On several levels, David Bowie's 24th studio album is a cunning act of sleight of hand. From the "Heroes"-referencing cover on down, he hasn't only come to terms with his past, he's making his old material work for his new material.

The Next Day

Before there was Ziggy, Aladdin, Halloween Jack, the Man Who Fell to Earth, the Thin White Duke, Major Tom, the Goblin King, The Dame, the Mid-Life Crisis Soul Patch, and all the rest, there was the Mask. In 1969, when David Bowie was just another struggling London songwriter desperate for a break, he shot a promotional film to showcase his particularly dramatic brand of performance. Along with a handful of songs-- including an early version of "Space Oddity" in which a tinfoil-helmeted Bowie is seduced by a couple of space sirens-- the reel included an original mime piece called "The Mask". It shows Bowie, looking like the least intimidating pirate of all-time in tight white tights, a frilly top, and a pageboy wig, stealing an invisible mask and proceeding to charm his family, co-workers, and eventually entire concert halls by simply placing it on his face. "Autographs, films, television-- the lot!" he says, in voiceover, describing the opportunities afforded by his mysterious new facade. "Had a very strange effect on me, though." The mime ends with the white-faced "star" giving his biggest performance yet-- and then he can't get the mask off. It strangles him. "The papers made a big thing out of it," he continues, "funny though, they didn't mention anything about a mask." Even before David Bowie gained a smidge of notoriety, he was well aware of its pitfalls-- and his own susceptibility to the lure of disguise.
To put it mildly, this self-aware attraction to reinvention has served him well. In the 1970s, he rifled through looks, genres, and band members without hesitation, from space-age glam, to cocaine funk, to harrowing ambience, to name a few. In more modern terms, consider Radiohead's whiplash transformation between OK Computer and Kid A... and then consider how Bowie pulled off equally radical shifts at least five times between 1970 and 1980 alone. This malleability astounds because it runs so counter to the way most of us think and behave. It's non-conformist, uncomfortable, and irrational, without any of the detrimental consequences that are supposed to come along with such rule-breaking. Granted, a stupendous coke habit nearly killed him and he wasn't able to be a present father to his young son during that time, but even those disappointments led to the despondency that fueled his oblique Berlin trilogy. While many artists claim to despise the status quo, only a few have discarded previous successes with the abandon of Bowie, especially during that flawless decade-long stretch. "Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming," read the tagline in an ad for 1977's "Heroes". It was anything but hyperbole. Back then, Bowie may have had many masks, but he knew exactly how long to wear each one.
The following couple of decades weren't quite as fulfilling, with Bowie reaching stadium success, over-diluting his art, and then doubling-back and over-corroding it. Whereas the 70s run was marked by unpredictability, the 80s and 90s were more transparently reactionary, with Bowie eventually following trends rather than leading (or ignoring) them. But this is what happens to rock stars, right? They age, they wither, and they eventually play 30-year-old songs to 50-year-old people who are doing their best to avoid nostalgia's bittersweet aftertaste while nursing an $11 Bud in the back of a basketball arena. Bowie could've gone that route. He didn't.
Following the death of his mother, the birth of his daughter, the decision to lay down roots in New York City, and a reunion with Tony Visconti, the producer who helped him hit career highs like Young Americans, Low, and Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), came 2002's Heathen. The album found Bowie in a contemplative mood, finally finding peace by twisting up his own past in a way that did service to his accomplishments without overtly repeating them. The following year's Reality pulled off a similar trick, and it seemed like David Bowie was settling into a respectable late-career renaissance. And then, on June 25, 2004, he collapsed backstage after a show in Germany, and had to undergo emergency heart surgery. "I tell you what, though, I won't be writing a song about this one," he joked, following the angioplasty. "I can't wait to be fully recovered and get back to work again."
Nearly a decade of silence followed. Rumors of retirement or serious illness came up once in a while, but that's about it. In Paul Trynka's 2011 biography Starman, a friend of Bowie's was quoted as saying, "If you were in hospital after a heart scare, would you be wishing you'd spent more time flogging yourself on tour? Or would you be wishing you could spend more time with your five-year-old?" The explanation seems reasonable; Bowie was going to avoid rock'n'roll fogey-dom by avoiding rock'n'roll altogether while making up for his early fatherly failures. But then he figured out another way to move ahead.
On several levels, David Bowie's 24th studio album is a cunning act of sleight of hand. On The Next Day, he hasn't only come to terms with his past-- he's making his old material work for his new material. For Bowie, the always-savvy son of a public relations man, it's good for business and good for art. The "Heroes"-erasing cover is an admission, a boast, and a provocation ("how dare he!") all at once. And by keeping the album's recording sessions a tight-lipped secret, the back-from-the-dead exclamation of its announcement was that much more pronounced. Also, by abstaining from any new interviews and only releasing a few drab black-and-white promo photos, he's all but forcing the press to go back through his archives to fill the inevitable cover stories from all across the globe. So, there's long-haired Hunky Dory Bowie on the cover of France's Telerama, a lightning-eyed Aladdin Sane fronting the UK's Q, a "Heroes" outtake peering out from Japan's Rockin'On. He turned the "David Bowie is dying!" worry into a thousand fawning would-be obituaries that instead build excitement for his new album-- all while he's likely sitting at his computer, sipping tea and enjoying the coup.
The music found within is also something of a bait-and switch; on the surface, many tracks are uptempo rockers that recall various moments of Bowie's near-50-year career-- hopeful fodder for a tour that looks unlikely to take off-- but delve into the lyric sheet and you'll find death, war, graves, murder, and ghosts at almost every turn. Admittedly, this is not new subject matter for the singer-- his 1967 debut album ended with the theatrical "Please Mr. Gravedigger", an essentially a cappella tale of a child killer and a man re-digging holes for bodies after a bomb tore up their original resting places. And there's the glam apocalypse story of 1974's Diamond Dogs. But while those yarns could be fanciful and campy-- the musings of a young man glamorizing or sensationalizing the ultimate end-- The Next Day's deathly bent is more blunt.
Inspired by English medieval history books, the title track tells of a man being dragged and maimed by an angry mob. "Here I am, not quite dying/ My body left to rot in a hollow tree," sings Bowie, in a husky voice. The simmering "Love Is Lost" observes a troubled, perhaps suicidal 22-year-old girl whose "fear is as old as the world." It builds to a clenched-fist climax with Bowie ruefully pleading "oh, what have you done?" "Valentine's Day", meanwhile, is a Ziggy-style romp... about a tiny-faced school shooter; "How Does the Grass Grow?" offers a quasi-sentimental graveyard tale in which Bowie quips, "Remember the dead/ They were so great/ Some of them"; "You Feel So Lonely You Could Die" wishes comeuppance upon a heartless Cold War assassin. You get the point. It may very well be his bleakest set of lyrics to date, words that don't glorify death as much as they detail its cruel inevitability throughout history. So while "The Next Day" could be seen as an optimistic phrase on paper, on the title track its describing nothing less than eternal brutal violence: "And the next day, and the next, and another day."
Musically, The Next Day isn't as radical or dreary, as it bounces around from style to style, casually suggesting past greatness while rarely matching it. The production is clean and crisp, almost to a fault, leaving little room for the off-kilter spontaneity that highlights Bowie's best work; it's no coincidence that two of the album's best moments, on the skulking "Dirty Boys" and the taut "Boss of Me", feature glorious sax solos from longtime collaborator Steve Elson. Too often, though, the instrumentation sounds museum-ready. This is a shame, especially considering Visconti's pedigree-- this is the same guy who revolutionized the way rock drums sound on Low by pitching them down using a device that, he boasted to Bowie at the time, "fucks with the fabric of time." The same effect teasingly shows up ever-so-briefly on The Next Day, at the start of "Love Is Lost", and the Scott Walker-style closer "Heat" nails a disconcerting ambience, but otherwise, the album's sonics could've certainly been fucked with a bit more.
In 1974, Rolling Stone sat a 27-year-old Bowie down with a 60-year-old William Burroughs to discuss accelerating technologies, the uselessness of love, and the quality of porn films from country to country: "The best ones were the German ones," Bowie concludes. (In one of the few Next Day press photos, the 66-year-old Bowie sits beneath a photo of himself and the famed author from that '74 interview.) They also touch on the trappings of public perception. "They want to see their picture of you," says Burroughs, "and if they don't see their picture of you they're very upset." David Bowie has made a career of walking that line between the picture people want to see and the one he wants to give them. In this way, The Next Day finds him as astute as ever, casting a ghoulish shadow over sounds and images we know and love. In fact, there was at least one exclusive magazine cover photo to go along with the new record; according to an editor's letter, the image that appeared on the front of last week's NME arrived in his inbox with the message, "This is just for you. No-one else has seen this. David would like to be on the cover." The photo, shot just last month, shows two eyes-- one pupil bigger than the other-- behind a stark white mask.


Can's 1971 album Tago Mago, freshly reissued in a "40th Anniversary Edition," is a colossus, the product of a band that was thinking huge, pushing itself to its limits, and devoted to breaking open its own understanding of what rock music could be.

