A modern-jazz touchstone that opened the door to the sleek introspection and sophisticated aplomb of 1950s cool jazz gets an exquisite and essential vinyl reissue.

Miles Davis: The Complete Birth of the Cool

The Complete Birth of the Cool

“And right now, ladies and gentlemen, we bring you something new in modern music,” announces Symphony Sid Torin from the stage of the Royal Roost, a chicken shack turned bebop haunt on Broadway, near Times Square. “We bring you: Impressions in Modern Music, with the great Miles Davis and his wonderful new organization.”
This introduction opens Side 3 of The Complete Birth of the Cool, a deluxe vinyl reissue of a modern-jazz touchstone that opened the door to sleek introspection and sophisticated aplomb and, fairly or not, was credited with the boom in 1950s cool jazz.
Davis was only 22 at the time of the Royal Roost gig. Best known as the trumpeter who’d bravely succeeded Dizzy Gillespie in the Charlie Parker Quintet, he had been workshopping a less mercurial, more chamberlike strain of bop in collaboration with the brilliant arranger Gil Evans. Their experiments in form and mood, fleshed out in Evans’ New York basement apartment on 55th Street, expanded on ideas that had gestated in the Claude Thornhill Orchestra before the war. Thornhill’s signature was a delicate blend of timbres, with soft projection and virtually no vibrato—a far cry from the regimental blare of a garden-variety big band. Evans, who arranged for the orchestra, famously described its effect: “The sound hung like a cloud.”
The unorthodox nonet that Davis brought to the Royal Roost in 1948—featuring bebop confreres like Max Roach (drums) and John Lewis (piano) as well as forward-thinking Thornhill alums like Lee Konitz (alto saxophone) and Gerry Mulligan (baritone saxophone)—did in fact represent “something new in modern music.” But as Symphony Sid’s next utterance implies, the ensemble wasn’t yet known by a catchy album title. Studio sessions for The Birth of the Cool were still months away, initiated by a Capitol Records producer, Pete Rugolo, who was persuaded by the gig. Those sessions would yield a series of 78-rpm sides in ’49 and ’50. The iconic moniker wouldn’t be attached to the project until a compilation album in 1957, touted on the LP jacket as “the classic recordings” that “launched a jazz era.”
Which is to say that The Complete Birth of the Cool is a repackaging of a repackaging, informed at every stage by a canny awareness of its own cachet. Seventy years since the studio recording of The Birth of the Cool, we’re equipped to understand that phrase as a signifier of aura and intention in Davis’ multifarious career. A documentary film by that name premiered at Sundance this year. It’s also the title of a new children’s book. To state the obvious, that earlier tag, Impressions in Modern Music, has a lot less mystique; The Birth of the Cool, timed to coincide with the rise of hi-fi systems and the word “cool” as a lifestyle, had a title intrinsic to its success.
The music itself is rightly considered a landmark and in this new edition, mastered from the analog session reels for the first time since ’57, its exquisite intricacies assume an almost tactile form. I’ve been listening closely to The Birth of the Cool for about as long as I’ve been listening to jazz. Hearing the new reissue on my turntable was a revelation: not so much a matter of “warmth,” as vinyl proponents often put it, but rather a function of spatial clarity.
The slithery inner voicings of Evans’ orchestration—on both a lissome swinger like “Boplicity” and the intriguing highlight “Moon Dreams”—sound present and alive in a way they hadn’t before. Some sly, murmuring touches from the tuba and French horn are clearer in the mix, without diverting from the coherence of the whole. The other arrangements, mainly by Lewis and Mulligan, shine nearly as bright; there’s a unifying style that makes each piece seem like a room in a house, with Davis’ trumpet serving as a guide. (For a present-day listener, the only truly jarring moment may be “Darn That Dream,” a vocal feature for Kenny Hagood that evokes the bandstand customs of the big-band era.)
Due to the limitations of the source material, there isn’t nearly as much improvement in the quality of the Royal Roost recordings, made on Sept. 4 and 18, 1948. (They first appeared in sanctioned form on a 1998 2-CD reissue, also titled The Complete Birth of the Cool.) So the primary selling point here is the superior sound of the studio material. The new set also features exemplary liner notes by Ashley Kahn, who connects all of the dots while preserving a big-picture narrative arc. Among the sources that Kahn quotes is the authoritative jazz critic Gary Giddins, who once wrote that The Birth of the Cool nonet went “straight from cult to classic,” at least among jazz cognoscenti. “Its musicians redesigned jazz in the ’50s,” Giddins goes on, “calming bop’s fevers, soothing its brow, bringing wreaths to its entombment.”
Davis always expressed ambivalence on the subject of West Coast “cool jazz,” which made stars out of Mulligan, trumpeter Chet Baker and others. There was a racial dynamic at play in the popularity of the style, and Davis wasn’t one to let such matters slide. “Birth of the Cool came from black musical roots,” he asserts, maybe a touch defensively, in Miles: The Autobiography, first published in 1989. “It came from Duke Ellington. We were trying to sound like Claude Thornhill, but he had gotten his shit from Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson.” At the same time, it’s worth noting how harmoniously the nonet functioned as an integrated unit. Davis heard complaints from black musicians about that, as he recalls in his book: “I just told them that if a guy could play as well as Lee Konitz I would hire him every time, and I wouldn't give a damn if he was green with red breath.” (Listen to Konitz’s harmonically daring and hummingbird-quick alto saxophone solo on “Israel,” a John Carisi tune, and the remark will make perfect sense.)
In his notes, Kahn also consults with arranger Ryan Truesdell, a leading authority on Evans, who elucidates the quantum leap of a track like “Boplicity,” in which “all the inner parts have strong melodies, much in the way you would write for strings, which brings out the strength, warmth, and color of the piece.” The Birth of the Cool not only opened the next lyrical phase in bebop’s evolution; it also foretold the expansive Davis-and-Evans collaboration realized on albums like Porgy and Bess (1959) and Sketches of Spain (1960)—feats of synthesis between jazz and symphonic music, often hailed as emblematic triumphs for the classical-jazz hybrid known as Third Stream. Davis himself regarded them as high-water marks in his recorded career.
And yet it would be an error to categorize The Birth of the Cool as a document of transition. The “birth” in the title may have been a marketing flourish, but this music did signal a new set of possibilities for modern jazz, while establishing Davis as a savvy bandleader and a leading trumpeter. The unhurried calm in his phrasing as he improvises on “Move,” the brisk opener, could be seen as a statement of intent. Even in the most boppish of circumstances, with Max Roach swinging fast behind him, Miles is going to set his own terms: unharried, unhurried, and yes, fundamentally cool. Whatever this album prefigured in his career, and in the modern-jazz discourse, it should take a backseat to an experience of the music. As this new reissue only helps clarify, The Birth of the Cool stands very much on its own—not as a counterargument or a checkpoint, but a singular achievement unto itself.


Filled as always with ridiculously catchy garage-pop hooks, Wavves’ sixth album is caught between exploring something new and rehashing something old.

You’re Welcome

Nathan Williams began making music in his early twenties. It was deft and reckless, all noise-pop, no seriousness. Wavves was an outlet for the San Diego guitarist to get melodies out of his head and let California punks let loose in the crowd. Several garage-pop veterans have figured out how to uphold youthfulness when leaving their 20s: hone your style into one that can’t be mimicked. On You’re Welcome, Williams is unwilling to part with his hooks or sharpen them, letting Wavves neither coin its sound nor push it forward. A title like You’re Welcome makes it clear Wavves believe that’s good enough to warrant fanfare. So the record sits there, limp, like a rain-soaked, half-torn blunt: satisfactory when there are no other options in sight, but an item of questionable pride to the one who unveils it.
As expected, Wavves sound best when revisiting their early tricks. “Hollowed Out” and “No Shade” follow their format to a T: descending backing vocals, drums like a metronome, and a chorus that doubles the volume of the verses bookending it. “Exercise” recaptures the spirit of King of the Beach where Williams goes from self-portrayed laggard to energy-strung hitmaker. These may be a missed opportunity to grow from rote learning, but Williams has never failed in writing catchy hooks. It just doesn’t justify settling for menial pop-punk everywhere else.
Had Wavves leaned into glossy production head-first, You’re Welcome could be a fulfilling listen, an LP of welcome change. These songs have the structure of tangled Sour Belts, full of brash noise and sugary choruses that the band half-heartedly cleans with studio tricks. Voice filters feel carefully contained. Guitar scratches sound safe. Even the spastic synth outro in “Dreams of Grandeur” presents itself in a tidy bow. Production that starts strong softens the punches it tries to land. By no means is it offensively bad—Wavves momentarily solve the problem with “No Shade,” a bite-sized number that polishes off fuzz pedals with flashy appeal—but it tends to undermine the energy of their past.
You’re Welcome fails to pick a side because Williams didn’t see the point, likely part of why he ditched Warner Bros. They traded racing summertime songs for cheapened guitar melodies, like the stringy plastic of “Daisy” and “You’re Welcome,” and snotty jokes like “Come to the Valley” playing for two minutes too long or “I Love You” existing at all. Darting through a tracklist works when capturing material that explodes at its core, something garage-pop tends to do naturally. Sauntering through a tracklist works when the material is lyric-heavy. You’re Welcome feels stale, dried of both new inspiration or improvisational allure. It’s why “Million Enemies” sounds like a cover of “My Sharona” on Oxycontin instead of an intentionally obnoxious hit. Williams wants attention and big responses, but the energy that granted him both early on is starting to slow. Now, he has become an artist who overlooks the very revisions that could have sanded down You’re Welcome’s faults.
Bands of a certain track record reap the comfortability of tenure, but their longevity is only impressive if they do something with their time. Effortless garage pop is what made Wavves a king of the beach years ago, and since then, they’ve moved in and out of lo-fi bedroom records to a roided-out major label sound to something that’s locked into a mode like early Devo left out in the sun for too long. But once a band gets older, failing to partner that initial indolence with innovation turns effortless songwriting into bitter apathy. It becomes a frontman front-flipping off a balcony onto fans half his age who just wanted music to skate to.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the 1993 debut from the Irish pop-rock band, a showcase for Dolores O’Riordan’s disarming songwriting and immaculate voice.

