Stones Throw's new anthology documents how pioneering hip-hop artist Egyptian Lover paved the way for acts like N.W.A. and stretched hip-hop into more experimental territory.

Egyptian Lover: Egyptian Lover 1983-1988

Egyptian Lover 1983-1988

The email address Egyptian Lover lists on his Facebook profile, like Egyptian Lover himself, is a cipher and a time capsule, and not just because it exists on the ancient servers of former dial-up titans AOL. His handle is egyptianlover661, where 661 is a reference to DMSR-661, the catalog number for the first record a young Greg Broussard ever put out on his own Egyptian Empire label back in 1984. "DMSR" was a reference to his idol Prince’s 1999 "D.M.S.R." (Dance Music Sex Romance). The record was called "Egypt, Egypt," and it became a hit and a West Coast hip hop/electro staple. In making it, Egyptian Lover drew on both Prince (May He Rest in Peace and Reign in Purple) and Kraftwerk. He combined the melody from Kraftwerk's "Trans Europe Express" that Afrika Bambaataa had sampled on "Planet Rock," flipping it and inserting it into his own electrofunk framework, with the addition of some heavy breathing à la The Purple One.
"Egypt, Egypt" along with 21 other tracks have now been compiled, smartly sequenced, and packaged into 1983-1988, a 4-LP Stones Throw anthology that charts the Lover’s reign over West Coast hip hop during that same time. The anthology itself contains the majority of Egyptian Lover’s On the Nile album (including "Egypt, Egypt") with a couple of fresh re-edits from Stones Throw’s Peanut Butter Wolf ("Yes, Yes, Yes" and "My Beat Goes Boom"), 12" singles, never-released material, and others—all taken from the original master tapes. The anthology is mostly chronological, and the accompanying booklet contains a track-by-track breakdown as recounted by the Lover himself. (Full disclosure: Pitchfork contributor Jeff Weiss wrote the liner notes.) There aren’t any big sonic shifts or tracks that speak to particular "phases" the Egyptian Lover went through, mainly because for the years between '83-'88 and for the entire 30 years he’s been in the game, he’s primarily only had one phase and overarching sound: old-school electrofunk—that '80s 808-driven, Parliament- and Kraftwerk-inspired, breakbeats-referencing, futuristic-yet-analog pastiche that laid the foundation for everything from g-funk to techno to Miami bass that followed.
Egyptian Lover has remained similarly faithful over the years to his persona as a freak-a-holic pharaoh blasted forth from that bend in the space-time continuum known as his mind. His origin myth begins in high school, by which time he was already making and selling his own pause-button mixtapes to other students under his Egyptian Lover moniker. Broussard says he got his name in part from Rudolph Valentino, the famous white actor who played an "Arab sheik" in The Sheik, during that vibrant era of racist 1920s black and white films. The young Greg Broussard was drawn to Valentino’s savoir faire. Additionally, growing up in South Central Los Angeles in the '70s and '80s, he was drawn to King Tut, who represented to him a kind of mystique, power, and escape. Hence "Egyptian Lover" was born.
Not long after graduating high school, the young Lover was invited to join the ranks of Uncle Jamm’s Army, the top LA dance party crew at the time. KDAY Radio bumped them constantly, and at their peak, they filled up 10,000-capacity sports arenas. The Egyptian Lover became Uncle Jamm’s star DJ, spinning, scratching, and wreaking freaky havoc on dancefloors across LA, alongside Unknown DJ, Cli-N-Tel, Chris "The Glove" Taylor, and Ice-T, among others. The latter two, along with Egyptian Lover, can be seen working their magic at the infamous Radio Club (later Radiotron) in the landmark West Coast hip hop documentary Breakin’ N’ Enterin’. Not accidentally, Lover had also been hired to score the film, and two of those tracks are featured on the anthology: "Egyptian Lover Theme" and "Spray It Super AJ."
These LA mobile dance party crews, including World Class Wreckin’ Cru and LA Dream Team, were where a number of prominent West Coast DJs, producers, and MCs got their start. World Class Wreckin’ Cru, which included a young Dr. Dre, along with fellow future NWA member Yella, followed swiftly in Uncle Jamm’s steps in producing electro hits like "Surgery" and "Juice"—but only after Uncle Jamm’s had already changed the game a year earlier by being the first LA crew to press to vinyl, producing hits like "Dial-A-Freak" and "Yes, Yes, Yes," which now find their place on 1983-1988.
Since then, Egyptian Lover’s sound hasn’t changed a whole lot, but in the 30-some years he’s been in the game, he’s been able to manipulate a lot of different sounds out of the machines he uses. Often, this has meant his beloved 808 in various combinations with turntables, a mic, vocoder, and SH-101 bass synth (among others). Clocking in at just under 2 minutes, "What is a DJ if He Can’t Scratch" is a quick flex on all the DJs who can’t scratch, MCs who can’t rap, and beats made without live claps. A more minimalistic and rhythm-focused cut from his debut album On the Nile, the track shows off EL’s scratching techniques, including his ability to play a record backwards entirely on-beat. By contrast, "I Cry (Night After Night)" from the same album, is the most melodic and Prince-ly pop song of the lot and even incorporates electric guitar. Egyptian Lover whimpers, recounting his nightly walks staring up at the stars, looking himself in the mirror, and bemoaning an unrequited love interest. Over '80s drum smacks, he programs high, breathy, Prince-inspired call-and-response vocals and twinkly bells that ornament his raps, which are equal parts horny and humorous.
Lover also wasn’t afraid to stretch hip-hop into more experimental territory. The track "Electric Encounter," which was never actually completed until the making of this anthology, is basically a conceptual electronic number set to a hard funk beat. "Gears (gears), belts (belts)," recites a chipmunk voice, running through a long list of "computer" parts. "Plugs (plugs), switches (switches), nuts (nuts), and bolts (and bolts)." Over the course of the song, this computer’s desire for an electric encounter burns through its inner circuitry, and a heavily distorted hardware meltdown ensues, resulting in a gloopy puddle of busted wires and melted transistors.
This tendency to blur the lines between human and machine, reality and fantasy, and present and future is a hallmark of Egyptian Lover’s particular imagination—as well as of electro more broadly. "Kinky Nation," originally released on One Track Mind (1986), lays out Lover’s vision of his kingdom come. It’s a sexual paradise guarded by a robot with a talk box for a voice, who greets visitors at the gates with a mechanized, "Wel-come-to-the-kin-ky-na-tion." Like many of Broussard’s songs, "Kinky Nation" also leans on old popular cultural depictions of Ancient Egypt–which have often relied on exotification, or even cartoonification, and which even today affect popular (mis)understandings of modern Egypt and Egyptians. On "My House (On the Nile)," as on "Kinky Nation," EL describes his sex pad on the Nile, complete with camels out back and Egyptian women for whom "there’s no substitute." To be sure, Egyptian Lover injects a lot of humor into his music, but sometimes, as in the box set’s recent infomercial or in his songs about bellydancers, the way the exoticism plays out can feel questionable or off-color.
That said, Egyptian Lover’s imagination is still colorful in other ways. On that same "My House (On the Nile)" record, he talks about getting freaky on his 50-foot waterbed flanked by solid gold speakers, from which blast the very song he’s singing. "Dial-A-Freak," an early track from his Uncle Jamm’s days, is all about phone sex, an exercise in pornographic imagination if there ever was one. And on 1983-1988’s final track, "I Need A Freak," a remake of (unfortunately named) electro group Sexual Harassment’s single of the same name that Egyptian Lover then put on his 1994 Back From The Tomb album, and which now features additional synth work by Dam Funk, he raps, "In these times of hate and pain, we need a remedy to take us from the rain…I need a freak!" In the liner notes, Egyptian Lover mentions that when he first heard the song back in the day, he thought it sounded like Prince. So it seems only right that this is the note this anthology should end on.


Kool Keith offers a belated sequel to Dr. Octagonecologyst, which changed underground rap forever by abandoning any connection to the genre’s concrete-narrative roots.

The Return of Dr. Octagon

When Rakim made his triumphant return to the New York stage a few months back, the stage was so crowded with admirers-- everyone from Kool Herc to random nobodies-- that the man himself was barely visible. Off to the left of the stage, a naggingly familiar figure in a bright-orange jacket struck poses. "Kool Keith in the house!" Rakim yelled, and it was like: Oh, right, Kool Keith is a rapper.
Keith isn't doing much rapping these days. On The Return of Dr. Octagon, he's mostly ranting beatnik spoken-word stuff about aliens and Richard Gere and trees going extinct. It's getting more difficult to remember the fact that back in the 1980s this guy was one of the first to weave surrealist gobbledygook into old-school boast-rapping, and that he changed underground rap forever with the first Dr. Octagon album by abandoning any connection to the genre's concrete-narrative roots.
The difference is that both Critical Beatdown and Dr. Octagonecologyst were both rap albums. The Return of Dr. Octagon is something else entirely. Case in point: "A Gorilla Driving a Pick-Up Truck", wherein Keith mumbles about a primate motorist in a fake dusty-cowboy voice over eerie slide guitars and harmonicas: "I was moving fast/ He got up in front/ The gorilla looked at me and passed/ He was on my ass." It could be a Buck 65 parody, but after a few listens, it starts to sound like the work of another black man with O.G. outsider-artist ranter-status and a white fanbase whose giggly appreciation never moves too far from look-at-this condescension: Wesley Willis. Of course, Willis's mental problems were well-documented, while Keith's are just a rumor. But it's still a little troubling to hear Keith leave rap alone and get completely unhinged ("Get off the ship and walk to motherfucking 42nd Street like a motherfucking sailor"). It's like Keith has realized that a huge chunk of his fanbase could really give a fuck about rap, that they just want to hear the funny weird black guy say funny weird stuff. It may be a shrewd move on Keith's part, but it makes for an oddly deflating listen.
There's a world of difference between Dr. Octagonecologyst and The Return, and most of the divide comes from the production. On the first LP, Keith's lyrical insanity was balanced out by the RZA-esque sensibility of Dan the Automater, who anchored Keith in hip-hop without tying him down to it. On The Return, the Germany-based production trio One Watt Sun replaces Automator and abandons his minor-key synth zooms and damaged piano-rolls for brittle, artificial electro and kitchen-sink eclecticism. It's not all bad; "Trees" has a nice synth-bounce, and "Al Green" rests on an itchy, jumpy disco bassline. But more often than not they lean way too hard on obnoxious blurting keyboards and tinkly lounge-jazz pianos, and so we mostly get Keith ranting over halfassed IDM.
On a couple of songs, they chop up Keith's vocals into word-fragments, unfathomably using the album's longest track to showcase the nonexistent skills of Princess Superstar, who I didn't even realize was still trying to rap. The Return is supposedly a Kool Keith album, but four of the 14 tracks are skits, two mangle his vocals so the producers can show off their DJing, and one is a Princess Superstar song with Keith on the hook.
Keith himself is responsible for all of the album's good moments. Even when he's in unhinged-rant mode, Keith's imagery often remains lucid. And so the album's best song is "Ants", where he comes off frantic but omnipotent, comparing the humans infesting Earth to ants in a colony, enthused and disgusted at once: "Ants work together, jerk together, do concerts together, cry and get hurt together." It's dense and fascinating stuff, a tantalizing glimpse of what might've happened if Keith hadn't treated the reemergence of his most popular persona like an easy payday.