Can: Tago Mago [40th Anniversary Edition]

Tago Mago [40th Anniversary Edition]

Can have long been one of those bands that are more talked about than heard. They were enormously influential on certain kinds of forward-thinking rock artists (their fingerprints are all over Radiohead and the Flaming Lips, not to mention more more recent underground acts like Woods and Implodes); their records have never been out of print for long. But they've got a big, disorderly discography, and they don't really have any signature songs (the Can tracks that pass for pop-- "Spoon", "I Want More", and not many others-- are alarmingly unlike the rest of their work). They're also tougher to "get" than a lot of their contemporaries: They specialized in long, jam-heavy rock grooves, and they had (two different) aggressively difficult vocalists, as well as a guitarist (the late Michael Karoli) who liked to noodle way up in the treble range. So where do you start?
You couldn't do much better than beginning with 1971's Tago Mago, freshly reissued in a "40th Anniversary Edition" (whose main difference from previous editions is the addition of a live disc from the following year). It's a colossus of an album, the product of a band that was thinking huge, pushing itself to its limits, and devoted to breaking open its own understanding of what rock music could be. The core of Can was four German musicians from wildly different backgrounds-- when they initially came together in 1968, two of them had studied with composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, one had played jazz, and one was a teenage guitar whiz. They recorded soundtrack music and a few straightforward rock songs early on, but what they were really interested in doing was going beyond kinds of music for which they had language.
For some musicians of that time, that meant replacing (or augmenting) composition with improvisation: letting the unconscious mind take over in the instant, and recording the results. Can's insight was that jamming alone wasn't going to do the trick. One of their solutions to that problem was that, like Miles Davis' electric group at the time, they were not a jam band but a jam-and-edit band. Their working method involved collectively improvising on little riffs and grooves at enormous length, but that's not quite what you hear on Tago Mago. Bassist Holger Czukay chopped up, layered and extensively reorganized pieces of their recordings (including recordings they made when they didn't think the tape was rolling), imposing afterthought on instinct to create something as densely packed as composition but distinctly different.
Their other solution was smashing the crutch of language. After Can's original singer Malcolm Mooney had left the band in 1970, they'd encountered a Japanese street artist named Damo Suzuki "singing or 'praying' in the streets of Munich" (as Czukay put it) and immediately installed him as their new frontman. Suzuki is ostensibly vocalizing in English-- the lingua franca of rock-- but English that's either seriously mangled or almost totally faked.
Tago Mago is seven songs in 73 minutes; the first half is big-beat floor-fillers, the second half yanks the floor away. For those first four songs, drummer Jaki Liebezeit is the star of the band, setting up rhythmic patterns of his own devising (isolate his part of almost any Can song, and you'd immediately know what you were listening to) and repeating them like mantras. His drumming is actually the lead instrument on "Mushroom", which could very easily pass for a post-punk classic from 10 years later; everything else just adds a little tone color. (The song might be about a psychedelic mushroom, or a mushroom cloud, or maybe just the kind that comes in a can.) And his deliberate, crisply articulated marching-band-of-the-unconscious beat is the spine of the overwhelming "Halleluwah", possibly the only 18-minute song that would be too short at twice its length.
Then the trip turns sour and trembly. "Aumgn" is almost as long as "Halleluwah" but clammy, deliberately disjointed, and nearly rhythmless; its central sound is keyboardist Irmin Schmidt's repeatedly intoning elongated, mangled variations on the meditative "om." Both "Aumgn" and its follow-up "Peking O" mess with their listeners' perception of time-- everything in them happens much more quickly or slowly than it's supposed to, and as soon as any pattern of sound has stuck around long enough to grab onto, it shudders and evaporates. By the time the dreamy, softly throbbing one-chord piece "Bring Me Coffee or Tea" arrives to conclude the album, it's almost hard to trust it not to be a mirage.
The bonus for the new edition (aside from a reproduction of the original sleeve, with four variations on a semi-abstract image concerning the mouth and the mind) is a three-song 1972 live recording: something identified as "Mushroom" that shares nothing but a couple of lines with the Tago Mago version, a "Halleluwah" that fades out after nine minutes without generating the studio recording's heat, and a half-hour workout on the band's three-minute German hit "Spoon". It's okay-- they were a solid jam band, and Liebezeit could pull off those remarkable rhythms on stage, too-- but it's mostly interesting for its perspective on how much less a band Can might have been without Czukay's keen razor blade slashing away their excesses and preserving their flashes of revelation.


The Brooklyn rapper and former beauty influencer has charisma to spare on her swaggering, stylish debut.

Hot Commodity

In the music video for her breakout single “Telfy,” Maiya The Don shimmies down the aisle of a beauty store in Crocs, flexes her designer handbag, and gets sturdy with her girls at a playground. The Brooklyn rapper has the type of charisma that demands to be recorded. She got her start as an influencer and beautician on TikTok, where her wig tutorials and “get ready with me” vlogs quickly built her a loyal following. Rap was something she loved, but she never pursued it seriously until the runaway success of her menacing 2021 track “Chiraq.” On her new album, Hot Commodity, she expands her irresistible personality, approaching East Coast bully rap with the confidence of a Sephora manager.
Maiya shows off her undeniable New York swagger as she calls out faceless haters and dumb men over beats that range from fast-paced street rap to Nicki Minaj-esque pop-rap. These subjects are well-worn, but her brash tone and creative delivery keep things fresh. On “Dusties,” she interpolates both Ice Spice and Lil Kim while dropping clever esthetician bars: “Bitches tryna make up, knowing we don’t blend.” On the hook for opener “Hella Scary,” she zig-zags through producer D.A. Got That Dope’s 808s, bubble pops, and finger snaps while clearing her nemeses: “Lotta rap hoes wack, these the same ol’ tracks/Wouldn’t pop even if you put Drake on that.”
But Maiya hits differently on earnest love songs. “Got me ignoring DMs/I might just be your BM,” she says on the sample drill track “Luv U Better,” playing friends with benefits with Queens drill rapper Shawny Binladen. Things escalate further on songs like “In Your Hands” and “Call Me If You Down,” where she asserts her freedom (“I don’t gotta deal with you, I could fuck your friends”) while still catching feelings. But even at her most tender, Maiya never simps; she lays out the ground rules, but she’s perfectly content to keep it moving if her man’s not willing to shower her in affection and designer brands.
Maiya sounds great on just about every beat. She rides the luxe instrumentals of “Into Myself” and “Telfy” with bravado; she slinks her way through the middling digital funk of the Ty Dolla $ign-featuring “In Your Hands,” the project’s sole weak spot; and she keeps pace with the breakneck sample drill of “Luv U Better” and “Body.” The latter is a chest-thumping roll call for people who want to test Maiya’s patience, delivered over a sample of Mariah Carey’s bubbly 2009 hit “Touch My Body.”
Hot Commodity operates from a similar blueprint as Cardi’s B’s 2017 mixtape Gangsta Bitch Music Vol. 2 and Megan Thee Stallion’s 2018 breakout Tina Snow: It’s a focused and punchy sample platter of regional styles that proves Maiya is capable of holding her own. By the time she’s breaking down her origin story—growing up on the intersection of Macon Street and Marcus Garvey Boulevard, raising her siblings in and out of foster care—it’s clear that she’s interested in more than just flexing her fabulousness. “I can’t put a price on this; I put my life in it/My story ain’t finished because nigga, I’m still writing it,” she says, growing from despondent to triumphant over the course of two bars. By this point, she's left the comforts of BeautyTok for a real world takeover.


Today on Pitchfork, we are taking a critical look at the UK band Sade—from quiet storm mainstays to defining a generational vibe—with new reviews of four of their records.

Diamond Life

In 1984, while British new romantics like Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet filled arenas with enormous synth-pop, Sade became the minimalists, crafting quiet, vintage soul out of basic components. Their end product, Diamond Life, values brevity. The band had a weapon in lead singer Helen Folasade Adu—Sade for short—a modest contralto who wore hoops with a classic red lip and moved in silence like Carmen Sandiego. Despite early comparisons to the likes of Billie Holiday and Nina Simone, Sade, then 25, saw not jazz but Black American soul as her band’s core influence. “I’m frightened of anyone for one minute thinking that we’re trying to be a jazz band, because if we were, we could do it a lot better than we’re doing now,” Sade said in 1985. “Our music is clearly pop, because it’s easy to understand.”
More precisely, their sound liquified soul and jazz into new-school pop. They were executors of spaciousness. With Diamond Life, Sade produced feeling music that became a prototype for a generation of singers who favored naked elegance: D’Angelo, Jill Scott, Alicia Keys. Maxwell later borrowed guitarist, saxophonist, and co-writer Stuart Matthewman for his own immaculate 1996 debut Urban Hang Suite; and Drake once equated the “dark sexy feel” of Sade’s records to those on his mixtape So Far Gone. The seductive undertones of artists like Tinashe and Yuna are similarly tethered to Sade, whose fierce dashes of sensuality originated here.
Over nine tracks, Sade sings of unwanted separation and missed connections under the banner of “quiet storm” music, the nickname for mood-setting, after-hours R&B that powered adult contemporary radio. Washington’s WHUR-FM is said to have originated the format in 1976 in response to radio programming that featured predominantly white easy listening acts. Quiet storm was, in contrast, a platform for balladeers like Anita Baker and Luther Vandross and their mellow grade of soul. For Sade, a band that conveyed turbulence even in their subtlety, the label fit. The swagger of “Smooth Operator,” their breakout U.S. single, almost overshadows the fact that the subject’s task is to travel across state lines breaking hearts. Their album, for the most part, seeks out and cherishes serenity and stability in partnerships while acknowledging the rocky parts. Lead U.S. single “Hang On to Your Love,” a stylish, midtempo number, views commitment as a courageous act, and on “Your Love Is King,” Sade drags out her prose, praising ordinary love between the exhales of a sax. The song has all the romance of a shimmering sunset gondola ride.
Born in Ibadan, Nigeria, Sade moved to England at 4 with her mother and brother. As early as 14, she began hitting nightclubs, and by the mid-’80s, the former art student turned menswear designer was casually experimenting as a backup vocalist in the seven-piece funk band Pride. Sade and Matthewman then morphed into a slicker breakout known collectively as Sade (a band name suggested by the singer herself), with Sade as their lead singer, keyboardist Andrew Hale, and bassist Paul S. Denman.
At the time, Sade was living in a deserted fire station, where she and Matthewman would listen to her collection of soul records, from Curtis Mayfield to Nina Simone. When band manager Lee Barrett began shopping a demo featuring “Smooth Operator” and “Your Love Is King”—material they’d been performing in clubs across England—producer Robin Millar said label execs dismissed their songs as “too slow, jazzy, and too long.” Next to the electro-pop of that era, Sade read as desperately tender, which proved to be an asset. The band eventually landed a deal with Epic in 1983 and issued Diamond Life the following year.
As with other idols whose enigma was part of their appeal, Sade practically invented the artist hiatus, taking years-long breaks between records, trading celebrity for freedom and longevity. She was, by all accounts, the coolest in everyone’s orbit. Tom Hanks, who appeared with Sade on Saturday Night Live in 1985, told The New York Times, “Calling her elusive or mysterious might color her as unkind or remote. She was not that. She was, rather, just very comfortable in the command of her art, as well as her presence.” Sade communicated gravity, often amid a cascade of keys and gentle sax riffs suspended in the air. Her voice entered the room like a chill. But her strength was in her ability to render truth and desire concisely. In relaying the sensation of a physical rush on “Your Love Is King,” she sings, “You’re making me dance…” and pauses before settling the emotion: “…Inside,” stretching its syllables into eternity.
The tracks on Diamond Life play in the arena of blues because Sade sought inspiration in the love stories of soul music that centered everyday people. On Diamond Life, she’s still refining her narrative voice, so the allegory in a cut like “Sally,” a sauntering tour through “one angry day in New York,” about the Salvation Army, has good intentions, but it’s the rare Sade song that offers the pretense of sentimentality in lieu of the real thing. The working-class anxieties that became a thread in their music materialize on “When Am I Going to Make a Living,” a song Sade wrote on the back of a receipt from the cleaners one night during a downpour.
Even when the lounginess is laid on thick, the album’s tones are subdued enough to be affecting. The damp ambiance of songs like “Frankie’s First Affair” and the six-plus-minute “Cherry Pie” burn like the type of molten soul expected to backdrop a film noir. While the track billows and tapers, becoming more atmospheric than dynamic by the end, Sade’s debut is a strong compilation of stories that bristle with simplicity.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Though the lucre here at Pitchfork is plentiful, and I scarcely have time to get one wrecked Lex towed off ...

