Grating yet perversely gratifying, this King Krule-adjacent South London band’s debut also contains music of inarguable force or surprising beauty.

Debonair

King Krule’s Archy Marshall prefers to keep it in the family, breaking away from the conclave of musicians who play on his curated, hermetic records only for occasional genre-crossing collaborations with friends like Mount Kimbie, Trash Talk, and Ratking. So why is Marshall’s first new song since 2020’s Man Alive tacked onto the end of the debut album by an unknown South London band called Horsey? It snaps into place in the credits: Horsey features singer-songwriter and keyboardist Theo McCabe, King Krule drummer George Bass, singer-guitarist Jacob Read (who was once immortalized in a King Krule song), and bassist Jack Marshall (who is Archy’s older brother). It’s the first gleaming of what an Extended Kruleverse might sound like, and that’s the only context in which it makes a lick of sense.
Debonair is an exasperating, exhilarating record that suggests—but here the comparisons threaten to spiral out with hypnotic absurdity. You might think of Benny Goodman’s band being cryogenically frozen at the end of the swing era and reanimated during the 15-minute reign of Art Brut, but to simplify, imagine the Fall if Mark E. Smith could sing. I hated this album the first time I heard it, and the second, and the third. By the seventh, it had settled into my gray matter like a glittery, pukey miasma, and I had to admit that while I didn’t always like it, I kind of loved it.
In truth, it was mainly the first single and opener, “Sippy Cup,” that stuck in my craw: Though it’s played with striking dexterity and clarity, the theatrical surf-jazz brings back not entirely fond memories of hyperactive, anything-goes aughties bands with names like Architecture in Helsinki. It also introduces the protean McCabe at his most overbearing, modulating from something akin to Frank Black doing a Louis Armstrong impression into a hail-fellow-well-met showtunes persona. But he does it all with impeccable smoothness and a weird force-of-personality lucidity that’s irritating and unforgettable.
“Sippy Cup” is a lot, and more challenging moments soon follow, like “Arms and Legs,” which welds blues vamps that resemble Modest Mouse at their shoutiest to bouncy little organ choruses redolent of 1970s Beach Boys. One of these choruses goes, “Take me away/Take me to a salad bar/Feed me to an elephant mask/Lock me in a cable car,” and here we can no longer put off addressing McCabe’s lyrics. His surrealism resonates in a genuinely personal key, though it might be compared to that of Tom Waits in the ’80s. It goes awry only in one strange, stray use of the word “bitch” on “1070,” an unappealing Scott Walker-like turn late in the album that seems to say, We haven’t had any classical piano yet, so why not?
Horsey could’ve made a whole album in this ponderous vein, or that of the demented funhouse tune “Clown” (which is like the Frogs doing Screamin’ Jay Hawkins); thankfully they didn’t. Grating yet perversely gratifying, Debonair also contains music of inarguable force or surprising beauty. Its best songs operate on the same moody, underwater wavelength as King Krule’s contribution: On “Underground,” Read works a sweet, sincere melody from the merest rumble to a Four Seasons falsetto with superb control. The two-part “Wharf” is similar, packed with little tempo and genre changes that exemplify one of the best things about Horsey: If you don’t like one part, another will be along presently.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is “Everyone’s Tongue,” a memoir of a shark attack that harks back to Les Savy Fav at peak ferocity. On another plane entirely is “Lagoon,” a yacht-rock delight with an irresistibly lusty vocal performance that’s only occasionally interrupted by hellish screams and train-wreck transitions. It’s a dollop of glorious schmaltz on top of Debonair, a noise-rock opera that should be buried in a time capsule to troll the future, and also to get it away from me, because I can’t stop listening to it.

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A posthumous album captures the legendary drummer and Afrobeat icon at his most copacetic and polished, meeting collaborators at their level even as he urges them to his.

There Is No End

In a video from a Paris recording session in 2014, Tony Oladipo Allen jams behind a drum set, hands lightly grasping the sticks, his body at ease. His mind was likely laser-focused on the rhythms, and yet nothing about him reads tense or forced. In this moment, the late drummer, composer, and Fela Kuti collaborator personifies Black cool—a term that, to borrow from the Roots drummer Questlove’s description, means Allen radiated “cool heat, intensity held in check by reserves of self-possession.”
During his 60-plus-year career, Allen pioneered a genre fused with multiple signifiers of Black cool—jazz, highlife, soul, funk—while traveling the world as a solo artist and shaping the musical direction of Africa ’70, one of the most captivating bands in Afrobeat. Yet one of his most impactful gifts was his commitment to collaborating with a wide range of musicians. On his final, posthumous album, There Is No End, he’s entirely in his wheelhouse, directing up-and-comers and veterans as they find their place in his steps. It’s an intimidating mission for any artist—melding their own distinctive sound to the amorphous beats of those still sharpening their arsenal. But Allen meets his collaborators where they are and transfers not only his musical knowledge but his ability to embody coolness while deep within a performance.
Allen composed all of the beats on the 14-track album and shares production credits with Berlin-based producer Vincent Taeger and French musician Vincent Taurelle. Like his dynamic work with known and unknown artists on 2006’s Lagos No Shaking, “Deer in Headlights” is a magnetic meeting between the drummer and Detroit rapper Danny Brown. It runs like a whip-smart back-and-forth, with Brown bringing the hard-edged, always-on-offense style of his home city beside Allen’s restrained, unhurried groove. The hook is instantly memorable, and the transition from melody into Allen’s assured playing is a smooth curveball. ZelooperZ, a rapper in Brown’s Bruiser Brigade collective, is another salient presence. On “Coonta Kinte,” he projects anxiety about America’s need to diminish Black life: “Why you want me in the ground, cover my skin in soil/I’m just a Black man in a world full of colors,” he sing-raps, perhaps unintentionally echoing the thoughts of a character in Ghanian American author Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s 2018 collection Friday Black. Both narrators portray anti-Blackness as a constant disruption that requires survivors to cultivate dark humor to survive.
Allen was born when Nigeria was still under British rule, and by the time he joined Fela Kuti’s band in 1964, the country had been independent for less than five years. In 1969, Allen was part of the entourage that traveled to the U.S. with Kuti, settling in Los Angeles during the height of the Black Panthers’ advocacy against state-sanctioned anti-Black violence and their push towards Black economic and social sustainability. The experience profoundly impacted both men. Fela returned to Nigeria emboldened and ready to die for his people. Allen, though not the frontman, molded his compositions to reflect the urgency, rage, heat, and fire of a diaspora under attack. The violence is ceaseless, but on this album, Allen and his collaborators make clear that so too are the collective cries for accountability. On “Hurt Your Soul,” the drums take center stage; on one standout section, snares like gunshots underline rapper Nate Bone’s fear of jumpy law enforcement agents who, while armed, are startled by the slightest sign of Black activity.
Aside from showcasing a legend in top form, the album also serves as an arrow toward future stars. British-born artist Lava La Rue’s ethereal yet confident tone and delivery on “One Inna Million” channels the agility of FKA twigs. Tsunami is quietly menacing on “Très Magnifique,” and Sampa the Great is enthralling both as a feature on “Stumbling Down” and as a student of Allen’s work: As an artist from Zambia who’s based in Australia and influenced by genres beyond her native country, including hip-hop and R&B, Sampa has faced a similar challenge of being put in a box.
While the breadth of voices here highlights Allen’s constant search for new creators, it also means the album tapers off in places. Tracks like “Rich Black,” featuring Koreatown Oddity, and “Gang on Holiday,” with Jeremiah Jae, could have been trimmed for a tighter sequence. Even the earlier released single “Cosmosis,” alongside Skepta and Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri, would have best served as an interlude connecting Okri’s poetry to the album’s overarching themes of self-interrogation and displacement. Its existential musings on the fickleness of world peace feel out of place and unmoored against the record’s more immediate and insular reflections of the present.
One of the most crushing moments of the pandemic has been the interruption of rituals, specifically homegoings. Bidding farewell to those we love while unable to congregate and celebrate the lives they lived means that mourning Tony Allen was a global but lonely act. The crowds that would have turned into listening parties were impossible to amass; amid worldwide despair, it felt almost selfish to mourn him with communal reverence that acknowledged his instrumental mastery and legacy. There Is No End is Allen as his most copacetic, polished self. It doesn’t feel like the finish line, but rather a passing of the baton—to artists who compelled him to evolve, and to fans always willing to be surprised.

Buy: Rough Trade
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A new anthology of previously unissued performances covers three distinct facets of the jazz pianist’s career: his trio work, orchestral arrangements, and his endlessly inventive solo playing.

Bill Evans: Treasures: Solo, Trio and Orchestra Recordings from Denmark (1965-1969)

If Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue is the most common entry point for a new jazz fan and John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme is number two, a typical next step would be an album by Bill Evans. The LPs drawn from the Village Vanguard sessions in 1961, when he recorded with his great trio that included Scott LaFaro on bass Paul Motian on drums, are widely considered to be the pianist’s high-water mark, but he was an artist of unusual consistency, not just in quality but also in musical vision. While the ’60s and ’70s were a time of rupture in jazz, with the rise of free improv and fusion, Evans mostly worked within relatively narrow parameters—acoustic post-bop played with trios, some solos, a few duos, an occasional date with a larger band.
When you pair Evans’ endlessly listenable style with a seemingly bottomless well of recorded gigs, you get a reissue cottage industry boosted further by the vinyl revival. Every Record Store Day seems to bring a new Evans release or two. The latest of these, Treasures, is a collection of previously unissued performances—over two hours of music, 2xCD or 3xLP—made for Danish radio and cut between 1965 and 1969. It runs counter to some recent Evans reissues by featuring an array of instrumental configurations, and it’s a strong showcase of how he adapted his playing to reflect the settings.
The first section finds Evans in two different trios he worked with for a short time, and running through tunes he played frequently—standards like “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “Someday My Prince Will Come,” and “Beautiful Love,” along with a couple of standards Evans wrote himself, “Very Early” and the immortal “Waltz for Debby,” which appears three times in this collection. These are relaxed, warm sets with Evans in top form.
The second disc contains later trio recordings, this time featuring bassist Eddie Gomez, eventually the pianist’s longest-tenured collaborator, along with drummers Alex Riel (on the ’66 set) and Marty Morell (from a ’69 session). Evans and Gomez were like two halves of one musical mind, and it’s always fascinating to hear them together, as Gomez moves easily between supporting rhythm, undergirding the harmonic foundation, and playing melodic leads. There are some excellent livelier cuts in the mix this time, like the humming “Autumn Leaves” and the hard-swinging “Emily.”
But while the earlier trio work here is good and the latter is great, the more tantalizing Treasures sessions are those with the Royal Danish Symphony Orchestra and the Danish Radio Big Band, and those that feature Evans alone. The pieces for orchestra were arranged by trumpeter and composer Palle Mikkelborg and recorded in 1969, and included Evans compositions along with this album’s title track, written explicitly for the performance. For me, there’s something slightly vexing about hearing a jazz pianist backed by an orchestra of this size, if only because I struggle to hear the loose interplay to which I’m accustomed. That said, Mikkelborg’s arrangements hold interest, sprinkling modernist dissonance in with the lush cinematic swoon.
In this arrangement, the perfectly melodic “Waltz for Debby” sounds like something out of a Rodgers & Hammerstein musical, while “Time Remembered” has a gorgeous, low-lit ambiance. Evans was experimenting with orchestra periodically in the late ’60s—his lesser-known LP Bill Evans Trio with Symphony Orchestra came out in ’66, and he had a series of live dates with orchestra in the city that year—and Mikkelborg’s sympathetic backing gives a good sense of how his harmonic approach translates in such a setting.
Bill Evans alone is always full of surprises. He used his solo work to explore extremes of touch and density. On one piece, he might leave chasms of silence and finger each note with almost painful delicacy, and on another, his playing might be very dense, as if he’s compelled to explore every structural possibility simultaneously. His quest for harmonic intrigue even led him to record several albums of him accompanying himself, multi-tracking his improvisations so that two or three pianos were heard simultaneously. I think of his solo material as something apart from his small-group work, unlike, say, Thelonious Monk, whose musical personality is more unified.
The full range of Evans’ approach to solo piano is heard in these sessions cut for radio in 1965. His composition “Re: Person I Knew” is a piece of rare beauty, mysterious and lyrical, and his version here is organic and alive, expanding and contracting as if it were a living, breathing thing. Monk’s “‘Round Midnight” opens with a knotty and angular intro before the eternal melody glides out of the clouds, and Evans sometimes seems like he’s wrestling with the tune, trying to extract every viable idea from its harmonic shape. Evans recorded a classic uptempo version of “My Funny Valentine” with guitarist Jim Hall on the 1962 album Undercurrent, but here he takes it at medium tempo and lingers over the individual notes in a way that makes you hear the lyrics in your head before adding inventive embellishments to the melody in his arrangement’s middle section. A few songs later, he ends his solo set with “Epilogue,” the haunting fragment threaded through his 1958 LP Everybody Digs Bill Evans.
Treasures is kind of like four mini-albums in one: You get a taste of Evans in a pickup trio, another with him and one of his most reliable collaborators, a suite for orchestra, and then an excellent solo set. As with so many previously unheard releases from Evans’ vault over the past decade, both the sound quality and the overall package are excellent, reinforcing the idea that this is important music that demands to be preserved properly. This even though Evans probably didn’t give these sessions much thought once they were over—he was a busy man during these years, always on the way to the next gig.


Working with members of the National, Grateful Dead rhythm guitarist Bob Weir goes Americana and discovers a great old voice.

Blue Mountain

It’s been a slow transformation (and a decade of beard-growing) for former Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir, who hasn’t released a studio album since Ratdog’s Evening Moods in 2000. As co-creator of a jam-friendly musical language with the Dead, the 68-year-old Weir has never entirely been able to escape that musical flavor during his collaborations with numerous lyricists and producers, almost all geared towards live performances in front of dancing audiences.
However, on what is unquestionably his best solo release since 1972’s Ace, Blue Mountain finds Weir in territory that is both new and intimately familiar. Produced by longtime auxiliary National member Josh Kaufman, and working with songwriter Josh Ritter, a gaggle of National members, jammers, and others, Blue Mountain returns Weir to the American west of the Dead’s youth, populated by rivers and trains and cloud-scapes, all flickering at the edge of magic.
Pitched as Weir’s “cowboy album”—and the songs are largely about that—Mountain is both a collection of contemporary Americana and something more. While some of the material would likely sound at home in the Dead’s repertoire, like the good-natured gallop of “Gonesville,” it’s hard to imagine the latter lineups of the band treating the music quite so elegantly as Kaufman and company. Most often, the album lands Weir in thick-aired spaces not dissimilar to Daniel Lanois’ work with Bob Dylan, like the humming spaghetti western chorale of “Ghost Towns” and the misty alt-folk stomp of “Lay My Lilly Down.”
As Weir’s sixth studio full-length outside the Grateful Dead, Blue Mountain functionally serves as a reboot for the guitarist, whose solo sensibility long ago veered far from Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter’s cosmic Americana and into the AOR waters of 1978’s Heaven Help the Fool (made with Fleetwood Mac producer Keith Olsen), the pastel fusion of Bobby and the Midnites in the ’80s, and the dense jam-jazz of Ratdog in the ’90s. With an ambient C&W production that often subsumes lead guitar into the reverb swirl (and occasionally swallows Weir), Blue Mountain will likewise probably prove inseparable from the historical period in which it was recorded. But, unlike Weir’s previous albums, Blue Mountain also finally seems like the right album at the right time for Weir. Quietly adventurous, wise, and a welcome late-career turn, Blue Mountain builds an ethereal home for a rhythm guitarist who was tempered in the chaos-friendly environs of Dead.
Filled with deep folk allusions and cowpoke asides about Mormon girls and Red River Valleys, Blue Mountain is very much a Josh Ritter album, too, who guides Weir back to the emotional turf of 1970’s American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead. But Ritter's lyrics sometimes teeter between timeless imagery and folksy platitudes, with the chorus of “Only A River” and other moments sounding a bit more like a musical about folk music.
But one of the nicest surprises of Weir's recent tours with his former bandmates—and what really sells Blue Mountain—is the vocal gravitas developed during Weir’s two decades of life and music after the Dead. In many ways, Blue Mountain is merely a vehicle for it, which itself is quietly miraculous. “Bobby Fans Are People Too” asserted a bumper sticker sold on Grateful Dead tour, neatly summarizing the junior Dead guitarist’s spot in the band’s canon. Long acting as an overblown short-short-wearing counterbalance to Jerry Garcia’s stoned (and sometimes somnambulant) cool, on Blue Mountain, Weir finally achieves some of the grace that Garcia possessed so easily from a young age.
Perhaps Blue Mountain’s most striking track is the totally solo “Ki-Yi Bossie,” one of a half-dozen songs in Weir’s 50-year career credited to him alone. A wide-eyed C&W strum set in “a 12-step meeting under harsh fluorescent light,” it’s the only moment of Blue Mountain that takes place in the unaffected present, and not coincidentally, the only place where Weir seems to express something of himself. Never mind the song as an account of sobriety, Weir’s grizzled hippie verse tags (“Well, alright, right on…”) and wry lyrics about searching for meaning and saving whales make it a 21st century Marin County cowboy lullaby. Minus producers or songwriters or bandmates, it’s a place for Weir's steps alone, suggesting a wide open territory still waiting to be explored.


Manu Chao: Estacion Proxima: Esperanza / Radio Bemba Sound System

Reading the news section on Manu Chao's website, you have to wonder whether you're looking at an artist's updates or some sort of multi-lingual, alternate reality CNN ticker. In between items about tour and festival dates, written in a mix of French, Spanish, Italian, German, and English, there are updates on the Saharawi independence movement in Western Sahara, Colombia's FARC rebels, and other causes and interests of the singer. This is only fitting for a musician who makes left-wing politics the lyrical centerpiece of his relentlessly globalist music and happens to be good friends with the Zapatistas' Subcomandante Marcos.
Chao is a superstar in Europe and Latin America but hasn't quite connected in the U.S., a country where his politics can seem fringy even to the left. But leaving aside his ideological drive and tendency to sing in up to seven languages on his albums (English among them), his music has a melting-pot logic to it that actually seems quite well-suited to a diverse society like ours. It's easy to look at his history, compare it to where he is now, and conclude that Chao was destined to become a musician without borders-- he was born in France to a Galician father and Basque mother who were living in exile from Franco's Spain, which made him a dual minority in his ancestral homeland and part of an immigrant family in the country of his birth.
Chao spent more than a decade playing in punk-influenced rock bands, including Los Carayos and Mano Negra, the latter of which punched his ticket to notoriety with its strange tours of South America by boat and train. In the late 90s, Mano Negra split up and Chao recruited musicians from Europe, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina into his new band, Radio Bemba Sound System, which he named partly for the word of mouth communication system favored by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara during their revolutionary campaign in Cuba (radio bemba is a Cuban colloquialism akin to rumor mill, bemba meaning lip). He recorded his first solo album, 1998's Clandestino, with this loosely assembled band.
His current label, Nacional, perhaps looking toward the wider exposure Chao gained in the U.S. with last year's La Radiolina, has now reissued Chao's second and third albums, Proxima Estacion: Esperanza and the live album Radio Bemba Sound System. Esperanza, whose title translates to Next Station: Hope, a reference to a stop on the Madrid transit system, has a unique feel, flowing like a blocks-long street party through 17 varied tracks. By the time of the album, Chao had moved mostly away from his punk musical roots in favor of a sound that incorporated elements of Spanish and Latin American folk, reggae, African rhythm, and hip-hop, as well as samples of crowds, radio broadcasts, and individual voices.
The album is not quite the masterpiece it is occasionally framed as (it was huge in parts of Europe, where just after it came out you couldn't escape the image of its cover), but it is a very good, cohesive, and internally consistent record that functions as a continuous suite. Chao's adenoidal voice is not spectacular, but it ably delivers his multi-lingual message of universal justice and equality, and helps him keep his melodies simple and straightforward. Many tracks are brief, textural excursions that serve as connective tissue between more fully developed songs.
The way the Cuban-style horns rise on "Eldorado" is reminiscent of a car driving by with the windows open and the stereo up, "Papito" is a nearly unclassifiable mix of ska, Roma brass, circus music, New Orleans street funeral, and European pop, while closer "Infinita Tristeza" is an urban soundscape, casting somber acoustic guitar and organ into a sea of voices speaking different languages. Reggae beats figure prominently, mixing with surf guitar on "Me Gustas Tu", and subtly buoying the sonar-ish lead guitar on "Homens".
Radio Bemba Sound System captures a 2001 live performance featuring songs from Esperanza, Clandestino, and the albums of Mano Negra. The recording, a blend of two performances, never lets up, packing all or part of 29 songs into an hour, and I think it captures the inclusive spirit of Chao's music even better than his studio work. The cheers at the end of "Bienvenida a Tijuana"-- when the final line offers a ringing endorsement of sex and marijuana-- are amazing, and the transformation of punky Mano Negra songs such as "Peligro", "The Monkey", "Mala Vida", and "Machine Gun" into multi-genred beasts is something to hear. "Machine Gun", for instance, begins as slow reggae, kicks up to a quick ska gear and ends as a blazing punk song.
Chao's 10-piece band is extremely versatile, augmenting a standard rock set-up with horns, accordion, and extra percussion. They leap from reggae to funky merengue to punk to flamenco with flourishes of surf, blues, North African rai, Central African rumba, mariachi, and rock'n'roll while also switching languages, sometimes in mid-song. Esperanza's subdued reggae track "Mr. Bobby" is much funkier live, with a great psychedelic guitar solo and second, dancehall-ish vocal from Bidji. Because it samples two shows, a few songs appear twice but that feels like an appropriate side effect of the collage approach. My biggest complaint is the way the sound obviously cuts back and forth between recordings-- the fades on the crowd noise can be very abrupt and even distracting.
Each reissue appends a bit of bonus video content, which is plenty worth watching, but there are no audio extras. Essentially, this is a chance for Americans who missed out on these records the first time to hear one of the world's most popular musicians. They're definitely worth the investment for anyone who loves popular music that blurs the lines between cultures and sounds.


