Damn the Torpedos is the peak of Tom Petty’s songwriting with the Heartbreakers. Slick, big, and immutably classic, the album is a front-to-back feat of production and songwriting.

Tom Petty / The Heartbreakers: Damn the Torpedoes

Damn the Torpedoes

Before he was the American bard of the wandering, willful, and stoned, Tom Petty was an ornery Southerner who migrated from a Florida college town to scrape together a record deal in the rotten heart of the Southern California record business. Four years after signing with Shelter Records, and in the midst of recording the third Heartbreakers album for the label, it all went bad.
When MCA bought Shelter’s fledgling parent company ABC in 1979, Petty tried to opt out of his contract—in which he’d naively ceded all publishing royalties—and MCA and Shelter sued him in L.A. Superior Court. Refusing to be “bought and sold like a piece of meat,” Petty threatened to shelve his band’s new album, and MCA counter-threatened to confiscate the band’s session tapes—legally, their property. Petty then privately told a studio assistant to hide each day’s reels in a secret location without his knowledge. Petty’s final blow was filing for bankruptcy, which opened his current contracts to renegotiation and signaled that he wasn’t about to flinch. Remarkably, MCA and Shelter caved. MCA kept Petty on contract, but it was now far more lucrative with significant creative latitude. They also returned to him all publishing rights and gave him his own boutique label, Backstreet. It was a rare victory in a cutthroat business: a musician called a major label’s bluff and forced them to fold. The album the Heartbreakers released that October, a day before Petty’s 29th birthday and four months after his Chapter 11 filing, was appropriately titled Damn the Torpedoes.
”We didn’t sit around and talk about making an album about that experience,” Petty told Rolling Stone in 1980, “but we knew we were. They get you pinned in a corner, and the last thing you can do to keep your sanity is write songs.” Especially for someone who specialized in songs about losers trying to get by, Torpedoes was a positively triumphant moment. Thanks in large part to the studio wizardry of producer Jimmy Iovine and engineer Shelly Yakus, “Refugee,” “Don’t Do Me Like That,” and “Here Comes My Girl” sounded massive on FM radio. After two studio albums, after “Breakdown” barely cracked the Top 40 and “American Girl” didn’t even chart, after four years in the industry mines and a few months of court battles, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers had finally conquered the pop world.
Torpedoes sat at No. 2 on the Billboard albums chart for seven weeks—kept from the top spot by Pink Floyd’s The Wall—and would eventually sell nearly three million copies. The band’s stardom was actually validated through MCA’s own blinkered corporate logic. Having learned no lessons from testing Petty’s will, the label determined that the Heartbreakers now qualified for its unscrupulous “Superstar Pricing,” an increase from $8.98 to $9.98 already applied to big sellers like Steely Dan’s Gaucho and the Xanadu soundtrack from ELO and Olivia Newton-John. Yet again, Petty threatened to withhold the LP—arguing that his label was trying to price-gouge his fans—or title it Eight Ninety-Eight. MCA decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. Petty won again, and named the followup Hard Promises.
The Heartbreakers—guitarist Mike Campbell, keyboardist Benmont Tench, drummer Stan Lynch, and bassist Ron Blair—split the difference between a lot of styles: They weren’t massive UK art-rock or the arena-sized metal of AC/DC and Van Halen. They were an L.A. band, but without the slick, expensive sound of Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles. They fit somewhere between spiky new wave, the blue-collar rock of Bob Seger and Bruce Springsteen, and the emergent crop of critically-beloved, acerbic UK traditionalists Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Graham Parker, and Joe Jackson. In the previous few years, the Heartbreakers had opened for everyone from Blondie to Bob Seger, the Kinks, Al Kooper, Rush, even the jazz-rock ensemble Tom Scott and the L.A. Express—but had never headlined their own tour. Their second album You’re Gonna Get It! had gone gold, but Petty was tired of being a support act. He wanted the third album to be different, and definitely bigger.
Enter Jimmy Iovine.
Four years earlier at 21, he’d stumbled into engineering Born to Run and studied  Bruce Springsteen’s studio perfectionism during some long sessions at New York City’s Record Plant. Springsteen’s insistence on perfecting Max Weinberg’s drum sound on the album—three weeks’ worth of insistent tracking and re-tracking—even forced Iovine to quit on one occasion. A few years later, Iovine signed on to produce Patti Smith’s third album Easter while he was engineering Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town. Knowing that Smith’s long-delayed third LP had no lead single, he coaxed Springsteen into giving Smith a skeletal tune he’d shelved—just a chorus, really—called “Because the Night.” Smith finished the song, and her scenery-chewing romantic mini-opera was easily her biggest hit. It sounded great, too, thanks in large part to veteran engineer Shelly Yakus, whom Iovine loved. The Heartbreakers loved “Because the Night”—I mean, everyone loved it—and Lynch was particularly fond of Yakus’ drum sound on the record. Shelter brokered an introduction between Petty and Iovine, and when Petty played him the demos of “Refugee” and “Here Comes My Girl,” Iovine was instantly sold. “It’s the first and last time I’ve ever said to anyone that they don’t need any more songs,” Iovine later recalled. “I’ve never said that to anyone since.” According to Petty, after he played the songs, Iovine looked around the room and exclaimed: “We’re all going to be millionaires!” Iovine signed on to produce Torpedoes and showed up in Van Nuys’ Sound City studio with Yakus as his engineer.
The first single released from Torpedoes, the roller-rink R&B of “Don’t Do Me Like That,” was the band’s highest-charting yet, reaching the Billboard top 10 and saturating rock radio playlists through 1980. The song dated back to demos from Petty’s first band, Mudcrutch, and packed significantly more Gainesville choogle than anything else on Torpedoes, or either of the first two records, for that matter. Petty was planning on giving it to the J. Geils Band, which made perfect sense—their 1981 hit “Centerfold” would borrow its bounce—until Iovine insisted that the Heartbreakers re-record it. It’s a unique single in the band’s discography, as close to the proto-MTV new wave as the Heartbreakers would get. Tench’s piano plinks and tangy organ licks play tag with Campbell’s chicken-scratch riffs and Lynch’s tumbling fills, while Petty spits admonitions in a sprechgesang that owed as much to Stax R&B lifer Rufus Thomas as any contemporaneous rock frontman.
The Heartbreakers were more used to gigging as a group than playing separate studio parts, and Iovine and Yakus put the quinet through its paces during the tumultuous Torpedoes sessions, which Petty was regularly leaving to meet with MCA’s lawyers a half-hour south on the 405 in Century City. Iovine’s meticulous studio M.O. chafed against the Heartbreakers’ lackadaisical approach. “We would sit back and get stoned and discuss it for a while, and then jam for a while,” Campbell remembered. After several days of Iovine’s and Yakus’ obsession over the album’s drum sound, particularly during the recording of “Refugee,” which, according to the band, took between 100 and 200 takes, Lynch and Campbell reached their breaking points. Iovine nagged Lynch to break free from his style of playing to the point that he actually quit the band (and was coaxed back by Petty). Pushed to the edge by the constant bickering, Campbell disappeared for a bit as well. Yakus’ preoccupation with Lynch’s drum sound led him to tune his heads much looser, resulting in a muffled tone similar to what he achieved on Easter. It might have driven Lynch nuts, but it sounded great on record and radio. Entire music recording messageboard threads are devoted to trying to match the gear, mic positions, and tunings that Yakus perfected on Torpedoes.
Released in January 1980 as Torpedoes’ second single, “Refugee” was the best-recorded and hardest-sounding song the Heartbreakers had yet released. For an album recorded in L.A., “Refugee” sounds incredibly New York—more alleyway than highway, which the band recognized in the song’s music video. It was certainly anthemic, but in place of “Because the Night”’s Orbisonian romanticism was a searing, metallic sound, no less menacing for its exquisite mix; a blend of Tench’s keyboard stabs with Campbell’s blues-derived minor riff (which he’d taught himself from listening to late-’60s John Mayall albums). Petty did not boast Smith’s or Springsteen’s poetic inclinations but offered a variation on a spoken/sung verse. The shift from his laconic, stonerish Southern drawl on the verses to the in-the-red adenoidal yawp on the chorus is still thrilling, and peaks at the last word of the middle-eight, when he shreds his vocal cords before Campbell’s solo: “One of those things you gotta feel to be truuuuuue!”
Like most rock lyrics, “Refugee” is best read as a composite of ideas and characters. It’s certainly, at some level, Petty’s translation of his unsettled state as the creative ward of a corporation during the song’s composition. Yet he maps this frustration onto his favorite theme: a wayward soul looking for a home. A couple years after the titular character of “American Girl” sought “a little more to life, somewhere else,” here was another girl, or maybe the same one, rootless and worse for wear. Indeed, the clearest predecessor to “Refugee” from a narrative standpoint isn’t “Because the Night” or anything from Born to Run or Darkness on the Edge of Town, but Steely Dan’s gloomily empathetic 1974 ode to a troubled transient making her way through L.A.’s Chandleresque underbelly, “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.”
If “Refugee” was the perfect outcome of the Heartbreakers-Iovine mind-meld, then “Here Comes My Girl” added some twists to the band’s jangle-pop arsenal. Ever the traditionalist, Petty was a fan of ’50s throwback and CBGBs mainstay Mink DeVille, and on the verses of “Girl,” he tweaks the speak-sing into the dejected persona of a hard-luck nobody, a worn-down iteration of DeVille’s streetcorner hustler archetype. Petty’s voice morphs into a rasp on the pre-chorus, before coming to full bloom on the chorus, when the streetwise greaser lapses into a romantic stupor at the mere sight of his beloved. Petty’s dead-on imitation of Roger McGuinn’s gentle tenor is backed by Tench drizzling piano notes on one edge of the song and holding a sustained, dreamlike organ chord on another. Petty’s career is defined by his mastery of effortlessly pretty medium-tempo grooves, and the “Girl” chorus stands out among them: It’s both the most genuinely sweet and unexpectedly psychedelic moment in Petty’s extensive canon of hooks.
Speaking of choruses, is there a single six-word phrase more humbly aligned with rock’s zero-to-hero mythos than, “Even the losers get lucky sometimes”? Not released as a single but later included on the band’s over-10-million-selling Greatest Hits package, “Even the Losers” shows Petty in his American Elvis Costello mode, equal parts snarl and self-deprecation, and features a killer Chuck Berry-derived solo from Campbell, who’d come into his own as a sideman while Petty developed his songwriting chops. His fiery solos on Eddie Cochran-style deep-cut rave-ups “Century City” (Petty’s snide take on the corporate L.A. enclave where he battled his label) and “What Are You Doin’ in My Life?” showed his old school chops, while his slide work on album-closing ballad “Louisiana Rain” displayed his capacity to channel Beggars Banquet-era Keith Richards.
Torpedoes’ hits can overshadow the fact that the album—far from the singles-and-filler approach of so many contemporaries and predecessors—is end-to-end great. Beatles acolytes that they were, Petty and Campbell urged Iovine to keep random bits of studio noise in the tracklisting, including a trippy drum loop that segued into Campbell’s wife yelling, “It’s just the normal noises in here!” which Petty grabbed from the four-track demos Campbell cut in his living room. Torpedoes-era Heartbreakers deserve to be in the conversation with the critically-adored post-Beatles studio-rats generally referred to as “power pop”: Todd Rundgren, the Raspberries, Badfinger, Dwight Twilley, the Flamin’ Groovies, and Cheap Trick. Consider the breadth and confidence of the band who gave the world the album track “You Tell Me,” which opens as slick, urbane L.A. pop (which Sheryl Crow would later unconsciously plagiarize for “My Favorite Mistake”) before segueing into the kind of nerdy, nasal hook-fest that lesser-known power-pop contemporaries like Shoes and 20/20 would’ve killed for. Or the nod to the Drifters’ “There Goes My Baby” that opens “Shadow of a Doubt,” a breezy Americana romp that, with hindsight, predicts peak Wilco by a couple decades.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers made music that still befuddles critics: they were too chill to be punk, and too famous to be underdogs. Petty was too unassuming a superstar to be Springsteen, and though he was equally gnomic and cantankerous, he was far too lyrically judicious to be Dylan. They were a singles band who made great albums and a “heartland” band from L.A. via Gainesville. In the year that Graham Parker’s Squeezing Out Sparks took top honors in the Pazz & Jop critics’ poll, Torpedoes finished eighth, which the Village Voice’s Robert Christgau chalked up to votes from conservative daily paper rock critics, and though he was happy Petty beat Supertramp and the Eagles, he snorted, “If Tom Petty ends up defining rock and roll heaven, then Johnny Rotten will have died in vain.” Of course, Petty himself knew more than anyone that the very idea of a “rock and roll heaven” is ridiculous. There are players and songs, producers and albums, labels and gigs, fans and critics, and his job was not to aim toward redemption or salvation, but to keep a little bit of pride, get lucky sometimes, and always move forward, full speed ahead.


