This sprawling set comprises all seven Blur albums, three DVDs, and five-and-a-half hours' worth of rarities. For its breadth and complexity, the box tells a simple story: Blur are a band that did an astonishing amount of different things really, really well.

Blur 21

Choose Damon. Choose Graham. Choose Damien Hirst's cheekily agit-pop country house or Sophie Muller's teen-spirit-stinking squat. Go pop, then spend a decade slowly deflating; study the songbook so you can tear it up with precision. Choose irony, choose sincerity. Choose your own worst NME: a Gallagher, any Gallagher, or maybe just yourself ("Do you feel like a chain store? Practically floored?"). Choose fame, or flee from it fast as you can in a milkman's suit. Choose Ray Davies, choose Stephen Malkmus; choose la-la-la or wooo-hoo. (And before you answer this next one know that the Queen is watching.) Choose Britain. Choose America.
Or, you know, don't choose. Blur have been a band for 21 years, and their story is long enough to speak a bunch of contradictions. That's what happens to bands that house four egos and a pair of dueling geniuses. They rarely move in straight lines. One example of many: Blur arrived in New York for the first time on the day Nevermind was released. When asked on radio what they thought of the new Seattle sound, Graham Coxon said, "I fucking hate it." Later he'd be the one to lead the band toward a post-grunge, indie-tinged sound, a nugget of which will be blared alongside "Smells Like Teen Spirit" at sports arenas until the end of time. Another? In 1994, Damon Albarn wrote a snide little number about the cultural allure of the West (sneeringly: "La-la-la-la-la/ He'd like to live in Magic America/ With all the magic people"). Three years on, he was a bit more forgiving (one more time, with earnestness: "Look inside America/ She's alright/ She's alright"). It's not despite but because of these pivots and complexities that it feels appropriate to call Blur a defining band of the past two decades.
Up until now, listeners have been urged to take one of two positions: 1) "Great pop band, until they went to America and sold out!"; or 2) "The early stuff is too British, but I love all that weird shit they did later on." There was a sense that you couldn't love it all-- the witty, theatrical, Kinks-inspired character sketches perfected on 1994's Parklife and the impressionistic elegies of their 1999 sad-bastard masterstroke, 13. And the choice was loaded. Think I'm exaggerating? Just read some of the reviews of their last two greatest-hits collections, 2000's Best of Blur and 2009's Midlife, both of which favored their later stuff. "Let Blur bash their way on towards the margins," Steve Sutherland wrote defensively in a 2000 issue of NME. "Just because these [early] songs embarrassed them once they started listening to broadsheet critics and retreated wounded from the big-sales battle with Oasis doesn't mean that we're morons to love them." Nine years later, Scott Plagenhoef observed on this site, "Few bands from the 90s increased their stature this decade among America's self-identifying indie set as much as Blur." Midlife, he said, "can be seen as a more Americentric look at Blur's career, which makes some sense as they still have a lot of fanbase growth potential in the States."
Three years after Midlife-- and with the whole world turned to their second reunion at the London Olympics closing ceremony-- it's time for a truce. So here it is, Blur 21, the inevitable box set comprising all seven albums, three DVDs, and five-and-a-half hours' worth of rarities. And even if you can't afford the thing on vinyl, its very existence presents us with the perfect opportunity to rethink the band's history. Because for its breadth and complexity, the box actually tells a simple story: Blur are a band that did an astonishing amount of different things really, really well.
Be patient, though, because we're going to start at the beginning, and their 1991 debut, Leisure, is not very good. It shows a melodic gift and hints at the Syd Barrett obsession that would plant seeds for future experimentation ("Sing"). But mostly, it's the work of a band still searching for its identity. Prior to signing with the London label Food Ltd., Blur were known as Seymour, a madcap art-punk four-piece that generated a mild buzz in late-80s London with their boozy, chaotic live shows. That anarchic energy is all but absent from Leisure, though it's captured on the box's first disc of rarities, including early Seymour demos and a 7" containing the endearingly awkward baby picture "Superman".
When Leisure came out, baggy was all the rage in the UK. The label's intention was to turn Blur into the next Stone Roses-- or better yet, the even better-selling Food signees Jesus Jones. They wanted Blur's first single to be the baggy-by-numbers "I Know" but, in the first of many well documented band-vs.-label throw-downs, the band fought for the shoegazey "She's So High". Blur won, and 21 years later, this art-over-commerce victory feels prophetic, even if the song doesn't. "High" is still a better track than "I Know", but it has a kind of time-stamped anonymity that pervades even the best moments of Leisure: pretty, vacant, and vague.
1992 would light a fire under Blur, kindled by a few factors: a bad management contract that left them in significant debt; critical and commercial disappointment; intra-band conflict (a flame that never stopped burning); and, above all, grunge. Blur toured North America for the second time that year. And just a year into the post-Nevermind world, flannel, disaffectedly mumbled lyrics, and buzzsaw guitars were the new normal. "Nothing in England counted and that really pissed us off," Albarn recalled in 1999. "So we decided to make a record as English as possible; a record full of English references and English cultural icons." Therein lies the irony of their breakthrough 1993 album, Modern Life Is Rubbish. Though it wouldn't hit big in America, it was conceived with the same spirit of roguish overthrow as Nevermind itself. Albarn's newfound articulateness was, actually, an act of punk rebellion, a sneering rejection of the status quo.
The artistic leap between Leisure and Modern Life Is Rubbish is roughly the same size as the one between Pablo Honey and The Bends: unpredictably huge. It's a statement record in title, sound, and content. What else can be said of an album that begins with a once-upon-a-time as dramatic as, "He's a 20th-century boy..." and draws upon an lineage of English guitar pop ranging from the Kinks to the Who to T. Rex? Blur would improve on these ideas on their next few records, but Modern Life remains a finely observed, tartly disillusioned snapshot of post-Thatcher Britain, buoyed by exquisite pop hooks. "Colin Zeal" and "Chemical World" also mark Albarn's first forays into the character study songs he'd later become known for. Into theater since his teens, Albarn would occasionally let drop in interviews that his greatest influences were Brecht, Weill, and Artaud's "theater of cruelty." Modern Life began to fulfill that promise: Blur were suddenly a band of ideas, though none so pompous that it weighed down the immediacy of their music.
Parklife is the masterpiece of this era. Pop-art bright, stingingly funny, and at times suddenly poignant, it remains the defining artifact of Britpop. It's a nationalistic record in the same way Born in the USA is a nationalistic record: It might look like sloganeering patriotism if viewed from outer space, but up close it's a finely detailed, intricately cracked document of a very particular national malaise. The disco smirk "Girls & Boys" (propelled by one of Alex James' best basslines) finds its hedonistic vacationers "avoiding all work, 'cause there's none available," while the tragicomic "Tracy Jacks" sketches a lonely civil servant who goes quietly mad. With humor, pathos, and nostalgia, Parklife tells of a modern world where dreams have been boxed in by materialism, conformity and routine, and even the once-space-age future has lost its sparkle. "End of the century," Albarn shrugs over Coxon's minor chords. "It's nothing special."
The millions-selling, Brit-Award-sweeping Parklife was also the record that made Blur into bona fide pop stars, a role that some members embraced more readily than others. "I made a point of drinking two bottles of champagne a day for 18 months," is how bassist Alex James remembers 1994. "England only imports something like 100,000 bottles a year, so I reckon I drank 1% of England's total champagne import." At that point Coxon was, arguably, drinking even more, but without the joie de vivre; instead, he was increasingly uncomfortable with the band's success. The Great Escape, the improbably strong 1995 effort they churned out amidst the squeals of Parklife mania, is fittingly a record of baroque excess (lots of brass) and tension. It's Blur's poppiest album, but it's puffed within an inch of bursting: "Stereotypes", "Charmless Man", and "Entertain Me" are all deceptively dark, stretched like a smile pulled eerily tight. Escape's crown jewel is the brilliant, Pulp-like single "The Universal", an exploration of anhedonia, a state of mind the band knew intimately at this point. Coxon retreated further, and for a moment it looked like he'd leave the band. What happened, though, was just the opposite. He steered them toward their biggest re-invention yet.
"Death of a Party" (which now sounds like the first proto-Gorillaz Blur song) is the most apt song title on 1997's Blur. Recorded partially in self-imposed exile in Iceland, it is a post-success record, what happens when the odd burdens of mega-fame don't destroy a band but instead sends it diving into uncharted waters. It is 1995's hangover. Exquisitely bleary-eyed ("I'm Just a Killer for Your Love", the oddball sprawl of "Essex Dogs") and often jolting ("M.O.R.", "Chinese Bombs"), Blur sounds like staying up for six days and then accidentally catching a glimpse of yourself in the mirror. And somehow, amidst the claims of career suicide, it was a huge international hit, the one that finally broke them in the States. (Which is to say that yes, this is the "Song 2" album.)
Blur found Pavement in the mid 90s the way Dylan found Jesus in the late 70s: The transfiguration was that complete, that apparent, that difficult for longtime fans to swallow. Coxon had long been evangelizing American indie rock to his bandmates, and, wearied of fame and looking for a new direction, they finally started to listen. To call Blur Coxon's record is a huge simplification (it also marks the height of Albarn's Bowie phase), but it does contain the first song that Coxon wrote and sang on a Blur record, the sweetly wooly "You're So Great". Much has been made of the Pavement and Dinosaur Jr. influence on his virtuosic playing, but Coxon has said that the record he was listening to most while making Blur was Big Star's elegiac Third/Sister Lovers. Alex Chilton was an artistic kindred spirit for Coxon. Both had experienced intense, Tiger Beat-cover-style adoration (Chilton had a No. 1 song with the Box Tops before he was 18) and had figured out early on that commercial success wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Chilton, of course, lost his foil too early when Chris Bell left Big Star and died in a car crash not long after. The tension that kept Blur going, in a creatively fertile, decade-long state of about-to-combust, was the push and pull between Coxon and Albarn.
"Graham used to say that he wanted to make an album that nobody would want to listen to," says drummer Dave Rowntree in the box's liner notes, "But you can't do that in a band with Damon." 13, their second masterpiece, finds Albarn and Coxon's opposing sensibilities bleeding into each other like a muddy watercolor. Both were hurting. Coxon was depressed and still at odds with the rest of the band, and Albarn's long relationship with Elastica's Justine Frischmann had just ended. A coping method he'd picked up from blues and DIY alike, Coxon knew how to translate personal pathos into Blur's music. Both the Blur songs on which he sings lead, "You're So Great" and 13's "Coffee and TV", are candidly about his drinking, and on 13, he guided Albarn toward confessional songwriting, too. Albarn had always used character songs to express emotion, but his songs on 13 strip away the protective covering of wit. "I hope you're with someone who makes you feel safe in your sleep," he croaks on the gorgeous closing lament "No Distance Left to Run", while the wounded pop-spiritual "Tender" is an obvious career highlight. William Orbit's brilliant, painstaking production pushes Albarn's ever-present pop sensibility to the brink of dissolve. The Third/Sister Lovers comparison feels more apt here: 13 is a record in a sustained state of elegant unravel, full of the unexpectedly beautiful sounds that pop songs (and people) make while they're falling apart.
As time goes on, 13 sounds more like a definitive statement, and 2003's Think Tank sounds more like a post-script. Recorded in Morocco after the first Gorillaz record and Coxon's departure (he plays on just one track, the gloomy "Battery in Your Leg"), it may be the only Blur record that suffers in retrospect. There are some great tracks ("Out of Time" and "Sweet Song") but it doesn't quite pack the punch it did a decade ago. On the other hand, the newest track in the box, the archly grand "Under the Westway", feels like a return to form, which is to say it finds the band sounding like it hasn't quite sounded before. In the liner notes, James points to something true, recalling the Think Tank tour: "It took at least four people to replace what [Coxon] does. Two backing singers, another guitarist, and a lead guitarist. And a percussionist." Now that the band is-- tentatively, feebly, and contemptuously as ever-- back together, it's even more clear that Blur is the alchemy between these four people.
Like any box set worthy of attention, the sprawl of rarities offers some illuminating gems (an early demo of "Beetlebum"; the underrated oddball 1992 single "Popscene"), plenty of cheeky throwaways (a Seymour-era cover of "Maggie May"; an orchestral pop snippet called "Sir Elton John's Cock"), and, of course, omissions for never-satisfied diehards to whine about (mine include the original, Leisure-era recording of "1992" and the mid-tempo demo of "Song 2"). The box also contains DVDs of two complete live performances, which tell two very different tales. The first is a show at Alexandra Palace in North London from October 1994. Blur are at the height of their first wave of fame, and the young audience is whipped into such a frenzy that they even sing along with the melody of the instrumental filler "Lot 105", as if they just need something to scream; the band gets off on it. Five years later, they are at Wembley Arena playing all 20 of their singles in chronological order. They look as weary as second-term presidents as they slog through the motions for the first three-quarters of the setlist, but at "Tender" everything shifts. Suddenly, they embody the material, coming achingly alive again, reborn on the stage.
If you need a through-line, try the story that those selected bookends tell: Blur are a triumph of feeling. They spent the first half of their career creating modern characters who'd become fashionably distanced from their own emotions and the next half actually, unfashionably, emoting. But that's just one straight line you could draw; why should you have to choose? Modern life is full of champagne and hangovers. So is Blur.


