The North Carolina rapper refines his technical wizardry on his second album, but he’s too often buried by 9th Wonder and Khrysis’ overblown production.

Love Is War

While an underclassman at Charlotte’s Myers Park High School, Reuben Vincent managed to squeeze a full-fledged rap triumph into his courseload. With production from North Carolina fixtures 9th Wonder and Khrysis, 2017’s Myers Park was the sort of go-for-broke debut that inevitably serves as a measuring stick. Flashing extraordinary mechanics across a suite of moody instrumentals, Vincent considered his life in wordy meditations, ably carrying an album without guest performers. He wore DatPiff-era influences on his sleeve—he flowed like Joey Bada$$, when he wasn’t harmonizing like Big K.R.I.T.—pursuing a modest thematic scope in deference to his remarkable technique.
The reception was muted, especially given the assembled personnel; Vincent enrolled at North Carolina A&T and secured a wealth of resources for the follow-up, Love Is War. Billed as a joint endeavor between Jamla and Roc Nation, with contributions from Dreamville’s Christo and TDE’s Reason—not to mention what can only have been a very expensive “Funny How Time Flies” sample—it feels like a tax write-off for the entire rap-industrial complex. 9th Wonder and Khrysis return as producers, joined by Sndtrk, Young Guru, and a half dozen others. It’s too big to fail, and too unwieldy for a cohesive statement: Now 22, Vincent isn’t unrecognizable so much as drowned by Love Is War’s orchestral arrangements.
Vincent remains a technical wiz, turning the album into a vocal clinic. On “Just Like a Dream,” he sails through intricate rhyme patterns with nimble enunciation. His voice is more textured than in the Myers Park days, and he modulates it in subtle degrees, gradually ratcheting up the tension like Nas on “One Mic.” The exacting syllable placement of “Geechie Suede” is underscored by Vincent’s breezy, melodic delivery. He’s honed his bars and breath control, but his increased musicality is the most impressive element of Love Is War.
Instead of making Vincent the featured instrument, though, the producers tend to bury him. Love Is War is a milepost for 9th Wonder, a backpack-rap icon once known for his serene beats composed on cheap desktop software. In the mid 2000s, his DIY approach posed a counterpoint to pricey major-label affairs; he wrangled evocative samples into concise drum loops, favoring approachable, small-town rappers. But between the frictionless layers of “Butterfly Doors,” the listless funk of “Geechie Suede,” and the ponderous chords of “Just Like a Dream,” Love Is War is slick and anonymous. The aforementioned Janet sample on “2ime Flies” marks the album’s nadir: 9th does nothing to disguise or dress up the instrumental, and it’s too obvious a reference for Vincent to make his own. It’s not a tribute or an homage, just an insipid cover.
Too often, Vincent takes lyrical cues from the melodramatic arrangements. “Bottle Service” and “Trickin’” are built around suggestive vocal loops; the former rehashes Kendrick Lamar’s “Swimming Pools,” while the latter paints a fallen woman straight out of J. Cole’s playbook. (In a weird pantomime of Cole’s origin story, Vincent claims to have skipped his senior prom for a chance to meet Lamar.) It’s a misapprehension that plagues Love Is War: the producers seem to have isolated ambient mood music as the main attraction of Lamar and Cole’s work, rather than the exquisite rapping. There’s also an unshakeable theater-kid quality to Vincent’s performance. He’s constantly referencing pop culture—A Different World, Uncle Luke, Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper, Steamin’ Willie Beamen—too old for him to have experienced firsthand. Could a 22-year-old really be so exasperated by women, money, and adulthood?
It’s tempting to blame North Carolina. Vincent harbors immense pride in his home, a place he’s described as “the perfect mixture of Southern culture and Northeast culture.” But Cole, Rapsody, and Little Brother—accomplished technicians and labored, sanctimonious lyricists—are inauspicious role models for such a promising artist. Their devotion to hip-hop as an institution manifests in reductive, classicist nostalgia, the defense of an imported canon. Charlotte boasts a breadth of fresh styles ranging from Mavi’s cerebral excavation to DaBaby’s freneticism and Elevator Jay’s down-home theatrics; Vincent needn’t be tethered to fake-deep revivalism.


On the Salt Lake City, Utah, grindcore band's third and best album, the sounds are as intensely amped as vocalist Jon Parkin's colorful, politically charged lyrics.

No Absolutes in Human Suffering

Gaza's last album was called He Is Never Coming Back. The "He" in the title refers to God. Around the time of the record's release in 2009, vocalist Jon Parkin was quoted as saying "He Is Never Coming Back is a knife pushed slowly through the temple and into humanity's primitive religiousness. It is a call to utilize the same logic and reason applied in every other aspect of our lives in the assessment of theology." And when I spoke to him about the record shortly after it came out, he told me, "We wanted this record to pick you up and death shake you like a dog would snap a rabbit's neck. And to once in a while stop to lick the blood running from your nose." The frontman, who is 6'7", and wears his hair close-cropped, clearly isn't afraid to use colorful language when making a point. The music's just as intense and amped on No Absolutes in Human Suffering, the Salt Lake City, Utah, grindcore band's third album-- and best to date.
It works so well because they find a balance between melody and cacaphony. The 11-song collection was produced by Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou, who gives Gaza's warped blend of grind, hardcore, and crust a dense, sturdy feel. On their Facebook, the band calls what they do "progressive crust" and "math piss." The first works, but I might change the latter to "math pissed off." Like Gaza's past work, the music here is a dense and intense, a twisting, churning spin on noisy grind with a tendency toward rock'n'roll. The songs, with their constant warping mutations, feel like they're melting. Outside the more mid-tempo title track, and the closing dirge, it's unrelenting. Even when songs are longer-- the six-minute "Not With All the Hope in the World", which moves from a blur to a beautiful sludge anthem, to that surprisingly plaintive, doom closer "Routine and Then Death"-- the pieces never stop throwing unexpected shifts at you. "The Vipers" melds hyper grind, a mid-tempo breakdown, indelible melody, and a noise-rock pep talk. It's a dexterous showing: math rock made up of violent equations.
In a self-penned bio, the group refers to themselves as "failed emo musicians." A joke, maybe, but there is plenty of emotion and emoting here. Parkin reminds me of a short story writer in some ways, or Converge's Jacob Bannon writing for Harvey Milk. His lyrics are sketches and observations that move from the economy ("I understand we have invented ourselves out of a job"), playful anti-religiousness ("It sure was nice of Jesus to take time away from ignoring/ Ethnic cleansing genocide and famine-bloated children/ Or regrowing limbs for landmine victims/ To help you score that touchdown"), the generally political ("Know your children will know more of this earth than you ever will/ You should be embarrassed/ I can hear them laughing at their history books"), to tracks that remind me of punk zine Cometbus, or the poetic manifestos of the anarchist collective Crimethinc. In "Routine and Then Death", for example, the only words we get are "It's the same noise every day/ We walk back and forth." Parkin finds a way out of that cycle in "Skull Trophy" via "a deer carcass someone had cleanly taken the head off of" that he passes in his car. As he puts it, in a way that I find fairly romantic, "I thought of you/ I knew you'd find it full of wonder/ Someone had desecrated a corpse for a sportless opportunistic skull trophy/ That alone is some hillbilly shit/ But the bigger picture is that we've lost feeling in our left arm." Best pickup line of the year.
For all the challenging complexity, this is music that sticks in your head. No Absolutes opens with the wobbling post-rocking drone of "Mostly Hair and Bones Now"-- the track ushers in a huge grind explosion after 50 seconds-- and moves through the AmRep muscularity of the title track to the proggy soloing/post-rock slipperiness of "When They Beg" to the jazz breakdowns at the start of "Skull Trophy". You get the point. Amid all this chaos, though, there's calm. Amid the anger and bile, a discernable beauty. Gaza are a rare band in this way-- an uncompromising group that should appeal to folks who don't usually stock grindcore in their music collection, all without trying, in the least, to win them over.


The breakout Nigerian star’s second EP explores new sounds even as it returns to familiar ideas—her ongoing search for peace, love, and emotional clarity.

If Orange Was a Place EP

This time last year, rising Nigerian pop star Tems was just about to unleash her debut EP, For Broken Ears. From the project’s seven bubbling tracks, the trio of “Damages,” “Free Mind,” and “The Key” stood out, and lead single “Damages” became the top-played song on Nigerian radio. The following months alerted the rest of the world to the magic of Tems: She offered a captivating performance on WizKid’s “Essence,” which secured a spot on Billboard Hot 100; a Justin Bieber-featuring remix elevated it into the Top 20. A short clip of Adele meeting Tems and joyfully singing Tems’ own song “Try Me” to her circulated online, and Drake engaged her for “Fountains,” a slow-burning track on his recent Certified Lover Boy. Now—with looks from some of the biggest artists in the world—Tems returns with a follow-up EP, If Orange Was a Place.
Even before she soared to mainstream recognition, Tems was protective of her signature sound. Early on in her career, she faced pressure from industry professionals to tweak her approach in order to succeed within the Nigerian music climate, she said in a recent radio interview. Tems, however, stuck with the distinctly emotional approach that lit up For Broken Ears, a collection of songs that sounded as deeply personal and turbulent as handwritten letters. Coupled with her freewheeling delivery and emotional rawness, whatever doubt anyone had about her artistry was dispelled.
If Orange Was a Place takes on a different texture and mood. If there’s any element still resonant, it’s Tems’ unrestricted expression, which she makes evident from opener and lead single “Crazy Tings.” Over brooding melodies and groovy percussion, Tems cooly sings about an estranged lover’s faults and pleas for peace: “Give me time/I need space.” The uptempo vibes of “Crazy Tings” slows on the Brent Faiyaz-assisted “Found.” Musically, the track recalls the early version of Tems, who loved to display her vocal prowess over gently strummed guitar. Turbulent feelings still weigh heavy on her mind, and she isn’t done analyzing them, concluding, “Basically, I might not be weak.” But by comparison to the clear emotional snapshots of From Broken Ears, the songwriting feels hazy. Faiyaz, seemingly playing the role of a comforting presence, offers words of healing and reassurance: “If you had you’ll forgive the past.”
After the moody haze of “Found,” the EP jerks back to vibrancy with the heady, swirling melodies and crisp, jazzy horns of “Replay.” Tems is coasting, soaring comfortably as she revels in her own elusive power: “Oh, my voice is a mystery,” she declares. Towards the end, she taps into intriguing pockets of melodies to empty her stash of unhealthy emotions: loneliness, heartbreak, and an unfortunate recent experience in Uganda, where Tems and fellow Nigerian artist Omah Lay were arrested last year for allegedly flouting COVID-19 protocols.
The similarity that links this EP and its predecessor is Tems’ preference to air her worries and talk about the darkness residing within. Save for closer “Vibe Out,” many of the songs linger in a familiar headspace—ruminating on being taken for granted as a lover, or trying to free oneself from the remnants of toxic emotions. Though she ups the ante on “Replay” and “Crazy Tings,” the more usual fare on “Found” and “Vibe Out” sometimes overshadows the new ideas, clouding the project’s intentions. If Orange Was a Place might not provide the same instant gratification as her debut, but it’s a presentation of her vulnerable self.

