The duo’s joint project is wistful and occasionally danceable, juxtaposing steely electronica with a stadium-ready take on Yachty’s sing-rap sensibilities. But too often, they play it safe.

Bad Cameo

When James Blake and Lil Yachty debuted as divisive wunderkinds, they earned feverish acclaim—and controversy—for the way they blurred the lines etched by their predecessors. Blake stormed dubstep’s dancefloor and rendered it a dusty confessional booth; Yachty looked at the hip-hop landscape he inherited, cursed its gods, and spent the beginning of his career at war with a generation. Not everything has changed: They’re still divisive, and they’re still doggedly trying new things. But they aren’t upstarts anymore; nor are their disruptive ideas breaking boundaries so much as reinforcing them. (So long, saxophones, and so long, rap.) A pair that once embodied youthful iconoclasm now often seem to see only as far as their next grievance. More and more, they sound like the gatekeepers who didn’t believe in them years ago.
Thus the defensive crossover spectacle of Bad Cameo, their new joint album. Few things announce themselves louder than a tag-team LP by a polarizing producer and an equally polarizing rapper-turned-rocker. But instead of provoking, this record largely takes the low-key road, like a terse postscript to a more transgressive past. It’s dreamy and occasionally danceable, steely electronica rubbing shoulders with a sharp, stadium-ready take on Yachty’s sing-rap sensibilities. The shoulder-rubbing is promising, but at a certain point, when the friction hasn’t progressed any further, the party starts to feel like a corporate lunch: Hey Post-Dubstep, have you met Post-Trap? I’ll leave you two alone to hit it off! Sometimes, they do. More often, Blake and Yachty are cozy in their respective corners, taking turns in the spotlight rather than sharing it. You get the sense that they’re trying to rekindle old magic—the wonders Blake worked with his glitchy soul-searching, the weightlessness Yachty proffered with his pitch-shifted lilts. These elements sound nice next to one another. They’d sound even better if they did more than just coexist.
When Yachty released “Poland,” his unlikely 2022 hit single, part of the draw was his quivering, liquid delivery: “It is a really fucking weird song,” Blake told him in a recent sit-down, revealing that it brought him to tears. He’s right to identify the weirdness as jolting—at least enough to channel raw emotion, or inspire it in others. But when they try to accomplish this on Bad Cameo, they sound maddeningly riskless. The title track registers like an attempt to run “Poland” through Blake’s chilly alt-pop processing and produce something equally apt for dorm rooms and sound baths. There’s a repeatable mantra, minimal frills that foreground the vocals, and an air of confession—only now, instead of spiking one another’s worlds, the crossover dilutes their respective strengths. “Did you ever love me?” Yachty begs, in full “Poland” voice, with Blake echoing his prayer in the background. You might recall a similar plea on the 2022 song (“Hope you love me, baby, I hope you mean it”). Where “Poland” producer F1lthy supplied Yachty with a jumpy, trap-infused hotbed, Blake’s canvas is restrictive, limiting the singer to a cramped crying closet both have outgrown. Solemn as it sounds, it’s hard to take very seriously.
Part of Bad Cameo’s appeal is the promise of a novel palette: lean meeting lemon tea, hip-hop meeting post-dubstep, confessionalism meeting vanity. Sometimes, as on “Twice,” this works beautifully—a staggered four-on-the-floor beat might morph into something airier, a haggard Yachty and wistful Blake taking turns reveling in their respective terrains. Other times, in moments where you’d expect the contrast to unearth rich new flavors, there’s a dulling effect. “Save the Savior,” a crunchy ballad that sounds a bit like a screen-adapted Future therapy session, would absolutely crush in a ritzy, white-walled gallery. Play it a second time, this time with the pair’s capabilities in mind, and it starts feeling like it should go beyond those insular limits. Blake is coming off his most energetic and danceable record to date; Yachty is freshly removed from a risky, compelling—if controversial—psych-rock dispatch. Considering the boundary-breaking instincts each contributor brings to the table, Bad Cameo feels too safe, too familiar, to tell us anything we don’t already know.
The bulk of Bad Cameo’s novelty arrives, instead, in songcraft. To Blake’s credit, he’s a master of seeing tracks as living things, subject to as much growth and meandering as the masterminds who make them. Familiar as they may feel, the most striking songs on this project keep some powder dry, sprawling into realms far beyond their starting places. Midway through “Midnight,” when Yachty and Blake’s harmonized refrain gives way to a beat switch and the drums fall out from beneath their voices, it sounds like they’re prostrate before something powerful. “Woo” begins with an echoey grand piano over a trap beat, no new addition to the annals of introspective hip-hop. But by the chorus, it seems like it’s all falling apart: The drum pattern sputters, and a sly ghost chord gradually infiltrates Blake’s somber progression, culminating in a single jolt of dissonance. You wish there were more room for such uncompromising mischief.


Mark E. Smith's unlikely music institution tries to keep its 00s Narnack-signed winning streak intact on this album, recorded in L.A. at the end of the group's ill-fated 2006 U.S. tour.

Reformation Post TLC

Mark E. Smith has helmed the Fall for a full 30 years. It's pretty mind-blowing to think of them as the institution they've become-- this band has always been so strange, prolific, and unpredictable, and Smith has built his oddball ranting into a sort of brand by sheer force of will. Because of the group's constantly shifting lineups, they've just as capable of releasing several masterpieces in a row as they'd be following them up with two puzzling disasters.
Since signing to Narnack in 2003, the Fall had been on one of their good runs: 2004's Real New Fall LP was their best album in ages, Smith had assembled players with nearly as much punch and muscle as the Burns/Hanley/Rogers/Scanlon/Brix crew that made the band's greatest stretch of classic in the early to mid-80s, and 2005's Fall Heads Roll was a solid second act in Smith's mini-renaissance. The Fall were storming across America with all cylinders firing in 2006 when something strange happened: Smith and his keyboardist/wife Eleni Poulou woke up in Phoenix to find the rest of the band gone, back to the UK unannounced. Only the band members know what happened to make them leave-- and Smith does have a history of cantankerous relations with his musicians-- but at any rate, Smith and Poulou were stuck in the U.S. in the middle of a tour with no rhythm section.
So they kept touring, naturally. The first thing to realize is that the Fall aren't really a band in the usual sense. It's MES & Musicians Currently in His Favour, so he and Poulou simply scraped together some guitarists and a drummer and kept going. They wound up going right into a long-scheduled studio session in L.A. as well, where they cut Reformation Post TLC. Remember a few sentences ago when I said the Fall isn't really a band in the usual sense? Well, on this record they don't sound like one, either. With only a few exceptions, the album is a mess, and not a very memorable one at that.
I think Smith is referencing the United States of America's "Coming Down" on opener "Over! Over!" when he sings "I think it's over now I think it's...ending," but you'd be hard-pressed to call it a tribute, at least in the same way his covers of "Victoria", "Mr. Pharmacist", and "I Can Hear the Grass Grow" have been in the past. Much more troubling, though, is Smith's tendency to fall back on using slurred speech and growls whenever he runs out of things to say. He does the wookie thing on "Over! Over!" and a few other songs, and it's just annoying, the kind of thing he may wind up getting away with because, you know, he's Mark E. Smith. But I'm not buying it in part because even when he is saying something, he's not saying much. He sounds tired and unfocused on most of the record, and when he cedes the vocals to Poulou on "The Wright Stuff", she basically imitates him, rambling over the backing track.
More damaging than Smith's unusually incoherent performance, though, is the production. The only thing that's uniform about it is that it's lousy. The sound on the album is all over the place, and ranges from muffled to unevenly mixed-- the mastering level on certain tracks even sounds different from the level on others. There are things about the new band, even in the inchoate state it was captured in here, that sound promising, so it's a shame the texture is so scattered. The aptly named "Fall Sound" features a vintage Fall groove, with the whole band locked in tightly, guitars nagging at the edges of a thick bass line, but Smith doesn't do much with it, gargling on the intro and wandering in and out of his usual sneering deadpan. You almost wonder if he's just telling the truth when he shouts, "It's a scream for help that's desperate."
"White Line Fever"'s country aesthetic is somewhat interesting but it needed more time in the oven-- if they develop this angle, it could be a good new direction. Going into much more detail than that doesn't serve the record well, but suffice to say that "Das Bootuboat" is the worst Fall track this decade; it trudges through a sludge bath of bass, wobbly sound effects, jokey chanting, and other sonic muck. It sounds like an incidental track when it stops around two minutes in, but then it comes back for another eight minutes to go nowhere slowly all over again.
More than anything, it seems as though this version of Fall is ill-served by the first album it made. There are moments of clarity when the band sounds fantastic, but they're not enough to save the record from landing in the band's forget pile. The rhythm section can play its guts out, but if Mark E. Smith isn't leading the charge and dripping acid, it won't come to much good. Reformation Post TLC is ultimately a record that was made out of stubbornness, and one that almost certainly could have been better if they'd taken more time to write and rehearse it before recording it.


In the first installment of the London nightclub’s relaunched mix series, an artist best known for soulful, worldly downtempo tries his hand at upbeat house.

