The London producer Nathan Jenkins, who once successfully combined Pet Sounds and the music of J Dilla, offers a frequently vocal-led EP of five original tracks and a Robert Wyatt cover.

Love Me Oh Please Love Me EP

The fact that Bullion-- aka west London producer Nathan Jenkins-- is able to throw a curveball shouldn't come as a surprise. After all, he's the man who combined Pet Sounds and the music of J Dilla to entirely non-terrible effect. Four-and-a-half years after his first material appeared, though, he still hasn't put out a proper debut album, instead darting around releasing unpredictable EPs and the odd single on different carefully curated labels. The Canterbury Mix, which preceded the 2010 EP You Drive Me to Plastic, contained psych-folk strains from the likes of Caravan, Gong, and Robert Wyatt, which didn't particularly manifest itself on the release it heralded. On the Love Me Oh Please Love Me EP, however, Jenkins includes a stringed, aridly dubby cover of Wyatt's "The Age of Self", which curiously lends the collection a modern sentiment: "There's people doing frightfully well, there's others on the shelf/ But never mind the second kind, this is the age of self." It's basically as detached a sneer at the 1% as it's possible to muster.
That's really the only point at which Jenkins' voice rises above the parapet, even on a frequently vocal-led EP. You could allude to a sense of hopelessness in the repetitive refrains of "It's All in Sound", a reserved drone with a Caribou-like itch that spirals into a spectacular saxophone solo. However, Jenkins' templated vocals are one of the EP's weaker links. Here, the pattern is "Thinking up and thinking down/ Whichever way around, it's all in sound/ Walk back and sideways too/ Whichever way you like." The Badalamenti-heavy pads and chipping woodblocks of "Collision" couch awkward verses ("I feel het up/ There is no let up") that slowly accelerate towards a more graceful rhyme: "My vision/ And your vision/ It's a collision." "Keep a Document" urges capturing moments in order to "Watch mum smile again/ She's a child again/ Times are wild again." These blocky verses unnecessarily affect a false and mildly contrived style in what's largely a very fluid EP.
The beginning of the penultimate song, "Family", feels like an Atlas Sound track getting suffocated not by digital crackle, the way that Bradford Cox's material under that moniker often goes, but by taut, ephemeral 1980s synth pop. It's an odd combination that somehow works, the two strains looming over each other throughout until they combine into a luscious harp bounce woven through by bursts of harmonica. "Save Your Lubb" starts off sounding like the rhythm section from Kelis' "Millionaire", and winds from being a light beach-side frolic to a kind of space-age prairie trek, all heavy crevices, strange lunar washes, and widescreen haunt. Unsurprisingly, Jenkins has a knack of leading the listener on a peculiar trajectory, although it often turns out to be a fun wild goose chase. As a whole, Love Me Oh Please Love Me slows from an agitated funk to a dry, Oriental-inflected slump over the course of its six songs, and aside from the odd foreboding draught of reverb, it lacks the freakiness of You Drive Me to Plastic. In that sense, Love Me feels no closer to elucidating what might go on when Bullion finally releases an LP, but it tantalizingly adds to the pot.


The London producer’s new instrumental EP is off-kilter, mercurial, and playful, at once a logical extension and a radical departure from his previous work.

Songs for Midi EP

Kwes’ music banks heavily on atmosphere. His debut EP, 2010’s No Need to Run, wrapped sketch-like beats in layers of synth swaddling and dub delay, and in 2012, his Meantime EP, the British musician’s breakthrough as a singer, arrived like a small, semi-precious object bundled between pillows of air. His debut album, ilp, presented an even blurrier kind of cherry-colored funk.
But the emphasis there remained on his songwriting and his voice, which snaked through all that digital processing like a serpent in wavy grass. Songs for Midi, on the other hand, is all instrumental, and its six tracks account for the most ethereal music the London producer has made yet. It sounds at once like a logical extension of his previous methods and a radical departure from them, as though he had leapfrogged whatever the natural next step after ilp might have been and leapt boldly into the unknown.
The record is meant as a tribute to his 2-year-old niece, Midori (the title’s a reference not to MIDI cables but to her nickname, Midi), and it feels appropriately childlike—full of playful melodies, music-box pings, and even sounds sampled from the toys of Kwes’ little cousin Connor. Those are presumably the playthings rattling about in the closing “Blox/Connor,” an unpredictable excursion through stuttering chord samples and skittering trap beats that begins whimsically enough but, like many a play date, finishes up in full-on meltdown mode.
Anyone who has ever spent much time with a toddler may recognize something of their psychology in these mercurial tracks, which don’t develop at all in the way you might expect. There’s something of SOPHIE’s balloon-squeak sonics in the EP’s hesitant plunks and zaps, but these songs bear little resemblance to the PC Music school of pop subversion. “Trike” begins with a lyrical plucked string fantasia reminiscent of Arthur Russell before pivoting to a buzzing synth melody that vibrates like a screen door; from there it just keeps moving outward, through squalls of pitch-bent synths, the feeble clicks of a dying wind-up toy, and finally, a climax of dub delay run amok. In the back of your mind, you keep expecting it to return to something resembling an A/B structure, and the song’s refusal to do so leaves you feeling slightly off balance. The other shoe never drops; instead, it morphs into a CGI butterfly and flutters away.
The whole EP is held together by the relatively consonant sounds of the opening “Midori,” in which softly pinwheeling arpeggios fuel a gently meandering path through woodwind-like synths, sparkling chimes, and the wow-and-flutter warble of disintegrating magnetic tape. It’s here, balancing the lyrical impulses of his previous records with the mind-bending sonics of his current interests, that Kwes’ adventurous vision shines brightest.


After the simultaneous crescendo and crash of 2011’s Simple Math, Manchester Orchestra's fourth album is 11 bullshit-free rock songs about getting past the bullshit in your life. They sound like Band of Horses at their major-label crossroads, with none of that band's sweep and expanse.

Cope

If you’re stoked that indie rock no longer has to remotely resemble “rock”, Manchester Orchestra’s fourth LP, Cope, is probably like nothing else you’ve heard all year. "Top Notch" sets the tone immediately and it's that of a fire alarm*—*the drums loudly stutter-stomp, the guitars strain in harmony at an even higher volume, and Andy Hull’s rebel yell is even louder. This is the sort of thing that used to be called “alternative rock” out of habit, and in 2014, it’s actually earned that name.
And yet, Cope once again finds Manchester Orchestra in the netherworld they’ve long occupied: not quite as cerebral as they aspire to be, nowhere near as lunkheaded as they could allow themselves to be, making radio-friendly rock too leaden and static to make reciprocity a foregone conclusion. That’s a shame, since Hull’s clearly an ambitious guy, demonstrated by his leave-it-all-on-the-floor live performances—but the ever-escalating arms race with himself resulted in the simultaneous crescendo and crash of 2011’s Simple Math, where Manchester Orchestra took the latter part of their name to heart and burdened their sturdy, workmanlike rock with Michael Kamen-level bombast.
Cope doesn’t frame Simple Math as a misstep-in-hindsight, although it doesn't try to top it, either; this time around, it's 11 bullshit-free rock songs about getting past the bullshit in your life. Essentially, this is Band of Horses at their major-label crossroads and choosing not to hightail it into the heart of Dixie, alternating between pedal-to-the-floor howlers and bluesy bluster with little else in between. For fans of Cease to Begin, the potential that comparison carries is pretty awesome, except Manchester Orchestra lack any of the aforementioned’s sweep and expanse.
Even if Cope never manages the undeniable wallop of Manchester Orchestra's S&M-friendly “Virgin”, it’s still every bit as exhausting and overproduced. The strings are gone, but there’s not a single yielding surface on any of these songs, and the only respite you get from the roaring, textureless guitars is a palm-muted guitar. Even the high, lonesome harmonies, clearly meant to imbue some kind of human element, sound like digital clipping. Hull also fails to muster warmth and empathy, and despite his promise of Cope being “unrelenting and unapologetic”, he mostly flips “one good thing about music, when it hits you feel no pain”: these are loud songs that strike with the blunt force of a Nerf bat, as Hull emotes his heart out without really copping to anything. His lyrics have become tougher to parse, filled with parable and metaphor about relapse, religion and redemption, which makes the lost-soul clichés stick out even more than they previously did.
Look, if you’re anything like me and strive to find at least five real-deal alt-rock bangers per calendar year, it’s easy to pull for these guys*—*they are underdogs within an extremely unique context. Because this stuff can be potent in three-minute shifts, there’s an undeniable thrill in the way “Top Notch” thrashes in place, similar to watching the fight scenes from Iron Man 3 and knowing you’re not going to get that from an arthouse flick. And even if the verses rarely check out, the choruses are pretty fun to yell, and if you can open your heart to yet another imperial rock song called “The Ocean”, well, it’s the most fun of the lot here. And besides, if you think you can just dial this stuff up by turning on your local “alt-rock” station, well, there goes the Neighbourhood. But four albums in, it's becoming pretty clear that the genre in which Manchester Orchestra resides has more untapped potential than the band itself.


Like its predecessor, the second volume of Night Slugs' label compilation ties together highlights from the roster's most visible and pivotal members including Girl Unit, Egyptrixx, Kingdom, and L-Vis 1990.