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On a brief collaborative EP, the digipop artists pay tribute to ’90s electronic music while rediscovering the kinetic thrill of their past work.

dSX.fm EP

A few years ago, quinn and Dazegxd were key players in digicore, a sprawling internet scene that has lately felt more like a withering quarantine relic. quinn was at the forefront making frantic hyperpop, while Dazegxd produced spectral neon rap beats. Like most of the scene’s main flag-wavers, they’ve since departed the milieu. quinn has lately turned toward messy rap experiments and lo-fi idea-dumps. Dazegxd, meanwhile, has spun his instrumental technique into dreamy, expansive electronic music. Still, their scene was always friends first and this chummy spirit carries through to their collaborative EP dSX.FM, a jolt of hooks, hectic breaks, and astral synths that’s both a tribute to and an update of ’90s electronic music.
Drum ’n’ bass with vocals has been a hot fad since PinkPantheress skyrocketed in 2021, but this record is the work of passionate admirers of the genre, not trendbouncers; in fact it might turn away anyone looking for an easy injection of breakbeat ecstasy. quinn’s vocals are glowing but restrained; she hopscotches the 170 bpm breaks with a fiery coolness, rhyming and repeating her musings on thorny romance and self-assurance until each word gleams. It’s a joy to hear her surf inside these mellow rollers and frenetic typhoons, especially since her last two big albums were subtle and introspective. From ditching vocal music and hyperpop as a way to protect herself from viral fame in early 2021 to her recent streak of restless rap, quinn sounds to be slowly rediscovering the thrill of her kinetic, digitized early music.
quinn’s vocals flash across the mix like headlight beams, and they flutter and mold around the rippling backing tracks. Sometimes her voice splits into multiple layers, while at others it distorts and dissolves in the beat, like on the delirious “dementia footwork” remix of “say so.” Her total immersion in the ambiance gives the music a sweet home-crafted feeling at a time when much recent sing/rap drum ’n’ bass sounds optimized for breakneck intensity or like the breaks were plopped in as an afterthought. The lyrics trend vague, but there are moments of striking sharpness, like her and labelmate saturn’s baleful verses over the juddering medieval beat on “maybach music.”
Dazegxd’s voice is equally clear throughout the EP—it’s just that he’s speaking through his machine. In a recent blog post, Dazegxd described how he takes influence from the West African concept of “talking drums” to contour his breaks around the vocalist’s flow and pepper his beats with call-and-response rhythms. As guest vocalist Af1shawty extends a dreamy invitation on the MON co-produced “wait here,” synth keys dance in the background as if prancing in the street. The closing track ditches recorded vocals for sampled specters that Dazegxd warps and weaves into the symphony: an MC’s feverish shouts lead to an ecstatic bass drop, and a pitch-shifted voice yearns to “let me keep you,” followed by a chorus of sweet chirrups. The maximal quality of the hyper-digital sound and frazzled production finish evokes the in-your-face approach of the most chaotic internet rap. Whereas some zoomer junglists like Nia Archives produce in a more traditional style—tightly refined so you can follow all the moving parts—Dazegxd’s music hits like a big fuzzball of electric emotion.
Dazegxd’s actual voice is only heard during the spoken-word intro and intermission, which frame the tape as a fake radio channel. It wouldn’t be a great station in real life, particularly for a long car ride, since it’s a brief 15 minutes. You can easily envision a more fleshed-out version, one where Dazegxd wrangles other genres into the mix, the song structures transform, and quinn’s verses conjure up memorable scenes to match the sounds. But for now, while digicore fractures and fades into the digital archives, the scene’s soul lives on through the artistic bonds it cultivated.


On her promising debut EP, the New York singer-songwriter searches for ideal settings for her stunning, intimate voice.

Ache of Victory EP

Zsela Thompson’s rich, strange voice first appeared in February 2019 with her debut single “Noise.” There was something haunting about the song’s fluid, hymn-like motion, the way Thompson’s vocals evoked Sade. When the native New Yorker released her second single, “Earlier Days,” eight months later, I felt similarly to one of the commenters on YouTube: “HOW CAN I LISTEN TO MORE OF HER MUSIC, HELP.”
Her five-song EP Ache of Victory arrives after years of teasing. Although it’s her first official release, it comes with an intimidating pedigree. Thompson is the daughter of Marc Anthony Thompson, the neo-soul artist Chocolate Genius, and though her music has traces of her father’s sound, she also fits in with the modern R&B cohort. She’s a scene staple, playing local haunts like Joe’s Pub and Baby’s All Right as well as more rarefied gigs: She covered Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” at MoMA PS1 for the fashion label Vaquera, performed at NYFW for Collina Strada, and at the Whitney for the museum’s annual Art Party. Her producer on Ache of Victory is Daniel Aged, who’s worked with Frank Ocean, and, as one half of the duo inc., with FKA twigs and Kelela. Last year, she toured with Cat Power and Angel Olsen.
Judging by this EP, she belongs to her generation’s modern R&B cohort, marrying the bedroom-pop idiosyncrasy of Okay Kaya with the intimacy of Moses Sumney. In the opener, a synth-backed piano ballad called “Drinking,” the singer admits that she’s been “drinking again,” perhaps a nod to the bluesy sentimental standard of the same name. Alternating between the melancholy and maniacal euphoria that comes with ruining your own life, the song charts the ambivalence of falling off the wagon. Zsela’s voice vacillates between sulking and sprightly: “I’ve been drinking again/I’ve been losing all my friends.” The lines are sung from the bottom of a bottle, then from on high in an angelic chorus, then from back down again, before the song ends abruptly mid-sentence, jolting the listener from their vicariously drunken stupor.
The strongest songs here remain the singles. “Earlier Days” shows Zsela singing breathlessly over gauzy ambient synths punctuated by laid back percussion. On “For Now,” Zsela is backed by synth arpeggios and slow-rolling drums. Her vocal range is astonishing; on the chorus, her voice dives to a bellow, then climbs into a weightless falsetto. When the drums are pared down, her layered vocals produce a stunning, Enya-like choral effect.
The album’s last two songs, though they use similar stylistic quirks, do so with less precision. “Liza,” a torch song backed by a lovely undulating synth, offers little lyrical complexity compared to the rest of the album, and relies a bit too heavily on Zsela’s peculiar voice and vocal layering to carry it. Like “Drinking,” it ends abruptly, but rather than adding to the dizzying quality, it just sounds like someone’s pulled the plug. “Undone,” the album’s most stripped-down song, feels like a return to the piercing simplicity of “Noise,” but it’s so short that it feels unfinished.
Perhaps the first cut is the deepest. Where singles like “Noise” reveal a distinct sound, the other material succumbs to generic, murmured any-R&B—imagine Rhye, the xx, and Aged’s project inc., all blended into autoplay monolith. But Zsela is too interesting to become a casualty of the “beats to chill/study to” playlist, and there are plenty of signs on this short, promising project that her formidable voice will enter the pantheon of greats in a matter of albums.
Correction: Zsela’s father is Marc Anthony Thompson, not Marc Anthony Johnson. Her performance at the Whitney Museum took place at its 2020 Art Party, not at the Wide Rainbow Gala. This review has also been updated to clarify Daniel Aged’s production credits, both solo and as a member of inc.


The fourth album from the London duo recalls Brian Eno's post-psych, pre-ambient albums from the mid-’70s and explores how modern media interacts with musical transcendence.

Furfour

For an album that radiates solemnity, Grumbling Fur’s *Furfour *is surprisingly preoccupied with television. Its trailer has the aesthetic of a scrambled cable signal, lines blurring into swirls as seen through dilated eyes. Snippets of found dialogue at the beginnings and ends of songs evoke channel surfing. The device itself is mentioned more than once in the London psych-pop duo’s lyrics, too, most strikingly in the chanted chorus of “Silent Plans/Black Egg”: “I can see through the day/To the fridge and television.” It’s an image that, like much of Furfour, suggests both a constant, voluntary awareness of the outside world and a simultaneous urge to escape from it.
The great selling point of psychedelic music is the distance it puts between the listener and material reality. Even in the absence of drugs, it’s spirituality without religion—or, at least, it’s immersive and abstract enough to transport you. But something curious is happening, now that hysterical news cycles and frenetic workdays can follow us to bed at night via smartphone. Artists who would’ve led us into reveries a decade ago are now making music that admits the impossibility of mental vacations. Morgan Delt’s recent album, Phase Zero, quotes clickbait and frets about the apocalypse. Of Montreal’s adds internet slang to Kevin Barnes’ robust vocab list and up-to-the-minute identity politics to his fantastical subversion of the gender binary.
On Furfour, so titled because it’s their fourth album, Grumbling Fur’s Alexander Tucker and Daniel O’Sullivan have a subtle way of honoring reality while tilting towards transcendence. They’ve often described their music as a collage; their drowsy voices rest atop synthesizers, clips of sound and speech, and an array of organic instruments. In this case, the collage effect extends to the album’s themes, too. The multi-instrumentalists paste images of drudgery and loneliness onto a larger canvas that uses the language of science fiction to express a hunger for spiritual stimulation: “The ultraviolet sun/You know it radiates through everyone/But the show it must go on go on and on and on,” they sing in unison on “Heavy Days.”
Once an improvisationally inclined quartet, Grumbling Fur found themselves writing pop songs as a two-piece sometime after the release of their 2011 debut, Furrier. *Furfour *is a bit of a comedown from the two hallucinatory albums that followed, 2013’s *Glynnaestra *and 2014’s Preternaturals. Only its thumping first single, “Acid Ali Khan,” achieves the abandon of those two records. But you rarely miss it. Tucker and O’Sullivan are still working within the realm of psychedelia, and still collaging sounds in unexpected ways. “Pyewacket’s Palace,” a wordless piece of sound art situated midway through the album, trembles its way from the strings and timpani of a vintage film score to the choral sighs of heavenly ascension. Here they prove they know how to deploy a guest musician, too: the fluttery, wired flute at the end of “Golden Simon” comes courtesy of Bardo Pond’s Isobel Sollenberger.
But this is the first Grumbling Fur album that suggests a meditative trance more than an intoxicated daydream. With the exception of “Sapien Sapiens,” which layers a robotic speech about evolution and genetic engineering over ponderous drones in a way that feels surprisingly obvious, *Furfour *is too rich with ideas to become a drag.
Rooted in a long, strange tradition of English experimentalism that also includes bands like Throbbing Gristle and Coil, *Furfour *is most reminiscent of Brian Eno’s post-glam, pre-ambient albums from the mid-’70s—it’s music that proves pop is as fertile a genre for conceptual songwriting as any other. “Silent Plans/Black Egg” transitions from a violin-led dirge of quotidian exhaustion to a glitchy bed of noise that’s eventually paired with a clip of someone reading from the Book of Revelation. It sounds like the dream you might have if you fell asleep in front of that TV from the chorus.
Eno is also a great collaborator, but he never had a partnership quite as intimate as the one that underlies Tucker and O’Sullivan’s spirit of sonic inquiry. From the White Stripes to OutKast, duos are often studies in contrasts. On paper, Grumbling Fur are similarly mismatched. Tucker, a comic book artist who also records as a solo act and plays in the psych-folk duo Imbogodom, is entirely self-taught. “Put me in a room with instruments and I can play every single one of them—but I also have no knowledge at all of the mechanics,” he told FACT. O’Sullivan is a classically trained musician whose other past and current projects—proggy Guapo and the Norwegian post-metal act Ulver among them—hinge on technical mastery.
But the music they make together is remarkably coherent. Crowded as it is with instruments and ideas, Grumbling Fur doesn’t sound like a collision of sensibilities. Down to Tucker and O’Sullivan’s fondness for blending their voices, the band is an experiment in subsuming two personalities to a collective aesthetic—and that might explain why it’s so cosmic. It may be hard to transcend the spiritual starvation of the fridge and television, but *Furfour *suggests that the small-scale ego death of a creative friendship is one way to do it.


