After he conquered the world with Purple Rain, Prince made a hard left turn into bright and sweet psychedelia. But the album had more going on beneath the surface.

Prince / The Revolution: Around the World in a Day

Around the World in a Day

Prince had been to the mountaintop, and he didn’t like what he saw. He had spent a full year fine-tuning his sound, his band, his look, and his story for Purple Rain, with the explicit goal of conquering the world. And it had worked perfectly—repositioning himself as a badass guitar hero and fronting a band which included multiple genders and races had opened up new audiences for him, and made him the biggest rock star in the universe.
But as soon as he reached that peak, that rarefied altitude so few artists get to see, Prince realized what being a superstar required. He knew that to meet the demand for his music, to feed the beast of the celebrity he had attained, he would be expected to keep pushing Purple Rain for all it was worth—to tour the U.S., then go to Europe, maybe to Australia, then back for a bigger U.S. victory lap. But Prince was too restless for that. And so he did the only thing he always knew how to do: He made more music, which sounded different from anything he had done or anything his new fans might have expected.
Around the World in a Day was completed on Christmas Eve of 1984 and released in April 1985, just two weeks after the final date on the Purple Rain tour—which Prince cut short abruptly, after just six months. His breakthrough album was still riding high on the charts.
He had quietly been working on the new album in scattered sessions that had actually started prior to Purple Rain’s release, without the knowledge of his label, Warner Bros.; even members of his band, the Revolution, didn’t know that a new project was underway, much less completed. “I wasn’t totally aware that he had been tracking that album,” said keyboardist Matt Fink. “I was not involved in it…I was okay with it, but at the same time, you always want to be in there if you can.”
The most noticeable thing about Around the World in a Day was what it wasn’t: It wasn’t remotely a sequel to Purple Rain. On first listen, it was instantly clear that the album was a dramatic left-turn, with none of the flashy guitar and few of the pop hooks. The sound was bright and sweet, as opposed to low-end raunch. If Prince had streamlined and rocked up his approach for global domination, now he was creating something more intimate, cerebral, and challenging.
Though Around the World was released with no radio single or advance promotion—“This has got to be the easiest album I’ve ever worked on,” Warner Bros. creative marketing chief Jeff Ayeroff said—the first taste for most listeners wasn’t too shocking. The irresistibly playful “Raspberry Beret” was in fact the most pure pop Prince had ever delivered. (I clearly remember hearing him play the song alone at the piano during the Purple Rain show I attended that spring, and the crowd went nuts, singing along by the second chorus.)
But “Raspberry Beret” was actually a song he had written a few years earlier, and was a bit of an outlier on the album. The real linchpin for the project was a demo that Revolution members Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman brought him, a track that had been recorded by their respective brothers, David Coleman and Jonathan Melvoin. It was a shimmery, winding instrumental with flutes and strings reminiscent of the Beatles circa Magical Mystery Tour. Prince loved its sound and feel, and he began to build the album around the psychedelic sensibility of this song, which would ultimately give the album its title.
The album cover—a painting depicting the Revolution in a trippy, candy-colored landscape—clearly evoked Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The first sounds you heard backed up this reference; the record kicked off with a keening Middle Eastern flute, and Prince’s first line is “Open your heart, open your mind.” This vision of a mystical journey for which “laughter is all you pay” was followed by “Paisley Park,” a depiction of Prince’s dream world (and, for those paying attention, the name of his new label imprint, for which Around the World was the first release) where “admission is easy/ Just say U believe,” and whose inhabitants feel only “profound inner peace.”
At the time, this utopian hippie bliss was the most obvious element of Around the World in a Day. “Prince goes psychedelic” was the common hot take, with all of the naïve optimism that implied. Several of the songs opened with fairy-tale introductions—“Once upon a time in the land of Sinaplenty” or “There was a girl in Paris.” Over time, though, what emerged was a much darker undertone running through the album. Even “Paisley Park” included a betrayed wife whose husband died “without knowing forgiveness” and a man crying as his house is condemned.
Over a loosely thudding drum sound, “Pop Life” (the album’s other Top 10 hit) was a skeptical meditation on the trappings of success, the lure of drugs and anti-intellectualism. “Everybody can’t be on top,” Prince sang with a hint of a sneer, “But life it ain’t real funky, unless it’s got that pop.” It was the moment that first articulated the creative tension that would play out over the rest of his career; was Prince more naturally a stadium-filling superstar or was he really the world’s biggest cult artist, with a dedicated following ready to follow him down which musical path he chose?
The album’s most conventional-sounding rock song was in some ways the oddest of all—was “America” a patriotic anthem without irony, an anti-communist manifesto written at the height of Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” or a savage attack on that mentality? Prince sang about a girl “making minimum wage/ Living in a one-room jungle monkey cage…she may not be in the black/ But she’s happy she ain’t in the red.” Tougher to interpret than “Born in the USA,” the song also allowed Prince to indulge his fantasies of nuclear apocalypse that went back to “1999” and “Ronnie, Talk to Russia.”
Some of the most striking moments on Around the World were the most compositionally experimental. The jittery, sexually-charged funk of “Tamborine” never fully coheres into a complete song, stretching the tension almost unbearably thin. “Condition of the Heart,” its jazz chords unfolding over an impossibly slow tempo as Prince maintains an inhuman falsetto, is as delicate as a spider’s web, threatening to fall apart at any moment.
As the album nears its conclusion, things get genuinely mystifying, and we get the clearest sense of the issues Prince was grappling with in the aftermath of Purple Rain. “The Ladder” is a bewildering parable of a king “who didn’t deserve 2 B,” and who embarks on a spiritual quest. The reward he (and we all) receive for “looking for the ladder,” Prince sings, building up his testifying vocal screams over slow-swinging, traditional gospel chords, is that “a feeling of self-worth will caress U/ The size of the whole wide world will decrease.”
There’s a remarkable co-writing credit on this curious epic, as well as on the title cut—John L. Nelson, Prince’s father, whose conflict with his son was spun into the fictional emotional center of the Purple Rain movie. A jazz pianist, Nelson even attended Prince’s initial presentation of the album at the Warner Bros. offices, clad in a caftan. What could it possibly mean that this father-son reconciliation and collaboration resulted in such dense, almost coded lyrics, with such a desperate yearning for salvation?
The final track on Around the World took things even farther. At some of the Purple Rain shows, Prince stopped the music to engage in actual on-stage conversations with God. Unlike his R&B sex symbol predecessors like Al Green and Marvin Gaye, Prince had never seemed tortured by the relationship between sex and faith; rather than defining physical love as sin, he had embraced sex as an earthly manifestation of the divine spirit. But clearly there was some new guilt pulling at him, some reaction to his success or his lifestyle, and it is documented on the eight-minute-plus “Temptation.”
Reeling off spiky, fuzzed-out guitar licks, Prince practically drools his expressions of desire; “Working my body with a hot flash of animal lust,” he squeals, shrieks, leers. Eddie M.’s saxophone gives the song an almost comic burlesque strut as Prince works himself into a sexual frenzy. Until another voice comes down from the heavens: “Oh, silly man, that’s not how it works/ You have 2 want her 4 the right reasons/"I do!"/ U don’t, now die!”
Prince ends the album having learned his lesson—that “love is more important than sex”—and by saying goodbye to his audience. “I have 2 go now,” he whispers, “I don’t know when I’ll return.” And indeed, just a few weeks before the release of Around the World in a Day, Prince announced his “retirement” from live performance; it may have been sincere at the time, but it was barely a year later when he was back on tour, this time for the Parade album.
With the momentum of Purple Rain behind it—or, more precisely, with the momentum still going full tilt—Around the World sold over two million copies; no Prince record would ever be as commercially successful in his lifetime. But the album didn’t capture the public imagination to anywhere near the degree that Purple Rain had. If anything, its lilting textures and cryptic lyrics served to confuse a large portion of the fans attracted by the girls-and-guitars spirit of the motorcycle riding, Jimi Hendrix-meets-James Brown image the movie had cultivated. Which, of course, seemed to be his intention, his only possible way out of competing with a world-changing, life-changing phenomenon.
But it’s unfair to only consider the album as a defensive maneuver or a strategy to keep his future options open. It was also a brave and deeply personal project, exploring sounds and ideas that were almost shocking coming from a pop icon at his peak. “I sorta had an f-you attitude,” Prince told legendary Detroit DJ the Electrifying Mojo about his mood while recording Around the World in a Day, “meaning that I was making something for myself and my fans. And the people who supported me through the years—I wanted to give them something, and it was like my mental letter. And those people are the ones who wrote me back, telling me that they felt what I was feeling.”


Uniform, a new Brooklyn duo composed of ex-The Men bassist Ben Greenberg and ex-Drunkdriver singer Michael Berdan, have an unremittingly bleak worldview. Perfect World's six songs work within the limits of hardcore and industrial to create a monolithic record that manages to slyly underminine its central thrust.

Perfect World

Uniform, a new Brooklyn duo composed of ex-The Men bassist Ben Greenberg and ex-Drunkdriver singer Michael Berdan, don't joke around when it comes to their dreary worldview. Perfect World is not meant as an optimistic title; it suggests the will to perfection choking the humanity out of the populace. The band name furthers that notion. World's cover, a sigil of a cross and death's sickle, is imposing and cryptic. But appearances can be deceiving: The album's six songs work within the limits of hardcore and industrial to create a monolithic record that slyly undermines its central thrust.
Let's get the only criticism, a fairly minor one at that, out of the way—the opener and title track is far and away the best song. Who would think that a stark industrial song, with a rhythm ready to break down and self-destruct at any moment, would be a summer jam? Over a sharp and thin Ministry-like attack, Greenberg programs a drum track suggestive of a metal drummer stuck in a blast-beat fugue state. His guitar grows increasingly paranoid as the song progresses, and Berdan's shrieks contribute to the tension, but "World" never loses its hook. Greenberg's pop instincts he cultivated during his tenure in The Men shine through Berdan's screeching voice and the brittle guitar. Thankfully, he's returned those talents to heavy music, not settling for bar rock. The Men were best when they simultaneously rode the lines of making clubs feel like stadiums and punk as destructive freedom, and Uniform might be, spiritually, the closest thing we'll get to their older works.
On "Buyer's Remorse", Uniform exhume '80s hardcore. Hardcore as a genre has explored dystopia plenty, but Uniform bob and swing with an urgency as if the stage-divers, instead of flailing about in the disorganization of their own lives, are out to specifically target you. "Indifference" moves toward a dark dance atmosphere, where Greenberg shifts his programming from metal purgatory to militaristic bass and snare. Feedback gets corralled into moaning riffs. Occasionally the guitar reaches blissful heights, contrasting and mocking the hell below. Dance music's utopian promise of one love and its undeniable undercurrent of sleaze all mix together, like Prurient's Through the Window with guitar in the mix.
World's last two songs, "Lost Causes", a collaboration with former Coil member Drew McDowall, and "Learning to Forget" are slower than the rest of the album, and would seem like Uniform's letting you coast off anesthetized. Not quite: "Causes" submerges the band's torment under unsettlingly pleasant drift, bringing Uniform's themes of suppression to their logical conclusion. Greenberg's guitar comes back roaring in "Learning", with Berdan, once the angry punk kid, rambling hushed and defeated. There's no pulse, and signs of life have been stamped out. The last two songs demonstrate how the spirit dies long before the flesh.


