Clarence Johnson—better known as DJ Roc—is one of Chicago footwork's more underrated veterans, despite having made some of the scene's most approachable projects. More than any other footwork release this year, Practice What U Preach a study in control, all of its rough edges polished into sharp points.

Practice What U Preach

Clarence Johnson—better known as DJ Roc—is one of Chicago footwork's more underrated veterans, despite having made some of the scene's most approachable projects. In a genre often pigeonholed as repetitive and raw, Roc's production style throughout his nearly 15 years in the game has maintained a fine balance between streamlined minimalism and organized chaos. He favors clarity over experimentation for its own sake, and often, his tracks are formatted in the style of a pop or rap song, with distinct bridges, choruses, pre-choruses. His 2010 Planet Mu debut, The Crack Capone, was one of the first great footwork full-lengths, a subtle and often overlooked gem from the era in which footwork began to seep into the global dance underground.
His latest, Practice What U Preach, is a concise, eight-track mini-album on Swiss footwork label Duck 'N Cover Records. More than any other footwork release this year, it's a study in control, all of its rough edges polished into sharp points. Roc's strong suit has always been deft, tricky sample manipulation. He has a keen eye for detail, and a knack for successfully juxtaposing clips that seemingly shouldn't work: on Crack Capone, he made Kid Cudi's hokey Lady Gaga-sampling "Make Her Say" barely recognizable, interspersed Evanescence with the "Twilight Zone" theme and crunk adlibs, and gave edge to Robin Thicke's pillow-soft "Lost Without U". The latter track remains one of Roc's best, and its ethos—making easy listening just a touch harder—guides much of Practice What U Preach.
The title track is built around an extended sample of Barry White's 1994 song of the same name, and serves as the ultimate example of Roc's eye for raw material. Halfway through the original, White's delivery edges just slightly out of time on the pre-chorus, chopping up his own rhythm in real time in a pattern that uncannily suggests footwork. It's a window into Roc's seemingly gut-driven sampling instincts; elsewhere, on "The Worst", he molds Jhené Aiko's mellow break-up song of the same title into something desperate and urgent. "Lowend Unity", a shout-out to the Low End neighborhood on Chicago's south side, gathers choppy snares and syrupy sax solos into neat, tight knots and then lets them unravel and ride out. It's the smoothest a footwork album's sounded in 2015, though it's not without its moments of catharsis: "Destruction" pounds organ loops into Lex Luger-style blasts, a battle track in the Spartan sense. Roc's style has often intersected with hip-hop, albeit never quite as overtly as DJ Rashad's (though he is perhaps the only footwork producer to have been sampled multiple times by Lil B).
But Roc's a juke producer as much as he is a footwork producer, and perhaps his closest parallel is to DJ Slugo, the juke pioneer with whom he's frequently collaborated. Both make finely crafted, approachable, and surprisingly subtle tracks that know when to build momentum and when to let things unfold organically. "Ready or Not", a sleek but dramatic orchestral juke track, is perhaps the album's best demonstration of how much Roc can do with so few components, its intricate structure a counter to anyone who still thinks footwork tracks are simple.


The 26-year-old sounds reinvigorated on his latest—the flows are crisper, his puns are more colorful, and the beats are pristine.

Wunna

Gunna’s lifestyle is less like a rapper and more like one of Bravo’s Real Housewives. He shops, travels, hangs out with his rapper friends, and has few issues outside of what color Audemars Piguet watch he should wear on his wrist or if his new pair of Amiri jeans will fit nicely around his waist. Among his Atlanta peers, he’s the most predictable. Listening to a Gunna album or tape is easy and familiar, like turning on the television and landing on a marathon of your favorite sitcom.
The difference between Gunna’s best verses and his worst is at the molecular level: The best are easily recitable and bring color to his lavish lifestyle; the worst are basically the same except it just sounds like he’s going through the motions. On WUNNA, the 26-year-old’s latest, Gunna has the heart and is the most engaged he’s sounded since his 2018 breakthrough, Drip Season 3. (Insanely, WUNNA is an acronym—“Wealthy unapologetic nigga naturally authentic”—and as you would expect he explained the title in an interview as, “Honestly, I was just high, bro.”)
WUNNA is more than an endless barrage of boasts about his designer clothes and foreign whips; the flows are crisper, his puns are more colorful, and the beats are pristine (new-age Atlanta beat-making royalty Wheezy and Turbo are mainly behind the boards). On the calm, Turbo-produced single “Wunna,” Gunna’s flow is patient, every word is emphasized. And then on the intro, “Argentina,” he changes paces with ease. Thanks to his bank of deliveries and melodies, his flexes stick. “It’s easy to slip, don’t want you to fall/Walk in with the drip at Met Gala ball,” he croons on the “Met Gala” hook. It’s a simple line that could have been generated by a bot, but through sweet vocals, it becomes something more.
WUNNA hits a stride when it becomes a family affair. Much like “Sold Out Dates” and “Drip Too Hard,” “Blindfold” is like hanging out with Gunna and Lil Baby as they partake in a fashion duel: Gunna has a new pair of Rick Owens jeans and Lil Baby can’t decide if he wants to lace up his Dior or Jordan sneakers. Similarly, the album revolves around a pair of collaborations with Young Thug. “Dollaz on My Head” is ripped by Thug and Gunna is smoothly rapping about spending a bag on Prada. Followed by “Far,” their second collaboration, a welcomed disruption, and a rare moment of introspection. “I ain’t tryna talk down ’cause I know niggas be hardhead/Thinkin’ about how they put my brother in the ground, had to pour up more red,” wails Gunna, as it slides into a vulnerable territory he should go to more often.
But, of course, at 18 tracks, there are moments when Gunna lapses into monotony. The nearly four-minute two-parter “Nasty Girl/On Camera” is tiresome, and guest features by Roddy Ricch and Travis Scott seem like nothing more than formalities to juice streaming numbers. Yet it’s hard to not have fun when Gunna is telling posh tales in a rushed melody over Wheezy and Turbo beats that sound like an elevator ride up to a penthouse. Like “I’m On Some,” where Gunna reflects about the moments he truly cherishes: a New York trip to buy baguette diamonds from celebrity jeweler Elliott Eliantte and purchasing his latest girlfriend liposuction just to brighten her mood. Who else can sound so unrelatable, materialistic, and superficial, and still remain charming? Only Gunna.


The resurrected Pixies' EP-2 dates from the same recording sessions as last year's EP-1. The four new songs here are less blank than the four on the first, but the gulf between the feel this music has on the mind and the name on the cover remains jarring.

EP-2

Many groups go away then return to us diminished—Goodie Mob, Black Flag, the Stooges, Smashing Pumpkins. We have more or less reconciled ourselves to this phenomenon. But very few bands come back wiped clean of their basic essence, as the Pixies did with last fall's EP-1. Their mystery, their fidgety precision, their peculiar tensed grin, was simply erased, replaced by an utterly indistinguishable modern rock band. The severity of the cognitive dissonance was almost fascinating, or it would have been if the music weren't so brutally anodyne. Had any legendary band returned with new material this limp and attenuated before?
We have another chance to consider the question. EP-2, released this week, dates from the same recording sessions as the first. (There is one more on the way.) The four new songs here are less blank than the four on the first, if only marginally: "Magdalena" and "Snakes" arouse the faint suspicion that you might be listening to the Pixies, or at least vaguely Pixies-inspired music. The minor-key chorus and stairstep chord progression to "Magdalena" is the most harmonically rich moment they've managed since reuniting. Black's lead vocal is muted and sensitive, and it sounds, passingly, like a lesser track from Bossanova or Teenager of the Year.
They are the only moments, however. The appealing, smeary lead guitar line on "Green and Blues" introduces a thin, banal rock song, both melodically and lyrically devoid of interesting ideas—the chorus turns on “I'm wasting your time just talking to you/ Maybe best to go on home/I’ll leave you alone.” Black sings of being an alien, a visitor, but his eccentricity, his fundamental strangeness, has never been less evident. The Pixies traded in unpredictability and startling outbursts—they were pixies, for god's sake. Mischief, subversion, and nonsense were part of their job description. Frank's scream used to be vivid in part because it emerged out of nowhere, a teddy bear that suddenly became a golem. On"Blue Eyed Hexe", he screams like a Brian Johnson imitator over a foursquare riff with no wit or play in it, the clonking woodblock hitting like a kid brother socking you repeatedly in the arm. It is arguably worse, more slow-witted, and painful than anything on the original EP.
The gulf between the feel this music has on the mind and the name on the cover remains jarring. Frank Black has been making more traditional, MOR rock recordings under his own name since the Pixies disbanded, but even his most meat-and-potatoes solo offerings had something—a flutter of vulnerability, a darker streak beneath the riffs that suggested mischief and imagination. When he played with country and roots-rock tropes on quickly assembled, low-stakes creative projects like Paley & Francis, the crooked grin was legible beneath the surface. The songs collected on these two EPs display almost no creative vision or signature.
Black and the remaining original members—Joey Santiago, David Lovering—seem intent, above all, on pushing their brand forward. They recently dismissed Kim Shattuck, the bassist hired in Kim Deal’s conspicuous absence, and hired Paz Lenchantin. In all of this, they are moving with a bracing, almost refreshingly blunt cynicism: the Pixies are a franchise now, and franchises need to keep moving. Fair enough. But even the most mercenary-minded, craven reboot works if there is some evident love of the source material, and this is where these EPs fail so pitifully. These eight songs would be subpar, unremarkable work for a band with no reputation or mythology to live up to; for the Pixies, they are an increasingly mournful asterisk affixed to a beloved legacy.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the power-pop trio’s 1991 debut, a scrappy, diamond-sharp, hook-filled attempt to become the biggest rock band out of Chicago.

