Jill Scott's fifth studio album is slow in the way that the familiar is slow: we already know what to expect. With Scott, it's mom-and-pop, all-you-can-eat R&B; sexy fun for grown folk over the age of 40, like speed dating at church.

Woman

Jill Scott's voice is familiar like hair being braided on a stoop, like a fire hydrant pouring out into the street, like a slow summer. Woman, her fifth studio album, is slow in the way that the familiar is slow: we already know what to expect. With Scott, it's mom-and-pop, all-you-can-eat R&B; sexy fun for grown folk over the age of 40, like speed dating at church.
Woman's first track, "Wild Cookie", initially seems like a spoken word ode to "Empire"'s Cookie Lyon, but the lyrics quickly suggest that "Cookie" is a euphemism for the vagina. "Wild Cookie choices lead to lonely pregnancy," Scott says over strings and drums. The vagina in "Wild Cookie", personified, acts on its own. Desirous, it does not have a mind of its own, but it would seem that way. "Just the other day my girlfriend said she was watching TV and her wild cookie detached from its seat." That detachment, that Jill speaks of—that desire—is a magnetizing energy.
Beyond "Wild Cookie", there are other food references. After all, Scott perpetually sings like she's about to cook dinner for a family that isn't even hers. She wants domesticity, craves it. "Prepared", the track that follows the intro poem, has the lyrics "I've been getting recipes off the Internet" and "I've been eating more greens", which come as no surprise for anyone who's ever listened to "The Way" off her first album. Food is a big part of Scott's music. Additionally, in the track "Closure", Scott sings about not making a man quiches and homemade waffles anymore, how he shouldn't expect breakfast.
"I'm on my way, I'm almost there," Scott sings in "Coming to You", a percussion-laden, breathless track, the most urgent on a decidedly slow record. "Coming to You" is a funky, upbeat jam, but for a faster song, it's not necessarily more fun. The fun tracks are the ones that shimmer. "Fool's Gold", arguably the best song, is about a disillusioned Scott who finds herself in a relationship that might as well have been a pipe dream. "I was living the dream/ Believing things that just ain't true/ Oh, I can't believe I ever believed in you/ Had me chasing fool's gold," she sings over a bouncy, enchanting instrumental. Another strong track is "Lighthouse", a somberly reassuring lullaby of a ballad about supporting a lover through trying, burdensome times. "I'm your shelter," Scott sings like an overprotective siren, striking a balance between sexy and soothing.
Intimate and slow-moving, Woman is good but underwhelming. It lacks the dynamism of Who Is Jill Scott?**, the rap features of Light of the Sun. What was new, interesting, and different 15 years ago isn't anymore. Scott's mastered the formula of candlelit, slow-cooker music. Her sense of humor and sensuality, fine-tuned, endearing and bold, is infused throughout this album, but it doesn't feel like enough. It misses the mark, like a lot of great music does, because it's less inventive.


The London-based literary polymath’s fourth album fuses spoken-word poetry with skeletal production, painting a picture of contemporary UK culture in imagistic, intricately wrought verse.

The Line Is a Curve

Since making their live debut doing spoken word at 16, London-based Kae Tempest has made their mark across multiple disciplines: poetry, theater, fiction, and rapping. In 2012, they won the Ted Hughes Award for innovation in poetry. Two years later, they were selected as one of the Poetry Book Society’s Next Generation Poets. Two of their albums have been nominated for the Mercury Prize.
The tension between the self and the collective is central to their work; so is narrative’s role in bridging those two realms. Tempest has a predilection for myth (in 2013, they released Brand New Ancients, a contemporary retelling of the tale of Tiresias), and their writing often argues for the importance of storytelling itself. On their fourth album, The Line Is a Curve, they turn their attention to more contemporary stories. The album attempts to capture what it feels like to be alive today in contemporary Britain, drawing on familiar signifiers and clichés: online lives, multiple jobs, youthful years drowned in pubs. But as Tempest examines the stop-and-go motions of being, it also feels like they are asking what it feels like to be alive, period.
The Line Is a Curve is a sentimental, prophetic, mimetic, and worldbuilding work that blends moody electronica with elements of neo-soul and grimey hip-hop. It chronicles the afflictions of everyday life and the pressure to overcome them—from the violent desire to dissolve into limerence (“Don’t You Ever”) to breaking patterns of generational trauma (“Smoking”)—and ultimately counsels that we make peace with our daily adversities. With “more pressure” comes “more relief,” they intone on “More Pressure.” Beginning and ending with the same melody, the album’s cyclical structure mirrors the daily obligation to overcome our suffering and endure.
The album begins on a menacing and claustrophobic note with “Priority Boredom,” as co-writer and co-producer Dan Carey braids an apocalyptic melody into the center of the mix while Tempest tangles their vocals right into it. As the album progresses, Carey’s instrumentation becomes wider and lighter, and Tempest’s lyrics become more optimistic—“More grounded/More rooted/Less convoluted,” they rap on “More Pressure” over Carey’s euphoric, oscillating synth. In these more positive moments, Tempest can come across as mawkish; their style has always felt aligned with the heightened emotion of the American slam poetry scene, and This Line Is a Curve brims with chicken-soup-for-the-teenage-soul lyrics. Yet the album’s strength of heart is undeniable. “There are things I have to say about the fullness and the blaze/Of this beautiful life,” they rap on “Grace,” offering the album’s final words. It’s a beautiful and well-earned release after several tracks’ worth of despondency.
This is Tempest’s show, but musicians who have been playing with them since they first began gigging provide little smatterings of drums, guitar, tuba, cornet, and french horn. Further contributions come from Fontaines D.C.’s Grian Chatten (whose verse on “I Saw Light” feels conservative and glib compared to Tempest’s incisive and intimate imagery) and former BROCKHAMPTON member Kevin Abstract, who was introduced to Tempest through Rick Rubin, the album’s executive producer. Tempest and Carey have spent the last several years learning from the studio guru, using their time at Shangri-La trying to reconstruct the relationship between Tempest’s intricately polysyllabic verses with Carey’s post-dubstep productions. On 2019’s The Book of Traps and Lessons, their first Rubin-produced project, Carey reined in his sound, leaving more space for Tempest’s words. Carey and Tempest repeat this formula on The Line Is a Curve: As Carey’s synths brood, Tempest explores a whole poetry anthology’s worth of meters. Their dramatic delivery functions like a musical monologue, and their lyrics, which are stuffed with glottal stops and plosive consonants, function like a layer of percussion against Carey’s largely beatless electronic meanderings.
Throughout, Tempest balances character study, vignettes, monologues, and prosaic details that function metonymically—“Discarded masks, empty tubes/The colds, the flus,” they rap on “Salt Coast”—with each detail reconstructing the universe we live in. Tempest’s visceral yet temperate delivery is comparable to Little Simz’s calm conviction. Like Simz, too, Tempest is almost Biblical in their mode of address. Tempest’s linguistic instinct, however, is nearly peerless. The tight iambic trimeter of “Nothing to Prove”—ten lines of six slick syllables—sounds like bullets. Elsewhere, on “Priority Boredom,” where each verse is dedicated to its own vowel sound, the monotony of individualism is cleverly represented with congested “or” sounds: “Priority boredom/Gorging/Four courses/Forced absorption,” they spit, the words like slushy fruit in their mouth.
The Line Is a Curve functions as a therapeutic exercise in resilience and repetition. Starting from a place of isolation and dejection, Tempest ends with community-facing lightness and love. “But if you do not bring forth what is within you/What you do not bring forth will destroy you,” they prophesy—an epiphany that doesn’t last long, before the opening melody from “Priority Boredom” returns, and Tempest starts the journey over again.


For a lot of kids, David Bowie is a guy that's never been even remotely\n\ cool, let alone ...

Hours

For a lot of kids, David Bowie is a guy that's never been even remotely cool, let alone taken seriously. Yep, they remember him for what he's contributed to society in their lifetimes-- Tin Machine, Black Tie, White Noise, the "Cool World" soundtrack, Outside, Earthling, and now Hours. Who'd guess that a discography that unlistenable would belong to the richest man in rock music?
At this point, David Bowie has done more harm than good to his fans' cochleas. His last few albums have failed in almost every aspect, but not for a lack of trying. Outside, his 1995 "comeback," was a concept album about a futuristic murder case that featured an endless stream of clichés and banal S&M; imagery in lieu of lyrics. His 1997 follow-up, Earthling, attempted mock drum-n-bass, some shoddy reggae- tinged numbers, and a universally- panned tour with Trent Reznor.
Hours, of course, completes Bowie's late 90's trilogy in his usual fashion-- he's altered his sound to fit his perception of current musical trends. And as always, he's closer to getting it right than you might expect, but still way off the mark. Here, Bowie seems content to cut his losses with today's youth and reach for the older set. Hours opts for a spacy, but nonetheless adult- contemporary sound that comes across with all the vitality and energy of a rotting log.
For the better part of an hour, Bowie drifts through some the most sterile and unimaginative songs since Sting released Mercury Falling. On "Thursday's Child," Bowie acknowledges his issues with growing old, and possibly, his dwindling fanbase. "Throw me tomorrow," he sings. "Not that I've really got a chance." At least he can admit it. But just six songs later, Bowie regresses into "The Pretty Things are Going to Hell," an homage to his classic 1971 song "Oh! You Pretty Things" and Iggy and the Stooges' "Hard to Beat (Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell)" off Raw Power. As expected, it's not something you wanna find yourself listening to.
No, it's not a new low, but that doesn't mean it's not embarrassing. David Bowie is my dad's age, whether he likes it or not, and he needs to exercise some self-restraint-- you know, like taking a deep breath when he gets the urge to pen a sequel to one of his old hits. Or counting to ten when he feels the need to put a flanger effect on the guitar track. Or returning to an old drug habit when he becomes inspired to record another album...


The Alabama rapper’s official debut brings her sharp-tongued bars and bassy 808s into a glittery world of early-’00s pop culture and reality TV nostalgia.

You Still Here, Ho ?

If Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion are seniors in the school of pussy rap, then Flo Milli, Kali, Lakeyah, and Yung Baby Tate are the well-known sophomores. The grandchild of legends like Lil’ Kim, Trina, and Missy Elliott, modern-day pussy rap comes equipped with a sharp eye for sexual prowess, deprioritizing men, and getting to the money, a recipe that’s already elevated stars like Latto, Saucy Santana, and City Girls. Among the later class, Alabama’s Flo Milli has brought cutting bars and knocking singles that demand attention, moving at her own pace with performance, freestyle, and artistic direction chops. The 2021 XXL freshman’s best-known tracks—“Beef FloMix” and “In the Party”—have become bad bitch summer anthem mainstays.
Her 2020 mixtape Ho, Why Is You Here ? solidified Milli’s bravado and lyrical clarity. Tracks such as “Weak” off the debut were a flip of SWV’s classic and showed off Milli’s love for Southern snap music, punctuating her ability to insult you and degrade men in the same breath. Milli’s official debut, You Still Here, Ho ?, pursues various channels through Milli’s colorful world of boasts and empowerment anthems, but at times misses the mark of showing her range.
Alluding to a Southern girl’s dreams of superstar fame, Milli welcomes us to a glittery world of early-’00s pop culture and reality TV, complete with an introductory cameo by Flavor of Love alum Tiffany “New York” Pollard. Milli’s formula of contrasting her higher-pitched voice with bassy 808s and sharp-tongued bars serve her well on this project. Early single “Conceited” feels like a thudding Southern revamp of Remy Ma’s 2006 classic with Milli rapping, “Please don’t bark cause Milli bite back.” Even a slower tempo song such as “No Face” illuminates Milli’s knack for a simple yet effective chorus: “Put that pussy on his face/No face, no case.” Oddly enough, one of the second strongest moments is “Titled Halo,” where Milli plays the slow, syrupy storyteller as she contemplates the possibility of falling in love again (“You say I’m the one you pray for/But I ain’t nobody’s angel”). It’s the perfect song for a late-night drive of yearning and indecision.
The only time we lose the power of Milli’s pen is on “Pretty Girls,” an OG Parker-produced track whose stock power-pop guitar riff feels numb to the song’s bubbly, sunshine-filled mood. “Hottie” and “On My Nerves” run into similar problems: In theory, these should be big moments, but the beats lag behind Milli’s vocals and the predictable choruses don’t hold their weight. Some of the awkward shifts feel like understandable growing pains: In an industry hellbent on insisting that women in rap can only be caricatures, it’s refreshing to see Milli step out with both her classic approach and new attempts at claiming selfhood. You Still Here Ho ? meets Flo Milli in her most adventurous form yet.


STROOM, a Belgian label whose releases are not so much reissues as alternate histories of avant-garde pop, surveys the dreamlike soundscapes of a fringe figure from the 1980s.

Benjamin Lew: Le personnage principal est un peuple isolé

In a recent profile of the curious Belgian imprint STROOM, art director Nana Esi said, “You need some vagueness to be able to be flexible.” To which her partner and the label head, Ziggy Devriendt, added, were money not an issue, “I would immediately start a restaurant here in Ostend with the name STROOM, I would start a CBD shop named STROOM.” Music as sustenance, music as vapor: STROOM similarly slips out of easy grasp with every release. The label has drifted between sounds, countries, and eras; its releases are not quite reissues so much as alternate histories. One record might be hypnotic, globe-trotting ambient, another unabashed trance, while most revel in simply being unclassifiable.
That the label sought out Benjamin Lew aligns with this outlook. A furtive figure on the 1980s Belgian scene, Lew was responsible for a few evocative releases on the similarly genre-averse Crammed Discs label, working with the likes of the Durutti Column and Tuxedomoon. As Crammed owner Marc Hollander recalled, Lew wasn’t a trained musician but rather a guy who dabbled in “photography, writing, visual arts… and worked part-time as a cocktail mixer in a tropical bar,” serving drinks to other creative types. So his output makes sense in our current gig economy, as Lew sways between dreamlike ambient, woozy jazz, and skewered pop, beholden to nothing save his own whimsy. Le personnage principal est un peuple isolé draws from his ’80s albums and collects unreleased music, but it also feels like an unfinished portrait, given that it maddeningly leaves out his stunning, surreal 1982 debut, Douzième Journée: Le Verbe, La Parure, L'Amour.
The first few pieces here align Lew with other forgotten artists from that era only getting their due in the 21st century, like Woo, Gigi Masin, and Hiroshi Yoshimura. “Profondeurs des eaux des laques” and “Moments” draw on the playful slant of Erik Satie rather than the more objective ambient of Brian Eno, at once serene and gently surreal (the former title roughly translating as “the depths of lacquered waters”). Woodwinds and treated guitars move together in drunken duet, while “Moments” has all the resonant plinks, drips, and ripples of a good long bathtub soak.
The title track falls into the lineage of Can’s “Ethnological Forgery Series” along with recent productions from artists like Jan Jelinek, Andrew Pekler, and RAMZi. Here Lew creates an imaginary sound with a carefully constructed blend of thrummed hand percussion, sitar twangs, the buzz of a double-reed instrument, and voices that could be in any tongue. It conjures a world as tenable as smoke, drawing you in only to dissipate after four minutes. “Qu'il fasse nuit” does something similar with clarinet, violin, and clattering percussion, weaving them together to sound like a jaunty highlands folk dance unearthed by Lew the ethnographer. On “Etendue,” he creates something both earthy and ethereal, mixing a church choir with the sound of someone calling to their herd.
Only two short songs in the middle of the album break the spell: “The Wheel” and “Little Birds Sit on Your Shoulder” are clunky rather than charming. Despite a knack for trying on numerous hats, Lew won’t ever be remembered as a savvy songwriter or a good vocalist. He’s at his best wringing plangent feelings out of minor-key drama, as on the excellently titled “La magnifique alcoolique” and in the struck chimes that twinkle across the pensive yet tingly “Joyeux regrets imprécis.” That song’s title might also serve as motto for both Lew and STROOM: “Happy vague regrets.”


The third issue of Stefan Betke's Pole project just hit the stores, and\n\ in step with the album-naming ...

CD 3

The third issue of Stefan Betke's Pole project just hit the stores, and in step with the album-naming trend started by the band Chicago, it's called CD 3. The cover of Pole's first release was solid blue, the second was bright red, and this one is all yellow. From the outside, this is all that differentiates the three CDs, and many might say that there's even less difference in the music. These people have a point about the sameness; hell, even Betke would admit that Pole has a pretty narrowly defined sonic trademark. He makes vaguely rhythmic, dub-wise music constructed in part using the crackles from a defective pole filter, a device used when mastering vinyl LPs. Static pops, electrical buzzes, surface noise-- these are a few of Betke's favorite things. And what most people consider the annoying by-products of a retro music storage fixation, Betke considers instruments.
CD 3 is a good news/bad news kind of record. The good news is, if you've been unsure about Pole, understandably reluctant to spend your money on quiet, crackly ambient music, your prudence has been rewarded. This is definitely Pole's best record, and it's by far the most "pop" (as opposed to just "click-and-pop") of the three. The familiar scrapes, snaps and hisses have been relegated to the background here, as opposed to being the focus of CD 1, and the accessibility factor has definitely been upped. The first five tracks in particular should appeal to any open- minded fan of dub, as Betke meets the rockers uptown with deep, melodic bass, reverberating keyboard refrains, and loads of spacy atmosphere.
"Überfahrt" (alright, quiet down-- it means something entirely different in German) is particularly hypnotic, as every melodic and percussive phrase slides lazily in and out of the mix, echoing back from whence it came. And if you get high enough, you could probably actually dance to "Rondell Zwei," a tune that marches steadily forward on the strength of a downright catchy, substratic bassline. Somewhere, King Tubby is smiling.
The bad news is that if you already own a Pole record or two, it's tough to recommend buying another-- they're just too similar. CD 3 completes my Pole collection (except for those rare 12-inches), so I now own three albums of his minimalist, fractured techno records. Frankly, it's making me feel like an asshole. So, do I sell the first two and just hold on to CD 3? Probably. Because without a doubt, this is the record I'm putting on next time I feel like listening to Pole.


Fifteen years ago, kids didn't listen to this kind of music on CD, cassette, vinyl; they listened to it ...

Forged Prescriptions

Fifteen years ago, kids didn't listen to this kind of music on CD, cassette, vinyl; they listened to it on the tips of their tongues. It used to come on blotter paper, in tabs. When string-seducer Sonic Boom went into his Rainbow Guitarland of Doom, people's serotonin levels never recovered. The Perfect Prescription was like taking an acid bath in the dungeon of the mind: revelatory but solitary. On Forged Prescriptions, the Spacemen are trying to absorb us into their skin.
This two-disc release consists of various alternative mixes, demos, and covers from Spacemen 3's Perfect Prescription recording sessions. According to the Boom, the majority of these mixes were "considered by us to be too hard to replicate live and therefore reduced for the original release." This is admittedly kind of absurd, like saying these tracks were too good to be listened to, but there is some validity in the sentiment. Whereas the disparity between the old and "new" mixes are perhaps subtle at best and practically indiscernible at worst, there is a difference in mood. If The Perfect Prescription often sounded extraterrestrial, it also just as often sounded like traditional Velvets-inspired indie rock. On Forged Prescriptions, though, the stratifications of guitar are even further attenuated to stunning single tones, the basslines float even more subliminally under the psychedelic mind-spinning noodling, and... well, okay, the drums are pretty much the same.
The gateway drug on this collection is the alternative mix to "Things'll Never Be the Same". If the original was a feedback dust-up, quenched in gravelly, occasionally Bob Mould-ish vocals and an abyssal thump, the new mix is so bombarded with combating guitar squeals, earthen drums, and Pierce's sustained tones it will excoriate your entire body. From the classic intro onwards, the guitars are played backwards, forwards, sidewards, epiphanywards. The original was phenomenal strutting feedback stagnating in the void. This is a twirling tea kettle launched into orbit, feedback that goes somewhere, at a pressure that gives you the bends. By "Call the Doctor", the guitars are spewing their trajectories of cosmic refulgence farther than the ears can grasp. At one point, I accompanied this euphony with the "Rolling Fire" setting on Windows Media Player and my computer restarted itself. Truth.
The new "Walking with Jesus" is perhaps the most startling mix, taking the original into an even more incorporeal and immaculate sphere. The Perfect Prescription version used too many 80s-indie-rock guitars for my liking, and vaguely sardonic; this one is an anesthetic plunge into purgatory, equipped with a choir instead of rock 'n' roll, and it's positively cultish-- the anthem of a Polyphonic Spree crossed with Heaven's Gate. "Come Down Easy (Demo Version)" is a filthy atomic 100-bar blues, oscillating echoes of birdman Pierce, our acidhead savior. You will bow down to him for his beatific benevolence and serenity. Except in this religion, the communion wafers are shrooms, the crucifix is the solar system, and the holy book is my hallucinations about Toad Demons: "It's 1987/ All I wanna do is get stoned."
But the second disc is the one that truly breathes new life into Perfect Prescription. The extended version of the Red Krayola cover "Transparent Radiation" replaces the angry muddle of the album version with light and clarity. The demo version of "Walking with Jesus" is when the Son of God bought a shotgun, rockin' twine and fuzz battered by shivering engines. The demo version of the heralded "Starship" and the previously unreleased cover of the MC5's "I Want You Right Now" are bone-implodingly dense, perfect tributes to 60s psych-metal, plasma ghosts emerging from Sabbath's grave.
To get pragmatic for a second (a little silly considering the only word this band knows is "excess"), the differences between these tracks and their album version counterparts can seem innocuous enough if you're not listening closely. Purists who've spent years memorizing every note of The Perfect Prescription are sure to think of it as little more than a curiosity. Many of the mixes here, however, are more complex, harmonious and pulverizing than those on the original classic. The second disc also acts as a sort of paltry best-of that combines some excellent covers with the most memorable songs from the original LP. As for those neophytes who ask if this album's any good if you're not on drugs, a better question might be whether drugs are any good without this album.


