The Montreal duo’s scorching second album unites acid techno, future jazz, and hip-hop in service of incisive political punk.

Ahora Más Que Nunca

Pelada’s mantra is “love us or hate us, we don’t give a fuck.” Over the past decade, the Montreal-based duo of vocalist Chris Vargas and producer Tobias Rochman have fused punk aggression and politicized lyrics into a mutant strain of hardware techno. Four years have passed since their debut, and after parting ways with former label PAN, Pelada return with a second album that renders their hardcore punk politics even more incisive. Ahora Más Que Nunca (Now More Than Ever) sets the Colombian vocalist’s Spanish-language protest songs and empowerment anthems to ominous electronic beatscapes, matching them in intensity at every step.
On 2019’s Movimiento Para Cambio (Movement for Change), Pelada’s explorations into cumbia and reggaeton sounded more like a disjointed string of singles than a structured collection. The duo is still dancing between acid techno, future jazz, and hip-hop, but on Ahora Más Que Nunca, the increased consistency of Rochman’s production synthesizes these sounds into a uniquely confrontational and genre-agnostic take on club music. Guest appearances from horrorcore rapper Backxwash and trumpeter Aquiles Navarro of Irreversible Entanglements complicate the classifications even further.
Several core themes emerge from Vargas’ urgent electro-punk sermons. “Agua ≠ Mercancía” (“Water ≠ Merchandise”) calls out the Canadian government for its mismanagement of natural resources. “Latido de Extinción” (“Extinction Beat”) echoes the need to rise up against state and corporate greed, as Vargas shouts, “Estamos en tierra robada!” (“We are on stolen land!”) Album opener “La Gente Se Laventa” (“People Get Up”) calls for revolution “hoy, no mañana” (“today, not tomorrow”) before a beat switch arrives to propel Backxwash’s aggressive rhymes about eating their oppressors. “This dirty little life we live,” they spit, “it’s fight the rich, or go on till we ice these pricks.”
As any activist will tell you, meaningful action is not possible without self-care. After a brief introduction about finding inner strength, “Ya Fue” (“It Was Already”) merges vocoder-laced vocals with Navarro’s wandering, echo-drenched horn, like Miles Davis in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. On “Pilas” (“Batteries”), Vargas sings about overcoming doubts and depression, reminding that “un mal día no te define” (“a bad day does not define you”). Their angrily enunciated lyrics pick up speed as bouncing rubber-ball synths are replaced by orchestral percussion samples, giving gravitas to this pissed-off pep talk.
In the resigned yet resolved spoken-word passages of closer “Punto de no Retorno” (“Point of No Return”), Pelada argue that “la pobreza existe, no porque no podamos alimentar a los pobres, sino porque no podemos satisfacer a los ricos” (“poverty exists, not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we cannot satisfy the rich”). Yet perhaps the most persuasive moment is the ACAB anthem “Cerdo” (“Pig”), which concludes with cycling pianos reminiscent of John Carpenter’s Halloween theme. This album’s political slogans may not be Pelada’s alone, but bolstered by their unifying array of thumping beats, the horrors of colonialism become all the more real.


The second album in Mute’s planned series of archival Can shows captures a group figuring things out in real time. After 30 tentative minutes, things turn transcendent.

Live in Brighton 1975

When you’re improvising a piece of music from scratch, you’re bound to spend some time fumbling in the dark. You take a tentative stab at this chord change or that groovy ostinato, you listen to your bandmates conducting their own halting experiments, you wait for the idea that will illuminate a compelling path forward for everyone. For Can, on the evening of November 19, 1975, the light took its time showing up. But once the legendary German avant-rock band found it, they never looked back.
Live in Brighton 1975 is the second in a planned series of Can archival concert recordings, perhaps the next best thing to seeing them live for those of us who were born too late to witness their decade-long run. And if records must suffice, we might as well embrace the positives the medium has to offer. Given Can’s habit of pulling jams from thin air, there are no song titles here, just identifying numbers in German. The first few excursions have their moments, but if you’re digging into Live in Brighton 1975 for the first time, I recommend skipping straight to track vier.
We hear a rowdy audience, itself something of a revelation for a band whose legacy can seem phantasmagoric for a modern American listener—they were envisioning new forms for rock music that were far beyond the visions of their contemporaries, and doing so in relative obscurity, especially outside Europe. (Who are these people who had the good sense to see Can when they had the chance, and did they appreciate what they were getting?) Irmin Schmidt’s painterly electric piano chords suggest a pastoral scene, then Michael Karoli’s guitar feedback and Jaki Liebezeit’s snare drum rain down like napalm and gatling gun fire. Fans will recognize the riff that emerges from the onslaught as “Vernal Equinox,” a highlight from 1975’s Landed, the otherwise middling album that Can were ostensibly promoting at the time. But Can were never a band to merely recreate their records, and their take on “Vernal Equinox” here reaches a delirium that the studio version only hints at. Liebezeit, Can’s greatest individual player, propels his bandmates with a drumbeat that may as well have been pulled off a d’n’b record from 20 years later, envisioning the future as he skitters forward at 160 bpm.
Can remain at full throttle for the rest of the show. “Brighton 75 Fünf” seems loosely based on “Quantum Physics,” off 1974’s Soon Over Babaluma, but again the band takes its own source material as an open-ended suggestion about where the music might go, rather than a set of rules. Where “Quantum Physics” is whispery and diffuse, “Brighton 75 Fünf” is emphatic and visceral, hammering at the edges of its central theme until they’re sharp enough to draw blood. The most thrilling moment comes when they abandon the roadmap entirely. Liebezeit downshifts suddenly into menacing half-time and the band loses its footing for a second, seemingly unsure how to complement this new groove. Eventually, they stop trying to cohere, and the faltering ambiguity comes to seem deliberate. It sounds like a transmission from an alternate timeline where Karlheinz Stockhausen and J Dilla decided to team up for a 7".
The musicians are at their best when they have an anchor, some agreed-upon germ of an idea from which to build their improvisation outward. The set’s highest peak comes at the end with “Brighton 75 Sieben,” a jam clearly derived from 1972’s immortal “Vitamin C.” By ’75, vocalist Damo Suzuki had left Can, and in lieu of his manic hook, the band reorients “Vitamin C” around its instrumental bridge, a minor-key organ line that comes across as nearly incidental on the studio version but emerges as monumental here. Liebezeit’s barrages of percussion in the final section of “Sieben” would be astounding if they were the first things he played that night, and are even more so when you realize he’s been at it like this for an hour and a half.
What about everything else, the 30 minutes of music that come before Can hit their stride with “Brighton 75 Vier”? Other than a brief dip into the reeling melody of “Dizzy Dizzy,” it sounds to me like they’re working from scratch. And while they surely found magic in these unexplored zones on many other nights, it just wasn’t happening here. “Eins” and “Zwei” lean heavily on leads from Karoli, who was a wildly inventive guitarist in his approaches to texture and rhythm, but not at his best when playing more traditional solos. They sound less like the guys who exploded the boundaries of rock music with Tago Mago and Ege Bamyasi than they do like a pretty good jam band.
The mere existence of recordings like Live in Brighton 1975 is a gift to Can listeners. Unlike the Grateful Dead—perhaps Can’s closest equals in their vision of the rock stage as a cosmic realm where anything is possible—Can didn’t have bootleg tapers at every single show. The Dead certainly played their fair share of clams, but when you can zoom through their entire history, there’s less pressure for every moment to reach transcendence; even the rough spots become charming in their way. Hopefully, as Mute releases more of these archival Can shows, the effect will be similar. Commitment to spontaneous invention means willingness to accept the occasional failure. And you can always skip to the next track.

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Originally issued in 1960, this was Davis' studio follow-up to the landmark Kind of Blue and found him striking out in an entirely new direction.

