Fucked Up's new album is a relatively compact, dense piece of metacriticism taking an unsparing look at the genre of its creators and its social mores. It's a very personal work and, more crucially, one that doesn’t preach or provide answers.

Glass Boys

Get past the audacious concepts, the profanity, and Damian Abraham’s boarish grunt, and Fucked Up are essentially pragmatists, driven by a mission to rage within the machine. While Abraham may be conflicted about playing shows with Foo Fighters, being nominated for major awards and appearing on TV networks that still can’t say his band’s real name, they’re all necessary to give Fucked Up’s message the populist outreach it requires to be effective. Because unlike previous insurrectionists-turned-inside-operatives like the Clash or Refused, Fucked Up’s message isn’t political.
Rather, Abraham is hardcore's ?uestlove, a burly, gregarious, and eloquent music nerd maintaining a likable “What am I doing here?” outlook regardless of his successes, fixated on making the State of the Art as important as the State of the Union. Coincidentally, Glass Boys is similar to the Roots’ most recent album, ...And Then You Shoot Your Cousin—a relatively compact, dense piece of metacriticism taking an unsparing look at the genre of its creators and its social mores. The problem is that its message is also far more developed and interesting than the medium.
Glass Boys clocks in at 10 songs and 43 minutes, a canny move that preemptively neutralizes backlash or skepticism that would’ve arisen had Fucked Up tried to top 2011’s hour-plus rock opera David Comes to Life in any measurable way. It’s obvious that the aspirational Abraham conceded to guitarist/producer Mike Haliechuk’s desire to make a record befitting a “normal band.” And yet, with no ostensible “plot” and Abraham as the only recurring character, Glass Boys is more complex and thought-provoking than its predecessor. Most of the time, it’s like a Talkhouse piece-on-tape, with insider intel regarding art vs. commerce, nostalgia vs. forward thinking, individual vs. community, and why we have to frame these things as dichotomies to begin with. So make no mistake, this is heady stuff: while Abraham pours mulch and gravel all over his florid poetry ("Rejuvenations ocean spume perfume"), Glass Boys alludes to the patronage system, Greek mythology, primitive ritualism, pre-verbal communication, and basically everything short of the 2001 monolith to present Fucked Up as a tiny blip in the eternal timeline.
For all of its discourse and rhetoric, Glass Boys remains a very personal work and, more crucially, one that doesn’t preach or provide answers —though Eurycles pops up in a cameo, the album's inquisitive, open-ended discussion is more influenced by Socrates.  In opener “Echo Boomer”, Abraham gives voice to Haliechuk’s reminiscence of being a 15-year old mesmerized by the possibilities of music. But by the penultimate “The Great Divide”, he looks back puzzled and guilt-ridden, wondering if youth is wasted on the wasted youth who put their faith in bands like Fucked Up rather than something greater (“We ushered in all that corrupts/ Now we’re drowning in the glut”). In between, Abraham and Haliechuk cop to confessional songwriting as a "Jesus Christ Pose"-style farce (“Paper the House”) and spitefully air grievances (“Led By Hand”), before ultimately accepting their fate as part of the continuum as an honor. After all, if an echo booms and no one hears it, did it even happen?
These are conversations worth having, and you can have them simply by reading the lyrics sheet, watching the videos, and reading interviews with the band. For all the talk of Fucked Up getting streamlined and concise, it turns out that streamlined, concise songs are nowhere near as interesting as their wildest, most highfalutin concepts; Glass Boys finds a Great Punk Band making a Good Rock Record that’s weirdly superfluous.
And let’s be clear, this is a rock band, increasingly a hardcore-derived version of the Hold Steady, with static classic rock riffage serving as a platform for functional, verbose one-note vocals (the Van Halen-evoking “The Art of Patrons” could even be swiped from Separation Sunday). On their early breakthroughs Hidden World and the Chemistry of Common Life, Fucked Up set themselves apart not by pushing hardcore in a new direction so much as completely blowing it wide open in a manner unseen since The Shape of Punk to Come or even Zen Arcade. But now, Fucked Up have channeled all of their symphonic ambitions for the sole purpose of making Glass Boys sound like it has as many overdubs as a record four times its length.
That’s literally the case as far as the drums go: Jonah Falco is playing four different drum tracks throughout Glass Boys, another example of Fucked Up’s delightful, crackpot scheming—it’s a cool idea that no punk band would pursue, either out of economic hardship or just the innate knowledge that playing four drum tracks at the same time might detract from the visceral impact of the music. There’s even more of a homogenizing effect on the guitars; rather than contributing contrast, melody, dynamics or texture, it’s the kind of indiscriminate layering that appeared on Be Here Now and MACHINA/Machines of God, turning a presumably hard-hitting rock record into a gelatinous ooze that surrounds and consumes the listener rather than attacking their ears. Though less so than on David Comes to Life, Abraham remains omnipresent and indistinct, a grit amidst a sound that emanates like toothpaste.
At times, the saturation of Glass Boys creates a wonderful, psychedelic effect—“Echo Boomer” is possibly meant to describe Abraham and Fucked Up as reverberations of a punk rock Big Bang, though it’s every bit as applicable to the actual sound of the song. Meanwhile, “Touch Stone” is an aural illusion where a two-chord modulation sounds like it’s endlessly, upwardly cresting.  Combined with the spirited call-and-response of “Sun Glass”, the opening salvo of Glass Boys bears the promise of everything a direct and hook-filled Fucked Up album could be. But after “Warm Change” unravels into aimless guitar soloing and panned drums, Fucked Up usher in a second half that fails to distinguish itself in any way. Once again, there are guest vocalists supplementing the symphonic guitars—the credits lists cred-deficient Canucks such as Tragically Hip’s Gord Downie and Alexisonfire’s George Pettit, as well as indie heroes J. Mascis and Kurt Vile; with the exception of Mascis’ donkey bray on “Led By Hand”, they’re all just faint echoes struggling to be heard.
Glass Boys is a record dense with metacommentary, so it's possible that the record's claustrophobic production is meant to reflect Abraham and Haliechuk’s concerns about the walls closing in on Fucked Up. They’ve been deferential and self-effacing about their legacy, admitting they’ve lasted about a decade longer than even most successful hardcore bands. But they opted out of actual hardcore long ago; since signing with Matador, the genre has served as a theoretical control group for Fucked Up, something to compare the results of their experiments. Now, you can only hear faint echoes of their past greatness underneath the lard-laden production; it’s something that will please the fanbase Fucked Up have deservedly built and enrage the younger, angrier hardcore bands who will dismantle and try to improve on it, fueled by their own ideals and self-belief, however foolish it may seem in retrospect. Which actually validates Glass Boys’ ideas about hardcore's cycle of life—it just doesn’t make the music any more thrilling.


Greg Dulli and co. return with an eclectic, haunted set that feels untethered to their past work. They seem less interested in living up to expectations than upending them.

How Do You Burn?

After Top Gun: Maverick, Minions: The Rise of Gru, and Beavis and Butthead: Do the Universe warmed things up, the most highly anticipated sequel event of the summer has finally arrived—well, for Afghan Whigs fans, at least. Seven songs into the band’s ninth album, we hear a familiar voice, and it’s not Greg Dulli’s. Back on the Whigs’ 1993 album, Gentlemen, Dulli’s roiling cocktail of self-aggrandizement and self-loathing was splashed right back in his face by guest vocalist Marcy Mays; her star turn on the ballad “My Curse” centered the voice of a woman trapped in a toxic relationship with the sort of lothario that Dulli’s so fond of portraying. And now, 29 years later, we get a status update in the form of “Domino and Jimmy,” the emotional centerpiece of How Do You Burn? Decades removed from the turmoil, both characters are still traumatized by their rancorous romantic history: “Like a living ghost, you get lost inside my head,” Mays sings with a combination of resignation and resolve, before Dulli takes the mic to repent. But “Domino and Jimmy” opens up these old wounds to heal them once and for all—in contrast to the plate-smashing unrest of “My Curse,” the new song exudes the purifying quality of a sunrise swim in the ocean, suggesting both principals are now in a better place. Their curse may never fully be broken, but they’ve learned to live with it, and even draw strength from it.
Beyond bringing a sense of peace and closure to one of the most harrowing songs in their canon, “Domino and Jimmy” is also a measure of how much the Whigs’ have grown over the past three decades. An archetypal four-man indie-rock band during their initial ‘90s run, the post-reunion Whigs have become an ever-widening storm of serial collaborators, auxiliary members, and celebrity guests, with Dulli at the center (inheriting the open-door policy of his interim outfit, the Twilight Singers). Even the presence of bassist John Curley—Dulli’s most loyal right-hand man since 1988—is seemingly no longer a prerequisite for getting an Afghan Whigs record off the ground. Sessions for How Do You Burn? began amid COVID restrictions in September 2020, with Dulli and drummer Patrick Keeler (Raconteurs) holing up in the Joshua Tree studio of new guitarist Christoper Thorn (ex-Blind Melon), while Curley, guitarist Jon Skibic, and keyboardist Rick Nelson Zoomed in their parts from home later on.
So between the ever-changing membership and desert recording locale, the Afghan Whigs have essentially become Dulli’s Queens of the Stone Age, a point hammered home by the new album’s opening Hommeage, “I’ll Make You See God,” a pure, pedal-to-the-metal motorik rocker that counts as the fastest, heaviest, and most relentlessly bull-headed song in this band’s entire oeuvre. (Naturally, its impetus was as soundtrack fodder for the video game Gran Turismo 7.) But of course, the Queens connection runs deeper than that—both groups had long-standing ties to the late Mark Lanegan, who provided How Do You Burn? with both vocals and its title (which was his way of asking the question: what gets you excited?). Tellingly, Lanegan doesn’t get a star feature on the record—his voice is used more texturally, as a doomy echo of the darkest thoughts bouncing around Dulli’s head. Amid the elegantly Beatlesque chamber pop of “The Getaway,” he follows Dulli’s lead like a shadow: When Dulli boastfully exclaims that he’s “sitting on a wire, hiding on display/Waiting for the night as I destroy the day,” Lanegan repeats the words underneath in a weighty whisper that suggests he’ll actually make good on the threat.
For all the darkness that clouded its creation (Lanegan’s death was preceded by that of guitarist Dave Rosser in 2017), How Do You Burn? vibrates with an irrepressible ecstatic energy. Threading its horror-movie orchestration with wordless wails from class-of-1965 alumna Susan Marshall, “Catch a Colt” has all the makings of another clamorous Whigs workout, but the song’s frenzied batucada-style percussive pulse redirects the drama to the discotheque floor; the more steady-paced but equally boisterous “Take Me There” channels Dulli’s primal desire into the closest thing this band has ever had to a soccer-stadium chant. Even the song bearing the album’s most classically Dulli-esque title—”A Line of Shots”—proves shockingly sanguine, framing its tale of lost souls on the run in a blissful balance of tremolo and groove that evokes ‘80s college-radio standards like the Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now?” and R.E.M.’s “Finest Worksong.” Likewise, the track that feels like the purest distillation of Dulli’s anguished essence—“Please, Baby, Please”—is more prayer than confession, an organ-smoothed late-night serenade for the one you hope will stick around in the morning.
Many ‘90s alt-rock heroes have returned to cash a reunion-tour paycheck; a precious few have enjoyed a sustained second act as a recording entity. But the Afghan Whigs of 2022 belong to an even more rarefied realm: a veteran band less interested in living up to expectations than upending them. If 2014’s Do the Beast reaffirmed the Whigs’ doom-soul bonafides, and 2017’s In Spades gestured toward the epic Scorsesean set pieces of the Black Love era, How Do You Burn? boasts a mixtape-like eclecticism, communal bonhomie, and psychedelic texture that feel untethered to the Whigs’ past playbooks. Even as the closing “In Flames” places Dulli’s narrator in all-too familiar setting—“Snowblind and left behind/I’m on the street, looking for a good time”—the track unfolds like a last-call sing-along in a saloon that’s been set ablaze, erupting into a towering tempest of hair-raising strings, jabbing pianos, brain-melting guitar solos, and howling harmonies. This is how the Afghan Whigs burn: by turning up the heat until the line between chaos and rapture has been thoroughly obliterated.


