Producer Fatima Al Qadiri adapts the “evil extreme femme alter ego” of Shaneera for her new EP on the Hyperdub label, which is packed with melody, drama, and joy.

Shaneera EP

Although she may borrow from the tools of modern club music—rattling drum machines, wipe-clean synths, and corporeal sub-bass—the output of Fatima Al Qadiri is about as far from the stereotype of dance-floor workouts as it is possible to go. Her records come wrapped in elaborate conceptual frameworks that may envisage a journey into an “imagined China” (2014’s Asiatisch), explore the idea of war as refracted through video games (2012’s Desert Strike EP) or celebrate the right to protest (2016’s Brute), putting her in a lineage of electronic music producers from Matthew Herbert to Kode9 and Jeff Mills who use the infinite sonic possibilities of electronic music production to question the universe around them.
Shaneera, Al Qadiri’s new EP for Kode9’s Hyperdub label, is another fabulous example of her thematic explorations, and it’s packed with enough backstory to give Ken Burns food for thought. “Shaneera,” the press release explains, “is the English mispronunciation of the Arabic word, shanee’a ( شنيعة ), literally meaning ‘outrageous, nefarious, hideous, major, and foul.’” When used as queer slang in Al Qadiri’s native Kuwait, however, the word “Shaneera” takes on a positive tone, referring to a gender-defying persona and the notion of being an evil queen.
With that, you might expect an EP that is inaccessible or academic, more food for the mind than zip for the body. But underneath Shaneera’s steely sonic casing lies an EP packed with melody and joy. Al Qadiri appears on the EP’s cover made up as Shaneera—who she calls her “evil extreme femme alter ego”—clad in the kind of cake-thick makeup that was popular in mid-2000s Kuwait, the picture setting the scene for a love letter to evil and benevolent queens that bursts with dramatic energy. In this quest, she is joined by Lama3an, an Kuwaiti/Iraqi architect who moonlights as an artist and fashion designer; Chaltham, aka longtime collaborator Khalid al Gharaballi; singer Naygow; and Bobo Secret, noted for his “uncanny ability at projecting an evil femme queen voice.” It’s that kind of record: “evil as fuck,” in Al Qadiri’s own words. But it’s also theatrical, intense, and frequently funny, marked by Secret’s vampish, regal projections.
It’s a hugely original piece of work. Over the EP’s five tracks, Al Qadiri explores new sonic territory by marrying the Khaleeji music of the Arab Gulf to the granite-hard, grime and trap-infused production listeners will recognize from her solo work or adventures with Future Brown. Al Qadiri is a brilliant producer with the knack of squeezing the maximum effect out of individual sounds. Her synths shine like polished silver and penetrate with the force of a diamond-tipped drill; her drums are sculpted girders, dropped into the mix with the sonic precision of latter-period Kraftwerk, and her work here imbues Shaneera with a furious intensity that amplifies the EP’s drama.
Al Qadiri is also very melodically gifted and it is this that connects Shaneera to her career high-point Asiatisch. The melodies on the two may be very different—the Arabesque swirls on Shaneera versus the sinogrime elegance of Asiatisch—but both releases are home to some of Al Qadiri’s most powerful hooks. “Galby,” the best song on Shaneera, features a heart-rending vocal line from Naygow, while the EP’s title track makes an unlikely pop gem out of stately keyboard sweeps and the three syllables of the song’s title stretched into a bizarre yet affecting earworm. There may be something sinister in the heady, minor-tone melodies that dominate Shaneera, but this is set off by the bombastic timbre of lead vocalist Bobo Secret, whose voice suggests the melodramatic menace of a Disney villain.
The other big difference from the sedate tones of Asiatisch is that Shaneera simply bangs. The five songs here are all dance tracks, which charge along at the kind of frantic pace you could imagine inflaming both basement club and family wedding, while the percussion is a brilliantly frenetic mix of Western drum machine tone and Khaleeji rhythm. “Spiral” is particularly thrilling, with jittery synth lines that twist off into the mix meeting a pointillist layer of percussive touches to send the pulse racing.
The lyrical themes on Shaneera —which are sung in Kuwaiti and Egyptian Arabic, with one Iraqi proverb—sound equally exhilarating. Al Qadiri hasn’t provided an English translation, explaining that the meaning would be lost in translation, but we are told that the lyrics are “suggestive, imploring, shady and loving, some original and some re-recorded material from Grindr chats, online drag, and femme comedy skits.” In “Alkahaf,” Bobo Secret repeats the line “Aheenik ibjamaly,” which means “I offend you with my beauty,” a phrase apparently used by many non-binary individuals against hegemonic haters.
Shaneera doesn’t so much break boundaries down as invite them in, loosen their ties and take them out dancing. Electronic music can be experimental, danceable, thought-provoking, and fun. But to combine all of these attributes in a record that also breaks new sonic ground is a remarkable achievement.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit My Chemical Romance’s second album, an operatic pop-rock behemoth that became an icon for outcasts.

My Chemical Romance: Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge

Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge

Donna and Donald Way lived in a particularly bleak apartment in the gloomy little township of Belleville, a New Jersey suburb often mentioned in news stories about crime rings and mob trials. Donna, a hairdresser, had a penchant for horror films and eerie decor—at one point she filled an entire room with Victorian dolls. It was here, in a wood-paneled basement unit filled with gothic kitsch like petrified bats and lifelike human skulls, that their son Gerard spent most of his childhood. He posted up in a bedroom with only one window the size of a cinder block, fomenting the outcast mentality that would later manifest in My Chemical Romance.
Northern New Jersey would soon become home to a thriving hardcore and emo scene in the early 2000s, one that would eventually propel Gerard’s band to global recognition. But as children, the suburbs could be restrictive: “Our parents were kind of scared to let us out of the house,” Gerard’s younger brother, Mikey, said later. “It was mostly me and Gerard.” The Way brothers chose to make the best of their cramped environs. They were into horror movies and comic books, and made up characters and stories together to compensate for the loneliness. For Gerard, comics became more than a hobby; after becoming an amateur artist in his own right, selling his first comic book at age 15, he enrolled in the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
After graduating, Gerard nearly landed a TV pilot on Cartoon Network for a show about a Scandanavian monkey that could magically make breakfast out of thin air. But in 2001, when he saw the Twin Towers collapse during his morning commute, he found himself pulled away from his previous passion. Disillusioned and traumatized, he gave up his career, finding the world of TV executives insufficiently radical, too profit-driven and slow for the intensity of the post-9/11 era. Seeing local hardcore heroes Thursday perform at a small club flipped a switch: “I wanted to make a bigger impact,” he said later. After roping in his brother and local music nerd Ray Toro, who had the frazzled look and finger-picking acumen of a snobbish Guitar Center tech, My Chemical Romance was born a week later.
Today, My Chemical Romance are ubiquitous—a meme, a cult, an aesthetic. Though the term “emo” has long stuck to the band, their mix of vaudevillian pomp and four-on-the-floor punk progressions was more indicative of a new direction for the sub-genre. But they remained relevant long after the sound they championed died out commercially in the late 2000s. Rather than the pinch of nostalgia or embarrassment that often accompanies revisiting the histrionic lyrics of that era, My Chemical Romance subverted shame by embracing their gothic attire, wearing it like a base layer from which they could build unexpectedly melodic pop. When they announced their reunion earlier this year, fans embraced them not like a ratty relic of childhood, but like a long-lost heirloom that had finally been returned.
Perhaps their lasting appeal is because the band never wanted to strictly write about passing teenage anxieties. Their early songs were a direct response to the attacks of September 11. “Skylines and Turnstiles,” the first song Gerard wrote, teemed with heightened existential dread: “After seeing what we saw/Can we still reclaim our innocence?” The “Attic Demos,” recorded in 2001 in the attic of their then-drummer, barely made it past the North New Jersey punk scene—the production was tinny and compressed, Gerard’s voice was strained and out of tune. But the demo conveyed an earnest commitment to storytelling and a glimmer of ambition, enough to convince local punk stalwart Frank Iero to join as a rhythm guitarist: “There was just something about it where you could already imagine what it would sound like,” he said.
My Chemical Romance released their official debut, I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love, in July 2002. The record, produced by Thursday frontman Geoff Rickly and released on local punk mainstay Eyeball Records, had the hallmarks of the hardcore scene that surrounded them: guitars ripped through verses; clean vocals slipped into shredded screams. But My Chemical Romance stood out for its dedication to fantasy, writing the album loosely told from the perspective of a vampiric protagonist who must avenge his lover’s death. Their bombastic live shows, so violent and destructive they often led to broken glass, landed them a manager and, before long, a record deal with the Warner Bros. offshoot Reprise. Before the end of 2003, they’d outgrow the small Passaic clubs they used to frequent. By 2004, thanks to an optimistic album review in The Guardian, they’d be playing headlining shows across the UK, scoring a series of glowing write-ups in Kerrang! and NME before they even began recording their major-label debut.
The deal with Reprise gave the band access to their pick of producers. Their first choice, rock oracle Butch Vig, was busy, so they landed on Howard Benson, who had once worked with Motörhead but, more recently, had taken on the dregs of nu-metal with groups like Crazy Town and Hoobastank. Benson and My Chemical Romance were a strange pair. When he first arrived at the studio, wearing his usual uniform of sweatpants and a hockey jersey, the band allegedly mistook him for a pizza delivery guy. Everyone referred to him as “a sports coach” who would largely communicate in basketball metaphors. But Benson challenged the band to work on song structure and melody, pushing back against extra guitar solos and abrupt endings—saying things like, “‘What does this have to do with the rest of the song? You’re confusing the shit out of me,’” as Gerard later recalled. “That’s the point,” the band would yell in return.
But Benson’s coaching pushed the album, what we now know as Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, to its emotive peaks. While recording “The Ghost of You,” a seething song about loss, Benson convinced the band to include a final chorus to end the song. (“We all hated having that chorus in that song,” Toro later said.) My Chemical Romance came from a world in which nothing trumped the brute force of a scream like Rickly’s or an overdriven guitar-heavy outro; the original ending had both. But Benson’s formulaic approach helped anchor the pensive ballad: With that final chorus—a defiant, unabashedly self-serious crescendo— the band displayed a glimmer of the massive arena rock they’d go on to write for 2006’s The Black Parade. “The Ghost of You” shot to top the UK Rock and Metal Singles chart.
On its face, Three Cheers was a lofty concept record about star-crossed lovers who die in a gunfight, who must then “bring the devil the souls of 1,000 evil men” in order to be reunited in the afterlife. But it’s a conceit loosely held. Instead of a vigilante shootout, Three Cheers ripples to life with “Helena,” a guilt-laden tribute to the Ways’ grandmother, Elena, who died while the band was away on tour. The track begins with a restrained, reverberating guitar and Gerard’s voice at nearly a whisper. Then, almost like a jump scare at a haunted house, the band comes in at full volume: a legion of distortion, led by a full-throated yelp from Gerard.
While the songs on Three Cheers are certainly allegories for ennui and narcissism, they are often equally escapist explorations into storytelling and world-building. We meet our protagonist outright in “Give ’Em Hell, Kid,” as he journeys up from New Orleans pumped full of stimulants and ready to exact his revenge. By the third track, “To The End,” he’s inside a mansion to murder a wedding party, dropping small details—homosexual undertones, allusions to William Faulkner—like little breadcrumbs. The narrative also helps to unite an otherwise disparate record; by the time the Morricone whistles kick in on “Hang ’Em High,” they seem fitting in service of the story. The band, and Benson, carefully balanced these large gestures to literary tropes with hooks and choruses that are more in line with a typical rock song. Still, like the band members cooped up in Jersey basements a decade prior, the fans who needed it found an escape, a record that didn’t just lament a sleepy one-horse town, but transported them out of it entirely.
On the most successful manifestation of the album’s concept, the jaunty “You Know What They Do To Guys Like Us In Prison,” the band strikes a memorable balance between drama and black humor, dropping the listener in on the arrest of the protagonist and then documenting his ensuing panic attacks behind bars. His concerns vacillate between the laughably mundane (“They all cheat at cards and the checkers are lost”) and the deadly (“My cellmate’s a killer”). But it’s the delivery of the penultimate line of the verse—“They make me do push-ups in drag”—that reverberates after the song ends. It’s a half-laugh, half-sob delivered with flair and a wink. The scattered references to queerness and gender-play—Gerard might sing a verse from the perspective of a girlish ex-lover—add a counterweight to the record’s overarching violence and masculinity, a self-referential nod to a frontman who would later publicly admit to struggles with gender identity. In a scene that was quickly turning to gendered hatred and dreams of femicide, these small rebellions against the rigidity of masculinity felt like the loosening of a pressure valve.
But the song that would become an anthem for fans and the hoards of copycat bands that grew in the album’s wake was lead single, “I’m Not Okay (I Promise).” The song is a comparatively straightforward outsider anthem, with choppy chords, gnarled vocals, and lyrics that state pent-up, vindictive frustration outright. As far as narcissistic depression goes, the chorus is admittedly on-the-nose: “I’m not OK/You wear me out.” With its sensitive, almost sophomoric outlook (“Forget about the dirty looks/The photographs your boyfriend took”), the song could have been self-parody, an encapsulation of emo’s self-pitying melodramatics. Yet, perhaps because the band took themselves and their message as deadly serious, “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” remains a classic—an unfiltered stream of pure catharsis, destined to be screamed at karaoke bars for the foreseeable future. From the gasping desperation of Gerard’s vocal performance, recorded alone in a dark attic, to the song’s pop structure, it approached the desolation in its lyrics with almost triumphant glee. Unabashedly melodic and unafraid to whimper and shout in the same verse, “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” captures the most exciting way to be at the end of your rope.
In the end, sentiment won out over concept. A year into the tour for the Three Cheers, Gerard began to sing a different tune about the meaning of the record: “Really, it's about two boys living in New Jersey who lost their grandma, and how their brothers in the band helped them get through it." And the beauty in Three Cheers lies in that mutability: It took the quotidian drama of suburban kids and blew it up into a life-or-death soap opera. Instead of digging its heels further into the pressures of adolescence, the album attempted to transcend them; in a world of Judy Blumes, it read like Stephen King.
My Chemical Romance thrived because they came to the realization that emotional outcasts deserved something to cheer for, even if their victories were imaginary. Teenage emotions aren’t cut and dried and high school has no set heroes and villains. In building a world that reflected imperfections and guilt, exhilaration and depression, My Chemical Romance never patronized their audience; their characters, like the band members themselves, embraced the in-between. Perhaps that is why, when The Daily Mail accused My Chemical Romance of creating a suicidal cult, teens cloaked in the colors of a funeral procession shot back with a surprisingly affirmative response: “MCR SAVED OUR LIVES.”


