This latest reissue from the legendary soul singer features some of the greatest love songs ever made. It also reminds us of a tall and tarnished legacy left behind.

The Poet / The Poet II

This review contains mentions of sexual assault.

Bobby Womack’s music would have been a soothing ointment for the year we all lived, forced to be apart from loved ones and giving eulogies while thousands of miles from the final resting place. But it’s become harder to listen to Bobby Womack. His ministry of love, with its testimonial delivery carried by a gravel tone that’s one-part rock star, one-part blues-bar regular, has taken a darker pallor through the decades.
In 1981, he released The Poet, a beautiful interrogation of love, lovemaking, desire, and despair. Three years later, he would release The Poet II, completing his dual dissertation of the one emotion we can’t live without but have never been quite able to figure out. With his star finally reaching the heights that had eluded him, stories of alleged sexual assault fell to the wayside or became salacious industry gossip rehashed only to outline that Womack was wild. Hardly ever was it to inquire on the welfare of the women involved, particularly Barbara Womack, the musician’s wife, who’d been previously married to soul legend and Womack’s mentor Sam Cooke.
In 1964, after Cooke was shot, Womack married the still-grieving widow and took in Cooke’s 11-year-old daughter, Linda. Five years later, Barbara would catch him in bed with his now 17-year old stepdaughter. Recalling that moment, Bobby said, “I’m lying there kissing Linda and the light comes on—‘You dirty fucking bastard. What are you doing with my daughter?’ It was Barbara.” Numerous publications called it an affair, Bobby escaped with a bullet graze, and Barbara packed up her bags and left. “If You Think You’re Lonely Now,” a standout track from The Poet, has brought millions of listeners to the pinnacle of romantic bliss tinged with regret. But listening to it—a perennial favorite—compels me again to consider what it means to examine the brutal histories of men. What do we do with the deeply personal emotions brought to the surface by work that allowed us to cry and encouraged us to love?
On a scale of artistic inventiveness and an engagement with violence against women, the former has borne greater importance when it comes to taking stock of a public figure’s legacy. Marking the 40th anniversary since its release, The Poet will soon be reissued accompanied by The Poet II, and both are notable for putting Womack on the map in a definitive way. In the ’60s and ’70s heyday of soul’s reinvention, with a little help from R&B, it was no secret that Womack had a musical gift, having supported acts such as Aretha Franklin and the Rolling Stones both vocally and with his gold-churning pen. But true fame never quite lasted, and someone else’s light always seemed to burn a little brighter. That is, until 1981. In less than 40 minutes on The Poet, Womack delivers beautiful range, both in his lyrics and melodies. “Lay Your Lovin’ On Me,” “Stand Up,” and “So Many Sides of You” are funky, disco-inflected jams perfect for the roller rink with friends and the one you could love. The latter could seamlessly blend as a more mature pop hit, written by Womack alongside Jim Ford, a prolific songwriter who knew how to meld emerging genres with the standard forms that still brought fans to the record store.
Six years before the album’s release, Womack’s brother Harry was stabbed to death by his girlfriend, and it’s that life-shifting loss that bleeds through “Just My Imagination.” While the lyrics speak of romantic love, the melody is somber and funereal, the chorus almost gospel-like in its acknowledgment of incomparable grief. The sadness feels like one you can’t quite come out and say, so you use a lesser tragedy to address the one that’s too painful to share out loud. It’s a tender projection of the shades of grief: the memories of joy, the waves of loss, the stages of healing.
“Secrets” sneaks up on you. It’s a ballad dedicated to an alluring lover and filled with the familiar labels of “mystery” when the answer is usually more straightforward: sensuality and sex come when you feel safe. This idea has evaded even the best of music’s crooners, content to chalk it up to an inexplicable cause. The song made me think of Barbara and how she might have felt around Bobby as his intentions for her welfare and her daughter changed. When she left, Linda married Bobby’s brother Cecil and wrote several songs for Bobby, including “I Wish I Had Someone to Go Home To,” from The Poet II. A successful singer-songwriter in her own right, Linda never addressed that experience with Bobby, its impact on her relationship with her mother, or the ensuing years that found her collaborating with someone who had most likely taken advantage of her when she was still a teenager.
It’s the women who shine on the second album; Linda’s pen and the Godmother of Soul, Patti LaBelle, who is an effervescent presence on “Love Has Finally Come At Last” and “Through the Eyes of a Child.” Her appearance on the former arguably led to Bobby receiving his first top-10 R&B hit since 1981. LaBelle was ascending as a solo star in 1984, and Womack hitched a ride. In a 1996 interview, LaBelle recounted in painstaking detail being sexually assaulted by her mother’s boyfriend when she was 12, and again by singer Jackie Wilson and his assistant at a Brooklyn theater in the early ’60s. “It was like my schoolteacher or somebody, someone you look up to is trying to take advantage of you,” she said. “I was saying, I can’t believe this is Jackie Wilson.”
Linda Womack and Patti LaBelle are two women who experienced sexual violence in their lives. While they were able to heal and move forward, one can only imagine what we would have lost had their voices been silenced by the men who harmed them. “Where Do We Go From Here” is the final song on The Poet, and in more ways than one, that is the question, isn’t it? What do we do with Bobby Womack and his music? Not because of “cancel culture,” but because violence against women has been so normalized that acknowledgment and accountability are seen as solely punitive moves to discard a person and their contributions instead of protecting future generations.
The Poet and The Poet II are good albums that exist because opportunity and space were made for them. It’s their range that illustrates our capacity to exist alongside multiple truths, possessing the emotional bandwidth to address each with the required amount of compassion and care. Womack was an impressive artist. His music touched millions of souls. We should have the ability to listen and hear the women the same way we listen to ourselves. The inner conflict can be private, but the listening should be public and universal.

Buy: The Poet / The Poet II
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Presented as an hour-long Untold mix with a few new, unmixed extras tacked on, Hemlock Recordings Chapter One tells a chronological story of the label as it stands now.

Various Artists: Hemlock Recordings: Chapter One

Hemlock Recordings: Chapter One

When London label Hemlock started in 2008, the term "dubstep" meant something different than it does now: There was no such thing as Skrillex or Taylor Swift songs with vaguely dubstep-influenced choruses. Dubstep was not used to market cereal. The music had started out as another step in a continuum leading from Jamaican reggae through British techno; the most mainstream versions of it now function more or less like arena rock, with hot guitar solos replaced by "heavy, dirty, filthy" bass drops. This isn't a eulogy for what dubstep was or a criticism of what it became, just a statement of fact: times change, things trend, and what was once essentially just a genre of underground dance music having awkward brushes with popular culture is now a brightly colored Hot Topic t-shirt declaring, finally, SEX, DRUGS & DUBSTEP.
The role labels like Hemlock played in this transformation is pretty negligible. Even before dubstep's more widescale commercialization, they represented a boutique alternative whose releases were more diverse and usually less immediate than more iconically dubstep artists like Digital Mystikz, folding in house, electro, minimal and other sounds from outside the sphere.
The label's cofounder, Jack Dunning-- who records as Untold-- makes violent, corrosive little sound sculptures that resemble people trying desperately to catch their breath or the clang-on-clang of demolition sites. In a quote that stands as one of my favorite statements of artistic purpose, he once told Resident Advisor that, "I want to make people screwface, shout, dance weird." Hemlock put out James Blake's phenomenally great first single and remix, which sound like gospel if gospel were designed to terrify you instead of make you feel safe; they've also put out singles by magpies like Ramadanman and Fantastic Mr. Fox.
Presented as an hour-long Untold mix with a few new, unmixed extras tacked on, Hemlock Recordings Chapter One tries to tell a story of the label as it stands now. Almost 20 minutes of the mix is new material, including the tacked-on songs. "The tracks I play these days are basically house or electro, but made by producers who came through dubstep," Dunning said in an interview last year. "People are writing stuff that sounds like minimal techno, grime, juke etc, but it has a twist, an edge that carries through some of the trademarks of the original dubstep sound-- sub bass, darkness, space and unpredictability."
As evidence of his own argument, Dunning's mix moves in roughly chronological order, from the label's stuttering, lopsided first singles to its firm, house-influenced recent output. The change isn't just rhythmic, either: Hemlock's early tracks sounded hard, flat and airless, like the music had been vacuum-packed, while a lot of the mid-mix material-- especially Guy Andrew's "Resistivity" and Sei A's "Hyphen"-- sounds like its playing from inside a fog bank. (For a visual metaphor, try a Piet Mondrian next to a Gerhardt Richter.)
For a celebration of the past, it's a progressive and unsentimental attitude to take, but Dunning has always seemed like an admirably progressive and unsentimental artist-- he knows that all these familiar oldies were once new, too. But the format has its drawbacks. Some of the best older tracks have clever, winding structures that make them more interesting as start-to-finish pieces of music than raw materials to chop up and use in a mix. There's also something a little inbred about hearing an hour of tracks coming from the same place, even when a third of them are new. More than anything, the mix just seems like a formality-- the thing that techno labels do because other techno labels do it.
What it reveals about Hemlock is, again, what Dunning wants it to reveal: They never had a single exclusive sound to begin with. The affiliations between the artists here have less to do with dubstep and more to do with a misfit love of nasty sounds probably best exemplified by Dunning himself. He has said that his own pseudo-scientifically titled Change in a Dynamic Environment EPs from this year were attempts to use dance music's tendency toward short releases to capture small shifts in personal style, as well as evidence of his almost compulsive predisposition toward the new.
There's something sentimental about a commemorative release for a label that has only been around for four years. At least with Dunning you can take comfort in the knowledge that if they ever do this again, the sound will have changed just as much, if not more.


Cuzznz is an album-length collaboration between Snoop Dogg and Daz Dillinger, real-life cousins who have never stopped recording together despite Daz's lower profile. Several songs on the album are produced by Dâm-Funk.

