The New York noise ensemble PC Worship's Basement Hysteria is fixated on repetition, but with none of its usual comforting familiarity. The album is bristly, difficult, and unaccommodating. On it, rock'n'roll is a pirated vessel, steered unhurriedly toward doom.

Basement Hysteria

The cover of PC Worship’s Basement Hysteria features concentric circles. They appear to be in motion, rippled by an unseen hand. The imagery evokes Peter Saville’s iconic cover for Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures, another picture of linear stability disrupted. For the New York ensemble PC Worship—led by Justin Frye, who’s credited with the cover art—the uncannily destabilized image aptly introduces a full-length fixated on repetition, but with none of its usual comforting familiarity. Instead, Basement Hysteria restates riffs until listeners reach a dissociative threshold, a kind of aural vertigo.
If that sounds something like a tenet of minimalist composition, it’s no coincidence. The members of PC Worship seem like self-taught students of 20th-century avant-garde. The shifting lineup, which Frye has helmed since the late 2000s, incorporates circuit bending, tape manipulation, harsh noise, and field recordings. Their songs do not sound intended for replication. There’s too much improvisation, especially in the braying brass caterwaul, and the home recordings welcome environmental intrusions. And yet, last year’s Social Rust indicated a subtle departure. Still saturated with queasy dissonance, its songs hewed closer to conventional lengths and structures. PC Worship’s latest, however, makes no such concessions.
Basement Hysteria features four songs at over a half hour. The ostensible single, in so far as it was posted ahead of the release date, exceeds 13 minutes. Vital signs like that register less like an album or an EP and more like a statement: If Social Rust flirted with the common indie rock narrative about experimentalism capitulating to accessibility then Basement Hysteria is a harsh rebuff. It’s bristly, difficult, and unaccommodating. Here, rock'n'roll is a pirated vessel, steered unhurriedly toward doom.
Indeed, Basement Hysteria begins with a song called "Done". It’s easy to mistake the horns for a wailing baby. Some pundit babbles on a muddled radio or television. Piano—a detuned, unenthused clang—serves as the dreary pulse of this urban soundscape, but the rest of the album takes place underground. "Where am I/ Where am I/ I’m in my head when I should be outside," Frye groans later in the song, his delivery by that time a weary echo of the sluggish drumbeat. The title track, perhaps the only rudderless inclusion, sounds like little more than one-handed drumming and tuning peg abuse. On "Social Fiction", however, PC Worship compellingly recalls tour-mates Naomi Punk; both bands know the value of a slow, syncopated pummel. Only, Frye’s group textures leaden might with total scree.
The tracks conclude unceremoniously, with a coughing fit, or protracted instrumental decay. Resolution is for pop, or songs intended for an audience; part of *Basement Hysteria’*s appeal is an illusion: listeners are among the privileged few who get invited deep down below. And it’s convincing. A centerpiece of sorts, "My Lens" is a procession of seemingly discrete sections. High tones wail siren-like before a morose, spare passage of acoustic guitar and murmured poetics. It best conveys the simmering mania of Basement Hysteria, where obsession induces befuddlement and simple things grow unnatural features under prolonged examination.


The underrated Odd Future member Domo Genesis' debut is the culmination of his years of consistency, the result of existing on the fringes of his friends’ fame and trying to earn his keep.

Genesis

It was always difficult to figure out where exactly Domo Genesis fit in with Odd Future. Earl Sweatshirt was its teen prodigy, Frank Ocean its silent genius, and Tyler, the Creator its radical leader. In the beginning, Domo seemed like merely another warm body to justify the "collective" tag; his lethargic, professional weed carrier raps never really complementing the anarchist shouts of his teen rebel cohorts. But eventually he carved out space for himself on sheer tenacity, becoming more technically proficient and simply rapping harder. As the collective dissolved around him, he continued to be its steadiest member.
His Odd Future Records debut, Genesis, is the culmination of his years of consistency, the result of existing on the fringes of his friends’ fame and trying to earn his keep. "If you don’t like this song they gon’ turn my lights off," Domo Genesis painfully reminds listeners on "All Night," and throughout Genesis he raps like it, spitting coiling phrases densely populated with slant rhymes. He spends much of its time searching for answers, trying to piece together a sensible reason to keep rapping. Over the course of the album’s running time, he finds one: he’s logged way too many hours to just quit now.
It’d be easy to discount Domo Genesis strictly as a stoner rapper, especially since his second single, "Go (Gas)," featuring smokers of note Wiz Khalifa and Juicy J, is packed with references to the drug (many from vocal straightedge rapper Tyler, in the vein of his appearance on "Rolling Papers"). But that’d be reductive. Domo Genesis can be a thoughtful writer. His paranoia starts to get the better of him on "Questions," which is a rabbit hole of internal doubt, and he communicates much of the internal conflict with his voice alone, which is cutting and combative. The flute-driven "One Below," a song prefaced by words from his mother, delves into how industry politics have reframed his outlook, rapping jarring lines like "I’ma take all of mine if they’ve got nothing to give/ The lack of inspiration had me chasing broken ideas" and "my life story gotta be worth somebody’s time." If anything, Domo seems to be sobering up.
The subtle, soulful production, from Christian Rich, Sha Money XL, Sap, and Cam O’bi, gives him mellow headspace from which to unspool his musings. When he raps over the elegant vocal chop on "Coming Back," with one of his most tightly wound verses, his bars snap into the pockets left by the sweet, retreating voice. But there are kinks: Sometimes the hooks on Genesis get wonky, there are portions of the record that feel unfinished (like the second half of "Wanderer"), and every now and then Domo will sneak in a groaner. But for the most part, Genesis is a revelation. "I got knowledge for every dollar made, so look at me now/ I'm scared of none of my flaws, they got 'em shook of me now/ So if you ever had a doubt about it, it shouldn’t be now," he raps on "Awkward Groove." Now that the Odd Future bubble has burst, Domo Genesis is finally figuring out his worth.


After a wide variety of projects and releases, Norwegian singer-songwriter Susanna Wallumrød returns with a grim and often stirring extended meditation on religion and mortality.

Triangle

Norwegian singer-songwriter Susanna Wallumrød’s career has taken many forms. With her project Susanna and the Magical Orchestra, she made several albums of art-pop composed enough to be interesting yet accessible enough for TV syncs. One might also know her for her deconstructed covers of pop songs akin to those of Stina Nordenstam or Cat Power, or perhaps for her stint of making straightforward alt-rock—on 2011’s underrated Jeg vil hjem til menneskene, which was situated somewhere between jazz and grunge. These days, one’s as likely to know her for her collaborations with Scandinavian artists like Jenny Hval; like many in her circles, Susanna is an accomplished curator of talent, and her first self-produced album, Triangle, features a murderer’s row of jazz and experimental musicians, including Helge Sten of Deathprod and Anja Lauvdal of Skadedyr.
With so many influences to synthesize for a first solo production, it makes sense that Susanna would go big: 22 songs, reprises and interludes and variations on themes, generally on religion and mortality. She’s described Triangle as “soul music for lost souls,” and the first few seconds neatly sum up her idea of this: “Nothing is holy, nothing is sacred,” she intones over a synth pitched like a chant section. Triangle is the sort of fully-realized work that can only come from an artist lost in her highest, headiest intellectual space. It’s also near-monastically austere, nearly 70 minutes long, and a commitment, at best, to take in as an album; in even a mildly uncharitable mood, the unending sparseness will be wearying.
Paradoxically, Triangle is best experienced in short, repeated bursts of close listening. “Burning Sea” conjures waves of feedback that evoke its title, if perhaps too obviously. “We Don’t Belong” is an almost religious meditation on impermanence, Ecclesiastes arranged for solo voice and drone; when the piano comes in, it’s like anxious palpitations, scrabbling back and clinging to earth. “Born Again,” another religion-adjacent track, comes off like a deconstructed gospel song, the piano and brass collapsing where elsewhere they might exult, and Susanna’s words a subtly yet fundamentally tweaked credo: “born again, and again, and again.”
“Death Hanging,” in its original form, was a trio recording with Susanne Sundfør and Siri Nilsen in the vein of Harris/Parton/Ronstadt or Case/Lang/Veirs—folk that floats above and haunts its listener. The Triangle recording is a more traditional duet with Dutch mezzo Jessica Sligter; from her first note, her more harrowing voice amid Triangle’s spare arrangements and soprano lines is instantly arresting. The arrangement, a maelstrom of cello and low strings, works much the same. Death sounds more imminent here. A little more editing and pacing might have made the whole album like this, but given enough time, Triangle has moments of clarity to be found.


The debut album from Wye Oak's Jenn Wasner and White Life's Jon Ehrens recreates the omnipresent 90s pop that permeated their childhoods with aplomb. Dungeonesse is sparkling, intimate, and not nearly as self-conscious as you might expect, though it could lose the awkward raps.

