Toronto musician Seth Nyquist’s versatile voice soars on every track of an inviting debut that spans a surprising array of genres and techniques.

Heaven’s Only Wishful EP

MorMor begins his debut EP with a well-worn lyric: “I’m just a poor boy,” he sings lightly, between clipped guitar chords, immediately recalling one of the most histrionic moments in Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” While the Toronto musician, born Seth Nyquist, doesn’t aspire to that band’s theatrics or camp, he does share with Freddie Mercury a certain fondness for inhabiting multifaceted characters. Heaven’s Only Wishful contains a surprising array of genres and techniques within its five tracks. Nyquist has a crystalline ear for hooks, but he doesn’t coast on his catchy refrains. He’s also something of a perfectionist; the production on his record is so crisp that vocal ad-libs and slightly delayed notes in guitar solos sound less like mistakes than like deliberate glimpses of the human process behind the craftsmanship on display.
Nyquist’s voice rises to the top of the mix on Heaven’s Only Wishful, soaring over airy synth pads, taut drum patterns, and warm guitar chords. Unlike Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, who also constructs indelible choruses within a psych-pop framework, Nyquist positions the human voice as the center of his music, not as a burden to be sublimated into waves of reverb and distortion. His instrumental toolkit might be standard for rock and pop, but his singing tends to roam free above it. On the languid ballad “Whatever Comes to Mind,” he’s all croon and falsetto, completing a dreamy palette with vocal textures siphoned from R&B. Standout track “Waiting on the Warmth” sees him alternately sing-speaking and scuffing up his tenor with the controlled scream of a hard-rock frontman. He’s soft and adorned in reverb on the EP’s title track—until the coda, when he cracks a whisper open into a yelp. A distorted guitar solo spurs him on to that extreme as he repeats, “Some say/You’re the reason I feel this way,” like he’s just realized whom to blame for his pain and is gearing up for a confrontation.
A darkness lurks beneath MorMor’s sunny veneer, occasionally revealing itself by way of disjointed lyrics. “Heaven’s Only Wishful” conjures up an image of vultures circling their victim right after Nyquist muses on “life and its horrors,” concluding, “There’s no getting out.” “Lost” contrasts playful, carefree visions with apocalyptic ones: “Blow kisses to the sky ‘til it comes down.” It’s hard to piece together narratives across Nyquist’s compositions; his lyrics tend toward the dreamy and free-associative, like they’re orbiting the music’s themes instead of pinning them down. That leaves space for the listener to inhabit MorMor’s songs, to fill their vacancies with personalized expectations and predispositions. It makes the music inviting.
“I find color/I hope you find color,” Nyquist repeats in falsetto on the EP’s final track, “Find Colour,” while dizzying guitars and synths swirl around him. It’s the closest thing he offers to an explicit connection between artist and listener, and it closes the record with a reassuring gesture. If you’re coming to his music for comfort, he’s got plenty to offer. If you’re hungry for anger or excitement, he delivers those emotions, too. Heaven’s Only Wishful acknowledges the anguish that saturates its present-day, North American setting, but it doesn’t dwell there. It radiates a tempered optimism. MorMor knows that even the most dejected sentiments can be expressed in an upturned vocal melody, against lush, beautiful instrumentation. Sometimes music is enough of an escape.


The 23-year-old Chicago singer’s long-awaited debut makes a close study of R&B history, floating through weightless vocal arrangements with uncommon poise.

HYPNOS

When Ravyn Lenae emerged on Chicago’s R&B scene in 2015, she was a sensory architect. Her vocals were eclectic: a unique neo-soul style that channeled Erykah Badu’s nasal coolness and a falsetto that carried whispers of FKA twigs. Between 2015 and 2017, Lenae released two EPs, exploring a mode of alternative R&B that incorporated elements of dream pop, bounce, and soul. Between opening tours for Noname and SZA, Lenae seemingly found her groove on 2018’s Steve Lacy-produced EP Crush, a collection of daring electro-funk bedroom bangers. She seemed unstoppable, releasing so much in a short time period that it was exhilarating to see what she had lined up next. Aside from a few teases, however, Lenae went radio silent for the better part of four years.
Her debut full-length, HYPNOS, arrives as a mature reintroduction, a love-stained, moody transport that flies through Lenae’s world with a featherlight cadence. Lenae surveys the recent history of soul, alternative R&B, and even Afrobeats with precision. But most importantly, her debut showcases her ascendant vocal prowess as she moves across her wide range with ease. Lenae’s transcendental poise establishes her as a resonant voice in R&B.
The immediate appeal of HYPNOS is just how tantalizing Lenae’s arrangements are amid familiar soundscapes. On previous songs like “Sticky” or “Free Room,” Lenae tapped into her higher register, but here Lenae’s soprano has become a gravitational force. On the Kaytranada-produced “Xtasy,” Lenae’s sultry and blithe singing washes over the beat like water beading off a car. “Lullabye,” a kiss-off to a former lover, moves through melismatic harmonies like clockwork. “I hope she keeps you warm at night/This is our lullabye,” she croons, but you know she’s going to be OK just by her composure.
For someone already lauded for her singing, Lenae’s vocal technique on HYPNOS is the work of a perfectionist. Her sound has blossomed into a potpourri of the R&B female icons of the last three decades, but especially of the ’90s and early ’00s. The most obvious comparison here is Aaliyah, but Lenae’s vocal composition honors many on HYPNOS, pulling from Brandy’s “vocal bible” riffs and Solange’s visionary harmonies, Kelela’s outré artistry, and Destiny’s Child’s lullabying melodies. “Venom,” a seething funkadelic synth-led track, feels caught between something off OutKast’s Stankonia and Brandy’s “What About Us?”. “Why do you play me for a fool?” Lenae asks, before descending into harmonies that unravel like those on Solange’s “Rise.” On “Cameo,” Lenae brings back Lacy and frequent collaborator Luke Titus for a funky opener that recalls the synth bass sound of Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon.” The influences are never distracting so much as they are twinkling, fun, and carefully blended.
Sounding like someone else is by no means the limit to Lenae’s creative yield; she is as self-assured as she is exploratory. Rather than replicating a nostalgia that’s become commonplace, she has earnestly studied these forebears and applied their techniques to her own brand of soft and intense music. “Light Me Up,” the album’s sexy, slow-burning centerpiece, creates a moodboard of R&B references, and digs deep into the excitement of sexual exploration: “Come inside/Show me you’re the leader/Switchin’ sides/Make me a believer,” she begs. Lenae’s weightless falsetto and stimulated writing make it a female contemporary to D’Angelo’s “Untitled (How Does It Feel).”
The way Lenae seems to examine and deliberate her decisions in real time makes her a magnetic narrator. On “M.I.A.,” she takes stock of her life and goes full escapist mode in ways that commit to her shapeshifting tendencies. Taking notes from the Afrobeats artist Amaarae, the song is slick and coolheaded, cheekily rhyming about the freedom to sneak away at a moment’s notice. On “3D,” Lenae reunites with Zero Fatigue’s Monte Booker and Smino for a wobbly groove that puts Lenae in the driver’s seat of a relationship moving too fast. “I’m asking you to keep it light/Things are better movin’ slow,” she cautions, raising her pitch with each word of warning. In her earlier work with Booker and Smino, Lenae sounded like a gorgeous vocalist, but as HYPNOS emphasizes, she can be all of those things and the star of her own story.
While the majority of HYPNOS’ themes are commonplace to early twentysomething experience—heartbreak, growing apart, trifling men, finding your footing—Lenae makes them feel easily digestible and less existential. On “Skin Tight,” she ponders the kinetic energy of a past relationship with grace and respect beyond her years. The scornful acoustic number “Mercury,” with “Deep End” singer Fousheé, initially comes off as a minor song on the album. But Lenae’s airy, level-minded approach is captivating—making this a bold and bittersweet highlight. Even as she whispers “I fucking hate you/Don’t ever speak my name” it never sounds all that painful, more like pity in the face of disgust.
Even when heartache leaves her distraught, Lenae is laser-focused on reaching for spiritual affirmation and aggrandizement. The album ends on the feather touch of heartfelt closer “Wish,” which brings together Lenae’s dizzying expression and limitless execution as a vocalist. “Every night you close your eyes, make a little wish,” Lenae sings, tip-toeing down the words. It could lift you out of the deepest hole. Even as she touches on trends and familiar themes, it’s Lenae’s delivery, confidence, and alluring presence that makes HYPNOS stand apart. As she considers her anxieties, hopes, and doubts, she reveres the musical icons before her in ways that show just how ready she is for her own turn.


Cleveland producer Warren Harris pushes the deep house sound into rhythmical challenges and brilliantly gothic alcoves with the apparent nonchalance of someone barely breaking a sweat.

Demur EP

House music lyrics, with the odd notable exception, tend to be light, functional affairs, full of incitements to dance and enjoy the good times. “Game of Tragic,” the final track on Cleveland house producer Warren Harris’ Demur EP, is talking about suicide. “Take away, the smell is foul/Put the flesh in the ground/Suicide,” Harris sings, his untampered, soulful voice duetting with a separate vocal line that is sandpaper rough and reeks of desperation.
Harris, who records as Hanna and under his own name, does admittedly have a history of producing deep house that mixes the stately smooth with the immaculately melancholy. His 2017 EP The Never End housed one of the most moving summer laments in electronic music in “July”, while “Wayfaring Man,” from the inappropriately named Bounce EP, sounded like the work of someone who wanted to get well away from the troubles of the world.
All the same, “Game of Tragic” goes further than Harris—or pretty much anyone else in house music—has gone before in its embrace of mortality, the contrast between the skipping house beat and morbid lyrics both eye-opening and brave. Harris has explained that the song is about a person who lives with the body of their best friend after they have killed themselves and there is something rather punk in the way “Game of Tragic” rejects what house music should be about in favor of following its own emotional instincts. This would mean little, though, were the lyrics not backed by Harris’ poignant songwriting, the winding chords, meandering bass line and mournful vocal melody proving one in the eye for those who feel that electronic music can only deal with shallow emotions.
The other four tracks on Demur see Harris swap lyrical experimentation for musical exposition, as he loosens his rhythmical swing to a point where his productions feel on the verge of falling apart. “Finger of Love,” for example, features a disco-influenced pattern of bass drum, hi-hat, and snare that, on the face of it, sounds fairly standard. But each instrument hits in a way that feels a fraction away from going out of time, like a jazz drummer playing around the beat rather than square on the four. The effect, for an audience raised on the rhythmical perfection of electronic music, is of unease, fascination, and frenetic excitement. “The Sacred” takes things even further by threatening to pull the whole fabric of the song out of time. The bass drum only just connects with the hi-hat, which is on nodding terms with the piano, while a vocal loop pulls fractionally behind the rest of the song as the ensemble hangs on by the skin of its teeth.
Experimentation in electronic music is full of flash and bluster. But Harris favors progression by stealth, his productions on Demur pushing the deep house sound into rhythmical challenges and brilliantly gothic alcoves with the apparent nonchalance of someone barely breaking a sweat. You have to lean in to discover the wonders of Demur. But the reward is one of the most quietly brilliant, viscerally exciting and humanly funky house records of 2018.


