The composer and jazz multi-instrumentalist explores the myth of the American cowboy through an immigrant's lens on his genre-blending latest.

Wild Wild East

On January 23, fire engulfed the archives of the Museum of Chinese in America. Over a century of accumulated history—some 85,000 artifacts—could have been swept away like dust: film reels, old records, typewriters, wedding dresses, copies of the first English-language Chinese American newspaper. About a third of its archive was eventually recovered, but the disaster underscored the collection’s irreplaceability. MOCA’s founders, Jack Tchen and Charlie Lai, had initially salvaged items from dumpsters; apparently, the owners didn’t view their junk as worthy of preservation. As the cultural critic Hua Hsu observed last year, “Immigrants have not tended to regard their own lives as rising to the status of history.”
Something of the museum’s humble approach to memorializing—accumulating the residue of ordinary life, building it into something consequential—is expressed in Sunny Jain’s Wild Wild East, the first release in the Smithsonian Folkways’ Asian Pacific America series. Like several recent albums by artists of color that reimagine the American cowboy, it discards the romantic myth of a white gunslinger galloping across Western plains. Instead, it claims that the true spirit of the cowboy—his courage, resilience, and relentless pursuit of freedom—is embodied by immigrants. Jain’s ancestors migrated from Rajasthan to Western Punjab, and then during the 1947 partition of India, fled to Eastern Punjab in one of the largest mass migrations in history.
In the 1970s his parents emigrated to Rochester, New York, where he absorbed his siblings’ fervor for “Rush, Ice-T, and guitar ‘gods’”; he listened to his mother’s Jain bhajans (devotional songs); he discovered jazz legends like Max Roach and John Coltrane. Since then, Jain has become part of a rich heritage of South Asian American artists—and Asian American artists more broadly—who put Western jazz and other black music in dialogue with Eastern classical traditions. Wild Wild East, which combines influences from Bollywood music to surf rock, testifies to how second-generation immigrants form their own distinctly American identity.
Plunging into the cowboy theme, the album immediately conjures the arid frontiers of Ennio Morricone, the composer behind some of the world’s most iconic spaghetti western scores. Wild Wild East’s opening track, “Immigrant Warrior,” is cinematic almost unto parody, triumphant horns galloping with heroic resolve. But after a minute, the narrative begins to fray. Electric guitar whines and sputters, unchaining itself from the melody, until the composition snaps back to the victorious march. Other disturbances come later in a sensuous saxophone passage that flows into low, accelerating drum beats. Jain seems to suggest that there are spaces of possibility within these ruptures, signs of trouble within the smooth continuum of history.
Many of these compositions are intellectually thrilling to unravel, even while stifled by the album’s lofty concept. Wild Wild East is indebted to R.D. Burman’s vibrant, Morricone-influenced soundtrack for the 1975 “curry western” Sholay, but Sholay is imbued with a sprightly mischief and whimsy that Wild Wild East doesn’t quite reach. It’s really that the omnipresence of Morricone’s ghost can grow tiresome. “Wild Wild East” and “Aye Mere Dil Kahin Aur Chal” are invigorated by Ganavya’s wistful singing and Jain’s electrifying dhol rhythms respectively, but they would have benefited further from the sort of jubilance Jain unleashes with his dhol-and-brass band Red Baraat.
The album’s most frustrating song is “Red, Brown, Black.” Its opening cymbal crash is akin to the protagonist of a teen drama plugging his guitar into an amp to signal that he’s about to rock the high school auditorium. “Embarrassed of my culture from the get-go/Hip-hop raised me with best flows,” L.A. based rapper HASEEB boasts. Though well-intentioned, his subsequent acknowledgment that “black culture taught me how to say it with my chest though” is a superficial bid for cross-racial connection. As the album’s only English language-based song, it becomes an overly simplified attempt to summarize the release’s 42-pages of meticulously written liner notes on personal and global history. Then again, this record’s geographic and historical scope is so ambitious that its flaws reveal the difficulty of balancing cultural rigor with accessibility.
It’s worth remembering that the cowboy—tall, imposing—is revered not for who he is, but what he represents. Lionizing the immigrant in his place may be, on one hand, a long-overdue recognition of those who have been overlooked by history. But, more cynically, it can be a shiny valorization of one overbearing ideal for another. The most sincere moments on Wild Wild East are the ones least weighed down with meaning: After Pawan Benjamin’s solemn reflection on the bansuri flute in “Blackwell,” Alam Khan loosens the mood on the sarod. In “Wild Wild East,” shimmering walls of sound feel like floating face-down in a pool and watching light patterns dance on the floor. These small moments of peace feel more radical than any grand statement.


Martha Brown goes from Charli XCX band member to pop singer on her debut, tackling intergenerational trauma and the painful path to self-understanding with a melodic bubblegum sound.

Look At Us Now Dad

Before she played synths for Charli XCX on Taylor Swift’s 2018 Reputation tour, Martha Brown was failing to get by in Los Angeles as a musician transplanted from Melbourne. Her career-aiding spot in Charli’s band saved her from moving home, and she used what she earned from the tour to finance her debut LP, Look At Us Now Dad. Although the title might evoke the image of a daughter beaming with pride at having made it, Brown, who performs as Banoffee, actually uses parts of her debut to examine deeper concepts, like intergenerational trauma and the painful path to self-understanding.
Enlisting features from electro-pop singer Empress Of and rapper CupcakKe, Brown aims for a melodic bubblegum pop sound with industrial undertones—a well-established trend in queer music. On “Chevron,” a downtempo lament sung at rock bottom, she asks the album’s persistent questions: “What am I doing? Why am I here?” The song arrives at the album’s midpoint, rejecting an easy redemptive arc in favor of a steady landscape of ups and downs. To her credit, Banoffee never settles on answers to those questions but never gives up the pursuit of them, either.
The interludes “I Lied” and “I Let You Down” offer a graceful view into the album’s focus on reconciliation—with relationships, with the self, and with the past. Bookending the album, they contain the same lyrics: Banoffee sings about lying to a dying loved one, telling them that she’s doing well in an effort to spare them worry. While “I Lied” introduces deception into Banoffee’s role as a narrator, “I Let You Down” reframes her lies as promises to herself. Over synths that buzz like insects circling a light, she allows herself the possibility that one day those lies might become truth.
On the album’s second half, Banoffee probes the connection between her own psychological battles and her father’s, whose tumultuous childhood included a forced separation from his alcoholic parents. “Permission” is an intensely Auto-Tuned account of assault, and Banoffee’s quivering voice rises to a broken yell as she flips perspectives from perpetrator to victim. “I was young and never wanted/To touch a man or be a woman.” Despite the cyborgian vocals, the song has a shuddering, human ache, taking a cue from similarly produced tracks on Charli XCX’s Pop 2 mixtape like “Backseat” and “Lucky.”
On the closing title track, she attempts to wind her own emotional experiences together with her father’s. The song, the longest on the album, addresses her father directly as well as the suffering he inherited: “What was theirs is yours, and now it’s mine.” The placement implies closure, as if the song proves that there’s some new way forward for the two of them. Instead, it introduces the album’s most interesting material right at the end. If she had threaded it more steadily throughout, the album would have been a more keen statement than the respectable pop offering that it is.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Steeped in the Memphis underground tradition, the Young Dolph associate’s latest album is full of hard-working hustler music that never lets up.

East Haiti Baby

Before his senseless murder, Young Dolph took the defiant independence he maintained during his career and extended that support to a younger generation of hungry artists. The first of Dolph’s Padawans was his cousin Key Glock (who is a certified star in his own right), but Paper Route Empire has managed to expand its ranks into a tight-knit family that soldiers on despite the loss of its mentor. East Memphis native Big Moochie Grape stood out on this year’s Long Live Dolph tribute album with “In Dolph We Trust,” a dark and driving banger with an ornate beat built out of the skeleton of “Carol of the Bells,” and he makes a more extended introduction with his new project East Haiti Baby.
Flipping “Carol of the Bells” is a Memphis tradition. Since the holiday staple has been retrofitted into multiple beats by DJ Paul and Juicy J, its presence on Big Moochie’s breakout song places him in the city’s lineage. Moochie’s approach to making music is heavily steeped in the Memphis underground tradition, and his songs beg to be heard on the most powerful sound system you can find. Moochie first built his reputation as a rapper in Memphis by taking his tracks to the club right after he recorded them. It’s meant to be experienced as much as it’s meant to be listened to.
Big Moochie Grape’s punctuated flow is reminiscent of Project Pat’s. Moochie’s delivery isn’t overcomplicated, but it’s still effortlessly intricate, a rhythmic pitter-patter that’s slightly clipped while softened by his Southern drawl. Even Key Glock has his slower, more romantic numbers, but there’s no room for sentimentality in Big Moochie Grape’s world—his words come to us uncut and raw. Moochie doesn’t lose himself to despair despite the odds against him, and keeps his head up by focusing on the work, whether that’s spitting or serving. Big Moochie is tough enough to mostly stand on his own, but brothers-in-arms Key Glock and Kenny Muney come through with features, and there is a posthumous verse from Dolph on “Fun.”
The beats on East Haiti Baby are unsurprisingly the product of Bandplay, the architect of Paper Route Empire, whose sturdy drums gave Dolph and Glock a strong foundation for their flows. There’s a similar blueprint to every beat, but Bandplay mixes in unsettling keys and glistening bells that add a touch of Gothic darkness. A rare trace of soulfulness can be heard on title track “East Haiti Baby” courtesy of a sample of Blackstreet’s “No Diggity,” which interweaves Moochie’s flow with a soft background hum.
Many of the songs here have a hook built around a comparison between the artist and an unrelated pop culture icon, like the Biggie-indebted “Christopher Wallace” and the humorous “Joe Biden.” On “Rick Flair,” Big Moochie Grape most directly conceives of himself as a pro wrestler pulling no punches, and he makes scattered references to Hulk Hogan and Mick Foley throughout the album. Though there’s a slightly throwback flavor to Moochie’s sound, it’s not self-consciously referential like Duke Deuce’s crunk revivalism. Unfortunately, certain bars are an unwelcome throwback to some of the more regressive elements of classic Southern rap, in the form of some hard-to-miss homophobic slurs.
Unlike the countless rappers who have pilfered from Memphis over the last decade Big Moochie Grape doesn’t need to directly remake classics or recreate old sounds. East Haiti Baby captures the spirit of the city and its rap scene on a more existential level: It’s hard-working hustler music that never lets up, with a beat that never sleeps. Big Moochie Grape makes soundtracks not just for grinding, but for surviving.