Fabric Presents Bonobo

When London’s Fabric nightclub announced they were ending both their Fabric and Fabriclive mix series, they went out with a bang. Fabric 100 was a massive three-disc set from longtime residents Craig Richards and Terry Francis along with club cofounder Keith Reilly; Fabriclive100 was a tag-team effort from Kode9 and the ever-elusive Burial. The two sets signaled the end of an era. Perhaps, some ventured, they were tombstones for the mix CD itself. Yet, six months later, here we are with a new iteration of Fabric’s series, kicking off with Fabric Presents Bonobo.
In tapping Bonobo (aka Simon Green, a British-born, L.A.-based producer), Fabric the brand seeks to escape the fetters of Fabric the club. While Green has been a known quantity in electronic music circles since the turn of the 21st century, moving from trip-hop into world-music-flavored productions and the UK charts, he had only DJed at the club once, in October of last year. Popular on the festival circuit, he’s known more for his live sets than his skill behind the decks.
Bonobo’s most evocative work tugs at the heartstrings rather than the feet; his melodies and live instrumentation hint at a fondness for jazz, soul, folk, and minimalism. All of those were featured to sterling effect on Bonobo’s Late Night Tales mix a few years back. Fabric Presents doesn’t exactly play to those strengths; instead, he’s in upbeat house mode.
He’s on sure footing with the mix’s opening, which consists of two of his own tracks. Flecks of strings, saxophone, and woodwinds weave through the kick drums, evoking Bonobo’s warmest productions. That sensibility runs deep in these selections, be it the dramatic strings of Poté’s “Jacquot” or the bamboo flute tones of Alex Kassian’s “Hidden Tropics.”
Those two funnel into a curious and rather abrupt early peak with Âme’s 2004 house track “Nia,” which throws the mix into a lurch, losing momentum as Green breaks it all down and figures out another direction. Most of the set draws from recent, unreleased tracks, but it’s when he mixes in older material (the glitchy jazz of Nepa Allstar’s “The Way,” the dreamy ambient techno of John Beltran’s “Collage of Dreams”) that he strikes the right balance. It’s telling that both of those selections use just a handful of elements to make their point.
“Often I end up adding a bunch more elements to the track after I originally thought it was done,” Green confessed to Interview in 2013, and that lack of self-editing also tends to color his choices here. Too many overstuffed, heavy-handed picks—like Dark Sky & Afriquoi’s “Cold Harbour,” with its vocoder, thumb piano, acid bass, polyrhythmic percussion, and twanging strings—start to bog things down. The middle of the set is particularly wince-inducing, from the sappy sentiment of Will Saul’s echoing vocal (“I build my whole world around you”) to Dan Kye’s falsetto R&B and Titeknots’ heaving strings. The cumulative effect is as sappy as a maple tree.
In choosing an outside-the-box artist like Bonobo to launch Fabric Presents, there’s an implication that this next iteration of the series will look beyond the club’s walls for inspiration. In this case, though, Bonobo has ended up slotting right back into Fabric’s dancefloor-centric mold. Going forward, the series might be more interesting if artists take the opportunity to step outside the strictures of the club.


The K-pop quartet’s highly anticipated second album leans into an image of authority that’s undercut by familiar ideas and stale musical concepts.

Born Pink

When BLACKPINK debuted in 2016, K-pop had entered the international pop cultural lexicon, but it had yet to scratch the surface of the global music market. By 2020, the four-piece had become the first girl group to perform at Coachella, established partnerships with luxury brands like Celine and Chanel, and snagged the No. 2 spot on the Billboard 200 with The Album, its first full-length. For 26 consecutive weeks, BLACKPINK charted alongside Ariana Grande, Halsey, and their “Kiss and Make Up” collaborator Dua Lipa. With the help of loyal fans known as Blinks, who mobilized to influence streaming statistics, they ascended to K-pop royalty.
Born Pink, their highly anticipated follow-up, is a compact collection that leans into the image of authority BLACKPINK have fostered in the six years since their debut. Its eight songs juxtapose hard-hitting hip-hop—a staple of agency YG Entertainment’s sound—with a smattering of pop, disco, and balladry. Through sound and imagery, the group’s hard and soft sides mingle, but it’s unclear which element of BLACKPINK’s name Born Pink wants to focus on. What is apparent is an unfortunate disinterest in the growth and advancement K-pop has made in the last few years.
The album’s first single, “Pink Venom,” impresses with its braggadocio and influences, weaving in lyrical references to the Notorious B.I.G. (“Kick in the door, waving that Coco”) and Rihanna (“One by one, then two by two”). In the song’s rap break, a G-funk synth zips behind members Lisa and Jennie as they indulge in a lavish yet rebellious lifestyle of “designer crimes.” Sampling is less popular in K-pop than in Western hip-hop, but its use in “Pink Venom” aligns BLACKPINK with contemporary pop culture’s aesthetic obsession with the 1990s and ’00s. The updated approach to the “girl crush” concept holds some artistic merit, unlike their gimmicky 2019 single “Kill This Love,” an EDM march steered by buzzing horns that sounded dated on release.
Rather than following in the steps of “Pink Venom” by experimenting, the rest of Born Pink serves up more of the same. Side A, which supposedly explores BLACKPINK’s edgier side, is clouded with tried-and-true K-pop techniques like the classical sample (Niccolò Paganini’s “La Campanella”) on “Shut Down” and unsteady attempts at bass-heavy ringtone rap on “Typa Girl,” which calls to mind Billie Eilish’s whisper-sung “Bad Guy” or Ashnikko’s horror-tinged “Daisy.” Tiptoeing around already familiar ideas, the album’s first half never finds new footing.
The giddy love song “Yeah Yeah Yeah,” which credits members Jisoo and Rosé as co-writers, is no exception. Arriving in the middle of the record, its minimalist guitar loop and new wave synths represent the album’s first splash of soft and vulnerable “pink.” But the song culminates in the titular affirmation—“Just say yeah, yeah, yeah”—a line so cliché that it should have been a red flag. Even with member contributions, “Yeah Yeah Yeah” doesn’t have anything new to say.
Though it’s performed by Rosé alone, Born Pink’s centerpiece is the alluring and thorny “Hard to Love.” Encasing BLACKPINK’s ethos of hard and soft into one song, it’s a fitting successor to The Album’s anthem of yearning, “Lovesick Girls,” a similarly upbeat dance track that depicted the four women as desiring love, even if it hurts them in the end. “Hard to Love” is a muted expression of the same desire, using glowing neo-soul keys, rhythmic guitar, and a grounding bass groove to carry its storytelling. “Never meant to cause you a problem/Here I am, yet once again/With the same old story,” Rosé sings. The production’s clarity allows her vocal to take up space, bending and vibrating organically.
These days, you can pick up physical copies of K-pop albums at Target, and a slew of idols are forming what’s known as K-pop’s fourth generation. Across Aespa’s genre-blending metaverse, NewJeans’ au naturel approach, and Dreamcatcher’s metal-tinged sound, the industry is growing more varied as it becomes more saturated. BLACKPINK’s potential audience has never been larger, but the refurbished sound and half-baked ideas on Born Pink fail to inspire. There’s a sliver of direction in cuts like “Pink Venom” and “Hard to Love,” which translate the group’s core concept of duality into viable contemporary pop. But BLACKPINK are already a record-breaking K-pop act; if they want another shot at breaking new ground, they’ll have to raise their own standards.


Like its predecessors, the anonymous electronic musician’s third album for Los Angeles’ Peak Oil label consists of little more than dubby swirls of static; the record’s power is in its restraint.

Vol. 3

Topdown Dialectic’s Vol. 3 begins with five minutes of primordial soup: undulating rhythms that feel like bubbling swamp water, dubby textures that make everything gauzy, and fizzy synths constantly on the verge of forming something concrete. Compared to the previous album’s opening tracks, “A1” is notably low-key. While all three volumes of the anonymous artist’s Peak Oil releases were sent to the Los Angeles label in a single batch, there’s a certain aura that defines each LP. The first is effortlessly cool; Vol. 2 is more understated, even during moments of party-ready euphoria; and Vol. 3—the most distinct of the bunch—is quiet, introspective, and impressively even-keeled.
One can imagine the previous two albums as blasts of perfume that transform space and self into something exuberant. Vol. 3 is more like when the juice has dried up and all that’s left is the sediment making up the fougère: sparse, less flashy, but potent if you put in the work. As with many tracks on Vol. 3, “A2” doesn’t immediately lead you into some heady or celebratory space. Instead, its casual demeanor simply communicates its elements: aquatic swirls and percussive accents. They coalesce into an alluring fog, but Topdown Dialectic lets it exist as is. Immersion occurs on the listener’s terms, and when one takes the plunge, the deep bass swells prove more tactile than they appear on the surface.
More than past releases, Vol. 3 tends to foreground perceptibly sluggish tempos, limited dynamic range, and negligible development. Its very unobtrusiveness reminds me that these tracks are the result of generative processes and that this project thrives on mystique—the person behind Topdown Dialectic is unknown, the tracks are untitled and all exactly five minutes long, and the physical copies feature minimal if not zero information. “B3” is all synth gyrations and meandering clacks, but it’s less anonymous than self-effacing. The smeared vocal sample is hardly identifiable as such for much of the track, but when its humanness emerges from the murk, it’s like catching a glimpse of a specter for a brief, electrifying moment.
I’m reminded of an interview with dub-techno forebear Moritz von Oswald where he corrected an interviewer who called minimal techno cold. “It’s very warm, emotional and deep,” he said. “The more you listen to it, the more it affects you.” Vol. 3 reminds you of that truth, and it challenges any notion that this sort of music may be either too amorphous or straightforward. “A3” is one of the more kinetic pieces here, but it also feels aimless, like it doesn’t commit to its verve. Listen with a different mindset and there’s subtler drama on display: the periodic thwacks suggest an incessant urge to dance, despite being stationary.
Vol. 3 is at its most exhilarating when Topdown Dialectic nails this balance between static and dynamic sensibilities. “A4” has an instant warmth that recalls Stephen Hitchell’s softer tracks, or the blissful deep cuts found on Silent Season, but it’s sparser and less inclined to let ambience be the primary arbiter of mood. The synth pad isn’t overwhelming, the grainy textures don’t take hold like they do in Pole’s work, and the voices that appear are little more than vapor—mere suggestion of presence is always enough on these tracks. Even the twirling closer, “B4,” aims for antiseptic sci-fi gloss, but it never lets that idea take complete hold. With Vol. 3, Topdown Dialectic proposes a tantalizing methodology: keeping everything in moderation leads to feeling everything at full impact.

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On the first full-length Mr. Fingers album in almost 25 years, Larry Heard attempts to sum up the full range of his interests and talents.

