Like his best music, Gucci Mane's release with noted mixtape curator DJ Holiday is colorful, interesting, flagrantly dumb, and sneakily clever.

Trap Back

Even back in 2009, when Gucci Mane seemed momentarily poised to conquer the known rap universe, there was something combustible about him. His career trajectory felt grease-slicked and frightening, like he was in a car fish-tailing across a major highway, and Gucci did his best, in his music, to reinforce this sensation: Two of his most-repeated ad-libs ("nyyyyyaooooowwww", "SKRRT! SKRRT!") are the sounds of high-speed vehicles spinning out of control. Everything that has happened to him since then-- arrests, jail time, abuse cases-- illustrates the sad difference between the artist who courts chaos and the artist who succumbs to it. Everyone loves a live wire when they're sparking, but the flip side of "live wire" is, of course, "perpetual fuck-up." Gucci fans and rubberneckers alike have had more than enough of both sides to last them a few years.
To have fallen in love with Gucci's drunken-carnival rendering of gangsta rap, then, is to have learned to take what you can get from him, when and where you can get it. I may be alone on the internet in admitting it, but I enjoyed BAYTL, his inexplicable, internet-baiting team-up with Kreayshawn associate and deeply lamentable human being V-Nasty, simply because it provided several solid-to-great Gucci verses alongside production by frequent collaborator Zaytoven, whose best beats sound like they're built entirely from Dippin' Dots. Gucci never conquered the rap world-- sales figures for The State vs. Radric Davis, his best shot, roughly equalled that of the Game's last studio album. But nothing has been able to quite stop him and, every once in a while, he still surprises us with something great.
Trap Back, his latest release with noted mixtape curator and professional loud person DJ Holiday, is just that: great. It isn't as great as The Movie 3-D or the first Writing on the Wall mixtape. Or Gucci Sosa or even the 10-track Gucciamerica throwaway or The Gooch Man or any number of his past classics. But like all his best music, it is colorful and interesting and flagrantly dumb and sneakily clever, all at once. His mush-mouth buries the details of his writing so deep that you'd have to spend ages picking them out, but on a good Gucci verse, you can feel them flying by on first pass, content in the knowledge that you will be able to revisit and explore them later. In the dope-sales reminiscence of "Back in 95", details like "Smokers didn't know my name, so they used to call me Black" and "Dope-fiend Willie used to finger-fuck my rims" leap out and instantly signify a great rapper firing on all cylinders.
Gucci's best verses are also insanely memorable; it's very hard to walk away from his music without at least two or three phrases doing the dryer-cycle tumble through your mind. His voice is a difficult instrument to describe: Pitched somewhere between whine and blare, he sometimes sounds like a huge, overgrown baby who's bumped his head on a table corner. But the way he uses it to take apart words and put them back together with strange new emphases-- "Ghett-O, a-LASK-a, ghett-O, neBRASKa"; "I'm in the trap house, with SHOES on"-- is a brain-teasing pleasure. The phrasing in his best raps feels sticky, like a filthy movie theater floor under sneakers: "I drop the top like 'fuck it'/ I'm not in no lil' Cutlass/ I pull up in the 'What the?'/ Fuck, I don't know was it" he teases on "Plain Jane". On "Thank You", he unleashes this thick, transcription-worthy run: "Count a hundred in Syria/ Peanut-butter interior/ My jewelry game on Frigidaire, my watch game cold as Siberia/ Gucci Mane, is you serious? Hell yeah, I'm serious/ Red watch with a red chain, my diamonds on they period."
The other reason Trap Back is great is the increasingly prominent Atlanta producer Mike Will Made It, who continues to demonstrate that he has an ear for the smallest details that make a simple rap song a great rap song. His sound is like a Flubberized blending of Zaytoven's 8-bit pings and Drumma Boy's funeral marches: it's menacing and playful all at once, which means its a perfect match for Gucci's style. In a development that really shouldn't have taken this long, he flips the Tetris theme into trap music for Gucci to rap on for "Get It Back". The instrumental could serve as a neatly boiled-down synopsis of Gucci's style: simple, deceptively absorbing, maddeningly addictive, frantically paced. Drumma Boy also swings by, and Zaytoven contributes some of his gangsta tinker-toy productions. The result isn't a revelation exactly, but it's the most recognizably Gucci-ish Gucci release in some time.


Ever the innovator, Janelle Monáe has crafted a singular, youthful pop record that is the culmination of years of silence and deflection in order to one day be free.

Dirty Computer

“They call us dirty ’cause we break all your rules now,” Janelle Monáe asserted in 2013 on The Electric Lady’s “Q.U.E.E.N.,” a song that was originally titled “Q.U.E.E.R.” Five years later, during an interview with Hot 97’s Ebro Darden, the newly out Monáe, who identifies as pansexual, broke her latest album down into three acts. “Songs one, two, three, four—that’s the reckoning. That’s you feeling the sting of being called nigger for the first time by a white person. Feeling the sting of being called bitch by a man for the first time. Feeling the sting of being called queer or a faggot by homophobic people. It’s reckoning and dealing with what it means to be called a Dirty Computer.”
Nevertheless, Dirty Computer’s opening act is harmonically lush, filled with bright synthesizers and rhythm guitars that refuse to linger in the melancholy found in the lower frets—their realm is one of tentative exhilaration, of becoming. The album’s following two acts celebrate the unabashed ownership of one’s otherness (“Django Jane”) and speak to the fear that comes from such visible vulnerability (“So Afraid”). The story has no end in sight, in part because Monáe is one of its first authors.
As a queer, dark-skinned Black woman in an industry historically inclined to value her opposite, Monáe knows that the narrative behind the content matters just as much as the content itself, despite its exceptional quality. Which is perhaps why, from a distance, her career looks like an exercise in freedom by accretion, something amassed over time. Nearly 10 years have passed between Monáe first asking us if we’re “bold enough to reach for love” on Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase) and the bisexual lighting, tongue clicks, and aching sexuality of Dirty Computer’s “Make Me Feel.” “For the culture, I kamikaze” she proclaims on “Django Jane,” a rap song full of trap hi-hats that dunks on the patriarchy and her haters. Monáe understands how much she’s risking even today by being out. “I knew that I was supposed to make this album before I made [2010’s] The ArchAndroid,” she told Darden. The relief of Dirty Computer is palpable, the culmination of years of silence and deflection in order to one day be free.
The album is crucially accompanied by an “emotion picture” also called Dirty Computer that depicts a surveillance state where queer people and people of color are hunted down for noncompliance. They’re stopped while driving by the police. They’re beaten and arrested at their own parties. The music videos for the songs act as an allusive, visually stunning novel-in-stories, intentionally paralleling our own reality in judgment. Monáe’s love for her influences far exceeds the artistic and sartorial nods to Keith Haring and David Bowie within her film. In Dirty Computer, Monáe is undercover passion on the run. She is bad. She is part of the rhythm nation. She no longer needs to ask if she’s a freak because she loves watching Mary. In Dirty Computer, she wants Mary Apple 53, played by Tessa Thompson, to take a bite.
As for the musical component of Dirty Computer, Monáe has given us a pop record that feels gleefully youthful, perhaps even the album she wishes she could have had as a teen in Kansas City. The songwriting is precise if not always flawless. The reckless and joyful “Screwed” embodies the occasional, devil-may-care nihilism experienced by queer people of color living under a surveillance state. It also contains one of the funkiest and technically impressive basslines you’ll hear on an album already in awe of Chic and George Clinton.
Still, to listen to Dirty Computer and look at Monáe’s pallid chart history is to ask whether this is an industry willing to make room for Black women who don’t belt their wounds, those with slightly smaller, albeit gorgeous voices. What does it mean to be a newly out queer Black woman of Monáe’s stature making a pop album in 2018 when there is no precedent? And how does that affect how we interpret her music and her willingness to inhabit spaces currently dominated by white acts? As an album, Dirty Computer is what happens when a prism is held to the blinding light of a free Janelle Monáe. Her status as an acolyte of Prince dovetails with her modern pop sensibilities uniquely, which is how we get a queer anthem like “Pynk,” and its video brimming with defiant Black women, saddled with a chorus that could slide neatly into most Taylor Swift records. It is why “Screwed” sounds like a hedonistic Haim track.
But as with her queerness, her pop inclinations are a feature, not a bug, and it is difficult to separate Dirty Computer from the larger narrative of resistance across the arts today; from A Wrinkle in Time, a film dedicated above all else to instilling wonder and empowering young viewers; from Gabby Rivera’s (now sadly discontinued) America comic book series, one centering a young, queer Latina, America Chavez, who repeatedly declares she is America; from An American Marriage, Tayari Jones’ latest novel that emphasizes to be Black is to be American. While this is Monáe’s most personal record to date, there is an inherent distancing that takes place with songs largely speaking to the we instead of explicitly about the I—even when the we (i.e, queer folks) includes the I (i.e., Monáe).
But this royal, all-encompassing we is a part of Monáe’s larger aim. “I want young girls, young boys, nonbinary, gay, straight, queer people who are having a hard time dealing with their sexuality, dealing with feeling ostracized or bullied for just being their unique selves, to know that I see you,” Monáe told Rolling Stone. “This album is for you. Be proud.” Dirty Computer affirms that we are never more naked than when we stand in our joy. The whole of it is a testament to inclusivity both verbally and sonically. And Monáe’s love is liberation, for her and for us.

Wondaland Arts Society / Bad Boy / Atlantic


Jacob Long’s vaporous, lo-fi ambient tracks feel like snapshots of stillness made of moving parts.

