Over the past few years, Roberto Carlos Lange has gone from making softly warped, pastoral music with Spanish lyrics and Latin influences to more urbane pop with bi-lingual lyrics. A sultry, dreamy temperament always remains, and Invisible Life is Helado Negro's clearest record yet.

Invisible Life

It's tempting to claim that the Helado Negro of 2009's Awe Owe is unrecognizable in the Helado Negro of Invisible Life. The former was a softly warped, pastoral record with Spanish lyrics and prominent Latin guitar; the latter is a more urbane electronic pop record with lyrics in English and Spanish. But in every style Roberto Carlos Lange develops, a sultry, dreamy temperament remains apparent, from the shimmying cadences and simmered arrangements to his just-woken-up voice. Invisible Life is the clearest and most dynamic Helado Negro record to date.
His transition from acoustic to electronic took place on 2011's Canta Lechuza, which was lively but sometimes drifted through embryonic learning passages. Helado Negro generally deals in smart sounds rather than memorable songs (outside of maybe "El Oeste") but that changes with Invisible Life. Lange has committed to his MPC game and tightened it up, knotting his signature atmospheres into immersive, highly musical beats scrawled with unstable sub-rhythms. The glass-brick chords and deeply pumping bass of "Dance Ghost" are solidly constructed but hairline-cracked by jittery, stereo-panned clicks, and Lange's shivery falsetto halfway through lifts the whole arrangement up a level, breaking it free from its foundations. There are many patient, considered payoffs, as when, late in "Arboles", a staccato synth begins skipping atop the leisurely Latin rhythm.
A nostalgic feel lightly creeps in to Invisible Life, from the cartoonish snake rattles and bird whistles shot through the bass arpeggios of "Lentamente" to the gear-shifting 8-bit theme of "Catastrophe". Other songs are rooted in Caribbean music or techno. But Lange's most compelling moments come when he circumvents cultural references, exhuming mysterious but vibrant sound-worlds from the ocean floor of his imagination. He's never before ventured anything as formally distinctive and effectively delightful as "U Heard", which feels densely compacted even as its varied timbres peel off in every direction-- rubbery plucks bouncing around a low octave, bubble-like blips rising and sinking, and percussion threshing straight ahead.
A couple tracks don't measure up to this standard of invention. The rather thin "Relatives", for instance, plops Helado's pal Jon Philpot (Bear in Heaven) atop a rocksteady template of knobby bass and skating backbeats and then calls it a day. There are other guests lurking around, including Devendra Banhart supposedly playing guitar on "Arboles", which isn't prominent. Helado Negro actually seems to have begun as a more collaborative project. Lange has previously worked with Julianna Barwick and Guillermo Scott Herren. But there's always been something solitary about it, and the most subtly bewitching tracks on Invisible Life feel like the internal weather of a mind billowing and clearing. His once noticeable traces of tentativeness around electronic tools have disappeared. At the time, Canta Lechuza seemed like Lange dabbling in electronic music, but in the retroactive light of Invisible Life, it sounds more like him finding his voice.


Mouse on Mars have yet to repeat themselves. Radical Connector boasts the longest gestation of any Mouse on Mars album since the duo formed over a decade ago, and the departure on this record is dramatic enough that it's easy to imagine at least two other transistional LPs between it and 2001's landmark Idiology. Here, the duo shake their progressive IDM constructs for alien club bangers.

Radical Connector

As music makers in an electronic sphere, the nature and practice of repetition is something Mouse on Mars have had to confront. While they've often kept a finger on the club music button through remixes and various associations with the dance community, the Mouse on Mars method has always involved finding ways to knock the loops out of joint and upset the sort of internalized expectations that come from a lifetime of music listening. The element of surprise is crucial to their aesthetic, even though the change-ups are often subtle, which means serious attention to detail is a must. If they've taken longer to record and release albums than their contemporaries, it's because of this need to micromanage. Mouse on Mars on record are fussy and exacting.
Their full-length portfolio shows a similar inability to leave well enough alone. Mouse on Mars aren't in the business of repeating themselves, and even now, eight albums deep, it's difficult to describe one Mouse on Mars full-length by comparing it to another. Certain qualities overlap and there is a distinctive "sound," but each album picks a handful of ideas and explores them to varying depths. The next one then picks up somewhere else and goes.
2001's Idiology was unique because ideas were so numerous. Each track seemed to point to a possible new direction, and it seemed as if the next album could be anything from a screamo noisefest to an electro prog opera. You'd think we would have learned by now; it turns out that the threads running through the long-awaited new album Radical Connector are not found anywhere on Idiology. This is Mouse on Mars' most conventional album, with vocals on every track (by drummer Dodo Nkishi and Sonig fellow traveler Niobe), and it's also their most predictable in structure. Each song builds an internally consistent songworld and is content with its boundaries. If you're a fan of Mouse on Mars' more experimental side (hand up here behind the keyboard) it helps to approach Radical Connector on its own terms.
Though it is indeed pop, Radical Connector has an unusual sound. Nkishi and Niobe have strong voices even untreated, but their vocals are vocoded, chopped, and phased to seem as unnatural as possible while generally avoiding robotic cliches. Several tracks with Nkishi on lead feature an intentionally thick and sludgy low end, with the bass and drums merging into a lunging, leering, lumbering beast. And though heightened danceability has been a key selling point of this record, most tracks are a half-step slow.
"Wipe That Sound", for example, is nimble on its face with excellent "oo-way oo-way" disco background vox, a command to "kick the can" (do they play that in Germany?), and a gurgling acid bassline, but there's no way the plodding tempo is going to fill a dancefloor. Same goes for "Mine Is in Yours", probably the purest song on the album, with a simple chord structure whose catchiness becomes apparent when the electronics lay out and a ringing electric guitar takes over-- unique and excellent, but not dance music by any stretch.
The best rhythms are left for Niobe. On two of her four tracks, she assumes the role of a distant and aloof diva, intoning cryptic lyrics ("When the boats go round/ Turn on back to a spiral") behind several layers of processing. "Send Me Shivers" fits the tech-house template, with a steady chug of a rhythm hypnotic and groovy enough to earn its 6 minutes. The rhythmic accents are pure Mouse on Mars playfulness, however, with two stabs every other bar sounding like pistons from a Dr. Seuss machine.
"Evoke an Object" is comparatively sleek and sexy, with a metallic sheen and a persistent glow of distortion, and though the beat goes on for almost 9 minutes and threatens to go into full-bore house several times, it always maintains a hint of off balance herky-jerkiness. "Spaceship" is an altogether different animal, a prelude of political lyrics ("The inexact inquiry/ Profitable madness/ Society/ The abstract variety") over chaotic drum hits and wind-up noises that slowly gather like a storm before erupting into deeply goofy and great funk hinging on a rapid cut-up of the song's title. Niobe proves to be as sure a fit with Mouse on Mars' current sound as Laetitia Sadier was in the late 90s.
Though reference points like Daft Punk and Prince have rightly been thrown around, Radical Connector is in fact a strange album that doesn't sound like much else. Subversion is still here, but this time it comes in the form of texture, most of which is purely electronic in origin. There is something fundamentally ugly about the sound of Radical Connector, despite its song-oriented tendencies, but it's a quality present for contrast and complexity, and not as a statement on its own. The tension resulting from opposing forces continues to fuel for Mouse on Mars' fire, even when they're experimenting in the realm of pop.


On their fourth album, the restless Toronto trio change lanes again, this time to minimal, claustrophobic electronic music that sounds like the end of the world.

No Pop

On their previous album, Post Plague, Toronto’s Odonis Odonis warned us of the grave threats that technological dependency poses to the human condition. Now, a year later, they provide a despairing update: The robots have won. Where they were once a surf-damaged noise-punk trio, with No Pop, Odonis Odonis complete their incremental transformation into a bionic replicant version of their former selves. Their souls are trapped in the machine, screaming to get out. The last vestiges of their humanity have been choked out by wires, their internal CPUs threatening to violently short-circuit without warning.
Post Plague saw the group embracing the mechanized grind and aggression of EBM without sacrificing their primordial, paint-peeling dissonance. The album was so spot-on in its 1980s Mute Records evocations that they could drop a howl-for-howl cover of Nitzer Ebb’s “Join in the Chant” in their setlists last year without missing a beat. But while No Pop shares its predecessor’s compact, 10-track structure, the new album feels less like a series of discrete strobe-lit shocks than a single, amorphous, ultraviolet-lit piece. This is industrial punk shot through the smelting plant, mercurial machine music that solidifies and decomposes at regular intervals. And even though it eases up on Post Plague’s anvil-crushing pummel, it’s a more viscerally tense listen. The first lyric we hear on the record is “We have to talk”—a phrase that’s never followed by good news. It’s especially worrisome coming from singer Dean Tzenos, who sings with the unnerving numbness of a movie villain savoring the taste of his own blood after getting hit in the face. The steam-pipe synths and stalking beat that accompany those words on “Check My Profile” only amplify the sense of doom; once the queasy, contorted throb of “Nasty Boy” gets overwhelmed by piercing synth oscillations, Odonis Odonis effectively resemble a biohazard lab entering meltdown mode.
As they’ve moved beyond the lockstep thrash of some industrial music, Odonis Odonis have become ever more adept at doing more with less. “One” creates a suffocating sense of dread using just a circular bass-frequency pattern and synth squiggles that feel like spiders crawling up your neck. “By the Second,” meanwhile, is psychedelia stripped of its splendor, its chiming keyboard melody engulfed by icy textures like sunlight swallowed up by black clouds. Tzenos ominously repeats the words “Every second counts,” followed by a pained exhalation of “Ahhhhhs” that sound like a lost soul trying to remember what bliss feels like. Both tracks are best appreciated in the context of the album’s sequence, where they counter-balance the pulse-pounding peaks found elsewhere, like the Liars-on-Wax Trax thrust of “Eraser” (not a Nine Inch Nails cover) or “Vision,” a nerve-wracking jolt of diseased techno that retrofits Suicide for the supper-club.
It’s fortuitous that No Pop arrived the same month as Blade Runner: 2049—like the world of Ridley Scott’s epic sequel, this album is an immersive, disorienting display of technological precision and toxic atmosphere. You could say its mood is apocalyptic, but the images it conjures are less scorched-earth ruin, more classic claustrophobia. Congratulations: You avoided getting wiped out in World War III. Now you get to spend the rest of your life trapped in a subterranean shelter with flickering fluorescent lights that will slowly drive you crazy.


The latest album from the chameleonic hardcore band is filled with pithy one-liners and gigantic hooks. Mired in anxiety, this music builds intimacy from commiseration.