Material Issue: International Pop Overthrow

International Pop Overthrow

The rise of Material Issue seemed almost predestined. Their music lived in the realm of girls, cars, and hanging out with girls in cars. They sounded instantly familiar yet slightly wild, like a radio playing Top 40 hits in a dream. Jim Ellison, the band’s gangly and remarkably self-possessed frontman, was sure of their success from the very start: “Most people would enjoy our stuff,” he told the Los Angeles Times just a month after the release of their 1991 debut album, International Pop Overthrow. It was that level of faith in the purity of his project—the way he treated pop like a religion, the unshakable belief in the categorical goodness of his vision—that made the band’s eventual failure impossible to accept.
Material Issue, by their own admission, “reeked of Chicago”: The trio formed in 1986 when Ellison found bassist Ted Ansani at the city’s Columbia College (“We both had leather jackets,” Ansani later explained). They soon recruited drummer Mike Zelenko through an ad in the local music magazine, Illinois Entertainer, in which Zelenko professed his love for Buzzcocks, the Replacements, Tom Petty, and the Beatles. “The most important thing about Mike was the fact he had a van,” Ellison later said, which gave them access to studios and gigs around the city. The band was Ellison’s brainchild, down to its name, a reference to a request form from his job installing home security systems. He had a specific vision for Material Issue’s public image—shag haircuts, psychedelic fonts, and American flags—as an homage to Merseybeat bands from three decades prior. Ellison called it “psycho pop,” which meant the simple rhythms and sun-soaked melodies about being sad, perfected by power-pop bands like Raspberries and the Romantics.
Material Issue strived for the platonic ideal of pop, music that was as much about nodding to its predecessors as it was about hooks and harmonies. For Ellison, songwriting was the pursuit of perfection, a chance to craft something so affecting and catchy that it was almost scientifically guaranteed to break big. The band didn’t want to peg their sound to a specific place or era, and they weren’t interested in political music or the folksy alt-country that was overtaking their city at the time. Nor were they fully in step with the outgrowth of the peak of ’70s power-pop, which had morphed into jangly twee and “alternative pop” in the form of Matthew Sweet, the Posies, and the K Records extended universe. Those bands wrote about talking to the wind and the sun—Ellison wrote about talking to girls, or at least, dreaming about talking to girls. If punk was an attitude and pop was a style, power-pop was its commentary, a layer of self-awareness that made lovelorn songs about waiting by the telephone into high art.
The three booked studio time at Short Order Recorder, the Zion, Illinois studio owned by Jeff Murphy of local power-pop heroes Shoes. There were Chicago studios closer to the band, but the legacy of Shoes—who went from recording their 1977 debut in their living room to premiering on the first day of MTV four years later—represented the self-made pop explosion Ellison wanted to capture. Material Issue’s first singles share Shoes’ scrappy enthusiasm: “Renée Remains the Same”—one of four Material Issue song titles to feature a woman’s name on their eventual debut—places the band in the lineage of power-pop greats in the first 30 seconds: someone else’s girl, someone else’s car, and a fuzz pedal. The band released “Renée” and a B-side as The Super Sonic Seven-Inch on Ellison’s Big Block Records in 1988.
By the end of the ’80s, Chicago had become a hub for house music, but the Second City lived up to its nickname when it came to rock, trailing its coastal counterparts. But due to investments in the once hollowed-out industrial neighborhood of Wicker Park, by the middle of the decade, the city’s DIY scene was taking shape. The rise of Material Issue mirrored and bolstered Chicago’s overdue reckoning as a bona fide destination for innovative bands, built from new venues like the Empty Bottle, new labels like Drag City, Wax Trax!, and Touch and Go, and groups like Urge Overkill, Smashing Pumpkins, and Tortoise.
Surrounded by a typically humble Midwestern scene at odds with his prideful, self-aggrandizing personality, Ellison clashed with his fair share of local acts (one Chicago Reader column from 1995 details Ellison and members of Red Red Meat getting into urine-soaked skirmishes). At the same time, he put his hustle and sense of importance back into his hometown, working the door at long-dead local venues like Batteries, booking shows at Gaspar’s, and supporting local acts at spaces like Phyllis’s Musical Inn. The city returned the favor: Before long, the band’s first singles were in heavy rotation at local rock station WXRT, and they were packing spots like the Cubby Bear and what was then called Cabaret Metro. Their success was the city’s success: “It may be Chicago’s turn” in the spotlight, Chicago Tribune music critic Greg Kot wrote in February 1991, spurred by the news that two local bands had recently inked major label deals: Eleventh Dream Day had released Beet on Atlantic Records in 1989, and Material Issue had just signed to Mercury for their debut.
International Pop Overthrow is a debut album by way of a collection of singles. Ellison, Zelenko, and Ansani made the record piecemeal with Murphy over the course of three years at Short Order Recorder. Songs were written in four-hour sprints when they could afford studio time with the money earned from gigs; they tracked songs on rented tape. After the band signed with a label, Ellison asked Murphy if they could remaster the recordings, but their songs had long been taped over—their demos would have to serve as their debut. All told, the album’s 14 songs were recorded for under $6,000.
Material Issue excelled at creating a sense of incandescent melancholy, decorating heartbreak in arpeggios and chorus pedals. Album opener “Valerie Loves Me” is an unrequited lover’s manic breakdown, equal parts exhilaration and desperation. Written about Ellison’s childhood crush on his downstairs neighbor, the song’s verses are sung as an outsider looking into a life he dreamed of attaining, peering from his bedroom window, hopelessly obsessed: “I would give my whole life to her,” Ellison croons. But it’s the chorus—a gnarled, almost pained shout of “Valerie loves me!”—that launches the song into the stratosphere. With each screaming refrain, Ellison seems further detached from reality until by the end he’s praying poor Valerie winds up alone forever. The song—and its music video, in which an anonymous woman waltzes around in sunglasses while the band awkwardly tries on their best beatnik impressions —entered heavy rotation on 120 Minutes and rock radio, eventually peaking at No. 3 on the Billboard Modern Rock charts.
Like “Valerie,” the songs on International Pop Overthrow bend familiar lyrical and musical tropes into mangled, alien reflections. On “Very First Lie,” Ellison opens by listing all the little things he’d like to do with a girl—staying up late listening to records (“phonograph” and “better half” is an especially memorable rhyme) and meeting her parents—before dropping the song’s title: “I would like to tell the very first lie.” It’s a sly twist that takes its lyrics out of the realm of fantasy and into a more subversive kind of love song: Even an unrequited love is still love; a lie to a lover is still its own curdled form of intimacy. Elsewhere, Ellison gets closer to Ric Ocasek as carnival barker: “Diane” describes a woman who’s “got everything: a helicopter, a submarine!” We don’t learn much more about Diane—she’s maybe 19—but in her anonymity, she becomes an avatar for the eternally elusive dream girl. The song’s chorus, just an increasingly emphatic repetition of her name, conjures a woman who just might own multiple motorized helicopters and submarines. He makes it sound like Diane could stop the world.
In the world of power-pop, the goal isn’t to get the girl, it’s to write the best song about the girl. Ellison is not just in thrall to his subjects but to the history of pop music, from the rollicking country of “Chance of a Lifetime” and the swaggering morality play “Trouble” to the slow, shimmering soft rock of “A Very Good Idea.” Whenever the songs threaten to veer too far into paint-by-numbers romance, small interjections—“But hey, it was your birthday” on the bridge of “Li’l Christine”—bring them into Material Issue’s unique lane of punk and Brill Building pop. Material Issue built a pop universe that sounded fully formed from the start, as if its rhymes and rhythms had always existed in the ether and had just been waiting for Ellison, Ansani, and Zelenko to track it to tape.
International Pop Overthrow was released in February 1991, and by the next month, they were performing “Diane” for a group of neon-clad fraternity brothers on MTV’s Spring Break. Ellison and his band thought it was ambitious when their record shipped at 60,000 copies, but by the end of the year, Mercury had sold over 200,000; they instantly went from local scenesters to one of Chicago’s most successful new rock bands. They headed back to Zion to work with Murphy on a second record on Ellison’s request, returning to the familiarity of Shoes’ studio out of Ellison’s devotion to Murphy’s self-made melodies, despite their label advance providing them the freedom to leave Illinois. The result, 1992’s Destination Universe, sounded like a prime-time remake of their debut—the same hooks, the same layered vocals, the same girl-crazed lyrics, but without the come-from-nothing exuberance that made International Pop Overthrow so electrifying.
The band still found success—the boldly assumptive single “What Girls Want” landed them on The Dennis Miller Show—but the album didn’t sell. Despite recruiting a new producer, Mike Chapman (who had worked with Blondie), and including contributions from Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen for their third record, 1994’s Freak City Soundtrack, it failed to lift the band out of their slump. Ellison’s ideas in their purest form were strong enough to carry an album without a budget or expensive mastering, and their sound was hampered by additional money and time. The album sold less than 50,000 copies, and Mercury dropped the band within a year.
Material Issue was so predicated on forward momentum that Ellison couldn’t reconcile their fall from grace. He might have been a notoriously boastful frontman, but that was because he believed his music spoke to a collective pop truth that transcended the band. “He thought he had tapped into something universally great,” Steve Albini said later in the 2021 Material Issue documentary Out of Time. Ellison had tapped into what he thought was the core of the great American pop subconscious and found its heart beating in 4/4 time, yearning for someone to come along just to feel anything, even heartbreak. And though the band continued to work on new music in the years following Freak City Soundtrack—including several covers with Ellison’s close friend, the newly ascendant post-Exile in Guyville Liz Phair—there was a sense that Material Issue had stalled.
“Anyone who knew Jim personally knew what it was to be touched by the light of his star,” Phair said later. It seemed surreal, then, when the news came that he had died by suicide on June 20, 1996. By all accounts, it wasn’t meant to be the end for Ellison. He had just joined a local supergroup Wild Bunch with members of Guns N’ Roses and Blondie, and was co-writing songs with Phair at the height of her success. Appropriately, Material Issue played what would be their last show at Metro, one of the Chicago venues that helped launch their career five years earlier.
Two years after Ellison’s death, fanzine writer David Bash founded the International Pop Overthrow festival in Los Angeles, in tribute to Ellison. For International Pop Overthrow’s 20th anniversary, the band reunited at the festival, fronted by local musician Phil Agnotti, as “Material Re-Issue.” And though their debut has been remastered in the years since its release, their original recordings sound just as vital as the day they were made. The band’s debut crackles with the energy of a fighter finally getting his chance in the ring, shining with a glimmer of that universal truth Ellison eternally strived to reach. Of course, Ellison put it briefest and best: “We just rock—that’s it.”


Young’s fourth album of the century with his most famous band is simple and heartfelt, gritty and tender.