On their psychedelic and virtuosic second album, the Denver quartet brings death metal to new and exalted places.

Blood Incantation: Hidden History of the Human Race

Hidden History of the Human Race

Death metal glories in ugliness—rhythm guitars the texture of churned shit, leads like pig squeals, vocals like reverse peristalsis. But Blood Incantation do beautiful things with that ugliness. Their ugliness moves; within 40 minutes on their second album Hidden History of the Human Race, the Denver quartet brings death metal to exalted places, places it hardly ever goes, without ever losing the essential, foul tang of the sound.
It helps that they are incredible players, virtuosic in the most basic sense. In just the first few minutes of the opening epic “Slave Species of the Gods,” guitarists Paul Riedl and Morris Kolontyrsky evoke the cold steel-shavings scrape of Slayer’s Kerry King and the hair-flip theatrics of Metallica’s Kirk Hammett. But their virtuosity comes from their vocabulary, as well: They just seem to think differently than their peers. Great riffs are less the products of finger muscles than the peculiarity of a mind, and there is no question that they are singular players.
You can hear this relative oddness everywhere. They are more fond of harmonized guitars than most death metal bands, which give their suite-length songs uncommon melodic movement and emotional resonance. Ambient synthesizers play walk-on roles at several surprising moments, and clean-toned psychedelic guitar leads often pick up where those synthesizers left off, carrying melodic ideas forward. Even when drummer Isaac Faulk is drilling the music into the earth with blast beats, there is something in the arrangement arcing upward.
Another delicate touch comes from Jeff Barrett's fretless bass, an instrument known for rounded tones and freakishly high technical demands; in rock-music circles, it is most associated with louche pop records likee Roxy Music’s Avalon. In “The Giza Power Plant,” Barrett plays high up the neck, shaping long lines and sounding almost like a bassoon behind the din.
Death metal has a long history with juvenile winner-takes-all nihilism—it is the home of Cannibal Corpse, Goatwhore, Deicide. But in the last several years there have been a number of American bands that express some genuine spiritual stirrings—the Toronto outfit Tomb Mold and the Philly band Horrendous, to take two other examples. Blood Incantation take that transformational energy the furthest. Yes, the song titles are a pretty big hat tip in that direction—the album concludes with an 18-minute piece called “Awakening from the Dream of Existence to the Multidimensional Nature of Our Reality (Mirror of the Soul)”—but you feel it shot through the music as well. The leads glow through the murk; on “The Giza Power Plant,” they swarm atop the traditional down-tuned chugging rhythm guitars like phosphorescence in a swamp.
But the music feels meditative, despite all its frenetic motion; they recorded the entire thing—every interlocking part and lightspeed tempo switch—analog, which means that you are hearing a band breathing as an organism, a group of people accomplishing something remarkable when you play it. The euphoric “Inner Paths (To Outer Space),” was improvised “on psychedelics over a period of several months,” according to the band, and it evolves entirely in unexpected leaps, dissolving into synthesizer washes and backmasked guitars and then plunging ahead, again, stirring up the primordial ooze. At every point, you hear a band going somewhere new, hurtling towards a forever-receding spot in the consciousness.

Buy: Rough Trade
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From the spluttering hardcore of their first LP through wildcard bassist Cris Kirkwood's lost years, the Meat Puppets seemed to chase chaos, musical and otherwise. On their 14th album, they opt more for a leisurely drive down a familiar track.

Rat Farm

From the spluttering hardcore of their first LP through wildcard bassist Cris Kirkwood's lost years, Meat Puppets seemed to chase chaos, musical and otherwise. So when Cris, fresh off a few particularly rocky years, rejoined brother Curt Kirkwood in 2006, once-bitten fans didn't know what to expect, save a certain amount of mania. What they got was anything but: starting with 2007's Rise to Your Knees, the Meat Puppets got good and mellow, trading in their frenzied pacing and Spirograph guitars for a surprisingly even-keeled, weirdness-averse, country-tinged amble.
Rat Farm, the Puppets' 14th studio LP, finds the brothers Kirkwood continuing to take things easy. Curt's been calling Rat Farm "real blown-out folk music," playing up its compositional simplicity and explaining away its lack of fretboard melée. Rat Farm's pop jangles and crisp country workouts don't feel all that much straighter than the band's other post-reunion LPs, and there are still hints (however fleeting) of the Meat Puppets of old in Rat Farm's ragged harmonies, permafried geniality, and Curt's wide-eyed fascination with the natural world. But all that remarkable stuff that's been lost to the Puppets' gradual mellowing-- the hardcore furor, the Deadhead twinkle, the sunburnt boogie-- hasn't been replaced by, well, much of anything. Which leaves the perfectly pleasant Rat Farm feeling strangely wanting.
"Everything's cool, and everything's fine," Kirkwood sings at the top of "Waiting", quickly adding "and everything drives me out of my mind." That's kind of the trouble with Rat Farm: everything's fine, but that's about the long and short of it. Whether it's the Byrdsy stroll of "You Don't Know", a post-grunge chopper "Leave Your Head Alone", or a countrypolitan swoon like "Waiting", everything here unfolds as you'd expect it to, amicably enough, but with a distinct lack of adventure. The mood's convivial, the tempos are easygoing, and the solos—when they happen at all—are clipped. Sure, some things'll never change: Curt still sings like he's holding in a lungful, and there's a certain wobbliness to the arrangements that never lets you forget who you're listening to. But culling the chaos from their sound doesn't exactly flatter what remains, and with every layer of weirdness they shed, some personality follows.
Still, the smile stretched across Rat Farm's face does wonders for the hints of blankness behind its eyes. Curt's mind remains bent, even as his songs have straightened themselves out; Rat Farm's world is populated by a mechanical money, a yard full of cats and rabbits, and the titular Kirkwood-owned home for rodents. Dual highlights "Down" and "Time and Money" allude to adult concerns-- parenthood and cash-flow, respectively-- but even they never seem too far from a shrug and the crack of a beer. At its best, Rat Farm is warm, well-executed, and slightly goofy; that won't be enough for everybody, but for the Kirkwoods circa 2013, it seems to be plenty.


The London-based electronic duo's latest record was written well before Brexit, but its austere, dystopian murk reflects the deflated, anxious, uncertain national mood of their home.

Made To Measure

In 2015, as Britain anointed its first Conservative-majority government since 1992, there was a sense among vanquished liberals that things could scarcely get worse. A gimlet view of the national mood came from Darkstar, the London-based, northern English electronic duo. Following the departure of singer James Buttery, their election-year album Foam Island foregrounded spoken-word field recordings that captured working-class northerners as they danced in the pincers of Tory Britain. (“Cuts,” for instance, revolved around a bleak audio clip from a straitened council’s website.) What was once Darkstar’s subtext—soundscapes of barren yearning, conceptual nods to the English North—now had a concrete object: Here’s what’s screwed, and here’s why. It worked, in part because Foam Island handled heavy themes with a lightness of touch: preoccupied, spiritually drained, yet oddly upbeat, like a chipper coworker after a grueling shift.
In hindsight, it’s possible to see how political LPs like Foam Island and Jam City’s Dream a Garden (a companion piece, of sorts) were energized by the prospect of Tory re-election. As reality dawned, the outpourings of leftwing dismay were, if nothing else, inspiriting communal moments in isolated times. That was before Britain waved goodbye to the European Union, of course, and now, it’s all too easy to conceive of things getting worse. Made to Measure was written well before Brexit, but its austere, dystopian murk reflects the extinguished hope that’s characterized recent weeks here: deflated, anxious, uncertain.
While the duo always had the chops for poignant songs—after “Aidy’s Girl Is a Computer,” they scrapped a vaguely commercial debut to burrow into the impenetrable North—their vocally despondent music since hasn’t quite replaced that single’s computer-human discord with a compelling synergy of the two. On “Reformer,” guest vocalist Empress Of is a more natural fit, light-as-air and acrobatic enough to swirl above the smoky, claustrophobic synths. Gaika has less to play with, but complicates “Black Ghost”’s sparse, grime-textured production with a serenely stuttered elegy: “I sing for the black ghosts/I sing for all that we lost.”
There’s a sense of distant, benevolent forces at work on the pair of remaining tracks. “Deltaskelta” revives the digitally haunted “Aidy’s Girl” aesthetic with modem-like twinkles, illegible lyrics, and a sweet melody rendered with the effect of an extraterrestrial transmission. Shimsung’s moonlit edit of “Through the Motions,” a *Foam Island *track, threatens to drift into a starry-eyed slumber, but culminates with sad, strangled synths and warm chords that glide in to catch them.
Darkstar are sometimes lumped in with the “post-dubstep” crew—spatially abstract songs, earnest vocals, the odd 2-step beat—but it’s a tag they never really grew with. Unlike James Blake, who, as Mark Fisher puts it in Ghosts of My Life, has “gone from digitally manipulating his own voice to becoming a singer; from constructing tracks to writing songs,” Darkstar often feels like a construction project: Even the limber, prettier turns on News From Nowhere and *Foam Island *seemed somehow un-songlike, layered-up rather than laid down. While *Made to Measure *is refreshingly quick to the point, it solves one problem and creates another: The eerie tunes are so cryptic and dense, the structures so churning and hopeless, that the vocals are a necessary rescue operation. Across four tracks, the EP hovers gracefully on the cusp of an abyss, staring at despair and willing it to turn into beauty. It does, with help from their friends, but next time—regardless of who joins them—they’ll be stronger if they learn to save themselves.


The German producer abandons his customarily bass-heavy breakbeats in favor of smooth, pumping techno. It’s an unexpected shift, but the details and the dynamism are pure Skee Mask.