Hygiene

Flipping through the lyrics of Hygiene can feel like reading a book of Oscar Wilde epigrams if Oscar Wilde had been barely scraping by as a punk musician. Every song on chameleonic hardcore band Drug Church’s fourth album offers at least one pithy phrase to sum up the often cynical worldview of frontman Patrick Kindlon. “There’s so few reasons to prostrate yourself at the feet of all these fools,” he sings on album opener and de facto mission statement, “Fun’s Over.” If you’re looking for a mantra to break out of the endless doomscrolling cycle, try shouting along to this one from “Million Miles of Fun”: “News flash/I need news less.” And when Kindlon reaches the bittersweet climax of “Athlete on Bench,” he shares his most instructive aphorism yet: “I’m living between shrinking margins.”
Those “shrinking margins” have squeezed every musician working in the streaming era. On Hygiene, Drug Church invite us behind the curtain to see how they’re making it work. “I’m in the workforce of music,” Kindlon told Stereogum in January. “To that end, if there’s a material goal on my part, it’s to have a career. And if there’s an artistic goal on my part, it’s to experience the ups and downs of that career with some grace.” The lyrics on Hygiene explore these valleys, offering a self-aware look at a rock band whose livelihoods are shaped by the vagaries of late capitalism. “Fun’s Over” suggests there’s a dumb luck component to the band’s success, while “Detective Lieutenant” spins an extended metaphor to ask whether good art can be separated from a problematic artist: “If I do a double murder, what this song did for you doesn’t change an iota,” may not ring true for every listener, but it does invite some self-examination.
Kindlon’s vocal performance on Hygiene is the most deliberately tuneful he’s ever given, in either Drug Church or his longer-running band, Self Defense Family. He’s always been a capable singer, but he’s now learned that the best way to make a lyric stick is to pair it with a gigantic, undeniable hook. Even when he digs into his grittier register to charge a line with extra urgency, he manages to pull out a deceptively sweet melody, too. He’s evolved in lockstep with the rest of the band. Guitarists Nick Cogan and Cory Galusha bounce between nervy post-hardcore and sunny pop-punk with ease, hitting every way station between the two. Bassist Pat Wynne and drummer Chris Villeneuve are agile enough to keep up, buoying the band through wild tempo shifts and taking center stage when necessary, as on the rhythmically driven pit-starter “World Impact.”
Drug Church’s music has always felt like an extension of their wider community, and nods to peers and influences dot Hygiene’s landscape. Hearing how those reference points interact is still a thrilling part of listening to the band. For each passage that evinces the raw emotional impact of Touché Amoré or the brawny intensity of Sick of It All, there’s one that recalls the punk-poet erudition of the Hold Steady. A line in “Tiresome” references an album by the cult UK band Leatherface, and it sits comfortably next to riffs that feel inspired by the metal-infused pop-punk of Propagandhi.
Drug Church’s balance of brightness and heaviness also recalls Turnstile, a band whose ascent since the release of 2021’s breakthrough Glow On looks like a tempting blueprint. While the two bands do share an unusual gift for creating deep intimacy between band and audience, they forge that closeness in contrasting ways. Turnstile turn their inborn empathy into a feel-good party that everyone is invited to. Hygiene is mired in modern, adult anxieties—the financial pressures of making a living doing what you love, the tough questions that lead to a coherent political view, the complicated friendships that require reexamination. It’s an intimacy built on commiseration rather than communal joy: Drug Church want you to know that they’re in the muck, too, trying to figure it out.


The perennially reissued debut from the prog rock giants doesn’t offer much memorable bonus material, but the album itself remains a towering pillar of musicianship, wonder, and menace.

King Crimson: In the Court of the Crimson King (50th Anniversary)

It’s all there in the Schizoid Man’s face. Barry Godber’s cover art—a man mid-scream, nostrils flared, gaze fixed on a horror we can’t see—teases a manic, transformative head trip. In the Court of the Crimson King marks a vast fault line in the geology of rock music, refining a nascent genre into a pinnacle of the progressive rock form. The Moody Blues’ symphonic grandeur, Brian Wilson’s expansive production, the psychedelic experiments of Pink Floyd and the Beatles—these are some of prog’s essential building blocks. But with their first record, King Crimson shaped those pieces into a monument, wielding a sorcery unduplicated in the five decades since.
The band summoned that collective force—a hybrid of menacing rock, classical sophistication, pastoral psychedelia, and free-jazz mania—quickly, almost instinctively, guided by what guitarist Robert Fripp has called “the presence of the Good Fairy.” The original Crimson lineup emerged from the ashes of short-lived psych-pop act Giles, Giles and Fripp in January 1969, with guitarist Fripp and drummer Michael Giles linking up with bassist-singer Greg Lake (future frontman of prog juggernaut Emerson, Lake & Palmer), keyboardist-woodwind player Ian McDonald, and lyricist Peter Sinfield. The quintet assembled in a cramped rehearsal space in London’s Hammersmith district, working on songs for three months before their proper live debut at the city’s Speakeasy club. By that summer, they’d even made a fan of Jimi Hendrix, who showed up for their gig at the Revolution Club and, as Fripp has frequently recalled, exclaimed, “This is the best group in the world!”
Within months, the band had developed into a formidable live act—even supporting the Rolling Stones at Hyde Park in July. But they were struggling in the studio, failing to make progress during two sessions with Moody Blues producer Tony Clarke. In a move equal parts brave and absurd (given Clarke’s high profile at the time), they decided to end that collaboration and helm their own material: They reconvened at London’s Wessex studio, armed with a handful of songs worthy of Hendrix’s standing ovation.
Like Godber’s cover image, much of their music was designed to provoke and scare. “It’s meant to be frightening,” an unidentified band member notes during the in-studio chatter of “Wind Session,” a newly mixed bonus track on Crimson King’s lavish 50th Anniversary reissue. In that previously issued leftover, the musicians workshop the discordant sci-fi woodwind noises that kick-start “21st Century Schizoid Man,” clustering exhalations into what sounds like TV static and future dial-up modems. After much gentlemanly discussion, they arrive at suitably “diabolical sounds.”
What follows “Schizoid Man”’s airy intro is even more jolting: seven minutes of nuclear proto-metal riffs, stuttering jazz-rock drum fills, wailing alto saxophone, and Lake’s distorted shriek—capped off with the paranoid prophecies of Sinfield, who used images of burning politicians and starving children to survey the destruction of the Vietnam War.
While King Crimson later evolved through a series of lineups under Fripp’s mysterious guidance, they achieved a rare level of creative intimacy on their debut. The four musicians composed “Schizoid Man” as a unit, practically breathing down each other’s necks in their rehearsal spot: They reacted to each other’s riffs and arrangements in real time, weaving old ideas (McDonald’s strutting sax section, lifted from a tune he wrote during his days in the Army jazz band, “Three Score and Four”) into new ones (Lake’s heavy main riff, countered by McDonald’s chromatic, ascending lick).
The final version of that song, which Kanye West famously sampled for his 2010 single “Power,” would be enough to cement King Crimson’s legend. And the 50th Anniversary edition offers a revelatory alternate version, building from a recently discovered backing track recorded in June 1969 during the aborted Clarke session at Morgan Studios. It’s a mutant of old and new, mingling 50-year-old parts (Giles’ violently demented kit-bashing, Lake’s finished vocal from the official LP) with a pair of modern-day overdubs (current members Mel Collins and Jakko Jakszyk doubling placeholder sax and guitar solos, respectively, with stereo-panned lines).
King Crimson have reissued In the Court of the Crimson King so many times, the album’s Discogs entry boasts more listings than a phone book. And considering most fans shelled out for the 40th Anniversary set one decade ago, this 3-CD/Blu-Ray is a tough sell for anyone who can’t name all of the band’s three present-day drummers. If blindfolded, most fans would have trouble distinguishing between Steven Wilson’s new stereo mix and the original they know by heart. And since the vaults have been mostly cleared over the years, the package’s real value boils down to a handful of unreleased gems. The centerpiece is a mostly a capella rendition of the morose ballad “Epitaph,” underscoring the wide dynamic range of Lake’s voice. Building from a fragile croon to a crackling, full-throated roar, it’s one of prog’s canonical performances.
Other bonus tracks are revealing but lack replay value—like the instrumental, bare-bones version of closing epic “The Court of the Crimson King.” (Listening to this track without the wordless vocal theme or the Grand Canyon-sized mellotron is physically painful, though intriguing as an in-progress footnote.) There’s also a faster alternate take of “Moonchild,” the album’s experimental descent into psychedelic texture and free improvisation—the sorta thing you’ll savor a couple times out of collector’s guilt but probably forget about within a week.
The original LP itself is enough, and always will be: Its fingerprint is so distinct that even imitators—including the entire prog-metal movement—can’t even accidentally sound like it. “You must have gathered it’s good,” the Who’s Pete Townshend wrote in a half-page advertisement promoting Crimson King. “But in some ways too good too soon if that’s possible.”
He was right in a practical sense: King Crimson’s jarring upward velocity could only carry them so far. The band crumbled after their first U.S. tour, leaving Fripp to rebuild as their de-facto maestro—restructuring the line-up again and again in search of “Good Fairy” dust. They found it, of course: Many of their subsequent records (the percussive pummel of 1973’s Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, the interlocking guitars and new wave sheen of 1981’s Discipline) glimpsed galaxies of new ideas as Fripp endlessly re-tooled his vision. But all roads branch out from the mighty Court.

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Old adages and young women agree that things grow better with age, but a legion of late-90s rock bands stand ...