Colorado

Many have tried, but no one plays guitar quite like Neil Young. He solos like something’s buried under the fretboard that he’s trying to dig out. When he transposes to acoustic settings, the inertia of his playing can cause his legs to cycle up and down wildly, a source of energy traveling through his entire body, dissipating in the lonesome exhaust of his fragile singing voice and harmonica playing. Even when he was a young man, this sound expressed a world-weariness that complemented his lyrics. But his music always seemed engineered to age with him—to rust and burn and keep on going.
No group better suits this sensibility than Crazy Horse, the pared-down accompanists he first recruited for his sophomore album, 1969’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. The band—which then featured the late guitarist Danny Whitten, bassist Billy Talbot, and drummer Ralph Molina—were built to tear things up. They kept it simple. Young’s guitar solos sometimes consisted of just one note, looped and clipping until the whole band seemed to lock in place with him. And while Young explored a wide variety of genres in the following decades, from pastoral country to arena rock to instrumental guitar, this primal sound will always be the one most closely associated with him.
So when Young reassembles Crazy Horse for new music, there are always heightened expectations. Colorado marks their fourth studio album of the 21st century, following a dense concept album (2003’s Greendale), an unremarkable set of royalty-free cover songs (2012’s Americana), and a brilliantly meandering double album (2012’s Psychedelic Pill). Situated around those releases have been a spotty run of albums (even by Young’s standards), building toward his most inscrutable era since the ’80s. Young himself seems to acknowledge his current standards in the accompanying documentary Mountaintop, as he instructs his reunited bandmates to work quickly but meaningfully during its 11-day sessions. “It doesn’t have to be good,” he instructs. “Just feel good.”
Despite his empowering mantra, a dark cloud hangs over Colorado. Its songs are furious (“Help Me Lose My Mind”), haunted (“Milky Way”), and remorseful (“Green Is Blue”). In “She Showed Me Love,” the closest thing this album has to a characteristic Crazy Horse epic, Young sings about a new generation carrying the torch for climate change and imagines how they might view him. “You might say I’m an old white guy,” he speak-sings. “I saw old white guys trying to kill mother nature.” It goes without saying that the “she” in the song title refers to our planet, and the past tense refers to the shortening timelines of both the narrator and subject. The long jam eventually slows to a trudge and makes sure you feel every passing minute.
The rest of the record is shaded with subdued tones. In addition to Young’s old bandmates Talbot and Molina, he’s accompanied by Nils Lofgren—the E Street Band guitarist who also played with Young on career highlights After the Gold Rush and Tonight’s the Night. While Lofgren is best known for a near-athletic virtuosity, here he mostly colors in the lines. (His tap-dancing percussion in the sweet, Sleeps With Angels-referencing “Eternity” is the clearest showcase for his gifts.) Even for Crazy Horse, the music is simple but heartfelt. On tracks like “Olden Days” and “Rainbow of Colors,” Young’s basic folk melodies are rendered grittier and heavier by the band, if no less tender.
“When you see those geese in the sky, think of me,” go the album’s opening lines, and Young often sings from this distance, watching over a world without him. Outside a few words of gratitude in the gorgeous closing track “I Do,” his lyrics rarely seem autobiographical, but they do seem newly focused and reflective. And while the documentary is certainly not the most riveting film Young’s put his name to (highlights include a story about producer John Hanlon getting poison oak), it does occasionally offer a pure snapshot of his creative process. Seeing how ecstatic Young gets over a subtle tambourine part in “Olden Days” may permanently alter how you hear that song. It offers a reminder of his passion, how the studio remains a source of excitement and joy after all these years.
And yet, if it were up to him, none of us would be listening to this album in its final form. “I get to hear it the way we made it. Too bad about most of you,” he wrote on his website, bemoaning the current state of sound quality via streaming. The concern speaks to a lifelong battle with the industry, also discussed in his new 240-page book, but it also speaks to the struggle he’s faced as a solo recording artist this decade. Whether food justice or the destruction of the planet, his muses have often seemed muffled or misconstrued when they finally reach the market. Colorado surpasses those recent works by speaking directly to that ephemeral nature of life, our tragedies and joys and disappointments. “There’s so much we didn’t do,” Young and his bandmates sing together, their ages averaging around 73, in a ballad called “Green Is Blue.” And if one thing has remained unwavering about them, it’s that you know they mean every word.

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The British producer’s debut full-length illustrates her gift for rewiring jungle into arena-sized pop catharsis.

Silence Is Loud

The self-described “emotional junglist” Nia Archives sings cursive melodies over some of the most relentless breakbeats you’ve ever heard. It’s the sound of 100 thoughts racing through your head when you realize your situationship lied to you. A few years ago, she was balancing school with a job at the UK pub chain Wetherspoons, paying out of pocket for Instagram ads to promote her first song. Soon, she became a leader of a widespread jungle and drum’n’bass revival alongside artists like dazegxd and SHERELLE. The scene has had a slew of TikTok hits and bite-sized EPs, but no defining project—until now.
Silence Is Loud injects jungle with the glittery immediacy of pop ballads. It’s emo and elated, a diary blown up into sleek yet sensitive anthems made for arena-sized catharsis. Nia is a jungle obsessive, but she’s more concerned with honoring its culture and history than imitating any one of the myriad strains spawned in its ’90s golden age. In one interview, she describes her broad interpretation of the genre as “modern-day punk music in a dance space.” This loose understanding explains why her style has always been so malleable and unruly (for starters, on her last EP, she rewired the genre with bossa nova and sped-up Brazilian body music).
She’s keen to reshape a genre historically piloted by men, in which producers rarely reference their personal lives. Nia sings fiercely about things like unrequited desire, spinning out into soulful melodies and gleaming trills. The percussion simultaneously buries and intensifies her voice, giving her cover to unleash distressing fears. On “F.A.M.I.L.Y,” Nia talks about feeling alienated from her relatives, but the molten bass and singalong chorus nearly trick you into thinking it’s a positive power-bop. “Nightmares” possesses the vitriol of a novella-length hate text: Nia disses a lying man with such jaunty keys and cheeky moxie that it’ll make even the fuckboys smile.
While the music aspires to feel both clubby and confessional, many songs offer only vague sketches of emotional conflicts, trading concrete details for catchy rhymes. This works on “Cards on the Table,” where she somersaults across the guitars’ spindly groove. But it can also feel too neat and radio-packaged; the smooth vocal rhythm sometimes misaligns with the prickly worries she’s sharing. In the absence of nuanced insights or anecdotal texture, her struggles can come across trite at times—like, who hasn’t felt lonely in a crowded room?
But maybe emotional specificity isn’t the whole point. Instead, it’s this combo of party-hard sincerity that makes her music so punchy, like she’s animatedly telling secrets to a friend while wildly raving. And unlike the madcap cyber junglists of today, who adorn beats in delirious fuzz and frazzled digi-chaos, she hews closely to the pristine angularity of classic jungle percussion, each drum hitting with a satisfying sharpness. She’s the modern link between the genre’s past and present, palling around with new-gen producers and ’90s pioneers alike; Goldie makes a brief cameo on the dizzyingly lovesick “Tell Me What It’s Like?” to pump her up.
In the process of supersizing her sound, Nia has lost some of the subtle charm that made her early music so addictive. Where listening to tunes like 2022’s “Gud Gudbyez” felt like peering into a raver’s daydream reveries, these songs sound like they’re built for a massive loudspeaker. And the instrumental flourishes that made her wilder music feel thrillingly delirious, like eclectic samples and pockets of wistful ambience, have been replaced by flashy guitar and synth.
Nia’s jungle R&B reaches peak intoxication when the tunes feel less calibrated to bounce around your brain forever and more like misty hallucinations. There’s “So Tell Me,” a complaint about mistreatment that sounds like she’s addicted to the ouroboros of overthinking. Shimmery, reversed synths and Nia’s reverb-laden lilt conjure the image of an angel skating across the plush surface of a cloud. The entrancingly eerie “Forbidden Feelingz” shatters her voice into high-pitched shards, its dusty Columbo sample charging the air with a kind of haunted electricity like the Avalanches’ “Frontier Psychiatrist.” It makes Nia’s music feel like an aural lenticular print superimposing the 2020s onto the ’90s.
The most moving tune might be the only one without drums. It’s a reprise of the title track, an affectionate ode to her brother Zac that convulses with neon vocal fragments and a pulse manic enough for a hyperpop street carnival. The sequel opens with a voice note from her brother asking after her and praising the music, before dissolving into a piano ballad with a closing sample of ecstatic crowd cheers. A canny triumph of self-remixing, the song foregrounds community warmth and celebrates the people who make her happy. It’s tricky to revive a genre closely associated with a brief time period and specific sonic attributes. Haters say you don’t make real jungle. Critics constantly compare you to the genre’s pioneers. There’s nothing woefully timestuck about these sensitive dance songs, though. They’re made by someone living passionately in the moment and rushing into the future at breakbeat speed.


The latest from Roberto Carlos Lange's electronic pop project is a melodic and beautifully produced meditation on identity and the difficulty of connection.

