One of the year's most anticipated albums turns out to be worthy of the hype, as Grizzly Bear continue to expand their approach to lush chamber pop.

Veckatimest

Veckatimest ain't perfect; lord knows it tries. More than most any album in recent memory not named Chinese Democracy (please keep reading), it is compositionally and sonically airtight, every moment sounding tweaked, labored over. Perfection-- and the pursuit thereof-- has its price, and in less able hands (with all love to Axl), this obsessive attention to craft and execution could lead to something dull. What's perhaps the most remarkable thing about the truly remarkable Veckatimest, however, is how very exciting much of it is; no small feat for a painstaking chamber-pop record that never once veers above the middle tempo.
2007's Friend EP had me worried that Grizzly Bear's insistence on having everything in its right place had forced formula onto what had seemed to that point freewheeling and free-associative. For every inspired moment on Friend, there was another that fell back on the tried-but-true: a quiet intro bleeding into a big, harmonic midsection followed by an eventual denouement. That sound characterized a few of the better tunes on 2006's Yellow House-- and a fair bit of what little Grizzly Bear has released since. That said, we've had no shortage of Grizzly Bear-related music: Dan Rossen's recently resuscitated Department of Eagles made a pretty great record last year, Chris Taylor's done some stellar production work with Dirty Projectors and Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson, and the band proper have lined up onstage collaborations with high-minded sorts like Nico Muhly and the Brooklyn Philharmonic. In Veckatimest, one sees the fruit of that variegated labor as well; between records, these dudes have been busy getting better at all the things they do, and as it turns out, Veckatimest manages to do Yellow House at least a few better on nearly every metric.
First, the songs. By now, many of you should be familiar with the stunning bounce of "Two Weeks", the skyward swoon of teen creeper "Cheerleader", and the surefooted shuffle of "While You Wait for the Others". (In fact, I'm painfully aware you may just be intimately familiar with the whole damn thing. If that's you, listen good: that windtunnel 128k leak you nabbed that fateful night back in March? That is not Veckatimest. Get thee to a buying place.) Highlights, all, but there's more where that came from. The fluttering opener "Southern Point" takes off and circles back like a flock of birds, as inviting as Yellow House's "Easier" and a whole lot more to the point. The Rossen-sung "All We Ask" does the Rossen thing, starting soft and slow before exploding around the halfway mark, but it does it as well as or better than anything we've heard from him before. The record's final stretch, from "While You Wait" through the head-swimmer "I Live With You" to the masterful, muted "Foreground" closes Veckatimest on three very strong notes.
But this is Grizzly Bear, and despite an increased confidence in their pop sensibilities and an overall strengthening of melodies, they're still meanderers at heart. Highlights abound, but Veckatimest does sound as though it was conceived as a whole piece, and one must consider both the overall structure and the connective tissue between the abundant highlights to judge it a success. Save "Cheerleader" and the lilting "Ready, Able", the stretch between "Fine for Now" and "While You Wait" wanders a bit; certain moments, like Rossen's "swim around like two dories" line and the wispy, wheezing "About Face", hit harder than others. But you'll be looking for a while to find anybody who thinks the center of Veckatimest is as strong as the stuff surrounding it.
Beyond irking folks predisposed to slagging off intricate and, yeah, "sophisticated" music like this-- you stay punk, I'mma stay fascinated-- this trip down yonder to the minor key will doubtless be the big complaint about Veckatimest. But really, couldn't we say the same about Yellow House? I mean, there's some jam in between "Knife" and "On a Neck, On a Spit", but there's an awful lot of wide-open spaces and deliberate left turns in there, too. Yellow House was not a record defined so much by its two or three big numbers as it was by the slightly haunting impression it left when you played it front to back; it sounded deconstructed, whereas Veckatimest feels built brick-by-brick. As I mentioned, Veckatimest handily beats Yellow House in the bangers department, and while you're not gonna hear "Two Weeks" on any radio station that isn't already playing Ted Leo, there is something prim and proper about the record. Yet the pop moments on Veckatimest feel even bigger after the slight deviation at its core; surrounded by a few sour notes and sidesteps, "Cheerleader" and "Ready, Able" becomes that much stronger, and even the less effective numbers ("Hold Still", "Fine for Now") seem only to cower a smidge as a result of the staggering heights they're placed next to. Out of context, they're every bit as good as the more sinewy stuff that wove Yellow House together.
I walked into Grizzly Bear's much-lauded set at the church down at SXSW this year a skeptic and came out a convert; I knew what a powerful live band they could be, having seen 'em twice before, but my fear about flatlining and my initial (and incorrect) impressions based on the Veckatimest leak had me convinced I'd get my "Knife" and my "Two Weeks" and then perhaps a very welcome nap. What I got instead was as great a testament to band democracy as I've seen onstage; these new tunes require a terrific amount of concentration and skill to pull off in that setting, and any band whose sprightliest number ("On a Neck", still) sounds like half a ragtime had to work awfully hard to win me over after I'd spent the prior eight hours replacing beer-sweat with more beer. Yeah, Veckatimest sounds worked-over, but in the best of ways; carefully embellished, stripped bare when applicable, full of the joy of sounds colliding with other sounds. Grizzly Bear was once Ed Droste's band, but no longer; it's a family affair, and only four guys so completely serious about music-making could come together to make an album this labor-intensive sound so airy, so natural.
I get it; Grizzly Bear can come across to some as boring. Lord knows I could go my whole life never reading another Ed Droste Tweet about pho or seeing Chris Taylor use a neti pot. But this little microcosm of imperfection indie rock's been working through lately could use a foil like Veckatimest, a record that, in searching for perfection through meticulousness, feels beautifully flawed and gloriously off-kilter without either side serving as the entire narrative. Really, in a world far too concerned with backstories and far too lacking in good old dedication to craft, Grizzly Bear's just about as boring as they come: four guys who very quietly set out to make a fantastic record. And so they did.


Inspired by the tranquility of the Greek island of Gavdos, the Italian ambient musician luxuriates in leisurely synth passages and gentle piano melodies.

Calypso

The Italian composer Gigi Masin’s music has long mirrored his fascination with the natural world. His 1986 debut, a collection of gentle, flowing pieces for piano and synthesizer, was simply called Wind. Many of his subsequent titles have referenced waves, clouds, and insects. In 2014, Music From Memory pulled together an archival collection of his music, with a title that underscored his music’s dialogue with the world around him: Talk to the Sea. His songs are largely wordless, but they nevertheless echo these sorts of images. The melodies are simple and slow-moving, but in a powerful, unpredictable way. There’s a placid joy in tracing the movements of songs like “Clouds,” watching textures and rhythms coalesce and dissolve like ripples on a lake.
On his new album Calypso, Masin made his music’s connection to nature even more explicit. In a documentary about its creation, he explains that he retreated from his home in Venice to Gavdos, an island south of Crete that he’d wanted to visit for decades. The small isle has a mythical significance—legend has it that it’s the same island on which Odysseus was imprisoned by Calypso—but Masin was struck by its simple beauty. Being surrounded by sun, sea, and salty air was a way of escaping from the mundanities of life back home. It’s the kind of place, he says, “that regenerates, enlightens, [and] opens your mind.”
Calypso echoes the emotional experience of Masin’s respite. At nearly 90 minutes long, it’s a leisurely paced album with a lot of repetition. Each piece is full of slowly sighing synth passages and languorous piano melodies that mimic the strange way time dilates when you remove yourself from the rhythms of the city, the way an afternoon alone at the beach can feel like a beautiful eternity.
Masin has said that he’s accepted that his music is a sort of “non-idea.” He approaches the process of making music as intuitive and egoless; he’s more inclined to follow sounds where they lead him rather than dictate where he wants them to go. “This gives me the freedom to not have to make too [many] decisions,” he says. You can sense that approach in the wonderful biodiversity of Calypso. His music has always been varied, especially in the time since he’s returned to more active music-making, after spending most of the ’90s working an office job. Calypso is ambient in a broad sense, but it covers a lot of different moods and sounds.
The album opens with a delicate flurry of strings and synthesizers, but it quickly moves into a sleepwalking rhythm that feels like equal parts Portishead and L.A. beat scene on “Bellamore”; the trumpet-draped ambiance of “Nefertiti” recalls Jon Hassell’s mystic experiments. Each of these first three tracks could be worth exploring for an entire record, but Masin moves quickly through each successive style. It continues like this over the course of the record, no song too similar to the last. And yet, because it’s designed to echo the feeling of the island that inspired it, each piece still nevertheless takes place in this beautiful shared universe of sunny synthesizers and delicately purring electronics. If the through line connecting these tracks sometimes becomes hard to follow, that’s probably part of the point. There is a certain pleasure in getting lost in paradise.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On her second album, one of Nashville’s biggest new stars ups the ante with a stark survey of a country in crisis.

All American Made

America, in Margo Price’s country music, is not majestic, sprawling, or inviting. It’s broken. It’s oppressive. It’s stolen. Her second album, All American Made, plays out like a realist, modern Western film, offering a stark survey of a country whose “cowboys” are city-dwelling music industry vampires; whose farms are bankrupt and acquired by corporate overlords; whose citizens are treated like dirt because of their gender. The album’s loaded three-word title—a phrase that peers like Kacey Musgraves might sell with a sharp irony or Jason Isbell with a writerly wistfulness—ends up feeling more like an admission of complicity. Throughout the LP, Price tackles Steinbeck-sized issues with a no-bullshit humility in search of answers. When she turns to the late Tom Petty in the album’s final moments—“Tell me, Mr. Petty, what do you think will happen next?”—it’s a sincere, haunting question.
While her debut album, last year’s Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, succeeded through stark autobiography, Margo Price now seems a lot less interested in telling her own story. One of Nashville’s biggest recent breakout stars, Price doesn’t attach herself to any particular style so much as she does to an ethos defined by independence and self-motivation. She has noted that, despite selling off many of her possessions to record her debut at Memphis’ famed Sun Studios, the goal was never to make it big. Instead, she intended to craft an honest document of her experience, one that she could stand behind. “Maybe 20, 30 years down the road, or after I’m dead, somebody would find it and it would become a cult thing like Nick Drake,” she reflected in a recent New York Times profile.
On the contrary, the album took off instantly, culminating in a tour with the platinum-selling Chris Stapleton and a head-turning performance on “Saturday Night Live.” Her streak of country domination continues on the loose, wandering All American Made, which puts her side-to-side with a legend in its first 15 minutes. Sharing vocals with Willie Nelson in the slow-burning “Learning to Lose,” she bonds with him over their humble beginnings and the lingering self-doubt that remains in spite of success. “The only enemy I know is in my mind,” Willie sings wearily, sounding every bit his 84 years. When Price—half a century younger—joins for the chorus, she sounds bold and weightless as she weaves around his weathered croon. Their voices in tandem, never quite in harmony, are comforting and wise, like a community in song.
Alone, Price’s voice can summon multitudes. She crafts a hook out of one long howl sustained with primal intensity in the swaggering, soulful single “A Little Pain.” Softer moments, like the heart-wrenching title track and its sister song “Heart of America,” are sung tenderly. Like Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, on which Price balanced first-person accounts of recklessness and grief with rolicking, full-band fun, All American Made highlights a wide range of moods—a balm in one song and a bullet in the next. In its sharpest moments, she takes aim at the patriarchy. “We’re all the same in the eyes of my God/But in the eyes of rich white men, I’m no more than a maid to be owned like a dog,” she sings in a song called “Pay Gap."
The structure of All American Made works in a strange way, grouping like-minded songs together and moving at a galloping, constantly shifting pace. It hits its peaks at the beginning and end. While the opening salvo of retro country-soul songs seems designed to bring the house down in concert, her songwriting shines brightest in the more intimate closing tracks. When she performed the title track for NPR’s “Tiny Desk” last year, it was the morning after election day. Her eyes were red with tears as she sang about losing her family’s farm and heading west in an American-built pick-up truck. A lyric that might have once inspired hope now just seemed to make her feel more helpless. “The part of me that hurts the most is the one I just can’t spot,” she sang, “And it’s all American made.” Back then, her words seemed to suggest that there was no escape ahead. A year later, on All American Made, she finds power in sticking around and bearing witness.