Dungeonesse

"Something that Jon and I talk about a lot is the idea of reclaiming pop music," Wye Oak singer/guitarist Jenn Wasner said as an introduction to their new electro-pop duo Dungeonesse. “Placing it squarely in the hands of, I dunno, say, a couple of regular nerds from Baltimore.” (Jon Ehrens is of the Baltimore band White Life.) Wasner’s quote was a pretty soft sell. With very few exceptions, the best kind of pop music is superhumanly suave and wilts at the first sign of even quasi-academic jargon, so there are a couple of red flags in that sentence: “regular”, “nerds”, “reclaiming.” But luckily, none of these words have anything to do with the way Dungeonesse’s light, infectious, effortlessly cool debut actually sounds. Dungeonesse has none of the awkwardness you might expect from an artist like Wasner (who’s stepping more out of her comfort zone here than Ehrens is) making a self-conscious foray into a totally different genre; surprisingly, she sounds completely at home in the album’s crush-struck vibrancy and retro-90s shimmer. You’d be hard pressed to find the slightest trace of that self-proclaimed nerdiness-- except for the fact that one of the best songs is called “Shucks”.
Wasner and Ehrens wrote the album like a post-dial-up Postal Service-- he sent her tracks, she filled in the lyrics and melodies-- and as a team, they bring out the best in each other. White Life’s neo-new-wave self-titled 2011 debut was solidly catchy if a little faceless, but here Wasner’s husky, charismatic vocals bring his tracks to life. And as for Wasner herself, she’s had a busy and stylistically varied couple of years: since Wye Oak’s excellently brooding 2011 album Civilian, she’s released a few singles with her art-pop side project Flock of Dimes and made cameos on albums from Future Islands and Titus Andronicus, basically becoming the go-to name in indie rock's “elegantly forlorn female voice" Rolodex entry. Which is why it’s refreshing to hear her sound like she’s having so much damn fun on Dungeonesse. Ehrens’ bright and bouyant tracks bring out a lighter side of Wasner: Overtop a cascade of glimmering synths, she’s never sounded as playful as she does on the great lead-off single “Drive You Crazy”, while the Dev Hynes-like beat on the swooning “This Could Be Home” is punctuated with samples of her sighs and laughter.
Dungeonesse’s sound is poised somewhere between the past and present. Their take on the poppier side of modern R&B would sound at home on a playlist with Jessie Ware and Solange, but they’re also trying to reanimate a very specific mid-90s vibe-- think Jock Jams for a private party rather than a whole bleacher-rocking stadium. They embrace their influences wholeheartedly, enough to bring the past vividly into the present moment. It’s pretty amazing how well they get the vibe down: If you played “Cadillac” for someone and told them it was a long-lost would-be dance hit from 1994, they wouldn’t bat an eyelash. But like a few other tracks, “Cadillac” almost sinks under the weight of the album’s most glaring problem: They’ve yet to make a convincing case for why there should ever be a rap verse in a Dungeonesse song. TT the Artist lends a couple of hip-hop Mad Libs lines (“Get-get on up/ Feel the groove”) to the otherwise excellent “This Could Be Home”, and Baltimore emcee DDm’s cliche-ridden verse on “Cadillac” isn’t much more imaginative. Maybe this is just the one place where Dungeonesse studied the 90s dance hit songbook a little too hard; after all, the dude from Real McCoy wasn’t exactly Andre 3000.
It’s funny what a difference a couple years makes. Five years ago, it would have been a lot rarer to hear a singer firmly rooted in indie-folk territory gushing about 90s dance pop and her “youthful fantasies growing up, listening to Mariah Carey and trying to recreate [the] vocals.” But in 2013, that sentiment feels commonplace enough for Wasner’s comment about “reclaiming pop” to almost feel dated. After all, the boundaries that used to separate “pop” from “indie” are corroding from both sides. One example of many? Jenn Wasner has made a very good pop record... and the new Mariah Carey song opens with a warm, fuzzy riff that sounds like something lifted out of a Wye Oak song.


Former Cymbals Eat Guitars frontman Joseph D’Agostino’s solo debut is rangier and more intimate than his former band, but taps similar wells of grief and pain.

Empty Country

For a band that spent four albums fixating on demises, Cymbals Eat Guitars didn’t dwell too much on their own. The New Jersey indie rock band quietly confirmed their breakup after the fact, nearly two years after a trio of 2017 hometown farewell shows they hadn’t announced as such. The end came, in large part, out of recognition they’d hit their ceiling. After years of playing to shrinking crowds, the band once hyped as indie rock’s next big thing realized “there was nowhere else for us to go,” as frontman Joseph D’Agostino tells it.
Even Cymbals Eat Guitars’ small cult of devotees would have a hard time arguing with that. They were a great band, but a niche one, their music too sour and anxious to sit alongside The National or Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros on one of Barack Obama’s playlists. They could conjure the rousing, go-for-broke sweep of Springsteen or The Clash, but where those artists’ big songs played liked triumphs, theirs sounded like panic attacks. Between D’Agostino’s squalid storytelling and shell-shocked voice, nobody was going to license a Cymbals Eat Guitars song for a car commercial.
If there’s an upside to the band’s breakup, though, it’s that anything D’Agostino records is going to sound at least a little like Cymbals Eat Guitars, and so it is with the debut from his solo project Empty Country. Patched together with a lineup of friends and family, the self-titled record really isn’t much further removed from Cymbal Eat Guitars than any of that band’s albums were from their predecessors. It thunders a little less and wanders a little more, and although the arrangements are still dense and twisty, they clear room for chiming acoustic guitars, bright pedal steels and occasional strings. The album is vaguely indebted to Americana, but it’s a tourist’s fascination with country, not an aficionado’s.
And D’Agostino’s driving muse, as if the cemetery on the album cover left any doubt, remains death. The glimmering “Marian” opens the record with a half-hopeful song about a 1960s miner who has a vision of his own death in a mine collapse, then foresees his daughter’s adulthood. Queasy and distressed even by Cymbals Eat Guitars’ standards, “Ultrasound” documents an anguished week waiting for his wife’s biopsy results: “Body horror, pace the hall, waiting for the morning call/We tried to sleep, we’re spinning ’round, a shadow on an ultrasound,” D’Agostino sings, sounding near hyperventilation over nerve-racking distortion.
The sweeter the music becomes, the nastier the subject matter turns. Behind its uptempo strum and dulcet strings, the album’s jauntiest number “Becca” is essentially a horror story, a tale of a woman who tricks families into staring at the solar eclipse by handing out fake eclipse glasses. It ends on a note of sheer terror, as its narrative turns to her victims: “Waking in the darkness to their crying kids, feeling for the light switch, they will hear the ocean.” The album’s other great character sketch, the twangy “SWIM,” imagines a Sing Sing prisoner with an especially nihilistic tattoo on his rib cage “of the second plane hitting.” With some reluctance, he concedes his black-out behavior might have hurt someone, and while the character is fictitious, the song’s protest-too-much title (an acronym for “Someone Who Isn’t Me”) makes it clear D’Agostino sees at least a little of himself in his creation.
If Empty Country is a shade less wondrous than Cymbals Eat Guitars’ final records, that’s more feature than defect. Those albums were grand statements, designed to resonate with a vast audience, even if that audience didn’t actually exist. What Empty Country lacks in wild swings for the bleachers, though, it makes up for with a rangy intimacy that buys it a different sort of goodwill. “Come and live it down with me,” D’Agostino beckons on the serene, string-kissed coda to “SWIM.” It’s unclear whether that’s an invite to find redemption or to join him in the slums, but it speaks to how sublime the music is that he makes either proposition sound alluring.


On Leslie Feist’s fifth album, sparks of rock’n’roll are balanced with simmering introspection across a collection of patient, lushly arranged songs.

Pleasure

In a bizarro universe, Leslie Feist is a fool’s idea of a one-hit wonder—a distinctly aughts success story about the power of digital music providers, ad syncs, and viral videos in breaking quirky Top 10 hits like “1234.” Feist had her chance to take the iPod money and run, but instead of succumbing to her poppier sensibilities—which always felt more like a mask she put on when she wasn’t soothing her melancholy—she dug in deeper on her salt-of-the-earth soulfulness and relaxed-fit rock-guitar chops with 2011’s Metals. Her breakout masterpiece The Reminder made Feist a platinum-selling star in her native Canada, but Metals showed she was not terribly interested in the part. Instead, the one-time Broken Social Scene member was focused on the thoughtful long game, one she continues to play with no particular rush or agenda here on her fifth LP.
Pleasure features a number of songs that stretch towards the five-minute mark, making more sense as part of the whole rather than individually. The title track and “Century” position the album as Feist’s most overtly rock’n’roll record—the former resembling PJ Harvey in her prime, the latter upping the unf before Jarvis Cocker swaggers in, both with one of those triumphantly noisy choirs Feist grew fond of on Metals. The playful French pop, electronic flourishes, and jazzier inclinations that set apart her early work from the indie-pop pack are downplayed across the record, but a number of her signatures remain.
More than half the songs employ nature-related wordplay as a means of gauging relationships and changing mindsets, though the put-a-bird-on-it-ness is not as pronounced as on other Feist albums (she’s trying to cut down). The most striking example arrives with “The Wind,” which begins a little like an Arthur Russell tune, all lo-fi beats and ragged chords. Occasionally her head-in-the-clouds poetry about gaining perspective over time lands on straightforward realizations, as Russell’s often did; “I’m shaped by my storming like they’re shaped by their storming,” she sings, the sound swelling with a lovely horn undercurrent from Colin Stetson. Like many songs on Pleasure, the melody takes time to unfurl before loosely fading out.
These quieter moments are the ones that work best. “Baby Be Simple” is as tender as Feist gets—just an acoustic guitar and a humble plea to take it easy on her, the woman who once declared her ability to feel it all. Pleasure reminds you that Feist’s simmering introspection is the ideal vehicle for the more delicate facets of her voice. She can still surprise with a quick shift from cocked-hip talk-singing to yelps of fury, but her high range breaking through a dark sky like the sun remains the most stunning view.
Continuing to work with fellow Canadian ex-pat Mocky, Feist’s musical arrangements have grown slipperier and more subtle. “Any Party,” with its acoustic riff straight out of a Kinks song, slows way down and drops out almost entirely, eventually building up to a whimsical, barroom singalong. These songs don’t move how you expect them to, and that’s part of their appeal—or the frustration if you’re looking for the pared-down immediacy of The Reminder. Occasionally her “just trust me” approach makes way for a big risk that doesn’t always pay off. She sets up “A Man Is Not His Song,” a folksy ode to the fallacy of songs as diary entries, with field audio of crickets and a passing car radio playing “Pleasure,” then ends it with a snippet of Mastodon’s “High Road” as a comment on the femininity/masculinity at work. It’s a playful idea (and perhaps an inside joke with former collaborators), but it’s jarring and doesn’t fit the album’s easy flow.
On Pleasure, Feist faces middle age with a slow-burning ruckus. She accepts that getting older is growing comfortable with knowing you'll never have all the answers. And she savors the ride nonetheless—like she says, pleasure is what we’re here for—because this is it, this is life. When she finally wonders, on the swirling torch song that closes the record, “When they cart me away, will they say that I died already years ago?” we know the answer. Feist may have hidden away for a while and thought about giving up music before making this album, but a decade since she broke through, she’s settling in like a long-distance runner staring down the horizon she knows will outlast her. She will quietly make her mark in the meantime.


The reggaetonero’s latest sets him up for even more global success. Its infectious vibe is draped in dancehall with a dash of trap production and nods to salsa, bachata, and Afrobeat.