Private Energy

In Isaac Asimov’s short story “Runaround,” a robot in 2015 AD named Speedy becomes caught in a feedback loop; programmed to follow the laws of robotics, it becomes disabled when a command from a human (law no. 2) puts its own existence at risk (law no. 3). Stuck between the moral principles that guide it, the robot oscillates between being close enough to danger to require retreat and being far enough that it deems it safe to carry out its orders. Drunk off the cognitive dissonance, its speech becomes nonsensical, and Speedy becomes unable to accept new commands.
In the summer of 2014 AD, Roberto Carlos Lange, fresh off a tour performing as Helado Negro in support of his 2014 album Double Youth, was exhausted and weary about his future. St. Louis County prosecutor Bob McCulloch had just announced that there would be no indictment of the officer that killed Michael Brown, and Lange watched as his country publicly fractured along racial lines, wondering where he fit in. A child of Ecuadorian immigrants, the Florida-born musician had a decidedly pluralistic American experience, straddling both the old world and the new while never being fully accepted by either. Unfamiliar and uncomfortable with the idea of being on the front lines and protesting in the street, he looked inward, and started writing songs.
The songs he sat down to write would become Private Energy, Helado Negro’s fifth LP. The quandary faced by Asimov’s robot Speedy—a being conflicted by contradictions in his own identity—is mirrored by Lange’s experience. “Runaround,” one of the first cuts he wrote for Private Energy, is directly inspired by Asimov’s story, and even cribs some of its lyrics from Speedy’s nonsensical musings (“Hot dog, let’s play games/You catch me and I catch you/no love can cut our knife in two”). Lange has recorded music under a few monikers—Epstein, OMBRE, his own name—but for the last decade, he’s used the Helado Negro project to explore his sense of self. From his debut Awe Owe through Double Youth, most of his lyrics have been in Spanish, and most of his shows performed for people who speak English. It’s a quirk of the Latin diaspora, with artists such as Algódon Egipcio, Xenia Rubinos, and Ela Minus sharing the experience of finding an English-speaking audience for their Spanish-language music.
For Lange, it helps that sonically, the album might be his most accessible yet; half the lyrics are in English, and the abstract sound sculptures that dotted his earlier work are carefully arranged into an orderly sequence as instrumental interludes (“Obra Uno”-“Obra Cuatro”). He takes license with his Spanish, twisting words and phrases to fit his melodies, and he changes the gender of his perspective (“porque soy una mujer/porque sigo siendo tu hombre”) as easily as his adjectives (“tus ojos tan claras”). It’s difficult to find artists with a comparable sound, but the puzzle pieces feel familiar—some Blood Orange horns here, some Peter Bjorn and John bass there, even a dash of some Erlend Øye synths. The music is confident but unaggressive; Even as he experiments with abrasive textures that wouldn’t sound out of place on an Arca record (“Mi Mano”), the songs are draped in a shimmering sheen. The album is anchored by Lange’s soothing croon; it’s not hard to hear echoes of Julio Jaramillo, a “sappy Ecuadorean crooner” that was a favorite of his father’s. He plays guitar and the keys, samples records, live players, and field recordings, manipulating them beyond recognition and arranging them in pop song structures, and with considerably more skill than on 2009’s Spanish-language beach soundtrack Awe Owe.
Lange’s songwriting process has always been a solitary one—even when he collaborates, players will track music and then leave him to his own devices, to assemble the puzzle pieces. And while every Helado Negro record has been made at Lange’s home, he spent most of 2015 workshopping Private Energy in public. The songs were essentially finished in January 2015, but he took them on the road—including nine dates with Sufjan Stevens—pulling feedback from the crowd’s energy in real-time, fine-tuning the compositions. He used a $50,000 prize from the Joyce Foundation to help fund an 18-piece ensemble in St. Paul, Minnesota, working with his composer friends Jason Ajemian and Trey Pollard to meticulously arrange his oeuvre for the big stage. Seasoned from a year on the road, he finally re-recorded the Private Energy songs in January 2016.
Private Energy may gaze inward, but its themes are rooted in these connections with others. When he sings of waking up feeling “Young, Latin and Proud,” that pride and power is rooted in a shared history and culture. He has an intimate relationship with the skin that covers his body, but it’s an experience shared by every brown person on earth. He seeks to reconcile the transference of energy involved in recording and performing music (“We Don’t Have Time for That”) and the celebration of everything about being Latinx that feels great, terrible, or even just confusing. That same dark skin that protects him from the sun’s rays makes him vulnerable; too dark for white people, too light for black people, his Spanish too foreign for some Americans but too gringo outside the U.S.
This desire to connect with others is fundamental, but it’s the parts we choose to share that define our relationships and, ultimately, ourselves. On “Transmission Listen,” Lange sings paradoxical couplets to a lover as starry synths twinkle in the background (“And I feel invincible without your wisdom/But I feel invisible without your wit”). Human ingenuity has joined them via satellite, but they can’t be honest enough with each other to actually come together. Here, and throughout the album, he probes the depths of his own psyche, masking the painful process with a velvet voice. Lange seems to be asking if it’s even possible to let other people in without first reconciling your own identity. Which parts should be private, and which parts should be shared? He’s caught in between the incongruous parts of himself, and the sentiment permeates the entirety of Private Energy.


The Bristol native, now a London resident, maps the links between the two cities’ dance-music traditions in a four-track EP that infuses club energy with headphone-friendly nuance.

Thousand Year Stare

At the end of last year, a new high-speed train started running from Bristol to London. Touted as a win for commuters and the environment, it also piqued the interest of the real estate market, which is rarely good news for renters—some of whom are the artists that gave Bristol its appeal in the first place. The two cities have long been linked; historically by the long shadow of British colonialism, and culturally by a shared heritage of black British music. While their music scenes are indebted to much of the same sonic DNA—most notably, Jamaican soundsystem culture—having some distance from the bright lights of London allowed something different to sprout in the West Country. From trip-hop to purple to UK techno permutations that imagine new journeys between the U.S., the Caribbean, and the UK, Bristol has long been on its own wave.
Otik grew up in Bristol but now lives in London. Over the past six years, he’s put out a string of 12"s and EPs that each dip into a different facet, and era, of the music that grew from the seeds sown by dancehall soundsystems: jungle, UK garage, grime, dub techno. His new four-track release, Thousand Year Stare, is both a culmination of his stylistic exploration and a break from that pattern. While it was clearly designed with dancefloor dimensions in mind, what lifts the record up out of solely DJ tool territory is the storytelling detail that headphones illuminate.
The sound design of the EP’s title track—moving water, birdcall, and expansive effects like echo and reverb—sensually describes a bodily experience of standing in nature. There’s an all-back-to-mine ambient-house spirit to the song, one that speaks to dancing as a form of meditation. The name of the track remixes a phrase that describes the dissociative stare of a person with extreme trauma.
Where “Thousand Year Stare” created an endless horizon, “Antihero” is awash with a sense of towering dread. The eerie techno track’s central see-sawing creak of a synth line evokes the claustrophobia of a cornfield, something that decades of horror movies have amped up. In comparison, “Ghost Mole” plays on ideas of interiors. The bass, drums, and digital percussion—including what might be pitched-up rave whistles—sound like they are bouncing off the plastic and concrete surfaces of a built environment. Around the halfway mark, the treatment of the bass and the higher frequencies suggests a second interior: the one inside your own chest. These augmented sounds call to mind rushing air and pounding blood.
If the rest of the EP speaks to a sense of physicality, the final track, “Means Nothing,” performs an act of transcendence. Folding dream-state dancehall energy into the sunrise moment of a rave set, it takes interiority to its ultimate conclusion. Otik has called Burial, an artist whose music is closely associated with the wandering-wondering experience of traversing London by night bus, his “all-time favourite musician.” Thousand Year Stare does not sound like Burial, but it does paint a picture of a Bristol producer coming into his psychogeographic powers.


The new collaboration between the prolific Dan Melchior and Austin’s Spray Paint make mountains out of mantras across a jammy, post-punk album that barrels like an 18-wheeler down the highway.

Contributors

The music of Austin trio Spray Paint is simple but potent. Relying heavily on repetition, they use clanging guitar, motorik beats, and nervous singing to make music that can both wind you up and give you the chills. In just six years, they’ve mined this formula for six gripping, high-strung albums. If their distinctive post-punk hasn’t gotten its due, maybe that’s because Spray Paint aren’t easy to keep up with.
That’s a situation Dan Melchior knows well. Since the late ’90s, the British-born musician has generated over 30 solo releases and with his bands Broke Revue, Dan Melchior Und Das Menace, and the Lloyd Pack, a sprawling oeuvre that’s difficult to sum up. His sonic signature is more varied than Spray Paint’s, but he shares with them a knack for picking an idea and sticking to it. That single-eyed patience is a key to Contributors, a new collaboration between Spray Paint and Melchior (along with Will Slack from Austin band Soft Healer). During their self-titled album’s six tracks—most of which last six minutes or more—the group make mountains out of mantras, propelling forward like an 18-wheeler barreling down a highway.
The fuzzed out, driving pulse of Contributors is there from the beginning. Opener “Aiport Girl” starts with a single beeping tone, soon supplemented by a pounding beat and a chiming guitar note. Over the top, Melchior repeats questions about the song’s title character—“Why does she work so hard? Who is she working so hard for?”—until they become unanswerable Zen koans. As the tune progresses, none of its basic elements change much, but building momentum helps Contributors shift into ever higher gears. “Airport Girls” gains gravity through sheer centrifugal force.
The rest of Contributors follows a similar path. Simple loops of beat and melody escalate throughout. Small modulations in guitar volume and density help each song avoid monotony while maintaining stability. Melchior’s semi-spoken deadpan—which isn’t far from Spray Paint’s flat shouts—adds to the perpetual motion, but his wry bite is also surprisingly subtle. He’ll repeat a phrase as if photocopying the one before, then alter his tone slightly, poking bubbles of drama through the music’s steely surface. This works best on “Reef of Regret,” as Melchior attacks the title from enough angles that the effect is both smoothly hypnotic and oddly disturbing.
It can be easy, and enjoyable, to settle into Contributors’ grooves as if you’re cruising the Autobahn. But along the way, there’s always something slightly unsettling going on. That’s why even when they let up on the gas—take the slow, echoey “Clumsy Hands” or the near-bluesy plod of “Lazy”—the tension doesn’t recede. (The way Melchior bites off the lines in “Lazy” is particularly creepy, like he’s stalking the music). In that sense, Contributors lives up to the pedigree of its participants, working on different levels while merging into one unified lane.


The Los Angeles composer—son of late Fluxus composer Yoshi Wada—flexes his avant-garde instincts on a surprisingly song-driven new album, moving from abstraction into more expressive forms.

What Is Not Strange?

