The galvanizing New York dance-punk trio returns with a long-anticipated third album that sounds like the Rapture without retreading past successes. It's a nifty trick that underscores the band's hard-won identity and it happens to come at a time when house and disco are more fashionable than any period since the early 1980s.

In the Grace of Your Love

Looking back, the Rapture's legacy is as a galvanizing force for the underground, busting indie rock's standstill so mightily that we're now embarrassed to be the guy not dancing. They never seemed like a good bet to break dance music to the mainstream audiences, though, no matter how hard iTunes insists that the closing track on my copy of 2006's Pieces of the People We Love is titled "Best Buy Exclusive." Pan-pop conspiracy theorists might note that the Rapture reached fever-pitch in New York in 2003, or right around the time that Lady Gaga was enrolling at NYU, but if the Rapture hadn't stopped their own momentum, someone would have stopped it for them: likely labelmate/mentor/producer James Murphy, whose LCD Soundsystem offered the same funk-punk grooves but had better jokes (well, had jokes period) and a more explosive live presence, with pathos to boot. The Rapture were too nervy and out-of-sync to ascend the ranks.
None of that changes the fact that the Rapture return, minus a surly Youtube non-sensation, at a time when house and disco are more fashionable than at any time since the early 1980s. See Gaga, see Hercules and Love Affair, see couture Daft Punk Lego dolls, see the fact that Chris Brown knows a French guy. The Rapture, always medium opportunists, aren't interested in taking advantage of this. They've become what they've always threatened to become: an art-rock band with predilections for boogie and dippy lyrics. Grace sounds like the Rapture without retreading past successes, a nifty trick that underscores the band's hard-won identity.
The Rapture are a pretty good art-rock band, too: Grace is fleshier than its predecessors, with horns, needlework guitar, and Jenner's brash voice filling the negative space the band used to gift to the dance floor. They deftly respond to choral background vocals, funky synth slabs, and tasteful guitar fills. A group that was once a combustible ball of energy is now a functioning nervous system with a keen sense of pace and texture. You can hear notes of U2's propulsive anthems ("Sail Away"), Talking Heads' agitated funk ("Can You Find a Way"), and XTC's ballast pop ("Rollercoaster"). You can forgive them for envying Cut Copy's hot-knife-through-butter crowd uniters ("Children").
Grace is the band's mature album, by their own reckoning: Press for the record has almost unanimously focused on the members' stroller-pushing benders, how frontman Luke Jenner spent time playing softball, attending church, and coping with the loss of his mother. Stability and love dominate its themes, the title cutting think-pieces off at the pass by invoking grace directly: This album is about sustained, earned love, as well as the forgiveness inherent in it.
When it clicks, it's triumphant. My two favorite songs are two of the most explicitly groove-oriented, ramped to tempos at which Jenner's alkaline voice can't help but cast hooks. "Miss You" attempts to reconcile with his mother, while "Never Die Again" pleads for a healthy relationship, topics flung far from dance music's typical fare. Of course, if the songs were about Lunchables or macroeconomics, I'd love them just them same; such is the draw when Jenner turns his nasal pipes to siren.
Therein lies the fallacy of the Rapture's maturity: Jenner has always played peek-a-boo with God and serenity (previous albums included songs titled "Love Is All", "Live in the Sunshine", and "Open Up Your Heart", not forgetting that the name of the band is the Rapture). On Grace he does so with more explicit inspiration, but he's a fumbling lyricist, better suited for tunneling into our Nikes than our hearts.
Jenner used to scrap and cluck for our attention more often; he's had better luck wrangling sentiment out of a yelp than a platitude (the best disco singers handle both). His finest moment is on lead single "How Deep Is Your Love?", the galloping, piano-driven tour de force that so many Chicago house revivalists have failed to nail. Here, the rollicking pianos match his devotional pitch, the wilding sax echoing his hallelujahs. Still, Jenner can feel like a man without a country. He doesn't have the pipes for the sustained howling of "Sail Away", "Blue Bird", or the title track (a misplaced, tedious centerpiece). Nor does the sentiment of soul-sided closer "It Takes Time to Be a Man" lend itself to his tonal irreverence and pizzazz. Of all the naughties indie giants thinking hard about domesticity (LCD, Animal Collective, the National), the Rapture's medium is least primed for the message.
This isn't the Rapture's fault, necessarily. "House of Jealous Lovers" is such a totem amid the last decade of indie that it's easy to forget they began as a somewhat (no pun) catholic punk band. In the Grace of Your Love takes two large steps back from "dance punk." Nearly a decade after "Jealous Lovers", they're a patient, skilled rock band unafraid to look uncool. If they sound extra comfy here it's probably because discomfort pervaded their best work so completely. The band's personal choices-- to abandon rock iconography for smaller, more fulfilling family units-- will be Grace's fate as well: a record without broader narratives, meant for those who grew up with the Rapture, or want to.


It’s possible that nobody needs another 303 workout, but the Italian producer’s latest album proves that a programmer of his caliber can still wring some ecstasy from the machine.

Filo Loves the Acid

What’s left to do with the 303? Tadao Kikumoto’s 1981 invention for Roland was supposed to simulate a bass guitar, but instead it stimulated musicians’ imaginations and—with acid house—spawned a genre of its own. Beginning with Charanjit Singh’s 1982 classic Synthesizing: 10 Ragas to a Disco Beat and perfected on CTI’s “Dancing Ghosts” from ’84, the magic box went on to burble and gurgle and squelch and screech through warehouse anthems from Armando, Phuture, LFO, and Daft Punk, not to mention radio staples from Shannon and Aaliyah. An acid house revival seems to fade in and out every five years, summoned by various incarnations of analog fetishists, soft-synth and hardware market servicing, nostalgia—and the simple fact that few sounds tickle the body and mind (particularly when drugged) quite like its squiggle slipped into a set.
Few artists right now are plumbing these psychedelic depths with more success than the Italian producer Donato Dozzy. He’s built weird albums by sampling the mouth harp, and from multiplying and processing sounds from the mouth itself. But his real forte is programming, through which he’s somehow able to coax or conjure the most astonishing expanses. His minimalism is mind-altering in the same way Bridget Riley’s paintings are: It’s hypnotic, efficient, and inexplicable.
Maybe nobody needs another 303 workout, but Filo Loves the Acid proves an expert like Dozzy can still wring some ecstasy from the machine. Opener “Filo” (named, like the album, after an old friend of Dozzy’s) starts out humid and stays that way; a foggy melody that recalls the better of Richard D. James’ Analord tracks condenses for a few minutes, then dissipates. Through the clouds, “Vetta” arrives; its title is Italian for summit, and the track resembles a rocky peak, with 303 crags jutting out and over a simple kick drum, maybe a tom-tom or two, and some delays. An old trackmaster’s trick is to use the 303’s gradually shifting tones to simulate ascension—see: Josh Wink’s deathless “Higher State of Consciousness”—and here you’re climbing, too, but the path is winding, and it winds you, and when you get to the top you don’t know where you are anymore. Or even when you are, as Dozzy is also skilled at suspending time within rhythm. Later, in “Vetta (Reprise),” the journey is far rougher: Hurtling at a relentless clip, bassline engorged like a gasping throat, the track evokes the panic of freefall while hi-hats snap like failing safety ropes… until it’s all suddenly over.
Other tracks aren’t as lethal. “Duetto” is a po-faced cha-cha that is also, oddly, a three-way between kick, 303, and a shawl of phased hi-hats that finally unfurls and swirls around fabulously. “Nine O’ Three” is an icy delight, all distant sirens and chunky, barely submerged drums, equal parts palate cleanser and cold shower. “TB Square” has a charming “Sharevari” kind of snap and wiggle. “REP” closes things out with a euphoric raspberry of noise, pounding with full four-to-the-floor-as-two-fingers-up insouciance. And “Back” is easily the most luxurious of the bunch, with multiple garlands of glittery clamor so dazzling they almost prevent the ear from focusing. It could go on forever, and one night at Berghain it probably will.
For all of Filo’s thrills, though, Dozzy keeps things under control—a characteristic highly prized by the album’s stern German label, Tresor, which since 1991 has offered tense, uncompromising articulations of techno and electro from Drexciya, Surgeon, Robert Hood, and Jeff Mills. But it seems even they couldn’t resist a wink, commissioning this for their 303th release. At eight songs and just over 40 minutes, Filo is a fine thank you to friends—human and machine—who’ve stayed true over the years.


So far, Arca is best known as a producer. He's already produced some of FKA twigs' best work, he's co-producing Björk's next album, and he had a hand in four songs on Kanye West's Yeezus. Despite his high profile collaborations, his excellent debut album Xen is doggedly experimental, perhaps the strangest music he's made.

