Fresh off a thrilling collaboration with Joy Orbison, the British saxophonist teams with Mica Levi, Rupert Clervaux, and others on an audacious solo album that feels like another team effort.

Assimilation

Does any other form of music have the same existential resonance as solo saxophone? While a single musician on piano or guitar can fill up every sonic space, a saxophonist’s mission is to strike a careful balance between music and silence. Whenever they need to draw a breath, the void comes rushing in with it. There are sax players who find other ways to create the illusion of wall-to-wall sound, like Colin Stetson with his Herculean circular breathing, and the many artists who rely on electronics and loops. But beneath those embellishments, something elemental remains; the saxophone flickers like a brief flame against eternal blackness.
British saxophonist Ben Vince belongs to the latter camp, using loops to thicken his sound. His first few solo releases took a contemplative, layered approach to free improvisation that felt close in spirit to Terry Riley’s soprano saxophone and “time-lag” accumulator experiments. Then, in May, Vince teamed with adventurous dubstep producer Joy Orbison for a 12" of agit-techno explorations that demonstrated just how well he could play with others. Assimilation is another team effort, featuring four collaborative pieces (and one solo track) that venture to the furthest reaches of experimental song, free jazz, uneasy ambience, and bristling techno. He has called his new role a “demotion from creator to vector,” but Vince’s unflashy saxophone work binds it all together into an audacious whole.
“Alive & Ready,” his collaboration with outré vocalist Merlin Nova, throws listeners in at the deep end of this unfamiliar pool. Vince opens with a mournful, echoing phrase, his vibrato resonating against Nova’s operatic cries. Amid doom-laden percussion, the tortured squeals of Vince’s sax leave an unbearable amount of empty space around each sound and Nova voices all manner of screams, gurgles, and slurps. Spare, dramatic, and skin-prickling at once, this din brings to mind Scott Walker’s late work.
Just as adeptly as he followed the dizzying peaks and plunging valleys of Nova’s dynamic voice, he next shadows the subtler shifts in vocals from singer-songwriter and composer Mica Levi (aka Micachu). Liquid and ephemeral, “What I Can See” is a different kind of art song from “Alive & Ready,” one that—like Levi’s collaborations with Oliver Coates and Mount Kimbie—sounds as though it’s been imported from Arthur Russell’s World of Echo. Looped, echo-laden, and treated with electronic effects, Vince’s saxophone mimics both the fricative buzz of horsehair pulled across cello strings and the ethereal rumble of whale song. Levi’s Russell-like vocals are murmured yet deeply resonant. In tandem, they create an impressionistic reverie.
Vince’s saxophone playing is short on melodic phrases, to say nothing of long lines. He prefers staccato bursts and noisy jabs, delivering shifting rhythms that add texture and a steady pulse in any context. As Data Quack, his group with This Heat drummer Charles Hayward, suggests, Vince pairs well with percussionists—and that makes the second half of Assimilation all the more thrilling. On the album’s 10-minute centerpiece, “Tower of Cells,” Vince, Raime drummer Valentina Magaletti, and Death of the Rave artist Cam Deas work as a trio, making a dense, roiling cloud of toms, shaker, sax blips, and electronic spumes.
Paired with percussionist and Sian Alice Group alum Rupert Clervaux on “Sensory Crossing,” Vince maps a heady terrain. It’s reminiscent of Clervaux’s crackling duo work with experimental electronic producer Beatrice Dillon, mining a rich vein between spontaneous improvisation and programming in much the same way their 2016 release Two Changes did. Vince’s horn leaps above Clervaux’s morphing, polyrhythmic patterns, then dives back into them and becomes a pulse swimming among many others. The musicians’ kinetic interplay conjures a swirling cauldron of shrieks and thumps, where the histories of free jazz, early experimental composition, and leftfield club music all cook down together.
Only the closing title track presents Vince in solo mode. Here, his horn splinters into layers of loops and shrieks, growing in complexity. The song matches the intensity of everything that comes before it, but as it slowly fades out, Vince pares down the music to a lone high frequency that lingers in space. His synergy with others thoroughly demonstrated, Vince’s final act of assimilation is to fade back into the silence that surrounds him.


Matthew Tyler Musto’s latest album feels like a time capsule for this cursed year, a nauseating sludge of every “Study Beats” playlist and every TikTok influencer’s attempt at writing a hit.

everything means nothing

In Naoise Dolan’s recent novel Exciting Times, a noteworthy addition to the canon of millennial popular literature (think: Sally Rooney, lipsticked characters wielding laptops, plots about climate change and gender politics), Instagram Stories function as a narrative device. Dolan’s protagonist agonizes over whether to open a love interest’s story, worrying what it could signify if she’s seen viewing it. Technology is baked into the novel’s emotional framework, an extension of its characters’ brooding. It’s less an attempt to pander to a younger audience than it is an authentic representation of how it feels to live while anchored to at least two screens. In flickering moments, the rap-pop singer and producer blackbear reaches for that realism, too, narrating his relationships with the pulsing hyperactivity of the always-online. “Block my posts and my story,” he wails on the strum-heavy “queen of broken hearts.” “I’m sorry I can be annoying.” He doesn’t know what to do with a phone full of videos and photos of his ex. “Cracks in my heart/Got cracks in my phone,” he moans on the wincingly titled “sobbing in cabo.”
But blackbear’s latest album, everything means nothing, is also gracelessly Too Online, like a person explaining a meme, or verbalizing the words “heart emoji.” He speaks in hashtags. He regurgitates memes and stale tweets, slathering them in Auto-Tune and bleating them over beat drops. “Turn a big mood to a big mood swing,” he raps on “clown.” “You made me want to live, laugh, love, and now I want to die,” he howls on “i felt that,” as a diet trop-house beat shimmies under him. The album opens with “hot girl bummer,” a snarling bastardization of Megan Thee Stallion’s meme-turned-song released just two weeks after hers. In his version, women vomit into Birkins and sleep with strangers; they “buy [their] lips and buy [their] legs,” and, apparently, ignore blackbear.
The soggy self-pity gets old fast. “You’re so good/At making me feel bad,” he complains in the chorus of “i feel bad,” then clumsily doubles down: “You’re like a college grad that majored in the art of fucking over everything we had.” He moans about how he doesn’t want to have emotions; he yelps through Auto-Tune about how weak he feels, how the anonymous women haunting these songs are “punishing” him. All of it is rooted in a constant, stupefying misogyny. “Shoulda seen right through the gap between her thighs,” he rasps on the dubstep-flecked “half alive.” The plodding “why are girls?” doesn’t even attempt to disguise its inanity: “Why are girls so hot?/Take everything I’ve got,” he babbles. “Why are girls so cold? Why are girls so, why are girls so beautiful?”
everything means nothing feels like a time capsule for this awful, cursed year, a nauseating sludge of every “Study Beats” playlist on Spotify and every TikTok influencer-turned-pop-star’s attempt at writing a hit. Both Lauv, the 26-year-old pop singer who croons about loneliness, and Trevor Daniel, who scored a viral hit on TikTok in 2019, show up for guest spots; their slumped, algorithm-friendly pop, with its pitched vocals and skittery production flourishes, is the album’s dominant influence. blackbear’s songs aren’t trying to express an emotion, or even to come across as relatable—their main goal is to remind you of something else. “Oh, right,” you’re meant to think, listening to a meme from three months ago ooze into your headphones, “this again.”

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The new Majical Cloudz album picks up where Impersonator left off: Stark, ethereal instrumentals buoyed by frontman Devon Welsh's unflinching voice. His counterpart, Matthew Otto, doesn't try and approximate backing musicians so much as create vapor trails where backing musicians might've stood. Their music is kind of an emotional strip show: Welsh knows it's a performance but he still ends up naked.

Are You Alone?

Halfway through Majical Cloudz's set at the 2014 Pitchfork Music Festival, the music cut out, leaving singer Devon Welsh alone with a live microphone in front of 6,000 people. The scene put a new spin on an old bad dream: Not only had Welsh shown up to class without clothes on, but the classroom had become a baseball field and everyone on it was a little bit drunk.
After a couple of dumb jokes (the packing peanuts of any good showman), Welsh canvassed the audience for requests and ended up singing an a capella version of an already startlingly intimate song called "Bugs Don't Buzz" from the band's 2013 album Impersonator ("If life could be forever one instant/ Would it be the moment you met me? No, my love").
For some bands, the moment might've constituted disaster, but for Majical Cloudz it was a logical endpoint to their music, which functions as a kind of emotional strip show: Welsh knows it's a performance but he still ends up naked. When the song was over, the crowd clapped with embarrassed hesitation: Should we be watching this? And should Welsh be doing it?
The band's new album, Are You Alone?, picks up where Impersonator left off: Stark, ethereal instrumentals buoyed by Welsh's unflinching voice. Musically, their roots are in English romantics like Depeche Mode, themselves a moody electronic gloss on the lieder that composers like Franz Schubert were writing 150 years earlier. Philosophically, they chart a junction of new age and hardcore punk, both of which prize a radical scraping away of excess in their search for truth. Majical Cloudz want empathy and they want it now.
I call them a "band" but should note how they stretch the definition of the word. As a singer, Welsh performs with the confidence and intimacy of someone holding a hairbrush in front of their bedroom mirror—the music is mostly in his head. His counterpart, Matthew Otto, is less visible but equally important. A former student in an electroacoustic studies program that emphasized sound design as much as composition, Otto doesn't try and approximate backing musicians so much as create vapor trails where backing musicians might've stood. If the name Majical Cloudz has any bearing on their sound, it's because of him: He's the air Welsh breathes.
Alone is less stripped-down than Impersonator, but it feels less confrontational, too. The band recently went on tour opening for Lorde, and seem to have figured out how to broaden their sound while softening it at the same time, all without losing the detonating high that made Impersonator so remarkable. Songs like "So Blue" and "Downtown"—both standouts—are easy to imagine as more fully fleshed out pieces of music, conveying size without occupying space. Like photographic negatives, you can still see the image but the inversion of blacks and whites lends it a kind of alien melancholy.
Like Impersonator, Alone is a sad album, but its sadness is a kind of tall tale, the details of which are overblown for dramatic effect. At times its lyrics sound less like expressions of personal darkness than advertisements for darkness in general, written in lettering so big you could read it from the highway. In a recent interview with Pitchfork, he professed his admiration for Andy Kaufman, an artist usually classified as a comedian but whose work tends to function more like social performance art. The connection makes sense: Like Kaufman, Welsh tends to scramble performance and sincerity, laying himself bare in a way that seems more honest when he's onstage than it might in so-called real life. At peak he becomes a kind of Puberty Incarnate, bearer of feelings so awkward and yet so incandescent that they seem like a joke and a dare at the same time.
A few weeks ago, I blew off part of an afternoon to see the Pixar movie Inside Out, which follows the inner life of a young girl named Riley as personified by five fundamental emotions: joy, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness. The emotions—characters unto themselves—run around Riley's head jockeying for control, turning each new experience into a color-coded orb later filed away in Riley's labyrinthine memory.
Early on, Sadness—a dumpy, self-effacing Midwestern woman—is portrayed as a kind of negative-force King Midas, unwittingly ruining Riley's memories by turning them a cool, melancholy blue. The movie's revelation is when Joy—cannily represented as part-Tinkerbell, part passive-aggressive control freak—starts to realize that Sadness isn't a threat to Riley but a necessary catalyst for her growth, not a barrier to Joy but a bridge. Toward the end, a new feeling pops out of Riley's psychological conveyor belt: The yellow of Joy and the blue of Sadness, swirled together like ribbons inside a marble.
The moral is simple, but in a culture obsessed by happiness, it seems surprising, too: Maybe sadness isn't just an O.K. feeling to have, but an essential part of our emotional balance. Without it, we live in monochrome.
I kept thinking of Majical Cloudz, whose music—like *Inside Out—*seems to recast sadness as a feeling that doesn't damage the self but helps keep it whole. Now, when I see that album title (Are You Alone?), it seems less like a grim rhetorical question than an invitation—the kind of thing you might ask someone who is alone but looks like they could use a little company.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Madonna’s first album of the new millennium, a maximalist dance-pop experiment that made the people come together.