Singer Rosita Bonita and producer Prinz George prove R&B can still be crazy, sexy, cool on a mixtape that favors the uptempo ’90s grooves of Timbaland, New Edition, and especially TLC.

Heart 2 Say

You’ve got to hand it to S4U. Plenty of modern artists have found 1990s R&B a tempting narcotic, but it takes supreme self-confidence to try on Aaliyah’s baggy pants and Montell Jordan’s snakeskin jackets. While fellow revivalists Jessie Ware, Wet, and Jacquees have drawn from the era’s urbane, romantic sounds, the London duo favors its more uptempo grooves. The small body of work cut by singer Rosita Bonita and producer Prinz George—2016 EP Brazil, plus a handful of loosies—has offered a smart, streetwise hybrid of Babygirl’s and Timbaland’s cyborg sensibilities, New Edition’s new jack swingin’ pop-soul credibility, and, in particular, TLC’s slamming rhythms and swaggering flippancy.
For strong evidence of the latter connection, observe how the smooth programmed horn section of the 2016 single “Twice” summons the spirit of TLC’s evergreen “Creep,” or how Brazil’s “Sket” plays like an East London-set remake of “No Scrubs.” With T-Boz, Left Eye, and Chilli as their spiritual guides, S4U add a thick layer of hazy atmospherics and spiky drum machines to their sonic purée, reinventing these old-fashioned grooves for the future while keeping things distinctly of the British capital. And they’ve done so with a certain low-budget aesthetic, keeping all production in-house and releasing a set of self-directed videos that play like the most visually popping Sweded versions of old Adidas commercials ever. As that great prophet DJay, from Hustle & Flow, once said: “It’s not enough for a man to climb Mount Everest. You know, he gotta do that shit with the least amount of tools.”
Heart 2 Say, the pair’s first attempt at a full-length release, is pitched as a mixtape—and it feels like one in the most modern sense of the term. Though made up entirely of original music, there’s a brevity to the tape as a whole. A dozen or so rising local artists wander in and out of each track, adding slam poetry recitals and heavily accented rap verses to the mix. Songs like “Refrain” sound less structured than previous singles, with Bonita’s voice deployed as textured tones to wrap around the glittering keys and tough drum machines. The singer tests herself on “Untitled,” playing around with a more barbed trap vocal style than she’s previously adopted, while “Alone” is an unlikely rave-inspired number tacked on to the back end of Heart 2 Say, probably because the pair didn’t know what else to do with it.
No experiment here is entirely unsuccessful, though the tape’s best moments unsurprisingly come in its most fully formed songs. Take “No Ego,” a track about hitting the darkest, dankest of dancefloors and letting your body get entwined with another: The synths are murky and shadowy, the climate so thick, it sounds like the music is being teased out in a tiny underground club running two smoke machines on full blast.
“Trust” is underpinned by a shuffling, garage-style drum loop that reasserts S4U’s affinity for the genre following last year’s Artful Dodger-esque single “Too Much.” The best song, though, is “Heart,” an R&B jam that manages to feel both suave and slightly wonky. Prinz George deploys thick drums and rocky, drip-drip synth riffs that are reminiscent of Timbaland while sounding more vital than almost everything Tim has done in years. Up top, Bonita’s vocals rasp like T-Boz meets Brandy, further crystallizing her connection to the legends of her youth.
Over 38 minutes, the melodies blend beautifully, making Heart 2 Say a groomed, funky listen, if not the definitive statement of the first phase of S4U’s recording career. But hey, try compiling the best work they’ve done without even releasing a proper album: Take “Twice” and “Sket” and “Too Much,” then add “No Ego,” “Heart,” and more. You’ll end up with a London street classic that showcases an act that simultaneously celebrates and defies contemporary R&B norms while proving that the genre can still be crazy, sexy, cool.


On their fifth album, the Chicago rock band Disappears have traded in the pop streak of 2013's Era for a world of stark and brutal rhythm. Instead of melodies, the instruments trace shrapnel in the wind.

Irreal

Disappears left plenty of space in the cracks on their last album, 2013's Era, and at points it was a surprisingly inviting kind of emptiness. That album's title track even gripped something like a hook: "Is rapture your only fear/ Or do you think about it at all?" asks singer Brian Case at the chorus. Sure, he's musing on the end of days, but at least he's singing right to us. No such luck with the Chicago band's fifth album, Irreal. Disappears have traded in their last pop streak for a world of stark and brutal rhythm.
Instead of questions, answers, and hypotheses, the lyrics on Irreal assume the shape of isolated fragments. Instead of melodies, the instruments trace shrapnel in the wind. "I want to remember/ Make me," Case demands on "Interpretation" as a roiling drum pattern whips past him. He repeats the words in a steely monotone, only breaking his flat timbre when he throws the occasional "oi!" away from the mike. Somewhere behind him, guitars that don't sound like guitars play chords that don't sound like chords. "Anything could happen," he smirks, and it's more of a threat than a promise.
Irreal is a deliberately exhausting listen. The band dares you to see how far you can stomp behind them without a melodic phrase or a lyrical narrative to grab hold of. But unlike Swans, who paved much of this terrain, Disappears sound more resigned than spiteful. They're eager to pummel themselves, but not because it offers any catharsis.
"Another thought/ Another memory," Case drones later in the record. "Living in a loop of different lives." His accompaniment is pitchy, nervous, and streaked with noise. The drums racket from the right channel to the left. This is cabin fever at its most intricate, a cage of beautiful repeating patterns that holds no chance of escape.
On the album's title track, the guitars seem to bicker with each other, cutting squalls of feedback with sharp, demented arpeggios. Even the name sounds like a trap, a portmanteau of "unreal" and "irregular," maybe, a word that's just familiar enough to hint at meaning while still coming up void. When Case pronounces it, it sounds like "I will." I wonder if there's supposed to be a pun on "IRL", too.
The song "Halcyon Days" probably hides a joke about aging behind its title. It's certainly no calm before the storm. That may be Irreal's whole punchline: You count your years in suffocating routines and repeated patterns. You build memories somewhere between the filler. What do you get from it, except a library of respites to look back on in the tedium? What good are the best days of your life if you can only access them in retrospect?
The album's last song coughs up the first melodic bass line in the whole piece, a mournful, descending figure. "Am I alone now?" Case wonders as the record spirals to a close. The band named that song "Navigating the Void". If Irreal is a map, don't expect to stop walking in tight, lonely circles.