Tashi Wada was born into the avant-garde. Growing up in a building shared by Fluxus artists, Wada lived next door to the choreographer Simone Forti. Video artist Nam June Paik was in the apartment upstairs. His father, legendary composer Yoshi Wada, worked as a plumber by day and an artist by night, stretching the limits of minimalism by incorporating Scottish bagpipes and Indian ragas. Tashi’s own work is rarely described without reference to those pioneering drones, but he shrugs off questions about paternal influence. “Sometimes I have a sense of how my work is perceived in relation to my father’s, but I tend to limit my understanding to my own personal space and how I feel about it,” he said in a 2019 interview. “I leave the rest to the world to sort out.”
While the younger Wada’s musical output is certainly related to the elder’s, it’s no imitation. Yoshi tended toward grand gestures, recording bagpipes in an empty swimming pool or composing for startlingly loud auditory flares normally used for nautical emergencies. Tashi is more academic, preferring to generate microtones with unusual tuning systems rather than through massive volume. After studying with James Tenney, he forged a link between the Fluxus movement and a newer generation of artists centered around the CalArts music program. The 2018 album Nue, credited to Tashi Wada with Yoshi Wada and Friends, represented a passing of the torch: Yoshi and Forti featured alongside CalArts alums Julia Holter and Corey Fogel. With What Is Not Strange?, Wada takes the next step, moving from the periphery of his father’s community to the center of his own and demonstrating a newfound maturity as a composer in the process.
The biggest surprise here is that Wada has written honest-to-goodness songs, albeit rather strange ones. This shift is due in part to life events that drew him away from abstraction and toward more expressive forms. In the years after Nue, Yoshi passed away and Tashi had a child with Holter, his partner. “Grand Trine,” a sprightly chamber-pop number, celebrates their daughter. Its title refers to three planets forming an equilateral triangle on her astrological chart, but the trio of father, mother, and daughter is clearly the song’s subject. “She is my star,” Holter croons over elegant harpsichord and strings. The instrumentation leaps to abrupt climaxes only to fade away again and again, like surges of joy that dissipate only to return with renewed vigor. But the mood is troubled in the following song, “Revealed Night,” which is built on an urban field recording of sirens in the distance, evoking the pandemic into which she was born.
The microtonal minimalism of Wada’s early compositions appears as well. The back half of the album drifts away from song-based pieces into an ocean of drones that uneasily ebbs and flows, with seasick synths tuned in an obscure 18th-century temperament that makes even a triumphant crescendo sound dissonant to modern ears. The nadir of this section is “Calling,” a dead-calm wash of strings and synths, but the wave crests again with “Plume,” which patiently builds into a dramatically spiraling finale.
Wada is best as a bandleader who lets his extensive knowledge of alternate tunings inform, rather than dictate, the shape of his tracks. At times, he trades his austere minimalism for rambunctious maximalism, letting his bandmates—experienced noise-makers all—explore the parameters he has set. “Flame of Perfect Form” is a sizzling freeform workout that, at its peak, recalls the psychedelic barrage of Acid Mothers Temple, while “Subaru” deploys just intonation in the service of a slightly off-kilter earworm melody that’s all the more memorable for its odd tonal character.
The album ends with “This World’s Beauty,” a delicate miniature that again combines Holter’s vocals with Wada’s harpsichord. Its graceful and compact form, just 1:40 long, is the closest to a standard verse-chorus-verse tune in Wada’s discography. But on an album full of surprising detours, it represents his breakthrough: a simple statement of purpose from a composer newly confident in his abilities. With What Is Not Strange?, Wada honors his father’s legacy, but he also begins to carve out his own.


Mike Hadreas' powerful second album addresses personal traumas like physical abuse, drug addiction, and desperation, but, unlike his 2010 debut Learning, some light shines through the darkness.

Put Your Back N 2 It

How do we deal with personal trauma? After it's over, what comes next? These are some of the Big Questions Seattle singer/songwriter Mike Hadreas addresses on his second album as Perfume Genius. Put Your Back N 2 It follows Hadreas' overlooked 2010 debut, Learning, and it feels like a proper sequel to that album's suite of dysfunction and devastation. On his first album, Hadreas tackled subjects such as molestation, substance abuse, suicide, the complications of inappropriate sexual relationships, and the struggle for acceptance from those you love. The morose subject matter and melodic simplicity of Learning's piano-based songs drew comparisons to indie-pop artists like Stephin Merritt and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone's Owen Ashworth. But Hadreas' ability to set a scene and convey detail, which brought to mind Sufjan Stevens circa Seven Swans, lent the songs extra force. There were moments of impressionistic, synth-smeared beauty on that first record, but the overriding sense of despair and hopelessness could be overwhelming. On Put Your Back N 2 It, there's a crack of light coming through the darkness.
Hadreas is still exploring the more harrowing corners of human behavior. "Dark Parts" details the abuse his mother suffered at the hands of her grandfather; opener "AWOL Marine" takes inspiration from a tape of homemade pornography that Hadreas viewed, in which one of the participants admits, camera still rolling, that he's just trying to get medication for his wife. "Floating Spit" also deals with drug addiction, "Take Me Home" explores prostitution in the context of the need to be loved, while "17" uses a metaphor of a body stuffed into a violin, covered in semen, and hung up on a fence to shine a light on corrosive self-loathing. So don't let the whimsical album title fool you: If you're looking for something low-key to vibe out to, you've come to the wrong place.
The "light" the album allows has to do with how Hadreas approaches the material. He has a brilliant feel for poetic imagery ("The hands of God were bigger than grandpa's eyes/ But still he broke the elastic on your waist," from "Dark Parts", is particularly haunting), but he's mostly moved away from storytelling to explore emotional themes at their most fundamental. Put Your Back N 2 It is an album about love-- what happens when we feel sheltered by it, how we fail to love ourselves and the people around us-- but amidst the heartache and bruised tenderness, there's hope, too. Hadreas sums it all up in the hollowed-out torch song "No Tear": "I will carry on with grace."
For all its violence, Back radiates warmth. Much of the beauty is due to the expanded instrumentation, from the swooning, countryish guitar bends of "Take Me Home" to the interspersed snare rolls on "No Tear". The brutal low fidelity of Learning is gone, replaced with clarity and sonic intimacy that, when paired with these rich songs, raises every hair on the back of your neck. The more expansive sound gives room for experimentation, from the submerged electronic percussion on "Floating Spit" (contributed by UK producer David Edwards, aka Minotaur Shock) to the robust and surprising full-band blast of "Hood". The latter, with its bloom-and-burst structure, is the perfect example of Hadreas' growth as a melodic songwriter, having moved well beyond the the functional melodies that marked Learning.
Many of these songs-- "Hood", "All Waters", "Take Me Home", "17"-- forego resolution and basically build tension and drop everything, in silence. Hadreas likes to steer clear of cathartic release, since in this world, there is no easy way out. On "All Waters", he begins singing in a low register and ends in his highest falsetto, as the song dissolves in wordless cries and frissons of far-away distortion. The song is a wish for a world where he and his boyfriend, Alan Wyffels (who also serves as his main musical collaborator), can hold hands in public without fear, and the lyrics ("When all waters still/ And flowers cover the earth") suggest that it's not going to happen any time soon.
Mike Hadreas is gay, and many of the songs here focus on the issues that young gay men face in their lives (he referred to "17" in a press release as "a gay suicide letter"), even as Back's sustained exploration of love and hate has resonance for anyone. There is a lot of him in this music, the minutiae obviously pulled from a single person's life and experiences. But the album is less about confession as a form of release and more about trying to bring something positive into the world. "I don't want it to seem like I've been through more than other people...", he says in promotional materials for the album. "Staying healthy can be more depressing and confusing than being fucked up. But I want to make music that's honest and hopeful."
With so much recent conversation about marriage equality and gay teen suicide, and with the predictable election-year demonization of homosexuality, Mike Hadreas' work is not only satisfying on a purely musical level, it also feels of-the-moment and above all necessary (it's so topical, he found himself in the middle of a standards-of-decency "family values" battle earlier this year between his label, Matador, and internet-media titans Google and YouTube). Independent music has woefully few artists dealing with these issues and asking difficult questions, and doing so in a context that never forgets about the importance of songwriting. That's a disappointment, but at least a handful of people like Hadreas are doing something about it.


On her second album, the Texas-born, Charlottesville-based singer-songwriter traces generous circles around nebulous feelings; her songs seem to emerge from deep stillness.

The Window Is the Dream

When Jana Horn was writing songs for The Window Is the Dream, she had almost no access to music—her record player, laptop, and phone were all broken. “I didn’t hurry to have them fixed,” she admitted. The only CD in her car was the Fall’s 50,000 Fall Fans Can’t Be Wrong, to which she listened on loop until it lived in her memory and she didn’t need the CD anymore. “I just think I require quiet,” she told Paste. “I need to be able to hear myself think.”
The Window Is the Dream, the Texas-born, Charlottesville-based singer-songwriter’s second LP in two years, has an exquisite clarity. Even more than on Optimism, the songs seems to emerge from deep stillness. It feels like music made by a mind washed clean by restorative silence.
If Optimism was mostly focused on Horn’s quizzical singing and jewel-cut lyrics, The Window Is the Dream is a band-in-a-room record. To assemble it, Horn recruited an extraordinary group of Austin musicians, including experimental guitarist Jonathan Horne, percussionist Adam Jones, and multi-instrumentalist Jared Samuel Elioseff (piano, synth, bass, and classical guitar). Together, they holed up in a barn that was halfway along its conversion to a studio; Horn would sometimes set down her guitar between sessions, then get down on all fours to lay bathroom tile.
The longer The Window Is the Dream goes on, the more clearly you can perceive the contours of that room and the presence of the musicians playing in it. On “Song for Eve,” Horne lets off a remarkable solo, a speckle of notes high on the neck that feels as vivid as a cameo. Jones’ simple cross-stick drumming pattern on “After All This Time” is hypnotizing. The implied light in the room is late-summer, every instrument framed by its own clean shadow. You hear the whisper of Horn’s thumb calluses on the bottom strings, feel her breath as it touches the pop filter.
On record, Horn cuts an unassuming presence. Her inflections are conversational, and her impressionistic guitar playing usually consists of just a few bass notes. But something in her tone and sensitive touch suggests technical skill intentionally held in reserve. For Horn, the words are the thing, and she delivers her words as if coaxing dark shapes to the surface.
Her lyrics often read like prose on the page, but she finds ways to bend them into melodic shapes it’s difficult to imagine anyone else finding. Take this stretch from “Days Go By”: “Maybe one thing doesn’t lead to the next;/Two sides of a coin are not the head leading to the tail./I didn’t mean to say that; on a different note/I’m listening to the sound of everything going on without you.” It sounds unsingable, like something from a Robert Ashley opera, and yet she finds a way to make you hum it.
Horn has called her lyrics “thoughts about thoughts.” She traces generous circles around nebulous feelings, allowing you to step into them. She wants, more than anything else, to get out of the way of something bigger than her. On the almost-title track “The Dream,” she offers something close to a mission statement: “The last thing I want in this breath of existence/Is not to throw myself into it/As any bird might stop flying/When the window is the dream.”  Is this an ambiguous statement of surrender? A warning? A vision of her own death? Horn is generous enough to allow us to dream our own way through.


