The PC Music producer’s first EP in eight years is a loving paean to the earnest euphoria of 2010s EDM.

ELECTRIC EP

Although less of a name brand than his PC Music buddies A. G. Cook and Danny L Harle, Easyfun has played just as significant a role in pushing modern pop to its extremes. The debut EP by the British producer, born Finn Keane, was PC Music’s first ever release, a gaseous and disorienting beat tape that sounded a little like a methed-out take on TNGHT’s permanently in-the-red hip-hop experiments. Since then, his name has continued to pop up in unexpected places—he co-wrote Rita Ora’s “Let You Love Me,” a massive hit everywhere except America—and all the expected ones: He’s worked on many of Charli XCX’s best tracks, including Pop 2 opener “Backseat” and her recent Billboard-charting Barbie cut “Speed Drive.”
As a writer and producer, Keane is more of a traditionalist than Cook or Harle. His songs have become aerodynamic and tightly structured over time, the straight-ahead nature of his music belying his origins as a producer of punishing, footwork-adjacent experimental tracks. His first EP in eight years, ELECTRIC, parlays those pop instincts into a set of songs that’s dynamic, rich, and bright. “Audio,” the EP’s opening track, is perpetual-motion-machine-EDM with a bubbly, infectious refrain: “Audio, all you ever want.”
There’s always been an earnest core to PC Music releases, and the same goes here. Although two of the songs on ELECTRIC, “HARDPAIN” and “carelesscarelesscarelesscarelesscareless,” are built around aggressive jackhammer synths, the rest of it is comprised of fairly traditional songs about love and heartbreak. All that sentimentality is in service of a greater purpose. With the exception of “Know Who You Are”—the EP’s weakest track, and not coincidentally its most contemporary-sounding selection—ELECTRIC feels, in many ways, like a loving tribute to late-aughts and early-2010s EDM, recreating its spine-tingling drops, ecstatic chord progressions, and heart-on-sleeve affect. “Audio” plays like a more sugary take on Aviici’s “Levels.” The upbeat but downcast “Be Your USA” sounds like a more sophisticated version of The Chainsmokers’ first hit, the Daya-featuring EDM-R&B hybrid “Don’t Let Me Down.” Rubberised wub-wub-wub basslines, the type once favored by Skrillex, tear through “HARDPAIN” and “No Body.”
These are works of unadulterated nostalgia, replete with the kind of shellacked, high-saturation cast that entails. If you were partial to that style of music, as I was, listening to ELECTRIC can be a surprisingly emotional experience: The EP’s deep, shuddering bass notes and unashamedly romantic melodies give me the same shiver-inducing thrill I felt when I first heard, say, Calvin Harris’s “How Deep Is Your Love (Chris Lake Remix)” or Grey, Zedd, and Hailee Steinfeld’s “Starving.” Is that embarrassing to admit? Maybe a little—but Keane graciously references this sound without a whiff of irony or cruelty. 2010s-style EDM-pop is coming back into vogue right now—evidenced by Kim Petras’ latest album, as well as the recent chart resurgence of David Guetta—and EASYFUN’s take on big-tent euphoria is more interesting than most.


The Pro Era rapper channels the adolescent moodiness of Machine Gun Kelly and the aspiration navel-gazing of J. Cole.

Anywhere but Here

Anywhere But Here, the latest effort from Pro Era rapper Nyck Caution, opens with a slice of devastating imagery. On “December 24th,” Caution recalls returning to his native Brooklyn after a tour date in Philadelphia to surprise his father for Christmas. When he arrives, the NYPD has blocked the entrance to his childhood home like a crime scene; his father, he learns, lies dead inside. As a narrative hook, it’s the sort of deftly captured, life-altering precipice found on the intros to Ready to Die and Me Against the World, Clinton-era coming-of-age classics that Pro Era has long attempted to replicate. But the gut-punch specificity of “December 24th” makes it an outlier on Anywhere But Here, the album’s hollow interiority representative of the collective’s ongoing identity crisis.
When Joey Bada$$ introduced his Murrow High schoolmates on 2012’s 1999, they arrived with the verve of eager theater kids who’d stumbled upon a shopworn copy of Enta da Stage. As the years passed, Pro Era strove to shake the revivalist tag but struggled to to distinguish themselves otherwise. On 2017’s All-Amerikkkan Bada$$, Joey flitted between street-corner chronicles and we-the-people generational spokesmanship, yet couldn’t quite commit to either; the group clung to a nebulous ideal of New York City as a cultural institution in hopes of ascribing their music with secondhand prestige. 2019’s supergroup outing Escape From New York sought an updated musical context, but by that point the prospect of Kirk Knight and CJ Fly rapping over trap beats landed like a joke without a punchline.
The conundrum is particularly acute for Caution, a 27-year-old white man from suburban Mill Basin (Nyck is an acronym for, sigh, “New York City Kid”) who befriended the late Capital STEEZ as a teenager. His nimble vocal technique evinces his outerborough roots, but his writing is more akin to J. Cole’s aspirational navel-gazing and Machine Gun Kelly’s opaque melodrama. On the one hand, he’s a working-class, middle-American underdog; on the other, he’s convinced of his claim to a hip-hop legacy. This self-styled contradiction imbues Anywhere But Here with adolescent moodiness. “I need a reason to be better than I am/At the moment I been broken, putting pieces of the puzzle back again,” he raps on the title track. Both the sentiment and rhyme pattern are echoed on “Session 47”: “Every tomorrow I’m runnin’ again/Don’t really know who I’m runnin’ against.” Caution’s ambiguous tales teem with nameless demons, detractors, and lonely-at-the-top laments.
That’s not to say his targeted vitriol is any more effective. On the Joey Bada$$ duet “How You Live It,” Caution’s verse opens, “I drop the bag off, early morning I jack off/So when I fuck your chick, afternoon, I last long”; within a few bars, he’s bemoaning the vanity of Instagram models. He gripes about mumble rappers and internet hype on “Dirt on Your Name,” threatening to take his ball and go home if he doesn’t get his overdue accolades. His grievances are informed by a peculiar bootstraps logic—a conviction that only those who’ve put in their 10,000 hours are entitled to rap glory. Of course, if that were actually the case, Nyck Caution would have to find something else to grumble about.
Like his group members, Caution has taken pains to distance himself from Pro Era’s earlier golden-age sound. Production-wise, Anywhere But Here models a frictionless anonymity, with contemplative, Statik Selektah-type beats courtesy of Canis Major, Dreamlife, and Erick the Architect. Caution is a chameleonic collaborator, which works in his favor: the Denzel Curry track “Bad Day” sounds like a Denzel Curry track, with both rappers speed-rhyming over a frenetic bassline. Caution’s third-person autobiography on “Product of My Environment” doesn’t stick the landing, but the song is redeemed by Kota the Friend’s guest verse and producer Freddie Joachim’s lively groove. In the company of his pals, Caution is notably less morose.
But on his own, he’s such a blank canvas that you can more or less project whichever attributes you’d like upon him. Is he a true-school torchbearer? Sort of. A solemn diarist? Sometimes. A token of middle-class angst, adapted for an audience who came to hip-hop through their smartphones? Maybe so. Anywhere But Here exposes the limits of Pro Era’s student-of-the-game reverence, their submersion in technical and aesthetic trappings at the expense of the bigger picture: Jay and B.I.G. weren’t just interesting people because they were rappers, they were great rappers because they were also interesting people.

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The mad scientists of UK psych-rock take an unexpected turn toward pop on their third album.

Marble Skies

Ever since their 2012 debut, Django Django have banked their popularity on their ability to mash as many genres as possible into one dense, heady sound. At their best, they sound like wide-eyed kids toying gleefully with an impressive arsenal of influences, ranging from ’60s psych to ’70s space rock, ’80s pop and ’90s indie, often within the same track. While this stylistic dexterity helped break them into the competitive independent UK scene of the early 2010s, it failed them on their overthought second record, 2015’s Born Under Saturn, where entire songs got lost in a fog of moody synths and splashy hi-hats.
On the band’s third album, Marble Skies, all the typical elements of their music are front-and-center: the noodly vintage synthesizers, the bouncy disco basslines, frontman Vincent Neff’s falsetto. But where much of Saturn got buried under the weight of its own grandeur, here Django turn the dial ever so gingerly back towards the sound that, at one point, made them Mercury Prize-nominated electro-psych-rock children of tomorrow. At the same time, you can hear them striving for the evolutionary jump that eludes so many indie bands on their third records—trying to concoct something fresh and exciting without losing the momentum they’ve built thus far. While Marble Skies doesn’t always quite get there, the planets it frantically orbits while awaiting touchdown are worth the journey.
Take the album’s title track. As straightforwardly enjoyable as anything Django has ever released, “Marble Skies” is a galloping, chugging pop song that positions the LP as not only spacey but fun—a quality that Django sometimes sacrifice in the name of intellectualism. It’s an explosion of vocoders, sing-along choruses, post-punk bass and harpsichord-styled keys straight out of “The Safety Dance.” The mixed-up sound is pure Django, but the commitment to good times feels new.
They continue to take risks with “Surface to Air,” a vocal collaboration with Rebecca Taylor of the British folk duo Slow Club. Her smooth contralto, overlaid with a crackly sheen of reverb, recalls vintage Marianne Faithfull, while strange flourishes in the production, like a snare drum that sounds almost exactly like an asthmatic cough, give the track an out-of-time feel. The most memorable element of the song, though, is its dancehall-influenced melodies and percussion, which fit perfectly with the post-Rihanna tropical pop that has been dominating the charts for the better part of this decade.
Elsewhere, Django Django battle their inclination for wink-nudge nerdism (there’s a slow, heavy track called “Beam Me Up,” which, we get it). And “Further,” which is supposed to be a country-tinged, desert-rock stomper, instead drones away without really anchoring to any one idea that Django haven’t explored many times before. “Tic Tac Toe” makes much better use of the band’s propensity for throwback sounds, taking sunbleached ’60s harmonies and punching them up with layered blasts of prog-rock.
If the best songs on this album propose the idea of Django as pop stars, “In Your Beat” blows it into the stratosphere. The most realized song that the group has released since its debut, it’s a huge-sounding dance-rock groove that would have been an international hit had it been released in 2007. That sounds like a dig, but it’s really a testament to how well Django evoke the now-distant time when the intersection of indie and dance was at its strongest. Here in the present, Marbles Skies suggests that they still have either a great pop record or a mind-bending rock opus in them, if they ever feel like going all the way.