Teaming with the playful producer Tobacco, Aesop Rock has a joyous playdate with his overlooked senses of humor and storytelling.

Malibu Ken

Aesop Rock has always been funny, though listeners could be forgiven for not noticing. Anybody who raps this often about cats doesn’t lack for self-awareness. But between the claustrophobic production, the miserablist worldview, his imposing delivery, and the sheer density of his wordplay, his music scans as dead-serious even when it drips with pitch-black humor. He’s funny, sure, but he’s a lot of other things first.
If he just needed the right producer to highlight that wit, he’s found a choice one in Tobacco, of the Pittsburgh synth-psych outfit Black Moth Super Rainbow. Aesop Rock and that band toured together over a decade ago, and Aesop guested on the producer’s nutty “Dirt” in 2008. Now they’ve released a full-length together as Malibu Ken, a madcap project that unmoors Aesop from expectations of high-mindedness. Tobacco previously produced the bass-addled “Silicon Valley” theme song, and, like that jingle, his Malibu Ken tracks radiate demented whimsy. For all its erratic shifts and kinks, his miswired electro-funk is purely pleasurable, a rarity in Aesop’s catalog.
Fueled by Tobacco’s sugar-jolt beats, Aesop lets the zingers fly. On “Tuesday,” he goes full stand-up, detailing his unkempt lifestyle and sad apartment: “I can’t even keep a cactus alive when I’m present/When I’m gone, it’s a groundbreaking botanical epic/From desolate to Little Shop of Horrors in a second/It’s weird knowing life thrives more when you exit.” Even more vivid is his description of his own skin and flesh, which he paints in the grotesque detail of a “Ren & Stimpy” still: “The pizza face is pepperoni, carbuncle, and caper/I’m bunions and contusions, bumps, lumps, and bruises/Discoloring and other things I can’t reach with the loofah.”
Elsewhere, Aesop writes about violent events with the prosaic specificity of Sun Kil Moon. On “Churro,” he recalls a webcam broadcast of an eagle snacking on a cat like the song’s sweet namesake. Despite his personal fondness for felines, he doubles down on the bleakness here. He imagines that some poor bastard cued up that very cam to cheer himself up after his cat ran away, only “to watch his little fluffy torn to pieces by the very nature he had sought to ease him through his deep depression.”
Similarly grim, “Acid King” is dense with 1980s details, from Mary Lou Retton to “Excitebike.” Aesop recounts the 1984 saga of Ricky Kasso, a 17-year-old metalhead who murdered his friend while high on LSD, claiming Satan appeared to him as a crow and made him do it. Tobacco matches him with the period-piece synths of a 1980s action show, as Aesop fixates on all the unknown details of the incident, which fueled a fervor over the dangers of heavy metal.
Even when his subjects are less clear, there’s still so much imagination and purpose in Aesop’s language that he sounds like he’s telling a story. The guy mints new “cellar doors” with nearly every verse, combinations of viscerally satisfying syllables that keep exact meaning out of reach. “Under the boardwalk, half eighth and a half-ate corn dog/Face halfway to P-40 Warhawk, graze in the gore with the whores and the warthogs,” he raps on “Dog Years,” as if setting the stage for a tale as fulfilling as “Acid King.” Instead, he unfurls a parade of ecstatic imagery.
With its 34-minute runtime, its cartoon cover art, and the pervading levity of Tobacco’s beats, Malibu Ken may seem at first like a minor work. But there’s nothing diminutive about a record this sharply written. It’s a side project every bit as substantial as Aesop Rock’s proper albums. That it also happens to be more fun than most of them is a bonus.


Noah Lennox finds solace in solitude on his sixth solo album as Panda Bear, stripping the instrumentation down to just a handful of sounds to create an unusually unified listen.

Buoys

When working with Animal Collective, the exuberant Noah Lennox surrenders to the spirit of collaboration. But when he’s working solo as Panda Bear, his music honors the state of aloneness. That word describes how his music as Panda Bear is created (typically written, played, and sung by Lennox), performed (Panda Bear shows usually feature Lennox by himself, standing before a mixing board and microphone, with a guitar around his neck), and experienced. You have to think twice before putting on a Panda Bear record when hanging out with friends—the music is just too interior, and Lennox’s work has always been best suited for headphones and solo contemplation.
The new Panda Bear album, Buoys, suggests that aloneness can be represented in a number of different ways. The last three Panda Bear full-lengths—2007’s Person Pitch, 2011’s Tomboy, and 2015’s Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper—were light and airy. Their queasy weightlessness brought to mind dreams, memories, and imagination, sometimes shaded with fear and darkness, and the billowy reverb created an illusion of an enclosure filled with activity, even if it was being observed from afar. Lennox’s voice suggested physical spaces—cathedrals, for the grandest of songs, perhaps a bathroom for ones that felt more closed-in. It seemed to exist somewhere in the physical world.
Buoys takes a different approach, stripping the instrumentation almost to nothing and forgoing the overt warmth of the lingering note. In these songs, which have a stark, brittle quality that feels very “digital,” there’s barely anything moving. The primary instrument on Buoys is acoustic guitar, which is not a new thing for Lennox. In the middle of the last decade, Lennox used acoustic guitars on records like Sung Tongs and Young Prayer like an extension of his body, creating a drone effect that sounded more like breathing. But the acoustic guitar on Buoys doesn’t sound played, exactly—it’s more a device for sending ripples of chords across the stereo field at regular intervals, or else short, declarative chops of rhythm. It sounds disembodied. Just a handful of sounds make up the production for the album (along with guitar, there are assorted gurgles and laser sounds, a few drum breaks, some deep bass throbs, and not much else), which makes for an unusually unified listen.
From the opening “Dolphin,” Lennox resides in new territory. He has never sung like this before—his voice is a true close-mic’d croon and it even has a bit of vibrato. As he soars over a lightly strummed acoustic guitar and a percussion arrangement that subs a drop of water for a snare, the sense of effort is palpable, the laying of each piece in its place. That sense of exertion extends to Lennox’s voice as he tests a chest-heavy bass register, stretches single syllables for a couple of bars at a time, and offers careful articulation of each consonant where reverb-enabled smearing was once the norm.
The songs here unfold at an even, mid-tempo pace. Some, like “Cranked,” are disarming in their sparseness. “Token” is the rare song that opens up on the chorus, with Lennox folding his voice into harmony as he sings of longing and need. “Inner Monologue,” which is, along with “Dolphin,” one of the record’s big highlights, conveys a tense, nervous atmosphere. In the background, you can hear what sounds like someone sobbing, and the droning synth line that snakes through the track makes it feel ominous, even charged with violence. But the drama makes it an outlier. Most of the songs move forward step-by-step and unfold almost mathematically.
Throughout the record, Lennox offers the simple affirmations and pledges of loyalty (“I would always be there when you need it” on “Dolphin,” “Guy on the ropes (yes you can)/Don’t give up hopes (start again)” on “Cranked”), a motif common in his music. But these homilies are more complicated in this setting. He describes wanting to be a good person and remaining hopeful, and inside the perfect-from-now-on desire is the suggestion that what’s happening at the present may not be so wonderful. That’s where a certain amount of the sadness in Lennox’s music comes from—what’s happening now might be too much to talk about, so let’s talk about what might one day come.
Buoys is a sad and wistful album, though in a non-specific way. Part of it is the inner pep-talk of lyrics that imagines a future that may never come. There’s an ache in being stuck between who you want to be and who you actually are. And part of it is the sound, which feels closed off from the world, but in a carefully considered and ultimately beguiling way. This sort of privacy can seem alienating, cordoned-off, suffocating, solipsistic. But those who connect with it hear something else, something deeply comforting: It’s the sound of one person considering his place in the world, beamed to a person who, in turn, considers their own.


Newly reissued with a more polished sound, the ATL rapper’s third mixtape finds the promising SahBabii on shaky ground trying to discover his voice.

