So Sure" aren't as immediately riveting but do the best job of replicating screw's woozy allure. That said, there's an awful lot of connective tissue here-- fairly lengthy passages (especially for such a short album) bridging the more immediate moments. If the performance had been longer, such sequences would be acceptable interludes. As it is, it feels like dead patches make up almost half of Chopped & Screwed. Shelve it next to the Knife's Tomorrow, in a Year as an effort that hearteningly shows an inspired artist staking out bold terrain, but one that only fitfully delivers the impact of the artist's previous, pop-focused work.


The new vinyl reissue from Milan Records highlights the “sonic architecture” of Dr. Shoji Yamashiro’s intense and immersive suite of music.

Geinoh Yamashirogumi: Akira (Symphonic Suite)

Akira (Symphonic Suite)

Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1988 animated film Akira is, by and large, considered to be among the greatest animated films ever made. Set in the year 2019, in a post-apocalyptic Tokyo populated by marauding motorcycle gangs, shadowy paramilitary organizations, student protesters, and corpulent oligarchs, the film was immediately hailed as a narrative and visual masterwork.
But before a single frame of the film was drawn, Katsuhiro Otomo wanted to make sure the music, or as he and the score’s composer Dr. Shoji Yamashiro called it, the “sonic architecture,” was in place. For Akira, the visual material was built around the sonic components, and not the other way around. The film as we know could not exist without the score. Now, after a new vinyl reissue by Milan Records, one of the most important suites of filmic music in Japanese cinema history is available for the first time in 29 years.
Yamashiro was the leader of a Japanese music collective called Geinoh Yamashirogumi, and the group was comprised of a rotating crew of hundreds of amateur musicians, academics, college students, and other non-music professionals. Trained as a molecular biologist, Yamashiro considered Geinoh Yamashirogumi to be more of a think tank, and the score for Akira, specifically, was a testing ground for some of the collective’s most far-fetched and ludicrously ambitious ideas.
For one thing, the score was most often referred to as a “Symphonic Suite,” and Yamashiro specifically cites symphonic choral works like Bach’s Mass in B Minor, Beethoven's “Ode to Joy,” and Shostakovich’s “Song of the Forests” as close antecedents. Though, he also drew inspiration from Noh (a form of Japanese theatrical music), Indonesian folk traditions, prog rock, and more. The reissue also features remastered audio (taken from a DVD re-release of the film), which punches up the sonic frequency of the recorded material to 48khz as opposed to the original 22khz threshold, in order to create what Yamashiro called the “Hypersonic Effect.” In the 26-page liner notes, Yamashiro goes on at length describing the neurological studies he conducted to prove that sound at the 48khz level could elicit more vivid psychological and physiological responses in a listener. Indeed, the sound on the reissue is rich and at times terrifying. (Though, the science behind the Hypersonic Effect has since been contested.)
Otomo only asked Yamashiro to follow very loose conceptual “pillars” for composing the score: one-half should correspond to the idea of “festival” to represent the bacchanalia and violence of the film’s opening acts, and the second-half should be a “requiem” that is the complete opposite of that chaos. This afforded Yamashiro an immense amount of freedom to dictate the film’s pace and feel. This is immediately clear in the first scenes of the film.
The score begins in earnest, when one of the film’s protagonists, Kaneda, the leader of a teenage motorcycle gang, enters a song into the jukebox of an underground dive bar. He and his crew, the Capsules, are gathered right before they are set to meet a rival gang called the Clowns, to engage in a bloody street fight. Right as they rev up their motorcycle engines in a seedy alleyway, the needle of a record player hits a vinyl disc in the bar, and the first moments of music enter the film. This moment is boisterous, deafening, and unforgettable, courtesy of a melody of the Balinese Jegog, a percussion instrument formed from an array of bamboo trunks “aligned in a manner similar to a battery of bazookas.” The Jegog was one of the compositions’ consistent leitmotifs, and its power was brutal and immediate.
This first song “Kaneda” makes clear the fastidiously designed aspects of the film’s score. The thunderclap from its opening seconds was lifted from a field recording taken at the Golden Triangle in Thailand, and the motorcycle rumble was sourced from a 1929 Harley-Davidson engine. A chorus of festival chanters that come towards the back-half of the song is frightening and celebratory all at once. As Kaneda and his gang speed through the streets of the decaying city, Otomo’s dystopian vision is given life by the highly precise, yet emotional compositions Geinoh Yamashirogumi provided.
This feeling of pitched intensity and churning disorientation is something Geinoh Yamashirogumi achieves time and time again. In the following song, “Battle Against Clown” blasts of guttural chants and polyrhythms could likely cause vertigo if listened to loudly enough. The choral work is especially skillful, and the way the members of Geinoh Yamashirogumi manipulate and make magical and alien the human voice is a highlight of the score. On “Dolls’ Polyphony,” they create a sense of nightmarish weirdness using only a mix of childlike voices and baritone grunts. In the score’s grand finale, “Requiem” they perfectly create a sense of megachurch rapture with angelic hums and a pipe organ.
As the product of an unlimited budget and six-months of composition and recording, the score for Akira was never meant to be utilitarian or incidental. It aspired to greater heights, to immerse the listener in the world of Neo-Tokyo and stir the emotions without once dropping you out of the film. But on its own, the craft, care, and technology that went into the 70 minutes of the soundtrack are intense enough to place you right beside Kaneda without ever opening your eyes.


On his full-length debut, the versatile Queens producer Brian Piñeyro adopts his serpentine alias to make the most of the dembow riddim’s slippery extremes.

Dulce Compañia

The Ridgewood, Queens, producer Brian Piñeyro seemingly has a different DJ handle for every mood, which can make keeping up with his productions tricky. “I don’t want to forcefully be anonymous,” Piñeyro said in an interview earlier this year. “But I also don’t want to forcefully fit into one cool package.” So you may have encountered Piñeyro’s productions as DJ Wey, Luis, Deejay Xanax, or DJ Python. The latter alias takes as its jump-off point the skipping dembow riddim, that telltale boom-ch-boom-chick that is the foundation of everything from Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina” to El Alfa el Jefe’s “Banda De Camion.” Underpinning dancehall and reggaeton since the early 2000s, it’s a sound that Piñeyro heard booming out of every car and club during a stint living in Miami. “I knew that I wanted to make music like this and recontextualize it,” he said of this particular beat, and dembow has led Piñeyro’s first full-length to heady, sweaty results.
Just don’t call Dulce Compañia moombahton. While Piñeyro does slow down the beat to a near crawl, he also suffuses it with a hazy sensibility quite unlike the crisp contours of moombahton’s 110-BPM snap. During the album’s most sublimely smoky moments, DJ Python brings to bear shoegaze’s gauziness, new age music’s interiority, and deep house’s sense of time suspended. Take the opening track, “Las Palmas,” which reveals each aspect of Piñeyro’s concerns. It opens with chime-like tones that verge on the vertiginous, their metallic edges slipping out of focus. A stuttering drum figure comes in, making everything feel coherent and grounded, but even that is a transitory state: Piñeyro soon loops small snippets of bells again, loosening them from the grid and allowing them to ripple outward and overtake the rhythm. Every component feels slippery as riverbed rocks.
Dulce Compañia standout “Cuál” best exemplifies Piñeyro’s penchant for in-between states, striking a balance of tropical rhythm and ambient wooziness. The dembow rhythm gets pushed into the red, with echoing hand percussion dribbled across it. But between the beats, one can just make out small ambient sounds, like crickets and frogs, suggesting a swampy locale. A synth line bubbles up two minutes in, which Piñeyro then dubs out, and as the track’s arpeggios gurgle along, that once-heavy dembow beat now seems to float and bob atop the surface.
The track that might hew closest to its reggaeton forbears, “q.e.p.d.,” foregrounds that boom-ch-boom-chick meter. But as quickly as it’s established, Piñeyro starts to pull at its edges, allowing all manner of  wooden clacks, rattles, and mechanical whirrs to fall in between the cracks, and a wafting synth line makes the track feel light and airy. A similar sense of drift infuses “Esteban,” in which tick-tocking percussion just barely keeps the track tethered.
The walloping thump of “Acostados” moves towards synchronizing with house’s kick, but with the rattles that wriggle around it, DJ Python more than lives up to his serpentine namesake. Drums get dubbed out, a voice mewls wordlessly, a synth line fidgets and twitches; Piñeyro keeps every component shifting, never letting the tracks follow a predetermined pattern. While the dembow riddim arises throughout Dulce Compañia, it’s never left as-is. In Piñeyro’s hands, it proves to be just as slippery and versatile as it is booming out of cars every summer. “I like DJ Python being one thing, slithering around, letting itself be known eventually,” Piñeyro said of his low-key approach. With this debut, it proves to be a sound well worth knowing.


Chromatics' first album since 2007's stunning Night Drive is a 90-minute tour-de-force that gives their nocturnal foreboding a new sense of grandeur. Though long, Kill for Love is lushly atmospheric and replayable, with expansive interstitial tracks balancing its impressive clutch of gorgeous synth-pop singles.

