Two veteran electronic producers balance their club instincts with headier inclinations, fusing breakbeats, dub delay, and squalling electronic frequencies into side-winding psychedelic excursions.

Antiposition

Wrecked Lightship make music that evokes great civilizations collapsing—crumbling structures and ruined grandeur, marble columns disappearing beneath sea-foam. Its imaginative scope is slightly distant from the music that the duo’s members made their names with. Laurie Osborne, best known as Appleblim, came up as a DJ at the foundational London dubstep nights FWD>> and DMZ and helmed the Skull Disco label alongside Shackleton; over the past decade and a half, he has flitted between house, techno, bass music, and hairsplitting hybrids of them all, typically with at least one eye on the dancefloor. Adam Winchester also has a background in dubstep, under the alias Wedge, though his more recent experimental music—in the duo Dot Product and under his own name—offers a hint of where Wrecked Lightship’s world-building tendencies might come from. Winchester’s industrial soundscaping suggests mainframes on the fritz and nuclear cores in meltdown, dystopian sci-fi fantasies playing out on a galactic scale.
Antiposition is the duo’s third album in as many years. Where 2022’s Drowned Aquariums and 2023’s Oceans and Seas often veered into pure abstraction, Antiposition puts the percussion first. The improvisatory drift of the previous records has given way to a newfound focus; the bass and drums sound like they’ve been designed to stand up to the gale-force winds of the duo’s dubwise effects. The record’s intensity is surprising in part because of its context: The label releasing it, Peak Oil, is better known for the wispier, more amorphous sounds of artists like Purelink and Topdown Dialectic. Compared to their grainy fantasias, Antiposition is a tornado trailing debris in its wake.
Across the album, the duo maintains a careful balance between club inclinations and more psychedelic effects. In the opener “Hex,” syncopated kicks and massive Reese bass call back to canonical tropes from the hardcore continuum, while flickering bleeps and bursts of white noise fill out the atmosphere. It’s both powerful and enveloping, a full-body blow that feels like an embrace. So is “Bizarre Servants,” whose thrumming drums—faintly reminiscent of Aphex Twin’s classic Bradley’s Robot EP—suggest taiko drummers in a wind tunnel. The pulse is tough and driving, but a gleaming, tape-warped synth melody adds an optimistic note to the mood of grim determination.
“Sunken Skies” is the album’s heaviest track, growing from a quick-stepping dub rhythm into crisp breakbeats whose stuttering repetitions call back to the cut-up techniques of jungle’s pioneers. The bass threatens to crater the foundations, yet the high end is a dreamy wash of reverberant harp—an inspired contrast that sets the track apart from its predecessors in the breakbeat canon. Elsewhere, the two musicians mark their distance from club convention in subtler ways, like their preference for tension-building arrangements that withhold the Pavlovian pleasure of a climactic drop.
Wrecked Lightship abandon drums entirely on the closing “Sounding Bodies,” a beatless reverie of clanging bells and shape-shifting electronic tones with a meditative and intermittently wistful air. In an Instagram post, Osborne wrote that the track features a light-reactive synthesizer called the Brain designed by a friend of theirs. That friend, named Bobby, is no longer alive; Osborne marveled about the process of transubstantiation—a chain of neurological and electrical signals across space and time—that allowed a late friend’s creation to continue manifesting, even now, in the sounds that stream from the speakers every time the song is played. It’s an observation that goes to the mystical heart of Wrecked Lightship’s ethos, which holds that whole worlds can spring from nothing more than vibrating air.


Another unfabulous collection of classic 70s rock riffs, recorded by today's most irrelevant artists!

718

For Ghostface and his Theodore Unit, 718-- a collection of outtakes from this year's The Pretty Toney Album-- is all about freedom: The freedom to host as many guest MCs as possible, to experiment with samples that could have seemed too outlandish on Pretty Toney, to be brash and angry and emotionally honest, and to call out "faggot niggas" at every turn. That The Pretty Toney Album has criminally underperformed seems to defeat the commercial mandate for an outtakes collection, but the bevy of surplus material is surprisingly consistent; Ghostface's first entry under the Theodore Unit moniker serves as a nice, if unnecessary, accessory to its criminally unsuccessful counterpart.
718 compiles recent mixtape tracks that didn't make the cut for Pretty Toney and a handful of previously unreleased odds and ends. But the continuity, strength of production, and sharpness of the record's guest lineup suggests a good deal of forethought. A track like "Guerilla Hood", for instance, which would have sat favorably in the Pretty Toney tracklist, was probably reserved with a side project in mind.
"Punch In Punch Out" is a fairly straightforward battle-rhyme-cum-testament to black market business operations. Pejoratives like Trife's: "You's a has-been/ Always will, always have been/ That garbage you pumpin'/ You need to save it for the trash bin," roam over a brooding beat underpinned by a single sustained synth note. "88 Freestyle" features some nimble verses but the song is sullied by a particularly garish sample: A wailing, vaguely Middle Eastern guitar bend that feels awkwardly wedged in.
Lest we forget this isn't a Ghostface solo effort, "The Drummer" brings a cast to make Ocean's Eleven soil its pants. On previous outings, such generosity has been an invitation to unwelcome distractions, but here the MCs' interplay is arch, transitioning quickly from voice to voice over a breathy, crackling beat. Even Method Man drops in for a droopy verse.
Despite this being a decidedly populist affair, the tawdry, blaxploitation production and the tic-addled vehemence of Ghostface's verses are intact. But beyond its reliably scruffy sound, the sampling on 718 is-- with a few catchy, well-placed exceptions-- chintzy. "Mama Can You Hear Me" thrives off the nervous trills of an overwrought orch-pop ballad, while "Smith Brothers" uses a stinging string line and cops Queen in its bawdy chorus: A serpentine verse fit to a familiar cadence before the telltale, "Tell 'em, 'We will, we will rock you...pop you.'" Such witticisms pervade the album but, on the whole, 718 is more introspective than previous Ghostface releases. Whereas in the past Ghostface has been preoccupied with gregarious, almost parodically violent lyrics, 718's "Mama Can You Hear Me" and "Who Are We" show a touching vulnerability. On the former, Solomon Childs levels charged laments ("This the projects/ Summertime ain't comin'") in a huge baritone swollen with echo.
Of course, amid this panoply of competent lyricists, Ghostface still shines. But his closest competitor remains Trife, whose verses, delivered in a thick, cocky cadence that sounds naturally double tracked, are among 718's finest. It's hard to imagine why Trife doesn't yet have a solo album to his credit, but his spots on Supreme Clientele, Pretty Toney, and now 718 have given him a fantastic endorsement.
Though undoubtedly strong, 718 is a pale stand-in for a proper Ghostface full-length. That's because it's a different record, more varied, more scattershot. Even so, Ghostface chose the right men to surround himself with. Commercially feasible or not, 718 features enough stylish production and idiosyncratic rapping to service Ghostface's reputation while providing the Theodore Unit stable with a cornerstone for its own.


Following a standout contribution to Berlin label PAN’s Mono No Aware compilation, the Stockholm producer delivers an impressive debut album that’s both gloomy and delightful.

Rogue Intruder, Soul Enhancer

Rogue Introducer, Soul Enhancer is an almost uncomfortably gorgeous piece of work. “Clumsy,” the second single from the Stockholm producer Oli XL’s striking debut LP, is a good distillation of the record’s most memorable qualities. Working with a sound palette that recalls humorless glitch recordings, it offers a demented version of bliss that a listener could live with for a very long time. The melancholy yet weirdly fun track is built around a pair of freeze-dried chords and features a pitched-up rendition of the iconic chorus from Beck’s 1993 single “Loser.” Where the original hook sounds like Sappho on whippets, Oli XL makes the words mean something else. Now they’re not just about a guy in a disorienting historical moment, but about everything, somehow. “Soy un perdedor. I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me?” Next to Oli XL’s angelic sound design, this comically profane request starts to feel sacred.
Rogue Intruder, Soul Enhancer recalls aughts electronica, jungle, and Basement Jaxx, but Oli XL’s approach is thrillingly his own. It follows the producer’s standout contributions to PAN and Posh Isolation compilations, arriving on his own Bloom imprint, a subsidiary of Stockholm's YEAR0001. The record is both gloomy and joyful, and its pop-adjacent tracks are produced with severe attention to detail. “Liquid Love” sounds like a cosmic turntablism exercise, and you get the sense that it might help astronauts in a lonely space station unwind after a long day of arguing with the computer. The heavy drum patterns on “Orchid Itch” make it one of the more DJ-friendly tunes on the album, while the EQ and compression settings are warped to create a sense of disorienting atmospheric pressure. The specter of dub hangs heavy over the LP as a whole: Sonic space is stretched out, pulverized, and uncannily flattened. Even in its most depressive moments, the album is playful.
The album would (probably?) sound fine as background music in an H&M, and it would sound great in a playlist alongside heady compositions by Iannis Xenakis and Kara-Lis Coverdale. Rogue Introducer, Soul Enhancer is heavy on breakbeats, and while many club producers have explored that rhythmic world in the last few years, Oli XL is in his own orbit. “I think about music in a pretty ‘theoretical’ way, but it’s my own completely made up rules I try to follow, often with silly analogies,” he said in a recent interview. “Like judging the rhythmic vibe—it’s some dude walking a wire between two skyscrapers… No one wants to see someone just walk flawlessly back and forth, dude needs to look like he just might fall!” The producer suggests that we might think about his music as sleight of hand: a kind of cunning performance.
While there isn’t any linear narrative tying Rogue Introducer, Soul Enhancer together, it tells a compelling story on its own terms. There are recurring themes of failure and self-doubt in track titles such as “Hesitation,” “Imposter,” and “Clumsy,” while “dnL” features a funny robotic voice doing some abstract chastising: “Boring… lame!” The album’s less-than-optimistic subject matter has a certain tragicomic effect alongside its borderline effervescent sound. A number of songs feature lyrics, but they’re often hard to parse, which itself feels like a form of self-obfuscation. The final track, called “Sniper Baby”—a very surreal and funny title—does feature some legible verses over its introspective beat. “I don’t go outside/I’m losing my friends/How you gonna fill the void and make it end.” After about a minute his voice coos a little, then trails off as the take comes to a close, breaking the recording’s fourth wall. Just before the song ends, there’s a sound that could either be a muffled sob or a microphone being moved—it’s genuinely hard to tell.


On their Relapse debut, the infernal Full of Hell crack apart metal genres like oracle bones.