Vibras

On his first trips to America as a precocious teen, Colombia’s J Balvin didn’t necessarily understand all the words in the pop songs he fell in love with. But he knew how they made him feel, and he’s been trying to bottle that feeling with his music ever since.
The reggaetonero’s global success has dovetailed with the surge of reggaetón’s popularity in his home of Medellin, Colombia. The scene there has helped bring the genre back into the mainstream, often by taking a more suave approach to a traditionally explicit and misogynist aesthetic, not unlike his contemporary Maluma. But the 33-year-old Balvin has his sights set higher than just being the supreme reggaetonero romántico. And on his latest album, Vibras, we’re finally getting a clear picture of what that sounds like.
Vibras, or “vibes” in Spanish, is defiantly Latin, but it is also in direct conversation with what’s happening in American pop—especially the pop that draws its direct ancestry from hip-hop. If it’s no longer important for rappers to be skilled lyricists, then the vibe rules supreme. Can you ride the beat? Can you nail the melody and make people move? If you can, it really doesn’t matter what words are said. Just set the vibe.
This aligns well with J Balvin’s plans for world domination. If the words are less important than the vibe, then why should the language matter? While Vibras is rooted in reggaetón, the beats are draped in dancehall and a dash of trap production techniques, with nods to salsa, bachata, and Afrobeat. Even for an American audience, it’s hard to classify this as global music when it often feels strangely familiar.
Much of it is produced by Alejandro “Sky” Ramirez and Marco “Tainy” Masis, the former a frequent Balvin collaborator and the latter a Puerto Rican production powerhouse who broke out with Luny Tunes’ Mas Flow: Los Benjamins. They freak beats with roots in flamenco (”Brillo”), toy with some Afrobeat influence (”En Mi,” “Tu Verdad”), and even somehow to flip a dembow beat into a romantic ballad with a little twinge of guitar (”No Es Justo”). Balvin’s duet with Willy William, “Mi Gente,” was one of last summer’s biggest hits, and rocketed into the mainstream when Beyoncé jumped on the remix, prompted by her 6-year-old daughter’s love for the song. And while Vibras certainly sounds like the future of reggaetón, Balvin’s global reach might best be evidenced by album closer “Machika,” which sees Suriname’s DJ Chuckie contribute a little bit of the up-tempo Dutch-Caribbean dancehall style known as “bubbling.”
Throughout Vibras, Balvin’s sensitive but street-savvy personality is on display. Colombia’s answer to Drake, he seeks to seduce, not subjugate, and seems poised to appeal to an audience at least as wide. Though music that tries to appeal to everyone often appeals to no one, Vibras' inclusiveness is a plus. It is the most accurate representation of J Balvin as an artist; he’s not just trying to seduce the women in his songs, but us, the listener, as well.
Alongside Daddy Yankee, Luis Fonsi, Ozuna, and Bad Bunny, Balvin’s success in Anglo markets is evidence of something more than just a “crossover” moment. As Latin culture site Remezcla points out, it raises the question of whether we can truly even consider Anglo music as the dominant culture in the international music market. And much like hip-hop did when it was assimilated into the American Top 40, Latin pop is re-writing the rules of what’s mainstream.
While Vibras is certainly engineered for the mainstream, its diversity is crucial to its identity; a straight reggaetón record softened up for mainstream consumption would feel shallow and cynical. And while the blurring of distinct genres often makes for new, exciting music, in the case of reggaetón it runs the risk of erasing the progenitors in Panama and Puerto Rico who built a counter-culture only to watch it run away from them in the mainstream. And it’s no coincidence that as reggaetón moves from the streets to Spotify, its biggest hits would be delivered by light-skinned artists with family-friendly overtones. But Balvin, who grew up wealthy but was relegated to the slums when his father’s business failed, has long straddled both worlds. On Vibras, he’s poised to take his place on the global stage—mi gente in tow.


Third album from the intelligent, eccentric singer-songwriter is her first recorded under major-label contract.

Begin to Hope

It's no secret that Regina Spektor has some quirks. As a songwriter and performer, she hoards eccentricities like the Collyer brothers (Google it). She hiccups and yawps, breaks syllables against their grain, beatboxes unself-consciously, belts like Ethel Merman, recites like Patti Smith, coos like Tori Amos, shrieks like a Kate Bush for the McSweeney’s set. And her songwriting, in addition to occasionally folding in snippets of “Hava Nagila”, makes frequent, often humorous use of pop culture references, anachronisms, dream imagery, even made-up words. And yet, these eccentricities allow unfriendly listeners to keep Spektor at a distance, dismissing her feminine presence as cutesily affected while indulging the endless costume changes of Gnarls Barkley and the sniping whine of Conor Oberst.
But eccentricity isn’t her defining characteristic. That would be her native intelligence, which shows through in every note. Spektor is a street-smart songwriter masquerading as a book-smart one, with a self-awareness that can be endearingly goofy. Spektor can profess her love for “November Rain” and paraphrase the Madame de Pompadour without stretching, showboating, or seeming academic.
This quality-- her smarts-- is present in every aspect of her new album, Begin to Hope, except perhaps in its made-for-TV-movie title. Her third full-length and first recorded under her major-label contract, the record was produced by Dave Kahne, who has turned knobs for the Bangles, Paul McCartney, and, um, Sugar Ray. Under his direction, Begin to Hope sounds expensive: There’s a hermetic studio quality to the tones, a studied three dimensionality in the interplay of instruments, and a perfectionism in the mix that suggests a bigger budget and a nicer studio. Elegant beats sculpted from orchestral samples adorn opener “Fidelity” and “On the Radio”, while precisely calibrated synths enter and exit on cue. “Hotel Song” trips along on a snappy drumbeat and a spritely chorus that has the professional bearing of Brill Building pop. On “Lady”, a paean to Billie Holiday, Spektor duets with a mournful jazz band that cuts in and out abruptly like a staticky transmission from the past.
One downside to this crisp production is the loss of place: 2001’s 11:11 and 2003’s Soviet Kitsch both sounded like they could have been recorded in some smoky Bronx bar or in a friend’s living room, but Begin to Hope evokes no particular setting or venue. Nevertheless, Spektor sounds confident and comfortable. Her songwriting remains as testy and idiosyncratic as ever-- as well as ambitious. With all the fanfare and bombast of a battle hymn, “Apres Moi” is a Spektorian epic about the weight of mortality and heritage. She sings from the perspective of a statue, perhaps the one she sung about in “Us”. She rewrites the Beatitudes to instill a little paranoia: “Be afraid of the lame, they’ll inherit your legs/ Be afraid of the old, they’ll inherit your soul”. Then there’s that Madame de Pompadour reference: “Apres moi le deluge/ After me comes the flood,” she sings defiantly, as if the Russians have just defeated her very own Franco-Austrian armies. Spektor sings a verse in Russian, then leads the song to an stirring finale featuring a small symphony led by a rickety drum set. The song would sound like a stunt if it didn’t make so much sense and have so much feeling behind it.
Occasionally, though, Spektor can overdo it. On “That Time”, she recounts a string of friendly reminiscences: “Remember that time I ate only tangerines for a month,” she asks some unnamed companion before intoning, “So cheap and JUI-cy!” At the end she turns the song on its head with the sudden memory, “Remember that time you OD’ed?” The change in tone is a little too obvious and complete, like a movie with a cheap twist ending. Still, Spektor is bold enough almost to sell the song, and on the whole her performance throughout Begin to Hope exhibits new levels of control and direction, reaching a point where the song and the singing are inseparable.


The Swedish band Graveyard's Innocence & Decadence is a proudly welcoming metal record. On it, they synthesize influences like Slayer, Howlin’ Wolf, Motown, Dylan, and Queen into something that is swell-chested, triumphant, and surprisingly human.

Innocence & Decadence

Though they’ve netted comparisons to everyone from Black Sabbath to Thin Lizzy, if there is an analog in the history of hard rock to the Swedish group Graveyard, it is probably Judas Priest. Both bands have roots in blues, both have a fondness for topping caramel-sweet melodies with gravel and tacks, and both know precisely how to ride the edge of bombast and camp without ever becoming the Darkness. On their fourth album, Graveyard root around even deeper in their record collections. In the kind of quote that becomes instantly regrettable, frontman Joakim Nilsson once said that he wanted the band to be a mix of Slayer and Howlin’ Wolf, but on Innocence & Decadence, they also find room for Motown, Dylan, and Queen. What makes the record work is the way they synthesize all of this into something that is swell-chested, triumphant, and surprisingly human, dosing each song with equal amounts of swagger and charm. In a genre that often prides itself on being forbidding, Innocence is a proudly welcoming metal record, throwing open its tattooed arms and carrying off even the darker material with a wink and a smile.
That all-in m.o. is evident from the outset. Opener "Magnetic Shunk" rides in on a deep-set, galloping blues groove, Nilsson’s eye on a woman at the far end of the bar. Instead of shaming or objectifying her for her sexual experience, Nilsson celebrates it—"It’s nobody’s business who you give your kiss"—before devising an almost comically ridiculous come-on: "No need to be gentle, baby, I like it raw/ Treat me like I was crime and you are the law." That kind of loopy wordplay turns up throughout Innocence; on "The Apple & the Tree", whose wandering guitar lead sounds like a distant cousin to "All Along the Watchtower", Nilsson opens singing, "I remember the days I don’t recall." Before the absurdity of the line can be fully absorbed, he’s skated clean into the song’s slow-winding chorus (the lyrics of which suggest the title’s apple might be the same one that turned up in Genesis Chapter 2). The hard-charging "Never Theirs to Sell" is a lean, mean-eyed, fist-pumping anthem of defiance, opening into a double-time, soul-clap break about halfway through that imagines Angus Young sitting in with the MGs.
Though the twin themes in the album’s title turn up in most of its songs, it’s the former that gets the most airtime. On the breathless, roller-coastering "From a Hole in the Wall", while low-end guitars pummel like rubber bullets, bassist Truls Morck sings, "Can you hear a big bird singing somewhere in the back of your mind?/ It’s loud enough to make you wonder/ ‘Can I please hear it one more time?’" Lines like this contribute to the album’s odd sense of sweetness—youth isn’t fetishized as a period of penalty-free rule-breaking, but considered wistfully, as a time of almost ceramic cleanness, before things like pain and disappointment became everyday occurrences. That same sentiment is given flesh, blood, and a broken heart in the straight-up soul ballad "Too Much Is Not Enough", which wouldn’t sound entirely out of place on an Amy Winehouse B-sides comp. Over a wood-fired blues lick, Nilsson mournfully watches a longtime lover walk out the door, before concluding, "I know you tried to keep us together/ But in the end, there was nothing left to keep." The gospel trio that parenthesize his verses provides the necessary dramatic flourish.
Innocence was recorded at Atlantis Grammofon Studios in Stockholm, which is the same place ABBA recorded their earliest material. While it’s not quite the same deep-dive into confectionary pop, Innocence shares both that group’s fondness for immediate melodies and their egalitarian spirit. Theirs is a club where you might get lucky, you might burn the night philosophizing, or you might reconnect with old friends. Best of all, it has a decidedly low barrier of entry: If you’ve ever nursed a drink while thinking misty-eyed about the good old days, you’re in.


Challenging but never chaotic, contemplative yet too rigorous to be mistaken for ambient music, the experimental vibraphonist’s solo debut carves out its own place in contemporary music.

