Another electro-acoustic collaboration, this record from the Japanese group and the Australian head of Room40 rises well above most of its peers.

Lawrence English / Minamo: A Path Less Travelled

A Path Less Travelled

The Japanese group Minamo plays tiny, dulcet music for guitars, keyboards, and light electronics. Australia's Lawrence English, the owner of the dreamily experimental Room40 label, shares Minamo's knack for pastoral understatement, though his solo music relies more on ambiance than instrumentalism. This collaboration took place in the ether between Tokyo and Brisbane, with English shaping Minamo's instrumental sketches with a toolkit including harmonium, field recordings, and electronics. While it seems like new nice-enough collaborations between niche electro-acoustic artists come out every day, A Path Less Travelled rises above the pack. The two years of work that went into it are evident in its patient cohesion, not to mention its flat-out gorgeousness.
Between the placid beauty of Minamo's disarticulated tunes and English's harmonium and bass, the music courses with warmth. Birds sing on "The Path", crickets chirr on "Headlights", and water splashes against a dock or boat on "Springhead". (Birds sing in 99% of pastoral electro-acoustic music and seldom receive any royalties. English's use of crickets and water is more striking: The former add a subtle Reichian pattern to a nocturnal melody, while the latter kick-starts the rest of the track's liquid swirl.) The drones are fat and windy, the instrumentation spindly and bright, creating a well-balanced sound mass that banks through prismatic timbres and textures. Each track builds toward the merest intimation of a climax that really arrives only with the final song, "Fireworks", a hard-strummed anthem that feels earned after all the delicately shaded moods.
So, okay, an ambient-ish record evoking the great outdoors-- it doesn't exactly sound like press-stopping material. But A Path Less Travelled offers an unusually microcosmic perspective on that scenario. It's less like being swept above nature from a bird's-eye view than sitting still in your yard all day, sinking into a heightened awareness of how much happens in all that apparent [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| stillness, from the constant fluctuations of light and temperature to the shifting sound profiles of wind and animals. Instead of the mountain and the river, we get a little stripe of sunlight on the lawn, and it's plenty.


The boisterous rapper’s latest is mellower and more muted than its predecessor, breaking from the maximalist bluster of conventional Brooklyn drill.

One and Only

Like most successful New York rappers from the last few years, Sheff G broke out by looking beyond New York. A pioneer of Brooklyn drill and one of its most technically gifted lyricists, he drew heavily from the implosive ferocity of Chicago street rap while adopting the husky patois of so many UK drill rappers. Even the music was imported: His 2017 street hit “No Suburban” was produced by Londoner AXL Beats, part of a fleet of British producers whose unflinchingly tense beats shaped the sound of Brooklyn drill.
Sheff G’s new album One and Only arrives at a precarious moment for that scene. Pop Smoke, Brooklyn drill's biggest star, was killed in a home invasion in February. Weeks later, the coronavirus put the city on lockdown, closing the clubs where this music is shared and market-tested for the foreseeable future. And while Sheff G is still a star in his borough, his belated debut The Unluccy Luccy Kid landed last fall without much hype or impact. It was fine, but the ideas already felt stale, not worthy of a scene leader.
One and Only doesn’t really feel like an event either, but this time that’s by design. It’s mellower and more muted than its predecessor, breaking from the maximalist bluster of conventional Brooklyn drill in favor of more nuanced shadings. Sheff G has settled on a producer closer to home, New Jersey native Great John, who crafts mood pieces from little more than hard snares and spectral traces of guitar—a distinct signature at a time when drill’s other architects are leaning hard on pianos.
Great John isn’t an elite producer, at least not yet, but he understands how to frame to Sheff G’s nimble, cavernous baritone. It's rare to hear such a weighty voice glide so gracefully. The sparse accompaniments do little to tame Sheff G’s innate rowdiness—“Moody” may be his most deliriously sticky single yet, while “Lil Big Bro Shit” plays up his feral snarl—but they lend an introverted energy that matches the moment. Whether by fluke or intuition, Sheff G’s timing is impeccable: With the clubs empty, he released a headphones album.
One and Only features a sequel to “No Suburban,” which under different circumstances might feel desperate—it's rarely a good look when a rapper tries to rehash a three-year-old hit. Instead of repeating the original’s formula, though, Sheff G uses “No Suburban Pt. 2” to highlight his evolution. The new track is as sparse as the original was boisterous. Stripped of its predecessor’s dramatic church bells and cacophonous embellishments, all that’s left is a husk, but Sheff G navigates it like a gymnast, his nimble voice spiraling over and under the beat at alternating tempos. He can really rap. Sometimes it doesn’t take much more than that.


Eric Partridge's Dictionary of the Underworld (1998 NTC/Contemporary\n\ Publishing), a lexicon of 19th Century street slang, defines ...

Lateralus

Eric Partridge's Dictionary of the Underworld (1998 NTC/Contemporary Publishing), a lexicon of 19th Century street slang, defines the idiom "pitch the fork" as "to tell a pitiful tale." The term appeared printed in 1863 in Story of a Lancashire Thief:
"Brummagem Joe, a cove ["fellow" or "dude," if you will] as could patter or pitch the fork with anyone."
At last, the secret motivation of my schtick and the etymology behind our name can be revealed. These reviews have been less critique than loquacious concept reviews by an entertaining tramp. So you'd think an 80-minute opus by Tool would be right up our alley. You'd be wrong.
Undertow, Tool's 1993 debut LP, took studio skill and over-trained chops to metal with aplomb. It was Rush Sabbath. As emotional, melodic metal goes (the cultural impact of which will be left to the reader), it opened doors for bands like the Deftones, and to some degree, Limp Bizkit. However, Tool have always possessed a latent understanding of absurdity and comedy; their videos look like Tim Burton stop-motion, goth Primus.
But with popularity and praise, Tool's shadowy tongue-in-cheek turned into the simple biting of tongues. \xC6nema spiced their sound with electronics and industry, as was the trend at the time. Now, with the early new century demanding "opuses," Tool follows suit. The problem is, Tool defines "opus" as taking their "defining element" (wanking sludge) and stretching it out to the maximum digital capacity of a compact disc.
Dictionary of the Underworld also offers several definitions for "tool," including: "a small boy used to creep through windows," "to steal from women's pockets," and "to loaf, to idle, to do nothing in particular." All of which oddly strike the nail on the head in relation to Lateralus.
And now, the obligatory pitching of the fork.

My Summer Vacation, by Crispin Fubert, Ms. Higgins' Eng. Comp. 901
I believe that music comes and goes in cycles, and some of us are lucky enough to ride the crests. The men in my family are perfect examples of this. Initially, I thought that perfect music appeared every 16 years, which is also the number of years between Fubert generations. My dad was born in 1971. In that year, landmark albums were released. They were Nursery Crime by Genesis (the first with Phil Collins), Yes Album by Yes, Aqualung by Jethro Tull, and In the Land of Grey and Pink by Caravan.
My grandfather skipped out on Vietnam-- because Jimi Hendrix himself told him to-- and he moved to Canterbury, which is in the United England. There, he got married to my grandmother, who used to sell baked goods to people at concerts, and they had my dad. After the war, they moved back with a box of awesome records like the ones I mentioned. I think it was cosmic or fate or something that my dad was born the same exact day Chrysalis released Aqualung, in March of 1971.
Jump ahead 16 years later and my dad got this girl pregnant, who turned out to be my mom. It was 1987 and a whole bunch of lame dance music was ruling the world, like Hitler or Jesus or something. But all of the sudden, albums like Metallica's ...And Justice for All, Celtic Frost's Into the Pandemonium, Queensryche's Operation: Mindcrime, and Slayer's South of Heaven came out. That's when I was born.
All those records were sitting around the house we all live in, and I grew up listening to them in the basement. So I couldn't wait until I was 16, because fate says that would be when 1) more kickass records would come out, and 2) I'd get sex. Both were due, because girls are dumb and listen to stuff like N'S(t)ync and BBSuk. But after this summer of 2001, I've had to rethink my entire cycle theory, like maybe the cycles of music are speeding as time goes forward, since two amazing things happened: Tool put out Lateralus and I saw Tool in concert.
I feel like this record was made just for me by super-smart aliens or something, because it's just like a cross of 1971 and 1987. Imagine, like, Peter Gabriel with batwings or a flower on his head singing while Lars Ulrich and Rick Wakeman just hammer it down. It's the best Tool record because it's the longest. All summer I worked at Gadzooks, folding novelty t-shirts, and on each break, I would listen to Lateralus because the store just plays hip-hop and dance. My manager would always get on me for taking my breaks 20 minutes too long, but that's how long the album is and it just sucks you in. It's like this big desert world with mountains of riffs, and drum thunderstorms just roll across the sky. The packaging is also cool, since it has this clear book with a skinless guy, and as you turn the pages, it rips off his muscles and stuff. Tool's music does the same thing. It can just rip the muscles and skin off you. I think that's what they meant. So my manager would be like, "Hey, there's a new box of 'Blunt Simpson' shirts I need you to put out and the 'Original Jackass' shelf is getting low." He's a vegan and I would buy him Orange Julius because he didn't know there's egg powder in there.
The first song is called "The Grudge," and it's about astrology and how people control stuff. Maynard sings like a robot or clone at the opening, spitting, "Wear the crutch like a crown/ Calculate what we will/ Will not tolerate/ Desperate to control/ All and everything." Tool know about space and math, and it's pretty complex. "Saturn ascends/ Not one but ten," he sings. No Doubt and R.E.M. sang out that, too, but those songs were wimpy and short. Maynard shows his intelligence with raw stats. I think there's meaning behind those numbers, like calculus. He also mentions "prison cell" and "tear it down" and "controlling" and "sinking deeper," which all symbolize how he feels. Seven minutes into the song, he does this awesome scream for 24 seconds straight, which is like the longest scream I've ever heard. Then at the end there's this part where Danny Carey hits every drum he has. This wall of drums just pounds you. Then the next song starts and it's quiet and trippy. Tool are the best metal band, since they can get trippy (almost pretty, but in a dark way) then just really loud. Most bands just do loud, so Tool is more prog.
Danny Carey is the best drummer in rock, dispute that and I know you are a dunce. I made a list of all of his gear (from the June issue of Modern Drummer):
Drums, Sonor Designer Series (bubinga wood): 8x14 snare (bronze), 8x8 tom, 10x10 tom, 16x14 tom, 18x16 floor tom, two 18x24 bass drums.
Cymbals, Paiste: 14" Sound Edge Dry Crisp hi-hats, 6" signature bell over 8" signature bell, 10" signature splash, 24" 2002 China, 18" signature full crash, #3 cup chime over #1 cup chime, 18" signature power crash, 12" signature Micro-Hat, 22" signature Dry Heavy ride, 22" signature Thin China, 20" signature Power crash.
Electronics: Simmons SDX pads, Korg Wave Drum, Roland MC-505, Oberheim TVS.
Hardware: Sonor stands, Sonor, Axis or Pro-Mark hi-hat stand, Axis or Pearl bass drum petals with Sonor or Pearl beaters (loose string tension, but with long throw).
Heads: Evans Power Center on snare batter (medium high tuning, no muffling), G2s on tom batters with G1s underneath (medium tuning with bottom head higher than batter), EQ3 bass drum batter with EQ3 resonant on front (medium tuning, with EQ pad touching front and back heads).
Sticks: Trueline Danny Carey model (wood tip).
He has his own sticks, even. In "Schism," the double basses just go nuts at the end. They also do in "Eon Blue Apocalypse." And in "The Grudge." And in "Ticks & Leeches." And nobody uses more toms in metal. You can really hear the 8x8 and 10x10 toms in the opening for "Ticks & Leeches." Over the summer, I counted the number of tom hits in that song, and it's 1,023!! Amazing. That's my favorite song, since it's the one that starts with Maynard screaming, "Suck it!" Then he says, "Little parasite." Later he shouts, "This is what you wanted... I hope you choke on it!" Every time I watched my boss suck down those Orange Juliuses I had that stuck in my head.
There is simply no way you could just dismiss the music (which is excellent). The bass playing is just really creepy and slow and sometimes it has this watery effect. Tool even follow in the footsteps of Caravan with Middle Eastern or Asian or something sounds. "Disposition" features bongos, and then on the next song, "Reflection," Carey's toms sound like bongos or tablas or whatever is in those Fruitopia commercials. Close your eyes and imagine if Asia had a space program. This is like the music they'd play. The song is called "Reflection" since it's quieter and slower and sounds like it's from India, where people go to reflect. Maynard's voice sounds like that little bleached midget girl flying around inside the walls in Polterghost. It's messed up.
In conclusion, there is more emotion on that album than would be on 30 Weezer albums. At the very least, there's 2.5 times as much. Like I said, it's messed up, like the world, which makes it very real. I don't think I'm going to have a kid this year, but that's also a good thing. Just imagine the Tool record that will come out in three years, according to my theory. It will be the future, and albums can be like longer with better compression and technology. Even as amazing as Lateralus is, I feel like there's a monster coming in three years. Music comes in cycles, and works on math, and my life and Tool are proof of that for sure.


