A consolidation of the band's considerable strengths, much of the new SY album seems fixated on death, loss, and what little can be known about either.

The Eternal

The Eternal, Sonic Youth's 16th album, has nothing to hide. Its strengths and weaknesses are all upfront-- in fact they're pretty well encapsulated in the first two tracks. Opener "Sacred Trickster" is a quick, adrenalized rocker in the vein of 2006's similarly straightforward Rather Ripped. Slamming to a stop after a tight two minutes, the band then tears into "Anti-Orgasm", exploding into biting noise halfway through before the song eventually drifts into beatific, instrumental wandering. It's a familiar move that Sonic Youth have deployed to strong effect many times (try "Pacific Coast Highway" on 1987's Sister or "Rain on Tin" on 2002's "Murray Street for starters). But here it seems to come too soon-- an auto-pilot turn that rings a bit off-key.
The rest of The Eternal runs through similar cycles of ebb and flow. And while the flow outweighs the ebb, it doesn't always defeat it. Many of the band's signature styles are well-timed: the concise blasts from guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo during the bridge of "Calming the Snake", the slow-building denouement of "Walkin Blue", the acoustic flourishes that give closer "Massage the History" a chilly mood. But sometimes the go-to moves feel forced-- take Moore's stiff rant on "Thunderclap (For Bobby Pyn)", or the dead-end bridge of "Leaky Lifeboat (For Gregory Corso)". The best Sonic Youth albums cohere enough to withstand missteps--sometimes even make virtues out of them-- but here the stutter-steps stick out a bit, putting The Eternal on a middle rung of Sonic Youth's discographical ladder.
Which still means it's pretty damn good. There's no denying the vitality of songs like "Antenna", a Moore sing-the-guitar-line classic akin to A Thousand Leaves' "Sunday" or Murray Street's "The Empty Page". "Radios play nothing when she's far away/ TV antenna rusts and gone to waste," Moore contemplates, his voice decaying along with his chiming strings. Just as good are two Ranaldo songs, the aforementioned "Walkin Blue"-- a swaying rocker with Beat poet-influenced couplets-- and "What We Know", sort of an elongated update on Rather Ripped's "Rats". "Heaven's not about your reputation," he sings, musing about "stepping across the great divide." Like much of The Eternal, "What We Know" seems fixated on death, loss, and what little can be known about either.
High points like that might hit harder without some surrounding lags, like the ZZ-Top-on-downers "Poison Arrow", or the weary yeah-yeah's of "Thunderclap (for Bobby Pyn)"-- especially since each of those tunes is followed by a similar, much better track. The chugging guitars of "Malibu Gas Station" trump "Poison Arrow" with sped-up, Television-like twin-guitar, while the wiry energy of "No Way", with its Ramones-ish chorus ("I'm not talking to you no more," chants Moore), echoes classic punk better than "Thunderclap".
But then it's easy to nitpick with a group that has been this good for this long and always offers a lot to comb through and dissect. Besides, The Eternal could turn out to be a grower. It certainly has happened before with Sonic Youth, whose unique place in rock history-- as a kind of living glue between late-70s post-punk and 90s alternative, 80s DIY indie and 00s net-age, tight pop and improvised noise, hard punk and hippie jams, etc.-- is secure, no matter what time reveals about individual albums. At the very least, some excellent songs lurk among these 12 tracks, and there's enough potential for debate about which are which to make The Eternal worthy of Sonic Youth's singular canon.


Bay Area vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Ephemeral Domignostika puts out solo material as Mastery. With Valis, he's crafted one of the more challenging black metal albums in recent memory.

Valis

Among many other projects, Bay Area vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Ephemeral Domignostika puts out solo material as Mastery, including splits with Skullflower and Palace of Worms as well as a 2011 demo compilation Barbaric Usurpation of the Hypereonic Black Metal Throne. These early releases suggested a budding technical brilliance and a desire to take black metal as far as it could go, but none were adequate preparation for Mastery’s first full-length. Valis is an exercise in hyperactive neuron overload, one of the more challenging black metal albums in recent memory.
This is the first time Ephemeral Domignostika’s vision has been so clear; the memorable riffs are here, but he pushes them all to their breaking point. He plays with the velocity of Orthrelm's Mick Barr and the inventiveness of Gridlink’s Takafumi Matsubara. To call this music "dense" would be an understatement, as he piles on the skronky twists and synapse-melting tapping, pausing only for a couple of ambient interludes ("A.S.H.V.E.S.S.E.L." and "I.L.K.S.E.E.K.E.R.") and moments where the electrified spasms give way to acoustic strumming ("V.A.L.I.S.V.E.S.S.E.L.") while frantic drums and scowls continue. Mastery is polarizing, but unlike Ephemeral Domignostika’s one-man-band project Pandiscordian Necrogenesis, the music is much more than a cheap spectacle.
Because for all of Valis' chaotic energy, Ephemeral Domignostika remains a keen tactician, with each improvised freakout compressed, cut up into dizzying pieces, and put in place. It sounds like it was created in one take, with no edits, which would be impossible. But the knowledge that he composed the album from jams, integrating the best of improvisational spontaneity and metal’s tradition of rigid composition, and in the process making sense of his own madness, is just as staggering.
There are sections where a righteous black thrash riff will come in, something that demands only your most vigorous headbanging and your fists raised as high as you can raise them—the opening pummel of "V.A.L.I.S.V.E.S.S.E.L.", which he also revisits in "S.T.A.R.S.E.E.K.E.R."—but just as soon as these come to fruition, Ephemeral Domignostika will break it down and switch to another sequence equally as turbulent but even less comprehensible. While Mastery never abandons black metal, his ability to nod to catchy riffs while also surgically dismembering them is what elevates him above would-be avant-metallists.
Valis appears just as one-time Bay Area compatriot Leviathan is gaining attention—and in some eyes, redeeming himself—for his latest, and most accomplished, record, Scar Sighted. Both are triumphs of singular visions, the ethos of one-man black metal fully realized. While Scar Sighted is an examination of a troubled self, Valis is a warning to let you know just what Ephemeral Domignostika is capable of and how far he’s willing to scramble his mind for his music. It’s not an album for the stubborn traditionalists, nor is it for the newcomers who preach open-mindedness but are too timid to really engage with the art.


The Massachusetts-raised singer-songwriter’s second album exudes a quiet intensity, slipping between gentle indie rock and barely-there folk songs with bottomless vulnerability.

Blue Angeles

There’s no two ways about it: At times, Haux sounds a lot like Bon Iver. The similarity goes deeper than their shared approach to granularly detailed electronic pop, falsetto vocals, and sunken guitars; you might find yourself double-checking Spotify, wondering if somewhere, Justin Vernon’s broken angel wings are twitching. To Vern out this hard and then call a song “Hazel” almost begs for the association. Nevertheless, on Blue Angeles, as on his 2020 debut LP, Woodson Black has an otherworldly way of making an ordinary song his own.
That first album, Violence in a Quiet Mind, is remarkable for its unshelled vulnerability. It’s music you hover over, cupping your hands around it like a candle flame you have to shield from the wind. Isolation and depression are its themes; it leaves a pale scar on Blue Angeles in the barely-there folk of “Bella Blue.” But the new LP is cast as an escape from Los Angeles on the Appalachian Trail, breathing with more fresh air, natural light, and inertial energy than its superbly introverted predecessor. It’s this diurnal energy that draws out some glaring comparisons, but Black’s own fingerprints are all over them.
Blue Angeles is an album of indie rock and folk songs done up in pop, with deliriously driving basslines, precise pauses and drops, and deep DAW dives that dredge up strange volumes and curves in heartfelt, straightforward melodies. The production zings with hyperreal shudders and swooshes; stray syllables are tweezed off and blasted with freezing ethers, then left to shiver in digital limbos. The songs wax in emotion by waning in intensity, as Black’s flute-like voice slips down long, cool, fluid corridors.
Outside of well-turned but more commonplace fare like “Hazel,” “Carte Blanche,” and “Claire De Lune,” things get weirder and more interesting; a certain Old Hollywood glamour keeps casting a shadow through all the partly sunny weather. “Cover Girl” revels in raw earnestness and plush staging, sampling a classic Rita Hayworth film noir in an eerie lullaby adorned with iridescent harps. It sounds like Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl” crossed with the Smashing Pumpkins deep cut “Cupid de Locke.” “Blood Moon” might have been at home on the first album, which resonated with the smallest, most cowering songs of Xiu Xiu, where the singing sounds like a weeping cartoon mouse. “Waves” is a convincing throwback to early James Blake, all loosened virtual drumheads and sewing-machine percussion, even though there’s a questionable Post Malone-y part stashed a little sneakily at the end.
Blue Angeles is seamlessly designed, except when it pointedly chooses not to be; across the record, there is a tendency to paste up flawless fantasies and then rip them down. When things start to feel too perfect, too professional, too cinematic, a plain acoustic guitar will shred the patina, or perhaps a brief recording of a roller coaster will zoom through a solemn anthem. On one song, a friend named Crow gives a homily about the earth; on another, he improvises on the harmonica. It resembles a light afternoon nap, when the world starts to filter into dreams. If the tentative daybreak of this album is slightly less unique than the prior record’s bottomless night, it’s just as casually gorgeous and finely shaded.


For their third album, Sleigh Bells have made a few tweaks to their formula. On Bitter Rivals, Derek Miller and Alexis Krauss have embraced more varied instrumentation and they've become more creatively democratic, with Krauss writing most of the melodies.

