The third volume in Luaka Bop’s World Spirituality Classics series spotlights a Nigerian musician who fuses traditional rhythms and pan-Nigerian highlife with the teachings of Islam.

Alhaji Waziri Oshomah: World Spirituality Classics 3: The Muslim Highlife of Alhaji Waziri Oshomah

The concept of religion as a realm separate from secular life does not exist in many sub-Saharan African cultures. Spirituality is to be considered intrinsic to the material world, and all aspects of life are infused with ritual and belief. Holiness can be found in nature, prayer, medicine, and song. Dance, in particular, is a way to channel the divine and communicate with spiritual forces. It’s therapy, worship, ecstasy.
Alhaji Waziri Oshomah’s music is all of these things. A devout Muslim and pillar of his community, he fuses traditional rhythms, pan-Nigerian highlife, and elements of Western pop with the teachings of Islam, playing frenzied concerts where provocative dancing is soundtracked by his religious and philosophical musings. The mix of the sacred and the apparently unholy is no contradiction in Waziri’s hometown of Auchi, a majority Muslim city in Nigeria’s largely Christian Edo State, where over time Islam has become interwoven with the culture and traditions of the Afenmai and Etsakọ people.
Seven of Waziri’s dance tracks are collected on The Muslim Highlife of Alhaji Waziri Oshomah, the third volume in Luaka Bop’s World Spirituality Classics series, following 2017’s The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda and 2019’s The Time For Peace Is Now. Each compilation explores the ways in which music can lead people closer to God. For Alice Coltrane it was through gentle spirituality, calm, and reflection; for the likes of the Floyd Family Singers or the Religious Souls, religious preaching went hand in hand with funky rhythms and soulful grooves.
For Waziri, enlightenment happens on the dancefloor. He was born in 1947 into a deeply religious Afenmai/Etsakọ family, and as a child he discovered the Nigerian highlife that was sweeping across Lagos at the time. When he began sneaking into clubs and eventually playing in his own band, his family disowned him, convinced their Muslim faith was diametrically opposed to popular music and the lifestyles associated with it.
But Waziri stayed firm in his belief that music could be a way of spreading positive messages and the teachings of Islam. He crafted his own idiosyncratic style of dance music, emphasizing the region’s mellow palm-wine rhythms over the horn-heavy, big-band highlife that was exported from Ghana to Nigeria by musicians like E.T. Mensah in the 1950s. The horns on “Forgive Them Oh God Amin – Amin’’ are reminiscent of Ebo Taylor, but rather than supplying extra punch to the funk-heavy sound that Taylor pioneered, they provide a counterpoint to unfurling, languorous guitar lines and unhurried rhythms. With a steady, almost spoken delivery, Waziri asks God to forgive those who gossip, descending into a hypnotic call-and-response chant with his backing singers.
It’s not hard to draw comparisons with Fela Kuti, who was exploding onto the scene in those same years. While Kuti’s Afrobeat did have an undeniable impact on Waziri—at one point he even said his music was “the Afenmai brand of Afro Beat”—their approach to politics and power couldn’t have been more different. Where Kuti challenged and rebelled, Waziri praised and celebrated, writing several songs in honor of the important people of Auchi. On the sprawling, 17-minute-long “Alhaji Yesufu Sado Managing Director,” for example, he pays homage to a local village chief over breezy guitars, a light, bouncing bassline, and bubbling electric organ.
It was a different Nigerian legend who had the biggest impact on Waziri. Victor Uwaifo was a fellow Edo State musician known for a unique style that blended modern instrumentation with traditional rhythms, soul, and funk, even experimenting with electronics. While remaining rooted in traditional styles, Waziri also incorporates electronic effects into his music. On “Jealousy,” a siren-like synthesizer announces the beginning of Waziri’s sermon, a warning against the perils of jealous feelings (“You that is entangled in envy/You will be killed by hypertension”) over warbling electronics and percussive shakers. As in many of Waziri’s songs, the lyrics’ ethical emphasis—preaching living according to one’s values and respecting other people—transcend any one particular religious sect.
As religious divisions increase in other parts of Nigeria, the people of Auchi—irrespective of creed, age, or gender—still come together to listen to the teachings of Alhaji Waziri Oshomah, finding catharsis and community in the Etsako Super Star’s spiritual highlife. With its sprawling grooves, strutting rhythms, and joyful atmospheres, Waziri’s music conveys a lesson that is not bound by language or local context. Rather than searching for pathways to enlightenment in a higher realm, it preaches the possibility of finding God in the here and now: in togetherness, pleasure, music, and dance.


The legendary New Jack Swing trio reunites for a new album, right as fellow alumni New Edition hit the charts for the first time in over a decade.

Three Stripes

Few anticipated the trio Bell Biv Devoe’s sensational 1990 debut. All three members were in the important and longstanding R&B vocal group New Edition, but none were ever a central focus of the ensemble. They were consistently overshadowed by Ralph Tresvant, who provided lead vocals on most New Edition tracks; Johnny Gill, who joined the group in 1988 for their most fully realized album, Heart Break, but already had hits of his own; and even by former member Bobby Brown, who left New Edition in 1985 and hit No. 1 on the Hot 100 three years later. While Ricky Bell, Michael Bivins, and Ronnie Devoe were essential to the success of the group as a whole, they almost always served to support their more prominent co-stars.
Until they didn't: heeding advice from the world-class production duo Jam & Lewis, Bell Biv Devoe formed a trio and released an album that was eventually certified quadruple platinum. Of the New Edition diaspora, Brown enjoyed the most sales and notoriety, Tresvant approached one-note perfection with “Sensitivity,” and Gill built an enviable collection of ballads, but it was the underdogs in Bell Biv Devoe who came up with that elusive thing, a crossover standard which everyone will know for eternity: “Poison.” President Obama recently invited the group to the White House to perform the track, confirming its designation as a piece of universal American pop culture.
That honor makes it a fine time for Bell Biv Devoe to reemerge with Three Stripes. They're also likely to benefit from New Edition’s high level of visibility at the moment: the group returned to the radio for the first time in over a decade last year, credited as featured vocalists on Johnny Gill’s No. 1 R&B hit “This One’s For Me And You,” and a three-part New Edition biopic is slated to air on BET the same week that Three Stripes hits the shelves.
This is the first Bell Biv Devoe album in 16 years, and early on, it feels like the trio is stepping gingerly, with continuity in mind above all else. Despite their time away from the studio, Bivins and Devoe still rap in the end-rhyme-heavy style of the late ’80s. And since the majority of the group's early hits were smutty accounts of the group's interactions with the opposite sex, similar narratives guide several songs on Three Stripes. “I’ll say a bunch of slick shit to get between your thighs,” Devoe promises in “I’m Betta,” a pushy, hurry-up-and-leave-him-number which reminds listeners that 49 year-olds have the right to be juvenile, too.
But despite these allusions, Three Stripes rarely crackles in the manner of early Bell Biv Devoe—the Poison album is resiliently pesky, like an especially pugnacious welterweight, but there's little of that scrappy spirit here. As they did in 1990, the trio calls on hip-hop producers for help: Erick Sermon of the famous New York hip-hop duo EPMD crafted “Run,” and other beat makers here include DJ Battlecat (Snoop Dogg, Xzibit) and Doug E. Fresh. But the tracks are mostly either pedestrian and unmemorable, or memorable for the wrong reasons. This is exemplified by the lead single, “Run,” which redundantly interpolates Notorious B.I.G.’s “Hypnotize,” a song too molded to Biggie to provide a favorable look for anyone else.
It’s a pair of the least energetic moments, though, which turn out to be the richest on the record. While Bell Biv Devoe classics mostly eschewed harmony, a New Edition hallmark, in favor of skeletal thwack, the trio embraces the full-group approach on the back half of Three Stripes. When Bell trades verses with SWV’s scene-stealing Coko on the ballad “Finally,” her full, trembling tone nourishes his lancing falsetto. And Boyz II Men, who owe their name to a New Edition song, appear on “One More Try,” helping create a benign, slender number based around Jerry Butler’s “I Could Write A Book” from 1970.
Plummy as these tracks are, they make you wonder why Bell Biv Devoe didn’t recruit from the crack platoon of contemporary songwriters most adept at balancing R&B tradition with the requirements of today's production practices. This coterie includes Babyface, who writes nearly as well as he did two decades ago (see 2015’s “Love and Devotion”); Gregg Pagani, who helped pen Gill’s No. 1 last year; and the duo of Pop & Oak, who gifted the world with Usher’s “Good Kisser” and Tamia’s “Sandwich and a Soda.” But Bell Biv Devoe aren’t looking for that kind of help, and who says they need it? “Run” is currently a top ten record at Urban AC radio: once again, this underdog trio is enjoying unexpected success.


The latest album from the child star turned Star Child can be pretty in a tuned-out sort of way, but her psychedelic soul music is no closer to showing us who she really is.