The charitable way to describe We Can Do Anything, the first Violent Femmes record in 15 years, is that it's a back-to-basics record; a less charitable perspective is that it's a pale Silly Putty copy of their still-beloved self-titled record from 33 years ago.

We Can Do Anything

Imagine that you had made a great, enduring piece of art with a couple of your friends when you were barely out of your teens. Now imagine that it's more than 30 years later, you no longer have anything in common with your former comrades, and all anybody wants to hear from you is that one glorious burst of hormonal fury you came up with as alienated kids.
That's roughly the position in which Violent Femmes find themselves in 2016, as they release their first album of new material since 2000. Singer/guitarist Gordon Gano has recently noted that he and bassist Brian Ritchie "don't agree on most basic things", which is putting it mildly: Ritchie sued Gano in 2007, and snapped that "it is his karma that he lost his songwriting ability many years ago". Original drummer Victor DeLorenzo rejoined the group when it reunited to play Coachella 2013, but quickly left, citing "disrespect, dishonesty and greed".
Somehow, though, Gano, Ritchie and DeLorenzo's replacement, Dresden Dolls' Brian Viglione (who departed the group at the end of last year), managed to scrape together an album's worth of tunes. Some of them were resuscitated from demo tapes dating back to the era when that meant "cassettes"; three were co-written by Gano and a handful of song doctors; "What You Really Mean" is a cover of a song by Gano's sister.
The charitable way to describe We Can Do Anything is that it's a back-to-basics record: ten brief songs in the band's most immediately recognizable idiom, with Gano singing and strumming with the twitchiness of a guilty teenager, Ritchie snapping strings like he's shooting rubber bands, and Viglione's brushes smacking the hell out of a single snare drum. A less charitable perspective is that it's a pale Silly Putty copy of Violent Femmes, with the vocal and instrumental tone reprised precisely from 33 years ago. It touches on all of the Femmes' familiar themes: masturbation ("Foothills"), Christian awe ("Holy Ghost"), lady troubles ("Big Car", which starts as leaden double-entendre and becomes a leaden murder ballad in its final line). The closest thing to a deviation from the formula here is "I Could Be Anything", a beer-kegger polka (with accordion!) about a dragon-slaying hero, which seems like it's heading toward a narrative twist but never comes up with one.
Violent Femmes have spent most of their career in the shadow of their debut album. (On their 2014 tour, they played it in its entirety, and last year's gigs inevitably began with "Blister in the Sun" and "Kiss Off" and ended with "Add It Up.") But they used to get some juice out of trying to get out from under it. The most memorable recordings of their subsequent career have been the biggest departures: the industrial fever-hallucination "Machine", the holy-rolling shock-skronk of "Black Girls", the in-your-face T. Rex cover "Children of the Revolution." They're not trying to pull off anything like that any more; instead, they're polishing up the durable façade of their signature sound, while the songwriting that it used to support has crumbled.


This domestic, stripped-down edition of Khruangbin has all the comforts of home, wherever in the world that may be.

A LA SALA

In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, Khruangbin released their third studio album, Mordechai, a disco-funk reprieve with the unusual, yet welcome, addition of vocals from bassist Laura Lee. Four years later, the trio returns with the stripped-down A LA SALA, a stark change in direction and scale from their last few albums. Khruangbin have always drawn inspiration from genres that span the globe and transport the listener to its far-flung corners. This time around, they squeeze all those influences into a universally beloved place: home.
Woven together from collected pieces of unreleased recordings and beat loops, A LA SALA—which translates as “to the living room”—pulls the group back to their earliest days in Houston, where their early recordings were heavily inspired by ’70s psych rock and funk, embedded with modalities from Thailand to Niger. In the intervening years, Khruangbin have become a streaming behemoth and darling of the indie jam scene, which means there’s far less to prove. There is a lot less of everything in A LA SALA: less spacey synths, less vocals, and a less-is-more approach to their usual genre-bending approach. The band thrives when it sheds all of the frills, and creates a small world where anything is possible.
Breathing room is the big draw here. If Mordechai exhibited too many moving parts to focus on any one moment or feeling, A LA SALA gently guides you through the ebbs and flows of varying moods and personalities. “Fifteen Fifty-Three” welcomes us like a late-night conversation, as if guitarist Mark Speer is relaying a story of a past life with each long-decaying strum. “Hold Me Up (Thank You)” begins as a familiar Khruangbin psych-funk workout until midway through, when a few sharp tugs of the guitar bring the song into a traditional Congolese soukous rhythm. All the while, the subtle vocal work shines in the background, allowing the instruments room to breathe.

“Pon Pón” lives in a tropical paradise, transporting us to some oceanside boardwalk late in the afternoon with the sounds of old-school Brazilian funk and MPB. DJ Johnson’s deft, subtle drumming adds to the movement of the melody without distracting from the strings and soft vocals counting down in a variety of languages. The big standout is “Ada Jean,” a noirish composition anchored by Lee’s shadowy, suspicious bassline. As the song progresses, Speer’s fluttery guitar riffs soften the scene, which ends with the distant sounds of sirens and whimpers. Perhaps “Ada Jean” is an assassin who hit her mark and the weeper a bereaved loved one. Perhaps it’s a Wild West story of a bank robbery gone awry. Regardless, when the trio is humming like this, the catalog of mental imagery runs deep.
In 2022, Lee explained that the band creates each new track piecemeal. The process begins when Lee pulls a drum loop from her bank of beats and layers it with her bass riffs, followed by guitar, followed by another round of percussion. Through this process, each member creates an individual composition that makes a track feel like a living piece of work. In A LA SALA, each member of the trio has several opportunities to shine while making each track sound individual, and it all comes together cohesively because Khruangbin know where their strengths lie. Even the most confident travelers must sometimes rest; A LA SALA represents a relief from the uncertainty of experimentation. This domestic edition of Khruangbin has all the comforts of home, wherever in the world that may be.


Songs: Ohia's best and most pivotal album, 2003's The Magnolia Electric Co., showcased the late Jason Molina's strong shift toward rock populism. Imbued with a dust-under-the-fingernails weariness, the album is so representative of Molina’s sound and spirit, he subsequently took Magnolia Electric Co. as his new band’s name.

The Magnolia Electric Co.