The Drums made their name on jaunty surf pop, but a collection of little-heard songs from their early years explores themes of longing and heartbreak that guided Jonny Pierce from the start.

Mommy Don’t Spank Me

Halfway through Mommy Don’t Spank Me, the new collection of early rarities and remixes from the Drums, frontman Jonny Pierce sings mournfully of a woman who so fears the world’s judgment that she has locked herself in her frigid studio. The situation is imagined, but the woman is not: The subject of “Wendy” is synth pioneer Wendy Carlos, and while Pierce and Drums co-founder Jacob Graham cherish her music, the song’s real concern is her queerness. When it was first released as a bonus track on the Japanese edition of 2011’s Portamento, “Wendy” was an outlier in a catalog of keenly melodramatic indie pop widely assumed to be about straight love. Not until a year later did Pierce and Graham talk openly about their homosexuality, casting their work—and the little-heard songs collected here—in a new light.
Pierce understood the fear of being exposed: Early on, when a prying journalist had asked if anyone in the Drums was gay, he’d dodged the subject. His reticence was understandable. The child of Pentacostal pastors from upstate New York, Pierce has described his childhood as abusive, recalling torturous years in religious school and the thrill of listening to secular music in secret. In 2005, a few years before the Drums’ breakout “Summertime!” EP—and four years before the earliest of these songs was written—an experience at New York City’s Pride parade sent Pierce into a crisis of conscience that led him temporarily back to his conservative family home. He’s now reclaimed that trauma as inspiration. Mommy Don’t Spank Me is a reference to a playground chant from his school days, a fittingly cheeky nod from a band that made its name delivering winking sex-and-death lyrics over jaunty surf rock. But there’s little winking in these songs. Without the burden of selling the Drums as cool-kid counterparts to their more buttoned-up indie rock contemporaries, the collection showcases Pierce’s precise writing (important for a band that proudly shirked musicianship) and makes clear the themes of longing and agonizing heartbreak that have been his lodestar since the start.
That’s not to say that these lovelorn tracks, written primarily in 2010 and 2011, lack polish. Even with a thin concept and just 10 repeated words, album opener “The Only Son” is a stunner, relying completely on Pierce’s commitment to sounding like he’s on the edge of bawling. His talent for doing the most with the least is on full display on “You’re the One That Makes Me Happy,” a minimalist love-is-war ballad with a drowsy doo-wop guitar that could soundtrack a post-breakup stumble down a moonlit boardwalk. There’s no earworm here to match “Let’s Go Surfing,” but “The New World” comes close. Its moody synths, jangly guitars, and soaring chorus epitomize the Drums at their best, and in a group of frequently glum songs, Pierce’s closing chant of “hold on, hold on” plays like a welcome message of allyship and hope.
Though matters of the heart are a constant, the only song that tiptoes toward contextualizing  love as queer is “Instruct Me.” Written in 2009, soon after Pierce’s brief relapse into fundamentalism, it’s the collection’s oldest song and its most arresting. A plea from a man who is “too young” to be losing his virginity, the track is a ramshackle collage of raygun synths, mouth sounds, and a falsetto that’s shocking to hear from a guy who typically croons like Edwyn Collins. Though still vague, it hints at the more confessional songwriting Pierce would come to embrace as the sole member of the band on 2017’s Abysmal Thoughts and 2019’s Brutalism.
The second half of the collection is less compelling. Aside from a tremendous lo-fi rework of “Let’s Go Surfing” by now-defunct Brooklyn garage rockers Knight School, the compiled remixes serve both as a time capsule of indie electronica c. 2010—super-twinkly synths and other Merriweather Post Pavilion influences abound—and precursors to the dancefloor swerve of Pierce’s most recent singles. Twin Shadow transforms “Me and the Moon” into a patchwork of ’80s horns and exploding synths that sounds alarmingly like “Money for Nothing”; Matthew Dear stretches the same song into a seven-minute dirge. The Beat Connection remix of “Money” is the most exciting of the bunch, chopping up the song’s math rock guitars and resonant drums and rearranging them into a rollercoaster of a dance track.
In naming this collection Mommy Don’t Spank Me, Pierce imbues these songs with a sexual confidence and sense of humor that were decidedly in-progress at the time they were written. These qualities have only grown more pronounced in recent years, as the Drums have become the type of band to put a fetishistic pin-up on an album cover or write a self-actualization anthem culminating in “spit on your own dick, honey.” But the seeds of that bravado are here. Compiling them isn’t a means of putting them on a shelf; it’s Pierce’s way of bringing them into his present.

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The Los Angeles-based pop singer's new EP plunges into her psyche with quiet desperation, producing some of her most vulnerable music yet.

2007 EP

In a country where more than half of Americans believe in a Christian God, Miya Folick was raised as a Buddhist. Her belief in the spiritual power of community and mutual support—rather than an individual responsibility to rid oneself of sins—echoed across much of her anthemic debut album Premonitions. On its opener, “Thingamajig,” Folick offered herself up as an apologetic vessel, placing her haunting melodies on a foundation of shared suffering and forgiveness. “I can sing an apology for somebody else, because I’m sorry that I’m a human and so are you,” she said in an interview at the time, willing not to absolve sin but refract it.
“Oh God,” the opening track on 2007, Folick’s first collection of music in four years, offers a less assured and more insular take on faith. “Who is God? I’ve never had God,” she sings with both doubt and determination, her voice rich and layered atop a shimmering production. Folick modulates her vocals with precision—she falters, wavers, and quietly screams. It’s a chorus far removed from the composed confidence she once displayed in earlier material. And though she tempers the outsized eccentricity of Premonitions for 2007, what emerges is some of Folick’s most vulnerable music to date: despondent, emotionally frank, and brimming with intimate self-reflection.
Each song on 2007 illustrates a type of yearning that feels eternal, whether it be for the love of a partner, the comfort of a parent, or the safety of the past. On the title track, Folick wishes to retain the innocence she once had when she was on the cusp of young adulthood. “I’ve never gotten used to having tits and ass/I’ve never gotten used to living alone,” she despairs, her voice tumbling along a dusty rock groove. The lyrics aren’t inventive, but genuine emotion still shines through Folick’s full-bodied, classically trained voice, and her angelic falsetto is baked with a touch of desperation in the chorus: “I wanna smile real big/I wanna fucking live.”
Where Premonitions took aim at larger systemic inequality, turning the self outward in service of the whole, Folick’s goal here is to be directly introspective and personal. A messy acoustic guitar line grounds her in the regretful “Nothing to See,” as she castigates herself for losing her sense of personhood in a relationship. Amid a crescendo of drums and synths, she seeks a secure sense of self, supported by distant wails and ethereal lyrics. The lavish instrumental and vocal ornamentation ends abruptly in the last few seconds, as if Folick knows that it’s not always possible to find complete clarity in matters of the soul. 2007 tends to favor these lonesome and occasionally isolating modes of thought: Piano lines loop into a dreamy state of incompletion, lone guitar licks call out without a response, and chanted vocals reach the point of hyperventilation, as heard on “Bad Thing.”
This internal back-and-forth—answering questions with more questions—can be frustrating for anyone with a litany of anxieties, but Folick characterizes it as a reliable and occasionally welcome presence. It’s most evident on the EP’s poppiest track, “Cartoon Clouds,” which reveals Folick at her most inquisitive self. “Look out of the window all the clouds are cartoons/And the sky is so blue,” she sings lightly over a jaunty synth line. “What’s the point in being gloomy/When there’s so much else to do?” Getting out of the doom and gloom in her mind, however briefly, allows her to recognize that not every turning point in life requires an immediate direction. 2007 recognizes a strength in quiet vulnerability, one that is powerful enough without the backing—or even forgiveness—of others. No question needs a detailed answer; sometimes, just asking can be enough.