Miles Davis: Sketches of Spain: Legacy Edition

Sketches of Spain: Legacy Edition

Is this even jazz? Sketches of Spain was perhaps the first Miles Davis album to inspire this question, though it certainly wouldn't be the last. Originally released in 1960, it was Davis' studio follow-up to the landmark Kind of Blue, and it found him, yet again, striking out in an entirely new direction.
Working with arranger Gil Evans, Davis cooked up a concept album, looking to the structure and texture of Spanish folk and classical music for inspiration. The two old friends and collaborators were on a huge roll creatively during this period. Davis was piling up hall of fame-caliber jazz albums with alarming regularity, while Evans, in addition to working with Davis frequently in the late 1950s, recorded what was perhaps his finest solo album in 1960, Out of the Cool (it vaguely shares a vibe with Sketches, but is in my estimation just a hair better). So to say both were in strong form here would be an understatement. Davis takes what is most striking about his trumpet style-- the controlled soloing in the middle register, with a mastery of subtle shifts in focus-- and amplifies it, creating measured phrases of almost painful intensity. While Evans' distinctive approach to harmony and tonal color-- one of the most enjoyable "Hey, I get it!" moments as you first explore jazz is when you start to recognize his arrangements-- inhabits a form that to the uninitiated can sound mysterious and exotic and sensual. It's hard not to be taken in immediately.
And that's the first thing to note about Sketches of Spain: Where Davis' "Is this jazz?" albums from the late-60s forward were often dense and challenging ("Is this even music?" even came up now and then), Sketches of Spain was always easy to like. So much so that, like its predecessor, it became the kind of record that someone with only two or three albums by jazz artists might have in their collection. That's partly up to its potential contexts being so variable. There's a lot going on in the music that rewards a close listen, but it's also something you can put on and read to (though admittedly, some of the dynamic surges could be a little jolting). It's often quiet and atmospheric, at points coming over as almost ambient. It's the kind of album that dims the light in the room whenever it plays. It's also absolutely gorgeous.
The writers of The Penguin Guide to Jazz felt that the moodiness of Sketches of Spain dominated to the point where it added up to something closer to glorified elevator music. There is some merit to their claim, but the criticism now seems, interestingly, dated. The majority of people encountering a record like Sketches of Spain for the first time probably have no special interest in jazz as an idea, and the notion of pursuing atmospheric records whose primary selling point is an overriding feel and an abiding surface-level prettiness is nothing to be embarrassed about. If we want something more forward with more improvisation and interplay, hey, there are a billion other records out there. But Sketches of Spain does something special.
There's a real charge that comes from the distant, clattering percussion that begins "Concierto de Aranjuez (Adagio)", the opening track and centerpiece. It's a piece by Spanish composer Joaquín Rodrigo, and if you hear it played with a classical guitar and full orchestra, you realize both how faithful Evans was to it in terms of structure and what he accomplished as far as texture. Using French horn, harp, oboe, and bassoon, as well as more typically jazz brass instruments like trumpet and trombone (Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb, the rhythm section of Davis' band, are both on hand, but they're playing charts-- there's no room here for improvisation), Evans creates a shifting tapestry of luscious sound. Sometimes the music just seems to hang in the air, and sometimes it lurches toward an unexpected climax. Davis is the only soloist on the record, and he burrows deeply into the melodies, turning them over with a huge, bulbous tone that's both strong and vulnerable. He sounds especially impassioned on "Saeta", a piece whose scales reflect the influence of North African music on flamenco. It opens with a march and a fanfare, and then Davis blasts an uncanny solo-- slow, choosing between a small handful of notes, but so intent and concentrated that his trumpet almost seems to be splintering. The contrasts between Evans velvety but complex backdrops and Davis' extemporaneous work out front is compelling from start to finish.
The problem with this edition is a familiar one to anyone who has followed the never-ending Miles Davis reissue campaign: There's an extra disc of material here, all of which was issued elsewhere and most of which is of interest primarily to collectors, and that extra disc inflates the suggested retail of the set to $25. That's a lot of scratch when you get down to what you're really paying for if you don't own the set already, and that's the first five tracks from the original record, 41 minutes of music total. Disc One, in addition to the full album, does contain the sessions' one true outtake, "Song of Our Country". It's easy to see why it was left off, since its tone is several shades brighter and the arrangement is more firmly entrenched in jazz proper-- it actually sounds closer to something from Miles Ahead, the 1957 Evans/Davis big band set. But it's still worth owning, even if it was later compiled into one of Davis' many odds-and-ends sets, 1980's Directions.
Eight of the 11 tracks on the second disc consist of alternate takes, including four that cover sections of "Concierto". As good as some of this material is, you'll never reach for this sequence over the master unless you're researching the subtle differences in the solos. A live version of "Concierto" from 1961, the only time Davis performed this material in concert, is the most worthwhile inclusion by far. But by the end of the disc we're hearing "Teo" from the 1961 album Someday My Prince Will Come, and all of a sudden Coltrane is soloing, which makes no sense whatsoever in this painstakingly arranged context. As the notes indicate, "Teo" bears a melodic and thematic resemblance to material on Sketches, and though that's true, its inclusion here is dubious. It seems more a way to pad out a set that needs to be of a certain length to justify the price tag. Better that this edition had included "Song of Our Country" and the live "Concierto" as bonus cuts on a single disc. The liner notes, by composer Gunther Schuller, a "Third Stream" pioneer who mixed jazz and classical, are informative and well done and do add value. The music benefits from his analysis, which is technical but still accessible.
So the score given here reflects a compromise between the vast musical riches of the original album and the questionable packaging of the reissue. I wish I could say that Sketches is an album that turntable owners should just seek out on inexpensive used vinyl-- with a jazz record this popular, there are plenty of copies floating around. But the music is so subtle and detailed, surface noise really can get in the way here. Sketches is a masterpiece that opens up with a close listen, with every detail of the music clearly audible. So do seek it out, but if you do so with this edition, it'll cost you a few bucks.


The pressure to make a White Stripes comparison here is almost unbearable, so I'll get this out of the ...

Thickfreakness

The pressure to make a White Stripes comparison here is almost unbearable, so I'll get this out of the way quick-like: The Black Keys and the Stripes will inevitably be indexed on the same page in the great canon of Rock history, but paper similarities aside-- each duo brazenly, turbulently rehashing American blues tradition through a minimalist storm of scraping guitars and bruised skins-- they've got almost nothing in common. The Black Keys may just be a couple of white dudes from Akron, but they seem closer in spirit to something that Muddy Waters himself might've considered "the blues" than to any midwestern bar-band's approximation of it. The only Stripes link of any importance, in fact, is that the Keys' previous album was better, too.
Last year's The Big Come-Up introduced the garage-grime and "white Hendrix" croon of The Sonics to the unholy strut of Junior Kimbrough's legendary guitar lines, fusing them into a spitting, spewing, 40-ton monster. Winners like "Heavy Soul" evoked the primal ballet of Fordzilla crushing unmanned Buicks, and when it wasn't busy flattening rides, still offered a glimpse of the delicate machinery under the hood with soul cuts like "I'll Be Your Man". With Thickfreakness, the once-massive guitar is exponentially weightier, thicker, and juicier, swelling to Earth-shaking proportions, at the unfortunate loss of a little subtlety. But that's just the way it is sometimes; there's no room for luxuries like nuanced variations in tone, or shifting rhythms when you're fleeing from a fire-breathing behemoth.
Still, swallow enough white-hot blues riffs and you get heartburn; it's hard not to miss Come-Up's pace-breaking exercises like "Countdown" or "Them Eyes" after blues explosion #348 (and counting). Even at its most delicate, Dan Auerbach's fretwork still hits like a hollowbody that's been filled with cement, and Patrick Carney's swaying grooves seem suppressed, driven further back in the mix. Once again, the Keys stomp as violently and elementally as before, but they nearly get carried away. Tracks like "If You See Me" and "Hurt Like Mine" attempt to reduce Thickfreakness' wildfire to merely a controlled burn, but even when the Keys try to play it cool on this album, they still run hot. Nothing strays too far from the molten desperation of a more typical offering of "Midnight" or an uber-faithful cover of The Sonics' "Have Love Will Travel".
Ah, but who'm I kidding? Thickfreakness may veer towards oppressively monolithic, but it's also equal parts sincerity and devotion, thunder and lightning, majesty and naked anger. Look upon the power of the title track, mortals, and despair! The central riff splits heaven and earth, and for a few brief minutes, commands all your attention as you fear for your very life; it's an exorcism, a catharsis. And it only gets thicker and freakier from there, lurching into the cautionary force of the too-similar "Hard Row"; like a simplified, but equally relentless version of its predecessor, the simple bluster is momentarily awe-inspiring. When Auerbach howls, "It's a hard row to hoe by yourself," the release is overwhelming.
But sure enough, the intensity of the opening combination proves impossible to maintain for long. Though the stutter-stepping percussion and racing, rise/fall soloing of "Set You Free" nearly succeeds at preserving the pummeling drive beyond all limits of human endurance, it ends up being the most purely entertaining cut on the album simply out of the necessity for respite. The body braces itself for another towering blast after being further skewered by Auerbach's nasty hooks in the opening seconds, and gets (only a little) less than that, but the relaxation is welcome. From that point on, Thickfreakness begins to run together slightly, though as mentioned earlier, not for lack of energy.
The related concerns of a need for a bit more understatement and variety hinder the Black Keys this time around, but remain somewhat insignificant in relation to their even-more-muscular blues attack. On top of that, the ultra-minimal echoes of "Cry Alone" and the R.L. Burnside-as-channeled-thru-MC5 tangle of "Hold Me in Your Arms" partially ameliorates the somewhat pervasive sameness, closing the album with a distinctly different sound than they've yet shown. All told, the shortcomings are relative to what the duo already proved themselves capable of on The Big Come-Up; Thickfreakness isn't quite their debut, but it's still a powerhouse, even exceeding its ancestor in total spectacle. Raw rock grandeur as so frequently conjured up on this album is hard to come by in any capacity; if that means having to overlook a few minor flaws, it's worth it.


Best known as one half of art-rock duo Ohmme, the Chicago musician turns towards lush, baroque-tinged folk on a solo debut with a reverent approach to self-knowledge and growth.

Mouth Full of Glass

Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist Macie Stewart has had a hand in making some of the best tracks of the past five years transcendent. Their string work added a vital spark to the single that SZA named after Drew Barrymore and the title track of indie rock band Whitney’s breakthrough album. Stewart’s own career is a tour of the Chicago scene: Starting with the genre-splicing group Kid These Days, which featured rapper Vic Mensa and a debut album produced by Jeff Tweedy, Stewart (who uses she and they pronouns) honed their skills in bands like the avant-garde jazz group Marker. Later, she became a session player for Top 40 acts like Chance the Rapper and underground stars like Nnamdi. Most visibly, she and Sima Cunningham make up the avant-pop duo Ohmme, who released their third album last year.
A few years ago, Stewart described these vast collaborations as a necessary way to sustain energy. “It takes a cross-pollination of communities to ensure that you stay creative,” she said. But at a certain point, she realized that lending her talents elsewhere had plateaued her own journey toward self-understanding. “I didn’t know who I was or what I sounded like as an individual,” she explains in press materials for her debut solo album, Mouth Full of Glass. Still, collaboration remains central to the work: Stepping away from Ohmme’s combustible art-rock, Stewart recruited several Chicago musicians, including Ben LaMar Gay and Sen Morimoto, to embellish her poetic, baroque-tinged folk. The project’s cinematic quality and refreshing self-awareness makes clear that working with others strengthened the language needed to express herself.
In their lyrics, Stewart zero in on personal flaws as a way to move forward. On the lush, romantic opener “Finally,” gentle, rippling guitar plucks introduce a meditation on opening up amid misgivings. “I’m wrong and I know it/But not willing to show it,” Stewart sings sweetly. Their voice ascends cherubically as they admit that they’re finally ready to tell the truth, first to themself and then to others. Lia Kohl’s cello rushes in like cleansing water alongside their acknowledgements of personal growth.
In Stewart’s telling, confronting oneself is a curious journey, full of vibrant images that ground complex emotions in tangible metaphors. On “Where We Live,” her words become the brick and mortar as she builds a future home, warm with fire, honey, and wine. When she compares herself to the namesake of “Garter Snake,” confessing to feeling “wicked” while accompanied by angelic backing vocals and blooming synths, it feels like a tender embrace of our shadow selves. Stewart doesn’t indulge in self-loathing; instead, a trickle of piano or swell of saxophone make the prospect of change seem beautiful. Near the album’s end, on “Tone Pome,” she extends the motif of change to natural elements. Soft strums accompany images of snow; swirls of cello enter when Stewart begins to sing of spring’s arrival. Although pretty, it’s the weakest track—Glass’ success doesn’t rely on Stewart’s romantic lyricism, but her animated compositions and vocal gymnastics.
The best songs on Mouth Full of Glass feel like they’re alive. Finger-plucked guitars mimic falling rain as Stewart’s melodies wind through the octaves like ivy, and the string arrangements feel as detailed as hand-embroidered tapestries. Most stunning is the quasi-titular third track, “Mouthful of Glass,” which recalls the decadent work of George Martin, specifically “Sea of Time” from the Yellow Submarine soundtrack. With few words, Stewart shifts the emphasis to tone, elongating her phrases. Low piano notes fumble in the background, and a pearly sound recalls a leaky faucet. Inspired by a dream and grounded in no concrete narrative, the magic is in the satiny vocals and paisley compositions, a world unto itself.

