Steeped in the warm, psychedelic pop-rock of the 1970s, the new record from erstwhile garage rocker Kyle Thomas is a gold-toned nostalgia voyage that’s never entirely familiar.

Smalltown Stardust

Smalltown Stardust reveals the sensitive side to King Tuff, the garage-rock persona Vermont eccentric Kyle Thomas adopted in the late 2000s. Those early King Tuff records—delivered just after Thomas spent some time playing in Witch, the stoner metal group from Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis—prized fuzztone and grime, offering cheap, high-octane thrills. Thomas consciously avoids that kind of excitement on Smalltown Stardust, instead wandering down the path he began to carve with 2018’s The Other. Designed as a deliberate reset, a chance to flush the dirtiest elements of garage rock out of his system, The Other nevertheless featured significant contributions from fellow rockers like Ty Segall and Mikal Cronin, inevitably tying it to previous King Tuff albums even if it never sounded as sludgy. Smalltown Stardust represents the true opening of a new chapter, showcasing a gentle troubadour singing songs of nature.
Previous King Tuff albums occasionally suggested the pastoral—see “Evergreen,” from 2012’s King Tuff—but these tender accents effectively highlighted the raucousness of the rest of the record. Here, Thomas strips away the filth from his hooks, relaxing his rhythms while placing melody at the forefront. He doesn’t do this on his lonesome: Smalltown Stardust was written and produced with singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist SASAMI, aka Sasami Ashworth. At the start of the pandemic, Ashworth and Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy holed up at Thomas’ home in Los Angeles, a living arrangement that encouraged collaboration. Smalltown Stardust is the third in an informal series that includes SASAMI’s 2022 album Squeeze, co-produced by Thomas, and Fun House, the 2021 Hand Habits record produced by Ashworth and mixed by Thomas. In every meaningful way, Ashworth is on equal ground with Thomas throughout the album, not only providing harmonies but shaping melodies and molding an aesthetic distinct from any other King Tuff record.
The album title hints at Thomas’ grand concept: He’s writing about childhood in his hometown, a time when he felt more deeply connected to nature. Getting back to the garden is hardly a new idea in rock’n’roll and, unabashed revivalist that he is, Thomas reaches for a handful of old records as he plots his own journey through the secret life of plants. There’s a vague Wings wind blowing through this small town: Not only do Thomas and Ashworth’s platonic duets suggest an alternative Wings where Marc Bolan married Linda McCartney, “How I Love” and “Portrait of God” are punctuated by simple, tasteful guitar fills straight out of Paul McCartney’s six-string work on Wild Life, while “The Bandits of Blue Sky” marches to a stately rhythm reminiscent of Ram. Wings aren’t the only 1970s touchstone in play: The cheerful pulse of Thomas and Ashworth’s harmonies on “Tell Me” evoke Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks.
Recognizing these allusions is part of the fun of Smalltown Stardust—the record is littered with them, including a knowing nod to the Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society on the title track—but pastiche isn’t the point. The references buttress Thomas’ voyage into a nostalgic, naturalistic past: an ode to childhood animated by favorite sounds of old. Ashworth helps keep Thomas from drifting down memory lane, adding textures and harmonies that sound comforting but not entirely familiar, giving the psychedelic lilt of his melodies space to breathe. Gaze into Smalltown Stardust’s airy arrangements and you might see a reverse image of previous King Tuff records. That was music made for the cold dark of night, or at least a dimly curtained bedroom; this is music made to be heard in the reassuring glow of sunshine.


Will Toledo’s re-recorded version of an album originally released in 2011 speaks to his greatest gifts as a songwriter: wit, cynicism, and an eye for detail that captures teenaged desire and heartache.

Twin Fantasy

With his band Car Seat Headrest, Will Toledo has constructed the perfect vehicle for his obsessions. Since its inception in 2010, it’s become a highly referential project with a series of related album titles (2015’s Teens of Style preceded 2016’s Teens of Denial) and nods to other songs and bands from the Cars to Modest Mouse to They Might Be Giants. But the connection he makes to the music of others is nothing compared to the density of the internal references. A chorus from one song might show up as the bridge in another; a lyric might connect to an observation made earlier in the record, or even the record before. And Toledo’s constant tinkering goes beyond hiding Easter eggs; he also revisits older recordings until he gets them right. Teens of Style consisted of re-recorded versions of songs culled from his vast catalog (he put out nine releases on Bandcamp before signing to Matador). And now he has taken that re-make/re-model impulse even further.
The new Car Seat Headrest album, Twin Fantasy, is a completely re-recorded version of an album that Toledo originally released in 2011. There’s not much precedent for this sort of do-over—if this were film, say, it’d be like Steven Soderbergh re-making Sex, Lies and Videotape, which I could actually see him doing at some point. But Toledo, two years after his last batch of new songs, apparently believes enough in this album to think that he can make a better version of it to share with the wider world.
Twin Fantasy isn’t just another one of Toledo’s Bandcamp albums. It’s an ambitious song cycle that’s been held up by his small but fervent online cult as his masterpiece. The songs explore in painful detail the narrator’s infatuation with a nameless man, a relationship that Toledo has said was based in part on his own experience. It was originally written when Toledo was 19, and the album is appropriately dense with confusion and anxiety and self-doubt, though the self-laceration is characteristically cut with laughs. And whether or not it fits the criteria of a concept album proper (there isn’t a clear narrative from song-to-song), Twin Fantasy feels very much like an album about a single experience. Aside from an offhand comment about an ex or two, there are only two people in every song—the person singing, and the guy to whom it’s addressed (“Most of the time that I use the word ‘you’/Well you know that I’m mostly singing about you,” Toledo sings on “Nervous Young Inhumans”). If the person delivering the lines wasn’t so funny, the level of obsession might be a little scary. But Toledo pulls off an album with a jarring degree of specificity that touches on feelings familiar to almost anyone who has experienced young desire and heartbreak.
Toledo’s narrator in Twin Fantasy wants to get so close to the object of his affection that they essentially fuse together, but all he can think about is everything that’s pulling them apart. He sees images of his beloved everywhere (“When the train came it was so big and powerful...I wanted to put my arms around it”) while suspecting they’re too fucked and damaged to make it work (”We were wrecks before we crashed into each other”). He writes about watching movies and taking drugs, relays a story about coming out to his friends while pretending to be drunk, notes that having a body can be a drag. The story he tells is not about what happens, but what almost happens, what he wants to happen, what he wishes didn’t happen. The present moment is always undercut by a memory or a wish; strictly from reading the lyric sheet, it’s never entirely clear if the relationship is something real or something that is happening in Toledo’s head. The promise of pleasure is washed out by feelings of dread.
This makes Twin Fantasy sound grim and somber, but it’s actually the opposite. The explosive arrangements and Toledo’s delivery make it much more of a dark comedy. Brilliant individual lines pile up (”My soul yearns for a fugitive from the laws of nature” is a line that Silver Jews’ David Berman wishes he wrote), but the record’s real genius is in how the songs simmer and then burst, in perfect sync with the arc of the feelings. Early highlight “Beach Life-In-Death” stretches over 13 minutes, an epic meditation on raw want and jet-black self-loathing (”I am almost completely soulless, I am incapable of being human…it should be called anti-depression, as a friend of mine suggested, because it’s not the sadness that hurts you, it’s the brain’s reaction against it”) with instantly memorable screamed choruses worthy of the finest power pop.
“Bodys” has the gleaming pulse of the Strokes, and finds Toledo commenting on the song in real-time as it unfolds—“Is it the chorus yet? No. It’s just a building of the verse, so when the chorus does come it’ll be more rewarding”—and then it delivers on that observation, with layered vocals that bring to mind the stacked harmonies of ELO. The songs never stay still, for better or worse, they’re always in the process of building up or breaking down, which makes this jagged tail feel even more restless.
Some will find it shocking that an even lower-fi version of this album exists. The production values are somewhere on the lower end of inexpensive mid-tier indie rock, but the meat-and-potatoes sonics ultimately serve to make the record sound timeless. Give or take a Skype reference, it could have come out in 1994. It’s hard to know how the faithful who have been living with this album for half a decade will take its reinvention. Given the force of the music, the improved sonics give it greater weight, and the existence of two versions somehow makes the whole thing even more interesting—fading memory reflected and then re-assembled—and it’s hard to hear this re-visit as anything but a triumph. Twin Fantasy is not a perfect record—the latter half is bogged down by soundscape-y passages and spoken word, for one thing—but that only validates it as a powerful document of teenaged pain and longing.


Tom Jenkinson returns to his "classic" sound, albeit with a twist-- this is a live, solo performance recorded in Paris.

Solo Electric Bass 1

Getting called a virtuoso or mad scientist comes with some heavy baggage for a musician, so it says a lot about Tom Jenkinson, who records as Squarepusher, that he's been repeatedly labeled as both. Getting tagged with these contradictory stereotypes-- a classically trained workhorse mastering the canon versus an improvisational, intemperate tinkerer dismantling the rules-- goes a long way toward describing the Warp mainstay's musical output. He can sound technically brilliant and wickedly provocative at times, whether it's with restless, distended breakbeat patterns, buoyant bass-heavy fusion excursions, or airy combinations of these and other styles. And on his new album, in a gesture that could be a challenge in both senses of the word, he merely plugs in his bass and lets his playing speak for itself.
And bass, unaltered and without digital delay or effects, it definitely all you'll hear, whether it's delicate melodic progressions, arpeggiated chords or spitfire runs up the fretboard. While Jenkinson's skillful playing, the vital pulse of tracks like "Cooper's World" from Hard Normal Daddy or "Circlewave 2" from Hello Everything, has earned serious plaudits and a shout-out from Flea, it may be slightly surprisingly to hear how classically oriented some of the songs on Solo Electric Bass 1 are. Granted, he claims to have taught himself classical guitar at age 10, but the elegant, breakneck playing on tracks like "S.E.B. 6" resembles that of a Spanish guitarist, and "S.E.B. 5" is a rubbery, staccato splatter of notes that belies the thickness of bass strings. Hyperactive "S.E.B. 8" showcases Jenkinson's antsy side, bouncing between slap-happy antics and more slow and soulful passages. As the naming convention and out-of-order tracks suggest, the songs blend into each other. It creates an album weighed toward showcasing masterful execution that leaves a pretty muted general impression. Unless you're predisposed toward technical prowess and solo bass recordings, it's probably going to come off as more of a clinic than a collection of great songs.
In a 2006 XLR8R interview with Pitchfork contributor Mark Pytlik, Jenkinson spoke of avoiding the "music for musicians" tag. A limited-edition solo bass album recorded live at a Paris theater-- just one musician, one amp, and a six-string-- might appear pretty musician-friendly, leaning heavily toward virtuosic self-satisfaction. A large part of Jenkinson's fanbase isn't going to rush out to purchase uncut and unfiltered bass noodling, unless they were hoping for some intriguing digital manipulation or that the Loveless-esque cover was meant as a strong visual clue. But don't start with the simplistic slap bass/"Seinfeld" theme jokes without considering what these tracks say about Jenkinson's process and procedure. There's a reason the audience gets enthusiastic during this 12-song set. Jenkinson is technically one hell of a bass player. Perhaps by playing it straight, he's playing with people's definitions of what does and doesn't constitute musical skill in a digital world or merely showing off his own ridiculous abilities. For an artist known for restlessness and provocations, this may be a "mature" way to fuck with expectations.