Xen

The Venezuelan-born producer Alejandro Ghersi, aka Arca, has got a handful of releases to his name so far, including 2012's Stretch 1 and Stretch 2, a pair of bewildering EPs that threaded glassy digital synths with sped-up vocals and chopped'n'screwed stutterbeats, all as twisted and contorted as the weird, milky appendages pictured on their sleeves. Beyond that, though, Arca is best known as a next-generation super-producer, or a potential one, anyway. He's already produced some of FKA twigs' best work, he's co-producing Björk's next album, and he had a hand in four songs on Kanye's Yeezus.
Ghersi's proper debut album, Xen, named for his ambiguously gendered alter ego, shows that his brush with the big time has not softened him. Kick drums stutter and stumble; rhythmic patterns fall apart in mid-song. A few of the beat-oriented tracks, like "Fish", have come completely untethered from the rigid grid that usually governs electronic music's timekeeping. Sounding like a hardstyle rework of Laurie Anderson's "O Superman" made with a broken MIDI clock, it flaps at the edges like a tarp with a busted tent pole. Aside from a few relatively placid sketches recalling Harold Budd or Vangelis' Blade Runner soundtrack, the palette tends to emphasize hammered metal, broken glass, and melted plastic; plucked tones and bent notes and nails-on-a-chalkboard sheets of dissonance. (The strident synths of "Tongue" sound like they've been inspired by the shower scene in Psycho.) Taken as a whole, it is an album about unstable unities, things that cannot easily hold together, wholes breaking to pieces and being put back together again in new and unfamiliar shapes.
Even the pacing of the album seems to move in fits and starts. From the dramatic opener, "Now You Know", all elastic arpeggios and rocket-launch glissandi, he feints left into the Harold Budd homage "Held Apart", and from there it's on to the schizophrenic "Xen", a song divided between metallic locust-swarm passages and Fairlight fantasias flecked with synthetic birdsong. "Slit Thru", a downcast Dem Bow number, gives way to the languorous and atmospheric "Failed", a meandering synthesizer jam that wouldn't sound out of place on Fairlights, Mallets and Bamboo, a mixtape of Japanese ambient pop from the 1980s. From there, the pizzicato string synths of "Family Violence" lead into the reggaeton-leaning "Thievery", the closest thing to a single on the album. And so on, all the way through the anticlimactic (but still exhilarating!) closer, "Promise", with its aimless string plucks and blast-furnace rumble. Xen feels less like a narrative arc than an amalgam of two- and three-minute chunks that might work just as well on shuffle. That's not a criticism. To the contrary: the album's mazelike shape is an indicator of how much lies beneath the surface. You really could get lost in this thing.
It's been a while since it felt like there was anything really, categorically new in popular music, or even semi-popular music. As Simon Reynolds' Retromania argued, the story of the century so far has mostly been one of collaging together the bits and pieces of earlier decades. Gradually, however, it is becoming clear that something is cresting the horizon, and while it's too early to make out the particulars of its shape—this lumbering behemoth with the Teflon gleam and Transformer joints and image-mapping skin—it is getting closer.
This new thing is not a genre, exactly; call it a style, a sensibility, a veneer. It has to do with computers and digital sound and digital imagery. It has to do with representation and malleability, the idea that sound and image can be stretched and twisted and copied ad nauseam. It revels in digital gloss and grit, in bent tones, in smeared and frozen reverb tails. Extreme compression, schizoid pith: rap vocals broken down to monosyllables, a single "Huh" as metonym for everything that's happened between the Sugarhill Gang and now. History reduced to a USB stick.
It's not necessarily sci-fi in its themes—not, say, in the way that Detroit techno celebrated cybernetics and space travel—but there's still something inherently futuristic about its portrayal of technology as something tangible and even sensual, its suggestion that data has texture and heft. It spins code into a second skin. (I realize that that description doesn't sound that far off from The Matrix—a 1999 film that, these days, we're likelier to read as kitsch than as prophecy—but this stuff is different; it's less Keanu than Cronenberg.) You can make out its traces in the work of people like Actress, Oneohtrix Point Never, Evian Christ, FKA twigs, Berlin's Janus crew, and even PC Music, and it feels like it's coming to a head on Arca's Xen. The next few years—his next few years—are going to be interesting.
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Editor’s Note: At the time of this review’s publication, Arca used he/him pronouns. Arca now uses she/her pronouns.


The English punks’ debut is a rage-forward bulldozer of poetic wordplay and experimental hardcore.

The Great Regression

Brighton’s Ditz make angry music in a world where there’s a lot to be mad about. Since forming in 2016, the quintet have armed themselves with pummeling drums and serrated guitar riffs against a world that persecutes queerness and normalizes harassment. “Shit jobs, stuck inside, no hope etc.,” the band explained in a recent interview. “People forget that it’s just quite fun to shout really loud.” Their full-length debut, The Great Regression, is a rage-forward bulldozer of poetic wordplay and experimental hardcore that smelts and polishes that anger into engrossing melodic rock. Across 10 tracks, Ditz grapple with breakable bodies, the failures of a perception-based society, and the mindless trudge of worklife.
Inspired by everything from PC Music to At the Drive-In, Ditz aren’t afraid of plunging in headfirst and then working backwards to balance their chaotic experiments against pop structure. Opener “Clocks” demonstrates why it’s hard to fit this group into one category: Singer Cal Francis begins with combustive, chord-splitting screams that recall Converge, before switching character to eerie post-punk spoken word. The oscillation between his venomous roar and leaden spoken vocals resonates with the cultural mood: Anger over a raging dumpster fire of problems that cools to a complacent hopelessness.
But The Great Regression isn’t only unnerving because its whirlpool of distortive effects can feel like a tortuous auditory illusion, or because Francis’ vocal screeches sometimes reach poltergeist highs. On “Instinct,” he numbly recalls a habit of eating flowers and feeling the thorns scratch against his throat, not recognizing he swallowed them whole. Reaching a boiling point, he screeches, “I gnaw and I spit out my own flesh/Razor sharp pin pricks of want fill my head and coalesce.”
What makes The Great Regression such an relentlessly exciting listen is how Ditz balance an army of alien textures without compromising the dark irony of Francis’ performances. Some of the album’s most unsettling moments are the subtlest: “I’ll make you smile,” asserts the sinister entity at the center of “The Warden,” a metaphor for an obsession with work output that’s reminiscent of Interpol. “Summer of the Shark” critiques an insidious modern attention economy by comparing sensationalist news coverage of shark attacks in summer 2001 to the subsequent events of 9/11. “Now I know why Elvis shot TVs/Boredom is more evident when sensation is key,” goes one poignant line, flipping a pop-culture legend into an act of vigilante justice against a screen-obsessed society. The Great Regression has fun pointing out the world’s contradictions, subverting its vulgarity, questioning its systems. At its peaks, it feels like an antidote for the ennui of ceaseless catastrophe.


On his second album, the quasi-anonymous DJ in a stylized marshmallow mask proves the perfect figurehead for a commercial EDM scene running on fumes.

Joytime II

If you need proof that EDM is firmly in its late-capitalist phase, just take a look at what the music-industry marketing gambit’s brightest stars are up to now: Skrillex is producing for the Weeknd, Diplo’s doing hip-hop again, Calvin Harris is dutifully churning out his own Northern Soul-ish take on American R&B, Zedd’s offered a few pleasant twists on the Chainsmokers’ MOR-sleazebag sound, and Martin Garrix is still desperately trying to make another “Animals.” Ultra’s gotten safer, but the culture’s excesses continue to tragically claim lives in the rearview; when Diplo threatened to go “full Pusha T” on Zedd earlier this month, in the wake of “The Story of Adidon,” the resounding lack of public interest in the button-pushing beef highlighted how uninteresting the supposed stars behind EDM’s successes have become.
But even though EDM’s brief pop-cultural dominance has faded, there are still artists making maximalist music that’s perfect for corporate raves and streaming algorithms alike. This would be happening whether or not EDM ever reached its apex of public awareness (after all, Tiësto had a career way before your parents became aware of furry boots), but the difference between today’s mainstream dance music and the genre's pop breakthroughs of decades past is that the rising stars of the moment take their inspiration primarily from modern-day EDM titans—a profit-oriented subgenre of dance music feeding off itself instead of building on dance's already rich history.
Perhaps the most visible artist in EDM’s smaller second wave has been Marshmello—which is ironic, since he performs and makes public appearances with a marshmallow mask on his head, much like the frequently irascible, mouse-head-wearing progressive-house producer Deadmau5 (who has since acknowledged the similarities in approach in his own confrontational way). Similar to Skrillex, Marshmello—whose true identity is alleged to be the 26-year-old Philly resident Chris Comstock—plays fast and loose with his sound, spanning bass-heavy trap and piano-line trance (sometimes in the same song). Not unlike Garrix, Oliver Heldens, and tons more EDM once-hopefuls, he’s got that One Killer Track, 2016’s “Alone,” a towering anthem that he’s yet to replicate in terms of quality (although he’s subsequently had higher-charting songs bolstered by star-wattage guest singers).
Artists trafficking in EDM have typically been averse to the album format, but Marshmello’s two Joytime releases aren’t exactly albums. Think of them more as collections of DJ tools—packages of cuts tailor-made for setlists and remix fodder alike. The first Joytime was released in 2016, and the second one arrived this month alongside a “Fortnite” streaming session with gamer-of-fame Ninja. Marshmello’s not typically averse to digital cult-of-ubiquity gimmicks (have you seen his cooking show?), but his gaming association makes some sense beyond mere trend-riding: From the synth fanfare of “Stars” to the slick sugar-rush grooves of “Imagine,” Joytime II sounds colorful, aggressive, and relentless, like dropping into Dusty Depot right as the comet hits.
Marshmello does show some stylistic evolution on Joytime II—specifically, towards emo. It’s a development that might seem surprising on its face, but less so after considering “Spotlight,” his collaboration with late emo-rap vanguard Lil Peep that came out late last year following Peep’s passing. “Rooftops” centers on Marshmello’s histrionic vocal line, which is easily identifiable to anyone with a passing familiarity in 2000s mall-centric emo, while the relatively downcast “Paralyzed”—which opens with dark synths dripping over his flatly delivered vocal take—seemingly attempts to replicate the aching approach that Peep popularized during his brief ascent.
Unfortunately, both tracks ultimately scan as far too generic to signify any sort of real artistic growth, an issue that extends to Joytime II as a whole. Its most intense and melodically toothsome moments—the stomping fanfare of “Check This Out,” the loopy melodies and buzzsaw rhythms of “Together”—are reminiscent of Glasgow maximalist Rustie and his peers (including Hudson Mohawke and Lunice’s TNGHT project, which Marshmello and a host of trap-adjacent producers owe a decent part of their careers to). When Rustie came to prominence with his brilliant 2011 debut, Glass Swords—to say nothing of his epochal contribution to BBC 1’s Essential Mix series the following year—his digital-excess approach felt like something new and sorely needed, coming off of the pared-back bass music that dominated electronic music in the early 2010s. On Joytime II, Marshmello takes what’s come before him does little more than simply add more—a pile of garish and unmemorable synth-slop that’s as charmless as the mask atop his head.


On their new LP, California indie-poppers Rogue Wave hint at breaking open their songwriting model but keep things modest in the end.