Englabörn

Though the lucre here at Pitchfork is plentiful, and I scarcely have time to get one wrecked Lex towed off before a new one is delivered, any promo CD package that falls through my mail slot is doomed. They will all be sold unless they can prove something to me, and quick. I don't need the damn things cluttering my pad. Englabörn, with its pretty little Jon Wozencraft cover, didn't have a prayer. But through a series of accidents, the disc somehow slipped into repeat mode without my realizing it. By the time I'd caught the error, the album had played through twice, looping and breathing to life, its leitmotifs orbiting the room in blissful, indolent circles, completely entrancing me. This first solo album from Jóhann Jóhannsson is absolutely beautiful, and it has only become moreso over the past few months, sustaining me for long periods of time when other music just wouldn't do the trick.
Jóhannsson is a member of the Icelandic artist group Kitchen Motors, and aside from the fact that his loose-knit collective has, on at least one occasion, held a concert for cellphones at their local Reykjavik mall, additional information is scarce. So I'll tell you what I know: Taking cues he provided to a stage play by Hávar Sigurjónsson, Jóhannsson's Englabörn is composed of music he wrote, as performed by the Eþos String Quartet, with a light gauze of electronic processing applied to it. Although it's difficult to ascertain any obvious tweaking in the end result, there is just a slight haze in the air surrounding the sounds, letting the notes levitate and linger.
It begins innocuously enough with an AppleTalk voice reciting Latin scribe Catullus' poem, "Odi et Amo". An intriguing selection of text, the poem addresses the agonizing extremes between devout love and consuming hate. To have this very human poem delivered by a droid tenor reveals all sorts of counterbalances at work: gentle, nuanced music that soundtracked a brutally violent piece of theatre, these acoustic, classical string quartets mixing with digital alchemy, and an ancient voice coursing through the latest in Speak 'n' Spell technology. It somehow balances beautifully, graceful in all its gestures.
Some of the pieces, like "Karen býr til Engil" and "Eins og Venjulegt Fólk" recall the similarly melancholy electronic touch that infused the most desolate moments of Radiohead's Kid A. With subtle, digital rumbles, poignant glockenspiel, and scarce violin sustainment, a dreadful space surrounds each note, allowing the music to resonate deep inside of you. "Jói & Karen" is exceptionally restrained, the piano moving like droplets off of slowly melting icicles, and the violin breathing warmth from above. The hesitation of each breath and falling bead feels as though it were a Morton Feldman piece condensed to three minutes.
"Sálfrædingur" is the most propulsive of the set, sounding like classic Moondog, with shaking rattles, percolating drums, and stately piano. Its counterpoint is "Sálfræðingur Deyr", where the theme is recast with bowed strings, the bass solemn in its slow movements. As the violin shivers against it, Jóhannsson reduces it all to scarcely whispered vibrations. This resonates into the music boxes and small squeaked brass of "Bad". "Ég Átti Gráa Aesku" recombines the processional percussion from before with the earlier refrains of piano into a more majestic statement, while "Krókódíll" recapitulates the downward movement of piano notes of the opening theme, this time with the voice replaced by profound organ drones.
By the time of "Odi et Amo - Bis", which slows the original recitation to the point of near stasis, each computer tone and bowed note is stilled to the point of absolute zero, the echoes reverberating off of the ice. A rememberance of things past is conjured up as chilling ghosts float in the ether. The emotional strain is apparent with these haunting last moments, though the music remains elegant and elegiac.
Just as Catullus balanced the extreme emotional opposites of love and hate into a composite whole the greater of its parts, so does Jóhannsson transform these sixteen miniatures into an exquisite listening experience. With the slightest of movements, and in a handful of descending notes, a shivering gulf of sadness is conveyed. It's easy to mention something grandiose, but to fully expound upon this subtly gestured work of music is far more difficult a task. While Englabörn remains out of reach with these words, the music continues to enrich.


Latest batch of reissues from Brian Eno includes three records from the late 1970s and early 80s and adds a new collection.

Brian Eno: Music for Films / Apollo / Thursday Afternoon / More Music for Films

A spiritual big brother to theory-sopped music bloggers everywhere, the left-brained Brian Eno has always had a love affair with parameters. As the story goes, when Microsoft asked him to compose the Windows startup sound in the early 90s, they supplied a broadsheet of adjectives requesting the piece embody the phrases "universal," "optimistic," "emotional," and "futuristic," among others. The task of mediating those descriptors would be a lot to ask of any composition, never mind one that couldn't exceed 3.25 seconds in length. But to Eno, who happened to be stuck in a particularly barren creative rut, Microsoft's challenge looked a lot like a life preserver. By subsequently creating more than 75 pieces of music that fit the description (one of which was the familiar open-ended bell chime that probably sits somewhere between "Happy Birthday" and any number of Coke jingles on the master list of North America's most frequently heard pieces of music), Eno managed to shake himself out of a tree; not soon after, he was back to composing original material with his usual prolificacy.
But it's the rare puzzle solver who naturally gravitates to hazy, formless spaces, and Eno fits that description as well. Arguably as interested in the mysteries of methodology as he is in music, he's never been one to deny ambiguity's role in the creative process. Few composers have trusted music's nowhere qualities as fully as Eno-- that he's managed to maintain a logician's interrogative, purposeful edge while maintaining an output of sounds so enveloping they hang like a fog is one of his most interesting accomplishments.
Released under the Soundtracks container, these beautifully packaged reissues mark the third batch of Eno remasters from Astralwerks. Where the four discs released under the Early Works banner focused on Eno's vocal-driven compositions and those in Ambient Works on his most clearly defined ambient pieces, the thread tying these four 'soundtracks' together is more tenuous. Two of them (1978's Music for Films and the new compilation More Music From Films) include significant portions of music that were only ever conceived (but not used) as film soundtracks; 1985's Thursday Afternoon may have comprised the backing to one of Eno's video art installations, but it's built in the mirror image of his more famous ambient compositions, and has little in common with traditional soundtrack work.
So really, instead of lumping them together as soundtracks, it's probably more accurate to say these discs represent the point in the excavation where Eno's work starts to get a little trans-concept and certainly more difficult to classify. Containing music for films that never existed and music for existing places that, as far as the earthbound among us are concerned, might as well not, this is the sound of Eno playing with parameter and ambiguity's relationship to one another.
Music for Films is a collection of sparse, moody setpieces whose connections to actual films vary widely. Although more active and more heavily orchestrated than Eno's ambient compositions, its 18 tracks waft in and out in similarly unceremonious fashion. Some, such as "Inland Sea" and the "Sparrowful" trilogy, recall the fat-bodied analog keyboards of Discreet Music; others, like the percussive drone-piece "M386", counteract the melodic lulls with hammering nervous tension. Featuring songs recorded in different time periods with different musicians (Robert Fripp, John Cale, and a young Phil Collins are among the many who turn up here), it runs a little unevenly in spots, but it's nonetheless as evocative as anything Eno's ever done.
My favorite of these four reissues, 1983's Apollo-Atmospheres & Soundtracks is the only full-fledged film soundtrack of the lot. Co-written with brother Roger and Daniel Lanois (who provides radiant guitar work on tracks like "Silver Morning" and "Deep Blue Day") as the score to Al Reinert's documentary on the Apollo lunar landings, it represents Eno's attempt to slightly redress the popular media's glib and histrionic television presentation of the event. At times empty and disconnected ("Matta"), weightless and serene ("Drift") and completely beautiful ("An Ending (Ascent)"), it adheres to an internal logic that culminates with the suitably skin-crawling "Stars".
Featuring a single, mostly static track that hovers unchanged for the bulk of its 61 minutes, Thursday Afternoon is probably the best example of what Eno famously called a holographic work. Just as a small piece of a holograph contains the information of that holograph in its entirety, any small portion of this track also contains its essence as a whole. With its ambient drones and gently suspended piano notes, Thursday Afternoon unfurls like a blanket, and along with Music for Airports, remains one of Eno's most mystifying and durable works, a thing you could stare into forever without ever seeing through.
Finally, More Music For Films marks the first of Astralwerks' twelve reissues to potentially hold something new for existing Eno fans. Consisting of tracks taken from the rare, vinyl-only compilations Music for Films Directors' Edition and Music for Films Volume 2, it represents the first time that about half of these songs have ever been released on CD. As you might expect from a collection of lesser heard odds and sods, it's easily the most disjointed and sprawling disc of the bunch, but there are enough rewards and curiosities there to reward the diehards. Be warned though: due to a manufacturing error, many of the discs contain the music for "Approaching Taidu" as tracks 18 and 20, thus shortchanging the buyer of the scheduled track 18, "Climate Study". Astralwerks are currently working on a replacement version, so caveat emptor and all that.
Fans who've had the opportunity to A/B any of the old CD pressings to the first eight reissues in this series already know how good the remastering job is, but it bears repeating one last time. Not only are the small details now significantly more vivid, but the overall levels have been adjusted as well. To me, these feel definitive, the pressings that these records have always deserved, and it's nice to be able to hear them for the first time again.