On their full-length debut, the Danish dream pop group take a quantum leap forward, with a richer and more eclectic sound.

Heba

When Lowly first appeared with a string of singles in 2014, the Danish five-piece’s proficiency with atmospheres was clear. Those singles, along with an EP the following year, showcased the band’s affinity for soaking its songs in heavy reverb. Naturally, Lowly’s music hearkened back to previous generations of dream pop, shoegaze, and even the Beach Boys recording vocals in a swimming pool. But atmosphere alone isn’t much more effective than aiming a video camera at a hunk of dry ice, and Lowly—like countless bands who aim for a similar feel—appeared to approach music from the outside in, as if tones and pedals could substitute for drama.
On Heba, Lowly’s debut LP, the band takes a quantum leap forward. Opener “Still Life” taps into universal feelings of sadness and isolation with such power it would be unbearable if the music supporting it weren’t so beautiful. “Still Life” captures that moment when one becomes aware that a relationship is doomed. Guitarist/vocalist Nanna Schannong and sampler/vocalist Soffie Viemose sing together, as keyboardist Kasper Staub’s synths sweep across the music like gusts of remorse. Viemose and Schannong convey a sense of repetition over multiple lifetimes when they sing, “The memories distort before I can tell/For centuries they’ve been fading/Over and over again.” Meanwhile, drummer Steffen Lundtoft—who manages to play with both a jazz player’s taste for active patterns and a pop musician’s instinct for economy—drags the beat back to a crawl, as if to frame the glacial pace of the lyrics.
Lowly’s previous work hovered in a state of somber, slightly edgy, but otherwise unremarkable introspection. The music on Heba is exponentially more rich. And unlike, say, Mazzy Star, Lowly don’t dwell in the languid cadence of the first song. “Deer Eyes” might have qualified as techno if Lundtoft hadn’t, in a sense, reverse-engineered an electronic beat for his live kit. Even if they had opted for a programmed beat, the song’s tempo layering and synths, along with bassist Thomas Lund’s Moog work, make it all difficult to classify.
At times, “Deer Eyes” recalls Radiohead’s Kid A-era forays into a form of music that is neither organic nor synthetic, but some combination thereof. At one point, the music clears away as Staub plays a synth line that evokes a warped, somewhat cartoonish string section; Staub drops the line in just once, a deft move that gives the song a fleeting touch of vintage records where pop chanteuses are backed by an orchestra.
The band varies its approach on pretty much every song after that. When Schannong sings lead on the funkier “Look at the Sun,” her cutting voice injects a dose of Morcheeba-esque electro-R&B into the mix. And even though most of the lyrics only vaguely illustrate their subject matter, they shift in texture enough to magnify the stylistic changes from song to song. Named after a friend of the band who emigrated to Denmark from Syria, Heba doesn’t explicitly reference the real-life Heba’s experience. Without that context, you’d be hard-pressed to spot a correlation, although several of the songs could be interpreted to fit a refugee or immigrant’s perspective. “Have you ever felt so lonely/That you could map it on your body?” Viemose sings. The answer for all of us is “of course.” Yet Lowly have found a way to ask the question so that it sounds fresh every time, much like this album as a whole.


The Brooklyn singer-songwriter’s third album takes a microscope to the messy business of being human, finding revelatory moments of empathy in the smallest everyday details.

Even in the Tremor

Aly Spaltro’s music has always been verbose in a way that’s as delightful as it is overwhelming. It takes two, three, four listens to catch up with her as she describes her world in painstaking detail. Her anecdotes are unusually specific: On “Billions of Eyes,” she sings of racing to make the train, only to discover that all of its passengers were rooting for her to succeed.
On Even in the Tremor, her second LP as Lady Lamb (third, counting one earlier LP she released as Lady Lamb the Beekeeper), Spaltro’s focus shifts toward the troubles and anxieties of a late-twenty/early-thirtysomething, a striking contrast to the romps of 2013’s Ripely Pine and 2015’s After, where she unspooled her hopes and worries at an upbeat, energetic clip. Though her breathless exuberance may have faded, her incisive commentary is as sharp as ever.
Spaltro’s inclination toward maximum wordplay serves her well. Lines that might be flimsy standing alone (“The past will kill the present if I let it,” from the title track) are bolstered with startling moments of clarity—the kinds of breakthroughs that usually require hours on a therapist’s couch. Like Annie Dillard reveling in the woods, Spaltro examines emotions and sensations in microscopic detail. Her vivid observations amplify nuance and color, giving her songs a synesthetic quality: the smells of bourbon and bonfires, licking birthday-cake frosting off her fingers, juicy berries dripping in the hands of teenagers.
Her straightforward indie-rock arrangements are unobtrusive throughout Even in the Tremor—they’re neither killer nor filler, clever enough to hold interest without overshadowing Spaltro’s lyric-writing. Electric guitars and drums mostly chug along, peaking with the heart-quickening “Strange Maneuvers,” while piano and strings lend heartfelt gravitas to “Deep Love” and a somber side to “Without a Name.” On closer “Emily,” a loose touch of pedal steel makes for a fitting, hazy complement to the song’s golden-hour nostalgia.
“Little Flaws“ and “Deep Love,” the album’s first two tracks, make a tidy and compelling package deal of Spaltro’s greatest strengths. With “Little Flaws,” she casts an empathetic eye on her partner: “You’ve got little flaws just like me/You try to be hard but I know you’re a softie,” she croons over a plunking rhythm as strings and electronics glide nimbly in the middle. On “Deep Love,” she celebrates her neighbors doting on their pets and other serendipitous moments of tenderness. There isn’t a name for the ambient warmth of stumbling upon those small moments of kindness or empathy, so Spaltro describes it in her own wordy fashion: “Passing through a good scene in somebody else’s life fills my cup.” (She’s since started a social-media campaign to encourage others to share their own heartwarming moments.)
Spaltro also digs into spiritual questions with frank vulnerability, expanding her internal inventories to include the greater baggage of adulthood and the even bigger questions inherent to being human. In “Young Disciple,” she recalls watching her parents, born-again Christians, get baptized in a kiddie pool; in another striking detail, she remembers her mother explaining the Second Coming over fast-food milkshakes. This storytelling serves a deeper purpose. As she explores the things about her mother that she doesn’t understand, she recognizes that they share the same essential existential fears.
With her thoroughly detailed accounts of everyday life, Spaltro offers the comforting affirmation that complicated, hard-to-identify feelings aren’t so strange after all. Her songs, stuffed with information and emotion, act as an extended reminder to appreciate the gentler things the world has to offer—proof that even in the tremors of everyday life at its most confusing, kindness, calm, and empathy still have ample room to grow.


The Chicago duo makes slow and wide-open instrumental music for drums and pedal steel guitar, creating its own lane and rarely straying from it.

Lapse in Passage

Mute Duo’s music is emblematic of their deep roots in Chicago. Pedal steel guitarist Sam Wagster and drummer/multi-instrumentalist Skyler Rowe draw on the city’s long legacy of omnivorous instrumental music, with a sound that is slow and wide open, incorporating elements of free improvisation, ambient music, and Americana. Many artists in Chicago’s underground music scene seek commonalities in seemingly divergent styles, inventing a new vernacular from their juxtaposition. Mute Duo’s list of local collaborators, ranging from folk-leaning mainstays Ryley Walker and Bill MacKay to up-and-coming jazz musicians Matthew Lux and Ben Lamar Gay, marks them as direct inheritors of that approach. Though the duo is similarly innovative, the results of their experimentations are mixed.
Lapse In Passage, the group’s second album, alternates between languid improvisations and riff-centric pieces. Regardless of compositional method, each track feels dusty and ragged, unfolding at a pace that slips fluidly between measured and lethargic. The music’s doomy twang recalls the mellow late-period albums of drone metal pioneers Earth, and the occasional glissandos of Wagster’s pedal steel paired with Rowe’s expressive, untethered drumming bring it close to Australian trio Dirty Three. His inventive approach to the kit, which places equal weight on colorful flourishes and steady time-keeping, provides Lapse in Passage with much of its character. The duo configuration lends itself to a sparse and conversational atmosphere, with each member taking turns conjuring the smoky ambience and generating steady forward motion among the haze.
The album arrives at a moment of pedal steel renaissance in experimental music, as Pitchfork contributor Jesse Jarnow pointed out in a recent essay. With its extended range and ability to slide between notes, the pedal steel has the capacity to create mystifying, idiosyncratic music. But Wagster only takes advantage of his instrument’s extraordinary potential for novelty in a few moments. It’s not that he plays into stereotypical Nashville tropes. Instead, with the exception of moments like the swelling rush of melody on the otherwise laid-back “Dallas In the Dog Days” or the subtly drifting chords that open “Canopy Bells,” much of the album sounds like it could have been written and realized on a standard six-string. It feels like a missed opportunity, as so many others develop new ways to make the instrument sing.
This dynamic embodies a significant difference between Mute Duo and their brightest peers and forebears in Chicago. While Wagster and Rowe’s amalgam of styles is unique, they rarely deviate from that formula once they’ve established it. After you’ve eased into Mute Duo’s sound, it is hard to be surprised by anything that follows. Classic groups like Art Ensemble of Chicago and Gastr del Sol, and more recently standouts like ONO and Angel Bat Dawid, are constantly reinventing—not just weaving together various genre signifiers, but making a practice of breaking their own rules. Despite Rowe’s impressive improvisational skills and the creative way he and Wagster synthesize elements of different traditions, Mute Duo largely stay in the lane of their own making.
This doesn’t make Lapse In Passage unpleasant, or even wholly uninteresting. There are moments, such as the climax of “Red-winged Blackbirds” when Rowe adds pounding atonal piano to the swirl of distorted pedal steel, that they tiptoe toward something like rapture. Opener “Derived from Retinas” is the album’s strongest song, moving through several different distinct movements: at first heavy, dour, and full of grit, then emerging triumphantly into a major key. But when they stretch out into looser, less defined structures, like the nearly 10-minute “Overland Line,” they drift into a comfort zone and stay there for the duration. The more purposeful and focused Wagster and Rowe are, the more enjoyable it is to get lost in their music.