Delusions of Grand Fur

After losing his Silicon Valley job in the early-'00s dotcom bust, Zach Schwartz debuted his Rogue Wave project in 2002, during the indie-pop boom. Like his Shins-era peers, Schwartz, who goes by Zach Rogue, was a sensitive songwriter who politely aired grievances with wayward friends, reckless parents, and departed partners in a way that shone a warm light on his personal losses. It was the redemptive aspect that attracted TV music scouts, and the scouts who helped break the band. But after syncs in shows like "The O.C.," the label Sub Pop, who had signed the group after Rogue’s lo-fi solo debut, mysteriously dropped them. A decade later, following increasingly crisp and radio-ready LPs, sixth album Delusions of Grand Fur finds the California band at a crossroads from which every path looks like a cul-de-sac.
Rogue, a self-effacing character, would be the first to concede his modest prospects. He’s recently professed his newfound obsession with hip-hop and electronic music, lamenting that breakout stars like Kendrick Lamar are rare beacons at a time when "[so] many artists rising to the top are garbage." Where 2010’s Permalight felt like a rudimentary synthpop dalliance, Delusions of Grand Fur is a chance for Rogue Wave to bust open the indie-pop model, inspect the components, and rebuild from scratch. That chance goes untaken and, seemingly, unobserved. The record is chronically mild—it neither pulls off nor attempts songwriting acrobatics. Highlights like "Endless Supply" and "Take It Slow" are pastoral and pretty, vast yet cosy, with a vague sense of battles won. But for all the formula tweaks and threads of political intent—"In the vast expanse of governments/ I think you’re gonna burn," Rogue sings, Leonard Cohen-like, on "Look at Me"—Rogue and Pat Spurgeon have redrafted their gentle-and-epic songwriting orthodoxy, when what it needed was a revolution.
A sign of the record’s impasse is its cover, a defaced, hollow-eyed image by the artist Matthew Craven of Confederate general P. G. T. Beauregard. That a decorated racist seemed fitting art for an otherwise harmless pop record feels instructive: Rogue has thoughtful intentions—his reading concerns white America’s blindness to its past, particularly given the present GOP agenda—but overlooks the possibility that album sleeves simply aren’t the best place to put Confederate generals in 2016. Like the album’s lyrics, it presents a potent idea in a manner just broad and ambiguous enough to ring hollow.
It’s a shame, because Rogue has a gift for making art of his uncertainties. On 2003’s "Postage Stamp World," he sang, "You can all get in line/ And lick my behind"—a comically sheepish threat that felt somehow revealing. Now, apprehensive of both world-weariness and quixotic optimism, his songwriting is compromised precisely by its faith in compromise. "Hey, in the morning/ Can’t get you off my mind," goes a typically airy lyric from "In the Morning," a nicely crafted anthem about the trials of marriage. But never does the music submit to raw emotion, relay the breathless rush of dreams chased or the complexities that, in a grim political climate, make retreating into the love of one’s family such a terrifying, guilty temptation. As much as the record flirts with reinvention—personal, political, musical—its modest ambition sounds exactly like complacency.


Tel Aviv’s Nadav Spiegel is one of the more promising producers to emerge from his city’s revived electronic scene. His new LP draws on post-punk, disco, kosmische, and more, but the lyrics fall flat.

I Love You, Go Away

Autarkic is the name for Tel Aviv-based producer Nadav Spiegel, a solo electronic act and one of the more promising artists in the city’s revived electronic scene, along with the likes of Red Axes and Moscoman. The latter released Autarkic’s mini-LP Can You Pass the Knife? last year on his Disco Halal label, their first release of original productions after a series of Middle Eastern-tinged disco edits. It showed the young producer straddling house, coldwave, electro, Depeche Mode-style synth-pop, and the like, keeping the proceedings just sullied enough.
Now Spiegel follows that up with his nine-track debut LP. As both its title and cover image of a cigarette stubbed out in a cupcake suggest, Spiegel is conflicted when it comes to love. Conceived as a documentation and remedy for a recent heartbreak, the album reveals Spiegel’s angst, mistrust, spite, and—like any good romantic—willingness to go through the wringer all over again by album’s end.
“New Heimat” features squalls of guitar feedback, churning bass, and distorted hi-hats topped by Spiegel’s strangulated vocals; it resembles a post-punk band rather than a producer behind some gear. Spiegel repeats the refrain “home is where the hatred is” until the words start to fray. But is he speaking of “home” in the domestic or national sense? With such lines as “No more fighting for the state/No more bleeding for some faith,” home sounds like the last place he wants to be.
The track then segues into the bent synths of “Violence.” Closed hi-hats and shaken bells rattle about the slinking disco bass, reminiscent at times of LCD Soundsystem’s “45:33.” It’s here, though, that Spiegel’s lines start to fall flat. “Envy/It’s not good,” he deadpans, and then draws on a couple’s line of argument (“It’s not about you”). But he fails to do much with either thought. The terse and glowering “How to Cheat” again finds the production in fine form, but Spiegel’s lyrics make it feel like a rant, like a friend whose chat about his ex turns from therapeutic to bitter. Petty and overly dramatic, he sings of sodomizing the mind, money, and sex, to where his temper makes the words verge on incoherence.
All of which makes “Gibberish Love Song” the most effective track here, as Spiegel opts for catchy bits of nonsense rather than embittered lines. A siren-like tone widens into a brooding banger. When the words do return, it’s for a mumbling kosmische take on Guided by Voices’ “The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory,” a curious cover to slot in the middle of the LP. It’s a curveball that doesn’t quite land, but it proves Spiegel’s penchant for going leftfield.
“Bongos & Tambourines” smears Spiegel’s voice across a clanging beat of bells and marimba. The analog keys suggest early Cluster, but again the words feel clumsy with Spiegel’s pitchy delivery of “Bankers and robbers got hit by a cowbell/Bankers and robbers got hit by a snare.” Closer “Warmth (How Mean Is Mean?)” bears the album’s keenest melody courtesy of a violin playing a Middle Eastern scale as Spiegel sings of “the weirdest desire,” hinting that he may once again utter “I love you.”
Looped hand percussion and echoing chimes give “Wipe the Shame” a slightly different feel. But it’s this song that makes one wonder if the album is really about a failed relationship or else an ultimately untenable nation-state. Is Spiegel singing of love or something more oppressive when he delivers lines like, “Brutal oppress as self-defense... How can we take that man down”? There’s a kernel of protest to be had here, but it would resonate deeper with stronger lines and more assured delivery.


Kacey Musgraves' first holiday album summons ‘60s nostalgia, embraces kitschy exotica, and passes the pipe with Willie Nelson.

A Very Kacey Christmas

Kacey Musgraves continues to follow her arrow. In 2013, she built her reputation as an antidote to all that was said to be ailing country music: a traditionalist of unobtrusively twangy arrangements and a credible small-town Texas background, who was also slyly progressive in her down-home narratives. She cowrote Miranda Lambert’s deliciously vengeful mini-masterpiece “Mama’s Broken Heart” and released her own major-label debut, Same Trailer Different Park, which beat out Taylor Swift and the genre’s swaggering bros to win the Best Country Album Grammy. In 2015, she released Pageant Material; that record didn’t go big, it went home, eschewing radio-friendly hits to double down gorgeously on the gentle, folksy nuance of its predecessor. It opened at No. 1 but didn’t sell as well overall.
Its follow-up, A Very Kacey Christmas, is yet another left turn from Musgraves. The third album is pretty early in an artist’s catalog for a holiday record, but she throws herself into this one as wholeheartedly as any proper LP. Her great epiphany is the short distance between rhinestones and aluminum trees, how what once was considered tacky and artificial can, with time, come to seem nostalgic and real. Musgraves’ album summons up the mid-’60s era nostalgia of A Charlie Brown Christmas, gliding naturally from her established Western-swing throwback aesthetic to kitschy exotica and vintage pop, with an expertly curated song selection that leans on campy novelties, classy standards, and a stocking’s worth of originals.
Because our Christmas recordings pile up over the years, to be dusted off with the other decorations for a few weeks and then put back in their boxes, they may be one of the few types of albums many people still play in full. The sequencing of A Very Kacey Christmas exploits this advantage. Musgraves doesn’t rush her conceit, opening elegantly but conventionally with cello and pedal steel on “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” followed by a sleigh bells- and fiddle-accented “Let It Snow” with fellow Western swingers the Quebe Sisters. She shows her hand next on—of all things!—a polka-like cover of “Christmas Don’t Be Late,” a/k/a “The Chipmunk Song.” Replacing the cartoon characters’ irritating high-pitched voices with Musgraves’ crystalline effortlessness (and ditching the “ALVIN!!!” banter) renders this familiar bit of silliness deeply affecting; when Musgraves sings, “I still want a hula-hoop,” it’s with the poignancy of a adult yearning for all that she didn’t get in Christmases past.
The other non-originals are cut from similarly elvin-green cloth, and they’re thoroughly enjoyable if less revelatory. Musgraves salvages “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas,” an oft-annoying mid-century gag record, gamely singing about not wanting “rhinoceroses-es.” She delivers an effectively restrained “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” with children chiming in with schoolyard backing vocals. Elsewhere, Musgraves lets the band’s instrumental prowess shine in a nimble, mariachi-flavored “Feliz Navidad.” Another song about various cultural ways of saying merry Christmas, the Hawaiian ditty “Mele Kalikimaka,” piles on the pedal steel, with the Quebe Sisters returning on close-knit harmonies. Ending with a woozy “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?”—capped by a snatch of “Auld Lang Syne” on piano, around a hearth of ambient chatter—feels obvious but fitting, like watching It’s a Wonderful Life on Christmas Eve.
The four originals here vary in their success, “A Willie Nice Christmas,” if you’ll forgive a pun (and you’ll have to) is Musgraves’ weed-heavy holiday reunion with Willie Nelson, whose 1965 song “Are You Sure” she rebooted with him on Pageant Material. It is hardly essential, but notable for merely existing: Musgraves, who once sang, “I’m always higher than my hair,” name-checks “On the Road Again” and hopes “we’ll all stay higher than the star at the top of the tree,” as Nelson genially reminds us not to get so stressed. “Present Without a Bow,” which features Musgraves’ fellow classicist Leon Bridges, reaches for the holiday soulfulness of a song like Charles Brown’s “Please Come Home for Christmas,” but it doesn’t quite cohere. “Ribbons and Bows,” an upbeat hand-clapper in the Ronettes and Darlene Love mode, feels like a potential single, with “All I Want for Christmas Is You”-style lyrics channeled through Musgraves’ eye for what “the ladies [down] at the hair salon” will say.
The real gift here is “Christmas Makes Me Cry,” a gut-punching acoustic ballad that Musgraves cowrote with Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally. While another country star with crossover ability, Dolly Parton, sang about keeping a stiff upper lip in her “Hard Candy Christmas,” Musgraves confides now that Nat King Cole, starry-eyed kids, and “seeing mom and dad get a little grayer” each year never fails to bring tears to her eyes. “Another year gone by/Just one more that I/I couldn't make it home,” she sings. For all her retro leanings, she wisely chooses to sing about contemporary people trying our damndest to be cheerful and loving in a particularly hectic—and, often, sad and heavy—time of year. Getting a little misty-eyed around the holidays? Now that’s a sentiment everyone can appreciate, in any era.