The Brooklyn rapper follows up his 1995 debut with an ornate sequel that indulges nostalgia on its own terms.

Doe or Die II

Doe or Die, the 1995 debut by Brooklyn rapper AZ, suffers critically for its flawless execution. A coming-of-age treatise and a doctorate-level technical exercise, it’s Illmatic’s cosmopolitan sibling and Cuban Linx’s sober cousin, bridging their ideas and surpassing their acrobatics. Where its closest peers—ruggedly hard-won classics like Word...Life and operatic genre favorites like 4,5,6—commit more fully to autobiography or ambiance, Doe or Die explores weighty themes but doesn’t leave quite as much to chew on. Its modesty is unique among rap masterworks: AZ is all polish and rolled consonants, his rhyme patterns nested like Russian dolls so as to belie their complexity.
The album’s subtle magnificence extends to its exposition. On Doe or Die, life is fragile and death nonsensical, the born-alone-die-alone ethic making for a stark intimacy. Basking in a penthouse sunset, the kingpin narrator of “Sugar Hill” seeks distraction from memories of his criminal past; the chilly prisoner’s lament “Your World Don’t Stop” lands closer to Hard Rain Falling than “One Love.” The record is paced like a brooding HBO drama, long cigar-room dialogues punctuated by flashes of brutal violence.
Although 23-year-old AZ established himself as one of New York’s premier album artists, the industry had other ideas. When singles acts like Ma$e and Fat Joe ascended to cultural stardom, AZ was relegated to pinch-hitter status, emulating Bad Boy Records’ interpolation-heavy homages while signed to a succession of flailing major labels. Despite a productive mid-2000s indie run, his catalog remained overshadowed by the specter of his debut and his association with Nas. The promise of Doe or Die’s titular sequel made headlines when it was announced in 2009, the pressure of replicating his magnum opus all but dissipating over a 12-year delay.
Doe or Die II is a better record for it. The best sequels offer fresh lenses through which to consider their predecessors, and AZ’s discography has a rare narrative trajectory. Where Doe or Die’s narrator did the dirty work of pushing hostages’ heads through plane propellers, its follow-ups find an older man idly enjoying the spoils of wealth, plotting political maneuvers, and reminiscing over the bad old days. On “The Wheel,” AZ layers his couplets with concentric rhyme schemes: “When your features is as fresh as your sneakers, you age well/From the reaper era of reefer-puffers that make bail.” The ornateness might be grating from a lesser vocalist, but alliteration leavens the delivery. Even if his lifestyle bars found their logical conclusion in the mouths of Roc Marciano and Westside Gunn, AZ’s preternatural finesse still confers a sense of ceremony.
Doe or Die’s aesthetic triumph lay in how vividly it evoked the sound of mid-’90s New York: crackling snares, melodic arrangements from Pete Rock and D.R. Period’s salad days, Black and Hispanic guys parrying one another with Italian-American slang. (There are entire theses to be written on “We was already molded in people minds as mulignanes/Now we more fucked, stuck with a mayor named Giuliani.”) But even New York doesn’t sound like New York anymore, which frees AZ to indulge nostalgia on his own terms. Pete Rock and Buckwild return, joined by Alchemist, Bink, KayGee, and Rockwilder, a roster approximating a 20th Century Masters revue. Their collective vision of the AZ Type Beat—befitting of late nights and amber-hued spirits—makes for a cohesive sound that’s not indebted to any particular scene or era. For “Time to Answer,” Heatmakerz revisit the frosty chipmunk soul of 2005’s impregnable “Never Change”; when Baby Paul flips the Bobby Caldwell instrumental on “Keep It Real,” you marvel that AZ never rapped over it before.
Lil Wayne, T-Pain, and Conway all drop in to pay their respects in what is surely a first for a 49-year-old rapper’s self-released victory lap. Lest it turn into a survey course, a few genuine fireworks are scattered amongst the mood music. AZ mirrors the saxophone’s eighth notes on “Never Enough,” whereas Rick Ross plows right through them; their methods are discordant, but stylistically, they could not be better matched. On Buckwild’s show-stopper “Blow That Shit,” Dave East jaunts from marble-mouthed chorus to a synesthetic tour of emerald rings and cranberry leather. It’s the best case yet for Dave East, the hip-hop star—all it took was a quick immersion among AZ’s resplendent set pieces.
For half his life, AZ has been measured against Nas’s bloated profile, but AZ may emerge the better for it. The King’s Disease series finds Nas mired in joyless legacy building, each breath a hectoring appeal to Rock & Roll Hall of Fame voters. Doe or Die II is businesslike to a fault—more than anything, it would benefit from a dose of AZ’s mid-2000s exuberance—but for AZ, the proof has always been in the product. The unvarnished rhymes and staticky drum loop on “Found My Niche” sound like an early demo; listening to the bare vocal, it’s hard not to reflect on what was and what might have been. But when you can flow like that, who wants to look at your résumé?
One of Doe or Die’s more engrossing feats is its elegant fusion of memoir and fiction, the way AZ appends bittersweet reminiscences with aspirational visions of a 1990s caporegime. The sequel is uncannily self-contained by comparison, its discourse more immediate, its cast of characters winnowed. Yet if any of Doe or Die’s audacious promise—that intricately foretold ascension from basements and back alleys to yachts and private jets—remains unrealized, its Delphic narrator is only a little worse for wear. In a game of neoclassicists and revivalists, satirists and true believers, AZ remains a man apart.

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The self-appointed (and much-derided) new King of R&B attempts to live up to his own hype with a slick and ambitious new LP.

King of R&B

When Atlanta singer Jacquees crowned himself the King of R&B last year, his self-coronation was met almost entirely with jeers and dismissals. Despite his vague caveat (“for this generation”) and its clear intentions (for Jacquees to psyche himself up), haters, talking heads, and all the once and never Kings gathered en masse to dogpile the poor guy. It was only The-Dream, a singer-songwriter who can stake his own claim to the throne, that came at the comments with any sense: “That’s how you gotta talk, man,” he told Beats 1. “I did the same thing before I wrote ‘Single Ladies.’ ... Everybody took that as me being asinine at the time. They didn’t know like ... No, he’s trying to psych himself out to do some great shit.”
Jacquees makes a similar clarification on “King,” the opener to his sophomore album, which he dedicates to all the kings that came before: “Every day, a star is born/And if we talkin’ kings, there’s more than one/You should clap for ‘em,” he sings, reworking the hook from JAY-Z’s “A Star is Born” to reframe himself as just the latest in a long line of R&B royals. King of R&B, an hour-long, 18-track practice of the genre’s techniques, is Jacquees’ job application. He doesn’t write any songs as great as “Single Ladies,” but his ambitions are crystal-clear.
Of the R&B singers under 30 that Jacquees could feasibly call his competition, he is the most well-rounded. He might not have the massive crossover appeal of Bryson Tiller, or the experimental range of Daniel Caesar; his music isn’t as rap-infused as the alternative R&B of 6lack, and he’s nowhere near the songwriter the Internet’s Syd is, but he is as fundamentally sound as any of his peers: he understands R&B songs at their basic components and he is easily the most gifted singer of the bunch. In his clash with one such contemporary, Tory Lanez, on the album cut “Risk It All,” Jacquees steamrolls the Canadian mimic with bigger melodies and bolder come-ons. Throughout, he tries on Trigga-era temptations, Usher-sized confessions, and nearly everything in between.
He is still more reliant on mood than actual scene-setting, but his songs are broadening in scope. His debut album, 4275, was all about the anticipation of sex—trying to connect with someone after coming home from a long tour, yearning for a lover during a late night at the studio, the final moments just before sealing the deal. There was a song called “House or Hotel” that focused primarily on sneaking around with women in relationships. Titillation was all he could muster.
The new album fills out these vignettes, not just rolling around in the sheets (“Round II”) but also navigating the interpersonal exchanges that come with it. On the apologetic “Cross the Line,” he finds himself renegotiating boundaries after getting caught cheating. “Warning” proposes an entirely new construct for him, one where he is not in control: flipping the “one that got away” trope on its head. Past Kings of R&B have always negotiated a fine line between raunchy pleasure-seeker and hopeless romantic, and Jacquees is learning how to balance that emotional equation. From the sleek, body roll enticements of “Come Get It” to the starry-eyed Summer Walker duet “Superstar,” these are carefully crafted totems from an admirer of the form.
In a bit of irony, Jacquees sounds most comfortable on King of R&B among melodic rappers. He sucks Young Thug and Gunna into his orbit on “Verify,” their raps serving as accents for his croons. The strobing, synth-led “What They Gone Do With Me” sponges up some of Future’s bravado. Alongside Lil Baby, on closer “Your Peace,” he turns the throwback bounce of hip-hop soul into a middle ground. On “New New,” he filters down Thug and Travis Scott-ish vocal takes into a serenade, basically purifying a rap song into an R&B one.
Even straddling the hip-hop world, he never loses the smoothness R&B requires. At a time when so many pride themselves on being genre-benders, he remains a formalist. There may be room to debate who the King of R&B is or what that even means, but with King of R&B, Jacquees formally accepts his place within a storied lineage.


Let Me Hang You is the result of long-shelved sessions from the 1990s, during which Burroughs recited some favorite riffs from Naked Lunch. The album conjures only a portion of the book’s wild power.

