There’s Nothing Wrong With Love, newly reissued on vinyl after being out of print on the format for almost two decades, has come to define a certain strand of indie rock, leaving a cluster of threads picked up by Modest Mouse, Death Cab for Cutie, and many more.

Built to Spill: There’s Nothing Wrong With Love

There’s Nothing Wrong With Love

It's May 1994 in Boise, Idaho—one month after the death of Kurt Cobain. Though this town is 500 miles southeast of Seattle, almost an eight-hour drive, that's not so far in this part of the country. You have your car, and everything is spread out, and you're always ready to cover ground when you need to. So despite the distance Boise could conceivably be considered part of the Pacific Northwest, if you stretch the definition a little bit, and the music scene there, such as it is, has some connections to its larger neighboring cities. There's a Boise band called Built to Spill led by Doug Martsch, who used to be in an indie rock band based in Seattle called Treepeople.
Two of the stories in the Pacific Northwest rock scene in the '80s and early '90s are the ramshackle D.I.Y. scene surrounding K Records and of course grunge, which by this time had gone so far overground it was on its way to becoming a cliché. Martsch's songwriting has some parallels with the wide-eyed and playful perspective of indie pop, but his twee impulses are tempered by his epic guitar work, which is not connected to grunge proper but can be traced to one of the scene's influences, J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. Having made one album, 1993's Ultimate Alternative Wavers, Built to Spill return to Seattle to record their follow-up, There's Nothing Wrong With Love, the record that would change everything for the band. "That was the last record when I was able to make music without thinking a lot of people would hear it," Martsch told SPIN in 1999. "It makes a difference. I'd like to think it doesn't matter, but it does."
That relative anonymity, free from the nebulous expectations of what eventually became a sizable fan base, gave Martsch license to write his most personal album. There's Nothing Wrong With Love, newly reissued on vinyl after being out of print on the format for almost two decades, has come to define a certain strand of indie rock, leaving a cluster of threads picked up by Modest Mouse, Death Cab for Cutie, and many more. But beyond its influence, it captures a truly original songwriting voice at the exact moment he realized what he had to offer. It's the album as snow globe, a small place where interconnected stories happen and you can get a different perspective on them depending on your vantage point. Built to Spill had some great records ahead of them, but they would never make another album with this level of intimacy.
There's Nothing Wrong With Love finds Martsch on the cusp of true adulthood (his first child was born around the time it was made, and his feelings around that are documented on "Cleo"), but the past is close enough where he sees it with tremendous clarity. The songs highlight the tiny feelings and sensations that have no obvious consequences in the moment but somehow stay with you in every detail. And Martsch has a special talent for pinpointing the tossed-off moments that others might connect to. As a kid, I was excited to learn about the constellations— where they were supposed to be, how the dots were connected, the mythology they represented—but I quickly realized the only one I could make out was the Big Dipper. I spent 20-something years with that meaningless thought pinging in my head, and then I heard a song on this album that started with the words "When I was little someone pointed out to me/ Some constellations but the Big Dipper's all I could see" ("Big Dipper") and suddenly this stray private thought became a shared experience, one wrapped inside an ultra-catchy power pop song.
Nuggets like this, borne of Martsch's keen sense of introspection and emotional generosity, are the lifeblood of There's Nothing Wrong With Love. On "In the Morning" he explores the difficulty of enjoying the present moment when filled with anxiety about the future ("Today is flat beneath the weight of the next day, next day, next day, next day") and how instinct takes over in moments of uncertainty. All the album's hyper-specific lyrical details—and there are many—check out. "Seven Up I touched her thumb, she knew it was me" (from "Twin Falls") might sound impossibly precious from another songwriter, but Martsch always leavens his sweetness with self-aware humor. "My stepfather looks just like David Bowie/ But he hates David Bowie," goes a line in "Distopian Dream Girl", certainly the first time in pop music history that this particular thought has been expressed. Then he follows with "I think Bowie's cool/ I think Lodger rules, my stepdad's a fool," showing just how in touch Martsch is with the feelings of adolescence, those years when you're floating through life, a bundle of nerves, and nothing quite makes sense.
The music and arrangements on the album are every bit the match of the subject matter. Built to Spill showed only hints of the explosive rock machine they'd later become. Acoustic guitar features heavily, a cello saws away in the background, serving as a sort of Greek chorus tracking the emotional arc of a given song's characters. Once in a while, Martsch hits the stomp box and unleashes a noisy solo, the distortion dusting his effortless melodicism with longing. There's plenty of open space, and his voice is much cleaner than it would be later. The sequencing and editing is brilliant, from "In the Morning"'s split-second pause after Martsch yells "Stop!" to the pause between "Twin Falls" and "Some" that makes them seem like one long song. It's a sound that is simultaneously tiny and huge, a keepsake tucked into a pocket that could at any moment magically become the size of a billboard.
With its focus on childhood, the nature of existence, and the search for meaning, it's possible to hear There's Nothing Wrong With Love in the terms of "What if there was another universe in my fingernail?"-style stoner dorm-room philosophy. But Martsch's open heart keeps you on his side. There's real beauty in the fumbling exploration he describes in "Car", a song filled with lines that crystallize what it's like to be an excited-but-frightened kid learning about life in fits and starts: "You'll get the chance to take the world apart/ And figure out how it works." Listening to this album in 2014, another line in the song, "I want to see it when you get stoned on a cloudy breezy desert afternoon," kept bringing me back to the final scene in Richard Linklater's film Boyhood, when the main character we've watched grow through the years takes mushrooms and hikes through a canyon in West Texas, a landscape not unlike parts of Idaho. It reminded me that one reason young people do drugs is because they offer a second chance to see things for the first time. To borrow one last line from "Car", on this album Martsch remembered when he wanted to see "movies of his dreams." For the vast majority of us that wish is never fulfilled, but There's Nothing Wrong With Love is a celebration of the desire itself, the vulnerability that comes with allowing yourself to imagine possibility.


The London trio Shopping makes tight, bright, danceable post-punk featuring blunt statements about queer politics and alienation. Their debut, Consumer Complaints, first out on the band's own DIY label in 2013, now sees a proper U.S. release.

Consumer Complaints

The London trio Shopping makes tight, bright, danceable post-punk that owes much to forebears like A Certain Ratio, Mo-Dettes, and Lucrate Milk, though it never sounds particularly dated or like a carbon-copy, a testament to the group's songwriting abilities. Their debut, Consumer Complaints, was one of the best punk records of 2013 when it was released by the group's DIY label Mïlk Records in November of that year. (Here it sees a U.S. release courtesy of larger longtime UK indie label Fat Cat Records.)
All three members previously played together in the underrated group Covergirl, and all three sing here, though guitarist Rachel Aggs (also of Trash Kit, Golden Grrrls, and scores of other bands) takes lead on most of Shopping’s songs. Overlapping and circling vocal patterns are played to excellent effect, so that the vocals seem less like something that sit on top of the music, and more part of an integrated whole.
Aggs’ trademark guitar style leans on broken and manipulated '60s-style garage riffs—in style and tone, in this band and others, her guitar work is often reminiscent of a less straightforward Holly Golightly/Headcoatees. This is one of the elements that keeps Consumer Complaints’ songs from blurring into one another, though they rarely vary in tempo. All of the songs also have their own structures: there's no verse-chorus-verse or predictable bridge insertion; instead, songs are structured to breathe, blurring into noise where necessary ("Santa Monica Place") or stretching out melodic themes to disco ends ("Get Going"). As a result, no track seems too short or too long; one gets the sense that the songs have been structured only to start where they need to and then were allowed to grow organically into their recorded forms through repeated practice and performance.
The politics on Consumer Complaints are refreshingly more embodied than didactic, mixing blunt statements about the alienation and immediacy necessary to queer desires under capitalism without preaching or feeling heavy-handed. Drummer Andrew Milk has said that Shopping "never discussed having a particular political message at all as a band." This may be yet another reason why Consumer Complaints bubbles with joy without being explicitly joyful and why this collection of songs never feels artificial or forced.
There is no cool plastic sheen meant to signify the post-industrial age over this record, and Shopping’s music doesn’t feel consistently grinding or harsh, though they don’t shy away from dissonance or from breaking melodic motifs. These are warm, human songs, songs that celebrate real power in making the music you want to with your friends on your own terms, songs that celebrate the multifaceted natures of people struggling to make themselves heard via relatively antiquated technology in a sped-up world where human interaction is often mediated through digital simulacra.


The Canadian duo takes a chill, fuzzy-headed left turn but retains the bleak imagery and nuanced production of its best work.

