With seven excellent albums and over a decade of experience under their belt, the esteemed Oregon doom outfit YOB have long since established themselves as one of the most progressive acts of their generation. Their latest album reshapes the traditionally-forlorn moans and groans of doom into an amorphous roar that, however hellish, shimmers with something resembling hope.

Clearing the Path to Ascend

It’s been over forty years since Black Sabbath, Pentagram, and their kin founded the Church of Doom, one of metal’s oldest and most enduring houses of blasphemy. These days, metal’s gnarled family tree has blossomed into a dizzying number of subgenres, but almost all of it comes back to doom, regardless of tempo or texture. Doom may center itself around stoned stupor, Satanic camp, and sick riffage, but it also possesses a meditative musical mode buried deep inside it, a glassy-eyed glance into life’s grimmest mysteries.
Earlier this summer, Arkansas's Pallbearer provided a winning example of this approach with their esoteric, genre-ignorant Foundations of Burden, and now the always-crushing YOB have returned with a similarly-striving epic called Clearing the Path to Ascend. With seven excellent albums and over a decade of experience under their belt, the esteemed Oregon outfit have long since established themselves as one of the most progressive acts of their generation. Psychedelic rock, stoner rock, stoner metal, blues metal, ambient: all reside comfortably in YOB’s wheelhouse, coalescing and collapsing on a path that stretches as far as the listener’s imagination. The band's most recent effort, 2011’s Atma, took its inspiration from the Eastern concept of “the higher self”—a theme they fleshed out with droning, circular mantras and monolithic instrumentation. YOB take similarly transcendent strides on Clearing the Path to Ascend, reshaping the traditionally-forlorn moans and groans of doom into an amorphous roar that, however hellish, shimmers with something resembling hope.
As is typical with YOB (and doom in general), enlightenment doesn’t come easy. Clearing the Path to Ascend contains only four tracks, each surpassing the ten-minute mark and the heaviness of a black hole. On opener “In Our Blood", philosopher Alan Watts offers some soothing instructions—“Time to wake up”—before gingerly stepping aside for a rude awakening: Mike Scheidt’s banshee-like wail, accompanied by swooping, sullen guitars. Bassist Aaron Rieseberg and drummer Travis Foster handle the majority of the heavy lifting, but it’s Scheidt’s singing that drives the band’s metamorphic energy. He’s not a singer so much as he’s a shaman, using his diverse range of grotesque death growls and plaintive melodies to toy with the listener’s preconceptions, especially where identity is concerned.
Such is the queasy fun of "In Our Blood", Scheidt's sixteen-minute trip to hell and back. His thin, feeble tenor coasts along smoothly for the first several minutes, but before long, something wicked reaches beyond the void and snatches up the melody, leaving in its place the sound of utter ruin. Scheidt's chameleonic vocals present the band with an ever-replenishing resource from which they derive some of the album's most lasting material: the unfurling, feminine "Unmask the Spectre", which is situated alongside "Marrow", the album's defiant death knell of a closer.
YOB’s latest record stands as one of their densest, so it's good that the band's greatest asset, their impeccable pacing, remains intact. “Unmask the Spectre” plays out as a masterclass in dramatic tension, its punishing core buffered on both sides by moody, barren sludge. At last, Scheidt finally unleashes his thunderous yell, a solo nipping at its heels—and before long, he's whispering again, dragging everything back into the gloaming. The power of darkness depends on contrast, so by spacing out their otherworldly confrontations, the Oregonians ensure that the true path lay ever in sight.


On the slinky follow-up to their carefree debut, the R&B sisters take greater risks with their production and their writing.

Ungodly Hour

In the two years since Chloe x Halle released their lighthearted coming-of-age debut The Kids Are Alright, the Bailey sisters have kept busy. They starred in three seasons of the sitcom Grown-ish, snagged two Grammy nominations, opened for JAY-Z and Beyoncé’s joint tour, sang at the Super Bowl—oh, and Halle was cast as Princess Ariel in Disney’s upcoming live-action The Little Mermaid. In whatever free time they had, the Atlanta duo also managed to write, perform, and contribute production for their second album, Ungodly Hour. Just the normal course of life for a 22- and 20-year-old, right?
But Chloe x Halle also want to curse and talk about sex and make drunk mistakes and deal with the aftermath of unsolicited dick pics. They want to be somewhat normal twenty-somethings, in other words, a feat that seemed impossible on their debut album, where they were protecting their squeaky-clean images. But now they’re over that: “It’s four o’clock/You sendin’ me too many pictures of your…(oh),” the duo sing with a Destiny’s Child-invoking rhythm on “Busy Boy,” every line delivered with an audible smirk. But this isn’t the album equivalent of former teen stars making scandalous headlines; Chloe x Halle shed their innocence with grace, as they do with everything else.
Frequently the sharpest Chloe x Halle songs are the ones where the sisters are the most hands-on. “Baby Girl” immediately jumps out, with danceable and warm Chloe production reminiscent of a Kelela album. On “Tipsy,” Chloe’s pulsing instrumental elevates the duo seamlessly weaving between rapping and singing, a moment that should make their mentor, Beyoncé, proud.
Even when everything isn’t clicking, Chloe x Halle’s presence is enough to bring a track to life. The Mike WiLL Made-It-produced and Swae Lee-assisted “Catch Up” sounds like a pop song produced via algorithm, redeemed only by their sweet harmonizing. “Wonder What She Thinks of Me” is nearly brought down by Disney-musical-soundtrack vocals, but the the production (provided by both sisters) and colorful songwriting saves it—the lyrics sound like a dramatized version of  conversations had in a stressful relationship: “I wonder what she thinks of me/When you’re coming home/I know that she smells my perfume under your cologne.”
But if “Wonder What She Thinks of Me” is a rare moment where Chloe x Halle could’ve used more direction, typically their decisions go well: They flip a sleek and sexy Scott Storch rhythm into a night-out anthem on “Do It” and deliver sugar-coated melodies over a blissful Disclosure groove on “Ungodly Hour.” Their riskiest songwriting pans out, too: “You must got me fucked up/You must got me fucked up/I think I had enough,” they wail on “Forgive Me,” potentially alienating some of their fanbase. Though most should understand that Chloe x Halle aren’t just television characters or former YouTube stars or proteges of the world’s biggest pop icon, but real grown women with layers, flaws, and emotions. With Ungodly Hour, Chloe x Halle take a quick moment to reflect on that growth, before they ultimately return to their grind.

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Blu & Exile finally offer a worthy spiritual successor to their seismic 2007 debut with a sprawling double album about the cultural forces that shape us.

Blu & Exile: Miles: From an Interlude Called Life

Miles: From an Interlude Called Life

Despite some initial drama—a botched release, a shuttered label—Blu & Exile’s 2007 album Below the Heavens quickly became a cult classic. Years later, it was hailed as a “magic album” and a tectonic shift that changed West Coast rap. The Los Angeles backpack rapper and Dirty Science producer have each had their own successes since, but they’ve never quite been able to escape the shadow of their massive collaborative achievement. The follow-up, Give Me My Flowers While I Can Still Smell Them, was delayed five years, its name hinted at looming fatigue, and it sought to replicate the BtH palette outright. In the eight years that followed they continued to work together, producing shelved trap and electronic albums, but they were never able to “answer the call,” as Blu put it. That is, until Miles: From An Interlude Called Life, the worthy successor to their seismic debut.
Named, in part, for jazz titan Miles Davis (and dedicated to Miles Elijah Barnes), the album is about closing loops (musical, personal, historical), the pair’s long, exhaustive journeys through the underground, and tracking their roots in the process. “It felt like we had been miles away from where we started, and it felt like we had a lot to say about all those miles that we’ve traveled since we’ve begun,” Blu told Bandcamp. In many ways, Miles is like a bookend, not just measuring the distance traveled since Below the Heavens but also finding some semblance of closure. As a rhymer, Blu uncovers the contexts associated with words and finds where different shades of meaning overlap, especially with his name, and here he goes to the next level. He is optimistic amid adversity and adept at managing complex ideas, summed up by this lyric from the opener: “I don’t see the glass half full, I see the whole pitcher.”
Miles: From An Interlude Called Life finds a great rap bluesman, laborer, and journeyman thinking about what produced him and the nature of connection. In an interview with the Grammy website, Blu shared that Davis was his grandfather’s favorite artist, that despite always being around the songs, those vibrations didn’t reach him until he was in his 20s, and that getting into jazz through Davis opened his eyes. On “All the Blues,” he raps about naming his son Miles in tribute. The album features Blu’s childhood friend turned R&B star Miguel and Exile’s longtime partner Aloe Blacc, who introduced Ex and Blu in ‘03. In a clever bit of stitching, “Miles Away,” a song about going from city to city on the road, samples the Mos Def verse from “Travellin’ Man.” Many of the early verses are autobiographical, raw, and full of detail as he charts his path to rap through the people and places that molded him, and he shows how BtH helped open a gateway for rappers like Kendrick Lamar and Earl Sweatshirt. He has never been more approachable than he is on “The Feeling” and “You Ain’t Never Been Blue,” songs that navigate the emotional and financial woes of a working-class rapper.
The second half of the double album digs deeper into ancestry and shared history. It is a bit like Terrence Malick’s 2011 film The Tree of Life in its pursuit of an existential throughline; both weigh the experiences of the person against the larger forces that shape identity, exploring the relationship between the singular and the collective. Blu’s raps about growth and struggle lace into accounts dating back to antiquity—of soul music, freedom fighting, and self-discovery. Each of these threads is carried by Exile’s stunning, rich sample work, patching together themes about being Black and blue, searching, and learning from your pilgrimage. Miles doesn’t stray too far from the formula of their first two albums, but they feel more like diarists than classicists.
The nine-minute epic “Roots of Blue” is a generational survey of the Black civilizations that sprung forth from the cradle of life and how their descendants came to occupy America. The verses are dense yet rapped gracefully as Blu traces the diaspora back to the source; each verse unpacks a royal, spiritual, political, or musical Black legacy. He doesn’t just sound like he’s rattling off names or reciting facts; it’s as if he’s connecting dots. “African Dream” and “The American Dream” are like halves of a whole—the motherland fantasy against a capitalist fairy tale. Both are feats of imagination.
Miles is the rare 20-track, 95-minute album that mostly justifies its length. The scope is broad, and Blu weaves with skill between macro and micro. Some of his attempts to zoom out don’t cohere. On “To the Fall, But Not Forgotten,” an homage to the lost becomes a random roll call for celebrities as disparate as Kimbo Slice and Paul Walker. “Dear Lord” is like a COEXIST bumper sticker in song form. And on “The End,” he compares his album’s grand finale to famous assassinations, the 9/11 attacks, and the extinction of the dinosaurs.
But Blu is usually deft at pinpointing himself inside the larger narrative. The nostalgic “Music is My Everything” unfurls his own personal history of hip-hop—his cousin teaches him about basslines, his aunt dates Eazy-E, and his mother’s new reverend husband bans secular music from the house. His flows are fluid, his thoughts lucid, recalling memories as his route to rap runs parallel with the boom of the California scene. As with most of Miles, the firsthand experiences of its creators are presented as tiny pieces in a much grander mosaic, one spanning generations.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Elbow's latest deepens their formula—rich, sweeping rock songs about melancholy and love—with a dreamy sense of loss and time passing.