The second album from guitarists Sir Richard Bishop (Sun City Girls) and Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance) and drummer Chris Corsano confirms Rangda to be an active, cohesive band of the highest caliber.

Formerly Extinct

While a completely accurate count is near impossible, the three musicians who make up Rangda-- guitarists Sir Richard Bishop (Sun City Girls) and Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance), and drummer Chris Corsano-- have between them appeared on somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 albums, recorded with dozens of different collaborators. With artists this prolific it is never certain how long any particular collaboration or project will last; and in 2010 when the three released False Flag, their debut as Rangda, it was not immediately clear if this was to be a one-off album or the work of an ongoing group. But musicians with this much experience are also able to recognize when they've struck upon a special combination, and their second album Formerly Extinct confirms Rangda to be an active, cohesive band of the highest caliber.
In retrospect, False Flag sounds like a bit of a feeling-out process, as the three musicians, each with his own well-established voice, blast noisy improvisations and rifle through ideas as they learn how best to mesh their eccentric styles. On Formerly Extinct that process is completed, and Rangda sounds like a band that knows exactly who they are and what they want to do together. Forgoing noisier digressions, every track on the album is taut and sinewy, with the musicians listening to one another and anticipating each other's moves as if they were sharing limbs. For now at least, Rangda have settled into a sound that seems very much an idealized hybrid between Six Organs of Admittance and the more song-oriented moments of Sun City Girls, with the album performing the weird magic trick of sounding about as you might expect it to while still being filled with surprises.
For Sir Richard Bishop, whose work as a solo artist and with the Sun City Girls, as summarized by Marc Masters, has continually defied all possible boundaries, Formerly Extinct might be one of his most straightforward and song-centered albums to date. Even "Silver Nile", the album's lone long-form piece, is crafted with an entrancing, slowly unwinding melody as Chasny's and Bishop's guitars patiently circling one another like a pair of desert vultures. As is always the case with Bishop's work, vague Eastern and North African echoes abound on such tracks as "Idol's Eye" and "Majnun", with Chasny able to match whatever accent Bishop chooses to adopt.
There have always been two main risks whenever such veteran improvisational musicians as these play together: Either someone will tend to hog the ball while the other players are reduced to the role of mere accompanists, or else everyone will be so disinclined to step on each other's toes that nobody actually makes any memorable moves at all. The most remarkable thing about Rangda, then, is their music's balance. No one player ever dominates any given song, and whenever either Chasny or Bishop steps forward to take a solo, the other works with Corsano to keep things continually engaging in the background.
Whenever a trio is able to achieve a balance like that, it usually means there is some world-class drumming going on, and that is the case with Corsano on Formerly Extinct. Rangda's songs are oddly built creatures, filled with enough abrupt time changes and strange meters for me to wonder if any of this might qualify as math-rock. Throughout the album Corsano is able to keep everything moving so deftly his playing seems almost nonchalant, his rhythms continually churning and roiling but never sounding particularly flashy or show-offish.
As satisfying as Formerly Extinct sounds, it also drops a few tantalizing hints of what might still be to come from Rangda. On "Tres Hambres", with its sly nod to ZZ Top, Chasny and Bishop volley a circular riff back and forth between the speakers with a dazzling ease, and on the brief "Goodbye Mr. Gentry", I can't help but get visions of classic Minutemen songs in my head, and it leads me to wish for a track or two where these guys fuel the amps and rip into a straight 4/4 psych-rock monster closer to what Chasny does with his Comets on Fire crew. But that's just me getting greedy; for now it's enough to know that, with Formerly Extinct, Rangda not only prove themselves to be a going concern as a band, but that they might just be starting to really hit their stride.


At one point, Luke Slater’s atmospheric-techno guise sounded like the future of electronic music; a welcome new archive proves its soundscapes and grooves were prescient.

The 7th Plain: Chronicles II / Chronicles III

Chronicles II / Chronicles III

For years, the 7th Plain was the least understood alias of British electronic producer Luke Slater. In the early 1990s, he beat ravers into submission with the unrelenting techno of his project Planetary Assault Systems. Under his own name, he signed to NovaMute for albums that presented him as an electronic auteur, capable of melodic floor-fillers, Underworld-inspired alt-techno, and the occasional dalliance with electroclash. In the 2010s, he narrowed his focus on Planetary Assault Systems’ spartan purism and launched L.B. Dub Corp as an outlet for his bassier instincts. But the work of the 7th Plain—Slater’s atmospheric-techno guise, responsible for two sublime albums in 1994 and almost nothing since—languished in obscurity, even as its lush soundscapes and carefully sculpted machine grooves have proved prescient.
In 2016, A-TON—an imprint of Ostgut Ton, the label of iconic Berlin nightclub Berghain—began rectifying that disappearance with Chronicles I, a collection of the 7th Plain’s unreleased and archival material. With Chronicles II and III, curious listeners are finally afforded a more complete picture of what made the 7th Plain so special. (All three volumes are also available as a six-LP box set, Chronicles I-III.) The character of the sound leaps out: Slater drizzles his synths, as syrupy and golden as honey, on in loopy arpeggios and gloopy layers. His flickering drum programming bristles with hi-hats, rimshots, and flintlike handclaps, raining down in showers of sparks.
Stylistically, the music of all three volumes hovers between Detroit techno and early IDM, in both genres’ most lyrical modes. The lush pads and legato leads of tracks like “Time Melts” are precursors of the liquid-metal atmospheres Carl Craig would pursue on Landcruising the following year. The dubby undercurrent and wafting, wordless vocals of “Shades Amaze” could almost be mistaken for electronic shoegaze act Seefeel, while “Excalibur’s Radar” has a silvery drama reminiscent of Autechre’s Amber, IDM’s emotive peak. Foggy cultural memory around rave’s chillout-room traditions has led to a kind of oppositional thinking: music for dancing here, music for lounging there. But, aside from a purely ambient track or two, including a burbling number that could be an early Air demo, the 7th Plain’s work resists that binary. Instead, in its emphasis on groove over bounce, it finds a middle path between dance music and armchair raving. At its most electrifying, it moves like a daydream strapped into a hydraulic exoskeleton.
For longtime fans, Chronicles II has the surprises. Four of its eight tracks are previously unreleased, rescued from the old DATs and reel-to-reel tapes of Slater’s studio; three more are non-album tracks, alongside the 1994 single “Astra Naut-E,” from The 4 Cornered Room. At their best, the previously unreleased cuts expand upon his known work in subtle ways. A planetarium fantasy par excellence, “Silver Shinhook” weds gently thundering percussion to limpid piano reminiscent of Harold Budd; its surging arpeggios connect the dots between Tangerine Dream and Global Communication. “JDC” dials back the atmospherics to zero in on a wriggly, shape-shifting synth lead that’s among the funkiest things here; “To Be Surreal” sets out its shiny drum and synth baubles like miniatures in a glass menagerie.
But Chronicles III has the stronger material: With four songs from The 4 Cornered Room and three from My Wise Yellow Rug, this is the nucleus of Slater’s best and most affecting work, and the obvious place for newcomers to start. “Time Melts,” “Reality of Space,” “Excalibur’s Radar,” and “Think City” are all as good as atmospheric techno gets; in the past quarter-century, they haven’t aged a day. It’s hard not to wonder why A-TON chose this particular shape for Chronicles, cherry-picking from carefully paced albums that benefit from being heard in full rather than just re-issuing them. The tracks that aren’t on Chronicles make perfect sense in the context of their records. There doesn’t seem to be any logic to dividing the unreleased songs between Chronicles I and Chronicles II, either.
There’s more unreleased 7th Plain material still out there; his 1996 album Playing With Fools never made it past the test-pressing stage. One track was repurposed as “Railer (Further Exploration),” which opens Planetary Assault Systems’ 2011 album, The Messenger; as for the rest, says Slater, “That’s buried.” It’s a shame, as “Railer” is among the most emotional music in his catalog. The rare occasion when he has left beats behind entirely, it offers a glimpse of the ambient essence lurking inside this opulent architecture. While the shape of these anthologies might frustrate hardcore collectors, having this music available is beyond welcome. The 7th Plain never became techno’s future—at least, not in the way it sounded at the time. But today, rescued like a fistful of heirloom seeds from its neglected patch of turf, it’s ready for rediscovery.


Evoking the golden age of LA hip-hop with rapid-fire rhymes, vivid set pieces, and sample-centric beats, the rapper finally offers a proper follow-up to an ill-fated opus.

