The second EP from London producer Murlo is competent but bland. It feels like a document from dance music’s recent past, proof enough that the post-club sound is becoming stale.

Club Coil EP

There is something decidedly untimely about Murlo’s Club Coil. There’s its dystopian, digitally rendered urban landscape of an album cover; its collection of sleek, “post-club” tunes; its obligatory features from a smoky vocalist. These are all elements of dance music that might’ve been rather au courant, if not forward looking, five years ago. The second EP from the London producer/DJ Murlo (aka Chris Pell) sounds and feels like a document from an era of dance music that’s come to a close.
Pell was one of a crop of DJs that emerged earlier in the decade when slippery, amorphous electronic music was coming into prominence. What made the music of Pell and DJs in his peer group (Kingdom, L-Vis 1990) arresting at the time was how it offered a peek into a future of pop that was cybertronic, gaudy, ambitious, and in-your-face. In some respects, that sound did successfully seep into pop music: Kingdom’s collaborations with mainstream artists like SZA and Syd show that this style of music has been influential. But there are limits to what one can do with a toolbox of frigid synths, dark atmospheres, and disconcerting drums. Club Coil is proof enough that the post-club sound is becoming stale, in need of a dose of inspiration.
On Club Coil, Murlo reveals how shallow the standard formula for this particular kind of dance music is. He works at the intersection of many genres—making a fusion restaurant’s equivalent of dance music—by sprinkling bits of grime, dancehall, soca, and UK funky into his productions. In practice, this often equals shuffling synths and booming bass and plenty of snapping kickdrums. His songs are all neat and tightly organized—but they’re exceedingly bland, or at the very least inoffensive. Take, for example, the opening track “Coil.” On its surface the song is extremely competent: it bears a legible arc, its synth and bass sounds are crisp and well designed, and it has little moments of fright and simulated emotion that come from burping horns and thick drum rolls. But you’d be hard pressed to say any one part of the song was affecting—it’s too safe to elicit any feeling other than mild head nodding.
And this feeling of middle-of-the-road production is especially evident in the vocal collaborations with Gemma Dunleavy. Like Murlo, Dunleavy’s style lacks its own identity. Rather, both Murlo’s production and Dunleavy’s singing can feel like an assemblage of recognizable parts borrowed from other artists. Even if done well, it doesn’t necessarily make for an interesting listening experience.
For example, “I Need”—the strongest of their two collaborations—contains a mix of chiptune sounds, precise percussion, and interesting vocal effects, offering a sense that the song is glossy and thoughtful. But Dunleavy’s singing, while pleasing, is hardly moving; it never goes beyond or below expectation. “I Need” is a highlight of the EP, but it unfortunately illustrates what makes Club Coil such an inessential record. Murlo and Dunleavy are contended to play it safe—her vocals are just brassy enough to make for a diluted impression of singers like Dawn Richard or Kelela, while his production is just clean enough to be a passable approximation of Kingdom’s frigid dance songs or AlunaGeorge’s pop house. While it is maybe too much to expect any one artist to reinvent the wheel they’ve been given, Club Coil sounds so much like a plethora of other things that it comes over like the album equivalent of paint-by-numbers.


This live document of a sweaty performance from drone-rock outfit Moon Duo in Ravenna features the first time the band's played as a trio, with John Jeffrey furiously hammering on the same beat for upwards of 10 minutes at a time. You can feel all that sweat and humidity dripping off this recording, which corrodes the skillfully sculpted fuzz and laser-like rhythmic precision of their studio albums with enough grease and grime to constitute a fire hazard.

Live in Ravenna

Like their mothership act Wooden Shjips, drone-rock outfit Moon Duo—aka Shijps builder Ripley Johnson and musical/romantic partner Sanae Yamada—are not ones for dramatic dynamic variation. They instantly set a psychedelic scene and then spend the next several minutes retracing it, until all the lines blur into a sound that’s constantly morphing and hypnotically static at the same time. However, for this new, limited-edition live album, the duo effect a change that, if not radically reorienting their core aesthetic, at least turns their very band name into one big typo.
While Johnson and Yamada’s job descriptions respectively bill them as singer/guitarist and keyboardist, Moon Duo’s recordings to date have deployed drum machines to bolster their motorik momentum. However, their summer 2013 trek through Europe marked the first time they lugged a proper kit on tour and enlisted a full-time stickman, John Jeffrey, who, following a recommendation from the band’s manager, was hired without so much as a single audition. Of course, it helps that Moon Duo aren’t the sort of band to trouble budding percussionists with complex arrangements or tricky cues to remember. But the show documented here presented Jeffrey with a trial by fire all the same—by having him furiously hammer on the same beat for upwards of 10 minutes at a time in the thick of what was apparently a brutal heat wave. (And even though the Ravenna show was performed at an outdoor beachside stage as opposed to a claustrophobic club, the stifling temperature still prompts Johnson to make a mid-set plea for towels.)
You can feel all that sweat and humidity dripping off this recording, which corrodes the skillfully sculpted fuzz and laser-like rhythmic precision of their studio albums with enough grease and grime to constitute a fire hazard. And with Jeffrey’s imposing kick-drum thump and chain-whipped, tambourine-rattled backbeats added to mix, Moon Duo feel come off less like the blissed-out soundtrack for melting into your rec-room shag carpet than a gang of toughs ready to start a rumble on an overcrowded dancefloor. The big-boom effect also illuminates how Moon Duo savvily update the influence of their canonical psych-punk forbears: the beefier versions of “Mazes”, “I Been Gone”, and “Goners” refashion the Spacemen 3 as the ultimate go-go party band; “Free Action” reroutes Suicide’s “Rocket USA” into a foot-stomped heartland hoedown.
Aside from that last track—which gets distended to double the length of the version heard on 2012’s Circles—Live in Ravenna surprisingly doesn’t stretch Moon Duo’s hypno-rock rave-ups too far beyond their original parameters, nor does it yield any significant rethinks of the material. So, on top of capturing the band at an intriguing new phase of their evolution, Live in Ravenna effectively functions as a handy, compact compilation of Moon Duo’s three albums to date (if underscoring their uniform vibe). For more casual trippers, this could be all the Moon Duo you need—but don’t sleep on the digital-only bonus track, “Set It On Fire”, which caps off this hot August night with an incendiary collision of Fun House fuzz and “Tomorrow Never Knows” drum rolls that makes you hope an official rebranding into Moon Trio isn’t too far off.


On their latest collaboration, the Detroit rapper and the Beverly Hills producer turn out one of the year’s most immersive rap albums.

The Price of Tea in China

The chronically overlooked Detroit rapper Boldy James has been making excellent street rap for a decade. His 2011 mixtape, Trappers Alley: Pros and Cons, sprawls across 28 tracks and improbably holds attention with quick cuts in mood and tempo. Boldy fits into a broad idea of his city’s grimy rap lineage, but owes little to the stylistic trends that have emerged from there in the 2010s—you will find in him little of Doughboyz Cashout’s manic dread or Danny Brown’s eccentricity. While the 2015 Trapper’s Alley sequel and his 2017 mixtape House of Blues dabbled in faster, more maximalist production, he works best when he works methodically, finding crevices in a skeletal frame.
Boldy writes without show, in short vignettes or standalone thoughts. Ninety seconds into The Price of Tea in China, his excellent new album with the producer Alchemist, he recalls his grandmother “cussin’ me out/‘Quit running in and out the house/What’s all the fuss about? It’s either cut me in or cut it out.’” His verses build tension slowly and resist the urge toward melodrama or moralizing; his voice is deep enough to project menace or instill calm without ever seeming to strain or slide out of pocket. Having worked twice before with Alchemist, this is familiar ground—or as familiar as Alchemist’s beats can ever be, as they molt from lush to serrated. Boldy responds by delivering what is one of the best, most immersive rap albums of the year so far.
As underground rap producers go, the Beverly Hills-bred Alchemist is this century’s great album-length auteur. He reinvigorated the late Mobb Deep legend Prodigy’s career with 2007’s minor masterpiece Return of the Mac. He was responsible for Curren$y’s 2011 Covert Coup, one of the prolific New Orleans rapper’s most celebrated releases. Boldy and Alchemist teamed up in 2013 for the well-received My 1st Chemistry Set, and again last year for the brief Boldface EP. Even as the economic (dis)incentives for sampling keep mutating, Alchemist crate-digs aggressively, turning out fascinatingly textured, sample-based records at a daunting rate.
On China his beats vary from the vaguely wistful (“Pinto”) to the skull-rattling (“Giant Slide”); some songs sound like slow creeps through mud (“Mustard”) and others recall the rhythmic creaking of a hotel bed frame (“Run-Ins”). Crucially, they make space for Boldy, who raps here with a disarming poise whether he’s quipping that a rival crew’s members “look like a boy band” or dispensing quasi-military wisdom like “The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat.” His voice at times recalls the Gary native Freddie Gibbs, who appears here on “S.N.O.R.T.” But where Gibbs likes to lapse into quick, technical passages of double-time (he does so here), Boldy centers himself at a midtempo, giving his verses a complexity that emerges only on repeat listens.
For a lesser writer or vocalist, that might be a recipe for dry songs, but China is mesmerizing in its minimalism. His near-metronomic control also means that, when Boldy for once turns to a more ostentatious style—the extraordinary Vince Staples duet “Surf & Turf,” where he raps entirely in a cascading, tightly wound meter—it doubles as a reminder of the careful construction elsewhere.
Boldy’s verses are webs of evocative detail: jail tats that linger from teenage years, insomniac drives down to Kentucky, gloved hands clutching guns, dealers huddled outside in Nike tech fabrics, a son who thinks his road-tripping dad doesn’t love him, Pyrexes full of dope that looks like oatmeal, stolen pills to salve a grandmother’s throat cancer, cars set to cruise control to eliminate variables, half-kilos of coke stuffed under mattresses like grain in a silo. These fragmented scenes are littered with enough Detroit street names that you become sure you could find the Citgo or Kroger in question. In fact, the bulk of China is so richly specific that Boldy earns the latitude to yada-yada an entire murder, to chilling effect. On “Giant Slide,” he wraps up a man’s story like this: “Now he out in Memphis, Tenn., future looking bleak/It took a week, but when they caught up to him, he got put to sleep.”
The Price of Tea in China is not a creative breakthrough marked by a new production palette or a leap in writing style. It’s the result of two superb technicians slowly whittling away the excess material from what was already a singular sound. It opens with an isolated piano and no drums and ends with what sounds like a villain’s theme from a B-movie mafia thriller; its great trick is to be so expertly crafted that you scarcely notice the jaw-clenching stakes until it’s already too late.