The former Ought members’ second album balances economy with exploration, reaffirming their place in a lineage of prickly, leftfield guitar rock.

The Gloss

In the dozen or so years that Tim Darcy and Ben Stidworthy have been playing together—first in Ought, and now, with drummer Evan Cartwright, as Cola—their music’s defining characteristics haven’t changed much. The two still specialize in a knotty, post-punky brand of indie rock embedded with cryptic yet conversational observations about maintaining one’s sanity in the modern world. But when you compare Ought’s 2014 debut, More Than Any Other Day, to the music Cola are making now, it’s like listening to completely different musicians—and the contrast goes beyond the fact that their current trio seemingly has no use for a keyboardist. Ought always sounded like a band in flux, unfurling their tightly wound sound for deeper explorations in drone and groove, while Darcy wielded his mercurial voice with theatrical aplomb. But Cola’s second album, The Gloss, is a model of focus, precision, and economy—the sound of players who know exactly who they are and what they want to do.
Listening to The Gloss feels a lot like sitting in on a practice session in a windowless jam space the night before a gig—a nervous, claustrophobic tension hangs in the air, but everyone is completely locked in and buzzing with energy. Unlike like their pandemic-spawned, file-swapped 2022 debut, Deep in View, The Gloss was recorded as Cola came into their own as a touring act, and as such, the album foregrounds their intuition and rapport and keeps their spoken-word piano-jazz proclivities at bay. But while The Gloss renews Cola’s membership in a fraternity of prickly, leftfield guitar rock that runs through Television, Sonic Youth, and Women, they use their discord less to agitate than ingratiate.
These tracks are largely confined to three-minute bursts, but each exhibits that special sense of discovery that results when close friends instinctively follow one another’s lead, and a simple chord change or strategic pause can instantly transform a song’s essence. Cuts like “Tracing Hallmarks” tick all the boxes on the contemporary post-punk checklist—jabbing guitar lines, propulsive rhythms, staccato phrasing—but they also shift into surprisingly congenial choruses that lend Cola uncommon lightness and levity. On “Albatross,” Darcy sings, “I’m a lame horse with an optimistic mind,” making explicit a theme running throughout: In a world that’s constantly trying to beat you down, staying positive constitutes an act of radicalism.
Like Stephen Malkmus, Darcy favors language that’s equally evocative and enigmatic, routinely blurring the line between the sardonic and sincere. His most pointed social commentary comes through on “Down to Size,” which suggests an urban activist version of the Strokes: the song revisits the topic of gentrification previously referenced on Ought’s 2015 slow-burning masterpiece “Beautiful Blue Sky,” but at a more frantic pace that mirrors the ruthless breakneck speed of development. More often, he takes delight in overarching metaphors that simultaneously obscure and amplify his intent, whether using journalist lingo to frame a couple’s communication breakdown (“Pulling Quotes”) or invoking film-set imagery to highlight the performative aspects of daily life. (“My taste is avant-poor,” he cheekily declares on “Pallor Tricks,” and somewhere, a slumming trust-fund kid weeps.)
If Darcy’s lyrics require putting in some work to decode them, the band makes musical immersion easy by consistently striking the familiar balance of dissonant sound, disjointed melody, and bone-dry production that defined indie rock’s late-’80s/early-’90s golden age, before synths, string sections, and festival-baiting choruses became de rigueur. When you hear Cola cruise on the perfect-sound-forever groove of “Nice Try” or unleash the clang and clamor of “Bell Wheel,” the effect is as poignant as it is powerful. The Gloss is a reassuring reminder that, however many iconoclastic rock heroes have recently fallen, their legacies are in good hands.


The country singer was “raised on heartache,” but her latest album is a triumphant testament to the way that Wyatt has outpaced her demons.

Neon Cross

The last time we heard from Jaime Wyatt, she was at the start of a bad spiral. Covering Merle Haggard’s “Misery and Gin” at the end of her 2017 debut Felony Blues, the Nashville country singer succumbed to her loneliest thoughts, “sitting with all my friends and talking to myself.” Now, she’s all but abandoned. Her latest album, Neon Cross, begins with the slowest of slow burns: a lush, stately piano ballad called “Sweet Mess.” Even more than its hopeless lyrics or gentle rainfall of piano and pedal steel, you’re left hanging onto her voice—a smoky, one-of-a-kind instrument. Just from a few notes, you might imagine it echoing from the darkest corner of a bar, from someone with a troubled past and a long, sad story to tell. And you would be right.
Raised in rural Washington, Jaime Wyatt headed to California as a teenager with the hopes of breaking into the music industry. Instead, she found herself in personal and professional hell. She turned to hard drugs and, at 21, was arrested for robbing her heroin dealer. After serving eight months in jail and getting clean, her marriage fell apart; she relapsed after the death of her father and several of her closest friends. Some of these experiences, soundtracked by boozy, swaggering outlaw country, made their way onto Felony Blues, a tight, seven-song introduction that confirmed her as one of the genre’s most exciting and skillful storytellers. But “Sweet Mess” is her first song that suggests a darkness from which she can’t escape. It is beautiful, enveloping, and totally bleak.
It is also an outlier. For the most part, Neon Cross is another triumphant record that speaks to the ways in which Wyatt has overcome these situations. She wrote most of its songs after recovering from addiction and coming out as gay: “I lost years of my life being in the closet and living a lie and trying to be someone else,” she explained. “I just can’t do it anymore.” The title track immediately feels like her defining song. Over a galloping rhythm and jangling acoustic guitars, she allows for winking, momentary self-pity: “So sad, goddamn/I’m wearing some pitiful perfume.” But the way she sings it, it seems more like a rallying cry, an effort to turn the car around and make the most of the night. A refrain of “Oh, poor me!” has never seemed so hopeful.
The rest of the songs follow suit, searching for silver linings, or at the very least, a good punchline. She recorded the album with fellow outlaw revivalist Shooter Jennings, who expands on the old-school blueprint of Felony Blues to match these songs’ wide-ranging emotions. You can sense the pair digging through their record collections to find just the right texture. A brief twinkle of keyboard at the end of “Just a Woman”—a duet with Jennings’ mother, country legend Jessi Colter—sounds straight out of an ’80s jukebox classic, while the ghostly fiddle and pedal steel in her rendition of Dax Riggs’ “Demon Tied to a Chair in My Brain” make it sound more like an unearthed Carter Family standard. There is a cumulative feeling to the music, like Wyatt is placing herself within a deep history of folk wisdom.
While Neon Cross highlights the versatility of Wyatt’s gorgeous, commanding voice, she finds her comfort zone in singalong anthems like “Goodbye Queen.” It’s got a sunny, windows-down charm that feels perfectly suited to the timeless grain of her singing. She mines similar territory in “Make Something Outta Me,” a callback to her last record’s more overtly autobiographical material. This time around, she embellishes her past with self-effacing humor as she zooms through her last 15 years, cracking jokes about her regrets, her online dating profile, and her fatalist tendencies. “I was raised on heartache,” she sings, “So I like to suffer slow.” It’s a clever lyric that should ring true for anyone who, like her, gravitates toward sad songs with dark, inevitable endings. But Wyatt wants you to know that’s not how she sees herself. On Neon Cross, her story is just beginning.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Nearly 50 years after he recorded perhaps the first country album by an openly gay person, Seattle folk singer Patrick Haggerty returns with a follow-up. In all of his songs, he’s equal parts empath and scold, a soft touch with a sharp tongue.

Blackberry Rose

When the North Carolina label Paradise of Bachelors first contacted Patrick Haggerty about reissuing his 1973 album of openly gay country songs, he was 70 years old. Lavender Country, as he’d called the project, was ancient history to him—after recording it with friends, he’d pressed about 1000 copies, sold them in the back pages of gay newspapers, and then, when they were gone, went about his life. He had two children, got married, and ran for Washington State Senate on the Socialist ticket. His musical career was mostly confined to performing at old folks’ homes, where “Cryin’ These Cocksucking Tears” presumably didn’t make the setlist.
When Lavender Country was reissued in 2014, the same 10 songs he’d recorded and released to resounding silence in his late twenties suddenly sent him on his first national tour, often supporting punk bands one-third his age. He became the subject of an award-winning documentary. In 2020, RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant Trixie Mattel covered his tender cruising ballad “I Can’t Shake the Stranger Out of You.” Hollywood came calling, interested in a biopic. Four decades later, Haggerty’s plaintive, defiant statement on gay American life had finally entered the national conversation. Haggerty, once a footnote, was now a pioneer.
Now, Patrick Haggerty is 78 years old, and for the second time in his life, he’s in a recording studio. The songs on Blackberry Rose, the second-ever Lavender Country album, were written at all points in his life. The oldest (“Red Dress”) predates the first record by four years, while Haggerty came up with “Sweet Shadow Man” and “Don’t Buy Her No More Roses” in 2019. As the follow-up to a nearly 50-year-old album, Blackberry Rose has few precedents: The psychedelic folk artist Linda Perhacs, who returned to recording after a 44-year absence, comes to mind. But unlike Perhacs, who shifted more definitively into new age with her comeback The Soul of All Natural Things, Haggerty returns to recording virtually unchanged: His voice, which was unaffected and childlike in its simplicity in 1973, is unaffected and childlike in 2022. His band is a touching assortment of regulars, people who have been playing with him for decades, and his perspective remains consistent. In all of his songs, he’s equal parts empath and scold, a soft touch with a sharp tongue. His vision is clear enough to see the good, or at least the pain, in everyone.
Like the radical feminist Clara Fraser, to whom Blackberry Rose pays tribute, Haggerty is a true-blue Marxist, one who views the world as a series of oppressed underclasses, united by more than what divides them. The 10 songs on the original Lavender Country, written and recorded shortly after the Stonewall riots, focused on the injustice and pain of gay American life in the 1960s and ’70s. The material on Blackberry Rose ranges far wider: On these songs, Haggerty is an overworked Wyoming housewife one minute, a white Baptist boy sneaking off for dalliances with a young Black man in 1962 Louisiana the next. But even when he’s playing the role of the conniving strikebreaker on “Clara Frazer, Clara Frazer,” there’s a playfulness to the portrait that suggests, if not redemption, than a certain sardonic understanding. Haggerty’s songs contain villains, but no monsters.
Haggerty often plays a soother, a lover, one whose playful tenderness is a balm. “Lay all of your yearnings and all your concerns/In that pretty head down on my pillow,” he sings on “All Disillusions Behind.” “Let me blow them away with the dust of the day/They are dandelion fluff on the billow”—and it’s that last clause, “dandelion fluff on the billow”—that tells you everything you need to know about the mind at work. Language is a site of play for Haggerty, and he writes like he’s trying to outdo himself. On “Red Dress,” a wronged-woman lament written for his divorced sister and sung by Kassi Valazza, he offers up a doozy: “Lately when you look at me, you been seeing a trinity/Your mama, the Irish washerwoman, and a whore from gay Paree/But I’m from Enid, Oklahoma and my name is not Marie/And I don’t like the aroma of your third-hand ecstasy.” Like he did with “Back in the Closet,” a rewrite of “Back in the Saddle,” Haggerty revises a country standard with winking new lyrics: This time it’s “Stand on Your Man” (“Give him your boot heel to lick on”).
The only place his pen gets slightly away from him is on the story-song “Blackberry Rose.” Haggerty has said it took 30 years to write, and it’s consequently the album’s most labored-over song. A vivid and disturbing account of an interracial love that ends with terrible consequences—a lynching, a miscarriage, a beating—it veers closer to pulp than anything else here. Even this, though, is a testament to Haggerty’s intentions: He’s an antenna for human suffering, able to probe his way into the particulars of just about any life. He may have risen to his late-breaking renown as a “gay country singer,” but Haggerty has his sights set on something deeper: He’s a folk artist, a singer for everyone.