On his first release in six years, the UK producer trades the atmospheric grime of his debut for a more driving techno sound, lush enough for headphones but punchy enough to keep one foot on the dancefloor.

Light Armour EP

Despite his history of making low-end-heavy grime, Iglew has never cared much about bass drops. His music is more about building shapes that wobble in mid-air, generating tension but never quite delivering release. Urban Myth, his squarewave-filled debut EP on Mr. Mitch’s Gobstobber label, sounded less like a collection of bangers than an atmospheric distillation of how grime might feel rumbling through the club walls to anyone outside on the street. Now returning after a six-year hiatus, Iglew has ditched the gritty bass stabs in favor of a fluttery, more driving techno sound, once again revealing the adventurous spirit that makes his music stand out.
On first listen, Light Armour sounds like the work of an entirely different artist than the Iglew who put out “Lullaby.” While the old flashes of rubbery bass occasionally appear on tracks like “Caffeine Dreamer” and “Gold,” Iglew seems much more interested in building songs that glide in a heavenly mid-zone—uptempo but never manic, bursting with quirky sounds but never overtly absurd. They’re a perfect fit for his new home on Facta and K-LONE’s Wisdom Teeth label, slotting right into the UK producers’ warm, tactile take on techno. Like his labelmates, Iglew’s music on Light Armour is full of bouncing marimbas and Mothersbaugh-esqe synth tones, carrying the torch of labels like 1080p and 100% Silk that spent the ’10s working to keep dance music colorful (in contrast to the apocalyptic club aesthetic of PAN and Houndstooth). Often, Light Armour calls back to first-wave IDM producers like Orlando Voorn and Speedy J, capturing the same gleeful intersection of ambient music, classic techno, and good old-fashioned knob-twiddling that helped bring electronic music from the club to the living room.
That sense of giddy excitement courses through “Caffeine Dream,” Light Armour’s first and strongest track. Over the course of its seven and a half minutes, Iglew sounds like a kid on a trampoline full of bouncy balls, leaping between mechanical skronks, elastic bass, and jazzy chords with reckless abandon. It’s the kind of dance music that’s lush and eccentric enough for headphone listening without losing the breathless punch to help it function on a dancefloor. Though the rest of Light Armour never quite hits that high again, it does give room for Iglew to flesh out his vibrant sense of club impressionism. “Microfunk Lament” adorns its barely there rhythm with bubbly synth melodies straight out of the Wii Sports menu, and the title track hits an airy stride that feels like Aphex Twin’s “Fingerbib” put through a tropical-house filter. Though the songs rarely rise above a simmer, Iglew’s production is always immersive, and even the most ambient-leaning track (the moody, minimalist “Hawksworth Woods”) has a cyclical pulse that calls back to the club, albeit from a distance.
For an artist who hasn’t released much, the change from Urban Myth to Light Armour is dramatic, which suggests that even if Iglew might not be sure exactly what kind of music he wants to make, he knows how he wants it to feel. Listening to the EP conjures up vivid imagery: flickering laboratory machinery, icy landscapes, passing clouds. It’s peaceful and playful at once, teasing all the different directions his work could go without ever fully committing to any of them. In that way, Light Armour captures that feeling of discovery and expression at the core of dance music, as each of Iglew’s oddball rhythms find their own ways to sink into the groove and wiggle until we start moving too.

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The clandestine and engrossing Newark rapper’s latest is a seamless continuation of a long string of reliable records; it is also one of his strongest yet, engrossing despite its brevity.

Mach's Hard Lemonade

About halfway through Mach’s Hard Lemonade, Mach-Hommy thanks his fans, then catches himself: He’d rather refer to them as “investors.” This word is both a reference to the unusual passion the Newark rapper inspires in his followers and of the exorbitant prices he charges for his music and merchandise (the deluxe vinyl version of Lemonade retails for $444.44, the standard version a steal at half the price). But as time goes on and Hommy’s catalog grows, the idea of fans as investors begins to evoke the image of a satisfied shareholder, idly reaping the benefits of betting on this nomadic maybe-genius who seems committed to quarter-over-quarter growth.
Mach-Hommy’s public persona––the quasi-anonymity, the wonderfully prickly interviews, his refusal to allow sites like Genius to sell ads against his transcribed lyrics––and his probing, uncompromised music might suggest a flightier artist. But Hommy has grown prolific, even when you allow for gaps on the release schedule where albums that are unaffordable or unavailable on streaming platforms might otherwise sit. Lemonade is the seamless continuation of a long string of reliable Hommy records; it is also one of his strongest yet, engrossing despite its brevity.
It would seem that there is an opportunity for Hommy to court some crossover fame: Lemonade’s digital release was exclusive to Tidal; he was photographed last fall at a meeting with JAY-Z, who took obvious inspiration from Hommy’s cadences for his verses on Jay Electronica’s A Written Testimony. But the closest Hommy comes to incorporating Jay into his latest work is a line on album opener “SBTM” (“I seen the same shit happen to Shan”) that alludes to a quip on Vol. 3 about rappers biting another Juice Crew member. And so when he raps, on that same song, “I was hidden/Now I’m risen,” you understand that Hommy––and not well-meaning advisers assembled around a conference table––is the one setting the stakes and scope of his myth.
Lemonade is mixed more crisply than some of Hommy’s other records, but the sound design––pleasingly jagged, occasionally muddy––is still the unifying force in his music. Hommy is a collagist, someone who can connect lines from a posthumous Biggie song and Baby Doc Duvalier’s reign in Haiti to MC Shan and the Atlanta rap group D4L (Fabo and the late Shawty Lo are both shouted out in the opening verse of “Smoked Maldon”––before Hommy compares himself to Steve Prefontaine). These scraps of material culled from seemingly disparate worlds suggest an observer so keen that he sees the source code of life hidden to the rest of us; he realized the value in masking up in public long before the plague.
When rapping, Hommy exercises remarkable control: at times his verses will seem to careen across the beat, becoming more and more verbose, all while slowly revealing an underlying, rhythmic logic. (This makes it all the more jarring––and rewarding––when Hommy opens his chest and bellows a verse, as he does on the superb closer, “NJ Ultra.”) But it’s Hommy’s intermittent singing that makes his albums so dynamic: See his chorus on “Marshmallow Test,” where the way he croons “One for you… one, two for me” turns an experiment famously carried out on children into a cool, capitalist taunt.
Lemonade’s high point is “Squeaky Hinge,” a moment of complete synthesis for Hommy’s technical virtuosity and musical instincts, his sly humor and his feel for the violent undercurrents in American cities. “The smell of death” wafts from apartments on gentrifying blocks near where the “hot mama” is “in the bordello with the Jonathan.” There’s a devilish bounce, even, to the way he opens the track: “What’s pocket change?/What’s house money?/What’s stock exchange?/All I know is clout, dummy.” Mach-Hommy is interested in evoking, not explaining, and has neither the patience nor desire to bring you up to speed.

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Tricky's newest collection returns to the ethereal, almost fragile intensity that marked his well-loved 1995 debut Maxinquaye, but with the more solemn perspective of a grown man who's felt like he's lost his way.

False Idols

I wouldn't blame Tricky if he was sick of hearing about the 1990s. It's the decade where he set up his presence, released his defining works, and then noisily tried to escape. That he spent the last dozen years of his career stumbling into the kind of modern rock/indie pop territory that didn't mesh well with his early aesthetic says something about how definitive (and potentially imprisoning) his fame-making sound was. Whether or not his genre-hopping would've worked out on its own terms-- and for the most part, it hasn't-- it'd have a hard time maintaining the moody, seductive yet stressed pull of his first few albums. But Tricky wasn't wrong to try shaking his trip-hop rep and attempt new things, he just sounded so adrift that it was hard to figure out where he'd find his way back to once he finally refocused. By the time he released Mixed Race in 2010, it became clear that the best-case scenario where Tricky was concerned was to either wait for some new thing to finally click, or hope that he looks back just long enough to be reinvigorated by memories of where he started.
False Idols tries to split the difference, and weirdly enough, it nearly succeeds. Calling it Maxinquaye for the middle-aged seems a bit too glib, but this album really does return to the ethereal, almost fragile intensity that marked his well-loved 1995 debut with the more solemn perspective of a grown man who's felt like he's lost his way. And for a while, everything seems right. The production's appropriately spare, moody, and elegant, streamlined and engineered to sound uniquely his while still throwing alternate jabs and nods to contemporary R&B's underacknowledged debt to his sound. But it's still far from monochromatic; the subdued yet rich minimal house thump of “Bonnie & Clyde” and the dirgy guitar squall of Antlers collaboration/cover/semi-rewrite “Parenthesis” are integrated variations on the stylistic theme, not whiplash detours. That sustained mood benefits greatly from his harmonizing and interjections with singer Francesca Belmonte, filling Martina Topley-Bird's role as the quietly assured yet emotionally driven foil to Tricky's clenched, whispery murmur, like two introverts trapped in close quarters. Going into a Tricky album hoping for that pull between beauty and tension is going to leave you at least somewhat happy with this record.
But the catch-22 of “return to form” albums is that without the dregs that precede them, they need to stand up as something deeper, something without ghosts following it around. And even if False Idols is approaching a more coherent idea of what a Tricky album could sound like in 2013, a lot of the record comes off more like a tentative first step. There's no overthinking here, which is a relief after all the tryhard high-concept ideas-- poppy hip-house, French Touch knockoffs, leering cock-rock-- that didn't really take off on his last couple of records. But with that simplified approach comes simplified songs: Only the gel-submerged minimalist funk of “Tribal Drums” barely scrapes past the three-and-a-half-minute mark, and even the more immediately catchy tracks start to sound like sketches on further investigation. It's most evident in the songwriting: Opener “Somebody's Sins” is simply a cover of Patti Smith's opening verses to her cover of “Gloria”; “Nothing's Changed” features a generous interpolation of Pre-Millennium Tension highlight “Makes Me Wanna Die”, and too many songs lean on simplistic metaphors and imagery that merely hint at deeper things they leave frustratingly concealed: the vague romantic overtones of “Valentine”; disjointed debauchery on “Is That Your Life”, the evasive “Passion of the Christ”.
And yet in the end it does show promise: the songs aren't bad by any stretch, and when the first negative that comes to mind is that the ideas need to be fleshed out a bit, it's a long way from wishing they'd've been discarded in the first place. Even with 15 tracks all averaging around the three-minute mark, there's little time on False Idols devoted to offbeat goofs or weird failed experiments, just a handful of songs that bottom out at “not bad but a bit forgettable.” A front-to-back listen won't dredge up any obvious duds or collar-grabbing highlights, but it might get this album's focused vision planted a bit deeper in your head. Tricky might not have succeeded in bringing his old sound 100% back to life, but as an effort to hit the reset button and rediscover himself, this record's a better-than-expected surprise.