Deja Entendu

Old adages and young women agree that things grow better with age, but a legion of late-90s rock bands stand as evidence to the contrary. Supergroups like Jets to Brazil and The Promise Ring rose to prominence as some of the last worthwhile pop bands of the decade, only to become the first great disappointments of the new millennium. One heard whispers of a confused direction, and perhaps even (in TPR's case) a confused sexual orientation. Either way, The Promise Ring went out with a sigh, and the odds of another good Jets to Brazil album are about as good as that dodo on the cover of Four-Cornered Night coming to life in your living room and shitting all over Electric Pink.
Enter Brand New, whose first album was the effective sum of Saves the Day and Dashboard Confessional. You guessed it: LIES. LIES stands for L.ong I.sland E.mo with S.creams-- think Taking Back Sunday, Thursday, Wednesday, Friday, and any other group of emo-dandies that prance delicately through candylands of Orange Rhyming Dictionaries, New Nathan Detroits and Bells, Bells, Bells. But S.O.S! Very Emergency! Brand New's new album for Razor and Tie, Deja Entendu, is produced by Stephen Haigler, engineer of the Pixies' Trompe le Monde. This and the album's postmodern cover art hint at something more substantial than 2001's Your Favorite Weapon.
While it was surely a treat for ninth and tenth-graders chomping at the bit for "Jude Law and a Semester Abroad", Brand New's debut did little for anyone with an interest in instrumentation or variety; it also had a bad case of self-consciousness, with singer Jesse Lacey spending more time thinking up crazy song titles than anyone in the band (himself included) spent on actual songcraft. But Deja Entendu, while a football field short of groundbreaking, has an air of substance and maturity that, at its peaks, makes me forget a little of how Jade Tree once jaded me.
Deja Entendu comes complete with its own share of ridiculous track names-- a few of which are funny if you can fit your tongue next to that lollipop in your cheek. The opener, "Tautou", isn't the album's strongest, but it's significant in that it introduces the band's new sound with just over a minute of minimalist guitar arpeggio and sombre vocals. Things pick up quickly with "Sic Transit Gloria...", as Lacey's layered whispering over the bass-driven verse breaks violently into an overdriven chorus. In come harmonic shrieks and screams which fall in bassy stair-steps back to the verse. This song rocks but it makes me wonder: Why would a band like this tour with Dashboard Confessional? To score chicks?
"Okay, I Believe You But My Tommygun Don't" gives Brand New's formula away, but as the song progresses there are flashes of wit and maturity, even humor. Lacey scoffs at the narcissistic pretentiousness of the emo scene with lines like, "These are the words you wish you wrote down/ This is the way you wish your voice sounds/ Handsome and smart/ My tongue's the only muscle on my body that works harder than my heart." As long as it stubbornly refuses to roll over and die, emo should at least develop this sense of humor. It could have come off a backpacker hip-hop record if it weren't pulled off with such searing sarcasm.
"The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows" is trite enough for radio play, which is frustrating as it opens promisingly. Unfortunately, though, LIES overcome the band and the song mutates into an aberrant hybrid of Jimmy Eat World and The Used. This burn is thankfully extinguished in favor of a Smiths-y ballad, "The Boy Who Blocked His Own Shot". "Jaws Theme Swimming" is cool and controlled enough to be crafty, but "Me vs. Maradona vs. Elvis" is flat-out indulgent. Fortunately, for the subsequent 3:25 seconds, "Guernica" will make you forgive and forget. It's a brilliant lament about the horrors of cancer that manages both desperation and confidence. Still, at the end of the day, we're left with just an EP's worth of decent songs and a spark of interest where formerly there might've been a laugh of disgust. Stephen Haigler may have aided Brand New in discovering a more mature approach to recording, but as far as breaking new ground, the album's title says it all.


Following last year's split with Grimes, the Montreal musician releases an LP, a sprawling collection that explores extremes of spirituality in a digital world.

LP

In his brief career to date d'Eon has marked himself as a curious prospect. He is part of an exciting new scene of mostly electronic musicians in Montreal; including Purity Ring and Grimes (with whom he released a split EP last year). Like those two artists, d'Eon's approach has an esoteric bent to it, and on his new full-length, simply titled LP, he investigates two extremes of spirituality: He explores ideas of tradition and religion, pitting them against a modern self trapped at the top of a Facebook profile or communicating via iPhone.
For the most part, the questions LP poses are the ones you might ask yourself everyday when turning on your computer, but they also seem to be issues that haven't been explored that much in music. James Ferraro pushed some of the same buttons on last year's Far Side Virtual, but Ferraro's approach felt a bit more ironic, or tongue-in-cheek. d'Eon's struggle with the online world and spiritual identity seems to come from a place of real soul-searching.
The near-10-minute closing track, "Al-Qiyamah", is a high point, and the most successful illustration of d'Eon's concept. He frames the track with a question right away: "If we're stuck in here, what happens on Judgement Day?" It's a dramatic sentiment but one equally applicable on a small scale, too: At what point does "real life" intersect with online life? The track is held together by some of the best production on the record: Swirling, iridescent synths keep pushing with forward motion before a breakbeat consumes the song at its halfway point. That beat eventually degrades, sounding almost like a chip tune by the time it rubs against a new age synth line at the end. Fittingly, it ends with the static of a phone signal interrupting a speaker frequency.
Elsewhere, the density of LP does the record no favors-- it clocks in at a mighty one hour and 13 minutes-- and you almost wonder if there's some sort of meta point being made about saturation on the internet. Musically, LP isn't strong enough to sustain this weight, and the length makes what should be an interesting concept seem at times rambling and forced. Songs like "Transparency Pt. II" drag things down especially-- scanning like a babbling Tumblr entry and tapping into a Kevin Barnesian level of unearned excess. As such, LP's a little frustrating. There are some challenging and interesting ideas at its core along with spots of very good production, but ultimately the lack of self-editing makes the sprawl too difficult to truly access.


The refined sophomore album from Majid Jordan—best known for featuring on Drake’s “Hold On, We’re Going Home”—finds the Toronto duo coasting on an atmospheric pop-R&B sound that is uniquely their own.

The Space Between

On the title track of Majid Jordan’s The Space Between, singer Majid Al Maskati invites the object of his affection—or the listener, or both—to live in the moment with him. The directive comes at the end of a blissful album that aims to make each song its own event. The Toronto duo has existed in a perpetual state of evolution since rocketing into the spotlight, four years ago, with a feature on Drake’s “Hold On, We’re Going Home.” Their 2014 debut EP, A Place Like This, settled on moody R&B, while their self-titled debut album from last year attempted a balancing act between sullen and bright. Here, on their sophomore LP, Majid Jordan arrive at a sweet spot: their own in-between, a dance-flavored romance uniquely theirs. They’ve created a set that understands the beauty of the journey, no matter the destination.
Jordan Ullman’s retro-futuristic productions are built on a foundation of 1980s synth-pop energy and dreamy contemporary effects. It shines consistently throughout The Space Between, and perhaps most so when he does things like remix their proper opening song for an outro. Majid’s vocals take on different auras that change based on the backdrops they’re placed against. On the sexy ballad “You,” the duo soften the music to expose Majid’s tenderness; on “Asleep,” the layers and pulsating beat give his voice edge. The pair have a symbiotic relationship that highlights their gifts while offering both the benefit of versatility.
An audio rip of “Gave Your Love Away” has been floating around the internet since June when it was previewed at a Louis Vuitton fashion show (and again on an episode of OVO Radio). But the official version is an early standout on the album, and it was worth the wait. Jordan’s deep basslines and Majid’s atmospheric voice are readymade for dropping the top and heading out on the open road of the prior “Intro.” The same intoxicating groove carries over into “OG Heartthrob”—a fine blend of R&B romance with addictive pop sensibility. This trio of tracks may be one of the year's best opening sequences: the transitions are impeccable, offering a seamless sense of place and mood.
Aesthetically, The Space Between shifts away from the darker tints of their previous album, painting in upbeat, sunset tones. Lead single “Phases,” for example, could have easily taken a more melancholic turn: “All of these people and all of their names/All of this love and all this disdain,” Majid sings over swelling piano stabs before a skittering drum spins his introspection into a rink-ready bounce. Even the lovesick “What You Do to Me” is garnished with otherworldly synths that translate the kind of love that makes you “feel like [you’re] magic” into actual magic.
The album’s only features come courtesy of their OVO labelmates PARTYNEXTDOOR and dvsn. Together, the three acts create a spectrum of current R&B aesthetics: PARTY’s proclivity for rap influences in contrast to Majid’s smoothness, while the latter’s voice lacks some of the emotion of Daniel Daley’s. But Majid Jordan’s position in, yes, the space between makes sense: they are the only ones going for larger-than-life, bonafide pop music. They shirk profanity and the overly obscene in favor of a sound that seeks to defy age and time. It's radio-ready by default, but Majid Jordan don’t sound particularly concerned about whether or not it works so much as creating a neon-lit jam session where everyone is welcome.
The Space Between is Majid Jordan’s most refined full-length. The writing is simple but effective; the productions are intricate but subtly propulsive. There is plenty that can stand alone here, but the album is best consumed all the way through, present and unhurried. It offers a place of solace in the discomfort of change, a means to an unknown end. It remains to be seen whether Majid Jordan have peaked, but they’ve certainly found solid ground to coast on. This music feels as good as it sounds. And its spirit, rather than its lyrics, encourages you to keep moving, to get in the car and just go—even if it is on a road to nowhere.


The French musician’s solo album is full of blissed-out vocoder ballads that would have slotted effortlessly onto his duo Air’s Moon Safari.

Concrete and Glass

The two fundamental principles of any Air or Air-related project are 1) that it will display a total disdain for modern music’s rhythmic rough-and-tumble and 2) that it will sound a lot like Air. Concrete and Glass, the second solo album from Air co-founder Nicolas Godin, sees no reason to buck this trend. The record is designed as a hymn to the world of architecture and it sounds utterly, decadently Air, full of blissed-out vocoder ballads that would have slotted effortlessly onto the band’s 1998 debut, Moon Safari.
That might sound like a decidedly retrogressive move in 2020. But unlike, say, the Ramones (another band who always sounded perfectly like themselves), Air’s sound is a malleable beast, employing orchestral ambience, 1970s funk, and Serge Gainsbourg baroque soundtracking in one elegant stride. Besides, nostalgia is a tricky subject with Air: Their appeal was always retro-futuristic, a slightly corny vision of the future that sounded as anachronistic when they emerged alongside Britpop and French house as it does now.
The charm of Concrete and Glass rests not so much on the album’s architectural concept—it would be no great surprise to find that every Air song is about architecture—as in the ornate songwriting, luxuriant synth-and-string production, and moments of alchemical magic that Godin charms out of his guest vocalists. Air have a history in bringing out the best in their guests—think Beth Hirsch’s wonderfully wistful vocal turns on Moon Safari—and Russian artist Kate NV and soul singer Kadhja Bonet excel on Concrete and Glass.
NV delivers gilded heartbreak on “Back to Your Heart,” which sits somewhere between the Carpenters’ daytime melancholia and the fuzzy futurism that 10cc nailed on “I’m Not in Love,” while Bonet employs a strangely forceful, spooked psychedelia on “We Forgot Love,” her voice casting a spell over Godin’s undulating synths. These two songs are topped and tailed by two of Godin’s best vocodered performances, “Concrete and Glass” and “What Makes Me Think About You”: The pair’s velvety textures, lush melancholy, and gentle warmth send listeners drifting back to Moon Safari’s scatter-cushion reign.
The record’s other guest vocalists fare nowhere near as well. Cola Boyy’s nasal soul twang and Alexis Taylor’s little-choirboy-lost chirp fit awkwardly with Godin’s silky musical bed, while Australian pop provocateur Kirin J Callinan is wretched on “Time on My Hands,” his anemic vocal limping along atop clichéd lyrics and moldy guitar lines. These three songs have a nastily infectious quality that seems to seep into “The Border” and “Turn Right Turn Left,” two decent pieces of sumptuous, if lightweight, pop that suffer by proximity to this terrible trio.
Thankfully, closing number “Cité Radieuse” breaks the hex. It’s the one moment on Concrete and Glass where Godin shifts out of his comfort zone; the song’s neo-classical synth lines ripple in subtly shifting patterns that suggest Steve Reich and Valium, as Godin makes an admirable attempt of interpreting what he describes as the “Tetris-like form” of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation building in Marseilles.
It’s an intriguing choice to end on. While Le Corbusier’s work was bold and divisive, Concrete and Glass has a comforting familiarity that is more cozy brick cottage than towering skyline. Concrete and Glass won’t shock, sparkle, or challenge cultural norms, but it’s a (mostly) lovely place to inhabit.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The teen rapper’s dreamy yet dark mixtape leans into gruff flows and gun-toting punchlines with a wink.