Various Artists: Night Slugs: Allstars Volume 2

Night Slugs: Allstars Volume 2

If you want a sense of where things are headed in bass music through the near future, it's always a good idea to keep tabs on the Night Slugs label-- not because it adheres to or forecasts any specific scenes and movements, but because it doesn't. Its identity in a post-Soundcloud world hinges on extending the UK bass diaspora far outside the confines of Bok Bok and L-Vis 1990's London-- all the way to Los Angeles (Kingdom), Toronto (Egyptrixx), even Savannah, Georgia (Helix), and Lawrence, Kansas (MORRI$). And the Night Slugs sound, such as it is, isn't merely compatible with but hotly anticipates so many potential directions for underground and aboveground club music, all while revealing a deep and adventurous postmodern enthusiasm for its decades of heritage. Run though their three-year catalogue and you'll hear adventurous integrations of boogie funk and electro, deep house, Second Summer of Love rave, first-gen two-step, pirate-radio grime, and white-label dubstep. The label's sonic commonalities mostly extend to a garage-inflected sensibility, a thing for feverishly intricate yet danceable drum tracks, and an intangible mood of refined hyperactivity-- enough to make for a trustworthy imprint, while still keeping its style fairly unconstricted.
Like the first volume of the Night Slugs Allstars series, Night Slugs Allstars Volume 2 ties together highlights from the roster's most visible and pivotal members. Its label-sampler format draws off a lot of previously released material, though there are just as many potentially overlooked deep cuts as there are top-tier favorites. It's practically a given that this is a collection for people who've already checked out Volume 1, whether it was their introduction to the label or a culmination of everything they'd already grown to appreciate about it. But it also reveals subtler pleasures at work under the label's purview. There's nothing on here with the instant gravitational pull of Volume 1's appearance by Girl Unit's go-berserk "Wut", the breakthrough single that cranked up the label's early buzz 2 1/2 years ago. But Volume 2 does a lot to show just how much ground one label can really cover.
The handful of new and/or unheard tracks are enough to bolster the ranks and give the diehards something to look forward to, but they're not the kinds of afterthoughts that come across as fans-only barrel-scrapings. L-Vis 1990 delivers "Not Mad", a twitchy stomp of a cut that pits an off-kilter shuffle-beat bassline against nervous chuckles, xylophone rolls, and 85 pop-funk synthesizers. Girl Unit's "Double Take Part II" reconfigures the last minute or so of the Club Rez original so that the shivery slow-jam R&B coda stands alone as its own song-- becoming his most accessibly moving track to date. The East Coast contingent turns in a couple gems, too. The all-tension/no-release drift of Kingdom's "Bank Head" is the most provocative track on the compilation, constructing a whole track off the kind of anticipatory clap-drummed, sweeping chord build that usually prefigures some kind of big sonic epiphany that never actually arrives. (It should work wonders as a DJ set opener.) Egyptrixx's "Adult" is a bit more intense-- there's something to it that feels like the austere future-noir drum and bass of late 90s Photek wrapped around a post-dubstep chassis-- but its ebb and flow pumps laser-cut chords and all-caps bass over an efficiently propulsive rhythm track that lets a lot of air in between the beats.
The rest of the collection is filled out by singles, b-sides, remixes, and deep EP tracks that point towards a more crossover-friendly direction for the label-- one that's trimmed away some of the over-the-top bombast while still prioritizing a sense of rhythmic intricacy. It's a smartly selected cross section that covers a lot of bases: Kingdom's tense horror-flick homage "Stalker Ha", the glowing, prismatic techno of Jam City's "How We Relate to the Body", the luxuriant longing of L-Vis 1990's Javeon McCarthy deep house feature "Lost in Love (Night Slugs Street Mix)", and Helix's frenetic, understatedly titled kick/snare apocalypse "Drum Track". Novel without being gimmicky, body-moving without being overbearing, these are all selections that point towards a rewarding future for one of the most exciting labels in bass music. Whether or not they're pointing the way for some scene or another, the artists of Night Slugs definitely know where they want to go themselves.


Built around his new custom synthesizer, the latest from the electronic musician and Nine Inch Nails member showcases the vast potential of both the instrument and the artist behind it.

SCURO CHIARO

Alessandro Cortini, a rock guitarist turned synthesizer expert, is best known as a longtime member of alt-rock mainstays Nine Inch Nails. While this gig surely keeps him busy, he has also developed a reputation for collaborating with luminaries from the dimmer worlds of ambient, drone, and noise—artists such as Lawrence English, Daniel Avery, and Merzbow. These collaborations have helped inform the signature sound on Cortini’s solo albums, pitched somewhere between purgatory and the planetarium.
A lover of rare and vintage modular synths and drum machines, Cortini is well equipped to deploy all the glassy drones, upwelling noise, and electronic pulses he can imagine on releases such as last year’s Illusion of Time (with Avery) and 2019’s VOLUME MASSIMO. And just as his 2017 record Avanti focused on an early-1970s synthesizer made famous by Brian Eno, the palette of his latest album, SCURO CHIARO, centers on one specific instrument. The difference is this time Cortini created the instrument himself, and it catalyzes his lush, lean music into one of his liveliest albums yet.
As Pitchfork reported, the black hole at the heart of SCURO CHIARO’s dark galaxy is the Strega, a semi-modular synth and effects box scrawled with stylish but inscrutable runes. (“Strega” is Italian for “witch.”) Working with the boutique-synth builders at Make Noise, Cortini integrated his favorite features from various cult-legendary modular rigs into one small unit. In other words, he uploaded his musical consciousness into this machine and subjugated it to his will—and if science fiction tells us anything, it will soon rise up and destroy him. In the meantime, SCURO CHIARO succeeds in showing off the unit’s smoky yet lustrous range.
In addition to illustrating the vast potential of the Strega, the album is a showpiece for Cortini. The sound often resembles a tonier Ben Frost, and it has a striking internal consistency: a focus on the infinite fluctuations of limited palettes, a fine way of hanging harmonic flesh on sinewy rhythms, and an urge to slowly explode minute pulses into capacious sound worlds. Each track offers something new: The music of “ECCO” sounds like a huge, heavenly harmonium, while the papery, mechanical whoosh and wheeze of “CORRI” suggests a steampunk Xerox machine run amok. “CHIAROSCURO” spatters plaintive stars on a bassy dome, recalling the cosmic idylls of ’70s groups like Harmonia, before a radiant bolt of noise ignites its sense of peace.
Several highlights suggest the influence of classical composition as much as gearhead exploration. “SEMPRE” prestos an alien rave into an almost symphonic climax, while the music of Steve Reich looms over “NESSUNO,” as bass, percussive treble, and a flute-like whisper relay an inexorable momentum. With all these possibilities at his fingertips, Cortini can seem like a minotaur who built his own maze. Throughout SCURO CHIARO, he stalks his twisting signal paths with confidence and vitality, eager to turn each corner, each knob, and see where it might lead. Blending expertise and extemporization, his work consistently manages to thrill and surprise.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The motor-mouthed rapper’s latest album reboots him as an heir to the early-’00s pop-punk canon, with Travis Barker producing and playing drums.

Machine Gun Kelly: Tickets to My Downfall

Tickets to My Downfall

With his roguish blue-collar image and Hot Topic wardrobe, Machine Gun Kelly always seemed more lightweight than his self-serious rap music suggested. Over the course of four full-lengths and two EPs on Sean Combs’s Bad Boy Records, his audience didn’t grow up with him so much as shuffle listlessly alongside him, waiting for something interesting to happen. Despite flirtations with a more pop-driven sound, he always reverted to moody persecution narratives; he seemed neither aware of nor particularly interested in his place as a white rap star, save for the opportunity it afforded him to squabble with Eminem and make eyes at the elder rapper’s then-teenaged daughter. The motor-mouthed flow which once made Kelly a fixture at Apollo showcases was never in question, but—save for isolated guilty pleasures on 2015’s overblown General Admission and 2017’s schlocky bloom—he never had much to show for it.
Turns out, all he ever needed was Travis Barker in his corner. Tickets to My Downfall reboots MGK as an heir to the early-’00s pop-punk canon, with Barker producing and playing drums. Barker’s fingerprints are everywhere: most of the songs clock in under three minutes, replete with three-chord melodies, big hooks, and breakdown bridges, nestled within the same 85-to-110 bpm sweet spot as blink-182’s singles catalog. “concert for aliens” is the most faithful Enema of the State homage, with its extraterrestrial theme, pulsing Hoppus-ian bass track, and four-note guitar solo. MGK’s singing voice, which tended toward reedy when it wasn’t slathered in bloom’s vocal effects, brandishes a snarl that faintly recalls Deryck Whibley’s SoCal-by-way-of-MTV lilt.
Even the sugariest pop-punk confections occupy a lineage, one which can’t be donned as easily as a studded belt. But the authenticity equation on a record shaped by turn-of-the-century suburban mall soundtracks is different than the one Kelly’s used to as a rapper. In the way that blink’s smirking skate-punk insolence perfectly captured Clinton-era insouciance, Kelly’s mopier navel-gazing is suggestive of a generational attitude—had he arrived a few years later, it’s easy to imagine him finding his footing in the emo-rap explosion on Soundcloud. Unlike blink’s most recent effort NINE, which tried on a modern, synthetic sound in largely halfhearted fashion, Tickets to My Downfall embraces its source material without hedging its bets. “drunk face” chronicles the same cycle of drugs and heartbreak MGK’s been singing about for years, but in the context of a downtempo earworm it echoes American Hi-Fi more than Hopsin. To his everlasting credit, Kelly finally found both a genre and a producer as brazenly allergic to subtlety as he is.
Tickets to My Downfall is a genuine throwback to the post-9/11 gauze of TRL countdowns and Tony Hawk multiplayer. Halsey’s vocals soar on the angsty breakup jam “forget me too,” which might work as a show tune if it didn’t rock so hard. “bloody valentine” is a winningly bittersweet ballad anchored by a sober bassline, whereas the title track is practically operatic—following a dramatic acoustic intro, Barker’s drums lurch between a blistering pre-chorus and a half-time hook. The Iann Dior and blackbear collaborations are laced with light trap drums, making for minor deviations from the template.
The blackbear track “my ex’s best friend” is particularly instructive in terms of the fate MGK avoided with his well-timed pivot. A similarly brooding, tattooed Instagram ex-boyfriend, blackbear writes wallowing R&B from the perspective of the perpetually jilted lover; his vengefulness (“Look at this damage you did to me!” he wails on “my ex’s best friend”) makes him a deeply unsympathetic narrator. As recently as last summer’s “FLOOR 13,” Kelly elicited a comparable you’ll-miss-me-when-I’m-gone spite, taunting “Don’t cry at my funeral” like a sophomore who just coughed up his lunch money. Tickets to My Downfall’s finale “play this when i’m gone” shows the same fatalism, but MGK’s concern—crucially—lies with prospective survivors instead of his rivals. “You’re gonna cry, and baby, that’s all right,” Kelly sings over melancholic guitar strums. It’s more theatrical and more compassionate than his barbed journey-into-the-mind rap records: a win-win.
In a certain sense, Kelly’s rebirth as a pop-punk revivalist might be the ultimate form of fan service—the aesthetic is far more suitable for his diaristic instincts and Warped Tour following. Thematically, Tickets to My Downfall is hardly a departure from MGK’s past work, but the new surroundings lightens his music up considerably even amidst the hormones and histrionics. With Travis Barker on his side, he might win over skeptics accusing him of trend-hopping, but the best part of Downfall is that he doesn’t take the whole endeavor too seriously.

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Fugazi's third album arrived in 1993 when the underground began seeping into the mainstream. The D.C. band stayed raw and visceral, growing their fanbase while keeping their famous DIY ethics intact.