The Texas rap star’s new album has something for every type of Megan Thee Stallion fan—and the strain of catering to the masses has begun to crowd out the goofy charm of her best music.

MEGAN

It is hard to overstate Megan Thee Stallion’s success: She is not just a rap star, but the kind of supercharged celebrity who appears in commercials and movies and hobnobs with pop stars, all while serving as the new flagbearer of Houston rap heritage. On MEGAN, her newest album, you can feel the pressure on her to keep all those plates spinning—to maintain momentum, to not fuck it up. After Tina Snow, the 2018 EP that cemented Megan as a rapper who’s as raunchy, funny, and charismatic as anyone, all of her full-length projects have, to varying degrees, felt like exercises in becoming everything to everyone. But it’s never been as distracting as it is on MEGAN, an uneven album so preoccupied with giving every single type of fan exactly what they want that it might as well be crowdsourced.
Do you share Megan’s infatuation with anime? Then you will get a thrill out of “Otaku Hot Girl,” which samples a song from Jujutsu Kaisen and features an intro from one of the show’s voice actors. Bankroll Got It’s drum-heavy flip of the soundtrack is uninteresting—though it’s not like he’s working with an anime renowned for its music—and the character references are earnest but unbearably corny. The better song that leans into her fondness for Japanese culture is the multilingual “Mamushi,” which pulls off the theme without flattening her personality. Maybe instead you need new Megan to play at your Pilates class: She’s got you with the feel-good “Worthy,” a Lizzo-coded pop song. Those muscles are put to more effective use on “Spin,” where the silky Victoria Monét hook complements aggressively flirty Megan verses. The fluffy finger-snap beat sounds like it could have been on Love/Hate. (Come to think of it, Megan would have ripped “Shawty Is Da Shit.”)
Then there are the songs for those deeply invested in Megan’s beefs and squabbles. I can picture fans gathering in group chats, dissecting subliminals and clues like they’re in an Agatha Christie book club. After the last three months, I’m all feuded out, so I’m less interested in that game. Still, she lands a few good jokes on “Hiss,” where she calls out the misogynistic dudes in rap who can’t keep her name out of their mouths. (Drake has had a one-sided vendetta toward her for a while now; Megan hits back with some BBL Drizzy theories of her own.) “Rattle,” which has a fast, groovy beat that melodic South Florida rappers would eat up, leaves a sting. “’Cause the niggas don’t beef with the niggas/They scared of each other, but beat on the women,” she attacks; she could be talking about a dozen different rappers, which makes the song feel like a sharp indictment of hip-hop culture in general. As critical as that line is, she still has fun chanting, “Ain’t got no tea on me, this ho’ think she TMZ” while hitting a Harley Quinn cackle in the background.
Megan doesn’t fool around like that enough. Even tracks made to light up the club feel as if they’re satisfying expectations. On the would-be party anthem “Where Them Girls At,” Megan reworks the nostalgic Facebook-era twerk sound of Kansas City’s Kstylis. She doesn’t add anything new to his style; I can only imagine how TisaKorean, a Houston native who is always having a good-ass time tinkering with the past, would have sauced it up. Megan loosens up alongside Glorilla on “Accent,” capturing the tipsy bounce she’s always had in freestyles and features, like Latto’s “Sunday Service” remix. When she’s in that mode, she’s incredibly funny. “That ain’t my bae, he really more like my bidet,” she raps on “B.A.S.,” a Teena Marie-sampling club drill experiment that works because she’s all in. She’s even got a whole song (“Down Stairs DJ”) about masturbating before she falls asleep—not unexpected from Megan, but silly in a way her best music can be, going back to “Big Ole Freak.”
For all my reservations about MEGAN, I do understand the pressures, especially in rap, where hitmaking women have historically been discarded quickly. Foxy Brown got caught in label purgatory after 2001’s Broken Silence wasn’t as huge as Def Jam hoped; Trina had dirt thrown on her name when she did her own thing away from Trick Daddy. The stories are endless. The fears are real. If Lil Baby drops an album that makes zero cultural impact, he can go back to the drawing board. If Megan does? Who knows. She’s not trying to find out. This reality isn’t just depressing on a systemic level, but also because of the effect it has on an artist like Megan Thee Stallion. Even for one of the most celebrated Texas rappers of her generation, nurturing a fanbase takes priority over the music because it feels like a matter of time until the hip-hop industry finds an excuse to turn its back.


It's difficult to fathom today, but Stardust-- a collection of standards-- was a risky left turn for an artist of Willie Nelson's power and magnitude. Now the record is reissued with a set of other Nelson covers from throughout his career.

Stardust: Legacy Edition

The standards album has suffered a lot of abuse during this decade, as aging singers use it as a shorthand for artistic revitalization and as a shortcut to career revival. Nothing communicates serious intent quite as earnestly or as cheaply as recording a 75-year-old song, as Rod Stewart, George Michael, Cyndi Lauper, and others who used to be much cooler have discovered. As a result, even the word "standards" provokes an admittedly healthy skepticism in many listeners, but it wasn't always so. Thirty years ago, Willie Nelson took a typically left turn and followed up a string of successful albums (starting with 1975's career-making Red Headed Stranger) with a covers album of songs made famous by decidedly non-country musicians like Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, and Louis Armstrong. It's difficult to understand today how unusual this sort of album was, going against the grain of the contemporary country business. Label execs initially balked, but Stardust become one of the best-selling country albums of all time, spending nearly a decade on the country charts.
Stranger is touted as country's first concept album and one of the foundations of outlaw country, which gives it a sheen of originality in a genre nominally interested in tradition more than innovation. But Stardust sounds like the riskier album and is by far the more rewarding collection, which is to take nothing away from Stranger. What makes the record so thrilling and very often beautiful-- and what separates him from today's ham-handed vocalists-- is Nelson's facility as an interpreter. It's not enough for him just to sing "Georgia on My Mind" or Kurt Weill's "September Song" or even to translate these songs into a country setting. With his tender, textured voice and intuitively around-the-beat phrasing, Nelson gives these songs fresh readings, with just the touch of sentimentality and nostalgia they demand. The cliché "makes them his own" certainly applies here: He sings them as they've never been sung before or since, which is quite a feat considering their age and popularity.
Hardened from endless touring into a tough, tight roadhouse revue, Nelson's band gives a surprisingly supple performance on each song, which reinforces the album's sweetly ruminative mood. Producer Booker T. Jones, of Stax fame, facilitates every aspect of the band's sound, showcasing the performers' range while ensuring the arrangements play to the lyrics and vocals without overwhelming them. The organ and restrained rhythm section hint at the soul records Jones made a decade before, while Bobbie Nelson's piano, perhaps mimicking her brother's vocal style, adds gospel and jazz flourishes to "On the Sunny Side of the Street" and Mickey Raphael's harmonica, one of country's most distinctive instruments, moans lonesome on "Moonlight in Vermont". Nelson and his band blur the distinctions between all of the stylistic elements to create a sound that is best described as simply "American." As such, Stardust has the force of a statement album, yet it's unlikely anyone ever intended it as such. Its casual demeanor may ultimately be the record's most winning trait.
Stardust, however, was not an anomaly in Nelson's career. Previously, he had regularly tackled standards and non-country tracks, and he has continued the practice up to the present. Rather than weigh down this 2xCD Legacy Edition with lesser-quality alternate versions or sessions outtakes, compiler Gregg Geller has collected Nelson's versions of other chestnuts from previous and subsequent albums like Angel Eyes in 1984 and The Promiseland in 1986 (both of which, stunningly, are out of print). The range of material on this second disc, if not the quality or overall cohesiveness, surpasses even that of Stardust, with Nelson returning to Carmichael ("Ole Buttermilk Sky") but also tackling the Dixieland jazz of "Basin Street Blues" and the smoky lounge of "The Gypsy". That these songs are all previously released and most of them readily available doesn't diminish their impact here. This reissue, besides being absorbing as music, almost has the feel of an essay on Nelson's interpretive abilities.
It's not being billed as such, but this Legacy Edition marks the album's 30th anniversary. While country music has changed dramatically since then, Nelson continues to tour like crazy, record nearly constantly, and generally follow his own muse wherever it takes him. In the past few years he has collaborated with artists as diverse as Ryan Adams and Kenny Chesney (surely Timbaland is in line). He rarely writes new material anymore, but continues to reinterpret his own and others' past hits. Generally the songs he chooses are so durable and his style so personal that they allow and even reward countless variations. As such, even more than the sustained narrative of The Red Headed Stranger, Stardust set both the template for Nelson's career and the standard. Few artists have treat the American Songbook so affectionately and so cavalierly.