epiphany

Ka$hdami is attempting to do what only a few have done before: breakthrough on a major scale while rapping over plugg beats. The production style originally shaped by MexikoDro, StoopidXool, and the rest of a crew called Beat Pluggz is like Atlanta trap beats merged with Screw music and Zelda OST melodies. It was the foundation of many promising rappers on SoundCloud in the mid-2010s, including UnoTheActivist, Thouxanbanfauni, Yung Bans, and, most famously, Playboi Carti. But a wave of “type beats” producers oversaturated the sound with half-assed imitations. Soon enough, it felt like everyone with a SoundCloud account had adopted the form, and by the time Carti put out his heavily anticipated 2017 debut mixtape, he’d left it behind. Plugg music was then unfairly written off as underground and played out until recently when a new wave of rappers and producers who never stopped loving it emerged.
But Ka$hdami is also strongly influenced by his home base in the DMV. Since the 16-year-old’s voice became deeper about a year ago, he no longer sounds like he should be waving a wand on the Disney Channel. With his latest mixtape epiphany, he leans into the gruff flows and gun-toting punchlines delivered with a wink by regional staples like Xanman, Q Da Fool, Lil Dude, and Goonew. On “Look N the Mirror!”—Ka$hdami’s breakout single and the heart of the record—he aggressively raps, “I ain’t the same lil’ nigga from the block/It’s a one way, nigga, come down, get shot/Boy, you had the drop for a motherfuckin’ year/Without your niggas, you gon’ disappear,” over a lush plugg beat. Typically, in the DMV, lyrics this brash would be delivered over a brooding instrumental that sounds like a producer tossed tense hi-hats and blaring 808s over the A Nightmare on Elm Street theme. But Ka$hdami’s tracks don’t resemble that at all—they’re sweet and, despite the violence, come off as the innocent imaginations of a teenager who fell in love with his local street rap scene on the internet.
The best songs on epiphany bring to mind taking a wholesome skip through the park. “Figures” even starts out with birds chirping before the ethereal beat kicks in. Ka$hdami’s rhymes aren’t quite an afterthought, but they’re more about his rough yet sort of melodic delivery. Unlike his DMV-based inspirations, his punchlines aren’t that colorful or memorable, but they don’t have to be—plugg music was always more about fantasy. On “Trust Issues,” a beat that feels like cannonballing off a cliff into a warm body of water, the way he glides over the track is enough to overlook writing that is basically filler. If anything, the song is held back by miserable-sounding features—this happens again and again on the project. The only purpose of these guest verses is to stretch his songs beyond the two-minute mark. It’s unnecessary—making short songs is fine! “Look N the Mirror!” (at 1:25) and “Dior” (1:58) are his best tracks to date.
A handful of instrumentals on epiphany feel similar to that original wave of bland “type beats” that diluted the sound. “Up!” and “See Ya!” have all too familiar melodies that seem as if they’ve been used better before. The easiest way to avoid this is to go straight to the source as he does on “Receipts,” which is co-produced by StoopidXool, one of the innovators of the sound. It’s light and dreamy, and Ka$hdami’s punchy flow gives the track a darker edge. It’s a clash that not only defines his tape but the best plugg music as well.

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Radiohead drummer goes acoustic guitar-strumming singer-songwriter, putting his sticks down to pen Nick Drakesian songs about family.

Familial

Whatever your opinion on the relative merits of Philip Selway's transmogrification into an acoustic guitar-strumming singer-songwriter, it's tough to find an angle that doesn't at least give the guy points for bravery. Firstly, he's spent 25 years in the ruthlessly self-correcting Radiohead, a band who tend not to go more than three records without ritually wringing themselves inside out and emerging from the studio, eyes bulging and ears ringing, with some newly invented sonic paradigm. Secondly, said band also includes Thom Yorke, whose own noted songwriting abilities and singing voice have by now gifted him with an unreasonably long shadow. Thirdly, Selway's a frigging drummer. In an arena rock band. And when was the last time any drummer in any rock band (much less arguably the world's biggest) put his drumsticks down to write some Nick Drakesian songs about family?
Make no mistake: This is a risk. A risk of exposure, credibility, mystique, whatever you want to call it, and Selway deserves credit for putting his newly elongated name on the line. The good(ish) news is that Familial is hardly an embarrassment. It's a modest, mannered record that prizes directness, simplicity and bittersweet sentiment above all, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. The highlights, such as they are, are front-loaded. With its delicately hooky chorus, lead single "By Some Miracle" is probably the most immediate thing here. Elsewhere, a cleverly syncopated vocal loop in "Beyond Reason" evokes some of Radiohead's sonic trickery, while "All Eyes on You" offers up an oddly naked account of Yorke's stage fright: "So frail and small/ So scared you're terrified by all/ The eyes on you."
The bad news is that Selway's material, tasteful and expertly played as it is, never fully transcends the novelty of who it's coming from. That two of the three highlights contain Radiohead callbacks should tell you something about the rest of the record. Even though Selway acquits himself as a capable an [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| d likable enough frontman, a lot of the material, especially on the second side, is ultimately just too bare, too slow, and too earnest to connect. For every one line that hits, there are two that shouldn't have made it out of first revisions. On "A Simple Life", the crowds pour out "on a cold, cold night." On "Patron Saint", Selway's played for a fool by "a web of lies and compromise." Such overtly earnest lyrics aren't helped by the unwavering politeness in his delivery, which, in being pretty-sounding but not much else, create a clear path for the clichés to land with a dull thud.
Selway's famous for his restraint as a drummer, so it's not a stretch to suspect that his response to being the frontman for the first time has been to crank up his natural predilection toward politeness. Unfortunately, in this instance, it feels like a counter-productive strategy. Fans of shivery folk music with subtle plateaus will surely find things to like, but the rest of you might find yourselves wishing the "black dog" in Selway's basement had a bit more bite. At least he let it outside.


After their most recent and extremely spotty album Future This, the Big Pink try and reconnect with the bombastic electro-rock sound that made them popular while casting around for a viable future.

Empire Underground EP

Two events have defined the British electro-rock band the Big Pink since their last, extremely spotty album, Future This. Firstly, founding member Milo Cordell left to focus on running Merok Records. Secondly, the band's frontman, Robbie Furze brought his wife Mary Charteris into the fold, on vocals and keyboards. At the center of their new EP, titled Empire Underground, is this notion of both separation and union, an idea of reconnecting with the aesthetic that made them popular while casting around for a viable future.
Try, if you can, to close your eyes and picture the environment in which the Big Pink released their first, and still best, record A Brief History of Love, in 2009. Bloggers are losing their grip on the meritocracy of independent music, the general aesthetic is shifting from fluorescent party attire to nouveau goth black and basic athletic wear. On the strength of two meteoric singles, "Velvet" and the boisterous, anthemic peak of "Dominos," the Big Pink are able to bridge two eras of British music pretty much seamlessly: the boyish swagger of Britpop and the more electronic music that was going to become prevalent. It seems like they have been chasing that eureka moment ever since to diminishing returns.
Which brings us to "Hightimes" the lead single off of Empire Underground, which opens with the same ethereal coos and ultra-fuzzy guitar riffs that became the Big Pink's signature at their prime. And the message couched behind the layers of distortion couldn't be more clear: "It's about high time/ Better than the last time" wails Furze as Charteris' pleasantly smooth vocals sail beneath his. Big booming drums and rubbery basslines roll across the song, almost but never quite succumbing to a sheen of static. It's obvious that the Big Pink were aware that their future depended on getting in touch with the sound that made them, and while not exactly reaching the heights of something like "Dominos," it's a welcome reintroduction to a band that had somewhat lost their way.
If Richard Ashcroft were to front the Kills, "Decoy" would be the result, a throwback of another kind. While perfectly enjoyable (the track's most notable aspect is its mid-career-Oasis-style chorus), it's mostly a precursor to "Beautiful Criminal," the only track that hints at a new direction. It could be placed coherently on a Selena Gomez or Demi Lovato record, and I mean that with the utmost respect: Breaching the hull of mainstream pop, where some of the most interesting musical innovations are being made, is a coveted skill. It boasts an instantly catchy hook, a memorable chorus and a world-weary quality that cuts through any traces of saccharine. The band have already announced a third album in the works, and if they continue in this vein, it could definitely help push them beyond a niche that can no longer seem to support them.


The country icon’s latest is a loose concept album about the American road, a scattershot travelogue that houses some of her best-ever songwriting.