Since their humble beginnings on Premiers Symptomes, their 1997 debut\n\ EP, Air haven't striven for much more than ...

The Virgin Suicides

Since their humble beginnings on Premiers Symptomes, their 1997 debut EP, Air haven't striven for much more than to bring a French flavor to spacy electronic pop. Even back then, this was by no means an original concept. Hundreds of bands-- Stereolab, Dimitri from Paris, Komeda, etc.-- preceded Air with Bacharachian melodies and Moog hisses scattered throughout their albums like trademark logos. But while their predecessors carried themselves on kitsch value and band-of-the-moment media praise, Air seemed somehow more serious about their music.
Is the world really interested in another Air release, though? Premiers Symptomes and Moon Safari, while intriguing albums for their genre, were somewhat similar in mood and direction. Both showed a band whose intent was to create instrumental French space-pop, and not much else. And with the "French space-pop revolution" pretty much over and done with, what could a new Air record possibly offer that the duo hasn't already accomplished?
Well, from the sound of The Virgin Suicides, the score to Sofia Coppola's directorial debut, Nicolas Godin and Jean-Beno\xEEt Dunckel have a bit more to achieve before their 15 seconds tick to a close. Though the record does aim for the same kind of prog-rock atmospherics as their earlier releases, Air have managed to alter their sound this time out, drawing from a wider array of rock influences, instead of limiting their scope to Perrey and Kingsley.
Godin and Dunckel have a larger arsenal of instruments here. The bulk of the equipment implemented still seems to be a diverse assortment of analog keyboards, but Air also incorporate those dependable traditional rock instruments, guitar and bass. It's a marked improvement from the synth surplus of their previous material. The band also seems more influenced by the melodic psychedelic rock of the late 60's and early 70's than before. There are distinct nods to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and especially the Beatles' Abbey Road. The Beatles' influence is most notable on "Bathroom Girl," "Cemetary Party," and "Highschool Lover (Theme from 'The Virgin Suicides')," during which several of the drum fills and guitar squalls sound almost directly snatched from Abbey Road.
Of course, The Virgin Suicides has its dry moments, but surprisingly, they're few and far between. For the most part, the album showcases Godin and Dunckel's dramatically improved songwriting skills. The majority of these 13 tracks actually feature a true rarity for rock music these days-- unpredictable chord progressions. And the album undeniably serves its purpose: it's a film score. The fact that it holds your attention, despite being created solely as incidental music, says something about the guys playing it. Whether we want to admit it or not, Air are pretty good at what they do. Still, the backlash is well underway at this point, and it seems doubtful they'll hold up quite as well by the time their "official" follow-up to Moon Safari sees release later this year.


Despite the fact that there's still some old reliable structures underpinning Do It!, this new album might be Clinic's most adventurous since Internal Wrangler.

Do It!

More than almost any group out there, Clinic make you question how integral change is to a band's vitality. If you don't own any of their music, buying all their albums and listening to each and every one of their songs in alphabetical order (an undertaking that'd take less than four hours, B-sides included) wouldn't tell you much less about their career's arc than a chronological study would. The formula they hinted at on 1997 debut single "IPC Subeditors Dictate Our Youth" and got down to a science on 2000's Internal Wrangler has expanded only slightly, and while there've been some noticeable shifts in production style (especially on 2002's crisp and glossy Walking With Thee), there's not much that sonically separates a decade-old Clinic song from what they're up to today.
But maybe there's just not enough room for any other ideas: Clinic's aesthetic has already incorporated snatches of punk, doo-wop, garage psych, Krautrock, hard bop, mid '70s Miami disco, the film scores of Ennio Morricone, Augustus Pablo-informed dub (complete with melodica), Phil Spector girl-group pop, a few decades' worth of rockabilly, and antediluvian European folk music. It's all contained in an intricate frameworkt hat risks falling apart entirely if it's tweaked too much, and if that means that the same rhythms and melodies and moods keep cropping up in familiar ways, well, at least that sound hasn't gotten any worse. And while it's pretty easy to predict what you'll hear on their new album Do It!, especially if their last couple albums (the water-treading but enjoyable Winchester Cathedral and the slightly weirder, slightly better Visitations) are any indication, it's not the kind of predictability that results in disappointment.
Despite the fact that there's still some old reliable structures underpinning Do It!-- the aforementioned parade of references wrapped around their playbook of big cabaret stomps, swing rhythms, shoegaze drones, and waltz-time R&B-- this new album might be Clinic's most adventurous since Internal Wrangler. Clinic songs are usually recognizable as such within less than 10 seconds, with or without the buzzing wail of lead singer Ade Blackburn, and that's still the case. Usually the giveaway relies on a combination of Carl Turney's organically metronomic drumming-- heavy clomping gallops or delicate cymbal rides, depending on the mood-- and Hartley's guitar, which sounds like nearly nobody else in rock, whether he's coaxing slow strums, sharp twangs or fuzzed-out violence out of his instrument. But they often find themselves in uncharacteristic contexts; there's a couple of surprising moments of acoustic demi-blues, like the freight train rattle of "Tomorrow" (think Led Zeppelin's "Bron-Y-Aur Stomp" with hints of Internal Wrangler track "T.K.") and the 3/4 swoon of "Mary& Eddie", which eventually explodes into a foghorn-accompanied burst of trapeze-act acid rock. And there are other curveballs: Opener "Memories" makes like it's going to be one of their burlesque-rhythm boogie numbers (i.e. "2nd Foot Stomp" and "Vertical Takeoff in Egypt"), but dips into a smart little bit of summery Beach Boys organ for the chorus, while "Free Not Free" bookends and interrupts an otherwise-tranquil bit of slow-dance reverie with a brief, snarling riff that sounds like some unhinged class-of-66 garage band scoring a bullfight.
Blackburn, still murmuring half-intelligible lyrics with the same spooky whine, has aced a perplexing syntax that gives these songs a labyrinthine, off-putting sense of psychological unease: "Knowing the chapters here that you close/ Fill in the gaps as half your mind is gone" ("Emotions"); "See yourself outside your skin here/ See yourself outside you for miles" ("Free Not Free"); "You stitch who you always wanted/ Now your thoughts begin to fray" ("High Coin"). And even when they stick to their old blueprint-- "The Witch (Made to Measure)", "Emotions", and "Winged Wheel" sound a bit like 10 other songs they've already done, except better-- Clinic play with a renewed sense of the same eerie raucousness that drew people to them in the first place; this would be an easy second-album recommendation for a new fan after they've initially discovered and absorbed Internal Wrangler. Clinic could still stand to stretch their legs just a bit more-- it's still inexplicable for a band this savvy about groove-minded freakouts that they've never recorded a song longer than four and a half minutes-- but any band that's staved off stagnancy while still sounding more or less like they did a decade in the past shouldn't worry too much about messing with a good thing.


With killer beat selections and a fresh sense of focus, the New York rapper’s latest project exudes the unnerving calm and clarity that come with years of refinement.

JP5000

Every Junglepussy project begins with a statement of intent. “Want Some Mo’,” the opener to her 2014 debut Satisfaction Guaranteed, turns a one-night stand into a celebration of her prowess in the bedroom and on the mic. “Spicy 103 FM” and “State of the Union”—the intros to her 2015 album Pregnant With Success and 2018’s Jp3—use breakups as a platform to reclaim power over her narrative. On 2020’s Jp4 starter “Bad News,” she predicts that for all the influence she’s exerted over the game, the world won’t “give me props until the casket drops.” Eight years into her career as an independent New York polymath with a taste for genre-bending and Trader Joe’s, she was tired of waiting for her due respect.
“Critiqua,” from her latest project JP5000, is the first opener since her debut not to start on the defensive. Her voice is collected and focused into a deep alto that cuts across producer Bohemia Lynch’s thudding drums and banjo plinks to address the critics and exes: “Earn my respect, held down the day shift/Pregnant with success/And you know what they did?/Tryin’ to test something so sacred.” Adversaries are within Junglepussy’s sight, but her claims unfold like self-actualization more than targeted gripes. Though the whip-smart energy of her past work is gone, she doesn’t sound tired or spent; she sounds content, even happy, to make her own crown. The thousand-yard stare bars add an air of nonchalance without diluting her searing wit or sense of purpose.
Junglepussy has never shied away from a melody or hook, but Jp3 and Jp4 featured nearly as much singing as rapping. Aqueous riddims like “Ready 2 Ride” and the bouncy pep of “Morning Rock” lend themselves to airy vocals, a vibe that JP5000 quickly jettisons. In a similar spirit as flex-worthy projects like Tyler, the Creator’s Call Me If You Get Lost and Milwaukee rapper Lakeyah’s My Time, the emphasis is back on beats and bars alone. On the surface, JP5000 is the closest thing to a mixtape Junglepussy’s ever released—its five tracks are lean, loose bursts of energy. But she’s already released some of the fiercest and most pleasingly indulgent music coming out of New York in the last decade. What’s different here is the focus granted by her vocal shift, firm without rising above indoor volume. It gives her ever-present barbs an icier feel than usual: “Don’t give me side-eye as I shapeshift,” she asserts on “Movie Screen,” unbothered and above it all. It sounds like she could clear a room with a smirk.
Tone adjusted, Junglepussy’s words exude the unnerving calm and clarity that come with years of refinement. “Movie Screen” bubbles and snaps with thoughts of perseverance before pulling the rug out from under the haters anyway (“Keeping you mad at me is such an easy plan”). “Foreign Exchange” depicts a relationship that begins in the crowd at a Highline Ballroom show for the titular band and deteriorates into cheating and social media posturing (“Are you typing about ‘Protect a Black woman’?/Don’t have a clue, just clout”). On “Raqueletta,” she’s lusting after a European boy toy, sending him perfume-scented letters and counting the minutes until “big dude make my problems micro.” These songs aren’t private thoughts, yet they share an intimacy akin to internal monologues or drafted DMs. There’s a noticeable lack of sex raps compared to Junglepussy’s earlier work, but her other modes—tender, vicious, vulnerable—receive room to expand and round out the Jp Experience.
That experience is aided by some of the best beats Junglepussy has ever chosen. All five are loops with deep drums on the downbeat, but they each dovetail with Jp’s voice in distinct ways. Nick Hakim pits an operatic violin sample against twinkling keyboards on “Movie Screen,” creating a horror-flick soundtrack for Jp to slash to ribbons. Bohemia Lynch and New York-via-Baltimore producer Suzi Analogue bend synths into patterns that strobe and seethe on “Foreign Exchange” and “Raqueletta,” respectively. Virginia producer Døøf mixes horns and wind chimes into the cocksure strut of closing track “Mystical,” another opportunity for Jp to assert her earned self-reliance.
JP5000 revisits well-worn topics in the Junglepussy songbook—claims to her legacy, short-lived romance—but they’ve never landed quite like this, and her evolution mirrors the morphing traditionalism of New York’s underground scene. When, at the end of “Mystical,” she announces, “You stuck on the damn trends/I’m top of the mountain, meditating topless/I transcend,” the words linger like an incantation: Junglepussy is inviting the world to revel in her self-fulfilling prophecy.