The indefatigable punk icon reworks his anthemic 2020 album No Dream as ska, and wouldn’t you know, it works.

SKA DREAM

Like a surfer at sunrise, or a lieutenant general girding for a melee attack, ska fans are always scanning the horizon for the next wave. The Jamaican first wave reshaped music; the British second wave proposed a cross-racial, working-class solidarity. At the back half of the 1990s, a slew of screwy ska-punk from like Less Than Jake, Reel Big Fish, and Dance Hall Crashers introduced the actual idea of a wave: ska as a natural, recurrent phenomenon. Since then, the big question is… has that fourth wave hit yet? Should we celebrate or dread its arrival? Are chart hits the harbingers? Perhaps it happens when ska is spliced into new contexts. At some point, the indefatigable underground punk icon Jeff Rosenstock took his place at ska’s vanguard. After the dissolution of his Long Island ska-punk act Arrogant Sons of Bitches, Rosenstock recorded an album—which he credited to “Bomb the Music Industry!”—at home. 2005’s Album Minus Band took full advantage of the bedroom format. The expected frenetic guitar upstrokes were supplemented with superhuman cymbal taps and plugin anti-theft hiss; Rosenstock leapt from folk-punk to ska-core to synthpunk like he was cutting a promo reel.
It wasn’t the shape of ska to come, exactly, but it was a bracing, omnivorous statement, one that Rosenstock elaborated upon as he added members to BtMI and styles to his repertoire. But by the time of 2011’s Vacation, the horns suggested Neutral Milk Hotel more than Mustard Plug. There were as many ska tracks as Brian Wilson-indebted wordless interludes (one). It was Rosenstock’s favorite Bomb release, and the band’s last album. Since then, he’s leaned harder into pop-punk, power pop, even heartland rock. In a 2018 interview, Rosenstock recalled his approach to Vacation. “I felt that with the songs I was writing I’d be shoehorning ska parts into them to make them ska songs,” he said. “I thought, why the fuck would I do that?”
Why the fuck indeed! On 4/20, Rosenstock announced the release of SKA DREAM, a skanktified rework of last year’s anthemic, exhausted NO DREAM. Anyone with the barest interest in Rosenstock’s career knew that this wouldn’t be some Covid-induced stopgap. Sidelined from the club circuit, free to track whatever he wanted, he chose to turn a group chat goof into a celebration of ska. To up the ante further, he did so with an expanded cast of players, all of whom had to send him their parts from across the country. Some of the guests (Fishbone’s Angelo Moore, Skankin’ Pickle singer/Asian Man Records founder Mike Park) are ska royalty; some—like Jer Hunter, the hepped-up proprietor of the popular Skatune Network channel, who contributes trumpet and trombone—are up-and-comers in the genre. Other guests are merely ska-adjacent, like Oceanator mastermind Elise Okusami and the pop-punk band PUP. And some guests, incredibly, are George Clarke of Deafheaven.
There is very little here that seems shoehorned. That’s due in large part to regular supporting cast Death Rosenstock, who utterly rearranged everything on NO DREAM. The insistent klaxon guitar intro of “State Line” becomes an air-raid siren on the dubby “Horn Line,” as drummer Kevin Higuchi holds down a Specials-inflected reggae lope. (At one point on SKA DREAM, Rosenstock cribs a bit of “Nite Klub.”) “Monday at the Beach” was a perfectly breakneck pop-punk number, and could have been easily translated to, like, skacore. But “Monday at Back to the Beach” slows things down to a Sublime crawl, with Rosenstock’s hazy croon suggesting Brian Wilson trying chillwave.
This is not to say Rosenstock and company overthought this: the absurdly peppy opener “No Time to Skank” matches its counterpart punch for punch. “SKrAm,” another third-wave remake, swings hard upon Rosenstock’s sturdy vocal line. At points, “SKrAm” sounds like some mythical Asian Man crossover hit from ’97. The illusion is shattered once Bay Area rapper Boboso pops up with some nerdcore bars (“Brain is feeling scrambled/Homer Simpson in the bramble”), but goofiness was integral to the third-wave project. Spiritually, it works. Lyrically, it’s the only real addition to the original album.
That’s the other reason this set holds together: Rosenstock’s a damn good songwriter. Turns out, the poignance of “Honeymoon Ashtray,” with its portrait of mutual flailing stasis, translates even if you throw a steppers’ groove on it, or chase it with toasting. On NO DREAM’s “The Beauty of Breathing,” Rosenstock uses prickly power pop to suggest his frustration with unhelpful mental-health advice. “The Rudie of Breathing” sees him withdrawing instead of pushing back, quietly keening over a midtempo 2 Tone groove and sympathetic horns.
For anyone without the constitution for ska—someone who, say, can’t see the magic when the Aquabats don spandex, deep into middle age—SKA DREAM may sound like a quarantine-induced crackup, along the lines of Old Dominion Meow Mix. (The 4/20 release date surely won’t help.) For longtime fans of the genre, though, each hup and pick it up is truly affecting. At its best, the third wave was a paradoxical state of being: profoundly goofy. Pushing Jah Jerry rhythms to absurd tempos alongside 10 of your closest friends, half of whom have known each other since seventh-grade concert band? And welding all that—the show-band brass section, the ingratiatingly chipper off beat, the dang porkpie hats—to the alienation of American punk rock? What a dream.
Regardless of its ample artistic merit, SKA DREAM represents something rare: an act re-doing an LP because they felt like it. Album do-overs are almost always undertaken under duress. In the mid-2000s, Victory Records began prepping a reissue of Catch 22’s ska-punk classic Keasbey Nights. That was unpleasant news for Keasbey’s principal songwriter, Tomas Kalnoky, who had left Catch to form Streetlight Manifesto (also signed to Victory). As a compromise, Streetlight released Keasbey Nights 2, a dutiful take that only postponed the inevitable. A more modern example would be—of course—Taylor Swift, who has a Rosenstockian propensity for surprise album releases during pandemics. Fearless (Taylor’s Version) practically invites the listener to discern how Swift’s psychographic landscape has shifted since her country-pop days. SKA DREAM is the reverse: as a goof, Rosenstock invites the past to inhabit the present. Can you believe it? The Airwalks fit.

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To celebrate five years in business, the Hyperdub label gathers tracks from Burial, Flying Lotus, and more into a convincing statement on the range of dubstep.

Various Artists: 5: Five Years of Hyperdub

5: Five Years of Hyperdub

Beatportal.com user Yield Load thinks "dubstep is wicked music, but I didn't know how your suppose to dance to it." The grammar's not there, but the idea is: Dubstep-- the nocturnal, claustrophobic subgenera of British electronic music that emerged from garage and 2-step-- is descended from dance music but doesn't sound like it's made for dancing. The tempos feel slow, the mood is usually threatening, lonely, or both. If there's any movement I can imagine going comfortably with dubstep, it's what Three 6 Mafia's DJ Paul rapped about on "Side 2 Side", and the standard step at indie-rock shows worldwide: "I'm in the club posted up, got my arms folded... twistin' my body from side to side."
Of all the videos of dubstep dancing I clicked through online, two stick out in my mind. One is by an overweight teenager in what is likely his parents' living room, a decorative ship's lifesaver on the wall between what appear to be illustrations of the seaside, a large desktop computer at one end of the room, an open door leading to a yard on the other. A track by the producer Skream comes on, and he starts to move his fists up and down like a child banging steadily on a table, taking very deliberate steps across a carpet. That's it. The other is of two men, one black and one white, dressed in suits, dancing in some kind of white, computer-generated void, as the names of their dance steps flash across the bottom of the screen. My favorite is called "Lost in the woods (with bewildered stare)". I don't know if the comedy was intentional. Either way, it's a sign that dubstep has reached a particular position of cultural importance: hundreds of thousands of people are watching a suburban kid dance to it on YouTube.
Hyperdub is usually cited as dubstep's most prominent and progressive label, but it's hard to even call most of their releases dubstep, strictly speaking. They've released off-centered hip-hop (Flying Lotus), brooding chill-out music that recasts the chill-out room as a bunker (Kode9 & the Spaceape), and misfit rave music (Zomby). Hyperdub's sound isn't dubstep, it's urban noir in the 21st century, or at least how the 21st century looked in 1970s science fiction: A procession of florescent signs over an empty street. 5: Five Years of Hyperdub-- their first CD compilation-- has the tall task of trying to anthologize the label without making it seem like they've run out of ideas. Their solution is sensible: One disc of new material; one disc of classics.
Like any label compilation, 5 functions as a kind of mission statement: Here's what we've done; here's what we do. Most of the music on it sounds made for the head, not the feet. In a way, it's like a modern analog to Warp's 1992 compilation, Artificial Intelligence, whose sleeve was a picture of an empty armchair in a living room-- electronic music that has a place in the home.
Describing his music to The Guardian in 2007, the producer Burial said, "I want it to be like a little sanctuary. It's like that 24-hour stand selling tea on a rainy night, glowing in the dark." His two albums, Burial and Untrue, have more in common with Massive Attack and ambient music than anything you'd hear at a club. Zomby, on the other hand-- whose Where Were U in 92? sounded like jungle and drum'n'bass chewed up by a Game Boy-- described his daily routine to XLR8R magazine as "lots of rolling joints" and "eating some chicken-based dish à la carte." These guys aren't public faces, they're lost in the crowd-- they're people spacing out in their living rooms, alone. Burial's identity was secret for two years after he started putting out records. Zomby will be photographed only while wearing a mask.
Anyone familiar with Hyperdub-- or dubstep in general-- will know most of the classics disc. That's the point. One of the label's first singles-- Kode9 & the Spaceape's bloodless cover of the Specials' "Ghost Town"-- doesn't even have a beat behind it; it floats. Burial shows up twice, once with "South London Boroughs", once with "Distant Lights". There's Zomby's nightmarish "Spliff Dub (Rustie Remix)", whose sampled vocalist sings, "One spliff a day keep the evil away," over a track of 8-bit garbage and what sounds like synthesizers in a deep fryer. (The music captures weed's paranoia more than its elation-- I mean, is it supposed to make me like pot or fear it?)
The word "classics" has a kind of accelerated, lax definition in dance music, and some of the tracks on the second disc are from as recent as earlier this year. The heaviest is Joker's "Digidesign", a spacious, bone-simple piece of 80s-style R&B based around a handful of acidic countermelodies, so elegant it almost plays like a jingle.
The first disc-- the new one-- is good, but doesn't hold up to the classics. Those expected to bring it, as it were-- Burial, Zomby, Joker, Flying Lotus-- do, just not in any revelatory ways. Of the bunch, Zomby is probably the most satisfying because he's so hard to pin down: "Tarantula" doesn't sound exactly like anything he's released before, and his most recent single, "Digital Flora"/"Digital Fauna" doesn't sound like "Tarantula". I was never sold on Quarta 330's chiptune routine, nor on Kode9's music either-- their new contributions roll off. The only track that actively perplexes me is Black Chow's "Purple Smoke", whose junkshop hip-hop beats are the most brainlessly retro flourish on the whole compilation, and whose come-hither Japanese vocalist confuses sexy with corny. Minor complaints. Hyperdub deserves this: They've reshaped the little world they work in, and they've reached out to a wider one-- whether that world dances or not.