The late Jason Molina began his career by enduring constant comparisons to Will Oldham. The analogy became a lazy one, but its basis is understandable. Molina’s debut single under his Songs: Ohia moniker, 1996’s “Nor Cease Thou Never Now”, was released on Oldham’s own Palace Records, and his quivering, sing-speak cadence bears an unmistakable resemblance to Oldham’s. That association endured—up to and including a 2002 collaboration between Molina and Oldham (plus Appendix Out’s Alasdair Roberts) called Amalgamated Sons of Rest. But there are two other singing-songwriting contemporaries of Molina that make for equally apt comparisons: Ryan Adams and Elliott Smith. Adams’s Gold came out in 2001, and its unabashed ode to heartland-fueled classic rock emboldened a generation of punk-and-indie shitkickers to embrace their FM-radio roots. Smith had turned increasingly away from indie rock and toward a more organic classic-pop sound in the late 90s and early 00s—that is, until his suicide in 2003 cut that evolution short.
That year also marked the release of Molina’s best and most pivotal album: The Magnolia Electric Co., which showcased his own strong shift toward rock populism. Imbued with a dust-under-the-fingernails weariness, the album is so representative of Molina’s sound and spirit, he subsequently took Magnolia Electric Co. as his new band’s name. Molina’s work on Magnolia wasn’t as cryptically oblique as Oldham, as stadium-sized as Adams, or as harmonically polished as Smith. It was, perhaps for the first time in his recording tenure, pure and full Molina. But the album installed itself into the American songwriter landscape circa '03 in a way that closed the circuit among his peers and secretly, quietly willed a pocket of the zeitgeist into being.
The 10th anniversary of The Magnolia Electric Co. is upon us, hence the obligatory 10th-anniversary reissue. The album would have called for the deluxe retrospective treatment even if Molina hadn’t died earlier this year, of organ failure related to his long struggle with alcohol. The respectful euphemisms have flown. The bottom line, however, is harsh: Molina drank himself to death. But Magnolia is not a drunk record, nor is it a drinking record. While legions of alt-country troubadours have drained the tear-in-my-beer song of much of its traditionalist proof, Magnolia is sharp, clear-eyed, and savagely focused.
Beginning the album with “Farewell Transmission” is more than an act of perversity. Molina lays out his blueprint not just for the rest of Magnolia Electric Co. the album*,* but for the rest of Magnolia Electric Co. the band. What once was jittery and hesitant in his delivery is now howlingly powerful; gone is Songs: Ohia’s push-and-pull between intimacy and stridency. In its place is red-blood, full-throated, post-hippie country rock, right down to a name that evokes both Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Grateful Dead’s “Sugar Magnolia”. Only this is Cosmic American Music scorched by the heat of reentry, space-cowboy romance for the year of the Columbia shuttle disaster. “Must be a big star about to fall,” Molina rasps in awestruck wonder over amber waves of twang and pedal-steel majesty. The sweetheart of the rodeo now works at a truck stop somewhere on Route 66, handing out the men’s room key and smiling crookedly to hide her missing teeth.
Route 66 is mentioned by name on “John Henry Split My Heart”, and it’s more than just an obvious stab at harnessing American mythology. But it is that—an homage to the folk archetypes of a relatively young nation, yet one that hauls around so much weight. Calling Molina a death-obsessed singer-songwriter would be as off the mark as calling him a drunk singer-songwriter. Still, the gravity of “John Henry”—especially its bruising distortion and spiraling chords—hits like a Dust Bowl twister. And on “I’ve Been Riding with the Ghost”, a more hushed meditation on absence and regret builds into a stiff, inexorable shuffle toward death, complete with ghoulish backups by Molina’s frequent foil, Jennie Benford of Jim & Jennie and the Pinetops (the group with whom Molina recorded the sparse Didn’t It Rain in 2002). “Ghost” is almost Halloweenish in its spooky, oohing, voice-and-guitar refrain, but that dead-leaf brittleness raises gooseflesh. And when, on the churning threnody “Almost Was Good Enough”, Molina chants, “Almost no one makes it out,” it’s Crazy Horse galloping along the lip of a cliff.
For every act of negation—self- or otherwise—on Magnolia, there’s an imperative. “Just Be Simple” is Molina’s lone commandment, only he wields his Occam’s razor with a gentle subtlety, even as his arrangements are far more textured and complex than they let on. “Everything you hated me for/ Honey, there was so much more,” he sings softly and cleanly; meanwhile, what he doesn’t sing screams volumes. The obvious reference is to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man”, only here there’s no external narrator, no motherly figure through which to filter homespun wisdom. This is a hard-earned, heart-damaged cautionary tale told far too late for caution to do any good, and Molina seems content to judge no one but himself. “Hold on Magnolia” also delivers an order, but again it’s directed inward. “You might be holding the last light I see/ Before the dark finally gets a hold of me,” he pleads over lonesome strums before adding doubtfully, “Hold on, Magnolia/ I know what a true friend you’ve been.” The eerie similarity between “Magnolia” and “Molina” isn’t lost on anyone.
The dark-horse tracks of Magnolia have only gotten better with age. Presented back-to-back in the middle of the album, “The Old Black Hen” and “Peoria Lunch Box Blues” feature guests vocalists—grizzled country singer Lawrence Peters on the former and British-born singer Scout Niblett on the latter. Both are excellent. On “Black Hen”, Peters drawls like molasses across a honky-tonk funeral waltz; “Peoria”, on the other hand, conjures a mystic, distorted-folk lope worthy of Sandy Denny-era Fairport Convention. More than just being strong on their own, though, this one-two punch gives Molina a breather from all the turned-earth bleakness—plus it describes the entirety of the spectrum he draws from: orthodox Americana on one hand and otherworldly atmosphere on the other.
When it comes to the bonus tracks, not a moment is wasted. The complete set of guitar-plus-vocals demos—originally included in a limited-edition run of Magnolia upon its first release—shows the bones of “Black Hen” and “Peoria” with Molina himself supplying the vocals, studies in haunted restraint that recall the Songs: Ohia of old. “Just Be Simple” is given the most felicitous treatment as a skeleton of its full-band self. Every crevice and shiver of Molina’s voice is allowed to hang in empty space, naked and aching. The pair of newly restored outtakes, “The Big Game Is Every Night” and “Whip Poor Will”, are essential to the album; hearing them in the context of the established track listing, it’s hard to imagine how Magnolia ever did without them. “Whip Poor Will” is light and sweet, a melancholic confection in which Molina plucks at taut strings and duets with Benford, whom Molina begs to “Sing it, sister, one more time.” Their harmonies on the chorus are jagged, uneven, vinegary, perfect.
But it’s “The Big Game Is Every Night” that truly astounds: 10 glorious minutes long, the song pulses like a severed vein, its rhythm slowly ebbing out as Molina sings, “The last thing I see/ Let it be me helping/ Honestly, let it be me working/ On being a better me.” Only Molina knew if he fulfilled that promise to himself before he died. Ultimately, that’s all that matters about Magnolia, regardless of its maker’s deserved place in the pantheon alongside Oldham, Adams, and Smith: the way Molina sank his roots so deep, they took up more than they could bear.


On their second album, the wildly inventive art-rock band works harder than ever to unburden itself of the influences heard in its earlier work.

Rock Island

Listening to the first 30 seconds of Rock Island, it might surprise you that Palm never really learned to play their instruments in the classical sense. Singer-guitarists Kasra Kurt and Eve Alpert, bass player Gerasimos Livitsanos, and drummer Hugo Stanley were all more or less amateurs when they converged at New York’s Bard College circa 2011, as you’ll learn from most writing about the Philadelphia-based band. This part of Palm’s backstory has trailed them for years, perhaps because it helps explain the wayward frenzy and exuberant sprawl of their music. On their 2015 full-length debut, Trading Basics, and last year’s Shadow Expert EP, they’ve continually pushed themselves to evolve at an accelerated pace—it’s as if they’re aspiring toward an identity they haven’t quite found. Their second album, Rock Island, shows Palm working harder than ever to unburden themselves of the influences heard on those earlier releases, from Slint and Sonic Youth to Battles and Animal Collective.
It’s a document of a band that’s too busy moving forward to be certain of the destination. Consider the scrappy jangle of opening track “Pearly,” with its riot of synthetic steel drums, looping vocals, and quaintly retro synth pads, or the smooth flourishes of fake brass toward the end of the album on “Swimmer,” like a robot’s approximation of yacht rock. These are not what you would call expressions of a carefully thought-out artistic vision; the turns are too chaotic, the decisions too turbulent. Though there are byzantine time signatures, rhythmic hiccups, and anti-pop musical modes all over the album, Palm’s wild energy still bears not a trace of convention. The songs feel like they’re still being invented and perfected even as you listen to them.
This tendency to follow every whim sometimes feels like an insurance policy—protection against the threat of boredom, both the listener’s and Palm’s own. Rock Island has a restless quality. When the band tires of steady plodding two minutes into “Bread,” the song pivots and erupts in an outburst of frantic percussion, before pivoting once again a minute later into a softer swirl of dreamy backing harmonies and prickly guitar. Of course, that twitchy songwriting can’t help but put one in mind of Deerhoof, one of Palm’s clearest philosophical forebears, even when they don’t exactly sound alike. Similarly, Kurt will likely always sound a little like Avey Tare (who, in turn, will always sound a little like Brian Wilson). For all their innovation, the piecemeal quality of Palm’s music never lets it cohere into something uniquely their own.
When they fight against those similarities most ardently, the music gains a compelling sense of tension. “Dog Milk,” the album’s strongest cut, is a dazzling blaze of anarchic inspiration that makes five-plus minutes of steel-pan drum loops and warring yawps feel like pure euphoria. It’s a vigorous song, animated by real imagination and brio. Not coincidentally, it’s the moment on Rock Island when Palm sound most comfortably themselves, bringing their gifts to bear less in hazy imitation of eccentric acts of old than in service of something startling and new.


Cave performed these 22 career-spanning songs alone in a deserted concert hall, reworking them into haunted piano sermons that glow with unnerving intimacy.

Nick Cave: Idiot Prayer: Nick Cave Alone at Alexandra Palace

Years ago, people asked Nick Cave questions at their peril. In 1988, one NME hack riled him so badly that Cave started swinging punches, tried to steal the interview tape, and screamed: “You’re nothing but a shite-eater!” Today, though, you can ask him anything—literally—and he’ll answer on his Red Hand Files website. How do I cope with losing someone I love? Should I bring children into this world’s Boschian hellscape? Do you enjoy stage magic? Every warm, generous response makes Cave seem more like a kindly agony uncle instead of the larger-than-life construct of yore. The man who once passed for some crazed netherworld shaman, as unearthly and sinister as the stranger from “Red Right Hand,” usually limits the supernatural grandeur to discussing his beloved dachshund, Nosferatu.
Other recent projects have made Cave the flesh-and-blood human more visible, too: chatty Q&A shows, candid documentaries, and a poignant Bad Seeds record, 2019’s Ghosteen, touched by the death of his son, Arthur. But none have been as eerily intimate as Idiot Prayer. A live film and LP recorded at London’s Alexandra Palace after Covid-19 waylaid a Bad Seeds tour, it finds him performing alone in a deserted concert hall, reworking 22 career-spanning songs into haunted piano sermons. The 84 minutes are filled almost entirely by melancholy keys and Cave’s rich croon. On the solitary new track, the longing ballad “Euthanasia,” he sings of spending a desperate evening roaming lonely landscapes, unmoored by grief and seeking salvation. “In looking for you, I lost myself,” he quivers over its elegant arrangement.
That contemplative approach means Cave doesn’t so much strip songs down as peel back the flesh and expose their skeletal beauty. “Sad Waters” is recast as a pretty, tumbling lament; “Stranger Than Kindness” is broken down into a ghostly hymn; an otherworldly “Girl in Amber” entrances. Nearly a third of the set is taken from 1997’s The Boatman’s Call, a choice which forges a spiritual link between that record’s stately heartbreak and Ghosteen’s sublime ruminations on grief. In Alexandra Palace’s lavish, uncanny void, the lines between past and present start to blur, and compositions become unstuck in time. Twenty-year-old wounds are as tender as purpling bruises on “Brompton Oratory” and “Far From Me,” while Cave’s choked falsetto on the sparse, sumptuous “Black Hair” suggests the scent that an ex-lover left on his pillow still fills his nostrils. “Waiting For You,” on the other hand, emerged just last year, yet he purges the Ghosteen version’s gauzy electronic sheen until only a brittle prayer remains, and his voice cracks as if he’s spent an eternity in purgatory.
Inevitably, the spartan setup favors a certain vein of Cave’s songwriting. For the most part, he snubs the Bad Seeds’ priapic sleaze and fire-and-brimstone filth to embrace his softer side. When he sinks into heartbreak on “Nobody’s Baby Now,” it’s as wistful as the coda to a silver-screen romance; during Grinderman’s “Palaces of Montezuma,” which is reimagined as a jazzy lounge number, his grand pledges waver between bravado and bashfulness. As with many of the deconstructions, the unvarnished treatment allows a greater vulnerability to shine through.
And yet some of Idiot Prayer’s finest moments crackle with a more dangerous energy. On a handful of mesmerizing tracks, Cave sounds less like he’s revisiting his songbook than conducting a seance. “Higgs Boson Blues,” a sprawling surrealist odyssey on 2013’s Push the Sky Away, starts out hushed but slowly spirals into a fevered vision. “Driving my car, flame trees on fire,” he keens over its music-box melody; by the song’s end, as he riffs on Miley Cyrus, monkeys, and smallpox-carrying missionaries, his voice has broken into a howl and he’s hammering away at the keys. Old live favorite “The Mercy Seat,” meanwhile, has rarely had the kind of dark intensity that Cave summons here, transformed into a glowing murder ballad.
About 30-odd minutes in, just after he’s finished a forlorn “(Are You) The One That I’ve Been Waiting For?,” Cave lets slip a quick, disbelieving chuckle, as if suddenly snapping out of a reverie. Otherwise, there’s no talking, no wisecracking, no concession that anyone else might be listening in as he reckons with his life’s work. The result is a performance that exists in a strange hinterland, an album that’s unnervingly intimate yet flickers with the strange unreality of a dream. Idiot Prayer is as up-close and personal an encounter with Cave as there’s ever been. But a little mystery remains, always.

