With two epochal singles and some of the decade's most engaging production and remix work under his belt, the DFA's James Murphy unveils his full-length debut with LCD Soundsystem. Also included on a bonus disc are-- at last-- his seven previously released A- and B-sides.

LCD Soundsystem

James Murphy makes great tracks. He isolates cowbells and places the microphone at just the right distance from the hi-hat so you get the analog-crisp sound post-punk bands took for granted because they didn't know how good they had it with engineers like Paul Hardiman and Rick Walton. Murphy, obsessed with Can and Liquid Liquid, has the right influences at the right time in the right city-- which is to say, if he couldn't be French, New York is the best place for LCD Soundsystem. Like Parisian duo Daft Punk (who get their second Murphy shout-out on this album), LCD makes substance from style, content from form, something from nothing. That's a rockist attitude, of course, but then LCD Soundsystem is a rockist fantasy: full command of the history with none of the high-caloric obligation to "meaning" or purity. Murphy even puts together a live show that out-pummels the noise bands a borough over.
LCD Soundsystem has been anticipated since Murphy's 2002 splash "Losing My Edge"/"Beat Connection", and like it, makes clear that although his musical reference points (Suicide, Eno, Can, ESG, Talking Heads, the Fall, and on and on and on) are upfront enough to be conspicuous, they never quite cross the line into hipster-wallpaper. In fact, if anything, Murphy has a given a good name to cooler-than-thou poses, presenting his music, if not irony-free, then as earnestly as can be expected from someone emulating Mark E. Smith's pronunciation-uh. And yes, his flare for singles is pretty amazing: "Losing My Edge"/"Beat Connection" and "Yeah" are two of the most ubiquitous 12-inches released in the last 20 years-- at least in the neck of the woods where folks are likely to get the Fall and Suicide references. Heck, even "Give It Up" rises near the top of DFA's crop of punky dance anthems, and that the second disc appending LCD Soundsystem contains all of this music shows both generosity and considerable foresight on the part of Murphy and DFA.
However, it's still debatable whether or not Murphy makes great records. Where the singles emphasize his strengths-- impeccable arrangements (especially his signature drums-plus-drum machine attack), pacing (the dynamic expansion of "Yeah (Stupid Version)" is almost unchartable) and the gift of less-is-more-- his debut full-length lacks similar allure for almost the exact same reasons. It doesn't so much have a pace, per se, as nine distinct flavors of the LCD Soundsystem agenda, be it cowbell-ridden dancepunk, homages to any number of 70s and 80s hip rock icons, or rubbery would-be house jams just sloppy enough not to qualify as house. The production is as you would expect-- and therein lies the letdown: There aren't very many surprises here, either in the bank of sounds Murphy pulls out, or in how he uses them. Still, that wouldn't be bad if the songs lived up to the promise of his singles. The worst I can say about LCD Soundsystem is that there are precious few moments that stand up next to his most lauded singles.
But we'll start with the best-- which is to say, he'll end with the best: "Great Release" is a very non-dancefloor number pulled out of the Big Book of Ambient Pop. Beginning with soft, pulsating drum machine pliff, the song glides for more than two minutes using only a stately chord progression on piano before Murphy's distant, obviously Eno-cribbed vocal enters. The song builds and builds, in a manner typical of many other LCD Soundsystem songs, but does so via lush echo, like ocean waves, watercolored synthesizers and Murphy's "dat-da-da-da" harmony vocals near the end. And where "Great Release" shines with a symphonic glimmer, "Daft Punk Is Playing At My House" and "Disco Infiltrator" stick to bare-basic LCD pump; yet, they're just as rewarding. (In fact, "Disco Infiltrator" should really have been this album's first single, rather than the comparatively indistinct Fall rip "Movement").
"Never As Tired As When I'm Waking Up" is a near-brilliant pastiche of both White Album Beatles and Dark Side Floyd, with only its telegraphed George Harrison lead-guitar riff at the end and chord progression ripped from "Dear Prudence" keeping it from making as grand an emotional impact as it might. Likewise, "Too Much Love" seems just a bit too close to Talking Heads for comfort, though as with all things Murphy, the imitation is masterful. House-centric songs like "On Repeat" (a low key take on the structure of "Yeah", right down to the disco explosion near the end) and the excellent "Tribulations" (which prudent fans will know leaked months ago) should sate the danceheads, though they might have wished for more songs like the latter and some of the fat trimmed from the former. Ultimately, LCD Soundsystem suffers a similar fate: plenty of good-not-great stuff, and a tad unfocused.


Six decades into his career, Bob Dylan delivers a gorgeous and meticulous record. It is the rare Dylan album that asks to be understood and comes down to meet its audience.

Rough and Rowdy Ways

For 60 years, Bob Dylan has been speaking to us. Sometimes breathless, often inscrutable, occasionally prophetic, his words have formed a mythology unto themselves. But his silence holds just as much meaning. Less than a minute into his 39th album, which he has decided to call Rough and Rowdy Ways, the accompaniment seems to fade. It’s a subtle drop; there wasn’t much there in the first place—a muted string ensemble, a soft pedal steel, some funereal motifs from classical and electric guitars. It’s the same twilight atmosphere that comprised Dylan’s last three studio albums, a faithful trilogy of American standards once popularized by Frank Sinatra. But now he’s singing his own words, and about himself. He compares himself to Anne Frank and Indiana Jones, says he says he’s a painter and a poet, confesses to feeling restless, tender, and unforgiving. “I contain a-multituuudes,” he croons, to anybody who hasn’t realized by now.
The rest of the album follows this thread: furnished with more space than his words require, sung gracefully at the age of 79, speaking to things we know to be true, using proper nouns and first-hand evidence. In other words, it is the rare Dylan album that asks to be understood, that comes down to meet its audience. In these songs, death is not a heavy fog hanging over all walks of life; it is a man being murdered as the country watches, an event with a time, place, and date. And love is not a Shakespearean riddle or a lusty joke; it is a delicate pact between two people, something you make up your mind and devote yourself to. “The lyrics are the real thing, tangible, they’re not metaphors,” Dylan told the New York Times. So when he sings about crossing the Rubicon, he’s talking about a river in Italy; when he tells you he’s going down to Key West, he wants you to know he’s dressing for the weather.
Still, he is Bob Dylan, and we are trained to dig deeper. (In that same Times interview, he is asked whether the coronavirus could be seen as a biblical reckoning—a difficult question to imagine posing to any other living musician.) We have learned to come to Dylan with these types of quandaries, and more often than not, we have left satisfied. But for all his allusions to history and literature, the writing drifts toward uncertainty. In a macabre narrative called “My Own Version of You,” Dylan sings about playing god as he scavenges through morgues and cemeteries to reanimate a few notable corpses and absorb their knowledge. Among the questions he poses: “Can you tell me what it means: To be or not to be?” “Is there a light at the end of the tunnel?” We never get the answers; all we hear is the depravity: slapstick horror rendered as existential comedy.
The vaudevillian spirit that ran through 2001’s Love and Theft and 2006’s Modern Times is mostly limited to this one song. But there are other head-turners. “The size of your cock will get you nowhere,” he grumbles to a sworn enemy, who might be death itself, in “Black Rider.” “I’m the last of the best, you can bury the rest,” he boasts in “False Prophet,” summoning the gnarled lunatic who narrated most of 2012’s Tempest, the voice that seemed to be choking while cursing you for trying to help. These twists lead to some memorable lines—and welcomed moments of levity—but his biting, absurdist humor is not the focus. There are no distractions; he speaks carefully, quietly, earnestly.
It results in a gorgeous and meticulous record. The lyrics are striking—dense enough to inspire a curriculum, clever enough to quote like proverbs. Played by his touring band, with understated appearances from Fiona Apple and Blake Mills, the music is a ghostly presence. Its sound is threadbare and hypnotic, backed by small choirs and acoustic instruments, a sharp turn from the raucous blues reenactments of his 21st-century records. As depicted in Daniel Mark Epstein’s book The Ballad of Bob Dylan: A Portrait, Dylan kick-started those sessions by playing his bandmates another artist’s “prototype” track to apply to whatever batch of songs he brought to the studio. There are obvious reference points for this music as well—Billy “The Kid” Emerson in “False Prophet,” Jimmy Reed in “Goodbye Jimmy Reed”—but the performances are less formal, more impressionistic. It is blues and folk music that seem to drift in and out of consciousness, an in-between-world described in its opening lines: “Today and tomorrow and yesterday, too/The flowers are dying like all things do.”
Since 1997’s Time Out of Mind, an atmospheric return-to-form after a long period of wandering, death has been Dylan’s chief concern, to the extent that some have read it as a personal obsession. Which, of course, has only aggravated him. Yes, his recent songs deal with mortality. “But I didn’t see any one critic say: ‘It deals with my mortality’—you know, his own,” Dylan observed. It seems that he has accepted this grievance as an artistic failure and has returned with songs whose subjects cannot be misinterpreted. The last two tracks on Tempest addressed the sinking of the Titanic and the murder of John Lennon—historical events that now exist through a greater cultural consciousness. He continues and improves upon this method throughout Rough and Rowdy Ways, using notes from history to reflect something universal about our own brief, ordinary legacies. “I hope that the gods go easy with me,” he sings in “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You.” For a minute, you forget the status of the man singing; his prayer sounds as humble, as fragile as anyone’s.
Dylan previewed this music in March by releasing “Murder Most Foul,” the longest song in his catalog and now his very first No. 1 single. The 17-minute ballad closes the record by inverting the structure of its other death songs: He begins with the ending. In concrete terms, Dylan describes the assassination of John F. Kennedy: “They blew off his head while he was still in the car,” he sings. What follows is a story of life: the world, its culture and art, that sustained without him. Through its stunning final moments, with an arrangement that sounds like a small orchestra packing up their instruments, Dylan makes a couple dozen requests to the iconic ’60s DJ Wolfman Jack: “Mystery Train,” “Moonlight Sonata,” “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.” It’s a radio show—one of Dylan’s favorite mediums, that disembodied voice speaking to us through other people’s words. But as the music plays, it also becomes a wake, a gathering of spirits, the perfect distraction for our host to slip out into the night, alone.
“I just heard the news about Little Richard and I’m so grieved,” Dylan wrote on his social media a month ago. “He was my shining star and guiding light back when I was only a little boy.” He sounded crestfallen; after all, Dylan has repeatedly cited Little Richard with the invention of his job, his sound, even his hairstyle. This vulnerability was almost jarring. We are used to meeting Dylan from a distance—in verse or in code, somewhere just beyond our reach. Now, he was asking us to imagine him as a kid in Minnesota, listening to the radio and imagining what his future could be. In its quiet way, Rough and Rowdy Ways is another invitation. “Forge my identity from the inside out,” he sings in “Mother of Muses,” “You know what I’m talking about.” Take him at his word and it’s an outreached hand, a chance to see the world through his eyes before it crumbles into ruin. The view is beautiful; even better, it is real and it is our own.