Willow

Things happened quickly for Willow, as they tend to do for children of celebrities. At 9, she scored a platinum hit and signed to Roc Nation just as the song went viral. At 10, she was cast as the lead in a movie remake of the musical Annie. Just as the Smith family career plan had seemingly taken hold, she rebuked it: She quit Annie, withdrew from the pop sphere, and started releasing music with titles like Interdimensional Tesseract. She has called having famous parents “excruciatingly terrible” and has been in overdrive forging her own path. On “Boy,” the opener to her 2017 album, The 1st, released on her 17th birthday, she was as honest about how the outside world sees her as she’s ever been, looking through the eyes of a new lover: “I come from a cluster of super bright stars/And probably to him it feels scary to reach that far,” she sang. She’s been trying to be more down to earth her whole life.
Willow, a child star turned self-professed Star Child, has had a different kind of coming-of-age Hollywood story since. She has been in a perpetually transitional state searching for her own identity, a ghost haunting the Smith family celebrity legacy. That journey has largely manifested as bohemian, third-eye musings in search of absolute truth. But, more often than not, Willow’s vision quests haven’t produced impressionable music. She sounds like if SZA suddenly retreated from the limelight, got really into Alanis Morissette and junk science, and was noncommittal about songcraft. It may be a lack of practice or it may be a lack of interest, but her brand of psychedelic soul and blurry dream-pop can be so immaterial it’s as if it’s trapped in the astral plane. Her self-titled album can be pretty in a tuned-out sort of way, if you let it wash over you like a gentle current of #vibes, but she is no closer to showing us who she really is.
Willow co-produced the album with musician Tyler Cole, half of the duo Sol Prophet, who (both solo and in tandem) makes music aimlessly searching for something, anything, to say. He is a member of the MSFTSrep “art collective” Willow founded with her brother, the now full-time inventor Jaden. Two of their previous collaborations, “Afraid” and “Sorrow,” feel like entry points into this nebulous headspace—light on music, powered mostly by hums and incantations. Both Willow and Cole would consider genre an insult. They want their music to transcend the limits of classification to a higher level of consciousness.
Willow was already getting into guitars on The 1st, but Cole’s influence is clear. He has driven her toward a more atmospheric sound. The music here is competent enough to pass for enlightened but it’s actually illusory. There is nothing tangible to latch onto. Listening closely feels like trying to identify solid objects when wandering through a fog, particularly on “Like a Bird” and “U KNOW,” which both seem to blur until they’re out of focus.
The 1st was rangier and explored who Willow was as a young woman, thinker, and artist, delving into the personal in a way she hadn’t before in her music. The songs on Willow just bleed together at the edges into a composite of wokeness. Cole tweeted that Willow was the official album of the Area 51 raid. Across its 22 minutes, Willow’s “falling into the arms of naked truth” and singing about Annunaki and sacred geometry. She still writes about love, but primarily in the philosophical sense. In the search for deeper meaning, her songs lose all sight of what’s right there on the surface. There’s a song called “Overthinking IT” where she warbles, “I know that sometimes/I’m crippled by my mind/I don’t wanna be.” It’s the realest, closest, most truthful thing she says.
On “Time Machine,” she longs to live her life out among a previous generation, so she can rub shoulders with the visionaries of the past with whom she feels kinship—predictably, Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1983 and Kurt Cobain in 1993, two of the most mainstream icons to represent artistic license among teenage misfits. She’s nostalgic for MTV. Her message—things were better any time before now—feels poorly justified and unearned. “I don’t care what anyone says/Everyone is disconnected these days/’Cause everyone is looking at their phone/Tryna feel like they are less alone/And I’m here to tell them that they’re wrong,” she sings, drawing a ham-fisted beeline from technology to despondency.
The new age tropes are exhausting, and the means of expression are narrow, but Willow is clearly striving to be something more. She is obviously both talented and ambitious but she still hasn’t translated those qualities into the caliber of music JAY-Z projected onto her all those years ago. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe, with its far-out-ness, Willow is subverting those expectations even now. But in an effort to avoid being the Willow Smith everyone seemed to think she’d become, the pop culture polyglot, Willow seems to have lost sight of what makes her interesting.


Couching politically brazen lyrics about police repression and state hypocrisy in a highly stylized goth maximalism, the high-concept Moscow duo is one of Russia’s most exciting bands.

До Свидания / Goodbye

In the 2018 mini-documentary Let It All Burn, the Moscow duo IC3PEAK are about to play a show in the Russian city of Voronezh when health inspectors and police arrive to shut the venue down on suspicion of food poisoning. Although the alleged incident has taken place the day before the band’s arrival in town, the officers demand to speak to the band and their manager. This is the latest obstacle on a tour where every stop has been plagued by interference from government officials. As the club director is interrogated, the sound engineer and the duo’s manager sneak fans through a backdoor into the dimly lit room where IC3PEAK members Nastya Kreslina and Nikolay Kostylev launch into their song “Сказка” (“Fairytale”): “I come from a Russian horror fairy tale/It doesn’t matter where you come from,” Kreslina spits. “I do not play your games/Someday you will die.” At the end of their short set, a sizable crowd, most of whom didn’t even make it into the venue, lingers in the cold outside, singing along to their favorite IC3PEAK songs. Kreslina and Kostylev join them to sing the controversial hit “Смерти Больше Нет” (“Death No More”), which may have set off the government’s ire to begin with: “I fill my eyes with kerosene/Let it all burn, let it all burn/All of Russia is watching me/Let it all burn, let it all burn.” With their politically brazen lyrics about police repression and state hypocrisy, as well as a fierce, highly stylized goth maximalism, IC3PEAK is one of the most exciting bands to come out of Russia in a while—and Russia’s youth and officials both know it.
The duo’s latest album, До Свидания (Goodbye) was released with the tagline, “It’s going to get darker.” That’s a hefty challenge for a band whose first major hit was called “Sad Bitch.” But До Свидания delivers. Sounding at times like a cross between Eartheater and Deli Girls, IC3PEAK’s music oscillates between pitch-black hymnals and twisted club bangers, often in the same song. Kreslina is indeed something out of a gothic fairy tale—sometimes a ghostly child reciting a menacing nursery rhyme, sometimes a vengeful banshee. Her vocal toolkit incorporates seething whispers, operatic flourishes, chilling high falsetto, and melodic, radio-friendly toplines. It is important that the band sings in Russian, but Kreslina emotes so effusively that their message touches even those who don’t speak the language. “[In our early tracks] there was this idea of the universal language, which is the language of the scream,” Kreslina told sports journalist Yury Dud in an interview for his pop-culture YouTube talk show, vDud. Kreslina’s screams are balanced perfectly by Kostylev’s impeccable production: restrained soundscapes always ready to attack with a well-timed drop, danceable wobbling trap beats, and abrasive industrial screeching—a natural evolution from performing at underground bunker raves in Moscow in their early years. Once upon a time IC3PEAK would have fit neatly under the witch-house umbrella, but they set themselves apart by wedding its aesthetic to a sharp political consciousness. Postcolonial scholar Achille Mbembe coined the term “necropolitics” to discuss how state power renders some lives disposable, thus creating “death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.”  With a mouthful of dirt and blood, IC3PEAK weaponizes this already-dead positionality, conjuring the silenced, repressed, and murdered subjectivities that haunt the autocratic patriarchal regime.
On До Свидания, IC3PEAK continue to touch on political themes. In “TRRST,” featuring former 6ix9ine songwriter ZillaKami, they address censorship (“Mama, they say I’m a terrorist (what?) I did nothing wrong but I got on a blacklist”). “Марш” (“Marching”) deals with the suppression of democracy (“Without an invitation they come into my house/[With] a new word and a new law”). And “Плак-Плак” (“Boo Hoo”) deals with domestic violence, decriminalized in Russia in 2017: “I was always good, I was never bad/All my life like a good girl I obeyed the rules/I’m tired of crying, tired of suffering/Either way I won’t be able to predict my own death.” In the video for “Плак-Плак,” a somber child with Kreslina’s iconic braids opens a blood-red diorama and mimes her parents (played by Kreslina and Kostylev in doll form) fighting, only to frighten when the Kreslina doll comes to life and takes vengeance into her own hands by murdering her husband with a butcher knife. But the record is full of more universal subjects as well: loneliness, betrayal, love, death. Each is handled with the same heavy-handed melodrama, to various degrees of effectiveness. There’s a wealth of necro imagery and sinister voltas (“I kiss your corpse/I thought you were my friend”; “I want to hug these mountains/I want to lick the sky/I will kiss the water/I will cover my head with earth”) which can feel both mall-goth maudlin and archetypically black metal. When Kostylev really lets rip, it sounds as deliciously apocalyptic as the Body, and though the heavier songs can feel eclipsed by the focus on the ballads, they are definite highlights.
The metal affinities are not just in the lyrics but also in the aesthetic: desaturated photos emphasizing pale skin, black formalwear, and red accents (lipstick, blood) set against the Russian forest or dystopian brutalist cityscapes. IC3PEAK have always envisioned themselves as an audiovisual project, directing and producing high-concept, relatively high-budget music videos that give their music dimension and expand their audience to millions. Thanks in part to multi-platform exposure, their reach has expanded internationally: They have played Berlin’s CTM festival; toured through the U.S., China, and Brazil; and even caught the ear of Skrillex, who has dropped a remix of “Sad Bitch” in his sets. On До Свидания, an unprecedented number of features suggest the extent of their growing reach. ZillaKami’s unmistakably gravel-voiced verse is the biggest surprise, but the record also includes contributions from Russian rapper Husky (who has also experienced show cancellations and even imprisonment for his music) and horrorcore Florida rapper GHOSTEMANE, a former affiliate of Lil Peep in Schemaposse.
Throughout Let It All Burn, both IC3PEAK and their fans seem unflustered by the police interference: This is just how things are. But the weight of it lingers—after all, it is one thing to sing abstractly about state violence and another to be personally targeted by it—giving До Свидания a more vulnerable and forlorn tone than previous albums. Still, amidst the record’s mortal desperation and corpse worship lies a vehement refusal to accept the psychic death implied by total resignation, further proving to IC3PEAK’s commitment to fearlessness at a time when state power feeds on fear and silence. “You buried me beyond the MKAD/Fed me dirt/But I crawled out of hell/And came back for you,” oozes Kreslina on the swerving “мкАД” (“Moscow Automobile Ring Road”). Even necropower can’t keep the undead down.

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Terry Reid turned down offers to front Led Zeppelin and recorded some flawless folk-rock albums but never escaped obscurity. This comprehensive reissue rounds out his untold story.

The Other Side of the River

In 1968, Aretha Franklin reportedly said: “There are only three things happening in England: The Rolling Stones, The Beatles and Terry Reid.” And the deeper you delve into Reid's music, the more astonishing it becomes that he has lived out the past half-century in relative obscurity, while so many of his contemporaries have been enshrined as rock music royalty for decades. Due to his uncanny ability to channel raw emotion through his bombastic voice, Reid picked up the nickname Superlungs at the beginning of his career, turned down the opportunity to front Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, and set out for a uncompromising solo career. In 1973, at the age of 24, he released River, a near-flawless album of roots, blues, rock 'n' roll, folk and jazz that quickly became a collector's item as it revolved in and out of print for years. The Other Side of the River is a new collection of 11 tracks from River's session, six of which are previously unheard, and the stunning part is, had they been released with the original LP, it would probably be even more coveted than it is today.
Take, for example, “Avenue (F# Boogie),” a rambling and rollicking number that lazily directs you into the heart of the album. The newly unearthed version has a lived-in, worn-out feel: you can easily picture a gang of long-haired dudes with mutton chop sideburns lounging around a studio, cracking off riff after riff. Ike and Tina Turner's Ikettes are featured on backing vocals on the track, and their infusion of lush R&B warmth ties the chorus together with spine-tingling effect. It's gorgeous, and in a way improves on the already-fantastic, tighter studio version.
Clearly, having ready access to the talents of the Ikettes never hurt anyone, but the main star in virtually everything Terry Reid ever released is his otherworldly voice. On every song, it bursts forth with equal parts gravel and honey; his soulful belting is effortless and at the same time, sounds almost painful. On “Let's Go Down,” his vocals ride crescendoing blasts of brass up and down the chorus, alternating from a surly talk-sing to chest-bursting wails. The song is a perfect introduction to Reid as Superlungs – even setting aside his virtuoso guitar playing, he's an artist defined by an incredible natural instrument.
The sound on The Other Side of the River is impeccable, but the tracks themselves are obvious rescues from a very deep vault (“Let's Go Down” finishes with Reid cutting the track short, quipping: “Do you want to have another go, or shall we end it here?”), which makes the fact that it sounds like a well-rounded and complete record all the more impressive. Title track “River” is probably the closest to its original, Reid's jazzy phrasings mimicking the languid semi-tones of Nina Simone, skipping atop plucked guitars and minimal bossa nova percussion. It's a quiet moment that demands your attention, and an admirable palette cleanser from the album's more raucous moments.
The record's only major fault is that a few of the tracks are truly just studio noodling – “Celtic Melody,” while still an interesting listen due to Reid's inherent charm, peters out before it really starts, and “Late Night Idea” is basically just that. But given that the bulk of the album manages to rival its original incarnation, these transgressions are excusable, and even the few mostly improvisational outtakes, like the sweet and lilting “Anyway,” prove to be well worth salvaging from the cutting room floor. Light years from a mere slap-dash rarities compilation, The Other Side of the River takes some of a seminal rock musician's most interesting sketchworks and reimagines them as his magnum opus.