This score to the 1973 sci-fi film was sampled by generations of hip-hop luminaries. Reissued for its 50th anniversary, it remains a dazzlingly avant-garde fusion of styles and moods.

Alain Goraguer: La Planète Sauvage (Expanded Original Soundtrack)

While René Laloux’s 1973 animated film La Planète Sauvage (Fantastic Planet) is celebrated for its enduringly shocking, Dali-esque visuals, Alain Goraguer’s soundtrack is a surrealist triumph in itself. Composed for the French-language story of a planet where humans are hunted and domesticated by gigantic blue aliens, its orchestral fusion of jazz, prog rock and modern classical still feels—as the film’s adverts once trumpeted—“Strange! Frightening! Fascinating!”
Goraguer ought to be better known. Born in 1931, he was a go-to arranger for French pop giants like Serge Gainsbourg, Jean Ferrat, and France Gall, but he often avoided the limelight, using pseudonyms like Milton Lewis or Laura Fontaine. Despite the global stardom his music helped others achieve, his death in February of this year went relatively unpublicized. His score for La Planète Sauvage has similarly left a legacy from the shadows, having been sampled by generations of major hip-hop artists. Appearing the summer of DJ Kool Herc’s block party, it was dusted off in the ’90s by KRS One and Big Pun, in the ’00s by Madlib (as Quasimoto) and J Dilla, and over the past decade by Mac Miller, Little Simz, Flying Lotus and Denzel Curry, and Run the Jewels. A new 50th-anniversary reissue—including 10 unreleased cuts—is a fresh reminder that Goraguer’s score is a true avant-garde gem.
Most of the original score’s 25 short pieces refer to two motifs that first appear in the prowling, noirish opener, “Déshominisation (I)”: a descending melody and a twanging bass riff first heard amid a jazz drum groove, trembling orchestral strings, and flashes of flanged guitar. While iterating on a core motif is a common device in film scores, the extent of Goraguer’s repetition is striking. (A looming deadline may have necessitated his recycling: After the French-Czech co-production dragged on for five years—a period interrupted by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia—Goraguer was brought on at the very end, and given just weeks to complete his score.) Regardless, each instance is full of new twists: The melody reappears as jaunty pop in “Le bracelet,” terrifying stabs in “La cité des hommes libres,” and an eerily romantic waltz in “Les fusées / Valse des statues.”
While an enormous procession of orchestral and rock instruments (from saxophones to flexatones) adds variety and color, the real joy is in Goraguer’s far-ranging uses of recurring elements. Standouts include the expressive female vocals, which deliver a melancholy solo on “Terr et Tiwa dorment” and eerily seductive sighs on “La Femme.” If this might be expected from an arranger for great chansonnières like Isabelle Aubret, his wildly contrasting electric-guitar arrangements are more surprising: from Derek Bailey-esque probing on “Attaque des robots” to dramatic soloing on “Générique (Fin).”
The album feels curiously unmoored from its time and place. While the opening guitars and bass of “Déshominisation (I)” are transportive to Europe’s 1973 experimental rock scene, rubbing shoulders with Can’s Future Days and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, in moments like the baroque pastiche “Conseil des Draags,” the score hurtles centuries into the past. Goraguer’s orchestral instrumentation suspends everything in a state of temporal ambiguity, while his constant jerking between aesthetics means even acutely contemporary sounds—like the Black Sabbath-esque drums on “Terr et Medor”—feel like brief stops in 1973, rather than grounding us there for good.
This reissue features 10 (frequently excellent) outtakes and alternative cuts. “Flore et faune” is a bracing highlight, featuring a tactile palette of ratchets and waterfall shakers, while the call-and-response groove closing “Le destin de Terr” is one of the melodic motif’s finest interpretations. The alternative versions reveal interesting new dimensions to recordings on the original score, but are generally less dazzling: The staccato, squalling alternative take of “Déshominisation (II)” can’t help but underwhelm after the more grandiose orchestral version.
The greatest triumph of Goraguer’s score is how engaging it is even when heard outside the context of the film. While track titles indicate the scene each piece accompanies, the rapid-fire impression created by their brevity and track-to-track contrast divorces the record from the film’s pacing; the story becomes easy to put out of mind. For those who haven’t seen the film, La Planète Sauvage holds its own as a purely musical experience: a breathless, Technicolour avant-garde record of bewildering sonic and emotional scope. Lurching between far-ranging palettes, tempos, and moods, Goraguer’s score remains an otherworldly adventure.


The industrial music and metal sculptures of Tristan Shone can sound and look scary. But there are songs and even soul lurking beneath the grim façade.

Beastland

If you or I wanted to mess with the pitch of an electronic bass signal, we’d probably plug in the nearest $50 MIDI controller and have at it. But we are not Author & Punisher. When Tristan Shone, who has made music under that justly severe moniker since 2005, wants to mess with such a pitch, he gears two high-torque motors to a pair of throttles, giving them autopilot and force-feedback functions. When he performs, it looks like he’s trying to fly an X-Wing with a bad steering rack into the Death Star.
Though he had already issued a few albums of moody industrial music before 2010, those throttles were the first “drone machines” the San Diego-based robotics engineer with a master’s degree in sculpture designed and fabricated. Shone literalized the idea of sonic sculpture, fusing the ethereal and the physical into an industrial metal vision. This tension characterizes Shone’s cursed soundscapes, too, which rampage between rhythm and randomness, melody and mayhem, infernal depths and screaming heights.
Eight years and a half-dozen releases later, Shone has released his Relapse debut, Beastland. His arsenal has grown to include so many forbidding prosthetics and devices he’s like a Rube Goldberg war machine stamping out arty Godflesh songs in stainless steel, his industrial core sprouting tumors of doom, drone, noise, and, covertly, pop. Metal vocals are recessed inside demonic sub-bass, concussive percussion, and skirling frequencies. Whether simmering or exploding, these eight three-to-six-minute tracks are exercises in perpetual combustion, a burning darkness expending some unnaturally limitless fuel.
Most of Shone’s creations are not instruments, per se. Some merely capture vocals in the most ominous sense of the verb, portending torture to follow—his elephantine drone mask, his fetish-y trachea mic, his Bane-style headgear. Others control electronic sounds. His “Linear Actuator” is visually suggestive of both a railgun and a tank tread, while “Rails” looks like some cruel factory press poised to remove a machine worker’s arm. These devices are not just for show; they meaningfully shape the sounds Shone makes. Instead of being designed for ease, his controllers fight back, offering physical resistance and semi-predictable outcomes, sewing chaos instead of order.
But make no mistake: In part, they very much are for show, concretizing the sonic shocks of his albums, which can’t help but pale beside his live sets. The pronounced vibe of James Wan-style medical horror and medieval torture loudly states the music’s creepy aspirations, as if the nightmare-fuel vocal sample that appears a couple of times, first on “Nihil Strength,” leaves any doubt as to what kind of story this is. Shone valorizes the effort of both creation and consumption, pitched against an increasingly frictionless world. “Pharmacide” opens Beastland with a bass frequency I can't listen to on headphones, at any volume; it feels like a black hole opening in my brain. This is not just a performance of sound, but of struggle between human and machine.
Or, let’s be honest, man and machine. I’m not usually drawn to bellicose, self-consciously transgressive personas and sounds. I like music with a lot of softness, space, and curves. But under all the aggressive metal gestures here, it’s impossible to miss the songful gestures embedded in Beastland. Shone’s cold fury lashes the listener, but it’s laced with warmer emotional undercurrents of nostalgia for the raw, ragged soul of 1990s alt and indie rock. At its most inviting, Beastland sounds like the Melvins, Dinosaur Jr., or fucking Candlebox playing a festival stage over from Sunn O))), mostly getting drowned out.
Tell me you don’t hear it on “Ode to Bedlam” or “The Speaker is Systematically Blown,” a prettiness pooled beneath poisoned tonality, righteous chord progressions trying to pound through the calamity. Or tell me you don’t hear a humanizing hint of self-conscious comedy in the overstated ghoulishness of that “Nihil Strength” sample. No one without a sense of humor would fashion oversize control knobs sheerly to mock brow-knitting DJs, anyway. I’ve got one for him, then: Make something out of nine-inch nails.


Since coming on the scene in 2007, genre-smashing West London producer Nathan Jenkins still hasn't released a proper full-length. Though not a proper debut, the one-sided 12" You Drive Me to Plastic proves as idiosyncratic and danceable as past efforts.