Music

By the year 2000, there were no more pages in the pop star rulebook for Madonna to rip up. At no point in her nearly two-decade career had her star begun to dull; 1992’s Erotica was, by Madonna standards, a flop, but it still peaked at No. 2 and spawned two top 10 hits. She followed it up with 1994’s R&B-influenced Bedtime Stories and its single “Take a Bow,” which stayed atop the Hot 100 for seven weeks. With 1998’s Ray of Light, she claimed to be stepping away from the trappings of pop star life—and still, somehow, wound up more famous and more influential than ever.
Madonna’s pivot on Ray of Light was wildly successful, her Britpop-suffused entry into the world of Eastern spirituality and clean living cannily marrying the tastes of a culture as interested in Pure Moods as Oasis. As a rebrand—from the bratty transgression of her early career to a serene, anti-individualist earth mother—it was almost too successful. For the first time, Madonna was up in the clouds, presiding over her pop kingdom from afar, seemingly uninterested in the vagaries of the modern landscape. Although Ray of Light produced three undeniable hits—its title track, the steely, lovelorn “Frozen,” and all-timer power ballad “The Power of Good-Bye”—the reserved persona necessitated by Madonna’s more self-serious music had also stamped out some of her sense of fun.
No matter: As ever, Madonna had more cards to play. On 2000’s Music, the wise, newly magnanimous superstar came back down to earth and, naturally, the club. Capitalizing on the gargantuan success of Ray of Light, Music managed to maintain Madonna’s newly mature image while reinjecting her sound with fun and freedom. It wasn’t a reinvention, exactly. Instead, Madonna proved that she could be a 42-year-old mother of two and still be as sexy, silly, and provocative as she’d always been. “There’s nothing sexier than a mother—Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer, I mean, those women are sexy,” she told People in March 2000. “I’m in better shape than I was at 20.”
On Music, Madonna presented her vision of global heartland music. The cowboy getup she wore throughout this era isn’t tied to any overarching country influence; instead, think of it as a (slightly gaudy) symbol of humility, an indication that this record is something real and vital. This was an album designed to unite the disparate tastes of America and Europe, to act as a bridge between teen pop and sophisti-pop, the mainstream and the underground. Across Music, Madonna infused French touch with the sleazy grind of R&B, reinterpreted Americana through the lens of Timbaland and Aaliyah’s warped pop experiments, and put her spin on the clean, heartfelt ballads that the Titanic soundtrack had pulled to the top of the charts. An album comprised entirely of earnest balladry and heaving club tracks, it became one of Madonna’s final world-beating successes—a flexing of artistic muscle that holds its own alongside her most electrifying, epoch-defining records. “The world is in the doldrums musically. It’s all so generic and homogenized,” she told Billboard at the time. “If this record happens, it might mean that people are ready for something different.”
The success of Ray of Light had energized Madonna, but a tight filming schedule for her 2000 rom-com flop The Next Best Thing put plans for a tour on hold. In the interim, she fell in love with the British director Guy Ritchie and by early 2000 was pregnant and living in the UK part-time to be closer to him. London’s voracious paparazzi overwhelmed her, but she felt inspired by the city’s “cool, creative vibe” and decided to retreat to the studio.
Initially, Madonna had planned to work once again with William Orbit, the British producer whose dual interest in Britpop and frosty underground electronic music colored Ray of Light. But as was the case with Babyface after Bedtime Stories, she found that her new music with Orbit was too reminiscent of what had come before. “I knew that I didn’t want to repeat myself,” she told an interviewer. “After I wrote about nine songs, I decided that there was too much of a similarity to the last record, so I threw out everything and started all over again.”
Her salvation came in the form of a relative unknown: Mirwais Ahmadzaï, a French producer whom Guy Oseary, Madonna’s manager and chairman of her Maverick label imprint, was considering signing. Mirwais’ demo tracks were funky and hypnotic, descendants of Daft Punk’s club squelch with a grungier edge. Madonna was so enamored with them that two songs—“Paradise (Not for Me)” and “Impressive Instant”—made their way onto Music practically wholesale. With Mirwais’ manager acting as translator, the pair began work together at Notting Hill’s Sarm Studios. Mirwais ended up producing six of Music’s 10 songs, with Orbit working on another three.
Aside from pulling her back into the underground, Mirwais solved another problem for Madonna. By 2000, teen pop had fully taken hold of the charts. Artists like Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and the Backstreet Boys were now fixtures of the same tabloids and TV stations that had fixated on Madonna; the embodied, self-made brand of womanhood she had been selling in the ’80s had given way to music that was sugary-sweet and unashamedly infantile in its presentation. Madonna hated teen pop—she complained to Rolling Stone how “depressing” it was that teenagers were the only people buying records, leaving artists like “Massive Attack, or Tricky, or Goldie” with “no outlet for any of their music”—and, to her, Mirwais presented an electrifying, grown-up alternative to the treble-heavy confections populating the radio.
“Music,” the album’s opener and lead single, provides an instant palate cleanser. Its opening line—a pitched-down Madonna cooing, “Hey Mr. DJ, put a record on. I wanna dance with my baby”—sets the terms: These songs are for dancing with people, not for them. “...Baby One More Time” may have been perfect for practiced choreography, but it lacked groove and grit. Here, Madonna announced, was something to make you move.
Music is a wonky, maximalist record—a far cry from the sleek and limpid techno of Ray of Light. For the first time in her career, Madonna told Tatler, she had given herself license to relax: “OK, you don’t have to win any races.” The absence of internal pressure opened space to experiment and get downright strange. Mirwais filled the songs on Music with bizarre, avant-garde touches: On “Music,” Madonna’s vocal is frequently stacked out of time, as if the song is playing over itself; a vocodered voice asking “Do you like to boogie-woogie?” is as present as Madonna herself. “I like to singy-singy-singy/Like a bird on a wingy-wingy-wingy,” she trills deliriously on “Impressive Instant.” Unlike the records she made before or after, Music is absent concept; it feels guided by first thought, and is often intentionally ridiculous in a way few (or no) other Madonna records are.
Mirwais, more than any producer Madonna had worked with before, was interested in the voice as an instrument to be manipulated and remolded. On “Impressive Instant” and “Paradise (Not for Me),” his vocoder makes Madonna sound like an alien diva, alternately nasal and mischievous and disturbingly disembodied. She had heard Mirwais’ Auto-Tune work—he claims his 2000 solo cut “Naïve Song” was the “1st electro track with Auto-Tune FX on vocals”—and asked to use the effect on Music; the resulting ballad, “Nobody’s Perfect,” is ghostly and forlorn, its self-lacerating lyrics made more piercing by the vocal processing. At the time, Auto-Tune was best known as the “Cher effect” and synonymous with euphoric dance pop. Its inverted application on “Nobody’s Perfect” presaged Radiohead’s use of the technique on 2001’s Amnesiac and the wounded android pop ballads of the 2010s. But Mirwais also recognized when to hold back, and on the steadfast and optimistic “I Deserve It,” the vocals are totally dry. Madonna has never been a particularly soul-baring lyricist, and Mirwais’ detail-oriented production allowed for clean emotional delineation between each song: one alienated and upsetting, the other expressing personal affirmation.
Other songs feel like the perfect synthesis of dozens of disparate strands of ’90s pop. “Don’t Tell Me,” the album’s most indelible song and one of Madonna’s best-ever singles, plays like Sheryl Crow’s “Strong Enough” as remixed by Timbaland. A guitar part loops and rewinds, occasionally halting to give way to a grand, glacial string break, à la Moby’s Play. (Madonna had hoped to work with Moby on what would become Music, but plans never came to fruition.) “Don’t Tell Me” began as a demo by Joe Henry, a cult singer-songwriter married to Madonna’s sister Melanie. Henry had written the song “in 25 minutes” in order to test the gear in his new studio; when he played the demo for his wife, she told him she could hear Madonna singing it. Madonna overhauled the track completely, turning it from a noirish, Tom Waits-style tango into something rhythmic, defiant, and contemporary. Although she barely changed Henry’s original lyrics, they play like commentary on her reception in popular culture at the turn of the century. From the moment she turned 40, the media had hungered for signs of Madonna’s imminent irrelevance, but in the song’s simple terms, she refuted any idea that she should be going into middle age quietly: “Don’t tell me to stop/Tell the rain not to drop/Tell the wind not to blow.”
She was rebellious as ever, but the shift that had occurred on Ray of Light wasn’t just a pose: Madonna was a more benevolent figure now than she had been in the early part of her career. Although she occasionally rolled her eyes at the mention of Britney, she saw her younger self reflected in the new generation of female pop stars, and recognized an opportunity to support them. While promoting Music, she sometimes wore T-shirts that read “Britney Spears” in rhinestones, and used interviews to decry Spears’ treatment in the media. While recording, Madonna said, she’d thought about her own place in the world, at one point realizing that, as she put it to Interview, “Smart, sassy girls who accomplish a lot and have their own cash and are independent are really frightening to men. I felt like ‘Why didn’t somebody tell me? Why didn’t somebody warn me?’”
Music codifies that warning. Although much of the record is about love and hedonism, another thread runs through songs such as “Amazing” and “Runaway Lover”: the idea that women will often be left high and dry by men, and by the world at large. The apotheosis of this theme arrives during “What It Feels Like for a Girl,” Music’s emotional climax. Produced by Guy Sigsworth, “What It Feels Like for a Girl” is something like Madonna’s take on a Dido ballad, with plush synths wrapped around the album’s purest, most traditional hook. It is a beautiful yet slightly baffling song: For every lyric that’s cutting and totally earnest (“When you open up your mouth to speak/Could you be a little weak?”) there’s a mention of “tight blue jeans” or “lips as sweet as candy.” Then again, it’s not a song of empowerment so much as a plea. Madonna wrote it while in the process of moving to London and hiding her pregnancy, fed up with the fact that she was the one having to make accommodations in her relationship. The lyrics are universal, but still hard to separate from the memory of the brazen, armored pop star who debuted in 1982, so consciously invulnerable to the standards of the world around her.
On Music, along with Ray of Light and Music’s maligned, arguably misunderstood follow-up American Life, Madonna was at her most analytical and most reflective. She has never written a memoir; these three records do as good a job as any book would, exploring her relationship with her parents, her children, and American culture at large. On “Gone,” Music’s final track, she seemingly makes a pact for the future: “Selling out is not my thing,” she sings. “Turn to stone/Lose my faith/I’ll be gone before it happens.” It was a promise she couldn’t keep. Twenty-three years later, she’s only rarely reached the same artistic heights (2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor being a notable exception) and was never again as commercially successful: Music sold 4 million copies in its first 10 days of release, and its title track became Madonna’s final Hot 100 No. 1 to date. As the definitive end of an imperial phase, though, Music stands as a document of Madonna’s artistry at its wildest and most free.