Mondo Tempo

In the 13 years that Canada’s Freak Heat Waves have been making music, they have channeled a welter of influences: post-punk, shoegaze, dub, goth, Detroit techno, Japanese synth pop, German prog. Drop the needle at random on one of their records and you might be reminded of Black Dice or Gary Numan, Can or Tones on Tail, Seefeel or Brian Eno. Freak Heat Waves’ music represents not so much a style as a sensibility: druggy, unkempt, and a little bit dangerous, a souped-up ride whose wheels could fall off at any moment.
Until now, there was nothing in Freak Heat Waves’ catalog to suggest that the duo of Steven Lind and Thomas Di Ninno were capable of—much less interested in—making a song like “In a Moment Divine,” the standout on Mondo Tempo, their fifth album. Featuring guest vocals from their longtime friend and collaborator Cindy Lee (aka Pat Flegel, formerly of Women), it’s an almost shockingly sentimental offering from a group that has typically paired lumpy drum machines and oozing synths with a baritone drawl as gnarled and imposing as the trunk of a fallen oak. “In a Moment Divine,” by contrast, begins with a rosy blush of pads before kicking into an easygoing breakbeat house cadence. “The gates of heaven open with your smile,” sings Lee, and no matter how cryptic the details—is it a farewell to a lover? a tribute to a tragic figure?—the song’s emotional valence is unguarded and deeply affecting. Garlanded with production reminiscent of New Order’s Power, Corruption and Lies, Lee’s high, wistful voice is faintly reminiscent of the Pet Shop Boys, but there’s something idiosyncratic about it all—the melancholy silver-screen strings, maybe, or the way the parts feel Scotch-taped together—that transcends pastiche, or even homage. This isn’t the first time that Freak Heat Waves have sounded chill, but it’s the first time they’ve sounded so unabashedly beautiful.
Nothing else on Mondo Tempo quite matches that song’s heart-on-sleeve yearning, but the record nevertheless marks a significant change from their last album, 2020’s Zap the Planet. There, they downshifted into an uneasy strain of downbeat, pairing trip-hop beats and clunky ’80s drum machines with low-key funk and gloopy psychedelia. Although more laid back than its predecessors, Zap the Planet was still smoggy and dank. On Mondo Tempo, the skies clear. Suffused in crisply programmed drum grooves, bluesy vocal samples, and lush synths, the album filters Balearic-beat influences through the slightly shaggy style of house music practiced by Vancouver, BC’s Mood Hut, who put out the record.
“The Time Has Come” opens the album with a jaunty sampled sax riff drizzled over a trim disco-funk groove complete with chicken-scratch guitar. Between dubbed-out breaks and moody bass riff, “How Do We Come Alive” would have been right at home on Mo Wax’s classic Headz compilations. “Endless” bubbles with trance-gate effects, a background vocal sample that Play-era Moby would have killed for, and hard-panned drums that feel like a breakbeat embrace. (It can’t be overstated how funky many of these songs are—with little more than a few subtle bass nudges and some carefully swung snares, their grooves feel tailor-made for the basement-party long haul.) The title track is the apotheosis of their fuzzy-headed retro: The syncopated drum programming suggests a narcoleptic take on new jack swing, the synths would have been right at home on Twin Peaks, and there’s even a sax solo straight out of Blade Runner’s noir imaginary.
However much Mondo Tempo diverges from the group’s previous records, there’s an obvious throughline in the form of Lind’s gravelly, drawn-out vocals, which present him as a kind of Lothario on ludes. It’s not the depth of his register that’s striking so much as its slightly greasy panache. His loamy purr carries an unmistakable hint of menace, and his often unintelligible syllables feel like sleight of hand: The way he draws out his words, you may forget how a line began by the time it finishes. In fact, despite the leisurely grooves, Lind’s lyrics are frequently anything but chill, and have little to do with anything resembling sensual pleasures. “Our time at last, free of the past,” he announces on “The Time Has Come.” Any shades of yearbook-quote optimism quickly curdle as he pushes into more ambiguous terrain: “Is there a method to the wild/A fear to evolve/Does it lead to one setting sun.” Peel back the blissed-out blister pack and dejection swells to fill the hedonistic vacuum. “Are we bound to lose or ruin the mood,” he asks in “How Do We Come Alive,” noting, “There’s an ominous feeling to us.” The perky “Endless” begins optimistically enough, but its meager two lines turn out to be a frighteningly economical accounting of disaster: “I wish that it was endless, spanning lives of plastic/Are we helpless, spinning tires to ashes.”
The more closely you listen to Lind’s lyrics, in fact, the more that Mondo Tempo’s summery quality starts to sound like a bleakly sarcastic joke. The title track locks into an uneasy mantra: “One degree worldwide, one degree worldwide…/Let’s realize it’s a crime/I think it’s a sign that it’s on the rise.” In a season marked by Canadian wildfires, heating oceans, and sweltering temperatures around the globe, deciphering the song’s message isn’t particularly difficult. Such doomsaying lyrics add a provocative dimension to Freak Heat Waves’ baleful take on Balearic, making an already captivating album that much more rewarding to untangle.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a tacky, mail-order compilation that strangely, almost perfectly encapsulates the class of early-’90s pop-rap.

Monsters of Rap

“I don’t party and shake my butt,” rapped Ice Cube in 1990. “I leave that to the brothers with the funny haircuts.” At the time, party music was splitting the hip-hop nation down party lines, mainly due to the unprecedented success of Oakland’s insanely gifted dance-rap behemoth M.C. Hammer. He had dominated pop radio and MTV, starred in a Pepsi commercial, garnered a Rolling Stone cover, walked home with two American Music Awards, and had the No. 1 album in the country for an astonishing 21 weeks. He was dissed by The Source, the magazine that served as the most crucial hip-hop information pipeline of the era. But that schism wasn’t always easy to see, especially if you lived in a city where the population was less than, say, 100,000 and your cable package didn’t include the Box.
Ice Cube’s razor-tongued reality rap group N.W.A. lived side by side with Hammer on the playlists of Yo! MTV Raps and in the pages of Word Up! magazine. Between 1987 and 1988, they had played multiple shows on the same bill. 1989 gateway compilations like Priority Records’ Hard Rap or Tommy Boy’s Monster TV Rap Hits simply threw Hammer and N.W.A. together on the type of cassettes you could buy in the Kmart electronics department. In 1990, you could find the post-Cube N.W.A. joining Hammer on the Dr. Dre-produced West Coast Rap All Stars posse cut “We’re All in the Same Gang”: a plea to end gang violence that presented the Parental Advisory faction and the MTV Party to Go faction as a united front. Hammer was given a particularly harsh Gas Face by 3rd Bass, but he received a full-throated defense from Chuck D of Public Enemy, who also toured with Hammer. “That brother’s bad,” Chuck said in 1990. “I know he’s all there. When he says ‘U Can’t Touch This,’ you can’t touch it. To me it’s not just about style, it’s that he’s built a whole environment around him that’s real.” No hard-nosed game-spitter less than Ice Motherfuckin’ T said this on his 1991 rap classic O.G. Original Gangster: “Special shout out is going out to the one and only M.C. Hammer. A lot of people diss you man, they just jealous. Fuck ’em.”
By 1991, Hammer had a 10-times-platinum album under his belt: a feat then unheard of in the rap world. Hammer, however, won the battle but not the war. In the past decade, N.W.A. were immortalized in a blockbuster hagiographic biopic and inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. And Hammer—currently an Internet mogul and tech entrepreneur—doesn’t get nearly enough credit for the hip-hop doors he had blown open.
Kurtis Blow had a Sprite commercial, but Hammer had Pepsi sponsor a monster arena tour. Run-D.M.C. went platinum, but Hammer moved Whitney Houston numbers. Beastie Boys conquered rock radio, Hammer conquered radio itself. People derided the way Hammer jacked entire chunks of Rick James and Prince, but Puffy would build an empire off of “Take hits from the ’80s/But do it sound so crazy?” Hammer had a Saturday morning cartoon and dolls like the Beatles or the New Kids on the Block. He wasn’t the first rapper to find success, but he was the first to show that rap’s success wasn’t going to be defined by the limited imaginations of program directors, music video channels, and record labels.
Hammer’s success occurred in the space between Run-D.M.C.’s 1986 and Dr. Dre’s 1993. Run-D.M.C., teaming with Aerosmith for the literal and figurative wall-smashing of “Walk This Way,” proved that rap could work hand in hand with pop music. When “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang” hit No. 2, Dr. Dre proved that the most undiluted, uncompromising, unedited rap music was now pop music itself. As far as the music industry was concerned, everything in the six or so years in between was growing pains: What is this new sound that’s already successful beyond our control? And how do we sell it?
No document captures this moment better than Monsters of Rap, a two-disc, 35-track compendium of the once-omnipresent pop crossover sensations that brought hip-hop from the streets to the junior high school dance, including Hammer, Vanilla Ice, Young MC, Tone Loc, DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince, the Fat Boys, Technotronic, Snap!, C+C Music Factory and more. It was released in 1999 by Razor & Tie, nostalgia-miners who had success early in the decade with the ingratiating Those Fabulous ’70s compilations, and were presently riding high on the hair metal compendium Monsters of Rock. Shortly after the release of Monsters of Rap, Razor & Tie co-founders and producers Craig Balsam and Cliff Chenfeld would unleash the first volume of an ambitious new series named Kidz Bop.
Like its forebears, Monsters of Rap was crass, shameless, cheap-looking, somewhat incoherent and—at $26.99 plus $5.95 shipping and handling—not exactly inexpensive. It has the original version of Black Sheep’s “The Choice Is Yours,” not the iconic remix. Not available in stores, you bought it off the TV like a Shamwow. It sold more than 250,000 units but I could not tell you if I’d actually seen one before I bought a copy off Discogs for $6 to do this review. As compilations go, it’s not exactly comprehensive (a truly exhaustive overview of the ’90s pop-rap bubble would need Biz Markie, Marky Mark, Digital Underground, Kris Kross, and the asshole-era Beasties), but it’s most of the way there. It stands as the most complete compendium of the jiggiest era before the jiggy era.
By 1999, when Monsters of Rap first landed in mailboxes, hip-hop radio had already undergone several genre upheavals and was now fully dominated by JAY-Z’s Roc-A-Fella, Master P’s No Limit, and Birdman’s Cash Money. It caught a tracklist of pop and dance acts at the absolute nadir of coolness: Its artists were too late to make more hit records, and too early for their eventual redemption arcs on VH1 reality shows and I Love the ’90s touring packages. Even beloved names like A Tribe Called Quest and the Pharcyde were sagging in cachet since the world hadn’t caught up to the Dilla beats peppering their latest albums.
Yet in its own unlikely way, Monsters of Rap is as authoritative at capturing a moment as any compilation put out by Rhino or Numero Group. The rap music on here is the equivalent of late-’60s bubblegum rock, radio-ready unit shifters doing the running man on the line between “trite” and “brilliant.” They’re all here: Pop savants, hucksters, true-school legends, fly-by-nights, one-hit-wonders, novelties, new jack swingers, Spanglish spitters, rap-rock crossovers, R&B crossovers, alt-rock crossovers, Eurodance crossovers, hip-house crossovers, Miami bass crossovers, bohos, smooth operators, and more than one questionable Caucasian. The best songs (A Tribe Called Quest’s “Scenario,” J.J. Fad’s “Supersonic,” a tacked-on addition of Kurtis Blow’s 1980 hit “The Breaks,”) are basically as good as rap music gets. The worst (the cringetastic Fat Boys/Beach Boys crossover episode “Wipeout,” Snow’s reggatta de Canadien blanc “Informer,” Gerardo’s deeply annoying “Rico Suave”) are—at the very least—of some historic import
Love them or loathe them, these songs’ long tail is indisputable. Nicki Minaj turned Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” into the undeniable smash “Anaconda.” As recent as last August, she hit No. 1 with “Super Freaky Girl,” a song that flips the same Rick James song as “U Can’t Touch This.” Daddy Yankee scored a Top 40 hit remaking “Informer” as “Con Calma.” Eminem’s “Rap God” is a TikTok smash thanks to a motormouth tweak of J.J. Fad’s “Supersonic.” One of the most critically acclaimed songs of the last 20 years, M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes,” does a play on Wreckx-n-Effect’s “Rump Shaker.” And the Monsters of Rap lane for lightweight, fun, pan-demographic novelty-ish crossover raps still exists—Psy, Lizzo, Macklemore, Little Dicky, bbno$, Jack Harlow, Young Gravy, Lil Shordie Scott —except now they explode through viral video challenges. The ethereal wash of “cloud rap” is just a beach that P.M. Dawn tread first in “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss.” Sadboi R&B is just a puddle once crossed by Oran “Juice” Jones on “The Rain.” The reboot to Kid ’N Play’s House Party series was released last Friday.
One of the reasons pop-rap is so derided—both then and now—is because it reliably lays bare the music industry’s worst impulses and endemic biases. The memetic genius of label executives meant that the Fat Boys naturally followed up their successful rap rendition of “Wipeout” with a rap rendition of “The Twist” and a rap rendition of “Louie Louie.” The New Kids on the Block got a hip-hop makeover. Bart Simpson briefly had a rap career. There was an entire album by the animated cat that raps in the Paula Abdul video. The raps on Snap!’s “The Power” only exist because two white Germans wholesale jacked an a capella by Jersey rhyme titan Chill Rob G—then Arista made them re-record it with Turbo B doing Rob’s lines. Both Technotronic and C+C Music Factory were busted for replacing the actual vocalists on their songs with lip-syncing models for their music videos.
The runaway success of white pop-rapper Vanilla Ice has long made him the scapegoat for the music industry’s racist machinations. Yes, “Ice, Ice Baby” does appropriate a Black fraternity chant; yes, he was marketed as a watered-down Elvis-style heartthrob in sequins; yes, his flow can be borderline gibberish (“flow like a harpoon?”). However, “Ice Ice Baby” was not borne of some record label’s calculated Pat Boone scheme: Vanilla Ice came up as a battle rapper playing to Black crowds in Dallas and “Ice, Ice Baby” was a bona fide regional smash released on an independent label and boosted by rap radio.
At their best, the songs on Monsters of Rap were Trojan horses sneaking rap culture writ large into mainstream America. Heavy D (“Now That We Found Love”) would be rightfully remembered as one of the best rhymers of his day even if he hadn’t garnered the pop success that eluded heavyweights like Big Daddy Kane and Kool G Rap. No true-schooler would question the skills of Sir Mix-A-Lot, Young MC (“Bust a Move”), Positive K (“I Got A Man”), Kid ’N Play, Onyx (“Slam”), 3rd Bass (“Pop Goes the Weasel”), Yo-Yo (“You Can’t Play With My Yo-Yo”), or Black Sheep. While they’re all best known for the one explosive pop single here, they all have at least one stone-cold classic full-length worth seeking out. DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince are best remembered as a squeaky-clean crossover act for preteens, but anyone who bought their 1988 double album He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper off the strength of “Parents Just Don’t Understand” would be treated to pyrotechnic displays of raw hip-hop: Game-changing turntablism from the Philly pioneer that helped popularize the Transformer scratch, bravado displays of beatboxing from Ready Rock C, and an electric throwdown from Union Square that showcases hip-hop’s crowd-rocking live roots.
If Monsters of Rap could be issued or reissued with actual liner notes (instead of an ad for Razor & Tie’s The Rolling Stone Women in Rock Collection), the footnotes would speak volumes about rap’s future. PM Dawn—critically adored in their day and now one of the most underrated groups of a generation—were the first to prove that Black rap artists could skate past the Marky Marks and capture a Hot 100 No. 1. Wreckx-n-Effect’s “Rump Shaker” was the first writing gig for a young Pharrell Williams. A Tribe Called Quest’s “Scenario” broke a firebrand named Busta Rhymes. 3rd Bass’ MC Serch was the executive producer of a little album called Illmatic. Father MC’s “I’ll Do 4 U” was an early hit for A&R wunderkind Sean “Puffy” Combs and featured background vocals from Mary J. Blige. Prince Markie Dee of the Fat Boys would not only produce “I’ll Do 4 U,” but go on to produce multiple tracks on Blige’s pioneering 1992 R&B smash What’s the 411? And for serious enthusiasts of the butterfly effect: Where would Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Jimmy Iovine be if Interscope didn’t have immediate success with their first release, Gerardo?
Rap spent the 1990s embroiled in various conversations about whether it was better to remain true to the game or lift the whole genre into the opportunities, resources, and wealth provided by the pop universe. The argument is itself laid bare on Monsters of Rap, which sequences “Ice Ice Baby” right next to 3rd Bass’ savage Vanilla Ice diss “Pop Goes the Weasel.” Whether that choice is inspired or chaotic, it’s certainly appropriate to an era where—to paraphrase Dres of Black Sheep—you could get with this and you could get with that.