Grass and Trees

As Earthen Sea, Jacob Long spent more than a decade pulling his music gradually into focus. The erstwhile post-hardcore bassist began recording under the alias sometime after the turn of the millennium, but the project hit its stride in the early years of the 2010s, when the dissolution of the D.C. scene veteran’s groups Black Eyes and Mi Ami led him to concentrate his energies on a foggy, idiosyncratic take on lo-fi ambient. At first, it was a vaporous, secretive sound. “He had two Casio keyboards with the preset beats run through a bunch of pedals so it made these rhythmic rumbling textures,” Long’s former bandmate Daniel Martin-McCormick (aka Ital and Relaxer, and a Pitchfork contributor) recalled of an Earthen Sea live show. “It felt really private, but just with one more step that could go into this whole other area.”
Long began taking those steps on 2014’s Mirage and 2015’s Ink, both for Martin-McCormick’s Lovers Rock label, crafting airy, spacious ambient tracks that warily circled the reassuring pulse of dub-techno. With 2016’s The Sun Will Rise, for Nicolas Jaar’s Other People, and 2017’s An Act of Love, on Kranky, his beats continued to assume shape and gather strength. To follow the arc of those records was to trace a slow but unmistakable coming into being. But Grass and Trees, his first album in more than two and a half years, takes a step back into vapor. His music is beginning to dissolve again.
All seven of the album’s tracks have similar contours. Most songs consist of just one or two chords run through dub delay until the echoes flicker like a candle in the half-breeze of a humid night. Long’s synthesizers are unfussy, little more than a metallic glint in the darkness. Minor triads predominate, standard for dub techno, but occasionally he strays into unexpected major keys, adding extra color to his dusky sound. Sometimes he drifts outside conventional tonality altogether with synths more like church bells or wind chimes wrapped in muggy, muffled dissonance.
If there’s a barely there quality to Long’s tonal register, that goes double for his rhythms. Dub techno’s grounding pulse is largely notional—it seems to exist as a kind of muscle memory, connecting scattered drum hits and glancing chords. He traces a number of different pulses across the course of the album. The opener, “Existing Closer or Deeper in Space,” is propelled by a bassy, deep-diving downbeat; “Window, Skin, and Mirror” is fluid and easy moving, with faint hi-hats run through rapid-fire delay. “Spatial Ambiguity” and “Living Space” have almost no pulse at all—synths and isolated drum hits eddy in place, aimless and uninterested in moving forward. Never does Long indulge the straight-ahead boom-tick of his heaviest tunes, and sometimes his rhythms play tricks on you. No matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to parse the cadence of “A Blank Slate,” which feels like a normal 4/4 groove until you begin counting it out; some black magic seems to govern the relationship between synths and hi-hats.
Even at just 34 minutes long, Grass and Trees can get a little samey. There’s not much variation in the tonal palette or sound design, and there’s very little development within any given song—just synths, drums, filters, and delay tumbling in circles, like pebbles in the tide. And the production lacks the fullness of previous albums. These are snapshots of stillness made of moving parts; they are shallow pools reflecting pewter skies. But there is one sound that cuts through the murk of several tracks, providing a surprising through-line to the album: a simple handclap, seemingly human, rather than machine-made. It’s as though you were sitting alongside Long in his studio, listening to this nebulous, otherworldly music hissing from the speakers while he clapped along absent-mindedly. The sound is dry and close in the intimacy of the room.
The claps assume a particularly important role on the closing track, “Less and Less.” In the absence of any discernible downbeat, these loose, unquantized claps do their best to provide an anchor, a center of gravity. Gradually, they are met with other claps; the overarching feel is almost but not quite haphazard, like a rhythm unraveled. Eventually, the chords fade out, leaving just a smattering of smacked palms keeping precarious time against a backdrop of silence. Grass and Trees is an exercise in reduction, and eventually, it bumps up against minimalism’s limits. But “Less and Less” is a potent reminder of how much can be burned away without losing the distilled essence of a groove.


Frank, honest, and irreverent, the songwriter’s fourth album attempts to subvert the should-bes of a woman making a country record.

Denim & Diamonds

On her fourth album, Nikki Lane operates under the assumption of a Cher quip: “Mom, I am a rich man.” Lane quotes these words in the title track to Denim & Diamonds, the latest in a series of assured strides beyond the country-adjacent stables of 2017’s Highway Queen. Earlier this year, the South Carolina-born singer-songwriter backed Spiritualized on Everything Was Beautiful’s “Crazy.” Last year, she co-wrote and joined Lana Del Rey on “Breaking Up Slowly,” and Lana name-checked her in “Blue Banisters.” With her latest set of originals, Lane catalogs mistakes made and lessons learned, framing her smoky vocals with driving electric guitars. From the opening tour of Americana tropes in “First High”—including jeans “tighter than goddamn Springsteen”—Lane delivers songs that subvert the should-bes of a woman making a country record, for better and, occasionally, for worse.
Lane is sharpest when she leans all the way into irreverence. She sings with the authority and weariness of someone who’s been through the wringer, the cool insistence of her voice giving her an air of earned wisdom. “Born Tough” is punchy and confident, matching the audacity of “Denim & Diamonds” as Lane outlines her efforts at building a life for herself after being “let down all around, discouraged by life.” It’s clear that Lane has a soft spot for the bad girls, a point emphasized in the irresistible crackle of “Black Widow.” She warns against the temptations of this femme fatale, but a thrill takes over as the song hops into a Pentecostal double time.
Lane has her tender side, too, and in the more introspective forays of Denim & Diamonds, she examines her efforts at overcoming disappointment and heartbreak. “Try Harder” is a dose of big-sisterly encouragement, and the humble love at the heart of “Good Enough” makes for a sunny break as the track rides on a soft patter of drums. With Alain Johannes’ nylon-string guitar lead, album closer “Chimayo” takes a left turn into somber panache. It’s pretty as a standalone cut, but it feels vague and open-ended as a concluding number, its poetic flourishes at odds with Lane’s more characteristic frankness.
An uncomfortable supporting presence sours Lane’s raucous good time: Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme—who in 2017 apologized for kicking a female photographer in the face, and whose ex-wife more recently testified that he headbutted her so hard she blacked out—produced, mixed, and co-engineered the record, and occasionally plays guitar and drums. It’s a perplexing choice for a project defined by a woman’s independent spirit. The overall twangy mix is straightforward enough that listeners might not clock Homme’s involvement at all—so why choose him, right now?
Lane’s most compelling songs come out of her acknowledgements of imperfection and her impertinence toward the status quo. Her honest, reflective songwriting would be well-suited to a wide array of not-just-country producers who could abet her creative vision without threatening to undercut the triumph of being a “big-hearted girl” who’s “living in a man’s world,” as she sings on “Born Tough.” With her sense of wit and comfort, Lane often echoes another sage diva aphorism: the Dolly Parton-attributed truism that it’s hard to be a diamond in a rhinestone world. Lane has the kind of sharp perspectives and inherent sparkle that might make her one of the former, if she can resist the false promises of the latter.


After four years of releasing pioneering and transcendent techno, the UK label offers a new comp full of charm that looks ahead to its promising future.

Various Artists: Shall Not Fade - 4 Years of Service

Shall Not Fade - 4 Years of Service

At the end of 2015, Bristol’s Kieran Williams launched Shall Not Fade with Alone, a four-track EP by the Australian producer Mall Grab comprising definitive takes on the lo-fi house aesthetic. Labels like Lobster Theremin, Cactus Traxx, 1080p, and Opal Tapes were also exploring and refining the sound, which typically uses the thump of deep house as a vehicle for wooziness, and depends upon melodic dexterity, swing, and the almost occult ability to conjure vibe in order to push through the murk. Over the years, Shall Not Fade has transcended over and over, with superlative 12"s from heads like DJ Boring, Adryiano, Steve Murphy, Lake Haze, and LK which gently fold disco, French house, Detroit techno, and electro ingredients into the mix.
The new Four Years of Service compilation is more of a look ahead, and the label’s fresh voices prove themselves more than welcome. Harry Griffiths, in what seems to be only the second track ever released by him, offers the wistful “Since We’re Here,” which tosses a crisp break over warm pads like a windbreaker over a soft hoodie; by the time a space-funk synth line joins a bubbly arpeggiator, all seems right with the world. New signee Soela conjures a similar mood with “Sensual,” and it works just as well, particularly if you listen to it just a little too loud, a little too late, on the way home after a little too much, and sink into its gurgling echoes.
Before that, though, shake a tail feather to Black Loops & Ruff Stuff’s “La Progressive,” which recreates the metallic structures of Basic Channel-style dub techno in tubular steel. Harrison BDP’s “Interference” glistens like the rainbow in an oil slick; a pitched-down vocal intones “it’s all the same, just noise,” and somehow that sounds reassuring. And 1-800 GIRLS goes downright beatific, if not Balearic, with a slow-and-low house cut called, well, “My Speedos.” This ensemble of faux congas and electric piano might come off either sexy or cheesy depending on your taste, but it’s in keeping with the beachy spirit of Big Miz’s electro gem “Sun” and Kettama’s “Sundaze,” like smuggling a beach ball into Berghain.
The label’s big stars are mostly absent, as are—“Sundaze” apart—bangers. But two exceptions to this are exceptional indeed: Adryiano’s “U Used 2 Know Me” is a hi-hat-forward delight, with a bit of disco constantly filtering and shape-shifting as if the past, present, and future of the dancefloor all at once. And LK’s “Unified Love Machine” is exactly that, a device for dancing that’s well-oiled with Italo charisma and Teutonic efficiency. It’s a highlight of this compilation that doesn’t stretch the boundaries of genre as much as convincingly argue these forms are still fun. It might sometimes narcotize with comfort, or shy from explicit political engagement. But it has charm, and charm is an underrated way to connect.


I should get one thing out of the way before this review gets too long: Leonard Cohen's charm, for ...