The Cranberries: Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We?

One Sunday afternoon in 1990, Dolores O’Riordan lugged her keyboard across Limerick, Ireland, for an audition. The 18-year-old only knew a few details about the rock band she would potentially be joining: They only wanted to play original songs and they were punnily named the Cranberry Saw Us (say it out loud).
For their part, the Cranberry Saw Us had not formed much of an identity beyond these details. The trio—drummer Fergal Lawler, guitarist Noel Hogan, and his bassist brother Mike—had grown up together in Limerick. As teens, they shared a love of breakdancing—Ireland had a robust breakdancing scene—and a fondness for the Smiths. The three had formed the Cranberry Saw Us about a year earlier but since their fourth member and frontman had departed, the band had been adrift. They had been searching for a female lead singer for months, but now that a slight, mousey candidate actually stood in front of them, they didn’t know what to make of her. However, when O’Riordan began to sing—her audition consisted of a few original tunes and a rendition of Sinéad O’Connor’s “Troy”—there was no question that they had found their new vocalist.
O’Riordan grew up about 10 miles outside Limerick in the rural townland of Ballybricken. The youngest of seven children, and one of two girls, O’Riordan learned early on that her voice would set herself apart: She was the precocious student that was asked to sing in Gaelic in front of the class, the tiny niece uncles brought around local pubs to entertain sloshed patrons. On her first day of secondary school, O’Riordan declared that she was going to be a rockstar before launching into a Patsy Cline song. She would go on to sing with a school choir that would frequently sweep the boards at Slogadh, an Irish youth arts festival. A devout Catholic, O’Riordan would later credit the church where she played the organ as the place that helped her envision music as a potential career. In 1992, she contextualized her band’s success as a kind of religious karma: “I could be just superstitious, but I think what’s happening now is a kind of a reward.”
After the audition, as O’Riordan headed out the door, the band handed her a tape with a loose sketch of a song—maybe she could think of some lyrics? The track consisted of four simple chords but, as O’Riordan remarked a few years later, “I took them home and I just wrote about me.” One week later she returned with a song that would change the foursome’s lives. Inspired by O’Riordan’s first kiss and the swift sting of rejection, “Linger” condenses every stage of heartache into four-and-a-half minutes of pop perfection with a few humble tools: an acoustic guitar riff, O’Riordan’s wistful humming, Lawler’s rolling drumbeat, and swooning orchestrals that aim for visions of grandeur far beyond the cheap synthesizer that produced them. The problem, as O’Riordan tells it, is that she gave her heart to someone, they stomped on it, and now she’s left holding the pieces. “But I’m in so deep/You know I’m such a fool for you/You got me wrapped around your finger,” she sings, her Irish brogue warming the edges of every syllable. All she wants is a little compassion moving forward: “Do you have to let it linger?”
As if galvanized by their new member, the band quickly began writing and performing with a newfound intensity. As O’Riordan later recounted, she initially assumed that people would find the cards-on-the-table emotion of songs like “Linger” too “girlie girlie.” “The music was so emotional I found that I could only write about personal things….I was sure that it would be considered soppy teenage crap, especially in Limerick, because most bands are really young (men), and their lyrics are humorous or mad. They don’t go pouring their hearts out,” she said. But the appreciation of O’Riordan’s vulnerability proved a point: everybody’s got a heart that breaks.
Once relegated to brief mentions in the local newspaper, by the summer of 1991, the band—now blessedly called the Cranberries—were British indie media darlings, especially after they signed a reported six-figure deal with Island. The press was especially charmed with O’Riordan, who was initially as unguarded in interviews as she was in song. Despite her shy nature and tendency to sometimes perform with her back to the audience, O’Riordan became the band’s mouthpiece, offering soundbites about her unfamiliarity with basic music equipment and passionate endorsement of the Catholic church.
That fall, Melody Maker visited the O’Riordan home in the Ballybricken and spotlighted the family’s soon-to-be-slaughtered Christmas turkeys, a kitschy Jesus clock, and supposed “gallons and gallons of Lourdes holy water.” “The Cranberries in general, and Dolores in particular, bring new meaning to words like innocence and naivete,” an Irish magazine quipped. (“Just because every second word isn’t ‘fuck’ and every song isn’t about sexual intercourse, people think it’s innocent,” O’Riordan retorted in 1992.) O’Riordan’s songwriting was vulnerable and her origins were certainly humble. But more often than not, these details played into sexist attitudes that align emotional awareness with fragility rather than a certain strength.
In March of 1993, after extensive soul-searching and some behind-the-scenes managerial drama, the Cranberries released their debut, Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? If the band’s initial ascent to fame had exploited O’Riordan’s sensitivity as an oddity, Everybody Else bears no evidence that her heart was hardened as a result. “Linger” reappears and ascends to “Be My Baby”-levels of yearning thanks to the grandiose handiwork of producer Stephen Street, who had worked with the band’s beloved Smiths on albums like Meat Is Murder and The Queen Is Dead. “Dreams,” which articulates how falling in love is thrilling and terrifying all at once, achieves similar heights. From the first words out of O’Riordan’s mouth—“Oh my life/Is changing every day/In every possible way”—“Dreams” embraces the uncertain adventure ahead. With every new line, the band seems to breathe in fresh new air, constantly revitalizing themselves in real-time; at one point, O’Riordan lets out a defiant yodel, a vocal tradition that she was taught by her father.
Everybody Else is an album about relationships and the ways that a pair of people can love and hurt each other with equal intensity. Unfortunately, O’Riordan is consistently the one whose heart is getting broken. (“I was always one for the tears,” she once said.) Across 12 songs, the wind that once swept O’Riordan up into a gust of romantic euphoria has disappeared, leaving her desperate to understand where she—or her lover—faltered and everything fell apart. “Sunday” examines the dissolution from both sides, beginning with the other person’s unhurried romantic indecision, which is conveyed atop a gentle string arrangement. As if to express how destabilizing this waffling makes her feel, when it’s O’Riordan’s turn to vocalize her own perspective, the song shifts into a tighter, more upbeat melody. “You’re spinning me around/My feet are off the ground/I don’t know where I stand/Do you have to hold my hand?,” she tells her aloof lover. “You mystify me.”
While only “Dreams,” “Linger,” and “Sunday” channel swirling bliss, every song on Everybody Else blazes a path towards catharsis. Sometimes the exact conflict O’Riordan is trying to process can be difficult to pinpoint—“Still can’t recognize the way I feel,” she sings at one point—but this is an album that sinks into the idea that simply feeling can be enough. When O’Riordan is conflicted about a breakup, as on opener “I Still Do,” the band kicks up a grungy squall around her. Meanwhile, the seething betrayal of “How” boils over into a flood of rage, urged on by a blistering guitar riff, which Noel Hogan delivers as if he were trying to outrun the fire set by O’Riordan’s anguish. The Cranberries sound ridiculously tight as a unit, but their most expressive asset is always O’Riordan’s voice. In the band’s early days, she was often compared to Sinéad O’Connor; a feeble observation rooted in the fact that they were both Irish. But on the Cranberries’ heavier songs, O’Riordan moved into a class of her own: Every syllable becomes a tussle in miniature, either ripped from her mouth in protest, spat out in disgust, or bursting forth in delicious victory. On “Not Sorry,” you can hear her lips curl around each word: “Cause you lied, lied/And I cried/Yes, I cried, yes I cry, I cry, I try again,” she bellows, channeling the Gregorian chants that captivated her as a child.
As a songwriter, O’Riordan paid little attention to poetics and instead focused on firm, recurring questions: How do I feel now, what do I do next, can I learn anything from this? It is selfish songwriting that ends up being remarkably generous: O’Riordan’s recognition of her own emotional depths is affirming. Every matter of the heart is treated like a butterfly pinned under glass, a quietly complex entity deserving of appreciation for simply managing to once exist in this cruel world.
Everybody Else was far from an immediate hit in Europe. Across the Atlantic, however, “Linger” wormed its way up the college radio charts and soon its Godard-inspired video was receiving heavy rotation on MTV; its ethereal take on angst was a welcome divergence from grunge’s takeover. Spurred by the Cranberries’ American success and the re-release of “Dreams” and “Linger” as singles, by 1994, the album would hit No. 1 on the charts in the UK. Soon enough, O’Riordan couldn’t shop for underwear without being mobbed. Not since U2 a decade prior had an Irish band inspired such pandemonium. The band quickly capitalized on their popularity with a second album, 1994’s No Need to Argue, which featured the gigantic hit, “Zombie,” a protest anthem defined by O’Riordan’s commanding vocal performance.
Predictably, since they are the album’s poppiest moments, “Linger” and “Dreams” were the tracks on Everybody Else that would leave the largest impact through their ubiquity in film and television. Within a year of Everybody Else’s release, “Dreams” had become Angela Chase’s anthem on My So-Called Life; “Linger” later soundtracked a romantic flashback in the 2006 Adam Sandler comedy Click; a Cantonese cover of “Dreams” by Faye Wong appeared in Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express and became a still-beloved song in Asia.
One recent afternoon, desperate for some levity, I turned to Derry Girls, a silly sitcom about teens coming of age in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, right around the time that the Cranberries were ascending. At the end of the first season, “Dreams” plays over a powerful scene that contrasts the young friend group dancing while their parents watch a report of an explosion on television. The moment had a two-fold poignancy as a depiction of youthful innocence but also as a serendipitous tribute to O’Riordan, who died as a result of an accidental drowning the same month that the show premiered. “Dreams” burst through the screen and pierced through my veil of depression. Soon enough, Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? was playing on repeat; O’Riordan’s commitment to being fully present in her emotional reality was like an intravenous drip of clarity, helping me understand that the only real way through pain is to face it head-on. The Cranberries held out a hand that gave me—and countless others—the strength to feel.


Shania Twain’s fifth studio album and first in 15 years feels courageous. Her songs are modern and pleasant but the specter of her life’s temporary collapse hangs over its best tracks.