On his first album in seven years, the UK producer embraces chaos: ten guests, 22 tracks, countless genres. Yet it can sometimes be hard to locate SBTRKT’s musical identity amid all the commotion.

The Rat Road

When SBTRKT recently returned to the public eye after a six-year absence, it wasn’t with a bang so much as a groan. The groggy, distorted vocal of 2022’s “Bodmin Moor” suggested an artist waking from a coma, cotton-mouthed and baffled by the world around him. Eleven months later, a similarly uncommercial questing spirit hangs heavily over The Rat Road, SBTRKT’s sprawling and abstruse fourth album.
SBTRKT—real name Aaron Jerome—may have ditched his trademark mask sometime around the middle of the 2010s. But, as on his 2011 self-titled debut and 2014’s Wonder Where We Land, he remains content to sit in the shadows on The Rat Road, ceding the spotlight to a stream of featured vocalists, including serial collaborator Sampha. His production remains similarly varied, with the house/UK garage/electro/R&B/broken beat/hip-hop stew of his first two albums oozing ever outward to take in techno, drum’n’bass, classical, jazz and more.
“More” appears to be the album’s guiding principle: twenty-two songs (whittled down from 400), 10 special guests, numerous beat switches, and enough genres to give a Spotify playlister cause for a lie-down. The single “L.F.O.” alone features two vocalists and three distinct sections and bears the influence of everything from Detroit techno to samba. The only way in is to embrace the chaos: Maybe it doesn't make sense that the frenetically unstable “You Broke My Heart but Imma Fix It” is followed by the refracted, beat-free wash of “Palm Reader,” or that the production on “Demons” constantly threatens to slip under a sea of reverb. But it does make for a lot of fun, albeit of the slightly exhausting, long-day-at-Disneyland type. Doing all this and starting a largely electronic album with “Remnant,” 90 seconds of bittersweet orchestral soundtrack, is pure mischievous flex.
This roguish spirit is matched by a long-standing gift for finding and nurturing new talent. In 2011 SBTRKT gave early appearances to Sampha and Jessie Ware; in 2023 London singer LEILAH, who has just one solo single to her name, lights up The Rat Road on songs like “Forward,” her voice drifting around gorgeously dejected melodies like the fluttering petals on a rainy spring day, while poet Kai-Isaiah Jamal’s Tricky-esque growl is chillingly eloquent on the nerve-busting “Coppa.” At times, the closest point of comparison for The Rat Road’s heavily-guested, pan-genre sprawl is Gorillaz, with the electro-pop soul of a song like “No Intention” a kissing cousin to the more reflective moments of Damon Albarn’s merry bunch (think “Empire Ants”). But unlike Gorillaz, who have Albarn’s peerless voice as a connecting thread, SBTRKT’s retiring presence works against him. You’d recognise a Gorillaz track on a blind listen, but what makes SBTRKT SBTRKT, particularly in a world where multiple guest vocalists and stylistic shifts are simply what pop does?
How much this matters depends on your expectations. As an artist album, The Rat Road is too self-effacing, an avalanche of great ideas in search of a vision. As a producer album, The Rat Road is frequently stunning. “L.F.O.” combines what sounds like a randomly generated system of electronic tones with a sensuous back-and-forth between vocalists Sampha and George Riley and somehow makes it work, like a one-in-a-million alchemy of clashing browser windows. “Days Go By” immerses Toro y Moi’s vocal in an unsettling but inventive patchwork of effects, sending his voice aflutter on mechanical wings; and “Limitless” does an excellent impression of a Frank Ocean song collapsing in on itself under intense sunlight. SBTRKT also has the melodic skills to match his production chops, from the poignant, inquisitive chord sequence that beckons in drum’n’bass number “You, Love” to the cycling synths of “No Intention.” That song, in particular, is proof that SBTRKT can produce satisfyingly cutting-edge pop music when he puts his hand to it.
Ultimately, it’s hard to decide whether The Rat Road’s structured chaos has obscured SBTRKT’s musical personality, or whether all this disorder is simply who SBTRKT is. Could Jerome reveal a little more of himself on record? Or is he already showing himself to us? The Rat Road offers no easy answers and—frankly—not all that much easy listening. But if you’re looking for a sometimes baffling yet often entertaining adventure, The Rat Road delivers.


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 classic rock staple from a band who rebounded from tragedy to record one of the biggest albums ever made.

Back in Black

For many bands, the sudden and horrific death of their lead singer at the peak of their popularity would be a career-ender. AC/DC took a few weeks to regroup and then recorded one of the biggest albums of all time.
Back in Black is claimed in equal measure by the jocks, the stoners, the nerds, the delinquents, and the teachers. Nashville studios used it to test their acoustics. The title track boasts nothing less than one of the most gloriously elemental riffs ever devised—the perfection of the form, the ne plus ultra of jock jams, destined to be clumsily chunked out for eternity by teens testing fuzz pedals in God’s own Guitar Center. It might not necessarily be AC/DC’s best—if their career can even be measured in units of particular albums rather than one long, loud, continuous mid-tempo guitar riff spanning five decades. But it is their most album—most accessible, most successful, most enduring, most emblematic, and, given its genesis, most unlikely.
In 1979, AC/DC had made the leap from workingman Australian hard-rock band, opening arena tours for the likes of Cheap Trick and UFO, to bona fide headliners in their own right. Highway to Hell—their seventh album in five years—had gone platinum in the U.S., thanks in large part to producer Robert John “Mutt” Lange, whose kitchen-sink ethos would define the sound of rock radio for the next decade. (Previous AC/DC albums had been produced by the legendary Australian songwriting duo of Harry Vanda and George Young, the latter of whom happened to also be the older brother of AC/DC guitarists Malcolm and Angus Young.) The success of the album cemented the image of the band as libidinous but harmless dirtbags, perfecting carnal anthems tuneful enough to attract normies seeking an edge and heavy enough to keep the metal faithful in line. Angus was as much mascot as musical director, a perpetual motion machine decked out in a schoolboy uniform, but ultimately less threatening than an actual teenager.
Though not necessarily the band’s focal point, their lead singer was 33-year-old Bon Scott, a hard-partying, Scottish-born, impossible-voiced dynamo for whom the word impish was invented. He died alone in the passenger seat of a car on a freezing February night in London in 1980 following a night of drinking, having asphyxiated on his own vomit; authorities ruled it “death by misadventure.” The Young brothers retreated doing the only thing they knew how—coming up with shitloads of guitar riffs—then kicked off a search for Scott’s replacement in earnest almost immediately.
Among the candidates to join the band were Australian rock mainstays like Jimmy Barnes and John Swan, as well as Stevie Wright, who’d been in George Young and Vanda’s band the Easybeats in the ’60s. It was Mutt Lange who recommended Brian Johnson, lead singer of British glam band Geordie and owner of a cat-in-heat vocal register that was unlike anyone’s other than, as luck would have it, Bon Scott’s.
Johnson was 32 and living with his parents in Newcastle, in northern England, and running his own shop repairing the vinyl roofs of classic cars when he got the call to meet the band. “In the rehearsal room sat the boys of AC/DC, looking quite bored—they’d been auditioning singers for a month,” Johnson wrote in his 2009 memoir Rockers and Rollers. “When I walked in, I introduced myself and Malcolm said, ‘Ah, you’re the Newcastle lad,’ and promptly gave me a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale. He said, ‘Well, what do you wanna sing.’ I told him ‘Nutbush City Limits’ by Tina Turner.” The next afternoon, Johnson got a call asking him to return, and that was that. AC/DC decamped to record their eighth album in the Bahamas, again with Lange, and were finished seven weeks later. By July, the album was out, nearly a year to the date after Highway to Hell, and about five months after Scott’s death. This would prove to be the most acrobatic mid-career personnel change in pop history.
Although sketches of some songs had begun with Scott, Johnson was given free rein to write his own lyrics. Nothing strayed from the band’s tried and true formula of meditations on rocking and/or rolling. The first new song they did together would prove to be their biggest: “You Shook Me All Night Long” was a Top 40 hit, something that had eluded Scott-era AC/DC. While Back in Black is largely an extension of the things that worked on Highway to Hell, “You Shook Me All Night Long” was as close as the band could come to an outlier, yet never felt like pandering. It was a pure, melodic sing-along, and possibly the best to ever compare a vigorous sexual encounter to a car, a meal, and a boxing match all in three and a half minutes. The single’s success may have been thanks to beginner’s luck and inspired songwriting, or possibly an assist from beyond the grave.
“I remember sitting in my room writing that and I had this blank sheet of paper and this title and I was thinking, ‘Oh, what have I started?’” Johnson said in 2000. “I don’t give a fuck if people believe me or not, but something washed through me and went, it’s alright son, it’s alright. This kind of calm. I’d like to think it was Bon, but I can’t because I’m too cynical and I don’t want people getting carried away.”
But that was as far as Johnson would color outside AC/DC’s pre-drawn lines. He did not try and will the band into some sort of new direction or bend them to his taste. The degree to which the transition felt seamless was a triumph of branding as much as human resources: The idea of AC/DC prevails over any one song or album, but Back in Black happens to be the moment when that idea found its purest form and its widest purchase. If someone says “AC/DC,” you will think of the logo before you think of anything else, and Johnson’s fast acceptance and immersion, without any appearance of ghoulishness or greed, was the ultimate validation. His omnipresent tweed newsboy cap quickly became as central to the band’s iconography as Angus’ schoolboy getup. His voice may have lacked Scott’s nuance and character—a belt sander with one less speed—but there is no way of knowing how many people who embraced Back in Black in 1980 didn’t even realize there was a new singer. It definitely wasn’t zero.
Back in Black doesn’t ignore Scott’s passing but isn’t maudlin or cautionary— you can’t spell death by misadventure without adventure. “Hells Bells” opens the album with the clanging of the one-ton iron bell the band had custom-made to bring on tour, but that is as mournful as things get. Johnson howls, “You’re only young but you’re gonna die,” more as permission than warning before genially big-upping Satan and coming down squarely on the side of tempting fate in the name of a good time, of celebrating the abyss rather than stepping away from it.
Five tracks later, “Back in Black” is similarly defiant—“Forget the hearse ’cause I never die”—but that is pretty much it for discussion of mortality beyond the tacit assumption that the bereaved want to fuck, too. “Have a Drink on Me,” a gleeful ode to getting absolutely hammered, might be an odd choice for a band whose previous singer just drank himself to death, but Back in Black was not meant to be a reckoning, it was meant to be a reaffirmation.
Helping matters was the fact that AC/DC were funny, almost always intentionally. “Givin’ the Dog a Bone” is half an entendre short of a double entendre but thanks to its big, fat chorus of layered background vocals, you laugh even if you think you know better. AC/DC seemed to invite absurdity: The T-shirts sent to be sold at the North American tour’s first stop in Edmonton were all misprinted as “BACK AND BLACK.” They didn’t walk the fine line between stupid and clever, they drew it.
A year later, the one-ton “Hell’s Bells” bell was replaced by the “For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)” cannon, keeping the streak of acquiring heavy antique iron totemic metaphors alive. Lange returned for a third and final time and 1981’s For Those About to Rock hit No. 1, something that Back in Black did not do. Their 1976 album Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, which had not been released in the U.S., was, finally, in the wake of Back in Black’s success, giving Bon Scott a proper posthumous bow at the considerable risk of confusing new fans. A band that was on the brink of oblivion instead became the paragon of consistency and longevity for another four decades.
There is no such thing as a bad AC/DC song. You can certainly not like an AC/DC song, which would then mean you probably don’t like any AC/DC songs, which is fine. But none of them really fail at what they intend to do and they all intend to do more or less the same thing. Some turns of phrase are less dunderheaded than others, some riffs make their point more indelibly than others. They didn’t really have an experimental phase unless you count the bagpipes in “It’s a Long Way to the Top,” but that wasn’t really an experiment because it totally worked. There were no ballads, no curveballs, no symphonies, no DJ remixes, no synths or pianos, no unplugged sessions, no cute covers, no BIG HAIR. Their greatest hit features the line, “You told me to come but I was already there” and may have been co-written by a ghost. They were the Ramones chopped and screwed, and similarly frozen in amber, eternally wearing their teenage uniforms.
Beyond the tens of millions of copies sold, it is easy to overlook the legacy of something like Back in Black. The album didn’t signify any sort of change or cultural marker; it instead proved the power of stasis, of doing something well, then doing it again but louder and with more money. In a sense, the success of Back in Black helped predict the current reboot moment: Give the people what they want, but more. The music does not feel of any time or place; it means now what it meant then. The record’s ultimate legacy comes less from the artists it influenced or even the songs that remain staples of whatever is left of commercial rock radio than in its confirmation that evolution can be an overrated quality. And, as ever, AC/DC were their own best messengers for this simple idea, laid bare in the final moments of their most famous work: “Rock’n’roll ain't no riddle, man.”