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To paraphrase Grace Slick, "If you can remember the 80s, you never suffered\n\ any serious head trauma." Ladytron remember ...

604

To paraphrase Grace Slick, "If you can remember the 80s, you never suffered any serious head trauma." Ladytron remember the 80s very, very well. These youngsters fly the new wave flag and keep feeling fascination, passion burning, love so strong. But Ladytron's musical interests stretch back before MTV, to 70s Bowie, Roxy Music, Kraftwerk and Cluster. They're like an unabridged Encyclopedia of musical Eurotrash with a sharp pop sensibility. And with 604, they've made a fine debut full-length.
I had a pronounced tinge of déja vu when listening to 604, but it wasn't the retro sound that made me feel like I'd been here before; it was the fact that three of the songs here were on the band's four-song Commodore Rock EP. Looks like they missed the memo from the Department of Redundancy Department. Don't you hate that? You probably didn't buy Commodore Rock, though, so you're not going to mind the overlap. In fact, if this is the first time you're hearing "Play Girl", you'll be damn glad they decided to include it on both their releases. It's an ace pop song that Allen Hunter would have been proud to announce the world premiere of, and it would have sounded great between Nena's "99 Luftballons" and "He Was Really Sayin' Somethin'" by Bananarama and Fun Boy Three. Great stuff.
"Play Girl" is sung by Helen Marnie, and with her relaxed, breathy tone, she's definitely the more engaging of Ladytron's two vocalists. "Another Breakfast with You" is another great track she fronts, with a fat Moog drone that gives it the feel of early Stereolab. "The Way That I Found You" is the third major score for Marnie, with a bouncy, anthemic melody over some dark, Naked Eyes-style keyboards. These three songs approach new wave pop perfection.
Mira Aroya is around to give the more "arty" tracks a serious Continental flair. Her deep, Bulgarian-accented voice is used both for humor (as with "Paco!", where she offers a tour of a department store over a dense electro background) and to provide a dark, gothic element to the background (as on "Discotrax"). When Aroya and Marnie come together to sing the Kraftwerk homage "He Took Her to a Movie", which borrows its melody and hook from "The Model", both slip into robotic Ralf and Florian mode with excellent results.
Rounding out the album are several instrumentals that range from dreamy computer love ambience ("CSKA Sofia" could be from the second side of Autobahn) to dense analog synth textures in the style of Add N to (X) ("Laughing Cavalier"). The tracks on 604 are sequenced intelligently and keep this slightly overlong album purring along nicely. Latter-day new wave may be old hat, but there's still room for it when it's done right. Enter Ladytron.


The Seattle doom duo embarks on an audacious mission—a beautiful and melancholy three-album cycle about eternal returns and daily toil.

Bell Witch: Future’s Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate

Stepwise and slowly, Bell Witch have been forever approaching The Clandestine Gate, which is not only the Seattle duo’s new 83-minute, single-song album but also the first volume in a trilogy meant to loop eternally. A decade ago, the sans-guitar pair used bass and drums to make turgid but familiar doom, the dozen-minute songs of their debut, Longing, lurching toward glory. The follow-up, 2015’s Four Phantoms, felt epiphanic by comparison, its dual tandems of much longer and more radiant pieces seeming to reach skyward from hell, like Hieronymus Bosch enshrined in dual wheels of black wax.
The 2016 death of co-founding drummer Adrian Guerra only seemed to amplify the ambitions of bassist Dylan Desmond, as though existential urgency led him to slow down and stretch out even more. Mirror Reaper arced and ached for more than 80 uninterrupted minutes, the constant friction between its colossal parts tossing off radiant sparks. One of the longest metal tracks ever, it felt beautiful but conclusive. Where does a band with a single piece so long it’s split between two CDs go, aside from maybe the conservatory?
Bigger, retorts The Clandestine Gate. This sprawl opens with a mighty organ dirge, rippling like a massive flag swaying in a faint breeze. That is how Bell Witch’s proposed three-album cycle, Future’s Shadow, will also likely finish, the organ returning to reconnect the end to the beginning to form a cycle that actually has no ending or beginning. The Bhavacakra, the ouroboros, the eternal return: Desmond and drummer Jesse Shreibman lifted this pan-cultural motif from some of Friedrich Nietzsche’s most famous works. As much as The Clandestine Gate is the culmination of Bell Witch’s last decade, it also marks the surefooted start of their next several years, the first step in a truly audacious and titanic mission.
Ceaselessness permeates these howled, groaned, and hissed lyrics, full of “recurring dawn[s]” and “arrow[s] loosed at forever.” Dark fades into light, life into death, on and on, again and again. But the more immediate and enduring result of this approach to infinity is structural. A small clutch of riffs and rhythmic figures thread through The Clandestine Gate, disappearing only to reappear in slightly warped form. The record is more orderly motel than sprawling mansion, a few motifs repeated through the maze of levels and hallways.
The Clandestine Gate moves in a string of interconnected three-to-five-minute segments, the larger piece always shifting subtly just before tedium sets in. Early on, it’s the way Desmond’s high bass notes begin to trace a careful filigree over Shreibman’s steady organ; nearly 45 minutes later, it’s the way distant monastic chants finally coil into death-metal growls, severing the reverie and sending it back to solid ground. These eternal returns are less about infinite lives and more about pedestrian repetition, or surviving social structures that often ask the same of us at least five days per week. An earthbound interpretation of Nietzsche, The Clandestine Gate sets up life as the ultimate endurance exercise.
Still, in spite of The Clandestine Gate’s modular design, any record this long and involved can feel intimidating. And despite its grandeur and volume, its real power stems from its subtlety; check out, and you’ll put in an hour of listening with shallow rewards. Take The Clandestine Gate on a four-mile walk someplace quiet and even boring, where distractions are nil. It only gets richer.
Notice the way the rhythm expands and contracts, with Shreibman and Desmond pulling close and spreading apart, improvising with patience and precision that seem telekinetic. This dynamic pace mirrors breath itself, slowing and speeding as the task at hand changes. When Desmond’s riff tightens, Shreibman often springs beneath him, his heavy hits helping lift the notes with a sudden heave. This sense holds for the textures, too. Listen for the way Desmond’s distorted basslines echo the bright, clean leads he picks out with the high strings above them. Or spot Shreibman’s faint synthesizer harmonies rising in the distance during the quiet bits, like miserable fog framing another gray morning.
All this proffers itself as a readymade punchline, of course. An 83-minute doom album that is actually the first third of a four-hour opus seems a sort of galaxy-brained terminus, the ostensible slag of two stony dudes sitting for far too long in some smoke-clogged rehearsal room, tossing off absurd hypotheticals. Its minimalism becomes not just maximalism but also mannerism, so far up the form’s ass it may seem hard for outsiders to peer in. But Bell Witch are blessedly self-aware, adding one second of silence to The Clandestine Gate just to make it longer than Mirror Reaper, then sharing a laugh in interviews about the ridiculous choice. They get that this is a lot, that most folks don’t have the space for four hours of doom about, well, being doomed.
But aside from the riffs that glide through the haze, that gumption is perhaps the best part of this entire enterprise—how entirely out of step The Clandestine Gate feels with most everything about how we consume culture right now. This is metal that may have made Pauline Oliveros proud, because its rewards demand you submit fully and listen deeply, to slow down and crawl inside. To wit, on streaming services, Bell Witch have not bothered to break this into bite-sized segments in order to make more money. It is one piece, meant to be played and heard without interruption. The Clandestine Gate is about our cycle of daily and perhaps even eternal toil, or how, as the last verse has it, “the down-stroking rapacious eye of doom” never turns away its gaze. This is an 83-minute break from that torment that Bell Witch hopes, two albums from now, may never end.


In 1977, electronic composer Laurie Spiegel's "Kepler's Harmony of the Worlds" traveled to the edge of the solar system as part of Voyager 1 and 2's "Golden Record". This reissue of her 1980 LP shows how Spiegel always contemplated orbits, heavenly bodies, and the cosmos through her compositions, while remaining affectionately human.