Weeping Choir

Full of Hell can be hard to parse, even for those well-versed in grindcore or for connoisseurs of harsh noise. The East Coast outfit—with its members split between Maryland and Pennsylvania—have made their name by cracking apart genre conventions like oracle bones. Grindcore, hardcore, and death metal meet within their music to produce something feral and unknowable, doubly so when they team up with other like-minded oddballs like The Body or Merzbow. There’s just something about them, a reason that they’ve been met with such acclaim and fervent fandom. The nihilistic vibe helps—when Samuel DiGristine gurgles, “All goes onward and outward/All collapses” on “Silmaril,” it’s hard not to shudder.
Recorded by the legendary Kurt Ballou at God City, the band’s third album (and Relapse Records debut) is intended as a companion piece to the band’s innovative 2017 LP, Trumpeting Ecstasy, but even a passing listen shows that the band’s interests have shifted a bit. The band’s affinity for the most bestial side of grind is on full display, and on Weeping Choir, only death is real.
“Burning Myrrh” blasts the record wide open with two minutes of pummeling grind, dual vocalists Dylan Walker and Samuel DiGristine frantically trading off registers like they’re pulling a double shift in hell’s biggest department store. “Haunted Arches” abruptly ends with a few seconds of warped, ghostly audio reminiscent of The Caretaker’s bastardized 1930s parlor recordings, before “Thundering Hammers”—an apt title if there ever was one—comes crashing down, its destructive grooves redolent of classic Morbid Angel.
They veer between the swampy, old-school stomp of death metal and cerebral, choppy swaths of experimental brutality, keeping the tone and pace unpredictable. “Downward” veers away from the bludgeoning pace of the album’s first half into more complex territory, while “Silmaril” is distinguished by its inhuman howls and gleefully ignorant goregrind stomp. The track that separates the two, “Armory of Obsidian Glass,” is an album highlight—a measured dollop of thoroughly haunted death/doom that stretches to nearly seven minutes, periodically collapsing into puddles of sometimes-wretched, often-lovely ambient noise and featuring guest vocals from Lingua Ignota’s Kristin Hayter. The profane marriage of old and new, big ugly riffs and shrieking noise, beauty and brutality seems like the clearest marker indicating where Full of Hell may intend to head next.


The third LP from Altar of Plagues is a dense, demanding record where black metal slams against industrial throb, and noise sheets work alongside diaphanous electronics. It suggests the heyday of Touch and Go, Nine Inch Nails in their prime, or Swans at their vitrolic apex.

Altar of Plagues: Teethed Glory and Injury

Teethed Glory and Injury

Two years ago, Altar of Plagues frontman James Kelly talked about his band’s enormous black metal landscapes as though his Irish trio played free jazz: The group, he said, would lay dormant for extended periods and then work obsessively in an isolated, caffeine-fueled state for two-week bursts, using that sporadic schedule to create music that capitalized more on feeling than technicality. “With us, it’s almost let it write itself. That allows us to engage with it more, too, because it’s so repetitive,” Kelly said, explaining the oblong and unordinary structures of the four massive songs on Mammal, the band’s second LP. “We just let it grow.” Kelly also called Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew the most inspirational music he’d ever heard, compared Arvo Pärt to Emperor, mentioned his excellent muted dance productions under the name Wife, and called jazz “fire from the soul.”
Kelly’s references and enthusiasms did not adhere at all to any metal-dude stereotypes, and to an extent, that’s long been the fount of intrigue at the center of Altar of Plague’s music. Their post-metal, if one must call it that, took unexpected turns, with moments of ruthless industrial slink or minimal improvisations that turned suddenly to mournful throat signing embedded within more standard forms of aggression. They could roar, too, working themselves into sustained roils that gave any accusations of hipster or dilettante metal a direct and devastating gut punch.
Teethed Glory and Injury, the third LP from Altar of Plagues, is again intended to do exactly that but in a much different way than before. “I just found that the type of black metal we were being associated with was not exciting to me anymore,” Kelly told Terrorizer in an in-studio interview earlier this year. “What a few years ago was a very exciting and promising template for a genre … has also just been watered down.” Both Mammal and 2009’s White Tomb comprised just four tracks each, with the shortest pushing past the eight-minute mark. But Altar of Plagues pushes the action back toward the center of the song on Teethed Glory, a nine-piece set that favors a more immediate four-to-five minute range. This is a dense and demanding record, where fragments of black metal slam into shards of industrial throb, where sheets of noise work alongside diaphanous electronics. Moments suggest the heyday of Touch and Go Records and, alternately, Nine Inch Nails in Trent Reznor’s commanding prime or Swans at their vitriolic apex. Several electronic impasses are as dense as those of Altar of Plague cohorts the Haxan Cloak, while others could pass as tinted Boards of Canada fragments.
If that matrix of touchstones sounds intriguing, it often is; indeed, with Teethed Glory and Injury, Kelly’s reputation as an avid and eclectic listener feels fully represented by the music his band makes. However, the other alluring aspect of Altar of Plague’s music-- the jazz-like ease with which it was made and, consequently, unfolded-- has almost altogether disappeared. Every moment of Teethed Glory feels like a deliberate plot point, built to fly squarely in the face of any expectations for this brand of aggrandized heaviness. The omission of that free-and-easy mentality isn’t a problem because of the songs’ relative brevity; rather, the pieces within Teethed Glory often feel forced together, coerced into collisions that don’t meld the components so much as stack them side by side.
Altar of Plagues overthinks and overstuffs here, creating a gauntlet that defaces its own delight. “Burnt Year”, for instance, opens with an almost phosphorescent surge of distorted guitar and bass thrum, funneling into a belligerent, howl-along march that suggests the work of Ministry. By song’s end, Altar of Plagues has ripped through an atavistic black metal sprint, dipped into dreamy moments of rest and ultimately arrived at an instrumental surge that suggests the rocky peaks of Pelican. On “A Body Shrouded”, Altar of Plagues' seesaw between post-punk simmer and doom-like pounce adulterates both aspects. Individually, they’re interesting, but taken together, they simply feel claustrophobic. It’s a problem that hounds most of Teethed Glory, a string of compelling parts that does not compel as a whole
The album’s most successful songs are also its most fully synthesized: “Twelve was Ruin”, for instance, pairs Kelly’s blossoming electronic touch to Altar of Plagues' previous sense of sprawl and current sense of attack. It builds through icy keyboards and scythe-shaped guitars, culminating in a coda that’s urgent and intricate, two qualities that often combat one another throughout Teethed Glory. And the record’s first single, “God Alone”, is written so well that its most brutal stretches dovetail perfectly with its more delicate moments. It all cascades into a chorus that sounds as soft as Alcest but as savage as Immortal.
Though Teethed Glory and Injury doesn’t deliver the systemic and singular rupture Kelly and his band might have intended, it should not diminish the excitement for Altar of Plagues’ revolutionary compulsion. If anything, the trio have proven here that they’re driven only by the need to subvert and shock, to weld rather traditional ideas into strange new hybrids. The possibilities that Teethed Glory and Injury present are more interesting than the album itself--and, really, more interesting than the possibilities presented by any Altar of Plagues music to date. Maybe next time, they’ll write themselves into reality.


The techno artist discovers a softer, warmer side in an album named for his childhood home.

Oderbruch

Outside of Germany, most people likely haven’t heard of the Oderbruch. Situated along the Polish border, this former marshland was first drained during the 18th century by Prussian king Frederick the Great. A century later, the region played host to months of intense fighting at the end of World War II, including one of the Nazi regime’s final stands at the Battle of the Seelow Heights, the war’s biggest conflict on German soil.
That same soil is where René Pawlowitz, best known as Shed, was born and raised. His family has been based in the Oderbruch for generations, and Pawlowitz himself continues to split his time between Berlin and this largely rural area in which he grew up. Clearly, he feels a connection with the region, so much so that he’s dedicated his latest full-length to it.
Oderbruch is the fifth Shed album, and easily his most colorful. While Pawlowitz’s music has always been heavily rooted in the past—particularly the ’90s house, techno, and rave that soundtracked his teen years—he’s expanded his repertoire here, taking inspiration from nature while venturing into bucolic ambient and dewy-eyed synth swells. It’s an unexpected move from a producer best known for driving techno and cracking breakbeats—not to mention one who’s also always seemed like a relatively serious (if slightly grumpy) figure—but on Oderbruch, Pawowitz sounds downright refreshed.
With its fuzzy field recordings and joyous, marimba-like melody—a sound one usually wouldn’t expect to hear in a Shed track—the sprawling “Nacht, Fluss, Grille, Auto, Frosch, Eule, Mücke” (translation: “Night, River, Cricket, Car, Frog, Owl, Mosquito”) feels like a lazy walk alongside a babbling brook. Another beatless cut, the pensive “Der Wolf Kehrt Zurück” (“The Wolf Returns”), is a bit darker, but there’s genuine emotion living inside the song’s creeping synths and lingering patches of static.
Even when percussion is brought into the mix, Oderbruch still feels like something new for Pawlowitz. “Das Bruch” pairs a stuttering hip-hop beat with dreamy melodic pads, recalling the blissfully blunted sounds of beat scene stalwarts like Teebs and Nosaj Thing. With its plush—and slightly weepy—strings stretching across its hyperactive frame, “Trauernde Weiden" might be the album’s most epic moment.
In fairness,Pawlowitz’s work as Shed has always varied, and over the past decade-plus, he’s employed upwards of 20 different aliases while exploring different strains of electronic music. However, in the past few years his music has sometimes felt less innovative, mostly because his once-signature style has been so widely imitated. A decade ago, when techno producers everywhere were scrambling to recreate the stereotypical Berghain aesthetic of artists like Ben Klock and Marcel Dettmann, Pawlowitz was something of an outlier. These days, however, electronic music is rife with clever nods to the ’90s, not to mention the slamming, UK hardcore-style breabeats that have populated much of Pawlowitz's work. Perhaps that’s why his last album, 2017’s The Final Experiment, was greeted somewhat unenthusiastically; for many, it was just another Shed record amongst a vast sea of soundalikes.
Oderbruch is not just another Shed record. The LP displays a warmer, softer side of Pawlowitz, and while the album is not without its bangers—opener “B1 (Anfang und Ende)” is a dynamic piece of chirping bleep techno, and “Seelower Höhen” is built atop a kick with all the subtlety of a battering ram—even those tracks rely upon lush pads and vivid melodies. “Sterbende Alleen” (“Dying Avenues”) ramps up the melodrama even further while bathing its jungle rhythm in a thick glaze of opulent synths. Although Pawlowitz isn’t known for tugging on heartstrings, he sounds comfortable during Oderbruch’s more cinematic moments.
Pawlowitz called his first album Shedding the Past. All these years later, the title still feels a bit ironic, especially coming from an artist whose work, even then, was so thoroughly tied up in his influences. Yet Pawlowitz’s music has never truly been a mere nostalgia exercise. In his mind, history—particularly his own—is just fodder to create something new. It’s undeniably a difficult tightrope to walk, and Pawlowitz had arguably begun to wobble as of late, but Oderbruch seems to indicate that he’s confidently regained his balance. Apparently, all it took was a trip home.