Cuzznz

For the better part of the last decade, Snoop Dogg has trafficked in clicks and views more than in listens. He's capitalized on his celebrity as well as any veteran rapper: He’s just recently spun a web-series into a legitimate TV talk show, he’s still nursing and launching on-brand marijuana industry investments, he makes headlines ranting to Bill Gates about Xbox on Instagram. But his music felt like a listless afterthought (remember Bush?). Daz Dillinger, Snoop’s cousin, has kept a lower profile: Despite producing for 2Pac on albums like All Eyez on Me, his biggest headlines of recent years are probably from him trying desperately to get a Dogg Pound biopic off the ground. Still, the two have never stopped recording music together.
Cuzznz, a full-length collaboration between Daz and Snoop, was announced with the October release of a new Dâm-Funk-produced song called "Sho You Right." Another new single, "Best Friend," followed, but the album is primarily an outgrowth of years-old mixtape material repurposed as album filler. New songs pepper the tracklist instead of providing its substance, and several of the recycled tracks were throwaways to begin. Adding to the album's "what is this thing?" quality: A limited hard-copy version was supposedly released last fall, but it’s just recently become available digitally. Cuzznz was also released by a record label apparently operated by Daz Dillinger himself, and, a handful of new songs aside, it seems entirely possible that Snoop isn’t aware that his cousin has compiled this effort.
Of the 14 songs on Cuzznz, around three are exclusive to the album. The newer songs, including previously released tracks from an EP last year, offer the only continuity here, largely attributable to Dâm-Funk. Dâm's’s production on the album, the type of low-stakes but infectious funk boogie he mined for 7 Days of Funk, is the sustained highlight. "It’s Not a Secret," an Auto-Tune-laced glider, brings the best out of Snoop’s lazily conversational delivery. "Have U Eva" accomplishes the same trick, and Daz’s contrastingly shouty verse here might be his best on the project. "N My System" is an off-kilter spin on the same sound; the track is chunkier and a looped up cowbell lends an unexpected flair to the beat.
By contrast, the oldest song here, "Keep’a N***a High," dates back to 2012 and was a sparsely produced dud back then too. A couple of other older songs, like "Happy Birthday" and "Phenomenon," come off like failed experiments, and neither neither rapper escapes looking awkward. The generic reggae hip-hop beat of "Six N’Da Morning" offers Snoop a chance to revisit the unfortunate, forced Jamaican patois of his 2013 Snoop Lion persona. The song also highlights the type of clunky bars Snoop has stretched thin for years: "We headed to the hookah bar/ Man, I’m chilling like a superstar," he says, only half-rapping. The same delivery might work over different production, but here it snags: These days Snoop can’t reliably carry a beat so much as slip into it.
At its best, Cuzznz is breezy and digestible, a funky outlet for the type of relaxed rapping that both artists can still spew out endlessly. Unfortunately, the album’s low points are the most memorable, not only because the music is sloppy and dated, but because the songs feel so awkwardly cobbled together from previous projects. Especially for a pair of accomplished veterans, the album functions primarily as unnecessary compilation. If anything, Cuzznz might leave a fan wanting less instead of more.


The 1960s French pop star Françoise Hardy was one of the few of her era to cross over, inspiring rock stars like Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan. She wrote most of her own material, setting her far apart from her peers, and her songs have resonated with romantic loners everyone.

Françoise Hardy: Tous Les Garçons Et Les Filles / Le Premier Bonheur Du Jour / Mon Amie La Rose / L’Amitié / La Maison Ou J’Ai Grandi

In the 1960s, French yé-yé pop stars had a particular shtick. They were teenage girls, dressed up in bows and baby doll dresses, singing flirty songs about love and adolescence penned typically by adult male songwriters. France Gall sang of swallowing "lollipops", Chantal Kelly sang of telling an older lover she’s only 15, Clothilde was forced to sing bloody fables. When the songs weren’t sexually charged jokes, they were melodramatic pop ballads about youth, from Chantal Goya’s unpredictable heartache to Sylvie Vartan’s simple dance-driven desires.
And then there was Françoise Hardy. She wasn’t quite a black sheep of the genre, but she certainly complicated the formula. The Parisian singer auditioned for Vogue Records at 18 and went on to top charts with her very first release, a 1962 self-titled record now known as Tous Les Garcons Et Les Filles based on its hit song. From there, the infamously timid Hardy became one of the few French pop stars of the era to cross over, jetting from England to France to record, serving as a muse to designers like Yves Saint Laurent, and inspiring Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger.
That debut showcases Hardy at her simplest, wringing rockabilly-tinged pop magic from modest jazz percussion and steel guitar. Hardy wrote most of her own material, setting her far apart from her peers, and on her debut she penned every song but two. Her lyrics would never hew this close to yé-yé traditions again: See the "whoa-oh-oh" echoing on tracks like "Il Est Tout Pour Moi" and her cover of Bobby Lee Trammell’s "Oh Oh Chéri". The title track "Tous Les Garcons Et Les Filles" remains an iconic vision of Hardy's aesthetic: frank music for romantic wallflowers. "They walk in love without fear of tomorrow," she sings in French of the young couples she watches on the street. "Yes but me, I’m single with a tormented soul, yes but me, I’m single because nobody loves me."
The five albums that make up Hardy’s reissues are really compilations of four-track, seven-inch singles. Because of this, some of these records feel disjointed, a side effect from compiling songs that weren’t initially made to sit next to each other. Such is the case for her next three records, Le Premiere Bonheur Du Jour, Mon Amie La Rose, and L’Amitié. Still, each has a different story to tell about Hardy’s musical influences at the time. Le Premier Bonheur Du Jour pulls from American girl groups, echoing the Crystals and the Ronettes on "L’Amour D’Un Garçon", "Nous Tous", and "On Dit De Lui". Elsewhere, the record boasts electric organ arrangements on snappy jazz-inspired tracks like "L’Amour Ne Dure Pas Toujours" and "Comment Tant D’Autres".
On Mon Amie La Rose she explores a Morricone influence that was inchoate on Tous Les Garcons Et Les Filles. "Mon Amie La Rose", based on the poem by Cecile Caulker and Jacques Lacome, and "La Nuit Est Sur La Ville" are terrifically spooky and cinematic, the latter depicting Hardy wrestling with cheating with a man on a lonely dark night. Elsewhere, she dips her toes in plucky Western country-rock on "Pas Gentille" and "Tu Ne Dis Rien". But with L’Amitié she zigzags between all these references: She’s the cowgirl guitar-heroine on her cover of "Non Ce N’est Pas Un Rêve", a dreamy wall-of-sound pop charmer on "Le Temps De Souvenirs", and folk singer on "L’Amitié".
No matter her inspiration, Hardy’s music is bound together by her point of view, which is part of what makes her fascinating. Her songwriting is profoundly lonely, frequently insecure. Observers have emphasized Hardy’s anti-social nature as a celebrity, but you can hear it even in her music. Like all introverts, she seems most alone when surrounded by others, her insecurities ricocheting off those around her. On Tous Les Garçon Et Les Filles' "La Fille Avec Toi" she reaches out to an ex only to see him with another girl, bemoaning how beautiful she is. "I dream of losing myself, if only I can lose myself with you," she sings on L’Amitié’s "Tu Peux Bien". On Mon Amie La Rose’s underrated star track "Tu N’As Qu’Un Mot A Dire", she pines for an old lover, singing the verse in hushed tones like someone hugging the sidelines before rushing desperately to the forefront for the chorus, filled with shrill, swooning violins: "You just have to say the word and I’ll return," she cries, breathing urgency into a word as simple as "toi."
It wasn’t until her fifth record La Maison Où J'Ai Grandi that Hardy grew into a more grown-up, baroque sound, one that matched the depth of her sorrow and its complexities. It was her most well-produced, well-written record to date, cohesive in sound and subject matter. Over harpsichord and Hardy’s own Spanish guitar, she echoes the previous four albums' worth of lip-quivering romantic longing, reflecting on what it means to lose love once you find it, or when it doesn’t live up to your fantasies. On "Si C’est Ça", her whispery voice and hushed guitar playing operate on the same frequency. "Maybe this is the moment I prefer, the moment, despite it all, where everything could suddenly switch, where life could change at last," she sings to a lover who is leaving her on "Surtout Ne Vous Retournez Pas". "So I say nothing." The girl whose greatest fantasy was once having a hand to hold now wishes to let it go.
What always made Hardy’s music stand out from her yé-yé peers is how it tackled adolescent desire: Hardy was often consumed with romantic extremes. She reveled in chest-clutching longing, but her adorations came from a place entirely her own. Her obsession with love was devoid of older, male sexualization or control, a privilege not many others of her era enjoyed.
Hardy’s songs feel timeless in how they emphasize a universal dream for pure love. Is this music antique in its sound? Surely. In its sentiment? Hardly. Aside from a few anachronisms ("I’m fine with the movies, for rock, the twist and the cha-cha," she sings on her first album’s track "Je Suis D’Accord") this is '60s pop devoid of vintage signifiers; nobody goes steady, nobody sings of dying an old maid, there is no cutesy, wink-filled posturing. Sometimes, especially in Hardy's choice to cover male singers, her music feels almost devoid of gender. For a genre so tethered to young women of a certain time period, this is a feat.
On Le Premier Bonheur Du Jour’s quick little track "Le Sais-Tu?", Hardy finally sings directly to the object of her affections, but she’s forgotten what she yearned to express. She keeps stopping to sing, "did you know?" as if stuttering: "I so dreaded, did you know, this second, which made me think of the end of the world ... One in which you’re there, holding in your hands without maybe even realizing it: my destiny." There’s a reason her music crossed so many country and language barriers, and it wasn’t just because she looked like a model and hung out with the Rolling Stones. These songs map a sort of adoration that derives its intensity from youth but lingers with us for the rest of our lives. Not many pop stars sing about that these days. To the joy of romantic loners everywhere, Françoise Hardy built her career on it.


On a remastered and remixed edition, the brilliant third record by the Champaign, Illinois band represents the platonic ideal for what Midwest emo has to offer.

Braid: Frame & Canvas (25th Anniversary Edition)

Don’t take it personally if the literal meanings within Frame & Canvas remain elusive after a quarter century: Braid themselves aren’t entirely sure what it’s about either. Five years ago, upon the 20th anniversary of their brilliant third album, singer/guitarist Chris Broach admitted he couldn’t make heads or tails of “Ariel,” while co-frontman Bob Nanna favored a kind of physical impressionism, the actual lyrics bearing little resemblance to the points of inspiration captured in its tail-chasing melody. The most narrow reading of Frame & Canvas plays up its importance by taking its title at face value, rendering it a snapshot of a very specific milieu: 1998 graduating class at the University of Illinois. The most accurate reading is what everyone outside of the world recognizes in its fitful dynamics and irrepressible exuberance: “a dream for the teens and in-betweens, and twenties yet unseen,” making “the leap” not to level up or climb the ladder, but rather to fly blindly into whatever comes next.