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The idea of Sun Kil Moon’s Mark Kozelek releasing a Christmas album might seem like an odd one, but there’s no doubt he has a voice suited to the material, that he comes up with solid guitar arrangements, and generally imbues these holiday favorites with a sense of calm and contemplation.

Sings Christmas Carols

Timing is everything. We’ve known for a while that Mark Kozelek was going to be releasing a Christmas album before the end of the year, but for much of that time Kozelek was riding a wave of goodwill following the release of (the still very good, even if I’ve stopped bringing it up at parties) Benji. Now Sings Christmas Carols finally comes out and it feels like an unwanted present from the obnoxious uncle you try and avoid at family gatherings. What happened in between? Kozelek saw the reaction he got from a typically cranky and offhand comment about War on Drugs’ music bleeding into his own at a festival and somehow thought releasing not one but two songs about it a would be amusing to someone other than himself (plus a t-shirt with another insult). Suffice to say the joke isn’t funny anymore, and Kozelek is looking pretty sad, not to mention that he’s probably alienating new fans he may have acquired since Benji’s release. And now we’re supposed to allow him into our homes and into Mom and Dad’s 5xCD changer, slotting his CD next to Dolly Parton and Nat King Cole and A Charlie Brown Christmas? If nothing else, we can be thankful that Kozelek finished this album some time ago, so he didn’t alter his version of “The Christmas Song” to include the line “Although it’s been said, many times, many ways, War on Drugs can…”
Anyway. If you can listen to Sings Christmas Carols and think, “This too shall pass,” knowing that by Christmas 2015 Kozelek will have become bored of this game and we’ll have moved on to the next internet beef, you may well enjoy this one. There’s no doubt Kozelek has a voice suited to the material, that he comes up with solid guitar arrangements, and generally imbues these songs with a sense of calm and contemplation. This is by and large a traditional Christmas album all the way, something that you could play for your parents and have them say, “Hey, that’s better than the weird one you brought last year.” He layers his voice into a mini choir for the a capella on “O Come All Ye Faithful”, throws a funny spoken word interlude into “Christmas Time Is Here” that pokes fun at his sad-sack persona, and includes an overlooked Christmas-themed song into the mix, the Pretenders’ “2000 Miles”, which really should be a standard. It’s just voice and guitar throughout, but Kozelek’s nylon string work is consistently engaging, even as he falls back on some of his go-to fingerpicking patterns.
But the album’s strengths—the relaxed vibe, easy prettiness, and earthy undercurrent, all appropriate for a bloated eggnog buzz—happen to be qualities Kozelek can conjure at will. He has a weird way with covers; he can make any song sound like a Kozelek song, but that’s a double-edged sword. When he tackles someone else’s music it almost always sounds good, but there is rarely any depth, and the actual content can seem irrelevant. Two previous covers collections, the AC/DC set What’s Next to the Moon and Tiny Cities, featuring Modest Mouse songs, were more about domination than interpretation. Kozelek smothers the songs in his own aesthetic, and the same holds true here. The main differences being, Christmas songs lend themselves well to his particular concerns, and not too many people are thinking about the deeper layers of meaning inside “O Christmas Tree”. Is it going to bump Low’s Christmas out of the rotation? Not likely. But it’s not bad, and it very well may sound better with each passing year.


Purple Rain was a landmark that solidified Prince’s standing as the preeminent pop genius of his generation; more than three decades on, it still retains all of its power.

Purple Rain

Prior to Purple Rain, the backstory Prince had created for himself was that of a sex-obsessed R&B groove superstar, a multi-instrumentalist and prodigious musical upstart who used his considerable powers for the sole purposes of getting the club lit the fuck up. He presented himself as a kind of raunch alien bringing the divine soundtrack to your coke-fueled, crushed velour orgy, the musical equivalent of a fog machine and a black strobe light. He refused interviews and shied away from press profiles. He famously stonewalled music press royalty—even kingmaker Dick Clark on his own show. You were not to know who he was or where he was from. You were not to fully comprehend his race nor his gender. You were not to find pictures of him in Teen Beat buying apples and milk at the grocery store in sweatpants and a baseball cap. He was most decidedly not just like us. He was from some alternate dimension where it was always 2 a.m. on a misty full moon. You were to believe that he was as mysterious as god, something conjured, perhaps from your fantasies, a magical apparition descending from funk heaven, arriving on a cloud of purple smoke and adorned in little more than a guitar, a falsetto made of glitter, and a deeply intractable groove.
But as the wildly creative are wont to do, by 1983 Prince was looking to switch that whole thing up. Despite his acute talent, he was still viewed by the industry at large as little more than an extra-funky urban novelty act, someone in league with the likes of Rick James and Lipps Inc. His most successful song to date, “Little Red Corvette,” had peaked at number 6 on the Billboard Hot 100, which simply was not good enough for the man who once described the musical training he received at the hands of his father as “almost like the Army.”
In 1982, Bruce Springsteen was devastating the country with the spare and stark depictions of a bankrupt American Dream on his darkened opus Nebraska. Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet band were doubling down on white-man soul with the basic but wildly popular “Old Time Rock & Roll,” and Michael Jackson was re-wiring the industry with an album composed almost entirely of number 1 pop hits that spent 37 weeks lording over the Billboard charts. Prince’s keyboardist, Dr. Fink, recalls that during the 1999 tour, his band leader asked him what makes Seger’s music so popular. “Well, he's playing mainstream pop-rock,” Fink told him. “If you were to write something along these lines, it would cross things over for you even further.” Prince had already been carrying a purple notebook with him on the tour bus in which he had been scribbling the ideas, notes and images that would become his next movement. (Prince didn’t make albums, he made environments) and he was looking for something new.
That “something new” was Purple Rain, a sonic and visual experience that cracks open the shell of his reclusive sex alien persona to tell something of an origin story, one slightly more than loosely based on Prince’s real life. The film, directed by an unknown, produced by first timers and starring a bunch of people who had never acted in a movie before, has become an astronomical and enduring success against overwhelming odds. But it does so because it’s a film about America, about revolution and youth and anger and fucking. About not being like your dad. That is to say, it’s about rock’n’roll. It’s the tale of a kid from an abusive home in a cold, working-class city who has a shitload of talent and a dream. And he has to figure out, through tortuous trial and error, exactly what he needs to destroy in order to achieve it. Purple Rain is rough and vulnerable, common and funny, and at times even cute. It is the exact opposite of everything Prince had been before it. But let’s not kid ourselves. The movie is merely decently shot, competently directed, and not even passably acted. The real reason it works is because of the itinerant magnetism of its lead and of the music he can make.
Prince’s sixth studio offering, 1984’s Music From the Motion Picture Purple Rain, is Springsteen’s Nebraska laced with the violence of James Brown’s deepest grooves and liberally dusted with white dove feathers, dried rose petals, and scented candle wax. The album manages to deftly thread the needle between a dazzling array of genres: disaffected synth pop, tongue-wagging hair metal, dark R&B, and pleading soul. The result is something that isn’t a successful combination of genres as much as an effortless, almost incidental transcendence of the very idea of genre itself. It doesn’t matter what it’s called. It doesn’t matter what you like. You like this. It is wrong to say that Purple Rain blazes a new trail. Rather it beams a blinding light signal from a part of the forest that no one will be able to ever find again. You cannot make another album like it. The only way to get to where Purple Rain takes you is to play Purple Rain.
Given that the album is somewhat of an early-career look back for Prince, it gives us new access into his musical and cultural background. His hometown of Minneapolis boasted a black population of 4.3% in the 1970 census and, other than the low range KMOJ, didn’t have an urban formatted station until 2000. If you grew up listening to the radio in the Minneapolis of Prince’s youth, then you grew up listening to rock. Thusly the album’s opening salvo, “Let’s Go Crazy,” thematically picks up where the titular track from 1999 leaves off, namely: “We’re all going to die one way or another, so let’s rock while we’re here,” but musically is a dramatic departure from the slick, smokey grooves of its predecessor. It is set against a hyperactive American backbeat reminiscent of latter-day rockabilly, and features Prince ripping out the kind of ostentatiously speedy Van Halen-esque guitar work that would become the audio version of the generation’s early MTV aesthetic.
From there, the album drops into the closest thing it has to a dud in the Apollonia duet “Take Me With U.” But like another genius pop composer, Stevie Wonder, (to whom Prince is not compared nearly enough), his work brims with so many compelling musical ideas that they can be found hidden in even the weakest of tracks. “Take Me With U” is distinguished by a stellar intro and bridge played only on tom-tom and strings. On “The Beautiful Ones,” Prince the serpentine is at his most coiled, his falsetto vocals syrupy and tightly wound until they explode into a wounded animal scream. “Do you want him/Or do you want me/Cuz I want you!” he howls, bursting out of the song all together. In the movie’s plot, this is about a love triangle, but it feels more like Prince is at the throat of his listeners. “Do you want that bullshit on the radio? Or do you want this brilliance? Make up your goddamn mind!”
“Computer Blue” begins with a cryptic spoken exchange between guitarist Wendy Melvoin and Keyboardist Lisa Coleman that may either be about an impending sex act or an impending cup of tea, (vaguely pornographic ambiguity is an aesthetic calling card of the Revolution, Prince’s adroit, androgynous, and multi-racial backing band). The ensuing song is a club jam about the common ’80s theme of existential technological alienation. It flows smoothly into a melodic instrumental, the unlisted “Father’s Song” that showcases Prince’s talent for crafting a surprisingly emotional narrative out of a chord progression and a guitar solo (foreshadowing, perhaps?) before devolving into feedback, wordless screaming, and the intro to the crowning achievement of the first half.
That achievement is “Darling Nikki,” a track that is both thick and skimpy, dark and taut: a thumping, loping, grinding fuck song about getting dirty with and getting played by the timeless femme fatale. The denouement, a quivering undulating coda, impossibly finds the musical link between burlesque backing bands and thrash metal double bass pedal rumbles, and is topped off by a terse and violent guitar solo. The whole song seems to operate at three different tempos simultaneously, leaving no part of your body or spirit quite able to escape its savage grasp.
The second half of the album begins with the confessional “When Doves Cry,” the album’s first single (and Prince’s first ever Billboard #1) wherein he delivers his most pointedly personal lyrics yet, “Maybe I’m just like my father/Too bold/Maybe you’re just like my mother/She’s never satisfied.” In the hands of a lesser talent this could come off as maudlin public journal reading, but fortunately for all of us, “When Doves Cry” is one of Prince’s most affecting compositions to date, launching with a bristling guitar burst before dropping into a karst LM-1 drum pattern featuring the signature knocks he used to great effect on 1999. The ensuing groove provides a solid bed for a bouquet of rococo keyboard arpeggios and steadily unfolding melodic progressions that expertly capture the helpless confessional pleading of a man trying to figure out who he is and why it hurts so damn much. It is the the mid-show stopper, Prince as Rimbaud in pressed petals and lace, carefully gluing together a ransom note from a prison of his own beauty and emotion.
Having covered the tough stuff, we are free to party, and “I Would Die 4 U” is a celebratory, if lyrically morose, jam distinguished by a vast swaths of new wave synth, deep bounce and an insistent high hat. Following that is the impish and yet entirely earnest “Baby I’m a Star.” This is not Prince the character saying it, it is Prince the 26 year old serving notice that he’s greater than we could have ever imagined (turned out he was right) and that we need either get on board or get left.
Which brings us to the album’s title track, the epic and uncharacteristic arena jam “Purple Rain.” Prince here is part preacher, part guitar god. So deeply embedded in arena rock is this song that Prince reportedly called Jonathan Cain and Neal Schon of Journey to ask their blessing (and to ensure they wouldn’t sue over the song’s proximity to “Faithfully”). “Purple Rain” is a baptism, a washing clean of sins and a chance at redemption, even if the words don’t make any sense, (and to most people they don’t) the vastness of the arrangement, the grandiosity of the soloing, the pleading of the vocals reaches you, makes you cry, makes you feel free.
With Purple Rain, Prince bursts forth from the ghetto created by mainstream radio and launches himself directly onto the Mt. Rushmore of American music. He plays rock better than rock musicians, composes better than jazz guys, and performs better than everyone, all without ever abandoning his roots as a funk man, a party leader, a true MC.  The album and film brought him a fame greater and more frightening than even he imagined and he would eventually retreat into the reclusive and obtuse inscrutability for which he ultimately became known. But for the 24 weeks Purple Rain spent atop the charts in 1984, the black kid from the midwest had managed to become the most accurate expression we had of young America’s overabundance of angst, love, horniness, recklessness, idealism, and hope. For those 24 weeks at least, Prince was one of us.