Now

Shania Twain’s return to public life and performance is the foundation of one of this decade’s most remarkable comeback stories. If it seems ludicrous that an artist with three diamond-certified albums could possibly need a “comeback,” much less a remarkable one, it’s worth taking a minute to review the one-two punch that threw Twain’s life into quiet disarray. Her vocal cords were ravaged by dysphonia, a physical disorder induced by Lyme disease and exacerbated by stress that left her unsure if she’d ever be able to sing again. And while she lost her voice, she also lost her partner: her marriage to super-producer Mutt Lange fell apart in 2008 after Twain learned about his affair with her best friend.
It’s not like Twain had anything left to prove: her album sales are unimpeachable, and her influence has grown to encompass almost every musician with a passing interest in pop—Taylor Swift to Sheer Mag. (Listen to Haim’s “You Never Knew” and try to imagine it existing without “Love Gets Me Every Time.”) The skepticism she weathered from country traditionalists made it easier for contemporary boundary-pushers like Sam Hunt and Maren Morris to blaze their own trails. She would’ve earned plaudits just for settling into a comfortable Las Vegas residency and the occasional charming cameo on “American Idol” or “Broad City”. It’s in this light that Now, her fifth studio album and first in 15 years, feels courageous: a woman who’s enjoyed several careers’ worth of success and pain is searching for a place in a musical landscape that’s unrecognizable compared to her salad days. It’s the kind of leap you don’t take unless you have something you really need to say.
Now is a pure expression of Twain’s intent: she wrote and produced every song on the album, curated its additional four producers, and laid down strict guidelines regarding their involvement and the album’s sound. “I told anyone getting involved musically to forget about my other records,” she told Rolling Stone in February. “I didn’t want it to be related to Mutt’s productions at all. I wanted a more organic approach.” To appreciate the creative risk this decision represents, you have to understand the nature of Twain and Lange’s partnership. Their collaboration on mega-smashes like The Woman in Me and Come on Over reflected their romantic connection: they had a deep respect for each other and a sincere belief in the work they were doing, even if no one else did.
”Mutt was incredible with the feel and groove of a song,” Twain wrote in her intense 2011 memoir From This Moment On, “and my challenge was to write lyrics and melody to his phrasing.” This division of labor made Twain one of the best-selling artists in musical history, so it’s hard to argue with the results. She and Lange would alternate scraps of lyric and ideas on a single notepad, their two minds coming together as one. “As much as I loved Mutt as my husband, it’s possible I admired him even more for the unique way his musical mind worked,” wrote Twain. “It was as though the only person who really had the whole thing in his head all at one time was Mutt.”
Left to her own devices, Twain’s album touches on her past glories without leaning too heavily on them. Its eclecticism is an extension of her work with Lange on 2002’s Up!—an album famously released in “country,” “pop,” and “world” mixes to capture the greatest possible international market share—but there’s nothing about Now that feels cynical or even boardroom-tested, even with songs that sound like clear descendants of the Chainsmokers (the aching “Poor Me”) and OMI’s summer 2015 hit “Cheerleader” (”Let’s Kiss and Make Up”). Instead, it sounds like the work of an artist who’s written and spoken frankly about country as a means to an end rather than an abiding passion. Twain is still putting together load-bearing vocal arrangements: hooks like the ones at the heart of “Swingin’ With My Eyes Closed” or the Motown-lite romp “You Can’t Buy Love” throw off as much light as anything on Come on Over— but she isn’t going out of her way to cover up the combined effects of illness and age on her voice. The top of her range has been sanded down, and the residual grit is pebbled through a voice that was once uniformly crisp and clean.
And while Now still rings with Twain’s irrepressible optimism, its most impactful songs explore what happens when that unstoppable force meets heart-shattering, life-changing betrayal. Twain is adamant that Now isn’t a “divorce album.” Her marriage to Lange ended nearly a decade ago, and she’s long since moved on and found happiness with her ex-best friend’s own jilted lover. This isn’t her version of Lemonade. She’s never been able to summon that kind of righteous fury.
Yet the specter of her life’s temporary collapse hangs over the album like a shadow. She sounds a world away from the sassy, effervescent icon of “That Don’t Impress Me Much” on songs like “I’m Alright” and “Where Do You Think You’re Going,” piercing and desperate even as they end on hopeful notes. (Her writing is particularly bleak on the former: “I tried to scream/But silence haunted/Me in my sleep/Oh, and probably always will.”) Even at her bubbliest, darkness is always just outside the rear-view mirror. “Let’s Kiss and Make Up” is a plea for communication masquerading as lightweight tropical house: “Let’s be honest, let’s be open/We’re not broken, not yet.” And on lead single “Life’s About to Get Good,” jaunty strumming belies extreme vulnerability: “I trusted you so much, you’re all that mattered/You no longer loved me and I sang like a sad bird/I couldn’t move on and I think you were flattered.” Twain never quite reaches jubilance. She has to settle for relief.
Now can’t help but suffer by comparison to Twain’s absolute zenith, both in terms of musical potency and commercial performance. These are pleasant songs, but Twain and Lange’s perfectionism meant even the weakest cuts on The Woman in Me and Come on Over were weapons-grade pop; her label is already brushing off her recent singles’ poor showing at radio and on the charts. (”[Radio is] the magnifier,” said UMG Nashville president Cindy Mabe to The New York Times, “but frankly, does she need it? No. She’s a global icon.”) There’s an air of inevitability to Twain’s upcoming world tour: she’ll play the hits to legions of adoring fans, and they’ll hit the concession stands as soon as they hear an unfamiliar note.
This album deserves more, if only because it successfully conveys Twain’s one immutable strength: her personality. Her space in our collective cultural memory has as much to do with her character—her pluck, her unpretentious elegance, her genial nature—as her melodies or stomping arrangements. Even after tens of millions of albums sold and a decade-plus out of the spotlight, she still feels a little like your daffy aunt: ready for a campfire singalong, quick with a bottle of Pinot Grigio, and overeager with an exclamation mark. Time can’t take that away; trauma can’t take it away, either.


Chaz Bear delivers a smartly crafted, comfortably mid-fi album of grooves and melancholy—it’s one of his best albums in years.

Outer Peace

With Toro y Moi’s last album, 2017’s pleasant but often forgettable Boo Boo, it seemed possible that Chaz Bear was running out of new ways to make his habitually laid-back music register a pulse. He’d already spun his sound in seemingly every possible permutation, from lo-fi sampledelia to instrumental disco to guitar-crunched indie rock and back again. On Boo Boo, with tempos sagging like a wet paper bag, his production chops too often outstripped his songwriting abilities—a weakness that had dogged Bear (fka Chaz Bundick) since his debut.
But on Outer Peace, Bear sounds revitalized: Buoyed by a refined take on the kinds of dance music he has occasionally toyed with as Les Sins, his woozily recumbent sounds snap to attention. It’s the most smartly crafted Toro y Moi album since 2011’s Underneath the Pine, bringing Bear’s stylistic savvy and studio finesse to some of the stickiest songs in his catalog. Lean, packing 10 tracks in just over half an hour, his sixth album is frontloaded with breezy, house-inspired grooves, shot through with bassline after truly excellent bassline, and fleshed out with a handful of surprisingly affecting sad-trap tearjerkers. The production is comfortably mid-fi—neither expensively hi-def nor self-consciously distorted or tape-warped—yet it sounds remarkable on headphones or good speakers, the rare example of indie dance whose sound design could go toe to toe against most “proper” dance music. It will make any car ride approximately 300% more enjoyable.
In a typical slacker move, Bear wears the low stakes—a mid-career album from an artist closely identified with a cultural moment rapidly receding in the rear-view—on his sleeve. On the giddy single “Freelance,” he turns a filtered vocal line into a garish cavalcade of gagging noises, like a French house tune sung by Bill the Cat. On “Laws of the Universe,” he sings about Prometheus and Bob, claymation characters on the late-1990s Nickelodeon series “KaBlam!”; he mutters that James Murphy is spinning at his house, playing “all rare shit from Flying Dutchman”— a wry and meta-meta double LCD Soundsystem reference. (“I met him at Coachella,” he deadpans. That’s not the only indie inside joke here: On “Monte Carlo,” he rhymes “PDX to OAK” with “Isaac Brock I float away.”)
But such gags are more tongue-in-cheek window dressing for the album’s spry synth lines, 1990s-inspired chord stabs, and sparkling little details—like a few lines of Ugly Casanova’s “Hotcha Girls” interpolated into “Freelance,” just because. “Laws of the Universe” harbors the funkiest guitar lick this side of George Benson; on “Monte Carlo,” the silky way he sings the phrase “1997 Monte Carlo” is so satisfying—run through Auto-Tune and delivered in the staccato cadence of contemporary rap—you could happily loop it for an hour and drift away, Chuck Person style.
Given the gloomy national mood (and the fact that Spotifycore has made a mockery of all things hazily supine), it’s easy to be skeptical of the entire premise of artfully laid-back music nowadays. But if Outer Peace had a subtitle, it would probably be Inner Turmoil. A deep, abiding melancholy runs beneath the record’s house-party vibe. Bear’s cool sigh frequently sounds like the aural approximation of bedhead, his vowels tousled, his consonants shying away from the light. Whether multi-tracked in close harmony or applied like superfine sandpaper, his voice has never been lovelier than it is here, and it trails a pensive shadow as he sings about boredom, anxiety, and ambivalence, and wonders (on two separate occasions!) if he’s getting old.
“I want a brand-new house/Something I cannot buy/Something I can’t afford,” goes the refrain of “New House,” one of the album’s sneaky highlights; it’s the recession-pop anthem we’ve been waiting for since the financial collapse of 2008. But perhaps it’s fitting that it falls to Bear to deliver it: Chillwave’s adolescent regression was always a response to the recession, even if it wasn’t recognized as such; chillwave embodied the “dream of the ’90s” insofar as the 1990s was a decade in which young people’s opportunities withered and died on the vine. A decade down the line, the unemployment rate has fallen below 4 percent but young people’s fundamental prospects haven’t gotten much better. “Uber messed up everything,” Bear grumbles on “Monte Carlo.” In the gig economy, it’s no wonder that the chorus to a song called “Freelance” would mimic someone gagging. Toro y Moi’s brilliance is to make the mere act of survival sound like so much fun.