Little Fictions

Ever since 2008’s Mercury Prize-winning The Seldom Seen Kid, Elbow have offered slight tweaks on a reliable formula: meditative, dramatic rock songs, studded with sweeping orchestration and boasting subtly idiosyncratic songwriting. At this point, they may not win many more new fans stateside (or elsewhere), but as they age, they are settling into this groove, one that deepens slowly with more years passed and miles traveled.
Their last album, 2014’s The Take Off and Landing of Everything, catalogued the mixture of life changes that come with adulthood, but was specifically shaped by the end of frontman Guy Garvey’s long-term relationship with the writer Emma Jane Unsworth. An album blurred between places and times, it found Garvey writing from a place of increasingly crowded memory. Their new album Little Fictions picks up those threads, with a few more years behind them as touring musicians. Living that way has a certain effect: other people’s live drift out of yours and seem to settle into place, while yours keeps rushing forward but also remains static in its own way, with you simply replacing old characters with new ones. Much of the album outlines love lost, love percolating, love maturing. And, as always, Garvey is a skilled chronicler of human interaction, offering a manifesto for the album in its penultimate title track: “We protect our little fictions/Like it’s all we are.”
Unlike its predecessor—where the weight of the past sometimes bogged down the tempos, too—Little Fictions moves. Lead single and opening track “Magnificent (She Says)” rides on a nimble guitar figure and string arrangement. The drum pattern in “Gentle Storm” wouldn’t feel out of place in a club, were it not for the beautifully ruminative song that surrounds it. Though at their most insistent Elbow still mostly operate at “purposeful stride,” a song like “Firebrand & Angel” combines off-kilter elements to achieve a forward-momentum lurch.
Even at their most emotionally bombastic—in huge orchestral sweeps like “One Day Like This” or the slow-intensifying koan of “The Take Off and Landing of Everything”—Elbow write songs with a careful architecture. And now, perhaps more so than ever, the affecting moments of their new material are rooted in very precise decisions, like the interplay of piano and percussion in “Gentle Storm.” One of the most striking examples here is the vocal layering in “All Disco” and “K2.” Abstracted, ghostly background vocals bubble in the background throughout “All Disco” until they finally boil over and mingle with Garvey’s, a manifestation of memory overtaking and reshaping your perception of the present. “K2,” the album’s highlight, pulls a similar trick. One long unhurried tumble (its verses and chorus elide together), it finds Garvey in a reverie, eager to unspool but doing so in many directions at once; the moments and places listed are far-flung. Throughout, his vocals echo themselves in the distance, slightly out-of-step with the main vocal performance. It’s a watercolor representation of life passing and the experiences you collect, making the clarity of repeated lines like “Opens the fist just enough for a hand/To slip into the hand” hit harder.
Little Fictions is full of moments like this, where discrete flourishes yield quietly resounding payoffs. Sometimes it’s easy to wish Elbow would let a different kind of intensity in—that the storm wasn’t always so gentle. But that's not really what Elbow do, and this many albums in, they know what they do well. They still excel in melancholic music about loss and love. But  these days, wide-eyed wonder is always around the corner. “Then my telephone shakes into life I see your name,” Garvey sings towards the end of closer “Kindling” (a song that plays like U2 in their lowest-key), before the repetition of “Then the wheat fields explode into gold either side of the train,” as the final lines of the album. In a different group’s hands, it’d all be too mawkish. But as Elbow settle into middle age, the additional wrinkles and whiskey stains only deepen the gravity of their stories.


This Estonian band’s debut album sounds like a long, lonely drive on a moonlit night, with plenty of guitar reverb.

Slow Sundown

Estonia’s capital city, Tallinn, has some of the shortest, darkest days in the world: Thanks to cloud cover and haze, an average one includes less than five hours of sunlight. On their debut album, Slow Sundown, Tallinn’s Holy Motors waste no time trying to hide the way that feels for them. In this band’s slow, chilly songs, you’re always being watched, and the moon might be your only friend. “Hold me like the moon/Through night time,” singer Eliann Tulve sighs in a rare moment of warm, major-key respite. “I’m planning to drive until my heavenly place arrives,” she adds moments later, as the band cruises on at an unhurried pace behind her.
Those lines, from “Silently for Me” and the subsequent “Signs,” respectively, embody both of Holy Motors’ favorite images. The first, of course, is the moon, which looms over this album from the opening track, “Honeymooning,” onward. That song’s tone couldn’t be further from honeymoon-esque, unless your idea of one takes place at the bottom of a swamp. Yet this is Holy Motors’ comfort zone: Tulve sounds at ease as the lights go down and her bandmates gradually rise up in the mix. Their lineup features three guitarists, less to create a sense of volume or power than to maintain some peripherally detectable presence that’s always over your shoulder, never in your face.
The album’s other core motif is the lonely night drive. “I am alone in the valley/Looking for a girl I’d like to marry,” Tulve sings to introduce the desolate, country-tinged “Valley.” Spooky, empty highways crop up several more times, including quite literally in the video for “Sleeprydr,” the crescendo moment of the album and the band’s most evocative exploration of the theme. The guitarists, meanwhile, keep croaking out clunky, echoing thuds, like the sound of a stone skipping across ice, but pitched several octaves lower—ice on the highway to hell, maybe.
Tulve’s peacefully resigned voice and the guitarists’ infinity-pool-style shimmer court easy comparisons to Mazzy Star and Slowdive. But Holy Motors shade towards the darker side of that sound, and they’re a little too eager to let the world know it. The lyrics on Slow Sundown are regularly, astoundingly on-the-nose. One minute into the album, Tulve informs us that “Behind the gloom/We’re drowning/In our own tears.” Some things go without saying, but that doesn’t always stop Tulve and the band from saying it.
If Holy Motors are limited in range, they show genuine skill at bringing their one mood to vivid life. We’re all alone at the end of the day, Slow Sundown suggests. It’s only fair to wonder if they’ll ever dare to show us what their world looks like when the sun comes up.


On his sometimes-hilarious, seat-of-the-pants live concert album, Arcade Fire's Will Butler shows the good and bad sides of winging it and hoping your audience follows.

Friday Night

Friday Night begins with an encore, and that’s not even the weirdest thing about this unlikely live album. It follows Will Butler’s solo debut, last year’s Policy, an eight-track, one-man rumination on his place in the world and possibly in the Arcade Fire. Those songs mimicked the scale of that band’s biggest anthems, yet kept the stakes aggressively personal, as Butler revealed his dire worries over his family, his country, even his eternal soul. He called out God Himself, demanding that the Big Man account for His actions.After that, he spent a week writing and recording a song a day based on headlines from the Guardian, then he released a new version of Policy containing them. It’s clear the guy likes a risk.
From anyone else a record like Friday Night might be a bit suspect, an easy way to milk a few songs or get a little closer to the end of a record contract. But Butler has always been a compelling performer, a guy who claims—in song, no less—“I have never been drunk and I have never been stoned” but seems to lose himself on stage. So he’s much more comfortable in front of the crowd at Lincoln Hall in Chicago than he ever was in Electric Lady Studios, which might explain why the live album is nearly twice as long as the studio album. Even with comedian Jo Firestone acting as his hypewoman and the great Abbi Jacobson providing Magic Marker artwork, much of the show has a you-had-to-be-there vibe. But there are also moments when Butler’s music sounds more jagged, more hapless, more violent, more paranoid than it has in years.
Now, about that encore. Butler opens the track by giving a shoutout to the sound guy, which is a nice gesture but not a “This is the first song off our new album!” kind of moment. Then he explains that they’ve never played “Tell Me We’re All Right” before. “I mean that literally,” he clarifies, right as he’s launching into some piano chords practically quoted from Queen’s “You’re My Best Friend.” Butler forgets the lyrics at one point, cajoles the audience to sing along (which they don’t seem to do), adds a lengthy bridge during which he rap-introduces his backing band, and finally plays the song right into ground. What makes the performance so remarkable—and probably the entire reason it’s at the beginning of the show rather the end—is its by-the-seat-of-their-pants momentum, the feeling that the whole thing might just fly apart at any moment, leaving the band defeated and exposed up on that stage.
Butler obviously lives for those moments of musical risk, when he can either fall on his face or subsume himself into something larger. He prizes spontaneity both in writing and playing, which adds a rambunctious energy to “Son of God” and punk abandon to “II”. It gives him license to explore every style and genre that comes into his head, and the new songs point in some directions Butler might go in the future: the raw heavy metal riffing of “Public Defender,” which is simultaneously bracing and ridiculous; the homemade ‘80s soundtrack rock of “Sun Comes Up,” which sounds like a Moroder sequencer held together by duct tape.
But that quest for pure spontaneity can reveal the cracks in Butler’s craft. Penned for the Guardian, “Madonna Can’t Save Me Now” meanders for four and a half minutes with no memorable hook and only a smug sense of its own cleverness to sustain it. It’s an indie-rock song as hastily typed Facebook post, which can’t be what Butler intended, and it shows just how ugly the results can be when his seat-of-the-pants approach actually fails him.


On his debut full-length, the Brooklyn producer invites a wide range of guests over for a genre-spanning studio party. 21 Savage, Hudson Mohawke, DJ Rashad and the Deftones’ Chino Moreno feature.