Let Me Hang You

The penultimate section of William S. Burroughs’ most notorious book carries the heading “Atrophied Preface,” and it’s there that the author drops a useful—if belated—hint for the reader: “You can cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point.” That line provides a shot of literary self-esteem for anyone who’s experienced trouble following the experimental text in sequential fashion up until this juncture.
Given how slippery the 1959 book is with chronology and setting—and how quickly it moves between riotously debauched sexual libertinage (and violence), vaguely sketched political conspiracies, descriptions of alien-bug climaxes, and comparatively sober theories regarding various aspects of drug dependence—most readers will have already cottoned onto the fact that Naked Lunch privileges an aggregate feel over any traditional sense of novelistic progression. In his late-50s correspondence, Burroughs even went back and forth on the question of whether Naked Lunch was a novel at all. It’s always nice to have some authorial permission to skip around in a piece of writing as avant-garde as this one, the better to attack it from multiple angles and see what happens at the level of comprehension.
Now that the author of Naked Lunch is gone, this officially approved liberty-taking comes in handy for Hal Willner—a skilled producer who worked with the writer on LPs made during Burroughs’ lifetime—as well as for a group of musicians that stretches across eras. Let Me Hang You is the delayed result of some recording sessions from the 1990s, during which Burroughs was reportedly asked to isolate and recite a number of his favorite riffs from Naked Lunch. These performances received a bit of musical accompaniment at the time, courtesy of guitarist Bill Frisell, violinist Eyvind Kang, and pianist Wayne Horvitz, before the overall project was buried by record label executives. Some time after Burroughs’s death, Willner exhumed the tracks, and asked a new generation of musicians to help him refurbish the album—among them the Canadian punk auteur King Khan as well as the singer (and author of the “Negrogothic” manifesto) M. Lamar.
The casting is right. And even the irregular nature of the album’s path to market would seem to be in the spirit of its anarchic source material. That said, for significant stretches, Let Me Hang You only manages to conjure a portion of Naked Lunch’s wild power. In part this is due to Burroughs’ editorial decisions regarding excerpted texts, which seem focused on the book’s perviest jags. Even within certain of these more infamous “routines” from the author’s repertoire, his readings here excise key lines from Naked Lunch that originally lent the book’s scenes a distinction beyond their noted luridness.
The album’s title track is a refrain from the portion of Naked Lunch devoted to group orgasm-via-hanging. In the book, the transgressive erotics are part of a story within the story—specifically, a porno being projected at something like a society ball. At the end of the book-section titled “A.J.’s Annual Party,” the actors who portrayed this brutal ménage à trois on-camera step out from behind the screen, at film’s end, and take a bow while sporting ropes around their necks. Part of the charge of this passage in Naked Lunch comes from this slapstick juggling of modes, as well as the depiction of what an elite audience in the novel’s fictional land of Interzone will happily consume.
On Let Me Hang You, though, the routine is merely presented as a distinctly naughty sex scene that was written and read by the author himself, and then paired with an often-quiet but suitably discordant avant-rock arrangement. The stripping away of context seems primed to privilege the nastiest parts, though at the expense of the author’s social and political cynicism. (Not to mention his humor.) Instead of promoting the feel of Burroughs’ early approach to satire, this latter-day performance feels more akin to that of a grade-schooler walking around the playground at recess, eager to show you something unexpected and unsettling.
This juvenile fixation extends to other tracks here, like “Islam Incorporated,” which also snips out some of Burroughs’s funniest gags (as set down in the Naked Lunch section “Islam Incorporated and the Parties of Interzone”) in order to focus on the gross-out clauses. (The most savage jokes in this part of the book are actually trained on the American bourgeoisie.) Burroughs’ interpretations here seem clearly inferior to his first recorded excerpts from Naked Lunch, on the 1965 spoken-word album Call Me Burroughs.
Just as the aesthetic range of Burroughs’ writing tends to be scaled back in these vocal takes, most of the arrangements stake out a single style and then stick with it for the duration of a given reading. Gravely thrumming bass tones hold sway during “Lief the Unlucky,” 60s-style rock-boogie drives “Clem Snide the Private Asshole,” while countrified twang is created for “The Queen Bee.” The performances always sound crisply played, but for the most part, they don’t measure up to the moment-to-moment inspiration of Willner-produced tracks on the 1990 Burroughs album Dead City Radio, which placed the author alongside John Cale, Sonic Youth, and the NBC Symphony Orchestra.
Just because it’s possible to “cut into” Naked Lunch at any point doesn’t mean all readings will be equally robust. Though there are, happily, two arrangements here that do full justice to the book’s surreal stream of textures. During the lengthy “Disciplinary Procedures,” ambient noise dominates at first, before some staccato strings are added. A groove is gradually lathered up, and the swinging finale suggests big-band bombast. And on “Gentle Reader,” M. Lamar’s countertenor voice manages to be both spooky and lyrical—the perfect accompaniment to a spiritual, incantatory Naked Lunch lick in which the narrator announces his intention to set loose his “word hoard.” It’s Burroughs’ best vocal performance on this album, too, as he slides from his trademark aristocratic whine to more overtly threatening cadences. Along with attractive miniatures like “The Exterminator” and “Quick,” these major tracks from Let Me Hang You offer some stray, valuable new connections with the best of the Burroughs style.


The masked psychedelic band Goat claim their project stems from a long-running collective of townspeople in their small Swedish village: People have been playing under the name Goat in various incarnations for decades, but this nine-song, steady-burning World Music is the first proper release.

World Music

As the series of interviews they've given in recent months suggests, the Swedish band Goat is hilarious: In September, before their performance at Britain's Supersonic, the Quietus published its second talk with the ever-vague group. When writer Joe Clay asked who might headline the festival of that unnamed member's dreams, they answered, "If Holger Czukay and Geezer Butler had a son, it would be him. Just him playing bass for a couple of days." The Goathead described the band's live performances as "the harvesting of souls," and its lifestyle as "invocations, prayers, and total rejoice!"
Beneath that jester veneer, though, there's a much more serious idealism at work here. As key member Christian Johansson told The Quietus in an earlier interview, Goat stems from a loose and long-running collective of townspeople in Korpilombolo, a village with a population of a few hundred in the northwest hook of Sweden. Though people in the town have been playing under that name in various incarnations for several decades, the nine-song, steady-burning World Music is the unit's first proper release. That alleged tradition, it seems, is mostly an excuse for being a true band or collective rather than a collection of personalities, vying for the attention of micro-celebrity at a time when that's easy enough to find. To wit, they wear masks on stage and discuss the details of membership-- who has been in the band, who will be in the band, who is currently in the band-- in incredibly ambiguous terms. "In northern Sweden-- it is hard to explain in English-- it is about not drawing attention to yourself. The important thing is what you do, not who does it," explained Johansson. "This is why we never have tried to make ourselves heard before now." The songs matter more than the sources.
That approach of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts largely defines World Music, a psychedelic rock record that strangely never seems hyperbolic. It's fun and often dizzying, employing a kaleidoscope of unexpected tones and far-flung influences. But it doesn't feel forced. Over insistent rhythms that suggest Spacemen 3 and, at least in spirit, the conjuring drones of Pandit Pran Nath and La Monte Young, Goat weave an ecumenical history of rock'n'roll. They intercept signals from Led Zeppelin and Funkadelic, Jefferson Starship and Fela Kuti, the Congos and the Rolling Stones, bending them into a resiliently consistent album. Sure, opener "Diarabi" finishes with a brief drum solo, but that span flows naturally from the song's steady ascent of tangled guitars and distant keyboards; it feels less like a solo than the end of the song. "Let it Bleed" is a mildly funky number with powerfully strutting (and anonymous) female vocals, suggesting ESG in its sass and sizzle. But even its syncopation seems somehow reserved, taking care not to come too hard or too heavy. With its fuzz-tone bass, wah-wah love, and chanted vocals, "Goatman" is the record's traditionally heaviest track, keying on a guitar solo that sounds as though played with barbed wire. Still, Goat seem to be holding back, tempering sizzle and drive with a proper modicum of listlessness. This might sound tepid to some; to me, at least, it's an invitation for immersion.
Like their fellow Swedes in Dungen, Goat have succeeded in not only borrowing the sounds of yore but reinvigorating them, creating a record that doesn't mimic the past wholesale so much as re-contextualize its components. But for all of Dungen's musical bustle and urgency, Goat seems preternaturally at ease with this stuff, soaking insistent beats with lysergic tones and high-flying hooks. If their creation myth is dubious (and it seems to be), its ethos-- this music is an extension of traditions, so there's no need to rush it or demand that it make them famous-- might not be. The short and infinitely catchy "Run to Your Mama" could be a single, but it isn't polished or produced enough to be meant that way. "Goatlord" coasts over a tide of pump organ and casually strummed acoustic guitar, existing in a Velvets haze until an electric guitar solo-- nasty and snarling, like Comets on Fire falling back to earth-- finally intersects it. When the drift returns, the electric guitar sticks with it, following it toward the exit. It's a fitting illustration of the band's philosophical insistence that all of this is world music-- ancient and modern, accessible and mutable.
I wonder if, in a matter of months, the world were to learn that the story of Goat was one of complete hokum, would it matter? That is, if their tales of Korpilombolo and voodoo and ancestors passing down a tradition of inclusive and now-electrified ritual music were false, does it matter? Probably: Despite the detail droves that the internet and itinerant social media allow, a sense of mystery still begets a sense of wonder. Perhaps you and your friends could begin your own Goat, live a myth of your own making?
But at least at this moment, Goat afford listeners the opportunity to press pause on self-obsessed information cycles, to push past the noise of minutiae, check into their wonderfully vague story, and check out with a wonderful record. Indeed, if certain components of Goat's lore prove to be just that, they have, with World Music, created a vivid manifestation of the ideals they've espoused. "We've been taught since we were small to have an understanding of not only western bands, but of music from other parts of the world," Johansson told The Quietus, a sentiment echoed when the band told another interviewer that its influences include birdsongs and food. "The title World Music was chosen because we believe we play 'world music,' and that's what we think everyone plays." For all its psychedelic tendencies and marketing trappings, Goat's World Music feels as assured and unfussy as folk music.


The group’s new mini-album is their most consistent and focused, but by drawing their sound down to its essence, they dampen the anything-goes spirit that made them so appealing.