Released shortly after Boosie's emotionally gripping In My Feelings mixtape, which grappled with his cancer diagnosis, Out My Feelings reflects on a life covered in scars and pain—not just his own, but those of the people around him and people he’s interacted with. Since his release from prison in 2014, the Baton Rouge rapper seems committed to living up to the 2Pac comparisons his ardent supporters have given him.

Boosie Badazz: Out My Feelings (In My Past)

Out My Feelings (In My Past)

Since his release from prison in March of 2014, Boosie Badazz has made some of the best "adult" rap music imaginable. This is partly by design: Baton Rouge and the backwoods Southern communities that gravitated toward Boosie appreciated him for the thoughtful street rapper he always was, even as he came to fame off songs like "Wipe Me Down" and ratchet culture, and since his release, it feels as though Boosie has committed to living up to the 2Pac comparisons those fans gave to him. The other part of this is that Boosie (government name Torrance Hatch) has been through so much strife and ill will that it would be hard to talk about anything else on record. Past the familiar story of the existential dread that comes from street hustling, he went from staring the possibility of a death penalty in the face to serving time in one of the harshest prisons in Louisiana to a freedom nobody believed he’d get to see to the discovery that he had kidney cancer.
It’s this diagnosis that led to Boosie’s most emotionally gripping album to date: In My Feelings (Goin’ Thru It), released just earlier this year. After a nephrectomy to remove half his kidney, Boosie was declared cancer-free: news that is both cause for joyous celebration and introspection on a life lived. His newest album Out My Feelings (In My Past) is borne of this introspection, filled with solemn musings about the old-school street life he came from, the people lost to prison, death, or just time over the years, and his inability to understand how much street codes have changed amongst the youth of today. "We grew up youngstas on the corner, tryna make a livin/ Tryna make it back home, so we take a pistol," he begins on "Takem Back," painting a grim snapshot of the most impressionable and vulnerable time in a young black man’s life in a rough environment.
Throughout Out My Feelings, Boosie reflects on a life covered in scars and pain. Not just his own, but those of the people around him and people he’s interacted with; on "Look at Life Different" he raps about a mother with sons who are stuck in jail, one who is gangbanging and another abusing drugs. His tone is somber but resigned—he knows this story too well: "Asked me to pray wit her and asked me can I call Johnny/ That’s her baby boy who wylin’, catchin body after body." It's clear from his ragged delivery that he hurts for her and her sons the way he hurts for his own mother and the grief he brought her during his own wild days. "Thank God for Boosie" is repeated throughout the song, and the implication is that rap was the only thing that saved Torrance Hatch from these dire fates.
Out My Feelings doesn’t have the rawness of In My Feelings, but its production is impeccable where that one was spotty, and it soars when Boosie reminisces on his pre-rap days or makes statements in line with Black Lives Matter about the murders of unarmed black people by cops. Its lows come more sporadically and feel uncomfortable—like the homophobic lyrics found on "The Truth," for example—and the lecturing to young street kids about not sticking to the code of his youth is understandable but carries an "old man yelling at a cloud" vibe after awhile.
Incidentally, one of the best songs on the album is "Wanna B Heard," a wistful love letter to the forgotten where Boosie raps about the pull of gang life and the cry for help that the violence and crime committed by street kids really is. The most potent line: "I saw Glenn had something on his mind, I should’ve asked him what’s wrong/ Probably would’ve told me instead of blasting his dome." Above anything else, Boosie’s intense popularity began with those most ignored. He was their star, because he listened and he understood and recognized that their pain was real and it mattered in a way a lot of self-proclaimed "street" rappers have never been able to do. Thank God for Boosie.


The new album from electronic artist Phil Tortoroli earns the optimism of its title. There are dark themes, but his music is brighter than ever, cut with Maya Angelou and James Baldwin samples.

Voices Bloom

The electronic music that Phil Tortoroli makes as James Place is usually layered and abstract—not exactly what you’d call music with a message. But there’s clear meaning in “Courage to Ask,” the opening track of his new album, Voices Bloom. Over a sharp beat and dramatic synth tones, Tortoroli samples Maya Angelou praising, “The courage to ask, to ask, ‘Will you be my brother?’,” and ends with a bite of James Baldwin insisting, “All men are brothers. That’s the bottom line.”
Nothing else is that lucid on Voices Bloom, but the positivity of Angelou and Baldwin echoes throughout the rest of the album. In the past, Tortoroli has often buried his beats under dense surges of sound, but here he pulls them closer the surface, giving everything an insistent momentum. His synths and samples are generally brighter now, more like sunbeams than stormclouds. There are still many moods in Tortoroli’s music; he doesn’t let the light block out dour themes. But overall, Voices Bloom earns the optimism of its title.
In fact, for anyone familiar with James Place, some tracks on Voices Bloom are surprisingly bouncy. “Robin Weep,” which follows “Courage to Ask,” feels eminently dancefloor-ready, with its clicking beat and rippling synths relentlessly pushing air. “Rumor and Choir” has a similarly excited pulse, plus a nearly-giddy sense of humor via an organ loop that evokes a carnival carousel. Yet neither track trades pace for depth; throughout, Tortoroli paints textures onto his bubbling canvases that give them new hues when viewed from different angles.
One of those textures comes from Sam Sally, a singer who Tortoroli has collaborated with in the past when she would send him isolated vocal tracks to use. Searching for a layer to add to Voices Bloom, he dipped back into an old folder of her files, and incorporated them into some of the album’s most stirring cuts. Her contributions shine most vividly on “Move in Blue,” whose ice-blue beats melt into her sky-seeking presence. It’s a pretty simple formula—ethereal voices over cloudy music—but Tortoroli arranges those elements in such a way that you can never quite pinpoint the song’s character.
That knack for making music feel emotionally three-dimensional is what connects Voices Bloom to Tortoroli’s previous work. This kind of moody electronic music is all about choices: presented with infinite options inside the machine, how do you choose which sounds will be the most resonant, and stick in the memory instead of floating pasting ears? Tortoroli excels at that kind of decision making. Take closer “Wild Theme Unseen.” By far the album’s longest cut at 10 minutes, it continually rises in waves of synths buttressed by small rhythmic clicks. Structurally, it’s an outlier on the album, since it’s almost solely about repetition. But thematically, it’s exactly right: upbeat music that contains downbeats, on a bright album that’s not afraid of the dark.


The London band’s deeply self-aware debut is worthy of being taken seriously even when it’s not serious.

925

The Elvis Presley costume Asha Lorenz wears in the video for Sorry’s “Rock ’n’ Roll Star” is closer to a last-minute Halloween costume than a genuine impersonator. Dancing and skipping through rainy streets, Lorenz exudes the same combination of sarcasm, silliness, and begrudging cool that runs through her band’s debut album, 925. Though they’re barely famous yet, Sorry act like they’re already over it. The London band’s sound is omnivorous but austere, absorbing elements of post-punk, pop, and jazz into a tongue-in-cheek, deeply self-aware update on indie rock. Few new rock bands seek to telegraph their most cliché ambitions so clearly—they aren’t even the first to call a song “Rock ’n’ Roll Star”—but few bands are as ambitious as Sorry.
Lorenz met Louis O’Bryen, the band’s co-founder, guitarist, and sometime vocalist, when they attended the same private school in central London. They formed Sorry (original name: Fish) with three additional live band members in 2016 and gained attention at events put on by the south London collective Slow Dance, an early supporter of futuristic prog rockers black midi. After releasing a string of woozy alt-rock songs on Domino, Lorenz and O’Bryen opted out of university to spend time honing their sound. The result is 925, an album Lorenz says is named after the percentage of precious metal in sterling silver (92.5). There’s room for other interpretations, too: the most obvious is “9 to 5,” the type of job Sorry have so far managed to avoid.
The album is full of these slippery double entendres and onomatopoeic puns, like the howl-at-the-moon guitar on “Wolf.” On “Ode to Boy,” Lorenz’s self-conscious rhymes of “baby” with “maybe” are pitched up into a literal baby voice. Sorry don’t hesitate to add their own irreverent slant to familiar pop music tropes: the obstinately catchy opening track “Right Round the Clock” interpolates Tears for Fears’ “Mad World,” while “As the Sun Sets” twists Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” into a nightmarish inversion. In a listless tone, Lorenz sings about running into an ex with someone new. What a wonderful world for them, she seems to say, as she sarcastically riffs on Armstrong’s timeless chorus.
Lorenz’s nakedly honest voice, often uncomfortably close in the mix, is the most arresting and consistent feature of a chaotic record full of zany sound effects and saxophone riffs. The sparse, eerie “Snakes” showcases her prowling lower register, while the closing track—a polished-up rework of Sorry’s first single, “Lies”—hinges on her brittle performance, including a devastating half-laugh as she rips apart the line, “I make lies like we should be together.” But she’s just as good when she’s being silly, heaving “eurgh” on the strutting chorus of “Starstruck” or echoing O’Bryen’s vocal line by shrieking “a boy!” on the otherwise sweet and straightforward “Heather.”
925 is a strange and searing debut, worthy of being taken seriously even when it’s not serious. Occasionally, the band’s sardonic send-up of rock clichés overshoots and winds up sounding grating: “I want drugs and drugs and drugs and drugs,” insists “More.” Their parodic humor can feel like a defense mechanism, a strategy to hold the listener at arm’s length. But powerful songs like “Starstruck,” “Wolf,” and the delicate ’90s-style grunge duet “Perfect” lift the curtain to reveal genuinely inventive songwriting. On 925, Sorry lovingly poke fun at themselves and at rock history—but they also prove they’ve got the talent to go further than their gags.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Unapologetic about his intelligence, Angel Del Villar is the type of rapper beloved by hip-hop traditionalists: proudly old school, technically savage, and lyrically sharp. His debut EP for Stones Throw is his best work yet.

