The Portland rapper’s debut album balances playful verses and cheerful wit with more revealing moments of introspection.

Good for You

On the cartoonish cover of his debut album, Aminé sits nearly naked on a bright blue toilet reading The Good for You Post, a newspaper—a real one, in fact—featuring writing by friends and peers like Steve Lacy, Taco, and Madeintyo, as well as his mom. As is often the case with Aminé, the playfulness of the image belies its actual content. In an essay of his own, he writes about the way an ex once served as an escape from the depression he refuses to name. “That word isn’t easy to say when ‘suck it up’ seems to be the only reverb that echoes with the feeling as a black man,” he writes.
But Good for You finds the Portland rapper, born Adam Daniel, sounding charming, clever, and carefree. On opener “Veggies,” he claims to be “Andre's prodigy”—a lofty aspiration, to be sure—but that unapologetic ambition, coupled with his animation, drives the album. The songs are glossy, the melodies sunny, the flows smooth. “Spice Girl” is flutey and flirtatious pop-rap; “Wedding Crashers” features an Auto-Tuned Offset and a comically scorned Aminé rapping over tropical marimbas. Then there’s the multi-platinum “Caroline,” whose polyphonic synths and honeyed lines remain contagious as ever. (One line in particular—“‘Cause great scenes might be great/But I love your bloopers”—could double as a reflection of his attitude about #serious rap albums versus simple fun.) Despite the album’s overwhelmingly lighthearted mood, though, he doesn’t shy away from making a few more serious statements as well.
In the closing essay of his newspaper, he writes about the ways that Portland’s foodie culture has gentrified neighborhoods and pushed out his friends. On the percussive “Money,” he critiques material obsessions—“Money don’t make you happy, it just makes you wanna get richer,” he observes—while sliding in offhanded jabs like, “Saying you ain't racist really sound racist.” The video for “REDMERCEDES,” which got the remix treatment from Missy Elliott but didn't make the album, employs whiteface to satirize white people’s attempts at performing what they think is blackness.
That Aminé is socially aware (see his incisive remix of “Caroline” during a post-election performance on “Fallon”) and still finds a way to manifest joy is remarkable, the way any person of color finding a way to enjoy a life under attack is remarkable. At times, there's an inclination to write off a rapper's cheeriness as a corny gimmick at best and insincere at worst. Such buoyancy, or #BlackBoyJoy as it’s come to be known on social media, is still an under-appreciated aspect of rap, but every D.R.A.M., Lil Yachty, and Chance the Rapper brings that quality a step closer to acceptance. With Good for You, Aminé joins their ranks, basking in his own resilient sense of humor.
When he does let the reality of his pain win, it comes in the form of standout “Sundays”—the emblematic day of serenity and rest. Set to slow-burning snares and a harmonizing vocal, it’s a poetic series of pre- and post-fame revelations. “I bench press my problems like add another weight/And act like it’s all right when it's not,” he raps, falling into a layered hook. “Some days we get Sundays/But most days, the rain comes down/And I feel like I'm bound to drown/Jesus Christ.” It’s followed by the melancholic “Turf,” examining the things—the people, the mentalities—he left when he finally escaped his hometown. In these instances, he proves capable of more than a hit single or one-dimensional feel-good music; his joy becomes that much more meaningful when he explores the things that would constrain it.
There's a breadth of experiences contained within the 15 tracks of Good for You, most of which hinge on love interests old and new, underscored by a playful outlook that’s channeled into bubbly, off-center production. It's far from serious but stops just short of turn-up—more like the soundtrack for an almost-sober drive home. In the album’s final moment, the celebratory “Beach Boy” dissolves into an atmospheric chorus repeating, “I don't know when I'm gonna die/Hopefully there's hope in me.” The sentiment is remarkably similar to the closing note of one Post essay, where he writes, “The finish line to optimism seems to be getting closer." On his debut, it appears he’s a lot closer than he gives himself credit for.


Parlaying creative independence into her best work to date, the R&B star’s latest self-released album is a showcase for her omnivorous tastes and supremely light touch.

333

For all the indignities that major labels subject R&B artists to—the constant album delays, retoolings, and forced-fit singles—life after the majors is rarely glamorous. Cut off from the resources and promotional budget of a label, many singers fade into B-list obscurity, their best work behind them. It’s a fate Tinashe might have met after she ended her stymying seven-year run with RCA, but instead, she parlayed her independence into the freest, most exuberant album of her career. Revealing a wider range than any of its predecessors, 2019’s exceptional Songs for You bounded between buoyant R&B, spry dance-pop, minimalist trap, Cali funk, and throwback roller skating jams with such capricious glee, it played as if it’d been sequenced by a giant game show wheel.
To the extent that Song for You’s “whatever feels good” approach could be considered a template, Tinashe’s follow-up 333 repeats it, leaning further into the singer’s two great strengths: her omnivorous tastes and her supremely light touch. The outline is the same—brisk songs with lots of movement—but the particulars are even more refined and surprising. “Let Go” introduces the album with a fake-out, a velvety, two-minute neo-soul fantasia that sounds precisely like nothing that follows. “Shy Guy” test-drives a jungle beat for 66 seconds before retiring the idea. The pivots continue one after another, often within the same song. “Small Reminders” is 333’s longest track at four and a half minutes—a veritable Ken Burns documentary by the standards of this album’s fleet pleasures—but it rewards every second, transforming from smoldering jazz into doobie-lighting funk at the flip of a breakbeat.
The album also indulges Tinashe’s growing interest in EDM and IDM. On “Unconditional,” her weightless voice triple axles over an intricate Kaytranada beat that continually folds in on itself. But even that song sounds downright understated compared to 333’s title track, a puzzle box that never stops molting its skin. There’s no chorus, or even a clear throughline, just a cosmic scope and a series of bombastic, staccato movements that keep one-upping each other. The song is a flex, a tease of all the fantastic avant music Tinashe could make if she wanted to.
But it’s clear she’s not interested in that. Whenever 333 threatens to skew too far left of the dial, it snaps back to instant-gratification R&B like “X,” a Hitmaka-produced sheet burner featuring Jeremih, or “Bouncin,” a gleaming, feeling-myself affirmation (“I been sending dirty pics/Hope they make it to the cloud”). As deft as her stylistic experiments are, Tinashe’s default is bright and poppy, and for all the chocolate ganache she puts on display, she doesn’t deny herself penny candy either. The dance workout “Undo (Back to My Heart)” and Rihanna-esque power ballad “The Chase” may not wow with innovation, but they’re both great jams.
Tinashe’s voice glides through much of the record as if she’s smirking at a private joke. Ultimately, it’s that breezy, impish spirit that most distinguishes 333 and its predecessor from her RCA albums. Early in her career, Tinashe was uncomfortably lumped with the era’s alternative-R&B movement and was too often cast against vibey, overly serious production that snuffed out her natural ebullience. With its stodgy interludes and thick ambiance, even her excellent 2014 debut Aquarius occasionally dragged. But 333 never does. It’s Tinashe’s second consecutive triumph, another gregarious rebuke of the notion that R&B has to be difficult or demanding to be transcendent.

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The Brooklyn metallic instrumental trio Sannhet make music for subway stations and unlit street corners, not winding hikes and idyllic vistas. Their second LP is rooted in metal but revels in outside influences.

Revisionist

Revisionist feels grander than it is, and bigger than the band that made it. The second album from the metallic Brooklyn instrumental trio Sannhet lasts only nine tracks, or 38 minutes. But its overall density—of emotions and dynamics, of textures and melodies, of strengths and surprises—makes each moment so compelling that the record seems at least twice that length. The album’s brilliant centerpiece, "Empty Harbor", rises from a slow, electrified fusion that suggests ECM in the '80s to a blast beat-backed surge powerful enough to match the best codas of Temporary Residence Ltd. Driven by masterful drummer Christopher Todd, it sounds like a little symphony, both in execution and effect; looking at the clock, however, it’s shocking to find that the song lasts for less than five minutes.
Sannhet have always defied quick taxonomy. They are a byproduct of Brooklyn’s emergent metal scene; Saint Vitus, one of the city’s heavy hubs, issued their 2013 debut LP, Known Flood, which featured a tirade of screams from bar booker David Castillo. Although their new home, The Flenser, is an aggressively eclectic imprint, the core of its catalog remains metal, however soft or mercurial. From the pummeling black-metal drums during the exhilarating climax of "Lost Crown" to the tense rhythmic lock of death metal near the middle of "False Pass", traces of that pedigree populate Revisionist. But AJ Annunziata’s bass distortion during songs like "Enemy Victorian" implies the astral ascendance of space-rock. The same goes for John Refano, a guitarist who likes to widen the band’s sound with layers of background noise perhaps more than he prefers to lead with coiled riffs. There are astutely applied electronics that suggest the abstraction of Touch Music masters like Philip Jeck, and careful but brief drone passages that conjure Kranky. If metal made for the most convenient tag for Known Flood, it is at best an awkward fit for Revisionist, a record that revels and delights in a trove of outsider influences.
American post-rock and post-metal have often offered the scores of wide-open spaces, be they the football fields and Texas hills of Explosions in the Sky’s Friday Night Lights accompaniment or the rivers and valleys of their fellow Lone Star residents Balmorhea. Labradford, Red Sparowes and ISIS suggested settings more vast and hospitable than the cities they called home. But Sannhet take many of those same sweeping, cinematic impulses and apply them to cramped urban landscapes and lifestyles. They begin "Mint Divine" with a sample of voices, which blur into the mind-numbing chatter endemic to busy city streets. The band works to overcome the pervasive din, or to at least carve out a sheltered space within it. Refano and Annunziata deliver a delicate duet, their gentle guitar notes and pulsing bass competing with the hubbub. The voices waft into the next track, "False Pass", but Todd battles them back with his heavy hands and deep, floor-tom thuds. Together, Sannhet finally overpower their environment, finding solace in the solidarity of volume.
This metropolitan sense of setting also explains Sannhet’s concision. Only "Enemy Victorian", the album’s one listless point, breaks the six-minute mark. Otherwise, Sannhet push the parts together, moving at a rate that suggests they’re worried the city will swallow them if they don’t press ahead. "You Thy_" collapses feelings of romance, terror and longing into four breathless minutes, maximizing emotional impact and efficiency all at once. By oscillating between lumbering, loping patterns and sustained blast beats, Todd turns the three-minute "Lost Crown" into a frantic, crazed quest in an unsympathetic environment, where no one else cares if you ever recover your holy grail. Sannhet make music for subway stations and unlit street corners, not winding hikes and idyllic vistas.
If Explosions in the Sky and similar bands create accompaniment for Hollywood productions, Sannhet offer a vivid, real-life counterpoint. There’s no lighting, no scripting, no catering—just the exigencies and anxieties of existence, delivered by a band battling pedestrian frustrations with uncommon focus. Revisionist, turns out, is bigger than its 38 minutes or the trio that made it; these nine songs are as big as whatever life it is they soundtrack.