On his second release of 2012, the young singer-songwriter writes about life-- both the heavy moments and the mundane ones-- with economy and newfound grace. He has a knack for building songs where the realness of his subject matter lies just below the surface.

2

Making honest art can be terrifying; with 2, Montreal-based Mac DeMarco's second release this year, it feels like he's jumping into the deep end. On DeMarco's other 2012 record, the EP Rock and Roll Night Club, he tinkered with yacht rock, AM radio gold, and Bowie-like glam. The mixture injected an unsettling sleaziness into a funny, occasionally creepy collection of songs that walked the line between irony and sincerity.
In contrast, 2 goes right for the gut. DeMarco writes about life-- both the heavy moments and the mundane ones-- with economy and newfound grace. He's still not entirely upfront, but he has a knack for building songs where the realness of his subject matter lies just below the surface. In a Pitchfork guest list from earlier in October, DeMarco cites Jonathan Richman as a role model, mostly because he felt that Richman had "a very enjoyable time his whole life." Richman is an expert at writing entire worlds into his songs, an approach that DeMarco nails on 2.
Opening track "Cooking Up Something Good" is a strong example of his approach. A loose instrumental vamp slides into a greasy guitar line, as his laconic, sleepy voice delivers subtly heartbreaking observations. "Mommy's in the kitchen, cooking up something good/ And daddy's on the sofa, pride of the neighborhood". When the chorus comes in ("Oh, when life moves this slowly/ Oh, just try and let it go"), it's blindsiding, and his sense of defeat is palpable.
As the song progresses it becomes clear that what initially felt like an ode to the frustrating teenage days of struggling against your suburban surroundings is actually about a father figure manufacturing drugs in the basement. "Cooking Up Something Good" is about boredom and sadness and our skewed perception of time, but it's also about family secrets and how we construct emotional escape hatches to get away from the inescapable realities of blood ties. This careful world-building continues across the entire album, sometimes with a lighter touch. DeMarco's thinly veiled honesty shows up prominently on "Ode to Viceroy" where, over an unsettling guitar flange that fizzles into a flat shimmer, he sings about how much he loves smoking cigarettes. His voice skirts the edge of disinterest, but never quite gets there.
After spending time with 2, DeMarco's vocal deadpan starts to sound weary and wise. On "My Kind of Woman", he effectively makes a prom love song that will never get played at any actual prom-- it oozes beautifully simple and direct sentiment: "You're my kind of woman/ And I'm down on my hands and knees begging you please, baby, show me your world." That last line, "show me your world," returns to the concept that DeMarco and the people he sings about are all living, breathing entities, not blank slates to project emotion on. When they're gone from DeMarco's life, they still exist. It doesn't really get more honest than that.


Teeming with revved-up riffs and apocalyptic imagery, the post-hardcore group’s first album since 2005 reasserts their status as the most merciless band in their scene.

Jericho Sirens

During their initial 1999 to 2005 tenure, Hot Snakes were indie rock’s greatest and most rewarding consolation prize. After Rick Froberg and John Reis’ previous band, Drive Like Jehu, unceremoniously disbanded following their 1994 prog-punk masterpiece, Yank Crime, and as Reis’ concurrent group—brass-knuckled garage-rockers Rocket From the Crypt—started exhibiting more of an Interscope-sanctioned pop polish, Hot Snakes emerged to reassert the deadliest twin-guitar attack in post-hardcore. For long-time followers of Froberg and Reis, the new band represented the best of both worlds: all the contorted discord of prime Jehu, delivered with the street-gang swagger and participatory appeal of early RFTC.
But like Jehu before them and RFTC just after, Hot Snakes came to a sudden, screeching halt in 2005, as the principal duo disentangled to pursue more streamlined takes on what had come before (Froberg in Obits, Reis with the Night Marchers), among others. Of course, there’s no such thing as a true break-up anymore: within a decade, RFTC, Jehu, and Hot Snakes were all hitting the reunion-tour circuits, with attendant reissue campaigns to further court a new generation that was losing their shit to spiritual successors like Metz and Pissed Jeans. Now, we finally get the first new music to result from all those reboots. And while Jehu may seem like the band with the most unfinished business to tend to, Hot Snakes have gamely stepped up to become the true flagship act from this bunch.
Jericho Sirens is a reunion in the high-school sense of the term, corralling everyone who’s ever called themselves a Hot Snake. Where the band’s first two records featured former Delta 72 drummer Jason Kourkounis and their third replaced him with RFTC stickman Mario Rubalcaba (later of OFF! and Earthless), the new album features appearances from both. No matter who’s behind the kit, Jericho Sirens’ unwavering thwack attack and chain-whipped tambourine rattle soundly reassert Hot Snakes’ status as the most merciless band in the Froberg/Reis nexus. Even at their fiercest, Rocket From the Crypt songs were always fueled by a classic rock’n’roll abandon, while Jehu’s art-punk epics balanced the visceral with the cerebral. But on this LP, each of Reis’ and Froberg’s revved-up riffs feels like a nasty sucker-punched elbow to the ribs, each piercing staccato guitar line a finger poking at the bruise.
Jericho Sirens releases the pause button as if Hot Snakes had been locked in freeze-frame for the past 14 years, instantly thrusting them back into action on the frenzied “I Need a Doctor.” With its manic expressions of helplessness and desperation (“I need to be near a toilet!”), the song seemingly invites interpretations tied to America’s current political crisis and ongoing healthcare nightmare. And certainly, the marauding “Death of a Sportsman,” with its graphic depiction of a doomed big-game hunter (“What is left of him ain’t worth sending home!”), works as an unsubtle eat-the-rich metaphor. But Froberg has been the very embodiment of wiry agitation and tinfoil-chewing tension for the past quarter century, no matter who’s running the country. All that pleading for medical attention you hear on “I Need a Doctor”? If you take the band at their word, it’s a simply a request for an MD’s note to skip out of an office Christmas function.
Hot Snakes always sounded like Froberg and Reis eagerly getting a head-start on their cranky-old-man years; this is a band, after all, whose most potent, clear-eyed mission statement was called “I Hate the Kids.” On this album, it sounds like they’re already bracing for the end of their lives, if not the world. No fewer than three songs feature the word “death” in their titles, and even its most intimate scenes are rendered in apocalyptic terms. The closest thing to a love song here, Jericho Sirens’ arresting title track, finds Froberg seeking solace in his partner from the tinnitus piercing his brain, evoked vividly by the song’s bulldozer swing and ominous melodica refrain.
As that track’s rousing shout-along chorus illustrates, Hot Snakes are still refining the melodic sensibility they flashed on “Plenty for All,” the song that brought 2004’s Audit in Progress to a surprisingly congenial conclusion. On Jericho Sirens, an 80-second hardcore strike like “Why Don’t It Sink in” is immediately answered by a steady-pulsed rocker like “Six Wave Hold-Down,” where the tense guitar strums loosen into a resonant jangle, and Froberg’s seething bark assumes a more plaintive tone. And for all its perpetual discontent, Jericho Sirens is not without its moments of joy—even if they’re delivered through a song called “Death Camp Fantasy.” Atop a brisk motorik punk backbeat, Froberg rhetorically asks, “Have I been preyed upon?” before inviting the whole band—and, no doubt you, at home—to sing along to those words, transforming a moment of private anguish into celebratory group therapy. Panic and paranoia may be the default mental state of our times, but, to quote an old hardcore koan, maybe partying will help.


On Tyler’s sincere and most accomplished album, he gets to the essence of what he's been chiseling at: the angst of a missed connection, the pain of unrequited love, and navigating youthful ennui.