The Australian psychonauts embark on a two-part mythological synth odyssey. It’s one of their wackiest and most uninhibited records to date.

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: The Silver Cord

The Silver Cord

In 2013, Giorgio Moroder sat down to give Daft Punk some advice. “Once you free your mind about a concept of harmony and of music being correct, you can do whatever you want,” he monologues on “Giorgio by Moroder.” Consider King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard enlightened: They’ve abided by that method for their entire career, yielding microtonal trilogies, thrash metal climate criticism, and occult-themed hip-hop. If you’ve ever wondered Have King Gizzard made a song like this?, chances are they have.
Inspired by Moroder’s free-spirited approach, the Australian sextet presents The Silver Cord, a synth-based improvisational odyssey that retells ancient mythologies. In an echo of the extended remixes Moroder created for stars like Donna Summer and Blondie, the album appears in two forms, one that runs about 30 minutes and the other stretched as thin as possible into 90 minutes. Skeptics might ask why; the band would probably answer, “Why not?” Even 25 albums in, it’s one of their wackiest and most uninhibited records to date.
The 30-minute mix is clearly the more approachable. Twinkling opener “Theia” might trick you into believing The Silver Cord resembles Butterfly 3000, the mid-pandemic Gizz album that sought to escape into a world of lush synth loops. Closer inspection reveals the new album is more like an electrified sibling of Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava, whose mellow, free-flowing songs emerged from open-ended improvisational jam sessions. Though the band has traded guitars, drums, and bass for Rolands, Junos, and Moogs, you can hear familiar techniques, like Michael Cavanagh’s breakneck synth drum fills on “Chang’e” and Stu Mackenzie’s throaty growls on “Gilgamesh.”
The extended mix is where the band really runs wild, creating elaborate imaginings of mythological worlds. It feels most organic on the brighter tracks, like the chameleonic “Theia” (now pushed to 20 minutes), the head-bobbing “Set,” and the celestial “Chang’e.” Named for the Chinese deity who escaped to the moon, “Chang’e” is dreamy and invigorating, with synths that oscillate like waves. In the second half, the tempo rises and the synths pitch up, rocketing to the exosphere; then just when the song threatens to burst, it opens onto a new expanse, as if landing on the lunar surface. The brooding 11-minute version of “Gilgamesh,” on the other hand, drags on with little purpose except to challenge your attention span, and the chants of “Gila! Gila!” feel out of place amid the digital pulses.
The band takes another cue from Moroder with the metallic groove of “Set,” which picks up with a stuttering beat mimicking a turntable scrub. Rapping like a fourth Beastie Boy, Ambrose Kenny-Smith riffs on the Egyptian god of war and chaos with the psilocybin-infused lyricism Gizzard fans have come to expect: “Lucifer inverted/Slender usurper/Piece of work/Struggling stranglehold akin to poison and going for broke.” Certain King Gizzard albums would make welcome trip companions, while others you’d fervently hope to avoid. The Silver Cord lands right in the middle: The band’s retellings of these deities’ stories can be graceful (“Theia,” “Chang’e”) and other times so overwhelming they induce paranoia (“Swan Song,” “Extinction”).
The Silver Cord won’t convince every listener to join King Gizzard’s Phish-like fandom, but it stands out as one of their most playful records in recent years. And compared to some past gimmicks—like an album intended to be played ad infinitum—offering 30- and 90-minute options is practically fan service. Thirteen years into their career, and the band’s stamina is endless. They’ve traversed ancient Mesopotamia to outer space and it still feels like they’re searching for new terrain.


In their seemingly telepathic interplay, the London post-rock trio eschews typical song forms in favor of a kind of collective flickering; their music tracks the process of its creation.

Still House Plants: If I don’t make it, I love u

If I don’t make it, I love u

Whatever ineffable force makes music feel both contained and alive, Still House Plants have it. Their beautifully fractured sound seems made of nerve endings, like the band’s process is on view and we’re hearing the very moment of a Still House Plants song taking shape. The London trio of vocalist Jess Hickie-Kallenbach, guitarist Finlay Clark, and drummer David Kennedy, who met about a decade ago at the Glasgow School of Art, once said they practice only the starts and endings of their songs, which underscores how each one works: as a vessel for abandon.
Is it telepathy that guides them? When Still House Plants made their U.S. debut in New York last spring, they often communicated among themselves with just their eyes. Elongated silences held between notes would put the audience on edge before everything crashed together at exquisitely incongruous angles. On stage as on record, the trio inhabits the free space of punk and the capaciousness of free improvisation at their own frequency.
Like 2020’s Fast Edit, which established Still House Plants as one of the most exciting experimental rock bands around, If I don’t make it, I love u still eschews conventional song forms in favor of a kind of collective flickering, with rhythms that speed and slow by their own logic and carry the persistent charge of small epiphanies. But this is a bolder, clearer, preternaturally vivid iteration of their music; “I’ve been trying to get much stronger,” Hickie-Kallenbach sings on “MORE BOY,” a thesis. Kennedy brings the inquisitiveness of a free-jazz drummer while Clark uses their guitar to synthesize the glimmer of Midwest emo and ’90s slowcore with the choppy minimalism of no wave. Hickie-Kallenbach’s deep, soulful singing suggests Tirzah’s R&B rasp if it were more elastic and ecstatic. The band applies the tropes of electronic music (samples, breaks, loops) in the way they construct, or more accurately deconstruct, songs with only guitar, voice, and drums. A Still House Plants song is a three-way search forward. It’s always a high-wire act.
The album is divided into 11 tracks, but it feels anchored more discernibly by specific moments within songs: notes and tones that make you think, What’s that? The answer might be some unknown glitter in the guitar, or some marvelous friction, like the sparks that punctuate “M M M” or the buzzsaw discord that cuts through “Silver grit passes thru my teeth” like a flash of shoegaze. The melted chords of “Pant” and wobbly edges of “3scr3w3” make me think fleetingly of Autechre (and it’s hard to imagine another band that could simultaneously conjure Autechre and American Football while speaking their own language entirely). On “MORE BOY,” when the drums pick up midway and Hickie-Kallenbach’s singing locks in, ascending over Clark’s chiming guitar, it’s chilling. The singer’s guttural vocals glitch, digging into a repeated phrase, as if she were sampling herself using only her voice. “MORE BOY” also proves Kennedy’s assertion in an interview with The Wire that withholding drum fills “helps in building up a continuous phrase that never finishes,” a liminal sound.
Still House Plants play with an egalitarian ethos; no one instrument dictates how a song moves. “It’s natural to think that the voice sits at the front, the drums drive, and the guitar is like the bricks, but we move all that around quite a lot,” Hickie-Kallenbach recently told The Quietus. Clark said that “it’s important to remember [the guitar] is just metal and wood,” and “not to get too caught up in what a guitar is ‘supposed’ to do.” Perhaps this extends to the way Hickie-Kallenbach’s lyrics, which are often inscrutable, don’t seem to determine what a song is about—as she told The Wire, she distances herself from the mandate to “narrativize” as the vocalist.
But when her words do ring clearly, If I don’t make it, I love u offers a unique mix of mystery and disclosure. “Deeply sensitive, deeply watchful, mostly head down,” Hickie-Kallenbach sings shyly on “no sleep deep risk,” putting a character inside the music’s abstractions; “I really like it my way.” On “M M M,” I’m pretty sure she croons, “I just want my friends to get me/I want most to support them,” between admissions that “I just want to be seen right” and “I wish I was called Makita,” the melisma of “called” lasting five full seconds. This heartfelt sentiment feels just as risky as the improvisatory bones of the music. It emphasizes the intimacy and vulnerability inherent in their cracked-open musical dialogue. The very title of the album is an emotional prism: If I don’t make it, I love u could be what you’d say to a friend when you’re not sure if you’ll make their birthday party, or it could be the most tragic text message ever composed.
There are precedents for Still House Plants’ postmodern collage and fragmentation. This is the process-oriented essence of ’70s post-punk, prioritizing deconstructed sounds over impossible wholeness—a fractured aesthetic for our fractured, plural selves. Still House Plants have cited other ’90s and early-’00s math-rock and slowcore influences (like Bedhead, Life Without Buildings, and Red House Painters, who inspired their band name). Yet to fixate on the past feels at odds with the unfixed music. If Still House Plants truly evoke anything about those predecessors, it’s how firmly their vision feels of its time—not only in the fevered assembly and unraveling of their stylistic melange, but in the fusion of emotional candor, electronic technique, and conceptual art strategies.
It speaks further to Still House Plants’ rare power that this record comes out via a tiny UK label called Bison, which was created after its founder, an employee of London avant-garde music hub Cafe Oto, saw a 2016 set by the band and established the imprint to release their debut. Maybe the space inside the tracks allows us to bring what we want to the music, but I associate Still House Plants with the conditions of how I first heard them, a time when my mind and heart were rearranging themselves with the stark, uneasy clarity of a new beginning. Note by note, If I don’t make it, I love u seems pitched to that generative, indeterminate energy. “It’s hard to know about anything,” Hickie-Kallenbach sings on “Pant.” “But feeling is good by me.”