Ed Sheeran has bragged that he wrote seven of his new album’s songs in a combined two and a half hours. It’s easy to believe him.

- (Subtract)

The media entrepreneur Jamal Edwards, Ed Sheeran’s friend and first industry champion, died unexpectedly last year at age 31. Around the same time, Sheeran’s wife, Cherry Seaborn, was diagnosed with a malignant tumor while six months pregnant with their second daughter. As recounted in a new four-part Disney+ docuseries, the child is healthy and Seaborn is cancer-free. But these traumatic events set the emotional tone of Sheeran’s sixth album, -, pronounced “subtract,” which responds to them much like its predecessor, 2021’s =, did to its themes of turning 30 and becoming a parent: with the usual beige palette, generic hooks, and vapid lyrics.
The songs on - are almost uniformly dour, often slow, occasionally drumless. Sheeran’s chief collaborator on the album is the National’s Aaron Dessner, who lends the sort of brooding gravitas that helped restore Taylor Swift to the good graces of Grammy voters. Sheeran’s trusty acoustic guitar is back, joined in a somber yet tasteful array by mopey piano, downcast strings, and a smattering of muted electronics. Now and then there’s a naturalistic scrape of fingers against guitar strings that might have been surprising from an artist of Sheeran’s commercial status before Folklore. But the order of the day is mostly polite and unobtrusive. The ghost of late-’00s indie rock will haunt the dentist’s office.
It’s not Sheeran’s first time singing about death. For the last album, he liked another songwriter’s line about “Visiting Hours in Heaven” so much that he got approval to use it for his own song, a tribute to the late Australian record executive Michael Gudinski. The new record never quite touches such greeting-card levels of sentiment, but that’s partly because its expressions of sadness and resilience are a confused jumble. On the chorus of strings-bedecked acoustic opener “Boat,” Sheeran sings dramatically, “They say that all scars heal, but I know maybe I won’t.” But nobody says that all scars heal—they’re scars.
Obviously Sheeran is not one of the streaming era’s most bankable stars because of his vivid way with metaphors. His four previous arithmetically titled albums updated light Jason Mraz folk-pop and po-faced James Blunt arena rock to keep pace with chart trends and sold 63 million copies worldwide. But his sloppy writing cuts against the earnest presentation on an album that is almost uniformly grave and plodding. It’s welcome to hear a figure of Sheeran’s stature speak out about depression, substance abuse, and suicidal thoughts, as on the heavy-handed “End of Youth.” But a song can have admirable intentions and still leave people rolling their eyes when, like someone misremembering Counting Crows at karaoke, Sheeran sings, “It’s been a long year and we’re not even halfway there.”
Being derivative shouldn’t be a federal case, but it’s still fair game for mockery in the court of public opinion. “Life Goes On” doesn’t earn its blatant ripoff of Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’” guitar intro with the clunky refrain “Easy come, hard go” (and Emmylou Harris sang those words first). The romantic ballad “Colourblind” fares slightly better—Sheeran brings more concrete detail to a tale of making art with his wife, comparing their love to shades of paint and singing about watching it dry—but the waltzing keys suggest someone has Rihanna’s “Love on the Brain” on theirs. Sheeran has bragged that he wrote seven of the album’s songs in a combined two and a half hours. It’s easy to believe him.
The album does perk up a couple of times, with mixed results. Max Martin co-write “Eyes Closed” armors Sheeran in the Swedish hitmaker’s adamantine hooks. Dusty in Memphis homage “Dusty” discovers a rare moment of joy in the familiar act of sharing a beloved record, and the subtle percussion by Big Thief’s James Krivchenia is a welcome touch. But both songs also speak to Sheeran’s dull familiarity: In court testimony recently, Sheeran explained that the Beatles’ “Let It Be” and Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry” are similar enough that you could mash them up together in a live performance; you could sing either of those classics over “Eyes Closed” and “Dusty,” too.
Taken generously, what’s most likable about Sheeran and - is their childlike insistence that, despite all life’s hardships, love will prevail. The songs of grief are almost incoherent, but toward the end of the album, the sparkling “Sycamore” narrates the events of Cherry Seaborn’s cancer diagnosis with utmost clarity. This is not a painstaking documentary, but the worry and the love come across. “It’s scary putting out your sort of deepest, darkest thoughts to the world,” Sheeran says of the album near the start of the docuseries. “Life is unpredictable but life goes on, and you just take it one day at a time,” he says at the end. On the evidence of -, Sheeran’s deepest, darkest thoughts don’t make for great or even simply good songs, but he believes in his business-friendly platitudes with his whole heart.


Bolstered again by the louche and ravaged voice of singer Greg Dulli, the latest from the indie rock icons is delightfully stuffed with romance and rancor.