The boundless debut from the London-based artist is a delirious tug of war between pleasure and unease, shuttling between club sounds and psychedelic mind states with a steely, unbridled intensity.

im hole

A DJ set from aya can be both thrilling and disorienting, a giddy maelstrom of jungle breaks, Dutch techno, UK funky, South African gqom, and who knows what else—plus edits of Charli XCX and “Call Me Maybe,” for good measure. Synthesized voices offer bite-sized philosophical observations (“Google Street View has allowed us to shrink geography,” proclaims a text-to-speech snippet midway through her 2018 Boiler Room set). Mic in hand, aya might shout crowd-stoking interjections, urge her supporters to vote Corbyn, or offer reflective commentary about her own tracks: At Krakow’s Unsound Festival this October, she said that “backsliding,” a queasy, K-holed vision of ambient grime peppered with cryptic references to hedonism and regret, is about leaving Manchester—“probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she added, sounding suddenly serious. On at least one occasion, she has crowd-surfed, oversized chains and tartan plaid flapping as she tumbled over the hands of the crowd. The vibe slips from heady to humorous and back again with whiplashing intensity; the bass is so physical you can feel it in your follicles.
Building on the club sounds of LOFT, aya’s former alter ego, and extending into the realms of musique concrète, drone, and knotty wordplay, the Huddersfield-raised, London-based artist’s debut album, im hole, takes her boundless energy and unbridled creative instincts into a wild new space. On record, her voice is either pitched up and wreathed in the clammy reverb of a small, dank tunnel, or digitally pulverized and scattered to the winds. On paper—the album’s physical edition is a clothbound book—her lyrics take the form of carefully typeset poems whose butterfingered misspellings (“once went west ypp off ur chesdt my ribssn embpdty vessel,abeadt slippd an ekxtra stuttr fluttr midst th wrestl alll breath losstt”) reflect their origin as notes tapped out on her phone in what she has described as states of “transient psychosis.”
aya’s previous releases hewed to more or less familiar traditions of experimental club music. “a fflash gun for a ffiver,” from last year’s Physically Sick 3 compilation, recalls the intricate, jewel-toned bass investigations of labels like Wisdom Teeth, where LOFT released an early EP in 2017. The cartoonish vocal processing of last year’s playful “delishus” sounds like an homage to SOPHIE songs like “Lemonade” and “Hard.” But on im hole, some of aya’s playfulness has burned off, making way for a steely, psychedelic intensity.
The opening track, “somewhere between the 8th and 9th floor,” charts strange new territory. Over a chilly microtonal blast—recorded with her phone in the stairwell between the eighth and ninth floors of her old apartment building, where the wind screaming through a broken window created an uncannily electronic-sounding effect—she intones a sing-song incantation in a witchy pipsqueak: “Me, more, me, more, me, more. Red or blue, me, more, red or blue, red or blue. Red shoes or blue shoes! Red shoes or blue shoes!” It sounds less like a song than a spell being cast. And by the track’s end, a magical transformation has taken place, one that introduces the autobiographical theme that gives this baffling, enveloping album the personal gravitas to balance its dazzling sonic fireworks: “Last year I came round from a hole/With a broken thumb/And a note on my phone/Four words,” she croaks, her voice digitally garbled: “Thee/Vibe/Hath/Changed.”
Change is deeply woven into the album’s fabric. Sounds shift their shapes in midair; rhythms morph; timbres transmogrify. aya favors volatile textures evocative of blown glass, oily concrete, and quaking Jell-O, but the provenance of any given sound is rarely clear. On “what if i should fall asleep and slipp under,” her voice takes on a gravelly, fluctuating buzz, as though she were hissing into the rotors of a swiveling electric fan. On the instrumental “dis yacky,” crows caw over dangerously arrhythmic breakbeats while a gummy acid bassline tries desperately to hold the song’s jagged shards together. Even at the music’s most overwhelmingly physical—like the tinnitus-and-nausea cocktail of pinging highs and oozing sub-bass of “tailwind”—this is as spare as her music has sounded; rarely are more than a handful of elements in play at any given moment. A few tracks are essentially spoken-word poetry set to industrial grinding and buzzing sounds—or post-industrial, seemingly inspired less by rusted-out Northern English factories than the ominous throb of this century’s sprawling underground server farms.
The lyrics play out as blurry snapshots of daily life and nightly follies; the writing is dense but fleet, skipping over tangled internal rhymes like a sailboat riding hard, choppy waves. Druggy allusions and sly double entendres abound, and her twisting wordplay limns the stealth and slipperiness of sex with startling accuracy. im hole can be darkly funny—“Oh the stubble/Oh begone/You unholy cunt,” she snaps on “OoB Prosthesis,” lamenting the indignity of unwanted hair—and she has a talent for zooming in on vivid details that crystallize a whole constellation of feelings. In “3.36,” a poem included in the accompanying book, she sits awake late at night, ketamine in her system, buzzing on the feeling of her fingertips brushing against her ears: “im shaking my body side to side some rhythm gone amiss/fantano’s reviewing billie eilish.”
But despite the spry wit of her writing and the spirited force of her drums, a dull ache is often palpable. The album’s title puns on wholeness and physical orifices but also emptiness. A trans person, aya wrestles in her lyrics with dysmorphia and struggles with irreconcilable binaries (“If I were one or the other/I could smother half of myself/Mother myself for a laugh to a sickening health”). Even sexual pleasure comes cloaked in existential pain: “Come find me undercover/Come over we could fuck the void out of each other,” she offers on “what if i should fall asleep and slipp under,” digitally enabled vocal fry scraping against bass that glints of polished latex. But there are moments of tenderness, too. On the brooding “still i taste the air,” she pays a melancholy visit to an ex-lover and, despite the abiding sadness of the encounter (“His dimensions once undulating, pulsating/Sit still now/Bound, drab”), she returns feeling serene, “lighter somehow,” secure in the knowledge that “one night’s enough to know where’s roots.”
Shuttling between club sounds and psychedelic mind states, assembling brain-rearranging rhythms only to topple them in a jumbled heap, im hole enacts a delirious tug of war between pleasure and unease—between the bodily embrace of dance music and the bottomless pit of the mind. In the closing “backsliding,” aya paints the picture of a narcotic, late-night session, a blur of rolled bills and tunnel vision set to some of the album’s most disorienting production, where a sub-heavy rhythm dissolves into backmasked streaks of icy dissonance. Like all meaningful drug experiences, it pairs the temporary loss of self with the search for something more—in this case, the simple discovery that “some nights the light hits just right.” Electronic music is often predicated on the idea of losing yourself on the dancefloor. But im hole explores a deeper and more regenerative sense of loss; it is an ode to the new self that forms when the old one crumbles. As aya intones in the opening track, “Straighten out your shoulders, love/Push your head up/And don’t forget to breathe.”

Buy: Rough Trade
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Amidon’s self-titled record continues his polyglot blending of folk, classical, and jazz, drawing a resounding personal statement out of songs in the public domain.

Sam Amidon

“Revival” is a funny term for “mass commercialization,” but that’s just one of the paradoxes of the 20th-century folk music revival. Another is that it minted a production line for new folk songs, which once was an oxymoron. Sure, someone had written the old traditional tunes, but often they had been passed down regional and familial generations for so long that no one remembered who. They existed outside of copyright law, and they were played on acoustic instruments because that’s what people had around. None of this can be said for, say, Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” but still, we tend to call that one a “folk song,” too. It’s become conventional to brand any lightly dressed acoustic song as folk without regard for the former essence of the term—that it had been shaped by many voices over time.
This isn’t to say that mass media automatically taints folk music; it can also just provide a larger vessel through which it can travel. Sam Amidon is living proof. There’s hardly an original to be found on the six LPs—two on Bedroom Community and four on Nonesuch—that make up his main discography, though there are many daringly original arrangements, and The Following Mountain mixed original lyrics in the traditional. Amidon stages a polyglot conversation among folk, classical and jazz, re-dreaming traditional tunes as contemporary conservatory music with minimalist grit. Few artists have drawn as strong a personal statement from the public domain.
Amidon reportedly regards his new, self-titled album as the fullest realization of his vision, and indeed, it’s a digestible nine-song omnibus of his modes and moods. Amidon was drawn into the modern classical world of Iceland’s Bedroom Community by Nico Muhly; the icy, crackling ambience of many of the label’s acts and the composer’s lissome orchestrations still influence his work. Regular collaborators such as Shahzad Ismaily and Sam Gendel bathe his guitar and banjo in a high-contrast palette, from flute and saxophone to Moog bass. It can shift as needed from dark coloration (“Spanish Merchant’s Daughter”) to springy rhythms, which peak in a sort of rainforest hoedown on “Cuckoo.”
“Cuckoo” emphasizes Amidon’s habit of pulling folk taut to the edge of dance, befitting its origins as social music with a wide range of practical uses. Likewise, “Maggie” begins with a house-music feint that lingers subliminally in the coldly fiery funk that emerges. But these are balanced by moments of piercing simplicity, where the arrangements melt away from the pure pleasure of Amidon’s voice. All its buoyant softness is revealed on “Hallelujah,” a 19th-century shape note song, and “Time Has Made a Change,” a hymn by Harkins Frye that Amidon’s parents sang around the house when he was young.
Such personal threads are shot through the album. “Pretty Polly,” an oft-covered English murder ballad that Dock Boggs stamped almost a century ago, appears not because it’s novel, but because it was one of the first trad tunes Amidon learned to play. Perhaps it’s telling that he omits just one aspect of his prior albums: the pop cover, whether it was Mariah Carey’s “Shake It Off” or (gulp) R. Kelly’s “Relief” in 2010. In context, these inclusions suggested that these songs had shaped Amidon as much as Appalachian folk. The closest he comes to a pop cover is a version of Taj Mahal’s “Light Rain Blues.” But he doesn’t need to shoehorn in a modern pop song to underscore that this old music is utterly modern, which is demonstrated most vividly in its cool, commanding vitality—a revival in the truest sense.

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One of the world's best, most interesting rock bands, the Japanese noise group Boris, teams with the former singer of 80s hard rock heroes the Cult.