In on the Kill Taker

If 1991 was The Year Punk Broke, and 1993 was when the underground had fully bubbled to the surface, between that, the world got Cliff Poncier, the singer of the band Citizen Dick in Cameron Crowe's 1992 movie *Singles. *Cliff (played by Matt Dillon) is a musician in a band with Eddie Vedder, Stone Gossard, and Jeff Ament of Pearl Jam, and has an album out on an independent label. To a large swath of America that was still getting used to Kurt Cobain’s face and R.E.M. winning Grammys, Cliff was the fictional bridge into the world of indie artists. He’s “like a renaissance man” we’re told, but it’s obvious he wants to make it big. Everybody wanted that, right?
Alt was the new normal. Things had gone from “Our band could be your life” to stadium concerts opening up for rock legends and poisonous major label contracts. Nirvana followed up Nevermind with the Steve Albini-produced In Utero, former SST bands Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, and the Meat Puppets enjoyed radio and MTV airtime, countless kids got copies of the No Alternative compilation, and grunge was officially a runway style thanks to Marc Jacobs. Fugazi’s independent scene had become a global phenomenon, funded, largely, by corporate money.
Fugazi—reluctantly—turned into one of the last bands standing from the old guard of American punks. They became a band that mainstream kids and college radio stations wanted to check out at the perfect time in their career. Fugazi’s nonstop touring made their music more accessible to a wider audience than ever before. They had an organic buzz that led to better distribution deals, which allowed them to remain fiercely independent. To kids straddling the Generation X and Millennial borders, Fugazi were a touchstone, an introduction into the DIY mindset. Their ability to get people excited without a team of advertisers, big hit song, or anything besides word of mouth is, at this point, the stuff of legend.
And while their hardcore contemporaries were chasing big contracts and slots on the Lollapalooza tour, Fugazi teamed with groups like Positive Force—a Washington D.C. youth activist collective that took on poverty and George H.W. Bush’s war in the Middle East. Fugazi wanted to let you know they stood for things, and that maybe you should, too. Punk was more than just not knowing how to play an instrument but having something to say—it was about starting a zine, doing distribution, or going to a protest to fight inequality in all its forms. They were champions of the utopian freedom of the 1960s filtered through the busted amps of punk. If there was any environment for Fugazi to put out the biggest record of their career, this was it.
Since the band considered live shows to be their most natural setting, Fugazi toured relentlessly between albums. One look at the band’s show archives finds them playing the Palladium in New York City to 3,000 people on a spring night in 1992, Father Hayes Gym Bar in Portland, ME to 750 people a few nights later, then wrapping up an East Coast tour at City Gardens in New Jersey to a hair under 1,000 before embarking on a tour of Europe two weeks later. At some point during 1992, even though none of the band’s 73 shows were played anywhere near the Midwest, they found time to go to Chicago to record with Steve Albini. Self-producing their second LP Steady Diet of Nothing left the band “pretty disappointed at the end of the day with that record,” as Ian MacKaye would later say. Bassist Joe Lally found the experience “weird,” and that going to Chicago to record new songs was less about getting a new album out of the sessions, “it was more about working with Steve.”
The resulting demos were not what the band or producer wanted. The song “Public Witness Program” had the same buzzsaw guitar and sped-up tempo of what you’d expect from one of Albini’s own Shellac songs. “Great Cop,” sounded much more like a raging hardcore song than the band may have wanted. The sessions, which float around file sharing sites and YouTube, would end up being simply a footnote in American indie history; titans from the 1980s underground getting together to mess around. In the end, after they made it back home to D.C., the band received a fax from Albini saying, “I think we dropped the ball.”
The band just couldn’t beat the sound they created in their hometown, so they entered Inner Ear Studios with Don Zientara and Ted Niceley in the autumn of 1992. When they finally emerged playing their first show on February 4, 1993, at the Peppermint Beach Club in Virginia Beach, the 1,200-person crowd got a set filled with almost all new material, peppered with older songs like “Suggestion” and “Repeater.” The band went on an American tour that stretched over 60 shows. In on the Kill Taker was released on June 30, sold around 200,000 copies in its first week alone, and Fugazi cracked the Billboard Top 200. Later in August, they played a show in front of the Washington Monument to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s March on Washington. Five thousand people crowded the outdoor Sylvan Theater and this time, when they played their new songs, the crowd knew every word.
Like the albums that came before it, In on the Kill Taker begins small and grows into something larger. Maybe it’s a metaphor for how Fugazi sees the world, or at least the one they helped to build: “Facet Squared” opens with a few seconds of near-silence that builds into feedback, then some guitar mimicking a heartbeat checks in at the 15-second mark, joined in by the rest of the band who work together building up what sounds like it will be a slow jam with no real leader. The guitars, along with Joe Lally’s bass and Brendan Canty’s drums, all work together like a machine. MacKaye’s guitar takes over for a few seconds, signaling the next level the song is about to take. That buildup leads to one of MacKaye’s most furious deliveries as a singer, opening by claiming, “Pride no longer has definition,” with the kind of energy and anger he channeled in his younger days with Minor Threat. The song ends and cuts right into Canty pounding away to start the Guy Picciotto-fronted “Public Witness Program.” Complete with handclaps, a ringing chorus, and Picciotto yelling, “Can I get a witness,” like a punk preacher; it showcases the band at their most driving. This is the closest you get to a polished Fugazi record, but by no means is it slick.
MacKaye, in an interview for Brandon Gentry’s book Capitol Contingency: Post-Punk, Indie Rock, and Noise Pop in Washington, D.C., 1991-1999, believed that little bit of shine was intentional, the result of producer Ted Niceley reacting to what he heard from the popular bands with the same DNA as Fugazi that were getting heavy airplay. “It’s that consciousness of radio,” MacKaye said, “that puts me off a little bit,” while also railing against the producer’s “total fixation on detail.” Yet it’s exactly that consciousness of radio and fixation to details that give In on the Kill Taker its real edge. It’s hard to imagine a song like “Cassavetes,” with Picciotto conjuring up the ghost of the dead director, screaming, “Shut up! This is my last picture,” being sandwiched between the Smashing Pumpkins and Candlebox on a radio station’s playlist. The extra lacquer on top only makes it more scathing and visceral.
There’s no single on In on the Kill Taker. Besides “Waiting Room” somehow becoming one of the defining Gen X anthems, Fugazi never set out to make any one song hold any more importance over the others to try and get radio program directors to pay attention. In fact, on their third album, they threw all curve balls, going from fast and hard to slow to mathy and instrumental. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Picciotto and MacKaye had helped lay the foundation for the hardcore and emo scenes in the ’80s with Rites of Spring and Minor Threat, respectively. The roots of Fugazi were blooming out into hundreds of subgenres and taking hold in regional scenes across the country. Fugazi appealed to such a vast swath of people, something a lot of punk, hardcore or indie bands couldn’t claim in 1993, and In on the Kill Taker had something for everyone.
A song like “Smallpox Champion,” again with that slow start that builds, blows up into Picciotto delivering a sermon, railing against America being a country founded on genocide, “The end of the future and all that you own.” While “23 Beats Off” sounds like a song from Wire’s early years literally stretched and pulled out to nearly seven minutes, MacKaye goes from singing (as best he can) to screaming about a man who was once “at the center of some ticker tape parade,” who turns into “a household name with HIV.” You get a dose of the past, present, and future listening to these 12 tracks.
Lyrically, it’s also one of the more ambitious albums from the era. While burying any meaning beneath a pile of words like Cobain or bands like Pavement were so fond of doing was certainly du jour, Fugazi liked to mix things up. Picciotto flexed that English degree he got from Georgetown, while MacKaye’s muses were Marx and issues of The Nation. The band blends political with poetic, while sometimes erring on the side of the latter. If there’s any deeper meaning behind “Walken’s Syndrome,” besides being an ode to Christopher Walken’s character in Annie Hall, it’s difficult to tell what that is. “Facet Squared,” with MacKaye singing about how “flags are such ugly things,” could either be about nationalism or the facades people wear when they go out in public, you pick. Maybe that’s what they wanted the listener to do.
Fugazi were so unbelievably popular that it was more so the idea of Fugazi had caught on like it was just another adjective like goth or grunge. Even with their famous anti-merchandise stance, an entire small economy of bootleg shirts popped up, including the infamous “This Is Not A Fugazi T-Shirt” t-shirt. The press also took even more notice. Rolling Stone, in a positive review, said Fugazi had inherited the title of “The only band that matters” from the Clash, while Spin wasn’t so hot on it, calling the members “radical middle-class white boys” and the album “rigid, predictable.” The food critic Jonathan Gold, whose music writing tends to be overlooked when discussing his oeuvre, gave it three out of four stars in his LA Times review. In on the Kill Taker wasn’t hailed as a masterpiece or an album that was changing the game, but everybody needed to weigh in on Fugazi.
And as a profile that came out in the Washington Post a month after the album’s release showed, everybody wanted to be associated with them. The article mentions fans like Eddie Vedder, “rock’s couple of the moment” Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, and Michael Stipe, who shows up to one of the band’s shows in Los Angeles: “He dances the hokey-pokey in the street in front of the Capitol Theatre with Fugazi drummer Brendan Canty,” in a very 1990s moment. In on the Kill Taker isn’t brought up until somewhere near the bottom of the piece. It was almost like saying that you liked or knew them was like a badge of honor, it absolved you of your own sins. The music was eclipsed by the message.
Mainstream interest in Fugazi was never as strong as it was during the period surrounding their third album. Two years later, when they released Red Medicine, the spotlight had shifted to pop-punk bands like Green Day and the Offspring. Fugazi continued to put out albums and pack shows that usually cost around five dollars, but the press was less interested in figuring out this crazy band with their wild set of ideals.
Many of the people who did pay attention to Fugazi, however, reacted. Like Brian Eno said of the initial 10,000 or so people who heard the Velvet Underground when their first album came out, the hundreds of thousands of people who bought In on the Kill Taker or saw the band as they trekked across America, Canada, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, that year and beyond, were impacted in some way. Maybe it was one kid out of 1,200 in attendance on September 27, 1993 who saw them in Philly with the Spinanes and Rancid, or another of the 100 who saw them in Kyoto, Japan. Maybe a 15-year-old girl read about them in a magazine, this band that everybody was talking about, and decided to start her own band. Maybe it was a kid in El Paso, or a kid in Iowa City, or Greensboro. Maybe they inspired another kid to start a zine, which led them to realize they wanted to be a writer. Maybe 10,000 teens were so moved by Fugazi in 1993 that the ideas the band lived and worked by were ingrained into how those people have tried to go out and face the world.