Ten New Songs

I should get one thing out of the way before this review gets too long: Leonard Cohen's charm, for me, lies mostly in his words and the way he says them. This is perhaps something he picked up from the poets, or maybe imbedded from his years as a writer, before he ever recorded a note. It's not that his music is easily dismissed, or even that his legacy isn't being closely guarded by dark, genius songwriters hidden somewhere in the corners between Bob Dylan, Nick Drake and probably anyone worth their ink everywhere. Cohen's music is often the coolest part about what never immediately strikes me with his songs. It's just always seemed a little secondary to his words.
It could be that you just don't write phrases like, "May the lights in the Land of Plenty/ Shine on the truth someday," when making catchy tunes is your primary objective. It seems to me Cohen's songs come more from a hope that he'll hit on an answer, or maybe if he's feeling generous, that he would be able translate some of the truth he already understands, more than from any kind of songwriting tradition. I just read he was in a Buddhist monastery for the last few years. His new words could be more prophetic than usual, or maybe just a little morbid, in the most humane way possible. But they're his, and I suppose even the best people are obliged to listen.
Ten New Songs is Cohen's first release of new material since 1992's The Future. He often finds a partner to share the weight (usually on the musical end), and this time he's found Sharon Robinson. Robinson (best known as a session vocalist, and pop songwriter), while certainly leaving her stamp on the proceedings as producer, arranger, performer, and co-writer on every tune, hasn't muffled Cohen's artistic voice any more than his previous collaborators. Of course, her kind of soft rock-- closer to "I Want to Know What Love Is" by Foreigner than I'm comfortable with-- probably isn't going to score many points with the indie crowd, but it's not going to throw off your concentration for very long.
Tunes like "In My Secret Life" and "Alexandra Leaving" actually end up in a far more soulful world because of Robinson than if they had been purely Cohen efforts. These tunes, with Cohen's immensely weighty vocal, lower and possibly darker than ever before, shine with a peculiar optimism even as they betray his resolve with just about every corporeal sensation imaginable. And his passion is still there: "I'd die for the truth/ In my secret life," he sings in the opening track, and where there's a marked distaste for the material world all over the album, he still admits to buying "what I'm told" just like any other conditioned consumer species. Maybe it's indecision, or maybe it's a realization of the hopelessness of running against the grain, but Cohen never stops to consider his own insights or stoop to self-pity. Or, maybe I'm missing his point entirely. He's such a good writer that I wouldn't feel bad for having heard him speak/sing the stuff.
Elsewhere, though Robinson's slick backdrop relentlessly attempts to disguise it, Cohen unleashes harsher demons. In "By the Rivers Dark," he admits the constant threat to spirituality (in whatever form) in the modern world: "And I did forget/ My holy song/ And I had no strength in Babylon." And, per his willingness to let it be, "By the rivers dark/ Where it all goes on/ By the rivers dark in Babylon." There are perhaps correlations I could make to Cohen's recent immersion in Buddhism, and its doctrines of allowing one's self to flow with the river of life and to accept that we simply cannot know what we are not. But the truth is, Cohen has always been as perceptive, and has found his way seemingly by a mix of keen insight and passive discovery.
There are moments where I wonder if he hasn't gone over the edge into helplessness, letting his inner conflicts have their way with him. "Boogie Street" (I know, terrible title, and let me say that Robinson's uber-lame Skin-emax sex scene atmospherics don't exactly do the tune any favors) opens with a joyful reunion with the "Darkened One." "A sip of wine, a cigarette," and Cohen's ready to take a trip to other side, meeting any number of transient pleasures on an avenue where "all the maps of blood and flesh are posted on the door." And the song never brings you back to the safe neighborhoods. Maybe this isn't the kind of thing that goes over well as a conversation piece, and if I had one request, it would be to listen to the album after a shot of something very hard (but very smooth), and just take it in alone.
The album ends with "The Land of Plenty," and suitably, Cohen picks the last song to raise the layered curtain a little. The tenth new song features reminders of forgotten promises ("I know I said I'd meet you... I can't buy it anymore") and faiths long since given up ("For the Christ who has not risen"), but then it lets me down gently. He says, "May the lights in the land of plenty shine on the truth some day." And this is where I remember why I listen to him: Cohen says these words as if he heard them on top of a mountain. Maybe he heard them from some Zen master who doesn't have to live in our world, and must have realized their meaning while meditating, transcended from pain, but soaked in wisdom. But this is not where the words came from; Cohen said them, and he wrote them, and whether it's nice music or just amazing prose, I can only tell you what I heard.


The legendary singer has lost little expressiveness with age, but these songs are about the small, quiet spaces where she can catch her breath and steel her nerves.

We Get By

Mavis Staples carves out a little space for herself on “Heavy on My Mind,” a time-stopping song on her fifth album of the 2010s. The mood is dark, the music spare: just a steely electric guitar, a distant tambourine that sounds like rattling chains, and Staples’ mighty voice. She’s mic’d so close you can hear the breath catch in her throat between words, subtle exhalations that reveal her sincerity as well as her age. She turns 80 this year, and she doesn’t mind showing her experience and wisdom. “Heavy on My Mind” grapples with the devastation of loss and the confusion that accompanies grief: “Sometimes I wish, sometimes I fall in the well,” she sighs. “We can wait out the storm or we can stand in the rain/Gonna have to mourn or hide from some pain.” It’s a remarkable vocal performance by an artist who specializes in them, and a reminder of just how easy it is to take Staples for granted.
Staples has sung quietly before, in particular on some of the more prayerful songs from her recent trilogy of albums with producer Jeff Tweedy, but “Heavy on My Mind” is a little different, in that it allows her to escape her own legacy and sing for herself. For 70 years—ever since she started singing with her family’s gospel group in the late 1940s—she has conveyed a sense of moral authority, drawing from the faithful certitude of gospel as well as the populist activism of folk. Her voice is so powerful and her disposition so joyful and generous that she sings for every American, as the first-person-plural title We Get By implies: We are all in this together. Her music has a communal glow and a steely determination, but “Heavy on My Mind” shows how hard her walk has been.
Perhaps through divine intervention, Staples launched a comeback right when we needed her: celebrating a hopeful new era in American politics in the late 2000s and commiserating the seemingly hopeless era that followed. We Get By is about the strength and determination required to weather these storms, to sing for so many people without losing focus or hope. She and producer Ben Harper don’t shy away from big, public statements about the direction of the country, and songs like opener “Change” (“things gotta change around here”) and “Brothers and Sisters” (“not too far down the wrong road to turn around”) don’t venture far from her recent albums in sound or sentiment. Harper gently harkens back to the Staple Singers with raw, rolling guitar licks that recall Pops’ innovative style and a genially funky rhythm section that would be at home in the concert hall or the church sanctuary.
Because Staples has lost little expressiveness with age, We Get By sounds surprisingly raucous and admirably rough around the edges, especially on the percolating “Anytime.” But these songs are more about the small, quiet spaces where Staples can catch her breath and steel her nerves. Weighing particularly heavy on her mind is the idea of change, both the change she’d like to see in our country and the change she’s going through as she outlives beloved friends and family. The recent passing of sister Yvonne Staples looms large over these songs, so much so that Mavis dedicates the album to her. “Grab hold of the days, before the days grab hold of you,” she advises on “Hard to Leave,” which traces the distance between herself and home. Written by Harper, the song might be just another sad tale about the trials a touring musician faces during a life on the road, but Staples lends it extra gravity, as though aware she’s reached an age when each goodbye might be the last. The tone, however, is wistful rather than grim: “I’m passing through time like a warm summer breeze,” she sings. “It’s always hard, so hard to leave.” It’s a heavy burden, but she gets by.


Husband/wife indie pop duo follow a string of well-liked blog mp3s with their nostalgia-soaked, Brill Building-referencing LP.

Cape Dory

In May 2010, when homemade indie pop of every stripe was deep in the throes of its baffling obsession with the beach, a new band was taking the music to the next logical place: the open sea. Tennis, we learned, were a married boy-girl duo from Denver, and their earliest circulated mp3s came with an odd story. After finishing college in Colorado, the couple sold their possessions, bought a sailboat, and embarked on an extended trip along the Eastern Seaboard. After returning to land, they began to write and record songs based on their experiences. Their music, as heard here on their full-length debut, touches on tide patterns and shifting winds and sandbars scraping beneath hulls; it also emphasizes the essential romance of the whole adventure-- that they went through it all together. Above all, Tennis strive to evoke an unnamed but certainly more innocent past.
Everything about the project comes to us through a thick, triple-folded blanket of nostalgia. From the band's name (a sport that had its peak popularity in the 1970s and 80s) to the overall sound (girl-group pop is the basic template) to the record's cover to the choice of font, it all seems to yearn for one bygone day or another-- the 60s, the 80s, those seven months they spent on the water. The musical structures are straightforward, led by simple guitar lines and rhythms that are either waltz-time invitations to slow dance or more upbeat numbers with the familiar 1-2-pause-3 beat (think the Shirelles' "Will You Love Me Tomorrow", the Chiffons' "One Fine Day", etc.) so evocative of when Brill Building songwriters ruled the airwaves. The muffled recording, on the other hand, might be an attempt to capture the feel of a cheap AM radio spilling out of a bungalow, but it mostly serves to make the music sound distant and indistinct.
Tennis have a good ear for a tune and a solid understanding of how pop songs in this style fit together. The finger-snap-and-voice opening of "Marathon" has an appealingly peppy hook, the guitar twang in "Long Boat Pass" is of the proper vintage, and the melody on "South Carolina" has a nice build to the chorus break. Alaina Moore sings lead and has a likable voice, though her way of stretching vowels, when combined with the dull recording, sometimes makes the words hard to follow. Still, in single-song doses, the music on Cape Dory is pleasant, if not particularly memorable or expressive of anything in particular.
The problem comes when the music is taken at album length. Even though these 10 songs clock in at less than 30 minutes, their cumulative effect is weirdly numbing. Part of it is up to the central conceit: An extended getaway on a sloop is nice enough image, but is the allure of this one fantasy enough to sustain a record? Not when there is so little personality emanating from the songs themselves. Say what you will about Jimmy Buffett, an artist most people I know consider to be among the most loathsome of the modern popular era, but his tales of island hopping and boat drinks have a sense of humor and an identifiable point of view. Tennis, conversely, seem content to hit their marks, replicate an established style, and let the associations that come with a familiar sound do the emotional work. Bizarrely, considering the detailed and unique backstory, which describes something these two went through and which most of us will never experience even if we wanted to, Cape Dory comes over as a depersonalized exercise. It seems too concerned about transmitting a very specific sound and getting all the nautical details right. So while the record is pretty and intermittently enjoyable, it feels one-note and ultimately flat.


The Chicago guitarist and sound artist tucks worlds of deep feelings into these four immersive pieces, which seem to shift with your own mood.

