Nick Murphy (fka Chet Faker) fires off in a new direction while trying to bridge a gap with his diverse new EP featuring Afrobeat, R&B, soul, and Kaytranada—sometimes all at once.

Missing Link EP

Reinvention is a risky proposition for any artist, riskier still for Chet Faker. In just five years, the award-winning, chart-topping singer/songwriter went from an unknown with a cheeky moniker to Australia’s most popular independent artist this side of Tame Impala. After relocating from Melbourne to New York in 2014, with hopes of learning something about himself, Nick Murphy announced a new direction for his neo-soul music. “There’s an evolution happening and I wanted to let you know where it’s going,” he tweeted in September of last year, underlining that he dropped the alias Chet Faker for his given name. Years after his debut album, Built on Glass, it was a surprising announcement from a wildly successful artist who had every reason to stay in his lane.
Our first glimpse of the new Nick Murphy arrived with “Fear Less,” a confident shift towards electronic pop tinkering à la Moderat or Bonobo. The eight-minute “Stop Me (Stop You),” co-produced by Darkside’s Dave Harrington, came two months later, and its uplifting vocal introduced some stadium-sized emotion to Murphy’s changing sound. His new tracks were a far cry from the bubbly, sensual Chet Faker hits “Gold” and “1998,” but even as he dabbled in more adventurous styles, Murphy kept playing to the cheap seats. It gave the sense that, despite all the talk of evolution, maybe the name change was more about shedding a moniker Murphy didn’t exactly want in the first place. Or maybe it had to do with his streak as a finicky, conflicted perfectionist, someone who is said to have scrapped his debut album twice and often writes multiple versions of his songs. Was a radical transformation just around the corner, or would the evolution be more understated?
On Missing Link, Murphy’s first record released under his given name, the music remains uncertain of its direction. Granted, all previous allusions to change ring true, but they’re realized as a mixed bag of mostly underdeveloped ideas and polished demos. The sultry collaboration “Your Time,” described by Murphy as an “old song” he wanted to put out “before it was too late,” first appeared in rough form on Kaytranada’s 0.001% mixtape. It has a fair amount in common with Built on Glass—including an engrossing vocal performance and moody but subtle hooks—though it proves to be a false start. As does the needless interlude “Bye,” which sounds more like a Run the Jewels beat than anything to do with Murphy’s past or present. Sure, Missing Link comes with the disclaimer calling it “A bridge between what’s out and what’s coming,” but it’s a sizable leap from one side to the other.
By track three the EP reaches Murphy’s new frontier, the electronic, heavily-produced pop that “Fear Less” and “Stop Me (Stop You)” had outlined. It’s still a sound marked by mixed textures, fits of noise, thick atmosphere, and punchy drums, and those characteristics are well suited for the skybound structures and lyrics about tumultuous love. But for an artist like Murphy, whose renowned singing has only grown stronger and more distinctive over the years, it’s strange that the songs underutilize his voice. Even compared to the measured delivery on “Your Time,” there's a restraint that verges on flatness in the toplines of “I’m Ready” and “Forget About Me.” If his goal is to leave room for more showy instrumentation, Murphy’s focus on production doesn’t always work, either. The first 45 seconds of “Forget About Me” are especially egregious, where a high-pitched vocoder, a clanging bell, and operatic strings mush together to introduce the song’s U2-lite posturing. For the last two minutes, Murphy finally lets his voice run wild, and yet he buries it beneath electronic clutter and the arrangement's pedestrian histrionics.
Of *Missing Link’*s newer material, “Weak Education” is by far the most interesting, and it points a way forward for Murphy that doesn’t ditch his past entirely. Not unlike Built on Glass’ “Cigarettes & Loneliness,” the song competently borrows from artists and styles outside the R&B and soul spheres. Thom Yorke’s solo work informs the mild-mannered eclecticism; Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat bolsters the jittery, stripped-down groove; from the opening horns to the wailing keyboard solo at the end, Murphy’s enduring jazz obsessions emerge with gusto. During a recent interview with Zane Lowe, Murphy said, “I’m so confused by myself right now, in terms of the music I’m listening to. It just seems to be getting heavier and heavier, and weirder—just abstract as hell.” But by pairing those fresh inspirations with his familiar strengths, he”s began to make some sense of it all.


This set of unreleased material from the late singer/songwriter collects two CDs' worth of material recorded around the same time as Elliott Smith and Either/Or, and makes for a worthy and welcome addition to a stunningly consistent catalog.

New Moon

Elliott Smith's legacy is best spoken by his records. For all the emphasis placed on his unhappy backstory and the distressing nature of his death, Smith left behind a body of work that defies and exceeds any stereotyping. Sadness may be the easiest emotional current to pick up on in his songs, but Smith's expressive range was as wide as it was subtle; his music could be angry, funny, hopeful, and despondent, often at the same time. New Moon collects two CDs' worth of material recorded around the same time as 1995's Elliott Smith and its 1997 follow-up Either/Or, and unlike typical posthumous releases (not to mention second ones), is a genuinely worthy addition to a stunningly consistent catalog.
Part of what makes both Either/Or and 1998's XO so essential is Smith's avoidance of "classic album" compartmentalization; you don 't get "the sad song," followed by "the experimental song," followed by "the upbeat song." Smith didn't record specifically towards any album, he just recorded-- more or less constantly. At their inception, the songs compiled for New Moon were no less significant than those that wound up making the cut for Elliott Smith and Either/Or, and for the most part they're no less developed.
Smith's signature style is more musical than it is aesthetic; from the lo-fi folk of Roman Candle through the muscular chamber-pop of Figure 8, Smith's songwriting tics remain completely recognizable. New Moon is overflowing with characteristic melodic turns and unexpected chord changes, yet still covers a good deal of ground stylistically. The chugging acoustic guitar of "Big Decision" conjures Johnny Cash, while "New Monkey" subtly nods to a similarly titled Beatles song. Each song seems fully realized in its own right; for a 2xCD posthumous compilation, it's unbelievably refreshing to not pick up even the slightest whiff of exploitative barrel-scraping.
Like much of Smith's material from this era, New Moon is by and large quiet, acoustic, and emotionally complicated. It's easy to see why Smith's music earned him a reputation as a "sad sack," but such dismissals don't really hold up to any scrutiny. When asked whether he considered himself a "lo-fi" artist, Smith once responded that he simply didn't want the recording process to be "a drag." Smith's interest in the the expressive potential of recording comes through loud and clear on New Moon; even when the subject or tone of a song is depressing, it still carries an unmistakable note of joy.
Which is certainly not to say that New Moon finds him sounding "happy." Many of the songs here are almost unbearably melancholy, but their weight is the product of expert craft, not wanton self-indulgence. The coda of "Talking to Mary", in which Smith repeatedly intones "One day she'll go/ I told you so," would not be nearly as powerful without the subtle tension and movement in Smith's guitar part. "All Cleaned Out", which hints at the musical and lyrical concerns that Smith took up with XO, is made all the more affecting by a second vocal line that injects well-placed harmonies into an already memorable melody. Every musical decision on New Moon feels both intuitive and considered; never obtrusive or distracting, but thoroughly rewarding when examined in depth.
Nowhere is this clearer than on an early version of the career-making "Miss Misery". This is the fourth, and earliest, version of this song that I've heard, and it speaks to the incredible care and refinement that went into Smith's recordings. The melodic backbone of the song is definitely present on this version, as are formative fragments of the lyrics, harmonies, and arrangements. It's fascinating to hear this track in such an early stage, but downright humbling to connect the dots to the song it eventually became. Smith had an uncanny and arguably unmatched talent for developing his music to suit his ever-evolving arrangement and production techniques, and every intermediate version of "Miss Misery" makes perfect sense the way it's performed and recorded.
Phrases like "rare talent" are thrown around all the time these days, but this compilation makes painfully clear just how unique and valuable this music is. Smith's visionary qualities were not terribly flashy or transgressive, and his great musical gifts were not those of innovation. Instead, he steadily and quietly wrote, honed, and recorded a body of beautifully executed, deeply moving records not quite like any others. Consider him the patron saint of hobbyists, a talented and dedicated craftsman with a tireless love of the creative process.


Aphex Twin's first album since 2001's Drukqs is sixty-five minutes of highly melodic, superbly arranged, precisely mixed, texturally varied electronic music that sounds like it could have come from no other artist. Syro absorbs many different sounds, from loping breakbeat to drum’n’bass to techno proper to hints of disco, but it has a way of making other genres seem like they exist to serve this particular vision.