You Drive Me to Plastic

Being a fan of Bullion can be frustrating. The West London producer-- real name Nathan Jenkins-- first caught a fire in 2007 with Pet Sounds: In the Key of Dee, a surprisingly deft, quasi-mash-up record that married snatches of the Beach Boys' classic LP with a variety of J Dilla samples. Roughly four years, an EP, and a handful of singles later, and an honest-to-goodness Bullion full-length still hasn't fallen into our laps. This brings us to You Drive Me to Plastic, which saw release on Young Turks at the tail end of last year as a one-sided 12". The 500 copies went fast, and while it was made available overseas on CD this past April, it's only now available stateside.
While it might be the second closest thing he's ever done to making an album proper, You Drive Me to Plastic is, in fact, not the debut we've been waiting out for. Billed as a "non-LP," the piece's nine tracks blend into one another to create a 20-minute extended mix, highlighting Bullion's genre-smashing groovers that continue to prove just as idiosyncratic and danceable as past efforts. Using shorter, less movement-minded pieces to glue together three big, single-friendly tracks and a more ambitious finale, Plastic most certainly doesn't feel like a debut, but it also doesn't seem like just another keeping-busy-mix-of-the-month either. Whether the whole "non-LP" tag sounds like a bunch of nonsense to you or not, a little more Bullion in any capacity is a good thing.
One of Bullion's greatest assets is being able to work with so many different ideas and styles while being overwhelming, and the way Plastic is structured is perhaps even more of a testament to this ability. Each of those interludes provide a specific purpose, linking the more memorable moments to create an even more fluid experience. And while stuff like "Lol Express" can get by on its own merits, sounding something like M83 crashing into a 1980s cop-show theme, the real pull are the more fully realized songs that will inevitably end up in a "Best Of" folder along with his more pop-oriented assemblages. Everything from wandering saxophones, strange vocal clippings, chic club pulsings, and a variety of geographically varied rhythms coexist together while rarely sounding jumbled or too mazy. It shows that, for a guy who isn't terribly prolific, his attention to pacing and matching incompatible sources with finesse often results in success.
Bullion has often oriented himself using hip-hop-- he's the same guy that could thrown Klaus Nomi and Buffy Sainte-Marie on a track and still have it sound like an Afrika Bambaataa record-- but Plastic finds him exploring the dancefloors of Europe and the Carribbean. "Magic Was Ruler", which again features a Sainte-Marie sample ("God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot"), feels as if you could salsa to it, with a bright guitar line and horns that are evocative of a night out in Havana, while "Pressure to Dance" splits the different between slinky Italo-disco moves and Kraftwerk.
There was always a sort of deranged quality to Bullion's sound as well-- maybe it has something to do with the fact that his music has always had a joyous, almost spritely disposition, but often contained imperfect samples and darker tinkerings that could readily translate as feelings of unease. A good many of these 20 minutes explore even more haunted extremes. "Too Right", which features a pulsing Laurie Anderson vocal sample, is one of the more menacing things he's ever produced. Plastic might not contain your favorite Bullion moments (some of the shorter tracks feel a bit lost), but they're important in the sense that he can feel comfortable exploring certain extremes of his personality without compromising the sound he's been sculpting over the past few years.


The D.C. dance-music vet and Future Times honcho drops a freeform set of free-spirited club tracks that show off his keen beatmaking abilities.

Many Any

While the Washington, D.C. metroplex is one of the 10 largest urban areas in the U.S.—not to mention the seat of the nation’s capital—the music it produces tends to feel insular and intractable, unaffected by outside forces. D.C. scenes like hardcore punk, go-go, and DMV hip-hop show off a sense of both community and incubation. In the 21st century, Andrew Field-Pickering has been a bit of everything for D.C. music: punk drummer, broken-beat MC, house-music producer, jazz-fusion dabbler. His label Future Times also ranges wildly: In the last year it has dropped festive house, boom-bap R&B, and hip-hop that runs from jumbled to amoebic.
Many Any, his fourth album as Max D (fka Maxmillion Dunbar), was released without much fanfare on fellow D.C. imprint 1432 R and draws on all of the above sounds. Like the traffic circles of his city, Field-Pickering is a hub himself, bringing together friends and neighbors Mike Petillo, of Protect-U and Geo-Rip, and 1432 R’s Dawit Eklund and Sami Yenigun. As an album listen, it feels as casual as a few choice tracks and field recordings that have been dragged from his hard drive into Dropbox. Its 45 minutes breeze past without feeling overthought, with random interludes—a sneeze in an airport terminal, the crackle of melting snow—adding a little breathing room. He’s not trying to create dancefloor weapons so much as explore dancers’ headspace. That approach might seem careless or informal in the hands of most electronic music producers, but Field-Pickering’s craftsmanship comes through no matter the cut.
Previous Max D albums showed off lithe, creamy rhythms, but the machine meter of “I Think Our Souls Are Other People” is stiff as robot yoga. As the seven-minute track unfurls, though, the bass thumps and starchy snares slowly get nudged further and further apart, first by an incessant throb and then by vaporous noises twirling around the space. Then the beat falls away altogether, and a pretty, synthetic swirl balloons until the track has turned itself inside out and become a gentle ambient wash instead. He does something similar to the silky stutter-step of “Fly Around the Room,” taking its early-1990s feel and peppering it with small blips and squiggles until it’s as wriggly as the inside of a tackle box.
Other times he prefers stasis in his productions, letting the loops roll on without much fiddling. The dizzying hits of the DJ tool “Many Any Dolo Brush” nod to the slippery rhythm tracks he releases as Dolo Percussion. “Cuz Its the Way” is a throwback to the breaks of early-’90s hip-hop, all chopped vocal samples, chunky drums, and snipped basslines. The cumulative effect of “Shoutout Seefeel,” similarly constructed out of just a few elements, is mesmerizing. One of the longest tracks in his catalog, “Shoutout Seefeel” stirs video-game squelches, gurgling pads, tricky cymbal figures, and a reverberating guitar that seems to be sounding from the bottom of a swimming pool, every element rippling and floating weightless. When it abruptly cuts off after 11 minutes, it feels somehow too short, much like the 45-minute album itself. Even so, Many Any offers an expansive look at Field-Pickering’s casually subversive approach to house, techno, club tracks, and ’90s R&B.


The Puerto Rican rapper wields impeccable flows and pointed barbs into a forceful statement of queer Caribbean spirit.

La Sustancia X

Queer kids have long identified with superhero narratives: specifically, stories in which regular people discover a latent power within themselves and fulfill their destinies. For Villano Antillano (“Antillean Villain” in English), the story that most resonated with her was the Powerpuff Girls, three kids engineered to be perfect little girls who are accidentally dosed with an unidentified substance called “Chemical X,” which grants them superpowers. Troubled at first by their power, they soon come to embrace it, able to defeat even the most evil boys with just a kiss on the cheek.
On her debut LP La Sustancia X, she leans into the metaphor, wielding her gender transformation as a weapon and reveling in the powers it grants her. Across 32 minutes of controlled chaos, Villano and her primary co-producer Ismael Cancel weave trap, reggaeton, metal, and pop into an electric synthesis of the sounds of el movimiento. There’s a direct line between her barrio barbie aesthetic and Nicki Minaj, but she also clearly draws from the divine feminine energy of Puerto Rican performers like Iris Chacón and Myrta Silva. From the first to last notes of La Sustancia X, she carries a natural swagger, making femme expression gangster and embodying a fresh model of femininity in the process.
Across 11 tracks, Villano makes the case that she’s a villain worth rooting for. On “Cáscara de coco,” she draws on the power of flaunting femininity in the face of “machos,” leveraging a Boricua expression that correlates human grit to the hard exterior of a coconut shell. Her sexuality is as fluid as her style—she’ll steal your girl or your man—and refuses to feel bad about it, because she knows you want a piece of her, too. The record’s drum programming is immaculate; Villano and Cancel brandish percussion from the Caribbean and the strip club with equal aplomb.
There are also moments of levity; she unapologetically embraces the sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll of “Hedonismo,” but later tempers it on “Kaleidoscópica” with the admission that the pills are armor to endure a dystopia hostile to your very existence. And album highlight “Mujer”—featuring a combative verse from the Puerto Rican singer iLe—is both an admonition and a flex, calling out the forces conspiring against women while admitting those threats are no match for their own strength. While Bad Bunny has made Spanish-language rap-rock records all the rage, few could hope to link prog and trap as effortlessly as she does on “Puesta,” featuring Cuban singer La Dame Blanche.
It’s hard to imagine a record like La Sustancia X cracking the mainstream even just 10 years ago, a testament to the Puerto Rican queer community’s hard-fought battles to claim space—and the vocal support of the biggest pop star in the world. Her BZRP Session may have opened the door to the pop world, but now that she’s here, her collaborative choices suggest she’s propping it open and bringing her community with her. “Yo no soy un artista, so un movimiento,” she raps on the album’s first track (“I’m not an artist, I’m a movement”). There’s more at stake here than just one woman’s success.
While La Sustancia X is clearly a forceful character statement, you don’t need to know anything about Villano to move to these bops, or even understand Spanish to recognize her flow is impeccable. But her identity does add an air of authenticity to el movimento’s trademark braggadocio; these are war stories from the front lines, the ultimate flex from a self-actualized superhero.


On an expansive new album, the Los Angeles rapper filters current events through the distorting fuzz of memes, late-night cable, and barbershop chatter.

ISTHISFORREAL?

For all his painstaking reticence, the moment eventually found the Koreatown Oddity. A veteran of Los Angeles’ scuzzier hip-hop outposts, the multi-hyphenate artist spent the 2010s alternating between abstract rap records and nervy beat tapes, usually appearing in a rubber werewolf mask. Following the 2019 death of collaborator Ras G, KTO shed his psychedelic trappings for Little Dominiques Nosebleed, a gnarled work of autobiography centered on a succession of childhood car accidents. At times wistful, others free-associative, Nosebleed’s whipsawing chronology turned the spotlight on a rapper who’d long avoided it.
The follow-up, ISTHISFORREAL?, is a return to marginalia, one in conversation with the work of art-rap forerunners Quelle Chris, Open Mike Eagle, and R.A.P. Ferreira. Nine years into his recording career, KTO is now lodged comfortably in a scene of cerebral loners in their thirties and forties, loosely based in Brooklyn and L.A. but more firmly rooted online. Like Eagle’s Anime, Trauma and Divorce and Quelle and Jean Grae’s Everything’s Fine, ISTHISFORREAL? approaches current events obliquely, filtering them through the distorting fuzz of memes, late-night cable, and barbershop chatter.
The album’s discourse is dour and claustrophobic. On “History Tension,” the ambient drone of grief and police violence is condensed into a blunt, visceral refrain: “The tension of history’s attacking.” He invokes anxiety as a living, breathing thing, yet ISTHISFORREAL? is animated by questions. Over the syncopated cleves of “An Endless Run,” KTO raps with a rigidness approaching spoken-word: “What is the signal/For niggas to know/What direction shit is gon’ go?” He inverts the inquiry for the melodic “Indifferent.” “Am I indifferent or desensitized?” he sings. “No grass is greener/It all gets fertilized.”
KTO favors a stiff, almost mechanical delivery, but he’s rarely bound by the strictures of language. “Misophonia Love” (misophonia: a condition characterized by sensitivity to repetitive and soft sounds, as breathing, chewing, clicking, etc.) pairs ASMR vocals with new jack swing-style 808 drums as KTO’s narrator fetishizes the act of chewing almonds and rubbing together gym socks. In the first chorus, his precise diction makes the song’s title sound like “Me so funny in love.” On the second, the inflection is delicately shifted: “Me so phony in love.” Even the more lighthearted moments are rich with subtext.
Like a De La Soul project, ISTHISFORREAL? gestures at a running talk-show concept without really committing to the bit. Instead, KTO deploys a breadth of styles to match the record’s expansive themes. “Existential Landlord” wanders into noise-pop territory; “Homeboys in Outerspace” and “Hellloooo???” veer into full-on sci-fi. But the title track functions as a centerpiece, returning to Nosebleed’s tone of diaristic poignancy. After some quirky editorializing (“When y’all think of Karen, it’s a racist white bitch/When I think of Karen, it’s an auntie we miss”), KTO expresses gratitude that, during the month of July 2019, his newborn daughter briefly occupied the same earthly plane as his friend Ras G. The song concludes with a jarring edict: “I wish I could say that it was unusual/To hop on a plane from a prom to a funeral.” In the context of ISTHISFORREAL?, paranoia is nothing more or less than a survival instinct.