Band of Horses' fourth album moves further into the realm of radio-conscious pop staked out by its 2010 predecessor, Infinite Arms. Befitting its name, Mirage Rock is so lightweight and inconsequential that it truly does seem more like an illusion than a record.

Mirage Rock

In a year of adjective-rock album titles, Mirage Rock is as telling of a descriptor as Celebration Rock. The difference is that Japandroids' intentions matched their achievements-- Celebration Rock was a winning testament to good times and good rock music at its most life-affirming. Mirage Rock, on the other hand, evokes an emptiness that couldn't have been intentional. Like an actual mirage, there is no there there on Mirage Rock. All the elements for a typical Band of Horses album appear in their right places-- Ben Bridwell's honeyed whine, the straightforward thrust of the guitars, the earnest hippie-dippiness of the lyrics-- and yet the music dissipates instantly upon impact. Mirage Rock is so lightweight and inconsequential that it really does seem more like an illusion than a record; it's wispy and indiscernible, as if the people who made it had no vision for what it should be.
Band of Horses themselves have become something of an apparition-- what they appear to be aren't what they really are. With 2007's Cease to Begin, Bridwell unveiled a version of Band of Horses that was not the Band of Horses of the group's beloved 2006 debut, Everything All the Time. The original members-- including Mat Brooke, who had been a bandmate of Bridwell's since their days together in the Seattle indie rock band Carissa's Wierd-- had quietly departed. By 2010's Infinite Arms, which found the band signing to Columbia, Bridwell had shed another member and added two more. Frontmen retaining a group identities despite losing their backing musicians is nothing new, of course, and Bridwell made sure to publicly declare Infinite Arms a very different beast from the first two BoH records. But if you cared about this group at all, it was difficult to hear that album and not try to pick out the things that made Band of Horses what it used to be, even if most of those things had been systematically removed by Bridwell and replaced by a flatter, shinier, more overtly southern rock sound.
If Infinite Arms marked a significant turn away from the starry-eyed, backwoods indie rock of the band's early sound, Mirage Rock moves boldly forward into the realm of radio-conscious pop that its predecessor only toyed with-- although "bold" may be too strong a word for a record this mellow and inoffensive. The rush of emotions Band of Horses channeled on its first two albums has slowed to an intermittent trickle, collecting into a very shallow and sad-looking puddle of a record containing nothing and reflecting nothing.
Band of Horses was never the hardest riffing band in the world, but it's disheartening to see just how far they've moved away from actual rock music here. Much of the album falls into the mold of "Slow Cruel Hands of Time", a hazy folk-pop tune that aspires to the soft-focus comfort of 1970s AM radio staples like Dan Fogelberg and John Denver. And Bridwell has neither the lyrical insight nor the vocal gravitas to go any deeper than its superficial veneer allows.
Going deep was never Bridwell's specialty, even on Band of Horses' good records. But he used to make up for it by pushing his music out as wide as it would go, until it wrapped you up like the warmest of bear hugs. Mirage Rock, in comparison, seems shrunken and cold. Lead single "Knock Knock" is strangely gutted, hinting at an emotional catharsis that never arrives. "How to Live" moves along on a snappy start-stop drum beat, but only reaches a peak courtesy of a stinging guitar solo cribbed from Neil Young.
Bridwell's gift for assembling catchy melodies and big, relatable sentiments into neat and clean three-minute packages-- typified by the band's irresistibly heart-tugging breakout song "The Funeral"-- is obvious and not without merit. But over and over again on Mirage Rock, this talent is used to serve up Americana-flavored junk food devoid of substance. The back-porch shuffler "Long Vows" and the annoyingly repetitive "Shut-In Tourist" are essentially placeholders for better classic-rock songs by Bread and Crosby, Stills & Nash, lazily flashing soft-rock signifiers without adding any depth of their own.
But it's the terrible protest song "Dumpster World" that truly exposes Bridwell as a well-meaning but hapless dude who's lost his course. "Break out everybody in the jails/ Let's get it on," he sings, like a callow bro confusing Bane for Noam Chomsky. The line elicits a moment of embarrassment so shudderingly profound, it makes one question any allegiance to the band’s past successes. Disastrously, Mirage Rock seems to have been conceived, consciously or not, as a photo negative of what this band once was, emphasizing Bridwell's weaknesses and negating his strengths. It's not a pretty picture, to say the least. Perhaps it's best to just squint your eyes and hope it disappears altogether.


Power Trip embody a platonic ideal of heavy metal escapism. With more focus on detail, the Dallas thrashers push their second LP over the edge, balancing modern intricacy and old-school aggression.

Nightmare Logic

No one throws a party like Power Trip. In the years since their 2008 inception, the Dallas crossover quintet has come to embody the platonic ideal of heavy metal escapism, in person and on record. Genre boundaries get blown to smithereens during their rambunctious, pretension-free concerts; they’ll play with anyone who’s willing to get noisy, be it New Orleans bounce queen Big Freedia, moody post-punk outfit Merchandise, or black metal darlings Deafheaven. Power Trip’s excellent debut album, 2013’s Manifest Decimation, further solidified this reputation by translating their live ferocity to wax. One album on, nine years in, Power Trip have mastered the rager. They now turn their focus to widespread revelry with Nightmare Logic—a mission that goes off with a big, beautiful bang.
Nightmare Logic doesn’t find Power Trip making any significant shifts to the no-holds-barred approach they showcased so powerfully on their debut. It’s an LP crafted in its predecessor’s literal spitting image, from the proliferative gang vocals and thrash beatdowns right down to the eight-track runtime and gory old-school artwork. Frontman Riley Gale still huffs, puffs, and howls like a rabid wolf, a feral intermediary through which the band issues blistering, occasionally loony indictments of corrupt politicians (“Ruination”) and greedy, polluting CEOs (“If Not Us Then Who”). Gale’s bandmates match these screeds with litanies of their own: particularly guitarist Blake Ibanez, a hardcore titan (and occasional shoegazer) whose slithering riffs incessantly run amok. Even the audience can’t escape Power Trip’s leaden censure. On “Waiting Around to Die,” Gale delivers this sputtering, incendiary pep talk with a rage so palpable you can almost feel it shaking you by the shoulders: “You’re waiting around to die, how can you live with it?/Just waiting around to die, AND I CAN’T FUCKING STAND IT!!!”
Thrash has always been a goofy genre with a morbid sense of humor: a direct consequence of the genre’s primordial days in the Reagan era, when trolling the silent majority doubled as a pre-eminent past-time and a form of protest. Like their peers Iron Reagan and Skeletonwitch, Power Trip view the impending apocalypse as a cause for celebration, powered by schadenfreude. Evangelical Christians are treated to particularly hilarious roastings. “Executioner’s Tax (Swing of the Axe),” the album’s best song, sees Gale calling the bluff of all those Bible-Belters who’d so passionately pleaded for the arrival of the man upstairs, only to come face-to-face with the titular killer-for-hire when the End of Days finally arrives. “You’ve prayed for so long, and now you have your chance/The executioner’s here, and he’s sharpening his axe!”
Power Trip’s new attention to detail pushes Nightmare Logic over the edge. It’s abundantly clear that they’ve spent hours at the dissection table with Manifest Decimation, amplifying—but not recycling—its best hooks and theatrics, trimming off the static scar tissue. They’ve chopped a few seconds of extraneous riffing here, a repeated breakdown there; it’s an impressive operation, considering their debut was plenty lean and mean. The nit-picking pays off, as Nightmare Logic outmatches the preceding LP across all verticals, from cohesion and catchiness to impact and atmosphere.
The band’s secret weapon remains producer and Sumerlands guitarist Arthur Rizk, or as I like to call him, the Ariel Rechtshaid of heavy music; Code Orange’s Forever and Prurient’s Frozen Niagara Falls are just two of the bevy of ambitious records he’s worked on. A master of dynamic contrast and sonic feints, Rizk’s the textbook definition of a board-wizard. Under his command, Ibanez’s already-huge tremolo riffs on “Executioner’s Tax”, “Firing Squad,” and the title track become hulking, like a stampede of hellish racehorses against the thundering backbeat. Meanwhile, in the back of the mix, the rhythm section ebbs and flows to accommodate the axework, ensuring sustained impact and easy passage from one ripper to the next. Rizk again runs Gale’s yelps through a heap of effects, rendering every syllable an echo-laden boom from on high. And in spite of its sheer heft, Rizk makes Nightmare Logic a crisp, nuanced listen; like the band themselves, he strikes a rare balance between modern intricacy and old-school aggression, nodding to tradition without over-relying on tropes.
You don’t need to be a metalhead to have a blast with Nightmare Logic. Screamed sardonics, persistent chug, and apocalyptic melodrama are all acquired tastes, sure. But Power Trip’s fist-pumping choruses, ricocheting grooves, and ample charm are so animated that they leave us with something addictive and, well, fun. Just like Metallica, the Texans pitch a big tent, where the only prerequisite for entry is a willingness to splash around in the bloodbath for half an hour. With Nightmare Logic, there’s a good chance you’ll stick around for a good, long soak.


In four years, New Zealand rock'n'roll revisionists the Dead C will celebrate their 30th anniversary, and they're currently making some of their most vital, urgent, and completely cutting-edge music. The two-song haymaker Armed Courage is the mightiest work they’ve made since leaving the Siltbreeze imprint in the mid-90s.