With his fifth album since 2007, dance producer Matt Cutler has released his most complete statement: Each track on Galaxy Garden is a maximalist marvel in minimalist disguise.

Galaxy Garden

Matt "Lone" Cutler is the best neo-rave producer out there. Give or take Rustie, he may be the best dance producer to make a name in the last five years, period. And Galaxy Garden, the fifth Lone album since 2007, is a wonder, his most complete statement yet, both a refinement and an expansion of the genre-of-one he's been perfecting over the last few years.
Each track on Galaxy Garden is a four- or five-minute maximalist marvel in minimalist disguise. Always direct and propulsive, as if racing forward without the time to stop and admire their own brilliant detail work, Lone tracks still manage to juggle three or six or 10 layers of rhythm with disarming skill. One beat alone may be constructed from footwork-like kick barrages, clattering retro drum machines, wild hand percussion loops, and chimes and bells that accent the already intricate groove science.
Even at his "simplest," like the clank-clonk of "Cthulhu", which echoes the spare programming of late drum and bass, Cutler swirls all sorts of glittering rhythm baubles around the main beat. Because why risk boredom when you can go all-out? Like the best young dance producers of the moment, happily embracing abundance after years of miserly dance minimalism, Cutler's attitude seems to be that more is always better, provided it doesn't fuck up the groove.
And then there's the magic Cutler works on top of those grooves, a spell of simple heart-tugging melodies, show-off instrumental virtuosity, and pure sound effect pyrotechnics. As if constructing such head-wrecking beats was no big deal, he then attempts to throw in everything else he can, whether it's warm Detroit synth washes, plangent guitar licks, prog-like keyboard runs, hardcore synth stabs that trigger both nostalgia and an adrenalin rush, or all of them at once. "The Animal Pattern" is anchored by a silly bouncing ball of a keyboard pattern, guaranteed to produce grins. It's a good enough hook to carry someone else's whole track, but that doesn't stop Cutler from including spasms of acid house, delicate Kraftwerk-like runs, and whooshes like cartoon spacecraft taking off.
What's amazing is that, despite their density, Lone tracks never splutter out into headache-inducing clutter. I'm guessing that's because Cutler has fixed on certain operating principles of old-school rave as much as the sound itself. He understands the way the best rave producers managed to combine so many paradoxical ideas about form and intent into single tracks.
So, sure, Cutler can expertly echo certain precise moments from rave's past, intentionally or not, like the way "As a Child" recalls both the tape-warp wooziness of Bodysnatch's "Secret Summer Fantasy" and the idyllic guitar loop of DJ Die's "Autumn". But those are two reference points you're hardly required to know in order to enjoy the track, maybe two reference points Cutler didn't even have in mind. Because forget historical fidelity for a minute: What really links Galaxy Garden to that early-1990s golden age is the way it manages to be both manic and chill, overstuffed with ideas and viscerally direct, relentlessly uplifting and never drippy about it.
Most millennial neo-ravers were barely eating solid food when acts like Orbital were cutting their first ecstatic singles. As Simon Reynolds noted in his "Maximal Nation" essay, they'd come of age with the starkness of dance-punk, the gloom of early dubstep, the grimness of "serious" European techno. So maybe this youthful revolt-- rediscovering the neon surfaces, speedy beats, and throw-in-as-many-hooks-as-you-can pop thrills of late-1980s and early-90s dance music-- wasn't so surprising. Kids gotta go against the dominant culture, after all. And after a decade spent exploring thousand shades of darkness, this overturning of values was wonderful, like waking up one day to sunshine after a week of shitty weather.
But once you got over the surprise, that this music had not been stricken from dance history after all, it was hard not to hear something dry and academic and forced in a lot of the new stuff. There was a certain irony there, given that early rave was all about vitality and immediacy, as if this wave of rave reverence had drained the sound of some essence. There was also the nagging question of whether these neo-rave records offered anything new, any 21st-century twists to make them stand out from the records they paid tribute to.
Cutler is in his late 20s, not really a kid anymore, and so he probably has vague memories of this music playing itself out in real time. But anyone can easily download the whole of rave history now, become a scholar without having been there at all. Part of what makes Galaxy Garden unique, in a scene that's quickly become glutted, is its simultaneous sensitivity to particular old-school sonics and an interest in everything that's come after.
Mostly this now-ness surfaces in the rhythms. There are groove ideas here that never would have occurred to a producer in 1991, either because the technology wasn't quite there yet or beats had yet to be twisted in those particular ways. Which is a little funny, because for his first few doggedly downtempo albums, melody was Lone's strong suit, not rhythm. And yet, after a few years making excellent if not particularly noteworthy homages to Boards of Canada, something in Cutler's music opened up once he rediscovered that early rave and techno really moved him. This is not the way things usually go with retro-minded artists, who are often so obsessed with mimicking each period detail of their heroes' work that the results wind up sounding pinched and inhibited. By focusing on the music he loved, however old it was, and keeping tabs on the present, Cutler could become more himself.
I'm usually wary of making the kind sweeping pronouncements about an artist's value found in that first paragraph, but in Lone's case, uncomplicated enthusiasm seems like the appropriate response. Lone's music is obviously complex, especially once you get past the overwhelming brightness of its outer layers and the rush of the tempo. But like the music made by his rave and techno heroes, Galaxy Garden is celebratory stuff. Mostly it seems to be celebrating the simple luck of being alive, of getting to make music designed to bring people together rather than bum them out.


You might expect a set of dusty disco and deep house from the house legend Moodymann. But his first officially licensed mix CD, for the 51st entry in the DJ-Kicks series, confounds expectations throughout, detouring at peak moments, going left where he might build momentum, all of it leading to luminous results.

DJ-Kicks

Despite a dance music career now stretching into its third decade, it’s rare for the man born Kenny Dixon, Jr. to grant an interview. But in 2010, Moodymann sat down for a now-legendary talk with the Red Bull Music Academy, and while the bon mots he drops across its two hours are legion—"My bitches and my hoes is my MPCs, my SP-1200, my bass, my keyboards"; "Detroit is a dying city; well, I’m going to die with that motherfucker"; "Hell, I thought Kraftwerk was four niggas"—whoever watched the video came away with only one image: The entourage of African-American women who walk in with him and twist his unruly afro into braids onstage and then pass Hennessy around to the audience.
This strategy of misdirection has cemented Dixon’s legacy in house music while also keeping his mystery intact. I’ve seen him DJ with a black veil over his face or else a hoodie pulled tight, keeping attention off of him. A set of disco and house can easily veer into White Stripes, Led Zeppelin, and Nirvana before swerving back. The cover of 2014’s self-titled album portrayed him as a house slipper-wearing, Solo cup-swigging layabout while the music within slyly touched on heartbreak and urban decay. With his first officially licensed mix CD, for the 51st entry in the DJ-Kicks series, one might expect a set of dusty disco and deep house, but Dixon confounds expectations throughout, detouring at peak moments, going left where he might build momentum, all of it leading to luminous results.
Whether he alights on underground hip-hop (Dopehead), vocodered soul (Talc), quiet storm psychedelia, or skittering, looping grooves (Jitwam), Moody moves at a flâneur’s pace, easeful yet determinedly at his own leisure and meter. Beats might never accelerate beyond headnod speeds, but Moodymann continually changes up the drums: crisp snares drop into swinging hi-hat patterns, Brazilian congas into Rich Medina’s kickdrums back into smoky downtempo, with fellow Detroit producer Andrés’ contribution adding a Latin flare to the mix. The first half posits an alternate history of 21st century soul and R&B: Passing over well-known acts, he finds jewels in the shadows, like the Pied Pipers’ remix of "Can’t Hold Back" and Julien Dyne’s "Stained Glass Fresh Frozen," and places them alongside tracks by Flying Lotus and Jai Paul.
It’s 16 tracks in before the BPMs enter disco territory, with Rodney Hunter’s "Uptown Tricks" remix of the Fort Knox Five. But not even two minutes later, that momentum veers into the solemn solo guitar of José González, who sings "we’ll remain after everything’s been washed away." From there, Moodymann picks it back up, from the quickening future jazz of "Tag Team Triangle" to the deep house of Joeski, and where other producers might lose or confuse a crowd with such temperamental switches, Moodymann holds us calmly in the palm of his hand. Who else would suss out a Kings of Tomorrow track from 2013 (stuck on a CDR promo no less), some 20 years after their '90s heyday, to push the mix to its ecstatic peak? But that’s exactly what he does on "Fall for You."
He again deviates from trajectory for a dramatic, beatless reading of Anne Clark’s "Our Darkness." For Detroiters who grew up on legendary radio jockey the Electrifying Mojo, this proto-techno spoken word track is a classic, the type of brooding synth-pop track (what you’d now deem darkwave) that in the early '80s music blurred the color lines on the dancefloor. Dropping a live, piano-only version here, Moody harkens back to his Detroit roots, and Clark’s lines about "[an] idealistic assurance that…we'd keep our heads above the blackened water/ But there's no room for ideals in this mechanical place" are particularly resonant. Clark’s song rails against detachment as a means for surviving in the modern era, of keeping ideals intact in the face of insurmountable odds. It might sound like an outlier in the mix, but it doubles as Dixon Jr.’s own outlook. "I am not the hottest motherfucking DJ in the world," is how Moody put it during his RBMA lecture. "I am not going to play the hottest tracks in the world, but what I will do is give you the truth on them turntables."


Off That Loud is billed as DJ Spinn's first EP for Hyperdub, but the footwork producer and Teklife co-founder with the late DJ Rashad has been recording for decades, with or without his name on the title. On his first solo release since Rashad passed away in April 2014, Spinn finally takes center stage.