Sheffield boy-girl duo nail precious, vulnerable feelings over the course of their sweet (but not twee or saccharine) indie pop debut.

Yeah So

Slow Club, a folk-pop duo from Sheffield, England, write great songs for mixtapes. Specifically, the popular ideal of mix-making, i.e., the kind you make to express yourself to another person. As such, their songs tend to be kinda cutesy and obsessed with love and relationships. The world is one in which people are constantly falling in and out of love, and even when their lyrics stray into cynicism and self-deprecation, it's obvious they are true believers in old-school romance. Most of their songs come across like a young person putting up a jaded front to defend their wounded, open heart. It's very sweet stuff, but usually just shy of cloying. Their technique is mature and refined, yet loose and free-wheeling. More than anything, they're wholesome. That could be a damning term for some listeners, but if you're the type of person who does not reflexively recoil at reading the word "cuddle," you're probably going to find something to like in their music.
Rebecca Taylor and Charles Watson co-write their songs, and in most cases, sing the songs together. Their voices complement each other nicely but are distinct in tone and personality. Most often, Taylor and Watson sing in unison, and generally avoid making it seem as though they are singing to one another. Whereas many male-female vocal pairings have a communicative quality and/or an apparent subtext of sexual tension, Slow Club have a more neutral dynamic. It's not sexless, but there's seldom an implication that Watson and Taylor are pining for each other. The major exception is the nearly-saccharine opening track "When I Go", which has them making a series of pacts to get married if they're both still alone at various ages. Perhaps putting that song at the top of the running order is in some way meant to have us question their relationship in the subsequent songs.
Though Watson has a pleasant tenor voice, Taylor is generally a better singer, and the songs come alive when her more expressive voice is highlighted in the arrangement, as when she takes the lead on the chorus of "Giving Up on Love" or the during climax of the jangly travelogue "Trophy Room". She gets a few spotlight songs, and the best of them is in an unlisted song on the same track as the finale "Our Most Brilliant Friends". It's the simplest, saddest song on the album, gently building up to their most heartbreaking lyric: "You say 'baby' a lot in your songs/ It takes all my courage not to sing along." It's a fragile moment, but it's not oversold or delivered with an ironic grin. It's almost unbearably earnest, actually, but sometimes that is precisely what you need. Slow Club nail these precious, vulnerable feelings without getting mawkish or melodramatic. Everything, from their cheery optimism to their crestfallen lovesickness is life-sized and lived-in, resulting in a crop of tiny, good-natured tunes that invite the intense identification of young romantics.


The UK post-punk pioneers’ influence always outshone their popularity, but a new box set makes a convincing case that stardom actually was within their reach.

Gang of Four: 77-81

Why didn’t Gang of Four become pop stars? Four and a half decades after the UK band began, the answer might seem obvious. From the start, their work was innovative and challenging, with politically aware lyrics that drew on academic theory and music that moved at razor-sharp angles. One reason why their early singles and first two albums—collected on this new 77-81 box set alongside a live 2xLP and a cassette of demos—still sound so vital is that the band never pandered to the mainstream or dumbed its songs down.
At the time, though, it wasn’t far-fetched to imagine Gang of Four as the next big thing. Their melodic and danceable music quickly snared them eye-opening gigs supporting the Buzzcocks and Siouxsie and the Banshees and landed them on the cover of New Musical Express before they had even been signed. Despite their art-school backgrounds, they were intrigued by the idea of popularity, and they chose a major label, EMI, to release their debut album, the half-ironically titled Entertainment! “We’re not trying to be difficult and hard-to-understand,” guitarist Andy Gill said. “There might be some pretty out there things that we’re doing, but we want our records in the charts or whatever. To us, that’s half the point.”
It’s hard to say exactly why Gang of Four didn’t top those charts. Maybe radio wasn’t ready; maybe timing and perception didn’t align; maybe their refusal to play on BBC’s Tops of the Pops when asked to censor their lyrics doomed them. (“Frankly, you could say [the BBC decision] was career suicide,” said drummer Hugo Burnham years later). Whatever the reason, 77-81 makes a convincing case that, based simply on their songs and performances, stardom actually was within their reach.
Early singles—tightly wound gems like “Damaged Goods” and anthemic shout-alongs like “Armalite Rifle”—had immediate power. Entertainment! and its follow-up, 1981’s Solid Gold, were filled with lyrical hooks that you could chant despite their sophistication. Take “Natural’s Not in It,” a jab at the commercializing of relationships (“Ideal love, a new purchase… the body is good business”), or “Why Theory?” a pithy argument to treat society as more than “natural fact,” or “He’d Send in the Army,” an indictment of the patriarchy couched in a child-like tale. With their words, Gang of Four encouraged thinking critically and systemically, while still leaving room for interpretation.
Their music matched that openness, inserting maximal energy into minimal sounds that allowed listeners to fill in blanks. As Gill put it, “Instead of guitar solos, we had anti-solos, where you stopped playing, just left a hole.” The band’s working methods had a populist bent: Creative decisions were made democratically, and whoever wrote a song would usually sing it. Even their design—see the bold colors and cut-and-paste commentary on the cover of Entertainment!—had pop-art appeal. Altogether, the Gang of Four approach was accessible enough that legendary producer Jimmy Douglass, who had worked with Aretha Franklin, Led Zeppelin, and Hall & Oates, was convinced to oversee the recording of Solid Gold.
Alongside that oft-told part of the Gang of Four story, the unearthed material on 77-81 reveals new evidence of the band’s magnetism. The demo cassette—one side taken from three different late-1970s recordings, the other from a 1981 session at Abbey Road—shows how their exhilarating mix of spare beats, clockwork riffs, and high-stakes singing emerged fully formed. “No jamming—that was the J-word,” Gill said. “Everything was thought out in advance.” Hearing the band confidently sprint through songs that ended up on singles, then into previously unreleased tracks like the swinging “Silence Is Not Useful” and the funky “Disco Sound,” makes the term “demo” seem ridiculously insufficient. Even the more polished recordings on side two show how each song was a self-contained machine made of fast-moving parts. “We spent a lot of time stupidly pissed,” Gill admitted. “But when it came to the work we threw ourselves into it 100 percent.”
That ethic is equally borne out by Live at American Indian Center 1980, composed of 15 songs from a 1980 concert in San Francisco. Gang of Four more than earn their reputation as a great live band here—the songs shoot out quickly and with little pause, finding a speed that the studio albums never hit. That was by design, as they specifically avoided recreating their live sound on record, instead wisely using the studio to hone the more elemental aspects of their sound. As Curtis Crowe from Pylon—who opened Gang of Four’s first U.S. show—says in the book included in 77-81, “Gang of Four was first and foremost a live-wire act and I always felt the recordings failed to do them justice. It seemed like trying to photograph lightning.” The extra juice applied to the racing “At Home He’s a Tourist” and the stair-stepping “Guns Before Butter” adds a third dimension to songs that were already bursting.
Gang of Four didn’t stop in 1981, and subsequent work retained much of the band’s fervor, even as the lineup fractured (Gill, who was the only original member in the recent version of the band, passed away last year, likely ending the Gang of Four story). But the material on 77-81 is clearly a big bang, informing not just everything the band did after, but a lot of what other bands did, too. Though Entertainment! and Solid Gold have been reissued many times, this box set is the first release to fully capture the moment that created them, as well as the first reissue controlled by Gang of Four, who were recently able to reclaim rights to these recordings after many decades.
The history of post-punk is long and sprawling, but combine 77-81 with a remarkably similar archival box by Gang of Four’s comrades Pylon from last year, and you instantly get a clear sense of why post-punk mattered—as musical innovation, political movement, and DIY statement. In this band’s case, that came from blending complex ideas and radical music into something that landed a direct hit on the ears of anyone lucky enough to hear it. “What we were doing wasn’t intellectual,” Gill insisted. “It was from the gut, like painting a picture.”

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The dance-punk duo Formation made the most 2003 album of 2017, and it’s co-produced by house mastermind Leon Vynehall.