Blu / Oh No: A Long Red Hot Los Angeles Summer Night

A Long Red Hot Los Angeles Summer Night

Under slightly different circumstances, Blu might’ve been a star. In 2009, following years of increasing buzz and work alongside the likes of J Dilla, the Los Angeles rapper inked a deal with Warner Brothers that included not just music but films for each of his forthcoming records. But a familiar tale of major-label woe followed, culminating in a sort of pyrrhic victory: Frustrated or jaded, Blu allegedly leaked his major-label opus, NoYork!, at Rock the Bells in 2011 and has since burrowed into the underground, releasing a steady string of small-budget, lo-fi albums. At last, though, he appears ready to offer a proper follow-up to NoYork!, even if A Long Red Hot Los Angeles Summer Night doesn’t sound like the record you’d expect from an underground rapper with a bent toward experimentation. An ambitious, slickly produced throwback, Red Hot taps Blu’s reserves of nostalgia and civic pride.
This isn’t the first time Blu has tried to make a record like this: 2014’s Good to Be Home attempted back-to-basics West Coast rap. But it lacked cohesion, exacerbated by a perpetually murky mix. Still, it now feels like a trial run for Red Hot, which addresses the previous problems while retaining the core conceit. This album works in conversation with iconic LA rap records of the previous three decades, from Regulate...G Funk Era to Madvillainy. It is Blu’s most ardent attempt to embed himself within that lineage. And if you’re hoping to make a West Coast classic but your relationship with Madlib is strained, you could do worse than enlist his younger brother, producer Oh No. Working from a shared love of dusty samples and technical rapping, the two traditionalists are entirely in sync.
The sheer conviction with which Blu delivers his vision here sets Red Hot apart from its revivalist peers and Blu’s own past. Not a single second feels wasted, as Blu crams a cascade of syllables into every available space. He raps furiously, wielding more energy and focus than at any point since his hungry debut, 2007’s Below the Heavens. Inspired by the narrative settings of The Chronic and Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City, Blu weaves a story that reads like a paean to a disappearing metropolis, creating a real sense of place over these 17 tracks. Blu’s Los Angeles is filled with tense moments, suspicious looks, and flashes of violence, a city where encroaching gentrification exists somewhere over the horizon and danger lurks around every corner.
As you might expect from a rapper who managed to finesse a film deal, these pieces are cinematic in sound and scope. With descending keys and autoharp stabs, “Stalkers” conjures a film noir score, as Blu and Donel Smokes breathlessly trade bars like they’re in a rap battle. Unfortunately, Blu mars the throwback stance with a homophobic slur—inexcusable in 2019, regardless of what decade you’re emulating. “Murder Case” interpolates Snoop Dogg’s “Murder Was the Case” to tell the story of the protagonist’s downfall, while guest emcees play the roles of Blu’s new cellmates in “Jail Cypher,” sharing stories and advice.
The album’s most theatrical moment arrives with a two-track centerpiece, as tightly scripted as a scare in a horror movie. The interlude “Champagne” mimics the sort of major-label-mandated “song for the ladies” that was so omnipresent on 1990s rap records, but it cuts off abruptly as “The Robbery” begins. Blu and Oh No milk the jarring transition for everything it’s worth. Over little more than a palm-muted guitar and snares that sound like drumsticks hitting metal trash cans, Montage One and TriState narrate a robbery as it unfolds, vying to deliver the best rap-nerd pun while they’re at it. “So take it off slow, nigga, run the jewels/Another rap group? Nah, I mean chains and shoes,” TriState growls.
NoYork! hinged on buzzing chiptune production, forward-looking for its time. But A Long Red Hot Los Angeles Summer Night is willfully out of step with contemporary hip-hop, rendering a world where New York and L.A. remain rap’s only gravitational centers. That kind of wishful thinking might not win over many new listeners, but Red Hot makes a strong case for Blu and Oh No as two of the most dedicated West Coast zealots working. Blu clearly stopped paying any mind to others’ idea of success a long time ago; he now sounds all the better for it.


Wordy, thoughtful rapping is thriving, but the Virginia-born MC makes the style feel particularly urgent. Neither his full-on delivery nor his absurdist sense of humor dilute his razor-sharp focus.

$ilkMoney: I Don’t Give a Fuck About This Rap Shit, Imma Just Drop Until I Don’t Feel Like It Anymore

The average $ilkMoney song is stuffed with information, a veritable almanac of psychoactive drugs, John Singleton movies, and Black liberation theology. There aren’t many rappers in 2022 who could spit about phonemic orthography, like some long-lost member of X Clan, before dissing jeweler Johnny Dang and dreaming of someone stealing his stash of DMT so they can expand their minds; there are even fewer who would title the song in question  “I Ate 14gs of Mushrooms and Bwoy Oh Bwoy.” But that’s exactly what the Virginia-born rapper and member of the now-defunct group Divine Council has done on his absurdly titled surprise album I Don’t Give a Fuck About This Rap Shit, Imma Just Drop Until I Don’t Feel Like It Anymore. He may be ambivalent about the rap game—he accuses labels of low-balling him, and seems cagey about working with all but a select few rappers and producers—but his actual bars land with a white-hot intensity that could melt lead.
$ilkMoney crams syllables together in his verses, but he never succumbs to the robotic verbal fireworks of battle rap or the hokey faux-traditionalism of a Logic. The best analogues might be Extinction Level Event-era Busta Rhymes or Brooklyn rapper Elucid on pep pills; $ilk’s speed and careening rhythmic patterns never dilute his diction or razor-sharp focus. “Fuck Black Lives Matter, let’s go/Back to the days of Black power when our struggle was ours/And wasn’t monetized for the outsiders outside us,” he barks on “Cuummoney Amiliani,” in one massive gulp of breath. Just listening to him rattle off thoughts can leave you feeling winded, and that’s clearly by design—on “One Glazed and One With the Jelly Filled Nucleus,” he admits he’s not here to offer hooks or melodies. Anyone can rap fast or chortle into the mic, but $ilk’s words impact with precision, dozens of calculated blows drumming away at the chest.
In keeping with his staccato technique, $ilk favors nonsequiturs over storytelling: He jumps from rap grievances to boasts that he’s never had sex with a white woman to drug-fueled conversations with serpent gods that could’ve easily come from an episode of The Midnight Gospel. Punchlines aren’t always his focus, but much of what he says is funny or shocking in some way. In “Jodi Don’t Love Me No Mo :-(,” he invokes Jimmy Kimmel’s infamous blackface impersonation of basketball player Karl Malone, while “Emmm, Nigga You Is Tasty >:)” descends into frenzied slam poetry, casting rhythm to the wind as he laments how racism and capitalism are figuratively boiling him alive, howling, “How can I be so delicious to a nation that claims to hate my skin and existence?” Even the song titles—“A White Bitch Killed Gary Coleman,” “Colonized Ectoplasmic Jar-O-Niggafish,” “Eddie Murphy Golden Child Hat”—give $ilk space to flesh out these demented little worlds. That brazenness is sometimes a double-edged sword—the opening of “S.F.C.S.S.S.$ (P.a.a.M.F.)” dwells a little too long on his rationale for “call[ing] bitches bitches” before deflecting altogether—but his ability to make you laugh, think, and stew in cathartic rage through the chaos is consistently entertaining.
If $ilk is a bowling ball crashing his way through these hallucinogen-laced thoughts, then Harlem-born producer and longtime collaborator Kahlil Blu is the bumper keeping him from sliding into the gutter. Blu produced all of Imma Just Drop, and his beats match the hectic variety of $ilk’s raps with outsized flair. “I Ate 14gs of Mushrooms” and “Cuummoney Amiliani” blend hazy sample work with crystal-clear drums and synths to compound two different but equally epic sounds into psychedelic rocket fuel. “One Glazed” lets a guitar lick simmer in the background of what sounds like 808 Mafia trying their hand at drum’n’bass. “A Visit From the Giant Portal Wizard Snake” and “Jodi Don’t Love Me No Mo :-(” settle into intoxicating sampled chops and loops, while “Emmm, Nigga You Is Tasty >:)” turns a whir of sampled hand drums and flutes into an audible seance. Both Blu and $ilk are at their most uninhibited on “Tasty,” $ilk’s growing anger over connections between slavery, the music industry, and Black death dovetailing perfectly with the syncopated madness of Blu’s sample. No matter what he’s served, $ilk never trips up, barreling through every beat with purpose.
$ilk is living through the same disheveled, surreally racist society as the rest of us, and the emphasis he places on rapping his way through the madness is jaw-dropping. Wordy, thoughtful raps have thrived over the last decade, but they rarely feel this urgent or wired, as though he were snapping out of a drug-induced dream and trying to commit it all to paper before it fades from memory. $ilk has nothing but contempt for the rap industry at large, but he still cares deeply about craft and intent. He says as much on the second half of “One Glazed,” where he raps that putting all his competitors on notice is his duty: “This a hard task but it came with a tool, like a hard hat/It’s all facts; you ain’t slept on, lil nigga, your fuckin’ song’s wack!”
Structurally, Imma Just Drop isn’t much different from $ilk’s earlier projects, like 2019’s equally wildly titled G.T.F.O.M.D: There’s Not Enough Room for All You Motha Fuckas to Be On It Like This or 2020’s Attack of the Future Shocked, Flesh Covered, Meatbags of the 85. But Imma Just Drop is looser and burns more intensely, pressing $ilk’s love for pop-culture references, Black self-actualization, and blunted conversations with floating planet chunks into a tab of potent rap music—and rap is just his side gig. As long as the music hits like this—and is willing to rip listeners out of their chairs and punt their brains across the room—there’s really no reason to fix what isn’t broken.


On his 1977 solo debut, the American flutist probes the possibilities of his instrument: multi-tracking it, pairing it with harpsichord, and playing alien, unadorned Ellington standards.

Flute Music

In late 1984, James Newton climbed through New Mexico’s Carson National Forest, near where Georgia O’Keeffe lived, to play the flute amid the din of crickets and twittering birds. He recorded himself using power generated from a motorcycle battery. Newton was “thinking about the flute as an instrument found in all world cultures,” he said. The resulting album, Echo Canyon, captured long threads of improvisation bouncing off the rock around him, forming walls of sound that seemed just as ancient. In the years since, Newton has continued to use the flute as a probe to poke at the sublime. He began laying that groundwork years earlier, in his solo debut Flute Music, reissued this year for the first time since its 1977 release.
Newton tries out different structural frames for his instrument throughout Flute Music. On opener “Arkansas Suite (Bennie),” he multi-tracks it into two minutes of fluttering chorus. A fleeting architecture forms: When one layer rises above the rest, those beneath it support its exploration of melody, or its slow glide into a single sustained note. It sounds like a convocation, highlighting the flute’s proximity to the human voice. There’s no layering on the song’s second part, “Arkansas Suite (Solomon’s Son).” Instead, Newton hems his flute in with the help of a harpsichord, whose metallic sound holds the flute’s wandering like an enormous wire cage for a rare bird. He uses percussion on “Darlene’s Bossa” to the same effect, letting his flute embroider the song’s steady samba rhythm. These structures provide a sort of anchor for Newton, ground that he can use to contrast his flute’s airborne freedom.
The most exciting moments on Flute Music happen when Newton is fully unbound. “Skye” begins with martial drums and rattling chimes that sound at first like swords unsheathing. They quiet when Newton’s flute emerges as a calming force, compelling the percussion into order. With the addition of guitar, bass, and percussive embellishments, Newton lets the song unfurl like a changing landscape watched from a train window. He adjusts his playing so that the tone wavers between mournful and agitated, his blowing ragged and torn one moment but clear and full the next. On the album’s B-side is “Poor Theron,” an 18-minute free-jazz experiment. Rattling bells, trombone bursts, and long piano riffs often replace Newton’s flute altogether; when it returns, it sounds like a scream.
The record’s penultimate track is a version of Duke Ellington’s jazz standard “Sophisticated Lady.” Where singers like Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday imbued the song with complicated feelings of longing and ennui, Newton’s take is barren and strange, the only track on the record that features nothing beside his flute. Newton’s career is studded with other references to pioneering artists, including a full-length ensemble tribute to Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, and, later, one to Frida Kahlo. Looking back at his debut, it’s clear how those influences would come to figure into his goals as an artist and jazz innovator himself—to find out out how to push the expressive limits of his instrument as close to transcendence as possible.