Wednesday’s noisy, rangy sound finds a home in the quiet, lonely corners of America. Their outstanding new album is why they’re one of the best indie rock bands around.

Rat Saw God

When Karly Hartzman tells you “there’s a place where the kids go to kiss,” it’s just one stop on a long, weird tour. The line arrives in the closing verse of a song called “Handsome Man” from Wednesday’s 2021 album Twin Plagues, right after she points out how the wallpaper in the bathroom seems to “wince” while you piss. You get the sense she’s mentioning this place less as a starry-eyed invitation than for the sake of being comprehensive: It’s another spot to revisit, and plenty of people have written songs about it. There’s much more to see.
How about, for example, the Planet Fitness where someone died in the parking lot? Or the fridge with the crickets behind it? Have you seen the sex shop with the biblical name? Or how about the house that turned out to be a mob front? You will find all these hidden, unloved locales scattered through Rat Saw God, Wednesday’s lightning bolt of a fifth album. So much writing about the quiet, lonely corners of America spends its time longing to break free, aching for something big to happen. Hartzman’s characters have no great plans and nowhere to go, so they wind up luxuriating in the quiet and the loneliness as Hartzman traffics in the casual poetry of people who share enough in common to skip the pleasantries. “We always started by telling our best stories first,” she sings. “So now that it’s been a while I’ll get to tellin’ you all my worst.”
The same way Hartzman can guide you through a landscape that subtly grows as familiar as the one where you grew up, she sometimes gives the sense that you’re poring through her books and record collection, sitting beside her as she recites the underlined passages. In her lyrics, there are quotes from fiction writers George Saunders and Richard Brautigan; shout-outs to Bill Callahan and Drive-By Truckers. These are lofty comparisons, but Wednesday have the ambition to make these masters feel not only like peers but also like neighbors in their mythological hometown.
As Hartzman’s lyrics delve deeper into a rich, suburban mundanity, her bandmates respond with their most dramatic and explosive performances. Listen casually and you will hear a killer rock band raised on alternative landmarks from the ’90s and early ’00s; listen closer and the woozy, grainy performances speak a language all their own. Some songs play like nonstop crescendos, starting at a steady rumble and only gaining speed, like the eight-minute “Bull Believer.” Others take you on a journey from twinkly ambience to reckless, pile-driving rock, as in the awestruck “Turkey Vultures.” This dynamic sound, propelled by the gnarly interplay of guitarist MJ Lenderman and pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis, allows Hartzman’s details to reveal themselves in surprising ways over the course of a single track: buried in cozy blankets of indie-rock fuzz, peering through rusty layers of noise-rock sheet metal, or burbling atop grinding alt-country that sputters like a stalled motor.
Even at their most crowd-pleasing, these modes always complement the stark realism and gothic humor in Hartzman’s words. “Chosen to Deserve” is, in theory, a love song. Centered on an undeniable Southern rock riff that would sound at home on FM radio between, say, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Bob Seger, Hartzman winds through verses that pledge her devotion through a series of confessions about her messier, scrappier teen years: an ode to reaching the giddy point in a relationship when it’s impossible to overshare. “If you’re lookin’ for me/I’m in the back of an SUV,” she sings, “Doin’ it in some cul-de-sac/Underneath a dogwood tree.”
The real way Hartzman shows her love, however, is by refusing to cover up the ugly parts. In the second verse, she sings about a friend who nearly overdosed and the doctor who told him he was “lucky to survive.” But listen to the way she sings that last word, her voice dipping and cracking and falling out of key. Filtered through the perspective of a kid who doesn’t see life as some rare gift to cherish, she makes “survival” sound a little pathetic, kinda humiliating—not something to celebrate, just another slog to get through.
If this seems like challenging material—and indeed, Wednesday are likely the first rock band to rhyme “sedan” with “Narcan”—then the approachable, communal feel of Rat Saw God is a breakthrough. The music seems designed to draw people in, aided in part by producer Alex Farrar, who’s worked on similarly commanding records from Indigo De Souza, Angel Olsen, and Snail Mail. These introspective outsider anthems could very well be the songs that bring Wednesday to their biggest stages, and they navigate this transition with newfound melodic pull—it only takes five seconds before “Quarry” lodges in your head—and increased confidence as storytellers. Like the characters she sings about, Hartzman might seem at first like she’s rambling, narrating the view as she circles the block, before you realize she’s actually baring her soul.
So much of this magic can be heard in her delivery of the words “finish him” at the end of “Bull Believer.” First, there’s the lyrical context: She’s at a New Year’s party; she has a nosebleed; someone is on the couch playing Mortal Kombat. Then there’s the way she sings it as her band thrashes and swells: first a murmur, then a wail, then a cry, then a shredded, unintelligible shriek. It goes on for a long time, and it’s difficult to imagine her replicating it every night on tour. Hartzman has explained in interviews she didn’t rehearse this moment, and she considered driving to the middle of nowhere to try it out, alone, in a wide open space. Still, the recorded version—a first take in the studio while her bandmates were downstairs playing video games—is the one. By now she’s learned there’s plenty of escape to be found in the wild, uncharted country within.


On the latest of the Toronto band's experimental zodiac EPs, Fucked Up continue to break and rebuild the definition of hardcore, venturing further out into realms of drone, ambient, and psychedelia.

Year of the Snake

Over the band’s 16-year career, Fucked Up has alternated between more straight-ahead hardcore on its proper albums and a parallel lane of experimental releases named after the Chinese zodiac. That’s a bit of an oversimplification, but the dichotomy between the two modes is still intact enough where it’s fair to say Fucked Up has operated as two different bands. For perspective, compare how 2014’s Glass Boys featured Tragically Hip frontman Gord Downie, while 2012’s Year of the Tiger featured Jim Jarmusch.
Like last year’s two-track, 45-minute release, This Mother Forever, Year of the Snake sees Fucked Up venturing further out into realms of drone, ambient, and psychedelia with shades of prog and fusion thrown in for good measure. In fact, the two releases work as companion pieces and make the most sense as a pair. Both feature epic-length songs in the 15-to-30-minute range. But it’s their differences that reveal the full breadth of Fucked Up’s ambitions.
Where This Mother Forever sticks to a uniform structure of slow building—its two songs are basically single ideas stretched about as far as they can go—Year of the Snake flows in a less linear fashion, its ideas materializing and de-materializing as if the band could have turned them into separate songs but chose instead to let them bleed into one another. Over its 24-minute span, the title track encompasses simplistic riffing that verges on stoner metal, pastoral new-age psychedelia (complete with pan flute, recorder, and prayer bowl), epic hard rock, and a violin section that lands convincingly close to post-rock. Each section has ample time to simmer and it never feels like the band sacrifices flow for the sake of experimentation.
About halfway through the title track, when Fucked Up are going full bore channeling 2112-era Rush at their most majestic, the song transitions so that a synth figure bubbles up from underneath. The two parts initially clash, like someone bumping loud music in a car not far away. For that moment, Year of the Snake sounds almost like a mashup, but it’s short-lived. It also exemplifies how carefully considered all of the decisions on Year of the Snake are.
On the other hand, nothing feels especially careful about the voice of Damian Abraham, whose bark sounds so large and forceful it's like listening to King Kong next to an orchestra. That contrast gives Year of the Snake its distinct character. And as Fucked Up have delved into ever more delicate forms of expression, it’s been interesting to see how the band addresses the discrepancy between Abraham's style and the rest of the instrumentation. Abraham doesn’t appear on the second track, drummer Jonah Falco’s six-minute instrumental “Passacaglia,” and guitarist Mike Haliechuk composed the title track in a way that employs Abraham as an intermittent texture rather than a focal point. Which isn’t to say that there isn’t plenty of Abraham to go around, but only that if his voice was a dealbreaker for you before, Year of the Snake might be your best shot at appreciating everything that Fucked Up have to offer. (Guitarists Josh Zucker and Ben Cook do not appear on the EP.)
At the beginning of “Passacaglia,” which functions as a kind of denouement for the title track, the guitars (played by Falco) contain echoes of Killing Joke’s groundbreaking 1980 self-titled debut. As revolutionary as Killing Joke sounded at the time, they approached their music as if it was a given that punk’s rules were there to be shattered. Likewise, even after decades’ worth of relaxing boundaries, Fucked Up bastardize hardcore in a way that gives off the thrill of creative heresy.  As a creative insurgency waged from within its own ranks, Year of the Snake makes the genre sound more pliable than ever.


The Atlanta rapper makes some of his most intimate, introspective tracks yet and proves why he’s one of his city’s most dependable.

