Chicks. I mean, what's up with them? There's one outside my window right now, down on the concrete ...

All Is Dream

Chicks. I mean, what's up with them? There's one outside my window right now, down on the concrete, in the arms of some big, oily brute, passive and seemingly content. But the thing with me and chicks isn't just that they're virtually always down there when I'm up here. The thing that gets me is that the guy she's with doesn't know any better than I do what's going on inside her head. As much as he smiles and nods along when she moves her mouth, no male will ever truly understand what females are ultimately up to. I can only guess that she stopped out there because she was drawn to the sweet pop music dripping from my stereo like an ant stuck in a puddle of honey.
At least, this is how frustrated hetero males have been thinking for as long as the thoughts of frustrated hetero males have been recorded. Inked on papyrus, set in type, expressed in terms of humors, temperatures, and tides, and eventually grooved onto vinyl, it's a piggish sentiment backed by libido and ignorance (and more than a little unfair to women). It's also, oddly enough, a sentiment that's been the motivating force behind a great deal of beauty, most notably in pop music (possibly the greatest repository for male frustration ever created). Much of the time, male pop is trying to both seduce and explain the opposite sex in the same instant, knowing all the while that one of these objectives is a lost cause.
Mercury Rev's All Is Dream claims its share of pop brilliance by taking up this position with enormous reserves of intelligence, grace, and emotion. As long-time Rev flautist Suzanne Thorpe-- who's been with the band since their sprawling psych-noise days-- has been demoted to the orchestra pit for this release, the band is now all-male. With Dave Fridmann mainly taking the role of expert producer (and making contributions on bass and mellotron) and Jimy Chambers passing the sticks on to new drummer Jeff Mercel, the core group is possibly the most stripped-down line-up in Mercury Rev's 10-year recording history. Though their approach hasn't changed from the radically orchestral turn of 1998's Deserter's Songs, these songs are far more personal than their last set.
Even when bathed in Jonathan Donahue's constant wash of fever-dream lyrics, it's clear that these are Mercury Rev's first real (though predictably odd) love songs. "If God moves across the water/ Then the girl moves in other ways/ And I'm losing sight of either," he sings in "Nite And Fog," his collapsing love story gently suspended above its lyrical melancholy by the song's flowing strings and Fridmann's buoyant bassline. Throughout the album, Donahue takes the concept of woman as the proverbial "other" to an almost illogical extreme, funneling oceans of uncertainty into a female form and turning these emotions out again into uncomfortable reflections on death, fate, and all of those other nasty things.
"Tides of the Moon" takes a typical image of femininity and transforms it into a meditation on loss and powerlessness ("The threads that run through your life/ Hang from your sleeve/ Wind through your soul/ The kind you can't control/ But wish you could break"), only to come back to the now-unsettling romantic sentiment, "It ties you to me." But even during all this, the band refuses to simply wallow in emotion, instead confronting their connections to pop lyricism smartly.
On "A Drop in Time," Donahue quips, "Her words profane, her mouth divine/ I tried to sympathize with both sides/ But I was caught, like a floating thought/ Stuck inside of Leonard Cohen's mind." As playful as they can occasionally be, though, Donahue's words are always rooted in nagging doubts and creeping riddles like those voiced by his creaky falsetto in "Lincoln's Eyes" ("What is dark like a birthmark/ Pulls like a magnet/ Male and female/ And covets like a dragon?").
The music, of course, is by no means as unstable as the lyrics. Where the band seemed a bit more easygoing and loose in their explorations of the orchestral-pop form on Deserter's Songs, All is Dream takes the band's newfound preoccupations in a definite direction. This makes the music sound a bit overdetermined at times (most notably, the opening track's calculated symphonic swells), but for the most part, their grasp of the sound has improved. The dark, driving rocker "Chains" cuts out at exactly the right moment, and bangs out a few cathartic Beethoven string hits before again steamrolling ahead. A soprano voice that sobs out the soft prelude to "Lincoln's Eyes" returns as a banshee-wail in the song's brink-of-chaos midsection, and the song returns obliquely to this sound in its gorgeous bowed-saws outro. "Little Rhymes" makes the most from its beautiful pedal steel lines, accentuating Donahue's melody without obscuring it.
Of course, Mercury Rev don't need all this fancy instrumentation to get their point across. "Spiders and Flies," a relatively simple piano ballad, stands as the most affecting song on the album. As Mercel caresses the keys, Donahue quietly unravels, confessing fears of death and disconnection from the unnamed female who's been flitting around the edges of the album the whole time. And, with shocking ease, the band shifts from these depths into the exultantly dreamy final track, "Hercules." As the song's percussive glee swells alongside guitarist Grasshopper's transcendently melodic noise solo, it becomes oddly clear that Mercury Rev has, in some way, come to love this uncertainty-- just as the pop protagonist can't stay away from the inscrutable object of his affections, and the pop fan can find a place in its heart for the erratic motions of a band as in love with music as this one.


Orlando-born singer and synth manipulator Emily Reo's first album for Elestial Sounds, the Gainesville record label/collective behind Hundred Waters, finds her sharpening her older lo-fi material and sweeping away the tape-deck dust to reveal a palette of bright colors.

Olive Juice

Emily Reo takes things slow. In 2009 she put out Minha Gatinha, an album of narcotized dream-pop that sounded like she'd been on a steady diet of Neil Young’s honey slides (she also covered “On the Beach”, capturing and translating the song's despair for a bedroom recording generation that spent the last three years stuck on Beach House). In the years following, the Orlando-born singer and synth manipulator’s output came to a standstill as she moved from Florida to New York, Boston, and Los Angeles. Olive Juice, Reo’s first official release in several years-- even though five of the album’s eight songs have already been around for awhile in different form-- shows she’s gone a long way musically as well. Though her vinyl debut and sophomore record still moves along at a resting heart rate, she's shed the heavy-lidded haze that swaddled these songs the first time around.
Olive Juice is Reo’s first album for Elestial Sounds, the Gainesville-based record label and collective behind Hundred Waters and Levek. It’s the perfect platform for Reo, who also belongs to FMLY, a “DIT” (do it together) assemblage of visual artists, musicians, and other creatives. That nurturing community has always been an important part of Reo’s work-- when she covered Built to Spill’s “Car” at FMLY Fest last year, by the end of the song at least one audience member was cradled in another’s lap, which is kind of what her music makes one feel like doing. On Minha Gatinha, that manifested itself as lo-fi murmurs suitable for times when drifting off to sleep starts to sound more appealing than being awake, like rainy afternoons or staying up late enough to watch the sun rise. That warm and fuzzy feeling doesn't come through quite as strongly on Olive Juice, whose comparatively crystal-clear production value can take some time to get used to. But the songs sound much better now that you can actually hear them.
“Car” is a pretty good example, especially since the lyrics “I want specifics/ On a general idea” may as well be about Olive Juice. Like “On the Beach”, Reo's 2010 version of the cover nearly drowns out her voice in reverb, and the volume is turned way up on the original’s buzzing organs. With different tools at her disposal this time-- namely, a recording studio-- she sharpens the focus, leaving room for harder-hitting drums and a more coherent structure. More importantly, Reo’s voice is now front and center, loaded and plaintive like Doug Martsch’s and kaleidoscopic with her own echoes. Those same edits hold true for her other re-released songs: titles have been tightened (“Wind Can’t Hear You” is now “Wind”, “Metal on Your Skin” became “Metal”, etc.), rhythms made more pronounced, and tape-deck dust swept away to reveal a palette of bright synth colors. The keyboard warbles at the beginning of “Wind” aren’t unlike those at the beginning of the Postal Service’s “Clark Gable,” and Reo’s multi-tracked vocals nod to Imogen Heap’s harmonies on “Hide and Seek”.
A new album of mostly reissues that’s not billed as a re-release might seem like cheating, but Reo has said she views Minha Gatinha as a collection of demos made while she was still learning how to write and record songs, which makes sense. Olive Juice, then, is a natural artistic progression, even more so now that her old songs fit like puzzle pieces with the new ones. Such consistent aesthetics might prove limiting as Reo writes more new material, but until she sets her sights on something grander, they’re perfectly lovely.


On their new album, the duo of Patrick Riley and Alaina Moore continue channeling the retro warmth of ’70s pop. But their lyrics can drip with sarcastic self-effacement, adding bite to their sound.