After 30 years, the London duo sounds more refined than ever, though their mix of ethereal jazz, ambient electronics, and mechanized drums has rarely been harder to define.

Signals Into Space

Ultramarine have always seemed to exist slightly outside their time. Their 1989 debut EP, Wyndham Lewis, incorporated recordings of the work of Lewis, the futurist painter and writer who died three decades earlier. And where their first album, 1990’s Folk, bore certain hallmarks of its era—a mix of breakbeats, funk bass, and keening saxophone, embedded within groove-heavy, sampledelic post-punk—subsequent albums ventured further afield. Paul Hammond and Ian Cooper made good on the promise of what Simon Reynolds called “pastoral techno”: an unorthodox fusion of sleek machine funk with woolly jazz, wonky soul, and occasional vocals from Robert Wyatt, an iconoclastic legend of the Canterbury scene.
Signals Into Space, only their second album in two decades, distills elements that have always been present in Ultramarine’s music into a potent new brew. Their sound is more refined than ever, but it’s hard to put your finger on what, exactly, that sound is. Warm, liquid synths and gently pulsing grooves scan as ambient, but vintage drum machines add teeth. The tone of the electric bass, muscular but understated, flashes to Tortoise’s spacious brand of post-rock. The watercolor wash of Ric Elsworth’s vibraphone and the searching saxophone of Iain Ballamy (a member of the group Food, with multiple albums for ECM and Rune Grammofon to his name) nod to ethereal jazz. The most fitting tag might be “Balearic,” given the album’s drowsy drift; there’s even a sample of a 1983 song by Orquesta de las Nubes, Suso Sáiz’s balmily experimental Spanish group.
Ultramarine call Signals Into Space—composed in a small, windowless room in an industrial complex in their native Essex—“an escapist record.” But it’s no mere pastiche of palm trees and Mediterranean tides. Its effects are more complex, even contradictory—a picture of white-sand beaches superimposed on dull cement walls, a dream of summer bundled in heavy down. Atmospheric and skeletal, their music projects outward yet turns inward.
Their oblique way of working tends to smudge edges. Instead of taking the lead, guitar and bass riffs add subtle adornment to softly cycling synth arpeggios and mysterious streaks of tone, bounced from tape to tape so many times that they’ve lost all trace of their original contours. On the title track, you can identify the provenance of some sounds, like the scrape of fingertips against coiled strings or the rustle of muted vibraphone. Others swim just past the limits of perception, like dark shapes beneath the surface of the water.
Still, Ultramarine’s music isn’t murky, exactly. They have learned from dub how to get the most out of empty space, from Talk Talk how to make elaborate studio artifice sound as natural as a single mic hung in the center of a candlelit room. Their sleight-of-hand sometimes makes it difficult to fix your attention on the music’s outlines. These are not melodies that stick with you after the song is finished. Instead, they’re rewarding while you’re in them, and that elusive quality has its own magnetism.
Their only real concession to center stage comes with Anna Domino, a singer who made a string of idiosyncratic synth-pop records for Les Disques du Crépuscule in the 1980s. She sings on four songs here, with mixed results. Her lovely voice is cool and controlled, but the presence of a vocal melody throws the music’s proportions out of whack. The jazzy lilt of “$10 Heel” and “Spark From Flint to Clay” feel out of keeping with the diffuseness of the music. Ballamy’s saxophone is a more natural fit, sometimes sliding like a blurry brushstroke across wet canvas. He’s often content just to add the faintest spot of color to the duo’s electronic textures, like a blush coming to the surface.
On the most successful of Domino’s songs, “Arithmetic,” her voice is harmonized, vocoded, and folded back into the fabric of the music, restoring the balance. The arrangement is beyond subtle: just reeds, Rhodes, reverb, and a twinge of birdsong, like a chain reaction of glancing accents and hints of things not quite heard. There’s a snatch of some foreign language, as though the recording has alighted on a distant radio station, and a powerful sense of groove. “Arithmetic,” sings Domino, her voice quiet and low, “Skies are streaming/You look up and get carried away.” It’s a fine approximation of how, at its best, Ultramarine’s music feels: a flash of logic and a fog of unknowing, the trace of an equation on a chalkboard wiped clean.


A posthumous 1973 solo album from the Texas singer-songwriter, released the week he would’ve turned 75, displays his careful sense of craft across a set of covers, favorites, and unheard songs.

Sky Blue

Townes Van Zandt often seemed indifferent to his recording career—or anything resembling a career, really. He certainly gave the music business his best shot, traveling from his native Texas to Nashville to cut a series of albums for the tiny label Poppy between 1968 and 1972, frequently collaborating with Jack Clement, a producer who decided to ostentatiously augment the songwriter’s eccentricities instead of accentuate them. It wasn’t a winning formula commercially, and his lack of success during his only prolific period helped fate him to decades of wandering on the margins of country and Americana. Hits came for other people—Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson took “Pancho and Lefty” to the top of Billboard’s country charts in 1987—but not for Van Zandt, who wound up amassing not so much a body of work as a deep, varied songbook, which could be brought to life either by himself or other singers.
On Sky Blue, a posthumous album released the week he would’ve turned 75, underscores the notion of a songbook, Townes Van Zandt rifles through his drafts and recent work, punctuating his original work with covers. Van Zandt recorded the 11 tracks that comprise Sky Blue in 1973 with Bill Hedgepeth, a journalist who also was one of the singer-songwriter’s buddies. At the time, Van Zandt had just wrapped up his run at Poppy with The Late Great Townes Van Zandt. Nobody knew it at the time, but there was more than a kernel of truth in that title. It took him five years to return to action with 1978’s Flyin’ Shoes—the same span of time in which he had churned out six records for Poppy. Such long gaps between albums became standard operating procedure for Van Zandt, with the singer-songwriter buying time and generating cash by putting out the occasional live album, such as the celebrated 1977 LP Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas.
The set captured on Live at the Old Quarter was recorded in 1973, the same year Van Zandt cut the material that wound up on Sky Blue. Both albums were made at the outset of Van Zandt’s years of rambling, so they share a sense of freshness and immediacy; he’s hardly brimming with optimism but he’s yet to be hardened by the alcoholism that later took his life. On Live at the Old Quarter, he’s blessed by the addition of an audience, whose very presence cajoles Van Zandt to display the wry sense of playfulness that’s so often overlooked within his work. There’s no such chance of such understated humor surfacing on Sky Blue, however. Recorded on his lonesome at Hedgepeth’s home studio, Van Zandt is singing to himself. He runs no risk of unexpected digressions, unless the choice of songs counts.
On that front, Sky Blue offers a few surprises, chief among them two unheard Van Zandt originals. “All I Need” opens the album on a soft, wistful note, achieving a comforting melancholy sway that’s countered by the delicate, bruised “Sky Blue,” which barely keeps the sadness at bay. Neither are major items but that’s their appeal: They’re finely-etched yet modest, the product of a songwriter who remains dedicated to the craft. In that light, it’s easy to hear his covers of Richard Dobson’s “Forever for Always for Certain” and Tom Paxton’s “The Last Thing on My Mind,” along with the traditional folk tune “Hills of Roane County,” as roundabout inspirations, song where Van Zandt began exploring ideas he’d later develop on his own, but within the context of Sky Blue, they help make the album feel a bit like an intimate live set. Van Zandt may not be playing for punters but he’s playing songs that would suit a small, attentive crowd, balancing covers, favorites (“Pancho and Lefty,” then new but already seeming like a classic) and newer songs.
Much of Sky Blue’s charm derives from how it doesn’t quite slide into any particular category. It’s neither a live album nor an album of its own, yet it’s also not a set of demos for a forthcoming record. Instead, it’s a vivid snapshot of a particular moment, preserving a time when he had yet to fritter away his good will, and capturing Townes Van Zandt when it still seemed like he was on the verge of great things.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the grandiose British rock band’s second album, a supranatural space odyssey powered by all-too-human emotion.