In Spades

Back in the 1990s, the Afghan Whigs were way ahead of the curve on what would become two of the most dominant tropes in 21st-century rock’n’roll: an open embrace of R&B on one hand, and widescreen Springsteen-sized epics on the other. And yet, you’d be hard-pressed to find a band today that actually sounds like the Afghan Whigs. Because no band has a frontman quite like Greg Dulli, who possesses such a distinctively raw rasp of a voice and such a particular lyrical POV, the thought of trying to emulate him is probably why artists don’t cover hip-hop songs more often—it feels less like an act of musical homage than intellectual property theft.
And so, even though the Afghan Whigs’ second post-reunion album after 2014’s Do to the Beast bolsters their current six-piece lineup with a small army of string and horn players, the most resounding instrument we hear throughout emanates from Dulli’s ravaged throat. As ever, Dulli spends the majority of In Spades teetering on that shaky precipice where romance turns to rancor, and pillow talk leads to restraining orders. But like a master genre filmmaker, he’s always got a couple of new tricks up his sleeves to keep us on our toes. “Birdland” honors his tradition for slow-burning, cinematic scene-setters, but rather than gently immerse us into his nocturnal netherworld, we’re pushed right in by staccato shocks of harmonium and operatic vocal gasps, like strobe-lit flickers of an image that take you a few moments to process into a fluid moving picture. “We’re coming alive in the cold,” Dulli declares, like a beast reawakened and ready to do damage once again.
Like its 2014 predecessor, In Spades is closer in scope and spirit to Dulli’s other group, the Twilight Singers, than to the Afghan Whigs’ ’90s-era output—which is to be expected given that this reformed line-up is essentially the Twilight Singers with original Whigs bassist John Curley. The branding is pretty much immaterial at this point; what matters really is that Dulli can still pull off his louche lover-man act with conviction—and surprising poignancy. “Copernicus” comes on like cock-rock with an STD, its ugly fuzz riff and pounding backbeat goading its predatory protagonist into action, but then suddenly at the two-minute mark, the song blossoms into a wistful lament for the one who got away. Taking a different route to a similarly fraught destination, “Toy Automatic” is a survey of a shipwrecked relationship that makes you feel like you’re actually standing alongside Dulli on some wind-battered shoreline.
In Spades clocks in at just 10 songs in 36 minutes, but feels as expansive and substantial as a double-album statement. And that’s thanks in large part to coolly paced, multi-sectional songs like “Arabian Heights” and “Light As a Feather,” where Dulli masterfully ratchets up the tension before unleashing his fevered howl at just the right moment (while reminding us that the Whigs are the rare rock band that can pull liberally from ’70s Blaxploitation funk without sounding like they’re making a jokey porno soundtrack). The album’s dramatic arc is completed by two late-game pleas for redemption—though the melodramatic, string-swept closer “Into the Floor” feels like overcompensating in the wake of the devastating piano confessional “I Got Lost,” Dulli’s best ballad since Black Love’s “Faded.” This is a familiar Dulli mind trick: play the bastard for a whole record, and then elicit our sympathies for being such a hopeless fuck-up. Vicious cycles like these are welcome so long as the records turn out as good as this.


Tim Rutili has spent a quarter century cryptically subverting folk-rock convention. But in these songs—some of his warmest and most welcoming yet—he tells you just how he feels.

Villagers

Each Califone album has been a madcap second-hand store, a trove of treasures tucked away in some overlooked corner of a busy city. For a quarter century, Tim Rutili’s songs have lined their shelves like cryptic bits of bric-a-brac, with uncanny and sometimes unsettling familiarity. Folk tunes damaged by tape hiss and microtonal bleats, torch songs scarred by wary bon mots and circuit-fried drum machines, power-pop melodies with the plug pulled: Across seven albums, Califone have tempted listeners to pick up these almost ordinary oddities and figure out not only how and why they work but what unites them.
At first glance, villagers may appear uncharacteristically modest, its nine compact tracks too slim for an act that has stuffed some discs with 14 songs and others with 15-minute songs. And there is a certain easiness to much of this material, like the gentle hand-drum drift of lovelorn closer “sweetly” or the horns-and-harmonies peaks of the R&B waltz “comedy.” The curdled noise and vertiginous rhythms have receded, just enough to let a little light peek through the shop’s shaded windows. But at this ostensibly late date, Rutili and a returning cast of longtime Califone collaborators have tapped a newfound efficiency within their shared love of the strange, channeling it into some of the band’s most fetching songs ever. villagers radiates openness and accessibility, maybe more than any other Califone album. But that’s not to say that things don’t get strange.
The title track is telling. In the past, Califone would have ripped open the frame of this angular acoustic blues, filling the space around Rutili’s comfortably worn voice with corroded electronics or strings swiped from the Dream House. But Rutili saunters along undisturbed here, the ringing tones of his open tuning buttressed by Aaron Stern’s supple bass and Rachel Blumberg’s steady shakers. There is a discernible structure, a hummable hook, and even a slide-guitar solo, with Rutili guiding his quartet like some stock folk-rock troubadour.
But listen for the wobbly keyboard line lurking beneath the surface, its warped notes almost mocking the singer as he reflects on youthful ambition, lost now like “a Roxy Music cassette dying in the dashboard sun.” When such idiosyncratic textures appear on villagers, Califone are careful to put them to narrative use, letting them illustrate some central tension. They count in “ox-eye” like a Sunday afternoon shuffle, Rutili practically crooning over reassuring piano and a guitar riff Phil Spector might have favored. But that easy feeling cannot hold for this survey of our darkest inclinations. By song’s end, the nice bits have tensed into a fist, clenching around Rutili’s falsetto until it disappears.
Opener “the habsburg jaw” moves in reverse, starting with a surrealistic loop that stretches the rhythm over a modem-like whirr. But then it gallops ahead, a jangling little number that might have worked on the side stage of some mid-’90s alt-rock shindig. Rutili uses the distinctive oblong facial structure of a ruling European family (a consequence of inbreeding, no less) as a frustrated indictment of dynastic dynamics, and a lament for the ways the mighty but ignorant escape the consequences of their idiocy. After three minutes, one of the band’s catchiest songs ever shifts into a no-wave dance melee, saxes and synths ping-ponging against big bass thuds. It’s an escape hatch from a fight with the impossibly powerful, a private party with no tickets for the rich.
Such indignation is an unexpected delight of villagers. Rutili has often been a coded lyricist, his impressionistic poetry inviting you to tease out meanings different than his own. But here he pulls up his chair to tell you—in broken fragments, film references, and bits of alliterative internal rhyme—how he feels about money, depression, love, nihilism, nostalgia, and posers. He doesn’t sound cynical or jaded, simply frank in a way he’s rarely been. His words reinforce the band’s burgeoning lucidity. “Burn the story,” Rutili sings toward the end of “skunkish,” a gorgeous tune about being on the receiving end of someone else’s disappointment. “Bury the ashes.” It plays like a personal permission slip, a pass between Califone’s past and present.
At this point in Califone’s career, it would be understandable if Rutili turned inward to turn out increasingly abstruse albums, offering inroads only to the long initiated. He has, after all, been at indie rock’s almost-famous precipice for 30 years now. As Red Red Meat, he signed with Sub Pop in the mid-’90s, then started a short-lived band with Modest Mouse. For what are arguably their weakest albums, Califone even linked with the star-making Dead Oceans. An indie-rock lifer at 56, Rutili almost certainly knows the easy on-ramps to success are fading from the rearview.
And that is, in large part, what makes villagers so surprising and gratifying. Despite the vexations Rutili espouses here, these are some of the warmest and most welcoming songs in Califone’s lengthy catalog, postcards meant to lure new visitors to an old landmark. It’s as if Rutili has invited you into his well-kept second-hand shop yet again—only this time, he’s not asking you to clean the dust off and figure out why something is worth keeping. At long last, he’s happy to tell you exactly what it means.


The legendary LP from the Swedish hardcore band is given a deluxe reissue with a live album, video, and a documentary.

Refused: The Shape of Punk to Come: A Chimerical Bombination in 12 Bursts [Deluxe Edition]

No band has ever mastered the ominous cymbal tap quite like Refused. On the Swedish hardcore band's final album and masterpiece, David Sandström's shivering tings signal a sort of warning. They usually come right as the band launches from tense, coiled quiet into all-out assault-- or, if they're already in assault mode, from one head-spinning riff to another. Those transitions come up a lot on 1998's The Shape of Punk to Come, and they keep you on your toes. Throughout the record, the band found some platonic ideal of tension-and-release, mutating constantly and pulling in all sorts of vaguely silly genre-leap ideas (chintzy techno beats! jazz breaks!) without altering the fundamental heaviness that they were so great at. It's the sound of a world-class hardcore band deciding that they're done with hardcore, that they want to push their music in all sorts of unexpected directions, and then just ending up with an amazing hardcore album at the end.
The Shape of Punk to Come has always been an album with a certain mystique, from the Ornette Coleman-referencing title (Coleman tweaked the title of a book by H.G. Wells for his LP The Shape of Jazz to Come) to the clouds-gathering whisper of a closing track, "The Apollo Programme Was a Hoax". It's far and away the best thing Refused ever did, and it's also the album that broke Refused up; they could reportedly barely stand each other by the time they got done with the thing. Besides the world-exploding album, Epitaph's new reissue includes all kinds of extras: A furious live album, a documentary, the incredibly pretentious original liner notes, music videos, and footage of the band playing every song on the album in concert. It's a lot to get through, and it's almost all rewarding; you learn, through crystalline recordings and grainy video, that Refused were the type of live band that would slice the top of your skull off.
But what the whole package doesn't offer [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| is a sense of context. For all the bluster of the title, it's not like the album invented angular guitar spazz-outs or prevented punk rock, as a whole, from falling into MySpace-emo hell a few years later (though it is telling that Paramore-- arguably the best of the MySpace emo wave, for whatever that's worth-- liberally quoted Refused's "Liberation Frequency" on their first album). Refused Are Fuckin Dead, the accompanying documentary, is supposed to explain why the band broke up in the wake of this clarion-call album, but it mostly just consists of arted-up landscape shots and ex-band members speaking as vaguely as possible about how much pressure they put on themselves. (Pet peeve: No chyrons to identify who's talking. Come on.) We don't learn what these guys did.
So here's what I think they did: They synthesized some of the greatest ideas to come out of American hardcore in the 1990s, and gave them just enough production sheen so that they sounded huge. Nation of Ulysses and Born Against were two of Refused's favorite reference points, and you can hear Nation of Ulysses' sloganeering, off-kilter skronk and Born Against's grainy, ferocious all-angles roar all over the album. But neither of those bands ever produced a document as viscerally gripping as The Shape of Punk to Come. That's partly because those bands never cared much for fidelity, whereas you can feel every one of Refused's snare-rolls in your chest. But it's also because Refused were great songwriters.
It's a stretch to link what this band did to Sweden's tradition for popcraft; after all, they weren't working with verse-chorus-verse structures or striving for melodic clarity. But it's pretty amazing how intuitively the members of Refused knew how to put together a hardcore song. Every track holds back at the right moments, explodes at the right moments. "New Noise", now and forever their defining statement, has an intro that lasts more than a minute-- insinuating, building, teasing, drawing back, and then suddenly shooting off out of nowhere. And when it kicks in, singer Dennis Lyxzén screaming, "Can I scream?!" as the guitars blast in behind him, is just a singularly thrilling moment of music. The guitar-crunch frenzy and Ric Flair whoops that follow are monstrous, but it's that intro that sticks with me.
And the album has plenty more moments that annihilate. Lyxzén's yelping, pleading, wailing vocal on "Liberation Frequency". The shockingly pretty quiet bits on "Protest Song '68", right before the fragment-bomb drums rip through. The epic, mournful gypsy violin on "Tannäuser/Derivè". The album absolutely does not sound like the work of a group of dudes who aren't speaking to each other. Rhythmically, all members are locked-in, feeding off each other's energy and authority. (Even without those cymbal taps, you could make a pretty good case for Sandström as the best punk drummer ever; he's on fire throughout.) They also sound like they trust each other enough to allow in potentially dubious ideas, like the cheesy Casio-techno breaks that occasionally pop up. And even those moments work in the context of the album; they're the parts where you get to compose yourself in anticipation of the next onslaught.
Those techno bits underline how over the top The Shape of Punk to Come can get, sometimes to the point of ridiculousness. The first lyric on the thing is this awkward-as-fuck line: "I got a bone to pick with capitalism, and a few to break." The title of the song "Deadly Rhythm", it turns out, refers to "the production line." But as hammy as those gestures might be, they also reinforce the album's central theme: Complacency is a creeping, crippling disease, one that every structure of society seeks to encourage, and it's something you have to flail against constantly, every day. As simplistic as that concept might be, it's also a potent one, and it led these guys, screaming in their second language, to make an album as brain-obliterating as this one-- even if it spun them to pieces in the process.