BXI EP

The four Boris tracks on BXI EP are among the most concise and powerful in the Japanese trio's catalogue. For more than a decade, Boris have moved seamlessly from rigorous thrash to colossal drone to soaring psychedelic metal; but those two qualities-- concision and power-- have often been mutually exclusive. These four tracks, however, each feel like a condensed epic that allows the band's love of dynamics and development to find thoughtful focus. And then, over it all, former Cult singer Ian Astbury croons about animals and witches. Yikes.
The brisk, confident rock punch of the Cult often swept Astbury's histrionic vocals inside. Tracks like "She Sells Sanctuary" and "Love Removal Machine" guided his bombast, never letting him shine too long in any particular spotlight. On BXI, Astbury treats his position as the temporary leader of one of the best, most interesting rock bands in the world like a bully pulpit. During opener "Teeth and Claws", Boris teases again and again, lurching forward just to ease back the volume. Astbury takes the empty space as an invitation to merely roar. Closer "Magickal Child" opens beautifully, with electronic hum and drifting chords; when the band explodes in a haze of cymbals and distortion, Astbury leans back to belt some blend of Wiccan and New Age ideals in a stagy, lachrymose delivery.
Ultimately, BXI-- "Boris multiplied by Ian," we can presume-- is one of the most ignorable releases for a band with nearly a hundred of them. It's not a complete waste, though, neither with regard to the songs themselves nor with what it might mean for Boris' future. Again, the playing is excellent, and when Astbury backs away from the microphone, Boris sound masterful. Guitarist Wata leads the quartet through a cover of the Cult's 1985 hit "Rain", and her soft, wispy coos offer the perfect contrast to the band's rhythmic maw and suffocating guitars. Boris capture the march of the original take perfectly but send it spiraling through the final minutes.
The negative flipside to Boris' eclectic approach has been a tendency to make records that feel like mixtapes, records without a real aim (see 2008's Smile, especially). But the material on BXI proves that, just as they're able to devote an album to resplendent drone, they're as capable of crafting an album of relatively straightforward though still imaginative rock'n'roll. Maybe it took Ian Astbury to show them they could do it; here's hoping that, now that we know, they no longer require his imperial, aggressive British lead.


Isolating the rhythm at the center of their work and tapping into a new physicality, the Washington, D.C. experimental duo find joy in improvisation and liberation in the body.

both feet en th infinite

In their work as Model Home, NappyNappa and Patrick Cain blur the line between affirmation and destruction. NappyNappa is a maker of koans, embracing cryptic lines and repeated ululations in his solo work as a rapper and as MC of the group. Cain lays down sheets of metallic whirs, providing a backdrop of pounding, uneasy electronics for his partner’s esoterica. Their music has its own language and referents, drawing equally from the missionary zeal of Lee “Scratch” Perry and the firmament-destroying power of Khan Jamal’s Drum Dance to the Motherland; listening feels like being sucked down a vortex of splintered beats and horn stabs. You won’t understand every word, but that’s not necessarily the point. What the noise and lyrics generate is a zone of challenging incomprehension, of unexplored terrain. On their latest album, both feet en th infinite, the duo embrace propulsive movement, isolating the rhythm that has always centered their work and tapping into a newfound physicality.
both feet en th infinite foregrounds the precise pulse that lived beneath the dystopian energy of Model Home’s 2020 compilation One Year. The distended production of opener “Night Break” brings to mind the fat bass drum hits and squelching horns of Dinosaur L’s Paradise Garage classic “Go Bang.” Over the top, NappyNappa bleats out different phrases, basking in the haze of distorted disco as he lays down his lines with the tenacity of a motivational speaker. Tinkling piano, synthetic zaps, and his enthusiastic exhortations trap you in the song’s web, forcing you to contend with the complexity of each strand. “Crux of Et All” starts with the type of motorik bass one might associate with the experimental hip-hop of Madlib or Dr. Who Dat?, while NappyNappa yelps and harmonizes over its tangle of snares. There’s something vaguely thrilling about how Model Home adapt this idiom to their style; it’s like watching someone attempt a series of increasingly unlikely tricks on a broken-down vehicle and being surprised when the car actually starts.
While nothing on this record is an easy listen, there are insights to be gained from its fractures. Model Home scatter Mantronix-like hi-hats and piercing sounds throughout, touches that function in the same way as tambourines and shakers on a spiritual jazz record; they’re here to announce the elation that improvisational music-making can inspire. (It’s not for nothing that NappyNappa starts “Crux of Et All” by commanding, “Shout for joy.”) “3D Printed Quinoa” is easily the album’s most abrasive track: NappyNappa’s voice is constantly modulated up and down, and Cain layers on a heavy, mosquito-like synth buzz. Even when the tell-tale vibrations of a deep sub-bass surface towards the end, the movement it summons feels organic. By pricking you with what hurts, Model Home demand focus, toughening your ears but not hardening them so much that you tune out before things click.
While they’ve flirted with dance music on songs like One Year’s “Damn Disco 99” and their remix album with Pure Rave, the overt kineticism on display here is a recent development. On “Body Power,” NappyNappa is in toaster mode, moving the crowd with his words and his voice simultaneously. Over a giddy piano twinkle and kick drums, he screams about the potential of the body as a vector for liberation. He’s eventually joined by other voices, which shout in unison: “More power in your body.” The phrase may seem simple, but Model Home are rummaging through the collected detritus of expression and finding anything—old or new—that produces an intense reaction. Their songs aim to reawaken senses dulled by overexposure, and their refusal to immediately satisfy can feel grueling. Yet there is a purity to their provocation; by putting your senses to the test, both feet en th infinite generates new pathways for hearing and movement.

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The Nova Scotia quartet’s chilled-out, endearing indie rock gets a slightly more cutting edge on on their third album.

I’m Bad Now

Partway through Nap Eyes’ third record, singer/guitarist Nigel Chapman reveals what he likes to listen to when he’s out for a stroll—and it’s not the Velvet Underground or Pavement or Yo La Tengo or any of the other archetypal indie rock bands to which his Nova Scotian quartet are routinely compared. Sure, Chapman still very much sounds like a Lou Reed who hails from Canada’s East Coast instead of New York’s East Village, but at the moment his interests seem to lay far beyond the rock canon. On the campfire-ready acoustic reprieve “Follow Me Down,” he sings, “Went out walking with my headphones on, classical Indian raga, 20 minutes long/Then I listened to old American folk song/Little bit shorter, still a lot going on.”
“Follow Me Down” is much closer in style to the latter form, even as its subliminal feedback drones try to tilt it toward the former. But that lyric is less a catalog of Champan’s direct influences than a snapshot of the internal contradiction at the core of Nap Eyes’ music—namely, the band’s desire to zone out into zen states versus Chapman’s tendency to share every existential observation bouncing through the synapses of his brain. If folk songs were the original social-media posts, then on I’m Bad Now, Chapman has more than enough on his mind to overwhelm a 280-character limit and then some.
I’m Bad Now is a somewhat cheeky title coming from a band that exudes such a chilled-out, endearing sense of bonhomie. But the commitments to self-improvement and healthy living that permeated 2016’s Thought Rock Fish Scale assume a more cutting tone here, as if Chapman was taking a more aggressive tack to weed out the toxic relationships and unnecessary noise in his life. On the title track, the song’s easy-going jangle belies a biting self-critique, one that leaves Chapman so exhausted that all he can say in the end is “you’re so dumb.” A few songs later, amid the motorik country-rock of “Roses,” he’s plumbing the uneasy feeling of having to maintain pleasant appearances in the face of unwanted attention: “Somebody sent you roses/Now what do you do with them/You’ve got no reason to trim them/No nice place to throw them/Because it doesn’t seem right to throw them away/Yet you can’t very well send them back the other way.” Even at his most withering, Chapman remains nothing if not polite.
Chapman’s—and by extension the band’s—calm demeanor can trick you into thinking there’s not a lot happening in any given Nap Eyes song. And as you hear throughout the album, Chapman is fond of circling back to his opening verses and repurposing them as choruses, changing his inflection and emphasis every so slightly to create just the right amount of dynamic definition. But as Nap Eyes retrace their steps, they’re digging into new ground underfoot. When “Roses” introduces a surprise chorus hook in the song’s dying moments, it’s like suddenly finding your lost car keys in a room that you’ve already searched 20 times over.
I’m Bad Now is a more forthright, steady-going listen than Thought Rock Fish Scale, and, on first pass, it seems a touch less enchanting than that record’s nocturnal reveries. The new album shows Nap Eyes can certainly excel at tight, snappy power-pop (check the incisive opener “Every Time the Feeling”). But there are also all-too-brief flashes of viscerality that you wish the band had explored further—like the noisy, chicken-scratched outburst that momentarily erupts from the simmering build of “Judgment,” or the glorious arena-rockin’ surge that upsets the otherwise mellow slide-guitar sweep of “Sage,” but stops short of elevating the song into Nap Eyes’ own “Impossible Germany.”
The real jamming on I’m Bad Now isn’t happening on the fretboards, but in the lyrics. Atop the countrified dream-pop of “Hearing the Bass,” he revels in the words of songwriter Danika Vandersteen like a guitarist indulges in arpeggios, and practically comes up with a new Dr. Seuss book in the process: “Want to wonder, to watch, to weather, to whisper a tune/To whimper, to will, too well/Swelter, swallow, to switch, to swim, two swan too/To swing, to sing, to sting, to stone, to tone.” But he saves his most bon mots for the astounding “White Disciple,” where the religious undercurrents that have always coursed through Nap Eyes’ music roil into a tsunami. Part Pixies bass rumble, part soulful “Beast of Burden” sway, the song proves to be Chapman’s Mangum opus, a breathless meditation on faith and vice that burrows a winding path from Christianity to Hinduism.
It also happens to contain the album’s best joke: After cycling through seven biblically dense verses, Chapman finally reaches his protagonist’s moment of spiritual awakening, and the only way he can describe it is by unleashing a long, deeply satisfying “shhiiiiiiiiiiiiitttttt” worthy of Clay Davis. Coming from such an eloquent wordsmith, it’s a jarring jump from sacred to profane—but clearly for him, being bad has never felt so good.

Paradise of Bachelors / You’ve Changed / Jagjaguwar


On their second album, the cheerfully subversive L.A. art-punks critique societal norms as they revel in their own absurdity (and saxophone).

How Am I Not Myself?