Ernest Greene floats back into the slipstream with an album of innocuous, Balearic-influenced makeout jams that sound lush but are mostly empty on the inside.

Purple Noon

Ernest Greene seemed like he was finally about to turn a corner on 2017’s Mister Mellow. He switched labels, moving from the long-running Seattle indie Sub Pop to the more beat-oriented label Stones Throw, and shapeshifted samples from crate-digger classics, resulting in an album that felt plucked from the speakers at some chic beachside bar. He wasn’t shattering zeitgeists or anything, but he’d roughed up and tripped out his sound a little bit, creating an album that felt properly realized. His new record, Purple Noon, has Greene back at Sub Pop and opting to make a more streamlined album of innocuous makeout jams; background music that you can put on and forget about. The resulting record is one that feels distilled, extraordinarily meandering, and sometimes too chill even for Greene, the godfather of chillwave.
A great Washed Out track is one that rejiggers and reimagines otherwise forgotten dance music. Usually this means some combination of sleazy Italo Disco, cultish disco tracks, and funk from the ‘70s and ‘80s. On Purple Noon, Greene seems most interested in yachty Balearic pop, and the results are mixed. “Face Up” is laden with plenty of oohs and ahs, cavernous bass, and whopper-sized production flourishes, the blue-eyed song is sterile, and feels true to its Balearic inclinations. There is, however, something unusually anesthetic about the song; it feels impersonal, hollow, and noxiously relaxing. There is little to no scaffolding here, and the track gives off the vibe of a muzak playing in an empty office building.
Greene has always been a bit of an impressionistic songwriter, writing short, simple morsels of verse. Most of these songs are about the dissolution of a mercurial relationship with a lover. On “Paralyzed,” he sings about their amazing chemistry, and how much he longs to see her again. “Each time I think about/You doing those things that drive me wild/Makes me go crazy at the thought,” he coos, like a lost member of the Rat Pack, over a celestial synthesizer and a lazy drum machine loop. The pulsating “Reckless Desires” is meant to be listened to while wearing a pair of boat shoes with a coupe of champagne in hand. Pretty to the touch, Greene isn’t sure what to do about his love interest once again. “You find yourself in someone’s bed again/The lies begin to start/And our story falls apart,” sings Greene tearfully. The statement conveys a sense of intense longing, but there is such a lack of substance in the details.
Purple Noon is missing that joy of discovery that makes Greene a compelling artist. He is at his best when he takes elements of eclectic music from the past and bounces them off his otherwise relaxing sound beds. He shines when he successfully reinterprets the music he is excited about, and that does not happen at all on this record. Diving into Balearic music here seems too obvious for Greene, there is not enough high-contrast tinkering for the results of this record to be anything other than expected. On his past records, Greene has mixed oil and vinegar together, creating music with a satisfying difference in density that might be chill but is never boring. What we have on Purple Noon is more like the product of mixing two different tomato sauces together and then adding a dash of some vaguely horny, cursed relationship drama into the mix. Over a decade into his career, Greene is more than capable of producing technically interesting music that comes across as deceptively simple. Unfortunately, Purple Noon falters and feels too safe and lacking in substance.

Buy: Rough Trade
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For their first release in seven years, Garbage faced a conundrum similar to that of many artists who found success in the alt-rock 1990s: Do you update your approach to conform to a more contemporary sound, or do you keep partying like it's 1998?

Not Your Kind of People

I don't know how long it's been since you've listened to Garbage's best and biggest albums, but there's a good chance that 1995's self-titled debut and 1998's Version 2.0 are more brutal than you remember. The former is all sneering, lapsed-Catholic angst (on "Vow", a scorned Shirley Manson compares herself to "Jesus Christ coming back from the dead" and utters the words like they're curdling in her mouth) and dark sensuality ("This is what he pays me for," she breathes on the early single "Queer", "I'll show you how it's done"). Version 2.0 focused even more on internal demons: There's the forlorn "Medication", the asphyxial trip-hop of "Hammering in My Head", and the feel-good anxiety disorder anthem of the 90s, "I Think I'm Paranoid". Duke Erikson, Steve Marker, and Butch Vig supplied the sort of relentlessly keyed-up, cranked-to-11 racket you get with a band full of producers, matching Manson's macabre with a persistent sense of unease. "When I grow up, I'll be stable," went the optimistic refrain of one of their bigger radio hits, but those familiar with the deep cuts knew that was wishful thinking.
Garbage reigned in the late-period glory days of alternative-rock radio, probably because their sound was a hectic amalgamation of almost everything that mingled on the format's airwaves: electronica, punk, industrial rock, grunge, and the occasional trip-hop. But given the recent decline of the alt-rock format, the radio station on which you first heard Garbage's big hits probably changed formats years ago. So when Garbage entered the studio to record Not Your Kind of People, their first release in seven years, they faced a conundrum that many other artists who found success in the alt-rock-crazed 90s are dealing with, too: Do you update your approach to conform to a more contemporary sound? Or do you say fuck it and just party like it's 1998?
We got a hint of Garbage's answer earlier this year, when Manson called off plans for a solo album because her label wanted it to have a poppier, more radio-ready sound. ("Too noir," Geffen Records said of the demos. When she later scrapped the record, she issued a public statement: "We had the funeral…it made such a beautiful corpse that we had an open casket.") And, indeed, Not Your Kind of People is in some respects a return to form for Garbage. The material is tighter and more kinetic than their last two records, the relatively tepid Beautiful Garbage (2001) and Bleed Like Me (2005). There's the exhilarating opener "Automatic System Habit", which finds Manson spitting venom over a steely crunch of keyboards and percussion ("Not for you, not for me, not for your other lover/ I won't be your dirty little secret.") On the gentler side, there's the lush "Felt", which buries her vocals under an avalanche of arena-sized Siamese Dream guitars. It's a soothing moment on the otherwise pummeling record but, characteristically, Manson can't help but sound a little sinister as she sings, "They're only feelings, baby."
Growing up hasn't made Garbage any more stable. Their music is still focused primarily on pain and darkness, so much so that it occasionally feels rote, as on the melodramatic, predictable "I Hate Love". Then there's the unfortunate finale "Beloved Freak", a brooding ballad that ends with Manson reprising "This Little Light of Mine". It's a moment that aims for catharsis but veers into the maudlin. Though not without highlights, Not Your Kind of People contains nothing as memorable as their big hits, and it's heavier on the filler than their earlier albums.
The great irony of alternative rock was how relative that term is; as Thomas Frank once asked in the title of an essay about the whole phenomenon, "Alternative to What?" In the mid-to-late 90s, Garbage didn't feel so much in opposition to the times as they did a frenzied synthesis of everything that was happening in rock at the moment. That'd be a harder task to accomplish now, in more sonically diffuse times, but now-ness is no longer Garbage's aim. "It's not our job to reinvent the wheel," Manson said in a recent interview, reflecting on the new album. "That's the playground of the young." So Not Your Kind of People is a statement from a band that's stuck, combatively, to its guns. The times have changed but Garbage haven't, and now, for better and for worse, they've at last become alternative to everything.


Continuing in the tradition of 2003/04's double-shot of Want One and Want Two, Release the Stars finds this singer-songwriter flitting between opposite poles-- lovestruck and glib, opulent and gimmicky, overblown and undercooked-- with rumpled uncertainty.

Release the Stars

After a decade-long career and five albums, Rufus Wainwright's best work is still ahead of him. His heritage implies this; much like his father Loudon and his mother, Kate McGarrigle-- as well as spiritual contemporaries ranging from Randy Newman to Van Morrison-- Wainwright is cut from the cloth of songwriter for whom youth isn't an essential component of creativity. A quick scan through Wainwright's discography reveals he often falters when he self-consciously asserts his age. Whether in occasionally cringeworthy attempts to massage fragments of popular culture into his comi-tragedies (see 2003's "Vibrate", on which he crooned "My phone's on vibrate for you") or his increasing propensity for folding rock music into his otherwise anachronistic cabaret pop, Wainwright generally works best when he's trying to be outside of his time, not of it.
Continuing in the tradition of 2003/04's double-shot of Want One and Want Two, Release the Stars finds Wainwright flitting between opposite poles-- lovestruck and glib, opulent and gimmicky, overblown and undercooked-- with rumpled uncertainty. To be fair, it doesn't take much to locate the source of his wanderings; unlike most new artists, Wainwright came out of the gate with an incredibly assured aesthetic. Both his 1998 self-titled debut and his 2001 follow-up Poses were remarkably developed records-- the former establishing his way with a wending, operatic arrangement; the latter proving his songs nicely amenable to tidy flourishes of 70s AOR. Since then, whether out of boredom, excitement, or desire for the mainstream acceptance he's so frequently pined for, Wainwright's expanded his sound, tempering his natural inclination towards opulence with different song styles and textures, always with mixed results.
A theatre buff, Wainwright has always known the value of a good opener, and Release the Stars is no exception. "Why does it always have to be fire and brimstone?" he wonders in the explosive curtain-raiser "Do I Disappoint You", which itself sounds a bit like five orchestras playing out the second coming. That's followed by first single "Going to a Town", which balances simple piano chords against a uncommonly pointed lyric: "I'm going to a town that has already been burnt down/ I'm going to a place that has already been disgraced/ I'm gonna see some folks who have already been let down/ I'm so tired of America." With all kinds of satisfying variations and twists on the main melody, it's the rare political song that actually hits its mark, and is easily the album's highlight.
As is often the case, Wainwright's ballads account for a disproportionate amount of the standout moments. With its gentle turns of phrase and slow string arrangements, "Nobody's Off the Hook" recalls what still might be his finest single song, 2001's "Poses". Elsewhere, "Leaving For Paris No. 2" finds Wainwright at his most lovelorn, wrenching a meandering ballad out of a churning piano motif.
As he's always been better about writing about romance than sex, there are some clunkers to contend with as well. None of are more forgettable than the tepid bar-room rock of "Between My Legs", in which a small army of lite rock guitar peels soundtrack Wainwright "shedding a tear" you know where. Meanwhile, allegedly based on Wainwright's one-night stand with the Killers' Brandon Flowers, "Tulsa" opens with a killer jab ("You taste of potato chips in the morning/ Your face has the Marlon Brando club calling") and descends into self-aware pointlessness. Even worse is "Slideshow", a six-minute epic that rests on a ludicrously overwrought refrain: "And I better be prominently featured in your next slideshow."
Such frequent attempts to elevate the banal into the meaningful ultimately keep Release the Stars from achieving any significant momentum and only add weight to the notion that Wainwright's shaky aim-- rather than his lack of talent-- might be his biggest downfall. Nonetheless, it's hard to take away from what he's already accomplished. At only 33, he's quietly amassed a body of work, the best of which rivals most of his singer/songwriter contemporaries. If we do ever get that masterpiece, it'll be straight icing.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we explore Bob Dylan’s masterful comeback, 1997’s Time Out of Mind.