Captain of None is the sixth solo album from French multi-instrumentalist Cécile Schott. She's still working with her Renaissance-era instrument treble viola da gamba, but is now using it in particularly inventive ways.

Captain of None

Captain of None, the sixth solo album from Colleen (née French multi-instrumentalist Cécile Schott), is the product of an unusual series of creative decisions. Her primary instrument is once again a Renaissance-era treble viola da gamba, and she does all she can to extend its conventional range of sounds, drawing direct inspiration from the studio techniques of dub masters Lee "Scratch" Perry and King Tubby for English-language songs featuring her own vocals.
The gut-string viola da gamba first appeared in the mid-15th century and it's seldom heard these days outside of early music ensembles. This general lack of use and natural versatility make the instrument difficult for modern ears to easily identify. When bowed, it can sound like a cello or a modern viola; when plucked or strummed, it can sound like a harp or lute; and when tapped or thumped, it can even sound something like a hammered dulcimer. Schott has made use of all of these techniques at various points, but on earlier albums such as 2007’s Les Ondes Silencieuses, her playing style was more traditional and her compositions more closely centered on post-Baroque chamber music.
On Captain of None, however, Schott casts tradition aside and frequently uses her viola da gamba as a percussion instrument to create impressively rich, dub-inflected basslines. In live performance and on past records, she has used various samples, loops, and delay pedals to layer her voice and instruments back upon themselves. Here, on such tracks as "This Hammer Breaks" she pushes these techniques to a new level of invention, with the strings of her viola refracted beyond all recognition.
In fact, there are times on Captain of None where the album’s architecture is so compelling it's easy to miss the resonance of the songs themselves. But pieces like "I’m Kin" and the title track positively vibrate with melodic ideas, their lyrics filled with oblique little koans ("I’m kin to two stones making fire, I’m kin to melted ice giving water").
The album’s dub influence is felt most strongly on the bass-heavy "Eclipse" or "Salina Stars", which is laced with an Augustus Pablo-style melodica. It’s tricky to make a true dub album without the benefit of an actual rhythm section, but Schott's hands-on production effects of delay and echo slip in and out through these songs like apparitions, projecting a sort of dub silhouette across the armature of the album. It is an impressive feat of reverse engineering, and the way Colleen uses classical acoustic instruments to reconfigure modern idioms recalls Arthur Russell’s cello-driven World of Echo or Hauschka’s house music variations on Salon des Amateurs. Somehow, Schott is able to make these disparate elements feel organic and effortless.


The Japanese avant-garde pop band strove to create a “sacred ambiance” on their second album, fusing unconventional arrangements with bouncing volleyballs and an eyes-wide air of wonder.

Paradise of Replica

Born from Kansai’s new-wave scene, After Dinner were an ambitious 1980s art-pop group spearheaded by the singer, composer, and sound artist known simply as Haco. She’d been inspired by a slew of different music growing up: the orchestral arrangements in the children’s book and LP series Doremifa Book, film soundtracks and incidental noises emanating from her father’s television set, and various rock bands from the Doors to Young Marble Giants to Art Bears. She attended an Osakan media-art school to learn musique concrète techniques, which would suffuse the colorful tracks on After Dinner’s 1984 debut LP, Glass Tube; there, she married her avant-garde practices with her affection for pop and rock, with tape loops and found-sound collages sitting alongside prim cabaret songs. In the context of 1980s Japan, they had the theatricality of Jun Togawa and the zany eccentricity of Haniwa-chan or Wha-ha-ha, but the experience was more like being trapped in a haunted toy box.
For their second album, 1989’s Paradise of Replica, After Dinner moved toward pop, but Haco’s avant-garde practices still permeate every song. The title track, for example, opens the album with triumphant synths that are layered with whimsical tape manipulations. The phrase “Paradise of Replica,” which Haco majestically recites throughout the song, came from imagining a bird’s-eye view of an island where everything below was fake. The synths’ approximation of resounding horns is apt, but the song still feels like witnessing something extraordinary—the hammered dulcimer and jaw harp that close out the song are spellbinding in a cozy, childlike way.
The title was also an ironic joke regarding Japan’s proclivity for, in Haco’s words, “cop[ying] from other countries” and blending those influences in a distinctly Japanese fashion. That practice holds true across the record, which pulls from a deep well of influences including John Cage’s prepared piano works, Strawberry Switchblade’s buoyant synth pop, and the hauntingly beautiful Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares. The result isn’t a direct transposition of those inspirations, but they’re there in the details. Haco’s admiration for Captain Beefheart is audible in the frenetic energy and engine-like guitar revving on both “Kitchen Life” pieces. Her fondness for Nino Rota’s soundtracks is obvious throughout centerpiece “Ironclad Mermaid,” whose sweeping strings carry the same dramatic elegance of something from Federico Fellini’s Amarcord.
For all the moving parts that make up any given After Dinner track, their songwriting always feels meticulously organized and purposeful. “Dancing Twins” is only a minute long, but its use of a bouncing volleyball as an instrument is major: It lends its eyes-as-shooting-stars metaphor a jovial schoolyard air, suggesting a child swept in fantastical daydreams. “A Walnut” is just as magical, as Haco’s operatic vocals and gastronomic lyrics soar above an array of woodwinds, percussion, and flickering synths. It recalls what After Dinner told NME in 1987: “We’re trying to create a sacred ambiance.” Such sacrosanct atmospheres, however, always feel everyday and attainable. Even “KA-NO-PU-SU-NO-HA-KO”—an eight-minute epic which finds Haco tracing her thoughts after seeing an Egyptian mummy at a museum—accomplishes the feat with supple percussion and patient drones. It’s rare that art-pop matches its extravagance with such alluring modesty. In doing so, Paradise of Replica feels like encountering cinematic spectacles in miniature.


The Smiths' Andy Rourke and Cranberries' Dolores O'Riordan team up with producer and singer Olé Korestsky for an album that doesn't lean too much on everyone's bona fides.

Science Agrees

At first glance it might seem unfair that the Smiths' bassist Andy Rourke’s initials are at the center of D.A.R.K.: Dolores O’Riordan of The Cranberries is only alluded to with the D from her first name and the K represents the last name of Olé Koretsky, a DJ, producer, and singer who had been working with Rourke under the moniker of JETLAG since 2009. Thankfully, D.A.R.K. does not present themselves as a supergroup and the songs on their debut hardly rest on their members’ laurels. But upon close listens to Science Agrees, it will start to make sense why Rourke gets both of his initials right in the middle of the band name.
Although O’Riordan and Koretsky handle all of the vocals, Rourke’s bass is right in the center of the mix throughout the whole album, presented as a lead instrument. It exposes his playing to extra scrutiny and it sometimes sounds dated. It’s not like he’s doing that same old three-note walk up from “Frankly, Mr. Shankly.” It’s more like he’s turning up a little too loud while trying out a new rig at Guitar Center, and proving to anybody within earshot that he knows how to slap. He also digs up a few unlikely influences, and even sounds on occasion like the only other person who could arguably be Manchester’s most famous bassist. But for the most part, Rourke’s playing is tasteful and original, and it’s about time he wasn’t completely overshadowed by Johnny Marr.
Placing this much emphasis on the bass makes the rest of the tracks on the mixer far more subtle. O’Riordan’s voice is underutilized, but she’s not here to belt out “Zombie.” Cranberries fans might be the only group of people who are already fans of Koretsky, whose voice blends with O’Riordan’s in oddly sweet ways. The pair singing together means that a lot of the songs often take on multiple points of view. It’s sometimes like “Don’t You Want Me” if the male character was a morbid creep, like in “Loosen the Noose,” where O’Riordan sings “somebody’s walking close behind me,” and Koretsky later sings, “I found true love six feet below.” “Gunfight” includes both of them singing together, “I remember your eyes, hip to the fact that we’re all gonna die.” They also do a lot of whispered vocals and forlorn deep breathing into the mics.
The album flows well, effortlessly segueing from Achtung Baby-like rock to mechanical new wave like Depeche Mode and Pet Shop Boys. O’Riordan and Koretsky sing simple lyrics, often repeating the same phrase over and over, allowing alternate meanings to sink in. Another subtle tactic they employ is to differentiate parts of songs by singing different vocal lines over the same chord progressions, finding enchanting new melodies out of a familiar sound. It's the greatest thing that can happen for the three storied musicians in D.A.R.K.