Palomino

When Miranda Lambert announced her upcoming Las Vegas residency, she was following in the footsteps of kindred artists who evolved from icons into brands: think Cher, Shania Twain, Whitney Houston’s hologram. It’s not off-script for a woman who, 20-plus years into her career, is approaching the status of another genre-transcending icon-turned-industry, Dolly Parton, whose CV Lambert’s has often mirrored: songwriter, performer, celebrity-coupledom survivor, chart-topping duet partner, all-star vocal trio co-leader, inclusive club jam dabbler. Lambert’s breadth is on full display on Palomino, a loose concept album about the American road, completed during two years spent largely off-tour. It’s a scattershot travelogue, idealized and hopeful, bright with giddy pleasures, welled tears, and some of her best-ever songwriting.
In many ways Palomino springs directly from The Marfa Tapes, Lambert’s winning 2021 writers round with Jack Ingram and Jon Randall, full of deeply-felt storytelling and boozy punchlines. Palomino reimagines some of Marfa’s highlights and re-engages Randall, a former Emmylou Harris sideman, as co-producer and co-writer alongside Lambert’s longtime MVPs, Luke Dick and Natalie Hemby. Unlike the dusky Nebraska sound and campfire harmonies of The Marfa Tapes, Palomino is not tonally coherent. But neither was 2016’s The Weight of These Wings, Lambert’s most ambitious display to date, and that record’s unleashed spirit returns on Palomino, demonstrating the tensile strength of Lambert’s craft in all sorts of settings.
It peels out with “Actin’ Up,” a modern Music Row rhyme showcase channeling Elvis’ Sun sessions with the spirit of an Eminem freestyle, stuttering consonants and spitting random signifiers: Billy Bob’s Texas, Tiger Woods, “Mony Mony.” After some road-trip scene-setting (“Scenes”), Lambert settles in for the ride with some Marfa Tapes remakes. “In His Arms” was already near-perfect in its fireside-demo iteration; here its acoustic guitar frame gets wrapped in a lovelorn country-western dreamscape, with watercolor-washes of electric guitar and steel. Benefiting more from a fuller arrangement is “Geraldene,” a feisty dress-down that echoes the scenario and title of Parton’s love-triangle signature, albeit with more of a “Fist City” attitude: “You're trailer park pretty,” Lambert sings, “but you’re never gonna be Jolene.”
“Music City Queen,” a funky strut about a riverboat with another nod to country’s high priestess, features prominent guest vocals by the B-52’s, a Southern band whose camp sensibility always felt Parton-esque. “Tina never quite had a Hollywood body/But she makes a damn good look-alike Dolly,” sasses Lambert, Schneider answering “woo, Dolly!” in his best “Rock Lobster” bray. It’s an inspired gesture on a goofy song that, like much of the album—see “Country Money”’s Southern-rock swag and the honky-tonk take on Mick Jagger’s juke-jointed 1993 solo track “Wandering Spirit”—hums with the joy of master musicians screwing around, reveling in process and each other’s company. It feels more about having fun than about song-crafting for the ages.
But Lambert does that too. There’s a wide-screen version of “Waxahachie,” the aching Marfa Tapes gem, and the deceptively easy-rolling “Tourist,” which is as much an existential meditation on that mindset as an embrace of it, another example of the introspection that’s distinguished Lambert’s country since 2014’s “Bathroom Sink.” “That’s What Makes the Jukebox Play,” a co-write with Dick and Hemby, joins the long tradition of country songs about country songs, a wistful slow dance sketching a barroom full of hurt with resonant couplets (“When you live like neon/There’s a song you can lean on.”) And the single “If I Was a Cowboy,” a co-write with country-pop virologist Jesse Frasure, manages the hat-trick of both timelessness and timely activism. Slipping into genre myth like tailor-made chaps, Lambert delivers a stealth anthem of inclusivity so supple you might miss it, even with the flip of Waylon & Willie on the bridge, when she issues the gentle challenge: “So mamas, if your daughters grow up to be cowboys, so what?” It’s not out of character from an artist who built her brand tweaking gender stereotypes and demonstrating LGBTQ+ solidarity without sounding like a PSA.
Palomino closes with “Carousel,” a paean to reinvention about a trapeze artist concluding her life in the spotlight. “Every show must end/Every circus leaves town,” Lambert sings, pivoting from third person to first person to reveal that the song’s subject is in fact telling her own story, the carousel a metaphor for both the stage and the cycle of time. It’s a resonant reflection for anyone who saw their old way of life end in the pandemic, temporarily or permanently. “I bet you it’s the last song I’ll ever sing when it is time,” the songwriter told Rolling Stone. As a lovely coda to a set that celebrates the thrill of unfettered motion and the reflective craft that still propels her, it’s not a bad choice.


Luz Elena Mendoza follows her full-length Mujeres with an EP of introspective folk songs that understand just how visceral introspection can be.

Entre Los Dos EP

Earlier this year, Y La Bamba (aka Luz Elena Mendoza) released the full-length LP Mujeres, examining her intersecting identities against the backdrop of the poisonous American political landscape. The album was Mendoza’s first in the role of producer, and she continues to lead her band in new directions on *Entre Los Dos —both in sound and message. As the title implies, this is a record concerning the intimate space between two people. Though still grounded by lo-fi percussion and surf-rock inspired guitar, the arrangements veer in more experimental directions, matching Mendoza’s inward turn.
Her acrobatic voice fills each track, often evoking Angel Olsen when it trembles. The pared-down piano ballad “Octavio,” the only song sung in English, emerges in the middle without warning. More frequently, though, it transforms into something closer to a yell, as on the title track and on “Rios Sueltos” and “Las Platicas.” The record rumbles along at nearly the same pace and tone as Mendoza’s contemporary Molly Burch, but it never loses sight of where it’s headed.
The title track of Entre Los Dos begins with a threat, calmly delivered: “Y me saltaré de mi ventana” (“And I will jump out of my window”). The EP is filled with similar sentiments, with Mendoza fighting to understand her place within her relationships and coming up against the brink of her composure. Later on the title track, she admits that she doesn’t think she can be what her lover needs, then repeats the phrase “No creo que puedo” (“I don’t think I can”) three times, her voice inflected with mounting desperation. It’s an arresting moment, her desire to make things work colliding with her dawning understanding that they probably won’t.
The tracks collide and overlap in ways that mirror Mendoza’s lyrics: The end of “Entre Los Dos” dissolves into piercing bird calls and wind chimes, which carry over into the following track “Rios Sueltos,” bolstered by an ominous drone. Similarly, the delicate piano that backs her warble on “Octavio” falls out of tune as the song ends and turns into an unsettling, frantic twinkling—countered immediately by the enthusiastic guitar riffs that follow on “Soñadora.” On “Los Gritos,” she announces: “Mi piel es mi lengua, mi lengua es mi piel, los huesos son hechos, son hechos de pura sal” (“My skin is my tongue, my tongue is my skin/The bones are made, are made of pure salt”), and the music tremors with the same physicality. Entre Los Dos is an introspective folk record, yes, but it’s one that understands just how visceral introspection can be.

Buy: Rough Trade
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A new project from Boy Scouts songwriter Taylor Vick expands her homespun sound into spectral, immersive dream pop.

Art Moore

Taylor Vick makes feeling like shit seem worthwhile. Recording under the name Boy Scouts, the Oakland native paints vivid scenes of annihilating, enlivening pain, her songs dramatizing the belief that big feelings are better than no feelings. On the first album by Art Moore—her new collaborative project with Los Angeles-based musicians Sam Durkes and Trevor Brooks—she sings about sleepless nights, unyielding heartache, and memories so haunting that they infect every moment of her waking life. Like her past work, the record straddles the line between succumbing to present-day suffering and smothering herself in the pleasures of the past, but Durkes and Brooks’ swooning, blissed-out production offers a new landing place: It’s Vick’s dreamiest and most immersive album, an impressive addition to her prolific catalog.
As Boy Scouts, Vick spent the latter half of the 2010s uploading a surfeit of full-length projects and EPs to Bandcamp. Her guitar-backed indie pop hit its stride on her two most recent albums, Free Company and Wayfinder: spunky, sapient records that showed off her perceptive songwriting and subtly dense arrangements. When she linked up with Durkes and Brookes in 2020, the trio entered the studio hoping to make a few tracks to pitch to various film and TV projects. Soon they realized they were onto something bigger. Though the pandemic cut their studio time short, they continued working remotely. Durkes and Brooks began adding synths and programmed drums to Vick’s guitars and stacked vocal melodies, morphing her once homespun sound into sensuous, spectral dream pop.
The interplay between Vick’s singer-songwriter roots and Durkes and Brookes’ synth-laden production evokes the sumptuousness of 2010s bands like Beach House and Wild Nothing. But Art Moore still sticks to Boy Scouts’ rawer indie rock sweet spot; the first four songs—“Muscle Memory,” “Sixish,” “Snowy,” and “Bell”—are built from guitars and dusty studio drums, and Vick’s listless singing sounds like it could be lifted from any number of Boy Scouts tracks. The album’s second half, however, introduces more electronic elements, and Vick experiments with new cadences and harmonies. On “Rewind,” a plodding guitar pluck blends into hi-fi synths and ambient whirring as Vick slides into her upper register, cooing softly as the song descends into distortion. “Something Holy,” another late album highlight, is a stirring electro ballad embellished with  beeps, a tinkly bell synth, and processed ad-libs. It also includes some of her sharpest writing: “Well, you told a lie/That something holy could never die.”
In her lyrics, Vick explores the complexities of heartbreak, the mutilating power of memory, and the disorienting fugue state between dream and sleep—themes that she renders with an understated, sophisticated touch. It’s not always clear when she’s writing literally or figuratively, like on “Habit,” when she recalls how her ex used to water their garden, or how she sleeps with the lights on to avoid love-longing dreams. To Vick, dreams are not heartwarming intuition chambers but essential venues for escape, the only space for her to recreate the world as she sees fit. On “A Different Life,” she sings that, in her dreams, her life seems “full of meaning.” She’s alive in these subconscious moments, and the music becomes an attempt to prolong them and make them real.
Vick has described Art Moore as a more abstract project than Boy Scouts: “I love writing my personal shit,” she said in a recent interview, “but I was at this point in my life where I wanted a break.” She describes these songs as “short stories” that may or may not be about her own experience—the line isn’t always clear, even to her. Autobiographical or not, the narratives feel just as personal as any Boy Scouts record, and maybe even more so. While Free Company and Wayfinder were rife with wry one-liners and observations to offset the otherwise emotionally knotty writing, Art Moore is a bruising and remorseful record that aches without reservation.


On this re-release of her 2014 cassette, the Austin-based songwriter Caroline Sallee offers homespun solo recordings that draw on C86, bossa nova, and soothing folk music.