Window In

Michael Vallera’s Window In is the ambient-music equivalent of a mood ring. The Chicago guitarist tucks microcosms of disparate sounds inside each of these four amorphous pieces—warm drones that unravel like deep sighs, creepy clicks that haunt like ghosts, curdled riffs that rush like dangerous rivers. They reflect what you bring to them, whether anxiety or hope. As menacing or majestic as you like, Window In is a timely reminder that it’s OK if your feelings are complicated, confounding, and subject to change. They’re all right here, bound inside 43 mesmerizing minutes.
In one form or another, Vallera has been pursuing a single idea—electric guitar processed to the point of oblivion—for at least a decade. He played on Rhys Chatham’s guitar-symphony masterpiece, A Crimson Grail, and formed the excellent duo Cleared with drummer Steven Hess, a fellow Chicago instrumentalist who fosters a sense of formless wonder. On his three previous solo albums, each more intriguing than the last, Vallera suspended bits of piano chords or broken beats inside clouds of brittle or beautiful guitar, shaping an unstable horizon that seemed always to inch nearer.
For Window In, Vallera limits himself to the electric guitar and anything he can use to interrupt, augment, warp, or otherwise ruin its output. The restriction is a boon, as Vallera has never before elicited such a wealth of sophisticated and ingenious sounds—or found such novel uses for old ones. “Hours” opens with a high-end hiss and a low-end growl, the extreme registers of his guitar simultaneously pushed to their limits. “Blue Mind” peaks when Vallera interrupts a resplendent tone over and over, so it constantly collapses only to rise again. It’s as if, by casually flipping a switch, he’s accidentally stumbled upon the idea of rhythm itself. In the past, Vallera has followed a distinguished tradition of guitarists reimagining their instrument’s textural edges; with these discoveries, he becomes part of the vanguard, like Keith Rowe or Christian Fennesz before him.
More important, though, is how Vallera nests, layers, and intertwines these elements, like Grouper or Kara-Lis Coverdale, so that they unspool in an emotionally rich listen; otherwise, they might remain arcane elements of mere sound design. During “Blue Mind,” Vallera conjures the pop of a guitar cable that refuses to stay plugged in, a mundane noise familiar to anyone who’s ever played an electric instrument. He surrounds those tiny jolts with coruscant notes and a purring hum. The effect is like staring out at a splendid ocean scene while reeling from seasickness. And midway through “Deep Sleeping Exit,” his guitar wafts like the smell of springtime lavender, at least until the amplifier seems to crumble beneath the signal’s power. It’s like watching a thunderhead cut short a picture-perfect picnic.
Outside of music, Vallera is a photographer whose frames capture a subtly altered reality, recalling both the astute framing of Alfred Stieglitz’s pictures and the backyard surrealism of Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings in one shot. Stare at one of his exquisite stills long enough, and you’ll finally notice the distant threat of an approaching cloud, or the way shapes that seem orderly slowly reveal an underlying chaos. Window In captures the same essence—a seemingly simple image that asks more questions the longer you sit with it. There are times when Window In suspends you at the edge of an abyss, others when it lifts you skyward. Mostly, though, those states linger here together, ready to remind you that one feeling won’t last forever.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a 1993 comedy album full of dick and fart jokes, and the brilliant, self-effacing man who made them work.

Adam Sandler: They’re All Gonna Laugh at You!

They’re All Gonna Laugh at You!

If comedy’s eternal wellsprings are shame and humiliation, consider the possibility the form has seen no purer practitioner than Adam Sandler. Even now, as a 56-year-old multimillionaire, he looks as nervous and furtive in front of a microphone as he did at 28 when he starred in Billy Madison, the 1995 breakout hit about a contemptible man-child forced to repeat school from kindergarten onward. Even in the year 2022, when the search string “adam sandler oscar snub” returns credible results, he still enters every room armed only with the unshakeable conviction that he, himself, should not be in it, a conviction written on his squinting face, weighing down on his hunched shoulders. The ancient Groucho Marx dictum—“I wouldn’t want to join any club that would have me as a member”—isn’t even self-immolating enough for the profound sense of unworthiness that seems to consume Sandler like some kind of existential indigestion, and it’s possible no one has twisted himself into more pitiable shapes, abased himself more thoroughly onscreen, than he has over the course of his career.
If there is any deeper reason that Adam Sandler’s filthy and juvenile comedy has endured—and it has endured, proving so influential that entire movies have been made around the idea of his fame—then it is in this coursing root of self-loathing. Perhaps this is also why Sandler achieved his comic apotheosis in a medium even more lowly, if possible, than the Saturday Night Live skit: the comedy album, a loner’s medium even within comedy’s low-lit environs. You don’t even have to venture out to a basement venue, risking eye contact with others, to experience it. All you needed for They’re All Gonna Laugh At You! was a CD player, headphones, maybe one conspiratorial listener, and your own invincible sense of shame. You needed, in short, to be in seventh grade.
That’s how old I was the first time someone—it may have been the kid named Dave, but more likely it was was my neighbor Brad—plugged a set of headphones into a Discman, finding my eyes the way Natalie Portman would one day gaze into Zach Braff’s in Garden State, and waited for my life to be changed by the immortal words, “Now, take that shampoo bottle and stick it up my ass.”
The song—given the bland brown-paper-bag title “At a Medium Pace” and set to midtempo acoustic-ballad guitars—described a series of ritualized abasements and humiliations that only started with the shampoo bottle. Listening as an adult, it’s at least technically imaginable—if you are looking for the most charitable possible interpretation—to hear “At a Medium Pace” as something like a sub’s sincere bedroom wishlist, maybe a funny but no-longer-horrifying actual love song. But as seventh graders, we were no more prepared to imagine that than we were to go cliff jumping. We had only known our bodies as sites of disgust, and out of the hazy leap towards imagining them as sites of mutual pleasure, we got something like “At a Medium Pace,” which felt like a dispatch from a frightening adult world of shooting fluids, inexplicable desires, and unspeakable creativities. We listened to “At a Medium Pace” and laughed loudly with wide eyes, briefly and harmlessly exorcizing the terrors surrounding the act we could neither get our minds around nor stop ourselves from trying to envision. It was sort of an anti-porn, shared in the same furtive spirit.
If this is your frame of mind, then They’re All Gonna Laugh at You! is the Magna Carta, a document pressed with clammy fingers into equally clammy palms. They’re All Gonna Laugh at You! functioned almost like a rite of passage, its title confirming and granting communion with our very worst fears. As a 12-year-old, the only rule of human society you’ve internalized is its boundless capacity for cruelty and humiliation; the world seems custom-built to annihilate your budding and fragile sense of self, and yet you’re asked to step into it, daily. If you were lucky, you had well-meaning adults around you to help you, but to feel truly understood, you might have turned to something like, say, “The Severe Beating of a High School Janitor.”
These recurring bits—in which a series of low-level authority figures are subjected to ruthless beatings, with their whimpering cries and cracking bones providing the punchlines—were evidence to some critics of a hopeless nihilism. But what they might have missed is that in each one, the person enduring the beating was Sandler himself. They were his yelps (“My sideburns!”), his pleas, and the implicit invitation was to imagine ourselves receiving the beating, not doling it out. This wasn’t some Clockwork Orange–style exercise in cheerful sociopathy; this was self-loathing, creatively realized via some excellent foley work.
They’re All Gonna Laugh at You! was released in 1993, two years before Billy Madison went straight to No. 1 at the box office, prompting the unified disdain and mortification of a generation of film critics (“One of the most execrable movies ever made,” Richard Schickel wrote in Time, a review I still remember for teaching me a new word) and cementing Adam Sandler movies in the cultural landscape. But if Billy Madison birthed the Sandler Industrial Complex, They’re All Gonna Laugh at You! functioned like a shadow recruitment tool. Written and recorded with a cast that would help shape the next two decades of comedy—Robert Smigel, Bob Odenkirk, Judd Apatow, Conan O’Brien—the album snuck out into the world to near-total indifference, only building momentum as word spread, pre-internet, of its puerility. “We didn’t see the album budging on the charts for a while,” remembered producer Brooks Arthur, whose credits, besides helping Sandler record convincing farts, included Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” and Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline.” “Then little by little, we started to see it come alive.” By the end of the year, Sandler was noticing people shouting lines at him from the “Toll Booth Willie” skit during his concerts. Eventually, the album went double platinum.
The critical reception to They’re All Gonna Laugh at You!, insofar as one existed, agreed on one thing: Sandler’s sketches were “terminally unfunny,” he went on “ad nauseam about bodily functions and the futile pursuit of kinky sex,” and it was all “embarrassingly adolescent.” “This man needs help—not a microphone,” concluded one newspaper columnist, who went on to contrast Sandler’s album unfavorably to the recently released Jeff Foxworthy tract, “You Might Be a Redneck If…” Another summed up the appeal even more succinctly: “Stupid, but young boys like it.”
Stupid, but young boys like it. Even if young boys as a purchasing bloc were largely unacquainted with the opinions of local newspaper columnists, we nonetheless reveled in our awareness that Sandler’s humor struck many sentient beings north of 15 as indefensible, mystifying, barely classifiable even as “humor.” Indeed, it was central to its appeal. Sandler was our guy, someone whose very introduction onscreen on SNL seemed to contain an apology, and a tacit acknowledgment that someone more talented, with better ideas, should almost certainly be in his place.
He had distinguished himself on SNL with a series of “bits” that redefined just how slight something could be and still make it to air. If an older generation of comics like Steve Martin or Andy Kaufman embodied something of the punk-rock promise—that even without honing your chops, you could get onstage and express yourself to a willing audience—then middle and elementary school kids saw something similar in Sandler, a big brother to us and a little brother to the cast who was somehow allowed to go on national television, squish his face together, and yell “gimme some candy” to laughter and adulation. In actor Jim Downy’s famous speech delivered two years later in Billy Madison—“What you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard…. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul”—kids sensed the shocked proxy of every adult in our vicinity, and we giggled in delight. We knew this stuff was ruthlessly, remorselessly dumb, and that its very existence in the public sphere was an affront, a burp on the intercom during the morning announcements.
And yet, even in comedy swamps as choked and fetid as this one, peculiar ideas could take shape and linger. “The Longest Pee” might be the stupidest two minutes of audio to which I’ve ever purposefully listened—it’s just the sound of a pee that goes on longer than it’s supposed to, that’s it—but the mounting concern in Sandler’s voice (“Oh man,” he wails, as the sound, supervised by super-producer Arthur—in whose studio Bruce Springsteen recorded his first three albums—grows to impossible levels of water pressure and velocity) is funny, goddamn it. There is something lurking in his voice—despair tinged with hysteria, or maybe the other way around—that makes it oddly more discomfiting than, say, the roughly contemporaneous bathroom scene in Dumb and Dumber. If Sandler’s comedy has aggravated so many critics so profoundly, perhaps it’s because his detractors, too, sensed that there was something deeper, and not entirely dismissable, swimming around in the bowels of his work. “Adam doesn’t have much interest in being cool or hipper than the room,” Judd Apatow told Spin in an oral history of the album. “He’s not a smartass. He’s not cynical. He just loves being funny. He’s a Rodney Dangerfield guy.”
Inside Apatow’s invocation of “Rodney Dangerfield guy,” of course, was some subtextual cultural coding. Dangerfield, particularly in film roles like Caddyshack, made comedic hay out of a very particular loaded cultural trope—the American Jew crashing the party of the horrified WASPs—and Sandler, from Billy Madison to Happy Gilmore and beyond, threw himself into the same role: the self-designated turd in the punch bowl, the foul smell spoiling the dinner party. Unlike his Borscht Belt forefathers, Sandler didn’t usually play up the mannerisms associated with the stereotype of the American Jew. Hunched over in basketball shorts rather than pulling anxiously at his too-tight starched shirt, Sandler wrapped himself in his internalized self-loathing like a bathrobe instead of straining against it like a straitjacket. In his sneaky version of assimilation, he allowed every American kid, whether they had a bar mitzvah or not, safe passage for their suspicions that they, too, were the turd in the punch bowl. If Sandler’s comedy wavers between the more collegiate environs of The State and Mr. Show and the gutter of the Jerky Boys and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, never claiming allegiance to one camp or the other, then it’s because he knows that somewhere in this indeterminate region is the precise locus of his appeal, the reason that entire generations have not been able to get his voice out of their heads.
I am not so depraved or insane as to suggest that everything on They’re All Gonna Laugh at You! is still as funny to me now, a 41-year-old father, as it was when I was a 12-year-old in the era of JNCOs and Sun-In. A handful of the 22 tracks now strike me as boring and pointless as they must have seemed to those regional newspaper critics. But I can still hear some of that darkness squirming around in here. There is no laughing on this album that is not done queasily—all his characters, even his sympathetic ones, are mush-mouths, screechers, or quaverers. Take, for example, the “Oh, Mom…” sketch, from which the album takes its name. Like every Sandler bit, the gag reveals itself within the first few seconds: Here, the joke is the mom who won’t stop shrieking “No! No!!! They’re all gonna laugh at you!” in response to even her children’s most mundane requests. On the surface, it’s a one-note riff on a scene from the movie Carrie. But then there is that screech itself, which digs a little deeper every time Sandler unleashes it. As the skit gets more ridiculous (“Mom, will you please pass the salad dressing?” “No!!!!”), something else happens, something that keys into his best work. It’s not much of a leap to envision the skit as a portrayal of Sandler’s own psyche, gathered around the dinner table. The next time you see him slouching in front of some paparazzi lens, imagine this is the voice he is blocking out.
Over the years, a great many people who would otherwise not eagerly throw themselves into dick and fart jokes with Sandler’s enthusiasm have thought about this voice, quite a lot, and they have attempted to put some of their thinking on screen. If there by now exists, in the cultural imagination, anything close to an idea of a “serious” Adam Sandler role, that is because Paul Thomas Anderson was unable to rid himself of the character that Adam Sandler plays—the frightened creature sidling out of the dark, wracked equally by mind-obliterating fear and self-loathing and bursts of annihilating rage. Flush with cultural capital after the massive success of 1997’s Boogie Nights and 1999’s Magnolia, Anderson wrote Punch-Drunk Love, the first-ever “thinking person’s Adam Sandler movie.” To the astonishment and dismay of many interviewers, Anderson recalled how he had visited the set of Sandler’s 2000 movie Little Nicky to discuss the possibility of collaboration. He had seen Happy Gilmore, he explained, and was entranced. Thus were we treated to our first sight of Adam Sandler, singer of “Lunch Lady Land,” sitting with a shit-eating grin across the table from PTA and Charlie Rose. When Rose reports, gravely, to the camera that critics have called it “the best performance of [Sandler’s] career,” his nervous whinnying giggle is audible in the background.
There was an implicit offer at that moment, one that Sandler refused. Lots of comedians have reached the stage when they tire of falling on their faces for the amusement of the public: Think of Steve Martin, who has by now styled himself as a sort of in-house humorist for The New Yorker, provoker of urbane smiles, and then remember the character he played in 1979’s The Jerk, which is not so far off from the buffoon Sandler himself plays; or Bill Murray, who starred in low-rent films like 1981’s Stripes just to have a chance to perform his cosmic-idiot schtick before striding into the embrace of Wes Anderson and Jim Jarmusch. If Sandler had gone this route, as a great many critics of the era expected him to, he would have embarked on a much more typical, and far less volatile, career—the comedian who made raucous and generally disdained entertainments that he would go on to recall fondly in his autumnal years, fondly but dismissively. Jamie Foxx took this road with the Ray biopic and never looked back, saying of his early comedies, like Booty Call: “Horrible…. There was no art in it.”
But not Sandler, who has never wanted to choose between making films like Jack and Jill or Hubie Halloween or starring in the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems. The production company that was born from his massive run of late-’90s hits, Happy Madison, continues to churn out films, and while everyone agrees many are transparently terrible, the conversation gets interesting when you notice how little agreement there is on which ones are the terriblest: For years, 2011’s Jack and Jill was shorthand for “the worst film ever made,” and yet it has acquired an admiring cult following for scenes like this, which contains the best and most dialed-in line readings I’ve seen from Al Pacino in decades.
Sandler has continued writing silly songs, which he performs on concert tours to rhapsodic audiences, and he continues to mock the very idea of critical respect at any podium he reads from: Upon accepting his Best Male Lead award at the Independent Spirit Awards for 2020’s Uncut Gems, he gave “a shoutout to my fellow nominees, who will now and forever be known as the guys who lost to fuckin’ Adam Sandler,” in his best Sandman voice. In his mind, he’s still the buffoon on the date with the valedictorian, shouting pointless obscenities at an uncomprehending world attempting to smooth over or ignore him. Sandler has remained loyal to the buffoon, in part because he knows the buffoon helped get him where he is—when The New York Times asked Josh and Benny Safdie about the autobiographical roots of Sandler’s Howard Ratner character in Uncut Gems, they pointed to their own haggard, put-upon father and recalled the time he bought each of them a disastrously inappropriate comedy CD called They’re All Gonna Laugh at You!, which the two of them, aged 7 and 9, listened to on headphones for hours on end. “They’re not just comedy records,” Benny said, the awe palpable in his voice. “They’re worlds.”


