Ambitious, self-referential, and packed with their signature bad puns, the D.C. emo-punk duo’s double album hones in on the nostalgia and sincerity that lies beneath all adolescent woe.

Gami Gang

Life sucks. Origami Angel use this indisputable fact as justification not to take it so seriously. Gami Gang, the double LP that the Washington, D.C. emo-punk duo completed during the pandemic, is an ambitious ode to making the best of unfathomable doom. “This world is such a dead end/I know we’ll make it perfect while we still can,” vocalist/guitarist Ryland Heagy sings on “/trust.” Across Gami Gang—titled after fans’ social media Bat-Signal—Heagy and drummer Pat Doherty capture that ambition by way of expansive emo-pop embellished with screamo, post-rock, and electronic experimentation.
Like their contemporaries Dogleg or Home Is Where, Origami Angel are products of a recent crop of emo bands whose style is more in line with Joyce Manor or Jeff Rosenstock circa WORRY. At its best, Gami Gang feels limitless. When he was first learning guitar, Heagy took lessons from metalheads, whose techniques trickle down to much of Origami Angel’s output; “Bed Bath & Batman Beyond” is spring-loaded with finger-tapping, while “Self-Destruct” opens with ear-splitting power chords atop double-bass drums. Paired with Origami Angel’s lighthearted humor and penchant for twinkly, mathy elements, Gami Gang feels daring and lively rather than flat-out brutal.
Origami Angel have developed their sound beyond the skate-punk of their 2019 breakthrough Somewhere City. But they still have their moments of adolescent woe, like reminiscing about eating Taco Bell and binge-watching Pokémon with a crush on “Caught in the Moment” or coming to terms with cystic acne on “Neutrogena Spektor.” Some of Gami Gang’s more innocuous subject matter borders on cutesy, but their wisdom pokes through elsewhere: “Noah Fence” flips a memory of politely rejecting a door-to-door evangelical into a metaphor for affection. “They keep telling me ’bout heaven, it sounds a lot like when I’m with you,” Heagy sings. “If I could write a book about you, maybe they would see exactly why you mean the world to me.” This heartfelt allegory is a highlight of Gami Gang, and the album could use more like it.
The majority of Gami Gang’s first half is wistful and longing, as if to suggest that love is the key to withstanding life’s turmoil. The latter portion is distinctly darker. “Blanket Statement” unfolds the internal monologues of depression, and the epic closer “gg” confronts stagnation: “I’m incapable of change; you are in a constant state of flux,” Heagy sings. On “Footloose Cannonball Brothers,” he calls out a materialistic antagonist’s attempts at racking up online clout: “When you press send, everybody is the victim.” Gami Gang’s weak points can feel a little green and trifling. But in the right state of mind, these guileless moments strike as nostalgic rather than outgrown; who among us hasn’t indulged in a love interest’s favorite TV show only for it to become our own go-to?
Gami Gang anticipates the worst, but always keeps existential dread at arm’s length; all lazy days on the couch must come to an end, and former flames might barely recognize you on the street. Maybe the messages are obvious, but in the context of the album, they resonate like advice from a trusted friend. When Heagy sings, “I can’t stop smiling, that’s so unlike me,” he’s speaking for people who feel just the same way.

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The NYC rapper’s latest is a 22-minute blast of dank, dingy, experimental rhymes that feels too fleeting to be a long-term stylistic shift.

Telephonebooth

Swift and changeable, Patrick Morales is a misfit of many cloaks. Since emerging as a slinger of screwball flows in the New York collective Ratking, Wiki has charted sleepless world tours, coaxed out one of Ghostface Killah’s best latter-day verses, and inducted himself into the “deli hall of fame.” He’s done this across No Mountains in Manhattan, a serious attempt at making the Great East Coast Rap Record, and the grimier OOFIE—two albums that alchemized bodega-level street rhymes and alt-rap weirdness. In commercial terms, it hasn’t made Wiki the next A$AP Rocky—a deal with XL proved short term as he u-turned back to independence. But he did unite The New Yorker and DJ Booth in exalting praise. Now, taking his cues from the colder and more cracked sound of a new generation of NYC bohemians, Wiki dashes into a midtown telephone booth and bursts out in his darkest robes, looking like a rap game Venom.
On the other end of the phone line is NAH. The Philadelphia-born, Antwerp-based producer is a long-time Wiki confidante having previously been called in to add an extra layer of production on OOFIE. But Telephonebooth is something different, more spectral. It’s a 22-minute blast of dank, dingy, experimental rap, as songless as Wiki’s last two projects were songful. No track sees the three-minute mark, and 11 of the 14 cuts clock in at less than two minutes. This slightness is occasionally frustrating: “Shit Blood” features a wonderful beat that harnesses what sounds drawn from 1980s quiet storm and is desperate to be fleshed out into a more full-bodied song. But you take the project for what it is: a bunch of good raps on blood-raw instrumentals.
Telephonebooth comfortably fits in the corner of underground New York rap blazed by the likes of MIKE, Adé Hakim, Caleb Giles, and Slauson Malone. The atmosphere is brutal. NAH’s drums frequently glitch and drop out. The samples warp like misshapen vinyl. Wiki’s verses sound informal—almost freestyled—as he dips and dives in strange patterns and angles, witnessing the world through a sepia lens.
There are fewer overt nods to New York than before but peer in close enough, and you’ll still see a Subway map. Opener “Life Like?” enters the screen with superfly Harlem trumpets that spark memories of Jay-Z’s “The Ruler’s Back.” Jigga’s 1996 classic even gets a shout-out on “Hip Hop”: “Learned to see through the evils/Learned it from Reasonable Doubt when I was a teen, yo.” Wiki also takes the opportunity to name-drop Russell Crowe and Deebo from Friday, admirably dedicated to keeping his references era-specific.
The most well-thought-out song is “No Work.” NAH’s beat sounds like a descent into a mysterious vortex. Wiki’s fluttering delivery may or may not have been directly lifted from Kanye West’s on “Addiction.” Here, the rapper calls in sick for his day job, sounding like a young bum flaking for no good reason, even if it means coming up short on rent. It’s anti-bling-bling rap depicting the daily grind, reminiscent of Ye’s “Spaceship,” a microcosm of Wiki’s ability to pull influence from alternative viewpoints.
“The Crown” could be interpreted as Wiki’s rejection of the legend of the King of New York or even a vicious critique of his homeland’s current rap scene. Morales describes finding a crown among debris, dusting it off, and placing it on his head to see if it fits. The idea that he could be coronated in such a low-key manner, on such a low-key record, feels almost offensive to hip-hop’s birthplace. Then again, this is Wiki jumping on a new and extremely harsh form of New York rap that takes pleasure in deforming the old. It’s as if by insulting the very idea of the King of New York, Wiki finally said what others who indulge in this new style had been secretly thinking.
Telephonebooth feels too fleeting, too minor, to be a long-term stylistic shift for the restless rapper, and for sure it’s not his finest record. Importantly, though, at this point of his trajectory, it’s a strong assertion that Wiki has no problem tearing up what worked for him in the past to keep things moving. In doing so, he remains one of his city’s most gripping voices.

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The New York group recruits Marina Abramović to narrate a mythological dream-pop epic suffused in rich, swirling arrangements.

Emerald Sea

You don’t often think of shoegaze in terms of theatricality; the genre’s very name evokes the downturned eyes of a non-event. But New York-based duo k and Ryan Hover, of Candy Claws and Sound of Ceres, have always treated the style like a stage production. Across their oeuvre, symbolist plotlines animate an opaque, otherworldly sound: The deities Ceres and Calypso idyllically frolicked through Candy Claws’ Ceres and Calypso in the Deep Time, while Sound of Ceres’ The Twin led a journey through Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. On Emerald Sea, the Hovers’ latter group takes their theatrical instincts to new heights. Formatted as an elaborate play in three acts, the record is narrated by Marina Abramović as the omnipresent Universe, who falls in love with the Roman deity Venus; their story plays out against a lush, empyrean backdrop.
On vocals, k plays the central role of Venus with fairy-like wonder, pursued by the Universe as they journey through the titular body of water and back into the sky’s void. Resplendent with harps and flutes, Emerald Sea’s arrangements evoke fantasy, echoing the Apples in Stereo’s rich psychedelia. “Deeper Surround” snakes through waterlogged reverb like a Mario water level, “Handlion’s Palace” thrums and crashes with tsunami-like force, and “The Glare” is imbued with simple dream-pop romanticism. “The Fawn,” the album’s strongest song, describes a flame-lit bacchanal in flickering images and gilded guitar flourishes. Delivered with a dark playfulness that reflects the title’s innocence, “The Fawn” makes the most of k’s voice; their voice sharpens to a fine point as they retreat into a cornered panic, exclaiming, “Come see where I am!”
But for all Emerald Sea’s ambition, the album’s texture is too sumptuous, like a heavy dish of foie gras. k’s breathy delivery rarely changes; to that end, even their uniquely ethereal tone eventually collapses into a grating background instrument. Occasionally, they vary their inflection for effect—during “2nd Star Shroud,” they drop to a reverent hush as they whisper, “Where I find you, moonlight child,” and on “Arm of Golden Flame,” their careful enunciation is genuinely cinematic—but for the most part, this immutability undermines the dynamism of the story. Even Abramović’s judicious Universe delivers her lines as if she’s reading off of cue cards for the first time. Similarly, the sound of Emerald Sea doesn’t hold enough musical variation to stretch across its manifold ideas. Where Sound of Ceres’ debut, Nostalgia for Infinity, drew on its members’ varied strengths, Emerald Sea seems to fall into the same complacent pattern as The Twin, where aesthetic eclipsed substance. Across the swollen strings, harp, and reverb, the magic begins to bleed into monotony.
Sound of Ceres have always had the potential to be extraordinary. The Hover duo’s dream pop sounds nothing like their contemporaries. But there’s something missing on Emerald Sea. Untethered from pop’s punchy foundation, songs play out in opulently drifting shapes—a change that could be refreshing, if only Sound of Ceres could figure out a way to change things up beyond marginal differences in tempo. Emerald Sea is audibly crafted with tremendous skill and love, but its uniformity keeps it from soaring, no matter how many deities fly through the upper reaches.


The frenetic, sample-heavy album from Eric Andre’s clown alter-ego is hard to take seriously, which is probably the point.