Time Out of Mind

Not long after attending the California funeral of his friend Jerry Garcia, Bob Dylan found himself snowbound at his Minnesota farm. He would listen to the storms and write after the sun sank from the winter sky. Those songs turned the cold environment into a crystalline lens on the tiring world—a place that was “not dark yet, but getting there,” where “the blues [were] wrapped around my head.”
What Dylan had left to say or whether he had any enthusiasm left for saying it had, for a while, been unclear. Seven years had passed since he had released an original new tune, and that album, Under the Red Sky, was a near-catastrophe, scuttling what had seemed a comeback after Dylan crept through his polarizing ’80s evangelism. He had grown disillusioned with the cycle of writing and recording, he later said, and simply wanted to play.
During the ’90s, he issued two solo acoustic albums of earnest, sometimes poignant renditions of American standards, delighting those who had pined for the lost days of the folk kid from Greenwich Village. But coffeehouse covers hadn’t made Dylan a spark of resistance in the ’60s or a source of bittersweet reckonings with reality in the ’70s. He had become a legacy act, accruing lifetime achievement laurels and touring his hits for Boomers in khakis. Possibly for the first time in his career, Dylan was beginning to blend into the scenery.
But months after Garcia’s funeral, Dylan approached the audacious producer Daniel Lanois. Since helming the contentious sessions for what many had prematurely considered Dylan’s actual comeback, 1989’s half-stepping Oh Mercy, Lanois had cut U2’s Achtung Baby and Emmylou Harris’ Wrecking Ball, a wondrously atmospheric abstraction of the singer’s gorgeous and aging country vision. In a New York hotel room, Dylan read Lanois the lyrics and asked him if he had a record. “I said, ‘Yes, Bob, I think we’ve got a record,’” Lanois remembered with a sly laugh during a recent phone call.
Dylan sent Lanois home with a list of reference records to study—Charley Patton, Little Walter, Little Willie John, a mix of ragged blues and primordial rock. “I listened to these records, and I understood,” Lanois wrote in his memoir, Soul Mining. “A new birth with the old dogs under your arm, like a stack of classic books.” In the end, that rebirth was Time Out of Mind, Dylan’s 30th album and one that doesn’t sound much like the basic blues at all. Instead, it is an essential post-modern reappraisal of them, an experimental consideration of what could become of the blues’ sound and spirit and a mutual communion of articulate, exquisite despair. At the last minute, Lanois took Dylan’s blurry snapshot for the cover of Time Out of Mind; on tape, that’s exactly how he had captured him.
The next year was a reminder of what Dylan said he despised about making records—extended seaside sessions on the Atlantic and the Pacific, guitars smashed in anger, a militia of Nashville crackerjacks and world-class session players who had to be told more than once to play a lot less. Lanois and Dylan fought like hell in the parking lot of the Miami studio where they recorded, but after more than half a year and many mixes, overdubs, and lyrical revisions, Time Out of Mind—11 songs that would transform Dylan from seemingly obsolete icon to wise, wizened visionary almost overnight—was finished. And then Dylan nearly died.
Four months before Time Out of Mind arrived and just days after his 56th birthday, Dylan was admitted into a Los Angeles hospital after persistent chest pains that suggested a heart attack. Instead, acute pulmonary histoplasmosis—a nasty fungal infection caused by bird-and-bat feces in the country’s most fertile river valleys—had inflamed the covering around his heart and nearly killed him. “I really thought I’d be seeing Elvis soon,” he said later. For weeks between his hospital release and the album’s release, Dylan was bedridden, emerging just in time to play for the pope in Rome and sit for a series of high-profile interviews that inquired not only about his near-death experience but also that of his career.
Dylan’s brush with Elvis made for an easy press hook, especially given the twilit misery of Time Out of Mind. In its four-star review, Rolling Stone noted the album “confront[-ed] his advancing years and the prospects of failing health.” In a moment of too-soon chicanery, Newsweek’s cover joked “Dylan Lives.”
But Time Out of Mind is not merely about death, though its inevitability looms at the periphery of these songs with the certainty of the setting sun; sometimes, death even seems for Dylan like the easy, desirous exit. Instead, Time Out of Mind is about dealing with life and its itinerant lows, knowing how it will all end, anyway. The blues become an emotional state of being.  Through the cobwebs of his beleaguered voice, Dylan musters all the feelings of losing love, full of pride and insanity and lust and violence and humor, implicitly navigating the five stages of grief.
He writes with the hardened edge of Hemingway, trying to cloak feelings with callouses and sweetening his bitterness with a dash of wit. A portrait of the sometimes-awful truth about life and love, Time Out of Mind stands alongside Mark Rothko’s so-called Black Paintings, conceived in poor health just before he killed himself, for its ability to stand at the lip of an abyss and stare into it. If you look long enough at the Rothko or listen closely to the Dylan, the most unexpected shapes will eventually stumble out of the dark.
Dylan begins in a bout of denial. At the start of “Love Sick,” he shuffles through empty streets in the rain, a tangle of warped guitar, haunted organs, and faint drums aptly framing his bleak mood. He is mad at the world, judging its smiling people and castigating its illusion of happiness. “I’m sick of love/I wish I’d never met you,” he calmly seethes in the closing chorus, addressing his ire not at anyone in particular but at the idea of human connection at large. “I’m sick of love/I’m trying to forget you.”
But the first five minutes of “Love Sick,” which sound so preternaturally cool and ultimately unaffected that the song was immortalized in a Victoria’s Secret advertisement, are purely a pose. After Dylan sashays through that last refrain, he collapses into the confession that sets the tone for most of Time Out of Mind: “Just don’t know what to do/I’d give anything to be with you,” he sings, his voice now curdled. The band pulls back from the pulse and lets the melody dangle against the open air, as if they too are surprised by the sudden candor of their maestro. This is the moment where we get to the heart of Time Out of Mind, where Dylan crawls inside his own depression.
For most of the next 70 minutes, that’s where he stays: Dylan’s misery is so exhaustive that, during “Dirt Road Blues,” he turns the sight of a rainbow into an instance of pain. Elsewhere, parties give him headaches. He is alternately cold and broke, hot and aimless. “It’s such a sad thing to see beauty decay,” he half-howls during “Cold Irons Bound,” an aired litany of grievances that finds him losing most everything he holds sacred. “It’s sadder still to feel your heart turn away.”
Dylan hits rock-bottom during a duo of creeping existential crises, mercifully separated here by a swaggering barroom prowl. During “Not Dark Yet,” he tells us he has been to “London… and ‘gay Paree,’” reminders that he is a worldly sort who has had success and lived well. But here he is, shattered by the most pedestrian of things—love, or the loss of it—and tragically concluding “There’s not even room enough to be anywhere.” A decade before, he was coming down from his great Christian awakening. Now, he doesn’t “even hear the murmur of a prayer.” How could he fall further?
Lanois’ production has often been criticized for warping Dylan’s voice too much, for burying it in a cloud of effects. In early Time Out of Mind demos and outtakes, after all, Dylan practically sounds like Etta James, riding on top of his blues; on the record itself, he is pushing the words upward as an act of mere survival, letting them out so he can breathe back in. But the pervading murk of “Not Dark Yet” is exactly what these lyrics demand. As with the transmuted blues of Loren Connors or Grouper, Lanois lets Dylan flicker at the threshold of existence here, giving his troubles a sense of mortal urgency.
“Trying to Get to Heaven” is about being uncomfortable with everything and everyone everywhere—kicked out of Missouri, given false consolation in New Orleans, taken for a ride to nowhere in Baltimore. In the end, he simply falls asleep to escape inside his dreams, a world that now seems as concrete and meaningful as the actual people around him.
Strange as it may sound, “Trying to Get to Heaven” has long felt inspirational, given the subsequent arc of Dylan’s career. “When you think that you’ve lost everything/You find out you can always lose a little more,” he half-grunts toward the end, reaching the apogee of his sadness. But Time Out of Mind won three Grammys and kick-started Dylan’s true second coming—a string of self-produced, hyper-stylized albums that turned his love of the blues, standards, and literature into impressionistic, intricate Americana and helped him on his way to a Pulitzer. In your grimmest moments, just remember how near-death Dylan sounds here—and exactly how much life he actually had left.
Even deep in his own hurt, Dylan maintains a sense of pride, hoping to preserve some dignity as he approaches his end. Amid the sad, stately waltz of “Standing in the Doorway,” he tells his best lie: “I would be crazy if I took you back,” he sings, the slide guitars curling beneath him like confused question marks. “It would go up against every rule.” This is what he is supposed to say, of course, to save face when the entire album is about how not getting her back will be his ruin. Who hasn’t been here before—completely despondent, but trying to pretend you’ve got the upper hand in some romantic standoff?
This is the softer, more playful side of Dylan’s anger, but it occasionally flashes into hints of violence. When he croons “Don’t know if I saw you, if I’d kiss you or kill you” early in the album, it feels like a lonely abstraction, a what-if penned from a distance. By record’s end, though, it has morphed into real menace. Breathing fast, pulse racing, he’s doing his best to hold himself together during “Can’t Wait,” trying not to lash out or do something he will live to regret. The guitars slash, and the organs roar, fighting the same urge to explode. “If I ever saw you comin’, I don’t know what I might do,” he yells as best he can. “I’d like to think I could control myself, but it isn’t true.” His sadness, at last, has beaten his civility.
In spite of its presiding gloom, Time Out of Mind actually delivered a new Dylan standard—his first hit in decades and a song that has become almost as ubiquitous as “Like a Rolling Stone” or “Forever Young,” even if he mostly hasn’t been the one to sing it. A month before Time Out of Mind arrived, Billy Joel turned the spare ballad “Make You Feel My Love” into a bombastic, string-swept single, shouting the lyrics and howling behind the harmonica like it was he who stepped onstage at Newport in 1965. Twin versions by Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood soundtracked the 1998 rom-com Hope Floats, while takes from Neil Diamond, Ed Sheeran, and Kelly Clarkson have followed. But it was Adele’s piano-and-cello lament—and its subsequent appearance on “Britain’s Got Talent”—that turned Dylan’s ostensible love song into an international standard and, according to Adele, made Dylan at least a million pounds in a year.
But what is there on Time Out of Mind to suggest that Dylan had suddenly turned soft for three minutes, that he would dip so smoothly into guileless piano ballads? Absolutely nothing. In the preceding song, he’s so tormented his crops are dying and all his friends are traitors; in the next song, he wonders again if he could control his violent impulses if he encountered his paramour. This isn’t the sort of person who shuffles over to the piano and readily forgives. This is the sort of person your friends warn you about, the guy who shows up drunk at 3 a.m. and slurs drunken promises as he bullies the doorbell.
All the song’s romantic images about warm embraces and dried tears and self-sacrifice are purely hypothetical, things he “could” do if the subject would simply submit to his advances already. In the five stages of grief, this is bargaining, and it’s a particularly nasty business here. “I know you haven’t made your mind up yet, but I would never do you wrong,” he pleads, the trace of guilt in his voice vanishing as quickly as it appeared. He makes his demand clear. “I’ve known it from the moment that we met/No doubt in my mind where you belong.” In context, “Make You Feel My Love” is not a romantic bauble; it is an ironclad threat in a velvet glove, one final attempt to force love from the listener at any cost.
The Dylan faithful largely hated “Make You Feel My Love” from the start. Ian Bell—the late British journalist and exhaustive Dylan analyst—quipped that the song “should have been shipped off instantly, gratis, to Billy Joel, Garth Brooks, and the rest of the balladeers who would take the vapid things to their sentimental hearts.” It is a song worth reconsidering, though, not in Joel’s mawkish translation or even Adele’s austere one but instead in its original setting. Those famous covers alternately sound triumphant or plaintive, suitable enough for a standalone single.
But even as Dylan plays tender piano above a pillow-top organ, he sounds absolutely broken, the cracks of his voice widening into chasms. There’s occasionally a whisper of percussion and a distant acoustic guitar lick, but he’s mostly left to wrestle these feelings himself. This is the real pit of his desperation, concealed to read like romance in order to save face. It is an essential piece of this picture, a last-ditch attempt for sanity from someone who has lost control.
In the end, Dylan pulls himself together, at least enough to survive for a while longer. Time Out of Mind ends with “Highlands,” a brilliant and occasionally hilarious 17-minute shuffle that frames life’s endless numbered days as a string of largely meaningless moments. “Feel like I'm driftin’, driftin’ from scene to scene,” Dylan mumbles in a monotone fit for someone who has simply resigned himself to exist. “I’m wonderin’ what in the devil could it all possibly mean.” He listens to Neil Young, avoids a sad dog, ponders his wardrobe, envies young people, and details an awkward encounter with a waitress in a Boston café that paints him as an artist perennially uncomfortable with his audience. All the while, he daydreams of the Scottish Highlands and its verdant scenery—for him, heaven, or “where I'll be when I get called home.” He understands his age and fate, even if he longs for youth. Without the ballast of his love, this moribund acceptance becomes his life.
The total craft of Time Out of Mind, the dry spell that preceded it, and the saga that produced it collectively serve a cautionary function. If you hadn’t given up on Dylan by 1997, you were either a zealot who would eke merit from most anything he made or a casual fan who had stopped paying enough attention to have a strong opinion. But the sophistication and nuance of Time Out of Mind work only because Dylan had become a wunderkind, gone electric, faced backlash, crashed his motorcycle, wrecked his marriages, found his faith, faltered in it, fathered a family, seen his kid become a rock star, lost old friends, wavered in relevance, and wondered if he cared about any of it anymore at all. The extra grain in his voice, the lessons of his words, the disorienting blur of his band: It is the sublimated sound of actual pain, lived and analyzed and announced in songs that show you exactly how dark the world can get.
Time Out of Mind feels like the antithesis of our pervasive need to have an opinion about everything all the time. It is a reflection on a life lived, not a reaction to someone else’s ideas. There’s a place for both, as Dylan’s own brash, youthful songs made clear a half-century ago. The difference is one of insight, of 55 years of life slowly distilled into wisdom. Everything won’t be alright, but desolation can be its own unlikely source of triumph. Dylan had a grief that gave him nowhere to go but the grave—or, as he did, onward.