Bitter Rivals

A decade ago, Derek Miller was playing guitar in a hardcore band while Alexis Krauss was singing in a teen-pop group, and they came together in Brooklyn in 2009 with the provocative idea that these two genres have more in common than conventional wisdom suggests. Sleigh Bells' spectacular 2010 debut album, Treats, was like Jock Jams for Hell's Angels; Miller's riffs went off like illegal bottle rockets, and Krauss lilted, roared, and chanted ("Did you do your best today?") with the cataclysmic cool of a cheerleader who's just hijacked a monster truck. Like all records that don’t quite sound like anything before, you either loved it or hated it, but you couldn’t ignore it.
Finding damaged beauty in distortion and compression, Treats sounded magnificently charred, like it had been recorded on the only console to survive Armageddon. After its success, Sleigh Bells got the opportunity to make the transition to hi-fi, and there was reason to worry that squeaky-clean production might extinguish what made them original in the first place. But their 2012 sophomore album Reign of Terror did "pulverizingly loud" in a different, though equally distinct way: It had the cavernous and slightly haunting atmosphere of a collection of songs recorded in an empty stadium. One of its best tracks was called "Crush"—a title that compacted all of Sleigh Bells' tensions and contradictions into a single syllable. "I got a crush on you," Krauss cooed, but in the very same breath she flashed a switchblade, "I gotta crush you now."
For their third album, Bitter Rivals, Sleigh Bells have made a few more tweaks to the formula. They've embraced more varied instrumentation—see: the lightning-strike synths on "Sing Like A Wire"; the menacingly strummed acoustic guitar that opens "Bitter Rivals"—and added a drummer to their live show. But most notably, they've become more creatively democratic. Miller handled the lyrics, music, and production on the previous records, but on Bitter Rivals Krauss wrote most of the melodies. The material she's composed for herself does allow her to show more range—Bitter Rivals features both Krauss's most tuneful and aggressive vocals yet, sometimes within the same song—but overall it is the work of a band enduring some growing pains. The good news is that Sleigh Bells have new ideas, but the often-undercooked Bitter Rivals shows they haven't yet found effective ways to execute many of them.
And it doesn't take long for this to become apparent. Opening track and lead-off single "Bitter Rivals" starts off with a misleadingly minimalist, showdown-at-high-noon vibe, but it soon becomes a cluttered and unrelenting mess of chunky power chords, high-voltage synthesizers, and near-Karmin-grade rapping—all heaped on top of each other with little rhyme or reason. The same goes for the puzzlingly stilted "Sing Like a Wire", which feels so disjointed it's like the verse, bridge, and chorus were dragged-and-dropped from three different songs. The hook hits like an earthquake, but there's no build; the drop appears so suddenly that it doesn't quite feel earned.
Compare these songs to the sleek, expertly controlled chaos of Treats, and you get the impression Krauss and Miller are still getting the hang of how to write effectively together. They've also lost a bit of the spark that once made their production so thrilling. Sleigh Bells usually have a knack for turning sounds just on the edge of punishing into something deeply, viscerally pleasurable (on the first couple listens Treats seemed like the sort of thing that might permanently damage your hearing), but Bitter Rivals contains a few of the only Sleigh Bells songs that can rightfully be dismissed as "grating." The worst offender here is the hellish chorus of "Minnie", which takes what are already Krauss's most uncomfortably piercing backing vocals and, cruelly, pitches them up. I'm pretty sure there are frequencies in this song that only dogs can hear.
The slower, less insistent songs on Bitter Rivals fare better. The R&B-inflected "Young Legends" showcases the album's strongest melody, but it's unfortunate that the song's hesitant and ill-fitting production (at least half of Krauss's vocals come through sputtered and muffled like walkie-talkie transmissions) holds it back from fully blooming. The mid-tempo "Tiger Kit" is a more effective display of restraint; its do-or-die urgency ("You're gonna jump from that cathedral/ In front of all of these people") is subtly kindled by synth hits that fire on cue but duck out before they overwhelm the arrangement. One of the album's brightest spots, though, is also its quietest: the airy ballad "To Hell With You" shows off Krauss's vocals with minimal effects, and its lyrics slyly toy with the expectations set by its brazen title. Like "Crush", it's partially a kiss-off, but the undertones are unexpectedly sweet: "I'll go to hell with you/ Here's the proof." It's a rare and welcome moment of pause on a record that often feels cramped, rushed, and cluttered. Much has been made of the fact that it was mixed by Andrew Dawson, who also worked on Yeezus, but what this record really could have used is a reducer.
In 2013, it’s no longer enough to simply be loud. To command attention in a world that's already blaring with distractions, interruptions, and no shortage of airhorns, a record needs to be loud in a creative, compelling, and previously unexplored way. Sleigh Bells have proven that they know this better than almost anybody making music right now, and that's why Bitter Rivals feels like an exceptionally unfortunate misstep. It isn't enough of a disaster to put a dent in their solid fanbase, but it doesn't have the spark of the stuff that built it up in the first place. Treats had the wildly aerodynamic dips of an elegantly constructed roller coaster—think of that rolling riff that careens through "A/B Machines", or the surprise ending of "Infinity Guitars" when a song that goes up to 11 reveals, only in the last 40 seconds, that it actually goes up to 12. Bitter Rivals too often feels like a cheap thrill ride, firing on all cylinders but without any grand design.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the original soundtrack to the Coen brothers’ 2000 film, one that primed a generation for a modern folk revival.

Various Artists: O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Original Soundtrack)