Cease & Desist

Beneath the clown makeup and knockoff Ronald McDonald costume, Blarf is comedian Eric André, creator and star of Adult Swim’s “The Eric André Show.” The madcap TV program parodies late night talk shows with its trademark brand of high-octane anarchic nihilism. He revels in discomfiting celebrity guests through exhibitions of gore and destruction. On a typical show, André will destroy his set with a chainsaw, tackle the house band, or do something that's just plain gross—while interviewing Lauren Conrad of The Hills, Andre vomited on his desk then slowly slurped it back up. Conrad left, dry heaving.
Though André tweeted, “People are confusing this guy BLARF...for me,” it’s pretty clear he made the music. Blarf was the name of André’s band while he was a student at the Berklee School of Music, and, in 2014, he released an album, Blarf, with Toronto based industrial band the First Seed. Aside from these “clues,” Cease & Desist is an absurdist cultural survey, which is kinda André’s whole thing.
Cease & Desist comes with a dare to “make it through six minutes of this album,” a foreboding invitation from André, a master of testing the endurance of his show’s guests with gruesome and strange displays. The tracks on Cease & Desist are bound together like files collected in a downloads folder: a collection of random mp3s that someone found interesting. There are short Girl Talk-style mashups that weave bongos through what sounds like The Fast and the Furious soundtrack, Death Grips’ aggression folding into dream pop, Jorge Ben mixed into intentionally annoying “Soundclown” auditory memes, Scandinavian noise that becomes cheesy violin. Just as the celebrity segments on The Eric André Show are satires of interviews, the tracks on Blarf are musical jokes.
So, is the album a critique of music? Did André succeed in making something that sounds bad? Well, sometimes the music sounds quite good. “I Dunno,” a 36-second distorted witch house-y instrumental sounds like the start of a decent Crystal Castles song. I kind of enjoyed “The Me in Me,” which sounds like an Oasis song that’s been beaten to death and thrown into a quarry. Meanwhile, “Hella Rhymes,” which pairs West Coast rap with glitchy guitar and arrhythmic drumming, just sounds atonal and aggressive—and not in a renegade punk way.
Cease & Desist sounds like the work of a talented person who is too busy or distracted to fully realize their ideas. While juggling a cult television show, an international stand-up tour, and voice-acting as a hyena in the remake of The Lion King, it’s understandable why André may not have devoted himself to polishing Blarf’s debut. The shorter tracks, which are the album’s best, seem like sketches for “real” music, perhaps abandoned because making something actually good requires more time or effort than he’s willing to expend. Meanwhile longer cuts, like “I Worship Satan,”—which sounds like 12 minutes of a pocket-recording while driving a convertible with the top down—didn’t seem to require much effort to produce at all.
The best joke (if it is one?) appears on the second track, “Save It Babe.” It opens with a sample of Katie Couric asking Lil Wayne in an interview from 2009 if he’s a good role model. Her earnest, hopeful tone mimics the precious interludes commonplace in popular music (see: “Futura Free,” the emotional interview with a skateboarder that closes Frank Ocean’s Blonde, or “I Got It” in which a woman tells T-Pain she has HIV directly following club banger “Tipsy.”) “If you need an example for how to live,” Wayne says, drawing us in, “then you just shouldn’t have been born.” Blam. The dunk on the interviewer is punctuated by a blast of electric guitar, as if to punish us for believing, even just for a moment, that this could be genuine.
Correction: A previous version of this review misidentified the sample in “Save It Babe.”


Inspired by a cross-continental move following a painful breakup, Lykke Li's ballad-heavy I Never Learn is for the times when heartbreak is so life-affirming that you want to share the feeling with the world.

I Never Learn

If you’re unsure of why Lykke Li named her third album I Never Learn, the last four songs leave nothing to the imagination: “Love Me Like I’m Not Made of Stone”, “Never Gonna Love Again”, “Heart of Steel”, “Sleeping Alone”. The titles alone feel like disclaimers—are you willing to live life on these terms? It's worth noting, then, that Lykke Li moved over 5,400 miles from her native Sweden to Los Angeles at the age of 28 after the most painful breakup of her life. It hardly matters that almost none of us will experience anything like that; what is important is that many of us have endured the kind of heartbreak that made it feel like your old self is halfway across the planet. But if you’ve ever just secretly hoped your life could inspire such romantic ideals of romantic failure, wish fulfillment doesn’t come more potent than I Never Learn.
I Never Learn is both spartan and expansive; it's Li’s most ambitious and shortest album, at nine songs and 33 minutes. This is widescreen drama meant to hit with direct and precise impact, so the operative term for advance singles “No Rest For the Wicked” and “Love Me Like I’m Not Made of Stone” has been “Spector-esque.” It's a fair comparison, as Li plays a winner-take-all game of “He loves me, he loves me not” accompanied by a host of string players and drums that beat and thump like a flawed human heart. Li relies on classic emotive archetypes as well—excepting “I Will Always Love You”, torch songs don’t get much more literal than “Never Gonna Love Again”, and as with most of I Never Learn, its incapacitating sense of impending emptiness is closer in spirit to “I Have Nothing”.
The power ballads are just what the tag implies: ballads that require an enormous amount of exertion and are about power itself, whether it’s helplessly putting in the hands of another (“Love Me Like I’m Not Made of Stone”), taking ownership of your culpability (“No Rest For the Wicked”), or watching it disappear in a moment of passion (“Gunshot”). Rather than evoking a specific decade of music, though, Li approaches this style of songwriting as musical theater that should be created by something other than a proper band—either by professionals just off-screen, or some kind of studio magic.
I Never Learn utilizes the simplest tools of confessional songwriting: uneasily strummed acoustic guitars and resonant piano chords enlarged for texture and dramatic flair, like they’re appearing from behind a just-raised curtain, or from a radio as you sing to yourself. Thanks to the cavernous production, the enduring mental image of I Never Learn isn’t Li slumping over a glass of whiskey, but rather letting fresh wounds breathe, soundchecking alone in an empty arena.
Note the word “arena”, because even if these are stark, personal songs, there’s a tacit acknowledgment here of Li's status as a pop star on the verge. She drops a lot of the ingratiating and occasionally grating mannerisms of Youth Novels and Wounded Rhymes that could be viewed as defense mechanisms—coyly sung melodies, the coquettish humor, and the booming beats and handclaps that endeared her to many but could also did little to dispel the idea of her as a benefactor of “Young Folks”’ cottage industry of meet-cute indie-pop. The onyx-and-gray, dead serious, striking cover shot of I Never Learn isn’t fronting on you; Li hangs around David Lynch, collaborates with A$AP Rocky and admires Beyoncé, Drake, and Rihanna, all of whom commingle celebrity and artistry to serve as avatars, people through whom we can imagine how our idealized selves might sing, dress, fuck, or hurt.
Li is not a tabloid fixture nor a force of nature, and I Never Learn takes advantage of that by emphasizing the rawness of her lower registers and utilizing negative space to keep things from getting too far out of proportion. At times, the record resembles a pocket version of Adele’s eternal 21. Yes, “Love Me Not I’m Not Made of Stone” does American teenagers a disservice by showing up a couple weeks late for prom season, but right when Li chokes on the line, “Even though it….hurts,” she negates any idea of this being makeout music; it’s more like getting told "let's be friends" in the middle of a slow dance.
The artillery-riddled, burnished metal of “Gunshot” was helmed by Greg Kurstin, best known as a collaborator of P!nk, Kelly Clarkson and Katy Perry—but he’s also the guy who produced Tegan & Sara’s Heartthrob, another record that commingled teenaged emotions with adult situations and vice versa while nudging a beloved, modest act in a way that led to a polished, radio-ready album that reflected their real-life popularity.
“Gunshot” is I Never Learn’s fist-pumping climax and a total outlier, as longtime producer Björn Yttling still handles the majority of I Never Learn, his trademark, treble-harshed reverb making each lovelorn lullaby sound like it’s smeared with Li's own tears and ruined makeup. That lends a crucial, tactile reality in Li's sadness, since very few of her lyrics are going to remind people of things their significant others have actually said to them—“Every time the rain falls, think of me.”  “Baby wait a lifetime before you find somebody new”, “Every time I pay the price for a heart that can’t be broken.” Maybe you've thought these things, and hearing them out in the open ensures I Never Learn isn’t an admission of defeat; there’s an unspoken uplift to be had, that you can only hurt this badly after loving way too hard. A chorus of Lykke Li's sing the title of “Never Gonna Love Again”, whereas the gospel choir does the same with “Heart of Steel”, either taunts or acceptance of a fate where grand, sweeping sulks are just a natural and welcome state of being. We’re used to breakup albums that assume you just want to crawl into a hole and die, but I Never Learn is for the times when heartbreak is so life-affirming that you want to share the feeling with the world.


A new anthology of the ’60s folk singer suggests that she could have been a bigger star, had her label known what to do with her—and had she taken her career as seriously as her independence.

