A collection of George Gershwin interpretations by the avant-jazz legend traces his roots in the swing era, fleshing out a seldom-heard side of the astral voyager.

Sun Ra Plays Gershwin

“Calling planet Earth,” sings Herman Blount, aka Le Sony’r Ra aka Sun Ra, less than 10 minutes into the 1980 documentary Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise: “I am a different order of being.” Decked out in splotchy face paint, a purple wig, flowing robes, and a crown, and surrounded by a large ensemble of similarly costumed musicians honking, moaning, and screeching away, he makes you inclined to believe him. Though born in May 1914, Blount claimed a spiritual rebirth occasioned by an interplanetary, out-of-body journey to Saturn at some point in his early adult life. This is the image most people probably think of when they think of Sun Ra: the cosmic seer behind mid-1970s classics Space Is the Place and Lanquidity, a kind of ur-freak that all aspiring weirdos duly give props to.
Beyond these gateway LPs, however, lies a vast and daunting expanse of recordings that stretches from highly experimental group pieces to novelty songs to solo piano works. A generation older than the free-jazz players he would influence and often employ in his Arkestra, Ra had his roots in the swing era of the 1930s. He never really shed the influence, which is detailed on this compilation of George Gershwin interpretations. A quick, 38-minute dip into a less-celebrated corner of his catalogue, Sun Ra Plays Gershwin offers an opportunity to explore some of his formative recordings and to expand on the story of one of the 20th century’s most distinctive musicians.
The album’s first piece is a previously unreleased live take of “Rhapsody in Blue” by the Arkestra. Though the fidelity is a little muddy, it nonetheless stands as a testament to Ra’s rigorous bandleading and fluency in jazz’s inner and outer rings. The first three minutes showcase him soloing on the piano, one moment chopping up the iconic melody in an angular collage worthy of Thelonious Monk, the next laying back into impressionistic eddies. Gershwin’s soft-focus swagger is supplanted with something more ambiguous, even dangerous. In the middle of his solo, a small group of horns accents the melody and then darts upward into a squealing scream. The full band’s sudden, joyful entry, some three minutes in, leaps with rugged joy and swings with authority.
Elsewhere things get stranger. A deliciously lo-fi recording of “The Man I Love” with Ra on piano and Wilbur Ware on guitar mucks around in proto-skronk dissonance. The sentimental melody gets a plunky once-over from Ware, and the in-the-red tape saturation adds to the atmosphere. Toward the end, what sounds like a Mellotron creeps in for a warbly, schmaltzy refrain, and there might even be an autoharp tucked in there somewhere. The track ends abruptly; perhaps the tape ran out or someone pressed stop just a little too early. It feels like we’re eavesdropping on something private, even secret.
The vocal collaborations are some of the most charming pieces in the collection. An “early version” of “S Wonderful,” with Hattie Randolph, is two minutes of pure sweetness that places the vocal lead in front of a distant, hissy combo of piano, hand drums, and bass. There are no solos or head-turning key changes and certainly no visions of Saturn. Two songs with the Nu Sounds, an otherwise off-the-radar male vocal group, are delicious slices of jazz ephemera. Likely intended for release as cash-grab singles, these tracks and their quick-and-dirty arrangements bubble with spontaneity. “Nice Work If You Can Get It” clocks in at less than two minutes long, but even in this brief window the singers seem late to the party; they give themselves less than a minute to get through two choruses, a verse, and a tossed-off coda. But the track brims with small details—the elegant bass vocal that leads the first chorus, the sloppy handclaps that crowd the verse, Ra’s chunky piano embellishments—that make it all worthwhile.
The album closes with “I Loves You Porgy,” one of the most poignant melodies known to humankind. Here, the Arkestra are far from the astral denizens of A Joyful Noise; they sound more like the house band of a particularly jumping night club. As on “Rhapsody in Blue,” they are both tender and forceful. If Sun Ra had stopped here, he would perhaps live on in collectors’ wish lists, an eccentric also-ran from one of jazz’s most vital eras. Instead, he kept going—mythologizing, philosophizing, and defying almost every available orthodoxy. But the core musicality on display here never left him. Cosmic voyager though he was, Sun Ra Plays Gershwin shows him to be a softie at heart.


On her first official mix album, the Tokyo DJ unveils an intricate, inspired playing style whose value system differs from the typical dancefloor mix.

Powder in Space

In the 19th century, as unions throughout America pushed for the eight-hour workday, striking workers from coast to coast crowded the streets chanting a slogan for a better future: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what you will!” The last part of that slogan, the eight hours devoted to “what you will,” remains one of the labor movement’s most radical demands. The idea of leisure time for all, a space in the day to pursue whatever you want—be it something or nothing—is worth fighting for, especially as it becomes more elusive and harder to fulfill. Because in those hours you’re not toiling away or passed out, beautiful things can happen. The music of Momoko “Moko” Goto—aka the Tokyo-based DJ and producer Powder—is a testament to that.
By day, she works in the accounting department of a technology company in Shibuya. Doing mostly data entry and clerical work in a windowless office, she’s unable to listen to music until she takes lunch or when she makes her way back home. It’s at night, back in her apartment, she’s able to finally listen and create. That act of post-work creativity seems like a release from the pressures and banality of of the day. And holed up in her spartan home studio—a pair of synths, two drum machines, a turntable, a pile of records, and a laptop—she’s crafted one of the most vibrant and versatile catalogs of dance tracks in recent years. Even though she’s a genre hopper—her small and growing discography reveals someone curious about every imaginable vernacular expression of house or techno—Goto’s music is united by one overarching goal: Making the most of the hours she steals away from work and sleep, turning that time into pure positive energy. It gives her a music a very particular mood—a sort of focused and concentrated languor; a feeling of utter, electric relaxation.
The same philosophy is evident in her DJ sets, and with her latest release, an hour-long mix called Powder in Space, made for Tim Sweeney’s Beats in Space label, you’ll find everything you need to know about one of the world’s most interesting DJs and producers. Her mixes have a different set of values. They’re interested in what you might expect, like creating avenues for dancing and crowd pleasing, but she also spends a lot of time tinkering with tactility and texture. There’s almost a certain touchability to the music she selects on Powder in Space, like in the soft, downy noise and scratchy synths of the opener, Samo DJ and Hidden Operator’s “Захват Сзади Rox,” or the chunky woodblock percussion of Don’t DJ’s “Southern Shore.”
By creating a space that feels physical and close by, her playing toys with a listener’s sense of expectation. Even though the set, like all good mixes, flows in smooth, uninterrupted locomotion, surprise seems to await at every corner. That Powder can pull of a feat of casual DJ daredevilry like a three-song sequence in the middle of the set—moving seamlessly from galloping beats to sweaty noise music and then glitched-out breakbeats—speaks to her powers of control and invention.
But the best part of this series of songs is the pair of original productions she’s snuck in: “Gift” and “New Tribe.” Each, in a microcosm, explains what makes her such an arresting talent. The former, with its kaleidoscope of drum-machine pulses and strutting keyboard chords, is that Platonic ideal of vibrant leisure her music aspires to. The latter is a doozy in its own right—a daunting acid track that climbs and climbs until it breaks through storm clouds to be greeted by a chorus of angels.
More than anything, the real pleasure of this mix comes from how it invites us to slow down and appreciate the handiwork. It’s a patient and novel sequence of songs that beckons listeners into Powder’s headspace. Tucking into this one-hour mix—whether piecemeal or in its entirety, in the background or in a bout of focused listening—is all about carving out a sense of possibility and making Powder’s fantastical vision of downtime a thing of reality.


If you only buy one dubstep album this year...

Burial

The past 12 months have witnessed a flurry of reminders that dubstep can be more than just an intricately sculpted deathmask for UK garage's sarcophagus. Skream's 'Request Line", fluttery and propulsive, was the sub-genre's most enchanting love letter to grime yet. Pitch's "Qawalli" went in the other direction, its distant low-end tribal thud and ghostly shards of accordion rejecting rigor mortis futurism in favour of necromantic fluidity. And then there's Burial, whose music is somewhere between these two poles, and also somewhere else entirely.
The most immediately striking aspect of this heretofore unknown producer's eponymous debut is that its beats are reminiscent of "proper" 2-step's frisky agility; except Burial's rhythms are nervous not joyous, their fleet-footed insubstantiality evoking the fear and dread of dubstep. It's not the delectably programmed beats that stick in your head, however-- else Burial would simply be Horsepower Productions redux. Instead, the success of this music lies almost entirely in its unexpected and unabashed emotionalism. Above the edgy beats hover layers of lugubrious synths, passing over one another like successive waves of blue and purple rainclouds. (The beatless "Night Bus" actually samples rainfall to heighten the effect.) Combined with its tense, busy rhythmic arrangements, the effect is reminiscent of the more cinematic late-90s techstep of Hidden Agenda or Dom & Roland.
Burial also sporadically resurrects the 2-step practice of sampling and fucking with female vocalists: On album opener "Distant Lights", a bleated "Now that I meet you..." drifts from the swirl like Brandy caught on the other side of the looking glass. This is Burial's best trump card: The handful of tracks with sampled vocals stand well above their brethren, possessing an almost manipulative quality of quivering emotional directness. Far from speaking of final resting places, the overriding vibe is one of homelessness and rootlessness, and the nagging feeling that something important has been mislaid. Thematically and sonically, the closest reference point is Tricky's eerie, foreboding "Broken Homes" (ironically, Burial's own "Broken Home" is perhaps the album's most upbeat moment, sampling a winsome reggae crooner); I'm also reminded of the black eyeliner melodrama of parts of DJ Shadow's The Private Press. Some may scoff at such middlebrow reference points, but it's these resemblances, rather than any fidelity to inner-London dance music, which makes Burial's music such a viable crossover candidate.
If anything, Burial is weakest when he conforms to the undemonstrative grimness of dubstep proper: The Spartan, assymetrical groove of "Spaceape" (featuring the MC of the same name) might sound impressively muscular over a soundsystem, but it's also the album's only genuinely unlikeable moment, and some otherwise interesting tracks such as the brooding "Southern Comfort" are dragged down by an air of tight-eyed stiffness, as if afraid of the open expressiveness which the album's highlights revel in. More generally, what prevents Burial from being quite as spectacular as its strongest moments promise is simply its inconsistency-- what we have here is a brilliant EP padded out with sketches and noble failures.
For the future, Burial would do well to concentrate on deploying these amassed secret weapons simultaneously, as he does on the astonishing "You Hurt Me", where a spiralling 2-step rhythm, foreboding Middle-Eastern drones, a disembodied diva plaintively moaning the title and a too-fleeting but essential sampled "Drop!" coalesce into a groove that's unnerving, mournful, and compulsively physical. Shepherding together so many familiar musical impulses, it's how Burial spins them into webs of torturous beauty that can make this music so compelling.