Origin of Symmetry

In 2001, on a Saturday-morning show with celebrity guests and a slime tank, a rakish man appears onstage with hair spiked into dyed black blades. The man is a little scary, a little sinister, like anyone cool. He wears dark shades and wiggles his arms, conjuring a lullaby from the keyboard like a hired magician. Then the guitar swings around his neck and he summons a perfect squall of distortion.
The song, introduced as “New Born,” begins to overwhelm him. He throttles the guitar, hops about the stage, barely pretends to sing and play. You know he is miming, but he also performs the artifice of mime—that is, he is miming miming—and as the credits roll another man bursts in and inexplicably breakdances. What are you watching? A satire of an empty TV spectacle, perhaps. Unless you are nine years old. At nine, you are witnessing genius.
By this point, Matthew Bellamy’s heavy rock laments had already won Muse a global cult, gripped by his softness and oddness. But that is not how the British trio got to be stars. For that, they were shipped out to studio sets for Live & Kicking and The Pepsi Chart Show, learning to peddle the shamelessly real while embracing the shamelessly fake. By the end of it, Bellamy could fluently translate his grandiose, pentatonic misery into four minutes of thrillingly throwaway pop. Stuff would get smashed, but most of the time he was freakishly good at the job.
To straddle the sincere and absurd, the real and fake, was never a stretch for a man who did not resemble his straight-faced Britrock contemporaries so much as the swaggering peacocks of ’70s glam. Before his myriad quirks congealed into lovable schtick, and arena floodlights greeted Muse’s rebirth as prog-pop conspiracists, the band released a pair of fascinating LPs: 2003’s pop opus Absolution and their 2001 space odyssey, the formidable Origin of Symmetry.
Origin of Symmetry depicts life as the school-friend trio of Bellamy, bassist Chris Wolstenholme, and drummer Dom Howard saw it: a war zone where tyrant guitars and drums vie for space with balletic miniatures and stargazing synths. Muse were playing melodrama as teenage realism, an extremely, ridiculously honest noise. My sense they were overblown—that scaling the heights of psychic tumult might not require galactic pomp and an actual jetpack—would take a few years to kick in. In the meantime, I listened to Origin of Symmetry as if to a documentary. “Space dementia in your eyes/And peace will arise and tear us apart,” Bellamy sang, machines clipping his voice to a slithery alien rasp. Wow, yes, I thought, frowning seriously into my lunchbox.
Formed in the seaside town of Teignmouth, Muse signed their first deal in 1998 in Los Angeles, before amassing a giant fanbase in continental Europe. Their province back home transpired not to be London (too jaded and skeptical) but rather in pockets of smalltown and middle Britain, where latent ambition and stifled bombast can thrive among thwarted romantics. Where Is This It, released two weeks later, garnered the Strokes a coalition of hedonists and neurotics drawn to the big city, Origin of Symmetry positioned Muse as an outpost of Radiohead’s broad church of the alienated.
The album soundtracked a pipeline out of outsiderdom for suburban students and scruffy skate kids—the next generation of techno gourmands and bong-ripping metalheads, math-rock nerds and hardcore loyalists. For at least the next decade, slapdash “Plug in Baby” covers blasted from provincial pub stages, anointing a new mainstay on the popular front of radio rock. To legions of longhair disciples, Origin of Symmetry sounded a final alarm before the tractor beam of domesticity beckoned, promising annual trips to Download Fest and pet cats curled up in Korn hoodies. The album’s cult has endured not so much by converting new fans as by presenting a pungent memory box.
Muse themselves never stopped being teenagers, happiest whipping up us-versus-them screeds and epic expansions of boyish obsessions. But nor would they nail adolescence with such panache as they do on their second LP. Origin of Symmetry romanticizes a time when pop was primal, titanic, and camp. By combining goth vulnerability with sci-fi scale and hard-rock drama, it captures a paradox of young romance: On one hand, Bellamy sounds wracked with despair, but he proclaims his heartbreak with the glee of an ecstatic preacher. Origin of Symmetry’s mercurial range honors those dueling emotions: in “Space Dementia”’s barbarian opera, “Feeling Good”’s benevolent vaudeville, “Bliss”’s Nintendo-prog fantasia, “Plug in Baby”’s widdly licks.
Their radio A-list forebears were the mannered realists of kitchen-sink Britpop, whose fetish for authenticity had awakened an everyman army of Coldplays and Travises. Across the pond, grunge had transformed goofball rock into lucrative torment, unloosing a glut of disaffected Nirvana clones. Muse’s debut, Showbiz, tried the self-serious angst thing, too. But Bellamy, emboldened by nu-metal’s reign, was nudging it into the hyperbolic. He sang with real pain—Muse are ruthlessly unironic—and channeled Berlioz and Mahler, minting a sound so ludicrously over-the-top it broke the serious/piss-take binary.
Despite little retrospective attention, Showbiz had been a commercial success, outselling higher-profile late-’90s records by bands like the Offspring and Korn. From a backwater filled with “a load of old biddies” (as Wolstenholme put it), the debut had flung Muse into orbit—playing arenas with the Foos and the Chilis and prancing about at their backstage parties. As his ego played catch-up, Bellamy dubbed Showbiz “a bit faffy and bollocks.” He had reacquainted himself with the mischievous Russian composer Rachmaninoff: both traditionalists in accelerating worlds, fond of naive melodies that sweep and lurch into sudden turbulence. Inspirited, Bellamy delayed the second album sessions to dispense with faff and bollocks.
Finally, in a rural English studio abutting a field of magic mushrooms, Muse and Tool producer Dave Bottrill recorded “New Born,” “Bliss,” “Darkshines,” and “Plug in Baby”—the latter while tripping. (They wound up “naked in a jacuzzi,” with Bellamy “deaf in one ear from falling asleep in the sauna,” he told the writer Ben Myers.) The earthy energies lingered when they reunited with Showbiz producer John Leckie, who filled their studios with percussive animal bones, llama-claw necklaces, and wind chimes for ceremonial clanging, as well as introducing the band to madcap bards Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart.
By then, their songwriting had already transformed, sometimes subtly and sometimes not. The riff and chorus of “Hyper Music” could have come from the debut, but not the flirty flair of the pinball-bumper bassline, nor the playful, fuzzy jangle that drops us into the verse. The vocal production sensationalizes the falsetto that writhes loose from Bellamy’s body—his revelry in every wet gasp before he belts out another battle cry.
At the same time, amid the clamor, Bellamy oozes sensuality. He groans like a four-poster bed, elongating “ooh”s with erotic decadence. It is possible for the casual listener to imagine the frontman a meat-and-potatoes rocker, conjuring women as shallow conduits of lust and disdain. Then he tickles you with a quietly odd lyric like the ones that pepper “Bliss”:

Give me the peace and joy in your mind.
Everything about you is how I’d wanna be.

That second one in particular, innocuous as it sounds, strikes me as wonderfully offbeat. Bellamy identifies not with the conquest but with the object of desire. It is a sentiment closer to sexually ambivalent goth (as in “Why Can’t I Be You?”) than downtuned, guitar-slinging rock.
Bellamy uses operatics to act out gender transgression, albeit while taking equal relish in what makes rock machismo click. The desire to be “over-the-top,” he said in 2001, “is inside every human being on the planet, but sexism has said that that was female….None of us are embarrassed about expressing [our] feminine side.” In lyrics delivered with enough falsetto and tremolo to shatter a mirror, his submissive “Space Dementia” narrator practically begs for emasculation. “I love all the dirty tricks and twisted games you play,” he snarls, quivering with hammy deviance. The tension lies in his tightrope walk from the sub- to the super-human, balancing claims of being a lowly worm with flashes of the sublime.
Where other virtuoso bands would marry rock with opera, Muse present the two in the midst of a messy divorce. The obliterating power of “New Born” derives from the contrast between its devilish riff and its intro, the saintly piano lullaby. “Citizen Erased,” a metallic storm, concludes with a piano coda drenched in post-apocalyptic bliss. In downtime throughout the record, where others would merely solo, Bellamy ferrets away glitzy cadenzas and sanctuaries of stillness. Muse’s sadness, like their ecstasy, is always joyfully lavish.
In press around the release, an increasingly inscrutable Bellamy outed himself as a conspiracy theorist, perhaps playing the media the same way he had played the keyboard on Live & Kicking. Aliens had planted ancient star charts on tablets in Middle Eastern catacombs. The U.S. government was performing mind control with radiation and electronics. All this made his zeal for advanced science hard to parse. Pinched from the physicist Michio Kaku, Origin of Symmetry’s title alludes to an outcrop of string theory describing an apparent symmetry of matter in a mooted 11th dimension. To find its origin, as Bellamy understood it, could lead to a sort of god. In the frontman’s personal universe, the source of stability—the origin of symmetry—was the act of creating music, he said. “Plug in Baby,” then, is as much an ode to his mythic guitar as a riff on dystopian tech.
Hallucinatory themes aside, the tone of the lyrics is painfully human, laced with spite. Lies are exposed, bitterness festers, toxic relationships crumble. (Bellamy’s endless press digressions about science and tech may have been, in the end, another bit of misdirection. It sounds to me like a breakup album.) Whatever the cause, antagonism suits him. He sings best in the role of a man possessed: so wretched and pained that histrionics seize him unbidden, expelling bile from his lungs.
In the calm that falls near the album’s end, Bellamy struggles for gravitas. Finale “Megalomania” takes a big plunge into gothic balladry but slightly bungles the landing, overestimating the depth of its existential lyric and stately organ soundscape. “Feeling Good,” as made miraculous by Nina Simone, wants to meander and kick its heels but here feels overcooked, a show tune stiffened with jazz-lounge starch. For now, at least, Muse’s powers would wane the further they ventured from their trademark gaudy discord.
But for six or seven songs—before the side-B slump, before the rock monoculture collapsed and they blasted off into stadium bluster—Muse were briefly the mightiest band in the world. Origin of Symmetry’s endurance, if nothing else, humiliates their former U.S. label Maverick, which reportedly buried the record upon Bellamy’s refusal to re-record “Plug in Baby” with manlier vocals. (The band left their contract as the album hit the UK Top 3, before a belated U.S. release in 2005.)
This year’s impressive new mix and remaster, billed as the XX Anniversary RemiXX, is even more colossal and timeless. It smooths out period giveaways like “New Born”’s dustbin-lid drums and scratchy rhythm guitar, while amplifying the baroque grandeur of the irrepressibly mad “Micro Cuts.” “Space Dementia”’s puny strings become Hollywood symphonic. Bonus track “Futurism,” initially cut over fears of flubbing it live, assumes its rightful place as a second-half pick-me-up. The reissue is definitive.
“If it wasn’t for Muse,” Bellamy once said, “I think I’d be a nasty, violent person.” And if rock is the space reserved for that rage—where bottled-up people (particularly people presented as men) can reach a new emotional tenor—then he may be right: The greatest achievement of bands like Muse is preventing literal murder. To take a humbler view, Origin of Symmetry is propaganda for self-indulgence. In a precarious adolescence, music like this can awaken a brewing madness, summon it up like a haunted shipwreck from a lake and say, “Come take a look—this is actually pretty cool!” Muse’s ilk will always be saving lives in this way or that, looking to mollify teenage mania. But few insist so persuasively that the mania, too, is a gift.