On her self-produced second album, the Kentucky songwriter offers vivid portraits of complex people, synthesizing decades of Southern music into a singular vision.

Teeth Marks

The South loves to make heroes and legends of its own kind, to spin the tales of rather ordinary people until they acquire a kind of mythic permanence. The Kentucky songwriter S.G. Goodman, though, requires no fabulists to be compelling. She is 33 and from a small Mississippi River town so emblematic of rural America its slumping population statistics betray a war of economic attrition. From a lineage of sharecroppers, she talks in interviews about cavorting in creeks and gigging for gar, then sings of her complicated love for the dollar-store economy and her adoration of Spanish moss sanctuaries. In a region where being gay can mark you for ostracization or damnation, coming out nearly killed her. “Space and Time,” the first song on her 2020 debut, even read like her farewell to the world. She sings not just of a progressive South but of shrugging off capitalism at large, of dismantling the systems that still make the place so difficult. It is apt that Kentucky novelist Silas House penned a recent magazine profile of Goodman; she knows the truth of her home but also eternally reimagines its future, epitomizing our shared New South dreams.
The self-produced Teeth Marks is a sharp and thoughtful distillation of these modern American small-town complexities. Religious hypocrisy, financial ruin, systemic addiction, ruinous love, devotion so intense it begins to burn like hatred: Goodman finds space for it all in these 11 tracks, which glide between breathtaking a cappella eulogies and dive-bar R&B, between gnarled rock and plaintive ballads. Goodman’s scenes are vivid and specific, like her nod to unswept floors or time marked by a procession of crinkled tin cans. Her conclusions, however, seem undecided and open, as if she holds too much hope for the characters and crises in her life to pass final judgment. Goodman takes care not to slip into diaristic voyeurism. She studies each stone carefully before she tosses it into the pond, watching the ripples scatter forever.
Much of Teeth Marks deals with complications of identity and existence—namely, the friction between your expectations for and the actuality of someone you love, like, or simply know. The broken waltz “Dead Soldiers” details a friend slowly losing a battle with alcoholism, steadily tumbling into a version of himself so damaged Goodman barely recognizes him. “Heart Swell” documents the disorienting effects of an unexpected breakup. “The cicada choir is my backing band,” she croons, sporting loneliness with a grudge, like wearing dirty laundry because it’s all that’s left.
The staggering opener “Teeth Marks” mentions physical scars, as the title suggests. But it’s more about the permanent mental wounds left behind by the lover that never respected you, the one who never even tried to “see things my way.” These songs concern the communities and relationships we think we’ve built—and the damage they leave behind when the façade fails.
It is tempting with Teeth Marks to get lost in logocentrism, to become so absorbed with the stories that you don’t notice how very musical these tracks are. Goodman always lands her hook, no matter how desperate the tale is. And there is, relative to lots of Southern indie rock, a staggering diversity in the assortment of inspirations and references. “The Heart of It” shimmers like R.E.M., then arches like Band of Horses. “All My Love Is Coming Back to Me” has the nervy thrum of Lee Bains’ bands or even Archers of Loaf, a feeling amplified by an endless vibrato borrowed from Sleater-Kinney. The solo lament of “If You Were Someone I Loved” aches like old gospel or Ralph Stanley, while motivational finale “Keeper of the Time” sways like Otis Redding until she rides out on a guitar jam that feels a little like a Skynyrd crescendo.
Remarkably, little of this suggests pastiche or collage. Goodman has synthesized decades of Southern music into a singular vision, cohesive even as the sounds shift. Her small but mighty set of collaborators helps. Kyle Spence—now a member of Kurt Vile’s Violators, formerly of weirdo Georgia metal demigods Harvey Milk—provides the perfect drift for the lovelorn “When You Say It,” exquisitely framed by the crystalline piano of Athens’ Jojo Glidewell and the lambent pedal steel of Nashville’s Luke Schneider. And on several songs, Goodman and longtime collaborator Matthew David Rowan play most everything, suggesting just how complete Goodman’s conception was from the start.
One of the best moments on Goodman’s 2020 debut, Old Time Feeling, came in the title track, a pugnacious song about people badmouthing or bailing on the South. “The Southern state is a condition, it’s true,” Goodman opined. “Stick around and work your way through.” It was a protest song for making the place Goodman still calls home better. It was also honest about how backward that home can feel—a diet of “gas station delicacies,” as she put it, and the deafening sound of a “coal train gunning.”
Goodman returns to that mode for “Work Until I Die,” Teeth Marks’ most distinctive song and the one where she suggests another partial solution for at least one challenge of Southern identity. Over drums that feel like a heavy-duty assembly line, she juxtaposes mutations of a 1988 hit by country superstars Alabama and the type of simple blessing one might offer over Sunday supper. “Oh, bless this food to our bodies/And our bodies to your service,” she sings. “In the company’s holy name. Amen.” She is excoriating the modern religion of work, of wasting our lives building the wealth of others. You wonder how many of the other problems she examines here—repression, addiction, depression—are symptoms of this condition, of Christianity crosshatched with commerce. For 40 minutes, Teeth Marks expertly surveys the thorny landscape of the modern South; for these six, Goodman suggests there’s a way to change.


The latest unearthed work from San Francisco disco innovator Patrick Cowley is a woozy, fascinating synth experiment with Candida Royalle, the feminist porn director and actress.

Patrick Cowley / Candida Royalle: Candida Cosmica

Candida Cosmica

Despite the decades that have passed since porn moved from cinema backrooms to the internet, the phrase “porn soundtrack” still conjures raunchy funk guitars and that “bom chicka wah wah” sound. In the ’70s, the porn movie genre was still taking shape, while box office successes like Behind the Green Door and Deep Throat provided a template focused on male pleasure first and foremost. Working within the industry and yet pushing for more positive depictions of female sexuality, the late Candice Vadalla moved from being in front of the camera to behind it, a pioneer in feminist filmmaking. “Women were curious and wanted to see if there were some sexy movies they could enjoy with their partner, and there was nothing out there for that,” she once said of her own foray into directing blue movies.
With her interest in body- and sex-positive activism, it makes sense that Royalle—who would adopt the stage name Candida Royalle—found a kindred spirit in Patrick Cowley. Having left the East Coast, both were 20-something transplants living in the sexually-unshackled playland of post-’60s San Francisco. In the early ’70s, Cowley provided soundtracks for Royalle’s street theater work with the Angels of Light (a spinoff of legendary troupe the Cockettes) as well as her performance projects, Warped Floors and White Trash Boom Boom.
The Candida Cosmica EP is a fascinating, too-brief compilation of Cowley and Royalle’s recordings spanning ’73 to ’75. Predating Royalle’s own porn career, it shows where female sexuality and gay pornography, which is to say feminism and disco, briefly inhabited a shared space. (Some dates are hazy, but Cosmica may be contemporaneous with Cowley’s own gay porn soundtracks.) A decade before Cowley ushered in the Hi-NRG sound and scored a 1982 chart hit with Sylvester’s “Do Ya Wanna Funk,” Royalle was his early champion, occasional lover, and muse. The exploratory relationship between the two friends informs the slowly unspooling synth excursions of the five tracks here.
Still a student at City College of San Francisco then, Cowley playfully repurposed equipment like the Serge modular synthesizer and Arp 2600 to electronically recreate Eden, using the primitive patches and filters to suggest gurgling streams and gentle air. Royalle occasionally lends her purrs and sighs, giving the synth-scapes a sense of beauty and wooziness. Only on the sultry closing “Tomato Song” does Royalle sing a proper song. She primarily provides an array of mewls, exhales, and murmurs that—through the lens of her subsequent career—scan now as libidinal. There’s a playfulness to her appearance on the title track, which Cowley then experiments with, converting Royalle into all manner of bird chirps, amphibian blips, wind howls, and the like. The track meanders, but delights, as Cowley’s electronics slyly turn Royalle into river, wind, woods, and then back to a nymph.
“Elementals” is noisier, with Cowley evoking his early electronic forbearers. Its erratic blips and buried snatches of movie dialogue are reminiscent of Vladimir Ussachevsky, Luciano Berio, and Morton Subotnick, as Cowley sorts through just how to make electronics and the human voice work together. “Tantum Ergo,” meanwhile, is underwater electronic abstraction that brings to mind Jürgen Müller’s Science of the Sea.
The nearly 12-minute “Shimmering (Where Am I?)” is the cosmic Quaalude at the center of it all, as Royalle harmonizes with Cowley’s undulating sinewaves, wondering aloud where she is. This parallels the sensuous strangeness of the Dark Entries label’s previously unearthed Cowley offerings. As “Shimmering” evolves, a tingling sensation feels at first physical, then mental, before the notion of a binary fades. Perhaps not as crucial as previous Cowley discoveries, Cosmica nevertheless intrigues, as Cowley uses his electronics to transform Royalle from flesh to a goddess, her every whisper echoing as if from some other dimension.


On their first album in seven years, Mercury Rev chart a gradual, linear journey from darkness to light, with the first half featuring the weightiest, most affecting songs the band has produced since 2001’s (vastly underrated) All Is Dream. As the album goes on, they enter some of the most bizarre territory of their career.