Recorded in 1971, the lost album by the Meters’ guitarist and co-founder plays like a document of what happened, and also what could have happened—a heart-on-your-sleeve acoustic career from a funk icon whose feelings always seemed to be hidden in his riffs.

Another Side

Since it developed in the late 1960s, roots rock has been a confusing genre. Rejecting ornate frills for something folksier, simpler, bluesier—think Let It Be and the Band—the name itself raises the question: Just whose roots are we talking about? The Beatles, after all, honed their Chuck Berry covers in Germany. Mostly Canadians, the Band had a queasy affection for the Confederate South. Rock’s origins were clearly located in Black America—yet the vast majority of the artists associated with the back-to-basics movement were white. For them, “returning to their roots” meant making the music they had innovated sound more like the structure and sound they had cribbed in the first place.
The phrase “roots rock” feels especially irrelevant in New Orleans, the delta of the Mississippi River along where rock‘n’roll, jazz, and the blues all supposedly began. At the dawn of the 1970s, the most forward-thinking musicians in the bayou weren’t simplifying their sound. They were expanding it with traditions from their own communities: The Meters flirted with second line rhythms, while Dr. John dosed his swamp shamanism with Mardi Gras pomp. Rediscovering roots was nonsense—these artists had never parted with them.
It’s still a bit disarming to hear the stripped-down beauty of Another Side, the excellent solo debut by Meters’ guitarist and co-founder Leo Nocentelli, recorded largely in 1971 but issued for the first time this year by Light in the Attic. Nocentelli wrote the album during a brief span when the Meters were split up. He was in his mid-twenties, enamored of folkster James Taylor, and concerned with his career’s future. Perhaps this was why he was trying to be a singer-songwriter—though his band already broadened the vocabulary of funk, scored a bonafide hit with “Cissy Strut,” and composed songs that would later become a treasure trove for hip-hop producers. The Meters, though, were more ubiquitous than they were famous or rich. Their democratic workings meant Nocentelli’s contributions could often be buried, even if he was perhaps the group’s most consistent songwriter as well as their motor, his palm-muted grooves as regular as a train, headed for pop’s future. Nocentelli’s command as a bandleader comes as no surprise. The shock is this: For lack of a better term, Another Side is a roots rock record.
Spanning nine originals and a tender Elton John cover, the music blends mellifluous, roving acoustic guitar and country stomp; only an experimental hip-hop producer could make a viable beat out of most of these songs. The nakedness of Nocentelli’s lyrics is unprecedented in the Meters’ expanded universe—the record includes maybe the most touching love song, “You’ve Become a Habit,” any member of the group ever recorded. And while it may seem out of step with the New Orleans scene, Another Side came from its center, engineered in part by R&B impresario Cosimo Matassa and rife with local heroes filling the role of chameleonic session men: Two members of the Meters, George Porter Jr. and Ziggy Modeliste, play the bass and drums, respectively; Allen Toussaint sits in on the piano; and on several tracks, jazz great James Black plays drums. The album’s 35 minutes are a document of a city, milieu, and sensibility, all the more lucid because they feel as though they came from another place entirely.
As often happens with lost recordings, the story of Another Side’s fifty-year, hazardous path to wider distribution is so winding that the narrative threatens to scrawl over the tunes themselves. After Nocentelli sidelined the project, because the Meters scored a record deal with Warner in 1972, Toussaint held the masters at his own Sea-Saint Studios, and then Hurricane Katrina destroyed the legendary Clematis Street haven and three-quarters of the tapes housed there.
A storied artistic pipeline leads from New Orleans to Los Angeles—Nocentelli himself lived in Southern California for years, and musicians from Jelly Roll Morton to Frank Ocean made the westward trek in the hope of finding wider prospects. This, too, is how Another Side survived. In 1995, Toussaint sold Sea-Saint to a label publisher and marketer named Bill Valenziano, and as Sam Sweet reported in the Los Angeles Times, Valenziano moved the surviving masters, numbering in the thousands, to a storage facility near his California home, only to neglect them. “I had checked in my head that 2020 would be the year that I deal with this,” the octogenarian told Sweet in 2019, “And if I can’t find a new owner….do you have time to have a bonfire at the beach?”
Luckily, someone transported a modicum of the archive to another facility, which foreclosed and the contents ended up at a swap meet in the beachy L.A. suburb of Torrance, how crate digger Mike Nishita lugged them home, shocked to discover both classic records from the ’70s and unreleased material thought to be forever lost. A producer for someone Sweet describes as “One of the world’s most successful rappers” offered Nishita $250,000 for the whole haul, wanting to use a bunch of unheard music from hip-hop’s most sampled era to create unique beats. Nishita declined, and now, Another Side sees the light of day. The record feels like a document of what happened, and also what could have happened—a heart-on-your-sleeve acoustic career from a funk icon whose feelings always seemed to be hidden in his riffs.
Another Side has a narrative, too. It traces a loose tale of a young man, reeling from a break-up, riven between his romantic angst and an intense, perhaps doomed desire to make it in the music business. The first song, “Thinking of the Day,” uses warm, close-mic’d vocals while setting up the record’s themes: “Thinking about tomorrow/But tomorrow never comes/I guess I’ll be thinking about tomorrow/Until my day is done.” We have sketches of frustrated dock workers working for the weekend on the Mississippi—the dyed-in-the-wool blues rocker “Riverfront”—and farmers imagining leaving their daily routines for the big city (“Pretty Mittie”). We see a tableau of dreaming as a young Black man in the south, and how aspirations have a ceiling because of both circumstances and choice. “We are sentenced to life/By our own convictions,” Nocentelli tells us in a poem included in the album booklet, an apt description of his often selfless-seeming career with the Meters and beyond: If he ever asked his bandmates for the spotlight, he sure never received it.
Bolstering the lyrical themes are low-key virtuosic performances, the same quality that give the early Meters’ records their power, though these songs are in a completely different vein. Modeliste’s rim shots on “Thinking of the Day” are muted and unassuming; Toussaint’s organ trills fill out the space of “Riverfront”; airy backing vocals elevate “Tell Me Why” into a full-bodied pop song; Nocentelli’s dense picking makes the outro of “Your Song” feel climactic, even without the strings swells of Elton John’s original; James Black gives highlight “Give Me Back My Loving” a shambling force, and Nocentelli’s voice has a warbly personality throughout. On the aforementioned “You’ve Become a Habit,” about a young man who falls in love with a sex worker named Fancy, his guitar playing and singing thread their way like smoke to someplace hallowed and rare. Every part of the song strikes at someone unhappily resigned to one-sided love, the words themselves the unsure whispers of the young and confused rising through the billows.
Gorgeous if era-bound, Another Side comes with a certain sadness, thanks to the content, but also because we know what happened next. Nocentelli had a sterling second act with the Meters, yet his songwriting benefited him in limited ways—like many artists, particularly Black ones, he was cheated out of substantial royalties. Fascinatingly, Another Side starts and ends with lyrics that describe a song as an interpersonal gift. Ultimately, this gift took the form of a fragile physical object, yet like all presents, it suggests something about generosity itself, how the giver is left exposed without an assurance of anything in return. Leo Nocentelli gave us his music, which at one point probably felt like all he had. Now we accept it as an heirloom, a remnant of a vital culture constantly in danger of slipping into the past, and a voice so powerful it must be part of what we remember in the future.

Buy: Rough Trade
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This 2xCD comp is split between artists based in North America and the British Isles and features contributions from Sufjan Stevens, Animal Collective, Vashti Bunyan, and Espers, among others.

Folk Off!

Folk rock compilations have been sprouting like dandelions in recent months, as various labels have tried to get their arms around the ongoing profusion of new and reissued folk-related material. Complicating matters is the fact that the current international folk revival is less a unified movement than a series of smaller, overlapping sub-movements that might include any variety of American Primitive guitarists, free-form avant-folk collectives, ramshackle campfire pop, medieval-tinged electronica, or wayfaring acoustic singer-songwriters. Predictably, the general upshot has been that a large number of wildly disparate acts have frequently been lumped together under the same banner despite sharing little or nothing in common.
The latest collection to attempt to make sense of it all is Folk Off!, a 2xCD set from UK label Sunday Best. Dubious pun notwithstanding, the album's title is intended rather literally. The compilation is cheekily packaged as a competitive folk-off, with North America and the British Isles each getting one full disc to prove their supremacy, ignoring for the moment the enormous musical debts the two regions owe to one another. For the occasion, Sunday Best's curator Rob Da Bank has used a broad and imprecise definition of the term folk, casting a perimeter wide enough to corral such decidedly borderline folkies as Micah P. Hinson, Acid Casuals, and Magnétophone. Unfortunately, the set also chooses to ignore the massive free/drone/psych wing of contemporary folk almost entirely, instead focusing an unflattering degree of attention on sleepy-eyed acoustic pop and tepid bedroom electronica.
Fortified by familiar, previously-released tracks like Sufjan Stevens' "Decatur, Or, a Round of Applause for Your Stepmother" and Animal Collective's "Kids on Holiday", the North American half of Folk Off! is its most uniformly satisfying. If you want to get pedantic about it, however, few of these tracks genuinely owe much of anything to American folk tradition. To domestic ears, Hinson's opening "Yard of Blonde Girls" might skew more closely to standard alt-country, while Baby Dee's luminous "Morning Holds a Star" appears as a mystical sort of space cabaret. Philadelphia's Espers prove the exception to the rule, and their reverent take on the traditional "Rosemary Lane" sounds just as handsome in this mixed company as it did on their 2005 The Weed Tree EP.
The selection criteria gets even more lax and confusing on the album's British Isles side, which ranges from the strictly traditionalist (Deep Elem's "Lost in the Woods') to the not-identifiably-folk-whatsoever (Same Actor's "Nothing Yet"). Of course, such genre distinctions wouldn't matter much if the mix were consistently entertaining. Vashti Bunyan's "Here Before" and Song of Green Pheasants' "Nightfall" provide a pair of dusky highlights, but too many of the remaining soporific tracks combine into a lukewarm, treacly mush. James Yorkston & Reporter's "Woozy With Cider" is a meandering bit of digital spoken-word that brings any momentum to a crashing halt, while the inclusion of Acid Casuals' neo-sock-hop ditty "Bowl Me Over" just seems inexplicable, unless the American Graffiti soundtrack is now considered some kind of folk relic.
In the liner notes, Pete Paphides credits some of the current folk revival to the music's easy portability, a point that seems somewhat ironic since it appears that many of the artists on this collection did all of their recording home alone in their bedrooms. By omitting such significant (and adventurous) folk-inspired voices as Ben Chasny, Richard Youngs, Josephine Foster, Charalambides, Matt Valentine, Vibracathedral Orchestra, etc. Folk Off! is woefully incomplete as a primer on the contemporary folk scene, and thereby fails to adequately illustrate the extraordinary artistic value our shared folkloric traditions might have for tomorrow's more enlightened musicians and listeners.