The Edmonton-born, Métis singer-songwriter’s debut album is a complex study of webs of interpersonal hurt, and a celebration of emotional survival.

Communion

Growing up, Sister Ray’s Ella Coyes never spoke Michif, the language of their Métis heritage. Through colonization and devaluation, the language and many Métis traditions are endangered now. But what Coyes did have to link them to their culture was music. The Métis fiddle tradition and its accompanying jigs, passed down through generations, were the earliest musical expressions that Coyes ever felt connected to. In a 2018 interview, they said it taught them to value music as a communal celebration rather than a place of authority. In writing their own music, a style of indie folk more comparable to Big Thief than to traditional fiddle music, they explained, “That I didn’t feel silenced [is a celebration]. It gave me a lot of power that I had lost.”
That power underpins their debut album, Communion. It’s a complex study of webs of interpersonal hurt, one that attempts honesty without blame and resilience without toughness. Most of these songs explore the blood and guts of a breakup. That’s often visceral: An ex smells like death and lager on “Violence,” and the narrator dreams of reaching “deep inside for your tonsils” on “I Want to Be Your Man”; whether they’re talking about a kiss or an act of gory violence isn’t clear.
Sister Ray’s songs describe moments devoid of safety. There are many references to fire and death. Lust is a creeping, foreboding force, keeping a corpse animated when it should have been buried. Not everything is metaphor; they numbly narrate the mundanities of a breakup, from splitting up the furniture to staring at glow-in-the-dark stars on the bedroom ceiling as the end draws near. Coyes doesn’t airbrush their own behavior; by the end of the record they’ve described themself as selfish, sardonic, and inconsiderate. On “Jackie in the Kitchen,” they recount a time they almost kissed someone else with their partner in the next room. And “Justice” interrogates a larger guilt, that of complicity in both personal and global disaster: “Do I seek justice or merely my own comfort?”
Still, they make room for humor—I smirked to hear them crib a lyric from Eurodance act Cascada on “Reputations,” sounding as if it was a winking improvisation designed to make someone in the crowd laugh. That’s bolstered by Coyes’ vocals, which are conversational and deadpan, often dipping like they’re cracking a joke when they’re really saying something heavy (“Death is all around,” they matter-of-factly lilt on “Good News”). Meanwhile, the musical backing (performed alongside Coyes by Joe Manzoli and Jon Nellen of Ginla, who also produced the album) spotlights that distinctive voice. Only the essential instruments—clean-tone guitar, bass, drums—are mixed up front; the flourishes, like slide guitar and synths, are ghostly echoes in the background, boosting the music’s interior, confessional feel. That said, there’s a slight sag toward the finish line, where a little more variety might have given the album a boost in stamina.
On “Reputations,” Coyes asks, “You always said you’d give me something to sing about; was that a promise or a threat?” With a bitter sense of humor, the question points to the crux of cathartic lyrics like Sister Ray’s: In an ideal world, these songs wouldn’t exist. But in writing them, and navigating old harms, they create the conditions for a sense of safety that eluded the artist in moments of turmoil. Coyes takes control of the things they can and finds grace for those they can’t. It’s not a question of winning or losing, but a matter of their own emotional survival. The most important lesson is right there in the title, Communion: In sharing this survival, they celebrate it.


The Pitchfork Global Positioning System Satellite tells me that most of you are in the northern hemisphere. As such, it ...

Jane Doe

The Pitchfork Global Positioning System Satellite tells me that most of you are in the northern hemisphere. As such, it's summer, and you need a good metal album. Jane Doe wasn't released this year, but sometimes you've got to pay dues when they're owed. And Converge might not exactly be heavy metal, either. They got their start in their hometown of Boston in the early nineties, playing covers of their favorite punk and hardcore songs. The blistering fusion unit they've evolved into has been called many things-- hardcore metal, math metal, metalcore-- but they could be ultra-core for all I care. Let's ignore the niceties. Converge is a smart, aggressive, brutal quintet, and Jane Doe will kick your ass repeatedly until it leaves its long imprint in your flabby buttflesh.
The album opens in a throttling surge of bass and drums courtesy of "Concubine." If you're not familiar with this kind of music you might be blown back by the apocalyptic screech of frontman Jacob Bannon's vocals. It's clear with each gritty blast that the guy is screaming out his lungs for you. Naturally, you can't follow a single word but the vox bleed into the furious guitars and it's all acidic corrosion. With the emphasis lately on Fennesz and the pixilated laptop set, it's easy to forget that there's whole realms of sound to be found in the lethal decay of metal guitar's radioactive isotopes. In less than a minute-and-a-half, this song churns from a murderously fast-paced midsection to a slow stomp and back to a breakneck pace.
"Fault and Fracture" picks up seamlessly where the last left off. Once again, the instruments lose their origins, blending in sonic onslaught. Ben Koller's harsh yet amazingly nuanced drumming ties it all together, and the one standout are these hilarious metal trills that peal out from the guitar. Until you reach "Distance and Meaning," it's not clear where the hardcore influence lies. The band slows the pace just enough so you can understand Bannon snarling, "That's where they die, that's where they suicide," amongst the lines wrought by the wiry rhythm. Jane Doe weaves different weights of heavy music together like this, careful to keep the listener interested.
As the album moves on, you realize that Converge aren't just showing off their impressive stylistic range; they're telling a story. "Homewrecker" reaches an awesome peak as Bannon's "No love! No hope!" chorus transmutes to a howl so searing that even veteran scenehounds will be looking for a pit to flail around in. But it's during the tug-of-war vocal trades on "The Broken Vow" that the tale solidifies, one of missed phone calls, old bridges being burned, and lost love. The narrative builds up again and climaxes with "Phoenix in Flight," which begins as a mournful dirge but soon sweeps up through a series of blazing guitar lines that make the elegy even more powerful. You get the sense that the mysterious female mentioned in the lyrics reaches apotheosis with "Phoenix in Flames," an absolute cataclysm of noise that sounds like contact mics were stuffed in a bass drum and tossed down the side of a mountain.
At the end you think back, scratch your head and wonder what the hell it was you listened to. Ultimately, Converge resists easy taxonomy; they're not going to play into that guy's game of "Who's Metal?" As it is, the artwork is strangely concerned with women. A series of faces arise out of stippled dots, all black-ringed eyes and pouty lips vamping from behind the cover of lyric text printed across the page. Is the message that this woman is just like any other, now that she's lost to him? The archetype is unsettling, but no more so than applauding as success the picture of a woman removing her burqa in a country still overrun by thugs and warlords. At least anonymity won't curse Converge for long with an album like this so full of intelligence, skill and intensity that it's simply masterful. Otherwise, I don't know what to call it. That's probably a good thing.


The Swedish band, which mixes psychedelia, prog, and extreme metal, reissues three ambitious studio albums and a live DVD from the early years of the millennium, records that found it transitioning from death growls to cleanly sung acoustic compositions.

Opeth: Blackwater Park [Legacy Edition] / Deliverance [Reissue] / Damnation [Reissue] / Lamentations [Reissue]

Opeth are one of those bands who are great for starting arguments simply because they exist and do what they do. Not that they planned on it, presumably, but when you have people getting into endless flamewars about exactly what kind of metal the Swedish act performs-- or even if they're metal at all, thanks especially to last year's release of Heritage-- then they've done what any reasonable band should by not caring what they're called so long as it's out there. Doubtless bandleader/mastermind Mikael Åkerfeldt loves that fact, even as he's on the road now on tour with Mastodon, probably hip-deep in comparing notes on King Crimson bootlegs with Brann Dailor.
That Åkerfeldt says, in the liner notes to Blackwater Park, that he's "reluctant to do reissues for no reason whatsoever" might explain why this particular clutch of rereleases-- three studio albums and a live DVD, Lamentations, from the early years of the millennium-- is essentially no more than a basic repackaging of what Sony had already done a couple of years previously in Europe, given that the original domestic issues here had already fallen out of print. (Lamentations provides a little bonus in that a separately released full CD version of the same show is now included with the DVD.) But perversely the time may be right for this kind of past focus where 10 years ago it was next to impossible to see bands like Opeth discussed outside of metal-centric circles to start with.
The reissues do reconfirm that Åkerfeldt and the band's then line-up-- currently only bassist Martín Méndez also remains, guitarist Peter Lindgren and drummer Martin Lopez having departed in recent years-- were perfect products of their death-metal-obsessed time and place regardless, with guttural singing and powerful riffing and more besides at work. The band had been going in one form or another for a decade when 2001's Blackwater Park came together, thanks in large part to a mutual admiration society with Porcupine Tree's leader Steven Wilson. His production help and encouragement teased out the band's explorations of acoustic-led arrangements as much as electric ones while further showcasing Åkerfeldt's sweet, clear singing as much as the roars on songs like "The Leper Affinity" and the title track.
In turn, the follow-up was even more ambitious, with Deliverance and Damnation originally planned as two halves of a big release then split into two albums that appeared in 2002 and 2003 respectively-- the first a "heavy" release, but following the same general blend as Blackwater Park, the second, also co-produced by Wilson, a thoroughly moody but never explosive album that ditched any expected death-metal touches entirely. Hearing songs like "Closure" and "In My Time of Need" from the latter is pretty well designed to make you think of contemplative classic rock melancholy rather than anything close to blast beats, while the title song of Deliverance showcases how skilled the band was at perfecting where calmer drift evolves into a full band crunch ridiculously well. The concluding half of that song is probably more monstrously memorable than anything on Blackwater Park.
The fact that the band covered Iron Maiden a couple of years before this run is as much of a sign as anything-- like the UK stalwarts and its guiding figure Steve Harris, not to mention his own contemporary Wilson, Åkerfeldt is openly enthralled with that era of the 1960s into the 1970s when it seemed like all kinds of riffage would rule the earth, often in tandem with whatever reflective, dazed, sorrowful, or just plain stoned routes progressive rock was creating. He's a stone-cold fanboy and doesn't hide it at all-- Blackwater Park takes it name from an obscure German band, Deliverance's "For Absent Friends" borrows the title from a Genesis song from Nursery Cryme, and so forth-- and he is serious, at times painfully so, about it.
Throughout all three albums, Opeth are about explicit formalism as stirring power via the rock gods-- the goal is far from new, but it's done so expertly that it's hard not to be impressed. Given just how equally formal and specific Porcupine Tree have become over the years, Wilson's influence on these albums is evident throughout, even on Deliverance where he only guests rather than also producing. Åkerfeldt says as much in the Blackwater Park notes, but you get a sense that a sheer level of obsessiveness on Åkerfeldt's part would have always been there, a desire to make everything sound just absolutely correct, huge and momentous when needed, controlled and calm otherwise.
Opeth's saving grace in this regard is that no one song on any album quite sounds like anything else on it-- there's certainly a defined range that's being explored intensely, but Blackwater Park has the reputation it does in large part because none of the songs follow the same songwriting formula, instead looking toward variations within general themes that all build to a dramatic conclusion in the title track. Yet Damnation may simply be the clearest statement of intent as well as the most surprising and entertaining album just because it flat-out goes for it-- hints of nearly everything on it can be heard on the two albums preceding it, but by eschewing the formalities of death metal entirely it also clearly demonstrates the abilities of all four players plus the constantly guesting Wilson as accomplished performers in general.
That album may not be the metal that longtime fans had expected or wanted perhaps, then or now-- but again, what matters so long as the results work? Given that in recent years Åkerfeldt has invoked albums like Scott Walker's glowering masterpiece The Drift as inspirations, he's keeping his ears open more than even he might have guessed.