Subject: Matter

The old order of Underground Rap went rudderless for a variety of reasons. Illegal downloading ruptured the already weak tendons of small independent labels. Fans favored 1990s nostalgia over out-there artistry. Top producers got tired of dealing with rap-biz bullshit and opted for MC-free experimentations with jazz, soul, and electronic. But my favorite theory is that most people got tired of rappers rapping about rapping.
Due to its nature as a reactionary sect, for the underground to evolve, it had to do something more than stand athwart history and yell, "chill!!" (In this re-enactment, William F. Buckley is played by KRS-One). And there is no more elliptical act this side of a Steve Reich riff than writing lyrics about your lyrics. Yeah, it might have been a building block in the on-and-on-to-the-break-of-dawn days, but as George Harrison and Fatlip pointed out: All things pass. Swag will be ill before we know it.
Over the last 24 months, an ideology-free counter-culture rebuilt itself, waving different banners and maintaining few borders. It's an underground in lowercase letters, a constellation encircling everyone from Detroit amphetamine enthusiast Danny Brown to sardonic arsonists Das Racist and Open Mike Eagle, to anesthetized Oakland cloud rappers, to the Prosciutto-plumped adenoidal New Yorker Action Bronson, and the cold-hearted Hempstead Rambo, Roc Marciano. It includes older gods like Ishmael Butler (Shabazz Palaces/Digable Planets), Aesop Rock, Brooklyn Bomb Squad scion El-P, and the Dungeon Family's Killer Mike. So fluid are its boundaries that the latter two did a record together funded by Adult Swim money.
Enter Sandman. So anachronistic as to appropriate the slang, "Homeboy." Born name: Angel Del Villar. An ex-teacher, Ivy League undergraduate, and Hofstra Law student psychologically aligned to the older underground of 1995, when the term meant Beatnuts and Do You Want More?!!!??!, not Jurassic 5 and flip-flops. Sandman is the type of rapper beloved by hip-hop traditionalists: proudly old school, technically savage, and lyrically sharp. In the all-star game of the new subterranean, he is the guy with flawless fundamentals, wearing his socks high and his cleats sharp and polished. So it was little surprise when the surviving infrastructure of the 1990s immediately supported Sandman: underground hip hop radio, the Nuyorican Poets Café, the XXL Chairman's Choice column, and rap's Daily Worker, Okayplayer. The straw poll was sealed when Sandman signed with Stones Throw, one of the last garrisons of the late 90s, an imprint blessed with the resources to shower him with proper promo, branding, and an array of dazzling sun- and smoke-carved beats.
East meets west on Subject: Matter, Sandman's debut EP for the label of Madlib and Dâm-Funk. To accompany the introduction, Sandman added a subtext to his six-song collection, noting on its cover that they encompass content that "no one has ever rapped about before in the history of rap music. Unfortunately not a very difficult thing to do." Sandman is as Queens as the Unisphere, and his braggadocio bears a boldness that suggests that he grew up in the Bridge not Elmhurst. It's probably unnecessary arrogant, but it also reflects a welcome sign of ambition. Few deducted points from Lil Wayne for boasting that he was the greatest rapper alive (even if 49 percent of the electorate disagreed). Nor should they blame Sandman much for his myopic history.
After all, the man can rhyme. A former saxman, Sandman takes a modal approach with his screwball flow that dips and dives, stops and starts. He bevels his patterns at bizarre angles, employing a vocabulary worthy of Lisa Simpson. He's unapologetic about his intelligence, and even if it skirts the line of pretension, he keeps a progressive approach. Not only does he carefully weigh the importance of "being nice," he's focused on vivid storytelling too. Subject: Matter is both a self-challenge and the hurling of a gauntlet. Sandman wants to see his peers expand their imagination. And while the modern-day rap world has no scarcity of songs channeling topics of the zeitgeist (the entirety of XXX, 1/3 of Watch the Throne, whatever you make of Lil B), his originality is warmly welcomed, if not demanded.
So though "The Miracle" parallels the storylines of Pharoahe Monch's "Rape" and Mos Def's "Love", it offers a penetrating analysis of the act of creation from Sandman's side. "Unforgettable" tells the tale of the woe brought onto a man too sprung on his ex. It mirrors a less-graphic version of Ghostface Killah's "Marvel", but Sandman spins his own saga of picking up mediocre girls at Best Buy and sexing them while reminiscing on his last conquest. "Canned Goods" is about canned goods. Closing track "Soap" pictures a biblical deluge washing away the inequities of the world.
The psychedelic, elegiac beats are handled by 2 Hungry Bros, Ben Grymm, the Audible Doctor, rThentic RTNC, and the latest Stones Throw rated rookie, Jonwayne. Despite the diffuse cast, the EP feels exceptionally cohesive; it's also a throwback to the days when A&R departments actually existed. A half-decade ago, a record like this would've been needlessly over-hyped, with true-schoolers rushing to anoint Sandman the bulwark against an ineradicable tide of commercialism and greed. Now that the "Hip Hop is Dead" era's over, Sandman merely needs to be good. And he is.
With a healthy number of his peers engaged in shoving rap onto strange terrain, Sandman is another vivid character adding to the expansion. Subject: Matter might be Sandman's best work yet, but more importantly, it's a salient reminder that a song's only perimeter is the limits of human imagination.


The UK-born, L.A.-based rapper and beatmaker vacuums up Jersey club, Brazilian funk, classic soul, and Auto-Tune melodies for a crispy, kinetic mix with a foot in every corner of the internet.

#gigi

It’s the beginning of summer, skin is exposed, and the urge to get up and move is growing. Enter skaiwater: a Nottingham artist, currently stationed in L.A., who’s breaking out of the web underground with a kinetic blend of blown-out bedroom rap, futuristic R&B, and electronic experimentation. Initial iterations were moody, subdued sketches in a similar vein to Travis Scott. But when skaiwater took production into their own hands, they started multiplying the tracks in the DAW, adding layers of detail and pent-up drama. “#miles” and “eyes,” experiments indebted to Jersey club, kept the style’s pounding drums and danceable rhythms but substituted the usual raunchy lyrics for heartfelt pleas to a love interest. These singles couldn’t be as easily categorized, melding frenzied dancefloor energy with intimate thoughts typically reserved for private conversation.
The imaginative tinkering culminates on skaiwater’s new album, #gigi. Primarily self-produced, it mashes together some of the decade’s most prevalent sounds into a crispy mix that plays like an amalgamation of SoundCloud likes. Beats venture all across the African diaspora; skaiwater makes excursions to chaotic Brazilian funk, Jamaican dancehall grooves, and the jittery litefeet that turns up NYC parks. Distorted bass and random EQ hijinks will terrorize your speaker. Vocal pitches fluctuate all over the place.
Taking inspiration from this many places at once can mean spreading yourself thin or bloating the final product. skaiwater makes it all work by never directly emulating specific genres, instead using them as jumping-off points. Their adventurous splices generate brand-new compounds: “real feel” grabs the skittering hi-hats and shattering 808s that accompanies the off-the-wall maximalism of a natecxo beat and lays them over a ’70s soul sample. On “richest girl alive,” Auto-Tuned emo wails find pockets of melody between funk-infused drum patterns. The PARTYNEXTDOOR-core serenade “princess” builds up a pillow of delicate acoustics before climaxing into Young Thug-esque ad-libs. On “run,” Milwaukee low-end claps and New Orleans bounce rhythms poke through skaiwater’s dejected vocals.
These engrossing sound beds shield a raw display of feelings. “wna torture me tn?”, a team-up with Atlanta rapper Karrahbooo, flirts with masochism: “Sacrifice me like a lamb,” skaiwater croons. “Box” sandwiches hints of obsession (“Prized possession, hang you up in my archive”) between Jersey-club bed squeaks. Confidence fuels the freeform Atlanta-sourced flows in “bleach” and “rain” as skaiwater cycles between admiration and disdain for a lover. Even Lil Nas X captures some of that suavity in his feature on “light!,” the album’s most radio-ready track and only song not produced by skaiwater: Producer 9lives’ glimmering synth piano leads the way for a streak of catchy, celebratory bars about an overdue breakup.
Those sighs of relief rarely last long. skaiwater surfs between moods and soundscapes at a moment’s notice, omnivorous in a way that’s reminiscent of a young Kanye West. Perpetually restless, #gigi mines the full spectrum of musical ideas percolating through the internet, sourcing niche ingredients for a meal that offers something for every taste. Sometimes the broad scope and fast pace swallows up the endearing quirks that define specific scenes. But more often, it feels like firing up a freshly jailbroken phone: a ticket to endless possibilities concealed just out of sight.


Angel, the third album by Austin’s Pure X, is lackadaisical in its tempos and moods, coming on at an almost laughably leisurely pace. But while there’s a lot of emphasis on mood and texture, they never get in the way of the songwriting, which is consistent and generous with its hooks.