It’s that last quality which makes Frame & Canvas the platonic ideal for what Midwest emo has to offer. The music is cerebral and introspective yet subject to unpredictable physical impulse; the musicianship is acrobatic but too jittery to reveal its virtuosity; the lyrics embody a sense of wanting to experience everything the world has to offer while trying not to be paralyzed by the fear of missing out on any of it. Frame & Canvas begins on an airplane, ends in a tour van, and spends its entirety in motion. The center of “The New Nathan Detroits” only holds if all four members charge at equal and opposite speeds. The chorus of “Collect From Clark Kent” sticks a seemingly impossible landing after consecutive backflips, emo’s equivalent to a Biles II. “I drink too much and you sing too much,” Nanna hyperventilates on a song called “Breathe In.” There are prettier songs, but no ballads: “Never Will Come For Us” and “I Keep a Diary” twinkle and sigh as the wheels keep spinning, Nanna watching vast stretches of anonymous America pass by, “as slow as Rapid City.”
Even Nanna’s lyrics refuse to stay in one place, words constantly nudging themselves into new shapes, the product of a fidgety mind forced to entertain itself through hours of idle time: “A cast of kittens, the cats we’ve been kissing,” “If deception is fine, then this is divine/Define divine,” “You’re moving like a movie.” All the while, outsiders try to alter the trajectory. Parents beg for a moment of reflection to consider the future, not just what lies ahead in the next week or the next college town. “When the boys want in/Boys will be boys/Boys will be poison boys,” Nanna warns on the prophetic “Urbana’s Too Dark,” the title alluding to a movement at the U of I to install more street lights as a prevention measure against sexual assaults. Friends urge them to ignore punk’s self-defeating ideals (“Let’s not settle for satisfaction/We are women and men of action/Let’s stop clapping, let’s start doing”), as there will be plenty of time to paint floors after we’re done naming the stars. “Collect From Clark Kent” memorably compares long distance romance to Superman getting trapped in a phone booth. The most memorable hook doubles as Braid’s modus operandi: Go!
These strengths were all loudly apparent in 1998 and every year leading up to this one. Upon this remixed and remastered 25th anniversary reissue, Frame & Canvas is not a Numero Group-style excavation nor is Braid experiencing an unexpected uptick in relevance aside from an obvious anniversary. Though the reputation of emo as a whole has fluctuated wildly since Braid first broke up in 1999, Frame & Canvas has been held in fairly constant esteem, perhaps more so than any album of its era other than Diary. So it’s fair to ask a question that should accompany any reissue that arrives without a wealth of unheard material: Why?
Though Braid had compiled a dozen indelible songs before they entered a studio, they were short on technical know-how and shorter on funds. This is exactly the kind of situation that led aspirational emo bands to work with J. Robbins during this era, but I’d argue his impact as a producer was more symbolic in 1998. Getting out of town to record in Virginia’s Inner Ear studios lent Frame & Canvas a legitimacy that their previous albums, Frankie Welfare Boy Age 5 and The Age of Octeen, lacked, putting Braid in conversation with Texas Is the Reason, the Promise Ring, and, of course, Jawbox. Between the playfully orchestrated combat of Nanna and Broach’s vocals and the cruel swing of new drummer Damon Atkinson, what were Braid if not a Dischord band without the hang-ups towards emo’s melody and sentimentality?
I’m not gonna lie and say I’ve compared the sound waves side by side; listen to the intro from both versions of “Killing a Camera” back to back and in the remaster, the drums are punchier, the bass louder, the sort of things I’d guess would happen if I simply raised the volume on the original. But throughout Frame & Canvas, there’s greater sense of space in the mix, more pronounced dynamics, more texture in Atkinson’s kinetic drumming, more opportunities to hear Broach creeping around the margins of any given verse before he barges in for the chorus.
If Braid seems like a band that carries more respect than influence, then Frame & Canvas argues that this is largely a result of their inimitability; it’s not easy to sing like Jeremy Enigk or come up with an American Football guitar harmony, but at least you know what to shoot for. Have you ever tried to play a Braid song on a solo acoustic? The more each individual member of Braid gets isolated on the remix, the more clear it becomes how inseparable they are from the whole. Their 2014 album No Coast—still the finest of the “revival”-era reunions—is perhaps the best evidence of this, as streamlined and immediate as anything from Hey Mercedes, but unmistakably more propulsive and vital. You can’t just chalk it up to Broach returning to the fold; 16 years after Frame & Canvas, he wasn’t even screaming anymore.
On the album’s first lyric, Nanna yelps, “1998 looked great on plain white paper,” rightfully assuming that their future was unwritten in spite of their best plans. Frame & Canvas was an unequivocal triumph, not just for Braid, but also for the Champaign-based upstart Polyvinyl Records and thus, the entire concept of Midwest emo. They subsequently toured with ascendant peers in Compound Red and the Get Up Kids and, later, Warped Tour icons All and Less Than Jake. Braid eventually made it to Japan and Hawaii by April 1999 and then broke up months later. “It’s pointless to play if you don’t get paid,” Nanna snarls on “The New Nathan Detroits,” and if touring wasn’t exactly pointless by 1999, it wasn’t sustainable either, mostly for the usual reasons—creative differences that would spawn Hey Mercedes and the Firebird Band, arguments about money and accommodations, regrets about putting relationships and education second. Yet, knowing how the story ends doesn’t mean the optimism and confidence of Frame & Canvas rings false. As much as it’s about Champaign or emo in 1998 or sleeping on floors, it’s an enduring testament to college grads recognizing the terrifying prospects of adulthood and still believing they can power through anything with the momentum of blind faith.


Released for charity, this star-studded covers album celebrates music from the state of Georgia. It is a joyful affair with sadness lurking in the shadows.

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit: Georgia Blue

Georgia Blue

Jason Isbell floated the idea of Georgia Blue just after Election Day 2020. As the country anxiously awaited the results, Isbell tweeted, “If Biden wins Georgia, I’m gonna make a charity covers album of my favorite Georgia songs.” As it happens, Isbell had been toying around with the idea for a while, long enough to create a rough setlist. After Biden took the state, thereby clinching his path to the presidency, that initial clutch of songs was fleshed out by friends and colleagues who were eager to participate: Brandi Carlile, for one, tweeted that she wanted to record the Indigo Girls’ “Kid Fears,” and John Paul White of the Civil Wars quickly offered his services. While other prospective pairings didn’t materialize, Isbell wound up with a rich cast of guests, ranging from legends like bluegrass picker Béla Fleck to emerging stars like singer-songwriter Brittney Spencer.
All of the cameos give Georgia Blue the slight air of an old-fashioned tribute album, the kind that blossomed during alternative rock’s peak in the 1990s. During that decade, tribute albums showcasing a songwriter, style, or trend for edification, entertainment, or charity were so commonplace they almost formed their own subgenre. The artists covered on Georgia Blue also strengthen the connection to alternative rock’s glory days. The album is bookended with two songs by R.E.M., the pride of Athens, Georgia, who also provided college rock’s moral compass during the ’80s and ’90s. R.E.M. is a center of gravity on Georgia Blue, too, as Isbell covers tunes by Drivin’ N’ Cryin’, Vic Chesnutt, and Now It’s Overhead, every one of them a former tourmate, peer, or associate of the band. Even the Black Crowes—whose rousing “Sometimes Salvation” is performed with the Crowes’ original drummer Steve Gorman—are part of R.E.M.’s orbit, as Chris and Rich Robinson, along with Gorman, cite them as a primary influence.
Threaded through the alt-rock covers are songs that feel closer to the traditional definition of Southern music: blues, R&B, soul, and Southern rock. Here, the 400 Unit get to flex their muscles, sounding equally at ease with soulful grooves and jazz-inflected jams. Generally, the older the song, the closer they stick to the original arrangement—but that's not a detriment. Guest vocalist Brittney Spencer enlivens both Gladys Knight & the Pips’ “Midnight Train to Georgia” and James Brown’s “It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” adding new vibrancy to these familiar oldies. Similarly, keyboardist Peter Levin helps give the lengthy version of the Allman Brothers Band’s “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” a lively, limber swing, so that it never grows dull over the course of 12 minutes.
As good as these renditions are, the emotional heart of Georgia Blue lies in those alternative rock covers, songs where Isbell and the 400 Unit allow themselves some freedom of interpretation. With assistance from Béla Fleck and Chris Thile, Isbell warms and softens R.E.M.’s stark “Nightswimming,” pulling off a similar trick with “Driver 8,” this time with John Paul White. Isbell’s wife and bandmate Amanda Shires gives Cat Power’s “Cross Bones Style” a steely strength, while Isbell milks all the melodrama out of Chesnutt’s “I’m Through” and Brandi Carlile and Julien Baker turn the melancholic undertow of “Kid Fears" into catharsis.
Such emotional bloodletting doesn't necessarily sit easily next to either the roaring “Honeysuckle Blue,” a Drivin’ N’ Cryin’ standard here sung by Sadler Vaden, a former member of the band who is now a guitarist in the 400 Unit, or the easy ramble of Adia Victoria’s version of Precious Bryant’s “The Truth.” Yet the shifts in tone and style on Georgia Blue reflect a wide range of human feeling. At its heart, Georgia Blue is a joyful affair but there's sadness lurking in the shadows. Somehow, that's appropriate for an album conceived as a celebration during a time of crisis.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Kompakt star and former Closer Musik member returns with a record of maximal oddity, an album far from his minimal roots.

Ay Ay Ay

This review was going to write itself: "Matias Aguayo killed minimal dead," it would read, this on the heels of Aguayo's 2008 star turn, "Minimal", in which he convicted his home genre of growing stale. It was an easy plotline: The man who helped popularize and expand minimal-- a seminal contributor, as one half of Closer Musik, to Kompakt's early discography, and author of 2005's still-underheard Are You Really Lost-- would, with Ay Ay Ay, re-order our expectations for minimal's future. Ay Ay Ay explodes that meme, however, with an album so far removed from Aguayo's past-- it's a record of maximal, fermented oddity-- that it borders on the bizarre.
Ay Ay Ay is an album composed mostly of the human voice, continuing Aguayo's penchant for silly/sexy singspeak but filling out the rest of the compositions with throaty squelches, triple-tracked a cappella nonsense, and sampled chants. More than simply "that techno guy who sings," Aguayo seems to have developed a childlike fascination with the human voice on par with Timbaland, Rahzel, or (frequent collaborator) DJ Koze. Because of its sparse percussion, preponderance of voices-- chatting, yelling, singing-- and Chilean-born Aguayo's tendency to sing in Spanish, Ay Ay Ay often feels like world music, though less in a 1980s-Borders-Books-and-Music-endcap sense and more because it sounds well-traveled and totally foreign.
Foreign as in unfamiliar: Ay Ay Ay sounds like no other album this year, and it's no stretch to say it's one of the most out-of-character releases ever for Kompakt. Any discussion of musical influence almost seems superfluous, however, as Aguayo spends much of Ay Ay Ay proving his credentials as an inspired goofball. Lead track "Menta Latte", which barrels out of the gate with whumping bass voices, sounds like a group of skilled six year-olds putting Saturday morning to song. "Koro Koro" is Soweto-style pop undercut by compressed, clacking beats. The title track is stepping tropic pop. The clingy "Rollerskate" is disarmingly coherent in its form and presumed function: it sounds like rollerskating.
"Rollerskate" is easily the most parse-able jam; I don't speak Spanish, but Aguayo's history indicates that the rest of the lyrics are husky shit-talk and/or crappy come-ons. It's hard to wonder what else would fit into the hum-hum-grind of "Desde Rusia" or the Talking-Heads-on-E of "Ritmo Tres".
If Aguayo's electronic background rears its head, it does so abstractly, as long stretches of the hour-long Ay Ay Ay can dissolve into prattling sound-soups, the clicks and thumps of the producer's previous work replaced with tongue-snaps and party favor whoops ("Mucho Viento"). Despite the expectations for the record, Ay Ay Ay doesn't redraw the lines of minimal electronic music. Naturally, it's not trying to. It does reroute our conception of Aguayo, however. Ay Ay Ay is a sticky-sweet, unbounded mess, but only the priggish and unimaginative will hold that against it.