The sound of Godspeed’s radical fury takes a sideline on their impeccably composed sixth album. It contains their most melodic and powerfully positive-sounding music to date.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Luciferian Towers

Luciferian Towers

“An end to foreign invasions. An end to borders. The total dismantling of the prison-industrial complex. Healthcare, housing, food and water acknowledged as an inalienable human right. The expert fuckers who broke this world never get to speak again.” Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s demands are firm, but, you know, fucking fair.
These demands come attached to a press release for the band’s new album, Luciferian Towers—a title that recalls the fiery horror that befell London’s Grenfell Tower and the gruesome class inequity that disaster exposed just weeks before the album was announced. Song titles include “Anthem for No State” and “Bosses Hang.” Fire courses through the “context” provided by the band in a press release: “We recorded it all in a burning motorboat.” “The wind is whistling through all 3,000 of its burning window-holes!” “The forest is burning and soon they’ll hunt us like wolves.” By the sound of it, post-rock’s most overtly political and unapologetically powerful band seems ready to toss the ravenous zombie corpse of neoliberalism on the pyre for good and all.
Seen in that infernal light, the sound of Luciferian Towers is the last thing you’d expect. The pulverizing, prophet-of-doom riffs that characterized Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! and Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress, the band’s previous two albums, are gone. So are the six-to-ten-minute stretches of drone—the anxious calm before those records’ storms. Ominous field recordings—a one-time Godspeed sonic standby, already pared down to a minimum on Allelujah! and eliminated entirely on Asunder—are again nowhere to be found. The album barely even hits minor-key territory until six tracks in, before resolving the melody into a more uplifting mode within a couple of minutes. If you’re looking for Lucifer, search elsewhere.
There’s always been this other side to Godspeed, perhaps best summed up in a t-shirt slogan from the Allelujah! era: “MORE OF US THAN THEM, AMEN.” Godspeed’s music is undergirded by its musicians’ radical leftist politics (I mean, look at that press release), and that means there’s hope rather than despair at its heart—a belief that collective struggle against our overlords is a battle worth fighting instead of a foregone conclusion to surrender to. It’s this spirit that animates Luciferian Towers, the band’s most melodic and powerfully positive-sounding album to date. One glance at the world around us offers a persuasive argument that it’s the spirit we need.
“Undoing a Luciferian Towers” [sic] feels like the warm-up before the workout. The slow-tempo waltz twirls its way through the constant hum of guitars into a rousing melody a film score might associate with a downtrodden hero. The band’s dual drummers Aidan Girt and Timothy Herzog pound away beneath it, while guest musicians Craig Pederson on trumpet and Bonnie Kane on sax and flute trill away above, filling every available space with joyful noise. “Fam / Famine,” an interlude between the album’s two longest compositions, reprises the melody in a more atmospheric form later on.
The tripartite “Bosses Hang” is even more of a showcase for the band’s anthemic abilities. Like “Undoing a Luciferian Towers,” it too centers on a simple but stirring hook, one so warm and crowd-pleasing that it recalls the great big all-in-this-together refrains of ’90s alt-rock radio staples. Part one introduces the melody, unfurling it slowly and waving it back and forth like a banner on a barricade. Part two shifts away to a five-note pattern that increases in speed like the highland-reel closing crescendo of the Who’s “Baba O’Reilly,” before going full tilt and reintroducing the main melody like a returning redeemer in part three. It’s a much less complex effort than previous Godspeed suites, but their skill as musicians and composers helps them find riches in the simplicity.
The album closes on another three-part composition, “Anthem for No State.” It’s the angriest, heaviest song on the album, but not in the metal mode of Allelujah! standout “Mladic” or Asunder highlight “Peasantry or ‘Light! Inside of Light!’” There’s a Morricone standoff feel to the guitars when they finally kick into high gear in part three; the drums and strings groove and swirl rather than pound and screech during the final minutes. Somehow, the band makes these disparate parts feel inevitable in their connection. No one working in this genre does that better.
But impeccable as it is, Luciferian Towers has a disappointing lack of fury. Throughout their long career, guitarist and ostensible mastermind Efrim Menuck and his many collaborators have crafted a sonic profile of pure terror. It was a huge sound, abrasive but enveloping, the kind that swallows up your entire aural landscape. Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad had it in their heyday. So did the Luxa/Pan Productions team of Al Jourgensen and Paul Barker during the industrial-metal peak of Ministry and its many side projects. It’s hard to watch Godspeed walk away from that menacing magic, no matter how skilled they are at the flip side of their sound. You want them to knock down towers, but for now, they’re building shelter amid the ruins.


CASHINTHEBATHROOM EP

It's tempting to suggest there's nothing subtle about Tacoma's ILLFIGHTYOU. Everything you need to know about them is in their name, right? All caps, no spaces. (As opposed to all caps with spaces.) The three members are named UGLYFRANK, Khris P, and EvergreenOne. Both of their releases, and all songs on each, are tagged in the same ALLCAPSNOSPACES fashion. A casual listen reveals a sound that's part-West Coast shit talk, part-Pharrell layered beats, and all brash. You can probably almost hear a song based on these ingredients in your head right now.
And maybe your estimation wouldn't be too far off, but what you would miss would be how charming and fun their music has consistently been, from even before their 2013 self-titled full-length when they were just frequently-hilarious dudes with a Tumblr. Like a glass of water after 10 shots of whiskey, ILLFIGHTYOU's CASHINTHEBATHROOM EP chases this year's glut of serious-minded spring and summer hip-hop albums. Two years after their debut, the appeal of ILLFIGHTYOU is even more apparent—they sound effortless, and they're clearly having a blast.
Khris P and UGLYFRANK trade verses with the temerity (if not complexity) that made Clipse so much fun, or the 2014 model of Rich Gang so electrifying. And ILLFIGHTYOU's sound definitely owes a lot to not just Clipse, but a lot of mid-'00s Pharrell work: think of the line Fam-Lay toed between menacing and joyful. FRANK grounds the music with a delivery that's both deadpan and knives-out (the first verse on the album includes vivid images like "sniffing coke up in the movie theater" and "I'm angry and hella faded, I'm flipping vehicles back") but also works as Khris's logical foil: Khris has a naturally mercurial voice and he covers more territory, delivering the line "stacking turkey burgers on my damn plate" and bragging about having your girl in his mentions all in the same verse. His flow is so natural that "Oracle" fades with him still rapping: The sense you get is of having caught a tantalizing glimpse of a guy with better things to do than rap this effortlessly.
"FLASH" is the best song here, opening with Bill Paxton's famous line from Aliens, "game over, man, game over!" It contains my favorite line, Frank's "Had a dream I got murked and bought a ticket to heaven/ Nah I woke up, popped a perc and I purchased another necklace," which somehow interpolates a dark, self-effacing Kanye line from "Can't Tell Me Nothin'" into something even darker. The line is punctuated by Khris yelling "hey!" in the background, underlining how much fun these guys are having trading verses. And then the chorus riffs on Tribe's "Award Tour" just because it can. The recipe is simple, but potent: casual irreverence with a pinch of nihilism.
In 2015, with the Internet bubble of "weird rappers" giving way to either novelty hits like "CoCo", the pop appeal of "Trap Queen", or whatever the Awful Records guys feel like doing, ILLFIGHTYOU occupy an interesting middle space: their in-house produced beats knock and sound 0f-the-moment, but the in-jokes and hooks have an almost throwback appeal to them. It's helpful to have someone around to remind you that rap doesn't have to be so dark to make an impression or communicate something meaningful, and in this context ILLFIGHTYOU are surprisingly refreshing. When the last time you heard it like that?


On a fun but monotonous EP, the Detroit dance-music duo stops the clock at the party’s peak.

Night Killaz Vol. 1 EP

You’re in the club so late your limbs have melted into sweaty spaghetti. You could collapse from exhaustion, but the lights and fog and music keep you levitating. Snow Strippers songs are based solely on evoking this tremulous state of perpetual climax. Like 100 gecs and Frost Children, the Detroit duo continues in the hipster tradition of rediscovering and rewiring the discarded passé. Their focus: lurid, cheap-sounding EDM pop. Their music’s been called electroclash, but it’s more like electroflash: vocal electronica overclocked to a shrill and peaky breaking point.
Vocalist Tatiana Schwaninger and Graham Perez, a producer with a past life making beats for underground rappers like SoFaygo, have worked as Snow Strippers for a couple years now. This spring’s breakout April Mixtape 3 is like a Dance Dance Revolution soundtrack for moonwalking cyborgs: a strobing blitz of neon melodies and tinny shrieks. Their music slots nicely into a zeitgeist of Crystal Castles reappreciation and viral hits like laura les’ “Haunted,” but they also took pleasure in mutating their core sound in intriguing ways, like mashing the vocals with robotic ad-libs or slowing the pace to a glistening stomp-trot. On the duo’s new EP Night Killaz Vol. 1, they juice their garish dance sound even more, showcasing the music’s overheated thrills as well as its diminishing returns.
Snow Strippers’ music is a piñata of pastiche, modeled after the gothic unease of SALEM, the shivering chaos of Crystal Castles, and the campy heart-rush of DJ Sammy. But it’s also seamless and stupidly fun. Even neurotic genre purists who scold PinkPantheress for trilling over UK garage classics will get swept up by Snow Strippers’ tidal wave of hardstyle kicks and pleading vocals. Detonating with a blinding shock, “Just Your Doll” will whip anyone in blast radius into a frenzy. “Cautious” throttles like a deep-fried Cascada song, Schwaninger’s helium-high cries fluttering like’s she running from an evil monster. At its best, the music smacks with the greasy goodness of 3 a.m. pizza.
The issue is that Snow Strippers don’t have anywhere else to go. They landed on one strong idea—but only one. After the hypnotic first half, the tape fizzles out into a hazy locked groove. The lightshow synths of “Just a Hint” and “Touching Yours” sound exhaustingly similar, and Schwaninger’s vocals dissolve into a shiny-silver blur. Even “Comin Down” doesn’t offer a reprieve from the onslaught. Where the original electroclash scene deployed snarky humor and prurient imagery against the cushy mainstream club cultures of the time, this music isn’t rebelling against anything. The duo seems to have little to say, an artistic manifesto that boils down to: It’s a laugh, it’s euphoric, let’s get lit on a dark street. But when it stops being fun, the music turns into a rave-by-rote charade.