In February 2002, as Americans were still recovering from the aftermath of 9/11, the Grammys insisted the show must go on. The contenders for Album of the Year were a varied bunch that included Bob Dylan’s Love and Theft, India.Arie’s Acoustic Soul, and U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind. The final two candidates stood as especially intriguing foils, each presenting a unique perspective on life in the American South: OutKast’s celebrated fourth album Stankonia, and the soundtrack to Joel and Ethan Coen’s unexpected hit adventure-comedy, O Brother, Where Art Thou?
By the arrival of the new millennium, the Minnesota-born filmmakers had sealed their reputations as high-minded auteurs on the consecutive successes of Fargo and The Big Lebowski. With O Brother, Where Art Thou?, released in December of 2000, they knitted the lurking everyman terror of the former with the absurd and twisting humor of the latter, approximating the arc of Homer’s epic, the Odyssey. The rural Depression-era Mississippi setting of the film was accompanied by a diegetic slate of gospel, bluegrass, pre-war blues, and string-band music, and its soundtrack became an improbable but massive hit, selling more than eight million copies and snagging the Album of the Year.
It’s no real surprise that the Recording Academy, never the vanguard of taste or talent, favored an album that spoke to white Americans’ nostalgic follies over one by two Black men from Atlanta daring to turn a critical eye toward the future. But the win was a watershed moment for an album that would define a significant part of the music-industry landscape of the next two decades. Beyond the immediate impact of the soundtrack—minting major careers for some and giving a late-in-life boost to others—O Brother, Where Art Thou? primed a generation for a modern folk revival, establishing a new Americana industrial complex along the way.
The Coen brothers took the old saws of folk songs—death, sex, disaster, the highwire act between piety and damnation—and peppered them into their own folkloric adaptation. In press cycles around the film, the Coens spoke about how the music shaped the narrative and the overall tone of the movie. Though the film’s main protagonists are not musicians by trade, music is the backbone of their story and the vehicle for their salvation. And ultimately, the crux of O Brother, Where Art Thou? follows another theme in folk: the homecoming.
On the lam from a chain gang and in search of a vast fortune, three men—played by George Clooney, Tim Blake Nelson, and John Turturro—pull a short grift cutting a record at a radio station, accompanied by a Black guitarist they picked up at a rural crossroads. Their recording of the well-worn folk number “Man of Constant Sorrow” explodes as a local hit, but their hand-to-mouth pursuit of a treasure keeps them out of the loop of their much more concrete commercial popularity.
The Coens cast Clooney as ringleader Ulysses Everett McGill, a speedy talker and phony barrister who thinks just fast enough to keep leaping from one frying pan into increasingly hotter fires. Dragged along for the ride are Turturro’s Pete and Nelson’s Delmar, alternately cynical and dim-wittedly optimistic fellow cons. The film’s centerpiece is Clooney’s nervy, bug-eyed performance of “Man of Constant Sorrow,” with Turturro and Nelson hamming it up as backup vocalists. The Coens had a mind to let Clooney sing it himself, but they found that unlike his aunt Rosemary, Clooney couldn’t carry a tune. Instead, producer T Bone Burnett called in the ringer Dan Tyminski, a guitarist and vocalist who had established himself as a formidable talent with bluegrass singer Alison Krauss and the all-star group Union Station.
Burnett had summoned Krauss, Tyminski, and their Union Station bandmates from the deep pool of bluegrass talent concentrated around Nashville at the time. By the end of the ‘90s, the country charts were dominated by high-gloss stars who packed arenas with heavy pop-crossover appeal: Garth Brooks, Tim McGraw, Shania Twain. But the music of O Brother, Where Art Thou? forewent bombastic pyrotechnics and headset mics. Instead, the Coens wanted to ensure that the film’s music was period appropriate, if not dating back to the Depression itself. They dove headfirst into their own research of folklorists’ field recordings and other long-neglected tunes. Burnett applied his expertise, drawing from his own deep well of historical understanding and recruiting the sharp singer-songwriter Gillian Welch as associate producer. His commitment to authenticity was so great that he arranged ribbon microphones by the Decca tree method of the 1930s and ’40s to more faithfully capture a vintage feeling. The production even hired a forensic musicologist, Sandy Wilbur, to determine whether “traditional” songs like “I’ll Fly Away” and “O Death” were, in fact, traditional (no and yes, respectively).
The results of the production’s many pains are, at times, stunning. Krauss takes the lead alongside the First Baptist Church Choir of White House, Tennessee on “Down to the River to Pray,” a gospel hymn that swells in a plea for communion. She joins Welch and Emmylou Harris, ever the nimble and generous collaborator, on the siren song “Didn’t Leave Nobody But the Baby.” Welch and Burnett had expanded the lullaby from a recording of Sidney Lee Carter by folklorist Alan Lomax. It drips with suggestion without once approaching a naughty word, proving how well-aligned vocal harmonies can overpower a song with subtext to knee-knocking ends.
The music of O Brother, Where Art Thou? roots the story in reality even as the story romps around in fiction, down to how Black artists fit—and are subsequently diminished—within the narrative. The origin of the story’s crossroads guitarist, Tommy Johnson, mirrors that of the real-life bluesman Robert Johnson, who, apocryphally, sold his soul to the devil in exchange for an inimitable guitar talent. Played by New Orleans blues guitarist Chris Thomas King, Tommy is essential to the crew’s survival: his lead on the radio station rescues them in the short and long term. King’s performance of Skip James’ “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues” is a balm in one of the film’s rare moments of quiet, but the movie otherwise rarely allows him to speak about his own view of the world.
Beyond its role as the story’s emotional engine, music is essential to the central fiction in O Brother’s climax. The Soggy Bottom Boys’ schemes collide and come unspooled at a political fundraiser, where a bigoted gubernatorial candidate takes umbrage at the band being “integrated.” Outraged at the disruption to their good time, the townsfolk ride him out on a rail, cheering on the lovable scamps of the interracial ensemble. The film’s biggest improbability isn’t in a brush with a bank robber, a one-eyed Bible-selling Klansman, or a fortuitously timed flood, but in the notion that one good-enough song could move a room full of white people to collectively disavow racism and punish the offending party with passionate haste.
The rapid success of the soundtrack led to some career-changing quirks for almost all of its personnel. It created a surprising windfall for James Carter, whom Lomax had recorded singing “Po’ Lazarus” while Carter was imprisoned at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in 1959. The Coens used the recording in O Brother’s opening credits, and as the soundtrack began to boom, Burnett worked with an investigative reporter and Lomax-affiliated licensing personnel to track Carter down and give him the check he’d earned. Carter got a $20,000 lump sum and a trip to the Grammys with his family, who continued to receive the royalties that arrived after his death in late 2003.
The soundtrack also turned a spotlight back toward Ralph Stanley, who’d been a preeminent figure in bluegrass with his brother Carter. Ralph Stanley’s unaccompanied vocal performance of the ballad “O Death” scores one of O Brother’s most chilling scenes, and though Carter Stanley died in 1966, Ralph continued performing the song as a setlist centerpiece until his own earthly departure in 2016. Welch, Tyminski, and members of Union Station all enjoyed on-screen cameos, as did members of the Fairfield Four, who sing the haunting “Lonesome Valley” as Everett, Pete, Delmar, and Tommy seem to face certain doom. A concert film released in 2001, Down from the Mountain, helped put names and faces to the soundtrack’s not-quite-celebrity players as well as family-band contributors like the Whites and the Cox Family.
All of a sudden, people who thought they didn’t like “folk music” found themselves enjoying it. The old songs pressed on the reminiscences of some of its audience while acting as a new portal to the past for others. Maybe some had heard the tunes in church as children; others perhaps discovered that Deliverance and Hee Haw did not paint a complete picture of the banjo. Aligned with the upper-middle-class appeal of the Coens’ endorsement, the soundtrack wooed listeners who might’ve previously written off the genre as the stuff of uneducated hicks. Regardless, it’s hard to build any argument against the warm encouragement of “Keep on the Sunny Side” or the teetering charm of “Big Rock Candy Mountain.” The songs have stuck around because they’re good.
More long-term, the door had opened for a roster of powerhouse modern players. Already a highly respected presence in the bluegrass and country worlds, Krauss earned her laurels as an outright star, returning to work with Burnett on the soundtrack to Cold Mountain and a 2007 album with Robert Plant. She has 27 Grammys, the most held by any woman or singer—Quincy Jones is the only American with more, having 28. Welch released her lodestar Time (The Revelator) in 2001, which reeled with prescient weariness and an empathetic eye for lonely outcasts. Barely out of their teens, Nickel Creek had already proven themselves a prodigious set with their self-titled record in 2000. Krauss produced their next record, 2002’s This Side, which won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album. The affable trio of siblings Sara and Sean Watkins with Chris Thile made Nickel Creek an appealing crossover among boomers keeping up with the kids, Gen Xers who’d heard about their Pavement cover, and millennials connecting with modern folk idioms on their own terms.
The Nashville-based string band Old Crow Medicine Show were also well-primed to ride the wave, having wrapped themselves in an enviable mythology at their outset. Their big break came after the daughter of Doc Watson—the blind grace èminence of Appalachian acoustic guitar whose playing shaped the understanding of the instrument’s melodic capabilities—heard the band busking on a corner in Boone, North Carolina. The group punched up some Bob Dylan scraps into “Wagon Wheel,” which made it to their 2004 self-titled album and became a potent regional favorite for its marriage of barroom bluster and homesick sentimentality. Old Crow had been playing “Wagon Wheel” for a decade by the time Darius Rucker, of South Carolina’s Hootie and the Blowfish, made a No. 1 hit out of it with Lady A (then still operating under their Antebellum auspices) in 2013.
Elsewhere in North Carolina, two hot-blooded young men sharing the Avett surname had begun trading their grunge-inspired electric guitar licks for emotive acoustic yawps. They went from a string of raw, searching records (2004’s Mignonette, 2006’s Four Thieves Gone, 2007’s Emotionalism) to working with Rick Rubin by the end of the decade. The Carolina Chocolate Drops coalesced in 2005, arriving as a necessary corrective and testimony to the presence of Black Americans in the history of country, bluegrass, blues, and more. Mumford & Sons, from the other side of the Atlantic, eventually hitched a ride with purported English charm.
Since O Brother, the Coens have returned to nearby wells, but none have bottled lightning like O Brother. Inside Llewyn Davis felt like a genealogical successor as it followed a young musician struggling to catch a break in the Greenwich Village folk-revival scene of the early 1960s. Burnett’s soundtrack likewise felt like O Brother’s spiritual offspring, with actor Oscar Isaac singing his own parts alongside old-guard favorites (Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk) and members of the younger set who’d been hoisted up by the previous wave (Marcus Mumford and the Punch Brothers—a group led by Chris Thile, by then also a MacArthur “genius” grant winner). Tim Blake Nelson reunited with the Coens as the titular sharpshooter in 2018’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs opposite a cowboy played by former Old Crow Medicine Show fiddler (and co-founder) Willie Watson. They conclude their vignette singing a duet written by Welch and David Rawlings, which was nominated for a Best Original Song Academy Award.
Keeping with Coen tradition, the dynamic emotional heft of O Brother, Where Art Thou? comes from ordinary people going to great lengths and battling unrepentant chaos just to get home. The story’s flawed heroes are good folks messily trying to make a better way for themselves in this life or the next—a spirit underlined with a soundtrack that spoke exclusively to the same sentiments. The film laundered the reputation of “hillbilly music” to more widespread appeal, signaling to the music industry an appetite for twangy tunes packaged with aw-shucks humility. It broadened the platform available to generational talents like Welch, Thile, and plenty of their peers, while inadvertently securing a slot for “Wagon Wheel” on the setlist of countless dive-bar bands across the country.
The impact of O Brother, Where Art Thou? coincided with a cultural moment that left millions of Americans reaching for reassurances about their values. The music spoke to ideas of gentle, earnest goodness, which seemed an increasingly difficult comfort to come by. In subsequent years, boundaries between bluegrass, country, alt-country, blues, Southern rock, old-time, and folk music have been dissolved and re-negotiated under the umbrella of “Americana,” which has itself become a convenient marketing label for just about anything else. But fortunately for folk songs, the good ones have a way of enduring because they speak to moments in ways that Mason jar glassware and Anthropologie prairie dresses never could. They tell the truth about the trying weariness, the sorrowful lows, and the preposterous delight of staying alive.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The UK psych-rockers’ pan-genre approach benefits from a little extra curation and fun. As versatile as they are, their stylistic detours eventually feel like overkill.

Glowing in the Dark

When London-based four-piece Django Django began peeking out of their bedroom studio, around the dawn of the last decade, synth-toting psych-rockers were already climbing festival lineup posters from Brooklyn to Perth. But nobody else had a chopped-up robot vocal hook that could split the difference between the Mercury Prize shortlist and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, like their self-titled debut album and its wonky standout, “Default.” The next two albums, 2015’s Born Under Saturn and 2018’s Marble Skies, kept dabbling across styles—from surf-rock to dancehall—but never matched that early sensation of nerdish epiphany.
Turning into the home stretch of Django Django’s fourth album, Glowing in the Dark, a realistic-sounding doorbell rings (sorry, dogs!), an unidentified speaking voice that singer and guitarist Vincent Neff compares to comedian Martin Short’s gushes a quick greeting, and an indie-dance exorcism is underway. “Kick the Devil Out,” which combines Primal Scream’s gospel-powered backing vocals and the Rapture’s cowbells with the good-riddance schadenfreude of “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead,” illuminates why Django Django’s latest feels like a refreshing return to form. Though it ranges through drummer and producer David Maclean’s record collection as widely as ever, Glowing in the Dark homes in on the group’s most memorable set of songs to date—and it sounds like a little extra time curating has helped them loosen up and have fun, too. “One thing that we were really conscious of going into this album was to try to be a bit more playful with the songs and not get too bogged down with details,” bassist Jimmy Dixon has acknowledged.
Django Django finished Glowing in the Dark before the coronavirus hit, and some of the best tracks seem like attempts to transcend social problems that predated the pandemic and will almost certainly outlast it. “The world [was] a bit of a mess even before the lockdowns,” Maclean told a recent interviewer, singling out climate change and globalization. Opener and first single “Spirals” is a psych-rock anthem whose high-flying synths are almost intoxicating enough to sell what the feathery vocal harmonies are saying about “crossing the line that divides us.” The title track, appropriately flickering electro-pop à la recent remixers Hot Chip, harks back to “Default” with a stuttering cyborg vocal hook so catchy I’m willing to overlook the distinct possibility that it’s about the light of a smartphone. Less striking but still tough to hate is the strutting “Headrush,” a punk-charged rebuke toward some creep who says that “might is right.” That guy sucks!
Versatile though Django Django may be, their stylistic detours eventually feel like overkill. The bilingual rockabilly-goes-samba of “Got Me Worried” whisks by quickly enough to act as a palate cleanser, and cosmic synth interlude “The Ark” feels true to the band’s DIY sci-fi spirit. “Night of the Buffalo,” a clumsy show of solidarity with Native American tribes, picks up an extended violin outro that’s nice for what it is, but feels like a moment of self-indulgence. And the homespun folk of “The World Will Turn,” while not at all unpleasant, mainly reminds me of how Welsh pan-genre forebears Super Furry Animals did something similar with “Fire in My Heart,” from 1999’s Guerilla—right around the time they were warning that “The Man Don’t Give a Fuck” umpteen times over a Steely Dan sample.
Django Django would never do this; even at their most generous and direct, they’re still pretty damn polite, mad scientists who can never fully doff the lab coats. This drab reserve is most evident in contrast with labelmate Charlotte Gainsbourg, who infuses smoky charisma into “Waking Up,” a highlight that otherwise might’ve been merely the latest in a long list of songs about life on the road. Maclean, a DJ and sometime house producer who spent much of his youth trying to make hip-hop beats, recently said, “I’d love to do a whole album of collaborations, a bit like Gorillaz do.” It will be a shame if life on the road doesn’t return in time for Django Django to perform Glowing in the Dark on sunny festival stages, perhaps alongside woolly successors like King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. But it’s no shot to say that their real strength might lie in playing backup to someone more singular or subtle, so they’re not constantly serving the whole buffet just because they can.

Buy: Rough Trade
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After the grotty, pissed-off Monomania and Bradford Cox's catastrophic car accident comes Deerhunter's most content, warm and plainspoken work to date. While the band's written many indelible songs, Fading Frontier may have their first that could conceivably blend into real-deal classic rock radio.