Flower Boy

Tyler, the Creator’s music has often been defined by exclusion. He was furious when rap blogs refused to post Odd Future songs. He has gleefully responded to being banned from countries. His songs attempted to reconcile with a divided fanbase. The subtext of Odd Future was that pearl-clutching moralists simply weren’t in on the (obscene) joke—the whole point of being radicals is to be “apart from.” He has also done his fair share of exclusion, too: marginalizing and upsetting women and queer people with violently misogynistic and homophobic lyrics. It has been asked how to reconcile the genius with the foul-mouthed punk.
Flower Boy (promoted as Scum Fuck Flower Boy) is Tyler’s course-correction, surprisingly meditative and beautifully colored, a collage of memories and daydreams that trades bratty subversion for reflection and self-improvement. He probes the things that shaped his psyche—loneliness, isolation, and disorientation—and focuses on outgrowing friendships, balancing the pull of nostalgia and the necessity for growth. Not only is Flower Boy Tyler’s most trenchant work, it’s his most inclusive: “Find Your Wings”: The Album, gentle and liberating. “Tell these black kids they can be who they are,” he raps on “Where This Flower Blooms,” as he grows into the artist he’s always longed to be, and perhaps always was.
While trying to recreate an N.E.R.D. album, Cherry Bomb more or less imploded. But it didn't completely shed Tyler’s old skin, enlisting a host of colorful collaborators (Roy Ayers, Leon Ware, Charlie Wilson, Chaz Bundick, and Dâm-Funk) for songs about jerking off and underage relationships. His raps were regularly empty games of juvenile one-upmanship, snooty hand-wringing aimed at homebodies and the working class, and vitriolic rant raps aimed at no one in particular. There were love songs, but they were immature and sometimes flat-out creepy. Time had rendered his shock raps pretty toothless, and it was all sloppy. Conversely, Flower Boy is transformational, lovestruck and penetrating. Finally, Tyler gets to the essence of ideas he’s been chiseling at all along: the angst of a missed connection, the pain of unrequited love, navigating youthful ennui. These are hopeful and sincere songs about finding yourself and trying to find someone who values you completely.
Tyler spends much of Flower Boy chasing his “‘95 Leo,” coming out in the process. On “Foreword,” he raps, “Shoutout to the girls that I lead on/For occasional head and always keeping my bed warm/And trying they hardest to keep my head on straight/And keeping me up enough till I had thought I was airborne.” He later writes, “Next line will have ‘em like ‘Whoa’: I’ve been kissing white boys since 2004.” The album’s literal and figurative centerpiece is “Garden Shed,” an inward-looking sexual awakening turning an extended metaphor into a watershed moment. Flower Boy unfurls from this revelation and the subsequent romance. He pens songs for his lover (“See You Again”), leaves him voicemails (“Glitter”), and seeks comfort through contact.
Much will be (and has already been) made of what exactly this means for a rapper who once responded to an open letter from Sara Quin criticizing his homophobic words and actions and those who support them by crudely saying, “If Tegan And Sara Need Some Hard Dick, Hit Me Up!” Pivotal moments in his catalog are largely dependent on his often shameless and unapologetic use of gay slurs, and while these admissions don’t absolve him of past hate speech, they do paint a portrait of a confused and tactless young introvert in crisis. However listeners choose to interpret this conflict, Tyler doesn’t seem to be rapping to make amends but to be understood. This is not an apology or even an explanation. Flower Boy gingerly disentangles a knot of personal and complicated thoughts and feelings through the lens of flashbacks and love songs.
So subdued, wistful, permissive, and relatable, are these songs—they are Tyler’s most refined to date. Collectively, they’re a kaleidoscopic sonic wonder. Though still obviously taking influence from the Neptunes, his production remains unlike anything else right now—glowing oddball orchestrations with unpredictable chord progressions, adorned by choruses of sweet voices. “Garden Shed” and “Glitter” are among his prettiest creations. He cedes “Droppin’ Seeds” to an in-form Lil Wayne, content to show off his peculiar ear for sound. “Enjoy Right Now, Today” takes it a step further, going lyric-free, accented by light Pharrell vocals. The title and the warm soul interior seem to usher the listener outside. For those chasing a Bastard-esque, punchy rap fix, there’s “Who Dat Boy” and “Pothole.”
In the past, Tyler’s albums have been bloated and messy. Flower Boy is 17-minutes shorter than the average Tyler album with more understated transitions and less disorder and chaos. He has been known to overthink things or get too cute with compositions, tagging on eight-minute posse cuts, piecing together mismatched songs, adding attachments and embellishments where they aren’t needed. These songs here carry in them his tinkerer’s spirit without becoming overwrought. His ambition is a driving force in his work, but he curtails it for a more enjoyable and streamlined listen. The standouts, “911 / Mr. Lonely” and “I Ain’t Got Time!,” are carefully assembled arrangements made of gorgeous parts that fasten together seamlessly. There are several neat aesthetic choices, like playing “See You Again” as a radio request or pitching the halves of “Glitter” at opposing frequencies. There’s the juxtaposition of “Boredom” with “I Ain’t Got Time!”—a song about finding time with one about not having enough—then ending the latter abruptly to take a phone call. Where previous outings were tangled, Tyler’s adds a new elegance to his work.
Though it’s probably an overstatement to call Flower Boy penitent, the album is certainly aware of past wrongs, and Tyler pursues integration through confession. Onlookers have wondered aloud when Tyler would “grow up,” and while “mature” still feels imprecise when describing the rapper-producer, there is certainly an evolution taking place. But this isn’t about the strides taken to make sense of a complicated past; Flower Boy shows thoughtfulness can be freeing. As Tyler, the Creator embarks on a journey of self-discovery, he becomes close to whole.


The latest from the experimental rap trio is chaotic but sleek, a streamlined presentation of the singular style Young Fathers have crafted.

Cocoa Sugar

Young Fathers albums have raps on them but they’re not “rap albums.” Calling the Scottish trio “rappers” is equally imprecise. Their use of rap, just like their use of rhythm in general, only broadens the depth of their textural palette, which includes club, dub, industrial, R&B, and pop music. They have been given all manner of hybrid genre tags as a result ever since their Mercury Prize win for the 2014 album Dead. Now that “weird” is their normal, they’re breaking from convention again by making something more standard but no more ordinary. Their new album, the sleek Cocoa Sugar, is not necessarily less genre-curious but it is more streamlined and far easier to process.
Much of their music considers classification—whiteness and blackness, otherness and outsiderness—and is rooted in their diasporic origin story. Alloysious Massaquoi was born in Liberia then moved to Edinburgh as a child. Kayus Bankole was born in Edinburgh to Nigerian parents but lived in both the U.S. and Nigeria before moving back to Scotland in his teens). Graham “G” Hastings, the only white member, was born and raised in Edinburgh. They met at a hip-hop night as teenagers, finding each other as kindred spirits pushing back against traditional rap expectations. As the title suggests, Cocoa Sugar subtly explores the duality of light and dark, bitter and sweet, a contrast Massaquoi says is an amalgamation of the way they see the world. In these songs, they embrace their polarities without forcing them.
With 2015’s White Men Are Black Men Too, Young Fathers were clearly trying to say something, but it was unclear what, exactly. Lost in their musical obfuscation was meaning or purpose. “I’m tired of blaming the white man/His indiscretions don’t betray him/A black man can play him/Some white men are black men too,” Massaquoi rapped on “Old Rock n Roll.” There wasn’t much to the idea other than funneling this pent-up anxiety and exasperation. Cocoa Sugar is less preoccupied with veiled statements and more interested in concepts and impressions, moving more on impulse. “Turn” even offers a bit of a correction to “Old Rock n Roll.” “Don’t you turn my brown eyes blue,” it demands. “I’m nothing like you.”
The songs on Cocoa Sugar are unquestionably Young Fathers’ most accessible. They have a sense of a narrative flow and an overarching theme, but they’re still knotty and confounding. Much of the writing is symbolic, at times biblical and political, but more about feeling than anything. It’s full of bravado, cynicism, and wonder in equal measure. There are broader allusions to the current social and civic moments, but they are intentionally left obscure. What separates this album from previous ones is their willingness to present powerful images without imposing their will. “Not here to drown ya; I’m only here to cleanse ya,” Bankole raps. It is at once rousing, illusive, and inviting.
“G” Hastings, the group’s primary producer, is tasked with curating the whole Young Fathers experience, and on Cocoa Sugar he stages some striking and imaginative scenes. The muffled, half-sung vocals on “Turn” bleed into coiling 8-bit synth progressions that tuck in and out of one another. “Fee Fi” is a maelstrom, all fidgety drums, minor-key piano plunks, and vocals of varying frequencies. “Lord,” which is almost a gospel song with its choir and piano accompaniment, suddenly surges into a guitar riff that beams like light through a stained glass window.
There are some obvious religious overtones throughout Cocoa Sugar, which is as fascinated with holiness and heresy as idol worship, and these moments color the album’s tone and worldview. On “Picking You,” a loss of faith becomes a non sequitur for establishing virtue: “I said the only time I go to church is when someone’s in the casket/Good men are strange, bad men are obvious.” The wordy incantation “Holy Ghost” is even more cynical: “You can tell your deity I’m alright/Wake up from the dead, call me Jesus Christ.” Delilah is used as a signifier for sin on “In My View,” and on “See How” they embrace a cruel reality about morality: “I’ve never seen wicked ones face their fears/I’ve always seen brave men filled with tears/The older you get, the colder you get.” Massaquoi has said that they see the world as “aesthetically pleasing, but fucked up,” beautiful but broken and godless. On Cocoa Sugar, it shows, in their gorgeous meditations on chaos.


The Austin indie-pop duo’s music conjures a steady, gentle longing. Foggy, warm, and wistful, it sounds like faded time.