The Expanding Universe

In 1977, American astronomer Carl Sagan selected the composer Laurie Spiegel's computerized realization of Johannes Kepler's 1619 treatise "Harmony of the Worlds" for inclusion aboard the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft's "Golden Record". Kepler's "Harmony of the Worlds" was the lead cut on a collection that held recordings of natural sounds, greetings in 55 languages, selections from Beethoven, Mozart, Blind Willie Johnson, and Chuck Berry, for the sake of demonstrating to other life forms in the galaxy that there is intelligent life on our planet. And now, Laurie Spiegel's music has traveled to the edge of our solar system.
Back on Earth, the New York label Unseen Worlds has obliged us with more Laurie Spiegel, reissuing her 1980 album, The Expanding Universe, and adding over 100 minutes of additional music. At a time when crucial female electronic composers like Pauline Oliveros and Suzanne Ciani are receiving new recognition for their work, Spiegel's music continues to resonate and often sounds strangely contemporary. That her work can be simultaneously dystopian and luminous speaks to Spiegel's talents. She can evoke the chilling cosmos while also crafting something small-scale and warm. When Voyager launched, President Jimmy Carter said: "This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings." His statement applies just as readily to The Expanding Universe.
Spiegel attended Julliard before researching at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, and at Connecticut's Electronic Music Laboratories on the nascent music systems being developed there. (Ultimately, she chose to pursue programming, forgoing musical composition altogether.) The notes within this reissue show the room-sized computers with which Spiegel concocted her music, and her anecdotes recall disk drives the size of washing machines preserving mere seconds of code. She offers details like: "This 32k DDP understood FORTRAN IV and DAP II 24-bit assembly language. It could do an integer add in as little as 3.8 milliseconds but a floating point multiply could take up to 115.9 microseconds. You can bet we all wrote the tightest, smallest, fastest code we could."
Whatever its heady origins, Spiegel's music is inviting, playful, and visceral. As she explained to The Wall Street Journal recently: "There were all of these negative images of computers as giant machines that would take over the world and had no sense of anything warm and fuzzy or affectionate." Yet "Patchwork" has the buoyancy of the ARP figure from the Who's "Baba O'Riley", "Old Wave" is woozy and syrup-slow, and a number of melodies anticipate the analog splendors of Jürgen Müller or Boards of Canada. Her intellectual curiosity led her to investigate African and Indian polyrhythms-- which inform the throbbing and lively "Drums"-- as well as the modal Celtic tunes she heard while studying American folk music in the Blue Ridge Mountains, which permeate three iterations of "Appalachian Grove".
Thrilling as these shorter studies might be, it's in her longer, more contemplative works that Spiegel's sensibilities become clearest. "The Expanding Universe" is nearly a half-hour of swelling, evolving tones, and she stresses that the composition is neither "minimalist" nor "ambient," and that it exists wholly in its own space. Even if Spiegel's music weren't already launched into the firmament, it would finds its natural home there; it's when she contemplates orbits, heavenly bodies, and the cosmos through sound that her imagination is unparalleled. While Kepler mused that the "Harmony of the Worlds" would be audible only to the ear of God, what reaches human ears via Spiegel's realization is bracing, menacing, and disorienting, the piercing tones not unlike a choir of air raid sirens. An alien life form encountering it on Voyager's "Golden Record" would conclude that our world was a maddening, maniacal place.


The Japanese post-rock band's latest features backing strings from the Wordless Music Orchestra and the maximalist production of Henry Hirsch (Michael Jackson, Madonna, Lenny Kravitz).

For My Parents

Mono are a post-rock band with a well-tested formula that they have been working for years: lay out a weepy string theme, fatten it up slowly over nine or 10 minutes, and then nail it to the wall with guitars. On  their latest album, For My Parents, there isn't much juice remaining in it: You can anticipate every single dynamic shift in its five compositions, which is not typically an asset for instrumental music meant to take you on an emotional journey. There isn't much of a journey to be taken on For My Parents; the music doesn't develop, darken, or tell a story so much as it expands and deflates like a balloon. Trying to engage actively with it, to search its contours with your mind, is like poking a soap bubble.
As they did on their live album Holy Ground, they enlist the Wordless Music Orchestra to back them, and the added heft of their strings makes the bombast even harder to take seriously: This is music destined for helicopter-panning shots of majestic rainforest canopies, close-ups of dewy-eyed Olympic athletes, and little else. They also stepped out from Steve Albini's production to enlist producer Henry Hirsch, who gathered the band and the orchestra in his cavernous cathedral space, Waterfront Studios, where every kettle-drum thump and overdriven guitar could resound into the heavens. The album sounds beautiful, in the way that Peter Jackson's visions of heaven in his critically reviled adaptation of The Lovely Bones looked beautiful: picture-book simple but vivid and clear.
The Wordless Music strings play their melodies with a nice arm-twisting dab of schmaltz, which is necessary when you are navigating the Mr. Holland's Opus-caliber key modulations in the finale of "Legend". They manage to make a simple rising major scale on "Legend" feel like dawning rays of morning sunshine. It's an uphill struggle, though, to claim real pathos from such transparently cheesy material: The guitar melody for "Nostalgia" directly plagiarizes some Suzuki Violin School tune-scrap my memory is still struggling to place from my childhood years in group classes. The melody to "Unseen Harbor" has a similar children's-exercise obviousness to its progression. It's hard to turn a nursery rhyme into Tchaikovsky.
Mono's music is better used than listened to actively. As a vigorously marked road map to emotional catharsis, I can imagine it being helpful: If I were, say, doing a particularly tough yoga class, I'm sure that cueing up "Dream Odyssey" at the right moment would help me sink more deeply, more meaningfully, into my Warrior Two. Other music functions this way, creating a space for you to have your own thoughts more than it bothers to have its own. But you can't exactly sink into a soothing bubble bath while Mono plays, either, as every piece works its way into a thundering, Trans-Siberian Orchestra climax that would have me scrambling out of the tub for the volume button.
The garish maximalism would be fine if the pieces did more to distinguish themselves from each other. Or if they were truly exciting. But For My Parents suffers, somehow, from both tastefulness and tastelessness: Too mushy and indistinguishable to wallop you in the gut and too cheesy to be taken seriously, the album feels, at its worst, like a series of power ballads with the choruses ripped out. If they really want to make the post-rock equivalent of a Michael Bay film-- try a dirtier distortion pedal, for instance, or bring in the brass or better yet, a big heavy gong-- I'm there. But that kind of awesome would likely entail risking more genuine awfulness than Mono probably have in them.


On a scrappy solo album inspired by grief and personal upheaval, singer-songwriter and Joyce Manor guitarist Neil Berthier explores new musical outlets for emo.

At Some Point You Stop

After Joyce Manor guitarist Neil Berthier’s father passed away from dementia in 2020, Berthier responded to a plea from friend and fellow musician Petey, packed his bags, and moved from Boston to Los Angeles. These conflicted emotions clouds At Some Point You Stop, Berthier’s latest album as PHONY (and third solo record following the dissolution of Donovan Wolfington, the band he once led). But in the throes of such heartache, Berthier lets his complex emotions guide his most expansive set of songs yet.
A quiet sense of despair defined Berthier’s first two records as PHONY, Songs You’ll Never Sing and Knock Yourself Out. The feeling lurks on the new album’s opening tracks “Christmas Eve Day” (featuring vocals from Ratboys’ Julia Steiner) and “The Middle.” But as the fingerpicked guitars and dreamy synths in the background of “Christmas Eve Day” transition into the harsh, reverberating drum machines of “The Middle,” this shadowy despair transforms into something much larger and louder as Berthier—drawing on the text of a letter he wrote as he processed his grief—pleads to his late father to “just meet me in the middle.” The track trades the snarky, emo revival-era punk of his previous work for heavier, slowcore-inspired indie rock, a sound he’d explored on Knock Yourself Out but revisits with greater purpose in the wake of tragedy.
Throughout the album, Berthier rifles through his own history and popular music at large. As he moves from icy, vaporous post-punk (“Animals”), resonant piano ballads (“Kaleidoscope,” which features Petey), and upbeat psychedelia à la Hüsker Dü (“Great White”), Berthier’s passionate performances connect the dots. The scrappy production on the album is both a compliment and a detriment to Berthier’s songwriting: While songs like the fast and fuzzy “Otherwise” benefit from a more hands-off approach, the bombastic chord progressions of outro “Winter’s Warm” don’t hit quite as hard as it should in the context of such a cathartic record.
Though At Some Point You Stop is Berthier’s most adventurous work yet, his attempts to cover so much new territory means its scale doesn’t always match his ambitions. Yet there’s a tenacity throughout the new album that wasn’t as present on the first two PHONY albums, especially Knock Yourself Out. While that record featured long stretches of dejection with the occasional moment of urgency, At Some Point You Stop flips that equation. Instead of letting the gravitational pull of grief and self-loathing drive him towards isolation, as Berthier hints at on “Wedding & Funeral Family,” he seeks love in the comfort of community. This shift in perspective, corresponding with the cross-country move and life-altering tragedy, makes his new album feel like the work of an artist in the process of finding their new form.


Already out in his native Canada, this singer-songwriters debut LP of spare, soft songs is now issued by Sub Pop.

Infiniheart

Maybe this is just an American's projection onto our northerly neighbors, but I imagine Chad VanGaalen knows the cold very intimately. He hails from Calgary, where he busked street corners and subways for years, gradually building up a large catalog of original songs. Using a variety of instruments and equipment-- some of which he's fashioned by hand-- the relentless DIY'er has recorded hundreds of his songs in a makeshift studio in his bedroom, where you can imagine him retreating from a frigid evening. On his debut album, Infiniheart, which was released in Canada earlier this year and which Sub Pop is now releasing domestically, that crisp chill hangs over every chiming note and every booming beat. Even the packaging cannot escape the cold front: Snow-white and ice-blue dominate the cover artwork, and the inner sleeve is wind-chapped pink.
This chilliness suggests an album full of spare, soft songs conveying subtle emotions, which is accurate but only to a degree. While he keeps his accompaniment to a minimum, VanGaalen is no minimalist. His songs are balanced with only a few carefully chosen elements, as if he has expended a great deal of energy trying to avoid adding another instrument here or overworking a beat there. But the range of sounds on Infiniheart is impressively wide: When VanGaalen culled these 16 from the hundreds in his vault, he chose with an ear toward the eclectic, showcasing his musical ingenuity.
In fact, there's an almost maximalist spectrum of sound on Infiniheart, and the album is all the more impressive for creating and maintaining such a specific mood over 16 songs. Brushes stir against snares on "Blood Machine" imitating slow respiration, and the prismatic guitars of "Liquid + Light" and "Somewhere I Know There Is Nothing" evoke the cutting cold in the air and the sharp glare of sunlight off frozen snow. On "1000 Pound Eyelids" a bleary trumpet suggests the bending metal and breaking bones of a car crash, and the sharp notes of a dobro and a breezy penny whistle pierce "Sunshine Snare Hits".
VanGaalen's guitar can be gentle or brutal, his beats reserved or ostentatious, and he has sequenced the album to showcase this dynamic. The two-guitar coda of "Kill Me in My Sleep", which is perhaps best described as "gossamer", is immediately followed by the instrumental "J.C.'s Head on the Cross", which bounces frenetically on thudding beats. He sings these songs in a voice that stretches towards a shivering falsetto, which cracks noticeably on "Chronograph #1" and adds to the otherworldliness of "Red Blood" and the videogamey "The Warp Zone/Hidden Bridge".
If this chilliness enlivens the music, it unfortunately dampens VanGaalen's songwriting, which relies too heavily on weighty, sci-fi concepts that seem frozen and immobile. In theory, such reliance suggests a unique vision, unflinching in its conception and execution, but in practice, he too often sounds coldly remote, more aloof than elusive. "Clinically Dead" starts the album with the demise of a man-machine: "Clinically he was dead, and the modem inside his head was still working." Conceptually, it recalls the Flaming Lips (who based an entire album on the heartbreaking inner conflict of a crime-fighting cartoon) and Grandaddy (who based an entire album on the melding of humanity and machines in a post-apocalyptic world), but those artists play with the distance between their subject matter and the emotions they intend to communicate. Very rarely does any self-awareness come through on Infiniheart.
When his flights of fancy are anchored in the actual, Infiniheart becomes a powerful combination of words and music. "After the Afterlife" asks about such mundane matters as a mother's haircut and a father's drug habit before conjuring eerie seaweed imagery that hints at tragedy. And "Chronograph #1", about a party whose guest of honor is noticeably absent, possesses more gravity than any of his oddball lyrics. But still, those cumbersome songs stand out the most, especially "Blood Machine", which imagines a Matrix-like underworld where everyone is hooked up to a "giant machine that could circulate blood." He tries to connect it to larger, existential issues, but despite the fluttering guitarwork, the song falls flat: "One of them explained to me/ how they used to be free/ Before the machines got built/ And before there were laws regulating free will." To his credit, VanGaalen invests those clunky lines with a vocal intensity that's surprisingly graceful and even poignant. That's ultimately the sticking point with *Infiniheart: VanGaalen's songs tend toward folly, yet it's impossible to discount his commitment to the material. *