Cerebral Hemispheres

Despite the visceral punch of the Chicago house innovator Larry Heard’s earliest hits—“Washing Machine,” from 1986, churned with grueling acid squelch; the following year’s cymbal-battering “Slam Dance” came down like a hailstorm—it’s his conflicting impulses that made him an icon. His two biggest tunes, “Can You Feel It” and “Mystery of Love,” both released under his Mr. Fingers alias, balanced percussive force with a newfound softness, drawing up the blueprint for deep house in the process.
But that same reluctance to settle into a single lane probably kept him sidelined in a genre that can be notoriously risk-averse. Boasting a glistening finish and bearing titles like “Dolphin Dream,” 1994’s freeform Sceneries Not Songs, Volume 1 came closer to new age, while 1995’s Sceneries Not Songs, Volume Tu suffused hip-hop and house beats in crystals and incense. The following year, Alien grafted jazzy R&B onto cosmic synths, suggesting a lab-grown hybrid hatched way out in interstellar space.
Heard has periodically returned to remind clubbers that he is a force to be reckoned with; his 2006 single “The Sun Can’t Compare” has attained latter-day classic status. Now, with Cerebral Hemispheres, the first Mr. Fingers album in almost 25 years, he attempts to sum up the full range of his interests and talents.
His last Mr. Fingers release, 2016’s Outer Acid EP, picked up Alien’s interstellar signals and translated them back into the language of the dancefloor, and part of the new album continues that project. In fact, all four of the EP’s tracks are reprised here, scattered across the album: The gurgling standout “Outer Acid” finds its mate in the steely minimal techno of “Inner Acid”; the ruminative drum circle “Nodyahed” has a new percussive counterpart in the title track, a similarly hypnotic array of drums, synths, and breathy accents.
But the operating metaphor this time is not space but the brain, whose opposing halves preside over Cerebral Hemispheres’ dual nature. Counterbalancing his techno leanings, a good portion of the album is given over to R&B’s silkiest trappings: jazz brushes, saxophone solos, dimmer-switch synths. In a recent Billboard interview, Heard recalled a proposed Sade collaboration that never came to pass, and there are hints of what that might have sounded like in the quiet-storm detailing that shades the album’s first half. A slow-burning blues guitar solo colors “City Streets,” a mid-tempo house instrumental; “A Day in Portugal” drizzles honeyed pads over a bossa-nova beat; the horn leading “Sands of Aruba” wouldn’t have sounded at all out of place on Diamond Life.
Given that the last Mr. Fingers full-length, Back to Love, came out in the second year of Bill Clinton’s presidency, it’s understandable if Heard wants to make up for lost time, but the album probably doesn’t need to be 100 minutes long. Its length might have worked better if he had more neatly divided its 18 tracks into a right-brain and left-brain side, rather than breaking up its flow by zigzagging between satin-finish soul and misted minimal house. But the few surprises scattered along the way that make its unpredictable course feel worthwhile.
In “Tiger Lounge,” jazz guitar, sitar, and dub swirl together over indistinct background noise; whether a live recording or a simulacrum of one, it suggests a space that’s not quite of this world. Then, just past the album’s midpoint, “Electron” fires up the fattest-sounding synth in Heard’s arsenal and sets its course for the heart of the Arpeggio Nebula, following in the path of cosmonauts like Klaus Schulze and Edgar Froese. Set to a skeletal beat, it’s the simplest song on the album, and the perfect distillation of his expressive sensibilities.


The experimental Chicago musician expands his already broad instrumental palette for a lonesome album that fuses folk and electronic music without succumbing to the tropes of either.

Sand Like Stardust

Since 2017, Jordan Reyes has been an important cog in the large Chicago ensemble ONO, whose 2020 album Red Summer is a radical outlier in American music: an industrial-funk opus that excoriates racial, sexual, political, and military oppression from the 1600s to the present with poetry and a maximalist, disorienting sonic attack. By contrast, Reyes’ solo work has skewed more austere and synth-based. On last year’s Close, he quested for post-human feelings in alien synth emissions. Closer, from earlier this year, offered exploratory synthesizer music that resembled some of the more agitated, sinister specimens that dotted the IDM field in the late ’90s and early ’00s.
With Sand Like Stardust, Reyes adds acoustic, electric, and lap-steel guitars, trombone, keyboards, and an electronic drum to his palette in order to, he says, “channel the warmth, immediacy, and vulnerability of hand-played instruments and voice.” However, this more organic foray is far from an overfamiliar back-to-roots exercise. Rather, it’s a bold attempt to fuse folk and electronic music without succumbing to the tropes of either.
Inspired by the Tejano side of Reyes’s family and a childhood blanket covered in cowboy imagery, Sand Like Stardust chronicles the media-manipulated myth of that American archetype along with the more reality-rooted concept of the nature-oriented cowboy, according to the artist’s notes on Bandcamp. Further, Reyes told online zine Slug, “I felt inclined to imagine the cowboy as an ecosensual outsider, someone scrappy and magical with an amorous love of the land but who is reckoning with their identity’s legacy and ancestry.” As interesting as those points may be, the music stands on its own merits.
The album aptly begins with “The Pre-Dawn Light,” which layers polyphonic chants, both guttural and ethereal, as if to herald the launch of a grave and mysterious ritual. It’s a bold, unconventional way to start an album, but it’s riveting. From there, Reyes proceeds through stages of the day with subtle gradations of mood. As their titles suggest, “Drifter,” “High Noon,” and “Dusted” conjure the profound lonesomeness of the peripatetic cowboy. “High Noon” particularly stands out, as Reyes pits blurred guitar twangs that evoke the work of New Zealand’s Roy Montgomery against a trombone drone ominously humming like a distant generator and more sonorous chants that vibrate your skull. Extremely moving in inexplicable ways, these songs send a primal thrum to your pineal gland.
At times, Sand Like Stardust takes on the quality of a Goblin horror soundtrack transferred to the dusty American West. For example, “A Grain of Sand” inspires a suspenseful chill with a doomsday riff that suggests a man’s final trudge to the electric chair, as guitar ostinati form cascades of radiance over insistent drum-machine beats. Reyes achieves the extraordinary feat of making hopelessness seem transcendent.
Stardust reaches a disturbing peak with “An Unkindness,” featuring dire chants and startling trombone blurts, all counteracted with twinkling guitar mandalas. This strange combination of elements triggers rich yet contradictory feelings. “Centaurus” hymns us to slumber with forlorn, foggy ambience that hints of side two of David Bowie’s Low. Reyes sings the lyrics to the traditional lullaby “Hush, Little Baby” as a keyboard drone swells in elegiac splendor. What could’ve come off as saccharine instead ascends to a state of grace and gravitas. Enveloped in the murk, you suspect Sand Like Stardust may have been yet another mythical American dream after all.

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Ho, why is you here ?

Flo Milli raps like she was born and raised in a no-flex zone. When she claims, “None of you bitches is fuckin’ with me,” it feels less like a boast and more like a law that governs the universe. There’s no moment on her debut mixtape Ho, why is you here ? where she doesn’t sound untouchable and self-possessed. The brief, playful project from the Alabama rapper is one of the breeziest records of the year, a clinic on nimble shit-talking that’s as effortless as it is brash.
Ho, why is you here ? hews closely to the formula that made Flo Milli a viral star. She likes snappy, bass-heavy beats that give her ample space to fire off reams of insults and flexes. “Beef FloMix,” which began as a freestyle snippet on Instagram and was later boosted into a TikTok hit through a dance challenge, is her standard mode. She tends to frame disses as me/you comparisons (“I do what I please and you do what I ask/He love my confidence and that’s what you lack”) that snowball into larger-than-life boasts. In the song’s single verse she shouts out tween group OMG Girlz, likens her cash-filled pockets to K. Michele’s ass, and claims she’s guarded like an Obama. It’s not surprising that her music lends itself to dances and videos; she’s a visual speaker.
Over and over, Flo Milli turns heads when she enters the room and mows down an inexhaustible horde of haters. She opens “In the Party” with a perfect line: “Dicks up when I step up in the party.” On “19,” her entrance lowers the self-esteem of those around her; elsewhere her shine leaves necks near-broken. All this attention breeds contempt, but Flo Milli will gladly be the villain. “Slap a bitch in her face if she askin’ for it,” she says on “Send the Addy.” “Like That Bitch” features a moment where she discovers and ends a tiff in the same breath. “Actin like we got beef/I didn’t know that you exist!” she yelps, elongating the vowel in “know.” The conflicts are all so definitively petty, which is what makes this record so fun.
Her constant barbs are bolstered by her subtly spry cadences. Her flows are conversational and loose despite being strictly metered. The record is largely devoid of melody, but Flo Milli doesn’t need to sing to emote. She has an intuitive sense of when to throttle flows for emphasis, as on “Pussycat Doll,” which is full of tiny pauses that set up her punchlines. “Make a nigga blow a check on me/Save his number under ‘We gon see,’” she jokes. Her performance on “Weak,” a J White Did It production, is fleet and buoyant, flipping SWV’s  “Weak” on its head yet preserving the song’s warmth. “These niggas weak/They been texting me all week/Just let me be,” Flo Milli huffs with exasperation.
The production isn’t always as spirited as Flo Milli’s performances. “Scuse Me” is an outright dud; it sounds like a parody of a JetsonMade beat and Flo Milli’s hook is uncharacteristically strained. Otherwise, a current of self-discovery runs through the beats. “Like That Bitch” and “Not Friendly” embrace the minimalism of snap music, which has long been a testing ground for experimenting with flows without sacrificing bounce. (Incidentally, “Not Friendly” interpolates Soulja Boy’s “Gucci Bandana.”) And the bouncy bass and bright keys on “In The Party” and “Send the Addy” evoke the charm of bubblegum trap, which tapped into the joy of a subgenre often characterized by stress and struggle.
There’s certainly a disparity between Flo Mill the cocksure persona and Flo Milli the budding artist, but even when Flo Milli is spitballing ideas trying to see what sticks, she’s a force of nature. She once described her catchphrase “Flo Milli shit” as the mantra for “My alter ego, which is what I am most of the time,” and Ho, why is you here ? sells that odd dynamic. She’s still figuring out her music, but she knows exactly what she wants it to be.

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After spending fifteen years as a member of Sigur Rós, composer Kjartan Sveinsson makes the leap into classical with a sweeping, elegiac orchestral and choral score.