Latest from the should-have-been hip-hop star is rumored to be a deal-closer with Geffen, and from its bare packaging to its idle rhymes, it feels like one.

True Magic

There's more than a little griping in hip-hop circles these days, and not just from disgruntled older listeners, hungry for something "fun" that resembles the refracted memories of their youth. Fans are hungry for an MC they can genuinely admire-- one who doesn't resort to moral backpedaling, misogyny, foolishness, or even guile. An honest guy, but not just an everyman. A super-everyman. In many ways, Brooklyn's Mos Def (née Dante Smith), should have been that guy. With his third solo album, True Magic, that dream is all but over.
It's been rumored that this is a deal-closer, the last album Mos owes Geffen Records, the label that inherited him when Rawkus Records folded in 2002 and was rolled into Interscope Records' vast empire. Mos, who's best known now as an Emmy-nominated actor, or concurrently "that guy from the Denali commercial," seems to have lost any interest in a music career, at least one under Geffen's umbrella. Everything about this album is half-assed: From the bafflingly bare packaging to the at-times miserable mix, True Magic is a mess. Experimentation has been an organizing principle for Mos for some time, from the jagged riffs and polemics of "Rock N Roll" from his debut Black on Both Sides to the psych noodlings and bluesy crooning on his last album, the uneven and only slightly less calamitous The New Danger. Here, experimentation isn't even on the radar.
These songs feel blah-ed out, packed with idle rhymes that sound as if they've been sitting in a notebook that never should have been opened. Take this nugget from "Undeniable", a song nominated for a Grammy this year, one presumes because Mos carries some sort of artistic clout: "These jokers don't want none/ And all the pretty mamis want some/ Tell 'em come." Thrilling.
The production doesn't help often, either. "Murder of a Teenage Life" is turgid and off-key-- death knells for a rhymer-- while "Fake Bonanza" is the sort of aimless, generic production that gives boho rappers a bad name. Some tracks here would be decent fodder for a C-level mixtape, like "Crime & Medicine", a note-for-note remake of GZA's "Liquid Swords", minus the Genius' lyrical bite and intensity. Also included is the much-maligned "Dollar Day (Surprise, Surprise)", his Hurricane Katrina missive released last year. Messily rhyming in an odd twang over Juvenile side project UTP's "Nolia Clap", Mos received a pass for the song, as his heart is clearly in the right place (at least he dissed Bono), even if his ear seemed waterlogged. But to include it on a proper album is a poor move.
Still, Mos Def is an engaging figure that has long radiated the charisma, if not the work ethic, to grab the mantle hanging above his head. "U R the One" is a lovelorn, confused wail-- the grown continuation of his own "Ms. Fat Booty". He raps: "When we met your face was so brown, your ass was so round, of course I'm so down/ Wish I knew then what the fuck I know now/ Couldn't read the signs of the road: SLOW DOWN." It's one of the few symbols of growth here. Even the simplistic and poorly recorded "There Is a Way", a song with just two lines, has verve-- even some uplift-- in its rally-cry sloganeering.
For years, it seemed as if Mos' songs had ideas and that those ideas had vision (assuming we can all ignore "New World Water"), woven smartly with a bookish, booming flow. And suddenly, as his acting profile grew, his musical output faltered. Many of the songs that leaked prior to True Magic's release aren't included here, offering some a glimmer of hope that Mos is holding that stuff close to the vest for his first post-Geffen project. Still, the apathy here signals some sort of finality. Whether it's the end of a chapter or a book is unclear.


On her debut album, the Brooklyn-based producer and singer smartly and subtly remakes her sound, meshing R&B and New York drill in melodically refined and technically daring ways.

Hadja Bangoura

Hawa has never been shy about her ambitions. At 10 years old, the Berlin-born, Guinea-raised, and Brooklyn-based artist enrolled in the New York Philharmonic’s youth composer program and was, for a time, the youngest composer in the orchestra’s history. She quit the program when she was 15 because, she says, she “couldn’t make gay music in the Philharmonic.” Instead, she turned to rap and R&B, bringing her prodigious abilities and world-beating attitude with her. “My goal isn’t to be the best, it’s to take out the best,” she said in 2018. “It’s go big or go home.”
Hawa’s debut EP, 2020’s the One, showed signs of an artist still discovering the scope of her talent. While she proved herself to be a deft vocalist, able to beautifully bend notes in half and rap in messily precise patterns, the project’s often bland trap-pop production and cliched songwriting rendered it repetitive, suggesting unfulfilled promise. Still, if you lingered on any song long enough you’d likely catch a glimpse of Hawa’s immense, jarring talent: in her tenacious growl on “Frick,” for instance, or her gorgeous ad libs on “Get Famous.” It’s gratifying, then, to see her string together more than just great moments on her first full-length, Hadja Bangoura. Across its brisk 18-minute runtime, Hawa smartly and subtly remakes her sound, meshing R&B and New York drill in melodically refined and technically daring ways.
The production here is primarily courtesy of Hawa and her go-to producer, Tony Seltzer, as well as frequent collaborators Swaya and SYN. The sonic architecture is constructed from soft, solemn keys and skittery, re-pitched vocal chops; siren FX and sweeps sometimes creep into the mix, too, adding urgency to the album’s otherwise moody melodies. Even when drill-inspired drums stampede over the rest, like on the brilliant “Trade,” in which stacks of Hawa’s voice are sampled, distorted, and sped-up, there’s an emotionally cutting core anchoring these songs. The raw drums on “En Route” threaten to blow the beat open, but the jazzy electric piano and Hawa’s swooning harmonies convey a desperate longing that courses throughout the record like a curse.
Hawa’s emotive instincts are her key strength as a vocalist. Though her lyrics contain very few specificities or long lines of tension—the record’s most legible scenes depict raunchy sex or violent heartbreak—her delivery signals the commitment and resolve of someone for whom each syllable denotes life and death. “What do you want from me?” Hawa pleads in a stunning, anxious cry on lead single “Gemini.” It’s a brash, mesmerizing song that deepens with each listen; at first it scans as a trunk-busting revitalization of drill, then a raucous R&B ballad, and then, finally, the torturous and haunting sound of someone drowning in despair. On “Credits,” Hawa pesters a lover with a simple taunt: “Wouldn’t you like to know?” As the question repeats, her voice sinks further into a slab of distortion, panning right, then left, then trailing off in a tail of reverb. There’s no macro theme or emotional arc to contextualize what the song means, per se, but there doesn’t need to be. The best songs on Hadja Bangoura nuzzle beneath your skin, make you ache—replicating the immediacy of the feeling itself.
The back half of the album abandons drill experimentation and leans further into traditional R&B structures. “Ain’t U” boasts memorable melodies and bold production choices while also feeling slightly unfinished, like a demo waiting to be further fleshed out. So do “Progression” and “7 Deadly Sins Lust,” whose minimalism could use a touch more intricacy to achieve their full potential. At her best, Hawa appears unstoppable, like her goal to be the best artist in the world isn’t so far-fetched. Hadja Bangoura is a massive leap in the right direction, but its execution and attention to detail aren’t quite on the level of Hawa’s ambitious vision.


On 1995’s Daydream, the spectacular pop vocalist fine-tuned her songcraft. The album redrew the boundaries of what a Mariah Carey song—and a pop song—was supposed to sound like.