Latest from David Tibet features multiple versions of Charles Wesley's 18th century poem "Idumea", as well as contributions from  Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Antony, and Six Organs of Admittance's Ben Chasny.

Black Ships Ate the Sky

Even the most casual Current 93 fan knows David Tibet's career has tended toward rue and malice: cracked spiels, sunken solemnity, opiate apocalypses. Of course, this has been going on since the early 1980s, but his past few albums have depicted an ever-expanding arena of anxiety and resignation. Tibet's recent output has been one decade-long spiritual crescendo, pitting atheists and junkie academics against blind blues oracles and Rapture-rousing dispensationalists. On 2004's Halo and this year's Sleep Has His House, the loosely organized outfit had maximized all of its most intriguing elements-- musical asceticism, mind-wrecked mysticism, intellectualism-- without lapsing into total self-parody. Black Ships Ate the Sky continues the trend with an extraordinary conceptual breadth (a formal song cycle based on a Methodist hymn) and some of Tibet's best songwriting in a decade.
Structurally, * Ships* is anchored by eight versions of Charles Wesley's "Idumea", a 1763 paean to doom and uncertainty: "A land of deepest shade/ Unpierced by human thought/ The dreary regions of the dead/ Where all things are forgot." Eighteenth-century hymns are not known for their entertainment value, and Tibet hedges his bets by enlisting a cadre of young sycophants (including Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Antony, and Six Organs of Admittance's Ben Chasny). Each performance is unique, and yet the cumulative effect is cyclical: One Armageddon precedes another. Marc Almond's rendition situates an echoing Appalachian falsetto in the place where "flaming skies" break asunder. Bonnie's serrated rasp cuts through banjo drones. Baby Dee bristles with stormless rage and cool regret. The two irrefutable stars are Antony, whose doubled vibrato sounds like a shelf of glassware, and Shirley Collins, who slowly turns her honeyed voice into gravel.
Tibet mentions that the album's conceptual scheme comes from "a dream I had that Black Ships had entered our skies in preparation for the arising of the final Caesar and for the Second Coming of Christ." Regardless of one's disposition toward sin and redemption, that idea is certainly enough to warrant a full album, and Tibet is nearly unrivaled as a ranting doomsayer. He observes that "flying moons scare children," proclaims that he is "the king of the Eucharist," and obliges listeners to "kill Caesar like black ships eat skies." That solid advice is administered with weaving violins and a guitar that howls from the galley. Even in an era of freak-folk minstrelsy, Tibet makes nonsense sound genuinely harrowing. As always, you can accept his imagery as a profound allegory of warfare and disaster, or you could just read it as a sophisticated treatise on lunacy. A sentimental favorite is "The Autistic Imperium Is Nihil Reich", a funerary waltz at which Tibet delivers the eulogy: "I want to make love with the umbrella ladies who inhabit the stealing time." He is backed by dust storms, creaky floorboards, and streaking violas. The songs are incendiary and cosmic: solar flares and vibratory crackles on "The Dissolution of the Boat", steel-plated screams on "Black Ships Seen Last Year of Heaven", the slow contractions of a melodica on Clodagh Simonds' "Idumea". As a further development of the apocalyptic narrative, the album becomes less reliant on acoustic austerity and folk balladry. "Black Ships Were Sinking" drums up lashing typhoons of metal filaments, gibbering cellos, and cybernetic locust. "Black Ships Ate the Sky" is probably Tibet's most savage song since the early 1990s, a disconcerting concentration of hemorrhaging drums and lo-fi thrash. But these brash interludes hardly detract from the general sensation of suspension and cessation. In fact, Tibet's finest achievement is compiling mournful songs into an album with obvious momentum and tension. Like all Current 93 projects, Ships is bloated, but this is more of an inevitability than an accident. Despite patches of plodding esoterica, Black Ships builds elegy and aggression into hell-fire incantations. It's a mesmeric album made for midnight crackpots, acid-addled prophets, and nebbish posers.


Against soft keys and faint wells of synth, the Scottish singer-songwriter’s intense, intimate songs sound like unmediated transpositions of feeling.

Kathryn Joseph: For You Who Are the Wronged

For You Who Are the Wronged

Across three albums, Glasgow-based musician Kathryn Joseph has gradually extended a loving hand outwards. Her first, Bones You Have Thrown Me and Blood I’ve Spilled, which won the 2015 Scottish Album of the Year award, was an intensely personal and interior record about loss, made in response to the death of her son Joseph (whose name she subsequently adopted as her stage moniker). In 2018, From When I Wake the Want Is featured the stories of some of Joseph’s loved ones: a young niece who suffered a severe illness, friends who temporarily lost their strength and self-worth to abusive relationships. Joseph’s music is urgent, sparse, and largely unembellished, its intimate, slow-burning intensity rendered without distraction or added drama. Often, her songs sound like unmediated transpositions of feeling.
Like her previous records, for you who are the wronged takes desecration and pain as its subject matter, though it presents a more abstract and generalized view, addressing abuse and trauma as broad topics, rather than individual stories. Now reaching out a hand to anyone who might take it, Joseph uses pain as an entrypoint to human connection. From her place of abjection, she offers peace and loving kindness, encouraging whoever hears her music to find themselves in it and to seek power. To do this, she renders brutal subject matter—the violence of those who use their love to abuse—into a soft, soporific register, not unlike a kind of true crime ASMR.
Her luminous brand of minimalism makes use of a very limited and quaint palette of sounds. She plays each of these songs on a keyboard with the subdued twinkle of a music box, almost entirely in a wiggly 3/4 time signature, drumless rhythms spinning in a ceaseless waltz. Her quavering voice, with its tiny reverb tails, establishes a simultaneous nearness and distance. In its cursive expression and diminutive intensity, it recalls Swedish singer Stina Nordenstam. Paradoxically, Joseph carries the majority of her vocal intensity within the diminishing of each note. On “until the truth of you,” her vibrato sounds like the agitated flapping of a bird’s wings, and in its exigent refrain, she wheezes to be heard.
Every element on the album—the sounds of Joseph’s voice and keys, alongside the faint embellishment of collaborator Lomond Campbell’s modular synths—reverberates as long as its breath can carry. Joseph battles against the negative space, conveying her essential urge to communicate and the inadequacy of her keys to transpose her emotional furor. The contrast is immaculate and occasionally excruciating, endowing the tiniest sounds with monumental impact. On the title track, Joseph is simultaneously at her wildest and most restrained; her whisper becomes a wail, though she reins back into a warble at the slightest hint of catharsis. It sounds like the unbearable tension of wanting to scream yourself out of your own body but only being able to manage a howling hush.
Her lyrics, as nonsensically sensical as a dream, often resemble the echolalia of Gertrude Stein. “Until you found it out/You are survive her,” she sings on the title track, mutilating the syntax and manipulating the words so that they embody the broken subjectivity of the abused. Throughout the album, Joseph’s imagery is visceral, fleshly. Blood splatters as she sings of pouring salt into open wounds, of sucking poison from her perpetrator’s veins and spitting it back into their mouth. In its gentle violence, for you who are the wronged functions like a kind of sweet and delicate surgery. Joseph lovingly lulls you into anesthesia while prodding at your most vital pain, and then delivering you back to yourself: poison extracted, powerful, clean.


Originally released in 1994, the Parisian rapper’s second album brought a particularly French sensibility to hip-hop, countering the hegemony of American artists—and the English language itself.

Prose Combat

One of the most frequent accusations levied at French music in the early 1990s—before French touch and the Serge Gainsbourg renaissance—was that the country only ever seemed to produce weakling copies of Anglo-American music styles, à la Johnny Hallyday’s preening Gallic Elvis. So it was a formidable shock when MC Solaar heaved into view with his 1991 debut, Qui Sème Le Vent Récolte Le Tempo. Thanks to Solaar’s nonchalant flow and a healthy dose of jazz instrumentation, the album packed a particularly French sensibility into hip-hop, reeking of Left Bank cafés and vintage Citroëns even as Solaar’s lyrics explored the underbelly of Parisian society.
Three years later, Solaar’s second album, Prose Combat—now being re-released as part of a wider campaign around Solaar’s early LPs—took this languid Parisian charm and ratcheted up the commercial appeal. The album’s cool rap finesse would propel Solaar to the kind of international acclaim that had eluded his compatriots, as he signed with cult UK label Talkin’ Loud and appeared on the Stolen Moments: Red Hot + Cool album alongside the Roots and the Pharcyde. If you wanted to introduce someone to French hip-hop in the mid ’90s, you would inevitably play them Prose Combat’s “Nouveau Western”: Its velvety Gainsbourg sample (from “Bonnie and Clyde”) and trilling saxophone line, crossed with Solaar’s gently authoritative baritone, proved that other countries didn’t have to fall so strictly in line with America’s rap hegemony.
That’s not to say that Prose Combat doesn’t take influences from the U.S.: The album’s jazz-funk-heavy production, boom-bap beats, and elongated scratches (at the hands of producer/DJ Jimmy Jay) clearly owe a huge debt to DJ Premier, while Solaar’s nimble yet relaxed flow, like a man calmly picking him way through a raging torrent of honey, is reminiscent of Guru. (It is no surprise at all that Guru got Solaar involved in his Jazzmatazz project in 1993). But Solaar proved definitively on Prose Combat that the French language, with its throaty (and very un-Anglophone) “r”s, nasal vowels, and constantly evolving slang and even stress patterns, could bring a beautifully melodic trill to hip-hop that differentiated it from American styles.
For listeners who don’t understand French, Solaar’s acrobatic lyrical tone is a delight to be savored musically, his voice dancing around the beat with the quiver of a double bass. (Consider the wonderfully percussive cadence on the line, “De la rime et des mots dans l’art d’arrimer les mots,” from Prose Combat’s “Superstarr.”) For those who paid more attention in French class, Solaar reveals himself as a masterful storyteller, like a Gallic Nas: On “Nouveau Western,” he tells the tale of Harry, a modern cowboy type who heads from Arizona to Paris, where he eventually ends up in jail. Throughout, Solaar revels in exquisite details: the suds on a glass of beer, the zinc of the bar beneath it.
The production, too, is sparkling throughout, a sinuous mixture of well-chosen jazz-funk licks, finely weighted beats, occasional live bass, and agile scratching that tied Prose Combat into wider trends in French music—in particular, the country’s nascent house music scene. Hubert Blanc-Francard (Boom Bass) and Philippe Cerboneschi (the late Philippe Zdar), who would later find fame as Cassius, worked alongside Jimmy Jay on Solaar’s first two albums and with DJ Mehdi on the following two. And it was Zdar who decided to use a Fairchild compressor—a piece of gear more associated with 1960s pop than hip-hop—on Prose Combat, giving the album a smooth but punchy dynamic range that was subtly different from American productions. The opening to Prose Combat’s “Dévotion,” with its filtered bass and echoing percussive strikes, sounds like an obvious antecedent to the European deep house that Motorbass—Zdar and producer Étienne De Crécy—would nail on their dazzling debut album, Pansoul, in 1996.
To focus on the production may be to impose a rather Anglophone take on things: Solaar is a towering talent in his own regard, and a bigger star in France (and Francophone Africa) than Cassius could have ever hoped to be; Prose Combat, meanwhile, is one of the defining moments in French hip-hop, and French pop as a whole. Yet the links to electronic music producers and their unusual studio gear help underline why Solaar’s second album was such a key moment in the march of global hip-hop and its ever more localized scenes: This is a record that looked to U.S. rap and decided it could make changes—an album that took on the Anglo lyrical template and won. Twenty-seven years later, Prose Combat is a “Vive la différence” of musical diversity that positively purrs in its victory.