ISS010

“In the beginning, there was Jack, and Jack had a groove.” Last August, that iconic line from Rhythm Controll’s oft-sampled 1987 classic “My House” was the opening salvo to Skee Mask’s back-to-back set with Rotterdam DJ Stranger at Amsterdam’s Dekmantel Festival. The echoing proclamation served as the setup for a stuck-in-reverse hardgroove loop that seemed to tear open a hole in space-time, sucking in all those within earshot of the UFO II stage. Inside the rift, Skee Mask and Stranger dished out a barrage of classic techno from the likes of Ben Sims, Jeff Mills, and Joey Beltram.
It was an unexpected stylistic shift from Skee Mask, real name Bryan Müller, who’s best known for cobbling together unpredictable broken rhythms from a number of bass- and breakbeats-heavy genres. On ISS010, the 10th EP from Ilian Tape’s Ilian Skee Series, he makes his most extensive foray yet into techno. From start to finish, the record runs on bouncy, tightly looped four-on-the-floor grooves that pump like greased-up pistons. But don’t mistake their repetition for monotony; if the pounding kicks are Müller’s sturdy chassis, then the peripherals are his hissing hydraulics, warm neon underglow, and spinning rims.
On “Matchpoint,” the repetitive bassline may induce mild tunnel vision, but Müller’s amorphous percussion is the star of the show. He cycles through an unhinged carousel of different hi-hats, switching up patterns and continuously tweaking delays, echoes, filters, and slippery reverse effects. The following track, “Double Standard,” puts similarly dubby synths to more aquatic ends, swirling them around a chugging monolith of a groove. The way that Müller slaps in different percussive elements with an audible thwap brings to mind Jeff Mills, whom Müller has more than once posted about on X (formerly Twitter), trying to ID a long-lost track from a 1995 DJ set at Germany’s Slam Club. Mills is a maestro behind the decks, commanding the gear to do his bidding, and Müller suggests a similar assuredness in the studio, tinkering away in what sounds like an invincible flow state.
“Stomp” is where Müller applies the blissful synth and pad work from Compro to his new techno experiments. Easing off the accelerator a bit, he introduces the first breakbeat of the EP. For a moment, rigid techno and breaks rhythms scrape against each other before Müller welds them together with a synth swell that glows white hot. Just when they feel like they’re going to come apart, he fires off another arc, with melodic sparks flying off into the distance. Before the track ends, Müller indulges in a bit of IDM deconstruction that further bridges the gap between ISS010 and his previous work, if only for a moment. The callback is a welcome reprieve from a hardgroove-leaning onslaught.
ISS010 marks a significant departure from Skee Mask’s massive soundscapes and genre amalgams. With fewer tools at his disposal than usual, Müller seems to be testing himself to do more with less—and inviting listeners to dig deeper into his music’s subtleties. ISS010 may not be the map to “the groove of all grooves” that Body Controll once promised, but it reveals a promising new facet of Müller’s ever-evolving profile.


Because its 10 songs are variations on the single theme of "heartbreak," Jens Leman has said I Know What Love Isn't feels like the first proper album he's made.

I Know What Love Isn't

Two years ago, Swedish pop troubadour Jens Lekman released the first song that would appear on his next LP, and it was a characteristically verbose, witty, and string-kissed number called "The End of the World Is Bigger Than Love". That title was disconcerting: Jens Lekman's music is the kind you look to when you need confirmation that love is the end of the world. Over the past decade, few songwriters have dedicated themselves to dramatizing the rise and fall of the heart as brilliantly as Lekman. Whether he's falling in love at the post office or making out during a boring Sunday sermon, his well-detailed, gracefully arranged songs inflate everyday moments and view the most banal aspects of modern life through rosy lenses, as though somebody's constantly spiking his drinks with love potion. So the message of this new song was a stark departure. Coming from the guy who once wrote a song about using his one prison phone call to dedicate a love song to a girl on the radio, a chorus like "A broken heart is not the end of the world" brings with it Santa's-not-real-either levels of illusion-shattering.
But even for the most hopelessly romantic Lekman fans, two years should have been long enough for the track to reveal itself as a grade-A grower. There are a few characteristic laugh-lines ("It's bigger than the Flatbush Avenue Target! And their pharmacy department!"), but mostly "End of the World" glides through a wide variety of tones, scenes, and feelings, as Lekman's breezy delivery distracts from how difficult it is to write a song that's so emotionally precise yet complex. The second verse finds him in Washington, D.C., on the night of the 2008 presidential election, trying to reconcile his private heartbreak with the public elation exploding around him-- and the strange happiness he feels in that moment, too. This isn't "Black Cab", his magnificently gloomy 2003 ode to being bummed when everyone around you is happy. It's a song about the infinite shades of gray that exist between joy and sadness. These are not always easy things to capture in pop songs, but they're the hues he's chasing throughout I Know What Love Isn't. During a six-minute song about the painfully prolonged end of a relationship ("The World Moves On") someone snips, "I wish you just would have cheated on me instead." For one thing, that would have been an easier song to write.
All of this means that I Know What Love Isn't is, by some stretch, the hardest Jens Lekman record to love-- or at least feel instantly infatuated with. His earlier songs specialized in big, bombastic choruses and memorable hooks-- the kind of writ-large tricks that leave you swooning on first listen. But he's after something different here. A word that Lekman's repeatedly used when describing the record is "aerodynamic," and in a recent interview he said, "You know how in the early 90s, a lot of the songs were very focused on the verses being very quiet, and the choruses being super loud, like Nirvana? I was looking for the opposite of that, where you hardly notice where the chorus starts; it's just like an airplane taking off from a runway, smooth, and all of a sudden you're in the air."
Though he sometimes takes this "smoothness" to an extreme (the Spanish guitar solo and saxophone riff make "Erica America" one of the more divisive songs in his oeuvre), it's most gainfully employed in the service of some of Lekman's classic lyrical sleights of hand. He's always gotten a kick out of wordplay ("And when she talked about the fall/ I thought she talked about Mark E. Smith" remains one of his greatest deadpans), but on the standout "Become Someone Else's", it's used with remarkable deftness-- not a punchline so much as a gutpunch. Over a moseying, Bacharach-y piano riff, the title phrase transforms from an idyllic profession ("Life's too good to become someone else's") to an image of loneliness ('That lonesome feeling and what it tells us/ Sleeping on my arm 'til it becomes someone else's"). It's funny, until it's not-- at which point you realize that it ranks up there with his best songs.
Before I Know What Love Isn't, Lekman's gone so far as to say that he hates "albums." His terrific 2005 record Oh You're So Silent Jens was actually a singles collection, and when it came time to assemble the tracklist for his arguable career highlight Night Falls Over Kortedala, he let his friends choose what should make the cut. The hodgepodge approach suited him well, and those records had a feel that was both panoramic and casual: A song about his girlfriend was followed by a song about his barber, each as expertly sketched. I Know What Love Isn't is, he admits, singularly focused on heartbreak, and because its 10 songs are variations on a single theme, he's said it feels like the first proper album he's made. But he's the first one to point out the casualties of thematic maturity: "[On Night Falls Over Kortedala], I created a big rainbow of different colors on my little palette," he explains. "But, for this album, I only chose a few of those colors, so it's a little bit more held back." Ultimately, some of those missing colors leave a void.
But even when he focuses his unflagging talents within fixed bounds, Lekman's still one of the most distinct and observant writers in indie rock today. The understated closer, "Every Little Hair Knows Your Name", is a gem, as wrenching as it is lyrically agile. The title and first verse make it sound like a love song, until the phrase "when we broke up" drops like an anvil. "Every chord I struck was a miserable chord," he croons, and then plucks a few examples, note by mournful note. "It all sounds the same, every chord knows your name." It's heartbreak at its most sumptuously sad, as though he's taking back everything he said before. It actually sounds like the end of the world.


The Brooklyn band’s ninth album is an unpretentious garage-punk racket that wears its analog heart on flannel-clad sleeves.

New York City

The Men: Now there’s a band that knows how to self-mythologize. You might associate the punk four-piece with the Brooklyn music scene of the early 2010s, a world of 285 Kent gigs, Northside showcases, and the BrooklynVegan comments section. But they were always slotting themselves into an earlier classic-rock lineage—recording straight to tape; pushing out five albums in four years; naming their 2011 breakout album after a Ramones classic; going full Crazy Horse on their fourth and arguably best album, 2013’s New Moon. That album’s recording process (in a cabin in the Catskills, naturally) was immortalized by singer-guitarist Nick Chiericozzi in a liner-notes essay, the kind of grandiose reminiscence you’d expect to accompany a 30th-anniversary reissue. These guys knew they were onto something.
The Men’s uber-prolific imperial phase came to a close with 2014’s Tomorrow’s Hits, but they’ve soldiered along since then, releasing a solid album every two years or so. These have vacillated between roaring throwbacks to the band’s shit-kicking punk roots (2016’s Devil Music) and rangier, mellower efforts that serve as eclectic samplers of their rustic influences (2018’s Drift, 2020’s Mercy). Within the opening seconds of the skittering, straight-ahead “Hard Livin’,” as Chiericozzi declares, “Hard times are over/Just because!” in a phlegm-caked growl, it’s clear that New York City leans towards the former category.
The album’s backstory and title (come on—who besides Lou Reed and X has the nerve to name an album after their home city?) reflect the group’s knack for shamelessly blowing its own horn. As the story goes, founding members Chiericozzi and Mark Perro laid down an early iteration of New York City with a drum machine in 2020. Unhappy with the result, they went into a Brooklyn studio with bandmates Rich Samis (drums) and Kevin Faulkner (bass) and rerecorded live to 2" tape, favoring impromptu energy over multitrack perfectionism.
To wit, New York City is the scuzziest the Men have sounded in years, an unpretentious garage-punk racket that wears its analog heart on its flannel-clad sleeves. On tunes like the hard-charging “Echo,” the guitars are in the red, the vocals are in the red, and even the drums thwack and wobble like a Times New Viking deep cut. The closest thing to a ballad is the minor-key dirge “Anyway I Find You,” which would have felt right at home on New Moon. Elsewhere, it’s a gaudy rock’n’roll album filled with gaudy rock’n’roll gestures, from the pair of throat-busting screams that open “Eye” to the wailing guitar solo in “Through the Night” that pans back and forth between stereo channels with all the subtlety of a Spinal Tap goof.
Yet this is hardly a return to the corrosive post-hardcore of Leave Home. As raw and blown-out as New York City may sound, it retains the melodic sensibility the Men have spent the past decade refining; uptempo rave-ups like “Peace of Mind” and “Eternal Recurrence” draw more from the boozy well of ’70s rockers like Thin Lizzy and Cheap Trick than a no-wave punk lineage. Even the record’s weaker moments—looking at you, “God Bless the USA,” a Chuck Berry-powered 12-bar protest-rocker with a limp Putin name-check—slot right in with the modern-day dudes-rock canon of White Reaper and Japandroids. The songwriting is often brash and undercooked, but the album’s sheer boisterousness is a joy.
Why’s the album called New York City? Who knows. I suppose the Men are a New York institution at this point (what’s more NYC than recording your best album upstate?). But New York City is less a reflection of the sanitized, hyper-gentrified New York of today than a reaction against it—sneering from the paint-peeling dive bars, flipping off the real-estate vultures, and summoning the snottiest ghosts of the city’s punk past.