Caroline Says: 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong

50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong

The first lyrical image on the debut album from Austin-based songwriter Caroline Sallee, aka Caroline Says, is a name written on a window. In Sallee’s song, her lover left the mark months earlier, before she took a Greyhound around the West Coast—a trip that would inspire her to return to her family home in Alabama and create an album in her parents’ basement. But when we meet Sallee here, the name has faded away, as she attempts to wipe herself clean of this person’s impact through the passing of time.
There is a lot that is familiar on her new Caroline Says record, which is called 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong. Hair is left on a pillow; the streetlights glow at night. And then there’s the project’s name and album title, lifted from the pop music lexicon, borrowing from a Lou Reed song and an unofficial Elvis Presley album respectively. Death and solitude and heartbreak are sung about with the same reverence, to the point that they become virtually interchangeable, all factors leading to a similar state of melancholy. The result is a road trip album that knows the catharsis of looking out the window as the scenery changes. It’s firm in its belief that running away and running towards aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s even resolute in its genre hopping, as if turning of the dial to hear whatever station is coming in clearly.
Getting a proper release after a tape-only run in 2014, 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong returns as a precursor to a proper studio follow-up expected next year. But working on her own doesn’t hold her back. “Winter Is Cold” is fleshed out with hissing harmonies that mimic the wind rushing by a speeding vehicle. “Funeral Potatoes” replaces a twinkling piano line and Brian Wilson-sounding backing vocals with the static of the radio waves fading away over miles. And the record’s best and most Lou Reed-sounding song, “Lost Feeling,” winds down with an extended fade out until all that remains is an atmospheric whooshing. Homespun recording, for Caroline Says, is an asset that adds to the sensations of days passing and cities flickering by.
Clocking in at under 30 minutes, Sallee packs numerous songwriting and recording styles into the collection. The gentle bossa nova of “My Fiance’s Pets” passes by like a satellite, while “I Think I’m Alone Now” uses higher fidelity to support her most straightforward melody. “Gravy Dayz” drifts closer to C86 than anything else, and “Ghost Pokes” glistens as sunny California garage pop. There’s an ease to Sallee’s gear switching, even if it is the soothing folk music that binds the album together and winds up being its most memorable element. “I never know what I’m doing,” she claims on “My Fiance’s Pets”; the line doesn’t speak as well for her art as it does for her relationships.
But the heartbreak that Sallee reflects on and flees throughout 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong is never completely outpaced in the miles she travels. When the album closes, the name that faded away from her window on the album’s opening lines lingers. “Even when you weren’t there, I never cut you out,” she sings on “Lost Feeling,” her ghosts never quite disappearing from the rearview mirror. If the journey can’t put the past to rest, maybe an album can.


At the time of their endearing-but-muddy self-titled debut, “San Francisco’s Grateful Dead” were already local legends, but no one quite knew what to do with them on record.

Grateful Dead: The Grateful Dead: 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition

Before they were the Grateful Dead, they were “San Francisco’s Grateful Dead.” At least that’s how they were to be billed on the title of their debut album: a scuzzy, organ-drenched oddity, more representative of the era it came from than the band it introduced. Leading up to the record’s release in 1967, the Grateful Dead had fortified their reputation as an uncontainable force, a live act who had to be seen to be believed. They were a band inextricably linked to their locale (Haight and Ashbury, San Francisco) and the scene it had hatched (namely Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests, for which the Dead served as the house band). In a spirited but nascent Vancouver show attached to this 50th anniversary reissue, mostly comprised of embryonic attempts at original songs (“Cream Puff War,” “Cardboard Cowboy”) and jumpy renditions of soon-to-be standards (“I Know You Rider,” “New Minglewood Blues”), the audience greets the band with silence. Bob Weir responds dryly, “I see our fame has preceded us.” He’s not entirely kidding. At the time, no one was quite sure what to do with the Grateful Dead. It was a question the band would face multiple times throughout their career and one that was immediately apparent when they recorded their debut album: How do the Grateful Dead present themselves, stripped of the context that defines them?
While the band would never find a definitive answer to that question (although they came a hell of a lot closer on their next self-titled release, a staggering live album from 1971), their debut record found the Dead choosing the path of least resistance. Signed to Warner Brothers with a “jazz rate” deal—meaning they were paid by song length, not number of tracks—the band conceded to nearly every label expectation, transforming themselves into something like a traditional garage rock band. In thirty-five minutes, they speed through the album’s nine songs with an anxious energy, resulting in an endearing-but-muddy listen—something Phil Lesh would describe as “sound and fury buried in a cavern.” Maybe it was the nerves of a group of young freaks trying to sell themselves for the first time, or maybe it was the massive amount of Ritalin they were all on, but the Grateful Dead sound more energetic here than they ever would. Which is to say, if the Dead’s characteristic brand of sprawling experimentalism isn’t your bag, then this might be the album for you.
On the flip side, it also means that this is not a particularly essential album in the Dead’s catalogue. Jerry had not yet developed his trademark brand of soloing—or if he had, he was keeping it to himself; it’s almost comical hearing the songs fade right as his solos are about to pick up. In lieu of Jerry’s defining sound, Pigpen’s organ mostly steals the show: just listen it bobbing chaotically throughout “Sittin’ on Top of the World” like an LP playing at the wrong speed. The album’s finest moments are a slow, summery “Morning Dew” and a thrilling take on “Viola Lee Blues” where you can allegedly hear someone in the studio urge the producer, “Let them play!” just as the track fades. It’s no coincidence that these highlights arrive when the band settle down and play the way they want to.
While the Dead would never sound quite like this again—their following studio albums would be more confrontational and experimental, and then looser and statelier—they would also shift their attitude as musicians. On The Grateful Dead, they were not only submissive to producer Dave Hassinger, who had previously worked with the Rolling Stones and Jefferson Airplane and maybe wanted to turn the Grateful Dead into a tripped-out combination of the two, but also to their label, who had the nerve to request a single out of them. The Dead responded with “The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion),” the album’s buzzy opening number and one of only two original songs on the record. It’s telling that even when the Dead were trying to sound commercial, this is how it came out. “The Golden Road” is a warped and woozy pop song, almost novel in its unwieldiness. They try to harmonize during the chorus but it comes out sounding more like a gang of strangers doing vocal warm-ups with earplugs in. Of course, the Grateful Dead would eventually write an honest-to-god hit single—they’d also record tighter albums and find their own permanent place in rock history. But, as with all things the Grateful Dead would do, it would be on their own terms and in their own time. “Let them play,” indeed.


On their latest album, Peaking Lights’ dreamy mix of dub, new wave, and disco is emboldened by Indra Dunis’ simple, repetitive verses.

Peaking Lights: The Fifth State of Consciousness

The Fifth State of Consciousness

Indra Dunis begins Peaking Lights’ fifth album in a kind of zombie state. “I’m wondering/Where my mind has gone to now,” she breathes slowly on opener “Dreaming Outside.” “Here I am just wandering.” Surrounded by her partner Aaron Coyes’ loping beat, Dunis’ voice floats passively, synth waves bobbing her up and down. Her soak-up-the-world tone persists throughout The Fifth State of Consciousness in songs about staring at the sun, walking alone at night, and “sitting watching time go by.”
Dunis’ meditative aura naturally fits Peaking Lights’ dreamy mix of dub, new wave, and disco. As Coyes layers loops with growing textures, simple tunes morph into enveloping swirls. In that process, familiar sounds are shaped into a unique signature. On their previous album, 2014’s Cosmic Logic, that signature blurred, submerged under styles that drifted toward the generic. But The Fifth State of Consciousness corrects that course, echoing many influences but sounding definitively like Peaking Lights.
A lot of that correction is due to Dunis, whose simple, repetitive verse emboldens the duo’s musical cycles and gives the album a consistent mood. Often she sounds like a friendly hypnotist, calmly coaxing you to open your senses and invite the world in. “Hear the ring/Jangling/Let it sing /And envelop you,” she sings on the reggae-inflected “Coyote Ghost Melodies.” During the angelic “A Phoenix and a Fish,” she extols the rewards of observation (“Everywhere I look I see beauty”); she even celebrates the therapeutic power of smell on the rippling “Sweetness Isn’t Far Away.” On the album’s most beatific tune, “Put Down Your Guns,” her outlook is clear: “Let love come in/And put down your guns/Look at everyone /Love conquers all.”
Such sentiments could sound saccharine were Peaking Lights’ music not infused with many colors. Trace the intersecting loops on any track and you’ll see that a lot happens inside Dunis and Coyes’ bubbling mixes. Two of the best examples are the album’s catchiest tracks, the insistent “Everytime I See the Light” and the retro-tinted “Love Can Move Mountains.” Both establish solid beats and pulsing basslines that never waver, yet the music continually swells. It’s why Peaking Lights’ take on dub is often called psychedelic: its effects hit subconsciously, like a high that kicks in while you were thinking about something else.
The Fifth State of Consciousness isn’t just one big happy trip. As on their best record to date, 2012’s Lucifer, Peaking Lights’ songs get a little darker as this album progresses. Emotionally, “Love Can Move Mountains” is a mixed bag: Dunis tries to listen to and connect with others, but admits that “I’m lost inside/And it’s hard to know/If I can hear your sound.” On “Eclipse of the Heart,” the darkness threatens to take over: “Don’t let the shadow/Cover who you are,” she sings over descending bass and cloudy synths.
Light always wins on Peaking Lights albums, though, and this time the victory comes in a sugar-sweet closer. “Wild Paradise” is so bright and giddy you might think the duo’s drug of choice is laughing gas. “Electric sunset/Fluorescent candy clouds/Sunlight makes the moon come alive,” Dunis hums as glistening tones rise around her like bubbles. At times like this, when the duo seems to breathe helium, they’ve earned the right to indulge. Whatever plane The Fifth State of Consciousness represents, Peaking Lights make it sound like gold at the end of a rainbow.


Like her former band Stereolab, Laetitia Sadier’s new solo album draws on sounds ranging from French yé-yé to krautrock, though its tone is earthier. It features a duet with Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor.