The ranging album from the Philadelphia songwriter adopts a drifting mind as its emotional compass. There’s no rush to get where he’s going, and he rarely checks to see if you’re still following along.

Bottle It In

Nestled into Side A of Kurt Vile’s seventh solo album, Bottle It In, is “Bassackwards,” 10 minutes of warped, psychedelic folk-rock, like a long sigh in the face of existential dread. Some songwriters seek wisdom in their aimlessness—reflecting on what they could have done better, trying to pinpoint what went wrong. But there’s no moral to Vile’s story; he wallows, unapologetically. To a slow-pulsing chord progression, like Tom Petty’s “Swingin’” played on the moon, the 38-year-old Philadelphia songwriter repeats himself and gets distracted before losing his train of thought completely. As he drifts through space, he sounds confused, resigned, distant. It’s one of his best songs yet.
This track, and its circuitous path toward nothingness, is a key insight into the mind of Kurt Vile. A lot of his lyrics take place in the early hours of the day, those bleary, pre-coffee moments, when nobody else is around, that have always somehow inspired his clearest thoughts. Over the last decade, Vile’s musical evolution from scuzzy, self-recorded doodles to fuller, brighter vistas has resembled a diary composed entirely of late-summer weekend mornings: He seeks comfortability over clarity, with anxiety creeping in but never quite blocking the light. Or as he puts it in “Bassackwards,” “The sun went down, and I couldn’t find another one… for a while.”
Recorded gradually throughout America while Vile was on tour over the last three years, Bottle It In adopts a drifting mind as its emotional compass. The scenery changes, but Vile’s dazed, half-smile remains constant. “One Trick Ponies” is a bouncy highlight about friendship and the joys of repetition, as Vile depicts the span of life as a “song, if the repeats were long.” Communicating in a chewy monotone that’s more for zoning out than singing along, he still writes lyrics that feel like predictive text: “What a world we’ve inherited/From another mother/What a whale of a pickle.” So over Bottle It In’s 80 minutes, he manages to communicate very little, yet the mood is immediately identifiable: slow, smoky, heady. There’s no rush to get where he’s going, and he rarely checks to see if you’re still following along.
While Bottle It In—Vile’s longest, most introspective record—lacks the quiet beauty of 2011’s Smoke Ring for My Halo, the warmth of 2013’s Wakin on a Pretty Daze, or the immediacy of 2015’s b’lieve i’m goin’ down…, its monolithic Kurtness is its own defining quality. In a recent New York Times interview, he jokingly compared the record to Bruce Springsteen’s multi-platinum Born in the U.S.A. Of course, nothing sounds like a “Dancing in the Dark”-style breakthrough, but there is a sense of comprehensiveness, each song zooming into a different, hazy corner of his psyche. The result feels like an extended hang alone with Kurt in a dark basement. Here, he’s less likely to summon the energy for a jam like 2009’s “Freak Train” and more likely to, say, crack a joke about avoiding parking tickets (“Loading Zones”) or gush about being in love while ripping noisy guitar solos for 10-plus minutes (“Skinny Mini”). At a certain point, though, the air can get a little stale.
To keep things fresh, he enlists the help of Cass McCombs, Kim Gordon, and Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa, though often in barely noticeable ways. Only harpist Mary Lattimore steals the show, ascending the free-floating title track into a menacing, regenerative anti-epic. Yet Bottle It In rotates entirely around Vile. Just as you couldn’t mistake his voice or lyrics for anyone else’s, his silvery, shapeshifting guitar remains a defining sound in modern indie rock. When his compositions feel like thoughts in progress, his guitar speaks to the intensity bubbling just under the surface.
At its best, Bottle It In pairs music with message to create a new tension in Vile’s work. The anti-technology lyrics of “Mutinies” are fairly simple (“I think things were way easier with a regular telephone,” he mutters), but the arrangement is complex and colorful, building to a droning sunshower that envelopes his words. “Cold Was the Wind,” meanwhile, furthers his penchant for rambling about his rambles, but its arrangement is one of his darkest, most unsettling studio concoctions yet. It could pass for a spidery Tom Waits demo or the theme for an HBO miniseries about a sad detective.
And then, of course, there’s “Bassackwards.” It’s the beautiful, banal peak of the record, a warning for the purposeful meandering that follows. The album’s structure—with its more accessible tracks up front and a meditative, somewhat indulgent back-half—can feel like a conversation slipping silently into sighing and nodding. At the end of “Bassackwards,” he mumbles, “Just the way things is these days/Just the way things come out.” It’s the type of thing you say when you’re bored and trying to change the subject but it also serves his momentary thesis statement. Vile has long embraced such in-between moments—he’s just never sounded so lost in one.


The Brooklyn metal band Tombs have shifted their lineup repeatedly while maintaining an eerie consistency—the group hasn’t released a bad record. Their new EP is capable of making you think of Unsane, Darkthrone, and Bauhaus in the same song.