The Light In You

It’s been seven years since Mercury Rev's last album, and even by this long-suffering band’s standards, the ensuing period was tumultuous. When we last heard from them, they seemed to be tentatively stepping away from their Catskills-scaled orchestro-rock on 2008’s Snowflake Midnight and its ambient companion piece Strange Attractors. And more recently, they revisited their avant-garde film-school roots, performing live improvized soundtracks to screenings as the Cinematic Sound Tettix BrainWave Concerto Experiment. But given the recent upheaval in Donahue and Mackowiak’s personal lives, The Light on You finds Mercury Rev taking comfort in the familiar. The band spent much of 2011’s touring behind a deluxe reissue of Deserter’s Songs, and, in many respects, that campaign continues here. But on The Light In You, the proverbial deserters throw themselves a celebratory homecoming after years in the wilderness.
The album charts a gradual, linear journey from darkness to light, with the first half featuring the weightiest, most affecting songs the band has produced since 2001’s (vastly underrated) All Is Dream. For the first time in Mercury Rev history, bassist/producer Dave Fridmann was not involved in the recording, but after 25 years of working with him, Donahue and Mackowiak have a pretty firm grasp on how recreate his seismic sound. So even if the opening "Queen of Swans" begins as typically twee Donahue ode to a mythical goddess, its helium-huffing chorus is followed by a rupture that sounds like an orchestra tumbling into a fault line.
While that song serves as a reintroduction to Mercury Rev’s symphonic might, they wield it to more devastating effect on "Amelie", where mounting string swells accompany a junkie’s plea for forgiveness ("I’ll break the habit/ it’s my last score") that seems destined to go unanswered; the gorgeous, ELO-esque sweep of "You’ve Gone With So Little For So Long" doesn’t gloss over the tale of impoverished hardship couched within. And with the six-minute epic "Central Park East", Mercury Rev provide a staggering reminder of what made Deserter’s Songs so captivating: They conjure a sense of intense isolation amid vast, breathtaking vistas. It’s the sort of song that’s intimate enough to let you see the cold breath coming from the mouth of Donahue’s park-prowling protagonist, while expansive enough to conjure the glow of the skyscrapers surrounding him.
But The Light in You eventually lets go of urban tensions to revel in the psychedelia of nature. Delivering the sundazed serenades "Coming Up for Air" and "Autumn in the Air", Donahue sounds like someone who can get a contact high just from watching the leaves fall. On the latter track, he sings, "I guess this must be what it’s like/ to be in Beatle George’s mind,"  which actually proves to be a relatively subtle namedrop compared to what follows.
In what might be the most bizarre turn in this band’s disjointed trajectory, The Light in You*’*s final third sees Mercury Rev refashion themselves as the house band on some alternate-universe ’60s teen dance show, complete with exuberant brass fanfares, sitar accents, and bongo-powered go-go-dancer breakdowns. In their time, Mercury Rev have covered enough oldies-radio standards to fill several jukeboxes, but here Donahue practically turns into a pitchman for a Time-Life box set—on "Are You Ready," he’s getting down to The Rascals and The Pretty Things and episodes of Shindig! and Solid Gold; "Rainy Day Record" awkwardly extols the life-changing virtues of listening to misanthropic ’80s post-punk on vinyl in the context of a cheery paisley-soul romp. (Even if you happen to enjoy Jonathan Donahue, rap music, and The Fall, you don’t need to hear Jonathan Donahue rapping about The Fall.) In light of all this band has gone through over the years, it’s understandable that they’d want to let loose, have some fun, and reconnect with the feeling of discovering a favorite band for the first time. But as The Light in You’s dichotomous halves prove, Mercury Rev are much better at being trippy than being groovy.


The San Jose rapper’s unorthodox approach situates him with broader, border-crossing peers like Le1f, Big Baby Ghandi, and Cities Aviv. His new album finds him in a more meloncholy mood, but sadness is ultimately powerless before his insatiable libido.

Heavy Hearted in Doldrums

Even by the standards of alt-rap eccentrics, Antwon’s pretty damn protean: a former hardcore kid brought up on boom-bap and pop singers who’ll readily name his new favorite thrash bands after compiling a list of the best Cocteau Twins songs. The San Jose rapper’s unorthodox backstory easily situates him within the broader, border-crossing movement that, thanks to peers like Le1f, Big Baby Ghandi, and Cities Aviv, seeps steadily into hip- hop’s consciousness. “Post-internet” labels aside, it’s easy to see why his two most recent mix tapes, End of Earth and In Dark Denim, were received with enthusiasm: combining vaporwave synths, Death-Grips-style compression, and Biggie worship into a cohesive rap song is hard enough, and tougher still when sex jams are one of your main specialties. Somehow, Antwon pulled it off. On his new album, Heavy Hearted in Doldrums, the rapper constructs his boldest collection yet, grounded in improved production and his characteristic schoolboy wit.
If the album’s mildly redundant title and its po-faced track list don’t make it clear enough, Antwon’s grown sulkier since we last saw him. From the shadowy posturing of “Cold Tears”—this album’s closest thing to a banger—to the molasses-thick, melancholic  “Don’t Care”, Heavy Hearted in Doldrums is often mired in sorrow. But the sadness is ultimately powerless before the rapper’s insatiable libido. In spite of his laments on “Loser” (“I used to have a heart/ It once was filled with love”), Antwon continues to approach sex with the bushy-tailed perspective of a teenager who’s just been handed his driver’s license. “She bust seven times, made a nigga feel great!” he crows on “Break Yo' Back”, a boast he supports throughout the album with his many, many references to oral sex. Wacky erotic banter remains his biggest strength, fueled by a warmhearted, sex-positive spirit that recalls fellow horn dog Danny Brown, or perhaps, a kinkier Biz Markie. Even when he’s being a creep (“As long as your Dad don’t care/ I’ma run my fingers through your baby hairs”) or indulging his bad habit of running a phrase like “bust in threes” into the ground, you’ve got to admire his originality, not to mention his gusto. At the very least, he’s leagues above the majority of his guests, whose contributions to this album range from tight (Lil Ugly Mane’s crossfaded musings on “Rain Song”) to irremediably tepid (Wiki’s shrill, stilted verse on "No Metro Nome”).
Heavy Hearted in Doldrums has been billed as Antwon’s first proper “album”, a distinction that translates into some much-needed upgrades in production. Most notably, there’s none of the dodgy mixing that rendered portions of In Dark Denim downright unlistenable. After the cramped sonics of the past, even the first few seconds of the Sean Kemp-produced, “Rain Song” feel overwhelming: a sudden onslaught of ambient nature sounds, cavernous chorals, and somber violins before the bongo beat comes creeping in. When Antwon finally comes in over the primal beat, his voice doesn’t have to fight for space, so even a stale hook like “She’s got me up all night doing that rain dance” gets a vital dose of immediacy.
That’s not to say the mix is immaculate. It suffers from a serious dearth of bass, and frequently overemphasizes their weaker aspects, like the cheap synths that drive  “Mr. Intercontinental”. “KLF ELF”, the worst offender in this regard, includes a refreshingly ribald guest verse from Das Racist’s Heems that packs in a reference to Olivia Benson from “Law and Order: SVU”, but it’s hard to appreciate the rapper’s wit when he’s muffled by Pictureplane’s blaring calisthenics jams. Were this another run-of-the-mill mixtape, these flaws could easily be overlooked. But considering the fact that Heavy Hearted in Doldrums was funded by a clothing company that charges upwards of 50 bucks for a faux-distressed t-shirt, one would think there’d be fewer duds.
Last summer, Antwon crossed paths with Deafheaven guitarist Kerry McCoy for a washed-out remix of In Dark Denim’s title track, hinting at a possible new scheme through which his two selves, Crusthead and Biz Markie .gif incarnate, could be joined in anguish. Instead of putting these new configurations to the test, Heavy Hearted in Doldrums tinkers with the made-in-the-‘90s blueprint he’s been using from the start, with solid and safe results. That framework suits the rapper just fine, but listening to this album, you can’t help but wish for his dirty genius to fester into something fiercer.


With at least 50 albums over three decades, the jazz pianist Matthew Shipp has honed an inherently diverse and exploratory style. He says Piano Song will be his final recording.

Piano Song

After making at least 50 albums over the past three decades, pianist Matthew Shipp has decided that Piano Song is (probably) his final recording. So it’s tempting to hear it as a definitive statement, perhaps even a career summation. But really, every one of his records could be called definitive. His playing style is so inherently diverse and exploratory that he’s almost incapable of making narrow-sounding music. Even when he sticks to a specific theme or format, his full array of stylistic weapons eventually gets deployed.
There’s no explicit theme behind Piano Song. It’s simply strong, well-considered jazz, with Shipp’s piano leading a thorough dialogue with bassist Michael Bisio and drummer Newman Taylor Baker. In fact, the trio is so comfortably conversational it’s easy to miss how much territory they cover, especially in the beginning. Opening with a slow, somber solo piece, Shipp guides his partners through subtle, subdued tracks that earn names like “Blue Desert” and “Silence Of.”
But once the trio launches into “Flying Carpet,” with Shipp slamming out portentous chords and Baker pounding snare-bombs in response, Piano Song’s relentless variety becomes crystal clear. The contrast between those heavy sounds and the tune’s calmer passages is thrilling, and it’s one the band revisits in numerous variations throughout the album. On “Mind Space,” short stretches of quiet energy burst into raucous crescendos, while during “Gravity Point” furious action cleverly cascades into reflective pauses. The trio can run full-throttle for entire tracks, too: In “Microwave,” Shipp’s note clusters twist around Bisio’s stair-stepping bass without few gasps of breath.
The conversations in Piano Song feel ongoing, as if we’re merely getting glimpses of a longer, potentially-endless back and forth. All three players have an abundance of things to say, and though there’s sufficient space for each, no single recording could really encompass it all. That’s true of most of Shipp’s work, which makes his decision to leave the realm of recording disappointing but not entirely disheartening. He surely will keep conversing with his piano—he has no plans to stop playing or performing—and if the best venues for that might be something other than albums, he’s earned the right to make that call. Just absorbing his discography could take lifetimes as it is, and Piano Song is another entry that will reward listening for a long time.


After decades of legal red tape and intraband strife, Minneapolis’ revolutionary punk trio break the silence with an exhaustive summary of their lo-fi, frenetic first three years.