Norma Tanega: I’m the Sky: Studio and Demo Recordings, 1964-1971

Imagine the women in Norma Tanega’s songs with arms interlocked, braced against the chill of a Manhattan winter, queering the sleeve of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. The singer-songwriter of the 1966 semi-hit “Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog” presented a vision as rounded as Dylan’s or Aretha Franklin’s: self-mockery as self-reliance; folk music verities shorn of messianism and topicality; lesbian and none too oblique about it. Collecting two studio LPs with another album’s worth of unreleased material, I’m the Sky: Studio and Demo Recordings, 1964-1971 marks the first meticulous appraisal this multimedia threat has earned, and it’s a good one—the collection argues for an artist who could’ve been major had her label known what to do with her, and had she taken the arc of a career more seriously than she took her independence.
“I never wanted to be a serious artist because I like to laugh too much,” Tanega once said. The child of a Filipino father and Panamanian mother, Tanega didn’t look like the other folkies. And the outlier turned her birthright into material. I’m the Sky’s “If Only I Had a Name like Norma Tanega” boasts the couplet, “It can rise to the occasion/Even though it’s not Caucasian.” A stint at Claremont College studying classical music precipitated a move to the Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene, where she eventually hooked up with Bob Crewe after her demos impressed the Four Seasons songwriter; he and producer Herb Bernstein were taken by a tune Tanega wrote about a cat she kept on a leash. This was awesome. In the post-Joan Baez era, Crewe and Bernstein fought the temptation to smother her with solemnity. Perhaps the quietly gay Crewe recognized the sense of fun and the tainting of received forms, the homosexual’s lasting gifts to popular culture.
And what tonal complexity Tanega brought to her songwriting. The songs don’t stop their yuks and clucks. A sardonic epitaph or a pirouette on a tombstone, “You’re Dead” uses doomy chords to address a “you” who might be Tanega herself or a lecture on planned obsolescence: “You’ll never get a second chance/Plan all your moves in advance.” The collection includes “I’m the Sky,” not quite hippie bullshit kept at bay by her mournful, bassoon-like timbre, which darkens the happy songs and buttresses the sad ones. Even better is “Jubilation,” a sexy-as-hell come-on in which an oboe deepens Tanega’s most lovesick melody; the valentine has the lilt of a canticle. “A Street That Rhymes at 6 A.M.” will stand as her anthem. “Syncopate your life and move against the grain/Don’t you let them tell you that they’re all the same” functions as advice to a prospective acolyte, or as a lesbian’s avowal. The alone-and-in-love-in-the-big-city air has a wintry crispness.
Although no evidence exists, it’s tempting to imagine that Paul Simon had “Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog” in mind when he wrote about cruising Chinatown for Lin’s chow fun. Tanega’s next album, 1971’s defensively titled follow-up I Don’t Think It Will Hurt if You Smile, steeps in its moment too long. Stressing her silly-goose side, the songs flaunt their allegiance to a memory of swinging London and to period pop stylings, to mixed effect. The influence of the Rolling Stones’ “Lady Jane” flickers over “Elephants, Angels and Roses” and the instrumental “Cowfold.” Much better are baubles like “A Goodbye Song,” a polish away from competing with Janis Ian and Carole King on the pop charts.
Reluctant to adjust to the times, or because she simply lost interest in them, Tanega moved to England in 1967 with her lover Dusty Springfield, for whom she wrote the devastating “Goodbye (Go, My Love)” with the help of one Johann Sebastian Bach, and “Come for a Dream” with Antonio Carlos Jobim. Traces of Tanega’s influence color Springfield’s vocal choices too: The purr on “The Windmills of Your Mind” and Dusty in Memphis’ “In the Land of Make Believe.”
But that was that for Tanega. Returning to California in the Nixon era, she substituted paints for guitar, as commemorated in the recently published Try to Tell a Fish About Water, without entirely giving up on music. She became a familiar figure in Claremont’s LGBTQ community; she even taught English as a second language. She died in 2019. A bit much on first listen, I’m the Sky whets the appetite for more unreleased Tanega. She wasn’t a comer or a could-have-been. “A Street That Rhymes at 6 A.M.” nails it: Tanega found her place in time. Like many queer artists, she stood there in plain sight hoping an audience accepted her unaccountable interests but not giving a damn if they didn’t. Maybe giving a slight damn. Queer artists have mixed motives too.


On a loosely conceptual project, the singer-songwriter finds his groove in smooth, soft-rock sounds and adolescent optimism.

Jump for Joy

M.C. Taylor is no stranger to alter egos. It could be argued that Hiss Golden Messenger, the name of the loose collective he’s fronted since 2008, is a nom de plume itself. Cloaking his fears and dreams within the confines of the project gives Taylor enough remove from his introspection to get up on stage, a dynamic that's compounded on Jump for Joy. Stepping somewhat outside of himself, Taylor invented the semi-autobiographical character of Michael Crow, an adolescent who soaks up everything the world has to offer and pours it all into his music. The songs that constitute Jump for Joy are either written from Crow'’ perspective or in dialogue with Taylor’s older, wiser narrator.
If this all sounds convoluted, a sentiment Taylor winkingly underscores by opening the album by singing “There’s no such thing as a simple song,” Jump for Joy doesn’t sound complicated. That’s a deliberate decision. Jump for Joy belongs to an emerging class of albums by artists who’ve chosen to embrace positivity after suffering through the pandemic. This wasn’t a straight line for Taylor. He spent most of his previous record, 2021’s Quietly Blowing It, on a voyage inward, reacting to the onset of COVID-19 with an atypical melancholy that he sought to temper with a stronger sense of soulful rhythm.
Jump for Joy picks up on that thread, pushing beats and grooves to the forefront and moving Taylor’s coded confessions to the back burner. Listening to the album without the aid of a lyric sheet, it’d be difficult to discern the concept; the lyrics support the sound and not the other way around. Hiss Golden Messenger always has traded in ambience, incorporating brief bridges of sound between tracks. To a lesser extent, they have also been groove merchants—the band’s 2009 debut, Country Hai East Cotton, had a swampy little number called “Boogie Boogie.” The difference here is that a lot of Jump for Joy actually does boogie and does so proudly.
Take the title track: With its limber New Orleans polyrhythms, it’s a loving salute to jam-rock legends Little Feat. “Jump for Joy” has clear cousins in the thick funk of “Nu-Grape” and “California King,” a blissed-out number whose guitars burble like the Grateful Dead's on “Sugar Magnolia.” Neither song should be interpreted as Taylor reinventing Hiss Golden Messenger as a jam band, though; he’s working once again with bassist Alex Bingham and guitarist Chris Boerner, adding drummer Nick Falk and pianist Sam Fribush to the mix, a group that’s too focused on individual songs to plunge into the deep waters of improvisation. Rather, the loping rhythms are part of the positivity Jump for Joy exudes, a sensibility that also surfaces in the chilled out shimmer of “Jesus Is Bored” and “Shinbone,” a pop number that sounds like a yacht rock relic, glistening with synths and riding a mellow groove.
All the slickness on Jump for Joy can be beguiling. It’s an album that feels less like a roving party than a backyard BBQ, and the music seems designed to fade pleasingly into its surroundings. Such an anodyne approach has its appeal yet it’s strange that a record from a singer/songwriter as ambitious as M.C. Taylor equates optimism with simplicity. His notion of rekindling his initial music-making spark by writing from the stance of a teenager leads him down a path where he punctuates aphorisms like “I saw the new day in the world” with such evocative imagery as “There’s a tangerine moon over Texas, ripe enough to feel it dripping.” Here, it’s possible to hear the tension between Taylor’s craftsmanship and creative conceit; it can occasionally feel as if he’s purposely muting his colorful verbiage. Then again, those open-ended, vaguely corny affirmations match the sunniness of Jump for Joy. They’re the sentiments that suit the smooth sounds he’s laying down.


Finally reunited, Yung Miami and JT bring their signature amped-up party jams, while also making space to acknowledge what they’ve survived.

City on Lock

For Miami, Florida duo City Girls, pain and fortune often live in tandem. Yung Miami has balanced becoming both a rap star and a mother of two while separated from collaborator JT, whose recent federal incarceration for credit card fraud highlighted the prison industrial complex that disproportionately affects Black women. The pair have overcome an unfair share of adversity, challenges that represent systematic factors many of us confront while working hard for our dreams and the space to thrive, raise families, and celebrate. So for City Girls, who were finally reunited last fall, the premature leak of their new album City on Lock—much of it recorded from separate states—was especially devastating. But throughout the 15 tracks, Yung Miami and JT come through with their signature amped-up party jams, while also making space to acknowledge what they’ve survived. It’s a dynamic informed by their time apart during a trying period that required confidence and ambition to conquer.
The appeal of City Girls’ music is the duo’s ability to turn up, take up space, and demand the crème da la crème, despite life’s hardships. City on Lock underscores their humor and their money-making mission, but it’s also tempered with reflection. Yung Miami is first up on the punchy double-track album opener “Enough/Better.” She sets the in-your-face energy at the top of her verse: “Enough is enough, bitch/City Girls with the fuck shit,” she snaps. It’s a familiar City Girls mood, one that reminds their foes that she and her crew are prepared to defend themselves. “Don’t make me put my wig in a rubber band!” Yung Miami warns in a jokey ad-lib. Halfway through, the track segues into the breezy “Better,” allowing City Girls to let us in on their vulnerability. “I’m fightin’ loss, fightin’ demons and anxiety/I really used to sleep on pallets/Now I’m sittin’ in the condo like it’s a palace,” JT raps. Yung Miami reflects with the same self-acknowledgment as she recalls losing JT and her mother to the prison system and surviving a shooting at seven months pregnant—all while becoming world-famous. City Girls have always made the kind of music that might support you in dancing through your issues, but seeing the pair make room to talk about their own adds dimension.
On “Jobs,” they make their status clear and revel in the fruits of their labor. “I don’t work jobs/Bitch I am a job,” City Girls say in the hook. Miami in particular shines on the Southside-produced anthem “Pussy Talk,” featuring Doja Cat. She sets the energy of the song with a snooty tone as she rants in the chorus, “Don’t nothin’ but this cash make this pussy talk/Don’t nothin’ but a bag make this pussy talk.” Both anthems are laced with free game on how to receive pleasure and gifts from men willing to ante up.
The friendship between Yung Miami and JT remains the most special component of City Girls. “I go so hard for my sister til the end we came from nothin man,” JT wrote on Twitter last week. It’s a natural synergy that spills out into the enthusiasm of their music. Fully in sync over the chest-shaking bass of Twsyted Genius production on “That’s My Bitch,” City Girls are playful while crushing their time on the mic. “Pretty bitch, plenty racks in the Chanel bag/Yung Miami keep the Glock if you act bad/Pussy juice drippin’ on a nigga durag,” JT brags. They’ve witnessed one another’s laborious come-up and they’re here to cheer each other on.
City on Lock closes with the short and sobering “Ain’t Say Nothin.” As at the start of the album, City Girls go deeper into the traumas they’ve overcome. JT raps about being left by her mother and raised by her father: “Middle finger to my daddy/Why a sucker had to fuck my mammy/Left us and he traumatized us badly/Created him, a savage/Hustle hard just to get cabbage/’Cause growin’ up, a bitch never had it.” At just over a minute, the song feels a bit incomplete, fading out just as they open up: “I get it out the muscle/Nigga, you ain’t sayin’ nothin’/I’m a grown-ass woman/I ain’t a stranger to the struggle.” City Girls have endured tribulations and amassed an abundance they’d always wanted, an underappreciated and compelling piece of their narrative. Though Yung Miami and JT end with a somber look back, City on Lock is also a testament to their blessings.

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On his second album, the cloud-rap innovator hones the decaying instrumentals of his mixtape series to make some of his warmest-sounding music to date.