On their first album in 15 years, the Long Island post-hardcore band Glassjaw picks up right where they left off. But their heaviest material yet is, at times, lacking in dynamics and atmosphere.

Material Control

Material Control wouldn’t exist if Daryl Palumbo didn’t believe it was “the most Glassjaw-sounding music we could be making at this point.” There is no doubting the purity of their vision, as lead single “New White Extremity” is Glassjaw as hell. Its aggression and abrasive, abstract skronk tie together New York hardcore and no wave, mixed with astringent third-wave emo melody and the CGI’d musculature of nu-metal production—all with Palumbo doing his ocean-sized roar over it all like Long Island’s answer to Perry Farrell. In 2015, the band released “New White Extremity” as a one-off, assumed to lead up to this very moment, where it serves as the opener for the first Glassjaw album in 15 years. If there was any doubt whether Glassjaw can pick up where they left off, Material Control answers it as immediately and literally as possible.
Whether or not they were doubted, Glassjaw were going to act as if they were. They’re a band that’s thrived in a state of constant conflict. Fan favorites from their 2000 debut Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Silence include “Pretty Lush” and “Ry-Ry’s Song,” chief exhibits among the evidence of their scene’s ingrained misogyny. These were scorched-earth responses to romantic betrayal performed with such energy that they sound like an endorsement. With their 2002 album Worship and Tribute, Glassjaw were positioned as post-hardcore’s Next Big Thing, forged under the pressure of Warner Bros. execs, the Twin Towers of nu-metal (producer Ross Robinson, mixer Chris Lord-Alge), and the band’s own outsized ambitions. It didn’t have the impact of, say, Relationship of Command, but like At the Drive In, Glassjaw followed their frenzied, fraught breakthrough by taking the next decade off.
While creating Material Control, multi-instrumentalist Justin Beck (he and Palumbo constitute the core of Glassjaw) asked a rhetorical question: “Yo, if we were 14 again and recording with Martin Bisi and could just be the illest, grimiest band in New York, what would the environment be like?” This is a smart approach, especially in the wake of recent albums from post-hardcore greats like At the Drive In, Refused, and Quicksand. Think of the fan who found those other albums to be hella soft, who wrongly assumed that Palumbo would remain too committed to the pop ambitions of his regrettably-named electronica outfits Head Automatica and Colour Film—Material Control is for that person.
Material Control certainly can lay claim to being Glassjaw’s heaviest or most aggro album. And though most of Palumbo’s lyrics are too circumspect to get much across beyond their titles (“My Conscience Weighs a Ton,” “Bibleland 6”), he says it’s political in a “George Carlin way.” “New White Extremity” surveys the demographics of a new Brooklyn, which Beck describes as “white people from Kansas.” Despite their multimedia affinity for gruff, hardscrabble NYC cynicism, Material Control lives in the now, one of constant physical and mental confrontation and claustrophobia. Like their hardcore heroes, Glassjaw want you to feel the experience of getting constantly elbowed on the street and the subway, only now it also happens while staring at an iPhone and getting constantly prodded by bad opinions.
Nearly every second of Material Control is meant to duplicate this sensory overload. Beck, in particular, puts forth a performance of remarkable endurance and dexterity, neck-snap riffs constantly battling his textural playing in the right channel, intended as field recordings from the concrete jungle—circular saws meeting sheet metal, the blare of car horns, jammed traffic. Without Dillinger Escape Plan to use as an outlet anymore, drummer Billy Rymer pushes his new band to their most feral extremes, shuttling from groove-metal, d-beat insanity, free-form dub, and tabla-spiked drone in consecutive tracks.
But Glassjaw are so intent on proving they can still Glassjaw that they leave no space to build, to create dynamics or generate atmosphere. They really leave no space for Palumbo, and while there are distinct choruses, there are no hooks. There are more memorable basslines than vocal melodies. If Glassjaw was expected to top their forebears like Orange 9mm and Mind Over Matter as a commercial proposition, though, it was due to Palumbo—a “Jeff Buckley-in-hell post-hardcore,” an unusually magnetic presence for this grotty realm. But he can’t work within these arrangements so much as over or under them. Palumbo elongates vowels while improvising pitch and hoping for the best. Elsewhere, he’s almost completely submerged in a mix created without nuance or mercy.
If you can withstand the initial onslaught of Material Control, it can be plucked for stems: the cooed harmonies on “Shira,” the warm bass countermelodies from “Golgotha,” any of the individual elements of “Pretty Hell.” The latter serves as the kind of U-turn into amniotic balladry that has sustained the midsections of Deftones albums for the past 20 years. Despite its studied dub production, “Pretty Hell” is a mess that wastes the strongest chorus on an arrangement where no instrument appears to be aware of the other’s existence. There are points where Glassjaw can work towards a satisfying payoff rather than going all in at once, like the raga experiment “Bastille Day” and the title track, which both aspire to the symphonic grandeur of major-label Trail of Dead.
To Palumbo’s credit, he recognizes the potency of being that angry, impulsive 14-year-old hardcore kid—though he’s now channeling his adolescent rage towards more worthy targets. On an immediate level, Material Control is a record that simply feels good to have, specifically at the end of 2017—a time when everyone’s coming together to praise the year’s most agreeable rock records, when every day brings further proof that the arc of the moral universe has gone way the fuck off course, when you just want to scream into the void. Think of Material Control as a post-hardcore Long Island tea: it’ll take you back to being a teen when you could care less what was in it and how it was mixed together. The only thing that mattered was whether you got knocked on your ass.


Featuring Simon & Garfunkel’s studious folk and the easy listening of Dave Grusin, a new vinyl reissue attests that what makes a fascinating artifact does not always make for an especially good listen.

Simon & Garfunkel / Dave Grusin: The Graduate (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Like any good tale of generational conflict, The Graduate will mean different things to different people at different times in their lives. When I first watched Mike Nichols’ film as a college student, roughly the same age as its disaffected anti-hero Benjamin Braddock, I saw it as a coming-of-age tale about the exploitation of youth by an older generation and as a righteous upheaval of middle- and upper-class norms. A lifetime later, when I was closer to the age of Mrs. Robinson, I understood The Graduate to be a horror story about an older woman who, like her young paramour, is searching for meaning but ultimately must endure endless indignities and the ingratitude of the youth.
Neither interpretation is any more wrong or right than the other, but the skirmishes between children and parents and between the young and the old in the middle/late 1960s spills over onto the film’s soundtrack, a hastily organized collection commonly credited to Simon & Garfunkel but featuring just as much—if not more—music by jazz pianist Dave Grusin. It’s not a collaboration between them, more like a war reenactment, with the folk duo representing youth culture and the composer giving voice to their older nemeses with a series of lushly orchestrated easy-listening tunes. Throughout the soundtrack’s short duration, these very different songs and sounds butt heads, sparking some unusual musical juxtapositions as well as some jagged transitions. As this new vinyl reissue attests, what makes the record a fascinating artifact does not always make it an especially good listen.
The Graduate was perfectly timed for Simon & Garfunkel, who by 1967 had released three albums of studious folk music but were nevertheless losing ground to harder rock acts and grittier folkies like Bob Dylan and Neil Young. “One of the duo’s biggest ’sins,’” writes Robert Hilburn in his new biography Paul Simon: The Life, “was that much of its music could appeal to both young people and their parents.” The very things that led many to dismiss the duo—being too bookish, too New York, too self-serious—made them ideal for Nichols’ project. Their gentle harmonies and especially Paul Simon’s lyrics helped him shape the character of Benjamin, who I always assumed had discovered Simon & Garfunkel at whatever East Coast university his parents sent him to and imported them to sunny California. Their music speaks to an intensity of youthful emotion that doesn’t always have a ready or dignified outlet for expression.
Nichols used three songs as placeholders during production: “The Sound of Silence,” their biggest hit to date; “Scarborough Fair/Canticle,” their cover of a centuries-old ballad that subtly doubles as an anti-war anthem; and “April Come She Will,” a short, plaintive B-side about the changing of seasons and moods. Together, they form something like Benjamin’s internal monologue, the quiet space in his head where he retreats from the din of the adult world. But they also put him in a very particular place culturally: Simon & Garfunkel may have dabbled in hippie ideas but they were far from countercultural. Nichols’ film arrived the same year as Forever Changes, Are You Experienced?, and Surrealistic Pillow, among other psychedelic touchstones. By comparison, the duo’s austere folk songs would have sounded square and safe, but that only made them more relatable to the young moviegoers who made The Graduate the top-grossing film of 1967. Likewise, Benjamin isn’t meant to be part of the counterculture nor is he part of the establishment, but adrift between the two.
Simon wrote new songs for the film, but Nichols rejected all but one, a rough scrap called “Mrs. Roosevelt” that was little more than a chugging melody and a chorus that namedrops Jesus and Joe DiMaggio. Catchy and evocative, commenting only obliquely on Benjamin’s predicament, it shows up in the film and on the soundtrack in its unfinished form, practically an acoustic demo that hints at the popular version to come. Simon & Garfunkel completed it only after the release of The Graduate, so the film’s most popular song doesn’t even appear on its soundtrack or on this reissue. Released as a single, it became the duo’s second No. 1, the first rock song to win the Grammy for Record of the Year, and arguably their most enduring hit. So here’s to you, “Mrs. Robinson,” for redefining the duo in the public eye and transforming them from folkie squares into establishment hitmakers who could reach the youth audience.
The Graduate pits Simon & Garfunkel against an older, moneyed generation represented by Dave Grusin’s composition, which are grounded in the florid easy-listening and middle-brow exotica of the era—artists like Mantovani, Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, Henry Mancini, and Bert Kaempfert, and others would play on her expensive hi-fi. He writes and arranges with a knowing wink that plays up the comedic spirit of Nichols’ film, whether it’s “The Singleman Party Foxtrot” dancing around the social improprieties that Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson are about to break or the bounce of “A Great Effect” turning sex into a lurid spectacle. Grusin is obviously having a lot more fun on this soundtrack than Simon & Garfunkel.
When I first watched The Graduate, I laughed at these garish pop confections, as though they were themselves the film’s best punchlines. With age and perspective, however, I’ve grown to love their goofy opulence and to realize their grave implications. Just as “The Sound of Silence” voices Benjamin’s vague fears about his future, even a song as frivolous as “Sunporch Cha-Cha-Cha” reveals Mrs. Robinson’s deep sadness. She hides all her regrets and pain behind those candyfloss flutes and taffy strings, the jet-setting horns and exotic percussion. With its jarring transitions from one style to another, the soundtrack never quite reconciles these two generations or the music they used to define themselves, and perhaps for that reason, it works less as an album and more as a souvenir from an era when American culture teetered on the edge of enormous change.