Yours Conditionally

If you know just one thing about the duo Tennis, it’s probably that they were born at sea. Their craft is called Swift Ranger, it’s 30 feet from stem to stern, and it inspired Patrick Riley and Alaina Moore’s first album, 2011’s Cape Dory. For their latest, Yours Conditionally, Tennis clambered back onto the boat for an ocean jaunt—from San Diego to the Sea of Cortez—and, they hoped, for artistic rejuvenation.
But whether they are landlocked or bobbing at sea, Tennis remain devoted to a specific span of musical history, drawing on the beautifully rendered tunes that emerged between pop’s Wall of Sound era and the eruption of punk’s unkempt energies, give or take a few years. Think along the lines of Evie Sands’ “I Can’t Let Go,” a stringless version of the Carpenters’ “They Long to Be (Close to You),” Dusty Springfield’s “Easy Evil,” and the “Angel” side of Fleetwood Mac’s catalog. These are unimpeachable reference points—plenty of other acts would do well to study similar benchmarks—but they also pose a forbiddingly high bar.
On 2014’s Ritual in Repeat, Tennis rose above pastiche and wrote a few sturdy tunes that stood apart from the history they channelled. The group achieves this again two or three times on Yours Conditionally, displaying a keen appreciation for harmony, balmy keyboards, and analog-sounding bass. When the guitar doubles and then embellishes the primary progression on the outro of “Baby Don’t Believe,” or when Moore arcs her singing downward without warning on “Modern Woman,” the band lifts off.
Lyrically, the album seesaws between portraits of perfect love and something decidedly more ambivalent. “My Emotions Are Blinding” drips with sarcastic self-effacement: “If the night goes exactly as planned,” Moore sings, “I’ll be giving all my attention/To the world’s most interesting man.” She delivers sweet nothings in the next song, “Fields of Blue”—“I really love you, I cannot help myself”—milking the contrast between tone and message.
“Ladies Don't Play Guitar” is more pointed. Here, Moore offers a send-up of female-as-male-muse, adding bite and an incisiveness that feels new for this band. “Ladies don’t play guitar/ Ladies don’t get down down to the sound of it,” she sings. “Maybe we can play pretend?” Moore, of course, does play guitar; on Yours Conditionally, she also contributes keys, piano, and some percussion. As she presents a caricature of a woman on the sidelines supporting her rock-star-lover’s dreams—“Ladies just need your love... I can be the archetype of whatever you’re feeling”—she undermines it immediately with her presence in the song.
Despite the lyrical punch, Yours Conditionally is hamstrung by Tennis’ drums. The keys and bass on the album are unfailingly warm, but the shabby percussion is one-note, almost the work of a different band. This feels like an eyesore amid an otherwise splendid view, an indie affectation that causes the duo to fall just short of their tasteful influences. It’s a shame, because Tennis’ return to Swift Ranger furnished them with some of their best material yet.


Ohio rapper Trippie Redd’s second mixtape this year is all hooks, all emotion, but features poorly designed songs that lack the spark of his previous mixtape.

A Love Letter to You 2

Trippie Redd arrived just in time for the emo rap moment, as if summoned by the seance that is “XO TOUR Llif3.” The 18-year-old Canton, Ohio native treats Marilyn Manson as a guiding light, and he started out making what he describes as “alt rock” songs before he deleted them. Trippie cites melody-friendly rappers like Lil Wayne and Ja Rule as inspirations and has a fascination with KISS, Slipknot, and K-pop boy band Big Bang’s G-Dragon. Sometimes his songs channel melodic hardcore, and other times they’re indebted to the growls of Chief Keef. Trippie got the words “love scars” tattooed on his face and then made the tat a song title for what became his big viral hit. “Love Scars” is a gripping tune that makes plain the ache and (seemingly) life-or-death seriousness of teenage romance: “You used to say you in love/I used to say that shit back/Taking that shit from the heart/Now look where the fuck where we at.” After building a huge following on SoundCloud, Trippie shared his second mixtape of 2017, A Love Letter To You 2. The tape doesn’t fully realize the promise of “Love Scars,” but there are signs of a melody savvy MC working out kinks.
Trippie’s breakout mixtape, A Love Letter to You, earned its title, mixing scrawled bawler raps in with tortured ballads. There were songs like “Deeply Scared” and “Romeo & Juliet” that depended largely on melodramatic turns: “Shawty on fire, and she really blazin’/Flames Armageddon, yelling Jesus save me/I’ma take her soul, if she try to play me/‘Cause that’s all mine, that’s my lil baby,” he barked, as if he were truly being consumed by hellfire. The sequel isn’t as interested in twisted romance, though there are flashes of that same energy—on “Feel Good” and “Overdose on L1fe,” especially. He’s more interesting in that space, where he’s forced to think about someone other than himself. Here, we mostly get random jawing. His POV as a flex rapper requires too much colorless navel-gazing, and it doesn’t help that he has little feel for songcraft.
Unconventional song structures are all the rage among the SoundCloud elite, who either live on hooks, distract listeners with constant motion, or deafen them by cranking the decibels way up. Trippie Redd is all hooks, and he likes to mix and match parts, with mixed success. Few songs on A Love Letter to You 2 have more than one Trippie verse. There are songs where he only sings the chorus. Those hooks are usually just echoes, the same word, phrase, or basic idea repeated or reiterated. “I Know How to Self Destruct <3” is mostly just him howling “I know,” as if into the void, taking the song’s title a bit too literally. When there are verses, the lengths vary from absurdly brief to seemingly endless. Sometimes there are choruses longer than verses. He’s a rambler, so stanzas can come out circuitous (as on “Today”), hysteric, or downright incoherent; they’d be digressions if his songs went anywhere. Still, nearly every Trippie song can be enjoyable on the condition you don’t pay too close attention.
Trippie Redd is often compared to Lil Uzi Vert, and there are similarities in tone and technique. (Calling a song “Woah Woah Woah” certainly doesn’t help dispel the notion.) Trippie isn’t the charmer Uzi is, and his phrases are less earwormy, but he really commits to many of the performances; his showings rely heavily on execution and histrionics. Because of this, the songs play up a nearly biblical struggle—sin, wickedness, greed, lust, hell, heaven, and unholiness. His scenes are like the circles in SoundCloud rap’s Inferno: Sipping Actavis, lusting after women, relentlessly chasing blue-faced hundreds, trapped in a savage lifestyle. “Dangerous” weighs the hazards of this cycle—the money, the drugs, the people. He navigates darkness in “Hellboy,” where Canton, which has one of the highest violent crime rates in the country, is a literal hellscape he’s escaping from, into a rap paradise of his own making. “Deadman’s Wonderland” is like a dread-filled note to self: “You gotta get this fuckin’ bread, man/‘Cause if you don’t then you’s a dead man.” The last words uttered on ALLTY2 are “Don’t bring me down, bring me closer to God.” If Trippie could see any one of these ideas to their conclusion, it’d be deeply satisfying.
A Love Letter to You 2 never fully realizes any of the concepts it sets in motion, and the tape doesn’t match the fire or flair of its predecessor, but Trippie Redd does show signs of untapped potential. There’s value in the explosiveness of his voice and his ability to segue, how effortlessly he transitions from a mush-mouthed delivery to bellowed, impassioned pleas. And his ad-libs can take on lives of their own, expanding into full-blown croons in the middle distance. On “Overweight,” he pauses abruptly just before the end of each bar as the beat ripples beneath him, eventually building into a complete wail. Alongside Cydnee with a C, he erupts into full-throated howls for “Back of My Mind”; her pristine vocals balance his hollers. While keys beam on opener “Bust Down,” he excitedly gloats in a nasally whine. As he breaks down the levels of his savagery—taught to him by his mama, the streets, and now the industry—Trippie Redd sets his default mode. But on A Love Letter to You 2, his wildman enthusiasm isn’t enough to sate.


The singer-songwriter brings a more considered levity to her full-length debut, striking a balance between heartache and resolve.

Are You Happy Now?

The comparisons may have been inevitable given her voice—a brassy alto powered with throaty projection—but Jensen McRae wears Tracy Chapman’s influence on her sleeve. The 24-year-old’s stark folk songs center on lone guitars, with bluesy grooves and linear narratives delivered in second person. Yet the most striking similarity is the way McRae enunciates, mumbling through verses with a shy aloofness, embellishing odd vowels and images before belting choruses with glaring urgency. These punctuations can be startling, but they rarely feel gratuitous in light of McRae’s allusive subject matter: Her earliest singles confronted abuse and degradation, filtering brazen candor through an allegorical lens.
If Chapman’s earnestness is at odds with the meme-fluent, smart-aleck tone of folk-pop’s Zennial set, McRae has toed the line somewhat. In early 2021, she gained Phoebe Bridgers’s attention  with a parody song imagining a breakup at a mass vaccination site, then repurposed the track for her June EP Who Hurt You?. The impulse to balance the EP’s heavier themes with self-referential winks was understandable, but it was also a bit superfluous given how well the record’s melodrama worked at face value. Five of the Who Hurt You? tracks reappear on McRae’s full-length debut, Are You Happy Now?, although new material supplants the EP’s irreverent moments with a more considered levity.
The best of the Who Hurt You? holdovers comprise the new album’s emotional backbone. “Starting to Get to You” maintains the melancholy of its opening chords, yet the song’s economy is masterful. Volleying between fluttery falsetto and a forceful lower register, McRae intersperses hard facts (“You l-l-loved me for a second there”) with harsher realizations (“Loving you is habit-forming”); the pre-chorus and chorus stretch 12 bars, lingering like an unspoken thought. Sequenced in the album’s second half, “White Boy” and “Wolves” play like companion pieces contrasting strains of male predators. The former accretes into an orchestral manifesto; the latter chronicles a loss of innocence with barely any melody at all.
These understated arrangements ensure that McRae’s vocals are the focal point, but the co-star of Are You Happy Now? is Rahki, a quietly accomplished hip-hop producer whose mid-2010s output peaked with Kendrick Lamar’s “i.” The album’s sonics are distinguished by an open-mic spareness, bestowing the songs with well-earned breathing room. Rahki’s synthetic percussion is particularly brilliant, drawing attention to small flourishes like the breezy rimshots on “Good Legs” and foregrounded cleves on “Take It Easy.” Animated backing vocals accentuate the melodic pivots of “With the Lights On”; on “Starting to Get to You,” a descending bassline punctuates the final chorus like an exclamation point.
The chamber-pop instrumentals of “Machines” and “Adam’s Ribs” are slightly overwrought, if only because McRae’s modulated performances speak for themselves. Are You Happy Now? is an album about failing to meet expectations, or not wanting to, which means striking a balance between heartache and resolve. “Happy Girl” splits the difference with plainspoken lyrics and a delightfully moody chorus. “Good Legs” and “Take It Easy” border on easy-listening, but McRae shines in the upbeat framework, leaning into the big hooks and sticky imagery.
Her ballads might still benefit from additional sharpening—the lumpy title of “My Ego Dies at the End” is shoehorned into the song’s chorus—yet it’s hard to find fault with McRae’s instincts. Her remarkable voice is deployed in service of ambitious statements, and even the detached metaphors of “Wolves” and “Dead Girl Walking” are purposeful. People have a natural tendency to shrug off vulnerable moments, but McRae knows better.