Kjartan Sveinsson: Der Klang der Offenbarung des Göttlichen

After spending fifteen years—nearly half of his life—writing, recording and touring with the Icelandic band Sigur Rós, composer Kjartan Sveinsson finally decided in 2013 that he was ready for something else. In his time with the band, Sveinsson was responsible for bringing classical elements to Sigur Rós’ music, but since branching out on his own he has leapt completely into the composing world. Beginning with an orchestral and choral piece performed (but never released) in 2010 called “Credo,” Sveinsson began to establish that he not only had an ear for beautiful melodies but also possessed the trickier skill of understanding of how to properly conjure grandeur. He followed that work with scores to two films by fellow Icelander Rúnar Rúnarsson, the austere Volcano (2011) and Sparrows (2015), as well as two collaborations with artist Ragnar Kjartansson, each of which showcased his ability to write for context and to match sight with sound.
Der Klang der Offenbarung des Göttlichen, with a title loosely translated from German to mean “The Explosive Sonics of Divinity,” is Sveinsson’s third collaboration with Kjartansson, and by far his most substantive work yet. Unlike “SS Hangover” and “Take Me Here By the Dishwasher,” each of which were conceptual art pieces for which Sveinsson composed a durational accompaniment, Der Klang is a complete work, one that stands majestically on its own.
Although structured as an opera, it diverges significantly from the form, featuring neither stage actors nor any kind of evident storytelling. Broken into four “acts” titled “Teil” I-IV, each piece was performed as an aural backdrop to a series of minimalistic, static sets designed by Kjartansson, with only subtle environmental changes to the set (flashing lights, burning fires, background colors changing) over the course of each’s running time. The sets’ visuals are elegantly designed but their simplicity belies the more complex beauty of the music itself.
While there are no actors onstage, there are vocals across the latter three compositions, which in performances were delivered by a chorus located in the orchestra pit. And there is, if not a libretto a connection to a story, apparently inspired by Nobel Laureate Halldór Laxness’ novel World Light, but it is entirely impressionistic. World Light is about the life of a young poet seeking greatness whose expectations for success aren’t ever met, causing him to seek solace and and beauty in his own failure.
“Teil I” stands out from the following three pieces, for being both the lone track without vocals as well as for its brooding and ominous mood. Kjartansson’s set for “Teil I” was a backdrop of a rocky sea bay on a dark gray night, with only waves moving across the screen, but the music adds its own suggested image to this tableau—a ghost ship approaching or departing slowly, perhaps. The seesawing string melodies slowly evolve into piercing glissandi so cacophonous it nearly shuts down the senses; its extreme simplicity only serves to enhance its power.
The following two compositions illuminate the grey skies with rays of sunlight, however faint. “Teil II” begins with a funereal choral piece reminiscent of “Orphic Hymn,” from Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Orphée earlier this year. The vocal intonations continue unaccompanied for three minutes before being joined by a sea of violins and cellos, which gently provide counterpoint by infusing a delicate sense of hope into the proceedings. Though not exactly sunny, on “Teil III,” another orchestral-choral work, Sveinsson turns tentatively towards more optimistic stirrings. It’s curious that Kjartansson’s set piece is just a frame of a house burning down in the darkness of night, because it’s easy to imagine an entirely different visual—a film scene of hard-earned epiphany, maybe, a broken character realizing their lot and resolving to improve it.
On the opera’s final evocative act, “Teil IV,” Sveinsson returns to this sense of human resolve of as our salvation. Beginning with a droning cello and wistful female alto, Der Klang’s closing piece speaks to the power of personal commitment in the face of struggles big or small. The chorus vocals soar as high as the strings themselves, surging like a tidal wave that mirrors the first piece, a wall of sound that is both crushing and somehow comforting.
Der Klang boasts all the qualities we tend to associate with sweeping modern neo-classical—it's beautiful, reflective, sad. But to slap the commonly used “ethereal”  tag on it does it a disservice. Sveinsson has a light touch, but his work hits a deeper and more visceral level, permeating and lingering long after it’s subsided. Sveinsson has a preternatural sense of scale and pacing, and seeing how powerfully he can provide canvases for ephemeral pieces of art raises the question of how he would do trying his hand at something bigger: A traditional libretto-and-song opera, or to re-infuse his talents in the more open but anchored spaces of rock music. Whatever he does, he has already quietly announced himself as a major talent.


Metal giants team with Steve Albini on their latest Relapse album.

Blessed Black Wings

On paper, Steve Albini's production style is the exact antithesis of what you'd want for your metal opus: big dank drumz and shrill, almost choked guitars, all gussied up in superfluous reverb and an air-tight low end. I've never listened to an Albini-produced band and not thought my ears were clogged. Sure, the man's 'nuff-said production credits go on and on, but I often wonder if a band like Mclusky would sound even more punishing if they were left out in the open, free of the silo 'verb and guitar strangulation.
Still, Albini remains the preferred penis pump of underground rock acts of all stripes. He's on the speed dials of bands looking to get huge in that other sense. High on Fire already own one of the burliest sounds in metal, so what they were hoping to gain by phoning Albini isn't clear. The two seem an unlikely marriage anyway: High of Fire unleash a competent fury that thrives on warm-ish, tube amp'd guitars, and mainlined adrenal essence-- a far cry from Albini's balled-fist, hyper-compressed sludge treatments. 2002's Surrounded By Thieves was a tight-wound stoned-dead masterpiece; if the band were aching for change, they sure didn't play like it.
High on Fire fans rejoice: Blessed Black Wings is the band you know and fear. Albini's influence is discreet, serving only to calcify the band's laser-cut attack. My only complaint with the sound is that Matt Pike's vocals-- more tuneful and comprehensible than the genre protocol-- are mixed down, so only the most glottal elements seep through. But perched atop Albini's distended low end, High on Fire are as toothy as they are flesh-searing. Previously, the band's raw energy was trapped in a self-imposed oubliette of standard gloom-n-doom; on Blessed Black Wings, they've busted out, terrorizing the masses with a sharper, more agile sound that will appeal to fans of Mastodon's Leviathan. But unlike Mastodon or prog-metal clairvoyants Converge, High on Fire don't seem the slightest bit preoccupied with the future; they're content to do what they do best as long as there are subtle unexplored pockets of terrain to be squatted on.
Blessed Black Wings catapults full-throttle from the gate and scorches at 11 for nearly an hour, halting only for the occasional full-band kick. Avoiding polyrhythmic arabesques, High on Fire are almost antigravity: Their energy seems like it could last forever. Opener "Devilution" (now there's a subtle pun) splits the earth and stitches it back together, sending tom-bashing tremors through a landscape of bilious chugging and Voice of God vocals. "The Face of Oblivion" is less incendiary but no smaller, steering through a slow sooty opening before turning around in a smooth, economical breakdown that's grandiose sans bravado.
Other highlights include "To Cross the Bridge"-- a seven-minute epic that does the acoustic/electric guitar duel better than Converge or erstwhile Metallica by combining traits of both-- and "Anointing of Seer", whose gelatinous plunder gives way to a resplendent, fleeting riff around the 2:30 mark. Up in the elevated mercury of these six- and seven-minute sculptures, things can get muggy, but in terms of shear bombast, Albini has seldom worked with a more independently powerful group of musicians.


Stately, luxurious sounding, professional-- one of the decade's quietly underrated bands has its best album given a 2xCD/DVD reissue.

Elbow: Asleep in the Back [Deluxe Edition]

Asleep in the Back [Deluxe Edition]

Elbow emerged fully formed at a time when it may have helped their cause to be more malleable. Around the turn of the century, hailing from the British Isles and playing mid-tempo rock served as qualification to be "the next Radiohead," and even if Elbow got caught in that dragnet, they weren't quite as fresh-faced or brash as those now-laughably incompatible peers. Once that whole thing morphed into the search for the next Coldplay, Elbow weren't quite singles-minded enough to fit that bill either, and unlike Starsailor or JJ72, they weren't destined to be used solely as comic fodder for music reviews in 2009. True, they've carved out a pretty enviable career, but stateside I imagine someone right this very minute is confusing them with Doves.
If Elbow did seem too mature for a new band, you can chalk it up to Asleep in the Back gestating for almost a decade. As such, it can be described in a lot of unsexy ways-- patient, stately, considered, professional.  There's only one song that really qualifies as "rock" (though the menacing "Bitten By the Tailfly" is defined by its tension as much as its volume), half of the tracks top out at over five minutes, moving with cruise-ship luxury and tempo, and there aren't really hooks so much as "moments" where the restraint and attention to sonic detail build into an undeniable payoff. Now, talking about production is usually viewed as a backhanded compliment-- we should be talking about the songs, man... right? But as languorous as the tempos can be, Asleep in the Back is studious and hardworking, proof that modern albums can still sound luxurious.
Despite minimal soloing and nothing in the way of tricksy time signatures, it strangely got tagged as "prog." It sort of is in the way Built to Spill's Perfect From Now On was "prog"-- constantly shifting textures and always sounding like it's headed somewhere. The dank bass and processed, dub-influenced drum sound that begins "Any Day Now" come off like a hungover transmission from Massive Attack's Mezzanine until the band opens the shades and lets the sun inside (to cop a quote from Cast of Thousands' "Ribcage"). Two bright and major-key chords repeat throughout the track's six minutes with unease, breaking down for an a cappella mission statement: "How's about getting out of this place... got a lot of spare time, some of my youth and all my senses on overdrive."
Most tracks are buffeted with horns and strings, but in retrospect it's all the more impressive how they're culled for shading than the kind of levels-in-the-red overkill that often resulted in post-Arcade Fire orchestration. So much about the gorgeous title track sneaks up you-- a whistling organ drone breezes easily through the mix, woodwinds seep into the guitar waltz like ink into water, and when the trumpets herald its hopeful finale, it feels earned. The violin shredding at the end of "Red" combines with the controlled chaos of Jupp's cymbal hits to mirror its subject's descent into substance addiction. "Saxophone coda" is the sort of thing that gets brought up when savaging an overblown cod-epic, but such a device is all the more effective on "Powder Blue" for how it contrasts with the powerless of its narrator ("I'm proud to be the one you hold when the shakes begin").
Which is not to suggest Elbow are merely a studio band. A couple of Steve Lamacq radio sessions and an early EP are included in the Deluxe packaging, and the band sounds great in a stripped down setting, particularly singer Guy Garvey. The Peter Gabriel comparisons were certainly fair, as the strongest melodic moments of Asleep tend to find Garvey in that register. But for the most part, Garvey turned out to have more in common with barstool-bound indie bards of America-- wryly romantic like the National's Matt Berninger without the class-consciousness, drunk like the Walkmen's Hamilton Leithauser but not as unhinged. Although the guitar hook of "Bitten By the Tailfly" rivals the earwax-blast of "The Rat", it's in large part due to how quiet its surroundings are-- it's a rare treat to hear a major-label album where the soft parts are quiet and the loud parts are loud. The dynamic volume of Asleep in the Back set the standard for what would turn out to be one of the most consistently well-produced bands out there.
And then there's "Newborn", the centerpiece of Asleep. If you've heard only the radio version, you've literally got only half the story. Though clocking in at a mighty seven minutes, the first three were used as a compact single, while the the triplet guitar figure that bridges the verse and chorus become the intro for the stunning second half, a constantly building that sits somewhere between Catherine Wheel's most heroic moments and the strange, pastoral spirituality of latter-day Talk Talk (it's possible the abrupt ending is a direct nod to "Ascension Day"). It's such a stunning, career-defining performance that the second half of Asleep in the Back can't help but take something of breather: The downtempo "Don't Mix Your Drinks" establishes the languid mood that isn't lifted until the lovely, fingerpicked nostalgia of "Scattered Black and Whites".
I guess we're dancing around the obvious question of who knows why Asleep in the Back is getting the bonus treatment right in between rounder anniversaries-- about eight years old, and can be easily obtained in its original edition. Maybe it's contractual, maybe it's just a Hail Mary attempt to give critics a quick reminder while putting together Best of 00s lists (NME has it at #30), or maybe, as Jason Crock pointed out in his review of the recent Jesus Lizard reissues, it wouldn't be a surprise if it merely was done to cut through a poky December release slate to remind listeners of its existence. Either way is satisfactory as long as Elbow have a chance to be heard anew instead of taken for granted: Asleep in the Back shows one of this decade's most underrated bands in its finest hour.