On Shut Down the Streets, the New Pornographers' Carl Newman is writing autobiographical songs for the first time, about the birth of his son and the death of his mother. Though for the most part, the most heartfelt, eloquent statements here are expressed musically.

Shut Down the Streets

When Carl Newman of the New Pornographers rebranded himself as the more authorial-sounding A.C. Newman for his first solo record, 2004's The Slow Wonder, indie's foremost creator of over-caffeinated pop-rock signaled a small but important change in direction. On his own, Newman took a deep breath and a couple of steps back from the hopped-up band dynamic of the Pornographers; as A.C. Newman, he was presenting himself in the mold of the thoughtful and introspective pop composer. Wonder and 2009's Get Guilty weren't all that removed from the Pornographers in terms of sound, especially in light of that band's contemplative and somewhat draggy 2007 transitional effort Challengers. But Newman's solo sensibility has been steadily marching toward full-fledged "mature" singer-songwriter-isms for a while now, and the process reaches its full fruition on Shut Down the Streets.
Not only is Newman writing autobiographical songs for the first time, he's announcing it in interviews, underlining the impact that the birth of his son and death of his mother had on his creative process. "There were all these things that just seemed so mammoth, and I was trying to make sense of them," Newman recently told Exclaim! "But at the same time, there's also this subtext of, 'Everybody goes through this. This is so earth-shaking, it seems so impossibly sad and, at the same time, happy.' I didn't want to portray it like I felt like [I] was the first person that's gone through this." The happy/sad divide doesn't only exist in the songs that address fatherhood (the sweetest being the dad-to-son advice-dispensing "There's Money in New Wave") versus the songs about death (the wistful title track). This dichotomy also appears in the space of the same song; on the enchanting "I'm Not Talking", Newman sings about the fear of loss that accompanies getting the family life you've always wanted, over the album's most robust melding of acoustic strumming and lush synths. "Until there's a reason to think I have a shot at redemption/ Until then I'm not talking," he says, hoping to beat out a cosmic jinx.
In the press materials for Streets, there's a defensive aside about the critical prejudice against so-called "dad rock," which in this context refers specifically to music explicitly exploring the joys and melancholy of early parenthood. Streets belongs in the company of records like Wilco's Sky Blue Sky and the Walkmen's Heaven that similarly touch on grown-up themes of responsibility, aging, and the never-ending fight against fucking up a good life you've worked long and hard to establish as middle age looms.
These are worthy, if terribly un-sexy subjects for a record. Newman has never been a lyricist comfortable with direct and easily discernible statements, even (or perhaps especially) when he's writing openly about his own life. But the most heartfelt, eloquent sentiments on Streets are expressed musically. Even if you ignore every word he sings on Streets, the album telegraphs an unsettled sense of contentment. "You Could Get Lost Out Here" includes references to "roots in the ground" and uses a wilderness metaphor to describe the disillusionment that lingers in the background of any long-term relationship. But it's the music-- a sad-sack cowpoke waltz graced with stunning steel-guitar-- that truly makes "Lost" a heartbreaking plea not to let hard-won love unravel.
It's no surprise that a writer as precise and tasteful as Newman would be precise and tasteful with the musical aesthetic of Streets. He's zeroed in on late-70s psych-tinged and synth-accented singer-songwriter records-- specifically referencing the Gordon Lightfoot song "Daylight Katy"-- as an inspiration for the album's "acoustic baroque" sound. The material on Streets that sticks to this vein is most successful; unfortunately, Newman can't sustain the mood over the course of the whole record. Where the album falters, ironically, is with the most Pornographers-like songs, particularly the too-clever "Encyclopedia of Classic Takedowns", which never quite takes off, in spite of a springy bassline and backing vocals from bandmate Neko Case. "Strings" is another non-starter, piling on layers of keyboards and guitars in ways that feel out of place on what's otherwise intended to be a quiet, late-night-with-a-sleeping-baby record.
A would-be song cycle, Streets finds Newman opening up like never before, but it's ultimately stymied by a lack of nerve. Newman's melodic gifts continue to serve the emotional core of his songs well, but he pulls his punches with opaque lyrics and too many wheelhouse-sticking power-pop cuts that keep Streets from achieving the impact it could have had.


Kevin Patrick Sullivan’s latest is a patchwork of new and old material with some gorgeously off-the-cuff strummers and unvarnished folk songs that start to detail his curious shape as a singer-songwriter.

Floral Prince

About three months ago, Kevin Patrick Sullivan posted two songs to SoundCloud under the name Paper Rose Haiku—a Kratom-influenced alter ego that he described as “a cowboy [crying] through AutoTune over a trap beat.” Newly sober, Sullivan considers Paper Rose Haiku an anomaly, a demon that emerged during an unfortunate relapse, existing only to be exorcised. In truth, it’s more of an inversion of what he’s been doing for years under his more well-known moniker of Field Medic. Frequently shirtless, flamboyantly mulleted, and aligned with emo-rappers like Bladee and Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, Sullivan often sings of the acute sadness that follows when pills and sex fail to keep his baseline sadness at bay. He just does these things in an astringent, high-lonesome wail over fingerpicked, open-tuned acoustics, captured on hissing 4-tracks—a clash of both the authenticities and affectations of purist folk and SoundCloud rap. Floral Prince is the first Field Medic release Sullivan attributes to the “full-time freestyle” approach encouraged by his therapist—and like Paper Rose Haiku, “full-time freestyle” isn’t so much of a break with his past, just a cooler way to describe what he’s been doing all along.
A patchwork of unreleased material, previously available singles, and his YouTube “field medic show,” Floral Prince is functionally similar to 2017’s Songs From the Sunroom, a compilation that marked his signing to Run For Cover and included self-explanatory songs like “do a little dope (live)” and “fuck these foolz that are making valencia street unchill.” Despite Sullivan wanting to sidestep the pressure of making the follow-up to his proper debut, 2019’s fade into the dawn, Floral Prince isn’t noticeably different in its content or fidelity. Horns seep into the mix of opener “-h-o-u-s-e-k-e-y-z-” like ink into water, maintaining fade into the dawn’s pleasing mix of orchestral frill and lo-fi ingenuity, while the live percussion of “HEADCASE” is produced to sound like the drum machine pitter-pat of “henna tattoo.”
Floral Prince’s immediacy comes from a nexus of improvisation and strict ground rules—minimal rewrites, recorded to 4-track or a phone, usually with a limit of three takes. But Sullivan’s too much of a formalist for Floral Prince to ever go fully “based.” The songs that would seem like the result of his first-thought best-thought policy—i.e., the ones where he talks in very plain terms about his bodily functions, drinking habits, and sex life—are the ones where Sullivan’s writing fits into more of a structural grid. “i want you so bad it hurts” and “it’s so lonely being sober” might be litmus tests for new listeners, even though “I even started doing pushups/And my dick’s harder than ever” is the sort of unvarnished truth that should be heard more often if earnest folk music is meant to be a quotidian artform.
And yet, if Floral Prince has any flaw, it’s that reducing the overall “field medic show” to a collection of songs inherently restricts Sullivan’s personality from fully coming across. About half of the album consists of gorgeous, off-the-cuff strummers that feature Sullivan’s most poetic writing; they’re also the songs that sound like they could be written by other people. Conversely, “talkin johnny and june (your arms around me)” deftly holds space for Field Medic’s tendencies towards twee and debauchery, a rare instance of a song that taps into Johnny Cash’s life story without resorting to hagiography or caricature. “it’s so lonely being sober” likewise reflects on the assumptions that arise when hard-living artists write about getting clean. People usually expect a newfound clarity and gratitude, not the self-pity that arises when the inspiration doesn’t come immediately and your friends are still out partying because they’re on the same timeline.
Immediately after, “better way” makes the case that he’s moved onto accepting whatever comes next; it feels just as real despite its more universal lyricism, as the best Field Medic songs strive to live in the present, rather than trying to build a universe. “We do whatever we want because we have nothing better to do,” Sullivan jokes to Great Grandpa’s Alex Menne (credited as Pickleboy) before debuting “talkin johnny and june (your arms around me)” on the “field medic show.” As with Songs from the Sunroom and fade into the dawn, Floral Prince doesn’t question whether Field Medic can be done justice by the album format, just whether he needs to in the first place.

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Nature takes center stage on the experimental guitarist’s latest album—a response to climate crisis blending fractured melodies with recordings of severe weather and emergency broadcasts.

Almanac Behind

Daniel Bachman records often sound like collaborations with nature, blending his instrumental guitar compositions with sounds from his native Virginia. From the cicadas on 2013’s Jesus I’m a Sinner to the rain, insects, and frogs that punctuate 2018’s The Morning Star, field recordings from back roads and front porches bring Bachman’s surroundings to life and strengthen his connection with the state’s rural folk tradition. But the closer he observed the natural rhythms around him, the more alarmed he became at the changes he noticed: dying trees, drying creeks, flash flooding, and wildfires.
On his latest album, Almanac Behind, nature takes center stage, sometimes overwhelming the music completely. Whereas last year’s Axacan generated a sense of dread by weaving thunderstorms and emergency radio broadcasts into its sonic fabric, here panic sets in as the seams rip apart. Nature is no longer aestheticized; it is real, immediate, and dangerous. Instruments struggle to be heard over pelting hail, and melodies are drowned out by windstorms. “People that are familiar with my work over the years may be wondering why my music has taken such a drastic turn in theme and composition recently,” Bachman wrote in a lengthy Twitter thread. On Almanac Behind, his answer is that artistic expression, his music included, risks futility in the face of overlapping climate crises.
Instead of addressing the global scale of these crises, Bachman chooses to stay local. Almanac Behind crafts a composite thunderstorm from weather events in northern Virginia. Wind chimes softly clink in the background as a digitally manipulated slide guitar attempts a halting improvisation on “Barometric Cascade (Signal Collapse).” Soon the guitar is lost between radio frequencies as an emergency weather report cuts in. The relaxed front-porch atmosphere of Bachman’s earlier albums is transformed into a narrative of survival through the ensuing storm, from gust front to supercell to flooding to blackout. On album standout “Flood Stage,” radio static dramatically slows to create a pulsing beat that backs a dissonant pairing of harmonium and slide guitar. Even this relatively placid track turns unsettling as rainfall rises in volume until it breaks into the harsh “Inundation.” Throughout Almanac Behind, these instrumental interludes only serve as brief respites on either side of another disaster.
In a video for “540 Supercell,” Bachman explains that summer heatwaves harden the soil of waterways and river beds, causing both floods and fires. As a wildfire roars into life on the album’s second side, a hand-cranked radio tunes into a smoke inhalation alert on  “3:24 AM KHB36 (When The World’s On Fire).” Its monotone voice is distorted and spliced, engulfing Bachman’s version of a Carter Family tune in hair-raising warnings that the air is unsafe to breathe. All seems to be well again on the closing “Recalibration/Normalization” until the guitar warps into a low drone and the same wind chimes from the album’s opening reappear. In fact, Almanac Behind is a loop that can be played seamlessly on repeat: a reminder that the catastrophes it describes are not singular, but cyclical. Amid the violent weather and Bachman’s fractured melodies, we hear the warnings loud and clear.