Peewee Longway / Cassius Jay: Longway Sinatra 2

Longway Sinatra 2

Peewee Longway emerged as one of the last new members of the old 1017 before Gucci Mane’s last period of incarceration, popping up in 2013 and 2014 on early Young Thug tracks. Since the boss Mane’s release from prison in 2016—followed by Gucci’s crossover success, healthier rebrand, and Master P-type pivot to mentor of “The New 1017”—Peewee has mostly struck out on his own, orbiting Atlanta’s rap scene as a perpetual, determined independent, the head of his own MPA Bandcamp label.
He’s cited by peers as something of a mover and shaker behind the scenes, even as mainstream momentum has slightly eluded him—he helped facilitate Migos’ original deal with Quality Control, and Gucci Mane credits Peewee with introducing him to the enigma and icon that is Thugger, one of the most fruitful and paradigm-shifting creative relationships of rap’s last decade. Most recently, Peewee has positioned himself as part of a tag team with fellow Georgia self-starter and crypto-entrepreneur Money Man; together the two are a classic opposites-attract odd couple pairing, Money Man like a more menacing Red Power Ranger to Peewee’s goofier “Blue M&M.”
The first Longway Sinatra might have had the swagger, but it lacked close-to-the-mic crooning. On Longway Sinatra 2, Peewee pulls the listener closer for some of his most intimate and introspective tracks yet—call it In the Peewee Small Hours. He’s now something of a link between multiple eras of regional hip-hop history—the rap game Rat Pack of Longway Sinatra 2 is made up of everyone from legendary Memphis producer Jazze Pha, to new stars in the Southern constellation like Lil Baby and Blac Youngsta, to similarly underrated Atlanta workhouse Hoodrich Pablo Juan.
Peewee has long leaned into the cartoonishness suggested by his name, rapping with a playful candor. It’s an image enhanced by his delightfully absurdist mixtape covers, usually designed by surrealist mixtape visionary KD Designz, casting Peewee as pieces of candy or bowls of spaghetti. Even his play on Ol’ Blue Eyes feels more like a Dick Tracy comic book character than a signification of slickness or timeless cool, as Sinatra is for perpetual cornball Logic. There’s a kind of cheeky self-deprecation to Peewee’s lyricism; not many rappers would dare compare the itchiness of their trigger finger to their struggles with chronic premature ejaculation and then make a hook out of it, as he does on “Anxious.”
Cassius Jay displays a malleable hand when it comes to production, backing up Peewee’s various vibes like Sinatra conducting a spectrum of colors. Grinding tracks like “White Horse” and “Takeoff” recall Jay’s work on Future’s DS2 with growling drums, laser blast synths, and icy bells. But he’s equally adept at soundtracking the softer and sweeter side of Peewee’s playboy persona, draping “Pink Salmon” in bright keys and bringing “Blue Benjamins” to a decadent MBDTF-like climax with a shredding guitar solo.
In the past, Peewee has rapped from the perspective of a non-stop hustler at the frontline of various illicit industries, but on Longway Sinatra 2 he occasionally zooms out to the bird’s eye perspective and reflects on the emotions and memories behind him. “Heaven Got a Ghetto” is the kind of track you can only make once you’re nearing middle age, a thoughtful and almost gentle reflection on the vast changes decades can bring.
Over a clean electric guitar line on “Skydiving,” Peewee reminds us that Atlanta, despite having become a new money media metropolis, is still deep in the heart of the country. He effortlessly slides into a Southern sing-song drawl for an authentic country-rap fusion, with few novelty signifiers beyond some bars about riding horses. It’s not exactly a melodic interpolation, but the chorus—“Skydiving/Now she on Rocky Mountain climbing”—gestures toward Tim McGraw’s bleeding heart power ballad “Live Like You Were Dying” (from the album of the same name, a raw and self-hating pop reflection on the loss of a parent that’s like the 808s & Heartbreak of radio country).
“Blue Benjamins” flips “I Would Die 4 U” for a tribute to the love of the game—“I will die for these blues”—that would have been right at home during Southern rap’s golden age of mixtapes, next to the shelf alongside Yo Gotti and Gucci Mane’s “Pure Cocaine.” It’s fitting that a Prince riff is a prime showcase for the flexibility of Peewee’s voice, slipping between his usual delivery, a deeper rumbling mumble, and stretches of Thug-like falsetto. Peewee has long been one of Atlanta’s most dependable and essential emcees, even if he never acquired the national stature of some of his comrades, but Longway Sinatra 2 suggests an artist who, just like the chairman of the board, will only develop and complicate with age.

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The hapless solo debut from the Vampire Weekend drummer is excruciatingly self-reflexive.

Youngish American

This solo debut of Vampire Weekend drummer Chris Tomson was born three years ago, when the band took a break after touring behind 2013’s Modern Vampires of the City. Tomson, who had just turned 30, got married and got a mortgage. Less typically for someone his age, Tomson was also staring at what he called “a fairly large amount of time off.” He had his childhood piano moved from his parents’ house in New Jersey to his basement in Brooklyn, and—after “probably two months watching sports and then two months staring blankly”—started writing these songs.
He went with the name Dams of the West because of an article debating whether the dams in western America have outlived their usefulness and, “as a straight, white man playing generally rock’n’roll music” in 2017, “felt a certain camaraderie with the crumbling infrastructure from the middle of the last century.” He uses this acute awareness of his place in life as a vehicle to muse about the droll scenes that play out in his narrow range of vision. Its effect on almost every level—political, social, artistic—is essentially useless.
The muddle of Youngish American begins with the music. As the rhythmic force on three of the most critically adored albums of the past decade, Tomson knows his way around the drum kit. He also deftly plays almost all of the instruments on Youngish American. But his mellow voice is affectless, even with Black Keys’ Patrick Carney as producer. Carney’s touch on the record is serviceable, keeping the reverb gauzy and the percussion brawny, similar to his work with bands like Tennis and Black Lips. However, at some point, it was mistakenly suggested these songs should include swooping violin runs behind Tomson’s showy, clumsy lyrics.
Those lyrics dream oh so big of mixing Courtney Barnett’s knack for detail with Father John Misty’s ironic self-awareness. As a rule, the less comically winking they are, the better Tomson comes off. It’s charming when he sings “I don’t care where your heart is at/Even if it’s right where Sinatra sat,” on the slower, statelier “Polo Grounds,” named after the long-gone home of baseball’s New York Giants.
But other mundanities are delivered with such a dearth of meaning or poetry that they simply become mundane. “The Inerrancy of You and Me” hops from cooking “pasta with the red sauce/When I know you’re PMSing” to using the titular word Tomson says he recently just learned. The woozy ballad “Flag on the Can” repeats a half-baked question about Bud Light packaging, then adds, after what could only be a rip from some comically oversized bong, “What is philosophy, anyway?” Wine and personal finance are actually recurring themes across the album.
Like the least charming aspects of Father John Misty or late-career Sun Kil Moon, Tomson’s self-reflexiveness is exhausting. The fuzzed-out “Pretty Good WiFi” describes noticing a person’s legs and then having to realize, “Oh, shit, the male gaze!” A fairly representative track lyrically is the spaciously arranged “Perfect Wave,” which mostly involves the protagonist talking about vintage Pittsburgh Pirates baseball with his father-in-law, but then realizing he doesn’t need “the coldest fridge in the city” because the grocery store is so close. Tomson has said the line was inspired by a radio story that “made me feel like I took both my fridge and proximity to infinite foodstuffs for granted.” It just goes on like this.
The real pathos comes from how affable and intelligent Tomson comes across in interviews, and the real tragedy is that he simply might’ve benefited from testing the waters on a couple of EPs. The anxiety Tomson has acknowledged about becoming the last Vampire Weekend-er to go solo is understandable: VW frontman Ezra Koenig parlayed a Yeah Yeah Yeahs in-joke into a Beyoncé songwriting credit; Rostam, who officially quit the group early last year, left his bold stamp on songs by Solange and Frank Ocean when he wasn’t collaborating with the Walkmen’s Hamilton Leithauser. Bassist Chris Baio was releasing glinting synth-pop under his own surname for several years before he delivered his debut album, 2015’s The Names.
Vampire Weekend have been working on a fourth album. When Tomson returns as a solo artist, it’d be better if he first had something he felt an urgent need to say, and then decided to make a record of it. Youngish American is a hapless vanity album, sad for all the wrong reasons, and all the more frustrating because it couches wokeness in songs about the extra advantages afforded to Tomson’s demographic. Issues of privilege and identity are complicated no matter your tax bracket, but it’s better to seek inspiration from without rather than from within.


The Brooklyn noise musician Will Kraus makes one person sound like a fully staffed shoegaze band, adding new personality to a storied genre.

Path

Shoegaze is an isolating artform whose defining stylistic tropes have hardly shifted at all in the past 25 years from when it first bubbled up in the UK with bands like Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine, and Ride, to name the best. As such, the innovations have typically come from people like Brooklyn electronic noise artist Will Kraus, solo acts who reconstruct the long and lonely overtones through a non-guitar idiom. And while Path is one of the more intriguing entries into shoegaze of recent vintage, Kraus takes an unconventional approach to conventionality—he tries to make one person sound like a fully staffed rock band.
Kraus’ thin, prickly vocals are the only musical element that doesn’t sound like a synthesized version of the real thing, and they don’t mesh with the mix so much as get stuck in it like short-bristled comb trying to navigate a Tibetan Mastiff. But if the neon plasticity serves as a reminder that Kraus is going it alone, all the better. For a subgenre obsessed with pedalboard geekery, shoegaze is typically defined by standoffish, leather-clad chic or an obsession with burying “perfect pop” in static—timeless definitions of cool. Odds are if Kraus was a full-band operation, someone might’ve vetoed Path’s straight-up ’90s alt-rock feel, the most unique aspect of the album.
There’s an invigorating need coursing through Path that maybe honors Kraus’ adolescent obsession with Linkin Park, a crucial distinction in a genre that usually has a real problem with establishing stakes. The yearning is all in the rhythmic tics—the double-clutching muted chords, pulsing progressions that leave the major 7ths to drone for a few extra bars, and so about 70 percent of Path could be mistaken for the heaviest instrumental sections of Siamese Dream. Meanwhile, “Bum” collapses Hum’s “Stars” so every part is the one where the distortion pedals kick in. Kraus is a drummer by trade, and he also takes after the likes of Smashing Pumpkins’ Jimmy Chamberlin and Battles’ John Stanier, punk-jazz fusionists almost made their hulking bands almost funky at times; the booming intro of “Games” falls somewhere between the Big Pink and “Give It Away.”
The collating of arena-rock volume, nu-metal digital dreams, and bedroom-artist claustrophobia is a cool trick, enough to sustain Path for most of its 35 minutes even though it’s the only trick. But whether it happens on “Reach,” “Follow,” “See,” or any of the other functionally and forgettably titled songs, the general trajectory reveals why the album title isn’t plural. Nearly all begin with a reminder that this is one guy in Bushwick: the errant sound of a guitar plugging in, some lightly strummed chords, and a brief bit of yawning silence before it collapses in its own burnt-socket exhaust about three minutes later.
Path is bookended by two pieces where Kraus’ coos are enveloped by gritty, spun-sugar drones, but these wordless songs feel just as evocative as anything in between. The real outliers on Path are the songs that could be scoured for meaning if you’re the intrepid soul reading the lyrics sheet—“See” delivers a bedside elegy as a narcotized singsong (“She leaves on the TV/so it feels like you’re home”) and “Games” crossbreeds chillwave and Clintonian nostalgia by referencing a VHS recording of the “X Games” surrounded by Surge-guzzling guitar work that could’ve fit on its original soundtrack. Shoegaze doesn’t need ego, but Path shows it’s always better with personality.


Jawbox's final album receives a welcome reissue. If it doesn't match the heights of its predecessor For Your Own Special Sweetheart, it still captures a powerful band in top form.