Pittsburgh-based Girl Talk absolutely detonates the notions of mash-up, cramming this 40-minute mix with layered samples from more than 150 uncleared top 40 pop bangers, electro anthems, indie classics, yacht rock flashbacks, 80s metal cuts, and more.

Night Ripper

The element of surprise is gone from the mash-up. Hollertronix and 2 Many DJs mastered the technique, made it a staple of their sets, and next, everyone on the block was mix-matching hip-hop to electro and indie rock. The idea that two songs blender-ized can recombine to create something wholly new is thrilling in theory, but the execution is usually sloppy or samey, either simply aligning two similar beat structures or pairing up two completely disparate tracks for the slapstick novelty of a jokey title.
Pittsburgh native Greg Gillis (Girl Talk) absolutely detonates the notions of mash-up on his third album, the violently joyous Night Ripper. Rather than squeeze two songs that sorta make sense together into a small box, Gillis crams six or eight or 14 or 20 songs into frenetic rows, slicing fragments off 1980s pop, Dirty South rap, booty bass, and grunge, among countless other genres. Then he pieces together the voracious music fan's dream: a hulking hyper-mix designed to make you dance, wear out predictable ideas, and defy hopeless record-reviewing.

Night Ripper* doesn't stretch the boundaries of mash-ups because there were no boundaries to begin with. As an illegal art form, it's surprising no one came along with an idea like this sooner. Still, it's doubtful they'd have the sturdy, meticulous hand that Gillis flaunts here. The record's pacing is astonishing-- with more than 150 sample sources (all thanked in the liner notes), it ricochets from Top 40 hits to obscure gems and back again like a cool breeze, clocking in at less than 42 minutes. The sampling is pure precision, slotting razor-thin (but highly recognizable) guitar stabs on top of blaring synths on top of anthemic rap couplets and so on, all at breakneck speed.

Part of the fun of listening is trying to figure out the source of each fragment used on these tracks. Familiar as they may be, you'll never place every sample. But at the risk of getting sucked into Gillis' name-game vortex, an example speaks to the power. "Smash Your Head" glides into the siren keyboards of Lil Wayne's "Fireman" less than a minute in, then abruptly shifts into the crushingly dense riffs of Nirvana's "Scentless Apprentice" while Young Jeezy spits the familiar flames of "Soul Survivor", before it all tumbles into a Pharcyde-Elton John-Biggie somersault. On "Minute by Minute", Gillis even slots Neutral Milk Hotel's "Holland, 1945" up next to Juelz Santana's "There It Go (The Whisper Song)". There are no ties, other than the miracle of chopping and looping.
Due to its overwhelming number of unlicensed sources, Night Ripper is practically begging for court drama. In the event of litigation, Gillis' label has armed themselves with a Fair Use argument, citing artists' rights to liberally sample in the creation of new works. Whether that'll hold any water in a courtroom remains to be seen, but for listeners it's an afterthought. Some may dock him points for lack of originality, but Gillis' schizophrenic attitude toward pop music is so novel it's impossible to stay mad at. Time will tell whether it's still fresh in 12 months, when the very recent samples (M.I.A., Gwen Stefani, Webbie) lose their chic appeal next to Smokey Robinson, the Pixies, and Public Enemy-- but for 2006, Night Ripper is the soundtrack of the summer.


The acclaimed avant-metal outfit Gojira’s sixth full-length LP is their most accessible release yet, melodically immediate and charged with emotion.