Kill for Love

Chromatics formed in the Pacific Northwest as a rickety no-wave band more than a decade ago, but re-emerged in the mid-2000s with a revamped lineup and a new sound that nicely coincided with a resurgence of interest in the slow, dreamy, not-always-Italian dance-pop subgenre known as Italo disco. As with other acts on New Jersey-based Italians Do It Better, a label co-founded by group mastermind Johnny Jewel, Chromatics didn't just incorporate the vocoders and vintage synth arpeggios of the turn-of-the-1980s originals, they added the brittle guitars, dubby reverb, and urban dread of post-punk.
In the years since, the label's emphasis on grainy synths, smokey ambience, and analog-fetishizing textures became the M.O. of an entire class of artists. And the band's 2007 Night Drive set the blueprint for last year's Nicolas Winding Refn-directed thriller Drive; featuring two Jewel-assisted tracks, the film's soundtrack exposed this music to a wider audience. Earlier this year, Jewel built on that momentum by releasing a two-hour epic created with fellow Chromatics member Nat Walker. Titled Symmetry, Themes for an Imaginary Film, the set culled material from a full score that the duo were said to have composed for Drive.
Kill for Love, Chromatics' first album since Night Drive, finally gives this loosely associated, prematurely decayed musical aesthetic its magnum opus-- and brilliantly transcends it. The moonlit vibe of previous highlights like street-skulking stunner "In the City" or haunting Kate Bush cover "Running Up That Hill" recurs, and various tracks still crackle and pop with the all-too-mortal degradation of vinyl. And despite the unfinished-seeming recording quality of the music videos that preceded the album's release, the completed product also boasts some of the most engrossing synth-pop songs so far this year.
The 90-minute Kill for Love signals its tour-de-force ambitions from the opening track, a synth-draped cover of Neil Young's "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)". As with their past brooding renditions of Bruce Springsteen's "I'm on Fire" or Dark Day's "Hands in the Dark", it's a thoroughly rewarding pop deconstruction, setting one of singer Ruth Radelet's most affecting performances against an evocatively restrained backdrop. "There's more to the picture than meets the eye," Radelet coos, in what emerges here as a key lyric. There's more to Kill for Love than the sum of its best songs.
That said, Kill for Love's clearest improvement over Night Drive comes in its impressive clutch of left-field synth-pop standouts. The pill-dropping insomniac rush of the title track is the most likely to propel Chromatics onto the kinds of late-night TV stages and festival billings lately seized by M83, but the existential ache of "Back From the Grave" is no less gorgeously catchy. The bleakly yearning "Lady" returns to the group's signature Italo glide but wisely ditches the robotic vocal effects of a previously released late-2005 recording. When Jewel suggested in a recent Pitchfork interview that he was more influenced by Madonna than by crate-digging Eurodisco rarities, it was logical to wonder if he was being falsely modest. That is, until hearing "These Streets Will Never Look the Same", which stretches "Eye of the Tiger"-like guitar tension into an eight-minute treatise on loneliness and includes the album's first male lead vocal, rendered cyborg-like by a vocal harmonizer. Or take the vampire-pallid lament "Running From the Sun", another male-led track, based on piano chords reminiscent of those found on Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time". Fans who discovered Chromatics through Drive will find plenty of easy entry points here.
Still, just as the pop songs on Kill for Love are more direct than on Night Drive, the interstitial tracks are also more expansive and abstract. "Time is stretching on/ And it keeps repeating/ As the beat goes on," Radelet sings, on the deceptively uptempo last-ditch plea "At Your Door", and those words could just as easily apply to the album's instrumentals (and near-instrumentals). Nevertheless, even the record's most ephemeral moments are more deeply engaging than their equivalents on the last album, livened up by disembodied vocals and orchestral touches. Though there appear to be as many references to walking and riding trains as to driving, the album is at least as cinematic as Themes for an Imaginary Film. In fact, the languorous "There's a Light Out on the Horizon" goes so far as to revive Night Drive's phone-call conceit, though with results that are more beautifully agonizing.
After a front-loaded opening and sprawling, bewitching midsection, Kill for Love resurfaces with two tracks that encapsulate what Chromatics do, in an uncompromising way that's sure to confound as many people as it awes. "The River" reprises the Symmetry album's nearly a cappella closing track as glacial synth-pop, with finger snaps and artificial strings lending emotional support to Radelet's stiff-lipped vocal performance as a woman left behind. And then there's a sparsely forbidding 14-minute instrumental finale, available on the digital versions of the album, which is appropriate of Jewel's recent tendency to talk up 20th-century classical composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage rather than film scorers like John Carpenter.
If Kill for Love had been a 10-track LP, with its most immediately striking songs each edited down to around 3 minutes, it would've still been impressive. In fact, as recently as an interview posted last month by Self-Titled, Jewel hadn't yet made up his mind about whether to put out one or two discs. Ultimately, he made the right choice. Closer "No Escape" may not be as immediate as the title track when heard in isolation, but luckily, we don't have to listen to it in isolation. Just as on albums by the War on Drugs, Deerhunter, and countless others, the experimental interludes here help create a context that makes the pop songs that much more effective; by including so many mood-oriented parts, Kill for Love paradoxically rises above hazy synth-pop's occupational hazard of dissolving into a blur of mood and mood alone. It's not just a collection of hits; it's an album, one that gives the project's familiar nocturnal foreboding a new sense of grandeur.


The 15-disc box set of puns and polka is a monument to pop music’s once symbiotic relationship with parody—a linkage that has dissolved in the wake of the monoculture’s demise.

“Weird Al” Yankovic: Squeeze Box: The Complete Works of “Weird Al” Yankovic

Listening to the complete recorded works of “Weird Al” Yankovic—which is now easy to do, thanks to the release of the 15-disc Squeeze Box, which contains all 14 of his studio albums along with a disc of rarities, housed in a replica of his signature accordion—provides a graduate course in the junk culture of the 20th century. Sure, the songs he sent up are pillars of pop music—whether it was “Beat It,” “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Ridin’,” or “Blurred Lines”—but hearing Yankovic’s parodies provided a sense of their deep, lasting impact. It wasn’t simply that these familiar tunes were mocked; his send-ups underscored the ways that hits become part of the fabric of daily life. Joke songs are a tricky idiom even for clever musicians, but “Weird Al” finagled a robust career out of novelties. Chalk it up to smarts or good timing, but “Weird Al” Yankovic arrived at a time where the counterculture met the monoculture, beginning his career as an outsider and winding up as a beloved institution.
A nerd by birthright, “Weird Al” was always a step ahead of the curve. He started kindergarten a year too early and skipped second grade; growing up in the southern Los Angeles suburb of Lynwood, he was always the runt of the litter. To make matters worse, when he was six, his parents gave him an accordion, not a guitar, and he embraced the anachronistic instrument. Rock‘n’roll wasn’t really his thing; Al’s personal Elvis was Dr. Demento.
Operating out of the darkest reaches of Pasadena, Dr. Demento—born Barret Hansen, so who could blame him adopting a nom de plume–specialized in airing the weirdest records he could find, a task suited for an ethnomusicology major masquerading as a ringmaster. Novelties were his métier, but he didn’t limit himself to old Nervous Norvous 45s he had excavated. He’d play new oddities, which is why Yankovic made it a mission to get himself onto the Dr. Demento show. Al passed along a tape to Demento in 1976, which got on the air but didn’t spark much attention. Things got going a few years later when Yankovic was studying architecture at Cal Poly, where he spent his spare time recording himself in the men’s bathroom, which had just enough echo to round out his sound.
”Weird Al” sent one of these bathroom recordings to Dr. Demento: a version of the Knack’s “My Sharona,” which he spun into “My Bologna.” Demento wasn’t the only one who liked it. Doug Fieger, the author of “My Sharona,” loved it and tipped off his record label, which released it as a single. (They assumed it was a one-shot novelty, though, and dispensed with Al after a single 45.) Almost immediately, he topped it with “Another One Rides the Bus,” a pumping parody of Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” that landed Yankovic on national television, including a spot on Tom Snyder in 1981.
Listening to these early singles now—along with various oddities on the bonus disc Medium Rarities, one of which is a frenetic “Pac-Man” set to the Beatles’ “Taxman”—what’s striking is Yankovic’s qualities. He’s not a polished performer; there’s a fevered desperation that gives the music a kinetic edge. Some of this nervous energy was dampened when he signed to Scotti Bros. and teamed with Rick Derringer, the guitarist who had a smash with “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo” in 1973. Derringer didn’t produce “Weird Al” as if he was a freak. He made sure the albums worked as pop records—a novelty within novelties, since the format usually placed jokes above hooks. Even with this polish, Al’s eponymous 1983 debut is ragged, almost confrontational in its jokes. While Yankovic’s instincts aren’t wrong, he’s too anxious to sell his premises, and the album relies on goofy original numbers that don’t bear the mark of a savvy pop stylist.
Almost immediately, Al sharpened his pop instincts. Credit confidence or craft, but 1984's “Weird Al” Yankovic in 3-D is where Yankovic hits his stride, maybe because he discovered his muse: Michael Jackson. “Eat It,” Yankovic’s parody of Jackson’s hungry, fevered “Beat It,” became a sensation, because his concept was clean and its accompanying video arrived just when MTV was starved for content. It’s impossible to extricate Yankovic’s rise from MTV and vice versa, which only reveals how they needed each other. The very existence of “Weird Al” parodies validated the network as something worthy of sending up, while “Weird Al” needed the boost into the mainstream because he was no longer singing about reruns and strange scenes from the Valley.
In 3-D also established the blueprint he’d follow for the next 30 years: It was anchored by spoofs of current hits, interspersed with originals styled after vaguely familiar tunes and precisely one polka medley. Dare to Be Stupid, the record that swiftly followed In 3-D, in 1985, was distinguished by his affection for trash culture detritus—he covered the theme song for “George of the Jungle” and wrote an ode to “Slime Creatures from Outer Space,” the kind of 1950s B-movie that would’ve been on constant rotation on local TV in the ‘70s—but what was more noteworthy is how the silly single “Like a Surgeon” was overshadowed by Yankovic’s title track, which could easily be mistaken for a Devo original. Polka Party!, delivered just a year later, saw Al continue to improve as a songwriter—“Don’t Wear Those Shoes” is a nice slice of pure pop, while “Christmas at Ground Zero” peddles its pitch-black humor with a smile—but the record stalled his chart momentum, which could be attributed to his pop parodies being somewhat subpar: Just the titles “Living With a Hernia” and “Addicted to Spuds” suggests he was grasping at straws.
“Weird Al” bounced back with Even Worse, a 1988 album that found him reconnecting with Michael Jackson for a hit, but the more interesting elements lay elsewhere. It took savage wit to turn “Mony Mony” into “Alimony,” and the Beastie Boys spoof on “Twister” worked because it concentrated on the sound, not the words. The album amounted to a considerable commercial comeback, but Yankovic allowed himself to be distracted by Hollywood, releasing the muddled film UHF and its messier soundtrack in 1989. Arriving too late to be a sensation, UHF disappeared, and while the film has its cult, the soundtrack feels like an afterthought, as if “Weird Al” didn’t have the time to polish his compositions. Its failure helped to position Off the Deep End as a genuine comeback in 1992. The first album Yankovic produced on his own—he severed ties with Derringer after UHF—Off the Deep End clicked due to its “Smells Like Teen Spirit” parody, but it was also a richer album than its predecessors, thanks to satires delivered with a light touch, originals that weren’t tied to a specific style, and production that was more precise than Derringer’s, and also more colorful.
Alapalooza, released in the fall of 1993, slowed his momentum slightly, because none of its big songs was tied to the times. Its lead single, “Jurassic Park,” revived Jimmy Webb’s florid 1960s standard “MacArthur Park,” the polka was grounded on “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and spoofing the Red Hot Chili Peppers via the Flintstones seemed too conscious of corporate synergy. Al soon bounced back. After a year of compilations, “Weird Al” took his first stab at hip-hop with “Amish Paradise,” the first single off of Bad Hair Day, and scored another MTV hit. Unlike its predecessor, Bad Hair Day seemed to understand the currents of culture, particularly the nonsense kicked up in the wake of Nirvana: The Presidents of the United States parody “Gump” was dead on, and “The Alternative Polka” lent zest to a familiar trope.
Running With Scissors, from 1999, is where the mature “Weird Al” Yankovic arrives. Less eager to please and more confident in his craft, he doesn’t go for easy jokes; he picks the right modern hits to mock (the Offspring’s “Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)” gets spun into “Pretty Fly for a Rabbi”). There’s evident care given to the originals, and when he digs into the past, there’s a context: An ode to the Star Wars prequels, “The Saga Begins,” benefits from its association with Don McLean’s “American Pie,” since both are artifacts of the ‘70s. From this point on, Yankovic’s records are clean, polished, and assured, capitalizing on formula instead of being beholden to it. While “Weird Al” remained a prisoner of pop—his hits would come when there was a song that was undeniable—he made better, smoother records. Poodle Hat (2003) has no classics, but it goes down easily. Straight Outta Lynwood blew up in 2006 because “White & Nerdy” (a parody of Chamillionaire’s “Ridin’”) became his first Top 10 single, its success disguising his increasing musical ambition: He’s as comfortable with the florid stylings of the Beach Boys (“Pancreas”) as he is with modern R&B (“Confessions Part III,” “Trapped in the Drive-Thru”). Despite a pair of Lady Gaga parodies, Alpocalypse (2011) found Yankovic retreating from the modern world slightly, reworking the Doors, Meat Loaf, and Queen for his originals—a subtle sign that Yankovic was entering his middle age. Mandatory Fun received a big boost in 2014 when “Weird Al”’s fans rallied to get the album to No. 1, but it also was a worthy chart-topper, as it was executed about as perfectly as a “Weird Al” album can be. The parodies “Handy,” “Foil,” and “Word Crimes” were sharp, and the originals were robust.
Mandatory Fun was the last album Yankovic owed RCA, which may be what precipitated the release of Squeeze Box, but “Weird Al” has also been hinting that he’s not eager to cut another record at any point in the future. Maybe this is due to the state of the record industry, but the pop world since 2014 hasn’t kicked up many singles ripe for his kind of satire: hits so big, they feel like wallpaper. That time is passing. Squeeze Box feels like a testament not just to Yankovic’s career, but to an entire era in American popular culture: a time where a guy as strange and nerdy as him could wind up chronicling all the nation’s odd undercurrents in song—songs that catapulted this one-time outsider into the epicenter of pop culture, where he became as iconic as the stars he mocked.