On their debut collaborative album, R&B’s most self-aware lotharios synthesize their respective approaches in quixotic pursuit of sexual healing.

MihTy

Jeremih and Ty Dolla $ign are unquestionably the natural successors to the figure of the of “R&B thug” that defined the R&B charts for most of the aughts. This seems self-evident and unproblematic—until you remember that the progenitor of the term is R. Kelly, whose legacy is now permanently marred by his misdeeds. But that now-instinctive aesthetic wince is exactly why the two artists’ careers have been so refreshing—they’ve proven to be experts at parsing the difference between charmingly rakish and disturbingly loutish that Kelly’s songcraft (and personal life) nearly always elided. Both artists often feel as if they’re singing about their loverman personas as much as they are inhabiting them. With Jeremih, the deconstruction is mostly musical, through the dubby, reflective negative space that the Late Nights mixtape and album both exuded. With Ty, it’s more often manifested in lyrical detail that provokes empathy even toward his most louche stories, especially on last year’s career peak, Beach House 3. On MihTy, their debut collaborative album, they’ve linked up with frequent collaborator Hitmaka and created a project so buttery smooth that you might not realize how much it’s at war with itself.
The sound of MihTy is blockier and brighter than the usual palettes of either artist, often hearkening back to the chunky hip-hop soul of peak Puff Daddy and Jermaine Dupri—sometimes overtly, as in the R. Kelly-aping chorus of “FYT,” or the bassline borrowed from Mary J. Blige’s “Love No Limit” remix for “The Light.” To distinguish themselves, Hitmaka and co. bring neon synth pads and a dash of vaguely Balearic electronic sparkle to the proceedings, eschewing deference in favor of, oddly enough, a chillwave-y evocation of 1990s R&B. The general effect of the production’s geometric wobbliness is a woozy, classicist gilded cage in which Jeremih and Ty are set loose to ping-pong off each other.
Accordingly, there’s something slightly anxious about the album, flitting lyrically as it does (often within the same song) between straightforward fuckbook braggadocio and nervous reflections on success—“You know this shit ain’t me/So you can’t blame me/If I act a little different these days,” croons Jeremih on the hypnagogic slow jam “These Days.” On standouts like that one, the MihTy project lays out a central driving conflict that’s classically hip-hop, with a twist: Rather than negotiating street authenticity, Ty and Jeremih instead unpack the post-fame viability of intimacy. The aforementioned “FYT” has some of Jeremih’s best lines here, as his honeyed vocal gently skewers his diva reputation right along with his lover’s apparent lack of taste: “I’m in Neiman Marcus throwing tantrums/You think you know high fashion/Just to take it off, babe.” Ty, meanwhile, demonstrates a more explicit neurosis, singing on “Perfect Timing,” “Wish that I could take it back/Said some things I shouldn’t have said/Meant it at the time/I know I take it way too far.” His gravelly “Meant it at the time” subtly percolates, until you suddenly realize that it’s a clever inversion  of the classic line, “I didn’t mean it, baby!”
Reading MihTy (and, by extension Jeremih and Ty Dolla $ign’s careers in general) as a critical take on R&B’s full-throated embrace of lust before all—“My mind is telling me no, but my body is telling me yes!”—is tempting, but it inevitably brushes against some annoying realities. Chris “ugh” Brown’s presence on this record is aggravating in a way his appearances usually aren’t—mostly because it’s harder to explain him away as a mere hook for hire. When Brown delivers his salacious lines on “Surrounded,” it inevitably draws attention to the incongruity of the song with the savvy, winning self-awareness of the rest of the album. As a result of that track, and a few emotionally one-note cuts in the middle stretch (“New Level” and “Take Your Time,” both of which feel like the result of perfectionism overwork), MihTy fails to shake its creators’ shared albatross of always almost making a classic record.
But in general, MihTy gently gleams with a humanism that is equal parts existential and licentious. The delicate closing triptych of “Lie 2 Me,” “Ride It,” and “Imitate,” perhaps the album’s three best tracks, feels instructive. The first is a swaying ode to paranoia and loyalty. The second inhabits the anxiety of exhibitionism and then lullabies it to sleep. The third fears romantic loss with a choral intensity and seeks to bargain. Each song feels, at first, like it might be a goodbye, or a hello, or a c’mere. Each one is really all three.


Double Cup, the new album from Chicago producer Rashad Harden, is a gorgeous, invigorating collection that places equal importance on melody and rhythmic texture. It’s unquestionably the strongest footwork-related LP since the genre was introduced to a wider audience.

Double Cup

The rise of footwork as a formidable sub-genre of electronic music over the last few years has raised an interesting question: How do you listen to the stuff? On one level, the Chicago-borne sound is purely functional; its high-BPM tempos, disorienting bass lines, and hypnotically repetitive approach to sampling form the perfect soundtrack for the juke-derived footwork style of dancing, which favors fast feet and athletic skill. Near the top of this decade, footwork caught the collective ear of the always-hungry-for-something-new UK dance scene: Forward-thinking label Planet Mu delivered a smattering of footwork-associated releases near the end of 2010, including the first volume of the scene-surveying Bangs & Works compilation. Much of the footwork music created around that time was fascinating, inspiring—and, as home-listening material, maddening.
Footwork’s relative inaccessibility suggested that it would become a niche concern in the constantly changing realm of dance music, but it stayed in the conversation, as solid releases from veterans of the sound, boundary-pushing newcomers, and canny genre-fusion outsiders pushed things in more musical and distinctly individual directions. All these roads lead to Double Cup, the new album from Rashad Harden, who produces as DJ Rashad. A gorgeous, invigorating collection of tracks that places equal importance on melody alongside rhythmic texture, Double Cup is unquestionably the strongest footwork-related LP since the genre was introduced to a wider audience. This stuff would kill on a dancefloor, but you don't have to watch anyone’s feet to appreciate what’s on display here.
Double Cup closes out a particularly fruitful year for Rashad, a two-decade-plus veteran of the scene who started dancing juke at 12 and began honing his DJ and production skills just a few years later in the early ’90s. In March, he made his debut on Hyperdub with the Rollin’ EP, an expressive collection that featured the astounding “Let It Go,” a game-changer of a tune with rolling, hyperspeed drums and an evocative vocal sample; in July, he dropped another solid EP, I Don’t Give a Fuck, the title track of which appears on Double Cup, too. (“Let It Go,” a superior cut and arguably Rashad’s strongest track to date, is conspicuously absent here, but the record’s overall high level of consistency makes its exclusion a negligible gripe.)
Ironically, Double Cup achieves a new level of musicality previously untouched by footwork by jettisoning much of the genre's rigid formality. This stuff is practically in Rashad’s blood, so his ability to dismantle the sound he’s lived with for much of his life and reassemble it in a fresh and exciting way is expected as much as it is impressive. For instance, he splices in other elements of beat-fixated music—jungle’s frantic mania, bass music's oblong structures, the glowing synths of vintage house and techno, West Coast hip-hop’s honey-slathered haze—to fit a more footwork-indebted framework. I've heard a few people compare Double Cup’s dizzying sampledelia to J Dilla’s masterwork Donuts; while the former lacks the latter's cohesion and singularity of purpose, both records possess the similar thrill of hearing a master of an existent genre taking their sound to new, exciting heights.
Footwork often sounds as handmade as it does futuristic, and being able to see the seams of tracks both imperfect and flawless is one of the genre's more endearing qualities. On Double Cup, those seams are more or less nonexistent—for music that is so frequently intense and hard-hitting, many tracks here possess an impossibly smooth finish. From opening cut “Feelin”’s twinkling sighs to the smothering sensuality of “Let U No,” it at times sounds like Rashad has literally opened a window in footwork's oxygen-sealed atmosphere. The bass lines smack as hard as ever, but they’re placed lower in the mix rather than serving as these tracks’ central axis, creating a more varied sonic topography that’s also easier on the ears.
Footwork’s practitioners tend to congregate in scenes, and Rashad is no different: He’s a founding member of the Teklife crew, whose logo is emblazoned on Double Cup’s packaging, and he’s also a part of the largely elder-statesmen Ghettoteknicianz outfit. Accordingly, Double Cup is collaborative—“I Don't Give a Fuck” and the harrowing weed anthem “Reggie” are the sole Rashad solo cuts here—with DJs and frequent collaborators Spinn (whose very good LP from earlier this year, Teklife, Vol. 2: What You Need, makes for a nice companion to this record), Manny, Earl, and Phil pitching in on additional beats and the occasional rap cadence.
It’s also a largely Midwestern record, and its sole misstep occurs in the form of a collaboration with a non-regional artist: UK producer Addison Groove, whose 2010 single “Footcrab” was instrumental in introducing footwork’s genetic material to bass music. His and Rashad’s “Acid Bit” is an intriguing curiousity, with plenty of the acidic synth work that the name implies, but ultimately the tune is a disruption to the album's already-nebulous flow. Which raises the other caveat regarding Double Cup: Listening to footwork in long stretches can be exhilarating, and exhilaration can often lead to exhaustion. The record runs 51 minutes long, and since it resembles less a properly structured album and more an expertly curated collection of tracks, it’s best taken in smaller bursts for maximal effect.
The greater Chicago area has frequently been at the forefront of left-of-center sounds that have bubbled up, from the coruscating rock deconstructivism of Shellac and Big Black, to Gastr del Sol’s amorphous genre fusion, to Frankie Knuckles’ still-standing reign as “The Godfather” of house music. The past few years, especially, have provided a few fresh and unfamiliar sounds in regional hip-hop and dance music, and Double Cup is the latest testament to the wellspring of ingenuity that Chicago’s recent musical culture has to offer. For Rashad, it’s a defining statement 20-plus-years in the making, a brilliant document that puts him in the position any veteran would kill to occupy: Instead of looking back at the past, now it’s all about where he takes his sound next.