A comeback of sorts, the only actual reunion taking place here is between Billy Corgan and his most famous brand; drummer Jimmy Chamberlin was already involved in both of Corgan's post-Pumpkins projects, and James Iha/D'Arcy preferred to stay in hiding.

Zeitgeist

There are many reasons-- cynical, sad, or artistic-- for Billy Corgan to pull the Smashing Pumpkins moniker out of the crawlspace. Corgan has hardly been in hiding since the Pumpkins were dissolved in 2000, making music first with short-lived supergroup Zwan and then under his own name for 2005's TheFutureEmbrace. That latter record's commercial fizzle was abetted by Corgan's newspaper-ad announcement-- on the very day of TheFutureEmbrace's release-- that he was getting the band back together. Of course, the only actual reunion taking place was between Corgan and his most famous brand; drummer Jimmy Chamberlin was already involved in both post-Pumpkins projects, and James Iha/D'Arcy preferred to stay in hiding.
Thus, one couldn't help but feel that the Smashing Pumpkins revival wasn't little more than a calculated move for cash or attention or both. And, unsurprisingly, the strategy worked-- nobody could claim that Zeitgeist or the corresponding tour would have attracted nearly as much attention if the words "Billy Corgan" were at the top of that awful cover art instead of Smashing Pumpkins. But, it's possible, just maybe, that Corgan had artistic reasons for the switchback, genuinely wanting to reclaim the muse that led to his most artistically and commercially successful work, and add to the legacy of his most famous project. Hey, stranger things have happened.
Zeitgeist's replication of that old SP sound is impressive, despite the lack of half the original lineup...it's not like Corgan ever let D'Arcy or Iha do anything in the studio anyway. For a band that was stadium-size right out of the box, it's a return to the band's trademark overdriven and overblown M.O., inflated even further by a few tracks with legendary Queen producer Roy Thomas Baker. Corgan's guitar tone remains utterly unique, folding umpteen overdubs into the razor-sharp solos and grinding chords that are recognizable as his from the first note of "Doomsday Clock". Chamberlin, meanwhile, bashes with the same enthusiasm of his much younger self, helped by production that isn't afraid to push the drums front and center.
I'd be a liar if I didn't admit that it sounds big when compared to the relatively thin, wispy sound of the modern alt-rock competition. Songs like "Doomsday Clock" and "Tarantula" wave the flag of stoner rock like Black Sabbath and Blue Oyster Cult without embarrassment, and could likely pass for Queens of the Stone Age if it wasn't for that characteristic Corgan whine. On the other hand, this hard-rock approach only used to be one aspect of the Pumpkins persona, call it the "Zero" dimension. By focusing only on this portion of the group's character, Corgan misremembers the versatility that launched his band to the A-list: not just guitar-god bludgeoning, but epic psychedelia like "Rhinoceros", fragile pop like "Today," wide-screen symphonics like "Tonight, Tonight", and synth-loop ballads like "1979".
Most of those flavors are suspiciously absent on Zeitgeist, making it far more aggressive than any other record in their catalog-- perhaps a preemptive response to charges of getting old and mellow. Unfortunately, that leaves the record rather homogenous; while Corgan still can pull out a melodic surprise ("7 Shades of Black") or conjure up a dense effects-pedal atmosphere ("That's the Way (My Love Is)"), he lacks for variety. When he tries, the album-closing duo (depending on what chain store you bought the album from, I suppose) of "For God and Country" and "Pomp and Circumstances" are bland reminders of the synthy midtempo blandness that once tripped up Adore. When he stretches, as on the centerpiece "United States," the result has none of the cosmic magnitude of previous 10+-minute Pumpkins epics, instead opting for a turgid, chugging pace and thimble-deep political commentary.
That substitution of political angst for the personal kind is the one nod to maturity on Zeitgeist, though some of the get-happy sloganeering of Zwan persists as well on tracks like "(Come On) Let's Go!" Yet Corgan's serrated voice hasn't dulled with age, and unlike the refreshing heaviness of the band's restored sound, it sounds more and more ridiculous, well along the almost-inevitable march of all iconic rock voices towards self-parody. The disconnect between tortured nasality and lyrical content is never more awkward than on lazy tracks like "Bring the Light", where Corgan is content to merely whine the title with dozens of different inflections, or the chorus of Billys that backs up "Starz".
Of course, nobody wants progression from the Smashing Pumpkins, that's the whole point of manufacturing this reunion in the first place. In that sense, Zeitgeist is interesting as a demonstration that the artist himself is usually not be the best person to play historian for his own career. Given the chance to revisit the good old days, Corgan has unearthed only a portion of the Pumpkins character-- and while that portion is meticulously revived, all the parts left behind remain sorely missed. In the end, it's the one-dimensional approach, not the lack of half the original members, that leaves Smashing Pumpkins Mk. II a cardboard cutout of the real thing-- not the empty ATM-reunion it could have been, but still a ghost of the old band.


Timbaland's new mixtape King Stays King is a middling effort from the former pioneer of R&B, rap, and pop. Most disappointingly, it shows him as a beatmaker rather than a full producer.

King Stays King

At one point, it would have seemed unfathomable that Timbaland would be making a play for relevancy. In the latter part of the '90s, his full-length contributions for Aaliyah, Missy Elliott, and Ginuwine redirected R&B from its increasing reliance on relaxed grooves and hip-hop drums to slick, broken, hi-hat happy rhythms that were playful, sophisticated, and not-infrequently referred to as "futuristic." His work in R&B established him as visionary, and the echoes of his sound are all over today's musical landscape—from Noah "40" Shebib's atmospheric moodiness to the worldwide underground of Soulection's beat scene. Timbaland took many cues from UK electronic soul styles, but he also gave them back: it's impossible to listen to dubstep without hearing Ginuwine's "Pony" in its DNA; it's hard to imagine the UK grime scene without Missy's Da Real World. Timbaland may not have invented any of these styles but he seemed to predict and inspire them all, down to EDM.
If these were his only contributions to music, his new mixtape—King Stays King, released this past Christmas—would make sense. It would be a rehashing of glory days by a once uber-influential musician. But Timbaland's prowess wasn't limited to R&B—he also released major and minor hits for rappers of note and footnote,  and ushered pop artists into adulthood while blurring the lines between mature swing and youthful bounce, mainstream and urban. In terms of reach, his only peer of the past 20 years would be maybe Dr. Dre, or Tim's hometown colleague, Pharrell Williams.
But in the past few years, as Dre repolished his laurels and Pharrell refined himself into an inescapable pop force, Timbaland languished as a struggling legacy act, releasing respectably selling, but forgettable solo efforts and attempting to create buzz with his Timbaland Thursdays series. None of this is what anyone saw for Timbaland—at best he would still be a major cultural power; at worst a reclusive genius releasing small, but impactful records that ousted music forward. At the least, he should have been Swizz Beatz—caught up with ventures beyond music but returning occasionally to the table, if only to prove that he still has it. But scoring lowbrow fare like "Empire" and releasing a middling compilation like King Stays King, was not in the trajectory.
There's precious little that's adventurous about this new effort. Blaze Serving's "Where You At!" is darkly bubbling, but leans too heavily on Future's "Fuck Up Some Commas," coming off like a local DJ's remix he plays during his set to take a bathroom break. The album's best number comes from Rico Richie, a rapper perhaps best known for getting arrested when the authorities raided Young Thug's studio. On "Drug Dealer" Timbaland seems to be aping the Neptunes, alternating between a moderately ominous swing and cavernous drums (an interesting turn, considering Tim's brain-melting work on Pusha T's recent Darkest Before Dawn) but Rico, like many of the rappers here, comes through with mostly generic baller boasts tinged with just a hint of creativity: "I flew her out to L.A. for the summer/ And she said she love me, even though a nigga used to hit her cousin/ My niggas say I'm trippin', I'm like, 'Fuck it, I don't need a rubber.'" Even the established stars fail to register above serviceable here. Who wouldn't want to hear the erratic madness of Migos, 2 Chainz' goofy eccentricities, and Young Thug's swallowing and taffy-like yelping on a Timbaland beat? It may be a case of elevated expectations, but all their songs sound relatively straightforward—the raps feeling phoned in, the beats playing catch-up.
Perhaps the biggest disappointment here is that Timbaland comes off as beatmaker instead of a producer. In an era where producers like Mike WiLL Made-It and Metro Boomin cater their sounds around their artists, adding subtle fluctuations, transitions, and progressions to their music (things Timbaland once did so well), most of the tracks here plod straight ahead. The R&B numbers here don't sound like Timbaland; they sound like the modern day sub-Timbaland impressions that get pushed on your Soundcloud playlist via algorithm. It's all functional, but there isn't a single standout performance here.
It can be said that Timbaland hasn't been able to create stars—most of his hits have come courtesy of artists with strong songwriting ability and intrinsic inventiveness. Aside from Missy, Timbaland's most notable collaboration on this front was with Aaliyah—together the two sculptured R&B in their own image. Aaliyah appears here posthumously on "Shakin" and she's in classic form. As always, her delivery dances with a light grace, but the song sounds more like a redundant album cut than a lost gem. While it's great to hear some new classic Aaliyah, hearing not-quite classic Timbaland in 2016 only makes him seem dated.


The Jamaican vocalists of Sun Araw and M. Geddes Gengras’ Duppy Gun project team with producers from Bristol label Bokeh Versions on a dub mixtape that tests the limits of the genre.