The world's best hipster black metal band unsurprisingly crafts a great crossover-friendly black metal album.

Aesthethica

Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, the creative force behind the Brooklyn-based black-metal band Liturgy, has gone to extravagant lengths to ensure that the hardcore metal community utterly loathes him. The band performs black-metal festivals in jeans and street clothes, instead of the normal corpse paint, to heckling and jeers. In interviews, he talks about metal's ability to induce "disorientation from ordinary, end-directed existence" like some black-metal David Foster Wallace. He uses the music, which has virulent opposition to Christianity encoded in its DNA, as a vehicle to explore Big Ideas about, among other things, Christian redemption. Aesthethica, their second album, comes out on Thrill Jockey, home to the Sea and Cake, High Places, Fiery Furnaces, and absolutely zero other metal bands. Oh, and if you ask, he's also happy to share stories about hanging out with Ezra Koenig when they both went to Columbia University.
He and Koenig would probably still get along-- they both seem to take a perverse joy insouciantly baiting the easily riled. The hatred Liturgy have incurred is white-hot and laser-focused, as the Google search for "Liturgy black metal hipster assholes" eloquently attests. As it is with any genre, black metal "authenticity" is basically a smell test: It's black metal if it feels like black metal. It's an unassailable, indefinable, and profoundly inarguable criterion, but there it is. And it must be said that, in the end, Liturgy just don't feel like black metal. Somehow, you can hear the jeans.
Luckily, this doesn't matter in the slightest. In fact, it's Aesthethica's primary sense of strength. Without "reinventing" black metal, Liturgy have successfully refashioned its basic components-- the thundering, all-sixteenths assault of blast beats, shredding tremolo guitars, and boiled-pitch vocals-- in their own willful image and directed its energy toward the [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| ir own idiosyncratic ends. Hunt-Hendrix might be the kind of guy who says things like, "The meaning of black metal has something to do with a longing for ecstatic annihilation, a perfect void," in interviews, but he's also the kind of musician who pursues these thoughts just as enthusiastically in his music. Aesthethica is inventive, alive, and shrieking with more ideas than many bands explore over an entire career.
The idea of "a perfect void" can be heard in Liturgy's complicated relationship with momentum. Many songs here settle into a mesmerizing stasis as often as they barrel forward. Songs that seem to be gearing up for a stratospheric takeoff instead harden into a rhythmic lockstep. "Generation", for instance, grinds out a series of syncopations on a single thudding power chord for a mind-obliterating seven minutes. It resembles Steve Reich's 2 x 5, in which two rock ensembles face off onstage and play highly mannered figures at each other, more than the work of any metal band.
The echo of Reich isn't incidental; even more than their debut Renihilation, Aesthethica feels like black metal by way of the conservatory. Hunt-Hendrix, it turns out, studied composition at Columbia with spectralist composer Tristan Murail, and guitarist Bernard Gann is the son of the post-minimalist composer and former Village Voice critic Kyle Gann. You can hear the sound of A-students getting loose in some of Aesthethica's wilder moments: the glimmering fugue of guitars buzzing like mechanized locusts on "Sun of Light", for example, or the perpetual-motion keyboard canon that opens "Helix Skull". Hunt-Hendrix's words, which are utterly indistinguishable sans lyrics sheet, point determinedly toward the same transcendence the music seems to be aiming for: "Floating upwards/ Lungs filling up with air/ As God inhales me/ Into the impossible," Hunt-Hendrix screams on "True Will".
None of this will endear Liturgy to black-metal fanatics, of course. But every insular scene needs its carpetbaggers and interlopers, and Liturgy can hardly be accused of disrespect; you just don't make something this joyful out of music you hate. Without interested outsiders peeking their nosy way in, we would have never seen David Bowie, or Elvis Costello, or the Beastie Boys, or Bad Brains. Liturgy, for their part, seem more than willing to take their lumps for what they believe in. As Hunt-Hendrix recently told Time Out New York, "We are really willing to suffer being hated for doing what feels right aesthetically." If that isn't fucking kvlt, nothing is.


About the time A Series of Sneaks hit the scene, I probably could have been convinced to wager a\n ...

Kill the Moonlight

About the time A Series of Sneaks hit the scene, I probably could have been convinced to wager a substantial amount of money on Spoon coming out on top. On top of what? Of anything. That album was the sound of a band that had nailed their particular aesthetic to the wall, or so I thought. Spoon was ready; Spoon was there; and then, fatefully, Spoon was dropped. Monsieur Laffitte, the Elektra A&R; man whose villainy was immortalized on the band's The Agony of Laffitte EP, set them adrift. Now, few things fuck with a band like being dropped by their label (taking third place behind smack, and of course, suicide), and indeed, something changed in Spoon. Freshly cut loose, they suddenly decided to go 'respectable,' cleaning up their sound as if to win back Laffitte's heart while deriding him in song.
I'll be candid: at that point, I missed Spoon. Girls was swell, but its slickly produced lounge grooves only made me long for the casual "just swung by the studio to drop off some tunes" brilliance of Sneaks. Nothing on it could ever generate the massive, ultra-condensed endorphin rush of "Car Radio." Fortunately, somewhere between there and here, Spoon took the time to burn their sound down to its foundation, dissect the sullen intricacies of Girls using Sneaks' barbed, melodic hooks, and reassemble something out of the pieces that's far more than the sum of its parts. The result, Kill the Moonlight, plays like a greatest hits compilation not of songs, but of sounds-- the best echoes of everything Spoon has done swirl around and unite. Bowie soul seamlessly flirts with Spoon's deceptively simplistic rhythms and vocals that span all the hope and hopelessness of the human condition.
Moonlight plays out as if Spoon is standing dead center in a vast, empty warehouse. Thousands of seats are placed close to the band, and there's a drawn-out nervousness-- total silence-- before they produce a single sound. At that moment, a Hammond-esque drive kicks off "Small Stakes" with enough energy to get even a factoryful of hipsters doing the wave. And then you look around and realize that you're the only person in attendance. This record is an adventure in starkness, beyond Girls Can Tell even while evoking some of that album's finest moments.
But any hack band can create space, right? Maybe. But using it is the tricky part. Like some of the best minimalists in music, Spoon use the null and void to create tension which bolsters and sets apart every nuance of the music-- every handclap, every reverberating crash, every beep from the synthesizer. "Paper Tiger," in particular, effortlessly floats into of the realm of the hyper-real; there's nearly more silence than music. Spoon has always struck me as a band that, no matter how good the rest of their album was, could always be relied upon to produce at least one or two songs every album that would make my jaw drop ("Car Radio," "Everything Hits at Once," "Lines in the Suit"). And while Moonlight has far more than its fair share of stunners, "Paper Tiger" blows them all away. Daniel distantly croon-growls, "I'll never hold you back/ And I won't force my will/ 'I will no longer do the Devil's wishes'/ Somethin' I read on a dollar bill," over reverse-playback beats, solitary piano chords, and drumsticks; nothing else. It's an effect of singular elegance and power.
The rest of the album is largely more upbeat, fortunately, or it could have slipped into a fugue. A little of the guitar braggadocio that netted the band so many past comparisons to the Pixies, and older acts like Wire, is showcased on "Jonathon Fisk." The riffs hit hard and fast, and some of the horns Bowie once used on Hunky Dory drop by to lighten things up. Later, the rock piano stylings of Jerry Lee Lewis could shed a tear for catapulting the bittersweet "Someone Something" into the "best of" section of Spoon's catalog. Bright-eyed optimism and the faintest hint of the uncertainty of expectation are conveyed through the staccato piano, and the vocals build and carry it off to a beautiful conclusion. Also of note: "Something to Look Forward To" may be the best fusion of older and newer Spoon to date, and "Stay Don't Go" will likely be your only chance to experience a sample of Britt beat-boxing. Truly surreal.
Kill the Moonlight is a hailstorm of complex emotional underpinnings; sometimes vibrant, sometimes morose, but usually in a frighteningly anxious limbo. "Vittorio E" closes shop and turns eyes toward the future with a 3\xBD-minute synopsis of the album's emotional heft. Choir-like harmonies fade in from the depths behind the main vocal, and a simple, sweet piano refrain lifts it away from any of the sadness or trouble left behind it. It never looks back.
Indeed, Spoon's latest is their magnum opus to date; it takes a scalpel to the highlight reel of their career, cutting and pasting a 35-minute tour de force that ends too soon. And yet, despite all the elements Spoon has toyed with over the years, it doesn't sound distinctly like any of them. In fact, this all feels like a decidedly different Spoon, like the real start of the next phase for which the merely likable Girls Can Tell was only a bridge. So be prepared. The difference is in the distance.