Maquishti

The vibraphone is an easy instrument to ignore. Its placid chimes lend themselves to Christmas standards, mall music, and corporate jingles; the vibes’ place in jazz is often traced back to 1930, when NBC hired percussionist Lionel Hampton to play the network’s sound mark on them. Since then, generations of players have coaxed exquisite music from the vibraphone, yet too often the vibes are tacked onto gigantic ensembles, like a maraschino cherry on top of an already sickly-sweet dessert.
Patricia Brennan is no stranger to her instrument—one of the largest and most unwieldy around—feeling small on a crowded bandstand. She’s a member of several excellent big bands and jazz orchestras, yet Brennan shines brighter in small settings, where she can show off her skill as an improviser. In a recent profile in The Wire, the Veracruz-born artist opened up about how, performing in symphony orchestras in her native Mexico as a teenager, she felt as though she didn’t have enough parts to play. “There were moments where I just didn’t really feel like a real musician,” she said. Sparse and spontaneous, her solo debut, Maquishti, features Brennan alone on the vibes and their musical cousin, the marimba: More than a focused exhibition of pitched percussion, the result is full of avant-garde possibility.
Part of the album’s appeal is wrapped in its narrow toolkit. Maquishti is not the first solo outing by a vibraphonist, but Brennan actually performs alone—which is surprisingly rare. Masters of the instrument, including Bobby Hutcherson on Solo/Quartet and Gary Burton on Alone at Last, sprinkled ostensible solo affairs with collaborators or overdubs, as though tacitly acknowledging the difficulty of attracting listeners to the unadorned vibraphone. Brennan skirts these problems by using guitar pedals, and also because her approach is unceasingly modal. Never availing herself of even the hint of a blues pattern or a snatch of familiar melody, Brennan forces us to consider the sonic qualities of the instrument itself.
There’s enough variety, though, to keep things interesting. The shift from the vibes on “Solar” to the duller wood marimba on “Improvisation VI” is subtle yet accentuated by her use of four mallets of graduated size, which shows off the latter instrument’s range. The twinkling “Magic Square” illustrates the vibraphone’s versatility, alternating a piano-like contrapuntal movement with a hypnotic assertion of the main theme. And then there’s the final suite of tracks, which departs dramatically from expectation only to draw the listener back to a more traditional approach, as if it’s a port in an improvisatory storm. On “Point of No Return,” Brennan creates both clicks and glissandos by scraping binder clips against her tone bars, while “Away From Us” filters bowing through a delay pedal to forge a rock-friendly drone. When Brennan picks up her mallets again, on the swelling closer “Derrumbe De Turquesas,” they feel familiar, even comforting.
Such a courageously quiet album as Maquishti occupies a strange space in the modern musical landscape. It’s challenging but never skronky, chaotic, or abrasive, like a lot of improvised jazz can be. It’s contemplative but so compositionally oriented that it won’t likely be mistaken for ambient music. It features an instrument—the marimba—that developed its contemporary character in Mexico, Central, and South America, yet Brennan’s deployment feels far removed from these regions’ musical traditions. What she crafts on Maquishti are unprecedented sounds: warm and sleek, both modern and eternal. You could say that Brennan drags the vibraphone into the 21st century, but her record suggests that mallet-based percussion was always ripe for exploration. We just had to recognize the beauty of one of the most ungainly instruments in the room.

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For their tenth album, the great British art punk band returns to the material that they would have recorded for the album that never ended up following 154, their third LP. Originally heard in muddy, difficult live recordings, the 13 songs on Change Becomes Us sparkle.

Change Becomes Us

Only Wire would attempt to make their fourth album after their tenth. At the beginning of their career, between 1977 and 1979, the great British art punk quartet released three perfect albums, Pink Flag, Chairs Missing and 154, each wildly different from the other. Then they splintered, though a bunch of post-154 songs-in-process came to light later, in the dodgy live recordings that made up the bizarre, messy Document and Eyewitness (1981) and 1996's Turns and Strokes.
Since they first reunited in 1985, Wire has had an exceptionally weird relationship to its own past. During their commercial peak in the latter half of the 80s, they refused to play anything from the pre-breakup era, and for the first few years of their current incarnation, they mostly acted as if they'd jumped straight from Pink Flag to the year 2000. At the beginning of this decade, they started looking back in earnest-- not in a "hey, kids, we wrote "12 x U", remember?" way, but in a "cleaning up loose ends" way. 2011's Strays EP contained four pieces that had been kicking around their live repertoire for a long time but had never been recorded to their satisfaction before; the Black Session album that came out last year actually included a few relatively faithful versions of old songs.
And now they've gone back to the material they'd have recorded for the album that never happened after 154. The 13 titles on Change Becomes Us are new, but the songs themselves aren't; they're all more or less newly rewritten versions of the Document and Eyewitness/Turns and Strokes repertoire. It's not the first time they've reckoned with some of those sketches, either. "B/W Silence" and "Time Lock Fog" are respectively adapted from "Lorries" and "5/10," which singer/guitarist Colin Newman previously reworked on his 1982 solo album Not To. "Doubles & Trebles" is a new version of "Ally in Exile", which Wire mutated first into "Art of Persistence" on 2000's The Third Day and then into "I Don't Understand" on 2002's Read & Burn 01; positioned as the new album's opener, its arrangement and lyric (about a solitary agent in enemy territory) explicitly allude to the way "Reuters" introduces Pink Flag.
The Wire of 1980, and the band's members on the solo records that immediately followed the split, were radicals who were trying to pry open the pop-recording form and avoid repeating themselves. The Wire of 2013 have settled on a sweet-and-prickly sound that suits them, and sonically Change Becomes Us is of a piece with Red Barked Tree and Object 47, the other studio albums they've recorded since the 2004 departure of guitarist/texturalist Bruce Gilbert. (These days, his spot is filled by Matt Simms, who's 30 years younger than the rest of the band.)
Considered as a set of songs, though, it's fantastic-- a clear look at the twisty, glittering material that had previously only been a few sparkles of possibility shining through the muck of those difficult live albums. The band who wrote these songs were a couple of years away from becoming hardcore punk icons-- there are hints of that when drummer Robert Grey breaks into a high-speed two-step on "Adore Your Island" and "Stealth of a Stork". And they were so deeply invested in non-obviousness that their lyrics sometimes read like cryptic crossword clues: the hook of "Eels Sang Lino"-- recast here as "Eels Sang"-- is an anagram for "in Los Angeles."
But the Wire of 1979 and 1980 were also developing their enduring fascination with unlikely kinds of beauty, and their 21st century incarnation has built some of their most fetching songs from some of the most ragged and jagged ideas to come from their younger selves. ("Re-Invent Your Second Wheel", sung by bassist Graham Lewis, is a languorous waltz whose DNA has traces of the in-your-face Document and Eyewitness experiment "Zegk Hoqp".) History and transformation are, understandably, recurring themes in the new lyrics on Change Becomes Us, and it's a treat to have this missing link in the Wire story repaired, even if it's as much an anomaly in the present moment as Document and Eyewitness was in its time.


With her seventh album, the country star cheerfully exposes her sometimes-chaotic inner life, wearing her heart on her sleeve as she reaches for another shot of tequila.

Wildcard

Miranda Lambert opens  Wildcard with confidence: “I’m finally on the up and up.” It’s jarring to hear her use the word finally here, as she’s seemed to be on a long ascent for the past few years. Following the public dissolution of her marriage to fellow country star Blake Shelton, her 2016 double album The Weight of These Wings debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s country charts. Last year’s reunion with the Pistol Annies delivered another bout of biting, clear-eyed songwriting from Lambert and her bandmates. With Wildcard, she cheerfully exposes her sometimes-chaotic inner life, wearing her heart on her sleeve as she reaches for another shot of tequila.
Lambert packs Wildcard with her quick-witted, cheeky observations about her world; it’s as if she strode off the set of a Steel Magnolias reboot and headed straight for the studio. Opener “White Trash” contrasts her have-not days with her more glamorous present, while “It All Comes Out in the Wash” offers reassurance that no stain—be it a splotch of Merlot or some messy gossip—is permanent. The songs are warm, funny, and comforting, acknowledging the hassles of existence outside of the upper class while transforming them into sing-along choruses. Maren Morris joins Lambert on “Way Too Pretty for Prison,” which makes for a punchy later-day foil to the Dixie Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl.” Lambert and Morris let their cooler heads prevail upon considering the practical realities of incarceration. “The bars there ain’t got boys to buy us drinks,” for one. The pair flip the traditions of timeless murder ballads: they don’t go through with their crime of passion, but they could get away with it if they really wanted to.
Wildcard hits its hellraiser high-water mark with “Locomotive,” a rollicking number where Lambert draws on a familiar country artifact to make a case for her own unbridled power. She belts every verse before careening into a rapid-fire chorus, while a harmonica imitates the long wail of a train horn in the background. The track’s funky instrumental coda sends it out with a stomp. “Tequila Does,” which arrives late in the album, is a steller last-call anthem. Lambert tempers her casual dismay about barroom wannabe-cowboys (who are “all hat, no cattle”) with a chorus that radiates the warm, rosy glow of one-too-many. Not one to sully her beers with tears, Lambert relishes the prospect of going home alone rather than surrendering to potential disappointment. Lambert’s sleight-of-hand with country tropes distinguishes her as a clever songwriter who honors the music’s history without kowtowing to the hagiography of the genre.
Lambert balances her high-spirited romps with more contemplative numbers, cooling off long enough to reflect without flagging Wildcard’s momentum. With “Settling Down,” she examines the forked road ahead of her as a 35-year-old woman, wondering if it’s better to follow her restless spirit or settle down; a gnarled bassline in the bridge recalls the restless churn of an anxious stomach before Lambert bursts into a sunnier chorus. And though Lambert’s mentions of alcohol across Wildcard are mostly celebratory, she acknowledges the more heartbroken side of such pleasures with “Dark Bars.”
Lambert uses these songs to share some of her reservations about what the next few decades hold for her, but when she takes stock of it all, she lands on a firm conclusion: It’s pretty bitchin’. The heyday of “bitchin’” as a “cool” qualifier came and went with the Reagan administration, but Lambert injects them with new vitality, singing the four-syllable refrain of “Pretty Bitchin’” as equal parts schoolyard taunt and tongue-in-cheek recognition that she does, indeed, have it pretty great.
Wildcard shines in part because Lambert comes across as neither the damsel in distress nor a lone-wolf heroine. The album doesn’t feel “relatable” inasmuch as Lambert and her stable of co-writers (which includes Highwoman Natalie Hemby among other Nashville lights) have distilled common anxieties and insecurities into a batch of excellent country tunes. And though Wildcard is fun as hell, Lambert sounds relaxed, playful, happy, and comfortable throughout. Her “up and up” feels earthly and attainable—it’s not just the Restoration Hardware furniture or the Airstream trailer with white-wall tires. Lambert celebrates the multitudes of being a hot mess, prioritizing the joy of personal growth over lamenting the pitfalls and potholes. Life is, in fact, pretty bitchin’.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The first album in David Bowie's Berlin Trilogy sees Bowie as a tragic figure. The album's first side is a beautiful futurist ruin, littered with holes left purposefully unfixed, while the blank, instrumental second side feels like a calculated attempt to kill the author.