Magma

Gojira’s Joe Duplantier didn’t ask to be a heavy metal auteur. Before taking up arms as the singer, vocalist, and principal songwriter of the acclaimed French avant-metal outfit, the Frenchman had dreams of becoming a fireman–a career path that shifted drastically following his childhood exposure to Metallica and Voivod, which inspired him to pick up an axe and start composing his own music. “I don’t decide to do this,” he recently told Rolling Stone, “It’s bigger than me; I can’t help it.” (He’s not the only member of the Duplantier family to adopt that mindset; Joe’s brother Mario is Gojira’s drummer.) Although Duplantier’s remarks suggest a primal, intuitive musical approach, the band’s discography thus far suggests the opposite: A decade into their career, Gojira have earned a reputation as one of the genre’s most studious acts, combining intricate, highly-technical arrangements with abstract, recurringly-political lyrics, most recently on 2012’s excellent L’Enfant Sauvage.
That narrative’s shifted dramatically with the arrival of Magma, Gojira’s sixth full-length LP and their most accessible release yet. In a departure from the sprawling, progressive frameworks of albums past, the Bayonne-based band deliver a taut, catchy crossover effort that inoculates their heady metal with equal parts melodic immediacy and emotional intimacy, while retaining the pillars of their caustic panoply: mathy riffs, uncommon time signatures, ferocious, death-metal-styled vocals, and above all, overpowering anxiety. The new sound’s largely a consequence of the Duplantiers’ grief; their mother passed away during the album’s gestation, forcing the brothers to get out of their own heads and revisit the material they had so far–often fighting back tears during the sessions.
Accordingly, Magma’s most intense moments center around personal anguish, rather than political musings. Thanks to the group’s usual tech wizardry (in this case, vocal multi-tracking), the majestic “The Shooting Star” expands Duplantier’s eerie chants into a mournful chorus 16 tracks deep, which teeters over a hollow, cavernous groove: an impressive display of courage in the face of untenable bleakness. “Only Pain” doubles down on the despair, incorporating manic drum patterns and wailing guitars (the same, eerie squeal, which resembles the sound of a hellcat getting its tail yanked, resurfaces on the irresistible single “Stranded.”)
Magma’s not nearly as esoteric as the albums that preceded it—and considering how Gojira’s progressive tendencies have distinguished them from the get-go, the catchiest tracks on the record arguably take the biggest risks. With its growled melodies and groovy, nü-metal-tinged choruses, “Stranded” and “Silvera” are well-positioned to wreak havoc on mainstream rock radio, much to the ire of purists. The album’s atmospheric interludes, “Yellow Stone” and closer “Liberation,” comprise another source of contention, wholly skippable outside of the context of a full listening session (although the latter’s seamless transition into brutal opener “The Cell” offers one of the album’s most dynamic moments). Such deviations will undoubtedly draw comparisons to similarly-streamlined crossover efforts like Mastodon’s The Hunter and Baroness’ Yellow & Green, but to write off Magma as a mere bid for audience expansion is to ignore its overarching aims: the album’s universality is a testament to its emotional heft, and some tragedies can’t be expressed through labyrinthine musical proofs. Loss is bigger than Gojira. The guys can’t help it—and keep in mind, they were named for a giant, monstrous lizard.


The gloomy new album from British rapper, DJ, and now filmmaker Mike Skinner echoes but doesn’t equal the narrative force of the Streets’ classic material.

The Streets: The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light

If the rave life hadn’t claimed him, Mike Skinner would have made a pretty good screenwriter. There’s always been a filmic quality to the Streets’ music: laddish but insightful rap that paints slice-of-life tales so vivid and relatable they made Skinner a folk hero for a certain breed of sensitive geezer. But The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light is an actual movie. Though there’s been a smattering of Streets activity over the last few years—a handful of releases, a guest-packed mixtape—Skinner calls this the project’s first official full-length since 2011’s Computers and Blues. It only exists, he says, because of a feature-length film of the same name out now in UK cinemas—a “noir murder mystery” set in London clubland that Skinner wrote, directed, produced, funded, edited, and even acted in himself.
After putting the Streets on ice in 2011, Skinner set out to explore other musical avenues, plying his trade as a club DJ and putting his name to collaborative projects like the D.O.T. and Tonga Balloon Gang. Even the title The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light began as an alias, used to release a string of fresh tracks on SoundCloud from 2016 onward. For all this creative restlessness, all roads ultimately led back to the Streets, and perhaps that’s not surprising. Skinner’s voice is immediately recognizable and remains singular: a softly monotone English drawl that plays subtle tricks with rhythm and assonance as it weaves its tales of rickety love affairs and late-night misadventure.
Intentionally or not, The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light points to past Streets landmarks. The laggy synths of “Troubled Waters” feel like a queasy flashback to “Blinded by the Lights.” “Too Much Yayo” trembles with the post-bender anxiety that powered The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living. Longtime collaborators Kevin Mark Trail and Robert Harvey pop up to croon the hooks. At times the callbacks feel deliberately self-referential, but over the long haul they give the sense of a project that has long since staked out its boundaries.
Skinner’s penmanship remains intermittently fantastic. He still has a talent for a good one-liner (“Behind every great man a girl rolls her eyes,” he deadpans on “Funny Dream”) as well as deeper meditations on the human condition, told from the perspective of a mid-40s hedonist who’s burned through more serotonin that most. “Troubled Waters” is the key track. Its nocturnal feel and occasional surge of d’n’b rhythm locate it in the club. But the mood is grim as Skinner muses on sin and redemption: “Is it nature or nurture when you hurt your bredrins?/We pray in church for our personal heaven.”
Existential gloom is a key flavor of The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light, and while that title implies duality, darkness often has the upper hand. Familiar tropes of depression get a thorough workout: “The black dog follows me as I walk,” he raps on “Each Day Gives.” “The walk of shame is my daily commute,” goes “Walk of Shame.” “Bright Sunny Day” is anything but, three-and-a-half minutes of stormy thoughts and self-recrimination that closes its curtains to the world. Skinner at his best has a knack for spinning tales and drawing characters, but here he seems more interested in picking over his own midlife crisis. While the decision to avoid narrative exposition appears intentional, the songs can lose momentum, drifting off into lyrical non sequitur and navel-gazing.
Some daring musical choices keep things moving, even when the storyline flags. “Gonna Hurt When This Is Over” unfurls lazily opiated raps over droning sitar, while the title track loops a dusty sample of ragtime jazz. A couple songs summon the magic of yore: “Shake Hands With Shadows” captures the sensation of clubbing as darkness gives way to dawn, Skinner’s elegiac nightlife poetry unfolding over punchy kicks and dancehall zaps. The closing “Good Old Daze,” meanwhile, adds to the growing catalog of songs designed to evoke the experience of riding a London night bus. Most music on this topic is rooted in rainy Burial-esque melancholy, but Skinner’s take is a celebration of the night bus as a multicultural melting pot, a microcosm of the city at large. “The night bus home is like a night bus club,” he muses over gospel sighs, and it’s the album’s warmest, most communal moment.
As for the film this music accompanies, it’s ambitious and full of ideas but let down by wooden acting and a convoluted plot. Skinner’s high-water mark of narrative fiction remains 2004’s A Grand Don’t Come for Free, an album that worked both as a set of standalone tracks and as a broader story arc—with a twist that felt genuinely redemptive. By comparison, The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light is baggy and unfocused. If he wants to sell a promise of salvation, he needs a better story to tell.


The ambient-jazz saxophonist offers unpredictable, impressionistic takes on R&B hits from the ’90s and early ’00s, tackling songs by Beyoncé, Aaliyah, and Erykah Badu.

Cookup

Sam Gendel’s ascension to beloved ambient-jazz savant has been fueled, in part, by the inexhaustibility of his output. His prolific catalog foams with free-improv sessions, bedroom recordings, a three-and-a-half-hour archive dump, and a bevy of collaborative projects showcasing his stuttering guitar playing and wistful, narcotic approach to the saxophone. A limber, unselfconscious sense of intuition runs through his many detours and discursions, and his work consistently blurs the line between conception and completion. In Gendel’s world, meaning emerges amid limitless swells of sound. “Putting out a ‘normal’ album just doesn’t work for me,” he said recently. “I’m more interested in throwing ideas out and seeing where the ceiling is.”
Gendel’s newest release is a covers album in which he reimagines R&B hits from the ’90s and early ’00s, a framework that provides him and collaborators Phil Melanson and Gabe Noel a remarkable amount of freedom inside seemingly fixed structures. With his woozy, wandering saxophone anchoring the record’s soothing soundscapes, Gendel interprets songs by Aaliyah, Erykah Badu, Boyz II Men, and others with a lucid and improvisational touch, bending them into almost unrecognizable shapes. It’s an engaging albeit low-stakes effort from an artist unafraid to splatter fresh paint across a familiar canvas.
Gendel’s no stranger to putting his own spin on classic songs. In 2020 he released Satin Doll, an album where he repurposed jazz standards in his own upside-down fashion. He treats the tracks on Cookup in a similar way, maintaining the melodic integrity of his source material while also revealing foreign tones and textures. On “Differences,” his insouciant horn takes liberties refashioning Ginuwine’s vocal runs as Noel’s bass undergirds the rhythm and Melanson’s electronic percussion squeezes into tight pockets. Another highlight is his impressionistic take on Mario’s “Let Me Love You,” where Gendel’s dazzling sax work stretches the track’s melodic core to its furthest limits.
The album is less persuasive when songs adhere too closely to their original forms. There’s a rush of gratification when “Crazy in Love” and “Didn’t Cha Know” appear, but the cleanness of the renditions makes them feel like your average, capable cover song, ones you might hear while walking past a street performance or scrolling through TikTok. Gendel’s virtuosity announces itself more forcefully when he veers into weirdness, like on a deranged, sputtering take of Soul for Real’s “Candy Rain,” or when eerie forest sounds surround his celestial playing on “In Those Jeans.” This messy fingerpainting suits Gendel’s loose and instinctual style better than mimesis. Cookup soars when the players’ interpretations converge into new creations, and the source material becomes a portal to a new dimension. The vestiges of old melody may remain, but Gendel’s best reimaginings illuminate subtle resonances and hidden pleasures.


Fred Thomas is a Michigan indie rock lifer best known for his time in the throwback pop troupe Saturday Looks Good To Me. He's also released eight solo albums, and his latest, All Are Saved, is devastating and funny in ways that previous releases barely even considered, a biographical work of art capable of leveling people who have never heard of him.