After two volumes of heavy, straight-up motherland funk, DJ/label curator John Bryan culled Africa Airways 3 from only the sleekest and fastest-burning cuts from mid-’70s West Africa.

Various Artists: Africa Airways Three: The Afro-Psych Excursion 1972-1984

After two volumes of heavy, straight-up motherland funk, DJ/label curator John Bryan culled Africa Airways 3 from thousands of warehouse records from West Africa, paring down to only the sleekest and fast-burning cuts. Coming from a time when West Africa was full of military rulers and one-party states fueled by oil money, the compilation provides sneaky testimony that the region flourished culturally all the same. Some collectors might grumble that there’s a few overlaps with Stone Throw’s excellent 2005 comp World Psychedelic Classics 3. AA3 has no big names except for Manu Dibango (“Soul Makossa”), with a number of groups only existing for a few singles or an album. The tunes are mostly instrumentals, sprinkled with occasional vocals (many times in English) scattered in the lo-fi mixes, leaning more towards guitar freak-outs and tropicalia itself. And even though many of AA3 songs are complex, multi-part journeys, most of them still confine themselves to the classic under-five-minutes single format.
What’s extraordinary about these otherwise forgotten, barely existent singles isn’t just their dynamic, insistent groove but also how each piece giddily slices across traditions and styles as much as it honors them. Since the lilting poly-rhythms of Nigerian juju were also coming up in the early ’70s, it’s no surprise to hear them in cuts like Afro National’s “Push Am Forward” and Bunzu Soundz’s “Zinabu.” You can hear Santana-like modal guitar flights in the Bunzu as well as in Ofo & the Black Company’s “Allah Wakbarr,” which also adds chants and thunderous percussion over flailing guitar stabs. Just as with other classic dance records, we get boogie instructional guides here too, including Afro National’s directive to “push am forward, to the left, to the right” and theatrical Indonesian outliers Aka’s “Shake ” which offers up James Brown tributes surf music drum rolls, and a shout-out to Mickey Mouse over a halting groove.
Cultural clashes abound too, with Sory Bamba’s “Kanaga 78” pitting Chic-like guitar riffing over an insistent art-rock synth, followed by African Black’s “Nzango” with guitars/keys fighting for lead, resolved by ambient atmospherics. Even for psych music, there’s some real oddities here— try Dibango’s soundtrack-culled “Ceddo” (from a flick ironically about corrupting foreign influences) with xylophone/synth interplay that could be a Frank Zappa piece or Damas Swing Orchestra’s “Odylife,” with solitary piano and taped crowd noises that sound like they crept out of an early Pere Ubu session.
With all these little-heard wonders creeping out of Bryan and friends’ warehouse, we can only wonder what other hidden treasures are buried there, waiting to come out and illuminate us about other barely known slices of ’70s/’80s African musical history.


The subversively sleazy Stockholm post-punk band walks a delicate satirical line between provocation and trolling.

Welfare Jazz

Punk bands are a lot more careful with their satire than they used to be. Decades ago artists like The Fall or Nick Cave could get a pass for dropping racial slurs on the assumption of good intentions, but these days even punk’s most subversive acts respect some basic sensitivities, at least the ones looking for play outside of edgelord circles and 4chan. For bands like Stockholm’s Viagra Boys, whose values are basically progressive but whose presentation is brutalist and debauched, those shifting mores pose a challenge: how to provoke without offending or trolling. Theirs is a delicate satirical walk; everything about the band is an exercise in insinuating bad taste without crossing the line into it.
They’ve certainly perfected their visual presentation. Frontman Sebastian Murphy has one of rock’s all-time great bad postures, an antagonistically dismissive slouch he put to memorable use in the band’s breakout video for “Sports.” On stage you’re likely to find him shirtless, wearing the dark sunglasses of the permanently hungover, shimmying his hips in a mockery of sexual suggestion or pouring beer over his protruding, tattooed belly. In the studio, Viagra Boys conjure that sleaze even without the visuals, thanks in part to Murphy’s slovenly growl—he’s got the wanton vocal presence of a man who’s never flossed. The band’s post-punk rhythms are also embellished with cartoonish lasciviousness, slow and gnarly, scribbled with unruly saxophones that overrun portions of songs where horns usually don’t belong.
On the band’s 2018 debut Street Worms they lampooned toxic masculinity and classism, both of which remain targets on their chaotically jubilant sophomore album Welfare Jazz. But increasingly, Murphy directs his aim at the mirror, too, calling himself out for his own dickish behavior. Over the album’s nastiest groove on opener “Ain’t Nice,” he plays the role of the shitty boyfriend, negging his partner while using their pad as his personal storage unit. A few songs detail his quest to be a better person, often in lyrics cribbed from hoary old songwriting tropes. He saves the most contrived of them all for “Into the Sun,” where Murphy apologizes to the love he’s wronged, vowing to end his rambling ways and win back their heart. Even without the cliches, his pledge is transparently unconvincing.
As always, the band brushes against the boundaries of good taste. On “Toad,” Murphy bellows like an old bluesman—or an exaggerated impression of white rockers imitating old bluesmen—about how he don’t need no woman. He adopts a similarly racially loaded impression for the spoken-word snippet “This Old Dog.” On “Creatures,” a glowering slab of synth-pop, he details the squalid existence of unemployed addicts surviving on scrap metal and stolen copper. His portrayal isn’t without empathy—Murphy has been there, he sings—but it plays into the most parasitic stereotypes of society’s have-nots. There’s an air of exploitation to it.
And for a band that so deftly mocked bourgeois interests like dog shows on their debut, there’s a sense that sometimes the band is punching down on a handful of tracks that take the piss out of country music, traditionally the music of the lower working class. Amyl and the Sniffers’ Amy Taylor joins the band for a looney cover of the late John Prine’s “In Spite of Ourselves” that splits the difference between tribute and mockery, with Murphy and Taylor competing to throw down the loopiest, most exaggerated Southern accents.
Is the cover satire, or, like the absurdist death-disco banger “Girls & Boys,” is it just silliness for the sake of silliness? As with much of Welfare Jazz, it’s not always clear, but Viagra Boys are a better band because they give themselves the freedom to do both, and between Murphy’s big-bad-wolf bellow and those untamed horns, even the band’s most corrosive material whizzes by with the invigorating loopiness of a cartoon. Viagra Boys have a gift for making listeners wrestle with choices that might be deal breakers if the music weren’t all so ludicrously entertaining.

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Latest from the band led by Boredoms drummer Yoshimi P-We is their broadest, busiest, and furthest reaching album to date, which oddly enough leads to some problems.