The New Zealand musician’s third album is a collision of hard electronics with a touch of R&B. Though it contains moments of great power, it sounds like a work that’s stuck between two places.

Primal Heart

It’s been four years since Kimbra released The Golden Echo, her audacious and futuristic second album, one that established her beyond just the other voice on Gotye’s 2012 hit “Somebody That I Used to Know.” That LP further ensconced the New Zealander born Kimbra Lee Johnson as a one-woman odd-pop machine; a producer, an arranger, a multi-instrumentalist, and a unique dynamo vocalist. Oddly, there has been little fanfare around the release of its follow-up Primal Heart.
Perhaps tellingly, this album comes at a transitional point in her live show. Kimbra has pared down her prior set-up with a full band to just a small rig where she programs beats alongside only two shrouded players. Her intention is to arrive at a simplistic core, relying majorly upon digital sounds. Outside of tour, she’s built her own studio in her new home of New York (since The Golden Echo, she’s moved from Los Angeles) and she’s further indulged her technical geekery alongside co-producer John Congleton, known for his work with St. Vincent and Nelly Furtado, among others.
Kimbra insists that she’s given herself time for a more vulnerable phase of artistic growth. Her intention has been to strip away the bombast and locate her raw essence, hence the title Primal Heart. The results show that she’s still unable to let her ideas breathe without suffocating them beneath layers of quirks and tricks. Despite the protracted process, the album sounds like a work that’s stuck between two places; reaching for a larger audience but clinging on to her offbeat nuances. In its quieter minutes, even Kimbra seems to have realized this. “Version of Me,” a standout, is a soft ballad that positions Kimbra at her most exposed. She sings about the human truth of never being the finished article. “There’s a better version of myself/Stay for the person I’ll be,” she pleads of a love interest. She could be asking the same question of her audience, or even of herself.
Primal Heart is a collision of hard electronics with light sprinkles of au courant R&B making for Kimbra’s most mainstream statement yet. And though she’s described her approach in making this album as being one of “radical fearlessness,” the album contains only a few moments of power. On lead single “Everybody Knows,” she sings with great conviction about being “young and gullible.” It’s the sonic accompaniment to a Tumblr post she wrote last October about experiences she and friends have had as women in studio environments. Conversely on “Human,” she juxtaposes that individualism by pining for another’s affections and validation to survive. The track happily reinvents a classic soul sound with little percussive ticks and booms, providing strong evidence of what Primal Heart can be when the songs are restricted in scope and home in on one intention.
However, her most ambitious efforts don’t quite reach their apex, causing her somewhat cocky assertions to land flat. On “Top of the World,” she semi-raps over a Skrillex-assisted beat that builds to a climax about limitless success. “Talk like I be the Messiah,” she says, with excessive hubris. It’s the kind of statement you want to root for by such a hugely talented artist. Her vocal delivery, however, isn’t fierce enough to pull it off. Other than a few attention-grabbing choruses, the results are largely limp.


Beneath a shroud of dry ice and woodsmoke, the UK producer’s new record discards the conventional cadences of dance music.

Dismantled Into Juice EP

The words inked across Blawan’s knuckles—KICK DRUM—offer shorthand to the UK producer’s credo: a paean to the life force that is rhythm, the pulse at the heart of all things. The heart, of course, is also a muscle, and Blawan—real name Jamie Roberts—has spent the past 13 years sculpting percussion with a boxer’s obsessive focus. His drums (often, his tracks are nothing but drums) are big, bruising things, swollen with ill will and latent violence. Behind every beat lies the threat of a knockout blow.
But Blawan’s latest EP, the thrilling and bewildering Dismantled Into Juice, complicates things. It is one of the heaviest records of his catalog, yet those kick drums are practically nowhere to be found. Rather than the elegant symmetry of the four-on-the-floor, the record evokes a maelstrom of distributed violence. Rhythm as matrix, rhythm as mesh; a sticky web of mayhem bobbing in the breeze, snaring everything that comes close.
Take the opening “Toast.” The vibe is jittery, over-caffeinated; the drums thrash in spasms, fibrillating wildly, kick and snare locked in a vicious shoving match. Paroxysms of rolling toms establish a bizarre call-and-response pattern with gurgling rave stabs, like a machine gun in conversation with a water fountain. Warps in the groove give the impression that the tempo is perpetually speeding and slowing in bursts, like an industrial-strength YKK yanked back and forth across battered rows of interlocking teeth. There’s something almost cartoonish about the song’s lumbering motion, but where tracks like Pearson Sound’s “Earwig” or Pangaea’s “Bone Sucka” are spirited and goofy, “Toast” just sounds deranged.
“Panic” is even heavier, riding a bass-fueled bulldozer that recalls the Bug’s speaker-shredding low end. This time, Blawan shifts his attention from rhythm to texture. His drums sound like they’ve been hollowed out by termites; the high end quivers like crinkled cellophane. “Body Ramen” does even more with the same damaged patina. On the surface, it’s an almost-conventional mix of halftime beat and Knife-like trance arpeggios, but the real action is in the sandpapery surface, the gravelly pocks in the varnish. Despite the sound design’s cataclysmic crunch, there’s a weird clarity to it—most of the frequencies have been sucked out of the mixdown, leaving pockets of severe highs and crisp mids silhouetted over an ominous, ultra-low throb.
The textural fuckery extends to the vocals, which are credited to one Monstera Black, but sound, in their abrasion and confusion, like the output of an AI. Swaddling a dulcet refrain in the close, clammy reverb of a clogged drainpipe, “You Can Build Me” toggles between sweetly major-key passages and rude explosions of atonal bluster. Everyone knows that Cocteau Twins represent the apotheosis of dream pop, but what this track presupposes is, maybe they were actually an industrial sludge band?
“Dismantled Into Juice,” whose bubbling sounds seem to have dropped us directly into a witch’s boiling cauldron, is the most batshit of them all, not so much for its charred vocal melody but for the tricks it plays on the timekeeping. Set to a brisk andante, the swinging rhythm glides easily yet doesn’t quite make sense. It’s like two contradictory gaits fused into lockstep, a three-legged race that’s jaunty and determined, tottering and lithe, all at once.
It’s this counterintuitive approach to rhythm that makes Blawan’s record so dazzling: Beneath a shroud of dry ice and woodsmoke, he has completely discarded the conventional cadences of dance music. There’s nothing here you could easily call house or techno or drum’n’bass, nothing that shows even the slightest interest in familiar templates. Since the nascent days of jungle, UK dance music has always been about switching up the beat, throwing fresh kinks in the syncopation—finding new places to put the kick drum, basically. In that sense, Dismantled Into Juice is part of a long, proud tradition of UK club tracks that turn the dancefloor on its ear. Blawan’s two-fisted attack flips it much further, and more giddily, than usual.