Former Vivian Girls and the Babies member Cassie Ramone has marked her transition to Burger Records by taking on the modern Christmas classics. Christmas in Reno is uncomfortable to listen to—the tracks that you so often associate with being jolly are torn up into pieces and burned at the core.

Christmas in Reno

"Alternative" (in the loosest sense of the word) Christmas covers are usually brimming with positive holiday cheer, even if they have a slight humorous bent à la Yo La Tengo's "Toymageddon" or Ben Folds' "Bizarre Christmas Incident". Cassie Ramone's collection of covers, however, forgoes the usual Christmassy spectacle; the songs on here are dark and harrowing in their interpretation. As gusts of wind introduce both the record and Ramone's drawling take on "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)", she immediately projects loneliness and isolation. As she sings "The snow's comin' down/ I'm watchin' it fall," Ramone counteracts Darlene Love's powerful hopefulness in the original song with sheer hopelessness.
While she had some assistance from Ariel Pink on bass and Jay Heiselmann in mastering on her first solo effort, The Time Has Come, this time Ramone, formerly of Vivian Girls and the Babies, is truly on her own*. Christmas in Reno* was recorded and mixed mostly by Ramone herself, rendering these covers with a vulnerable and intimate touch. Nothing is tight and structured per se, but everything is meticulously executed in order to reach its intended effect: portraying a despondence and loss of interest in life. Reverb guides Ramone's disturbed voice on her version of Paul McCartney's "Wonderful Christmastime", letting her pain linger. The track fades out with a wobbly wah-wah, leading into a haunting and fuzzy rendition of "Blue Christmas". "I'll Be Home for Christmas" is tragically slurred and toward the end Ramone's recital of Bing Crosby's popular lyrics becomes indecipherable.
"Run Run Rudolph" is probably the most upbeat thing here—it sounds like a rough DIY track, which Ramone accentuates with guileless yelping. But even "Sleigh Ride", possibly the chirpiest and most festive Christmas ditty of all time, feels haunted. Ramone zooms in on the "you" in the line "It's lovely weather for a sleigh ride together with you," letting it linger with ache; she wants whoever "you" is to know how much they hurt her. Her memories of Christmases together with a former lover are too painful, but she tortures herself over and over, ending the song with a repeating "you."
Christmas in Reno is uncomfortable to listen to—the tracks that you so often associate with being jolly are torn up into pieces and burned at the core. However, that's exactly Ramone's intention—to find the melancholy in a "joyful time of year." Bad things can happen to you no matter the time of year. She affirms this using Nat King Cole's "The Christmas Song", halfheartedly ending the record with a bleak "Merry Christmas to you."


On her Dave Cobb-produced latest, country singer/songwriter Lori McKenna shows her remarkable facility for conveying the inner lives of women trapped in soured relationships.

The Bird & the Rifle

Lori McKenna has released ten albums in nearly twenty years, amassing a formidable catalog that marries forlorn country-folk melodies with vivid-story song lyrics about desperate women and dying towns. But her solo work has been lately overshadowed by the hits she has either written or co-written for other artists, including Faith Hill, Alison Krauss, and Mandy Moore. Last year she stirred up controversy when Little Big Town recorded a composition she co-wrote with Hillary Lindsey and Liz Rose. Radio programmers and some listeners objected to “Girl Crush” and its intimations of gay desire, specifically to the physicality of her lyrics (“I want to taste her lips, because they taste like you”). Despite the hubbub, it won a Grammy for Country Song of the Year. This past spring Tim McGraw took McKenna’s “Humble & Kind” to the top of the country singles chart—the first time in four years that a song with only one writer reached that spot.
The songs on her latest album don’t veer too far from anything she has done before, but The Bird & the Rifle may do for McKenna, career-wise, what Traveller did for veteran songwriter Chris Stapleton last year. McKenna has a remarkable facility for conveying the inner lives of women trapped in soured relationships; that may not be an easy sell for the conservative playlists of country radio, but it makes for one of the most accomplished and devastating singer-songwriter albums of the year. McKenna even worked with producer Dave Cobb, who helmed Traveller. As he’s done with so many artists from Jason Isbell to Sturgill Simpson to literally anybody on his recent Southern Family compilation, he gives the music a lived-in quality, emphasizing an amiable acoustic strum, a relaxed backing band, and the ragged texture of McKenna’s voice.
The drama in her songs has the easy feel of the everyday; nothing much happens beyond her characters pondering where things might have gone wrong. “Wreck You” opens with a disarming couplet: “I get dressed in the dark each day/You used to think that was so sweet.” The language is simple and direct, but that phrase “used to” hangs in the air, suggesting several years of quiet sacrifices and well-worn routines that have frayed the edges of this relationship. The narrator dreams of disentangling herself from this late sleeper, and the Mellotron strings on the coda—a Cobb signature—soundtrack a daydream that may never come true.
Even with its references to teenagers blasting Nirvana while racing down suburban backroads, “We Were Cool” isn’t about generational nostalgia but something more personal, and the last verse throws a twist into the story, with McKenna going full Springsteen: “Duran Duran on the radio, those wild boys would never know we had a baby on the way the year our friends started school.” It’s an understated reveal, but something about the melody makes the sentiment sound bittersweet instead of just plain bitter. McKenna knows that the power of a barbed lyric or a rich character relies on a bold melody and a patient vocal, and more than anything else her vocals put these songs across and makes these stories relatable. On “Always Want You,” the break in her voice implies intense yearning even as the lyrics hedge their bets. The most important words in the chorus are the first two: “I think I’ll always want you.”
McKenna doesn’t cover “Girl Crush,” but she does include her own version of “Humble & Kind.” It sounds like it ought to be a Hallmark card of a song, with a parent passing life lessons along to her children, but what could easily have been platitudes turn out to be bits of hard-won wisdom. “Know the difference between sleeping with someone and sleeping with someone you love,” McKenna cautions, “‘I love you’ ain’t no pick-up lines.” When she gets around to that chorus, to that loving reminder to rise above your basest fears and to “always stay humble and kind,” it’s a startlingly powerful moment, especially at a time when such virtues of humility and compassion seem to be in such tragically short supply.


Animated by a sense of endless potential and patchwork charm, a new box set collects the influential British songwriter’s work during a transitional period.

Bridget St. John: From There / To Here: UK/US Recordings 1974-1982

Sparrowpit is the fanciful name of a small village in Derbyshire, a small cluster of old buildings located at a bend in the road almost halfway between Sheffield and Manchester. In 1973, the folk singer Bridget St. John settled there and wrote songs for what would become her fourth album, Jumblequeen, the centerpiece of a new box set, From There / To Here: UK / US Recordings 1974-1982. Judging by those songs—which chronicle divorce, grief, confusion, loneliness, and a very gradual recovery of self—she lived there during a period of extreme upheaval. “Her gentle man has left her after just four years of life, it became impossible to call her ‘wife,’” she sings on the song she named for that place. “Now she has no place she can call her home, has to start all over this time on her own.” “Sparrowpit” is a torrent of jigsaw syllables delivered against a runaway melody and a folk-funk arrangement. The music suggests a life moving too fast, and St. John sounds like she’d love just a moment of calm: “If you’d like to help her better, got to take her under your wing.” She might as well be singing that directly to the good people of Sparrowpit, asking for all the peace and quiet such a quaint village promises.
Jumblequeen is an album about emotional wounds, about feelings too extreme to corral or even identify. So why does St. John sound like she’s having so much fun singing these songs? “Sparrowpit” is almost jubilant, like a game she’s playing with the listener, especially when she dives into her lower register. Even on the saddest songs, though, she savors certain details, certain turns of phrase. She dispenses wisdom casually, especially on the devastating “I Don’t Know If I Can Take It.” Even at such emotional extremes, these songs make space for hope and possibility, as though St. John knows she’ll leave Sparrowpit stronger and more clear-headed than ever. “I want to be where someone loves me best of all,” she declares on “Want to Be With You,” and she makes it sound like the most perfectly natural desire of all, and a perfectly achievable one, too. Jumblequeen is, as its title implies, a piece-by-piece self-portrait by an artist who’s not quite sure how the final puzzle picture will look—but she relishes the process just the same.
Along with the dusky timbre of her voice and the bounding eccentricity of her phrasing, this is a crucial part of St. John’s appeal as a singer and songwriter: It’s not that she makes sad sentiments sound happy, but that she finds a kernel of creative joy in confronting such hardships. She seems to love turning pain into something useful, or beautiful, or fun. In other words, she doesn’t write simply to express herself. She makes music to move through the world. From There / To Here, which collects Jumblequeen along with several discs of rare and unreleased tracks, traces St. John’s movements in the late 1970s and early 1980s, recounting her story of moving halfway around the globe to find a community of like-minded souls, trying but failing to keep record labels interested, working with various producers and collaborators, and gradually settling into a more grounded life as a mother.
St. John was supposed to be a star. In 1968 John Peel started playing her music on BBC radio, in particular her single “To B Without a Hitch,” and he even started a new label—Dandelion Records—just to put her songs out into the world. Her ’69 debut, Ask Me No Questions, featured just her voice and her crisp guitar picking, and her second album, 1971’s Songs for the Gentle Man, added softly psychedelic flourishes of strings, horns, and flute. Like John Martyn and Kevin Ayers, St. John pushed against the strictures of British folk-rock, incorporating American country and R&B elements into her music, which made the press take notice even when the public did not. Dandelion had rocky promotion and rockier distribution, and the label folded mere months after releasing St. John’s third album, 1972’s Thank You For…, essentially marooning her and her potential hit single, “Nice.” Those albums were compiled on the excellent, if dully titled, 2015 comp Dandelion Albums and BBC Collection, which serves as preamble to From There / To Here.
If Sparrowpit is the “There” in that title, then the “Here” is New York City. After Jumblequeen performed no better than her previous albums, St. John was dropped by yet another label and moved across the Atlantic. She found a musical home in Greenwich Village, then more than a decade past its folk-revival heyday but still a bustling neighborhood for musicians, and she booked sessions with new collaborators and even recorded an album’s worth of material with Stuff, a popular crew of session players. It would take 20 years before those songs got a proper release on the 1995 comp Take the 5ifth, which is the second disc in this set. It shows an artist casting in all directions for inspiration, as though a new country presents a new set of possibilities. “Moody,” her first demo recorded in America, opens with a springy bossa nova riff, then blossoms into a lush arrangement with a chorus of saxophones and an electric guitar solo. But St. John wrings as much sound from the two syllables in that title, which only makes the key change at the end sound all the more ecstatic.
Occasionally Take the 5ifth and the unreleased demos on the set’s third disc sound a little too slick and professional, which distracts from her vocals and robs the music of its intimacy. The Stuff recordings in particular are moored in the marina of yacht rock, a curious development for St. John, but it brings out something in her voice and pushes her in new directions. She adopts an accusatory tone on “Chamille,” her voice like barbed wire in such a silky arrangement, and by rounding out her vowels and drawing out her consonants, she tries to stop time on “Song for John,” a eulogy for the Beatle, written and recorded in the wake of his death in 1980. What could easily have been a maudlin ballad quoting “Working Class Hero” and “All You Need Is Love” instead becomes a weirdly affecting eulogy not for the man but for what so many saw in him, all the possibilities he perhaps reluctantly represented. “This is more than a light put out,” she insists. “This was more than fire dying.”
That sense of endless potential is what makes this music so lively and rambunctious nearly half a century later, and it’s perhaps why a new generation of folk artists—including Ryley Walker, William Tyler, and Steve Gunn—has found inspiration in her work. She thrives on all these different sounds and styles: an artist in love with all the possibilities of music, the infinite ways she might sing a single syllable and all the subtle gradations of emotion a melody might convey. That makes From There / To Here a patchwork set, but St. John has always been the queen of jumble.