The hardened Detroit traditionalist finds a surprising foil with the New Zealand producer Leonard Charles.

LSD

Guilty Simpson is the kind of rapper traditionalists love—weathered as old boots, lyrically focused, incapable of tethering himself to any fashionable sound. He forged his style in Detroit way before 8 Mile burned an image of the city into hip-hop consciousness. As the years passed, some of his contemporaries went on to bigger things while others fell by the wayside, and his trusted ally J Dilla died far too young. All the while, Simpson mastered the art of remaining true and staying still. It’s 2020, and he is still worshipping the gods of boom-bap, still unleashing that cast-iron voice, still making old-school Detroit hip-hop.
Guilty’s best album is the decade-old OJ Simpson, in which Madlib’s kaleidoscopic beats snapped together with his collaborator’s monotone flow. But with the once-touted OJ Simpson 2 nowhere near materializing, the rapper required a new collaborator, a partner in crime outside the hip-hop ecosystem that would appeal to his singular tastes. As things turned out, Simpson needed to look halfway around the world.
Enter Jeremy Toy. The New Zealand producer and engineer—operating here under the name Leonard Charles—has enjoyed a nomadic career as an multi-instrumentalist and producer in an island nation with about half the population of Michigan, but his spiritual link to Detroit was forged when he dared to remake J Dilla’s Donuts with live instruments. Some would argue that touching the postmodernist instrumental masterpiece qualifies as sacrilege, but Toy is nothing if not audacious.
Simpson and Toy have dubbed their partnership The Leonard Simpson Duo, and their album title bears the abbreviated initials LSD. The hallucinogenic name foreshadows the freaked-out sound: Trading in psychedelica, the union resembles a rap blog-era mash-up of ’90s street rhymes and ’60s San Francisco psych. It’s sometimes jarring, like spotting a time traveller strolling through the hippie-era Haight-Ashbury in Cross Colours.
Take the strangely haunting “Nobody,” which rides a sample of Marlon Williams and Aldous Harding’s 2018 duet “Nobody Gets What They Want Anymore” manipulated to sound like a ’60s folk ballad. Over washed-out guitar chords, Guilty shares space with an angelic vocal loop before making way for a sour guitar solo. There’s even a couple of instrumental interludes peppered throughout LSD, resembling a teenage band working through a fixation with the 13th Floor Elevators.
When in the mood, Charles can cook up a meat-and-potatoes classic. On “G.U.I.L.T.Y.” he takes a spelled-out sample of Simpson’s name cuts it with heavy ambient and psychedelic tones, gifting the rapper an eponymous anthem in the vein of Snoop Dogg’s “Who Am I (What’s My Name)?” or Cam’ron’s “Killa Cam.”
After years spent driving towards a more hardened street sound, Simpson is tested by Charles’s orchestration. It’s fair to say that Guilty’s writing isn’t always at its peak—“I’m inspired by hate/It makes me want to be great,” he says on “My Inspiration”—but there are moments when he is extremely fun. The swirling electronics and hard-knocking drums of “Bricks” gives Simpson a chance to unleash his blunted syllables gloriously. “Friends,” meanwhile, resurrects the famous hook from Whodini’s song of the same name over knocking drums and light keyboard licks. It’s pretty funny to hear a grizzled old 40-something rapper rant about the snakes in his friend group. It perhaps encapsulates LSD, a strange odyssey of opposing elements and counterintuitive choices.


With soft synth pads and fathomless echo, Ukrainian electronic musician Dmitriy Avksentiev creates a mournful ambient meditation on wartime upheaval.

Serenity

On last year’s Millennium Sun, Dmitriy Avksentiev grappled with futurism’s pleasures and terrors by revisiting the past. Inspired by classic science-fiction films like Blade Runner and Akira, the Ukrainian electronic musician, aka Koloah and Voin Oruwu, set out to craft an album about our own era, “where science and technology coexist with wars and dictatorship, where world hunger exists alongside space travel.” In keeping with that tangled timeline—which echoed an observation often attributed to William Gibson, “The future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed yet”—the music’s high-tech overtones tangled with echoes of the past 30 years of electronic music, mixing alien textures with familiar strains of jungle and techno. There was a dystopian cast to some of the album’s darker moments, with pummeling breakbeats wreathed in minor-key synths, and TB-303 patterns dripping like acid rain. But placid ambient tones transmitted a message of cautious optimism.
Then dystopia came knocking on Avksentiev’s door. On February 24, Russia attacked Ukraine, launching the first salvo in an invasion that continues to wreak destruction on the country more than two months later. As rockets flew over Kyiv, Avksentiev grabbed his laptop and his cat, packed some clothes, and began a 70-hour odyssey in search of safety. The story of his flight is printed on the front cover of Serenity, an album he completed since settling down in a new, undisclosed location, where the sounds of sirens and explosions continue. “In daily hell, music became my support, my therapy,” he writes. “Now I want to share my strength and support with others. I created this album to reflect on what is happening to us: tears, nostalgia, dreams of the future, and faith in a bright tomorrow. We will survive, return to our hometowns, and rebuild the country when the war is over.”
Serenity picks up where Millennium Sun’s few purely ambient tracks, like “Hope” and “See You in 1000 Years,” left off. There are no drums, no hard edges, and few obvious melodies. Arpeggiated synths churn in deep pools of reverb; plangent chords hang like heavy mist, while bells and choral pads hint at liturgical contexts. Avksentiev completed half the album’s tracks before the war broke out and finished the rest after fleeing Kyiv, but it’s impossible to say which songs belong to the before times and which the aftermath. (The lone exception is “Seachless,” which he previewed on Instagram on February 16, shortly before the invasion, after performing it that week at Kyiv’s Malaya Opera.) All eight tracks draw on a stripped-down palette of soft pads and fathomless echo; less than half an hour long, Serenity is bound by a focused and meditative energy. Listening on headphones, you feel cocooned in Koloah’s soft, radiant webs of sound.
The mood is more reflective this time around, mournful but never maudlin. “Before the Storm” launches the album with long held tones that recall the foggy unease of Burial’s Antidawn, pensive and unresolving; in “Seachless,” gently spiraling arpeggios circle the root note warily, as though searching in vain for answers. “Serenity” and “Overlook” smear gaseous (and GAS-like) synthesizers into sweeping, elegiac shapes, swells teasing at climax without ever reaching one. Yet Serenity is, above all, hopeful, particularly in its second half, where the tones brighten and melodies come into sharper focus. Veiled forms in the mix suggest a sense of possibility looming on the horizon, and the closing “New Dawn” and “Dyvo” toy with major harmonies. What could have been a solemn affair becomes strangely uplifting. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine makes Serenity feel particularly timely. But it’s the obvious care that Avksentiev has put into the music, as well as the depth and the range of feeling he communicates, that makes it matter.


The zany, ’80s-inspired debut from the 24-year-old pop singer and TikTok star showcases a promising young artist in the age of internet virality.

Hemlocke Springs: Going...Going...Gone! EP

Going...Going...Gone! EP

Hemlocke Springs explains her creative process as a haphazard exercise with only three steps: collapse into neurosis, keyboard smash on your preferred DAW, and spill your guts. It's a characteristically insular approach for a young bedroom pop songwriter, but Springs winds up with something more eccentric than her peers. Her music is kitschy and yearning, drawing from 1980s synth-pop and 2010s alt-pop alike, delivered with the anguish of a 19th-century woman being sent out to sea. The 24-year-old artist, born Isimeme “Naomi” Udu, found an audience after uploading her music to Soundcloud and later TikTok while she was completing a master’s degree at Dartmouth. On her debut EP Going…Going…Gone!, she fleshes out her sound, highlighting a promising young artist in the age of internet virality.
Every song on Going…Going…Gone! can be imagined in a different scene of an ’80s rom-com. Springs captures that era’s endearing cheese with bright tones and singalong hooks, wearing her influences—Depeche Mode, Prince, and Tears For Fears—on her sleeve. At the same time, her music also hearkens back to the pixelated laptop experiments of an artist like Grimes. She presents herself as the unlucky heroine pining for love and then hating herself when she can’t find it, emphasizing her agony with vocal melodrama. She yelps, croons, and growls on tracks like “girlfriend” and “the train to nowhere,” blending the most theatrical moments of several decades of pop icons into the EP’s brief runtime.
Springs’ lyrics make her sound like a cursed Victorian ghost, doomed to live in heartbreak for all of eternity: “I need your attention/In this frail dimension of a brain,” she pleads on “gimme all ur luv.” “enknee1” has verses posed as racing thoughts, synthesizing embarrassment, dejection, and naivety all at once: “But I have made a mistake, it’s such a shame, I don’t think you’re into my kind,” she sings as she grapples with feeling inherently incapable of love. Later, the song explodes into half-time fantasia that could fit right into SPELLING’s The Turning Wheel. The EP scratches that nostalgic itch for a time when everything feels bigger, scarier, and more complicated than it actually is, so you let it out because it’s the only way to feel better.
The last three tracks of the EP were written in quick succession after Springs visited Los Angeles, and at times, that hastiness is evident. On “pos,” she is at her most mercurial, too preoccupied with self-destruction to realize she’s destroying a relationship. The skeletal, cowbell-embellished production struts forward; her voice goes from raspy to shrill, and then she trills her lips. It’s exciting to see her push her weirdness, but the lyrics can make you scratch your head: “We should take an Andrew Jackson with tact and check in the movies at two.” But messiness is part of the journey, and Going…Going…Gone! is zany enough to feel unique and relatable enough to make you want to scream along at the sky.