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Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the birth of jazz fusion, a combustive 1969 album led by a prodigious drummer striking it out on his own.

Emergency!

One night in the fall of 1969, at a Manhattan club called Ungano’s, Herbie Hancock willingly put his hearing at risk. He was there to catch Lifetime, a new trio led by Tony Williams, his former bandmate in Miles Davis’ revolutionary 1960s quintet. He didn’t know what to call the music being played that night by Williams, organist Larry Young, and guitarist John McLaughlin. But he sensed that the experience was worth the aural toll.
“It was loud,” Hancock later recalled of the gig. “It was the loudest stuff I ever heard in my life. It was louder than rock’n’roll. I said to myself, ‘This is something new.’ … It was exciting and very arresting. It snatched you. It yanked you out of your seat. A lot of the people couldn’t take the volume. They got up and left. I also knew that if I stayed, I would pay the price in later years with my hearing. I consciously made the bad decision to listen anyway.”
When Miles heard the trio amped-up and jamming at a Harlem club, he promptly recruited McLaughlin for the session that would produce the 1969 ambient-jazz landmark In a Silent Way. That album and its 1970 follow-up, Bitches Brew, would come to be known as foundational texts of jazz-rock fusion. But as startling as those Miles dispatches were, and as entrancing as each remains more than a half-century on, neither fully harnessed the volume and volatility of contemporary rock. The true big bang of fusion arrived right on the heels of In a Silent Way, and well before Bitches Brew: Emergency!, the Tony Williams Lifetime’s aptly named 1969 debut.
Crank up the opening title track, jeopardizing your ears as Hancock did, and you’ll hear, within the first minute, jazz-rock’s fiery inception. Williams plays a taut snare-roll crescendo and the band enters with a blaring four-chord vamp, McLaughlin’s guitar bathed in fuzz and wah and Young’s Hammond B-3 framed by ominous distortion. Williams rampages through the riff—hammering the bass-drum pedal, syncopating furiously on the snare, rolling on the toms, exploding across the cymbals—while still conveying seismic waves of groove. The collective sound suggests Jimi Hendrix, Keith Emerson, and Clyde Stubblefield jamming on the rim of an active volcano. Just when it seems like Williams’ kit might splinter, the band downshifts gracefully into simmering swing, with the drummer playing springy jazz time on the ride, McLaughlin picking out nimble lines and Young adding chugging chords.
As with every transition in the piece, Williams’ otherworldly dynamic control makes this abrupt shift seem as though it’s cushioned by velvet. Later, the band builds to a thrash-funk theme reprise, driven by Young’s muscular bassline, during which you can hear one of the musicians (McLaughlin, perhaps?) whooping at the outrageousness of it all.
“Here is where we take a giant step into the future,” Lester Bangs wrote of Emergency! in a Rolling Stone review. He went on to characterize Williams, McLaughlin, and Young as “jazz musicians who have seen through the smog of pop artifice and picked up on the very best that rock has to offer, making their music a totally unique entity.”
Before a 23-year-old Tony Williams essentially willed fusion into existence, he’d spent his first few years on the scene revitalizing the rhythmic vocabulary of jazz. Already a star drummer by the time he was a teenager, he gigged regularly in his hometown of Boston with organist Johnny “Hammond” Smith and saxophonist Sam Rivers. In December 1962, days after Williams’ 17th birthday, he shared a local bandstand with saxophonist Jackie McLean, who immediately invited him to move to New York. During the next several years, the drummer appeared on a staggering array of adventurous, now-classic jazz albums—including McLean’s One Step Beyond, trombonist Grachan Moncur III’s Evolution, multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch!, pianist Andrew Hill’s Point of Departure and Rivers’ Fuchsia Swing Song—goading musicians a decade or two older than him with a hyper-alert style built around crisp articulation, jutting accents, and the artful dilation and contraction of tempo. Meanwhile, Davis drafted him into the quintet—with Hancock, bassist Ron Carter and, eventually, saxophonist Wayne Shorter—that would come to be known as one of the greatest jazz groups ever. Williams was the band’s designated upsetter, adding an impulsive urgency that beautifully offset Shorter’s moody compositions.
Seemingly anytime Davis recalled his collaboration with Williams, a string of effusive expletives would flow. “I had heard this great little 17-year-old drummer…who just blew my fucking mind,” Davis wrote in his autobiography, adding that “I could definitely hear right away that this was going to be one of the baddest motherfuckers who had ever played a set of drums.” In a 1969 Miles interview in Rolling Stone, conducted after Williams had left his band and formed Lifetime, the trumpeter sounded like he was feeling the drummer’s absence. After avowing that “Tony can swing and play his ass off,” and again labeling him a “motherfucker,” Davis added, “I don’t think there’s a drummer alive can do what Tony Williams can do.”
Williams had idolized Miles, and both participants and observers viewed the Shorter/Hancock/Carter/Williams quintet as pivotal, but he knew the gig wasn’t his ultimate destiny. In the later years of his tenure with the trumpeter, as the drummer later explained to Down Beat, “I started living under a kind of cloud. Miles is a very strong personality. He has definite ideas about what he wants. There, you live in his world. Living in someone else’s world is not easy. I was subject to his whims and desires and caprices. It took me a long time to realize that and to get out of it.”
At the same time, he was brimming with fresh musical inspiration, drawn in part from voracious listening. In Herbie Hancock’s memoir, Possibilities, the pianist credits Williams as a constant source of new and challenging sounds during the ’60s, turning him on to radical composers including Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage. “I was always asking him, ‘What are you listening to?’ because I knew I’d learn something,” Hancock wrote.
While keeping up with the latest avant-garde developments, Williams also soaked in the pop music of the day. He’d grown up on doo-wop in the ’50s, even singing lead in a group called the Monticellos, and in the ’60s, to the dismay of some of his jazz peers, he became a proud Beatlemaniac, an enthusiasm that would endure for the rest of his life. As rock got progressively wilder, and louder, throughout the decade, the drummer was paying close attention. He would later characterize Turn It Over, the second Lifetime album, as “my version of Kick Out the Jams” by the MC5. For Emergency!, other rock luminaries like Cream, the Who, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience lit the spark.
In interviews conducted in the early Lifetime era, Williams spoke of amplified, overdriven rock as if it were a tractor beam, drawing him in. “I started hearing a lot of electricity,” he told Down Beat in 1970, citing Hendrix’s Are You Experienced as a touchstone, "…and that started to excite me, and I wanted to hear more of that.”
If Lifetime’s rock trappings were staunchly contemporary, the group’s basic makeup pointed backward roughly a decade, to Williams’ early days working alongside Johnny “Hammond” Smith. In that earlier era, the organ trio was seen as the pinnacle of swinging soulfulness, the instrument itself acting as a direct link between modern jazz and traditional gospel and blues. “I wanted an electric group, to have an organ trio which would go back to my roots in Boston, when I played in the late ’50s and early ’60s,” he later reflected. “I figured why not do that but make it more aggressive, more rock-oriented than blues-oriented? That was the premise. There’s nothing new, it’s just how you use it and how you put it together.”
The format may have been retro, but the personnel was state-of-the-art, with two virtuosos that Williams handpicked from very different backgrounds. In the early-to-mid-’60s, Newark-born Larry Young had progressed from soul jazz—sometimes working in the classic organ/guitar/drums format that Williams revived with Lifetime—to forward-looking post-bop. McLaughlin had spent the prior decade as a guitarist for hire on the London scene, playing jazz, blues, and R&B with future members of Cream and Led Zeppelin, among many others, while keeping close tabs on the innovations of Miles and John Coltrane. Hearing a tape of McLaughlin playing at London jazz mecca Ronnie Scott’s, Willliams appreciated that the guitarist was playing, as the drummer later said, in “a very aggressive way, not so politely,” and quickly called and invited him to New York.
Emergency! is a sprawling statement, a double album lasting 70 minutes. But one of the fullest realizations of Williams’ Hendrix-meets-“Hammond” Smith concept is the relatively brief “Vashkar.” Pianist Paul Bley had previously recorded the tune, penned by his then-wife Carla, as a pensive mood piece; in Lifetime’s hands, it’s an uptempo prog-jazz burner. Driven by a tumbling Williams pulse, the trio dances through the complex stop-start theme, ending each iteration with a dramatic full-band rest. Then, in the middle of McLaughlin’s scrambling solo, Williams starts playing an embryonic version of an extreme-metal blastbeat, alternating snare and bass in rapid succession while rising precipitously in volume, as Young joins in with shuddering note clusters. During Young’s solo, the organist seems to incite Williams to repeat the move with his increasingly frenzied lines, and soon all three musicians are hurtling toward a supernova climax. In these heated exchanges, you hear the thunderous echo of Williams’ earlier acoustic playing, as though he’d found a way to extrapolate an entire group language out of the rambunctious charge he’d previously brought to Miles and other bandleaders. For the drummer, the Emergency! title itself underscored the way the record acted as a kind of manifesto: “It was an emergency for me to leave Miles and put that band together,” he later said. “And I wanted to play an emerging music that was my own.”
“Sangria for Three,” a kaleidoscopic 13-minute suite penned by Williams, is the album’s rangiest piece: an ideal showcase for the band’s genre-detonating approach. Cycling deftly through grinding acid-rock groove, scampering white-knuckle jams and freeform noise duets between McLaughlin and Young, the track could almost pass for a fragment of a Mars Volta bootleg. In a more just world, we’d have numerous live takes of “Sangria for Three” to pore over, à la better-known epics of the day like “Dark Star,” “Soul Sacrifice” or “21st Century Schizoid Man.” But the Emergency! version is enough to instantly debunk the notion, born out of later, slicker iterations of jazz-rock, that fusion was an inherently polite or calculatedly commercial movement. Don’t let the track’s breezy title fool you: As much as, say, “Sister Ray” the year before or “Fun House” the year after, this is punk before punk.
An instrumental album by this trio would have felt plenty provocative to both the jazz and rock establishments, especially one with the audaciously overdriven sound of Emergency! (Williams himself was unhappy with the album’s production: “It sounded distorted,” he said at the time, pejoratively.) But there was another facet of Emergency! that made it challenging even for sympathetic listeners: the drummer’s decision to include his own highly eccentric vocals on three prominent tracks. Easily the strangest is “Via the Spectrum Road,” co-credited to Williams and McLaughlin, which alternates a languid 11/8 funk groove with march-like improv interludes. On top, Williams speak-sings couplets seemingly drawn from the touring life (“Rain on the ground/In every town”; “Club owner’s wife/Causes strife”). The piece feels like an oddly casual tangent on an otherwise urgent album. The most convincing use of vocals on Emergency! comes on “Where,” a McLaughlin-penned piece on which Williams’ gently murmured inquiries (“Where are you going?/Where have you come from?”) enhance the intermittent mood of eerie stillness.
At the time, Melody Maker called the album’s vocal passages “almost indescribably awful,” while Bangs’ otherwise glowing Emergency! review described them as “preachy, pretentious vocalisms.” Discussing Lifetime’s use of vocals in a contemporary interview, Williams cited crooners like Nat King Cole and Billy Eckstine as inspirations but then seemed to deflect the matter altogether, saying, “I’m just experimenting.” Driving home his insistence on keeping his creative options open, he added, “Five years from now I may just walk on stage and saw a chair in half.”
The quip seemed to foreshadow the restlessness that would mark the rest of Williams’ career. Other Miles alums established themselves as star fusion bandleaders after splitting from Davis, riding the jazz-rock wave all the way to arenas and impressive commercial success during the ’70s: McLaughlin with the proto-tech-metal Mahavishnu Orchestra, the germs of which are clearly audible on Emergency! tracks like “Where” and “Spectrum”; Hancock with the ultra-funky Headhunters; Chick Corea with the proggy, virtuosic Return to Forever; and Wayne Shorter and keyboardist Joe Zawinul with the colorful and eclectic Weather Report. Lifetime, meanwhile, never gained wide popularity, even with the addition of Cream’s Jack Bruce on bass and occasional vocals for Turn It Over, released in 1970. McLaughlin left after that album, and Young—whom Williams would later call “the heart of that original Lifetime band”—departed after 1971’s Ego. (The organist, too often overshadowed by Hancock, Corea, Zawinul, and Mahavishnu’s Jan Hammer as a pioneer of fusion keyboard, died in 1978 at age 37.) An entirely different lineup, dubbed New Lifetime, would craft another classic with 1975’s stylish, well-rounded Believe It, but the magnificent grit and spontaneity of Emergency! was mostly absent from later editions.
Williams would go on to play everything from driving hard rock alongside Ronnie Montrose to sparkling standards with the Great Jazz Trio. But in his sprawling discography, Emergency! stands out for its wired intensity and brash experimentation—and for the visionary way it unified the most vital sounds of its era. Electricity was in the air in 1969, but it took a musician of Williams’ conviction and imagination to harness it, to bring together two musical poles and allow them to spark rather than fizzle, to create something, in Herbie Hancock’s words, “louder than rock’n’roll,” but without sacrificing the dynamic range and microscopic conversational detail of jazz.
Late in his life, the drummer often recalled the chilly reception Lifetime received in its day, mainly from jazz purists. “The band was vilified,” he said in the ’90s, looking back on the original Lifetime. “But the audiences loved it…. We were the hot band for rock people like Janis Joplin, but most jazz people didn’t want to know.” Still, decades on from Emergency! he stood firmly by the project. “It was something that had to be done at the time,” he said in 1996, the year before his death from a heart attack at age 51.
In another ’90s interview, he elaborated on why the original Lifetime was a necessary step. “The music was a reaction to what happened then, the turmoil of the ’60s,” he said. “The ’60s was about making a statement.” Then, distinguishing his, McLaughlin, and Young’s bold emergence from later iterations of fusion with typical brashness, he added, “The jazz rock I hear now … it’s in restaurants … it’s yuppie music.”