Loosely keyed to a story of Hollywood hedonism in the ’70s, the second album from William Basinski’s dance-pop project taps into the teeth-grinding edginess that follows a euphoric high.

Foxy

William Basinski shares a few traits with the late director William Friedkin. The two artists—who both have answered to the nickname “Billy”—have created prolific bodies of work while moving gracefully between disparate genres. Like Friedkin, Basinski has become bolder while growing older, letting his hair down on playful releases that contrast with the somber drones he is known for. In 2020, right around the time that he moved from NYC to the palm-lined streets of Los Angeles, the revered ambient composer upset listeners’ expectations with a new dance-pop project, Sparkle Division. Collaborating with electronic artist Preston Wendel—who records solo as Shania Taint—Basinski pulled out his saxophone and his sense of humor on To Feel Embraced, an album of fizzy filter-disco concoctions.
Three years later, the group—now augmented by new member Gary Thomas Wright—returns with Foxy, ushering in the teeth-grinding edginess that inevitably follows a euphoric high. The album’s deconstructed disco maintains many of the elements of Sparkle Division’s debut—schmaltzy exotica strings, moody piano chords, noir-jazz standup bass—but a specter of evil now lurks in the shadows. On To Feel Embraced, choppy samples and looping vocal snippets made the duo’s soft-focus songs sound more like Eccojams than Jam City, but uch of their harder-edged sophomore effort is propelled by hectic breakbeats, while Basinski’s sax blurts continually, providing the only constant in a panoply of genre explorations. Beatless fantasia “The Punch!” offers the closest link to his drone works, sinking into a morass of bell-like tones that reverberate across nearly nine minutes.
As the carefree hedonism of the 1960s’ free-love bubble was burst by the Manson Family murders at decade’s end, parties in the Hollywood Hills took on a nightmarish quality. Foxy is guided by a loose narrative set in that historical moment that gives the eight songs their titles and structure. A note on the album’s Bandcamp page spells out the album’s characters and trajectory: “gorgeous young interns,” a drug dealer named Foxy, drinks spiked with LSD25. “Have Some Punch” and its reprise “We Were There” bookend the album’s path from rising tension to bad acid trip, but there’s still plenty of fun to be had along the way.
The stomping drums and late-’80s production touches of Foxy’s title track initially bring the attitude of “What Have You Done for Me Lately” until silky synths glide into the chillout room. After the album’s vaporous centerpiece, “The Punch!,” drum’n’bass rhythms teased out in previous tracks are shoved to the front of “Oh Yeah!” If it wasn’t for Max Kaplan’s tenor sax, this airy banger could be mistaken for the soundtrack of an N64 snowboarding game. By the time they reach the liquid beats of “Slip and Slide,” the two musicians are riding the faders in a way that suggests a Boiler Room Session loosened up by a tray of bellinis; the chipper “We Were There” wraps it all up in a deranged, dissonant bow. Like the taut three-act structure of a Friedkin film with an ambiguous ending, Foxy stays compelling until the finish.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story omitted the name of Sparkle Division’s third member, Gary Thomas Wright.


A quick, tangentially related diss from our sponsors: In what twisted mockery of a universe does a label like V2 ...

Lost Time

A quick, tangentially related diss from our sponsors: In what twisted mockery of a universe does a label like V2 give Moby the green light to crap out opportunistic schlock like 18, while simultaneously cutting loose a band as talented and unique as 12 Rods? I mean, okay, the Rods' last product for V2, the ass-Rundgren'd Separation Anxieties, was a complete disaster from any angle, failing to satisfy the band's devoted fanbase and completely tanking on a commercial level. But isn't there something to be said for sticking behind bands with artistic merit, bands with the potential for greatness?
Sad, but true: In the end, the age-old struggle of quantity versus quality (or lack thereof) is the simplest explanation for this seeming judgmental error, and 12 Rods had to take the fall. Fortunately, the karmic scales are being righted even now. Though this band no longer has the resources and backing necessary to move the kind of volume an operation like V2 could provide, Lost Time is rich in quality, and if self-releasing the record is what it takes to get the boys back on track, so be it.
Bear in mind now that unlike some people, I wouldn't have you believe that Gay? was the sound of God's orgasm, nor did I find Separation Anxieties quite as terrible as it's sometimes made out to be. It seems to me that, on their previous outings, 12 Rods have served as a balancing act of sorts, combining a bewildering array of desultory styles and influences, sometimes successful and sometimes not. Their full-length debut, Split Personalities, nailed the ratio of spacy, synth-driven lounge jazz to sharp-toothed arena-pop, and when it was on, it was both incredibly original and stunningly catchy. Lost Time is that record's proper follow-up.
Here, 12 Rods juggle slow grooves, killer hooks, and stop/start changes with the same practiced ease that endeared them to so many in the first place. The manic, metallic sheen of Anxieties has been subdued and replaced with more of the organic production that marked Gay?, albeit of much higher fidelity. But most importantly, the band has rebounded from the uneasiness of Separation Anxieties to actually sound comfortable with their material again.
The tempo and mood of Lost Time change with virtually every song. The glitchy, slow-burning harmonies of "Fake Magic 8-Ball" dissolve seamlessly into a tower of guitar and complex rhythmic shifts to open "Twenty-Four Hours Ago"; trilling keyboards segue the bouncing power-punk of "Terrible Hands" into the laidback stadium rocker, "The Time Is Right (To Be Wrong)". 12 Rods can't seem to sit still long enough to commit themselves to any one monolithic sound, so they simply bend every atmosphere they create to their own inventive aesthetic. The result is entirely natural; nothing is out of place, nothing is overdone.
A significant portion of the credit for Lost Time's paradoxical feeling of simultaneous unity and diversity can be attributed to Ryan Olcott's vocals; his slickly treated delivery shows chameleon-like adaptability across all of this album's varied terrain. He croons, shouts and wails with equal proficiency, maintaining the record's remarkable pace without losing so much as a step. In fact, in many ways, Lost Time's consistency even gives it an edge over Split Personalities.
Now, admittedly, consistency often amounts to little more than a critical consolation prize in the art of album-building, something to be trotted out when other defenses fail to justify quality ("But, at least it's consistent!"). Not this time. Lost Time is an exceptional start-to-finish listening experience, and on top of that, it hits as high as, or higher than, any Rods album to come before, minus any of the awkwardness that occasionally accompanied earlier releases. In short, Lost Time brings 12 Rods back from the brink of irrelevance to thrive outside the corporate clutches of V2, and shows them poised to finally deliver on the promise of the early material they built their name on.


Joji’s first full-length project features a host of guests in a quality effort to help push past the confines of his bedroom walls and tedious heartache.

BALLADS 1

George Miller’s nearly seven years of trolling the internet as the equal parts viral and vile YouTube personas Filthy Frank and Pink Guy were accented by his quiet SoundCloud releases as Joji. Comprised of emotional croons and lo-fi, sample-driven production, Miller’s side project eventually caught the attention of 88rising, a largely Asian music collective home to acts like Rich Brian, NIKI, and Keith Ape. A debut EP and an 88rising world tour later, Joji has seemingly cleared the leap from bizarre internet comedian to full-fledged musician, officially retiring his YouTube channel and all. Now, with all the shiny trappings of a label and a fanbase hungry for self-deprecating zingers like “Yeah Right” rather than Pink Guy’s stir fry raps, his first full-length project BALLADS 1 makes an effort to push past the confines of his bedroom walls and tedious heartache.
Joji serves as the record’s main producer, manipulating the same chain-clanking samples, tinny percussive hitches, and maudlin keyboards that drove 2017’s In Tongues EP on tracks like “WANTED U” and “XNXX.” But on BALLADS 1, Joji solicits contributions from a grip of artists that align with his cloud-rap and trap-influenced mentality, including Clams Casino, RL Grime, Ryan Hemsworth, and Shlohmo (one of his proclaimed musical idols). And as the album’s title announces, he loosely follows a simple objective: fine-tuning his sound against a style championed by the Whitney Houstons and Adeles of the pop mythology.
The ballad is a great mode for Joji. It retains the tormented intimacy of his music while elevating his approach to a more radio-friendly consistency than the runny compositions of In Tongues. The album’s second single—the self-described “new age Celine Dion”-type power ballad “SLOW DANCING IN THE DARK”—is a brighter, bolder take on his usual lovesick songs about an ex moving on. Production from Chairlift’s Patrick Wimberly imbues a high-fidelity clarity with harp arpeggios and synths that expand and contract around Joji’s near-yelling vocals. He flips pangs of an unrequited crush into the danceable Clams Casino-assisted “CAN’T GET OVER YOU,” dishing out both delusional and self-aware sentiments over an elastic Thundercat bassline. “I don’t have no social cues, I’m all for you,” he mumbles before delving back into a chorus that ends with the tired, toxic trope: “If I can’t have you no one can.”
Whether he’s singing about waiting for someone to desire him back on “WANTED U” or driving around, alone, feeling dead inside on “NO FUN,” Joji wallows in the tension between being the bigger person and lashing out. “Give me reasons we should be complete/You should be with him I can’t compete,” he cries on “SLOW DANCING IN THE DARK”’s anthemic chorus, unable to keep his intentions straight for two consecutive lines. He’s cathartic at best and pathetic and worst, but there’s a strange comfort in his neurotic rumination. Yet outside of a few standout tracks, BALLADS 1 coasts along a lukewarm formula of sad-boy R&B. Joji relies on a driving analogy to carry the underwhelming songwriting of his RL Grime collaboration called “TEST DRIVE,” while he misses the mark with his only non-producer feature Trippie Redd as they sing through a repetitive, aimlessly morbid narrative on the Ryan Hemsworth-produced “R.I.P.”
There’s a sense that Joji is searching for peace in his life beyond failed romances and conflicted guilt. The album’s opening track “ATTENTION” is, per usual, about his unfulfilled expectations in a relationship, but it’s also about the expectations he places on himself. “I don’t wanna die so young/Got so much to do,” he casually throws between lines about his insecurities and neediness. In the context of the neurological condition behind his departure from YouTube—which causes stress-induced seizures and requires he take daily medication—his preoccupation with mortality feels earned. Along with his medical scare, feeling “stuck” as the clownish content creator of his own making drove him to a point of drinking too much before he decided to take a chance on a new career. Throughout the despair and negative self-talk, there’s a hope underneath BALLADS 1 that Joji is closer to outrunning the immaturity of his past life.