Fading Frontier

A Deerhunter album rollout usually coincides with some pithy and provocative statements from Bradford Cox on pop culture. He sort of obliged on Fading Frontier, calling most modern pop music "totally unredeemable" in an interview. But other than that, he seemed serene: "Fifteen years I spent proving myself," he mused in that same piece. "The only reason for me to make a record now is to make the record." Accordingly,  after the grotty, pissed-off Monomania and Cox's catastrophic car accident comes Deerhunter's most content, warm and plainspoken work to date.
Cox drew an "influence map" for this record, one which included R.E.M., Tom Petty, and INXS. All of these names together clarify something about Cox's intentions: These are amongst the most agreeable rock artists to ever become stars, and Fading Frontier sounds like Deerhunter attempting to create songs that are equally enjoyable in an objective way as "Free Fallin'" or "Need You Tonight" or "The One I Love"—ones where if you hear them in a restaurant or car or house party, no one will ever ask you to turn them off.  While Deerhunter's created a number of indelible songs over their career, Fading Frontier may have their first that could conceivably blend into real-deal classic rock radio.
Deerhunter reunite with Halcyon Digest producer Ben H. Allen, who forgoes his trademark aquatic ambience and booming low-end to approximate the embossed sound of Jeff Lynne or Scott Litt on "Breaker" and "Living My Life". Even compared to the contemporary indie rock elite working with late-'80s pop-rock at the moment, Fading Frontier sounds happily centrist. Opener "All the Same" shares a title with a Real Estate song, as well as their chiming, interlocked guitars and chipper melodic resolutions. The waltz-timed number with tinny drum machine and slide guitar also happens to share a title with Beach House ("Take Care"). These are crisp and professional recordings, midtempo strides with cleanly strummed open chords, broad harmonies and hooks, unbeholden to any particular subgenre or time period. Meanwhile, the harpsichord and high-capoed guitars of "Duplex Planet" and "Carrion" show a clearheaded psychedelic side of Deerhunter that's more Paisley Underground than Velvet Underground.
Cox has called Fading Frontier his "domestic" record, but you shouldn't expect a facade of contentment: "All the Same" finds Cox turning his attention to a friend's father, who "changed his sex and had no more" out of boredom and loses his wife, kids and will to live as a result. Meanwhile, the foggy ambience of "Take Care" parts to reveal Cox singing about burnt dry ice and rotting corpses. The title is not a tender promise, it's a sarcastic, suicidal salutation. Even if Cox hadn't spent much of the past year in recovery, Fading Frontier would likely still obsess over mortality; this is a Deerhunter record, after all, and so we end up with sturdy, industrious pop-rock songs about creeping death, survival and revival. Cox has urged us not to confuse "I" with me," but  has spent a significant portion of his life in and out of hospitals, and both "Snakeskin" and "Duplex Planet" feel inspired by his convalescence." I don't ever want to go back again to the old folks' home," he sighs on the latter, and it feels like an echo of the riddle he posed on Halcyon Digest's "Basement Scene,'" where he claimed, "I don't want to get old" and "I want to get old".
Perhaps he did mean both.  Note the play on words of the closer "Carrion", or hell, the double meaning of "remains". If it doesn't initially seem like there's as much at stake as there was on Halcyon Digest or the singleminded commitment of Monomania, Fading Frontier is Cox reckoning with the dissonance of being relatively young man of 33 with a band who's already in legacy-building phase*.* But the tough talk on "Snakeskin" comes from someone whose mere physicality is considered a major health risk and confrontational by default ("I was born already nailed to the cross"). If there isn't a Deerhunter sound, there's a Deerhunter perspective that runs through their work, best summed up in "All the Same"—"take your handicaps/ Channel them and feed them back/ Until they become your strengths." The weird era continues.


The Ramallah-based electronic musician’s fifth album uses sampling and noise as tactics for disrupting official narratives and defending Palestinian historical memory.

Kamil Manqus كَامِل مَنْقوص

The Palestinian DJ Muqata’a’s alias has various translations: “boycott,” “interference,” “disruption.” He also uses his music as a form of political and cultural disruption. As a former member of the collective Ramallah Underground, Muqata’a has been fiercely critical of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. In his solo productions, Muqata’a has found a more artful form of protest, adapting sampling as a way of pushing back against the erasure of Palestinian culture. Muqata’a told The Guardian, “When your heritage is being attacked by the state, you have to find ways of being remembered.” In his productions, sampling becomes a political act of preservation; he takes snippets of classical Arabic music and local field recordings and renders them small but purposeful interruptions.
Where Muqata’a’s previous albums, particularly 2018’s Inkanakuntu, tended toward more traditional hip-hop and trip-hop, Kamil Manqus كَامِل مَنْقوص, his fifth studio album, leans closer to experimental noise. “Kamil Manqus” translates as “whole imperfect” or “perfect imperfect.” The idea of the glitch is central to the album. Shouts on the street become twisted so that it’s unclear whether they’re expressions of pleasure or pain; snatches of an ascending scale emerge through eerie feedback, like a radio that can’t quite find the right frequency. Referencing his patchworked sampling style, Muqata’a has said, “When our land is being taken away, our culture is muted. So it’s a way to try and disrupt that—being a glitch in the system is very important.” To extend Legacy Russell’s theory of glitch feminism, the glitch in Muqata’a’s productions becomes a powerful means of resisting oppressive narratives that have been imposed upon Palestine.
The glitches on Kamil Manqus كَامِل مَنْقوص vary from the mechanical bleeps of musical hardware to manipulations of short sung samples; every time a glitch appears, the melodic elements shift and change, making the essence of each track difficult to hold onto. “Shay’an Fa Shay’an شَیئاً فشَیئاً” is twitchy and nervous; its central motif morphs rhythmically as it’s interrupted by shouts and spoken fragments. The clicking, compressed beat of “Ma Wara' مَا وَراء” comes clattering through looped samples before a cavernous bass pushes to the fore, like an old man snoring himself awake to resume a half-forgotten conversation. The album hovers unsteadily between anxiety and defiance, balancing the desire to flee and to fight. It holds discomfort at its core, seeking to explore that unease rather than resolve it.
This discomfort extends to the album’s rhythmic inconsistencies; the moments where a discernible beat pattern breaks through are few and far between. The woozy “Bilharf Alwahad بالحَرف الواحَد” is given new shape several times, swaying between a clattering jungle and drunken techno. A careening breakbeat spins past on “Dirasat ’Ulya دِراسات عُلیا,” excitedly offering a tentative structure to the feedback and fuzz before snatching it away again at a moment’s notice. “Tanqeeb تَنقیب” opens on a nervous clicking of hi-hats before breaking into a fuzzy, forcefully rocking rhythm. This constant rhythmic shifting is deliberately destabilizing, and it’s from this agitation that the album derives so much of its intrigue. Kamil Manqus كَامِل مَنْقوص suggests that disquiet can be a productive power, a revolutionary force—at the very least, a strategy so as not to be forgotten.

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On their new collaborative 7-song mixtape, Lil Uzi Vert and Gucci Mane have a Who Framed Roger Rabbit dynamic, where Uzi is the elastic Roger and Gucci the human detective Eddie Valiant.

Gucci Mane / Lil Uzi Vert: 1017 vs. the World

1017 vs. the World

On his recent Hot 97 appearance with Funk Flex, Gucci Mane noted his immense desire to work with new artists that had risen during his time in prison. He name-dropped Lil Yachty, Dae Dae, 21 Savage, and, of course, the partner he collaborated on this new mixtape, 1017 vs. the World, with: Lil Uzi Vert. “Anybody who hot, and the kids say he hot, I think it’s hot” Gucci told Flex. This kind of talk would fit in nicely at any music label boardroom, but because it comes from Gucci Mane, a street-rap elder statesman with a proven track record of promoting and influencing new rappers—particularly in Atlanta—you trust that it comes from a good place. Gucci has been making good on his promise and, with the fourth project of his to be released in 2016, 1017 vs. the World brings Gucci’s slower tempo and aggressive style together with Lil Uzi Vert’s anime-tinged eccentricity and goofiness.
Beyond Gucci’s desire to connect with a younger audience and make music with a young upstart, there’s not much of a meeting point between these two. Uzi is so elastic and cartoonish that it makes the already-traditional trap style of Gucci feel even older by comparison. The tape is certainly not bad, but the chemistry of collaboration is absent: The songs that work best for Gucci’s mellow, bass-heavy nonchalance don’t work as well as for Uzi because he sounds reined in, and the songs where Uzi bounces off the walls in his Nicktoons rockstar manner get bogged down by Gucci. They have a Who Framed Roger Rabbit dynamic, where Uzi is the elastic Roger and Gucci the plodding Eddie Valiant.
There is something intriguing about the sound of Gucci's voice on Honorable C Note’s candy-colored beats, like the opening “Changed My Phone”; it doesn’t fully work, but you can feel him trying to work with a sound outside of his own. Gucci shines most when the sound is on his terms, such as in the Mannie Fresh-produced “Blonde Brigitte”; a heavy, sluggish record where Gucci can rap with adoration about “a black girl with blonde hair, green lipstick she look like a rainbow.” Uzi’s spastic irreverence, meanwhile, is better-served on the video game soundtrack production of “Today!!”
The roster of producers on this brief tape is eclectic, but they can’t bridge the generation chasm. Since returning from prison, Gucci has sounded hearteningly strong if rarely inspired, and the implied madness that sparked much of his best material, from 2008 to 2010, has dissipated. It might have served him next to Uzi's playfulness and flippant disregard of masculinity, his “diamonds on my choker” and “I was watching Food Network and learned how to make the cake.” Uzi isn’t that far removed from Future or Young Thug, both frequent Gucci collaborators, but the difference between Uzi and Thug is that Thug came up under Gucci's tutelage. Thug is still a student, whereas Uzi has no connection to his elder, and it’s evident.


The offbeat New York trio’s wicked sense of humor shines on an album of punchy, peculiar songs that register as pleasant and uncomfortable at once.