Syro

It’s 2014 and there is a new Aphex Twin album, which means the most conspicuous musical drought this side of My Bloody Valentine has ended. Syro, unlike the Caustic Window LP released earlier this year, is not a collection of material cut during Richard James’ prolific 1990s heyday and shelved. It’s a new album of new music recorded in the last few years, and it’s said to be the first of more to come. Unlike MBV, it’s not that James went away entirely—in 2005, he released a series of Analord 12" EPs as AFX, and there were a couple of low-key EPs as the Tuss. But with many-monikered electronic musicians, branding is everything: it’s not an Aphex Twin release unless it’s presented as an Aphex Twin release.
Syro is an unusual album to contemplate because its overall approach is not particularly unusual. Older fans of electronic music who followed along with James’ shape-shifting in the 1990s may need to adjust their expectations slightly. On the evidence here, he has no interest in re-inventing his sound. Syro has few extremes, no hyper-intense splatter-breaks or satanic “Come to Daddy” vocals or rushes of noise. On the other end of the spectrum, Syro doesn’t cast James in a quasi-classical light; there's no “serious composer” tracks like “4” or “Girl/Boy Song” that beg to be arranged for string quartet. And there are no “Windowlicker”-like nods to pop, no attempts to smuggle some truly weird music onto the charts.
Without all that, what’s left? Sixty-five minutes of highly melodic, superbly arranged, precisely mixed, texturally varied electronic music that sounds like it could have come from no other artist. James throughout the ’90s was an influence sponge; part of his genius was how he took ideas and ran them through his highly idiosyncratic filter. The bizarro highlights came when he put his own spin on genres, making jungle weirder, pop more unsettling, and piano music more gorgeous. Syro also absorbs many different sounds, from loping breakbeat to drum’n’bass to techno proper to hints of disco, but in a more subtle way. It has a way of making other genres seem like they exist to serve this particular vision. And it’s a confident album precisely because it’s not self-consciously pushing the envelope. Electronic music with a strong beat not intended for the dancefloor was, if not invented by this guy, certainly perfected by him. So with his first trip back from the wilderness, he’s demonstrating exactly how it’s done.
Syro scans as “’90s” in terms of form but is quite modern in its particulars. Music sounded like this in 1996, but it didn’t sound quite this good. Whether James has acquired better machines or improved the way in which he records them, Syro contains some of his most tactile music; it’s a headphone record par excellence, an hour-long feast for the ears. But as exquisite as all the fragments are in isolation, the heart of the record is its steady sense of momentum, all the more remarkable since the tempos are mostly relaxed and uniform. James has spoken of tricks he uses in sequencing to free his music from a ridged digital grid; whatever his methods, his rhythmic DNA is as identifiable as John Bonham’s. There’s a playful swing to his rhythms, with accents that dance on and around the beat, and that unmistakable drive is the frame upon which the album is built.
The album’s formal simplicity keeps the focus on the arrangements, especially in the first half. The ten-and-a-half-minute “XMAS_EVET10 [120][thanaton3 mix]” glides forward like a smooth stone over polished ice, allowing a new element—a sly melodic twist, a stuttering shift in the beat, an unusually bassy groan—to enter seamlessly in every bar. It’s complicated but never busy, myriad parts cohering into a logical whole. “4 bit 9d api+e+6 [126.26]” mixes muted acid squelches with twinkly keyboard melodies, with barely-there voices intoning a few layers beneath, while the opening “minipops 67 [120.2][source field mix]” has wordless singing presented straight—the one new wrinkle on the album—and it’s so naked it’s disarming. The album gets a few clicks harsher in places, as on “CIRCLONT6A [141.98][syrobonkus mix]”, with its assertive bass grind and rubbery video game noises, but it never goes too far in that direction. The care and virtuosity with which these tracks were assembled is immediately obvious, but nothing feels difficult; the record’s easy flow despite it all is one of its primary virtues, and there’s something new to uncover with every listen.
Syro’s tremendous focus on detail marks it as a more muted release in Aphex Twin’s discography. The “What the hell was that?”, once an Aphex touchstone, is nowhere to be found; there’s little here in the way of brute-force appeals to the lizard brain, and Syro is on balance more sophisticated and cerebral. And that silliness, that bratty desire to be noticed, was part of what made the Aphex Twin experience special. Some will miss it. But this record—virtuosic, precise, but also alive with feeling—has something else in mind. It’s telling that the most extreme moment here is also the quietest—the closing “aisatsana [102]”, a painfully lovely minimalist piano piece recorded on a creaky upright with birds chirping away in the background. By that moment, the feeling of “I’m listening to a new Aphex Twin album” has fallen away and the deeper beauty of Syro starts to sink in.


On this collection of officially sanctioned archival bootlegs, we can hear the roots country icon Gillian Welch in the process of discovering and honing her inimitable voice.

Gillian Welch: Boots No. 1: The Official Revival Bootleg

“If any of y’all wanna give me shit about my twang, you can just do it,” Gillian Welch once told a chatty San Francisco crowd in 1994. It was two years before Welch would release her debut Revival, but the California-bred daughter of two entertainers was already anticipating the skepticism that would greet her when she rose to prominence in the mid-to-late ’90s singing about destitute coal miners and Depression-era whiskey runners with an unsettling familiarity for someone born in New York City, raised in Los Angeles, and who found their lifetime musical partner at a conservatory in Boston.
In 1994, Welch’s repertoire consisted largely of a number of songs that would never find their way onto a record, a handful of traditional tunes, and some John Prine covers. For an artist with an aesthetic as carefully and consistently rendered as Gillian Welch, it’s strange to think of a time when she wasn’t producing or reproducing that aesthetic, but was, rather, searching for it herself.
That sense of fresh discovery and wide-eyed experimentation can be heard plainly on Boots No. 1, Welch’s first archival release that serves as a 20th anniversary expanded release for her debut LP.  The two-disc collection is comprised of outtakes, demos, and alternate takes culled from the Revival sessions, a time when Welch and guitarist Dave Rawlings were first honing in on their precise sound, mood, and style. “There really was no me. The artist Gillian Welch didn’t really exist,” Welch has said of the sessions, “And then after that, I did.”
Welch’s spectral country music has always felt otherworldly in its ability to evoke feelings, memories and atmosphere on command. “Sound [that] holds moods the way humid air holds smells,” is how writer Jedediah Purdy has described it. Part of the revelation of Boots No. 1, then, is witnessing Welch’s music made mortal, to hear her navigating her many influences with a young artist’s enlightened uncertainty, and to hear imperfect recordings that may not necessarily conjure universes on their own accord so much as they recall old-fashioned country music that’d sound at home on the radio.
Some of the most thrilling moments on this 21-song release are just that: hit records. “455 Rocket” is a hand-clapping muscle car ode in which Welch deadpans goofy lines likes like, “Whose junk pile piece of sh….Chevelle is this?” “Dry Town” is a talking country-blues Johnny Cash pastiche about craving a six-pack for the road. The former became a hit for country singer Kathy Mattea in 1997, while the latter ended up, a decade later, on Miranda Lambert’s chart-topping Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.
Boots No. 1 takes a more subtle approach than landmark archival releases like Dylan’s Bootleg Series. With dozens of songs remaining unreleased from this period, many of which, like “Birds of a Feather” and “Unfinished Business,” are even more telling examples of the diverse country traditions Welch was soaking up at the time, this collection is definitively more interested in tracing Revival’s process and evolution than in presenting any sort of radically alternate history of Welch’s mid-90’s artistry.
Nevertheless, witnessing gradual transformation can be revelatory, and several early takes lay bare the process of refining Gillian Welch into “Gillian Welch” with staggering clarity. The version of “Paper Wings” that made its way to the final album is much slower, sparser, and jazz-leaning than the honky-tonk demo. Moments like this show how greatly producer T Bone Burnett’s subtle aesthetics helped sculpt Welch’s sound.
Listening to the original Revival now, it’s astounding to hear all the constructed artifices and delicate contemporary flourishes that were so easy to overlook when the album first came out. The closing moments of “Orphan Girl,” Welch’s first signature tune, reveal a shocking swirl of grungy guitar feedback and tape distortion. “One More Dollar” is just one of several songs with a crisp, full rhythm section, a reminder that Welch and Rawlings wouldn’t settle into their now-famous acoustic duo format until 1998’s follow up Hell Among the Yearlings.
As several of these new songs also affirm, Welch’s third-person storylines often point inwards at moving autobiography. Like so much of Revival, “Wichita” and “Riverboat Song” are stories of movement and motion that trace both the thrill of fleeing home and the lonely alienation of being a stranger in the big city. Both songs were written just a year after Welch and Rawlings had moved to Nashville, a period when the two singers lived a ghostly existence spent largely recording music in the middle of the night by themselves.
Part of Welch and Rawlings’ aura is the sense that their music exists out of time, so it’s illuminating to hear the two artists conversing so intimately with contemporary genres and artists. They cover Robert Earl Keen and later, respond to him in song with “I Don’t Want to Go Downtown.” Lyrically, “Barroom Girls” is an equal-rights-to-party anthem that would’ve sounded at home on a Lilith Fair mainstage. On the other hand, “Pass You by” is strikingly loud, just a full drum-kit away from sounding like an outtake on Wilco’s roots-grunge opus Being There, released six months after Revival.
All of which goes to show that the authenticity scare that surrounded Welch upon her arrival feels, twenty years later, almost unrecognizably dated. Perhaps it’s because Welch herself, who would go on to play an integral role in Americana’s big-bang O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack just a few years later, has since become the very aesthetic and artistic paradigm for 21st-century roots singer-songwriters. Or, perhaps, it’s because the anxieties about Welch’s authentic credentials were so misguided in the first place.


The singer's new EP, featuring production from Kingdom, Nguzunguzu’s MA, and Arca, continues her sensuous, sensitive, and hi-definition approach to R&B. These songs use the gristle and guts of feeling as a thematic base for exploring new textures.

Hallucinogen EP

Earlier this year, the L.A.-via-D.C. singer Kelela spoke about the challenges of performing electronic music in a live setting. "I feel like I just want my emotions to be at the forefront of my performance, and if anything distracts from that, I’m in trouble," she told The Cut, riffing on the experience of seeing the veteran of digital feelings, Björk, on stage. That kind of resonant tactility also goes a long way when it comes to listening to electronic music, and Kelela’s 2013 release Cut 4 Me indicates that, whether she was aware of it or not, this ability to transpose intimacy to music has been part of her wheelhouse from the start.
Her new EP, Hallucinogen, uses the gristle and guts of feeling as a thematic base for exploring new textures in music. Like Cut 4 Me, the sound is like being enveloped in the black-lit silence of the intro to Belly: it’s a sensuous, sensitive, hi-definition approach to R&B. Some of the producers are the same (Kingdom, Nguzunguzu’s MA) and some are new (Arca, Kendrick and Drake collaborator DJ Dahi), but these partnerships hew to what’s now the Kelela template: soulful songs with unpredictable, assaultive drum patterns, whorls of whimsical synthesizer effects, and so much processing on the vocals that it sounds like you’re listening to a transmission from tomorrow. The deconstructed clatter of FKA twigs—who also worked with Arca—might be from another dimension altogether, but Kelela, whose music feels like there is blood flowing through it, looks to a future with a decidedly human shape.
Kingdom, who co-produces the EP’s sole uptempo track, "Rewind", is a student of Timbaland’s slick approach to pop-R&B. Alongside Kelela and Nugget, he channels that, as well as the bounce of Jazze Pha, for the song, which is the EP’s lead single and a showpiece for Kelela’s much-improved singing. "All the Way Down" pulls rap producer DJ Dahi into completely different terrain; the shudders of hi-hat trills provide the seams, but the print he’s working with is studded with twinkling synths that gives way to a droning. Dahi’s beat doesn’t explicitly recall Aaliyah, but Kelela's voice does—she riffs on the melody and phrasing and pillow talk-closeness of the late singer’s 1999 track, "I Don’t Wanna" (incidentally, a Jazze Pha production).
More pressing is the existential rumble that bookends the EP. "All I know is all I’ve got/ Is it hard to face all we lost?," Kelela questions on the desolate opener "A Message". Arca’s hollow kickdrums prod the song along at a ragged crawl, allowing Kelela to wring out a melody with her voice while he fills the space with funereal, yawping organ-like patches. It’s the only song on the EP, aside from closer "The High", in which Kelela sings without heavy reverb or effects, heightening its somber quality.
"And I’ll do anything for the high," she urges a placid lover on the latter, the piercing hook contrasting with her hushed verses. In content—and maybe even in producer Gifted & Blessed’s tranquil heartbeat—it’s a song that feels spiritually descended from the Weeknd. And there's another connection: writing on Pitchfork about the Weeknd’s music and its inherited ambience, Hannah Giorgis described a "long Ethiopian musical legacy of tortured pining," and it’s instructive to think that Kelela—whose family is also from Ethiopia—may have absorbed a similar propensity for mournful music.
If you consider that Kelela’s roots are in soul and R&B, the emotional side of her music makes sense. The mechanics of dance music might inspire feelings in listeners, but within the genre, overrun with the egos and opinions of "bro-teurs," her emotions are revolutionary. She is a transparent creator, unafraid of tainting the canvases of her mostly male collaborators with the imperfect, vulnerable contents of her brain and heart.