Laetitia Sadier Source Ensemble: Find Me Finding You

Find Me Finding You

In an interview surrounding her 2014 album Something Shines, former Stereolab singer Laetitia Sadier laughingly said that, since the days of her old group, she’s been “cultivating the same piece of land, [but] maybe I grow different vegetables.” The pithy comment stands as a fairly perfect summation of the 48-year-old’s career. Since arriving on the European indie scene back in 1991 with the first Stereolab EP, Super 45, Sadier’s vocal and lyrical approach has remained consistent: She applies her crystalline alto to lyrics that explore philosophy and political inequality through a Marxist lens. In Stereolab and as a solo artist, Sadier’s musical tastes have tended to skew nostalgic, mixing influences of 1960s pop from the U.S. and Brazil, easy listening, and German kosmische.
Find Me Finding You, the first album she’s released as Laetitia Sadier Source Ensemble, also relies on these familiar musical elements. French drummer Emmanuel Mario and Brazilian bassist Xavi Munoz, both of whom played on Sadier’s previous solo albums, are present throughout, as is David Thayer, the filmmaker and musician who co-ran the group Little Tornados with Sadier. Opener “Undying Love for Humanity” burbles with intertwining guitar lines, stuttering keyboard signatures, and bouncing vocal harmonies—it recalls French yé-yé 45s and the knotty exotica of the Free Design. The rest of the album is dotted lightly with krautrock droning, Latin percussion, and chiming twee.
“Undying Love” is ultimately an outlier, though, playing with those elements that Sadier is most associated with before the album moves towards earthy tones and a temperate atmosphere. Find Me maintains a consistent mood better than any other album Sadier has released on her own or with the now-defunct side-project Monade. There are minor pulse-quickening moments, like the psych pop interludes within “Psychology Active (Finding You),” but everything else sticks to a calm mid-tempo like a resting heart-rate.
Still, there’s a wealth of variation to enjoy here. “The Woman With the Invisible Necklace” somehow connects flamenco rhythms with a post-punk swing akin to the Marine Girls. Closer “Sacred Project” shows off the keyboard collection of Ensemble member Phil F MU, with the rumble of Taurus 3 bass pedals warmly humming below a tinny modular melody and assorted synth squeaks. “Reflectors” builds confidently around a pulsing marimba and a rich bass tone before temporarily falling hushed, as guitar and flute waft around Sadier’s commentary. “Wars cannot overcome our troubles,” she sings, “Status, prestige, prominence, don’t mean a thing at this time.” Though Find Me was written before the Brexit vote and the U.S. political disaster, Sadier’s sharp eye for the slowly rolling tides of geopolitics gives these songs added resonance.
Sadier’s lyrical pattern continues on Find Me, as her lines revolve around tyrants, indoctrination, and states of conflict. This is what makes “Love Captive” stand out. A duet with Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor, it’s a ballad for slow dances, but it finds both singers shunning the idea of romantic love, wondering why we “make promises of eternity/When really a heart needs to run open and free.” Instead, they advocate for a broader definition: “We are made to love/Not to fall in love.” The song comes early in the album, but it provides a small lyrical breather that feels necessary to the whole. In the past, Stereolab’s 2001 Sound-Dust tracks “Nothing to Do With Me” and “Les Bons Bons Des Raisons” functioned similarly. Amid Find Me’s otherwise downcast worldview, “Love Captive” lets in some light.


With help from HEALTH's Jupiter Keyes, Denver producer Travis Egedy refines the blasted-electro approach of 2009's Dark Rift.

Thee Physical

The hands-across-the-void cover art that accompanies the proper sophomore effort from blasted-electro producer and Denver scene magnate Travis Egedy's Pictureplane project, Thee Physical, brings to mind a few things: fictional Spinal Tap album Smell the Glove, the "kid who found the severed hand" statue in "Arrested Development", and Magic Eye artwork with all the eye-straining already in place. In reality, the image ties into the album's loose themes of human touch and technological eroticism. This dorm-room theorizing also shows up in selected song titles: "Trancegender", "Post Physical", "Body Mod".
Listeners who approach Thee Physical probably aren't showing up for Egedy's flimsy personal-political philosophizing, though. They're here for his frayed, ear-bleeding take on 1990s diva-house and electro-- disembodied leather hands be damned. Pictureplane's 2009 label debut, Dark Rift, was a statement of purpose, packed with both thrilling moments ("Goth Star") and drifting provocation (nine-minute closer "True Ruin"). On Thee Physical, the approach is considerably more refined, with HEALTH's Jupiter Keyes helping lend a new, immediate sonic appeal. Keyes knows a thing or two about tempering industrial-tinged aggression with sugared sensuality (see last year's HEALTH single "USA Girls"), and on Thee Physical that balance is more present than it's ever been in his main gig.
Further contributing to the album's accessibility is Egedy's move from staticky speaker-pounders toward honest-to-god pop songs. Early album offerings "Real Is a Feeling" and "Post Physical" ably showcase his steps toward electro approachability; other songs feature Egedy engaging as an in-the-flesh sideman to the snippets of throaty vocal samples strewn throughout. This man-machine relationship was prominent on Dark Rift, too; Thee Physical does it better. What's more, Egedy's inherently thin voice sounds stronger in its surroundings here.
And yet, for all the improvements, there are times when Egedy's handmade beats seem slightly out of rhythm with everything else that's going on around them (an issue that's especially apparent on "Black Nails"). And when the album's most vibrant hook shows up, on "Trancegender", it's quickly buried in favor of the murky atmospherics that jam up the album's second half. Thee Physical wants to mosh in the punk club as much as it wants to throw on some lip gloss and hit the town, and it's frustratingly enticing to imagine how the record would have turned out if Egedy had leaned on the gas towards the latter option.


After finding an audience on TikTok, the Ohio producer extends their hypercute, ASMR-inspired sound into an album that floats between states of relaxation and overstimulation.

brain scratch

Listening to Galen Tipton can feel like watching a mad scientist at work. Over a number of different projects, the Ohio producer has tossed ideas at the wall with a zany abandon: Last year they released an album specifically meant to be played directly out of your phone speakers and into your mouth, while projects like digifae and recovery girl have dealt in varying strains of whimsical, speaker-busting hyperpop. Though their other monikers have allowed Tipton to push and prod at song-based production, their solo work is where their tinkerer’s sensibility goes to its wildest places. Each mixture sounds like it could combust into a big, multicolored cloud at any moment.
Recently, Tipton’s bleeding-edge laptop jams have found an audience on TikTok, particularly as they’ve narrowed in on a new style they refer to as “brain scratch.” Taking cues from ASMR, Tipton coats the listener’s ears in microscopic electronic particles that sparkle like slime suffused with iridescent beads, their largely improvised chords and melodies acting secondarily to the constant rush of squelching synthesis underneath. A hypercute take on avant-garde synth music, Tipton’s pieces are an appropriately bite-sized accompaniment to videos pining after the sweet taste of frosted bouncy balls. After introducing this mode in raw blocks of tickling noise on last year’s nymph tones EP, brain scratch arrives as Tipton’s full-length investigation into the sound, using a more structured approach to see just how far the putty will stretch.
No matter how dissonant the music gets, one of Tipton’s most consistently delightful tricks is spinning unwieldy chaos into sumptuous shapes. The ribbiting voice that opens “brain scratch 01: the scavengers hymnal” is constantly ballooning out into notes that won’t quite stay in key, yet Tipton is able to create their own skewed tonal logic. “brain scratch 07: grove of the green knight (beta scale)” balances the almost dubsteppy bass throbbing through its core with a featherlight piano melody, cultivating a strange sense of calm on a track that should be anything but. brain scratch constantly floats in this state between relaxation and stimulation, its heightened sensory overload delivered with a cozy warmth.
Though much of brain scratch follows the cadence of a rainstick trickling in eight directions at once, occasionally Tipton offers something almost approaching a song. The standout “brain scratch 09: playground myths” swells from its fizzy intro into a racing parade of drums complete with a flailing brass section, hitting a sugary stride reminiscent of ’90s Shibuya-kei. But for the most part, the focus rests on Tipton’s dense instrumental textures and bright, childlike imagery. “brain scratch 16: thawing flowers” bursts to life with flutes that flutter softly as if settling atop bright green lily pads, while “brain scratch 4.5: bootlegged elixirs” plays like the soundtrack to a bubble bath slowly flooding an entire house.
After the heavy digital processing of the first three songs, the shorter interludes “brain scratch 15.5: burnt out candles” and “brain scratch 2.5: folk songs for the creepy crawlies” each introduce an earthy, tactile feel—the former with a warm, chalky layer of surface noise, the latter with a gentle mix of pirouetting percussion and cooing kazoos. Though these tracks would be dizzying by any other artist’s metrics, the effect they provide here is a grounding one. Tipton brings enough peaks, valleys, and glimmers of melody to hint at the musical possibilities of this sound, but brain scratch is still an overflowing teacup of a record: music made for a swooning, adventurous date with your headphones.


This collection of post-Cerulean material-- previously available only as a limited tour CD-- is Will Wiesenfeld's latest attempt to crush the competing sides of his personality into song.

Pop Music / False B-Sides

When Will Wiesenfeld recorded a Daytrotter session under his Baths moniker earlier this year, he chose to include three piano ballads in his four-song set. There's a certain logic at work there, considering the emotionally charged material on his debut full-length, Cerulean, from last year, but it's still not a move that most beat-obsessed bedroom producers would have the balls to try out. Wiesenfeld's post-Cerulean career has partially been shaped by a series of left turns, whether it's through his desire to work in piano balladry and on his more passive Geotic project, or in his affable banter with audiences during his live shows. During the Pitchfork Music Festival in July, he seemed to spend most of his non-stage time wandering among the crowds with his shirt off. Wiesenfeld clearly doesn't care to be bracketed, either personally or professionally, and Pop Music / False B-Sides is his latest attempt to crush all those competing sides of his personality into song.
What's most impressive about Baths is how that all-embracing approach never devolves into sloppiness or identity loss. Wiesenfeld is always careful to string recognizable, Baths-like traits through his sound so that the listener never comes completely unshackled from his world. Sometimes it's through those stringy beats that he's so adept at constructing ("Seaside Town"); at others it's when he drenches a song in bathos via a few twists of his immaculate falsetto ("Iniuria Palace"). Frequently both of those elements are deployed, such as on the standout "Pop Song". This isn't supposed to be a proper follow-up to Cerulean-- it's a collection of tracks Wiesenfeld has worked on since that album was released, originally made available to fans who attended a tour from earlier this year-- which illustrates the strength in depth he has at his fingertips when something as appealingly frail as "Pop Song" is buried here.
If this is an indication of where Wiesenfeld is heading, it feels like a spot somewhere between Geotic and Baths, with a greater emphasis on traditional instrumentation. Strangely, it's often reminiscent of work by artists who have walked backwards into the electronic world and assimilated some of its elements after wringing all the inspiration out of the guitar-bass-drums format. "Somerset", for instance, skews close to the kind of dolorous studio experimentation Blur were tooling around with on 13, all tied to a looping, post-rock bassline that could have been uprooted from Tortoise's Millions Now Living Will Never Die. That material points to Baths' future, although there are still a few ties to the Cerulean comfort zone (on the jumpy "Seaside Town" and the fuzzed-out "Damnation") that make Pop Music / False B-Sides feel like a passing of the baton from old to new.
That could be how this album is viewed in the Baths' discography in future years, depending on where Wiesenfeld heads next, which is another testament to his sequencing skills. There are no huge stylistic leaps here, just a subtle testing ground laid out so new ideas can be unwrapped and worked into the sound. It's clear that Wiesenfeld has progressed as a lyricist too, with tracks like "Nordic Laurel" and "Iniuria Palace" easily among the best song-oriented works he's produced. There are occasional misfires, particularly when Wiesenfeld channels his inner Robert Smith on "Tatami", but in the context of this release he can be cut a little more slack than if this were Baths' actual second album. For most of this record, he's still wrapped up in those sci-fi lullabies that made his name, while also gently prodding his surprisingly malleable aesthetic into welcome new territories.