Daydream

Mariah Carey pranced through a slow-motion trainwreck in Times Square last New Year’s Eve and there was neither shock nor disappointment. Her instrument has been notoriously temperamental for well over a decade in the best possible conditions, let alone live on stage in the December cold. Her short setlist was ambitious at best and begging for trouble at worst. Laid low by technical problems, a failure to prepare, or some combination of the two, she tried to remain a good sport. She probably never should’ve taken the gig, though Carey’s career has been characterized by desperation and mismanagement for much of this decade, and she’d been reduced to hawking failed buzz singles and C-grade reality shows well before self-destructing in front of millions of viewers.
No matter how she got there, Carey found herself in an ignominious position for one of the greatest pop stars of the last 30 years. She’s sold enough albums to afford a new chaise longue every day until the sun burns out; when “Despacito” finally fell out of the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 this summer after 16 consecutive weeks, it had only just managed to tie a record Carey and Boyz II Men set two decades ago with “One Sweet Day.” She may reject being called the “queen of Christmas,” but it’s a title she earned by co-writing the greatest contemporary holiday song in “All I Want for Christmas is You.” Her biggest hits have cumulatively spent well over a year on top of the charts. Her dominance gave her the reach she needed to become the most influential pop vocalist and writer of her generation.
The critic Sasha Frere-Jones outlined the two linchpins of Mariah’s legacy in an astute 2006 piece in The New Yorker, published after she defibrillated her career with the release of “We Belong Together.” Frere-Jones called Carey’s 1990 debut single “Vision of Love” the “Magna Carta of melisma,” and while its influence has finally started to wane, it remains the gold standard for pop stars who care about the craft of singing. You can hear her ghost in Adele and Sam Smith, in Bruno Mars and Demi Lovato. It took Carey three and a half minutes to lay down the terms by which pop virtuosity is still defined: power, range, and versatility, all of which she possessed for the first decade of her career.
Her second stroke of genius was ultimately more impactful. Carey did more than any other artist to bridge the gap that once separated traditional pop and hip-hop and R&B. She fused genres and sounds that were otherwise distinct, encouraging future artists to find and meet her somewhere in the middle. The aftereffects trickled down through the teen-pop icons and R&B crossover acts of the late ’90s to the stars shaping contemporary music: Beyoncé, Kanye West, Drake. (And Claire Boucher, of course: “The first time I heard Mariah Carey it shattered the fabric of my existence and I started Grimes.”) When Taylor Swift taps Future and Ed Sheeran for a posse cut and Rihanna hops on a N.E.R.D. single to rap alongside Pharrell, they’re walking a trail Mariah helped blaze. Her fifth studio album, 1995’s Daydream, played host to some of her purest pop songcraft, but it also pushed the boundaries defining what a Mariah Carey song was supposed to sound like.
In retrospect, Carey’s omnivorousness was hiding in plain sight: she’d gotten Carole King and members of C+C Music Factory to share space on the tracklist of 1991’s Emotions, and her ebullient 1993 smash “Dreamlover” sampled Stax-era soul via Big Daddy Kane. She had the diverse listening tastes you’d expect from someone who grew up in and around New York City with a classically trained opera singer for a mother and a black Venezuelan father. (”I’d get home from school, and she would have, like, five friends over who were jazz musicians,” Carey told Vibe in 1996, “and I’d end up singing ’My Funny Valentine’ at two in the morning.”) The album version of “Fantasy” would’ve represented another step towards the sound of hip-hop on its own: sampling Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love” lent the song a laid-back bounce that wasn’t too far from G-funk.
And yet everyone other than Mariah was still shocked when Carey worked with Puffy Combs and Ol’ Dirty Bastard on the “Fantasy” remix. Her label wasn’t exactly psyched: “Everyone was like ’What, are you crazy?’,” Carey told Entertainment Weekly in 1997. “They’re very nervous about breaking the formula. It works to have me sing a ballad on stage in a long dress with my hair up.” Puffy couldn’t believe it either: it “bugged [him] out” when she asked to work with O.D.B. “She talked about Wu-Tang and Notorious B.I.G. and Mobb Deep—everybody who’s hot,” Combs told Vibe in 1996. “It was like talking to one of my friends.” The surprise in his voice is palpable, even on the page.
Carey was the only one with the vision, and it paid off: the “Fantasy” remix is still lean and cool, like one of those Nestea commercials where beautiful people fall backwards into interdimensional pools when they take a swig. By stripping the original “Fantasy” down to its skeleton, Puffy created space to appreciate Mariah’s complex vocal runs; O.D.B.’s ragged, comic energy is the perfect contrast to her adolescent dreaming. Hearing it now, it’s one of those songs where you can imagine pop shifting in real time as it plays. And Carey knows she had the last laugh: “They laughed at me at the label when I played them my ’Fantasy’ remix with Ol’ Dirty Bastard,” she told  Rolling Stone in 2006. “But you can’t explain to someone who didn’t grow up on hip-hop and who’s wanting to listen to the GoodFellas soundtrack exclusively that this is hot and it will be a classic.”
Daydream is at its most satisfying when Carey directly interfaces with R&B and hip-hop. “Underneath the Stars” is a tribute to ’70s R&B legends like Minnie Riperton complete with vinyl crackle, and it’s a display of the subtlety Carey’s detractors liked to claim she lacked. Gliding over a glistening Rhodes organ, she remembers an easy young love that slipped away. Lying with her lover on a warm summer night, she’s “a bundle of butterflies/Flushed with the heat of desire.” This is recurring imagery in the Carey discography, but it’s never rendered with more finesse than it is here. The accompanying vocal arrangement is delicate and imaginative; her whistle register is a garnish, not the main course. The final product is one of her greatest hidden gems.
She dipped into the opposite end of her range for “Melt Away,” a syrupy collaboration with Babyface that sounds like it could’ve been written for Toni Braxton. Carey’s voice is so rich during the song’s first verse that it tripped up some listeners: “A lot of people who wrote about the album thought that was Babyface singing at the beginning,” she laughed to Vibe. She’d come to lean on the sultry bottom half of her range as time and age made it tougher to reach the stratosphere, and “Melt Away” makes for an elegant early proof of concept.
Daydream also marked the start of Carey’s long, fruitful working relationship with the producer Jermaine Dupri. While the buoyant “Always Be My Baby” was a bigger hit—it was the third and final Daydream single to reach No. 1—it’s album cut “Long Ago” that now sounds like the shape of things to come. The songs have similar bones: there are moments in each where all you hear is Mariah singing over rock-solid piano chords, and the simplicity is almost surprising given her taste for the ostentatious. But “Long Ago” weds those chords to a rugged beat, and Mariah flows over it with the ease of someone with a genuine appreciation for hip-hop. (She could’ve gone even rougher: “I remember the first track we tried to do, she wanted to sing over Wu-Tang’s “C.R.E.A.M.,” Dupri told Genius last year.) Carey made this seamless blend of pop and hip-hop the core of Butterfly, and it served as the foundation for her late-career reinvigoration nearly a decade later.
Daydream is still interesting when Carey isn’t breaking new stylistic ground. She may have been showing off a newfound versatility on “Long Ago” and “Melt Away,” but she was also still near the peak of her powers as an athletic vocalist, and she put that athleticism to work powering daring arrangements and stunning modulations. “One Sweet Day” may be built around a killer hook, but that’s not what sticks with you on repeated listens—it’s the song’s ecstatic second half, in which Carey and Boyz II Men use that sturdy chorus as the foundation for gymnastic riffs and clusters of harmony. It’s not just showmanship, it’s an expression of communal grief that transcends lyrics and musical structure. (Carey wanted to write a eulogy after the producer David Cole, a collaborator and close friend, passed away in early 1995.) Their performance transforms an elegy into something joyous, a celebration of life and whatever might unite us after it. And while no other song on Daydream can match the emotive power of “One Sweet Day,” Mariah’s performances are uniformly strong no matter the context. “I Am Free” is a gospel workout, complete with an organ and the support of a mini-Mariah choir; dewy weeper “When I Saw You” is rescued by her melismatic belting; Ariana Grande would eat her ponytail for a ’50s waltz as potent as “Forever.”
The only Daydream ballad that’s an unequivocal failure is Carey’s cover of “Open Arms,” and that’s in part because it lacked Mariah’s pen. Carey came into her own as a writer on Daydream: she showed off her fabled vocabulary without leaning on the self-aware quirk of her later work, and almost every song is bolstered by at least one stunning piece of imagery. “When I Saw You” opens with a description of a lover that takes on cosmic significance: “Soft, heavenly eyes gazed into me/Transcending space and time.” (She touches on the power of “dawn’s ribbon of light” in the second verse.) The bridge of “Melt Away” opens with a “cloud of reverie” and ends with Mariah “rhapsodizing.” And she describes the love she feels throughout “Underneath the Stars” as “so heady and sublime,” a phrase that also happens to describe Carey’s lyrical stylings.
Daydream wasn’t just transitional in a musical sense. We know now that it was the beginning of the end for Mariah’s innocence, a moment that has some gravity given we’re talking about a star who likes to refer to herself as “eternally 12.” Her marriage to former Sony Music chief Tommy Mottola was crumbling, and she would look back on their relationship later and reflect on how it was governed by abuse and control. She didn’t know it then, but her absolute commercial zenith would soon be in the rear-view mirror. The instability of Rainbow and the full-blown breakdown of Glitter weren’t far away. Only closer “Looking In” hints at the darkness looming on the horizon: “She smiles through a thousand tears/And harbors adolescent fears/She dreams of all that she can never be.” It’s a startling final statement, but you still leave Daydream with effervescence in mind—sweet, stirring, and dominant, a tour de force from one of the greats at the top of her game.


On a disorienting and adventurous new album, the Mexico City hardcore band raises hell in pursuit of a better world.

Fantasías Histéricas

When Malcría scrawled “What the fuck do you want?” in Spanish across an early EP, the title was less an insult than an invitation: They raised the question with the goal of kindling listeners’ determination. Malcría come from a long line of hardcore bands that find bottomless energy within their anger, and since breaking onto Mexico City’s scene in 2014, the trio has scoffed and stomped and screamed in pursuit of a better world. Lately, their anger spawns from the recognition that the future their generation was promised no longer exists.
On Fantasías Histéricas, their second album, Malcría try to imagine a reality where misery and paranoia can be escaped, but they find the task impossible. Singer-bassist Baldo Crudo, guitarist Alan Di González, and singer-drummer GG Androide drop right in on opener “Una Vez Más,” warning that decadence and blind devotion have led us astray. A flurry of D-beat drumming and Crudo’s yelped vocals morph through tempo change-ups, a hair metal guitar solo, and excerpts from the Spanish dub of John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness. On “El Monumento,” Androide admits his fight against the status quo is in vain: He’s growing older and more fragile each day, just like everyone else. By the time he acknowledges there’s a limit to his romanticism on “Utopía y Fracaso”—“No tiene caso imaginar una sociedad donde no haya mal/El mundo ideal es irreal” (“There’s no point in imagining a society where there is no evil/The ideal world is unreal”)—he’s already scratched his throat trying to scream it into existence.
Malcría write their lyrics as a group, and Crudo and Androide take turns singing them. Throughout Fantasías Histéricas, their voices stab each word with the rhythmic motion of a tattoo machine. The two spit out warnings and twist vowels with a similarly charred tone; panic and fear have a way of reducing us to equals. The dynamic interplay between their ever-so-slightly different vocals only adds to the album’s disorienting rush. While they don’t adhere to nihilism per se, Malcría find little comfort in ideas like personal liberty or even work-life balance. If you don’t ignore these sources of false hope, the band warns, you’ll get sucked into a black hole. “Toda fantasía tiene su precio” (“Every fantasy has its price”), Crudo reminds on the title track, as Di González shreds with thunderous volume and the muddy, crunchy distortion of grunge. On closer “Todo Es Aquí,” Malcría barrel over the finish line with synchronized riffs that sound like Rudimentary Peni overlaid with Poison Idea. At a whopping three minutes, it’s by far the longest song on the record.
Even with the breakneck pace—eight songs in just 15 minutes—Fantasías Histéricas offers more space to breathe than 2019’s El Reino De Lo Falso, which never slowed. Malcría’s latest feels more melodic and adventurous, a byproduct of the musicians embracing their varied experience: Crudo handles his bass with a jazz hand, Di González incorporates the gloom of death metal and black metal, and Androide keeps his hardcore drumming tight with ample practice. Take “Precipicio,” where Malcría pummel a power chord before picking it apart into a gnarly, caustic spread of gothic punk, never losing sight of their hardcore roots. This blend of styles mirrors their lyrical focus on the risk and thrill of living a precarious world. “Quiero enfrentarme al tiempo y fracasar por la eternidad,” screams Androide “¿Qué tan cerca puedo llegar?” (“I want to face time and fail for eternity/How close can I get?”). With Fantasías Histéricas, Malcría channel that disenchantment into the search for something better.


Cult favorites Mock Orange return with an eighth album that reconciles their later alt-country leanings with their Midwestern emo roots.