Cranberry

If there’s anything you’re nostalgic for, Hovvdy’s second album, Cranberry, is likely to dredge it up. It’s not that the Austin duo invokes a particular time or place—Will Taylor and Charlie Martin aren’t revivalists, and they don’t seem to hold any sentiment for a mythical suburban teenhood. It’s more that their music simulates the mysterious function of memory itself. Foggy, warm, and wistful, it sounds like faded time. With two drummers who now take up the guitar and synthesizer as needed, Hovvdy share an instinctual melodic sensibility with the duo Girlpool and an indefatigable calm with their Double Double Whammy labelmate Yowler. While their debut, 2016’s Taster, itched a little with a distortion-shrouded anxiety, sounding occasionally like a desaturated Weezer album, Cranberry focuses the act’s emotional palette to a steady, gentle longing. Hovvdy sound surer of themselves than before, and that confidence gives them more room to be vulnerable.
While a sheet of fuzz tends to obscure much of what Taylor and Martin are actually singing, the lines that do come through manage a poignant simplicity. “Yesterday I woke up outside/Saw you for the very first time,” goes the album’s opening couplet on “Brave,” conjuring up the delightfully surreal image of someone coming to in a clearing and falling for the first stranger they see. On “Truck,” Hovvdy build a swaying chorus out of a little self-effacement: “If there’s trouble, I will run from it/All the time.” It’s a little strange: Here’s a song about shirking responsibility, and maybe feeling guilty about your failure to be there for someone else, and yet the vocals fall over the guitars as gently as ash from a distant forest fire. Hovvdy pull this trick a lot. They write lyrics that hint at some kind of danger or urgency, then sing them as languidly as possible. That dissonance gives their songs a magnetic pull: You’ll want to go back to them to see what you’ve missed, to try to read more deeply between the lines.
A similar ambiguity hovers around the album’s instrumentation. “Truck” weaves slide guitars into the mix so subtly they barely register on the first few listens, and the relatively upbeat “In the Sun” boasts a flute sound that definitely came from a keyboard but at points could almost pass for the real thing. On “Float,” the repeating sound of a cymbal bleeds into the song’s grain; “Thru” confuses guitars and synthesizers so readily it’s difficult to tell where the strum of an electric six-string ends and the wash of a digital instrument begins. All the details another band might tease out, Hovvdy subsume into their music’s overall texture. This isn’t a band that wants to direct your attention to specific techniques, necessarily. They don’t need you to witness all the microscopic decisions that go into making a record. They just want you along for the ride.
In a 2016 interview, Taylor relayed a brief anecdote about his friendship with Martin. “One time we got lost in the woods and had to stick together to make it out,” he said. “It ended up being really fun. That’s pretty close to how things are with us always.” That kind of relationship, where a potentially terrifying mishap turns into a fond memory thanks to mutual support and a shared sense of playfulness, drives Hovvdy’s songwriting ethos. They don’t panic when they lose sight of the path; they just keep going, sure that whatever happens, they’ll remember it well.


This 2xCD collection pares down the L.A. producer's 5xCD debut album series, intended as a mission statement for what he calls "modern funk."

Toeachizown

Imagine there's nothing funny about the 1980s. Block out your referential nostalgia, your tendency to make punchlines out of Cazals and keytars. Unlearn everything you know about Stock-Aitken-Waterman and gated drums and the synthesizers in "The Final Countdown". Try to think about how the music of the era might've sounded to you if you were experiencing it for the first time, without any knowledge of where or when it was made.
Now you're ready to listen to Dâm-Funk. One of Stones Throw's recent breakthrough stars, L.A.'s Damon Riddick spent the 90s as a session keyboardist for assorted New Jack Swing and hip-hop acts (most prominently on the soundtrack to Master P's I Got the Hook-Up), and lately has parlayed his love for music into a popular 80s boogie/funk DJ night, Funkmosphere, at the Venice Boulevard club Carbon. His recent work reflects a confluence of these two bullet points on his résumé, as he jumps from retro-novel intrigue (2008's "Burgundy City" b/w "Galactic Fun") to indie-crossover remix buzz (his incredible transformation of Animal Collective's "Summertime Clothes") to the ambitious sprawl of a five-part debut album series, intended as a mission statement for what he calls "modern funk."
That series has been pared down to the 2xCD, 140-minute collection Toeachizown, which shares the name of the collection from which it draws. It's your call how best to experience this stuff; each individual volume of the original Toeachizown series has its own thematic undercurrent ("Hood", "Life", "Sky", etc.) and its own strengths, but this condensed aggregation pares it down to a manageable, cohesive 24-track introduction at the cost of editing down a couple of the songs. Either way, you've got a thorough rundown of Dâm-Funk's repertoire this year, which, even in its pared-down form, is an absurdly prolific output-- apparently it would've come out sooner, but the man couldn't stop recording new tracks for it.
Anyone with a thing for g-funk should find instant geek-out recognition in this music, a garage-bound DIY love letter to the post-Worrell musical diaspora that covers everything from Roger Troutman's eternal bounce to the cosmic jazz crossover of the Clarke/Duke Project. In between, you get slow-ride R&B jams ("One Less Day"; "I Wanna Thank You For [Steppin Into My Life]"), grooves that toy with the more prog- and fusion-influenced corners of funk ("Flying V Ride"), post-disco dance music ("Candy Dancin'"), proto-electro ("Keep Lookin' 2 the Sky"), and just about anything else you might've heard on the SOLAR label 25 years ago. There are nods to the retrofitting treatment that the cream of late-70s/early-80s Moog funk underwent once DJ Quik and Dr. Dre got ahold of it; "Killdat aka Killdatmuthafu*ka" actually sounds a bit more like 1992 than 1983, all sinister chords and bop-gun percussion.
But calling Dâm-Funk's music straight-up throwback nostalgia only skirts what's really appealing about it. For the first minute or so, you might dredge up some roller-rink memories, but once that groove sets in-- granite-thick Moog bass coupled with drum machine breaks so propulsive their physical impetus overrides their mechanicalness-- it starts transcending historical allusions and becomes all about structure and groove, about how just plain fucking great fat Roland basslines and Oberheim kick drums sound together. That's about when you get waylaid by one of Riddick's solos-- fluttering and unpredictable, often flowing more like something that might come out of a free jazz sax or an acid rock guitar than a funk synthesizer. It's the secret weapon that underscores how seriously he takes this stuff, the catalyst that should provoke listeners to realize this music isn't just a fun update of a classic sound-- it's a work of real transcendence.
This isn't a comedic tribute to talkboxes and widebrims; there's no Snoop Dogg descending a foggy staircase through a faded VHS haze here. Toeachizown is a deep, astute collection that feels like a natural resuscitation and progression of funk as it stood just before hip hop usurped it. Much in the same way that Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings transform from a reenactment of a circa '66 soul revue to a distinct set of musical personalities the more you listen to them, Dâm-Funk uses all his vintage equipment as a medium to express his own voice, tucking a lot of stealthy forward progress and experimental tendencies between the notes. Chortle at that keytar all you want-- he can still make it sound like the future.


Inside songs that capture the body-moving pulse of nightlife and the post-club comedown, the Long Island quartet follow the danceable lead of their last album.

Salt

The genre fluidity and playfulness of Mr Twin Sister evoke nostalgia for the CD era of indie. Since the Long Island quartet emerged near the end of the last decade with the charmingly lo-fi indie rock of Vampires With Dreaming Kids, they have pursued a number of alternate avenues—squishy synth-pop, stiff funk, starry disco. You could imagine plucking their eclectic, softly strange 2011 LP, In Heaven, from the aisles of Tower circa 1996, the disc alphabetically and musically lodged between Cibo Matto and Stereolab. Their self-titled 2014 album pushed their dance-oriented tendencies, flipping the way “dream pop” had often been used to describe their hard-to-classify stuff.
Mr Twin Sister’s third full-length, Salt, adds new flourishes to that electrified approach— moonlit jazz-pop reminiscent of the increasingly influential British act the Blue Nile, the placid environs of chillout, slinking R&B, Auto-Tuned outré-pop. There’s a distinct downtown New York City vibe that runs throughout these songs. Sure, Salt elicits imagery of rain hitting a cab window after a night out. More important, Mr Twin Sister, like city contemporaries Yaeji and House of Feelings, tap into a distinctly urban vein through gentle mutations of house and techno, their sound reflecting the cosmopolitan, body-moving pulse of the nightlife and the post-club comedown.
Salt’s highest points happen when the band’s impressive textures shape tuneful, easy-to-grasp songs, providing a lovely counterpoint to lead vocalist Andrea Estella’s millennial musings on digital desensitization, the melting pot of global culture, and the ills of consumerism. “Jaipur” thrums steadily beneath Estella’s commanding voice, fluttering woodwinds creating a fine mist around her. “Tops and Bottoms” pairs her introspective musings on fashion, body image, and the pressures of existing in public over a bed of brittle rhythms and luscious keyboards, while propulsive opener “Keep on Mixing” fashions hyperspeed pop from a skipping beat that suggests UK Garage and 2step.
Such conventions have become the reference points of copyists during the last decade, but Mr Twin Sister synthesize them differently, crafting distinct moods around them in a manner that feels out-of-step with indie trendspotting. The production throughout is astounding, especially when considering Mr Twin Sister’s modest beginnings. The details are vivid in the mix, like the saxophone curlicue that rolls into the piano-and-drums arrangement of “Alien FM” or the horns that burst forth in “Taste in Movies.”
Although Mr Twin Sister’s first release preceded chillwave, they gained prominence around the time the micro-movement took hold through the likes of Toro Y Moi and Neon Indian. Mr Twin Sister were briefly but incorrectly tagged this way, too, which made less sense as the band established their own genre-amorphous identity. But Mr Twin Sister have always been more than capable in establishing vibes, the essential quality of chillwave’s otherwise-nebulous form. On Salt, they’re sometimes too good at mood-setting music. The rippling, Vocalcity-like textures of slow-burning tracks such as “Deseo” and “Set Me Free” are just two of several instances that sound immaculate but offer little melodically except wispy atmospherics. But over-scrutinizing Mr Twin Sister’s capacity for vibe-setting feels like witnessing a rare bird in its natural habitat: attempting to examine them any closer risks disrupting the simple joy of watching them exist.


The latest project from the rising UK rapper is unsettling but addictive, enormous in scope, and plays front to back like the ultimate hybrid mixtape.