Savage Young Dü

On January 26, 1988, one of the most important contemporary American rock bands came to an end at a kitchen table in St. Paul, Minn. Exhausted from nearly a decade of nonstop touring and recording, compounded by the recent suicide of their manager and, most pressingly, drummer Grant Hart’s spiraling heroin addiction, guitarist Bob Mould and bassist Greg Norton sat down with Hart at his parents’ house. A few awkward minutes later, Hüsker Dü was no more—out with a whimper unbecoming of the noise they were semi-famous for.
And they never looked back; in fact, no band of their stature has ever looked back less. There were no gussied-up reissues or valedictory anthologies to cement the band’s legacy for latecomers or fans who wanted something beyond the sludgy audio quality of older recordings that was growing less romantic with age. A lot of this had to do with sundry legal and label entanglements, but there was a festering spite that time seemed to intensify rather than heal. “I’m blessed to have such a nice history,” Mould told me in 2008, “but I’m careful not to cash in on it.” Hart’s death this past September at 56 from liver cancer closed the book on this for good, but the band is no less worthy of reappraisal and recontextualization.
This longstanding animosity and frustration isn’t mere backstory; it’s the reason Savage Young Dü is an event at all, more momentous than the sum of its ramshackle parts. It was only two years ago that the appearance of a bare-bones official online merch store augured a major breakthrough; after nearly 30 years of post-breakup enmity rivaled only by the Smiths and the Gallagher brothers, all three members coming together to sell lapel buttons was a hard-fought victory. But the notion of them collaborating on a project as comprehensive and thoughtful as this still felt as fantastical as a headlining spot at Coachella. That it ultimately could only be undertaken by Chicago-based excavation specialists Numero Group, speaks to the degree of difficulty
Comprised of 69 chronologically sorted tracks, most live and 47 previously unreleased, Savage circumvents the nightmarish parsing of rights from SST and Warner Bros. by focusing on raw recordings from the band’s formative years in the Twin Cities between 1979 and 1982. Beyond heralding the band’s youthful prolificacy with a book including archival photos, a comprehensive band history, and the provenance of every salvaged track, the box set offers a slight revisionist tweak to the band’s generally accepted narrative arc as a Very Fast, Very Intense Hardcore Band That Evolved To Slow Down A Little And Write More Nuanced Songs. Even in unvarnished recordings, some of the earliest tracks here—the innocent teen angst of Hart’s “Can’t See You Anymore” and “Sore Eyes,” the handclap-abetted “The Truth Hurts,” and Mould’s studio outtake “Writer’s Cramp”—show an attention to and ease with pop songcraft that later became a hallmark. Hart’s Thin Lizzyish demo “All I’ve Got To Lose Is You” could have been one of their most beloved songs had anyone known about it.
That playfulness was largely jettisoned once they got out of the Midwest and started spending time with punks like Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, and DOA. By the time they’d returned home from an eventful three-month 1981 West Coast tour, they had a mission: “If the Ramones were fast and the Buzzcocks were faster and the Dickies were even faster, that meant Hüsker Dü needed to be the fastest band in the world,” Mould wrote in his 2011 memoir See a Little Light. “Before we left, there was breathing room in our performances; now that breathing room had been replaced with a claustrophobic, frenetic intensity that reflected our eye-opening experiences on the road, our elevated ambitions, and our burning need to upstage any band in sight.”
Much of the box set captures that mission in full bloom, highlighted by a dutiful recreation of the band’s aptly titled debut Land Speed Record taken from a 1981 show a few weeks after the one that formed the original live album, showcasing the trio at their most punishing and political. The sheer speed is as shocking now as it must have been then—possibly more so given the clearer understanding that it was a conscious shift rather than overcompensating for tunelessness—while Reagan-era rants like “Guns at My School” and “Push the Button” feel depressingly up to date.
Nestled amid the amphetamine-fueled primordial punk are tracks like “Industrial Grocery Store,” “Outside,” “Call on Me,” and “Private Hell,” which stand as undiscovered blueprints for the rest of the band’s career, surrounding pop hooks and melody with discordant noise—a concept that is a lot more familiar in 2017 than it was in 1980. While any rarities collection is a map of paths not taken, Savage Young Dü presents dozens of crudely recorded castoffs as evidence of mounting confidence and feverish productivity; a different band could have built a career solely off the songs Hüsker Dü routinely discarded. The objective of a project of this magnitude and care isn’t just to show how a particular artist got to a particular place, but how we all got there, too; to remind, again, how things we take for granted about culture stem from basement experiments no one was supposed to hear.
Which is not to say that the non-hardcore songs here are an easy listen; production miracles were no doubt performed on all these recovered tapes, many of which were culled from the band’s former engineer and early acolyte Terry Katzman. But once you get used to the fidelity, the voyeurism makes the sense of discovering these otherwise fully-formed songs feel that much more palpable. By the time the set gets to the 1983 studio debut Everything Falls Apart, it’s a little like Dorothy stepping into Technicolor. Perhaps the most shocking takeaway is that for all this collection’s depth and intensity, it’s largely prelude. In the two and a half years between July 1984 and January 1987, Hüsker Dü released five bona fide classic albums (two of which were double LPs) and zero bad ones—a winning streak that deserves to stand with any in rock history, if one unlikely to yield the same trove of orphaned, unheard ideas.
In a Facebook post eulogizing Grant Hart in September, Numero Group’s Ken Shipley, who spent seven years tracking down tapes and artifacts and contracts, remembered a visibly ailing Hart asking him in March if there was any way the box set could come out “before I go.” While Mould has long been the most visible member of Hüsker Dü, Savage Young Dü makes the case for Hart as its, well, heart. His drumming propels the most brutally fast songs here while his barefoot-scamp charm grounds the catchiest; nothing defines the band better than its alchemy of those two elements. But it was his addiction issues that hastened the band’s demise, and the rest of his career, despite brilliant moments, can’t help but feel like a cautionary tale compared to Mould’s. If only an accident of timing, this immersive, high-profile origin story, cleaved from its messier conclusion, can be read as a redemption of sorts.
“We’re not the most professional band in the Twin Cities,” Hart sheepishly tells whoever happened to have been in the Minneapolis club Jay’s Longhorn in July 1979, right after tearing through the rarely heard, dizzyingly fun entomology-themed romp “Insects Rule the World.” Just 12 tracks into a collection that makes the definitive case for Hüsker Dü as the platonic ideal of a band discovering, absorbing, exemplifying, then eclipsing an entire subculture, it sounds like an apology and a promise to do better.


EL VY is the new project from Matt Berninger of the National and Brent Knopf of Ramona Falls and Menomena. Their debut offers a chance to hear Berninger  divorced from the context of his main gig, and the results are muddled and confused, unsure of a clear direction to take.

Return to the Moon

It's probably unfair to compare EL VY, the new project from Matt Berninger (the National) and Brent Knopf (Ramona Falls, Menomena), to Berninger's main gig. The National have come to cast a surprisingly long shadow over indie rock: even if their booking at Barclays Center was more a case of "huge in New York" than "huge in Oklahoma," the National have emerged as a big-tent indie mainstay because their widescreen melancholia has proven durable and difficult to emulate. EL VY provides our first look at Berninger divorced from that context and a clue toward deciphering how much of the National's appeal hinges on Berninger's GQuaalude musings and how much belongs to his band's gilded alt-rock.
It's easy to say EL VY's first record, Return to the Moon, isn't a National album; it's more difficult to put a finger on what exactly it is. On lecherous lead single "I'm the Man to Be" he's still talking about his dick, the one he swung around so much on 2005 breakthrough Alligator. Elsewhere ("It's a Game") he's comfortably forlorn, trading on elegant little phrases ("It's a game/ And I can't wait to see you") like he did on 2013's Trouble Will Find Me. Knopf's jaunty and hectic keyboard-heavy arrangements are a little indistinct and, worse, noncommittal, unable to choose between glam ("I'm the Man to Be") and lounge rock ("Paul Is Alive"), between lush folk ("No Time to Crank the Sun") and boozy bluster ("Sad Case").
We get glimpses of how Berninger might fare as a Bryan Ferry-esque put-on—he has the wardrobe for it—or as Greg Dulli-indebted horndog, but only in the moments before Knopf's arrangements whisk him away. The particularly ill-fated opening trilogy—including "I'm the Man to Be", the title track, and "Paul Is Alive"—reek of that fake-funky, post-Beck period when major labels gave odd, talented bands just enough rope to hang themselves; the results sound like Berninger and Knopf deemed Soul Coughing not haughty enough. There are cooing background vocals, dirty organs, harpsi- and power chords, but it all feels random, deployed only because something has to fill these spaces.
Berninger, for all his magnetism, doesn't help matters. Absent his backing band's grandeur, his poet-laureate-of-the-upwardly-mobile-schtick cedes way to a clever misanthrope in need of an editor and an Advil. The album opens with the unforgettable and irredeemable line, "I scratched a ticket with the leg of a cricket/ And I got triple Jesus," straight from the Tweedy School of Left-Leaning Refrigerator-Magnet Poetry. He's still name dropping other musicians—the Beatles, the Cramps, the Minutemen—but he puts too fine a point on things when, in the middle of "Sleepin' Light", he declares, "Ain't no Leonard Cohen." He's still funnier than he's given credit for ("You were supposed to bring me your brother's weed...this is heartbreaking!") but he seems in on the joke less often. His haphazard proper nouns—"Silent Ivy Hotel", "Happiness, Missouri"—carry less import.
Trouble Will Find Me was well-received, but there was a sense, even amongst National die-hards, that this was the last time the band, and Berninger, could coast on that particular sound. Return to the Moon is an unhappy departure, one that suggests that Berninger is as reliant on the National's luxe environments as they are on his all-the-wine sloganeering. And while there's nothing here that suggests Berninger and Knopf are truly incompatible, there's equally little evidence that Knopf's spirited arrangements are suited to Berninger's spotlight-gargling word soup. "Return to the moon/ I'm dying," Berninger croons on the opening track. Yeah, man.


Meek’s fifth album is an extended victory lap that can be thrilling and thoughtful in spots but is mostly content to aggressively spin its wheels.