Much as it always has, the married duo’s confectionary indie pop lands somewhere between pleasantly forgettable, reliably vibey, and genuinely inspiring.

Pollen

After more than a decade of dedication to a singular sound and soft-focus vibe—not to mention the marriage, the boat, the name—it may be time to accept that Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley are not doing a bit. They simply like what they like, and that’s making confectionary indie pop.
To be fair, they have stripped away some of the whole Tennis thing over the past decade. They’ve dialed back the nostalgia, both visual and aural (back in the day of Cape Dory, their fixation on reverb-y, boom-clap Beach Boys production bordered on parody). They went earnest for Yours Conditionally, a densely packed 2017 album dedicated to the ups and downs of marital devotion. On 2020’s Swimmer, their last full-length, Tennis’ sound finally felt truly broken in, with a new groove and a subtler atmospheric touch.
On Pollen, Tennis’ latest, their persistent melodies quiver with the same earnestness as always, and their self-production continues to hit its stride. Against the stately hush of Moore’s voice, Riley’s bass thunks satisfyingly, and their songs groove harder than ever. Warbled and muffled pianos contrast with acoustic guitars, and a few zany synth choices set Moore up to knock out some vocal delights.
Tennis smartly avoid the thunderous pronouncements that their peers reach for—the lyrics on Pollen, typical for the band, don’t so much untangle emotional knots as paw at them. Where another songwriter might pen a plodding lament about America, on “Glorietta,” Moore spares us, simply cringing at the “patriotic displays” and complaining that the air show is blocking the sunset. And the song has the decency to bop. And they’re still married as fuck—Pollen has not one but two songs about the couple’s first meeting, when Riley worked as a valet. The closest the album comes to erupting is its penultimate track, “Never Been Wrong,” but instead of heart-stopping strings or crashing guitars, there’s a cascade of glimmering arpeggios and a suspenseful stretch of choir-ish coos. The overall airiness on Pollen gives the sense that Tennis are continuing to have a blast making music that glides from one hook to the next.
This is not to undercut Moore’s writing as simplistic; in their recent albums, she has developed a deceptively gothic sensibility. Pollen actually ends with a song called “Pillow for a Cloud,” and an announcement from Moore that she’s “terrorized” by time’s “evidence,” which is “carved into my skin and over everything I ever loved.” But even as she gets darker, the music prances. As she sings in a particularly sticky hook on “Let’s Make a Mistake Tonight,” “I’ll take my pain with pleasure any day.”
Indie pop’s politeness means that it can scan as a (quaintly, charmingly) unambitious genre. And it doesn’t always work on Pollen; “Gibraltar” feels two-dimensional, like it was written around its title, and on “One Night With the Valet,” they sound like a pastiche of themselves. But Tennis are content with modest ambitions, writing songs that, when they catch the right way, can work themselves into your head for weeks, and warm your heart—songs that land somewhere between pleasantly forgettable, reliably vibey, and genuinely inspiring. Unless you’re pursuing some dizzying state of perpetual jouissance, some degree of ordinariness is just part of the ride. If so, it should be this well crafted. In “Pollen Song,” Moore captures a sentiment Tennis have been seeking pretty much all of their decade-and-a-half-long career: “Baby, you and I/We go cruising over highways/Your hand on my thigh/I got one hand out the window.” Sounds like a good time to me.


Recorded over one night in 1976, Hitchhiker is an acoustic snapshot of Neil Young’s creative process, captured at a time when he was crafting music strong enough to last his whole career.

Hitchhiker

One night in Malibu in the summer of ’76, Neil Young drove a Cadillac convertible to Indigo Ranch Studios and recorded an album called Hitchhiker. Its ten songs were united by sparse arrangements and a tenuous grasp of time. Names like Kennedy, Nixon, Brando, and Pocahontas commingled with mysterious figures from Young’s own imagination. His writing was looser, funnier, and more surreal than the junkie nightmares that comprised his recent records, though he’d retained their hard lessons: detachment and disillusionment as side effects of getting older. While Young narrated each song in first person, the man himself, then 30-years-old, never seemed fully there. He was always in transition: a lonely visitor, a hitchhiker on the road.
The session was lost to time, but the songs were not. They were re-recorded and spread across several decades of Neil Young albums, from Comes a Time and Rust Never Sleeps to Hawks & Doves and Le Noise. Presented together for the first time on this new archival release, they play more like a cohesive set of demos than a missing chapter in his story, but that doesn’t make it any less affecting. Hitchhiker, produced by longtime collaborator David Briggs with no overdubs or noticeable effects added, is an intimate snapshot of Neil Young’s creative process, captured at a time when he was crafting music strong enough to last his whole career.
Young writes about Hitchhiker in his second memoir, Special Deluxe. “It was a complete piece,” he tells us, “Although I was a little stony on it, and you can hear it in my performances.” Note the low, mischievous giggle that introduces “Hawaii,” one of two previously unreleased songs on the collection. In his book, Young recalls that the only breaks during the sessions were for “weed, beer, and cocaine.” All three substances audibly influence the recordings: Songs open with muttered studio banter or mic adjustments. Some end abruptly or fade distractedly. There are missed chords and mumbled lyrics. The sense of comfort suits the transitory subject matter, coating the album in a playful haze. It breezes by like no other release in his catalogue.
The best songs on Hitchhiker are some of Young’s finest songs, period. “Campaigner,” which was eventually released on the greatest hits set Decade, benefits from its placement among other work that shares its sad, percussive sprawl. “Powderfinger” always enthralls, whether it’s backed by the boozy chug of Young’s band Crazy Horse or the shaky strum of his acoustic guitar. The Hitchhiker rendition flows from verse to verse like a folk standard, uninterrupted by solos, showcasing the fragile quiver of Young’s voice. Other Rust Never Sleeps cuts like “Pocahontas” and “Ride My Llama” are not dissimilar to their album versions. The former finds a more urgent pace without its psychedelic background vocals, and the latter goes down in less than two minutes so that its smoky hallucinations linger just long enough to resonate.
The “new” tracks are equally appealing, if less essential. In the chorus of “Hawaii,” Young stretches out the final syllable of the title in a reedy whine, lending it the same awkward musicality that once turned “Albuquerque” into a long, exhausted sigh. The widely bootlegged “Give Me Strength” is more straightforward: a searching power-pop number that Young bangs out on acoustic guitar like he’s trying to summon the force of a backing band using just his right hand. Its plainspoken wisdom after a breakup is one of the set’s more personal dispatches, along with the title track’s litany of his brushes with addiction. These songs—which tell stories through disoriented scenes, overlapping visions, half-remembered advice—reflect an increasing disinterest in narrative coherence: one that he also applied to his own career.
Several weeks before Young recorded Hitchhiker, he abruptly ended a tour with his former bandmate Stephen Stills that marked the 10-year anniversary of their old group Buffalo Springfield. Sick of singing old parts to old songs and already dreaming up concepts for new material, Young decided to pack it in early. “Funny how some things that start spontaneously end that way,” he wrote to his bandmates. He’d close the year on the road with Crazy Horse, playing new versions of songs he’d recorded for Hitchhiker and a few others that’d show up even further down the road. Young was on the verge of an epiphany in the summer of ’76: his past, present, and future cohabitating in a body of work with the potential to get torn up and rewritten with any sudden vision, any chemical impulse. Beautiful, strange, and stoned, Hitchhiker lets us in on one of those nights.


The Swiss producer reframes electronic music as a mode of spiritual searching on an album that deemphasizes grooves and lyrics in favor of icy, alien sounds and high, inscrutable cries.