Aquaria is the full-length debut from the producer best known for his work with Beyoncé. It's hollowly explosive and impeccably engineered, but Boots remains in his own shadow, his own music eclipsed by his production work.

AQUARIA

The fact that you still can't mention Boots without also mentioning Beyoncé teaches two mournful lessons: 1) It's a mixed bag to start your career with a zeitgeist-definitive icon re-recording your best songs,  and 2) It's even harder when you struggle to find a distinctive voice on your own. Four-fifths of Beyoncé had Boots' stamp on it, and since then the artist and producer, whose real name is Jordan Asher, has been busy. He's brought his surly, gentle, unfurling darkness to a feature-heavy mixtape, a series of well-chosen collaborations—Run the Jewels and FKA twigs, most recently—and now a first album, Aquaria. It's hollowly explosive and impeccably engineered; it's a ball of static electricity, its aesthetic distinct. And nevertheless, Boots remains in his own shadow, his debut album eclipsed by his debut.
As a musician, Boots has an ear for sweet melody and a percussive, subtle, muscular style. His instincts cleave to R&B easily, and innovate from inside the genre; you can hear this happy marriage clearly on "Haunted," the Beyoncé meditation that was originally a Boots track called "I'm Onto You." Aquaria recalls that track's sound world directly: the instrumentation that rattles and slaps, the vocal line narrow. Aquaria itself is a rock album cumulatively – its soul is Mad Max and Jesus' Son, as if someone pushed Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead underwater and made them kiss – but Boots's primary instinct is genre agnosticism. This is an enormous benefit to the artists who work with him, but it's often a detriment when he's left alone.
As a rule, Boots' instrumentals are much more persuasive and emotionally precise than his vocals. The slinky and rabble-rousing title track is a highlight, and not coincidentally because Angel Deradoorian is paired against a great, fat, delicate clap in the beat. "I Run Roulette," another standout, is hard-edged pop that rides the contrast between the pitch-black riot that serves as the backdrop and the verses, which come very close to bubble-grunge.
But Boots has an imprecise delivery as a vocalist. When he sings, or just as often sing-raps, you often forget what he's trying to say. Part of the difficulty lies in the lyrics. They're half-heartedly combative, noncommittally weird, full of half-clever neologisms: like the song title "Oraclies," for "oracle" and "lies." On "Bombs Away," Boots sings: "All the wolves are famous/ Hide the rich and shameless/ Thirsty like an addict/ Hope is for the tragic/ Sell me down a new stream/ New world has new dream." The same restless, idle soothsaying comes in on "C.U.R.E.," a track that aches for a Run the Jewels guest verse (El-P is a co-producer on Aquaria) but, with Boots at the helm, sounds almost, truly, like Crazytown. There's a slightness in his voice that he doesn't use well; there's a melodic whimsy in his aesthetic that's best matched either with formidable guest charisma or else with his own production, its taut anxiety left unverbalized, slicing and revving away.
As on WinterSpringSummerFall, snippets of melody are briefly mesmerizing here; on Aquaria, the old-fashioned slow-dance ballad "Only" is a beautiful lament. "I am the only one alive," he sings, then switches: "You are the only one alive." Those are your options, solipsism or fixation; the album whirls between the two poles to occasionally claustrophobic effect. Each song confines you to a small set of characters: a bassline, a beat knocking, a squidge of sonic interference, a melody.
For all of Boots' fluidity and technical proficience, his solo work seems hampered by his attachment to pop, which doesn't fit his elusive profile. Aquaria could explode live, with two drummers at Boots' back. But in speakers, the album feels just pop enough in intention that its pleasures seem noticeably absent; with a few strong exceptions, the album could be a folder of songs waiting for someone else to bring them to life. Boots has talent enough to make a star, or to elevate a star to a new realm. You wonder who his next one will be.


Two years after 2004's They Were Wrong So We Drowned turned dance-punk's brightest trio into impressionistic noise-rockers, Liars return with an even bigger surprise: Drum's Not Dead actually tops their groundbreaking, beat-heavy debut through an evolution of the sound that turned much of their fanbase against them.