Look at the Powerful People

Let’s start with the name: whether it’s Hillary Clinton or some clueless piano bro posting covers on YouTube, many have been accused of co-opting the unimpeachable power of “Formation” under dubious pretenses. For Matt and Will Ritson, it is at least plausible that they’ve never heard the song. On Look at the Powerful People, Formation sound directly teleported from a time when Destiny’s Child was still Beyoncé’s main source of income. It is the most 2003 album of 2017, so convincing a simulacra that having a Mike Skinner-directed video is one of the least time-stamped things about it.
Anyone under 21 reading this review would’ve been in elementary school when “House of Jealous Lovers” dropped, so to clarify, “2003” essentially translates to “dance-punk.” It was a time where DFA lorded over cool, LCD Soundsystem mocked classic rock before they became it, the jeans were tight, the riffs were angular, bassists were minor celebrities, and cocaine use started to become a little too unironic. Regardless of how well any of it has aged, exciting things tend to happen when guitar bands intermingle with dance producers. And Formation’s got themselves a hell of a co-sign. Look at the Powerful People is co-produced by house mastermind Leon Vynehall and he’s not the kind of dude who just makes himself available. Take the C.V. of Formation’s live band into account, and they boast connections to Caribou, Floating Points, and Fela Kuti. One of their earliest singles basically ripped off “Dance Yrself Clean”; they’ve opened for Jagwar Ma and Foals. They’re a dance-punk band that isn’t hesitant about reaching the cheap seats and one that won’t set you back six figures on Stubhub.
Distill that last paragraph down to proper nouns and it looks like a screenshot from a pretty kickass festival poster, doesn’t it? And damned if Formation sounds like they can make good on that promise. Look at the Powerful People blasts off with gigantic, boom-clap synth-drums, soon overlain by syncopated cowbell and a cable-thick bassline, all of it saying, this is happening. This kind nostalgia might be about two years too early. But most indie rock is playing smallball right now, and suffice to say, Look at the Powerful People begins with 54 of the most exciting seconds of music I’ve heard in 2017.
And then they start talking. “I’m on the list/Where do I sign up-uhhh,” brother Will sings, but that uhhh turns out to be the most interesting thing he has to say. “With no pain, on cocaine, you half-brain,” he goes on, “I got the cash, so don’t get tough/It’s not greed, just give me the stuff.” This song is called “Drugs” and it’s about drugs, probably. The greater likelihood is that it’s about something bigger than that—the frivolity of capitalism? The emptiness of festival culture? Is it about how drugs are actually bad? Is it not as smart as it thinks it is, or nowhere near as dumb as it should be? Either way, it carries about half of the resonance of Weezer’s “We Are All on Drugs” as a piece of social critique.
But is it really fair to harp on lyrical deficiencies in a style of music where Luke Jenner was once considered profound? It’s less of an issue when Formation hit the Hacienda during the album’s midsection, although their grooves make them come off like a flabbier Friendly Fires. The moralizing of “Buy and Sell” and “Gods” could damn near pass for backpack rap, and about that album title—“Look at the powerful people/Stuck in their wonderful world/Who is gonna to help them?” Ritson yells and, seriously, all the powerful people. Look at them!
It’s not like these guys planned to end up being a slightly more woke version of the Music: the bibliography of Look at the Powerful People includes Lightning Bolt, ESG, the Postal Service, John Coltrane, Rammellzee and that’s just the half of it. An awesome record collection doesn't make anyone a geopolitical expert, but c’mon: Ritson is somehow telling a crossroads origin story on the abysmal ballad “Blood Red Hand”—and that’s the one Formation said is influenced by “Purple Rain.” But even if their taste is impeccable, they’re a 2003 band with the most 2017 of problems—the current state of political affairs is making everyone feel a type of way and it’s easy to confuse that for actually having something to add to the conversation. Then again, the American military is just as deep in its 2003 nostalgia, so this probably is the political dance-punk the times demands. Or at least proof that every generation gets the Radio 4 they deserve.


The Swedish pop star’s fourth album contains some of her most vulnerable writing inside her clubbiest record.

Sunshine Kitty

Tove Lo got big by breaking herself. She topped the charts with the stark, corrosive imagery of first hit, 2014’s “Habits (Stay High)”: vomiting in bathtubs, trapping her mind in a haze. Self-destruction has paved the way for self-care in much of mainstream female pop; you’re less likely to hear a woman on the radio brushing her teeth with a bottle of Jack than you are to hear her describing her skincare routine. Women are charged with empowering other women: Everyone’s a hot girl, no matter what the season.
Tove Lo cracks this dynamic open on Sunshine Kitty, a title that she’s said is “a play on pussy power.” There are tote-bag-ready you-go-girlisms on the album, but they’re lit by neon and grounded in nuance. “Bad as the Boys,” a shiny single about the collapse of a queer relationship, has a fairly boring premise—women can break hearts, too! But the song surpasses its set-up, partly because of its shimmering production and partly because Tove Lo eloquently describes the specific pains of a bi woman trying to navigate a heterosexual-dominant dating culture. On the album, she sings about using women and being used by them, about competing for male attention with women she’s attracted to. “When I hate on you, I’m breaking the code,” Kylie Minogue confesses to Tove on one of the album’s best tracks. “Hard to be fair to you when I got my heart broke,” she admits seconds later.
Sunshine Kitty holds some of Tove Lo’s most vulnerable writing; it’s also her clubbiest record. The result is a cutting confessional line like, “I think you like the way she kissed you better/Maybe I’m mistaken,” thrown over thrumming bass. These are house anthems and each track has a unique texture: undulating drums, layered effects that sound like a chain being rattled. She churns through emotions—lust, shame, defeat—as each winding beat paves the way to the next.
Tove Lo once wrote a sardonic ode to the effortless “Cool Girl”; now, she revels in overthinking, highlighting the neuroticism that underpins each corner of a party. “I see you looking, so I turn my charm on, hoping I look awesome,” she sings on “Equally Lost.” She calculates when to ask someone for a cigarette. She deconstructs each kiss. There’s an entire track wrestling with whether or not to disclose an affair, another consumed with asking someone to stay over. Tove Lo’s songwriting is unsubtle but not uncomplicated, and while her scenes are well-worn in pop music—bodies tangled in purple lights, morning sun stabbing at hangovers—her best tracks are both blunt and polished enough to sound original.
At its worst, the album can slump into fizzy banalities. The last track shows Tove Lo in love, and she wreaths her emotions with generic hyperbole. “I’ll follow you anywhere you go,” she cries over a beat ready to be bastardized by the Chainsmokers. “Jacques,” a mostly fun song with British DJ Jax Jones, can sound like the worst kid in your study abroad program trying to get past a bouncer: “Je m’appelle Tove, get the show on the road,” she chants. These lines dissolve into the glitter, though; it’s hard to focus on any one moment in an album that yanks you through the dancefloor. In Tove Lo’s world, there is no emotion too grave or grand to take place outside the club.

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The 8xLP box set gathers the ’60s and ’70s studio recordings of a singer-songwriter whose melodically intricate work had a profound impact on Joni Mitchell, Elton John, and Steely Dan.

American Dreamer

Laura Nyro’s first album was called More Than a New Discovery, and the message implicit in that title was indicative of the way people talked about the Bronx songwriter early in her career. The marketing was hyperbolic. The expectations were unreasonable. And, more often than not, Nyro lived up to all of it. Only 19 when her debut album was released in 1966, she soon became famous for writing hits for other artists—one week in November 1969, three of the Top 10 songs in the country were her compositions, as interpreted by the 5th Dimension, Blood, Sweat and Tears, and Three Dog Night. Her own music, however—performed at the piano and sung in a voice that galloped between octaves as if auditioning for all the roles in a musical at once—aspired to places beyond the charts.
History looks fondly upon artists who prove themselves commercially yet seek to occupy more artful territory. Like so many of them, Nyro’s greatest legacy is in the wide range of artists she influenced: Joni Mitchell was inspired by her inventive piano playing; Elton John found his voice within her detail-rich songwriting; both Todd Rundgren and the members of Steely Dan took early influence from her jazzy, meticulous melodies; Bette Midler wanted to sing like her; Miles Davis and Alice Coltrane spent studio time alongside her.
Some of these artists’ testimonies appear in Peter Doggett’s liner notes for a new box set, American Dreamer, which collects Nyro’s studio output from the 1960s and 1970s, all remastered on vinyl along with a bonus LP of familiar demos and live recordings. Reading her biography from beginning to end is intense, and it’s a little heartbreaking to realize the extent to which she was misunderstood despite her obvious, prodigious talent. But, as she always intended, her story is best told through her music. These albums are so melodically intricate, so carefully performed, so thematically ambitious—encompassing life, death, love, religion, addiction, politics—you can hear why so many musicians around her tore up whatever they were working on and decided to take their craft a little more seriously.
The key element to Nyro’s approach was freedom. Her songs would begin and end whenever she wanted, fragmented or extended into symphonic mantras. When one melody had done its work, she would shift to another one entirely, often with no warning. (It is no surprise that she preferred playing solo, without the constraints of explaining herself to collaborators.) Her primary influences were girl groups, soul music, and gospel, and what she seemed to admire was the way these styles were built to move an audience: Her most memorable songs, like 1968’s “Poverty Train,” would speed and slow abruptly, as if she noticed someone in the audience who seemed unmoved, and so she climbed out to meet them and adjusted her delivery to suit that particular person. She would not leave the room until everyone had been engaged.
Two of the albums in this box set are unabashed classics: 1968’s Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, which offers a timeless survey of Nyro’s gifts as a songwriter and several of her most indelible songs (“Stoned Soul Picnic,“ “Emmie”), and 1969’s New York Tendaberry, which focuses on her more ambitious side with virtuosic, often solo performances. But the centerpiece is 1970’s Christmas and the Beads of Sweat, a two-part album that, for my money, stands as her finest work: Side A consists of music she performed with the Muscle Shoals rhythm section, showing how easily she could have transitioned into the ’70s as a rock artist. On the second side is her most spiritual, visionary work: a suite of long, interconnected songs with harp from Alice Coltrane and piano performances that intend to sweep you away. Ranging from the tightly wound “Brown Earth” to the sprawling “Christmas in My Soul,” it is the album of hers I would recommend to newcomers.
The surrounding records are also strong. 1971’s Gonna Take a Miracle, a tribute to her beloved era of girl groups, recorded with the vocal trio Labelle, remains a joyful exercise in one of her more crowd-pleasing modes. And her debut, More Than a New Discovery—the only album here created with blatant commercial aspirations—places her earliest compositions in chiming mid-’60s arrangements, smoothed out for radio play. The irony is that the message in its title wasn’t taken seriously: The label paired Nyro with session musicians, barring her from playing the piano herself, and while the music still resonates, its pop sound makes it an anomaly in her catalog. As if to prove that point, this new edition comes with an enormous hype sticker promoting the single “Wedding Bell Blues”—a retro attempt at reproducing the original packaging that ends up obscuring the gorgeous, stark photography on the cover.
If there’s another gripe I have with the set, it’s that it perpetuates a myth that Nyro’s career ended in the ’70s. After her hits dried up for other artists, and after the towering artistic triumphs of Eli and Tendaberry, the word on Nyro is that she retreated: Never mind that she still put out great albums while balancing live shows with the needs of her family, or that her work continued to influence singer-songwriters through each successive decade. The music she made during these later years was often remarkable—1976’s Smile, a quietly stirring tribute to her late mother, and 1978’s expertly written Nested represent this era in the box, but later albums like 1984’s Mother’s Spiritual and 1993’s Walk the Dog and Light the Light are just as essential to her story.
Like so much about Nyro, these subtle, joyful albums were destined to remain in the dark. Where plenty of artists become disgruntled with the music industry, Nyro refused to grow bitter: She instead decided to observe its mechanisms from a distance, to focus on her own evolution and take greater comfort in her journey. She began writing more sharply about capitalism—“Money,” on Smile, was an early stab—and feminism. “[S]ometimes I think being a star is kind of silly,” she told Melody Maker in 1976. “What does it make everyone else? I’d sooner be looked on as a comrade rather than a star.” And so she began living her life increasingly out of the spotlight: performing solo at clubs only when she felt like it, operating on her own schedule, and mostly avoiding public appearances.
For an artist who brushed so closely with the mainstream, this desire for complete control felt uncommon, and it can be observed throughout her career. As proposed release dates came and went, as she attempted to accompany her LPs with specific fragrances to better situate listeners within their settings, and as she tried to explain to her accompanists what particular color to conjure as they found their way around her words, Nyro slowly learned that the only person in the industry worth pleasing was herself. There is a story about Nyro that has been told to the point of cliche, but it bears repeating. When she auditioned as a teenager for Clive Davis at Columbia Records, she sat at the piano and didn’t take to the lighting in his hotel room. Instead, she requested total darkness, with just the television on, so that its glow would light the room. What might have seemed like an eccentricity turned out to be a keen awareness of the most natural environment for her music. As I sit listening to these records tonight, alone in my apartment with the television on mute, I can feel her worlds becoming real.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Two decades into his career, these songs are among the most incisive but somehow most complex ones Jurado has ever written, lined up from end to end without a wasted note, layer, line, or word.