Taiga

It's not saying much that, 13 minutes into a 58-minute album, it feels like things are already over. Indeed, it takes only the first two tracks of OOIOO's fifth album, Taiga, to completely comprehend the record. Everything is readily apparent: These are four dexterous, imaginative musicians playing difficult music. And, if Yoshimi P-We's vocals aren't a giveaway, the colorful and percussive nature of almost everything here should be: This is an album from the same school of Japanese polyglots that gave us Boredoms. Taiga is OOIOO's broadest, busiest, and furthest reaching album to date. Strangely, those same characteristics ruin it.
Once again, consider those first two tracks, "UMA" and "KMS", two cuts obsessed with the difference between on and off. "UMA" is a spree of ecstasy, four minutes of forward charge rattling on tribal drums and Yoshimi's antiphonal cheerleader shouts. At one point, a shrill synthesizer dots the phrases. It gives way to a gym whistle, playing in tune and in time before bleeding into "KMS", a nine-minute, slow-or-speeding dance through rocking-chair bass lines, horn whole notes, fragmented guitar melodies, and cymbal splatters. With two minutes left, the band hits their improvisational stride, and the album reaches its pinnacle: A synthesizer squeals, feeding off of drum rattles and a peak-riding guitar.
But then it all falls to a lazy, closing guitar chord, epitomizing a bold build to absolutely nothing. That's exactly how far Taiga goes: It's like watching someone make a truckload of taffy. Once you know how it's done, it's about combining the core ingredients with different flavors and molding the brew into slightly different shapes. In its current four-piece set-up, OOIOO uses much the same substrate as before: Yoshimi's elastic voice commands the band above a cavalcade of drums, which either drive frenetic Afro-beat passages or ride Sunny Murray-inspired cymbal-and-skin splashes. For flavoring, synthesizers, oscillators, razor-thin guitars, trumpets, electronics, glockenspiel and the occasional gym whistle are the rage.
Taken in small doses, Taigia is still inspired and moving, sweet even: The referents-- Sonic Youth, Don Cherry, Fela Kuti, Patty Waters, Sun Ra, Miles Davis, Neu!-- are so wide-ranging, it's hard not to enjoy it in portions. When they grapple Mungo Jerry's "In the Summertime" and pin it to house-music polyrhythms and counterpoint synthesizers on the closing track, it's hard to resist. But, over 58 minutes, you not only watch the taffy get made, you get sick sampling chunks from two-dozen flavors.
This is largely disappointing since OOIOO-- Yoshimi, especially-- has done better. On Gold and Green, recorded in 2000 but not released domestically until last year, the band was capable of excitement and restraint. The same was true of Yoshimi's 2003 collaboration with Yuka Honda, Flower With No Color. And, though it's not proper form to dismiss a side project in favor of its wellspring, Boredoms get something right that OOIOO hasn't mastered: They announce ideas and give them space, building through notions instead of building on top of them. And, while such an aesthetic may not be part of OOIOO's binary, on/off domain, it makes for a better band, or at least a band capable of making records a bit more, well, nourishing.


On their latest album, Brooklyn's Men put their own spin on the raw and ragged sound of noisy 1980s indie rock to delirious effect.

Leave Home

Nothing is sacred to the Men. For one, this Brooklyn quartet's name is pretty much identical to that of fellow New Yorker JD Samson's active post-Le Tigre project, MEN. Their 2010 sophomore release, Immaculada, featured a caterwauling noise-punk thrasher called "Oh Yoko" that had absolutely nothing to do with the classic John Lennon song, or Ms. Ono herself, for that matter. Their new album swipes its title from a legendary record by New York's most famous punk band, the Ramones. And part way through the obliquely titled mid-album track "( )", when the band realize they're ripping off the fuzz-bomb riff to Spacemen 3's "Revolution", they just go ahead and swipe a line from the song too, and cap it with another quote from Spacemen's "Take Me to the Other Side" for good measure. And yet: For all the cheeky references and inside jokes at play on the Men's Leave Home, you'd be hard-pressed to find a purer, no-bullshit, serious-as-a-heart-attack rock record released this year.
Listening to Leave Home feels a lot like living inside of Michael Azerrad's 1980s indie-rock tome Our Band Could Be Your Life, variously bringing to mind Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr.'s SST stints, Sub Pop-vintage Mudhoney, and Touch and Go-era Butthole Surfers (who surely would approve of a song title like "Shittin' With the Shah"). Tellingly, Azerrad's book ties up its narratives the moment its subjects signed to majors-- partly because, technically speaking, they ceased to be indie rock at that point but, more importantly, because those artists produced their most enduring, groundbreaking music while recording for independent labels. Leave Home is likewise a frozen tableau of that tipping point, imagining a parallel universe in which your favorite first-wave indie-rock bands never had to sign on corporate letterhead, never got anywhere near MTV, never toned down their act, and never got old-- they just kept on blowing minds at the peak of their powers in perpetuity.
Where the discographies of those aforementioned influences can more or less be plotted on a straight line from chaos to control, the Men's modest catalogue thus far presents no such linear evolutionary trajectory. Immaculada may have introduced folky acoustic guitar passages and extended doom-metal instrumentals to their post-hardcore attack, but rather than continue to explore those stylistic detours, Leave Home sees the Men return to the full-torque distorto-rock of their 2009 debut EP, but blow it up on a grander scale with a more intense batch of songs. And rather than try to upgrade the fidelity to accommodate the more epic execution, the unapologetic corrosiveness of the sound is ultimately what gives it its power and heft.
So that means Leave Home's boldest gesture-- the seven-minute opener "If You Leave..."-- is also its least typical, not just for its tsunami-sized shoegaze haze, but for its open-hearted candor, as its lone, repeated lyric ("I would die") provides a surprisingly affecting answer to the title's open-ended suggestion. The song is every bit as surprising coming from these guys as the similarly miasmic "Farewell" was on Boris' 2006 album Pink, showcasing the respective bands' abilities to be as blissful as they are bludgeoning. But where "Farewell" anticipated the Japanese doom demigods' eventual drift toward melodic accessibility, "If You Leave..." is a calm-before-the-storm misdirection. By the time Leave Home's side one winds down with the grueling, hoarse-throat howls and torturous, slow-motion squall of "L.A.D.O.C.H.", you'll be wondering if you're still listening to the same band.
But on Leave Home's second half, the Men's dual affinities for brute punk-rock force and bad-trip psychedelia fuse together to brilliant effect, with a searing series of songs that refuse to relent even as they encroach on the five-minute mark-- in particular, the storming "Bataille" suggests Sonic Youth's "Hey Joni" as recorded by Funhouse-era Stooges, while the closing "Night Landing" effectively blurs the line between krautrock and punk in fine Neu! '75-style. Of course, with a name like the Men-- and reference points like these-- it's all too fitting that this album will undoubtedly appeal to a certain subset of record-collecting dudes. But the Men's treatment of their well-curated influences is less akin to that of fan-boys playing in a tribute act and a lot more like an irreverent hip-hop producer's approach to breaks-- key in on your sources' coolest moments, change the context, and ride that perfect sound forever.


Neil Young's latest studio record, his first with Crazy Horse in nine years, isn't so much a covers collection as it is a concept album in the vein of Nick Cave's Murder Ballads.

Americana

Neil Young's legend has essentially been built through obfuscation; he's accumulated one of the most celebrated yet byzantine songbooks in rock by impulsively shifting course album to album, whether it means periodically alienating fans, band mates, and record labels alike. But when it comes to covering other people's songs, he's an unabashed populist. "Blowin' in the Wind", "All Along the Watchtower", "A Day in the Life", "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay", "On Broadway", "Four Strong Winds"-- Young is obviously not the sort of artist who selects covers to reveal something new about himself, or to prove how cool his record collection is. Instead, true to his utilitarian ethos, he's more interested in transforming the mythical into the practical, reclaiming once-vital songs that have essentially been overplayed into Muzak and investing them with a new sense of purpose. In Young's hands, the most totemic songs in pop history become more flawed and, as a result, more down to Earth.
For this latest studio album-- the first with Crazy Horse in nine years-- Young applies that logic across an entire record. Americana joins Paul McCartney's Kisses on the Bottom and Iggy Pop's Après in this year's aging-rocker covers-album sweepstakes, though it's less about digging into personal favorites as reclaiming some of the most popular songs ever written. And we're not talking about mere golden oldies here, but ancient public-domain standards that predate the existence of pop radio and the music industry entirely: "Clementine", "She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain", "Oh Susannah", and the like. These aren't songs anyone really listens to anymore, because we don't need to. They're practically part of our collective DNA: songs that you whistle while you work or use to sing your baby to sleep or to entertain impatient kids sitting around a campfire. Invariably, they're also songs whose simple, sing-along melodies obscure the real-life maladies-- poverty, unemployment, lost love, murder, crises of faith-- that originally inspired them over a century ago. As such, Americana isn't so much a covers collection as a concept album in the vein of Nick Cave's Murder Ballads: new variations on age-old themes that still resonate loud and clear today.
Alas, it's also the sort of album where you pretty much know what it's going to sound like just by reading the record's spine and tracklist. What you see is what you you get: old-timey tunes subjected to Crazy Horse's desecrating grungy grind. And given the over-familiarity and brevity of the source material, it's a novelty that wears itself out quickly. While Young and the Horse effectively tease out the unpleasant undercurrents in songs like "Oh Susanna", "Wayfaring Stranger", and "Clementine" (which reinstates the oft-omitted line about macking on the deceased title subject's sister), Americana doesn't so much amount to a caustic commentary on the modern-day American condition as capture a bunch of old pals trying to rediscover their chemistry by sloppily jamming on some standards-- and in some cases, like the repetitious eight-minute trudge through true-crime tale "Tom Dula", driving them into the ground. Compared to his previous state-of-the-nation addresses, Young doesn't so much attack the material as playfully mess around with it; nearly every track here concludes with some cheerful studio chatter that suggests what we just heard was the Horse's first-ever pass at the song. This slackness defines Americana more so than its political intent; as the tracklist moves forward to relatively more recent fare like Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" and the Silhouttes' late-1950s standard "Get a Job", you might as well be listening to the Shocking Pinks.
But just as the aforementioned Murder Ballads capped off its orgy of carnage with a surprisingly redemptive cover of Bob Dylan's "Death Is Not the End", Americana boasts a similarly high-concept denouement: Only Young would deign to close out a tribute to the American folkoric tradition with a cover of the British national anthem. Whether it's a backhanded salute to the country that incited the American Revolution in the first place, or simply a sly nod to his own roots in the Commonwealth, Young's "God Save the Queen"-- with its drunken drummber-boy beat, squealing electric-guitar fanfare, and cheeky choral vocal--proves to be just as blasphemous to Britain's most sacred song as the namesake number by his one-time muse Johnny Rotten. It ain't exactly Hendrix doing "The Star-Spangled Banner", but then that's precisely the point: It's Young's way of saying that-- even when you're dealing with another country's intellectual property-- this song is your song, this song is my song.