Angel

Angel, the third album by Austin’s Pure X, is lackadaisical in its tempos and moods, coming on at an almost laughably leisurely pace. A chiming electric guitar chord, as well as some actual chimes, make for a half minute of aural sage-burning to introduce the opening track “Starlight”. From there, the album is an intricate but not overwrought construction of clean, twinkly tones that distills George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, the more gently decadent moments of the T. Rex catalogue, and other high points of rock’s early-70s post-hippie chill-out phase. All along, Angel just sort of cruises on with tempos pegged to double-digit BPMs and the mood locked on “as mellow as humanly possible.”
That doesn’t mean it’s a boring record, though—it has a healthy pulse, even if it never really climbs above an exceptionally relaxed state. There’s a lot of emphasis on mood and texture, but they never get in the way of the songwriting, which is consistent and generous with its hooks. The album’s surprisingly broad spectrum of influences seem to include a decent amount of Big Star—the melody lines on songs like “Valley of Tears” and “Every Tomorrow” have some of the zero-gravity quality of some of Chilton and Bell’s more pop-perfect moments. (And if the more brooding, swoony “Livin’ the Dream” is any indication, Big Star acolyte Elliott Smith’s probably well represented too.)
Angel’s promotional material emphasizes the fact that the album was written and recorded in a hundred-year-old dance hall in a remote corner of central Texas over the span of just five days, but that aspect of its creation doesn’t come through in the recording in an obvious way. A modern studio offers musicians interested in texture and atmosphere a more or less limitless range of options, but Pure X wisely keep things simple here. Beyond layering gentle acoustic guitars, ethereal multi-part vocals, and the occasional subtle flourish of analog synthesizer, they stick to a basic four-piece rock setup; the songs never fall victim to their own ambition and the music remains appealingly and accessibly human-scaled.
Pure X draw heavily from the past—not only Harrison, Bolan, Chilton, and Bell, but from the troves of vintage private press psychedelic folk records that in recent years have been uncovered and rescued from terminal obscurity. Their forbears offered a personal, pastoral cosmic transcendence that made sense in its own time, when Summer of Love naiveté was eroding into Nixon-era cynicism. Angel serves as a balm in another era defined by mass pessimism and doubt. It’s easy to criticize it for its escapism and refusal to grapple with a reality that extends outside the listener’s personal space. But on “Heaven”, when vocalist Nate Grace promises that, “heaven is a feeling,” it sounds believable, an offer to find shelter and peace in Pure X’s blissed-out cloud that’s almost too appealing to pass up.


A 4xCD/Blu-ray box set unpacks the bombast behind the UK band’s sprawling 1989 hybrid of soul and neo-psychedelia, recorded over four years and hundreds of hours of experimentation.

Tears for Fears: The Seeds of Love (Super Deluxe Edition)

To transform from a bedsit synth-pop outfit with a thing for prim diction to a global phenomenon projecting miserabilist pensées at arena scale must have ground Tears for Fears into a fine powder. Relaxing in a Kansas City hotel bar while promoting 1985’s quintuple-platinum Songs from the Big Chair, singer-guitarist-songwriter Roland Orzabal and singer-bassist Curt Smith were entranced by Oleta Adams, the Seattle-born R&B singer at the piano. Something went off in Orzabal’s mind. A couple years later, deep into recording their third album, he contacted Adams with a request: would she join their sessions?
What became The Seeds of Love resulted from hundreds of hours of peripatetic experimentation, and, when the sessions stretched almost four years, probably just seemed pathetic to their dismayed label. By this time even Phil Collins and fretless bass wonder Pino Palladino had been enlisted alongside Adams. Released in 1989 to cautious reviews, The Seeds of Love dropped at a time when formerly obscure acts like The Cure and Depeche Mode were earning Top 10 singles. “Sowing the Seeds of Love” peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in October, and, for the sake of Fontana/Mercury’s promo department, it better have. But The Seeds of Love had trouble keeping its audience. UMe’s fulsome box set, packed with jam sessions, discarded mixes, okay B-sides, and a remaster of the original, hopes to find a new one. The Seeds of Love remains a not-great album, but Orzabal finding the Little Feat in Songs from the Big Chair’s bombast has a seductive pull.
The Seeds of Love marks the culmination of the neo-psychedelic soul hybrid that Orzabal had not stopped Rubik’s Cubing well into the summer of 1989. The allusive, Thatcher-baiting “Sowing the Seeds of Love” (“Kick out the style, bring back the Jam,” indeed) still thunders like the most tuneful of anomalies. Several sections grafted together, stitches showing, unfurl in Orzabal and Smith’s Beatles revue: trumpet solos, the lilting callback to “I Am the Walrus,” the love-power ridiculousness of the thing. It still sounds fabulous—the next chapter in Songs From the Big Chair’s “The Working Hour.”
The other singles are better, if that’s possible. Skip the radio mixes of “Woman in Chains,” and “Advice for the Young at Heart”; luxuriate in the longer album versions, on which Orzabal, Smith (on occasion), and their players make silence as loud as six guitar solos. Neither Talk Talk nor Peter Gabriel could have come up with “Woman in Chains,” impressive in the specificity (and prescience) with which Orzabal examines his masculinity. It also plays like a gospel song interrogating itself, notably when the full band joins them for a “Hey, Jude” singalong finale whose prayer (“So free her!”) forgets God and looks Man straight in the eye. Earlier, as Adams takes over for the second verse, her plummy contralto hovers in its own space, somewhere between Palladino’s discreet plucks, Collins’ superhumanly steady rimshots, and an eerie sampled flute from Orzabal’s Fairlight; unlike the title character, who “calls her man the great white hope,” she’s asserted herself. The creamy, assured “Advice for the Young at Heart” boasts Smith’s only lead vocal; his falsetto suits what is in essence Tears for Fears’ sophisti-pop track, in which bongos and Nicky Holland’s piano add the lightest of jazz colorings.
The album tracks don’t proffer such immediate pleasures; the band must have agreed, for the set includes no less than five versions of “Badman’s Song,” a boogie track fussy and ungainly in its original form but crisp in the so-called Townhouse jam sessions in which Tears for Fears rehearsed the material. Although the organ line perilously evokes Steve Winwood, Adams and Orzabal duet with such congruity that the discrete parts meld. (On the other hand, a version from discarded sessions with Alan Langer and Clive Winstanley has horn parts so zealous that the rhythm section sounds pinned against the wall.) “Year of the Knife,” which Tears for Fears never got quite right either (seven versions here, not counting remasters), lurches from a “Head Over Heels/Broken”-styled raver to a mix for Canadian radio that features a programmed dance rhythm with Madchester overtones.
After debuting at No. 1 in the UK, once “Sowing the Seeds of Love” failed to dethrone Janet Jackson’s “Miss You Much” in America, The Seeds of Love sank, a victim of record company jitters. They wanted another “Shout,” another “Head Over Heels”—they might even have settled for another “Mother’s Talk.” In a year when baby boomer musical icons turned persistence into platinum—the year of Lou Reed and Neil Young comebacks, sure, but also Donny Osmond and the Doobie Brothers—Tears for Fears could’ve exploited pop culture’s obsession with the ’60s, reified and reformatted into Richard Marx readymades. Study the busy album sleeve: Sgt. Pepper with hints of a Benetton ad. Hell, months earlier XTC released Oranges and Lemons, a college radio hit awash in received 1968-isms.
The stretch from 1989 to 1990 turned out to be the year of the knife for Tears for Fears. Tired and sidelined, Smith jumped ship after the tour. Orzabal, a devotee of their brand, released two enervated follow-ups under the band’s name. But the seeds he’d planted for Adams didn’t lie fallow: Her decent Orzabal-produced debut Circle of One included Brenda Russell’s “Get Here,” a Top 5 smash in 1991 and reality TV mainstay for years, and “Rhythm of Life,” found here in its Tears for Fears demo. At a friend’s funeral last March, her version of “Everything Must Change” devastated my fellow mourners. Smith rejoined Orzabal for 2004’s Everybody Loves a Happy Ending.
To absorb The Seeds of Love box set is to admire it anew as a culmination, not an aberration. Thanks to this set, we can hear Orzabal assembling “Sowing the Seeds of Love” from blocks into its unwieldy, epic final form. In the call-and-response moments of the Townhouse sessions we can appreciate why Adams entranced two Arthur Janov-influenced Englishmen; noting how well Orzabal and Adams harmonized is a delightful surprise. And the still, sparkling “Famous Last Words” remains a forest pond of sound. “As the day hits the night/We will sit by candlelight/We will laugh/We will sing/When the saints go marching in,” Orzabal sings in the voice of a comforting pal. Four years of tumult to end here, from the mouth of the guy who sang, “Time to eat all your words.”

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Florida teen rapper’s ambitious new project pulls together disparate strands, from plugg to shoegaze and emo balladry. It’s messy, but it works more often than not.

ghetto cupid

jaydes references the online and regional rap sounds of the 2010s like a daily poster in a niche hip-hop Discord community, the type who nitpicks small moments in seemingly inconsequential songs and fantasizes about what they would do if they were their favorite rappers. Last summer, the Broward County teen released his breakout mixtape heartpacing, which rewired plugg by pairing emo croons with the lush, blissed-out production typical of the style. His newest project Ghetto Cupid ambitiously tries to pull more musical strands together, from the layered guitars of shoegaze to the faded and cloudy murmurs of Lucki songs. It’s messy, but it works more often than not.
Over 17 tracks, a majority of which are credited to the pseudonym yen (it’s confusing because there aren’t any noticeable differences between yen and jaydes but just rock with it), jaydes layers soft, lovelorn melodies over a wide range of beats. His raw lilts evoke XXXTentaction’s tortured balladry, but jaydes songs are not nearly as heavy; they’re gloomy but in a bored teenager kind of way. When jaydes delivers his most melancholic lines, he usually follows up with a fun detail that feels retooled from rap of the recent past. “Sometimes I would rather be alone/Sometimes I stay off of my phones/Sometimes I wonder if she the one,” he sings almost unemotionally on “let me b,” which is then immediately followed up with a Carti-like vomiting ad-lib as if he’s disgusted by his own corniness.
jaydes is a decent writer, but his songs are more about mood, his forlornness felt even when he’s not saying a whole lot. Brief bits add texture to the melodrama: the exasperated lip flap at the beginning of “Undercover,” or the spammed producer tag—“you have no heart”—on “Horror,” repeated to the point that it sounds like he’s channeling some sort of Candyman-esque spirit. I like when he gets swamped by the instrumental, for example on the blurry “Fallen”—produced by marcusbasquiat, who was behind the boards on a couple of the most desolate-sounding Lucki cult favorites—or the blaring shoegaze intro “Rose.” On both, he sounds lost, fighting to be heard through all the distortion and mayhem.
But the other guitar-driven joints on Ghetto Cupid—he flips Weezer on “Misery,” for example—are too on the nose. I get it—he wants to make sure we know that his influences go beyond rap. But the appeal of his music is that he applies the sort of sentimental sing-rapping usually done on GothBoiClique-type beats to production with a Southern flair. Listen to how much more singular he sounds over plugg, his bread and butter. Usually plugg sounds kind of dreamy, but he gives it a vulnerability that I associate more with Florida pain rap in the mold of Lil Poppa or T9ine. Only someone as tapped in as jaydes could make the emotional tweaks on the fluttering “<3,” the twitchy “Witchy Bitchy,” or mellow “Damage” sound right.