Laurie Anderson’s collaboration with the San Francisco-based string quartet presents a powerful, elegiac cycle of songs that show how human memory can be stronger than catastrophe.

Laurie Anderson / Kronos Quartet: Landfall

Landfall

“How many people can do everything?” asked Lou Reed in 2003. He was explaining to the television host Charlie Rose why Laurie Anderson was the “absolute perfect person” to be NASA’s first artist-in-residence. (She would also be its last.) By then, Anderson had been a visual artist, filmmaker, and unlikely pop musician. She once read David Bowie’s mind; she hung suspended upside-down over Coney Island; she taught her dog to play piano. With the folks at NASA, Anderson toured the Hubble Space Telescope and met astronauts and nanotechnologists, ultimately producing a poem called The End of the Moon, which she recited between violin interludes. Formally and conceptually grappling with colossal forces of the unknown, The End of the Moon is a fitting precedent to Anderson’s gripping collaboration with the revolutionary Kronos Quartet—a string quartet who also once worked with NASA and have in their four-decade career, you could say, done everything.
Both Anderson, a consummate New Yorker, and Kronos Quartet, from San Francisco, have been prolific interrogators of American power since the 1970s. In classical music, Kronos challenged the dominance of European-American composers, investigating world music, rock, and jazz; at times, they have played with projections of Occupy and the Arab Spring behind them, or collaborated with leftist historian Howard Zinn. In a 2014 interview, Kronos founder David Harrington said, “Of all the string quartets in the world, I’m intending to have the largest F.B.I. file.” But the greatest link between Anderson and Harrington might be their abilities to see the future.
Harrington dreamed of collaborating with Anderson for decades. But it was not until after the release of Anderson’s 2010 LP Homeland that Landfall began to take shape, first as a traveling live performance and now as a 30-track album of epic sweep. Composed by Anderson and featuring her spoken word, Landfall is a cycle of songs that observe the devastating wake of Hurricane Sandy through her eyes. Though much of Landfall was written before the third costliest storm in U.S. history ravaged the East Coast in October of 2012, Sandy dominates this intense work. It is the sound of a quintessential New Yorker processing a New York tragedy, salvaging something from the sad wreckage, internalizing the debris of a creative life, showing how human memory can be stronger than catastrophe.
The elegiac tracks of Landfall, most no longer than two or three minutes, are episodic fragments that can cut off abruptly, like photographs with torn or water-damaged edges. This gives Landfall a momentum and a grace that’s slightly askew. There is a celestial scope to these pieces, as if Anderson has composed a new cosmos where lies are not hidden, but rather laid bare; where we can decipher what is real. Anderson’s lucid spoken word combines with the quartet’s weeping elegance to portray the gravity of disaster, of seismic motion, of ominous anticipation, all with a gentle immediacy. By “Our Street Is a Black River,” Anderson begins her story: “From above, Sandy was a huge swirl that looked like the galaxies,” she states, and in her iconic way, she continues, “whose names”—pause—“I didn’t know.”
Anderson’s spatial phrasings convey a sense of steadiness in an increasingly precarious world. She speaks on only a handful of tracks, but her extended pauses are like deep breaths amid the exhausting act of processing. Here, the Kronos Quartet heighten her breaks to audacious effect, sometimes emulating the shape of drones, or ragas, or curled question marks, sometimes augmented by electronics. Anderson—who once turned the William S. Burroughs maxim “language is a virus” into song—has found fantastic collaborators in Kronos, who can say so much without language when language fails. On “The Electricity Goes Out and We Move to a Hotel,” there are no words but churning, paddling, involuntary movement; it is a resigned procession; you have to keep moving.
On “Everything Is Floating,” Anderson plainly describes how it felt to descend upon her waterlogged downtown basement after Sandy and see the muck of keyboards and projectors, papers and books, “all the things I had carefully saved all my life… becoming nothing but junk.” With this somber, dramatic, and yet peaceful music, she evokes another maxim she has repeated often, from her Buddhist teacher Mingyur Rinpoche: “Feel sad without actually being sad.” This is a survival guide, and maybe Landfall is, too.
Landfall seems to synthesize many of the concerns of Anderson’s life: language, technology, America’s gargantuan cons. And it all coalesces on “Nothing Left but Their Names,” an astounding nine-and-a-half-minute monologue in Anderson’s classic down-pitched vocal style. She catalogues extinct species such as spotted lizards, mastodons, and many kinds of sloths. Her meditation wanders through the imaginative power of words, how they can be superior to experience itself. But Anderson ends, profoundly, on the moon and the stars. “You know the reason that I really love the stars?” Anderson asks. “It’s that we cannot hurt them. We can’t burn them. We can’t melt them or make them overflow. We can’t flood them or blow them up… But we are reaching for them.” If natural disasters are wrapped up with the worst of humanity—the greed and consumption and violent men that keep greenhouse emissions rewiring the atmosphere; the forces of destruction that cause nature to combust upon itself—at least we still have the stars.
Simultaneously with Landfall, Anderson has released a career-spanning book of art and essays called All the Things I Lost in the Flood. In it, she recalls the wild discussions she had at NASA, like a 5,000-year plan to move all manufacturing, and its pollution, off the Earth. She also illuminates her 1981 hit “O Superman,” the electronic odyssey of a tune that transformed her into what she’s called an “anthropological” pop musician. “Here come the planes,” it goes, “They’re American planes.”
When Anderson sang it a few days after 9/11, she writes, “I had the eerie sensation of singing about the absolute present. Each time I revived the song people would say, ‘Did you just write this? It’s so much like what’s going on right now.’ They had forgotten that the current war has been going on for well over 30 years, every once in a while getting a new name: ‘The Gulf War,’ ‘The Iraq War,’ ‘The War on Terror.’” If climate change, a war against Earth, is to continue, Landfall is destined to retell the story of the next hurricane, the next perilous Sandy. Anderson still sees the future, but she starts by paying attention.


With Bush, those who yearn for a Snoop album produced entirely by the Neptunes almost get their wish: Pharrell Williams handles the boards here, with occasional assistance from his former production partner Chad Hugo. It's less a rap album than a tribute to '70s funk and R&B.

Bush

Over the course of two decades, Snoop Dogg’s adaptability has allowed him to move from the G-funk of "Gin and Juice" to the sweaty club anthems of "Down 4 My N’s" to the reggae of Snoop Lion. His voice sounds good over all kinds of production, but some of his best late-period work has come when collaborating with the Neptunes. The success of "Beautiful" established Snoop, the Neptunes, and Charlie Wilson as a powerful team, and led to the Virginia producers contributing several tracks (including the chart-topping "Drop It Like It’s Hot") to his 2004 album, R&G (Rhythm & Gangsta): The Masterpiece. With Bush, fans who might have yearned for a Snoop album produced entirely by the Neptunes at the time (almost) get their wish: Pharrell Williams handles the boards here, with occasional assistance from his former production partner Chad Hugo.
Bush was conceived as a tribute to the funk and R&B of the 1970s, and the familiar wail of Stevie Wonder’s harmonica on the stand-out opener, "California Roll", establishes the mood. Over an instrumental as smooth as a ride down Rodeo Drive on an 85-degree day, Snoop's croon is convincing enough to sell lines like “So if you wanna go to Melrose/ Let’s hit Adidas, girl, we got our own shell toes." Pharrell positions L.A. as the nucleus of luxury and vice ("Baby you can be a movie star/ Get yourself a medical card, yeah/ ‘Cause that’s how California rolls") on the sticky hook, and Wonder accents P’s trademark falsetto with background vocals.
Both Snoop and Pharrell are products of the '70s, so it makes sense that they'd embrace the ambiance of the music they grew up listening to, and that they'd be pretty good at it. The mood holds from the bubbly disco of "R U A Freak" to the Nile Rodgers-inspired guitar work on "Awake", a song that brings to mind the second wind you get during a party’s final 20 minutes. On "Peaches N Cream", Snoop, Pharrell, and Wilson combine once again for an infectious retro-funk fusion. From start to finish, Bush is a feel-good record.
Snoop has said that he tapped Pharrell for creative guidance because he wanted a cohesive sound for the album. At just 41 minutes long, Bush is indeed an easy listen, but the songs also bleed together. "I Knew That", for example, opens with the same motif as the one used on the superior "Peaches N Cream". And although the album features just 10 songs, it feels like there are only about six. Bush is designed to function as an old funk record that you can let run for an entire party’s duration, but its uniformity might make it less appealing over the long haul.
Still, it makes sense for Snoop to be making this type of music at this stage of his career, as he approaches his mid-forties and rap recedes into his past. The music puts past images of him grooving to Bootsy Collins while stoned in Baby Boy or dancing to Funkadelic in The Wash in perspective—funk has long been his lifeblood. So while Bush is strong enough musically, you can’t help but wonder what would’ve happened if this crew had followed R&G with a full-length a decade ago, when everyone involved was still in his prime.


With a crisper sound and direct homages to underground music of generations past, the enigmatic London trio’s Matador debut is moody, moth-eaten record-collector rock that gets by on moody insouciance.