The Horizon Just Laughed

During the past two decades, the singer-songwriter Damien Jurado has been tortuously restless. He first emerged in the late ’90s as a sensitive troubadour sort, sharing a curious traveler’s clutch of geographical ruminations and missed-connection laments with a confidant’s alluring wisp. Jurado was good enough to maintain the balladeer guise in perpetuity, but he pushed against the role’s tight fit almost immediately with an album of agitated indie rock, another of homespun experimental folk, and even a collage made from voice memos salvaged at garage sales. In 2010, Jurado finally seemed to have found his match in fellow singer and idiosyncratic soul Richard Swift, who framed Jurado’s endearing voice and emotional abstruseness in shades of neon and pastel on four sporadically stunning albums. Jurado, in turn, distanced himself from those early works: “My records,” he confessed, “all sounded like me trying to be everybody else.”
Jurado, it seems, has now disavowed those albums with Swift, too. For the wondrous new The Horizon Just Laughed, Jurado elected to produce the music himself for the first time in years, settling into a California studio with a modest band. The results are spellbinding: These eleven songs are among the most incisive but somehow most complex ones Jurado has ever written, lined up from end to end without a wasted note, layer, line, or word. And after his stint with Swift, Jurado has allowed himself the latitude to be both a simple singer and sophisticated stylist. Yes, there are devastating acoustic confessions and breezy folk-pop tunes, but there’s also a hypnotic samba meditation, a twilit tone poem, and a surging finale of organ-loaded rock’n’roll. For his entire career, Jurado has built good records from the bones of two or three staggering songs at a time, be they the early, acoustic “Ohio” or the later, lysergic “Museum of Flight.” The Horizon Just Laughed—Jurado’s best record to date and a magnetic middle-aged reflection on a lifetime of basic but profound changes in the world—funnels a quarter-century of trial-and-error into thirty-seven minutes of triumph.
The Horizon Just Laughed is an intricate personal diorama, teeming with characters and scenery culled from stacks of diaries and snapshots. Jurado takes us high into Wenatchee, that splendid forest impasse that divides Seattle from much of Washington, and down to Midwestern plains and South Texas towns, where “the skies are a firework show … the stars are a stanza.” He visits airports and train stations, marvels at the majesty of Mount Rainier, and considers the conditions of Brooklyn.
Some figures are anonymous—“Q,” who sits in the back of a cab during opener “Allocate,” or the outwardly tough and inwardly tortured man stalking the streets during the closer “Random Fearless.” Others are obscure, like the dual bit players from the ’70s sitcom “Alice” (and its sequel, “Flo”) who get their own song titles or the man who invented the stoplight’s yellow warning signal and prompts the record’s best joke—“Mr. Garrett Morgan, I’m always stop and go.” Still others are celebrities or celestial beings, recast in unusual roles. Peanuts creator Charles Schultz and his tragicomic star, Charlie Brown, are the stars of a tender suicide note, written by a man ultimately broken by his lack of breaks. Moroni—the angel who led Joseph Smith to the source material for The Book of Mormon and who you now see cast in gold atop Mormon temples—becomes Jurado’s companion for the apocalypse, which arrives here in nested waves of remorse and hope. You get the sense that these songs are stitched together from thoughts and feelings Jurado has jotted onto bits of paper or in text messages to himself, a patchwork testament to existence.
These specific references will likely mean very little to most listeners, but their power stems from Jurado’s ability to work through them in search for insight about himself and the world. These revelations sporadically appear, pulling what may have seemed like a haze of arbitrary events and ideas into a sudden bolt of focus. “Percy Faith,” for instance, strings together stanzas addressed to an assortment of ’60s easy-listening bandleaders and comedians, revealing vague discomfort with society. In the last verse, though, Jurado stares at people staring at their cell phones as they ride moving walkways and talk to their watches. “I know everything and yet no one at all,” he concludes, singing as if with a sad smile. After all these years, he’s simply more in search of connections than he’s ever been.
“The Last Great Washington State” beautifully drifts through discursive meditations on our cult of celebrity death and our impulse to search for the greener grass. But it crystalizes in an instant: “What good is living if you can’t write your ending?” Jurado sings, his pace quickening, as if he needs to say this aloud before he forgets it. “You’re always in doubt of the truths you’re defending.” The Horizon Just Laughed is an indispensable depository of perfect lines like this, keepsakes you can clutch closely when the world is set against you: “I can only exist so long as you last,” “Jealous is the dark that keeps me from you,” and the album’s wrecking ball, “Somebody shouted your name/And I swear they yelled fire.”
Considering how stuffed these songs are with Jurado’s peculiar interests and personal reckonings, his choice to produce The Horizon Just Laughed himself doesn’t seem like much of a choice at all; there’s simply too much to cover, too much baggage for anyone else to squeeze into any four-minute frame. How can you explain to someone in advance, after all, that the most important musical element of the exquisitely rendered “Over Rainbows and Rainier” won’t be the choirs, strings, or horns? Instead, it will be a moment of near-complete silence three minutes into the song, when we hear Jurado swallow hard before divulging his own vulnerability. It’s a striking moment most producers would have taken as a mistake. But here, the person who knows the most about what these songs are trying to say is the one deciding how to say it. He gets it right at every turn.
In March, when Jurado announced the May arrival of The Horizon Just Laughed, he declared that the album wouldn’t appear on digital platforms until July, two months after its release. He wanted to “foster opportunities for people to hear it in a way that it was created to be heard, from front to back in its entirety.” The patience, he hoped, might prompt them to listen a bit more closely.
At first blush, that’s too bad; more than any album Jurado’s ever made, these songs demand to be heard, and two months might as well be a year in an industry of instant streaming. On the other hand, these songs pull their power from slow reflections, from a series of sights that have been seen and pondered during long drives down open roads or quiet nights of deep thought. It took Jurado a quarter-century to make something this meaningful and half a lifetime to grasp and articulate these realizations. These truths—whose meaning becomes clear when you’re no longer listening, when one of these stunning lines creeps into your head during a nighttime walk—feel like his scripture. They aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.


On his third outing composing music for film, Anthony Gonzalez breaks from his own soundtracking habits with a welcome sense of playfulness.

M83: Knife + Heart (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Anthony Gonzalez has essentially been making music for movies his entire career. The widescreen pop of M83 has been effectively used in skate videos, Nicholas Sparks romances, Britney Spears documentaries, CW fairy-tale adaptations, and tear-puddled YA-novel adaptations; “Outro,” the mountain-scaling closer from the project’s massive and marvelous 2011 album Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, has popped up in so many commercials and movie trailers that The Huffington Post once published an in-vain plea to cease syncs of the song entirely.
All this malleable retrofitting of the M83 catalog speaks to the project’s core values dating back to the total blowout that was 2005’s Before the Dawn Heals Us; specifically, nostalgia, the driving force behind so much popular culture over the past decade. Gonzalez may have not invented ’80s fetishization, but just the Breakfast Club’d cover art of 2008’s Saturdays = Youth is more than enough evidence that he anticipated the trend’s eventual cultural dominance years before Drive and “Stranger Things” became mass-cultural totems.
Gonzalez’s creative mind seems specifically attuned to the crafting of sounds that conjure distinct imagery—which is why it’s surprising that his official score work to this point hasn’t packed the same effectiveness. He did double-duty in 2013 with music provided for the sci-fi action film Oblivion and his brother Yann’s You and the Night; the former barely bore his imprint amid co-writer Joseph Trapanese’s orchestral blare, while the latter resembled variations on Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming’s starry-eyed theme and little else.
His third go-round in the scoring arena, for Yann’s latest Knife + Heart, was surprise-released last week in anticipation of the film’s imminent limited theatrical release; rather than engaging in watered-down retreads of his previous work, Gonzalez breaks from his own soundtracking habits with a sense of playfulness. Part of this new-feeling approach is undoubtedly owed to the subject matter of the film itself—an erotic slasher film that, when not inscrutably immersed in its own atmosphere, centers around a series of mysterious killings on a gay porn set and a leather-masked villain wielding a deadly blade tucked inside a black dildo.
With 1970s Paris as its backdrop, Knife + Heart is loaded with enough kitsch to suggest that nostalgia runs deep in the Gonzalez brothers’ bloodline—in order words, a suitable playground for M83’s own past-peddling tendencies. In a press release, Yann stated that he put forth to Anthony “straight and gay porn [film]” soundtracks as well as the scores that accompanied the filmic work of Giallo masters like Lucio Fulci and Mario Bava; the latter style’s melodramatic sweep shines through in the pounding-and-piping “Un Cocteau Dans Le Coeur,” while the freewheeling and groovy synth line of “Detective Rachid” radiates a grindhouse-esque seediness that mirrors the film’s bawdy-and-bloody approach.
More than anything else, though, the score for Knife + Heart—which encompasses bite-sized synth doodles, organ-grinding dread, and vaporous tone-clouds—finds Anthony Gonzalez again recalling his own work, this time in form instead of explicit sound. It’s hard not to hear Knife+Heart’s multifarious approach without thinking of Junk, M83’s quixotic 2016 LP that mostly traded the 4K synth-pop for stately French balladry, glassy keyboards, and schmaltzy, horn-laden hooks.
Junk represented a conscious retreat from M83’s signature style not unlike French electronic duo Air’s divisive 2001 album and Moon Safari follow-up 10,000 Hz Legend—itself coming off the heels of their shapeshifting, woozy score for Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides. With his score for Knife + Heart, it’s almost as if Anthony Gonzalez discovered Air’s beaten path and chose to travel it in reverse—a fitting and successful approach for one of the most capable retro fabulists of the last 20 years.