Lo-fi heroes graduate to crafting country-inflected indie pop that's part Wowee Zowee and part Workingman's Dead.

At Echo Lake

One of the most promising developments of the last year or so in indie rock has been the removal of the Grateful Dead from the blacklist. Thanks to the valiant efforts of folks like Animal Collective and Arthur magazine, your average Brooklynite is starting to wonder why they ever hated the Dead in the first place. Truth be told, there's a lot to be learned from the Dead, and plenty of bands on both coasts seem to be taking notes. There's a re-emphasis on the live experience, on finding the psychedelic space within compositions, on not fearing the improv, on passing around music in cassette form. It's as refreshing as a 1967 Morning Dew.
Woods sound very little like the Dead; few of these bands actually do. But there's something of Garcia and co. in their DNA, most markedly in the free-form excursions of their live set, where the four-piece weaves through compelling improvisational passages. But the Grateful Dead made albums too, and the country-inflected indie pop that fills At Echo Lake, their fifth full-length and possibly their best, is a worthy heir as well. Loose, shuffling, and tuneful, the abridged Woods experience sounds more like Wowee Zowee than Workingman's Dead, but it hits just the right contradictory note of tight arrangements and breathing-room playing to get that back-porch, weird America vibe.
Where previous records got distracted with lo-fi detours or lengthy workouts that didn't translate from the stage to tape, At Echo Lake is far more concise. Made up exclusively from the soft landing points that punctuate their longer live jams, it's a brisk listen, even down to its half-hour runtime. Only the brief near-instrumental "From the Horn", which sounds excised from a longer jam session, hints at the group's more exploratory and dangerous side. The rest is a sunset daydream flickering by with songs, often acoustic-based, rarely lasting longer than it takes to plant a melody in your head. The endearing nasality of Jeremy Earl's voice is sloughed off by a distorted effect on all lead and backing vocals, making the record sound like a patchy signal from a distant ham radio.
Successful as At Echo Lake may be, Woods are still more interesting live than on record-- a photo-negative of 99% of indie rock bands these days, who mostly remain content to jukebox their catalog on shuffle night after night. Adding a couple of extended jams might help make a Woods record a more accurate souvenir of the live experience, but is that really necessary? Perhaps the most important lesson to be learned from the Grateful Dead is that the show and the album can be discrete experiences, feeding each other, but not overlapping.


After a smattering of singles and a compilation, this raucous garage-pop outfit with an eye for the perils of teen love offers its full-length debut.

Hunx and His Punx: Too Young to Be in Love

Too Young to Be in Love

The first things we hear on Too Young to Be in Love, the full-length debut from Hunx and His Punx, are wordless vocals cooing a familiar melody and the drums pounding out the iconic "Be My Baby" beat. To figure out the number of times these devices have been used over the course of the past three years, all you need is a calculator with a properly functioning multiplication key. But by the time Hunx frontman Seth Bogart alternates between speaking and singing in the first verse, all worries that the band might lean too heavily on dull, tasteful homage are thrown out of the window. The fourth wall is brought down and the band is all smiles and gleefully reveling in sock-hop pastiche.
But don't get "pastiche" confused with "smug ironic distance." The 10 songs on Too Young to Be in Love are exuberant snapshots of rock music's earliest years, bursting with teenage romance and allusions to oral sex, but they are also very faithful ones. Backup singers are deployed (in addition to playing their respective instruments, drummer Erin Emslie, guitarist Michelle Santamaria, guitarist/organist Amy Blaustein, and bassist Shannon Shaw all contribute vocals) and the most recognizable chord progressions are used. And while the sense of enjoyment feels sincere, the band alternates between conveying uncomplicated emotion and offering up conscious subversion. Bogart is gay, which inevitably upends some of the archetypes from the 1950s and 60s. So the call-and-response of "The Curse of Being Young" and the bouncy "Tonite Tonite" sound like a local contemporary theater rewriting Grease, where Danny Zuko and Sandy Olsson are best friends who have a crush on the same boy.
The vintage greaser girl-group vibe comes courtesy of producer Ivan Julian (Richard Hell and the Voidoids), working in a studio that was once graced with the presence of Bogart favorite Ronnie Spector. The record's dry, modest production highlights the vocal performances. Bogart is not exactly what you would call a classically trained singer. His distinctively nasal tone is punctuated with a lisp, so if you're the type of person who winces and grits your teeth when confronted with the voice of, say, Cassie Ramone or John Darnielle, Bogart's singing will likely try your patience. The background vocals are useful for taking the focus off of him (most notably on "He's Coming Back"), and they are equally untrained, but not nearly as potentially divisive. On the other hand, Shaw operates as the band's charismatic secret weapon, stealing the scene on a handful of songs here. The freewheeling "Bad Boy" is improved by her rockabilly-leaning rasp, emotion pours out of her leads in "The Curse of Being Young", and during the end coda of "If You're Not Here", Shaw is given a vocal solo, where she wrings a great deal of emotion out of a few simple words. She creates the album's most arresting moment in the process.
After the 20-some-odd minutes of sounding like they're having a blast, the band slows down the tempo and changes the time signature on closer "Blow Me Away". With its lyrics of sadness, regret, and crying mothers, the song at first sounds like yet another one of the band's odes to young love. But it's actually about the suicide of Bogart's father during the songwriter's teenage years, giving a bolstered level of affect when he sings, "I want you to blow your troubles down the drain/ And then you'll never, ever have to be in pain." It's one of those rare moments on the record where Bogart shows a sense of genuine vulnerability. It also marks a potential new direction for Bogart, who after a smattering of singles and a comp (2010's Gay Singles) finds cohesion and stability.


Three years after their debut collaboration, the Egyptian singer/poet/trumpeter and the German electronic trio reunite for six haunting tracks of socio-political despair and existential dread.

Carl Gari / Abdullah Miniawy: Whities 023 (The Act of Falling From the 8th Floor)

Early in 2016, Will Bankhead’s eclectic electronic label The Trilogy Tapes dropped a thrilling run of club-melting 12"s from Rezzett, Four Legs, and Call Super’s Ondo Fudd alias. Slotted among these was an eerie, queasy release credited to Carl Gari and Abdullah Miniawy, with a stark photograph of Tahrir Square and the scorched exterior of the former parliament building in Cairo. The music matched that smoldering, post-revolutionary scene; the heavy atmosphere of the country and the bitterness of the military dictatorship resonated in haunting drones, ominous throbs, and a voice incanting in digitally processed Arabic. Despite what the credits suggested, it was not a duo, but rather a spontaneous collaboration between the German electronic trio Carl Gari and Egyptian singer/trumpeter Abdullah Miniawy. Three years on, Carl Gari and Miniawy emerge on another trailblazing English imprint, Nic Tasker’s Whities, again offering a bewildering, heart-shaking detour from normal club fare.
The Act of Falling From the 8th Floor is a harrowing and desolate listen that captures the mood and mindset of Miniawy and numerous other Egyptians living under the brutal oppression of the Al-Sisi regime. Miniawy only escaped by fleeing to France. The move makes for a less hurried collaboration than the group’s debut, which the musicians recorded in Cairo after their first meeting; these recordings took place at a remote house in the Bavarian forest. Even if the meaning of Miniawy’s lyrics escapes non-Arabic speakers, Carl Gari amplify their poetry with bleak, turbid electronics bringing to mind Joy Division and post-industrial soundscapes transported from Europe to North Africa.
The dread-filled throb of “Haj” recalls the Scott Walker-penned “The Electrician,” from 1978, which itself put the brutal right-wing regimes of Chile and Argentina into song form. But where that song pressurized until it finally burst at the chorus, here Carl Gari and Miniawy make the atmosphere more leaden, the pressure inescapable. In a broken voice, Miniawy’s words suggest volumes in only a few lines: “I beg you, man who ploughs/If I left after being a witness to the accident/Please don’t erase its traces.” With its sluggish drum machines, minor-key synths, and heavy guitar reverb, “Zawaj” suggests the dour gloom of early Portishead emanating from a more desperate time, Miniawy’s voice pushing through the morass and soaring over the rubble.
The centerpiece of the six-track release is “B’aj بعاج,” pairing metallic drones with a poem by Miniawy that follows a man’s fall from an eighth-floor window. Against a beat like an electric wire scraping against corrugated metal (echoing the sparse, desolate percussion of Joy Division’s “Decades”), his delivery is straightforward as he details how he plunges past each floor of his building. His downward path charts a microcosm of Egyptian society, everyday scenes that take on a fraught aspect; as the facade of home life slips, despair surges to the surface. There’s the fleeting image of a skipping rope that turns into a hangman’s noose, the tactile feel of fingernails against metal, a vertiginous succession of slides. All these details, these little failures, add up to convey a broader sense of dread, depression, and societal collapse.
But rather than offering the release of final impact, as the narrator reaches the end, Miniawy howls the kicker: “High diving from the first floor/Taking you again to floor number nine.” It’s a damnation worse than death, the very act of falling turned into its own Sisyphean hell. The Act of Falling From the 8th Floor is a gripping soundtrack to the inner despair not only of Egyptians, but anyone feeling bereft of hope in the modern world—a sound that keeps growing louder.


Recently, Sun Araw has been an expanding universe, one that finds Cameron Stallones incorporating various musicians into studio and concert settings. But his newest offering, the 80-minute double album Belomancie, is a solo record showcasing a hypnotic minimalism.