Buy: Rough Trade
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This solo debut from a fixture of London’s vital and eclectic jazz community delves into dub, soul, and fusion on a journey from the scene’s diverse roots to its exhilarating present.

Starting Today

In February, the London-based DJ and tastemaker Gilles Peterson put together a compilation of the city’s vital new wave of jazz talent. Titled We Out Here, its nine tracks are a fiery mix of fervent improvisation and slick grooves united by a tendency to branch out from jazz into hip-hop, dub, and grime. The artists on the album collaborate freely with each other, making We Out Here both a pocket guide to the scene and a launchpad for its members’ solo endeavors. That discography features recent releases like Sons of Kemet’s Your Queen Is a Reptile and Nubya Garcia’s When We Are. Now, it has expanded to include Starting Today, a debut album by Joe Armon-Jones that distinguishes the pianist and composer as a soulful, modern producer.
The six-song album opens with a stirring title track whose featured vocalist, Afrikan Revolution bandleader Asheber, proclaims, “Starting today, I’m gonna wipe the blood off these streets/ Starting today, spread love in the community.” Asheber’s reverential tenor casts him as something like the lost son of celestial jazz singer Andy Bey—and his improvised lyrics should resonate deeply in a Britain clouded by the murky haze of Brexit. The song eventually builds into a nine-minute modern-jazz-dance call to arms, complete with poetic guest sax riffs from Garcia and a deconstructed ending that fades to bass tones and atmospheric hiss.
After such a rousing start, the album’s next moves might seem disjointed at first listen. “Almost Went Too Far” is a blissed-out, sun-kissed slice of jazz fusion that nods to Bobbi Humphrey’s ’70s Blue Note output, with Armon-Jones’ Wurlitzer taking the place of her weightless flute. “Mollison Dub” marks another abrupt genre switch, entering a dub realm haunted by a ghost-town echo effect on Moses Boyd’s drumming and elongated bass tones from David Mrakpor. The songs are great showcases for Armon-Jones’ mastery of a range of styles—but, for a moment, they threaten to reduce the project to an academic exercise, demonstrating aptitudes without consideration for the album’s overall arc.
But Armon-Jones’ vision for the record soon comes into focus. “London’s Face” and “Ragify” take the vibes and styles he’s just laid down—the soul of “Almost Went Too Far,” the low-end theory of “Mollison Dub”—and fuse them together into a captivating whole. “London’s Face,” which features South London musician and composer Oscar Jerome on vocals and guitar, brings slinky, Arabic rhythms to a strut through a city defined by cross-cultural exchanges. Anchored by dubby basslines and African-style percussion, Jerome takes aim at “back door prophets—that’s where the hate be.” The album climaxes with the graceful “Ragify,” a track that tosses Armon-Jones’ greatest production tricks into a giant melting pot as his Wurlitzer cascades in psychedelic sheets over stuttering drum patterns.
Collaboration and cross-pollination are at the heart of the We Out Here ethos. On Starting Today, Armon-Jones takes a modern-jazz journey from the discrete influences on that eclectic London sound to its thrillingly diverse present—and stakes his claim as one of the scene’s most promising voices.


This box set gathers the Nonesuch albums featuring the Kronos Quartet playing the music of minimalist composer Terry Riley, and adds another disc of unheard material. Taken all togtether, the set confirms just how fruitful this 35-year partnership has been.

Kronos Quartet: One Earth, One People, One Love: Kronos Plays Terry Riley

After the radical minimalism of his 1964 composition "In C", Terry Riley’s place in music history was secure. The 53 melodic phrases in that one-page piece—available to be played as many times as members of an ensemble cared to repeat them—still inspire a range of artists today. (Composer Nico Muhly was among those contributing to In C Remixed, in 2009, while the musicians of Africa Express gave us their spin with this year’s In C Mali). Even if Riley had never fixed another note to paper, the Who would have name-checked him in the title of "Baba O’Riley" on the strength of his keyboard improvisations. Similarly, you can imagine contemporary connoisseurs like Big Boi taking time to pose for a picture with the composer on godfather status alone.
It almost happened just like that anyway. In the 1970s, as Riley was diving ever deeper into his study of North Indian classical music with the singer Pandit Pran Nath, a legacy based on "In C" and hypnotic live performances seemed probable. But then, in 1979, violinist and Kronos Quartet founder David Harrington intervened. After a year of persuasion, Riley was prevailed upon to write music on paper again. And the lobbying went both ways. Riley changed the way Harrington’s group worked: encouraging the members to improvise and to ditch the romantic vibrato common to mainstream string-quartet sonics. The result was a working relationship that has now lasted for 36 years, resulting in dozens of commissions and four full-length studio albums.
With Riley turning 80 this year, it’s an obvious move for Nonesuch to bring out all of their Kronos-Riley recordings in a box set, along with a half-hour of previously unheard music. The core of the set is a straight-up porting over of Riley-composed Kronos releases that haven’t ever been hard to find: the 1989 tour de force double-album Salome Dances for Peace, 2001’s Requiem for Adam, and 2008’s The Cusp of Magic (which guest-stars Chinese pipa player Wu Man). But taken cumulatively, the result feels less like an anniversary cash-grab than an attempt to help us see a major aspect of Riley’s art on its own terms.
Riley’s string quartet music reveals the interpretive limitation of the "minimalist" tag—the two-hour Salome Dances for Peace is nothing if not maximal music. In his writing for Kronos, Riley variously employs raga patterns, jazz harmonies, and chromatic dissonance. You may need the liner notes to help understand Riley’s mashup of Native American spirituality and New Testament narrative—it involves King Herod’s daughter being brought back to life, in order to inspire compassion instead of violence—but the diversity of the music and its emotional range are anything but compact in scale. Likewise, the surprising synthesized brass section that pops up in Requiem for Adam’s second movement highlights a daring compositional mind at work (one notably unafraid to try out new textures in the service of mourning). While I’d previously paid scant attention to The Cusp of Magic, thinking it a lesser entry in Riley’s catalog, this box set helps prepare the listener for Riley’s increasingly hybrid aesthetic over time.
Those who already own and appreciate these albums may wonder if the half-hour of previously unreleased material justifies purchase of the entire box. But Nonesuch has been generous here (especially in the box-set economy), by making the fifth disc of the set available individually, under the title Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector. And yes: it’s a necessary addition to the catalog—though perhaps not for the reason the composer’s fans will expect. Crate-digging may compel Riley-heads to lunge straight for "Lacrymosa - Remembering Kevin" or "One Earth, One People, One Love", since we haven’t heard those items recorded before. But the highlight of the disc featuring new material winds up being a recent Kronos recording of "Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector". At one level, that’s surprising, since "Sunrise" is the first piece Riley wrote for Kronos, back in 1980, and it’s been a staple of the group’s repertoire for some time.
Employing both a 14-beat structure borrowed from raga and a series of melodic modes (based on A), Riley has said that he originally conceived of the piece as a "jazz head arrangement" that could allow for improvisation and juxtaposition of themes. But Kronos’ 1985 recording doesn’t have that kind of flow at all. It sounds stiff and brittle—as if the players are paying too much attention to the 14-beat pattern. By comparison, the new recording on this box set is a marvel. Instead of leaping right into the work’s hottest rhythmic passage, this version kicks off with a meditative drone section (in which each member of the quartet progressively doles out notes from one of Riley’s scales). Heard against the vibrato-less drone strings, sliding pitches from one violin simultaneously refer to Riley’s North Indian classical studies, as well as his feel for folk-song Americana. And when Kronos does finally launch into the memorable main theme, "Sunrise" has a new wind at its back—perhaps the kind that can only be captured after 36 years of collaborative effort.


On an album that mines failed relationships for self-discovery, the Australian singer-songwriter shows her talent at distilling complex situations into searing couplets.