With producer Redinho, the Greek pop artist smooths out some of her defining idiosyncrasies, embracing new sounds but lacking the vision to transcend her influences.

Up and Away

With galloping guitars, off-kilter electronics, and quirky, imagistic lyrics, Stella Chronopoulou cemented her place as one of the most popular young artists in her native Greece. Since debuting in 2015, Chronopoulou, who records as Σtella, has paired her melismatic contralto with dream-pop synths to tell quotidian yet alluring stories that only needed small details like beer, wine, and a strong come-on to paint a complete picture. For the most part, she rooted her sound in 21st-century pop, but throughout her catalog, you could occasionally identify a dash of traditional European music, as on 2017’s “Works for You,” with its flourishes of mandolin and synth-flute.
On Up and Away, Chronopoulou’s first album for Sub Pop, those traditional European sounds move to the forefront. Produced by Tom Calvert, a.k.a. Redinho, the music abounds with fingerpicked nylon-string guitar lines inspired by Grigoris Bithikotsis and Tzeni Vanou, two of Chronopoulou’s favorite ‘60s and ‘70s Greek folk-pop musicians. You can also hear the influence of the globetrotting Houston band Khruangbin, whom Chronopoulou and Calvert bonded over in the studio. Like that band, whose once-adventurous music has gradually settled into duller textures, the experiment is not always successful, and her combination of desert blues, psychedelia, and Greek pop erases the idiosyncrasies of Σtella’s best songs, registering as little more than background music.
Chronopoulou and Calvert’s incorporation of new sounds blunts the sharpness that made her previous work so enticing. Sure, the smoky, reverbed drums on “Nomad” are pleasant, but the song is only pleasant—nothing about it lingers. The hourglass-slow guitar line and Chronopoulou’s sleepy vocals make the song sound like she and Calvert poured its raw materials into the precise mold of a “vibes” playlist. “Who Cares” is a direct homage to Chronopoulou’s Greek-pop inspirations, but the percussion and bass, along with Chronopoulou’s vocals, are so gauzy you’re more likely to tune out than tune in. The problem isn’t that Chronopoulou’s music can’t work outside modern pop fare: The invigorating title track from her 2020 apex The Break deftly fused a driving disco beat with playfully serrating strings that evoked highlights from M.I.A.’s Kala. Lacking the vision to distinguish the music from its influences, Σtella’s most explicit forays into Greek music often land as her most directionless work yet.
It doesn’t help that Chronopoulou’s voice, which can purr with subtle vibrato or scrape the skies, is buried far deeper in the mix. On 2015’s “Wait on Me,” her vocal control and clarity could make the most bizarre lyrics—including, of all things, “shaking my ass like a chipmunk”—sound earnest and endearing. On Up and Away, her voice, when it’s audible at all, is doused in effects that mask her quirks and blend her voice into the instrumentation. The percussion and jazz guitar of “Black and White” often blur her lyrics, and when she does break through the murk, she sings flat, nondescript lines such as “Ooh, I don’t understand you” and “You changed your mind/But I don’t care no more.”
The best moments on Up and Away reinforce what’s missing in the worst ones. The title track is an energizing, synth-driven gem, a rare instance of Chronopoulou folding her influences into a sound that feels her own, with handclaps adding a dance-like rush during the chorus. “Another Nation” returns strange yet charming lyrics to the Σtella formula (“Run like a pink flamingo/You’re familiar with some prison lingo”), and it’s built on the record’s catchiest guitar line. Toward the end of the second verse, Chronopoulou reaches into the highest, most exciting parts of her register: She sounds like she’s ready to leap off the page and revisit The Break’s most headphone-filling vocal performances, but she never quite gets there. Instead, she lets out some sluggish oohs and aahs, and then, the song is over.


On this triumphant live album, the Asheville songwriter transforms his dreamlike narratives into something joyous, collective, and free.

MJ Lenderman: And the Wind (Live and Loose!)

And the Wind (Live and Loose!)

When MJ Lenderman performs with his backing band, the musicians barely fit on stage. At one point, the Wind ballooned to eight members because the self-professedly “conflict avoidant” frontman couldn’t bear to kick anybody out. Standing with his electric guitar, behind the pedal steel and the occasional keyboard, Lenderman leads from within his band, a fitting stance for a musician who quit basketball because he couldn’t muster a competitive attitude. As a live ensemble—now generally pared back to a five-piece—MJ Lenderman and the Wind continuously rework the Asheville songwriter’s extensive back catalog, adding a vibrancy to his earlier home recordings that paints them as natural B-sides to his exuberant studio debut, 2022’s Boat Songs. On And the Wind (Live and Loose!), a live album composed of recordings from two shows during summer 2023, Lenderman and his band elevate his dreamlike narratives into something joyous, collective, and free.
“The less people hear me talk, the more they can project on me or think I’m a smart guy,” Lenderman said in an interview earlier this year. True to form, the frontman hardly utters a word between songs across the album. When he does speak up, during the minimalist groove that leads into “You Are Every Girl to Me,” it’s only to credit his collaborators—Wednesday bandmate Xandy Chelmis on the pedal steel, Ethan Baechtold on bass, Colin Miller on drums, Jon Samuels (also of Philadelphia bands Friendship and 2nd Grade) on lead guitar, and a special appearance from Lenderman’s girlfriend and Wednesday lead singer Karly Hartzman as a third guitarist and backing vocalist. The band’s chemistry is obvious throughout the record: Chelmis’ pedal steel melts almost imperceptibly into the empty spaces on “Toontown,” lending an extra sigh to Hartzman and Lenderman’s harmony of rodeo clowns. There, as with other Boat Songs cuts like “Under Control,” the band approaches the song as a marathon, not a sprint, Samuels’ riffs carving new paths into familiar rhythms.
Many of the songs from 2021’s Ghost of Your Guitar Solo were written around the same time as those on Boat Songs; with a full band behind them, they feel of a piece. Take “Catholic Priest,” a winsome ode to the perceived simplicity of piety and the naivete of youth: In its original form, Lenderman’s voice wavers uneasily, occasionally inaudible and cracking on the high notes, while a frail guitar moves through the song’s rhythms. But live, Lenderman sings with the confidence built from years spent on the road, while Chelmis’s pedal steel breathes new energy into the melodies once lazily plucked by an electric guitar. The same goes for an homage to Jack Nicholson’s courtside Lakers seats, “Live Jack,” whose jokes land even harder when they’re punctuated by dueling guitar solos. “Dan Marino,” the shakily recorded Boat Songs track that might be Lenderman’s most compact piece of poetry, sounds like peak time at the honky tonk from the minute the opening guitars come crashing in. Live and Loose! is a document of friendship, the experience of watching the stories Lenderman wrote in isolation become bigger than their creator.
This transformation from solitude to camaraderie reaches its peak on the live rendition of “Knockin’,” a song originally released as a fuzzy home recording in 2021. The pieces were all there in the initial version—the humor of watching professional golfer John Daly sing a Bob Dylan classic, the knowing sting in his voice as he sings “You’re all I need babe/Yeah, you’ve heard that one before,” the closed loop of Lenderman himself singing “knockin’ on heaven’s door” in the final moments. But the band continued to develop the song at live shows, slowing its pace and doubling its ferocity; no longer constrained by recording equipment or personnel, “Knockin’” is set ablaze. Lenderman’s voice rises to a gravelly roar at the apex, aiming toward the sky as he sings about taking flight. Lenderman finally released a full-band version of “Knockin’” just before the shows featured on Live and Loose!, but the live performance still captures a uniquely communal catharsis.
The album closes with a cover of “Long Black Veil,” a country standard about a man framed for murder, originally recorded by Lefty Frizzell but made famous from live covers like the Band’s 1969 Woodstock performance. Joined by Nashville experimental folk four-piece Styrofoam Winos at his Chicago show, Lenderman sounds at home among friends, his voice lifted by the lilting twang in Lou Turner’s. The song choice is also instructive: “Long Black Veil” reads like an MJ Lenderman song, rooted in gallows humor (Our protagonist can’t confess his alibi: He was sleeping with his neighbor’s wife at the time of the murder!). It also shares Lenderman’s uncanny ability to write songs that are both instantly classic and strangely contemporary, music that only grows from reinterpretation.


The London jazz-pop musician is at her most opaque on a new three-song EP, yet these tracks are as evocative and affecting as any in her catalog.

Feeling Lucky? EP

Nilüfer Yanya’s melodies have a pull so strong they almost necessitate their own law of physics: Play a song in your living room one time, and two days later, without fail, you’ll hear your roommate singing it. As she’s evolved as a musician, the London-based artist has shifted from slick jazz-pop towards scuzzier rock, but those tremendous hooks, bolstered by her intricate guitarwork, remain at the center. On last year’s full-length debut Miss Universe, Yanya candidly tackled heartache, disappointment, and paranoia, channelling existential dread into unyielding anthems of angst. Her new three-song EP, Feeling Lucky?, is nominally about losing and finding good luck. But the theme comes secondary to continued dread—fear of flying, resentment about feeling trapped in a relationship. These songs are some of her most opaque, yet they are as evocative as any in her catalog. More than ever, those intricate melodies—guitar lines that evoke Soccer Mommy or Liz Phair, flurries of roller rink-ready synth notes—provide the emotional heartbeat.
The narratives on Feeling Lucky? feel nebulous in part because Yanya’s layered, distorted words often dip in and out of legibility, functioning more as an instrument than as a means for communication. Most striking is her expert falsetto, gauzy but crystalline, like a frosty window on a cold winter morning. “Day 7.5093” finds its backbone in the lower registers of Yanya’s voice, which intertwines with a guitar riff that could propel a ’90s alt-rock jam. But the whimsy and sparkle comes when she intermittently breaks into falsetto—and at the end, when she duets with a series of staccato, high-pitched synth blips, like two robots having a conversation.
Yanya has always made deliberate use of repetition, an approach that’s especially effective here, as the words and phrases that emerge from the instrumentals become more resonant. The chorus on the Nick Hakim-produced “Crash”—“If you ask me one more question, I’m about to crash”—emerges through a mesh of guitar, twisting like a ribbon. The song leaves you dizzy and agitated, capturing the emotional tunnel vision induced by extreme annoyance. The lyrics of “Same Damn Luck” discuss spite and resentment, but what echoes in the mind are the chanted words “miss you, miss you,” a feeling of confused yearning that matches the ’80s nostalgia of the diffused synth and meandering guitar.
Short EPs like this one can sometimes feel like stopgaps between bigger projects, but the songs on Feeling Lucky? express Yanya’s anxiety from a new vantage point: in the middle. Permeated by adrenaline and confusion, they parse feelings without establishing any distance from them. At a little over 10 minutes long, the project is too short to elaborate on its overarching themes. Instead, it submerges the listener into the middle of the action and invites them to stay for a moment.