Annual

In the 16 months since the release of Modern Nature’s debut EP Nature in March 2019, the group led by guitarist Jack Cooper has explored krautrock, paganesque British folk, sideways In Rainbows jams, spiritual jazz, tape loops, meditation music, and the kind of minimalist indie rock Cooper forged with James Hoare in their group Ultimate Painting. Modern Nature’s new mini-album, Annual, is their most consistent and focused release to date, but by drawing their sound down to its essence, they dampen the anything-goes spirit that made them so appealing. As a result, Annual feels polished and smartly constructed, but limited in its scope—a high-definition planetarium that makes you wish for the night sky.
Annual purports to be a calendar cycle of songs, beginning at the end of the year and moving through the seasons, culminating in the return of winter. Instead, this 20-minute suite feels more like a bleak February set off by a weekend-long warm spell. The overall mood is dark, gray, and cloudy, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Where last year’s full-length How to Live felt like an exurb meeting between Neu! and Fairport Convention, Annual is more at home in the territory of Songs: Ohia, Low, Ryley Walker, or the Sufjan Stevens of Seven Swans: American artists working in the dim light of midwestern winters.
This is a mode that suits Cooper well. With Will Young focused on BEAK> and momentarily out of the picture, Modern Nature have scaled down to little more than stand-up bass and shuffling drums that follow the lead of Cooper’s guitar, which curls like a flag in low wind. Like Talk Talk, a heavy influence here, this iteration of Modern Nature uses shadow and suggestion, their small size somehow standing in for the immensity of the object upon which they’re focused. Sunwatchers’ Jeff Tobias, whose sax whirled across How to Live, mostly reduces himself to textural work, laying down a high-pile carpet that serves as the foundation for many of these songs. In Ultimate Painting, Cooper perfected his sense of negative space, carving his way through the group’s albums with deceptively complex guitar lines. Here, he’s backed by a band capable of matching him step for step.
But it’s hard not to miss the risk-taking of Modern Nature’s previous releases. “Harvest,” whose lead vocal is sung by Itasca, is stroked along by swells of guitar, and just when the song seems ready to strike deeper into the darkness, it sputters out on Cooper’s brief, throat-clearing solo and a couple of leashed bars from Tobias. “Halo” glances in the direction of a long, low-stress jam à la Alice Coltrane, but ultimately decides it’s not worth the trip; a stretch that seems like the prelude to a pleasurable workout turns out to be nothing more than a yawn.
Despite its misfires, the ambitious scale of Annual’s song suite is another step forward for a young group evolving at an unnaturally fast rate. The band’s all-gates-open conceit has clearly sparked something in Cooper, who is already at work on a follow-up, and who seems more aware than ever of just how malleable a song and a band can be. All the more reason to wish he’d hammered harder.

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On her debut album, the Kenyan composer folds field recordings, ambient textures, and layered vocalizations into a gripping meditation on illness and healing.

Feeling Body

In “feeling body,” the twelve-minute title track of Nyokabi Kariũki’s debut album, the composer’s voice wavers as she asks a vulnerable question: “If you’re not hopeful for your body, then who is?” Amid a wash of violin pricks, whispers, and everyday ambience, the young Kenyan composer thinks aloud about illness and the strain of unfulfilled recovery. Like the millions of others who have felt haunted by the same specter of corporeal disquiet, she has no answer.
Kariũki developed FEELING BODY from her experiences with the extended, amorphous symptoms of long COVID, along with the compounding ills of the virus and a society that badly wants to disappear the sick. With last year’s peace places: kenyan memories EP, she built compositions around field recordings she’d taken in her home country, searching for her own sense of place and self as she spent time living in New York and Maryland. On FEELING BODY, Kariũki plucks more hyper-localized sounds from domestic life. She shares a visceral tour through the psychological journey of recovery without reaching any definitive solutions, mapping the aches of illness and isolation with careful intensity.
Especially in its title track, FEELING BODY can be an uncomfortable listen, in part due to Kariũki’s precise attention to the mix. Between tense, quiet passages, vocalizations sneak up like distant calls for aid, and oozing electronic sounds evoke the squeezing pressure of headaches and stuffed sinuses. A faucet’s drip is a steady, rhythmless presence, like a cold reminder of a hospital sink. Tangled with background noises of household puttering, instrumental knots snake around Kariũki’s vulnerable musings about reconciling her mind and body, wrestling with hopelessness, and grieving. “feeling body” pierces so deeply that Kariũki said that she was unable to return to some of its elements after she first recorded them, a way of shielding herself “from having to relive saying these things.”
Kariũki surveys other aspects of healing as the album progresses. She grapples with the strictures of the body and memory with the micro-opera “folds,” exploring how her moods changed throughout seasonal cycles and virus-imposed stagnation. In “fire head,” a mechanical voice repeats, “They stopped asking, ‘Are you okay?’” Its tone is flat, not unfriendly. But as Kariũki crests an ominous instrumental tide, she erupts in a piercing high; electronic thuds land wet, crunching blows, and the voice continues: “...when they knew the answer wouldn’t change.” It is a crushing realization: Not only may there not be a “better,” but cherished personal connections are more fragile than we’d like them to be.
From the anguish of “fire head,” Kariũki shifts to “quiet face,” where a bittersweet melody dominates. “Hope is for the weekend/Scrollin’ Reddit ’til I’m sleepin’,” she sings. It’s the ghost of a sweet pop hook blown away by a listless sigh, with the chasm of evaporated potential emphasized in the homophone of “weekend”/“weakened.” “Subira” has a similar gossamer eeriness, with Kariũki singing in a near-whisper over flitting violin and airy vocalizations.
“Nazama,” however, resolves the album’s tension with an exhale at the end of the record. It feels like a baptism, and in the record’s liner notes, Kariũki connects FEELING BODY’s watery flow to both the Biblical River Jordan and homeopathic traditions of Kenya’s Kikuyu people. “I’m getting better at facing the ocean,” Kariũki sings over a heavenly, wordless chorus. Instead of a sharp prickle, sounds of water murmur alongside her long, quivering notes; a baleful air returns, but Kariũki’s sense of calm triumphs over the swells. A solution to Kariũki’s ailments may still be intangible, but “Nazama” suggests an answer in surrendering to a flow state.
As COVID-19 has kept shapeshifting, so too has the concept of the “pandemic album.” There are those made in immediate reaction to its circumstances, like the solo efforts written in newly liberated swaths of time and the work assembled over sturdy WiFi connections. But fewer projects have reckoned with the pandemic’s elliptical tail: the rippling effects of its years-long destabilization, the lingering cloud of long-term illness, and the gaps between those still living in the pandemic and those who’ve left it behind them. FEELING BODY occupies this uncharted terrain, probing at visceral feelings of physical and psychological discomfort. Operating without meaningful answers about what may lie ahead, Kariũki nonetheless extends a reassuring hand into the void.


L.A. production duo continues to do no wrong, including this wide-eyed, creative reshuffling of the piles of au courant music.

The Perfect Lullaby

If you want an example of the wide-ranging nature of dance music in 2011, look no further than Nguzunguzu, the Los Angeles production and DJ team of Asma Maroof and Daniel Pineda. The duo, which got some attention hosting the popular (and now-dormant) Wildness party series at the L.A. club Silver Platter, incorporates most every strain of domestic and global music into its beats-- from Chicago juke and footwork to UK bass, mambo, reggaeton, and cumbia. But they also celebrate the familiar: For all the exotic sounds in an Nguzunguzu track, there are usually elements of chart hip-hop and R&B offsetting them.
Nguzunguzu have two EPs to their name-- Mirage and a self-titled one, both from 2010-- but the best introduction to their sound is The Perfect Lullaby, an album-length mixtape made for the online art magazine DIS. (It's available for a free download here.) On this, Pineda and Maroof (it's worth mentioning that the latter recently served as M.I.A.'s tour DJ) build a bouncy, dreamy mix that takes specific inspiration from the Angolan dance genres of Kizomba and Zouk. These styles are generally slow and seductive and have a grimy, percussive undercurrent, and Nguzunguzu match that with the similarly sultry vocals of artists like Brandy and The-Dream. The combination is pretty ingenious.
A big part of the reason the mix works so well is simple execution-- Nguzunguzu blend these far-flung sounds together in a way that just feels natural. They often leave source material intact (vocals are rarely tweaked or mutated, as they are in some recent indie-leaning R&B), so it's less about intricate remixing than careful beat matching. For example, early in the set (it's not divided into individual tracks), they put R. Kelly's verse from Ja Rule's "Wonderful" over a Zouk instrumental by DJ P&P Productions that flips the context of the source but maintains something essential about it, too. The same goes for Amerie's classic "1 Thing", set here to a grimy beat by France's DJ Lo, placing the original's high-energy clamor on a humid slow boil.
In a recent interview with DJ /rupture on his WFMU show, Mudd Up!, Maroof talked about a Nguzunguzu track combining a Wiley instrumental with the Nicki Minaj remix of Drake's "Best I Ever Had", saying, "She kind of raps like a grime MC on it... I want her to be a grime MC, so I just kind of put the two together." A simple statement, but it gets at what the group does so well-- sort of a wide-eyed, creative reshuffling of au courant music. So even with the R&B bent of this mix, the group seems more in line with folks like DJ /rupture and even M.I.A. than the crop of urban-pop revisionists that has sprung up recently. But for Nguzunguzu, it's not about politics-- these two are just trying to build the global discotheque of their dreams.


The North Carolina noisemakers Earthly mix the psych noise of early Animal Collective and Black Dice with the audio collages of the Books, Matmos, and Prefuse 73. Their joyful album Days doesn't make you feel like a kid so much as it reminds you how great it can be to act like one.

Days

Sometimes you can tell a lot from the smallest details of a project. The suffix "ly" in the name "Earthly", for instance, nods subtly to how this pair of North Carolina noisemakers create music not necessarily of Earth but cobble together fragments from their terrestrial experience into a rough resemblance. The album title may account for the sheer amount of time ex-college roommates Edaan Brook and Brint Hansen have spent together, working through school, hanging out at home, writing songs, or just getting to know each other. You can hear that time in Days—the lifeblood of its tracks is an endless collection of samples that would've taken years to assemble, let alone arrange into music—and sense that close friendship, too. Look at the cover: two strange, colorful faces stare blankly, content to simply be in the same place.
But maybe that's all a bit too serious for music like this, because if nothing else, Days wants to have fun. Earthly finger paints with found sound, plays tag with sequencers, jumps rope with drum machines, seesaws with FX pedals, and pigs out on bubblegum melody. You can imagine sing-songy opener "RGB" as the theme for a CGI "Rugrats" reboot, or "Ice Cream"'s carnival bounce as a Cartoon Network interlude. One particularly exuberant track is straight-up called "Games", and though it wastes no time dropping PlayStation samples into its iridescent chords, the music plays like an anthem for indoor kids who discovered their kindred spirits at noise shows and dance parties. Days doesn't make you feel like a kid so much as it reminds you how great it can be to act like one.
Surrealist as they are, Brook and Hansen frequently dip into the uncanny valley, and it's where their best ideas are found. Not unlike Oneohtrix Point Never or Holly Herndon, vocals are chopped and pitched into tuneful glossolalia, occasionally allowed to speak in daffy non sequiturs. And it's often impossible to discern exactly what other sounds Earthly recorded, dismantled, and pieced back together for any given track. Was that a pan flute fluttering in the background of "Honison Climber"? Did they sample a soda commercial for "RGB"? You may want to pick apart the layers, but it's better to soak in the frenzy; all those moving parts would be nonsense on their own, but together amount to a baffling electronic spectacle.
It's unlikely you'll hear another album like Days this year, but it's not without predecessors. The influence of early aughts psych noise courses through the music, as if it's a love child conceived during the first Black Dice and Animal Collective tour. But the offspring has grown independently, learning to speak its own language with new slang and more deliberate syntax. The sound resembles fellow audio collagists in places—Javelin's playful No Mas, early Prefuse 73, Matmos, and the Books are all here. But throughout the record, Brook and Hansen discover new ways to surprise and thrill, making unexpected turns with each consecutive track. Even low-slung drifts and beatless shimmers aren't off limits in their topsy-turvy digital funhouse. Maybe "balanced noise album" is an oxymoron, but so is "adult playground." Indeed, Days is both.