Wald marks a new beginning for Pole, the solo alias of the Berlin producer and mastering engineer Stefan Betke. His early albums from the last decade were dub-inspired ambient landmarks, but his new music is more spacious and open, though texture still reigns supreme.

Wald

Wald marks a new beginning—maybe even a new new beginning—for Pole, the solo alias of the Berlin producer and mastering engineer Stefan Betke. It is his first album in seven years, and its predecessor, Steingarten, was itself a kind of reboot. Early on in the Pole project, Betke was remarkably productive: In just six years he recorded five albums, and the first three of those were instant classics, despite the fact that they were all essentially variations on the same theme—an alchemical fusion of dub bass and static crackle. But with albums four and five, as Betke sought to escape the strictures of his own signature, he seemed to find only detours rather than a viable way forward (2001's R, featuring remixes from Burnt Friedman and Kit Clayton, has held up rather well; 2003's Pole, featuring the rapper Fat Jon, has not). A four-year break followed, and it must have done him good, because Steingarten, in 2007, was among the best work of his career. Abandoning the midrange murk and omnipresent white noise in favor of crisp sounds, elastic rhythms, and vast space, it felt like vacuum-sealed krautrock, and as a celebration of texture and tone color, it was exhilarating.
Perhaps Betke's unwillingness to repeat himself explains why he followed Steingarten with yet another extended silence, one broken only in 2011 with a trio of EPs, Waldgeschichten (German for Forest Stories). That title, like Wald, refers to the walks in the woods where Betke apparently looked for inspiration. That image may bring to mind Wolfgang Voigt's Gas project, whose foggy swirls of classical samples were inspired by the Black Forest and its role in German Romanticism. But the two artists' impressions of the woods couldn't be more different. Where Gas is either dark and claustrophobic or starlit and idyllic, Pole's Wald evokes porous thickets and branches stripped bare by the elements.
As is customary in his work, texture reigns supreme. Instead of melodies, there are clusters of tone—glassy drum-machine pings, brushed metal, scraped flint, the atonal shimmer of a guitar being strummed above the nut. In "Käfer", a junkyard guitar provides the semblance of a through-line across a landscape of crickets and electrical interference; a synthetic melodica takes the lead in "Moos (Live)", and wheezing organs lend both color and a viscous sense of substance to many of the album's tracks. Only in "Myzel" and "Fichte", whose chiming leads are faintly reminiscent of Autechre, does a melodic sensibility begin to creep back into the heavily abstracted landscape.
The three songs designated as "Live" aren't concert recordings, but live-in-the-studio updates of tracks previously released on the Waldgeschichten EPs. That method—recording in real time, both hands on the mixing desk—is Betke's enduring debt to dub. Those dub mechanics have a lot to do with the music's flexible rhythms and odd syncopations, which contribute to the mercurial sense of flow: There are almost always more elements in play than you can track, and whatever silvery filament you choose to focus on, your attention will soon be hijacked by something else. Still, there's nothing hectic about the listening experience; thanks to its relaxed pace and gently abstracted shapes, Wald is every bit as contemplative as the forest walks that inspired it. It has an unfettered sense of motion that, for an artist who was once, by his own admission, stuck in a rut, sounds like the sweetest kind of freedom.


The Albany emo band offer us a fuck-up’s masterpiece, a hero’s journey following a guy who might conquer the world if he could leave his couch.

Prince Daddy & the Hyena: Cosmic Thrill Seekers

Cosmic Thrill Seekers

In the Prince Daddy & the Hyena universe, Titus Andronicus’ The Monitor is the greatest album ever made. Not the greatest punk album, or the best of the decade—the greatest ever, better than Pet Sounds, OK Computer, and Illmatic put together. They’ve also namedropped American Idiot and The Black Parade in almost every interview for their boisterously extra second album Cosmic Thrill Seekers, a “Disney soundtrack written by a punk band” tailored to a very specific set of aspirations—they’ve made a fuck-up’s masterpiece, a hero’s journey following a guy who might conquer the world if he could leave his couch.
It’s worth noting that Green Day, My Chemical Romance, and Titus weren’t taken seriously before they bumrushed the rockist canon—they were, respectively, a pop-punk institution in a steady commercial decline, avatars for a widely discredited form of emo, and a band most known for playing suburban New Jersey pool parties. Prince Daddy & the Hyena start from an even greater disadvantage—for one thing, they are called Prince Daddy & the Hyena, and they are leading figures in a punk-rock subset often known as sparklepunk, weed emo, party emo or even “meme-o.” A counterbalance to artsy, cerebral acts like The Hotelier or The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, these bands played riotous basement shows with songs about self-medication, anxiety and self-medicating anxiety as pleasurable and fleeting as a plate of Bagel Bites or the Bagel Bites theme song.
Cosmic Thrill Seekers is a concept album in three parts, albeit one with a plot engine about getting high and watching TV—the final act, where one would expect some kind of moral revelation, hinges on consecutive tracks titled “C’mon & Smoke Me Up” and “Klonopin.” “You tried to put a documentary on the galaxy on,” Kory Gregory shrieks, defacing the lovely acoustic guitar progression opening “I Lost My Life.” The song recounts his experience taking LSD-laced Sour Patch Kids and spending years wondering if he’d permanently fucked up his brain chemistry. Before coming down, he watched The Wizard Of Oz and saw it as a metaphor for his own life; he was impressionable and innocent enough to see this revelation as uncharted territory for punk-rock songwriting.
Throughout the album, the band flaunts a previously inconceivable range—careening from proggy musical theater (“Dialogue”), to brassy Broadway punk (“Ursula Merger”), Irish drinking interludes (“Dream Nails”) and grim sludge (“Trying Times”), cramming an entire weekend of Fest into 40 or so minutes. The hooks are shameless and Sum-41 snotty, each one like mashing a nuclear-option big red button. Gregory’s bloodied vocals are an acquired taste even for the band’s fans—he sings like he’s rejecting a tracheal transplant—but they are a perfect vehicle for his hyperbolic self-loathing (“I’m pretty fucking confident that I’ll die the next time I’m alone in my bedroom,” or “pretending to sleep, don’t bother talking to me”).
Despite the inherent divisiveness of Gregory’s vocals and his misanthropic tendencies, Cosmic Thrill Seekers aspires to personal revolution and communal uplift—members of Strange Ranger and Remo Drive contribute vocals, while Diva Sweetly, Oso Oso, and Kississippi all appear in the video for “Lauren (Track 2).” Gregory and Kississipi’s Zoe Reynolds actually got engaged on stage at Fest. Gregory calls it a “selfish” album, though the music suggests otherwise: Cosmic Thrill Seekers may be intended as Prince Daddy & the Hyena’s masterpiece, but it’s clear that it depicts a guy Gregory is no longer interested in being.


Sonny Smith continues to excel at simple, low-stakes music done extremely well, with clever touches that don't reveal themselves on first listen.

Hit After Hit

The ridiculously fertile San Francisco garage-pop scene is full of people who crank out vast amounts of music and who sound like they're having fun doing it. And much of the time, Sonny Smith seems to be making more music and having more fun than anyone else. About a year ago, his band Sonny and the Sunsets released the sweet, inventive album Tomorrow Is Alright, and Smith then followed it up with his "100 Records" art installation, in which he wrote and recorded an absurd 200 songs for 100 fictional bands. While he was at it, he issued an EP for one of those fake bands, Earth Girl Helen Brown. And now, after that furious burst of activity, we get the Sunsets' sophomore album. That's Lil-Wayne-in-2006 levels of productivity.
But Smith never sounds like someone rushing to crank out literally hundreds of songs. His songs have an enormously appealing loose, homespun quality-- muffled, refracted, self-aware takes on the starry-eyed, innocent sounds you hear coming from oldies radio. Smith's voice is warm and laconic; you can practically hear a goofy stoner grin on his face a lot of the time. He allows himself a few guitar solos, but unless the song is an instrumental, he likes to keep them to three seconds or less. A lot of the fun in his records is hearing him interact with his backing vocals-- wordless ooh-ahh harmonies on some songs, equally flat female interjections on others. The whole thing sounds like something they could've bashed out in a long afternoon, killing time waiting for a midnight screening of Rock 'n' Roll High School.
This, then, is simple, low-stakes music, but it's simple and low-stakes music done extremely well, with clever touches that don't always reveal themselves on first listen. Plenty of tiny instrumental flourishes show just how deeply Smith and his band have studied their oldies-radio fare: The lightly tribal floor-tom rumbles on "She Plays Yoyo With My Mind" [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| , the nifty little surf-guitar riffage on "Home and Exile [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| ", the heartbroken jangle on "Pretend You Love Me". And Smith has a lyrical mischievousness about him, too. One line on "Don't Act Dumb" sums up four decades of lovesick garage-rock frustration in a few words: "I'm in love, love with you baby/ I am dumb and so are you." And "Teenage Thugs" has to be one of the first punk songs in history that doesn't identify with juvenile corner toughs but with the grown adult weenies who are afraid of them.
Many of Smith's defining qualities-- his self-deprecating lyrics, his easy way with melody, his ability to make bashed-out and idiosyncratic music out of ancient forms of pop-- unites him with another wave of Bay Area bands. In Smith, I hear a lot of the Bay Area pop-punk of the early 90s-- bands like the Mr. T Experience, Samiam, even very early Green Day. And like MTX frontman Dr. Frank, he knows how to convey confused-teenager feelings in smart, adult ways. With Hit After Hit, he's made 11 more charming and knowingly primitive bursts of sunny fuzz. He's got plenty more left in him. And as much fun as it could be to watch him grow as an artist, part of me hopes he stays his lane and keeps making these sugary jangles forever.