Mock Orange: Put the Kid on the Sleepy Horse

Put the Kid on the Sleepy Horse

The most recent spate of “Best Emo Albums of All Time” lists makes an admirable attempt to legitimize a style of punk rock that has spent the past two decades derided as something you’re supposed to grow out of. But the inclusions unintentionally serve as the best counterargument: Dear You might be the only time you see a band’s *fourth album in there. Nearly of all the classic emo bands either spectacularly implode in their early stages, devolve into sustainable mediocrity or are Fall Out Boy. But after launching some of the leading figures of emo’s 4th wave, Topshelf Records has served as a continuing ed lab for elder statesmen: in 2014, Braid sounded as contemporary and vital as ever on their Will Yip-produced No Coast *and also shed some light on the oft-overlooked Jazz June when they released *After the Earthquake *months later. With their *ninth *release and first in five years, Mock Orange is in the same place the Velvet Teen were on their 2015 Topshelf comeback All is Illusory: previously unclassifiable to their detriment, they’re now given a new, flattering context in which to be understood.
Looking at it now, Mock Orange’s convoluted trajectory could actually serve as the basis for a tragicomic mockumentary of late-'90s emo. Their first two LPs were produced by Mark Trombino and J. Robbins and released on a label that was destroyed by George Lucas in a copyright infringement suit. After the turn of the century, they evolved into a kind of floral, orchestrated indie rock that the Get Up Kids, the Promise Ring and Saves the Day used to effectively end their commercial peaks. 2004’s sync-friendly *Mind is Not Brain *somehow found them within reach of MTV2 airplay and major cable shows and fittingly, they toured with Rogue Wave, that era’s definitive “shit luck” band. On their next two albums, they dabbled in literate, NPR-indie and more or less went alt-country. And now, here’s Put the Kid on the Sleepy Horse, which was put in jeopardy after a nearly fatal hard drive failure. Seriously, always back things up, kids.
After all that, it’s natural that Mock Orange would spend *Put the Kid *trying to assess whether the bullshit has been worth it. Single “High Octane Punk Mode” probably would’ve been sarcastic even in their early days, but the lightly chiding tone fits within what is otherwise midtempo, “The O.C.” indie mode. Ryan Grisham relates how his desire to expand his social circle and listening habits even the slightest bit are still seen as betrayals in his community, reflecting on the blinkered view within hardcore that only becomes apparent once you step outside of it: “the safety pin floats way out, but never really goes away.”
As with *No Coast, Put the Kid on the Sleepy Horse *finds itself in an existential and geographic liminal space, between adult responsibility and spiritual upkeep, between major media centers. And yet, while Braid felt marooned even in Chicago, Mock Orange is based out of Evansville, Indiana, a corridor between the Midwest and the South—bordering Kentucky, equidistant from Chicago and Tupelo, Mississippi. Twenty years in, they’ve finally reconciled the strident, universal yearning of their earlier, midwestern emo phase with the twang of 2011's *Disguised as Ghosts. *Surprisingly, they’ve dropped any vague sense of alt-country for straight-up southern boogie: the blown-out riffs on “Window” and “Too Good Your Dreams Don’t Come True” sound like they are one Dan Auberbach cosign away from KROQ airplay.
And yet, while this is undoubtedly the greatest eighth album from any band ever tagged as emo, *Put the Kid on the Sleepy Horse *itself lacks the true standout moments that would explain what earned Mock Orange their cult status to begin with. The most intriguing hook occurs on “Nine Times,” where brash slide guitars and shifty rhythms pivot into a stately march on the chorus. Elsewhere the choruses cruise rather than soar, and Grisham’s lyrics cut your skin but never draw blood. Brief insight into scene politics aside, most of his judgment is directed at himself for his artistic intransigence. Of course, there’s a cheat code for dealing with this, which is to write about writer’s block:  “There was a time when all my lines kept pouring out, now they’ve gone missing,” he sings, lamenting the “dead end verses on my back.” After the self-deprecating “Too Good Your Dreams Don’t Come True,” the final song is titled “Tell Us Your Story” and it's final line is “I fear I’ve stayed too long.” But the song itself is the first time  on the album Mock Orange sound triumphant, so while that might have been his fear, it was worth the past five years to push through it.


The Bronx rapper drags himself back and forth between agony and breakthrough on his latest record, the fullest and most realized album of the 20-year-old’s career.

Tears of Joy

It’s easy to get lost in MIKE’s Tears of Joy: the baritone voice, the abstract bars, the unrecognizable sample chops that lift you into his painful world. The Bronx emcee has kept his personal life close to his chest, only revealing small bits here and there, mainly his deep emotional and spiritual connection to his mother. Tears of Joy is a magnetic and loving tribute to his mother, who passed away recently. After years of shadowy raps, MIKE is at his most vulnerable in the face of tragedy, able to turn grief and frustration into an album rich with both musical and individual growth.
Much of MIKE’s writing has come off as a stream of consciousness, but on Tears of Joy every bar has a purpose. “Sittin’ with my head in my hands, hold it in” and “Trippin’ why my eyes always damp, roll a spliff,” he says defeatedly on the album’s intro. On the following track, “Whole Wide World,” he sounds like he’s sleepwalking, stuck in a state of gloom. “Shit scary, but I stay spinnin’/Lookin’ through obituaries with your name in it,” says the 20-year-old in a heavy voice, over an Ohbliv beat that feels like you’re stuck eternally in the waiting room at the dentist.
MIKE’s music is a mood, always attempting to drag itself through the melancholy to seek a brighter outlook. On “Ain’t No Love,” he warmly reflects over a dreamy Ted Kamal production, perfect for a Sunday morning: “With my moms that type of stress is soothing/Really wrapped around your arm while the weather gruesome.” Then, long-time collaborator Adé Hakim laces MIKE with a head-knocker of a beat and he stumbles into that new outlook. “I remember I was blinded, I can see now,” he says heartily on “Planet.” His feelings are an endless back and forth: breakthrough followed by agony; agony followed by breakthrough. And he often just opts to numb that uncertainty by smoking his days away: “Why you always see me high, it’s hard to come down.”
But MIKE shines brightest when he takes over the production reigns under his beat-making alias DJ Blackpower. It’s like these songs specifically were recorded in a room, alone, with his eyes shut, picturing both the past he misses and the future he dreams of. There are times when he realizes that his youth has just been ripped from him and moments when he’s keeping his feelings stuffed in a box, but the way he weaves in his rich vocal samples and the steady bounce of the drums gives off a feeling of joy even at his most bleak.
The album’s finale—the horn-laden, Navy Blue-produced “Stargazer Pt. 3”—is both crushing and cheerful. MIKE raps in a voice that sounds like he’s trembling, seconds away from tears. He’s still grieving and maybe he always will be, but those better days are within reach. That hopefulness has been the core of MIKE’s music since he was just a promising Bronx teenager with an affinity for words, searching for the voice he’s finally found.


Half the fun of any new Matmos album lies in its concept: Here, Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt attempted to telepathically communicate their intentions for this record to a group of subjects, whose responses are woven into Marriage. The scientific approach resulted in an antic, lively record.

The Marriage of True Minds

Matmos has made a career-long game of devising increasingly outre frameworks for its records. Half the fun of any new Matmos album, in fact, is in discovering its motivational concept: examination of the sounds of an operating table, for example, or the folk music of the Civil War. And yet the conceit for The Marriage of True Minds, their ninth full-length, just might top them all; if its hypothesis were true, you would hardly need this review to tell you what to expect of it, because you would already know.
Briefly: The members of Matmos, Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt, conducted parapsychological experiments on a series of test subjects that sound oddly similar to those from the opening scene of Ghostbusters: They attempted to telepathically communicate their intentions for this record to their subjects, who then reported any images or sounds they thought they received. Their input is woven inventively throughout True Minds; On "In Search of a Lost Faculty", you can hear these participants struggling to describe visions of triangles (a startling number of them report having received images of triangles, actually) while Daniel and Schmidt surround them with ringing chimes. The concept seems designed for ethereal, mystical music, but Matmos doesn't really do ethereal or mystical: The Marriage of True Minds hits harder and feels more joyfully physical than anything Matmos has done in years.
Daniel and Schmidt sometimes give off the impression that they are eggheads, forensic scientists of sound, but Matmos' music, at its best, has always been fun, and The Marriage of True Minds is no exception. With some judicious excisions of its scary and disturbing parts, most of it would make an excellent soundtrack for a kindergarten classroom. "Very Large Green Triangles" starts out with some heavy, irregular stomping, transitions into some four-on-the-floor pummeling, and then lurches to an abrupt halt as if signaled by a cartoon traffic cop's hand. "Mental Radio", with its sploshing puddle sounds and clattering layers of percussion, sounds like a conga line sent across across a wet, dirty subway platform. "Ross Transcript" opens with the sound of a radio flitting between stations, landing briefly on a syrupy bit of Muzak before plowing forward, cycling through a menagerie of funny sounds, including baaing sheep and babbling, indignant chatter seemingly recorded on the planet Tatooine.
There are still occasional bursts of discomfort-- Daniel and Schmidt have cast-iron stomach for cringe-inducing sounds, and it wouldn't be a Matmos album if you didn't occasionally wince. The dry, squeaky violin that briefly saws away on "You" hits the ear like a dentist scraper touching an exposed nerve ending. "Ross Transcript", in addition to the funny noises described above, also samples a bit of what sounds a lot like choking and spluttering. Their music has always had an antic, morbid cast to it, like a Grimm's fairy tale with all the ghoulish aspects slightly accentuated, and The Marriage of True Minds is maybe the most confident they've ever been at balancing the two sides of this equation.
There are many songs on this album, for instance, that you could actually dance to, rather than just think about doing so. The stomping, crunching, tactile feast of itching guitars, hand claps, and zooming interstellar synths that is "Tunnel", for instance, is an NYC no-wave disco done as a splatter painting. "E.S.P." starts out with a parodic, goofy recitation of the lyrics to the Buzzcocks' song "E.S.P." in growling, black-metal style. Then, after thrashing through some doomy down-tuned metal guitars, it lifts off into a fizzy, joyful coda, a hootenanny swarmed by genetically engineered fireflies. I didn't make the connection to the Buzzcocks song until the fourth or fifth listen, as I was too absorbed in the music itself. The best compliment you can pay Matmos' music, then and now, remains that in the moment, it didn't matter to me in the slightest.


Fat White Family sound just like they look—diseased, drug addled, utterly corrupt. Their debut album is getting a belated North American release after gaining a swell of attention in the UK. It represents the shambolic beginnings of something, full of directions tried and discarded and barely fleshed out.