Over the last year, Chairlift's Caroline Polachek was playing secret shows and debuting new material under increasingly inventive, singer-songwriterly pseudonyms such as Ramona Lisa, the name under which she’s presented her solo debut, Arcadia. The album is a quiet curiosity, a quirky side project that’s mostly a labor of love.

Arcadia

To the outside observer, Chairlift’s Caroline Polachek had an identity crisis over the last year. She was playing secret shows and debuting new material under increasingly inventive, singer-songwriterly pseudonyms: Kimsin Kreft, Theora Vorbis (an A/V pun), and most fancifully, Ramona Lisa, the name under which she’s presented her solo debut, Arcadia. Chairlift’s sophomore LP, 2012's Something, possessed some excellent singles, and the Polachek-written “No Angel” ended up on Beyoncé's recent self-titled album, but despite all this upward momentum, Arcadia is a quiet curiosity, a quirky side project that’s mostly a labor of love.
Arcadia was composed and recorded entirely on tour and on laptop with MIDI instruments, but the music’s not too recognizably lo-fi or idiosyncratic, especially when compared to some of Chairlift’s past work. There are reprises and recurring motifs that lend Arcadia a conceptual coherence, but Polachek’s songwriting is as broad as it is pared-down. The record works in two modes: for more abstract material like “Hissing Pipes at Dawn (They're Playing Our Song)”, which is, yes, a impressionistic sound-painting of hissing pipes at dawn, there are tracks like “Lady’s Got Gills” and “Backwards and Upwards,” which resemble Chairlift album cuts that were allowed to melt around their chorus sections.
Despite their meandering tendencies, the songs on Arcadia sound neither tossed-off nor incomplete, and are surprisingly sticky at times. “Backwards and Upwards” is a driftier sequel to Something’s “I Belong in Your Arms” as an insistent organ hook and bass burble are paired with love-dazed vocals; “Lady’s Got Gills” is as playful as its title suggests, its synthesized instruments scattered through the busy beat like stones.  These moments are where Polachek’s sense of humor comes through: “Getaway Ride” is a charming bit about arson and fanciful theft, and you can hear little deadpan nudges and winks in Polachek's delivery. Arcadia's introspective cuts are mostly effective as well, particularly the pastel waltz “Dominic,” which comes and goes as drowsily as the “perfect disaster” of a fling described in the song. Like much of Arcadia, "Dominic" is “pastoral” in the sense that it uses nature—fields, pale mornings-after—as an incidental backdrop for stories that tend toward the small and personal.
Arcadia tends to lean instrumental and abstract, interspersed with field recordings that were inspired by Polachek’s traveling through Rome and wanting to recreate what she saw out the windows. The results are warm and almost meditative: synth pads that evoke sunbeams, choral multitracking that sounds like General MIDI voice patches. There are referents for this, some expected and some not; Polachek is an avowed fan of cult singer-songwriter Virginia Astley—specifically, of Hope in a Darkened Heart, her collaboration with Japan’s David Sylvian and Ryuichi Sakamoto—as well as Japanese artist Mishio Ogawa, and their watercolor art-pop is a clear, audible influence.
But Arcadia evokes other artists' work, too, from ambitious composers like Julia Holter or Lucrecia Dalt, to more workaday ambient artists like Sleepthief in his less trip-hop moments, to Miriam Stockley (who coincidentally has her own “Arcadia”), to any number of bedroom-produced singer/songwriters. The album is an interesting, almost peculiarly personal mix of sounds, one that almost seems underdeveloped and unlikely to win Polachek any new fans. As an outlet for Polachek’s songwriting, though, it suggests there's more interesting work yet to come from her.


Hearing Prince sing these songs that he gave to other performers brings you close to the pulse of his artistry: transgressive, funky, sexy, a testament to his genius even in the form of demos.

Originals

It was said that only Prince knew the combination to his legendary, quite literal vault with the spinning wheel doorknob. But sometime after his death on April 21, 2016, the hulking door was drilled open, revealing an astounding archive of unreleased songs—so many thousands of tapes and hard drives that his estate could allegedly release a Prince album every year for the next century. Now, the latest from the vault, comes Prince: Originals, a compilation of 14 previously unreleased songs written for other performers that prove once and for all that a Prince demo was often better than most other musicians’ finished songs. It offers a window onto the playfulness of his improvisations and, in a structure that mimics the range of an actual Prince album, shifts nimbly between up-tempo songs and ballads, sweat and tears, near impossible to stay sitting still while listening.
In the winter after the release of his third album, Dirty Mind, 22-year-old Prince moved into what he’d call Kiowa Trail Home Studio in suburban Chanhassen, Minnesota, not far from what would become Paisley Park. Prince had its cream-colored exterior repainted with his favorite hue; it was nicknamed the Purple House. Outside was the driveway where he’d do motorcycle laps practicing for Purple Rain and the gates he decorated with a sculpted heart and peace sign. Inside, he outfitted his studio with a 16-track recorder and later upgraded to a 24-track Ampex MM1200, with a piano upstairs for any sudden inspiration.
Inside the Purple House, large parts of Controversy, 1999, Purple Rain, and Sign o’ the Times were recorded, as well as about half the songs on Originals (most of the rest were recorded at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles). In 1985, when he sat with a Rolling Stone reporter on the white plush carpet of the bedroom at Kiowa Trail, he said that he finally came to understand why his musician father was so hard to live with. “When he was working or thinking, he had a private pulse going constantly inside him,” Prince said. “I don’t know, your bloodstream beats differently.” Discovering some of the unscripted moments in Originals feels like taking that pulse.
Written into his Warner Bros. contract was a clause that allowed him to recruit and produce other artists. It essentially assured him access to a congregation of performers who would spread the gospel of his music—the pop-funk he’d canonized in his early records, and a vast and uncharted road ahead, both under his own name and others. Sometimes he adopted an alias—as Joey Coco, for instance, for the power crooner “You’re My Love,” one of the surprises on Originals. It appeared on Kenny Rogers' 1986 album They Don't Make Them Like They Used To, but Rogers’ version pales next to Prince’s, who uses a deeper, full-throated register that sounds an imitation of what he thought Kenny Rogers should sound like. But the Prince of Dirty Mind and Controversy didn’t exactly mesh with Nashville of the 1980s—what would the world have thought then if he released a country song? Giving that song to another voice freed him to fly elsewhere.
Better known is his alias for “Manic Monday,” which charted at No. 2 for the Bangles, second only to Prince’s own smash “Kiss.” Here, Prince is “Christopher,” a reference to his character from his 1986 film Under the Cherry Moon. The song, triggered by a dream he wrote into the lyrics, is essentially a rewrite of “1999,” and Prince’s rendering of it here centers on a synthesized harpsichord and the psychedelic flourish of the song’s bridge, which sounds as if Alice just dropped in the rabbit hole.
Most of the other tracks on Originals represent even greater gifts. Prince gave songs to Minneapolis’ great performers: Morris Day, Sheila E., Jill Jones, Apollonia, among others. By spreading out the credits, “he was creating the wave, but he made it seem like there was a lot of people doing that thing in Minneapolis, which was brilliant,” engineer David Z once said. To the press, Prince acted nonchalant. “I usually try to give up a groove to somebody if they ask me,” he said.
These grooves are the dance-floor core of Originals. Prince’s version of “Jungle Love” is close to the rendition on the Time’s Ice Cream Castles and the Purple Rain soundtrack, down to the “oh-we-oh-we-oh” chorus, but embedded with his ad-libs (“If you’re hungry, take a bite outta me!”). Prince had showed up in the studio shirtless with one bandana around his neck and another tied on his ripped red pants, but he loosens up in the recording. “Somebody bring me a mirror!” you hear him shout midway through. He gets it in “Make-Up,” a torrid electric number that was fine on Vanity 6’s lone solo album but made surprising and transgressive by Prince, who voices the lyrics in robotic staccato bursts: “Blush. Eyeliner. Hush. See what you made me do.” It has the percussive electricity of Liquid Liquid and maybe a little Kraftwerk too, androgynous Prince at his most diva: “Smoke. A. Cigarette,” he retorts to an impatient lover. “I’m. Not. Ready Yet.”
How wild that a chronicle of a lost era can feel so modern when all over it are musical markers of the ’80s: synths and drum machines and clap tracks and extended breakdowns and of course, sax solos. Nostalgia, even rendered fresh, works on the ear in invisible ways, as does the sequence of these songs. We careen between slow-burning love songs (witness Prince’s glorious falsetto over the heartbeat percussion of “Baby, You’re a Trip,” which Prince wrote for Jill Jones, about the time she snooped in his diary after he read hers) and more quintessential dance hits. “Holly Rock,” which he gave to Sheila E. for the Krush Groove soundtrack, is snappily upbeat, Prince punctuating the chorus with James Brown-esque flourishes (“I’m bad, good god!”) and a snarky taunt at the end: “Now try to dance like that,” he says.
“Nothing Compares 2 U,” the best-known and most-loved of all the songs here, became a massive hit for Sinéad O’Connor, whose rendition was, in fact, a cover, not one of Prince’s gifts. Here, in its original incarnation, Prince turns it into a torch song for himself. He lets a love-worn raggedness occasionally creep into his voice, lets it tremble ever so, powered by the saxophone accompaniment of longtime Family and Revolution member Eric Leeds. The video shows a collage of Prince and his band running through stage choreography: dressed in a scarf worn as a backless shirt, or suspenders and white high-heeled boots, he delivers perfect splits, kicks, and spins. But the arrangement here is stark and lonely and beautiful, the closest you get to hearing Prince’s own pulse. Arriving at the end of this set of originals, and with the promise of hearing more from that vault, it becomes an affirmation too. Maybe all those flowers you planted in the backyard will bloom again.