All Empires Fall

Tombs are restless—or at least vocalist and guitarist Mike Hill is. Hill's changed the lineup around him a handful of times since founding the band in 2007, and the sound's shifted just as often. They've had a couple different drummers, a few different guitarists and bassists. They've also moved from an act that brought to mind Helmet collaborating with Immortal to something that can bring to mind Sisters of Mercy stuck in a blackened downpour.
Hill has done all this while maintaining an eerie consistency—the group hasn't released a bad record, and their last two collections, 2011's Path of Totality and 2014's Savage Gold, were among the best the years they came out. The music has always been precise and muscular, tough but elegant, even as they started working more elements into their sound: They are capable of making you think of Unsane, Darkthrone, and Bauhaus in the same song. The band name itself,"Tombs," is flexible—broad, everyday, non-specific—but it's always related to death.
Their new EP, All Empires Fall, features their biggest stylistic shift to date. Much of this is due to the addition of synth/electronics player and co-vocalist Fade Kainer, an avowed Andy Stott fan who used to front the crusty doom group, Batillus, and currently plays in the power-electronics project, Theologian, among other industrial-leaning acts. (The EP also welcomes new drummer Charlie Schmid of Vaura and guitarist Evan Void of Sadgiqacea.)
There's more space here than on past offerings. The songs are still coiled and intense, but Tombs allow themselves room to drift into dark chasms of rough, bleak ambience. You have to think this is partially a result of the flexibility Kainer affords them. He also adds Wax Trax howls alongside Hill's brutal barks. Hill continues to grow as a singer; When not shouting or screaming, he's crooning clean tones that can bring to mind Peter Murphy or Ian Curtis. In the past I've likened Hill to a drill sergeant because of his muscles and shaved head. In person, though, he strikes me as especially calm, even zen. You do get the idea, however, that he's pushing the people around him to make the most disciplined music of their careers—and that they're happily following his lead.
All Empires Fall is brief. There are five songs across 24 minutes, and it feels more like a palate cleanser than a complete offering. But because of its precision, and Sanford Parker's dense production, it's also powerful. Short instrumental "The World is Made of Fire" sounds like a post-metal anthem reminiscent of fellow Brooklynites Sannhet until the entrance of melancholic, gothic-metal synths. It's followed by "Obsidian,” which as its name suggests, offers swarming black metal. On the song, Hill growls"We are the fallen/ Manifest in shadows"; much of the record explores the apocalypse on a personal, individual level.
Like all of what Tombs does, the lyrics and music feel thoughtful— there are no tossed-off details in the maelstrom. The more mid-tempo "Last Days of Sunlight” drips with haunted, clanging atmospherics; Hill chants lyrics that feel personal ("It is hard to forgive me/ 100 tears have fallen") with a dead-eyed intonation. The shredding, bass-heavy, death rock-paced"Deceiver" features dual vocals from Hill and Kainer, along with contributions from Sera Timms of Black Mare and Ides of Gemini. It's kind of like industrial Watain.
But it's the last song,"V”, that has me most excited for what they do next. Opening with a minute and a half of what sounds like a distant wind tunnel lined with ice, the six and a half minute track becomes an anthem that moves between black metal, post-punk, and death rock. Hill and Kainer repeatedly shout"Fall into the great divide/ Fall into the netherworld," while elegant synths and layers of guitars and drums fight it out behind them. It's maybe the catchiest song Tombs have ever written. It reminded me of the dark punk anthems that would sometimes show up on MTV's 120 Minutes when I was a kid, which made me think about how black metal is often just one step away from goth and punk. On these songs, Tombs take those steps and more, and then sprint.


At their best, the Philly punk band JANK highlights the connection between emo’s fourth wave and the unconventional, genre-spanning pop of the Dismemberment Plan or the Unicorns.

Awkward Pop Songs

Humor has a tenuous place in music, and actual “jokes” have almost none at all. It's understandable: Most songwriting places a premium on some sort of basic honesty, and asking someone “are you joking?” is usually a way to determine if they are shitting you. Honest, earnest attempts to be funny, meanwhile, usually end up with the opposite result. So this is what *Awkward Pop Songs *knowingly puts itself up against—its cover art and album title immediately establish its prank-punk bonafides and “JANK” itself is probably even sillier than the "Futurama" reference frontperson Matt Diamond used for previous band Panucci’s Pizza. But in the few months since its initial release and its physical reissue, *Awkward Pop Songs *has lived out a lyric from another trio whose superficial goofiness was a Trojan horse for one of the most inventive, original and flat-out *fun *records in its realm: “Saw the cover of the tape, figured it’s pretty wack/later on eventually admitted that it’s pretty crack.”
As was the case with Das Racist, local heroes Ween, and even the Golden State Warriors, JANK’s irreverence feels like an unlocked superpower rather than a defense mechanism or compensatory measure—that they’re having this much fun with their technically astonishing chops makes their subversion of realness seem all the more amazing. Even more improbable is the number of styles in which they can operate: though the title *Awkward Pop Songs *is the least-clever aspect of the LP, it’s an accurate descriptor for an overview of nearly every offshoot of “revival” emo that has coalesced into the new shape of alternative rock.
There’s plenty of the arpeggiated, hammer-and-pull guitar of the dubious, American Football-fathered “twinkle” subgenre, as well as the two-handed tapping that marks its mathier offshoots. JANK can also veer towards hefty, Will Yip-approved emo-gaze and sometimes it all happens within the *same song (“Caitlyn”). Diamond’s voice can elicit the instantaneous thrills of raw-throated, Midwestern emo and caffeinated pop-punk without the requisite adenoidal whine. In fact, the songs that most immediately sound like they're crushing hard on someone *turn into surrealistic stoner talk: “Caitlyn” proposes a playdate of “Katamari Damacy” and late-night TV with an imaginary dog. “Wut I Liek Abt U” cops the irrepressible, house party giddiness of Nothing Feels Good and its whimsical, quotable non-sequiturs—“And you could use a new toothbrush!;” “Tell me your favorite kind of dinosaur?”
At its peaks, Awkward Pop Songs draws a fat highlighter on the connection between emo’s fourth wave and the unconventional, genre-spanning pop of the Dismemberment Plan or the Unicorns, bands whose manic, effusive, anti-cool styles soon were subsumed by more earnest, bombastic forms of indie rock. This aspect of JANK can make *Awkward Pop Songs *sound damn-near necessary in 2016—if peers like Foxing, The World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, and the Hotelier are stewards of the communally composed, broadly ambitious sound of mid-decade indie rock, they also have its tendency towards somber intensity.
But JANK kid because they love: the most impressive part of *Awkward Pop Songs *is that it’s incredibly funny without sounding like it’s ever making *fun *of anyone specific. Diamond's pop culture reference points are still cartoonish and broad—“Ouran Highschool Toast Club” tweaks the title of a popular parody of *otaku *culture, while “Race Car Bed” nods at an overlooked joke on the otherwise overexposed “Can I Borrow A Feeling?” episode of “The Simpsons.”
But the best laughs are musical in-jokes and some have nothing at all to do with JANK’s style of music. “Race Car Bed” also nominally “features” the presumable #sadboy parody Yung Goth Boi and “Loading Screen” might be a subtext-free goof on the retro-futurist fetishizing of James Ferraro or PC Music. “The Hat Store” strives to be this decade’s “Combination Pizza Hut & Taco Bell;” “Spilt to Bill” shouts out the similarly untamed Island of Misfit Toys and announces, “if you don’t like Built to Spill, then I don’t fuck with you or anyone you know” while sounding like a There’s Nothing Wrong With Love* *cut played at 78 rpm.
The climactic moment of *Awkward Pop Songs *occurs when the happy hardcore of “J A N K!” crumples into a heap for no discernible reason. And then, the most legit LOL a punk record has given me in ages: a group chant of “THIS IS...A RIPOFF...OF A...TITLE...FIGHT SONG,” knicking the melody of their emo-gaze turning point “Head in the Ceiling Fan.” It doesn’t come off like a joke at the expense of punk rock’s most stoic bands, or really even the countless pop-punk acts who’ve aped it to establish a more “mature” sound. It's more of a simple “if if feel good, do it” moment. Or, an acknowledgment that even if it's only four years old, that's a watershed classic, and thus, public domain. It’s the same kind of open-ended communication and crowd participation that constantly pops up in hip-hop and pop music. Rather than shy away from people claiming their fans are “meme loving Tumblr kids,” JANK say, “we are too.” Is it any wonder that JANK can basically be their own backing band at shows these days?


Inspired by the Beatles circa Revolver, Mike Donovan’s lo-fi marauders fuse their habitual folksy garage and fantastical psych into a wily sound fleshed out with Mellotron and tape echo.

Blexxed Rec

Hyde Street Studios has been canceling out the din of its eponymous San Francisco block for six decades now. As Wally Heider Studios in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it freeze-framed the boundless spirit of the Bay Area—and the counterculture more broadly—in records by Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. A half-century on, in a dank, unassuming space next door, Mike Donovan’s lo-fi marauders the Peacers help to carry the mantle for savvy psychedelia.
Recorded between 2017 and 2020 at Hyde Street, another space across the way, and in Hudson, New York, their third album, Blexxed Rec, mines scrappy pop majesty from a relatively modest setup. Reuniting Donovan with Bo Moore, Shayde Sartin, and Mike Shoun—returning from 2017’s Introducing the Crimsmen—joint action proves key here. Splitting songwriting duties so that each member reveals a hue of their full-spectrum sound, the band earns its loose supergroup stripes. In sound and synergy, the example of the Beatles circa Revolver looms large. It’s a big shadow to fill out, but they wear it well.
Like many of their peers, including Donovan’s previous outfit, Sic Alps, the Peacers have generally sat in the overlap of two compatible worlds: folksy garage and fantastical psych. Here these often thread as one. A shifting, glam-tinged gem, “Dickdog in Paris” is an exercise in changing gears. Flipping full-blown swagger to skeletal Mellotron and tape echo, it neatly captures the band’s wily curveballs. Elsewhere, the acoustic-driven “Stinson Teep” is a peak. “All the living, faceless actors/You can have your Grammy now,” Donovan drawls. It’s languid, kind of out of it—a dosed tale that equally conjures White Fence and G N’ R Lies, if the latter had a Drag City catalog number.
In a recent video, a masked-up Bo Moore and Mike Shoun gave a guided tour of their space on Hyde Street. They geek out over mics, snare drums, and other equipment. But it’s their trusty ¼" 8-track recorder, the Tascam 388, that commands the most reverence. The versatile, affordable machine has gained a cult-like following among artists in the Bay Area and beyond (John Dwyer’s Castle Face have regularly used it to capture shows in the garage and psych community). It isn’t the vintage desk next door, and it’s far from Studio Two at Abbey Road, but with it, the Peacers get dynamic range while retaining that all-important analog touch. This Goldilocks ideal has a point: The band are, in their own thrifty way, gearheads but not precious. Blexxed Rec captures that important distinction. Crowning it all is the way each instrument is fixed in space, neither lost nor squashed in the mix. Dozy to the point of almost veering off the road, the Syd Barrett-like slouch of “Irish Suit” exhausts the full range of their beloved recording console.
As Stephen Malkmus has in recent years, particularly on Sparkle Hard, the band honors past masters without skewing into pastiche. The most obvious hat tip to the Beatles, Moore’s “Colors for You” blends the warm, round tone of Paul McCartney’s Hofner bass with a backward-looped swirl of strings. Penned by Sartin, who stocked the rock shelves at San Francisco’s Amoeba store for a number of years, “Make It Right” plays like a long-lost relic from a Bay Area troubadour of yore. “You know I want to make it right,” Sartin vows over a brittle refrain. It’s the band’s most heartfelt moment this time around—not least because it sits alongside titles like “Dickdog in Paris” and “Ghost of a Motherfucker.”
In various formations, Donovan has long been an ace at wrangling puckish lyrics from the prosaic. Here, Sartin and Moore adopt the tried-and-tested approach as they outright refuse to signpost the times beyond getting by in a vague, Dadaist daze. “Irish Suit” concerns itself with “Catholic leisure” and pink guitars. On “Blackberry Est,” Donovan sings, “You cleared your debt and straightened your top.” A highlight, the lysergic pop of “Dandelion” finds Moore obliquely asking, “Who will tell her now?” Maybe it has something to do with its three-year gestation, but these songs don’t feel typical of the times. In fact, they sidestep worldly strife in ways we should probably be thankful for.
The current status of rock’n’roll—rendered by longtimers like Foo Fighters less an art form or a living culture than a contractual obligation—make the Peacers feel all the more invaluable. There’s no “Eleanor Rigby” or “Tomorrow Never Knows” here, but by absorbing and reimagining the spacious, surrealist lineage from which they have sprung, they offer an album that feels like it’s already stood the test of time.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Like those on Mountain Goats' We Shall All Be Healed, the songs on Gowns' dark, trembly, electronics-laden folk album are about people so unbelievably narcotized that they're barely cognizant of their surroundings.