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On the sort of record that would have once sparked a minor bidding war between Stones Throw and Ninja Tune, hip-hop, IDM, and ambient music drift into a waking dream.

Elder Mantis

Imagine if the Caretaker were more into RZA than early jazz, spinning detuned and damaged stabs of harp and piano into loops that stumble atop crumbling percussion. The new Black Taffy LP by Dallas’ Donovan Jones, a former member of heavy post-rock act This Will Destroy You, is that image, shivering into life. The enchanting instrumentals of Elder Mantis (even the title seems ripped from the Wu-Tang manual, right?) rise up like mirages from smoothly spreading bass lines, slowly skidding claps and snares, and dusty scraps of harp and koto. The overall effect is like Liquid Swords stripped of GZA and reworked as a meditation exercise.
That’s one way of hearing it, of course: You could also say it’s like J Dilla and Boards of Canada blending into a sinister Bibio, or a boom-bap Harold Budd. However you slice it, there is something distinctly time-stamped about Black Taffy, pitched between soul-streaked glitch-hop and beard-stroking bedroom electronic. This is the sort of record that would have sparked a minor bidding war between Stones Throw and Ninja Tune a little more than a decade ago.
But Elder Mantis is more than a dated genre exercise because of its liminal position between genres and its modern sense of hollow, haunting, almost Burial-like space. Jones has found a voice of his own among his touchstones, one that knocks like hip-hop, wobbles like IDM, and hovers like ambient. For something so restrained and hypnotically webbed with shuddering loops, Elder Mantis has a striking sense of musical eloquence and variety. Where “Divining Rod” quivers and drifts like its namesake, tracks like “Corridors” and “Switchback” scroll by in steady breaths, so that the record is constantly tightening or slackening, as if on a spool.
Unlike many of his reference points, Jones doesn’t let things blur into murk. He cultivates a rare atmosphere that is at once clear and polluted, spacious and looming, relaxing and uneasy. Elder Mantis thrives on the pleasure of hearing a sparse, precisely defined palette thoughtfully interpreted through a set of colorways and feelings. The simple elements are legible but pitched at a slant, creating a tension that allows each of these pieces to be more than the sum of discernible parts. Each stereo pop, frequency notch, or sprung-clockwork drum seems placed by hand, and unsuspected melodies keep rising from beneath them, like gas from cracks in the earth. From the slithery “Land of Nod” to the elegant noir of “Windflower,” the lush string sweeps of “Geraldine” to the Laraaji-style zither hymn “The Empty Mirror,” Jones contrives all manner of subtle drops, openings, and turns without ever rising above a hushed drift. It’s an alert album that, turns out, is also great for drifting to sleep.


St. Vincent, Low, Courtney Barnett, the Linda Lindas and more highlight the enduring influence of Sleater-Kinney on this track-by-track tribute to the band’s breakthrough 1997 album.

Sleater-Kinney: Dig Me In: A Dig Me Out Covers Album

Dig Me In: A Dig Me Out Covers Album

It’s hard to hear a song from Sleater-Kinney’s heyday without thinking of the individual contributions of each of its three members. What would “Words and Guitar” be without the piercing exclamations of Corin Tucker, the nimble riffs of Carrie Brownstein, or the rollicking drums of Janet Weiss? When Tucker belts “take the noise in my head,” each syllable razor-sharp, you can’t help but feel a sense of urgency. It isn’t a song about simply enjoying music—it’s a song about music as a life source.
A good cover shouldn’t try to replicate its original, but instead highlight the strengths of both its performer and songwriters. Take Courtney Barnett, who covers “Words and Guitar” for Dig Me In: A Dig Me Out Covers Album, a track-for-track tribute commemorating the 25th anniversary of Sleater-Kinney’s breakthrough third album. Barnett barely tweaks the tempo, but she gives the song a more lenient attitude; she doesn’t try to mimic Tucker’s sharp snarl, instead letting her mid-range deadpan flow. It doesn’t feel forced or xeroxed but perfectly attuned to Barnett’s skillset.
With 13 artists total covering each of the original album’s songs, Dig Me In is a slightly unbalanced collection that attempts to distill what made Sleater-Kinney’s 1997 album so powerful and enduring. Its high points do that successfully: TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe makes “The Drama You’ve Been Craving” barely recognizable, swapping its frenetic spunk for sultry synth-pop. Black Belt Eagle Scout’s take on “It’s Enough” keeps its chugging guitars at the forefront, but they’re blanketed in a healthy dose of fuzz that, along with Katherine Paul’s subdued murmurs, turns the original’s insistence into brooding, cryptic allure. The most drastic change comes thanks to Low, who strip “Dance Song ’97” down to little more than just vocals and a leaden bassline; when Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker’s voices converge to declare the track’s desires—“You’re the one that I saw/You’re the one that I want”—their words sounds less romantic than haunted, or even sinister.
Because Dig Me Out includes some of the best songwriting of Sleater-Kinney’s career, the renditions on Dig Me In also underscore its performers’ weaknesses. Jeff Tweedy doesn’t pretend his voice carries the same intensity as Tucker’s, but when Wilco otherwise copy and paste “One More Hour” note for note, the result is feckless. On the other hand, St. Vincent’s “Dig Me Out” encroaches on the opposite extreme, bogged down by clumsy, grating electronic production; meanwhile, alt-pop singer Self Esteem shrinks the ardor of “Heart Factory” into an ultimately forgettable acoustic ditty. Then, there’s Tyler Cole—the musician/producer best known for his collaborations with Willow—who augments “Buy Her Candy” into an overstuffed, heavy-handed slice of arena rock that strips Tucker’s version of all nuance and intimacy.
One of the most genuinely fun moments on Dig Me In is a faithful performance of “Little Babies” by teen and pre-teen punks the Linda Lindas, who’ve heavily acknowledged the influence of Sleater-Kinney in their music and make their appreciation clear in their performance. To attempt to eclipse Sleater-Kinney with a cover of their song is to predestine failure, but the herd of artists featured on Dig Me In—who range in age as widely as they do genre—encapsulate the band’s endless relevance and lasting legacy.


The Lisbon batida producer’s second LP is more spacious than her hard-charging debut, but infused with ambivalent emotion; the ghosts of good times seem to hover anxiously in the wings.

Não Fales Nela Que A Mentes

On her debut LP, 2017’s Nídia é Má, Nídia é Fudida, Nídia sounded tough and triumphant, firing out knotty batida rhythms and piercing melodies with the pluck of a newcomer. Batida, a salmagundi of styles circulating through the Afro-Lusophone diaspora, and a sound closely associated with Lisbon’s Príncipe label, was still finding its footing on an international stage. Two years earlier, Nídia had joined the label when she was just 18 years old, building on the style as it had been established by pioneers like DJ Marfox and DJ Nigga Fox. After a long stint living in Bordeaux, Nídia has returned to Lisbon; Não Fales Nela Que A Mentes is one of three new records produced in her bedroom studio there. But unlike her hard-charging debut LP, this one is a breezy collection of mid-tempo tracks, clocking in at just 29 minutes.
With their spacious arrangements and shuddering, 808-style bass blasts, the 10 tracks owe more to rap and grime instrumentals, or the street sounds of the global South, than they do to the heat and frenzy of the club. (The title, taken from a poem by Jorge de Sena, roughly translates as, “Don’t talk about her or you’ll end up lying about her.”) Nídia’s approach to sound is efficient and elemental, taking recognizable material—hand claps, crash cymbals, plasticky brass—and creating complexity through arrangement rather than signal manipulation. She paints in bold, black lines before filling in the gaps with heavy pigments. On “capacidades,” a distorted voice pops up like a cartoon speech bubble, chanting “Go! Go! Go!” as the beat topples forward. On “rap-tentativa,” the rhythm is spelled out like a schoolyard clapping game while a pair of two-note melodies circle each other like a team chant.
The track titles read like hastily chosen placeholders—“popo,” “intro,” “RAP-complet”—as if they’ve come from a sample pack of “Nídia-Type-Beats” for prospective MCs. That doesn’t necessarily reflect on their contents; the interplay of breathy flute and twanged strings on “popo,” for instance, provides enough narrative without the need for human input. But other tracks do seem to be making space for a guest who never shows up, whether it’s a vocalist or simply a further development of melody or dynamics.
Nídia exits the stage with a reverse fanfare on “emotions.” Sad stubs of synth brass blare out over hand claps and hi-hats, like a negative sheet for some mid-’00s Southern rap hit. The ghosts of good times seem to hover in the wings. In fact, Nídia often finds her way to a minor key or a dissonant triad, upsetting her upbeat rhythms with a shred of nervous energy. On a two-track 7" released in tandem with this album, there’s more of this happy-sad, stop-go mood, as growling basslines square up to pretty pianos. Such complications are fundamental to the Príncipe universe, where tensions are left unresolved.


After a six-year absence that found the South become the dominant region in hip-hop, Houston legends Bun B and Pimp C sound equally frustrated and vindicated on their outstanding comeback album. Outkast, Scarface, Three 6 Mafia, Geto Boys, and Too Short are among the guests.