Belomancie

The back cover of Belomancie reads “COMPOSED, PERFORMED, & PRODUCED BY CAMERON STALLONES.” A few years ago, that information would’ve been redundant, as Sun Araw began in the late 00’s clearly as Stallones solo project. But lately it’s been an expanding universe, incorporating various musicians into both studio and concert settings; he’s even referred to it as the Sun Araw Band. This ensemble has morphed so much that some iterations took on new names—Turban Chopsticks, Duppy Gun, The Celebrate Music Synthesizer Group—suggesting Stallones is increasingly interested in subsuming his personality into a larger collective. So, suddenly, it’s surprising that he would make a Sun Araw record by himself.
This would all just be interesting trivia if it didn’t have discernible effects on the music. But the sonic minimalism of Belomancie makes it distinctly the expression of a single mind. This is easily the most sparse, skeletal record Stallones has made. He’s explored stripped-down versions of his woozy psych-dub before, and this double LP is too wide to be labelled with a single style. But the majority has a building-block feel. Frequently throughout its 80 minutes, Stallones hones in on the most irreducible elements of Sun Araw—a single beat here, a minute loop there—to see what might happen if they got to play alone for a while.
The result hypnotizes as strongly as the murkier swirls of previous peaks—the glowing smoke of On Patrol, the bleary humidity of Ancient Romans—but in a different way. In a sense, listening to the album’s sharp, pointillist beats and all the air in between them is like staring into space rather blinking into the fog. But there’s also something microscopic about the music that makes it like a nuclear laboratory. With so many layers stripped away—primarily the heavy reverb of Stallones’ guitar, which usually drowns his songs in swampy dreams—what remains gets magnified, meaning a single machine-drum hit can sound as big as a bomb. It’s as if Stallones zoomed so far into the essence of Sun Araw that you can see the molecules circling each other, the neurons firing through synapses. And it’s pretty fun to just keep on staring.
Part of that enjoyment comes from how Stallones can go minimal without losing a key Sun Araw effect—the sense that it’s all happening spontaneously. There may be a path in the crooked beats, squeaking synths, and three-note guitar loops, but there’s certainly no forseeable destination. This open, anything-could-happen vibe comes easier when music is bathed in echo or buried in haze; making sparser stuff feel so pregnant with potential is a trickier feat. But Stallones is so practiced at conjuring that magic that it’s almost impossible to imagine him not doing so. When the pin-pricks and string-slashes of “Scrim”, or the snare punches and two-word lyrics of “Huff” (note those minimal titles) unfurl across their nine-minute journeys, every moment feels like a step toward something new. By the end of each I’m thinking less about how long Stallones has been churning away than about how much longer he clearly could.
Which points to the greater significance of Belomancie in the context of Sun Araw’s oeuvre. It shows Stallones has more moves in his aresnal, more ways he can adjust or reimagine his approach without losing its essence—or in this instance, actually enhancing it. The sounds may be comparatively shrunken, but together they stretch his world, suggesting its expanse may be boundless. If you’ve been fascinated by any of Stallones’ work, Belomancie will get you stoked about not only what he’s done, but how much more he can do.


Kanye’s big year culminates in an LP that feels like an instant greatest hits, the ultimate realization of his strongest talents and divisive public persona.

Kanye West: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Kanye West’s 35-minute super-video, Runaway, peaks with a parade. Fireworks flash while red hoods march through a field. At the center of the spectacle is a huge, pale, cartoonish rendering of Michael Jackson’s head. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’s gargantuan “All of the Lights” soundtracks the procession, with Kanye pleading, “Something wrong, I hold my head/MJ gone, our nigga dead.” The tribute marks another chapter in West’s ongoing obsession with the King of Pop.
West’s discography contains innumerable references and allusions to Jackson. His first hit as a producer, Jay-Z’s “Izzo (H.O.V.A.),” sampled the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back.” For many, his first memorable lines as a rapper came during 2003’s “Slow Jamz”: “She got a light-skinned friend look like Michael Jackson/Got a dark-skinned friend look like Michael Jackson.” And when West’s recent interview with Matt Lauer on the Today show went awry, he took to Twitter, writing, “I wish Michael Jackson had twitter!!!!!! Maybe Mike could have explained how the media tried to set him up!!! It's all a fucking set up!!!!” Like most everything else, Kanye may exaggerate the kinship, but it’s real. And it’s never more apparent than on Twisted Fantasy, a blast of surreal pop excess that few artists are capable of creating, or even willing to attempt.
To be clear, Kanye West is not Michael Jackson. As he told MTV last month, “I do have a goal in this lifetime to be the greatest artist of all time, [but] that’s very difficult being that I can’t dance or sing.” He ended the thought with a laugh, but you get the impression he’s not kidding. Unlike Michael, he’s not interested in scrubbing away bits of himself—his Blackness, his candidness—to appease the masses. And while Jackson’s own twisted fantasies of paranoia and betrayal eventually consumed him whole, West is still aware of his illusions, though that mindfulness becomes increasingly unmoored with each newspaper-splashing controversy. The balance is tenuous, but right now it’s working to his advantage. On Twisted Fantasy, Kanye is crazy enough to truly believe he’s the greatest out there. And, about a decade into his career, the hardworking perfectionist has gained the talent on the mic and in the control room to make a startlingly strong case for just that.
Kanye’s last album, 2008’s 808s & Heartbreak, was heavy on the Auto-Tune and stark synths, but relatively light on grandiose ideas. It was a necessary detour that expanded his emotional palette; a bloodletting after a harsh breakup and the passing of his mother that manifests itself in Twisted Fantasy’s harshest lows. But musically, the new album largely continues where 2007’s Graduation left off in its maximalist hip-hop bent, with flashes of The College Dropout’s comfort-food sampling and Late Registration’s baroque instrumentation weaved in seamlessly. As a result, the record comes off like a culmination and an instant greatest hits, the ultimate realization of his strongest talents and divisive public persona. And since the nerd-superstar rap archetype he popularized has now become commonplace, he leaves it in the dust, taking his style and drama to previously uncharted locales, far away from typical civilization.
He’s got a lot on his mind, too. After exiling himself for months following last year’s infamous Taylor Swift stage bomb, the rapper made some of his first comeback appearances at the headquarters of Facebook and Twitter in late July. Videos of West standing on a table in tailored GQ duds while gesticulating through new rhymes (sans musical accompaniment) quickly made the rounds. The Silicon Valley visits seemed like a stunt, but they were prophetic. Forever an over-sharer, Kanye was looking for an outlet for his latest mirror-born musings. He found that platform with Twitter, and proceeded to dictate his own narrative in 140 character hits. Whether showing off exotic purchases, defending himself against the press, or going on stream-of-consciousness rants, Kanye finally had the middleman-free, instant-gratification platform he’d always wanted.
Juiced on the direct connection, he began releasing weekly songs for free online, the generosity of which would be moot if the songs didn’t deliver. But they did, over and over, eventually building up the same type of superstar goodwill Radiohead pulled off with their pay-what-you-want In Rainbows release plan and Lil Wayne’s free mixtape barrage leading up to 2008’s Tha Carter III. So while Kanye can’t sing or dance like Michael, he’s making meaningful connections in a fresh, oftentimes (ahem) naked way. “When I used to finish an album I would be so excited for my mom to hear the final - final!” he wrote on November 11. “The final - final is what we used to call the... completed album with all the skits!!! I made songs to please one person... MY MOM!!! I would think... would my my Mom like this song!”
I’m not sure which song he’s talking about. Because, between July and November, West seemingly decided to make My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy less mom-friendly and more of a hedonistic exploration into a rich and famous American id. At Facebook, he rapped the first verse of what would become album closer “Lost in the World,” at one point changing Michael Jackson’s "Wanna Be Startin’ Something” refrain to, “Mama-say mama-sah Mama Donda’s son,” referring to his late mother. The familial allusion was left off the album. Another Facebook tune—a brutally oedipal account called “Mama’s Boyfriend”—was also deleted, along with the vintage-Kanye-sounding “See Me Now.” Such exclusions speak to the album’s sharp focus—to move everything forward while constantly tipping on the brink of frantic instability.
This isn’t the same resourceful prodigy who made The College Dropout or even the wounded soul behind 808s & Heartbreak. Instead, Kanye’s Twisted Fantasy incarnation cherry-picks little things from his previous work and blows them up into something less than sane. The expansive, all-encompassing nature of the album is borne out in its staggering guest list which includes mentors Jay-Z, RZA, and No I.D., along with new charges like Nicki Minaj, Rick Ross, Kid Cudi, and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. The inclusion of Minaj (who contributes the schizoid verse of her life on “Monster”), Ross (a guy known for making up his own reality as he goes), and Cudi (who’s probably even more wildly self-destructive than Kanye) especially adds to the hallucinatory tone. By the time Chris Rock shows up to provide comic relief during one of the album’s bleakest moments, it begins to feel as if Kanye is stage-managing his own award show with enough starpower, shock, and dynamism to flatten the Grammys, the VMAs, and the rest all at once.
Over the past few months, Kanye has intermittently tried to flush away his rep as a boorish egoist in interviews and on Twitter, which is, fortunately, impossible. Because without his exploding self-worth—itself a cyclical reaction to the self-doubt so much of his music explores—there would be no Twisted Fantasy. “Every superhero needs his theme music,” he says on “Power,” and though he’s far from the virtuous paragons of comic book lore, he’s no less complex. In his public life, he exhibits vulnerability and invincibility in equal measure, but he’s just as apt at villainy—especially here.
With “Runaway,” he rousingly highlights his own douchebaggery, turning it into a rallying cry for all humanity. Like many of his greatest songs, it’s funny, sad, and perversely relatable. And while the royal horns and martial drums of “All of the Lights” make it sound like the ideal outlet for the most over-the-top boasts imaginable, West instead inhabits the role of an abusive deadbeat desperate to make good on a million blown promises. “Hell of a Life” attempts to bend its central credo—“no more drugs for me, pussy and religion is all I need”—into a noble pursuit. As a woofer-mulching synth line lurks, Kanye justifies his dreams of not sleeping with but marrying a porn star, peaking with the combative taunt, “How can you say they live they life wrong/When you never fuck with the lights on.” Inspired by his two-year relationship with salacious model Amber Rose, the song blurs the line between fantasy and reality, sex and romance, love and religion, until no lines exist at all. It’s a zonked nirvana with demons underneath; a fragile state that can’t help but break apart on the very next song.
The haunted, Aphex Twin–sampling “Blame Game” bottoms out with a verse in which Kanye’s voice is sped up, slowed down and stretched out. The effect is almost psychotic, suggesting three or four inner monologues fighting over smashed emotions. It’s one of many moments on the record where West manipulates his vocals. Whether funneling some of his best-ever rhymes through a tinny, Strokes-like filter on “Gorgeous” or making himself wail like a dying cyborg in the final minutes of “Runaway,” he uses studio wizardry to draw out his multitudes. Tellingly, though, he doesn’t get the last word on the album. That distinction goes to the sobering tones of Gil Scott-Heron’s 1970 spoken-word piece “Comment #1,” a stark take on the American fable. “All I want is a good home and a wife and children and some food to feed them every night,” says Scott-Heron, bringing the fantasy to a close.
On “Power,” Kanye raps, “My childlike creativity, purity, and honesty is honestly being crowded by these grown thoughts/Reality is catching up with me, taking my inner child, I’m fighting for custody.” The lines nail another commonality between the rapper and his hero. Like Michael, Kanye’s behavior—from the poorly planned outbursts to the musical brilliance—is wide-eyed in a way that most 33-year-olds have long left behind. That naivety is routinely battered on Twisted Fantasy, yet it survives, better for the wear. With his music and persona both marked by a flawed honesty, Kanye’s man-myth dichotomy is at once modern and truly classic. “I can’t be everybody’s hero and villain, savior and sinner, Christian and anti Christ!” he wrote earlier this month. That may be true, but he’s more willing than anyone else to try.