Moon Trip Radio

Many prominent rap producers parlay their notoriety into touring careers, taking checks to spin their hits on the road, or they lose their signature sound and become “super-producers,” bending their sounds to fit the needs of a given artist. Not Clams Casino. After helping invent cloud rap near the beginning of the decade—lending his hazy, arcane beats to A$AP Rocky, the Weeknd, and Vince Staples—the New Jersey producer born Mike Volpe has devoted himself to refining his oft-copied brand of atmospheric beat music.
After 2016’s major-label debut 32 Levels, featuring vocal turns from singers like Kelela and Future Islands’ Sam T. Herring, it seemed like Volpe was ready to consolidate his own star power. But the album came and went, and Clams Casino was no more a household name than before it was released. This, it seems, is just how he likes it. The following year, he returned to his long-running Instrumental Mixtape series for a fourth edition, and now he’s released his second album, Moon Trip Radio. No longer beholden to the requirements of a major, he eschews features; instead, Volpe gives us an unadulterated stream of his ambient hip-hop amalgam.
By now, the Clams formula is an essential part of 2010s rap canon. His legacy can be felt in the druggy, washed-out productions of SoundCloud rap producers like Ronny J—drums forward, bass up, atmospheres of druggy malaise smeared across the background like black paint and perpetuated by lo-fi samples. Moon Trip Radio’s opening track (and lead single) “Rune“ instantly feels like classic Clams, an ominous and alien-sounding vocal sample perfectly setting the tone for granular textures to come. It sounds like it could have been made at any point of his career.
Nonetheless, there’s a clear arc throughout the album, and by the midpoint, Clams—who used to source new sounds by typing search terms like “cold” and “blue” into LimeWire—is offering some of his warmest-sounding music. The songs are as sonically destroyed as ever, bristling with digital flotsam and tape hiss—see “Twilit”—but the patient harmonic changes give the doomy atmospheres a certain sentimentality. Chopped breaks and angelic electric piano noodling on “Cupidwing” and “Fire Blue” invoke the lovelorn works of DJ Shadow, while “Lyre,” with its lonely guitars and wildlife recordings, reframes Clams as hip-hop’s own Daniel Lanois.
He’s said that he’s ready to get back to making “some fun rap shit or something” now that this new solo release is finished. But the album highlights the difference between Volpe and the myriad imitators in his wake: Anyone can oversaturate some moody samples and chalk it up to a “vibe,” but few can weave those disparate elements together in a compelling way that inspires the listener to fill in their own narratives.


The trio’s latest is a beautiful mess of squelchy psych-pop—emphasis on pop—where effervescent instrumentals soundtrack an earnest and hard-earned lust for life.

Famously Alive

On Guerilla Toss’ fifth album, Famously Alive, frontperson Kassie Carlson sings about enjoying every day to the fullest after a years-long opiate addiction that landed her in the hospital for weeks and persuaded her to get sober. The music reflects her shift toward not just surviving but thriving, and it feels like the culmination of a long-brewing transformation for Guerilla Toss, now a New York trio after years in Boston as a five-piece known for earsplitting live shows and head-spinning studio recordings. Famously Alive is a beautiful mess of squelchy psych-pop—emphasis on pop—that feels in conversation with the band’s abrasive, dissonant past: As Guerilla Toss turn a new page musically, Carlson turns one of her own.
On 2019’s What Would the Odd Do? EP, Carlson chronicled her recovery and Guerilla Toss began to soften their harshest, skronkiest musical layers. Famously Alive takes that path to its logical conclusion. These melody-forward songs arrive with crystal-clear fidelity and sugary guitars and synths, but their frantic rhythm and psychedelic tint connect them to the band’s past work. Carlson’s newly steady vocals (she took voice lessons as she wrote the album) transform simple sentiments into earnest revelations about how good it feels just to be. When she sings “You’re famous/Famously alive” on the title track, she holds the notes mid-register, with none of her signature shrieking. Her band, which flanks her with arcade-like synths and ecstatic percussion, sounds just as steadfast.
Famously Alive is jam-packed with Day-Glo cheerleader chants dedicated to celebrating existence right now, today. On “Live Exponential,” against gleaming electronics and harp arpeggios by LEYA’s Marilu Donovan, Carlson sings, “I’m special! You’re special! Live exponential!” On “Wild Fantasy,” Guerilla Toss find a space between the anxious tempo of 2016’s Eraser Stargazer and the stark hallucininations of 2018’s Twisted Crystal with bursts of power chords and synth sparkles that hit like a sax solo. The glittery stomp goes hand-in-hand with Carlson’s excitement as she chants the titular phrase: She sounds elated just to wake up every morning.
Motivational-speaker lyricism can be tough to pull off, but Famously Alive’s exuberant, squishy instrumentals—think Merriweather Post Pavilion with a splash of hyperpop—prevent it from ringing hollow. The sound, far poppier than any past Guerilla Toss release, exudes the same abundant, genuine positivity that Carlson’s lyrics do; the music alone glows brightly enough to impart her newfound perspective, though things do briefly cool down on “Happy Me.” “Each day a celebration/I am a radiant sun/All things a fascination/Happy me, happy me, happy me, happy me,” Carlson coos through a thick vocal filter. Her voice gradually fades into the background as the refrain segues into the outro, but it sounds like it’s ringing out forever.


The L.A. band behind 2016’s slow-burning single “Loveless” turns in a perilously top-heavy debut album.

Lo Moon

In September 2016, there was the zeitgeist and there was Lo Moon’s debut single “Loveless,” a space about a billion light-years away where sophisti-pop and shoegaze snuck off for seven minutes of heaven. Suspiciously well-produced and promoted, “Loveless” was the only Lo Moon song in existence for nearly a year, during which it attracted the attention of Columbia Records, former Death Cab For Cutie guitarist/producer Chris Walla, festival bookers, and Coachella-core heavyweights MUNA and the Temper Trap. This phenomenon was dutifully documented, most thoroughly by NPR, which has published 20 pieces of Lo Moon content in the past six months. Nearly all would note that their guitarist was the son of Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart. Ah, but plausible deniability for you industry-plant theorists: “Loveless” took nearly five years to evolve from singer Matt Lowell’s original demo to its final released version. Nevertheless, “Loveless” remains a song with a lot riding on it. Without it, there’s no Lo Moon and there’s definitely no Lo Moon, the perilously top-heavy LP it’s expected to carry on its own. If they had a more shitposty sense of humor, they could’ve just called it Loveless.
It’s not like they have any real issue with telegraphing their influences. They’ve covered Prefab Sprout in their live sets, and Lowell has acknowledged that Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis is, “especially vocally, a big influence on me.” This is a massive understatement on two levels, the first of which is that Mark Hollis is the biggest overall influence in every conceivable way on this album’s sound. Most specifically, it lookbooks 1986’s The Colour of Spring, the midpoint between the state-of-the-art pop of early Talk Talk and the timeless, anti-pop spirituals of their later work. Meanwhile, Lowell doesn’t just have almost the exact same vocal timbre as Hollis, both sonorous and strangely clipped like a muted horn, but the same inflections and melodic cadences. Hollis isn’t just the biggest influence on Lowell’s vocals—he might be the only one.
You could do a lot worse than Talk Talk as far as role models, and you can’t do much better. But when a relative unknown attempts and mostly succeeds with emulating a singular, inimitable presence, you end up with the same distracting Uncanny Valley effect that plagued those what’s-his-names that played Biggie and 2Pac in their recent biopics. It’s not quite them, and it becomes difficult to focus on anything else.
That might actually work in the album’s favor. Though Lo Moon can occasionally work in a tingly chorus that hits with the satisfying jolt of a synthesized orchestra hit, nearly all aesthetic decisions are in the interest of signifying vulnerability, intimacy, every part of the lovemaking process that makes lust look crass. The thrill of the chase, ugly-crying over your heartbreak—that’s for pop music. But give any serious scrutiny to Lo Moon and it reveals itself as nearly 50 minutes of relationship vaguebooking, with Lowell scattering scraps of Chris Martin’s notepad over Walla’s downy, high-thread-count covers like rose petals. “We’ll learn to outgrow/The thorns on the rose,” “I know I never had a heart of gold/And now I’m crawling in and out of your skin/I only open doors that I can’t close,” “I used to follow my heart/But now I’m safe in the dark.”
But hey, there’s still “Loveless,” a glittering monolith that towers over Lo Moon and at the very least stands out in the muddled indie-major DMZ just like it did back in 2016. Lo Moon may spend the rest of their existence trying to scale its heights once more, but the very next song throws some unexpected shade on the process: “I sang a song with no words/It sounded absurd/But it brought my numbers up/‘Fair game’/Or whatever works/For better or worse/Who are you to be the judge?” Lowell sings on “The Right Thing,” which could conceivably be a slow-release metaphor for romantic intransigence, or him in character as a former pop mercenary with a guilty conscience (like, say, Mark Hollis).
“My Money” tempts even more far-fetched, non-literal interpretation of very literal lyrics to reconcile the jarring conflict between its sour sentiment and every other aspect of Lo Moon. As these things typically turn out, it’s the song that lingers the longest. “Don’t marry me for my money/I’ve got this love for you honey/It’s baby blue,” Lowell sings on the least relatable chorus of this young year. Whenever it pops into my memory, it’s like a sip from a glass of curdled milk I just can’t help taking to make sure it really is spoiled. If it’s not a failed attempt at a playful jab, à la “Gold Digger,” the only other possibility is that of a character study formulated while watching “The Bachelor.” If Arie Luyendyk Jr. said those exact words, it would sustain schadenfreude Twitter for the rest of 2018. Take the sophistication out of sophisti-pop, and Lo Moon is just another L.A. indie R&B act who tries to bring us a higher love but can’t take things much further beyond bed and bath.


Film of Life doesn’t break new ground for influential drummer Tony Allen, but it does offer a solid and succinct demonstration of Afrobeat’s adaptability to changing times. Allen's longtime collaborator Damon Albarn guests.