The Punjabi rapper-producer’s genre-hopping second album paints a richly detailed picture of a psyche buffeted by turmoil. Wildly ambitious in sound and scope, it raises the bar for India’s hip-hop vanguard.

Tabia

On a warm spring evening in 2019, rapper-producer Prabh Deep trooped into a New Delhi rehearsal studio with a group of some of the city’s most impressive instrumentalists. Their goal was to take the Punjabi rapper’s critically acclaimed 2017 debut album, Class-Sikh, and rewrite it for a live band. It was an ambitious undertaking. Producer Sez on the Beat had created a gritty, trap-tinged soundscape for Class-Sikh—skittering 808s, aggro bass synths, loads of samples—that reflected Prabh’s grim sketches of life in a crumbing West Delhi neighborhood, filled with families (including his) that were violently displaced by the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. Over five rehearsals, Prabh and the band crafted a radically different sound for the project, incorporating breezy sax solos, chunky alt-rock guitar riffs, and funk rhythms into a fairly impressive rap-rock hybrid.
The One Eight Project—named after his neighborhood zip code—only performed once, headlining a local music festival. But it was during those hasty jam sessions that Prabh began sketching out the basics for his new sound, first showcased on 2019 EP K I N G and now perfected on sophomore LP Tabia (both released on indie hip-hop label Azadi Records). Trap beats and triplets were out, as (mostly) was the militant persona he’d so carefully built up. In its place, Prabh brought in a lush, organic sound that drew inspiration from the Brainfeeder gang and Sounwave’s recent work with Kendrick Lamar. Dreamy synths set the stage, melodies swirling and swooping with languid purpose. The basslines became almost liquid, engaged in a sensual waltz with the shuffling percussion. And tying it all together was a pristine pop sensibility that Prabh had only hinted at in his earlier work.
This left-field turn came at a fortuitous time. Indian hip-hop pioneers such as Mumbai rappers Naezy and Divine, Sez on the Beat, and Prabh himself had spent the preceding few years crafting a new archetype for the nascent Indian hip-hop scene. Details differed according to city and language, but the broad brush strokes aligned: The Indian rapper came from the streets, had a passing relationship with criminality, was strongly rooted in their community, and had a socially conscious edge. This archetype found its most successful form in the gully rap popularized by Naezy and Divine’s “Mere Gully Mein” (produced by Sez), a 2015 track that became such a surprise hit that it inspired an award-winning feature film by Zoya Akhtar, imaginatively titled Gully Boy. The gully rap phenomenon (named after a Hindi term for “street”) generated so much hype that it eventually led to Mass Appeal launching an Indian imprint, with Divine as its marquee signing.
But the attention that Gully Boy brought to Indian hip-hop was a double-edged sword. With millions of rupees flooding into the scene, largely from brands and major labels that had no real understanding of the subculture, commercial airwaves were suddenly flooded with scores of gully rap bandwagoners. The corporate feeding frenzy was intense enough to warrant comparisons to the grunge gold rush. Inevitably, Indian rappers—especially those not in Mumbai, where the boom was largely focused—have pushed back against co-optation by dropping what I call the “poetics of identity” and pushing into bolder, more experimental directions. With Tabia, Prabh has produced the first meisterwerk of this alternative hip-hop vanguard.
Taking its title from the Arabic word for the opening moves in a chess game, Tabia is a concept album that charts the 27-year-old’s search for ever-lasting happiness, detailing all the hedonistic dead ends, lost opportunities, and near-misses along the way. Over the course of 15 tracks and 55 minutes, Prabh explores the tensions between the materialism that’s almost hard-coded into hip-hop and the Buddha-esque self-actualisation that he’s now straining for. The record is a guided tour of his psyche, offering a richly detailed innerworld buffeted by turmoil—successes soured by regret, temptations resisted in vain, hard-earned equanimity lost in moments of madness.
The euphoric synths and Turkish percussion samples of the titular opening track invite the listener into a meticulously crafted dreamscape, offering a brief moment of meditative tranquility before “Qafir” (“Nonbeliever”) drags you into the murky depths of hip-hop excess. Sultry synths sashay suggestively over arpeggiated guitar lines as Prabh paints a familiar scene—an artist caught up in the trappings of early success, believing in their own self-created myths. “Paapi” (“Sinner”) moves deeper into confessional territory. “Oh jad tak mainu pyaar na kre, mai te theek va” (“As long as she doesn’t love me, I’m all good”), he sings on the hook. Combining R&B vocal stylings with the earthy vocal textures of Punjabi folk, “Paapi” sounds like the quintessential fuckboi anthem, until you read between the lines and see a man so deeply uncomfortable with vulnerability that he’s made a virtue of being emotionally unavailable.
A breezy little ditty about the importance of love, “Preet” (co-produced by 15-year-old newcomer Lambo Drive) offers a brief ray of sunshine before the clouds darken again on “Taqat.” One of the record’s few throwbacks to the Class-Sikh sound, “Taqat” chronicles a Prabh drunk on his success, an almost comical portrait of the artist as a young gangster. Most of the song is a power fantasy propelled by co-producer IDEK’s minor keys and overdriven bass lines (there’s more than a hint of Kendrick here). But in the last 30 seconds, the rug is pulled out from under Prabh as he comes face to face with an actual gangster, who quickly strips him of his valuables along with any pretensions about how powerful he really is. “Te hun tu lalae hisaab/Ki bacheya tere kol gyani?” (“Now you take stock/What do you have left, genius?”), asks his tormentor. “Zindagi” (“Life”), comes the cheeky response.
The middle third of the album centers on the two-track suite of “Antar” and “Abaad.” The former showcases a deeply conflicted Prabh veering between unhinged aggression and smell-the-roses serenity at the drop of a hat (the working title for the track was “Bipolar Disorder”). Richard Craker’s production perfectly mirrors the track’s emotional confusion, alternating between hard-edged belligerence and spaced-out dream pop. The first inklings of enlightenment emerge on “Abaad,” a collaboration with SYPS that repurposes an Egyptian afterlife myth—Anubis weighing the heart of the recently deceased against the feather of Ma’at—as a mantra for self-love (“Won’t you trade your heavy heart for happiness”).
By now, Prabh is heady with this first brush with self-knowledge. Lambo Drive’s improvised electro-jazz on “Qaabu” gives way to the lo-fi house of “Huqum,” which segues into the rushing drum’n’bass of “Babur.” There’s more to this genre-hopping than Prabh showing off the range of his influences and songwriting skills. The tempo jumps closely mirror the stop-start ramp-up that accompanies an ecstatic experience (psychedelics/religious ecstasy/oxygen deprivation, take your pick). Meanwhile, the lyrics take on an increasingly messianic tone, peaking with “Huqum”’s cheesy refrain, “Follow me, I know the way.”
Lead single “Waqaf” is the record’s Ten Commandments, a spent but elated Prabh dropping nuggets of hard-won wisdom. “Je tainu lagda tu vada ve boht” (“If you think you’re a big shot”), he raps, “vekh asmaan ch” (“then look at the sky”). Synths swell and wane with lofty dignity, as Prabh’s vocals channel the mysticism of Punjab’s rich Sufi tradition. Richard and Prabh trade in the synths for acoustic guitar and percussion on “Gyani” and “Sthir,” respectively, as reality—and its attendant doubts and self-recriminations—creep back in. By the time closer “Safar” rolls in, you’re already dreading the inevitable. “Yadash chali gayi/Hatha di lakeera badal gayia” (“I lost my memory/The lines of fate on my hands have changed”), raps a mournful Prabh. The track’s chopped-up vocal samples and downtempo keys evoke the fuzzy disorientation of the comedown, as the secrets to life, the universe, and everything slowly slip away like sand running through your fingers. It’s a clever trick, immediately recasting the narrative arc of the album in a new light and tempting you into hitting repeat.
Not that you’d need the encouragement. Despite its grand ambitions and lengthy runtime, the record never feels flabby or self-indulgent. Apart from a handful of stumbles—“Alope” (feat. Zan Twoshades) never really gets going, while the formal experimentation of “Huqum” and “Babur isn’t quite as accomplished as Prabh would perhaps like—Tabia is a meticulously crafted record that pulls you in with the first note and doesn’t let go. When the horns blare out their last morose lament, it’s like a spell has been lifted. You emerge dazed and emotionally battered, sure, but also reinvigorated. In an ideal world, Tabia would be the crossover record that Indian rappers have dreamed of for years, the one that finally makes the world sit up and take notice of Indian hip-hop. Sadly, just making fantastic music isn’t enough when you’re an artist from the global South. For now, Prabh will just have to be content with having created one of the best rap records to come out of South Asia. As far as consolation prizes go, that’s not too bad.

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The Canadian punk band’s fifth and final album is a softer, more family-oriented affair, with reflections on motherhood and loss set to metallic riffs.