In 2000, Dave Portner and Noah Lennox self-released a home-recorded album in a tiny edition of CDs. But Animal Collective’s de facto debut is far more deliberate, ambitious, and sophisticated than you might remember.

Animal Collective: Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished (Remastered 2023)

You probably know the story of Animal Collective, the band that started out making electronic-acoustic noise jams with lots of babbling and screaming, gradually learned to pull melodies and song structures from the iridescent muck, and eventually became indie-rock stars. Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished, self-released in a tiny edition of CDs by the duo of Dave “Avey Tare” Portner and Noah “Panda Bear” Lennox in 2000, and now remastered and issued alongside an EP of previously unheard tracks from the same period, doesn’t quite fit that tidy narrative. Animal Collective’s de facto debut is a far more deliberate, ambitious, and even sophisticated album than a listener working their way backward through their catalog might expect, given the music that came soon after.
The likes of 2001’s Danse Manatee and 2003’s Here Comes the Indian (later retitled Ark) can give the impression that the band in its early years was driven mostly by intuition and enthusiasm, summoning whatever ecstatic racket their limited tools and proficiency would allow. But as is so often the case with artists who are labeled childlike outsiders or savants, it seems at least as likely that they cultivated their primal sensibility on purpose, because they were interested in its expressive and aesthetic possibilities. Revisiting Spirit They’re Gone two decades and 10 or so albums later makes clear that Animal Collective were not a bunch of naifs who donned silly names, twisted a few knobs on their SP-404s, and landed dizzily in the art-pop avant-garde. From the beginning, they knew what they were doing.
The subsequent Animal Collective release that Spirit They’re Gone most resembles is 2005’s Feels, in that it is more or less a rock album, albeit a highly idiosyncratic one. Portner and Lennox recorded it at Portner’s parents’ house, when both were just shy of drinking age. Portner sang and played guitar, piano, and various electronics; Lennox played drums. The songs are long and elaborate, with dramatic dynamic and rhythmic shifts, more like progressive rock than anything else in their catalog. Portner’s lyrics reflect on childhood and look apprehensively toward what comes next, rendering the adolescent journey in imagery befitting a fairy tale.
The story goes that Portner had originally envisioned making a solo release, but was so moved by Lennox’s contributions that he gave him co-billing. It’s easy to understand why. Lennox’s drum parts are as important to the album’s uncanny atmosphere as Portner’s vocals. They often sound like the fills most rock drummers use to punctuate a section or transition from one to another, tumbling across toms and cymbals to build tension before locking back into the beat. But Lennox didn’t use them that way. Instead, he repeated these ornate sequences over and over, so that an entire six-minute song might live in the transitory moment of a drum fill, forever on its way. It’s a fitting technique for an album so focused on the passage of time.
Such active rhythms might overwhelm the songs or oppress the listener if it weren’t for Lennox’s light touch. He plays more like a jazz drummer than a rocker, landing hits like drizzle on a tin roof. Anyone who primarily associates Animal Collective with the pounding of a single floor tom may be surprised at how skillfully he finesses the kit here. His crucial decision to use brushes rather than drumsticks was apparently guided in part by the pair’s mutual appreciation for Love’s 1960s psych-folk landmark Forever Changes, a choice that points obliquely toward Animal Collective’s more mature work. Part of their greatness lies in the ability to absorb outside influences, assimilating rather than replicating them; Spirit They’re Gone sounds no more like Love than later albums sound like Frankie Knuckles or the Grateful Dead. Nor, for that matter, does it sound much like free jazz or reggae, despite the distinct imprint of the former on the stormy introduction of “Alvin Row” and the latter on the synth basslines across the album. The similarity to Jamaican music is most pronounced on “Chocolate Girl,” when that song’s initially jittery rhythms downshift into loping half-time for the chorus, and for a moment Avey Tare and Panda Bear are grooving just like Sly & Robbie.
Those faint glimpses of influence on Spirit They’re Gone are the exception. More often, the album is striking for how singular it sounds. How were these 20-year-olds, without the resounding validation that would come later, already so confidently in command of their own ideas, especially when their ideas were so strange, so free from received notions about how rock bands should operate, so feral, so potentially uncool? Which record in Portner’s collection could have possibly inspired the section of “La Rapet” when the drums fall away and all that’s left is a lonely acoustic guitar, a sound like crumpling paper, and his queasily pitch-shifted voice, cooing and sighing like a toddler? It’s the sound of Sung Tongs in miniature. What about their habit of adorning Spirit’s otherwise delicate arrangements with screeching, grating, headache-making high-frequency noise, somehow made beautiful by its surroundings? Pick almost any later album and you’ll hear some version of this impulse. And what made them so sure that such outré inclinations could share space on the same album—the same song, even—with music like the coda of “Alvin Row,” surging and heroic and easy to love, the sort of communal gesture that would eventually take them to the big stage? They started playing it live for the first time 16 years later, as if they wrote it with the future already in mind.
There are puzzling small decisions, perhaps indicative of the band’s lack of experience, that I imagine they might go back and change if they could. The omission of a bass part on “Penny Dreadfuls” slightly undermines its otherwise expertly paced arrangement, depriving it of a certain heft and grounding. The band was still figuring out which passages would begin to levitate with repetition and which would be better off played just once, and Portner’s surrealist poetry yielded the occasional awkward line, a combination that means “Bat You’ll Fly” ends with a full minute devoted to the chanted couplet “I feel so elusive in Houston/You feel so exclusively Houston.” Lennox abandons his restraint behind the kit for the final section of “Chocolate Girl,” and his copious cymbal crashes temporarily break the stillness of the album’s atmosphere, so that it sounds for a few moments like what it really was: a document of two young men jamming in a bedroom, rather than a transmission from a magical netherworld. The remastering job makes the album as a whole sound a little bigger and more present, but it can’t really fix issues like these, which is just as well. Part of the reason to reach for Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished when you might otherwise play Feels or any other Animal Collective album is that sense of messy youthful aspiration and yearning.
The reissue also reveals another Animal Collective trademark already in place at this early stage: the quietly arresting album-companion EP. Five previously unreleased songs, collected under the title A Night at Mr. Raindrop’s Holistic Supermarket, reflect the themes of Spirit They’re Gone through an electronic funhouse mirror, replacing Lennox’s skittering percussion with dreamy sample collages and drum machines. The original songs, including a trancelike rework of “La Rapet” and an untitled track that presages the swampy synth ambience of Strawberry Jam, are good to great. The most interesting track for historical purposes, though, is a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.” The arrangement reimagines the soft-rock classic as buzzing DIY dub, but otherwise it’s faithful to the original. A selection from one of the slickest and biggest-selling albums of all time seems an odd choice for this band, whose next few albums would approach pop the way an alien might approach a turkey sandwich. Maybe they knew bigger things were on the way.
Correction: Josh “Deakin” Dibb engineered the A Night at Mr. Raindrop’s Holistic Supermarket EP; he did not engineer the original Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished sessions.


On their 14th studio album, the best-selling duo in UK pop dampen the euphoria; the result is a tuneful, wan album that lands somewhere in the middle of their rich catalogue.

Hotspot

For more than 35 years, Pet Shop Boys singer-keyboardist Neil Tennant has returned to a question of world-historic import: Do I stay in or do I go out? “Turn on the news, drink some tea/Maybe if you’re with me we’ll do some shopping” goes one couplet in 1988’s “Left to My Own Devices.” Observing a teen on “I Don’t Wanna,” a song from Pet Shop Boys’ 14th studio album Hotspot, Tennant sings with his usual starchy plaintiveness, “Feels so shy/He’d rather sit alone and cry/But no one understands this guy.”
Pet Shop Boys do. No other act has so richly documented the cautious development of lonely queer boys whose ambitions—sexual and economic—are as huge as the beats they heard at the club last Saturday night. On the dancefloor, these boys rehearse how to deal with other boys checking them out or abandoning them for hunkier alternatives. Giorgio Moroder’s sequencer lines are lodestars for Tennant and keyboardist Chris Lowe, like Beatles guitar licks were for other acts. On Hotspot, the best-selling duo in UK pop dampen the euphoria; the result is a tuneful, wan album: a mid-tier effort.
Hotspot observes Pet Shop Boys’ pattern of following up a pair of bangers (2015’s Super and 2013’s Electric) with a bagful of autumn leaves. The mid-tempo tunes keep their top buttons buttoned, muted and wary like the sixtysomethings Tennant and Lowe have become. No dictate requires late middle-age to be as fraught as adolescence, but Hotspot puts Lowe’s orchestral synth chords and house keyboard patterns in the service of rote tales of resignation, whose resonance may be dependent on the affection of their listening base. Dismiss “You Are the One” as a sappy little thing if you like;  listen generously and you may appreciate the lyric’s affirmations and the mournful way in which Tennant caresses the chorus hook. The object of desire may be “the one,” but Neil’s none too pleased about it. Three decades after he gleefully shacked up with a bloke who may not love him on the catty “Why Don’t We Live Together,” now he weighs the costs.
Hotspot stumbles when Tennant and Lowe convince themselves they need a good time. The interplay between strings, bass synth, and call-and-response female vocal on “Monkey Business” sounds fabulous until Tennant sings, “We’re gonna have a pah-rty!” like he’s a human resources vice president at the Hyatt bar; he’s often played these guys, but now the joke’s not funny. And there’s no reason for “Dreamland,” a duet with Olly Alexander, who as the frontman of synth-pop band Years & Years makes a natural heir to Tennant. So many of Alexander’s songs detail the kind of danger implicit in Pet Shop Boys’ 1993 “Young Offender”: older man getting mixed up with a far younger male lover. Why then is this song such an inoffensive racket?
Perhaps the inoffensiveness is the point. In a post-Obergefell environment where gay youth can imagine a life untrammeled by disease but experience anxiety about kissing in public, tracks like “Wedding in Berlin” (“We’re getting married because we love each other/We’re getting married today”) signify as goal and fantasy. Tennant-Lowe’s incorporation of Mendelssohn’s ubiquitous “Wedding March” registers as a shrewd gesture of queering an original text—not an unexpected move at this point in Pet Shop Boys’ career, but nonetheless a discomfiting one, as inoffensiveness can be too. “Only the Dark,” a shimmering ballad in which Tennant pledges fidelity so long as the lights are out, is better. It’s not the first time he and Lowe have preferred the erotic possibilities of the unseen—a longstanding fascination which speaks to how profoundly Pet Shop Boys revel in paradox as a first principle. So much uncertainty requires consistency.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The fifth album from Damon McMahon is his euphoric breakthrough. Everything feels silvery and romantic, like a hallucination of the classic-rock songbook.