S.A.N.D.A.S

In early 2017, SahBabii’s “Pull Up Wit Ah Stick” became a sleeper hit, continuing a trend of light-hearted youngsters infiltrating the Atlanta trap scene with impishly playful romps. The Chicago transplant has identified his sound as “melodic trap” and likened it to racing a Mario Kart beach track on Wii. He is a surrealist who finds delight in the bizarre, emphasizing melody over meaning and concentrating on the little vocal flourishes and ad-libs to flesh out songs. The kaleidoscopic quality to his music beams in vibrant colorways.
Few seemed to follow “Pull Up Wit Ah Stick” back to the 2016 mixtape that produced it called S.A.N.D.A.S., or Suck a Nigga Dick Ah Something, a beta test for a polished product just about ready to go to market. The song was one of several tracks that proved a relative compositional acumen, but it was “Pull Up” that stuck with audiences, and with good reason; it synthesizes some of the most interesting things happening in Atlanta in recent months with relative ease. Soon the song had remixes from T-Pain, Fetty Wap, and Wiz Khalifa. A label bidding war ensued, and Warner won the rights to the upstart, who feels built for the streaming era, playlists, and virality.
The newly remastered S.A.N.D.A.S. is an attempt to capitalize on Sah’s healthy buzz. It’s a bit like slapping a fresh coat of paint on a used car and pushing it back onto the showroom floor, but it can serve as a suitable crash course in his spasms and bird calls for the uninitiated. Aside from the title track, the project is largely the same, just with a noticeable improvement in sound quality. The only new additions are the recently released “Marsupial Superstars” with his brother T3 and the long-teased “Geronimo,” both of which put into action all of his strengths, twitching in and out of phrases and moving in little leaps and bounds. The charm is the seamlessness: the seemingly endless propulsion and how fluidly everything happens.
Since stepping into the spotlight, Sah has acknowledged Young Thug as his forbear, whose influence cannot be ignored. Sah is less dynamic, significantly less captivating in action, and the recently released “Pull Up Wit Ah Stick” remix featuring Thug only magnified the gap between the two. He’s nowhere near as unpredictable as Thug and he smooths out some of his predecessor’s kinkier flows. Sah’s style is steadier and less gnarly, but more certainty doesn’t mean there’s more purpose. Actions and words are both often aimlessly assembled here, even when you know what’s coming next.
The tape has a very loosely recurring jungle theme, particularly on “King of the Jungle,” “Purple Ape,” and “Titanoboa,” where he compares himself to animals without explanation. The components of his songs are mostly the same—the phrase “animal planet,” armed robberies, hundred round drums, lots and lots of fellatio—and after a few listens a compositional formula emerges: triplet flows constructed on repetitive melodic phrases. But then there are songs like “Chit Chat,” which transcend their basic moving parts to form something nearly supernal.
At his sharpest, he can string together haymakers (“That Glock get to burning like gonorrhea/That chopper sound off, onomatopoeia”) and flat-out outlandish non sequiturs (“Recording that hoe with no kissing scene/How you suck dick but don't eat string beans”) that anchor his more delicate tunes. There’s a fun scheme where he rattles off references to various Steves (Irwin, Urkel, Harvey, Jobs, the family from the Disney Channel show “Even Stevens”) in quick succession. But at his most derivative, he exposes the things separating him from the stars he emulates. “Bullshit” sounds like a low-budget rework of a Future and Zaytoven collaboration. “Cracks & Crevices” is a half-mumbled, half-crooned ditty that relies heavily on the laziest Young Thug tropes. Even “Pull Up Wit Ah Stick” marries midgrade Thug vocal turns with dead-eyed 21 Savage gun talk.
It can be difficult to reconcile the SahBabii appearing in interviews—the one who turned the number of the beast into a symbol for the most basic element of life, worries about the ozone layer, decries capitalism, and wants to design video games—with the one who appears on S.A.N.D.A.S., simply because his melodic musings don’t seem to share the same thoughtfulness. That isn’t because his SoundCloud persona isn’t as philosophical, or because these topics don’t make their way into his music—no 20 year old should have to rap about global warming; it’s that his music doesn’t provide the same window into his personality. So far, he’s spent more time projecting images of his sires than growing into his own. Re-releasing S.A.N.D.A.S. is a lateral move reiterating his defining truth thus far: he has yet to find his voice.


The tireless psych rocker’s latest is simultaneously sleek and sludgy. It’s not quite his cleanest-sounding album, nor his heaviest, but it stands close to the top of both categories.

Harmonizer

Harmonizer arrives after the longest stretch that Ty Segall has ever gone between albums of original material under his own name: just over two years, or 20 Ty Segall years. Before now, his longest gap preceded 2016’s Emotional Mugger (about 17 months), followed by 2019’s First Taste (about 13). Each of those albums also happened to be among his most bizarre: the former a choppy, devious conceptual escape, the latter a bouzouki- and koto-based experiment that arose from guitar fatigue. For Segall, working within the confines of garage and psych rock makes hairpin lefts a necessity; there’s only so much room in there for a guy who moves as much as he does. “I don’t think I can write songs on the guitar right now because I think I’m tapped out—I’ve hit my maximum guitar style,” he said around the release of First Taste. And when you’ve been as consistently good for as long as he has, it’s a cruel irony that it becomes harder to make something that really stands out. Returning from a relatively long silence with a confounding gesture is one way to try.
Harmonizer, however, makes sense immediately, regreeting his audience not with a cheeky bow or something in Pig Latin, but with a stoic and confident “hello again.” Co-produced and mixed by Cooper Crain and released by surprise last week, it maintains a simultaneously sleek and sludgy quality across its 35 minutes, like a cornstarch slurry gluing the whole thing together. Glistening, squelching synth voices and guitar effects fill up the mix, while Segall exaggerates his best fake British accent with ecstatic doom, sounding like an executioner riding out a sugar rush. It’s not quite his cleanest-sounding album (Freedom’s Goblin, probably) nor his heaviest (maybe Slaughterhouse, or anything that he’s made with Fuzz), but it stands closer to the top of both categories than any other.
The album distinguishes itself from the Segall catalog with extra-punctuated parts that slam into the ears, a calculated continuity enhanced by tracks that transition seamlessly, and a bunch of laser sounds. In fact, it would score a laser show nicely, and its unabating propulsion would fit equally well in a hockey arena, a HIIT class, or a high-speed chase. While it’s all too catchy and generally non-confrontational to be considered self-subversion, it does feel something like Segall tearing off his Stooges shirt to reveal a King Crimson one underneath it.
Harmonizer’s two best songs, “Whisper” and the title track, are its proof of concept, standouts that make the others sound even better and that deserve to become regulars at his blistering live shows. But the album’s songwriting doesn’t quite rise to the level of its overdrive energy, running out of gas towards the end and sputtering out with two tracks that mimic the established motions more than they thrive in them: The lead guitar buzzes through a fuzzbox, the lyrics describe sensory thrills, but the sense of all-consuming obsession over this new world fades. Some front-loading is forgivable, though: Segall is likely already obsessing over his next album, and by the time you reach the end of Harmonizer, it might be done.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Quiet folk duo Luluc gained attention after last year’s covers collection Way to Blue: the Songs of Nick Drake; the National's Aaron Dessner produces their sophomore effort and Sub Pop debut.

Passerby

On the title track to Luluc’s second album—and their Sub Pop debut—Zoë Randell laments what she calls “the passerby life.” The song recounts several friends who have come and gone, some human and some not: a bearded guy named Mike Brown, an old man she knew as Mr. Finnegan, “a young dying baby lamb” that she fed by hand, “a tiny Christmas Island bird” with a broken wing. They’re lovely images and poignant remembrances, especially sung in Randell’s robustly ruminative voice and set to Steve Hassett’s gentle acoustic strums. As befits a duo that moved around the world to soft-start their career, the song dispels any romanticized notions of connection and memory: Everyone is a passerby in your life, and you’re merely a passerby in theirs.
And then Luluc ruin it. Randell ends the song with a blah couplet—“And as you go, know I love you so”—that brings the song to a rousing conclusion, completely undercutting the tough-minded verses. What begins as a world-wear reverie finishes as a Nicholas Sparks epilogue, as Luluc choose to state the obvious in the most obvious way possible. It’s not that those lines are wholly unnecessary, but that they carelessly cordon off the song’s emotions to deliver pat catharsis. Similarly, Passerby toggles awkwardly between the evocatively melancholy and the chintzily sentimental, rendering the carefully composed and performed music as little more than pretty.
This stumble will be all the more disappointing for anyone who heard the Brooklyn-via-Australia duo play on last year’s Way to Blue: the Songs of Nick Drake. It was an ill-conceived public tribute to a deeply private artist, yet Luluc’s versions of “Things Behind the Sun” and “Fly” were highlights that showcased both the dignified yearning of Drake’s lyrics and the easy chemistry between Randell and Hassett. They were something of an anomaly for those live performances, as at the time they had only one album, self-released back in 2008, to their name. On the strength of that tiny catalog and Randell’s big voice, Luluc signed to Sub Pop, where they join the Head & the Heart and Mirel Wagner on the folksier side of the roster.
Perhaps more crucially, Luluc gained the ear of the National’s Aaron Dessner, who agreed to produce Passerby at his studio in Brooklyn's Ditmas Park area. His contributions are low-key and mostly unobtrusive. To reinforce the theme of departure and travel, he emphasizes the spry rhythmic guitar strums on opener “Small Window” and peppers “Early Night” with low-key industrial noise. Only “Tangled Heart” builds to anything that might be considered a big moment, with its texturing of horns greeting the Randell’s romantic regrets. Still, even Dessner can’t nudge Luluc out of their comfort zone: Every song trudges by at the same midtempo, conjuring the same atmosphere of glum reminiscence with no relief or variation.
As rich as Randell’s voice may be, this collection portrays her as a sharply limited artist, with only one mode and a few interpretive tricks up her sleeve. Occasionally she goes purposefully flat like Nico, other times she rounds her vowels luxuriantly, but there’s no tension, no conflict, no story to connect those moments into something larger. The result is a strictly passerby album: one that is heard and then quickly forgotten.


The latest from the prolific psych-folk duo comes courtesy of Woods' Woodsist imprint, and the higher profile coincides with some of their more memorable tunes.