The most liberal use of saxophone you’re likely to hear on a rock record in 2019 does not involve Bruce Springsteen, nor any titans of third-wave ska (yes, Reel Big Fish put out an album recently). It’s the new album by French Vanilla, a cheerfully subversive art-punk group nurtured in Los Angeles’s queer punk scene. Throughout How Am I Not Myself?, Daniel Trautfield’s saxophone squawks, groans, and erupts into melodies far more playful than you might expect from a band that cites Leonard Cohen and novelist Dodie Bellamy among its lyrical influences. These sax parts share virtually no DNA with the smooth sax solo, that much-mocked ’80s tradition recently rehabilitated by the likes of Carly Rae Jepsen and the 1975. Like much of French Vanilla’s music, they are jittery and anxious and a little bit outrageous—critiquing cultural norms and reveling in their own absurdity all at once.
French Vanilla are a relatively new band: They released their self-titled first album in 2017, after finding a local audience playing queer punk parties and then DIY performance spaces in L.A. But their music taps into a deeper lineage, one that includes the nervous energy and eccentric vocal stylings of the B-52’s and the jagged no-wave dissonance of early ’80s acts like Bush Tetras. (You could draw a fuzzy line from the latter band’s underground hit, “Too Many Creeps,” and French Vanilla’s own unease with misogynistic institutions.) On “Suddenly,” a devilishly funky mid-album highlight, an octave-leaping sax solo conveys the simultaneous intoxication and anxiety of modern nightlife. “All the Time” evokes the robotic edge of Devo as vocalist Sally Spitz sings about the terror and glee of an intense crush: “The way you look at me, so deep into my eyes/You’re not like other guys,” she blurts, giddy with panic.
Spitz, French Vanilla’s lead vocalist, studied performance art at UCLA, where she was influenced by avant-garde giants like Diamanda Galás and Nina Hagen. She is a compellingly weird and charismatic singer; on this album, she whoops (“Real or Not”), talk-sings (“Move Along, Move Ahead”), shrieks cartoonishly (“Joan of Marc by Marc”), and enunciates words with the odd pursed-lips affect commonly employed by Mark Mothersbaugh. The rhythms are fast and nervy; the guitars eschew conventional chord progressions because guitarist Ali Day never learned them.
Like Priests, the D.C. punk band with whom French Vanilla have played, much of the songwriting addresses the overlap between the personal and political, with a probing eye towards sexist power structures. “Lost Power,” one of the record’s more conventionally catchy numbers, finds Spitz reflecting on a sense of identity loss she felt while in a long-term heterosexual relationship. “Bromosapien” skewers a sexist and condescending coworker as Spitz hopefully wonders, “Will there be a day when guys like you don't exist?” It’s an irreverent take on a maddening situation; despite the band’s academic interests, they are not above shouting “I think I hate you!” four times in a row.
How Am I Not Myself? is a brief and self-contained album. What it lacks in stylistic diversity it makes up with sustained and unrelenting energy, even on the least distinctive songs, like the relatively flat “Protective.” The saxophone, of course, is present most of the time—including on the final track, “Sensitive (Not Too Sensitive),” where it trades phrases with Spitz’s righteous exhortations against the indignities of wage labor. That insistent sax is the raucous, unwavering id of a band that takes its anti-oppressive, anticapitalist spirit—but never itself—seriously.


The short EP from the Philly rapper might not be essential but it reveals more of the fascinating dark side of her artistry.

in case i die first

Chynna is honing her craft, balancing her braggadocio and combative jabs on equally violent and hollow sounds. On her fourth EP, in case i die first, the 25-year-old Philly rapper is letting the world in on a late-night car-ride therapy session, full of convoluted, introspective thoughts where Chynna is both the shrink and patient. Each song juggles self-doubt caused by the ex-lovers and friends that fuel her distress and the reassurance that emerge once she finally decides to kill her bad behaviors before they kill her. Having openly battled depression and opioid addiction, Chynna’s latest project centers defining moments of sanity and rejecting everyone’s projections to aid her swaggering rebirth.
Chynna is not just a model cosplaying as a rapper, but a Philly native birthed by same the grit and grime as Ruff Ryders’ Eve and Murder Inc.’s Charli Baltimore, who use their aggressive rhymes to cement their validity in the male-dominated realm of rap. Like Eve and Charli, Chynna’s jarring rhymes are not confounded by her femininity or androgynous tone, but rather the Ford Models signee doesn’t hesitate to let you know she is an attractive woman that is aware of, but not reliant on, the power of her pussy. Women rappers turn their sexuality into a measure of power, but similar to Rico Nasty’s gut-wrenching lyrics, Chynna also dismisses the notion that her beauty supersedes her talent. On “gin,” Chynna masterfully connects “mustang” and “nuts hang,” challenging male counterparts and ensuring those words will be used in phonics exercises for years to come.
In working towards demolishing her self-doubt, Chynna questions the authenticity of her platonic friendships as she recognizes how easy it is to fall back into depression. “Kamikaze soldier/[who] suffers from dark kinks” she raps on “gin,” displaying her proximity to toxic friends and environments. Her smooth delivery sits evenly amid heavy bass production that almost turns her voice into a percussion instrument.
Introspection is the main theme here; it feels like you’re inside her head trying to follow along with her train of thought. Her flow is similarly herky-jerky: The melody of “asmr” almost imitates it. Although Chynna is transparent in her self-analysis—relatable to any woman contemplating dismissing a boy-toy versus keeping him around for convenience—it’s still hard to connect to this brief project. The illusory raps, the ghostly production, the seeming randomness of its moments, all create a mood that’s unique but difficult to translate. And despite the slight deviations in tempo, all four songs on in case i die first run the risk of sounding like one long song. But we see more of who Chynna is as an artist, warts and all, which is never a bad thing.


The New York rapper attempts to be all things to all people, but in his efforts to split the difference between bar god and pop rapper, he ends up proving he is neither.

Bishop Nehru: Nehruvia: My Disregarded Thoughts

Nehruvia: My Disregarded Thoughts

For a while, it seemed like Bishop Nehru was living the dream of every aspiring teenage rapper to ever sleep under an Illmatic poster. Before he’d turned 20, he’d: scored beats from super-looper 9th Wonder; signed with Mass Appeal records; and finished an entire tape with drunken uncle rhymer MF DOOM. Nas, somewhat ridiculously, dubbed the young, earnest rapper “the future of music.” But Nehru has spent the years since 2014’s NehruvianDOOM trying to both live up to these co-signs and play them down. He relishes the notoriety that comes with his lyrical miracle title and getting asked about being endorsed by hip-hop royalty, but he dreads the prospect of being pigeonholed as dated and dusty. His new album, Nehruvia: My Disregarded Thoughts, is an attempt to be all things to all people: conversative wordsmith, progressive curator, storyteller, anthem-maker, introspective entertainer. In his efforts to split the difference between bar god and pop rapper, he ends up proving he is neither.
The album is mostly produced by Nehru with a few assists, including DJ Premier and DOOM. It woefully samples diet trap, jazz rap, and boom bap. Just as Elevators: Act I & II was haplessly divided into two parts, the Kaytranada-produced “Ascension” and the DOOM-produced “Free Falling,” My Disregarded Thoughts follows a similar model. “The Abyss” is supposed to represent the darker recesses of his mind; “The Escape,” his relentless optimism. The binary doesn’t provide any narrative focus, or explore a duality, the way Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded separated Nicki’s rap and pop instincts. Nehru is chasing a balance between his classicist nature and his Grammy ambitions—“still lyrical, still hip-hop, but with a way to make everyone relate to it on a grand level,” he told Clash. His gestures toward relatability aren’t subtle: He does some singing, flexes over some Maaly Raw beats, and even utters the words “too litty” through Auto-Tune. Every one of his attempts to show range demonstrate how limited he is.
The bits of SoundCloud rap parody aren’t fooling anyone. “All of My Years” sounds like the TV movie version of a Chance the Rapper song. In all his straining efforts to show off the skill that landed him a Madvillian apprenticeship, he sounds lightyears away from city dwellers like MIKE and Medhane, meditative rhymers who do far more with less. Even the Premier-produced “Too Lost,” which should be right up his alley, sounds like a chore. He raps some as the voices inside his own head, which can be an effective device, but where a song like Kendrick Lamar’s “u” is tension-filled and gripping, Nehru’s struggle to personify his mounting anxiety doesn’t make any discernible impact.
Too many of these thoughts truly warrant disregarding. On the intro, “Colder,” he laments going over the heads of the closed-minded masses before rapping this galaxy brain couplet: “They want me mad, ’cause cops drop us within a week/But it’s nothin’ new, it’s just now you can send a tweet.” Getting worked up over police violence is pointless, because racism is old hat, he asserts. Wake up sheeple! His songs about being alone and lost are circuitous, constantly reiterating how alone and lost he is without ever probing what he’s feeling or why. His would-be boy-king rants about ruling the rap world are like celebrating winning a race you’ve already been lapped in (on “Emperor”: “I know that I got the recipe/I mixed the grinding with destiny”). So much of this album is vacant and inexpressive. “My main muse and fuse is just life in general,” he declares on “Never Slow,” sounding like the corniest rapping anti-drug PSA. “Little Suzy (Be Okay),” his story of a homeless girl who becomes a drug addict, is all clunky exposition, no activity. There is more talk of thinking than actual thinking taking place.
Nehru is often considered a technical rapper, but his bars are amateurish, cluttered, and inexact. His rapping can be so syntactically bizarre it sounds like it was written by a neural net. And this isn’t zany obfuscation like his metal-faced mentor; it’s a lack of precision. The raps aren’t hard to follow, per se, they’re just off. He forces phrases to fit his schemes instead of letting them unravel naturally. His flows are stilted, pushing to prove expertise he doesn’t have. And the bars that aren’t completely flavorless (“Been broke, my pockets had mad hope/Couldn’t buy a laugh like bad jokes/And they wait for falls like bad ropes”) are mind-numbingly lame.
When given some thought, Bishop Nehru’s bifurcation of rap and pop feels woefully out of touch. Not just because the worlds of rap and pop seem more and more indistinguishable every day, but because even the most hardcore, bar-heavy posturing can reach a really wide audience—DaBaby owned 2019. Nehru doesn’t need to change tactics to become the rapper he seems confident he can be, he simply needs to be a more lucid writer and a more arresting performer. On Nehruvia: My Disregarded Thoughts, he’s convinced himself that the key to unlocking his rap career is broadening his horizons. But Bishop Nehru doesn’t need to branch out; he needs to go back to basics.


The Bradford boys make a bid for commercial glory on their fourth album, but they’re better off staying unhinged than appealing to the mainstream.