Champagne Holocaust

Fat White Family sound just like they look—diseased, drug addled, utterly corrupt. The fact that they live above a London pub that stages exhibitions of rectal hand insertions, all while serving Sunday lunch to families, is an almost too-perfect addendum to their bio. Champagne Holocaust is the band’s debut album, a no-budget affair originally released on Bandcamp and now getting a belated North American release after gaining a swell of attention in the UK. The nucleus of the six-piece band is two Northern Irish brothers, Lias and Nathan Saoudi, plus guitarist Saul Adamczewski, formerly of failed indie-punk outfit the Metros. If the album sounds like it cost about 10 of their English pence to record, then it probably did—but that’s all part of Fat White Family’s squalid charm, where rampant idiocy, intelligence, and deranged humor combine.
A cursory look at this band’s early press leaves little doubt that they know how to play the game, with one attention-seeking spectacle after another giving them all the scrutiny they need. Bodily fluids gush forth from the stage when they play, their manager is a tweed-clad fellow named Robert Rubbish, and they even gained note for a mundane stunt to mark the death of Margaret Thatcher. It speaks volumes for how exhausted the corpse of rock & roll is that such antics can still prick the attention, but at least Fat White Family appear to be as genuinely unhealthy and depraved as their records and shows suggest. They’re even topical, with one of their best songs, “Cream of the Young”, taking an unflinching approach to pedophilia, just as their country is sinking in a mire of celebrity related scandal relating to the topic.
It’s unlikely that Champagne Holocaust will be the album Fat White Family is best remembered for—this is the shambolic beginnings of something, full of directions tried and discarded and barely fleshed out. Lias owes a huge debt to Ben Wallers of Country Teasers for both lyrical inspiration and execution, plus a dose of Mark E. Smith and, perhaps more surprisingly, a soupçon of blue-eyed funk and the wistful psychedelic folk of Shimmy Disc outfit Bongwater. It’s distinctly backward-looking in outlook and sound, but that scarcely matters when the force of Lias’ songwriting obliterates the indie template they often take as their starting point. “Who Shot Lee Oswald?” amusingly imagines a series of culprits for the title’s crime, including Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground, and gloriously devolves into sonic and lyrical chaos that’s just on the right side of stupidity. “Was it a secret government within the American government?” Lias asks at one point.
The place Fat White Family are coming from is just as confusing as the stylistic turns this record takes. They’re part drug addled lunatics hell-bent on blocking out the world, part angry Situationist operatives looking to kick up a shitstorm of trouble as the world disintegrates around them. If contemporaries such as Sleaford Mods also find humor and anger in the wider state of things, Fat White Family are just as likely to turn everything inward and examine their own failings. “If my mind was clean I’d be fine,” is a key lyric on the raggedy “Borderline”, but instead, we get a distinctly unclean vision of life, with Lias at his best when depicting sordid sexual encounters. Most of those gain a grubby strength from the minutiae he picks up on—the “five sweaty fingers on my dashboard” in his paean to car fellatio, “Is It Raining In Your Mouth?”, being his greatest chant-along moment to date.
In some ways it’s fitting that Champagne Holocaust can’t hold together as a coherent piece, especially when the primary working mode of this band takes disarray as an important requisite to function. The back half is especially weak, leaning into cheery, jangly guitars that don’t have a natural place (“Bomb Disneyland”) and redundant Syd-era Pink Floyd pastiche (“Garden of the Numb”). This version of the record wisely adds one of their strongest moments, “Touch the Leather”, as a final rallying call, with Lias again immersed in a pit of sexual degradation that appears to be the best reflection of his naturally soiled state of being. The video for the song—Lias, missing teeth, his face wrinkled beyond his years, mouthing words in slow motion while his brother moons the camera—illustrates the mix of low-level living and base humor this band has sunk into. It’s not pleasant, maybe not even relatable for many, but it works simply because it’s so vivid in its depiction of a life permanently on the cusp of falling apart.


Pop and R&B melodies meet shambling, C86-style song structures on the eclectic Toronto band’s first album since 2011.

Bernice: Puff LP: In the air without a shape

Puff LP: In the air without a shape

In the days before GarageBand, a great deal of indie music was recorded over a few rushed days in cheap studios and pushed out on vinyl with barely any post-production. Bernice, a Toronto group led by singer-songwriter Robin Dann, often sound like a throwback to that glorious, shambling era of the Pastels, Sarah Records, and C86. There is a ramshackle charm to many of their songs, which lollop along at their own sweet pace. And the band’s commercial ambitions are perhaps best summed up by the seven-year gap between their debut album, What Was That, and its follow-up, Puff LP.
Where Bernice differ from most indie shamblers is in their broad-minded approach to songwriting. While few C86 acts betrayed influences more diverse or mainstream than the Smiths, Bernice take their cues from electro, jazz, soul, pop, and R&B, with Dann recently naming Brandy, Sade, and Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream as touchstones. This eclecticism sets up a fascinating musical conversation in which melodies that lean toward R&B and pop—genres whose orthodoxy wouldn’t accept a shamble unless it was Auto-Tuned, double-tracked, and sonically boosted to within an inch of its life—meet Bernice’s loosened song structures.
The single “Passenger Plane” has a soaring chorus that you could imagine Perry bellowing, hurricane-lunged, at the center of a million-dollar music video. But Bernice treat the hook as though it were a nervous hamster, swaddling it in paper-thin layers of synth melody. On “St Lucia,” another fabulous chorus is subverted by a rhythm that sounds permanently on the verge of toppling over. The drums on “Glue” suggest a Canadian exchange student tapping out rhythms on pots and pans outside a tourist attraction for beer money, rather than the perfectly polished, corporeal thump of R&B.
Despite this purposeful raggedness, the songs never feel unfinished: “Glue” also sees the band show off a knack for embellishing their songs with unlikely details, including chirps, burbles, and clicks of indeterminate origin. Ideas surface as light, individual touches rather than piling up in full-bodied, radio-friendly layers. “He’s the Moon,” the best song on the album, is the clearest example of this trade-off between detail and simplicity. Much of the song consists of a simple bassline and Dann’s swooping, Björk-style vocals, to which the band adds subtle trimmings like the occasional clatter of a drum-machine clap, patches of static, and a woozy recorder riff.
Despite the strong songwriting, Puff doesn’t court—and seems unlikely to win over—a broad audience. Dann’s labored low notes on “David,” which recall a prepubescent boy dressed up in a suit to buy cigarettes, might make you wish Bernice had smoothed their rough edges just a bit. The album’s lyrics periodically verge on twee, in lines like, “Red and orange and yellow and blue/I am rubber and you are glue,” from “Glue.” There are moments, too, when the idea-rich Puff becomes idea-laden; “Boat” tosses and turns like the titular vehicle, its melodies too insubstantial to carry so much instrumental folly.
But this willingness to confound is, in part, what makes Bernice special: The band records quietly alluring music in a world of grandstanding blowhards and hides brilliant pop melodies in the shadows of obscurity. Puff may sound as slight as its name suggests—but this idiosyncratic and inventive record is anything but lightweight.


Ian MacKaye and Amy Farina have a new band with an old friend—Fugazi bassist Joe Lally. Their debut is a shrewd distillation of some of the United States’ most insidious issues.

Coriky

It is both cruelly ironic and fitting that Fugazi bowed out after 2001’s The Argument, just as the U.S. was entering a perpetual state of war, both in the external, militaristic and ideological senses. As the unwavering moral compass of the underground—not to mention the most impassioned, inspiring, and adventurous post-hardcore band of their time—Fugazi had spent much of the late ’80s and ’90s opening our eyes to the abuses of power, income inequality, and toxic masculinity that have only seemed to become more pervasive in the 21st century. In times of crisis, we look for heroes to rally around—or even just to provide a quality protest song—but Fugazi were never interested in being those kinds of saviors. They were sharing the blueprints that exposed the fallacies of the system, but their retreat affirmed that the task of changing the world is on all of us.
And yet when, during George W. Bush’s first term, Ian MacKaye debuted the minimalist, melodic indie-rock duo the Evens with ex-Warmers drummer (and wife) Amy Farina, it felt a bit like Clark Kent opting to live as a mortal while Metropolis plunged into chaos in Superman II. Though his insights were as sharp and critical as ever, MacKaye had essentially traded in Fugazi’s bullhorn for tin cans and string, resulting in music that was more intimate and threadbare. The Evens’ low-stakes, homespun quality was further reinforced when the band was put on the backburner after the couple became parents, resulting in a six-year gap between 2006’s Get Evens and 2012’s The Odds, and mostly silence since.
Now, in the midst of the most tumultuous election year in American history, MacKaye and Farina have resurfaced with a new band featuring an old friend—Fugazi bassist Joe Lally (fresh from playing in jazz-punk power trio the Messthetics with fellow Fugazi alumnus Brendan Canty). But in terms of career aspirations, they practically make the Evens look like shameless self-promoters. Formed in 2015, the new group existed for three years as a private affair; they played their first show in 2018 before they had even settled on a name, announcing it at the bottom of a community-bulletin email from Washington, D.C. activist group Positive Force. Not surprisingly, Coriky sound like they could’ve popped up in 2003 as the logical bridge between the nimble, jazz-inflected rhythmic undercurrents and artful dissonance of latter-day Fugazi and the more congenial pop sensibilities and song-sketch scrappiness of the Evens. But if Coriky sound more emboldened and agitated than the Evens ever did, exhibiting the focus and fury the times demand, they’re less interested in addressing the current state of the nation than in probing the insidious issues and attitudes that afflict America no matter who’s sitting in the Oval Office.
As ever, MacKaye shrewdly distills macro calamities to personal, almost prosaic vignettes. “Clean Kill” takes the concept of “office drone” to its most literal extreme, indicting a modern military apparatus where triggering drone strikes halfway around the world is just another mindless desk job, complete with coffee breaks and idle chit-chat. The perverse normality of the scene is framed by an uncanny sing-along hook—“it’s a clean kill, but it’s not clean”—that captures both the callous efficiency of the gig and the mental toll exacted on the operators. “Have a Cup of Tea” zooms out to implicate the country as a whole: As the song locks into a “Suggestion”-like lurch en route to a similar conclusion (i.e., “we are all guilty”), MacKaye explains how authoritarian violence—and bourgeois indifference to it—is simply the American way: “It’s in our mind/It’s in the Constitution/It’s in our house/It’s in our hands/It’s in our eye/It’s in our blood/It’s in our DNA.”
When you hear MacKaye barking those words with jugular-popping force alongside Lally’s stalking bassline, it’s tempting to close your eyes and imagine it’s 1991 with the White House looming in the background. Coriky abounds with similar displays of Fugazi-fan catnip, like the “Give Me the Cure”-style build-up of “Inauguration Day” and the start-stop funk and frenzied guitar scraping of “Say Yes.” But as the vocal interplay on the latter song illustrates, Farina’s presence lends Coriky a personality all their own. Where MacKaye and Farina often worked in humble harmony with the Evens, her sassy and soulful performances here position her as a more mischievous foil, playfully poking holes in the patriarchy (“Too Many Husbands”) and the shocking regularity of shootings in American classrooms (“Jack Says”).
In moments like these, Coriky present chronic disappointment as a psychic survival tactic, offering odd reassurance that things have always been fucked. (On the cheeky “Hard to Explain,” MacKaye seems to equate right-wing trolls with Minor Threat stans who still resent him for abandoning hardcore dogmatism to pursue Fugazi’s open-minded experimentalism: “Your position is you want me to fix/Something that you said I broke in 1986.”) But they’re not about to let their complaints harden into complacency. Atop the doom-blues groove of “Last Thing,” Farina, MacKaye, and Lally solemnly sing in unison: “The last thing we ever wanted was a war/But we found it much too easy.” It’s the sound of D.C. punk’s most seasoned footsoldiers declaring their return to active duty.