Buy: Rough Trade


L.A. avant-pop musician Julia Holter's mesmerizing third album is her interpretation of Gigi-- the musical and the original 1944 novella. The collection's learned and erudite, but not in a way that talks down to the listener: Loud City Song is breezy, contemporarily resonant, and flutteringly alive. It's her first record for Domino, and the one most likely to turn skeptics to believers.

Loud City Song

In an early scene in the still-fascinating, delightfully bizarre 1958 MGM musical Gigi, a few characters enter a restaurant called Maxim’s. The vibe is Moulin Rouge meets Cheers: a frenetic, turn-of-the-century Parisian haunt where, for better or worse, everybody knows your name. When each couple enters Maxim’s-- yes, couple; somehow you get the sense that it would be social suicide for a respectable lady of the time to step foot in the place unaccompanied-- a crowd of patrons begins to chant in a hushed, gossipy tone. As they whisper the kinds of things that people rarely say aloud (even when they’re thinking them), and the scene draws a bleak, ironic contrast between people’s private thoughts and the outward demands of polite society. “Isn’t she a mess? Isn’t she a sight?” they say as one pair enters. “Let’s invite them out tomorrow night!”
“There’s something kind of creepy about that scene that I wanted to bring out,” L.A. avant-pop musician Julia Holter said in a recent interview, talking about “Maxim’s I & II”, a gorgeous (if slightly sinister) pair of songs that appear on her mesmerizing third album, Loud City Song. Holter’s said that the album is her own loose interpretation of Gigi-- both the musical and the original 1944 novella by the French writer Colette (the plot, in the expert, proto-Twitter brevity of a Turner Classic Movie blurb: “A Parisian girl is raised to be a kept woman but dreams of love and marriage.”).
Plenty of other songwriters might fumble or stiffen when drawing on source material from decades before they were born, but not Holter. Maybe it’s because making a record based on a 1950s MGM musical is actually her idea of keeping things new-school: Tragedy, her 2011 debut, was an ambitious yet intimate meditation on ancient Greek playwright Euripides’ Hippolytus, while her dreamily crystalline follow-up Ekstasis (also a nod to ancient Greece) sounded like bedroom pop made by somebody with pin-ups of Heidegger and Virginia Woolf (and also maybe Laurie Anderson) papering the walls. Holter’s music is learned (she studied musical composition at CalArts) and proudly erudite, and yet not in a way that feels like it’s talking down to the listener. Still, she’s never made a record quite as inviting as Loud City Song-- her first album for Domino and the one most likely to turn skeptics to believers. From the panoramic ballroom swoon of “Maxim’s I” to the twinkling, kinetic chatter of its sequel, there’s an energy coursing through Loud City Song that makes it feel-- more than anything she’d done so far-- breezy, contemporarily resonant, and at all times flutteringly alive.
Loud City Song is the first album that Holter recorded outside of her bedroom, and-- like a 19th century French literary heroine seeking the therapeutic air of a seaside vacation-- the change in scenery seems to have loosened her up a bit. If Ekstasis had the serene intimacy of home recordings made with the apartment curtains drawn, Loud City Song finds her flinging open the drapes and taking rhythmic cues from the bustle of people below. Much of this newfound dynamism comes from adding new collaborators (and returning to trusted old ones: like Ekstasis, the record was mixed and co-produced by Ariel Pink collaborator Cole Mardsen Greif-Neill) and embracing a more jazz-oriented instrumentation-- trombones, strings, and a double bass all add a little drama, agility, and even playfulness to her sound.
Holter name-checks old Parisian landmarks like Maxim’s and says she was also inspired by the disconnectedness and buzzing anonymity of her hometown ("In L.A., it's like everyone's invisible. That's why I like it here."). But what gives these songs an emotional resonance beyond the confines of her own imagination is the way they capture something universal about the joys and anxieties of living in any modern city. As Holter's nimble voice skips between her siren-song falsetto and a more percussive delivery closer to spoken word, the mood of the album is in constant flux: in the menacing “Horns Surrounding Me” the brisk footfall of her fellow passersby evokes claustrophobia, danger and paranoia (is she being chased? Or is it all in her head?), but by the next song, the playful pop-cabaret “In the Green Wild”, she’s looking at her fellow pavement-pounders with a sense of bemused wonder.
Still, it’s the album’s centerpiece, a hypnotizing six-and-a-half minute rendition of Barbara Lewis' “Hello Stranger”, that might just be the most uncomplicatedly gorgeous thing Holter’s ever done. It’s risky to tackle a tune that’s been covered enough times to make it feel like a modern-day standard, but Holter’s atmospheric take finds a particular strain of longing and serenity in the song. It's a heart-stopper. Amidst the rest of Loud City Song’s chatty, high-concept vitality, “Hello Stranger” is a moment of comfort and instant connection, like suddenly spotting a familiar face on a busy street.
Though there’s definitely a narrative arc to the record, it doesn’t stick so close to the Gigi script to become tedious; Loud City Song moves with an internal logic that’s more impressionistic than literal. Some of its pieces do stand sturdily on their own, but taken in one sitting the album unfurls like one long, thoughtfully arranged composition-- lyrics and images recur, and characters gradually evolve. The narrator at the center (Gigi? Holter? Some kind of poetic hybrid of the two?) begins as a detached, observant outsider-- just another anonymous face gazing curiously at the city below from the perch of her fifth-floor walk-up ("I don't how why I wear a hat so much," Holter sings beneath the sparse groan of a cello on the opening song, "World", "The city can't see my eyes under the brim.") But by the end-- the second-to-last track, “This Is a True Heart” prances like a lazy-Sunday carousel ride-- she sounds not only more vulnerable but lighter, too. In a way, the arc of Loud City Song mirrors Holter’s artistic evolution: Ekstasis found kindred spirits in statues and goddesses (“I can see you but my eyes are not allowed to cry,” she repeated on “Goddess Eyes II”, cloaked in a vocoder), but the psychologically complex narrator at the heart of Loud City Song moves like flesh and blood.
“There’s a flavor to the sound of walking no one ever noticed before," Holter chants in a rapt whisper throughout "In the Green Wild". It's a telling line: Loud City Song is one of those records so full of un-jaded wonder and attuned to the secret music of ordinary things that the world looks a little bit different while it's playing. I don't think I fully appreciated it until I listened to the whole thing while looking out a second-story window onto a crowded street during rush hour, watching an endless procession of people with eyes hidden to the city under the brims of hats (or, to update Holter's image, staring down at their iPhones). To the tune of "World", I started wondering who they all were, where they were rushing, and what they were thinking. Though it draws upon the distant past, Julia Holter's made a timeless people-watching soundtrack: an acutely felt ode to the mysteries of a million passersby, all the stars of their own silent musicals.


The path Underworld took to get to Dubnobasswithmyheadman, their extraordinary “first” album in the second phase of the band, was full of dashed hopes and improbable left turns. This five-disc reissue serves as a reminder of why the record is a key release in both that journey and the planet-sized thinking of EDM, which plays out as a further manifestation of its ideas.