Root/Void

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Root/Void—an album unfathomably deep in the discography of Vermont-based psych duo Matt “MV” Valentine and Erika “EE” Elder—is that they hadn’t already released a song titled “Yr My Jam.” The title is a tidy encapsulation of MV & EE’s most defining features: the intimate bond that makes their music together feel wholly natural, and the lengthy, meandering improvisations that constitute their records. The song in question is, fittingly, a nine-minute encapsulation of their best tendencies, wrapping their brain-dead, out-of-key vocals around Valentine’s searing guitar solos. “Your love is so wide it could have been a canyon,” they shout in unison, “Flies so high, I’m surprised they didn’t ban ya.”
Released on the Woodsist label, as opposed to Valentine’s in-house Child of Microtones imprint, and arriving on the heels of two excellent solo albums from Valentine, Root/Void might seem like the perfect opportunity for the duo to clean up their sound and aim at a larger audience. But the very joy of MV+EE’s spacey, homemade music has always been that they seem largely incapable of breaking through. Together, they have invented their own language and have demonstrated no interest in varying or expanding it for newcomers. Still, Root/Void does have its fair share of high points, many of which would serve as fitting introductions. Inasmuch as MV+EE could ever pen a pop song, “Much Obliged” is the album’s hit. In three minutes, it features an actually-catchy chorus and a sunny melody that wouldn’t sound out of place on a latter day Dinosaur Jr. record.
If “Much Obliged” represents the album’s most amiable tendencies, then “I’m Still In Love With You Love > Void” is its finest experiment. A slow, synthy jam, it’s akin to the sound of “On the Beach” blasting from a rattling van, driving slowly down a beach road at sunset. Its 11 minutes glide by effortlessly and close the album with a deep sense of atmosphere that lingers like thick humidity. Of course, not every moment on the album is quite a revelation. The staggeringly titled “No $ (Shit Space - It’s All About the Coin ¢ / Corn),” for example, also happens to resembles a Neil Young song; unfortunately that song is “Cough Up the Bucks.” The two jams that center on the repeated mantra “Love is everyone,” meanwhile, could have likely been condensed to greater their impact (and to lessen the potential for listeners to ponder what that phrase means).
The balance between psychedelic nonsense and genuine beauty has always been an underlying tension in the group’s music, and at this point in their career, the idea of turning off potential listeners isn’t likely to weigh too heavily on their blissed-out minds. More than maybe any MV & EE release, Root/Void is propelled by a sense of cosmic satisfaction that makes even its weaker moments feel like a necessary part of its story. In its relative concision, it also feels like the duo’s most mature album, a thoughtful, hazy meditation on love. Nearly two decades into their career, MV & EE have firmly drawn the borders of their music, but it’s never been more exciting to hear them explore the strange, beautiful terrain in between.
CORRECTION: The original version of this story incorrectly identified Valentine’s in-house label as Ecstatic Peace when it is Child of Microtones.


The co-founder of Oakland’s Club Chai merges samples of Turkish and Middle Eastern music with club beats on an EP that casts a skeptical eye on club culture’s promise of personal liberation.

Bodyguard

In 1980, following a decade of political upheaval and violence, Turkey’s General Kenan Evren staged a coup. When the conservative regime shuttered trans brothels and banned performances by trans artists, Turkish transgender singer Bülent Ersoy began her sexual reassignment process, publicly revealing her new body at a national trade show. Subject to intense discrimination, Ersoy attempted suicide before fleeing to Germany, where she was able to rebuild her career in a place where her choices were accepted and understood.
This history of fascistic bodily control looms over the work of the Bay Area DJ, producer, and multidisciplinary artist 8ULENTINA, named after Ersoy. Along with Lara Sarkissian, aka FOOZOOL, 8ULENTINA co-founded Oakland’s Club Chai, a collective that cultivates safe spaces for trans and women-identifying individuals working at the intersection of electronic music and disaporic traditions. On Bodyguard, 8ULENTINA raises existential quandaries familiar to anyone whose personal boundaries have been violated. “How do bodies protect each other? How do we deal with that mutual responsibility and trust?” they ask in a text accompanying the album. As on their previous EP, last year’s Eucalyptus, 8ULENTINA refracts percussion and melodies sampled from Turkish and Middle Eastern music through angular club rhythms. They chop and loop excerpts of traditional instrumentation and hand drums alongside kicks and snares at techno BPMs.
Bodyguard’s five tracks are meant to be conversant with each other, with vocal samples formatted as a quasi-poem on the EP’s Bandcamp page. Making sense of these somewhat inscrutable bits of text feels a bit like eavesdropping on a hushed exchange in a corner of the dancefloor. On the opening track, a barely audible voice mumbles, “No, I was fast,” accompanied by an urgent stringed riff based on the makam (a system of scales utilized in Turkish and Middle Eastern music). It would seem to be a response to a question posed in the closer, featuring the Lebanese-Australian producer DJ Plead, punctuated by entrancing woodwind and hand-drum samples: “Were you tough?” Elsewhere, on “No One Could Get By You,” someone murmurs “I’ve never felt this safe before” in a hushed tone that belies the churning acid drone beneath. It’s a fleeting moment of relief before horror-film violin stabs introduce the next track, “Doesn’t Always Work.” “I spend a lot of time trying not to react to things that other people do,” someone says—de-escalation as a survival tactic.
Post-#MeToo, the policing of bodies, especially in a nightlife setting, can be complicated. Bouncers decide who enters the club based on appearance, and even when nightclubs establish codes of conduct, it can be unclear how to enforce them. 8ULENTINA is clearly committed to fostering conversations about these issues in their artful manipulation of samples. No solid answers to their questions emerge by the end of Bodyguard’s 15 minutes. But the push-and-pull between prickly and intimate makes for a mesmerizing EP that provokes with every listen.


On their second release, the Disappears alums turn mercurial, whipping their habitual post-rock into more impressionistic, unpredictable forms.

Lifelike

Disappears were a perfectly named band. Over the course of five studio albums, the Chicago quartet took the standard indie-rock starter kit—Velvets-schooled guitar noise, motorik propulsion, hectoring post-punk sing-speak—and gradually melted it down until all traces of the band’s initial identity had been obliterated. Post-rock has become synonymous with large orchestral ensembles and sweeping crescendos, but the term was originally meant to describe artists that used traditional rock instrumentation to make music that steadfastly did not rock in any traditional sense. And on their 2015 album Irreal, Disappears’ swan song, they honored that original definition, forsaking their signature fuzz-covered thrust for skin-piercing guitar pricks, stalking post-industrial rhythms, and pure gothic dread.
In hindsight, it’s tempting to label Irreal as the first album by FACS, the post-Disappears outfit formed by singer/guitarist Brian Case (who initially moved to bass), guitarist Jonathan van Herik, and drummer Noah Leger. The group’s 2018 debut, Negative Houses, effectively picked up right where their previous band left off, with an increasingly atmospheric spin on post-hardcore that suggested Slint given a King Tubby remix. But even in its slowest, most methodical moments, Negative Houses bristled with a punk-fueled intensity, its predatory lurches giving way to frenetic, white-knuckled climaxes.
Following the departure of van Herik and the addition of former We Ragazzi drummer Alianna Kalaba on bass (allowing Case to return to guitar), FACS turn both more mercurial and minimalist on their second release, Lifelike. The new record feels less like a collection of proper songs than a series of evolutionary steps as the band unmoors itself from its taut rhythmic foundation to drift further out into the chop, and not always with a set destination in mind. It’s the sort of record where each successive track seems to embellish ideas introduced by its immediate predecessor: After the murky opener “Another Country” establishes the album’s burbling, seasick feel, “In Time” adds the impressionistic smears of guitar squall that become Case’s go-to trick over the remainder of the record. It’s easy to see why he’s so enamored with it: Like an aluminum sheet bending and wobbling in your hands, the sound is metallic and monochromatic, but produces radiant flashes of light at the right angle.
Though the ominous air is as thick as ever, and Case’s curt, cryptic phrasing is all the more brutally blunt (“Nothing left to save/Burn it down/Get out”), Lifelike is an oddly restrained record—perpetually roiling and churning, but with precious few moments of cathartic release. The band wades through the sludgy riddims of “Anti-Body” like the Jesus Lizard on muscle relaxants, dialing down the temperature just when it feels like the song is about boil over; “Loom State,” meanwhile, summons the thundering ritualistic clamor of Drum’s Not Dead-era Liars, albeit without the wild abandon. But if Lifelike’s individual songs can’t always muster the strength to deliver a dramatic payoff, the album itself does. With the closing “Total History,” FACS distill all the preceding experiments in Dub Like Jehu discord and apocalyptic fridge-magnet poetry into an exhilarating eight-minute epic, making good on Lifelike’s exploratory promise and razing the path for their next step into the unknown.


A little Gary Glitter, a little Kid Rock, even a little Smash Mouth—the third album from these former California party kids holds nothing back.

Almost Free

FIDLAR’s last album, 2015’s Too, began with frontman Zac Carper screaming that he’d never sell out—well, unless the price was right. Like all of his jokes, there was more than a hint of truth to the quip. But if there’s a central takeaway from the testy Los Angeles skate-punk band’s third album, Almost Free, it’s that they wouldn’t know how to sell out if they tried. Recorded with producer-to-the-stars Ricky Reed and mixed and mastered by a team of industry pros touting Rihanna and Imagine Dragons credits, Almost Free plays like a bid for the same crossover alternative audience that Portugal. The Man found. Yet while FIDLAR may have the chops and attitude to play to the masses, they may never have the restraint.
Almost Free shares some of the showy sprawl of Portugal. The Man’s commercial breakthrough, Woodstock. Where that record drew from an unwaveringly safe pool of modernized soul and psychedelia, though, FIDLAR’s left-field influences are either hopelessly uncool or smirkingly out of step in 2019. “Scam Likely” teases the Clash then ambushes with Big Audio Dynamite. “Alcohol” plays like one of the Vines’ tamper tantrums. “Called You Twice” flirts with a guitar riff perilously close to the Proclaimers’ “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles),” while “Flake” has echoes of a certain Gary Glitter jock jam. And then they go full fucking Smash Mouth for “By Myself,” a surf-funk shimmy that only a wedding DJ could love.
On paper, most of that sounds unbearable, but it largely isn’t. FIDLAR trade in some of the gaudiest radio sounds of the last three decades, but they present them with the enthusiasm of a puppy that’s dug a greasy hambone out of the trash, too gleeful to admonish. Almost Free may be obnoxious, but it’s never cynical. FIDLAR are as devoted to old Now That’s What I Call Music! compilations as the Ramones were to Phil Spector’s girl groups.
Still, sometimes it’s all too much. The raucous opener “Get Off My Rock” begins as a spot-on Beastie Boys homage, then heaps one overkill accompaniment on top of the next: pissy harmonica, Kid Rock’s cowboy rage, Cage the Elephant slide guitars, a rooster call, 40oz to Freedom dog barks. Even more grating is “Too Real,” which goes a step further by adding some shrill politics to the mix. For much of the album, Carper plays the angry 99-percenter, but here he sets his sights on P.C. culture and white guilt, too. “You’ve gone so far to the left you ended up on the right,” he seethes. “Was that too fucking real?” he prods after tossing out each jab from a grab-bag of grievances so full his attacks become meaningless. It’s never clear where the satire ends and the truth begins.
Carper’s sour worldview probably hinders FIDLAR’s crossover potential as much as the group’s contrarian indulgence, but, for better or worse, it seems to stoke his band. Carper’s new sobriety has admittedly divorced him from the party lifestyle that was once their animating spirit, so he’s still struggling to figure out a new place. “Why does getting sober make you feel like a loner?” he stews on “By Myself.” Perhaps that sense of alienation explains why FIDLAR is so eager to try on so many different hats during Almost Free. They’ve made a record that captures the tumult of feeling displaced, without abandoning the hyped-up spirit that made them such a spectacle during their party-animal days.


Emo barrel-scrapers make Rites of Spring seem two decades old. Oh, wait.