Cleaned up and newly remastered, these demos are bright and captivating, a rare look at the iconic emo band's sketchbook.

Year One Demos

While digging through old belongings, American Football drummer Steve Lamos came across a 1/4" master tape swaddled in brown paper. The tape—still wrapped neatly around a clear plastic reel—was recorded in his childhood basement back in May of 1997, barely four months after American Football formed. His father “engineered” the session by plopping two vocal microphones in the band’s general direction, adjusting the levels, and pressing record. Only four songs were marked on the tracklist: one from their 1998 self-titled EP, two from their 1999 self-titled full-length, and one mystery track, “Song #1/Song #2 (Demo),” whose lack of an identifier left Lamos stumped. When he gave the tape a listen, he didn’t recognize the first section of the two-part track. Neither did guitarist Steve Holmes or singer-guitarist Mike Kinsella. Was this a forgotten American Football song?
As a band whose discography is painstakingly archived by fans, the decision American Football should make was obvious: release the tapes. But those with eagle eyes know the demos are already within reach; CD and cassette versions of this same audio allegedly surfaced on eBay two years ago, were bought, and promptly uploaded online. In those versions, the sound quality is crunchy and muddled — likely the result of audio being re-recorded from one medium to another. Cleaned up and newly mastered, the Year One Demos versions are bright and captivating, a rare look at American Football’s sketchbook before the drawing was colored in.
The one thing demos succeed at where finished recordings fail is their ability to convey the warmth of an idea’s spark. Year One Demos digs up the very roots of American Football’s linear songwriting. These demos feature no singing or lyrics at any point — unsurprising, given American Football was conceived as an instrumental band. Enamored with Music for 18 Musicians and In a Silent Way, they built sprawling guitar patterns that interlocked on “Five Silent Miles,” repeating in cyclical motions until the smallest modal movement felt like a major chord resolution. Here, “The Summer Ends” creates space to get lost in its own thoughts without the defining trumpet part from the studio album version.
Without debate, the prized gem of Year One Demos is “Song #1 / Song #2 (Demo).” Like American Football’s biggest hit, it begins with a faraway count-off. Hesitant guitars chatter back and forth while Lamos taps patiently on a hi-hat. Soon, the guitars find their comfort zone, pick up the pace, and get consumed by the muted roar of an electronic bow that spits them out into open-ended math rock inspired by Weather Report’s 1971 self-titled debut. What follows is better known as “Untitled #2,” from the deluxe reissue of their debut album. Over the songs’ combined runtime of nearly seven minutes, American Football churn through a seven-part instrumental that’s more complex and melodically surprising than some of their official music. Unfortunately, they cut the song from their proper recording sessions to keep their tracklist diverse — “The One With the Tambourine” already used the EBow effect and it had space for lyrics.
“This recording represents our first attempt at a proper demo,” writes Holmes in the liner notes for Year One Demos. “We played through each song live once or twice in one afternoon and called it quits.” Perhaps that’s why the occasional flubs are noticeable: a flat trumpet note, a missed guitar hammer-on, an extra bass drum kick. No matter how cultivated the songs were from inception, Year One Demos is still a photograph of a band about to grow into themselves. Unlike a traditional demo where missed notes and delayed downbeats point towards inexperience, though, American Football’s occasional errors sound like a student jotting down a complex equation before they forget it and discovering the answer in the process. The finished product is correct even if the handwriting got smudged along the way.

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Completed before the death of Frightened Rabbit’s Scott Hutchison, this tribute to the band’s most celebrated album takes a relaxed, occasionally unconventional approach.

Various Artists: Tiny Changes: A Celebration of Frightened Rabbit’s ‘The Midnight Organ Fight’

Tiny Changes was not meant to be a posthumous tribute album. Completed before Frightened Rabbit’s Scott Hutchison took his own life in May 2018, the compilation was intended as a celebration of the band’s 2008 album The Midnight Organ Fight, not a eulogy for its primary songwriter. As a result, the compilation (which shares its name with a tribute concert and a mental health charity; a portion of proceeds will support the latter) feels oddly low-stakes. No one among this collection of old friends and more recent fans thought they would have to honor a legacy when they recorded these covers, and the relative lack of pressure allowed for a relaxed, occasionally unconventional approach.
Covering Organ Fight, a breakup album with the sort of insight that arises only from uncomfortably intimate storytelling, would be challenging under any circumstances. Hearing these intensely personal songs sung by others was always going to be jarring; anything too similar would pale in comparison. The weakest songs on the compilation are those that do the least: Mid-2000s Sub Pop signees Oxford Collapse, who reunited for the occasion, deliver a near-exact recreation of “I Feel Better,” while the off-key vocals and piercing cymbals of Right on Dynamite’s “Fast Blood” resemble an unpolished demo rather than a fresh take. While not soulless, these versions fall short of the originals’ force.
The riskier these covers get, the better they demonstrate what made Frightened Rabbit’s music compelling. Josh Ritter’s goofy bluegrass “Old Old Fashioned” recognizes that Hutchison’s charm was just as significant as his more harrowing material. The Philistines Jr., the band of Organ Fight producer Peter Katis, clash cheap-sounding synths against heavy snares and processed acoustic guitars on “Bright Pink Bookmark,” connecting Frightened Rabbit’s roots with the polish that defined their later studio output. Meanwhile, the prolific Canadian group Wintersleep’s version of “The Twist” is quirkier and denser than the original, but holds its own with beefier drums and a plainspoken but affecting performance from frontman Paul Murphy.
Not every reinvention works; Ben Gibbard’s “Keep Yourself Warm” is too soft-spoken to carry the blunt titular line (“It takes more than fucking someone you don’t know...”), and if Gibbard eventually conjures a beauty of his own, it can’t match the catharsis of the original. Scottish rockers Biffy Clyro’s entertainingly frantic take on album opener “The Modern Leper” ultimately overflows with too many ideas to register. Julien Baker’s version of the same song works much better, her voice wringing out the desperation beneath the gallows humor and bombast. According to the band, who approved all these covers early last year, Baker’s contribution was Hutchison’s personal favorite.
Out of everyone, Baker best captures the specific kind of deep depression that Hutchison was known for articulating. Had an album like this been recorded after his death, it’s hard to imagine that anyone would want to cover “Floating in the Forth,” with its eery foreshadowing lyrics and the grim new context of the closing line, “I’ll think I’ll save suicide for another year.” The Twilight Sad are virtually the only band that could, given the close friendship between Hutchison and frontman James Graham. Their claustrophobic version renders the melody nearly unrecognizable, but not the emotion; Graham repeats that last line until it starts to feel as hopeful as it once did.
The timing alone makes Tiny Changes a difficult listen, a last glimpse of when fans and musicians could celebrate Frightened Rabbit without the complication of tragedy. It’s far from a perfect set of guests or covers, but it wasn’t supposed to be. A different kind of tribute, less focused on the band’s longtime supporters, might have featured newer musicians inspired by Hutchison; it might have illustrated his band’s influence and introduced their cult following to a younger generation. But those involved in Tiny Changes had no intention of looking to the future—they were merely celebrating how far they had all come.

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Acoustic guitarist Dan Knishkowy is joined by an improvisational quartet for an album of autumnal instrumental folk that meditates on self-knowledge and change.

Hot Fruit

Dan Knishkowy has spent much of his career as Adeline Hotel exploring the breadth of his acoustic guitar, from the minimalist blues of 2016’s It’s Alright, Just the Same to the reflective folk of 2021’s Good Timing. But after writing seven solo guitar songs for his new record Hot Fruit, he couldn’t shake the thought that something was missing. So he reached out to friends to add their own improvisational touches, tapping electric guitarist Ryan El-Solh, bassist Carmen Q. Rothwell, drummer Jason Burger of the Brooklyn jazz trio Scree, and Office Culture’s Winston Cook-Wilson on piano. Each finished song feels like a guided journey, and the way in which these orchestral collaborations blossom along the edges ushers in a new era of spontaneity for Adeline Hotel.
Knishkowy long aspired to write from a place of intuition; this time, that instinct finally comes across naturally. Drawing a blend of sweetness and sharpness out of his guitar, he summons the conflicted emotions of outgrowing one’s former self. His finger-plucking alternates gracefully between loud notes played with confidence and notes that hesitate to ring out until the last second, as if quelling their nerves. El-Solh, Rothwell, Burger, and Cook-Wilson read his cues like any good friend would; they play in unison with certain guitar sections to further highlight Adeline Hotel’s original strengths (“Big Al”), and during other parts spiral off to emphasize the freeform shapes he’s building (“Little Chili”). The finished arrangements simmer into a rich nectar of orchestral folk as affecting as Nick Drake’s pastoral classics or William Tyler’s wordless portraits.
In the best moments on Hot Fruit, all four guest musicians integrate their ideas with Knishkowy’s at once, their colorful improvisations lacing around his nimble guitarwork like ribbons threaded into a bird’s nest. On opener “Beksul,” each addition fades into the frame: the calm scratching of a shaker that grows louder, individual piano notes that transform into heartfelt chords, plucks of upright bass that turn dewy and soulful. The beauty of this collaboration reaches its peak with the three-part suite “Seeing Yourself Seen.” Pedal steel lends the song a gentle sway as clarinet, flute, and strings—all arranged by El-Solh—trickle over Knishkowy’s autumnal acoustic guitar lines. The ease and unpredictability of the swells evoke the kinds of small, quotidian human interactions that inspire gratitude for life.
On previous records, like 2021’s piano-driven The Cherries Are Speaking, Knishkowy sang in a soft timbre about devotion and isolation. There’s no singing on Hot Fruit, but what we lose in words, we gain in sound as themes of self-concept and change take shape in probing melodies. It all stems from the intimate way Knishkowy wields his guitar: deft fingers and a light touch, with an understanding for how space and silence bolsters the music. The rhythmic hook and twinkling trill of the title track relays the magic of curiosity; the slight shift into a downtrodden chord on “White Sands” alludes to a moment of doubt yet forges onward. The clarity of these guitar parts sets Hot Fruit apart from Adeline Hotel’s previous work. It’s one thing to set out to follow your intuition; it’s another to illustrate it so lucidly in song that fellow musicians can tap in and improvise along.