Premonition

Remember when White Lung seemed poised to soundtrack the revolution? Between 2010 and 2016—years that neatly aligned with the liberal complacency of the Obama era—these Vancouver-formed punks unleashed four hard-charging, sub-half-hour dispatches of fury. On career-defining records like 2014’s Deep Fantasy and 2016’s Paradise, you could almost feel the spittle hitting the microphone as singer Mish Barber-Way snarled about body dysmorphia and rape culture while drummer Anne-Marie Vassiliou and guitarist Kenneth William absorbed punk melodies into a gnashing, metallic maw.
Then, during the Trump years, White Lung disappeared. Barber-Way took a high-profile job as executive editor of Penthouse, and the band’s reputation was tarnished after the frontwoman, a self-described “equity feminist,” began promoting prominent right-wing voices in the magazine and on social media. Meanwhile, the band started work on their next album. In 2018, Barber-Way was in the studio when she learned she was pregnant with her first child. The album was postponed, then postponed again, and—well, it’s almost 2023, and White Lung’s fifth and purportedly final album has arrived.
Everything has changed for White Lung in the last six years, but on a superficial level, once Premonition revs up, not too much has changed. The singer’s wail is still intact, though more restrained, on songs like “Date Night,” a high-octane standout about a nightmarish date with God, who turns out to be a thrill-seeking, chain-smoking nihilist. William still plays pummeling riffs, this time with a more pronounced thrash-metal influence; on “Hysteric,” he shreds up and down the fretboard hard enough to keep guitar-tutorial YouTubers in business.
Such gestures belie the album’s softer, family-oriented hue. As in any thirtysomething’s Instagram feed, babies are an overarching theme. In interviews, Barber-Way, who now has two young children, has described how impending motherhood changed her approach to songwriting. “It was like this baby inside me was taking up everything I had,” she told author Melissa Broder. “I was consumed. I became fixated on that feeling, so the album is about the transition to motherhood, pregnancy, and the massive life change that I embarked on during the lull between our last album.”
When Scott Stapp learned he was to become a father, he welcomed his child with arms, and music video budgets, wide open. Like a pop-punk answer to the Creed staple, “Bird” addresses Barber-Way’s unborn baby and envisions the awe of finally meeting him: “I want to know you/We are forever/Where are you hiding?” she wails in one of White Lung’s most melodic and anthemic choruses. “Girl” is framed as advice to a future daughter, though neither the faceless melody nor rhymes like “I must confess/You’ll get depressed” match the poignancy of the subject. More affecting is “If You’re Gone,” a metal-tinged lament about suicide and the grieving children it leaves behind.
When a punk band that thrives on raw immediacy spends five years making an album, some skepticism is warranted. The songs sound tight and punchy, filling out their arrangements with glistening synths, but the careening intensity of White Lung’s earlier work is absent. Overdubs don’t help; on tracks like “Girl” and “One Day,” Barber-Way’s vocals are layered in multitrack harmonies that flatten the vigor of her voice. The album’s songs were tracked in a piecemeal fashion—“We’ve never played them all in a room together,” the frontwoman said recently—and it shows.
Back in 2014, Deep Fantasy captured the ferocity of an absurdly tight band playing together in a room, thrashing against the walls and playing off each other’s anger. That ferocity has faded. By contrast, Premonition sounds like talented professionals working remotely. Fitting, perhaps, for an album that’s largely about leaving the punk lifestyle behind and finding joy in family instead.


Rummaging through glam, teen-pop, and garage-punk, this Chicago band exudes an earnestness almost as pure as its recording levels are deafening.

The Smith Westerns

Girls know what boys want. But a little subterfuge can still go a long way. On his hit single, 22-year-old singer/rapper Drake insists, "This one's for you," then cops some "gray sweatpants, no makeup" sweet talk en route to envisioning himself "all up in your slot." He recently admitted to MTV that "it's not the most heartfelt song." Where Drake talks dirty and sounds Auto-Tune clean, the Smith Westerns take the opposite approach. Like the Beatles, though, these four Chicago teenagers don't want to hold your hand-- they want to do more.
Don't let the Fab Four mention throw you: From this young Windy City group, retro-rock doesn't feel like a history class. Rummaging through 1970s glam, Phil Spector teen-pop, and Nuggets garage-punk with the youthful abandon of kids finding new toys in the attic, the Smith Westerns' self-titled debut exudes an earnestness almost as pure as its recording levels are deafening. Their simple, sweet choruses about boys and girls in love could spike the punch at a 1970s TV show (OK, "Freaks & Geeks"/"That '70s Show") school dance. Parent chaperones would be none the wiser.
When singing guitarist Cullen Omori, his bassist brother Cameron, second guitarist Max Kakacek, and a drummer known to Google only as Hal have the tunes to make themselves heard over their vintage aesthetic, The Smith Westerns' teenage kicks are hard to beat. Take string-swept glam ballad "Be My Girl", which softly punctuates one of the year's most wrenchingly innocent hooks with somewhat pervier pick-up lines. There's less lyrical subtext, but no less raunchy production, on the glam-rock boogie of "Girl in Love", a come-on cursorily addressing the fleetingness of youth. It's only fitting that in a year-old YouTube video featuring scratchy sockhop swooner "Tonight", the Smith Westerns both look and sound like the Black Lips' good-bad not-evil twins.
These guys are sort of literally true to their school-- garage-rocker Miss Alex White is a fellow Northside College Prep magnet-school alum-- and their time on the road with the likes of Jay Reatard and Nobunny is evident on fine 60s-style frat-rocker "Gimme Some Time". With fuzzed-out xylophone, frenetic opener "Dreams" suggests the group's most recent tour with Girls and Los Campesinos! might serve them better for a follow-up. "Diamond Boys" almost earns its piano on the strength of its adolescent grandiosity, but "We Stay Out" lets lo-fi become the end rather than the means, with a guitar line that sounds like a bee buzzing underwater.
Japandroids, another loud punkish group concerned with youth and girls, ask a cathartic question on Post-Nothing's "The Boys Are Leaving Town". DFA signees Free Energy channel Thin Lizzy's "The Boys Are Back in Town" on their recent "Dream City" single. The Smith Westerns turn to lighthearted psych-folk for their own declaration: "Boys Are Fine". Then, on blithely woo-oohing fuzz-popper "The Glam Goddess", they actually go and say it: "I wanna hold your hand." Boys will be boys.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit Mercury Rev’s 1991 debut, a heroic dose of psychedelic rock that is equal parts nerve-wracking and awe-inspiring.