On her second album, the Nashville spitfire flits easily between country, bluegrass, and rock.

Other Girls

On her second album, Nashville spitfire Lillie Mae keeps tabs on everyone who’s spurned her, and her tightly wound voice convinces you to join in. She can calibrate her disappointment to multiple settings: damning and plaintive on “You’ve Got Other Girls For That,” deliciously scorning on “At Least Three In This Room.” She can sound coolly independent and wounded at once, evoking Dolly Parton in one breath and Ariana Grande in the next. She’s played the fiddle since she was three, touring with her family band to fairs and RV parks, and by now she can turn the country on or off as needed.
Mae’s Jack White-produced 2017 album Forever and Then Some had a hard-rocking veneer, but Other Girls (still under White’s label Third Man Records, this time produced by Dave Cobb) invites more natural light into the mix. She plays acoustic guitar and fiddle throughout, but keeps her voice front and center, floating effortlessly between bluegrass, country, and rock. She plays tag with the guitars or spars with a fiddle, singing with but not over them. At the end of “Didn’t I,” she vaults into exalted trills and yeah yeah yeahs over finger-picked guitars that seem to be goading her to go even wilder.
Like some fellow retro-minded musicians Molly Tuttle and Courtney Marie Andrews, Mae is unafraid of swampy instrumentation. Sometimes the tug of tradition can pull a little too hard. The word “dames,” when it pops up on “At Least Three,” is tough not to cringe at. But the awkward moments are outnumbered by the Dorothy Parker bullseyes: “I ain’t your only, maybe the only one who think that’s so,” she sings on “You’ve Got Other Girls For That.” It would be funny if it weren’t so forlorn and self-aware, a self-defeating joke at her own expense.
To record Other Girls, Mae paused touring for the first time in her adult memory. She told Rolling Stone, “This has been the slowest year of my life,” and the effects of this slowdown can be heard everywhere in this album. Regrets and disappointments linger in the music the way they do in life, casting long shadows. On her last album, she was at her finest when near-breathless, but here she soars in the pauses.  At the end of “Crisp and Cold,” she lets the line “Don’t be scared, be more” float into silence with no symmetrical Nashville instinct to rhyme or tie it up.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On his second solo album, Austrian producer and Flying Lotus associate Oliver Johnson puts his own eclectic spin on FlyLo’s brand of over-caffeinated astral jazz and hiccuping robo-breaks.

The Nature of Imitation

In dance music, four years can feel like an eternity. Take Flying Lotus, who has been unusually quiet since the release of 2014’s You’re Dead!, but whose influence continues to grow. In the interim, his collaborators on that album, Kendrick Lamar, Thundercat, and Kamasi Washington have won a Pulitzer, jammed yacht rock with Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald, and become the driving force in modern jazz, respectively. Low End Theory—the party that got FlyLo his start—is finally shutting down, even as his Brainfeeder label keeps forging into strange new terrain, from dizzying footwork to hazy lo-fi house.
It has also been four years since we last heard from Austrian producer Oliver Johnson. Once a touring member of FlyLo’s group (and a contributor to his album Cosmogramma), he released an album called Joined Ends as Dorian Concept in 2014. The record unveiled a sparkling, melodic side of Johnson’s sound, which put a dreamy spin on IDM. Now, he’s popped up again, on Brainfeeder. And his 180-degree turn on The Nature of Imitation suggests that he has stepped in to fill the void left by his former employer, offering an array of over-caffeinated astral jazz and hiccuping robo-breaks.
The fanfare that opens the album, in the intro to “Promises,” does bring to mind the mix of orchestral fanfare and free-jazz blasts on You’re Dead!, though Johnson pivots from there, toggling between Lonnie Liston Smith-style spiritual drift and fusion. Careening from blissed-out to wonky and back, he crafts a sonic zigzag that carries through the rest of the album. Standout single “J Buyers” similarly toys with expectations, building itself up like a festival-ready EDM track, all tingly ascents and dramatic bass anticipating a big payoff. But Johnson seeks effervescence rather than the gaudiness of the drop, abruptly detouring to milder sounds. A buzz disrupts that placidity, as though a power cable has come unplugged, before the composition bursts into full bloom. Chirping voices and an effortlessly catchy melody eventually flutter into earshot, then out. Dorian Concept’s playful mixing brings to mind the convulsive pleasures of a late-’90s Aphex Twin cut.
This hyper, protean aesthetic means that unabashedly beautiful moments like the piano-focused “A Mother’s Lament” mingle with “E13,” which chirps and beeps like a sentient video arcade. “No Time Not Mine” imagines what a FlyLo/D’Angelo collab might sound like—at least in its first half, before the track spirals out into something busier and more frantic.
Flying Lotus’ “Putty Boy Strut” seems to inform “Pedestrians,” but Johnson adds his own swagger to it, as always. It’s a peculiar track—funky yet mechanical, like Johnson is feeding Cameo and Shalamar records into an algorithm. In its squelching synths and vocoded voices, Dorian Concept creates something that ’70s and ’80s electro-funk auteurs like Kraftwerk, George Clinton, and Roger Troutman hinted at: computer music that uncannily imitates the funk, rather than just faking it.


Producer Daniel Pineda, who is one half of Nguzunguzu, has transformed club dancefloors into zones of unmitigated free expression.

Cellar EP

Working with a large cohort of friends and collaborators spread across the globe (he’s one-half of Nguzunguzu), producer Daniel Pineda has transformed club dancefloors into zones of unmitigated free expression. In some ways, his second solo release as NA feels more like a busy construction site than a collection of dance music: It’s 21 minutes of unrelentingly hot, noisy, messy electronic thumps. Thematically, each of Cellar’s five songs is supposed to represent a different dark and claustrophobic room in a large dungeon, complete with its own set of problems and pleasures. The extended architectural metaphor at the heart of Cellar is a fitting description for an artist whose career has been defined by spatial dimensions as much as sonic ones.
The music’s physical tenor is steamy and crowded—it’s like a top down shot of a dance floor, with poor souls trying to claw their way out of the mass of bodies. On "Brass Claims," Pineda adds aggressive horns to his wild array of percussive sounds. The middle chunk of the EP: "Menace" and "Definite Sentence" attempt to scale back the tone and lighten the mood, lowering the frenetic BPM, but the rhythmic zig-zags accomplish little more than creating an anxious block of music. There are a handful of lighter moments in "Definite Sentence" where it sounds like Pineda is sampling a dog’s squeaky toy. And the closer, "NA in a Mood," is surprisingly open and airy. It’s a long fade out that nears ambient music in the relaxation it can somehow pull out of the metallic and mordant sounds Pineda trades in.
At its best, the EP’s pure visceral nature is a stark reminder of the body’s central place in dance music. At its worst, it’s a numbing and grating experience that would never be able to extend past its short runtime. The EP’s attempt at pacing is never smooth but closer to flagellating, and if it did not end at least a little bit gently, the vice-grip it clamps on to your ears would start to feel oppressive. On the whole, though, Cellar is a focused curation of the simple and harsh sounds that were the strongest parts of Pineda’s work in Future Brown and Nguzunguzu.


On their third album, Tyvek's delivering a unifying garage-rock anthem for Detroit's punks, nerds, and audiophiles fighting for something to do on a Saturday night.

On Triple Beams

Tyvek are a Detroit band, which is definitely a point of pride for them. In interviews, they talk about the city not just as a place where they derive inspiration or play shows, but as a place where the community is obligated to fill a vital role. "I feel like in other cities there might be more of a separation from the different crews or different scenes, whereas in Detroit people are supporting each other just by default so they have something to do on a Saturday night," frontman Kevin Boyer said. "It's definitely a survivor kind of city." In the past, something like "survivalism" made itself apparent in the band's near-hardcore aggression, especially on their 2010 album Nothing Fits. That's still present for On Triple Beams, but in a key moment, they soften somewhat to deliver a unifying anthem for Detroit's punks, nerds, and audiophiles fighting for something to do on Saturday night.
That anthem is "Wayne County Roads", which takes its name from the greater Detroit area. The song's title is chanted in response to the line, "Can you explain to me just how we get home?" It's a song not about the sort of "white flight" city desertion from the history books, but about recent, specific young people ditching the city for other places. "Friends that I hold so dear, it's sad to report/ Not hardly one soul around to defend the fort." It's a depressing notion, but the title is chanted as a sort of rallying cry-- there are fewer soldiers around, but that's all the more reason to fucking do something.
Appropriately, the song comes right after a track called "City of a Dream", which discusses the recent efforts to "rebuild" Detroit. Boyer's view of the current situation is cynical, though he sings it over a cheerful progression: "City of a dream, but it's just a lie/ You can write about it in the Sunday Times." But aside from the standard bitterness seemingly directed at politicians and the media, there are glimpses at real life in the city, like working at Temple Bar or the movie theater. If the allusions to the big picture make On Triple Beams feel contemporary or significant, it's the descriptions of "Midwest Basements" and the MOCAD namedrop that make it feel special.
And since it's Tyvek we're talking about here, most of the tracks emanate urgency in nearly every respect. The guitars are buzzy and loud, the rhythms are quick, the drums crash, the lyrics are densely packed into a short span of time, and Boyer spits them out with punk rock confidence. His words are often eloquent, but sometimes, shit's just too frustrating for poetry. On "Little Richard", he sings about not being able to afford rent or heat, which eventually leads to, "Click clack click clack click clack FUCK/ We've got a live one, we've got a live one!" It's a simple, understandable descent into nonsensical anger.
More often than not, tackling current events on a punk record can end with corny and terrible results. But Boyer and Tyvek succeed because they don't set out to make a condescending, chastising political record. Yes, they allude to the current state of Detroit, but they also reference what sound like personal details from their own lives: friends moving out of town, sleeping in Midwestern basements, getting drunk, forcing the band into the van by 3pm, working tomorrow with Steve, etc. It's not a romantic view of Detroit at all, but idealism has never been Tyvek's thing. Do they offer a great reason to come to town and support the local scene? Hell no. But that's not what they're trying to do. With their urgent, sometimes aggressive, sometimes anthemic delivery, they show us Detroit from their vantage point.