Off That Loud EP

Off That Loud is billed as as the first EP for Hyperdub from DJ Spinn, but this designation obscures the footwork producer's long history in the Chicago underground electronic scene. Spinn, born Morris Harper, has been pressing energetic, beguiling footwork onto record for decades, even if only a fraction of those releases have featured his name on the title. Back in the '90s, he dropped tracks on cassette with longtime collaborator and Teklife co-founder, the late DJ Rashad. He squeezed through the closing doors of vaunted ghetto house label Dance Mania before it shuttered in the early '00s, releasing a raw, crackling track in 1998 called "Mutha Fuc*a" that Dance Mania misattributed to DJ Thadz. He also had a hand in eight of the 14 songs on Rashad's masterpiece, 2013's Double Cup, and this year alone appeared on a slew of Teklife and Rashad-related releases.
Spinn's lack of marquee status often seems due to his eagerness to work with others, but he finally takes center stage on Off That Loud. It's his first solo release since Rashad passed away in April 2014, and the EP comes during a particularly rich year for footwork. Massive opener "Throw It Back" delivers megaton drops between scorching acid synths and sprightly, rapid-fire kicks. Footwork remains a niche concern—Planet Mu honcho Mike Paradinas recently told Dummy Magazine footwork albums sell so poorly he can only afford to drop two a year—but "Throw It Back" could chameleon its way onto a playlist of arena-sized EDM songs as easily as it could provide a soundtrack for dancers facing off at Battlegroundz on Chicago's South Side.
Spinn handles two of the EP's four tracks on his own—"The Future Is Now", with its cross-stitching rhythms, is the hardest of the four, and the title track marries rich Rhodes organ with sputtering vocal samples and twitching patterns of percussion. But the best of the bunch is a tune Spinn made with Rashad, the previously released "Dubby", which showcases the pair's penchant for experimentation while keeping footwork grounded in its idiosyncratic pulse. Spinn and Rashad marry jungle breaks to footwork's syncopated drum and bass, and then pass the mic to Danny Brown, who raps: "I don't know 'bout where you from but this is how my hood work." Brown's squawk has colored downtrodden tales about growing up in Detroit, but he sounds utterly at home on "Dubby". As Spinn adeptly blends foreign sounds into a distinctly Chicago genre, Off That Loud shows his ability to help footwork thrive outside its birthplace. Spinn earned his veteran bona fides years ago, but Off That Loud feels like a new beginning.


Chances are, the first time you heard DJ Shadow's Endtroducing, it sounded damned unique. No, the fat beats and ...

The Private Press

Chances are, the first time you heard DJ Shadow's Endtroducing, it sounded damned unique. No, the fat beats and the goofy samples and the wickedy-wicky weren't anything new, even back in those halcyon days of '96, but the idea of fat beats and goofy samples and wickedy-wicky on an album bereft of some sucka MC's verbal gymnastics-- that, friends, was gold. Instrumental hip-hop, of course, was no more radical an idea back then than it is now; but for many of us young wannabes and poseurs, Endtroducing was the first time we'd ever heard anything quite like it.
And even if the concept wasn't just out of the box, the freaky melange of John Carpenter soundtracks and visceral, pounding punk beats in a hip-hop environment most certainly was. So, DJ Shadow may not have invented instrumental hip-hop, but he did sound a revolution with it. And now, six years, two mix records with Cut Chemist and a handful of UNKLE remixes later, here we all sit at our little terminals wondering if Mr. Josh Davis is capable of doing it all over again.
But The Private Press is being dropped into a market vastly different than the one that gave birth to its predecessor. Ninja Tune, Mo'Wax and other like-minded labels have spent the last half-decade slowly and laboriously digging a grave in which to bury the beats-and-samples formula. Which might explain why-- despite its fair share of fat beats, goofy samples and wickedy-wicky-- The Private Press will not go down in history as the record that brought electronic music out of its state of imminent peril.
After an irritating introductory segment in which some woman who's probably dead now recites a written letter to a friend (the record is littered with these skit-like clips, and though some are mildly entertaining, they tend to detract from the real deal), the album opens up for real with "Fixed Income," a fine-enough instrumental hip-hop retread that leaves little impression after it's clicked over to "Walkie Talkie," where things lighten up a bit. Built from a harsh drumbeat and a few alternating samples-- a man bellowing "I'm a bad muthafuckin' DJ," a woman proclaiming, "This is why I walk and talk this way," and the now-ubiquitous cry of "SUCKA!"-- the groove on "Walkie Talkie" is seriously tight (even 'dope,' if you so dare), despite its too-quirky, scratched-upon boasting.
Up until now, The Private Press has resided in the comfortable niche chiseled out by Endtroducing, albeit with a less darkly atmospheric bent. But the record's also got its fair share of tracks that sound nothing like Shadow's previous endeavors; alongside the familiar sounding cuts, new directions abound: on "Six Days," a soulful R&B; crooner tears off close to a week's worth of page-a-days, lamenting with each that, "Tommorow never comes until it's too late." This 007-esque sentiment is set to hand drums and organ washes that wouldn't sound out of place on a pitched-down Can record. "Right Thing/GDMFSOB" infuses the standard Shadow routine with a hint of electro, replacing some of the trademark live-sounding drumming with cheesy machines, and looping a nicely staggered vocal to fit the beat.
"Monosylabik" heads a bit further down this path, matching a vocal sample and drenched-in-delay drums with buzzing synths and bumping bass. "Mashin' on the Motorway" is a short but sweet tip of the hat to road rage, "Grand Theft Auto III," and those reckless driving songs rebelliously churned out in the 1950s. Angry drivers serenade Lateef the Truth Speaker (of the Quannum Projects duo Latyrx) with horn honks and swears as he ponders the slow-moving fiends surrounding him ("I tell 'em move over/ This road ain't big enough for ya/ I'm flying like Knight Rider/ They tryin' to keep up with they Grandma beside em'/ 'Sides, maybe his steel-belted radials are expired/ Maybe they tired/ Maybe their odometer needs to be rewired"), the whole thing escalating until it crashes and detonates like a hundred-car pile-up.
Next up is "Blood on the Motorway," a comparatively slow, meditative reaction. Spoken word ruminations about death fall over simple piano chords, chimes and bad 80s synths, the relative corniness of which I could tolerate were it not for the hair-metal balladeering that comes with it. At one point, the vocalist repeats the phrase "let the laughter..." three times before he manages to get to what he wants us to allow the laughter to do. Personally, the melodramatic delivery of such underwhelming lines as, "Your eyes will not close/ Your tongue barely speaks/ But I can still feel you," over an electro-synth arpeggio isn't exactly my cup of tea. Still, I appreciate Shadow's attempt to take a different approach, even if I don't care for the execution. Besides, the song does eventually resolve itself with a hot instrumental charge headed by a tight-as-can-be breakbeat, so I suppose nothing's lost... er, except any unhealthily harbored expectations of perfection.
Shadow closes the album with a song called "You Can't Go Home Again." The title fits: though he makes a point of referencing styles and techniques from his breakthrough debut, he's clearly most interested in forward-thinking sounds. Like watching live improvisation, the results aren't always perfect, but you feel part of the process; the relative success of the whole takes a back seat to the art of trying.
It's better this way, anyhow. It would, after all, be a sad thing if Shadow took a sad shot at Xeroxing his debut. But what would be sadder is if people dismissed this album just because it doesn't live up to the strength of its groundshattering predecessor. The Private Press is more solid an album than anyone dared expect from an older, wiser DJ Shadow, and though it won't be televising another revolution, I'd be lying if I said its celebratory pleasure centers didn't communicate directly with my own.


Finally, after an endless parade of spotty and/or unofficial compilations, legendary post-punk band The Fall are given their proper due with this two-disc, career-spanning retrospective, which at last offers a convenient summary of their best material-- from their 1977 roots to the present day.

The Fall: 50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong

50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong

The Fall have seen so many compilations and reissues of their work during the course of their 26-year career that they named their latest full-length The Real Fall LP for clarification. Given the reputation of these numerous shoddy anthologies, however, and the fact that, with the exception of the excellent 2002 Rough Trade release, Totally Wired, there has never been any truly "definitive" Fall retrospective, the best a potential convert could hope for was to pick whichever disc bore the prettiest packaging.
While other Fall comps pride themselves on monochromatic slabs of cover design more appropriate for Rothko retrospectives than tumultuous punk albums, 50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong instantly has one thing going for it: Its artwork is absolutely hilarious, keenly referencing Elvis Presley's billion-selling 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong. With its image of countless self-replicating Elvises hailing down in dashing suits, that original cover was a perfect embodiment of pop music's narcissism and weirdness-- incidentally also the two subjects of nearly every song Mark E. Smith ever laid to tape.
As the first legitimate career-spanning compilation, 50,000 Fall Fans begins at the band's inception in 1977. Smith was a mere 20 years old, weaned on garage rock, kraut-rock, and a one-year stint as a dock worker. Like all young adults, he named his band after a Camus novel, quickly releasing a series of singles before 1979's full-length debut, Live at the Witch Trials. Represented by "Repetition", the pre-Witch Trials band consists of simple angular guitars, teen-pop rhythms, and drunken charm without any of the complexity or chaos that would later become integral to their work.
Around 1980's Grotesque, The Fall began to seriously investigate other genres, channeling spiraling rodeos ("How I Wrote Elastic Man"), steely noise-pop ("Totally Wired"), and rhythmic shrapnel ("New Face in Hell"). 50,000 Fall Fans spends its leisurely time in this nascent stage, but the brunt of the album is understandably spent exploring The Fall's near-perfect run of albums in the mid-80s, from 1982's Hex Enduction Hour to 1986's Bend Sinister. A staggering 13 tracks from this era find their place on this two-disc set, forging a truly brilliant sequence. Ranging from the blustering, seismic noise of "The Classical" to the schizophrenic death-rattle of "The Man Whose Head Expanded", the album provides a convincing case that The Fall were the most uncompromisingly progressive and reliable band of the 1980s, whether they assumed the guise of punk heavyweights or sweet electro-divas (with the assistance of Smith's wife, Brix).
With this sort of lead-in, even the most questionable song of the band's notorious early-90s phase seems challenging and substantive. Considering that this anthology's second disc includes the band's stab at Europop/ska-rap ("Why Are People Grudgeful?"), this is truly a feat. As a general rule, this disc pulls one song from every album released from 1990 to the present, distilling each allegedly mediocre release to one stunning single. If anything, however, these selections compel listeners to return to the band's 90s output with their tranquilized synths ("Masquerade") and brash genre-blenders (the Cocteau Twins-vs.-AC/DC dynamics of "The Chiselers").
Of course, with a career that's spanned four decades, 50,000 Fall Fans inevitably winds up omitting some of the most crucial songs in their canon, including "Oh! Brother!", "Slang King", "Bombast", and "Oleano". Still, the songs represented are consistently fascinating and invigorating, many standing as among the finest of the last quarter-century, chaotically navigating punk through ever more adventurous territory, from Countrypolitan to house music.
As a result of this willed diversity and comprehensiveness, 50,000 Fall Fans has finally stepped up to assume its rightful position as the most successful and essential Fall compilation in existence-- a convenient summary for fearful neophytes reluctant to dip their toe into the black hole of the band's discography, as well as die-hard fans seeking a distillation of choice cuts from the group's more wayward 90s efforts. Smith is never less than inspiring on any of these 39 tracks, flaunting his confrontational sneer and leering sarcasm over some of the most erratic, riled riffs in punk. In his oft-ignored later period, Smith sounds even more unhinged, furious and battered, cloaking criticisms of governmental policies in lunatic poetics that the most pretentious high-school fanzine dadaists would cower before. Smith quite literally sounds as if his mouth has been pierced full of gaping holes leaking bile and cancer.
Incidentally, this is also the fundamental difference between Smith and Elvis. Elvis was pure sexual dynamite, basking in his own libidinal juices; in sharp contrast, Smith is the ugliest, grimiest beast of Lucifer to ever drag his expanding head from a pub's water closet. Elvis may have drooled sex, but it was artificial, manipulative, cheap. The Fall, like all truly great sex, climaxes in rage, regret and release-- the three criteria for all utterly essential rock music. 50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong chronicles more than two decades of those climaxes, perhaps to one day be held in similar regard to the album its artwork parodies.