The East New York rapper’s complicated relationship with wealth, poverty, and his neighborhood fuels his debut, an album about what happens when you leave home in search of fame and money.

I Can't Go Home

Brooklyn’s East New York neighborhood, like so many neighborhoods in the city, was once ravaged by the crack epidemic. As dealers supplied junkies and prompted violent crime, a community long crippled by poverty, negligence, and disenfranchisement became a forgotten public housing cesspool. As recently as 2011, the neighborhood had the highest murder rate in New York City. These surroundings raised Jimi Tents and sharpened his critical eye.
Now, the poor Brooklyn neighborhood has become the darling of city officials and private investors, a pearl to be pried from a clam shell of minority indigence. Earlier this year, East New York was deemed the “hottest new neighborhood” in the city, inspired by rezoning and speculation. Dubbed “gentrification’s last frontier” by Curbed, the old East New York is vanishing. However it may change, this is Jimi Tents’ home, and he’s constantly wrestling with what exactly that means to him, for the neighbors being pushed out, and for the invaders doing the pushing.
It’s nearly impossible to listen to I Can’t Go Home without thinking about the transition of East New York. Gentrification and reclamation are big forces in his world, and Tents is the mouthpiece for local dreamers. There’s a certain stress charging each bar, producing high-powered raps that flex in and out of breaths. The strain of bearing the hope of others, and carrying a place with you wherever you go can be taxing, but it can be inspiring, too. In 2015, gentrification hit Jimi close to home when his childhood residence faced foreclosure. The album’s title can be read as a relation of this painful truth, but the lyrics suggest otherwise: within brews a homegrown resilience, as a prodigy refuses to return from his rap quest empty handed.
Jimi writes carefully-worded stories, unpacking where his pursuit of fame has taken him. Upward mobility often means dislocation for the people below, and as he evaluates his own hunger for affluence, he mourns those being displaced by WASPs with similar ambitions. On the skittering dash “Right Now (I Wanna Interlude),” Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock’s “I wanna rock right now” goes from casual profession of skill to exasperated imperative. Sometimes he raps like he’s pursuing entry into an imaginary hall of fame, sometimes he raps like he has no choice. The dichotomy produces breathtaking displays of timing and finesse.
When Jimi Tents broke through with his 5 O’Clock Shadow EP, he came off as a proud New Yorker who refused to shackle himself to the plagues of the city’s contemporary rap scene. Many of those conversations were internal and without geotags, more universal ruminations on police brutality and depression. Each song on I Can’t Go Home spirals outward from Brooklyn, considering his brief career arc in the bigger picture and placing it in context. The album’s most powerful moments, confessionals like “Should’ve Called, Pt. 2” and “Below the Surface” with Saba, pulse with life as Jimi explores his city, his relationships with the people in it, and how they shape his outlook.
On the surface of opener “NY vs. LA,” the track merely balances local promise against bicoastal aspirations. But in the fringes, Jimi can’t help but think about how his actions affect the folks back home, and subsequently, just how much of the process is in his control. Intricate ideas are broken down into their simplest components. On “No Looking Back (Glance),” he raps, “Left my hood with no problem/Left my home for the squatters,” a single lyric that balances the culpability of black flight and gentrification in the reshaping of poor neighborhoods like his. There’s always an underlying sense of responsibility as if he’s wondering what role he plays in society’s systems, particularly the ones dismantling his home. Even after experiencing the violence of commerce first hand, he still surrenders to his desires on “The Shining,” where a gospel staple becomes a critique of materialism: “This little light of mine/Shine a little different/Bright as I am, I am still victim/To buying, buying/I’m materialistic/Cause being broke hurts to feel, nigga.”
For 42 minutes, Jimi considers the tangle of poverty and wealth, his complicated relationship with his home fueling his richest work. His raps expand and unwind to suit any circumstance with a wide-ranging series of elastic flows that coil around the beat. I Can’t Go Home is a statement album, but not in the way it’s meant to be: like an eyewitness account from the frontlines of a shifting neighborhood, delivered by a rapper tracing his path from the projects to fame, and measuring the potential costs. If home truly is where the heart is, then there’s so much at stake when you lose it.


Swedish pop duo Galantis are gleeful vocal manipulators who have written for the likes of Britney Spears and Icona Pop. On their new LP, their maximalism takes on the halting sounds of tropical house.

The Aviary

The Swedish duo of Linus Eklöw and Christian Karlsson, aka Galantis, specialize in making familiar-sounding dance pop with heavily obscured singers. Independently, Eklöw co-wrote Icona Pop’s breakout “I Love It” and also works under the moniker Style of Eye; Karlsson is one-third of the dance pop act Miike Snow. They are both vets of scenes—deep house and pop—where vocal manipulation is a standard approach: a way to concoct peculiar emotional valences. Together, they gleeful scramble frequencies as if to stay ahead of codebreakers.
Their debut EP crumpled Britney Spears—who’s worked with Karlsson since “Toxic”—into a sigh and launched her into orbit. “Runaway (U & I),” the biggest hit off Galantis’ 2015 release Pharmacy, pitched English singer-songwriter Cathy Dennis low on the verses and Sweden’s Julia Karlsson (no relation) to a child’s range on the chorus. Pharmacy’s other big hit was the soul stomper “Peanut Butter Jelly,” in which they desiccated Dragonette frontwoman Martina Sorbara’s vocal, then pumped it full of hot air, the better to match its Steely Dan-indebted mix of privilege and menace: “Sleepless nights at the chateau/Visualize it/I’ll give you something to do.”
On The Aviary, Eklöw and Karlsson are still calling from the same playbooks. Now, though, the halting pings of tropical house largely supplant Pharmacy’s four-on-the-floor synths. It may be a necessary update, but sometimes it’s the frame for flimsy structures. The creeping “Hunter” is a lyrical mess: “Got them red eyes in the night,” sings London’s Hannah Wilson, dangerously close to patois, “like a panther, outta sight.” It’s not a total loss: at the end, Galantis chop up her vocal and toss it onto a scaling electro figure. English singer Leon Jean-Marie fronts “Hello,” a plea for romantic sanity. He goes big on the chorus—singing from his heels over massive piano decay—but the sentiment is immediately scrambled by trop-house patter. Galantis have him try on different pitches until he delivers the title like Kurt Cobain.
“Hello” shows how Galantis treat melancholy: like spilled ink that needs to be blotted. “Girls on Boys” begins with gospel piano, as Philadelphia-based EDM artist ROZES bears witness to a party’s aftermath. At the chorus, the duo switch course in a blink, as a clipped guitar and synth-trapped vocal chirps relive the festivities. These kinds of shifts should make more sense on the festival circuit, where Galantis (ever faithful to the Scandipop charge to entertain) are a hyperkinetic live draw. They succeed when they forsake tonal right angles for the emotional shifts inherent in their vocal production style. “Hey Alligator”—featuring songwriting heavyweight Bonnie McKee—transforms a standard power ballad (a plea for mercy to a “cold-blooded, hot-headed” lover) into something more inscrutable. McKee’s already performed the song in concert, replacing Galantis’ pensive synth pings with alt-rock arpeggiation. Though she’s in the same key on the record, her vocal is pitched downward, into a register at once more devastated and puckish.
This kind of theme—desire despite pain—is a pop evergreen, and Galantis do their best with it. Still, jubilation remains their surest mode. On “True Feeling,” they attempt to write an entire song around a kind gesture on a cold evening. The producers convert a steel-pan figure into a resolving phrase; Los Angeles songwriter Stephen Wrabel performs his ooos in a meditative state; the rise builds to a determined gallup.
With help from L.A.-based producer Hook N Sling, Galantis perform their sharpest wizardry on “Love on Me,” featuring X Factor alumna Laura White. White’s vocal is deployed in haphazard combos: high-pitched close harmonies on one verse, low- and high-pitched harmonies on another. Shot through with strings and steel-pan synth bubble, the effect is euphoric, if ruthless. That might be the norm now that they’ve established their festival bonafides (they jumped into the top 40 of DJ Mag’s poll last year, one spot ahead of Jack Ü) and, crucially, have a pop hit. Last year, they made their debut Hot 100 appearance with album closer “No Money,” a shrill anti-bullying anthem featuring Reece Bullimore, the pre-teen son of Beatbullyz’ Andrew Bullimore, who co-wrote the track. “You can call me what you wanna,” Reece sneers over a fast-moving trop-house riff, “I ain’t givin’ you a dollar.” His range is already high, but in Galantis’ hands, no one is safe. As usual, they pitch his chorus all the way to the premium suites.