Film of Life

Best known for defining the pulse of Fela Kuti’s propulsive Afrobeat sound, the self-taught Tony Allen is a near superhuman combination of metronomic sense of time, light touch, economy, endurance, and musicality. Though it took a long time, his distinctive beat is part of the world’s musical vocabulary now. Since parting ways with Fela, he’s done quite a range of work, including a couple of recent, fairly high-profile collaborations with Damon Albarn that took him pretty far away from the pigeonhole people tend to place him in on the basis of his best-known playing.
Film of Life doesn’t quite break new ground for Allen, but it does offer a pretty solid and succinct demonstration of Afrobeat’s adaptability to changing times. There are no side-long epics in the Fela mold here, but Allen packs quite a bit into each of these four-to-seven-minute-tracks, building up from his own drums grooves with hypnotic guitar and bass patterns, a richly arranged horn section, and an assortment of other sounds that are nearly all overwhelmed by the massive rhythm that dominates everything.
Allen himself handles vocals on the first two tracks, mostly talking in his deep bass register and aided by a female chorus, narrating a personal history and thanking the listener for being there. His voice is appropriately situated well down in the mix; he does his best talking with his hands, and though he shows a little uncharacteristic flash here and there, the really impressive thing about Allen is the way he can take a simple, slow beat like the one on "Tiger’s Skip" and make it sing when a lot of drummers would have trouble just staying in time at that tempo. Comparing it to the much faster beat on the storming, spacey funk instrumental "Ewa" reveals a lot about what makes his playing so special; no matter what else is going on, Allen has an ability to stay steady and fill time with exactly as much embellishment as necessary.
Albarn’s guest vocal turn on "Go Back" provides the album’s highlight and the closest thing to a single that it has to offer. The man could sound sad singing "The Wheels on the Bus", and the contrast of his hang-dog delivery and Allen’s spryness makes for a song as good as anything the two have done together in the Good, the Bad, and the Queen or Rocket Juice & the Moon. Moments like this and Kuku’s totally unexpected Auto-Tuned vocal in the second half of "Koko Dance" take Film of Life a few steps past a simple summary of the things Allen excels at and make it something to hear even for people who aren’t Afrobeat obsessives.


The Buffalo rapper digs deeper into his established lore, savoring his victories while further stewing in past regrets.

Tana Talk 4

Benny the Butcher is at the point in his career where he knows exactly what his fans want from him. His 2020 album Burden of Proof, with its distractingly polished Hit-Boy production and victory-lap energy, expanded the Buffalo rapper’s sound from the grainy film stock of his earlier work to IMAX clarity. Burden was warmly received and pushed Benny to another echelon of rap stardom, but the three followups he released shortly after found him back in the mud-stained trenches that made him. Unlike Anderson .Paak—whose attempt to recontextualize his sound on his major label debut Oxnard resulted in fans bullying him back to his vintage microphone stand—Benny’s shift to the familiar wasn’t a defensive play. Griselda’s foundation of traditionalist drug rap has proven to be sturdy, and he’s in no hurry to fix what isn’t broken.
Tana Talk 4 is a sequel to Benny’s 2018 breakout Tana Talk 3, and it plays out like a blockbuster expansion of the original. The guests are bigger—J. Cole and Diddy make show-stopping appearances. The beats crunch with an amplified sense of gravel and warmth, and the raps are equal parts hungry and self-mythologizing. It’s not as reinvigorating as 2021’s The Plugs I Met 2, opting instead to be a greatest hits entry with a few tweaks to the formula. But here, Benny digs deeper into his established lore, savoring his victories while further stewing in past regrets.
For Benny, moving weight has always been a means to an end, a necessary evil that ensured he would survive long enough to see his rap dreams come true. But his thoughts and guilt linger a little longer over every boast and successful drug run across Tana Talk 4. Tinges of sadness shoot through his verses more often, like the image of him hiding drugs in his father’s couch on “Super Plug” or his attempt to pick shooters out of a lineup from his hospital bed on closer “Mr. Chow Hall.” By the time he’s describing the hollowness of celebrating his 36th birthday in a wheelchair after surviving an attempted robbery in Houston on “Bust a Brick Nick,” you can feel the scratch marks on the edge of his soul: “Being honest, this could be karma I probably deserve in the first place,” he says with a sigh. These moments infuse the record with a sense of melancholy that’s rare in a world that runs on the ethos of a rap robber-baron.
But the atmosphere is never grim for too long. Benny’s self-awareness cuts the other way, too, breaking the fourth wall often to address fan expectations and build out his legacy as one of rap’s fiercest stylists. “Guerrero” uses song titles from Tana Talk 3 and Burden to create a Spark Notes retelling of Benny’s origin story. On “10 More Commandments,” he flips the Notorious B.I.G.’s classic “10 Crack Commandments” on its head by pleading with hustlers to get out of the drug game (“Them old stories how you was getting dough won’t amount to shit/Can’t feed your child with it when they come wearing jackets with alphabets.”) “Tyson vs. Ali” recruits cousin Conway the Machine so the duo can set the record straight on any sort of competition between them, bigging each other up in the face of instigation. No Griselda rapper has allowed themselves to get quite this meta before, deconstructing and reaffirming their mythology with a wink and a smirk.
Unfortunately, these relative experiments only make up a portion of the album. Once they fade into the background, Benny’s raps begin to blur. There’s nothing wrong with being a specialist, but Benny’s flows and stories aren’t as fluid as more established artists like Freddie Gibbs or Pusha-T. Multiple guests get the best of the Butcher, whether it’s frequent collaborator 38 Spesh gnashing his way through their back-and-forth on “Uncle Bun” or J. Cole bestowing opener “Johnny P.’s Caddy” with the kind of barn-burning verse he should really be saving for his own albums. The beats throughout are also a mixed bag, with the texture and dimension of Alchemist’s work often outclassing Daringer’s. Alchemist simply brings more variety to the table, the muted prance of “Thowy’s Revenge” and the chandelier luster of “Bust a Brick Nick” being particular standouts. Comparatively, Daringer’s work is serviceable but often lacking in flavor, saved by Beat Butcha’s twangy instrumental flourishes on tracks like “Back 2x” and “Guerrero.”
At this point, there aren’t many people who don’t know that Benny the Butcher can rap. He’s proof that it’s never too late to see the success you deserve, and he’s earned every one of the lofty cosigns legends have tossed his way. While it’s nice to see Benny have a bit of fun deconstructing the Griselda aesthetic, and his skills are as sharp as ever, there isn’t enough excitement or edge to separate this from anything he’s released since 2018. Tana Talk 4 never feels languid or dull, but it lacks the freshness of Tana Talk 3 and the sense of forward motion that propelled The Plugs I Met 2. The Buffalo collective built their empire on this sort of release model, but most kingpins know the cost of being too complacent.


Orbital's first album in eight years, featuring a collaboration with Zola Jesus, finds the Hartnoll brothers doing what they've always done best.

Wonky

There was no need for Orbital to release a new album. Eight years ago, The Blue Album sent Phil and Paul Hartnoll out on a moderate high note, a career-spanning compendium of their best ideas, if not always the best executed versions of those ideas. It was a perfectly acceptable cap to the decade-plus career of two reliable purveyors of strong-to-amazing dance music full-lengths. Orbital staged a seven-album run (nine if you count film scores) between 1991 and 2004 that produced only one or two outright clunkers. Looking at the ignoble history of electronic producers as album artists, this is hardly the faint praise it might seem.
As one of the most beloved live acts of the first rave era, Orbital could have reunited to profitably play festivals every year without ever putting out new and potentially rep-tarnishing new music. You had to wonder if they looked at the trajectory of their one-time peers over the course of 21st-century so far and worried a little. The last 12 years have been a downer in this regard, with way too many 1990s dance titans staging major comebacks and making embarrassing attempts to look with-it, even as dance culture's hyper-accelerated trend-hopping had long since passed them by.
So thank whatever god you wish that Wonky mostly finds Orbital deciding to do what they've always done best: gorgeous blends of house drive and techno precision, linking airy whoosh and stadium stomp, melodic hook and rhythmic push. These are dance tracks that hit you with the immediacy of pop singles, occasionally erring toward outright throwback territory but usually with just enough juice purloined from club culture's more recent mutations and underground niches to keep things vital. This doesn't mean the Hartnolls aren't still devoted to the sounds of the 1990s, ideas they helped either pioneer or refine, and there are indeed plenty of sonic nods to rave's (and Orbital's) most fertile decade.
Orbital tap young goth chanteuse Zola Jesus for a guest spot on "New France", turning her steely, gothic vocal into the yearnings of a spooky diva in an ultra-bright world-- a tech-house anthem that would have worked just as well in the days when Alice Deejay was on the radio. Brighter still, "Stringy Acid" is a rush of all the shiniest, most emotional bits from the first few years of Orbital's career, a track so beautifully constructed and 3-D rich that you can forgive how unrepentantly stuck in 1991 it is.
But Orbital's great trick was always to fold the sound of the moment-- whether it was the epic sweep or prog trance or the tricky rhythm programming of jungle-- into the architecture of their own brand of mass-appeal anthems. It's a strategy that served them well as pop ambassadors during the ever-shifting 90s, beholden to no one scene but able to communicate some of the thrill to folks who got most of their dance music from Columbia House. They deploy that trick again on Wonky, except now they seem to be translating the current codes of for-the-kids club sounds for an aging audience of Orbital fans who might not be paying as close attention as they did in the past. And so "Distractions" is their take on the half-time lurch of recent techno-tinged dubstep, stripped of the bass drop, but with enough heart-tugging and Orbital-esque melodic curlicues filling up the haunted space that remains, so that it scans more as unique twist than desperate homage.
The only time this pick-and-mix approach to contemporary dance really falters is "Beelzedub", which attempts to take the distortion of brostep to an almost comically snarling extreme, complete with a headbanging burst of nasty breakbeats in the final third-- the kind we haven't heard since Alec Empire was smashing jungle and feedback together. The problem is that the extreme parts aren't quite extreme enough, distracting wannabe tough-guy kitsch and a desperate reversion to a played-out style. It's the only time the Hartnolls come off like old dudes struggling to outdo the young roughnecks.
And yet despite occasionally stumbling in this quest to keep things short and immediately ear-grabbing, the Hartnolls haven't lost their knack for gracefulness, tracks that seem to effortlessly build to goosebump-inducing climaxes. If anything, they've managed to work within mainstream dance music's current vogue for radio-friendly track lengths without abandoning their patented crest-to-the-big-release style. Nor have they forgotten how to extend the live act's seemingly preternatural knack for pop-rave pacing across the peaks-and-valleys arc of the listening in your bedroom experience, where even the bridge between the shimmer of "Stringy Acid" and the ugliness of "Beelzedub" feels natural. Wonky has the one-jolt-after-another vibe of a great collection of familiar hits but without the disconnected feeling you get when a bunch of obviously Big Moment singles are slapped together and called an album, rather seamlessly covering a whole lot of musical ground without sacrificing concision or intensity. It's not perfect, but it is an unexpectedly great comeback album that manages to seem utterly "Orbital," occasionally backward-looking, and yet up-to-the-minute in a not-embarrassing way.