Bon Iver’s first album in five years takes an unexpected turn toward the strange and experimental. But behind the arranged glitches and processed voices are deeply felt songs about uncertainty.

22, A Million

There’s a line deep in Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice wherein Doc, a small-time stoner-sleuth, considers the dissolution of the 1960s, wondering if the decade wasn’t merely “a little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness.” It’s a funny way to think about time—that an entire era can be nudged back into the ether, erased. But on 22, A Million, the extraordinary third full-length from Bon Iver, Justin Vernon echoes Doc’s somber pondering. These are fluttery, skeletal songs that struggle against known trajectories and then threaten to disappear entirely. 22, A Million might be musically distant from For Emma, Forever Ago, the collection of aching folk tunes Vernon debuted in 2007—mostly gone are the acoustic strums, replaced by lurching, electronic gasps born from the Messina, a doctored combination of the Prismizer software plug-in and some hardware that was invented by Vernon and his engineer, Chris Messina. But the albums share an ideology. All things go, taken back into darkness.
22, A Million is certainly Bon Iver’s most difficult record; it’s the work of a songwriter who seems to have lost interest in established, easily deciphered forms, a possibility Vernon has been hinting at for nearly all of his career. In 2006, Vernon, then living in North Carolina, was emotionally razed by a perfect storm of shitty turns: his band broke up, his relationship dissolved, he came down with an acute case of mononucleosis. He did what any reasonable person with an eye toward self-care would do: decamp to his family’s hunting cabin in rural Wisconsin, drink a gang of beers, watch endless hours of “Northern Exposure,” and write a batch of lonesome, yearning folk songs on his acoustic guitar. His high, brittle falsetto gave these pieces an otherworldly quality, as if they had blown in on a particularly cold wind.
For Emma, Forever Ago was, in its own way, an experimental record—Vernon’s vocals and phrasing are deeply unusual; its stories are impressionistic, fractured—but because it’s so heavy with heartbreak and loss, it feels intimate, authentic, easy. 22, A Million is comparatively strange and exploratory, but its worries are more existential. The album opens with a high, undulating voice (Vernon, singing into an OP-1, a combination synthesizer, sampler, and sequencer) announcing, “It might be over soon,” and goes on to examine the idea of impermanence. Nearly all of its songs contain a question of some sort, as if Vernon’s own reckoning with the inevitability of decay has led him to interrogate every last thing he’s seen or known. Inasmuch as his lyrics are narrative—and they have always been more connotative than exegetic—he seems preoccupied with whether or not a life has meaning. “Oh then, how we gonna cry? Cause it once might not mean something?” he asks on “715 - CRΣΣKS.”
Kanye West once called Vernon his “favorite living artist,” and has long professed a deep and unexpected admiration for “Woods,” the closing track from 2009’s Blood Bank EP, and an obvious precursor to “715 - CRΣΣKS,” itself a kind of warped a capella jam. “Woods” featured no instrumentation, but is merely five minutes of Vernon singing through Auto-Tune, in ghostly harmony with himself. In retrospect, “Woods” feels like a revelation: it was not only an unexpected affirmation of pop’s future—artists aggressively distorting their vocals, feeding their voices into machines in order to build spectral, nagging songs that reflect alienation, arguably the reigning sensation of our time—but of Vernon’s own trajectory.
Plenty of beloved contemporary artists, from Dylan to Neil Young on, have ditched the supposed purity of folk music to push the work harder, to make art that’s less reliant on a tradition and invests, instead, in the strangeness of the present moment and collective uncertainty about the future. Trading on preexisting pathways—it’s too easy. Vernon isn’t alone in his hunger for true, tectonic innovation, for songs that seem tethered to and reflective of their actual time and place: Radiohead has been mirroring anxiety about the encroachment of electronics and virtual living since Kid A, a record that also required them to warp if not abandon their beginnings as a guitar-rock band.
Beyond its sonic striving, 22, A Million is also a personal record about how to move forward through disorienting times. Vernon occasionally employs religious language to express his anxiety, some explicit (“consecration,” “confirmation”), some more plainly vernacular (“So as I’m standing at the station,” “I could go forward in the light”). He samples two gospel tunes: Mahalia Jackson’s live version of “How I Got Over,” from 1962, and the Supreme Jubilees’s “Standing in the Need of Prayer,” from 1980. There is a song titled “666 ʇ,” and another titled “33 ‘GOD.’” A bit of marginalia in the album’s liner notes (“Why are you so FAR from saving me?”) is attributed to Psalm 22, though in the King James Bible, that imploration is for help, not salvation (“Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?”). Either way, Psalm 22 opens in medias res: its author is undergoing an urgent crisis of faith. So is Vernon?
Maybe. Musically, Vernon resists not just verse-chorus-verse, but all the ways in which Western cultures have come to conceptualize narrative. As kids, we’re taught how stories work, and we use that rubric to organize and make sense of the events of our lives. But the imposition of structure can be violent; perhaps, Vernon suggests, the idea that we are organizing events at all is patently nuts. So when he ventures a line like “We’ve galvanized the squall of it all,” from “8 (circle),” it feels like a mission statement. There is solace in resisting formal structures, in both acknowledging and embracing a certain amount of chaos.
It’s the same story on “00000 Million,” the album’s haunting closing track, where Vernon samples a wobbly line borrowed from the Irish folksinger Fionn Regan: “The days have no numbers.” Pitted against the record’s obsessive numerology—each song has a number in its title—it lands like an admission of defeat. There’s resignation in his voice, which gives way to desolation. The song’s lyrics will be familiar to anyone wondering if they’ll ever actually start to feel better, while still continuing to do something they know is hurting them: “If it’s harmed, it harmed me, it’ll harm me, I let it in.”
For a while now, Vernon has been building songs in a modular way, and there are moments here (like the meandering last minute of “21 M♢♢N WATER”) where it feels as if he could’ve jiggled the pieces together a little more—where his disavowal of connective tissue feels less deliberate than random. This is evident, in part, because he is exceptionally good at writing melancholic laments in the highly structured style of ’80s soft-rock giants like Bonnie Raitt and Bruce Hornsby (Vernon has covered Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” and Vernon and Hornsby have collaborated on several occasions; “00000 Million” feels like it could have been recorded by either).
“8 (circle)” is the most immediately reminiscent of Vernon’s last record, Bon Iver, Bon Iver, itself now recognizable as a clear midpoint between Emma and here; it’s also the album’s most conventionally composed track, with the smallest amount of vocal manipulation. Elsewhere, Vernon’s vocals are filtered until they begin to actually dissolve, as if they have been dunked in a tub of lye. The song’s stunning emotional peaks—I come to a full stop every time I hear Vernon sing, “I’m standing in the street now, and I carry his guitar,” his voice steady and deep, as if he’s announcing himself to someone he loves—are so plainly beautiful it’s hard not to mourn, briefly, for the Bon Iver of yesteryear.
But 22, A Million sounds only like itself. There are precedents for all of Vernon’s moves deep in the histories of rock‘n’roll and rhythm and blues and electronic music—and, more immediately, on newer records by West, Frank Ocean, James Blake, Chance the Rapper, Francis and the Lights, and Radiohead. But this particular amalgamation is so twitchy and idiosyncratic it feels truly singular. Its searching is bottomless.


Released less than a year after their debut full-length Light Up Gold, Parquet Courts offer five new songs about heartbreak, rebellion, depression, and trying to deliver weed on a bike.

Parkay Quarts: Tally All the Things That You Broke EP

Tally All the Things That You Broke EP

The language of Brooklyn's Parquet Courts focuses on the mundane minutiae of the everyday: Even when they’re stoned they’re not just simply starving, they’re walking around Ridgewood, Queens weighing the consequences between roasted peanuts, licorice, and Swedish Fish. Often it seems they don’t want you to take any of their shit all that seriously, either. But just like Steve Malkmus was mis-labeled the slacker king, Parquet Courts singer/guitarist Andrew Savage can sound like he’s murmuring lyrics from deep within a futon. Some of the first words you hear on their shining 2012 full-length debut Light Up Gold are “I didn't come here to dream or teach the world things/ Define paradigms, or curate no living days,” and here there’s a little speech bubble in the corner of the artwork for the new Tally All The Things That You Broke EP that says “Got damn it’s just a bootleg!”
But that excuse is scratched out in red marker, and instead, front and center, are five “Self-Evident Truths” taken from each of the five songs of the EP. Parquet Courts, if for only some brief minutes on this collection, actually spend some time caring about, you know, stuff. There’s even a song on here that nods to the subversive punk directives of bands like Minor Threat and Black Flag and is diametrically opposed to anything resembling a “slacker” anthem.
Released just over a year after Light Up Gold, the droll post-punk of the band's debut rolls onward for these five songs about heartbreak, rebellion, depression, and trying to deliver weed on a bike. Levity remains Parquet Courts’ strongest suit, obviously. They’re the young wise fools of New York (by way of Texas), and their sound openly recalls all the frayed and wiry post-rock of the 80s and 90s, though their southern twang and sharp satire push them away from being revivalists. Savage’s delivery of the anxieties running through his mind is just as thrilling as the spidery guitars that run beside them. What separates him from his Gen-X forebears is that none of what he does feels typically cool at all—he has a way of masking honest songwriting in crooked wordplay and a joke about the munchies. At his most honed, he’s a two-bit philosopher on “You’ve Got Me Wonderin’ Now”, suggesting that “Toothache’s better than heartache” and “Seasick’s better than heartsick,” but some heart-breaker has him second guessing his own platitudes.
The rhythm section is wound tight on the Tally EP, whether snapping against each other to get totally wired (“Descend (The Way)”) and stumbling into each other to get totally weird (“Fall On Yr Face”). Even when they stretch it out for five minutes on the shuffle-punk of “The More You Use It”, they stay focused. That's the song that hurls out a succession of anarcho-individualist platitudes (“Say something without the words they fed ya! Find something they didn’t tell you to hunt for!”), any one of which could be stenciled on a DIY zine. If you ever doubted that Parquet Courts gave shits, this is their exonerating testimony. Savage sends each line out to the back of the club every time, all underneath sugary post-punk revival guitar lines courtesy of Savage and his longtime associate Austin Brown.
All this leads to the finale, an ambling snooze-rap that sounds like a bunch of kids doing a loving but remarkably faded tribute to the Beastie Boys. The song trails a weed courier on his bike as he cruises through the streets of New York, seeing paths in all directions, walking up stoops in Union Square, and ringing hundreds of apartment buzzers. All’s well for our hero until he gets busted on Wilson Ave. in Bushwick by the 83rd Precinct. He’s left handcuffed in the gutter as Savage lets out the last of the “Self-evident Truths” Parquet Courts detail on the cover, “The powers that be choose to surveil the poor.” Unfortunately it drags meaninglessly on for three minutes against some dog-whistle guitar feedback—a sloppy way end an otherwise stellar EP. That "jam" at the end does, however, remind us that Parquet Courts are still just loveable ne’er-do-wells, content to be starlings of the sardonic slipstream just as much as they want to rise above. They don’t waste the involuted micro-analysis that comes with THC—the wan, specific observations about love and life—they actually use it.