Roach Goin’ Down

Time is rarely wasted on a Palberta record. The New York trio favors jagged, punchy, peculiar songs that make their points in a minute or two but, perhaps paradoxically, work best when absorbed a few dozen at a time. The effect is something like binge-watching a cult TV show: Palberta’s stylistic conceits seem awkward and foreign at first, but over time their odd logic starts to make total sense. Soon enough, it’s hard to remember what life was like without them.
Following a handful of early EPs and singles, the band’s second full-length, 2016’s Bye Bye Berta, sharpened their anarchic vision. Palberta leap another level on the hyper-charged Roach Goin’ Down, an album whose addictiveness reveals another paradox: multi-instrumentalists Lily Konigsberg, Anina Ivry-Block, and Nina Ryser craft a sound that is simultaneously pleasant and uncomfortable. The trio’s rushing energy, danceable staccatos, and sunny singing are as cozy as a basement full of friends listening to records together. But every track subverts musical conventions, too; there are skewed rhythms, off-key vocals, detuned guitar parts. This is music that pokes as it soothes. You can swing and smile to Roach Goin’ Down, but Palberta are not about to let you settle in.
That central dichotomy gives the trio the freedom to get minimal without getting staid. Many compositions have just a couple of parts and a few lines of lyrics. One obvious candidate for Palberta ur-song is “Palberta,” which opens with the trio yelling “We’re Palberta!” before ripping out a minute-long rickety groove that falls somewhere between ESG and Captain Beefheart. Even more representative of their style is “Sound of the Beat,” whose entire lyric is, “Hey! That’s the sound of the beat/I can hear it now! That’s the sound of the beat!” It’s a simple template for a chant-along dance number, and the music is sure to get hips moving. But the group’s stretched singing and discordant guitars make the song unnerving in a way that’s weirdly infectious.
That effect is enhanced by Palberta’s pervasive sense of humor. It’s present in their unfettered playfulness, with all three members switching instruments from song to song. When they sing together, you can imagine that they’re beaming at one other. The music sounds like it was fun to make, too—during “Ziddy,” the three musicians actually crack themselves up—in large part because the band takes so many chances and eschews perfection in favor of enthusiasm.
But there’s also humor of a more wicked stripe on Roach Goin’ Down. Often, Palberta’s sparse words feels parodic, poking fun at self-serious punk and rock clichés by turning mundanities into goofy anthems; the lyrics to “Cherry Baby” are just the title repeated over and over again. “Rich Boy” is a literal parody song: Palberta skewer the Hall and Oates hit “Rich Girl,” switching the chorus from “You’re a rich girl, and you’ve gone too far” to “She’s a rich boy, and she’s gonna go out,” thereby flipping the lazy contempt of the original (which was, in fact, inspired by a boy, but Daryl Hall was too scared to openly criticize a male). The track recalls the trio’s smashing of the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” on Bye Bye Berta, but this deconstruction has even sharper teeth.
It’s that sharpness that makes Roach Goin’ Down a new peak for Palberta. The album achieves consistent conceptual acuity without losing the band’s shambling edges or tightrope daring. A lot of self-made indie bands from the past four decades have struck this balance, but the trio’s talent for packing a nuclear punch into a few chords, some rhythmic twists, and a pithy spit of words bears the strongest spiritual resemblance to Minutemen. That’s heady company for a band that isn’t even five years old, but Palberta’s quickly honed prowess and growing mastery of their own slanted vision suggests even higher peaks to come.


In the wake of longtime Bad Seeds member Blixa Bargeld's departure, Nick Cave issues this double album-- its halves ostensibly split between quiet and more chaotic material-- on which he further explores human nature's dichotomous penchants for piety and depravity.

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus

Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus

Nick Cave has made a long and bountiful career of cataloging mankind's depravities, and how greatly these deeds contrast with our declared pious objectives. But moderation has never been Cave's strength, so when he opens fire with the immoderate double barrels of Abattoir Blues and The Lyre of Orpheus, it appears that he intends to fight audacity with audacity.
For the occasion, Saint Nick has again donned his Boatman's Call preacher darks. You can almost taste the brimstone puffing from his nostrils on Abattoir Blues's opener "Get Ready for Love", which-- in its full-throated gospel-punk regalia-- sounds like it could be the most raucous Blues Explosion track ever. This unruly blast sets the stage for The Bad Seeds' most varied and dynamic collection in years, an ironic fact considering that this is their first album since the departure of designated avant guardian Blixa Bargeld.
I'm not sure when it was decided that double albums now require two titles (is this Outkast's fault?) but the record imprecisely splits its quiet half (Orpheus) from the disorderly half (Abattoir), with only a couple of strays crossing the border in each direction. Compared to previous Nick Cave efforts, its most prominent new feature is the risky inclusion of a backing gospel choir on several numbers, a maneuver so hackneyed that even U2 has largely abandoned it. But on tracks such as "Hiding All Away" the extra voices manage to dovetail nicely with The Bad Seeds' more theatrical, over-the-top tendencies-- only the most devoutly secular will find cause to object.
Throughout his career, Cave has avoided overt political and social commentary, and on the surface, that remains the case here, with the bulk of Abattoir/Orpheus ostensibly consisting of love songs directed to God, nature, or some other nameless "she" or "babe." But it'd be pretty difficult not to notice the panicked, apocalyptic subtext that veins through tracks like "Cannibal's Hymn" or "Messiah Ward". "Do you feel what I feel, dear?/ Mass extinction, darling, hypocrisy/ These things are not good for me," Cave sings on "Abattoir Blues", a song which attempts to inject some humor into Armageddon. "The sky is on fire, the dead are heaped across the land/ I went to bed last night and my moral code got jammed/ I woke up this morning with a Frappucino in my hand."
Elsewhere, Cave struggles to decide whether the arts should be merely an entertaining distraction for an audience or if the artist has a responsibility to direct our focus on society's ills. On "Nature Boy", the singer gets advice from his father after watching a gory news report: "Don't look away now.../ In the end it is beauty/ That is going to save the world." And on the writer's block lament "There She Goes, My Beautiful World", he notes the link between creativity and the ability to endure and stand witness to hardship. "John Wilmot, penned his poetry riddled with the pox.../ St. John of the Cross did his best stuff imprisoned in a box/ And Johnny Thunders was half alive when he wrote 'Chinese Rocks'."
But Cave also creates escapist music, singing extensively of linden trees and cornflowers, red-breasted robins, and gamboling lambs. And it sure seems as though he slams the door on the notion of art saving the world on The Lyre of Orpheus's title track. In Cave's sardonic, tedious rewrite of the Greek myth, the music created by Orpheus' instrument spreads across the Earth like a murderous pestilence until God gets pissed and throws him down into hell where Eurydice threatens to shove the lyre up Orpheus' "orifice." (Unfortunately, this song sounds no better than it looks on paper.)
It would be foolish, however, to think that you could get through a Nick Cave project this ambitious without a few clunkers. At least here Cave's missteps occur when his reach exceeds his grasp, and the songs that fail manage to do so dramatically rather than boringly. If you're able to hunker down and dodge the occasional duds, you're rewarded at the finish line with "O Children", a straight-faced, full chorus number that somehow overcomes every inspirational music cliche (including a lyrical references to "Amazing Grace") to become genuinely beautiful and stirring. It may even leave you with a brief but powerful feeling that piety may yet someday overcome depravity.


Eight years after “Huzzah,” the Brooklyn rapper is back on his own label, back on his own terms, and just as defiant and provocative as ever.

Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire: Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire

Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire

“Huzzah!” This was the triumphant cry Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire rode to viral success in 2011. The Brooklyn-raised rapper broke through with an outlandish attitude and fluid flow, bragging about downing half a gallon of budget vodka over an eerily funky beat sourced from underground gore master Necro. A remix to “Huzzah!” roped in Das Racist, Despot, Danny Brown, and El-P, boosting eXquire’s profile even further. He signed to Universal records. The major label platform didn’t work out for the uncompromisingly creative rapper—pretty much to no one’s surprise. As he rhymed after leaving the label, “When I came, niggas said I was just 40s and orgies/Took all the deep shit I rhymed about and ignored it... My stupid ass sold his soul and didn't even get the fame—I ain't even fuck Rihanna.” Eight years later, eXquire finds himself back where he started, self-releasing music entirely on his own terms via his Chocolate Rabbit enterprise. The move feels full circle, like the welcome reclaiming of his soul.
eXquire's self-titled album starts in fiery fashion with “FCK Boy!” Over a lo-fi track that sounds like a no-budget Italian horror movie blasting from a dying television, eXquire gets right to the rabble-rousing: “R. Kelly can rot in hell, but his music too good to mute/Oops!/Telling me no more ‘Ignition’ while I'm dancing/But then I'm ‘posed to stand for the fucking national anthem?" Next, he’s alluding to reparations and a "Gucci fabric noose” and adding, "Fuck Prada, Burberry, fuck Louis Vuitton too/They ain’t do nothing racist but that's just in case they do.”
The tirade is eXquire in capsule form, erudite and profane, delivering pop culture and politics in a spellbinding, seamless flow. As much as he channels no-fucks-given icons of bygone eras like Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Eazy-E, and Willie D—and Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire gleefully hits Efil4zaggin levels of expletives—his lyrics have always offered savvy political commentary and catharsis for those prepared to hear it. On the slinky piano of “Nosediiive,” eXquire namechecks Abbie Hoffman and updates his philosophies for a world of surveillance capitalism, where corporations are “pulling our privacy from under our feet.” “SpankBang favorites and Amazon wish lists/Algorithm trigger words, they put me on their hit list,” he raps.
Balancing the politics are eXquire’s reflections on self-doubt and depression. On “RumbleFish,” over a hazy funk beat by long-time foil CONSTROBUZ, eXquire flashes back to being a 12-year-old kid in the projects, retreating behind comic book fantasies and watching his mom in a physically abusive relationship with a man who’d go on to kill his next girlfriend. Despite the heavy subject matter, eXquire’s sing-song flow and the track’s nostalgic glow make it redolent of Slick Rick’s “Hey Young World”—it’s genuinely tender and moving. Naturally, eXquire follows it with the unapologetically coarse “I Love Hoes,” which expresses exactly what its title promises. But that’s always been the real draw with eXquire: He’s a complicated and multi-faceted artist who defies pigeonholing. He conveys this sentiment on the hook to "RumbleFish" in pleading terms, where he repeats, “Don't box me in, don't box me in.” It might not be as catchy as “Huzzah,” but it feels twice as heartfelt.


The influence of Big Star and Deep Purple looms large over the first collaborative album by Fugazi's Brendan Canty and singer-songwriter/remixer Rich Morel, who met as members of Bob Mould's touring band.