Panic! at the Disco: A Fever You Can't Sweat Out

A Fever You Can't Sweat Out

Ten years ago, who would've guessed that emo would usurp punk as the genre du jour for angst-ridden teens. By the late 1990s, most fans of the genre's second wave were abandoning it. Many of the best bands had split up, while the handful that were left were moving toward a more straightforward pop rock sound. But just as it appeared over, the scene suddenly exploded, giving birth to an entire new generation of slick, generic, mall-store neo-emo. It's like the bartender yelled last call, the house lights came on, and then at the last minute, he decided to keep the club open all night serving Cokes. So now, 20 years after Rites of Spring's only full-length album was released, we've arrived at Panic! at the Disco's A Fever You Can't Sweat Out.
Where does one begin to describe this steaming pile of garbage? You've already seen the ridiculous name, so let's try a few of song titles on for size. Track two is called "The Only Difference Between Martyrdom and Suicide Is Press Coverage", and it's followed by "London Beckoned Songs About Money Written By Machines". If those don't quite do it for you, check out "I Write Sins Not Tragedies", or my personal favorite, "Lying Is the Most Fun a Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off".
But of course, the asinine song titles and the moronic band name have nothing on the actual songs. The usual guitar, bass, and drums are augmented by drum machine beats and synths that would be more at home blaring over the P.A. at your local gym than in anything one might consider enjoyable music. The production, handled by Matt Squire, a guy who is certainly no stranger to radio-friendly emo, is slick and polished. Vocalist Brendon Urie's impassioned, warbling vocals are so strained it's as if he might just burst into tears at any moment. This poor guy's heart must get broken on a daily basis or something. And if it wasn't bad enough, someone convinced him to add some fancy effects on a track or two that make it sound like someone is lightly karate chopping him across the throat while he sings.
The lyrics are just the sort of vague teen heartache you'd expect. In "Camisado", Urie croons, "You're a regular decorated emergency/ The bruises and contusions will remind you what you did when you wake," sliding up to a falsetto while keyboards shimmer behind him. In "Time to Dance", which utilizes some sort of poorly realized gun-as-a-camera metaphor, he belts out, "When I say shotgun, you say wedding/ Shotgun/ Wedding", and "Give me envy/ Give me malice/ Give me attention/ Give me a break." Yeah, you and me both, kid.
It's sad that this is what emo has become. The genre's always had some irritating characteristics, but this newest batch of heartbroken heartthrobs has managed to build their careers solely out of those characteristics. The whining, the emotionally exposed lyrics, and the passionate choruses are there, but there's no sincerity, creativity, or originality.


The 21-year-old Norwegian producer’s debut EP is driven by whimsy and promises a fresh spin on the Pelican Fly sound.

Existence Problem EP

One of the unlikeliest developments in the decade’s commingling of underground electronic music and mainstream pop has been Cashmere Cat’s leap from making twinkling, daisy-chain trap to working with singers like Ariana Grande and the Weeknd. Here was that rarest of unicorns: an artist on the fringes—a Norwegian former turntablist hiccupping his way through a mutant take on of Scandinavian skweee, to be precise—who catapulted himself into the Hot 100 by trading the maximalist ethos of EDM for an aesthetic about as tough as kittens and cotton candy.
It was the Brussels label Pelican Fly that originally put Cashmere Cat’s music out into the world, and after he jumped ship for LuckyMe and then Interscope, the Belgian label soldiered on with similar, if slightly less distinctive, sounds: variations on trap, R&B, and Jersey and Baltimore club punctuated by the usual 808 skitter, trance zap, and helium spritz. Norway’s Marius is the label’s latest discovery. He makes fizzy instrumental hip-hop that’s clearly indebted to fellow Norwegians Cashmere Cat and Lido, another Pelican Fly signee. And though its four songs cumulatively clock in at under 12 minutes, his debut EP for the label suggests a fresh, promising spin on the Pelican Fly sound.
Like Cashmere Cat, the 21-year-old producer’s music is driven by whimsy: He’s fond of plinky, harp-like strumming and kazoo buzz; he likes his chords wistful and his keyboards wheezy, with long attacks suggestive of a backmasked sample. Voices drip and synths detune in mid-flight—an aesthetic influenced by wind tunnels and the Doppler effect. While his melodies have their heads in the clouds, though, his beats stay grounded with a mixture of overdriven machine hits and sampled rock drumming. “Give In” has the staggering, brawny cadence of hip-hop grooves pounded out on the MPC; “LAME” balances distorted 808 blasts with nimble hi-hats so vivid you can practically make out the Zildjian logo leaping off the cymbal. Nothing spells out his use of contrast like the guitars that compete for attention in “LAME”: One’s a winsome, clean-toned kin to Cocteau Twins or the Durutti Column, and the other’s the kind of gnarly, gut-punching prog riff, compressed to within an inch of its life, that Daft Punk have made their stock-in-trade. It’s a fun, surprising combo.
Until earlier this year, Marius went by the name Melf, and listening to the first couple of singles he put out under that alias, “Crzy” and “Guilty,” suggest how quickly he’s developing. Where “Crzy” was a fairly run-of-the-mill pop-trap tune, and “Guilty” was a little too beholden to SOPHIE’s Flubberized funk, the new material finds him coming closer to carving out his own sound. He still has some kinks to work out. The soulful falsetto hook that dominates “Existence Problem” feels like a step backward into the R&B-collage aesthetic that has been bass music’s default for years now. And as much personality as his sounds have, that’s not always enough to sustain them. “Existence Problem” treads water for the final minute of its 3:22 running time, although the longer “LAME” manages to keep you guessing until the very end, thanks to its agile dodging and feinting, building up to a big climax and then pulling the rug out. And while “Master Dope (Interlude)” is probably the EP’s least original cut—two minutes of hip-hop breaks suffused in dissonant keys and shortwave static, it’s clearly indebted to producers like DJ Shadow and the RZA—its thick, viscous frequencies are among the record’s most visceral pleasures.


The Ibiza-based producer’s first full-length in over four years, originally intended as the score for a Japanese documentary, nudges down the thermostat on the island escapism of his earlier work.

Jōhatsu (蒸発)

Mark Barrott’s awe and gratitude at living in an real-life island paradise has informed most of the music he’s made since moving to Ibiza in 2012. The snaky flutes, burbling sequencers, and hand drums that populate his Sketches From an Island series err just on the right side of kitsch, not to mention album covers that resemble illustrated postcards. What keeps him from becoming electronic music’s Jimmy Buffett or Jack Johnson is the genuine sense of wonder his music conjures. There’s no happy-go-lucky humor about how a toke and a margarita are the answer to life’s problems, and no weighty moral lesson to be learned, either. He lives on a balmy Balearic island, it’s beautiful, this is how it is.
As soon as the first piano chord falls on “森林浴 (Shinrin-yoko),” the second track on his new album 蒸発 (Jōhatsu), we’re in for a different kind of Barrott album, one that nudges down the thermostat a few degrees from the Sketches From an Island albums or his early, pseudonymous releases on his International Feel label. What’s striking about the transition so soon after the familiar synths and sequencers of opener “京都 (Kyoto)” is the loss of an anchor. The reassuring pulse disappears and confronts the listener with a pregnant silence. All sorts of thoughts and associations rush in to fill the space, not least the image of Barrott thinking: maybe about which note to play next, or simply about the shortness and transience of life.
Tracks like “Shinrin-yoko,” the field-recordings-and-piano reverie “9月のある金曜日 (One Friday in September),” and the sublime closing drone “神隠し (Kamikakushi)” just feel like they come from a deeper place than “Kyoto” and the album’s other more rhythmic cuts. Maybe it’s because Barrott’s sequencers maintain such urgent momentum that the music never really has time to slow down and collect its thoughts. Maybe it’s just leftover associations with acoustic-leaning ambient albums like Harold Budd’s Perhaps, Grouper’s Ruins, or Ryuichi Sakamoto’s 12, whose sustained piano chords seem to empty into the vastness of the universe. Or maybe it’s the nature of the piano itself, an instrument that lends itself well to depressive slumping, as opposed to instruments like guitars and drums that force you to remain upright.
Jōhatsu was originally commissioned as the score for a film about the titular Japanese phenomenon in which people seemingly disappear from their lives without a trace, often to escape obligations such as debts and dead-end jobs. While the as-yet-unreleased documentary faces funding issues, the soundtrack represents Barrott’s first full-length solo album in over four years. Its origin as film music helps explain pieces like “すべての幽霊を殺す (Kill All Ghosts),” which switches halfway through from a plangent keyboard miniature into a mess of prog-rock synths. But it’s less interesting to imagine this album’s melancholy moments as simply mourning the plight of the jōhatsu than to take the broad view: This is Barrott’s most emotionally gripping album yet, with ample space between the piano chords to locate your own existential quandaries.


Before Trish Keenan's passing in 2011 she teamed with James Cargill on this largely instrumental soundtrack. The album picks up on the similarly fractured thread found on their 2011 Focus Group collaboration Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age.

Broadcast: Berberian Sound Studio: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