I'm With You, the first Red Hot Chili Peppers album without John Frusciante since the turgid, Dave Navarro-helmed One Hot Minute, is the work of a band with all kinds of capital to blow but no incentive to do anything differently.

I'm With You

I'm With You is a Red Hot Chili Peppers album. No shit, right? It's a point worth repeating because not only is it the most important thing about I'm With You, it's the only important thing about I'm With You. None of the actively recording Peppers-level elite-- not Metallica, not Coldplay, not U2, not Green Day-- have been more consistently and richly rewarded for simply showing up and being themselves. Since Californication kickstarted a second sustained run of monster popularity, the Peppers have not bitterly divided their fanbase over the way their drums were recorded, nor have they gone outside their inner circle for a bold sonic reconstruction. None of their albums were considered kinda hitless duds, and even their samey double-LP wasn't scoffed at as ambitious but more of the same. They've released nearly identical, bittersweet songs about California, sex, and, increasingly, nothing. These songs chart the same and appear on albums that perform nearly identically. All the while, the band continues to sell a ton of copies as the rest of us openly mock Anthony Kiedis (simply by quoting Anthony Kiedis) and find some nice things to say about John Frusciante.
But I'm With You is their first record without Frusciante since 1995's turgid, Dave Navarro-helmed One Hot Minute. A former tour understudy for Frusciante, new axeman Josh Klinghoffer blends in with a slightly more textural and less chopsy style, and he thankfully doesn't impose his will on the Peppers like the glam-metal narcissist Navarro did. But in the grand scheme of things, it means nothing. Tremendously dumb lead single "The Adventures of Rain Dance Maggie" picks up where prior tremendously dumb lead single "Dani California" left off-- which is to say, totally within PeppersWorld, a place where an incorporeal female is a prop for Kiedis to drop happy-go-lucky jewels about cockblocking, rockin' like the 1980s, and god knows what else. Over the past decade, the band's had incredible instincts about their choice of singles, the deep cuts rightfully forgotten by all but the dieheards. But while "Maggie" is by a large measure the worst thing here, it foreshadows I'm With You's paucity of overtly choice options, "good Chili Peppers" and "bad Chili Peppers" coming ever closer to a horizon point.
More than ever, three extremely talented musicians are all in servitude to Kiedis, the single most irreplaceable frontman in rock history: Seriously, there are plenty of singers who can do a passable Bono or Ozzy or Robert Plant in a pinch, but who's fuckin' with Kiedis' sixteens? Granted, they've never been a source of much food for thought, but at least it worked when the band appeared to be riffing from the reptile brain that craved women, drugs, and party plans, "uplift mofo" or otherwise. Here, unless Kiedis is being totally explicit about his subject matter ("Annie Wants a Baby", "Police Station"), I'm With You is simply a continuously futile pursuit to figure out what the fuck he's actually talking about.
On "Factory of Faith", spiritual intransigence is described as such: "All my life, I was swingin' for the fence/ Always lookin' for the triple/ Never playing good defense." Then, before you know it, he's quoting Dirk Diggler ("feast on this"). He falls in love with a stripper on "Look Around", explaining "Hustle here/ Hustle there/ Hustle me bitch and you best beware/ It's emotional/ And I told you so." (This is before Fayetteville-- North Carolina? Arkansas?-- gets a shout out… because it rhymes with "say it will.") The tricky funk rhythm of "Ethiopia" stoically withstands Kiedis singing a scat version of "Old McDonald Had a Farm", while on "Even You Brutus?" he yawps like David Byrne and courts a young lady by namedropping Steve Miller and Stevie Wonder in the span of fifteen seconds.
Thing is, he can shut off that Funky Monk mode in time for the choruses, and if I'm With You proves anything for the Peppers, it's that a one-step solution to making this a better, even enjoyable record is to cut out the verses entirely. Sounds like a good enough idea, but it'd only make it more obvious that they've been writing minor variations of the same exact (admittedly effective) chorus for the past decade: four repeating chords boxing in Kiedis' maxed-out soul croon as Flea and Chad Smith dutifully swing, wondering when they'll finally have a chance to let loose. (When they do during the frenetic coda of "Brendan's Death Song", it's a damn revelation.)
Some of us will be making “Sir Psycho Sexy” jokes to our grave, but many still have a soft spot for the wild abandon of Blood Sugar Sex Magik because it found space for rock songs that rocked, funk songs that were funky, and ballads that were truly affecting. But they've become so stuck in their Peppers-Mk-II ways that 2006's Stadium Arcadium turned out to be possibly the least adventurous double album ever, and I'm With You does even less to pursue sonic diversity*.* Much of the blame lies with Rick Rubin: As with Stadium and 2002's By the Way, he produces I'm With You entirely without nuance or dynamics. Whether it's the midtempo acoustic ballads ("Brendan's Death Song"), the midtempo piano masher ("Happiness Loves Company"), or the midtempo rockers (nearly everything else), they're all equally loud and flat. As a result, the sequencing of the 14 tracks feels arbitrary, the hour-long runtime intentionally superfluous: It feels as if even they don't think anyone will play this in its intended order after the first listen.
As far as arena-dominating radio rock goes, you could do worse: Even as they soften in old age, the Peppers can still remind you that a lot of people discovered Gang of Four, the Minutemen, and George Clinton through them. And occasionally, the punk-funk still rings true: I'd love to see an intrepid mashup junkie lay Luke Jenner's vocals from In the Grace of Your Love over these instrumentals and vice versa. After all, Flea sounded great in Thom Yorke's Atoms For Peace project while actually playing more slap-bass than he does here, and we learned from John Frusciante's troubled but occasionally fascinating solo albums that these guys would probably be far more interesting outside the scope of their main gig. Until then, I'm With You's hip thrusts and gyrations simply go through the motions, the work of a band with all kinds of capital to blow but no incentive to do anything differently. After all, it's a Red Hot Chili Peppers album.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past. Today we revisit Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings’ third album, an Americana masterpiece whose prophecies reverberate through modern folk and indie rock.

Time (The Revelator)