Red State

Almost none of the songs on Gowns' drone-folk album Red State take place outside. The issue here isn't preference of location, but inertia: Moving becomes both physically difficult and psychologically unappealing when you're on a tremendous amount of drugs. On the Mountain Goats' We Shall All Be Healed, John Darnielle explored the same drag: "When we walk out in the sunlight we tell every we know it hurts our eyes/ When the real reason we don't like it is that it makes us wonder if we're dying."
Red State is, like We Shall All Be Healed, an album about people so unbelievably narcotized that they're barely cognizant of their surroundings. But fully grasping reality isn't the goal of most vision-seekers; when Erika Anderson reads off the roll of toxins in their system on "Fargo", she's not scared or even proud, she's bemused. And when she wheezes a minute later that "The light that poured in through the window was golden" in a crappy basement room in South Dakota, well, that's her way of saying hello to heaven.
Gowns' music is serially unstable: Both Anderson and Ezra Buchla wheeze like they have knife wounds in their stomachs, the band's synth patches fail to spread into full drones, and its clattering percussion (especially on the album's centerpiece, "White Like Heaven") never settles into a groove. But the catastrophe is strategic; it accentuates a feeling of possibility-- for as often Gowns might have a wreck, they might have a revelation. In an era where indie's fetishes have been for composure, discretion, muscle, and nice shoes, Gowns' agenda-- to make a porno about confusion-- is radical.
On the process of making Red State, Anderson wrote, "When you listen you can tell that it could have only been recorded in a shit-ass meat-packing city in the Midwest where people shoot crank mixed with grape Kool-Aid and the grocery checkers don't even know what tofu is and all there is to do is get shit-faced at the bar and ask everyone how their kids are doing." And you can tell. Fragile people make bad decisions. There are places in this country cursed by boredom and bad weather. Of course, Buchla, Anderson, and drummer Corey Fogel see what they want to see (or what the drugs point their characters toward). This makes them good artists and potentially horrible journalists.
Still, for all the romance and theatricality of their visions-- drug freaks are nothing if not indulgent in their compellingly insane hunches-- Gowns' stories end up sounding like grisly reportage. Red State concludes with "Advice" and "Cherylee", the former a sampled television speaker talking about the difficulties of addiction over a slow fade of distortion and piano, the latter morphing from uncertain noise into a ballad about recovery, Anderson moaning, like she's at church, "You've gotta stare into the mirror till you name this disease/ You've gotta write down all the symptoms even though it's obscene." Television and mirrors: two of the scariest things found in almost every American home.


Girl Band are an Irish punk quartet featuring no girls. This new EP compiles past singles, including 25-second circle-pit blurts along with updates of songs by Beat Happening and Blawan, to introduce the group's nihilistic noise to North American audiences.

The Early Years EP

The obvious joke with Girl Band is that the Irish quartet features no girls (and not everyone’s laughing), but really, the bigger misdirection lies in calling themselves a band. Sure, their composition conforms to standard punk-rock parameters—yelping singer, fuzzbox-tweaking guitarist and bassist, pugilistic drummer—but even at its most ferocious, their music lacks the emotionally raw, primal catharsis we associate with post-hardcore acts. They come off more like steely lab technicians administering shock treatment for dubious purposes. You don’t so much listen to a Girl Band song as get strapped into it: militaristic drum stomps mimic the beat of your pounding heart; foreboding, unidentifiable noises emerge suddenly from unseen corners seemingly by the push of a button; and, as they pile on the punishment with sadistic glee, your convulsions effectively form a new dance move.
It’s a drill that Girl Band have been gradually perfecting over the past two years, through a string of singles that have showcased their bone-crushing force, but through markedly different demonstrations, be it 25-second circle-pit blurts or updates of songs by everyone from Beat Happening to Blawan. While these tracks have been compiled by Rough Trade on The Early Years to introduce Girl Band to North American audiences, the EP is also a snapshot of a band still figuring out how to harness the nihilistic noise of punk and the architectural precision of dance music without conforming to the conventions of either.
It’s no insult to say that Girl Band’s signature song at this point is a cover—because it's one that perfectly encapsulates both their antagonistic essence and unorthodox methodology. Their grueling distension of Blawan’s "Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage"from 2013 not only betrayed a vision that looked far beyond punk for inspiration, but proved to be an ideal vehicle for frontman Dara Kiely to assert his split personality: part arch absurdist, part panic-attacked nervous wreck. The band’s hammering 2014 single "Lawman" further entrenched these sarcastic/spastic extremes, though, after the past year of awful police-related headlines, the satirical non sequitirs ("He starts every sentence with 'I know I’m not a racist, but…'") and the song’s violent meltdown climax have acquired an accidental, uncomfortably topical resonance.
Girl Band’s singular qualities are best appreciated in these longer tracks, which clear adequate space for Kiely's wild mood swings, while affording the band enough time to experiment and find just the right dissonant frequencies to power their apocalyptic finales. The more concentrated songs, naturally, give them less to do: the rumble through Beat Happening’s "I Love You" is ultimately more a reverential nod to Girl Band’s smart-ass indie ancestors than something they try to fully claim as their own, while the group were in such a rush to unleash half-minute no-fi thrasher "The Cha Cha Cha" that they seemingly neglected to master it properly. But "De Bom Bom" marks the point where Girl Band’s primordial aggression and burgeoning ambitions start to coalesce, packing all the textural disorientation and mounting intensity of their extended workouts into a taut, three-and-a-half-minute shot.
Like the Girl Band name itself, the title of The Early Years is a silly joke—for one, the EP doesn’t even include the band’s earliest recordings (that would be 2012’s France 98 mini-album), and the period that it faux-nostalgically canonizes covers a mere 19-month span that ended just last summer. But the mercurial, combustible potential within suggests we may not be laughing at it for much longer—like patron saints Liars’ equally feral 2001 debut, The Early Years could one day seem like a mere baby step for a band that has evolved into something even more imposing.


On her fourth album, Elysia Crampton continues staking out an anti-colonialist conception of time. It blooms from big, propulsive drum patterns while conjuring a sense of profound loneliness.

Elysia Crampton

Throughout her work to date, Amerindian electronic producer Elysia Crampton has maintained a skeptical relationship to linear time. In interviews, she cites the Aymara concept of taypi, “a sort of juncture where the space-times of the here and now and the unknown or de-known co-mingle,” a place “where weeping turns to melodious noise.” Her music resists ingrained ways of hearing; where a listener trained on Western dance music might search for tension and release, for narrative followed by denouement, Crampton offers discombobulated fragments, ragged contradictions, and anticlimax. Her 2017 record, Spots y Escupitajo, positioned radio spots for imaginary FM stations as songs in their own right, not auxiliary experiments accompanying the “real” music. On her fourth, self-titled album, Crampton continues staking out an anti-colonialist conception of time, using music’s sequential nature as a tool for imagining processes that have no beginnings and no ends.
By drawing from the rhythms of Andean genres like khantus and tundique, Crampton investigates the relationship between the individual self and the social structures in which the self is embedded. Though Elysia Crampton blooms from big, propulsive drum patterns, the kind that must be played by a group of musicians and not an individual, it also conjures a sense of profound loneliness. Mournful synth chords permeate “Oscollo,” whose glitching textures situate those drum patterns at a remove. They don’t envelop the listener so much as they seem to waft over from a vast and desolate landscape, as though the celebration they suggest were happening far away. On “Pachuyma” and “Moscow (Mariposa Voladora),” the drum beats barely insinuate celebration at all. They gnash their teeth, as if in warning, while air horns and disembodied voices cry out amid the chaos.
While it takes a band of people to create these patterns with physical drums, the technology accessible to electronic musicians makes it possible to render these beats alone. The clipped, airless quality of the synth drum sounds creates friction with the collective settings of ritual and celebration in which such drum patterns might be found. Crampton implies a parade and then reveals herself to be the sole participant.
That’s not to say that Crampton is the sole presence on the album. Different voices speak different words across its six tracks, though the language never coheres or settles into a pattern. These voices could be radio spots interjecting across the airwaves, or discrete fragments of spoken conversation severed from their origin and embedded in the fabric of the music. They have their own internal rhythms, and because the same clips appear in more than one track, they have the effect of uniting the album, of grouping its songs together into the same space.
In the liner notes, Crampton dedicates the record to Ofelia (aka Carlos) Espinoza, the trans femme Aymara revolutionary known for changing the festival costume of the China Supay, a femme devil figure critical to indigenous celebrations like the Carnaval de Oruro in Bolivia. In citing Espinoza, Crampton connects a cultural history of trans survival to the present moment. This blur of contemporary dance music into historical ritual complicates two colonialist myths: that Native Americans belong to the distant past, not the present, and that trans people belong to the present, not the past. American racism falsely situates indigenous peoples within a vague “history;” likewise, but in reverse, contemporary transphobes make the tenuous claim that gender nonconforming people represent an entirely new phenomenon. Both myths attempt to sequester oppressed people into disconnected units of time, isolating them from their histories and their futures. In her music-making practice, Crampton uproots these ways of thinking, presenting a kind of perpetual motion as an alternative to discrete portions of time. There is no now and there is no then. There is only the way the beat hits the ear.