The prolific Detroit rapper continues his dazzling run with yet another album of detail-rich, tightly-constructed street rap.

Boldy James / Real Bad Man: Killing Nothing

Killing Nothing

Call it what you will–rappity-rap, boom-bap, or “real” hip-hop–but it’s clear that back-to-basics street rap is enjoying something of a renaissance, thanks in large part to the ascension of Griselda Records. Of course, this style of music never really went away—rappers like Boldy James have been carrying the torch in the underground all the while. Now that he’s finally catching some limelight thanks to his association with Griselda, James is enjoying his own career renaissance; few rappers this decade can claim to have better balanced quality and quantity. The secret to his longevity seems to be his craftsman-like approach, one that prizes consistency and continuous refinement above all. On Killing Nothing, he continues to narrate stories of street life in the gruff, seen-it-all monotone that’s become his trademark. But James never runs out of clever, funny, and menacing new ways to weave these yarns about the drug trade—the strength of his writing and rapping prevents the music from ever feeling stale.
Like 2020’s Real Bad Boldy, Killing Nothing is produced entirely by the Los Angeles clothing and production collective Real Bad Man. While they might not have the profile of some of the producers James has worked with in recent years, they know the rapper’s tastes well. Across these 13 tracks, they do a convincing job of approximating the musically-omnivorous, sample-based beats that made living legends out of Madlib and frequent James collaborator the Alchemist. As usual, James doesn’t waste an inch of the canvas, packing each song with tightly-constructed bars. Given the pace at which he’s been working these last few years, it’s remarkable how focused Killing Nothing feels: there’s no fat to speak of across the record’s 43 minutes.
Take the opening track “Water Under the Bridge,” whose ringing piano keys recall DJ Premier’s “N.Y. State of Mind” beat. Less than a minute into the album, James is reminding you of how long he’s been in the streets and how far back his grudges go: “But back in grade school, you was running for student council/Now you a killer and a shooter but we doubt you.” As if to underline the point, he later raps, “hundred-fifty rounder, that’s a rumble pack,” nodding at anyone old enough to have once found a Nintendo 64 under their Christmas tree. This is a trick that James employs frequently: tacking on an eye-level reference to make even the wildest street tales feel accessible. This sort of thing might feel like pandering in the hands of a lesser rapper but every detail in these songs bears the texture of a real memory.
However, James isn’t always concerned with making his songs feel relatable. On “Cash Transactions,” he engages in a common boast over a dusty loop: “I’ll probably never love this rap shit more than these cash transactions/I got a passion for selling drugs.” He stretches out that last word—”druuugs”—and it sounds like he’s sneering at rappers who overstate their proximity to the streets. On “All the Way Out,” he skates over a rolling bassline, tossing out judgements (“None of your niggas killers, they just got attempts”) and compares his footwork during a gunfight to the “Hokey Pokey.” “Game Time” is genuinely gutting when, over a bed of steely synths, James admits, “Mama gave up on me early, damn near called it quits/Seemed like I never stood a chance until I caught a brick.”
In the ongoing barrage of Boldy James’ releases, Killing Nothing is likely to get overlooked: it lacks the prismatic production of Bo Jackson or the high-profile guests of The Price of Tea in China. And sure, even James die-hards might not be clamoring for more music at this point. That said, it’s hard to deny how good Killing Nothing is when taken on its own terms. The sheer variety of Real Bad Man’s production goes a long way toward keeping things fresh; James raps over a circular guitar arpeggio on “Sawyer,” a jangly afro-pop sample on “Killing Nothing,” and spaceship sounds on “Hundred Ninety Bands.” All the while he sounds like a guy who has learned how to rap so effortlessly, he doesn’t know how to stop.


Visible Cloaks’ hard-to-classify ambient music is a fascinating mix of organic and synthetic, past and future.

Reassemblage

So far, Spencer Doran’s mixtapes have overshadowed his actual albums. In 2010, the Portland, Oregon, producer posted Fairlights, Mallets and Bamboo—Fourth-World Japan, Years 1980–1986, a stunning collection of early-’80s Japanese synthesizer music by artists like Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Haruomi Hosono and Ryuichi Sakamoto. While not a party-starting DJ set, it was in its own meticulous, contemplative way, influential; you can hear its sensibility course through later works by the likes of Oneohtrix Point Never, Neon Indian, Motion Graphics, and the entire vaporwave contingency. A second volume followed, as did another series, Music Interiors, cementing Doran’s status as an innovative curator of now-obscure sounds.
But despite the bubbling ambience and generally high quality of Doran and partner Ryan Carlile’s 2015 debut album as Visible Cloaks, the initial full-length was overshadowed by the earlier mixes. On their second album, Reassemblage, however, the duo fully absorb these far-flung influences, weaving the strands into something delicate yet decidedly original. Lullaby-like though compositionally rigorous, serene but slightly unsettled, organic and synthetic, Reassemblage strikes an intriguing balance between extremes.
Like Daniel Lopatin, James Ferraro, and Laurel Halo did during the short reign of Hippos in Tanks at the start of the decade, Visible Cloaks scrutinize the once-novel digital sounds that now riddle modern pop and envelop us in our everyday lives. Just don’t call Visible Cloaks “vaporwave”—if anything, Reassemblage is the antithesis of that trend. While on the surface there is a shared obsession with the cleanliness of early digital music and the Japanese pop culture that helped usher it in the early ‘80s, what Doran and Carlile do with the raw material stands apart.
Scroll through the Discogs page for vaporwave and almost any title bears either a visual wink or track title that mimics Japanese script. As an Esquire piece proclaiming that vaporwave was dead posited last year, the genre itself was a “musical parody of pop consciousness… [a] sarcastic take on the unachieved utopias of previous decades.” But as Fairlights, Mallets, and Bamboo showed, there was a deeper investigation into the music beyond a mocking appropriation of a cool surface. The title itself comes from Vietnamese filmmaker/theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha's 1982 film Reassemblage, a documentary filmed in Senegal that doubles as a tacit admission that one can never fully decipher another culture. While never able to fully grasp the Japanese sounds they adore, Visible Cloaks nevertheless have created an album along the axis of Fennesz’s Endless Summer and OPN’s Replica, an abstract electronic album that’s readily accessible and an immersive listen.
Visible Cloaks specialize in blurring boundaries, as they collapse organic sounds into precisely machined new shapes. “Mask” works from a palette closest to those Root Strata mixes, as gamelan bowls, bird calls, and vocodered hums are stretched and processed like a Fennesz track. “Terrazzo” has Doran and Carlile team up with Motion Graphics’ Joe Williams, taking his flute and elongating it until it more closely resembles a shakuhachi bamboo version. Around this timbre, the duo stir a marsh of small blips, twinkling crystals, and koto strings, a strange sensation of natural ambience and glitching electronics blending into an alien landscape.
Even when working with thoroughly synthetic tones, Cloaks tease them out so that they clench and exhale, emerging as digital blips that seem as natural as breath. Water sounds gush out of “Screen,” but rather than replicate new age nature sounds, the frequencies become high and crinkled, like the baldly fake cellophane sea of Frederico Fellini’s And the Ship Sails On. “Valve” continues with that gentle pacing, this time featuring the crystalline vocals of Miyako Koda, one-half of Japanese elegant ’80s group Dip in the Pool. Curiously, the group didn’t factor into any of Doran’s mixes, but “Valve” sounds like a lost Bamboo selection with its deliberate mallets and misty chords. Koda is the perfect fit here and the duo shadows her already gossamer voice with what might be puffs of steam on glass rods.
Water, glass, cellophane, crystals, glass—these metaphors suggest sound that can at once seem transparent and featureless. But Visible Cloaks take pains to pivot their compositions every so often, so that light catches off the sleek edges and a full spectrum of color suddenly appears. And as the album glides along, Cloaks moves away from the easy Hosono and Sakamoto comparisons. “Circle”—with its slivers of voices, strings, and woodwinds—sounds exacting in its every gesture, bringing to mind modern composition rather than laptop mincing. “Neume”—named for an early form of musical notation—finds the Cloaks collaborating with fellow Portlander Matt Carlson. They Auto-Tune his voice, but also warp it until he starts to resemble the polyphonic chants of a medieval organum. It’s one of Reassemblage’s loveliest moments and reveals Visible Cloaks’ essential appeal, not where East meets West so much as where ancient music anticipates its digital future.


The Massachusetts songwriter’s ragged, tormented indie rock puts a surreal spin on the grim realities of life.