Crushing

On her second album, Julia Jacklin is discovering her body, and she just wants to see it for herself. “Give me a full-length mirror/So I can see the whole picture,” the Australian singer-songwriter implores; “My head alone gives nothing away.” She winds up clambering onto a chair to get a better look at herself, grasping for self-knowledge in the reflection staring back at her. It’s a simple shift in perspective, but one that makes all the difference.
This act of reframing lies at the heart of Crushing, an album that charts the devastating duality of its title—the way something innocuous and tender can transform into something so debilitating. Across 10 songs, Jacklin examines relationships in crisis, all the while fighting to center herself in the viewfinder and repossess her body, heart, and mind. “Started listening to your favorite band/The night I stopped listening to you,” she sings on “You Were Right,” a song that kick-starts the arduous process of extracting a one-time partner’s opinions from her own. It seems to have a happy ending: “Started feeling like myself again/The day I stopped saying your name,” is her assured conclusion in the final verse, peppered with energetic bursts of guitar. But most of the time, it’s not so easy; there are a million holes to patch, a million fits of uncertainty to endure before that sort of relief will come.
Take opener “Body,” a somber, simmering epic. The song, rooted in a real-life event, hinges on a compromising photo taken by an ex-boyfriend, and the fear that he’d use it to get back at her. In the end, she can only shrug: “I guess it’s just my life/And it’s just my body.” The repeated phrase is ironic and earnest in equal measure, covering all the ground between the heart’s genuine suffering and the head’s nihilistic recognition that, in the end, it probably doesn’t really matter. The vulnerability in Jacklin’s voice—delicate and fleeting as snow melting on exposed skin—brings real intensity to the song, though it’s built on just a handful of quiet chords and never accelerates past a slow creep. Here, and just about everywhere else on the album, the arrangements are noticeably deprioritized. They’re mostly limited to understated passages of crisp, measured guitar and basic kick-and-snare patterns, there to set Jacklin’s pace, then step aside and let her vocals and storytelling do the heavy lifting.
As much as Jacklin’s writing is steeped in the knowledge that there is work to be done—to fill in the space left behind by a loved one, to practice self-care instead of looking after someone else—some of her most affecting writing is borne of what comes before that process begins. Ahead of the work, there is stillness: prescience, accompanied by temporary paralysis in the face of the truth. On “Good Guy,” Jacklin begs a paramour to profess love for her, knowingly putting off the reality she’ll have to contend with come daylight. “Don’t Know How to Keep Loving You” captures a moment of impasse, when she recognizes that she and a partner have grown into each other so much that being together is almost the same as being alone. Instead of wrenching herself away, Jacklin wants to make concessions: “What if I cleaned up, what if I worked on my skin?/I could scrub until I am red, hot, weak, and thin.” Sometimes, breaking our own bodies seems a less daunting task than breaking the hearts of those we love.
“Turn Me Down,” the penultimate track, marks Crushing’s emotional peak, but still hovers in the moment before the moment. Impending breakup looms over a two-day drive to Melbourne; Jacklin, following a gorgeously cascading melodic line, pleads for her partner to end things so she won’t have to summon the courage to do it herself. It’s unclear how much of this drama is spoken out loud and how much takes place in Jacklin’s mind, but as her delivery builds to a near-scream, you can imagine the sentiment beating against the walls of her skull as the two drive silently into the night. Over barely there guitar accompaniment, Jacklin closes out the song with a gut punch: “Don’t look at me, look at the center line/Maybe I’ll see you in a supermarket sometime.”
It’s hard not to tumble into Crushing’s vast emotional depths and look past everything else that makes the album exquisite, but lyrics like this showcase just how clever Jacklin’s songwriting can be. There are the subtle twists of irony, yes—her pan of self-involved dudes on “Convention,” the implied eye-roll in her refrain on “You Were Right”—but also careful choreography behind what scans as raw feeling. Jacklin has an ability to mine minuscule details from immensely complex situations and package them in searing couplets. It’s why you’re likely to walk away from this record thinking about an estranged someone you dread running into at the grocery, or the casual cruelty of giving up on your own body, or the fraught goodbyes you’ve had to say. “Are you thinking of me too?” Jacklin muses in the final moments of the album, “I was so happy all those years with you.” Her well-chosen words reverberate endlessly.


Turning away from the mix of big-room energy and outré sounds that marked his debut, the London producer’s surprisingly muted second album is a catch-all for his varied tastes.

Song for Alpha

A lot has changed for Daniel Avery since 2012, when his mix album for Fabric pushed him beyond his residency at the London club. Fabriclive 66 struck a chord in the dance-music community with its omnivorous, no-nonsense selections. Featuring crowdpleasers like Miss Kittin and Simian Mobile Disco along with underground stalwarts Kassem Mosse and Call Super (under his given name, JR Seaton), the mix reveled in Avery’s taste for big-room energy accentuated by more outré sounds. In 2013, Avery’s debut album, Drone Logic, doubled down on that approach. It presented a powerful yet idiosyncratic amalgam of acid house, techno, and electro, a style Andrew Weatherall once described as “gimmick-free machine-funk of the highest order.” On the back of those two releases, Avery was soon appearing on stages around the world.
“I like weirdness and oddness,” Avery said in a 2012 interview, with one caveat: “I still want to be able to dance to what I make.” Drone Logic for the most part struck that balance eloquently, and the following years found Avery experimenting. There was an ambient collaboration with synth artist and sometime Nine Inch Nails member Alessandro Cortini; a duo with the London producer Volte-Face, called Rote, offered dyed-in-the-wool European techno. Somewhere along the line, perhaps during his extended stay on the touring circuit, Avery’s music began changing.
Five years after Drone Logic, Song for Alpha, Avery’s second album, is mostly an inversion of the music he became known for; its swaggering electro beats smoothed into unchallenging techno precision, its chunky 303 sequences muted and slowed down, and its trampled pads brought into the foreground and given a thick wash of reverb. These new approaches are present across the tracklist, and yet a clear musical direction fails to emerge.
Both “Sensation” and “Clear,” two early singles from 2015, are featured in the album’s first half, and they’re the least interesting wrinkles in the producer’s habitual approach. Only “Diminuendo” delivers similarly druggy, hard-tumbling techno, albeit with an added sense of tension and release that serves the banger well. Much of Song for Alpha is surprisingly understated, at least compared to Drone Logic. There are a few run-of-the-mill ambient interludes, some introverted club oddities, and touches of soporific acid reminiscent of the German producer Recondite.
“Slow Fade” and “Quick Eternity” do the best with Avery’s variations upon subdued dance music, tying airy melodies, glowing pads, and resonant drum machines into a sound not unlike Selected Ambient Works 85-92. In fact, it’s damn near impossible to listen through Song for Alpha without drawing connections to Warp’s early catalog. The softly spooky “Days From Now” could’ve been lifted straight from Music Has the Right to Children, while standout track “Citizen / Nowhere” sounds like a gorgeous homage to Amber-era Autechre. An album full of this Artificial Intelligence-esque electronica would be fascinating in Avery’s hands, even if it meant less straightforward dance music to his name.
Avery has taken a confident step forward in redefining his sound on his own terms, and he has made some remarkable new tracks in the process. Nearly every highlight, however, feels hermetically sealed—produced in a vacuum and unable to feed into or connect with the others. It turns Song for Alpha into a catch-all for Avery’s disparate experiments, something that less resembles a fully realized album than a dynamic, robust playlist from a seasoned DJ taking a break from the road.


The second album from producer Joe Seaton offers a rush of effervescence. With a childlike and immersive touch, he pulls apart and rearranges small, twinkling sounds.

Arpo

A totality of vision surfaces on every production Joe Seaton releases as Call Super, from the music to the artwork. That’s true of the slithering tracks he made in collaboration with Beatrice Dillon, as well as his adventurous entry in the Fabric mix series earlier this year. In advance of Seaton’s second full-length, Arpo, that ardor even extended to hand-inking 200 7” sleeves for the album’s first single. Arpo was preceded by a run of crisp yet quicksand-y EPs that thrillingly moved between techno, electro and house brought Seaton more notoriety. But Arpo refines and then traipses further afield than anything else in his discography.
At first listen, it might seem to exist in the shadow of his thrilling debut, 2014’s Suzi Ecto. That album situated Seaton among the likes of Actress and Lee Gamble, straining against the confines of modern dance music tropes. But while that album featured a muggy atmosphere, groggy tones and a metallic menace at its edges, Arpo provides a rush of effervescence instead. The album’s biggest beats rattle around like BBs in a can or clack like a pencil against a Coke bottle; Seaton’s bass tones bear tactile properties closer to being gummy than beefy. Full of such small, playful turns (Seaton cites the silent harp-strumming Marx Brother, Harpo, as inspiration for the title) it makes more sense as soundtrack for strolls through Volkspark Friedrichshain than the wee hours at Berghain.
From the opening theme of “Arpo,” Seaton takes a filigree of woodwind and winds it around an iridescent line and a globule of bass. That theme returns again midway through on “Arpo Sunk,” now cloaked in warm hiss and just a dab of echo, the melodic line of the reed taking the track off to wander far from any typical dance beat. The clarinet and oboe come courtesy of Seaton’s father, painter and Dixieland player David Seaton. His horn arose on both Suzi Ecto and Seaton’s fourth world ambient tracks made as Ondo Fudd, while also providing the fluttering shriek at the core of “Fluo.” The ductile tone that the elder Seaton provides on these tracks—by turns frisky, tuneful, droney and shrieking—keeps the music from ever staying pat on the grid or rolling out in a predictable manner.
The first half of Arpo contains all the heady, mushy sounds of early 1990s ambient house, but it comes in tightly coiled, two-minute bursts. The array of sounds that crop up on the minute-long “Any Pill” might have comprised a 10-minute Orb track some 20 years previous. An iridescent sheen glimmers across the surface of “Music Stand,” making the track feel like a sculpture made entirely out of soap bubbles. Sounds swell and pop, bubble up anew and shift shapes, yet the cumulative effect is one of ineffable airiness.
Small rustling, blipping, twinkling details pop up on longer tracks like “No Wonder We Go Under” and standout “I Look Like I Look in a Tinfoil Mirror.” Such sounds percolate and nip around the headphone space, helixing into new shapes before Seaton pulls them apart again and arranges them anew. The dizzying attention to detail and design rivals that of Seaton’s close mate Objekt (TJ Hertz), but his touch feels less intense and bewildering, more childlike and immersive. Certain instances of Arpo might hearken back to rhythms associated with tech-house, electro, and harsher variants on each (especially the metallic shrieks that cry-out on “Trokel”), but no track sounds like it’d readily slot into a club set. There’s something squishy and slippery about every component here, each moving into the other so that markers and track distinctions begin to feel wholly irrelevant to the listening experience.
“The music and spaces of a time past that preoccupies you can be shaped into something that can drive your own visions,” Seaton wrote in advance of a weekend party he curated for December at Amsterdam’s De School, speaking of dance music histories and places he’s obsessed over but never visited. There’s a sense here that Seaton is seeking to move beyond such tropes in dance music towards something not yet defined. Seaton then adds: “Don’t take me there. Just let me learn and dream.” Arpo might just soundtrack such a speculative night out.


No Age follow their 2007 EP compilation, Weirdo Rippers, with an ambitious Sub Pop debut: Nouns is gorgeously thick-- a hazy, delirious expanse that's friendly and warm and, best of all, unpredictable.