Page Hamilton takes more chances than he ever has on Dead to the World, Helmet's eighth studio album and fourth since he re-launched the brand with a revolving cast of side musicians.

Dead to the World

It’s hard to calculate just how pervasive Helmet founder Page Hamilton’s influence has been, but at one point during the mid-90’s it seemed as if his footprints were all over the heavy metal and alt-rock landscape. You could make a strong case that there are traces of Hamilton’s style in the music of Tool, the Deftones, and even the likes of Weezer and the Smashing Pumpkins. Helmet’s reach makes sense given that the band's career arc traversed multiple scenes in a short time. Starting out with one foot in New York’s avant-garde sphere following Hamilton’s tenures with Glenn Branca and Band of Susans, Helmet’s earliest releases on the iconic indie label Amphetamine Reptile in ’89-’90 landed them in the middle of a burgeoning underground wave that included other cult acts like Cows, Killdozer, Today Is the Day, and others.
Along the way, Helmet also became associated with the artier side of New York’s hardcore and post-hardcore circles alongside Quicksand and Orange 9mm. Metal audiences—and bands like Sepultura and Pantera —embraced them as well. By 1994, Helmet found themselves in the thick of the alternative rock zeitgeist as their video for “Milktoast,” their contribution to The Crow soundtrack, scored heavy rotation on MTV. And just prior to the band’s breakup in the late ’90s, Helmet toured with Korn and Limp Bizkit.
Hamilton’s hypnotic, earworm-like riffs have a way of instantly getting under your skin and sticking to your brain like gum. So does the grooving but strangely counter-intuitive approach to rhythm that sets the band's sound apart to this day. So it’s easy to see why Helmet's signature style rubbed off so readily on other bands. In fact, it’s hard to imagine Meshuggah or the Dillinger Escape Plan evolving the way they did without Hamilton’s proto math-metal vocabulary to build on.
But in spite of his master’s degree in jazz composition, Hamilton imposed a rigid, primitivistic structural frame on Helmet’s music that he's never completely broken free of. Most of the time, he hasn't really tried. Not unlike Guided By Voices mastermind Bob Pollard, Hamilton has more or less recycled the same formula for Helmet’s entire career, insisting on defining the band by its limits even long after it was creatively expedient to do so—shocking when you consider that, in his time away from Helmet, Hamilton played with Bowie and Joe Henry, nearly joined Wire, and worked on film scores with composer Elliot Goldenthal.
The good news is that Hamilton takes more chances than he ever has on Dead to the World, the band's eighth studio album and fourth since Hamilton re-launched the Helmet brand with a revolving cast of side musicians. Things start out promisingly enough when, on album opener “Life or Death,” Hamilton manages to find the elusive middle ground between the tinny grain of the band’s early (and recent) non-album singles and the lush, pumped-up-for-airplay tone of the first Helmet 2.0 album, 2004’s Size Matters.
Hamilton also explores melody more fearlessly than ever. On “Bad News,” he nods at Revolver-era Beatles. And the title track might be the most layered and spacious of anything Hamilton's ever released under the Helmet name, with its somber cello occupying a prominent place in the mix. Strings play a key role on the eerie “Expect the World” as well. Meanwhile, “Look Alive,” with its haunting vocal line, is arguably the first time that a Helmet tune has conveyed genuine pathos. And when Hamilton slows down and reprises "Life or Death" at the end of the album, you can make out the harmonic fabric of his chords more clearly than ever before. But the Elvis Costello cover “Green Shirt,” his attempt at spry pop, lands too close to the ill-conceived hard rock bubblegum of Lita Ford’s “Kiss Me Deadly” to make sense as a Helmet tune.
Going all the way back to 1994’s Betty—Helmet's only other album with genuine variation —Hamilton proved that he was actually capable of introducing melody into the band's vocabulary without dulling its edge. Hamilton may have started out as a barking vocalist, but he developed into a tunesmith at a time when he was still coming up with vital, intricate riffs. Both Betty and 1997’s Aftertaste contain examples of Hamilton ingeniously weaving vocals and riffs together, expanding while also staying true to Helmet’s core sound.
Try, for example, to sing a song like “It's Easy to Get Bored” while playing (or even air-guitaring) the rhythm guitar part without tripping up. In such cases, Hamilton’s experimental instincts and songwriting acumen came together seamlessly. That doesn't happen nearly enough on Dead to the World, where too much of the material stumbles in a confused attempt to marry Hamilton’s increasingly generic pop sensibilities with the savagery of classic-era Helmet. The two elements don’t gel, and both sound forced.
Longtime fans will recognize touches of that old Helmet magic in songs like “Red Scare” and “Die Alone,” with its spiraling riff and 3-on-4 rhythm that's long been one of the band's most recognizable hallmarks. But Hamilton has undeniably lost some of the touch that captivated his audience the first time around. Up ‘til the band's breakup in ’98, Hamilton's elliptical lyrics were marked by an intellectual distance that created a rich space between the words and the music—and, crucially, separated Helmet from the glut of their angst- and rage-driven peers.
Since 2004, Hamilton has written more openly about relationships, which might have added texture to the music if his lyrics weren't so painfully one-sided and mean-spirited. Not to mention that he continues to attack New Age ideals, as he did all the way back on the early non-LP track “Shirley MacLaine.” To still be harping on the same topic almost 30 years later points to an alarming lack of growth and self-awareness. At least back then, the quirks in Hamilton's lyrics gave them character.
Now, when he growls embarrassing lines like “Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up!” at the end of “I <3 My Guru,” Hamilton just comes off like an aging, bitter misanthrope with no substance to offer in place of vacuity that still bothers him so much. (Try moving out of L.A., maybe?) Lyrics aside, the elephant in the room on any latter-day Helmet release is the absence of founding drummer John Stanier. Before Stanier re-invented himself as an agile, polyrhythm-juggling finesse player in Battles, he was basically a one-trick pony whose ultra-tight snare crack became as integral to Helmet's sound as Hamilton's riffs.
Stanier's brute simplicity provided the yin to Hamilton's yang, and the band hasn't really been the same since his departure. It's encouraging to see Hamilton reaching for new modes of expression on Dead to the World. Ultimately, though, after making such an indelible and unique contribution to the language of modern heavy rock, Hamilton continues to show that he's hemmed-in by the style he invented.


The array of sound and style on the Norwegian duo’s latest EP is engrossing, the sound of off-kilter future-pop composed with equal amounts of sugar and existential dread.

Have fun EP

The two women of Smerz are musical omnivores. They’re the kind of listeners who shout out Kendrick Lamar and Rihanna in one breath and call a concert from the experimental musician Yves Tumor “one of the best music experiences [we’ve] had in a while” in another. Beat specialists and vocalists Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt spent their Norwegian youth engaged in traditional musical pursuits—singing in choirs, studying classical violin, and theatre—before falling in love with electronic music through Jessy Lanza, DJ Rashad, and Jamie xx’s remixes of Gil Scott-Heron. The breadth of their experience might explain the feel of their beguiling new EP Have fun, which sounds like something Tove Lo might make if she gave up on making hits and started obsessing over Yeezus and field recordings.
“Oh my my,” the oldest single on Have fun, remains the best way into Smerz’s disorienting world. It’s built around a distorted beat and a synth line that shimmers and melts like a heat mirage, one of the duo’s favorite sounds. Like much of their work, it’s animated by the tension between Motzfeldt’s chilled, affectless voice—not to mention lyrics that sound like a word salad of teen Instagram captions—and arrangements that evoke existential dread and churning industry.
On “Oh my my,” Stoltenberg punctuates every few lines with a sardonic reading of the title phrase, muttering about “basic bitch problems” over a shuddering, vacuum-like effect. You’re left wondering exactly what constitute “basic bitch problems” in the Smerz extended universe: is switching from dairy to almond milk making them feel bloated, or are they being sucked into a cold, blank void? The contrast is profound enough to make you giggle, especially since it’s obvious Smerz are in on the joke.
“Oh my my” is fun enough that Smerz return to its melody and motif on the gauzy, defrosted “Girl 2.” It’s a trick revisited a few times throughout Have fun: after attacking the listener with an array of groaning horrors, Stoltenberg and Motzfeldt ease up and let some air into their arrangements. Of the eight songs on the EP, opener “Worth it” is one of four new tracks, and it’s an intimidating introduction: you’re whacked with a jackhammering rhythm, hissing pistons, and textures like sandpaper and steel wool. Once you’ve been thoroughly desensitized, it breaks open into a shimmering expanse and a new beat that’s better suited to a club than a metallurgical site. “No harm” and “Have fun” opt for a less acidic approach, leaning on degraded trip-hop rhythms and eerie refrains. (When Motzfeldt’s processed chanting is laid over one of those slowly warping synths on the title track, it sounds less like encouragement than the start of a descent into madness.) “Half life” flips the script by ratcheting up the intensity over its runtime, its thudding beat mutating into a fuzzy cacophony. And the duo follows up the blistering footwork of fitness “Fitness” with “Bail on me,” the EP’s most accessible moment by far. It’s a laid-back glide, one intercut with spoken segments and simple, sweet harmony.
I was struck by something Stoltenberg said when asked about Smerz’s musical growing pains last summer. “We started to make stuff we thought sounded nice, rather than trying to make stuff because that’s how we thought it should sound,” she said. “We gained more self-confidence when we ignored the right way to do it.” It reminded me of Lorde’s apocryphal story about writing “Green Light,” though the stakes were obviously a little smaller: when Max Martin described her songwriting as “incorrect,” she reveled in its oddity instead of doubting her convictions. Have fun is full of songs you might call “incorrect”: they’re off-kilter, even at their plainest. But coming into your own as a creative force means learning to trust your instincts, no matter where they take you. By veering off the beaten path, Smerz have stumbled into a vision for pop that’s both approachable and esoteric.