Through the Window

Izzy Hagerup isn’t afraid to get uncomfortable. On Through the Window, her debut album as Prewn, upsetting realities of human grief and greed live alongside scenes of nightmarish surrealism: Houses burn, bodies wither, and children’s blood fuels the megalomaniac fantasies of a billionaire. In one song, Hagerup’s narrator describes in grotesque detail her plan to gut, fry, and eat every fish in the ocean—then wash them down with wine and smack her lips. Each track has the suspense and revelation of a slow-building horror film, the kind that stirs you awake and makes you see your surroundings in a new light.
Hagerup has been working towards this debut for years, but it wasn’t until lockdown that she gave these songs undivided attention. Finding a middle ground between perturbed garage rock and ragged freak folk, the production is equally scrappy and spooky. Guitars howl, grunt, and anxiously squiggle. But there are whimsical sparkles—eerie strings or a spunky, rudimentary Casio beat—that demonstrate Hagerup and collaborator Kevin McMahon’s taste for the unexpected. Hagerup’s voice, feisty and tremulous, steers this ship through sinister waters. It can be dangerous like barbed wire, or miraculous like a bouquet of wildflowers.
Album opener “Machine,” the most pared-down song, quickly builds the tension. At first, a steadily plucked guitar treads alongside Hagerup’s aching vocals, and all seems calm. But there’s a gathering cloud of unease, evident in the way her voice begins to crack as the narrative spirals. Within a minute, Hagerup’s story careens from an unsteady late night drive—“Drive home with my sunken eyes wide/Try so hard, I flip the car/And wake up in a gurney”—into an oscillating trip between heaven and the depths of the ocean. The experience is disorienting, like waking up and trying to remember what’s reality and what’s a dream.
Hagerup is adept at writing from alternate perspectives, and on the jaunty “Perfect World,” she takes up the point of view of a sociopathic plutocrat. “It’s a beautiful land/And I plan to expand,” she sings, stealing words from the mouths of historic conquerors and dictators. Then the quest for domination takes even more a disturbing turn: “It’s a perfect world and I’m murdering my children… My skin is glowing from this baby’s blood,” she sings. As violently frightening as this is, the most striking track on Through the Window adopts the perspective of Hagerup’s father, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease. On “But I Want More,” Hagerup evokes the despair of experiencing physical decline while the soul languishes. But the song is a stubborn expression of will, and by the end, the man who Hagerup first described as vulnerable and bedridden is running “till they catch me falling,” headed for the casino to win his life back.
As in a horror film, Through the Window’s most horrific and fantastic images represent a sincere attempt to reckon with the monstrous weight of fear and grief in real life. On “Woman,” Hagerup describes a more direct revelation prompted by the imminent death of her grandmother: “Woman, I don’t know a thing about your life/I don’t know how I could ever make it right.” Her eerie coos turn sharply into aching howls, and the song morphs into sinister psych-garage as she confronts the thought that “my day will come.” It’s another striking example of Hagerup’s ability to sit with ugliness—and her refusal to let it swallow her whole.


Making peace with the passing of their late drummer, the South Korean indie rockers lean into their gentler side as they channel noise-pop greats of yore.

The Last Thing Left

Despite the sweetness of their sound, Say Sue Me are an unstoppable force. The South Korean indie rockers wrote and recorded half of their international breakout, 2018’s When We Were Together, while their original drummer, Kang Semin, was in a coma; they called in another drummer to help finish the album, and the songs they recorded with him took on a wistful remembrance for their ailing friend. Right before the band’s first North American tour was set to kick off, around the end of 2019, Semin passed away. Still, they soldiered on. When the pandemic put a halt to their touring, the band kept working. With time to reflect on the whiplash of sudden success accompanied by the loss of a friend, they retreated to their Busan studio to work it all out. The band’s third LP, The Last Thing Left, is the result of their soul searching.
A sentimental shift is immediately palpable; the rough-and-tumble fight songs of past releases have all but disappeared as the band leans fully into a gentler side. Rather than seeking the comfort you can find at the bottom of a bottle—the theme underpinning much of When We Were Together—they choose to face their demons head on, extending an open hand instead of a closed fist. “We want to deliver bright energy rather than sadness and complaints,” singer and lyricist Sumi Choi tells Rolling Stone. “Now that I’m done with what I have to/I’ve gotta find what I wanna do,” Choi sings on “Still Here,” signaling equal parts trepidation and optimism. Toward the end, guitarist and primary songwriter Byungkyu Kim glides in with one of Say Sue Me’s trademark surfy riffs, lifting the track heavenward alongside charming vocal harmonies. It feels like letting go; the same jangly sound they once used to project anger they’re now using to make their peace.
Though Say Sue Me have narrowed their focus, their reverence for the indie-rock lexicon remains broad. The soaring guitar of the high-flying “No Real Place” evokes Dinosaur Jr., while the sing-songy “Around You” wouldn't sound out of place alongside Rose Melberg in the pantheon of indie-pop royalty. Some of the styles they play with highlight their strengths more effectively than others. The acoustic slow-burner “Now I Say” would have benefited from the oomph of at least one hard-hitting expressive element. Similarly melancholy but more successful, “The Last Thing Left” uses mournful guitar and snappy percussion to drive it forward.
“To Dream” is the album’s crown jewel, synthesizing the group’s strengths into an all-out assault. Choi sings in Korean for the first and only time on the record—something she does sparingly, she says, because singing in a language she’s less familiar with creates an emotional buffer that makes her feel less exposed. That moment of extreme vulnerability is well spent, as fuzzed-out guitar and atonal howling from jazz saxophonist Kim Oki swirl together into a raging whirlpool. It’s the one moment of real tension on the album, making the intensity of its release feel particularly satisfying.
The band ends on a note of thanks with “George & Janice,” written as a wedding gift for the heads of their label, Damnably. The syrupy sweet twee anthem thumps along like a triumphant march, a celebration not only of the eponymous pair, but of how far the band has come. A musical friendship brought the group together, and it kept them together through a turbulent few years. It’s been a common refrain that Say Sue Me wear their influences on their sleeve—on The Last Thing Left, they’re holding them close to their hearts.


More than two decades into its career, the band formerly known as British Sea Power sounds newly energized, eagerly plotting new routes to familiar emotional peaks.

Everything Was Forever

“Another day, another age,” declares Scott Wilkinson (aka Jan) during his first turn at the mic on Everything Was Forever, neatly summarizing his band’s current condition in four words. Since 2001, Jan has fronted one of the most reliably ambitious groups in UK indie, and their seventh album is another testament to their consistency. But Everything Was Forever does indeed mark the dawn of a new age—after two decades of flying the flag as British Sea Power, Jan and co. have staged a reverse Brexit. From here on out, they’re continuing their course simply as Sea Power. The name change is a means of distancing themselves from the nationalist implications of their original handle and all its troublesome connotations at a time when patriotism so easily curdles into xenophobia.
The name British Sea Power was always a bit of a lark—far from celebrating England’s militaristic might, the band was more concerned with the failures of elites, the fragility of masculinity, and the fear of being forgotten. This is a group whose very first single opened with a petrified cry of “Jesus fucking Christ, oh god no,” and whose second led with the question, “Do you worry about your health?” The shift to Sea Power has done nothing to change that mission: As ever, Everything Was Forever finds Jan and his brother Neil (aka Hamilton) pondering the precarity of existence and the faded totems of a bygone Blighty. But the rebranding does bring with it a sense of renewal. Sea Power haven’t sounded this fired up since the days when their concerts would routinely descend into chaos and/or piggy-back rides. But they also sound eager to plot new routes to familiar emotional peaks.
For much of the band’s existence, it’s been easier to define Sea Power by what they weren’t: too epically scaled to fit into the early-’00s post-punk revival; too unruly to ride the Arcade Fire wave; too idiosyncratic and arcane to reach the largest-font tier on the festival poster. But Everything Was Forever captures a group that, after so many years together, knows it has complete ownership of its lane and delights in flouting local traffic ordinances. On “Transmitter,” Sea Power envision a Joy Division that survived long enough to become an ’80s arena-rock act, with equal parts motorik momentum and heartland expanse. The following “Two Fingers” sounds like it was tracked atop the same propulsive rhythm, but it scales even grander heights, resulting in a new national anthem for a divided country where the hand sign for victory and “fuck off” are almost the same. In its gradual transformation from wiry rocker to ambient, synth-smeared chorale, the song is a worthy sequel to the group’s definitive 2003 single, “Carrion.”
The abiding sense of nostalgia goes beyond mere musical echoes of Sea Power’s past. Since the release of their last album, 2017’s Let the Dancers Inherit the Party, the Wilkinson brothers lost both parents a few years apart, and though no song here directly addresses their passings, wistful childhood memories permeate the lyrics like benevolent ghosts. Beyond its obvious hand-gesture interpretations, the aforementioned “Two Fingers” was also inspired by their dad’s favored method of measuring out his booze, while Hamilton’s “Lakeland Echo,” a symphonic reverie suffused with soft-focus melancholy, is named for the community periodical the brothers delivered as kids growing up in the Lake District. But as the song embarks on its slow-motion surge toward the white light, “Lakeland Echo” starts to feel less like a paean to the local paper than a ceremonial invocation of a past that can never be revisited.
Traditionally the calm counterpoint to Jan’s impassioned presence, Hamilton practically wafts through this record as an apparition, undercutting Sea Power’s signature grandeur with hazy-headed balladry (“Scaring at the Sky”) and answering Jan’s valorous calls to action with eerie displays of creeping paranoia (“Fear Eats the Soul”). And yet as much as Everything Was Forever consolidates the band’s strengths, it also blurs the traditional contrast between Sea Power’s principal songwriters. Jan delivers one of the album’s most gorgeously subdued moments with “Fire Escape in the Sea,” a lush serenade set to a brittle drum-machine beat, while Hamilton pads out the group’s repertoire of arms-aloft anthems with “Folly,” which sets its oddly reassuring apocalyptic premonitions (“And if it makes you feel better/The creeps are all gonna cook/Along with the rest of us”) to a New Order-worthy synth-pop stomp.
Comparisons to such ’80s alt-rock giants have been a running theme throughout Sea Power’s history, always carrying the implicit suggestion that this group was born in the wrong era. But the idea that Sea Power could be the biggest band in Britain no longer requires an overactive imagination or parallel-universe portal: Days after its February 18 release, Everything Was Forever was on course to take the top spot on the UK album chart. And in light of that somewhat shocking development, the album’s tsunami-sized closer, “We Only Want to Make You Happy,” feels less like a plea for acceptance from a veteran band still grinding it out and more like an affirmation of mission accomplished. “Why aren’t you with us tonight?” Jan asks, and it’s here that the inclusive impetus behind Sea Power’s name change finds its clearest articulation: Even if you’ve missed the boat over the past 20 years, Everything Was Forever is an open invitation to hop onboard.