Expensive Pain

Meek Mill’s raps usually come with mortal stakes attached. It doesn’t matter if he’s in legal standoffs with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, digital standoffs with other rappers, or just taking aim at faceless haters; when his back is against the wall, he’s capable of making any adversity feel like a third-act Marvel Cinematic Universe blowout. This me-against-the-world fervor is what turns songs like “Dreams and Nightmares,” the intro to his 2012 major-label debut of the same name, into timeless anthems and his 2018 album Championships—released more than seven months after a long battle with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court—into a celebratory middle finger. Meek had a rollercoaster of a decade and has vanquished (or made up with) most of his enemies. His fifth album, Expensive Pain, is an extended victory lap that can be thrilling and thoughtful in spots but is mostly content to aggressively spin its wheels.
With no tangible enemy to rally the troops against, the idea of “expensive pain” creeps along the edges of the album. Meek is pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars per show and is freed from the bondage of parole, but money and fame can also isolate people from the world. Sometimes, like on “Intro (Hate on Me)”—the latest in his series of explosive album openers—he barrels through the commotion and flexes for the hell of it (“I put baguettes on all of my dawgs; they fall, they makin’ a sound”). Other times, like on both the title track and “Tweaking,” he dwells on falling out with friends over money and being told to seek therapy after admitting to cuddling his gun in bed. For better and worse, he’s a long way from the cold Philly street corners where he cut his teeth, and the album’s best moments amplify the pros and cons that come with attaining wealth while grieving loved ones.
The soul-searching on Expensive Pain is some of the most potent of Meek’s career. He’s nervous about his friends leaving jail and jumping back into the streets (“Expensive Pain”); he’s reflecting on being a “gangsta since like 5, since my daddy died” (“Cold Hearted III”). His trademark pumped-up anthems, on the other hand, are more of a mixed bag. There, he’s mostly running in place, recycling well-worn stories of haters lurking in the shadows and women lurking in his bed and his wallet. He’s made dozens of songs like “Sharing Locations” and “Me (FWM)” before. Mid-album highlight “Hot” is most notable for the velocity of Nick Papz’s beat and a nimble guest verse from Memphis rapper Moneybagg Yo, distracting from Meek’s unsexy sex bars. The fun and energy are there, but there’s little separating these Meek Mill songs from those already clogging workout playlists.
He’s singing more often on Expensive Pain, too, but his Auto-Tuned vocals are indistinct, the exact opposite of his well-established persona. “On My Soul” aims for glossy vocal runs but scans as Roddy Ricch cosplay. He sounds so much like Young Thug on “We Slide” that it’s genuinely surprising when Thug himself shows up on the second half for a duet. Paired with one of the most unique voices in rap, Meek sounds like a deepfake. He was clearly inspired to continue pushing his voice after isolated singing moments on his 2017 album Wins and Losses and Championships, but it’s largely an unwelcome expansion, drawing attention away from the more melancholy corners of Meek’s brain.
As a rapper who’s now five studio albums and nearly a dozen mixtapes into his career, Meek can’t be blamed for wanting to switch things up. Many of the experiments on Expensive Pain don’t pan out, and a handful of the album’s more traditional songs bleed together, but the glitz, glamour, and paranoia typical of his music generally hold. Expensive Pain is Meek’s first album not embroiled in or directly inspired by controversy since 2015’s Dreams Worth More Than Money, a place to regain his footing without playing defense. Its introspection and chest-thumping are just enough to keep the stakes reasonably high.

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Another consistent, quality LP from Scotland's three-headed power-pop songwriting team.

Man-Made

Scotland's Teenage Fanclub are the standard-bearers of modern power pop. Eight albums into their career, no one else comes close to their mastery of the genre, and when you think about it, the pieces for their run of remarkably consistent albums were in place from the beginning. The band has three accomplished songwriters whose voices blended as though nature intended it; what it lacked is a sense of adventurous experimentation, and as such, their discography is consistent almost to a fault, always good but never surprising or amazing.
It's possible that the band felt the need for a bit of a shake-up when it came time to record Man-Made, and they traveled to Chicago to record with John McEntire at his Soma Electronic Music Studio. The change of venue and the choice of McEntire are the kinds of moves that could precipitate real change in a band's sound, but as it turns out the record is full of the same intensely classicist power pop that's filled every Teenage Fanclub album. McEntire's influence is felt keenly on the edges of the music, though, in the textures of the guitars and bass and in the injection of a host of buzzing and burbling keyboards low in the mix. So while it's not a reinvention, the production does bring in a subtle infusion of the kind of energy and youthful vigor that was missing from recent outings like Howdy! and Songs from Northern Britain and makes Man-Made possibly the band's best outing since 1992's near-masterpiece Bandwagonesque.
The tracklist is split amongst four songs each from Norman Blake, Gerard Love, and Raymond McGinley. Blake's finest is opener "It's All in My Mind", which features the band's trademark gentle harmonies through a monster hook that counter-intuitively pulls back from the verse. Francis MacDonald's drums give the song an insistent beat while buzzing organ and e-bowed guitar quietly mingle in the background to lend the sound a little extra punch. Blake's "Slow Fade" is an invigorating nod to the swifter tempos and louder volumes of the band's early-90s salad days, whipping by in less than two minutes and including a spry if somewhat tuneless guitar solo.
Love's "Time Stops" benefits from well-placed, almost inaudible pizzicato strings in the pensive verses and floats by on a buoyant rhythm full of richly recorded drums and artful piano accents. McEntire's peculiar talent for recording basslines is on full view on McGinley's "Nowhere", which rides and especially nice one in its harmony-soaked verses. The vocals aren't the only thing harmonized on "Feel", a song that bursts out of the gate with doubled lead guitar and rides a loose groove the relies on a sparse piano part for a lot of its motion.
Man-Made ultimately sounds exactly like you'd expect a Teenage Fanclub album to sound, but with just enough extra to make it feel new again. It's unlikely at this point that any of their fans would want them to completely overhaul their approach anyhow, and indeed those fans are treated to the band's best collection of songs in more than a decade here. The uninitiated shouldn't skip over Bandwagonesque for this, but fans of both Teenage Fanclub and power pop in general will be very pleased with this.


The Atlanta duo’s Sub Pop debut examines the mundane anxieties of modern life with caffeinated post-punk that recalls Parquet Courts or Wire.

Networker

Omni chose their new album title with a pressing question in mind: How does an aspiring musician make a living? The Atlanta post-punk duo isn’t just referring to social media with Networker—they admittedly detest it—but also the perceived obligation to rub elbows with industry folk of importance, and the depressing spectacle of observing all your friends do the same around you. Thankfully, Omni found a little success, as this record marks their Sub Pop debut.
Their music has always thrummed with nervous energy, as if they were forever anticipating the worst. They’re considerably more secure since becoming labelmates with Sleater-Kinney, Beach House, and Father John Misty, but their worries haven't subsided: “Are you nervous for your career?/Are you insincere?” singer/bassist Phillip Frobos prods on opener “Sincerely Yours.” While there are mentions of modern technology, Networker is at its best when dissecting how these technologies intersect (or don’t) with the mundanities of daily life. On “Present Tense,” Frobos’ long-distance partner texts him a nude photo, but their clashing schedules keep him from responding right away.
Omni’s jittery post-punk, filtered through Parquet Courts and the Talking Heads, sounds slightly dialed back here, but the lyrics still burn with unease: “Continue to avoid me/But you’d like more photos to see/Are you dreaming of the stranger that turns you on?” Frobos asks “Skeleton Key,” recounting the agonizing self-consciousness of an online fling. “With your confidence, well, where do I fit in?” begs the narrator of “Sleep Mask.” “Is your silence concentration? Or should I take a hint?” There are more question marks than full stops on the lyric sheet, presenting frustrations with no hope for a resolution. “I’m an imposter/I blend like wallpaper,” Frobos laments over the quarter-note slog of “Genuine Person,” as matter-of-factly as if he were introducing himself.
At their best, Omni’s layered influences amount to a complex and absorbing churn, but here, the band sounds a bit depthless; frenzied guitar riffs can only evoke so much when there’s so little stylistic variation between them. The band is nimble and admirably tight, but most tracks chug along with similar tempos, volumes, and textures; the most memorable moments are the few welcome changes of pace, like the time signature shift of “Underage” or the synthy slow-jam of the title track. To stick with the digital-age-anxiety theme, Networker feels not unlike a dating app meetup that went fine, but not great—just entertaining enough to hold your interest for a round or two of drinks until you’ve decided you probably wouldn’t see them again.

Buy: Rough Trade
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7 Year Bitch's blunt and spiky rock music married social commentary with punk brevity and Riot Grrrl righteousness. Live at Moe comprises recently uncovered recordings from a 1996 show at Seattle’s Club Moe, and it's a welcome document that adds meaningfully to the band’s oeuvre while capturing a moment in the thriving Seattle scene of the '90s.

Live at Moe

"I’ve been wanting to spit on you all night," sneers 7 Year Bitch’s Elizabeth Davis-Simpson. The throwaway line from Live at Moe, composed of recently uncovered recordings from a 1996 show at Seattle’s Club Moe, sums up the band’s appeal. A baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire, 7 Year Bitch’s blunt and spiky rock music married social commentary with punk brevity and Riot Grrrl righteousness. Crowning their ferocious riffs on sex, trouble, and death were Davis-Simpson's heat-seeking remonstrations, which were as precise as they were lethal. Live is a powerful showcase—a welcome document that adds meaningfully to the band’s oeuvre while capturing a moment in the thriving Seattle scene of the '90s.
On Live at Moe, we hear a band in transition but not necessarily in decline. The opener, "24,900 Miles Per Hour," from 7 Year Bitch’s third and final album Gato Negro, is a furious demonstration of the band's broadening palette. Selene Vigil-Wilk’s melodic narration, detailing the demise of a "poor white trash" girl, has a looser cadence and more languid delivery than anything from the band’s earlier catalog—the song sounds like a Daydream Nation outtake, until the vocal snarls suddenly in the chorus. This version cleaves to the studio iteration but thrums with sharper urgency.
The live spark transforms other songs from Gato Negro, the band’s first and only album with Atlantic Records, which was simultaneously less scrappy and less compelling than 1992 debut Sick’Em and 1994’s ¡Viva Zapata!. Wandering beyond their original metal-underscored feminist fury to introduce funk idiom and bluesy touches, 7 Year Bitch’s lyrics also shifted, from incendiary directness to sometimes-more-clichéd lines. "Crying Shame," with its plodding chorus and piqued nursery-rhyme rhythm ("They like the kind of girl/ The kind they cannot tame") gets a thoroughly menacing showing here; Valerie Agnew’s hi-hats pull tension lines tight, and Elizabeth Davis-Simpson’s nimble, subterranean bass anchors the sparse instrumentation. While the live mix isn’t uniform between tracks—the recording was originally streamed online—it’s generally even-handed; it breathes, often capturing the distinctive character of the musicians’ contributions.
Nuclear force arrives in the set with "M.I.A.," from ¡Viva Zapata!; both the album and the track memorialized Mia Zapata of the Gits, who was raped and murdered in 1993. Directed at the killer, at any abuser of women, the song unites the band’s dual strengths of raw sonic power and scarifying screed: "Will there be hundreds mourning for you?/ Will they talk of the talent and inspiration you gave?/ No." Vigil-Wilk’s blistering delivery speaks of monstrous anger and loss, articulating a remembrance that is both salute and spur. "Hip Like Junk," also a ¡Viva Zapata! cut, prowls the dark grounds of drug abuse and addiction, a perennial theme for 7 Year Bitch after the drug-related death of original guitarist Stefanie Sargent in 1992.
"Lorna," from Sick ‘Em, harks back to beginnings, when the band’s sound had more in common with contemporaries L7 and Babes in Toyland, like surf rock filtered through granite. The penultimate offering is classic brat directive "The Scratch." Live at Moe’s version swaggers, growls, and grabs; "I want it," yells Vigil, "Give it to me." Closing out the record is "Kiss My Ass Goodbye," introduced as the last song guitarist Roisin Dunne would be playing with the group before departing. Given 7 Year Bitch would break up the next year, the energetic exit feels bittersweet but apt. Live at Moe is a fierce hello-again-and-farewell to an iconic group, chronicling a set that’s tight and short, like a skirt that says "Fuck you" on the butt.