Nouns

It's disingenuous to talk about Los Angeles' New Yorker-profiled, vegan-snacks-serving, book-lending, all-ages venue the Smell with the same high-art vocabulary you'd use to dissect other creative collectives, like Andy Warhol's Factory-- the Smell's constituency (L.A.'s optimistic experimental art pack) appears un-fixated on fame, self-aggrandizement, or furthering its nascent mythology. To an outsider, the Smell is idealistic and romantic, a stroller-friendly, cheap-haircut-hocking haven that's as functional as it is fruitful. Save Baltimore's Wham City, it's been a while since American music fans have had a similar hometown scene to get riled up about; regional culture has been fractured and marginalized by the internet, and being too focused on anything local-- except produce, maybe-- feels depressingly provincial in 2008. Consequently, it's weirdly thrilling that a community-sponsored, community-supported art space can attract (and sustain) such a horde of admirable bands.
No Age, along with Mika Miko, Abe Vigoda, Lavender Diamond, BARR, and a handful of others, are mainstays at the Smell; the cover of No Age's 2007 EP compilation, Weirdo Rippers, famously features the exterior of the club, and guitarist Randy Randall reportedly helped mine trenches in the venue's concrete floor so that a second bathroom could be installed to accommodate new crowds. Given the critical success of Weirdo Rippers, No Age's scope has now expanded well beyond Los Angeles, and Nouns, their first full-length, is appropriately ambitious.
A guitar/drums duo (Randall and drummer/vocalist Dean Spunt) with a penchant for self-recorded samples, No Age are mostly unconcerned with things like space or pause, and Nouns is gorgeously thick-- a hazy, delirious expanse that's both comforting and disorienting. Opener "Miner" begins and ends in murk, and in between Randall and Spunt sputter and twitch and pound, alternately revealing and concealing a sweet, taut melody-- such is No Age's agenda, burying an addictive little singalong in layers of effects and fuzz.
"Eraser" is more immediately user-friendly, opening with sunny guitar chirps and a knee-slapping drumbeat, before Spunt starts barking intelligible lyrics ("Wait for the foreman now get paid/ Wait and see the list of shit you made") and the music goes steady and frantic. "Eraser" is a summer song in the sweatiest, most realistic sense-- it's not the Beach Boys' gooey, über-idealized, convertibles-and-beach-volleyball version, it's the waiting-for-the-bus, sweaty and desperate but still-sorta-excited-about-all-that-sunshine take. "Here Should Be My Home" is similarly exuberant, full of power chords and distortion; it's arguably the poppiest thing No Age have recorded to date (all those cries of "baby" are practically bubblegum), and accordingly, completely addictive. "Sleeper Hold", meanwhile, is the sound-- both literally and metaphysically-- of everything happening all at once, an ecstatic, feedback-addled lullaby.
Some fans might pine-- at least at first-- for the (vaguely) more experimental, less riff-driven muck of Weirdo Rippers, but Nouns is a more thoughtful, coherent (and still plenty dirty) version of what No Age began building with all those EPs. Listening to Nouns, it's hard to comprehend how just two people can manage to make so much noise while still sounding so subdued and mysterious-- it's easier to imagine Randall and Spunt spewing these songs underwater, bursting forth from some colossal California quarry rather than a tiny, stuffy art space a few blocks from L.A.'s skid row. Nouns is so cacophonous, so fertile, and so ripe with sound that parsing out the samples and effects and various layers of guitar is nearly impossible; besides, it's way more satisfying to just close your eyes and just enjoy it. Ultimately, it's part of No Age's allure that Nouns is so difficult to figure out, that it manages to be so big while coming from a place so small: All you'll know for sure is that you want to listen longer. Maybe forever.


The soundtrack to the 2005 documentary of the same name, You're Gonna Miss Me attempts to economically anthologize Roky Erickson, a man whose vast, scattered output all but defies anthologizing.

You're Gonna Miss Me OST

Roky Erickson didn't invent psychedelic rock, but he did (with the 13th Floor Elevators) give it its name. He didn't invent garage rock, either, but he remains one of the few artists of the Nuggets-era revered as more than a flash in the pan.
This much is made clear in the first few minutes of You're Gonna Miss Me, the excellent 2005 documentary about the life and times of Roky Erickson. In fact, these early biographical touchstones essentially mark both the start and end of the Roky Erickson musical story, since Erickson spent much of his years past his late-1960s prime struggling with drug addiction and alleged schizophrenia. You're Gonna Miss Me is thus less about Erickson's musical legacy than it is about the quest to restore that legacy, allowing Erickson to reclaim his past so that he might have a future.
Obviously, given that Erickson is playing live again, the mission was a success and Erickson's reputation was restored. Still, for many his music remains either hopelessly obscure or too scattered around to get a grip on. Erickson's been anthologized so often that even some of the numerous best-ofs and boxed sets aren't necessarily the best place to begin.
That's where the You're Gonna Miss Me soundtrack steps in: as a well-intentioned one-stop dive-in point for Erickson's colorful and storied 40-year career. Except that even that's been done already, too, by 1995's excellent two disc I Have Always Been Here Before: The Roky Erickson Anthology, which includes all but a couple of the paltry 12 songs included on You're Gonna Miss Me. That leaves this disc a well-intentioned one-stop dive-in point with an asterisk. It's a well-intentioned one-stop dive-in point for anyone that doesn't want or have an earlier, superior one-stop dive-in point.
But that's OK, especially if your introduction to Erickson-- his trademark shriek, his surreal lyrics and, most of all, his otherworldly life-- comes via the documentary's narrative. Certainly Erickson's songs possess different meanings when paired with the sight of this disheveled veteran, victim, and survivor, for years passed over or ignored as an outsider when in the end his mixed-up ways were more a matter of him getting-- or being denied-- the right meds, care, and treatment than the actual effects of madness.
As far as that goes, Erickson's best songs-- the ever-astounding "You're Gonna Miss Me", "Fire Engine", "Red Temple Prayer (Two Headed Dog)", "For You (I'd Do Anything)"-- are no crazier than those of any gifted songwriter whose effortless output marks both a sign of genius and a certain insanity. Where do these things come from? And are all artists able to reach down into themselves and produce music capable of affecting so many perhaps a little bit nuts, too?
The happy ending of movie and man alike is, of course, that Roky Erickson is back up and running, but You're Gonna Miss Me adds one important facet to the tale: he's still good, too. One unique selling point of this disc is an unreleased song of recent vintage, "Goodbye Sweet Dreams", which plays over the ending credits of You're Gonna Miss Me and implies a fresh start to Erickson's stalled career. Is there more where that came from? Of course there is. There always is. But for the first time in his life, Roky Erickson may be in a position to actively expand his legacy rather than simply fade away with it.


The Italian electronic producer and arch conceptualist finds a new flamboyance in astoundingly ornate, song-like pieces of deconstructed trance and video-game chirps.

Scacco Matto

To promote Scacco Matto, his first album for Warp Records, Lorenzo Senni challenged his fans to a virtual game of chess. With a penchant for deconstruction and a back catalog defined by monochrome palettes of icy sawtooth waves, the Italian electronic musician does seem like the kind of guy who’d be handy at the game. The rules are fixed but the outcome is unpredictable; within extremely narrow parameters, players can display flair, cunning, and subterfuge.
Scacco Matto, which is Italian for checkmate, is the product of self-imposed limits and rules. The writing process was a back-and-forth volley, according to Senni, with every action followed by a reaction, as he deliberately countered his own moves in a knotty one-player game.  The basic material remains familiar—gated synth tones arranged in taut melodies and spindly arpeggios—but Senni has found a new flamboyance in these astoundingly ornate, often song-like pieces.
The Milan-based artist has been working within strict limitations since 2012’s Quantum Jelly, the record that seeded his idea of “pointillistic trance”: a mirage of a familiar genre constructed from the “Super Saw” preset of a Roland JP8080 synthesizer, with no drums to anchor the beat, but big drops for that euphoric release. When Senni joined Warp with 2016’s Persona EP, he added flesh to those bare bones by introducing himself as the “rave voyeur”: a bright-eyed, clean-living soul who gets his late-night fuel from energy drinks and observes our hedonism with calculated interest. Now he leads us gently away from the dancefloor to a more orderly setting, a manicured garden of synthetic topiary and rococo fancies. “Dance Tonight Revolution Tomorrow” is the most relaxed Senni has sounded in a long time; a ponderous melody line makes its way across a grid of synthetic pizzicato strings which pluck-pluck-pluck in tidy formation. It’s a simple phrase, immediately memorable, but over seven and a half minutes Senni keeps finding subtle ways to build tension while barely moving.
“Canone Infinito,” which was originally commissioned for the corridors of an intensive care unit in Bergamo, takes the refined ambience to the extreme. A sad melody ebbs and flows in an endless looping musical round—think Pachelbel’s Canon for furloughed ravers—and the undulating arpeggios feel like a portal to a lost world of straight-backed courtiers and gilded harpsichords. But “Canone Infinito” also points to a long-established link between classical music and trance, which has repurposed plenty of concert hall hits for peak-time euphoria (as established by William Orbit’s ’90s spin on Barber’s Adagio for Strings and its remix by Dutch DJ Ferry Corsten).
Elsewhere, Senni makes this connection through tiny gestures: a few bars of hands-in-the-air piano followed by stabs of harpsichord-like synth, buzzing and metallic, on “XBreakingEdgeX.” There’s a further classical/electronic reference within the squeaky melodies of “THINK BIG” and “Discipline of Enthusiasm,” which recall the 8-bit Bach and Tchaikovsky that once blared from primitive video-game chips.
It speaks to Senni’s increasing dexterity as an electronic auteur that all of this simply makes sense together; his themes and reference points cohere smoothly, right through to the cover art. The image, titled “Zuma #30,” was shot by photographer and conceptual artist John Divola in 1977 as part of a project documenting the dilapidation of an oceanfront house in Malibu. Seen through a window, one of those perfect Californian sunsets burns gold and orange beyond the white walls of the interior, which have been covered in thick black dots of spray paint. Was this an act of vandalism? Or some kind of manic meditation? Either way, it’s a retina-searing image of creativity born of limited means.
Checkmate, the game’s final, winning move, is the chess position in which the king is doomed to be captured. It’s a frustrating quirk of chess that you don’t actually get to capture him—the inevitability of the result is enough to wrap up the game. Senni, so comfortable surfing his endless trance builds, surely thrives in these moments. With Scacco Matto he sweeps the tournament to become a grandmaster of unresolved tension.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The dub techno of the Manchester duo’s latest mixtape attempts to capture the violent energy vibrating through the world at this particular moment in history.

hybtwibt?