The Sunny Day Real Estate leader's 1996 solo debut is often viewed through the prism of his Christian rebirth. Sub Pop's reissue reveals how its orchestral grandeur helped shape indie rock's future.

Return of the Frog Queen

In the annals of rock music's early flirtations with the internet, an incident from the career of Sunny Day Real Estate stands as prophetic of the echo chamber we know today. In December 1994, the band's frontman, Jeremy Enigk, responded to rumors of an imminent breakup by posting an open letter. While SDRE were being celebrated as the best thing to hit the Seattle scene since grunge, Enigk was coming out as a born-again Christian—and the words he used in dropping that bombshell left a mark as indelible as his band's emo masterpiece, Diary on his career.
“Jesus isn’t anything that I want to compromise with, for He is far more important then [sic] this music, financial security, or popularity could ever be,” Enigk wrote. “So the idea of breaking up has been talked about." The Jesus stuff stuck with fans and the press alike, and speculation that it was the reason for SDRE’s split—just months after the letter and more than half a year before the release of their second album—dominated the rumor mill. Over the years, this collective obsession with Enigk’s faith has drowned out everything else he’s said about his mental state in the mid-’90s. “It’s not that I was unhappy back then," he reflected in 2006, "but I definitely was a younger man… reaching for the unknown, I guess, trying to find my place." That quest defines his peculiar 1996 solo debut, Return of the Frog Queen, an album that finds a spiritually awakened Enigk summoning the courage to reach beyond the blunt, soul-baring music SDRE had released and toward thematic grandeur his bandmates weren't yet prepared to grasp.
Christianity was never why Enigk left the band; it was how he began his journey of self-discovery. And Frog Queen—with its half-baked mysticism, charming introspection, and lofty musical ambitions—was the first milestone. Any celebrations of faith or a higher power were largely unrecognizable as such. "Songs that I’ve written about God, I am singing about in a language of my own heart, not one of an organized structure," Enigk once explained. The lyrics on Frog Queen have a poetic bent; the rhapsodic, soul-searching verses of “Explain” seem designed to stick in the subconscious. But some of the other songs scan as nonsense.
Written and recorded around the time of SDRE’s disbandment, the album exchanged the increasingly anachronistic sound of a rock band splitting the difference between Rites of Spring and U2 for timeless influences like Neil Young, Nick Drake, and Red House Painters. Acoustic guitar waltzes and intimate, unhurried musings replaced stark loud-quiet contrasts. A 21-piece orchestra filled a background once occupied by reverb and delay pedals. And production by Greg Williamson, who would go on to produce SDRE's transcendent comeback record How It Feels to Be Something On, gave Enigk's wispy croon enough space to expand and contract at will.
If Frog Queen was, on some level, a message to his former (and future) bandmates, the takeaway seemed to be, "It's not you—it's me." Yet the album feels anchored to the foundation of SDRE. Soft, swaying ballads like "Abegail Anne" and downtrodden odes like "Call Me Steam" are well suited to composer Mark Nichols' delicate arrangements, but Enigk's version of chamber pop still employs plenty of the vocal distortion and guitar pounding for which his band was known. At its best—from the quiet ache of "Lewis Hollow" to the anthemic splendor of "Shade and the Black Heart"—Frog Queen sounds like the unplugged record SDRE never made.
In less successful moments, the album reflects the limitations of a young songwriter deliberately leaving his comfort zone. "Carnival" is a strange combination of boilerplate guitar chords, overproduced vocals, and disorienting orchestral motifs. The plodding "Lizard" oversells its awkward verses, then overshoots the emotional mark during its brief crescendo, aiming for drama but delivering histrionics.
Frog Queen made an impression on those who heard it upon its initial release, in July of '96. CMJ described it as mysterious, enchanting, and “purely spiritual,” while otherspraised its originality. Sebadoh's Lou Barlow called it his favorite album of the year. But it didn't sell so well at first—at least not compared to SDRE releases—and wasn’t repressed. Instead, it became a cult classic and a footnote to Enigk’s long career, often mentioned in the samesentence as bassist Nate Mendel's departure to join the Foo Fighters or Hoerner’s move to a farm in rural Washington. Like many relics of pre-Web 2.0 indie rock, Frog Queen remained an underground favorite, its mythos proliferating through mix CDs, AIM away messages, and local scene forums.
Spotify curators and YouTube influencers may not have been clamoring for Sub Pop’s new reissue of the album, but its long absence from the cultural conversation has only made the experience of discovering or revisiting it more powerful. An record whose trackable influence seems lost to the archives of the Wayback Machine, Frog Queen helped define a sound that became ubiquitous in indie rock for years following its release. The rough-edged perfection of “Explain” is bound to speak to Neutral Milk Hotel cultists who pored over In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Fans of Grizzly Bear’s Yellow House will surely recognize its predecessor in the pastoral folk-pop, sparse orchestration, and simple studio flourishes of "Call Me Steam" and "Return of the Frog Queen.” Although it doesn’t reach the heights of SDRE’s greatest albums, Enigk's labor of love deserves to live on—not just as a turning point in his life, but as an inspiration to younger risk-takers looking to make deeply personal, unabashedly flawed music of their own.


The pair’s debut collaboration is an amorphous, droning flood that sounds like the advent of the end times. In its hopeless sound world lies a poignant condemnation of colonial violence.

Disconnect

Disconnect opens like a pit slowly forming in your stomach. A featureless, windswept expanse emerges from the silence, and distant booms ring out on the horizon. The first sign of life is far from reassuring: a chorus of sighs and exhalations, the universal sound of hopelessness. “Differences” and the subsequent “Arkives” never really pick up momentum, only accumulating more shades of gray as they sprawl onward across double-digit runtimes. These two tracks comprise half of Disconnect on their own, and Kevin Richard Martin and KMRU spend the remainder of the album stripping them down and peeling back the layers in classic dub fashion—until they resemble errant puffs of smoke escaping from a Rhythm & Sound track.
Anyone familiar with the works of the two artists shouldn’t be surprised by how grim their debut collaboration sounds. Martin is best-known for the mind-melting dubstep he makes as the Bug, but he’s recorded much of his best work over the last decade in a more ambient register, including his nerve-wracking solo album Sirens and the great Concrete Desert with drone legends Earth. KMRU, born Joseph Kamaru, broke out with 2020’s Peel on the late Peter Rehberg’s Editions Mego label, and has since amassed an eclectic if generally monochromatic catalog. These are musicians who thrive in blasted, apocalyptic sound worlds; Disconnect is a natural extension of both of their repertoires.
What’s a surprise on Disconnect is the inclusion of Kamaru’s vocals. His spoken-word passages expand on a theme he previously explored on his 2022 album Temporary Stored: the theft of African artifacts by Western museums and archives. “African traditions are passed across through apprenticeship and other oral traditions,” the Kenyan-born artist explains on “Arkives,” as opposed to the Western emphasis on written documents deemed “ontologically concrete.” On both albums, Kamaru argues that the keeping of African artifacts in Western museums distorts their meaning and purpose, as many of these items are “more than just objects” in their own cultures.
Martin first discovered Kamaru through a documentary and was attracted to his musical sensibilities as well as the quality of his voice. Across the four versions of “Differences” and “Arkives” that constitute the album’s second half, Martin chops Kamaru’s voice into tiny fragments, emphasizing the “ark” part of “archives”: It’s an appropriate choice for a record that sounds like the first showers of a cataclysmic flood. At first, it might escape a casual listener’s notice that these are six variations on two songs, not because the versions are radically different from each other, but because the sound palette is so consistent and so subdued that it all eventually blurs into an amorphous miasma.
What’s curious is that Kamaru’s vocals on “Arkives” are smeared in megaphone filters and delay effects that occasionally make them hard to understand. That initially seems like a strange decision for an album that’s consciously trying to make a point about colonial violence, but by presenting Disconnect’s two core tracks as mutable materials rather than as treatises written in stone, the two artists honor the malleability of tradition through the very medium they work in. Dub treats songs as living, breathing, changeable entities. Disconnect gets its message across through Kamaru’s words and through the music itself, whose darkness feels less oppressive thanks to the creators who speak life into it.


With nods to the likes of Miles Davis and Pharoah Sanders, the inventive Canadian band sets aside its affinity for hip-hop and kindles a love of classic jazz.