Warp celebrates 20 years in business with a massive box set collection.

Various Artists: Warp20 (Box Set) / Warp20 (Chosen) / Warp20 (Recreated) / Warp20 (Unheard)

Kode9's dubstep label Hyperdub is celebrating its fifth anniversary this year with a two-disc compilation. Venerable Berlin techno imprint Get Physical is turning seven, while the even more beloved Cologne label Kompakt is 10. In the fickle world of electronic music, any anniversary it seems is worth noting. Warp Records-- at 20, almost as old as all three put together-- is doing it right with an expansive, expensive-looking (and, ok, expensive) box set, some elements of which are available separately.
Let's be frank about the overall package: It is in no way for the casual fan. But was it ever going to be? Warp, aware that a 20th anniversary collection couldn't work as both an introduction and a want/need item for its rabid fans, wisely went all in on the latter. If music is now, to many, free, and the draw of a music product is everything but the music, Warp embraced this dilemma: Yes / Dan Holdsworth (designers of the box itself) and the label's longtime visual collaborators at the Designers Republic (who are responsible for much of the art inside of it) have created what amounts to a fetish object. Housed in a 10" slipcase, this thing has physical heft; and with a 192-page book detailing the complete visual history to date of the label, the full Warp set looks more like an item for your shelf. Even the CDs are housed in case-bound 10" folders rather than delicate little sleeves.
Inside the box, aside from the perfect-bound book, are five sets of music, three of which are also available on their own. Warp20 (Chosen), is a 2xCD set featuring 10 songs selected by warp.net users (from a pre-selected pool) and 10 selected by Warp co-founder Steve Beckett. Warp20 (Recreated) is a 2xCD collection of new covers of Warp songs by Warp artists. Each of those are out now. Warp20 (Unheard)-- which comes in the box as a 3x10" set but starting November 9 will be available on its own as a single CD or LP (as well as included as a digital add-on for box-set purchasers)-- is an 11-song gathering of unreleased tracks from Warp stars such as Boards of Canada, Autechre, Broadcast, and Plaid. Also included in the box is Warp20 (Elemental), a 65-minute mix of Warp songs by Osymsyo, and Warp20 (Infinite), a 2x10" set of locked grooves.
The original packaging for Warp's IDM template Artificial Intelligence wondered, "Are you sitting comfortably?" before claiming that the record of home-listening electronic music was for, among other things, "quiet nights." The same could be said of this set, which works best when you allow yourself to live in it, to fully explore the label rather than simply skim off the top of it. That's true of any vinyl experience to a degree, but Warp's collection is a true pairing of art and sound, rather than one being supplemental to the other. The steady avoidance of fashionable, ephemeral stylistic choices in favor of clean, classic lines and colors makes the look of the set seem remarkably timeless and universal. This is particularly impressive for an electronic imprint, which avoided the temptation to look futuristic or au courant, and has allowed the label to retain a look from earliest singles by Forgemasters and Nightmares on Wax through their 10th and now 20th anniversary sets.
When Warp did this whole thing 10 years ago, before the full impact of file-sharing, the music was the thing. Back then, Warp compiled three 2xCD sets-- one of non-Warp techno and house classics, mostly from the half-decade that immediately preceded their label's launch; one of the label's top work; and one of Warp artists remixing songs from the Warp catalogue. If you somehow have not yet heard Warp's music, that actually might be a better place to start, since you'll therefore almost certainly not have also heard the Chicago and Detroit pioneers that populate that set's first disc.
But it's also true that Warp in part succeeded because it hasn't been beholden and overly reverent to the pioneers of techno and house. It avoided the dead end of traditionalism by both breaking from electronic music's dancefloor utilitarianism and embracing artists with wit and charisma over the sometimes monochromatic communalism favored by techno's more faceless producers. It's no surprise then that Warp found many fans outside of dance: Its colorful music tends to emphasize shifts and melodies and complex rhythm structures over the more subtle builds and crescendos of repetitive dance. As Warp has became an influence on rock and hip-hop-- Radiohead most famously championed the label around the turn of the millennium-- the label wisely invited pop-structured acts that carried the spirit and sensibility of electronic music into its fold. It now boasts a roster of not only top-notch electronic producers but also the fussy, prim indie of Grizzly Bear, the loose-limbed modern soul of Jamie Lidell, the haunted, avant-pop of Broadcast, and the askew hip-hop and wonky of Flying Lotus.
Picking out highlights from the 20 years would be nearly impossible, so thankfully the label has done it for me. The half of Warp20 (Chosen) selected by fans is music of extremely high quality, but it is also the least essential aspect of the box set. If you're interested in paying for the set, or even if you're interested in adventurous modern music, you're probably pretty well versed in most of its contents. The results of the vote provided the 10 tracks here, and unfortunately older tracks were undervalued, and arguably novelty was overvalued.
The fan vote disc is complemented by a disc of tracks chosen by Beckett, which breaks up some of the predictability of the choices and thankfully provides spots for first-decade favorites like Nightmares on Wax, Seefeel, and Black Dog Productions (here recording as Xeper). Boards of Canada, Squarepusher, Battles, and Aphex Twin make second appearances on the set, but those Beckett-chosen selections provide alternate looks at the work of each, and aren't obvious song selections. The exclusion of more primitive early tracks from artists like Sweet Exorcist, Forgemasters, and Tricky Disco is slightly regrettable. But considering that Warp10's best of, Warp10+2, was limited to tracks from 1989-92 it makes some sense, allowing these discs to work practically as a Volume 2 to that set, with only LFO's "LFO (Leeds Warehouse Mix)" and Nightmare on Wax's "I'm for Real" appearing on both.
Warp20 (Recreated) is the most grab-baggy thing here, at times leaving you wondering why this is a set of covers rather than remixes (see Luke Vibert's take on "LFO" for one). Not surprisingly, the tracks here work best when artists start with material that isn't within their comfort zone. Nightmares on Wax's slinky version of the stiff "Hey Hey Can U Relate?" is a marvel. Elsewhere, Mira Calix and Autechre manage to re-work Boards of Canada and LFO, respectively, without losing either a sense of the original or their own sensibilities. Gravenhurst's take on Broadcast's "I Found the F" and Born Ruffians' deconstruction of Aphex Twin's "Milkman/To Cure a Weakling Child" are odd clashes on paper that turn out to be highlights. Leila continues the decade-long rehabilitation of Aphex Twin's Drukqs album with a moody, hollow, piano-led take on "Vordhosbn", while Jimi Tenor is one of the few artists here who unearthed a relatively lost gem with his redo of Drexciya-related project Elecktroids' "Japanese Electronics". More on-the-nose things like Jamie Lidell's take on Grizzly Bear's "Little Brother" or Tim Exile's take on Lidell's "A Little Bit More" don't seem necessary.
Osymyso's mix provides a solid overview of the whole label, highlighting the strong universal sensibilities of the founders. Best known for providing himself rigid constructs (his "Intro-Inspection" takes the starts of 100 pop songs and combines them into one 12-minute marvel) and changing out tracks quickly, here Osymyso wisely relaxes and lets the tracks play. Warp devotees can still enjoy trainspotting song titles, but if things moved at the pace of some of Osymyso's other work it wouldn't give the less initiated a chance to catch up and locate sounds and shifts. With deft pacing and relative seamless mixing, it also rewards long after that first listen.
The unreleased set, Warp20 (Unheard), is limited to 11 well-chosen tracks. The new Boards of Canada song "Seven Forty Seven" sounds like Boards of Canada and you're reminded why these guys own this hazy, nostalgic sound. Broadcast, too, have tossed aside the retro albatross and become one of the more singular and consistently excellent artists of our time, and their contribution, "Sixty Forty", keeps the winning streak going. Clark provides the too-short "Rattlesnake", Flying Lotus stretches out a bit on the bleary-eyed "Tronix", and Plaid and Nightmares on Wax each provide a pair of songs. The most consistent record in sound and tone, Warp20 (Unheard) recalls the feel of the Artificial Intelligence comps that helped secure Warp's fame.
The locked grooves disc, Warp20 (Infinite), is obviously a specialty item. But with so many of these tracks built on repetition to start, it's a natural albeit esoteric fit. And if you ever wanted to play "Atlas" by Battles or "On" by Aphex Twin forever, now you can. Hilariously, this leaked as mp3s for some reason.
Warp has long staked out its own ground online, fussy and protective of its product. The label opened its own Warpmart early in the digital music era rather than do so via a third party, and it doesn't seem to subscribe to the idea that just offering free shit all over the web is good for its artists. Part of the reason is Warp's big wigs care about sound and presentation, and it shows. Warp20 (Box) is another reminder of the thought that goes into what they do-- not just the records they release, but the total package of the label. It's one reason they've survived for two decades.
Another reason, aside from the obvious (a good ear; a willingness to regard their artists as family, giving them license to record at their own pace without regard for their bankability), is that they've slowly and organically adapted to the growing indie and dance worlds. Nominally known first as a center for the blippier end of rave, and then as the home of IDM, Warp has made wise, cautious steps toward embracing other sounds and styles. IDM itself, seen as a fad with a sneered-at tag, has proved endurable. Indeed, one of the stories of indie this decade is that mocked sounds from the margins-- freak-folk, dance-punk, electroclash/nu-rave-- wound up becoming central to the whole. IDM is practically the grandfather of this trend, and the best of its music outlasted the name, until the textures and sounds that once necessitated new descriptions no longer had to be boxed in. If Boards of Canada, Squarepusher, Authechre, Black Dog/Plaid, and Aphex Twin may have once been IDM musicians, today they're just individual artists making beloved music, more known for their own singular styles than as part of an umbrella trend.
Warp has outlasted conceptual and contextual constructs in ways that are rare in the electronic world, where music is often tagged as easily dated. Throughout Warp's history, care in the construction of sound is important, so are syncopated rhythms, wit and whimsy, and the blending the abstract and the melodic. In the end, that there are no shortcuts to defining a Warp sound; that they are a fully trusted brand name that doesn't embrace 21st century eclecticism for the hell of it is admirable and rare. It may have been unthinkable 20 years ago that an electronic music imprint would still be around today, but it's no surprise Warp made it. And if music labels are still around in another 20, it would be no surprise if Warp was one of the survivors of these times as well.