Yerself Is Steam

Sure, you could look at the birth of Lollapalooza in 1991 as the tipping point when American counterculture turned into big business. But you can’t deny, on those early tours, a lot of insane shit went down. To date, it remains the only festival where you could watch Flea drink Jim Rose’s bile, Eddie Vedder dangle precariously from 30-foot-high scaffolding, and Rage Against the Machine exercise a less-rock/more-cock policy. Ultimately, there were limits to this lawlessness—as one band discovered, it was, in fact, possible to be too weird for Lollapalooza.
On June 26, 1993, Mercury Rev appeared on Lolla’s second stage at the Fiddler’s Green Amphitheatre in Greenwood Village, Colorado, slotted between “a guy juggling chainsaws” and Tool. Like most of their sets from that era, their performance climaxed with an extended jam on “Very Sleepy Rivers,” the sinister, psychedelic hallucination that closes their 1991 debut album, Yerself Is Steam. But where the song normally provided the band with an opportunity to zone out and surrender to the squall for 15 minutes, on this day, their noise bath was rudely interrupted: After their onstage volume level suddenly dipped, the band noticed their soundman being violently pulled away from the board by security, bringing the set to an abrupt end.
As it turns out, the mayor of Denver was strolling the Lollapalooza grounds and stumbled upon Mercury Rev’s set. He was so sufficiently traumatized by what he heard, he demanded an immediate shutdown. In his estimation, the band sounded “like a bus idling out of control,” and unbeknownst to him, the mayor was actually offering up an astute piece of music criticism. In their formative years, Mercury Rev really did sound like a careening bus headed towards a fiery crash—one where half the people on board were frantically fighting each other for control of the wheel, and the other half were in the back obliviously singing nursery rhymes as the whole bucket of bolts went up in flames.
Hindsight positions Mercury Rev as rare American entrants in the early-’90s shoegaze fuzzbox wars, a claim supported by UK tours with Ride and My Bloody Valentine. But if shoegaze was a collision of melody and noise, both of those elements were generally tuned to the same psychedelic frequency. What Mercury Rev captured on Yerself Is Steam was less a melding of disparate sounds than a battle royale of oppositional ideologies: order and anarchy, ecstasy and terror, purity and perversion.
While Mercury Rev would later become synonymous with the bucolic Catskills area, their saga begins a couple hundred miles west in Buffalo. When the band formed in the late-’80s, the city had become another hollowed-out notch on America’s Rust Belt, ravaged by an all-too-familiar recessionary cocktail of shrinking manufacturing industries, mass unemployment, and population decline, not to mention punishing winters and an inordinate amount of fires. (For a certain generation, no day was complete without hearing Irv Weinstein of Eyewitness News announce another five-alarm blaze in Cheektowaga.) Whatever local bands achieved any degree of national renown at the time—be it the trashy early iteration of the Goo Goo Dolls or fledgling death-metal deities Cannibal Corpse—reflected the city’s reputation as a harsh, unforgiving place to exist.
For much of the 1980s, the future members of Mercury Rev seemed headed down a similar path. In the first half of the decade, a teenaged Sean “Grasshopper” Mackowiak played drums in local punk band the People’s Front, whose peak achievement (according to a fan site) was having their cassette reviewed by Maximum RockNRoll. By 1987, Mackowiak was a media studies major at SUNY Buffalo and playing bass alongside a quartet of fellow students in Shady Crady, the sort of weirdo indie-rock band that would fill the first-of-three local-opener slot when Sonic Youth rolled through Buffalo—though the fact they featured a flautist (Suzanne Thorpe) and a lead singer (David Baker) who messed around on a Casio SK-1 suggested a certain willingness to subvert punk orthodoxy.
Playing guitar in Shady Crady was Mackowiak’s close friend Jonathan Donahue, whose side hustle booking gigs for SUNY’s student union put him in the orbit of Oklahoma psych-rock misfits the Flaming Lips, who opened for Throwing Muses at SUNY in 1987. After dropping out to serve as their roadie for a few years—which, in the Lips’ case, largely meant operating their smoke and bubble machines—Donahue became the band’s full-fledged second guitarist in time for 1990’s In a Priest Driven Ambulance, the album that dramatically transformed the Lips from acid-punk pranksters into cosmic-pop craftsmen.
As a child growing up in the Catskills, Donahue wasn’t exposed to the record-collector canon; his parents raised him on a steady diet of classical music, Broadway soundtracks, and variety-show country tunes. “I never listened to Pet Sounds,” he admitted to Magnet’s Corey DuBrowa in 2015, “but I liked Sons of the Pioneers.” That music’s sense of wonder and grandeur would stay with Donahue even as he cut his teeth in the grimy late-’80s American underground. Lips leader Wayne Coyne has largely attributed Priest’s artistic breakthroughs to Donahue’s kid-brother energy, and his ability to dream big on a low budget. “He had this little cassette 4-track,” Coyne recalled to Rolling Stone, “and we bought some crappy little microphones and used our guitar effects to experiment with how we would record. He brought that whole thing into it… If Jonathan hadn’t jumped in and encouraged us and added his abilities to ours, I think little by little we would have been frustrated.”
In a Priest Driven Ambulance was also the first album to feature the words “Produced by Dave Fridmann” in the credits, long before that phrase became a shorthand for orchestral-indie extravagance and platinum-plated alt-rock. At the time, Fridmann was studying music production at SUNY Fredonia, about an hour south of Buffalo. A childhood friend of Shady Crady drummer Mike Huber, Fridmann had helped produce a demo for that band at the campus’ studio in 1988, and though that tape never yielded a record deal, the connection would ripple out in the years to come. Around the same time that Donahue was welcoming Fridmann into the Lips’ circle, he was also, he was also enlisting the producer for a new project he was developing with fellow Shady Crady exiles Mackowiak, Baker, and Thorpe.
A lot of experimental music is described as bands making soundtracks for movies that don’t exist. Yerself Is Steam began as soundtracks to actual movies, composed by a band that didn’t really exist. The nascent Mercury Rev started making music together less with the intent of playing gigs than concocting musical scores, be it for student films showing in local galleries, or the nature documentaries they’d put on the TV while they improvised. Limited access to resources and equipment meant they had to get extra-industrious. As recounted to Magnet, Donahue played his guitar through a jury-rigged TV-set speaker; songs were recorded onto answering machine cassettes.
While recording with the Lips, Donahue workshopped some embryonic versions of future Mercury Rev songs, and it was already clear to Coyne and co. that their new guitarist would inevitably need to focus on his own project. (Donahue’s tenure in the Lips would last for just one more record, 1992’s Hit to Death in the Future Head.) In Mercury Rev’s case, the term “project” could be applied in the literal academic sense: Fridmann agreed to produce their recordings as part of his course-work, allowing Donahue and co. to access the SUNY Fredonia studios in off-hours at bargain-basement rates. Fridmann eventually contributed enough bass parts—and household-appliance sound effects—to become an official member of the group, while drummer Jimy Chambers joined late in the process to effectively serve as the frame around Mercury Rev’s musical splatter. (As Chambers told Magnet: “What you hear is me not knowing what to do and being really uncomfortable.”)
Where the Lips were clearly a product of classic rock, psychedelic, and punk traditions, Mercury Rev were built atop a philosophical foundation more than a musical one. At SUNY, Donahue studied under Robert Creeley, the celebrated post-modernist poet whose minimalist, evocative work often embraced the non-linear logic of jazz. Mackowiak studied under avant-garde filmmaker Paul Sharits and composer Tony Conrad, whose early-’60s drone explorations would lay the groundwork for the Velvet Underground, and whose classroom teachings instilled Mercury Rev with new perspectives on creating art. “One of the first assignments he had the class do was to pick a film or piece of music that we personally strongly disliked, and write about it in a very positive way,” Mackowiak would reminisce to NPR following Conrad’s 2016 passing. “Then the next week, we were to do the opposite, pick something we liked and totally trash it. That was an amazing exercise in opening the mind up to questioning: ‘What is high-brow? What is low-brow? What is good art and what is bad art?’… the distinctions between folk art/folk music and the ‘classics’ were erased.” Baker, meanwhile, didn’t even think in musical terms at all. “It’s more emotion that influences us than music,” he would tell the L.A. Times in 1993. “An influence could be a car backfiring, chocolate, sex, or deprivation of sex.”
In eight songs, Yerself Is Steam uncorks a flood of sounds and sensations, resulting in an awe-inspiring, nerve-racking experience, floating in the liminal space between childhood innocence and adult anxieties. That volatility is reflected in the dynamic between the group’s two vocalists: In Baker, you had a singer who sounded like a malfunctioning tape recorder, randomly pitch-shifting between voice-cracking glee and gothic gloom, sometimes in the span of a single line; in Donahue, you had a stoner crooner who could chase the dark clouds away with his starry-eyed serenades, while tapping deep veins of sorrow. When their voices appear together, they’re not so much playing off each other as fronting two completely different bands in their minds, making a song like “Syringe Mouth” sound like a kindergarten circle-time sing-along being held in the middle of a Butthole Surfers concert.
Given the group’s piecemeal origins, the members of Mercury Rev were always quick to downplay any grand design on their part. Speaking about the band’s creative process to the L.A. Times, Baker said, “We’re not trying to make radio-friendly hits and if there are those song structures there, well, it’s not intentional.” No song advertised that anti-pop manifesto as proudly as “Very Sleepy Rivers,” where Baker freestyles madcap Dr. Seuss-like couplets (“I sensed a new scent, so innocent and bent/I sense a new scent that's innocent and spent”) in his creepiest register, while the band’s seasick groove oozes and churns for over 12 unsettling minutes. But even at its most confrontational, Yerself Is Steam is ultimately a testament to Mercury Rev’s innate melodic fortitude.
The album’s totemic opening track, “Chasing a Bee,” is a study of contrasts upon contrasts: its acoustic refrain suggests a certain campfire tranquility, yet Baker recites the verses as if they were koans: (“It’s not as easy as it may seem/Remember that yerself is steam”) with the queasy discomfort of someone who really needs to get to the bathroom. But when Donahue steps in to deliver the chorus, his blissed-out vocal is answered by a punishing blast of distortion—and even that can’t prepare you for what occurs at the 3:07 mark, when he and Mackowiak unleash a discombobulating shock of feedback that feels like Earth splitting open. (That sudden intrusion is reflective of the album’s combative tug-of-war mixing process, where the final product was often determined by which band member got their fingers on the faders last.) And yet the song’s calming choral hook ultimately sticks the landing, with Thorpe’s flute melody serving as the safety cushion.
Where many shoegaze bands used noise to corrupt or outright obliterate their pop sensibilities, Mercury Rev seemed to treat each song like a laboratory test to see what their core melodies could withstand. The nine-minute fuzz-covered stunner “Frittering” sounds like a mid-’70s Neil Young ballad slowly fading out of broadcast range on a late-night drive. But rather than obscure its emotional intent, the static-soaked production amplifies the song’s melancholy and strung-out confusion. And even the album’s unwieldy, cardiac-arresting centerpiece, “Sweet Oddysee of a Cancer Cell T’ Center of Yer Heart,” demonstrates a fine balance of chaos and craft, by reimagining Sonic Youth’s “Expressway to Yr Skull” as a Wagnerian symphony. If Mercury Rev weren’t yet at the point where they could afford a string section, they could certainly approximate the thunderous power and cavernous sound of a live orchestra.
As far out as Mercury Rev ventured sonically, their music was always anchored by a strong sense of place. The album’s most compact (and Lips-like) psych-pop statement, “Coney Island Cyclone,” is the first entry in what would become a long-standing Mercury Rev tradition of incorporating New York State scenery. And while “Blue and Black” makes no explicit reference to its setting, it is undoubtedly the most vivid song ever made about surviving a Buffalo winter. “It’s so cold outside,” Baker intones in an impossibly low voice, while the huff and puff of a percolating coffee machine animates each frost-covered breath. But the introduction of a glistening piano melody, dreamy guitar swirls, and blood-pumping percussion magically transforms this greyscale scene into a Technicolor fantasia, crystallizing that moment when you peek out from your parka and notice just how beautiful all the snow looks in the moonlight.
Mercury Rev could afford to be hyper-local in their approach because there was never any expectation that these songs would find an audience beyond upstate New York. But the band found a sympathetic ear in the UK micro-indie label Mint, who released the album in May 1991 and was able to get it in the hands of British music-press tastemakers like Simon Reynolds and Chris Roberts. Six months before Nirvana’s Nevermind turned the underground upside down, the UK hype machine was trumpeting Mercury Rev as American indie rock’s next great saviors. And that’s not because they saw them as potential rock stars, but as the “alternative to the alternative”—torch-bearers for a transgressive aesthetic that seemed to be dissipating as leading freak-scene luminaries like Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., and Butthole Surfers were trading up to major labels and streamlining their sound. In a move that seems unfathomable in today’s depressed music-media economy, Melody Maker actually flew Roberts to Fredonia to see Mercury Rev perform—despite the fact the band had yet to perform a single show, and therefore had to swiftly arrange a local bar gig for their British visitor.
By summer, the overseas buzz around the band was loud enough to earn them a place at the Reading Festival for just their third-ever gig. (Improbably, their fourth gig was an opening slot for Bob Dylan at Yale University.) On stage, Mercury Rev were even more unhinged than they were on record; both physically and behaviorally, Baker was the antithesis of the typical rock frontman, a convulsive human conduit for the band’s live-wire energy. But once the post-Nevermind hysteria overwhelmed the music industry in early ’92, major labels could look at a band this strange with dollar signs in their eyes. After their first North American distributor, Rough Trade, went belly up, Mercury Rev signed a deal with Columbia to properly release Yerself Is Steam in the U.S., where CD editions came appended with the bonus non-album single “Car Wash Hair,” an atypical orchestral-pop delight that let a radiant dose of summery sunshine into Mercury Rev’s forbidding Buffalo-spawned sound-world.
With its chirpy trumpets and beautifully sundazed melody, “Car Wash Hair” pointed to a bright future for Mercury Rev—but it would take them many years to get there. Despite all the rave reviews and Peel Session invites, Mercury Rev’s sound was ultimately too proggy in scope and too violent in execution to put up Nirvana numbers. Extensive touring behind Yerself Is Steam and its equally frazzled and bedazzled 1993 follow-up, Boces, took a heavy psychological toll on a group that never intended to play together outside the studio, leading to some infamously acrimonious incidents that rival Oasis and the Brian Jonestown Massacre. The tale of Baker trying to gouge out Mackowiak’s eyes with a spoon on a transatlantic flight—leading to a ban from Virgin Airways—may not be entirely true, yet it was easy enough to believe it was. As Donahue is fond of saying, “We’re like the Doors biography, in reverse—all of our weirdness happened first, and then we got sorted out and found some kind of sense in it.”
As such, the Mercury Rev story tends to be divided into two chapters, the first of which came to a close in 1993, when a dissatisfied Baker left the group—a move that effectively cleared the cloud of chaos surrounding both the band and their music. After steering Mercury Rev’s out-of-control bus onto more stable terrain with 1995’s commercially ignored See You on the Other Side, Donahue and Mackowiak checked out of the alt-rock rat race and retreated into the Catskills, and deeper into their imaginations. And when no one was looking, they came up with 1998’s critically adored cosmic-Americana classic, Deserter’s Songs, the album that turned this once-precarious entity into an art-rock institution, inspired a young Coldplay to reach for the stars, and granted Mercury Rev entry into the kid-flick canon. In Baker’s absence, Donahue’s croon became the focal point, while the music around him blossomed into a fantastical swirl of regal orchestration and sepia-toned atmosphere, ushering in an era where every ambitious indie-rocker of note was calling up Fridmann for some production pixie dust.
However, this reading suggests the Baker-era recordings represent the grueling growing pains that Mercury Rev had to endure before realizing their true potential. And that does a great disservice to Yerself Is Steam, an album with a formidable legacy of its own—you can draw a direct line from here to the mountainous crescendos of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, the otherworldly expanse of Sigur Rós, and the lysergic melodies of Animal Collective. In contrast to 1991’s other art-of-noise masterwork—My Bloody Valentine’s transcendental Loveless—Yerself Is Steam is an unrelentingly visceral experience that you feel not just in your blown-out eardrums, but in your accelerating heart and butterfly-filled stomach, reminding you that joy and panic often present themselves with the same symptoms. Ten years later, Mercury Rev would go on to release an album whose title perfectly summed up their contented latter-day philosophy: All Is Dream. But on Yerself Is Steam, all is real—this is an album as mystifying, terrifying, and unexpectedly beautiful as life itself.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan.