The Atlanta rapper is slowly coming into his own as a Young Thug disciple with an intrinsic tunefulness and strong storytelling that is marred by the undistinguished Quality Control production.

Too Hard

Ever since he was released from prison last winter after serving two years on a drug charge, Lil Baby has been making up for lost time. The 22-year-old only began rapping in February, but he already has four mixtapes, the backing of the taste-making Atlanta incubator Quality Control, and a major street hit, “My Dawg,” that just got the star remix treatment with verses from Quavo and Kodak Black. By March, Gucci Mane was already trying to sign him. Even in a city that breeds overnight successes faster than any other, Baby’s ascent has looked almost too easy.
Credit Young Thug for fast-tracking Baby to the city’s inner circle. An old friend from the neighborhood, Thug cosigned the melodic rapper right out of the gate and appeared on some of his earliest tracks. As Baby tells it, even before he began rapping, he spent days in the studio watching Thug do his thing, internalizing his work ethic. Inevitably, he picked up a little bit of Thug’s singsong lilt, too, but his own delivery is considerably more subdued than the typical Thug performance. He sings in a slack, Auto-Tuned murmur, with an intrinsic tunefulness that suggests he could probably be a decent R&B singer if he put the work in. Despite his embrace of the word “hard” on the titles of his last solo mixtape, Harder Than Hard, and his latest, Too Hard, his voice is soft around the edges, almost pretty.
Most of Too Hard finds Baby in a contemplative mood, still processing his sudden good fortune. “I went to prison, it made me a better me,” he croons on “Money Forever,” opposite Gunna, another singing rapper specializing in florid trap serenades. There are a lot of them right now. This is one of the most crowded lanes in rap, but Lil Baby distinguishes himself with a rare command over his voice. The quieter he goes, the more emotion he conveys.
That delivery heightens his already-sharp storytelling. On the tape’s most vividly written track, “Best of Me,” he relays a close call. “Remember that shootout we had that time we thought a kid died?/Only thing I know is when we pulled up, everybody hopped out fine/I remember on the way back, everybody in the car quiet,” he raps somberly. He goes on to recall watching news coverage of the shooting and hoping the kid survived, knowing the ramifications if he didn’t. The chorus’ assurance that he isn’t embellishing—”Ain’t no facade, no cap in my raps, everything that I say is the real me”—is almost redundant. His voice is so sullen, so shaken, that there’s never any doubt whether he’s making any of it up.
Tracks like that make it almost impossible to believe Baby’s been at this for less than a year. He’s got clear talent, and considering how much he’s improved just in the months since his first mixtape, Perfect Timing, his ceiling is potentially massive (even Young Thug’s earliest projects weren’t nearly this assured). Too Hard also has a potential hit in “All of a Sudden,” where Baby and an electric Moneybagg Yo ping-pong speedy bars off of one another, putting maximum spin on each. It’s one of the tape’s few outright bangers.
What Baby still lacks, though, is an original vision—he’s skilled at parroting popular styles, but hasn’t yet honed his own. He isn’t helped in that regarded by Too Hard’s production, which is as refined and professional as you’d expect from the Quality Control stable, but also completely undistinguished, almost stubborn in its refusal to deviate from the most established sounds. He’s got time to figure it out, but for now Baby faces the same problem as many of his peers in Atlanta’s overcrowded rap scene: Talent can only take you so far when you sound so much like everybody else.


Dylan LeBlanc is a 25-year-old Louisiana native with ties to Muscle Shoals. His latest album Cautionary Tale documents his recovery from a personal tailspin.

Cautionary Tale

We are not, nor have we ever been, short on young, white, male singer-songwriters: Moody, earnest, troubled and usually in their mid-twenties, wielding an acoustic guitar and writing songs ranging from thoughtfully introspective to blissfully unaware. Enter Dylan LeBlanc, a 25-year-old Louisiana native. According to his bio, LeBlanc found himself, at 23, "exhausted and damaged," thanks to alcohol and hard living. True to this particular troubadour form, he more or less got his life together and wrote some songs about it. He’s even got a tie to the Muscle Shoals golden goose, having lived in the Alabama town as a child before returning to write his third LP, Cautionary Tale.
The result lands comfortably in the contemporary singer-songwriter canon, but it’s hard to say exactly where. Lilting pedal steel, brushy acoustic guitar strums and tender piano licks suggest Americana, but string sections pull LeBlanc in a different direction. Cautionary Tale often feels like what most folks probably expected from Night Beds as a follow-up to 2013’s Country Sleep. LeBlanc’s somewhat high mumbled singing directly recalls Night Beds’ Winston Yellen, most notably on "Man Like Me."
It’s these richer textures and unexpected twists that do Cautionary Tale the most favors. The result is a record that, on the surface, sounds beautiful from start to finish. At times, though, these arrangements create a smoke-and-mirrors effect that obscures the weak spots in LeBlanc’s songwriting. "Beyond the Veil" is a slow, bluesy track with blunt lyrics about lying politicians and media manipulation that don’t read much different from a teenager’s Tumblr post encouraging readers to "stay woke." Later, "Balance or Fall" feels like a tired take on a lonesome cowboy metaphor: guns, the desert, harlots, and the hangman’s noose all come up at some point. An Americana-leaning song romanticizing the Wild West: imagine that!
These arrangements don’t prevent Cautionary Tale from dragging in its back half, either. Centerpiece "Beyond the Veil" sounds pretty, especially with its extended instrumental coda, but by the song’s end, you’ve pretty much gotten the gist of the extent of LeBlanc’s capabilities. The remaining four songs end up feeling like dead weight, adding little else of note. "I’m Moving On," a pleasant shuffle that sounds teleported from the early '60s, might be an exception—even if most of its lyrics are just the title repeated about a dozen times.
Despite these shortcomings, LeBlanc still fares better than many of his like-minded contemporaries. Cautionary Tale never feels cloying or over-the-top—LeBlanc’s voice and arrangements always fit together naturally. His songwriting seems promising enough to expand, offering him an opportunity to examine himself and the world around him with a more critically thoughtful eye. LeBlanc might be part of a club that never seems to stop expanding, but he at least offers some extra intrigue with his membership.


Twenty years ago, Joel Gibb joyfully preached a vision of gay revolution. His group’s debut offered a prescient vision of the currents that power queer culture today.

The Hidden Cameras: The Smell of Our Own (20th Anniversary Edition)

At the dawn of the new millennium, charismatic hunk leader Joel Gibb gathered his apostles, tens of ragtag Torontonians with fluency in gay culture and faith in indie rock. They gathered organs of every kind, from throats on down, and began hosting ceremonies in porn houses and museums. Crucially, they did their work in houses of worship, of both the dancing and devotional kinds. They called it “Gay Folk Church Music.” In 2002, with just some demos on a CD-R called Ecce Homo and a few gigs under their belt, the Hidden Cameras won converts across the city. Even Rough Trade heads Geoff Travis and Jeannette Lee came to Canada to witness.
A news report on their pilgrimage surfaces as part of the 20th-anniversary celebration for The Smell of Our Own, the Hidden Cameras’ debut album. You can see how they pulled Travis and Lee into their flock. In the beginning, the band gussied up the egalitarian gang mentality of Belle and Sebastian with the gay-and-loud flamboyance of queercore. They put on shows, with themes like “Bread and Shit” and “Skulls” and “Disease” and dancers dragged up in sports costumes and excitable twink choreography and no real demarcation between those watching the scene and the people plucking harps, pounding timpani, bowing strings, and crying out in joy and rage. At the center of it all was Gibb delivering his gay revolution psalms and infectious paeans to drinking piss.
The Smell of Our Own, which Rough Trade put out in 2003, starts with a pipe organ pumping. It ends that way, too. It surrounds Gibb’s versatile pipes, sometimes crooning like a post-coital Karen Carpenter and sometimes calling out like Slim Whitman or Sylvester, with choirs stacked with luminaries including Owen Pallett and the Fifth Column’s G.B. Jones. Its 10 songs, not a dud among them, thrust complicated existential and spiritual concerns into boisterous orchestral pop. “Golden Streams” is a urophilic fantasia in which the bonds created by the intimate act become literal world-building, as the piss cools into ice. “A city of gold that lives in broad daylight,” Gibb proselytizes, then prophesies its ruin as he and his lover flood it again. The legend is soundtracked by heralding trumpets, swells of Pallett’s violin and viola, belfries of vibraphone and glockenspiel and sleigh bells. The allegorical “Animals of Prey” is equally baroque: Gibb and co. “descend on fours” like moles, fuck and kiss, and “ascend as swans.” Gay sex is metamorphical. A Hammond organ throbs like blood.
Virilely, they pack a couple climaxes into the original album’s 43 minutes. “The Man That I Am With My Man” queers the idea of blood brothers. Two lovers wash and consume each other, then become a literal army of lovers. “We could be in the army or the Klan,” Gibb warns—and, truly, the subsequent decades have proven that gay men, from Andrew Sullivan to George Santos, are as likely to be found at the forefront of racist and transphobic movements as they are in the #resistance. “Boys of Melody” offers counterpoint. In five minutes that build into a shattering crescendo rivaling “O Holy Night” for sonic reverence (and faith in the virtues of falling to your knees), Gibb takes up a pack of ghosts who leave the sea to cruise the beach. They sing in harmony. They march along. They’re finally, finally happy. The song is a coup, a fairy tale, both a recording and invocation of the kind of queer joy we all should be so lucky to witness. I swear there are generations in the echoes.
If “Boys of Melody” is a cathedral, the live take from a contemporaneous CBC session is a blueprint of how to build one yourself: Get some friends and some instruments, and voilà. Other tracks on the reissue prove Gibb was a kind of visionary, tapping into the currents that power queer culture today. A demo of their introductory anthem “Ban Marriage” lacks the finished version’s majesty but feels somehow more revolutionary in its intimate arrangement of mostly acoustic guitar and percussion. As the story goes, a groom shows up at the altar after a night of glory holes. God then appears, not to condemn gays for wanting to marriage but to condemn the joyless institution entirely. It’s a riot. B-Side “Fear of ’Zine Failure” could have come out last fall, when New York City’s queer cognoscenti made the Art Book Fair the sold-out social event of the season, with hundreds left feeling like flops on the sidewalk when they couldn’t make the scene. The album’s magical “A Miracle” appears here as a humble demo, shorn of its blooming string arrangements but leaving its thorny disquisition into the nature of suffering intact. The song threads bug chasing, bad dreams, sodomy, martyrdom, and Anne Murray-style vocals, and it’s a miracle indeed.
More live tracks finish off this very welcome reissue. “Shame,” a private interrogation of the gender politics of picking up closet cases, becomes a shimmering invocation of sexual solidarity. And gathered together, “Breath on It” and “Day Is Dawning” are proof that the Hidden Cameras can pitch a tent revival wide enough to take in the psychedelic Christian visions of Judee Sill and the holy fuck of Prince and the rip-roaring filth of John Waters and the DIY shambolic fervor of their Rough Trade brethren. Like all evangelicals, their point might be that they believe, and if they can, so can you. Get your organs ready. Let’s begin.