The ex-Yuck frontman Daniel Blumberg's first album as Hebronix is a hangover/breakup record produced by Royal Trux’s Neil Hagerty. Unreal features frazzled, fuzz-flecked guitar tones and marathon track lengths and comes off as decidedly less wholesome than any of Blumberg’s previous work.

Unreal

When Daniel Blumberg yelped “I can’t get away!” on Yuck’s self-titled album, it felt like a prime example of their period-specific craftsmanship: the buzzy, hooky guitars and explosive alt-rock dynamics signify a sort of overwhelming, ill-defined angst and here was a perfect, all-purpose phrase giving it a voice. Now that Yuck is carrying on without its primary frontman, the vagueness of that lyric allows us to reverse engineer Blumberg’s personal life into it. First there was Cajun Dance Party, then there was Yuck, then there was Oupa, and now here’s Hebronix-- in the past five years, Blumberg's released widely available records with four different, awkwardly named bands. That takes a lot of commitment and an utter lack of it as well. But while the rambling and roomy songs on Unreal offer Blumberg all the space he wants, it often turns out to be far more than he needs.
In addition to the opening track on Yuck, Unreal recasts that album’s closer, “Rubber”, in a new light; a seven-minute slowcore dirge, “Rubber” smoldered with the speed and intensity of a tire fire. It was an outlier on Yuck and a template here. There are six songs on Unreal and “Rubber” would be the fifth-longest. The initial problem is how this framework can make Blumberg sound more stubborn than ambitious. Opener “Unliving” has some intriguing passages: it begins as a downer solo performance that immediately posits Unreal as a confessional, eventually evolving into a slowly levitating chorus of “ahs.” But they’re splayed about haphazardly and separated by extended subdivisions of laggard drumming and aimless guitar interplay-- it feels like Blumberg started with the goal of making a daunting, 10-minute opener and just worked towards that end. This quality is also shared by its uncompromising and uneventful bookend, “The Plan” which personifies the insularity of its hook (“I’ve got some things to do/ Some private things to do”). In addition to the title of that track, Blumberg’s tastes in frazzled, fuzz-flecked guitar tones will allow comparisons to Built to Spill, another band that’s never shied away from Crazy Horse soloing and marathon track lengths. But where even Doug Martsch’s most labyrinthine studio constructions have a plan, Hebronix can sound fueled by the belief that an eight minute song necessarily grants you twice the ragged glory of one that’s four minutes.
As with most indie artists in the lineage of Neil Young, Blumberg’s proclivity for jangly acoustic/electric jamming can ultimately reveal itself as charming rather than curmudgeonly. Unreal hits a stride during its midsection where “Wild Whim” and the title track strike the right balance of being unforced but not too effortless. They’re every bit as shambling as “Unliving” or “The Plan”, but aren’t meant to convey the idea of Blumberg as a “challenging” artist. “Wild Whim” details a “wild day of sin” but also a solitary one (“There you are on top of him/ Creating situations I’ve never been in”) over an endlessly repeating chord progression, while “Unreal” simply intones “I feel unreal” over and over again until this insouciant state becomes some kind of a stoned reality, a day without clocks where you wake up and just keep going until you shut down. Unreal is a pretty explicit hangover/breakup record, yet “Wild Whim” in particular feels like it’s mining the positive side of those situations, a freedom you get from a sudden a lack of obligation, where you counter the hardships of the previous day by taking back the power and wasting the current one.
It’s easy to draw that conclusion based on the fissuring of Yuck as well as the ramshackle production of Royal Trux’s Neil Hagerty. A benefit of working with Hagerty is that you appear a little seedier by association and Unreal does come off as decidedly less wholesome than any of Blumberg’s previous work. There was a sweetness and naivety to the heartbreak detailed on Yuck’s “Shook Down” and “Sunday”, whereas here, “Viral” and “Wild Whim” both underline his loneliness with lyrics that make big assumptions about the sex his ex is having elsewhere. Likewise, the rare rhythmic foible or piped-in electronic noise is meant to sound queasy rather than quirky. But you mostly sense Blumberg’s decidedly depressive state in the manner in which Unreal takes its sweet time doing everything. After two minutes of whooshing cello, feedback, and electric piano, “Viral” blooms into Unreal’s most immediately fetching chorus. In fact, it might be the only one. Listening to the sweet co-ed harmonies, the concise and utilitarian lyrics, it stands to reason that Blumberg might feel a little guilty about “Viral”; despite all of his attempts to contort and distend “Viral” during its relatively brief five minutes, you can’t shake how reminiscent it is of Yuck.
It’s an encapsulation of the messy separations that define Unreal. The lyrics talk about disintegrated relationships in the past tense, while the music suggests that while Blumberg has left Yuck, he hasn’t quite quit his last and most successful guise. Blumberg is a capable, if not particularly distinguished guitarist. He is also a songwriter with an unusual gift for sticky, familiar hooks and the issue here is that Unreal puts far more emphasis on the former. On Unreal, Blumberg still can’t get away from himself, he’s just figuring out ways to accept it.


The Los Angeles band’s idiosyncratic debut is a whirlwind of post-emo maximalism, fusing mid-aughts pop-punk with synthy, sugarcoated chiptune.

glass beach: the first glass beach album

the first glass beach album

When MySpace lost 12 years’ worth of audio files during a server migration last year, many grieved the loss of what had been a formative source of music discovery. Sure, the site has been a shell of its former self for years now, but the phrase “MySpace music” still feels inextricable from a certain irreverent, malleable sound. Los Angeles’ glass beach breathes life into those audacious bygone trends. Their idiosyncratic debut, the first glass beach album, is a whirlwind of post-emo maximalism, fusing mid-aughts pop-punk with synthy, sugarcoated chiptune. Combined with a mid-century jazz flourish and a few ambient interludes, it makes for one of the more bizarrely inventive recent rock albums.
Glass beach came together sometime around 2015 under singer and multi-instrumentalist J. McClendon, then working under their solo alias Casio Dad. Future bandmates William White and Jonas Newhouse were DJs together at a college radio station in Minnesota, where they occasionally played Casio Dad tracks. A real-life friendship was born, and the trio began making music together in LA. Though glass beach’s unique confluence of influences appears tailored to a niche audience, they’ve found loyal devotees and a measure of underground buzz. Supporters championed the band with such earnestness that Run for Cover has reissued the first glass beach album on vinyl just eight months after its initial Bandcamp release.
Glass beach separates lengthy bursts of electro-punk (“bedroom community,” “yoshi’s island,” “dallas”) with shorter, palette-cleansing instrumentals. “I’ve always just been more into the idea of listening to a whole album all the way through,” McClendon has explained, a philosophy that keeps the sequence feeling orderly even amid its most frantic exaggerations. One such moment is the opening track, “classic j dies and goes to hell part 1,” a jazzy opus best described as The Black Parade off-Broadway. It’s the most overblown track here, but if you can bear it, more polished moments throughout the rest of the record are their own reward.
While glass beach most immediately call to mind recent cyber-pop phenomenons like 100 gecs, they cite the influence of the Brave Little Abacus, an obscure, short-lived emo group from New England with a similar affinity for experimental electronic elements not often heard in rock music. “bedroom community” fits a traditional piano solo between passages that evoke classic video game soundtracks, while the first portion of “dallas” taps into minimal Midwest emo before breakneck synths take over. There’s as much pop-punk and math rock here as there are cartoonish embellishments. But despite the laundry list of resemblances—American Football’s odd time signatures, the Octopus Project’s theremin hooks—nothing on glass beach sounds copied and pasted.
The band falls short when their subject matter starts to rely on hackneyed mid-aughts emo tropes: “I’m always making a list of all the people I’d help if I wasn’t helpless myself,” McClendon croons on “bone skull.” “cold weather” has little to add to its description of a relationship conducted over text: “I love the way you make me feel/When I’m staring at my screen/At 4 a.m., trying not to fall asleep/And you hit me up just to see if I’m OK.” But even when glass beach’s lyrics feel slight, they deliver them with conviction—a confidence that comes from committing to artistic decisions hardly anyone else would make. They’ve learned that genuine connection sometimes means forgetting about trying to appeal to the masses.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Working with Aaron Dessner, the English singer-songwriter trims down his compositions and expands his comfort zone, experimenting with elements of jazz and historical fiction.

Ben Howard: Collections From the Whiteout

Collections from the Whiteout

Ben Howard was a laid-back star of English neo-folk who garnered comparisons to José González and wrote songs with titles like “Keep Your Head Up.” But in 2014, he released “End of the Affair,” a dramatic, tortured single that stretched towards eight minutes. His subsequent album I Forget Where We Were was successful enough to top the UK album charts and thoughtful enough that Jason Isbell cited the title track as an influence. The 2018 follow-up, Noonday Dream, was a relative disappointment, full of druggy mood pieces without the craft of Where We Were or the hooks of his debut, 2011’s Every Kingdom. Not long after that, Howard heard the experimental piece “Santa Agnes,” by guitarist Aaron Dessner of the National. Over the next 18 months, the two met periodically to work on Howard’s fourth full-length, Collections From the Whiteout.
In theory, Dessner and Howard are natural collaborators but hardly engaging foils; neither lacks for soft-spoken, brooding ballads. Yet they push each other forward, expanding their comfort zone and making choices that feel genuinely unconventional. Dessner likes to emphasize that his main band’s music is more than just the five men at its center, and the albums he produces often employ the same auxiliary musicians and techniques. Whiteout involves a healthy mixture of Dessner’s team (Jason Treuting of So Percussion, ubiquitous keyboardist Thomas Bartlett), Howard’s team (bandmates India Bourne and Mickey Smith), as well as some new collaborators, like Big Thief’s James Krivchenia and jazz drummer Yussef Dayes. Dayes co-writes several highlights here, including driving, oddly sensual lead single “Crowhurst’s Meme”; his drums make “Sage That She Was Burning” sound more like progressive jazz trio GoGo Penguin than a typical Howard song. “Unfurling” rides a slightly off-kilter shuffle that resembles little in his catalog. Even the songs where Dessner and Howard are alone feel new for them: The arrhythmic pulse and lack of percussion make “Finders Keepers” genuinely unsettling.
“Finders Keepers” is also new lyrical territory for Howard, moving the focus away from his own search for purpose to depict an absurd, macabre scenario in which a friend of his father discovers a dead body in a floating suitcase. On this record, he finds inspiration in the stories of amateur yacht racer Donald Crowhurst and airplane thief Richard Russell, though on the outro of “Crowhurst’s Meme,” Howard admits that he’s “aware of the allegory”—using niche historical events to explore the same inward-looking concepts. His attempts to grow beyond his usual soul-searching meet mixed success; “Far Out” aims for Roald Dahl-style dark humor but a groaner about a gravedigger who can’t “make a killing, what with all of this living” feels meaningless, as does the not-quite-wisdom (“half a life is half in dream”) of “Sage.” Fortunately, the timbre of Howard’s double-tracked vocals helps the more koan-like lyrics go down easy. The most successful storytelling experiment is “Rookery,” where he criticizes a lover’s unfeeling attitude: “I bet you think everything’s in its rightful place/That sentiment is man’s disgrace” nails the acuity he reaches for elsewhere.
Howard has long loved a slow burner, but only one song here exceeds five minutes; the rest are sufficiently edited down that the 14-track Whiteout is the same length as the 10-track I Forget Where We Were. Brevity turns out to be a strength, ending songs like “Unfurling” and “Metaphysical Cantations” before the experimentation becomes repetitive. “The Strange Last Flight of Richard Russell” rapidly expands and contracts in its middle section but never builds on that tension, landing with a non-committal ambient fade-out. Considering how routinely Howard’s songs have stretched out in the past, it’s a genuine shock when one feels too short.
Whiteout doesn’t always sound like a revelation, but it allows Howard to open up, letting in new lyrical and musical ideas that complement his own without overwhelming them. On “What a Day” and “You Have Your Ways,” he incorporates the choruses of his UK hits in the odd time signatures and synths that mark an Aaron Dessner production. Howard winds up not in the realm of the National, but of a weirder Dessner side project like Big Red Machine—the kind that thrives on collaboration. The contributions of outsiders wind up proving how well Howard can hold his own.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Swedish producer’s second full-length album is streaked with bright, bold melodies yet marked with a lightness of touch that’s unusual in dance music.