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Written and recorded around 2007 after Redd Kross were coaxed out of retirement for a handful of festival dates, Researching the Blues proves the L.A. band still has a knack for shifting power pop into fresh shapes.

Researching the Blues

Released in 1982, Redd Kross' debut record, Born Innocent, was to mall-punk what homo erectus was to modern man. Founded in the suburbs outside of Los Angeles, the band, led by teenage brothers Jeff and Steve McDonald, wrote scrappy and bratty three-chord pop songs that betrayed a fascination with B-movie kitsch via references to Charles Manson, The Exorcist actress Linda Blair, and sugar-infused breakfast cereals. According to legend, they even opened for Black Flag at a middle school graduation party.
But eventually, Redd Kross accrued some polish. By the early 90s, the band had evolved into a heavy but hooky power-pop outfit. After a few years spent wandering the globe supporting less-worthy, yet more successful, alternative era bands-- Spin Doctors and Stone Temple Pilots, among them-- Redd Kross decided to hang it up for a while, easing into an indefinite hiatus following the release of their 1997 album, Show World.
And now, they're back. Researching the Blues, the group's latest record, was written and recorded around 2007 after the band was coaxed out of retirement for a handful of festival dates, and is just now seeing release via Merge. The McDonald brothers pick up pretty much where they left off, smudging vintage Cheap Trick riffs with liberal amounts of overdrive and balancing lovelorn lyrics with imagery swiped from the "cult" aisle of your local video store. But in a lot of ways, they're better at it now. Produced by Steve, the younger brother, lately of OG hardcore revivalist outfit Off!, Researching the Blues is a leaner and more focused records than its two predecessors. With the murky production artifacts of the 90s stripped away-- the heavy reverb, the walls of fuzz, the chorus pedal-laden solos-- Redd Kross sound tighter and more energetic, even though their guitar tones have mellowed a little.
Over the last several decades, power-pop has proven to be a suitable vessel for all sorts of far-out content, from the surrealist ranting of Guided By Voices, to the teenage ennui of Shoes, to punk-informed self-examination of the Mice. But from a structural standpoint, you have to play by the rules. There has to be a verse, a chorus, and a jangling guitar hook. On Researching the Blues, Redd Kross prove they still have a knack for shifting those component parts into fresh shapes. In just three and a half minutes, "Stay Away From Downtown" ping-pongs between vocal hooks and sticky guitar leads. "Dracula's Daughter" cakes on the Byrds-style "oohs" and "aahhs" to dreamy effect. With its power chord-driven teaser chorus and miniature slide guitar break, "Winter Blues" is the kind of song Weezer fans would gladly trade all of the band's post-Pinkerton records to get. Sometimes it pays to take a break, even if it lasts a little more than decade.


Natasha Khan's latest album as Bat For Lashes is a richly theatrical concept album detailing the story of a woman left at the altar after the husband dies in a car crash on the way to the wedding.

The Bride

Natasha Khan, aka Bat for Lashes, has  an uncanny knack for world-building, an ability to craft a musical and aesthetic environment brimming with rich scenes and fantastical characters. Moving gradually from folk and chamber music to emotional electronic pop over four albums, she’s been able to carve out an uncompromising niche for herself, and while not as musically stunning as her last two records (2009’s Two Suns and 2012’s The Haunted Man, both excellent benchmarks for her brand of self-contained yet grandiose songwriting), The Bride may be Bat for Lashes’ most ambitious project yet, a true concept album, every song tightly woven into a through narrative from start to finish.
The Bride tells the story of a woman left at the altar—not because her fiancé skipped out on the occasion but because he died in a car crash on his way to the wedding. The eponymous Bride then finds herself alone and unmoored on her own honeymoon, grieving the loss of her true love and trying to find the strength to piece together the rest of her life. Written as a soundtrack to an imagined movie, it commits to Bat for Lashes’ previous flirtations with going full storybook while never sounding contrived or heavy-handed. Although The Bride is relatively more stripped down than what we’ve come to expect from Bat for Lashes, Khan has no trouble filling the space with her signature lofty soprano, which does all the dramatic work the storyline needs to feel real.
The album’s opener, the idyllic “I Do,” is a bit of a red herring–its strummed harpsichord and simple melody harks back to Fur & Gold, Bat for Lashes’ debut album and first foray into the persona she's meticulously constructed over the rest of her career. It does its job, setting up the scene, but it feels pallid after her previous records, and stirs concerns that Khan’s storyline might be shortchanging her songcraft. Luckily, by the time we get to lead single “Sunday Love” The Bride has hit its stride, the track’s shuffling drum loop and plucked strings transporting listeners directly into the mania of the Bride’s pure heartbreak. From there, what began as a slightly unbalanced collection begins to take shape: the quiet duo of “Never Forgive the Angels” and “Close Encounters” signal both the emotional core of the record and the stage where Khan’s character begins to lose touch with reality. “Some say my lover is a pale green light […] I feel him come to me in the dead of night/And I go to the other side” she sings, and it's a beautiful moment musically and within the context of the record: The Bride realizes, through swelling synths, that death, rather than being an absolute barrier, is more of a shifting veil between herself and her beloved.
The second half of the album is a long, tapered comedown from this peak, with the soft guitars and mellow strings of “In Your Bed” and “Clouds” feeling like the tail end of a crying jag, when you’ve used up all your tears and lay exhausted on the floor. It’s still sad, but a peaceful sadness, one that ends the album on a semi-uplifting note. At its essence, The Bride is a sort of anti-breakup album, a story where the absence of physical love doesn’t mark the dissolution of a romantic relationship, but rather its strengthening through celebration and remembrance. Through the metaphor of her character, Khan weaves a story about the most simple of poetic themes–eternal love–but devoid of all the sappiness and clichés one would normally associate with those ideas. Its few shortcomings aside, The Bride is further proof that Khan, unlike almost all of her contemporaries, understands how to wade into mystical realms and emerge with big, beguiling pop.


The London IDM polymath’s fourth album puts artificial intelligence in the composer’s seat, rounding out computer-generated rhythms and melodies with AI-penned lyrics sung by Koosha himself.

Return 0

Over the last decade human beings have gotten used to artificial intelligence nuzzling into our everyday lives. Virtual assistants like Siri have normalized the idea of chatting away to our devices, the self-driving car is (almost) a reality, and computers have trounced humans at everything from Go to “Jeopardy!” Computer-created music, however, remains something of a moot point. While computers are present in some form in the vast majority of modern recordings, the idea of a computer actually composing is at odds with a widely held belief in music as a deeply felt form of human expression.
Return 0, the fourth album from the London IDM polymath Ash Koosha, pushes against these notions. Koosha, who has previously dabbled in VR and spatial computing, used generative software to create melodies, arpeggios, and chord sequences that he then arranged into their final form on Return 0. “Humans are best at taste because we have intention in finalizing and presenting something,” he explained in a recent interview. “The computer can create arpeggios and melodies—parts that I don’t necessarily want to spend time on.” This interplay between human and machine is perhaps best seen in the album’s vocal lines, which Koosha sings from melodies and lyrics generated by computer. Or, as he puts it, “I perform the machine’s output as voice.”
Without wanting to sound like the last human apologist in front of our silicon overlords, these human-sung vocals are probably the most satisfactory part of Return 0. Previous attempts at computer-generated music have tended to deliver songs that are catchy without tapping into much human emotion—a predictable result for work born out of analysing vast amounts of data—and the same happens here. “Muzikenono” has a circular vocal melody that unwinds like a great spiritual yawn from the depths of the speakers, while “Wild Heart” immerses a soaring vocal run in the haunting sound of the Kamancheh, an Iranian bowed string instrument. Strong as these melodies are, though, they really flourish thanks to the producer’s effects-laden voice, which injects a touch of humanity that was notably absent on “Yona 1.1 (feat. Yona),” a song on Koosha’s previous album, Aktual, that was sung by a computer.
Musically, the album is more disappointing, for reasons attributable to both humans and computers. While there are moments of instrumental brilliance on Return 0—notably “Redempshun”’s warped neo-classical procession, which brings to mind the unsettling electronics of Wendy Carlos’ A Clockwork Orange soundtrack—at many other points the album flops, as middling computer melodies come up against all-too-lenient human editing. “Reach” seems to go on about twice as long as necessary, the pointillist synth lines soon losing their charm, while “Baptizanax” is shaggy, chaotic, and ill-formed, like a repository for all the instrumental parts Koosha couldn’t fit elsewhere on the record. You wonder, too, if the producer could have done more to tidy up the album’s computer-generated lyrics, whose nonsensical nature contributes to the album’s detached air.
In the end, for all Return 0’s innovative conception, the faults that scupper the album are the same ones that Koosha has faced throughout his recording career, notably a weak editorial voice and a tendency to drift that leaves many songs sounding like noises in search of a genre. Return 0 is an interesting record that breaks new ground without coming across as too self consciously important. Ultimately, though, it ends up a proof of concept that’s more rewarding to read about than listen to. There’s lots to admire here, but frustratingly little to love.