The fourth album in Nas’ ongoing series of collaborations with producer Hit-Boy locks into a straightforward groove. It’s loose and expert and finally nimble again.

King’s Disease III

For the first 20 years of his career, each Nas album was not only a major event, but a departure from or escalation of what came before. This changed in 2020, when he locked into a steady rhythm with Hit-Boy, the producer from Southern California’s Inland Empire who seemed, at the beginning of the 2010s, like he might shape the decade in rap (he produced JAY-Z and Kanye West’s “Niggas in Paris,” A$AP Rocky’s “Goldie,” and Kendrick Lamar’s “Backseat Freestyle” in a little over a calendar year), only to retreat into the quasi-anonymity of expensive pop projects. Since then, he and Nas have been on an unwavering schedule, arriving once a year to drop music that has to this point hovered just above “competent,” a master artist with a workmanlike producer doing earnest work for hire. Their most recent installment, somewhat ironically, was called Magic.
King’s Disease III, which is almost twice as long as Magic, is the first argument in favor of this deliberate demystification. Nas’ chief concerns (Queensbridge circa 1988, the corrosive effects of violence, upward social mobility for Black Americans, and banal luxury) are the kind that come into sharper focus with each variation on minor variation. And a rush of new albums frees each from the albatross of his legacy, which he no longer feels the need to litigate to the lengths he once did. KD3 is steeped in nostalgia but not besotted with it; it is routine, and all the better for it, loose and expert and finally nimble again.
With this newfound looseness comes a more direct mode of writing and delivery. Nas verses were once like cobwebs, seeming to stretch in every direction at once, phonetically and topically, until isolating the individual threads became impossible—and beside the point. Songs like 2001’s “Rewind,” where a pulp crime vignette, including its lines of dialogue, is told in reverse, are actually easier to digest on first pass than many of the denser, knottier ones from his first several albums. As late as 2012’s “Nasty,” he was staking his albums on ostentatious displays of raw technique. Here he seems to stride atop Hit-Boy’s beats where he once would have scurried back and forth through a network of tunnels he’d dug beneath them. On “WTF SMH,” he makes nearly every point—about Big Daddy Kane’s influence and how profitable his publishing has been for MC Serch, about “cowards” who “cut the tough guy shit”—land with percussive single-syllable bursts.
The enemy, as is always the case with Hit-Boy and often with Nas, is the middle. KD3’s most effective songs are the ones pulled toward opposite poles: “Thun” recalls the mournful songs, produced by DJ Premier et al., that imagined mid-1990s New York City to be rife with well-dressed mobsters and poorly maintained project stairwells, while “Once a Man, Twice a Child” is its languid, luxuriating counterpoint. When Nas describes himself, on the lush, Marcus Miller-sampling “Hood2Hood” as a mixture of “Paisley Park Prince with Supreme Team Prince,” he’s finally landed on the elusive elevator pitch that resolves his most seemingly irresolvable contradictions.
The paring down of Nas’ verses necessarily makes them feel less improvisatory; he has always been such an exacting writer that little seems to be discovered in the recitation of lyrics themselves, but density brings more opportunity for little bends in inflection and hitches in rhythm. The drabbest moments on KD3 come when he lapses into mechanical entrepreneur-speak (“For those who claim a hundred million on taxes…”) doled out with a deliberate hand and no room for flourishes that might undercut or deepen its meaning. Fortunately these are far rarer than on the first two King’s Disease volumes—and they’re balanced by more charming references, as when Nas notes, on “Get Light,” the “grown ladies with Mercedes-Benz keys” who are “friendly as little kids on 10-speeds.”
While one could point to his singing hooks as far back as 1996’s “Street Dreams”—or to the huskier, 2Pac-indebted vocals he dabbled in beginning around the turn of the century—Nas is dogged by a reputation as a rapper who is not particularly musical. This critique obscures how well he has modulated his voice to inhabit different characters, emotions, and mindsets in his songs. The four Hit-Boy records, this one included, tend to flatten out this dimension of his work, being rapped largely from a place of evident comfort. So when Nas interrupts “Don’t Shoot,” the final song of the album proper, with his exhausted, pleading rasp of a hook, he injects the lyrics with the stakes he clearly feels they deserve. “Don’t shoot, gangsta, don’t shoot,” he exhorts as if he’d sprinted into the recording booth and is only now trying to collect himself. “You are him, and he is you.”


The Australian musician caps an adventurous trilogy of EPs with another round of plush, laid-back songs that effortlessly mix pop, rap, R&B, and reggae.

Tkay Maidza: Last Year Was Weird, Vol. 3

Last Year Was Weird, Vol. 3

Tkay Maidza’s Last Year Was Weird trilogy is an open sandbox, a way for the Australian artist to try out as many genres as she likes without overcommitting. Since the first volume arrived in 2018, she’s paved a fresh, reliable lane: With a dexterous flow and a close ear for wordplay and melody, she infuses her music with a breezy, effortless mix of pop, rap, R&B, and reggae. The new Vol. 3 caps off the EP series with another round of plush, laid-back songs that mingle with some of her toughest rapping yet. Her bright, boastful personality remains front and center.
Vol. 3’s songs are newly tactile: Maidza is soft like cashmere and rich like syrup, comparing a lover’s bond to sticky honey. The lyrical flourishes give way to deeper ideas as she digs into the sense that she’s been overlooked, whether by a former flame or the public at large. “Yes Lord, I been slept on,” she sings over a jittery beat and choral backing vocals on “High Beams.” Maidza, of course, is nonplussed: “They late, can’t cope.” On the leisurely “Cashmere,” she allows a more vulnerable side through: “I disconnected myself,” she sings in a lilting voice before letting loose a haymaker: “And when I wanted your wisdom/You just gave me a reason to put a hole in your chest.” The delicate balance between big talk and forthright emotion colors the EP, closing the distance between Maidza as a person and a performer.
Her regular collaborator Dan Farber serves as executive producer, wiring the new set with bass-heavy undertows. The cheerleader stomp and rumbling buzz of “Syrup” nod to Timbaland and Missy Elliott’s future-shocked collaborations, but Maidza makes it her own, cruising in the pocket as she reels off boasts: “I want it all, can’t apologize/I’ll take the cake and the kitchen knife,” she vows. The standout “Kim” pays homage to the 2000s cartoon show Kim Possible with one of Maidza’s most swaggering hooks: “Bitch I’m, bitch I’m Kim,” she roars over ping-ponging synths and shuddering bass, her voice filtered as though shouting through a speakerphone. Like last year’s stadium-sized “Shook,” it’s electrifying proof of Maidza’s talent for catchy songs that punch above their weight.
Listening back through the entire LYWW series confirms that Maidza has found her artistic footing, evolving past the nondescript dance-pop of her 2016 debut toward a wide-ranging approach that serves both her creativity and her confidence. “Kim” exposes her stealth mission to the top in a springy cadence: “I been going hard and I ain’t slept/And they ain’t even know it, I’m a threat.” Though she has yet to notch a bona fide hit, Vol. 3 gives credibility to the claim. By building steady momentum at her own pace, Maidza has delivered her most bracing music yet.

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With help from producer Cate Le Bon, the Chicago band’s 13th album flickers to life on several songs that hint at the controlled chaos of their bygone experimental era.