On this new album, Simeon Coxe rewires 1960s underground space poppers Silver Apples (again) and makes far-out sounds and sweet left-field songs.

Clinging to a Dream

In terms of homemade instruments, Silver Apples’ oscillator-synth contraption, known as “the Simeon,” remains undersung. It has never gotten as much attention as the theremin, Harry Partch’s ensembles, Os Mutantes’ fuzz pedal, or Glenn Branca’s third bridge guitars. Operated by telegraph keys and foot pedals, the Simeon was more an ad hoc construction of weirdly humming parts than a functioning instrument. Its vibrating chrome shadow blended perfectly into the pop elation of Silver Apples’ recordings. Unplayable by anybody besides its namesake inventor, it disappeared into the lunar mists when the band dissolved in the early ’70s.
Heard now, the band’s two ’60s albums don’t channel psychedelia as much as the hard-wired promise of the space age. Undeniably pop, inventor and songwriter Simeon Coxe’s songs were playful and soulful and cosmic, and—outside the New York underground—fairly sunken on their original release. Somehow unrelated to rock‘n’roll, “I Have Known Love” and others were more like open-hearted show-stoppers arranged for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Returning to the Simeon in 1996, Coxe revived the Silver Apples for a few years of albums and collaborations and tours. During one of the latter, Coxe broke his neck in a van accident, rethinking and stripping down the Simeon upon his recovery.
Now 78, Coxe (professionally, just “Simeon”) and the spirit of his invention return for Clinging to a Dream, the first Silver Apples LP since the instrument and its creator’s reconstructions. At the core of the album, Coxe pilots his electronics towards beautiful and strange-colored waters. The opener “The Edge of Wonder” floats on omniscient myth-chants not dissimilar to Brian Eno’s Another Green World. At its best, Coxe pairs a wide-eyed sweetness with far-out electronics, as on “Fractal Flow,” where a nearly Vaudevillian melody keeps the space age alive and twinkling. Other pieces, like “Colors,” are rich and overt tone poems.
On “Susie,” a bouncing portal to a parallel universe of Radiophonic pop, Simeon finds an all-new future, like an algorithm-generated number for a food-obsessed A.I. pop star. But elsewhere, the future sounds a little too much like the present. On the bubbling “Concerto for Monkey and Oscillator,” the new-fangled beats overwhelm its tender oddity, sounding like an avatar-less Soundcloud account pumping synth jams into the ether (and probably with some Silver Apples elsewhere on its playlists).
Despite Silver Apples’ hiatus, Coxe hasn’t been inactive, most lately releasing 2013’s Amphibian Lark, a self-titled debut by a new duo. When he performs solo, Coxe’s new set-up finds him returning, at times, to the mysterious place that made the band’s original albums so appealing. But much of Clinging to a Dream finds him exploring sounds beyond the means of his original unwieldy oscillators. The results aren’t always as compelling, but one can sense the liberation in his new means of expression. Clinging to a Dream is a Silver Apples album in every way, but it rarely achieves the fully enveloping richness of some of the band’s ’90s work, which included 1999’s Spectrum collaboration A Lake of Teardrops as well as 1998’s *Decatur—*a full 42-minutes of oscillators and, in retrospect, an accidental requiem for the Simeon itself.
While Simeon and original drummer Danny Taylor once soundtracked the Moon landing during a giant free concert in Central Park, the Silver Apples of the 21st century are making music in a very different future. The new model Apples don’t always achieve liftoff, but Simeon still possesses the coordinates for dazzling new places.


The O.C. hardcore band level up their sound on their second album but remain gruff, guttural, and ferocious.

Failed Entertainment

Fury have reached that level of success where they’ve been given the opportunity to make something other than a hardcore album. You know the drill: sign with a bigger punk or metal-leaning label, get a bigger-name producer, and throw in some more populist gestures so the newfound exposure outside of the literal and figurative hardcore fanbase can lead to backhanded compliments about how it “transcends the genre.” This is all true of Orange County, California band’s Run For Cover debut Failed Entertainment, the long-awaited follow up to 2016’s Paramount that includes grunge legend Jack Endino and Parquet Courts’ Andrew Savage as collaborators. But Fury are more intent on upholding traditional structures rather than deconstructing them—on Failed Entertainment, they’re a rowdy yet welcoming host.
Fury don’t let their ambitions get in the way of what’s worked for their punk and hardcore heroes: They know why palm-muting during the verse makes the nasty riff more satisfying (“Angels Over Berlin”), when to bring back the nasty riff, but slower and also when to go into double time, what words sound best as gang vocals (“America,” obviously) and which ones work best as call-and-response (“Vacation”). But now that they’re past the point of having to prove themselves within a 15-minute set among five other bands, Fury have earned the right to add an extra bridge, to play at a tempo closer to groove metal, and bring out a latent allegiance to 90s Brit-rock, like a tambourine and nasal backup vocals on “Crazy Horses Run Free” or the booming drum intro in “Birds of Paradise.”
Jeremy Stith’s lyrical style has been Fury’s defining characteristic from the jump and similar to the equally ruminative post-hardcore exegesis from their new labelmates Self Defense Family’s Have You Considered Punk Music?, Failed Entertainment alludes to the inadequacies of his chosen medium right there in its title. In a recent column that named Wim Wenders and Sam Shepard as patron saints of Failed Entertainment, Stith makes only one brief mention of a fellow musician—“Now with hardcore, almost every decision a band faces comes with the question, ‘What would Ian MacKaye do?’” as in, how can Fury be intentional about their ethics and the meaning of their art as humanly possible?
MacKaye once sang “America is a word, but I use it,” and Fury likewise know how to weaponize it—for a hardcore band, there are few better nuclear options than actually making a song called “America” (“Innocence isn’t my America”) and later on in “Birds of Paradise,” Stith shouts “U.S. of A., just an idea to me.” This is one of the few lyrics on Failed Entertainment he feels necessary to use twice.
Otherwise, Fury sound like they could’ve been peers of Fugazi and probably would’ve avoided their firm stance against major labels or festivals. While Failed Entertainment is less flashy than last year’s big hardcore breakthrough—the genre-agnostic nu-metal splatter of Turnstile’s Time & Space—there’s a similar spirit of the flush ’90s at a time when the industry’s been inverted for rock bands. Nirvana once led major labels to throw money at any loud, grim band with even a modicum of melody: Helmet were the subjects of a seven-figure bidding war, NYC shitkickers Orange 9mm and CIV were stuffed into the same Buzz Bin as Nada Surf and Cake, Unsane crashed MTV with a skate blooper reel.
These are the acts that Fury evoke here, gruff, guttural and with a generally grim disposition —what people in southern California consider to be an “East Coast sensibility.” But if Failed Entertainment doesn’t have the brash bluster of the typical hardcore “level up,” it’s because Stith sees those levels as illusory, still focused on surviving the artistic, mental, and political purgatories in which we exist. “The grey is clear/But too cold to continue/No, not there/Here,” he shouts on the album’s first line, an unsubtle reminder of Fury’s enduring challenge to the absolutist thinking that makes hardcore so seductive and escapist in the first place. “Peace lies inside the grey,” Stith assures later on and while this world is grim, it’s all we got.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a buried treasure, the 1989 experimental new age solo album from the R&B legend, a Black queer epic where technology mediates tenderness.