DNA Feelings

Most electronic music chases the motion of the body, but Aïsha Devi is more interested in the subtle noise that rises from the body in stillness. Since dropping her Kate Wax moniker and co-founding the label Danse Noire, the Swiss producer has intertwined her experimental computer compositions with her meditation practice. She doesn’t make dance music; she makes music that sounds like the body forgetting itself, losing feeling in the extremities as mind and breath conjoin.
Devi’s 2015 album, Of Matter and Spirit, dissolved her classically trained voice in an unsteady sea of echoing electronics, testing the line between human and machine. Her second album under her given name, DNA Feelings, delves even deeper into the abstract. It’s a chilling listen, with few grooves or lyrics to grab ahold of, and its icy alien angles prove Devi’s patience and boldness. Few producers have this much restraint.
Like contemporaries Holly Herndon, Arca, and Fatima Al Qadiri, Devi would rather denature established song forms than adhere to them. Her voice still suffuses DNA Feelings, typically in one of two modes: high, inscrutable cries serrated with vocal effects or confrontational spoken words. Neither performs the voice’s usual role as an entryway into an electronic piece. If anything, the vocal parts are more alienating than the restless, intermittent drum beats and the cascades of synthesizer notes. Devi’s voice resists contextualization. It does not tell a story so much as it embeds itself in each song’s architecture.
A well-trained voice confers power; it reveals an investment in a hierarchy of skill and allows the singer to ascend that hierarchy. To warp a trained voice, then, is to interrogate power, a project Devi seems eager to undertake, however subliminally, on DNA Feelings. The advance single “Dislocation of the Alpha” centers Devi’s filtered speaking voice, which follows a rhythm but is not quite a rap, as she issues an oblique call to disidentify with the oppressors of the world—to starve out the “alpha” by denying him affinity. The method of listening this album demands disrupts the typical flow of identification from listener to musician. Left marooned in a field of sound, without many handholds, you start to question how and why you automatically identify with certain music.
The best thing an album like DNA Feelings can do to you is make you feel lost, and it does, frequently. “Light Luxury” tears its vocals to ribbons, then chases its uneasy introduction with a seasick synth riff so high-pitched it borders on the range of microphone feedback. “Aetherave” marries a placid, aquatic arpeggio to a bassline quivering at twice its speed. “Inner State of Alchemy” perforates a club beat with gaping pauses, and lets its sky-high vocal refrain, laced with trance reverb, hang in empty space. The lack of a beat under the track’s most melodically gripping moment is like a trap door giving way beneath your feet, a collapse of context. The voice is beautiful and urgent and falling through a void.
The album’s strangest and most striking moment arrives on “Time (Tool)” and continues into “Time Is the Illusion of Solidity.” “If you name me, you negate me,” says an echoing robotic voice. “You’ll unravel your ghostly matter, have visions of alchemy. You will smile when you die. You will not name me. I am the prophet and you are me.” These words come unaccompanied by music at first, then reappear in “Time Is the Illusion of Solidity” shrouded by ambient groans and synthetic church bells. They carry the weight of a sermon, and yet their meaning is impressionistic. Devi suggests another way of eluding power; by refusing a name, shedding markers of individuality, you also refuse surveillance and social control. You unstitch yourself and become more than a citizen of a technocratic hell-state.
Real human power, DNA Feelings suggests, lies not in the individual but in the collective—in the confusing of “you” and “me,” in the blurry region outside language, structure, and time. By reconceptualizing electronic music as a mode of spiritual searching, Devi alchemizes confusion into healing. To be without context is to be given a chance to start anew.


Big Black Coat leaves behind introverted electronica of previous Junior Boys records. There's some mid-era Kraftwerk in its place, as well as a big debt to Detroit techno, that sweet spot in the mid-'70s when krautrock met disco, several of Arthur Russell's many house aliases, and even Prince circa Controversy. But it never lapses into boredom and pastiche, standing instead as one of the highlights of their discography.

Big Black Coat

For well over a decade now, Ontario-based duo Junior Boys have released consistently stellar, deeply personal records, balanced perfectly between the body and the mind. In the five years since their excellent fourth studio album, It's All True, they've moved past the introverted electro-pop of their previous records into territory that feels both fresh and pointedly familiar. On Big Black Coat, you hear some mid-era Kraftwerk, a big debt to Detroit techno, that sweet spot in the mid-'70s when krautrock met disco, several of Arthur Russell's many house aliases, and even Prince circa Controversy. It's an impressive juggling act, and most importantly, it never lapses into pastiche or boredom, wearing its influences squarely on its sleeve while standing as one of the highlights of Junior Boys' discography.
The album is purposefully sexy, but never orgiastic: Like actual, real sex, it's a mix of abandon and introspection. When frontman Jeremy Greenspan sings "C'mon Baby," it's a plea, a supplication, not a wanton come-on. On "No One's Business," the line "When I kiss you/ I'm on fire" sounds as painful as it does lustful. The ultra-warm synth stabs of album opener "You Say That" offers a cocooned sense of security, paired with the kind of driving cymbals you feel in your legs before your ears. But  the song ends abruptly with Greenspan hacking a cough into the mic, as if he's just taken this new, dancier version of himself to its absolute limit. It's funny, irreverent, and refreshingly self-aware: In other words, it's pure Junior Boys.
A handful of tracks even delve boldly into techno, like the epic "What You Won't Do for Love," Greenspan's understated falsetto bubbling up from beneath a sea of arpeggiated tones. Follow-up "And It's Forever" would fit perfectly in a comedown house set, down to its repetitive vocal edit and pulsating bassline. It sort of sounds like if your friends tried to take you to the club after a breakup, but you cancelled on them last minute and spent the night cruising Discogs for old vinyl.
On the title track and closer, they sum up both where they've been and where they're going. It's a sprawling melting pot of a song, and you can hear techno, house music, bedroom pop, IDM, disco, and more, all packaged smartly into seven minutes. It's impressive and frankly unusual to see a band five albums into their career experiment with new sounds and actually make it work, but Junior Boys have pulled it off. Career longevity looks good on them.


Iggy Pop's newest, which he co-wrote and recorded with Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme, recaptures the avant-rock frisson of his early collaborations with David Bowie.

Post Pop Depression

In June of 1977, Iggy Pop appeared on Dinah Shore’s morning variety show, ostensibly to promote his debut solo album, The Idiot, with its producer—David Bowie—in tow to provide moral support. Instead, what transpired was almost an intervention, with Shore expressing quaint maternal concern for Iggy’s troubling behaviour, which included (but wasn’t limited to) chest-slashing and abandoning teenage groupies at airports.  He may go down in history as the patriarch of punk and one of rock’s greatest provocateurs, but Pop's most subversive quality has always been his ability to charm the squares—after all, this is a guy whose songs have been covered by G.G. Allin and Tom Jones.
Some four decades on from his Dinah! stint, Iggy is once again making the rounds on the talk-show circuit with a dapper, red-haired rock-star pal who can help him gain a foothold in the mainstream: Queens of the Stone Age kingpin Josh Homme. While Iggy may no longer be paraded before national audience for the freak-show factor (he seemed positively bashful in the face of reverential audience applause on his recent Colbert appearance), he finds himself in the same position he was in during the mid-’70s, with the future of the (reformed) Stooges in doubt and the singer in need of direction. Where Bowie whisked Iggy off to Europe to be his electro-shocked "guinea pig," Homme lured him out to Joshua Tree last year to take stock of his life, reflect on his legacy, and contemplate his place in a modern world where he’s no longer the first "Iggy" to come up on a Google search.
The result of these private sessions is Post Pop Depression, a record that recaptures the avant-rock frisson of Iggy’s Bowie collaborations, in exploratory spirit if not explicitly in sound. For a frontman, Iggy has always done his greatest work as a passenger, riding shotgun with a musical force as potent as his personality (be it Bowie, Ron Asheton or James Williamson), and submitting himself to their sonic abuse just as he’s subjected himself to pelted ice cubes and batteries from his audience. Now, with the man making none-too-subtle hints about impending retirement,  he has found a co-conspirator that can nudge him out of his comfort zone.
The album may have been recorded in secrecy, but it has  become an act of public mourning. Homme's friends in The Eagles of Death Metal were caught in the crossfire of last November’s terrorist attacks in Paris, and Iggy is grieving the recent loss of his long-time champion and career savior. As the name and context suggests, Post Pop Depression is awash in a fog of melancholy. The title reads like a harbinger of the come-down that will kick in when he inevitably has to hang up his shirt (or, in his case, put one on). "I’ve got nothing but my name… I am nothing but my name," he ruefully intones during a moment of quiet reflection, bracing himself for the moment when Iggy Pop has to go back to being Jim Osterberg. Essentially, Post Pop Depression furthers the existential conversations Iggy initiated on 2013’s (likely) Stooges swan song, Ready to Die, though here he’s given more freedom to be introspective without having to overcompensate with songs about worshipping big-breasted women. But unlike previous dark-alley detours like Avenue B or Préliminaires, Post Pop Depression d0esn't sacrifice his swagger.
Musically, the album is certainly not the Queens of the Stooge Age psych-punk blowout the advance billing may have suggested and, at times, the album's ruminative nature makes you long for a little less search and a little more destroy. But it channels Iggy’s legacy in more oblique fashion, through hypnotic, bass-battering grooves (bolstered by QOTSA/Dead Weather multi-instrumentalist Dean Fertita and Arctic Monkeys drummer Matt Helders) that hearken back to the singer’s original Detroit assembly-line inspirations. And that thunderous thump is matched by lush textures: the radiant shoegazey shuffle of "Gardenia"; the orchestral swirl that caps the tough disco rumble of "Sunday"; the Kraftwerkian synth shading on "Break Into Your Heart" and the "China Girl" echoes of "American Valhalla."
The record also reasserts Iggy’s facility with simple, suggestive phrases. Pick-up lines don’t get much creepier than the album’s opening couplet: "I’m gonna break into your heart/ I’m gonna crawl under your skin". The difference is that this time, he's singing about a culture of me-first indulgence and accordingly, Iggy spends much of Post Pop Depression trying to curb his appetite for excess. "Gardenia" may playfully revel in film-noir images of seedy motel hook-ups, but amid the hedonistic throb of "Sunday" and jazz-punk swing of "In the Lobby," he posits that a lustful life can only lead to a six-foot ditch. ("I hope I’m not losing my life tonight," he sings on the latter, punctuating that last word with genuinely terrified, "TV Eye"-style shriek.) And the deceptively sweet "Chocolate Drops"—a serenade worthy of early-’70s Steely Dan—packs the record’s most bitterly sardonic sentiment: "When you get to the bottom, you’re near the top/ the shit turns into chocolate drops," a comment on the fleeting, phony nature of success from a man who’s ridden the bumpy roller coaster of fame many times.
The elaborate, theatrical set pieces that demand more of Iggy—like the spaghetti-western folk opera "Vulture" and the swashbuckling blues grind "German Days"—feel overcooked and impersonal in comparison, and bog down the mid-album momentum. But if Post Pop Depression’s refined execution has you missing the more unhinged Iggy of old, rest assured, he’s not going down without a fight. The breezy west-coast strummer "Paraguay" may find him ready to throw on the Bermuda shorts and drive off into the sunset, but he abruptly pulls a U-turn for one final middle-fingered rant to the straight world. "You take your motherfuckin’ laptop and just shove it into your goddamn foul mouth, down your shit-heeled gizzard, you fuckin’ phony, two-faced, three-timing piece of turd," he screams to no one and everyone in particular, as Homme and crew egg him on with a Queens-sized crunch and chain-gang chant. And if that proves to be the last gasp of history’s first punk, well, he’s leaving us exactly how he came in—flipping off a world that’s no fun.