On a wildly ambitious 80-minute opus, Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix’s shapeshifting metal band reaches its most radiant incarnation yet.

93696

For over a decade, Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix has cloaked her shapeshifting metal band Liturgy in a dense matrix of symbology. Diving into her Substack and YouTube channel, where she connects dots between Marxist thought, the Upanishads, Thomas Aquinas, and Aleister Crowley, can be as enlightening as it is mystifying. For all of Hunt-Hendrix’s theorizing, though, the music has always been thrillingly physical. It’s one thing to read about her concept of the “burst beat” and how her rapid-fire rhythms are intended to induce a state of awakening and transformation. It’s another thing to simply feel it.
Devotees willing to trawl through Hunt-Hendrix’s countless diagrammatic wireframes may notice a recurring theme, perhaps best encapsulated by the title of one of her videos: “What Will Heaven Be Like? (Part 1).” Hunt-Hendrix’s music reaches toward utopian catharsis, reshaping the craven and nihilistic timbres of black metal into blissful, glowing pillars of sound. In her manifestos, she’s described a desire to create music that pushes listeners toward self-discovery and actualization, a goal that’s taken on more personal weight after she came out as trans in 2020. “Gender dysphoria is a huge part of what made me make this music,” she told the Needle Drop. 93696, whose title is intended to mean “heaven” according to Hunt-Hendrix’s interpretation of Thelemic numerology, plays as its name suggests: This is Liturgy in their purest form, tapping all of their strengths to reach their most radiant incarnation yet.
Across 80 minutes, 93696 incorporates elements from throughout Liturgy’s evolution. The mathy riffs of 2011’s Aesthetica, the glitch-hop of 2015’s The Ark Work, and the baroque orchestration of 2019’s H.A.Q.Q. and 2020’s Origin of the Alimonies are all accounted for (even riffs and motifs from previous songs reappear here in new shapes). 93696 may not present anything Liturgy haven’t done before, but it connects their many zigzagging roads into a rich cartography. Take “Djennaration,” whose vicious symphonic assault smashes through the gates in the album’s opening minutes. As its melody unfurls, drummer Leo Didkovsky batters his snare within an inch of its life. When Hunt-Hendrix’s shriek finally emerges, surrounded by chirping flutes, she sounds as if she were trying to tear a hole through the sky. After three continuously crescendoing minutes, a hip-hop bridge suddenly drops in, its rumbling bass and coarse handclaps finding a more natural interplay than her previous dalliances into the genre.
There’s a tenderness coursing through 93696, even when the band pushes its sound to extremes. As “Haelegen II” swells from its gloomy piano intro to a sludgy, tremolo stomp, the track comes off like Hunt-Hendrix’s version of a power ballad, with Didkovsky’s rapid blastbeats intensifying its melancholic sway. On the soaring 15-minute title track, the band’s thundering riffs and head-spinning polyrhythms come laden in glockenspiels and shimmering strings, lending their violent thrashing an elegiac, mournful resolve. In between the multi-suite epics, Liturgy include an array of brief interludes that restore an eerie calm. Following the short-circuiting final attack of “Caela,” the choral voices of “Angel of Sovereignty” undulate with a yearning, baptismal tranquility. The brittle ocarinas of “Red Crown II” tremble softly, as if illuminated by the glow of a post-apocalyptic campfire.
Liturgy have always brought a proggy, sprawling ambition to their music, but rarely have all the pieces locked into place so elegantly. 93696 can be pulverizing, but it’s also gentle, and amid the brutality lie some of Hunt-Hendrix’s prettiest and most ornate songs yet. As time has gone on, Hunt-Hendrix has discussed her interest in undoing conceptions of metal as a masculinist enterprise: “We’re ripe for a feminization of metal,” she explained in a 2020 video, going on to suggest that this may be a vital path forward for the genre. Listening to her band in full command of its sound, weaving between passages of chaotic release and delicate beauty, it sounds as if Liturgy have finally found some kind of promised land.


Powered by brittle electronic drums and buzzing synths, the Congolese musician’s debut album is simultaneously bleak and exhilarating.

Rey Sapienz / The Congo Techno Ensemble: Na Zala Zala

Na Zala Zala

Two dates figure crucially in Bahati Sapiens Moïse Dhekana’s artistic career. In 2002, in his hometown of Bunia, Democratic Republic of Congo—a city of 900,000, located near Lake Albert—he formed his first band. Rapping over Congolese soukous, he earned his nickname, Rey Sapienz, el Rey Mago—the wise king. He was 12 years old. Ten years later, he traveled to Kampala, Uganda, to collaborate with artists in the city’s burgeoning electronic scene. But when civil war broke out in the DRC, just the latest conflagration in a long-running conflict that between 1996 and 2013 killed an estimated 3.5 million to 5.4 million people, Sapienz chose to remain in Kampala. He already had years of experience leading songwriting workshops in Bunia’s youth centers; in Kampala, he taught himself music production and co-founded Hakuna Kulala, the club-centric sub-label of Nyege Nyege Tapes, a hub for experimental electronic music from across East Africa.
On Sapienz’ Hakuna Kulala EP, released in 2018, he took a more laid-back approach than his labelmate Slikback, who had inaugurated the imprint. Where Slikback’s Lasakaneku EP flirted with a jarring synthesis of trap and grime, Sapienz’ debut EP floated atop gracefully syncopated drums and buoyant soukous guitar riffs. Na Zala Zala, his debut album, is at the opposite extreme from that comparatively blissful EP, following the path of 2019’s dark, eerie Mushoro. It is a heavy, turbulent affair marked by brittle electronic drums, buzzing synths, and an overwhelming chorus of voices that whisper, mutter, growl, bark, and scream, sometimes all at once. (The album is credited to Rey Sapienz and the Congo Techno Ensemble, which also includes rapper Fresh Douggis along with percussionist and singer Papalas Palata, but they sound less like a trio than a small army.) Even for listeners who can’t understand the Lingala and Swahili lyrics, the multitudinous din can be harrowing.
The abrasiveness is apparent from the very first song, “Dancehall Pigme,” in which a broken electro groove throws off sparks in the form of dissonant synth stabs. (Somewhat confusingly, the song is unrelated to another with the same title from his 2019 EP.) The vocals are split between gruff rapping and a sour wail run through a gravelly harmonizer. There’s no melody to speak of, just a succession of tones that rise and fall queasily like a heaving prow in high swells with no land in sight. “Esala Rien” blends its multi-tracked shouts and murmurs into a frightening chorus in which the only consensus is nihilism itself: “It does not matter,” runs the repeated refrain. The drums are sharp as road spikes; the wilting synth riff sounds like disappointment incarnate.
In the context of such merciless beats, the lyrics can scan as bleak, at least in translation. “I’m sick I want to heal,” runs a repeated line in “Posa Na Bika,” against mournful background harmonies; “I have become stupid/I have become useless.” In “Dancehall Pigme,” Sapienz laments having been abandoned by his biological family and asks, “What do I do to get what I deserve?” It’s not all so grim; in “96,” Sapienz, Douggis, and Papalas trade playful verses about the return of clubbing after COVID. You might not hear a sense of hope in the song’s machine-gun percussion and samples of explosions and breaking glass, but it’s impossible to miss the exhilaration in Sapienz’ jagged syncopations. (And is that an intentional reference to Kid Cudi’s “Day N Nite” in the song’s blippy synth melody?)
“Santonge,” a highlight of the album, shows how far Sapienz has come from the sunny sound of his debut. There’s not much more to the beat than dull kick drums and the sound of knives being sharpened; in the place of synthesizer, reverb rushes like a howling wind. As Sapienz chants hoarsely, the background vocalists Lemeulleur and Sekelembele howl and shriek. Pitched halfway between dancehall and black metal, it’s a blood-curdling affair that sounds less like dance music than an exorcism. Like the best heavy music, it’s as thrilling as it is terrifying.

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Following on their 2010 debut, Ghost Blonde, the Montreal noise-pop band returns with a five-song EP that finds them changing up their style from one track to the next.

Negaverse

No Joy quietly slipped their 2010 debut, Ghost Blonde, into the marketplace in late November of that year-- i.e., a commercial dead zone for releases that aren't celebrity Christmas records or quickie cash-in greatest-hits compilations. But, in retrospect, the timing was brilliant. Though unknown outside of Montreal, the fledgiing band had already made an enthusiastic fan out of indie rock's most voracious Tweeter, Best Coast's Bethany Cosentino, whose band was just then starting to pop up on year-end best-of lists for their own 2010 debut. By January 2011, Best Coast had parlayed their critical buzz into theatre-headliner status, accruing enough clout to bring their Montreal mates on tour as their hand-picked opener, and introducing them to large Stateside audiences mere weeks after their album's release.
The instant mutual-admiration society made total sense: in their infancy, both Best Coast and No Joy exhibited a fondness for swooning melodies, and an equal affinity for obliterating them in a hurriance of fuzz and reverb. But since their 2011 tour, the bands have followed markedly divergent paths: while Best Coast followed Crazy for You by hiring Jon Brion to turn them into the world's youngest dad-rock band, No Joy have answered their own debut's promise by receding even deeper into the murk. If Ghost Blonde owed a considerable debt to the pedal-stomping squall of late-80s My Bloody Valentine, Negaverse sees them adopting MBV's release strategies as well, in the form of a five-song EP that feels less like a random collection of leftovers than a stand-alone mini-album of complementary tracks.
Negaverse marks an evolution from Ghost Blonde, though not in ways you'd necessarily expect. In concert, that album's hazy-headed distort-pop was given a muscular makeover worthy of SST-era Dinosaur Jr. Negaverse, however, deemphasizes the band's live presence by highlighting both the intimacy and intricacy of their songcraft; this is a record that feels demo-quality crude yet sonically dense and deliberate at the same time.
Opener "Junior" provides a logical leap-off from Ghost Blonde, its airy melody and wordless harmonies hitched to a double-time drum stomp that, thanks to the unyielding corrosiveness of Jasamine White-Gluz and Laura Lloyd's guitars, still feels like it's moving in slow motion. But even when working within Negaverse's downsized dimensions, No Joy seem eager to reveal that there's more to their music than a simple noise/pop dichotomy: "Shame Cave" is another trash-can-thwacking Mary Chained rave-up, but one where the drums drop out in its final minute, transforming the song's reverberating guitar line and backing harmonies into a slow-dissolving swirl; "Smiley Face" takes a good half of its 3:35 runtime pulling back the slingshot before unleashing a space-bound robo-cow-punk rampage. And if Negaverse's proudly washed-out sound still provides little clue as to what White-Gluz is going on about, the enchantingly whispered "Yang Sanpanku" still manages to sculpt a dramatic arc out of what at first seems like a monolithic, buzz-killing drone; it's a song that sounds anthemic even if it lacks the basic lyrical intelligibility required of a proper anthem. Packing five songs into 15 minutes, Negaverse goes by in a blur-- but what impresses most is its sense of patience.