Drum's Not Dead

Ditching Berliniamsburg for the real deal, Liars moved to Germany in late 2004 to replant their roots in fresh cultural soil and begin recording their third album in a studio that offered creative possibilities too fertile to resist: The acoustically rich radio facility in the former East Germany boasts a labyrinthine system of rooms, each with its own distinct acoustic advantages. The trio's relocation is sure to be cited as the impetus for the Krautrock-like propulsivity of the resulting LP, but prior to the change of scenery they were exploring this kind of dark percussiveness on 2004's They Were Wrong, So We Drowned. Most listeners had shrugged that album off for its dissimilarity to the band's acclaimed dance-punk debut, They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top, but while hectic, less refined, and at times sloppy, the underrated They Were Wrong marked the shift in direction that would lead Liars to the ethereal gorgeousness of Drum's Not Dead.
Highlighted by taut improvisation and frontman Angus Andrew's mastery of falsetto, the record's resolute seamlessness may be attributable to growth through practice: Liars wrote and recorded one album, but, not wholly satisfied with the results, decided against releasing it. Instead, that material was used as a blueprint for what became Drum's Not Dead, and in the process, the band cast off They Were Wrong's witches and Walpurgisnacht. Granted, there is still a conceptual libretto, this time centered on the universal struggle between confidence and cowardice. These traits are represented by two characters: the instinctive and assertive Drum, and the pessimistic, apprehensive Mt. Heart Attack. Of course, as with They Were Wrong, any conceptual devices remain secondary to the sound and mood.
"Be Quiet Mt. Heart Attack!" perfectly sets the stage, as fractured guitar waves, opiate military percussion, and Andrew's windswept vocals careen into pitch-shifts which slightly deepen the shadows. Segueing into "Let's Not Wrestle Mt. Heart Attack", Liars let forth a siren call that bears an uncanny resemblance to the first few seconds of Faust's "The Sad Skinhead", then plunge into bubbling floor-tom/cymbal madness that echoes both Liquid Liquid and This Heat. The percussion is corporeal, tapping into some inner biological timepiece, and as on the album's best tracks, guitar notes are employed only as simple pulsing behind layered, seraphic vocals. Completing the mood-setting opening triad, "A Visit From Drum" is linked again by a vocal gasp; a less treated kit accompanies a floor tom/snare and the clattering of sticks for a creepy, mystic sounding incantation. Here and elsewhere, the guitar is an ambient sidekick to high-pitched vocals and tribal drumming.
Those first three songs are the album's strongest grouping, yet the excellent push/pull sequencing of Drum's Not Dead creates a shivery cumulative effect that spans the entire length of the record: By its closing notes, you're likely to find yourself awed and emotionally spent. "Drum Gets a Glimpse" pairs a mournful Eno-esque melodic sense with cymbal washes, M83 guitar tones, crickets, and Andrew trading lines between the naive and melancholy falsetto of Mt. Heart Attack ("It seems like all our friends have gone"), and the deeper, more authoritative Drum ("You drove them out").
Later, there are a couple of abstract pieces-- fuzzier, looping canyon bliss-outs with left-channel acoustic guitar; a bit of swirling, Sister-era Sonic Youth shredding-- along with a pair of standouts. The first of these, "Drum and the Uncomfortable Can", is coated in reverb that amplifies the intensity of the cannibalistic double drumming: It's primal marching band music wrapped in guitar feedback and a howling voice singing about hiding a body. The second comes with the straightforward, closing ballad "The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack", which resolves the album at its-- and the band's-- absolute peak. Like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Maps", its surprise sentimentality lends essential emotional weight, but does so with a dedicated restraint. Gentle guitar drifts accrue density alongside sighing vocals, warmed tom tom heartbeats, tiny instrumental accents (piano, tambourine, roughed-up strings), and Andrew's simple, sweet sentiments: "I won't run far, I can always be found"; "If you want me to stay, I will stay by your side."
For added value, Liars flesh things out with an accompanying DVD that presents three visual versions of the album: "Drum's Not Bread" by drummer Julian Gross, "The Helix Aspersa" by Andrew, and filmmaker Markus Wambsganss' "By Your Side". Due to its liberal use of live and studio footage (and farm animals, actually), Gross' best held my attention. More refined, Wambsganss creates effects with light and motion-- his three-channel video for "The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack" is his portion's most compelling moment. Maintaining a stoic minimalism, Andrew fixates on a snail's ponderous adventures through Germany.
Of course, the music remains the greatest draw. Those who previously yearned for a career trajectory the band wisely ditched ought to listen to Drum and keep track of the epiphanies. In the coming weeks, its strengths will win converts, even among those who'd previously jumped ship. But my favorite detail of this feel-good story-- popular Brooklyn post-punk band falls out of favor by changing directions and ultimately produces an album that eclipses its debut-- is that Liars are still waltzing along on their own terms. This, their third LP, shows zero concessions to the criticisms they received from publications like Spin and Rolling Stone, who awarded They Were Wrong their lowest possible marks. Succeeding rather than regressing or retreating, Liars have had the last laugh: Drum's Not Dead is a majestic victory lap, and on all levels, a total fucking triumph.


Following the massive UK success of their 2002 debut, Up the Bracket, Clash-fearing rockers The Libertines crashed and burned: Frontman ...

The Libertines

Call this grossly irresponsible if you must, but short of dying in a plane crash, nothing says "rock star" quite like a public drug freakout. I'm not saying drugs are right for everybody-- kids, stay away from crack unless you think you've got a pretty good shot at getting famous-- but through the years, drug addiction has consistently remained the ultimate in-style rockcessory of all fashion's fickle vicissitudes. For the layperson, addiction may be a tragic, often painful disease; for rock stars, it's simply bolsters "mystique." Alright, I'm teasing, you got me. Addiction is pretty terrific for everyone.
Nevertheless, plenty has been made of Libertines frontman Pete Doherty's battle with crack, and I was fully prepared to not say another word-- right up until I realized that The Libertines' self-titled follow-up to 2002's Up the Bracket was indeed all about them and the interior struggles caused by Doherty's very public addiction. It's all a glitzy mess with a fair share less charm than the debut, and whether The Libertines is a wreck by design, or simply reflects the still-fractured state of the band in recovery, no one can say. All that's clear is that, once again, in the fishbowl of celebrity, addiction is being spun into a PR coup, a thing to be pitied, laughed at, cried at, forgiven, and ultimately used as just another excuse-- mostly for why this isn't a better album. The woes of drug use arise here at intervals, concluding with the romantic lament, "What became of the likely lads?/ What became of the dreams they had?" They signed with Sanctuary and released a slapdash second album; are you guys kidding me?
Considering the great heights this album occasionally reaches, it's a bit of a left-handed compliment to level the lone criticism that it seems hopelessly tossed-off. It's brilliant at points, exhibiting the casual, grimy grace that laced Up the Bracket through English countryside benders, sing-alongs, and pub anthems, but evidently, The Libertines are creatures of excess, and even a good thing can be overdone. Bands pull off "accidental genius" with more frequency than anyone has a right to expect-- Pavement founded an empire based on it-- but even if The Libertines are more hits than misses here, it still takes a little more than slurred speech and sloppy guitars to drive this act home.
Instead of lending the skiffling, slightly skewed rhythms a special air of irreverence, or making the occasionally off-key barbershop caterwaul sound a little sweeter, as on Up the Bracket, The Libertines' half-assed effort here produces half-assed results. Insouciance paid dividends for them in 2002 as they thumbed their noses at rock, dub, folk, and every other genre in arm's reach, but if you can possibly imagine it, that shambling style-blender was actually tighter then, both in terms of songwriting and cohesiveness.
The only issue here is one of investment (or possibly a calculated lack thereof), since little seems to have outwardly changed, except perhaps Doherty's singing. To his credit, his vocal resemblance to Julian Casablancas is downplayed, as he instead opts to rely on his considerable natural vocal character over needless imitation, but with that, so goes the one polished instrument The Libertines had at their disposal. Carl Barât still has a stranglehold on Joe Strummer's uber-Cockney accent, and puts it to good use in the rowdy, fuck-all fashion that's expected, if sometimes too effectively (see: the staggering, raucously incoherent rant of "Don't Be Shy"); but when Doherty goes on to slosh his own path through the impossibly English "Narcissist" ("Wouldn't it be nice to be Dorian Gray/ Just for a day?"-- that's Oscar Freakin' Wilde, folks), the vocal contrast between the two becomes conspicuous in its absence.
But what the hell, even "Narcissist" is still a riot. The worst that can ever be said of this album is that if it suffers from an excess of half-formed ideas, or a lack of effort (even if a little extra elbow grease could've made some otherwise marginal songs much, much better), it's because they're too busy having fun, asshole. The one thing The Libertines excel at without qualification is pure entertainment; they may not be masters of any of the styles they crazily flirt with, or even possibly talented enough to produce the craftsmanship this album begs for at points, but they string genres together so readily and wildly that it's tempting to allow one's self to be swept away in barrage and just have a great time in the face of other shortcomings. You're just lucky that someone was diligent enough to resist all the fun this album promises and point them out for you; if not, you might hear the quiet call-and-response of "Can't Stand Me Now" or the infectious groove-stomp of "Campaign of Hate" or any of the myriad other relentlessly enjoyable moments on this album and forget that The Libertines aren't trying very hard. Boo.
Okay, you caught me, I'm kidding; The Libertines is a charge. But it does still seem unfortunate that The Libertines don't more frequently reach the heights at which their music frequently hints here: The echoing chords and free-form trumpet of the sprawling sea shanty "The Man Who Would Be King" best exemplify The Libertines' lack of stylistic allegiance. Barely more than a string of "la-la-la"'s and a chorus, the lightning riffs and hollow, dramatic spaces still kick sand in the faces of the rest of the album cuts. The song is outdone only by the incomparable solo on "The Ha Ha Wall"-- indescribably brief, bright, evocative, and maybe the single finest moment The Libertines will ever lay to tape-- and "Music When the Lights Go Out", a genuinely sad, sweet tune with lots of cowbell and a chorus of earth-shaking majesty. These tracks show what might've been.
Instead, The Libertines settle for less because demanding more would've been harder. And lest we forget why this album was a necessary casualty, the obvious (and crass) snorting that opens "Last Post on the Bugle" is an unnecessary hint. Cocaine, crack, whatever-- whether their self-titled second album is a wreck on purpose or not, drugs are The Libertines' reason, and it's not a very good one.


After a lengthy hiatus, the distinctive MC returns with a record reminiscent of Beanie Sigel's The B. Coming, one that's alternately boastful and ruminative, and on which he mostly avoids misguided attempts to become a crossover star. Jay-Z, Scarface, Jadakiss, and 50 Cent all guest.