SPACEMAN

In its daring eclecticism, fusing delicate inner-thought with materialistic swagger, the music of Octavian achieves a galactic variety of scale. After dropping out of London’s prestigious BRIT School, attended by the likes of King Krule and Amy Winehouse, living between France and England, and becoming homeless as a teenager, the young rapper’s new project, SPACEMAN, is an attempt to write, co-produce, and curate his way down to our planet from somewhere alien and fascinating. Its careful manipulation of genres and provocative lyricism—threats to steal your partner or to “shoot you in your face” as he says in the flawless “Revenge”—are laid out alongside spoken-word philosophy about loyalty and self-fulfillment. We are given the feeling of an epic journey while being invited to decipher the troubled psyche of hedonistic talent. The result is unsettling but addictive, and can’t be too far from the ultimate hybrid mixtape.
From one angle, SPACEMAN can be taken as an intoxicated tour of South-East London (hence the name of his creative crew “Essie Gang” : “S-E”). The area of Camberwell, where Octavian grew up, is where arty students, young professionals, and hipsters converge with the poverty of long-standing social housing estates and the spill out from one of the city’s major trauma hospitals. A slew of fatal stabbings took place there this summer, sending shockwaves across the atmosphere of local life. “I told my guy put the suttin’ down/Everyday man get bad karma/Still runnin’ round,” Octavian blurts on the blue-sky reflection “This Is My World.” In instructing his friend to put a weapon down, he confronts the dilemma faced by an increasing number of boys and young men who feel the need to arm themselves in high-risk parts of Britain’s major cities. This sensitivity to what people ought to do and say ebbs and flows on unexpected ethical shores throughout this body of work.
But while Octavian dabbles in introversion and aggression, he does so by making himself refreshingly available with his emotions. He is confused about the contradictions of his unstable past, being seen as “the evil kid” despite his older brother being the drug-dealer. He references his mother on multiple occasions: “Guess what, Mummy, I said, guess what?” are his first words on the mixtape, rooting the whole project close to home, and heart, in a way that is rarely heard in a UK rap scene saturated with bravado and closed-book masculinity.
Then he zooms out, into the stratosphere, and beyond. Because Octavian wants you to get a good view of him living that life. He’s a “rockstar”; he doesn’t meet his label, he just gets his check in writing; he drops £500 on sunglasses, but is so waved he can’t even see. The flex raps are backed up with the real celebrity status he’s experienced recently, having been invited to perform at the forthcoming launch of Tokyo’s flagship Stone Island store, modeling for Louis Vuitton, and tapping de rigueur art and fashion mogul Virgil Abloh to design SPACEMAN’s cover. It endows the music with a galactic cool, his versatile, cigarette-scorched voice slurring and singing over a spectrum of pop melodies, house synths, and crisp trap beats.
At times, like in the ethereal “Stand Down,” the production can sound uncannily similar to producer Noah “40” Shebib’s catalog. Does this dilute Octavian’s polite dismissal of Drake’s cosign earlier this year? It doesn’t really matter, because the style is just as effective while employed by the Londoner. In this cold, neon-trap lane, Octavian brings up producers like teenage soundscaper Elevated, who produces eight glistening tracks here to cement his name. The trap aesthetic packages SPACEMAN’s otherwise challenging, experimental character in more accessible wrapping. It’s there for frowning British teenagers, excitable European music nerds, and the North American masses, alike.
Octavian is willing to stretch himself further afield than most artists do in their entire careers; to be undefinable in so many directions, without looking slightly phased or unnatural. He knows that everyone is watching him. This intense self-consciousness provides the binding glue to SPACEMAN. It isn’t often that we as listeners are required to work so hard to keep up, and straddle an artist’s multitudinous lanes all at once. Whether it’s tapping our feet on the wet curb to gritty, unstable British realism, or gazing from a height over the glossy cross-pollination of world music, making sense of this outrageously talented pioneer is a challenging but deeply rewarding task.


Approaching the rich Latinx musical tradition from intriguing new angles, the Chicago quintet’s album evokes the crisp air, soft color, and enveloping warmth of a greenhouse.

City of Mirrors

When Alex Chávez is not performing huapango music with his trio or crafting Latin psychedelia with his five-piece band Dos Santos, he is Dr. Alex E. Chávez, PhD, an ethnographer and assistant professor of anthropology at Notre Dame. In 2017, Chávez authored a book on huapango arribeño music, a type of huapango specific to the mountains of north-central Mexico. Sounds of Crossing examines the links between the poeticism of the dialogue-based Mexican folk genre and political commentary, especially about the evolving tensions at the U.S.-Mexico border. Chávez’s writing style is rigorously academic yet naturally agile. You get the sense that he might not see such a wide gap between the stage and the classroom, either.
The new album from Dos Santos, City of Mirrors, also reflects a band convinced that artistic ideas and political ones are not necessarily at odds, but different sides of the same truth. A relentlessly kaleidoscopic mosaic of novel sound pairings propelled by Latin rhythms, the album evokes the crisp air, soft color, and enveloping warmth of a greenhouse. Between lyrics on starry nights and cinnamon skin, Chávez also sings of the real consequences befalling real people in front of him. On the title track, a love song to Puerto Rico, he narrates flooded streets and houses collapsed by natural disaster, while a baritone sax and clarinet duel toe-to-toe like hope and grief.
City of Mirrors is easily Dos Santos’ most expansive album, partially a result of the band’s decision to hire its first outside producer (Elliot Bergman of Wild Belle). The first thing you hear on opener “A Shot in the Dark” is a community of voices: high, chopped nasal shouts that chime over a lilting bassline, adding a chromatic tint to Chávez’s falsetto when he cuts in—the stained glass to his beam of light. It’s an inviting and original first impression, opening up the ingenious possibilities of the studio as an instrument, and one of the band’s best songs to date.
The album offers a handful of such excitingly fresh moments (among the best, the backtracked sounds that blend into rippling puddles of keys on the instrumental coda to “Crown Me”) and plenty more where traditional sounds are approached at intriguing angles (like the cumbia beats of “Glorieta” and “Soledad” twisted by programmed-drum accents or spoken word, respectively). There are also a few that sound slightly overloaded with flourishes when a more naked version of the song might have landed better and provided some welcome contrast. “Ghost. Me.” strains a bit to fit into its frame, a slow, heavy arrangement on what is already perhaps the album’s heaviest song: a slow waltz reflecting on untimely death, which has been finding Latinx people in tragic disproportion since 2020.
One particular lyric, from “A Tu Lado,” feels designed to stick. It punctuates the song’s verses, and the band drops the beat completely to isolate Chávez’s delivery: “Futuros que no han llegados,” he sings. (“Plurality is key,” he has said about this lyric, which translates to “futures that have yet to arrive.”) In the context of the song, it could be about family and lineage, or about community and traditions, or maybe about Chávez’s huapanguero grandfather, whom he took after. But it’s the forward-pressing sounds surrounding those words that really make the line pop. In its finest moments, City of Mirrors sounds like those futures arriving.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The cool, disaffected Welsh avant-pop chanteuse's second album is more playful and irreverent than her debut, a 2009 collection released by collaborator/mentor Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals.

CYRK

In a 2009 interview with Pitchfork, Super Furry Animals' frontman Gruff Rhys admitted he was first drawn to the Velvet Underground because he thought they were fellow Welshman, having noticed John Cale's familiarly regional accent on White Light/White Heat's "The Gift". In light of this anecdote, his ongoing mentorship of Penboyr-raised/Cardiff-based avant-pop chanteuse Cate Le Bon amounts to more than just an elder statesman lending support to the next great Welsh hope; rather, in Le Bon, he presumably hears the genuine realization of that mistaken assumption. While Le Bon's cool, disaffected voice was a natural fit for Rhys' electro-fied side project, Neon Neon, the music she creates under her own name more closely resembles The Velvet Underground & Nico relocated from Warhol's Factory to a Welsh farmhouse, displaying an equal affinity for narcotic melodies and jangle-riff repetition, but with the East Village grime replaced by a certain lambswool coziness.
Like many debut albums by folk-schooled solo artists trying to assert their identity, Le Bon's Me Oh My (released in 2009 on Rhys' Irony Bored Records label), could come off as both whimsically precious ("Sad Sad Feet") and state-of-the-world serious ("Terror of the Man"), but showed a willingness to disrupt its serene surroundings with cutting lyrical barbs and well-timed blasts of psychedelicized guitar fuzz. The follow-up, CYRK, does little to upset Le Bon's pastoral, turn-of-the-1970s prog-pop alchemy (as she sang on Me Oh My, "I like what I like and I like what I know"), but as its title-- the Polish word for "circus"-- indicates, it's several degrees more playful and irreverent.
Where Me Oh My tended to reveal its charms and idiosyncrasies gradually, CYRK lets its guard down almost immediately with "Falcon Eyed", a scrappy, start-stop gallop that suggests Le Bon has been trading pen-pal notes with the Fiery Furnaces' Eleanor Friedberger. The song's punkish drive proves anomalous to what follows, but its mischievous energy carries through to CYRK's statelier turns as, much more so than on Me Oh My, Le Bon uses her deadpan delivery to droll effect. She takes particular delight in infusing innocent, golden-oldies-radio sounds with decidedly unromantic sentiment: "Puts Me to Work" is an ode to domestic unrest and ennui that nonetheless boasts all the sweetness and grace of the first-dance selection at a wedding, while "The Man I Wanted" finds her communicating desire for her one and only through a catatonic stare, before opportunistically asking him, "Where is the payout?"
But more than just chart her progression as a singer and songwriter, CYRK also sees Le Bon and her four-piece band developing into a crack psych-rock outfit that consistently leads the songs into unexpected places, from the wiggy guitar jams that overtake the title track and "Fold the Cloth", to the piano-rolled clamor on "Through the Mill" that sounds like a haunted house coming alive after dark. Tellingly, the closing two-part suite "Ploughing Out" serves as an autobiographical testament to LeBon's personal and musical evolution, beginning as low-key lullaby referencing her country roots and then yielding to an anthemic, acid-rockin' celebration of escape ("we'll be on the last boat out of here," she repeats excitedly) that spirals into joyous, saxophone-fired cacophony. Le Bon's days as a farmgirl in northern Wales may be long behind her, but she's clearly held on to certain agricultural principles: namely, that the right amounts of patience and nurturing can produce glorious yields.


Travis Stewart has bobbed and wove through many styles du jour, but his latest closes the gap between glitch and pop by using Dawn Richard, MeLo-X, and Jesse Boykins III on his euphoric compositions.