Talk Memory

BADBADNOTGOOD are sometimes dubbed “alt jazz,” a quick and easy tag, but not without truth. It was at a jazz program at Humber College in Toronto where the band came together and discovered a mutual affinity for hip-hop. Two early albums, BBNG and BBNG2, reinvented well-known rap songs as post-bop and lounge jams, connecting the two great American institutions from the opposite direction as jazz-head rap artists like Guru and Freestyle Fellowship. By 2015, BBNG had recorded a joint album with Ghostface Killah—the stoned grooves of Sour Soul gave Tony Starks his most replayable project of the last decade—and their résumé includes work with Kendrick Lamar and Tyler, the Creator, two more artists who enjoy amalgamating jazz and rap. After the dusty jukebox-soul and electronica of 2016’s eclectic IV, the band’s latest album, Talk Memory, is its tightest turn yet, presenting a group often defined by proximity to modern hip-hop in the idiom of more classic jazz sounds.
That doesn’t mean Talk Memory feels passé. The band deconstructs classic sounds, peers at their components, and rebuilds them with their own original parts. The velvety play and mildly psychedelic grooves are still present, but Talk Memory is also BBNG’s most compositionally complex record to date: It draws you in with vibrant hooks and melodic flourishes, then begs you to return and fully absorb its subtleties. Nine-minute opener “Signal From the Noise” eases the album to life with sounds beamed in from the cosmos, the spirit of Sun Ra looming overhead, before a simple but stirring piano riff emerges. The electric guitar underpinning the arrangement is indebted to Miles Davis’ plugged-in masterpieces of the 1970s, and the whole thing evolves into a cascading, polychromatic performance. Elsewhere, Leland Whitty’s swirling, kaleidoscopic saxophone leads “Open Channels,” a spiritual jazz number that nods heavily to Pharoah Sanders. The band that once saw antique sounds as something to be twisted and reformed now travel in the same lineage.
BADBADNOTGOOD made Talk Memory without founding member Matthew Tavares, who left the band in 2019. Because the core trio—Tavares, bassist Chester Hansen, drummer Alexander Sowinski—appeared in such harmony and typically shared credit, it’s always been more about the group dynamic than any soloist or bandleader. In the absence of Taveres’ synths, Hansen now provides an array of piano, organ, and synthesizers. With longtime collaborator Whitty on his second album as a full-time member, the band transitions into a post-Tavares existence without a palpable sense of loss.
The guests, though, are an undeniable asset. Three songs (plus one reprise) feature veteran Brazilian composer Arthur Verocai and his cadre of string instruments. BBNG’s music has always felt smoky and dim-lit, but Verocai’s arrangements add scope and romance to the cinematic “City of Mirrors.” The way the flowing strings complement the band on “Love Proceeding” approaches smooth-jazz serenity. Like Bird’s “bebop with strings” approach on Charlie Parker With Strings, or Kanye West’s recruitment of Jon Brion on Late Registration, Verocai brings extra wingspan to these compositions. Later, Terrace Martin’s alto sax leads the epic closer “Talk Meaning,” supplemented by Brandee Younger’s dreamy harp. The extended band plays fervently but never loses control.
The presence of the guests inspires BBNG to up its own game. “Unfolding (Momentum 73)” opens with the ambient sounds of Laraaji’s electric zither. A swirling keyboard melody plays beneath as Whitty—a melodic and inventive saxophonist in incredible form throughout the album—freewheels up top. Then, in a seamless transition, Whitty’s instrument begins to mirror the fluttering melody that has been present throughout. It’s an incredible sleight of hand that encapsulates the smoothness and imagination of these arrangements. BADBADNOTGOOD are known for turning tradition inside out, but Talk Memory is not just their finest album—it’s evidence of the historic appreciation that roots their reverence.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The appreciation of Madlib and Freddie Gibbs' new collaboration Piñata depends on the range of your hip-hop tastes and your familiarity with both artists' deep cuts. Funk-fusion and soul jazz breaks bubble and blister in the heat and Gibbs states the facts as he sees them.

Piñata

The appreciation of Madlib and Freddie Gibbs' new collaboration Piñata depends on the range of your hip-hop tastes and your familiarity with both artists' deep cuts. Madlib's Remixes albums put his beats in a street-rap context, giving his esoteric, dusty-sample imprint to cuts like Kurupt's "Who Ride Wit Us" and the Noreaga verse on "Misery Loves Company". And while Gibbs has thrived when his voice cuts through updated G-funk or soul-chromed Southern bounce, he's also sounded at home on the boom-bap-leaning East Coast beats of Statik Selektah (Lord Giveth, Lord Taketh Away) and the more blunted second half of Baby Face Killa. The team unofficially known as MadGibbs is a somewhat unexpected pairing, maybe a bit outside the usual, but the notion of Gibbs spitting over Madlib's dank obscuro-soul breaks became easier to understand before Piñata even came out.
The question, then, isn't whether Gibbs and Madlib make a compatible match, but what that match winds up motivating Gibbs to say. Piñata isn't a major lyrical departure from the last-real-gangsta-standing attitude that's kept Gibbs defiantly his own unfiltered self over the last five years. But his tendency to let the beat inspire certain facets of his writing has resulted in a record that, true to the underheard yet memory-stirring undercurrents of Madlib's production source material, is fueled by a certain kind of grown-man reflection. There's a deep awareness of how the embattled dealer from Gary has and hasn't changed on the way to becoming an L.A.-based enthusiast's favorite—renowned enough to get Scarface and Raekwon on his record, but for reasons that run deeper than just having famous co-signs. Many of Gibbs' lyrics on Piñata ride a line between pride in his own resilient hustle and ambivalence about what he did to succeed—maybe not guilt, but at least a concerted effort to confront his colder impulses. His stories of a talented man making his way in a bleak environment are brought up without either glamorization or moralizing, but they still feel human. Funk-fusion and soul jazz breaks bubble and blister in the heat, throbbing like a running man's pulse, and Gibbs states the facts as he sees them.
Gibbs is nothing if not an anti-bullshit activist, even if it means casting the occasional doubt upon himself or staring down his own contradictions. There's a great line on "Deeper" where he abruptly gets introspective after he confronts a woman who got pregnant by another man while Gibbs was in jail—"Maybe you's a stank ho, maybe that's a bit mean/ Maybe you grew up and I'm still livin' like I'm sixteen"—and a taut verse on "Broken" that address the supposed irony of having a cop for a father ("I'm a crook and you crooked, that's all we had in common"). Those are just a couple highlights; so many of Piñata's best moments are fueled by this sense that Gibbs knows he did wrong but also knows that letting any remorse slip would've potentially made him look weak. There's also a bit of triumph in there somewhere, not in the fact of what he's done and seen, but in the basic fact of his still being around to relay these things. This is a record that sounds really lived-in, in both the sense that it's been steadily labored over and the sense that it's focused on the personal details that come with years of weighted memories.
There are other cuts that focus more on the man Gibbs is now than the situation that made him, and they don't lack for urgency, either. "Real" is Gibbs' Young Jeezy dis track, which stands out as razor's-edge wrath in a hip-hop world that mostly sticks to subtweeting and passive-aggressive maneuvers; that it's based in actual creative grievances and personal fallout instead of just hearsay and general disrespect only makes the lacerations deeper. Paired together, "Lakers" and "Knicks" draws a straight line from his current pilgrimage-paying L.A. transplant status back to the early-days nickel-bag hustle that first proved his motivation. Even when he's doing a smoker's anthem—the blissed-out "High," featuring a characteristically hyperactive Danny Brown—there's an efficiently punchy energy that makes him sound ready to take on all comers. It's the same kind of energy that puts him on the same level as Chef ("Bomb") and Mr. Scarface ("Broken") when it comes to vivid crime-life narrative, lets him play virtuoso shit-talk mentor to Domo Genesis and Earl Sweatshirt ("Robes"), and has him leave such a dominant impression that it makes the otherwise-solid title-track closer seem like a mood-breaking outlier simply because it goes too many bars without his voice.
The way Gibbs uses that voice in the context of the production that deserves special attention here. Gibbs' acknowledged debt to 2Pac is paid back with a versatile, musical flow that seeps into and builds up the structure of the Madlib beats beneath it; his tendency to use the same intonation for both intricately tight-knit verses and simple, to-the-point hooks highlights just how skilled he is at both. He went in and challenged himself to rap fluidly over under-quantized drums and succeeds to the point where it feels like he snaps them into place himself. And that'd be noteworthy enough if this didn't double as some of Madlib's most inspired production since his Beat Konducta 00s—with Gibbs' deep resonance sinking into spaced-out synth-prog ("Bomb"; "Uno"), air-suspension glide R&B ("Robes"; "Shame"), and butterfly-knife-wielding splatter-flick funk ("Scarface"; "Real"). He even gets in the spirit of the comedic interstitial skits that're Madlib's stock in trade; while the blaxploitation dialogue and trailer snippets are fitting enough (and add some faded film-grain quality to the proceedings), the goofy kazoo-synth tag at the end of "Robes" where Gibbs mutters barbs aimed at industry-dependent fools is its own justification for the teamup on just about every level. It doesn't matter if Gibbs and Madlib were once considered artists playing to different audiences -- united in their uncompromising, independent-as-fuck visions, they put together something hardcore hip-hop heads on both sides should feel.


The Ottawa-Gatineau grindcore quintet Fuck the Facts can often switch styles two dozen times in a single song—often in the span of two minutes or less. But the real coup of their excellent new self-released album, Desire Will Rot, is an almost supernatural instinct for cohesion.

Desire Will Rot

If you'd walked up to even the most ardent extreme metal fan in 1987 and posed the question "How far do you think this music can go?" chances are you'd have gotten a blank stare in response. At that time, Napalm Death, Carcass, Unseen Terror, and others had significantly upped heavy metal's ante by combining thrash and death metal with hardcore, crust- and anarcho-punk at inhumanly fast tempos to create what would eventually come to be known as grindcore. This new movement represented a kind of logical endpoint beyond which it seemed impossible to push. After all, how could music get any heavier than the unremitting abrasion of Napalm Death's first two in-studio appearances on the John Peel show?
So, as much as this music shook up existing boundaries, it made sense to assume that grindcore would flame out as a novelty trend after about five years due to lack of innovation. And yet, almost three decades later, we have to marvel at the breadth of a genre that has done the opposite of stagnate. Modern acts like Cephalic Carnage, Pig Destroyer, Antigama, and many others have brought myriad new dimensions to the form, and they continue to infuse metal with a sense of limitless possibility. Among them, Fuck the Facts has become so adept at stretching grindcore's parameters that one almost detects a sense of gamesmanship in the way the Ottawa-Gatineau quintet switches styles two dozen times in a single song—often in the span of two minutes or less.
The latest Fuck the Facts offering Desire Will Rot begins, seductively enough, in fairly standard full-blast mode. But it isn't long—28 seconds, to be exact—before the band's penchant for nuance rears its head. Double-bass drum volleys, pogo-inducing "death'n'roll" crunch reminiscent of Entombed, crossover thrash riffs, powerviolence, guttural hardcore, Yngwie Malmsteen-worthy guitar solos, and jazzy off-time grooves all come to brief fruition before melting away into whatever complementary shade of metal the band chooses next.
This segmented approach has typified metal since (if not before) Death’s Chuck Schuldiner employed jazz fusion-loving members of Cynic for 1991’s death-prog classic Human, but it isn’t staggering technical agility alone that distinguishes Fuck the Facts as exceptional. The real coup here is that Desire Will Rot never gives you whiplash because it doesn’t actually contain hairpin turns. Take a moment to let that sink in: to make this music flow to this degree requires an almost supernatural instinct for cohesion. That instinct, on display in spades here, is what arguably positions Fuck the Facts at grindcore's cutting edge. This is all the more impressive considering this album was actually recorded three years ago.
Originally intended for release as the main-course companion to the 2013 EP Amer, Desire Will Rot does bear some similarities to the style and tone of Amer’s seven songs, but it leans far less in the straight-ahead melodic-metal vein the band first explored on 2008’s Disgorge Mexico. Even those who are well familiar with Amer or the FTF catalog as a whole wouldn’t immediately think to connect the two releases. Desire Will Rot was conceived and recorded just two years after Fuck the Facts solidified its current five-piece lineup in time to make the joint LP/EP set Die Miserable and Misery (both released on the same day in 2011). The recent split-LP with Fistfuck, released this past May, gives us a glimpse into where FTF might be headed in the future, but it’s easy to see why the band is pushing Desire Will Rot, easily the more expansive of the two titles, as its quote-unquote actual new album.
Desire Will Rot captures a band that spent significant time gelling and growing as a creative unit. Where Fuck the Facts started out as a quasi-solo vehicle for bandleader-guitarist-engineer Topon Das, these days every member is expected, even required, to contribute to the writing process. It’s not often that we can describe a three-minute song as "epic," but the winding twists and turns of a tune like "Solitude" suggest that a bunch of cooks can work together in the same kitchen without stepping on one another’s toes. Indeed, this five-piece incarnation marks the latest in a series of significant milestones in the band’s history, namely: the addition of frontwoman Mel Mongeon in 2002 and Mathieu Vilandré’s later switch from guitar to drums. Each of these changes has drastically increased the band’s pool of assets.
Mongeon, although she now shares vocal duties with bassist Marc Bourgon, remains one of grindcore’s most instantly-recognizable vocalists. Her lyrics hint at a sense of unease within the realm of identity that never explicitly references a worldview shaped by Quebec’s relationships with the rest of Canada and the U.S. Nevertheless, a hazy feeling of clawing for one’s place permeates this music and sets Fuck the Facts’ brand of angst apart not only from other grind acts, but also its own early work, which was characterized more by Das’ sardonic sense of humor. Not to be overlooked, Mongeon’s artwork makes the physical copy of Desire Will Rot worth owning for those who like the music enough to seek additional overtones in her sumptuous—even dazzlingly—grim, visuals.
Vilandré, meanwhile, serves as the ultimate dual-threat weapon. Ever since he moved behind the kit for 2006’s Stigmata High-Five, his precise, assertive style elevated Fuck the Facts from a dirty little underground act to upstart world-contender status. On Desire Will Rot, though, his drumming reaches a level of fluidity that’s rare even among the genre’s elite. Vilandré also contributes guitar parts, and his understanding of guitar no doubt contributes to this album’s seamlessness as Das and second guitarist Johnny Ibay’s parts spill forth in an endlessly churning outpour of riffs. By the time the album arrives at "Circle", its four-part ambient denoument, those riffs have touched on so many elements that the presence of cello, piano, and noise atmospheres hardly seems foreign or unexpected. Grindcore, as Fuck the Facts prove so ably on Desire Will Rot, can apparently accommodate any ingredients provided the artist has the imagination to support them.