Underworld: Dubnobasswithmyheadman (20th Anniversary Remaster)

The path Underworld took to get to Dubnobasswithmyheadman, their extraordinary “first” album in the second phase of the band, was full of dashed hopes and improbable left turns. Karl Hyde and Rick Smith, to this day the nucleus of the band, were previously known for being in the synth inflected new wave band Freur, whose “Doot-Doot” was a minor hit in 1983. A couple of albums as Underworld followed, until that phase of the band flopped quietly to a close after a 1989 North American tour supporting Eurythmics. It’s unlikely many people noticed the band had gone on hiatus, although Smith in particular appears to have seen it as a fresh start rather than an ignominious close. While Hyde stayed behind in New York, hurtling toward anonymity as a guitarist in Debbie Harry’s band, Smith was holed up in his studio in Essex, arguably the birthplace of rave, working on material with a much younger collaborator, DJ Darren Emerson.
The backwards way Underworld evolved was typical of similar UK acts of the era, most of whom were similarly inclined toward blowing dance and electronic music out into bigger spaces. The Orb’s Alex Paterson backed into ambient music through stints as a roadie for Killing Joke and work as an A&R man; Primal Scream went from pleasant Byrds-inspired jangle merchants to acid glazed indie-dance pioneers; Norman Cook, aka Fatboy Slim, got his start playing bass in the politicized effete rock of the Housemartins. The effect worked in reverse, too: the Prodigy were dyed-in-the-wool ravers who blew up by taking on certain characteristics of rock, even hiring a live guitarist with the none-more-punk name of Gizz Butt. Underworld’s roots were also in rock, giving them a sensibility that looked far beyond dance music's insular white-label culture, coupled with an approach that was more album oriented than the average dance act. In short, despite past mishaps, their ambition was completely off the charts.
It’s easy to ascribe this in retrospect, but Underworld’s ascent fits perfectly with the surge of confidence that flowed through both overground and underground music in Britain in the early-to-mid '90s. You can hear it in the sharply defined angles of jungle and drum'n'bass, or in the masterfully lethargic grooves of trip-hop, or, of course, in the major Britpop acts. In 1990, the KLF launched their “stadium house” trilogy (“What Time Is Love?”, "3 a.m. Eternal", “Last Train to Trancentral"), giving it a name that suggested house was moving beyond the club and chart environs it had largely existed in up to that point. They weren’t wrong; by the end of the decade, bands such as Orbital, the Prodigy, and Underworld were headlining major stages at festivals in the UK. Dubnobass, released in 1994, is a key release in both that journey and the planet-sized thinking of EDM, which plays out as a further manifestation of its ideas.
This five-disc release offers an exhaustive trawl through Underworld’s archives from the era, presenting a fuller picture of where the band were at immediately prior to the release of this record. There’s a disc of singles, including vital pre-album tracks such as the version of “Dirty” released as Lemon Interrupt, and the all-encompassing “Rez”—the latter such a strong part of their identity, especially in its live incarnation all wrapped up in “Cowgirl”, that it shows what riches they had on their hands that it didn’t make the final album. There’s also a disc of remixes, a disc of unreleased takes, and, most curious of all, an entire disc devoted to a series of live rehearsals that would become the Dubnobass tracks. The idea that these weren’t studio creations, but actually came out of something approaching live improvisation, feels improbable when hearing the strongly executed final product, although it’s likely a key part in explaining how adept Underworld were at pushing this stuff out into a live context.
The album itself has been considerably sharpened in its remastered form, with Smith taking it to Abbey Road and subtly pulling out textures that occasionally sounded muted on the original pressing. Hyde’s lyrics can still be problematic, with his cut-up style veering wildly between inspiration and moments of corniness, although the force of ideas on Dubnobass largely covers up the lyrical patchiness in ways other Underworld albums haven’t always managed. Here, he imbues the songs with a feeling of seediness, of bad sex and nights slumped in regret, giving the album a deeper undercurrent than something you can just get mashed off your face to in a club (although it also serves that purpose). Hyde’s at his best when lost in short mantras, such as the repeating verses of “Spoonman”, where he matches the trance-like flow of the music, his voice tweaked so it barely sounds human at times, becoming totally subsumed in groove and forward momentum.
The stretch through “Spoonman”, “Tongue”, “Dirty Epic”, and “Cowgirl” shows what acute listeners this band were, but it also highlights how skilled they were at assimilating contrasting ideas into their sound. “Tongue” borrows something from the ambient drift echoing through chillout rooms at clubs during this time, with Hyde multi-tracking his vocals in a way that makes him sound not unlike future collaborator Brian Eno. On “Dirty Epic”, Underworld demonstrate their mastery of subtle builds and strange fusions, cutting plinky-plonky house piano across needlelike bursts of electric guitar, with Hyde’s central lyric (“I get my kicks on channel 6”) suggesting someone lost in a world as lonely as it is unsavory. “Cowgirl” remains their most carefully honed club banger, drawing on screaming acid lines and dense drum patterns that feel like a precursor to LCD Soundsystem’s “Yeah”. It’s not hard to see some of Hyde in James Murphy and vice versa, especially as both were old hands coming to this game, bringing a dose of reflection to music that’s so often focussed solely on the now.
There are highlights in the rest of the material here (the Irish Pub in Kyoto mix of “Cowgirl”, the big beat workover of “Mmm...Skyscraper I Love You” in its “Telegraph 16.11.92” mix), along with things that are little more than historical curios (the 18-minute version of “Spoonman” on the rehearsals disc; the country-fied, Thrashing Doves-indebted “Bigmouth” from the same disc), and an admirable willingness to put things out there that don’t appear to fit anywhere in their career (the lite pop/reggae of “Can You Feel Me?” on the disc of unreleased material, which feels like an unexpected callback to the Freur era). It’s a well put-together set, with a logic to each part that offers insight into Underworld’s working method, but never falls into the kind of barrel-scraping to which reissues like this sometimes have to resort. Mostly it’s worth it to hear how hard Dubnobass still resonates: this was an album about community, about coming together through shared experiences—a chance to take club culture out of the club without losing a shred of nuance or sheer visceral excitement.


If 1985's Fables of the Reconstruction was R.E.M.'s most self-consciously Southern record to date and 1986's Lifes Rich Pageant their most overtly political, Document maintained both their regional self-definition as well as their indirect social engagement.

Document

Released in September 1987, R.E.M.'s fifth album, Document, contained something no one ever expected to hear from the Athens band. It wasn't the Wire cover or Steve Berlin's saxophone skronking through "Fireplace". It wasn't Michael Stipe singing what purported to be a love song, which he had sworn at one point never to do. The record packed an even bigger surprise: an actual radio hit. Before the year was over, "The One I Love" had peaked at No. 9 on the Billboard singles chart, and this was back when that meant something. It was R.E.M.'s first foray into a mainstream crowded with hair metal bands, mall-pop acts, and AOR interchangeables. Few of these acts would survive the decade, but this unlikely smash signaled only the start of the group's prolonged ascent.
How did this Southern rock band, who had more in common with Wire than with then-popular Peach Staters Georgia Satellites, find a spot in the public consciousness alongside U2, Guns N' Roses, and George Michael, who all more or less owned 1987? R.E.M. cultivated an air of mystery that extended from their music (the obscure lyrics, the refusal to lip sync in videos) to the packaging (mismatched tracklists, head-scratching instructions to "File Under Fire"). And "The One I Love" was an odd choice for a hit: Peter Buck's guitar possesses a rich, strange grain that charges the song with vague menace, especially when he unspools that psych-rock solo, and the mosaic hook itself is split between Stipe shouting "Fire!" in an empty theater and Mike Mills adding a descending countermelody. Lyrically, the song is one contradiction twisting into another: "This one goes out to the one I love/ A simple prop to occupy my time." Twenty-five years later, it remains nearly impossible to parse the implications of that particular couplet; on the other hand, 25 years later, it's still worth trying, as the latest in Capitol Records' reissue series proves.
If 1985's Fables of the Reconstruction was their most self-consciously Southern record to date and 1986's Lifes Rich Pageant their most overtly political, Document maintained both their regional self-definition as well as their indirect social engagement, even going so far as to sample Joseph Welch reprimanding Joseph McCarthy. ("At long last, have you left no sense of decency?") The album is a prolonged meditation on the idea of labor, opening with "Finest Worksong" before teasing out the implications on "Welcome to the Occupation". The defiantly chipper "Exhuming McCarthy" opens with the clack of Stipe's typewriter, connecting the work of the band with that of the journalist, and even "Fireplace" is less about the dance party than the preparations for it: "Hang up your chairs to better sweep, clear the floor to dance," Stipe sings, twisting his lines with each repetition until the entire building has been dismantled in an act of constructive destruction.
And yet, R.E.M. never sound openly angry or at all condescending here. They may not have had day jobs by then, but they saw their art as labor and their labor as art. Engaging with politics and social issues in their music emboldened and arguably ennobled them, although this lyrical mission didn't alter their general approach to their work. The band's democracy was not only a professional strategy but a musical one as well: R.E.M. always worked best when the four members had equal representation in the songs, and producer Scott Litt helps them find the right balance. Bill Berry is still the backbone, a one-man rhythm section that allows Mills to play ingeniously melodic basslines. Stipe continues his trajectory toward extroversion, bending his voice into a reedy sneer on "Lightnin' Hopkins" and rattling off a weird history of the 20th century on "It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)". That may be his best vocal performance, spirited and goofy and ecstatic. The album's most direct line-- "I'm addressing the realpolitik," from "Exhuming McCarthy"-- may also be his funniest; this was, after all, the man who made a virtue out of mumbly obscurity.
But Document is Buck's album, from the chiming fanfare that opens "Finest Worksong" to the sludgy trudge that closes "Oddfellows Local 151". He sounds intent on summing up more than three decades of rock guitar in these 40 minutes. Jangle was only the base from which to venture into surf, post-punk, country rock, even a little rockabilly. This is R.E.M. at their most rock: more targeted than Green but less self-conscious than Monster. Still, despite the thematic throughline, Buck's heroics, and a predictably excellent remastering job on the reissue, Document still sounds like the band's least satisfying I.R.S. album (says the Fables apologist), with an especially ragtag second side that starts almost perfectly but drifts off as it proceeds. As covers go, Wire's "Strange" proves less revelatory than the Clique's "Superman" on Lifes Rich Pageant, and the moody "King of Birds" and "Oddfellows Local 151" leave the album tattered at the ends.
However, saying Document is their weakest indie-label release is like saying Mothra was the least of Godzilla's foes: That big bug could still level Tokyo. Even five albums into their career, R.E.M. managed to sound both confident and unsettled, always pushing into new territory but galvanized by what they could do together. Whether they knew it at the time, Document represents a band readying itself for the spotlight as though preparing for a fight. That much is apparent on the bonus disc, which-- like the reissues for Murmur and Reckoning-- documents the band's live show and emphasizes the life of the song rather than the creation. The band wrangled them into new shapes every night, whether by adding new space and momentum to "Oddfellows" or appending "Exhuming McCarthy" with Mills' new vocal line: "Meet me at the book burning!" Recorded during a European tour, the live disc ends not with a Document number, but with a lovely, hymnlike performance of "So. Central Rain" featuring only Buck's guitar and vocals by Stipe and Mills. It's a moment fraught with tension and precariousness, especially when Stipe rolls in a few lines from "Time After Time (Annelise)". Some might find the absence of Berry on the song eerily prescient, but truly it shows a band fearlessly embracing its own newfound success. "The time to rise," as Stipe sings on "Finest Worksong", "has been engaged."