California musician Christopher Adams fuses shoegaze, house music, breakbeats, and hip-hop into an ever-morphing sound world as complex and irreducible as grief.

Harp

Dance music has long been used as a refuge—from breakups and soul-sucking day jobs, from homophobia, racism, and war. But Christopher Adams, the California-based musician and producer behind PENDANT, wasn’t seeking an escape from reality so much as an opportunity to confront the reality he’d been avoiding. His second LP, Harp, grapples with the grief and pain Adams locked away for years following his father’s death in 2010, channeling invigorating hardcore, eccentric rap, and weirdo rave alongside flashes of R&B and new wave. What makes all these sounds work together is Adams’ confident performances and complex sound worlds—icy yet inviting, ambitious yet grounded. “Follow me down, this is the caustic pop music sound,” he raps in a Beastie Boys-esque snarl on “Thorn.”
For much of Adams’ youth, his father struggled with alcoholism, ultimately passing away when Adams was 18. Adams—barely a legal adult—signed the papers to remove life support, and though he went on to release music with acts like DIY post-hardcore band Calculator and noisy punk outfit Never Young, it took over a decade for him to come to terms with the experience through his art. “My dad’s death was messy and confusing and it’s always been really hard to talk about,” he writes in a statement accompanying the album. “I wanted to make this record about pain, how ugly it can be, and how grateful I am to it for connecting me with myself and the people around me.”
Adams began work on the album in early 2020, writing and producing by himself with only a laptop. After several years making guitar music, he was drawn to different sounds: the ones that boom from clubs and warehouses, which then lay vacant at the onset of the pandemic. Harp is marked by thunderous dance beats, in-your-face rap, and fragments of spoken word—a jarring departure from Adams’ past work. Fusing his shoegaze, punk, and hardcore background with jungle, house, and hip-hop, the album cycles through a mad scientist’s library of musical styles, from UK garage breakbeats (“LED Head Rush”) to celestial synths (“Altered Destinies”) to abrasive electronic textures (“Contract”). Thankfully, the off-the-wall ideas largely pan out, and as an experienced shoegazer who’s previously worked with producers like Jay Som’s Melina Duterte and Jack Shirley (Deafheaven), Adams is accustomed to balancing layers within his music.
Against these harsh yet beautiful backdrops, Harp explores the interconnectedness of life, dreams, memories, and death—and how pain and love color all of this. Adams’ previous full-length as PENDANT, Through a Coil, was rather abstract, couching brief moments of vulnerability within metaphysical imagery that was often difficult to parse, alongside Creation Records-esque melodies that occasionally felt half-baked. With Harp, Adams demonstrates his ability to write a sticky hook or sustain attention without one, whether it’s the seductive dream pop of “Blue Mare” or the acid-doused club track “Rights for an Angel.” The melodies wield his relatively limited vocal range to near perfection, displaying his knack for soulfulness and rowdiness alike.
While the vaporous vocals, brash rhythms, and ever-morphing styles can lead Harp to feel larger than life, Adams’ words come across raw and direct. “Pain’s my bitch I fucking feel it,” he raps on the seething, hardcore-infused “Contract.” When he squawks “This is the sound of my head bleeding out” on “Thorn,” or delicately coos “I forgive you for everything I lived through/While so much is unclear to me” on “Secret in the Dusk,” the catharsis is apparent. He doesn’t claim to be cured—he frequently references his lasting anger and hurt—and although this music is born from a brutal experience of grief, it also reflects the euphoric power of love. “LED Head Rush” glows with the memory of a loved one who’s no longer around, and the anxious narrator of “Latex Heart” finds affirmation during a breakdown in the warm presence of someone they trust. It’s no coincidence that both of these moments on the album take place late at night, the traditional hours for dance music. As darkness gives way to light, Harp reminds us that opening oneself to love can be just as humbling as death.


An elaborate new box set explores the evolution of Justin Vernon’s early band through pivotal live sets, avant-Americana studio experiments, and a formative solo album.

Epoch

Epoch begins with a dilemma. To explain why the avant-Americana quartet DeYarmond Edison is worth remembering, the box set would have to start with the recordings they made closer to the end of their mayfly lifespan. But to tell the whole story, it would have to start with Mount Vernon, their precociously professional teen band, whose songs, as the accompanying book gently concedes, may grate on the adult sensibilities at which this handsome shelf-buster is aimed. That they appear at the beginning anyway shows just how hard Epoch comes down on the side of storytelling. It’s a work of music journalism as much as a portfolio of songs, excavating how Justin Vernon, Joe Westerlund, and brothers Brad and Phil Cook grew up together in Wisconsin, rampantly evolved in North Carolina, and split off asymmetrically, with three of them earning modest acclaim as Megafaun and one earning Grammy awards and Taylor Swift guest spots as Bon Iver.
The box is divided into six chronological parts, beginning with All of Us Free, an LP that captures DeYarmond Edison taking shape in the late 1990s and early ’00s. The second LP, Silent Signs, reproduces their second album, which they recorded just before leaving Eau Claire. That Was Then consists of four CDs documenting the performances in which they dynamited their newly refined sound, and these discs form the messy, brilliant heart of the box and the band. The LP Epoch, Etc. is the sound of them breaking apart under the stress, and hazeltons is Vernon breaking out on his own. The set concludes with the LP Where We Belong, with an A-side of recrimination and a B-side of reconciliation.
Epoch was executive produced by Grayson Haver Currin, a Pitchfork contributor who also wrote the 114-page accompaniment, Time to Know. When DeYarmond Edison moved from the Chippewa Valley to the Southern capital of Raleigh in 2005, Haver Currin became a friend and fan, and the project is such a close study of their bond that it becomes a monument for friendship writ large—how it fits people together, changes them until they fit no more, and then, with patience, rejoins them at new seams.
DeYarmond Edison lasted only a year in Raleigh, but this is where they pushed their trusty roots rock to its limits and beyond—in public. Their sound took as its provenance all the Black and Southern and mountain music recorded by Alan Lomax, the electronic webs and tape delays of Steve Reich, the drone-country collage of Richard Buckner, the pastoral graces of Bill Frisell, the free energies of jazz, the cellular structure of procedural music, and the microtones of bowed cymbals, all of it spinning the chrysalis from which Bon Iver would later emerge.
Vernon, a guitarist and singer, and Westerlund, a drummer, started playing together in middle school, but Epoch picks up in 1998, when they fused with bassist Brad Cook and pianist Phil Cook as Mount Vernon. It’s every high schooler’s right to be annoying, and Mount Vernon exercised it fully. Their Saddle Creek-style indie folk was lethally earnest, its high-minded ideals untested, their cultural boundaries unquestioned. They were rule-followers, un-punk, with a “terrifying Protestant work ethic,” as one member put it. In short, they seemed the people least likely to rip it up and start again. Singer Sara Jensen is appealing on “We Can Look Up,” but Vernon is still figuring out whether he wants to be Adam Duritz or Lead Belly. The ska horns don’t help. Mercifully, high school graduation put a stop to this.
Soon enough, the Cooks reunited with a Westerlund, Dan—Joe was studying experimental music and jazz with Milford Graves at Bennington—in another band led by Vernon. But they were all a little wary, and they were all changing. The dreadlocks, dashikis, and Tibetan flags had fallen away, and a gentle, tasteful, moody Americana style was emerging. Vernon’s writing turned inward, his meanings shrouded in melancholy weather reports from real places that already lay half in childhood dreams. By 2004, when they released their debut album as DeYarmond Edison, Vernon was ripening into his husky voice. On the first LP here, you can hear their expanding horizons in a trumpeting electronic bauble from one of Vernon’s solo projects and “The Orient,” a mystic mountain of organ chords that ends disc 1.
The second disc reproduces Silent Signs, the album DeYarmond Edison made before leaving Eau Claire at the peak of their local fame. Now Dan was off to college, and Joe tagged back in. “Lift,” 97 seconds of gorgeously suspended gongs, horns, and soft feedback, tunes the listener’s antenna to the experimentation stirring in the sturdy songs to come. On the title track, the horns hang in graceful swags, the harmonica an almost strident drone. Vernon attenuates simple chord progressions into shards and curls, his songs unrolling in many pensive stages. Other highlights include the surprisingly good Tom Waits impression “Time to Know,” the salty-sweet Stevie Nicks homage “Dead Anchor,” and the whispering banjo-and-vibraphone mirage “Ragstock.”
The book’s appraisal of the music is washed in friendship, but it also has the sharp-eyed insights that only friendship allows. The young Vernon is portrayed as being driven by jealous rivalry with area bands like Amateur Love, which was gaining steam in Eau Claire. Even worse, the Cook brothers were members. Vernon made them choose. The compromise, which probably made sense in their mid-twenties, was that they would go all in on DeYarmond Edison, but it would be a collaborative vessel for their new interests, and they would relocate to Raleigh, a city they knew as an alt-country hotbed in the ’90s, with a Southern halo thanks to “Wagon Wheel.”
After making the move in 2005, they lined up a semi-monthly residency at Bickett Gallery on the strengths of their polite folk albums. They ripped this music to pieces in front of a startled, up-for-it audience, as we hear on That Was Then. The first two CDs are culled from the Bickett shows on March 1 and April 22, 2006, where each member took charge of one set. Vernon tasked his bandmates with singing leads instead of their customary harmonies. Westerlund brought in jazz tunes and experimental practices from Bennington. Brad Cook gave a crash course in 20th-century electronic composition. And Phil Cook led a deep dive into early, unamplified American music: Delta blues, spirituals, string and jug bands.
By then, Cook had immersed himself in UNC-Chapel Hill’s folk archives and met some “real honest-to-goodness folk musicians,” as he announced at the Mabel Tainter Theater, a bejeweled 19th-century concert hall where they played a triumphant home-state show between those two Bickett dates. Filling the second two CDs of That Was Then, the concert mixes songs from their records with restrained versions of their discoveries at Bickett. It delivers an ideal version of “Silent Signs,” stretched and spectral like Sam Amidon, and the beautiful “Red Shoes,” which has the cloudy mixture of doubt and regret that marks Vernon’s best songs, and the darkly spun charmer “Song for a Lover (of Long Ago),” where the enigmatic repetition of the word “ring” is both a matured take on the circular prosody of “Bones” and a holographic step toward Bon Iver.
In contrast to the concert-hall coughs on the Mabel Tainter discs, the chatter at Bickett sounds like an audience who’d come to hear these new guys from up north play Southern music but had walked into something else entirely, something haunting and electrifying. This band raggedly drawled the Piedmont blues of Blind Boy Fuller and belted out Muddy Waters, played a convincing Latin clave in “Afro Blue,” and improvised at the edge of chaos and in pacific depths (the exquisite “Abel + Cain”). They built ambient keyboard aquariums, roughed up a Richard Brautigan poem, bridged Sun Records traveling rhythms and Sun City Girls drones, and indulged in bursts of rustic thrashcore.
They also chanted and clapped their way through “Old Dollar Mamie,” a song that Alan Lomax recorded Benny Will Richardson singing in a Mississippi prison, and then dissolved it into electroacoustic drones. The brilliance of the Bickett shows lies in their stark, well-considered leaps, in their courage to play like riverbank idlers one moment and loft dwellers the next. Yet they could leap too far. They were suburban Northerners laying hands on rural Southern songs in an art gallery, and while the line between specifically Black music and common folk property is often blurry, there are times when they are inarguably emulating Black Southern voices, however reverently and carefully sourced. The book spends several paragraphs facing this head-on, but it’s still uncomfortable to hear.
The Bickett sets also include the spiritual “A Satisfied Mind,” the result of Brad Cook suggesting that Vernon try a falsetto, which the book frames as ground zero for Bon Iver. This new vocal style—and an increasingly spare, sculptural, multi-tracked style of construction—takes shape on hazeltons, a solo album Vernon released in an edition of 100 copies in 2006. Its title track features the “Holocene” chord progression with different vocals and less production; more exciting are “game night,” where guitar harmonics slip through drums like schools of fish, and “Song for a Lover (of Long Ago),” with field recordings and vocal processing, tricks he’d learned from his bandmates. But he was also pulling away, already collaborating with a future Volcano Choir bandmate on “Hannah, My Ophelia.”
The Bickett residency seemed to unsettle the fault lines DeYarmond Edison had been riding, especially when they started trying to figure out what to do next. A telling anecdote in the book finds Westerlund and the Cooks rapt by a noisy, unhinged Akron/Family show while Vernon sits in the back, wishing he could hear the nuances and structures of the songs. He was writing but not sharing much with the band. They were hurt, but when they heard the wholly private world he was creating, they understood. Lost in the studio, DeYarmond Edison dissolved mid-session, leaving 1,000 copies of a reissued Silent Signs to rot in a barn in Durham. Vernon returned to Wisconsin to make For Emma, Forever Ago, and the others went on without him as Megafaun. “We were like three framers and a contractor,” as Phil Cook put it. “Then the contractor left. And then we just built a bunch of fucking houses.”
Still, the final DeYarmond Edison recordings, collected on the Epoch, Etc. disc, were some of their best, with new versions that balanced graceful songwriting and experimental taste. Instead of building on this promise, though, the box set concludes with Where We Belong, which tracks a decade of cautious rapprochement. The first side features some lonely, heartbroken, Lomax-y things that Vernon made alone after the band split and the collaborative work that his former bandmates had taken as a betrayal. “Lazy Suicide,” which became Megafaun’s signature song, is pretty clearly aimed at Vernon. But the second side finds the four old friends taking one another on tour and joining for Sounds of the South, a major Americana collaboration with Sharon Van Etten, Fight the Big Bull, and others in 2010, captured here at the Sydney Opera House—the professionalization of the performance-as-archivism that they first tried at Bickett.
Brad Cook has gone on to become a prodigious producer, Phil Cook an invaluable steward of local gospel music, Westerlund a well-circulated drummer and solo artist. So what does their old band amount to in the end? As one doubter puts it in the book, “Other than DeYarmond Edison being a failure, I don’t know how important any of this is.” But if there is something indulgent about the project, there is also something deeply fascinating about its attempt to face every inch of the past, laying bare how people change and change yet always end up as what they always were.