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On their debut album, the elusive R&B act signed to Drake's OVO Sound treats sex not as a social transaction but a serious act—something that can make you see things that aren't there, that can be a balm for life's rough edges, that can show you the worth of looking beyond yourself.

Sept. 5th

There's power in quiet, strength in silence. You can find it in the yawning spaces between beats on D'Angelo's "Untitled (How Does It Feel)"; in the skeletal longing of Prince's "When Doves Cry"; in the flickering throb of Depeche Mode's suitably named "Enjoy the Silence"; in Elliott Smith's "Angeles," which countered music industry excess with stark strums and whispered venom. Bits and pieces of Smith's cautionary tale are woven into "Angela," the penultimate track from dvsn's debut album, Sept. 5th, and though the depressive singer/songwriter doesn't seem like an obvious reference point for this lusty R&B project, the sonic nod makes a certain kind of sense. They both know emptiness. They both allow for holes in which listeners can fill in their dreams, desires, sorrows.
In his book Every Song Ever, music critic Ben Ratliff makes note of the intimacy that can arise from spareness. "Open space, whether in a park or a poem or a song, is first an element of design," he writes. "And then it is a sign, a signifier, or a symbol." Part of Drake's OVO Sound roster, dvsn—pronounced "division"—take this idea of austerity-as-symbol to several extremes: in their gaping slow jams, yes, but also in their artwork, which is dominated by big division signs, and their public face, which has thus far been almost entirely faceless. No videos. No press photos. No needy guest shots from their famous boss. But even following in the fog of one-time enigma and fellow Torontonian the Weeknd, dvsn's elusiveness doesn't seem like a gimmick. It feels assured. It understands that, in the face of digital endlessness, restraint is just as important as creation.
We do know a few things about dvsn. Sept. 5th was executive produced by two of Drake's most vital collaborators, Paul "Nineteen85" Jefferies and his mentor, Noah "40" Shebib, and also marks the the proper debut of Toronto vocalist Daniel Daley. All three men are around 30 years old, and the album speaks to their experience as artists—and their resoluteness as R&B innovators who come from a city that still has trouble sustaining a contemporary urban radio station. Which is to say: The dvsn sound did not come together overnight. Jeffries and Daley have worked together for at least six years, and their early collaborations are flimsy Usher knock-offs, gaudy and green. "Early on in my producing, I would just layer on every single sound I wanted to hear," Jeffries recently told Fader. "Getting all my dreams out on just one song." Compared to those tracks, dvsn's songs sound like photo negatives, selfless and vast.
Daley's delivery has matured as well, trading in "Idol"-style runs for sturdy melody lines that service nothing but the song. All of this can be heard on "Hallucinations," in which Daley's featherlight falsetto is often screwed down with effects to literally halt any extraneous embellishments while also offering up more breathing room. On "Too Deep," which lovingly references Timbaland and Ginuwine's 1999 hit "So Anxious," an unnamed female choir gets most of the spotlight, with Daley chiming in for whispered accents here and there. This grown-up musical strategy is also reflected in the way dvsn approach their songwriting raison d'être: sex.
Sept. 5th uses contemporary sounds to explore the positive and meaningful aspects of carnality. This puts the album in a sort of limbo: It feels much more adult compared to the casual, hip-hop-indebted come ons of R&B up-and-comers Tory Lanez and Bryson Tiller, but it's not as indebted to the genre's traditions as artists like Anthony Hamilton or Jill Scott. If neo-soul found 1990s artists taking inspiration from '70s masters, dvsn's neon soul puts a Blade Runner sheen on '90s and 2000s classics by the likes of R. Kelly, Aaliyah, and Ciara. There's no rapping here; the word "bitch" is never uttered. Some of the album's best moments also feature female voices along with Daley's. This is not corny music, but it is respectful, even sweet at times. It treats sex not as a social transaction but a serious act—something that can make you see things that aren't there, that can be a balm for life's rough edges, that can make you realize the worth of looking beyond yourself. These songs are consensual in every sense of the word.
And in that sense, Sept. 5th can be read as a kind of romantic guide for people who are beginning to stare down their twenties in the rearview, who are considering investing a big chunk of themselves into another person. As dvsn tell it, there will be plenty of heat—the languid "In + Out" is exactly what you think it is—but also a few complications. "Try / Effortless" has Daley struggling to put his pride aside as he considers a commitment; "Another One" is a cheating song that only deals with the act's existential aftermath; grand finale "The Line" is a seven-minute proposal that lingers in the comfort and ecstasy that love can bring. "At the end of it all I'm coming back to you," Daley concludes, as a woman's voice echoes in the cavernous expanse around him.
The project's purposeful anonymity has a few drawbacks. Though Prince is a clear influence, dvsn barely hint at the idiosyncratic kinkiness or sense of play that drives so much of that icon's music. And aside from the album's title, there's a slightly frustrating lack of specificity to be found in these songs; perhaps this is meant as a generous sign of universality, but it can also come across as unimaginative. Then again, considering the unseemly baggage R&B fans are presented with while listening to R. Kelly or Chris Brown, dvsn's namelessness can offer its own relief. "In art, the confident gesture, loud or quiet, is of highest importance," Ratliff writes in his book. "By extension, the acknowledgement of the human behind it… is secondary, if relevant at all." This group is wise and capable enough to eschew nearly every shortcut of today's personality-first music culture and dial into the silence between the noise. It's what confidence sounds like.


The latest album from the long-running English band is one of their most sensuous and sunlit, playing on new shades of hope, love, and melancholy.

No Treasure But Hope

Stuart A. Staples opens Tindersticks’ latest album with a note on the nature of beauty, a subject they’ve been pursuing for nearly 30 years now. “For the beauty, give me something to ease,” he sings delicately over Dan McKinna’s mournful piano, which sounds suited to a funeral rather than a new beginning. “For it’s the beauty that’s got its claws in me.” It’s an invasive virus, one that overwhelms your body and soul, that elicits malignant symptoms. Few bands—maybe the Bad Seeds?—have been as interested in the capital-R Romantic notion of beauty as Tindersticks, who set their lush, intricate, often unabashedly beautiful arrangements against dark, pained lyrics about ugly, messy emotions. They’ve thrived on that tension, but on No Treasure But Hope Tindersticks find a way to assuage the pain. It’s one of their most contented and effusive albums, and as a result one of their most immediately accessible.
Or, as Staples sings just a few songs later, “There’s a new kind of beauty that I’ve never seen before.” That song, “Pinky in the Daylight,” is something new for Tindersticks: a genuinely sweet declaration of love with no attendant grim irony. The band pulls out all the stops, indulging a dramatic key change, a sensuous pause at the crest of a refrain, a call-and-response of “Yeah, he loves you.” They want you to see the seams of the song, to consider how such overwhelming emotions—love and tenderness, awe and inspiration, hope and calm—are conveyed in music.
Staples wrote most of these songs while staying on the Greek island of Ithaca, and there’s a lot of that world on this album, from the map motif of the artwork to the trilling bouzouki that nods to rebetika music of the early 20th century. And there is sunlight in these songs, breaking apart the darkness that has become so familiar in the band. Even a song called “The Amputees,” which may comment on Staples’ experience as an Englishman living on the Continent, hinges on the sincere declaration, “I miss you so bad,” which changes phrasing and therefore implication each time he repeats it. Staples has always drawn on the techniques of American soul singers, but to his credit, he knows the limitations of his distinctive voice, and especially on “The Amputees” he knows how to deploy it to understate his message.
With all that light, however, shadows remain. “See My Girls,” the record’s longest song as well as its most daring, is sung from the perspective of a shop owner whose daughters send him postcards from around the world. Those postcards form a flipbook showing the glories and the dangers of the world, “the slanty pillars of Park Güell” in Barcelona along with “the killing fields of Cambodia.” But the song is more an expression of the father’s unending concern, which makes it a very different kind of love song—world-weary, but no less potent.

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Recorded in his final months and released 10 days after his death, the Tragically Hip frontman’s final album is a farewell and a testament, at once wistful and playful, urgent and defiantly hopeful.