Pretty, lovely, fine, fair, comely, pleasant, agreeable, acceptable, adequate, satisfactory, nice, benign, harmless, innocuous, innocent, largely unobjectionable, safe, forgettable.
I ...

Parachutes

Pretty, lovely, fine, fair, comely, pleasant, agreeable, acceptable, adequate, satisfactory, nice, benign, harmless, innocuous, innocent, largely unobjectionable, safe, forgettable.
I have just summed up in 19 words what I am about to say about Coldplay's debut full-length, Parachutes, in 600. Aside from being seemingly tailor-made for the paper-thin adult contemporary market, what is it about this Britrock quartet that's driving them up the American charts? Is it their popularity in their home country, or their Mercury Music Prize nomination? Could it be their charming, boyish good looks? Perhaps, even, a reputation built by Noel Gallagher's projected insistence that they're "a bunch of fuckin' pansies, the lot of them?"
In reality, Coldplay's secret deadly weapon is vocalist Chris Martin. With the ability to mimic a Brit-accented Dave Matthews one minute, Jeff Buckley revived from the dead the next, and sometimes even a young Peter Gabriel, Martin's heartfelt delivery seems to be what's winning the hearts, wallets and alternative radio request lines of Americans young and old. That's not to say that the rest of the group isn't sharp. Guitarist Jon Buckland provides plaintive, strummed acoustic guitar with the occasional amplified wail, and bassist Guy Berryman with drummer Will Champion form a competent rhythm section.
Oh yeah, the songs. They're nothing special. Most of the 10 tracks on Parachutes are indeed pleasant enough, often consisting of standard alterna-pop fare with the occasional folky ballad. They're innocent and inoffensive in general, but in turn, they're also exceedingly generic and immediately forgettable-- so much so, in fact, that after a minute of one song, you've usually already forgotten what the last song sounded like. And that's even after a few listens.
Parachutes opens with "Don't Panic," the title of which is likely lifted from British mock sci-fi classic The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, despite the fact that the song has nothing to do with it. This subdued, dreamy opener contains Martin's falsetto chorus of "We live in a beautiful world," which seems to sum up the overall sentiment of the record; the record also closes with the inspirational swinger "Everything's Not Lost."
Most of the other songs sort of drift in and out of consciousness, with the exception of the second track, "Shiver." It's the only truly decent song on Parachutes, but simultaneously, it's the only one that blatantly shows its influences. In fact, the influence can even be pinned to a single song: Jeff Buckley's "Grace." Martin has his Buckley impression down cold, complete with dynamic range and the trademark vibrato. But as enjoyable as the song may be, there's no question that Buckley did it better.
And of course, you've probably heard their smash hit single, "Yellow," by now. Indeed, it's the most obvious choice for a single, and it represents Martin's vocal stylings effectively, but it's also the record's weakest moment. Buckland's grating, slightly tuneless guitars seem jarring, especially when sequenced in the middle of a series of songs that generally lack dissonance. And the saccharine lyrics are those that might have caused Mr. Gallagher's hypothetical remark: "Look at the stars/ Look how they shine for you/ And everything you do." You'd practically expect the band to show up at your doorstep with a wilting bouquet and Hallmark card.
Parachutes is ultimately a promising debut for Coldplay, if by "promising," I mean, "promising them a windfall of cash and international popularity." If nothing else, it's harmless and pretty. Unfortunately, it's nothing else. If that's what you look for in your music, by all means, go for it. If you want substance, I suggest moving on.


The Atlanta metal band’s new double album is its least ambitious collection yet: an inoffensive, occasionally alluring, but overwhelmingly dull 90-minute slog.

Hushed and Grim

In 2014, Brent Hinds took a potshot at Dave Grohl. The Mastodon singer and lead guitarist shared a meme that read, “Making rock’n’roll safer with every red carpet all star jam.” Perhaps Hinds was merely being flippant to an old pal—seven years earlier, Grohl interviewed Mastodon for Revolver. But it’s confounding, then, that Mastodon—a metal band that has for years continually reinvented itself at the risk of driving away its core fans—chose such a safe route for its follow-up to 2017’s Emperor of Sand,  a highly regarded album that flirted with grunge and earned them their first Grammy win. Their new double album, Hushed and Grim, is an overstuffed collection of downtuned alt-rock with occasional flashes of greatness. Coming from a band that masterfully executed a sludge metal concept album about Moby Dick, it’s an inoffensive, occasionally alluring, but overwhelmingly dull 90-minute slog.
Most frustrating to fans who have remained on the Denim Vest Express, after the extreme metal diehards jumped off around 2009’s hard turn into prog, Crack the Skye, is that the band can still flat-out shred. It’s all the same members, too; Hinds and Bill Kelliher form a twin guitar attack, and drummer Brann Dailor and bassist Troy Sanders retain the low-end connection that has long provided their music’s weightiness. But without any sense of direction, Hushed and Grim should feel alienating for all factions—the longtime fans, and those willing to give the veterans another shot.
There are a few fleeting moments in which Mastodon teases what could have been a fruitful new direction. What the band shows for the first time—in depressingly short order for the amount of space they allot themselves—is a sneaky ability to write incredibly dense, chest-tapping emotional music. Hushed and Grim is, paradoxically, at its best when the band leans into a high-gravity, supercharged version of circa-1997 Crank! Records emo—the kind with breakdowns for solemnly nodding your head instead of banging it. But instead of leaning all the way in, Mastodon continually take refuge in long, meandering passages that merely highlight the valuable experiment that Hushed and Grim could have been.
Halfway through “More Than I Could Chew,” one of a few highlights, the guitars cease their endless chugging for a minute. Hinds and Kelliher unfurl dense, mathy guitar lines that float atop a slow and methodical distorted bassline. The repeated lyrics, “I have lost my way/Reaching for today,” aren’t quite poetry, but with room to breathe, the songwriting is as intense as any riff they’ve ever played. These brief passages of emotional resonance make everything else feel relatively anonymous. Mastodon repeatedly hints at this new direction but never actually commits.
Case in point is the mid-tempo “Teardrinker,” highlighted by an earworm of a lead guitar melody. An obvious single, it features emotive wailing about a failed relationship without crossing into mid-dial detritus. But Mastodon quickly grows bored with its new, introspective self, inexplicably tossing in an unsettling bass solo: It’s unclear if the band is being earnest or if they’re aping Led Zeppelin’s much-derided “The Crunge.” Moments like this feel like self-sabotage.
Crueler still, they place the album’s best song, “Gigantium,” at the very end of the album. After wading through a swamp of mostly bromidic alt-rock, there it is: the jewel of Hushed and Grim, and, incidentally, the song that sounds most adventurous, unlike anything in the band’s catalog. Evoking Meanderthal-era Torche, Mastodon hints that it could be the sludgiest nu-emo band on the planet. It’s ironically the one track I wish I could live inside for much longer, craving a third mystical guitar solo, even. “Gigantium” is proof-of-concept for another new version of Mastodon. But the band known for continually surprising listeners ultimately falls short, mostly hiding behind unexceptional, diluted alt-metal. Instead of letting this bold idea guide the way, it’s offered up as an apology affixed to the end of their least ambitious collection yet. Mastodon, once transgressive in its refusal to be put in a box, has shaved off its sharp edges and crawled inside.

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Jeff Tweedy and co.'s latest does what its title implies, consolidating their eclectic style into a coherent statement of identity. Leslie Feist guests.

Wilco (The Album)

At this point in Wilco's 15-year history, the band have been a lot of things, all of them sort of nebulous: alt-country, Americana, neo-folk, quasi-experimental, and, if you insist, "dad rock." Miraculously, the disparate strains within the group's catalog have somehow flowed together into a unifying aesthetic, largely due to Jeff Tweedy's distinctive singing voice and remarkable consistency as a songwriter. Though their previous releases, particularly the schizoid A Ghost Is Born, have embraced this eclecticism, the band's seventh proper LP, Wilco (The Album), does just what the title implies, and consolidates their style into a coherent statement of identity.
This is something of a mixed blessing. Though Wilco (The Album) is a good, concise distillation of the band's strengths, it is not their best work, mainly because it lacks the audacity of their four previous efforts. The group's 2000s output thrived on Tweedy's restlessness and perversity, as if each song were penned in part to challenge the preconceptions of listeners eager to pigeonhole his work. The new songs sound like the work of an artist confident enough to step back from personal innovation in order to develop styles and themes already in his playbook. This yields some fine results, such as the flagrantly George Harrison-esque "You Never Know" and the amusingly self-aware "Wilco (The Song)", but the record is more comfortable than exciting or interesting. The more extreme elements of Wilco's style are present-- the sinister Krautrock of "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" resurfaces in the paranoid murder fantasy "Bull Black Nova" and the sort of delicately arranged instrumental passages that characterized Sky Blue Sky are evident in a more abbreviated form on "One Wing" and "Country Disappeared"-- but these tics are toned down considerably, blending in seamlessly with simple, straightforward numbers such as "Solitaire", "I'll Fight", and the Feist duet "You and I".
Every song on Wilco (The Album) is written and performed with immaculate precision, though the subtleties in the work gradually reveal their charms upon repeated listening. "Deeper Down" in particular is a marvel in the way its textures shift dramatically from verse to verse without diverting attention from the relative simplicity of its melody and rhythm. Similarly, the way the band effortlessly evokes waves of guilt, anxiety, and fearful resignation in "Bull Black Nova" is masterful and makes the song potentially painful to hear if you're already feeling any of those emotions. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are moments of unapologetic, unguarded beauty, as in the lovely lead guitar and piano parts in "Country Disappeared" and the melodramatic orchestral swell in the otherwise understated "Everlasting Everything".
This is not the music of men trying to be cool; it is the work of veterans unafraid to express mature emotions with an appropriate level of musical depth and nuance. There is certainly more thrill to be found when the band is acting out but there is something rather pleasing about hearing a band sound so comfortable in their skin. Even if you don't connect with the music on Wilco (The Album), you may come away from the record envying their relaxed self-assurance. Being a chilled-out grown-up may not always be exciting, but it's certainly something to admire and respect.