All Are Saved

Talk to anyone who’s seen an indie rock show in Michigan during the 21st century and you’ll probably get a Fred Thomas story within the first thirty minutes or so. Maybe it was the time their band played with one of Thomas' 156 (give or take) musical projects at a warehouse in Ypsilanti. Or maybe they crossed paths at a demonstration in Detroit. To quote a colleague, "Fred Thomas is always standing right behind you at a basement show in Ann Arbor." Which is to say that Thomas is a "lifer", that mainstay of the local scene usually viewed with some combination of admiration and concern. Their commitment is cool even if they’re pushing 40 and clearly not in it for the money, but what are their alternatives? Do they have any marketable job skills?
Thomas' most well-known project, the lo-fi throwback pop troupe Saturday Looks Good to Me, developed a cult following, but was always on the verge of a mainstream-indie breakthrough that never happened. He's also released eight albums under his own name, but All Are Saved is the first to see widespread release. From the sound of things, Fred Thomas would be at peace if it was his last. It's in the tradition of a very specific kind of record, including Father John Misty’s Fear Fun, Sun Kil Moon’s Among the Leaves and the Wrens’ The Meadowlands—artists reinventing themselves as their actual self, lifers tired of watching their life pass by, tired of public indifference. With nothing to lose, Thomas ditches any pretense of metaphor to speak on every embarrassment and sleep-depriving doubt. And the results are devastating and funny in ways that previous releases barely even considered, a biographical work of art capable of leveling people who have never heard of Fred Thomas until the previous paragraph.
This is a record of epiphany, but there are no easy resolutions and false triumph. Despite its title, All Are Saved does not wrestle with mortality and arise with The Truth About What it All Means. It does not glorify the preciousness of our short existence. Most of it is derived from the realization that life, as it’s keenly described on "Cops Don’t Care Pt. II", "is so incredibly long/ Like a kiss on a bridge between two nervous ass kids/ Terrified of doing everything wrong." The image of teenage lip-locking pops up on two different songs: on "When They Built the Schools", Thomas recognizes the "jelly legs and awkward elbows" of first-timers who have no time for the "burden of nostalgia" that clings to him like a wetsuit and essentially translates to "regret".
Most of the memories Thomas processes on All Are Saved aren’t even good ones, and yet they’re revived with piercing clarity—drunkenly smashing his flip phone in a Baltimore basement in 2003; watching a girl get embarrassed by her dad’s use of slang on an airplane; the role reversal of going to a free dental clinic and having his dentist turn out to be a drummer he produced eight years ago. These are the types of situations that fill up an impossibly long life, so when Thomas opens the album asking his dog in its dying days whether trading 13 years of "walking in a clear straight line" for a human’s eight potential decades of fumbling is a "shitty deal", well... the answer is obvious, right?
The album at least sounds uplifting, adding layer after layer while Thomas spins desperately in place. The aesthetic reflects the two cities in which this album was created, honoring Athens' indie rock lineage by its Elephant 6-style thrift shop orchestration. If you’ve followed Thomas over the past two decades, this is a culminating work: the contrast of peppy horn blasts and foul-mouthed misanthropy on "Expo '87" recall Saturday Looks Good to Me; the spindly arpeggios of "When They Built the Schools" nod towards his emo-ish offshoot Lovesick; and the aquatic gurgling and electronic interludes make a case for reappreciation of his Type Records outlier City Center (namechecked in "Unfading Flower").
But otherwise, this is an idiosyncratic "singer-songwriter" record, filled with surprises and unorthodox percussion choices—a soupy tabla sample on "Unfading Flower", an erratic pound of a floor tom guiding the drunken amble of "When They Built the Schools". Vocally, Thomas largely abandons conventional song structure and melodies, taking on a quasi spoken-word approach that allows him the maximum word count and lends a sarcastic edge to his sly note on"Bedbugs": "If I seem too entertaining, I’m not singing, I’m just talking to you."
The most entertaining songs on All Are Saved are generally the cruelest: Both "Bedbugs" and "Bad Blood" speak in a language simultaneously more truthful and cutting than most of us allow ourselves. These rambling, bilious one-sided conversations might be mislabeled as "rants"; more accurately, they’re the kind of righteously angry emails you spend all night honing to a fine point, and then sleep on, waking up relieved you never hit "Send." Thomas provides us vicarious catharsis, but during the toxic airing of grievances of "Bedbugs", he makes the risks of such an approach perfectly clear—"You can’t tell everybody to fuck off forever.../ And be mortified when they finally do."
Thomas trudges through difficult relationships like most of us, being "so stilted and silent, not awkward, just angry." That’s how he describes his presumable run-in with a more successful artist on "Bad Blood", whose music he likens to "a pile of brown sweaters." All at once, he wishes he could go beyond their brief exchange and express his envy and resentments, that it could be Thomas on TV in 2015 had things worked out just a little bit differently for Saturday Looks Good to Me. Instead, he blasts through the fourth wall, summarizing the futility of his past decade with a gut punch—"This ‘first day of school’ shit just seems to keep happening...the smiles are so big and there’s no one at the gig." The most painful lines are Thomas quoting other people—"Hey I gotta go, but I’ll see you at the show!", "Man, it’s so cool, we’re glad you’re doing your own thing." It's the sound of Thomas realizing that most of his interactions are compromised by his own self-pity and dishonesty.
And yet, this realization is the strange source of hope in All Are Saved: Thomas seems inspired, even moved, by the possibility that the sharp, overwhelming and temporary pain of being forthright with someone can be a breakthrough after years and years of silence and half-truths.  It ties back to that line about those kids on the bridge and how Thomas sets an example throughout *All Are Saved—*life is incredibly long when you’re terrified of doing anything wrong, and in the process of connecting with another person, it’s best to just go for it as directly as possible.


The elusive Detroit producer returns after a years-long mysterious absence with a burning, urgent, and immersive new LP.

Sinner

Last spring, a new Moodymann album popped up on dance music sites listed only as “coming soon.” A single dropped and vanished, but June came and went with no full-length follow-up to his 2014 self-titled album. At that point, the Detroit producer also known as Kenny Dixon, Jr. had begun showing up in places far outside the dance music underground. Even in his years-long absence, he could be heard purring “fuck dat shit” on Drake’s “Passionfruit” and DJing Prince obscurities around the world. With little effort on his end, his woozy, soul-rooted take on house music had infiltrated everyone from Channel Tres and Motor City Drum Ensemble to Caribou’s Daphni alias.
In January, a rumor spread that he had handed out a few copies of his lost album, which subsequently wound up selling for upwards of $500. As of now, it still has not been officially released. Deep in the Ring-esque video for “I’ll Provide,” the lead-off track on Sinner, the fate of that original album is finally revealed, as Dixon dumps entire bags of them into a garbage can.
Sinner now arrives with little explanation. Does it replace the lost album? Is it a stopgap? The double vinyl has five tracks, while the Bandcamp version gets fleshed out with last year’s single and a few other goodies. Song by song—even moment by moment—it shows Dixon pulling in multiple directions. The music teems with small details, but it doesn’t feel dense, just more diffuse, harder than ever to grasp. It is also some of the most immersive he’s ever made.
“I’ll Provide” is seductive and menacing, driving and aching, his most claustrophobic track since “Freeki Mutha F cker.” But where that track was sleek and seductive, “I’ll Provide” is hurt, forlorn, desperate. Heaving synth strings, pulsing in-the-red bass, overdriven acid lines, digital glitching, crowd noise, a relentless kick—they all jostle for space on the track without affecting its aerodynamics one iota. Atop it all, Moodymann slots in killer couplets—“I got something/For all your dirty, nasty needs,” “Drunk and high/I’ll provide”—that evoke the backing tracks of Marvin Gaye and Al Green. Sometimes whispered, other times whooped from across the room, they make the track feels rowdy and confessional at once.
“Got Me Coming Back Rite Now” barely tops 100 bpm, but the house track bustles with sound, from Moody’s vocal scats and crisp hi-hats to dramatic strings and the whoosh of passing traffic. Relaxed as it sounds, there’s an unsettled, on-edge quality to it. As it shuffles towards its inevitable climax, Moody again growls like a man in conflict, offering to do the chores as well as “tie you down on this here floor.”
There isn’t really a weak moment: “I Think of Saturday” already feels like a peak-time classic, erected atop a Linn drum sample worthy of the Purple One. Dixon’s utterance of the word “church” alone can make you a believer. Again, Moody roves between nonchalance and urgency, rattling off the days of the week as if he’s merely waiting for the weekend. But another pass through the song reveals that for each day, he hasn’t heard from his crush, so that rather than the weekend offering release, it only increases the desperation. A perfectly placed drop into Joe Simon’s “With You in Mind” instead accentuates that mind in the throes of such an unrequited obsession.
“If I Gave U My Love” is more audacious with the source material, interweaving legends like Camille Yarbrough and Al Green into a mosaic. They are both iconic voices—Yarbrough’s will be most familiar to listeners as the source material for Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You”—and Moody even samples the same moment. But as church organ swirls, Moody manages to twist the overly familiar into something newly strange and ecstatic. Even for longtime fans of Moodymann that know his penchant with an MPC, these tracks find him pushing towards new ground.
The back half of the set gets stranger, slower. “Downtown” is a noodly smooth jazz jam that first appeared as “Pitch Black City Reunion” last year. “Deeper Shadow” is neo-soul with a bit of razorous psychedelic guitar added to darken the mood. “8 Mile D Boy” is a rare bit of fidgety electro from the man, but paired with the admission “I’m so sorry,” it’s a party track with a conflicted emotion at its core. The title track finds Moody at his simmering, neo-soul best, flickering in and out of focus and drawing everything down by singing about a “lonely winner” who “sat in your lonely dark room listening to Dilla/ hoping they would remember.” Knowing his own deep connection with the fellow Detroiter, one wonders if Moody is not singing about an object of his affection, but rather his own self? Like the man himself, he is in no rush to dispel that mystery.


On her debut LP, the young Atlanta rapper and singer avoids guests and try-hard hits while embracing a voice that runs like water.