The Rotterdam quartet makes sparse yet atmospheric post-punk that draws inspiration from all things dreamy and twee.

Out and About

Out and About, the fourth album from Rotterdam quartet Lewsberg, is a collection of hypnotic, talky post-punk that hinges entirely on atmosphere. It’s music for small rooms with weird lighting, old churches where you have to sit on a bench, graveyards where you are always standing under a tree. It is also poetic but in an extremely self-aware and twee kind of way, doing things like meditating on the difference between “dog” and “god” or describing a weirdly sexy interaction with a doctor.
Out and About plays like a mumblecore flick. The characters walk around musing about the meaning of life, winking after every sentence. They are prone to cerebral concepts, bringing in geometric optics into the song “Angle of Reflection,” but they find a way to immediately make it sound chill. They bring in an organ; a lonely drumbeat, practically unchanging; a crisp bassline, soft and almost out of focus. All of it flickers like a candle in a nightclub bathroom where you’d maybe hide out to avoid someone. Vocalists Arie van Vliet and Shalita Dietrich turn the environment into something spectral, intimate. “So there’s nothing new and I’m easily bored,” sings Dietrich, before following it up with “All I have to know: Would you do it once more?” She’s being deliberately cryptic, a mood that permeates the whole of the record.
As musicians, Lewsberg pulls from the best of everything twee, dreamy, and naive. Out and About is a little Stereolab in the Stunning Debut Album primordial era, when things were more lo-fi and guitar-oriented. It’s also a little VU, if Maureen Tucker got to sing more, or the Moldy Peaches in leather jackets. “An Ear to the Chest” has the album’s best guitar moment, a pristine break in the middle that is almost erotic, unbearably lovely. “Communion” is a song that is possibly about being friends with Jesus Christ: “Bless the lord! My soul/Watch his body from above,” sings van Vilet, the music growing scuzzier in the background.
On Out and About, Lewsberg are self-possessed, in touch with their aesthetic. They write songs that are funny, sweet, and weird. The music is an ever so slight sharpening and varnishing of the band’s past work. More so than melodic or lyrical choices, Lewsberg now focus on the small universe of a song, how different textures can alter the full effect. The violin on “Going Places” is like a small mouse running through some grass. Standout track “A Different View” pirouettes around like a toy ballerina in her miniature box, delicately atmospheric. Lewsburg are masters at conjuring these moods, capturing idiosyncrasies and turning them into intricate pop.


With two covers and two originals, the psych rock band of Genesis P-Orridge expands rather than fortifies the definition of classic rock'n'roll.

Alienist

At first glance, Psychic TV bandleader Genesis P-Orridge would seem a most unlikely champion of nostalgia. As co-founder of trailblazing ’70s noise act Throbbing Gristle, P-Orridge became the unwitting progenitor of industrial music—just one of several milestones in a multi-faceted career defined by a rabid dedication to non-conformity. And even when P-Orridge switched from Throbbing Gristle’s collagist technique to song-based structures with the formation of Psychic TV in 1981, the subversive streak remained intact.
But as this latest installment in a series of covers-themed releases proves, P-Orridge has long harbored a romance for musical tradition. You can go all the way back to Psychic TV’s first album Force the Hand of Chance to hear hints of P-Orridge’s childhood affinity for early, pre-rock forms of pop. That album, in fact, begins with P-Orridge singing, “You caress me with simple love,” over an orchestral string arrangement. Looking back, it appears as if P-Orridge was being totally sincere, but in the wake of Sid Vicious’ “My Way” and with the corpse of Throbbing Gristle still warm, the song must have come across as ironic at the time.
On Alienist, P-Orridge and the current incarnation of the band come to celebrate the past. Given P-Orridge’s history of provocation, Psychic TV aren’t interested in preserving anyone’s comfortable idea of the status quo. Nevertheless, the band’s renditions of singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson’s "Jump Into the Fire" and ’60s psychedelic outfit the Creation’s “How Does It Feel to Feel” stay faithful to the sonic character of the original versions. Still, the very act of picking those two tunes expands rather than fortifies the definition of pop music. It also says a lot about the band’s unwillingness to pander to the obvious—even as they play with nothing to prove.
If Psychic TV sound like a bar band on these covers, it’s a bar band that puts a lot of thought into its choice of songs. Since 2009, Psychic TV have recorded covers of Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain,” Hawkwind’s “Silver Machine,” Can’s "Mother Sky," and Captain Beefheart’s “Dropout Boogie,” releasing the covers as 12-inches once a year with new original tunes as B-sides. Alienist presents two covers and two originals that together clock-in at 34 minutes—long enough to qualify as a full-length but slanted closer to the mixed-bag personality an EP.
P-Orridge and drummer/producer/band director Edward O’Dowd (formerly of the Toilet Boys) don’t make very many radical alterations. The archetypal ’70s-guitar churn of “Jump Into the Fire,” for example, is panned to the right side of the stereo field, just like in Nilsson’s original. But keyboardist John Weingarten’s left-panned piano rolls burst with color and vibrancy where Nilsson’s merely served as an accompaniment. On both covers, in fact, the band oozes with an unguarded joy that’s downright life-affirming.
Meanwhile, the two original songs provide contrast. “I’m Looking for You,” a space-rock dirge, hovers in the same darkly reflective mood for almost 12 minutes, with P-Orridge sounding sinister, weary, and wise all at once. And on the title track, Psychic TV give us an organic version of electronic music as P-Orridge—a somewhat warbly but nevertheless convincing singer—muses about alienation in a robotic monotone over an upbeat dance rhythm played on live drums.
The term “rock and roll” all too often functions as a mantra for reinforcing boundaries, shorthand for “Weren’t things better back in simpler times?” The suggestion that the past was somehow better, more innocent and purer lends itself, consciously or not, to conservative social ideals. That Psychic TV can reach to the past without appealing to such regressive attitudes is just one of the qualities that give Alienist its charm. That they still sound vital and wide-eyed doing it makes it a triumph.


The singer’s new mixtape is a playful and adventurous flex, full of errant, shapeshifting compositions that flirt with choral music and Afrobeats, schoolyard chants and squeak-rapping.

CAPRISONGS

Pop stars reference crying on the dancefloor with such regularity that you wonder if DJs are out there spinning the audiobook to A Little Life. Last December, apparently unable to resist the temptation, FKA twigs released “Tears in the Club,” a metallic R&B and trap collaboration with the Weeknd in which she attempted to shed the memory of an ex and announced, “I’ma drown in the beat now.” Both the A-list guest and the single’s digestibility furthered speculation that she might drift from her usual meticulous, avant-garde creations. Would her upcoming mixtape, Caprisongs, launch a more exuberant and radio-friendly sound? Was twigs finally embarking on her “main pop girl” era?
Well, only in a sense. Caprisongs is a playful and adventurous flex, with guest features from the likes of Jorja Smith and Shygirl and executive production from El Guincho; twigs has framed it as a “journey back to myself through my amazing collaborators and friends.” The project’s title is not a riff on the kids’ juice pouches, but on being a “Capricorn sun”—a driven, in-control type of bitch. The songs are errant, shapeshifting compositions that move quickly, flirting with choral music and Afrobeats, schoolyard chants and squeak rapping. If you’re anticipating any straightforward hits with Dua Lipa, don’t: “Why Don’t You Love Me,” the much-awaited collaboration the duo recorded in 2020, is not on the tracklist. But the mixtape does feature life-or-death dramatics from a stan impatient for its release: “OK twigs,” they snap, “I’m tired of listening to it on YouTube.”
Caprisongs begins with the click of a cassette player—a framing twigs uses to swerve in whatever direction she desires. On opener “ride the dragon,” her purrs are met with a gargled, screwed reply, like having phone sex with the gremlin under your bed. The two voices build a slow momentum, winding around each other until click—the tape scrambles forward, jumping into the universe of what feels like a new song. Within a few seconds, another click: “So if you … reallywannakissme?” twigs accelerates.
Rest your head for a moment and you’re in a new location. “ride the dragon” goes out on a vaguely Asian palette of strings and flute, then the next number, “honda,” proceeds with the celestial harmonies of a Western church choir. The song is built on a delicious contrast, between heavenly background vocals and a beat that stays low to the ground, full of crisp clicks and clatters. twigs breaks her sentences into two-syllable bursts—“Baby. We can. Roll it. Mway. Smoke It. Honda”—while Gambian-British rapper Pa Salieu keeps things frisky: “Would you still be a freak even when we turn 50?”
While twigs is best known for her wispy, classically tuned falsetto, on Caprisongs she slips into a lively array of voices. “Everybody knows that I want your love/Why you playin’, baby boy/What’s up?” she chants on “oh my love,” with the speak-talking sass of Cher Lloyd. You can envision her with her hip cocked to the side, popping a lollipop out of her mouth. Over the misty “lo-fi beats” of “lightbeamers,” she shoots up her voice like she’s squeak rapper 645AR and then loosens slightly so she starts to resemble Jeremih. Elsewhere, twigs sounds a hell of a lot like Charli XCX: glitchy wails materialize midway through “meta angel,” a cherubic, slow-rocking number about craving validation from a higher power. On “darjeeling,” twigs deploys Charli’s spry, fricative cadence, counterbalancing nicely with Jorja Smith’s plush vocals.
Smith’s performance is a standout on Caprisongs; the rest of the collaborations yield mixed results. The Afrobeats single “jealousy” is the most easygoing song of the lot, but seems basic in comparison to everything else; Nigerian singer Rema’s appearance is nice but unremarkable. The gospel-tinged “careless,” with Canadian R&B singer Daniel Caesar, features some divine harmonies but is ultimately too slow-moving and tasteful. More fun-loving is the Shygirl-assisted “papi bones,” which sounds like a hammy SoundCloud remix of Y2K dancehall, air horns and all. If twigs’ objective was to stop overthinking and simply try out ideas in the studio, then “papi bones” preserves a nice spontaneity.
Caprisongs’ nine guests, in addition to its already peripatetic approach to genre and cadence, makes it a lot to take in. Then come the voice memo recordings that serve as interludes: peals of laughter, somebody strumming an acoustic guitar, some woo-woo sermonizing. (“The universe fam/The universe is so powerful.”) The snippets feel gratuitous, like one of those year-end Instagram dumps, full of in-jokes and private realizations without enough context to be significant. The mixtape winds down with a nutty astrological reading that sounds like it was conducted by Amy Poehler in Mean Girls and results in the most awkward transition of the project, wherein twigs recites her chart placements (“Sagi-moon, Picsy-veen, Capri-sun”) then, immediately on the next track, confesses she once wanted to die.
Over a year ago, twigs filed a lawsuit accusing her ex-boyfriend of abuse, and her 2019 album MAGDALENE was, in part, about the racist vitriol she experienced from outsiders in a prior relationship. She has spoken about her desire to be written about as her own entity, not attached to a partner: “My work was so beautiful. It was so much louder than my love life. It is so much louder.” Caprisongs is the sound of twigs in the driver’s seat as she traverses her own curiosities and instincts; there is no man looming over the music, no weighty public narrative dictating its terrain. It is intrepid and light, the image of a woman attuned to planetary alignments but casting her own fate.