Relationships

The cover art for Relationships features a photo of an entryway, nearly every inch of its canary yellow walls covered in signatures, writing and drawings. The photo was taken inside of Nick Hook’s studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where the producer has recorded and worked with a laundry list of hip-hop and electronic artists over the years, including Run the Jewels, Young Thug, and Action Bronson. Relationships, his debut album, feels a lot like that studio must: a place where Hook endlessly tinkers as a constant stream of guests passes through, each leaving behind bits of their sound. In keeping with Hook’s penchant for collaboration, Relationships enlists an impressive roster of artists: the freshly Drake-co-signed 21 Savage, the Deftones’ Chino Moreno, electro wunderkind Hudson Mohawke and even the late DJ Rashad. To hear him tell it, Hook didn’t pay for any of these features, relying instead on the goodwill accrued through years of production and engineering work.
Given the diverse company he keeps, it should come as no surprise that Hook’s debut is an eclectic listen. That said, Relationships manages to hang together surprisingly well, anchored in large part by Hook’s rhythmic and melodic sensibilities. Hook is a collector of vintage studio equipment and it shows: The sounds of analog synths suffuse these songs with warmth, while much of the drum programming has a tactile, human feel. Also old-fashioned is the manner in which Relationships was constructed: all of these collaborations were recorded in person at Hook’s studio, rather than cobbled together from emailed files.
Clearly, Hook is a big believer in chemistry, and this collaborative spirit tends to bring out his best. Over the course of Relationships, Hook allows his guests to pull his sound in a number of different directions, ultimately showcasing his own versatility. “Gucci’s” pitches up emerging Atlanta rapper 24hrs’ vocals into cartoon-character territory, the end result sounding like a trap banger crossbred with early Kanye’s chipmunk soul. “Can’t Tell Me Nothing,” a bleak grime number featuring 19-year old London rapper Novelist, colorfully evokes London’s wet streets: Hook’s synths alternately patter like raindrops and howl like sirens as Novelist raps with hungry-upstart fury. “Another Way” arrives at funky body music by way of cosmic synths, while “All Alone” matches Makonnen’s late night tomcat croon with the proper shade of noir. Given 21 Savage’s involvement and its title, you can probably guess what “Head” is about; more surprising is how exuberant the song feels—bass drum hits that pop like confetti-filled balloons, skittering hi-hats, glimmering synth lines. It’s a genuinely fun song, one where Savage sounds delightfully out-of-place, like a dead-eyed hustler at a child’s birthday party.
Relationships is bookended by two collaborations with the footwork pioneer DJ Rashad, culled from sessions Hook recorded with Rashad before his untimely death. Opening track “+ 3,” which also features DJ Paypal, has Rashad’s fingerprints all over it: classic house synths, a tug-of-war between a thudding low-end and rapid-fire hi-hats and a mantra-like chant, provided by Nasty Nigel: “Pull up/Back door/ID/Plus three.” Album closer “The Infinite Loop,” meanwhile, ends the record on a very different note. Good luck finding Rashad’s contribution in the folds of the impressionistic track, which builds up slowly over the course of eighteen minutes, guided primarily by washes of chiming, delayed guitar provided by Chino Moreno. Nasty Nigel returns here, with a brief, nostalgic verse that steers into the track’s dreamy atmospherics: “Copping 40s at the Wawa outside of Philly/I was only 14, kinda high, my uncle with me.” Even if it hardly sounds like a DJ Rashad song, “The Infinite Loop” feels like a fitting tribute, a contemplative remembrance of a relationship that animated Hook’s work, like so many of those on display here.


Seattle vocalist/guitarist Julie Byrne's Rooms With Walls & Windows feels like a secret she's keeping from you, even when it is safely in your headphones. Her version of folk, a whisper bordering on an ambient hum, will be familiar to fans of early Cat Power, or Grouper's Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill.

Julie Byrne: Rooms With Walls and Windows

Rooms With Walls and Windows

Julie Byrne doesn't sing her ice-crusted songs so much as murmur them beneath her breath. And "finger-picking," while accurate, feels far too percussive a word for her guitar playing; it's more like she brushes the strings with her fingertips, like wisps of hair obscuring her vision. Live clips show Byrne performing to reverent groups of three or four in cafes, where she barely rises above the sound of milk steamers and muffled coughing. Her album, Rooms With Walls & Windows, feels like a secret she's keeping from you, even when it is safely in your headphones. If you are listening while walking the streets of a city or while commuting, I recommend noise-cancellation; someone briskly turning the pages of their magazine next to you could drown her out.
Byrne currently lives in Seattle, but she skipped there like a stone across the country—first Buffalo, then Chicago. On "Marmalade", she describes what she's searching for: "All I want is a brick house with a porch that wraps around/ All I want is land enough for my child to roam."  The language in her lyrics, once it emerges into your awareness, is strikingly conversational, but not like any one kind of conversation. She alternates between vividly dark imagery—"I lean back like a woman baptized in the River of Styx," on "Wisdom Teeth Song"—to the breathlessly naïve: "The Museum of Natural History in its snow, blood, and fur and ivory/ It left me wanting to know so much more about this world" (from the same song).  Her delivery doesn't make clear if these sentiments belong to her, or if they are bits of life she's picked up listening to others.
She sings everything in the same cloaked, low voice, and over the same skeletal arrangements, which gives even the mundane sentiments a portentous ring. Her version of folk, a whisper bordering on an ambient hum, will be familiar to fans of early Cat Power, or Grouper's Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill, as will her ability to mine the uncanny from the everyday stuff lying around. Byrne occasionally tests your personal boundaries for what constitutes "enough" happening in a song: Many of her songs are not only two chords,  like "Marmalade", but two notes, hitting  like alternate condensation drops on your forehead while her lyrics follows drowsily afterward.
Some of the most memorable and indelible moments on her album are when she leaves off of words and hums into the ether—at the end of "Holiday", after she has sung "And I do travel alone, but yours is not a number I can call on the phone," she follows it with a wordless melody that seems to put a full stop on the enigmatic thought. You can hear it again on "Prism Song",  which follows up the hypothetical scenarios of the lyrics ("If you were a prism with the light passing through") with nothing but a wordless sigh. Sometimes we locate more meaning in sound than in sense, and Byrne's album sits at the nexus where one melts gorgeously into the other. The album concludes with a few glowing rays of synth, an arpeggiated tonalization that sits in place for about four minutes and dies away. The sounds are distant, foggy, and alluring, like echoes of echoes, the original sounding long gone.


Alex Zhang Hungtai takes a sense of displacement and an ear for eerie, stylized noirish sounds and creates something unique and refreshing.

Badlands

Dirty Beaches is Alex Zhang Hungtai, a Taiwan-born Canadian immigrant who spent a good chunk of his life feeling unmoored and adrift. "I don't really have a place where I can say I was born and raised," he told us last month. "For me, home is a collage of all these fractured landscapes that I try to piece together." This sense of displacement, combined with an ear for cinematic sounds-- particularly the eerie, stylized noir of David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino, and Wong Kar Wai-- fuels his work, which squeezes the sounds of early rock'n'roll and 1950s music through a lo-fi, distortion-drenched filter.
This set of influences, which extends to the minimal thrust of Suicide and the Cramps' manic rockabilly, feels unique, simply because it's been largely untouched by indie music during the past decade or so. Sure, there's been some casual dalliance between garage-pop and doo-wop, but we haven't really seen a lo-fi artist reach past the 60s to fully drape himself in such a dusty, road-weary atmosphere. Of course, mining a cool set of inspirations doesn't itself make for a good record. What Hungtai excels at, in addition to building evocative mood and atmosphere, is a sort of conceptual, film-like storytelling shot through the lens of these bygone eras of music.
Talking about Badlands in this clip, Hungtai said the album's songs explore "repeating themes, reoccurring characters being in exile or just away from home." So on each of the these tracks, which alternate between rumbling motorcycle punk and more plaintive ballads, you get this sense of man-on-the-road drama, a drifter going from town to town, dive bar to dive bar. The songs work in part because Hungtai has great command of his voice, moving easily from a hushed sing-speak to a throatier purr. A good example is the throbbing Lolita anthem "Sweet 17", where he shrieks and coos over a blown-out drumbeat and scraping reverb, making the track feel equally threatening and sexy.
Because the record relies quite a bit on aesthetic, it could start to feel same-y without tonal shifts, which is why Hungtai is wise to include the slower numbers. "True Blue" and "Lord Knows Best", a pair toward the end of the album, offer a druggy, somber counterpoint to the punchier stuff earlier on. Something like Everly Brothers-style solemn crooning recorded in a closet, both have this great death-prom vibe-- romantic and even pretty but with a healthy dose of evil. Two instrumental pieces that close out the record don't hold up quite as well, but ultimately what you get here is a refreshing take on the well-worn tropes of lo-fi-- raunchy, old-fashioned, and pompadoured, there's nothing else that sounds like this right now.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the influential New Zealand band’s 1992 masterpiece, a rambling double-disc totem of noise rock that expertly balances tight songs and long improvisations.