Across two long, imperceptibly evolving tracks, the veteran drone duo delivers a pair of luxuriant tonal sound baths.

Diptych

As part of the Olympia punk scene in the late 1990s, Kevin Doria and Joe DeNardo knew how to make the most out of minimalism. Their two-decade about-face as Growing, from aggressive noise veterans to contemporary drone trailblazers, has stretched that rubric into some blissful territory. Formed in 2001, Growing began by taking the essential disembodiment of ambient music and—as their name hinted—fleshing it out. The dense drone sculptures and Earth-like amperage on albums like 2004’s Soul of the Rainbow and the Harmony of Light catered to doom heads and seekers of deep listening alike. Later albums such as Vision Swim veered off into a thousand different directions, but with Diptych, they return with focused vision, once again intent upon widening a portal to vast, amorphous worlds.

Like their last LP, 2017’s Disorder, the album comprises two tracks of around 20 minutes apiece. The hulking body of treated guitars, oscillators, and modular synthesizers of opener “Variable Speeds” hits like an overture. Conjuring creases of light cast onto metallic strata, it’s a luxuriant tonal sound bath. Where fellow noise anatomists such as Tim Hecker and Ben Frost might opt for erosion, Growing’s mottled patterning around a single chord builds up and outwards, like tinted ribbon being swathed around a towering pylon.
Auditory illusions abound, especially on “Down + Distance.” Filtering slow, methodical organ reminiscent of Kali Malone (in this case, effect-heavy guitars) with the swarming depths of Loscil, ricochets of sound invoke everything from distant choral music to the faint drift of roadworks. It’s all imagined, of course, but their careful psychoacoustic interventions wonderfully disrupt even the thought of living in a noise-cancelling world.
The duo’s catalog on Bandcamp features an anomaly among more obvious genre tags: “living music.” You could be forgiven for assuming it to be some furtive scene, but it is—by virtue of their inputting it—Growing’s very own nanogenre. Tracing the naturalistic psychedelia of their Kranky years to the organic feel of Disorder, whose drawn-out tremolo feels like whole-body breathing, the term checks out. The duo’s live-wire ambient predated the advent of brainwave entrainment—tones and frequencies that some claim can induce sleep, focus, and maximum efficiency—and now, the immersive, subtly pulsing sedation of Diptych feels almost like the closing of a circle.

In 2006, DeNardo—who is also a filmmaker, cinematographer, and photographer—spoke of the potential for discovery in the genre he and Doria continue to push forward. “Drone is one of those sounds that can communicate a lot of subtlety,” he said. “Pare everything down to one note and there’s a lot of harmonic ephemera.” The longer that note is sustained, the more details from the depths come to light. Fifteen years on, Diptych bears out the merits of that approach. By paring down and zooming in, it’s the most wide awake their living music has felt in years.

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In the mid-1990s, Alex Chilton entered a Memphis studio to track a collection of deep R&B and pop covers. The results were fascinating and frustrating in equal measure.

A Man Called Destruction

Alex Chilton’s mid-1990s cover of the R&B novelty hit “What’s Your Sign Girl” opens with the once and future Big Star singer-songwriter playing a loosey-goosey lounge-pop guitar lick in clear defiance of the professionally tight rhythm section. The moment is gorgeously goofy, like Pavement covering Steve & Eydie, but then the vocals come in. “Capricorn, Sagittarius, Aquarius, Pisces, Gemini, Aries,” Chilton sings, trying his damnedest to make each astrological mouthful sound as melodious as they did on Danny Pearson’s 1978 original. “I’m a Capricorn, we believe in life and living, we trip on love and giving.” The song is still goofy, but no longer gorgeous. Rather, it’s grating and aggravating, like a B-side promoted to album cut.
Of course, Chilton’s obsession with astrology was legendary, going back to the 1960s, when he was a teen heartthrob singing “The Letter” and “Cry Like a Baby” with his first band the Box Tops. According to Chilton’s biographer Holly George-Warren, he would often refer to star charts to make professional decisions, including whether or not to give interviews: “We see this in stars who become popular at such a young age,” George-Warren said. “They can’t really process everything.” Was “What’s Your Sign Girl” intended as a commentary on his own reputation? Or is he playing the song straight? Chilton was a master of the inscrutable, yet A Man Called Destruction doesn’t always make the enigma especially compelling.
A Man Called Destruction is a collection of deep R&B and pop covers by a range of artists that includes New Orleans soul singer Chris Kenner, 1960s Italian rocker Adriano Celentano, L.A. pop duo Jan & Dean, and Polish composer Frédéric Chopin. There have been rumors that Chilton chose these tunes to thwart fans wanting something more in the vein of “The Ballad of El Goodo” or even “Holocaust”—something, that is, more like Big Star, a cult rock band that was in the early ’90s being reassessed as a major influence on acts as diverse as R.E.M., Teenage Fanclub, the Posies, and the entire Paisley Underground scene. Certainly Chilton had a strident contrarian streak that might compel him to zig instead of zag, but others claim these are songs he had grown up with, had loved, and simply wanted to sing with no regard for commercial viability. Maybe both sides are right, even if they romanticize the man in different ways.
Chilton had explored these sounds and genres before, most notably in the 1970s, when he and other locals—including local singer-songwriter-oddball Tav Falco and producer Jim Dickinson—were affectionately deconstructing Memphis music history, taking apart old rock and blues tunes, figuring out how they work, and then making them move differently. That interest motivated his first solo records, in particular 1979’s Like Flies on Sherbert and 1981’s Bach’s Bottom, both of which remain as defiant and weird as ever. But those records were the province of cratediggers in the ’90s, out of print and completely overshadowed by new Big Star reissues and a brief reunion chronicled on Columbia: Live at Missouri University 4/25/93. Clichés, Chilton’s first release after that wave of renewed interest, was an odd acoustic collection stemming from a tour of the Netherlands he made with Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, among other, un-likeminded singer-songwriters.
But a contract with the revived Ardent Records allowed Chilton to return to the Memphis studio where Big Star had recorded its three albums. It gave him the opportunity to assemble his own band, which included players from Stax and Hi Records as well as a jazz pianist whose biggest gig was in the lobby of the historic Peabody Hotel downtown. Released in 1995, A Man Called Destruction was his first real Memphis album in years, even taking its title from a nearly forgotten local figure: Howlin Wolf’s pianist William “Destruction” Johnson, so nicknamed for his emphatic style of playing. As Bob Mehr notes in the liners, that title may also refer to Chilton’s penchant for professional self-sabotage: “Most fans and critics took the title as a winking self-reference, an allusion to his reputation as a consistently mercurial and sometimes troublesome talent.”
Chilton had a fine ear for talent and corralled a band that couldn’t have turned in a bad performance. He emerges as a fine guitarist, whipcracking his riffs on the rambunctious instrumental “Boplexity,” and his energy on Celentano’s ’59 hit “Il Ribelle” is infectious, as though he knows you’re grooving to his twangy but fluent Italian. Opener “Sick and Tired” rolls along on a second line drum rhythm, evoking the Big Easy by way of the Bluff City. “New Girl in School,” a Jan & Dean B-side co-penned by Brian Wilson, churns up a chugging momentum over which Chilton’s falsetto soars. There’s something intriguing and endearing about these songs and these performances, when Chilton emerges as completely ingenuous in his affection for these disparate forms of pop music.
Elsewhere, that outsider naivete sounds strained or calculated; especially when he ventures into the kind of blues made popular on Beale Street. The band kick up a bit of seediness on “Devil Girl,” yet Chilton’s vocals lack bite and humor, even when he’s singing about her “cloven flip-flop.” A bonus track featuring double-tracked vocals and more cries of “Hail Satan!” sounds much more occultish, even a bit dangerous. “You Don’t Have to Go” makes Eric Clapton Unplugged sound like John Lee Hooker at his most lowdown, and “It’s Your Funeral,” based on Chopin’s funeral march, is a punchline lacking a set-up, although the previously unreleased “Why Should I Care/It’s Your Funeral” does provide a pretty good one, with Chilton caterwauling the tune from the 1960 film The Entertainer.
In that film, Laurence Olivier plays an embittered song-and-dance man named Archie Rice, whom Chilton cited as an influence in an interview with MTV News in 1999: “Archie Rice just kept coming up for me… Because that’s how I felt… Dead behind the eyes.” Chilton would make “Why Should I Care” a staple of his live shows in the late 1990s, when he was reuniting the Box Tops, but he never included it on an album or compilation until now. That song and its reference point reveal so much about Chilton’s state of mind at this stage in his career, whereas he’s elusive as ever on A Man Called Destruction. Each artistic decision could be interpreted in wildly different ways—as affectionate interpretation or piss take—which makes him something of a cypher on his own album, a blank entity into which listeners can foist their own ideas about the man called Alex Chilton. Destruction is, appropriately, fascinating and frustrating in equal measure.