Freedom

Words have a way of blurring in Amen Dunes’ music. Over the past decade, Damon McMahon has led his psychedelic folk-rock project with an ear for transforming language, stretching and repeating simple phrases past the point of clarity. His voice, distinguished by a ghostly, soulful vibrato, has never been entirely intelligible, and that’s part of why it works. Like Spiritualized or Panda Bear, McMahon suggests through his music that if you spend too long focusing on what everything means, then you’re missing the point. His records never seemed geared toward a popular breakthrough, if only because they already felt so self-contained. Each song is a hermetic breakthrough, its own emotional journey toward something bigger.
This all remains true on Freedom, the New York-based artist’s silvery, sprawling fifth album. “We play religious music/Don’t think you understand, man,” he affirms near the start, as direct a mission statement as you’ll find across his catalog. But where that spirituality once felt like a cryptic code, now it’s a little easier to take part in. On Freedom, McMahon’s voice is clearer, his hooks are sharper, and his music—once a hazy spider web of hisses, drones, and vamps—opens to reveal a latent aspiration toward the classic-rock songbook. These are the first Amen Dunes songs you could actually sing along with.
Painstakingly crafted over the span of three years, Freedom is propelled by sounds you wouldn’t expect to find on a record put out by the avant-goth label Sacred Bones: Everything is sparkling and reflective, like sunlight on an infinity pool. Collaborating with a large stable of musicians, including Italian electronic artist Panoram, guitarist Delicate Steve, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Nick Zinner, it’s the most dynamic, confident Amen Dunes record to date. At times, McMahon’s euphoria recalls a period in the late ’90s when singer-songwriter fare merged with au courant dance music on multi-platinum records like David Gray’s underrated White Ladder. Two decades ago, this record’s opening track, “Blue Rose,” might have been a massive hit: a kaleidoscopic scene-setter that introduces the album’s themes of grief, family, and self-empowerment to a lapping, luminescent rhythm.
Like a lot of records that tackle big topics, Freedom was born of loss. McMahon’s mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer following the release of his last album, 2014’s drone-folk opus Love, and the connective tissue throughout Freedom comes from childhood memories. The lyric sheet is littered with names—streets, saints, friends, relatives—but McMahon’s tone is too hallucinogenic for his work to seem autobiographical. His writing feels more like an intimate conversation heard from a neighboring apartment, with all the missing pieces and context left to the imagination. The feel-good rockabilly-reggae hybrid “Calling Paul the Suffering” might be a Bible story or a climactic confrontation, although it could just as easily be a stoned delusion, dazed eyes looking in the mirror for their own reassurance.
Even with the subtle narrative running through the record, McMahon’s songs gain resonance less from their lyrics than from the forward pulse of his music. He avoids conventional verses and choruses, so his songs rely instead on recurring musical motifs, trusting the trills and catches of their presentation to expose new angles. Songs like “Miki Dora” and “Skipping School” are stunning exercises in tension and release. The former is teased ahead by drum rolls and muted guitar licks, while “Skipping School” bursts open with a low, echoing harmonica that rushes like wind through a cracked car window. In “Believe,” the album’s emotional centerpiece, McMahon describes something that sounds like a resurrection, but it’s the choir of harmonies and synths that make his story come to life.
One of the thrills of Freedom is how McMahon rewires classic-rock tropes to feel new and entirely suited to his own music. It’s a quality that brings to mind the War on Drugs’ Adam Granduciel, whose project also reflects the sound of old FM radio through a gauzy, idiosyncratic filter. But where Granduciel channels those acts at their wisest—sighing and nodding through his lyrics as if contemplating them for the first time—McMahon is pure id. He stutters and scats and spits to get his point across. In “Freedom,” he shivers through the word “cold” like ’80s Mick Jagger. In his mouth, the word “suffering” is rendered completely untranscribable. During these songs that freefall through formative memories, there’s joy in hearing McMahon work through these rock-star poses, a feeling echoed by the rush of youthful confidence that opens and closes the album: “This is your time—their time is done,” a child’s voice instructs him.
Freedom revolves around that mantra, a tribute to how such certainty dissipates over time. The widened scope of the music is matched by an increased vulnerability in McMahon’s voice, a tenderness that can imbue even his vaguest incantations with a cosmic tenderness. If so much of Amen Dunes’ music felt like McMahon’s world away from the world—a druggy, impenetrable fortress—then this is when he confronts reality, an expansive breakthrough that’s equally mystifying and immediate. “Woke up Sunday feeling good,” he sings in “Skipping School.” “Thought I’d try maybe stay high forever.” The music lurches and grinds beneath him, but by the end of the song, it doesn’t seem like such a crazy idea.


With his self-titled debut, the rapper behind the smash hit "Trap Queen" has the platform to show he's more than a singles guy. Fetty Wap is light on guests and superstar producers and, for the most part, Fetty doesn't venture too far outside his comfort zone. But that turns out to be a good thing.

Fetty Wap

It's hard not to root for Fetty Wap, the rapper whose irrepressible 2014 single "Trap Queen" went from Tri-State SoundCloud sensation to this year's late-pass song of the summer. The 24-year-old, born Willie Maxwell, is unshakably positive, turning a prominent disability (he lost his eye to glaucoma as a child) into a proud calling card that's already inspired a 10-year old to venture out into the world without his own prosthetic eye. He's from Paterson, N.J., a place we would almost certainly not be talking about were it not for Fetty Wap; he's fiercely loyal to his longtime Remy Boyz 1738 crew, including perennial sidekick Monty, a rapper we would assuredly not be talking about were it not for Fetty Wap. He's almost singlehandedly revived the ride-or-die thug love ballad with a serotonin-soaked ditty—now double-platinum—that turns a negative situation (having to cook dope to make a living) into not just an unforgettable date but a symbolic proclamation of undying, committed love. And though he's no longer in a relationship with "Trap Queen"'s muse, he's currently paying her college tuition as a thank-you.
If there's any hurdle in Fetty's way at this point, it's his nagging reputation as a one-and-done singles artist that persists even as he smashes Billboard records. When "Again", the album's fourth single, entered the charts in August, he became the only artist in the history of the Hot Rap Songs chart to have his first four singles reach the Top 10 simultaneously. The same week, an article was published: "Is Fetty Wap Destined To Be Another One-Hit Wonder?" It's a bizarre dissonance, best understood as such: those four charting singles, addictive as they are, don't do much to break the mold of what we've come to expect from a Fetty Wap song. Which is to say: generous Auto-Tune, exuberant melodies, and a lot of warbled "Yeaaaaaaaa baby"s and "1738"s.
With Fetty Wap, released through the tech-savvy but still-transitional 300 Entertainment imprint, the rappa-turnt-sanga finally has the platform to show he's more than a singles guy. To that end, he put out a 20-song album with no new friends and no big-name producers—in short, this is the album he probably would have made with his RGF Productions squad in Paterson were there no label involved at all. Those looking for a new direction from Fetty, or who've already mined the depths of his prolific SoundCloud, may find this a letdown. But those who've embraced his loyalty and radical self-love should be delighted: Is there a more quintessentially Fetty Wap move than turning the year's biggest major label rap debut into a self-directed Paterson block party?
The first thing you might notice on Fetty Wap's tracklist isn't what's there—if you've kept up with his output over the last year and a half, there's a lot you'll recognize here—but who isn't. Drake's hastily added guest verse to "My Way" from earlier this year is missing; the album version features a verse from Remy Boyz' Monty, who appears on nine of the album's 20 tracks, the only guest aside from relatively unknown M80. As a whole, Fetty Wap adopts the same self-assured stance: Fetty's formula definitely ain't broke, and he doesn't seem in a hurry to fix it. In what can only be described as a flex, he opens the album with "Trap Queen", a seemingly audacious move he knows full well he can back up. Why coyly tease out your first and biggest hit when you've got 19 more just like it?
That's the thing: you could shuffle these tracks endlessly and the album would probably have the same effect. It's not that there are any missteps here, really; if you like what you've already heard from Fetty, you'll like these songs. There are variations, to be sure—second single "679" borrows some West Coast bounce, functioning as a clubby palate cleanser in the way that "Fight Night" did for Migos. "I Wonder" and "Boomin" successfully skulk into drill's shadowy corners. But for the most part, Fetty doesn't venture too far outside his comfort zone.
Still, when the highs are this high, it's hard to complain. "My Way" is still 2015's ultimate trap lullaby, lilting in hypnotic spirals. "RGF Island" turns somber keys into a hard-earned celebration, and "I'm Straight" dials the exuberance further up with triumphant steel drums. And though he's a much more natural singer, "Again" is Fetty's best rap performance. "I'm tryna finish who I started with/ I'm tryna spend it all who I got it with," he crows, reassuring his fed-up trap queen that his crazy life will all be worth it when they can enjoy it together. Fetty approaches everything in his music with the earnest devotion of matrimony: his trap queen, his money, his beloved Remy Boyz. So though it's tempting to wonder what may have happened had 300 recruited labelmates Young Thug or Quavo, or beatmakers du jour like Metro Boomin or Zaytoven, it's only right Fetty insisted on keeping things in the 1738 family.


Following the release of his sophomore tape The Water(s), the rapper Mick Jenkins jumped from not mentioned at all to one of Chicago's most promising rookie candidates. Wave[s] is a new direction, and it may upset expectations, pushing him away from his more strident instincts.