Harsh 70s Reality

In spring 1997, when the increasingly obtuse New Zealand trio the Dead C had been releasing records and tapes for about 10 years, Pavement appeared on the cover of Pulse!, formerly the in-house promotional arm of Tower Records. Pavement were promoting Brighten the Corners, an album that seemed designed to reengage a more mainstream crowd that had hopped on with the “Cut Your Hair” video in ’94 and hopped extremely off after Wowee Zowee. Inside the magazine, each member of Pavement provided a list of their 10 favorite albums. Steve Malkmus opened with the Groundhogs’ Thank Christ for the Bomb, a very necessary hunk of oddball British blues-rock. Right below it was the Dead C’s 1992 noisy, rambling masterpiece Harsh 70s Reality.
The early Pavement records pulled apart traditional songcraft and stapled it back together, covering hooks in gunk and fuzz, eschewing studio slickness for a looser sound and vibe. For a while there, the Dead C—the trio of guitarist Bruce Russell, guitarist Michael Morley, and drummer Robbie Yeats—did pretty much the same thing, often at even lower fidelity. And Pavement’s onetime label Drag City released records from Dead C’s first label, Xpressway, which took its own name from the Sonic Youth staple “Expressway to Yr Skull.” The bands seemed like distant cousins, as if the New Zealanders might get the younger act drunk at a family reunion and show them the magic of open tunings on a beat-to-hell acoustic guitar.
While Pavement quickly moved into more traditional studios and more traditional acceptance, the Dead C continued to mess with fans’ ears, their perception of time, and often their patience. The relative fidelity of the Dead C’s work seemed exactly matched to their aural goals, be it a rehearsal captured on a Sony Walkman WM-77, two-track, four-track or otherwise. The Dead C took the line between “live” and “studio,” sometimes a very formal division in the rock fan’s mind, and smudged it beyond recognition (their “live album” Clyma Est Mort, something of a companion piece to Harsh 70s Reality, was recorded live in front of one person). For longtime Dead C listeners, Malkmus’ appreciation for Harsh was understandable, laudable, and perfect.
From their start floating around the grotty 1980s New Zealand underground alongside Peter Jefferies, the incredible Plagal Grind, Alastair Galbraith, Dadamah, the Renderers, and many more, the trio took ideas from progressive and psychedelic rock, avant-garde improvisers such as AMM, minimalist composition, punk’s fuck-it stance, and Sonic Youth’s artier end. They made it into a collage and xeroxed it, zooming in and distorting the details with each pass. If fellow islanders the Clean lived inside the third Velvet Underground album, the Dead C built a summer shack in “Sister Ray” and stayed there year round.
From 1987 until about 1990, the period covered by such collections as the DR503 LP (released on Flying Nun and about as “out” as they got), the Perform DR503b cassette (alternate takes of the former), the EUSA Kills LP, the monstrous cassette-turned-CD Trapdoor Fucking Exit, and a few EPs, the band’s discography could charitably be called “annoying.” Various takes of key songs appear here and there on various tapes and albums, obliterating any notion of a definitive version. Albums appeared in the U.S. years after they appeared in NZ, with songs added and subtracted. Even devout fans got a little tired.
Harsh 70s Reality was the third Dead C recording to be released on Philadelphia’s Siltbreeze Records. Label owner Tom Lax first released the glorious 12" EP “Helen Said This”/“Bury.” The first song scans as one of the few breakup songs that actually sound like the time-as-molasses moments of internal chaos and distortion that accompany the end of a relationship; the flip side is a dignified rumble. Next, the mesmerizing single “Hell Is Now Love”/“Bone.” Then, Harsh 70s Reality, an old-school double album.
The CD version eliminated two songs, which, in retrospect, was both totally understandable and probably a mistake. It got hard to imagine in the 72-minute CD era that was the 1990s, but the double LP—by which I mean four sides running between slightly over an hour to 100 minutes—was once a major statement of purpose, an epic gesture, the moment a band expressed a worldview in as much detail as it saw fit.  The stacks of guitars, horns, and keyboards on Exile on Main Street took the Stones as deep into the heart of American blues as they cared to go, even if they cut it in France. The White Album found various combinations of Beatles putting everything from rock and folk to blues and avant-garde together in thrilling ways. Nobody has ever completely understood what is going on with the fractured tape experiments on Royal Trux’s Twin Infinitives, released two years before Harsh 70s Reality, but it remains a little scary to ingest.
Harsh 70s Reality was a double album in this same tradition, a massive dose of the muzzier songcraft mixed with the free-rock improvisation one usually associated with extremely high Germans in the ’70s, if one associated it with anything at all. It wasn't “noise rock”—that designation belonged to more structured acts releasing on labels like Touch and Go, AmRep, or Noiseville. This was something hazier, more mysterious, and far less aggressive.
Even for deep and nerdy fans, the Dead C’s first American tour in 1995 was a revelation, song form and improvisation jousting endlessly. Morley stood upright, every inch the guy who was charged with holding it all together, his vocal an occasional moan floating out of the chaos. Yeats’ beats were reasonably steady when it was called for, obtuse and skittering when it was not. But it was Russell everyone stared at. He treated his guitar almost like a nuisance: bending over into it, holding it by the body and waving it at the amp, pawing at the strings, doing everything other than play it conventionally.
The trick to Harsh 70s Reality is balance—between the rockers and the almighty zone-outs, between the tuneful bits and the parts that sound like a concrete saw. At the time, the Dead C could go in any direction, and after this record, they went in all of them, testing the limits of even their own audience. Their next few albums for Siltbreeze were increasingly “out there” but still occasionally engaged in the idea of writing songs. In 2000, the crew self-released The Dead C, a 128-minute double CD full of looped samples, restless electronic improvisations, a general sense of formlessness, and a 33-minute track called “SpeederBot.” As the band put it, “This is the hinge around which our career pivots…the Tascam porta-studio ceased to be our main technical mainstay, much of this was direct to open-reel two-track or digital video camera.”
I submit that the actual hinge in the Dead C’s career is Harsh 70s Reality. Russell has said the band stopped writing conventional songs around 1995. “We don’t have a theoretical rationale, we just do [it],” he said in a 2016 interview. “This dialectic is hard-wired into the trio. It is a product of our characters and our capabilities. Without that tension, there is no Dead C.” The album’s side-long opener, “Driver U.F.O.,” mixes a distant wind tunnel drone, clanging guitars, an oddly calming keyboard riff, voices perhaps, and tape scramble. It’s the sound of long-form confusion, a taste of where they were headed mixed with bits of where they’d been.
Kicking off side two is “Sky,” as conventional a rocker as appears on the record: driving strum und klang, one guitar a rusty screen door in the wind, another holding down some heavy buzz as Yeats bashes away, not so much holding a beat as smashing it into submission. Various voices wail “...to see the sky” and “I’ve got more important things to worry about.” This is the nature of the album: riffs (or, rather, repeated note-clusters) generally in the shape of songs. Yeats lays fractured triples on “Love” while the guitars technically sound clean but are also caked in gunk of varying flavors. “Suffer Bomb Damage,” with its acoustic intro, queasy keyboard, and giant-sounding distorted guitar, plays like the folk music of Tolkien-scale trolls, slightly intimidating for its simplicity.
The Dead C remain your favorite noise nerd’s favorite noise nerds. In 2009, TV on the Radio’s Kyp Malone told NPR that Trapdoor Fuckin Exit, itself a more semi-conventional song-album than not, was an all-time favorite. “They seemed so broken and messy to me when I first heard them,” he said. “But then early on when I was experimenting with psychedelics, one of their records was on heavy rotation at the apartment I was in… and I remember listening to it and having my mind really blown.” (Malone has been a member of the band Iran, which certainly owes a thing or two to the early Dead C.)
Harsh 70s Reality is one of the great psychedelic albums of its time in that it goes way out but it also lets you come down, the riffs akin to a guide talking you through a trip. In the 21st century, the band has abandoned songs for fully improvised pieces more akin to free jazz sessions than rock records. A generation of fans has grown up knowing them for full-on abstraction. “The process remains the same: We bottle the lightning as it strikes,” Russell has said. “You can’t plan that; you can only prepare.” On Harsh 70s, the Dead C balanced structure and lightning exactly right, as if they were throwing the bolts themselves.


A varied group of remixers tackles the Japanese composer’s 2017 album async, but despite a few standouts, the collection lacks the stark force of the original.

async remodels

Remix albums have a spotty track record. They are frequently promotional gambits aimed at illuminating the original artist in flattering light bounced off the hired talent. In the case of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s async remodels, the bar is set significantly higher. Sakamoto is one of electronic music’s living legends, a relentless innovator whose oeuvre winds through the synth pop of Yellow Magic Orchestra, glitching ambient experiments for Raster-Noton, Hollywood film scores, and music for the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. The original async followed a period of radiology treatment for throat cancer, and the album feels infused with the penetrating urgency of an artist facing his own mortality. remodels responds to this weightiness by assembling a multi-generational collection of composers, synth artists, and underground renegades, each of whom owes a debt to Sakamoto’s work. The musicians salute their forebear and the listeners survey the scope of his influence; the effect is not unlike a lifetime achievement award at the Oscars. And, as with such awards, the async remodels glitters with aspiration and emotion, and yet rings slightly hollow.
Let’s start with the good stuff: There are some excellent remixes on this album. The best are split between Sakamoto’s collaborators and younger artists with fresh perspectives. Alva Noto’s reimagining of “disintegration” bathes the original’s bristing severity in the spectral, hovering atmospherics and turn-of-the-millenium digital palette the duo is known for. Compared to their Satie-inflected 2002 outing Vrioon, this remix lunges with aggression. Similarly, Fennesz’s take on “solari” infuses the original with unabashed romanticism and gives it a ghostly, emptied out ending. Get yourself a nice pair of headphones and crank the volume—the insectoid water droplet pings at 2:20 move the track’s central theme from a roaring summit view to the depths of the sewers.
Elsewhere, Arca’s “async” is a lurching cyberpunk opera in which he sounds entirely at home. The original is barely perceptible in the fray of smeared vocals, ephemeral sound effects, and clipped trap drums. Yves Tumor, on the other hand, retains key elements of “ZURE” while framing it as an invocation. A woman’s voice, just out of earshot, whispers in the background: “You’re so much stronger than you think you are right now.” Many of these remixes aim for haunting, but only Tumor’s sounds properly haunted.
S U R V I V E’s contribution is the lone dud: a half-baked wash of synth textures and unearned bombast. The rest simply struggle to cohere, or cohere a little too much. Across these mixes there’s a surprising uniformity of tone and timbre, a kind of austere grandeur with lots of high end reverb trails, big percussion hits, and a sense of frozen futurism. Sakamoto glided across genres and eras with an ease rarely seen in artists not named Brian Eno, yet only Electric Youth’s gently driving remix of “andata” nods to Sakamoto’s pop side. Another quality the duo’s track doesn’t share with the rest: It’s the sole entry to feature a woman in a producer’s chair. In 2018’s musical landscape, surely Laurel Halo, Holly Herndon, Suzanne Ciani, Fatima Al Qadiri, Elysia Crampton, Nkisi, Pan Daijing, Pharmakon, Jlin, and Stellar OM Source—just a few of the women operating prominently at the forefront of experimental electronic music whose signatures dovetail with the styles explored here—weren’t all unavailable.
Toggling between async and remodels, it’s hard to miss the contrast between the stark force of the original and the restrained reverence of its follow-up. Sakamoto is one of the greats. Here he’s surrounded by an exemplary cast, including many artists groundbreaking in their own right. But remodels isn’t an album made by a master confronting life’s most unfathomable inevitability. And without that, it’s not quite sure what it wants to be. Though worthy, at times enjoyable, and well-intentioned, as a standalone work it’s uneven and hemmed in. Its greatest tribute will be to lead listeners back to the source.


Five albums in and another awesome, absolutely pummeling record of tough, fast stoner metal from Matt Pike and co.