Influential

Bad Boy Chiller Crew wants to be known for more than their silliness. Never mind the videos of them slugging Smirnoff from the bottle and retching in an alley, or cackling in the passenger seat as they churn through prank calls. Ignore the allegations that one member went to the hospital with a kidney infection after a fan hurled an ounce of ketamine on stage at a show. There they are showing up to the BRIT Awards in a horse and carriage, sharing their tips to avoid a hangover (“Get straight back on it”) and vowing to chop one of the boy’s mullets if their album tops the charts. The trio from Northern England makes frenetic tracks that slam through your skull; the songs explode like a shaken Coke bottle. In the Bad Boy Chiller Crew cinematic universe, every bender leaks into the next—“From the nightclub to the kitchen!” as the boys howl in one of their better new tracks. They make lifelong friends in urinals. They get high, get into hijinks, and get home just in time to hit up an endless blur of clubs. It’s because, not in spite of, this central goofiness that the Bradford boys have found such a broad audience. “People automatically wanna be our friends because we make the world look like a fucking joke,” one of the boys told British GQ; it’s also a large part of why so many listen.
Influential, the group’s latest release, is a bloated bridge between their frenzied bangers and a bid for the mainstream. “We’re going for commercial,” the boys have said in interviews, and with every release, they’ve gotten closer to that goal. Even though they strive to show off their range, the project feels more disparate and distracted than expansive. They wobble between blown-out bangers and a pitched-down Cher interpolation (“Believe”), treacly odes to girls they met at a club on a Tuesday (“Found True Love [You’re the Best Thing]”), wailing wonders about where their soul has gone. They demand to know if love is “true.” “Thought we could have set in stone,” they rap at one point. “Now you’re nothing but a stepping stone.” It’s clever-enough wordplay, but too flimsy to elicit any feeling, and too earnest to excuse as a bit.
Of course, you don’t turn to the Bad Boy Chiller Crew to learn about love. The boys work best when they bludgeon a sample: They take a shimmery vocal and pound any melodrama out of it, thwacking bass drops, grunts, sirens, and bleats over lilting lines about love and fame. Influential lingers way too long on other voices: “Why Did You Play Me” spends 45 seconds with Kyla, of “One Dance” fame, before the Bad Boy Chiller Crew barrels in. “Say Goodbye” begins with a wispy female vocalist pledging eternal devotion for nearly a minute, until the B.B.C.C. steamrolls through, chanting about drinks on tap. They edge dangerously close to sounding like Cascada.
Compared to the fricative pulses of a song like “Bounce to This One,” or the coked-out wallop of “Sliding,” the love songs here are chintzy sugar rushes. The less sense they make, the better they sound. Why are they frantically rapping about how badly they want to go into space? What’s with the squiggle of bagpipes in “Jurgen Kropper,” one of two throbbing tracks named after football players? They remix a 2007 rave anthem from DJ Q, a stalwart of the sped-up cousin of UK garage known as bassline, into a song that sounds like the “Cha Cha Slide” on poppers. Bad Boy Chiller Crew dazzles and delights in absurdity.
That’s not to say they can’t also make you feel something. “Memory” is the most successful song here at smuggling in an actual emotion, likely because the boys sing it themselves. “I want to be there with you, but I can’t trust nobody,” they murmur, before the beat hiccups and accelerates. No matter how hard they try to make themselves palatable to the masses, they’re still most comfortable in chaos.


Sunday School II improves on its first installment in almost every aspect: The songs are stronger, the Chicago rapper's performance more assured, and the "soul trap" production-- with assistance from producer Michael Kolar-- is deeper and denser.

Tree: Sunday School II: When Church Lets Out

Sunday School II: When Church Lets Out

Chicago hip-hop’s always had something of a split personality, and the recent global attention on the scene has only served to heighten the contrast between Chief Keef and the giddily sociopathic drill scene on one end of the spectrum, and on the other, Chance the Rapper and a new generation of artists looking to reinvigorate a conscious rap scene that was last at its peak back when Kanye was still a backpacker. And almost exactly halfway between the two ends of the spectrum sits an MC named Tremaine “Tree” Johnson.
Last year Tree released a mixtape called Sunday School. It was a rough record released in an unmastered, unpolished state, but it managed to establish him as something like the David Banner of the Midwest: a rapper/producer with a carefully considered aesthetic that’s organic and insightful, but who doesn’t consider himself above writing songs aimed at the street, the club, or the bedroom. Sunday School II improves on its predecessor in almost every aspect. The songs are stronger, his performance is more assured, and the production-- with assistance from Chicago hip-hop recording kingpin Michael Kolar-- is deeper and denser. He doesn’t feel like an artist sitting between two scenes, skimming off ideas, but one strong enough to stack them atop one another and climb on top.
Tree calls his artistic philosophy “soul trap,” and it’s as honest a name as it is catchy. On a basic musical level, it accurately describes Tree’s preferred blend of soul music elements-- warm, churchy organ lines and vocal samples pitched up, Kanye-as-chipmunk style-- with beats built around the kind of booming 808 kicks and snappy, precisely machined hi-hats that have been a feature of Southern rap mixtapes for years, and which have recently taken hold in the Midwest.
Taking a deeper view, “soul trap” can also describe the emotional and intellectual heart of Tree’s music. A native of the city’s notorious (and now demolished) Cabrini-Green projects, his roots are deep in the street-- in his lyrics Chicago gangs like the Black P. Stone Nation are features of the neighborhood just the same way brick high rises are, and he makes multiple references to a brief stint selling crack at age 13. He sees the nihilism that pervades the gangster lifestyle he opted out of, and wants to stay as far away from it as possible. In Tree’s capable hands these two elements, which on the surface seem so contradictory, combine into a raw but subtly layered portrait of life in black Chicago, one that’s miles away from Keef’s in tone but just as bracing and honest.
Tree delivers this portrait with a ragged melodic howl that recalls Chicago bluesmen as frequently as it does other rappers. Despite the sometimes weighty nature of the material he tackles lyrically, he’s a pop artist at heart (on “King” he gives the chipmunk-soul treatment to a snippet of Elvis’ “Can’t Help Falling in Love With You”), which helps set him apart from many MCs who get tagged as “conscious” and makes Sunday School II a pleasurable repeat listen.
And even when he’s being conscious he’s not a drag about it. On “So Bad” he describes a dream woman who’s independent, intelligent, and self-actualized, but also stacks paper, flashes diamonds, and projects the kind of intensely confident not-giving-a-fuck that’s more common to rappers than the women they write about. The song describes a combination of virtues that also fit Tree’s music: flashy enough to grab your attention and smart enough to know what to do with it, brainy but sensual, and easy to get hooked on.


Hans-Peter Lindstrøm's second solo album moves away from his taut and sparse early work in favor of something more bombastic but strangely cloistered.

Six Cups of Rebel

Lindstrøm's second proper solo album, Six Cups of Rebel, does away with both the taut sexiness of his early work and the warm yacht breezes of Where You Go I Go Too in favor of something more bombastic but strangely cloistered. The pressure here builds and builds, but rather than taking flight, tracks like "De Javu" struggle with a misdirected explosion of percussion that flattens out into a farty bass riff smothered in layers of percussion. It's bloated, lifeless, and weighed down with its own multi-tracked mayhem, a thick, wet coat of gloss dragging propulsion down to a crawl more than anything else.
Excess is nothing new for Lindstrøm, but on Six Cups of Rebel he sounds lost. Synths layer endlessly and drums bang and clank-- this is some Emerson, Lake & Palmer shit-- but whatever power they might possess is lost as the clutter breeds a numbing sense of saturation. The breathing room that was essential to Lindstrøm's original charm, from the rattling drums of "Arp She Said" to the exhilarating fly-bys of "Where You Go I Go Too", is nowhere to be found, replaced by a suffocating blanket of midtempo muck. For an artist whose signature track's called "I Feel Space", it's disheartening to hear so little of it here.
His last album-length effort, 2010's Real Life is No Cool, a collaboratioin with singer Christabelle, showed that his luxurious disco could harbor vocals just fine (a theme that stretches all the way back to 2003's fantastic "Music in My Mind"). But here Lindstrøm's own weak, garbled vocals are caught up in the soupy current of overdubs, strangled of momentum or melodic cohesion. Even worse, on "Magik", they're pitched-down into ugly, unnatural tones, one of those "what could he have possibly been thinking" moments made only worse by the creepy backing chorus that emerges halfway through. It's cringe-inducing, another misstep for a record that's already treading unsure ground.
Rebel has a few nice moments. "Quiet Place to Live", which spends its first three minutes hobbling on an awkwardly uneven vocal hook complete with stabbing bursts of electric guitar, suddenly melts into a stunning keyboard breakdown halfway through. It's gorgeous in that silvery Lindstrøm way but completely aimless, drenching the track in generic prettiness that wears after a few bars: The vocals continue to clash and everything sounds strangely out of tune, as if he just dropped the organ carelessly on top of an entirely finished track. That brief glimmer of hope dissolves, defining the rest of the album as distinctly unmemorable, little drum fills and other pertinent details like specks of glitter on a gaudy neon canvas only adding to the fatigue. "Call Me Anytime" takes up a whole nine minutes, and I'll be damned if any of it's going to stick with me, as it cycles restlessly through a number of phases like it's desperately searching for some kind of magic glue to hold it all together.
The album finally picks up with 10-minute closer "Hina", an elongated horizon of shimmering keyboards and vocoders, anxiously pumping prog rock like the breakdown of Pink Floyd's "Dogs" sculpted and smoothed-over into a disco edit. Shrouded in filters, Lindstrøm's vocals fit better here, and the track's relative tastefulness ends the album on a strange but refreshing note of restraint. Complacency is to be avoided, but the kind of step forward Lindstrøm tries here is a drunken, misguided one. The noxious muck on evidence here obscures most of what made his past music so singular.


On The Hamilton Mixtape, songs from the iconic musical have been reinterpreted by Nas, Jill Scott, Alicia Keys, Chance the Rapper, and others, for some reason.