The only time most people have heard the word “revelator” is in reference to the Bible. John the Revelator was the prophet who wrote the Book of Revelation, the final part of the New Testament. As the story goes, John was exiled to a Greek island as persecution for his Christian faith and wrote down his visions of the apocalypse as communicated by Jesus. Filtered through John, who was writing around 95 AD, these visions resemble a dystopian nightmare: the rise of the beast, masquerading as a charismatic ruler, whose mark must be resisted should you desire entry into heaven; the mysterious disappearance of believers during the rapture; and ultimately, after God goes full scorched-earth, a second coming. My father, a follower of John, said that taking in the predictions of Revelation was so intense, it caused him bouts of overwhelming existential dread.
Inspired by Son House’s gospel-blues classic “John the Revelator,” Gillian Welch “picked up the word ‘revelator’ and reapplied” it as the title of her third album. But as the alt-country musician told Billboard upon Time (The Revelator)’s release in July 2001, she was hesitant to over-explain the usage. She did not include the album’s lyrics in the original liner notes, an unconventional move in the CD era but one that held intentional meaning for Welch. “There are a lot of words on this album, but they shouldn’t be read—just heard,” she said. “The meaning has to do with the way they sound.”
You could say Welch was working in an oratory tradition, pulling from folk music and Biblical storytelling by tying up the message with its divine expression. But there was also the rare nature of her collaboration with longtime musical and romantic partner David Rawlings. Welch’s father once likened the couple’s locked-in concentration to “breathing together,” and Welch herself, in the same New Yorker profile, said that she loses track of which voice is hers and which is Rawlings’. On the chorus of Time’s opener, “Revelator,” his voice lags behind hers at such a close interval that it creates an eerie echo, the first but not the last time this occurs on the album. The interplay between their acoustic guitars is so lively and seamless on the “Revelator” solo that it actually makes me angry to remember that record-industry execs once tried to get Welch to perform with other guitarists.
Billed under just Welch’s name but very much a duo, Welch and Rawlings have worked almost exclusively with one another since meeting at Berklee School of Music in the early ’90s. (She was the Cali-raised adopted daughter of professional entertainers; he was a Rhode Island boy favoring cheap, gross, extremely old guitars; they were stuck at a jazz school.) On their first two albums, 1996’s Revival and 1998’s Hell Among the Yearlings, both produced by Americana kingmaker T Bone Burnett, Welch sang lead on country story-songs about miners and orphans, determined little mountain flowers, and the ghost of a rapist who haunts his poor wife (who killed him, of course). Shortly before making Time, Welch covered a duo of traditional songs alongside alt-country heroines like Alison Krauss and Emmylou Harris for the wildly successful soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a roots-music anointment sealed with Welch’s cameo in the Coen brothers’ film. Around the same time, her record deal with Almo Sounds dissolved, which led to the founding of the duo’s own Acony Records, their label to this day.
When Welch and Rawlings went into Nashville’s RCA Studio B to record Time (The Revelator) at the dawn of the new millennium, they were unwittingly working in a studio that had been the site of more than 200 Elvis Presley recordings. The lore fits the music: Here, they present intertwined tales of Elvis and Black folk hero John Henry, the Titanic’s sinking and Lincoln’s assassination, farm girls and surfer chicks, and how hard it was getting to make a living as a musician. Sometimes the two are foils, but largely Rawlings serves as the punctuation to Welch’s slightly crooked cataloging of country life. The duo would explore a full-band sound on their next LP, 2003’s Soul Journey, but within the sparse Revelator lives an entire band. Welch has likened it to a rock album without the amplification, which is apparent in all sorts of ways—namely, structures that work like rock songs, with big choruses and melodic dissonance, tension and release, lengths that run ragged like Neil Young and reference God, history, and culture like Dylan. You can hear where there should be more instruments, a place where you might stomp or slap your thigh to a rhythm that’s played instead by Rawlings’ strumming, and that’s part of the fun of these skeletal epics.
“My First Lover” makes a compelling case for such stripped-down arrangements for such evocative songs. A good story helps too, but it’s the stunning ambivalence with which Welch lingers on the details that make it an unforgettable tune about the loss of virginity. He was a tall, long-haired surfer boy who negged her, but she “was not waiting for a white wedding gown.” She can’t even remember why they broke up, just that a Steve Miller song was playing when it happened. Sometimes these supposedly important figures in a person’s life are completely incidental. But the tale has an ominous side, echoed in the haze of booze-soaked memories and a creeping tension between Welch’s voice and Rawlings’ banjo. The repeated phrase “quicksilver girl” hits like a warning, the way she prolongs the dissonant note on “girl” and eventually finishes her thought: “and she’s free.”
Quicksilver is liquid mercury, capable of abrupt change; it’s a surfing thing, too, a word for someone who moves fast. Welch borrowed the lines from the 1968 Steve Miller Band song “Quicksilver Girl,” which, sung from the perspective of a man, takes on either an air of wonder or a hint of judgment about the woman in question. I prefer Welch’s usage. In rock, women lyricists have cataloged the cornflake girls and rebel girls, the sisters of the moon, those made of doll parts and other viscera. (Welch herself had already contributed “Whiskey Girl” and “Barroom Girls” to the pile, and “Red Clay Halo” here is one for the girls with mud under their fingernails.) But there’s something so coolly aspirational about the quicksilver girl who slips off with no trace, ready to make her way in the world without any constraints, not even a lover (forget a boyfriend). Arriving second on an album where the central theme is the pursuit of freedom, “My First Lover” hits like the start of that awakening.
The flip side of that independence is a yearning for something that only time can reveal. “Dear Someone” feels like it picks up on that same quicksilver girl once again. “I want to go all over the world and start living free,” Welch sings, knowing that this doesn’t preclude her from wanting one true love. The song is slow-moving in pace but impatient in sentiment, beautiful and bittersweet in its melody. It sounds how searching for your person can feel.
At the heart of Time is a four-song suite that speaks to American history and rock’n’roll in a lucid, novelistic way that’s more comparable to Greil Marcus than contemporary guitar music. “April the 14th Part 1” uses the date of three tragedies—the murder of Lincoln, the Titanic hitting the iceberg, and the Black Sunday dust storm of 1935—as the occasion for a portrait of the struggling punks who once played the late show after Welch and Rawlings in a Eugene, Oregon club. It’s a semi-tragic slice of life set in whichever small rock club holds a place in your heart, wherein Welch observes the group’s squalor and still thinks, “I wish I played in a rock and roll band.” If you understand the appeal of this lifestyle as well as the inherent griminess, there’s a mix of desperation and dark romance summed up in the writing: “And the girl passed out/In the backseat trash/And there was no way they’d make/Even a half a tank of gas.”
A country-gospel original equating electric guitars with holy salvation, “I Want to Sing That Rock and Roll” is the fantasy of “I wish I played in a rock’n’roll band” come joyfully to life. The live performance is pulled from a set at Nashville’s famed Ryman Auditorium as part of Down From the Mountain, the concert film commemorating the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack. Repurposing a live track vaguely associated with one of the biggest films of the previous year is a challenge, but thematically and musically, it serves the album. After Rawlings plays a plucky solo, the crowd cheers like it’s the Opry equivalent of a touchdown.
After these dreams of deliverance, Welch and Rawlings offer up a cautionary tale in “Elvis Presley Blues.” As with the down-and-out band from Idaho in “April the 14th Part 1,” Welch humanizes Elvis through simple observations—“Just a country boy that combed his hair/And put on a shirt his mother made and went on the air/And he shook it like a chorus girl,” goes the first verse—contrasted against the icon’s later decline and the life of John Henry. Elvis lived in glory and died in tragedy, but Henry arguably suffered the opposite fate: He was freed from slavery in the late 19th century and took on mythic status as a strong-man steel-driver working on railroad tunnels, until his heart gave out after he bested a steam hammer—real man vs. machine shit. His story inspired two different styles of folk and blues songs—“The Ballad of John Henry” story-songs and “hammer” work songs. (Johnny Cash has an extensive song, “The Legend of John Henry’s Hammer,” that combines elements of both forms.) The melody here borrows from the traditional song “John Henry,” but Rawlings’ fingerpicking is light and nimble, and their subtle harmonizing on the chorus gives a sad song a hopeful tinge.
Welch picks up the Lincoln/Titanic/Black Sunday thread on “Ruination Day Part 2,” an incantation wrapped in a blues groove. She croons about Old Abe taking a bullet to the back of the head, but perhaps more curiously she sings of Casey Jones, the train engineer who died in a high-speed collision in 1900. Like John Henry, Jones was immortalized in many blues, folk, and country songs, often in ballad form, but Welch merely gestures to his story in describing the iceberg coming at the Titanic: “God moves on the water, Casey Jones.” When she repeats his last name, Welch once again draws out the dissonant notes slowly, building an intoxicating melody around a single syllable.
While the duo lingers plenty in the history books, the song that became a standard in and of itself, “Everything Is Free,” is a premonition of streaming culture and the internet’s devaluation of art writ large. Phoebe Bridgers, in her deadpan way, once called it her “favorite song ever written about Napster,” before performing the tune alongside Julien Baker; Courtney Barnett also has a wonderful version often played live; Father John Misty took the piss by covering the song for the Spotify Singles series. By 2001, Metallica had already taken Napster to court, and file-sharing was spurring tremendous change within the music industry. But no one had humanized the situation for middle-class musicians quite like Welch on “Everything Is Free.” What happens when your art suddenly has negligible commercial value, and your only way of making a living off it involves the indignities of touring? Welch embodies a Gen-X idea about the whole thing—“I can get a straight job, I done it before”—before clarifying, “Never minded working hard/It’s who I’m working for.”
Few suspected then that something like Spotify would arrive less than a decade later and take advantage of the situation created by Napster, offering artists fractions of cents per stream and further entrenching touring as the industry’s primary moneymaker. “Everything Is Free” never tries to be a manual of how to operate as a creative person in this corrupt world, but there is power in Welch leading the way by quietly refusing: By recognizing that the music in her head doesn’t need an audience to be real. By staying home and singing the songs anyway. And by making the tune so pleasing to the ear, like an afternoon dream described through Rawlings’ fingertips, with just a hint of melancholy around the edges.
The expanse of something lies ahead. At nearly 15 minutes long, the final song, “I Dream a Highway,” encompasses what came before it and points toward a direction home. “It just happened that all these lyrics I was writing belonged in that song,” Welch once said. “I tried to edit things out but it didn’t make it better. In fact, it was the opposite; I realized that everything this record was about was in that song.” She doubles back to John Henry’s hammer and the stragglers and the jags at the Eugene rock club. She references Johnny Cash kicking out the footlights at the Grand Ole Opry in 1965 and flirts with trading Nashville for Memphis in search of the real thing. She mentions the resurrection of Lazarus by Jesus in the Gospel of John, whose author, John the Apostle, was once mistakenly believed to be the same John who wrote the Book of Revelation. Time collapses while Gillian and Dave play on.
The most striking characters mentioned in “I Dream a Highway” are Emmylou Harris and Grams Parsons. Critical readings of the song often position Harris as the narrator, and the ghost she’s singing to as Parsons, her partner in forging country music’s cosmic path, before his tragic death in 1973 at just 26. Whether you hear it that way or as I do—with the imagined figure from “Dear Someone” also appearing at the end of this highway—the loaded phrases and scene sketches amount to something like commentary on breaking tradition, one of Revelator’s biggest themes. Welch and Rawlings had never played the song when they recorded it, and Rawlings spliced together the first two performances with a beginning and end in mind. Some of his most gorgeously ambling guitar work appears between the verses, like the way detours hit us in between the stanzas of life.
Just last week, someone sent me a tweet from the band Low. They were answering a fan question about a line in their 2002 song “Candy Girl,” “We wasted all our days/With Gillian and Dave,” confirming that it couldn’t be any other Gillian and Dave. “We are big fans. Many hours passed in the kitchen, listening to Time the Revelator [sic].” And while the album received no shortage of critical praise upon release, particularly within the Americana community, there is an under-explored connection between Revelator and the kind of slowcore played by Low, or the hushed folk-rock of Bridgers’ Stranger in the Alps, Adrianne Lenker’s finger-picked fantasias, or Lana Del Rey’s darkly romantic poetry on American myths. Even just a certain attitude in indie rock. “...Everything on that record has this crazy, fierce core of independence and being threatened and feeling alone,” Welch reflected five years ago. “I think it’s what gives it its reverberence today. It seems to resound with adults who are just dealing with their own true independence, certainly young musicians who are trying.” Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings saw the future in the past, and made an album for all time.
Editor’s Note: The Sunday Review series is intended to cover albums not included in our archives. This album was previously reviewed on Pitchfork in 2001. Due to an oversight, it’s been revisited here with a new essay.


The St. Paul rapper’s latest album is a study in faith and focus. His acrobatic rapping, rich hooks, and warm textures create a soulful record full of high stakes and interior depth.