Free at Last

The knock on Freeway is that his delivery is only suited for hood-on-smash conviction, but even if that's true, it's like criticizing GZA for being too clinical or M.O.P. for not doing enough for the ladies. There's something to be said for knowing your strengths, and-- lest we forget-- playing against type with Nelly and Mariah Carey collaborations on 2003's Philadelphia Freeway did him no favors. Free's been mostly out of the public eye since that record, embarking on a pilgrimage to Mecca and doubtlessly listening to The B. Coming hundreds of times. He's probably pissed that his former mentor, Beanie Sigel, came up with the "I still spit gangsta, think Muslim, and act Catholic" line first, but beyond that, you get the sense on his long-awaited follow-up Free at Last that he's trying to make a similar record-- one that's alternately boastful and ruminative, and on which he mostly avoids those misguided attempts to become a crossover star.
Free at Last also marks a shift away from the commercial behind the boards, with-- as he moans about on "It's Over"-- Freeway neither working with Just Blaze nor Kanye West, who between them produced three-fourths of Philadelphia Freeway. Instead, like a lot of Roc-A-Fella records, Free at Last employs sweeping soul loops and it's content to forgo a hook when the source material will do just fine. Though it isn't as opulent or expansive as Jay-Z's American Gangster, Freeway is still in some pretty tony real estate, with the live percussion of the orchestral "When They Remember" and "Reppin' the Streets" both flirting with Ghostface levels of classic soul.
Freeway's first album since 2003, Free at Last unsurprisingly often nods to the salad days of Roc-A-Fella, with the MC frequently decorating his verses with Sigel and Jigga quotes. "This Can't Be Real" catches you up to speed ("They say Free's nekkid/ He won't sell another record/ Y'all talkin' reckless!") with enough ambivalence to rise above rumor mongering, and on single "Roc-A-Fella Billionaires"-- a maddeningly catchy tribute to outlandish buying-- you can hear the difference between new money's hunger and the shit-eating satisfaction of CEO wealth as Jay-Z simply flips his "Dirt Off Your Shoulder" flow while detailing his spending habits ("I just copped me of all things/ A professional ball team").
Throughout Free at Last, Freeway displays a deft ability to play the foil to less exuberant MCs, with the exception of a firebreathing Busta Rhymes cameo on "Walk With Me". Free's intensity can be a lot to take in one sitting, which is why guest spots from Jay-Z, Jadakiss, and Scarface feel like the work of crafty sequencing. (Unfortunately, Lil Wayne collaboration "Step Back", once marked for the record, has gone missing.) Whatever religious enlightenment Freeway culled during his time off doesn't seem to translate to anything here, but his braying hood laments mix well with a typically sage Scarface verse on "Baby Don't Do It", as the Houston MC laments "I don't wanna be another joke/ 55, doing concerts, relying on the shows."
Listeners can guess which collaborations are skip-worthy from the tracklist alone. "Executive Producer" 50 Cent looms large over the mid-album trough of "Take It To The Top" and "Spit That Shit", temporarily turning Freeway into a G-Unit club connoisseur. Meanwhile, Cool & Dre's coke-cutting synths on "Lights Get Low" stand poorly in opposition of every other sound on the album and a Rick Ross appearance is a year too late to inspire anything other than wisecracks about hip-hop's most accomplished beards.
By the brief closer, "I Cry", Freeway finally gives into his emo-rapness, lamenting a life's story of woes, from having his G.I. Joe's go missing to being incarcerated during his daughter's birth. It's his voice more than his lyrics that has made him seem like an open book, but the title of this album isn't a mere play on words or a reference to his lengthy between-album hiatus; Free at Last is a portrait of someone who's still discovering his own identity.


The noise-rock duo’s fifth album is a fresh and clear-eyed statement, drawing most from punk’s impulse towards attentiveness and honesty.

Snares Like a Haircut

Dean Spunt and Randy Randall have spent 13 years unraveling the dualities that speak most to misfits: the beautiful and the ugly, the harsh and the bright, pop and noise. “Fever dreaming! Fever dreaming!” they shouted on their 2010 LP, cutting to the heart of everything amid a radiant mix of ear-drilling dream-punk and tugging vulnerability. No Age—named after a 1987 comp of SST instrumental music, perennial global ambassadors to Los Angeles DIY art space The Smell, immortalized with a beguiling rainbow-ombre logo—still present this, a tattered and abrasive vision of the ecstatic.
Snares Like a Haircut is No Age’s latest glimmering and grating progression. It sounds like holding a power saw up to the sun. After their last album, 2013’s slightly more abstracted An Object, No Age seem to have deconstructed their approach and analyzed the blistering pieces, viewing them now in a reinvigorated and relatively more refined way. The five-year break, though, was owing to life: Both Spunt and Randall became fathers. (For a glimpse of what Spunt’s been up to these days, see this endearing video of his young daughter persistently crashing/improving his recent performance at an art gallery in New York.)
Their first album for Drag City after three on Sub Pop, Snares Like a Haircut is also No Age’s most dynamic collection by some margin—their version of a proper rock record. If its nervous system is running on hooks and speed, then its blood is sublime, sparkling noise and emotion. Back in 2009, No Age performed a pair of Hüsker Dü classics alongside Bob Mould, “New Day Rising” and “I Apologize”—which Spunt called a “very mystical” experience that helped them put a magnifying glass to the songs—and whatever No Age learned there, they have applied the lessons on Snares Like a Haircut more fully than before. It feels utterly fresh, like thawing or spring, and it rips.
No Age have finessed their extremes. “Tidal” opens like a kind of experimental folk song, with hardly more than Spunt’s unvarnished voice, before bursting into color: “Hurt so much on the way down,” Spunt sings, “I feel every branch and thorn/For all of time.” Vulnerability is still No Age’s best move. Over the record’s remarkable industrial sprawl, Spunt brings this to the fore with raw lyrics and latticed melodies. It gives every song, even the sad ones, the life-affirming levity that elemental rock bands are always after, as if No Age are finally rolling down a window for air. “Drippy” has the indie-pop bounce of a careening C86 tune, and the inquisitive, existential “Send Me” is maybe the closest No Age have gotten to a sky-beckoning pop-punk ballad. “There’s so much that I wish I had,” Spunt sings, “Another room perhaps and then/I wouldn’t feel so bad.” No Age are still a punk duo in practice, but on this clear-eyed LP, Spunt and Randall draw most from punk’s impulse towards attentiveness and honesty.
They allow plenty of room for artful, minimalist edges. Spunt and Randall’s conceptual and visual sides come through on “Third Grade Rave,” an instrumental loop of a diamond-cut jam; you feel as though you’re in the room with them, at arm’s length. The title track, meanwhile, is a generative pastel-shaded drone that rattles and flickers wordlessly. These ambient-noise pieces are seamlessly incorporated; they never feel like deviations. Instead, they sound like moments of inspired reinvention, like symbols of a greater commitment to the band’s own creative growth. As much as No Age use Snares Like a Haircut to outline their best traits in boldening Sharpie marker, ensuring their permanence, they also keep changing.
One of No Age’s earliest songs—included on 2007’s Weirdo Rippers—was called “Everybody’s Down.” At the core of its tinny production was a simple but powerful line: “Everybody’s down/In every soul/In every town.” It makes me think now of the 2010 DIY guidebook In Every Town: An All-Ages Music Manualfesto, in which No Age—alongside their Smell comrades of yesteryear Mika Miko and Abe Vigoda—are cited as the primary example of how “the small creative choices involved in having a venue and putting on shows have wide-ranging ripple effects.” If those effects include the unlikely autonomy of two musical outsiders, they still ring through Spunt and Randall’s wise songs. It has now been over a decade since The New Yorker first reported on the half-pipe in No Age’s backyard, and Randall’s efforts to improve The Smell’s bathroom situation. But in 2018, No Age’s name seems self-actualizing. And in their psycho-candied sound, which has progressively gotten better, they still know how to locate the timeless, fever-pitched feeling of a beginning.


On her latest gothic folk missive, singer/songwriter Marissa Nadler opens up her sound slightly, retaining her grey-skies aesthetic while bringing in a more spacious and rock-oriented sound.

Strangers

Marissa Nadler doesn't seem like she's from here. She seems like a transitional spirit from another era—some dark and medieval place, a real-life Melisandre with an angelic tenor. Her music, a regal gothic folk, is equally soothing and haunting, and like singer-songwriters Angel Olsen and Laura Gibson, Nadler doesn’t need much behind her sonically to make an impact.
In years past, it was simply her and and guitar, singing of loss and regret. She occasionally seemed shy or reserved, but she’s opened up more with each album, and on Strangers, Nadler offers traces of her life—discussing personal friends on “Janie in Love” and “Katie I Know,” and, on “All the Colors of the Dark,” walking us through the house of an old flame. “Divers of the Dust,” the album’s panoramic opener, wrestles with heartbreak, yet as always with Nadler, she leaves the words open for broad interpretation: “Lying here, on the rocks, with the cliffs disintegrating/Last I heard, in the end, the waves were scraping city streets.”
Compared with Nadler’s 2014 LP, July, Strangers moves away from folk into more accessible terrain. Produced by Randall Dunn, who’s worked with Sunn O))), Earth, and the Cave Singers, these sounds are edgier, supplementing Nadler’s bleak aesthetic with layered strings, percussion and guitar, resulting in a rock-oriented sound that lends itself to a wider group of listeners. Even the more pastoral songs like “Skyscraper,” “Waking,” and “Dissolve,” feel heavier, not as gentle as her previous work. Nadler’s music is an acquired taste, but Strangers is probably her most expansive release to date.
As with any Nadler recording, this isn’t a stark turn from her usual vibe. The strength of this album lies in its subtle shifts, the way it casually unfolds without getting stuck. Dunn produces heavy metal, which fits neatly within Nadler's grey-skies approach; even the acoustic songs have a fierceness to them. She's been isolated on her records before, but here the music feels spacious and robust like the workings of a full ensemble in which ideas are allowed to flow. There’s an overwhelming connectivity to her music: As Nadler exorcises her own demons, she brings you along with her, making you feel a little less anxious about your own despair. She sees poetry in the mundane, elegance in the gloom.


The cheekily named compilation includes songs from three solo releases, alongside unreleased tracks and bedroom demos that offer a shining mosaic of the New York singer-songwriters indie-pop acumen.