SkinDiver

Sheathed in reverb, forged in the heat of an artist combusting her prodigious talent, Nona Hendryx proclaims: “Women who dream don’t stay too long.” It’s a faceted message, sung by a bisexual Black woman in her mid-40s who’d already been in the game for some 25 years. By the time “Women Who Fly,” the first and only single from her 1989 album SkinDiver arrived, Hendryx had an unrivaled list of accomplishments as an innovator of ’60s girl groups, a crucial member of ’70s Afrofuturistic soul force Labelle, and a firebrand of ’80s funk-rock. But she was shamefully under-heralded, and women, especially Black women, who didn’t make hits didn’t stay too long in the music business.
Someone else might have called it a day, or become a nostalgia act. Instead, she took up with an ex-Tangerine Dream synth whiz and made an album that amalgamates new age and adult-contemporary strategies into a song cycle of machines and mindfulness. At the end of the 1980s, Hendryx heard the sound of a new world, one in which technology mediates tenderness. Modern electronics and ancient drums and the timeless demand to love directly, and to be loved in return, have their place here. SkinDiver is a Black queer epic on a human scale.
Hendryx was born in New Jersey in 1944. “I came from a ghetto, a real one—Trenton. I lived hard and I can’t forget it,” she later told Essence. “Yes I wrote poetry even then, but I was on the street.” She was also in the church. A young Hendryx was singing in a choir when a member of a visiting choir, Sarah Dash, first heard her roar. As detailed in Adele Bertei’s laudatory Why Labelle Matters, Dash asked Hendryx to join her a cappella group, the Del Capris; in 1961, that group’s manager signed another group, the Ordettes, featuring a young but already mighty Patsy Holte. In the long tradition of managers mixing and matching Black voices and faces, the manager would soon recast the groups into the trio of Dash, Hendryx, and Holt, along with a fourth member, Cindy Birdsong. Now known as the Bluebelles, the group were the face of, but not the singers on, a hit song called “I Sold My Heart to the Junkman.” The original singers found out, the Bluebelles re-recorded the track, Patsy Holt was rechristened Patti LaBelle, Hendryx dropped out of high school, and the act hit the Chitlin’ Circuit, the Black DIY network of venues that, under Jim Crow, were as safe as spaces could get.
Such shape-shifting would be a constant for Hendryx. While superstardom eluded Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles, they put out some exemplary records and toured with the Rolling Stones. By the end of the decade, though, Birdsong defected to become one of the Supremes, whose style felt a bit recherché to the trio. In London, the three women met Vicki Wickham, producer of the influential BBC rock show Ready Steady Go!, who became their manager and hipped them to the city’s gay underground. They refashioned a fascination with Sun Ra and the right-on funk-rock of Sly and the Family Stone into a new life as Labelle and opened for the Who and Laura Nyro, with whom they made a revelatory record of sexuality and solidarity, 1971’s Gonna Take a Miracle. They made a quintet of out-of-this-world albums, and Hendryx wrote a lot of the songs on them, starting with their political and percolating 1973 album Pressure Cookin’. Onstage, decked out in space-age silver lamé and feathers, they were a riot: Parliament-Funkadelic may have lifted a spaceship into orbit at their shows, but Hendryx descended on wires to stalk audiences with a whip.
The gay singer-songwriter Bob Crewe, with writing partner Kenny Nolan, would pen their biggest hit, 1974’s sex worker paean “Lady Marmalade,” but Labelle surely are equally responsible for bringing it to life. Its strident and bilingual bawdiness, not to mention their record label’s perplexing inability to promote follow-up singles into the hits they should have been, led to irreparable fractures within the group. By 1976, Labelle fizzled. Their too-muchness had at last become too much. Sarah Dash recorded some ferocious hi-NRG records with Patrick Cowley and Sylvester. Patti became, of course, Ms. Patti LaBelle. Wickham managed Dusty Springfield, Marc Almond, and Morrissey and remains Hendryx’s long-time partner in work and love. Labelle reunited a few times. Dash died suddenly in 2021.
Hendryx went her own way. In 1977, she released a glammy self-titled debut that didn’t take flight. She joined Talking Heads, lending her voice and, let’s just say it, authority to their Remain in Light album and tour. (“The Great Curve” without her? Flatline.) As the ’80s arrived, she worked with everyone: Bill Laswell’s Material, on the disco-not-disco classic “Bustin’ Out”; Nile Rodgers, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, the Compass Point Studio geniuses. Prince wrote a song for her. Four albums came and went, including 1985’s hard rocking The Heat and 1987’s guitar-heavy/proto-new jack swing Female Trouble. “People still have this difficulty categorizing me,” she told NME. Black women had played rock’n’roll since its birth by Big Mama Thornton in 1952, but Nona’s seat at the table was suspect to the white music establishment. In the Village Voice, Robert Christgau first objected to her “insatiable desire to make rock records”; a year later, his take was that “she just isn’t as talented as you wish she was.” In 1987, the Los Angeles Times went further, grossly dehumanizing her as “a pedigreed workhorse, bred and groomed to fill conglomerate coffers.” Her labels kept dropping her. “I don’t want anyone to be like me,” she told NME, “but I want them to see the possibilities.” What was left to show?
An answer came in Female Trouble’s Peter Gabriel duet “Winds of Change (Mandela to Mandela).” The earnest tribute to the South African anti-apartheid revolutionary culminated in an ascension to a sparkling paradise of clear, tolling bells. It echoed the kind of twinkling arpeggios Tangerine Dream coaxed out of their machines—and, indeed, its founder Peter Baumann did the song’s sound production. Baumann had launched his label Private Music in the early ’80s to release landmark experimental-ambient albums by Suzanne Ciani, and also Yanni. The indie label would become a sympathetic venue for the hypnotic grooves she’d been programming on the computer in her New York City apartment. In the announcement of her new album, 1989’s SkinDiver, she called her home “a cubicle in a mass of metal,” and its songs sounded like that, soft private spaces to work in a hard world.
Like all of us, Hendryx longs to connect. SkinDiver maps out the ways. There is sex, and intimacy, its sometime companion. “Off the Coast of Love” swells in with electronic patterns of flutes and drums that paddle and struggle like feet against the tide. “Love would wash me ashore!” she bellows, as tom-toms thunderclap and lightning-bright orchestral stabs flash around her. But she remains unquenched. On the title track, a mid-tempo heater that throws off rumpled harmonies and folds of rhythm like sheets from a well-made bed, Hendryx details her failings. She’s negging herself in the service of seduction, or confessing just what a lover might get into with her. She needs more control, to be less controlling. She lays out a come-on: “I’d like to feel how you feel…I imagine it’s a thrill…I’m a skin-diver/So into you.” It’s a trip under the covers and into someone else, an escape through penetration.
For a moment, anyway. Much of SkinDiver happens in the moments where being in your body feels unbearable. “Women Who Fly” soars with rueful glory. There’s a bit of the Blue Nile’s synth-pop and a bit of Annie Lennox’s mask-that-tells-the-truth in the way Hendryx promises that “I’m most dangerous when the skin that I’m in isn’t mine.” But as a Black woman in her 40s, a queer person in the AIDS crisis, a legacy artist whose past hasn’t earned back—for Hendryx, the stakes are much higher. She’s about to blow. On “No Emotion,” she and Carole Pope, of the hugely-underrated Torontonian queer rock band Rough Trade, chant, “No emotion we must show,” while guitars worthy of Kevin Shields squall and cymbals worthy of Budgie throw tantrums. It’s an ironic catharsis that burns itself out, too hot to handle.
Hendryx can do the regal machismo of Grace Jones with abandon, but elsewhere the ice queen is melting. “Love Is Kind” is all thaw, her keys dripping over caresses of fretless bass. In a voice shadowed with echoes that extend in strange directions, she promises to take care of herself, even if that means humbling herself before a world that doesn’t deserve it. She’ll stop overthinking. She will feel love. And yet, like the endless arpeggios on a keyboard, the old patterns continue. In “Tears,” a heartbeat of a drum machine cradles blankets of organs. “My heart,” she says. “My head.” It’s Descartes as dream pop. Because it’s 1989, dolphins chirp. (They might be whales. Or Drexcyians.) “Who am I?” she cries out. The words reverb into nothingness.
SkinDiver can hypnotize on its way to oblivion. But Hendryx will not let alienation win. To really be embodied, one must acknowledge the terms of this world. Sampling both Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy, threading images of mediated violence like an uncynical version of Cabaret Voltaire into a showstopping belter from a cynical Céline Dion, “Through the Wire” is a blistering power ballad about power. Yet this is not the only power. In the audacious “Interior Voices,” structured like a clapping game, and also like future Vespertine-era Björk, Hendryx finds other sources. “The past and the present live as twins,” she sings simply. “God and the devil, fear and dreams/Pass from mother to child, an unbroken stream.” The Great Communicator is the umbilical cord; the coming World Wide Web is an amniotic sack. Drumrolls rustle like feathers. A children’s choir coos. It’s stunning, a bit camp like Kraftwerk were, a dazzling and generative kind of Woman Machine.
The album’s peak refuses all the old power structures. “6th Sense” reincarnates her old friend Patti LaBelle’s “New Attitude” into a new age anthem. Deep in thickets of wood blocks and pan flutes, Hendryx muses on superstition. She chants down those who’d deny her intuition. Unlike Patti, she hasn’t tidied up her point of view:  “I believe in déjà vu, ancient dreams, and primal screams that run beneath the conscious stream,” she declares. But isolation threatens enlightenment. “Is anyone listening?” she hollers, again and again. “Can anybody feel me? Does…anybody…care?” There is more to this world, and more to herself, than one might believe.
SkinDiver comes to rest in the afterglow. For “New Desire,” fingers tickle out a melody, and bells linger like embraces. She’s plummeting back to earth, and a bass glides to find the landing spot. There’s a subtle ticking noise in the distance. Hendryx has been on the trip of a lifetime, all alienation and love sensation, finding and losing her place in the world and making of it what she will. Her voice gathers force for one last lesson. “Love is the door through doubt and distance,” she says. And she’s right. “I surrender,” she says. But not to what you think. SkinDiver begins with Hendryx needing to hold someone; it ends with a call to arms around her. She’s yielding not to desire but to being desired. She’s learning to be loved in a world that mostly won’t. “Touch me,” she sings. “I’m waiting.”
Hendryx waited for people to catch up to SkinDiver. “I’d like it to be discovered rather than sold to people like the latest fashion,” she told Billboard in 1989. In 2007, she turned SkinDiver into a sci-fi multimedia rock musical at NYC’s downtown demimonde HQ Joe’s Pub. In the 2010s, she made a few fab house collaborations with Soul Clap, and in 2017 released a revelatory collection of Captain Beefheart covers with Gary Lucas. For the bridge of “Women Who Fly,” Hendryx warns all who can hear her: “Don’t give me wings and take away my sky!” It’s hard to imagine someone strong enough to clip her ambition. Her work keeps expanding. Almost 35 years later, SkinDiver remains a vista to gaze in wonder at, and wonder what else is on the horizon.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan.\


The unflinching and brutal new record from the Melbourne-based singer-songwriter is so direct that it demands your full attention for every single second.