Armed Courage

In four years, New Zealand rock'n'roll revisionists the Dead C will celebrate their 30th anniversary, a rare milestone for any band whose members have never changed. Rarer still, though, is the sense that the Dead C are making some of their most vital, urgent, and completely cutting-edge music right now, after more than a quarter century of persistent exploration. Armed Courage-- their fourth record in six years for New York label Ba Da Bing-- is the mightiest work they’ve made since leaving the Siltbreeze imprint in the mid-90s. A two-track haymaker for dual cranky guitars and irrascible drums, with vocals and piano scattered throughout like an explosion’s neglected debris, Armed Courage pairs restraint with force, subtlety with volume and magnetism with aggression. During the last decade, the Dead C have tinkered with electronics, explored more conventional song lengths, and even released 2010’s relatively approachable Patience. But Armed Courage reaches back to their 90s noise squall and revitalizes it in toto. In turn, the Dead C deliver one of the year’s most essential rock records by ripping apart most expectations of exactly what that means.
The Dead C’s clangorous, demanding music could never be called casual. The fitful, almost desultory nature of the Dead C’s process, however, seems essential to the band’s success on Armed Courage. Michael Morley, Bruce Russell, and Robbie Yeats formed the band at the apogee of the Dunedin Sound, where their pals and peers created jangly, fuzzy pop songs, as though the 60s had been refracted through bad electronics and given a strange new accent. But the Dead C didn’t aim for a similar version of pop perfection. In large part, they could not. They were not polished and practiced instrumentalists; indeed, as the band near the three-decade mark, the members still profess to a certain technical incompetence, while generally avoiding tags such as “rock band” or “professional musicians.” (Russell's daughter, Olive, recently finished a charming little documentary about this disparity.) They’ve toured very rarely and, aside from the release of a new album every year or two, the trio has avoided the general promotional timesucks of the music industry. For most of their career, they’ve completely foregone all scripts, too, choosing to improvise the contents of their records in sporadic sessions of old friends and electing not to recreate those pieces when they do climb on a stage. It might be hard to believe that while listening to Armed Courage, a record whose pieces cohere so well that you expect them to be mapped out on a practice-room wall. Then again, this band’s been speaking its own rewritten rock language for nearly three decades. They shout it here with the sort of extemporaneous enthusiasm that comes with a shared past, not weekly band practice.
“Armed” bubbles up from a molten swirl, drums tracing patterns atop two guitars searching for their shape. Morley and Russell eventually reach and sustain a dynamic equilibrium with their instruments and amplifiers, with blurs of notes and the buzz of circuits cultivating a web of claustrophobia. In on-again, off-again bursts, Yeats fights against that entrapment. Sometimes, he lashes out like he’s just joined a grindcore act or trots ahead as if he’s rehearsing for a marching band. Other times, though, he disappears completely. The move epitomizes the patience of three people who’ve been playing together for so long and allows every move the band makes across these 22 minutes to have maximum impact. Yes, the Dead C play workaday rock instruments, but they improvise with the sort of communication you’d expect from top-of-the-line free jazz. You hear each member cede space to the others, massage a new element into the gyre and shift into sequences unexpected to everyone, themselves included. “Armed” sounds like a composition, but it feels entirely of the moment.
If “Armed” is about peaking early and finding ways to make that plateau interesting for more than 20 minutes, “Courage” is a slipstream of oscillating ideas and fragments. After staying silent for Patience, Morley moans occasionally throughout the track, his narcotized voice seeping perfectly into the Thorazine shuffle. At one point, the Dead C even march like a proper rock band, Yeats pounding ahead beneath sheets of screech and wail, making their influence on Sonic Youth and the mass of noise-rock that followed painfully clear. Minutes later, though, they play as if underwater, any percussiveness relegated to a subaquatic thump and the guitars gasping for a lifeline. The trio surfaces once again, just before it fades forever into the middle distance. The Dead C have built their reputation on racket, but “Courage” proclaims they’re also very good at getting very small, or at creating music from the sounds most rock might dismiss as the ghosts living within their old equipment. “My amp makes a storm of noise even at rest. People mistake that for a hissy recording,” Russell told Perfect Sound Forever in 2000. “No, it’s a very clear recording of a very hissy sound, and that’s something people have trouble grasping.” Armed Courage leaves no room for misinterpretation.
The cover of Armed Courage features a newspaper photograph from 1968, when Russia invaded Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring. A Russian tank burns, while two Czech nationals march ahead in street clothes. “As ‘a band,’ the Dead C have used images of civil unrest, illegal warfare, and destruction of civilizations for the better part of 27 years,” Morley recently told Impose. This glimpse of active revolutionaries quarreling with total power feels forever appropriate for the Dead C. After all, rock'n'roll, the new converts are told, is a trapdoor for absolute liberation. Grab a guitar and an amplifier, plug yourself, and tell the world how you feel for a change. You can be the shirtless Iggy, sweating and slithering across the stage, or the unhinged Keith, unfurling the coolest riff you’ve ever heard as a cigarette dangles from your mouth. But have you seen all these decades-old rock bands, touring the songs or, at the very least, the formulas and molds and sounds they constructed decades ago? That’s its own form of glorified servitude. But after 27 years, the Dead C remain a fully liberated and aware band, capable of turning rock'n'roll’s basics into incredibly unpredictable music. The Dead C are lifers, then, who are too in control of their own sound to be detained by expectations-- of their own music, of rock'n'roll, of their legacy at large. Armed Courage proves the longterm vitality of that sadly rare strategy.


The pop music icon spends too much time looking back on a seemingly rushed, mostly forgettable collection of tracks.

Iconology

In the decade-plus since her last album, Missy Elliott has been trapped in a cycle of returns and retreats. Albums have been teased, then coming soon, then renamed, and later scrapped. Singles have been released and choreographed but then left at sea, never followed-up or built upon. Though Missy has remained an active producer, songwriter, and guest artist, it’s hard not to think of those efforts as busywork. When she rapped, “Thought I fell off, I ain’t quite finished,” on 2012’s single “9th Inning,” it felt like a Freudian slip more than a threat. Released the weekend before her receipt of the VMAs’ Michael Jackson Video Vanguard award, Iconology confirms what’s long been implied by these recurring starts and stops: Missy Elliott is no longer the future.
There is nothing rapped or sung on this EP that is not beholden to Missy’s past. “Throw It Back” is a tepid nostalgia trip that does little to hide its lack of inspiration. Retracing her steps, Missy recycles tired rhyme schemes and stuffs her verses with dry nods to her hits. Her allusions to her glory days are so artless and undercooked that they could be Genius annotations: “Missy still got ’em losing control/And every night is still ladies’ night.”
The production, courtesy of Timbaland, Missy, and Atlanta producers Wili Hendrix and Michael Aristotle, is a toss-up. The drum programming on “Throw It Back” and “Cool Off” is shifty and colorful, but painfully quantized. As Missy raps in staccato lockstep with the beats, the lack of bounce becomes grating. The doo-wop sway of “Why I Still Love You” fits Missy’s vocals well, but it’s damning that the a capella sounds better than the full song. The sole outlier, “DripDemeanor,” is groovy and indulgent; at one point background coos bleed into a guitar and harmonica melody that’s peppered with what sounds like hiccups. Paired with Sum1’s sultry crooning, the result is weird and charming and sensuous—but then Missy starts rapping.
There’s nothing insightful or fun about Missy looking back rather than ahead, especially when she’s already released two compilation records during her hiatus. The focus on iconography is frustrating in its neglect of Missy’s extensive influence throughout the past decade (Missy’s genes can be found in Tierra Whack, Tyler, the Creator, Azealia Banks, M.I.A., FKA twigs, J. Cole, among many others) and her lauded accomplishments (earlier this year she was the first woman rapper inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and the third rapper, period). Missy invited listeners to view her body on her terms; she condensed emotions into the perfect onomatopoeia; she befriended and supported the artists around her. Iconology could have tapped into all these dimensions. Instead, it settles for the safe and familiar. Throw it back.


On his fascinating debut album, the D.C.-based musician moves freely through many different styles—arena-rock, folk, rap—creating an album about that freedom as a Black artist and so much more.