Boris' third album of 2011 finds the band, originally known for doom metal and fuzzed-out rock, swinging toward pop structures with decidedly mixed results.

New Album

In recent years, Boris' self-mythologizing has been the most interesting part of their project. They've thrown plenty of curve balls since forming in 1992, but after 2005's Pink, they sped up the shifts and got weirder. The trio is also more willing to revisit its past and recontextualize its output with new styles and approaches. (It can often feel like an archival project, or like you're spying on someone else's déjà vu.)
Atsuo (drums/vocals), Wata (guitar/vocals), and Takeshi (bass/vocals) were quiet after 2008's forgettable grab-bag Smile, but they've made up for the silence with three 2011 releases, Attention Please, Heavy Rocks (which echoes the 2002 release of the same name), and New Album, a generically titled collection that reinterprets tracks from those other records: "Party Boy", "Hope", "Spoon", and "Les Paul Custom '86" from AP; "Jackson Head" and "Tu, La La" from HR II. The 10-song collection, first released in Japan this past March before this rearranged/remastered version, is their most unabashed pop experiment; offering a dollop of sugary atmospherics and dewy hooks. The band insists on labeling this new angle "extreme," though only because it's an extreme shift by a group best known for its doom metal and fuzzed-out rock. (It makes more sense than you might want to assume that they recently toured with New York City dream-pop group Asobi Seksu.)
Conceptually, they were inspired by the use of Vocaloid software in Japanese pop music: the program takes typed lyrics and turns them into a song sung by "an imaginary anime character vocalist." New Album does have the feel of sumptuous, otherworldly animation. The band usually self-produces its records but brought on mainstream dance/pop arranger and producer Shinobu Narita, and the guy has a way with Candy Land gloss. All of the Attention Please and Heavy Rocks tracks sound better here-- chewier, more refined nuggets. But in most cases, it's more a comment on the quality of the other records than a heap of praise for this one.
When the formula does succeed, the results do dazzle. "Spoon" offers a swirl of shoegaze detailed with chimes, synthesizers, atmospheric female vocals, and various bright, shiny things. In this case, as with NA's other best moments, Boris leave remnants of their usual sound within the gentler field: Bigger-than-twee drums, flanged feedback, and a heavy bass hold the elements together. You also get this in the shredding, cascading guitars of the amped "Tu, La La" and the mellower closer, "Looprider", a new track that comes off like Boris doing Yo La Tengo (via Sonic Youth). The best song, though, is "Luna", a rush of gurgling, humming dynamics that continues to hectically spiral upward for its eight minutes and change, creating soaring, stringed, crunchy goodness. (The original appeared on Adult Swim's Metal Swim compilation.) The other real standout-- kinetic, sunburst opener "Flare"-- didn't appear elsewhere before New Album.
But not everything works so well. Drummer/vocalist Atsuo told Rolling Stone the two albums that provided much of the source material were put together from "one abandoned record." You don't often see Boris short on ideas, largely because they can't seem to let them go-- even if they're running them into the ground. Here, the experiments too often come off as empty or forced: Decadent on the surface, hollow at the core. The slow, stoned bedroom-psych of the new song "Pardon?" bores. The sketchy, dorky techno pop of Attention Please's "Les Paul Custom '86" and Heavy Rocks' Jackson Head" annoy (Boris as 8-Bit Muse?). During these stretches, you can hear the band struggling to write songs from outside their area of expertise. A pop song can look like a pop song, but that doesn't mean it is one. And as pretty as it can be, New Album is another minor Boris album in a string of minor Boris albums.


This best-of collection democratically gathers tracks from every facet of the band's career along with two newly recorded songs, and it acts as sort of a last laugh for a group unfairly maligned throughout much of the 1990s.

The Afghan Whigs: Unbreakable (A Retrospective)

Unbreakable (A Retrospective)

There's about eight years between the first and second tracks on Unbreakable (A Retrospective), immediately revealing how much the Afghan Whigs developed over a decade, what was gained in the process, and what was lost. Opener "Retarded", from 1990's Up In It, a lo-fi maelstrom of raw, threatening guitars, introduces the band's defining elements: the knife-fight between guitar players Greg Dulli and Rick McCollum, soul and funk melodies ratcheted to aggressive tempos, and Dulli's in-character performance ("Motherfucker lied to you," he snarls), which detractors would label "posturing" throughout the 1990s. Following "Retarded" is "Crazy", from the band's 1998 swan song 1965; it's slicker and more controlled, dialing down its tempo and filling its empty spaces with "Soul Finger"-style party chatter, yet sacrificing not one iota of menace.
Unbreakable, a best-of collection that democratically gathers tracks from every facet of the band's career, along with two newly recorded songs, is a sort of last laugh. Despite their stature today (there's a 33 1/3 book on Gentlemen in the works), the band-- and especially Dulli-- were largely neglected during the 1990s, relegated to second-tier status behind alt- bands such as Live, Alice in Chains, and Candlebox. Formed in Cincinnati in 1986 and defunct by 2001, the Afghan Whigs were one of the few alt- bands to flourish on a major label, where greater control and bigger budgets allowed them to indulge every sinister urge. While alternative rock radio still sported untucked flannel, the Whigs looked dapper in all black or tailored suits. When popular music was at its most studiously PC, the Whigs emphasized the sexual, and Dulli played power-struggle games that many read as misogynist.
While their peers could barely see past the Who, the Whigs were digging through the Stax Records catalog and covering the Supremes ("Come See About Me" is included here). Even on their early tracks, the band found a way to integrate African-American sounds and influences into their white rock: "Turn on the Water", from 1991's Congregation (whose album cover infamously features a nude black woman holding a white baby, no less) uses Isaac Hayes' wakka-chikka guitars as a punk accessory, and its jumpy guitar riffs instill these songs with a sense of motion that suggests amped-up r&b. Black Love, the band's 1996 blaxploitation-rock epic, should have been the culmination of this trend, but in 1996 it sounded overdone and obvious. Unbreakable, however, reveals Black Love to be a closet singles album, fitting three still-visceral songs into the tracklist but making "Blame Etc." and "Honky's Ladder" the most glaring omissions.
With more dry wit and intelligent frustration than was often recognized, Dulli's lyrics were also intensely personal in their intimate sadomasochism, to the extent that he invited Scrawl's Marcy Mays to sing "My Curse" on Gentlemen because he couldn't bring himself to do it (nor could the producers include it here). Taken at face value, though, Dulli's songs made him out to be an asshole, so that's what people assumed he was. And he likely played that up, too. But on Unbreakable, the hyperbolic tension of his lyrics plays as an amplification of his own angst, not as a one-to-one projection. He wasn't necessarily the people he sang about, but they were certainly part of him. The leering threats of "Be Sweet" and "66" might best be read as useful exaggerations. And yet, Dulli's voice wavers on the quieter, slower numbers. He misses notes on "Faded", muddles his phrasing on the new track "Magazine", but never self-censors. He lets the moment stand, powerful in its imperfection, the sound of someone trying to convey overwhelming inner conflict. At a time when many bands strained to project anguish, Dulli kept his performances as raw as the hurt he's singing about.
The two newly recorded tracks-- the band's first since their break-up in 2001-- are surprisingly strong, picking up pretty much where 1965 left off. It's nice to hear McCollum's guitar slicing at Dulli again and Curley's bass trying to break them up. After the military grunts that count off "I'm a Soldier", the band launches into a massive gospel assault that prominently features Memphis vocalist Susan Marshall (who also appeared on 1965), as if they had the audacity to rewrite "Gimme Shelter" with a three-note chorus and cagier lyrics. Written shortly before the band split six years ago, "Magazine" begins as a slow ballad, but builds into something more angular, lacking a hook but still intriguing.
Rather than presenting these songs chronologically-- starting with their earliest Sub Pop singles and ending with their newly recorded tracks-- Unbreakable is sequenced more organically and intuitively, mixing together songs from each phase of their career so that they comment on one another. Ultimately, the tracklist comprises a larger, self-mythologizing narrative-- culminating in the sweeping drama of "Crime Scene Part One" and "Faded", both from Black Love-- that fits well with the Whigs' album-as-song-cycle approach. Unbreakable is one of those rare career compilations that shows its subject in a new and immensely flattering light, with the potential to clear up past misperceptions and to reveal vast complexities that were previously overlooked.


A set of intimate, in-studio performances from Matthew Houck’s creative breakthrough in the early 2010s reveals new meaning and intensity in his tough-hearted songs.