Miro Tape

Cameron Stallones and M. Geddes Gengras conceived the Duppy Gun Productions label following a formative trip to Jamaica. After recording with reggae legends the Congos for the 2012 LP Icon Give Thank, the Los Angeles-based musicians built relationships with a new guard of Jamaican vocalists, including I Jahbar, Early One, and Sikka Rymes. Duppy Gun matches those voices with experimentally minded producers, usually from Stallones’ (aka Sun Araw) and Gengras’ extended circle in the States. The collaboration has grown more rooted over time, with I Jahbar helming the label’s new studio in Jamaica.
For Duppy Gun’s latest release, the vocalists joined forces with dub innovators like Jay Glass Dubs, Abu Ama, and the British Columbia collective Seekersinternational, in pairings facilitated by another like-minded but physically distant label, Bristol’s Bokeh Versions. The result is Miro Tape, two 25-minute sides that edit together 23 tracks (most of them previously unreleased) in the style of a mixtape. It’s a format that suits the project well, offering listeners a concise introduction to the cross-pollinating international network of musicians whose work is often categorized as leftfield dub and dancehall. Submerged in contiguous waters, these diverse compositions achieve a cacophonous flow, with individual authorship—particularly where riddims are concerned—taking a backseat to collaboration.
Duppy Gun has cultivated a reputation for production so outré, it verges on extraterrestrial, and Miro is no exception. The tape begins at a sprint, with the rapid-fire dancehall of “Love Di People,” featuring Sikka Rymes, and “Mad,” with vocals by I Jahbar and Early One. Instrumentals by D/P/I and Butchy Fuego, respectively, match the singers’ pace, peeling out in a barrage of bleating sirens and start-and-stop bass textures. As Miro eases into dubbier territory, the producers’ maximalist approaches to layering converge, to satisfying effect. But an exhilarating sense of unsteadiness continues to reign, both in the murky plateaus that mark transitions between tracks and, sometimes, within the tracks themselves: “Beeki Boy,” for example, which teams I Jahbar with producers Big Flyte & Velkro, sets an odd, stuttering pace beneath a bright, guitar-like riff. The prominence of the vocals fluctuates, giving a dynamic, liquid shape to the sound. Details like these confirm that Duppy Gun tracks are crafted to be heard through headphones as well as sound systems.
Some of Miro is resolutely—and even aggressively—weird; the collaborators often seem less interested in pushing dub forward than in stretching the genre so far that it approaches a different form entirely. But a few tracks, particularly on the more relaxed B-side, glow with reverence for the history they engage: As Ras G and Lopo’s “Whereabouts” flows into I Jahbar and Big Flyte & Velkro’s “Turn Up,” the latter song weighs down its predecessor’s errant laser pulses with a syrupy, almost nostalgic melody. Miro Tape is thrilling in moments like this, when the past and the future smudge together, immersing the listener in sounds defined only by their boundless pliability.


With his third album, the North Carolina rapper J. Cole is certain he’s made his classic; he’ll tell you as much partway through the 15-minute credit roll “Note to Self”. In its quest to canonize, the record eschews both singles and guests: It’s a bold move, and where it floats, it soars, but it flops gloriously when it doesn’t.

2014 Forest Hills Drive

J. Cole is a student of hip-hop, the kind who moves to New York to stalk Jay-Z for an opportunity to rap for him, peppers his lyrics with nods to the greats, and pens an apology to Nas when his biggest single comes across as too poppy. Cole is aware of the structure and pace of good rap albums and anxious to apply them to his own music. For his third record, 2014 Forest Hills Drive, he channels the nostalgic self-mythology of Jay-Z’s Black Album. The cover is shot at his childhood home as Eminem did on the Marshall Mathers LP. The tracklist swaps s’s for z’s (“Wet Dreamz”, “A Tale of 2 Citiez”, “Love Yourz”) like 2pac’s All Eyez on Me. With 2014, Cole is certain he’s made his classic; he’ll tell you as much partway through the 15-minute credit roll “Note to Self”, which apes Kanye West’s joyous, candid College Dropout closer “Last Call”. Problem is, Cole hasn’t earned it yet.
J. Cole is a workmanlike MC, a good-natured populist grappling with the ridiculousness of sudden celebrity. He makes passable albums with memorable singles. He’s great at synthesizing everyman relationship woes into terse pop nuggets. He works well with guests; his collaborations with Drake, Missy Elliott, and TLC are highlights in his growing body of work, and he gets along so well with Kendrick Lamar that the duo is rumored to have clandestinely recorded an EP together. In its quest to canonize Cole, 2014 Forest Hills Drive eschews both singles and guests. It’s a block of Cole raps and Cole hooks served mostly over Cole beats. Bold move, and where it floats, it soars, but it flops gloriously when it doesn’t.
The laughable wordplay fails of mixtapes albums past (“My money like a senior, watch it graduate,” “Cole heating up like that leftover lasagna”) are thankfully absent, but Cole isn’t yet sharp enough of a storyteller to carry a full album on his own. “Wet Dreamz” recounts his first time having sex in lurid detail, from lying to a girl about his prowess to looking at porn for pointers to finding out the girl’s been lying, too. It’s relatable but hardly the kind of story you want to hear more than once. “No Role Modelz” parlays a suspicion about a hookup being a golddigger into a tirade about black women lacking respectable public figures, crudely suggesting that “she’s shallow but the pussy deep.” (For all the talk of Cole’s enlightenment he’s a perfect brute when it comes to women, and “No Role Modelz” is something of a tacit admission.) 2014 Forest Hills Drive often plays at a depth it never delivers.
Still, ceding an entire hour to a rapper who works best in short bursts works better here than anyone could’ve expected. “03’ Adolescence” flips the classic rags-to-riches narrative inside out as Cole starts to reminisce about how hard he had it growing up only to get a chin check from a friend whose future isn’t half as bright. “G.O.M.D.”, “Fire Squad”, and “A Tale of 2 Citiez” all flash Cole’s technical excellence, while “Intro”, “Apparently”, and “St. Tropez” emote through his gruff singing voice. The production here is never less than delightful; Cole’s own beats run coyly referential samples through milky instrumental embellishments. “Wet Dreamz” is an adept “Impeach the President” flip, and “St. Tropez” reimagines Mobb Deep’s “Give Up the Goods (Just Step)” as sedate, orchestral R&B.
2014 Forest Hills Drive is Cole planting himself in the pantheon of rap greats, a volley to the spike of Kendrick Lamar’s “Control” verse. He gets more than a little ahead of himself, though, claiming to be better than Slick Rick, LL Cool J, Rakim, and Big Daddy Kane on “January 28th”. Kane and Rakim’s flows were tighter, LL’s swagger is inimitable, and Rick’s stories surge with a purpose nothing in J. Cole’s canon can muster. This self-aggrandizing pageantry is a ultimately bad look on a guy who earns his keep speaking to the struggles of the common man, and these songs work best when they’re not busy telling you how good they think they are. 2014 Forest Hills Drive is a decent album selling itself as great. It wraps itself in the garments of a classic, but you can see that the tailoring is off.


After experiments with UK garage, club breaks, and more, the cheerfully chameleonic Atlanta producer turns his attention to dance punk; the results are as mischievous as ever.

Snake EP

ESG, Liquid Liquid, and LCD Soundsystem; cowbells, scratchy guitars, and hi-hats—we all know how dance punk goes. But what if there was another way? This is the question that Atlanta producer Nikki Nair poses on Snake, having recently turned his attention to rethinking 2-step on his 2023 EP with Hudson Mohawke, Set the Roof.
Collaborations have been a major part of Nair’s work so far; over the past two years, he has worked with everyone from Sam Binga to DJ ADHD—a mark of his flexible charm. Nair’s productions and DJ sets are defined by their eclecticism, swinging from UK garage to trance via IDM and pure pop. His range is admirable, but it makes it hard to pin down exactly who Nikki Nair is. The Snake EP redresses those uncertainties. At six tracks long, it ties with 2020’s Just Reduction as Nair’s longest solo release. More importantly, it is his most personal work yet. His family adopted the snake as their guardian—he calls them “a symbol of my life-force”—and the record’s sound is a homage to the DIY and punk scenes in which he grew up.
Rather than raiding the well-worn dance-punk sound that the Rapture once called home, Nair pays tribute by selectively combining dance and punk tropes. “Worm” joins a ferocious electro-punk beat to a dirt-eating synth motif that sounds like Mr. Oizo gone screamo or Suicide at their most unhinged. “Prowler” has a crudely bedraggled riff worthy of the gnarliest rock deadbeat and a bassline that shrieks like a dubstep dinosaur; and “Snake” is the Prodigy after they’ve blown both studio speakers and label recording budget. Listeners who found the latest Justice album lacking in drama will encounter plenty of roaring filth to satisfy their needs, as will fans of Daft Punk’s rusty, rasping Human After All.
Nair has said that the six tracks on the Snake EP were an outlet for his anger and frustration, which might explain the record’s overblown sound and occasional breakbeat fury. But the songs also reflect confusion and joy, a salmagundi of emotions that helps the EP to breathe beyond the slightly one-dimensional punk smashers at its core.
The opening “Sugar Kingdom” is a contemplative electro number, bass-sprung but sparse and stumbling, to which Nair adds a spookily understated vocal, more gentle lie-down than John Lydon. The result is as fragile as a hummingbird egg. “Catenate,” which closes the EP, maps the improbably excellent overlap between UK garage and the cardigan twee of Sarah Records, a label whose fierce DIY spirit didn’t exactly translate into musical muscle. The lyrics, too, suggest a Field Mice B-side: “You look so fresh/In your brand new dress/I think I’ll drown,” Nair sings, with the amiable angst of someone who has just got his heart broken on Etsy.
In attitude, Snake carries the torch for Blawan’s 2021 and 2023 EPs, Woke Up Right Handed and Dismantled Into Juice, standout records that stripped the carcass of conventional dance music to make a Frankenstein’s monster of scrapyard sound. Nair says that the songs on the Snake EP are “still pretty functional for DJing and stuff” which might be true of the beat-driven thrills of “Snake” or “333333.” But the idiosyncratic shapes of “Worm,” “Sugar Kingdom” and “Catenate” sit somewhere between guaranteed dance-floor hits and DJ self-sabotage, evincing a DGAF spirit that’s punk to the core.