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Rave Age sees French producer Pascal Arbez returning to maximalism in a timely fashion. The album's title addresses youth culture's embrace of intense electronic music, while the singles here echo the audacious moments of 2005's OK Cowboy.

Rave Age

Much of the current wave of aggressive, pop-oriented dance music can be traced to 2005. That year, Madonna's late-career foray into Eurodance, Confessions on a Dancefloor marked the last time she'd be ahead of the curve, while French Touch veteran Alan Braxe attracted indie types to glittery hedonism with his stellar singles comp The Upper Cuts. Meanwhile, the teeth-grinding one-two French electro-punch of Justice's antagonistic Waters of Nazareth 12" and Daft Punk's oft-maligned Human After All now sound strangely prescient.
Vitalic, real name Pascal Arbez, fit in with those last two artists in the middle of the last decade. Four years after releasing the stacked Poney EP, he dropped OK Cowboy, a dizzying collection of loopy, buzzy electro that would work for any 2010s HARD Fest attendee. If that album was a series of bright, loud firecrackers, then 2009's Flashmob resembled a slow-burning candle, as it found the French producer adding shades of sultry disco to his palette. It was a fine album, but the low-key aesthetic and lack of big singles lessened its impact.
Three years later, we have Rave Age, Arbez's third proper LP as Vitalic. The title seems to address youth culture's current embrace of big-box electronic music, and the record looks toward past glories, too. Rave Age's first two singles, "No More Sleep" and "Stamina", bring to mind OK Cowboy's more audacious moments, right down to the latter's cheesy "Crank it up!" vocal sample. "Rave Kids Go" aims for a similar mood but the slow buzzsaw builder is anchored by a rare lead vocal, courtesy of Michael Karkousse of Belgian outfit Goose. Karkousse's vocal initially recalls the kind of smoky vocal take you'd hear on a Chemical Brothers album but when he moves from sleazy to shouty on the song's bridge, it comes across as forced.
The streamlined vocal cuts don't all work, but at least Arbez seems engaged on them. The gritty "La Mort Sur Le Dance Floor" features a snotty performance from French singer Rebeka Warrior that should be avoided as long as Crystal Castles are going, but "Under Your Sun" fares better thanks to airy, hollow production and a perfectly competent high-register touch from fellow countrywoman Owlle. The standout from the pop cuts is "Fade Away", featuring an arena-scale tender take from Shitdisco's Joe Reeves. It works in part because it's the most straightforwardly gorgeous thing on the record, but for me the real appeal is how its structure parallels Saint Etienne's head-in-the-clouds remix of the Drums' "Forever and Ever Amen".
And that's the album's biggest problem: Rave Age makes you wish you were listening to other songs. The closer you listen to the wobbly hip-hop textures, overly-busy techno, and generic dark ambience, the less the album needs to exist. Maximalism has frequently been Arbez's thing-- it's the quality that made him rise to some sort of prominence to begin with. But on Rave Age, he does too much of everything and sounds mostly like a whole lot of nothing.


The latest album from the star of UK road rap is an entirely new and impressively unconfined sound with Nines still grounding himself firmly in his past.

Crop Circle

As groups gathered in parks or on balconies across London on April 20th—otherwise known as international weed day—to enjoy one of the hottest spring days on record, chances are, for rap fans, the soundtrack to their Friday evening came in the form of Nines’ sophomore studio album, Crop Circle. The theme of its accompanying short-film comically pivots around the hyperlocal weed economy of Nines’ housing estate, suggesting the timing was no coincidence. People took to Twitter to brand the release superior to J. Cole’s, reflecting London’s newfound ability to harvest and enjoy its own product over North-American competitors. “Nina wid da Nina” has used his year of mysterious silence to eclectically develop the icy neck-chains, boastful similes, and smooth Ma$e-like flows which have always formed the core of his aesthetic.
Born Courtney Freckleton to a Jamaican father and Somalian mother, Nines grew up on Church Road Estate in Harlesden, an infamous part of North West London known for its violent crime and concrete housing blocks. Since 2012, as the frontman of the Ice City Boyz collective, he has put out four classic mixtapes and a multitude of street anthems. The release of his highly-successful first studio album One Foot Out, after signing to XL, allowed him to become one of the only commercially viable kings of road rap. This loosely defined genre, shouldered through the late-2000s and early-2010s by the likes of Drake’s favorite Giggs, as well as C Biz and K Koke (two local rivals of Nines), and perfected most recently by young-gun Fredo, relies upon the hardline, weathered authenticity of its artists. Being an actual gangster—one who needs to prove little but, regardless of recognition from the masses, does everything in their power to retain their reputation on the roads—is a prerequisite. This is in stark contrast to the energetic temperament of London’s more performative MC-led movements, like grime or the teething UK drill phenomenon.
The 26-minute film also called Crop Circle, which Nines wrote, directed, and stars in, was released out of nowhere three days prior to the album. It is an impressive venture, proving that he has spent a year in the wilderness developing his multi-channel personal brand. Interwoven with trimmed threads of music, it serves as a collection of light-hearted vignettes about life on Church Road Estate. And while it won’t win a BAFTA, the comic scenes allow Nines to make himself more accessible, more vulnerable. This striving to connect with the fans is characteristic: after being sent to prison in 2013 for drug offenses, he posted his prison number online and encouraged people to write to him.
The album’s lead single “I See You Shining” was previewed to the world earlier this month. Its fun-filled video starts with Nines waking up to a bowl of chunky weed buds in a West Hampstead mansion, and features wild scenes of him levitating cross-legged, cooking up drugs in a snow-filled kitchen, and playing penny against the wall with the mandem. The song’s contagious, celebratory bounce makes it impossible not to dive headfirst into the remaining 15 tracks—although it is a shame that its playful tone is not replicated elsewhere on the album.
Throughout most of Crop Circle, Nines leaves the care-free party behind. Instead, he switches between contemplation and showboating, confessing to his life as a successful musician who still craves the financial rewards of industrial-scale drug-dealing: “I just made six-figures off of streams/Still dealing with the fiends ‘cause I got bigger dreams,” he admits in opening track “Picture in a Frame.” Many songs starts with the booming words of “Zino Records,” a touch that has always acted as both a symbolic wax seal for Nines’ music and a reminder that despite his glimmering braggadocio, the loss of Zino, his older brother who was gunned down in an alleged gang beef a decade ago, keeps him grounded and wary of his past.
Nines has traditionally been at his best while demonstrating an ear for the most precise, ethereal beats. This skill is perfectly applied in “Liz”—slang for money, his favorite topic, referencing the image of Queen Elizabeth II on British currency—whose delicate piano keys paint the picture of a reflective late-night car ride through the city. But the most impressive thing about this album is the way Nines has dared to take listeners into unchartered territory through a mature selection of soulful, melancholic as well as dancefloor-friendly tones, all made possible by the delivery of appropriately chosen features. Singer Ray BLK outshines everyone on “Rubber Bands,” which includes a verse from fellow Ice City Boy Skrapz. On “Oh My” the cheeky, contagious chorus from Tiggs Da Author alongside teenage south London driller SL, adds punchy schoolboy wit to Nines’ authoritative mumble raps.
It is refreshing to be able to sit down and sample such a patiently curated venture from a character as openly likable yet still intriguingly reserved as Nines. Crop Circle perhaps lacks some of the standout street anthems that have, in the past, propelled him into hood stardom. But the result is something entirely new, an impressively unconfined body of work. It doubles as a snapshot of London’s cross-pollinating music scene and a signal towards the rapper’s maturation as he continues to transition from being a homegrown talent into an increasingly reputable MC on the world-stage.


Brooklyn trio Sannhet is an instrumental powerhouse. On So Numb, they shake loose of their black metal and post-rock roots, making heavy music with their own beautiful language.