Live Forever

Mustang, Oklahoma is about 85 percent white and was only slightly less so a couple of decades ago, when, as a young child, Bartees Cox Jr. traveled around the state with his family, singing in operas and churches. On his debut album, Live Forever, Bartees Strange pays slight homage to his past with “Mustang,” with that feeling of needing to flee your hometown—cosmic synths, a hook yelped with scrunched eyelids, an outro that drives like a Charger on a clear highway. It’s a paradox that Bartees can’t escape whiteness in the music he creates as a Black man. It’s already part of whatever artistic turn Bartees makes, whether it’s the erasure of Black artists' contributions to indie rock, or the existential crisis Black rappers face when they must entertain largely white crowds. It’s a lot to work through on a 35-minute album, which is just a part of what makes this one of the most fascinating and affecting debuts of the year.
Most of Live Forever’s magic, however, is in how it doesn't seek to explicitly subvert whiteness. Bartees is not necessarily a boundary-breaker: He presents every bit of sound he collects as a natural part of his experience. From a childhood spent bouncing from base to base as an Army brat or shying away from becoming the frontman in the bands he shuffled through as an adult, the struggle to root his voice is a running theme. Yet every influence he pulls from—TV on the Radio’s world-weary poetry, Hot 100 hip-hop cadence, industrial punk—is marked by his personable, intimate presence. “Mustang” flexes its biceps, but doesn’t lose its humanity (“Last night I got so fucked up, near lost my job/It’s nice to think that folks are near, waking up was hard this year”). For all its arena-sized gesturing, the song is really a heart-to-heart.
Bartees’ introduction to the wider public was directly informed by his otherness. His breakthrough—March’s Say Goodbye to Pretty Boy, an EP of National covers—was inspired by being the only person of color at one of the band’s concerts in Washington D.C. Bartees’ interpretation of “Lemonworld”—which flips singer Matt Berninger’s sullen brokenness to a world-beating howl—speaks to the cathartic mode he sticks to for much of the album’s first half. The run is a pristine technicolor whir, where the seasick horns of “In a Cab” swing briskly into “Stone Meadows,” whose harmonic guitar interplay and bleak melodrama (“If I died in a meadow/If I died I don’t think they’d ever find me at all”) recall Silent Alarm-era Bloc Party. But the thrills mainly sprout from Bartees’ powerfully layered vocal performances.
“Boomer,” centered on Bartees’ formative years after he moved from Oklahoma to Brooklyn, has your basic ’00s pop-punk formula, let-’em-say-what-they-wanna-say-because-we’re-gonna-do-us-and-it’s-time-to-dance hook included. Bartees serves us Young Thug-meets-Fall Out Boy, rapping with vocal tics that accent his small joys (“We on track, woo!/I’ve relapsed, woo!/I told my girl that I was working, that’s a lie I’m in the trap”) and express the bliss of self-actualization. The cerebral drum patterns of highlight “Flagey God” create a dewy club sweat on the hook, and Bartees rides it with a bounce that carries the ghosts of gospel and house music. He’s spoken about struggling to find cohorts who knew what to do with his Black voice. But alongside mixing engineer/bassist Brian DiMeglio and mastering engineer/emo-whisperer Will Yip, Bartees places himself at the center of nearly every element in Live Forever. Regardless of how disparate its shifts may seem, his voice is the connective force.
Bartees reserves his lone screed against the compartmentalization of Black voices for “Mossblerd.” There are plenty of musicians who resist the industry gatekeepers who pigeonhole them into being a certain “type” of artist. But Bartees is specific in how this is not just an artistic frustration but something that jails you inside your own body. In a sharp piece of songwriting, he describes the way it spoils his Brooklyn paradise: “Pull up on these white folks, Park Slope abandoned/Used to hate my body, they tried to kill my spirit.” It lays bare what drives the album’s urgency: a generations-old form of strife.
The idea of Black mobility—from Oklahoma to Brooklyn, from punk to folk—that threads through Live Forever never feels like it’s about escaping yourself, but about staking out an identity in unfamiliar places. The album’s final minutes begin with “Far” and “Fallen for You,” sparser, campfire-ready love songs that lean on Bartees’ falsetto at its most quavering. Then, in the final moments, Bartees feigns transcendence. Amid the ascending synths of “Ghostly,” our protagonist finds himself yearning and alone. Instead of pointing outward, the narrative circles in on itself, calling back to the existential frustration of “Mustang:” “Most folks would say that I seem fine/But each morning I don’t feel worth it/Pull up to my job almost on time.” Live Forever argues that life is not some march toward a peak, but a closed loop—one that’s tighter if you’re Black. The brilliance of Bartees’ debut is in how it carves out an expansive space within that loop. Why escape when you can create a new place entirely?

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Relapse Records’ recent signee, the Philadelphia band Nothing, are fronted by ex-Horror Show vocalist Dominic Palermo. Their debut*, Guilty of Everything*, might be unusually heavy dream-pop, billowy alt-rock, or blustery shoegaze, but it is definitely not metal.

Guilty of Everything

Relapse Records is a metal label. You know that. I know that. I only bring it up because it’s going to frame a great deal of the discussion surrounding recent signee Nothing’s debut LP Guilty of Everything, which might be unusually heavy dream-pop, billowy alt-rock, or blustery shoegaze, but it is definitely not metal. There’s probably never been a time when wimp panic wasn’t a pressing concern in the metal community, but these are more fraught times than ever judging by the two most controversial records of recent months—countless hours in 2013 were spent debating whether Deafheaven were too soft to be “real metal,” while doomgaze progenitors Alcest dropped the “doom” part entirely on the antiseptic Shelter. Situated almost exactly between the sound of those two records, Guilty of Everything walks right into the ongoing crossfire, which might actually make it the ballsiest metal album in recent memory.
Whatever guff they get from headbangers, this kind of projected audacity certainly works in favor of a record that doesn’t really have much itself. Guilty of Everything is loud, it’s distorted and it’s heavy, but it’s not aggressive. It’s actually quite comforting. No matter how softly Domenic Palermo sings during the first minute of “Hymn to the Pillory” and no matter how pretty those clean, 8th-note guitar chords are, you’re conditioned to know the tidal crash is coming. And when it does, it’s warm and enveloping, soothing almost. Even the moments of dissonance on Guilty of Everything have an aqueous rather than an abrasive feel; on the stirring single “Dig”, Palermo’s vocals have a steadying effect amidst the seasick, melodic leads while “Endlessly” swoons in the manner of a wave pool, contained, just immersive enough and somewhat menacing if you let your attention slip.
Of course, Guilty of Everything is comforting because it’s familiar as well—25 years of indie rock have been supported by the idea that bludgeoning guitars and vaporous vocals are somehow incompatible and for the first 15 minutes or so, having the opposite once again confirmed can even be kinda thrilling. But after that point, Nothing have pretty much told you all they have to say. That’s in a figurative sense, as Guilty on Everything seems to fold back on itself, its second half repeating certain modes on the first—the “uptempo one”, the “quasi-ambient” one, the waltz. The guitars remain gorgeous throughout, though lacking tonal or dynamic variety and Palermo’s vocals start to take the effect of stale taffy, soft and still retaining its sweetness, but inflexible.
But in a literal sense, you haven’t really heard anything Palermo has to say. Even when pitted against the quietest moments of Guilty of Everything, Palermo’s words are nearly impossible to make out. To be fair, this applies to 99% of all vocalists in this realm. But otherwise, it actually made the lack of specificity even more frustrating. Because you sense there is some kind of personality Nothing can’t quite convey in their music just yet.
I listened to Guilty of Everything without the lyrics sheet and not much more was revealed after listening with it. Same goes for finding out that the songs were inspired by Palermo’s coming of age in Philadelphia’s extremely shitty Kensington section and serving a two-year bid for aggravated assault and attempted murder. It gives some kind of perspective to typically generalized lyrics like “I’m on my knees...I’m guilty of everything,” and can make this record something of a conceptual piece about the will to live and a death wish somehow converging. But otherwise, a solid debut can’t help but feel just a little disappointing after realizing you could’ve had the doomgaze answer to The B. Coming.


With an exceptional collaborative spirit and a highly refined sound, Kaytranada blesses this woeful decade with one last great dance record.

Bubba

For Kaytranada, everything starts with the drums. The Canadian producer builds tracks from percussion outward, perhaps opening with a hi-hat, then adding a bassline and kick drums and only afterward seeking chords that may suit the foundation. His terrific new album Bubba opens with one second of drumming before the beat switches and his signature synths arrive. On a more conventional pop record, this might be interpreted as an arbitrary gesture given how quickly it passes. But nothing on Bubba is accidental. The album capitalizes on the promise of Kaytranada’s 2016 debut, 99.9% and blesses this woeful decade with one last great dance record.
With 99.9%, Kaytranada established himself as a producer with a well-defined and influential sensibility. It was sample-heavy and for all of Kay’s digital chops, the production still felt analog: The synths shook and the drums swung. It was also collaborative in the best possible sense. Kaytranada’s sense of purpose was strong enough to yoke the other artists to his intent. In one of the few interviews he gave in the run-up to Bubba’s release, he described how he cajoles potential features. “Some people just want the usual, basic stuff they’re comfortable with,” he said. “You have to work to push them out of their comfort zone.”
Nevertheless, Bubba sounds very comfortable. It’s a dance album front-to-back, fun, confident, always keeping you in perpetual motion, no matter what might be happening around you (train delay, being mugged, the heat death of the universe). Take “Taste,” whose snapping beat is complicated by an uncooperative bass. Only two other instruments are necessary: topaz synths and the voice of VanJess, the Nigerian-American duo with businesslike vocals. It’s perhaps the simplest song here and like almost all the others, an undeniable dancefloor summons. (Kaytranada frequently uses the voices of his collaborators to reference the sounds of the early 2000s; When TDE’s SiR isn’t pitching his voice Anderson .Paak style, his layered voice recalls the songs of 112 or Jagged Edge, both because of the harmonies that end his bars on “Go DJ” and the fact that he sings the lyric, “Where the party at.”)
It does the record a small disservice to pull songs out at random like this. Both “Taste” and “Go DJ” are followed by tracks that lead out naturally like the flow of a DJ set. But that exceptional flow leaves room for punctuation marks, and several come when Kaytranada feels perfectly in tune with his collaborators. The first of these is “10%” with Kali Uchis. Three different beats, piled high like sedimentary layers, herald her alto, and she spends the remainder of the song surfing atop the beat. Kaytranada has similar chemistry with GoldLink on the song “Vex Oh,” and a cameo from Estelle on “Oh No” delivers the same promise that the Craig David feature “Got It Good,” did on the previous album.
The superficial outro “Midsection” featuring Pharrell and his falsetto might be the only track on which Kaytranada’s collaborator overrides him to the song’s detriment. But that only emphasizes how strong the other tracks are. Kaytranada uses vocalists as an additional instrument. (Lyrics have always seemed to function more as pure sound for him than anything else; he values the textures of words above their meanings.) So it’s particularly fun to see what he does when that tool isn’t available, as on the standout instrumental “Scared to Death.” Here, Kay stacks those strobing synths he favors on top of bass and on top of that, places a melodic build—a minute in, he pulls the bass out momentarily to let things ride for a moment. The room continues to rotate. A mournful airhorn sounds. And then the beat comes back, with all the impact you’d hope for, the sound of a party catching its second wind.
Twice now has Kaytranada demonstrated the vision required to carry a long-player, working subtle structures into his songs that allow him to keep the momentum up without losing the feeling that those songs are complete in their own right. Bubba is another set of coherent, well-sequenced set of tracks without any major drop-offs, all the more impressive as the album runs more than 50 minutes. It’s flexible, ever-moving, a dance record that could have come from no one else. It’s an old-fashioned skill, his ability to create albums that function as albums, especially for an artist so rooted in the progressive genres of hip-hop and dance. But it makes sense that Kaytranada is so good at it. Bubba thrives on pacing, sequencing, the placing of details that drive you to listen to all of its songs every time you put it on. Which is to say, building an album like this just requires a more advanced form of rhythm.


On his second album, the Nigerian pop artist provides not just an integrated sound all his own but a clear vision for its future. It is a buoyant, unsinkable record, one of the genre’s finest ever.