The Tragically Hip’s popularity in Canada is about as easy to explain to Americans as bagged milk. The old-fashioned rock band’s success seems almost unaccountably spectacular: sold-out nationwide stadium tours; two albums diamond-certified and a dozen more platinum; 16-time recipients of the Juno, the Canadian Grammy. And yet their success has remained confined to the homeland. In 1992, the Hip’s fourth album, Fully Completely, was the number-one record in Canada, and Billboard insisted the band was “now poised for international recognition.” It never happened. Abroad, the album flopped. By the late 1990s they no longer even had an American label. Last August, the Hip filled the nearly 20,000-capacity Air Canada Centre in Toronto three nights in succession; a scalped ticket cost thousands. When they performed in New York the year before, it was at the 2894-seat Beacon Theater. Many attendees, one presumes, were ex-pats from the north.
So when Gord Downie—lead singer, lyricist, and charismatic frontman of the Hip, but also poet, activist, actor, accomplished solo singer-songwriter, and altogether one of the most illustrious men in Canadian pop-cultural history—died last month of glioblastoma multiforme, an aggressive and virtually unbeatable form of brain cancer, Americans were understandably mystified by the extent and depth of their northern neighbors’ grief. It is hard to convey to outsiders what Downie meant to his compatriots. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, upon learning of Downie’s passing, was compelled to issue a statement of mourning to the nation. “When he spoke,” Trudeau said, “he gave us goosebumps and made us proud to be Canadian. Our identity and culture are richer because of his music, which was always raw and honest—like Gord himself.”
I mention this at length because it is essential to understanding and indeed appreciating Introduce Yerself, Downie’s final, posthumous solo album, released just 10 days after his death. Like David Bowie’s Blackstar and Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker, Introduce Yerself is the kind of confrontation with mortality afforded uniquely to artists who know or sense they’re near the end: It’s a farewell, a testament. The album was recorded over two wildly productive four-day sessions at Downie’s Bathouse studio in small-town Bath, Ontario, as Downie endured the often brutal effects of his illness and its treatment—memory loss, frailty. The process was a minor miracle of last-ditch vigor: 23 songs in all, many laid down in one take. “We were documenting how he was feeling, very quickly,” said Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew, who produced the album. “There was an urgency that pushed us to create as much as we could.”
That urgency looms over Introduce Yerself, even seems at times to haunt it. “In my life of get and get/I’ve got more than most, and yet,” Downie sings on “Wolf’s Home,” movingly. His reflections of regret are painful enough, but in the song’s final seconds one hears him sigh, almost beyond the range of the mic, and take a greedy draft of water. It’s a moment of profoundly wretched candor—a glimpse of weariness committed by mistake to tape. On the delicate, piano-forward title track, Downie relates the story of forgetting the name of a driver he could tell he ought to recall: a mild lapse, probably familiar to almost anyone. But knowing what one does of his condition, of the misery of his failing memory, the story gains a tragic dimension. Much of the power of Introduce Yerself derives expressly from woeful circumstance, perhaps inevitably. Listening, one is acutely aware of how much Downie still had to say—and how little time he had left.
But it would be a mistake to characterize Introduce Yerself as despairing. Downie was an unrepentant optimist, and remained playful even at his most wistful and pensive. On stage, in concert, he played the howling maniac, the madman unhinged: He would rant and rave, improvise lyrics, toss his microphone around and pick it up with his feet—and continued to do so as his illness did its best to enfeeble him. That puckish exuberance is very much in evidence throughout Introduce Yerself, happily. “You Me and the B’s” is a spirited paeon to “the mistakes, the slumps, the streaks” of the Boston Bruins, replete with percussion by hockey stick (really). “My First Girlfriend” is an ode to an old flame—in particular to her “sophistication” and her bikini. And of course, the upbeat “Spoon” is about seeing Britt Daniel and company live: “We sat in the back row/Deerhunter opened the show.”
The record’s prevailing theme, if it isn’t apparent already, is reminiscence. Downie has said that “each song is about a person,” and while he scarcely uses proper names, the abundant “you”s and “we”s feel unmistakably specific. “I say ‘I love you’ into your dark, unwavering eyes/That show caring, concern, disapproval, despair,” he sings with evident strain on “Faith Faith,” the album’s most overtly sentimental ballad. “But you’ll never leave me, never doubt me, never look elsewhere.” Downie’s lyrics generally have an ironic edge; in this case, as he was separated from his wife, it’s safe to assume one isn’t meant to take the romantic fervor in earnest. Mostly, though, the recollections are fond. “Bedtime” immortalizes a precious memory of rocking his baby to sleep. “Love Over Money,” a distinctly Kevin Drew-ish indie-rock jam, glories in Downie’s triumphs with his band.
From beginning to end, Introduce Yerself is ardently, defiantly hopeful, even as Downie’s fate casts the record in a more melancholic light. True to his career-long reputation, he proves a paragon of warmth and generosity, democratic in spirit and comradely in temper. Downie spent his last year and a half not resigned to defeat but buoyant with enthusiasm. Tellingly, while his nationwide farewell tour last summer took an enormous toll on him physically, watching him perform, you would have had no idea he was ill. The man was irrepressible. His defiance and ebullience were the fuel that urged him on until the very end.
To hear Downie tell it, he never cared that the Hip failed to find success in the United States. He was irritated to be so frequently defined by that lack. “[Interviewers] always ask us about our success or lack of success in the States, which I find absurd,” he said in 1997, plainly vexed. “All we’ve ever wanted to do was be successful on our own terms, which is to have a body of work become undeniable, to be known for 50 songs rather than one.” In Canada, if not elsewhere, the oeuvre endures; to the entire country it seems the Hip are eternal. But if Downie’s music should remain largely obscure, that would be most unfortunate—not because he merits fame, but because he so keenly fought to forge connections. He meant Introduce Yerself as a communal experience, and with it he aspired to connect to the world.


The latest from the Detroit rapper is impressively self-produced and features as many showy passages as clunky stumbling blocks.

The Allegory

From Eminem sidekick to Dr. Dre ghostwriter, from major-label hit-chaser to backpack powerhouse, from deliriously drunk shit-talker to soberingly woke preacher, Royce 5’9” has played them all. In his 20 years of funneling characters into hip-hop, there’s never been a stretch of track where the Detroit rapper couldn’t outrap anyone around him.
All of which puts Royce beyond a certain type of criticism. He has made great music many times before, but sometimes the issue is everything but the rapping. His last solo album, 2018’s The Book of Ryan, was more inwardly focused, a self-aware autobiography that also functioned as a late-career reckoning. His latest, The Allegory, doesn’t coast on that same goodwill. Instead, Royce looks outward as a heavy-handed attempt at converting his listeners to woke enlightenment. There are plenty of redeeming moments here, but it’s hard to shake some of the straight-faced proselytizing.
The anti-vaccination lines on The Allegory—and there are several—might have been chalked up as trivial goofy-horrorcore lyrics on an old Royce mixtape, but that’s a luxury he abandons here early on, staring into the camera at the beginning of the album to declare: “This is the allegory of the cave theory by Plato, this is the first chapter.” On one hand, you can’t take that seriously; on the other, he’s taking himself seriously—too seriously. Still, Royce wants it both ways. “Present picture: a guy battles sexuality in tight apparel, eyeshadow/That’s not deep, I’m shallow,” he raps on that same introduction. In other words: here’s something vaguely offensive, but I don’t really mean it. Right? Wink. Yikes.
Not everything is this clunky. If anything, the album is so dense that it’s best moments can feel buried. The many guest spots help lighten things up, even when they’re grimy. On “FUBU,” Conway the Machine shit-talk sounds breezy over a sinisterly kooky boom-bap beat alongside Royce’s complexity. On “Overcomer” Westside Gunn raps chilling street raps like “Where I’m from driveby’s overrated/If you got five bodies then you famous” that require no decoding. Vince Staples and G Perico inject their own nasally, jumpy energy on “Young World.”
Royce also produced every bit of music on The Allegory, a first for his career. His beats are generally chunky sample flips and simple loops, but he also has an ear for a good sound. But if you’re listening to a Royce album it’s because you want to hear the guy rap. To his credit, Royce has the rare effect of a rapper’s extreme technical ability making him seem limber instead of rigid. There a handful of moments on The Allegory of sheer delight where Royce barrels both forcefully and elegantly into a complex rhyme scheme and makes it seem easy.
You’ll have to brush aside some of the missteps (a well-intentioned Eminem skit is a clumsy grappling with white privilege and hip-hop as a Black art), but you’ll hear vulnerable catharsis about his father on songs like “Hero” alongside the more steely lyrical attacks. The best moment on the album might be the most light-hearted, when Royce pokes fun at a career misstep on a song called “Rhinestone Doo Rag.” (He tells his younger listeners they’ll have to Google it.) It’s an exercise in humility from a guy often pointing a finger and seriously overexplaining. It’s funny and lands better when he’s the butt of the joke. Plus, he’s rapping his ass off.


A calm breeze blows through the songwriter’s latest album, a road-ready set of tunes forged on the long journey to relaxation.

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit: Weathervanes

Weathervanes

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit launched their supporting tour for Weathervanes, Isbell’s eighth collection of original material, three months before its release, a tacit admission that these songs were built for the long haul. An exacting craftsman, Isbell constructed Weathervanes with tunes that benefit from familiarity: They’re filled with open spaces for a band to explore on stage. On record, these songs reveal their intricacies slowly, the measured, almost leisurely pace suggesting that Isbell is confident that his audience will stick with the album as they learn its subtle pleasures.
The calm breeze blowing through Weathervanes comes as something of a relief. As portrayed in Running With Our Eyes Closed, a recent documentary that chronicled the making of Reunions—the album he released at the dawn of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020—Isbell sometimes treats his craft as a burden, a trait that can carry some personal pitfalls. During those sessions, he sometimes appeared consumed with the prospect of living up to his own high standards, a worry that sparked marital strife between Isbell and Amanda Shires, the singer-songwriter and fiddle player who occasionally doubles as a member of the 400 Unit. Shires is credited as a guest performer on Weathervanes, the same billing that harmonica player Mickey Raphael, a legend from Willie Nelson’s Family band, receives for his spot on the lovely “Strawberry Woman.”
Though he’s worked with producer David Cobb since 2013’s breakthrough Southeastern, Isbell produced Weathervanes himself (Matt Pence provided additional production on a handful of tracks). He chooses to emphasize performance as much as the songwriting, a decision that shines a light on the 400 Unit’s chemistry. Weathervanes has its share of intimate moments, such as the gently rolling “Strawberry Woman” or “Cast Iron Skillet,” where the understated acoustic setting makes the narrator’s misguided life lessons (“Don’t drink and drive, you’ll spill it”) all the more unsettling, especially when Isbell murmurs, “That dog bites my kid, I’ll kill it.”
The 400 Unit excel on the quieter songs, conjuring the ghost of John Prine on “Volunteer” and Bruce Springsteen at his most reserved with the subdued train-track rhythms of “If You Insist.” Still, they sound best when they crank up their amplifiers, relying on texture as much as volume. Take “Death Wish,” where the band vamps on a minor-key riff, ratcheting up the tension as Isbell’s narrator sounds increasingly desperate. They pull off a similar trick on “Save the World,” which is as urgent and disturbing as a news bulletin. As Isbell struggles to process his thoughts in the wake of learning about another school shooting—“Balloon popping at the grocery store, my heart jumping in my chest/I look around to find the exit door, which way out of here’s the best”—the 400 Unit accompany his emotions by playing with controlled anger.
Weathervanes’ unsettled moments wind up making the sun-bleached vibe of the rest of the album feel earned: It takes some effort for Isbell to relax. That mellow feeling is crystallized by how “Middle of the Morning” cannily crosses Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic” with the Allman Brothers Band’s “Midnight Rider.” Such nods to Isbell’s forefathers are deliberate: “When We Were Close,” his salute to the late Justin Townes Earle, is propelled by a riff that recalls Tom Petty at his most Floridian; it comes within spitting distance of such wild-eyed Southern boys as .38 Special. Isbell and the 400 Unit aren’t revivalists, though. They specialize in synthesis, blending styles and eras so they feel familiar yet fresh, a trick encapsulated by “This Ain’t It” and “Miles,” the pair of open-ended, open-road jams that close the record. Weathervanes itself sounds forged from the endless miles the 400 Unit have logged over the past decade: It’s a snapshot of a band humming at cruise altitude, keeping focus not on the destination but the journey.