So Numb

The primary way of classifying the Brooklyn trio Sannhet is as an instrumental powerhouse. They have worked with black metal and post-rock, but neither of those genres define them; they harness extreme sounds while bringing a level of approachability to their music, with great emotional depth. Like many of their New York peers—Krallice, Tombs, and Yellow Eyes, for example—they use familiar forms to move into uncharted territories. On their third album, So Numb, they’ve left the sonic properties of black metal behind without dispensing of its forward motion, and shaking loose has helped them come into their own.
Guitarist John Refano relies less on repetitive tremolo passages, introducing more detached playing that compliments and also exists outside the rhythm section’s orbit. There are some traces of Sannhet’s metallic past—on the title track and parts of “Sapphire”—but Refano has switched an outright aggressive tone for a lusher sound that’s more suited for spacier breaks and tender melodies. Sannhet’s edge is drummer Christopher Todd, who has shifted from asset to primary drive. It’s no coincidence that the album begins with only drums on “Indigo Illusion,” working up to a climax instead of rushing right off.
Much like Todd’s former Flenser labelmate Ignat Frege of Wreck and Reference, he is active in a small space, bursting forth with fluidity that emphasizes power instead of complication. He takes the repetitive tom lull you find in a lot of Neurosis clones and makes it as energetic and urgent as a d-beat march. Once he breaks up AJ Annunziata’s solemn bassline in the beginning of “Sapphire,” he turns and makes Refano’s delicate riffs into forceful cries, adding energy without whipping nervous speed into the guitar.
More often than not, the drumming outpaces the guitar work, but it helps Refano take on new patterns that couldn’t be conceivable with their former blackened lockstep. Refano and Todd have always been the band’s core—Annunziata didn’t join until their 2013 debut Known Flood—and So Numb illuminates their interplay. “Way Out” is where they’re all clicking three steps ahead of everyone else: Todd pushes Refano’s melodies to ecstatic heights, which also veer in and out to make Todd rushing through even more alive and jarring.
So Numb celebrates constant activity, even in slower tracks like “Salts” and “Fernbeds” (featuring additional guitar from Planning For Burial’s Thom Wasluck) that emphasize Refano’s dreamier textures. “Sleep Well” reverses the dynamic, as Refano ascends into a squalling mass and leaves his bandmates locked in a noise-rock groove. Like the record of the record, “Sleep Well” is packed with lust for life, even when it turns more conventional. It’s not just a combination of sounds that makes So Numb an exceptional heavy record: it shows how comfortable they are pushing and working off each other. There’s a human element to how they squeeze raw emotion from industrialized creations. It flows with affirming beauty, despite how Annunziata has said the record draws from quite a bit of turmoil.
Sannhet is an all-consuming live experience, draping themselves in television static and flitting bars of white light while swallowing the audience in loudness and dexterity. When they played Show No Mercy’s SXSW showcase in 2014, it was a rare moment where I thought: I didn’t know you could do that with music. (The showcase was put on by former Pitchfork editor Brandon Stosuy, and his wife Jane Lea and son Henry are pictured on So Numb’s cover.) At that show, Sannhet’s references to black metal, post-rock, and overwhelming volume were familiar. But how they took all that to reach their own kind of ecstasy was bewildering. So Numb is where they’ve brought that totality to record; it is instrumental heavy music in Sannhet’s own language. Using recognizable words and expressions but elevating how they’re used, Sannhet is better categorized by what they evoke rather than what they play.


Ivana Carrescia’s latest project blends pop melodies with rich, moody, turn-of-the-millennium deep house. It’s the kind of music that makes you feel like you’re both dancing and floating in space.

EP1

The Las Vegas-born musician Ivana Carrescia’s voice flits about the edges of her club tracks like a benevolent ghost. She sings in a downy falsetto that rarely rises above lullaby levels, and she whispers as often as she sings. Her lyrics are mostly just scraps of snapshots, pieces torn from a larger whole and tossed to the wind: the taste of salt, the color blue, flowers in the rain. Much of her time behind the mic yields only wordless expressions—coos, sighs, wisps of tinted air. The first time we hear her voice, 30 seconds into her debut EP’s lead track, “Ischia,” it takes the form of a single reversed syllable, glinting like an apparition before it disappears into velvety dub delay: the echo of a shadow of a specter that haunts a decades-old memory of the dancefloor.
Carrescia used to record under the aliases Ivana XL and Eddi Front, writing wistful, reverb-laden songs for acoustic guitar and piano. Singing of angels, bad breakups, and the Lone Star State, she evoked the watery melancholy of Cat Power and the retro fantasies of Lana Del Rey, her voice faint as a sun-bleached photograph, her upright sounding like it had been through a hurricane or two. She reappeared in 2016 as Gioia with a strikingly different proposition, wrapping breathy singing in abstracted atmospheres and electronic throb—a homegrown style not too far from what Kelly Lee Owens was doing around the same time. But Carrescia’s debut outing as Isola marks an even bigger shift, embracing the rich, moody sound of turn-of-the-millennium deep house.
As she did on Gioia’s lone EP, Carrescia wrote and recorded her Isola debut in collaboration with Godmode head Nick Sylvester (a former Pitchfork contributor). Working remotely between Vegas and Los Angeles, the two exchanged ideas, condensing and arranging their sprawling raw materials—improvised synth jams, homemade soundbanks, tape manipulations, ad-hoc vocals—into streamlined forms. Like Godmode releases from Shamir, Yaeji, and Channel Tres, EP1 stakes out a middle ground between pop and dance music, pairing the melodies of the former with the enveloping flow of the latter. But Isola’s music might be the most unreservedly club-focused of her labelmates’ output—or at the very least, the most narrowly focused on a specific set of references.
She lays it all out on the table with “Ischia,” in which virtually every element is a fine-tuned tribute to Luomo’s 2000 album Vocalcity, from the dubby chords to the snub-nosed bassline to snippets of breath that drift like confetti. This brand of smooth, sophisticated deep house used to be a minor cottage industry, epitomized in tunes like Tom Middleton’s Cosmos remix of Kylie Minogue’s “Chocolate”; it’s been out of favor for so long, it’s a treat to hear it revived. But “Ischia” isn’t merely a good imitation. Hypnotic yet constantly evolving, it strikes the perfect balance of propulsive groove and heady atmosphere—the kind of thing that makes you feel like you’re dancing and floating in space all at once.
“Two Birds” sets its sights on trip-hop, while “La Notte” and “Canis Major” are largely amorphous sketches for voice and piano, but the bulk of the EP is dedicated to recreating late-’90s house and techno at their most immersive. “Ricorda – Tell Me” takes the deadweight bass thump and dub-techno chords of classic Rhythm & Sound and spins them into an eight-minute journey in which, despite the fundamentally repetitive form, no two bars sound alike. “Any Day” is structured around cascading chords that suggest a “Good Life”-type anthem is about to kick off at any moment; instead, the duo plays with expectations, building toward a climax and then pulling back, leaving Carrescia’s voice twisting in the wind just when you expect the drumbeat to drop. As laborious as the writing process may have been, the results feel fluid and spontaneous—linear but perpetually shifting, moving with the gyroscopic surety of a dancer weaving her way through a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd.
The EP reaches its own climax midway through with “Said It Again.” Following the drop-less “Any Day” and then the vaporous “Canis Major,” the song’s chest-caressing sub-bass and crisp, tick-tocking house beat come as an almost physical relief. Pastel chords add depth; Carrescia’s wistful vocal (“And in the nothing night, I cried for you/And in the morning time, I flew the field”) is her most emotionally direct performance on the record. The mix of elements faintly recalls Bodily Functions-era Herbert, another deep-house staple of the new millennium. The whole thing exudes a kind of weary glamor: The synths and voice have the texture of rumpled silk; muted horns shimmer like reflected sunlight on the skyline. I’m transported back to Sunday-morning taxi rides home from the club, ears still ringing. Isola’s music is alive with these moments; at once nostalgic and visceral, it feels populated by the spirits of life-changing nights on the dancefloor.

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While two quality full-lengths and an EP haven't reserved him a spot on indie's marquee yet, Cass McCombs still possesses a prodigal glow, and this is his first release for Domino.

Dropping the Writ

Cass McCombs sings and writes songs, but he's not a singer-songwriter in the conventional sense. Always willing to play the angles, McCombs sounded more like a spotlight-friendly frontman than a singular songsmith on 2005's dense, multi-layered PREfection, hiding behind walls of reverb and a hodgepodge of musical stylings rather than crooning directly into the mic. Even on threadbare debut A, McCombs cross-pollinated folksy shuffles with art-pop tropes, daring listeners to earnestly connect with his gorgeous yet arcane ballads. A less challenging artist with the same skill set set would probably be polishing his mound of gold records right now, but McCombs revels in ambiguity, not accessibility.
While two quality full-lengths and an EP haven't reserved him a spot on indie's marquee yet, McCombs still possesses a prodigal glow. Named after the parliamentary procedure in which the head of government requests a dissolution of parliament, Dropping the Writ suggests a reinvention for McCombs both in its title and the fact it's his first release on Domino. Of course, McCombs doesn't know the meaning of the word "sell-out," so any jitters surrounding his label promotion should be allayed. This is, after all, the same nut who only disclosed his debut's lyrics if fans were willing to personally mail him a SASE. Still, although the gussied up Writ doesn't find him morphing into a more indie-appealing form like Josh Ritter or Spoon, it's hard not noticing some edge has been taken off the curio's sound and mystique.
From "AIDS in Africa" to "Equinox"'s infamous line "Silverfish quilting testicle/ Despotic owl conducts the wolves," McCombs has beckoned listeners to dissect his oblique lyrics with the rigor of a piece of high literature. Hell, the guy could even pass for a Faulkner or Steinbeck in recent press pics. Writ, by comparison, feels lyrically straightforward, with the occasional idiosyncratic line thrown in merely for flavor. Opener and origin story "Lionkiller" sets a rare tone for McCombs-- he's content to talk about himself. "I was born in a hospital" he sings, echoing A opener "I Went to the Hospital", before unveiling other self-mythologized details of his upbringing over a rolling "Rawhide"-style riff.
The lyrical elucidation here extends to the music, as McCombs whittles PREfection's overgrown genre exploration down to easily digestible folk, chalk full of the Americanisms you'd expect from an acoustic-toting Yank. His Smiths and Cure tics have all but vanished, and even on McCartney-esque tracks like "Pregnant Pause" or "Full Moon or Infinity," the cheery anglo pop's undercut by the sort of detached dreariness typically reserved for Elliott Smith tunes. For the most part though, McCombs is content to lean back and strum away, gazing at the stars rather than his shoes. Yes, a couple unorthodox moments occur, such as the squawky melismatic "No me-e-eans yes!" chorus of "Petrified Forest" or the arpeggiating falsetto on "Deseret", but Writ mostly avoids conspicuous ideas. Maybe McCombs is trying to prove he's not dependent on eyebrow-furrowing eccentricities, but Writ, with its cut and dry approach, lacks the replay value of his previous releases. While this album may help broaden McCombs's close-knit circle of music-hungry fans, the indie renegade aspect of his music is sorely missed, even if his remarkable raw talent keeps this effort comfortably afloat.