Human Energy

Let’s bow our heads for the phrase “going pop,” a now-archaic term meant to note an underground artist compromising themselves to make gobs of money and perch themselves on top of the charts. “Gobs of money” no longer applies to industry hopefuls, in a splintered post-monoculture there’s nobody to compromise to, and with postmodern retromaniacal flailing still a top priority, anything that might otherwise skew “trendy” still sounds like a future that’s dragging its ass on actually getting here. Travis Stewart’s had one of the more typical internet-era careers in that context: as Machinedrum, he spent nearly ten years being underrated for working in the margins of glitch-hop, then was pulled into the post-dubstep orbit to find a cult audience that felt bigger than it actually was. He went on to find equal renown (and more resilient praise) in a team-up with Praveen Sharma as Sepalcure. And then, because this is what happens now, he started putting out the amount of work one typically needs to do to support himself, only to find out that people expect you to keep reinventing yourself, which, whoops.
But maybe what passes for “going pop” now is the very thing that’s actually snapped Machinedrum’s style into sharper focus. And it all clicks once you hear how geeked about contemporary R&B and dance music *Human Energy *is. This is the record where the guest features start pouring in, the scattered and shattered sampled-vocal loops receding in favor of live voices. There’s also some personal-life conceptual thinking about Stewart’s New Age holistic healing and meditation that went into this somewhere, and you can hear some signs of spiritually renewed energy in the music if you listen close enough. However, that could just be the arpeggios lining up in just the right sequence to hit that emotional/physical connection in that super crowd-pleasing way.
Those guest voices mesh well with Machinedrum’s enlightenment through repetition, bringing a bit more flexibility and unpredictability than your traditional diva loop. The neo-junglist rhythms of “Do It 4 U” might not sound as fresh as they did in 2011, but all it takes is Dawn Richard’s voice descending from the clouds to reintroduce the hazy uplift that makes the best of this stuff breathe. Like her best work with the similarly future-bass-inclined Kingdom, D∆WN’s voice gets pretty altered here—rebuilt into staccato waviness, flanged, and muffled—only to have it resonate high above the chattering melodies and give the track a weight before its weightlessness burns it up in the atmosphere. And both MeLo-X (growling “let the trumpets hit”-declarations on the Diplo-one-upping, dancehall-in-space anthem “Angel Speak”) and Jesse Boykins III (finding bliss in the crystalline glitch-soul cut “Celestial Levels”), earn the gravity they give to tracks that approach the boundaries of feel-too-happy euphoria.
There’s never been a sense in Machinedrum’s work, especially from Room(s)* *onwards, that this music is just a basic distillation of trends. I’m grateful that the drive-thru speaker fidelity and impenetrable wall of pre-drop clap buildups on “Dos Puertas” at least partially muffles Kevin Hussein’s disconnected art-but-not rap. But Stewart sounds renewed in channeling his posi-vibe mindstate into making the rest of his instruments soar. The glassy bells on “Morphogen” and the ’87 mall-pop distortions of “Isometrix” capture the idealized yet unfamiliar retro vibe that eludes most vaporwave composers, and he commands his dynamics to sequence a pixellated sugar rush (“White Crown”) right before an isolation-tank meditation (“Ocean of Thought”). Even the interlude-length sketches—the breathtaking “Lapis,” the organ-driven trance of “Etheric Body Temple,” the Boards of Canada-in-a-pastel-palm-tree-t-shirt zone-out of “Surfed Out”—fill in the blanks that the threats of diminishing returns left open. Maybe this is the album where Machinedrum breaks big. If it is, there’s even less to the glitch/pop divide than we ever suspected.


The debut LP from Boise, Idaho's Trevor Powers has all the sonic hallmarks of a bedroom project-- lyrics that reference childhood, thin production, reverb-- but manages to stand out from its lo-fi peers thanks to a sense of wide-eyed adventure.

The Year of Hibernation

There are a few things we've come to expect from recent, home-recorded indie pop: thin production, lyrics that reference childhood and nostalgia, a vibe of hushed intimacy, lots of reverb. Youth Lagoon, the project of 22-year-old Boise, Idaho, musician Trevor Powers, ticks all of those boxes and sounds immediately familiar the first time you put it on. "Posters", the opening track on his debut LP, The Year of Hibernation, even starts with a warbly synth to evoke the fabled VHS glow that has become a touchstone for kids of his generation. When you hear so much of this stuff, it starts to bleed together-- almost as if by design-- and you start to wonder what it would take for an artist in this realm to stand out. Powers has a few ideas.
Some of the album's appeal is straightforward. Powers writes melodies you remember and has an excellent ear for arrangement, even if the songs are rendered crudely. They generally start as whispered laments and then twist and turn until they become huge "oh oh oh" sing-alongs. The album sounds like it was recorded in a bedroom, which feels right given the small and personal details of the songs, but it strains to break free of its technical limitations. Rare is the record in this sphere that works much better loud, but The Year of Hibernation wants to be cranked. Room-filling volume allows a song like "Afternoon" to grow from its delicate, whistle-and-electric-keyboard opening into its grand, swelling conclusion, with a 4/4 marching drum and wordless vocal refrain that envelopes you like a hug.
The title of the record describes its world. These are songs about alternately hunkering down and hiding, and heading out into the world to explore and report back on what you've found. Powers is very much an innocent here, a kid with an ear for poetry who mixes striking images with the occasional groaner. The music of the Pacific Northwest feels like a key touchstone, and in many ways Youth Lagoon seems like a shy, quiet, and more hermetic version of what Modest Mouse were doing before 1997's The Lonesome Crowded West. Small town claustrophobia bumps against the possibility of wide-open spaces. Two of the first three songs reference the late-night strobe of the television and beds and walls of posters, and these are mixed with campgrounds, woods, lakes, and watching fireworks from a roof. I don't want to strain the Modest Mouse comparison, since this record doesn't have a "band" feel, but the guitar breaks also show Isaac Brock's early flair for simple melodic embellishments that complement the songs perfectly.
Dean Wareham is another guitarist with an ear for elegant guitar leads, and the comparisons with Galaxie 500 extend to Powers' cracked guitar whine and way of building clattering and echo-laden arrangements to moments of grandeur (not to mention the G500-like song "July" that outlines a disintegrating relationship against the backdrop of a sky filled with explosions.) Powers is small-town through-and-through and doesn't have a hint of Wareham's cosmopolitan sophistication, but that works for this landscape. Hibernation is a record for pulling up the covers and dreaming and then venturing out to the town to see the strange and magical world of encroaching adulthood. The anthemic "Cannons" starts off with Powers singing, "Rolling up the windows of my '96 Buick so the rain can't get inside of it," and that pretty much sums it up: The record mixes feelings of protection and safety with the tug of adventure and wraps it in compulsively listenable music that explodes at just the right moments.


Pairing songs rooted in classic Sufi poetry with electronic abstraction, the two experimentalists blur lines between cultures and eras in a moving tribute to the multiplicity of identity.

Intiha

In the spring of 2020, locked down in his New York apartment, Ali Sethi decided to turn his Instagram into a digital rehearsal space. At the same time every day, the Pakistani American singer and composer would sit down with his harmonium and tanpura, hit Instagram’s “Live” button, and spend an hour in freewheeling musical practice. He’d riff on Hindustani classical ragas, perform playful covers of South Asian classics, invite musician friends to log on and jam with him. It was during these sessions that he first began experimenting with spliced loops from Nicolás Jaar’s 2020 album Telas, improvising alaps over the Chilean American producer’s Stygian ambient soundscapes. When a mutual friend shared a recording of one of these experiments with Jaar, the producer reached out to Sethi via email. That kicked off a conversation that continues on their collaborative album Intiha, which features Sethi singing Urdu ghazals over re-worked loops from Telas, as well as new improvised sections courtesy of Jaar.
On paper, the two seem unlikely collaborators. Sethi is best known for his experiments with the ghazal, a poetic-musical form that is the South Asian analog of the blues, with Sufi spiritual renegades singing songs steeped in metaphysical pathos. He may annoy Hindustani classical purists with his innovations—ragas re-imagined for piano accompaniment, Punjabi folk blended with synth-laden indie rock—but his music rarely strays far from mainstream-adjacent sounds. His 2022 breakthrough hit “Pasoori,” a collaboration with Pakistani singer Shae Gill, melds Punjabi folk, Turkish strings, and reggaeton beats into a thrilling romantic banger that would fit seamlessly on any Spotify pop playlist.
Jaar’s music, on the other hand, seems to pull away from anything so obviously conventional or recognizable. Since breaking out with the minimalist techno of 2011’s Space Is Only Noise, he has pushed ever further into ambient abstraction. Even Against All Logic—his most accessible, dancefloor-friendly side project—bristles with harsh noise and gritty industrial textures. His solo work, particularly on Telas, resembles a primordial universe, swirling clouds of nebulous sound coming together and drifting apart in accordance with arcane physical laws.
Yet somehow, maybe because both their practices are so deeply rooted in improvisation and recontextualisation, the meeting of these vastly divergent musical worlds isn’t as jarring as you might expect. When Sethi first sent Jaar voice notes with his vocal improvisations, Jaar realized that “it was what Telas had been missing.” Perhaps that’s why the record is called Intiha. The word translates as “limit” but can also refer to the point of “termination.” Having already released Telas in both “solid” (the four-track album) and “liquid” (an interactive website that allowed users to recombine the record’s sounds) configurations, Jaar may be signaling that this is the piece’s final, definitive form.
Sethi’s intervention—with his raw, intimate vocals and Urdu couplets about yearning for a beloved other—transforms Telas’ impersonal cosmological study, imbuing it with the very human emotions of melancholy, longing, and licentious ecstasy. He takes a record with no discernable message—the only lyrics on Telas translate as “Nothing what I see/Nothing what I am/ Nothing in what it is to be nothing (nothing in nothingness)/In nothingness what I give”—and wraps it in up multiple layers of subjective meaning, mediated through the presence of an intelligent consciousness. It’s the musical version of quantum mechanics’ observer effect, or a less terrifying version of Douglas Adams’ Total Perspective Vortex.
The eponymous opener paints an inky, sub-aquatic scene with warbling bass and reverb-drenched synths before Sethi’s powerful but restrained vocals cut through the murk like a high-wattage fog lamp. On the tear-stained “Nazar Se,” the percussion plinks like water dripping onto a tin roof as he sings of locking eyes with his beloved in a soft, mildly lustful croon. “Dard”—which takes its lyrics from a Mirza Ghalib poem—is a seven-minute long paean to pathos, Sethi’s rich tenor swirling in mantra-like counterpoint to Jaar’s droning synths and nautical burbles. The chromatic blips and quasi-organic bleeps of “Lagta Nahi” and closer “Dono Jahan” invoke an empty, cavernous space station adrift among the stars. Sethi’s voice sounds lost and melancholic in this vastness, like a lonely human explorer stumbling on the ruins of an alien civilization, confronted with the artifacts of a history they cannot access or understand.
The poets that Sethi quotes here are instructive, highlighting the social, political, and personal undercurrents of songs ostensibly about romantic love and a search for the divine. There’s poet-emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal sovereign, who died in exile, and his contemporary Mirza Ghalib, whose poetry captures the sense of loss and despair that accompanied the onset of British colonialism. He also borrows from 20th-century revolutionary poets like Allama Iqbal and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, whose verses were forged in the nationalistic cauldron of anti-colonial struggle and the eventual tragedy of Partition. Within these cataclysmic historical threads—the death throes of the old world and the betrayals of the new—Sethi weaves in more intricate personal filaments, employing what he calls the “beautiful, deliberate ambiguities” of Sufi poetry to fully express his multiple overlapping identities: a queer Muslim immigrant to the U.S., a Hindustani classical musician who loves dance music and reggaeton, a globe-trotting progressive who finds inspiration in the syncretic traditions of pre-modern South Asia.
You can hear all these different influences on lead single “Muddat,” the one song on the album with a familiar structure and recognizable melody. Jaar layers bouncy syncopated bass over traditional Indian rhythms, while Sethi sings a 19th-century verse by Ghalib about missing his lover—and nights of drunken revelry at the Mughal court—in the slightly nasal twang common to North Indian folk music. Halfway through, the song transforms from desert folk to techno workout, before fading away to ambient sonics and a melancholy whisper. It brings to mind late-night raves I’ve attended on the rooftops of one of Rajasthan’s many palatial forts, old-world decadence meeting 21st-century hedonism, the past colliding with the future at 140 BPM under the starry desert sky.