On her first Spanish-language LP, the Colombian American singer eclipses crossover appeal with a moody, hopscotch pop take on the boleros, reggaetón, and Latin soul of her youth.

Kali Uchis: Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios) ∞

Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios) ∞

At the end of her second album, Kali Uchis invokes an angel, earthside, having strayed from the sky. This divine being, as she depicts it, is unafraid and unburdened of its duties; “A nadie le debo,” Uchis sings. It owes no one—and neither does she.
This epiphany marks Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios) ∞, or Without Fear (of Love and Other Demons) ∞, as her most honest work yet. The 26-year-old is a little dreamier, a little bolder, and a lot freer than she was two years ago when she released her genre-roving debut Isolation, a record that cemented her place as pop’s misfit siren. While working on it, though, Uchis felt like she had to “prove” herself to the world, so the polymath corralled a crew of bigwig artists and producers—including Tyler, the Creator, Bootsy Collins, and Gorillaz—to bolster her already singular work.
Fittingly, on Sin Miedo, Uchis dares to trust herself more. She pares down the guest list, opting for feature production by Puerto Rican hitmaker Tainy and a smattering of artists. Her voice, still thick and sultry, looms larger in the mix. And her affinity for jukebox jams sees her turning to the past again—but instead of only containing the funky breaks and trippy jazz stylings that Anglo-market listeners have come to recognize her music for, Uchis sharpens the spotlight on her bilingual, binational Latinx repertoire. She’s consigned her tragic Edie Sedgwick avatar to oblivion; this is Uchis in ’90s mami glam, grown as fuck at her Friday night perreo parties and Saturday morning limpiezas, ready to recover reggaetón and boleros for the new age.
Some of the sweetest flashbacks on Sin Miedo are actually covers of classic tracks, relaunched with pithy little missives worthy of a telenovela script (for what it’s worth, Uchis has always wanted to be a director). On opener “la luna enamorada,” an update of a 1960s bolero once made popular by the Cuban doo-wop group Los Zafiros, Uchis quips, “¿Y tú qué pensaste, que yo me iba a echar a morir?” (“And what did you think, that I was going to roll over and die?”). Uchis even nails a glimmering tribute to the Queen of Latin Soul, La Lupe, plugging her tour-favorite rendition of “Qué te Pedí” in as an interlude. For just under two minutes, Uchis sings with a gauzy gemido, aching with devotion to a selfish lover whose demands remain impossible to meet. Sometimes, even bad bitches get trapped.
But like la gran tirana before her, Uchis remembers the power of a good kiss-off—no matter how heartbreaking it may be. Standout “vaya con dios” evinces this most; the track turns the tender Spanish sendoff “go with God” into a reluctant lover’s exile with all the cinematic grandeur of a 007 theme. “Se que estoy perdiendo,” she admits, “pero el juego no ha concluido.” She knows what she’s losing, but the game isn’t over.
When one lover goes, there’s always a better one standing by—and it’s Uchis herself. While she has brought this kind of confidence into her songs before, Sin Miedo boasts her femme supremacy in ways more pining and authoritative. “Si me vas a hablar háblame con respeto” (“If we are going to talk, talk to me with respect”), she purrs on the indomitably hot “te pongo mal (prendelo),” featuring the steamrolling reggaetón duo Jowell & Randy. It’s a sentiment reggaetonera Ivy Queen made famous years ago on her dancefloor-consent anthem “Quiero Bailar,” but clearly bears reminding, like it does again on lead single “¡aquí yo mando!” Over a nasty bass, Uchis confirms she’s the one calling the shots, while fellow DMV renegade Rico Nasty spits Spanish bars that Uchis helped pen.
This boss moment wouldn’t be the same if Uchis had doubted her instincts. She held steady, even after assuming that her Spanish-language project might alienate some fans. Upon releasing her penultimate track “la luz (Fín)” featuring Latin trap upstart Jhay Cortez as a single in October, she tweeted her stance: “today i drop another song in spanish which i know means another day of disappointment for my english speaking fans who do not wish to make the attempt to listen to music in languages they can’t understand.” Sin Miedo proves it really is their loss.

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On Trash Generator, the Sacramento trio Tera Melos builds on its prodigious mix of post-hardcore and prog, reining-in the chops in service of catchy, harmonically rich songs.

Trash Generator

Prog rock still exerts a profound influence on popular music—perhaps even more so now than in its 1970s heyday. The genre’s modern descendants may not necessarily surround themselves with stacks of keyboards, or emulate the Gandalf-esque fashion sense of Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman. But you can rest assured that there’s prog DNA lurking within vital developments across a slew of contemporary styles. And while prog’s baroque extravagance once clashed with punk ethics and funk grooves, those divisions fell away decades ago, particularly in the post-hardcore universe that gave us Tera Melos.
When Tera Melos started out in the mid-2000s, the Sacramento trio (then a quartet) took a kitchen-sink approach to riffs and time changes that owed no small debt to the tornado-like, ultra-busy style pioneered by hometown predecessors Hella (the outfit that first put Death Grips drummer Zach Hill on the map). But even as Tera Melos grew more adept at cramming their music with whiplash-inducing twists and turns, they simultaneously shifted towards a bigger-picture view of songwriting. On 2013’s X’ed Out, Tera Melos struck a balance between complexity and songcraft that almost always eludes technical bands. X’ed Out also showcased frontman/guitarist Nick Reinhart’s increasing command of melody and hooks. Reinhart, bassist Nathan Latona, and drummer John Clardy had gotten so adept at shoehorning their chops into pop song structures that they were starting to sound more like, say, the Police and Pinback than the experimental/math/heavy/post-hardcore company they kept.
Trash Generator, the follow-up to X’ed Out, continues down the same road, with a guest appearance by Pinback’s Rob Crow for good measure. Much like last time, the new material sees Tera Melos reining-in their prodigious chops in service of tunes that function pretty much as traditional songs. On “Your Friends,” no amount of stutter-stops, extra beats, or audacious drum fills can derail the swaggering groove the band sustains throughout the verse-chorus sections. The song even gives us a glimpse of what it would sound like if the Police’s Andy Summers and Sting were reincarnated as a single person who plays chunky, metallic riffs. Reinhart at once nods to Summers’ watery echo and Sting’s sing-speak phrasing circa Regatta de Blanc.
On “Don’t Say I Know,” Reinhart smoothes a jerking, oddly metered guitar riff out so that the guitarwork itself becomes the song’s hook alongside his already-catchy falsetto vocal, which falls somewhere between Devo, the Beach Boys, and Enon. When Latona thickens his bassline to include deep chords, the effect is dramatic and powerful in a way that Tera Melos’ older material just didn’t leave room for. On the instrumental “GR30A11,” somber piano chords brush up against patches of static fuzz, strewn about like dust bunnies, while Latona noodles on the bass as if playing to an entirely different track.
A sedate, presumably lighthearted attempt at Cecil Taylor’s brand of jazz chaos, “GR30A11” certainly cleanses the pallette with a respite from the album’s assertive, high-energy mood. But “GR30A11,” while fun, also highlights how Tera Melos aren’t arriving at new expressions quite as assuredly as they did on X’ed Out. That’s not to say Trash Generator doesn’t break some new ground for Tera Melos: The horns on “A Universal Gonk” create a smoky atmosphere, and on the whole, the album is the band’s catchiest and most harmonically rich by far. But in its especially open moments—the serene but short-lived intro to “Super Fx,” for example—Trash Generator suggests that Tera Melos would flourish even more if they threw themselves into the ambient end of the pool, which they’ve only stuck their toes in.


After freeing herself from a bad record deal, the multitalented R&B singer celebrates with an effortless LP that fully displays her range.

Songs for You

When Tinashe split with long-time record label RCA in February, it seemed like an opportunity for a reset. After the L.A. singer released one of the best R&B debuts of the decade in 2014, she quickly chased it with a run of homogenous singles meant to foment hype for what was an eventually inert follow-up released four drawn-out years later. Many of the problems stemmed from RCA’s rumored and occasionally confirmed meddling, whether selling songs out from under her or arranging awkward guest features and promotion. Tinashe has since publicly celebrated the separation in interviews and on social media, and for good reason: Free from the music industry, the multitalented artist is now able to go in whatever direction she pleases, unburdened by expectations of a radio single or big first-week sales.
Songs for You, Tinashe’s first full-length project released under her own label and management, is a welcome return to form, evoking those moody early mixtapes and 2016’s compelling Nightride while pushing forward. It also stands as a statement of purpose against the industry that fumbled her bag. (She even released the project on a Thursday to “throw a wrench” in those never-ending sales discussions.) Compared to the strain of Joyride, Songs for You feels effortless, drifting between subterranean trap, airy dance-pop, and R&B ballads.
Her floor-fillers are compellingly mutated, full of sharp pivots; if the moving parts can be jarring to follow, they’re never boring. Heatsick lead single “Die a Little Bit” hinges on a numb, head-spinning chorus that strips her best club-ready benders for parts: “Drink, smoke, dance, vibe a little bit,” she and South London rapper Ms Banks recite over spare garage production, adding “Fuck, change, ride, die a little bit.” She spars with a filthy G-Eazy over a hollowed-out beat before moving into an acoustic, two-minute outro that quotes “Midnight Sun,” the mellow centerpiece of her 2013 mixtape Black Water. The reference feels intimate and real, a callback for Tinashe diehards and a reimagining of the phantom-limb sadness that occasionally accompanies the aftermath of a hookup.
Make no mistake: She fully takes time to talk her shit, too. The swanky “Cash Race” and “Link Up,” both Hitmaka productions that revolve around winding beat changes halfway through, are prime showcases for Tinashe’s melodic flow and shrugged-off boasts. The songs were originally meant for a shelved, hip-hop-focused project last summer, but here they instead provide a quick, satisfying glimmer of that bossed-up version of herself, with devilishly opulent lyrics about Brink’s trucks and private flights.
All of these different moods find balance thanks to Tinashe, a rebuke to anyone who thought she couldn’t work in this many different styles. She can embody “Nashe Houdini doing tricks with a saw” on “Link Up” and she can carry the melancholy soul of the hazy 6LACK duet “Touch & Go.” It isn’t fair that it took years of label mishandling to get here, but Tinashe has finally found equilibrium.