The Solange Knowles-curated compilation Saint Heron feels like the Flex Your Head or No New York of ambitious minimalist R&B. Although most of the songs here from the likes of Kingdom, Kelela, Sampha, and Knowles herself, have been previously released, she’s assembled them into a coherent piece that becomes something of an aesthetic manifesto.

Saint Heron

The Weeknd's House of Balloons is one of the more influential records of this decade, but thanks to Solange Knowles, “alt-R&B” would have happened without it. The sonic aesthetic she’s pieced together—a crackling experimental streak with potent pop hooks—is deeply pleasurable, and though she hasn't recorded anything as monumental as House of Balloons, people have increasingly taken notice. It's unknown whether or not Solange was attempting to claim the credit she’s owed while curating her Saint Heron compilation, but listening to it, it certainly has that result. Although most of its songs are previously released, she’s assembled them into a coherent piece that transcends the usual odds-and-sods nature of the compilation format. It's an aesthetic manifesto of a specific corner of a rapidly expanding scene—the Flex Your Head or No New York of ambitious, minimalist R&B that possesses considerable mainstream ambition and appeal.
Those loose parameters contain a broad range of sounds and styles. B.C. Kingdom’s album-opening “Lockup” and Kingdom’s “Bank Head” (featuring vocals by Kelela, whose “Go All Night” also appears) both give off a stiffly robotic funkiness—the latter through a juddering bass synth, and the former via the tasteful application of Robocop noises. Sampha’s “Beneath the Tree” is a jazzy piano ballad set to drum programming that combines elements of two-step, footwork, and Burial-style found-sound beats. Jade de la Fleur’s “Jaded” has the brutally stripped-down arrangement and smoky paranoia of a top-tier Tricky song. Spanish producer Pional's remix of South African artist Petit Noir's “Noirse" clears away the comp’s nocturnal moodiness with bright, syncopated staccato melodies passed down from township music.
Despite their different approaches, the tracks all share a few basic commonalities: deep bass unimpeded by fussy arrangements, stoner-friendly electronic textures, and a willingness to borrow from pretty much any musical style that can project stylishly understated sexiness, whether it’s post-dubstep or 4AD-style atmospheric goth. Above all, these songs are also song-focused—the artists assembled here may all have deep experimental streaks, but they never ignore pop’s pleasure principle, and there are hooks all over the place on this near-flawlessly sequenced compilation.
Solange wrote and co-produced her own wryly titled contribution, “Cash In”, and the track's one of the most aesthetically conservative songs on the compilation, featuring a straightforward beat, a relatively lush arrangement, and the kind of gracefully building, inspirational melody that slow-jam R&B hits are made from. It's the one song on Saint Heron that I could see getting radio rotation, a swaggering, graceful power move. It may have taken her a while to get to the point where she can pull such a gesture off, but in this insurgent territory, Solange reigns supreme.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Raphael Saadiq’s 2002 debut, a meticulously crafted record that bridged generations of soul and R&B.

Instant Vintage

When it came time to promote Erykah Badu’s 1997 album Baduizm, William “Kedar” Massenburg started looking for the right name to describe the sound. It needed to be short, snazzy, something to capture how artists like Badu and D’Angelo—both of whom Massenburg was managing—incorporated modern hip-hop and electronic styles into their music. He landed on “neo-soul,” and it stuck.
Neo-soul caught on quickly in no small part because it was a marketing term. The name was useful shorthand for fans and critics, but many of the artists who fell under the neo-soul umbrella didn’t appreciate it. “There’s nothing ‘neo’ about it. It’s just soul,” Raphael Saadiq said of the label during an interview about his 2002 solo debut Instant Vintage. A son of soul who, by this time, had produced and played sessions for both D’Angelo and Badu, Saadiq saw the label as limiting, an unnecessary divide between the innovation of the present and the foundation of the past: “Otis Redding would turn over in his grave right now if he heard someone say ‘neo-soul.’” Saadiq floated his own term: gospeldelic. “Gospel is for the truth in the sound and the words,” he continued. “-Delic represents the funky part and the room to experiment.”
Gospeldelic never caught on in the same way (or at all), but Saadiq committed to it anyway. Sampled voices saying the phrase are scratched into Instant Vintage’s triumphant opening track “Doing What I Can,” all shuffling bass riffs, swirling strings, and crisp drum programming. And he stands by it on the second half of the album’s closing track “Skyy, Can You Feel Me,” saying “it came from God” over a bed of wah-wah pedal and warbling synths. Functionally, gospeldelic pulls from the same tradition as neo-soul—they’re both preoccupied with the intersection of soul, hip-hop, rock, funk, blues, and electronic music. But where some artists in the neo-soul movement strove to blur the lines between old and new, Saadiq honored the old school. Instant Vintage wasn’t a vehicle for spirituality or a way to reap the benefits of a newly popular subgenre. He saw it as his duty to not just revolutionize what audiences considered to be soul music, but to breathe new life into tradition, to carry on a legacy.
Saadiq’s vision had its share of arrogance, backed up by a career that had already spanned two decades. Born Charles Ray Wiggins in 1966, he was the only one of 14 siblings to be born in Oakland, California. Music came early: He first took interest at age 6, teaching himself to play guitar, drums, and—his favorite—bass. By middle school, he was singing in gospel groups and spending summers at the Young Musicians Program at Berklee, where he was already approaching the level of a professional session musician. Days before his 18th birthday, he stumbled into the opportunity of a lifetime. He was at a studio in Oakland when he got a call that drummer Sheila E. was seeking touring musicians to join the Revolution on Prince’s upcoming Parade tour. Auditions were the next day. Other hopefuls showed up in flamboyant Prince gear but Wiggins, dressed down in jeans and a baseball cap, made quick work of his audition. When Sheila’s people asked for his name, he responded with the first one that came to mind: Raphael.
“Next thing I was in Tokyo, in a stadium, singing ‘Erotic City,’” he told The Guardian in 2009. “We were in huge venues with the biggest sound systems in the world; all these roadies throwin’ me basses, and a bunch of models hangin’ round Prince to party. For almost two years. That was my university.” But Wiggins did more than just party. Prince invited him to play bass for him at a handful of after parties on tour, which did wonders for his confidence. Two years after that first audition, he returned to Oakland and formed his own band with brother D’wayne and cousin Timothy Christian Riley, which they called Tony! Toni! Toné! (Each member remembers the name’s origins slightly differently, but all agree it started as an inside joke about a person who thinks they’re too cool for this planet.) Wiggins provided lead vocals and played bass; he wouldn’t begin producing until their second album, 1990’s The Revival. It was around this time that he officially took on the last name Saadiq, which is Arabic for “man of his word.”
The newly crowned Raphael Saadiq laid a strong foundation with his family, cultivating their modern blend of R&B and soul and earning a double platinum album, 1993’s Sons of Soul, for their troubles. But after 11 years of giving the world the Oakland stroke, Tony! Toni! Toné! parted ways in 1997 amid allegations that D’wayne, the eldest member, had mismanaged the group’s funds. (“Things just weren’t operating right,” Saadiq told NME in 2019. “We were young, we all really didn’t understand everything and [D’wayne] was sort of the leader of the group. We all had the same bank account at one time.”)
Saadiq didn’t rest long. In 1995, with the Tony! Toni! Toné! credits under his belt, he had begun to branch out as a producer. A beat with a simmering bassline he’d shopped around for six years caught the attention of D’Angelo; the two of them turned it into “Lady,” the third single from Brown Sugar. This was followed by “Ask of You,” a solo single recorded for the soundtrack of the John Singleton movie Higher Learning, which debuted at #19 on the Billboard Hot 100. There was also his induction as an honorary member of the Ummah—a collective of musicians including Q-Tip and Ali Shaheed Muhammad of A Tribe Called Quest and Detroit producer J Dilla—a connection that led him to help craft Tribe’s final two classic studio albums, Beats, Rhymes & Life and The Love Movement. After his time with the Ummah, Saadiq joined forces with Muhammad and former En Vogue member Dawn Robinson—who Saadiq had been friends with since they were 16—in the short-lived supergroup Lucy Pearl, who dropped a single self-titled album in 2000. But the partnership ended on bad terms through a combination of professional jealousy on Saadiq’s part and his reneging on plans to financially support Robinson, who’d turned down a major record deal in order to make Lucy Pearl, which resulted in Robinson losing her house.
By this time, Saadiq had burned a few bridges, but he felt he was on top of the world. What can you tell an artist who had just come off of two successful groups and produced gargantuan hits for everyone from D’Angelo—they’d scored another with 2000’s “Untitled (How Does It Feel?)”—and the Isley Brothers to TLC? But while Saadiq had accomplished a lot, he was better known as a producer and a group member than as an individual artist or a marketable solo act. Instant Vintage was the first time he took center stage, a performer, hypeman, and backing band rolled into one.
And contrary to his tutelage under a notorious perfectionist like Prince, the atmosphere Saadiq facilitated was fast and loose. That isn’t to say Instant Vintage sounds lackadaisical. By now, Saadiq’s mastery over the bass was profound: He could make a song jump, melt, or simmer with a handful of notes. Basslines on “Body Parts” and “Be Here” practically coax you between the satin sheets, while the one running through “Uptown” drips like spilled soda snaking down a hot sidewalk. The finished album has a sleek, professional quality, but throughout the recording process, Saadiq’s presence ensured the laid-back vibe of a jam session. Several guest features from artists like TLC’s T-Boz (“Different Times”) and Angie Stone and Calvin Richardson (“Excuse Me”) came from spurr of the moment recording sessions for other songs.
This spontaneity added variety to the album’s comfortingly sunny disposition. “You’re the One That I Like” and “Tick Tock” are more traditional bass-driven songs that feel like modern interpretations of Prince’s funk era. “Body Parts” and “Faithful,” two of the most spirited cuts, match the zany grooves of Fresh-era Sly & the Family Stone with orchestral embellishments: Digitized drum thumps mesh with cowbell and electric guitar streaks mingle with violins. “Be Here,” another D’Angelo collab, takes the aesthetic to cinematic heights, Saadiq’s bass notes dancing around an orchestra’s worth of strings and a steady flow of beatbox gasps. It writhes like the soundtrack to what romantic dramedy screenwriters call the “All Is Lost moment,” voicing the pain that comes with not being able to lay up with—or make breakfast for—the person you love.
Ironically, Instant Vintage comes into its own when it dips into the genre fusions of neo-soul, especially when production duo Jake & the Phatman bring hip-hop elements into the fold. The fellow Bay Area natives first connected with Saadiq while producing tracks for Lucy Pearl and became his go-to producers for years. Saadiq was already a rap fan: The Tonys made a song with DJ Quik, and Instant Vintage features interludes produced by friend Hi-Tek, as well as drum programming on “Faithful” by California DJ and producer Battlecat. But Jake & the Phatman brought their own full-bodied sheen to 10 of the album’s 18 tracks. Horns and strings on “Doing What I Can” were recorded to vinyl and then physically scratched back onto the records for added effect. The beating heart of “Still Ray” is an interpolation of Scott Storch’s iconic piano melody from Dr. Dre’s “Still D.R.E.,” which blooms around programmed kickdrums and an inexplicable tuba solo. Even on tracks that draw from more traditional soul sounds, like late highlight “Blind Man,” the snap and thump of the low end is all rap. The melodies and chord progressions on Instant Vintage would sound as comfortable in 1973 as 2003 or 2023, but they’re also begging to be chopped and looped into the shape of 16 bars.
Lyrically, Instant Vintage is decidedly less complicated than its musical arrangements might suggest. Time-tested romantic notions, like the pining of “Be Here,” “Still Ray,” and “Make My Day,” and the shoulder-to-cry-on thoughtfulness of “Tick Tock” had been Saadiq’s bread and butter since the days of the Tonys. A line like “Let me show you what you’re missing every day” sounds generic on paper, but there’s a boyish charm to his smooth, almost golden voice that helps it land like a first kiss. On the 15-minute closer “Skyy, Can You Feel Me,” Saadiq gives his most involved and passionate performance. He has said he wrote the song on the night Aaliyah died in a plane crash (“I was just feeling kinda angel-y about her,” he later told Billboard), and every high note or low rumble falls like a tear on the mic.
When it was released on June 11, 2002, Instant Vintage was inevitably lumped in with the then-peaking sounds of neo-soul. But it was both too reverent and too amorphous to find solid footing there. For all of the album’s genre fusions, there are songs that feel like boxes on a checklist: the Sly song, the Stevie song, the Smokey song. Nothing sounds ingenuine, but Saadiq occasionally leans a little too hard on emulation, and the album is at pains to show its work in a way that, say, Badu’s Mama’s Gun and D’Angelo’s Voodoo aren’t. Instant Vintage is timeless when it wants to be, but also desperate to be of a time, flexing for the traditionalists, making sure you recognize the significance of every moving part. This made it catnip for loyalists who’d followed Saadiq since his Tony! Toni! Toné! days, and even earned some award nods: He scored a Grammy nomination for Best R&B Album and two more for “Be Here” (Best R&B Song and Best Urban/Alternative Performance). But commercially, Instant Vintage was no Voodoo—the album debuted at No. 25 on the Billboard 200 and stalled at 168,000 copies sold, numbers that inspired MCA/Universal to end Saadiq’s contract.
Regardless, he emerged from Instant Vintage with his head high, gushing to the press about the influence of Quincy Jones and Stevie Wonder and how, after years of collaboration and compromise, he’d made something that felt completely, unapologetically his. The prominence of neo-soul has faded and “gospeldelic” never really got off the ground, but Saadiq’s particular hybrid strain created a ripple effect that remains easy to detect. The second act of California band the Internet’s career, from their 2015 breakthrough Ego Death through the members’ respective solo projects and their 2018 reunion Hive Mind, shares a spiritual kinship. Multihyphenate crooners like Leon Bridges, Anderson .Paak, Bruno Mars, and Steve Lacy all borrow from Saadiq’s blueprint, a vision of music’s future grounded in the warmest and funkiest sounds of its past.
After being dropped from Universal, Saadiq started his own label, called Pookie, and used his next albums, 2004’s Ray Ray and 2008’s The Way I See It (released with Sony), to dig further into the musical histories of Blaxploitation funk and doo-wop. He’s released solo albums, scored television and movies, and produced for Beyoncé, Solange, and Brent Faiayz. Perhaps it all could have happened without Instant Vintage—he was already a respected producer—but Saadiq needed to be sure that his vision would survive outside the security of a group. For all its virtuosity, Vintage is home to some of his catchiest earworms and warmest basslines—an imperfect but inspired reminder of the value of grooving to your own beat.