A Good Time

For the last several years, Davido has been reshaping the sound of Nigerian pop. As a prolific hitmaker and one of Africa’s biggest stars, he has pivoted away from global ambitions toward revamping the traditional sounds of his homeland. He released his debut album, Omo Baba Olowo, seven years ago and hasn’t released another until now. It feels like the stars aligned for it: Drake is still courting the sound, Burna Boy has a Grammy nom, UMG is moving into the region, and the music is crashing into our shores.
A Good Time is a nearly gapless immersion into his potent, wavy signature sound. Nigerian pop music—with its endorsement-based revenue structure and rejection of collaborative songwriting—isn’t really conducive to ideas like cohesion. Davido has championed the use of songwriters, and has as much of a unified vision for his music as any of his peers, but this is the first time he’s been able to translate that into anything resembling a complete album. “Everything I do is a lifestyle,” he sings on the intro. Over the next hour, that lifestyle can only be defined as lush and splendid.
Nigerian pop is a singles-focused genre with a hits-first infrastructure. From the Mo’ Hits era (2004-2012) led by D’banj and Don Jazzy to the Mavin Records stronghold established by Jazzy in its wake, labels have prioritized A-sides and roster-boosting compilations like 2007’s genre-defining Curriculum Vitae. Most of the digital revenue from Nigeria’s growing music industry comes from caller ringback tones (RBTs); streaming is on the rise but very slowly. (Most profits still go toward the country’s booming piracy market.) Making albums under these conditions is largely a secondary concern, if not a luxury. Davido, coming off a career-redefining singles run in 2017, knows a thing or two about luxury, and he has taken on the challenge. While his album isn’t thematic or self-contained, it feels comprehensive. Knowing the stakes, Davido curates a buoyant, unsinkable record, one of the genre’s finest ever.
His debut, Omo Baba Olowo—meaning “rich man’s son”—was a failure of imagination and ambition. Not only was it steeped in an already established Mo’ Hits sound but it was unsure about who it wanted Davido to be: the flexer boy-king or the down-on-his-luck hustler who worked his way into the music industry on his own terms. He was standing on his daddy’s money one minute then citing how no one loved him when he was broke the next, like Lagos’ own Mike Jones. He’s grown as an artist since and has had a lot of time to think about those mistakes, including the misadventure of his last EP, which he recently called “shit.” On A Good Time, he provides not just an integrated sound all his own but a clear vision for its future.
Davido’s overall theme here is a rich playboy who is embracing commitment. The songs are feel-good serenades, many with groovy dembow rhythms slowed to a gentle sashaying pace, and at least one dedicated directly to his fiancé Chioma Rowland (“Assurance”). “Fall” showers a lover with adoration and gifts as an apology. The writing is largely that of a smitten mogul, but occasionally he lets his guard down. “I just want to make history without my people back home missing me,” he sings on the Summer Walker duet “D & G,” exposing some anxiety beneath his often impenetrable pop star veneer.
Unlike some of his contemporaries, Davido has embraced the “Afrobeats” label in part because he and his team of producers have played such a big role in defining it. While artists like D’Banj and duo P-Square were pioneers of the streaking, synthy music that the genre was built upon, Davido (alongside rival WizKid) spearheaded what it has become: melodically subtler, gentler in tone, programmed drums evoking conventional and proven African rhythms. A Good Time sounds like an artist removing the bugs that prevent his songs from running at maximum efficiency. The R&B textures smooth down the sounds of Igbo highlife; the muted yet technicolor synth and guitar tones of songs like “1 Milli” and “Check AM” are perfectly devised for Davido’s sumptuous harmonies. As if seeking justice for the lost Popcaan version of Drake’s “Controlla,” Davido’s “Risky” uses similar skittering drums to a colorful dancehall hybrid with the Jamaican deejay in tow. At nearly every turn, Davido is upgrading.
Davido is one of the most charismatic performers in Afropop, but A Good Time’s polished and exquisite simplicity is owed to a crack team of Nigerian producers: Shizzi, Kiddominant, Speroach Beatz, and Tekno, in particular. Davido’s vocals drift sweetly just above the drums on “Green Light Riddim.” “If,” one of his vibrant 2017 hits, finds a home here among similarly sunlit productions. Over the layered rhythms of “Disturbance,” he’s beaming. Instead of trying to push the sound to its edge, it’s like he’s seeking a unified theory of the nebulous “Afrobeats” term.
As the already synthesized sound of Nigerian pop begins to transform into scenes and subgenres like alté and Fuji pop, and the future stars are mixing SoundCloud rap in with their more orthodox Naija pop, or bringing throwback Ja Rule duets into the sun, Davido is content to fine-tune his pristine songcraft. His songs aren’t experimenting with the form the way Rema’s, Odunsi’s, or wurLD’s are; he’s more concerned with making the most optimized Afropop possible. This extends to his streamlined album on the whole, which is a new benchmark for Afropop LPs. If Burna Boy is bringing the sounds of the diaspora back to the motherland, Davido is erecting a monument to his own status as a hometown hero.

Davido Worldwide Entertainment / Sony / RCA


Joey Burns and Jon Convertino have always surrounded themselves with an eclectic set of collaborators, and Edge of the Sun is filled with cameos, including Ben Bridwell, Neko Case, Carla Morrison, Sam Beam, and Gaby Moreno.

Edge of the Sun

A vintage synth belches out an insistent theme to open the noisy "Cumbia de Donde", a standout on Calexico’s new album. It’s one of the most striking moments on Edge of the Sun, a rusty tangle of staccato notes and syncopation atop a sinewy percussion groove. Not only does it chafe against the band’s default folk rock, but that central riff acts as a sort of code, as though the Tucson collective is offering coordinates for a northerly route connecting South and North, Sonora with San Francisco.
It’s a song about origins ("¿De dónde eres?") and destinations ("¿Adónde vas?"), punctuated by the dots and dashes of a conspiratorial horn section. "I’m not from here, I’m not from there," Joey Burns sings, imbuing this itinerancy with power and possibility. Taking over vocals at the bridge, the Spanish vocalist Amparo Sánchez reveals the song’s true destination. ¿Adónde vas? "A bailer cumbia." In this as in so many of Calexico’s songs, the characters can go anywhere and do anything. Perhaps it’s a quaint notion, but there is a certain freedom in rootlessness and restlessness.
This idea has been Calexico’s guiding principle since Burns and drummer Jon Convertino split from Giant Sand in the early 1990s and lit out for parts unknown. They have never stood still for long, working as a backing band for Neko Case and Amos Lee while expanding their drums-and-guitar soundtrack rock into something larger, more song-driven, and more cinematic. If the band have skirted accusations of cultural appropriation, that’s mainly due to the important fact that they do not deploy world music as a means to exoticize American folk rock. Rather, these various strains form the framework of their band’s songs, all the way down to the lyrics themselves. It wasn’t until 2012’s Algiers that they began to sound creatively staid, as though they had reached the ends of their inspiration in Latin American music, but Edge of the Sun sounds newly invigorated and inspired as Calexico reconsider their own past and find new music to explore.
Burns and Convertino have always surrounded themselves with an eclectic set of collaborators, and Edge of the Sun is filled with cameos, most of them lending their songs a distinctive sound. Case sounds like a mirage on "Tapping on the Line", and Ben Bridwell, on loan from Band of Horses, adds some 2000s indie-rock drama to opener "Falling from the Sky", making that central question resonate powerfully throughout the rest of the album: "Where do you go when you have nowhere to go?" With Sam Beam singing and playing guitar, "Bullets & Rocks" inevitably recalls their joint EP from 2005, In the Reins, only bolder and more resourceful as they set a Tinariwen guitar lick rolling through the Mojave.
As usual, however, the most compelling contributions come from artists less familiar to American ears. For this reason, Calexico place them prominently in the music, often building whole songs around their voices or instruments. Sánchez is as much a presence on "Cumbia de Donde" as frontman Burns is, and members of the Greek band Tikam lend "World Undone" its suspense, creating the impression of an unraveling groove. Mexican singer Carla Morrison dominates the dark reggae bump of "Moon Never Rises", ghosting Burns’ vocals before distorting her own delivery to make that central theme sound unsettling, uprooted, unplaceable. (Curious listeners should check out her excellent 2012 album, Déjenme Llorar.)
It’s tempting to praise Calexico simply for its globetrotting spirit, but corralling so many styles and sounds onto one album should not be an end in itself. Fortunately, the album’s musical diversity is a reflection of its lyrical themes. Named for a city that straddles Mexico and America, Calexico make music that is almost inevitably about borders both musical and national: finding them, crossing them, blurring them. Burns’ songwriting keeps that idea anchored in very personal and specific perspectives, which lends human proportions to the ambitiously cinematic arrangements. His characters are transient by circumstance, always striving for something better: a sense of security, a feeling of freedom, a place to dance without danger, sometimes just a dip in the ocean.
That’s the one wish of the main character in "Miles from the Sea", a landlocked laborer beaten down by "years of searing heat." He "dreams about swimming, miles away from the sea," Burns sings, his voice reaching deep to hit the low notes. The horns billow gently, the violin eddies wistfully, and Guatemalan singer Gaby Moreno draws those syllables out on the chorus to reinforce the sense of longing. The song fades in a roll of thunder, hinting that this dream of escape will go unrealized, but the music takes him and us right out among the waves.


Melody A.M. came out quite a while ago, but if you were hoping this would be a catch-up rave ...

Melody A.M.