The Chicago industrial rap duo tears into the horrors of contemporary America over dark, glitchy beats that convey an omnipresent sense of menace.

The Legend of ABM

Halfway through The Legend of ABM, the new album from Chicago industrial rap duo Angry Blackmen, Quentin Branch stares down Azrael, the Angel of Death. He opens “Dead Men Tell No Lies” by growling, “Death is all around me, smell the scent in my nostrils/Grim Reaper glaring in my eyes looking hostile,” his gravelly voice cutting against a sandpapery bassline. On every song, Branch and bandmate Brian Warren confront what feels like their imminent destruction. The ambient stress of being alive in America, especially for Black men, stems from recognizing that potential harm is omnipresent: Cops have bloodshot eyes and itchy trigger fingers, drugs and alcohol course through veins and cloud vision, the weight of a rigged economy keeps us all under the thumb of the invisible hand. Angry Blackmen’s music is the sound of the unfolding apocalypse rendered in stunning 4K.
Issued by stalwart Philadelphia experimental label Deathbomb Arc, The Legend of ABM shares its chaotic DNA with labelmates like clipping. and JPEGMAFIA. Derek Allen, who records dark, glitchy electronic music under the alias Formants, produced the record in its entirety, giving the songs a distorted, metallic palette. Snares sound like blades being sharpened, field recordings become smoldering drones, and kick drums hit like meteors cratering the earth. It’s brutal and harsh but always controlled. Warren and Branch first linked with Allen in 2020 after meeting at a basement show in Elmwood Park, Illinois. Allen worked with ABM on their 2020 album HEADSHOTS! and 2021 EP REALITY!, but The Legend of ABM is a full realization of their collaborative potential. Allen’s production is stripped of melody in favor of a constant oppressive atmosphere, inspiring Branch and Warren to lean further into the horrors of life under late capitalism.
There’s a blunt edge to their writing, as if the lyrics were scratched into stone with a Bowie knife. They’re both unflinchingly frank, detailing their demons with disarming honesty. Self-harm and destructive behavior are constant motifs. On Branch’s solo cut, “Suicidal Tendencies,” he describes the contours of a slow-moving mental breakdown, a collapse fueled by severe alcoholism, bleak living conditions, and an unshakeable feeling that he wouldn’t make it past 27. He’s on the other side of it, having gotten sober and moved to New Mexico, but a car crash in Santa Fe that nearly killed him and his girlfriend still repeats in his mind. Warren’s solo turn on “Amor Propio” (Spanish for “self-esteem”) is equally harrowing, a journey through the day-to-day frustrations snowballing since he was a child. It culminates with a withering admission: “Kinda hard to love myself/All these years in my skin.”
ABM work best when Branch and Warren play off each other; they weave with easy and undeniable chemistry, delighting in the challenge of one-upping the last verse. Tracks like “Stanley Kubrick” radiate competitive intensity; both rappers tumble through breathless triplet cadences, unbothered by quick tempos or blistering noise. On “Sabotage,” Warren speeds across the squelching synths and jagged claps, rapping about generational trauma with a Pharoahe Monch-like elasticity. Branch follows with a more spacious flow, finding the amorphous pockets that made Young Dolph so captivating.
Though The Legend of ABM is in conversation with noise rap, it feels more immediately accessible than a lot of the prickly subgenre’s output can be. Dälek records are often stately, almost academic, and clipping.’s work sometimes dips into brooding theater-kid territory. Angry Blackmen and Formants’ visceral but upfront approach owes more to the boom of 2010s Chicago drill and the wild-eyed frenzy of late aughts Lil Wayne than the punishing racket of Yellow Swans or Masonna. ABM’s brand of blown-out beats seems less like an aesthetic choice and more like a natural depiction of how it feels to survive in 2024. The cacophony never ceases and the mind always races, but there must be some way to exist within the din.


Linda Perhacs' psychedelic folk album, 1970’s Parallelograms, has persisted over decades, even as she's moved on with her life and copies of it disappeared from print. The followup, arriving 44 years later, was made with several of Perhacs' admirers, including Julia Holter and Nite Jewel's Ramona Gonzalez.

Linda Perhacs: The Soul of All Natural Things

The Soul of All Natural Things

Linda Perhacs is easily the most celebrated dental hygienist to ever have recorded a classic psychedelic folk album. That album, 1970’s Parallelograms, has persisted over decades, even as Perhacs herself moved on with her life after the record failed and copies of it slowly disappeared from print. The people who heard it, though, did not move on. They made their own editions and passed the album to those they deemed worthy. One of those people was the leader of the prog-metal band Opeth, who did as much as anyone to keep copies of Parallelograms circulating. A legend built. Eventually, someone notified Perhacs.
It’s the kind of tidy capsule story that makes for an excellent set of liner notes, but it’s worth stepping back and reassessing the phenomenal unlikeliness of the tale now that we’re faced with its follow-up, The Soul of All Natural Things. The gulf separating 1970 from now might be dizzying for some, but Perhacs' sense of time is looser than ours, and it doesn’t seem to phase her.
The Soul Of All Natural Things was made with several of Perhacs' contemporary admirers helping her; Julia Holter appears on "Prisms of Glass", and Ramona Gonzalez contributes backing vocals. The resulting album has a fluid, communal energy to it that feels very different from Parallelograms. Perhacs' voice is duskier at 70 than it was at 27, but her range is still surprising, dipping into sultry contralto and leaping easily into higher registers. Her ear for multi-tracked harmonies remains the clearest link back to her first album, and you can hear her quizzical and highly original musical mind operating through them. It's easy to find in them the sound that bewitched latter-day followers like Holter.
What The Soul Of All Natural Things isn't, though, is personal, or small-scale, the way Parallelograms was. Perhacs’ first words on Parallelograms were “And it rains here every day since I came”—a conversational line, right down to the way it begins with “And.” That song followed a series of abstracted thoughts like raindrops across a window pane—"It kinda gets inside you...the silences, I mean. They kinda wrap around you and loosen everything." The first words on the opening title track of The Soul of All Natural Things, meanwhile, are “See the waves that break upon the rocks and stones/ Hear the winds that play upon the ice and foam.” Same focus—the weather, the elements—but the smallness of the human mind has been subtracted. There is no chit-chat to be had here.
In other words, The Soul Of All Natural Things is more purely new age than Perhacs' first record. God as a force, as a character, suffuses these songs, whispering to wind and waves on the title track and carrying the world's "river of souls" on "River of God". "Immunity" is a plea to God to help listen for his love. There is no dogma, just a gentle insistence on slowing down. “Where are you going and if you are going can you take some time for me, just today?" she inquires on "Children". The music is gorgeously recorded, with strings and nylon-string guitar filitering through the mix like the sunlight through the trees in her Topanga Canyon home. But where Parallelograms basked in some cosmic energies, it also offered you a series of conflicting thoughts to puzzle over. The Soul of All Natural Things mostly pats you on the head a little and tell you to calm down.
The best moments are when the song forms fracture a little, and Perhacs' multi-tracked voice is allowed to spiral free. “Prisms of Glass” and “Freely”, two songs in the middle of the record, capture more genuine spiritual feeling with the haunting sound of Perhacs’ interlocking vocals than anything else on the album. On “Song of the Planets”, her voice blurs into a repetition of the words “one” and “sun,” creating the blissful synthesis that the lyrics can only point to. The Soul of All Natural Things is sumptuously recorded and often beautiful, and honestly, it’s wonderful to have it. If it's difficult to envision a 44-year cult of devotion arising from its songs, well, once in this lifetime is probably enough for that kind of achievement.


Cilvia Demo, the debut release from Top Dawg Entertainment's Isaiah Rashad, introduces an MC who isn't afraid to lay every anxiety and frustration bare and winds up looking stronger for it. His first full-length could go down as one of the best debuts of the year.