Of Montreal's darkest and most experimental record to date, Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer gorily chronicles frontman Kevin Barnes' recent relationship woes, all while rebuilding the band as a mechanical synth-pop/glam hybrid.

Of Montreal: Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

The breakup album is a familiar pop music trope-- countless artists have harnessed the emotional fallout of a relationship to fuel their songwriting efforts. The less imaginative practitioners wind up churning out acoustic self-pity or overdriven spite and angst, while the most effective have draped heartbreak in a clever disguise (like the high-gloss domestic dispute of Fleetwood Mac's Rumours), or rendered personal pain as the most important event in human history (like the symphonic catharsis of ABC's The Lexicon of Love).
Despite a soft spot for concept albums, Of Montreal would seem an unlikely participant in this arena, having spent much of their career eschewing confessional introspection for escapist fantasy. Even amidst the notebook-doodle psychedelia society of Elephant 6, Kevin Barnes and his compatriots stood apart for their day-glo Nickelodeon world, full of bizarre characters with alliterative names and toy-box, sugar-high arrangements. While there's always been a dark streak running through Of Montreal's cartoon universe-- and Barnes' chipmunk-shrill voice sometimes tips disturbingly from childlike to desperate-- few would look to the Athens, Geo., band to accurately depict love's gory aftermath.
Yet in the past year, storm clouds have intruded upon the band's rainbow domain as Barnes went through a separation (he and his wife have since reconciled); concurrently, the band's sound has been slowly molting off the giddy pop of its early days, using its past couple of albums to test the waters of a more sinister combination of synth-pop and glam without abandoning its steakhouse jingle-worthy melodies. These two plot threads intertwine at Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, an astonishingly good late-period record from Of Montreal that's as uncomfortably savage in its depiction of breakup psychology as it is relentlessly catchy.
The emotional accuracy of the record lies in Of Montreal's unwillingness, or perhaps inability, to settle for "woe is me" moping. Barnes resists the urge to cry into an acoustic guitar, instead portraying the full-spectrum manic mood-swings of the brokenhearted: desperately seeking distraction in drugs or religion, imagining himself as a cynical-minded lothario, and even considering violence. When Barnes does directly give in to his despair, it produces the monolithic 12-minute centerpiece of "The Past Is a Grotesque Animal", a gutwrenching soundtrack provided by an unrelenting bassline and a synth solo that sounds like an angry flying saucer.
The rest of Hissing Fauna is an endless supply of off-kilter but instantly appealing melodies intact over the band's newly robotic sound. The focus throughout is on mechanized rhythms and synthesizer swirls, though the tempos are no less hyperactive, and the attention span of the arrangements is only a shade longer. Occasionally, the bright synthesizers appear to mock Barnes' shadowy feelings, like the roller-skate organ riff that flits about the pleading drug-use of "Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse", or the Christmas carol exterior of depression saga "A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger".
Of Montreal's full embrace of this new sound works best in the record's second half, as after the soul-purge of "The Past Is a Grotesque Animal", Barnes tries to slut away the pain through a series of sex jams no less memorable for being completely unconvincing. "Bunny Ain't No Kind of Rider" finds the singer sauntering through the club brushing off sexual advances from both women and men and boasting of "soul power," while "Faberge Falls for Shuggie" struts over a bassline funkier than I ever could have imagined the group capable of producing. Throughout, Barnes multi-tracks several lascivious voices, making bizarre double entendres out of parachutes and interiors. It's not the direction many of their fans might've imagined they'd take, but it's that very attribute that makes it so ceaselessly fascinating and inexhaustibly replayable.


Neil Young's first collection of new material with Crazy Horse since 2003's Greendale features enough life and fuck-you attitude to remind a listener that "it's better to burn out than to fade away" wasn't necessarily about dying young, so long as you avoided phoning it in.

Neil Young / Crazy Horse: Psychedelic Pill

Psychedelic Pill

The signature Crazy Horse move is The Huddle. No matter how big the stage, Neil Young, Billy Talbot, and Frank "Poncho" Sampedro will inevitably find themselves tightly packed in front of Ralph Molina's drums, bobbing and flailing in such close proximity that it's a miracle they never crack guitar necks. It's an aggressively insular move for a band playing to thousands, an unambiguous signal that the feedback storm they are conjuring is often more about them than us.
That self indulgence is the beating heart of each time Young deigns to bring the Horse back out of the barn, even as the decision excites his fanbase like no other. To the point, the latest Crazy Horse reunion was announced with the leak of an instrumental jam on the chords to "Fuckin' Up" and "Cortez the Killer” that ran over 37 minutes. Then there was the first official leg of the comeback: Americana, where Young fed old-as-dirt traditionals such as "She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain" into the Crazy Horse engine, followed by an arena tour that filled nearly half the setlist with unreleased material.
But Psychedelic Pill might be the most accurate studio portrayal of The Huddle yet. Three songs gallop past the 15-minute mark, and the opener "Driftin' Back" approaches a half hour, quickly weeding out the faint of heart. They are the three longest songs ever released by Young (if you don't count Arc) and they feel like it. "Driftin' Back", in particular, is nearly trance-inducing as it locks onto the same chord progression, interrupted only occasionally by mini-rants about hip-hop haircuts and mp3 sound quality.
Yet other than these marathon challenges, playing with Crazy Horse is playing it safe for Young: You know exactly what you're going to get, and there are none of the pleasant surprises of 2010's excellent loop-dabbling Le Noise. One song, "She's Always Dancing", even sounds like the band just took an instrumental rehearsal of "Like a Hurricane" and added a new vocal track over the top-- which is good enough to make it the second best jam on the record. "Ramada Inn" is paint-by-numbers Crazy Horse, indistinguishable from any of their late-period outings beyond its refusal to end.
It will also surprise no Neil Young fan that most of the songs here are about aging, continuing a roughly 50-year streak of obsessing over getting old. So much of Psychedelic Pill is Young looking back, from the long-married couple of "Ramada Inn" to the classic rock name-dropping of "Twisted Road". He even reminisces his way back to the cradle, with "Born in Ontario", a brief country-rocker that's a welcome breath-catcher, even though it bears a giant hole in the shape of deceased longtime collaborator and auxiliary Horseman Ben Keith's slide guitar.
But Neil's particular flavor of nostalgia has always been a little on the sour side. When he references the Woodstock Generation, he tends to do it with a scowl, angry about the failure of the hippie dream even as he still clings to its promise. Psychedelic Pill suggests a softening of that harsh stance, particularly on the saccharine "Twisted Road" with its irony-free shout-outs to Dylan and the Dead and the distracting "trippy" effects that ruin the title track.
Thankfully, the album's final epic, "Walk Like a Giant", scrawls a jagged line through that cuddly history with a single chord change, coming immediately after an immensely dopey verse about how Neil and his friends were gonna save the world. In fact, "Walk Like a Giant", is easily the best studio Crazy Horse performance since Ragged Glory. Once again, the formula is unchanged-- it even swipes pretty heavily from the "Hey Hey My My" riff-- but between the verses the Horse is whipped until it foams at the mouth. Everything great about Neil Young, electric guitarist, is on full display, his singular tone veering from feral growls and feedback to blistering fury while the other three egg him on with subtle, perennially underrated counterpoint.
Despite the patience required to get there, the track underlines the greatest trick of Neil Young's long career: that his most self-indulgent mode can also be his most crowd-pleasing. At this point, the "these old guys still know how to rock!" angle for Crazy Horse is itself old enough to collect Social Security. But there's enough life and fuck-you attitude left in Psychedelic Pill to remind a listener that "it's better to burn out than to fade away" wasn't necessarily about dying young, so long as you avoided phoning it in. If circling the wagons is what it takes to keep Neil Young's fire raging, then just be happy he lets us pay to watch.


On her second solo album in nine months, the experimental poet and musician grapples with Black musical histories and “the work of memory.”