Dedicated to an incarcerated man who spent years fighting wildfires in California’s Sierra Nevada, Crampton’s latest album confronts the systems of oppression hidden in plain sight.

ORCORARA 2010

For thousands of years, the Sierra Nevada mountains regularly pulsed with wildfires. Lit by indigenous tribes like the Yurok and the Karuk, these controlled burns kept local ecosystems thriving, clearing weeds and detritus that, if left to accumulate, could fuel devastating infernos. When the state of California instituted fire control measures in the early 20th century, that kindling began to build up. Dried out by global warming, the state’s forests have succumbed to hellish blazes in the past few years, many of which have been fought by prison laborers making less than minimum wage alongside trained firefighters. It’s a phenomenon that nearly condenses the myriad horrors of the contemporary United States into a single scene: a forest on fire, thrown out of rhythm by centuries of colonialism, hosed down by people caught in the gears of the prison industrial complex.
Elysia Crampton, the American Indian producer whose experimental electronic music ranks among the most singular and idiosyncratic of the past decade, dedicates her latest full-length release to Paul Sousa, a man “who while incarcerated, worked years as an inmate firefighter across the Sierra Nevada of California.” This image hangs over ORCORARA 2010, which was originally released as the soundtrack to an installation Crampton debuted at the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2018. It was first meant to be heard in a dark room throbbing with diffuse light, an environment where sound overwhelms the senses and the mind can fall into a trance state. As an album, ORCORARA 2010 calls back to that method of listening. Its slow, sparse gestures reward patient attention with delicate, enveloping beauty.
On Crampton’s tight, condensed self-titled album from 2018, voices flitted in and out like stray transmissions from distant broadcast towers. Here, the voice emerges as a central instrument by way of a handful of guests. Jeremy Rojas layers a spoken-word performance atop several piano-driven tracks that set the record’s oblique narratives in motion, while the New York-based singers Embaci and Shannon Funchess appear at two of the album’s high points. Embaci’s classically trained voice darts between tangled acoustic guitars, droning synthesizers, and owl calls on “Grove,” a song whose placidity belies a gut-deep restlessness. Twin guitar lines strobe in and out of sync, and her voice lifts away from the confusion, gliding and searching. Later, Light Asylum’s Funchess, whose unmistakable voice graced the Knife’s 2013 album Shaking the Habitual, makes an earthshaking appearance on “Crucifixion,” a slowly building piece that increasingly sounds like it’s on the verge of toppling. There’s no steady beat to ground her stirring vibrato, just a thicket of quavering instruments, digital and physical, that pulse until a frenetic piano and drum breakdown ushers her out.
The album’s spoken-word segments return continually to the concept of twilight, a charged and liminal state where daylight ebbs away and the clean lines between seen objects tend to blur. “I confused you with the twilight/Confusing myself with you,” says guest vocalist Fanny Pankara Chuquimia on the tranquil meditation “Crest.” In this dusk, boundaries between people—between the self and the other, the “I” and the “you”—soften. Thoughts and desires become harder to constrain inside a single body. Feeling bleeds from skin to skin, and the individual dissolves into the environment.
Full of slippage and lacunae, whipping itself from moment to moment and then fading, ORCORARA 2010 is so absorbing as to make the world outside it seem bizarre, and in this it has political power: There are a great many systems of harm that survive on habit. Enough people have accepted that it is normal to lock others away in cages and send them out to fight fires when the fires get out of hand. Enough people agree upon the many acts of violence sustaining this and other countries that the atrocity is naturalized, a distant but constant pillar of a certain way of life. These systems are bigger than any one person and yet sustain themselves on individuals networked in covert agreement, people who act as porous cells for mass behavior. What would it take to agree on something else—something less painful, where fewer of us die? In its hypnotic and generative confusion, ORCORARA 2010 bores open a portal to a life hiding just beyond this one.


The follow up to 2016's revelatory Islah offers another showcase for the Baton Rouge rapper's fully formed and gloriously weird personality.