Space Afrika, the Manchester duo of Joshua Inyang and Joshua Reid, have always made music that directly responds to their surroundings. In the past, they’ve spoken of the way that Manchester itself, a city of grey skies and concrete, has informed the sparse, overcast nature of their productions. “Everything we do and are is a product of our experience,” they told Truants in 2016. “Manchester is the place that made us [...] It would be hard, maybe even ignorant not to translate that into the sounds we create.” Often wordless, but full of meaning, their downer dub techno and fractured ambient instrumentals have always been a conscious reflection of the world as they see it.
Their new release hybtwibt?—a mixtape based on material from the duo’s recent broadcast on NTS Radio—comes from a similar place, though it operates on a somewhat grander scale. Rather than looking just at their city, the mixtape seems to attempt to capture the energy vibrating through the world at this particular moment in history, as people across the globe take to the streets to protest police violence against Black people and other people of color, only to be met with more violence. (They've said that proceeds from the sales of this release will go to a variety of nonprofits, including Black Lives Matter Global Network and NAACP, among others.) Like a lot of their music, the general mood is downcast and foreboding, full of droning synthesizers and the distant hiss of reverb-hazed noise. But the music is intercut with meaningful samples and field recordings of protests, wrenching cries, wailing sirens, and profound monologues.
The tracks are dense. “Wanna know,” for example, feels more emotionally complicated than much of the music they’ve released to date, pairing a slowly unfolding piano piece with a person talking about the ways that the state antagonizes and entraps people who are already struggling. Were it not for the speech it accompanies, you might call the instrumental ambient, but the feelings it evokes are more complicated, balancing on a knife’s edge between the placidity associated with such music and an urgent call to action.
Other tracks take different tacks. “Kitty” is built on overlapping samples of disembodied voices from lost soul songs. It’s ghostly and shattered, an elegy for a world that shouldn’t have to be this way. Tracks like that, as well as the slivered interludes strewn amid the longer pieces, make hybtwibt? feel of a piece with the dizzying music that the critic Adam Harper once described as “epic collage.” Producers like Chino Amobi and Elysia Crampton stack disparate melodies and samples together to make disorienting music for a society that is more disorienting by the day. Working in this mode, Space Afrika pull together samples that capture the crushing feelings that have come up in these protests, channeling grief, pain, frustration, and desperation all at once.
And yet this record isn’t overwhelmed by these feelings—at its heart, it’s not especially austere. There’s this glowing core amid the chaos, a beauty in the maelstrom, that you can feel them gesturing toward on nearly every track. “DairyDay4” foregrounds this sentiment most clearly, featuring a person talking about the joy they feel about an impending wedding, over an instrumental that swells and swirls in a way that’s reminiscent of classic RPG soundtracks. It’s a spark of warmth and light, a distant dream that a better world might be possible, amid the reminders of how awful the one we live in can be.


HEALTH's debut album attempted to artfully reconcile dance/digital elements with rock/noise textures. The group goes one step further on this remix album, which features contributions from Crystal Castles, Acid Girls, Thrust Lab, and many more.

DISCO

Funniest band name ever (this week only). It's so undangerous and sub-ironics that it seems to circle back around to being scary, snide, and nihilist. I crack up every time I'm getting to see them live and someone wheezes any variation on "I cannot wait to get my fill of...HEALTH!" (How did these guys resist-- especially since, like certain fellow Californians Zach Hill and Spencer Seim, they share a love for maniac percussion and Nintendosonics-- giving themselves the pseudo-metal moniker Hellth?)
HEALTH's self-titled debut earned them sniggering sobriquets like "Boredoms Jr" and "Diet Liars," yet among what kept the admittedly derivative album interesting was the tension produced by its attempts to artfully reconcile dance/digital elements with rock/noise textures (not to mention  its ambient fringes and the occasional blotch of straight-up pop). The resulting sound was skeletal, adrenal, and clangorous. Listeners inclined to attribute narrative structure to otherwise chaotically sequenced albums could even consider the debut as bearing a tale of one musical mode's victory over-- or surrender to-- another: The electro-clubbily titled and (eventually) executed "Glitter Pills" was followed by the lurching (dying?) rock of "Perfect Skin", and then the platter closed with the tribal, clipped-Gregorian funereality of "Lost Time".
Which brings us to this remix album that feels like an argument: HEALTH's discography is here to mend those leftover rifty, provincial scenes where the guitar dorks and electro goobers still get aesthetically territorial at each others' keggers. Just a couple of weeks ago, I saw opener the Death Set put a crowd of (to safely generalize) dance-kids awaiting a Bonde Do Role and Villains card on edge by screaming "Come on, you motherfuckers, this is a punk rock show!" While, yup, the Death Set remix dance tracks and all, their own stuff is hooky hardcore, in some ways a better bridge from Death From Above 1979 into MSTRKRFT than that, ugh, DFA1979 remix album (plus all them groups are/were kinda dickish on stage). What I'm trying to say is that the overtly dancefloor DISCO/DISCO+ is a whole other thing from HEALTH's previous output, and yet, it works.
HEALTH ran so lean that you wanted to offer it some smoked gouda and cherry pop, so one might expect a rework-roster of blog-friendly artisans to supply the cheese and, well, coke. But DISCO is that rare, not-disposable such collection, largely justifying the charming pomp of the band-- printing their project names in allcaps, the tendency to issue artistic statements, etc. Of DISCO, they decreed: "It is not about market saturation or crossover appeal. It is purely about the music, and we are proud of it. This is an album, and meant to be listened to as one. The goal of this record is not only to present all these songs at once, but also to ensure that they are not forgotten in the constantly updating, content-hungry internet music world." Okay, they've hitched their viral sincerity to their synergy-savvy; just as Crystal Castles gave HEALTH's profile an alley-oop (and like hip-hop and r&b's infamous, infinite "featuring"s), they're boosting this release's electronic acts, to the point of listing them as members in a collective on DISCO's separate-from-regular-ol'-HEALTH MySpace page. And don't get my wallet started on the website for HEALTH FASHION, your mailorder source for American Apparel V-necks boasting pastel mandates.
The bandmembers' names don't appear in this review because I am taking the group up on its insistence that it's not concerned with the pretense/spotlight of individual utterance-- in fact, I kind of wish they, sigh, took it further by wearing masks and adopting glyphic pseudonyms. This dance collage may often push the vocals to the front of the mix much more than its source material did, but those droned-in, genderless, ghost-tech vox are what make HEALTH seem both disembodied and like a superorganism in the first place. The concept/gimmick of identity is further shattered by the diversity of the remixers' approaches; DISCO is like an Oz or Wonkan chocolate factory of beat styles, all proving the point that drum machines can pummel just as cathartically, and as fetchingly, as forearms.
Some of the remixers employ only one processed and reverbed "clonk!" from HEALTH, yet others use the original work's entire structure as an undergirding. DISCO's basic arc is: begin close to home, drift (albeit aggressively) through decades of electronic music, rest for a metronomic eight-minute piece by C.L.A.W.S. to wonder what the point of life is, and backtrack to a computer simulation of HEALTH's OCD assault for a finale. Amateurish DJs might score respect by playing the Acid Girls remixes, because their constant, exciting shifts will leave the impression that you're blending multiple tracks. Thrust Lab's epic "Problem Is" comes off as somehow funny and ominous, tonally coasting from Vangelis' Blade Runner score into Giorgio Moroder into some Weather Report fusion, landing on (duh) M83. CFCF's take on "Triceratops" picks up that dairy product and trumps it by adding Oldfield/Exorcist-y "Tubular Bells" jive, and some of that Steely Dan shit that Adult Swim's Tim and Eric mock/celebrate, all with a sick pulse reminiscent of so many 80s horror movie jams, including Hot Ice's "Theme From Friday the 13th Part 3 in 3-D".
The bonus material on DISCO+ is less of-a-piece, but just as varied and deserving of widescale distribution. Nastique throws the classically stilted "Blue Monday" beat under HEALTH's prehistoric-squawk bus, Bearded Baby re-remixes Crystal Castles' (also included here) HEALTH remix, and Captain Ahab mashes the band up with Foot Village's wellness-centered "Protective Nourishment". Only DISCO+ is as playful as the cover art's promise of "ALL THE HITS" in an awesomely humorless font. So, forfeit the urge to hold a conviction-o-meter up to these rattle-come-latelies' homages to Swans, Ruins, and Lightning Bolt. DISCO streamlines HEALTH's analog-trance thickets without letting the beats betray the atmospherics. Never merely meager, this project delivers, both when you're waving your orgy-snorkel all blotto on-the-town, and for a soundtrack to serious rumination at your midday desk of harsh reality. None of the parties involved are inventing, or reinventing, anything, necessarily, but damn if they aren't tinkering their asses off.


The veteran Chicago dance producer sets aside club conventions in favor of an ultra-smooth hybrid of house, disco, jazz, and new age.