Deathfix

Brendan Canty played drums in Fugazi; Rich Morel's a singer-songwriter with a side-hustle remixing Nelly Furtado songs for the club. The two met when they both joined Bob Mould's touring band (Morel and the ex-Hüsker host a monthly DJ night in D.C.). The stylistic gap between a post-punk legend like Canty and a song-and-dance man like Morel might seem a bridge too far, but Canty and Morel's pedigrees, impressive as they are, don't really loom all that large on Deathfix, their new band's self-titled debut. Canty and Morel bonded over a love of shaggy 1970s rock, and there's plenty of Big Star and Deep Purple's influence to be found on Deathfix, cut with swampy grunge, post-rock, and a touch of funk. So many new bands from established artists hinge on the tension between the two styles, but there's not much tension of any kind to be found on the surprisingly loose-limbed Deathfix. Unmoored from expectation, uninterested in rehashing past glories, Canty and Morel make for the basement, looking to make a racket all their own.
Opener "Better Than Bad" practically swings an arm out the window and asks if you need a lift. The glam-spangled, sweet-as-Raspberries power-popper seems to be at least 90% hook, its ribbony lead guitars driving the song's melody off into the night. "Low Lying Dreams" introduces the first of several unseemly characters, as Morel's Mark Lanegan-worthy leer gives way to a sweeping eastern-tinged crescendo. Faraquet's Devin Ocampo and Medications' Mark Cisneros joined Canty and Morel in the studio, fleshing out their demos with bits of their own, and the results are remarkably fluid, never showboaty, perpetually locked-in.
Most of Deathfix's lyrics concern themselves with the down-and-out. Characters sidestep sobriety, idolize wantonly, die in depressing fashions. Take "Hospital", which flits between the mania of a fever-dream ("the patients are turning red") to a young girl, a do-not-resuscitate order, and a patient's bed with a regrettably high turnover. Morel and Canty won't paint you a portrait, exactly, but there's enough detail in these thumbnail sketches to suggest a very real (and very troubled) cast of characters hanging in the shadows of these songs. Until "Dali's House", that is.
"Dali's House" is a goof; that's the only explanation. Riding a stock funk groove with a distinct jam band lean to it, "Dali's" finds our speak-singing narrator wishing he himself could house a loose gathering of cool kids from the annals of history: Jane Birkin, Muhammed Ali, Mr. Dali himself. If some guy wryly intoning a who's who over a locked groove sounds a little familiar, that's because it's supposed to: "I wish I was James Murphy's house," Morel notes, "because you can steal ideas, and Daft Punk's always playing there." It's kind of a rimshot in search of a punchline, but there's just a hint of acid in the delivery that makes it awfully hard to conclusively figure for a burn or a tongue-in-cheek tribute. Considering how quickly the song devolves into silliness-- "I wish I was the guy from House's house"-- we'll go with the latter. But while the first DJ to fake-out an LCD-expectant crowd with "Dali's House" is a hero in waiting, essentially it's just one of those jokes that gets less funny every time you hear it.
Deathfix quickly recovers with "Playboy", which charts a surprisingly nimble path between tricky jazz rock chords and starry-eyed, lighter-flicking balladry. But the snarl of its guitars can't keep the slow-burning "Mind Control" from getting a bit bogged down in its own murk. There's no shortage of dynamism in Deathfix's arrangements, a lot of little parts sliding past the periphery. But the strange paths some of these songs travel to get to their eventual crescendos occasionally gets them stuck in one place, or one mood, for too long. Penultimate track "Mind Control" gradually builds to a window-shaking post-rock climax, but it takes eight minutes and a false ending to get there. Deathfix gets its expansive, laid-back feel from the relaxed conditions under which it came together, but that's also the source of its occasional directionlessness and the fuck-around vibe of "Dali". The approach gives Deathfix a certain slightness that may rankle fans of either of its principals' more serious work. It's hard to imagine that bothering Morel and Canty much, though; they're clearly having way too much fun.


With a nonchalant flow, Eto paints a grim and familiar world where only survival-of-the-fittest tactics prevail alongside sumptuous production from Superior.

Long Story Short

“The new crack era ain't built for soft flesh,” snarls Eto midway through Long Story Short, the rapper’s 10-track collaboration with German producer Superior. With a granular voice that radiates warmth even when delivering grisly threats, Eto depicts a universe we've heard many times before: Born into a hellish environment, struggling to get by and inevitably getting sucked into the crime and drug world, where survival-of-the-fittest tactics ensure only the most bloodthirsty and ruthless prosper. This time, hell is Rochester, New York, where Eto hails from and where over half the city's children live in a state of poverty.
On “Another Day,” Eto updates a lyrical sentiment from JAY Z's “Dead Presidents”: “It was all good just a month ago/Now if I let a week pass, it'll get comfortable/Today's math didn't pay cash—it brought peace though.” The calm doesn’t last long: Next verse, Eto’s rationalizing destroying a foe—“I blow his lights out calm”— on the basis that “he likely got a junkyard pops and a piped-out moms,” before he and his team gloat how they’ll “pop a cork on his grave date.” Backed by lush, soul-dripping strings on “It’s Only Right,” Eto sketches surroundings populated by “young’un going through gun phases/Rest of ‘em die young ages/Backstabbers, front pages/Homicide drug cases.” Then on the flute-infused “Fortune,” he blithely recalls “a few fights with stabs/Juice wiped and grabbed.” He switches between block-corner philosopher and fighter from song to song, bar to bar.
Long Story Short gets over mainly on Eto’s nonchalant delivery. He shares Roc Marciano’s same lack of compassion: The violence may be brutal, but Eto is always unruffled. Parts of Long Story Short recall Clipse album-closers, the moments where Malice and Pusha-T inched towards confessing regret and then inched away. But Eto’s remorse doesn’t concern the specific ill deeds he’s seen or carried out—it seems directed at the broader fact he was placed in a situation where they had to happen in the first place. On “Wolves” he ad-libs it most tellingly: “If all of us is guilty then no one is, you hear me?” Rappers have long channeled elements of the Scarface fable and idolized Tony Montana’s ruthless approach to achieving the American capitalist dream. But Long Story Short feels closer in spirit to Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In America: The footage can be wickedly violent, but the tone is rueful.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a dream pop classic, a spare and gauzy outpouring of feeling that still ripples through modern music.

So Tonight That I Might See

In a 1994 interview, a journalist asked Hope Sandoval, the vocalist of the dream pop group Mazzy Star, how she would respond to those who find the band “too dark.” Sandoval’s answer was simple: “That’s part of reality. Sometimes life is dark.” Mazzy Star made music for those who implicitly know this to be true—introverts, wallflowers, loners. People who spend enough time lost in their own minds to understand that melancholy is often mistaken for misery.
Raised in a large Mexican American working-class family in East Los Angeles, Sandoval was comfortable lingering in shadows behind a wall of long, dark hair. As a child, she was intensely shy and struggled in school. Like so many thinkers and dreamers, Sandoval found refuge in music and often ditched class to listen to records. She especially adored the Rolling Stones, particularly their covers of blues classics like Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain” or 1965’s The Rolling Stones, Now!, which includes versions of Bo Diddley, Willie Dixon, and Chuck Berry songs. At night, Sandoval would sneak into nightclubs to catch performances by bands like Rain Parade, the Dream Syndicate, and the Three O’Clock, leaders of an L.A. ’60s psych-pop revival called the Paisley Underground.
The co-founder of Rain Parade, David Roback, was quiet like Sandoval, completely engrossed in his own vision. Willfully enigmatic by most accounts, he idolized musicians like John Lennon and Syd Barrett, trailblazers who pushed their art past pop beginnings toward avant-garde ends. Roback left Rain Parade after one record (1983’s Emergency Third Rail Power Trip) and soon partnered with former Dream Syndicate bassist Kendra Smith and started a psychedelic blues project called Opal. Meanwhile, Sandoval and her friend Sylvia Gomez had formed a band of their own, a folk duo called Going Home. A demo tape made its way to Roback, who ended up producing the group’s first—and never released—record.
In the middle of Opal’s winter 1987 tour supporting the Jesus and Mary Chain, Smith suddenly quit the band and abdicated her rock’n’roll throne for a quiet life in the woods. Down a vocalist, Roback called up Sandoval, who flew across the country to help finish out the tour, something she later called “the hardest thing I ever did.” Back in California, Roback and Sandoval began writing together. They decided that this new material required its own identity. “Opal was David and Kendra’s thing,” Sandoval succinctly explained. “So we started Mazzy Star.”
Mazzy Star’s debut, 1990’s She Hangs Brightly, is a staggering introduction to this communion. The record sounds straight out of a haunted honky-tonk, all country twang drowned by a hefty coat of feedback; Entertainment Weekly put it best when they said it was “as if Patsy Cline had lived long enough to record with the Velvet Underground.” She Hangs Brightly was a success by indie standards, garnering positive reviews and airplay on college and alternative-rock radio. Meanwhile, the band’s label, Rough Trade, declared bankruptcy and dissolved, leaving Mazzy Star without a home.
Then, in 1993, after being picked up by Capitol, Mazzy Star emerged from two years in near-seclusion with their major-label debut, So Tonight That I Might See. Produced once again by Roback, its 10 tracks hover on the border between consciousness and a dreamland that quietly threatens to tip over into a surrealistic nightmare. Though it evokes musical touchstones like Cowboy Junkies, So Tonight That I Might See feels totally removed from time or place—a retreat completely inside the dark corners of two introverted minds. “I prefer the Rip Van Winkle approach to art,” Roback once quipped. Mazzy Star’s dream pop contemporaries, like the UK’s Cocteau Twins or East Coast Ivy Leaguers Galaxie 500, each had their own unique energies; here, finally, was the dream pop for the glitzy decay that is L.A.
At the heart of Mazzy Star is the tacit interplay between Roback and Sandoval, outsiders who built a creative partnership based on trust and intuition. “There’s an improvisational element to what we do,” Roback explained to Guitar Player in 1994. “We don’t play dots on a page. My approach to the guitar is in response to the song’s feeling.” As a result, the destination of each song is unclear; their heavy-lidded melodies can be so atmospheric that you could seemingly fall through them for an eternity. “Bells Ring” is driven by a lethargic guitar and an undercurrent of fuzzy bliss. “Nobody asked about your story/Nobody wants to know the reason why,” Sandoval sings with languor. The eerily seductive “Mary of Silence” and an acoustic cover of Love frontman Arthur Lee’s “Five String Serenade” sound like ghostly lullabies lingering in the purgatory of twilight. Especially sparse is “Into Dust,” which recognizes the inevitable end of love, life, and pain: “I could possibly be fading/Or have something more to gain/…I could feel my eyes turning to dust/And two strangers turning into dust.” There’s no sense of resolve on these songs, only self-obliteration and the inescapable hypnosis of a waking dream.
Rather than shoving uneasy feelings—longing, mortality, loneliness—away, So Tonight That I Might See bears witness. The effect is the revelation of comfort amid solitude. Sandoval yearns for a world just beyond her reach on the swooning, organ-drenched “Blue Light.” With a steady softness, she strings together impressions of this distant land, the shimmer of light reflected in a best friend’s eye, a ship sailing towards nameless harbors, and “waves crashing me by.”
Mazzy Star’s downcast softness existed in stark contrast to their ’90s alternative counterparts, who tended to express their discontent through fury and a fuck-you. So Tonight That I Might See has moments where the images remain ethereal but the music grows harder, intoxicated on a mix of elation and exhaustion. “But she’s just like lightning/She goes right through you/Then you know you’ll never be the same,” Sandoval moans on “She’s My Baby,” whose bluesy grunge sounds straight out of Twin Peaks’ Roadhouse. If her voice is usually on the verge of floating away, on these songs she sinks into the earth and digs into an almost carnal hunger: “After I stuck my hands/Into your ground/And pulled out somebody else’s son/I felt a little unfortunate/A little mistake.” So Tonight That I Might See is remembered for its gauzy torpor, but it is equally full of moments like this: reminders that abstract, internal feelings like sadness, longing, agony, and regret can be articulated in corporeal ways.
All of their dusky amblings come to a head on So Tonight That I Might See’s monumental title track, a seven-minute gothic hallucination that echoes the wandering mysticism of the Doors’ “The End” or the Velvet Underground’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties.” Channeling the incantatory spirits of Patti Smith and Stevie Nicks, Sandoval conjures a vision of transcendence: “Come so close that I might see/The crash of light come down on me.” As her spoken word spirals into a monochrome trance, Roback jabs at his guitar as if he’s sticking a fork into an outlet over and over again just to feel the shock. When the track finally waltzes into the dark, it wraps up without fanfare only a sudden stillness.
Rather than letting So Tonight That I Might See disappear into an ether of its own conjuring, Capitol pushed the album’s most accessible track for nearly a year. “Fade Into You” opens the record with a pensive acoustic guitar, quivering slide, and gently shaking tambourine. From this reverie comes Sandoval’s sandalwood murmur: “I want to hold the hand inside you/I want to take a breath that’s true.” “Fade Into You” is a haunting ode to all-consuming desire, perhaps one of the best ever penned. (It borrows a chord progression from another song about evanescence, Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”) Its melody burns like the last candle of the evening with delicate, curliquing tendrils of smoke. Like all of Mazzy Star’s music, “Fade Into You” urges you not to think but to feel; it’s dream pop in the purest sense. Capitol’s director of marketing put it a little differently to Billboard: The track had serious makeout potential. “All those kids have boyfriends and girlfriends, and they like to neck, and I don’t think they listen to Barry White,” the executive explained. The label’s faith paid off: By summer 1994, “Fade Into You” was a hit, and by 1995, So Tonight That I Might See went platinum. Countless shows and movies have used the song to soundtrack slow dances and unrequited romances ever since.
But mainstream success was not Mazzy Star’s goal and they refused to let the indie fame induced by “Fade Into You” compromise their individuality. (“Follow anybody, is that what you do?” Sandoval sings on “Unreflected” with atypical contempt.) Roback and Sandoval were known for being painfully shy in interviews. They had equal trouble performing live, thanks to nerves and the intimate, lulling nature of their songs. “Once you’re onstage, you’re expected to perform,” Sandoval explained to Rolling Stone in 1994. “I don’t do that. I always feel awkward about just standing there and not speaking to the audience. It’s difficult for me.” In a clip of the band’s set at Neil Young’s 1994 Bridge School Benefit, Sandoval stands alone at the lip of a massive stage, folding into herself. Without the cover of darkness, she looks like she wishes the earth would open up and swallow her whole.
As the popularity of “Fade Into You” bloomed, Capitol decided that the song needed a new visual. The original music video recalled the song itself: a series of fleeting glimpses shaded by shadows. The second version, directed by Kevin Kerslake (who had filmed the clip for She Hangs Brightly’s “Halah)” is considerably brighter and weaves blue-toned performance footage with shots of the band wandering through a blazing Southern California desert. Crucially, the VP of A&R at Capitol told Billboard, the new video “showed Hope more.”
The undertext of a decision to push a female frontperson further into the spotlight is that beauty (or, more cynically, sex) sells. But capitalizing on Sandoval’s image perhaps unintentionally trivialized her role in the band, making her seem like merely the Nico to Roback’s Lou Reed. (Nico, of course, spent a lifetime reclaiming her agency from the myth of the muse.) But So Tonight That I Might See is not about keeping one musician behind a curtain. The creative partnership between Roback and Sandoval is the heart of Mazzy Star. They knew that the band would wilt if pushed into the spotlight more than necessary. So they stuck to the shadows, two quiet, introspective souls deeply engaged in one dream. Together, they drifted into a hazy unknown.