Cilvia Demo

The previously Los Angeles-centered TDE crew's adoption of a Southern member isn't so strange. Since they already feel like a modern iteration of the Dungeon Family approach that has seeped into the second-generation Cali gangsta, finding an inverse in Isaiah Rashad makes perfect sense. He's an OutKast fan from the South who's also comfortable in the context of a West Coast that gave us Labcabincalifornia and Me Against the World the same year. While his BET Hip Hop Awards Cypher appearance last year was a bit of an advance notice, the abrupt arrival of his voice in full proves at least one thing: Top Dawg has scouts that'd make Billy Beane lose his damn mind.
Rashad's background draws from a few different sources. While he rode around Chattanooga bumping No Limit classics through the speakers of the '95 Civic he nicknamed “Cilvia”, he did so knowing that the real scene and all the networking opportunities to advance were some 120 miles down I-75 to Atlanta. His style wound up developing with the outside influence of already known artists, but laced with the personal, true-to-self approach that typically comes from having to impress peers and friends instead of a scene wracked with hypebeasts. And with the development that comes when your subject matter demands introspection from the get-go, Cilvia Demo is as much a revelation as labelmate Kendrick Lamar's breakthrough *Section.80—*only this time, there's also a good kid, m.A.A.d city to look up at and aspire to.
That may come in time, maybe sooner than we think; Cilvia Demo already shows an MC who isn't afraid to lay every anxiety and frustration bare and winds up looking stronger for it. There isn't a clear delineation between Rashad's moments of struggle and his times of strength—these are songs where one typically tests the other, where Hennessey and Jagermeister are less the celebratory ingredients of VIP sections than the coping mechanisms for figuring shit out. Few lines seperate the verse-starting come-on “Baby, can you sucky on my dick/ I know it's big enough” and the admission “I done grown up for my child sake” in “Webbie Flow (U Like)," a song where his swagger and his responsibilities get tangled up in his own self-recognition. The vivid despair of “Heavenly Father", where the one point of hope in a litany of suicidal thoughts and dead-end burnout is the question of “If I give my story to the world/ I wonder if they'd book me for a show,” still persists in the mind when a tribute to the similarly introspective Scarface, “Brad Jordan",  has him spitting the rhetoric of invincibility. And there's a line on the title track where he worries about having his own kid look at him the same way he looked at his deadbeat dad; it hits even harder once you've taken in the lyrics about his own feelings about his father. It should all be instantly familiar to anyone dealing with “I'm 21, now what” introspection (or memories thereof).
His headspace comes through so strongly you could easily overlook that Rashad can also put together some fucking verses. There's a single line in the title track that could sum up why his lyrics sink in so deep—“'93 Til be cool for Emmett”—that packs the thematic merging of South and West, racist trauma and artistic resilience, oppressive violence and expressive freedom, all in six words. He can rattle off dense internals with double-meaning followups (“Soliloquy”'s line “Leave the bodies on the cul-de-sac, follow me the cult is back” opens the door for a Jim Jones meta-reference), he's got his share of punchlines (a pistol in “Menthol” “knock caps like it's senior year”), his hooks draw blood (“Tranquility for a Brutus/ And hard road for a Caesar”), and he mixes personal details and pop-culture namedrops so naturally that even his Vince Vaughn and Larry David shout-outs seem like matter-of-fact acknowledgements than celebrity punchlines.
As for his voice, Rashad's prone to conjuring up influences in a way that makes part of his stylistic blueprint clear. Along with the aforementioned Scarface shout-out, “West Savannah” makes the OutKast connection implicit; same for “R.I.P. Kevin Miller” and Master P. Throw in how he first started modeling his flow off a young Lil Wayne, and that's the base for a strong Southern itinerary that he's managed to make his own. He's turned those reference points into something more slippery and reflective, and whether his clear, subtly needling, percussive drawl is hyped up or worn down, he rides the beat with a sharp sense of timing. There are some occasional deliberate hitches in his flow that play up the unmediated, conversational yet still beat-driven cadence of his voice to an extent that it's hard to even break it down into component parts. It just is, and it can't and shouldn't be anything else.
At least a little of that could be the production talking, granted: the slate of beats on Cilvia Demo unites into a consistently immersive, complete album package that's just as ruminative as the lyrics. It draws from a downtempo vibe that swaps out Southern hip-hop's deep soul for noir jazz while retaining that certain cruising-speed dream-state glide. Post-Dirty South in the same way that previous TDE high points have been post-g-funk—indebted but transcendent—there's a consistent thread of deep, often heavily reverbed pianos and brittle yet steady off-kilter snares that make up for the South being the only American hip-hop region to never really give that whole Soulquarian thing a shot. That it pulls it off with a 10-producer committee full of relative unknowns is worth noting. Half of them have Cilvia Demo as their only Discogs credit, but their work stands out: Ross Vega's muted, melting-organ and screw-drum-lope opener “Hereditary”; Joseph Stranger's glow-bass 98 Dilla minimalism for the title cut; a grip of ethereal ghost-church beats by the Antydote (“Ronnie Drake”; “West Savannah”; “Banana”) that make him almost as much of a blindside breakout as the headliner.
Cilvia Demo ends with a remix of “Shot U Down", the name-maker that dropped last fall and remains the definitive moment of Rashad's career in a sort of “first result in Google autocomplete” kind of way. First single, last track—it's a fitting place for both, initially placing Rashad in an introductory context back in September and now, on this album, feeling like the culmination of a debut full-length that could go down as the best all year. The remix features some TDE co-signs in the form of Jay Rock and ScHoolboy Q, who contribute strong verses in embattled gangsta/money hustler mode, respectively. They're a welcome connection to Rashad's new place in hip-hop, but they're also added attractions rather than skeptic-comforting legitimizers. Rashad's already the real thing, even if his strengths lie in coming to terms with how to turn that real thing into a righteous thing. Now that he's arrived, watching him hit his next destination's going to be exhilarating.


Christian Fennesz and Jim O'Rourke tease out their differences across two long instrumental tracks that are alternately luminous and blustery.

Jim O’Rourke / Fennesz: It’s Hard for Me To Say I’m Sorry

It’s Hard for Me To Say I’m Sorry

Christian Fennesz and Jim O’Rourke are both romantics with different approaches. The Viennese guitarist and electronic musician Fennesz is an emotional maximalist, and he approaches his material the way J. M. W. Turner did his storm clouds: plowing straight into the squall, sails full, heart bursting. The American experimental-music polymath O’Rourke, on the other hand, is sly and exacting: Where Fennesz goes chasing vapor, O’Rourke is all about containment, channeling every drop of sentiment into finely wrought crystal goblets. On It’s Hard for Me to Say I’m Sorry, the two musicians tease out their respective differences across two long instrumental tracks that are alternately luminous and blustery. It is an album about small details and big emotions, and when it works, the collaboration represents the best of their tendencies.
The two musicians have a long history together. Alongside the Editions Mego founder Peter Rehberg, aka Pita, they have recorded five albums under the Fenn O’Berg alias since 1999, but this is their first duo project together. Running roughly 18 and 20 minutes, respectively, both tracks are vaguely narrative in shape. The material was recorded in Kobe, Kyoto, and Tokyo in September 2015; that there were three locations involved but only two tracks came out of the recordings tells us that some kind of editing was involved, but otherwise, there’s not a lot of daylight on their process. It sounds as though two guitars were involved, as well as a whole lot of digital processing, and it's tempting to ascribe the fuzzier, more reverberant axe-work to Fennesz. The clean-toned harmonic clusters, meanwhile, are more in keeping with O’Rourke’s delicate touch, as well as his frequent use of pedal steel.
“I Just Want You to Stay” is the stronger of the two tracks. It begins with gorgeous filaments of tone ringed with a halo of hazy dissonance, and for four minutes, it just swirls in place, its movements reminiscent of time-lapse video of tumbling thunderheads. Unlike most electronic music, there’s precious little repetition here: Even as the music approaches a long plateau that resembles a beatless, zero-G My Bloody Valentine, it remains in constant mutation. Mercurial and ephemeral, this is music that emphasizes time above all else; its considerable melancholy derives from the knowledge that beauty is inextricable from impermanence. And there are some truly wrenchingly beautiful moments here as it winds toward a long, gentle false ending—soft clacking tones, wreathed in curlicues of feedback, that suggests the sound of pebbles rolling on the ocean floor—and its final climax, ecstatic and bittersweet.
“Wouldn’t Wanna Be Swept Away” proceeds in almost exactly the same way, from its understated introduction to the way it breaks down into four main movements. But the balance is off: After a crystalline beginning, it gives way to a dissonant, distorted passage of eighth-note chug that mistakes bombast for intrigue, and it pushes you away instead of pulling you in. What follows is one of the loveliest passages on the album, rich with distant bell tones, quietly pinging synthesizer, and bright fifths reminiscent of Jon Hassell. But then the heavy-handed strumming returns, and the music's final five minutes amount to a duel between big, purposeful chords and quicksilver background burble. From the track’s tongue-in-cheek title, it’s clear that the artists are well aware of the risks of throwing themselves too eagerly into the wine-dark churn, but here, O’Rourke isn’t quite capable of reining in Fennesz’ more impetuous inclinations, and by the end of it, you find yourself craving a quiet patch of warm, dry land on which to catch your breath.


A glorious vision of house music’s inclusive, utopian potential unfolds on this DJ and producer’s first full-length album.

The Best of Both Worlds

Never underestimate the power of a darkened room. Mainstream culture likes to think of dance music as little more than a hedonistic pastime, imagining nightclubs as mere places of entertainment—just another choice on popular culture’s lengthy, laminated menu of leisure options. But for many, dance clubs are places of freedom, of self-actualization, of becoming. They offer space for the margins to be reimagined as a new center, giving people a chance to encounter their truest selves on a crowded dancefloor.
The Chicago-raised DJ and producer Honey Dijon, who grew up on the city’s South Side and first snuck out to go clubbing when she was 12, is one of contemporary house music’s most compelling proponents of this view. Dijon witnessed house history firsthand in Chicago and developed her craft in New York; along the way, friends and mentors like Derrick Carter and Danny Tenaglia helped her harness her talents. But it was what she has called club life’s “cross-pollination of people and cultures”—a mix of genders, sexualities, races, ethnicities, and social classes—that taught her the most, along with a passionate belief in sound’s ability to connect people. The Best of Both Worlds, Dijon’s debut album, takes its inspiration from those experiences.
Suffused in radiant synthesizer and murmured vocals, the sultry opener “Love Muscle” sets the album’s tone. “I wake from a deep sleep,” intones Nomi Ruiz, a singer best known for her work with Hercules and Love Affair, sounding half-dazed, reluctant to return to daylight. The song is a kind of conscious dream—an analogue, perhaps, for dance music’s own fantasy world. Occasionally, these fantasies turn explicit: “Personal Slave” wraps heavy-breathing come-ons from Charles McCloud (a.k.a. Matrixxman) around ominous synth stabs, tri-tone riffs playing up a suggestion of danger. Mostly, though, the world the album constructs is one where all strains of house music co-exist on an equal plane.
Over a dozen songs (including a stellar, 12-minute remix of standout cut “Burn”), the album takes up the mantle of a number of classic styles: Taut, synth-riffing jack tracks; heart-in-mouth hip-house; emotive, piano-led deep house. Her DJ sets are famous for their range—her recent Essential Mix for BBC Radio 1 zig-zagged across Gino Soccio, Fela Kuti, Larry Heard, and Isolée—and The Best of Both Worlds stakes out similarly varied ground. “Burn” dances around a slinky, downbeat rhythm reminiscent of Frankie Knuckles’ slower jams; “Why” dips into a 95-BPM reggae groove that’s got Compass Point written all over it.
She can be tremendously playful: “Houze (Houze Rebuilt Mix),” featuring the funk-influenced producer and vocalist Seven Davis Jr., is a driving floor-filler modeled on the “bitch tracks” of ballroom culture. Davis taunts pretenders in a leering baritone (“Bitch that ain’t house/Get out my house”) while Dijon pounds away on the sampling pads, triggering a no-fucks-given stream of monosyllabic vocal shots over a chunky bass-and-drums groove. “Catch the Beat” is more streamlined, but its pleasures are no less boisterous, thanks to the Brooklyn rapper Cakes da Killa’s hiccupping, rapid-fire flow. The track is an obvious throwback to hip-house, a short-lived, high-energy fusion of rap and house from the late ’80s, but Cakes’ nimble delivery is less reminiscent of Fast Eddie or Tyree Cooper than it is Me’Shell NdegéOcello’s “If That’s Your Boyfriend (Li’l Freaky Remix),” a deliciously syncopated Lil Louis version from 1993. “Thunda” is another fun one, kitting out a high-stepping house groove with Latin cowbell rhythms and the kind of brass-synth stabs last heard on Depeche Mode’s Construction Time Again in 1983.
Occasionally, Honey Dijon is happy to dig into a heads-down groove and simply get lost in the sound. “Lift” is a nicely enveloping dub-techno track in the tradition of her adopted home of Berlin. But the album’s most powerful moments are the ones that connect to house music’s emancipatory history. “Look Ahead,” a cover of a 1976 soul-disco cut by the group Aquarian Dream, also invokes Cajmere and Dajae’s spiritual-house anthem “Brighter Days” in its pianos-and-drums groove and its positive outlook (“Hold your head up/Don’t be discouraged/Better times are coming your way”). And it’s not just the lyrics; hope seems to radiate from the waveforms of the music itself, between the gorgeous multi-tracking of Sam Sparro’s voice and the deep, reassuring keys, where every chord in the sequence is somehow more satisfying than the last.
“State of Confusion” is cut from similar cloth, and, largely thanks to singer Joi Cardwell’s agile, deeply emotive voice, it’s an even more alchemical example of the relationship between music and personal liberation. “Burn,” likewise, goes to the heart of that connection: “Only when you see what can be done/Will you realize what you become/Only when you see what you can be/Will you realize that you are free,” sings Jason Walker, the song's guest vocalist, over a sensual, '90s-inspired groove. It’s a simple message, but as Honey Dijon shows throughout this fine debut, it’s one that goes to the deepest meaning of house music.