On the first record to appear since 03 Greedo’s incarceration, the L.A. rapper teams up with Vallejo’s Nef the Pharaoh on a breezy five-track EP that makes the most of their respective strengths.

Nef the Pharaoh / 03 Greedo: Porter 2 Grape EP

Porter 2 Grape EP

Last month, 03 Greedo reported to a prison in Texas to serve a 20-year sentence on drug and weapons charges. The week he set foot in the facility, he dropped God Level, an anxious opus that mulls his pending incarceration and its impact on his rapidly ascending career as a rap star. The sentence will rip him away from his family and his fans, but it won’t mark a hard stop to his output: There are dozens of solo and collaborative albums sitting on hard drives, waiting to be parceled out over however long the authorities in Texas keep him caged. Porter 2 Grape is the first such record to surface; it pairs Greedo with Nef the Pharaoh, who distinguished himself in the last couple years as one of the Bay Area’s most exciting and charismatic rappers. Their mixtape together is warm and refreshingly slight. It also reveals that, while Nef’s rise has proven much slower and less stratospheric than Greedo’s, he still possesses the wit, versatility, and magnetism that might land him a larger, nationwide audience.
Both Nef and Greedo grew their followings from their hometowns outward, but their relationships with rap’s regionalist conventions are far different. Greedo, who bounced all over the country in his childhood before settling in Watts, is a synthesist, as fluent in popular modes from Atlanta and Baton Rouge as he is in those from L.A. By contrast, when Nef broke through, in 2015, he was rightly singled out as the heir to the Vallejo throne—he even signed with E-40. While Nef’s style is more straightforward, Greedo’s is more in tune with national pop trends on rap radio in most cities; Nef is from a lineage that, save for a few breakout stars, has been hermetically sealed in one location.
Nef, though, has absolutely no interest in sitting still. The EP is littered with little odes to traveling: On “Ball Out,” he’s appalled that some of his peers haven’t ridden double-decker buses in London; on “Blow-Up Bed,” he compares his tattoos to the stamps in his passport; he and Greedo brag about being in Paris, Miami, Memphis, everywhere. That jetsetting figures so centrally on Porter is a testament to how both rappers process abstract ideas like fame and success: They ground them in the material changes of their day-to-day lives. How else do you account for the record’s best and most deeply felt song being an upbeat cut about air mattresses?
While the rapid pace of Greedo’s writing and recording in the final months before his prison term could have been expected, what’s intriguing about Porter 2 Grape is how carefully his vocals have been attuned to Nef’s. Their harmonizing on the “Blow-Up Bed” hook crystallizes the EP’s promise: Greedo’s voice is stranger than Nef’s, but he comes in softer, more melodic, while Nef is allowed to take the more forceful lead. Throughout the tape, but especially on that song and “Choosy” (the latter also features ALLBLACK and Chris O’Bannon), the two rappers pull one another into breezy, comfortable pockets that not only allow their senses of humor to come through but also communicate appreciation for their incremental progress—and, by implication (and occasionally overtly), lament the ways their advances might be reversed in a matter of seconds.
The last song on Porter 2 Grape, “Feeling You,” flips the same Bobby Caldwell sample that 2Pac used for “Heaven Ain’t Hard 2 Find,” the closing number on All Eyez on Me. (There are few better arguments for the symbiosis between Bay rap and L.A. rap than the second disc of All Eyez.) The Pac song is nominally about sex, but there’s a break in the middle where he reveals the neuroses that plague nearly all of his work. Pac was a more linear writer than Greedo and a more self-mythologizing one than Nef. What Porter shares with the breezy back-end cuts on Pac’s masterpiece is the sense that it’s never all good or all bad; that blow-up mattresses can become luxury hotel beds and, occasionally, prison cots.


Producer Jennifer Lee’s latest album is darker and more introspective, but the innovative beats frequently take a back seat to her guest vocalists’ voices and personalities.

Oasis Nocturno

Electronic producer Jennifer Lee, better known as TOKiMONSTA, considers making beats the ultimate form of freedom. As a child learning piano, she resented having to play entire compositions written by someone else, preferring to play her favorite passages over and over—an experience she likens to an early foray into sampling. After teaching herself production in her college dorm room, she joined a community of musicians in L.A. who organized beat battles, a signal to the world that their work was complete without vocalists. It was almost philosophical in nature: While beats are often considered background, Lee and peers like Flying Lotus considered them the main event.
But the beat-music world has changed in the past decade, and TOKiMONSTA’s sound has likewise opened up to incorporate sweeping arrangements, pop melodies, dance beats, and, notably, space for vocalists. On her last two albums, she has negotiated the process of making music on her own terms while accommodating an expanding roster of guest features. As she has worked vocals into the mix, she has also embraced more genres. Oasis Nocturno folds funk, rap, and R&B into a shape-shifting blend of styles that recalls Disclosure one moment, and Anderson .Paak the next. She also works extensively with house and house-adjacent beats for the first time, frequently slowing the tempo to a ruminative, heads-down pace. To branch out in so many different directions seems like the ultimate declaration of creative freedom, but it’s not clear that the strategy suits her; the album often feels like it’s on the brink of delving into a groove, only to be pulled in a new direction. And Lee’s beats frequently take a back seat to her guest vocalists’ voices and personalities.
TOKiMONSTA’s previous album, Lune Rouge, was held together by an underlying narrative. “Because I’m making beats, it might not be as obvious, but each of these beats—all these songs I put together—tell a story,” Lee said. She had recorded the record in the wake of undergoing surgery for Moyamoya, a rare brain condition; while recovering, she temporarily lost her ability to understand speech or music. It was only after finishing the first song for the album, “I Wish I Could,” that she finally felt like everything was going to be OK. That sense of relief was palpable in the album’s layered vocals and crystalline production.
Oasis Nocturno exists in the aftermath of that emotional catharsis. Compared to Lune Rouge, it is darker and more introspective, but it doesn’t have as explicit a narrative attached to it. The album’s song titles—“For My Eternal Love, Dream My Treasure,” “Love That Never,” “To Be Remote”—hint at stories Lee might be trying to tell; combined with the predominantly minor keys and slow, house-inspired grooves, they signal a newfound heaviness. But her frequent stylistic shifts and reliance on guest vocalists give the album a disjointed feel that contradicts her usual immersive sensibility.
Lee’s background as a beatmaker is still the guiding force on Oasis Nocturno. The songs are strongest when they are purely instrumental and the production has space to shine, or, as on “Love That Never” and “To Be Remote,” when a human voice is warped and stretched until it becomes another layer of texture. “Up and Out,” a leisurely, house-flavored track, is sleek and soothing, like a handful of marbles. On “House of Dal,” the pulse quickens: A see-sawing beat propels inky keys and twangy synth to delightful, cosmic effect.
In contrast, the vocals sound underdeveloped, and it often feels like Lee is holding back in order to make room for them, sacrificing complexity for glossy restraint. The more upbeat or empowering tracks feel out of place amid moody instrumentals. “One Day,” an anthemic self-love pop song, details the exes and doubters that vocalists Bibi Bourelly and Jean Deaux want to prove wrong. But the production—not much beyond a sparse drum beat and light keys—leaves you wondering how Lee’s vision for this otherwise morose and sedated album relates. Rosehardt’s echoey vocals are worked deeper in the mix on “Higher Hopes,” but the watery synth still feels aimless. “Fried for the Night,” a psychedelic party track about “those moments you feel fried and turnt,” is the lone case where the beats elevate the vocals: Atlanta hip-hop duo EARTHGANG’s jubilant, staccato flow and playful imagery (“Cotton candy in my cup/Sour Patches, pucker up”) sparkle over Lee’s warbling synths and rippling trap beats.
You leave the album wishing for she had allowed herself to get a little weirder. A few songs are nearly there. Opener “Love That Never” masterfully mixes wavy, distorted vocals through a wash of rain sounds and water droplets, conveying an acute sense of yearning that’s missing from much of the album. The breadth of Oasis Nocturno is commendable, but you can’t help but wonder what these songs would sound like if she had let the grooves, and not her guests, be her guide. As her songs become more encumbered, you can tell that the beatmaker in Lee still longs to break free.