Jadakiss's first LP in over six years features Jeezy, Puff Daddy, Future, and others. At a point in his career when he should be completely free from commercial expectations to make whatever music he wants, one of the world's best and most frustratingly aimless rappers ends up in the same no-man's land he always does.

Top 5 Dead or Alive

Jadakiss' first LP in over six years had its title as far back as 2010, when "Top 5 Dead or Alive" appeared on The Champ is Here 3 as a teaser for a record due later that year (and then in 2012). Like the original Champ is Here mixtape, 3 proved far superior to Kiss tha Game Goodbye and Kiss of Death, but it was bittersweet all the same for highlighting Jadakiss' strengths (spitting raspy punchline bars over someone else's beats) and admitting to his weaknesses by omission (putting actual songs together, getting those beats for himself). Impressive first-week sales notwithstanding, no one expects Jadakiss to be a commercial force anymore, which would presumably work to his advantage. Without the temptation to cater to a non-existent audience clamoring for him to make pop songs, you'd figure the boundaries between "album" and "mixtape" would no longer exist. This is kinda true of Top 5 Dead or Alive; the problem is that one of the world's best and most frustratingly aimless rappers ends up in the same no-man's land he always does.
The good news is that Jadakiss' typical means of scoring a chart hit is completely outmoded in 2015, so there aren't any chintzy Neptunes beats, unctuous R&B hooks or blatant attempts to recreate "Why" in its entirety. Yeah, Future shows up on the "street single", but he did the same favor for Uncle Murda this year—don't confuse his appearance for a guarantee of any kind of chart success. While Jadakiss can wild out on his own terms__,__ the gothic turn-up of "You Can See Me" is a long way from the Tunnel; for not a single second are we led to believe that We the Best producer Lee on the Beats, Future and Jadakiss were ever in the same room, let alone the same frame of mind here.
Otherwise, Jadakiss continues to show why he was a perfect fit to do player introductions for the Brooklyn Nets back in October—Top 5 Dead or Alive is likewise an intermittently entertaining, but dead-end collective of big-money heavyweights long past their prime. Puff Daddy's yelling spree on "You Don't Eat" might as well have been sourced from a Bad Boy conference call in 1996. On "Kill," Lil Wayne continues his path towards tragicomic, Neil Hamburger-esque performance art: "She a Cancer, I hit her with that chemo dick" would be a prime candidate for Weezy's preeminent sad trombone line of 2015 if he didn't just quote Smash Mouth on No Ceilings 2. While Jeezy occupies a similar "veteran hardhead" ground as Jadakiss at this point, "Critical" doesn't try to find common ground; instead, it's the kind of hyperactive hi-hat beat that predates Thug Motivation 101 with Jada on a double-time Dirty South flow that interrupted "who's the best MC?" discussions during the late 90s in New York.
Despite its street-level money, power and respect rhymes, almost all of it feels divorced from reality, free of any kind of narrative grounding or personal disclosure: "you can call me Paul/ long as Peter pay," "If you ain't in the circle, for a square I'll get you lined" are typical punchlines that generate a smirk and disappear completely, mildly impressive feats of wordplay that only have meaning within the format's strictures. You might as well be watching Jadakiss solve crossword puzzles.
There are brief indications that Top 5 Dead or Alive was workshopped within the past three years. There's a track about smoking weed and, wouldn't you know, Wiz Khalifa is on it instead of Redman. The chorus of "Jason" gives brief mentions to Eric Garner and Ferguson. Otherwise, Jadakiss has to remind you of a time when "top 5 dead or alive" was something fans of mainstream rap actually discussed: "Synergy" is the requisite give-n-go tandem rap with Styles P and it's flagrantly modeled after "We Gonna Make It", right down to the cadence of the hook. Even if there isn't the requisite track here in the style of "Why," Jada can't help but invoke its most infamous line (the one about Bush knocking down the towers). In the most desperate recall of his glory days, Jadakiss spits, "you heard my name on the last verse of 'Ether,'" which is technically true but feels like the equivalent of a boxing judge taking credit for Ali/Frazier.
Beyond muddled aims, extremely confusing and tone-deaf skits also seem to be a constant on Jadakiss projects. "Ahaa Interview" is a Madd Rapper-style Q&A where a salty veteran claims he's going solo over his resentments towards Jadakiss. You'd swear this was a scorched-earth attack on Sheek Louch, except the guy shows up two tracks later. I mean, Puff Daddy is here too, so I guess he didn't take "Rape'n U Records" skit to heart either. More importantly, a patron who sure sounds a lot like Busta Rhymes starts complaining about how heads don't check for "bars" anymore and now it's all about dancing and wearing blouses. You'd swear this was a diss against Young Thug, who's frankly been packing more inventive wordplay into a single verse these days than Jada does on the entirety of this "rapper's rapper" album.


Scum-rock, psychedelia, and drones collide on the latest full-length from NYC’s PC Worship, but Buried Wish errs towards a more skeletal sound.

Buried Wish

PC Worship are a few chromosomes shy of their own DNA strand. But the NYC band’s shakiness has long been key to their shredded charm. Since 2009, frontman Justin Frye has led shifting lineups through genre calisthenics rigorous enough that their repertoire encompasses way-out freak-flag jams, garage punk shimmy, and a Fraggle Rock cover, among other oddities. PC Worship stumble and shamble the way collectives like Harlem’s No-Neck Blues Band or Finland’s Avarus might if Captain Beefheart were sitting in. The PC Worship Experience is uncertain, splintered, alive, and never lacking in bristling forward momentum.
This makes the first song on Buried Wish a bit of a head-scratcher. No-tempo “Lifeless Rain on an Empty Moon” rubs together brass drones at peculiar angles before a zig-zagging sample burst. It’s tranquil, if uneasily so. Revisit the opening cuts from 2013’s Beat Punk, 2014’s Social Rust, or 2015’s Basement Hysteria—this is a sedate starting-point for PC Worship, signaling Frye’s move towards a more spacious sound.
Buried Wish does find moments to rollick. Stoner metal dirge “Back of My $$$” crawls forward like lava under the weight of gnashing guitars. Grease fire psychedelia and 1980s Lower East Side scum-rock collide on the sneering, accessible “Blank Touch.” Almost everywhere else here, though, the band embraces the spare or the stripped back.“Tranq,” a piano curio that morphs into a pummeling krautrock interlude, achieves the effect of its title.
The title track gently hoists a sitar-like frequency higher and higher up into the stratosphere before allowing it to plummet back down to earth in a storm of effects. Vertiginously anemic, the delirious “Help” thumbtacks atonal string whinny with spoken word. “Torched” carpets spindled guitars with constantly erupting drum rolls, like Standards-era Tortoise sound-checking. The cumulative tone at work here—aided by sharp production and stark arrangements—is one of calm, wary digression.
“Perched on the Wall” and “Flowers & Haunting” mark Buried Wish’s most radical departures, foregrounding Frye’s weary, blunt voice. Stung by glancing electric blues riffs, “Perched” stumbles and lurches languidly, a dazed quest for meaning that may or may not be there to be found. “Flowers & Hunting” strands Frye with an acoustic guitar and a pedestrian field recording to plaintively string together one daft couplet after another: “Unfortunate, and pleading/Incapable of breathing/Enraged and retreating.” The words mumble and tumble out, honest and pure in a way that mirrors, if inversely, his band’s splayed-tone. On the darkest of days, they’ll bear repeating.


Maryland singer-songwriter Jordana Nye’s bright, gauzy indie pop puts a sharp percussive edge on familiar melancholy.

Face the Wall

What happens when homespun synth-pop outgrows the bedroom? In Jordana Nye’s case, the cozy, lo-fi harmonies of her early Bandcamp tapes seemed to bloom in a hundred directions at once. Her 2020 breakthrough Something to Say to You played like a sampler, mapping possible futures in stylish electro-pop, earnest piano ballads, or fuzzy experimentation. Just 19 upon the album’s release, the Maryland native flashed unassuming brilliance as a producer and songwriter, mastering a breadth of styles without committing herself to any of them.
One can’t dine out on precociousness forever. On the follow-up, Face the Wall, Jordana and co-producer Cameron Hale collapse the disparate elements of her earlier work into a bolder, brighter soundscape. The instrumentation is still largely synthetic, the vocal effects gauzier than ever. As on Something to Say to You, sharp percussive flourishes contrast the tracks’ hazy layering. On “Pressure Point” and “Get Up,” heavy drum patterns throw the delicate choruses and instrumental breaks into acute relief; the rushing drums and one-note bassline of “Play Fair” animate a series of stop-start transitions.
There’s an evasive quality to Jordana’s performances dating back to her high school-era demos. Often her verses begin in media res, with vocal tracks washing over the instrumentals in soft waves. On Face the Wall, her lyrics maintain a bedroom-tape abstraction: “Catch My Drift” and “Difficult for Now” have sweeping, second-person dedications in place of narratives, weighting down the warm melodies. The record’s most compelling moments are those when Jordana shakes the ambivalence and emerges from the wings. The standout “Go Slow” evokes a familiar melancholy, yet it’s her most forthright affirmation to date: “Focus has never been a friend of mine, half the time I’m not sure if I’m flying/I’ll try, for certainty that I might find/Nothing works unless I take the time.”
If Jordana has a tendency to blend into the wallpaper, it’s largely due to her songs’ structural complexities. The cagey pre-chorus of “Catch My Drift” unleashes a euphoric hook, further refined by a breakdown bridge worthy of an arena-rock finale. On occasion, Face the Wall defaults to sunny ’90s touchstones—the chords of “To the Ground” make it a dead ringer for Shania Twain’s “You’re Still the One”—but not enough to distract from the production duo’s vision. With its sparkly guitar, call-and-response chorus, and chunky hip-hop drums, “I Mean That” plays like a Sugar Ray B-side you never thought to seek out.
Face the Wall bolsters Jordana’s resumé with a cohesive full-length, suspending the polymath approach for a more professional-sounding statement. It’s an accomplished record that, given the variety of Jordana’s catalog, feels short on surprises; having mastered the nuances of production and songwriting, she’s still finding ways to make her voice ring clear. Yet her melodies are dynamic, her ballads immune to adolescent melodrama: the toughest hurdles are behind her.