Melody A.M. came out quite a while ago, but if you were hoping this would be a catch-up rave or a late-breaking pan we're going to have to disappoint: Röyksopp are, ultimately, too beautiful to hate and too harmless to really love.
You might already be familiar with this Norwegian pair from their appearance on every downtempo or electronic pop compilation ever made. These compilations, which have spread across the recent musical landscape like mellowed-out and occasionally groovy dandelions, are basically the result of a few people noticing that slick-and-dreamy trip-hop and records like Air's Moon Safari could be appreciated by practically anyone: embraced by clubbers during their daytime hours, yes, and appreciated by ostensibly clued-up rock hipsters, but just as appealing to someone who never cared about being clued-up in the first place. All across the Western world, it was discovered, happy thirty-something couples with business degrees and Jettas could pick up free downtempo samplers at Crate & Barrel and-- we might imagine-- enjoy Zero 7, Badly Drawn Boy, and housed-up Dido remixes while lighting candles and taking baths. People who find this horrible will recall Dirty Vegas' "Days Go By" and call it all "music for car commercials," but on a certain level they're just being condescending and mean-spirited: People like this stuff because it's pleasant and reasonably interesting.
Röyksopp, you should know, are the heirs to exactly this lineage, having picked up the crown Air once wore and set it on top of creamy, accessible house music. Their own tracks are languid but funky, occasionally revving up into a friendly house throb and occasionally laying back into sunny crooning very much like Moon Safari's-- I'm not completely convinced "Sparks" wasn't actually on that record. Röyksopp's many compilation appearances are based in part on that, but just as much on their stunningly consistent string of truly amazing remixes-- a string that culminated last year with their getting inside the dauntingly singular world of The Streets, turning "Weak Become Heroes" inside-out into an ecstatic gush Mike Skinner would likely never have dreamed of.
The quality of those remixes is no surprise, because here's the thing: Röyksopp are master pop craftsmen, the Brian Wilsons and Burt Bacharachs of downtempo house. They know their tracks inside and out, from the subtlest sonic details, to the interplay of melodies, to the Big Picture build and flow-- and it's the pretty remarkable evidence of this on Melody A.M. that's endeared them even to many of those who think of themselves as being above easy-to-like compilation-fodder. "Eple", for instance, reconstructs vintage funky-drummer beats up against an addictively twinkly synth, all so enjoyably that it takes a while to notice details like the odd, rewinding stutter they've worked across several instruments. Or take "In Space", where loving little string swells drop off into achingly pretty harping while the remarkably complex beatwork ticks away bashfully in a corner. Call it new age pretty, Enya pretty, but hey: pretty is pretty, my friends.
Melody A.M. is full of this stuff-- the stuff some people call "sophisticated" and "organic," the stuff others might rightly identify as "house for people who don't actually like house" or "ambient for people who don't actually like ambient." The best moments, oddly, seem to come both from Röyksopp's devoting themselves entirely to this accessibility and from dropping their guard on it. On "Röyksopp's Night Out" they allow themselves to break into a free-flowing and slightly less restrained darkness, just enough for you to wish they'd try their hands at a full-on rage; immediately afterward, though, they've erased that wish by assembling another shyly sunny patter for King of Convenience-turned-downtempo-crooner Erlend Øye to sing-song winsomely over. ("Poor Leno", the album's most successful single, has Øye voicing a lullaby hook over a rich, subtly mutating, and equally charming groove.) The worst moments, unsurprisingly, come when Röyksopp go generically downtempo and then miss the mark-- witness the vocals on "A Higher Place".
The total package is, by any measure, a flagship release: This is likely the most solid, confident, and generally pleasurable downtempo full-length you'll be hearing for a while. Whether that means it's a must-buy, more well-meaning nondescript bubbling, or end-of-the-world car-commercial music has to be left to you. My vote may not be the first of those options, but at times it comes reasonably close.


This joint project between Madlib and drummer Karriem Riggins sounds like experimental jazz and feels like a beat tape.

Jahari Massamba Unit / Madlib / Karriem Riggins: Pardon My French

Pardon My French

Madlib is a blur of an artist, a perpetual motion machine who often seems more invested in process than product. As soon as he’s sculpted something discrete, he tends to put it down and move on. In that way, Madlib is forever onto the next one.
His latest album, a collaboration with the drummer Karriem Riggins, echoes that restless forward momentum. Madlib and Riggins have been producing music together for several years, but Pardon My French marks their official debut as a duo under the name Jahari Massamba Unit. Riggins, who has also played and produced alongside J Dilla and Robert Glasper, provides a barrage of expressive drums, while Madlib is credited with all other instruments. On its face Pardon My French is experimental jazz; in its execution it feels like a beat tape.
Throughout Pardon My French, Riggins gives Madlib a sandbox of percussion with which to experiment, and some tracks feel legitimately exploratory and free. The opening “Je Prendrai le Romanée-Conti (Putain De Leroy)” seems to stumble forward in the dark with random runs, hums, and interjections. “Les Jardins Esméraldins (Pour Caillard)” jogs briefly into and out of view, just over a one-minute swell of a crescendo.
In rare cases where we hear an extended solo voice, it is often fidgety and murmuring. “Trou Du Cul (Ode au Sommelier Arrogant)” rattles around like a top: Riggins’ tight shuffle of a breakbeat keeps the track spinning, Madlib’s off-kilter sounds—a weird whistle or kazoo here, a random cuckoo clock there—threatens to blow it over. Part of the thrill of freeform jazz is to hear a musician lob a note without a full view of where it will land, and listening to a record like this is to buy into that uncertainty and observe a sort of controlled chaos. Madlib is credited vaguely as responsible for all instruments besides drums on Pardon My French—whether or not he’s literally playing these instruments is both doubtful and beside the point—but his approach is grounded in pulling all the strings at once.
Unfortunately, there is also a chunk of the album that skids into indefensible noodling. “Inestimable Le Close” and “Du Morgon au Moulin-À-Vent (Pour Duke)” are longer explorations during which Madlib seems to get bored. Other tracks benefit from a more straightforward attack, like the jazz-funk romp “Hommage à la Vielle Garde (Pour Lafarge et Rinaldi),” whichocks into a pre-defined groove, a Madlibesque take on the theme to Idris Muhammad’s famous “Loran’s Dance.”
All of the song titles nod to Madlib’s fascination with wine. “Riesling Pour Robert,” named for a German wine guru with a cult following, takes a linear and precise attack with a random outburst of horns near the center. “Etude Montrachet,” an ode to one of Burgundy’s most famous Grand Cru vineyards, is appropriately luxurious, and a more traditional beat. But it’s exciting to hear a musician like Madlib untethered from the moment, and a testament to Riggins that he can create this type of space in the first place. Pardon My French is not always immediately gratifying, but it’s always moving towards something.


Grindcore band makes a strong pitch for the Metal Album of the Year honors with a record that's such a quantum leap even beyond Pig Destroyer's earlier, already pretty fuckin' awesome records that it might as well represent a quantum leap for the whole goddamn genre.

Phantom Limb

The amount of wiggle room in grindcore is, well, practically nil. You don't wake up one day and decide, as a modern day grindcore auteur, that you're going to add a string section or a New Orleans brass band or the Polyphonic Spree as backup vocalists. (Even if what I've described there is basically Mr. Bungle.) Grindcore is a genre with established borders-- tempo is beyond fast, length of song is short, guitar tunings are abrasive, vocal-style is either shriek-y high or growl-y low, and subject matter is dark, if not outright disgusting-- that butt up against other genres (death metal on the one end, noise on the other) but are nonetheless patrolled by vicious attack dogs. The fact that Pitchfork is even reviewing a grindcore band is probably a good sign to the faithful that said band is a crossover act or, you know, false metal.
Well, yes and no. Pig Destroyer is grindcore, through and through, and on its new album, Phantom Limb, some of the songs are slightly longer ("Loathsome" tops out at 4:04!) but many are well within the minute-and-a-half range. Singer J.R. Hayes still delivers his serial killer-chic lyrics ("Stench of solvent covers stench of rot/ I didn't even recognize her like a painting/ A masterpiece torn to pieces"; "Your rib cage is open like a great white's jaws/ Your legs look so sexy out of context") in an unintelligible, rasping shout that practically sprays you with acidic saliva. The guitars still feel like you're being pushed ear-first into a knife-grinder's stone, and the beats are often still more of a landslide of cymbal and snare than anything you can even bang your head to. The band still deploys shock-horror samples about bodies on fire and whatnot. But Phantom Limb is such a quantum leap even beyond Pig Destroyer's earlier, already pretty fuckin' awesome records that it might as well represent a quantum leap for the whole goddamn genre.
Pig Destroyer have always stood slightly outside grindcore's formal restrictions; for one thing, their sound is instantly recognizable, a plus when even fans sometimes have trouble telling one 30-second song from another. The band had no trouble distinguishing themselves at a performance a few weeks ago at the Maryland Deathfest, a three-day festival devoted to extreme metal and grindcore here in Baltimore: Whereas so many other bands that weekend had a rhythm section so tightly wound (and badly tuned) that their snare drums sounded like a guy whacking a hat box with a ballpoint pen, Pig Destroyer had a beefy low-end, a chest-punching, hefty bottom to its blurred blast beats. (All the more astounding considering there's no actual bass guitar involved.) And Hayes' vocals are ugly and shoved through a layer of distortion-- Pig Destroyer actually brought a noise dude, Blake Harrison, in to add, well, noise to Phantom Limb-- but they're never comical, his thick sneer-roar clamping your throat and giving you the evil-eye.
All of this carries over on record to Phantom Limb. But what really sets the album apart is riffs. It's still not "catchy," but the chewy bits of Southern-flavored rock'n'roll guitar that Pig Destroyer leaves like bloody gristle on otherwise bleached bones offers something for every rock fan to gnaw on. For a few seconds before the very end, "Lesser Animal" verily boogies until it tightens up into the dopesick bad vibes of Eyehategod. "Heathen Temple" shrieks like a Judas Priest solo hacked to fleshy chunks before Scott Hull's ZZ Top-meets-Kerry King riffing actually starts pogoing up and down like a lowrider. With another rubbery, bottom-heavy riff, "Loathsome" is the most mosh-worthy song of the year-- I know you don't see it much at Beirut shows, but people do still mosh-- and the breakdown is even kinda (eep!) funky. And guitar heroics aren't the only way Pig Destroyer fucks with grindcore orthodoxy on Phantom Limb. "Fourth Degree Burns" is a love song, and not one in which Haynes dismembers the object of his affection at the end: "Tomorrow she'll step on that plane and disappear/ But tonight her lips are real/ And kissing like a head-on collision." (I guess even romantic metaphors have to be violent in grindcore.)
After hearing Phantom Limb, a friend of mine noted that Pig Destroyer "only do the one thing, but dammit if it's not a fun thing." And true enough-- even with a palette that now includes veiny blues and sickly greens among the plasma reds and vomit ochres, Phantom Limb is not for everyone, especially if you have a low tolerance for music that delights in its own ugliness. But if you've ever remotely cared about heavy music-- whether you haven't bought a metal record since that last Megadeth LP in junior high or you're neck deep in one-man black metal bands from the ass-end of Tasmania-- buy the fuckin' thing already.


The South African singer-songwriter’s artful pop is full of wit and revelation. His second EP is evidence of an artist blossoming into form.