London Grammar first came to notice stateside with their vocal turn on "Help Me Lose My Mind", a highlight from Disclosure's Settle. Their debut album is filled with spacious, reverb-heavy pop that sometimes brings to mind the xx and Portishead.

If You Wait

When an album is proclaimed the frontrunner for the UK's Mercury Music Prize before it's even released, it's a sign of both the accelerated nature of the modern hype cycle as well as a vote of confidence in a band's ability to deliver the goods. That London Grammar have been the latest recipients of this sort of breathless anticipation shouldn't shock-- their influences are the kind of alternative-but-still-polite acts generally favored by the prize, and they were featured on "Help Me Lose My Mind", a highlight from Disclosure's Settle. But a cynic tempted to dismiss their downcast take on spacious, reverb-heavy pop as a calculated attempt to muscle into a sizzling market would miss out on an accomplished debut that belies the fact that this trio of Nottingham University alumni wrote and recorded their first song together less than a year ago.
That song-- the achingly slow-building "Hey Now"-- is a perfect encapsulation of London Grammar's sound. It begins with frostbitten chords which are soon joined by guitars that recall the xx at their most spectral and, eventually, Hannah Reid's vocals. Jessie Ware has often been invoked as a point of comparison, and both vocalists understand that restraint can be far more effective than constant demonstrations of strength. On "Hey Now", Reid's voice emerges as an elemental power that can clear entire fields, displaying an outward composure that always provides glimpses of a staggering vulnerability lurking just below the surface. This kind of range lets Reid come at any one line from multiple angles, which gives her obsession with the fallout from heartbreak a surprising amount of nuance. When she admits to "feeling shyer" at one point on the album, she sounds at once exhausted, confused, and defiant-- basically anything but shy-- and later in the song, when she advises a suitor content to send mixed signals and make half-plays for her heart that "maybe you should call her," it becomes a taunt rather than a desperate plea for attention.
There's always an emotional urgency in Reid's vocals-- she doesn't do low stakes. When producer Dot Major and guitarist Daniel Rothman find that musical equivalent to Reid's reserved sense of theatrics, the results are devastating. "Wasting My Young Years" starts off austere and picks up steam as it races toward a climax that never arrives-- at the precise moment you'd expect the song to launch into the stratosphere, it's yanked back to earth, satisfying through its refusal to meet our expectations. "I don't know what you want, don't leave me hanging on," sings Reid as the song disintegrates into pieces, but this kind of thread-dangling is London Grammar's strong suit. They can conjure emotions without hammering you over the head with them-- on the autumnal "Strong", Reid sings of being "wide-eyed and I'm so damn caught in the middle," plotting coordinates where romantic idealism and reality meet to disastrous results.
This no-man's-land between indecision and action is a common thread throughout these songs, even influencing Reid's approach to conflict. "We argue, we don't fight" she accuses on "Metal & Dust", making it clear she'd rather air things out in the moment than let resentment build. Major and Rothman wisely stay out of Reid's way when she locks her sights on a target, and they use their knack for dynamics to support her in subtle ways. They help elevate a cover of Kavinsky's "Nightcall" from filler to a vital peak in its emotional trajectory, stripping it of its fluorescence and ratcheting up its inherent melancholy a dozen notches. At points even a trip-hop influence can be heard, with Portishead-like breaks popping up on and injecting much-needed propulsion into moments that might otherwise wilt on their own.
Due to this emphasis on compositional restraint, If You Wait occasionally feels a little too homogeneous, a little too tidy. It's so uniform tonally that it sometimes approaches somnambulance, its negative space becoming a liability rather than a cleverly-used tool. Then again, London Grammar seem bright enough to know there's always room for improvement: "I've heard it takes some time to get it right" Reid opines on "Wasting My Young Years", but this trio already functions like a well-oiled machine, and they've produced a stylish debut that demonstrates both their immense talent and impressive instincts.


If this really is the grime producer's swan song, * Playtime Is Over* caps off Wiley's career in a low-profile fashion, considering that the progression he's taken since he dropped the "Eskimo" riddim on an unsuspecting underground in 2002 can be measured in inches.

Playtime Is Over

Playtime, amongst other things: Aside from the possibility of doing some by-request production jobs and mentoring younger artists, Wiley was originally planning on retiring from the grime scene after this album. Yeah, I know, rap retirements-- but he's gone through a lot of shit, whether recent (the fumbled pop-crossover of his Roll Deep crew's 2005 album In at the Deep End) or longstanding ("I'm getting threats but it's never stopped in 10 years," he told RWD Magazine during his "farewell" interview). Considering he had a beef at some point with almost everyone who appeared on Run the Road and is approaching 30 with a baby daughter in tow, the urge to step into the background is an understandable one-- even if there's little indication on his supposed last album that he's had it on his mind.
*
Playtime Is Over* caps off Wiley's career in a low-profile fashion, considering that the progression he's taken since he dropped the "Eskimo" riddim on an unsuspecting underground in 2002 can be measured in inches. While Dizzee Rascal took a few risky chances on switching up and Americanizing his style for Maths + English-- released, significantly enough, the same day as Playtime Is Over in the UK-- Wiley has kept his formula mostly intact: skittering, hiccuping bounce rhythms, synths that sound like a turbocharged Super Nintendo with a subwoofer attached, and a manic, borderline-toasting flow that plows through everything in its path.
Wiley's deficiencies as an MC aren't overwhelming, but the possibility that his retirement may just consist of him stepping away from the mic while continuing to produce seems like a decent outcome. His voice is a hell of an instrument in itself, a ragga-inflected string of serrated, lightning-quick jabs, but it spends a little too much time barreling over beats like they're suggestions instead of backbones. Opener "50/50" is a sharp bit of lyrical work, wrapping a few tight phrases around a titular term that typically wouldn't give much room for them ("I'm 50/50, nifty nifty/ Got the best deal, nobody can twist me/ Anytime somebody tries to shoot me/ I flip the ball they miss me, miss me"), but by the second verse he's dropping syllables off-rhythm and his inflections fight distractingly against the beat.
"Gangsters" (one of three tracks carried over from 2006's self-released Da 2nd Phaze) is a loosely-associated string of threats and observations with only one word-- an icy, synthetic female voice echoing "gangsters"-- holding his verses together, and technically there isn't even really much rhyming involved: "We just had a wave of new (gangsters)/ Yeah, I think there's been a rise, more (gangsters)/ Imagine that, I'm a street kid brainy like (gangsters)," and so forth. It's weird that someone with such a straightforward lyrical style is so frequently thrown off by his own beats, but after hearing "Bow E3"-- where Wiley's postal-code hood-rep is halfway submerged under Maniac's production and constantly undercut by a stuttering, omnipresent hook-- you begin to miss how his voice sounds, flaws and all, when it has breathing room.
And there's a couple tracks where he gives himself plenty of it, often with some uncharacteristically gentle touches. "Baby Girl" is the most notable example, a dedication to his daughter that tempers his typical gruffness with a soothing flute/Mellotron loop and paternally poignant lyrics about teaching her the music business when she grows up. "Letter 2 Dizzee" is the other standout moment of raw feeling, where his side of the beef with his onetime protégé is played out with more wistfulness and disappointment than straight-up fury, reminiscing about coming up in the business together and couching a tentative ceasefire in shit-talking lingo: "Nothin' ain't changed except I'm the best now/ It don't matter, I'm still your big brother." (Given how calm and reconciliatory he sounds, it's probable he cut this before Dizzee's alleged Wiley dis "Pussyole (Oldskool)" dropped.)
Still, Wiley's always been strongest as a producer, arguably as important to the rhythmic aspect of grime's development as Dizzee was to the vocal. Even if there's little here that's surprising to anyone who heard 2004's Treddin' on Thin Ice, there's no sign of any creative entropy behind the boards; the Castlevania creep of "Johnny Was a Bad Boy", the elbow-throwing conga line of "Eski-Boy" and the electro tinges in "No Qualms" round out an album that's varied enough to serve as a solid final mission statement. And the guest spots featuring young, ambitious up-and-comers like Scorcher (who sounds like Wiley's smoother-voiced doppelganger on "Flyboy") and Jukie Mundo (growling like a rudeboy version of M.O.P. on "Stars") could serve as a preview for what Wiley's post-"retirement" mentorship itinerary might involve down the road-- dense, precise beats with intricately flexible drum programming, fronted by a new generation of grime torchbearers.
But suitably enough, the best beat on this album is on the final hidden track: Like his name-making "Eskimo", it's an instrumental with icy electronics and elastic bass, but it's also got a massive rhythm built on Lennox Lewis-force handclaps and a loose-limbed tempo that smoothly shifts gears from an off-center grime rhythm to a pounding, pseudo-house 4/4 for roughly seven seconds, just because it can. The bonus track's name: "Where's Wiley". Hopefully not a question we'll have to ask two years from now.


Marking 10 years since he set off down his path of dour, slow-motion techno, the Manchester musician returns to his familiar palette of ashen moods and richly textured electronics.