Stockholm Marathon

When Kornél Kovács set out to record his debut album, four or five years ago, the Swedish producer’s initial impulse was to lock himself away, forget about the winking house tunes he’d put out for the past half-decade—mostly on Studio Barnhus, the label he co-founded with Axel Boman and Petter Nordkvist—and start from scratch. He’d follow a strict regimen, he told himself; he’d limit himself to just one drum machine, sample only certain types of records. Where his music had previously been all in-jokes and lopsided smiles, he would now be disciplined; he would button up the loosey-goosey. But a funny thing happened on the way to boot camp. He started going through old drafts on his hard drives, tracks from seven or eight years before, when he was just getting started, and found himself won over by these “super naïve, careless, basic productions.” He scrapped his original plan and came up with The Bells, a fusion of his latter-day studio know-how and his earliest, most innocent musical instincts.
Three years later, Stockholm Marathon has a similarly easygoing charm. It’s streaked with bright, bold melodies yet marked with a lightness of touch that’s unusual in dance music. Though the sturdy groove of house music forms its backbone, nothing here really screams “nightclub.” Most of its tracks could work on a dancefloor, at least early in the night, but they’re hardly limited to that environment. His twinkling high end suggests natural light, not neon strobes; his beats and basslines are as plump as feather pillows. The “marathon” of the title seems as likely to refer to a Sunday afternoon on the couch as it might some never-ending after party.
But Stockholm Marathon is clearly a more focused effort than Kovács’ debut. Gone are the rough edges of his early work, and gone too the zanier asides. There’s no “Space Jam” cover here, no giddy voices singing “Pantalón!” (Spanish for “pants”). Taking cues from classic drum’n’bass, his basslines are stitched together out of tuned toms, resulting in a sound that’s beefy and full but also swimming in open space—a velvety backdrop for nimble, intricate drum patterns driven by the swinging pulse of UK garage (“Szombat,” “Rocks”) or the finger snaps and triangle of vintage Neptunes and Timbaland (“Purple Skies,” “Marathon”). His ear for detail lets him play with proportion and shift the emphasis away from the obvious: “Ducks” has all the makings of a climactic, club-closing anthem, but instead of snare rolls, crash cymbals, and other trappings of main-stage bombast, he opts for lawn-sprinkler drums and simple, honeyed synths. It’s like the photographic negative of a peak-time banger.
On several of the album’s best songs, the spotlight falls on Rebecca Scheja and Fiona FitzPatrick, better known as the electro-pop duo Rebecca & Fiona. On the opening “Purple Skies,” their airy, gently processed voices offer a wispy contrast against the song’s crisp, clean-lined instrumentation; on “Marathon,” their R&B-honed hook is sleek and coolly compelling. Their contributions give the album an unusual feel: Voices like theirs tend to be heard in the context of pop, EDM, and other styles that emphasize drama. But Kovács holds back, carving out minimalist synth-and-drums grooves that steadfastly refuse to go where you expect them to. Every time a song seems ready to explode, he dials it back; every teasing drop lands back on tiptoes. On the closing “Baltzar,” chopped-up vocals call back to Joy Orbison’s 2009 bass-music classic, “Hyph Mngo,” yet the bleepy, buoyant synths have more in common with Raymond Scott’s Soothing Sounds for Baby.
One does occasionally wish there were a legitimately barnstorming tune here; dance music is frustratingly short on universally loved anthems these days—songs on the level of “Inspector Norse” or “I Feel Space” or, indeed, “Hyph Mngo”—and Kovács undoubtedly has the talent to deliver one. But he has already shown us that he’s plenty capable of more boisterous jams, whereas Stockholm Marathon, he says, came together largely as a process of reflection. Too big a detour from the cool-headed, warm-hearted feel of these low-profile tracks would have risked upsetting the album’s careful balance. Going forward, if Kovács can bring some of the album’s finesse to a bona fide floor-filler—or, better yet, a proper pop song—we’ll all be hitching up our pantalones and preparing to cut a rug. In the meantime, Stockholm Marathon is a snapshot of one of house music’s sharpest minds following his intuition, to delightful results.


Almost exactly one year after his death last October, Elliott Smith's posthumous final album features 15 songs, most of which are said to have been fully completed by Smith himself before being sent to one-time girlfriend Joanna Bolme and longtime producer Rob Schnapf for mixing.

Elliott Smith: From a Basement on the Hill

From a Basement on the Hill

Pontificating at length about the colossal sadness of Elliott Smith's discography might seem reductive or stupidly obvious, but "sad" still stands as the single most accurate label ever slapped onto any of the late singer/songwriter's records. Smith's melancholy is big, pervasive and suffocating: see strummed chords and meekly mewed verses coated in thick, gloppy layers of heartbreak, lyrics hanging heavy with cold defeat, vocals seeped in doom. Even the simplicity of Smith's songs can be oddly disheartening-- the pretty bits always conceal grim, prickly underbellies, with Smith's melodic lightness tempered by the very worst kind of self-alienation.
Pop music has enjoyed a long and tenuous relationship with sadness-as-aesthetic-anchor, and Elliott Smith's role in that lineage was obvious from the start. It was forever preserved the moment that an obviously misplaced Smith stumbled onto the Academy Awards stage sporting an awkward, ill-fitting white suit. Now, nearly a year after his presumed suicide, Elliott Smith has come to occupy a painfully specific spot in our collective pop memory, curled up alongside spiritual brethren Kurt Cobain and Nick Drake-- all somber songwriters who realized their artistic ends in hideously relevant ways, fulfilling every last one of the dismal prophecies they wrote themselves into. And, as with Cobain and Drake, the most devastating part of Elliott Smith's death wasn't the knife slammed deep into his chest, but the bland inevitability of that motion-- how nobody was surprised, how things felt so "validated," how it was disgustingly appropriate, how we were all just waiting for it.
Unsurprisingly, From a Basement on the Hill-- Smith's posthumous sixth solo album-- doesn't break form: Released uncomfortably close to the one-year anniversary of his death, the album is riddled with helpless proclamations and self-incriminating taunts, clanging guitars and foggy, jumbled arrangements. Like nearly all of Smith's records, From a Basement covers his despair in sweet, perky, folk-pop kisses; and yet the album is still the saddest thing you'll hear all year. Smith's gloom may be romanticized into gold, but what's ultimately most harrowing about his unhappiness is its nastiness-- and that same gritty, uncompromising accuracy is also what makes his records so impossibly urgent, so uncomfortable and desperate. Reality is splattered all over From a Basement on the Hill-- dissonant guitars that sometimes coalesce and sometimes clash, vocals that flit from beautiful to strained, lyrics that range from clever to pedantic, production choices that hop maniacally from right to wrong.
For whatever reason, Smith's happier moments have always felt a little meaner than his darkest. They're somehow more smirking and cruel, as if they'd been put in place as pure provocation. Even the lightest tracks here (see the excellent "King's Crossing", or the barely-there "Memory Lane") are bogged down by their own sense of inevitability, or maybe by our own-- it's almost impossible not to judge From a Basement on the Hill without first acknowledging the complicated context of its release, cringing at its song titles, and promptly biting back presumptive words like "foreshadowing."
Supposedly, Smith had finished most of the work on From a Basement before his death last October, and the completed tracks were posthumously compiled by his immediate family and mixed by one-time girlfriend/present-day Jicks member Joanna Bolme and longtime producer Rob Schnapf ("final production" is credited only to "Elliott's family and friends"). And perhaps surprisingly, From a Basement on the Hill is perfectly coherent and cohesive, without any sense of being slapped together from half-finished parts. The record even boasts a classic Smith opener, the booming and majestic "Coast to Coast", which swells in and out in a haze of guitar ping and found sound murmurs. Collaborating again with former Heatmiser bandmate (and current Quasi member) Sam Coomes, "Pretty (Ugly Before)" weds tinkling piano with goofy guitar bits and lyrics that are somehow equally disheartened and optimistic ("Sunshine/ Been keeping me up for days/ There's no nighttime/ It's only a passing phase").
Still, the most disheartening thing about From a Basement on the Hill is its plainness-- it's neither a perfect record (and not one of Smith's best) nor the kind of colossal disaster that could be angrily pinned on money-hungry handlers and desperate fans. It's likely that Elliott Smith will be resurrected and rediscovered countless times over, and that his suicide will become as big a part of his legacy as his discography, feeding the mythology, informing the songs. But while From a Basement on the Hill will certainly have a place in that tradition, its impact will prove a stark contrast to his most affecting work.