With hard-nosed bars and ominous, bass-heavy beats, the Canadian rapper’s debut album is her most cohesive and narratively ambitious effort to date.

13th Floor

Midway through “In Women Colour,” the defiant empowerment anthem that kicks off Haviah Mighty’s debut album 13th Floor, the Brampton-via-Toronto rapper vividly recounts an experience with a high school bully on the basketball court. She confronts an antagonist who’s thrown the ball out of her reach, only to find herself in a chokehold, beaten up for being a tomboy. “It’s just my struggle with the power divide,” Haviah reflects over distorted synths and peals of electric guitar. She gets the last laugh, but not before laying out the challenges she’s faced as a rapper because of her gender and skin color in unapologetic detail.
Whether solo or with hip-hop trio the Sorority—formed after its members met at a widely shared Toronto International Women’s Day cypher in 2016—Mighty wears her underdog badge with pride. Although she’s put out several self-released projects, including 2017’s evocative EP Flower City, 13th Floor is her most cohesive and narratively ambitious album to date. Mighty co-executive produced the record alongside Tim “2oolman” Hill of Canadian indigenous electronic group A Tribe Called Red, and a cadre including younger brother Mighty Prynce, frequent collaborator Young Dreadz, and Somali-Canadian beatmaker OBUXUM provide genre-diverse, radio-adjacent production.
The album’s title refers to both the superstitious tradition of buildings without a 13th floor and the 13th Amendment, forming a framework for Mighty’s impassioned commentary on cultural and socio-political identity. Over 13 tracks, she recalls harrowing brushes with racism in her neighborhood and classrooms growing up, and the close-knit family who taught her the importance of independence and perseverance. On the clique-celebrating “Squad,” she pays tribute to her parents and siblings, proudly claiming “Jamaican blood, Bajan blood, Canadian blood, UK in my blood, no Aryan blood, no alien blood.” The soulful, piano-led standout “Thirteen”—which Mighty has called “the only one that actually makes me feel like crying whenever I listen to it”—is an unflinching examination of North America’s history of slavery while acknowledging the continuing struggle for equality.
Elsewhere, 13th Floor captures the spark-plug energy of her live performances with ominous, bass-heavy beats and hard-nosed bars that could go toe-to-toe with any challenger. Like “Vamonos,” the 2018 collaboration with producer Book featured on HBO’s Insecure, “Blame” and “Fugazi” are packed with gleeful flexes and instantly rewindable punchlines (“Heard you want a resolution, ironically I’m not Aaliyah”). When she occasionally cedes the mic, it’s to like-minded Toronto artists who share her multitasking DIY ethos: Sean Leon and Clairmont the Second are prolific independent MCs themselves. “Fistful of dollars, punchlines kick ass like Chris Wallace,” Leon boasts on “Waves,” while on “Smoke,” Clairmont somberly reflects on the institutional racism and violence affecting young black people in his community. Sister Omega Mighty completes the family affair, lending a patois-peppered verse to the Fugees-referencing, Caribana-ready dancehall highlight “Wishy Washy.” Both it and “You Don’t Love Me” allow Haviah Mighty to show off her melodic chops, letting down her emotional defenses ever-so-slightly while scoffing at prospective suitors foolish enough to underestimate her.
Though the other two members of the Sorority—Keysha Freshh and Lex Leosis—are absent here, 13th Floor is an opportunity for Mighty to stretch her legs, not the beginning of the end for a promising group. They’ve recently promised new music, as well as solo releases from Freshh and Leosis, a breath of fresh air in the male-dominated Canadian rap landscape. “I do think the climate is opening up a little bit more to change. You're hearing a little bit more content from people that actually want to say something—not even just the women but also some of the men,” Mighty said in a recent interview. “And there's a little bit more openness as well. We’re a little bit less okay with certain types of ignorance.” As she puts it on “In Women Colour,” “I gotta do two times more to get four times less,” but she’s not doing it alone.


Morrissey and his Tormentors continue their 21st century winning streak with a record that, while offering no new twists or surprises, finds the former Smiths co-leader in strong voice-- both as a singer and songwriter.

Years of Refusal

Last time we saw Morrissey, on a rather slapdash Greatest Hits compilation, he was singing a song called "All You Need Is Me" and promising "You'll miss me when I'm gone." Neither proposition seemed watertight: His 2000s return to action had been welcome but rarely spectacular, and the man looked set on a twilit career of gently diminishing returns. So Years of Refusal comes as a gratifying shock: It's his most vital, entertaining, and savage record since 1994's Vauxhall and I.
What's surprising is that so little seems different. The personnel are largely unchanged: backing band the Tormentors and co-writers including old hands Boz Boorer and Alain Whyte. The approach is unchanged: muscular rock with plenty of room for Morrissey to roam and gesture and half an ear on live performance. Even some of the songs are unchanged: the new tracks from Greatest Hits show up again, though "All You Need Is Me" is transformed by context-- surrounded by fine new songs, you notice its snarl, flamboyance, and garage rock grind. Rather than try and reinvent himself, Morrissey has rediscovered himself, finding new potency in his familiar arsenal.
Morrissey's rejuvenation's most obvious in the renewed strength of his vocals. On the barnstorming opener, "Something Is Squeezing My Skull", he switches from fruity to fierce with impeccable timing-- the ringing leaps up the scale on "skull," the matter-of-fact checklist of drugs and mental treatments, and then the break into anger and desperation: "How long must I stay on this stuff?" On his old album sleeves, Morrissey would sometimes capitalize stray phrases for particular emphasis-- these days, when he wants to make a point, you hear those capitals.
By "Skull"'s ferocious closing he should have won stray fans back, and he keeps the energy levels high across most of the record. Much of the album was tracked live in the studio, and their leader's vigor seems to have rubbed off on the band. Not only do the songs have a snappy ferocity, they're full of unexpected touches in the arrangement-- the discordant keyboards on "Mama Lay Softly on the Riverbed", or the cod-mariachi flourishes on "One Day Goodbye Will Be Farewell". This makes Years of Refusal a rarity-- a Morrissey record you can dig into without caring much about the man's lyrics.
When you do pay attention to the words, Morrissey is on typically quotable form. He long ago got into the habit of paring his lyrics down into aphorisms-- "You don't like me but you love me/ Either way you're wrong"-- which run the risk of sounding too pat and polished: The source of much of the "self-parody" flak that flies his way. There's plenty of sigfile fodder here, but it's balanced by more startling imagery: "I've hammered a smile across this pasty face of mine"; "I was a small fat child in a welfare house"; and perhaps his most eyebrow-raising couplet ever: "The motion of taxis excites me when you peel it back and bite me."
For much of Years of Refusal Morrissey is turning his fire outwards-- taking on lovers, enemies, wannabes, or some combination of all three. On "The Last Time I Saw Carol", his younger admirer winds up dead and Morrissey responds with detached regret. On "You Were Good in Your Time" he paints a mournful and wandering picture of a dwindled hero-- he knows and you know he's self-aware enough to be singing partly about himself. But only partly: This is Morrissey's most venomous, score-settling album, and in a perverse way that makes it his most engaging.
Fitting then that Years of Refusal's peak is its angriest track: "It's Not Your Birthday Anymore" starts tender, but something callous is stewing beneath its padding drums and gentle croon. "Did you really think we meant all those syrupy sentimental things that we said?" sings Morrissey, before the song takes a still darker turn into grudgeful, violent sexuality. In its cruelty and intensity, it's a cousin to Pulp's "This Is Hardcore", and it's the most disturbing, gripping Morrissey track since 1994's "Speedway". Even though the album dies away after "Birthday", it and its more raucous predecessors suggest an artist as pugnacious, confident, and necessary as he's ever been.


Fresh & Onlys guitarist Wymond Miles' second solo release of the year was quickly written and recorded after the deaths of his closest friend and some family members.

Under the Pale Moon

Under the Pale Moon is Fresh & Onlys guitarist Wymond Miles' second solo release this year. The first, Earth Has Doors, is an ornate, intricately composed four-song EP culled from a backlog of songs accrued over several years. Meanwhile, Pale Moon was written and recorded within two months. Compared to the EP, the album's origin story reads like a burst of cathartic inspiration; according to Sacred Bones, his closest friend and some family members passed away within a short period of time, inspiring him to write and record the album's 10 songs. (The final line in the liner notes: "in memory of robin.") That explains why heartbreak, tragedy, and poetic melodrama hang heavy over Pale Moon.
Almost every song seems to come from a place of pain, confusion, or struggle. And as he explained in an interview, that's probably the case: "Lyrically, [the album is] a fairly direct mirror of my life at the time." The most direct example of that is "Pale Moon", where the lyrics are riddled with loving analogies before revealing some hard truths ("you want to be free from me," and "I just can't go on when I'm this tired"). And "Youth's Lonely Wilderness" seems to speak directly to Miles' loss ("Here we stand, two broken friends/ One beyond and one below"). But as the album goes on, the lyrics get more and more symbolic with varying degrees of success. The devil is brought up, as are ashes, darkness, and "a murder of crows." They're all deeply resonant images on their own, but after the album's 40 minutes are up, it's easy to feel like he's dipped into the Dictionary of Symbols one too many times.
In some instances, his lyrics are buoyed by the emotional heft of his instrumentation. As Earth Has Doors revealed, Miles is excellent at conveying a feeling in his compositions; "As the Orchard Is With Rain" managed to be mournful and contemplative without offering any lyrical narrative at all. Here, he sets the mood with a strong core hook, like the jangling backbone of "Pale Moon", which shifts from a major chord progression to a minor chord progression as the song thematically moves from warm nostalgia to grim reality. And he'll top the hook with a complementary flourish, like that same song's Spanish guitar solo. (Since this is an album of weighty material, it's easy to forget that he is, in fact, a great lead guitarist in one of the Bay Area's best garage bands.)
But the secret weapon behind Pale Moon is Miles' voice, which sounds as sensitive and pained as the instrumental moods he's set and his open-wound lyrics. He croons every song with a delicate, throaty warble that's flawed (he'll occasionally overemphasize a syllable), yet effective in its ability to tap into a specific song's mood. Because he packs so much emotion in his vocal delivery, his voice sounds like it could be an affectation. But when he trades out his go-to whisper for a cornball manly belt on album closer "Trapdoors & Ladders", the former is clearly much more preferable.
That final song marks a major issue with Pale Moon: The record starts to drag before it reaches the end. While side one is packed with solid hooks, like the slow-building jangle of "Strange Desire" or the slightly heavier riff and solo on "Run Like the Hunted", side two is a comparative slog. The hooks get a little less interesting and a little more repetitive ("You and I Are of the Night"). The lyrics begin to feel more corny (from "Badlands": "With your drinking habit and worn out leather jacket/ You're a burnout castaway of rock'n'roll"). And although it includes some interesting tinges of atmosphere, the self-serious symbolism in the lyrics for "Trapdoors" seems to have jumped out of a prog-rock caricature.
It's a disappointing place to leave Pale Moon, which is front-loaded with moments that are devastatingly honest and flat-out beautiful. And although there are several easy and semi-accurate comparisons to be made to early Cure records, Miles didn't have those things in mind. "I went in making this record without any conscious stylistic choices," he said. "I just wanted something raw and true to the moment of writing." Despite the album's flaws and thudding conclusion, that's the best gift of Under the Pale Moon-- it wasn't toiled over for years. It's a document of what he needed to get out in that moment.