Never the Right Time

A decade ago, the Manchester-based electronic musician Andy Stott extinguished the dub-techno torch he’d been carrying for Basic Channel and plunged into some lightless place where all the usual values got switched around. From that murk, he retrieved a pair of acclaimed short albums, Passed Me By and We Stay Together, which set his course for the next 10 years. What had been fast would be slow, what had been trim would be mussed, and what had been roomy would be cramped. Steep slopes were leveled flat, perpendicular lines knocked out of plumb. His affable name now seems like an accidental vestige of this transformation. It’s easy to think of an Andre making this spooky, severe music, maybe even an Andrew—but an Andy?
All of this remains as true as ever on Never the Right Time, Stott’s eighth album. As usual, the sense of techno passing through a looking glass is enhanced by the unique timbre of his production, which recalls a mirror with its silver flaking off. On its surface, fleeting images, often incarnated in the voice of Alison Skidmore, fragment across patches of matte and bright, opaque and sheer. As usual, the palette consists of mercurial basses, chromed synths, evaporated instrumentation, and hocketed rhythms spliced together from varied drum hits, scrawls of interference, stray sibilants, and other little wads of dream fluff. Yet despite all this, Never the Right Time adds one more inversion to Stott’s list: What once was exciting is now a bit boring, and it’s hard to say exactly why.
Stott is still a wonderful sound technician of unerring good taste, but something seems to go slack at the center of Never the Right Time. On prior standouts like “Numb,” from 2012’s Luxury Problems, he hardly even needed that one eventual kick drum to dissect Skidmore’s voice into a hypnotically seething groove. This music, by contrast, mainly wakes up when the drums do, as on the title track or the Junior Boys-like winner “Don’t Know How.” But even then, it tends to drift along in undissolved layers, and seems more linear than the spiraling burrows nested in Stott’s most inspired music. While the tracks have many pleasant modulations and evocative riffs, they seldom feel like they’d fall apart without our rapt attention holding them up.
Perhaps the consistency of Stott’s work since 2011 is itself the issue. He gained crossover success and minted his new identity when music was having a moody, damaged moment, not long after Burial, and in the thick of Demdike Stare and Salem. His dragging rhythms, interdimensional sound sense, and close-cut vocal samples put him on track with early James Blake, before the latter re-centered on the voice. But none of those references feel particularly lively these days. Maybe this record is just marked by that COVID feeling of time stretching out blankly, or maybe I am, but it’s also possible that Stott has painted himself into a dark corner, one he and we know too well, and it’s time to light a new torch.

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DāM-FunK’s latest is his most romantic and awestruck album. If his earlier work suggests a bleary-eyed, late-night haze, Above the Fray is a cloudless vista where you can see for miles.

Above the Fray

In 2009, DāM-FunK released a track that doubled as a promise: “(My Funk Goes) On & On.” His sound stays true to a few fundamental building blocks: the hollow thwack of a vintage drum machine, sinuous synth bass, searing keyboard leads, jazz chords that hang in the air like Los Angeles smog. Those basic elements have spilled over into so many EPs, collabs, and side-projects that he seems to be scooping up fistfuls of the same stuff and preserving it in packages of different sizes and colors. So when he makes an album, it’s a big thing: His brilliant 2009 debut Toeachizown sprawled across five LPs, and 2015’s Invite the Light was a triple album blessed by his funk forebears—Junie Morrison, Snoop Dogg, Leon Sylvers III, and Jody Watley, to name just a few.
Compared to the aforementioned monsters, Above the Fray is a modest affair—48 minutes, half the length of Invite the Light. DāM-FunK eliminates his own small but self-assured voice from the palette, letting fake guitars and funky worms do the talking for him. And it doesn’t exactly introduce any new sounds, either; even the song titled “Evolution” sounds like a holdover from Toeachizown. Above the Fray is, in fact, a lot like his 2019 EP STFU II. Both peak with lengthy, climactic house odysseys: “Deeper” on STFU II, “Levitate From It All” here. And both explicitly advertise the music within as a respite from the madness of the world to which DāM-FunK, as a Californian, has a front-row seat.
But like a great ambient artist, DāM-FunK finds subtle ways to push forward without really pushing forward at all. Above the Fray puts less of an emphasis on chords and more on solos, which halfway through “Levitate From It All” seem to duel in midair like fighting dragons. The “distorted guitar” synth preset on “Allies” and “Get There” is such a richly colored sound, somehow triumphant and melancholy at once, that it competes with just about any tear-jerking classic-rock actual-guitar solo you care to name. And while “UHF” and “I Mean Well” cruise at the unhurried pace of a lowrider, the title track and “Begin Again” hurtle forward so relentlessly that the instruments sometimes need time to catch up. The overall impression is of his most romantic and awestruck album yet. If his earlier work suggests a bleary-eyed, late-night haze, Above The Fray is a cloudless vista where you can see for miles.
Even its comparatively short length has an advantage: Above the Fray plays like something that might’ve been made in the early ’80s, when vinyl was still king and more expansive formats like cassettes and CDs were just starting to make inroads. A 10-minute track like “Levitate From It All” feels more significant and proggy when it’s slotted alongside shorter tracks on a shorter album than if it’d been just a pit stop on a multi-hour odyssey. It’s easier here than it is on his EPs to see just how ambitious his vision is, how ardent his belief remains in the power of funk. It’s also easier to worry that he’s landed on a sound so foolproof he’s more interested in luxuriating in it than elaborating on it. There was another track on Toeachizown called “Searchin’ 4 Funk’s Future.” Is he still?

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Mike Cooper's led a rich, erstwhile life, and these reissues of a cluster of folk-rock records released in the 1970s highlight just one facet of this multitalented artist's career.

Mike Cooper: Trout Steel/Places I Know/The Machine Gun Co. with Mike Cooper

The most famous line in Mike Cooper's biography is "turned down an offer to join the Stones." He did so in the early 1960s, while he was running a blues club in Reading; for this, he has earned some mild rock-history infamy, but given his trajectory since then it's unlikely he stuck around to observe it. Cooper had other things on his mind, and if he had joined the Stones, he might never have gotten to any of them: he's a collage artist, a painter, a world traveler, a sometime-music journalist, and a Hawaiian shirt enthusiast who will lecture you on the complicated post-colonial origins of the Hawaiian shirt.  In Cooper's rich, erstwhile life, the Stones were bit players, a group of well-meaning British boys inviting him down a very dull-seeming road.
After he and the Stones parted ways, Cooper departed England for the south of Spain, spending time in Almuñécar, reading Borges and 12th-century and Muslim philosophy and formulating an approach for the solo records he began producing in 1969 for the Dawn label. Trout Steel, in 1970, was his second solo album and his first landmark statement; Places I Know and Machine Gun Co., his fourth and fifth, were released in 1971 and '72. Cooper intended the two to be released at once, as a double album, but in "a corporate decision that involved musical taste, economics, politics and men in suits with cigars and bad taste in ties," as he deadpanned to Aquarium Drunkard, they were released separately.
They eventually fell out of print as Cooper moved on, to collaborating with writers and painters to accompanying silent films with live performance. But Paradise of Bachelors, which has made a name for itself in the increasingly crowded reissue market, spent two years tracking down the masters. The resulting reissues are the first time the albums have been available on vinyl since their initial release.
It is surprising, upon revisiting these albums, to contemplate that Trout Steel arrived first and was followed by the other two. The ear, free of context, suggests the opposite story: Places, in particular, is a more modest, songful affair than Trout Steel, which has the gracefully exhaled quality of a master statement. The records all tell various angles of the same story, however; Cooper began in British folk alongside Bert Jansch and Michael Chapman, strayed into country blues, and then veered further afield into free jazz when he became aware of Pharoah Sanders and Ornette Coleman. The wide-open music he makes here wants to let everything in: improv, folk-rock, blues, chamber pop. His high, rangy voice and dexterous, quietly brilliant guitar are the maypole that everything else twists around.
Cooper was driven by a firm theory in all of his explorations—namely, that country blues and free jazz are both "microtonal" forms that closely mimic the human voice and can naturally be combined that way. But as granular and egg-headed as that sounds, there is nothing even faintly theoretical about the music. The warmth of folk-rock is palpable throughout all three albums, even when observable traces of folk-rock have dissipated from the music. Cooper's tone is tender, grateful, wry, bewildered: "All these things are mine and much more," goes the refrain of Places I Know's "Broken Bridges". "And nothing that I’m sayin' seems to wanna make you leave," he marvels on "Night Journey", a song that cribs directly from Bob Dylan's "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry". "You don't know how she comes to me from time to time," he sings on "Time to Time", a gently love-drunk ballad.
Those songs, all from Places I Know, were written as exercises in imitation, tributes to Cooper's colleagues. They clear the path for the flights of imagination on Trout Steel and Machine Gun Co., in which Cooper's ensemble engages in flexible bursts of activity that abandon pop-song structure before relaxing back into it. Saxophonist Geoff Hawkins, standup bassist Harry Miller, and a coterie of other musicians wander in and out of the margins, forming the core of a band that could do anything and go anywhere while preserving the fluid, good-natured energy of Cooper's music. "I've Got Mine" wanders through 11 hushed minutes, the sung verse alternating with extended jamming like honey running from a spoon.
There are mildly abrasive moments—the spittle-flecked wailing of free saxophone on Machine Gun Co.'s "The Singing Tree", for instance, or the horns on "Goodbye Blues, Goodbye", which  break down like a St. Louis horn ensemble being dispersed by an angry traffic cop. But the albums mostly move in long, heaving sighs—long, free-flowing sections where Cooper plays in open tunings and clusters of instruments take their turns speaking to each other around him. In a way, he's like Van Dyke Parks; equally in love with traditions and in thrall to eccentricity, someone whose solo records build an alternate set of rules that their maker has no intention of spelling out for you.
"Improvisation is what I do—full stop. I am not interested in anything else," Cooper told video artist and sometime collaborator Grayson Cooke. "Improvisation is the reason to play music as far as I am concerned." On paper, this has a forbiddingly purist ring to it, a pronouncement from a high temple, but Mike Cooper makes music in a shack with the doors and windows open; for him improvisation is an allowance of all possibilities. He has name-checked Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, and you can hear its liquid ease coursing through every moment, while Cooper remains a calmly rooted spot in the center.