Jawbox

Two of the best Dischord albums didn't actually come out on the legendary punk imprint. In 1994, Atlantic released Jawbox's For Your Own Special Sweetheart and that same year Epic issued Shudder to Think's Pony Express Record. Both groups had made their names on Dischord, and "selling out" was a fraught move for anyone from that world. While neither record made much of a mainstream impact, they were masterpieces that used a major label's resources to magnify, not dilute, an innovative sound formed in a close-knit Washington, D.C. punk scene. Jawbox had a unique approach to that aesthetic with their jazzy time signatures and noise-rock textures, and their major label debut arguably represents the pinnacle of D.C. post-hardcore, catching it just as it made its way into the alt-rock era.
But if Jawbox reasonably fit into the mainstream three years after Nirvana broke, it wasn't meant to last. Beck's Mellow Gold also came out in 1994, leading the way for the stoned, sample-happy kitchen-sink pop that was about to push ideological punk-derived music aside. In the twilight of grunge, Sweetheart could get away with being defiantly noisy and raw. Two years later, Jawbox's self-titled finale, which is now being reissued, showed some signs of capitulation to an omnipresent college-radio sound. A certain passively disaffected mien creeps in here and there, an awkward fit for a famously earnest, intense, and hardworking band. But a few dated details detract little from the songwriting, where rampaging fury is tempered by calculating musicianship, pitch-conscious singing, and precise ethics disguised as cut-up squawks of code.
Jawbox signed with Atlantic in order to play music full-time, not necessarily to become famous, and their contract wasn't onerous. They had a lot of freedom on Sweetheart and anatomized their sound on its greatest song, the angelically bruising "Savory". Nothing about it is hard-charging in the manner of classic hardcore punk; everything coils and squirms in an ominous quiet punctuated by deafening detonations. All of this is still true on Jawbox: J. Robbins' warm, chesty voice oscillates between an ominous croon and an octave-leaping peal. His guitar's spidery treble clashes against Bill Barbot's gnarled, almost bluesy licks, bent out of shape by a high-pressure rhythm section. Zach Barocas lays a volatile foundation, drumming around the beats at a slant, and Kim Coletta's bass embeds more zooms and fillips in outwardly brawny, inwardly delicate masses of sound.
But "preserved" is an apt term, as the record sounds more canned than its predecessor, losing some of its palpable danger. Though the guitar attack can be ferocious, the former dynamic range is squeezed in. Barbot's guitar work is perhaps more inventive than ever before, but instead of exploding into being, it more often sidewinds in and out of the mix. Relaxed, almost boho passages on "Mirrorful", "Desert Sea", and "Livid" sound more like the Breeders and Pavement than Embrace and Rites of Spring, early emo-core bands that influenced Jawbox. My favorite song on the album is also their prettiest ever, "Iodine", a sleepy, melancholy ballad where Robbins sings, with unusual tenderness, over a limpid melody painted in liquid trails of guitar. There's even a hidden song, an unironic (if not overly reverent) cover of Tori Amos' "Cornflake Girl". You can't get much more "120 Minutes" than that.
Signs of the times aside, there is plenty of peak Jawbox to be found. "His Only Trade" churns as thrillingly as "Jackpot Plus!" from Sweetheart, with Robbins' fiery vocal performance matching the urgent lyrics: "Someday he's gonna wake up in a burning house and wonder what to save and wonder who to blame." "Empire of One" finds a deep, exhilarating pocket in jungle drums and terse call-and-response vocals. "Capillary Life" is notably grand and subtle, with a multi-staged depth and scope elapsing in the usual three-or-so minutes. J. Robbins chants and spits like he means it.
But what did he mean? "Best of all," as he sings, "it's open-ended." You'd call the lyrics stream-of-consciousness if they weren't so focused, the phrases and delivery so sharply wrought. Robbins' cryptic tirades have a moral dimension and an aesthetic one; they accuse and self-lacerate; they are wary of systems and alert to betrayals of trust. Two frames in particular stand out. On "Won't Come Off", Robbins sings, "One second cut from the arc of a swan dive, pulled out tight to the pitch of a taut line," as if encapsulating his band's situation and style: An arc of force that has been pulled straight, thrumming with the strength of its own will to bend back. "At the bottom, they all want proof, and at the top, no one's making room," Robbins adds on "Chinese Fork Tie", as if diagnosing his position between an equally restive underground and mainstream.
After their self-titled album, Jawbox's Atlantic sub-label disintegrated and mainstream music moved on from cleaning up punk bands. In their relatively brief existence, they made made a lasting impression on incoming waves of math-rock and post-punk bands with dissonant textures, awkward stop-start dynamics, and knotty instrumental phrasing. And if it's not their best album, their self-titled swan song, frequently cutting through its temporal trappings with that old desperation and drive, still holds up.


K Records reissues Phil Elvrum's quiet masterpiece, a record of intuitive music and esoteric flights of the imagination. The set also features bonus material recorded in 2007 specifically to accompany this release.

The Glow Pt. 2

In the latter half of the 1990s, as the grunge and riot-grrrl movements of the Pacific Northwest petered out, a young record store clerk in Anacortes quietly dreamed up a world that was entirely his own. Working in private, with analog tape, Phil Elvrum remade the twee-pop of Olympia, Washington's K Records into something broader in scope, proving that intimacy and opulence were not mutually exclusive by forging sweet tunes, childlike vocals, solar noise, and enigmatic tape collages into one molten mass. His speciality was reconciling extreme orders of magnitude, casting mountains and planets and stars as items hanging from a baby's mobile. The Glow Pt. 2, which remains his crowning achievement, is being reissued by K just as Elvrum says "it threatened to go out of print." Seven years of imitation have done nothing to dull its impact-- it sounds as unaccountably grand now as it did in 2001.
The Glow Pt. 2 wasn't conceptualized, then recorded; Elvrum figured out where it was going even as he committed it to tape. He strived to document the esoteric flights of his imagination, and produced appropriately intuitive music: Vocal harmonies blur, disappear, return as ragged organs. Creaky percussion sounds like it might give way at any moment, and sometimes does. Staticky thumps that could level forests give way to calm acoustic expanses. The bum notes peppering the acoustic riff of "Headless Horseman" are reminders that Elvrum was lunging impulsively from one idea to the next. In this, it's a perfect mirror of Xiu Xiu: While Jamie Stewart's music fumbles in pitch darkness, Elvrum's gropes through blinding light.
That easy but deliberate rhythm, along with Elvrum's mossy production, makes The Glow Pt. 2 feel uncommonly organic. Many of his songs move with the naturalistic but formalized cadence of an iambic meter. "I Want Wind to Blow" is cut by a heartbeat, plunked out on an acoustic guitar's low E string. The hardier pulse of "The Gleam Pt. 2" turns pitch-shifted guitars into a stately march. These could have been average indie pop tunes were they not shaped by Elvrum's unique sense of non-linear arrangement and space: He often gives us a few moments to acclimate ourselves to the Dub Narcotic studio's seething room tone before, with a sudden flourish, flooding it with energy, as he does on "Map" and "My Roots are Strong and Deep". Therefore, everything he records sounds huge and hollowed out, a little bigger on the inside than on the outside. Death Cab for Cutie would have written the frilly arpeggios of "You'll Be in the Air" and stopped there, but Microphones fans wait on tenterhooks for the moment when it inevitably shudders and begins to pile up on itself.
Bonus discs are typically the province of demos and remixes. Because of The Glow Pt. 2's piecemeal construction, Elvrum has none of the former-- everything was taped over or went on the album. As something of an artistic hermit, he's constitutionally inclined against the latter. But, wanting to give fans something in addition to the existing songs, Elvrum spent some time in 2007 recording bonus material for the reissue. These additions range from the obvious (like the acoustic version of "I Felt My Size") to the arcane (like a vaguely dub-influenced version of "I Want Wind to Blow"). There are also essential sketches of new material such as "I'm Like You, Tree", which expand the album's already-deep relationship to nature. Of course, none of the new lyrics clarify the overarching story; they're further snapshots of Elvrum feeling small and serene in a big, scary universe. But these snippets are thrilling for Microphones fans-- they reveal a few more glimpses of a distant, haunting world that's all the more alluring for its incompleteness.


The Boston rock trio’s latest attempts to reconnect with the songwriting focus of their early demos, pushing beyond slowcore in search of something more direct.

Natural Part

Before they were a hazy slowcore band, Horse Jumper of Love wrote folk songs. A look back at the trio’s 2016 Demo Anthology reveals a softer side to frontman Dimitri Giannopoulos’ songwriting, one as influenced by acoustic indie-folk acts like Fleet Foxes and Dirty Projectors as it was by anything from Duster. Yet somewhere between their acclaim on the Boston house show circuit, the release of their first two albums, and the relentless touring that accompanied each, the band became known for a sound altogether different from those somber early demos: one that emphasized dense chords and crushing distortion over a conscious focus on narrative. Their latest album, Natural Part, is both a return to the songwriting mode of their demos and something altogether new, pushing beyond the tempos and textures of slowcore in search of something more direct.
Horse Jumper of Love songs have long felt like band-centric affairs. The opening notes of their self-titled debut set the tone: steady chords with simple changes and vocal melodies that mirrored riffs clearly written out on the guitar. Lyrical meaning came second to the emotional impact of each melody, with entire songs constructed around serpentine guitar riffs and the vocal lines they inspired. This approach situated the band’s first two albums within a larger alt-rock lineage; comparisons to slowcore pioneers like Duster and Low have followed, but the group’s sound has always had as much in common with Smashing Pumpkins or Silversun Pickups as it did with anything to come from the short-lived slowcore moment.
Natural Part is an ambitious attempt to reconnect with the songwriting focus of the band’s early demos. The album opens with just Giannopoulos’ barren voice, unaccompanied by the heavy riffs that were once so prevalent. “I can’t control the urge to keep healing myself through you,” he sings on “Snakeskin.” Despite the clarity and force of his vocals, Giannopoulos remains committed to lyrical abstraction, building heady, dream-like images that resist clear explanation. Like many other songs on the album, “Snakeskin” aspires to something larger and more impactful than the noisy repetition of the band’s early basement shows, even as the trio struggle to present a single, unified statement.
Still, multiple songs benefit from the band’s renewed interest in narrative. “I Poured Sugar in Your Shoes” is a charming mid-tempo ballad about the early stages of a relationship, using imagery inspired by Giannopoulos’ time as a prep chef to explore how feelings can grow and change with time. It’s a glimpse of what effective songwriting looks like in this mode, drawing together tighter verses and cleaner production coming into a semblance of a pop song. The title track might be the band’s single strongest song so far, finding warmth and comfort that cuts through abstraction. Psychedelic images give way to humor, grief, and epiphany as Giannopoulos sings about getting drunk, reading A People’s History of the United States, and ultimately reaching a stoned realization: “Deciding that romance does not exist with you/Was so romantic to me,” he murmurs over chorus-drenched arpeggios. It’s a rare moment when the trio’s drug-induced impressionism fits naturally into a larger storytelling gesture.
These songwriting breakthroughs are rare exceptions on an album that feels strained and inconsistent in the context of the band’s catalog. Where their first two albums were charming, unambitious statements held together with a lo-fi glue, Natural Part aspires to new heights, attempting the requisite evolution into a band with greater range. But this expectation—that an early-career indie band must grow and evolve in ambition—misses just how much of the trio’s appeal was always bound up in feel-good shows and unassuming recordings. Despite occasional moments of beauty, what’s left in this progressive push feels stiff and labored over, betraying the warm, bleary-eyed feeling that made the band’s first two albums so beloved.