The late UGK rapper, one of the foundations of Southern rap, has another record posthumously released.

The Naked Soul of Sweet Jones

"Talkin' bout my first solo album, bitch," says Pimp C at the outset of The Naked Soul of Sweet Jones. "I ain't never had one before." He's sort of right. Sweet James Jones Stories, his official debut, was a cobbled-together collection released while Pimp served out a prison sentence. Pimpalation, the follow-up, actually came out while Pimp was alive and free, but, obviously enough, the man conceived it as a compilation-- a way for Pimp to showcase himself among all the artists and producers in his expanded circle, rather than a stand-alone statement. And sadly enough, it's impossible to tell how much of The Naked Soul is the real solo debut that Pimp wanted to release.
Pimp's been dead for nearly three years, a casualty of some combination of unprescribed prescription cough syrup and sleep apnea. Plenty of the material on the album sounds like it dates back to the era just before Pimp died, as his duo UGK roared back to life with the triumphant double album Underground Kingz. Other tracks could've been finished only later-- after Pimp's death. One of the album's guests, the onetime Pimp protégé Lil Boosie, has been in prison, facing murder charges, for about a year now. Another, Drake, has really had a career only in the years following Pimp's death; even though Drake calls himself "an honorary resident of UGK-town," I'm not even sure the two ever met. (And given Pimp's outspoken views on sensitive R&B types like Ne-Yo, it's easy to imagine Pimp mercilessly mocking Drake in public if their careers had had a chance to overlap.) Parts of the record, like the regrettable Jazze Pha collab "Fly Lady", feel like chintzy time-capsule artifacts from a forgotten 2007. Others have the sad air of a posthumous Tupac album-- left-behind sketches of freestyle verses, given new music and preserved only because the man isn't still around to improve on them. Like every other Pimp C solo album, this isn't really an album; it's just a bunch of tracks thrown together.
That's a lost opportunity because Pimp C knew how to put albums together. As half of UGK, he produced some truly dazzling Southern rap full-lengths-- giving plenty of room to his blues and soul and swamp-funk influences without ever letting them overwhelm his thunderous low-end thump, helping to establish the blueprint for 90s Southern rap in the process. As a vocalist, he was also the duo's emotional core, singing choruses in a strutting, pinched falsetto and sneering his verses in a thick, arrogant twang while partner Bun B played the wise and precise elder to his unreformed knucklehead character. Pimp himself didn't produce a single track on The Naked Soul, so we only get to hear a part of what made him great. But that overwhelming swagger remains very much on display here.
Pimp's rapping here covers a pretty narrow spectrum; he spends most of his time talking about either sex or jewelry. And if you're not into the idea of a song in which Pimp and Too $hort explain to you, at some length, why you have a vagina, you should probably stay away. But Pimp played up his player archetype perfectly, and it's still fun to hear him lay out juicy, borderline-disgusting come-ons in that elongated leer of his. More than any rapper this side of Ol' Dirty Bastard, Pimp took absurd delight in the squelchy, squeaky details of sex, and he was absolutely unafraid to sound gross. So: "We got to the beach, the ground was so sandy/ Bitches on my dick like ants on candy." Or: "Suck ya toes, I'm gonna shrimp tonight/ My dick make you weak like kryptonite." Objectionable as it may be, this stuff is always fun to hear.
But fun or no, the album mostly just makes me sad. There can be only so many unreleased Pimp tracks, so many chances to hear that voice on a new song. And only a few tracks here belong anywhere near Pimp's pantheon. "Since the 90s" features cheap, twinkling horror-movie keyboards; Pimp didn't rap on tracks like that too often, but he always sounded great on them, and an on-fire E-40 guest verse only seals the deal. "Hit the Parking Lot" is a rumbling slick-talk session with little buddies Webbie and Lil Boosie both operating at peak capacity and Pimp schooling them both. And "Massacre" is just a dinky instrumental, no chorus, Pimp issuing guttural threats for five minutes. Really, that was all he ever needed to do. An hour of that would work a lot better than the patched-together succession of guest-verses and lost verses we get here.


Recorded in 1972, this largely unreleased “lost” album is a fascinating glimpse into what one of the great 20th-century artists strategically allowed the culture to see.