The Welsh singer and producer leaves her indie rock past behind and mixes dream pop and ambient techno on her immensely varied and fully-formed debut.

Kelly Lee Owens

In electronic music, debut albums are often statements of aesthetic purpose. They are initial arguments in favor of a certain style or technique and pledges of allegiance to this or that subgenre. The debut of Welsh-born musician Kelly Lee Owens feels more personal; not so much a way of saying, “This is what I do,” but, “This is who I am.” The 28-year-old musician grew up singing in choirs and dabbled in bass and drums. In her early 20s, she interned at XL Recordings, played in the indie rock band called the History of Apple Pie, and worked in record stores. It was there she met fellow coworkers Daniel Avery and Ghost Culture, who got her into the studio and gave her a push to put her own music out in the world. But her debut album doesn’t feel like a debut. Its songs don’t so much feel like the product of her experiences as they do some hard-to-measure leap beyond them—a message in a bottle that’s come bobbing back from somewhere in the future.
One of the big surprises is the extent to which dream pop gives the record its overarching shape, despite her tutelage with techno guys Avery and Ghost Culture, and despite the floor-filling bent of her early remix of Jenny Hval’s “Kingsize.” The first sounds on the album are strings and her own voice, beatific in its aura of breath and reverb, paired with deep sub-bass. Over ringing tabla accents and a synth melody that burbles like a water fountain shot in slo-mo, she sings of love and the meeting of minds. There are more gaps than words, lending the impression that we’re listening in on her inchoate thoughts as they assemble themselves out of nothingness. The album’s second song, “Arthur,” is a tribute to Arthur Russell, the avant-pop polymath, and while it may not sound much like his own work, her samples of running water and her echo’s wispy contrails capture his vision of music as something that could emerge from the mist, or disappear into it.
There’s no single stylistic through-line and the tempos are all over the map. “Evolution” is bleepy, minimalist techno that’s content to hang back in the shadows; “CBM,” whose title condenses the song’s looped chant of “The colors, the beauty, and the motion,” is a dreamier take on peak-time abandon, when strobe lights turn a dancefloor’s moving bodies into snapshots of a roiling sea. At the other end of the spectrum is the shimmering “Keep Walking,” which sounds like the Jesus and Mary Chain covered in balloons and glitter, or the gorgeous “Anxi.,” where Owens channels Sarah Records and Slumberland in falsetto harmonies the color and texture of milk quartz. In the song’s first section, it’s easy to imagine it as an ambient remix of Frankie Rose.
Her songs are dead simple, often consisting of just a handful of electronic instruments: one or two synth parts, three or four drum sounds, and her voice, layered and patched through endless reverb. But she keeps them engaging by frequently switching up what would seem at first to be completely linear progressions. “Keep Walking” could be three songs in one: the introductory dream-pop passage constitutes another of her impressionistic interior monologues (“City through the window/Make it our own/Run to it/Plastic cherry blossom/Eyes never close/Run to it”). Then there’s a bouncy bridge for 808, chimes, and bass synth—an understated but effective drum groove she could easily draw out for six or eight minutes if the dancefloor were full and the fog guns were firing. Finally, an outro of wordless falsetto and echoing murmurs, like an entirely benevolent siren song.
Because it centers largely around vibes, you either submit to its spell or you don’t. There’s not much to pick apart here, and formalists may find themselves grasping at straws. But in her best tracks, there is a kind of magic at work—an emotional resonance that can’t be traced back to the rudiments of technology or arrangement. In her interview with Pitchfork, Owens talked about her interest in healing frequencies, and you can hear that play out in tones that feel super-charged with energy: plucked kalimbas producing impossible-to-map overtones, bass fifths that seem to make your entire body vibrate. The closing song, “8,” deploys a slowly oscillating sitar, for Westerners long an icon of spiritual music, as the launchpad for a 10-minute meditation on breath, rhythm, and drone. Whatever actual healing powers she may be channeling probably depends upon the patient; nevertheless, Kelly Lee Owens presents an artist with an unusually focused vision of what music is capable of.


A collaboration between the Japanese electronic artist and the Raincoats founding member lands at the natural middle of each musician's sensibilities.

Island

When Phew and Ana da Silva speak to each other on their collaborative record Island, their words have to pierce a thick fog before they can reach their intended recipient. The synthesized drones and stray noises that curl around each woman’s voice threaten to submerge them entirely, and so when the two artists speak, or sing, or speak-sing to each other in the other’s native language—Phew in da Silva’s Portuguese, da Silva in Phew’s Japanese—their words fly like detached missives from a sanctuary under siege. Their communication here does not unfurl as easy conversation (even though one of the songs is titled “Conversation”), but shudders out in fits and starts: a corrupted distress signal. Island is an unsteady record, less interested in closing the gap between its two participants than it is in exploring that gap for all its nooks and crannies. It seeks the productive friction that can sometimes emerge from misunderstanding, alienation, and confusion—the learning and healing that can result from losing one’s bearings.
Since playing in punk bands in the late 1970s and early ’80s (da Silva in the Raincoats, Phew in Aunt Sally), both artists have seized upon the voice as an instrument of provocation. Punk, after all, was mostly about the cynical passion the voice can rouse when compressed into a sneer. But neither the Raincoats nor Aunt Sally settled into the mold set by Ramones or the Sex Pistols, even if they were inspired by them. Teetering on the edge of punk and post-punk, the Raincoats embodied more color and flair than the most famous acts of either adjacent genre, while Aunt Sally folded psychedelic and experimental textures into a freewheeling punk mode. For both bands, punk was a starting point, not an end in itself—the ethos of irreverence mattered more than—and outlasted—a commitment to power chords and yelps. The solo records Phew and da Silva have released in this millennium let their curiosity roam even further from their more structured origins, and Island lands at the natural middle of each musician's sensibilities. Da Silva’s needling percussion and wiry melodies spur on Phew’s voice-curdling miasma. It’s a good fit.
Island’s strongest, climactic track “The fear song” begins with a whisper and a trace of voice that sounds like it’s sampled from someone’s answering machine. A drone buoys the two voices, and then the voices evolve to take the place of more typical instrumentation. The beat feels as if it derives from a clipped syllable, a stutter excised from its context; the percussive effect comes not just from the “k” sound at the start of the fragment, but from the hard line left by its removal. As the drone swells, Phew and da Silva raise the volume of their voices to rise above it. They sing few notes; it’s not the complexity of their melodies that makes their performances compelling, but the striving quality of their delivery, the searching, reaching urgency to their wails. The beat picks up, and both women hasten their words to match it, repeating the same phrase to each other. It sounds as if they were running to each other in pitch darkness, navigating only by the sounds of their voices and their echoes.
Many of the vocal tracks on Island follow a similar structure: A whisper grows into a bellow as the instrumental environment starts closing in. At times, like on “Konichiwa!,” cracks appear in the record’s overall malaise. As a voice—an original recording or maybe a cut-up sample from a Japanese language training program, it’s hard to tell—repeats the title, a low synthesizer uncoils a sour melody. A drum machine beat stutters and sways. But, in patches, the melody sweetens, brightens up, cuts through the haze. The album’s closer, “Dark but bright,” enjoys a similar joviality in its melodic development, the kind of semi-comic synthesizer ornamentation that populated da Silva’s 2005 solo album The Lighthouse. “Dark but bright” even samples birdsong, as if the world inside Island were finally allowing the sun to rise. In these moments, Phew and da Silva sound less like they’re searching for each other and scrabbling for common ground. It’s like the air has cleared, and in the new light, the two musicians can finally greet each other.