Snakes for the Divine

High on Fire make burly music; that's the only thing you can really call it. The Oakland power trio's thundering roar isn't dumb; there's a clear technical virtuosity on display in Matt Pike's squiddling solos, and the songs move confidently through multiple riffs and movements without ever relying on time-tested verse-chorus-verse formatting or compromising their brutality. But there is something elemental about their assault. While peers like Mastodon construct overthought concept albums, High on Fire do one thing, and they do it very well. They pummel. Matt Pike growls out his badass nonsense lyrics like a more gnarled Lemmy, if that's even possible, and rips out one gut-busting riff and shattering solo after another. His rhythm section does their best to imitate an elephant stampede. Their basic format might vary a bit over the course of an album; they're not averse to floridly acoustic intros or eastern-tinged psych moments. But their fundamental mission won't ever change. They make tough, fast, snarly stoner metal. It's just what they do.
Snakes for the Divine is the band's fifth album. For this one, they've decamped from the venerable metal indie Relapse to the way-less-venerable indie E1. On their previous two efforts, the band worked with legendary scuzz-rock producers (Steve Albini on 2005's Blessed Black Wings, Jack Endino on 2007's Death Is This Communion). On this one, they switch things up a bit, working with Greg Fidelman, who produced Slayer's 2009 comeback album, World Painted Blood, and worked on a whole mess of recent Rick Rubin projects. Fidelman's not as natural a fit for High on Fire as Albini or Endino, and the very, very slight sheen he brings to the proceedings doesn't do them any favors. The drums don't wallop quite as hard, and Pike's guitar doesn't sound quite as much like the sound of a swamp demon bellowing. But Fidelman's smart enough to keep his tweaks from interfering much, and the band's apocalyptic fury sounds undiminished even after the last masterful two albums.
And High on Fire aren't in any danger of losing their punch. They've gone through a few bassists now, but over the years they've developed the sort of telepathic alchemy that defines a great power trio. When one of their eight-minute tracks pauses for a split second, your heart leaps because you just know they're about to rip into yet another totally flattening new riff. Their songs don't really bother much with earthly concerns. "Ghost Neck", which I think is about some sort of junkie, contains the following unparseable line: "Overdosing on the mutual garbage/ Skeleton in the end unfolds". If I had to guess, I'd say the awesomely named "Frost Hammer" was about some sort of invasion of winter gods, but the song's highlight comes when Pike just screams the title four times. High on Fire are the sort of band who put devils or skulls or snake-demon ladies on their album covers just because those things are awesome, not because they illustrate any larger cultural point. And five albums in, they're very, very good at generating awesome on demand.
A couple of songs here, "Bastard Samurai" and "How Dark We Pray", do awesome better than the rest by slowing down the band's galloping tempo and letting their riffs breathe. Pike already did slow to perfection in his previous band, doom-metal legends Sleep, and these two songs don't sound much like Sleep. They pull all the same tricks as the fastest HOF ragers; they just pull them slower. "Bastard Samurai" locks into a brontosaurus stomp, letting Pike actually sing on the verses, building up to a climactic roar instead of just hitting with that roar straight in. (And when he does finally roar, the lyric is this: "Son of a bitch will bleed a whiiiiiiile!" It's so badass.) On "How Dark We Pray", bassist Jeff Matz gets enough room to add some melodic flourishes instead of just crunch, and the song builds up a serious head of steam over its eight minutes.
But even though those two tracks may be highlights, the album really has no weak moments. Like the other HOF full-lengths before it, Snakes for the Divine shows that metal, in its most basic and elemental forms, still has plenty of visceral thrill left in it-- as long as it's done right. And High on Fire do it right.


The Bronx-born pop star expands his musical empire on Golden. But for the all the album’s myriad sounds, its roots are firmly planted in bachata, the sounds of the campo.

Golden

The concept of a crossover star in the “Latin” music industry is more than just a bit icky. Whenever a Spanish-speaking crooner or pop star rises to the point of ubiquity in Latin America, they’re expected—mostly by ravenous music executives with pesos in their eyes—to crossover into the Anglo music market with an English-speaking album. It’s a model that proved wildly successful for a handful of artists in the late ’90s/early ’00s, with breakout hit records from Ricky Martin, Shakira, and Marc Anthony recorded in English with Anglo producers.
Romeo Santos’ path to becoming arguably the biggest Latin pop star of the moment is not without precedent. The Bronx-born son of Dominican and Puerto Rican immigrants first made a name for himself fusing bachata with pop music as the lead singer of Aventura, not unlike Martin’s rise fronting the boy band Menudo. Anthony (who himself got his start singing backup on Menudo records) had dabbled in fusing salsa, hip-hop, and house music with Little Louie Vega before fully embracing his salsa roots.
But this is where their paths diverge. Though it’s still quite early in his solo career, Santos has shown no signs of crossing over in the traditional sense. His latest album, Golden, is a bachata record that fuses various styles and sounds, from bossa nova (“El Papel, Pt. 1 (Versión Amante)”) to hip-hop, doo-wop (“Un Vuelo A LA”), and even Puerto Rican reggaetón (“Bella y Sensual”) and jibaro. Even when he makes a nod to new English-speaking fans (“I’ve been doing this a while/Put in work and traveling miles”) with a hip-pop intro co-written by Ne-Yo, he closes it out with a verse in Spanish. The pan-Latin Spanglish vibes of Santos’ work feels representative of his home borough of the Bronx, where all of these sounds co-exist, where Dominican dembow lives next to Colombian reggaetón, and your tio’s salsa shares space with abuelo’s merengue. But for the all the myriad sounds Golden pulls from, its roots are firmly planted in bachata, the sounds of the campo.
Bachata, an oft-maligned genre born in the Dominican Republic, has long been associated with the country’s poor rural classes. Rooted in romance, early bachata evolved from the slower Cuban bolero style, a raw, personal counterpart to the longstanding tradition of merengue orchestras. The sound is defined by a requinto lead (a smaller acoustic guitar with a higher pitch), and a segunda rhythm guitar, with a rhythm section dominated by the bass guitar and high-pitched drums like bongos or a tambora, and maracas or a guira. Los blanquitos, the Dominican Republic’s white upper class, looked down on the music—and the parties where it would be played—a sentiment not improved by the evolution of bachata into dance music, which often strayed from romance to raunch, both on the floor and in the lyrics. But even as Dominican radio and television ignored emerging bachata stars in the homeland, its popularity exploded across Latin America and the barrios across the U.S.: Look no further than the runaway success of Aventura in the early aughts.
Latin stars have often been used to spice up otherwise staid pop tracks, exploitative relationships that often serve the interests of the English-speaking star more than anything else. Santos hasn’t shied away from collaborations with such artists, but there’s a big difference: They come to him. When Santos and Usher go toe-to-toe with dueling falsettos on his solo debut Fórmula, Vol. 1, it’s on a bachata song (“Promise”); when Drake courted him on Nothing Was the Same with his line “Spanish girls love me like I’m Aventura,” the resulting collaboration saw Drake singing—in Spanish!—on Fórmula, Vol. 2’s “Odio”. And while the dogshit guest verses that Lil Wayne (“All Aboard”) and Nicki Minaj (“Animales”) contributed to early records may have been throwaways, it’s telling that they were the features, and not the other way around. On Golden, the two Americans featured strictly play the background; Swizz drops some Beatz on “Premio,” Santos’ ballad to his skills of seduction, and while Ne-Yo’s fingerprints are all over the “Golden Intro,” his voice is not. Such is the gravity of Santos’ orbit that when he collaborates with English-speaking artists, they’re the ones doing the assimilating.
Even Spanish-speaking stars are drawn in. Golden features Juan Luis Guerra (“Carmín”), the Dominican superstar who dabbled in several genres but is credited with helping bring bachata to the mainstream, and Julio Iglesias, the Spanish croon-quistador who unwittingly collaborated on Golden’s ode to a man’s best friend…his penis (“El Amigo”). Instant classics like “Ay Bendito” are the kind of jams that bring both adolescents and octogenarians out to the dancefloor at the quinceñera. If Santos is doing any sort of crossing over, this is what it looks like; bridging generations and the various cultures of the Latin diaspora, getting los blanquitos in Santo Domingo to shell out fat stacks of cash to see and hear the music of the campo, and selling out Madison Square Garden and Yankee Stadium.
Santos recently told Rolling Stone that the idea that a Latin star needs to cut an English-speaking record to crossover is a “misconception,” one proved wrong by the runaway success of Luis Fonsi & Daddy Yankee’s summer smash “Despacito” (a remix saw Justin Beiber try on one of Fonsi’s Spanish verses on for size). “I sold out two Yankee Stadiums and all of my hits are in Spanish, and they’re bachata,” he said. “That's a sign that you don’t have to do that. The number one song in the world is a reggaetón called ‘Despacito’ and that’s beautiful.”
“Despacito” proves that Spanish language music is palatable for the mainstream, but we’ve yet to see a global superstar singing in Spanish be fully embraced by the mainstream as anything other than a novelty. Santos’ considerable vocal talents are often tempered by his undeniably corny “Romeo” persona, but the artifice only seems to endear him to his fans even more. On Golden, we see the embodiment of what makes him special; un bachatero with a healthy respect for the working-class roots of the genre, unafraid to pull in influences from across Latinidad. And while Ricky Martin-levels of crossover success might not be realistic for Santos (or bachata), when Santos can flirt with selling a million copies (Formula, Vol. 2) and sell out stadiums throughout the Americas, all while staying true to himself and the fans that propelled him to stardom—does it even matter?


A$AP Mob’s latest group effort features RZA, Frank Ocean, Chief Keef, Quavo and more, but the Mob’s energy and skill are consistently eclipsed by that of their guests.

Cozy Tapes Vol. 2: Too Cozy

From the start, the members of the A$AP Mob have worn their influences and ambitions on their sleeves. They’ve name-dropped Dipset, No Limit, Ruff Ryders, and the Wu-Tang Clan, rap crews that managed to project unity while leveraging each member’s individual strengths. Initially, the A$AP Mob seemed poised to join those ranks, quickly establishing its two most charismatic members, A$AP Rocky and A$AP Ferg, as solo stars. However, they’ve since come up short during group outings, failing to expand their influence over rap culture at large. The first A$AP Mob mixtape, 2012’s Lord$ Never Worry, showed that most of its rappers were still unseasoned. By the release of Cozy Tapes Vol. 1: Friends in 2016, the Mob became far more compelling, leaning heavily on Rocky, Ferg, and a handful of guests, instead of shining a light on their lesser-known members.
Style remains a primary concern for the group. Like its predecessor, Vol. 2 opens with a fashion critique (this time by an Instagram meme guy). On the tracks that follow, the production is consistently on-trend, though much of it feels timid and generic compared that of earlier Mob releases. “Perry Aye” feels like a joyless retread of Rocky’s 2011 swag rap sound: a syrupy melody that evokes Future’s “March Madness” played at half speed, a pitched-down spoken-word chorus courtesy of Jaden Smith, unremarkable verses from A$AP Nast, Rocky, and Playboi Carti. On “Blowin’ Minds (Skateboard),” Pi’erre Bourne (the producer behind Carti’s breakout hit “Magnolia”) turns in a cookie-cutter flute-rap instrumental while Chief Keef sleepwalks his way through a marble-mouthed hook. The plunky, dismissive “Please Shut Up,” tries to clear space for the A$AP Mob. But what does Rocky have to tell us? “Living room full of way too many valuables.” At least Gucci Mane manages to get in a few punch lines (“Gucci Mane and A$AP Rocky, I got such a rocky wrist”), his newfound charm providing a bright spot during the tape’s dull first third.
Vol. 2 does fare a bit better as it progresses, with more interesting beats that coax stronger performances out of the Mob and their guests. “Bahamas” sounds like a spaceship struggling to lift off, a perfect match for Lil Yachty’s gleefully surreal lyrics (“I done count multiple commas/We brought in multiple llamas”). “Frat Rules” is as conceptually insufferable as it sounds, though it’s hard to deny Rocky and Big Sean’s chemistry as they trade conquest stories like two keg-pumping Casanovas. Rocky’s show-stopping staccato verse on “Get the Bag” is easily the tape's best and demonstrates that as a rapper, he still leads his pack. Enjoying a moment in the spotlight, A$AP Ant and A$AP Twelvyy do most of the heavy lifting on the crystalline “FYBR (First Year Being Rich),” while the latter gets to show off his breathless flow at length on the icy “Coziest.”
Also just like its predecessor, Vol. 2 closes with a star-studded posse cut. “RAF” drips with excess: Rocky appears alongside Quavo, Carti, Lil Uzi Vert, and not one but two Frank Ocean verses, while the video features the gang modeling runway clothes from Belgian designer Raf Simons’ archives. And yet, “RAF” never feels quite as dynamic as “What Happens,” a raunchy crew cut in the mold of Wu-Tang’s “Dog Shit.” Capturing the freewheeling energy of a cypher, “RAF” finds each rapper vying to bend the listener’s ear, by approaching the beat with a unique texture and flow. Notably, Rocky’s verse is among the least interesting here.
It’s hard not to wonder if the absence of Mob mastermind A$AP Yams, who died in 2015, has something to do with the lack of energy and focus on display throughout most of Cozy Tapes Vol. 2. Where A$AP Mob’s early releases were guided by a clear vision and unifying aesthetic, everyone here is content to follow rap’s reigning trends rather than lead them, a surprising capitulation from what was once New York’s most ambitious hip-hop crew. “I said, ‘I want all of y’all to get on this bus. And be passengers,” RZA told NPR in 2013, describing an early attempt to enlist his band members in Wu-Tang’s barnstorming of hip-hop radio. “And I’m the driver. And nobody can ask me where we going.” A$AP Mob’s bus has never had more passengers aboard: Mob members, magnetic guests, well-wishers and hangers on. And yet, the driver’s absence has never been more deeply felt.