Tracey Denim

Bar Italia spent their first few years in quasi-anonymity, tinged with the default intrigue that attaches to certain bands who decline to overshare. They bathed in the transitive mystique of association with Dean Blunt, who released their first few recordings on his World Music label, and they trafficked in a diffuse mixture of sounds cribbed from 1980s and ’90s UK indie: tendrils of flanged electric guitar, mopey boy/girl vocals, the occasional squall of stompbox fuzz. Pairing sullen dissonance with stone-faced reticence, their music was heavy on vibe and difficult to pin down, its consistency as vague as their intentions.
Early songs rarely broke the two-minute mark, but they were the opposite of pithy. Sour as curdled milk, they resembled demos rescued from a thrifted four-track recorder, practically archaeological in their layers of magnetic hiss and half-obscured hints of slowcore and shoegaze. One track in particular—“Killer Instinct,” the penultimate cut on their second album, 2021’s Bedhead—served as a kind of Rosetta Stone: Roughly halfway through its 99-second run, a warbly voice breaks into a ramshackle cover of the Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry,” the timekeeping as haphazard as the tune-carrying. For all the galaxy-brain speculation, the unguarded qualities of “Killer Instinct,” as well as the obviousness of the reference, suggested that the band’s motives weren’t all that complicated. As it did for generations of indie rockers before them, the apparent amateurism testified to the depth of their feeling.
With Tracey Denim, Bar Italia’s first album for Matador, even more of the mystery dissipates, and not just because the group is now known to be the trio of Jezmi Tarik Fehmi and Sam Fenton, of the duo Double Virgo, and Nina Cristante, a longtime Dean Blunt associate who moonlights as an “intuitive trainer” and nutritionist. The sound of the self-produced record suggests a fog burning off. The chords are crisper, the rhythms sprightlier, and the hooks stickier, though the mood remains hushed and the textures moth-eaten. More than ever, they wear their influences—the Cure, Slowdive, Pavement—on their tattered sleeves. “Clark” is a showcase for the guitar-bass interplay of New Order’s Low-Life; the lush acoustic guitars and sighing vocals of “changer” are prime Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me or Wish-era Cure.
On previous Bar Italia records, the contours of their music were obscured by lo-fi murk, but on Tracey Denim the guitars assume the foreground, chiming post-punk riffs offset by sturdy basslines. Their use of dissonance feels more strategic here, with clanging chords throwing off a faint metallic glow that helps silhouette the skeletal melodic lines. The grooves are groovier, too, imbued with the shuffling syncopations of the Stone Roses and My Bloody Valentine, groups that smuggled dance rhythms into late-’80s indie under cover of a guitar-heavy wall of sound.
This is, without a doubt, record-collector rock, a finely calibrated tribute to the evergreen sounds that have fueled underground rock for decades. Where Bar Italia attempt to impress their own identity is in their multi-part vocal interplay, an unusual approach that’s all the more noticeable for their distinctive (if unpolished) voices. On most songs, all three musicians take turns at the mic, lending a sense of fractured perspective to their narrow set of themes: anxiety, loneliness, breakups, unrequited love, the desire to be left alone. This broken-mirror style of storytelling feels novel, but there’s no getting around the fact that the vocals are not, by and large, Bar Italia’s strong suit. All three singers favor plodding, eighth-note cadences. Cristante opts for the sorts of sing-song melodies a daydreaming child might make up. And Tarik Fehmi has a distressing tendency to caterwaul like Robert Smith at his most despondent. They’ve got a built-in defense: For decades, this kind of shambolic aesthetic has signified immediacy over virtuosity, heart over chops. But it’s hard not to be distracted by the moments when the lyrics fall flat or the singing goes awry. Their chord progressions are smart and the production is appealing, but neither is enough to carry the record on its own.
Even though the album is only 44 minutes long, 15 songs feels like about seven too many. Apart from the standout “Clark” and the Breeders-esque “Friends,” the record’s back half congeals into a blur of muddy chords and aimless melodies. And even some of the catchiest songs, like “changer,” are bogged down by clunker rhymes (“Didn’t get the chance to say I want more/Doesn’t have to be this way, it’s too pure/Now that you have gone away, I’m bored”). Still, at their best, Bar Italia get by on moody insouciance. On “Nurse!,” Cristante encounters an awful man at a party and tries to steady herself with a kind of mantra: “You will make it to the other side/You know it’s just another night.” Then the song shifts. The groove lightens, the chords brighten, and Fenton paints a picture of unburdened freedom: “A mask covered your eyes/And you move like crazy to your favorite song/You said ‘I’m coming alive’/Haven’t felt this way since you were 21.” It’s a neat encapsulation of a powerful idea: music as the fountain of eternal youth, a timeless sentiment that hits especially hard on a record steeped in déjà vu.


Yeasayer's latest is an ambitious psychedelic quasi-concept record that is refreshingly (sometimes bizarrely) out-of-step with current trends, occasionally baffling, but mostly unsuccessful.

Amen & Goodbye

In 2009, Yeasayer's Chris Keating surprised fans by abandoning the comfortably pastoral landscape of* All Hour Cymbals* to guest on Simian Mobile Disco’s farcical electro-house banger “Audacity of Huge.” At the time, this decision seemed unusual for a number of reasons: Here was a guy who sang “we can all grab at the chance to be handsome farmers” when indiedom was cresting peak plaid, now ironically bragging about his “Damien Hirst telephone” and “Kool-Aid swimming pool.” The lyrics were clever in an era when hipster-bashing was particularly hip (the “bag of Bill Murray” line still scans as prescient in a post-Miley/molly world), but the move added to the already-nagging suspicion that Keating and Co. were calculated trend hoppers rather than truly idiosyncratic personalities.
That narrative further congealed when* Odd Blood* positioned Yeasayer as a glossier version of MGMT (or stonier version of Empire of the Sun), but the transformation largely pleased fans: “O.N.E.” and “Ambling Alp” remain two of the band’s most successful and beloved songs. So, when* Fragrant World* dropped in 2012, it was almost a surprise that Yeasayer took another creative left turn, abandoning synth-hippie bacchanalia for a more en-vogue, minimalistic sound. (Their lyrics, however, remained a similar mixture of oblique references, social commentary, and love songs.) Four years later, the band now has a chance to take stock of its motley career and reset expectations once again. And to their credit, Amen & Goodbye may be the first time the band has doubled down on its weirdest impulses. The result is an ambitious psychedelic quasi-concept record that is refreshingly (sometimes bizarrely) out of step with current trends, occasionally baffling, but mostly unsuccessful.
Nowhere is Yeasayer’s latest iteration better crystallized than “I Am Chemistry,” a psych-pop opus that, given the title and sartorial stylings of the band, you might assume is about drugs, but is actually—possibly literally—about toxic chemicals. (Keating sings, “A C4H10FO2P puts you on your knees,” listing out the molecular structure of Sarin gas.) This could be another instance of Yeasayer attempting to get political (see: "Reagan's Skeleton”) or an extended analogy about a troubled relationship. But "chemicals weapons = bad" is hardly a nuanced worldview and neither is identifying emotional instability with DDT. Worse, is the song's clunky sexual imagery. The words, “She only needs my help pleasuring herself beneath the rue leaves,” are sung with a vague John Lennon impersonation that the band returns to throughout the album.
Sonically, things aren’t any more coherent. The chorus to "I Am Chemistry"—big and syrupy—plays like an outdated bid for alt-rock radio play, but it clashes with the other discordant elements in the arrangement. Surprisingly pleasant, however, is the bridge, sung by The Roches member Suzzy Roche, which sounds like something Pink Floyd would have stitched into the fabric of a mid-’70s arena anthem, but it doesn’t jive with the otherwise slick production.
Other tracks are rarely more lucid, but just as ardent. “Gerson’s Whistle” is a keyboard-driven rocker that mixes elements of Yeasayer’s early-career folk harmonies (“Can you hear / There is something in the darkness”) with a vocal melody that heads into Californication-era Red Hot Chili Peppers territory. It makes you wonder what type of listeners the band is trying to court—possibly all of them? "Uma," a ballad that reaches for emotional resonance, comes off only as a treacly Beatles knockoff. However, "Cold Night," the most straightforward song on the album, is a simple pleasure. Rather than pile on historical or philosophical allusions, the lyrics are straightforward and immediate. "I regret all the times I didn't respond to you," goes one mournful statement, a sentiment we can all identify with.
According to the band, Amen & Goodbye was recorded in the Catskills, where the band attempted to return to a less digitally-saturated existence and there’s certainly an argument to be made that Amen & Goodbye is about the strife between contemporary technology and spirituality. But with songs that play like a grab-bag of genres and lyrics that have little of the humor or self-awareness the band displayed in the past, it's hard to muster the patience to uncover anything deeper. Amen & Goodbye plays as a sincere attempt at recreate the type of album that the band loved from decades past—meandering, experimental, uncompromising. This may seem interesting to the members of Yeasayer, but listeners will be left wondering where the band's interest in pop economy went. But the audacity, it should be noted, is huge.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Suzzy Roche is a sibling of Rufus Wainwright.


On her official debut, the electric rapper-singer is by turns deliriously chaotic, full of ambition, and unfocused as she tries a little of everything that’s made her a star.

Nightmare Vacation

It was Rico Nasty and Kenny Beats’ first time in the studio together. She asked him for heavy metal. Then she stepped out, took some molly, and came back in. He apparently hadn’t finished the beat yet, but Rico saw something in its half-baked state and insisted on recording. She might’ve been motivated by some rap beef, maybe not. Rico’s hook was simple yet deadly. Kind of like that time Ice Cube rhymed “AK” with “good day,” there was a sense of foreboding in its relief: “Thank God, I ain’t have to smack a bitch today.”
The 2018 loosie “Smack a Bitch” laid the foundation for the Maryland rapper’s electrifying screamo rap—jagged guitar riffs, booming trap drums, and an unbridled rage that pushes Rico's vocal cords to the brink, hoarseness be damned. The song reappears with a deliriously chaotic remix on Rico’s official debut album, Nightmare Vacation, recalling the genesis of her punk-rap hybrid sound. The menacing rasp was simmering under the surface on standouts like “Key Lime OG” and “Poppin” from her 2017 mixtape Sugar Trap 2, but it wasn’t until 2018’s Nasty and 2019’s Anger Management that it took shape.
Rico has talked of pop ambitions—one of her biggest inspirations is Rihanna—and like the Bajan icon, she finds multiple pit stops between the sweetness and fury of her various personas. In addition to Kenny Beats on “Smack a Bitch,” Rico enlists 16 other producers across 16 tracks, including Dylan Brady from 100 gecs and Take a Daytrip, hitmakers for Sheck Wes and Lil Nas X. There are more than a few moments of brilliance, but as a whole, the album lacks cohesion, feeling less exploratory and unbound than simply unfocused.
Where Nasty brought Rico’s hard edges into sharper focus, Nightmare Vacation reshapes them, experimenting with cadence and tone in playful and exciting ways. Rico has mastered aggression but shirks formulas and predictability, stretching out the spectrum of anger and blending it with humor, bravado, and brattiness. The sparse keys and impish vocal contortions of “Check Me Out” recall the dexterity of OG Maco’s flow on the Vine staple “U Guessed It.” On the track, her equally strained and cheerful delivery of “you snooze you lose” is both hilarious and frightening, a polarizing combo that Rico somehow makes work. On the more extreme end, the grinding guitar loop and feverish overdubs of “Let It Out” are expertly engineered to remedy the pent-up frustration and anxiety that have come to characterize not just this calendar year, but every single one before it.
Moving beyond rage, “iPhone” yearns for romance and conjures some of Rico’s most tender vocals, a considerable feat considering the maximalist production and extreme vocal effects of Dylan Brady’s production. Elsewhere, the flirty interplay between Aminé and Rico on “Back & Forth” is a welcome water break amidst the harder cuts, while the bubblegum singsong rap of the Don Toliver and Gucci Mane-assisted “Don’t Like Me” is a pleasant-but-forgettable pop number.
The second half of the album drags and struggles to match the vigor that preceded it: The pop-leaning “No Debate” is uncharacteristically devoid of emotion, while “Own It” has the kind of groove and vapid soundbites you might hear at a club more interested in bottle service than the mosh pits of Rico’s live shows. Even “Pussy Poppin,” which is structured around a loop that sounds strikingly similar to the Triggaman beat, awkwardly fails to capture the ass-shaking magic of New Orleans bounce despite being built off the genre’s secret sauce.
The deficiencies laid bare in the latter portion are almost wiped away by the “Smack a Bitch” remix. Featuring rap newcomers, ppcocaine, Sukihana, and Rubi Rose, the show-stopping posse cut takes the energy of the original, wraps it in explosives, and sets it on fire. Recalling the thrill of Nicki Minaj’s “Monster” verse, each rapper raises the bar set by the previous one, destroying and remaking the track as they go along. By the last verse, ppcocaine can barely be bothered to stay on beat as she threatens to run bitches over in her Tesla truck—it feels like you are riding shotgun with her.
Nightmare Vacation bursts with potential, and while not all of it is realized, the moments that click signal that Rico is an artist with a strong gut, confidently expanding the boundaries of her craft. In a recent interview with Coveteur, Rico discussed wanting to make music that explicitly referenced recent social unrest but stopped because it felt “cheesy” and” forced.” Her catalog has always reflected the time: In an age of immeasurable loss, the power of her raw expression—whether it be screams or angsty croons for affection—lies in its ability to excavate and release those feelings, giving way to something new and hopeful.