The BBC Sessions EP

The albums Matthew Houck released in the late 2000s and early 2010s were gregarious affairs. In addition to streamlining his songwriting and scouting out a scuffed-up brand of outlaw country, he shifted the focus away from Phosphorescent as a solo project. On his early albums he’d been the main player, and often the only one, introducing himself as a weirdo hermit fashioning clanging contraptions from old sounds. By comparison, 2010’s Here’s to Taking It Easy and 2013’s Muchacho, with their volleys of horns and dust clouds of guitars, sound almost like a party, one that grew wilder as Houck took an unruly, purposefully unrehearsed band on tour with him. Surprisingly, their presence only made his songwriting sound more haggard and world-weary, as though all those players were a buttress against the “new terror in the canyons, the new terror in our chests,” as he sings on “Terror in the Canyon (The Wounded Master).”
It is  a revelation, then, to hear five songs from this era stripped back to their barest bones, unguarded and unshielded. The BBC Sessions was recorded during two stops in England in 2011 and 2013, with Houck accompanying himself on electric guitar. Jo Schornikow provides some impressionistic piano and backing vocals, but such is the sensitivity of her performance that she actually reinforces the solitude of this EP. Houck stands alone, vulnerable. If on the originals he came across like a man who’d been through the shit and landed on safe shores, then these more austere versions suggest he’ll never get a safe distance away from the heartache and horror. “At Death A Proclamation,” off 2007’s Pride, is transformed: there’s no drumline, no crashing guitars, no big choruses, just Houck quietly testifying and playing his guitar like he’s revving a motorcycle for a quick getaway. There’s no romance, just regret: “One day I tarried too far, and I never came home,” he sings, and the sentiment sounds heavier for having so much space and silence around the notes.
Even when he sings about racing on the desert plains all night on “Song for Zula,” which remains one of the most tough-hearted love songs of the 2010s, the impression isn’t of a man sowing his wild oats but of someone running himself ragged, if not to death. “Love is a caging thing,” he muses, although freedom might be even more dangerous. In interviews from this era, Houck seemed aware that the hard-touring life of an indie rock musician was grinding him down, that he had been racing too far and too fast. His albums were a way to shout down his demons and reflect on his own worst impulses; they carry the weight of brutal self-reflection. The EP, however, has different stakes. These songs sound like missives from the road, and that treacherous terrain gives the performances a palpable sense of desperation.
What did it take to perform “Terror in the Canyon (The Wounded Master)” every night for months on end? The BBC version chucks the two-step country beat that civilized his original along with the smeared pedal steel that colors the version on 2015’s Live at the Music Hall. Houck sounds wrung out, nearly feral, especially when he gets to the lines, “I was a bleeding actor, and I was the stage.” Houck draws out that last word as long as his voice can bear it, then pushes it a little more. He sings the “g” in “stage” like he’s digging a bullet out of his shoulder. It sounds painful. Perhaps that maimed quality would feel less potent if he’d set these sessions loose seven or eight years ago, and splitting the songs up as B-sides or bonus tracks would surely have sapped them of their power. Disconnected from any round-number album anniversary or reissue campaign, the EP becomes more than a mere footnote to Phosphorescent’s creative breakthrough. Instead, it’s a release that potentially changes how we hear those records. These new versions don’t aim to supplant the originals but they distill and hopefully disarm the terror that inspired them.

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London group's debut, produced by Matthew Herbert, is a chaotic mess that also happens to be one of the freshest things to come along so far in 2009.

Jewellery

The first sound on Micachu and the Shapes' debut album is an acoustic guitar, so what else is new. But what Mica Levi is playing isn't a chord anyone's heard before-- it's a dry, gnashingly dissonant cluster, and she's hammering away at it very intentionally. A few seconds into "Vulture", she's joined by the other two members of the band, drummer Marc Pell and keyboardist Raisa Khan, who act as if Levi's actually just playing some kind of giddy surf riff. By the time the song skids to a halt, less than three minutes later, it's made a few hairpin turns into and back out of grime/carousel-music fusion while Levi's been chanting and whooping lyrics about her inedibility in a proud, largely indecipherable LDN accent. On a first listening, it's maddening noise; by the fourth or so, it's as catchy as a jingle.
Jewellery is a chaotic record, and an enormous mess. It's also, pretty much, the freshest thing to come along so far in 2009. Levi belongs to the generation that's grown up with the total availability of every kind of music ever, and she wants to play it all at the same time as she's text-messaging, so it's a good thing that pop plus anything equals pop. She's got highbrow compositional bonafides ("influences" listed on the band's MySpace page: "harry partch, and all those other guys"); she's got some U.K. hip-hop cred (her mixtape Filthy Friends is even more of a pileup); she's a little bit rock'n'roll (the fuse that ignites the album's best song, "Calculator", is the guitar riff from "Tequila"). "Sweetheart" is a high-tech, neon-butterfly take on the hardcore punk two-step. At least one song prominently features a vacuum cleaner. Nothing stays in place for more than a few seconds, but very often her avant-gardist and party-time impulses snap together, as when the scrape-and-tweak that opens "Lips" abruptly congeals into a wiry bhangra groove. It's not clear, though, how much the insanely clever arrangements are the band's and how much they're producer Matthew Herbert's.
At the center of this cyclone of jujubes and sandpaper is Levi's tart, snaggy voice, which occasionally recalls Lora Logic's dizzy trill but more often ducks down into the mix and clings to no more than a couple of notes. (It's probably perverse to wonder how awesome it would be if the group collaborated with a really good R&B singer.) Levi is one of the most androgynous-sounding woman vocalists I've heard in years-- pitch her down a percent or two and she could pass for Mike Skinner-- but her persona isn't quite post-sex: while most of her rare intelligible lyrics concern the romantic conundrum, they're generally brushing it off metaphorically ("I could eat your heart", she yodels) or literally ("I won't have sex 'cause of S.T.D.s").
Mostly, though, Jewellery is a vehicle to show off the band's hoard of shiny new sounds-- although they haven't yet figured out how to sort out the gemstones they've got in abundance from their ice chips and broken glass. It's not a record built for staying power, despite the thrilling moments in almost every song. But its failures mostly have to do with idea-overload and short attention span, which are very promising problems to have on one's first album. Levi and her band sound more like the future than the past, at a moment when we desperately need some more future, and as much as I've come to dig this album's awkward, brash cacophony, I want to hear what they do next even more.


The debut from pop-punk band Fits is full of sharp turns, heavy lyrics, and bursts of righteous anger. A fierce will to survive animates these lean, scrappy songs.

All Belief Is Paradise

Across its many iterations, punk maintains a steadfast tradition of running: away from suffocating hometowns, toward unknown horizons, into reckless relationships, out of trainwreck breakups. The galloping tempos reinforce the hasty decisions, and often it doesn’t matter where a song is going so long as it’s going there fast. On their debut LP All Belief Is Paradise, Brooklyn pop-punk band Fits embrace a frantic songwriting ethos in line with Plan-it-X’s early 2000s roster (think Spoonboy with extra amps and a drum kit) or fellow New York quartet LVL UP’s early records. Of the album’s 12 songs, none breaks the three-minute mark, and many clock in right around a minute. But this is no pool they’re building; if Fits shake their hooks out at a freewheeling churn, it’s only because every line has to be sung right this second or never.
Fits began as a songwriting exercise by de facto bandleader Nicholas Cummins, who scratched out bass and vocal demos into their phone before linking up with members of Big Ups and gobbinjr to flesh out the songs as a full rock band. Cummins tends to bury their heavy lyrical themes underneath bursts of righteous anger. There aren’t really happy songs on All Belief Is Paradise, but there are plenty of sharp turns and playful, surprising gestures. From the nose-diving guitar riffs on “Admission Day” to the spritzes of auxiliary percussion scattered throughout the album, Fits never let their feet drag.
Cummins edges their often double-tracked vocals with a compelling smirk, and the hyperbolic, inventive vernacular they employ in their lyrics adds to the sense of desperation propelling each song forward. “What we had was dead/But now it’s super dead,” they sing on “Superdead,” lamenting the end of a relationship that somehow broke even more after it had already broken up. At the end of “All the Time,” Cummins transforms a whole season into a verb: “I want you to be gone so I can summertime.” They drag an extra syllable out of that last word, folding a whine into the demand right before asking for its opposite. “I want you all the time,” Cummins concludes, sparking up both contradictory desires with equal fervor.
A lot of desires crop up on All Belief Is Paradise, and they often seem to be pulling Cummins in opposite directions at once. On “Running Out,” they take off toward the horizon with an eye cast over their shoulder, yearning for the past and future in the same breath while a clamor of tambourines and power chords spurs them on. “The Ground,” meanwhile, adopts a comparatively leisurely tempo while Cummins muses on an “old town” they’ve visited in the past. They repeat the phrase “you went away” on loop in the background, as if haunted by the decision to leave a place that will never really leave them. The running away and the not wanting to have run away compete for space here, stranding Cummins in the tortured middle ground between them.
More than desire and more than hurt, a fierce will to survive animates these lean, scrappy songs. Cummins’ lyrics can often be tricky to make out amid all the cymbals and distortion, but in the tone of their voice, they insist on being heard. The partially redacted narrative tends to draw you in deeper than wordy storytelling might. Instead of laying it all out, Cummins leaves it up to you to fill in the gaps between their oblique words, which makes Fits’ songs more spacious and flexible. There’s plenty to latch onto, and plenty to keep you on your toes.


The Memphis rapper offers hard truths and effortless swagger on his uncompromising new mixtape.

Yellow Tape

Forged in the fires of South Memphis, Markeyvius Cathey (aka Key Glock) was brought up by his grandmother and great-grandmother; his father was mostly not around, and his mother spent much of his childhood in prison. “It has been times where she in jail and I’m not, I’m in jail and she not,” he once told The Fader with a candor that’s becoming his calling card. His latest mixtape, Yellow Tape, is a street-rap saga peppered with such trenchant insights, narrating the lonely world of a 22-year-old who has been through more bad times than any 22-year-old deserves.
This chronicle begins with Key Glock’s birth. “I came in this world flexin’,” he says on opener “1997” before detailing his reckless existence in what he calls the “trenches.” Over the mournful piano keys and guitar riffs of “What Goes Around Comes Around,” Glock links life lessons from his elders to his dedication to rapping: “My granny told me what’s done in the dark must come to light/I recorded every night, now I got hella ice.” Detailing your come-up is pretty standard street-rap fare, but Glock’s rich use of language and slyly spiritual edge distinguish him.
To be sure, Yellow Tape is a brutal record, lyrically and musically. You won’t find a viral hit or lame commercial compromise; there are zero guest rappers diluting Glock’s energy. Even “Amen,” the album’s most obvious reference to faith, finds Glock calling on God not for moral guidance, but to give thanks for his expensive chains, cars and the strength to turn the blocks where his enemies roam into “a morgue.” This autobiography has no sentimental moments.
Production is mostly handled by a group of rising beatmakers who serve up moody instrumentals rippling with muscle. Sledgren’s horror-movie orchestration scores a drug-slinging tale on “Mr. Glock”; traditionalists will delight in hearing the young rapper reference old Snoop Dogg bars over BANDPLAY’s hard-hitting drums and swampy bassline on “Dough.” On “Crash,” Glock teams up with seasoned pro Southside, using vocal processing effects to render his voice dank and spectral. As a rapper, Glock’s accent is identifiably Memphis, if not quite the thick drawl of regional forefathers Three 6 Mafia. But like Juicy J, he can be a walking hook machine, coating every bar on songs like “Flyest Highest Coolest Smoothest” with swagger.
Glock does have some growing up to do. It’s fair to say that there are occasions when his similes can sound off the shelf—there’s countless references to not letting a woman get between him and his money. But these are small grumbles in a grand scheme. A focused vision of what Glock is capable of, Yellow Tape is a work of wicked truths and unfiltered confidence, a book of genesis that feels like a post-mortem.