Lily Konigsberg: The Best of Lily Konigsberg Right Now

The Best of Lily Konigsberg Right Now

Last year, Lily Konigsberg said, “I want to write songs that get stuck in people’s heads for the rest of their lives.” As one-third of the ramshackle art-punk band Palberta, that specific kind of stickiness might not sound like Top 40 hits composed by a professional songwriter consortium. Yet the lifelong New Yorker has explored the fringes of the mainstream for as long as she’s made music, both in her solo work and with avant-pop duo Lily and Horn Horse. This cheekily titled compilation collects Konigsberg's recent string of EPs, showcasing her hyper-melodic hooks and disarmingly honest lyrics while remaining left of the dial.
Konigsberg formed her first band at age 9, gathering together a group of girls in her neighborhood of Park Slope and banging on Tupperware until they made enough money for pizza. “Basically I was born and immediately started wanting to be a rock star—like, no other option,” she admitted. Konigsberg first performed solo at 15, before her confidence was boosted by winning a five-borough battle of the bands contest. While studying at Bard College in 2013, she met her future Palberta bandmates Nina Ryser and Anina Ivry-Block when all three were booked to perform separately at the same show.
Since linking up as a trio, Palberta’s free-flowing collaboration has resulted in an onslaught of music beginning with their lo-fi debut LP, My Pal Berta. Yet Konigsberg has explained how her solo work is both more meticulous and deeply personal. “When I’m writing alone I am way more of a perfectionist,” she has said. “It’s also a very solitary and quiet process at first. It’s harder in that I have to be alone with my brain, but it is really crazy and fun.” This introspection results in plainspoken lyrics about Konigsberg’s love and loss, accepting the end of unnamed relationships while longing for the intimacy that is absent from her life.
The Best of Lily Konigsberg Right Now includes songs from three solo releases, alongside unreleased tracks and bedroom demos. Arranged by mood instead of chronological order, it begins with 2018’s 4 picture tear EP before drifting into 2020’s It’s Just Like All the Clouds, and concluding with Konigsberg’s songs from 2017’s Good Time Now, a split album with Andrea Schiavelli. Early highlight “Rock and Sin” shows off her homespun arrangements with a capella vocal loops sung in the round, before “7 Smile” introduces a sputtering drum machine and fried Neil Hagerty-style guitar solos from Ivry-Block. “The point is not exactly where I am/The point is what I’m not,” Konigsberg repeats like an affirmation.
Konigsberg’s songwriting remains sharp as knives. The peppy indie-pop of “I Said” exploits alliteration in some of her funniest couplets: “Crushing all the bugs that I find in my hairbrush/Crusty but harmless guys/Clustering in a circle.” “Roses” ends with the defeated line “I used to be so good at boys” before switching gears into “North Porsche,” Konigsberg’s most slyly amorous song about following a crush in the speeding sports car of her dreams. “It’s Just Like All The Clouds” is a dancefloor jam with warbled Auto-Tuned lyrics focus on her decision to leave a relationship in the rearview mirror: “Now that you don’t want me, I don’t need your time.”
On the surface, nothing here is as defiantly normal as “Owe Me.” On this previously unreleased song, Konigsberg sings with the starry-eyed romanticism of Carly Rae Jepsen, while Water From Your Eyes’ Nate Amos contributes swerving keyboards and chiming 808s. It could be a bona fide Billboard smash if it wasn’t for the strange moment when Konigsberg thanks an imaginary audience for coming to her show and they respond with canned handclaps. Even at her most straightforward, she can’t resist commenting on the idea at a self-conscious remove, just like this album’s title. It keeps her off the radar, but it’s where she makes the greatest hits.

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Recording live in the studio with just voice, keys, and bass, the trio achieves an almost telepathic connection: three seasoned musicians breathing together as a single organism.

Arooj Aftab / Vijay Iyer / Shahzad Ismaily: Love in Exile

Love in Exile

Since 2015, Arooj Aftab has gradually distilled the essence of her work. On her debut album, Bird Under Water, the Pakistan-born, Brooklyn-based composer fused ghazal—a South Asian style focused on loss and love, both romantic and divine—with pop, jazz, and soul, finding the consonance between musical traditions from different corners of the world. On 2018’s ambient Siren Islands, she stripped away tradition, weaving her otherworldly voice between layers of synthesizer. By 2021’s Vulture Prince—her breakout record, an elegiac piece filigreed with voice, harp, and violin—she had learned to squeeze every drop of emotional resonance out of a single elongated syllable, or the vibrato of a gently pressed harp string.
Love in Exile—Aftab’s new album in collaboration with pianist and jazz composer Vijay Iyer and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily—takes that process of distillation even further: coaxing an entire album’s worth of pathos out of a handful of Urdu couplets, crafting complex emotional inner worlds through the ritualistic repetition of just a few lines of poetry. In Ismaily and Iyer, she has found the perfect partners. All three draw from a shared vocabulary that is subtle, intricate, and minimalist, yet incredibly expressive.
Recorded live in a New York studio and released with minimal editing, the album’s six tracks retain the unhurried, conversational feel of improvisation, but without any of improv’s attendant looseness. Iyer’s intricate piano phrases and Ismaily’s pulsing bass and drones move in intuitive cycles, with textures and melodies slowly coalescing out of the interplay between their instruments. Aftab’s powerful voice fits seamlessly into these soundscapes, melancholy melismas languidly unfurling like ink dropped into water. At moments—when Iyer’s piano melody weaves serpentine shapes around Aftab’s voice on “Sajni,” or Ismaily’s sepulchral Moog synth shares space with Iyer’s delicate topline on “Eye of the Endless”—their connection seems telepathic, three seasoned musicians breathing together as a single organism.
This potent chemistry is on display from the opening moments. Synths shimmer like cosmic backwash at the outset of “To Remain/To Return,” occasionally interrupted by the portentous thump of a bass drone. Iyer begins with hesitant, stuttering notes, as if testing the waters, before finally settling into a sinuous piano phrase that loops and loops, subtly mutating as it repeats. Aftab joins three minutes in, her expansive voice slotting into the spaces left by the two instrumentalists. That first disconsolate “Jaa re” (“Go now”) sets the emotional tone for both the song and the record; her voice hints at deep reservoirs of sorrow, channeling centuries of South Asian cultural fascination with romantic tragedy.
On “Shadow Forces,” Aftab sings of existential heartbreak over pensive minor-key piano, her voice dripping with dark disquietude. Iyer’s grim, dramatic keys add cinematic flair (albeit more French art-house film than Michael Bay blockbuster). The almost-15-minute long “Eyes of the Endless,” meanwhile, manages to be both monumental and deeply intimate.
Love in Exile deals with Aftab’s favored themes of love, loss, and longing, but she steers clear of explicit narratives. It might be tempting to look for meaning in the Urdu ghazals and qawwalis from which Aftab borrows her lyrics, but—even more than on Vulture Prince—she seems uninterested in interpolating or re-interpreting them. Instead, she uses a small handful of Urdu couplets as signposts, jumping-off points to explore the emotional resonance of voice, timbre, and stretched-out syllables.
The trio’s music may shed the usual instrumentation of the ghazal tradition, but it retains that style’s sense of metaphysical revelation. Iyer and Ismaily’s hypnotic interplay leaves the listener unmoored in time and space. The grand sweep of Aftab’s voice is a galactic super-wind capable of carrying you off to wondrous new worlds. The force of their collaboration is so much greater than the sum of its simple parts that it borders on the mystical.
These explorations find their apotheosis on “Sharabi,” which again zooms out to cosmic scale. Buzzsaw synths, rumbling bass, and washes of ambient electronics come together in an oppressive vision of infinity. Aftab’s reverb-laden voice rings out in the emptiness, a lonely beacon reaching out for someone to share this vast expanse with—a lover, the divine—but receiving no answer. Yet for Aftab, Iyer, and Ismaily, beauty and deliverance lie not in finding transcendence but in the search itself. The journey requires emotional honesty, the dissolution of the ego, and being open to the best and the worst the universe has to offer. Love in Exile is what happens when three vastly talented musicians embark on that quest together.


On his third solo album, Broken Social Scene’s Brendan Canning offers tentative experiments that ape other bands’ styles. It feels like a guy just filling downtime.

Home Wrecking Years

What happens when you devise a song so unlike your signature sound that it borders on parody? And what if it’s one of the liveliest tracks on your album? If you’re Brendan Canning, of Broken Social Scene, you openly acknowledge your point of inspiration in the lyrics. The song in question is a jammy number called “Hey Marika, Get Born,” in which the title character does not listen to the Grateful Dead. The song itself sounds a lot like the band he name-checks, regardless of whether or not Marika ever listened to them. It’s a fun moment, but not one Canning commits to entirely, and it ends up being cute, rather than insightful.
There are some solid songs on Home Wrecking Years, Canning’s third solo outing beyond the comfortable crowd of Broken Social Scene. The album captures the sound of a huge group of people having fun together (even if it’s a different huge group than we’re used to), but it doesn’t make the statement that solo albums usually attempt to make, as Canning’s previous two solo albums did. His first—2008’s Something for All of Us …—crackled with an immediacy that felt like he had something to say and something to prove. His second, 2013’s You Gots 2 Chill, seemed to have even more of an air of spontaneity and adventure. (It featured two guitar pieces recorded on voicemail.)
But Home Wrecking Years feels like a guy just filling in the downtime before he gets back to work with his main band. Canning’s approach is playful, but not very meaningful. When the songs don’t sound like they would have been more at home on the long-awaited BSS album, they sound like tentative experiments at aping other bands’ styles. “Once I Was a Runner” paraphrases James Brown in an incongruous way. “Keystone Dealers,” the album’s second single, could be the long-awaited third entry on your “People from the Northern Hemisphere Doing Passable Songs with What Seems to be a Casio-Based Bossa Nova Beat” playlist. “Work Out in the Wash” has a solo that Canning openly acknowledges is a “slick eight-bar late ’70s George Benson-ish guitar solo.” And the final song on the album, “Baby’s Going Her Own Way,” sounds like it could be a gentle deep cut from a Luna album that came out after you stopped listening to Luna.
As with his debut, a couple of BSS members make their way into the army of players here, including Justin Peroff, who plays drums on the entire album, and Sam Goldberg, who plays guitar on “Vibration Walls.” On their most recent summer shows, Broken Social Scene put “Book It to Fresno,” the very BSS-ish wall-of-fuzz single from Home Wrecking Years, on their setlists because Canning isn’t planning on touring solo. In a press release, Canning called the live version “pretty shit-kicking... which felt wonderful.”
It was indeed a shit-kicking version—as is the album take. Still, the whole Home Wrecking Years project seems like Canning has arrived at a photographer’s studio in a reliable old outfit, before shyly dressing up in wacky costumes, and then taking them off immediately after the photo is snapped because he doesn’t feel comfortable in the borrowed clothing. If somebody in Canning’s party had told him that the period-specific hat and goofy scarf looked good, he might have felt the rush of possibility. But at least, with Home Wrecking Years, Canning has archived that he had the nerve to try something on that was way out of character—even if it was just for kicks.