On this two-track EP, Ricardo Villalobos teams with fellow Chilean producer Umho to celebrate their shared love of Latin American music.

Ricardo Villalobos / Umho: Melo de Melo EP

Melo de Melo EP

Two decades on, Ricardo Villalobos is well into the “Friends & Family” phase of his career: The Chilean-German electronic musician often goes for remixes or collaborations—with the likes of synthesist Max Loderbauer, for example, or guitarist Oren Ambarchi—over solo productions. This two-track EP, for Santiago’s Drumma Records, sees Villalobos team with fellow Chilean artist Umho as Ricmho. Like many of Villalobos’ scattered collaborations, you can be forgiven for not recognizing this particular partner in crime: Umho has a scant two releases to his name (which are themselves collaborations) despite a long-running and healthy DJ career.
Melo de Melo feels more substantial, owing to its nearly 30-minute runtime. Uhmo and Villalobos have frequently shared the DJ booth over the years, and the EP is billed as a celebration of their shared love for Latin American music. While Umho’s limited production record makes it difficult to suss out who contributed what, the EP is full of the quick, pitched percussion that dots typical Villalobos tracks. Squint and you can hear a conga, or a timbale, or a maraca, all deployed with a busyness foreign to stodgier, upbeat/downbeat dance patterns. Still, Melo de Melo scans as Latin American in pretty much the same manner all Villalobos productions do.
The A-side, “Por Suerte,” features a resonant ping played with considerable vigor and debatable purpose. It sticks out in a thicket of percussion that, for much of the track, masks a warm, evolving ambient melody. That melody breaks through in the track’s final minute as the pops and clicks fade, churning slowly and sounding considerably more reflective and calm than your average Villalobos work. The EP’s title track (credited only to Villalobos) begins more conventionally, with a steady kick and a sparring match between a conga and a snare. Halfway through, Villalobos introduces a long, evolving sample that sounds like a string quartet being kneaded into itself. By the end of the track, it’s a roughly diced, digitally charred wreck.
It’s a beautiful sequence, one that underlines how Villalobos seems increasingly interested in welding avant-garde composition and dance music. (See also: last year’s Vilod collaboration with Loderbauer, in which the duo wrung minimal jazz out of their synthesizers.) Villalobos remains commendably weird in almost every way, even if, as a project, Ricmho seems only half-formed. Ultimately, that’s why Melo de Melo underwhelms, however slightly: Villalobos has been churning out jammy, crumbling tracks like this for most of a decade at this point, and these are hardly the jammiest, or the most crumbly.


After working with Danger Mouse on their last full-length, Black Keys sound re-energized and playful on their loosest record in years.

Brothers

When it was announced that Danger Mouse would be working with the Black Keys on their 2008 album, Attack & Release, it seemed like a fresh start for a band that had run out of ideas. While DM indeed brought some psychedelic side dishes to Dan Auerbach and Pat Carney's meat-and-potatoes blues-rock table-- a little pan flute here, some spaghetti Western guitar licks there-- Attack & Release had its share of samey-sounding midtempo cuts, suggesting that the duo were content to write variations on the same theme. Subsequent side projects (both worked in Damon Dash's not-disastrous rap-rock experiment Blakroc, and Carney formed Drummer) suggested that they probably felt this creative stagnation, too. As for Auerbach's basically-a-Black-Keys-album solo effort, Keep It Hid: guy's gotta get it out of his system somehow.
New challenges, as well as time apart from their main outfit, have served these guys well. Brothers is the loosest they've sounded since 2004's Rubber Factory. The Keys haven't undergone a drastic sonic shift or anything-- at this point, no one is going to mistake them for anyone else, especially if they keep putting out songs like Brothers' first two singles, "Next Girl" and "Tighten Up". The former is boilerplate Black Keys, complete with a burned-barn riff for a chorus and lyrics about wayward women; the latter, the only Danger Mouse-produced cut on the record, features a whistle-heavy melody that wouldn't have sounded out of place on Attack & Release. But you don't come to the Black Keys for reinvention.
Instead, Brothers finds Carney and Auerbach augmenting their sound with some new stylistic tics, suggesting that they might've learned something from working with Danger Mouse. "Too Afraid to Love You" feels spooked-out thanks to Auerbach's distanced vocals and some haunted harpsichord, while the Jock Jams beat on "Howlin' For You" and "Black Mud"'s winking nod to CCR's "Green River" find the Keys in an uncharacteristically playful mode.
Most striking on Brothers is Auerbach's incorporation of falsetto. The man has honed his speaker-blowing howl for so long now, it's genuinely surprising to hear him try another vocal style. Even more surprising is how good he is at it, too: he's controlled and natural on "Everlasting Light", vibing with high-pitched restraint and turning the tune into a lo-fi T. Rex stomper, while on penultimate track and Jerry Butler cover "Never Gonna Give You Up", he lets loose over a shimmering Motown melody.
If there's one thing that keeps Brothers from jumping the gap between a "very good" album and a "great" album, it's the running time. When it's all said and done, the 15-track set runs almost an hour long, causing one to think that the Keys might have done the best material here a disservice by shoving so much onto one album when they could've easily saved some up for their next release. It makes a skeptical fan like myself wonder if the Keys spent themselves creatively here, and if the next record will just be more back-to-basics trad-blues mediocrity. If the next Black Keys record builds on Brothers, though, they still have some good music ahead of them.


Chief Keef's Bang 3 has been in limbo since 2013, but it doesn't sound like a too-little-too-late effort. Instead, it sounds like Keef signaling a new beginning. The higher, clearer production values are immediately noticeable—this is the crispest-sounding Keef release since 2012's Finally Rich.

Bang 3

To some rap fans, Chief Keef is still a reliable wellspring of dense, intriguing street rap; to others, he's a misguided and spoiled ne'er-do-well who has been making sloppy Death-of-Rap mixtapes in his mansion since "Love Sosa" fell off the bottom of the charts. Even a cursory listen to Keef's new album, though, pokes a hole, or several, in the latter diagnosis. Bang 3 is clearly not the work of a contrarian, unfocused artist (or, for that matter, an "outsider" one) actively trying to antagonize and self-sabotage; nor is it an awkward or even phoned-in bid for renewed pop appeal. It's the work of a mature rapper and songwriter, putting the skills he developed over several years spent branching out stylistically to good use.
The release of Bang 3 carries some significance for Keef. This project has been in limbo since 2013; it was postulated first as his sophomore Interscope release, then as an album-turned-mixtape (a kiss-off to label bureaucracy), then, following the loss of his deal, as an independent album to arrive exactly one year ago. Luckily, Bang 3 isn't a too-little-too-late effort like Gunplay's recent, forestalled full-length; instead, it sounds like Keef signaling a new beginning. The higher, clearer production values are most immediately noticeable—this is the crispest-sounding Keef release since 2012's *Finally Rich—*and its well-ironed-out song structures. It feels like a new coat of paint to befit a new partnership: The rapper is in the honeymoon phase of a new deal with Greek billionaire, web entrepreneur, and probable psychopath Alki David's multi-platform entertainment company FilmOn, and the sense that he's getting some new encouragement (and constructive criticism) is all over this confident and studied-sounding music.
On Bang 3, his voice is turned up loud, left untreated and pushed to the front of the mix, highlighting smaller, expressive details in his delivery. He builds energy across verses rather than hammering on one idea, relishing word sounds and inflecting his patterns with a conversational, sing-songy style: "I'm rocking Tweet, beat, skeet, then delete" (from "You"). Often, the fun he's having in the booth is infectious, sellling chancier lines like "Remember having pistol fights, now I'm having food fights/ Now we having rack fights, now we having jewel fights" (from "New School").
For the most part, the production stays behind the rapping, unlike Keef's in-house work on Sorry 4 the Weight and the self-produced Back from the Dead 2. Trusted Atlanta stalwart Zaytoven is here, as is Keef's first and most important collaborator, his childhood ally Young Chop. On "Facts", produced by Glo Gang, he delivers some of his most pointed and emotional lyrics on the album over eerie synth string seesaws.
That said, while these songs feel more well-plotted and pristinely delivered than anything he has released in a while (that is not to say "better"), you still get the feeling they are molded from Keef's first thoughts after stepping in the booth. In this case, this makes for a lot of very good, but only a few great tracks; the rigorously composed '80s-inflected ballad "Ain't Missing You"— with its gunshot timpanis, EKG fluttering, and fierce hook—is a one-off novelty, not indicative of a new, aggressively poppy direction.
Ever since the the sleek pop appeal of Finally Rich, fans have wondered if the rapper will someday make another streamlined, unassailably consistent project.  Bang 3 seems to signal that, despite his newfound poise, he won't; he's not interested in that. That's not a bad thing, and it's even something of a relief to not be constantly waiting for some succinct return-to-form moment. The key to enjoying his work is appreciating the sweet spots, the moments where his reckless experimentation and his unmistakable attitude intersect and become more than the sum of their parts. These are tapes you wander into slowly and patiently, bypassing some murkier, hastier-sounding clunkers until you find the music that both sounds like no one else and begs for replays reveals itself. It's usually worth it.