The Mustard Seed

At many different points in the New Testament, a mustard seed is used to illustrate the Kingdom of God: impossibly small beginnings that yield an impossibly grand result. From Matthew: “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed [...] although it is the smallest of all seeds, yet it grows into the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches.” All of which is very nice, but parables don’t keep creditors at bay or take care of utility bills, especially in the middle of brutal St. Paul winters.
The Mustard Seed is Why Khaliq’s exceptional new album, a study in faith and focus that’s dedicated to the rapper’s young daughter. Having established his bona fides on the razor-edged The OtherSide: The Six5 and on the gentler, more contemplative Under the Perspective Tree, Khaliq reconciles those approaches on an album full of acrobatic rapping, rich hooks, and warm textures. He frets about being a new parent and trying to make a creative career work when there real stakes, mouths to feed—these are soulful songs culled from soul-crushing restaurant jobs.
The faith Khaliq struggles to maintain isn’t grand or ontological. He’s determined, in the long term, to become an artist of consequence, but finds himself mired in the daily struggle to avoid coming undone. “Smile” is about putting up enough of a front that your friends don’t worry too much; “Follow the Leaves” is about the state you need to lull yourself into to believe the endless hours at your day job will eventually pay off. In fact, the first line on the record is “I’ve just been doubting myself,” and he doesn’t move from that thought into a pew—he simply goes to the studio.
In obviously related ways, The Mustard Seed is about the economics of creativity. On “Trees,” Khaliq’s girl calls him a “wannabe-ass rapper” and asks him, “Where the fuck all that money at?” to which he replies: “I need space, then I need breaks, and I need silence.” Carving out the time to make his art becomes a constant struggle. The album’s strongest songs, the back-to-back suite of “Anita” and “My Jam,” are, on one level, joyous, but on another, about forcefully shutting out the outside world and avoiding the white noise that keeps us from tapping into that joy. A song called “Collection Day” sounds like a mortal reckoning—which, of course, it is.
The album’s emotional center is “First Love,” where Khaliq details his single mother’s determination in raising him, then gives his newborn daughter the highest compliment he can muster: by drawing parallels to his own mom. That song delays the emotional reward—you can practically see his knuckles turning white as he paces hospital corridors—but on the album’s closing track, “The Mustard Seed That Grew,” that release comes, and the gratitude starts flowing in.
The Mustard Seed recalls contemporary works like Isaiah Rashad’s calm, sprawling The Sun’s Tirade, but might be more accurately compared to Devin the Dude’s 2002 classic Just Tryin’ ta Live. On the latter album, the Houstonian crafted instantly digestible songs that, on closer inspection, creaked under the weight of a creative and professional life marred by money and distraction and self-doubt. Here, Khaliq fills familiar frameworks—“My Jam,” the late-night sex on “Trees”—with the sort of behind-the-curtain worries and interior life that give them depth. A distracted listen would make The Mustard Seed sound effortless, but the payoff comes when you realize that this the result of grit and sweat, not magic or epiphany.


Channelling Southern rap, house music, and lush orchestral pop, the third release from Yusuke Kawai as tofubeats is one of the best J-Pop releases of the year.

Fantasy Club

Yusuke Kawai could have settled into the J-Pop background. The Kobe producer became a breakout name in the country’s netlabel scene in the late 2000s, creating high-energy breakcore often centered around anime samples under the name DJ Newtown, before adopting the name tofubeats for wholly original compositions. His nervy, genre-skipping dance-pop songs featuring radio-friendly choruses made him an apt choice to bring the internet-centric sound to a major label. Since, tofubeats’ albums have mostly highlighted his songwriting and production, handing vocal duties off to pop heavyweights, comedians, models and more. It’s a common path for artists plucked from the underground who focus on building a sound for other voices.
Fantasy Club, tofubeat’s third major-label album, breaks from that path. The guests are mostly absent, and instead Kawai’s Auto-Tune voice sits in the spotlight. It’s one of the stranger releases to get prominent space in the J-Pop section in recent memory—across its 13 songs, *Fantasy Club *channels Southern rap, house music, and lush orchestral pop. Compared to the generally upbeat tone of his compatriots, Kawai often sounds angry or tired here, his tracks full of unnerving sputters. Yet all these intricacies make it one of the best from Japan so far in 2017, a style-blurring affair showing what happens when a strong personality gets the chance to broadcast themselves fully through their music, regardless of how left-field they can get.
Kawai has discussed being introduced to the concept of post-truth, and feeling shaken by seeing the web he came up on turn sour. Early number “Shoppingmall” sets the album’s tone. Musically it’s simplistic, seasick synthesizer melodies and hi-hat skitters. But that emphasizes the vocals, which find Kawai gnashing outward (“What's real and what's not/Is just that exciting enough?”). It soon becomes clear he’s not angry at what’s around him, but grappling with his own confusion and anxiety.
The songs that follow are rarely stable, reflecting the unease that shapes the theme of Fantasy Club. “Lonely Nights” calls on rising rapper Young Juju to cooly rap through a digital mist before Kawai delivers a distorted hook full of stuttering syllables. “Callin” is melancholy electro R&B, underlined by Kawai’s mutated vocals, run through layers of effects to the point it sounds like a depressed burst of static. Dance numbers designed for the club feature warped details—the title track shuffles forward on house whistles and a galloping beat, but the edges of every sound quiver with echo, like they are wilting. *Fantasy Club’s *most outright floor-focused moment, “What You Got,” is crashed by a disorienting passage featuring a flurry of menacing Kawais tripping over each other.
Yet all these disruptions make the moments of release well-earned. Whereas older tofubeat’s albums played out as singles collections that could be played in basically any order, complete with tracklistings reading like J-Pop all-star squads, *Fantasy Club *is best listened to from start to finish. At its center is “This City,” which starts off like it’s malfunctioning—synthesizer notes going wobbly and electronic sounds chirping off over it like it’s on the verge of going haywire. But from this chaos tofubeats builds an ecstatic dance number, growing ever more upbeat as its seven minutes play on.
As tofubeats, Kawai has always been able to hopscotch across styles, but *Fantasy Club *marks the first time he’s been able to really explore the sounds he loves: minimalist wooze-pop (late comedown “Yuuki,” featuring singer/songwriter sugar me) or Houston rap (the outro to opener “Chant #1” serving as direct homage to DJ Screw, something you don’t usually see in J-Pop) without having to worry about accommodating big names or scoring a hit. Given how much before it is shaped by anxiety about the world at large, it’s a bit funny that *Fantasy Club’s *climax is a simple love song called “Baby.” It’s anchored by a string sample sourced from a song by celebrated Japanese pop star Yumi Matsutoya. In the wrong hands, it could be treated like a building block, an obscure find waiting to be sped up in Garageband and be called an aesthetic. But tofubeats celebrates the sound and creates an original song showing its warmth. It makes one glad he stepped to the forefront for Fantasy Club.


On their second album, the Australian outfit go bigger and broader, unapologetically mining Primal Scream and the Madchester scene for inspiration.

Every Now & Then

Andrew Weatherall may not have produced Jagwar Ma’s second album, Every Now & Then, but his paw prints are all over it. Following tours supporting their debut LP—and a close call with a shark in their native Australia—Jono Ma and Gabriel Winterfield headed to Europe, first to the derelict French sunflower farm where Howlin’ was recorded, then to Le Bunker, the London recording studio of the famed acid house DJ and home to his enormous record collection. “Andrew was in close proximity towards the end,” Ma told Stereogum in a recent interview. “But I think most of the themes and the music had been written by that point, so I don’t think he’s had a direct influence per se.” The adjacency to Weatherall may have been a happy accident, but for Jagwar Ma—whose music is hugely indebted to Madchester and Primal Scream—the overlap is too perfect to ignore.
Weatherall, who co-produced Primal Scream’s Screamadelica and helped forge the “baggy” sound of the 1980s, has served as a sort of musical north star for Jagwar Ma. (Screamadelica, the band has said, is a favorite album and he remixed their song “Come Save Me” in 2013.) In Pitchfork’s review of Howlin’, writer Ian Cohen lauded the carefree aspects of the album, but feared the band's sophomore record might wind up a “‘darker,’ ‘introspective’ and duller sequel.” As it turns out, Every Now & Then is the opposite; rather than turn inward, Jagwar Ma build on their first record’s foundation, going bigger and broader, while continuing to look unapologetically in the rearview mirror.
As with Howlin’, the neo-psychedelic music of Manchester’s club scene remains an inseparable part of the band's sound. Lead single “O B 1” could be compared to the Stone Roses, New Order, and Primal Scream, depending on which YouTube commenter you ask. (It also has more than a little bit of Giorgio Moroder’s driving synths.) As with many songs on the album, the sugary lyrics serve mostly as a conduit for the melody. “You warm me up, you wore me down, I get the feeling now,” sings Winterfield. The song succeeds precisely because Jagwar Ma refuse to take themselves too seriously. Synths shimmer, Whitefield’s voice is studiously mixed, and the drums, courtesy of Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa, have a hypnotic circularity, but it's all in the service of a good time. Ma has said the track is about “moving through the motions of life under the influence of lost love, the fear of letting go of the past when not having anything set in place in the future to hold on to,” but, in truth, larger themes are secondary to the band’s primary goal of flooding the listener's serotonin centers.
Much of Every Now & Then is anchored by the sound of the Oberheim Two Voice synthesizer, a vintage machine with a compressed, funky zap that Ma bought on eBay. The Oberheim occasionally pushes their sound further into the 1970s, a decade that fellow Aussies Tame Impala know well, and which suits Jagwar Ma’s stadium-sized aspirations. Unlike friend-of-the-band Kevin Parker, however, Jagwar Ma don't have a particular interest in avant-garde experimentalism or pop economy, instead preferring mid-tempo tracks that check the necessary boxes: big hooks, ravey breakdowns, the occasional inspired left turn (see: the Egyptian Lover-recalling electro track “Don’t Be So Hard”). The album's highest highs are, not surprisingly, their most anthemic musically. “Ordinary”—a track that isn't— sees Whitefield’s voice arc like chemtrails across a neon sky. The song combines Britpop excess, the Ibiza dancefloor, and a vintage hip-hop breakbeat all without sounding forced. Jagwar Ma are also comfortable when settling deeper into dancefloor groove. Album closer “Colours of Paradise” embraces a headier form of bliss for nearly six minutes of Balearic house.
Jagwar Ma join a lineage of Madchester acolytes that range from Brooklyn’s Dinowalrus to the Swedish popsters on Sincerely Yours. But part of the allure of Madchester was the constant search for new forms of perception—through sonic experimentation as well as mind-altering chemicals—something that Jagwar Ma’s crate-digging fails to invoke. Every Now & Then is often vivid and enjoyable, but after a few listens, you may find yourself switching back to one of the band’s predecessors. The former is a fun ride, but Screamadelica could still blow your mind.