Cousin

There are protest songs that rage with righteous fury. Then there are protest songs that simply gesture at the headlines, powerless and numb. “Ten Dead,” a glassy-eyed track on Wilco’s Cousin, is the latter. Counting up the casualties, Jeff Tweedy decries the normalization of mass shootings: “Turn on the radio, this is what they said/No more, no more, no more than ten dead,” he murmurs as Nels Cline’s nimble jazz chords surround and console him. Tweedy sounds more weary than outraged (“Ten more, 11 more/What’s one more to me?”) as a dust cloud of guitars commandeers the final minute. Isn’t that the point, though? It’s hard not to feel more weary than outraged when hearing about another massacre. The song, to its credit, indicts its own shrug.
This is Wilco in their 30th year: more overtly political than ever—recall the double entendre of last year’s long-winded Cruel Country, with its patriot-baiting title track—yet musically more introverted. Channeling weariness is what Wilco do best these days, and on the refreshingly compact, fitfully surprising Cousin, weariness and uncertainty abound, elicited by violence, family (“Cousin”), and interpersonal relationships (“A Bowl and a Pudding”). After flirting with a youthful twang on Cruel Country, Tweedy scarcely raises his voice above a concerned hum. It’s a muted album about searching for connection amid decay, though it flickers to life on several tunes that hint at the controlled chaos of the much-mythologized Yankee Hotel Foxtrot/A Ghost Is Born era.
Much as those albums benefited from the input of an experimental interlocutor (the great Jim O’Rourke), this one shakes up Wilco’s inner circle with outside producer Cate Le Bon, the Welsh songwriter, who squeezes some blood and guts out of these arrangements: the turbulent build-up in “Ten Dead,” the splattery organ groans that enhance the dirge-like “Pittsburgh.” During the recording process, Le Bon favored multitrack complexity over the live-in-the-studio approach of Cruel Country and encouraged the band to take more risks. That comes through on opener “Infinite Surprise,” which instantly feels like the most daring Wilco track this side of “Art of Almost.” Tweedy’s mantra-like repetitions (“It’s good to be alive/It’s good to know we die”) pair well with an ever-mutating symphony of synth shards and deconstructed guitar. As on many of Wilco’s best songs, Tweedy sounds like he’s reaching for stability in a storm and it keeps slipping just out of reach.
A small bummer, then, that little else on Cousin summons that tension. The album’s middle stretch settles into an amiable midtempo blur. “Levee” and “Evicted” chug along on autumnal minor chords and climate dread, but it’s hard to imagine anyone but the realest Wilco heads differentiating them from listless deep cuts on Schmilco or Cruel Country. “Sunlight Ends” delivers one of Tweedy’s more oblique love songs, but its twinkling folktronica never quite lifts off. The lovely “A Bowl and a Pudding” spins a brooding variation on the undulating arpeggios of “Muzzle of Bees,” while the title track finally summons some jagged edges and post-punk vigor. “The dead awake in waves!” Tweedy repeats at the song’s snarling finish.
Remarkably, Cousin is the fifth Wilco album since 2015’s Star Wars, an eight-year stretch during which Tweedy has also released four solo albums and three books. The guy is prolific. Since writing his memoir Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), he has sometimes activated a more diaristic, literal approach to songwriting. This resulted in the stirring, grief-informed songs of 2018’s Warm, but can also yield exercises in banality. In “Levee,” lyrics like “I love to take my meds/Like my doctor said/But I worry/If I shouldn’t instead” hang there awkwardly, absent any conclusive revelation or melodic momentum. If the inaction of “Ten Dead” served a grim message, this just feels passive.
Cousin isn’t a sister album to Cruel Country, but would it be too on the nose to call it a cousin album? Both peer out at a country infected with hypocrisy and moral rot. This is the album Wilco was working on in 2019, before the band decided to shift gears during the pandemic and make the country record instead. In interviews promoting the latter last year, Tweedy teased the existence of Cousin: “It’s pretty sculpted art pop,” he told Aquarium Drunkard. “It’s alien. The songs are alien shapes.”
If Cousin falls short of that tantalizing description, that’s all right. It’s the first Wilco album in years to activate, in fits and starts, the band’s long-dormant experimental gene; the first one in years where the songwriting feels as guided by the production as vice versa. It’s a reminder that, as much as Wilco have become known for longevity and sturdy perseverance, the group’s creative restlessness remains their calling card.


On her soulful second album, Chicago singer-songwriter Kaina Castillo reconciles childhood memories and future dreams with the hard work of getting through today.

It Was a Home

Kaina Castillo’s music focuses on the machinations of identity and love. The Chicago-born Guatemalan-Venezuelan artist’s 2019 debut Next to the Sun deconstructed the complexities and inner turmoils of life as a first-generation Latina with immense vulnerability and clarity. As she moved through elements of R&B, Latin jazz, indie pop, and soul, Next to the Sun’s stark lyricism and resounding vocals revealed an artist speaking to the purgatory woman of color face simply for existing: the expectation to perform labor for others despite holding less power over their autonomy. KAINA’s refreshing take on the personal as political refused to be watered down or made palatable, a reflection of someone unapologetically working through societal projections with the stylistic tools other artists of color have long labored for.
That will to remain open defines KAINA’s second album, It Was a Home. Produced by KAINA with fellow Chicagoan Sen Morimoto and boosted by collaborations with Sleater-Kinney and Helado Negro, It Was a Home is a soothing progression from her debut and a soulful ode to the city and the relationships that have nourished KAINA’s life. Using the sonic and visual repertoires of her childhood as a guiding force, KAINA contemplates new ways of healing, calling upon the time-honored medicine of love and self-acceptance.
Much of KAINA’s mythologizing around love is rooted in her reckoning with community. Bringing to mind Solange’s When I Get Home, KAINA conjures up imagery of people and places of her life that feel foundational to the record’s spirit. In the video for album closer “Golden Mirror”—a jazzy curtain call reminiscent of Jessie Ware’s “Remember Where You Are”—KAINA invites friends into a dreamy recreation of her home, decked out in the brilliant palettes of childhood favorites like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and Sesame Street. As the group embraces and eventually heads out to perform the song onstage, KAINA invites local artists like NNAMDÏ to join in what eventually becomes a family affair, repeatedly singing the irresistible hook: “Love can feel like an illusion/But I see it everyday.”
Whether through colorful interiors or animated plants, It Was a Home’s visual and sonic indulgences play to a childlike wonder that honors KAINA’s past and future idealizations. On the title track, KAINA pays homage to the apartment where her family lived for 16 years while incorporating the Motown sounds her parents played on repeat. “And that little room/In the middle house/Is not the way I remembered/It was a home,” she sings, surrounded by production reminiscent of Al Green or Jackson 5. But she leaves room to critique memory as well. “That song is about, you know, feeling so small in a space or feeling like you might not reach the next thing, but sometimes you’re missing that beautiful moment right in front of you,” she recently told NPR. A song like “Casita” functions as a response: Coming towards the end of the record, “Casita” calmly blends Latin rock and classic R&B sounds to evoke the home she hopes someday to inhabit—almost as if tapping into a familiar formula will make these dreams a reality.
As much dreaming and recollecting is done on It Was a Home, KAINA also succeeds at addressing her well-being. Rather than dwelling on factors outside one’s own control, she homes in on the stillness of a moment in larger conversations around oppression. Tracks like “Sweetness” or “Good Feeling” unspool like self-affirming mantras: “I could give a little sweetness,” KAINA reflects on “Sweetness,” even as she laments the isolation and exhaustion of work. On “Blue,” Helado Negro’s Roberto Carlos Lange joins in for an assured meditation on the value of rest. Lange’s syrupy voice drips all over Castillo’s alto rasp as they embrace inertia as essential to recharging one’s relationship with the world.
While it’s refreshing to see KAINA develop into an even more confident artist—making strides at her own pace—there are moments on It Was a Home that could be more daring. Take the record’s most hazy and experimental track, “Friend of Mine.” As it fades out, her voice submerges into the song and recedes out of sight. At this moment, Castillo sounds somewhere in the territory of L’Rain’s Fatigue or Xenia Rubinos’ Una Rosa, and the distant undulations of her vocals pass like clouds across It Was a Home’s bright sky. KAINA’s intentions proudly lead elsewhere on this record, but these experimental moments are exciting nonetheless, and deserve further development.
By allowing herself to feel the full weight of her traumas and insecurities, KAINA is able to address them with the care and imagination learned from her community, educators, and the legacies that precede her. It Was a Home succeeds best when KAINA is at her most carefree, even if she recognizes there’s a long way to go. “When it all goes astray/Gotta just laugh about it,” she sings on the whimsical “Apple.” Every song and image on the record harkens back to some aspect of KAINA’s life, whether it’s the late-night salsa parties her parents threw growing up, the Black feminist thought she’s studied as an adult, or something as small and ordinary as an apple. These memories, ideas, and objects embed themselves into the grooves of her music, a balm for her and anyone who comes to join.


The rapper and professional gourmand’s latest album is a hallucinatory, fuzzed-out journey into the wilderness.

Cocodrillo Turbo

Action Bronson has always projected a unique air of authenticity. He’s a half-Albanian bearded bear of a man from Queens, equally shaped by the borough’s vibrant food culture and his experiences running with the graffiti squad Smart Crew. He oozes the sort of charisma that could inspire an old-timey, cigar-chomping Hollywood agent to gush to a room full of studio executives, “This guy can rap! He can cook! He makes jokes like nobody’s business! He’s got this old-school New York thing going on but the kids who are into all the hipster streetwear crap love him too! He’s got moxie, I tell ya—he’s going straight to the top!”
And after over a decade in the public eye, Bronson is certainly a star—just not a conventional hip-hop power player. He’s created his own little solar system in which he is the undisputed gravitational center, one that spans music, vapes, clothing, and books on cooking (F*ck, That’s Delicious), weed (Stoned Beyond Belief), and self-improvement (F*ck It, I’ll Start Tomorrow). Perhaps nothing helped build Bronson’s name as much as his food show, Fuck, That’s Delicious, which originally aired on Viceland and found the Queens roughneck exhibiting such personal warmth and cultural open-mindedness on camera that the New Yorker positioned him as one of the few credible successors to Anthony Bourdain. (I was an editorial staffer at VICE Media while Bronson was signed to the company’s record label, although I was uninvolved with VICE Records and left the company years before the rapper’s relationship with other departments became openly adversarial.) Though his fanbase is enormous, he’s never had a true radio hit, or needed one. Instead, he’s a cult phenomenon like Fugazi in their prime—or, to put a more cynical spin on it, less of a rapper and more of a one-man media company.
In this sense, Bronson’s past couple of records might be best seen not as genuine artistic statements but as grist for the content mill, fuel for more tours and merch lines, and for maintaining brand awareness as Fuck, That’s Delicious moved from Viceland to Bronson’s own YouTube channel and began focusing more on health. But on Crocodrillo Turbo, his latest record, Bronson is a more focused rapper than he’s been in years. As he did on past highlights such as Dr. Lecter and Blue Chips, he’s crafted a rich and strange world, and while those records were informed by Queens and YouTube sample rabbit holes, respectively, Crocodrillo Turbo is a hallucinatory, fuzzed-out, straight-up bonkers journey into the wilderness—think Dr. Octagon guest-starring on an episode of Wildboyz, plus a bunch of fuzzy guitar solos.
This is still an Action Bronson album. Yet again, he plays the sophisticated boor, your friendly local dirtbag who gets to say whatever he wants because everybody can tell he doesn’t really mean it (or he’s just so likable that they convince themselves he doesn’t). On the other hand, there’s something undeniably more interesting going on. Bronson’s gotten vaguely more progressive, rhyming “easily triggered by old trauma” with “you know I voted for Obama” on “Subzero,” and there’s probably like 40 percent less misogyny on Crocodrillo Turbo than usual. He also raps portions of almost every track from the perspective of various deadly beasts.
Communing and/or engaging in combat with nature is a steady theme on this record—and, to hear Bronson tell it, informed his mentality while making it. “I did a crocodile death-roll for 10 songs,” he told Blackbird Spyplane. Opening track “Hound Dog” begins with a sonic collage of roars, barks, and breaking glass before Bronson raps about “smoking drugs ass-naked, just a hat on” and “run[ning] a hundred miles in a downpour with six giraffes on my back.” On “Jaguar,” he’s both “jumpin’ over the hood of a Jaguar” and “in a tree” like a jaguar, and he kicks off “Jaws” by rapping about how he’s just killed a goat with his, uh, jaws. The record’s guests, including longtime collaborators Meyhem Lauren and Hologram (who happens to be Lauren’s brother), as well as underground stalwarts Roc Marciano and Conway the Machine, gamely step into Bronson’s biome. Conway nearly steals the show on “Tongpo,” embracing Bronson’s reputation as a wisecracker and one-upping him with a masterclass in intentionally tasteless humor, at one point pausing to laugh at his own bawdy Andrew Cuomo joke. Roc Marci’s verse on “Zambezi” is the greatest guest verse ever to include the phrase “horse poo.”
None of the madcap antics would land if there weren’t a suitable bed of beats for all the zaniness to rest upon, and in this regard, Crocodrillo Turbo delivers. Though Bronson has found success in the past working with a single producer on a project, here he taps a group including the Alchemist, Roc Marciano, Griselda stalwart Daringer, and himself. The music is almost uniformly psychedelic and spacey, with stray guitars wantonly wailing in some parts, insistent and razor-tight soul loops egging on the rapping in others. The album’s greatest musical achievement comes with closer “Storm of the Century,” a plaintive, drumless wonder from Daringer featuring saxophone work from Yung Mehico of Bronson’s live band the Special Victims Unit. Bronson raps the entire track not as a beast, dog, motherfuckin’ problem, goon, or even goblin, but instead as a man, one who walks the streets with a head full of regrets. “I’ve done things only the Devil knows/Got bicep tendonitis from revving the boat/And all this ancient knowledge, reverend, that’s from heavens ago,” he tells us. And while a common muscle injury sustained as a result of conventional watersports might not seem as mysterious as demonic deeds or the arcane teachings of yore, that’s just because you’re not using a sufficient level of Crocodile Logic. If you’re a big-ass reptile with no understanding of human society, boats are truly unknowable, not to mention inedible. Maybe that’s why Bronson sounds so electric on this record: His persona is motivated by raw power, yet he can still find wonder in the everyday.