I’M HIM

Somewhere along the way, Kevin Gates got buff. It wasn't a magical Gucci Mane transformation, but the once dad-bodded Louisiana rapper is now fit enough to be the subject of a Men’s Health video, where he outlined an exhaustive regime that includes rigorous dieting and 2 a.m. weight training. That same dedication he brings to working out—or to practicing oral sex on mangos, as he revealed when that Men’s Health segment inevitably took one of those weird, sexual turns that Gates always seems to invite—permeates just about everything he does, including his music.
I'm Him is Gates’ official follow-up to his revelatory 2016 album Islah, although that ignores all the very good EPs and mixtapes he released in the interim. Parsing the distinction between albums and mixtapes is usually a fool’s errand, especially for an artist like Gates who mostly works without guest features, name producers, and other big-budget trappings. But I’m Him differentiates itself from his non-album releases in one key way: The hooks are magnificent, his most boisterous and fine-tuned since Islah.
Lots of rappers sing, of course, but few seem to enjoy it as much as Gates. Even the most naturally tuneful SoundCloud rappers from the last few years sing as if out of solemn obligation. Gates bellows with a zeal rarely heard since Fetty Wap’s 2015 singles run; even when he's singing about pain and regret, he offers the go-for-broke gusto most of us save for a hot shower. “By My Lonely” runs a scant two minutes, but its hook is so monumental the track hits like an epic.
Gates has carried a full-length project by himself before, but that doesn't make it any less remarkable hearing him do it again.  Seventeen songs with no guest features should be a recipe for exhaustion, yet there's hardly a trace of fat on I’m Him, and most tracks clock in at about the length of a Ramones song. “Push It” belongs in a Rocky montage, while “What I Like” pits Gates’ voice against a blown-out bass rumble. There are fewer sex songs on the album than usual, too, which is nice. Wonderful as it may be, Gates' voice is not the aphrodisiac he thinks it is.
He includes two bravely sentimental standouts. “Betta For You” is an apology to the daughter he vows to do right by (“Your mother had you waterbirth and I skipped out, I was scared/I was afraid to be a failure, prayed my faith would prevail,”) while on “Fly Again’ he offers a grandiose love letter to his wife. “We the reciprocal of one another, come from the same star/We got the same moles under our nose and we got the same scars,” he raps, his voice dripping with sincerity.
If I’m Him feels just a hair less essential than some of Gates’ previous releases, it’s because there isn’t all that much new to see. Gates folds a bit of DaBaby’s irritable yammer into his flow on “Facts” and on “Pretend” he flirts with a dancehall patois, both of which he more or less pulls off. But innovation has never been integral to a Kevin Gates project. The draw remains, as always, hearing one of rap’s most well-rounded personalities be his unabashed self, whether that means being a hardhead, a hornball, an unguarded romantic, or all of the above.


Gucci Mane, once one of the most prolific and popular Southern rappers, has done an LP with Kreayshawn sidekick V-Nasty. Even more surprising? BAYTL is a competent, sometimes fun, low-stakes rap album.

BAYTL

It's hard to determine what the biggest surprise is regarding BAYTL: that it wasn't a joke, or that it isn't a joke. As far as the former goes: Yes, this thing exists. Gucci Mane, once one of the most prolific and popular rappers in the South, has done a full album with V-Nasty, the Kreayshawn sidekick who's famous only for being a white person that has vigorously defended her usage of, and her further right to use, the n-word. As for the latter, BAYTL is a surprisingly competent and sometimes fun low-stakes rap album, far from the disaster it could've been.
Though there are many ways in which the album might have gone off the rails, it's fairly easy to pinpoint why it often succeeds. One major reason is that Gucci and V-Nasty smartly decided to let underground big shot Zaytoven-- long one of Gucci's favorite and most fruitful collaborators-- handle the lion's share of the production. His beats are workshops in space and melody, stretching keyboard notes (that mimic organs) like they're taffy until the rappers have a melodic, yet unobtrusive, canvas to paint on. In Gucci's heyday the two were a constant source of gold, with Zay's production pairing harmoniously with Gucci's playful, inventive flows. On BAYTL, Zay is probably asked to carry too much of the load, and his effectiveness becomes dulled over the course of the album. But allowing him to produce nearly the entire record brings professionalism, cohesion, and coherence to a project that threatened to have none of the above.
V-Nasty, for her part, also acquits herself better than you would think. Her voice is atonal in a way that's more off-putting than interesting, and her flow can get clumsy and cluttered at times, but she's more or less up to the task of writing half of a decent album, which is more than you could say for some rappers famous for being actual rappers. She gets by well enough on swagger and brashness, and without the baggage her contributions would scan as acceptingly perfunctory. It would be hard to argue that the world needs V-Nasty's rapping-- and it doesn't, obviously-- but she'll get clowned for being a try-hard white girl when in reality there were at least four worse rappers in XXL's "2011 Freshman Class."
In a cruel and sad twist of irony, easily the best verse on the album belongs to Slim Dunkin, who shines on "Push Ups". Dunkin was murdered in Atlanta last month as he prepared for the filming of the video for that song. If there's anything truly exciting to be pulled from BAYTL, it's Slim's marked improvement as a writer, something that makes his premature death even sadder.
As for Gucci himself, he sounds sober and engaged, which is a step up from where he was for most of last year. He's on autopilot here, but he works so well with Zaytoven that the only drawback is that it allows you to dream of how good a full collaborative album between the two would've been three years ago. Gucci's major issue now-- even more than his lost affinity for cinematic imagery-- is that humor and creativity have been all but sapped from his writing, leaving us an MC whose aggressive braggadocio comes off as unnecessarily defensive. When, late on the album, Gucci raps, "I'm not romantic, but I cook my dope candlelit," it's as stunning as if you ran into a good friend you thought you'd never see again. But, just as quickly, that Gucci disappears.
BAYTL is a record that, contrary to the hopes of some and the fears of others, isn't a huge failure or massive embarrassment. The talent of all involved-- fading in some, and bubbling in others-- ends up taking control of the sideshow. But with that said, the album, more than anything, is a bizarre and unique artifact of rap music in 2011. It's a record that marks the time when the "Gucci Gucci" rapper's homegirl became notorious enough to do an album with Gucci Mane, and when Gucci Mane had fallen far enough to decide to go along with it.


Some may know the Chicago pastor only as the source of Kanye’s “Father Stretch My Hands.” Documenting his ’70s fusions of gospel, funk, and soul, Numero Group’s box set captures the full sweep of his legacy.

Pastor T. L. Barrett and the Youth for Christ Choir: I Shall Wear a Crown

I Shall Wear a Crown

It’s a child’s question: Where does God live? In Heaven or outer space, perhaps, or maybe a house of worship right here on Earth. Asking “where” unspools the “how” and the “if,” and things only get more complicated from there.
For T.L. Barrett and his followers, God lived at 5512 S. Indiana Avenue in Chicago, the address where the 23-year-old pastor stepped into the pulpit of Mt. Zion Baptist Church in 1967. Barrett’s own adolescent struggles had called him back to the South Side neighborhood he’d known as a boy; his mission manifested itself in the Youth for Christ Choir. Barrett’s fusion of gospel music with more contemporary idioms attracted a passionate following in his home city, even drawing the likes of Maurice White and Donny Hathaway to its pews. The charismatic minister expanded his local outreach as it grew in popularity, later leading his own Life Center Church of God in Christ.
Barrett’s optimistic approach to his ministry shines across I Shall Wear a Crown, a new 5xLP Numero Group box set. In more recent years, Barrett has attracted attention from a wider national audience via Kanye West, who sampled his “Father I Stretch My Hands” on The Life of Pablo. Before he used Barrett’s devotions to frame bars about a ruined t-shirt, West had wondered aloud how he could find a way to talk to God again. Barrett’s work suggests the best place to start is in song.
Barrett and the Youth for Christ Choir released Like a Ship… (Without a Sail), their first record together, in 1971. Light in the Attic reissued it in 2010; it remains a singular jewel. The distinction of youth over children’s choir is important: The singers were a bunch of 12-to-19-year-olds, which is to say, young people staring over the precipice, wondering where their lives were going to go. Their collective voices capture tender vulnerability and earnest hope, seeking relief and protection at the edge of uncertainty. The record’s stunning highlights—“Nobody Knows,” “It’s Me O Lord,” “Like a Ship”—are wide-open reaches for deliverance, offered in sweeping, passionate harmonic layers. Individual agonies dissolve in the magnificent din of the singers’ adulation. It’s painful, frightening, and lonely to feel cast out on the open ocean, but even as troubles endure, they never have to be borne alone.
The other four parts of I Shall Wear a Crown are stuffed with gems, and their details illuminate what make Like a Ship such a sparkling prize. Though death is necessarily a central theme of gospel music, Barrett’s selections search for love, redemption, hope, and clarity. They celebrate the abundant opportunities to be joyful on Earth before the hour comes to shuffle off the mortal coil, a massive nondenominational benefit of Barrett’s youth advocacy.
“Do Not Pass Me By,” the lead cut to Like a Ship’s follow-up, is a rollicking demand for recognition; “After the Rain” and “So Many Years” are vibrant and especially uplifting standouts from Do Not Pass Me By Vol. 1. Barrett doses counterculture with piety on “Turn on With Jesus,” an after-school special in song form that escalates into near-psychedelic shrieks at its end. The astonishing brassy peals of “I Shall Wear a Crown” establish the track as a rightfully representative title for the set, swaggering toward a roaring conclusion that hits like a platinum freight train.
Barrett’s arrangements fold the profound influence of Black American gospel music back on itself; they pull the spiritual playing field closer to ear level by reinforcing his ecclesiastic ends with popular sounds indebted to the genre. Western popular music would be nothing without Black gospel: Sister Rosetta Tharpe electrified rock’n’roll to life in her own two hands. Church choirs were the crucible for Aretha Franklin, Little Richard, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, Sam Cooke, and scores more. Barrett’s references are occasionally direct: The electric piano on Do Not Pass Me By Vol. II came straight from Wonder’s Talking Book, and “Pray, Pray, Pray” invokes Franklin’s “Chain of Fools.”
Digging into funkier grooves, Do Not Pass Me By Vol. II and I Found the Answer further toy with spiritual/secular boundaries. “I Want to Be in Love with You” begins like a potential Chess Records hit before Barrett pivots the narrator’s point of view. The results of Barrett’s reorganizations are sometimes surprising, as when the centuries-old Lord’s Prayer becomes a soul-funk jam where “Thy kingdom come/Thy will be done” is a hook slicker than sacramental chrism. Likewise, “My Country Tis of Thee” takes on the heavy poignancy of young people trying to believe in a better future for a country that has abused and exploited them for generations.
Barrett’s approach emphasizes the underlying two-way bond of sounds and the spirit: Music can be a vehicle for praise and celebration, but also an everyday place to commune with God. Even better, these fulfilling returns need no specific religious affiliation: The name to the feeling of surrendering oneself to a song doesn’t have to fall on a God-or-nothing binary, as anyone who’s lost themselves that way can testify. So if heavenly spoils reveal themselves in an organist’s exultant vamps, or in the euphoric shouts of a choir, where else might they be? I Shall Wear a Crown makes it easy to conclude that the difference between the ecstasy of feeling moved by a greater something in a church pew, on a dance floor, or in a concert hall is, functionally, nothing.
Elsewhere, Barrett’s gestures at pop music are looser, but no less distinct. The “I don’t know”s of “What Would You Give” recall the same in “Something,” but they find hope in their unknowing instead of chasing George Harrison’s anguish. Likewise, the choir nods to Donny Hathaway in “I Am So Glad,” drifting over a seasonal refrain that echoes the singer’s sublime take on “You’ve Got a Friend.” The lingering message—Your pal Jesus loves you—fits nicely with the notion at the heart of Carole King’s original, which is that deep and loving friendship can be a form of grace extended without divine intervention. (That moody WASP messiah James Taylor inspired both “Something” and “You’ve Got a Friend” is surely some other cosmic joke.)
Barrett continued to develop his ministry after moving on from record-making in the late 1970s, eventually building a facility known as the Prayer Palace. Despite his decades-long career at the pulpit, Barrett’s sermons get surprisingly slim representation on I Shall Wear a Crown. “Dry Bones in the Valley” revels in the transcendent live environment of Barrett and his congregation in action, while “How Would You Like to Have a Nice Hawaiian Punch” offers a glimpse at Barrett’s passionate commitment to engaging his flock with political participation.
In 1988, one of Barrett’s projects was accused of being an alleged pyramid scheme. The set’s liner notes address the scandal head-on, maintaining Barrett’s denials of bad-faith dealings. Barrett fulfilled the terms of his redress, which included paying back more than $1.3 million over the next decade. He continued his other church operations, and seems to be in good enough standing that NPR recently hosted him for their mild-mannered Tiny Desk series. Restitution is not the same as forgiveness, which can only be extended by those harmed; the truth of the matter, like questions of fallibility and the Holy Trinity, may ultimately find its answer only in searching the grayer chambers of the heart.
It’s hard to come away from I Shall Wear a Crown and not reconsider what it is to be moved by a piece of music. Returning to the query of holy residencies: there’s something rare and golden that lives in sounds that move the soul, in private and secret moments of joy, in other fleeting connections that feel like part of some bigger unnamed web. In his final book, A Man Without a Country, avowed humanist Kurt Vonnegut proposed an epitaph: “The only proof he needed of the existence of God was music.” Thank god, whatever it is, for that.