The former dubstep balladeer and sometime pop super-producer returns to his electronic roots, working cut-up vocal samples into leftfield dancefloor material.

Playing Robots Into Heaven

James Blake’s early EPs had the tension of a pregnant pause, with tracks so spacious that it seemed as if his airy drums and vaporous keys might waft away if you averted your gaze. The alluring post-dubstep balladry of his 2011 self-titled debut didn’t sound like anything else, and industry tastemakers were soon lining up for a helping of his icy, atmospheric magic. As Blake found himself recruited for projects from artists like Beyoncé, Frank Ocean, and Vince Staples, his own music began to grow into its once empty corners, losing some of its soft-focus glow and sharpening its edges; a predilection for doleful melodies sometimes overshadowed his adventurous touch behind the boards. His journey from club deconstructionist to pop auteur culminated in 2021’s Friends That Break Your Heart, a brightly colored, features-heavy singer-songwriter collection that careened through genres, light-years from the minimalism of his early work.
Blake’s new album, Playing Robots Into Heaven, isn’t an outright rejection of the path he’s taken, but it is a clear return to his electronic roots. Most of the material began as sketches on modular synth rigs he brought on tour, jamming to pass the hours between gigs. Some of those recordings morphed into tools for his DJ sets, eventually becoming the foundation for these dancefloor-friendly songs. Blake nods to his dubstep roots and weaves in elements of techno, house, and ambient, retaining some of his trademark icy melancholy but increasing the metabolic rate. The results make for an inspired evolution of his sound, with Blake occasionally glancing in the rearview mirror as he moves in a new direction.
One of Blake’s long-standing signatures has been to cut and rearrange bits of his voice to create texture or emotional resonance. He leans further into that bricolage method here, remixing warped vocal samples into yearning club cuts. These snippets often sound like melodic notes to himself, recorded at different times in different rooms and tucked away for later use. Blake sometimes rearranges scraps of lyrics exquisite-corpse style to craft a narrative (“Asking to Break”), or lets them repeat until they blend into a track’s rhythmic churn (“Loading”). On the soaring outro of shadowy 2-step tune “I Want You to Know,” he stacks wordless tones into reverberant layers of harmony that enfold a choppy, pitch-shifted vocal melody. Gnarled vocal loops bubble up from the murky cloud-rap beat of “Night Sky,” then gradually dissolve into drones.
A loose, improvisational feeling underpins even the most meticulous pieces on Robots. “Fire the Editor” and “If You Can Hear Me” take a more conventional structure with discernible verses, but even they bear markings of Blake’s cut-and-paste approach. A jarring, almost Jandek-like noise gate follows Blake’s voice in the first verse of “Editor,” abruptly cutting it off at the end of each phrase. He crafts “Hear Me” from a somber, chopped-up piano figure; you can hear the click of the digital artifacts on each loop’s uneven edge. Blake lets the seams show just a little more than in his more pop-oriented work, and though it’s not always successful—the disparate rhythms of “He’s Been Wonderful” never quite gel—his off-the-cuff approach gives the album a dynamic, unpredictable energy.
The bangers on Robots—and there are quite a few—make good on the promise of enveloping live staples like 2013’s “Voyeur” or the raw, baffling dubstep of exploratory singles like 2011’s “Order.” This is Blake’s most animated record, as if the chill of his previous albums had finally thawed enough for him to move his limbs again. In “Fall Back,” percussion coated in spring reverb and a nervy synth mesh with a Burial-like beat, creating a potent groove. “Loading” is an irresistibly loping garage cut, its insistent drums pushing through layers of choral harmonies, glinting digital tones, and plaintive vocal fragments. The thunderous “Big Hammer” constantly shifts the rhythmic center from one element to the next; it starts as a tense trap pattern, its timekeeping hi-hats skittering at regular intervals, before scattering into a deconstructed dancehall jam, using sampled vocals from the Ragga Twins to hypnotic effect.
“Tell Me,” the strongest track, is one of the best things Blake has put to tape, and a showcase for everything that makes Playing Robots Into Heaven so refreshing. A stuttering synth line is shadowed by a wobbling, off-time echo. The drums pulse and roll in ways reminiscent of techno and house, but don’t quite become either. Weird, clipped vocals and sharpened cymbals are slathered in distortion while luminous pads drape over their edges. Chest-rattling bass threatens to overtake the entire stereo field, but it’s kept at bay by tiny, achingly beautiful moments like a distant shout of “Tell me!” Despite his desperate plea—“Tell me if it’s worth waking up for”—the song never buckles under the weight of despair. Instead, it transcends. Playing Robots Into Heaven feels like a lesson in rejecting inertia, in finding a way forward by examining and dismantling what’s already been done.


The sort-of disco duo has got the hooks and the groove but on their third album, they struggle to find their footing.

More Disco Songs About Love

The opening track of Los Angeles-based duo De Lux’s third album is a story about hustling to pay the rent. One of its hooks is a hustle, that almost turns into Van McCoy’s; the guitar lick from Prince’s “I Wanna Be Your Lover” also turns up. Anyway, “875 Dollars” is a song about the difficulty of taking on and protecting a legacy from a band who clearly know their history well enough to be nervous about their place in it.
More Disco Songs About Love nods, of course, to Talking Heads’ More Songs About Buildings and Food, and singer Sean Guerin often sounds unnervingly similar to David Byrne. It’s tempting to meet one reference with another. This might be 21st-century indie pop music, but it ain’t no disco. De Lux is disco the way bands like Wild Nothing, Cut Copy, Holy Ghost!, Bear in Heaven, and Phoenix might be disco: that is, sort of. De Lux’s last record, 2015’s Generation, was full of hospitable songs built on the four-four thump, with frames of simple basslines draped with flowing synthesizer. It was inspired by Karen Finley’s shocking and disgracefully unheralded 1987 album The Truth Is Hard to Swallow, though there’s none of Finley’s politicized rhymes, raucous noise, or glorious filth. De Lux’s disco is tasteful; it sounds like good cheekbones and better record collections. It’s the disco of Roxy Music, not Patrice Rushen, but with Bryan Ferry’s debonair weariness swapped out for the wounded machismo of, like, “Owner of a Lonely Heart.”
The second track is called “These Are Some of the Things That I Think About,” and one of those things is: “What if I had the chance to rewrite what it means to dance?” Sal P of the legendary Liquid Liquid saw that chance 35 years ago, and merged punk and percussion into tracks like “Cavern,” which did enact this revision. But De Lux are stuck thinking about it, and ultimately the chance slips away. Sal himself appears on the lovely third track, “Smarter Harder Darker,” which reads like a misheard Daft Punk title but glistens in a genial, jazzy kind of way. They bring another post-punk legend, the Pop Group’s Mark Stewart, onto “Stratosphere Girl,” and he howls about voodoo.
Are these songs about love? There’s not much romance. “Keyboards Cause We’re Black and White” might be broadly about race, but its uncertain tone leads to confusion about whether they’re just goofing on “Ebony and Ivory.” Other tracks attempt to tackle toxic masculinity: the titular narrator of “Music Snob” is aware of his own boorishness, but that’s not enough to redeem him. “I guess I’m a music snob,” he says, “Even if I say I’m not/My girlfriend doesn’t like me/’Cause I hate to do laundry.” Fair enough, men are pigs, but the bro culture verses become bromides in the chorus about the need for connection, and ideas around why men behave this way are left unoffered. (Karen Finley has some good theories.) A strange moment where Guerin’s mother pops in to speak in French about crepes hints at other, more interesting avenues, but the song soon returns to its sighing refrain of “I’ll show you my taste is like,” which, in 2018, sort of sounds like a threat.
Things get meta with “Writing Music for Money, to Write More Music,” in which Guerin wonders: “Maybe I should get a job/And work for an agency/Because in case I write another song/And it doesn’t mean anything.” Today, the concept of selling out seems as outdated as eight-track players. Everybody’s got to pay the rent. But De Lux contemplates authenticity over an almost direct lift of Electronic’s “Getting Away with It,” a perfect pop song by three of music greatest writers. De Lux don’t stand a chance in comparison. But since they brought it up, they could definitely write some catchy jingles.


On her fourth album, Jazmine Sullivan contends with all that can be lost and gained through sex and love. She is in full command of her spectacular voice and totally delivers on an ambitious concept.