Re: M Field

Matthew Field has surveyed the state of the world and he’s got some news: We’re fucked. The South African guitarist and singer’s second solo project, Re: M Field, ruminates on the banal, devastating details of contemporary life: retail therapy, depleting attention spans, excess fossil-fuel emissions, depression without a discernible cause. Field paints these somber still lifes with a discerning eye, yet he never swerves into cynicism. More impressionistic than moralizing, his music carries a compelling sense of optimism, an abstracted hope that reconnection—with art, with intimacy, with nature—can lead us back to a path worth walking.
In the indie-pop trio Beatenberg, Field and his bandmates Robin Brink and Ross Dorkin (who produces the entirety of Re: M Field) established themselves as a sort of Vampire Weekend-lite, mostly because Field’s relaxed, conversational voice so closely resembles Ezra Koenig’s. But the comparison can also be heard in the group’s sense of rhythm, their toddling guitars, and the sweet melodies that skitter and snake throughout the mix. Field committed these qualities to last year’s M Field EP while also daring to get weirder. The bright guitars and African-infused percussion remained, but Field stretched his voice further and brought buzzing bass and Mellotron into his arrangements, which bent his songs away from Beatenberg’s more straightforward pop structures and closer to an art-pop core that swelled with the unexpected.
Though Re: M Field is a companion piece to M Field, the songs here roil with renewed dynamism. Guitars amble and strings surge, the compositions never sitting still. “Hyenas” flaunts an intricate collage of guitar riffs and key plucks, and a fizzy sawtooth synth that stamps on the chorus’s upbeat. And the hook here is one of Field’s sharpest; he contrasts what Susan Sontag once called “the painful structural contradictions inherent in the human situation” with freedoms found in nature. “They’ve got a lot of reasons/Got a lot of right words/Got a lot of rules,” he sings before dropping one of the most obscure precoital lines of all time: “Baby, I’m your forest/Baby, I’m your ozone.” Similarly, on “Fire on Campus,” amid organs and muted guitar strums, the narrator notes that, during a fire, “Some people are worried about all the archives/And some about birds.” There’s no takeaway here, just an image: people staring at a sea of flames, unsure of what they cherish most.
Insofar as Field offers any structural critique, it’s this: that we’ve lost something sacred on our road to progress. Nowhere is this perspective more apparent than on “House and Leisure,” perhaps the best song Field has ever made. While the arrangement slashes with buoyant fingerpicking, horn stabs, and pizzicato, he traces the contours of consumerist self-care: watering a plant purchased on Amazon Prime, drinking natural wine, fighting his “demons with spears of asparagus.” But when this speaker seeks intimacy with another, he can’t reach them; they are each fragments of themselves, their identities codified into product.
Even when Field’s sonic experimentation backfires—like on “Surely Years Ago,” where his Auto-Tune clashes with the lead vocal chop—Re: M Field feels like an artist blossoming into form, each syllable of his sound pored over and accounted for. And his songwriting, ever his forte, bounds with wit and revelation, like a comedian who never finishes a punchline but still finagles a response from his audience. “Block Universe,” for example, repeats a simple, biting line: “I can’t promise that I’ll always love you.” After each verse, the refrain takes on a new meaning—is this an admission to a lover? The universe admonishing him? Spending time in Field’s overflowing brain makes for charming company, even while he watches the world burn.


At barely 21, Sky Ferreira’s had a musical career burdened—and bolstered—by so many warring external forces that the sheer existence of her debut album is a minor miracle. It’s both a relief and a bit of a shock that Night Time, My Time is not only here, but that it’s one of the most pleasing pieces of pop-rock to come along this year.

Night Time, My Time

About 17 and a half minutes into her debut album, Sky Ferreira prods you to consider how strange it is that you’re listening to it at all. “I just want you to realize I blame myself,” she sings, “for my reputation.” The last word there is the slippery one: It’s difficult to pinpoint what exactly Ferreira’s reputation is at this point, or whom she might be shifting blame from. Maybe she has in mind her young parents, who put her upbringing in the hands of her grandmother. Or perhaps she’s talking to the A&R team at Capitol Records, who signed her at age 15 in the hopes that she’d become the next Britney. The label orchestrated some minor singles for her (“One” and "Obsession”), only to let her planned full-length sputter and die along with her recording budget.
It’s also possible she’s addressing the horde of fashion-world supporters who helped her become a raccoon-eyed ingenue better known for looking cool on Terry Richardson’s Tumblr and modeling Hedi Slimane’s Saint Laurent pieces than making music. More plausible still, her followers at large for being seduced by the socialite component while failing to invest in her musical aspirations. And what of her boyfriend, Zachary Cole Smith of bedroom-rock band DIIV, the guy carrying a bunch of heroin when the two were arrested together in upstate New York this fall? At barely 21, Ferreira’s had a musical career burdened—and bolstered—by so many warring external forces and unconventional zig-zagging that the sheer existence of her debut album is a minor miracle.
So it’s both a relief and a bit of a shock that Night Time*, My Time* is not only here, but that it’s one of the most pleasingly conventional and cohesive pieces of pop-rock to come along this year. Particularly given last year’s uneven Ghost EP, which rode the success of “Everything Is Embarrassing” and used big-name collaborators to dabble in a sometimes-confusing assortment of styles—Shirley Manson-stamped grunge, singer-songwritery folk, electro-pop. Night Time*, My Time* finds Ferreira navigating her tastes more gracefully, bridging the gaps between 80s pop sparkle and full-bodied 90s grunge in a streamlined way. Her primary collaborator this time is producer Ariel Rechtshaid (Solange, Haim, Charli XCX, Vampire Weekend, Usher), a guy known for adding both big-league pop polish to smaller acts and fine-tuning to bigger ones.
Night Time, My Time resists the self-serious instinct to position Ferreira as an artist artist— which might have been an especially powerful temptation considering she's a young woman in the music industry who’s spoken about coming into her own sense of agency. She examines emotional neglect (“Nobody Asked Me (If I Was Okay)”) and self-loathing, but also sings clever songs about lifestyle posturing—“Stabbin’ pens in my hand/ But I’m never workin’, just spending/ A giant comedy with museums and shopping with Kristine,” she sings on “Kristine”, a giddily odd track with ska undertones. She’s does her glummest Chan Marshall impersonation (“Night Time, My Time”), but she also refers to the men in her life as simply boys and isn’t afraid to address them in a purposefully grade-school tone: “Boys, they’re a dime a dozen,” she mutters. “Boys, they just make me mad.” Night Time, My Time isn’t the reactionarily somber anti-pop drag it could have been—instead, it’s a smart Kelly Kapowski hair-whip and loud bubblegum-crack of a record that lends itself to compulsive listening.
All of which was made possible by the unlikely power of “Everything Is Embarrassing”, the subdued electro-pop gem that reoriented Ferreira’s career map altogether last year. (Ferreira is one of the rare artists for whom the word “crossover” has meant a foray into the indiesphere.) The only flashes of that song’s anthemic pop fizz are found on “I Blame Myself”, an uptempo beast that sparkles with the promise of a song destined to become some kind of hit. What’s especially remarkable is that the song achieves the impact of “Everything Is Embarrassing” without its seductive too-cool vacancy—Ferreira now sounds like she has her head held up high instead of glancing down at the floor, bored and ready to leave the party. For someone whose voice often registers at a depressive whisper, she also knows how to look listeners directly in the eye and get them to just listen to her. Finally. She's at the center of her music now, blissfully free of anyone else to blame.


Unfussy, bursting with confidence, and freshly energized, the 3 songs on Hans-Peter Lindstrøm's new EP return to the space-disco euphoria of his most-loved work.

Windings

We chastise artists for changing, and we chastise them for staying the same. Give us more of what we like, but do it differently. Try something new, but make sure it feels familiar. Follow your muse, but only so far. There is, of course, The Radiohead Exception, but Hans-Peter Lindstrøm is not its beneficiary, and he must have felt the pressure of this contradictory mandate over the last decade. After being critically crowned as the leader of Oslo’s new disco scene for the pace-setting It’s a Feedelity Affair and the effortlessly majestic Where You Go I Go Too, he has kept his arpeggiators humming through diverse mutations. They’ve had their ups and downs by any measure, but were almost uniformly disappointing if you just wanted more retro-futurist space disco, spooled off a roll like so much celestial butcher paper.
For more flexible fans, there have been plenty of bright spots, from the earthenware prog of Lindstrøm's work with Prins Thomas to the riveted chrome pop of his Christabelle collaboration. There have also been a couple of clunkers, such as the oddly clogged, joyless Six Cups of Rebel and the inscrutable Runddans, with Todd Rundgren. 2012’s safe-but-satisfying Smalhans was hailed as a return to form, but it felt cautious, the songs modest in length and restrained in momentum. In retrospect, it was like Lindstrøm hitting reset to make way for the new Windings EP. Unfussy, bursting with confidence, and freshly energized, its three songs—two of them stretching past eight minutes—do one thing, and do it fantastically: mete out euphoria like time-release capsules.
Flawless opener “Closing Shot” comes scudding out with immediately likable clarity. You know exactly where it’s going—heavenward—but you can’t wait to hear how it gets there, and the journey is far from prosaic. It takes off like a sleek multistage rocket, gaining velocity as parts peel off and propellants kick in. The first epiphany comes about two minutes in, when a harmonic plume burns off like fog, revealing the rubbery strut of an irresistible bass line. The track is hardy, vibrant, sexy, and cosmic, but with a view from terra firma, the constellations wheeling above a rock-solid groove.
The other two tracks, while more playful than anthemic, feel equally rejuvenated, and the whole EP is subtly shot through with recurring threads that make it feel like a coherent whole. The new syncopation that perks up around five minutes into “Closing Shot,” evoking bursts of electro-funk horns, develops in “Algorytme,” which begins with teasing sprays of delayed arpeggios but could pass for a Zapp track by the end. Likewise, the graceful shapes traced in lasers through “Algorytme” carry on through “Foehn,” after which it's easy to let the record wind back to the opening track for another spin.
Windings' concept is glaringly simple: It's about nailing the ace track, stuffing it full of keen details and songful, entwining melodies. Lindstrøm has admitted as much: “I wanted to go back to the fun part of making music,” he said. He needn’t have bothered spelling it out; the sentiment is evident within moments of pressing play.