Broadcast's output was remarkably meticulous. In their 16 years together as a group, through various lineup changes that saw them ultimately shaved down to the duo of Trish Keenan and James Cargill, they released just four full-length studio albums. There was certainly a decent amount of other work that sprung up in the gaps between those records, but often a protracted silence would settle on the band. It wasn't hard to imagine a permutation of the Broadcast lineup locked away in a studio during those times, agonizing over pink noise settings, crafting a set of lyrics that sat just right with Keenan's detached delivery, mulling over sleeve design with longtime cohort Julian House of the Focus Group. As the world outside sped up they seemed to slow down, getting a little more lost in their own sound with every passing year.
Their final work together before Keenan's sad passing in 2011, the manic cut-and-paste Focus Group collaboration Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age, spewed Broadcast out into a disorienting space, deliberately clipping their pop wings. Their live shows from that era further emphasized the feeling, with Keenan and Cargill performing in near darkness, facing one another while hunched over tables laden with equipment, barely even acknowledging the presence of the audience. The sense of retreat from those shows was overpowering, even if it was the natural product of the insular existence the pair seemed to fall into over the course of their career. In the beginning they had easily traceable peers-- labelmates Stereolab, fellow Birmingham bands Plone and Pram-- but by the time of Witch Cults they were mostly out on their own. Even the "hauntology" sub-genre felt too parochial for a band that had such potentially limitless scope within its grasp.
It feels appropriate that one of Keenan and Cargill's final works together is a largely instrumental soundtrack to filmmaker Peter Strickland’s 2012 feature Berberian Sound Studio. The film follows a British man who travels to Italy in the 1970s to work on the sound design of a schlocky giallo movie, only to be driven to the point of self-destruction by his own creations. Broadcast are a natural fit for such a project, their working methods clearly mirroring the obsessive, isolationist approach of Strickland's central character. Their music often has a filmy élan to it, bearing traces of composers such as Krzysztof Komeda's work for Roman Polanski and Luboš Fišer's score for Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. It's not clear who did what here-- Keenan and Cargill began working on this project together, with the latter completing the score after Keenan's passing-- but it picks up on the similarly fractured thread sewn throughout Witch Cults, with 39 tracks included, many of them barely making it over the one-minute mark.
That Broadcast were still working deeply in the abstract suggests they were keen to further explore the ideas embedded in that last record. According to Cargill, we may find that out at some point in the future. For now, all we have is this, an album that arches away from Witch Cults in subtle ways, dialling down the self-consciously quirky material that periodically surfaced on that record and bringing a conspicuous feeling of terror closer to the surface. Berberian Sound Studio is all bone-chilling screams, deep red blood spilling across decaying celluloid, knives being raised pointedly in the air. It's the work of people enamored by the common devices of horror, who want to see how pliable that material is so they can find their own entry point into it.
This isn't an album easily broken down into tracks, but the influence of Herk Harvey's sinister organ grind from the classic Carnival of Souls surfaces sporadically ("Beautiful Hair", "Treatise") as do great bursts of menacing analog synth reminiscent of Fabio Frizzi's score for Zombie Flesh Eaters ("Mark of the Devil", "Found Scalded, Found Drowned"). Elsewhere, pieces of dialog from the film are regularly worked in, often through creepily whispered female voices reminiscent of a similar trick deployed on Goblin's Suspiria soundtrack ("Monica's Burial", "Anima di Cristo"). Occasionally there are even Broadcastian touches-- the keyboard refrain on "The North Downs Dimension" is noticeably similar to the one deployed on "You and Me in Time" from Tender Buttons. But mostly this is an attempt at subtlety emulating the work of others, of generating chills from an eerie sparseness (the quite beautiful "Teresa, Lark of Ascension") or from dense, compact forms (the strident "The Equestrian Vortex").
What prevents Berberian Sound Studio from being a genre exercise is the care taken to paper over the cracks, to find some common ground between droney, Popol Vuh-type material ("Valeria’s Burial (Under the Fort)") and more visceral horror soundtrack work (the positively seething "The Game's Up"). It's undoubtedly derived from that high level of fastidiousness Keenan and Cargill always applied to their work together, but it also demonstrates what big-picture thinkers they were, able to forge unseen connections between disparate, barely heard musicians. It's what gives an album like this, drawn from so many sources, a recognizable identity of its own, and it's what gave their ever-evolving career a solid grounding in a world that was recognizably theirs.


Stockholm trio Peter Bjorn and John branch out on their latest LP, exploring everything from lo-fi 1980s electronics and shoegaze guitars to slacker beats and icy dreamscapes. The result is their most focused and fully realized album yet, and one of the better pop albums we've heard this year.

Writer's Block

So, the title's just a pun. Peter Morén, Bjorn Yttling, and John Erikkson all wrote songs for their third album, Writer's Block, but where last year's heartbroken Falling Out drew inspiration mainly from 1960s pop, the Stockholm-based trio's latest LP finds them aspiring to new levels of sonic diversity, exploring everything from lo-fi 80s electronics and shoegaze guitars to slacker beats and icy dreamscapes. It's a lot of new ground for a band to have covered in a year's time; fortunately, PB&J (uh, yeah, we know) managed to harness their melodic expertise and cultivate their textural craftsmanship at precisely the same time. The result is their most focused and fully realized effort yet-- an album that adds an imperial hugeness to the teen noir and garage-y psychedelia of their past efforts-- and one of the better pop records we've heard this year.
Aided by Yttling's solid production (he's also worked with the Concretes and Shout Out Louds), Writer's Block's sonic textures demand attention first: odd synths, overdriven bass, dreamy harmonies, rolling drums, pink streaks of guitar noise, or a foot tapping in soft focus. But ultimately, the album is just as notable for the way it captures both the electric first moments of a deep relationship and the bleary aftermath of post-breakup malaise. The infectious, lazily whistled hook and playful bongo drums of first single "Young Folks" are immediately inviting, but the song's second layer-- the coy chemistry between Morén and ex-Concretes singer Victoria Bergsman-- adds depth, as the song's two hopeful strangers discover each other by chance: "All we care about is talking/ Talking only me and you."
As an album, Writer's Block shares these new lovers' singular focus. "Paris 2004" is a classical guitar-tinged traveler's ballad in the manner of John Cale's near-perfect "Andalucia", exchanging Cale's studied ambiguity for sentimental bedazzlement; Erikkson's "Start to Melt" flickers with amazed adoration; and Morén's "Objects of My Affection" combines the dramatic flair of an uncharacteristically upbeat Morrissey with the nasal vocals and ringing acoustic guitars of a post-Loveless "Like a Rolling Stone".
The album's narrators cast an equally attentive eye on love's jagged downside. Amid the simplistic percussion and glassy Flaming Lips chorus of "Amsterdam", Yttling mopes over his loneliness during a lover's vacation, before Erikkson's starry-eyed "Up Against the Wall" pictures a relationship at the precipice. "It's almost that I wish we hadn't met at all," sings Erikkson against a crystalline rhythm that could pack a John Hughes prom.
Written by the full trio, "The Chills" pays quiet homage to the New Zealand indie group of the same name, and steeps its bitterness in caustic one-liners ("Your tongue is sharp/ But I miss the taste of it"). And at last, Yttling's big-screen "Roll the Credits" pictures an escape, but as usual on Writer's Block, the romance fills the frame: "It's between me and her now/ Can't separate at all/ Let's put the cards back in the sleeve." Only droning closer "Poor Cow" kills the mood, like the George Harrison sitar song contrarians might revisit when the rest of the album grows overly familiar.
For Peter Bjorn & John-- as with their Pitchfork-approved compatriots-- love is all. As such, a certain amount of actual writer's block should have been expected; after all, what Writer's Block seeks to portray is, in the end, ineffable. "And the question is: Was I more alive then than I am now?" Morén wonders on "Objects of My Affection", rejoindering, "I happily have to disagree/ I laugh more often now/ I cry more often now/ I am more me." If lyric poetry is, as Czech novelist Milan Kundera recently wrote, "the most exemplary incarnation of man dazzled by his own soul and the desire to make it heard," surely the pop song is the highest incarnation of all-consuming love and its fundamental need to be shared. Writer's Block, indeed.


In a follow-up EP to last year’s The Mountain Will Fall, Shadow bucks expectations and finds inspiration in unlikely collabs with Nas and Danny Brown.

The Mountain Has Fallen EP

Early in his career, back when he was still a college-radio striver a couple years away from inspiring Mixmag to coin the term “trip-hop,” DJ Shadow made his way doing what hip-hop producers usually did: creating beats for rappers. He built up a promising résumé, from his self-released 1991 mixtape Hip Hop Reconstruction from the Ground Up (featuring a drums-of-the-apocalypse remix of Eric B. & Rakim’s “Let the Rhythm Hit ‘Em”) to his time making G-funk-deconstructing classics with neo-Panther and Bay Area MC Paris, in 1992, to his run on Solesides, starting in 1993, crafting beats for Blackalicious and Lateef the Truth Speaker. But once Endtroducing..… blew up in 1996, Shadow’s aptitude for abstract instrumental beats took center stage. And with rare exceptions—Kool G Rap and Mike D taking turns confronting “Drums of Death” on UNKLE’s Psyence Fiction; a hyphy detour on The Outsider (which, say what you will, gave us a great E-40 track); the Posdnuos/Kweli backpacker summit on The Less You Know, the Better’s “Stay the Course”—his music was pegged, usually unfairly, as hip-hop for people who didn’t like rap.
If the fact that the Run the Jewels collab “Nobody Speak” became far and away the biggest crowd-pleaser on last year’s The Mountain Will Fall doesn’t put the Timbs to that theory, the leading twofer on follow-up EP The Mountain Has Fallen probably should. There’s no ’90s-vet rapper’s-rapper quite like Nas, and few MCs this decade who’ve reached EDM and indie audiences on their own honest terms as successfully as Danny Brown, so bringing them in for collaborations reads like a canny move on the surface. But Shadow’s history of fuck-what-you-think iconoclasm puts these collaborative highlights in a more musical context that pushes past simple optics.
For instance: What do you even expect from “Shadow produces Nas” when both artists have been repeatedly burdened with the expectation of returning to their debut forms? Nas has been keeping quiet since his fine 2012 comeback, Life Is Good, save a few stray singles that keep up his future-focused elder-statesman vibe. So hearing him amped and inspired is always welcome, even when it’s a little thematically scattershot. “Systematic” seems lyrically torn between fuck-the-system calls to “occupy all streets” and hood-mogul dreams of tech ventures—a tension that gave it a self-aware spot on the “Silicon Valley” soundtrack while nodding to Nas’ investments with his own QueensBridge Venture Partners. At least you have a jittery, propulsive electro-G-funk beat to ponder late capitalism to; it’s almost like a direct nod to Nas’ predecessors in Queens’ Juice Crew, considering it hits a lot of the same dirty, low-end synth squawks as Masta Ace’s “Born to Roll.”
Meanwhile, Danny Brown sets up his own conflict on “Horror Show,” playing both to and against the type he spent much of Atrocity Exhibition staring down like an enemy: the manic maniac in rock-star threads spending stacks on “a bag of drugs looking like trail mix.” The first verse’s Porsche-flooring coke hubris links up to the second’s undertone of doomed self-loathing via a bouncy sing-song chorus somewhere between shaming himself and threatening everyone else: “Welcome to my horror show/Horrible, how I will do all of you.” Danny’s at his broadest here, but when his broadest sounds a lot like the Weezy ’07-via-Alice Cooper ’73 monster that made his last three albums throat-clenchers, all that’s left to do is head-nod. And even if the lumbering galoot of a beat that Shadow builds for him is horrorshow more in the Dark Carnival sense, rather than A Clockwork Orange, it’s the perfect excuse for him to stomp around with some of the most no-bullshit battering-ram drums and basslines he’s ever done.
That said, there’s not much of the beat-chopping restlessness that’s laced his best tracks, neither on the rap cuts nor the two instrumentals that round things out. “Good News” is a weird little slice of ’70s-prog kick/snare/synth noodling that alternately sounds like a slick cut-up and a drunken attempt to push a malfunctioning Moog up a flight of aluminum stairs. (You almost expect Hannibal Buress to improvise a silly talkbox song over it.) There’s a bit more nuance in the closing “Corridors,” an instrumental featuring string arrangements by Academy Award-winning composer Steven Price; it’s largely in keeping with the beat-scene excursions of The Mountain Will Fall and picks up the post-dubstep rhythmic intricacy that Burial left off his last single. But once the orchestral bits start overwhelming the intricate bass-music locomotion Shadow’s built to a crest, its cinematic flourishes turn a strong composition into a score in search of a super-powered fight scene—impressive, but emotionally distant. The three good songs on this EP could be streamlined into The Mountain Will Fall’s overall structure well enough, but the two rap collabs are the clear highlights. It’s fine hearing Shadow continue to work in new modes, but sometimes it’s better to hear him finding interesting new angles in his old ones.