Heaux Tales

Watching Jazmine Sullivan thrill herself with her own ability is like watching Spider-Man gleefully swing from skyrise to skyrise, not an enemy in sight. Just look at Sullivan shimmy on a recent NPR Music Tiny Desk (Home) concert as she sings, “I’m hoping these titties can get me out the city,” her voice tickling its lower depths. Her eyes widen with feigned confusion when she coos the words, “I don’t know where I woke up.” When she belts, “Don’t have too much fun without me,” from Heaux Tales’ outstanding single “Lost One,” she throws her head, arms, and palms back, as if offering herself to something bigger.
Heaux Tales itself looks to something bigger, too, beyond Sullivan as its subject or star. Her fourth album is expansive and inclusive, embodying as many women’s insights into love and sex (read “Heaux” as “ho”) as 32 minutes could reasonably allow. Across eight songs connected by spoken-word interludes from different women, Heaux Tales unfurls a patchwork of origins, outcomes, thrills, and disasters of coital indulgence in her most cohesive work to date. Sullivan strategically activates her regal voice with stories that are sharp, intimate, and addictive.
One of Sullivan’s breaks into popular R&B was with the 2008 revenge tango “Bust Your Windows.” The scorned lover in the song is one of many personas Sullivan would act out over the course of three albums that pulsed with drama and camp. Her music has jumped from reggae to disco to boom-bap to marching band and more as she explored the lives of women and men in the throes of crime, passion, and addiction. Heaux Tales, by contrast, commits to simpler, more timeless soundscapes, like the snaps and synths of “Bodies” or the standout guitars of “Lost One” and “Girl Like Me.” Over the comparably minimalist production and instrumentation, the album’s narratives of agency are made central.
There is a direct throughline between the archetypal portraits Sullivan has painted in the past and the more dynamic accounts here. On “Mascara,” from her 2015 album Reality Show, Sullivan personified a proud gold digger with an attitude to match. “We all want to be that confident person,” Sullivan said about the song at the time. “And it’s hard to be that way. ’Cause you always feel like somebody’s judging you.” Throughout Heaux Tales, though, the motivations and makings of women who do or wish to earn material things through love and sex are considered with more kindness and clarity. In one of the spoken intermissions, a woman named Precious Daughtry says a childhood of deprivation repels her from men without money. Her words are followed by Sullivan’s searing performance of “The Other Side,” a vivid daydream about moving to Atlanta to be with a rapper who can provide for her. “I just want to be taken care of/’Cause I’ve worked enough,” she reasons.
The album’s perspectives do contradict themselves at times. On songs like “The Other Side” and the Anderson .Paak-assisted “Pricetags,” sex is a bold means of empowerment, financial or otherwise. Then, on one interlude, Sullivan’s friend of 20 years, Amanda Henderson, dejectedly admits that looking to sex for power leaves her feeling insecure. “Amanda’s Tale” is followed by “Girl Like Me,” in which Sullivan and H.E.R. sing of the hos in Fashion Nova dresses who steal their love interests away from them. Ho-ing goes from a source of pride and abundance to one of shame. Sullivan’s songwriting is agile: These conflicting judgements and desires live in women—and both can live in one woman at once.
All over Heaux Tales, Sullivan contends with what can be lost and gained through sex, from a secure sense of self (“Get it together, bitch,” she tells herself on “Bodies.” “You gettin’ sloppy.”) to crazed pleasure (“I spend my last ’cause the D bomb,” she proudly admits on “Put It Down”). The colloquial bursts of specificity in these vignettes are a feat of songwriting, and the restraint a power-vocalist like Sullivan shows in her delivery is as important. Sometimes her voice is choppy and conversational, sometimes it sounds like rapping, and it’s almost always a delight to sing along to. On this album, she’s both Deena Jones and Effie White; she can be an easy-listen or an all-consuming one. From the crinkly opening run on “Put It Down,” her most powerful singing is mixed into the background, as if to render her a little less superhuman.
R&B has long offered women space to voice their sexual appetites, from the foundational dirty blues songs like Lucille Bogan’s “Shave ’Em Dry” in 1935 (“Say I fucked all night and all the night before, baby/And I feel just like I want to fuck some more”) to Adina Howard’s 1995 hit “Freak Like Me.” After six years between projects, Sullivan joins the ranks of today’s R&B and R&B-adjacent stars like Summer Walker and SZA, who have updated the genre with music that complicates desire with messy reality. Old archetypes like The Gold Digger and new ones like The Instagram Baddie begin to crumble away, leaving fuller women in their wake. Sullivan’s friend Amanda Henderson told the Philadelphia Inquirer that she was nervous to include her revelation on Heaux Tales, but has since found relief in the number of fans who have connected to it. Even in the way Sullivan’s Tiny Desk was arranged—with lush instrumental breaks, opportunities for her background singers to take the spotlight, and a guest appearance from H.E.R.—it is clear Heaux Tales is communal.

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A new anthology of the oft-overlooked 1990s indie rockers zeroes in on what they did best: gentle jangle, tumbleweed drift, and hazy harmonies that display profound comfort in quietude.

1992-2001

It was easy to lose sight of a band like Acetone. Even as the 1990s indie-rock universe splintered into myriad distinct niches, Acetone slipped through them all like water flowing through rocks. They were too rootsy to be shoegazers, too woozy to be alt-country, too classic rock for slowcore, too casually Californian to be mere Velvet Underground revivalists. Like many ’90s peers, they bowed before Big Star, but where Teenage Fanclub, Matthew Sweet, et al were chasing their own “September Gurls,” Acetone were curled up in the trunk of “Big Black Car,” whose spectral sighs and insular ethos (“Nothing can hurt me/Nothing can touch me”) perfectly encapsulated the L.A. trio’s blissfully hermetic sound. While some bands take years to define their sonic identity, Acetone swiftly stepped off their fuzz pedals and settled into a cool, countrified groove like an old pair of jeans that were far too comfortable to ever take off and wash.
But despite finding a No. 1 fan in Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce, sharing labels and tours with the Verve, and eventually signing on with Neil Young’s fledgling Vapor Records imprint, Acetone never found their audience. Then, in July 2001, the band’s bassist, lead vocalist, and lyricist, Richie Lee, killed himself at the age of 34. Like the tumbleweed drift of their songs, it seemed as though Acetone were destined to get swept away by the passage of time—particularly as the ramshackle charm of ’90 underground rock gave way to the fashion-plated dance-punk and festival-sized indie pop of the ’00s. And unlike, say, Nick Drake or Elliott Smith or Mark Linkous, no sizable cult has formed around Lee to grant him posthumous sainthood. Acetone’s four albums and two EPs never made it to Spotify or Apple Music; YouTube yields little in the way of live footage or official videos. On record, Richie Lee always sounded like a ghost; for much of the past decade and a half, it was almost like he never existed.
But if Acetone are not a name that gets dropped with any regularity these days, a survey of the contemporary indie-rock landscape reveals a number of artists striving for a similar zen state. From the slow-dissolve soundscapes of the War on Drugs to the window-gazing ruminations of Kurt Vile to the lysergic twang of Mac DeMarco, there’s a healthy appetite today for patient, clock-stopping music that, if only for a moment, can pull us out of a world where 24/7 news tickers and obsessive-compulsive feed-refreshing set the pace of modern life. As such, the surprise appearance of Light in the Attic’s Acetone compilation couldn’t have been better timed to get Earth to spin just a little slower.
Despite its seemingly utilitarian title, 1992-2001 is no comprehensive career retrospective. A handful of the band’s official singles are nowhere to be found here, and over half of its 16 tracks are previously unreleased, salvaged from a stash of rehearsal-room demos that had been languishing in drummer Steve Hadley’s backyard shed all these years. Rather, the album zeroes in on what the band did best (and what sounds best today), its non-chronological sequence making songs recorded several years apart sound as if they sprung from the same session. (It’s also intended to serve as audio accompaniment to a concurrently released band biography: Hadley, Lee, Lightcap, by writer Sam Sweet.) Listening to this compilation, you’d never know Acetone’s 1993 debut, Cindy, contained its fair share of noisy alt-rock; instead, the album is represented here by the gentle jangle and “Candy Says”-style swoon of “Louise,” the sort of romantic reverie Yo La Tengo were mastering that same year on Painful, and a crucial transitory track that soon led Acetone down a more pastoral path.
From there, Acetone became a much more relaxed and gentle band, crafting the sort of songs where Hadley’s cymbal taps rang louder than Mark Lightcap’s liquefied guitar lines. They would venture into backwoods spirituals, applying their hazy harmonies to a sweet cover of the Fugs’ folk-song spin on William Blake’s “How Sweet I Roamed.” And while 1997’s “Chew” teased at a shift toward upbeat, Meat Puppets-style country rock, “Vibrato” (from the band’s 2001 swan song, York Blvd.) saw them slather their signature slow-burn balladry in dramatic Hammond organ lines and Lightcap’s Eddie Hazel-esque guitar squeals. But even as they made the UV meter flicker to the right, Acetone never upset their unhurried pace. Lee still sang in whispers; he just no longer felt the need to cup his hand over your ear.
For all their tender touch, Acetone’s hushed demeanor could never be mistaken for meekness. Lee’s lyric sheet may have been filled with dejection (from 1997’s “Germs”: “I’ll never be what you want me to be/But there’s so much you’ll never know”), but he always sang as if he was looking you in the eyes. This band always projected a supreme confidence and comfort in their quietude, a quality that’s especially pronounced on this set’s trove of unearthed rarities. The excellent 1998 outtake “Return From the Ice” is a divine dose of slow-motion soul that gracefully skates atop an omnipresent church-organ hum, while “Too Much Time” is Chris Bell’s I Am the Cosmos floating on a morphine high. By contrast, the meditative instrumentals (“Shore Power,” “Pico”) ultimately amplify Lee’s absence—more than just showcasing the band’s flair for vivid, nocturnal atmosphere, these tracks feel like memorials for a voice that’s no longer with us.
It’s a context that lends an especially crushing weight to the last track here. “Smokey” is a twangy, tear-stained ballad crudely captured live off the floor in 1999, mic hiss and all. You can hear Lee singing the melancholic melody, but his voice is muffled far beyond comprehension, each line appearing as a smoke ring that instantly disappears before your eyes. Hearing it today, the track sounds like a band jamming by séance, summoning the faint apparition of a departed friend yet frustrated by the impossibility of reconnecting with him. But this collection at least provides a Ouija board through which the spirit of Richie Lee can be accessed eternally.


The second album from producer Nigel Godrich, drummer Joey Waronker, and singer Laura Bettinson is immaculately composed electronica that never really leaves a strong impression.

Sister

The second album from the experimental rock trio—producer emeritus Nigel Godrich, veteran drummer Joey Waronker, and singer Laura Bettinson—is mostly immaculate electronica. Listening to Ultraísta is like plunging underwater: a swift blast of relief, followed a need to get orientated. The vocals are muffled; the instruments gleam through burbled layers. This is music to swirl and splash around in, but it doesn’t leave you with much to remember when you come up for air.
This may be, at least partly, because Ultraísta feel less like a holistic group with a distinct identity or purpose and more like a few extremely talented musicians messing around. The band came together through a shared love of Afrobeats, electronica, and art, piecing the album together from improvised sessions over the years that Godrich sculpted into songs. Eight years after their self-titled debut, the result is once again lovely-sounding, but a pristine blankness permeates the record. “Water in My Veins” teems with stretched-out synths and immersive lopped vocals and ends with the blare of the outside world—cars honking, the muted purr of engines, footsteps, like the song has scooped you from the street and deposited you back where you are standing. Ultraísta intend to transport you, but the world it creates is too easily punctured by weak lyrics.
There is no narrative or structure to Sister’s writing, and Bettinson’s monotone doesn’t offer any clues as to what each song might be about. Are we meant to feel pensive while listening to her chant, “Be young, be hungry, be wiser” in “Mariella”? “If you wanna go, please don’t stay,” she croons over violins on “Anybody,” another statement tossed out for the sake of texture. “Lift me off the ground, so I can see/The twenty-first century,” she intones on closer “The Moon and Mercury.” The album’s production tends towards controlled distortion—blurred synths, twinkling mashes of drum and piano and violin—and the lyrics could be a foothold in all the intricate chaos. Instead, they just further confuse, or land as bleary platitudes to fill the space.
For a project born out of improvisation, the record mostly stays within the boundaries it creates for itself. Even the most complicated drum patterns never devolve into anything frantic or surprising; the added layered vocals are too faint to become panoramic. These are tightly-wound songs that highlight the band member’s obvious gifts. Sister is never anything less than adroit, but it’s also never anything more.