Jazz Codes

On Jazz Codes, the prolific artist Camae Ayewa’s second album as Moor Mother in the last nine months, the poet and musician lays the idea of genre out on the operating table and dissects it. With a career spent in close proximity to what could nominally be described as jazz, rap, and experimental music, Ayewa takes this opportunity to let in more legibly jazzy textures, like Keir Neuringer’s alto saxophone, so that she can peer at them with an analytical eye, exploring Black musical forms and their histories through bold recontextualizations of her own design.
Jazz Codes cycles through idiomatic sounds, often delivered by collaborators, each a reference that points to another reference, and on and on. Jason Moran lays down rollicking piano on “ODE TO MARY,” a tribute to the early jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams that ends with an archival recording of Williams talking about Dizzy Gillespie. On “UMZANSI”—credited to Black Quantum Futurism, Ayewa’s duo with Philadelphia’s Rasheedah Phillips—syncopated drum machines nod to Philly club and Chicago footwork. On “RAP JASM,” Ayewa slips out of spoken word to try on a rap flow and riff on OutKast: “Forever ever, motherfucker, you know the song.” Even as she references the past and the present, she worries on “DUST TOGETHER” about things disappearing when she falls asleep. She’s scribbling, contending not only with the erasure of marginalization but the inescapable fallibility of memory.
On “BLUES AWAY,” she begins, “Now how am I s’posed to play the blues when I’m feeling this good?” But what follows is a weeping complaint backed by New Jersey rap weirdo Fatboi Sharif. “You took the blues away from me,” they bawl together. So the blues is gone, and in its absence, “my heart won’t sing,” “the band can’t play,” and “the drummer can’t swing.” This is a theme on Jazz Codes: Black genres—jazz, blues, rap—have been adulterated, either destroyed or diminished. In this case, though, Ayewa is using a familiar narrative to stress that acrobatic leaps of Black musicianship from one innovation to another are a necessity as each successive form gets altered; she’s concerned with the things you must leave behind when you’re constantly made a refugee.
Jazz Codes is also a record about the anxiety of the artwork’s relationship to other works, a real artist-as-critic kind of deal. That line of inquiry becomes clear when she contemplates Mary Lou Williams’ piano sound, or tries to remake the woundedness at the core of the blues, or constructs an assemblage of hip-hop signifiers, or traces diasporic lines from “Mississippi to East Texas” to Congo to Barbados in a spoken-word passage over Aquiles Navarro’s echoing trumpet that she calls a “MEDITATION RAG.”
Her fascination with genre is something she shares in common with music critics: All those neologisms, all that anxiety about the end of monoculture, can most charitably be interpreted as trying to do what Ayewa, on “DUST TOGETHER,” calls “the work of memory.” Genre has, yes, a cursed history, and, yes, is a famously sloppy approximation of musical history, but it starts from an enthusiasm, an impulse to document not only songs, but the prisms of subjectivity they inspire as ways of remembering how music exists in the world.
And that’s where the nerdiness that undergirds Jazz Codes—like the nods to “abstract rap,” audible in the dusty, nostalgic sound of “RAP JASM”—comes in especially handy. On Jazz Codes, when Ayewa settles into a familiar hip-hop flow (which suits her well, by the way), her shift in tone connects contemporary styles with much longer arcs. The howls on “BLUES AWAY” are familiar Moor Mother textures: haunted voices at their limits. So effective is Ayewa’s conditioning of the listener to expect disaster that even when she sounds relaxed, rapping with abstract-rap stalwart AKAI SOLO, I’m still on edge, waiting for some gory scene. It’s a deeply anxious album, not least because of all these histories that Ayewa juggles.
The histories Ayewa’s drawing aren’t tidy ones, and they can’t be: Jazz Codes advocates for active remembrance as the remedy to the erasure it mourns. In the final song, “THOMAS STANLEY JAZZCODES OUTRO,” artist and academic Thomas Stanley meditates on the etymology of the word “jazz.” Over Irreversible Entanglements’ murky, percussive swirl, he tells us that the word was originally a term for sex, and though “its illegitimate origins [have been] lost in the murky brothels where it was conceived and birthed,” he calls for a return to that libidinal impulse. He urges us to free the music from its aesthetic trappings and see it as an attitude—a dirty one, one that’s embodied not only in Jazz Code’s song titles (“RAP JASM”, “NOISE JISM”) but also its repeated attempts to make memory an action, a gesture, a thrust. That’s right, I think: You have to have the grit to handle some vulgarity to even begin the job of really remembering. In Jazz Codes’ promiscuity, Moor Mother plots an escape from the oppressive confines of institutional memory.


Fueled by the curiosity of the untutored mind, Warren Defever’s collection of childhood recordings is wispy, mercurial, and improbably good.

His Name Is Alive: All the Mirrors In the House (Home Recordings 1979 - 1986)

In the 29 years that he has helmed the idiosyncratic project His Name Is Alive, Warren Defever has made many different kinds of music, few of them obvious kin to one another: lo-fi bedroom pop, ramshackle ambient, straight-up R&B, spiritual jazz, stoner metal, even a psychedelic rock opera. Recently, Defever came across a box of cassettes—many without covers or cases, the labels scrawled in ballpoint or Sharpie—that lay at the root of all of it: his own adolescent (and preteen) home recordings, from the years predating HNIA. Some went as far back as 1979, when the Livonia, Michigan, native was just 10 years old. He paid fellow Michigander Shelley Salant, of Saturday Looks Good to Me and Tyvek, to make digital transfers of their contents, and he asked her to flag anything that sounded “new agey, ambient, or had echoey guitars.” All the Mirrors in the House is the fruit of that harvest: a slim, beguiling album of reverberant ambient made with piano, guitar, and rudimentary electronics—reverb pedal, boombox, 4-track recorder—all as smudged a kindergartener’s chalk drawing. Made without apparent prejudice, and fueled by the curiosity of the untutored mind, it is an astonishing document of lo-fi alchemy.
On the surface, the sound of all 15 pieces is remarkably simple: They foreground graceful, slow-moving notes wrapped in reverb—though perhaps “foreground” is the wrong word for music that is mostly background. The space of a typical track is a dusky smear; the shape of a melody might suggest itself like the body of a whale slicing its way through cold water before disappearing into the darkness. The opening “Piano Rev” sounds exactly like its title suggests: sustained tones swishing gently in reverse. “Lliadin” is a soft wash of notes, wispy and kelp-like, on what might be a Casio’s string preset. “Something About Hope” multitracks fingerpicked acoustic guitar in wistful counterpoint; “Equally Divided” turns John Cale’s stabbing piano attack aqueous and unsteady. Rarely does a single track seem to use more than one ingredient; taking in the whole album is a little like looking at a backlit bar of homebrewed infusions, each glowing a slightly different shade, but all belonging to the same basic category.
But beneath that outward simplicity lies a deeper layer of mystery, and as the album progresses, its composition becomes even murkier and more mercurial. Judging from the title, “Tape Slow” might be an experiment in playback speeds, but going by the sound of the thing, it might also be something far stranger, perhaps a chorus of Amazonian tree frogs on a muggy night. “Echo Lake” is stirred by faint splashing sounds, like oars in the water; the closing “F Choir” could be a chorus of whirly tubes. The album is sequenced to flow as one seamless suite, a technique that draws extra musicality out of what might otherwise feel sketch-like.
There’s little trace of these songs’ making in their final forms; even Defever professes to remember little about how they were recorded. “By age 10, I had a tape recorder and was using it to capture the sounds of nearby lakes, thunderstorms, and my older brother’s LP collection played at the wrong speeds,” Defever recalls in the liner notes; he mentions using boomboxes to simulate multi-tracking, and an early-1980s guitar sampler with one second of memory. But these details are just teasing hints, which is as it should be: Part of the album’s charm is its flat-out improbability. As Mike McGonigal writes in a thoroughly entertaining essay accompanying the album: “Holy shit, whatever you think, this music is far better than it has any reason being.”
It boggles the mind to imagine a suburban teenager in the early ’80s making music like this, even if he did have the legendary Canadian radio show Brave New Waves to help guide his nascent taste for outer-limits sounds. Ambient music was hardly a household concept back then; Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports, which helped popularize the idea, had been out for only a year before Defever began experimenting with tape.
But for listeners familiar with His Name Is Alive’s catalog, what might be most intriguing is how much All the Mirrors in the House is in keeping with the rest of Defever’s discography. You can hear the same diffuse sounds running through the foggy melancholy of Livonia, his debut album; jump forward to 2017’s Black Wings, a workbook of ideas and alternate takes from the 2016 rock record Patterns of Light, and you’ll find exactly the same sorts of drones that form All the Mirrors in the House. “There’s such a unifying element to all of it that’s been there since the beginning,” Defever said of his work in an interview in late 2000, before the release of Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth. Some details might change, he said, “but ultimately it’s the same feelings, the same perspectives, the same emotions every time in every song.” All the Mirrors in the House bears that out: It captures the essence of an idea that has bounced through his music ever since in a never-ending chain of reflections.


Compilation LP is a remastered suite of the fiery Philly punk five-piece’s three EPs to date. The 40-minute record hurtles ahead, a swarm of righteous energy with hooks in every corner.