Wave[s]

Mick Jenkins' sophomore tape The Water(s) stood apart in a competitive Chicago scene. With a resonant baritone that telegraphed masculine authority, Jenkins jumped from not mentioned at all to one of his city's most promising rookie candidates. He combined an ear for poetic language with a principled consciousness and a no-bullshit persona, a formula which quickly snowballed into a substantial underground fanbase. Since that time, in numerous profiles and interviews, Jenkins has wrestled with what this sudden success means. His art has been in many ways about seeking truth in a system designed to obscure it, as an uncompromising, conscientious moralist unafraid to cut through the noise. It's a relatable pose, but one that doesn't necessarily lead artist and listener to the same destination. Wave[s] is a new direction, and it may upset expectations, pushing him away from his more strident instincts. Even if it isn't his best, it's probably for the best.
What that means in practical terms is a shift from the somber blues and greens of The Water(s) into a more colorful earth-toned exploration of musical possibility. Although his poetic approach and political conscience are still in play, it feels less like a focal point and more a part of the music's texture. With Haitian-Canadian producer Kaytranada and Chicago-based musical collective THEMpeople providing the backdrop, Wave[s] is influenced primarily by a jazzy neo soul—to be reductive about it—sound. In a time when artists have been celebrated for chasing fashionable worlds of influence through a bottomless hard drive, Jenkins has opted to stick to a core set of inputs, a closed circuit of musical inspiration, and is finding himself within that limitation. His more orthodox listening tastes are refreshing, a reminder of how constraints can provide a framework for freedom.
So when Jenkins opens up his world, it's for this tradition, one that gives him the grammar to relieve a pressure that had previously driven his work. Thus "40 Below" lets him tell a story of lost love that doesn't carry the burden of representing some sort of larger structural critique, or the obligation to wake up the world. Jenkins had painted himself in a bit of a corner, and Wave[s] is a sly sidestep, an exploration of possibility from an artist whose overriding purpose had previously eliminated that opportunity. Jenkins could risk didacticism, but it was his willingness to do so that initially cultivated such a loyal following; Wave[s] gives him an opportunity to shake those who may have valued his work only inasmuch as it provided that function.
As a whole, Wave[s] isn't as strong as The Water(s), and may ultimately be seen as a bit minor in Jenkins' catalog. His biggest strength as an artist is his pen: as a writer, Jenkins has a gift for poetic turns of phrase and clever wordplay, delivered with potent urgency. The level of applied skill in his writing—the work that suggests he could one day rival some of rap's biggest names in a larger arena—hasn't quite been applied to his songwriting. His choruses are things like: "Get Up, Get Out, Get Down!", bordering on blank cliches in need of workshopping. Even "Your Love"—the album's far-away highlight, with the potential to cross over—interpolates Lupe Fiasco for its ingratiating hook. Meanwhile, THEMpeople provide a vigorous experimental backdrop, but relative to the style's jazzy vanguard—think the Los Angeles world of Low End Theory parties, Thundercat, Flying Lotus, and To Pimp a Butterfly—the group is still establishing its voice, working toward a unique approach.
This is not to suggest that the album is a failure, or that Jenkins' new direction is a bad one; if anything, it points to an artistic flexibility that will pay dividends down the road. The room to grow is there, should he decide to pursue the colors Wave[s] has opened up for him. The artistic success of "Your Love" suggests he has the right instincts, even if the execution is, for now, more of an exploration than a destination.


London's Hot Chip follow their breakthrough 2006 LP, The Warning, with the lovable but flawed Made in the Dark.

Made in the Dark

The received wisdom on London's Hot Chip is that they're equal opportunity funsters who'll pinch from any old genre in the name of a grin. But after the potent combination of "Over and Over", "Boy From School", and all the attendant remixes increased their festival bill font size by about 20 points, there was good reason to believe that the London quintet's next record might find them rectifying their cartoonish pop into something sleeker and more streamlined. They might have, for instance, decided to expand on the soul and R&B influences that occasionally pepper their music; or to smoothen the undanceable rumples of their creaky, short-circuited pop with a few well-placed blasts of minimal techno; or maybe, to topple their previous output with an even more dazzling pastiche of color, candy, and complexity.
Any one of those paths would have served Hot Chip well. But of all of their many virtues, focus isn't one, and instead they took them all. A string of self-conscious interruptions, perfect pop moments, show-offy sonics, and inscrutable non-sequiturs, the lovable but flawed Made in the Dark has moments that come off as almost gluttonous-- and that's even by Hot Chip's standards. And while the majority of the material here ranges somewhere between inoffensive and fantastic, momentarily obnoxious misfires (the funhouse mirror horrorshow "Bendable Poseable", the impish "Don't Dance", and the weirdly overrated "Shake a Fist") underscore why "all of the above" is not a tenable long-term formula for the band: That level of consumption can't stay charming forever.
Which is to say that Hot Chip have a big record in them and this isn't it. Once you do away with that disappointment, though, there's plenty to appreciate. There might not be anything as definitive or as moment-making as "Over and Over" or "Boy From School" here, but once you've acclimatized to Made in the Dark's sonic trills and party poppers, some affecting songs emerge. On the pop side, none are as lovable as the tender-hearted electro of "Ready for the Floor", in which the band once again finds comfortable middle ground between Alexis Taylor's balladesque vocal and vibrant, electro-pop dressing. Elsewhere, the feelgood "Touch Too Much" cruises by on a big chorus and some characteristically clattering percussions, while the infectious "One Pure Thought" opens against a backdrop of gnarled guitar chords and keening synths.
Unhampered by the otherwise relentless hairpinning subjected to all their uptempo material, Hot Chip's ballads do better service to the band's songwriting skills. With a serpentine vocal melody, a healthy backbeat, and a gently unfolding array of whistles, pinging guitar notes, and reverbed backing vocals, album centrepiece "We're Looking for a Lot of Love" is an easy highlight. Meanwhile, with its slow changes and melting analog pads, the two-minute dirge "Whistle for Will" provides Low-style gravitas, closer "In the Privacy of Our Love" flirts with gospel, and the album's title track is an exercise in lazy, Sunday morning soul.
On paper, those individual components read like they might make for a patchy, turbulent record, and to be honest, that's pretty much how Made in the Dark plays. For all the talk about them being genre agnostics, they're just as beholden to everyday rules of pace and structure as anyone else. So: Good record but not a great one. By the time you see them this summer, they'll have it sorted out.


This box set collects instrumentals released under MF Doom's production alias and shows the depth and range of his beat style.

Metal Fingers / DOOM: Special Herbs: The Box Set Vol. 0-9

Special Herbs: The Box Set Vol. 0-9

Hiding behind a mask and a plethora of pseudonyms while working in collaboration as both spotlight-grabbing rapper and behind-the-scenes producer, MF Doom has enjoyed two decades as one of hip-hop's most restless and prolific artists. The vast Special Herbs project, an all-instrumental series of discs put out under his Metal Fingers moniker, would seem to form the center of Doom's ample discography, at least in terms of quantity. But despite the sheer amount of music collected under the Herbs banner-- 10 volumes released in a variety of formats between 2001 and 2005, enough to rival another artist's career output-- the series is often discussed as if it were a sketchbook of Doom's production ideas that is less essential than official "finished" albums like Operation: Doomsday or Madvilliany.
That's not particularly surprising, but it is a little unfair. On the one hand, the Herbs line mostly act as a compendium of instrumentals Doom produced for both himself and other rappers over the course of his career, from his early 1990s days with Native Tongues satellites KMD to his 21st-century rebirth as monster-loving underground polymath. Casual fans might wonder why, especially if they own the original rap albums these tracks spring from, they need to grapple with this much previously released material in instrumental form. But these releases are far from just being DJ tools or freestyle fodder for amateur MCs. They offer a chance for anyone to revel in Doom's breadth and inventiveness, to appreciate his head-spinning stylistic shifts as a producer by bringing the beats to the foreground. Make no mistake-- most of these tracks sound plenty "finished" even in rhyme-less form. And as a document of an underground producer's life's work (so far), the Herbs series is rivaled only Doom's friend and fellow manic archivist Madlib in both scope and completeness.
The box slaps all previous Herbs installments onto 10 slabs of DJ-friendly vinyl, while also offering a digital download of the full series and bonus material for those rabid Doom-heads who apparently didn't get enough with their first 10 doses (for this review, I listened to digital files). The bonus cuts include a 7" with two slices of lo-fi R&B nostalgia, the tense trunk-rattler "Constipated Monkey" and the richer brass-and-organ 60s fantasia "Project Jazz", their "lost jukebox 45" quality fitting the old-school vinyl single format perfectly. There's also a whole disc of unreleased material that ranges from the whimsical, Muppet-sampling "Humrush" to the standup bass showcase "It Sounded like a Roc!", though most of the never-before-heard tracks stick to the warm, friendly, jazz-tinged sound of the 90s underground, rather than Doom's harsher psychedelic/futuristic outings.
Naturally, 12 new tracks on top of 71 previously released cuts will only be an enticement to mega-fans who decided to preorder this set the day it was announced. But whatever the package, whether this lavish vinyl collection or the multi-disc mixed CD compilation Nature Sounds released a few years back, the Herbs are an essential buy for 21st-century beat freaks. Doom covers so much ground that it might be a little surprising for those who haven't been following his career for the last two decades, with something to please both hip-hop classicists and experimental-leaning b-boys on every disc. Do you miss the strutting Meters-derived funk of 90s hip-hop? Find plenty of it here. Or the way producers once shamelessly flipped classic rock/R&B chestnuts, letting you revel in the original hook with the bonus of a punchy rap beat? Well, Doom does his own brand of disco editing on the Doobie Brothers' "What A Fool Believes" on "Mandrake". Are you a new-school fan of the tweaked psychedelic beatscapes of the Brainfeeder crew? Doom seems anticipate those as well, making the decade-old Herbs feel more up-to-date than you might expect.
Sure, he's got his signature tricks, and yes some of these tracks will always feel like backing tracks in search of a rapper. But much of Doom's instrumental output is varied and listenable enough all on its own, full of gorgeous (the weeping violin on "Syrax Gum," the fluttering Spanish-tinged funk guitars of "Chrysanthemum Flowers") and often untrammeled melodies courtesy of his original sample sources. He's equally at home with lusher-than-lush symphonic soul homage and disorienting krautrock-esque noise refashioned into neck-snapping NYC minimalism, a breadth which justifies the Herbs' status as stand-alone product. Some tracks offer the kind of antic and hook-heavy funk-collage that once made "DJ records," from Steinski to the Invisibl Skratch Piklz, plenty of fun without a rapper in sight. And even the more static and laid-back cuts make for excellent, immersive background music. The luscious detailing and wild sonic change-ups of the Herbs recall a time when people didn't necessarily need an MC to appreciate the intricacies of a killer cut-and-paste job, when many were happy to lose themselves in the head-nodding repetition of a densely layered loop.