The Hamilton Mixtape

The Hamilton original cast recording recently passed half-a-billion streams on Spotify.  That’s billion, with a “B”: Try to think of more influential, beloved, and ubiquitous cast recordings in history—you will probably end up counting on two hands, maybe one. The music of Hamilton now sits directly in the center of American pop culture, and it has smuggled rapping—the unadulterated, information-dense kind that you can hear tripping from the tongues of the best MCs—into the ears of Dick Cheney and Mike Pence with it, for God’s sake.
So why does Hamilton Mixtape exist? Hamilton doesn’t need any help crossing over, into hip-hop or anywhere else. In its best-case scenario, The Hamilton Mixtape is an afterthought, an asterisk or a curio for Hamilton obsessives. On it, a wide-ranging group of rappers and R&B singers reinterpret, or in many cases simply cover, the tracks from the soundtrack, which has been lightly reworked and retooled by a range of producers, with guidance from Questlove and assistance from J. Period, !llmind, and more. Ja Rule and Ashanti reunite to take on the Eliza Schuyler/Alexander romance tune “Helpless.” Regina Spektor and Ben Folds perform "Dear Theodosia.” Sia is here. Wiz Khalifa is here. Oh, and Jimmy Fallon, too: he performs “You’ll Be Back,” the jaunty break-up song from King George addressed to the unruly colonies. Fallon starts with a painful joke about how he was classically trained, “and by that I mean I was trained by vocal coach Ed Classically.” Then he takes a breath and starts singing. Trust me: You do not want to be in the room where this happens.
The guest list throughout is an assortment of marquee names and WTFs. Black Thought sounds tremendous and forceful on the rework of “My Shot,” but he’s followed by a plodding Joell Ortiz and a humorless Busta Rhymes, who stiffens back into barking-youth-basketball-coach mode once away from the relaxing influence of his fellow Native Tongues members. There’s a lot of huffing and puffing, a lot of faux-motivational bluster, not a lot of good writing. Lin-Manuel Miranda, who doesn’t show up on the song, is missed.
Miranda does show up on one of the mixtape’s only original songs, called “Wrote My Way Out.” He’s joined by Nas, who sounds disengaged, cartoonish, and distant. Miranda, meanwhile, burns through the song’s tissue-thin noble-struggle atmosphere with a verse hot with details. “I caught my first beating from the other kids when I was caught reading/Oh you think you smart? Start bleeding,” he yelps desperately. Yes, his verse also contains the seven-ton-anvil clang of “My mind is where the wild things are/Maurice Sendak.” But he’s a performer, and his ability to convey rising desperation in verse is maybe his purest and clearest link to hip-hop.
The Hamilton Mixtape shares one thing in common with its parent album: It is very, very long. But since it isn’t sequenced as a linear narrative, treating the show like a sort of greatest hits, you lose all sense of the knuckle-whitening tension that propels the original forward. Alicia Keys leeches the marital tenderness out of “That Would Be Enough,” turning an urgent and warm plea from a wife to a husband on a frightening precipice into something for torch-lighting ceremonies, as impersonal and pretty as a hotel lobby chandelier. By the time you get to Chance the Rapper, crooning the show’s devastating “Dear Theodosia (reprise),” you realize that The Hamilton Mixtape has managed to drain away the edge and danger from a Broadway show, a curious inversion and just more proof that you can’t Xerox Miranda’s inimitable work.


On their second album, the metalcore band widens the limits of its genre, incorporating nu-metal, shoegaze, and even early-’00s emo.

Loathe: I Let It In and It Took Everything

I Let It In and It Took Everything

On their second album I Let It In and It Took Everything, the Liverpudlian band Loathe probe the connection between heavy music and ambient, intertwining prog-metal breakdowns with sweeping synthesizers and shoegaze textures. In the same way Deafheaven’s Sunbather served as an effective entry point to black metal for the uninitiated, this album expands the borders of what a metalcore band can sound like, and they do it while writing evocative choruses and fierce breakdowns in equal measure.
Loathe have greatly evolved from the aspirational yet occasionally timid metalcore band they were on their 2017 debut The Cold Sun. Now, nothing is off-limits, from the sample of a Nina Simone interview on the ambient interlude “451 Days” to the catchy nu-metal sludge of “Screaming.” When “New Faces In the Dark” makes an abrupt left turn from a Smiths-style guitar lick to feedback spirals and djent-y riffs, the contrast hits like a fist to the jaw. On “A Sad Cartoon,” they even channel early-’00s emo, juggling clean-toned guitars and dueling vocals. Deftones diehards will immediately spot the influence of Chino Moreno’s lovesick vocals on lead vocalist Kadeem France—Moreno counts himself a fan of the band—while guitarists Erik Bickerstaffe and Connor Sweeney tap into both the sweeping magnificence of Slowdive and the visceral pulse of more extreme groups like Meshuggah.
They balance all of these competing influences with meticulous precision; on “Broken Vision Rhythm,” drummer Sean Radcliffe stuffs a miniature history of prog drumming into a song that doesn’t even crack three minutes. It’s immediately followed by the gauzy epic “Two-Way Mirror,” Loathe’s closest thing to a potential crossover hit. Bickerstaffe is hardly the first metal musician to use (or abuse) the lower tones of a baritone guitar, but he’s able to conjure titanic slabs of distortion that never sound overwrought.
The members of Loathe have bonafides in the UK underground metal scene, having come up in various Liverpool bands before they started playing together in 2014. But the songwriting throughout I Let It In hints at a band more focused on bringing new fans into the fold than appeasing old ones. During a recent interview discussing “Red Room” and “Gored”—two of the more aggressive tracks here, which see France dig deep into his larynx for guttural, inhuman tones—the frontman touched on the all-encompassing ambition of their new record. “If it comes naturally to us, we want to do it,” he said.
In the past, France has referred to Loathe as a collective—a single unit defined by their shared passion, and not their instruments. The songs bear out this ideology; France might handle most of the screaming and singing in Loathe, but he and Bickerstaffe trade off clean vocals for certain songs. The two have similar enough timbres that they can blend effortlessly. Harmonizing at the apex of “Two-Way Mirror,” they put a human stamp on the surrounding walls of distortion, grounding themselves to a shared emotional bond that transcends genre.


The music of songwriter Brian Esser is at once hilarious and horrifying. His debut synth-pop album as Cabo Boing is an unrelenting collection of high-energy jokes.

Blob on a Grid

Brian Esser—the songwriter behind the synth-pop act Cabo Boing—seems fascinated with clowns. Aside from the announcement of Blob on a Grid, his debut full-length under the moniker after years playing in the synth-based bands Yip-Yip and Moon Jelly, his Tumblr page is mostly dedicated to the constantly grinning jesters. They beckon menacingly, floating in bodies of water; they show off arcade cabinets to small children; they play the saxophone; or they sit—in ceramic bust form—next to half-consumed jugs of milk. The archive as a whole is surreal, whimsical, and unsettling—a shrine that imagines the clowns as mythical figures from a Jodorowskyan nightmare.
It’s upsetting to say the least. But it’s also a strangely fitting accompaniment for the absurdist electronic music he’s made over the last couple of years as Cabo Boing—and especially the joy-buzzer beats that make up Blob on a Grid. He stuffs 12 tracks in just under 20 minutes, demonstrating a knack for slapstick comedy, garish colors, and even a few funny voices. These hallmarks of the art of clowning have turned the makeup-coated fools into figures of both wordless joy and unspeakable terror in the collective unconscious.
The pranks start from the opening moments of the tape’s first track “Asleep in the Saddle,” which layers several interlocking synth lines in a woozy pattern as sickening as a carousel on a cruise ship. Esser pitch-shifts a human voice into a goofy monstrosity and sings self-assured platitudes like “progress comes from within” and “subdue yourself and return to what is right.” The emotional effect is something like a group of oompa loompas covering OMD or the Residents leading a self-help seminar, which is to say that it’s both hilarious and horrifying.
That track, as well as a few of the album’s other longer tracks—like the neon vomit of the title track and “Nitwit of Gizmo”—show Esser’s predilection for writing pop songs in a long tradition of synth-toting goofballs. Like Mark Mothersbaugh’s electro-contortions or Animal Collective’s Sung Tongs-era surrealism or any of his many labelmates on the New York cassette imprint Haord, he has a keen ability to make music that’s both parasitically catchy and wholly unfamiliar.
But Esser isn’t content to just write singles, however ridiculous they may be. A large portion of the album’s tracklist is dedicated to stuff like the 45-second long “Elevator Pitch.” Its wheedling synth line wheels around erratically, like a unicycle on freshly buffed linoleum, before careening into the next song. Just as you start nodding your head to “Blob on a Grid,” Esser emerges with with the saccharine vocal tics and splattering percussion of “What Am I Bid”—a pie in the face as a punctuation mark.
Down to its title—and even the onomatopoetic prank of Esser’s moniker itself, which sounds something like an unfurling spring when you say it out loud—Blob on a Grid is an unrelenting collection of high-energy jokes. The way the intentionally gaudy synth lines fold into each other like a junkyard quiltwork can almost feel exhausting. But just when a song such as “Nitwit of Gizmo” begins to feel like a carnival ride gone on too long, Esser wisely cuts to another goofy composition. It’s proof in action that the difference between a good and a bad joke is… timing.


Central Belters is a three-disc (or six-LP) compendium celebrating 20 years of Mogwai.