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On his 2011 debut, Toronto-based producer David Psutka, aka Egyptrixx, took a widescreen approach to mining the fertile ground of the London dance music label Night Slugs. His second album focuses on a specific realm and comes off like a soundtrack pointing to a space between film noir and dystopian sci-fi.

A/B til Infinity

There's much to be said for exploring opposites. With Bible Eyes, his 2011 debut album as Egyptrixx, Toronto-based producer David Psutka took a widescreen approach to his mining of the fertile, boundary-less ground of London dance music label Night Slugs. Bible Eyes ran the gamut from lush to harsh, juxtaposed bass and synth in various contortions, and even toyed with guest vocals. Most importantly, it established his knack for seemingly effortless, deeply evocative arpeggiated melodies.
On A/B til Infinity, he flips the mode to zoom. The album focuses in on a specific realm—one he hinted at but abandoned with Bible Eyes’ opener “Start From The Beginning”—and comes off like a study or a soundtrack. Repeated motifs of rain and sirens, metallic surfaces and a sense of impending doom, point to a space between film noir and dystopian sci-fi. It is an underbelly world he traverses, one caught between the audible fizz of digital distraction and the sharp demand for material possessions. Water drips, signals fail, desires echo.
The album’s evocations are overwhelmingly literary, if somewhat familiar. The subdued grandiosity of “Bad Boy” calls to mind Alan Moore’s iconic graphic novel Watchmen, while its sister “Adult” invokes the dual feeling of intrigue and unease that is central to the work of J.G. Ballard. The synthetic choral voices of “Disorbital” stir a feeling of absence, one that Blade Runner fans might associate with the replicant’s fate to mourn memories it never had.
That’s not to say A/B til Infinity doesn’t have musical bedfellows. Atmosphere-wise, lines can be drawn to Kuedo’s majestic Severant (which also riffed on some of the same themes), while “Adult” feels in conversation with the taut conceptualization of Night Slugs comrade Jam City’s debut Classical Curves. While Psutka’s self-proclaimed love of black metal and his recent experience as one half of experimental post-rock/psychedelic duo Hiawatha aren’t exactly strikingly evident on this second Egyptrixx album, there is a newfound single-minded moodiness that could be credited to the influence of both. There’s no question that A/B til Infinity marks a distinct evolution: it has a stronger, more cohesive identity than Bible Eyes, but where it falls down is when it wallows in that guise. Both “Water” and “My Life is Vivid, My Eyes are Open” feel a little sludgy: their pulse is quicker but the blood runs cold.
Rather, in keeping with the titular theme, the record’s crowning glories are two sides of a flipped coin: the title track’s searing arpeggio that swims closest to the exquisite melodies of Bible Eyes (“Rooks Theme” and “Naples”) and the ambient elevation of final track “A.C.R.R.”. The latter closes the circle on the film noir ambience, shutting out the rain to embark on an internal journey. There is a sense of limbs and lungs stretching, followed by the triumphant punch through to a higher plane.


German techno giant Mark Ernestus delves deep into African music, and the result is drum-drunk and gorgeous, both techno-fast and dub-slow.

Mark Ernestus' Ndagga Rhythm Force: Yermande

Yermande

“I had a lurking interest in African music for a long time, but that door had never quite opened for me.” So Mark Ernestus said last year in discussing how he went from being a driving force in Berlin techno to delving headfirst into African music. It was a long road: Ernestus founded record shop Hard Wax—ground zero for techno in post-Berlin Wall Germany—and with partner Moritz Von Oswald they released totemic techno as Basic Channel, Maurizio, Phylyps, Round One, and more before evolving into the dub-heavy Rhythm & Sound. And as that project wound down, Ernestus encountered a DJ set featuring the Gambian dance style, MBalax.“I was hooked on the spot,” he said. “It was clear to me that these were not just a few interesting tunes and that there was more where this came from.” Soon after, Ernestus began releasing a series of singles credited to the Senegalese ensemble Jeri-Jeri.
Almost from the beginning, house and techno lifted from African music, making for tribal house and tracks like Caribou’s ferocious dance edit of “Ne Noya.” But Ernestus’s Senegalese projects—first as Jeri-Jeri and now with the slightly more streamlined Ndagga Rhythm Force—feel less like a techno master taking a passing fancy in African music and more of an attempt to grapple with this centuries-old music on its own terms.
Ndagga Rhythm Force won’t soon be mistaken for bigger Senegalese stars like Youssou N’Dour or Baaba Maal, though the rhythmic root of them is similar. Ernestus simply puts the family of sabar drums forward as the main attraction. That the rolling thunder of polyrhythms created by Senegalese drumming (which can be heard from 15 kilometers away) resonated with a techno producer whose entire discography could mesmerize with little more than a kick, the space between each hit, and the columns of air it shoved aside should come as no surprise.
While NRF is a slightly larger ensemble than Jeri-Jeri, it sounds more spare and focused. There are nine players in total on “Simb” but there is so much sonic space for the keyboard chords and guitar to skate about the drums that you might think it’s the work of a trio. Restrained, melancholic, the slow, slinking track brings to mind Miles Davis’ ’70s work, somewhere between the haunting elegy “He Loved Him Madly” and the menacing python-slither of Agharta. At least until Mark Ernestus triggers the bass drum, resulting in a tone so deep and rumbling that it could be a detonation from the asthenosphere, an instance of a beat that plummets a track into profound depths rather than sends it higher.
Between Ernestus’ production and mixing desk wizardry—to say nothing of the mastering job of Rashad Becker—it’s easy to get drum-drunk off of Yermande, to be concussed into submission. The battery of sabar drums are as relentless as a waterfall yet the depth of sound suggests a canyon, creating a sense of space so that hi-hats and talking drums clatter at the fore on “Walo Walo” while cannons discharge far on the horizon. The cumulative effect is both techno-fast and dub-slow. There’s a club pulse to tracks like “Lamb Ji” and “Jigeen,” but rather than just use the goat-skin drums to mimic machines, they instead land just off-grid, pulling and tugging so that no rhythm can be precisely determined. The drums fall like rocks on a mountain road on the former and gleefully accelerate the latter to the breaking point.
Released as a single last year, “Yermande” might be the most thrilling dialogue between German electronic engineering and African drum talk. The guiding beat wallops like a classic break and the hi-hat pattern is feverish, while echo and delay stretch out the anthemic synth chords, guitar and voice of Wolof singer Mbene Diatta Seck. And when the tungune, talmbat, and thiol drums burst through, the track pulls in two directions at once: furious breakbeat and syrupy dub. It’s a speedball of rhythm and sound as only Ernestus could capture it.


The Portland party rapper’s debut album is darker and more introspective than his past work, with features from the Last Artful, Dodgr, Michael Christmas, and Blossom.

Pool Party

Portland, Ore. is a famously rainy city. But what most people outside of the Pacific Northwest don’t realize is that the region has pronounced wet and dry seasons. During the summer months, Portland can feel more like idyllic SoCal, with nothing but sun, clear skies, and dry air for weeks on end. This is the Portland that rapper Myke Bogan has always evoked. Since relocating from South Dakota early this decade, Bogan has dropped four mixtapes’ worth of paeans to summers filled with women, weed, and liquor. Given the title and cover art for his debut LP, you’d be forgiven for expecting more of the same from Bogan this time around. However, Pool Party finds the rapper leaning into his more introspective side, with a darker sound to match. If this is pool-party rap, it’s a kind you might choose to leave on after the last revelers have departed and the evening chill starts to set in.
Pool Party marks Bogan’s first solo release for EYRST, the label co-founded by moody Portland producer Neill Von Tally and former Trail Blazers player (and sometimes rapper) Martell Webster. As EYRST’s house producer, Von Tally has a tendency to leave his fingerprints all over the label’s releases and Pool Party is no exception. Unlike previous Bogan releases, Pool Party’s sound is more submerged than sun-drenched, built for headphones rather than car stereos. While this texture-rich production is great at underscoring the album’s more contemplative moments, the album’s hazier tracks can also feel a little interchangeable at times, like one big greyscale blur. Luckily, Bogan is adept at providing splashes of color. While he’s a typical West Coast emcee in some regards—he tends to lag just behind the beat and often stretches out his words with a melodic drawl—he’s also a bubbly, animated vocalist with no shortage of gruff charm.
“Elevators Above” opens the record with a Tawrence-produced beat and synths that oscillate and shimmer—you can practically smell the scent of chlorine in the air. Bogan uses the opportunity to complicate his party-starter persona straight off the bat, admitting, “Emotions tend to taste of wine/See, I tend to bottle shit.” On “Not The,” Von Tally furnishes the album’s most interesting beat: a shifting instrumental built from a Vaudeviliian sample, snares that hit like blasts of static and the fluttering of what sound like hummingbird wings. Rather than ducking into the track’s many folds, Bogan raps forcefully, strong-arming the off-balance beat into submission.
“Top Gun” proceeds similarly; here, Von Tally’s instrumental evokes a drunken marimba player and rapper/singer the Last Artful, Dodgr coos a honeyed hook, reprising her role as Bogan’s foil from last year’s Rare Treat EP. Boston vet Michael Christmas drops in on the piano-driven “Gravy,” but Bogan steals the show with the line, “And I’m with this Black and Asian chick, eating phở/Prolly finna fuck,” rhyming “phở” and “fuck” so effortlessly, you’ll wonder why you’ve never heard another rapper do it. (His proper pronunciation of “phở,” it’s worth noting, will also score him plenty of points at home.)
Despite a handful of weaker songs lurking in the album’s back half, Pool Party is a largely enjoyable listen, though there’s still plenty of room left for Bogan to grow. He is an expressive and technically-proficient rapper, a fact that’s made even more apparent thanks to the challenging, rhythmically-complex beats he tackles here. Still, Bogan hasn’t yet developed the lyricism to match his mic skills: he’s great at landing one-liners but is less adept at conveying depth, nuance, and narrative in his rhymes. Pool Party provides Bogan with a promising way forward in this regard, one where he cops to the fact that partying provides only a temporary reprieve from life’s worries. Summer doesn’t last forever, a fact that Bogan seems to know all too well.