You’re the Man

Morally right-on, emotionally vulnerable, and still musically avant-garde, Marvin Gaye’s previously unreleased 1972 album You’re the Man is the timeless sound of a combustible rhythm and blues. Just from the title track’s first few seconds of wah-wah guitar, the album beams us directly into the heart of what a Jet magazine writer in 1972 once called “the new Black sound”—that rising tide of politically urgent, progressive Top 40 soul music like the O’Jays’ “Backstabbers,” the Staples Singers’ “This World,” the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” and Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly soundtrack extravaganza “Freddie’s Dead.”
Here’s the thing: You’re the Man is still the New Black Sound of today. It’s no less pressing and cutting-edge than Donald Glover’s racial satire “This is America” and it’s no less warmly interior or black community-minded than Solange’s proggy When I Get Home. Gaye’s 1972 anti-Nixon clapbacks on You’re the Man —such as “demagogues and admitted minority haters should never be president”—could just as easily apply to the ghastly failings of today’s crooked Trump administration.
In the 1970s, Gaye emerged as a seer, digging for deep grooves in the effort to realize an all-inclusive, democratic world that still seems beyond our reach. Troubled by imperial war, hypocritical governments, exclusionary racial policies, and looming ecological disasters, Marvin Gaye was the musician-as-dissident, striving for liberation that he himself never personally managed to achieve during his lifetime. Along the way, he demonstrated immense range. Within the course of a single album, Gaye could come off as conscious, pensive, concerned, driven, committed, topical, tough, sexy, urbane, hypnotic, tortured, troubled, hip, religious, defiant, disillusioned, high-flying, defiant, blunted, and compassionate.
You’re the Man captures those wide-ranging precincts, punctuating them with mesmerizing flights into black power era funk and soul by way of conga-tinged grooves. It’s not a concise, perfectly constructed concept album like Gaye’s 1971 What’s Going On, his erotic 1973 Let’s Get It On or his 1976 intimate masterpiece I Want You. There was, after all, a reason Gaye chose to shelve You’re the Man. And an essential question lingers: Is You’re the Man really a finished record that Gaye would have wanted released? But hearing it 47 years after it was abandoned, You’re the Man throws time itself into relief, offering us revisionist insight into how Gaye managed his creativity in the immediate aftermath of his runaway early ’70s success.
Just one year before the release of “You’re the Man,” in 1971, Gaye shed his crooner-cabaret Mr. Perfectionist image and forced short-sighted Motown CEO Berry Gordy to release his agitprop masterpiece What’s Going On. An operatic protest album, What’s Going On produced three commercial juggernauts, the anthemic title track, “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology),” and “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler”)”. Gaye carried the message music torch of Motown artists like The Temptations, Edwin Starr, Martha Reeves, and Steve Wonder to inaugurate the early 1970s FM-radio era of the black protest record. And alongside figures like Isaac Hayes and Curtis Mayfield, Gaye helped turned 1971 into the year where black albums mattered as much or more than singles.
By all accounts, however, Gaye privately struggled with how to follow up What’s Going On. In 1972, Gaye was in and out of studios in Detroit and L.A., working with producers like Willie Hutch and Hal Davis. Nearing the close of a troubling relationship with partner Anna Gordy, and resisting the idea of relocating to L.A. to be near Motown’s new headquarters, Gaye nervously abandoned plans to release all those other songs he’d been working on for a year, pursuing instead other options like his duet album with Diana Ross, and an original score to the film Trouble Man. A year later, in 1973, Gaye released the commercial smash Let’s Get It On, his official studio follow-up to What’s Going On, controversially leaving behind his excursion into political subject matter in favor of boudoir sex.
Co-written by his What’s Going On collaborator Kenneth Stover, and one of the last tracks he ever recorded at Motown in Detroit, You’re the Man’s scorching title tune remains an astonishing synthesis of the queasy, tricky state of American electoral politics in the early 1970s—it’s an orphaned masterpiece about hollow campaign promises disconnected from political action have imperiled American democracy. Released on April 26 in 1972 as his first single after What’s Going On, “You’re the Man” climbed the charts only a few weeks after American airplanes dropped more bombs over North Vietnam than any time since 1968. As the War disturbingly ramped up, the acidic presidential election campaign season kicked off, too. When Gaye blurts out in the title song “busing is the issue” (on the alternate version of the track, he downgrades the concern to “busing is just one issue”) he’s specifically referring to the way segregationist candidate George Wallace had turned court-ordered busing—a liberal move meant to speed up the integration of public schools— into a contentious issue every democratic hopeful had to address to stay in the race.
In that tumultuous election year, black folks’ interest in reconstructing society to ensure full participation for all was upended by more pragmatic concerns related to winning electoral seats. The passing of Civil Rights legislation in the mid 1960s, in tandem with Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on poverty, had failed to transform the everyday reality of harsh life for many black working class and poor people, particularly given national economic underdevelopment, the dissolution of city services, reduced federal spending, and widespread attacks on affirmative action programs. In March 1972, black leaders gathered in Gary, Indiana to launch the National Black Political Assembly—a clear sign of surging political momentum in democratic circles. Unfortunately, many black politicians—newly arriving in elected offices in and out Washington—hadn’t exactly been able to revolutionize the system, more just reform or work within its limitations. Some black politicians even became guilty of the same abuses and community neglect as their white counterparts. Both elated by the opportunity to participate in electoral politics and skeptical of the result, “You’re the Man” moves in both directions at once, full of political disgust and hopeful optimism at the same time.
“You’re the Man” takes sarcastic aim at ineffective elected officials, both black and white. Gaye serves up holler-worthy lyrics like “I believe America’s at stake,” “Politics and hypocrites are turning us all into lunatics,” and “Don’t you understand/There’s misery in the land” over a simmering rhythm track marked by his signature minor sevenths and suspended chords. “You’re the Man”’s musical DNA makes it a close cousin of “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler).” The track also features Gaye’s trademark vocal stylings (he’d incorporate multiple tracks of lead vocal; he essentially sings in counterpoint to himself) along with a full array of inhalations, blurted-out whoos, whelps and squelches, as if to suggest that words themselves can’t convey the sheer emotionality and toll of the subject matter.
Besides the title track and the transcendent ballad “Piece of Clay,” a handful of other tracks on You’re the Man tracks also diagnose the national condition. “The World Is Rated X” is a Bobby Womack-esque funk song that aims to convince us that “the world is in a grave situation,” “not only in the movie show” but we have to “take a look outside, it’s where the truth is really told.” Over chugging guitar and dramatically arranged strings, we learn the solution to the world’s taboo MPAA rating is to spread love and peace all over the land.
“The World Is Rated X” is a screed against sin that appears to want to suppress ’70s libertarian permissiveness in favor of conservative respectability politics (especially when Gaye croons “God is watching, he knows where you’re at,” as the track fades). But Gaye recorded “The World is Rated X” at a moment marked by the growing popularity of blaxploitation films like Superfly. Even Black Panther Party revolutionary Huey Newton lambasted these films as “counter-revolutionary,” admonishing the way that children and teens replaced their late ’60s prideful black power afros and dashikis for Superfly’s degradingly stereotypical fashion of coke-spoon necklaces and pimp fedoras. In that void, black musicians like Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, Bill Withers, and Stevie Wonder emerged as quasi-Messianistic, ethical figures in the community. In recording “The World Is Rated X,” Gaye posits himself as a hero, saving us from our own communal descent into retrograde behavior.
Gaye’s boho-hippie, Afro-Christian, universalist love ethic also extends to secular, more romantic concerns on the album, too. The seductive “I’m Gonna Give You Respect” blazes with horns, blaring tom-toms and Pips/Chi-Lites style harmonies; it spins a story about how Gaye’s insecurity that his girl might leave him makes him want to be a more respectful man. “You’re That Special One,” “We Can Make It Baby,” “I’d Give My Life for You” and “Symphony (the latter two newly mixed by Salaam Remi) are so-so romantic tunes, at least in the grand context of the Gaye musical canon. But romantic, sax-heavy “My Last Chance” lets Gaye show off his featherine, supple tenor: “May I have this last dance/his is my chance to get close to you” he sings, as he confesses “I’m just a shy guy/I’m so nervous/Girl, but I got to try.”
Gaye’s yearning intimacy extended to family situations, as well. “I Want to Come Home for Christmas,” replete with a 6/8 beat and a spoken word monologue, delivers its punchline nearly a minute into the song – that’s when we learn the song is really a profoundly empathetic lament about a prisoner of war, inspired by his brother Frankie, who served in the Vietnam war and whose plight previously inspired What’s Going On. “Christmas in the City,” on the other hand, is a wordless, electric piano doodle; its ho-hum jazz is both spooky and forgettable.
You’re the Man includes a fascinating, relaxed alternate version of the title track featuring the lyric “maybe what this country needs is a lady president.” It’s worth remembering that “You’re the Man” was composed and recorded in April 1972, just one month before the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution was passed by Congress and sent to the states for ratification. In February 1972, activist Angela Davis was released from jail on bail; in January of that same year, unflappable congresswoman Shirley Chisholm became the first African American woman to run for president. As Gaye chimed on about a woman president, numerous black women musicians—from Roberta Flack and Nina Simone to Mavis Staples and Aretha Franklin—made equally profound artistic statements, combining race, gender, politics, and pleasure in intersectional ways their male counterparts usually failed to do.
The way in which black women were both politically active in the early 1970s and yet suppressed by sexist and racist establishment glass ceilings is also what makes “Woman of the World” You’re the Man’s most boneheaded cut. The song refers to a “liberated lady of today” who has “come a long way baby” (echoing the Virginia Slims slogan). Gaye pleads with this newly free and emancipated lady who has caught his eye to remember their childhood days. Given that the new legislation has “put him down” in favor of her independence, he asks her if this is really where she wants to be. Basically the sentiment of the song is: Now that you’re running the show, lady, what about us dudes?
Less a vile anti-feminist tract than a profoundly confused and naive mess that prioritizes male panic over the new feminism, “Woman of the World” is a song only men could have written. It pales compared to Curtis Mayfield’s loving 1970 “Miss Black America” or the vision of mutuality between men and women that later informed Gaye’s 1976 Leon Ware co-composed album I Want You. Coupled with what we now know of Gaye’s history of troubling emotional and physical violence (ex-wife Jan Gaye alleges in her 2015 biography, co-authored with David Ritz, that he abused her), the singer-songwriter may have been prophetic with regards to race and class, but not so much when it came to feminism and women’s rights.
In its highs and lows, You’re the Man—a self-canceled/lost Marvin Gaye album that has now arrived 47 years later in the midst of cancel culture—is a fascinating glimpse into what one of the great pop music artists of the 20th century strategically allowed the culture to see—and what he didn’t. Just as the title track reminds us that charismatic political leaders often fail us, the album as a whole inadvertently reminds us that the culture doesn’t rise and fall on charismatic male music icons like Marvin Gaye and John Lennon—and others with questionable behavior or rap sheets—in the way it did when they seemed like singular, indispensable revolutionary heroes. You’re the Man reveals Marvin Gaye as a multidimensional, complicated human being who deserves our respect, but not necessarily our unchecked worship—no more so than the political figures he so rightly critiques. In 2019, movements like #blacklivesmatter have taught us that we can strive to be “‘leaderful”’ in embracing collective models of governance rather than pin our hopes and futures on any one single charismatic individual. Marvin Gaye was a single charismatic musician whose iconic genius was interlaced with the continuous trouble in the water that informed it. A profound musical gift from the past that remarkably has a lot to say about our present condition, You’re the Man presents us with the unequivocal truth that because we’re all fallible, nobody should be the man.


Following January's Let's Go Eat the Factory, GBV's second reunion LP is shorter, punchier, and livelier than its predecessor. Last time, Tobin Sprout's input felt especially triumphant. Here, it's Robert Pollard's show.

Guided by Voices: Class Clown Spots a UFO

Class Clown Spots a UFO

Deep into Guided by Voices' second reunion LP, Class Clown Spots a UFO, Bob Pollard makes an out-of-character suggestion: "be impeccable." Whoever he's talking to, it's not himself. Pollard, long prone to spiking even his most gloriously imperfect songs with out-there choruses, waves of static, and commercial prospect-shattering titles like "Game of Pricks", is not our foremost expert in matters of the immaculate. January's Let's Go Eat the Factory, the strange, spotty comeback album from GBV's "classic era" lineup, could've doubled down on Bob's back-bleacher arena-rockers or Tobin Sprout's tucked-in power-poppers, possibly earning them some new fans. But Factory wore its flaws proudly, sidestepping any and all easy "hey, we're back!" triumphalism and overeager "look how we've grown!" progressivism for a show-up-and-plug-in casualness that couldn't have come from any other GBV. So it goes with Class Clown Spots a UFO, their second LP on the year. Class Clown is shorter, punchier, and a lot livelier than Factory, but impeccable? Nothing doing there.
Tobin Sprout's age-defying voice and surplus of solid songs helped his return to the fold on Factory seem especially triumphant. This time around, it's Bob's show all the way. Class Clown's title track, a resurrected gem plucked from the outtakes collections Suitcase 3, deserves to stand as the resurrected GBV's new rallying cry. It's one of those dizzyingly catchy Pollard songs that seems to sew two or three viable hooks together, its criss-crossing chorus the product of some serious craftsmanship on Pollard's part. Next to Factory, his rockers are leaner and less fraught, while his ballads are more straightforward and more plainly gorgeous. Still, beyond "Class Clown" and "Keep It In Motion", Pollard seems the looser dude here, providing Class Clown with nearly all of its gnarlier rockers and oddball overtures.
Though Pollard is warmed up, Sprout's a bit stiffer. Long the classicist of the pair, Sprout's stately pop songs, at their best, play off Pollard's woolier mammoths in a way that does both sides favors. Here, though, his songs are too tame, seeming beamed in from another record. The especially bland "Starfire" finds Toby singing "worlds are falling down like raindrops" over an uninspired, starched-shirt string arrangement. The stripped-bare, minute-long "Lost in Space" is a good showcase for his striking voice, but it feels like a retread of Factory's similarly spare, Sprout-sung blip "Who Invented the Sun". Sprout's never been the font his buddy Pollard is, but after gracing Factory with some striking shiners, this pace of output seems to be stretching his songbook a bit thin.
Factory might've nailed that rickety old GBV feel, but the songs often seemed secondary to the sound. On Class Clown, a window's opened in Factory's dank back-basement and the songs make their way closer to the light. The production's brighter, the melodies more generous, and the songs themselves more fully formed. Still, as on Factory, pains have been taken to approximate the oversaturated, unpredictable feel of the classic-era LPs; writhing highlight "Tyson's High School" lets one of the set's best hooks-- standing "Be True to Your School" on its head-- ooze out of a psych-jam sludge, "Blue Babbleships Bay" goofily thrashes for 90 seconds before pulling the plug on itself, and "Worm w/ 7 Broken Hearts" ends quickly enough you'll wonder whether they actually got around to the "7 Broken Hearts" bit. This stuff gives the eclectic, at-all-angles Class Clown at least a spot of cohesion. But at times, the only thing holding the album together is its constant forward motion. A bit more of the title track's immediacy couldn't hurt matters; the best of the rest are growers, and they make you work for them. They've been peppering their recent sets with tunes from the new LPs, but as much as there is to like about the sputtering "Roll of the Dice" or the flat-out stunning "Chain to the Moon", they haven't earned the right to bump "Choking Tara" off the setlist just yet.
Being a Guided by Voices fan means adjusting your expectations for what makes a good record; when even Bee Thousand has its "Kicker of Elves", there's always the threat that things could get silly or stilted. Guided by Voices' 2012 output feels especially volatile in this way; Class Clown is full of left-turns and detours, willing to spike some of its better hooks simply to keep things interesting. Upon their return, a lesser band might've jettisoned the mess and noise of those classic records, leaving little but pure pop. But GBV Mark II have thus far proven way too ornery for that, and despite an uptick in catchiness, Class Clown's odd-angled pop and jittery arena rock keeps the weirdness on par with its predecessor. Granted, the sneakily tuneful Class Clown is still a few miles from impeccable. But that's what makes it a Guided by Voices album.