Low

[Ed. Note: In light of David Bowie's passing, Pitchfork commissioned reviews of several of his classic albums.]
Compared to its predecessors, David Bowie's 11th studio album is noticeably reserved. "I had no statement to make on Low," said Bowie, who could hardly write lyrics at all in the aftermath of his L.A. excesses, let alone fashion another extensive character study like Ziggy or the Thin White Duke. His lyrical gifts were already spread thin, and thinner still when a completed third verse was cut from "Always Crashing in the Same Car," in which Bowie did his very best Bob Dylan impression. Producer Tony Visconti thought it was so creepy, and potentially inappropriate given Dylan's motorcycle accident a decade earlier, that they scrapped it.
Bowie was hardly lucid in 1976, but you bet he knew exactly what he was doing with that verse. The mysterious injuries from Dylan's 1966 accident gave him the excuse to disappear from the rat race for years, whereas the full complement of wounds Bowie sustained in L.A. were proudly displayed for a while: the Station to Station-era diet of cocaine, red peppers, and milk, and the ensuing physical and psychic degradation that led him to endorse fascism, fear the occult, and allegedly keep his urine in the fridge lest anyone steal it. (From a flushed toilet?) When he realized he had to leave Hollywood and kick his prodigious habit, West Berlin appealed for its anonymity, though unlike Dylan, Bowie would make his own recovery a matter of public record. Both artists were escaping paradigmatic American success by retreating into themselves. Where Dylan let rumors of death fester, Bowie opened his hermitage to the world, reinforcing his outsider myth.
The Bowie of this era is a tragic figure: strung out and prone to spending days awake watching the same films on a loop. He was broke from the aftermath of a bad managerial deal and drained by the related ongoing court case, and so paranoid that, after his destitute charge Iggy Pop pushed him in the pool at the residential Château d'Hérouville studio in France, he had it exorcized to avoid being touched by the "dark stains" that he believed lurked at the bottom.
Yet Bowie's sense of purpose was at least somewhat intact. He applied exacting pressure on Iggy to make The Idiot as good as he knew it could be, and brought similar determination to Low, albeit the kind where having very few aims was its own liberating objective. Whatever they made didn't even have to be released, he told his new collaborator Brian Eno, who was brought in alongside Station to Station's crack band to further develop that album's hybrid of electronic R&B.
Low's first side is a beautiful futurist ruin, littered with holes left purposefully unfixed. Two decades after its release, Bowie noted that his crew "really captured, unlike anything else in that time, a sense of yearning for a future that we all knew would never come to pass." Visconti heightens the decay and distills the lifespan of every sound, treating Dennis Davis' drums so that he was playing along to a withered echo of his last strike, like an explosion contained in a tin can. Even Bowie's voice sounds aged and distant. Eno's sharp electronics jostle against the bolshy funk rhythms and Carlos Alomar and Ricky Gardiner's guitars, giving the record a feverish euphoria that hits like too much pseudo-ephedrine and mangles linear time. These swaggering fragments, seldom breaking the three-minute mark, promise bombastic payoffs but then fade out instead. Low's first side feels like having the carpet ripped out from under you by three wizards who have plans to fly it elsewhere.
All this playfulness means that Low's reputation for utter desolation doesn't feel quite right. Bowie is, of course, obsessed with barriers to connection: the sudden instinct that causes him to yelp and back away from someone on "Breaking Glass" ("You're such a wonderful person/ But you got problems/ Oh, oh, oh, oh, I'll never touch ya"), self-imposed isolation ("Sound and Vision") and isolation from the self ("What are you gonna be/ To the real me," on "What in the World"), and a semi-serious plea for lifelong companionship just as his marriage was disintegrating ("Be My Wife"). From the windows of Hansa Tonstudio (where the record was mostly finished, not tracked) the band could see into the watchtowers atop Berlin's dividing Wall. A lot of Low's lyrics were extemporized, but the consistency of these ornery admissions, however fragmented, implies a self-aware desire to push past them, to hunt some trace of optimism.
At the end of side 1 comes the instrumental "A New Career in a New Town," which plots the distance from Bowie's Anglocentric career to his new Teutonic mode, bridging the former's refractory squelched riff and the latter's dreamy gauze with a searching harmonica phrase: a regular substitute for emotion that the human voice can't reach, but a brilliantly strange idea in this context (as well as another Dylan affectation). Here, it's bittersweet, nostalgic but propelled by forward motion, and a resolution to commit to a place and escape his blue room funk. The mostly instrumental second side is a tribute to the people of the Soviet Bloc —Poland on "Warszawa," and East Berlin on the remaining three songs—in which the elusive nature of side 1 subsides and Bowie's persona is subsumed into his and Eno's pulsating sequences.
These were carefully calibrated attempts at killing the author: Eno set out a metronome pulse, and the pair selected a random beat on which to introduce a new musical complement to the central motif. On "Warszawa" that’s an eerily simple piano tune that was inspired by overhearing Visconti’s infant son playing to himself; "Art Decade," mostly Eno’s invention, circles around a ghostly melody worthy of "The Twilight Zone." Bowie shrouds the tune to "Scarborough Fair" inside "Weeping Wall," and a lonely saxophone (played by Bowie himself) eventually joins the cathedral of male vocals and strings on "Subterraneans." It’s credit to their influence that these songs sound pedestrian, even a little ponderous by today’s standards, but the way they conjure lost worlds is still something to behold, like the depths of dank paintings being X-rayed before your eyes.
The perpetual stranger finally finds comfort in a strange land, synthesizing his dislocation (and his love of the expressionist Brücke artists) and that of these broken nations with a tense, beautiful, elemental music that speaks of genuine engagement, and an empathy that seemed impossible on side 1. It makes good on the album cover's subtle joke: a still from Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth where Bowie’s orange hair fades into the background; the word 'Low' atop a vanishing profile. Bowie's meticulously crafted existence had always offered fans a sense of possibility. By submitting his ego to Low, he was able to create a new one for himself.


Using a fanciful palette of chintzy synths and other new-age-adjacent sounds, the Latvian producer pays tribute to the moon’s seas—and humans’ capacity for wonder.

Sea to Sea

Agata Melnikova is a dreamer. Back when she was putting together Closer to the Equator, her 2016 debut as Sign Libra, she longed to get out of her native Latvia and visit the tropical climates that inspired the music she was making. Lacking the money to travel, she found alternate sources of creative stimulus: BBC nature documentaries and rainforest sounds on YouTube.
On Sea to Sea, Melnikova’s second album, her gaze drifts toward a destination that’s even more remote: the moon—specifically, its “seas.” Collectively known as the Lunar Maria, these volcanic plains have likely captivated people ever since primitive humans looked up at the night sky and first noticed those giant dark patches on the moon’s surface.
A similar sense of wonder runs through Sea to Sea. Each of its nine tracks is named after a different lunar mare, and although we now know the moon to be a place that’s cold, gray, and devoid of life, Melnikova takes a more fantastical approach, evoking a time when people imagined that little green men were roaming around up there. Sign Libra’s music is bright and colorful, though she’s largely abandoned the woozy Balearic sounds of Closer to the Equator. Instead, she’s tapped into the same sort of dreamy, high-gloss new-age palette that artists like CFCF have successfully utilized in recent years. There’s a faint sense of ridiculousness inherent in Sea to Sea’s chintzy synth melodies, plucked strings, and faux woodwinds—even when they're channeling early Ryuichi Sakamoto—but Melnikova’s embrace of their campy overtones is clearly purposeful.
In the video for lead single “Sea of Islands,” she charmingly mugs for the camera, intermittently playing her keyboard and gliding around a surreal, almost Dali-esque set with moves that are somewhere between performance art and ’60s dance crazes like the Swim. The clip for “Sea of Nectar” is even more absurd, as Melnikova, decked out in a beret and white gloves, goofily struts her way through a hypnagogic rave for one, occasionally joined by a disembodied saxophone player. There’s no guile and no cynicism, just a childlike whimsy that makes the music feel almost impossibly light on its feet.
Adding to the otherworldliness is Melnikova’s voice, which is one of the album’s most compelling elements. Rarely using actual words, Melnikova mostly communicates in billowing melodies and shadowy whispers, although she’s not above the occasional burst of baritone or rhythmic nonsense. On “Sea of Islands,” snippets of her voice have been tweaked to sound almost guttural, resembling a didgeridoo or Tuvan throat singer. In contrast, on “Sea of Cleverness” she takes a soulful pop turn whose vocal melody is reminiscent, however coincidentally, of La Roux’s 2009 smash “In for the Kill,” as remixed by Skream.
Overall, though, Melnikova’s presence is a soothing one. Whether she’s gently cooing (“Sea of Tranquility”), getting weird and witchy (“Sea of Serenity”) or spinning her voice into a multi-part devotional choir (“Sea of Fecundity”), there’s something alluring about her voice and its many manipulations. Comparisons to artists like Enya and Kate Bush are tempting, but Melnikova’s choices also recall the mischievous spirit of Grimes’ early work.
That playfulness is ultimately what makes Sea to Sea such a rewarding listen. Although Melnikova certainly isn’t the first artist to revisit ’80s new age and globe-trotting postmodernism, she is one of the few who’s approached them with a genuine sense of humor. Sea to Sea isn’t a joke, but it has been made by someone who seems to realize that there’s a limit to just how serious someone can be while singing atop a spa-friendly suite of pan flutes and gauzy synths. There’s a lot of glee in this music, and Sign Libra seems more than willing to share it.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On what may seem like a readymade gag, the psych-folk favorite covers the lost Dave Matthews Band album in full. He convincingly connects his adolescent love to his adult explorations.