Wild Beasts bid fans farewell by revisiting their catalog in a collection of live studio takes. It’s not an entirely satisfying goodbye, but it’s a faithful snapshot of a band always in motion.

Wild Beasts: Last Night All My Dreams Came True

Last Night All My Dreams Came True

From the beginning, Wild Beasts’ music has been a story of two voices. At the forefront was Hayden Thorpe, with a falsetto that sounded like a punchline, swerving between low, horny grunts and operatic trills. In 2009, when he described a scene “equally elegant and ugly” in a song called “Hooting and Howling,” it was easy to hear it as winking self-diagnosis. Thorpe’s foil was Tom Fleming, the band’s second vocalist, whose earnest, fluttering baritone felt like a comedown from Thorpe’s high drama. If an animated movie were to be made out of Wild Beasts’ songs, it might involve a mischievous hyena and a bear cub teaming up to escape from depraved, Dickensian Britain.
As the band evolved, they learned more tricks. Their rhythm section, originally comprising Fleming and drummer Chris Talbot, became one of the strongest in indie rock. Songs like “Wanderlust” and “All the King’s Men” strut and gallop, turn sexy and menacing, find weird grooves and never sit still. And once they outgrew their theater-kid antics, Wild Beasts refined their sound with a synthy, sophisticated grace that seemed to come second nature to them. No group has evolved from Franz Ferdinand comparisons to Spirit of Eden so seamlessly.
Their last album, 2016’s Boy King, was supposed to be a triumph merging the youthful libido of their first records and the ambient pop of their latter ones, but it fell flat. For the first time, their ideas felt more interesting than their music. Last Night All My Dreams Came True is a live-in-the-studio collection that’s designed to be their closing statement after they announced their breakup last fall. Disappointingly, the tracklist skews heavily toward Boy King and offers an unflattering survey of their work. Listening to it, you could mistake Wild Beasts for a decent band with a couple of extraordinary songs, as opposed to an extraordinary band with one sub-par album.
It’s not uncommon for artists to revisit their lesser work, and trading the studio for a semi-live context is a good instinct. But the problem with Boy King was not John Congleton’s slick production (at its best, it sounded like Oneohtrix Point Never scoring Fifty Shades of Grey). The problem was the songs, and, without an audience to receive them, these renditions only highlight their flaws. “2BU” still feels underwritten, with Fleming addressing toxic masculinity through cliche (“I’m the type of man who wants to watch the world burn”) and cheap cop-outs (“You know that I’m the worst!”). The album’s lead single, “Get My Bang,” sung by Thorpe, unfortunately still resembles the Lonely Island featuring Wild Beasts.
The songs that fare best are the ones they’ve road-tested for years. Tracks from Two Dancers—the 2009 album that served as their pivot point—remain brilliantly romantic and grotesque, suggesting that maybe the conceit of Boy King was something they’d already accomplished. Their masterpiece, 2011’s Smother, is sadly underrepresented (“End Come Too Soon” would have been appropriate), as is 2014’s Present Tense. That album provides some surprising highlights, like when Thorpe weaves a few lyrics from “Palace” into “The Devil’s Crayon,” one of Fleming’s first great songs, from their debut.
Both Present Tense and this set open with “Wanderlust,” the dazzling fight song that calls out the legions of British acts who emerged around Wild Beasts and swiftly lost their identity. In this performance, a role reversal is at play within the band, as Thorpe breathes his lyrics in a delicate sigh and Fleming attacks the harmony with explosive intensity. Both that song and “The Devil’s Palace” suggest a collection that could change how Wild Beasts operate, a promise that the rest of the set retreats from. While it might not be a satisfying goodbye, Last Night All My Dreams Came True is—like all of Wild Beasts’ albums—an artfully rendered snapshot of a band always in motion.


Mental Illness is Aimee Mann’s quintessential statement, tempering the discord of life with elegant chamber folk. Mann fills her songs with ordinary people struggling against operatic levels of pain.

Mental Illness

Aimee Mann doing an album called Mental Illness is a concept so fitting it took her a lifetime to find it. Having already delivered a new wave smash, scored an Academy Award nomination, recorded eight stylistically diverse solo records as well a fiesty collaboration with punk’s Ted Leo, Mann is rightfully pissed that she’s nevertheless pigeonholed as a dreary fabricator of slow, sad-sack songs. So she’s answered her critics with her slowest, sad-sack-iest album yet, one populated by ordinary people struggling against operatic levels of existential pain at odds with their humdrum lives.
Mann has long been an expert of articulating this tension. Originally written about her attraction to a woman on the down low, her 1985 ‘Til Tuesday single “Voices Carry” found its defining shape when record company meddling forced Mann to recast it as a heterosexual melodrama that became a feminist anthem about overcoming male dominance. Yet no one would’ve predicted then that Mann would rank among the few new wave survivors who’d achieve both consistent sales and artistic credibility well into the 21st century. She continually finds peers among younger artists, like Father John Misty and Lana Del Rey, who recreate the smooth sounds and mild moods that defined the ’70s singer-songwriters of Mann’s childhood even as they lyrically upend them.
That’s the era and aesthetic she explores on Mental Illness. A rocker at heart if not always in practice, Mann has sometimes been muted but never mellow; her new wave training and constitutional angst haven’t allowed it. To prepare for her latest, she studied the gentle craftsmanship of Bread, Dan Fogelberg, and other unhip smoothies that punk tossed on the anti-establishment bonfire with Yes and ELP. Mental Illness is accordingly made of skeletal strings, coolly regulated commentary, and minimal drums. Juxtaposing elegant chamber folk against the discord of lives out of balance, it’s musically more delicate than even her soft rock models.
All this is telegraphed by the opening cymbal tinkle of “Goose Snow Cone,” a snapshot of homesickness that encapsulates how succinct she’s grown as a chronicler of lived-in unease. “Gotta keep it together when your friends come by,” she sings in that resigned, yet tight-jawed sigh that’s been her dominant mode of vocal expression since her millennial Magnolia/Bachelor No. 2 breakthrough, one that suits these sedate arrangements better than anything she’s attempted since. “Even birds of a feather find it hard to fly.” Mann holds so much back that when she gives just a smidgen via a couple extra notes, it feels as though she’s baring her country soul, even though she’s long lost her accent. As a Richmond, VA native who fled to Boston in her teens and settled into L.A. as a solo artist, Mann is only C&W by birth. Hers are blue state blues.
So she doesn’t waltz through “Stuck in the Past,” a waltz about nostalgia’s dead end. Her clipped delivery retains its reserve, even when hammering out the title’s rat-a-tat-tat against her instrumentation’s triplets. And though folky signifiers moan and murmur around her like ghosts of Laurel Canyon’s storied past, her wordless choirs are more Laurie Anderson than Joni Mitchell. True to her post-punk roots, she’s still in conflict with her world, even as she renders it tenderly. Pitting her anxiety against a style typically free from distress, the resulting rift suits her swimmingly as it spins the source material into ominous whirlpools. Mann is droll, even when dead serious, and although her perspective on depression is rendered with all the nuance of firsthand experience, her survival skills also sound steely. Although her wordplay is at times cryptic, perhaps to protect the guilty, she’ll abruptly go the other route, as sudden collisions of abstraction and plain speak coil and unravel like snakes slithering and snapping across her psyche.
Juxtapositions continue and compound—the adrenalin addict rendered with a calming berceuse (“Rollercoasters”), the scam artist conjured with foolproof folk (“Lies of Summer”), the upwardly mobile rube who meets a comeuppance camouflaged by the album’s sunniest melody (“Patient Zero”). Then she drops the album’s easy listening masterstroke, “Good for Me.” There’s nothing but a sole keyboard and Mann for over half its length, but it’s obvious from the first portentous chord that her good thing is destined to go bad. She’s defenseless against this hustle because it gives her what she needs, or at least what temporarily satisfies, and so she sustains her metaphors to the end, never revealing if she’s singing about a deceptive lover, a misleading consumer product, or a lying politician. She flubs a note here and there, as if cracking under the strain of her own willingness to be duped. Orchestration enters to underscore a moment of truth that hits as her composition’s bridge slides into unsettling harmonic territory: “And in the searchlight I can see/The rotors kicking up debris/The cloud, the dust, the blades are me.” The strings get appropriately stormy, sawing up and down their scales as if accompanying the twister that blew Dorothy and Toto straight out of Kansas before settling back down. Then the rhythm section finally enters, as if to suggest she’s found her footing while hitting rock bottom.
The rest sustains what came before. “Poor Judge,” the other prominent piano cut, even returns to the deception theme. “And I can see your light on/Calling me back to make the same mistake again,” she sings at the album’s tail end, self-aware but unable to fight the inevitable con. Like Mann herself, her fall guys and gals love too much, or the wrong person, for reasons they’re unwilling to unravel. They can’t get off the Ferris wheel because they like the ascension so much they forget the coming down.
Mental Illness harkens back to “Wise Up,” Mann’s secular, high-pitched hymn about finding the truth within. It slipped out 21 years ago on the Jerry Maguire soundtrack, but Paul Thomas Anderson gave the song its rightful place in film history by directing each of his solitary Magnolia characters to sing along to it in a sequence that still thrills and flummoxes. Here, Mann similarly shifts between observer and participant—too knowing to play the heroine, too trusting for the femme fatale—as she ramps up the emotional friction while dabbing her barbed tunes with baby oil and talcum powder. This is her quintessential statement, a wake-up call delivered as a lullaby.