The jazz trio continues its outstanding work, reflecting in their music our age of information and chatter. And they do a mean cover of "Galang".

Historicity

The classic Bill Evans Trio, with Scott LaFaro on bass and Paul Motian on drums, is sometimes cited as the best jazz piano trio ever. It's not a point I'd argue-- they were otherworldly. On Portrait in Jazz it doesn't even sound like three musicians playing. The record meets your ear like a feeling meets your brain-- you can't grasp it but you know it's there. Few pieces of music made by more than one person suggest quiet and solitude as powerfully.
The Vijay Iyer Trio, with Stephan Crump on bass and Marcus Gilmore on drums, is almost a negative image of the old Bill Evans Trio. The sense of telepathic interplay is there, but it's put toward different ends. If Portrait in Jazz is the sound of aloneness, Historicity is the sound of crowds, a heaving, seething swirl of cross-talk, phrases meeting in often unexpected combinations. It reflects how far both jazz and our world have come in the last 50-odd years. Today, we're never far from information and chatter, and Iyer uses both his own compositions and those of others to stir conversation with his bandmates.
The most strikingly modern and heavy-hitting track is Iyer's cover of M.I.A.'s "Galang", a startling, compact, and ultimately breathtaking reinvention of the song. It's not some Brad Mehldau look-a-jazz-guy-playing-Radiohead thing either-- this has all the vitality of the original coursing through its thundering block chords, funky backbeat, and fluttering hints of melody on the chorus. He uses the upper octaves of the piano to hammer out a Morse code-like pattern at the beginning of each verse. It stands perfectly well on its own, but it also made me appreciate the original more than I used to, which is about all you can ask of a cover.
The other covers don't require quite as much stretching. Stevie Wonder's "Big Brother" is a natural fit for this trio, while the version of pianist Andrew Hill's "Smoke Stack" reveals an ingredient in Iyer's own sound with its rushing phrases and unceasing motion. Historicity is defined in the liners as "a condition of being placed in the stream of history," and this is something jazz musicians have long been conscious of and displayed in the way they quote each other or interpret each other's tunes. Iyer's placement of a Hill interpretation right next to his own "Helix", a cascading, slow-building composition that showcases his pulsing chord-cloud style, historicizes his work in a way by showing its roots. Gilmore's solo is a marvel of textured, nuanced drumming that never gives up its sense of rhythm.
The trio's take on Julius Hemphill's "Dogon A.D." is faithful to the original's sense of hobbled rhythm and high/low melodic interaction, with Iyer's piano dueling against Crump's lurching arco bass. Iyer's own "Segment for Sentiment #2" creates a space for reflection at the album's close, dialing back the ferocity of the trio's interplay for a quiet, almost Evans-ish conversation. It's the kind of respite from daily overstimulation we all need. Iyer and his cohorts have spun the piano trio format into great art here, acknowledging their contemporaries and their musical ancestors. Iyer may be floating in the stream of jazz history now, but if he keeps making records like this, he may one day be a rock that influences the stream's very flow.


The British band’s outrageous and eclectic third album attests to the worth of putting in an honest effort in the face of near-constant gloom.

The 1975: A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships

The 1975 dare to be too much. Led by frontman and lyricist Matty Healy, the quartet has made its name on an unruly brand of abundance throughout this decade: musically, referentially, emotionally, all of it. Did Healy pop pills, lick coke, and twirl a revolver before holding up a convenience store and getting shot in the torso—but ending up totally fine!—in the video for early hit “Robbers”? He did. Did they lavish the title I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it upon their second album because it was the only thing grandiloquent enough to match the record’s fizzy mix of sunblast synths, plastic guitars, and millennial neuroses? Of course. And did they preface their new LP, A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, with a 24-page manifesto that includes manic scribbles (“THIS IDEA HAS BEEN DONE BEFORE”), a picture of Healy petting a dog whilst on the toilet, and a technophobic survey of our contemporary clusterfuck of an existence that concludes: “THE LEFT AND RIGHT GROW MORE APART BUT YOU CAN JUST CLICK ‘ADD TO CART.’” Yes, yes, and more yes. To infinity.
Such a riot of excess may cause the casual observer to think: Who the fuck do these guys think they are?! This is reasonable. But it is also misguided. Because the 1975 are a thrillingly unreasonable band for unreasonable times. Healy is their generational mouthpiece—a guy who’s never met a contradiction he couldn’t fully inhabit, to arresting effect.
The 29-year-old is a pop star who is both infatuated with and embarrassed by pop stardom. He will play his charismatic part onstage or in interviews and then immediately flog himself for doing so, as his incessant inner monologue does battle inside his skull. Five years ago, in an effort to quiet his brain buzz, he turned to heroin, and then to rehab, and is now a former addict who is wary of glamorizing the rock’n’roll cliches he’s lived through. He is constantly online and constantly alarmed by what that does to our sense of self, our humanity. He hates Trump but knows that talking about hating Trump is boring. He is the son of two British TV stars who, in his youth, was treated to regular family visits by the likes of Sting; he also once said, with a smile, that his “biggest fear” is “being Sting.” He’s an atheist who believes in a thing called love.
All of these curiosities play out spectacularly on A Brief Inquiry. The album is similar to its predecessor in its boundless sense of style, swerving from Afrobeats to brushed-snare jazz balladry to one track that sounds like a trap remix of a Bon Iver ayahuasca trip. But whereas I like it when you sleep… sometimes could be a tick too clever and unwieldy, A Brief Inquiry, produced almost entirely by Healy and drummer George Daniel, is more purposeful. Take that Bon Iver–type freakout, “I Like America & America Likes Me,” where Healy’s voice is transformed into a smear of Auto-Tuned slogans, an adbot on the fritz. But listen closely and his bionic spasms start to sound like the meter readings of a society that’s moving too fast to process anything in a meaningful way. “Am I a liar?!/Will this help me lay down?!” Healy yelps, too harried to stop for answers, too wired to take a nap. It’s impossible to tell exactly where his actual voice ends and where the digitized effects take hold.
When it comes to the 1975’s more widescreen scope—filtering in culture’s ills along with personal ones—the album hits a daunting apex with “Love It If We Made It.” It is the rare Anthem for Our Time that actually gets the job done: This thing holds the mirror up to our collective faces so close you can see your breath on it. As gargantuan drums clear a path before him, Healy mimics the endless scroll, where dead refugees and dead rappers all slide by on the same timeline. He recasts one of the year’s most cursed tweets—“Thank you Kanye, very cool!”—into one of the year’s best lyrics, in turn laying bare Ye’s current fallen status as nothing more than mere flotsam for the churning news cycle. Healy repeats the track’s title for a vaguely optimistic hook, but his gasping delivery tells a different story. The song ends with staccato strings that recall a clock ruthlessly ticking down the seconds.
According to A Brief Inquiry, if there is any sort of solution to our modern apocalyptic predicament, it involves stepping outside, risking a broken heart, and searching for connections beyond the screen. And yet, Healy is the first one to acknowledge that this is harder than ever to do: The album’s only marriage is presented as a cautionary tale, read by Siri, about a troll who falls in love with the internet. “The Man Who Married a Robot” acts as a sly sequel to “Fitter Happier,” Radiohead’s doomsaying, robo-voiced nightmare from OK Computer. It sits atop a bed of treacly piano plinks, like a demented parody of a Facebook commercial that’s desperately trying to get you to log on again. In the end, the troll dies. The internet does not.
The members of the 1975 began playing together in their teens as an emo band, and they are still interested in wringing out unadulterated feeling from everything they touch. This is the thread that grounds even their most dubious dabblings, and makes their dilettantism amount to more than a series of stunts. At first, with its glistening synths and languid tempo, “I Couldn’t Be More in Love” seems like pure ’80s schmaltz, something that Michael Bolton could have cut between yacht rides. But instead of luxuriating in the musical ooze around him, Healy takes the slickness as a challenge and turns in his rawest performance on the entire album. Recorded the day before he entered rehab late last year, his vocals are frayed as he laments the end of a four-year relationship with the panic of a crashing pilot. When he howls, “What about these feelings I’ve got?” it sounds elemental, a refashioning of emo’s core into something jarring and new.
The album is bookended by a couple of songs that offer some hard-won comfort while nodding to the band’s hometown of Manchester and the lives they once led there. “Give Yourself a Try” is all pinched guitars and staticky drums, a salute to fellow Mancunians Joy Division and their singer, Ian Curtis, who killed himself at 23. On the song, Healy looks back at what he’s done, what he could have done better, and what he would do differently given the chance. He also mentions a 16-year-old 1975 fan who took her own life. “Won’t you give yourself a try?” he asks sweetly, over and over.
A Brief Inquiry ends with “I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes),” the most life-affirming 1975 song to date. Its familiar fist-pump theatrics bring to mind the Glastonbury-leveling power of another one of Manchester’s most imposing bands, Oasis. But this is more than a tribute. Healy takes the broad ambition and jubilance of a classic Oasis song and turns it inward, with words that acknowledge the mettle it takes to simply get through the day—words that could only come from him. “There’s no point in buying concrete shoes/I’ll refuse,” he sings, resolute, before giving up one more plea: “If you can’t survive; just try.” Life becomes him.