The Snapchat icon’s 10th album is ostensibly an ode to the joys of fatherhood, but its A-list features and slick surfaces are the polar opposite of warm and fuzzy.

Grateful

Since his first child, a boy named Asahd, was born last fall, DJ Khaled has been living in a Huggies commercial—a soft-focus, blissed-out, brimming-with-pride advertisement for the joys of parenthood. Daddydom has been good for the king of the most self-interested social-media platform, Snapchat. Instead of shouting, “We the best,” he’s now shouting, “He’s the best.” Asahd is not only pictured on the cover of DJ Khaled’s 10th album, Grateful, which clearly was named in tribute to him, but he also appears on the cover art for four of the album’s singles, and he’s the subject of three (“I Love You So Much,” “Asahd Talk,” “I’m So Grateful”) of the album’s whopping 23 tracks. The number is meant as a nod to Asahd’s birthday, October 23; the tracklisting was selected in part, DJ Khaled has said in an interview, according to Asahd’s rapturous reaction when Khaled played him potential songs, which is why the boy also has an executive producer credit. Khaled even convinced Chance the Rapper to sing an interpolation of “The Alphabet Song.” In a world where too many kids get too little love, DJ Khaled is obsessed with his son, and that is beautiful.
Unfortunately, very little of that heart made it into Grateful, a bloated album that’s full of too many plastic tracks with a shiny list of features—from Rihanna and Future to Justin Bieber and Calvin Harris, name a big name and it’s probably here—that seem primarily geared toward capturing spots on bland-as-baby-food pop-rap radio playlists.
To that end, Grateful has been very successful. It just nabbed the No. 1 slot on the Billboard 200 charts and already has produced three mega singles, two of which are indeed album standouts: the glitzy “Shining,” featuring the country’s most glamorous couple, Jay and Bey; the pool-party staple, “I’m the One,” with the Biebs, Quavo, Chance, and Lil Wayne; and the dud of the bunch, “Wild Thoughts,” which couldn’t even be saved by Rihanna, Bryson Tiller, and a sample of Santana’s “Maria Maria.”
With the exception of “Wild Thoughts,” the first quarter of the album moves at a good clip. “To the Max” (featuring Drake) and “On Everything” (featuring Rick Ross, Big Sean, and a Travis Scott hook that almost derails the song) are high-octane club hits, their racing pulses a nice injection of urgency in such a long project. After that, however, it’s hit or miss. “Don’t Quit,” produced by Calvin Harris and featuring Travis Scott and Jeremih, is a more sophisticated song-of-the-summer contender than the blatant grab of “I’m the One.” But while its heart is in the right place, “I Love You So Much” comes off as try-hard and saccharine; despite having what should be a dream team, Alicia Keys and Nicki Minaj, “Nobody” never manages to gel.
Many of the songs on the second half slide into each other in a forgettable jumble, but Grateful’s best songs are here, too. Belly is whip-smart and effortless on “Interlude.” “Iced Out My Arms” (Future, Migos, 21 Savage and T.I. all come ready to play) is a woozy post-game song with a sharp edge, an off-kilter lullaby to wind down the after-after-party. Taking the crown, though, is “Good Man.” Imbued with surprising warmth thanks to Cool & Dre, the production is custom-fitted for Pusha T and Jadakiss to drop in and do clean, tight work like the consummate professionals they are.
But Khaled will have to teach Asahd the value of editing and restraint, because the good gets lost here. (Then again, this is a man whose tagline is “Another one.”) Too often, more is just more, and the slickness with which Khaled packages his product feels mass-produced for maximum impact, and calculating in a way that clashes with his fatherly quirk. As it is, Grateful is as over-processed as a Pop-Tart, and we all know Khaled would never feed Asahd one of those things.


On the stellar and small Electric Ursa, her third album but first to be widely distributed, the Kentucky singer Joan Shelley lets prepositions hang with no object, tucks nouns into vivid verb-less clusters, and prefers pronouns that linger with little clear meaning.

Electric Ursa

For an ostensible singer/songwriter, Joan Shelley doesn’t say too much—or at least, very much that’s concrete, direct, or explicit. On the stellar and small Electric Ursa, her third album but first to be widely distributed, the Kentucky singer lets prepositions hang with no object, tucks nouns into vivid verb-less clusters, and prefers pronouns that linger with little clear meaning. Electric Ursa includes only eight tracks, but still, Shelley foregoes lyrics altogether on the mid-album dream, “Remedios”. Instead, she hums a simple melody over banjo, piano and gathering drums, as though she were singing a child to sleep with the help of a rural chamber ensemble.
“There’s so much I’m longing to say, but there’s nothing to decide,” she offers during the hypnotic sway of the love song “Long Way to Night”, as if to apologize for the impressionistic shape of her own words. No condolences are required, really: Shelley’s primary instrument carries both the grain of a wizened Appalachian lifer and the maneuverability of a young torch singer. Paired with a simpatico band of Louisville musicians, her tone gives the words more meaning and weight than additional details or complete sentences ever could. Shelley’s voice fills the space between her pen’s lines.
Several years ago, Shelley recorded a pair of albums with Maiden Radio, a string trio with fellow Kentucky singers Cheyenne Marie Mize and Julia Purcell. They largely covered antiquated American ballads, country tunes, and lullabies, mixing in the occasional original or contemporary number to avoid any old-time novelty pratfall. The tunes of Electric Ursa indeed verify a musical education rich with various transcontinental folk renaissances. “River Low” feels like a letter for back home from a mountain pioneer, confessing both loyalty through love and personal growth. “There’s a calmness in my footsteps, in the new lines on my hands,” she sings with welcome resolve. The closer and title track, meanwhile, shakes with the same bucolic reverie of Nick Drake and Vashti Bunyan, Shelley linking images of “waning autumn light” and “moments given unto the ether” with a see-saw dynamic that makes you lean in close to records like Pink Moon. Her voice rises into sudden, stainless near-shouts and then slinks back toward a whisper. Beneath it, the rippling acoustic guitar of labelmate Nathan Salsburg affords the simple instrument-and-voice affair the ornate elegance of Pentangle.
But the respective placement of these songs at the album’s middle and then at its end feels like a subtle and deliberate revelation. It’s as though Shelley is reminding the listener of her foundation—that is, centuries of Anglo-American songbooks—only after offering a tour of the grand designs it can support. Collectively, those other songs put Shelley in the surprising, esteemed company of recent stateside singers like Sharon Van Etten, Justin Vernon, and Angel Olsen, songwriters who use modest observations as the basis for big and bold arrangements. When Shelley nests her voice inside of Electric Ursa’s more complicated productions, she stuns. “Something Small” begins as a simple acoustic trickle, with drums obediently echoing the strums. It builds one piece at a time, the music mirroring Shelley’s slow, steady feeling of being trapped by provincialism, loneliness and fate. “It’s all laid out in front for you to take it,” she sings in the closing chorus, organ pouring in like a wave of unexpected encouragement. The record’s peak, “First of August”, scans as the more mature flipside to a single from For Emma, Forever Ago, the singer suddenly capable of restraint in the face of complete emotional resignation. Of all Electric Ursa’s songs, “First of August” is the most lyrically elusive, with seasons that seem to obey no calendar, a subject that seems decisively indecisive, and an idiosyncratic style that cuts between hillside patois and sophisticated English. But Shelley and the band—all moping drums, crying keys, hand-wringing electric—make the mix of regret, longing and hope tucked into the lines perfectly clear. The feeling is complete and engrossing, even if the words are not.
Electric Ursa isn’t Shelley’s debut, but it is her absolute arrival. On 2012’s Ginko, issued by the Ol Kentuck label of longtime collaborator Daniel Martin Moore, Shelley worked for similar grandeur. But it felt stiff and forced, as though she had an idea of how she wanted to sound but not the experiences she needed to power it. In the interim, though, something seems to have softened and shifted for Shelley, making her less concerned with the perfection of these productions (there is, more often than not, a ripple of room noise and tape hiss in these songs) than their power. Again, it’s an arc and approach not unlike Van Etten’s, where two relatively minor albums preceded a sudden revelation. Where Ginko was too conscious and precious, Eletric Ursa suggests that Shelley is revealing bits and scraps from private journals, leaving out details to protect or piss off the guilty. Sounds like folk music, after all.


Three years after "212", her confrontationally profane lead single, Azealia Banks has finally released her proper debut. It's all over the place, with tracks new and old and production that runs the gamut from Ariel Pink to Lone to AraabMuzik, and it functions as a sort of anthology, complete with flashes of brilliance.