Young HeartThrob

These days, so many major-label rap and rap-adjacent records depend on vibes—musical moods that feel just out of reach, though they frame sonic environments meant for immersion. Kodie Shane is the latest Atlantan whose music embodies this contradiction, as she steadily rides the line between “singer” and “rapper” over beats and melodies that possess a purply, psychedelic drift. “She like it when I rap, but love it when I sing to her/She can’t get enough,” Shane brags on “Sing to Her,” a standout of her debut LP for Epic, Young HeartThrob. Her voice often sounds like running water, an unbroken melodic stream flowing above production that radiates a low-level glow. “I was thinkin’ about you last night/But now the sun’s up,” she emotes over a fluttering guitar loop on “Thinking Bout U,” a lovelorn lyric that captures this music’s nocturnal warmth.
Young HeartThrob is the purest and most effective distillation yet of Shane’s hybrid aesthetic. Despite her affiliation with the Sailing Team of mush-mouthed cavity-rap impresario Lil Yachty, her album is refreshingly devoid of features aside from fellow genre-blenders Trippie Redd and TK Kravitz. Otherwise, Young HeartThrob showcases her unabashed romanticism and elastic approach to melody. “High Speeds” frames her voice with barely there echo, its chorus hovering over wavy synths and a knocking hi-hat/kick-drum combo that seems to create three dimensions. On “Hiatus,” she ruminates on dreams of Vegas weddings and a relationship put on pause, breaking into a pleasing “Ooh, ooh” over squishy bass and warped chimes.
Much of Young HeartThrob focuses on lost love and unrequited pining; women are lusted after, visited in secret. (“Queer as fuck, by the way, and happy about it,” she defined her sexuality in a Red Bull documentary.) They are the object of Shane’s affection to the point that, when she starts discussing the size of watch faces during “High Speeds,” she cuts herself off, declaring “Fuck it.” By embracing her own perspective, Shane sidesteps the miserabilia that’s accompanied so much lovelorn hip-hop and R&B over the past few years. Over the glistening theme and stuttering drums of “Pulling Up,” she asks a potential paramour if she should drop by “when nobody’s home,” later confiding, “She just want me all on her body/Promise me that you won’t tell nobody.” She flips the woman-on-my-arm conceit that anchors “Party” by flatly stating, “Let’s run some errands.”
These mostly romantic musings play out over wispy beats provided by longtime collaborator and Atlanta fixture Matty P. He adds an occasional extra element—the muted bombast of “End Like That,” a vague move toward tropical pop on “Long Time”—to shift the scenery. Though the production trends toward contemporary hip-hop’s druggier-sounding side, Shane cuts through the melodic fog with her flickering voice.
If there’s one thing Young HeartThrob lacks, it’s obviousness—a big, distinctive single or a roiling party-starter that would reach beyond late-night drives and home listening. Given the record’s atmosphere, it’s unclear if that’s what Shane even wants, anyway. The murky flow and subtle sounds of Young HeartThrob fit her voice and romantic perspective like a big, fluffy coat: soft, comfortable, and enveloping in a way that makes it hard to envision anything more.


The patron saint of sneering, disaffected poets releases a collection of classic Christmas songs for Feeding America, a leading hunger-relief nonprofit.

Christmas in the Heart

When Bob Dylan-- the patron saint of sneering, disaffected poets-- announced he was releasing a collection of classic Christmas songs for charity, smirkers got smirkier: What, after all, is more absurd than a beloved iconoclast embracing the schmaltziest, most achingly commercial genre of all? It sounded insane. And it is insane, sort of.
The goal of Christmas in the Heart (all domestic proceeds go to Feeding America, one of the nation's leading hunger-relief nonprofits) is hardly reinvention. These are mostly traditional renderings, and even Dylan's craggy, get-off-my-lawn snarl-- the inadvertent template for decades of idiosyncratic vocalists-- is topped with a shiny red bow (is that a hint of prim, finger-snapping croon on "Do You Hear What I Hear?"). Still: There's something silly about Christmas music, there's something silly about Bob Dylan singing "Christmas Island" ("How'd ya like to hang a stocking on a great big coconut tree?"), and there's a lot silly about the cheesecake portrait of Bettie Page in a Santa suit and garters that graces the inside CD booklet (a companion piece, perhaps, to the Hallmark card-aspiring sleigh ride on the cover). Ergo: How seriously are we supposed to take Christmas in the Heart? And moreover: How seriously are we supposed to take Bob Dylan in 2009?
It's not hard to presuppose that Dylan-- who has an entire encyclopedia, dozens of nonfiction treatises, and at least a handful of college courses dedicated to parsing his lyrics and intent-- is either deeply irritated or deeply bemused by his anointment, and is responding to over-the-top canonization by doing deliberately oddball stuff (see also: leering at underwear models in a Victoria's Secret commercial). Even the title-- eerily reminiscent of Kenny Rogers' 1998 turd, Christmas From the Heart-- feels tongue-in-cheek. But maybe that's a trap, too-- maybe, like zillions of red-blooded, religiously ambiguous American dudes, Bob Dylan just likes Christmastime and Adriana Lima. And we're stupid for presuming anything more.
Regardless of intent, Christmas in the Heart is a surreal and occasionally rousing collection of gooey holiday ballads, complete with animatronic backing vocals and Nashville-smooth arrangements. Produced by Dylan-pseudonym Jack Frost and featuring David Hidalgo of Los Lobos (who contributed some memorable accordion to Together Through Life), it's a nice assortment of hymns and popular carols. Like any good gospel singer (or stand-up comic), Dylan is fully committed: On "O Come All Ye Faithful (Adeste Fidelis)", he crows the first few verses in Latin, and on the dizzying, Tom Waits-evoking "Must Be Santa", he chirps Santa Facts with frantic, seizure-inducing certainty. And some tracks-- "Silver Bells" and "The First Noel", in particular-- already feel familiar, like they've been a part of the holiday vernacular for years.
Dylan's thing has never been palatability, and he's clearly enamored with contrast-- in this case, between his worn, gravel-gargle voice and everything else. And it's his unhinged vocals that make Christmas in the Heart interesting, and, in some ways, appropriate to its subject: In practice if not in theory, Christmas songs aren't about perfect pitch and studied harmonies, they're about slouching around an out-of-tune piano with your relatives, sloshing back store-bought eggnog, and hollering songs you learned in kindergarten and have been singing-- with abandon, without training, without self-consciousness-- nearly all of your life. It's Christmas: Even Bob Dylan's allowed that.


Fusing toy piano, minimalist improvisation, children’s voices, modular synthesizers, and a purring cat, among other fanciful sounds, the American composer’s 1978 album revels in the accidental music of everyday life.

Alvin Curran: Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri

Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri

In the mid 1960s, the American composer Alvin Curran experienced what he called “a compelling need to toss my bourgeois ambitions and 12-tone music training in the trash and re-embrace music-making in an uncorrupted innocent way—a conceptual re-boot to an imagined primeval state.” He would henceforth commit to simplicity by employing monophony, simple strumming patterns, and the octave interval. In 1969, with his improvisational group Musica Elettronica Viva, he wrote a score in the form of a recipe that involved one toy xylophone, two large resonant glass plates, three or four old cow or goat bells, and several ping-pong balls, along with dozens of other instruments. The instructions were minimal; “The best soups usually just happen,” he declared. When the collective toured Europe and the U.S. during this period, they’d perform “Soundpool,” a piece inviting professional musicians and amateurs alike to join. Curran estimates that thousands participated, and in reminiscing about the time, he recalls, “Music was said to belong to the people.”
Such egalitarian music-making also coincides with another aspect of his personal philosophy: that all the world is “a real and imaginary concert hall which has a nonstop music.” Curran would obsessively record the cries of animals, the “empty” sounds of abandoned locales, even himself having sex: Nothing was off limits, because everything was beautiful. This culminated in his solo debut masterpiece in 1975, the intimate and otherworldly Canti e Vedute del Giardino Magnetico. Replete with field recordings and dreamy synth curlicues, it also features his voice, something which hadn’t been presented in a public musical context since his Bar Mitzvah. He understood how monumental the piece was, so the follow-up—his inimitable 1978 LP Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri—necessitated a deeper embrace of his musical capabilities and the sounds available to him.
Much like Canti, Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri is a longform piece whose distinct parts meld into a seamless tapestry. It begins softly, with a cat’s purring. This introduction is reminiscent of Annea Lockwood’s Tiger Balm, but the subsequent toy-piano plinks suffuse Curran’s piece with comforting naivety. An actual piano soon arrives, complementing that guileless charm to form an arresting lullaby. These initial 100 seconds are crucial table-setting: Other musique concrète pieces from the time were dark, discordant, and alien, but everything here is homey and eminently familiar. Even stylistically adjacent works offer inadequate comparisons: It’s less austere than Luc Ferrari’s Presque Rien or Henning Christiansen’s Fluxyl (Musik Essayistik), but more academic than Ernest Hood’s Neighborhoods. The balance that Curran strikes is the result of an incisive one-two punch: disarm the listener’s expectations about avant-garde music, and create childlike appreciation for everyday experiences.
Literal children appear, too. Alexis, the five-year-old son of Curran’s close friend Frederic Rzewski, describes building a spaceship, going to the moon, and finding a massive spider before coming home to eat cake. Another kid explains events involving the mythological city of Troy. These inclusions are reminders of the power of imaginative storytelling, and the voiceless passages on Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri are similarly free-flowing. Serge Modular drones and wispy ocarina flutters are woven into passages with chirping birds and looping yelps. The convergence of all these sounds into such a dizzying and nostalgic flurry feels like magic.
Later, Curran brings out his piano to improvise. It mutates from repetitive, minimalist motifs into a raucous take on the jazz standard “Georgia on My Mind,” but the piece’s sentimental spirit remains. When Curran was an adolescent, his father gave him his first fake book, and it contained so much music that he considered it a sacred text. Decades later he’d compile his own, called The Alvin Curran Fakebook. In a sense, Curran’s music serves as a guide to playing music, too. With Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri, he leads you by hand through a wide expanse of sounds and emotions. All of it remains as down-home as it is ambitious, as if a reminder that music is both infinite in its scope and, more importantly, readily accessible. Music belongs to everyone who seeks it out.

Buy: Rough Trade
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