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After years of making somber, traditionalist folk on dueling acoustic guitars, Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan expand their palette on the duo’s most engaging and diverse record to date.

The Milk Carton Kids: All the Things That I Did and All the Things That I Didn’t Do

The traditionalist folk duo the Milk Carton Kids put Stravinsky’s adage that limitations set art free to the test. For years, they adhered to the strict parameters they established on their 2011 debut, Prologue: two acoustic guitars, their harmonizing voices, and nothing else. Even after the band began sharing bills with bubblegum folk groups like Mumford & Sons, their music remained thorny and somber. Onstage, Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan perform their generally downtempo compositions with similar solemnity; dressed in funereal suits, half-facing each other, they make even their sunnier songs feel a bit gothic.
But All the Things That I Did and All the Things That I Didn't Do finally signals a change: Pattengale and Ryan have loosened their restrictions, inviting a cast of session pros that includes Wilco’s Pat Sansone to add splashes of piano, strings, and thumping drums to their songs. The additions are often subtle—conceptually, they have more in common with Beach House’s quiet amalgamation of synth tones than with Bob Dylan going electric—but they have an outsized impact on the group’s dynamics. These songs continue the world-weary narratives of earlier tracks like “Michigan” and “Years Gone By,” albeit with heightened urgency: Pattengale overcame a cancer diagnosis and the dissolution of a long-term relationship before recording got underway. Paradoxically, though, the album crackles with newfound levity and muscle.
All the Things is the Milk Carton Kids’ most engaging and sonically diverse record to date. Unfortunately, most of that variety is front-loaded into the album’s first half. Opening track “Just Look at Us Now,” a rueful reflection on idealism that could easily have gotten lost on an earlier release, is powered by undercurrents of cello and lap steel that amplify its bittersweet memories. “Nothing Is Real” offers stale commentary on the dehumanizing effects of technology but is redeemed by an airy staccato piano and cheery percussion that compensate for its shallow sentiment. But, past the halfway point, the album’s lead single, “One More for the Road,” proves its least thrilling and most heavy-handed moment. No amount of self-deprecating commentary can change the fact that the 10-minute track is a lukewarm attempt at an opus. Bookended by an elegiac verse, the meat of the song is an almost proggy guitar interlude that never reaches a satisfying peak.
That may be because the duo’s skillful guitar interplay, which often sounds like an Appalachian take on the National’s syncopated riffs, has become so predictable. Some of the album’s most exciting songs scale back the guitars, making room for intricate vocal melodies. Pattengale and Ryan sing “You Break My Heart,” a woozy waltz in the vein of the Ink Spots, with such a playful sweetness that it can be easy to miss its mournful message. “Younger Years” successfully combines Townes Van Zandt’s cowboy grit with a burbling Simon & Garfunkel harmony. All the Things may only mark the first step in the Milk Carton Kids’ transformation—but, in eliminating so many of the constraints they once placed on their music, they have already crafted the richest, most accessible songs of their career.


The second album from the Chicago MC is lighter and more fun than his debut, focusing on his incredibly versatile voice within a warm palette of sludgy R&B and neo-funk.

NOIR

Listening to Smino’s second album NOIR led me to an essay James Baldwin wrote for The New York Times called, “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” Baldwin makes his point simply in the title but continues in the first paragraph: “Language...is meant to define the other—and, in this case, the other is refusing to be defined by a language that has never been able to recognize him.” That came to mind when I read something Smino tweeted a few weeks ago, “dnt correct my grammar hoe I spelt it dat way kuz das high say it,” which also feels a bit like an echo of a Dunbar poem. Either way, Smino is working within tradition by bending his words to his will and through his Blackness.
NOIR is above all an album about language: Smino throws a million different voices into the mix, sometimes all at once. His default singing voice—which he uses to rap as well—is weightless and honeyed to the point that it’s hard to tell if he’s in a falsetto. He shrieks, whispers, squeaks, mumbles, and sometimes stops just a few notes from outright yodeling. He doubles his vocals and self-harmonizes everywhere, and sometimes he breaks a song down into a doo-wop vamp that could easily double as an audition for Boyz II Men—if D’Angelo was singing lead. On “MERLOT” Smino and one other singer conjure up a knotty harmony like Bone Thugs-N-Harmony.
All of those vocal tricks help Smino shape words to make them rhyme unexpectedly or to unlock new spaces inside them by folding them up into his breath. “I'm flee like 10 puppies/These Japanese/I don't drink champagne/But fuck it, clack the drinks.” You could sing that sentence to yourself a million times and never arrive at the way Smino raps it. Listen to Smino rap it once and you’ll never revert back from the upswing at the end of “10 puppies” so that it somehow rhymes with “Japanese” or the way he makes a four-syllable utterance of “champagne” feel like a graceful pirouette.
Smino never explains or calls attention to them but these moments are everywhere on NOIR sometimes to the point of bogging things down with cleverness. On the same song he makes “real freaky” sound like “Rafiki” to force a Lion King reference and accomplish nothing else. On another he rhymes “Shibuya” with “she boo, yeah” and “see-through dress.” The production is so warm and soft and despite all the maneuvers, Smino is so understated that it sometimes sounds like he’s whisper singing brags under a velvet blanket.
For the most part, NOIR is a raunchy bedroom party album where Smino would rather put a wet towel under the hotel bathroom door than be stuck in the club. He’s also downright hilarious and endlessly sassy. On “HOOPTI” he calls back to his single “Netflix & Dusse” and raps his idea of a perfect night: “Chicken strips and scary movies—romance.” At one point, on the throbbing R&B track “Z4L,” Smino snowballs into an all-out Bugs Bunny impression and ends up saying, “Check my color palette/White just like a bunny wabbit,” without breaking the mood, but also without making a point. He does this often: a funny voice that’s just a funny voice, a line that’s just clever and nothing else. Still, the revelation of his verses usually only clicks in on the third or fourth listen and can still feel like a discovery.
He’s has spent the last couple years helping build the artist collective Zero Fatigue, which also includes the singer Ravyn Lenae and the producer Monte Booker, who has helped Smino arrive at a warm palette of sludgy R&B and neo-funk here. Thanks to Booker in particular, many of the songs on NOIR are freckled with weird and fidgeting sounds. None is more forward about it than “KLINK,” which crumples a spooky clavichord or a harpsichord riff into a dramatic banger. Smino also produced “KRUSHED ICE” himself, giving it an enormous and unfurnished room of a beat meant for whispering weird flexes—it sounds like a Valee song even before he shows up. Almost everywhere else, Smino gives a precise delivery, but here he’s made up the room for Valee and burrowed into his flow.
NOIR is much less serious and autobiographical than Smino’s debut. Still, there are moments when he turns morose, clenches his fist, and sings explicitly about his Blackness. On “Spinz,” a sludge of trad-jazz inflected trap R&B, Smino chants: “It was gruesome/What we grew from/But we grew some in the end/Ain’t enough to be where you from/Had to be mixed with some Indian.” On “SUMMER SALT” he kicks off a playful gymnastic floor routine of a flow with: “What do they care? I need enough for my kids’ kids’ kids” before making a “Mortal Kombat” “finish him” sex joke (his girl’s a Scorpio). It might say less about himself up front, but NOIR feels like the real Smino.