The former Megafaun drummer uses a resonant, melodic palette of gamelan, thumb piano, and metallophones to achieve gemlike tones and ambient atmospheres.

Joe Westerlund: *Elegies for the Drift *

Elegies for the Drift

Milford Graves was a mentor, among a host of other things: percussionist, professor, autodidact, herbalist, acupuncturist, vegan, and the inventor of his own martial art. Born in Jamaica, Queens, he was at the vanguard of ’60s free jazz in the New York Art Quartet, embarking on a visionary journey until his death in 2021. He played all kinds of drums with all kinds of things—tire irons, pestles, the branches of trees—and developed a style based on the human heart but overturned the pleasant falsehood that it beats in 4/4 time. To see him perform—too many arms splashing out, a whistle or a microphone in his mouth, or all this and more—is to witness the great yawp of the universe vibrating in one mortal frame.
For four decades, Graves taught at Bennington College, where Joe Westerlund was one of his pupils. Westerlund is a Wisconsin native who has had most of his music career in North Carolina. He began as the drummer for the austerely psychedelic Americana band Megafaun in the 2000s and went on to add his subtle, murmuring time to many projects, especially with the Justin Vernon camp (that’s the Wisconsin connection) and the Sylvan Esso/Mountain Man camp (the Bennington connection). It was at Sylvan Esso’s studio that he recorded Elegies for the Drift, his third album of solo percussion, a year into his new life as a teacherless student.
Graves was not the only role model whose loss, or imminent loss, Westerlund was grieving as he developed the album. There was his ailing father-in-law, for whom he hung the cosmos in a mobile with a silvery, slowly spinning miniature, “Prelude to Quietude.” And there was his friend Miles Cooper Seaton, who had died in a car accident the year before. “The Circle,” which incorporates Seaton’s voice and a hailstorm Westerlund recorded after he learned of his passing, is seven cleansing minutes of what sounds like rain beating on little bells and gongs. It’s the centerpiece of an album that belies preconceived notions about how solo percussion sounds.
Emphasizing a resonant, melodic palette of gamelan, thumb piano, idiophones, and metallophones, Elegies for the Drift moves in periodic waves, in small impulses and intimate suggestions—nothing so pat or pushy as beats. “You can’t put a dang-danka-dang and call that the swing rhythm,” said Graves. For him, swing was survival, a way to keep moving by any means necessary. Westerlund does not put a dang-danka-dang. With warm electronic impastos, impressionistic colors, and a songful mien, Elegies for the Drift is mainly an ambient record. It’s significant that “The Circle” has little obvious relation to Seaton’s music in Akron/Family, any more than the rest of the record overtly resembles Graves, who taught individuality above all else. Westerlund has found his own tonic, yogic yawp; he learned his lessons well.
A few months after Seaton and Graves died, Westerlund was invited to Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to play with the Kasai Allstars, a sprawling collective uniting a number of groups in the Kasai region. This trip resulted in two of the album’s most dynamic tracks. My favorite is “Carolina Yin,” with its hovering, dripping, gemlike tones, though “Kinshasa Yang” is also terrific, coming as close as the record ever does to dance music. “This is all we teach to outsiders, but you’re free to take this and make your own music,” Westerlund recounted the Kasai Allstars saying about the instrument we call the mbira or ikembe in certain people’s hands and the kalimba or thumb piano in others, writing the conflicts of cultural transfer right into the name.
The story echoes how Graves came to develop his martial art, Yara, which was inspired by African dance and the praying mantis. He studied, learned as much as Chinese practitioners would teach him (which wasn’t everything), and fused it with himself. In this light, Elegies for the Drift shows how the long lines and sharp limits of mentorship serve to divide exchange from appropriation, to give a conscience to artistic connection, which takes root ungovernably—say, between a charismatic New York jazz drummer and a young Midwesterner with patient hands—with an almost biological force.


On their debut EP, and the third release from Oakland’s Club Chai, 8ULENTINA channels breakbeats, synths, and recorded objects into an unusual kind of dancefloor interiority.

Eucalyptus EP

Nimble movement between genres and the decentering of Western cultural narratives are hallmarks of the Oakland-based club night, radio show, and label Club Chai, run by 8ULENTINA and the producer FOOZOOL. Linking dance music to ritual, the event is named for the tea ceremonies familiar to both from their respective backgrounds, and the sounds the pair and their associates embrace run the gamut from lo-fi electronic dance music to all manner of non-Western pop. The collective aesthetic can be a bit kitchen-sink, but this range is tied together by a forward-thinking DIY ethos that involves both fostering real community ties and challenging listeners to engage actively and mindfully. 8ULENTINA’s work in various media distills these qualities, sometimes to manic effect. In this collection of tracks—the artist’s debut release as a producer, and Club Chai’s third as a label—their measured curiosity and embrace of interiority grounds this squall in a singular perspective.
8ULENTINA’s approach to sound is sculptural, rounding or sharpening samples without erasing their raw materials’ links to particular places and times (whether drum programming pulled from Middle Eastern music or original recordings of objects or vocals). “Metal Clip,” the opening track, lays down a tempered metallic beat, off of which spin muddled string and flute melodies. It’s a lovely listen on headphones; the titular clip sounds lend subtle textural bite to its spacious melodic arcs. “Wander Flute” centers on a dulled but pummeling heartbeat of a rhythm that leads to a single flute tone, fluid and clear. 8ULENTINA’s tracks parse ideas in phases, injecting thoughtfulness into a compositional process that could just as easily be gleefully accumulative.
Though there is room to breathe throughout, the energy of Eucalyptus cycles, relaxing and then tensing. “Soiled” is built around a clipped breakbeat, its pacing made all the more frenetic as those drums, interlaced with little synthesizer squelches, assault and recede. Such intensity never overwhelms, nor does it prize the dancing body over the wandering mind. The EP concludes with the keyboard-driven “Mint T,” with vocals from Organ Tapes, a standout and marked downbeat shift. The scratchy distance of Organ Tapes’ laconic vocals belies the gentle complexity of 8ULENTINA’s production, which is warm and evocative.
8ULENTINA invokes processes of self-care and healing in their notes on the release—concepts that make sense in context of the greater Club Chai project, but that are perhaps more elusive within sound itself. How might, or can, such a framework exist within a club track? This idea has circulated loosely around experimental subcultures the past few years, perhaps too often in the form of cheap verbiage produced by corporate promoters and publications. But Eucalyptus is a compelling and elegantly scaled (which is to say, only ever-so-lightly conceptually driven) argument for the possibility of music containing and even generating such practices of care. Genuinely experimental in form, the EP nonetheless seems distinctly attentive to the ever-looming possibility of exhaustion for both listener and maker and the small-scale practices of aesthetic sustainability that keep us running—an unusually generous creative offering.


On her first solo album in 14 years, the former Belle and Sebastian singer indulges a gently psychedelic fantasy of California fleshed out with gospel vocals and a Tom Petty cover.

There Is No Other

Twelve months ago you would have gotten long odds on Isobel Campbell returning in 2020 with an album of dashing, adventurous, and even rather funky indie pop. The former Belle and Sebastian singer may have scuffed up her musical palette in the 2000s with a trio of releases alongside onetime Screaming Tree Mark Lanegan, but she nevertheless remained frozen in the public eye as the ethereal voice of cardigan indie, an impression hardly helped by the two so-gentle-they’re-almost-not-there albums she recorded as the Gentle Waves.
But Los Angeles, where Campbell now lives, loves a comeback, particularly one as unlikely and triumphant as There Is No Other, Campbell’s first solo album in 14 years and among the best things she has put her name to since leaving Belle and Sebastian. There Is No Other may remind listeners of Campbell’s illustrious past—her nebulous whisper of a voice has the effect of Proust’s madeleine on a certain breed of indie-pop fan—but it also suggests the hitherto untapped potential of a musical magpie, taking in everything from synthesizer sleaze to gospel-infused soul.
Psychedelia is a touchstone—Campbell has spoken of the record’s “dreamy, otherworldly feel”—but she taps the gentle Californian psychedelia of “Incense and Peppermints” and Friends-era Beach Boys rather than the acid freak-out of Syd Barrett’s solo career; the kind of psychedelia you could take home to meet your parents for tea, muffins, and meditation.
Indeed, the gilded specter of California hangs heavy over There Is No Other. But this is the California of dreamy sunsets and Laurel Canyon bongos, as seen through the eyes of an outsider, rather than the more humdrum reality of America’s most populous state. “City of Angels” is an ode to a city Campbell finds “seductive yet overwhelming,” while “Boulevard” is her reaction to L.A.’s homeless crisis—not that you would notice the angst amid the two songs’ campfire-and-red-wine vibe. The former is particularly lush, a mixture of gently picked acoustic guitar, finger cymbals, and chirping cicadas, the melodic warmth inviting you to pull up a seat and toast a marshmallow.
Elsewhere, the vibe is closer to Glasgow-gone-American. “The Heart of It All” and “Hey World” add sweet gospel vocals to Campbell’s pastel tones, bringing to mind Primal Scream’s experiments on Screamadelica—sincere and evocative if not entirely convincing. In the album’s most unlikely move, Campbell covers Tom Petty’s “Runnin’ Down a Dream,” replacing the song’s signature guitar riff and driving rock drums with lightly distorted synth and drum machine, bringing a delicious nonchalance to Petty’s automotive anthem.
That Campbell gets away with this broad palette is thanks to her empathetic arrangements and clever songwriting—the pocket chorus of “Ant Life” has the kind of understatement that only experienced writers would dare. She has a knack for making everything sound utterly effortless, as if the songs came to her during an afternoon nap. A 14-year gap between solo albums might suggest struggle and toil, but perhaps the best compliment you could pay this picture postcard of a release is that you would never suspect how long its creator had been away.

Buy: Rough Trade
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