Aided by Nels Cline, Marc Ribot, and Esperanza Spalding, the New York pianist and her band mix lyrical song form, turntablism, and avant-garde strategies in unusually fluid fashion.

Diatom Ribbons

Not long after Cecil Taylor’s death, the Tzadik label crafted a tribute album involving six pianists. To find Kris Davis among their number was likely little surprise to fans of contemporary jazz, given that her live performances at New York venues like Roulette and the Stone have long shown off her melodic and percussive mastery of post-Taylor pianism. But she is not just a star soloist. One recent, notated composition of Davis’ was included on an exciting set of contemporary classical pieces performed by the pianist Rory Cowal. She is also an adventurous collaborator, working in a wide variety of ensembles.
That range is one of the principal delights of Diatom Ribbons, Davis’ latest release on her own label. (Yes, she’s an impresario, too.) Wilco’s Nels Cline appears on several tracks, and sometime Tom Waits sideman Marc Ribot also shows up on a couple. Both of those guitarists hold firmly established identities in the contemporary jazz firmament, though it’s not often that you’ll find them on an album that also features two guest spots from Esperanza Spalding (working only as a vocalist here). Davis’ organizational insight holds that all of these artists contain multitudes, and that it shouldn’t be so unusual to hear them grouped together.
That the stylistically diverse results flow so well, over the course of an hour and 10 tracks—all but two composed by Davis—is also partly due to a band within the band. The album gains a sense of unity thanks to a trio of players that shows up regularly amid the comings and goings of guest stars: veteran drummer Terri Lyne Carrington,  rising-star DJ Val Jeanty, and Davis herself on piano.
The trio’s collective attack sets the pace during the first minute of the arresting title track, which opens the album. First Davis, on a prepared piano, plays riffs full of metallic timbres while Jeanty samples spoken—but highly musical—phrases from Cecil Taylor himself. Carrington settles into a groove not long before Taylor’s line, “For me, music saved my life”—a construction that inspires Davis to introduce new percussive figures. Soon after, Jeanty retreats for a bit, making room for a bassist (Trevor Dunn) and a pair of tenor sax players (JD Allen and Tony Malaby).
There’s a lot going on here, including melodically captivating soloing, an intergenerational shout-out, and various experimental textures. But instead of being a jumble, it’s a triumph. Spalding’s voice gets the spotlight on the next track, “The Very Thing” (written by Davis associate Michaël Attias). But Jeanty again provides crucial work during this performance, attaching delicate trails of whispery turntablism to some of Spalding’s highest notes.
Carrington, Jeanty, and Davis also construct the head-nod feel at the outset of “Rhizomes” (with the help of onetime Xiu Xiu drummer Ches Smith on vibraphone). But Carrington is soon ably shifting into rock-adjacent territory before Cline enters with an energetic solo of lightly distorted tones.
That covers about the first 16 minutes of the album. There are plenty of highlights yet to come, including “Corn Crake,” the core trio’s standalone number, during which Jeanty samples oration from the French modernist composer Olivier Messiaen. But no matter how unusual the compositional structures may seem, there is a consistent, songful style at the heart of most performances.
The major exception to this rule is “Golgi Complex,” a short tour through a chaotic complex of motifs. But even here, Davis pursues a variety of approaches: The composition is presented twice on the album, with the original, more forbidding version sequenced second, after another variation that has an air of funk-indebted swing. Even when Diatom Ribbons ventures into unapologetically avant-garde territory, there is a clear desire to make each choice communicate. When expertly realized by such a vibrant cast of collaborators, this suite of strategies brings several of Davis’ skills—as a player, composer, and bandleader—to a new, heightened state of expression.


For their latest album, the Kansas City emo outfit again drafts the help of producer Bob Weston (Mission of Burma, Shellac).

There Are Rules

Perhaps no band has gone further to disassociate itself from emo than the Get Up Kids, which shouldn't be a huge surprise: Their brand of pining pop-punk, which became the predominant sound of early-2000s alternative rock, was probably more despised by punk and indie kids than any other chart-toppers at the time-- post-Disney pop, nu-metal, big beat electronica. No one got it worse than the Get Up Kids, attacked with the vigor of a scene that finally got to pick on someone its own size. Existing somewhere between the Promise Ring and Jimmy Eat World-- but lacking the former's jittery roots and the latter's obvious pop ambitions-- they once worked with Bob Weston (Mission of Burma, Shellac) and chose not to leave Vagrant, and yet somehow an air of dishonesty was projected on them. Considering they were just some guys from Kansas City who wanted to write songs called "Anne Arbour" and cover Mötley Crüe, I'm not sure the churlish punishment fits the crime.
There Are Rules isn't a return to form sonically-- neither to the limp, acoustic bowouts of On a Wire or Guilt Show nor to the eager-to-please effervescence of Something to Write Home About-- but a return to results, a just-all-right record from a band that always felt a step behind even in their own genre. The announcement that Weston was brought back in certainly perked some ears, but anyone expecting his gnarly edge to improve much on their material is destined to be disappointed. "Tithe" and "Birmingham" are the most obvious beneficiaries of Weston's imprimatur, and they snarl more than anything the Get Up Kids have done in the past. But these dudes just can't do menace, in large part because Matthew Pryor's vocals are the literal embodiment of "snotty," emanating almost completely from his nostrils.
What they can do is momentarily remold themselves in the form of borderline-emo go-getters Hot Hot Heat on spasmodic word puzzles "Automatic" and "Pararelevant", or regain some of their caffeinated buzz on "Regent's Court". And though they have dabbled in synth-pop before, "Shatter Your Lungs" is a legitimate surprise-- Pryor's vocals soften and let the tumbling melody come to him rather than force it, hinting at the sort of maturity There Are Rules should have aimed for.
The title of the album's closer, "Rememorable", proves to be pretty ironic, considering they completely forget what made them popular in the first place: the hooks. There Are Rules drags toward its middle, relying more on repetition than snappy melodies for growth: "Rally 'Round the Fool" feigns importance with the sort of vague paranoia and electro dabbling that characterized alt-rock's post-OK Computer obsession, followed by a run of three songs that do little else but allow Rob Pope's grinding bass riffs to drill fruitlessly for paydirt.
Gone are the band's geographic puns and tales of the romantic rigors of college freshman, but they're replaced by a professional anonymity that kinda sums up the problem with There Are Rules: When you spent the prime of your career trying to document the contours of post-teen torment, what happens when you no longer have a first-hand view? Get Up Kids likely don't have an answer because none of their peers did either: Jimmy Eat World soldiered on with drastically diminishing returns, Saves the Day alienated almost their entire fanbase with the surprisingly sophisticated pop of In Reverie, the Promise Ring broke up, Hey Mercedes were dead on arrival post-Braid, and Dashboard Confessional just sort of became something beyond judgment. For those of us who spent the tumult of our teen years with their records, we can hear the Get Up Kids and just think of them kindly.


On her two albums with Portland dream-pop trio Blouse, Charlie Hilton sang spectral, spindly songs that bear a mortal burden. On Palana, her solo debut, Hilton turns her gaze to a renewable kind of death: that of our morphing identities.

Palana

On her two albums with Portland dream-pop trio Blouse, Charlie Hilton sings spectral, spindly songs that bear a mortal burden. On "They Always Fly Away," from their 2011 debut, she stares gravely at a symbolic blackbird that returns over and over to the same telephone wire, and each time laments its next departure. "1000 Years," from its follow-up, is a dream of eternal life disguised as a pledge of undying love. But Hilton's morbid reveries recede without fail into the warmest and mushiest of mushy synth hooks, embracing human decay as if it were as alluring as a timeworn cassette. On Palana, her solo debut, Hilton turns her gaze to a renewable kind of death: that of our morphing identities.
Palana is the Sanskrit birth name Hilton left behind after high school, and she eulogizes it on the title track. "Palana, I always thought that you would be with me every morning," she sings in a lullaby melody, "Shifting with the wind, easily." Her tone hardens on "Something for Us All," in which "children disappear, their innocence a victim of time," so that we understand the pain, as well as the inevitability, of shedding one’s skins. "Is there anything that’s something all the time?" she wonders, with a sigh that suggests there is not.
Despite the songs’ homespun charm, there’s something faintly confrontational in Hilton’s phrasing–to precede the above line, for example, she sarcastically sings, "If happiness is something for us all/ Then go ahead and tell me what it's like." On "Funny Anyway," a lament for her lapsing memory, Hilton bemoans the social demands of small talk ("Why do they ask me what I’ve done?/ Do I have to say?"), in a way that could seem petty. Instead, you get the sense of a dormant intellect being perpetually roused into action—when the quietest person in the room suddenly speaks up, people tend to listen. Hilton's voice has a similar effect: It's pitched between Trish Keenan (or a slightly wooden impersonator) and Cat's Eyes’ Rachel Zeffira. Through the record she is elegantly detached—not disinterested so much as preoccupied, focused somewhere beyond the scope of the song.
Occasionally Palana will burst open, revealing churning undercurrents beneath Hilton’s surface calm. In the chorus of "Let's Go to a Party," she pairs a silly, splashy Europop beat with a deceptively naive mantra, sung like a curse: "I’m only happy when I’m dancing/ When I’m dancing for you." That she dances "for" and not "with" is intriguing, but true: sometimes it is easier to perform for others than honestly engage them. It’s perhaps a lonely way to be, and that melancholy floods out through the record—yet to Hilton’s characters, it feels like home. She dances alone in the company of others, and allows her many selves, simultaneously, to live.