Ending their 15-year run on Tommy Boy, De La Soul's first Sanctuary release features an all-star lineup of underground beatmakers-- including Madlib, 9th Wonder, Jay Dee, and mainstay Supa Dave West-- expertly backing the trio's usual cagy, confident lyrics.

The Grind Date

De La Soul, hip-hop's perennial ugly ducklings, have often forsaken the genre's style du jour in favor of musical contrarianism. When N.W.A. and West Coast gangster nihilism hit the charts, the trio battled E and Cube's thuggery with flowers and hi-top fades. When Bad Boy had a chokehold on the industry, De La Soul countered with their Stakes Is High manifesto. Now, with bear-knit sweaters and white tees on fire-- and after Tommy Boy dropped the trio's Spitkickin' asses for lacking a thirst for commercialism-- Posdnuos, Trugoy, and Maceo explore The Grind Date.
After 15 years, many observers wondered when their DiMaggio-like fresh streak would die. The triumvirate averages three years between albums-- stemming and refitting their dark horse costumes is hardly an overnight project-- but the results are frequently worth the wait, and The Grind Date is the group's best payoff in ages.
Let's be honest: Anything Matthew Knowles (responsible for his booty-hopping progeny Beyonce and owner of De La's new home Sanctuary Union) touches, is vinyl dynamite. Moreover, any album that kicks off with Jermaine Jackson's handiwork has genius written all over it. But frequent De La collaborator Supa Dave West's opening volley only serves as the jumpoff for a producer home run derby, and De La Soul wisely allow their all-county beatmaking team (Madlib, 9th Wonder, Jay Dee, and the aforementioned Supa Dave, among others) to craft a vehicle on which the trio can again revamp their style.
The third installment of the Art Official Intelligence series was envisioned as a DJ album before Tommy Boy canned it. The Grind Date inherits that project's propensity for organic production, as De La often wisely let the beats steep. On "Verbal Clap", Jay Dee pushes a sparse, apocalyptic swirl that lacks his trademark sound but buzzes with intensity. The ghostly keys and muted snare so effectively captivate the listener that Pos, Maceo, and Dave are willingly obscured. Even Ghostface displays a moment of weakness when he struggles to match the triumphant brass on Supa Dave West's "He Comes" (although Tony Sparks does manage to reclaim his stature with shoutouts to Uday and Qusay).
Of course, De La delivers their lyrical goods via FreshDirect with the comfort and ease of well-seasoned veterans. The title track serves as the album's centerpiece as Pos and Dave command the mic with authority and finesse. Dave spits, "Meat grind, street grind, whatever the beast/ I'ma take it at the horns til the pinky toe calls." Pos and Maceo's flexibility is uncanny as they retrofit their cadences to swing tracks into coalescence. Madlib's disjointed vibes and tinkling glass on "Shopping Bags" blend seamlessly with Pos' stuttering memo re: the perils of gold-diggers: "She say jump/ You scream, 'Okay, I'm reloaded!'/ Nigga, you shooting blanks." They even manage to draw the otherwise irrelevant Carl Thomas into the den of smoothness.
As Yummy croons "I never can say goodbye" on "No", De La Soul echoes the sentiment. The Grind Date brings together an unimaginable team of the underground's hottest producers and meshes their idiosyncrasies without dissidence. But more importantly, if this turns out to be the trio's final record, they'll have gone out proud, with unshakeable confidence and determination.


Merchandise aren't the first band to draw inspiration from 80s mope rock, but the Tampa, Fla., group's background in the hardcore and DIY community has given them an edge on your average gang of 20-something miserablists. On their latest LP*,* they tighten up their blend of weirdo tones and emo conviction.

Totale Nite

Merchandise aren't the first band to draw inspiration from 1980s mope rock, but their background in the Tampa, Fla., hardcore and DIY community has given them an edge on your average gang of 20-something miserablists. The trio’s debut album, (Strange Songs) In the Dark, and its follow-up, Children of Desire, reproduced sounds of melancholy mainstays like the Cure and New Order on a basement punk’s budget. Cheeseball drum machines battered out metronomic rhythms and shimmering guitar hooks blurred into swampy, dub-inspired textures. But even though the music was dense and trippy, the vocals were clear and urgent. Singer Carson Cox delivered his lyrics in a naked, unschooled croon that was more than a little reminiscent of Morrissey during the early days of the Smiths, minus the zeal for wordplay and Victorian poetry.
On their latest LP, Totale Nite-- which arrives via Night People, a go-to outlet for acts that split the difference between spooky and psychedelic, including early efforts by Peaking Lights, Dirty Beaches, and Pocahaunted-- the band tighten up their blend of weirdo tones and emo conviction. Merchandise songs can skew long and most of the tracks on Totale Nite find the band stretching out. These aren’t noodle-heavy excursions, though. The songs are long for the same reason that Swans' songs are long-- they’re meant to envelope and overtake the listener through repetition.
The album’s best tune, “Anxiety’s Door”, flows along a programmed dance rhythm for upwards of seven minutes, swapping in swatches of acoustic and electric guitars between Cox’s plaintive hoots. The song is memorable, in part, because its arrangement is eerily familiar, an echo of the Smiths' “The Headmaster Ritual”, embellished with heaps of psychic jewelry. The title track is looser, weirder, and longer, with Cox competing against blaring saxophones and washes of white noise for sonic real estate. The shrill sounds and long duration (10-minutes) make the song a more demanding listen than “Anxiety's Door”, but it's also a more complete display of the band's weird chemistry. Merchandise's take on pop works with extremes-- tweaking out hardcore kids with fey vocals and ethereal audio gook and then blasting the tamer ears with hi-frequency screeching.
It's only when the tempos start to slow down, like on the ambient ballad "I'll Be Gone", that the LP drags a little. There are still plenty of places for Cox to hide in Merchandise's music-- delay swells, blasts of noise, bottomless reservoirs of reverb-- he just never takes the opportunity. However, when the music gears down, he could stand to step a little further into the background.
In interviews, the members of Merchandise-- Cox and guitarist Dave Vassalotti in particular-- have laid out an earnest, if sometimes convoluted, series of principles that guide their music making. When they can, they prefer to play non-traditional venues. They are heavily devoted to their local music community and suspicious of the business practices of larger independent labels. Children of Desire was a well-loved record and, had the band been interested, a more mainstream-minded imprint might have stepped up to release Totale Nite. But so far, they've made good on their ambitions to stay off of the indie-rock cowpath.
Though Merchandise’s music is sonically distant from the band's hardcore pedigree, it places a similar premium on the projection of honesty and unguarded emotions. On Totale Nite, they manage to use small-scale elements-- jangling guitars, cheapo drum machines, toy keyboards-- to project the urgency of bands with louder screams and bigger amps.


After the late-career smash “Down in the DM,” Yo Gotti reinvigorates his long-running Cocaine Muzik series, serving his usual street fare with a bit more polish. It is a snapshot of Gotti in stride.

White Friday (CM9)

Yo Gotti has long been Memphis’ biggest rap star, but he’s also spent his 30s on the cusp of something more, idling through several underperforming major-label releases while nurturing the mixtape cred that built his name. And then suddenly, in early 2016, Gotti scored big with “Down in the DM,” a late-career social media smash that had propped up his fifth album in 2015 and wedged his name into new conversations, like the one that must have precipitated his appearance on a Meghan Trainor breakup single called “Better” last year. It wasn’t until 2016 that Gotti was the type to get a crossover call like that. So, how does a late bloomer mixtape rapper seize his moment to sidle into the spotlight? Smartly, he’s back on the circuit. Kind of.
Gotti’s latest seems to be billed as an album first, White Friday, and mixtape second, CM9, but he’s clearly folding his long-running *Cocaine Muzik *mixtape series into a newfound industry prominence, serving up his usual street fare with a bit more polish. To be sure, Gotti has a better track record as a mixtape slinger than he does as a major-label rap album artist, and *CM9 *benefits from a low-stakes formula that’s less concerned with stringing together a narrative than it is with song-by-song quality control. The Art of Hustle, Gotti’s last album, saw him overextended, trying to frame himself in with a single statement-worthy piece of work; *CM9 *instead is a snapshot of Gotti in stride.
This new project’s bookends are the most explicitly self-referential of the rapper’s big 2016, and he grapples aloud with his come up. He isn’t known for clever lyricism, but Gotti can make a straightforward phrase sound agile. “Biggest year of my career and I could feel the pressure, gotta follow-up,” he snips on “81,” a slapper of an intro and fine microcosm of Gotti’s honed simplicity. Tracks like “Off da Top (3am)” don’t fare as well, and scan instead like generically manufactured trap.
On “Blah Blah Blah” Gotti casts himself as a petty asshole over an eerie banger, taunting an ex while turning his attention elsewhere. He sounds utterly unlikeable through it all. But the tease—“All I heard is ‘blah blah blah blah blah’”—spills throughout the song with enough charisma to worm into your ear like a bully’s “neener neener.” On the last track, Gotti endears instead, dropping his guard to memorialize his former manager, Mel Carter, who passed away less than a month before this mixtape was released. Gotti narrates as much as he raps, thanking an old friend for an overdue come-up they’ll never see through together. “If I knew talkin’ to you was my last time/The other night, it wouldn’t have been about no CM9,” Gotti promises.
Sometimes Gotti turns in a better chorus himself than the mixtape’s guests designated for the job. Kodak Black is the exception that steals the show on “Weatherman,” hawking a fresh-out-of-jail hook about coming up and needing more, ad-libbing it all in his stylish whine. Gotti has taken a mixtape-like approach to sharing space with his featured emcees, but he’s nearly overstocked the tracklist’s obvious centerpiece. “Castro” is a star-studded blunder that packages some of the mixtape’s best and worst rapping hand-in-hand. Big Sean and Kanye West are here mostly in spirit, crashing the party with unforgivably clunking punch-ins like “Spanish chick—J. Lo” and “Astronaut—takeoff.” Quavo and 2 Chainz save the day with full-length verses of their own, injecting a bit of zany character into an otherwise tepid group project. Several months after the same troupe of emcees gathered for a Kanye West single called “Champions,” “Castro” feels a bit like the party’s stale leftovers. But it’s still a coup for Gotti, and he holds his own confidently. Last year, he plucked “Down in the DM” from its original mixtape tracklist and built a year and bonafide album around its success. Gotti’s chipped away and crammed at least a couple more single-worthy tracks into White Friday, enough maybe to keep himself afloat through 2017. Either way, the guy doesn’t let up.