The ninth album from the metalcore architects is sharp and urgent. Jacob Bannon’s songwriting shines as he turns his back on interpersonal torment and faces something bigger and more existential.

The Dusk in Us

Jacob Bannon does not want to fight anymore—or, at the very least, he doesn’t have time for it. Somewhere near the middle of “Arkhipov Calm,” the most belligerent speedball from Converge’s gripping and oddly comforting ninth album, The Dusk in Us, the preternaturally aggressive singer and screamer waves, of all things, his white flag. “With every barb that you threw, I saw you list to the side,” he howls above drums so powerful and guitars so charged that they suggest an approaching army. “And I won’t sink with you. I have so much more to do.”
The song takes its name and credo from Vasili Arkhipov, the Soviet naval officer whose vote against firing nuclear weapons from a submarine in 1962 became the historical footnote that prevented the Cuban Missile Crisis from turning into a conflagration. Here, that kind of cool head becomes Bannon’s logic—an unapologetic proclamation that he doesn’t have the energy to squander on fussing and fighting. “It’s the fires that we quell that save us from our hells,” he sings, “It’s the wars that we don’t fight that keep love alive.” It’s a necessary call for stability in preposterously uncertain times, rendered with enough might to make you listen.
Bannon—like all of us—hasn’t always been so collected, so reasonable. Sixteen years and five albums ago, Jane Doe staked Converge’s claim as metalcore architects. Bannon’s poetic bile was its keystone. “I think he pulled that trigger to empty that memory/I think he cut out the weight to end the floods of you,” he moaned back then on a record that coped with betrayal through violent reflection and angry demands. Then came 2004’s You Fail Me, 2006’s No Heroes, 2009’s Axe to Fall, and their 2012 opus All We Love We Leave Behind : They all expressed deep senses of regret and loss, of longing and despair. Bannon was the emotional pugilist, the guy who ended a song sarcastically called “Hope Street” with the imprecation that “No one will break your fall.”
But The Dusk in Us turns its back on the battle, or at least on the interpersonal torment that has mostly defined Converge until now. Throughout these 13 songs, many of them the best the band has ever written, they recognize that the real enemies are bigger, the problems more existential. The invocation of nuclear war is telling, but it’s merely a start. Bannon inveighs against police brutality and senseless violence, hereditary madness and original sin, firearm obsession and feudal overreach. He’s moved beyond bickers and betrayals as his reasons for fisticuffs, taking up the issues that threaten not just him but the child or lover he seems to address during “A Single Tear,” the record’s opener and linchpin. He has, he admits, finally found a reason to fight the good fight. “When I held you for the very first time,” he sings clearly and cleanly, making sure we all understand what’s bound to become a tattoo or two, “I knew I had to survive.”
Rather than looking for a fight, Bannon instead suggests a prepared pacifism, a steady strength that wins these wars with attrition. “Don’t need a helmet if I have my heart,” he stammers and slurs at the start of the gnarly “Under Duress,” an earnest middle finger in the eye of his oppressor. He suggests, over and over, that we rise above these foes—with solidarity, with smarts, with the sense that there’s more at stake here than winning little quibbles. “Reptilian,” for instance, commands us to outthink our base animal instincts, to “lose sight of who we are to know what we can be.” He bids farewell to the very temptation of arms, calling a truce and making his commitment clear. “You have to bury the gun to finally make sense of it,” he sings with the album’s best hook. Converge is his standing army, the force around him that makes you take those standing demands seriously.
Now near the end of their third decade, Converge offers a modern elder’s model for upstart bands or, really, anyone at all. The Dusk in Us is Converge’s first record in five years, and every moment feels earned and alive, like the band hit “Record” only when it had something to say. Between records, they helm or contribute to half a dozen other bands; guitarist Kurt Ballou runs one of the most crucial rock studios around, while Bannon helms Deathwish, a label that’s been testing the borders of heaviness for years. At a time when the problems that give Bannon reason to scream seem only to be getting worse, such self-sufficiency represents an inspiring antidote to the imbalances at the core of The Dusk in Us. Bannon implores us to overcome; Converge, by its very existence, shows us how.
And if Bannon’s lyrics reflect a quest for personal growth and self-preservation in a world that feels ever more fractious, Converge has offered a musical roadmap for as much for decades. They’ve constantly refined their core—a jagged mix of hardcore power and death metal kinetics—while spreading and evolving their sound, too. They’ve added ghoulish dirges, scabrous noise-rock, and bona fide pop hooks. All of that is here on The Dusk in Us, from Ballou’s feedback squall throughout “Murk & Marrow” and Nate Newton’s blunderbuss bassline at the center of “Trigger” to Ben Koller’s start-stop-and-sprint drumming during “I Can Tell You About Pain.” As sharp, urgent, and exploratory as they’ve ever been, The Dusk in Us is quintessential Converge, given the grand new purpose of salvation.


Taking full advantage of his voluminous, one-of-a-kind voice, experimental pop artist serpentwithfeet offers complex visions of queer love on his debut album.

soil

Since releasing his debut EP blisters in 2016, serpentwithfeet has built up a generous aesthetic universe full of clashing textiles, warm light, and Barbie dolls. When the singer born Josiah Wise performs live, he sets up a kind of shrine onstage, draping patterned fabric over his equipment table and arranging figurines from his collection to watch him sing. His live show is an environment into which he invites the audience; he even sings his stage banter in quick, R&B-inflected runs, drawing those present deeper into his music. The Brooklyn-based artist’s debut album, soil, provides a similarly welcoming feel. It expands the template set by blisters, taking that EP’s baroque-pop flourishes and growing them into a fully realized electroacoustic milieu with the help of texturally adventurous producers Clams Casino, mmph, and Katie Gately. This is an album you can set up camp and live inside.
While blisters made use of the Haxan Cloak’s dark ambient production and a striking classical music sample to render a portrait of abject heartbreak, soil delves into a fuller, more complex vision of queer love. There are breakup tracks, like “mourning song” and “slow syrup,” but there are also songs that indulge the exhilaration of falling for someone new. In between those poles, a multifaceted excavation of human connection emerges. In serpentwithfeet’s world, love doesn’t come easy—and he wouldn’t want it any other way.
Take “fragrant,” where he sings of tracking down an absent lover’s exes so they might collectively savor what they have left of him. A slow, scraping beat carries his words, solidifying their desperation and uncertainty, while minor-key synthesizer chords flesh out the atmosphere. Though the object of his affections remains missing, Wise finds communion with the others who miss him by the end of the song. “Their bodies coiled around mine/We sang your name in harmony,” he sings, diverting the mourning of a loved one from a place of loneliness to a place of collective celebration.
These complex emotional registers run throughout soil, as though Wise cannot feel just one thing at a time. A song about sexual rejection, “wrong tree,” ranks among the album’s most upbeat, while the devotional songs often take on a weighty tone. “Already I need you/Someday I’ll plant seeds with you,” Wise sings on “waft,” and though the lyrics swell with the promise of new love, he delivers them in a timbre befitting a requiem. Growing a future with another human being is not an endeavor he takes lightly—he recognizes just how heavy and frightening that undertaking can be.
In singing about love, Wise also frequently sings about work. Images of labor accompany images of connection throughout soil, as on the album’s stunning peak “cherubim,” where he sings at the top of his tenor range, “Sowing love into you is my job.” Sound designer and pop experimentalist Katie Gately’s astounding vocal production multiplies his voice into a grotesque choir as he sings the refrain: “I get to devote my life to him/I get to sing like the cherubim.” The vibrato across the different vocal tracks falls ever so slightly out of sync, creating a reverberating effect and lending the song a sense of profound texture and depth. Rarely has the human voice sounded quite like this. The plurality of Wise’s presence here makes it seem as though he were professing his love before a crowd, as at a wedding, which is not just a celebration of romantic coupling but a bold declaration of commitment to a life’s work.
The album comes to rest on “bless ur heart,” a gentle piano ballad about falling in love, writing about the experience, and then gifting that writing to “a kind and burrowing creature” so he might share the words with his family underground. “What was once a whisper will become a deep, rumbling sound,” Wise sings, conjuring the image of love poem as earthquake. It’s a lovely conclusion that reiterates how love never really belongs to just two people: At its best, it’s a connective force, not an isolating one. It draws you more deeply into the world and the people you share it with; it teaches you to open yourself, to be porous. With soil, serpentwithfeet deeply engages with the complex membranes between the self and a loved one, the self and the world. Few albums attempt this much nuance in articulating love; Wise’s success in his ambitions feels like a gift.


With their second collaborative project, this rapper/producer duo offer a well-studied paean to hip-hop’s past. You could call it a boom baptism.

Titans in the Flesh

At this point, there are few artists capable of doing justice to the styles and sounds rap gone by, but West Coast rapper Blu and East Coast producer Nottz are among the most proficient historians left in the game. Blu, 33, is a product of both gangsta rap and underground consciousness who credits Common’s “I Used to Love H.E.R.,” the 1994 lament about hip-hop losing its original essence, with changing his life. Nottz, 39, is a student of Dilla, Diamond D, Pete Rock, and Dr. Dre who was raised in the competitive Virginia beatmaking scene that spawned Timbaland and the Neptunes before making his name providing no-nonsense beats to everyone from Ghostface to Snoop across the last 18 years.
Blu and Nottz’s first collaborative project, 2014’s Gods in the Spirit EP, mostly got lost in the shuffle, surrounded by individual triumphs like Nottz’s brutally raw beat for Pusha T and Kendrick Lamar’s “Nosetalgia” and the official release of Blu’s acclaimed NoYork! album. But Gods in the Spirit was a successful trial run for the pairing, reminiscent of Nottz’s early work for Busta Rhymes and Rah Digga, and  loaded with sampled strings and compact raps. The duo’s latest tag-team effort, Titans in the Flesh, is a spiritual successor to that release.
Blu has a long history of working on projects with a single producer, including this year’s Crenshaw Jezebel with Ray West, last year’s Bad Neighbor with Madlib (alongside M.E.D.), and two albums with Exile, including his most well-received project, Below the Heavens. This streak suggests that Blu likes chemistry and continuity, structure and routine. And of the producers Blu has worked with, none are more committed to a singular method than Nottz, who almost exclusively toys with cinematic sounds, fashioning them into set-dressing for craggy thumpers that chug along thanks, in part, to conservative loops compressed on his drum machine. Nottz’s technique has grown predictable, but it’s still remarkably effective, and it’s perfectly suited for Blu, whose jump-cutting raps make use of the extra space afforded by open arrangements. Side-by-side, they’re classicists emblematic of the legendary soul-and-substance rapper-producer duos of rap’s Golden Era—teams like Gangstarr and Pete Rock & CL Smooth.
Titans in the Flesh doesn’t look to do anything differently than its predecessor, but it tweaks the process in spots—the production is bigger, the posse cuts are deeper, the rapping is far more clinical—and it commits to the duo’s tendencies at full tilt, all in the service of creating a cool throwback. This is a complete submersion into hard-hitting traditionalist rap that delivers the knock, especially on “To the East” and “Giant Steps,” which even has a Premier-esque scratch-and-sample hook. As a producer, Nottz samples everything from the Psycho score to ABBA B-sides with the intent to condense big sounds into tight casings. The production is decidedly no-frills, particularly on dusty-drummed slappers like “The Truth” and “Atlantis.” Meanwhile, Blu performs in his usual herky-jerky style, which splits phrases at their joints: “Django of the star spangle/My chain dangle/The city of the lost angels.” The whole thing is familiar—sometimes maddeningly so—but the cuts vary just enough to keep the mind flickering for connections, and to keep nostalgia’s pull just out of grasp. This is hip-hop broken down to its core elements: turntablism, cranking loops, bars. It’s a rap purist manifesto.