The most extreme thing about Deafheaven’s remarkable fourth album is how subdued it sounds. It suggests devastation without placing you at the center of it.

Ordinary Corrupt Human Love

Deafheaven’s music is not made for the everyday. No two of their four records sound quite alike, but their mood is immediately identifiable. It’s a place where serious subjects—love and loss, emotional apocalypse, existence—are amplified like sunlight through a magnifying glass. They make a kaleidoscope out of heavy music’s most introspective corners: The tortured shrieks and blast beats of black metal ripple through shoegaze’s immersive guitar tones, all building with the skyward patience of starry-eyed post-rock. You don’t put these records on casually.
Given their penchant for grand gestures, the most extreme thing about Ordinary Corrupt Human Love is how subdued it sounds. It’s the first release from the Los Angeles-based quintet that feels more like a collection of songs than one unbroken piece, and it exposes shades of their work that have primarily been kept to the peripheries. The slow, dramatic opener “You Without End” blooms from muted piano and slide guitar, instruments that lend a mournful touch to their typically explosive melodies. Other songs incorporate clean singing in contrast to vocalist George Clarke’s characteristic howl. “Night People,” with lead vocals from goth-folk singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe and multi-instrumentalist Ben Chisholm, is their most spectral and fragile recording to date. This music suggests devastation without placing you at the center of it.
Over the past few years, Deafheaven have discussed hitting various personal lows in the wake of 2015’s restless and intense New Bermuda, citing depression, creative fatigue, and substance abuse. Bassist Stephen Clark quit the band once the tour was over. Guitarist Kerry McCoy got sober. Taking a more metaphorical refuge, Clarke became interested in candid photography, collaborating with artist Nick Steinhardt to create stark portraits like Sean Stout’s photograph that graces Human Love’s cover. “I told him I didn’t want anything extraordinary,” he explained about the collaborative visual project. “Just people in their everyday routine.”
This shift in perspective, from the vast to the ordinary, is the point. On Human Love, Deafheaven tell unglamorous stories, examining intimate scenes that go down when no one is watching. “I’m reluctant to stay sad” goes an early lyric, and the record follows suit, as dark moods roll by like faraway clouds. Clarke’s piercing voice continues to evoke the highest reaches of human pain, yet he’s grown more adept at exposing subtler melancholy. In the surging, dreamlike “Honeycomb,” he writes like a goth beat poet surveying the city: Words like “geese,” “mariachi,” and “Cortázar” have never been sung with such brutality.
The band matches Clarke in all his passing visions. They’ve become as expressive in their slowcore balladry (“Near”) as their more bracing epics (the duel-guitar-laden second half of “Worthless Animal”). Their best songs, like centerpiece “Canary Yellow,” explore all these various modes in ragged, epiphanic cycles. While peers like Sannhet have grown more airtight with each new album, Deafheaven still love letting their seams show: Drop the needle at any point on Human Love, and you might hear a completely different band—one aiming for arenas, or mosh pits, or the soundtrack of a climactic makeout scene in a prestige television show. Five years removed from their landmark Sunbather, Deafheaven have never seemed less interested in being fashionable—as a result, they sound newly content.
In its hour-long runtime, Human Love unfolds as an even-handed showing of Deafheaven’s strengths. Like Sunbather and New Bermuda, it’s marked by fleeting moments of sheer beauty. Many of these arrive thanks to McCoy’s guitar playing, a direct and intuitive line of communication that complements Clarke’s illegible emotion. Some of his best riffs are scattered throughout “Glint,” a song that evolves magnificently as Clarke intertwines visions of marital bliss with fantasies of self-destruction. It’s an instant addition to their canon of showstoppers, walking the tightrope of extreme music and radio-friendly ’90s alt-rock without sinking into the cheesy, histrionic center of that Venn diagram. That they sound less interested in risking that fate only makes their successes feel more triumphant.
There have always been two ways to hear Deafheaven’s music. There’s the micro approach, which involves dissecting the band’s influences and navigating their records like a mixtape without a tracklist. (What’s that familiar melody? What emotion are they trying to express? What genre is this?) On Human Love, they recall the atmospheres of a wide variety of bands without explicitly copping their styles: Touchstones like Slowdive, the Smashing Pumpkins, and the Smiths are all suggested at various points within this music. Like watching a magic show backstage, looking for these references can draw admiration as much as disillusionment at how it all comes together.
The other angle to admire Deafheaven is more macro—which particularly benefits this album—as you stand back and surrender to the squall. Human Love is Deafheaven’s subtlest, prettiest music, and it aims for a different kind of transcendence. For all the influences their music conjures, you’d never mistake these songs for any other band. The record’s title is taken from Graham Greene’s 1951 novel The End of the Affair, words spoken by a narrator who is uncommonly torn between love and hate. In the place of his all-consuming obsessions, he longs for something benign and ignorable to ponder on the way to work—the type of fantasies he imagines occupying the mind of more contented people. It’s a common dream, though, for some of us, it’s unrealistic. Human Love thrives in the moments where the extraordinary and the commonplace collide and become indistinguishable. In search of something quietly universal, Deafheaven can’t help but notice the tiny miracle in each breath.


Charlie Louvin: Steps to Heaven / Charlie Louvin Sings Murder Ballads and Disaster Songs

Charlie Louvin has been singing about the extremes of country music-- salvation and damnation-- throughout his long life. He and his brother Ira began harmonizing at home as kids in the 1930s and playing their first public shows as teenagers in the early 1940s. During the 1950s and 60s, they had hits with secular and nonsecular songs alike, which cemented their legacy as one of country's most conflicted acts: On guitar, Charlie was sensible and earnest, but Ira, playing mandolin, was temperamental and worldly. The brothers' differences illuminate the morals in every song, whether it's a churchly number like "The Family Who Prays" or a grisly narrative like "Knoxville Girl". Ira died in a car crash in 1965; Charlie continues to make music, but has no one to harmonize with him.
After his strong self-titled comeback in 2007, the 81-year-old Louvin has released two follow-ups, each exploring a starkly different theme. Steps to Heaven is an uplifting collection of old hymns; Charlie Louvin Sings Murder Ballads and Disaster Songs is pretty self-explanatory. One is about glory and redemption, the other tragedy and tribulation. While he's not nearly as vocally agile as he was decades ago, he does sound better-- stronger, clearer-- than he did on last year's Charlie Louvin. On Steps to Heaven, he sounds plucky and rejuvenated, tearing into these ten hymns with spirited reverence and hitting even the high notes confidently and happily. Producer Mark Nevers (best known for his work with Lambchop) sets him in a casual church service setting, backed primarily by Lee Derrick's rollicking piano and a bold backing choir that occasionally intrudes on Louvin's leads. His lively "There's a Higher Power" and intensely testimonial "I Am Bound for the Promised Land" are sincerely moving. He conveys belief and contentment with every note.
Steps to Heaven may be the more spiritually rewarding of these two albums, but Murder Ballads is much more fun. These grim accounts of mine collapses, shootings, train wrecks, and dead babies-- some of which appeared on the Louvin Brothers' 1956 album, Tragic Songs of Life-- have an almost tabloid aplomb in their matter-of-fact details. Louvin sounds spry on opener "Darling Corey" (featuring Andrew Bird on fiddle) and "Dixie Boll Weevil", on which he voices both the farmer and the destructive beetle. Most of the album, however, is much more somber and often elegant, with Louvin relating these stories with an easy, earthy gravity, as if he's singing about people he has known personally. "The Little Grave in Georgia" sets the mournful story of a dead teenager against a soft two-step, and "Mary of the Wild Moor", which was among the first songs Charlie and his brother performed as teenager, sounds especially stately in this arrangement. Still, it's impossible to ignore the gruesome details, like the conductor scalded to death by a steam engine on "Wreck of the Old 97". What a way to go.
Of course, there is some thematic and musical overlap between these two releases. Steps to Heaven, as its title makes clear, has death on its mind, albeit as a reward for a forthright life rather than as punishment or tragedy. Similarly, the characters on Murder Ballads yearn for the redemption they soon realize will never come. Happiness and grief inform every life, and Louvin inhabits the songs like he's experienced his share of both. As he sings on "Down with the Old Canoe", "The hand of God was in it all."


Boredoms drummer YoshimiO returns to the long-running, shape-shifting project that represents the other major pillar of her career, consolidating the strengths the band has developed over the years.