What Do the Stars Say to You

If house music was a human being, it would be in its late thirties and plumb in the season of mid-life crisis, which makes a certain musical maturity an inevitable development. That it should be Chicago producer Ron Trent who brings house music its pipe and slippers on What Do the Stars Say to You is either remarkable or predictable, depending on whether you’re more familiar with Trent as the firebrand who produced the spartan dance classic “Altered States” at the age of 14 or the co-founder of Prescription, a label renowned for its unfathomably unwrinkled deep house.
What Do the Stars Say to You is the polar opposite of “Altered States” and other early house records that jolted their way out of Chicago and Detroit in the late ’80s and early ’90s. It is florid where so much early house was raw; laid back, where its predecessors burst with energy; and smooth, compared to the genre’s typically spiky funk. The album revels in an ultra-languid hybrid of house, disco, jazz, and new age that nods to Stevie Wonder’s sweetly pastoral Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants and the Germanic wooze of Tangerine Dream.
Trent is far from the first producer to bring live instrumentation to house: Masters at Work’s Nuyorican Soul project in the 1990s was a call back to the disco records from which house was born. But few producers have gone quite as far down the rabbit hole as Trent does here. The record features contributions from septuagenarian jazz violinist Jean-Luc Ponty, Ivan Conti and Alex Malheriros from Brazilian jazz fusionists Azymuth, and Texan psych outfit Khruangbin—an unlikely lineup for a house project. A hint of jam-band earthiness floats over the record like weed and patchouli at a Phish concert. (The album is designed, according to Trent, for “harmonizing with spirit, urban life and nature.”)
Synths and electronics do feature throughout the 10 tracks (15 on the mixed edition) but they are intended as a framework for the live musicianship, with Trent himself contributing drums, percussion, keys, piano, and guitar. Throughout, What Do the Stars Say to You keeps things immaculately clean and tidy It’s the kind of record where the mastering credit (New York house and disco legend François Kevorkian) really merits its prominence—an album to be downloaded in WAV and used to test out new speakers.
Maturity, musicality, and finesse are not always welcome words in dance music, and What Do the Stars Say to You makes no concessions to anyone who likes their house rough, ready, and machine-driven. Everything is smooth as velvet and as relaxed as a sloth sleepover, from Lars Bartkuhn’s silvery guitar solo on “Cool Water” to Italian ambient pioneer Gigi Masin’s synth lines on “Admira,” a song for those who consider Manuel Göttsching’s horizontal masterpiece E2-E4 to be a little too belligerent.
Within these criteria, however, there is plenty to admire. The synth melodies that frame much of the album are beautiful, notably the Detroit techno-ish sweeps on “Cycle of Many,” which evoke the cosmic melancholia of space telescope images on a rainy afternoon, and the mournful jazz cycles of the album’s title track. And the album’s blend of electronics and live instrumentation is elegant, suggesting both careful sound design and a certain musical empathy. On “Sphere,” Trent’s layered synth cradles Ponty’s bright violin melodies like a baby in a hammock, while the violin solo betrays its genesis in electronics: Trent initially played the solo on a synth, and Ponty then remade it.
Beneath the music’s supple folds there also lies the odd carefully sharpened knife. “Flos Potentia (Sugar, Cotton, Tabacco),” with Khruangbin, may seem to suggest tie-dyed good times to go with its gilded Afrobeat glide—“flos potentia” means “flower power” in Latin—but the song is subtitled after the three plants that drove the slave trade, hinting at more serious preoccupations. This subtle suggestion of resistance is cleverly played. What Do the Stars Say to You never demands that you pay attention; a record of gentle rewards, gradual discovery, and the slow musical ripening of age, it asks you to come forth and to meet it on home turf. In its idiosyncrasies, it’s quietly defiant.


Young Americans represented David Bowie's dive into soul music, particularly Philly Soul. Containing the stunning funk single "Fame," the album felt like a vehicle for Bowie to address one of his favorite topics—pop stardom—from a new angle, at a moment when it seemed likely to destroy him.

Young Americans

[Ed. Note: In light of David Bowie's passing, Pitchfork commissioned reviews of several of his classic albums.]

In the summer of 1974, as he was traveling across America on his mammoth Diamond Dogs arena-rock tour, David Bowie got deeply into soul music. By July, he was spiking his live sets with covers of the Ohio Players' "Here Today and Gone Tomorrow" and Eddie Floyd's "Knock on Wood," but he was even more interested in what was happening in dance clubs—particularly the new disco coming out of Philadelphia International Records. Bowie booked a mid-tour recording session at Sigma Sound, the studio where Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff were constructing the sound of Philadelphia. But he wasn't working with Gamble and Huff, or indeed any of the studio's house musicians: He had something else in mind.
The soul-inspired album that came out of the Sigma Sound recordings, Young Americans, was yet another new direction for an artist who staked his career on ceaselessly finding new directions. It was also the first time he’d made an album whose chief purpose was pleasure. There’s nothing like the apocalyptic visions of Ziggy Stardust and Diamond Dogs on Young Americans; it’s as smart as anything he’d recorded before it, but also relaxed and limber-hipped enough for his hardcore fans’ less alienated big sisters and little brothers to get into. And it was the first of his records to feature Carlos Alomar, the ingenious rhythm guitarist who would become his live band’s musical director for more than a decade.
Bowie had met Alomar at a session early in the year, when he'd produced the Scottish pop singer Lulu's covers of his own "The Man Who Sold the World" and "Watch That Man." He drafted Alomar in to play at the Sigma Sound sessions, and Alomar brought along a couple of singers: his wife, Robin Clark, and his best friend, the then-unknown Luther Vandross. Always quick to recognize talent, Bowie immediately got Vandross and Clark in on the recording.
At those sessions, Bowie recorded enough songs for an album (reportedly meant to be called either "The Gouster" or, more cynically, "Shilling the Rubes")—although it would've been very different from the Young Americans we know today. Its most radical gesture would have been "John, I'm Only Dancing (Again)," a rewritten and discofied version of a snarling, homoerotic glam-rock single from three years earlier. (Bowie didn't actually release "John, I'm Only Dancing (Again)" until 1979; it was a minor hit in England and ended up on his Changestwobowie compilation.)
"Young Americans" the song was a hybrid of contemporary soul (the Vandross-led backup singers were all over it), the hyper-emotive '50s singer Johnnie Ray, and—another recent obsession of Bowie's—the up-and-coming New Jersey songwriter Bruce Springsteen, whose song "It's Hard to Be a Saint in the City" Bowie covered at Sigma Sound. It was also very current: Bowie sang "Do you remember President Nixon?" in the middle of a song he'd started recording three days after Nixon's resignation.
After that initial burst of productivity, the Diamond Dogs tour resumed, now so deeply influenced by Philadelphia soul that it was nicknamed the "Philly Dogs" tour. Bowie ditched most of his elaborate stage design, and added an opening set by the "Mike Garson Band"—his own group, fronted by Vandross and Clark. (Their set included a terrific Vandross original, "Funky Music," as well as a reworked version of Bowie's hippie mantra "Memory of a Free Festival.") One of the new additions to Bowie's own set was a medley of the Flares' "Foot Stompin'" and the old jazz standard "I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate," powered by a funk riff Alomar had come up with.
When the group returned to the studio in November to try to get a little more uptempo oomph into the album, they unsuccessfully tried to record "Foot Stomping." They did, however, come up with two killer additions to Young Americans: Bowie's dreamy, spiraling slow one "Win," and his lyrical rewrite of Vandross's "Funky Music" as the haunting "Fascination."
Bowie had also befriended John Lennon around that time, and invited him along to play guitar on a cover of his Beatles-era song "Across the Universe" at a final session in January, 1975. (Also present then, for the first time on a Bowie record: drummer Dennis Davis, who would go on to be the hidden rhythmic genius of all of his records up through 1980's Scary Monsters.) "Across the Universe" is the album's one genuine embarrassment, Vegas-y and bathetic. But bringing Lennon in yielded an unexpected dividend: Alomar's "Foot Stompin'" riff, a bit of arrangement brainstorming from Lennon, and a sharp, bitter lyric from Bowie combined, very quickly, into the stunning funk track "Fame." (Young Americans ended up being curiously Lennon-heavy: there's even a slightly mangled line from "A Day in the Life" in the middle of "Young Americans.")
"Fame" was a knockout, the song that gave Bowie his first American #1 single, and the soul world that he so admired took it to heart. By November, 1975, it landed Bowie on "Soul Train." (He wasn't the first white solo performer to play the show, but he was close.) George Clinton, by his own admission, modified its groove into "Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker)." And James Brown paid Bowie the ultimate backhanded compliment: The instrumental track of his 1976 single "Hot (I Need to Be Loved, Loved, Loved, Loved)" was a note-for-note duplicate of "Fame."
In the context of Bowie's flabbergasting '70s, Young Americans is distinctly a transitional record. It doesn't have the mad theatrical scope of Diamond Dogs or the formal audacity of Station to Station; at times, it comes off as an artist trying very hard to demonstrate how unpredictable he is. You couldn't mistake it for an actual Philly soul record, although like the LPs Bowie was devouring at the time, it often comes off as hits-plus-filler. Still, a good deal of the filler is lovely, and recording funk and disco in 1974 put him way ahead of the curve. While there had already been a handful of disco hits on the pop charts, no other established rock musician had yet tried to do anything similar, and Bowie pulled it off in a way that not only didn't seem crass but gave Luther Vandross his big break.
The album was also a vehicle for Bowie to address one of his favorite topics—pop stardom—from a new angle, at a moment when it seemed likely to destroy him. ("Fame" shares its title with a Broadway show about Marilyn Monroe's life that closed after one performance in November, 1974; thanks to Bowie's disastrous management deal at the time, its quarter-million-dollar loss effectively came out of his pocket.) When Bowie talked about lower-case fame with Tracey Emin in 2001, he was a bit more sanguine about it: "There is nothing there to covet.... I understand that it doesn't even get you a Madonna ticket these days. So I won't be recommending it to my offspring. Having influence is more rewarding for feeding ego." He had nothing to worry about on that score.