This Melbourne trio's effusive, empathic, and emphatic indie-rock debut examines shame the way 69 Love Songs x-rays love.

Camp Cope

In the same way Benji was about “death” and 69 Love Songs was about “love,” Camp Cope’s enthralling debut is an album about “shame.” There are dozens of times where Georgia Maq, leader of this Melbourne trio, recognizes the subtle way shame has goes viral in real time, tinting and tainting almost every one of her interactions: The discomfort and depression she feels after passing by a homeless man in the park, getting catcalled at a construction yard or busking in the streets. Each encounter is processed as a projection of her emotional state or payback for the original sin of having been born. Maq’s emotional intelligence is off the charts here, but in that aspect, she might admit she’s too smart for her own good.
On “Flesh & Electricity,” Maq exhales, “I’ve been desensitized to the human body/I could look at you naked and all I’d see would be anatomy,” like she just might sink so far into her couch that she disappears. When she modulates the chorus a few steps higher, she sounds even wearier; the effect is like watching someone force a smile in a crushingly repetitive job. It’s perhaps the saddest of Camp Cope’s eight songs because it was inspired by her actually trying to do good in the world; Maq worked as a nurse during the writing process of Camp Cope, but her altruism might have just been shame management: “My father says it’s atonement for my reckless years,” she says in “Flesh & Electricity.”
Camp Cope’s sound is, increasingly, the sound of indie rock today: a divergence from the too-cool VU-the Fall-Pavement lineage that embraces the effusive, empathic and emphatic qualities of emo, with some pop-punk (Tigers Jaw and UV Race are namedropped in “Stove Lighter,” WHY? is paraphrased in “West Side Story”) and a social awareness that negates any of the aforementioned’s previously questionable politics. You can tell from the stock chord progressions and loudly projected vocals that Camp Cope used to be Maq’s solo project, but if it’s folky at all, it resembles the superlyrical the Front Bottoms or the Mountain Goats rather than any roots music.
It’s a testament to Camp Cope’s unique magnetism that they never cheat towards the catharsis typically expected to balance out such heavy subject matter. They often use deadpan humor instead: “Jet Fuel Can’t Melt Steel Beams” references nutball 9/11 conspiracy theories, but uses it as part of a pattern where any authority condescends to you, whether it comes from the NRA (“the only thing that can stop a bad man with a gun is a good man with a gun”) or the victim-blaming inherent in most sexual assault investigations.
The most powerful moments on Camp Cope come when Maq shows a willingness to take some kind of power back after being talked down to her entire life, by parents, by teachers, by partners (“Hey, I was looking for a reason to leave and it’s you”), friends and peers in the punk community. There are no revelatory epiphanies for Maq, just valuable growth spurts that feel like acceptance. In “West Side Story,” Maq gets closest to the “survive and advance” thesis statement of Camp Cope:  “It all comes down to the knowledge that we’re gonna die/find comfort in that or be scared for the rest of your life.”


After a run of dates warming up for the xx, playing “obtuse, strange” music for crowds of 20,000, Sam Shepherd translates that energy to an album of mischievous yet melodic electronic experiments.

Crush

Sam Shepherd is a meticulous fellow. Whether he’s tracking down a rare piece of vinyl for his voluminous record collection, wiring up an arcane modular synthesizer, or putting together the latest iteration of his audiovisual live show, there’s an attention to detail at work that’s practically unrivaled in electronic music. (Shepherd also managed to complete a PhD in neuroscience a few years back, so he’s clearly no slouch in his other endeavors, either.) The London producer exudes a nerdy yet winning enthusiasm, and each step in his decade-long career has felt carefully considered. Even his impeccable 2015 debut album, Elaenia, which surprised many people by skirting the dancefloor almost entirely, turned out to be a natural evolution of his sound and craft.
Knowing this, it’s genuinely surprising that he created the latest Floating Points full-length, Crush, in only five weeks. The album was born in the aftermath of a 2017 tour opening for the xx. After touring Elaenia for a couple of years with a full live ensemble, Shepherd suddenly found himself alone onstage—in 20,000-capacity venues, no less—improvising with just a Roland drum machine and a Buchla synth. While he initially planned to keep things mellow, he quickly threw that plan out the window, choosing instead to embrace a more “chaotic” vibe and warm the crowd up with what he describes as “some of the most obtuse, strange, difficult music of my life.”  It was a risky choice, but the shows left Shepherd feeling invigorated, and he was determined to continue these focused machine experiments once he returned to the studio.
Knowing that, you might expect Crush to be an intense, frenzied effort, but in Shepherd’s case, economy doesn’t preclude elegance. While certain elements—a distorted rhythm here, a shuddering synth there—can be traced back to those rough-and-tumble live shows with the xx, the LP as a whole is strikingly melodic and often beautiful, even in its most frantic moments. Take “Bias,” one of the LP’s strongest offerings: The track opens with subdued, almost pensive synth tendrils and brooding baritone, which intermingle and creep slowly skyward before a vibrant breakbeat sneaks in and eventually erupts, yanking the entire production onto the dancefloor.
Crush is not hurting for club-ready material. “Last Bloom” is another dancefloor cut with a cinematic streak, with a swinging, slightly off-kilter drum pattern nodding to UK garage as the song’s jaunty melodies bubble along. You could be forgiven for mistaking it for the work of Four Tet or Caribou, two of Shepherd’s closest friends. There’s also no missing “LesAlpx,” the album’s soaring, proggy first single. The track has a lot in common with 2014’s “Nuits Sonores,” arguably Floating Points’ most forceful tune to date, although “LesAlpx” actually goes much harder, veering into proper techno territory as Shepherd layers an array of crunchy modular melodies and technicolor synth blooms atop its sturdily galloping rhythm.
Shepherd has spoken often about his early clubbing experiences and their profound impact on his musical outlook, and Crush shows just how much his work carries on the legacy of London’s fertile club scene during the latter half of the 2000s. Those years saw early dubstep dancing alongside underground house, techno, garage, and a variety of leftfield rhythms, most notably in venues like Plastic People, which played host to all-night sessions from artists like Four Tet and Theo Parrish, along with groundbreaking dubstep nights like FWD>>. Experimentation and cross-pollination were paramount, and although this genre-melding moment was ultimately fleeting, it revitalized the UK scene and introduced a new generation of young producers, including Shepherd, whose initial flurry of releases began in 2009.
While Crush isn’t an explicit homage to Plastic People (which sadly closed in early 2015), the album does embody the club’s open-minded, music-first spirit. Although the scene that birthed him has long since devolved, Shepherd—a jazz-loving, vinyl-hunting, ensemble-building, classically trained outsider who only occasionally makes what could be described as proper dance music—has nevertheless become a prominent torchbearer for the ideals of that crucial era in UK electronic music. Crush is something of a return to Floating Points’ more dancefloor-oriented material from the first half of this decade, particularly in comparison to Elaenia and 2017’s jammy, rock-influenced Reflections - Mojave Desert, but the LP is also a sonically diverse effort with extended forays into modular synthesis, baroque new age, hyperactive IDM, and more.
The quieter passages are some of the album’s best. The stunning  “Falaise” opens the record with a simmering cauldron of trembling synths and strings, the sense of drama building as the music gradually swells into an orchestral crescendo. More delicate is “Sea-Watch,” a gentle sketch that sounds like a melancholy lullaby constructed with a lightly buzzing modular set-up. “Requiem for CS70 and Strings” is another symphonic gem, its combination of classical sensibilities and Buchla-generated new-age wanderlust recalling the magic of Suzanne Ciani’s first solo albums.
Crush has its more experimental flourishes too, and it’s in these moments that you can best imagine Floating Points holed up in his studio, tinkering with his machines. The closing couplet of “Apoptose Pt. 1” and “Apoptose Pt. 2” is built atop a foundation of burbling Buchla rhythms, although Shepherd infuses both tracks with a twitchy energy that channels the percussive ping-pong of 1990s IDM. He takes things even further on “Anasickmodular,” where ethereal melodies and a sturdy garage beat are suddenly swept aside as the track disintegrates into a flurry of whirring synths and gnarled drum sounds. The element of chaos is something new for Floating Points, and while disorder may seem antithetical to his generally thoughtful approach, Crush offers proof that Shepherd has quickly learned to harness its noise and power. In a live setting, this material might have the potential to blossom into something unruly, but on the LP it comes across as more mischievous than deranged.
Perhaps a little bit of mischief is exactly what Shepherd needed. An album like Elaenia may have impressively distilled Shepherd’s influences into a single, long-form statement, but it also took him five years to finish and largely sidelined his dancefloor impulses. Crush, on the other hand, provides a more complete picture of his artistic outlook, bringing his club sensibilities back into the mix while also feeling like the most relaxed and confident Floating Points effort to date. Shepherd will likely always be someone who dotes on the details, but this time around, he was smart enough to realize that the five weeks he’d spent on Crush were enough. He’d done all he needed to do, and more importantly, he was happy with the result. Sometimes, the most important decision is knowing when to stop.

Buy: Rough Trade
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