Air's soundtrack to the restored version of Georges Méliès silent film Le Voyage Dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) finds the duo trying to bring some artistry back into their music.

Le Voyage Dans la Lune

Notions of cool figure strongly in the world of Jean-Bénoit Dunckel and Nicolas Godin of Air. "Philip Glass is really harmonious to me: the harmonies are really simple, really amazing, really cool," said Dunckel, in a recent interview with the pair for Pitchfork's 5-10-15-20 series. "They were using guitars and bass but in a mechanical way, as if they were using a sequencer," said Godin, of the Strokes' first album, before adding: "That was very cool." The members of Air have always been immaculately turned-out, both in person and on record. Their music rarely has a hair out of place. Sometimes this works in their favor. The impeccably shaved-down prog tendencies of "How Does It Make You Feel?" from 10,000 Hz Legend shows how effective it can be to take the wilder whims of a genre and thoroughly de-clutter them.
That sense of nonchalance, executed with total control, has long been Air's M.O. It's a kind of stoicism shared with artists like Ron Mael of Sparks and Chris Lowe of Pet Shop Boys.-- a rigid, and admirable, commitment to a singular strain of projected being. When Portishead became a coffee-table favorite, they disappeared for years, overhauling their sound with the jagged lines of Third. Air went in the other direction. They were too locked-down in the detached journey they were committed to, resulting in bland and dispassionate albums like 2009's Love 2. This record, a soundtrack to the restored, hand-colored version of the classic Georges Méliès silent film Le Voyage Dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon), is a diversion of sorts. It offers Air a chance to bring some of the artistry back into their music, to work at rediscovering the elegance within the sleek surface drift they often lackadaisically flop into.
Le Voyage Dans la Lune is less light than its predecessor. There's a brawny thickness to the guitar line in "Astronomic Club", a spine-tickling ghostliness passing through "Décollage", a pile-up of electronics marching with resolve on "Sonic Armada". It's never less studied than Dunckel and Godin's prior work, but it feels like Méliès' imagery may have inspired them to rediscover the playful side of their personalities-- the side that once prompted them to release a remix album titled Everybody Hertz. By the time they got to Love 2, the understated joy of songs like "Kelly Watch the Stars" had all but vanished, replaced by vapid and overly serious stodge like "So Light Is Her Footfall".
After coasting in half-realized bliss for so long, Dunckel and Godin appear to be reaching into the past in order to go forward. In the 5-10-15-20 interview, Godin talks about the curse of making "shit records" after you turn 40. Here, his coping mechanism for that, on a handful of tracks, at least, is to pluck a few ideas from the playful Air on prior records. "Parade" is all bright Paddy Kingsland-inspired analog synth bursts, chirping birdsong, and ruptured drum parts that bring the track to a stuttering halt. But it's a retrogressive step, something this band has done before but better, fuller, and with a greater sense of direction. Here, it feels like a pleasant yet unremarkable switch back to the past, the sound of Air staring into a half-empty well of ideas, on the verge of becoming their own tribute band.
It's a shame, because the collaboration with Victoria Legrand of Beach House on "Seven Stars" seemed to bode well for this album. The percussion-heavy frame provides the edge that prevents the softer intonations from becoming too fluffy. There's a marrying of militaristic thrust, snug vocal cooing, and a gloriously silly spoken-word countdown halfway through. For a minute it feels as if there are a few cracks in the veneer, which is generally the space from which all the best Air material's gathered. When they lower their guard and open their music up to unexpected elements, it causes the professorial approach to melt away. It makes sense that Dunckel was a mathematics teacher. Air's songs often sound like formulas spread out upon a page, with its makers puzzling over them, trying to figure out why they don't quite add up.
Elsewhere, Le Voyage Dans la Lune is an unsteady mixture of partially inspired notions reaching for a purpose. It's a bountiful collection of loose ideas, hanging in the breeze without forging forward in any meaningful direction. "Who Am I Now?" is representative of the problem, with Au Revoir Simone providing nebulous vocals that touch on the kind of spectral folk the Ghost Box label so effectively delivers. But this feels like a facsimile of that work, and a poorly made one at that. It's too calculated, too studious. It's music reduced down to its raw components with all the mystery torn out. There are parts of the record that get back to the potential this band once possessed-- a slight return to interlacing all the best parts of Moog demonstration records, hoary old prog moves, and extravagantly deluxe production techniques. But back then they made it seem so easy. Here, it feels like they're trying too hard.


Using pitched-down vocals, the Australian singer-songwriter finds new folds and textures in traditional pop songwriting with the help of producer Tobias Jesso Jr.

Lilac Everything

Emma Louise’s enchanting new album Lilac Everything is the product of a handful of successful gambles. The Australian singer-songwriter tried to break herself out of a funk by booking an impulsive flight from Melbourne to Mexico, where she found the inspiration she needed to write most of Lilac Everything. She sent a cold pitch with demos attached to Tobias Jesso Jr., the pop balladeer who’s transitioned to working behind the scenes since releasing his debut album Goon in 2015, and he liked them so much he agreed to produce her album in full. And when Louise and Jesso were just about to finish their sessions together, she asked him to pitch her vocals down, dragging them out of her natural soprano range and into a full, creamy baritone. This series of bold moves has led Louise into uncharted territory; the stark, solitary crooning of Lilac Everything is a far cry from the art-pop that filled albums like 2016’s Supercry.
Louise first played with pitching down her voice while recording her first album, but the idea sat on the shelf until Lilac Everything was nearly complete. “I didn’t want it to be like another character or anything like that,” said Louise in a recent interview. “I recorded it on tape and we slowed it down and I called that voice ‘Joseph,’ and I was like, “I want to do a whole album like this one day!’” She doesn’t sound unrecognizable, but the lower pitch imbues her singing with a dense, mournful quality. (I heard the elegant “Never Making Plans Again” and thought about Adele’s robust lower register, a fitting touchpoint given the diva’s work with Jesso on 25 highlight “When We Were Young.”)
While Louise may not have written and recorded with Joseph in mind, there are a few moments on Lilac Everything in which her original tracking taps into her new voice’s masculine potential. She lags behind the beat and peppers verses with wordless ad-libs on “Falling Apart,” inhabiting a relationship that’s inching towards failure; when she opens “Wish You Well” by sighing “There she is,” you can imagine some bearded loner daydreaming about a woman until the perspective shifts midway through the verse.
The heart of Lilac Everything is the sort of sturdy, elemental pop songwriting that made Jesso a minor star a few years ago, and as a producer, he’s happy to get out of Louise’s way until she reaches an emotional climax. Songs like “Falling Apart” and “Mexico” spring from austere verses—the former little more than a tip-toeing bassline, the latter hanging on diaphanous synths and distant piano chords—into fuzzy, blown-out choruses, and they feel like hard-earned moments of catharsis. The heartbroken melody of “Never Making Plans Again” is afforded space to gracefully unfurl. The clouds even part just as you’re starting to feel sleepy: “Gentleman” is a jaunty, sample-flecked take on a Joni Mitchell travelogue, and the deliberate pacing of “Shadowman” is disrupted by spasming electronics.
Louise’s writing is at its most impactful when she’s fighting to make sense of an ending. What are you supposed to do and say when a relationship has run its course? Sometimes you can see clouds on the horizon: “I feel like one of us is gonna end up far behind the finish line,” she concludes on “Falling Apart.” “I can see it shaping up/Could be some kind of disaster, but I can’t help but wanna see it through.” She finds the grace to wish a lover happiness on “Wish You Well,” even as she admits she’d embrace a fantasy if it meant another chance; on “Mexico,” she has to flee across the ocean to find the peace she’s seeking. And on “Never Making Plans Again,” she’s compelled to give up the careful life she’s led—one spent drawing up strategies “in the schoolyard dirt”—and embrace impulse, if only because she can’t hurt any worse than she does now.
Lilac Everything represents its own kind of ending, albeit a happier one. Louise has made an album on which Joseph takes the lead, and she made it in collaboration with an artist she deeply respects. But you can’t chalk its success up to a vocal gimmick or a star’s touch behind the boards: her writing and singing has never felt this dramatic nor plumbed this depth of emotion. That new level of quality is going to serve her well, even if this ends up being Joseph’s final moment in the spotlight.


The titanic drone metal duo returns with Steve Albini for an enormous, meticulous, back-to-basics album that shows just how compelling those basics can be.