The Lillywhite Sessions

Ryley Walker’s music is a stormy, searching amalgam of proggy British folk, primitive guitar, free improv, and Chicago jazz-rock. He draws from a deep well of Serious Record influences, the stuff you discover once you’ve burned through the standard canon. But to get there, you’ve got to start somewhere, and for Walker, the journey began with a single “Two Step.” See, Walker wasn’t raised on Alan Bishop or the AACM; he came up a Dave Matthews fan, perhaps working out the changes to “Seek Up” in the space between bongloads. DMB’s musically omnivorous, improvisationally minded jazz-folk fusion put Walker on his own roundabout path. And on his second LP of 2018—a full-album reimagining of DMB’s largely lost turn-of-the-millennium album, The Lillywhite Sessions—he finds his way back to the source.
DMB’s The Lillywhite Sessions are almost certainly the most widely heard full-length bootleg of this century. In late 1999, Dave and company began working on a follow-up to 1998’s dense, daunting Before These Crowded Streets with longtime producer Steve Lillywhite. But the songs were depressed to the point of being maudlin, which made the air in the studio oppressive. Weeks stretched into months, and the frazzled band reached a detente: The label would fly Matthews to Los Angeles to meet with Jagged Little Pill producer Glen Ballard in hopes of reseting his system. The two went on a tear, writing and arranging an album’s worth of material in about 10 days. Those songs became Everyday, and the work with Lillywhite was unceremoniously abandoned.
But in March 2001, Craig Knapp, the lead singer of a DMB cover band, found himself with a copy of the scrapped Lillywhite work. The songs were a little rough, having come straight off the mixing board with a wonky left-right balance, scratch lyrics, and spaces begging to be filled. Still, Knapp had the new-old LP he never thought he’d hear from one of the United States’ biggest bands. Knapp and a buddy put the whole thing on Napster. There’s no telling how many people heard the sessions, but between DMB’s fiendishly bootlegging fanbase and the sudden ubiquity of CD burners and file-sharing services, it’s certainly in the millions. And for many, the unfinished album’s blue moods became the crowning achievement of Matthews as a songwriter. It is a suite of introspection and unease, a ruminative, whiskey-drowned set that found Matthews wading deeper into his obsession with mortality and melancholy.
Ryley Walker missed The Lillywhite Sessions the first time around; he’s a Stand Up guy. But he’s certainly aware of the long shadow the work cast over the DMB kingdom: The Lillywhite Sessions is the dark Dave record, the diehards’ favorite. These finer distinctions matter little in Walker’s generally Dave-agnostic circles, where the Dave Matthews Band aren’t much more than a punchline, an elevator-jazz ensemble fronted by the yowling human embodiment of a Coexist bumper sticker. But Walker still hears a kind of funhouse-mirror version of all the things he favors in his own music: the instrumental interplay, the tricky dynamics, the self-directed despondence.
Last January, Walker, bassist Andrew Scott Young, and drummer Ryan Jewell—erstwhile Dave fans, all–spent several days holed up in Chicago, working up a tribute to the entire Lillywhite Sessions. On its face, the idea is a pretty good gag: a prog-folk darling, burning off years of cred by warbling his way through “Grey Street.” But not so fast. On the subject of Dave Matthews, Ryley Walker is as serious as your life.
On these 12 interpretations, Walker and company offer a dozen wildly different approaches. Some flatter with imitation; others rearrange the songs’ DNA entirely. But no matter how far Walker strays from the source, he’s made every effort to stay true to the guiding ethos of the band that wrote these songs. He’s made a Dave Matthews tribute album weird enough for the experimental music set but reverent enough for the overprotective DMB fan wondering why this Pig-Pen-looking motherfucker’s got his grubby mitts all over their beloved “Big Eyed Fish.”
Opener “Busted Stuff” has all the serpentine guitars and pinprick rhythms of a Sea & Cake song, the ambling proto-heartbreak of the original now more tense and urgent. “Grey Street” doubles down on the melodrama, landing somewhere in the neighborhood of Xiu Xiu’s spin on “Fast Car.” “Diggin’ a Ditch” is revved-up and blown-out à la Experimental Jet Set-era Sonic Youth, while “Sweet Up and Down” is a stoned groove from the playbook of jazz-funk mainstays Medeski Martin & Wood. The playing here is sharp, intuitive, surprising; across these first four songs, Walker and company manage to sound like four completely different bands.
“JTR” gets going in an awful hurry, with saxophonist Nick Mazzarrella overblowing his way across the verses to get to the song’s downspouting chorus. But about a third in, everything stops, the tether to the original song suddenly cut. Walker and company blow the absolute back out of “JTR,” vibes, sax, bass, and chimes crawling and scraping their way to a spiraling free-jazz fracas. It’s here, in the disc’s most out-there moment, where Walker’s spin on The Lillywhite Sessions truly comes into its own. Walker’s not looking to give DMB some sudden appreciation among the avant-garde set; they are doing just fine without ’em, thanks. But he is seeking a kind of rapprochement between the music he loves now and the music that started him down this path. When he takes the last half of “JTR” way out beyond the bardo, he’s just stretching the DMB ethos—malleable songs, searching solos—to its logical endpoint.
Sometimes that simply means throwing a number against the wall and seeing what sticks. In the case of the divisive “Monkey Man,” he turns it into a swirling five-minute noise collage. With “Raven,” the band dig extra hard into the changes, highlighting the slippery rhythms. Walker’s locating the stray threads in these songs and yanking until they come apart at the seams.
For every upended expectation, there’s a “Grace is Gone,” the quietly wrenching Lillywhite highlight that Walker drapes with tracing paper. The plaintive original is one of the most out-and-out gorgeous moments across the entire DMB catalog, and Walker knows when to leave well enough alone. Much the same goes for the troubled groove of “Big Eyed Fish” and the soused spiritual epic, “Bartender.” While Walker’s Lillywhite Sessions often seem to favor the head over the heart, he goes for the core of these songs, reveling in Matthews’ bleary, brass-rail philosophizing.
Walker’s desire to do something novel with pretty much all of these songs occasionally distorts or otherwise dispenses with their emotional stakes, which could be a sticking point for curious DMB fans. These songs often don’t hit you in the gut the way the original sessions can, opting for a brain-over-body intent. But Walker’s spin on the Lillywhite material didn’t have to be faithful, or even reverent, to work: all it had to be was invested. He and his band have come to these songs with best intentions.
Walker’s Lillywhite isn’t going to make indie rock learn to love Dave Matthews any more than Dave Matthews fans are necessarily going to embrace this indoor-kid version of their illicitly acquired classic. That’s not the point. Walker’s idiosyncratic take is his way of reconnecting the celebrated, cerebral art-folkie he’s become with a past spent dodging beanbags and sucking down Natty Lights in an East Troy parking lot. If you hear a little bit of your own journey in there, hey, all the better. It’s like the man once said: “I will go in this way, and find my own way out.”


Lange, better known as Helado Negro, teams with the visual artist Kristi Sword for a sprawling and inspired project paying tribute to the Marfa, Texas sky.

Roberto Carlos Lange : Kite Symphony, Four Variations

Kite Symphony, Four Variations

Marfa, Texas is famous for its enormous bowl of sky. Just look at it: Here it is glazed pink, here it’s filled with marshmallow clouds, and here it’s spattered like a house painter's drop cloth. In the 1970s, the minimalist sculptor Donald Judd began buying up property in the Chihuahuan Desert town; punctuating its emptiness with his cryptic cement and aluminum boxes, he minted the area’s reputation as a locus of elusive awe. In the decades since, Marfa, with a population of fewer than 2000 people, has become America’s unlikeliest cultural hub, drawing artists from around the world to grapple with its landscape and its light, no matter how quixotic the endeavor might seem. In 2016, after years of planning, the octogenarian artist Robert Irwin completed untitled (dawn to dusk), an empty building meant to channel some of the region’s intangible alchemy of space and shadow. When asked what he hoped to achieve, he said mischievously, “I’m trying to grab a will-o’-the-wisp.”
How do you capture such an expanse in sound? Roberto Carlos Lange, better known as Helado Negro, and the visual artist Kristi Sword went to extravagant lengths to answer that question; the answer they came up with, a multimedia project called Kite Symphony,  ballooned to such an extent that its current form is nearly as amorphous, and as difficult to describe, as the object of their investigation. The piece, still a work in progress, currently incorporates sound and light sculptures, handmade instruments, and the wind itself. It’s a lot to wrap one’s head around, but all began simply enough: After an initial research trip in November, Lange and Sword returned to Marfa in March for what was meant to be a three-week residency making art out of kites. But as the pandemic hit the United States and lockdown orders went into place, the couple settled in for an extended stay, and the project evolved.
They transformed mylar kites into “ephemeral sculptures” that react to light and wind. The two artists fashioned kalimbas out of gourds and disassembled toys. Lange recorded sketches on a church organ and finagled access to a baby grand in a shuttered restaurant. Armed with a sheaf of Sword’s graphic scores—drawings meant to be used in place of traditional musical notation—he recruited Texas-raised violist Jeanann Dara and recorded her on site at the Chinati Foundation, Judd’s 340-acre outdoor museum, as she improvised responses to tactile cues: Imagine the sound of a cactus, say, or Express the feeling of wind on your skin. Working out of a local studio, Lange mixed all of these stray sounds together, along with remote contributions from cornetist Rob Mazurek, to yield Kite Symphony: Four Variations—a free-flowing collage that doubles as a snapshot of the project’s sprawl.
Lange’s work has always resisted categorization; after making experimental beat music in the ’00s, he has evolved into an unusual sort of singer-songwriter, movingly examining the nuances of Latinx identity in songs that blur the line between synth pop and folk. But the wordless, beatless Kite Symphony, even more exploratory than previous albums under his birth name, sails far beyond the known coordinates of the Helado Negro universe. Totaling a concise 32 minutes, the album’s four movements bob and weave between purposeful form and pure abstraction. The record opens with a strange, otherworldly sound—part start-up chime, part engine turning over, it might be a radio frequency intercepted from a distant galaxy—and quickly settles into a gentle groove of bright, rounded tones tossed by an incidental rhythm, like agates rolling in the tide.
This is as clearly defined as the music will get; the only constant is that no sound or element retains its shape for long. Birdsong bleeds into dubbed-out chord clusters. Bowed tones duet with scraped metal. Timbres darken like sudden storm clouds; rustling noises suggest the presence of critters skittering in the underbrush. There are expressive, deeply lyrical passages where viola, brass, and piano layer in luminous harmonies; there are also melodies so formless it’s easy to believe that they were created by the wind whipping through rusty gates. Like Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Music for Nine Postcards and GREEN, it is not so much ambient as environmental music, teasingly blurring focus as it slips between foreground and background.
While Kite Symphony is an indirect product of the pandemic, the music is ultimately marked by its lightness of spirit, as if to say, “This too shall pass.” A sense of place is implicit in crickets, distant traffic, blowing winds, and other field-recorded sounds, and perhaps a sense of humor, too: At one point, the music drops out and a buzzing insect takes an unforeseen solo, its wings brushing against Lange’s microphone. But most of the time, it’s anyone’s guess exactly how any of these sounds are being made. The whole thing is a conjuring trick. What’s remarkable is how Lange and his collaborators give shape to something so intangible.
Even when the music is at its haziest, there are submerged rhythms and hidden patterns at work. That’s true on a macro level, too: The final movement builds to a wonderfully satisfying climax as Dara’s multi-tracked viola traces the faintest suggestion of a line against a slowly oscillating drone, like a swallow barely visible against the evening sky. Dara’s playing, in fact, often feels like the music’s lifeblood. There are moments when her bowing rolls from the unmistakably physical sound of horse hair against metal strings to ghostly overtone. It’s moments like these that Lange and his collaborators’ kinship with Robert Irwin becomes clear: They, too, are grabbing will-o’-the-wisps, and Kite Symphony: Four Variations is alive with them.