Stylistic shifts and personal reinvention have become par for the course for this New York singer-songwriter. But on their new album, they turn uncharacteristically self-reflective.

The Art of Forgetting

Caroline Rose has a penchant for reinvention. They turned from their Americana origins to nervy indie pop on 2018’s LONER, then slipped into hyper-stylized digital pop on 2020’s Superstar. Released just days before COVID-19 sent America into lockdown, that album went largely unnoticed. For Rose, the professional bad luck was compounded by a sudden, painful breakup. The New York singer-songwriter processes those events on the moody, tumultuous The Art of Forgetting.
The move toward emotional exorcism on The Art of Forgetting is nearly as startling as Rose’s previous stylistic pivots. Each of these tonal shifts suggested that Rose preferred to operate at a distance, reluctant to reveal too much of themselves in their art. On LONER, they repeatedly relied on humor—the album cover featured a deadpan Rose cramming a whole pack of cigarettes in their mouth—and they immersed themselves in an entirely different musical persona on Superstar, a concept album about fame.
The Art of Forgetting, wit and artistic self-awareness are not the driving force of the music; they’re accents that color Rose’s descent into their psyche. “Miami,” the lead single—and the source of the album’s title—crystallizes the emotional shift within their art, building to a cathartic release. Rose returns to such vulnerability throughout the album, sometimes pushing their weathered voice to the brink, occasionally murmuring in a whisper that commands attention. These changes aren’t so much reversals as points on a spectrum, capturing the peaks and valleys of a particularly challenging bout of reflection.
As a song called “The Doldrums” suggests, Rose spends much of The Art of Forgetting testing the limits of sadness, boredom, and isolation. With its slow, dramatic crescendo, “Love/Lover/Friend” provides a keynote for the rest of the record, setting the stage for a song like “The Kiss,” which stretches out so long that its yearning feels almost meditative. It’s a trick Rose replicates on the introspective “Where Do I Go From Here?,” which ends the album on an uncertain, questioning note. Rose occasionally departs from mid-tempo melancholy. There’s an appealing slipperiness to the new-wave gauze covering “Everywhere I Go Bring the Rain,” while “Stockholm Syndrome” simmers over a subdued, lounge-y rhythm that neatly contrasts with the insistent “Tell Me What You Want,” which boasts the cleanest, clearest hooks here.
But individual songs, as carefully articulated as they are, tend to get swallowed up by the overarching psychological thrust of The Art of Forgetting: This is a mood piece capturing a specific frame of mind, even a particular era. Rose approached the album as a kind of audio documentary, threading in voicemails from their ailing grandmother. They describe these found sounds as “little grounding moments that capture the time.” Perhaps they do carry great personal import for Rose, yet these scattered voicemails backfire; the jarring bits of audio vérité unravel the songs’ dreamy, dramatic spell.
Those voicemails and other spoken-word fragments reveal a confessional side that Rose hasn’t previously shown. Once reluctant to spill their feelings onto the page, Rose now writes an ode to their therapist in “Jill Says,” a song that demonstrates admirable personal growth yet makes for awkward art. Rose's forthright lyrics aren't as bracing as their painterly music, where emotions are conveyed through shifting textures and circular melodies. For all of the soul-baring on The Art of Forgetting, what lingers are the unanswered questions and ambiguities—the places where Rose is still searching for their truth.


On her intimate and assured new album, the Brooklyn R&B singer eagerly seeks deliverance from bad sex, bad vibes, and the pulsing anxiety of dead-end jobs.

Madison Tapes

The Brooklyn singer Yaya Bey effortlessly mingles the personal and political. On 2016’s The Many Alter-Egos of Trill’eta Brown, a largely acoustic outing inspired by the work of Audre Lorde, she contrasted protest anthems with first-person accounts of romantic torment. Embracing the tradition of neo-soul songwriters like Erykah Badu and Jill Scott, powerful women who were forthcoming about their own hangups, Bey radiated resolve, not sorrow. In Bey’s estimation, there’s no reason the revolution shouldn’t be led by people who, like the rest of us, have shitty exes.
“I’ve been spendin’ my life on a paycheck,” she sings on “i got a promotion and i still miss you” from her third album, Madison Tapes. “When does my real life start?” Her storyteller’s eye imbues ordinary scenes of home and work with an enthralling freshness. Madison Tapes seeks common ground between neo-soul and the deconstructed R&B of Mereba and Ivy Sole, the soft guitar chords of Bey’s earlier records interspersed with sampled and synthesized instrumentals. On “sorry i unfollowed you” and “april showers,” Bey surveys a relationship gone sour, asking on the latter, “Who hurt you, boo? Bad enough to hurt me, too?” Both tracks have a faint vinyl hiss and looped horn arrangements, devolving into studio chatter as the songs transition into discursive interludes.
Madison Tapes has a spontaneous, meandering energy. There’s a pinging noise lurking on most of the tracks that sounds suspiciously like a smoke detector in need of a battery change. Unseen collaborators come and go, departing with jokes and bromides. Bey maintains a cool composure, singing with a throaty purr that ascends into an airy whisper. On the late highlight “morgan views,” she volleys between somber melody and a conversational delivery, rapping, “It’s a fine time to read between the lines, my dear/It’s a fine time to have a change of mind, my dear.” (Bey’s father, it bears mentioning, is the categorically laidback Hempstead rapper Grand Daddy I.U., whose 1990 Cold Chillin’ debut Smooth Assassin remains something of a lost classic.)
On the Trill’eta Brown tape Bey spoke earnestly of revolution, flitting among characters to inhabit differing perspectives. Madison Tapes is comparably insular, its pursuit a self-derived liberation consistent with the ethos of her neo-soul forebears. That’s not to say it’s any less idealistic—Bey eagerly seeks deliverance from bad sex, bad vibes, and the pulsing anxiety of dead-end jobs. “paterson plank,” the descending chords of which evoke Vinia Mojica and Pete Rock’s 1998 duet “Mind Blowin’,” concludes with a yearning final verse that keeps it from lapsing into mere mood music, Bey singing, “Forever is a long time/To be wasting somebody’s time.” On the inspired “unseen freestyle,” her runaway rap verse mourns lost love as well as peers lost to nine-to-five drudgery.
There’s also solace to be found in the record’s convivial atmosphere, particularly “that’s pressure,” on which Bey and fellow-Brooklynite guest rapper Juu Mcfuckit bemoan an unraveling fling. Mcfuckit raps with eye-rolling insouciance (“She lyin’, she tell me she love me, I say I love you back/Shorty sent me soul-searching, couldn’t use Google Maps”) and a palpably New York attitude. While some of the spoken interludes are considerably more profound than others, they cast Bey’s malaise in a universal context that complements the more overtly political themes of her earlier projects. There are attestations to love, surrender, and abandonment: On “what truly is,” a young woman speaks with startling prescience about the power of photography to both convey and garble stories of human will. Even in heartache, Bey cuts a forceful pose.


Mastodon seems like a kickass metal name until you realize that the now-extinct American Mastodon was a\n\ hell of ...

Remission

Mastodon seems like a kickass metal name until you realize that the now-extinct American Mastodon was a hell of a lot like a manatee with legs. A member of the Proboscidea family (like its cousin the Wooly Mammoth), the mastodon stood almost ten feet tall and weighed in at roughly five tons-- surely a big beast by any measure. Lacking the killer instinct of its contemporaries, the Sabre-Toothed tiger and the Pterodactyl, the American Mastodon was content to browse, trolling the plains for tasty morsels of shrub. If you look at artist renderings, most paleontologists seem to think the good-natured Mastodon even enjoyed smiling! But as meek and mild as this beast was, its placid demeanor and limited diet-range rated low on Darwin's survival scale, and it thus perished once and for all in 800 A.D.
The implications may be benign, but it remains that the name 'Mastodon' still sounds pretty badass-- certainly more badass than 'Manatee'. And I suppose it imports a metaphor that fits quite nicely for the band Mastodon, an Atlanta, GA-based quartet that has heavy-music lovers everywhere shitting themselves naked. For, like their namesake, this Mastodon represents something utterly imposing, primeval and oppressively heavy.
Mastodon, like pioneering heavy acts Botch, Isis, Converge and Dillinger Escape Plan, prefer to mix their metal with some hardcore, albeit with the strong emphasis on the 'metal' part. The others place a premium on virtuoso musicianship and highly technical song structures, and while that also figures prominently into Mastodon's music, these boys slather it all up in a special sauce that I like to refer to as 'classic sauce.' I'd like to give the credit for this sauce to heavy music über-producer Matt Bayles (Isis, Botch, Blood Brothers), but who really knows the sauce-source? What the hell am I talking about? I explain: I'm talking about the tight-jeans, Dodge Hemi, "Starsky & Hutch" production quality, that's what-- the perfect complement to the prehistoric riffing featured all album long. The recording sounds deliberately rustic and antiqued, like that milk-stained fake money you'd buy at the museum. (Admit it: you loved that shit.)
But production is not what prods Mastodon. What stimulates this band's formidable corpus are four super-proficient veteran musicians, two of whom (guitarist Bill Kelliher and drummer Brann Dailor) cut their tusks in Today Is the Day and Lethargy. It's Dailor, though, who takes home the MVP award on Remission; if drummers are action figures, Dailor carries both a rapid-fire uzi (the toms) and an erase-all, double-barreled bazooka (dual-bass drums). I guarantee, he will brutalize you.
Like their metal peers, Mastodon sport some mathematics. But where Meshuggah get deep into calculus and Dillinger Escape Plan prefer trigonometry, these guys enjoy the more accessible stuff-- we're talking pre-algebra here. They drop in just enough to keep the arrangements flavorful, but not so much as to overload the vintage guitar riffs with Dream Theater-like complexity. And then they counterbalance it with some nice, old-fashioned, Sabbath-style metal attitude: guitars crunch, wail, and burn. The complete package sounds timeless, but in that unbelievable way that you've never heard before.
Maybe there exists a parallel world where the mighty mastodon kept on walking. And maybe, just maybe, that mastodon met a sabre-toothed tiger and maybe they had kids (work with me here). And those kids crossed over into our world, became human beings, moved to Atlanta, and formed a band. A great band whose raging, sodden hellfire now beckons you to warm yourself at its side throughout the impending winter months. A band whose crushing, odiferous, sodomizing blade dices like a Popeil cuisinart and runs you through with gruesome exactness until you beg for Remission. This band is Mastadon. Thank God for the miracles of crossbreeding.