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Featuring Bob Dylan, St. Vincent, and Ben Gibbard, the performances here breathe refreshing gay life into old songs, even if it smacks of branded content a little bit.

Various Artists: Universal Love: Wedding Songs Reimagined EP

It’s #20gayteen and rising LGBTQ pop stars like Troye Sivan and Hayley Kiyoko are doing away with the vague usage of “you” and getting specific about the objects of their affection. It’s not you; it’s him, or her, or them. Welcome to the call-me-by-your-pronoun era of pop music. Perched in their midtown Manhattan offices, watching the movement swell to a tipping point, are the executives of McCann New York—an advertising agency that recently commissioned this Universal Love EP for its client, MGM Resorts. The six-song EP is comprised of traditional wedding songs redesigned for same-sex couples.
Heavy-hitters like Bob Dylan lent their names to the project alongside pop-activists like Kesha and indie megastars like St. Vincent. The EP’s executive producer, Rob Kaplan, and co-producer, Tom Murphy, hail from the advertising world and the former runs Wool & Tusk, a company that, “pairs advertising agencies, brands and cultural institutions with music.” As an ad campaign, Universal Love is a huge success. It scored free publicity for itself in The New York Times, Billboard and Rolling Stone, and, as a result, probably drove a few extra thousand clicks to its client’s website. It’s a case study in how to get brand activism right. But can sponsored content like this really offer its audience anything genuine? Can swapping the pronouns in a love song actually make it more relatable to LGBTQ listeners? Call me a sucker, but as a newly betrothed gay woman, I have to say, it feels nice to have a song.
The EP’s success stems largely from the involved artists’ interpretations. Since 1928, “She’s Funny That Way” has been sung by men and women about partners of the opposite sex and Bob Dylan was likely aware of the song’s genderfluid history. His version pays homage to both Sinatra’s orchestral take and Billie Holiday’s bluesier approach. In the first verse, a pianist’s light stroke of descending keys trails Dylan’s warm voice as he sings, “Now he seems quite out of place/Like a fallen star.” It’s one of many playful elements in the arrangement that helps surface the song’s inherent silliness which had been buried by more heavy-handed approaches in the past.
When it was first released in 1963, “Then He Kissed Me” was lauded for effectively capturing the rush of a first crush in song. Produced by Phil Spector, it told the story of a young girl gushing over her steady. Now rewritten as “And Then She Kissed Me,” St. Vincent’s version features vigorous drumming that keeps up with the furious heartbeat of a young woman who just experienced that “Oh fuck, I think I like her, like her” feeling for the first time. When Clark confesses, as if through clenched teeth, “I wanted to let her know that she was more than a friend,” she’s relaying an experience that’ll ring true for same-sex couples who’ve had to navigate their feelings in a world where opposites supposedly attract.
The lead singer of Bloc Party, Kele Okereke, took on love’s sturdiest soundtrack by choosing to redo the Temptations’ classic, “My Girl.” He freed himself from the song’s most famous hallmarks to make space for his own version which replaces the original’s strings, horns and endless crescendos with a more mellow and contained approach to instrumentation. A light but steady touch on the drums carries the track along at a pleasant pace. In Okereke’s hands, “My Girl” turns into “My Guy” and matures from being an exuberant, declaration of love to a relaxed admiration of someone dear to him. It’s a sweet transformation to a song that’s been nearly loved to death.
The biggest missed opportunity on Universal Love is Valerie June’s reworking of “Mad About the Boy.” Originally written by the famed, gay playwright Noël Coward, supposedly for Cary Grant, the lyrics tell the story of a man (Coward) who’s revived by a pesky crush for a young Hollywood star (Grant). It’s a dramatic song, and though June commands the sprawling arrangement well enough with her brassy vocals, she fails to imbue it with the kind of melodrama Coward intended. Given the song’s origins, it’s worth wondering what kind of emotional effect would’ve been produced by a version that featured a man’s vocals. Still, June’s version is a convincing one, as are all of the tracks on Universal Love. Kesha turned in a damn good version of Janis Joplin’s “I Need a Man to Love,” but it’s Ben Gibbard’s stripped-down version of the simple “And I Love Her” that reminds listeners just how ordinary but wonderful it is to love someone without limit.


The TDE soul singer takes a darker turn on his second record, a sad and gauzy R&B collection full of bitterness and missed connections.

Chasing Summer

SiR’s debut album began with a computerized female voice who answered to “K” telling the singer his plane was ready. “K” guided the album, chirping at SiR between creamy ballads and serving as a sort of tour guide and road map. You can hear faint traces of this narrative device on SiR’s latest album, Chasing Summer, which is book-ended by a pilot’s voiceover and the faint sputter of plane engines. It’s an odd framing for an album that never leaves home: The Inglewood singer drifts around the city with his hair down, flirting with girls who grew up on Queen Street. Even metaphorically, there’s not a lot of movement: SiR’s songs tend to find one mood and simmer in it.
SiR makes hazy, gliding neo-soul songs about love. He has been married for a decade, most interviews with him are quick to point out, and therefore much of his music is assumed to be autobiographical. His last album swerved towards ego and pettiness in a way that felt out of place and unconvincing. “All her little friends can’t stand me/Because they know I would trade her love for a Grammy,” he spat, before slipping back into his familiar jazzy, tender singsong. On Chasing Summer, SiR stops making excuses and plunges into cruelty. “Did I stutter when I told her ass/ None of this was ever meant to last?” he spits over surging synthesizers. On the ironically titled “That’s Why I Love You,” he gets even more direct: “I never wondered what this could be/I just fuck you and leave.” SiR has stressed that much of this album is fictional; the second track is titled “John Redcorn,” supposedly from the perspective of the cartoon King of the Hill character. “Sometimes, I’m not telling my exact truth because I like to keep some of my privacy,” he told DJ Booth earlier this month. Safely shrouded in make-believe, he’s free to lash out.
The effect is an album that bristles with paranoia. SiR creates conditions in which actual relationships are impossible: He’s always in the wrong place at the wrong time; he replays conversations that never happened; he waits for calls he won’t take. “We both know this house could never be a home,” he sings. “But ain’t you sick of spending all your nights alone?” The kindest words in the record are about weed—“Isn’t she the best?” he crows about a sativa hybrid.
But at 14 songs, the album feels bloated. Its swirl of features are hit or miss. Smino and Kendrick Lamar inject life into the spaces SiR hollows out. Zacari, who should be a natural complement, arrives on the soulless “Mood” for the generic hook: “I ain’t in the mood/If I ain’t in my bag/Do anything for the cash.” Lil Wayne’s presence seems more like a signifier of SiR’s stardom than an addition to the music; “What’s a girl without a booty?” he yawns through Auto-Tune.  SiR’s at his best when he’s swimming through his loneliness.
The obvious comparison point for Chasing Summer is SZA’s CTRL: another Kendrick Lamar-featuring RCA and TDE collaboration, another gauzy and sad love record with an unfortunate line about pussy (“Pussy tastes like diamonds”, SiR croons, which is only marginally less awful than CTRL’s “Pussy can be so facetious.”) The records are stylistically similar, but for SZA, deconstructing romance felt like a revolution. With SiR, it’s a way to tread in place.


New York band follows its debut album Fever to Tell-- this decade's gold standard for transcending indie hype-- with a record that offers only one side of the group's multifaceted sound.