Lower Dens' Escape From Evil siphons its aesthetic from the storied pop of the '80s, but it's not content to stop at homage. The Baltimore band uses the past, its clichés and its innocence, as a lens through which to imagine a queer and open future.

Escape From Evil

Lower Dens have toyed with the raw pleasure of pop music in the past, but they’ve never embraced it like this. Three years ago, the Baltimore band’s standout single "Brains" shone as a melodic gem inside the largely experimental Nootropics; now, on the band’s third album, core songwriter Jana Hunter embraces open, ringing melodies. Like a lot of current music, Escape From Evil siphons its aesthetic from the storied pop of the '80s, but it’s not content to stop at homage. Lower Dens use the past—its clichés and its innocence—as a lens through which to imagine a queer and open future.
As an aesthetic reservoir, the '80s continue to feed an abundance of nostalgia, from the American highway fantasies of the War on Drugs to Twin Shadow’s boy-meets-girl melodramas. Inhabiting characters from the past can lend a singer a certain gravitas; unburdened by modern irony, big emotions play bigger on a decades-old frame. But few artists have seized that retrospection as an opportunity to flip the power dynamics that governed pop culture 30 years ago. For Lower Dens, a neon palette serves as fertile ground for subversion. Hunter absorbs the range of gendered feeling from Billy Idol to Bonnie Tyler, emerging as a bandleader capable of flipping effortlessly between extremes of masculine aggression and feminine yearning.
The word "genderfluid" didn’t exist 30 years ago, but it’s a useful term for gripping the edges of this new work. The video for the album’s lead single "To Die in L.A." works almost as a queer retelling of William Friedkin’s 1985 drama To Live and Die in L.A., complete with characters that aren’t cast based on their actors’ birth-assigned gender. Hunter appears as a masculine presence in a buzz cut and suit to glower at the video’s lead femme, who’s vying for movie stardom; in the clip’s last image, the main character sets fire to a painting of herself, then she and Hunter gaze into the flames as it burns away.
The video is full of ambiguous, evocative imagery, and Escape From Evil also runs thick with powerful, slippery emotions. While Hunter seems more enamored of radio hits by the likes of Gary Numan and Flock of Seagulls here, Lower Dens never quite settle into an easy genre hook. A krautrock chug left over from 2012’s Nootropics powers "Company", where Hunter assumes the role of anonymous authority figure with lines like "you look really uncomfortable if I might be honest" and "we just want to help." You can hear the same smirk that Mike Patton wore on Faith No More’s "Land of Sunshine", the same glee in inhabiting a vague malice disguised as aid.
Hunter is a charismatic singer willing to deal in grand, sweeping gestures and also idiosyncratic specifics. Escape From Evil is a vivid world of queer retrofuturism, a wide open space that offers access the emotionality of the recent past without subscribing to its violence. Hunter embraces retro-pop as a channel of escape from the power that routes us in our mundane outer lives. In the world of this album, no one will tell you who to be or where to go; it’s all yours to become.


The fourth album from the NY duo composed of Elucid and billy woods is freer, lusher, and brighter than anything they’ve done before.

Shrines

In 2003 the NYPD, acting on an anonymous tip, punched through the wall of an apartment in the Drew Hamilton Houses at Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and 141st Street in Harlem. Through that hole, officers saw a mattress that had been shredded the way a dog might shred a newspaper and claw marks that reached all the way up to an eight-foot ceiling. The tiger they removed, a Siberian-Bengal mix named Ming, belonged to a construction worker named Antoine Yates. Ming grew as the story spread: 350 pounds, then 425, 450, 500. Yates had acquired the tiger from an exotic animal dealer in Minnesota by falsifying papers to suggest he had land to build a zoo in Sullivan County; he had just been hospitalized after it maimed him in an attack.
The fourth song on Shrines, the new album by Armand Hammer, ends with a clip of Yates’s brother being interviewed. “My brother wanted to build a zoo,” he says, maybe a little bit drunk, talking over the music in a club. “He wanted to build a utopia. Because when he looked around him all he seen was destruction in our neighborhood.” The interviewer does not follow up on the spiritual tip. Instead he asks a practical question: How much does it cost to feed a tiger?
Shrines is the third LP that Armand Hammer, the duo composed of New Yorkers Elucid and billy woods, have released in the last two and a half years––roughly the same amount of time that Yates kept Ming in his apartment. There are times it turns grim: see, for example, Elucid’s reference to the “prayers up but quickly fallen like sweat on the brow” in the face of a paramilitary police, or the way woods flips the Nas maxim from “Life’s A Bitch” into “that buck that lost the lotto could’ve bought a fucking bottle.” But on the whole Shrines is freer, lusher, brighter than anything the pair has done before, an album that strays into “streets where Siri noted coordinates and was too scared to speak” and sees what might grow from the soil.
woods is an extraordinary writer who populates his raps with characters he dangeles like a puppeteer, and with details that unnerve––like the expendable football players who are reduced to “donated brains” that “bob gently in solution,” or the “list of ill-fated quick licks” magneted to the fridge next to permission slips from a child’s school. His aunts tap cheap watches proudly as they tout the “Swiss movement.” His middle-aged men speak to shredded-knee prospects (“You got your whole life ahead of you son… nothing to be ashamed of”) in a way that makes clear they’re really consoling themselves. And his prosecutors consider lenience before stabbing a shiv in the accused’s neck.
He’s not just smooth, he’s “graceful as third-generation bomb makers”; he cracks jokes about plagiarizing a famous commencement speech at a “cash-strapped HBCU.” When he recalls his father’s second burial, you can picture the motorcade that curves “like a snake through the streets,” and when a cocky king thinks he can wade into the masses, you see the mob with “claws reaching, eyes like sequins.” One of the most incisive passages comes on “Ramesses II,” named for the Egyptian pharaoh from the “Ozymandias” poems. Of numbing luxury, woods raps:

Waves of pleasure, thought you had the best till you taste better
Taste butter
The tailors’ tape measure touch like a lover
Doormens’ faces blend into one another
Glass panels in the sky, with the sound off
Even when you drive you fly, they rarely touched the Porsche

Elucid does not lapse into the voices of others. Instead he flits between the chillingly real and poetic abstraction. A typical excerpt comes from the foreboding “Pommelhorse”: “It started as a lesson of achieving dreams and reaching fantastical heights/Ended with us watching the Challenger rocket smoldering on the black and white/Flame licked flame, like lovers do.” His voice––he sounds like a great singer whose vocal cords have been trimmed by a jagged knife—is an indispensable anchor on a record whose beats can be playful, even weightless.
The rappers are superb foils for one another; where woods’ language tends to be more straightforward, he will rap elliptically around a theme, while Elucid uses more cryptic phrasing but goes directly for the jugular. On “Slewfoot,” the latter raps of a simmering revolution that the white majority “...choose not to see–the labor’s free, with hidden fees/Razors tucked under wigs and weaves, plus degrees.”
Shrines begins by striving for some communion with the natural world. Toward the end of first track “Bitter Cassava,” Elucid raps about the summertime: the “thunder in the sky, rolling wide,” the jars of fireflies with holes poked in the lid. This gives way to a brief solo song of his, “Solarium,” which sounds like a mid-July celebration.
All is not perfect, of course—in that song some of the smiling friends on the block have turned informant, and in another the trees felled from forests are chopped up and spit out of “university printers” as counterfeit $20s. This feeling, this combination of wonderment and worry, emerges most clearly in the wrenching “Flavor Flav.” In that song–the Public Enemy hypeman’s cartoon clocks tick down your sprint toward middle age––Elucid recreates, with terrifying detail, the 1968 massacre at South Carolina State University, where three black men were killed and dozens of other protesters were injured when highway patrol officers opened fire at an anti-segregation demonstration. All nine officers were acquitted. Elucid draws attention to what he’s doing in the verse (“Traveling 50 years back, I only moved the pen six inches”), but not before he notes the humbling breadth of time––the future, the unknown, the “possibilities invisible, but endless.”
As its title might suggest, Shrines plays in a liminal space between the corporeal and something beyond, the “ritual smoke flumed above the tomb” and the Ruger underneath the robe. On the album cover a cop dangles by a thread on the outside of Antoine Yates’s apartment building, clutching a rifle in one hand, while the tiger rages inside.


Cameron Mesirow’s third album as Glasser is lightly fanciful yet deeply felt, using subtle flourishes to consider the meaning of death and what comes after.

crux

Cameron Mesirow—better known as art pop auteur Glasser—has always done it herself. Ring, her 2010 debut, was entirely made with Garageband. Its follow-up, 2013’s Interiors, traded colorful ridges for sleek contemporary avant-garde pop yet retained an independent spirit. A decade later, for her third studio album, Mesirow has pivoted to something more complex and idiosyncratic. If Interiors looked to the future and Ring faced the past, crux is nestled in a baroque, nearly-medieval period—a sort of in-between-ness of things, befitting for the album’s narrative of life after the death of a close friend. Falling back on her Celtic and Scottish roots, Mesirow crafts a lightly fanciful yet deeply felt elegy, using subtle flourishes to consider the meaning of death and what comes after.
In the olden days, a poet typically called upon a muse in the first few lines of a poem. Here, Mesirow echoes this technique with the opening song, “A Guide.” It’s a kind of invocation that fits neatly within the Vangelis-chic of the Weeknd’s After Hours, with neon-lit synths simmering in the wet dark and digitally androgynous backing vocals. On “Design,” from her last record, Mesirow wondered if there was a God. On crux, she seems to have surrendered if not to a specific deity then at least to a higher power—hope for the afterlife, perhaps.
Undergirding Mesirow’s spirituality is the physical desire that runs through all her work. “As far as I’m concerned, all my records are horny records,” Mesirow said in a recent interview with Vogue. Describing him simply as her “first love” in the same interview, Mesirow lets the music tell us all we need to know about her relationship with the man she lost to an accidental overdose. crux lovingly addresses that absence. “Knave” and “Thick Waltz” turn with nonverbal and primordial feeling, reaching for something folkloric but also instinctual with slide guitar and alto sax, respectively. On “Clipt,” Mesirow centers her Celtic ancestry, leaving room for a sprightly violin breakdown in the song’s second half. “Drift” balances a buoyant beat and strings with existential musings. “What a good life/except for all those times/when you want to die,” Mesirow sings.
If you’ll forgive a few lapses into the maudlin, where her songwriting lacks the words for grief’s indeterminable emotions, crux becomes a vibrant and altogether moving record. It relinquishes old frameworks for a deeper, more complicated approach to music than anything in Mesirow’s discography. It doesn’t just fill an empty space, it takes the shape of the void.