Sarah Mary Chadwick: Me and Ennui Are Friends, Baby

Me and Ennui Are Friends, Baby

In 1985, the French conceptual artist Sophie Calle suffered a heartbreak so devastating that she waited almost 20 years and then turned her grief into a book. That book, Exquisite Pain, is split into two halves. The first retells the days leading up to the moment where her boyfriend leaves her for another woman, and in the second half, Calle asks dozens of friends and strangers to answer the question “When did you suffer most?” There are pages and pages of stories about the kinds of breakups that slice you open and leave you raw, of deaths in the family, of stillborn births. The book was meant to be an exorcism, for Calle to finally rid herself of pain in the most public way imaginable. Melbourne-based Sarah Mary Chadwick’s latest record, Me and Ennui are Friends, Baby, is a Sophie Calle-style public release of grief. Unflinching and brutal, the record documents the death of Chadwick’s father and a close friend, her own suicide attempt, the dissolution of a long-term partnership, and the all-consuming mountains of sadness that followed.
Me and Ennui are Friends, Baby is so direct that it demands your full attention for every single second. It’s not at all fun to listen to, nor is it meant to. It feels bad, and you can’t turn away from it, not even to check a text on your phone, not even to rummage through your fridge for a beer. The record, which is just piano and vocals, feels claustrophobic at times—like you’re a mouse stuck beneath one of the piano’s pedals, struggling to get free. At points, Me and Ennui are Friends, Baby resembles a chapbook set to a piano more than music, perhaps like one of those letters people often write to an ex-partner after a bad breakup that they never send. Opening with the line “Mothers never love me/Baby that’s why you should,” her lyrics tend to focus on being loved badly, by men, by her mother, and by herself.
Chadwick is prone to exploring her own self-destructive behavior. “At Your Leisure” is about giving a married man head at a traffic light. “Every Loser Needs A Mother” is about sleeping with a man simply to give life to her father’s memory. “Always Falling” is about falling for aloof and distant people. Chadwick’s voice on these songs is singular—meaty, heaving, laden with bravado. She almost never resorts to flowery language or hides behind metaphor and simile. When she sings about a suicide attempt on the album’s title track, it’s not a figure of speech—it’s a violent memory petrified like a scorpion in amber. “On the way to stay alive I asked the guy his job/He said, ‘a Paramedic,’” she sings, her voice shaking like a tree in a hurricane, her piano vivid and clear.
There are other records like this one, but they’re few and far between. Its closest analog would be the “barely music” of Phil Elverum’s Mount Eerie; a more fitting description would be if Adele decided to record an album of Daniel Johnston covers. It is incredibly difficult to pull off, and Me and Ennui are Friends, Baby can feel so unrelenting you’d maybe feel inclined to turn it off and huddle up in a ball. Chadwick welcomes this reading of her music, and she has a sense of humor about it. When asked what kind of occasions she thinks her music is suited for, she cites a quote from a friend’s father: “You wouldn’t put it on at a fucking dinner party, would you?”
“Full Mood” exists on a different plane from the rest of the album. Instead of tapping into the well of grief, it comes from a place of warmth and hope. It is a perfect song about being profoundly in love with someone else. Her piano unspools softly, and her voice cracks like a smile does when you’re about to tear up a little bit. “You don’t think you’re very bright/God, you’re shining like a star,” she sings. She sings about this love like the cherished memory we hold onto when everything else is too hard to handle. So much of Me and Ennui are Friends, Baby can feel like a freefall into hell, like a complete encapsulation of a year that is terrible beyond words. “Full Mood” is a reminder that you can still access beauty even in the pits of despair. The song asks something of us far more heartbreaking than Sophie Calle’s suffering question in Exquisite Pain. It asks: what did it feel like to be loved? Did it make you feel beautiful?

Buy: Rough Trade
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Philadelphia instrumentalists Mary Lattimore and Jeff Zeigler have become indispensible facilitators for other people’s music. Slant of Light represents the duo’s cautious move into their own distinct territory, consisting of four improvisations that are surprisingly broad in focus given the duo’s limited, idiosyncratic instrumentation.

Mary Lattimore / Jeff Zeigler: Slant of Light

Slant of Light

Unless you’re a liner notes sleuth with a propensity for a certain strain of East Coast indie rock or abstruse folk exploration, the names Mary Lattimore and Jeff Zeigler may not be familiar. In the last five years, the Philadelphia instrumentalists have become indispensible facilitators for other people’s music—the multi-instrumentalist Ziegler as a producer and touring sound engineer for bands like the War on Drugs, Kurt Vile and the Violators, and Purling Hiss, the harpist Lattimore as accompanist for and improviser with a litany of rock musicians such as Thurston Moore, Sharon Van Etten, and Meg Baird. Their individual orbits have often overlapped, too: Lattimore, for instance, played on Smoke Ring for My Halo, the Vile album that Zeigler, in part, recorded. They’ve also led their own respective recording projects, with Zeigler even helming the sessions for Lattimore’s splendid 2013 solo debut, The Withdrawing Room.
Still, Lattimore and Zeigler have built their principal reputations as members of supporting casts—necessary, if not necessarily noticed—but Slant of Light represents the duo’s cautious move into their own distinct territory. Lattimore plucks, scrapes, and slaps her harp, running its sounds through a loop station that not only repeats her patterns but occasionally gives them a prismatic kind of echo, as though you’re watching a picture fade one color at the time. Zeigler routes an assortment of synthesizers, guitars, and melodicas through a small army of effect pedals. Inspired by their work on a live score for the 1968 French film Le Révélateur in Texas’ Marfa Ballroom, Slant of Light consists of four improvisations that are surprisingly broad in focus given the duo’s limited, idiosyncratic instrumentation. They shift between new age gloamings and atonal excursions, phosphorescent crescendos and needlepoint delicacy. “Echo Sounder”, the record’s moment of complete triumph, funnels all of those approaches into one beautiful climb. Zeigler shapes an enormous, swelling hum that still leaves room for Lattimore at the top; she plays patterns and pauses, allowing his electronic whirrs to slip through the rests like a warm breeze. It’s light but not thin, distant but not unfamiliar, engrossing but not all-consuming.
To that last end, Slant of Light benefits from Lattimore and Zeigler’s respective pasts, as their ancillary work seems to have fostered a degree of modesty in their step toward the spotlight. Slant of Light is a slight record, its four tracks just breaking the 30-minute mark; each piece suggests a single statement, meant to express one idea before moving on to the next one. Lattimore’s Lyon and Healy harp has 47 strings, but there's never the sense that she’s trying to show you that she knows what to do with them or the pedals they power. “The White Balloon” is a duet between Lattimore’s high-floating harp melody and Zeigler’s more mid-range guitar, which acts as a terrestrial tether to the bed of electric noise at the bottom of the track. For three minutes, they float with one another, dipping and diving through a ballet just above the din—and then they fade away, adding allure through brevity rather than overstaying their welcome.
Even the album's 12-minute finale, “Tomorrow is a Million”, feels brief. Together, Lattimore and Ziegler twist through beds of soft noise, with scraped and popped harp strings and splintered guitar notes clustering into alien whorls of anti-melodies. The pair’s playing is busy but not restless, moving more in mutual sympathy than selfishness. By track’s end, it’s hard not to wish it didn’t keep going, so you could see where all these quick runs and instant redirections might go if there were no limit. Slant of Light, then, succeeds on the level of the best improvisations. These pieces pry the audience’s eyes off the clock without taking advantage of that surrender, and perhaps that’s the valuable side effect of spending so much time learning how the music of others work—what’s too much, what’s too little, what’s just right. Slant of Light is a short, humble offering of the latter.


After the grand farewell of 2016's You Want It Darker, Cohen's son gathers his father's scraps and unfinished ideas and lovingly fleshes them out with help from collaborators like Beck, The National's Bryce Dessner and Feist.

Thanks for the Dance

Leonard Cohen could always wrangle a good song from a grim situation. Just one example: In 1966, he and a lover stayed in a squalid room at New York’s Penn Terminal Hotel. Everything was broken—the windows, the radiators, the taps, their relationship—but the miserable experience at least yielded “Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye.” Yet not even someone with Cohen’s wry humor would have guessed that, 50 years later, far bleaker circumstances would spur him into saying the most perfect goodbye imaginable. He was living with cancer when working on 2016’s You Want It Darker, and the shadow of mortality made his 14th studio album resemble a last testament. 19 days later, he fell in his home and passed away, aged 82.
Few records have sounded so heavy with finality. So it’s initially hard to know what remains to be said on Thanks For The Dance, a collection of bare-bones ideas and vocals lovingly fleshed out into finished tracks by Cohen’s son, Adam, with contributions from admirers including Beck, Feist, and The National’s Bryce Dessner. That’s not to say Cohen’s powers had waned: the elegant reckoning of the opening “Happens to the Heart” finds him still trying to untie the messy knot of sex, love, spirituality, and death with winking self-deprecation, saucy innuendo and rich religious symbolism, before finishing with a disquieting image that lingers like gun smoke: “I was handy with a rifle/ My father’s 0.303/ I fought for something final/ Not the right to disagree.” The fact that his crumbs would be most people’s banquets, though, can’t turn all the sketches into compelling songs.
This project was teased with a somber, reworked version of Cohen’s 1998 poem “The Goal” which suggested that, like … Darker, it would be dominated by his awareness of the dying light around him. “Settling at last/Accounts of the soul,” he sighs, finally putting his many affairs in order. In truth, while the other stories here are also full of old ghosts and reflections, they rarely play out as explicit confrontations with Cohen’s fate. Instead, the lead song’s soft, tinkling-glass piano and gentle acoustic guitar are more indicative of the supporting players’ penchant for classy restraint: they employ the light hands of musicians at an intimate soiree, allowing the guest of honor’s ravaged growl to hold court.
At times it works brilliantly, not least on “The Goal” itself, which is spun with the delicacy of a spiderweb. On other occasions there’s a sense of drift, a tendency for pristine arrangements to tip-toe around Cohen’s words as if fearful of intruding: although the mournful mandolin of “Moving On” makes for a pretty backdrop, it’s not the only track that’s essentially a poem recited over decorous orchestration. And while Cohen’s favorite flourishes are everywhere—the sweet, sad lilt of Javier Mas’s Spanish laud on the title cut, the Jew’s harp Beck plays on the moonlit rumble of “The Night Of Santiago”—they don’t always cut through or drive the compositions.
The reverence is understandable, but you’re left wondering if it stymied bolder invention. Some of Cohen’s greatest triumphs were risks, the result of him pairing his ever-sootier voice with different sounds: the cheap Casio keyboards that sparked his ‘80s renaissance, the haunting strings and choirs of the Adam-helmed … Darker.
Unsurprisingly, the best efforts here get closer to a similar alchemy. A mist of eerie piano and ghostly synths fogs “It’s Torn,” creating a quietly menacing score for Cohen’s vision of an unraveling world where the center cannot hold: “The opposites falter/The spirals reverse.” The jaded soul-searching of “The Hills,” meanwhile, is leavened with dry wit and the stately hum of horns and organ, as a pill-popping Cohen tries to make peace with the fact that his slog inside the Tower of Song is nearly at an end. “I know she is coming,” he insists, as his backing singers arrive to soothe his tired croak.
When everything clicks with that kind of harmony, the album becomes more than just a graceful, inessential postscript. Most startling is “Puppets,” which starts with the horrors of the Holocaust and grows into a black reflection on human nature, helplessness and inescapable cycles of violence. Rather than raging, the music is a heavenly balm—bells chime, angelic voices sing, ethereal electronics thrum with strange celestial wonder—and the effect is like seeing a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape on a stained-glass window. If Thanks For The Dance can’t one-up … Darker’s grand farewell, moments like that at least make it a worthwhile addition to his legacy.