Though still suited for delirious outdoor parties, the 19-year-old Tanzanian musician’s take on singeli is as much about the spiritual connection between producer and laptop as it is the dancefloor.

Mr Mixondo

It’s been almost five years since Nyege Nyege Tapes released its Sounds of Sisso compilation, a document of Tanzania’s flourishing singeli scene that proved instrumental in putting the genre on the international stage. The album spotlighted the movement’s sheer velocity, regularly pushing past 200 beats per minute while pitching synth loops and sampled soukous music up to unrecognizable heights. Though Western audiences likely associate such tempos with fringe techno offshoots like gabber, the singeli variants featured on that compilation—even the raw, DIY brand emerging from the record’s titular Sisso studio— were marked by their pop inclinations. Anchoring a sugar rush of hyperactive melodies and dense electronic percussion, Auto-Tuned rap verses offered a welcome sense of familiarity, despite their haste. If you lost your place in the maelstrom of snares and MIDI horns, a catchy chorus was never far away, extending a friendly hand to grab onto.
The complete absence of vocals on Mr Mixondo, the debut album by 19-year-old producer DJ Travella, is a striking departure from the style of singeli that Nyege Nyege diehards are likely accustomed to, especially since the label’s last compilation of Tanzanian music specifically highlighted MCs. The label bills Travella as a herald of singeli’s “new wave,” creating personal, instrumental work shaped by far-reaching influences. Though still suited for delirious outdoor dance parties, his music is as much about the spiritual connection between producer and laptop as it is the dancefloor. Singeli has long flirted with a cyberpunk aesthetic, with MCs adopting pseudonyms inspired by antivirus software and memory cards, but Travella’s take on the genre is especially entrenched in the digital world.
His previous work existed only on YouTube in the form of live screen recordings, revealing his semi-improvised creative process in real time. In each video, he loads a large deck of samples into VirtualDJ software, shuffling them in and out to create hypnotic, perpetually transforming beats. Mr Mixondo is the end result of this intense, cross-sectional study of singeli itself, breaking and rewriting the rules of a style that’s already challenging to the uninitiated.
His compositions are dense and tightly wound, braiding loops that draw from Atlanta hip-hop and R&B into tortuous patterns, phrases disappearing from the mix as quickly as they slide in. But it’s the record’s miniature breakdowns, in which a track’s samples and synths slough off their skeletal beat, that set up its most cathartic bursts of energy. On “Crazy Beat Umeme 2,” he hits the kill switch on the track’s frenzy without so much as a fade-out, deploying breakbeats that abruptly peel away from the time signature in effect. It’s an Aphex-ian prank that’s apt to trip up dancers and headphone listeners alike—diffusing the tension for a brief period before careening back into Travella’s solid wall of sound. On “21212,” he recklessly adjusts the pitch of a woodblock percussion sample, coercing melody from an instrument that rarely serves a purpose beyond fleshing out rhythm. Backed by eerie, snaking synth leads, this track is also punctuated by brusque starts and stops, glitching like a buffering video.
There are a few tracks that forego Travella’s experimental mixing to dial in on pure gratification. “London Bandcamp” is a blown-out, bass-heavy fusion of dembow and festival trap pulsing with adrenaline and featuring an electrifying lead riff that repeats ad nauseam atop lurching bass. It’s a crowd-pleasing respite from the record’s overarching eccentricity, rewarding those with enough fortitude to traverse Mr Mixondo’s thornier bits.
Occasionally, Travella’s curiosity comes at his own expense. “Tambasana,” which opens with a beautifully chopped vocal sample in the vein of Clams Casino, sours when an off-key piano enters the mix, creating a nightmarish dissonance that doesn’t quite evoke the foreboding atmosphere he’s going for. There’s a fine line between controlled chaos and outright disorder in his work, and the rare moments leaning toward the latter should have been left on the cutting-room floor. With more polish and experience, Travella may be able to fully conjure the Bosch-like rave inferno suggested by his most sinister impulses, but he hasn’t caught up to these ambitions just yet.
Like some IDM producers or the folks behind SoundCloud’s nascent “sigilkore” movement, Travella approaches composition from a provocateur’s perspective, striving to create as disorienting a sound as possible while logging his findings along the way. As artists in the UK and Japan have begun to incorporate the ideas of Nyege Nyege’s initial releases into their own work, he raises the stakes, slamming the genre’s accelerator until it spins out of control. Mr Mixondo feels like raw material for its successors to mold: a stark, mercurial record that subverts singeli’s conventions at each turn.


If their new EP is any indication, bass duo Sepalcure, which includes Travis Stewart of Machinedrum, are less about growth and more about refinement. Mixing hard-hitting rhythms with pastoral touches and pink-cloud ambience, Sepalcure are still deadly serious about having a good time.

Make You EP

Dance producers have a reputation for taking themselves very seriously (case in point) but Sepalcure are different. When I interviewed Travis Stewart and Praveen Sharma previous to the release of 2011's self-titled debut, the duo knocked back cocktails in the mid-afternoon while riffing on embarrassing screen names, potentially pornographic horror films, and, yes, the dance community's staunch seriousness. "You got to have fun up there, man," Sharma sighed after Stewart mentioned a negative review the pair received for "trying too hard" while opening for Jamie xx.
Indeed, while their level of on-stage enthusiasm may not be at the level of, say, Girl Talk, Sepalcure's sense of self-presentation differs from many in the bass music scene they're associated with, as they mouth along energetically to their own songs and frequently address the crowd (which very few DJs, for better or worse, care to do). Just before this past New Year's Eve, they ditched their originals-heavy set at a Manhattan gig for a solid hour-plus of euphoric house music; a year previous, the energy (and potential for clumsiness) at a performance at Brooklyn's Cameo Gallery was at a level that, for a minute, their sound system shut down, prompting some sheepishly enthusiastic apologies from the duo before things whirred back to life.
Sepalcure do very well with nightlife crowds of varying pretension, but their debut album's greatest selling point was how well it translated to the home-listening set. Sharma and Stewart inhaled a few different sub-genres of dance and expelled a romantic sound that approached pop (for bass music, anyway), fulfilling the promise of their early singles to create music that fused hard-hitting rhythms with pastoral touches and pink-cloud ambience. Their aesthetic had arrived confidently and fully realized, the work of two decade-plus veterans who, individually, finally found a distinctive sound by joining forces.
Last year, Sepalcure released a single for album cut "Eternally Yrs" that featured a new song along with a smattering of remixes, but Stewart and Sharma have suggested that, since the duo is separated by an ocean (Sharma's New York-based, while the somewhat nomadic Stewart currently lives in Berlin), there's no guarantee of the project becoming a long-term fixation. New EP Make You, then, is a welcome treat in existence alone, suggesting that, despite Stewart's relatively high profile due to work with Harlem pop-rapper Azealia Banks as well as his recent signing to electronic mainstay Ninja Tune, Sepalcure are still very much alive.
In addition to re-asserting their presence, Make You confirms that, at this point, Sepalcure aren't as concerned with growth as they are with refinement. The title track is a summation of what they do very well, as deep, belly-rumbling bass, a fragile percussive backbone, and evocative vocal samples coalesce perfectly before a fingerpicked acoustic guitar figure drifts into the mix. "The Water's Fine" elaborates on Sepalcure's slight fascination with juke's hypnotic stutter, as woozy synths and a pile of tangled vocal cries are washed in static and hung out to dry. "The Water's Fine" also stands as one of a few examples on Make You where Sharma and Stewart subtly expand their sound-- not in style, but in scope, as they allow plenty of space between the track's elements and make for one of their most emptily dense works yet.
If "The Water's Fine" represents Sepalcure dialing back their soft-focus tendencies in favor of something more sparse and direct, then "He Said No" finds the duo reaching total sensory overload, with dreamy keyboards and a twinkling sense of optimism resembling a hi-fi, bass-friendly version of Balam Acab (whose "See Birds" stood as the odd man out on Sepalcure's otherwise club-ready XLR8R mix from 2010). "Rumours" is something else entirely, as a whiplashed vocal sample gets chopped up and buried by atmospheric pressure before bubbling up to the surface again. Then, things change halfway through the tune, as the structure takes on a beguiling new shape with dark, piping tones and a percolating rhythmic bed swathed in ambient hiss.
By the time a few synths and manipulated vocal samples meander in, "Rumours" has completely changed, highlighting Sepalcure's undervalued ability to take listeners on a journey, regardless of whether they're on their feet. Similar to Sepalcure, Make You closes with contemplative ambience-- the fingerpicked guitar and dotted horns of "DMD"-- and although the EP's cohesive potency is can't match its predecessor's, the attempt to fashion a narrative underlines the duo's attention to detail. (One wishes that Stewart's Machinedrum, with its steady stream of ephemera, possessed this much quality control.) Sepalcure are still intent on having a good time, but as Make You's elegant expansiveness suggests, they're dead serious, too.