On his Warp debut, the Italian producer Lorenzo Senni deploys a Roland JP8000 synthesizer to isolate the builds and breakdowns of trance, to thrilling effect.

Persona EP

For his first release on Warp, the Italian electronic producer Lorenzo Senni drew on impish visual artist Ed Atkins’ video piece “Ribbons.” If you haven’t had the fuddling pleasure of seeing Atkins’ videos in-person, they involve hyperreal digital animations—usually avatars of himself—as they stumble through video game-like realms, muttering pop songs in bedrooms, airports, pubs, clubs, and other surreal and mundane spaces. Atkins’ sodden protagonists may croon the likes of Elton John and Randy Newman, but his aesthetics match those of Senni. His tracks also revel and find depth in synthetic surfaces, make pop allusions, and simulate the maddening sensations that arise from the digital corporeality of our modern life.
Senni finds all the thematic material he needs in one of electronic music’s most maligned genres: trance. His early albums were forays into glitch and ambient, but with trance, Senni sought the ecstatic in isolating that music’s builds and breakdowns. He excludes the elements where most listeners would find pleasure centers of such music, in its bass and drums. Like Heatsick with his Casio and Aphex Twin’s own rabbit hole plunge with the Cheetah MS800, Senni maniacally deploys but one keyboard for all of his sounds, the Roland JP8000. As he told Fact last year, “if I had to approach trance music, I had to have that synthesizer.”
Persona is denser than Senni’s previous albums, as the JP8000 is now layered, each bit of space filled with more effects. The result is maximal. The delirious BPM and synth stabs that gush forth on “Win in the Flat World” are cheesy and over-caffeinated, initially bringing to mind the productions of Nozinja and even PC Music. But while the track keeps up its whiplash machinations, slowly little tears form in its synthetic fabric. A curlicue of electric sax appears, the dense chords dissolve, and a single key is left to fidget. “One Life, One Chance” is equally cartoonish, a festival’s-worth of fist-pumping anthems freeze-dried and then shoved into three-minute pop length. A smear of bright brass and color, EP standout “Rave Voyeur” is a dizzying carousel—which makes its fluttering breakdown and subsequent build-up, halfway through, all the more thrilling.
Trance may be what Senni references explicitly, but it’s when he lightens his tracks by just a few clicks that the underlying intent and intensity of Persona get teased to the surface. On a less-manic number like “Angel,” Senni wrings a sense of contemplation out of the fast arpeggios. Closer “Forever True” seemingly settles on a breakneck speed, but Senni slams on the brakes and the track turns spare, slow, and hushed. A catchy, if halting, melody emerges, and one can almost imagine a synthesized Atkins avatar awkwardly lurching to it.


The weirdly fascinating South African outfit tries to make its rap-rave sound and conceptual underpinnings fit the LP format.

$O$

Die Antwoord were always a group of musicians of course, but chances are you didn't first hear about them because of their music. More likely, you first encountered them as a viral video, a meme, a performance art collective, a joke that left you searching for the punchline, or some combination of the above. Hell, when we first profiled the group, it was under the headline "Who the Hell Are Die Antwoord?"
Our introduction came last winter, when Boing Boing first posted a pair of their videos. Combining documentary elements with a surreal undercurrent, the clips were funny, confounding, and unique, the sort of thing that you forward to your friends and then do online detective work to learn more about what you're watching and sharing. There was a full music video for their second single, "Enter the Ninja", but the first thing most of us were entranced by, the element that articulated and contextualized in some small way who DA were, was a promotional piece about the group called "Zef Side". There was music in it, but it served only as a soundtrack to the band's off-the-charts personalities-- you got leader and MC Ninja's testicles dancing in Pink Floyd shorts in slow motion, along with the first hints at fellow MC Yo-Landi Vi$$er's strident, low-rent toughness, which was eventually cited by David Fincher as a potential cinematic look for the femme-hero of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo books.
Ninja and Yo-Landi aren't just striking visual curiosities, either; they're underrated MCs and pop personalities-- much more talented on the mic than they're credited for. They're also captivating live, where the visual fakery of what they do isn't lost; the simple challenge and central difficulty of their debut record, $O$-- most of which was released as a free download last year-- is to fully put across who or what Die Antwoord are when all you have to guide you through their world is recorded music.
It does all come together on "Enter the Ninja"-- still a fantastic single-- in part because it's an origin story. Ninja here works in and around aspirational hip-hop tropes and clichés, giving listeners me vs. the world self-helpsims alongside superhero boasts alongside regular-guy humility. It's catchy, clever, and funny-- full of excellent deadpan jokes ("They said I was a fuckin' psycho... well look at me now!") and forceful rave-rap. Also touched upon are the notions of racial confusion and an introduction to Zef culture, a sort of South African version of white trash. But while this bait to intellectualize the project might carry more weight in the racial powderkeg of SA, it's confusing at best outside of it, requiring more footnotes than most will have time for. No fault of Die Antwoord of course, but the racial and social implications of various ethnic groups in and around South Africa was always going to lose much of its potential power and cachet away from home. That in itself is a lamentable reality: South African apartheid, a more literal black-and-white issue, became a global civil rights cause in the 1980s; the subtle, complex, and all-too-real racial politics and biases since are more difficult to address, confront, and defeat.
The loss of the Zef and racial aspects of the project also highlight how much the Die Antwoord project suffers the further away from visuals it moves. For all the shit Lady Gaga or Nicki Minaj get about their potential cultural signifiers not showing up in their music, they at least create tracks that work on their own. So too did great conceptual pop stars of the past like the KLF or Adam & the Ants or the Sex Pistols. Die Antwoord try here and often fail, for some of the same reasons that the concepts themselves are confusing-- they're a jumble sale of mixed-up ideas and items. Ironically, Ninja and Yo-Landi's vast array of skills betray them here, and songs too often feel overstuffed or schizophrenic.
Frustratingly, most songs have great ideas in them, sitting alongside creative dead ends. The overall sound of the record-- to be reductionist, rave-rap-- is a welcome trend, and it proves they have their ear to the ground. If this is to be an ongoing project, they're off to a weirdly good start, despite the many reservations here on this record: They've put together a group of people with skills, ideas, and personalities, and they seem more than capable of piecing together an excellent 21st century rap record. But this isn't it. Still serving to introduce the project, despite much of the music being around now for months, the album is mostly a literal retread of the sounds a lot of us heard in February and March. It seems like one piece of the conceptual puzzle rather than something that stands on its own.
Ideally, Die Antwoord can now move forward with the freedom to not simply be "that Zef side group," but to be a hip-hop group full stop. That's often a death wish for pop stars-- the charismatic performer wanting to take full control of their vision in order to prove their artistry. Thing is, DA have proven gifted at doing both. Creating music and then adding meme-friendly visuals in aid of that, rather than the other way around, could actually find them improving by leaps and bounds, without losing what's special and unique and head-turning about them in the first place.


On his new EP, San Jose rapper Antwon raps about sex and drugs and general excess.

Double Ecstasy EP

San Jose rapper Antwon is not an easy read. For every vulnerable song there's another that feels insufferably ironic, and all of the above are unwaveringly libidinous, some more mature than others. Returning now with the five-song, 16-minute Double Ecstasy EP, Antwon has refined his vision as well as his aesthetic choices, but the overall message remains consistent. He's still a conflicted hedonist, adept at both indulgence and self-loathing.
Double Ecstasy makes more sense sonically than Antwon's previous work. The diffuse cloud rap of 2014's Heavy Hearted in Doldrums, which made any genuine confessions feel like jokes, has been replaced with pounding club-ready songs. On "Luv," Antwon openly raps about visiting the strip club to make himself feel happy like his friends (who consume drugs, in their own right, to ease life's pain), but at the most audible on the hook, he wouldn't dare say he's going to "the booty club" to "fall in love."
"Luv" is an important step forward for Antwon, as it's one of the rare times he sounds at home over an instrumental that's as powerful as his natural vocal delivery. On "Girl, Flex," however, Antwon falls right back into his musical and behavioral traps, rapping bland and juvenile lines like "I'm chillin' with my lil bitch at the mall." Unlike "Luv," there's no self examination, and he doesn't make sex sound particularly fun.
When artists like Future, Danny Brown, and Young Thug rap about excess, they're so beyond the pale or dejected that trauma is clear. But Antwon never manages that level of complexity. Still, the songs on Double Ecstasy are enjoyable and, at times, captivating. They're uptempo and Antwon's voice is inviting, his delivery incredibly consistent. But the EP also leaves the rapper at a crossroads. He could continue to make solid tracks that occasionally pop when all the circumstances align, or he could further explore his more confessional side, but at this point, it would make sense for him to commit one way or another.