Compilation LP

Sheer Mag’s signature tune is “Fan the Flames,” an anarchic jamboree with mandatory party hats. Guitar licks flirt, rhythms tease, and, amidst the stirrings of Tina Halladay’s furious yowl, champagne flutes tremble on their shelves. Only then does the song show its hand: a roaring screed on housing inequality and unjust rent inflation, with a cast of gentrifying yuppies, heartless investors, and a landlord negligent of human rights and fire-hazards. It concludes in a furnace of horror: “When our neighbors burned/The realtors shook hands/With their backs turned.” As Halladay fumes, acrobatic riffs twirl optimistically. A final chorus rallies troops: “You’ve got to stand up and break the chains/Make a plan and demand what the damage pays.”
On Compilation LP, a remastered suite of their three EPs to date, the Philly gang apply their fury to a thematic swath: by turns personal and political, romantic and righteous. Like any throwback band setting the world to rights with whiskey on its breath, the band requires a magnetic personality for anchorage, of which it has five. Halladay, while rooted in punk, is a born rock star with a soul singer’s defiance: In a soaring note, her wail can crest, tremble suggestively, and suddenly snap, as if to say, “Boy, you couldn’t handle the rest.” Less merciful is lead guitarist Kyle Seely, a prolific and preternatural hook-writer: “Point Breeze” opens with a wild, red-herring riff that quickly flips inside-out; you want to rewind it, like a magic trick, and locate the sleight of hand. Seely composes the songs with his key-jumping bassist and brother, Hart; drummer Ian Dykstra lays hot coals under their feet, his jittery beats primed for a structural collapse. Matt Palmer, the agile rhythm guitarist, often doubles as the band’s firebrand lyricist.
As befits a band that rallies its disenchanted listeners to organize, the result is an all-pistons-firing unit: The 40-minute record hurtles ahead, a swarm of righteous energy; there are abundant pre-choruses, mid-song transitions plugged with errant licks, a hook for every available nook. The awesome catchiness of opener “What You Want,” from their 2015 debut EP, hinges on a cheeky three-note bassline that bobbles innocently, as if lost between verses. Halladay sings of romantic submission—“I can be anything that you want me to be/Lock me up, yeah, you got the key”—but you’d need a Geiger Counter to detect vulnerability in her whiplash vocals. Even when the lyrics turn inward, Halladay’s throaty exhortations advance a subtext of personal liberation.
Hard rock’s value as an emancipatory symbol has, of course, diminished since its 1970s heyday. But Sheer Mag’s audacity, in reclaiming an era of working-class music that nobody takes seriously anymore, is central to their appeal. Plenty of throwback rock groups, taking after Weezer, would sooner invert cock-rock chauvinism with self-deprecation or slacker charm. But throughout Compilation LP, Sheer Mag play by the riff-rock rules—power chords empower, solos blaze, and choruses rally. They identify in Thin Lizzy’s swagger an underdog spirit that can be repurposed without irony. Matched to the group’s us-vs.-them narratives, hard-rock brawn becomes a crudely effective vehicle for political urgency.
More than most groups who sing of “fightin’ tooth and nail just to take what’s mine,” Sheer Mag are attuned to the forces underpinning their characters’ malaise. On “Hard Lovin’,” they conjure links between class oppression and domestic violence; “Can’t Stop Fighting” confronts the horror of Ciudad Juarez, the Mexican city where countless women’s murders have gone unpunished. On the latter, helpless to redeem a faraway injustice, the narrator’s viewpoint pivots to confront the broad spectre of misogynistic violence. Having asserted that “We’re striking back, baby,” Halladay glares at the camera: “You say you don’t understand?/I can see the blood/It’s on your hands.” It’s the album’s most direct, and darkest, line—piercing, outraged, with matter-of-fact finality. But Halladay exudes triumph, because her rage has found its object; she signs off with a yowled “Oh yeah!,” the glorious sound of renounced apathy.


On his poignant new solo album, the former Walkmen member fondly remembers his old friend and collaborator Stewart Lupton, who died in 2018.

The World at Night

When Jonathan Fire*Eater lead vocalist Stewart Lupton passed away in 2018, the Walkmen bassist and keyboard player Walter Martin grieved his dear friend with a note memorializing his work. “Whatever the hell that thing is that happens when you see the best art or hear the best music or read the best lines—that other-worldly beauty and that feeling that you are in the presence of something that is magical and real,” he wrote, “Stew’s poems had that.” Martin and Lupton met in middle school at age 11 and the two quickly bonded, writing music together for the band that would become Fire*Eater and staying in touch long after it disbanded. So it was obvious the inspiration for The World at Night, Martin’s fifth solo album, should come from Lupton, by way of a handmade collage still hanging above Martin’s writing desk.
The World at Night examines the symbiotic relationship between sorrow and hope. For every song grappling with loss, there are two marveling at life’s uncertainty. On the title track, Martin gazes at a starry sky: “Gee, is that you whispering to me?/Well I know I shouldn’t believe what I can’t see/But oh my, with each flicker in the sky/A ghost goes ghosting by.” It’s followed by the heartfelt “Little Summer Fly,” about delighting in each day’s fleeting pleasures, and “To the Moon,” an escapist ballad about following foolish dreams. No matter the circumstances, Martin refuses to hide the sparkle in his eye. Instead of dragging listeners through secondhand grief, he invites them to sit beside him at a New York City dive, raise their cocktail glasses in a toast to irrepressibility, and take to the dance floor to celebrate dodging life’s unrelenting punches.
Here, Martin’s optimism flourishes in the best arrangements of his career. Flutes, clarinets, upright bass, baritone sax—his childlike orchestrations in “October” and “First Thing I Remember” somehow avoid crossing into gratingly twee, perhaps because he does write music for children: Cheerios commercial soundtracks, family-friendly solo albums like We’re All Young Together and My Kinda Music, the theme to the Golden Globe-winning animated film Missing Link. And yet that side gig might be to blame for the moments in The World at Night where Martin sounds like he’s singing to his kids instead of his peers. This oversimplification appears in flashes, but it’s hard to miss: listing presents a toddler might want in “That’s All I Need,” or conversing with a bird in “Hey Joe.”
In interviews, Martin jokes that he can’t sing, but his raspy voice makes for a charmingly suave and despondent narrator in “The Soldier,” the real story of Martin’s grandfather-in-law shipping off to World War II. It’s a gutting listen, the kind that looks backwards with unflinching clarity. That might be The World at Night’s biggest strength. Martin isn’t naive; he’s just a romantic. At its best, The World at Night evokes the strangest part of mourning: when your eyes fill with tears but they catch the light, making everything look brighter anyway.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Conceptualized around listening to a retro-pop radio station in purgatory, Abel Tesfaye’s fifth album is the most thoughtful, melodic, and revealing project of his career.

Dawn FM

We might have noticed that there was something universally, perversely relatable about the Weeknd’s music when songs from his 2015 album appeared on the 50 Shades of Grey soundtrack and were nominated for a Kids’ Choice Award. To think that Abel Tesfaye—who rose to fame somewhat anonymously with sweaty mixtures about Alizé for breakfast and pills that burned his brain—would one day go on to play the Super Bowl would have felt bizarre to even his fans. But after a long album rollout for 2020’s After Hours wherein the singer had his face made up with bruises, blood, and bandages, there he was on the most-watched telecast of 2021—92 million people tuning in—looking like a quarter-billion bucks. A decade after his initial rise to fame, he had ascended to true Starboy status, glistening in a red sequin suit, performing hit after hit from his catalog, pop’s antihero taking his rightful place on the throne.
After Hours was a dancefloor record released when every dancefloor was under lockdown, an attempt to bridge the gap between a despondent persona and Billboard-charting retro-funk, flirting with both impulses without committing to either. On Dawn FM, released with essentially no fanfare, the Weeknd has gone all-in on a biblical fantasia, melding frisson and fear into euphoric disco and ’80s R&B with life and death stakes. And for the first time in all his dead-eyed chronicles of debauchery, he sounds a little scared about it.
Dawn FM is a concept album, sort of. In interviews, Tesfaye has said that the album plays like listening to a kind of adult contemporary radio station as you sit in a traffic jam in the tunnel, only the tunnel is purgatory and the light at the end of the tunnel is death. For the most part, Tesfaye earns this framework—he doesn’t toss out half–baked theories on the meaning of life as much as he prods at the looming dread and terror inherent to it. He filled his early-career songs with metaphorical self-destruction; on “Gasoline,” he sings about setting himself on fire: “It’s 5 a.m./I’m nihilist/I know there’s nothing after this,” he drones in a disarming British accent, bluntly summarizing his entire discography. His previous itch was for drugged-out oblivion, but Dawn FM is all about annihilation. Interspersed with his real-life neighbor Jim Carrey playing a blissed-out radio DJ and parody commercials for the afterlife, Dawn FM takes the Weeknd on a literal death drive.
This architecture gives a smart cover for the Weeknd to experiment beyond the confines of his previous work. Past songs charted the course of a single tortured party or a frantic, frenetic night; here, he opts for more grandeur. He executive produced the album alongside pop powerhouse Max Martin and experimental electronic musician Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, and the two function like a devil and angel perched on his shoulders—Martin’s glittering effects, Lopatin’s abstractions and absurdity—alongside production from Calvin Harris, Swedish House Mafia, and longtime collaborator Oscar Holter.
The result is a singular sound, with entropy built into the catchy dance tracks. You can hear it in the panoramic bleats on “How Do I Make You Love Me,” the buzz and haze of “Every Angel Is Terrifying,” the electronic squiggles on “Don’t Break My Heart,” before the Weeknd deadpans a line like, “I almost died in the discothèque.” Even the songs that sound the most like classic Weeknd fare—the blasé throb of “Best Friends,” the rap-adjacent cadence that starts “Here We Go….Again”—are flecked with screeching strings and squirming synths. The sound is decadent because it’s so discordant; each song is sumptuously saturated with instrumental quirks. Dawn FM is a cavernous album, and the surprises on its tracks can feel like hidden crystalline chambers. A sample from a 1983 Japanese city pop song slips into a shimmery ballad; a Beach Boys member coos background vocals while Tyler, the Creator howls, “You gon’ sign this prenup,” four times in a row.
The album works best when the Weeknd spirals out. The five-minute version of “Take My Breath” stretches out into a shimmering struggle—you can hear him fight for air, his gasps reverberating over the striding beat. He negotiates boundaries with a lover on “Sacrifice,” alternating between devotion and defiance; “When you cry and say you miss me, I lie and tell you that I’ll never leave,” he hisses, but he admits the extent to which he’s already compromised. He cycles through paranoia and jealousy, only making promises when he feels threatened. “The only thing I understand is zero-sum of tenderness,” he hums early in the album, and for much of the record he flails between articulating that cynicism towards romance and defeating it, like on the treacly “Starry Eyes.” It’s a ballad primed for catharsis, but it builds toward a limp conclusion: “Let me be there for your heart,” he wails, a syrupy pledge that seems to come out of nowhere and oversimplifies the toll it takes on him.
Still, this is the Weeknd’s most ambitious project in sound and scope, and the most effective record he’s put out in years. Part of the thrill comes from hearing him take himself a little less seriously, like the wink in his voice as he sings station identification bumpers in requisite jazzy harmony. There’s also all the little grace notes throughout: Quincy Jones detailing how childhood trauma ravaged his adult relationships; Tesfaye reciting a stanza from Rilke’s “Duino Elegies,” murmuring that “Beauty is the terror we endure.” This, too, could be a thesis statement for the Weeknd’s work—the horror built into compulsion, the fear that anything worth having will corrode. But it’s the pursuit of beauty that enchants this album, the search for the sublime, the will to turn a grid-locked crawl towards death into something incandescent. “You gotta be heaven to see heaven,” Jim Carrey muses on the album’s final track, a winding spoken-word poem that unfolds like a prayer. It’s a lovely thought, an instruction and a plea—to abandon regret, to hollow out shame, to cobble bliss out of the chaos, for as long as we’re able.
CORRECTION: The Weeknd narrates the passage from Rilke’s “Duino Elegies” on “Every Angel Is Terrifying”; director Josh Safdie voices the Arthur Fleminger character.
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Former Suede mates Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler reunite for the first time in a decade.