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The enigmatic masked country singer follows up his debut with more songs about lonesome souls alone together—and one standout duet with Shania Twain.

Show Pony EP

When Orville Peck croons about young men crying, he never reaches the word “cry.” He halts just before it, the silence hanging over what’s implied. On the surface, the enigmatic country singer is steely and collected, assuming the stoic veneer of the American cowboy. He shrouds himself in fringed leather masks, concealing all but his striking blue eyes. He sings about Marlboros in a rich, stately baritone that evokes Roy Orbison and Elvis. But Peck is gay and Canadian, and the glimmering torch songs on his 2019 debut, Pony, underscored the latent homoeroticism of the Old West—the undying commitment between a “lone” ranger and his trusty partner, streaking through ghost towns side-by-side. His outlaw persona toys with contradictions. Country music may be stereotyped as conservative, but Peck is seduced by another facet: its rhinestones and camp, the decadent flair of Gram Parson’s Nudie suit.
For decades, the cowboy has been a beacon for those who see their own loneliness reflected in the figure’s migratory lifestyle and estrangement. Though Orville Peck is a pseudonym, the singer believes it’s his most sincere project, “the most exposed that I’ve ever been.” But the contemporary trend for rodeo aesthetics has encouraged skeptics to receive Peck—a former punk musician who drummed in the Vancouver trio Nü Sensae—as a gimmick. “Call it country (like Lil Nas X did), and you can compel people to talk and listen,” one critic contended. The more “yeehaws” in advertising copy and bolo ties on the red carpet, the less convincing a Western act may seem.
Part of what spared Pony from seeming hollow was its vivid detailing—the velvet gloves of the rodeo queen, the violent sister “strik[ing] gold” on someone’s eyes, the failed love affairs with the rider, the boxer, the jailer. The album’s particularities gave shape to ballooning emotions, the bliss of a heady dare like “baby, let’s get high.” In that context, the cowboy identity seemed less like a gimmick than a metaphor, a matter of emotional and existential framing. By comparison, the original songs on Peck’s latest Show Pony EP are more vague. “Summertime,” the opener, is a wistful callback to a better season, anchored around a sad observation: “You and I/Bide our time.” But the stock coloring of the verses, which talk of “riding into the night” and “chasing the horizon,” pales against the eerie canyon roads and anguished memories of past singles like “Dead of Night.”
Show Pony’s most evocative original is the classic rock winddown “Drive Me, Crazy.” Two truckers ride out their days in an 18-wheeler, “November Rain” on the radio, as Peck relives their relationship with knowing fatalism: “Burning rubber wherever we go/Looking back on the orange glow.” The enduring image of two mavericks weathering the wilderness together recalls a touching observation from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke: that most noble task that two people could undertake is to “stand guard over the solitude of the other.” In Orville Peck’s world, the bond rarely lasts, but you can save the memory for later. He shares a similar comportment with Lana Del Rey, another artist who speeds forward, casting glances at what she’s left in her wake. The spare guitar ballad “No Glory for the West” harkens to Del Rey’s obsession with waning grandeur and the frail seams of American mythology. “Ridin’ past the best/And there’s still no rest,” Peck laments.
The EP’s two wild cards are both tributes to female country stars. The closer is a burly cover of Bobbie Gentry’s “Fancy,” which is interesting as an implied drag performance. But the overwhelming fullness of Peck’s voice becomes wearisome; he sacrifices sprightliness and wit in his delivery for growling power. Accentuated with bells, thuds, tambourine, and a sputtering guitar solo, Gentry’s lively tale about a girl escaping poverty through sex work takes on the melodrama of musical theater. The narrowness—or specificity, depending on your perspective—of Peck’s act already invites charges of being stiltedly one-note; the hamminess doesn’t help.
The Shania Twain duet “Legends Never Die,” meanwhile, is more pop and less “authentic”-sounding than what Peck usually attempts, but it’s truer to his playful vision of country as an outlet for fabulousness and glamour. In the music video, Peck steps onstage at a drive-in theater when Twain prowls forward in a leopard-print catsuit, sparkly fringe dripping down her sleeves—a callback to her iconic “That Don’t Impress Me Much” video. The two singers end up sharing the stage, swapping boasts in a cheeky, confident duet. “Takin’ orders never been my style,” Peck sings lightheartedly. Their tossed-out asides and easygoing camaraderie is delightful. For once, the lonesome cowboy doesn’t seem so solitary.

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Already one of the most talked-about and divisive records of the year, Vampire Weekend’s Afropop- and preppy-inflected debut is simple, jaunty, homespun, and—like the early albums from fellow fast-risers Belle and Sebastian and the Strokes were on their release—one of the most refreshing and replayable indie records in recent years.

Vampire Weekend

If there’s anything the happy New York kids in this band have learned from listening to African music, it’s the difference between “pop” and “rock”: Vampire Weekend’s debut album announces straight off that it’s the former. The first sound on the first song, “Mansard Roof,” comes from Rostam Batmanglij’s keyboard, set to a perky, almost piping tone—the kind of sunny sound you’d hear in old West African pop. Same goes for Ezra Koenig’s guitar, which never takes up too much space; it’s that clean, natural tone you’d get on a record from Senegal or South Africa. Chris Baio’s bass pulses and slides and steps with light feet, and most of all there’s Chris Tomson, who plays like a percussionist as often as he does a rock drummer, tapping out rhythms and counter-accents on a couple of drums in the back of the room. And yet they play it all like indie kids on a college lawn, because they’re not hung up on Africa in the least—a lot of these songs work more like those on the Strokes’ debut, Is This It?, if you scraped off all the scuzzy rock’n’roll signifiers, leaving behind nothing but clean-cut pop and preppy new wave, tucked-in shirts and English-lit courses.
This Afro/preppy/new-wave combination has a history—Brits like Orange Juice, Americans like Talking Heads. For now, though, it’s one of the most deservedly buzzed-about things around: People have been chattering over Vampire Weekend ever since a CD-R demo of three of these songs started circulating last year. (Full disclosure: One of the sound engineers of that CD-R now does freelance audio work for Pitchfork.) The excitement isn’t hard to fathom. People spend a lot of time poking around for the edgy new underground thing, convinced that plain old pop songs have been done to death. But Vampire Weekend come along like Belle and Sebastian and the Strokes each did, sounding refreshingly laidback and uncomplicated, and with simple setups that make good songs sound exceedingly easy. (The result being not “this is mind-blowing,” or “this is catchy,” but “I have listened to this, straight through, four times a day for the past month.”)
No surprise, then, that their first hit MP3 would be a song called “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa,” which is sly, quiet, and casual in a way that blows away so many other bands who actively try to get your attention. Their label seems to have understood this effect, and so they’ve left these demos sounding as natural as they were: This release just fiddles with the mastering, switches out a few takes in ways you wouldn't much notice, plays with the sequencing, relegates one song to a B-side, and adds a couple of great ones that you can nonetheless understand being omitted the first time.
Most of the credit will wind up going to Koenig, who’s the star presence here. By the second song, “Oxford Comma,” the band is ticking along on little touches of keyboard and the tap of a snare drum, and he’s still keeping the empty space captivating: There’s a little indie yelp to his voice, but mostly he’s relaxed, conversational, and wry. (Not unlike another guy who’s tried on an Afro-suave sound—though Paul Simon never sounded this exuberant.) The person who’ll probably never get enough credit turns out to be Batmanglij, whose pat, classicist keyboard arpeggios lead the way through tempo shifts and transitions, occasionally locking in with some sprightly violin parts. It all comes off as simple, jaunty, and homespun, but there’s a lot of precision lurking beneath—exactly what happens when you combine a music major and indie-pop.
Koenig is smart and lucky, in that he gets to play the preppy angle both ways: Like a guy who’s read a lot of Cheever, he can summon up the atmosphere of kids whose parents use “summer” as a verb and give it all the hairy eyeball at the same time. “Oxford Comma” is spent picking on someone who brags too much about money: “Why would you lie about how much coal you have?/Why would you lie about something dumb like that?” (Then again, there’s nothing more moneyed than having the luxury to find money tacky, and when Koenig adds that Lil Jon “always tells the truth,” you kind of suspect Lil Jon wouldn’t find how much “coal” someone has to be all that irrelevant.)
Later, walking across the Columbia University campus, Koenig drops a detail whose delivery always gets a smile from me, even if its thrust is hard to gauge: “You spilled kefir on your keffiyeh.” Koenig is a detail guy, a happy observer who never much bores you with how he feels; mostly, as befits a recent college grad, he’s singing about location, about where people will go and whether they’ll come back with new faces. In non-album B-side “Ladies of Cambridge,” he can’t decide whether to move there with the girl or mourn letting her go alone; “Walcott” whirls you through Cape Cod and then suggests getting the hell out (“Bottleneck is a shit show/Hyannisport is a ghetto”); the twitchy “A-Punk” sees one person off to New Mexico while another stays near college and finds a place in Washington Heights. And while the faux-African backing vocals on “One” might be the album’s only real misstep, the final line sums up where its concerns are: “All your collegiate grief has left you/Dowdy in sweatshirts/Absolute horror!”
Of course, while Vampire Weekend have certainly benefited from our new music world of internet buzz, plenty of people have found reasons to hate Vampire Weekend from the first note, many of them having to do with their prep aesthetic and Ivy League educations—Oxford shirts, boat shoes, Columbia University. But it just so happens that we’re in a moment where such things matter to people: As interest grows in clean-cut, clever indie-pop, plenty of folks would like to hear things get dirtier, riskier, less collegiate—and in a lot of corners of the indie landscape, they thankfully are. But here’s another odd parallel with that first Strokes record: Vampire Weekend have the same knack for grabbing those haters and winning them over. Bring any baggage you want to this record, and it still returns nothing but warm, airy, low-gimmick pop, peppy, clever, and, yes, unpretentious—four guys who listened to some Afropop records, picked up a few nice ideas, and then set about making one of the most refreshing and replayable indie records in recent years.


Touching on a variety of extreme-music styles, and sampling from iconic revolutionary thinkers, the Philadelphia grindcore quartet grafts noise onto bull-headed hardcore, to blistering effect.