nijimusi

Though YoshimiO is probably still best known as Yoshimi P-We, the longtime drummer for the avant-rock group Boredoms, it’s time to stop calling OOIOO her side project. Eight albums into a discography that stretches over nearly a quarter century, the band she co-founded isn’t just one among her numerous collaborations; it represents a pillar of YoshimiO’s long and impressive career.
The group’s punky late-’90s debut merely hinted at YoshimiO’s ambitions as a bandleader. Before long, OOIOO’s sound expanded to incorporate drum-circle groove, ritualistic chanting, and psychedelic tendrils of melody. Individual motifs could seem sectional, or even jarring, in isolation. Some of these same traits could be found in Boredoms’ turn-of-the-century work. But the way OOIOO approached similar postures has long felt distinct. By the time of 2000’s Gold & Green, the band landed on a method of stirring its influences into a style that could prove unexpectedly approachable.
In order to keep some sense of surprise afloat, balances between the band’s aesthetic ingredients have changed in worthy ways over the years, with the starker percussive attack of 2006’s Taiga giving way to lustrous shimmers of gamelan on 2013’s Gamel. Looming over it all is YoshimiO’s playful editorial hand. In a recent interview with band’s stateside label, Thrill Jockey, YoshimiO described her freeform approach in the studio. “When we record those songs, we play them as if we’re playing a live show. After all the other members go home, I add my parts to the songs... I record the same parts that I play when we perform the songs live, but I also add phrases that I come up with spontaneously, using instruments that I’m not used to playing. It’s like having a conversation with the song.”
A good conversation requires inspiration as well as a stable language. Now, with a couple decades in the rearview, it’s easier to see that YoshimiO’s drive to find this balance between the chaotic and the familiar has long been one of OOIOO’s goals. Over time, the overdubs and shifts in arrangement style have tipped listeners to the fact that the band is not on auto-pilot. But YoshimiO isn’t out to overthrow all of her prior work, either; the band’s albums frequently delight with singalong pop pleasures. It all adds up to a satisfyingly well-rounded quality that isn’t terribly common in the world of experimental rock.
nijimusi doesn’t do much to mess with this underlying approach. The subtle change, this time around, has to do with the debut of the group’s newest drummer, MISHINA. (According to YoshimiO, she had to edit this drummer’s tracks less extensively than those of prior percussionists.) And despite a culminating victory lap in which riffs from the group’s past albums come back for a curtain call, the album doesn’t feel like a nostalgia trip. Instead, it’s a consolidation of the strengths that this band has been amassing over its long life.
The opener gives just a hint of OOIOO’s chaotic energies: In 50 seconds, a wash of cymbals is put through a whirling, tape-like effect, leading in turn to squalling vocals and a brief hint of hardcore. A hard cut to the next track, “nijimu,” reestablishes the band’s more hypnotic quality, thanks to an attractive, descending bass motif. Throughout, there is a winning tension between the experimental touches and jammy meditations. The lightly swinging percussion in “jibun” helps root the song’s first half, when the melodic performances have a quality of purposeful wandering; the second half lurches into OOIOO rock mode, which might remind Boredoms fans of Vision Creation Newsun.
Tracks like “asozan5” and “tisou”—the latter of which features striated vocals, minimalist patterns, and funk—operate as mini-suites that draw on textures the band has explored previously. But this time, the pieces are all strung together with a veteran group’s poise. That next-level group mastery also lends merit to the band’s decision to reprise some past material, as they do in a track with a mouthful of a title (but one that’s beautiful to read, as a sort of conceptual-art command): “walk for ‘345’ minutes, while saying ‘Ah Yeah!’ with a ‘Mountain Book’ in one hand, until a shower of light pours down.”
If you’re fan of the group, you know “Ah Yeah!” from the album Feather Float, and “Mountain Book” from Gold & Green. But even if you don’t know the back catalog, this 11-minute opus is an excellent way to encounter some of those themes for the first time; the track’s patient ebb and flow has the feel of a mini-concert. When a band works the way OOIOO does—popping up a couple times per decade, while delivering subtle but interesting updates to a pre-established style—it’s easy to take it for granted. But that doesn’t mean we should. Certain kinds of conversations are only possible with friends of long standing.

Buy: Rough Trade
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At his best, the stalwart Memphis rapper excels at heart-on-sleeve, bluesy songwriting, and his new album shows him deepening and opening up.

A Gangsta’s Pain

Among the current crop of rising Memphis rap stars, Moneybagg Yo stands apart. Unlike Duke Deuce, who pulls from the region’s crunk tradition, or Key Glock, who is now Young Dolph’s right-hand man, Demario DeWayne White Jr. feels indebted to cities beyond his home. Despite his distinctive Memphis drawl, his music draws more from Chicago drill and Atlanta trap than his hometown. Alongside his compatriot Blac Youngsta and under the tutelage of their shared mentor Yo Gotti, they’ve developed a weathered sound that feels isolated from the rest of Memphis.
The title of his latest album, A Gangsta’s Pain, suggests opening up and deepening. But Moneybagg has rapped about trauma before: The cover to his 2019 album 43VA Heartless depicted him undergoing open heart surgery, a graphic visual metaphor for the way pain sometimes bleeds out from his tough exterior. Chicago rap breakouts Lil Durk and Polo G join him for “Free Promo,” and Moneybagg’s wearied rasp fits right into their full-throated, emotional approach. Before their falling out, Moneybagg collaborated with Baton Rouge’s YoungBoy Never Broke Again, and at his best, Moneybagg demonstrates a similar penchant for heart-on-his-sleeve, bluesy songwriting. That soulfulness comes through in the well-loved R&B samples as well: “Wockesha” revisits Debarge’s frequently flipped “Stay With Me”; “Hard for the Next” pulls from Ginuwine’s “Differences,” and “If Pain Was A Person” is built from Luther Ingram’s classic hit “(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want To Be Right.”
Moneybagg Yo explores duality with the contrasting “Hate It Here” and “Love It Here,” the former a dark slice of self-reflection about the fallout of a relationship, the latter a lighter pop number driven by acoustic guitar and chipmunk cooing. But even in the more luxurious, yacht rap vibe pieces, there are still clouds on the horizon and an edge of paranoia: “Trouble in paradise,” as he puts it on “Love It Here.” Moneybagg seems more comfortable working than relaxing—“Hard for the Next” recruits Future for a slice of HNDRXX-like pop, complete with electric guitar and seagull-like sound effects, but it feels at odds with Moneybagg’s strengths and is largely carried by Future. He can work with a smooth beat, but sounds a little out-of-place serenading Jhené Aiko on “One of Dem Night”—the album’s most sincere romantic intentions are expressed toward his double cup.
The beats on A Gangsta’s Pain often contain stray melodic details, glittering tones or ornate strings, but they’re usually buried under layers of preset hi-hats and pounding keys. With a Pharrell feature and Neptunes production to boot, “Certified Neptunes” is the only of the album’s tracks to fully embrace an off-kilter and unsettling sound, constructed from a distorted shard of noise. Moneybagg Yo’s assertive and chiseled flow is right at home atop a futuristic beat that would have fit in on Eternal Atake. Though Pharrell might be as big as pop gets, this collaboration is one of the album’s least overt attempts at pop, and it’s in these more experimental edges that Moneybagg finds most success. These high-profile features indicate a major bid for stardom, a process not without growing pains, but Moneybagg Yo seems most energized when he’s in the trenches.

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One of the best access points to Cameron Stallones’ eclectic discography, Rock Sutra imagines his act as a band playing together, reacting to the instincts of its members in real time.

Rock Sutra

At the age of 36, Cameron Stallones has released more than 20 albums—with Magic Lantern, Duppy Gun, and the Celebrate Music Synthesizer Group—but mostly under the name Sun Araw. A shockingly consistent electronic craftsman and guitar noodler who loves improvisation, Stallones’ songs are funny, rhythmic, never too danceable, and most obviously psychedelic, the first label to stick when the California-based artist arrived on the scene a decade ago. Now that he’s distanced himself from the reverb-heavy loops that marked his breakout, 2010’s On Patrol, it’s easier to understand Stallones in a wider world of spontaneous experimentation, one that extends to the adventurousness of mid-to-late century jazz and the heady treatments of technology-embracing classical composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez.
Still, Stallones remains a beguiling figure because of just how eclectic his discography and persona have become. Often photographed with a mustache and trucker hat, he presents like an indie rocker, and his relationship with the label Drag City adds to his cred in the genre. Perhaps his most beloved album, Icon Give Thank, is a collaboration with reggae legends the Congos, and while his production style borrows from the Jamaican dub tradition, the fluid shifts in his dense arrangements suggest West African pop music of the 1970s. With Sun Araw, Stallones gives these transcontinental musical voyages an idiosyncratic vessel. His vocals sound canned and generic, as though sampled from non-musical sources. His lyrics have a sense of humor, a disarming quality in an artist who once described himself as a “recovering academic.”
Stallones’ latest, Rock Sutra, is one of the best access points to his discography. While previous highlights On Patrol, Belomancie, and his recent The Saddle of the Increate stretched out over an hour-plus, Rock Sutra clocks in at a concise 40 minutes. Musically, the album picks up where Increate left off, with exclamatory vocals and swirling polyrhythms indebted to afrobeat. Yet for the first time, Stallones’ African influences sound doubly filtered through the western exposures of David Byrne and Brian Eno; the guitar on the rousing “Arrambe” functions as a bass, while the stormy basslines on “78 Sutra” and “Catalina” part in the middle to reveal soaring, short-lived melodies.
On Sutra, Stallones is thinking in terms of instruments and how they relate to one another. His set-up now includes synthesizer player Marc Riordan and percussionist Jon Leland, and their interplay is unprecedentedly groovy. On opener “Roomboe,” Stallones commands “Half-step!” like a Bar Mitzvah DJ encouraging reluctant kids to dance. The live-to-MIDI recording process, too, shows that Stallones wants listeners to imagine this iteration of his act as a band playing together, reacting to the instincts of its members in real time—even if he ultimately exerts a perfectionist’s control over each pitch.
Electronic music often sounds like the painstaking product of time in isolation. Mediated as it is by technology, Stallones’ experimentation acknowledges a social universe. The attentive way that he reacts to his collaborators, his influences, and his own ego indicates that he wants to talk to listeners, bygone musicians and—he would be the first to say—the cosmos. In these lonesome times, Rock Sutra captures Sun Araw at its most chatty: speaking to much that came before itself, and a whole galaxy outside.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Yesterday’s Active Rock playlist gets ransacked and reconfigured on the debut full-length from a Boston hardcore quintet whose influences range from Converge to Korn.

Errorzone

In hardcore, no sound is beyond reinvention or exploitation. If a strain of commercial rock or underground metal existed at one point, the question is when—not if—a younger generation will retool it in some cramped, dank basement. Boston hardcore quintet Vein are another band of interpreters, though they don’t draw from just one source. Their early material harkened back to the chaotic, pre-Jane Doe Converge, spazzing in technical bursts. Errorzone, their first full-length, adds vintage nu-metal fragments to that base, distorting them through the prism of technocratic dystopia. This approach makes Vein the most ambitious of their 1990s-infatuated cohort, using well-worn styles to unlock a hidden terror instead of settling for nostalgia.
Vein’s appropriation of nu-metal is effective because it’s irreverent. Errorzone acknowledges that the genre reigned supreme for a time, and that it wasn’t an aberration so much as a gateway to better heavy music. But the band isn’t trying to convince you that Life Is Peachy is a secret gem, even if the minute-long track “Rebirth Protocol” clearly draws from the higher register of Korn’s seven-string guitar parts, bleeding them out so that they sound more dissociated than ever. “Doomtech,” “Untitled,” and the title track confine Slipknot’s most radio-friendly choruses to a serene prison, isolating the band’s archetypal lost-Iowa-kid listener in another dimension. For hardcore bands, clean vocals usually signal a turn toward melody, accessibility, and so-called maturity; in Vein’s case, they’re another whiplash in a series of sudden jerks, confounding expectations but providing no relief. Yesterday’s Active Rock playlist is ripe to ransack and reconfigure as a vaguely familiar agent of disorder, transforming aggression that once soothed teen angst into something more destructive.
Nu metal and ’90s hardcore don’t quite speak a common language, but blocky rhythms comprise their shared root words and enable communication. Errorzone’s breakdowns muscle up as formidably as anything by Harm’s Way or Code Orange, the two acts closest to Vein’s space. It’s in these passages that Vein reassert themselves as a hardcore band, justifying their tinkering with history. “Broken Glass Complexion” concludes by merging brawn with scattershot drums and skronky guitar blasts, while “Old Data in a Dead Machine” ends with hammering downstrokes that are divorced from groove yet brimming with their own determination.
“Virus://vibrance” shifts, not even two seconds into its runtime, to breakbeats, in Vein’s most unexpected ’90s excavation. Breakbeats in hardcore would have been game-changing 20 years ago, and they still sound subversive here. Like so many elements of the album, they too exist primarily to agitate, sharp turns on a proudly nonlinear collection of songs. This is the sound of retro-futurism finally reaching the turn of the last millennium.
More than a particular sound, Errorzone evokes the late-’90s era when technology collided with rock and metal, as electronics crept in to threaten the dominance of guitar music and distribution models loosened. As artistic barriers crashed down, rock traditionalists put up new, higher walls and tightened their borders. Those years were tumultuous, and the dust hasn’t come close to settling; we’re still figuring out how placing the internet at the center of our lives fucked with our brains. Errorzone surfs this ongoing uncertainty: One of the most jarring sounds on the album is the sterile “goodbye” at the end of “End Eternal,” as if a rogue AOL free trial CD were shepherding you through a dystopian alternate reality. It’s terrifying, sure, but that unease sets the tone for one of the year’s most exhilarating heavy records.