The singer and songwriter’s second album sung almost entirely in Cornish is a document of a revived linguistic heritage with a breezy, ethereal touch.

Tresor

Gwenno Saunders’ new album Tresor is her second record sung almost entirely in Cornish, a Celtic language that bloomed around 600 C.E., and which the mothers of Cornwall passed down to their daughters for over a thousand years before the English more or less forced them to stop. Dolly Pentreath, purportedly the last fluent native speaker, died in 1777. But in 2010, the United Nations upgraded the status of Cornish from “extinct” to merely “critically endangered,” reflecting the work of the Cornish Language Partnership in standardizing written and spoken grammar for a community of about 300 speakers. The CLP also contributed to the opening of a Cornish-language nursery school, where, according to a news report, toddlers learn “to share their tegennow and play nicely in the polltewas.” Tresor, says Gwenno, is a record about her experience of becoming a mother, as well as a follow-up to her 2018 LP Le Kov, lauded for bringing Cornish to wider attention. It’s as though, having turned to face the public and taught them all she knows of this new-old language, she is relishing the opportunity once denied to Dolly Pentreath: to pass her linguistic heritage to her child.
The daughter of a Welsh mother and a Cornish father, Gwenno rose from the ashes of the retro-pop girl group the Pipettes to become an esoteric experimentalist. Every lyric on her solo albums, even the ones that cite Jung or obscure science fiction authors, is written in Cornish or Welsh. She records with close friends in rustic seaside cottages, and her artistic and activist goals are one: “Nid yw Cymru ar werth,” she sings, which translates as “Wales is not for sale.”
But Gwenno is in the business of pop artistry, not broccoli-boiling, so Tresor’s touch is light and breezy, even as its songs dive into analytical psychology, the patriarchy, the colonizer lurking up and to the right. Her richly layered instrumentation in “Anima” calls to mind Cate Le Bon, with a few more chimes and woodwinds, and a bit more space for Gwenno’s ghostly backing vocal to linger behind her melody. The riffs of “N.Y.C.A.W.” would be at home on U2’s October, as would the righteous insistence of its militant chanting.
Other moments are gentler, and more tender. The beautiful, ethereal opener “An Stevel Nowydh” begins with Gwenno welcoming listeners into her home, and singing, in Cornish: “Welcome, sit down/Fancy a cuppa?/How are you?” What a rare thing, to be welcomed so warmly into a world one knows little about, and to be won over. “When will you hear me?” Gwenno sings, in “Ardamm,” in a language spoken by, at most, a few hundred people. “When will you understand me?” In technical terms, very few listeners can understand her—but on some more vital, human level, anyone who spends time with Tresor will require no translation at all.


Stefan Kozalla's first original solo album in nine years, featuring contributions from Caribou, Matthew Dear, and more, is uncommonly engrossing for a techno record. Blessed with the carefree spirit of lounge music and Quiet Storm, and dressed up in tiedye, the music on Amygdala glows with an easy confidence.

Amygdala

Stefan Kozella is a whimsical guy. His music, from his early hip-hop moment through to his minimal techno heyday, has always been suffused with warm psychedelic colour. He brings that touch to his renowned remixes, where he reshapes the tracks of others in ways that would seem totally foreign to most. His first solo album in nine years, Amygdala appears after a quiet period that produced only 2009’s remix retrospective Reincarnations, and the founding of his own Pampa imprint. The German producer’s newest original work retains the quirky spirit of Reincarnations but settles into a kaleidoscopic landscape.
In a quote that’s been haunting Amygdala, Koze has apparently claimed the LP as his Sgt. Pepper’s. Hubris aside, that’s not such an unfair comparison. Both records rethink their respective genres from the ground-up, using elements and instruments that seem unusual on first glance but quietly lay the foundation for subtle reinvention. While it’s not likely to set the world on fire, dig beneath the pastel sheen and Amygdala is uncommonly engrossing for a techno album. Its visionary ambition recalls the fertile sprawl of Villalobos’ 2003 debut Alcachofa; baroque techno blessed with the carefree spirit of lounge music and Quiet Storm, dressed up in tie-dye, the music on Amygdala glows with an easy confidence.
Amygdala feels like a painting made up of delicate brushstrokes compared to techno’s laser-cut precision. Kozalla often chooses softly expressive horns or lolling organ over electronics, as on the plush spring overture of “Royal Asscher Cut”, and numerous vocal features only add to the effect. For an artist who has spoken on record how he hates collaborating, over half of Amygdala’s tracks have a “feature” credit as he brings out a cast of charismatic vocalists from Caribou's Dan Snaith to Matthew Dear. The dips into German balladry via his retouch of the classic Hildegard Knef lament “Ich Schreib’ Dir Ein Buch”, or his own heartworn slow-jam “Das Wort”, contribute to the the hallucinatory haze of styles and voices, like scrambling through a radio dial on mushrooms.
Koze has always had a predilection for looping microscopic vocal fragments as the chief anchor for his songs. But now these ghostly voices coexist with the fleshed-out songwriting; on “Das Wort” they provide a sugary counterpoint to Dirk Von Lowtzow’s gruff German consonants, and on “Ich Schreib’ Dir ein Buch 2013”, a Motown choir’s rendition of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” is twisted into a sickly tapestry of moans and screeches. Overstuffed and overfed, each track is an embarrassment of riches with a hook or melodic morsel everywhere you look, but Kozalla never loses the plot in the overflow of ideas.
That’s probably why Amygdala feels so accomplished: songwriting. It’s not something we often think too hard about in dance music. But Koze considers every aspect, from hummable melodies to pristine soundscapes to lyrics. Wisely leaning away from dance music cliches of love and desire, *Amygdala’*s subjects veer from everyday life to grappling with nostalgia and self-identity. Its most charming moment comes with Matthew Dear’s quirky vocal spot on “My Plans”. In a typically alien cadence, Dear addresses the anxiety of a world where everything seems to be going wrong with the cheeky line: “When I notice the world is falling apart/ I will run a bath/ And why does this make me laugh?” It’s a fine motto for Koze himself, never losing sight of his infectious sense of humour or complete resistance to trends. With Amygdala, he's created an album that invites obsession.


Written amid a period of intra-band tumult, Dilly Dally’s thrilling second album foregrounds frontwoman Kate Monks’ singular voice as she riffs on themes of power, sex, confidence, and self-care.

Heaven

In 2009, when high school pals Kate Monks and Liz Ball moved to Toronto to chase their rock’n’roll dreams, they got identical Dilly Dally tattoos even before properly starting the band. “The artist was like, ‘I really don’t think you should get these tattoos,’” Monks recently recalled in an interview. “And we were like, ‘We’re gonna be the biggest band in the world.’ We thought we were Oasis.” In pure feeling, if not quite fame, Dilly Dally’s ambition matches that conviction.
Every grain of Monks’ exhilarating voice tells a story: The singer, guitarist, and Dilly Dally’s primary songwriter is always bursting past a calculable edge; she is an amplifier turned to 11. Like a noise musician pushing power electronics into the red, Monks is an emotionally blown-out singer, and in her tattered voice she cracks, soars, gnarls, growls, drawls, slurs, rasps. Pain radiates through her and into the band’s songs, like the glow of burning charcoal.
Heaven is the quartet’s thrilling second album, and while Dilly Dally might still formally recall 1990s alt-rock à la Hole and the Smashing Pumpkins, their songs are noisier, more metallic, deconstructed. Monks’ raw rapture sets the comparisons at some remove. With her unwavering pop sense and keen way with a chorus, you can tell she is a woman who learned guitar through a Beatles songbook. Dilly Dally once covered Drake’s “Know Yourself” to delightfully grotesque effect, and as their fellow 6 dweller has posited: It’s not about who did it first. It’s about who did it right.
Dilly Dally wrote Heaven amid a period of intra-band tumult, and even as the album breathes deeply, its best songs betray those struggles. Heaven riffs on themes of power and sex, of confidence and self-care. But self-care is not soft on Heaven; it’s shrill, life or death, a leaden riff. These complex songs exhibit the care as well as the bleak cause that necessitated it. The roiling early highlight “Doom” swings from hushed dream-pop singing to dread-laden, industrial metal; the lyrics spin ominous uncertainty into New Age affirmations. “Remember who you are/And where you’re gonna be/What’s inside you/Is sacred,” Monks sings, contorting the last word into a guttural growl. On “Sober Motel,” Dilly Dally capture the overwhelming, nearly transcendent clarity that sobriety can beget. “When I’m sober/My soul comes screechin’,” Monks hollers, riding along the final careening syllables as if they were the last roller coaster on Earth.
“Sober Motel” feels of a piece with “Marijuana,” a song whose vividness tears you apart. As Monks sings sublimely of “angels” who “got ripped and torn apart inside of me,” heaven is clearly a joint: This is a woman’s impassioned love song to weed and its anxiety-quelling properties. “Couldn’t believe/What I see,” Monks sings on the ecstatic chorus, just before it crashes. “Couldn’t believe/Nothing but what’s inside.” As the song breaks down gloriously, “Marijuana” adopts a destabilizing feeling that is patently gorgeous, as if attuned to a deeper sensitivity of sound. Monks has said, “If the band died and went to heaven, this is the album we would make,” and “Marijuana” is indeed its most heavenly moment.
Monks penned “Sober Motel” as a “celebration of sobriety,” she wrote in a statement, “in the midst of an industry that is anything but.” Her hope was that its lyrics would become a mantra of mindfulness for the group, whose members have struggled with alcohol on the road, and “create a sort of protective layer around the band” at every show. Much of Heaven feels restorative in that way. But with “Sober Motel” especially, Dilly Dally subtly chip back at the ways music is exploited under capitalism. Its greatest element, as ever, is Monks’ rare voice—jagged, on fire, intoxicating itself.