Bliss

While fusing grindcore and noise is increasingly prevalent in modern extreme music, the two have a long shared history. Contemporary noise developed concurrent to grindcore in the late 1980s and early 1990s, both as forms of “anti-music,” and the metal label Relapse has released music from pioneers of both styles, Brutal Truth and Merzbow. Earlier this decade, Toronto’s the Endless Blockade and Portland’s Knelt Rote were destabilizing grindcore by injecting power electronics. The Philadelphia quartet Hell to Pay graft noise onto bull-headed hardcore reminiscent of Nails and Jesus Piece, the latter of which also features Hell to Pay bassist Aaron Heard and guitarist John DiStefano. Bliss, their full-length debut, uses that hybrid not just to bulldoze through expectations in sound, but also to achieve a higher purpose.
Nailing the combination of blistering grindcore fury with overdriven buzzsaw tone, Bliss sounds like a Kurt Ballou production, though it isn’t. It particularly recalls Nails’ Ballou-produced Unsilent Death, which was more explicit in its HM-2 worship. “Bleed to Me” is the most unapologetically aggro track here, transitioning from straight-ahead crust-grind into floor-punching breakdowns that would fit in with Harm’s Way or Hatebreed. “Static” spasms for 30 seconds before ending with low, pulsating rumbles that lead into “Runaway,” their slowest and densest track. “Runaway” takes from the uneasy tension of Black Sabbath’s “Black Sabbath,” guitars ringing like noises in the wind rather than doom’s meteor-like bludgeon. Hell to Pay draw from metal more slyly and broadly than their overwhelming grind influence suggests; “Starve” takes from the more Slayer-leaning modern thrash of Noisem, reckless yet barely in control, and “Void,” which first appeared as a single in 2014, nearly reaches death metal at its most monolithic.
Throughout, the noise doesn’t bleed into the grindcore too much; it acts more as a segue. This actually works in its favor: Bliss’ penchant for beatdown slams and occasional nods to thrash act as a break from pure speed and make the noise less intimidating. “Smear” is the only track that even toys with more treble-based blasts that would rival their grind foundation. Should noise be uncompromising? Yes, but not everyone can accept a record like Merzbow’s Pulse Demon on first listen.
While Bliss is accessible from a grindcore standpoint, they’re not letting you off easy with a few dopamine-blasting breakdowns and sizzling noise interludes. If their lyrics are generically anti-establishment, a few carefully chosen samples make their intentions clearer. “Thrive” cites Noam Chomsky’s “If the Nuremberg Laws Were Applied…” and “Education Is Ignorance,” adding creepy echoes and low-riding bass. The title track features excerpts from Angela Davis’ 1972 interview from prison and Mumia Abu-Jamal’s “A Life Lived Deliberately,” the latter an especially fitting pick for a Philadelphia band with songs based on oppression. It ends with a recording of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” whose cheery gusto sounds eerily fascist, and creates a provocative contrast with the political discourse that has preceded it.
Hell to Pay could stand to make the connection between their lyrics and samples a little more explicit. Still, opening an avenue for revolutionary thought is commendable. Grindcore and noise, together or on their own, were never meant to have a huge audience, yet that’s no reason to hole up and hide under convention. As Brutal Truth once said, extreme conditions demand extreme responses.


Alt-J's debut album went Top 20 in the UK, and they're favorites to win November's Mercury Music Prize. The Cambridge-based pop band's been described as "the new Radiohead," but that tag ultimately says more about lowered standards.

An Awesome Wave

It is a contradiction in terms that the band described by some as "the new Radiohead" are prone to statements such as, "Part of the reason [the album] is accessible is because we don't try to go out of the box or be innovative. We just try to play music we like to hear." Where's my "And if anyone else likes it, that's a bonus" klaxon? In Alt-J's case, those are some pre-banking crisis-sized bonuses: Their album has gone Top 20 in the UK, and single "Tessellate" has been all over radio on both sides of the Atlantic for months. They're the favorites to win the £10,000 accolade of November's Mercury Music Prize. As Radiohead would tell you, popularity doesn't preclude you from being experimental, but that Alt-J are being hailed as horndogs for innovation speaks volumes about the neutered, post-Maccabees peerage they've entered into.
The main claim for innovation on Alt-J's debut, An Awesome Wave, is that there's a lot going on. The notion of a male vocal that's halfway between Macy Gray and a goose gibbering over beats discarded from *Eskimo Snow-*era WHY? is certainly a complex notion. Sometimes they sound like Bombay Bicycle Club playing in a submarine. Comprehensible intonation is out of the window, which is probably a good job seeing as very few of the lyrics make any kind of sense. "In your snatch fits pleasure, broom-shaped pleasure," for one. The Cambridge-based, Leeds-formed band thinks nothing of layering on ever more crunchy drumbeats, metallic thuds on the piano, and constellations of sparkle as another knotty rhythm stutters forth: Woody cracks fracture the end of "Tessellate", a cloud of synths smother the final moments of "Breezeblocks", and some incongruous surf guitar twangs over the last seconds of "Taro". But these additions rarely forge any sense of dynamic or structural progression; strip all extraneous sparkle and amplification away, and the songs are exposed for the draining, elongated MOR tunes they really are. This was neatly proven earlier this week when Mumford & Sons covered "Tessellate" in the BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge, the single sounding indistinguishable from their own material.
The most frustrating thing about An Awesome Wave is its tentativeness. Alt-J have also been compared to Wild Beasts, and while there's a superficial similarity between both bands' oddly voiced singers, when Wild Beasts hold back-- as they did on the majestic Smother-- it's because they know that priapism would be inappropriate at that particular moment. In Alt-J's case, there was never any vim to quash in the first place. The second of the record's three interludes is a finger-picked acoustic guitar melody, played over field recordings of... a car park? The bleep of a lorry reversing prompts a woman to comment, "It's good today. It's nice, isn't it?" That rhetorical pleasantry precedes "Something Good" and just as listeners might be about to staple their collars shut for good, the song comes in with a speedy Arab Strap-morose guitar part, and singer Joe Newman uses the language of the bullring ("matador," "estocada") to describe how he's going to vanquish some unwanted lingering feelings. A flurry of piano rises like a tornado in slow motion, promising a break into some much longed-for catharsis, release-- before paling back to reedy acoustic strumming. They dangle the carrot, only for you to reach out and grab it, triggering a booby-trapped cage to fall and make stasis your sentence.
The members of Alt-J have been working on An Awesome Wave for five years, and it shows. It's both overstuffed and messy, and so overworked that what life there may once have been now exists as a kind of primordial paste. When they rise above that, as with the frequent a cappella male vocal harmonies, the effect is startling-- but comically so, given how incongruous these parts are to the rest of the record. "If you give [listeners] a list of influences that come from everywhere and every genre, then there's something for everyone and people seem more intrigued by you as a band," drummer Thom Green told a student newspaper. By that logic, why not throw in some crooning for the olds, a little innuendo for the Rihanna crowd, a cliff face worth of drops just to round out that universal appeal? Cynical, maybe, as Alt-J have proved perfectly popular on their own terms. But if this is what's getting tagged as an "innovative" success these days, then heaven help the weirdos.


Tween is a collection of outtakes from the perennially overlooked Baltimore indie rock band's previous two LPs, yet it manages to capture the full scope of their vision.

Tween

Wye Oak are somehow best known for being overlooked, just like a number of their Baltimore peers (Beach House, Lower Dens, Future Islands) once were. A breakthrough on the order of “Zebra,” “To Die in L.A.,” or “Seasons (Waiting on You)”—style has naggingly eluded the duo, but they aren’t really chasing after one anyway. Over the past decade, they’ve accumulated considerable goodwill with four cohesive and consistent records of indie rock repellent to hyperbole. *Tween doesn’t appear all too likely to change things—it’s a collection of outtakes culled from the transition period between 2011’s Civilian and the synth-pop rebranding of Shriek *while being presented as a “mini-album,” a format whose intentions still confuse most listeners. And yet, *Tween *is a collection of Wye Oak songs that becomes everything previous Wye Oak albums weren’t: unpredictable, assertive, varied and capable of capturing the full scope of their vision.
Note that these are *outtakes, *not B-sides. Wye Oak’s dream-pop of has never soared to the heights reached by the skyscraping “If You Should See,” and the forward velocity of nominal single “Watching the Waiting” is a new pacesetter as well. It’s hard to imagine anyone hearing these as, at best, the 11th-best songs the duo wrote between 2012 and 2014. I can’t imagine that Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack feel that way either—Wye Oak thought highly enough of the scorched-earth dirge “Trigger Finger” to release it as a maxi-single in 2015.
Due to the narrow artistic parameters of Shriek (mostly: no guitars), every song on Tween has this quality of a gem rescued from the cracks. “On Luxury” is clearly a product of Shriek’s emphasis on electronics*, *but far more percussive and textured to fit amongst the sleeker pop numbers. Likewise, “Better (For Esther)” and “If You Should See” are within the galaxy of ‘80s pop, though they touch on the era’s “big music” of U2 and Echo and the Bunnymen.
Wasner has proven to be a restless artist in and out of Wye Oak, so the decision to switch to bass and synths on *Shriek *was understandable and an easy narrative hook for a band that never provided one. But it wasn’t entirely beneficial, as Wasner happens to be a *really expressive *guitar player and *Tween *makes it clear that she was nowhere near running out of things to say. “No Dreaming” initially could be mistaken for a cut on Beach House’s Thank Your Lucky Stars, but then Wasner pulls it towards opposite extremities with a seasick sway of high-capoed chords and a torrential downpour of noise in the chorus. “Too Right” and “Trigger Finger” are even more physically demanding, feedback-scalded dirges that take on the burnt beauty of a Randall Dunn production. Even when Wye Oak hew towards the traditional indie rock structures of the past, they’ve never sounded this aggressive or downright rude.
This isn’t true of Wasner’s vocals or lyrics on *Tween, *both of which remain unerringly gorgeous and impregnable. The sonic rapture of “If You Should See” clouds an acceptance of romantic stability (“It doesn’t take me by the throat/but it’s an outcome I’ll never have to run from”) and throughout *Tween, *Wasner maintains the composure she’s shown in remarkable duets with Patrick Stickles and Samuel Herring, her spangly pop project Dungeonesse and the shoegaze-indebted Flock of Dimes. The flipside of hearing Wasner comfortably fit into so many contexts is that it starts to feel like Wye Oak is in a no-win competition with everyone’s personal Best of Jenn Wasner mixtape.
That's kind of what Tween provides, which is why it instantly feels colorful and more exciting than any of Wye Oak’s full-lengths—would any of these eight stylistic tangents have as much impact if they were extrapolated to 40 minutes? More importantly, *Tween *offers true catharsis, whether it’s physical release triggered incapacitating beauty or pummeling brutality or just Wye Oak saying “fuck it.” A mini-album of outtakes might not be the protracted breakthrough so many wish for Wye Oak, but as they take their galloping victory lap on “Watching the Waiting,” Tween sure sounds like triumph.