Here Come the Tears

For two albums, Brett Anderson and Bernard seemed as if they could grow to become the Morrissey & Marr of the 90s-- Suede's self-titled debut and its follow-up, Dog Man Star, are among the best records of Britpop, and even the B-sides they wrote together were pretty consistently amazing songs. The fraying and ultimate disintegration of their creative relationship pushed Dog Man Star to its final gloriously turgid, expansive state, with each musician trying to muscle his best ideas to the front. That album isn't just a collection of a band's recently written songs, it's a sweeping picture of despair and interpersonal meltdown. Post-Butler, Suede distanced themselves from that sound, opting instead to become a sort of gutter party band. The catharsis seemed to sap Butler as well-- his solo records are only a song or two removed from totally mediocre, and aside from "Yes" I'd rather not think about his collaboration with David McAlmont.
Ten years later, Suede are dead, Butler's way under the radar and here come the Tears, the official reunion of Anderson & Butler. It's a reunion that's been about as low-key as a reunion between these two could possibly be, given that Suede were once so huge that Virgin Megastores across Britain changed their name to Head Music for a day to mark the release of the band's fourth album. Listening to the results, it seems as though they genuinely enjoy working together again-- when Anderson refers to "you and me" on "Two Creatures" and talks about running away to warmer weather in Africa, it almost sounds like he's talking to Butler and not some anonymous girlfriend as the guitarist's distinctively dissonant leads snake alongside his vocal.
That amity is perhaps a part of the reason Here Come the Tears doesn't quite measure up to the duo's past together-- the seething tension and bitchy moodiness of their original partnership undeniably made the music better and more intense. The other reason things aren't quite as transcendent this time is the more mundane matter of Brett Anderson-- he's selling his voice to tobacconists on an installment plan and can't do melodrama like he used to. Plus, years of frequently lazy lyric writing with Suede Mk II haven't entirely cleared up. That said, there also are no songs that simply list the ways in which various unrelated people are decadent and none that string together references to gasoline, diesel, alcohol, polythene, and trash in a random sequence.
Removed from the context of their past work (ha!), Here Come the Tears is a good album, one with the respective drum and bass work of Mako Sakamoto and Nathan Fisher grounding sweeping ballads like "Apollo 13" and driving the speedier songs solidly so that Butler's guitar is free to roam, jousting with the vocal melodies. Butler is still an impressive guitarist-- his solo on "Lovers" is a particular highlight. Other hallmarks of the classic Dog Man Star-era sound that surface here include the wandering, Leslie'd pianos and smearing, slightly antagonistic string arrangements, which are held back for just the right moments.
So color me pleasantly surprised-- I really expected very little from an Anderson/Butler reunion, but they've ably demonstrated that my old-guard Suede fan anxiety was unfounded with catchy, dramatic songs like "Imperfections" and "Lovers". There's nothing as great as "New Generation", "She's Not Dead", or "The 2 of Us" but there doesn't have to be, either, because the Tears have enough natural dynamism of their own to stand alone.


Cold Devil is the most compelling album of the Los Angeles emcee’s career. His avant deadpan and impressionistic relationship to the beat is hard to classify, but it’s icy and unforgettable.

Cold Devil

The second song on Cold Devil, Drakeo the Ruler’s excellent new album, is called “Flu Flamming,” its title a nod to the L.A. rapper’s vast and inscrutable vocabulary of code, slang, and shorthand. It opens with a nine-second riff without drums, where the syllables of each line are chopped finely or pushed to (and past) the end of a measure. It doesn’t sound as if it’s part of any conventional or recognizable flow. But at the 10-second mark, the drums kick in, and Drakeo plunges immediately into a pocket: “All mud in my kidneys, my plug is a Gypsy/This a fully automatic, I let my kids hold the semis.” From there, with only minor adjustments to that song’s opening run, he’s mud-walking in Christian Louboutins, coolly breaking wrists, holding heat like Luke Skywalker playing laser tag, all the while playing cat and mouse with the beat.
Despite a low national profile, rap fans around Los Angeles have been eagerly awaiting the return of Drakeo’s avant deadpan. The South Central native, who spent 2015 and ‘16 garnering a reputation as one of the city’s most magnetic—and immediately influential—new artists, was incarcerated for much of 2017, following a January raid on a home that yielded weapons he maintains weren’t his. (The raid took place one day after his son was born, and until Drakeo was freed, he was only able to meet his child through bulletproof glass during visitation hours.) Cold Devil is not only a continuation of the momentum Drakeo’s been building for more than two years now, but a step forward in form, a distillation of what makes him such a compelling stylist.
Drakeo’s adventurousness as a vocalist can at first recall West Coast legends like E-40 or Suga Free, but where those two would slip in and out of the drums to dazzle—they’re virtuosos—Drakeo will often use his voice percussively, as if creating a new rhythm track, separate from the percussion. See “Hood Trophy,” where he raps alternately against and with the drums, slowing to a laconic creep, then pushing the pace at will. Even with more familiar approaches, he transcends: on “Fool’s Gold,” Drakeo darts around in what sounds like a dream-state, his voice cutting through the din.
As a writer, Drakeo works in short, impressionistic bursts. He can be wildly funny or rattle off bone-chilling threats without breaking character. Cold Devil’s centerpiece is “Neiman & Marcus Don’t Know You,” where Drakeo’s wearing “princess cuts on my wrist like an emo bitch,” and where the most scathing insult in L.A. county is that the clerks at Neiman Marcus don’t even recognize you. Some rappers are great for their ability to mimic an inner monologue in their writing; Drakeo is able to evoke powerful emotions with the same energy and cadence that you’d use to talk to yourself, under your breath.
On previous works, like last December’s So Cold I Do ‘Em or 2016’s I Am Mr. Mosely 2, he positioned himself as a counterpoint to rap’s mainstream forces, applying his more difficult—and often more rewarding—style to industry beats. Cold Devil feels more like an important piece of an L.A. rap scene that’s become one of the country’s most vibrant. The album’s B-side sports back-to-back collaborations with 03 Greedo, the experimental rapper whose own Odyssean records have made him a cult hero in the city. (That working relationship, where Greedo’s vocals run hot to Drakeo’s icy cool, seems as if it could yield some truly stunning music.) There are also contributions from the likes of Drakeo’s brother, Ralfy the Plug, and two from Ohgeesy, from the rapidly breaking group Shoreline Mafia.
That Drakeo’s flow has already been co-opted by other rappers around L.A. is a testament to its appeal, but it’s difficult to imagine someone accurately replicating his style. His mixture of the city’s street rap traditions and its most colorful fringe elements makes for a strange, irresistible alchemy, the kind that can’t be easily decoded.


Grouper follows her outstanding 2008 LP with another mix of submerged instruments and field recordings, on a split with a new Roy Montgomery track.

Roy Montgomery / Grouper: Roy Montgomery/Grouper

Roy Montgomery/Grouper

In 1996 the label Drunken Fish released the monumental 3xLP compilation Harmony of the Spheres. Featuring performances by Charalambides, Flying Saucer Attack, Bardo Pond, and Loren Mazzacane Connors, this lavishly packaged set proved to be a landmark, bringing several different underground streams into confluence. Inspired by ancient Pythagorean principles, each of the artists on Harmony of the Spheres strived to transform the base materials of folk, country blues, ambient, and psych-rock into vehicles for innovative, wholly unique personal expression.
It's never easy to conclusively measure an album's influence-- particularly a boutique collection with a limited initial pressing. But at the very least, it can be said that Harmony of the Spheres has since proven to be uncommonly prescient, as the music contained on its six sides anticipated the direction of many subsequent branches of avant-rock, shadowy folk, and glo-fi. And the album's echoes are certainly in easy evidence on this split album by Portland's Grouper (aka singer-songwriter Liz Harris) and the prolific New Zealand guitarist Roy Montgomery, himself a Harmony of the Spheres alum.
In fact, the echoes are literal on Montgomery's side, as he here presents a lovely live version of his majestic piece "Fantasia on a Theme by Sandy Bull", which first appeared on Harmony of the Spheres. But Grouper's songs seem to be direct spiritual descendents as well. Constructed using elemental strands of voice, submerged instruments, and field recordings, Harris' work here is never less than captivating, and a decade and a half later it seems in its own way a perfect distillation of Harmony of the Sphere's music and guiding principles.
On the original version of "Fantasia on a Theme by Sandy Bull", Montgomery took melodic cues from Bull's album E Pluribus Unum, gradually layering his gently strummed chords with multi-tracked effects and overtones to build dense and formidable sheets of sound. For this solo recording, the piece has been necessarily stripped-down, and the loss of the overdubbed layers of dissonance and texture do somewhat diminish its overall effect. Still, Montgomery is a skillful player with a distinctive, immediately recognizable sound, and in the crowded field of solo guitarists, that can sometimes be half the battle. Though it is not quite as transcendent as the original version, it can be a hypnotic pleasure to hear Montgomery cycle through this track's revolving, raga-like melodic ideas.
Grouper's half of the split is even more rewarding, and the music Harris presents here is among her most focused and spellbinding to date. Though divided into four tracks, her side seems composed to be heard as one continuous whole, as her vocals and source recordings bleed from one track into the next. As with such peers as Charalambides' Christina Carter or Fursaxa's Tara Burke, there is a timeless quality to Harris' vocals on "Hollow Press" or "Hold the Way". Her simple melodies and scales can occasionally recall the medieval vocal music of Hildegard Von Bingen, which, combined with her obscured or non-existent lyrics, can give her work a delicate liturgical character.
Her primary backing instrument of choice here seems to be a processed Rhodes or Wurlitzer keyboard, and its warm, distorted texture blends invisibly into grainy tape effects to give the whole performance a welcome degree of hazy dissonance. It is especially lovely to hear the way these songs seem to emerge out of the static and then return again to darkness, as though they are being broadcast from an orbiting satellite that is only briefly in range of Earth, with Grouper's music already moving on to seek harmonies on another heavenly plane.


The first reissue of the 2001 film’s soundtrack proves the last legacy of three Archie comics characters.