Though the band is now squarely in its pop era, the nostalgia that laced its early records has morphed into a timely, fatalistic vision of the future and national decay.

Deerhunter: Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?

By 2015, Bradford Cox had grown weary of the nostalgia that suffused Deerhunter’s early records. “When I was young, foggy nostalgia was such a part of my shtick. That pink haze of nostalgia and boyhood,” he said in an interview before the release of the band’s seventh LP, Fading Frontier. “Now I just wanna be around adults... I’m not as interested in the pink fog of nostalgia.” On the band’s eighth album, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?, that feeling has perceptibly intensified.
Nostalgia, after all, fuels some of the United States’ most dangerous reactionary thinking, calling back to a perfectly homogeneous and heterosexual national image that never really existed. While Fading Frontier spoke to a dilapidated American mythos—Cox sang of “amber waves of grain” that were “turning gray”—Disappeared reckons viscerally with late capitalism’s fallout. These songs contend with the emotional and physical ramifications of life in a country that’s reiterating itself to death, one franchise reboot or startup reinvention at a time.
Co-produced by Cate Le Bon, with whom Cox shared a residency at last spring’s Marfa Myths, Disappeared rewires many of Deerhunter’s aural hallmarks. The band has often sounded either gently sprawling, as on Fading Frontier and Halcyon Digest, or aggressive and claustrophobic, as on Monomania. Here, they manage to hit both moods at once. Opener “Death in Midsummer” attends to the memories of departed friends with chimes of harpsichord and drums that sound recorded inside a refrigerator; both hit with blunt force, pulling the song inward. Beneath them, though, a piano rings out as if into wide open space, and Cox sings like he’s trying to be heard from the other side of a gymnasium. A sickly, simple guitar solo reinforces the illusion that the song takes place in both an arena and a coffin. The vertigo of the combination makes an ideal vessel for the lyrics. “They were in hills/They were in factories/They are in graves now,” Cox sings, identifying emblematic blue-collar jobs as passageways to death instead of freedom.
A spiritual sequel to Fading Frontier, Disappeared seizes on its predecessor’s cheery melodicism. Deerhunter are in their pop era now, even as their lyrics remain unflinchingly bleak. “What happens to people?/They quit holding on/What happens to people?/Their dreams turn to dark,” Cox muses against a sweet, upturned piano riff at one point. One of the album’s most bubblegum offerings, “Element,” pairs piano with a swirl of strings, amplifying the melodrama of the syrupy hook. The piano leads the vocal melody, stringing Cox’s voice along like a dancing marionette, even as he sings of “cancer words/Laid out in lines” and a “curtain call for all those lives.”
Cox maintains a forced grin for most of the album, but his pantomimed cheer never sounds phonier than on “Détournement,” where he sing-speaks through a vocal filter that dramatically lowers his pitch. Laurie Anderson has employed a similar effect for decades to produce what she calls “a voice of authority”—a mannered, reasonable man’s voice that remains distressingly calm, even in the event of a plane crash. In his own authoritative voice, Cox calls upon an air travel metaphor, too, greeting various countries around the globe with postcard phrases. He interjects fatalistic non-sequiturs: “Your struggles won’t be long/And there will be no sorrow on the other side.” He concludes with “Hello eternal return/Eternal détournement,” citing an avant-garde technique used in culture jamming: a playful reframing of cultural detritus, like advertising, intended to puncture capitalism’s sheen.
Repetition induces decay; just ask William Basinski, whose series of Disintegration Loops repeats a musical phrase on fragile tapes until holes start to obliterate the sound. The final track here, “Nocturne,” applies a similar effect to the vocals. The gaps in Cox’s voice jar the ear, while a music box riff plays uninterrupted behind him. Nothing happens to the machines, even as the walls close in and the environment seems to teeter on the verge of collapse. It’s only the body that suffers, stutters, and begins to vanish.


Despite its technical mastery, the English producer’s debut full-length struggles to deliver on the emotional revelation it promises.

I AM JORDAN

When I. JORDAN spoke to Pitchfork in 2020, they weren’t getting their hopes up about the future. Their lofty ambition was to live in Berlin—“like every other DJ”—but they doubted they’d ever be successful enough to make that viable. They were, of course, being modest. By then, Jordan had already released a string of EPs that gushed with energy and emotion, blending UK rave styles with trance and the sunny thump of French house. Crucially, there was a personal element, too. 2020’s For You was a dedication to their younger self, an out-of-place queer teenager in the working-class northern English town of Doncaster. Four years later, Jordan has blown past those early doubts. Since 2021, they’ve found a home for their music on Ninja Tune, the prestigious and long-running London powerhouse. They’re now a fixture on the international club and festival circuit; Mixmag listed them as one of the 25 DJs who defined 2023. All the while, Jordan has kept their personal story front and center, chronicling their gender transition on social media and offering a real, humble, and empowering presence to their fans.
Sometime in the midst of this meteoric rise, Jordan’s music lost some of its magic. Early EPs like DNT STP MY LV, For You, and Watch Out! are beautiful, ecstatic, and overflowing with feeling in a way that makes you want to do more than dance—cry, maybe, or stage dive. But since around the time of their 2022 collab with Fred Again.., their tunes have felt glossy and flat, drained of intensity. I AM JORDAN, their debut full-length, is, in concept, a bravely personal record, celebrating Jordan’s self-realization, queer community, and working-class roots. Musically, though, it is strangely hollow, full of tracks that are technically well-executed but emotionally unmoving. In spite of its high tempos, rave clichés (police sirens, canned spinbacks, a Shephard tone), and rowdy hints of donk and hard house, it only occasionally achieves liftoff.
The album’s best track is “People Want Nice Things,” an ethereal banger that chronicles Jordan’s transition in a clever and subtle way: To track how their voice dropped when they started taking T, they recorded themself saying the title phrase once every month for 10 months, then used those recordings as the song’s central vocal sample. But the rest of the album feels less distinctive and artistically assured than Jordan’s early records. The first single, “Real Hot n Naughty,” is a collaboration with the actor and dancer Felix Mufti. Jordan says they aimed to create “a real queer northern dance anthem” with this one, which feels like a big promise for a bit of shiny organ house with jokey Scouse raps on top.
Other tracks feel more like genre templates than works of impassioned creativity. Take “Round n Round,” an effective speed-garage ripper, but one devoid of any twists or flourishes to make it exciting, surprising, or uniquely Jordan’s. This one debuted on Jordan’s socials in a tutorial titled “How to finesse your wobs in Ableton.” Heard in that context, you might have assumed it was a bare-bones demo made expressly for that purpose.
It’s telling that the wob tutorial is more memorable than the song in it. You wonder how I Am Jordan would hit without any supporting content—that is, no prior knowledge of Jordan’s personal story, no socials packed with professionally edited videos and pictures. It’s admirable when music explores delicate aspects of the human experience, especially in the often wordless and utilitarian world of club music. Ideally, though, the music itself would do that, without too much help from outside. Jordan has our attention because they are an artist with something valuable to say, musically and personally—but you might not know that from I Am Jordan.