A$AP Worldwide / Polo Grounds Music / RCA


Following in the path of his label-mates Skee Mask and the Zenker Brothers, the Italian producer’s debut album continues to provide a loose-limbed counterargument to more rigid strains of techno.

Upsurge

The celebrated techno label Ilian Tape doesn’t actually release all that much techno—at least not in the traditional sense. Founded in 2007 by brothers Dario and Marco Zenker and centered on a small crew of producers, the Munich imprint has always been something of an outlier, a loose-limbed counterargument to the rigid industrial stomp that characterizes so much Berlin techno. For Ilian Tape, broken beats have long been the norm, and in recent years, the label’s path has diverged even further by embracing the sounds of the UK hardcore continuum. Swinging garage rhythms, dubstep bass weight, ’90s rave breaks, brain-rattling jungle—it’s all become part of the Ilian Tape formula.
Few artists have embodied this ethos more than Skee Mask, the longtime Ilian Tape contributor behind beloved, genre-melding albums Shred and Compro. Before last month, only he and the Zenker Brothers had released full-lengths on the label, but they’re now joined by Italian producer Stenny. Part of the Ilian Tape roster since 2012 and based in Munich since 2014, he has been sparing with his output, generally releasing no more than one EP per year.
In 2019, however, he’s upped his game. Back in May, he released Stress Test, an EP whose title track paired skippy 2-step garage with menacing synths and the same sort of thick, syrupy basslines that powered old DMZ records. It’s been one of the year’s biggest tunes. Now, he’s followed that up with Upsurge, his debut album, which includes some similarly sharp club heaters. With its crunchy electro rhythm and seriously brawny bassline, the insistent “Swordfish” is likely the toughest—and best—of the lot, while “BFRB” combines a nimble drum attack with a booming low end that hits like a sledgehammer to the chest. The moody “Psygraph” ramps up the tempo even further, unleashing a fervent jungle beat amid a lingering fog of diaphanous atmospherics, and the drum’n’bass calisthenics continue on “Fast Fade,” its slinky purple melodies shimmering like a sportscar on a moonlit night.
Yet despite this cluster of club-friendly fare, Upsurge frequently operates outside the strict confines of the dancefloor. After years of crafting jagged techno, Stenny has elected to showcase his softer side; large swaths of the record feel notably pensive. Album opener “Water Maze” is a wide-eyed ambient number, its lush environs and colorful synth blossoms tempered by the sound of light rain. Darker but similarly introspective is “Sensitive Habitat,” which keeps its head down as a melancholy drone hovers amid rapid-fire percussion. In contrast, the tranquil “Dew” looks skyward, its twinkling melodies and wafting woodwinds conjuring images of remote Asian monasteries.
There’s a wondrous quality to Upsurge that frequently harkens back to the clumsily named post-dubstep sound that redefined the UK’s electronic-music landscape a decade ago. With his predilection for dreamily glowing melodies and stuttering rhythms, Stenny does occasionally seem to be channeling the early work of artists like Joy Orbison and Mount Kimbie; a song like “Blind Corners” could easily have been released on Hotflush back in 2010. Yet it would be unfair to describe this warm, delicately textured album as a nostalgia exercise. A big part of what made post-dubstep so exciting was its willingness to experiment; producers raised on garage, dubstep, jungle, and other bass-centric sounds expanded their vision, pulling from house, techno, ambient, R&B, IDM, and whatever else they could find while crafting new, mutant forms of electronic music. Stenny, like the rest of his label-mates, has taken the same hybrid approach, only with techno as a starting point. Ilian Tape’s evolution has been gradual, but few outfits outside of the UK have so constructively engaged with the hardcore continuum without falling into shallow mimicry.
Techno has always been rooted in notions of futurism, yet the music itself has often proven to be rather rigid. As recently as a few years ago, the thought of an artist like Stenny dabbling in drum’n’bass would have seemed almost unthinkable, but now, songs like the playful “Whyrl” and the brooding “Cursed” feel like natural extensions of his sound. Things are changing, and Upsurge is an impressive document of Stenny’s ability to flout genre boundaries while delivering introspective and highly personal music. Slowly but surely, techno is moving into the future—even if it doesn’t necessarily sound like techno anymore.


On his debut mixtape, the Interpol frontman doesn't sing or rap, and there's little to suggest his background in a post-punk band. Talib Kweli and El-P turn in a couple of legit verses, but in general, Everybody on My Dick feels intended to spark a brief moment of internet incredulity.

Paul Banks: Everybody on My Dick Like They Supposed to Be

This review began with me typing the words "Paul Banks" into the Datpiff search bar. If I got nothing else out of Everybody on My Dick Like They Supposed to Be, a rap mixtape from the lead singer of Interpol, I will always have that moment. Scrolling to the comments out of sheer curiosity, I came across one user’s eloquent plea: "stop gentrifying datpiff, white ppl." I sat with that a minute. Then I downloaded Paul Banks' mixtape anyway.
As I listened, the weariness of this tiny protest stuck with me; from its rib-jab of a title on down, Everybody on My Dick Like They Supposed to Be feels intended to spark a quick instance of internet incredulity: a ripple of WTFs in your timeline, a few dumb jokes in comments sections (a favorite being "Obstacle 1: Deez Nutz"). Whenever rock artists start fucking around with rap music, eyebrows raise, with good reason, and the prospect of Paul Banks rapping, with his dour, stentorian moan and deathlessly quotable lyrics, struck me as especially comical. Despite myself, I was nagged by faint curiosities: Would he dare to actually rap? If so, would his lyrics be as clumsy and clueless as this tape’s title? Would he drop mad science? And would any of this be remotely salvageable?
The answers to my low-stakes queries were all variations on "no." No, Banks doesn't sing or rap, and no, none of this is remotely salvageable. Everybody on My Dick mainly consists of Banks’ own beats and instrumentals, which are indistinguishable from most of the ones you hear on YouTube made by well-meaning college sophomores. They're littered with the canned synth pads and stock drum sounds of someone who hasn't spent much time or money on equipment, and the vocal samples strewn throughout lack imagination, to put it gently. "Iron Mike" samples the same old Tyson snippet ("I'm Alexander! He's no Alexander!") that's been used in more than one million rap songs to date (rough estimate). Clips from Miller's Crossing and Robocop float past, signifying zero. They aren't appealingly rudimentary, like Zaytoven or Young Chop; they're just rudimentary. Nowhere on this tape do you sense that Paul Banks actually has a feel for rap instrumentals, let alone a sense of how to make a good one.
And still, he managed to corral co-signs from two legit collaborators. Talib Kweli wanders in on "What's in the Box" (the title is, I'm guessing, a Se7en reference) and drops a hot line where no one is guaranteed to find it: "Fuck the opinion of these celebrities, including me/ They ain't doing me like Jane Fonda in the 70s." El-P also shows up on "Quite Enough" with a vivid, allusive, poorly recorded verse. To Banks’ credit, "Trace", with High Prizm, has a catchy, stabbing piano line, and there’s one pretty little synth sketch ("Show You My Footage") that doesn't sound like a rap song at all and which could almost be something. But there is no effort, vision, or craft in this music. The title and artwork were more than enough; the mp3s don’t even need to exist.


Anchored by a punishing and timely take on Neil Young’s “Southern Man,” this unexpected covers collection finds the audacious Southern band cutting loose.