At their best, this Montreal quartet locate the aching sincerity in pop clichés.

I Feel Alive

As of this writing, the pop quartet TOPS adorn the cover of Spotify’s “Montréal Chill” playlist. They look how I’d like to imagine myself looking when I’m chilling—pouty and photogenic, elegant and thin. Their music is a fitting soundtrack for the sort of glamorous melancholy that reliably passes for depth. TOPS’ songs are “big moods,” with their slow-blooming synthesizers and guitars and vocals from frontwoman Jane Penny, who always sounds somewhere between tender and disappointed.
But they begin their new album sounding ready to push through that malaise and on to something weirder. On opening track “Direct Sunlight,” prancing keyboard lines eventually give way to a cascade of voices cooing “sunshine” and a flute solo from Penny. This is TOPS at their most ambitious, showing their knack for taking references that might otherwise be dismissed for their cheesiness or chintz and finding the sincerity in the cliché. Here, and on the call-and-response “show me love” chorus on “Drowning in Paradise,” they show their aptitude for excavating half-remembered pop oddities. TOPS are at their best when they keep digging.
Elsewhere on the album, though, they’re just chilling. They’re as despondent and nostalgic as ever, but back to the kind of windswept indie rock that is their trademark. Their perennial reference point is Fleetwood Mac: “Witching Hour” has a churn worthy of Mick Fleetwood, and Penny sells her Nicksisms when she commits to them. But whereas on the best Fleetwood Mac tracks you can hear them stumble, baffled, into awkward truths, the wistfulness on I Feel Alive can seem reflexive rather than felt. Even the title track, with its vague verse imagery, undercuts its own nicely understated refrain. In these moments, the album threatens to collapse into a mood board.
But sometimes it’s okay to be sad for no reason at all. The title of “Ballads and Sad Movies” may prompt eye rolls, but it’s the song in which I Feel Alive clicks into place. When Penny wails, at the song’s climax, that she doesn’t know who she is anymore, the familiarity and comfort of nostalgia is ruptured, exposing the hopelessness and confusion beneath. Self-mythologizing is a survival strategy, and sometimes you’ve just got to indulge yourself if you’re going to stay sane. And cliché as the spoken-word French interludes and lyrics about missing-something-but-not-knowing-what may be, TOPS’ songwriting remains intuitive and rewarding when the band is firing on all cylinders, validating our tendency to mythologize our own petty tragedies.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Blending mumbled folk and bleary-eyed blips, the Bon Iver percussionist's new solo EP feels like the soundtrack for an ice-slicked, insomniac winter drive.

Hoyas EP

One of the profound truths we learned from the post-Grammys Who Is Bonnie Bear? meme is that there's still a good deal of confusion about whether "Bon Iver" is a guy or a band. It's understandable: The Walden-esque tale of Justin Vernon's isolation while recording For Emma, Forever Ago is now the stuff of legend, but in the years since he's assembled a legion of quietly formidable collaborators who have helped flesh out the Bon Iver sound. Among them is former music student and fellow Wisconsinite Sean Carey. After first hearing For Emma on Myspace in 2007, legend has it that Carey spent two weeks in his bedroom figuring out all the songs' percussion parts and harmonies. Booked as the opener for one of Vernon's early Bon Iver shows, Carey sang some Emma songs backstage and Vernon asked him to join the band that night. While this story doesn't exactly have the mysterious allure of Vernon's whole cabin-in-the-woods creation myth, it does pretty accurately capture Carey's role in the band: the talented yet dutiful behind-the-scenes guy with an ear for deconstructing arrangements.
Carey's first solo offering, the ambient-inspired folk of All We Grow, was a muted rustle of a record, and what it lacked in the strong vocal and storytelling elements of Bon Iver's music it made up for in elegantly realized arrangements and a warmed-breeze atmosphere. But if All We Grow had the benevolent glow of a Wisconsin sunset, Carey's new EP, Hoyas, sounds like a soundtrack for an ice-slicked, insomniac winter drive. Blending mumbled folk and bleary-eyed blips, lead-off track "Two Angles" sounds like the Postal Service might have if Jimmy Tamborello's tapes had gotten lost in the mail and accidentally ended up on Phil Elverum's doorstep. Muffled by a fog of gently distorted guitar chords, pulsating synths, and horns that sound so distant it's like they were plucked from somebody else's dream, Carey's voice never raises above a whisper.
Vocals and lyrics are usually the least compelling elements of Carey's music. The guy's definitely not a bad singer, he's just not a terribly distinct one, and on Hoyas, he proffers an interesting-- if kind of low-hanging-- solution to this problem: How about some Auto-Tune? All of the tracks except for "Two Angels" feature the sort of vocals that can't help but recall the Bon Iver's Kanye-famous a cappella track "The Woods". Carey's Auto-Tuned vocals don't serve the emotional gut-punch that Vernon's do, but his monotone delivery on the tracks "Inspir" and "Avalanche" show that stirring catharsis isn't exactly his aim. Instead, Hoyas expresses a fascination with the relationships between the synthetic and organic, between distance and intimacy, and between folk tradition and digital vocabulary. But the steely elegy of "Inspir" shows that across all of these divides, Carey's not interested in taking sides, instead mapping the terrain where they all converge.
That Carey's day job is playing in such an acclaimed, frequently be-memed band as Bon Iver is, of course, a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it will prove difficult for him to shed the "guy from Justin Vernon's backing band" tag should he ever choose to do something radically different, but for now, because Carey's music never strays far from that familiar neck of the woods, it means he's got a built-in fanbase. Carey might be a lackluster frontman, but he's an expert vibesman-- and maybe Vernon's infamous squirminess to his own acclaim has shown Carey that it's not a terrible position to be in; it's probably no great disappointment to Carey that he's unlikely to earn any solo Grammys or spawn any joke Tumblrs any time soon. Hoyas is at its best when it sounds like Carey's disappearing.


Richmond-based singer/songwriter Lucy Dacus' No Burden is an uncommonly warm indie rock record. Lead guitar lines pour in like slow columns of sunlight, and Dacus' voice itself is a comforting blur.

No Burden

Two songs on Richmond-based singer/songwriter Lucy Dacus' debut album No Burden contain the same chorus: "Without you I am surely the last of our kind/ Without you I am surely the last of my kind." The songs, "Dream State..." and "...Familiar Place," seem to complete each other elliptically, and approach their shared lyric through two different paths; the first describes a flood, both emotional and physical, while the second finds its narrator crawling through a dead garden. Both choruses seem to obey the physics of dreams: people are lost irretrievably, landscapes shift from domestic to alpine. Dacus conveys the warm, human perspective at the center of this turning vortex, a person trying to survive the infinite flow of change.
No Burden is an uncommonly warm indie rock record. Lead guitar lines pour in like slow columns of sunlight, and Dacus' voice itself is a comforting blur. "I let my mind get turned inside out/ Just to see what the kids were laughing about," she sings on "Direct Address." "And it wasn't worth understanding/ Something I could've gone my whole life not knowing." Her perspective is sober and carefully composed, but the blur in her voice also gives her songs the casual, permissive dimension that usually slips in after two or three drinks. "I thought you'd hit rock bottom, but I'm starting to think that it doesn't exist," she sings in "Strange Torpedo." "You've been falling for so long and you haven't hit anything solid yet."
The record is full of these candid and severe observations. "I Don't Wanna Be Funny Anymore" describes the arthritic inflexibility of social roles. "Is there room in the band?" Dacus asks. "I don't need to be the frontman/ If not then I'll be the biggest fan." Dacus herself intended to study film before focusing on music; "I Don't Wanna Be Funny Anymore" and the rest of No Burden seems a product of this wavering and observational focus. The people in her songs seem to naturally settle into realms of instability and ambiguity.
Becoming "no burden" means exerting zero pressure on the world, suspending yourself in a sphere of your own consciousness, as if sealed into a dream. Of course, removing yourself from the world and others is its own inverse pressure. Your body, mind, and their obscure combinations will carry, shift, and broadcast weight from any position they take up in space. "If you hadn’t come over, I would be so much colder," Dacus sings in "Dream State…" "I would be much less confused." Everything, No Burden seems to suggest, is burden.


The Olympia, Wash., black-metal band returns with the climactic, colossal, final installment in a trilogy that started with their 2007 album, Two Hunters. Here, they mix lengthy tracks with heavily textured interludes and make beautiful use of vocals from collaborator Jessika Kenney.