The alt-R&B duo’s second album remains preoccupied with breakups, but these stories of separation and loss are rendered so dispassionately, it’s hard to feel invested in their outcomes.

Still Run

What’s popular music without its staple, the breakup album? Alt-R&B outfit Wet, the duo of Brooklynites Kelly Zutrau and Joe Valle, are great champions of the form: Still Run is their second album and also their second contribution to the tradition. Following 2016’s Don’t You, a collection of languid songs about heartbreak, this record is the product of an arduous internal rift that culminated in 2017 with the departure of founding member Marty Sulkow. Loosely interpreted, most of the songs on Still Run are as applicable to Sulkow’s split as they are to actual romance, making it something of a double-layered breakup album. Unfortunately, the record does little justice to the drama that surrounds any sort of separation, whether creative or romantic.
There are plenty of things that should be working in Wet’s favor here, not least of which is the cast of collaborators they’ve assembled. Ubiquitous pop producer-at-large Rostam Batmanglij helms two of the 10 songs; Andrew Sarlo, who last year produced Big Thief’s stunning sophomore record, handles another four. R&B crooner Starchild & the New Romantic lends his voice to the title track, and Lykke Li also makes an appearance. As Zutrau tells it, Still Run contains some of the group’s most accomplished work to date, and, to their credit, they have made moves towards overcoming one of Don’t You’s major shortcomings: its struggle to break out of a downtempo daze. But despite its starpower and self-generated hype, Still Run ends up being something about as adventurous—and nourishing—as a plate of buttered noodles.
Lyrically, more often than not, these songs are frustratingly uncreative. Though the record centers on conflict, Zutrau, in her role as narrator, may as well be a friend of a friend of the person who actually lived through it: She recounts these stories of separation, grief, and recovery with such scant detail or apparent emotion that it’s hard to feel invested in their outcomes. Throughout, she readily turns to canned metaphor. In “There’s a Reason,” some instability (the actual tenor remains elusive) is described as a rhythm “just out of time.” Several tracks later Zutrau pleads, “life without you” is “like a note sung out of tune.” Behind her hackneyed words, a steady stream of unfussy piano chords and tidy percussion do little to elevate the listening experience.
There are a few moments when the ear perks up. At the beginning of “This Woman Loves You,” one of Rostam’s wards, he pushes Zutrau’s voice through a hazy filter and pairs it with wily country-inflected slide guitar; the effect contains hints of the same genre-smashing quirkiness that made the producer’s work with Haim so delightful. Unfortunately, the track still ends up being one of Still Run’s worst offenders. It lauds the flag and quotes “America the Beautiful” (“This woman loves you/From sea to shining sea”), likening romantic love to love of country—an effort that seems woefully miscalculated at a time when Wet’s base probably feels minimally patriotic.
Another bright spot appears in “Love Is Not Enough.” This final song, if a bit plodding, is at least intriguing. Its opening piano melody gives off haunted music-box vibes, and Zutrau’s voice, multi-tracked and so thin as to be almost translucent, approximates the sound of a gang of ghosts playing Ring Around the Rosie. For the first time on the record, strings are used to some emotional end, rather than as pure decoration, as they shudder in time with Zutrau’s fraught realization about love’s impermanence. The song leaves you to wonder why those that preceded it couldn’t have drawn more from its playbook. Regrettably, just as love is not enough to sustain a union, these few compelling moments are not enough to carry an album’s worth of fluff.


Biokinetics was the first album released on Berlin's Chain Reaction and 16 years later, Type has reissued Thomas Köner and Andy Mellwig's landmark experimental techno album.

Biokinetics

If you bought Porter Ricks' Biokinetics on CD in the 1990s and the disc is still intact, consider yourself lucky: The original edition is currently trading for $65 and up on Discogs. The price has something to do with the album's place in history: Biokinetics, a touchstone of experimental techno, was the first album released on Berlin's widely worshipped Chain Reaction label. But scarcity is a bigger factor: Biokinetics, like all of Chain Reaction's CDs from that era, came packaged in an aluminum tin that tended to crack the CD it was supposed to be protecting. (As a comment on Discogs notes, "Another Chain Reaction release, another metal box that eats up CDs.")
Fortunately, 16 years later, John Twells' Massachusetts-based Type label has stepped up with a reissue of the landmark album, not just on CD (this time in a standard jewel case) but also, for the first time, on 2xLP and digital download. It's a welcome reissue, and long overdue. It comes as certain ideas from techno's fertile, experimental, mid-1990s period are being picked up by a range of underground musicians. Many of these ideas have permeated so deeply into the culture that it's hard to remember a time without them, but we wouldn't have Burial, to name just one of the duo's distant descendants, without Porter Ricks' seafloor crackle and mottled-granite color scale.
Porter Ricks were the duo of Thomas Köner, a sound artist and ambient composer, and Andy Mellwig, a techno producer who also recorded as Continuous Mode and, with former Monolake member and future Ableton founder Gerhard Behles, as Async Sense. Released in 1996, Biokinetics was Porter Ricks' debut album, gathering tracks from three vinyl EPs released that year along with three songs exclusive to the album. It had been years since I last listened to it, and the Type reissue surprised me first by reminding me how diverse the album is. "Chain Reaction" has long since become shorthand for a certain fusion of buoyant dub, hazy ambience, and coiled techno, but on Biokinetics, none of these has quite settled into place; it's a dynamic, unpredictable mixture of pulse and hiss.
The opening "Port Gentil", a precursor to the template Wolfgang Voigt would adopt under his Gas alias, pairs soft, monochromatic tones with a muted 4/4 pulse. On the surface, it couldn't be simpler, but as it pulls you in, you become aware of shifting contours and unusual dimensions, the interplay of light and shadow; it sounds like a string section tuning up atop a freight train trundling through a deep canyon.
"Nautical Dub" hews closer to textbook techno, with muscular bass pushing relentlessly forward, but it's hardly conventional. There are no sharp edges, for one thing: Percussive accents have been buffed to a dull gleam, and the upper register of the track, normally reserved for crisp, cutting hi-hats, is diffused into a fine-gauge spray that sweeps back and forth like a lawn sprinkler. Only "Port of Call" assumes dancefloor techno's chiseled boom-tick profile, but this time it's the low end that's fizzed to near nothingness. A few years later, Pole would famously construct an entire aesthetic around the vagaries of a broken Waldorf filter, but Biokinetics was first: Everything sounds broken here, all frayed cables and dusty contacts, and every gesture toward techno clarity feels like a trade-off made at the expense of another element that's left to crumble.
Dub techno has since become one of electronic music's most mannered styles, but here, Porter Ricks' tracks feel not so much like compositions, much less stylistic exercises, than answers to very specific, fairly arcane questions-- what happens when we route this LFO through that filter? How many divisions can we parse between the downbeats? How can chaos be turned into rhythm, and how far can a repetition be stretched before it's rendered senseless? Where is the boundary between tone and white noise?
On "Biokinetics 1", a heaving, wheezing synthesizer struggles to stick to a regular pulse as it's fed through disorienting delay and looped back upon itself, stumbling and confused. As an experiment in stretching a groove to the breaking point, it's as exhilarating as anything in the history of techno. "Port of Nuba" and "Nautical Nuba" submit drum machines to a similar warping process, resulting in rhythms that gallop like teams of horses. Here, you can hear the origin of Thomas Brinkmann's tumbling cadences of a year or two later, as he used a double-armed turntable to draw elliptical rhythms out of the grooves of records by Wolfgang Voigt and Richie Hawtin. And while we're talking about precedents, the leaden dirge of "Biokinetics 2" lays the groundwork for the bleak, trudging techno of Andy Stott and his Modern Love labelmates.
That Biokinetics is an album about currents is reflected in its seafaring titles, such as "Nautical Dub", "Nautical Zone", "Port of Call", etc., and also in the way that the record's energies feed back into itself. What Porter Ricks learned from dub was less about particular rhythms or stylistic tropes than about the path that a sound travels as it wends its way through the mixing desk, and how it comes out transformed on the other side. Dub's hall-of-mirrors approach to versioning, meanwhile, informs the way that many tracks here are variations upon one another: "Port Gentil" and "Nautical Zone" bookend the album with nearly identical chords, while "Nautical Nuba" and "Port of Nuba" recycle the same drum patterns, using filters and delays to achieve very different results. Spontaneity is woven into the fiber of every track; it's easy to hear how some of them may have begun with the same sounds and patterns before the musicians' hands worked their magic on the filters, EQ, and delay, rendering each take unique and unrepeatable.
Like Detroit's Drexciya, Porter Ricks (who took their name from a character from Flipper, the 1960s film and television series) used aquatic metaphors to get at larger ideas, both musical and otherwise. Ocean currents, electrical currents, sound waves, feedback; dub, techno, minimalism, noise; exchange as a fluid back-and-forth but also, as Drexciya pointed out, as a loaded dynamic, fraught, unequal-- they all swirl together, rippling in time and veering out of sync, as though pulled by complicated gravitational forces. Biokinetics is above all a music of tides, suggesting rhythm as both celestial stroke and as a vibration deep in the body, bubbling at the molecular level.