The second album from the enigmatic duo is equally nauseating and joyous, like binging on several decades of euphoric pop and hurling it onto the floor of a Tilt-A-Whirl.

Orange 2

Macula Dog didn’t set out to be freaks. The enigmatic New York duo, who’ve become known for stumbling pop experiments in off-kilter time signatures, performed live with sculpturesque puppets strapped to their backs, have repeatedly claimed that their music isn’t meant to sound like it’s falling apart. The delirious, queasy tracks that the pair issued over the last decade are the result of a kind of compositional naivety: “We’re not musicians,” they once said in an interview. “I don’t know what a note is.”
As a result, Macula Dog’s music is led by instinct and interpersonal chemistry, following wherever their unique pop sensibility and their haphazard collection of drum pads, synthesizers, and salvaged “garbage” leads. Early records, like their 2015 self-titled release for New York abstract pop label Haord, drew deserved comparisons to previous generations of electro-weirdos like Devo and the Residents, but that was never their aim. They told Vice in 2015 that they mostly just wanted to sound like T. Rex. As they began to work on their second album, Orange 2, they doubled down on this goal, attempting to make, as they put it in a press release, “a ‘proper’ record…with a distinct, great lead singer, and music you could dance to.”
They failed, by their own admission. That much is clear from the moment an insectoid voice enters on Orange 2’s opening title track, singing clipped non-sequiturs about beverages that disintegrate the koozies that contain them. Onomatopoeic electronics sproing and splort and splash around the vocal melodies in delicately balanced chaos. If Orange 2 mirrors pop music, it’s only in its dedication to too-much-ness. Macula Dog dip and dive between icy 1980s synth-pop, the rhythmic precision of krautrock, the noisy disaffection of no wave, and more vertiginous sounds—“Go Green” sounds equally like a dial-up internet connection stuttering to life and Strawberry Jam-era Animal Collective. It’s nauseating and joyous in equal measure, as if the duo had binged on several decades’ worth of euphoric pop then hurled it onto the floor of a Tilt-A-Whirl. They sum up their philosophy with a one-liner on “The Novice”: “It’s cool to be confused.”
Despite the delirium, Orange 2 illustrates the group’s formal ambitions. Off-kilter and strange as each melody is, they all snap together into a kind of locomotion. For every careening synth line, there’s carefully sequenced percussion keeping it on the rails. Tracks like “Neosporin” roll from one section to another seemingly unpredictably, but deft synth flourishes and recurring vocal affectations lend each track a sense of continuity and purpose. It might be too disjointed for a sing-along, but you can follow the logic in a way that feels even more satisfying than a traditional verse-chorus-verse.
Like watching a Rube Goldberg machine in operation, you can never quite be sure how one component of Orange 2 will tumble into the next, but through some miracle of physics, momentum, or magic, it always does. See the way “Smart Man Do” jump cuts from chattering industrial electronics to hopscotching techno inversions—plastering the whole track in unsettling electro ephemera as they narrate with a gasping vocal about, in part, a conversation with God. Somehow it all congeals into something propulsive and energetic. It isn’t pop perfection, as they once imagined, but it demonstrates what Macula Dog do best: They turn trash into treasure.


Esperanza Spalding’s eighth album is a strangely romantic, sometimes didactic effort to mold the often private experience of listening and feeling the healing power of music.

Esperanza Spalding: Songwrights Apothecary Lab

Songwrights Apothecary Lab

It’s been 15 years since Esperanza Spalding’s auspicious debut Junjo. After that largely jazz-rooted recording, the multi-instrumentalist singer/songwriter collaborated with Janelle Monáe, Bruno Mars, and Harry Belafonte while composing and releasing six more albums. Spalding’s projects have reflected her compulsive need to expand the range of her artistry beyond jazz, and each collaboration reveals an artist invested in both the heart and craft of music. The bones of her releases still lean on improvisation and sparkling tones. Yet the sinew of her art-making has evolved—a shift audible on her eighth album Songwrights Apothecary Lab, which showcases a musician reluctant to embody any single mode of expression. Spalding has honed in on a lyricism that is psychologically tougher, less concerned with pleasure, and more aligned with revealing tiers of hurt and how they cling to our bodies.
Spalding recorded the album over several months this year and created a guide that describes the intended uses and effects of its 12 compositions, sequentially numbered Formwela 1, 2, 3, etc. The assigned healing properties of each song came from Spalding’s conversations with music therapists and neuroscientists whom she intentionally sought out for a record meant to have a specific healing effect on the listener. SAL is a strangely romantic, sometimes didactic effort to mold the often private experience of listening and feeling music. Taking a note from Alice Coltrane’s own healing melodies on her albums Divine Songs and Infinite Chants, Spalding offers the type of medicine that comes from days moving through nature or intentional solitude. The recipes here are as ancient as they are intuitive.
It’s remarkably unconventional and, at times, stifling listening to an album that comes with a how-to manual, though the concept isn’t unfamiliar. Music has long been a tool for healing, whether as therapy for patients or to commune with gods and ancestors. Spalding has turned those rituals into direct action for listeners seeking solace in her voice. Opener “Formwela 1” is a slow build of layered harmonies that slip into her crystal clear vocals, sitting atop a strumming guitar and gentle piano. The guide labels this song as one for “an acute moment of stress in the home,” and it’s that specificity of place that sets Spalding’s intention from the beginning. Her meeting with multi-instrumentalist Ganavya Doraiswamy on “Formwela 2” is ethereal and deeply rooted in the traditions that shaped it: the movement and philosophy of Harikathā; the poetry and elasticity of jazz.
The album’s three back-to-back collaborations with trombonist Corey King are dynamic and intrepid in balancing both artists’ skills. “You know we all see and make-believe, please, yes/What do you need, babe?” Spalding sings on “Formwela 4” before proceeding into a tender call and response with King, both singing, “Dare to say it,” as they urge us to love ourselves enough to dream our peace into existence. There are elements of Sade’s “King of Sorrow” in the acknowledgment of pain, but where the latter sinks further into despair, Spalding’s acceptance of that feeling is a reawakening. On “Formwela 5,” the duo perform pirouettes around each other’s vocals, spinning and spinning without stuttering or losing sight of the rhythm. “Promise while I’m working at it/I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you,” they offer as an urgent chant. On “Formwela 6,” Spalding leads while King is a ready and capable partner, adding the right amount of heart to a track that’s restrained and almost unsettling in its rhythmic simplicity.
Where the album falters is when formwelas lose the sense of space and intimacy crafted at the beginning. “Formwela 8,” a nearly 12-minute track, trudges at the same pace and never finds footing, its harmonizing bookended by drums and saxophone. After a few bars, the repetition starts to lag, weighing down the gentle piano notes. According to the guide, it’s a “formwelation” meant to foster the “buoyancy of a secure, comfy, and same home-place.” But the track has none of this lightness and assurance. “Formwela 9” plays off the confusion stirred up in the preceding track, and while Spalding’s improvisation takes center stage, the song feels unfinished and cold compared to the album’s first half. Spalding returns to form on closer “Formwela 13,” whose lyrics confidently hang over the horn and impatient percussion. It’s playful and unpretentious, making room for both silence and activity in relationships: “Love the way I do that thing we do/Smile with me, ’cause you do it, too.”
I found myself wondering if “formwela” is the combination of “form” and “well”—whether they function as sounds to help us form well the ties that bind us. While unmoored in parts, SAL compels listeners to find meaning in places they never looked; and in their most well-formed states, the songs lightly probe without being intrusive. Spalding is determined to reach you, even if she can’t touch you.

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Indiana’s Thunder Dreamer embrace their Midwest roots on Capture, mixing elements of emo, post-rock, and pop. It’s a summer album with thick atmosphere and a dusk that seems to last infinitely.

Capture

Evansville, Ind. is the Hoosier State’s third-biggest city, but its metro area spills over into southern Illinois and northern Kentucky, making for a jumbled geographic identity. Compared to its surroundings, Evansville is an urban hub, but its economy has traditionally thrived on shipbuilding and refrigerators, symbols of erstwhile American greatness. Evansville is a unique corridor between the Rust Belt and the south; it voted Trump by a wide margin. “Everything seems to die here... People get discouraged and stop trying,” said Thunder Dreamer drummer Corey Greenfield in a recent interview, reflecting on a city that’s so quintessentially American, it can seem invisible at times. With this in mind, it’s easy to see why a young rock band would have broken up with Evansville. Some of Thunder Dreamer did just that. But Capture is all the more powerful as a story of their eventual reconciliation.
Whatever Evansville lacks in industry infrastructure, it’s clearly been a tremendous incubator for a band looking to avoid the sonic hivemind of a scene. Capture echoes geographically-evocative artists from its Midwest surroundings while maintaining a singular center. Within Thunder Dreamer’s sound are the fidgety dashboard confessionals of Boys Life’s road-trip cult classic Departures and Landfalls; the mesmeric stoner emo of their northwest neighbors in Cloakroom; and early Mark Kozelek, Jason Molina, and My Morning Jacket, with the latter stepping outside the grain silo to take in the boundless vistas.
Thunder Dreamer have embraced “Midwestern” as a descriptor, identifying with its underlying humility and landlocked yearning. The bands they recall made grand, expansive, sprawling music that no one would call grandiose or epic. Most of the eight songs on Capture push towards five minutes and beyond with post-rock patience and the force of pop. They take after the landscape with slow, sloping escalations towards welcome pockets of bustle rather than relying on codified crescendo-and-crash dynamics; it’s less Explosions in the Sky than slow-burning bonfires in a secluded rural clearing. The songs are all given proper heft through analog production, capturing firefly flickers of guitar, misty reverb, and crackles of heat lightning to create an overall ambience of an overcast July night. It’s a summer album for the way most experience it outside of the coasts: a thick, palpable atmosphere that feels enveloping rather than oppressive and a dusk that seems to last infinitely.
Singer Steven Hamilton has noted that bands in Evansville actually do a disservice to themselves if they play too many local live shows. So while Capture is a traditional rock record, it lacks that dynamic of crowd-sourced pressure. Thunder Dreamer benefit from this in ways, though: “St-Malo” juxtaposes calm and claustrophobia, appropriating the walled-in, battle-torn beauty of its namesake, while the brisk and chiming single “You Know Me” has an unusually developed musculature for dream pop. Still, Capture’s standout quality is Hamilton’s forthright and crystalline vocals, a surprising contrast when “heartland rock” typically evokes the realm of mutters and drawls. It’s not slick by any means, but Hamilton lends Capture an alluring elegance, particularly on the luxurious mope of the title track. At points, it does slightly resemble their heroes in Mock Orange, the only band of note to previously arise out of Evansville and also one that rarely toured and never settled on a specific sound.
Hamilton’s voice is an effective instrument for what he calls “sad words to fit sad notes.” And whether he’s delivering plainspoken, classic emo heartbreak (“Why Bother”) or local xenophobia against refugees (“Living Like the Rest”), it’s never heavy-handed. However, Hamilton admits lyrics sometimes came at the last minute, and there’s certainly a discrepancy between them and the group’s painstakingly crafted instrumentals. But Capture benefits from its reliance on ambience for evocation. It’s a record of young men learning to live with the implacable fear emanating from the crossroads of America, rather than running from it.