Azealia Banks: Broke With Expensive Taste

Broke With Expensive Taste

It’s been three years since Azealia Banks sprung up from the New York underground fully formed with "212", her confrontationally profane lead single. "212" was the seed for all of the triumph and adversity that followed—the prodigious rap skills, the casual genre-bending, and the bratty disdain for authority. In its wake, Banks charted a career path typical of a budding rap talent. She dropped the promising, beat-jacking pre-album mixtape (2012’s unrelenting Fantasea) and the compact retail EP of brash originals (2012’s nostalgia tripping 1991). She navigated through mettle-testing beef with her peers. The tiffs were negligible as long as the music was nourishing, and for a while Azealia’s war on the rap establishment was excitingly disruptive.
But as work on her Interscope Records debut commenced, Banks hit a tight spot. The deal soured as her new tracks were met with indifference from label liaisons. Her uncompromising social media demeanor landed her in quaffs both hysterical (See: her merciless ribbing of T.I. and Iggy Azalea) and injurious (that time she defended her right to call Perez Hilton a gay slur), but vocal criticism of Baauer, Pharrell, and Disclosure began to cost her profitable collaborators. Her early career goodwill nearly spent, Banks finally caught a break: Interscope let her out of her deal with the rights to all the songs she’d recorded during her tenure there. Broke With Expensive Taste arrived this month with very little fanfare, its release announced with a simple tweet. Its lengthy gestation is, of course, its chief foible. Older material accounts for roughly half the tracklist, and some of it doesn’t mesh well with the fresher, weirder stuff around it. It helps to see Broke With Expensive Taste, then, as an anthology, The Portable Azealia Banks.
Three songs in, it’s clear why Interscope didn’t know what to do with the thing. Opener "Idle Delilah" bursts in effortlessly crossing elements of house, dubstep, and Caribbean music. It’s followed by "Gimme a Chance", a bass-heavy post-disco romp that takes a hairpin turn into smooth merengue halfway through, as Banks flits from rapping and singing in English to perfect unaffected Spanish. "Desperado" borrows a beat from early 2000s UK garage whiz MJ Cole’s "Bandelero Desperado" as Banks puts on a rap clinic, flaying adversaries in a flow so neat you might miss the fact that every piece of every line rhymes. Her voice is often the sole unifying force from track to track here, and it’s easy to see a label’s trepidation about pushing this thing on listeners who haven't followed her every move. "Nude Beach a Go-Go", for instance, a late album collaboration with Ariel Pink, is every bit the what-the-fuck moment it sounds like on paper.
By the end of Broke With Expensive Taste you’ll come to see Azealia Banks as a dance pop classicist underneath the flailing. The capable but unfussy approach to melody on deep cut confections "Soda" and "Miss Camaraderie" as well as Fantasea holdover "Luxury" and the massive "Chasing Time" showcase Azealia as a singer who’s studied her Robin S. and Technotronic. Coupled with her bullish rhyme skills, Azealia’s chops as a house vocalist make for a true rapper-singer double threat. (Credit is due to Drake and Nicki Minaj, but both sound like they picked up singing on the job.) She’s an angel on the choruses, but for the verses in between, she’s a formidable spitter whose flash and flow are unmistakably Harlem.
The party line among hip-hop aficionados is that New York rap currently lacks a distinctly New York identity. There’s some truth to it. The city’s biggest success stories of late involve locals breaking out by spicing Big Apple grit with outside flavors, from A$AP Mob’s Texas screw fixation to French Montana’s trap circuit traction to Nicki Minaj’s day-glo EDM daze. But the scene in 2014 can’t look like it did in 1994 or even 2004, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that the Statlers and Waldorfs pining for a new age of rappity boom bap wouldn’t notice a new New York if it came up and offered them molly in a Brooklyn bar bathroom.
Well, Azealia Banks is it, and Broke With Expensive Taste is a reminder that the corner of Harlem that she claims is walking distance from both Washington Heights and the Bronx, where you’re as likely to hear hip-hop booming out of apartments and passing cars as freestyle, reggaeton, house, or bachata. It’s a quick subway jaunt away from the landmark clubs where ball culture persists, as well as perennial dance parties at Webster Hall and the glut of eclectic Lower Manhattan concert venues. Broke With Expensive Taste glides through all of these, just like the faithful 1 train sampled on "Desperado". Both album and the artist revel in the freedom of a New York City where divisions between these sounds and scenes have ever so slowly ceased to exist.


Two virtuosic performances of a Bach composition by the eccentric Canadian pianist brought Baroque music into the modern era. Together, they explore how art and taste evolve through time.

Glenn Gould: Bach: The Goldberg Variations

Bach: The Goldberg Variations

The press release began: “Columbia Masterworks’ recording director and his engineering colleagues are sympathetic veterans who accept as perfectly natural all artists’ studio rituals, foibles, or fancies. But even these hardy souls were surprised by the arrival of young Canadian pianist Glenn Gould and his ‘recording equipment’ for his first Columbia sessions. … It was a balmy June day, but Gould arrived in a coat, beret, muffler and gloves.” The rest of the bulletin detailed the other peculiarities that Gould had brought along with him when recording J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations for the label.
These were many. Instead of nobly holding his head high with a proper recitalist’s posture, Gould’s modified piano bench allowed him to get his face right near the keys, where he would proceed to hum audibly while playing. He soaked his arms in hot water for up to 20 minutes before takes and brought a wide variety of pills. He also brought his own bottles of water, which, for 1955, was still something that seemed like only Howard Hughes would do. It was these initial, broadly trumpeted peculiarities that helped shape the Gould myth throughout his too-short life, the audacious genius who slightly unsettled everyone around him. Fittingly, throughout the 20th century, there would be no more audacious and initially unsettling act of musical reinterpretation than Gould’s debut studio recording.
With his 1955 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, the young pianist made a compelling case for a work that, at the time, was considered an obscure keyboard composition by an otherwise imposing master of Baroque music. Gould made his counter-argument for the piece’s rightful prominence by taking wild liberties with the source. In addition to playing the work on a piano instead of on the 18th-century era-appropriate harpsichord, Gould rushed tempos and varied his attack with aggression. His body flailed up and down his creaky chair, displaying melodramatic physical gestures—the very cliche of a young genius at work. But instead of seeming like an impudent youngster, Gould’s innovations signaled a clear love for the source material. He took the piece’s unusual status—a theme-and-variation work so varied that it could be hard for a lay audience to follow—and realized that it could be performed with modernist vigor, full of wild twists of character.
Gould drilled his famous technique over time, using an obscure practice known as “finger tapping” to produce muscle memory in his fingers—thereby allowing for dizzying flurries of notes with astonishing control and minimal physical exertion. And at a time when the future members of the Beatles were still obsessing over British skiffle bands, Gould was pioneering the use of the studio as an instrument by splicing together different takes: finding startling collisions of mood that could help drive his conception of a work.
In its fervor for relating Gould’s peculiar behaviors, Columbia’s first press release neglected to mention all the substantive ways in which the pianist was revolutionizing the art of interpretation. The critics, however, did notice. Gould’s Goldbergs received a raft of rave reviews from The New York Times, Newsweek, and Musical America, among others. Even writers who were unsure if his was a respectable way to approach Bach’s sublime music counted themselves impressed by Gould’s array of approaches—including his dancing sprightliness, a dashing top-gear of speed, and swooning sense of drama. And Gould proved a forceful advocate for his own ideas about the piece.
In erudite liner notes that accompanied the first LP issue in 1956, Gould writes about the strangeness of Bach’s theme-and-variation work: “...one might justifiably expect that … the principal pursuit of the variations would be the illumination of the motivic facets within the melodic complex of the Aria theme. However such is not the case, for the thematic substance, a docile but richly embellished soprano line, possesses an intrinsic homogeneity which bequeaths nothing to posterity and which, so far as motivic representation is concerned, is totally forgotten during the 30 variations.”
It’s a fascinating read of the piece—even if it seems trollish to accuse Bach’s Aria for adding “nothing to posterity.” (At least Gould was consistent in his dislike of obvious, top-line melodies. He didn’t much care for Italian opera, either.) Still, it’s true that the power associated with the culmination of Gould's Goldbergs—when the Aria returns—has something to do with how far the listener has traveled since the opening. If you want to make that Aria really floor people at the end, why not blow out the contrasts between the variations as you play them?
Gould makes an argument for his own radical vision of how the piece should be played. He sees his own jagged cadence not in defiance of but as a requisite to Bach’s score. Even listeners who put the Goldbergs on as background music are likely to sit up and pay attention when Gould pours it on during Variation No. 5. With that one far edge of intensity established, his ruminative way of handling Bach’s “Canons” is far more seductive. Gould’s lightning-fast runs tend to get all the press, but they cast into sharp relief his poetic handling of the so-called “black pearl” Variation No. 25. The power of Gould’s 1955 Goldbergs comes from the contrasts that Gould chooses to emphasize.
Gould’s first version of the Goldbergs reportedly sold 40,000 copies in its first five years: A considerable amount for any classical recording at any time, but particularly notable at the dawn of the LP era. The pop-cultural primacy of Gould’s first take on the Goldbergs also fostered some detractors, among them some Bach specialists like Wanda Landowska who were also interested in rescuing the piece from its relative obscurity. Late in life, Gould joined their ranks, offering some withering criticisms of his 1955 recording. In 1981, the pianist told the critic and biographer Tim Page that the 1955 handling of the “black pearl” variation had become particularly unwelcome to his own ears: “It seems to say—Please Take Note: This Is Tragedy. You know, it just doesn’t have the dignity to bear its suffering with a hint of quiet resignation.”
The idea of judging his famous 1955 recording on the basis of those criteria seems like a category error—or a set-up destined to prompt a negative assessment of his first record. The latter possibility is at least plausible, since when Gould offered this self-criticism to Page, he was doing so as part of a new publicity campaign. After being so closely identified with the Goldbergs for decades, Gould had made the rare decision to re-record a work already in his repertoire.
His 1981 recording of the Goldberg Variations is still recognizable as Gould: the strutting precision and emphasis on counterpoint apparent. So too is Gould’s famously divisive practice of humming along with his playing (a natural trait of Gould’s that seemed to flower into a deliberate affectation sometime between 1955 and 1981). But in the interim, much else has changed. There’s less swing in Gould’s playing; even when he turns up the tempi, it feels considered and autumnal.
Variation No. 5 is played in 37 seconds, the identical span of time Gould needed to burn through it in 1955. But in the 1981 variations, Gould makes good on his desire for dignity. The 1955 rendition of No. 5 has a compelling, nervy energy; the 1981 version takes a greater sense of self-possession. The ability to find that much expressive room inside a similar tempo resulted in Gould’s second masterstroke with the Goldbergs. This range of musical investigation signals something profound. Two different approaches to the same notes can say a great deal about how one ages and how tastes can move over time.
Gould died just days after Columbia released the second Goldberg set. His death enhanced the idea of this being a grand, final statement—as though touching the work again had created a fateful resolution for his startling debut. But even if Gould were still with us, the 1981 Goldberg performance would sound necessary. Here, Gould luxuriates in the stately character of the “French” overture (No. 16)—and its pivot away from the prior, minor-key canon—with greater pomp than on his first try. It’s just that the fun never spills over into abandon, as on Gould’s first pass. For all his eccentricities, Gould’s most striking trait may have been his ability to revise his own carefully considered understanding of a work that was important to him.
Both interpretations have their uses. Along with Bob Dylan’s “Love and Theft”, which I’d purchased at 12:01 a.m. on September 11, 2001, at the Virgin Megastore in Union Square, Gould’s 1981 Goldberg set was the album I played most often in the days that followed. With the ashen smell still in the air, and the streets south of 14th Street devoid of car traffic, most who lived inside the perimeter established by the National Guard spent some portion of each day balancing requirements of mourning and anger with the search for a new equilibrium—a way to feel less anxious that didn’t also involve pretending that something traumatic hadn’t just taken place.
I owned both versions of Gould’s Goldbergs because I had been told by guidebooks that this was a prerequisite for caring about classical music. (It is.) Until that week, I’d spent most of my time with the 1955 recording—identifying with its direct access to youthful exuberance. Now, however, the high energy of that edition seemed a poor fit to the mood. The dignity Gould had intended to emphasize in 1981 came through clearly.
Record collecting and music appreciation often turn on arguments about rankings, peerlessness, and the greatest-of-all-time. Classical fans play this game as aggressively as anyone—so hard that they occasionally seem to rule out the possibility of any worthy new music being made for traditional classical instruments. And we do this with Gould’s Goldbergs, too. Think fast: 1955 or 1981? Sometimes that’s fun. But these recordings’ mutual portrait of variations held in a single mind—one capable of such deliberate differences of opinion with itself—seems not just like something you’re well advised to have in a music collection, but instead like an approach to life worth exploring and emulating.