Seeking inspiration from John Fahey's Takoma Records, Rose attempts to drag ragtime into the 21st century.

Kensington Blues

The (apocryphal) outline of Jack Rose's game runs something like this: Ragtime and "jass" were bequeathed to him by the last words of Dr. Chattanooga Red, a mysterious mentor who allegedly told Rose to "not let the ragtime die, and to bring it into the 21st century"-- twin missions that produced Rose's 2003 homage to his teacher, Opium Musick. True or not (not), it's a nice story, and the myth does seem operative-- Rose often plays as if the health of ragtime rests on his shoulders alone.
Maybe it does. John Fahey and Takoma Records are gone, and Rose's modern compatriots (Ben Chasney, Kevin Barker, Sir Richard Bishop, etc.) are increasingly seduced by the East, by psychedelics, and by a "freak-folk" that owes less to American Primitive than it might claim. Although Rose is no stranger to the raga form-- or to the near 20-minute composition (2004's Raag Manifestoes had both of these in spades)-- his tools are firmly those of the past. While the new century's novel folk has already seen significant definition, Rose is largely alone in talking new century ideas with the old language.
Thus, Kensington Blues is derivative and at the same time nearly brilliant. The styles Rose employs are diverse: twelve-string virtuoso shows, a slide guitar that alludes as much to the sitar as to the blues, solid traditional Takoma ragtime and folk. Out from latter comes a Fahey cover, "Sunflower River Blues", which (not surprisingly) works as the soil from which the rest of the record grows. The original was predicated on Fahey's impeccable timing; Rose's take amplifies the feeling and melody, and then runs with it. Hence the stunning "Kensington Blues", a song full of clarity and syncopation, elegant and well composed. Two others, "Rappahanock River Rag" and "Flirtin' with the Undertaker", are less weighty, more jaunty deliveries of Rose's signature modern ragtime.
But Rose is more than a traditionalist, and the other tracks on Kensington Blues veer sharply into newer territory. "Cathedral et Chartres" uses twelve strings to abstract the melodic clarity so abundant elsewhere on the record, speeding it up and then sending it into a droning, buzzing finale. This idea is fully worked out in his closer, "Calais to Dover", in which Rose transfigures the raga into a kind of Dream Music, deep listening project, vibrating his way past individual notes and sequences and arriving at something more akin to pure tone and texture. The minimalist affinity is no coincidence: Rose's folk is not the least bit free, even as he explores freak sonic terrain, and control is his technique, no matter how many notes he stacks.


On a gothic and stormy new album, the experimental producer and vocalist constructs alien landscapes whose unpredictable structures seek to tune us more deeply into ourselves.

Death Is Home

On Death Is Home, Aïsha Devi arrives with the clearest and most distinct version of her sound yet. Defined by a sense of gothic scale and darkness, it’s rave music with a brain and a heart—for lone adventurers rather than big rooms. To understand it, one must take Devi’s entire discography into consideration: As Kate Wax, she made cloudy dance-pop—music that could have been dismissed as airy and transitory yet carried a strange and sometimes clunky heft. In 2014, the Swiss-Nepalese/Tibetan artist began releasing music under her own name, ditching the alter ego for a more avant-garde vision. She also began interweaving her meditation and spiritual practices into her production and performance. (Much ink has been spilled on the dancefloor as a space for potential healing; Devi appears to take this approach genuinely.)
DNA Feelings (2018) was a disorienting, minimalist affair that placed Devi’s heavily processed vocals against pristine, icy sound design. Hard to grasp and even harder to dance to, it’s a challenging but rewarding listen that demands patience and careful attention—Pauline Oliveros for the clubland set. Death Is Home is her first LP since then, and first new music since 2019’s S.L.F. EP, which married Devi’s earlier predilection for pop with DNA Feelings’ abstract map. Opener “Not Defined by the Visible” turns the rave build into a dizzying spiral staircase, the kind everyone expects to resolve into a reliable drop and attendant emotional payoff. In Devi’s version, it becomes delicate architecture, refusing obvious catharsis for a sense of vertigo.
Devi is an expert at building tension; a sense of foreboding lurked even in DNA Feelings’ relatively weightless palette. On Death Is Home she pushes that tendency as far as it will go, creating cavernous environments with such a restrained hand that when stabbed with squeaky synths and ruptured with dry, piercing kicks, as on “Lick Your Wounds,” they suggest the score for a sci-fi/body horror flick. “Immortelle” is just gorgeous, scribbly trance synths and ominous ambience anchoring Devi’s alien-frequency vocals. Visionary Kenyan club experimentalist Slikback helps the thrilling “Dimensional Spleen,” with its twinkling synth line and straight-to-the-hips bass, become the most accessible work of Devi’s recent career, though the track is no less thoughtfully constructed than anything on DNA Feelings.
At times Devi sounds as if she’s playing with the new age tropes of a particular kind of ’90s mainstream electronica, digging through the cheese to find something true. The celestial bells of “Mind Era” and fluted synths of “The 7th Element” wouldn’t be out of place on Pure Moods. The references feel loving—new age was music for seekers and meditators, just as Devi’s is—but she can’t resist messing with the program, processing her vocals beyond recognition and screwing up the song structures. “Prophet Club” is a lovely slice of futuristic R&B. Closer “Azoth Eyes” is a true stunner, showing that Devi is as adept with percussion-heavy work as she is with airier fare. She sets gauzy layers of fluttering vocals against thick, ominous ambience and crushing, distorted beats, creating an atmosphere that works on and within the physical body.
As Devi’s work has become inextricable from her spiritual practices, it’s clear that embodiment is key to her work. We are all aware that stress and trauma live in our bodies in unconscious ways. Grief and pain do communicate through Death Is Home’s textures, as does the undergirding sense of hope necessary to heal. But perhaps most notably, Devi’s own artistic voice sounds more developed than ever. In the process of healing, we become more ourselves, steadier on our feet and with an arsenal of practices and tools available to weather coming storms. Hearing Devi hone her vocabulary to this degree is proof enough of work.


The New York-based composer’s third album spotlights piano and vibraphone, as attuned to the notes struck as to the overtones produced and their natural decay.

Moments

Since its founding in Tommy McCutchon’s Austin apartment in 2006, the Unseen Worlds imprint has become a refined voice in late 20th- and early 21st-century explorations, whether exalting a historically neglected female composer like Laurie Spiegel or reissuing albums that plumb the divide between pop and avant-garde. Alongside reissues, Unseen Worlds has also offered up an adventurous exploration of contemporary piano music. Releases run the gamut from stately solo piano pieces by Ethiopian classical composer Girma Yifrashewa to achingly slow takes on Erik Satie by founding Fluxus member Philip Corner to a stunning modern ambient album from jungle/breakcore pioneer Robert Haigh.
This year the label adds two new entries to that list, first Hague-based Leo Svirsky’s River Without Banks and now Michael Vincent Waller’s third album, Moments. Waller’s 2015 double-disc debut The South Shore found the New York-based composer presenting a diverse array of works written over a five-year period, with some 20 total players performing pieces for solo cello, string quartet, flute, and a saxophone and electric guitar ensemble. On 2017’s Trajectories, Waller narrowed his focus to the interplay between cello and piano. Moments zooms in even further; five of the 18 compositions presented here are for vibraphone, the remainder for solo piano. R. Andrew Lee, pianist on Trajectories and a noted interpreter for minimal composers like Dennis Johnson and Jürg Frey, is again seated at the bench. Waller enlists William Winant—percussionist to the likes of John Zorn, Frank Zappa, and Roscoe Mitchell—on vibraphone. Both men are renowned for their restraint, and they are a perfect fit for Waller’s sensibilities. Every note and gesture on Moments seems to be deeply felt and philosophically weighed before a hand touches a piano key or lifts a mallet.
Waller is uninterested in hiding behind any sort of artifice in his compositions, conveying sentiment as directly through the notation as possible. There’s little reverb to the recording, no electronic processing or layering; the sustaining pedal isn’t depressed for the duration of the album. He’s uninterested in a larger canvas when a postcard will suffice. None of the compositions last longer than six minutes, and many speak their piece well before the three-minute mark. Waller seems as attuned to the notes struck as to the overtones produced and their natural decay, which perhaps comes from his studies with minimalist composers like La Monte Young and Bunita Marcus, the latter perhaps best known for the piece that composer Morton Feldman named for her.
Erik Satie’s name comes up in almost every writing about Waller, and it’s hard not recall Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1” during a passage on Waller’s own melancholic “Nocturnes - No. 4.” But Feldman is the more telling reference, especially in Waller’s balance and exploration of the instruments’ attack and decay. “Vibrafono Studio” wraps itself in warm, lingering tones, pausing every few lines to let the overtones fade away. The gorgeous “Jennifer”—dedicated to his cousin—moves swiftly from its opening chords to a flurry of high notes before drawing to half-speed, carefully exploring a descending bass melody that offers each note ample space in which to sound. His dedication to the late Pauline Oliveros, “For Pauline,” exemplifies her tenets of “deep listening” not with a durational, large-scale composition akin to her own work, but with three gentle minutes wherein each of Lee’s chords moves like steps across slippery river stones.
As understated as Waller’s writing is, and as self-contained and seamless as each piece is, it’s almost startling when the album arrives at the stunning finale of “Bounding.” Lee’s playing starts off measured, but soon gathers velocity, each run quickening the pace until it reaches an evocative peak. The final third of the piece gushes forth in a cascade, the emotional restraint of the album finally giving way to release. As sterling and subtle as Moments can be, the finale feels nothing less than cathartic.

Buy: Rough Trade
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