Ten months after the release of Merriweather Post Pavilion, Animal Collective return with an EP that finds them still on a creative roll.

Fall Be Kind EP

The first song on Fall Be Kind, Animal Collective's new five-song EP, is called "Graze", and it starts with a colorful swirl of Disneyfied strings as Dave Portner (aka Avey Tare) sings teasing lines like "Let me begin" and "Let light in" and "Some ideas are brewing." The song seems to be partly about the struggle of creation-- grazing on the imagination, maybe-- and then Noah Lennox (Panda Bear) comes in with his thick, honeyed voice to sing a bridge that seems a distant cousin of the Beach Boys' "Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)". There's tension in this opening section; the words and music suggest a sticking point, something that needs to be punctured before the song (and ideas) can really flow. And then it happens, the break, but in an unexpected way: a peppy flute melody materializes and the rhythm becomes a kind of stomp that seems designed to inspire folk dancing, while Portner and Lennox pick up the tempo and start singing rounds: "Why do you have to go?/ Why do you have to go?"
The first time through, hearing "Graze" explode into this weird sing-along RenFaire jig is a bit of a shock. It sounds very far from what we imagine a hip, frequently name-checked indie band with abrasive experimental roots to sound like. And their performance of it is certainly not tongue-in-cheek: They sound joyful, and they're not smirking. (I'm not sure they're capable of that particular expression, to be honest.) And thus it becomes clear that Animal Collective, despite having become a certain kind of alt touchstone in 2009, doesn't much care about conventional notions of cool. If they want to get dorky and put in a section that asks you to bust out the medieval garb and hop around on one leg for a minute, they'll do it. And maybe they'll put this song in the lead spot on an EP that follows up the biggest and most successful record of their career. All this went through my mind before finding out, after reading Fall Be Kind's credits, that the flute sample comes courtesy of an artist whose name became a punchline after an endless run of goofy TV spots advertising his music: Zamfir, the Master of the Pan Flute. Cool? These guys aren't sweating it.
Like their last three EPs of new material, Fall Be Kind exists in the orbit of the full-length that preceded it but it isn't defined by it. It's got songs written before and during the creation of Merriweather Post Pavilion, but they're songs that didn't fit that record for one reason or another. Given its fragmented genesis, it's surprising how listenable and of-a-piece Fall Be Kind is. "Graze" flows directly into "What Would I Want? Sky", a song that samples Grateful Dead's "Unbroken Chain" and is easily among the most warm, likeable, and melodic tracks Animal Collective have recorded. It refracts Aquarian optimism through a modern sense of uncertainty, undercutting the loop's jovial lilt with a tricky structure and lyrics that seem confused about what will happen next. "Sky" contains the first officially licensed sample of the Dead, and it's the best marketing move the band's organization has made since they greenlighted Cherry Garcia. It's not easy to take a cut-up voice and make it the centerpiece of a tune, and it's harder still to sing along with it in a way that doesn't sound forced. But "What Would I Want? Sky" sounds as natural as something that grew out of the earth.
The final three songs are more abstract and dreamy. "Bleed" feels like an interlude, something the band might have put on an album five years ago. It's a shifting drone, with Portner and Lennox's treated voices singing one simple refrain. It doesn't develop or do much, but it's not supposed to. Instead, it serves as a bridge to the EP's darker second half, which kicks off with "On a Highway". Something like the A.C. version of Bob Seger's "Turn the Page", "On a Highway" is a lonesome tour lament. Over a throbbing, dubby background, which is punctuated by thwacks of hand drums that slowly rise in the mix, Portner offers a series of scenes glimpsed out the window of a van, and he gets unusually personal, even referencing his bandmate directly ("Sick of too much reading/ Jealous of Noah's dreaming/ Can't help my brain from thinking"). Lennox's closing "I Think I Can" is the one song here that takes a few listens to sink in. It's longer (a touch over seven minutes), with busier production (sequenced piano notes, synth pulses, percussion, and voices flying back and forth between the speakers) and a more circular melody, but the final two minutes provide a terrific payoff to the opening clatter, with Lennox repeating the title's affirmation in a quick descending pattern as the song finally opens up.
At 27 minutes, Fall Be Kind is short enough to invite another play once "I Think I Can" fades out, which means a return to that striking second half of "Graze". When a band tries something that shouldn't work and brings it off, it's a sign of confidence. Animal Collective's focus and general disinterest in looking over their shoulders obviously makes what they're doing that much more appealing. But the most interesting thing about them at this point may be that, despite all the great music they've been making the past few years, it's not hard to imagine them failing. They've honed their craft and become very good at what they do, but there still seems to be a desire to go to unfamiliar realms, and it's possible that wherever they head next will turn out to be place they don't inhabit as easily. There's still a sense of gamble with Animal Collective, nothing is fixed-- and that's exactly what makes them an especially exciting band.


On this 5-disc musical memoir, Stephin Merritt has penned a song for each of the first 50 years of his life. His writing suggests that our deepest wisdom can be located in our most personal thoughts.

50 Song Memoir

Following his late-1990s triumph 69 Love Songs, Stephin Merritt began cannily organizing his Magnetic Fields songs. There was 2004’s alphabetic i, followed by the genre filters of 2008’s Distortion and 2009’s Realism. In 2012, Merritt took on a slightly defeatist project—“the concept is there is no concept!”—with Love at the Bottom of the Sea, an album whose lack of thematic unity resulted in a disappointingly uneven listen. Now, the Magnetic Fields return with a record that, like 69 Love Songs, forces Merritt to get focused and inspired. 50 Song Memoir is easily the best gimmick Merritt’s stumbled upon since the turn of the century.
Arranged chronologically with a song for each of the first 50 years of Merritt’s life, 50 Song Memoir is a conceptually satisfying work, spanning five discs and two-and-a-half hours without feeling repetitive or samey. If there’s one thing Merritt has learned over his three decades as a songwriter—besides how to seamlessly insert limericks into songs—it’s how to pace himself on record, keeping his quasi-showtunes from becoming cloying, his jokier ones from turning precious, and his ballads from sounding melodramatic.
Of course, for anyone turned off by the idea of Merritt—an escapist pop descendent of Bacharach and Sondheim—getting all Benji on us, you will be relieved to know that the story of his life sounds a lot like a Magnetic Fields album, and a very good one at that. There are some deeply revealing moments here. The opening songs, in particular, pinpoint the origins of Merritt’s career-spanning themes of placelessness and unrequited love—how they began with his parents’ wanderlust and a childhood cat, respectively. But 50 Song Memoir often takes a less literal route through Merritt’s life. “’76 Hustle 76” illustrates its time period by mimicking the then-inescapable sound of disco. Judy Garland’s death gets its own song, as does the rise of synthesizer music in the early ’80s. For a songwriter who once formulated an entire record around the first-person pronoun, 50 Song Memoir is more selfless than its title indicates. Here, Merritt seems more interested in exploring the moments that mark time—where we’ve lived, who we’ve loved and lost—than tracing his own particular narrative.
As a result, 50 Song Memoir is an immersive, incisive listen, despite its avoidance of traditionally memoiristic details (we never, for example, learn the names of Merritt’s parents, whether he has siblings, what it was like trying to follow-up a breakthrough album, etc). The themes that Merritt addresses over multiple songs become the album’s guiding lights. “All the young dudes of 25/Caught diseases, few survived,” he sings in “’90 Dreaming in Tetris,” before explaining, “We expected nuclear war/What should we take precautions for?” The AIDS crisis influences many of these songs, adding an ominous shadow to the darker tracks and a mournful tone to the love songs.
There’s something jarring about Merritt singing so directly about his fears—even his bleakest work used to come bundled with the naivety of a hopeless romantic. It helps that most of the album sits squarely in Merritt’s musical comfort zones. Like Love at the Bottom of the Sea, 50 Song Memoir draws inspiration from the sounds of each of his records, from the psychedelic synth pop of Holiday to the indie-film-trailer twee of i, even making room for genre exercises in dance music (his Future Bible Heroes records) and surf-rock (Distortion).
By the album’s end, though, the songs begin to lack the cultural context that distinguished the earlier ones, and 50 Song Memoir borders on morphing into just Several More Love Songs. But among these sit some of his finest tracks. “I guess there’d be other fish in the sea/But I don’t want fishes and you don’t want me,” he sings in the exquisite “’05 Never Again.” It’s the exact kind of song that would turn to putty in the hands of a lesser writer, but Merritt knows how to wring it for emotional resonance. In fact, its place near the end of the album almost signals—more than the impact of the breakup—his growing mastery as a songwriter. It suggests that our deepest wisdom can be located in our most personal thoughts. “I wish I had something better to do,” he sings, “But even my own clothes remind me of you.”
Just one song later, Merritt gets a little too specific, showing what the album might have been if he took its title more seriously. In “’06 ‘Quotes,’” Merritt dredges up an old controversy that involved several music critics accusing him of racism. The subject matter has him sounding slightly bitter and self-righteous, but even worse, it simply doesn’t make for a good Magnetic Fields song. Merritt’s work has always been less confessional and more “Things Fitting Perfectly Into Other Things”: you listen to his songs and marvel at how effortlessly he packs his thoughts into verse, one rhyme parlaying into the next. The best of 50 Song Memoir plays to his gifts (“From the time I began, I was mostly vegan,” he boasts in an early song), but with an extra layer of urgency, tied to the task of representing an entire year in a tightly structured pop song. “I am the least autobiographical person you are likely to meet,” Merritt admitted with typically humdrum candor in an interview about the album, “I will probably not write any more true songs after this than I did before.” He’s likely already dreaming up his next project—putting the past behind him and moving on, his catalog 50 songs richer as a result.