Wolves in the Throne Room: Celestial Lineage

Celestial Lineage

In a 2009 Show No Mercy interview with Olympia "astral black metal" band Wolves in the Throne Room, I mentioned that, as a byproduct of their relative success outside of the underground, they'd inevitably be on the receiving end of plenty of scenester backlash. (Black metal can be a strange place: at times, it's more acceptable to remain boring and unknown than be ambitious and heard.) A couple of years later, United States black metal in general is at an interesting point. The scene, or lack thereof, is something I've been going on about for the last few years; now, on the backs of crossover "experimental black metal" acts like Krallice and Liturgy, it's nudging into even more mainstream corners. And this time, there's more at stake than the ire of a 16-year-old Darkthrone fan.
Sure, there are longtime USBM diehards like Inquisition, Absu, and Averse Sefira, groups who've been there for decades, and who will keep releasing strong albums without showing up on your non-metal friend's iPod. That said, even three years ago, nobody would've expected Liturgy to share the stage with Dirty Projectors at a New Yorker festival. (Or, earlier this year, to play MoMA on their own merits, and not as part of a Banks Violette black metal-themed installation.) There will always be an underground, but these days, once you are outside of it, the opportunities are bigger. More important than scene cred and these crossovers, though, is the fact that American black-metal bands-- no longer the punchline of Scandinavian lifers-- are making truly staggering music.
Wolves in the Throne Room sit somewhere between the crossovers and the kvlt. Since forming in 2004, brothers Aaron and Nathan Weaver (and the occasional rotating bandmate) have tied early-90s Northern European sounds (especially Burzum and Ulver) and the progressive reach of San Francisco forebears Weakling to the Pacific Northwest, pushing the genre into new places without sacrificing its core. (Outspoken environmentalists, they live on a self-sufficient farm in Washington state.) To the chagrin of many of the band's later fans, they followed their biggest moment, 2007's Two Hunters, with 2009's Black Cascade, a collection of less-penetrable, 10-plus minute, stripped back, droning, unrelenting time-stretchers. Despite the running time, it was a pure, concise collection-- the sound that remains after the last log turns to ash in your campfire. Celestial Lineage, on the other hand, gains power via accumulation. (Press materials reference Popul Vuh, the Grateful Dead, Neurosis, and "Theosophists, beatniks… the back-to-the-land movement, satanic hippies, tree-spiking anarchist punks.") It takes the blisteringly insistent, gorgeously rousing, hypnotic repetitions on Black Cascade and jams them back into the more sylvan earlier records, 2006's Diadem of 12 Stars and the aforementioned Two Hunters.
Where the past two albums each had four songs of longer duration, Celestial gives us seven, spacing out the mammoths with briefer interludes. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who first surfaced on Two Hunters and has also worked with Sunn O))), Sun City Girls, Asva, and Mamiffer, sings on three tracks. Former Isis howler (and current Mamiffer member) Aaron Turner contributes atmospheric chanting of the two-minute "Permanent Changes in Consciousness". "Rainbow Illness" introduces noisy synth washes, and the dramatic, goth-liturgical chimes of the female-fronted, six-minute "Woodland Cathedral", feels like a continuation of Two Hunter's "Dea Artio".
It probably is. Wolves in the Throne Room consider Celestial Lineage the last installment in a trilogy that started with Two Hunters, and perhaps their last album as a band (at least in its current form)-- this is the climactic, colossal finale. In that regard, the epic, more metallic outpourings are the best they've done. We've posted the ethereal, harsh, 12-minute opener "Thuja Magus Imperium", with its psychedelic guitar freakouts, chiming bells, female choirs, field recordings, endless guitar/synth sustain, buzzing shoegaze, and monster dynamics. The seven-minute "Subterranean Initiation", in turn, spirals into infinity, layering in keyboards that come off like a celestial choir amid the frantic drums and levitating guitars. They locate a harsher, more earthly feel on "Astral Blood", a song with an anthemic, post-punk vibe that surfaces after a windy, gently pastoral acoustic interlude. The 11-minute closing track, "Prayer of Transformation", works as a synth-entwinted instrumental for 5 minutes before Weaver screams: "Lay your corpse upon a nest of oak leaves/ Wrapped in a star shroud repent your flesh/ A shadow child dissolves/ Meditate in a den of skins and straight poles... A vessel awaits built from owl feathers and moss," among other things. It's rare for a black-metal song to choke you up.
Despite being relative latecomers to the game, and even though they're fucking with the template more than purists would like, Celestial Lineage feels like the contemporary American scene's defining statement after San Francisco group Weakling's seminal 2000 offering Dead As Dreams. Since their early days, Wolves have grown assured, but haven't overstepped. The sound is enormous, but remains organic (at times, you can almost hear leaves rustling). It's true black metal creating its own rules, and a testament to the band that it can tweak something this much and still sound like it's sticking to the script. That said, though it's not the purest version, it's also not the most eccentric. In some ways Celestial feels like a throwback when compared to the claustrophobic experimentation of some of Leviathan's headier pieces or the genre-shifting hyper-speed "occult metal" of contemporary Absu. Thing is, though, unlike a lot of that other stuff, it also feels like a classic.


Recorded over three years, the former Grandaddy leader's debut LP sounds like... a Grandaddy album. Thankfully, a good one.

Yours Truly, The Commuter

It bears repeating: What a strange world Jason Lytle inhabits. As the frontman for Modesto, California-based Grandaddy, he sang about homemade pets, homesick space miners, and carpool jockeys struck dumb by the natural world. Three years after that band's final breaths, his world has grown no less odd. On his first solo album, he sets songs about dead dogs and birds on suicide watch to technorganic arrangements featuring ELO guitars, from-the-heart-of-space synths, and steady, stoic drums-- if drums can be said to sound stoic, which in Lytle's world, why the hell not? With Grandaddy, Lytle sung his mock epics with such earnestness that many took them as ironic, which itself is a little ironic. But then as now, his songs work because they are deeply sincere, and that sincerity makes them sound all the more awestruck and imaginative.
So Yours Truly, The Commuter sounds an awful lot like a Grandaddy album-- not just another Grandaddy album, though, but a really good one, the best since Sumday. Relocated from Modesto to Bozeman, Mont., he recorded these dozen songs over three years, sequestering himself in his home studio to indulge the perfectionism he says he couldn't entertain with the band. It's a return, of sorts, to his roots: Grandaddy was born as a solo bedroom project for Lytle in the mid-90s and mutated into a full band. Such care and attention show through in these songs, which generally sound a little spacier and synthier than the band's records. On the other hand, in three years you'd think he could have come up with a better album cover.
Yours Truly opens with what sounds like a thumb piano playing a quiet overture, which is interrupted first by a foundational bass rhythm and then by Lytle's warmly familiar voice:
Lytle: "Last thing I heard I was left for dead."
Comically high-pitched chorus: "Yeah?"
Lytle: "I could give two shits about what they said. I may be limping, but I'm coming home."
Is this a rebuke to critics who greeted Grandaddy's final breaths with enthused ambivalence, to no-longer-amicable bandmates, or to some made-up tormentors too quick to turn their backs on him? Whatever the target, the song strikes a defiant early note, and because it's not only a solo album but a solo debut, it's tempting and perhaps way too easy to read way too much into such moments. But Yours Truly is strong enough to absorb whatever interpretation you throw at it and still retain some of its mystery. Besides, defiance fits Lytle like s a sleek spacesuit. The title track immediately restores some of the old grandeur to his signature sound, and songs like the defensive "Ghost of My Old Dog" and the piano lament "This Song Is the Mute Button" have unexpected bite.
"I see the pretty in things," he sings on the latter, "but you disappeared like a dream." Lytle offsets the somewhat caustic tone that creeps into some of these songs with tender ruminations on absence, which fills the album. "Rollin' Home Alone", possibly a sequel to the title track, grafts a distorted synth line to sugary canned strings to evoke a great American expanse, as if to soundtrack some long, lonely road trip. "Flying Thru Canyons" creates a churchly ambience perfectly summed up by that title. On the other hand, "It's the Weekend" is Lytle's Loverboy moment, a churning power-pop anthem that sounds like a Friday-afternoon staple on classic rock stations of the future.
As with previous albums, Yours Truly benefits from creative sequencing that winks at expectations. There are two obvious closers here, and neither of them come at the album's end. The first is the opening title track, whose chorus-- "I may be limping, but I'm coming home"-- makes Lytle sound like a true survivor, and the second is the soft lament "You're Too Gone", which ends with him singing "So long, so long" like he's floating away in a space pod. Instead, everything closes with "Here for Good", a tender, almost entropic ballad that sounds less like mission accomplished than a mission never undertaken. Again, it's tempting to read real-life connections in a song like "Here for Good". It's not that they're not there, but they don't matter. Such autobiographical trappings aren't necessary to make Yours Truly sound strangely affecting or Lytle newly reinvigorated.


The New Zealand indie rock band’s thoughtful, witty, and brief songs pit surrealism against the malaise of workaday life.

What’s Growing

Wurld Series seem to know how to escape millennial disaffection more than most. The Christchurch band, led by songwriter Luke Towart and producer and drummer Brian Feary, fight the encroaching threat of an optimized, internet-led existence by translating the pains of day-to-day corporate life into bizarre, nursery rhyme-like ditties. The resulting songs are pint-sized tonics to cure disillusionment, often-sub-two minute tracks that loop and lope away from everyday grind towards something surreal and energizing. On What’s Growing, their second album, Wurld Series shake off the lo-fi trappings of their early work, further exposing the wit and ingenuity of Towart’s lyricism and, in the process, distinguishing themselves as a band more thoughtful—and more pleasantly looney—than your average ’90s revivalists.
It would be tempting to brush What’s Growing’s sound as little more than Slanted & Enchanted-gone-2021: first single “Nap Gate,” which chugs along atop a dense, overdriven guitar groove, certainly paints an image of Towart and co. as obsessives of ’90s American indie rock. “Nap Gate,” though, doesn’t tell the whole story. There is something distinctly rural about What’s Growing due to its ever-present Mellotron lines that pick up a thread of pastoralism present in British indie music from ’60s and ’70s psych-folk through to the Young Marble Giants, channelling it into droning, mostly-instrumental passages like “Growing (For Now)” and “To the Recruiting Officer.” At the same time, Wurld Series are distinctly New Zealand-born, and occasionally feel of a piece with classic New Zealand pop bands like the Tall Dwarfs, most notably in the hypnotic, tabla-heavy interlude “I See.”
The familiarity of Wurld Series’ recombinant DNA is no issue when Towart’s writing is so gleeful, visual, and distinct. As a lyricist, many of his songs seem to focus on the ambient terrors of the platform economy, social media, and the spectre of endless work — topics that could be dull but are instead painted as compelling oddball vistas. On “Nap Gate,” hawkish, watchful bosses are rendered as gruesome monsters, standing by as a protagonist drowns in managerial gobbledygook: “Bog Lord will state that he’s never been slicker/What is your name and the service you deliver?/Company time, you’ve got to work at a loss.”
Later, the pensive “World Beating System” turns the dissociative fugue of social media overload into a single, elegant rhyme: “Everything broken down and digested freely/And through your eyes I’ll hear it, and through your mouth I’ll see/And through your nose I’ll taste it, and then I’ll cease to be.” On the see-sawing “Eliminator,” life is a video game that’s impossible to win, its villain constantly “living behind your eyes” no matter how far you run or high you climb. There is a surprising joy to be found in these simple subversions of the discomforts of everyday life, in the way they make such pressing, ineffable specters so small.
Occasionally, What’s Growing’s images become inscrutable—“Grey Men” is a decidedly sinister alien invasion fantasy set to one of the record’s most animated, noodling guitar lines, while pensieve finale “Eighteenth Giant Brother,” one of Towart’s most beautiful vocal performances, provides no image beyond the 18 giant siblings of its title. Still, that strangeness feels by design: What’s Growing pits the surreal and the avant-garde against the all-consuming sludge of late capitalism, providing an entirely new set of tools with which to escape it.

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