Known for collaborations with chamber-oriented musicians like Sufjan Stevens and the National, Shara Worden is backed by the contemporary ensemble yMusic on her third LP, a record that both suffers and succeeds in relation to its scope.

My Brightest Diamond: All Things Will Unwind

All Things Will Unwind

Shara Worden's output as My Brightest Diamond is largely unclassifiable, a designation that's favorable in theory but can also be deeply stunting. For years, Worden has drifted between genres and tones (assimilating bits of the opera, classical, indie rock, folk, and experimental canons), letting her vocals act as the lone narrative thread and defining principle. These songs were hers because she was the only person who could sing them, and that felt like enough. Still, while confining artists to a single sound or style might be a philistine's errand, it also gives listeners something recognizable to cling to; there are no bits of boat floating in the water here, and her third LP, All Things Will Unwind, both suffers and succeeds in relation to its scope.
Already well known for her collaborations with chamber-oriented musicians (Sufjan Stevens, the National), Worden is now backed by the contemporary ensemble yMusic, who add plenty of playful bits to her oft-ethereal, shifting folk songs. Strummed opener "We Added It Up" is punctuated by various strings and toots; it unfolds like a Rube Goldberg contraption, all call and response. Worden sings about circumstantial incompatibility-- "If I was love/ Then you were shhh"-- with convincing fervor, before the track transforms into a quasi-reassuring mantra. "Love binds the world," Worden and her backing vocalists chant, but it's still hard to know (with good reason) whether those particular shackles are supposed to be a comfort or a curse.  It's a pleasantly hazy refrain; Worden's best moments come when she's at her darkest and most uncertain.
The excellent "Be Brave" opens quietly, with muted drums and Worden's low growls: "I'm feeling scared and I am overwhelmed," she sings. "Be brave, dear one/ Be changed, be undone," she coaxes, and like "We Added It Up", the song proffers a tiny, passing glimpse of insecurity. Although Worden's vocal performances are varied and borderline virtuosic, it's easy to find yourself wishing for her voice to crack or crumple or fail, to be fallible in a way that's just as beautiful. The carefulness of All Things Will Unwind can feel impenetrable sometimes, and while her closest musical analogue is the equally ambitious Joanna Newsom, Worden lacks Newsom's oddball vulnerability-- it's the difference between performance and possession, and while there's certainly room for both, the former comes, always, with the risk of affectation. All Things Will Unwind's theatrical bent can read as goofy, if not wholly inscrutable (the slow-but-punchy "There's a Rat" feels cartoonish, while "High Low Middle" feels showy, staged). Mostly, though, Worden's drive-- to be so many things, to harness and perfect so many disparate sounds-- makes her work feel more distant than it should.


Following the solemn elegance of his last album Brace the Wave, Lou Barlow's new ukulele-heavy EP feels incomplete.

Apocalypse Fetish

As a founder of indie rock institutions Dinosaur Jr., Sebadoh, and Folk Implosion, Lou Barlow’s career is synonymous with the scratchy production of an iconic lo-fi pioneer. When Barlow started releasing albums under his own name with 2005’s Emoh, he redefined himself as a more traditional singer-songwriter. And with last year’s Brace the Wave, he stepped even more decisively into “maturity” by crafting a solemn post-divorce album filled with complex adult emotions.
Barlow’s hushed singing on Brace the Wave conveyed the panic inherent in facing a major midlife upheaval. But after such a personal album, his new five-song EP Apocalypse Fetish feels like a retreat from a late-career blossom. As its title suggests, the new EP tackles end-of-the-world angst, which might have made for a suitable counterpoint to Brace the Wave’s lyrical themes if Barlow hadn’t chosen to strip the new material down so that it emphasizes his voice and down-tuned ukulele.
Barlow has been playing the ukulele since Dinosaur Jr.’s 1987 album You’re Living All Over Me—long before it became the instrument of choice for cute YouTube covers. But Barlow has never fallen prey to the preciousness that is often ascribed to the instrument. On Brace the Wave, for example, he used a baritone ukulele as a textured guitar, not a prop in a play. This time around, though, the ukulele booms in the middle of the mix, the toylike timbre of its strings offsetting the musical balance like a bull in a china shop.
Of course, we’ve heard skeletal arrangements and jarring mix choices from Barlow plenty of times before. But strangely enough, Apocalypse Fetish stumbles into murky waters, as if Barlow couldn't decide between returning to his lo-fi days or sticking with his current, more discreetly elegant sound. Like Brace the Wave, Apocalypse Fetish is full of additional trimmings that Barlow and returning producer Justin Pizzoferrato tuck behind the backbone of the songs. On the title track, for example, a sudden appearance of acoustic guitar and keyboard in tandem splashes the song with drama and color. Barlow even double-tracks the ukulele at times and his bass remains more felt than heard. Still Pizzoferrato’s naked recording style that served Brace the Wave so well only highlights how incomplete these new arrangements are.
As these songs show, Barlow isn't losing a step as a composer—his craft sounds more effortless as he grows. Unfortunately, Apocalypse Fetish is far too easy to mistake for a bunch of demos. On “Anniversary Song,” the absence of percussion actually strengthens the choogling rhythm of Barlow’s strumming, but it’s still framed as though he were performing it in a coffeehouse. Even if you think that works the first time around, Barlow scoops the percussion again two songs later on “Try 2 B,” a song that betrays the barroom rock‘n’roll stomper it truly is at heart.
Likewise, the ends of some of his verses on “Pour Reward” glow with a tail of reverb, but the song never finds the middle ground between its dry immediacy and its atmospheric gestures. “Don’t trust anyone/When it's us who can't be trusted,” Barlow sings on the title track. “We’re perverse/The safer we are/The more unsafe we feel/That’s the curse.” Having fleshed out personal crisis so thoroughly the last time around, it's anyone's guess as to why Barlow holds back from doing so while tackling a major social crisis on this EP. But by this point, Barlow is well beyond having to force the raw amateurism that once defined him. He’s no amateur anymore, as even Apocalypse Fetish proves in spite of itself.


There’s never been an electric bassist as deified as Jaco Pastorius, who had the swagger of a stadium rocker and the sophistication of a jazz artist. His 1982 Lincoln Center concert is newly released.

Jaco Pastorius: Truth, Liberty & Soul - Live in NYC: The Complete 1982 NPR Jazz Alive! Recording

There have been many guitar gods, but there’s never been an electric bassist as deified as Jaco Pastorius. And with good reason. A member of Weather Report from 1976–1981, Pastorius once commenced a concert in Montreal by jumping off a balcony and then onto the stage; in Toronto, he did a back-flip while playing. He wore his hair in braids, with bandanas, and in a man-bun (before anyone called it that). He referred to himself, echoing someone else of that era, as the “greatest bass player in the world.”
If Pastorius had the swagger of a stadium rocker, it so happened he had the harmonic sophistication of a jazz musician. With his fretless bass, he redefined the sound and role of his instrument. His sad, untimely death, at the age of 35—he suffered from bipolar disorder and was killed in an altercation outside a South Florida nightclub—only added to his mystique.
Pyrotechnics aside, his musical palette fanned out wide, as a composer, arranger, band-leader, and even big-band-leader. All of those roles are on display in this exultant, newly-released live recording from the Resonance label, which documents a June 27, 1982 concert at Avery Fisher Hall (complete with a 100-page book). The performance was part of George Wein’s Kool Jazz Festival and a large portion was broadcast on National Public Radio’s Jazz Alive!, a program produced by Tim Owens and hosted by Dr. Billy Taylor that ran from 1977 to 1983. Owens and Zev Feldman of Resonance uncovered 40 minutes that weren’t played during the NPR show, and have released the entire 130-minute concert in its entirety with the help of Grammy-winning engineer Paul Blakemore, who worked the original performance at Lincoln Center.
By 1981, Pastorius had left Weather Report, who were among the godfathers of the fusion movement. Having established his international reputation, he then formed Word of Mouth, an uncommon sextet made up of Randy Brecker on trumpet, Bob Mintzer on tenor sax, Othello Molineaux on steel pans, Don Alias on congas, and Peter Erskine on drums, all one better than the next. (Though in the book, Erskine—another ex-Weather Reporter—proves to be the most formidable raconteur.) Pastorius would expand Word of Mouth into a big band, and a mighty one. They were 22-strong on this night with some of New York’s top session players and special guest Toots Thielemans on harmonica. Everyone was on fire, with the precision of a regular touring act. In fact, they weren’t; Pastorius used different personnel, depending on the city he was in. According to the book, it was one rehearsal, sound check, and—boom—show time.
If the concert starts off jittery, with the frenetic 13-minute “Invitation”—the band seems almost too hyped-up—the remaining two-hours are a seamless, pitch-perfect display of A-game professionalism married to virtuoso sparkle. Even the sound is crystal clear, in a hall with notoriously poor acoustics, especially for non-orchestral music.
The next tune “Soul Intro” starts with a slow, two-minute Pastorius solo, showing off his elastic technique. The band settles into “The Chicken,” a funk number and one of the most rousing pieces of the night. Besides Mintzer and Brecker, the ensemble is joined by five additional saxophones, five trumpets, three trombones, and a tuba. Plus, there are two French horn players, one of whom, John Clark, is especially majestic in the Pastorius-penned tour de force “Okonkolé y Trompa” (which also included an extended conga solo from Don Alias).
Pastorius directs the band through rigorous new takes on some of his best-known compositions, like “Three Views Of a Secret” and “Liberty City.” He tips his hat to the jazz canon with Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady,” where Thielemans shines; Charlie Parker’s “Donna Lee”; and John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps.” He ends with the 1959 blues hit “Fannie Mae” and actually sings (Pastorius was many things, but he wasn’t a singer) before he mumbles the names of the band members to the adoring crowd.
The setting for the concert may have helped bring out the best in everyone. The 10-night Kool Jazz Festival was a big deal at the time; The New York Times devoted 2,300 words in a preview article. It may not have been Madison Square Garden, but painter LeRoy Neiman did the loud poster art, and many of those shows had the air of a big game, despite the normally staid venues. As grand as Pastorius’ show was, though, it was the beginning of the end for him. Erskine and Mintzer recall noticing his odd behavior on their ensuing gig in Montreal. And later in 1982, a tour of Japan was, in the word of the drummer, “disastrous.” Five years later, Pastorius was dead. At least this midsummer night’s dream of a performance is now available for all to remember and relive.