In an album of studio recordings informed by her partly improvised live hardware sets, the UK-based techno musician balances dance-floor functionalism with wild idiosyncrasy.

Rembo

In the four years since the release of her debut album, the dreamy and pleasingly homespun Needs Continuum, Karen Gwyer has honed her hardware setup into a formidable dancefloor weapon. It’s perhaps no coincidence that former Ann Arbor, Michigan, resident now finds herself attached to London-based imprint Don’t Be Afraid, where her labelmates include DJ Bone, one of Detroit’s finest—and perhaps most underrated—techno DJs of the last 20 years. His recent album for Don’t Be Afraid, which appeared under the new alias Differ-Ent, showed off a more adventurous and eclectic attitude intended to satisfy the label’s desire for “the weirdest possible music,” as he put it. On Rembo, an eight-track powerhouse of deep, dense, and hugely danceable techno, Gwyer proves herself just as adept at taking Detroit’s weighty history in freaky directions.
Where Needs Continuum sprang from a period of confinement, recorded in the UK (where Gwyer has lived for many years) while pregnant with her first child, Rembo is the product of many late nights honing her attack for a live audience, and it follows several EPs charting a journey deeper into body-music territory. Framing this album, Gwyer has spoken of her frustration that her live set might be treated as “a warm up act for DJs”, arguing that she’s just as capable of setting moods, responding to crowds, and creating spontaneous moments with her partly improvised hardware sessions. Accordingly, almost every track on Rembo sounds as if it’s been worked out under hot lights and thick smoke.
While she proves herself increasingly adept at stoking the energy on the floor, Gwyer isn’t afraid to leave an idea hanging in the air for an extra eight or 16 bars, gently nudging her captive listeners into trance mode. On “Why Don’t You Make Your Bed?,” she holds a moment between her fingertips for most of six minutes, spreading slow-motion synths like butter over a gritty, lo-fi rhythm. “Why Does Your Father Look So Nervous?” is the album’s central pearl, a shifty dancefloor moment that’s quintessentially Gwyer: chunky, primitive-sounding bass and drums lifted by a mid-range flightiness that’s part Reichian minimalism, part krautrock mysticism. A looming chord suddenly breaks through to raise the pressure, and out of nowhere we’re deep, deep inside—it’s a shiver-inducing moment, informed by an intuitive knowledge of the minute personal ecstasies of the dancefloor.
Split across two slabs of vinyl, the eight tracks are nearly all primed for DJ use, and, typically for Gwyer, the titles are a cryptic delight, pairing tracks into a call-and-response structure. “Why Don’t You Make Your Bed?” sets up “It’s Not Worth the Bother”; “Did You Hear the Owls Last Night?” is followed by “Yes, But I Didn’t Know They Were Owls.” Not that there seems to be a hidden narrative propelling the action; Gwyer is probably just having a laugh at techno’s expense, bringing a sense of humor sometimes missing from an often self-serious genre. That cheekiness also comes through on “It’s Not Worth the Bother,” a drumless synth folly that recalls the baroque busyness of early electronic pioneers like Wendy Carlos—best of luck to any DJ bold enough to take it on. Ultimately, though, Rembo is an album that prizes function as much as idiosyncrasy; much like Differ-Ent’s It’s Good To Be Differ-Ent, the yearning for experimentation is always kept in check by an intuitive appreciation for what dancers desire. It’s a talent to be cherished.


Oakland “stoner violence” trio Connoisseur’s entire debut LP is about the pleasures and politics of smoking weed. The band attempts to be dually comical and menacing, falling short in both capacities.

Over the Edge

Whenever a band focuses all of its attention on one subject, it’s bound to get old no matter how engaging that subject might be. With that, the appeal of Connoisseur’s debut LP depends entirely on your personal tolerance for the band’s, um, chronic monomania. Then again, by its own admission, the Oakland “stoner violence” trio is trying to be provocative: “If you are straight edge,” says guitarist Daniel Hague, aka Daniel “Machinegun” Grenade, in a press release, “this record will hopefully make you question your life choices. If you smoke pot, this record will make you feel sexy and intelligent.”
If only that were true, and if only the band could muster half as much wit via their music as Hague does in that single quip. All indications show they could; clearly, this is a band with a sense of humor. In 2015, their side-splitting video for “Pot Hole” depicted frontman Carlos Saldana sparking up with a pair of door-to-door religious pamphleteers. And Saldana keeps tongue firmly in cheek in the band’s live show, where his hyperactivity and self-deprecation make for a strong, distinct presence that recalls D.R.I.’s Kurt Brecht in his prime. But without the benefit of being able to see Saldana’s facial expressions as he jumps around and windmills his arms, Connoisseur’s schtick loses a critical dimension. On Over the Edge, the band attempts to be dually comical and menacing. The album falls short in both capacities.
Things start out promisingly enough when Saldana shouts, “You didn’t want your kids to be like us/We don’t want our kids to be like you” on opening number “The Stoning.” By the next line, though, Saldana’s train of thought gets a bit convoluted: “So now weed is mainstream/And profits are so fucking high/Fancy shops and fancy rigs/We don’t want your money in our scene/Get out.” Okay—it’s understandable that Saldana and company would resent marijuana chic and the gentrification that comes with it. (And hats off to Saldana if he got someone thinking about this issue for the first time.) But would these guys prefer someone face criminal charges and prison time just to maintain their sense of outlaw cool?
Worse, when Saldana closes the song out with “You can take your weed/You can fuck yourself,” it reeks of the same punk elitism that undermines come-as-you-are outsider scenes from within. On “I’d Rather Be Smoking Weed,” Saldana calls for a sense of solidarity, singing “No more divisions/Tearing each other down,” but his arms are only open for fellow potheads. Unsurprisingly, the music is most charming when it’s clear that Saldana is just clowning the audience, like when he sings, “Hit this/Or I’ll kick your ass/This weed/It’s so magical/So green/Put it in yer butt/Wait, don’t/I’m just kidding.”
On “Weeding Out the Weak”—a kind of boxing contest between smokers—Saldana cleverly makes himself the target of his own joke by losing the contest. Indeed, there’s a lot to like about how this band seems to wink at you between lines, as if screaming “if you take us too seriously, the joke’s on you.” Much of the time, though, Saldana shrieks and grunts as if he’s deadly serious, which makes it easy to miss the joke. And all too often, Connoisseur’s wit is eclipsed by what sounds like a sincere desire to brag about how much weed they burn through.
In an age where Weedeater’s Dixie Dave pulls stunts like cough-medicine and cheese tastings, there really are few cards left to play from the drugs-are-cool deck. And if a group as sonically engaging as Cypress Hill can reduce itself to self-parody after just a couple of albums, Connoisseur need to play-up the things that set them apart. Namely: the way they break out of the paint-by-numbers stoner metal mold by mixing fast and slow tempos with ease. However brief and ratty Connoisseur’s songs get, it’s noteworthy that Hague, Saldana, and returning drummer Lyle Sprague are actually emulating musically ambitious groups like Earth Crisis and Spazz. Their mix of sludge, powerviolence, and d-beat hardcore is flexible and seamless enough to accommodate “Hey! Ho!” Ramones-style chants (“All Day, Every Day”) and even clean guitars (“Boulevard of Broken Bongs”). With some tweaking, they could marry the music and the humor together for a particularly potent strain of stoner metal.


There's an infectious sense of discovery in Black Dice's latest album as the Brooklyn band finds ways to make bizarre music into something tightly structured and fun.

Mr. Impossible

Brooklyn sonic alchemists Black Dice are one of those bands that started off seeming like they could go anywhere. Early singles and EPs focused on scream-laden hardcore and mixed noisy electronics with traditional guitars and drums. By the time of their proper full-length debut, 2002's Beaches & Canyons, they had become psychedelic explorers who smashed gentle drones against noise and turned it into something both violent and graceful. In the years since that masterpiece, they've cut a stumbling but consistent path through bad vibes electronics, mixing dark humor, broken beats, and generally disorienting drugginess to create a sound that they pretty much own. And though recent records like Repo, Load Blown, and Broken Ear Record have a fair amount of variety, you'd never mistake them for anything early on in the group's history.
Since Black Dice are no longer as interested in formal innovation, the best way to evaluate their new music is to just think of it in terms of tunes. Are the riffs good? Do the melodies take some nice turns? Do they use the right textures to suit the track's overall thrust? On Mr. Impossible, the answer to all three of these questions is yes. At nine songs in 46 minutes, Mr. Impossible feels like a collection of instrumentals that has a clear if seriously bent relationship to pop music.
Black Dice's sound is resolutely urban, conjuring images of percussion pulled from junkyards, strange music leaking from a broken speaker in a bodega, the bass-heavy thud of a mobile subwoofer that happens to have an automobile wrapped around it. Regardless of how this music was created and which actual instruments were used, if any, Mr. Impossible feels organic in its own rusted-out way, wholly of this polluted earth. Black Dice get funky here, too, offering up something like a lo-fi, low-technique variation on the rubbery, densely textured grooves of Miles Davis' On the Corner.
Since Black Dice's M.O. has always been at least partly about chemical-laden anxiety, it's easy to forget that they can be pretty funny, and Mr. Impossible in particular is filled with playful silliness. The "lead" voice on "Outer Body Drifter" basically sounds like a couple of fun-loving dudes trying to get a party started, but their voices have been ripped from their throats and packed together into a single gooey, wholly unintelligible ball. The absurdity of these sorta-chants over the stomping, buzzy beats sounds both darkly fucked up and also hilarious. "Pigs" is a static-soaked, very distantly countrified tune with a 4/4 thump and snarling vocal that sounds like Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top with a bloody mouthful of broken teeth. The eight-minute "Carnitas" is the most free-floating thing here, a rush of awkwardly tumbling drum hits, sax blurts, and watery vocals that flows and careens and seems constantly on the move. "The Jacker" is downright jazzy, with a beat that actually swings and a bouncy little distorto-rhythm and a snaking wah-wah'd lead melody. Even with all the unease, there's real joy in this stuff, an infectious sense of discovery as Black Dice find ways to make bizarre music into something tightly structured and fun.
In other places, though, Mr. Impossible is a little more abstract and experimental and also a bit less interesting. "Spy vs. Spy", which has squelchy synths and a vocal loop consisting of a single chipped syllable, is Black Dice by numbers, the kind of thing that seems to come almost too easily to them; listening to it, it's hard not to feel a bit wistful for when they seemed to re-write the rules every time. Still, on the evidence of Mr. Impossible, they still sound like no one else and they're still thinking hard about music and texture. When you're craving something trashy and tripped-out in this very particular way, they still deliver the properly damaged goods.