David Bowie is not a man one would expect to revel in the accidental. It is as much of a cliché to divine cold strategy in his every move as it is to pretend that strategy didn't exist for, say, Janis Joplin. For those preferring to see Bowie as a contortionist auto-Svengali, the main revelation of the reissued live albums *David Live* and *Stage* will be how unafraid of imperfections he could be. These panoramic snapshots of 1970s Bowie (*David Live* came out in 1974, with *Stage* following mere four years later) mostly sound-- surprise-- like a good rock band

David Live / Stage

David Bowie is not a man one would expect to revel in the accidental. It is as much of a cliché to divine cold strategy in his every move as it is to pretend that strategy didn't exist for, say, Janis Joplin. For those preferring to see Bowie as a contortionist auto-Svengali, the main revelation of the reissued live albums David Live and Stage will be how unafraid of imperfections he could be. These panoramic snapshots of 1970s Bowie (David Live came out in 1974, with Stage following mere four years later) mostly sound-- surprise-- like a good rock band at work, not a collection of virtuoso day laborers supplicating at the feet of the Artiste.
For one thing, the singing remains gloriously unsweetened, not by studio overdubs for the original release nor by digital trickery-- save a spit polish of the highs and fattening of the lows-- this time. Bowie's is not exactly a golden throat, but by the mid-70s he could will his untrained voice into a soulful squeal, a come-hither lounge croon, and so on; he misses some notes but never the dramatic pitch of the line. He also used to be one of those singers who need half a set to get entirely comfortable on stage, and, as a result, Disc Two of both David Live and Stage is the stronger one by far. If by the beginning of each concert, Bowie simply performs the songs, by the end he is twisting them into entirely new creatures. David Live contains arguably the all-time greatest display of Bowie's voice as he lets loose on an r&b; version of "Rock'n'Roll Suicide", festooned with James Brownian stops, croaks, pregnant pauses, and beat-chasing rephrasings, as well as a completely sudden detonation of a very, very high falsetto.
Both albums start, predictably, with some selections from albums Bowie was promoting at the time-- Diamond Dogs and Heroes, respectively, before launching into a great big chunk of Ziggy Stardust. Interestingly enough, there are no overlaps here (name another '70s rock act that produced two 22-song concert sets in four years without repeating a single number), but an almost-complete live version of Ziggy can be put together by combining the two, if desired. In the battle of the openers, Stage wins-- the damp gloom of "Warszawa" easily trumps the glam doom of "1984".
David Live is a more genial album, as its title indicates. It's loaded with Diamond Dogs material-- nobody's favorite Bowie album-- but works hard to ingratiate itself: there's "Space Oddity", "Changes", "Jean Genie", "All The Young Dudes". What a difference four years and a move to Berlin make: David of Stage doesn't appear to be the least bit concerned with what you'll think of it, or him. Recorded between Low and Lodger-- in the odd period that found the singer at his gauntest and most ashen-faced, listlessly flirting with Aryan imagery and ignoring the verse-chorus song form-- Stage is a challenging and idiosyncratic set. Some of the risks don't quite pay off: The cover of "Alabama Song" is just a bad idea through and through, its original Weillness matted with Jim Morrisson's greasy fingerprints. And some do-- the colossal trifecta of Station To Station's eponymous track, "Stay" and "TVC 15" comprise a powerful (and punishing) 20-minute concert-closing gambit. It's just like Bowie, of course, to make two mutually exclusive modes of engaging the arena-- as a party palace and as a horror-movie science lab-- fit together in a remarkably cohesive whole.


The English singer-songwriter takes a scuzzy, loud, and political left turn on her gutsy fourth album. It sounds like a departure but feels like a renaissance.

Black Rainbows

Anyone in the vicinity of a radio around 2006 heard “Put Your Records On,” Corinne Bailey Rae’s warm ode to feeling relaxed and fulfilled in the moment. Since then, the song has become a staple of easy listening channels and kindred playlists, even spinning off one viral cover. The commercial success of the song—alongside Rae’s self-titled debut, which stayed on the Billboard 200 for nearly a year and a half—helped solidify jazz, soul, and R&B as the foundation for her breezy pop. Seventeen years later, Rae has taken a sharp and surprising turn toward unabashed rock music with her scuzzy, guitar-powered new album, Black Rainbows. She’s not whispering but roaring.
As a 15-year-old in her home city of Leeds, Rae was in an upstart, all-girl rock group called Helen, drawing inspiration from women-led bands like L7, Belly, and Veruca Salt. The young ensemble garnered attention from the alt-rock heavy hitter Roadrunner Records but the deal fell through, an industry heartbreak that nonetheless kept Rae pursuing music. For the first time in her solo catalog, Black Rainbows strikes directly at those formative tastes; Rae indulges the affections of her younger self without succumbing to cheap pastiche. With ferocious energy and clear-eyed confidence, it’s as though Rae is introducing herself all over again.
Rae has spoken about a personal metamorphosis inspired by a 2017 visit to the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago, a sprawling archive of Black life piloted by multi-disciplinary artist Theaster Gates. There, she encountered a striking 1954 snapshot of Audrey Smaltz, then a 17-year-old pageant winner posing with a grin on the back of a fire truck. The photo sparked Rae’s imagination for “New York Transit Queen,” which hurtles forward with blistering momentum. Less than two minutes long, it feels like the project’s thematic banner even more than the electro-collage title track. Shout-singing about her young heroine amid peppy hand-claps, Rae sounds like a cheerleader for the types of girls who need one: “Beauty is in her possession,” she sings, “and she rides, rides, rides.” Smaltz herself went on to work at Ebony Fashion Fair and establish a lifetime presence in the fashion world: Like Rae, her story is one of gutsy self-determination.
Rae immersed herself further in Stony Island’s collection of “Negrobilia,” absorbing the harrowing narratives of abuse and indignity that she contemplates in “Erasure.” “They tried to eviscerate you/Hide behind the curtain/Make you forget your name,” she howls, wrapping imagery of censored photographs in barbed-wire guitar lines and a pummeling rhythm. It’s loud, intense, and raw, a memorial to the unhealed historical wrongs that sit in the background of daily life.
Though Rae had outfitted her previous record, 2016’s The Heart Speaks in Whispers, with some synthy touches, those songs still felt oriented around radio-friendly structures. Rae co-produced Black Rainbows with her husband, Steve Brown, and she seems more comfortable with letting her experimental inclinations lead the way. “Earthlings” chugs on a mechanical synth as Rae invites us to a new utopia, and warm ripples of jazz guitar ebb into the mix like distant radio waves. “Put It Down” is Black Rainbows’ most dynamic piece, opening with an elegant string intro and the sound of gasping, almost choking breath. From a churn of slow-moving synth layers, slasher-flick violin swipes meet Rae’s staccato voice. It tumbles into a club-adjacent beat, with Rae singing as though she were shouting over the din of the dancefloor. She vows to throw her troubles down rather than be thrown under them. In these songs, Rae races through a surprising range of emotions—glee, doubt, pride, anger, grief, and peace—but her nimble ushering prevents any whiplash.
The softer turns on Black Rainbows feel nearest to Rae’s earlier material, but those, too, subvert expectations. She purrs about the perils of beauty standards on “He Will Follow You With His Eyes” before she drops the dreamy façade and celebrates her Black skin, her favorite lipstick, and her kinky hair over an electronic morass. Later, Rae splits the difference between Eartha Kitt and Kate Bush in the smoky closing track “Before the Throne of the Invisible God,” with chimes ringing among soft woodwind curlicues. The stunning “Peach Velvet Sky,” meanwhile, is a sparkling and bittersweet ballad inspired by Harriet Jacobs, author of the 1861 book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The song is Rae’s imagining of Jacobs hiding in an attic near the plantation from which she’d escaped, where she could watch her still-enslaved children in secret from a hole in the wall of her hiding place. In parallel with the themes of deliverance that Rae presents throughout the album, “Peach Velvet Sky” honors a life spent working toward freedom around challenges that never seem to sleep. In moments like these, Black Rainbows feels like far more than the result of a pivotal museum trip or old teenage dreams revisited. It sounds like a departure, but it feels like a renaissance.


The Swedish duo continues to find new ways of mangling techno’s lexicon.

Kongestion

Swedish duo SHXCXCHCXSH’s music is relentlessly focused. The two musicians are largely anonymous: They rarely give interviews and choose instead to hide behind codes, anagrams, and indecipherable patterns in their album names and track titles. Although techno at its roots, their music also carefully folds in elements of IDM and more experimental forms.
Since their debut EP, in 2012, SHXCXCHCXSH have generally been slotted alongside artists like Ancient Methods, Rrose, or their Avian labelmates Gunver Ryberg and Pris. They share with their peers a take on techno that is brooding, bleak, and sometimes sorrowful. But SHXCXCHCXSH’s work stands apart. In addition to their anonymity and code-like sequences, they seem to purposefully make themselves hard to decipher. The sound design is sprawling, temperamental, and alive. There are no unnecessary repetitions or generic motifs; their music may channel club culture’s hedonism, but it carries a carefully thought-out nucleus at its core.
On Kongestion, their signature textural depths accompany some of their heaviest productions to date. Their sounds are unusually harsh across the seven-song EP, frequently invoking the doomy sounds of Second Phase’s 1991 classic “Mentasm.” On opener “Kong,” jagged synths rain down over staggered, distorted kick drums, and the siren-like sound reappears on “Onge” and “Nges.” “Gest” is even more dystopian, streaked with grinding, buzzing sounds that are almost unpleasant to listen to, though the relentless drums balance out the synths’ erratic bursts, pulling you under the music’s spell.
Something about the way that Kongestion’s synth riffs tend to bubble under the surface, capped by frothing white noise, gives the impression of being underwater, which makes experiencing the record in a club context an intoxicating prospect. Yet despite this aquatic feel, the atmosphere remains heavily industrial: Their rhythms lurch like lumbering behemoths assembled from battered scraps, and many of their patterns feel like accidents caught on tape. The music’s deconstructed air extends to the fact that all seven tracks feel like remixes of the same source material.
Still, however brutal Kongestion may be, it’s consistently hypnotic, whether on juggernauts like “Tion” or the foggy “Stio.” The latter is the EP’s softest track, yet it still feels ready to crumble to pieces. On Kongestion, SHXCXCHCXSH consistently find new ways of mangling techno’s lexicon, stoking the tension between chaos and control.