Show Your Bones

It's impossible not to hear the ghost of Fever to Tell on the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' follow-up, Show Your Bones. With its 2003 full-length debut, the Brooklyn-based trio confidently staked out diverse territory-- from the meltdown-rock of "Pin" to the march of "Black Tongue" to the tenderly skewed balladry of "Maps"-- and played those extremes against each other, so that each became even more extreme in contrast. The result was a complex sound that was simultaneously inviting and confrontational, and it made Fever to Tell this decade's gold standard for transcending indie hype. But while it makes sense for the YYYs to play off that earlier sound here, their new album sounds like only one side of a multifaceted band.
For Bones, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs recruited producer Squeak E. Clean, who fits these songs with an array of bells and whistles-- not to mention sirens, organs, programmed beats, acoustic guitars, rattling percussion, keyboards, and various studio effects. Most of it, unfortunately, simply seems unnecessary or excessive. In fact, more often than not, these sonic geegaws detract from the band's intensity, compartmentalizing the record's explosive moments from the songs themselves.
Nick Zinner's guitar sounds smaller and less commanding here, and Karen O has toned down her presence considerably, rarely relying on the vocal tics that once seemed the equivalent of her famously ragtag glam fashion. Even when she unleashes that hellfire growl in "Fancy", it's buried so far in the mix that it's indistinguishable from the band's racket. Brian Chase's drum work remains confoundingly intricate, but seems strangely restrained nonetheless. The percussion should punish your eardrums when he pounds out the opening of "Fancy"; instead it sounds polite, like he's clearing his throat to get your attention. When the Yeah Yeah Yeahs finally do cut loose at the frenzied end of the Strokes-fest "Mysteries", the moment has a get-it-all-out-now feel.
These are growing pains for a band that has done a lot of maturing since Fever to Tell made them semistars. This newfound wisdom has its benefits, chief among them a confessional tone to the songwriting that effectively blurs the distinctions between Karen O and Karen Orzalek. Show Your Bones is a post-fame album, with many songs written from the specific perspective of a touring musician. "Warrior" begins as an acoustic ballad much like the previous album's "Modern Romance", but builds linearly to an intense finish as Karen O laments, "Travel away, travel it all away/ The road's gonna end on me." She never lapses into self-pity, though, mainly because the attraction of an excited audience proves as strong as the pull of a stable, homebound life. First single "Gold Lion" sounds like a mission statement: "We'll build a fire in your eyes."
For its faults, howeveer, Show Your Bones contains some genuinely disarming moments that reveal the band's considerable emotional and sonic force. Despite its similarity to Love and Rockets' "No New Tale to Tell", "Gold Lion" unleashes a booming wordless chorus and a high-flying guitar riff from Zinner. On "Way Out"-- perhaps the album's most effectively dramatic track-- O infuses her vocals with a palpable emotional fatigue, sounding desperate to reconnect with the world even as she slowly sinks into numbness: "It's around me so tight!"
Still, on Show Your Bones the Yeah Yeah Yeahs occupy only one corner of the territory they claimed on Fever, walking confidently in their own footsteps but without claiming any new ground. If Fever had a skuzzy film of sweat and alcohol that sounded persuasively real, with songs that could have been cobbled together from scraps found in garbage bins and dumpsters, unmade beds and mess-strewn rooms, Bones possesses a too-clean sound and a songwriterly approach that seems more redolent of the studio than the stage. These refinements, which prove merely cosmetic, sap their sound of its brutal spontaneity and mute the band members' idiosyncrasies, and as a result, the album sounds guarded, with very little danger and too few moments of real urgency.


Wiki is best known as the linchpin in the NYC rap trio Ratking. On his solo debut, he pares down his writing and focuses on the pointedly unglamorous side of touring, all stale gas station food and cramped van seats.

Lil Me

Wiki, a 22-year-old from the Upper West Side, is best known as the linchpin in Ratking, the trio whose 2014 LP So It Goes is one of the clearest articulations of New York City in the 21st century. Lots of the writing, critical and otherwise, about the group's music has really been about revivalism. Is Ratking bringing the '90s back? Should they bring the '90s back? (How much Avirex do they own?)  In reality, both So It Goes and the follow-up EP, 700 Fill, are forward-thinking. The group's ties to Clinton-era New York are ethereal—Wiki's affinity for Cam'ron-esque marriages of crass humor and life advice, Sporting Life's winter-resistant drum programming, Hak's careening narratives. And every piece of Ratking's New York has been picked for a purpose, even if it's dragged through mud and sleet and trampled on by commuters afterward.
The young rapper's solo debut, Lil Me, is an act of decluttering. Where he was once verbose and technical at the expense of his message, here he pares down his writing: "Light Ls, make it glow/ It takes a toll on my health," from the closer "Sun Showers". In some ways, this is Wiki's touring record, but it's not about groupies or friction in a relationship back home. It's pointedly unglamorous, all stale gas station food and cramped van seats. On "Living With My Moms" he raps, "I don't even know/ It's wherever the label tell me to go"; on "Seedy Motherfucker", he tells us about getting booed during his set. Even the victories (clean sound checks, crowds who half-understand the lyrics) seem smaller-than-life. Wiki alludes to graver problems—coke habits, robberies, loaded guns—but lets them linger in the margins.
The out-of-town dates serve primarily as an excuse for Wiki to re-examine his hometown. On the Madlib-produced half of the opener "WikiFlag", Wiki's pining: "It's been a minute since I've been given a New York dap." "3 Stories", one of two songs produced by the Montreal-based DJ Kaytranada, is a detail-obsessed narrative in the classicist vein. "Hit the L", which reassembles the Ratking lineup, could unfurl in a dozen different directions, but it stays fixed in a smoky room, walls closing in. Sporting Life hooks up a turn-of-the-century chipmunk soul loop, yet chops it into two one-second samples, and uses those sparingly.
The song that follows,"Old Blocks New Kids", is Lil Me's thematic center. Reigns at the top are short like leprechauns, and the song (another furnished by Sporting Life) celebrates the turnover. *"*Oh pops, I know you thought that you could do this/ You ain't stupid, but you old, pops—new kids." That's Wiki's New York: cold, cutthroat, decaying, being reborn. Over and over, stripping away anything that's unnecessary.


This avant-garde trio use piano, samples, and carefully skewered tapes to conjure an evocative sense of place. They drift to exquisite effect.

Sontag Shogun: Patterns for Resonant Space

Patterns for Resonant Space

Sontag Shogun songs are like environments to float through, lost in hushed wonder. An insectile fragility informs the music that this Brooklyn-based trio has released since its 2011 debut. Ian Temple’s curious, painterly piano—think Erik Satie or George Gershwin—grounds the aesthetic, while Jeremy Young and Jesse Perlstein tremor the balance with filmic samples and carefully skewered tapes. By 2012’s Absent Warrior, Abandoned Battlefield and 2014’s Tale, they’d stirred a variety of voices into the mix to haunting effect, and they had become adept at conjuring an evocative sense of place—a factory floor, a choir rehearsal, a public square—and triggering hazy nostalgia. Experiencing “Paper Canes” or the cosmic-mosaic “Hungarian Wheat” can feel like being the subject of an expressive August Macke watercolor before the brush’s work is even done.
Gentler than its predecessors, Patterns for Resonant Space threatens to crumble at a touch. Melting easily into one another, these 10 mostly brief songs spotlight field-recorded crackle and reversed piano tracks. The band often seems to be caught in the act of simultaneously disassembling and reassembling its own dreamed-in compositions. To tag along is to drift, to engage Sontag Shogun’s acts of reinvention. Piano remains their constant. The brisk, nagging ivories on “no.10 (£20,000)” competes, gamely, with disorienting whirrs, storm gusts, and random radio bursts. Gurgling drains and a cut-up announcer’s voice—“they’ve got different speeds,” it observes—lunge at the hopeful, resolute motifs that guide “no.17 (Chopsticks, Motor, Lecture).” Leading with unsettling sounds that land somewhere between hot oil and a bristling rattlesnake, “no.19 (Patient Elegy for Bernr’d Hoffmann)” stumbles into staggered chords as stratospherically exquisite as the wordless vocal harmonies that follow.
Patterns turns abstract at moments, showcasing a more ambitious Sontag Shogun—as on “no.4 (Sonar),” with its reverb-drenched drones and ink-blot organs. “no.16 (Windmill)” suggests a calliope organ being tuned in the path of a steam locomotive. The organic/artificial frisson at play on “no.2 (Music Box)”—a searching, tentative piano versus the sprained whinges of a manipulated music box—places it among the most surprising and satisfying entries in the band’s oeuvre.
Yet the album’s masterstroke is its longest and most conventional offering. The meditative “no.8 (Leaves like Photographs)” blends patient piano plinks and delicate trills with backwards versions of the same, until melodies and countermelodies blur, shimmering almost psychedelically. Before the song spindles out in a warped, choral wheeze, a woman’s voice emerges from the din. “Leaves are photographs, they’re light-sensitive materials; as they change color, the results are the same,” she explains. “It’s a reaction that happens with the silver nitrate, that’s why it changes color—you can think of green as being the white paper, when it’s exposed to light.” This is Patterns for Resonant Space in a nutshell—a slippery record that’s never the same twice, always evolving to reveal something new.


The Brazilian-born, Amsterdam-based producer’s new mixtape presents shapeshifting, pop-minded club tracks that showcase her dense production and versatile singing.

Mosquito

Born in Brazil and based in the Netherlands, Lyzza got her start as a teenager, playing around with production software and uploading songs to SoundCloud while DJing ballroom sets around Amsterdam. She introduced her style of metallic electronic pop on an enigmatic trio of EPs that progressively brought her voice to the fore. Lyzza’s blasé flow and kinetic production style—jumping between rapid BPMs with a deep bass undertow pulling beneath—are confident and enticing, capable of stirring up delirium on the dancefloor before retreating into a more pensive comedown. On her new mixtape Mosquito, Lyzza presents a series of shapeshifting, pop-minded club tracks that constitute her most cohesive project yet. It includes some of her most approachable songs, yet they retain all the thrills of her dense production, here used in service of headstrong lyrics colored by a tumultuous love life.
The music on Mosquito often sounds on the brink of collapse. Lyzza’s avant-pop impulses cut a sharp figure, with winding intros that build toward accelerating tempos, crunching synths, and lyrics that dart between English, Spanish, and Portuguese. The smoldering highlight “Cheat Code” quakes with resounding handclaps, giving shuffling footing to Lyzza’s coolly delivered vocals about the mental anguish of wanting to end a relationship: “No quiero un amor que no tiene cualidad,” she sings emphatically, driving home a growing sense of self-worth. On the reggaeton-tinged “Deserve It,” she recruits Spanish rapper La Zowi, who provides a flexing, rapid-fire verse over Lyzza’s mutating synth line and sticky-sweet beat. Along with the in-your-face “Blush Me Out!” and loping “Ressaca,” they’re among Lyzza’s best tracks, with a forward sense of pounding rhythm and dynamic, shit-talking personality.
Though Mosquito ably conveys the artist’s compelling persona, some songs on the mixtape tread water. “Mind 2 Lips” charges forward with a thudding drum pattern and zipping synths that never reach any real climax, content to simmer in the background instead. “Eraser” loops and chops up stabs of electric guitar into a foregrounded melody, a wrinkle that becomes more grating the longer the song goes on. Lyzza is proficient at creating a hook that sticks with you—the hypnotic, Rihanna-esque chorus of “Blush Me Out!” is indelible—but her competing, distorted production tricks threaten to submerge the mixtape’s better ideas.
Still, Lyzza’s flexible, airy vocals keep things on track as Mosquito threads together her growing sense of authority. She slips between a feathery coo and martial shouts on the choppy, 8-bit-streaked “For When I Fall Again,” which imparts a biting assertion of agency. Later, on the highlight “Heathens Call,” she and Canadian-Zambian firebrand rapper Backxwash dial into a particularly vivid, boastful sweet spot. “Cut through, cutthroat/Can’t tell no more,” Lyzza attests in singsong over head-knocking percussion and echoing synths, ensuring every ounce of tenacity shows.