After more than 20 albums in the past two decades, the idiosyncratic Chicago rock band takes a final bow. As always, their songs are welcome and familiar, yet a surprise every time.

Tim Melina Theo Bobby

Tim Melina Theo Bobby, the last album by Joan of Arc, plays as if Tim Kinsella, Melina Ausikaitis, Theo Katsaounis, and Bobby Burg sat down to compile their greatest hits, remembered they aren’t the kind of band that writes hits, and decided to try out a little bit of everything. There’s an effective literalism to this approach: If you’ve ever liked a Joan of Arc song, then you’ll almost certainly like some of these. And if you didn’t, then track 1 sounds exactly like American Football—talk about an instant crowd pleaser.
This is how a lot of people first come to Joan of Arc, of course: Via the most memed house in Champaign-Urbana, tracing the ways Tim Kinsella and his younger brother Mike’s musical careers have crisscrossed since Cap’n Jazz, the inventive and influential emo band they founded as teenagers. Joan of Arc’s anxious deadpan meandering and virtuoso weirdness can be a more acquired taste, and there’s a lot to acquire—they’ve released 20-some albums in the past 20 years. No two are especially alike, except for the constant presence of Tim Kinsella and a spirit of diffident, digressive unpredictability. And now it’s over.
As an album, Tim Melina Theo Bobby is maybe even less concerned than usual with coherence, which tends to create the atmosphere of a singles collection. If there’s a unifying theme, it’s about time and boundaries, the things that separate concepts like then and now or you and me. Musically, this can sound like a walk through Joan of Arc’s tangly, overgrown garden: the sawtoothed strums of “Karma Repair Kit” (“I got a lot of good to do/To possibly come out even”), the moodier reflecting pool of “Creature and Being,” the wet-noodle synth of “Land Surveyor.” Over the motorik groove of “Cover Letter,” Kinsella reviews his résumé, How to With John Wilson-style, reflecting on the many, many other jobs he’s performed in service to music: “I prepared various coffee drinks/And I waited tables stoned…/Afternoon shift selling businessmen porn in order to keep the shelves stocked with underground and foreign art films/And I wrote songs.” The hustle sounds like a drag; the song doesn’t, which is where the pathos comes in.
But Joan of Arc have always been a band of multiple simultaneous perspectives—never more than now, when Kinsella and Ausikaitis divide lead vocal duties. As a medium for undermining literal meaning, Ausikaitis is unrivaled; her lyrics can be funny, visceral, or morbid but always mysterious and absurd. “Another role where the movie ends, nice/It’s a natural conclusion that people can buy,” she sings at the top of “Feedback 3/4” (sounds just like the name says). I picture her reading film scripts, reaching for galaxy-brained director questions like But what is ending, actually? and So if this is ending, then what is life? Her riddles make for really good songs, like standout “Something Kind,” where a creeping, knotted guitar melody escalates to a noisy window-smasher as Ausikaitis describes a series of increasingly vivid and then sexually graphic scenes that refuse to resolve into secure meanings.
Tim Melina Theo Bobby is hardly the end of these four people making music: There’s Aitis Band, Ausikaitis’ group with Katsaounis and Burg, and Good Fuck, Kinsella’s duo with Jenny Pulse. But after all these years, Joan of Arc means something in itself: welcome and familiar but still a surprise every time, like the pickles of indie-rock comfort foods. We feel a pang when we lose something like that. Does it mean anything? Isn’t it supposed to? What it means, Joan of Arc will remind you—gently, quietly, at the very end of “Creature and Being”—is that it’s up to you: “We create/Retroactively/Our own causes/To rationalize beliefs.” Okay, then: Joan of Arc forever.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On their sixth album, the Los Angeles rockers attempt to reach across the political spectrum, but their noble intentions clash with cloying lyrics and worn-out arrangements.

Passwords

After the 2016 election, a subset of Americans became fixated on finding common ground with their fellow citizens on the opposite end of the political spectrum. On their sixth album, Los Angeles rockers Dawes follow suit: Passwords explores various means of reconciliation, with political adversaries and romantic partners alike. And its intentions are noble. Yet the album’s sentiments are often bogged down by cloying lyrics and worn-out arrangements. At times, the music feels conspicuously out of character for a band that has historically made tactful, if occasionally bland, rock’n’roll.
It’s laudable that Dawes are writing songs that attempt to push the national conversation forward. On “Crack the Case,” the strongest track on Passwords, frontman Taylor Goldsmith delivers a salient, perhaps naive statement of intent: “I wanna sit with my enemies/And say, ‘We should’ve done this sooner,’” before a sweet lap steel transports that bipartisan summit to a pig roast in Middle America. Later, on “Telescope,” he returns to the detail-oriented storytelling that characterized the band’s earlier work: His character Ricky, a conspiracy nut living in a trailer outside Albany, could be the ultimate embodiment of MAGA. The song is an empathetic narrative of disenfranchisement and a reminder that, as Goldsmith puts it in one admittedly on-the-nose lyric, “It’s really hard to hate anyone/When you know what they’ve lived through.”
Yet Goldsmith’s portrait of Ricky, like many of the album’s most focused narratives, gets lost in slogging arrangements; only four out of ten tracks clock in at under five minutes. “My Greatest Invention” aims for the syrupy sweetness of Paul Simon’s “Still Crazy After All These Years” but lacks that song’s forward momentum. Album closer “Time Flies Either Way” talks up the importance of finding love (Goldsmith happens to be engaged to Mandy Moore) when everything else is going to shit but foregrounds a dull, static guitar figure that makes it easy to miss the song’s emotional climax. Occasionally, these lifeless arrangements are resuscitated by flashes of sharp musicianship: The flamenco-tinged guitar on “Stay Down” glimmers with a honeyed sheen. Frenzied, Eddie Palmieri-style piano dances through the end of “Feed the Fire.”
The elephant in the room is the utterly incongruous “Living in the Future,” an inclusion that is all the more confounding for its selection as album opener and lead single. A beefy guitar riff leads to a series of cryptic doomsday pronouncements; the chorus treads alarmingly close to the humorless, testosterone-drenched arena rock made infamous by Creed and Nickelback. It’s a perplexing statement, particularly for these devout students of soft-rock luminaries like Jackson Browne (who have also served as a smart backing band for Conor Oberst and Brandon Flowers). Although it preaches the merits of comprehending what motivates our peers, moments like “Living in the Future” suggest that Dawes have yet to get a handle on their own objectives.


Soundtracked by euphoric bubblegum synth, the PC Music star takes a deep dive into two-dimensionality.

Perfect Picture

In 2013, the Oxford Dictionaries named “selfie” its word of the year. Not coincidentally, that’s also when hyperpop star and digital photographer Hannah Diamond debuted with the London label PC Music. Working alongside producer and label mastermind A. G. Cook, Diamond created high-concept electronic pop, as well as her own hyper-stylized, highly Photoshopped portraits. But a photo—even a bespoke self-portrait in sparkling high definition—can only tell you so much about a person. Perfect Picture, Diamond’s second and final album for the label, which will cease to release new music come January, is an earnest quest to capture her essence as a person and an artist—and a winking commentary on the construction of reality and the path to self-acceptance.
Early in Diamond’s career, her chirpy, processed vocals and hyper-feminine, seemingly plastic persona led some observers to doubt her mere existence. Her 2019 debut, Reflections, didn’t do much to change that Vocaloid-like posture, and its arrival was overshadowed by the fact that most of its songs had already been released. Perfect Picture, produced by David Gamson (Kesha, Charli XCX), has a much warmer palette than its predecessor. What was once a crystalline shell of mourning for insecurities and broken online relationships has matured into a dial-up dream of early-aughts stardom made real in 2023. HD is past sounding high definition: Perfect Picture embraces a blurrier resolution where pitch-shifted vocals glitch in and out of static and punchy, arpeggiated synths leap into massive choruses. Even the relatively downtempo cuts (“Flashback,” “Unbreakable”) carry a fresh buoyancy.
As Diamond steers away from the icy, sad-girl trappings of her earlier work, she morphs into a more upbeat, motivational pop star, something like Hilary Duff’s ’00s teenie-bop classic “What Dreams Are Made Of” by way of Eurodance hitmaker DJ Sammy and mid-tempo Britney deep cuts. If the connection between these oft-maligned pop gems isn’t readily obvious, their influence on Perfect Picture’s digitally mediated yet heartfelt emotional landscape is. “Want You to Know” is tinged with Eurodance, while the modulated backing vocals of Spears’ 2008 song “Unusual You” can be heard all over the record.
Lyrically, Perfect Picture covers a lot of the same ground as Reflections with renewed optimism. Many songs are ostensibly about Diamond’s own experiences—references to pixels, touchscreens, and photo-editing tools abound. Almost all the songs are knowingly self-referential, and the meta humor that’s a PC Music signature serves to highlight the genuine emotion behind them. Diamond is still contemplating her flaws, targeting imposter syndrome in “Poster Girl” and “Lip Sync” and uncertain relationships in cuts like “Impossible” and “Divisible by Two.” Instead of wallowing, she draws newfound strength from the cracks in her self-image. “When I focus on what’s perfect/I never notice the imperfections in moments that make life so worth it,” she admits on “Poster Girl.” Time and again, Diamond reiterates that artifice doesn’t negate sincerity, just as her role in constructing it doesn’t vacate her agency.
With Gamson and her co-writers (including Cook, though his presence is less felt this time around), Diamond cushions gentle self-empowerment earworms in fuzzy synthesizers and decks them in pink ribbons and bows. Notable among the credits, besides several songs written with SOPHIE collaborator Cecile Believe, is the early standout “Want You to Know,” an old Kesha demo that Diamond has airbrushed in her own image. On the surface, she’s asking a potential partner to see her for who she truly is, but the message is aimed inward too, one of the record’s many mantras of self-worth.
Perfect Picture hits its sweet spot with the mid-album trio of “Flashback,” “No FX,” and “Lip Sync.” “Flashback” tenderly reflects on a bygone relationship, lowering the emotional temperature a notch, before the sugary love song “No FX” picks it back up again to become the album’s shimmering centerpiece. “I’ve never been so at ease/With you, I feel like myself completely,” Diamond sings. Vocoders puncture her words but leave the “completely” crystal clear, just in case you thought she was still consumed by self-doubt. On “Lip Sync,” Diamond wonders if one day she’ll “be the real thing.” It’s a funny question to ask—one that echoes some of her earliest critics. But that doesn’t seem to bother her: For Diamond, the image of the girl lip syncing in the mirror is just another reflection of the pop star’s existential duality.