Underground Kingz

Even when they were scrappy newcomers from a town no one in rap cared about, UGK's Bun B and Pimp C sounded like wizened old veterans. Pimp's beats were slow, organic country-funk instrumentals; they could've passed for Stax backing tracks if they didn't have so much bass. Bun's matter-of-fact, virtuoso, baritone flow exuded weariness and authority. Fifteen years later, the Texas duo sound like eternal, immovable features on rap's landscape, and their style has hardened into a blueprint; an album like T.I.'s Trap Muzik, say, would've been near-unthinkable without UGK's precedent.
But it's been a while since we've heard from UGK. Dirty Money, their last album, came out in 2001. Since that time, Pimp spent four years in prison for violating his probation on an aggravated assault charge. During Pimp's imprisonment, the South became rap's dominant region, and Bun kept the group's name alive by going on an absolute guest-appearance tear, popping up on tracks with virtually every major rapper working. Even after Pimp's release, UGK's label pushed back the release of this album for nearly a year. And so now the album's release makes for a weirdly bittersweet moment: Underground Kingz is an equally frustrated and vindicated album. Pimp hasn't forgotten what it was like to rot in a cell while his region exploded, and Bun hasn't forgotten that he had to keep his group above water by himself. Neither has forgotten a decade-and-a-half of record-label drama and elusive success, and neither seems particularly happy with a rap climate that they helped to shape. On album opener "Swishas & Dosha", Pimp sneers at his successors: "I remember when a rapper was a go-getter/ Now all these rappers is some ho niggas." Bun agrees: "You MySpacing and Facebooking, playing games with them toys/ I'm in the streets where gangstas meet while you online with them boys."
Throughout Underground Kingz, Pimp and Bun wield their legacy like a club. They repurpose two rap classics, Too Short's "Life Is...Too Short" and Scarface's "The Fix" on "Life Is 2009" and "Still Ridin Dirty", songs that feature Too Short and Scarface, respectively. (The latter doesn't rap; he just shows up singing histrionic fake-gospel on the hook. It's awesome.) Other rap legends show up as well: Geto Boys bulldog Willie D snaps at region-dismissers on "Quit Hatin' the South". Houston depressive Z-Ro waxes elegiac on "Trill Niggas Don't Die". Big Daddy Kane and Kool G Rap, both old-school New York royalty, spit weathered threats all over Marley Marl's hard, simple track on "Next Up", and Pimp and (especially) Bun sound perfectly at-home alongside them. Most transcendently, the two trade verses with another legendary Southern duo, Outkast, on the gorgeous single "Int'l Players Anthem". Three 6 Mafia's DJ Paul and Juicy J throw enormous drums under a joyous loop of Willie Hutch's classic blaxploitation ballad "I Choose You", and Andre 3000's tender, lovestruck verse perfectly offsets Pimp C's megaton sneer. "Int'l Players Anthem" finds UGK in an uncharacteristically euphoric mood, and it just might by my favorite song of the year.
Most of Underground Kingz, though, is anything but upbeat. It's the first UGK album where Pimp doesn't handle the lion's share of the production, though most of the album's producers make sure to make their tracks fit the slow, woozy aesthetic that the duo established long ago. On "Cocaine", the Blackout Movement curl blues-guitar around minimal drum-thumps while Pimp moans the title over and over on the chorus and Bun gives a quick lesson in the drug's history: "It's been around for hundreds of years, exploited by the rich/ They even used to put it in Coca-Cola; ain't that a bitch?" On "Two Types of Bitches", Momo's nasty blues-guitar and blurting organs lazily circle each other while guest Dizzee Rascal turns up to spit some paranoid misogyny. Elsewhere, the duo absorbs the newer trends in Southern rap, showing the kids how to attack them: Lil Jon's jacked-up bass on "Like That", the Runners' epic synth-churn on "Take tha Hood Back".
The album really hits its stride, though, when Pimp takes over the controls and brings back the sad, heavy country-rap that he does better than anyone else. "The Game Belongs to Me" is an irrefutable declaration of supremacy, so warm and effortless that Bun and Pimp's voices sound like they're bubbling up from the track. "How Long Can It Last" winds seven minutes of emotional self-torture around screaming blues-guitars and gut-rumbling bass. Even a song as formulaic as "Chrome Plated Woman", which works the ancient car-as-girl concept, is executed with masterly panache.
The two discs of Underground Kingz run well over two hours, and plenty of fat could easily have been trimmed. Nobody needs another two tinny synth-beats from Jazze Pha, to say nothing of the man's abysmal verse on "Stop-N-Go". The warm sentiment of "Real Women" is much-appreciated after the bile of "Two Types of Bitches," the lite-jazz Fender Rhodes less so. As great as "Int'l Players Anthem" is, the album would be fine without its two remixes; the ugly screwed-and-chopped version practically kills the album's momentum right at the end. Still, these aren't complaints; they're quibbles. Underground Kingz is the first UGK album in six years, and it's just an enormous relief to hear that these two can still weave a cohesive long-form tapestry of an album better than almost anyone else in rap.


Austria-born, Barcelona-based producer Zora Jones makes tracks indebted to Chicago footwork, but with a unique vision. Her work suggests club music injected with helium and sent bobbing high overhead, and for all the flyaway nature of her sounds, her compositions carry real emotional weight.

100 Ladies EP

Zora Jones has described 2010 as her year zero. She saw DJ Rashad spin for the first time at a party in Montreal, where it was pretty much everyone's first encounter with footwork in a club setting. She and her friends ended up spending a week with the Chicago DJ, and he gave them a batch of tracks he'd produced with his Ghettoteknitianz crew. It opened up a whole new world for her. "That folder is still one of the main folders I go to for inspiration," she told The Fader. "Those tracks are so crisp to me and so influential. 2010 was the year for me."
You can hear the late Rashad's influence on Jones' debut EP, 100 Ladies—or at least, you can deduce it. Many of her tracks move at 160 BPM, smack in the middle of footwork's sweet spot. But in the past five years, Jones has also established her own sound, one that's indebted to footwork (and also to grime), but irreducible to either of those genres. It's several steps removed—and that's a direct result of the work that she's put in.
The title of the Austria-born, Barcelona-based producer's EP is a reference to a pact that she made with herself: to make 100 tracks before she released anything. This isn't the first thing she has unveiled; there have been collaborations with Sinjin Hawke and DJ Taye on FractalFantasy (the imprint she runs with Hawke, which began life as an online outlet for audiovisual productions), and she's posted the odd solo track to her SoundCloud account. But this is her first extended statement, and the singularity of her vision is immediately apparent.
Aside from the occasional anchoring 808 kick, she favors thin, silvery sounds: brittle rimshots, tinny hi-hats, and 808 toms tuned toward their upper limits. Her main instrument is the voice—resampled, stacked in dizzying fifths, pitched up near dog-whistle frequency, and painted on in bright, loopy brushstrokes. Put together, these elements combine to suggest club music injected with helium and sent bobbing high overhead.
Of the album's seven tracks, only two come anywhere close to resembling established forms. "Zui", with its shuddering 808 patterns and stuttering monosyllables, wears its footwork influences proudly on its sleeve, and the lurching cadence of "Too Many Tears" sounds like an outgrowth of the "weightless" style of grime favored by Mumdance, Rabit, and Murlo. Again, though, her wordless vocal melodies stand proudly apart; they're eerie, shapeshifting things, part violin and part warbling bird, and their effect is spellbinding.
The EP is bookended by its best tracks. The footwork-tempo closer "First Light" pumps away like Philip Glass rearranged for tin whistle, Gameboy, and chipmunk, while the opening "Oh Boy" forsakes drums entirely; it's just wordless vocal trills pitched up into icy configurations accompanied by the hollow hum of whirly tubes. Despite their novelty, both songs remain unusually moving; for all the flyaway nature of her sounds, her compositions carry real emotional weight. They offer the equivalent of a solid musical form being melted down and channeled into tiny, sidewinding rivulets; it will be fascinating to see where these streams carry her next.


Rage Against the Machine’s debut is a radical fistful of funk, rap, and rock. Through its power, it remains an essential call to activism and a necessary lesson on how to withstand the opposition.