Scott Herren follows two LPs of pioneering glitch-hop with a more guest-heavy third full-length, one that includes appearances from the Books, El-P, and a handful of Wu-Tang Clan members.

Surrounded By Silence

If Surrounded By Silence were a movie, it'd be one of those Technicolor Cecil B. DeMille epics that boldface hype "A Cast of Thousands." If it were a concert, it would be an indie-verse Live Aid. If it were a story, it'd be that chapter of Ulysses where James Joyce introduces the reader to just about every goddamn person in Dublin. We're talking a big canvas here, with so many guest stars you can't spit without moistening someone who has spent time on the (CMJ) charts.
All of which is somewhat of a U-turn for Scott Herren's best-known pseudonym, as the Prefuse 73 catalog has been distinct among its IDM environs for being emotional, intimate, and focused affairs. Prefuse albums have had guests over for dinner before, but rarely so marquee (sorry, Prekop) and never in such numbers...hell, I'm hard pressed to think of any non-compilation that has featured so many interlopers. Whether Herren is using Surrounded By Silence to spread the word about some of his favorite acts, or to insta-build a portfolio of outside production work, or a little of both, it's a much different-- and far more inconsistent-- affair than previous Prefuse efforts.
Much of the blame for this unevenness lies with Herren's attempts at hip-hop production, a role with tantalizing potential that so far had only been teased at with isolated, underwhelming efforts for Diverse, MF Doom, and others. Silence's first taste of Prefuse on the decks, "Hideyaface", finds Herren brokering a backpacker's dream summit of Wu-Tang and Def Jux municipalities. Sadly, it's outperformed by the instrumental reprise that appears down the tracklist, containing a merely routine showing by Ghostface that nevertheless still manages to embarrass the cottonmouth delivery of El-P, who lamely titles himself "Laserface" and follows the Def Jux party line of substituting hyperlogia for talent. (See also: Aesop Rock's blunder through "Sabbatical with Options".)
Only charismatic tracks with Jux defector Beans ("Morale Crusher") and relative unknown Camu ("Now You're Leaving") manage to fulfill the concept's promise, leaving one to wonder whether Herren is the victim of phoned-in MC work (looking at you, Masta Killah and GZA) or whether his considerable talents just don't adapt to background duty. Indeed, the composition of tracks like "Just the Thought" seems neutered compared to usual Prefuse material, short on ideas and compromising complexity. Ironically, it might be Herren's knack for atmospherics and jazz-like swing that keep his hip-hop dalliances from liftoff, as they tend to amplify rather than alleviate the dreary bookishness of underground rap emcees.
Appearances by artists from the rock and electronic side of the indie fence score slightly better on Surrounded By Silence, ranging from the disastrously shrill performance by Blonde Redhead's Kazu Makino to the delicious laptop jam between Prefuse and ihe Books. That latter track, "Pagina Dos", is pretty much exactly what you would expect from its constituent parts, but no less entrancing for it; an all-too-brief mixture of fractured banjo, chop-chop dialogue, and an itchier, funkier beat than the Books would normally allow themselves.
"And I'm Gone" somehow manages to squeeze another Herren alias (Piano Ovelord), Stereolabbites Broadcast, and Mexican outfit Café Tacuba into a less-than-three-minutes package, but makes it work as dense, dreamy psychedelia Caribou/Manitoba would envy. The two appearances by Claudia Deheza from On! Air! Library! (one with twin sister Alejandra) similarly make me reach for the "ethereal" meme, breezy like Herren's Savath + Savalas project, but without sacrificing the trademark Prefuse lope-swing and scissorhands editing.
Almost lost amidst the collaboration addiction are a handful of Prefuse-only tracks, the placement of which makes even the longer compositions feel like interludes. That's a shame, because while Herren shows signs of recycling old ideas (the album-opening fanfare, the wandering bassline of "Ty versus Detchibe"), some of these solitary works outshine the superstar vehicles. "Expressing Views is Obviously Illegal" is the Prefuse concept at its best, with jazz, hip-hop, and IDM elements all colliding in a granola-bar musicology lecture. Similarly, "Minutes Away Without You," reprises the One Word Extinguisher trick for juicing sentiment out of loops and samples, a slow jam tempo complimented by late-night noir horns.
Yet, if I may be albumist for a moment, it's this emotional core that's lacking from Surrounded By Silence, which is so caught up in the red-carpet procession that it loses the flow and cohesion of Prefuse's prior efforts. Like John Wayne popping up as a Roman guard in the crucifixion scene of The Greatest Story Ever Told, any momentum achieved by the music gets tripped up by another celebrity appearance and the ensuing reach for the liner notes. Getting by with a lot of help from his friends is clearly Herren's goal on Surrounded By Silence, but that doesn't keep the fulfillment of that goal from making the album his least rewarding effort yet under this name.


Inspired by a stint in silent meditation, these two sidelong pieces attempt to wrest orchestral order from real-life chaos.

Sonescent

In the Summer of 2017, Whitney Johnson realized she had a critical problem: She could hear vivid new music in her head, but she had no way to record it—in fact, the very idea was verboten. Years earlier, Johnson, an enthusiastic collaborator who has long made spectral pop as Matchess, emerged from a near-fatal medical catastrophe with renewed clarity and urgency, wielding an appreciation for life and the art she might make with it. As seasons passed, those feelings faded; Johnson slipped back into the humdrum soup of daily existence. She decided to stanch her existential recidivism with an extended stay at a Mojave meditation center, where she would live in the “noble silence” of the Vipassana tradition. But then the music—rich orchestrations for a little symphony, curious little melodies—came. She couldn’t write them down, let alone sing them. She simply tried to remember.
Sonescent, Matchess’ debut for Drag City, doubles as Johnson’s fascinating document of that experience and the most absorbing piece of an already interesting catalog. When Johnson emerged from silence, she scored the sounds she’d heard in her head, then assembled a chamber ensemble of Chicago ringers (Circuit des Yeux’s Haley Fohr, Joan of Arc’s Tim Kinsella, Bitchin’ Bajas’ Rob Frye, and so on) to play them alongside her own viola and inscrutable but arcing vocals. The result, though, didn’t reflect how she’d first heard the sounds inside the din of her own mind, surrounded as it was by silence, or the anxiety of hoping to hold onto them. So she suspended them inside a complex web of electronics, from the steely purr of sine waves to the murmur of a no-input mixer. The two sidelong pieces are a slow-motion seesaw between low-volume hums and symphonic rapture, or, really, between the way the chaotic world actually exists and our attempts to order it.
Johnson’s work as Matchess has always lived behind one scrim or another, with thin layers of noise or distortion warping her shifty pop. Her songs seemed to echo down long, dark hallways or up spiral staircases, her voice always arriving from … over there, somewhere. Despite the process, though, Sonescent paradoxically steps through that scrim, perhaps even tearing it down. This is the clearest manifestation of Johnson’s musical mind yet, as she works to wrest sound from silence, music from meditation. You can hear her find an idea and try to hang onto it, to spot a melody she likes and not allow the exigencies of the world to obliviate it before she can share. Sonescent feels incredibly vulnerable, as if Johnson is allowing you a perch inside her head.
From that position, Sonescent’s two pieces unfurl like a desert landscape—subtle or even listless at first, but truly alive and rich given time. Silence slowly rises into a harmonic hum during “Almost Gone,” like an extended invocation of “om.” Johnson’s viola joins at a distance, eventually tugging the full band into a classical march that gives way, in turn, to a roaring drone. The strings sigh above dancing drums and, then, phantom bass notes; it is ghostly, as if you’re conjuring the sound of some long-dead military band on a centuries-old battlefield. “Through the Wall” works in the other direction, the stately string orchestrations that begin it gradually giving in to corrosive electronics that peel away the layers until only crumbs and fragments are left. Just on the edge of disappearing, though, the band returns to play what could have been the theme song from some silly ’70s sitcom through the noise. Brian Sulpuzio’s electric guitar lick slices into the mix, a knowing wink that provides a playful bit of reassurance just before static finally swallows the band.
Silent meditation, Johnson told me recently, provided a way to return to the present, to not dwell in nostalgia or fret too much about the future. “What’s happening in this moment is the entirety of existence,” Johnson said. Sonescent, in turn, recalls the potential complexity of every moment, the way that layers of meaning—and, in this case, music—sometimes hide in plain sight. Are those drums that canter in after three minutes of “Through the Wall,” or a trick of the ear? What is the line between sonority and dissonance eight minutes later, when curdled electronics and crystalline strings occupy the same space?
Sonescent slips between Reynols’ brilliant Blank Tapes, where you imagine musical shapes coming from re-recorded sleice, and Ned Lagin’s immersive Seastones series, where there’s so much music you have to tease out the hidden figures. I find myself listening a little closer during those above instants, paying more attention to the present than I was just a second before. That’s what Johnson sought in the Mojave; it is, generously, what she extends in return during Sonescent.