On her third album, the French-Malian singer artfully slides between lingo and genres—Afrobeats, zouk, R&B—to create a far-reaching pop experience about life, love, and freedom.

AYA

Since catapulting to the top of the French charts, multi-platinum Malian-born artist Aya Danioko has been given countless labels. In one breath, she is abbreviated as an Afro-pop artist, the next bundled into France’s robust and increasingly populous rap scene, teeming with talent from Paris to Marseille. Her success has frequently been minimized as a novelty act, despite being the most listened-to contemporary French act in the world. Her international smash hit “Djadja”—from her sublime second album, 2018’s Nakamura—placed her on a feminist pedestal she was reluctant to embrace. Her detractors looked at her unflappable demeanor as a tall dark-skinned woman, churning out hit after hit in France’s cis-male dominated music industry, and pegged her as overly cocksure.
The clearest signal in the noise, however, lies in the labels she gives herself, indicating her creative essence long before she became a mainstay on Spotify. Her performing surname, Nakamura, comes from the character Hiro Nakamura of the superhero series Heroes; a warrior who, through sheer force of will, can bend space and time, transporting himself to different worlds. This has been Aya’s superpower since the days of her 2017 debut Journal Intime—playing with the universes of not just Afrobeats, but zouk, R&B, and pop to layer in her penetrating musings on life, love, and freedom.
Aya has a challenging act to follow; it seems nearly unfathomable to eclipse the cultural phenomenon of “Djadja.” The Aulnay-sous-Bois-raised chanteuse rose to the occasion, however, masterfully employing l’argot, or French slang, as she shifts through her various modalities of defiance, softness, and matters of the heart to create a cohesive, intimate experience. Aya is the sound of a young woman and mother who has found the love she deserves and is embracing it unreservedly.
The most explicit Afrobeats flair takes center stage with the tracks “La Machine” and “Doudou” (an kreyòl term for honey/boo). In the former, it is the crisp and commanding lyricism that makes the track so enjoyable, layered over production that harkens back to the spellbinding era early 2010s Wizkid; the latter reunites Aya with Parisian producers Le Side (“Djadja”, “Pookie”) for a sensual and forthright single that seems tailor-made for a Burna Boy remix. The notion of him doing a romantic French verse in response to the enticingly delivered “parle en français, sois clair” would seemingly do wonders for accelerating a bridge to a frequently misunderstood market of the French urban music scene. But as Nakamura has stated repeatedly, anglophone acknowledgment is not her concern. As it stands, the two English features on the album—Stormzy and Ms. Banks—are used sparingly and judiciously, with the latter providing the greater punch on the sweetly delivered “Mon Lossa.”
As in her previous projects, Aya flexes her melodic muscle in other genres. “Fly,” while in need of some refinement in execution around the hook, contains the same spirited airiness of a Dangerous Woman-era Ariana Grande ballad; “Plus jamais” (Never Again), despite Stormzy’s muted presence, is an R&B track at its core, the English version of which would find a perfect home in a Kehlani project. She shares the fear and intensity of falling in love, likening the pleasure of succumbing to it to a religious experience in “Nirvana”; the liberal use of Mashallah in a time when France is being challenged on the world stage for Islamophobic and racially heightened social contexts does not go unnoticed.
Just two tracks later, she partners with Franco-Malagasy rapper Oboy for the erotic “Préféré”—and therein lies the magic of Aya, or La Nakamurance. She will juxtapose her faith with a sexual liaison, dismiss wastemen while fantasizing about the traditional weddings that she had seen growing up in her West African community, and revive and transform a beloved mid-aughts zouk certified hood classic from a Franco-Comorian songwriter (“Sentiments Grandissants”) without hesitation. The efforts may not always land, but she approaches each layer with sincerity—and the successful conjugations are transcendent experiences, greater than their individual parts.
While some members of the French establishment may look askance at her heavy use of argot, she remains dominant, with a cultural penetration that hasn’t emerged from a woman in France since the days of Edith Piaf. Nakamura may be a self-designation, but she is indeed a superhero of sorts; informed by the line of griottes in her maternal Malian heritage, fearlessly genre-bending, shunning the unspoken limitations of genre labels. Like Piaf, Aya “ne regrette rien”—her musical fingerprint is an intimate portrait not just of her life, but the interplay of dominant sounds from the African and West Indian communities in France and how well she can slide between them, both in lingo and melody.
These compositions are what make her music most successful to her longtime fans—a zouk percussion line throbs under refrains that seamlessly flow between R&B and more potent Afropop intonations, as is the case with the deliciously sharp “Tchop” (Whip), and may even inject a classic kompa synth beat for some gouyad (as on the waning moments of “Préféré”). The young woman from 93eme is exposing the world to the France that she knows and hears, in prose and tempo, with every new stream. That is a level of cultural currency that far outweighs a new Times Square billboard—although it would be well served for the rest of the Western musical vanguard to come along for the ride.

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The second album from Julian Casablancas and his motley New York band is sludgy, psychedelic sesh that occasionally coheres into surprising moments of clarity and radiance.

Virtue

Fifteen years ago, Julian Casablancas opened the Strokes’ feverishly anticipated second album by declaring, “I wanna be forgotten.” At the time, it seemed like an all-too-knowing response to the band’s sudden fame. But everything Casablancas has done since—from the Strokes’ sporadic and scattered follow-up albums to his increasingly outré solo quests—suggests he wasn’t joking. Casablancas is the natural-born rock star whose essence was defined by his seeming indifference to rock stardom. But his blasé attitude always belied the Strokes’ airtight sense of craftsmanship. His current passion project, as lead singer for the Voidz, is what happens when Casablancas stops just looking like he doesn’t give a fuck and really starts acting like it.
In both look and sound, the Voidz are the Turkish Star Wars version of the Strokes: a proudly low-rent, audacious, bizarro-world transfiguration that’s equally admirable and repellent. And for those Strokes fans who thought the Voidz’s messy 2014 debut, Tyranny (credited to Julian Casablancas+The Voidz), was a one-off blurt that the singer just had to get out of his system, Virtue doubles down on his commitment to obfuscation. For one, Casablancas has taken his name off the marquee, stripping the Voidz of their lead singer’s star billing and whatever expectations may come with it. And while there’s no 11-minute hazing rituals like Tyranny’s progasaurus “Human Sadness” to be found here, Virtue’s hour-long, 15-track run-time still counts as a formidable endurance test, presenting a collage of ’80s ephemera—new wave, electro, hair metal, yacht rock—rendered in the snowy resolution of an overused VHS cassette. But like an old TV that only works when you position the antenna just so, the album’s scrambled signals do occasionally cohere into surprising moments of clarity and radiance.
On their later records, the Strokes sounded hamstrung about how to evolve, and their attempts to draw outside the lines felt forced and unnatural. But Virtue opener “Leave It in My Dreams” plays to Casablancas’ innate strengths while weirding things up in just the right ways: his bleary-eyed melancholy and just-rolled-outta-bed delivery give way to a disarming emotional payoff, as guitarists Amir Yaghmai and Jeramy Gritter spaz out over the song’s breezy strut. “Don’t overthink it,” Casablancas sings en route to the rousing chorus,  and Virtue’s best moments emerge when he takes those words to heart. There’s the divine “Lazy Boy,” a gentle jangle-soul reverie upended by a military-drummed chorus, and the neon groove of “All Wordz Are Made Up,” which suggests an alternate ’00s where Casablancas didn’t have to shoulder the weight of saving rock’n’roll and instead disappeared into the Williamsburg electro-party circuit.
Casablancas and co. scatter these sort of pop reprieves across Virtue, wisely deploying them whenever it feels like the album is starting to crumble under the weight of its excesses. This is a record where inspired ideas are constantly battling for oxygen with dubious ones: “One of the Ones” boasts an absolutely sublime guitar break, but you have to trudge through its sluggish grind to unearth it; “Wink” centers around a winsome Afro-pop melody, but the band’s incessant tinkering eventually reduces the song to a puddle. Even the album’s most straight-ahead rockers aren’t immune to the Voidz’s fussy impulses: The robo-metal rager “Black Hole” is neutered by its toilet-bowl production, while the anti-Trump screed “We’re Where We Were” feels less like a political punk song than a caricature of one. And this is to say nothing of Virtue’s questionable detours into nu-metal (“Pyramid of Bones”) and Falco-worthy Eurotrash (“QYURRYUS”).
But if there’s a method to all this madness, it’s revealed amid the sultry soft rock of “Permanent High School,” when Casablancas sings, “Just because something’s popular, don’t mean it’s good.” It’s a line that effectively serves as a hyperlink to that already-infamous Vulture interview, where Casablancas sounds off on injustices both real (the corrosive effects of corporations on democracy, the scourge of Fake News) and imagined (the perceived commercial failures of Jimi Hendrix and David Bowie), while castigating Top 40 pop music as a symptom of both. That disillusionment is laid bare on the mid-album acoustic respite “Think Before You Drink,” a melodramatic, Dylan-esque rendition of a ’70s-pop obscurity that reflects his great awokening. But Casablancas’ most potent protest against the powers that be is to simply be the change he wants to see in the world: Virtue imagines the sound of rock music in an upside-down universe where, as he fantasized to Vulture, Ariel Pink does sell more records than Ed Sheeran. And its response to the insidious evils of the internet is to mash-up and mutate oppositional styles in the same way your brain is forced to funnel serious CNN headlines and stupid memes into the same neural data stream. On Virtue, the murkiness is the message—the obtuse agitprop of an anti-star who still wants to be forgotten.