Rage Against the Machine: Rage Against the Machine

Rage Against the Machine

At the beginning, Rage Against the Machine were relentless.
It was 1990, and Tom Morello was a struggling rock guitarist in Los Angeles, with a Harvard degree in social studies. He had a vision to funnel the unrest of the day—the Gulf War, the prospective end of apartheid, the collapse of the Soviet Union—and his galvanizing experiences as a Kenyan-American kid in suburban Illinois into a group that synthesized rock and rap into something inherently rebellious. Or, as he put it in a want ad, he required “a socialist frontman who likes Black Sabbath and Public Enemy.”
A year later, he found his spark, the complete creative complement who shared his systematic disillusionment, anarchic interests, and multiracial experiences. A scrawny 21-year-old punk with an unruly tuft of dreadlocks and a stiff upper lip, Zack de la Rocha had been shuttled for many of his teenage years between divorced parents in tough East Los Angeles and the more affluent and pale Irvine. His father was a famed Mexican muralist, his mother a “half-Chicano/half-German” teacher’s aide, as he put it. He liked a jumble of music, from the flutter of Charlie Parker to the esprit of Run-D.M.C. and hardcore. In high school, his white friends rejected him when they caught him breakdancing on the football field.
But the moment de la Rocha stepped into a rehearsal room with Morello, drummer Brad Wilk, and de la Rocha’s childhood bandmate bassist Tim Commerford, the chemistry was instant and undeniable. “It was this kind of intense electricity that I hadn’t really felt before,” Wilk remembered. “Everyone in the band was fully on that trip.”
Within weeks of forming, Rage Against the Machine—a name lifted from an abandoned tune in de la Rocha’s last band—had recorded a 12-song demo of originals, pieced together largely from fragments in de la Rocha’s journals and song structures Morello had contemplated for years. By the end of 1991, they were navigating major-label offers. By the middle of 1992, they were recording their self-titled debut in a string of fancy Los Angeles studios. Seven of those first demos reappear on Rage Against the Machine in almost identical form, de la Rocha’s vocals simply sharpened by veteran engineer Garth Richardson.
The speed with which Rage wrote and recorded its first screeds is paramount to understanding why, now a quarter-century after its release, Rage Against the Machine remains an essential call to activism and a necessary lesson on how to withstand the opposition. While taking on the most powerful institutions of consolidated American power, Rage Against the Machine were having the time of their lives. You can hear it in most every note.
Politics, however, seemed preeminent. Haunted by guitar lines that whir like air-raid sirens, “Bullet in the Head” takes aim at war-driven nationalism and an endemic unwillingness to think beyond the narratives of the nightly news and presidential addresses. “Take the Power Back” addresses the same problems in the classroom, lampooning the “one-sided stories for years and years and years” of a Eurocentric educational system. “Motherfuck Uncle Sam,” de la Rocha spits in one of his sharpest barbs, a perfect proclamation of defiant self-worth. “Step back. I know who I am.” And a good half of the album, from the eternally combative anthem “Killing in the Name” to the battle cry of “Know Your Enemy,” presciently speaks not only to a period of perceived federal overreach, from the streets of Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict to the mountains of Idaho during the Ruby Ridge standoff, but also to the coming tide of neoliberalism and its half-hearted promises. Rage Against the Machine is a symptom of its time, presented as a possible panacea.
The political invective of Rage Against the Machine, though, has often overshadowed its arguably more essential quality, or at least the one that made hormonal suburbanites and buzzed undergraduates even give such issues the time of day: It is incredibly fun, not only for the millions who have since bought the album or chanted along to “Killing in the Name” live but also for the band itself. Just look at them, beaming on New Year’s Day in 1992.
De la Rocha became his generation’s most dependably popular political lyricist, but on the band’s first ten tracks he seemed every bit as exuberant as outraged. In the opening triptych alone, he emphatically counts into “Bombtrack,” repeatedly grunts and shouts inside every rest within Morello’s iconoclastic solo during “Killing in the Name,” and demands that you the listener “Crank the music up” and that the band “Bring that shit in” before he’s even launched into the first verse of “Take the Power Back.” No matter how mad you may be, you don’t scream “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me” against a collapsing din sixteen times without enjoying yourself. De la Rocha sounds entirely triumphant, a vexed-and-confused kid who has survived a difficult, discriminatory childhood to find the proper vent for his feelings.
He’s an unflinching young emcee, too, starting a full third of the album as battle raps against the entire world. “Bombtrack” begins, for instance, with a threat against the simpletons who haven’t realized that rap can be a weapon, while he aligns himself with the spirit and purpose of the Black Panthers and EPMD at the jump of “Wake Up.” He dips into the dozens throughout the record, popping out of politics to reassert his overall authority. During “Know Your Enemy,” he brags about being “born with insight and a raised fist… born to rage against ’em,” the native son of cultural assimilation who now has the book learning, energy, and microphone skills to push back. He is ready for every fight on every level.
As de la Rocha declares during “Bombtrack,” however, these would be just sketches in his notebook without his band; they provide the “dope hooks [that] make punks take another look.” The trio around him animates every idea, pushing what he’s selling with unwavering belief. The rhythmic undertow of “Township Rebellion”—where the bass plows through a cowbell-and-snare beat like a glacier through a narrow pass—is an ecstatic dance that practically vaults into the chorus that is the band’s best credo: “Why stand on a silent platform? Fight the war. Fuck the norm.”
And at a time when a mix of rap and metal was just a novelty, Rage outlines its own complex, chimeric identity. Rising and falling with de la Rocha’s despair, “Settle for Nothing” traces the dynamic peaks and valleys of prog rock, even as it grows into a hardcore tantrum. On “Wake Up,” they pivot between worship of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” and a delirious breakbeat, Morello scratching his guitar strings like he’s suddenly stepped behind the turntables. With ubiquitous funk bass and guitar theatrics, Rage sound, at times, goofy and unsophisticated. But the unselfconscious honesty in hearing these four navigate their shared interests in real time—and loving the process—is intoxicating.
Rage Against the Machine became a better band on each subsequent album. Their landmark follow-up, 1996’s Evil Empire, is much more coiled and concise. Wilk and Commerford were perfectly heavy. Morello had found the fertile nexus between gargantuan riffs and idiosyncratic techniques that intrigued adolescent fans and Guitar Player obsessives alike. And on 1999’s The Battle of Los Angeles, their hard-nosed finale, de la Rocha is at the height of his polemical powers, rhyming in great hypertextual arcs of political pleas. Morello’s singular guitar style had developed to the point that Rolling Stone famously mistook his screeching “Guerrilla Radio” solo for a harmonica break.
Never again, though, would the quartet sound so casually confident, as if they actually had the gusto and naiveté to take on the world. They recorded Rage Against the Machine in what felt like an instant; the next two albums took three and four years and never mounted the same sort of enthusiasm. By the time Rage cut Renegades, a farewell batch of covers from Cypress Hill and MC5 to Bob Dylan and Devo, they sounded exhausted and effete, drained by the process of being the planet’s most woke major-label band.
All of this pressure, of course, wasn’t internal, or the result of some infinite great internal awakening. From the beginning, certain factions of Rage’s rapidly metastasizing fanbase saw the great paradox of the band’s peculiar situation: Here they were, purporting to be against the machine, while very much deepening the coffers of the machine thanks to a record that blew up as quickly as it had been made.
Epic, after all, was then a subsidiary of Sony, the global electronics empire that not only profited from selling a Rage tape but also the very Walkman that played it. In cutting the checks, Rage’s patrons, some argued, had made capitalist cogs of the socialist rebels. In a representative moment, Rage launched a “Freedom Fighter of the Month” program toward the end of their run, intending to give a platform to a militia of assorted activists. One recipient confessed to Spin that he worried he’d compromised his cause by being but one chainlink away from a multinational corporation. “I was a little embarrassed, to be honest,” he said. “Maybe [Rage] aren’t as pure as they’d like to be, or as they’d like to look.”
The so-called paradox, in retrospect, was puritanical scaremongering, an absurd ideological litmus test that gave more power to those already controlling the world than those wanting to change it by any means possible. And anyway, Rage had done exceptionally well during its brief independent trial, selling more than 5,000 copies of their demo at shows and through friends. When the label executives (including Madonna, who tried to ink them to Maverick) started showing up at rehearsals, Morello didn’t see the chance to get rich. He saw the mechanism for public broadcast. “It’s great to play abandoned squats run by anarchists,” he later said, “but it’s also great to be able to reach people with a revolutionary message, people from Granada Hills to Stuttgart.”
The resulting riches have sometimes felt embarrassing, as when de la Rocha ran a stoplight with a Rolling Stone reporter in a Ford Explorer as he headed to his new home in the hills of Los Angeles. But how else should Rage have done its bidding, especially at least a decade before the internet allowed easy worldwide distribution, or at least the promise of it? Should they have remained independent and preached their politics to a smaller network of the already converted, made redundant by someone else’s system of moral absolutism? Or should they have exploited an already-exploitative label system to seed extreme ideas in politically fallow places—a state-sponsored conspiracy, if you will, against itself?
Consider this: Rage made just four music videos to promote their debut. The first, a grainy and heavily filtered live capture of “Killing in the Name,” could have served as the meet-cute concert setting for two California punks in some skate film. But the successors, for “Bombtrack” and “Freedom,” are pure four- and six-minute advertisements for unapologetically radical politics. As de la Rocha impugned the American educational system, jingoistic patriots, malleable media, and complacent suburbanites on the album itself, he largely avoided naming names or offering specific solutions, aside from taking direct aim at J. Edgar Hoover’s racist COINTELPRO during “Wake Up.” But these videos offered highly specific fights and fixes, putting a weaponized point to the record’s blunt rhetorical weight.
During “Bombtrack,” Rage thrashes inside a steel cage flanked by heavily armed guards, mirroring the circumstances of Peruvian communist leader Abimael Guzmán. Two months before Rage Against the Machine arrived, the Peruvian government arrested Guzmán in an effort to suppress his Shining Path party, which had spread through the country’s nooks and crannies for two decades. Flying in the face of U.S. foreign policy at the time (and even now), Rage offered a sympathetic portrait of the Shining Path, framing it as a movement of Peruvian liberation against oppressive brutality. “The people continue their heroic struggle,” the screen reads as the rebels arm themselves and head into the Andes, each word offered in emphatic synchronization with Wilk’s Bonham-sized coda.
But it’s the reel for “Freedom” that, a quarter-century later, still feels revolutionary, both in content and context. Rage plays in cramped quarters, pressed close to an audience that throbs to Wilk and Commerford’s militant thrum. “Freedom for [Leonard] Peltier,” reads the black banner at their backs, a demand on behalf of the American Indian Movement activist who received two life sentences for the murder of two FBI agents during a 1975 standoff at a South Dakota reservation. As they play, scenes from the battle, its prelude, and its aftermath interweave with a flash-card history of federal land grabs from Native Americans. (The problem has been especially pernicious in southwestern South Dakota, where Mount Rushmore was etched into lands previously ceded in perpetuity to Peltier’s ancestors.) When the song peaks, de la Rocha howling “Freedom/Yeah, right” with his last bit of breath, the Lakotas march and arm and fly the United States flag upside down, at half-mast, and beside the American Indian Movement’s banner. It is a righteous moment that fades into explicit instructions for writing to the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee and helping.
What’s more, Epic encouraged Rage to make this video when the company’s suits realized they needed something less profane than “Killing in the Name” to push on domestic radio and television. “Throughout Europe, South America, and Asia, the band had started to explode, partly because you have less censorship there… But not in the U.S., because we refused to edit for lyric content,” Morello remembered for Metal Hammer. “It was actually at [Epic’s] suggestion that the next single be a six-and-a-half-minute song without a chorus, and that we make a video for Leonard Peltier! That suggestion came from the record company, not the band, like they were trying to outflank us!”
These weren’t superstar-studded compilations for AIDS relief or even polite benefits on behalf of Tibetan liberation, both very much en vogue as Rage ascended. No, Rage Against the Machine’s major-label gambit was an infomercial for justice and reconciliation for centuries of indigenous extermination, funded by a major label. When has that ever happened? And in an era when the president criticizes the free speech of theater companies and threatens to dismantle broadcast rights for networks he deems enemies of the state, can you imagine it happening again anytime soon?
When I was a teenager, those videos Rage had made finally found me in rural North Carolina on the family farm, only after we had invested in an unsightly satellite dish. They were life-changing events, introductions to political protest and the personal empowerment it could engender. I have little doubt that, had Rage Against the Machine remained independent, I would have explored such ideas much later, if at all. And I have even less doubt that, had Rage not backed the ideology of “Bombtrack” or “Freedom” with a sense of liberation and enjoyment, those ideas would have likely held little sway.
Watch the crowds in a live video from the band’s earliest era: It is sweaty and ecstatic, church camp for the future activists of the world and an indoctrination to the joy of potential change. Rage Against the Machine recognized that, until the institutional changes about which they wrote and spoke were actually implemented, they would be yelling about cultural pride and socialist ideals into the void—that is, unless they could co-opt the mechanics of capitalism and wield them. Twenty-five years later, in a world of broad media consolidation and Silicon Valley-powered megaphones, the need to do just that has only grown. But so have the possibilities for smart rebellion, for using the tools of the machine to weaken the core.
“The test of whether Rage Against the Machine will be a successful band has nothing to do with album sales,” Morello told Guitar Player in 1994. “It’s going to have to do with the way the message translates into concrete action.” In the quarter-century since Epic issued Rage Against the Machine, the band’s subsequent self-seriousness and the dubious rap-metal that followed often turned it into a punchline. And amid the horrors of George W. Bush’s state surveillance and his continuation of his father’s war in the Middle East and the drone warfare under Barack Obama’s administration, it was hard not to feel like Rage had failed in that regard, like we had all failed.
During the last year, though, Democratic Socialists have won local elections. Ordinary folks have taken to the streets, marching en masse to embarrass the president, and taken to the Internet to dislodge powerful men who are also molesters. And an awareness of and reckoning with cultural appropriation is no longer a sidebar but a real public discourse. No ten songs are responsible for that, of course. But for millions, Rage Against the Machine helped shape a spirit of necessary and electric defiance, of yelling out loud and over and over, “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.” May it remain relentless.