Various Artists: Josie and the Pussycats—Music from the Motion Picture

Back in the Spring of 2001, a boom of lucrative live-action remakes of cartoons, comics, and picture books led to the radical reinterpretation of a beloved fictional band: Archie comics’ Josie and the Pussycats. In the original comics and television show, the Pussycats performed bubblegum pop as pure as their leopard-print bodysuits were skintight. But for the band’s big-screen debut, Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont, the writing/directing team behind the 1998 teen hit Can’t Hardly Wait, wanted to parody the synthetic nature of contemporary pop music and comment on the commodification of individuality.
Conveniently, there was no lack of material for them to pull from. The unfathomable success of the Spice Girls had spurred a cottage-industry of pop stars that revolutionized the market: as of August 2001, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, *NSYNC, and the Backstreet Boys had sold a combined 76 million CDs, more than a quarter of the U.S. population at the time. On the other end of the spectrum, pop-punk bands were neck and neck with Destiny’s Child on the Billboard Top 40 and nu-metal was crawling out of the shadows to invade MTV. Riot grrrl was taking its final breaths, bands like Hole, L7, and, the Breeders were all in various states of hiatuses, and recent touchstones for female power-pop like the Donnas largely existed in the margins.
Josie and the Pussycats aimed at an audience somewhere in the middle of all this, to the teen who watched TRL but could appreciate the film’s references to Hole. Josie (Rachael Leigh Cook), Melody (Tara Reid), and Valerie (Rosario Dawson) are three passionate outcasts who live in a funky clubhouse and play gigs to indifferent audiences. After signing a sudden and suspicious record deal, Josie and the Pussycats are whisked away to New York City to be oblivious harbingers of subliminal capitalist messages. (A very prescient take on sponcon!) But because Josie and the Pussycats is a Classic Teen Movie, friendship saves the day, character triumphs over the hive mind, and everyone rocks out at the gig.
Since the Pussycats were intended to be weirdos with great taste, Kaplan and Elfont decided to make Josie and the Pussycats “an all-woman Blink-182—a power-pop band with a bit of a punk feel.” The pair found an executive producer in an unexpected fan: renowned R&B mastermind Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds. From there, they built a gigantic songwriting team of the era’s alternative stars including Adam Schlesinger (Fountains of Wayne), Adam Duritz (Counting Crows), Anna Waronker (that dog.), Kay Hanley and Michael Eisenstein (Letters to Cleo) and many others. Originally recruited to provide the Pussycats’ backing vocals, Hanley soon found herself voicing Josie after the original singer was canned. Hanley’s own band Letters to Cleo had disbanded in 2000 and the producers thought her spunky sneer was perfect for Josie.
But what makes Hanley’s work on the Josie soundtrack so exhilarating is that she is vocalizing her own awakening. In the reissue’s liner notes, Hanley recounts her anxieties about performing the soundtrack’s only ballad, “You Don’t See Me.” “I just thought I was in a band and I wrote the songs and yelled really loud and hit the notes,” she says. But a chat with Babyface sparked a punk rock epiphany much like the principal character’s in Chorus Line: “God, I’m a dancer! A dancer dances!” “It was the first time in my life that I made the connection between my role in Letters to Cleo and being a singer.”
But aside from “You Don’t See Me,” the 10 other Josie and the Pussycats songs here are classic pop-punk girl power anthems with heart-on-sleeve hooks to amplify the heightened emotions of adolescence. The “whatever, dude” eyeroll of Hanley’s voice paired with one-liners like, “The only time I’d look at you is on a rock and roll poster” pack a sweet punch that bounces in your head like Pop Rocks. Even the boilerplate earworms that satisfy various plot points like asking a guy to quit playing mind games (“Pretend to Be Nice”), ignoring the haters (“You’re a Star”), and sexual independence (“Come On”) are impossibly catchy. The soundtracks’ two covers, “Real Wild Child” and “Money (That’s What I Want)” are the only real misses; even the revamped “Josie and the Pussycats” theme with its absurd “Long tails and ears for hats/Guitars and Marshall stacks” rhyme comes off better than this pair of rock’n’roll knockoffs.
Josie and the Pussycats’ best moments are when Hanley celebrates her own self-worth. The soundtrack’s revved-up opener and montage-ready single “3 Small Words” is an ode to self-love that recalls Letters to Cleo’s biggest hit “Here and Now” in Hanley’s rapid-fire delivery of peppy word associations like, “I’m a punk rock prom queen/Brown paper magazine.” Later, on the revelatory “Spin Around,” Hanley is dizzy and drunk off the merry-go-round that is coming into consciousness. (“I’ve been staring at the sun some time/And it gets dark inside but I don’t mind” is Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” for Josie fans.) And then there’s “Shapeshifter,” a call-out of a hypocritical faker that doubles as a statement against male privilege, a song as necessary in 2017 as it was in 2001.
It would be criminal not to mention the two bonus tracks by DuJour, the fictional boy band of tacky horndogs featuring Seth Green and Donald Faison. “DuJour Around the World” and “Backdoor Lover” perfectly lampoon the nasally falsettos and the “girl I love you so much my voice is weak” warbles of *NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys. They also whip the tissue-thin veil off those band’s sugarcoated sexuality and sing a song so obviously about anal sex that it’s a wonder that Jack Valenti wasn’t sent to an early grave.
For all this, Josie and the Pussycats bombed at the box office. It was largely reviled by critics who took the film’s tongue-in-cheek satirization of consumer culture at face value. “Josie and the Pussycats are not dumber than the Spice Girls, but they’re as dumb as the Spice Girls, which is dumb enough,” wrote Roger Ebert, who clearly missed many points. Others jeered at the actress’ musicianship, which they saw as amateur. Despite this critical disdain, Josie and the Pussycats reached its ideal audience—young women—who helped push the soundtrack to No. 16 on the Billboard Soundtrack charts.
Josie and the Pussycats, both the film and the soundtrack, continue to influence people who do not identify with the aggressively male music world. Even before this reissue, female-identifying musicians have discussed how revolutionary it was for them to see women in a mainstream platform. In 2016, Brooklyn’s Charly Bliss performed a Josie cover set. Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz and Sad13 said in a recent New York Times feature on women in rock music that she directly credits Josie and the Pussycats as inspiration (she has also covered “Pretend to Be Nice”). Now on the CW show “Riverdale,” Josie and the Pussycats are performed by three black women. In that same New York Times feature, as well as a more recent one that wonders if women should make their own pop music canon, the point seems to be missed. There has never been a moment where women haven’t existed in the pop or rock world. Underappreciated and forced to work twice as hard, yes. But absent, never. Perhaps it seems simple but just making space for non-male voices can be a radical means of shifting perception. Josie and the Pussycats did that in the mainstream and its impact still reverberates today.


Tapping Detroit techno, IDM, and boom-bap hip-hop, Lone’s horizontally inclined DJ-Kicks mix uses expert selection and programming to highlight his own distinctive musical sensibility.

DJ-Kicks

The DJ mix typically fulfills a number of roles in the modern musical jigsaw: It can serve as a showcase for the DJ’s mixing talents, a compendium of the latest tunes, or simply the soundtrack to a good hard dance. Lone’s entry into the venerated DJ-Kicks series, his first commercial mix CD, doesn’t really do any of these. What it does do, though, is far more interesting, guiding us into the singular sonic universe of Nottingham-born producer Matt Cutler, an artist who has forged his own distinctive musical milieu where techno, rave, boom-bap hip-hop, house, and ambient are drawn together by vibrant melodies and sun-washed atmospherics.
Cutler’s description of his DJ-Kicks album as “a weird midnight radio show” makes a lot of sense. This is a place where a strong authorial voice and expert programming join seemingly disparate musical strands, and each song is a second cousin to the next—familiar but distinct. As such, track selection and organization are far more important than mixing skills, which favor functional blends that neither jar nor radically reinterpret the songs in question.
Luckily, Lone’s track selection and programming are both excellent. Rather than show off the latest promos or the flashiest corners of his record collection, Cutler’s selection is primed for feel, with every track—be it old (the gorgeous proto-IDM of Balil’s “Choke and Fly”), new (Ross From Friends’ 2017 cut “The Outsiders”), obscure (Casino Versus Japan’s sprawling “Go Hawaii”), or chart-topping (Radiohead’s “Worrywort”)—employed for its particular ambience. Naturally, the two artists that have most influenced Lone, Boards of Canada and Madlib, also turn up in the shape of “Orange Romeda” and Lootpack's “Hityawitdat,” respectively.
Out of this comes a mix that stays true to its dreamy, melodic feel as it shifts genres and jumps between musical eras. Ross From Friends’ lo-fi house is followed by Drexciya’s electro classic “Bubble Metropolis,” a song that—at 24 years old—is almost prehistoric in dance music terms, while Lone’s woozy new “Brooklyn Banks” fades snugly into Camu Tao’s 2001 indie hip-hop banger “Hold the Floor.” And unlikely comparisons emerge as the mix unfurls. The twinkling deep house of Protect-U’s “Double Rainbow” shares a certain horizontal melodicism with Boards of Canada’s “Orange Romeda,” while the loose breakbeats that underpin Gnork’s housey “U” bring to mind the shuffling drums of “Hold the Floor,” some five tracks before. It’s only toward the end of the album—a slightly awkward run from Drexciya to Balil and finally Radiohead—that the mix loses its coherence, becoming more a collection of great songs than a work of artistry in itself.
Lone’s focus is generally trained on the overall flow, rather than individual songs, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t surfaced some gems. John Beltran’s “Placid Angels” is such a lovely piece of feathery Detroit techno, it beggars belief that it isn’t better known, while “Spotted,” by Heralds of Change (the duo of Mike Slott and Hudson Mohawke), sounds like a lost classic of abstract hip-hop, striding the borderline between Boards of Canada, Flying Lotus, and the imperious pomp of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir.” Among four new Lone tracks, the standout “Brooklyn Banks” marries a spring-heeled Lone Catalysts-style beat to detuned piano, and “Saturday Night” sounds like Larry Heard if he were a stoner from middle England.
Lone’s DJ-Kicks probably won’t get your party started—not in a great hurry, anyway. But it fits snugly into an illustrious line of DJ-Kicks albums that favor the mind over the feet and the bean bag over the dancefloor. In the long term, maybe that’s for the best: Depth, clever musical transitions and enveloping ambience give Lone’s DJ-Kicks an enduring appeal beyond the vagaries of electronic-music fashion and the transient demands of the club.