Life Metal

Sunn O))) albums have tended to be summits where the luminaries of noise and volume gather for electric communion. Almost as soon as the duo of Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley moved beyond the simple amplifier worship of their early days, they began recruiting peers to help build audacious records, as high on concepts as they were on decibels.
Noise paragon Merzbow added to the early bedlam, while misfit rock demigod Julian Cope read a poem that inserted Sunn O))) into a continuum of pan-cultural myths to begin their awesome if inchoate White volumes in 2003. Anderson and O’Malley infamously locked Xasthur’s Malefic in a coffin for their breakthrough LP, Black One, and recruited a few of their own idols for 2009’s elegantly textured Monoliths & Dimensions. They’ve made records with Boris, Scott Walker, and Ulver and employed black metal icon Attila Csihar of Mayhem as their lead speaker and performance artist in residence for a decade. Sunn O)))’s liner notes scan like the weirdo metal equivalent of some fantasy sports roster.
Sometimes, though, all those guests have clouded out the essence of Sunn O))). Anderson and O’Malley share a rare chemistry; they are able to work through extended riffs at famously testudinal paces and high volumes with absolute control. But Life Metal—the first of two Sunn O))) albums planned for 2019—rectifies the oversight. On four tracks that invoke metaphors about landscapes carved by geologic deep time and references to the music of the spheres, Anderson and O’Malley foreground their seismic relationship and their shared ability to make 12 or 25-minute spans of slow-motion drone feel like a historic religious ritual.
To be clear, Anderson and O’Malley are not alone here. Life Metal’s easiest sales pitch is the presence of producer Steve Albini, whose ability to make very loud records is fabled. In this partnership that’s as obvious as it is overdue, Albini captures the pair with perfect detail, so that you can practically feel their fingers crawling down their guitars’ necks at the end of “Aurora.” Silkworm’s Tim Midyett galvanizes the drones with his aluminum-neck bass, and longtime contributor T.O.S. Nieuwenhuizen again adds electronics. There is a trace of pipe organ, luminous and ominous, from minimalist composer Anthony Pateras beneath “Troubled Air,” too.
Perhaps most striking is Icelandic cellist and composer Hildur Guðnadóttir, who hesitantly sings verses borrowed from ancient Aztec poets during the colossal opener “Between Sleipnir’s Breaths,” her voice chipped into the drone like a petroglyph on a canyon wall. She also provides a steady cello hum on the colossal 25-minute closer, “Novae.”
But these are all Easter eggs that you’ll find in later listens. Again and again, what’s immediately striking about Life Metal is Anderson and O’Malley’s astonishing grace and dexterity with such heavy decibel loads. “Aurora” employs a classic Sunn O))) stratagem: cycling through the steps of a riff and webbing together the spaces between notes with rays of decay and feedback. Each note lands as another stomp to the chest, each roaring gap between them like an attempt to massage away the pain. For all the talk about Sunn O)))’s subterranean tones, the guitars here seem to sparkle with overtones and harmony. It’s the sensation of stumbling through a cavernous room in search of a light switch and instead finding a glowing James Turrell installation tucked in a corner. At its best, Life Metal can be breathtaking by surprise, with stunning moments nested inside expected settings.
One of the many running jokes about Sunn O)) is that anyone with the right gear and enough patience can make this music, slowly droning on in gradually shifting lockstep. And sure, in the late 1990s, when Sunn O))) was a bit of an excuse to get high and play low, maybe that was true. But O’Malley has spent the last several years playing and premiering the delicate music of composer Alvin Lucier, where tiny differences in pitch and time create hypnotic pulses so faint you doubt they’re there. Sunn O))) have rarely sounded as delicate as the later spans of “Novae,” their guitars wrapping around Guðnadóttir’s cello with the patience of a boa constrictor. It is a testament to O’Malley’s expanding music résumé.
Sunn O))) excel at sloganeering to the point of propaganda, using their particular obsession with volume as a sharp branding tool. Their maxim, for instance, has long been “Maximum volume yields maximum results,” while assorted T-shirts ask “Ever breathe a frequency?” or remind us to “Praise Iommi.” But Life Metal underlines the point of it all: These four pieces are best suited to take over a room, to fill a venue as massive as the sound itself and, in turn, to be felt. They vibrate, pulse, and quiver. In a time where we experience so much media on a seemingly microscopic scale, from earbuds to smartphone screens, Life Metal takes up a large space, where devastating waves of sound that make actual ceilings crumble somehow become a restorative listening experience. Depending on what you need, Life Metal is, at maximum volume, a shield or a cape, a timely exercise in either retreating from the outside world or squaring up to it without blinking.


The new album from the ambient baritone guitar and turntable duo is the most fully formed and expressive to date. Its recurring themes and phosphorescent textures evoke an engaging kind of ambiguity.

The Fun Years: Heroes of the Second Story Walk Up

Heroes of the Second Story Walk Up

Think of the Fun Years as Ratatat, only inverted. Like the feline-sampling Brooklyn bros, the bicoastal duo emerged a little more than a decade ago, offering the allure of an oddball instrumental configuration—a baritone guitarist with a sharp melodic sensibility and a crucial producer with a knack for situating that sound in some deeply absorbing context. But where Ratatat favored samples and beats and athletic themes, the Fun Years instead sprawled, sculpting soundtracks for the gloaming and for daybreak, or music to be played between Ratatat’s up-all-night anthems. Isaac Sparks used turntables to create haunted landscapes populated by soft drones, disembodied voices, and textural phantoms, overlaid by Ben Recht’s circular guitar lines, which always suggested some deep, unspoken longing. The Fun Years were a salve for when the lights weren’t quite out, but the party was inarguably over.
The engrossing new Heroes of the Second Story Walk-Up at long last perfects that premise and promise. It is the most fully formed and expressive of the Fun Years’ ten albums to date and an immersive emotional Rorschach test, where each moment scans differently depending on what you bring to it. A forty-five-minute suite of seven interwoven pieces, Walk-Up moves like a long piano sonata, where each movement seems to comment on the same subject but never in quite the same way. The approach enables an emotional breadth and accessibility that can be rare in these arcane corners of instrumental music, making Walk-Up the kind of record you want to crawl into and inhabit for a spell.
During the second movement, for instance, the guitars chime as though marching toward some grand post-rock climax. Just beneath, though, there’s a teeming bed of strained static and hiss, lurking in wait. The signals grow and eventually overtake those guitars, crawling across them and forcing them into submission, like ivy spreading over stone ruins. By the time Recht’s guitar creeps through the electronics for the third movement, they’re anxious and desperate, with tense minor notes reflecting prior failures. But they begin to harmonize with Sparks’ choir of electronics, shaping a two-player symphony that somehow sounds hellish and heavenly at once. And are those deep bass drum clips pounding beneath part five—aptly dubbed “Deepest Xylophone”—the sound of approaching thunder or a calming pulse? Walk-Up’s ambiguity is its most rarified accomplishment, an instrument that lets you take your own temperature just by listening.
The Fun Years have been working at this admixture for years, devoted to the perfection of a singular sound and form. They’re clear descendants of Touch Records and producer-composers such as guitarist Christian Fennesz and turntablist Philip Jeck, for whom timbre has sometimes seemed like the compositional pinnacle itself. But they’ve learned over time to give these ethereal sounds structure and motion, so that listening to a series of drones and spirals feels more active than merely drifting. On Walk-Up, they unlock what has made Tim Hecker astonishingly popular in recent years—textural phosphorescence that’s occasionally overpowering and always open to interpretation.
As the needle or the cursor nears the end of Walk-Up, you may start to anticipate some rhapsodic finish, some radiant climax that pulls all the emotions of the first forty minutes into one honed point. That expectation is understandable, a vestige of the quintessential post-rock and soundtrack scripting that also inform the Fun Years. But Recht and Sparks avoid the temptation of tidiness, choosing instead to stay true to script and let these feelings fade into the middle distance as one. Recht militantly strums one sharp chord again and again, as Sparks’ circuits run their course and empty into a series of fantastic glissandi that stretch, in the end, like an auditory ellipsis. It is a pragmatic conclusion, an honest admission that all these conflicting urges and experiences are only mercury, anyway. There is no triumph, no transcendence, no abject despair—or, depending on your momentary outlook, a little bit of all of it.


The leader of a new pack of fully modern jazz singers explores the historical context and modern possibilities of every song she sings, even the deepest American standards.

The Window

When the jazz vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant sings “Somewhere” on her fifth album, The Window, she approaches the American standard with complete knowledge of its monumental past—and its possibilities in the present. Over 60 years after its debut as a central number in West Side Story, “Somewhere” stands among the last century’s most-covered numbers, as one generation after another finds beauty to its promise of a place where they might fit in. So how does an artist in 2018 make “Somewhere” sound new? That’s the question Salvant and pianist Sullivan Fortner pose. After Fortner sneaks a few bustling bars of West Side Story’s “America” into the intro (a wink to the crowd at New York’s Village Vanguard, where this cover and another quarter of the album were recorded), the pair interrogate the tune and its guarantee of a safe haven.
Arguably the leader in a resurgent scene of fully modern jazz singers, Salvant makes great tonal leaps throughout “Somewhere.” She sounds playful at the beginning, as though acknowledging the convention of past jazz masters interpreting it. But soon, she sings those two syllables like they’re a grim punchline. Near the end, she imbues it with the melancholy of a daydream she knows will never come true. Salvant understands the song as quintessentially American, an aspirational immigrant tune—“Somewhere… we’ll find a new way of living.” To make it sound relevant for our moment, she introduces the idea that “somewhere” might actually be anywhere but here.
Among Salvant’s most distinguishing artistic traits is how she makes those tonal shifts not just exciting but meaningful. Her craft is undeniable, but built into her craft is the freshness of encountering each tune as though for the first time, figuring it out in the moment from one note to the next. She sings in conversation with every song, its lyrics, and its historical context. Salvant accomplishes that not only by using her voice to comment on lyrics while she delivers them but also by developing a diverse, daring repertoire. On The Window, she sings French cabaret, American showtunes, pop standards, and deep soul and blues cuts. She covers Nat King Cole and Brazilian songwriter Dori Caymmi, Cole Porter and jump blues pianist Buddy Johnson. She savors the spaces between styles, between lines, between notes.
Take The Window’s first two tracks. Salvant opens with a gently psychedelic cover of “Visions,” from Stevie Wonder’s 1973 album, Innervisions. Fortner introduces the song with a set of vertiginous piano chords, as though leading us down a dark staircase into a basement nightclub. Salvant remains on the street, dreaming of a place—another somewhere—where “hate’s a dream and love forever stands…. Or is this a vision in my mind?” She never answers the question, but her voice has the steadiness of someone who wants to believe. Salvant follows it with “One Step Ahead,” a love song from an early Aretha Franklin record. The shift from social issues to romantic maneuvering seems jarring at first. But Salvant finds new implications in the song, not only by increasing the tempo to a full sprint but by placing it in the new context of this moment in American history. “I’m only one step ahead of heartbreak, one step ahead of misery,” she sings with an almost frantic determination.
Salvant has found a fine match in Fortner, a New Orleans native who has played with the likes of Wynton Marsalis, John Scofield, and Paul Simon. He doesn’t accompany her so much as join in the conversation she’s having with these songs, occasionally even arguing with her about them. He toggles between the blues and jazz and classical figures with dizzying fluidity during “I’ve Got Your Number,” while his tectonic bass chords for “By Myself” make it seem like the ground is constantly shifting beneath Salvant. And when it comes to songs, it is: Salvant sings with the understanding that no tune is ever set in stone, even one as frequently sung as “Somewhere.” On The Window, she excels at keeping every possibility open all at once.