The Brooklyn punk-rock duo Hilly Eye features onetime Titus Andronicus member Amy Klein. On their full-length debut, songs are built on simple, opaque lines that are transformed into stinging slogans.

Reasons to Live

On Reasons to Live, the full-length debut by the Brooklyn punk-rock duo Hilly Eye, singer-guitarist Amy Klein repeatedly returns to images of emotional violence in her lyrics that initially seem like postcards from the edge of an especially awful and parasitic romantic coupling. But Klein, an ex-member of New Jersey rockers Titus Andronicus, tilts her hand just enough to imply that it could also be nation, rather than just a person, that’s left her feeling equal parts enraged and empathetic.
Amid the scuffed-up beauty of dime-store guitars rubbing up against Catherine Tung's brutalized drum kit, Klein seethes about deception in "American Rail" with a personal sense of betrayal: "In my dreams/ I believe all the lies you told me," she sings, in a voice that sounds both confessional and accusatory. On the dreamy travelogue "Louisville", she echoes the pleas of a forgotten underclass: "Don't bring me down/ Higher than the water/ Don’t bring me down/ I don't want to lose my ground." This neglect explodes into physical abuse on "Double Dutch", where Klein spits, "I can see all the marks that your arms left on me/ I can see what you are."
Or, you know, Klein could be singing about some asshole she's happy to have rid herself of. Even when she tiptoes precariously close to making A Statement-- like on the album-opening "Way Back When", a lilting folk-rock number that alludes to a returning soldier's difficult homecoming-- she always keeps one foot tucked safely in ambiguity. Hilly Eye songs are built on simple, opaque lines that are transformed into stinging slogans; on "Animal", the money line is "All the boys who get beaten up/ all the girls who get beaten down," which Klein delivers as a manic yelp and a churlish taunt over guitars that similarly oscillate alternating shades of pretty and ugly.
Lyrically, Reasons to Live is pitched somewhere between an angry breakup record and an ethereal, post-psychedelic protest screed. Musically, it seems to have been purposely constructed to deny easy satisfaction-- or satisfaction of any kind, really. If the meaning of these songs is difficult to pin down, so is their emotional core. Hilly Eye's primary musical characteristic-- the soft-loud dynamics of Klein and Tung's untrained harmonies and their pummeling, near-amateurish instrumental attack-- is the oldest trick in the indie-rock handbook. The lack of technique gives Reasons to Live an unfinished quality that suggests there's either more depth than there appears to be, or an underlying emptiness deriving from too much feral energy and not enough songwriting.
Given Klein's track record, I'm inclined to believe the former. Hilly Eye's emaciated sound is about as far as you can get from the all-fists-on-deck expansiveness of Titus Andronicus. It seems like a shortcut to something more singular to Klein's own experiences. What's left unresolved on Reasons to Live is what, exactly, Klein has to say about those experiences. It's a record borne of confusion-- though, to its credit, it's about confusion as well. "I am too young/ I am too old," she sings on "Almanac", which meanders aimlessly for a few minutes before magically producing the album's most rousing riff. Klein might still be figuring herself out, but the identity she seeks is definitely worth finding.


BJ the Chicago Kid's first major-label release is a tender update on classic Chicago soul, featuring guest spots from Kendrick Lamar, Chance the Rapper, and Big K.R.I.T.

In My Mind

Bryan James Sledge, who goes by the moniker BJ the Chicago Kid, has a soft, gentle voice, which is perfect for delivering multiple love letters. On In My Mind, his first major-label release, he doesn’t sing as much as he coos, adoringly, at the object of his affection, whose identity is renewed in each song. He might bring on current rappers like Kendrick Lamar, Chance the Rapper, and Big K.R.I.T., but the real wellspring of his inspiration is Chicago soul music, and on In My Mind he both honors and renews the classic form.
Tenderness is as inherent to Chicago soul music as the bass drop is to EDM, and BJ is surpassingly tender here, but that doesn't mean he's shy. Some of the tracks on In My Mind are so overtly sexual they could redden a teenager's ears. The adult and NSFW "Love Inside," for instance, is not about someone being beautiful on the inside, à la Bruno Mars. It is about uncensored intimacy, as is "Resume," "Church," "The New Cupid," "Woman’s World," "Heart Crush," and "Turnin’ Me Up". That’s almost half the album.
These songs represent the best of In My Mind. Sledge is in the zone when he’s singing to women, about women, and especially in praise of women, as he does on "Woman's World." A clever inversion of James Brown’s "It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World", the track features Sledge doing his best Smokey Robinson impression atop doo-wop tones and a frenetic, electronically rendered string section.
It’s one of the highlights on In My Mind, alongside "The New Cupid," in which Sledge laments what he sees as a lack of romance infecting his generation. Above a mellow sampling of Raphael Saadiq’s "Oh Girl," Sledge wonders where Cupid has gone, before ultimately deciding that he must be "too busy at the club." It’s up to Sledge, then, to play matchmaker, because "without a love song, something’s gonna go way wrong." Both in subject matter and style, the song is similar to fellow Chicagoans Carl Thomas’ stunning but slept on single, "Don’t Kiss Me," and R. Kelly’s saccharine "When a Woman Loves."
On "Turnin’ Me Up," Sledge enumerates the ways in which his lover satisfies his every need over an ever-thickening beat. On "Church," the woman Sledge adores is determined to ruin his Sunday. It’s Saturday night and she wants to "drink, do drugs, and have sex," and she doesn’t care that Sledge has to go to church in the morning. As Chance the Rapper says in his slick guest verse, "She always say, 'hey, I don’t wanna be saved.'" It's an interesting dynamic for a soul song: The woman is the protagonist, and the listener learns more about her likes and dislikes than Sledge’s. She is self-assured in her hedonism, happy to be the devil perched on Sledge’s quivering shoulder.
Sledge is a very straightforward lyricist; he doesn't stunt, he yearns. His lyrics favor plainspoken confessions over catchy turns of phrase, and when the album falters, it's because his words reduce a pair of lovers to their mouths and hands.  Tracks like "Man Down" and "Crazy" make clear that Sledge is at his worst when he tries to reinvent the R&B wheel. He knows too well what goes into a great soul song to be able to dismember it. He’s too much of a traditionalist, stubborn in his devotion to Chicago soul music and its unpretentious approach to sex, love and everything that happens in between.


The Sarah Records-like Swedish indie pop label celebrates its 10th anniversary with a 4xCD collection that features one song from each of its first 100 releases.

Various Artists: Labrador 100, a Complete History of Popular Music

A complete history of Swedish popular music would strain even the most long-winded reviewer. The Scandinavian nation responsible for the coolly melodic pop of the Concretes, El Perro del Mar, Jens Lekman, Love Is All, and Peter Bjorn & John also brings us the unguarded cuteness of Hello Saferide and I'm From Barcelona, the danceable insecurities of Robyn and Sally Shapiro, the visceral psych-rock of Dungen, and the Knife's 2006-defining haunted house. Blame Sweden, too, for Soundtrack of Our Lives and Yngwie fucking Malmsteen. Good thing they're peace-loving, right?
Stockholm's Labrador Records has helped define the "Swedish pop" sound now heard in club nights from London to Berlin. Cheekily titled Labrador 100: A Complete History of Popular Music celebrates the influential indie label's 10th anniversary with one song from each of its first 100 releases (including a new track from dream-poppers the Radio Dept.). At more than five hours, the four-disc set contains more than enough overlooked gems for indie-pop fans to obsess over, argue about, and fall in love with. Labrador specializes in sweetly chiming pop in the old Sarah Records mold; its sound has broadened considerably over the years, but don't expect any of the macho garage-rock that put Sweden on the NME's pub-crawl map in the early 00s.
Girlish whispers and Morrissey-esque enunciations are the norm. Early Labrador 100 tracks by bands like Starlet or Airliner display echoes of the Field Mice's bedsit lo-fi, while Pelle Carlberg and his band Edson apply self-conscious wit to Belle & Sebastian's initial hushed tones. The compilation also makes room for Laurel Music's country-inflected yearning, Douglas Heart's shoegaze twilights, Irene's bubblegum soul, the Legends' noise-swathed Northern soul, the homemade electro-pop of Club 8 or Waltz for Debbie, the Pulp archness of Corduroy Utd. and Loveninjas, and the shimmering new wave of newcomers the Mary Onettes.
Out of such gentle nostalgia, Labrador 100 presents song after song of would-be Perfect Pop Songs-- and plenty of them are pretty near perfect indeed. Suburban Kids With Biblical Names set forth a manifesto on their devastatingly catchy "Rent a Wreck": "I want to turn all their dance floors into a burning inferno of ba-ba-ba." Their labelmates have similar designs. Jangly Labrador standouts Acid House Kings ba-da-da on the gorgeous "Say Yes if You Love Me", breezy synth-poppers Mondial na-na-na on "Undeserved Potential", and New Order-echoing dance-pop duo Tribeca ooh-ooh-ooh on defiantly adolescent breakup tune "Teenage". Hell, [ingenting] sing in Swedish, but language clearly isn't the issue here.
For all their world-conquering melodies, Labrador 100's best songs have an uneasy relationship with mass appeal. They're shy. "It's my favorite song, but I don't like the crowd," Sambassadeur explain on one of my favorite songs here, the Velvet Underground-via-C86 "Between the Lines". This is pop, but it's also personal: I might not see the appeal of Wan Light's glassy-voiced space-pop or Hurray's nose-plugged twee, but surely someone will. In Jude Rogers' exhaustive liner notes, Acid House Kings' Niklas Angergard describes Labrador's essence as "quality pop music which sometimes no one likes, but hey, it doesn't matter that much as long as you like it yourself." No wonder Sweden doesn't have wars.