They’re still cooped up and bummed out, but the Swedish emo revivalists’ third album also boasts longer songs with stronger verses and a keener grasp of sequencing and flow.

No Driver

I Love Your Lifestyle don’t go outside unless it’s absolutely necessary. On the title track from 2019’s The Movie, frontman Lukas Feurst enjoyed the natural splendor of his Swedish homeland through his television screen, watching movies about camping until the trash piled up too high to ignore. “Dreamy Dreams” made getting home and going to bed sound like the highest possible reward for another day of pretending like you were someone who actually belonged in an office. Those two songs were preceded by another titled “Indoor Living.” Barring a massive attitude adjustment in the past 18 months, I Love Your Lifestyle were going to make an album suited for global indoor living whether they intended to or not. At the beginning of the pandemic, grim introverts joked that they’ve been training for quarantine their whole lives; on No Driver, I Love Your Lifestyle are likewise prepared to make the best of it.
Oh, and there’s been no massive attitude shift. “This song is made for rocking out,” they said of No Driver’s opening track, “and talks about how stupid this band must look from the outside.” Fair enough: “Stupid” uses the common tools bequeathed from pop-metal to emo—tapping riffs, massed harmonies—with the kind of self-deprecation that can be life-affirming in small enough groups. Gulfer provide backup vocals in a show of fourth-wave solidarity, underlining how I Love Your Lifestyle remain an anomaly of both time and geography. At the turn of the 2010s, this kind of music could convince a couple dozen kids in a Philly basement that they were witnessing the world’s best-kept secret. These days, a first press vinyl of Glocca Morra’s Just Married might run you over $400.
No Driver appears inspired by the same set of bummer personal circumstances as The Movie: “Car” is a sequel to “Dreamy Dreams” where not having a job doesn’t make sleeping all day sound any less appealing, while “Inner Freakness” recoils at even the possibility of roommates. But I Love Your Lifestyle are more in tune with their powers; they had previously made one song longer than five minutes, a number that quadruples on the first half of No Driver. Everything likeable about The Movie has been supersized: Verses are no longer speedbumps, but carefully constructed ramps that give Feurst enough momentum to leap towards chorus melodies at the absolute limits of his range. Guitar leads are now doubled in glam-rock harmonies, “No Harm, No Foul” swaps lines in English and Swedish, and “Align!” simultaneously evokes the lovesick innocence of American Football’s first album and the jazzy sophistication of their third.
If the second half of No Driver can’t quite sustain those peaks, the less ambitious tracks show a keener grasp of sequencing and flow. The 46-second thrasher “Well, That’s Not Ideal” comes just after the band’s signature Swedish-language track (“Fram Och Tillbaka”) regales itself with King’s Quest prog fanfare; the Tokyo Police Club fanfic “OK” arrives to reiterate the underappreciated bridge between blog-rock and revival-era emo. These guys can’t not be emo even when they try: The mesmerizing krautrock groove of “Inner Freakness” frees Feurst to take inventory of his failures until he’s buried in paperwork, and even though ILYL aimed “to make this song 0 percent emo,” they estimate it’s “at least 60.”
Despite all evidence to the contrary, Feurst might be willing to start digging his way out. No Driver closes with “Making Nothing Out of Something,” which isn’t about an inferiority complex. Rather, this song ends the album because it’s when Feurst admits he’s finally run out of things to say about boredom. Hell, he might actually have to leave the house at some point for new material. The post-quarantine I Love Your Lifestyle album will either break big or break them.

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Like his last LP, the drummer-producer’s Warp debut rejects false dichotomies like jazz vs. hip-hop. But sometimes, his freeform style is too haphazard for its own good.

Animals

About halfway through the lead single from Kassa Overall’s third studio album, Animals, the Seattle-based, ex-Brooklynite drummer, producer, and MC introduces an alter ego of sorts. Amid the cosmic jazz and methodical rap of “Ready to Ball,” a pitched-up Overall scoffs, “If you ain’t got no money, then shut the fuck up!” Given that his music doesn’t necessarily scream mass appeal, it might be a double-edged taunt.
Like Overall’s previous album, 2020’s I Think I’m Good, his Warp debut is an audacious freeform collage that leans on a community of collaborators to break down ancient false dichotomies between jazz and hip-hop, organic and electronic, spontaneous improvisation and meticulous editing. I Think I’m Good was a dreamlike labyrinth, with memoir, mental health, and Black struggle as guideposts. Animals is similarly thick with ideas, and in certain moments Overall’s heady meld of genres, lyrical conceits, and gifted guest performers can sound sublime. Overall has understandably tired of being defined narrowly by jazz-rap or self-care. But Animals, though a friendly hang, is a bit too precious to give a clear picture of what’s next.
On the prior album’s standouts, such as the ethereal “Please Don’t Kill Me” or propulsive “Got Me a Plan,” the music transcended and rendered irrelevant the decades-old discussion between jazz and hip-hop, mapping out an astral realm between Flying Lotus and Overall’s kindred drummer-beatmaker Makaya McCraven. Animals is at its most rewarding when it proceeds along a similar post-everything trajectory. That’s particularly true on centerpiece “The Lava Is Calm,” which lavishes folk, samba, and orchestral soul with Theo Croker’s serene trumpet, a noise-rock guitar solo, and furious drumming that’s like a one-man instrumental equivalent to Overall’s Warp labelmate Squarepusher. The handful of tracks that are wordless, or nearly so, are intermittently engrossing, but sooner or later they run back into jazz-hop awkwardness. Vijay Iyer’s eerie piano sounds great with fidgety electronic beats on penultimate track “The Score Was Made,” but then Overall lets the percussion go all “Rock the Bells,” without using the famous original sample, and it takes you right out of it. The cerebral jumble of “Still Ain’t Find Me,” one of several numbers with saxophone by Tomoki Sanders, requires a bold appetite for jazz with vinyl scratching. Overall’s own cadences as a rapper, meanwhile, tend to be measured in a way that can seem hammy (“jewelry” is “JEWEL-uh-RY”). This unfortunate habit undercuts the ornate jazz futurism of songs like Croker-backed “Make My Way Back Home,” which also enlists Nick Hakim for a sonorous guest vocal.
The most cohesive track on Animals is “Clock Ticking,” which brings fellow Warp signee Danny Brown’s yawping mischievousness and NYC indie-rap linchpin Wiki’s grizzled introspection to noirish boom-bap, sounding something like a Madlib collab without the samples. It’s thoroughly engaging, but even here, the pairing of these individualistic talents with a live instrumental emulation of golden-age hip-hop, however virtuosic, seems arbitrary. Six-minute finale “Going Up,” the song most likely to put a smile on your face, recalls the charm of Chance the Rapper circa 2015’s “Sunday Candy,” but it feels needlessly labored. Overall has compared the song’s bustling instrumental intro to “the part where Neo gets kicked out of the Matrix… but when you get spit out, you actually get spit out in the bush in Africa”—and that’s before we get to Lil B rapping non sequiturs atop Tomoki Sanders’ pillowy saxophone peals, or Ishmael Butler of Digable Planets and Shabazz Palaces rapping through orchestral swells, in an apparent nod to infants and their pacifiers, “Baby treated me like a binky.”
Overall is an ace drummer with credits that run from Arto Lindsay to The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and a savvy producer going back to his Tumblr-era rise in the camp of indie rappers Das Racist; Animals can best be enjoyed as a display of prowess by adept jazz players and distinctive MCs. Overall’s lofty creative ambitions have long been appealing, and he hinted at fitting grandeur in a statement upon the album’s announcement, where he drew connections between the album’s title and his thoughts on race, freedom, and the entertainment industry. We never really quite find out what those are. “It’s Animals,” the closest Animals comes to a title track, depicts two pilots talking about a “disruptive passenger,” as ruminative piano is disrupted by elephant roars. “There’s a large percentage of us that are not going to do OK,” Overall recently told The New York Times, linking the title concept back to personal well-being. “So maybe those are the people we consider animals.” This expansive menagerie of metaphorical creatures is not particularly manifest on the record, where you’re more likely to drift away to Overall crooning, smoothly if not particularly meaningfully, “Life is very long/I could’ve gave you everything/But you can’t have it all.” Animals is a provocative proposition with flashes of inspired bricolage, by a likable veteran muso, but for something so fussed over, it’s a little half-baked.