The British psych-rock provocateur pens an album-length ode to the fragile euphoria of clawing yourself back from the brink.

Nancy: The Seven Foot Tall Post-Suicidal Feel Good Blues

Note: This review discusses self-harm and suicidal ideation.

In her 2018 poem “Hammond B3 Organ Cistern,” the lesbian poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi describes “the days I don’t want to kill myself” as “extraordinary.” She goes on to compare such fleeting moments to:

the time I said yes
to gray sneakers but then the salesman said
Wait. And there, out of the back room,
like the bakery’s first biscuits: bright-blue kicks.
Iridescent. Like a scarab! Oh, who am I kidding,
it was nothing like a scarab! It was like
bright. blue. fucking. sneakers!

The title track of British psych-rock provocateur Nancy’s 7 Foot Tall Post-Suicidal Feel Good Blues is a surging, scuzzy ode to that “bright. blue. fucking. sneakers!” feeling. Nancy, known also as Jamie Hall, singer and guitarist in the Brighton noise-pop trio Tigercub, wants us to know how hard he had it, growing up bullied in public housing. At seven feet tall, with a predilection for wearing women’s clothing, Nancy didn’t and couldn’t fit in. “I used to think about suicide every week,” he sings, but not anymore. Now, he’s “the king of this city,” celebrating his survival with this big, brash kick in the ass of a rock record.
If you listen closely, though, you’ll hear a subtle twist in Nancy’s march from victim to victor. His anti-suicide anthem samples the melody of MGMT’s “Time to Pretend.” When he sings “I used to think about suicide every week,” he’s using the exact tune Andrew VanWyngarden deployed on “move to Paris, shoot some heroin, and fuck with the stars.” It’s a quiet but unmistakable signpost: Nancy’s hard-won happiness is, actually, the transient, illusory kind. He’s setting the stage for an album that will boomerang from grey to bright blue and back again.
Actually, a boomerang may be too simplistic; there are so many peaks and valleys on this record that the emotional arc looks like an EKG reading. Said peaks, like “Pleasure Pen” and “Leave Your Cares Behind,” are full of seductive, false cheer, like an extended party sequence in one of those British TV shows where Thatcher’s in power, everyone’s unemployed, and they’re ready to do anything, no matter how dangerous or self-destructive, to feel good for a minute. Drunkenness, debauchery, the two in combination in a moving vehicle—it’s all here, in Nancy’s lyrics, and in the delicious irony of his instrumental choices.
“Pleasure Pen,” a song about going for anything, opens with a distorted shimmer of synth that echoes “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do).” The whiff of lounge and chintz gives a nightmarish undertow to the party songs, as if Hall is admitting all this behavior is hurtful rater than helpful. He pulls off the same trick in “Leave Your Cares Behind,” rhyming “cruising on the motorway” with “might just float away” in dreamy falsetto over feisty finger-snapping and whistling, like if Mowgli and Baloo descended to hell to perform “Bare Necessities.”
Nancy pairs these ironic, winking highs with lows of great sincerity. He’s adept at wiping away the grunge and psych-rock distortion when he wants to connect. After threatening suicide on the jittery “Never Gonna Wake (Up),” he recovers with a stunning, yearning ballad: “Dear Life Give Me A Sign That I Am Not Alone.” His dark night of the soul is not over, but he can, at least, dare to ask, “Is there light within the endless dark?” Most of the album calls to mind the endearing weirdness of the Nuggets compilation, but “Dear Life” is gentler, more like a Stephin Merritt ballad.
Nancy’s got a gift for rendering the compulsively undercutting of his own happiness. “Happy Happy Happy” is a harrowing portrait of a guy who can’t keep himself from doomscrolling: “Click through to a page/Written on climate change/And it starts up all over again.” Later on, the narrator craves the chance to destroy something on his own terms. After mourning break-ups throughout the album, Nancy pivots, on “Psycho Vision,” to “looking for a wife I can divorce.” It’s a sharp line, and it’s not the only one—his humor often keeps his disturbing material from descending into the maudlin. The titular sound of “Clic Clac,” we’re told, comes from the bony feet of the Grim Reaper, creeping up when you least expect him. “Deathmarch” deploys the organ-heavy Halloween music of a Vincent Price special—or, at least, a Bill Hader impression of one—and lends some levity to the album’s heaviest contemplation of death.
This album was clearly born of a dark place. Its narrator, mired in darkness, doesn’t seem to know what enduring happiness or survival would even look like. Some listeners may enjoy and relate to Nancy’s rollicking ride through all this turmoil; others may find themselves triggered. At any rate, Nancy sounds grateful, more than anything, that he lives to fight another day. The album’s bleak points make his moments of genuine gratitude shine all the brighter. His ecstasy at waking up and deciding that, yes, he wants to go on living today—it’s palpable. If you don’t know this feeling, this anti-suicide, “then you’re lucky,” writes Gabrielle Calvocoressi, “but also you poor thing.”

If you are experiencing suicidal thoughts or know someone who is, we recommend these resources:
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org
1-800-273-TALK (8255)

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On his fourth album, the French producer plunges headfirst into camp, embracing overdriven synth-pop and vintage rock’n’roll.

GAMMA

In the beginning, Gesaffelstein exuded cool. His synths oozed menace; his German-sounding alias was steeped in the perfume of Teutonic techno cred. Like Rick Owens’ slouchy draping, the French producer’s shadowy, slo-mo techno felt elegantly seedy, like a runway show in a back alley. But success has a way of defanging danger. After his work on Kanye West’s Yeezus boosted his profile, Gesaffelstein’s sophomore album, 2019’s Hyperion, came front-loaded with features like Pharrell, the sort of A-list cosign that the industry requires of a rising star. The louche swagger stumbled.
It’s hard to stick to your dungeon-techno guns with Haim on the track; it’s hard to remain stone-faced with the Weeknd singing about fucking with the lights on. Where Gesaffelstein’s debut felt effortless, Hyperion scanned like the work of a guy who was trying too hard to fit in at the big kids’ table. (Turned out Gesaffelstein, real name Mike Lévy, was not immune to corniness: His alias was meant to shoehorn “Gesamtkunstwerk” into “Einstein,” as in Alfred—overstuffed references stretched by juvenile overreach into the portentous portmanteau.)
GAMMA, then, comes as a happy surprise. Instead of trying to be cool, Gesaffelstein has plunged headfirst into camp. Glowering, industrial-grade techno is largely a thing of the past. In its place, he gives us a winking amalgam of overdriven synth-pop and vintage rock’n’roll. Seventies electro-punks Suicide and their French contemporaries Doctor Mix & the Remix, as well as synthabilly acolytes like the Jesus and Mary Chain and Love and Rockets, are obvious influences on Gesaffelstein’s distorted circuits, throbbing arpeggios, and motorik grooves. Lévy’s analog-rooted sound design has always been one of his strong points, and his synths have never buzzed as vigorously as they do here. Filters howl, lasers zap, and distortion builds like a tea kettle about to blow. The whole album’s a riot of squelch and clang.
Depeche Mode—an act that knows a thing or two about turning high camp into stadium-filling pop music—cast an even longer shadow. That’s thanks in part to the Some Great Reward-esque accents that litter the record like so many tarnished lug nuts, glassy FM tones suggesting the steely clank of chains. (Idea for a great safe word: “Yamaha DX7.”) But it’s due even more to singer Yan Wagner, GAMMA’s lone vocalist, whose oily baritone lubricates six of the record’s 11 tracks. In “Hard Dreams,” his leering, bluesy singsong sounds like an armored-up homage to Dave Gahan at his leather-trousered toughest. In “The Perfect,” which does for AI what “Behind the Wheel” did for B&D, he actually sings the phrase “behind the wheel.” Much of the Depeche Mode worship is equally Lévy’s doing: The instrumental “Tyranny” taps into the same 6/8 shuffle that “Personal Jesus” borrowed from T. Rex.
But Wagner is never reducible to a mere Gahan impersonator—he’s too funny for that, too unpredictable. Some of the eccentricity comes down to his lyrics. In the opening “Digital Slaves,” he ties his vocal cords up in elastic knots as he sings deranged lines like “Bring out the fun jump in the void…I’m gonna have fun with the digital scums,” or speak-shouts a chorus of “Cars! Coolers! Color! TV!” In “Your Share of the Night,” he groans, “Grunting in euphoria/This place is like a big mouth/Wading in the mire/The field roams with million diseases,” like Cronenberg and Google Translate gone horribly wrong. Such zany moments are the album’s best. “The Urge” pivots in its final 30 seconds from a Liars-esque industrial pogo to a Phil Spector slow dance; the way that Wagner purrs “Yeeeeeah” over the Moogy doo-wop of “Lost Love” is a sinister chef’s kiss atop a towering swirl of poisoned whipped cream. And “Hysteria,” a white-knuckled instrumental, is a perfect miniature of thrashy ersatz punk. At less than two minutes long, it’s one of GAMMA’s two shortest tracks, but nothing here runs much longer, which contributes to the album’s considerable charm. In place of some inflated falderal about total artworks and the life of the mind, Gesaffelstein has whittled his music down to a much simpler essence: thrusting hips, sharpened hooks, and a tongue pointedly in cheek. It ain’t E=MC2—and that’s the whole point.