Inter Arma: Garbers Days Revisited

Summer 2020 is just not the time for a new Inter Arma album. During the last decade, the proudly complicated metal-etcetera quintet have made increasingly sophisticated, even confounding records, turning Odyssean tales into hour-long sagas. Their 2013 breakthrough, Sky Burial, was a brilliant manifesto from Richmond dudes who seemed to embrace Emperor, Skynyrd, and Pink Floyd in equal measure. But last year’s dauntless Sulphur English beat those icons into submission, shaping an inverted symphony of menacingly psychedelic doom and death metal. Listening to Inter Arma’s later albums is like running some labyrinthine gauntlet that may never end—and loving the feeling of finding out. But how many more tests of will do you need right now?
Instead, right on time, Inter Arma have returned with a welcome jolt of largely carefree relief—Garbers Days Revisited, a reverent and riotous collection of eight covers that’s playfully named for a polarizing Metallica landmark and their own fabled Richmond practice space. Inter Arma’s enthusiasm for a good cover is an enduring, endearing feature. They’ve taken on “Fortunate Son” and “Creeping Death” for the hometown crowd, done surprise sets of punk standards, and often teased “Hot for Teacher.” Their records, after all, are testaments to musical erudition, gyres of splintered genres made possible by ecumenical listening. For Garbers Days Revisited (and unlike Metallica), they steer clear of the relatively obscure or rather recent, cutting a wide path through familiar territory—from Ministry to Tom Petty, from Nine Inch Nails to, yes, Prince.
Most of these takes are pure fun, gleeful selections from a collective jukebox. Inter Arma bound through Cro-Mags’ anti-conformity anthem “Hard Times” as if reciting secular scripture memorized as wild kids, shouting out the chorus like they’re singing to the stereo. They prowl through Venom’s “In League with Satan” with devilish relish, using sinister effects to suggest they’re still trolling parents after all these years. “Runnin’ Down a Dream” scans as the allegiant work of the world’s best bar band.
Even when they’re reinventing a song, this mutual esprit is clear. Hüsker Dü’s “The Girl Who Lives on Heaven Hill” is surprisingly apt fodder for their black metal churn. They race through Grant Hart’s youthful ode to the tatterdemalion he loves, smearing the narrative details until only the adolescent exuberance remains. It’s the same guileless feeling that will make you wish the guitar heroics of “Purple Rain,” the record’s loving and lumbering finale, lasted forever—or at least as long as other Inter Arma albums.
The scale of Inter Arma’s music has often subsumed their lyrical ambitions, crowding out the tales of conquest, reckoning, fear, and forgiveness that have anchored their last two records. The cri de cœur of 2016’s Paradise Gallows was to overthrow “those men who wish to exalt themselves/as gods,” though you’d be excused for overlooking it amid the glorious commotion. These covers let them clear up any lingering questions. Their faithful take on Ministry’s “Scarecrow” fortifies the original with a belligerent swing endemic to Southern metal; the opener, it feels like walk-up music for fending off what Al Jourgensen decried as the “rotting corpse of inhumanity.” Their breathless race through “March of the Pigs” picks a similar fight—that is, how to survive a world content to use you for spare parts. (Bonus: Hearing a band as meticulous as Inter Arma approximate these abrupt changes is a stark reminder of how deeply disorienting the Nine Inch Nails hit remains.)
But nothing here is as powerful, convincing, or urgent as Inter Arma’s cover of Neil Young’s “Southern Man,” a song released in 1970 after a feverish decade of civil rights struggles in the face of racist white obduracy. It begins as a country-rock ballad, all maudlin harmonies and strummed acoustics. That’s a feint for the doom and black metal surges that follow, with Mike Paparo screaming the lyrics over blast beats as if delivering Inter Arma’s final commandments.
Garbers Days Revisited transcends novelty status here, reconnecting not only to Inter Arma’s past but to our present. After Young and Lynyrd Skynyrd clashed over their respective regional diss tracks half a century ago, they played nice, becoming buddies who wore one other’s T-shirts and swapped demos. Inter Arma offer no such quarter. These are native Southern sons, railing against their kind with tragically current charges. As the cavalcade of Confederate statues in Inter Arma’s hometown come down, maybe “Southern change,” as Young put it so long ago, “is gonna come at last.” It would be wonderful to hear “Southern Man” someday as a relic and not, again, as contemporary rallying cry.

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After abandoning leftfield disco for a more eclectic brand of weirdness a decade ago, the producer revisits the space disco sounds that made him one of Norway’s original house innovators.

Byen

A 2012 single from the mischievous Scandinavian dance label Sex Tags Mania came packaged with a shout-out: A message on the label of the 12" read, “Dedicated to Erot and Torske for giving Norway a true HOUSE era!” It was no exaggeration. At the turn of the millennium, in a country with no dance music tradition to call its own, Tore Andreas “Erot” Kroknes and Bjørn Torske hit upon a disco-indebted sound that would influence a wide range of their countrymen, from Röyksopp to Cashmere Cat, Annie to Todd Terje. Erot, who produced Annie’s breakout single “The Greatest Hit,” might have become a household name had he not tragically passed away in 2001, at just 23. For the better part of this century, Torske has turned his attention from leftfield disco to plain ol’ leftfield weirdness, as evidenced by the catholic giddiness of 2010’s Kokning and alien gurgle of his 2013 KokEP.
After more than a decade up in the clouds, Torske has slowly come down to the dancefloor again with a string of bristling percussion workouts for Sex Tags as well as the Oslo label Smalltown Supersound. Byen marks his first solo album in eight years and his first record in ages to wholeheartedly embrace the space-disco sound he helped pioneer. But instead of crisp disco drums and claps that would immediately show his hand, what beguiles on Byen is Torske’s gentle way with other instruments. His keys shimmer on “First Movement,” drifting along with a walking bassline, then playfully flitting around the hand drums to give the track the feel of a spiritual jazz number until it slowly gives way to crashing waves and seagulls.
These mellow sounds usher in the contemplative opening of “Clean Air”; for a moment, it seems like Torske might be venturing even deeper into ambient territory. But a bass throb, a conga beat, and a hi-hat pattern perk up after about a minute, and the track struts towards the stratosphere. This is the kind of streamlined space-disco beauty that Torske helped to export in the early 2000s, but “Clean Air” ascends beyond even those heights, as slowly unfurling piano fills and electric keyboard solos cast a pensive mood over the groove. It’s a rare composition that’s suited for both the club and for wistful daydreaming.
Byen’s biggest surprise is not the range of sounds Torske brings in (fans of his previous efforts know eclecticism is his métier) so much as the fact that he remains firmly planted on the dancefloor throughout the whole album. Most of its tracks are DJ-friendly epics that hover around the eight-minute mark, perfect for unfurling slowly within a set. “Chord Control” offers some gentle deep house moments, and “Gata” harkens back to the heady early days of Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas, finding a sweet spot between prog, Italo, and moon-booted disco. But just when the track seems headed for deep space, Torske introduces some out-of-place chanting that starts to drag down the mood.
Recent singles like 2016’s “Fuglekongen” and this year’s “Kickrock” signaled that Torske was returning to dance music: Both featured meatier drums and psychedelic touches that imparted dancefloor dizziness. But Byen feels a little safe and complacent by comparison. Perhaps because he has spent the past decade upending his listeners’ expectations, this largely successful attempt to string together a cohesive set of nu-disco tracks has the odd effect of making him seem kind of predictable.
Although Byen came out of a recent burst of inspiration, with all seven tracks dating back to last year, its 11-minute centerpiece, “Night Call,” sounds like it could have been crafted at almost any point in Torske’s 20-year career. It’s a nimble disco number, full of relentless drums, rubber-band bass, spacey synths, clean guitar strokes, and jungle calls that resemble the cheeky disco and house edits that helped put Norway on the dance music map in the early aughts. Byen might be a decade removed from the form’s peak, and it might not break much new ground, but it does mark a welcome return to space disco for its creator. After years of wandering in the weeds, the idiosyncratic Torske has rediscovered his old path—yet he remains proudly out of step.


Bobby Krlic (aka the Haxan Cloak) scores Ari Aster’s nightmarish new film Midsommar, and the result is transfixing, gorgeous, and terrifying at once.

Midsommar (Original Score)

Bobby Krlic has been crafting ominous, atmospheric work as the Haxan Cloak for ten years, so it’s no surprise his first stab at a horror-film score is so masterful. The director Ari Aster listened to Krlic’s music while writing the script for Midsommar, his follow-up to last year’s brilliant, slow-burning psychological horror breakout Hereditary. Aster decided who better to write the soundtrack than his muse, and the result is transfixing, gorgeous, and terrifying at once. Even without the film, Krlic’s revelatory work stands on its own.
The plot of Midsommar centers on a group of bros who visits remote Scandinavia for a variety of reasons: Pelle is visiting his home village; Josh wants to get some thesis research done; Mark wants to meet women, and Christian is just trying to figure his shit out. Christian has also invited his girlfriend Dani, who has recently suffered a horrible tragedy, in an attempt to repair their relationship, which is hanging by a thread. Whereas Hereditary began in relative mundanity before its plunge into hell, Midsommar throws us into a deranged folk tale within its first fifteen minutes and never lets up for the ensuing two-plus hours. Krlic’s score alternately offers the relief and turns the screws.
The film opens with colorful hand-drawn folkloric images coupled with Krlic’s cheery and romantic “Prophecy.” The piece is a breath of fresh air with cherubic vocals and harp strums—music straight from Disney version of Snow White. It’s the perfect tone for a film in which the hand-stitched floral costumes are just as bright and stunning as the blood that is ultimately shed. During “Gassed,” which accompanies one of the film’s most disturbing scenes, strings cry like nails on a chalkboard, sobs of agony collide with aching violins. Krlic’s drastic tone shifts map precisely onto Aster’s story, but they are just as dramatic on their own.
There’s a sinister aspect to Aster’s choice of setting during the midnight sun. Evil doesn’t come from the shadows; it walks out into the blazing light, rendering the ensuing murder and chaos no more comprehensible. Even though darkness can be terrifying, the routine of day and night provides its own comfort. At first, Krlic’s soundtrack captures the instinctive panic that comes with the upset of environmental and cultural norms. But as Aster’s characters grow acclimated to their new surroundings, he relieves us with symphonic moments of clarity (“The Blessing”) and triumph. “Fire Temple” is his exquisite farewell with strings that writhe with sorrow, with intensity, with relief. In life or death, none of these emotions are exclusive, and Krlic’s work continually reminds us that it’s all one tremendous grey area.


On its fifth, most-engaging album, the duo create biographical "sound portraits" of historically and culturally important gay figures, which incorporate details relevant to a particular person's life or practice.