Brandon Flowers dials back the pomp for an intimate, homespun, and sometimes clunky tour through the small town where he grew up.

Pressure Machine

For better or for worse, the Killers’ legacy and reputation were cemented with Sam’s Town. Released 15 years ago, the band’s second record established Brandon Flowers and co. as a band of Springsteen aspirants whose best approximations of “Dancing in the Dark” always seemed to miss the mark by at least a few hundred feet. They were Vegas-dwelling pop stars who fetishized all-American rock but who could only ever recreate it the Vegas way: lit with brighter lights, made with ersatz materials, and free of the gravitas of the definite article. The resulting songs—gleaming, indie-disco-ready hits like “When You Were Young” and “Read My Mind”—were most satisfying when they leaned into pop star pomp; the band seemed to cotton on to that fact, all but ditching the Boss worship on future records in order to try on shinier, more glamorous guises.
Five albums and a decade-and-a-half later, at about the exact point where they could have resigned themselves to a life of greatest hits tours, the Killers have decided to return to, if not exactly Sam’s Town, then somewhere down the road from there. Pressure Machine, the band’s seventh record and second in just under a year, is a decidedly more successful show of Springsteen idolatry: a concept album about Flowers’ childhood home of Nephi, Utah, that pays newfound attention to things like scene-setting and narrative throughline, key songwriting components that the Killers have always appeared to consider casualties in their pursuit of the Next Great Arena Anthem. Although positioned as a companion piece to last year’s camp, invigorated Imploding the Mirage—an artistic refocusing helmed by indie superproducers Jonathan Rado and Shawn Everett—it more often feels a little like an attempt on Flowers’ part to affirm himself as a writer with gas still left in the tank.
Flowers approaches Pressure Machine’s subject matter with a kind of dippy openness; he is entirely uncynical and, perhaps as a result, also entirely uncritical of his own authorial view. Sam’s Town, written with youth still in the rearview, focused on protagonists with palpable contempt for their hometown; here, he seems content to sketch out a relatively uncomplicated image of life in Nephi—specifically, life in Nephi in the ’90s, when he was a teen—that’s rife with problems but somehow absent villains both individual and systemic. Homophobia, in Flowers’ Nephi, is attributable to the fact that “culture is king”; the opioid crisis kind of just… exists; a life of forced poverty is presented as something immovable. There are no systems of cause and effect in Flowers’ Nephi, and people don’t ever really change. In other words, there are gaping holes in Flowers’ worldview, likely related to the fact that he’s about 20 years and several socioeconomic rungs removed from where he was when he actually lived in Nephi.
But discard a little bit of cynicism, and Pressure Machine starts to open up: Aside from the bloated opener “West Hills,” these songs feature Flowers’ most fully realized songwriting, the result of him writing lyrics ahead of recording for the first time ever, rather than just “scrambling at the last minute” for impressionistic, batshit phrases that have come to define his certain je ne sais quoi as a lyricist.
Although the Killers’ Springsteen worship has always been more of a vibe, “Desperate Things” is pure Nebraska, a murder ballad about a police officer who vengefully kills his girlfriend’s abusive husband. The song is spare and mournful until its fifth and sixth verses—perhaps the only fifth and sixth verses in the entire Killers oeuvre—when the song suddenly becomes all caterwauling guitar and cymbal crash. “You forget how dark the canyon gets/It’s a real uneasy feeling,” Flowers sings. You get the sense that intimacy is not his natural mode, that he’d much prefer writing songs less beholden to narrative and more driven by feeling and melody—perfect car stereo music. But the ambition is exciting and inspiring nonetheless: “Desperate Things” is troubled not just by its climactic violence, but by the twist that the officer has a wife and a daughter, too.
As on “Desperate Things,” the best moments of Pressure Machine add destabilizing wrinkles to Flowers’ usual iconography-heavy lyricism. “Quiet Town,” a spirited jaunt featuring cult Americana singer-songwriter Joe Pug on harmonica, is easily dismissed as a shallow Springsteen tribute—“They still don’t deadbolt their doors at night/In this quiet town” goes its chorus—until you realize the chorus is a foil to Flowers’ deceptively upbeat verses, which convey the chill of the opioid crisis sweeping in: “When we first heard opioid stories/They were in whispering tones/Now banners of sorrow/Mark the front of childhood homes,” he sings. It makes “Quiet Town”’s chorus sound more like a plea: This community is good, so why is it suffering?
“Quiet Town” introduces one of Pressure Machine’s most compelling thematic strains: How does one keep faith in the face of genuine struggle? On “Terrible Thing,” Flowers writes from the perspective of a closeted teen contemplating suicide: “Around here we all take up our cross/And hang on His holy name/But the cards that I was dealt/Will get you thrown out of the game.” There is no answer here, and no inspirational message: The protagonist, who in earlier Killers songs might have dreamt of ecstatic freedom, finds no solace in childhood memories. On “Cody,” one of a couple songs on Pressure Machine that feel inspired by R.E.M., Flowers once again questions the church’s deep roots in Nephi: “Cody says He didn’t raise the dead/Says religion’s just a trick/To keep hard-working folks in line/He says it makes his stomach sick.” Resigned as it is, “Cody” suggests you can believe both: Nothing’s real, but a miracle might just make everything better, too.
Reckonings with God don’t preclude Pressure Machine from including some of the Killers’ most direct pop songwriting. “In the Car Outside,” the record’s flushed centerpiece, inverts the band’s usual formula: Instead of a song about getting out of some shitty town, this is “Born to Run” on an endless treadmill, no end in sight. Its combustible heart is fueled by its protagonist’s recklessness and his death drive; the song is a race towards nowhere, culminating in a soaring, wordless finale. In a similar vein is “In Another Life,” the band’s most paranoid song since Hot Fuss. Where that record dealt in tales of defeatist glamour and anxious one night stands, the protagonist of this song is alone, drunk, wondering if he’s really living the dream he thought he was as the jukebox in the corner of the bar plays “country songs of stories that sound like mine.” These anti-anthems play to Flowers’ strengths as a songwriter without retreading old ground, examining the foundations of the “breakin’ out of this two-star town” fantasies of Killers songs past.
Ultimately, though, Pressure Machine rarely escapes Flowers’ Brandon Flowers-ness: try as he might—and you do get the sense that he’s trying so, so hard—his usual wide-tipped brush can’t do justice to what should be finely detailed scenes. He is a lover of maximalism and of songs “consume[d] through your heart” rather than your brain, a rightfully beloved form that nonetheless smothers the subtlety required to, say, tell the story of the opioid crisis’ incursion into Nephi. Flowers will always be pop’s great architect of the bright and shiny—but in the case of Pressure Machine, the people of Nephi deserve the real thing.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Italian electronic musicians Donato Dozzy and Eva Geist team up on a bewitching album of opulently appointed songs rooted in the country’s disco and synth-pop traditions.

Il Quadro di Troisi: Il Quadro di Troisi

Il Quadro di Troisi

If 2020 had turned out differently, the debut album by Il Quadro di Troisi might have been the perfect soundtrack to the arrival of breathless exchange students in Italy’s ornate university cities, its winsome synth-pop spilling out of the headphones of homesick young people sharing flirtatious guidebook sentences with mysterious, well-dressed locals. In the absence of foreign travel, Il Quadro di Troisi—a collaboration between Italian electronic artists Eva Geist and Donato Dozzy—does the hard work for us, conjuring up the head-spinning beauty of Italy’s architecture and the effortless elegance of its nightlife.
Geist (aka Andrea Noce) and Dozzy (Donato Scaramuzzi) are both excellent producers in their own right, behind everything from wobbly psychedelia (Geist’s 2019 Urban Monogamy EP) to body-slamming acid (Dozzy’s 2018 LP Filo Loves the Acid) to heady ambient techno (Scaramuzzi’s mind-bending duo Voices From the Lake). But nothing in their catalogs has suggested they might be capable of producing pop as lush and poised as “Il Giudizio,” a song shot through with an irresistible twinge of melancholy and glamour, like sorrow between silk sheets.
Noce’s vocals, in particular, are a revelation. She sings the way Venice must surely look after a late-night heartbreak, all gloriously dusted beauty and elegant sighs. On “Real” her voice soars to the rafters like a startled bird; on “Sfere di Qi” it is shot through with tension; on “Non Ricordi” it drips with erotic charge. Scaramuzzi’s production, meanwhile, draws on Italy’s small but perfectly formed history of Italo disco and synth pop, all dreamy synth lines and discerning machine rhythms; their graceful tick is like an enigmatic stranger’s tantalizing offer to dance, rather than the relentless mechanical pester of contemporary dance music.
The shadow of Ennio Morricone’s exquisitely textured soundtrack work haunts Il Quadro di Troisi’s arrangements, adding sumptuous flesh to Scaramuzzi’s electronic skeleton. Pietro Micioni, of Italian indie label Twilight Music, contributes a wonderfully spidery guitar line to “Il Giudizio” that pushes the song into full ecstatic melancholy, like a rural reprise of the Sabres of Paradise’s classic “Smokebelch II (Beatless Mix).” “Sfere di Qi” introduces lilting flute to a synth that coils around Noce’s vocals like a predatory python, suggesting early Kraftwerk if Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider had grown up on the banks of the Tiber. And Tommaso Cappellato adds the lightest dusting of live drums to “Raggio Verde,” his fine-drawn cymbal strikes upping the song’s organic texture by fractional—but important—degrees. These are pop songs for weary adults, which sacrifice the impulsive neon glare of modern production for a comforting pastel glow, their subtly layered charms emerging on sustained plays like ruins from the Neapolitan dirt.
Il Quadro di Troisi’s gloriously evocative touch leaves them in elevated company. If Air represent a guidebook glimpse of France, swapping mundane reality for the ornate grandeur of their native Versailles, then Il Quadro di Troisi do the same for Italy, their florid synth adventures painting pictures of a country so impossibly debonair it could only exist in our dreams. The album was born of a correspondence between Scaramuzzi and Noce about the late actor and director Massimo Troisi, best known for his outsider comedies, but it feels closer to Fellini's vision of Rome in La Dolce Vita: a work of pure creative opulence.

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