The last band standing playing primarily dramatic loud/soft instrumental post-rock returns with an LP of loud/soft instrumental post-rock.

Explosions in the Sky: Take Care, Take Care, Take Care

Take Care, Take Care, Take Care

Four years ago, Explosions in the Sky ended their last album with a short (for them) song called "So Long, Lonesome". It was pretty and melancholy, not so unlike a lot of their other music, really, but as its title suggests, it had the feel of a goodbye. It seemed so final. But no, the Austin quartet is not done. Take Care, Take Care, Take Care finds the band returning with a renewed focus on its most basic sound: multiple guitars with drums and a bit of bass. The piano that helped lend "So Long, Lonesome" its sense of cold finality is gone, and the band sounds confident getting back to the setup on which they built their reputation.
The band famously doesn't consider itself post-rock, but if we're being honest, today they may be the last true exponent of turn-of-the-century post-rock-- unlike Mogwai, they never wandered away from drifting instrumentals constructed around loud-soft dynamics and the contrast between soft guitar tones and pounding drums. Most of their other contemporaries from the period are gone or found dub or electronics or something else. But Explosions in the Sky are sticking to their guns-- Take Care is less ragged than Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, but it's otherwise a very similar album.
So whether or not you dive into Take Care will largely depend on your appetite for loud/soft instrumental post-rock. If your appetite for it is boundless, you will be very pleased by this album, and probably also its elaborate artwork, which can be folded several ways to make the interior or exterior of a building. At its best, Take Care is ruled by drummer Chris Hrasky. The guitars tend to hang on particular figures or throw up an e-bowed haze, and Hrasky is the one who can cut through that. On "Trembling Hands" his drum kit is the lead instrument as he unleashes Keith Moon-worthy torrents of snare, tom, and cymbal, throwing himself at the guitars as though they were a wall to break through.
One could argue that the music here is predictable and even a bit old-hat. We've lived with this sound for well over a decade now, and we have classics to compare it to, including Explosions in the Sky's own work. And that argument holds some water. But the simple fact is that Explosions in the Sky are very good at this particular thing, and it seems as though no matter how many crescendos and diminuendos they play, there remains a certain amount of cathartic power to their music. The emotion in it is ambiguous, and you can read whatever you want into it-- the soundtrack to your rainy day might be the soundtrack to someone else's overwhelming joy, and that too is important to its appeal.


On his first solo album since his 2016 collaboration with Jan Jelinek, the experimental vibraphonist blurs the edges of his instrument in compositions both abstract and warmly sentimental.

Book of Life

“Before the solid-body electric guitar, the vibraphone was the ultimate modernist instrument, [a] technology of struck metal and vibrating air, percussion and melody,” writes David Toop in his 1999 musical survey Exotica, which traces “the art of ruins” through everyone from Martin Denny to the Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E.. Developed in the late 1920s, the vibraphone became a staple of exotica and cool jazz after the war, its timbre hovering in a fuzzy space between rhythm and ambience, “primitive” and sophisticated. While there have been some titans on the vibes, like Bobby Hutcherson and Roy Ayers, it’s generally perceived as an accompanying rather than lead instrument.
Over the course of a decade—spanning a series of solo albums and a long-standing collaboration with experimental producer Jan Jelinek—the Berlin-based vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita has strived to make his instrument the primary focus, even as he blurs its edges. Fujita uses all manner of manipulation to make it sound like anything but a vibraphone, from electronics to bowing the bars to preparing his pipes with kitchen foil or a string of beads. For Book of Life, he doesn’t need so many tactics. Instead, he emphasizes his heart-stirring melodic gifts, often pairing mallets with violin, cello, flute, and voice. Fujita calls it his most “human” release, but considering the organic, woozy, at times alien atmospheres that arose from his previous efforts, such warmth feels slightly less idiosyncratic than before.
On the stirring opener “Snowy Night Tale,” his instrument glows softly as strings swirl, conjuring the wistfulness and intimacy of the title. And if the cello-and-vibraphone elegance of “It’s Magical” doesn’t lead to Fujita fielding calls for soundtrack work in the near future (perhaps for the next Hayao Miyazaki film), it will be cinema’s loss. Achingly poignant, it soon gives way to more anxious tones, conveying an unusually complex emotional state in the span of just a few minutes. But every once in a while, Fujita and cohorts get uncomfortably close to the mawkish, as on the precious “Mountain Deer.”
It’s when Fujita moves unaccompanied that he ascends to a more contemplative and numinous realm. Despite the relative straightforwardness of their titles, “Fog” and “Sadness” reveal the spacious terrain that Fujita can traverse with only vibraphone. The slow-blooming resonance of his instrument imparts an uncanny sense of both depth and weightlessness as Fujita allows enough space for each overtone to expand, spiral upwards, and decay before the next note arises.
On the gorgeous “Harp,” Fujita seems to mimic the peaceful, unpredictable flow of a body of water, moving this way and then drifting in another direction, his playing evoking flower petals landing on a pond, rippling outwards. If Milt Jackson or Bobby Hutcherson ever had the chance to step away from the jazz idiom to record a new-age album, it would sound as blissful as this. As Fujita moves through closer “Cloud of Light,” his touch is so light that the sound of mallet on metal starts to give way. The piece grows more hushed until it seems that, rather than playing vibraphone, Fujita is simply vibrating the air.


On his second album, the Malaysian-born, Shanghai- and Taipei-based producer interweaves industrial-strength techno and Asian instruments into a potent expression of rage and anxiety.

绿帽 Green Hat

“Let’s get physical,” a phrase originally made famous by Olivia Newton-John and recently repurposed by Dua Lipa, could serve as the implicit throughline of Malaysian-born, Shanghai- and Taipei-based DJ Tzusing’s sophomore album, Green Hat. It’s not the physicality of polyester-clad hips and pointed fingers, nor of canoodling under a disco ball’s plasticine shimmer; it’s the heart-pounding rhythm of primal instinct, the near-eruptive thump of blood through every vessel, the adrenaline that somehow propels you those few key steps beyond hunters in pursuit. It’s the physicality that arises when words will no longer serve you: when you finally realize that you may not, in fact, have this dance.
To call Green Hat a techno album would be a disservice to the L.I.E.S. affiliate, who disavows purism. And while he may be able to directly name his influences, which range from EBM and Chicago house to the wuxia action genre, he interweaves them into a bass-driven industrial sound, along with his characteristic string instrumentation, that somehow thumps evocatively, even cinematically, rather than being defined by genres or any flouting of them. “I think about the feeling first,” he once said of his production style. And more often than not, the feeling is explosive: “You can feel like you’ve broken someone’s face without actually breaking someone’s face. Isn’t that swell?”
If you were curious about Green Hat’s title, the opening track, “Introduction,” will immediately explain: “Wearing a green hat is a Chinese symbol of a cuckold,” chirps a robotic female voice. Building on themes of cultural standards that he explored on his debut album, 2017’s Invincible East, Tzusing uses Green Hat as a vehicle to barrel straight through questions about fragile masculinity and gendered expectations. Rather than answer them directly, he simply conjures those underlying feelings of anxiety and rage, allowing them to boil over the album’s frenetic breakbeats and walloping four-to-the-floor in waspish synths, screams and growls, and clip-emptying drums. In “Take Advantage,” he even samples Daniel Plainview’s infamous “I drink your milkshake” speech from There Will Be Blood, a winkingly on-the-nose expression of destruction via machismo. Where Tzusing’s A Name Out of Place EPs and 東方不敗 (Invincible East) respectively veered more industrial and more melodic, Green Hat synthesizes these directions into a chaotic, sprawling sound; acid-inflected drum’n’bass grows satisfyingly hellish in “Exascale” before the unexpectedly ambient, Aphex Twin-esque strain of “Wear Green Hat” catches you off guard.
Here, Tzusing’s classic combination of sheet-metal drums and shapeshifting strings becomes its lushest, most dynamic, and most frightening. On lead single “Filial Endure Ruthless,” an opening twang sharpens into razor-edged synths by the song’s end. Not even an LMFAO-style “Woo!” can cut through the menace of “Interlude,” where buzzsaw bass slithers beneath a minimal, germinating synth arrangement. Despite being one of the least texturally discordant tracks, “Clout Tunnel,” featuring Suda, maintains the album’s infernal chaos: Richly layered with viscous drums, cringing squeals, and background sirens that sound enveloped in smoke, it’s like a five-alarm fire set to tape. And let’s not forget the animalistic touches—the growling, hysterical wailing, and straight-up barking that add tangible flesh and blood to steel-boned production.
Though Tzusing’s use of Asian sounds is relatively unique within techno and undeniably central to his style, it would be irresponsible to define his discography simply by its cultural context. His work is frequently discussed as an expression of“dislocation,” as if the geographical distance of his sample packs’ origins from many of the clubs he plays them in were somehow irreconcilable. And this reductive perception seems to loom: “Otherness has often been used in gimmicky ways,” he’s noted, “but then, the Westerners are now looking to Asian stuff. They want that ching-chong shit.” Tzusing’s distinctive timbres and textures aren’t just ornamental or situative, though; they’re part of a deliberate soundscape that illustrates the magnitude of feeling, rather than just explaining its cause. Green Hat is an album that urges you to let it all out, more than anything: drums that punch, strings that rend, screams that pierce because they have to, as naturally as one has to breathe. It’s not about the dislocation, or the patriarchy, or whatever million other structures make you feel like shit, but about feeling like shit in the first place, the need to scream at the top of your lungs, the urge to run away until your legs give out. No matter where those samples came from, they’re just supposed to be heard.