Central Belters

In the vinyl-revival era, the box set exists for primarily completists and Record Store Day hoarders—by repackaging entire discographies in 180-gram reissues, they forsake curation for comprehensiveness. But in their initial '80s iteration as CD-stacked behemoths, box sets were actually designed for the casual fan. The earliest paragons of the format—Bob Dylan's Biograph, David Bowie's Sound+Vision—presented expertly compiled overviews of a veteran artist, weaving in hit singles, choice album tracks, rarities and live cuts to form a chronological portrait of their evolution. Sure, they could be prohibitively expensive, but in the days before you could access everything through a YouTube deep dive, box sets made life easy. When faced with the prospect of schooling yourself on an artist 20 albums deep into their career, a three-disc round-up of the best stuff offered maximum return for the least hassle.
So in that sense, there's something quaintly anachronistic about Central Belters, a three-disc (or six-LP) compendium celebrating 20 years of Mogwai. The Scottish art-rockers are ideal subjects for a box-set distillation—they've released eight proper albums, not to mention a handful of soundtracks and stand-alone EPs. They're the sort of reliable band—both in terms of line-up stability and rate of output—that's no doubt lost some old-school fans along the way, and picked up some new ones (2014's Rave Tapes was their first album to crack the UK top 10), so both camps could benefit from a refresher on what they've missed.
While Mogwai's means have changed over the years, the mood of their records has remained consistent. Pretty much every single Mogwai track resides somewhere on the spectrum between rainy-day melancholy and blood-boiling rage; the only laugh to be had in their discography is in the title of 2003's Happy Songs for Happy People. But they've been so good at recreating that despairing atmosphere on an album-by-album basis, that it's easy to overlook how much they've actually deviated from their formative script. Mogwai are an instrumental band, except when they're not; they're noise-loving sonic sadists, except when they're being tenderly delicate; they're slowcore saddos, except when they're making motorik synth-pop. They're a band you think you know, until you realize you don't recognize them anymore.
Mogwai have evolved in baby steps—each of their records has yielded a track or two that opens up new avenues for the band, without radically altering their essence. But the quasi-chronological, best-of compilation that comprises Central Belters*'* first two discs has the effect of making that transformation seem much more pronounced and dramatic. The set charts a mostly linear progression, from the stormy psychedelic surges of 1996 single "Summer" to last year's neon-tinted dream-pop anthem "Teenage Exorcists" (featuring Stuart Braithwaite's most unabashedly melodic vocal performance to date), but emphasizes the aesthetic outliers in their canon. On any given Mogwai record, the vocal tracks make up maybe 10 per cent of the tracklist; here, it's more like a third, lending this set a more vibrant energy than their albums proper.
Greatest-hits compilations in general are something of an endangered species, given that streaming-service playlists can now generate them for you, but there's still something to be said for getting a band's own take on what they deem essential. (To wit, the "Intro to Mogwai" mega-mix on Apple Music features 25 songs; only 12 of them are featured among Central Belters' 34 tracks.) For one, there's a conspicuous lack of tracks from 1997's Young Team, the album that first brought the Glasgow group international attention and solidified their noise-rock bonafides. Yes, Young Team is ably represented by its seismic 16-minute closer "Mogwai Fear Satan", but there's seemingly no room for its equally explosive counterpart "Like Herod", a song that pushed the well-worn indie-rock quiet/LOUD template to atomic extremes. (Perhaps Mogwai have come to see "Like Herod" as their "Creep"—an early, simply structured, attention-seizing track to which they no longer feel a connection.)
A career survey of Mogwai feels incomplete without "Herod", but, otherwise, Central Belters' first disc maps out the band's early peaks: the sad-eyed space rock of "New Paths to Helicon Pt. 1", the creeping, tension-tweaking build of "Christmas Steps", the mountain-scaling triumphalism of "2 Rights Make 1 Wrong", and the chrome-gilded grandeur of "Hunted By a Freak", which marked the breakthrough moment where Mogwai's epic canvases began to make room for a more finely tuned pop sensibility.
The second disc covers the era from 2006's Mr. Beast to last fall's Music Industry 3. Fitness Industry 1 EP, over which the band's guitar-powered onslaughts gradually gave way to synth-driven experimentalism. Even with the benefit of a cherry-picked tracklist, Central Belters still can't mask the inertia that set in for Mogwai in the late 2000s, with tracks like Mr. Beast*'s "Friend of the Night" and The Hawk Is Howling'*s "I'm Jim Morrison I'm Dead" following a well-trodden path from desolate piano meditation to cymbal-crashing climax. However, the robo-Pavement groove of Hawk highlight "The Sun Smells Too Loud" points the way to the electro excursions of 2011's Hardcore Will Never Die But You Wil**l and last year's Rave Tapes, wherein Mogwai toyed with cruise-controlled Krautrock ("Mexican Grand Prix", "How to Be a Werewolf") and sci-fi soundtrack ambience ("Remurdered"), and seemed to genuinely loosen up after so many years of painstaking post-rock crescendo-climbing. And with the aforementioned "Teenage Exorcists", Mogwai proved themselves capable of writing a proper pop song, even if it took them nearly two decades to figure it out.
Central Belters' third disc is given over to B-sides, EP deep cuts and outtakes, but compared to the carefully curated, crafty sequencing of the first two discs, it feels randomly cobbled together. And though it zig-zags between eras—encompassing everything from the elegiac Come On Die Young era castaway "Hugh Dallas" to the band's ragged 2008 collaboration with Roky Erickson, "Devil Rides" to a sampling of their Zidane and Les Revenants soundtracks—the overall tone is more dour and mournful. All but one of these tracks have been officially released (the exception being the loungey, laid-back instrumental "D to E"), so it's hardly some unearthed treasure trove that warrants a separate presentation. Integrating these tracks into the chronological greatest-hits sequence would've made for a more satisfying overview.
But then that would've meant dropping the disc three finale—the 2001 single "My Father My King"—halfway through the collection, and it's the sort of song that's nigh impossible to follow. A perennial Mogwai show closer, "My Father My King" is the band's wordless cover of the traditional Jewish prayer "Avinu Malkeinu", and it's biblical in every sense of the word, using the hymn's dual circular melodies to form a cyclonic 20-minute scorcher. It's the Mogwai song to end all Mogwai songs—and, really, the band never attempted anything as audacious, or brutally savage, from that point on. Its late-game appearance here reinforces Central Belters' raison d'etre: to trace the throughline between Mogwai's old and new testaments for lapsed fans and new converts alike.


After the comparatively bleak experimental club sounds of 2018’s Power, the Berlin-based Texan producer embraces the warmth and intimacy of slow-paced R&B, sounding newly at ease.

Water

Sometimes, when a person first starts living in their true identity, a modest weight begins to lift off their shoulders. For a few years afterward, they might still experience an ineffable but persistent mental pressure. Over time, though, that burden often fades, leaving behind a more complete, balanced person, one newly capable of experiencing all-encompassing joy. This transition from hiding one’s true self to fully showing it and then, after years of tumult, being—and loving—that self is what distinguishes Water, the Berlin-via-Houston producer J’Kerian Morgan’s lush, immersive sophomore album as Lotic, from her 2018 LP Power. On that album, she footed herself in unfailingly bleak tones on battering, largely instrumental songs about asserting her identity against the myriad forces attempting to quash it. For Water, she shifts to a fluid, gossamer sound and puts her unhurried falsetto at center stage. She sings about emotions that might seem ordinary to some but feel extraordinary to her—lust, longing, romantic disconnection—now that she’s finally properly experiencing them. She sounds newly at ease, and her self-assurance is thrilling to witness.
As its title suggests, Water—an album where the intimacy of slow-paced R&B unites with her past in experimental, abstract club music—gushes and flows rather than striking with sharp edges. The high-pitched synth squeals and stuttering undercurrent of centerpiece “Always You” are simultaneously propulsive and intimate—part cool jet stream, part warm rush. Beaming, jittery synths introduce “A Plea,” which grows from its enticingly pared-back initial arrangement into harps and rushing percussion. Both these elements could dominate or overwhelm other songs, but Morgan is careful to aerate her sound design. Her unobtrusive, transfixing touch evokes Vespertine, the microbeat-filled, seminal 2001 album from Björk, who Morgan counts as a collaborator and fan. The delicate flutes of “Come Unto Me” could likewise find a home on Björk’s most recent album, 2017’s Utopia.
“Come Unto Me” was the first song Morgan completed for Water; she has described it as “the moment i knew i was onto something.” It’s arguably the album’s apotheosis: Its flutes and tin-can percussion softly, playfully ricochet off one another, and the velvet sound amplifies Morgan’s breathy, high-pitched singing about entangling herself with another person. “Stroking your nape/Breathing you in/Making sure you'll/Never want to leave me,” she exhales as the music’s intertwined calm and clamor reflect the ins and outs of obsession. She often couples intense romantic and sexual feelings with sounds at once cooling and chaotic. As she reaches her highest register during the chorus of “Emergency,” flailing 16th notes and alternatingly thwacked and muffled percussion ensure that her cries of “Please fuck me!” sound gleeful rather than desperate. “It’s so hard to be apart,” she sighs on “Apart,” and the cricket-like synth chirps, astral arpeggios, and lethargic tempo transform this simple refrain into a deeply vulnerable confession.
“Apart” kicks off Water’s second half, which comprises slower, less pop-oriented experiments. These more intimate tracks find Morgan reckoning with the unwelcome aspects of romance: feeling unseen, loving someone more than they love her. The songs’ minimal palette aptly suits this introspection, facilitating a placating slow burn after the vivid, overflowing lust and passion of the album’s first half. The back half is the water that tames the front’s fire, and together, Morgan’s warm embraces and cooler thoughts attest to her full emotional breadth.
Morgan’s knack for sequencing is especially apparent in closing Water with “Diamond.” “Why do I allow all of this pressure?” she asks herself atop fairy-like harps and synths that sound both grumbling and victorious. Later, in an unusually low, placid tone, she murmurs, “This entanglement has expired/But I hope you know that this I admired,” during a passing moment of tranquility. Then the harps and synths return, and the track’s key question dissolves into a series of oohs and aahs. It sounds triumphant: After a transition from overwhelming feelings to less sanguine ones, Morgan emerges unburdened. In this state, she’s entirely ready to love and be loved. She’s fully herself.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Titled after the studio where the band rehearsed for a movie-soundtracking job, these purely instrumental pieces from 1986 offer another look at the Sonic Youth who had just recorded EVOL.

Spinhead Sessions

Most Sonic Youth fans know that the full band is unlikely to reunite. In recent years, those eager for new encounters with the group’s sound have made do with various members’ side projects and surprise guest appearances. (Kim Gordon and Lee Ranaldo even shared a stage at Dinosaur Jr’s 30th birthday bash.) Archived live shows and vinyl reissues of classic albums have trickled out of the band’s surviving merchandise machine. Though given how well Sonic Youth documented its prime-era productivity—with experimental EPs and imaginative collaborations showing up nearly as often as song-based albums—it’s reasonable to assume that the vaults aren’t stacked with unjustly overlooked material.
The gloomy state of this lowered-expectations game means that Spinhead Sessions prompts some moderate thrills. Titled after the studio where the band rehearsed for a movie-soundtracking job, these purely instrumental pieces from 1986 offer another look at musicians who had just recorded EVOL (and who were about to write Sister). At this point, they were so locked-in that they could prove compelling during practice time.
The music Sonic Youth contributed to 1987’s Made in USA was not released until 1995—that is, near the peak of the group’s major label-clout period (as well as that of the CD boom). That official soundtrack has never been mistaken for anything other than a collection of miniatures, few of which are given a chance to develop past the three-minute mark. Spinhead Sessions outdoes Made in USA merely by letting Sonic Youth be Sonic Youth. Freed from the need to provide concise film-music cues, they push a few of the spare themes created for a side-hustle gig into substantial workouts.
These performances are no less subtle for their matter-of-fact titles. “Ambient Guitar and Dreamy Theme,” the 16-minute opener, stirs nervy, tremolo guitar effects and a simple melodic line into a cauldron of dread in its first half. Eventually the atmosphere calms, thanks to some lightly strummed chords. “Theme With Noise” mixes some seductive slide-guitar playing into its miasma, and “High Mesa” builds from dreamy to cathartic, led by Steve Shelley’s gradually more forceful drumming. Overall, this half hour anticipates the tossed-off mastery of EPs the band would later issue through their SYR imprint.
That opening trio of cuts is the best this particular drawer in the vault has to offer. From there, Sessions tenders four shorter, less ambitious tracks. In terms of running time, this sequence pads the release out beyond EP length—though the material isn’t any more compelling than most stretches on Made in USA. Yet despite its clear status as a barrel-scraping effort, this album isn’t just for the most desperate fans. While it’s unavoidably casual in nature, the bulk of this set provides the pleasure of Sonic Youth during an era of good spirits and high creativity.