Matmos: The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast

Matmos lugged a rat cage to a recent Whitney concert so they could play "For Felix (and all the Rats)". Afterward, Drew Daniel mentioned it increased shipping costs exponentially. So then, why bring it? Well, it's a lovely piece. Plus, people are almost as interested in how the San Francisco duo create its sound as what it sounds like: A bowed-cage as symphony offers a sumptuous visual. Using anything from a crayfish's nerve tissue to a cow's reproductive tract, Daniel (who is, we must add, a staff writer for this website) and M.C. Schmidt utilize digital-age musique concrète to create tunefully fractured electronic music.
After giving nose jobs on A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure and providing backbeats to the war between the States on The Civil War, Matmos returns with their fifth, most-engaging full-length, The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast. These 10 works are described as biographical "sound portraits" of historically and culturally important gay figures, which incorporate details relevant to a particular person's life or practice. Displaying a continued mastery of their craft, the songs not only live up to the concepts behind them, they could easily exist without them. But because the theme is there, elaborate packaging offers a different cover image for each icon: Visual portraits of the subjects drawn, sketched, constructed, or painted by Dan Clowes, Jason Mecier, graphic designer Rex Ray, Michael Bernard Loggins, and others.
How's it all work? Well, consider "Rag for William S. Burroughs". The author's family accrued its wealth from the Burroughs Adding Machine Company (later, the Burroughs Corporation), based around his grandfather's invention. After grandpa's death, the company introduced the Burroughs typewriter. Various machines also show up as a central image in Burroughs' work; most famously, typewriters in the nonlinear, hallucinogenic masterpiece, Naked Lunch. The track swivels on a percussive adding machine and the clickity-clack of typists. The ragtime vibe? Burroughs was born in St. Louis, where Scott Joplin, the "father of ragtime," wrote a few of his most famous compositions. At just under 14 minutes, its Mugwump stylings go from Futurist machinations to swingy, piano-based saloon ramble, and then psyched-out hand-drummed raga. A question remains: What are the typists spelling?
Each track is just as thematically tight-- scored and curated to the smallest detail. "Snails and Lasers for Patricia Highsmith" uses the mystery writer's snail obsession-- she supposedly kept hundreds of them as pets, and she wrote about them in works like the short story, "The Snail-Watcher"-- as the slimy composers of that piece. The technique: A laser was pointed at a light-sensitive theremin; snails were let loose within the theremin's range, fucking with its pitch. The result is an ominous, hard-boiled brushed jazz piece accented with what sounds like a harpsichord flourish. It eventually turns into a bleakly paranoid theremin landscape as the snails frolic in slow motion.
One of the poppier productions is "Solo Buttons For Joe Meek", a crisp 1960s surf-rock anthem on which the Kronos Quartet add a layer of melancholic strings to the song's space-age bachelor joyousness. By track's end, summertime fun recedes in favor of the elegantly funereal. Joe Meek? He was a tone deaf, dyslexic 60s British record producer known in part for his quirky, deftly produced instrumental works-- sometimes fleshed out with space-age effects. He killed his landlady and then himself in 1967; the track manages to score the entire trajectory of his too-brief life.
The scraping, mechanical "Roses and Teeth for Ludwig Wittgenstein" is the most traditional bit of musique concrète here. Perhaps the oddest (most obviously brainy) tracks on the album, it's offered up to the complex Austrian philosopher, focusing on a conundrum paragraph from his "Philosophical Investigations" read by Björk and the composers Laetitia Sonami and Marcus Schmickler, among others. Wittgenstein sets it up more elegantly, but after stating that "A new-born child has no teeth. A goose has no teeth. A rose has no teeth," he supposes what would happen if a cow shit on a rose. Fittingly, the percussion is played with roses. There's also a goose honk, cow sounds, and manure is incorporated (somehow), etc. The final noise blast is pure industrial spillage. Well, philosophy homework was never quite like this.
Another piece based primarily around a written text is "Tract For Valerie Solanas". The same way Sunn 0))) was nailed for recording Xasthur in a coffin, Matmos will get a lot of column space for playing a cow uterus and vagina as tribute to the woman best known for shooting Andy Warhol. Sunn 0))) was aiming for claustrophobia and positioning Xasthur as cryptic solo artist; in a similarly smart way, the moo parts are a great pun on both the cow's goods (its reproductive tract) and Solanas's S.C.U.M. Manifesto (a feminist tract). Score.
Other standouts include "Semen Song For James Bidgood", a haunting, trance-style piano-based ballad which features Zeena Parkins on harp and Antony on vocals, "Steam and Sequins for Larry Levan", a rump-shaking disco mutation in honor of the Paradise Garage DJ, and the funkified "Public Sex For Boyd McDonald", which incorporates whispery, quivvery recordings made at the San Francisco sex club Blow Buddies.
There are a few moments when the concept's cooler than the result, but in general The Rose Has Teeth's experiments result in frenetic dance tracks doubling as reading lists. Throughout, Matmos smartly mix high-culture icons, underground heroes, and cult legends, consuming objects and texts that transform everyday items (and lives) into something beautiful and strange. All said, the two are lucky the album doesn't stink: If it had, Wittgenstein's defecating cow would've offered a pretty great metaphorical diss.


A devotional prayer for ill relatives inspires some of the Baltimore ambient musician’s most engulfing and moving songs yet.

Meditations Mixtape, Vol. 1

On last year’s Parted Plains, Baltimore ambient musician Ami Dang used other people’s stories to express herself, looking to Indian and Middle Eastern folktales as inspiration for avant-garde, beat-driven sitar and synth soundscapes. The songs were admirably dynamic and ambitious—boisterous one moment and brooding the next—but also felt disorganized. The mesh of sounds never quite related to the texts they referenced, or coalesced into something greater than their sum. On her latest project, Meditations Mixtape Vol. 1, Dang slows down and turns inwards, making music inspired by the Sikh hymns her family listens to together.
A few months ago, Dang’s uncle and aunt became sick with coronavirus. Her mother asked her to perform a shabad, or a hymn, at their family’s online celebration of Vaisakhi, a Sikh holiday. After her performance, Dang was reminded of the power of her voice and of these prayers. Over about 10 days in April, while in isolation, she recorded the four songs that appear on this EP. Dang’s emotional connection to this music is evident; these are some of her most engulfing and moving songs yet.
Though devotional music often improvises from traditional song structures, most Hindustani classical music begins with a freeform introduction when the musician plays with melody and sets the mood but hasn’t yet introduced any meter. The second phase is marked by the introduction of a percussionist, and the third by an increase in tempo. With the exception of “Simplicity Mind Tool,” which uses an acidic synth line to establish a gnawing sense of propulsion, Dang’s songs linger in the exploratory phase. Each meanders and expands, filling the room like a pleasant fog. On “Satnam Waheguru” and “Tension, Tension, Release,” synth and sitar seem to intertwine on the atomic level. They create a droning cloud that cushions Dang’s chanted vocals, which sound richer and more mature than ever. “Ajooni” is wordless but similarly expansive, as a twangy sitar line ambles across starry synth.
Inspired by introductions, these songs do sound somewhat unfinished, like exercises rather than completed pieces. If they only unfurled a bit further, they would be even more immersive. As it is, each song on Meditations Mixtape Vol. 1 feels a bit like talking to a good friend on the phone and being forced to hang up just as you move beyond casual chit chat. The album title suggests future iterations, and you can’t help but think ahead, as if this first volume were a warm-up to something greater.
Though Meditations Mixtape Vol. 1 grew from personal experience, it is also intended to be of service. Whether Dang is chanting the Sikh meditative phrase “Satnam waheguru,” or simply singing the notes “ni” and “sa” (the Hindustani classical equivalent of “ti” and “do”), she encourages the listener to ruminate on unity and togetherness. The lyrics of “Simplicity Mind Tool”—“By meditating and vibrating on oneness with humanity, you will become steady and stable”—make this intention explicit. In liner notes accompanying “Tension, Tension, Release,” Dang encourages the listener to breathe in and out with the music, meditate, and “re-evaluate your relationship to the material goods around you and remember that the only thing that is going to get us through this is love, belief in humanity and lifting up everyone.” Though the song is certainly soothing, you’ll have to do the work of personal transformation yourself.
But for me, who doesn’t come to the album with particular spiritual intent, the power of these songs lies not so much in their utility as in the poignancy and specificity of Dang’s perspective. It can sometimes be hard to understand what unity and togetherness mean in the abstract, but it’s not difficult to empathize with someone who’s moved to pray for a family member. There’s a new focus to these songs, a confidence that’s blossomed as Dang strips back her sound and relays stories only she can tell. When you imagine her recording them in solitude, reaching out to someone unreachable, the already evocative vocal harmonizations transmit a gut-wrenching mixture of mourning and hope.


Joe Plummer has played with Black Heart Procession, Modest Mouse, the Shins, and more. His debut solo album Built In Sun, with Black Heart Procession’s Pall Jenkins on vocals, delivers exactly the kind of open, upfront Pacific Northwest indie rock you’d expect from a guy who’s long made a living playing it.

Built In Sun

Every music scene has a few players who seem to be everywhere at once, always open to whatever opportunities comes their way. For the last decade, drummer Joe Plummer has been one of those guys, splitting his time between bands around the West Coast. Among his more notable gigs: He manned the kit for the Black Heart Procession, traveled with Modest Mouse during their boom years, replaced Jesse Sandoval after James Mercer rebooted the Shins, backed Michael Cera in Mister Heavenly, and, most recently, became the latest addition to the Cold War Kids. He may not be a big name, but he could probably write a pretty decent memoir one day.
Plummer carries over some lessons from all of those bands on his debut solo album Built In Sun, which delivers exactly the kind of open, upfront Pacific Northwest indie rock you'd expect from a guy who's long made a living playing it. The album wasn't originally intended to be such a direct reflection of his resume. Plummer had conceived it as a cinematic instrumental work, but began fishing the songs out to some of his singer pals once his focus shifted to more familiar territory. One of them responded so enthusiastically he became the project's designated voice: Black Heart Procession's Pall Jenkins, whose band had quietly gone on hiatus in 2013.
Compared to some of the singers in Plummer's circle, Jenkins isn't an especially glamorous recruit. He lacks the star power and dynamism of James Mercer or Isaac Brock, and Built In Sun probably would've been a more interesting album if Plummer had gone the rotating-vocalist route instead. But he and Jenkins have an easy chemistry that flatters his casual tunes, and Jenkins is a more versatile singer than Black Heart Procession's albums let on. That band usually confined Jenkins to the role of a sullen doomsayer, a part he played so convincingly it became difficult to imagine him as anything other than a buzzkill. Here Jenkins goes wherever the songs let him, relishing the chance to stretch out a bit.
Jenkins announces his gameness on opener "Honeybear", a hurried garage-rocker, crooning over Plummer's piping organ with gregarious abandon. David Bazan and Cody Votolato sit in on the woozy, Built to Spill-ish "Winters Fall" and he leads them through a merry sing-along chorus. And though Jenkins smuggles his share of macabre images into the album, with lyrics about arrow-pierced skin, broken bones, and abandoned dreams, he sings even the bleakest of them as if swinging a raised pint. Even "13 Souls", the closest Built In Sun comes to Black Heart territory (just look at that title), is bright and cheery, a lament that's played for a laugh. Only "Due to Rain", a detour into Public Image Ltd.'s claustrophobic dub-rock, teases the darker, more experimental turn these sessions could have taken.
Plummer has made an album like this before. His 2003 self-titled release with the Magic Magicians had a similar setup, pairing the drummer with another regional indie vet, 764-Hero's John Atkins, for some very low-stakes rock'n'roll. That album didn't make much of a splash at the time and it's barely remembered today, but it's still a pleasure to revisit, precisely because of the same casual attitude that made it so easy to overlook. Built In Sun will probably sound good a few years from now for the same reason. It's a likably modest work from a musician who has spent the bulk of his career backing distinctive songwriters with complicated visions, without forgetting the rewards of making carefree music just for the sake of it, too.