This epic compilation produced by the National’s Bryce and Aaron Dessner serves as both a fine showcase of the Dead's iconic songs and a who's who of current indie rock.

Day of the Dead

In the summer of 1987, MTV sent a bewildered VJ crew to report live from the long-rolling party taking place outside of Grateful Dead shows, this particular one manifesting at Giants Stadium in New Jersey. Besides broadcasting the news of a massive tailgate onto nationwide cable systems, the station pumped the band’s “comeback” hit “Touch of Grey” a few times an hour. While the 22-year-old sextet was already capable of selling out Giants Stadium, MTV’s “Day of the Dead” report fully transubstantiated the Grateful Dead and the Deadheads from an underground phenomenon into a legitimate part of mainstream American culture, as much an '80s phenomenon as a '60s band. Until Jerry Garcia’s death in 1995, the Grateful Dead would grow more popular each year, the Day of the Dead extending to nearly a decade. The director of the band’s ticket office and others would point to the MTV special as the tipping point towards the gate crashes and mini-riots of the '90s.
It was this popularity, too, that codified the deep uncoolness of the Grateful Dead during the same years, at least among a certain taste-making elite. Being anti-Dead had been part of the uniform for years (see the Teen Idles’ “Deadhead,” from Dischord’s very first 7” in 1980). That attitude, too, went mainstream a decade or so later, via Kurt Cobain’s homemade “Kill the Grateful Dead” shirt. The Grateful Dead boogied, perhaps occasionally achieved choogle; some of their fans were definitely on serious drugs, egregiously friendly, and stood out in crowds. They were easy picking for punks and the DEA alike.
This year’s Day of the Dead is a new 5xCD , five-and-a-half-hour compilation produced by the National’s Bryce and Aaron Dessner as a benefit for the Red Hot organization. With a cast of dozens drawn from a cross-section of indie-ish musical worlds, the set, like its MTV predecessor, signals another milestone in the San Francisco band’s profound influence on American music, closing old circles and opening new ones. In the same way that no single Grateful Dead show (or song performance, or even era) could ever be definitive, the 59 tracks of Day of the Dead represent (merely!) a major entry in the ever-deepening catalog of Grateful Dead covers, interpretations, and reinventions. Already containing universes, the Dead’s songbook is what makes the set enjoyable as a whole, transcending the performers and their translations. Perhaps even more than those of Bob Dylan (no stranger to covering the Dead), the songs of Jerry Garcia and lyricist Robert Hunter welcome musicians of all stripes—loud and quiet, singers and instrumentalists, big-eared non-virtuosos and players alike.
With an artist list that connects Mumford & Sons (who blanch the Satanic urgency right out of “Friend of the Devil”) to So Percussion (who carry “Terrapin Station (Suite)” to thrilling new realms), the set ranges eclectically in both style and level of inventiveness. Most anyone with any kind of appreciation for the Grateful Dead will find probably at least an hour or three of music to dig and really groove with; Dead freaks might also find a good deal to snicker at.
Where the Dead’s critical revival on the fringes of the early 21st century freak-folk scare hinged on the band’s weirdness (LSD, musique concrète, countercultural activity, untethered improvisation), Day of the Dead’s reclamation feels comparably restrained. Though the contributions nod at various Day-Glo threads, the core of the project is made from the softer colors and textures that have defined indie rock in recent years. At the center is a National-anchored house band that come off as conservative literalists compared to the Dead themselves—pleasant, but not usually taking the music anywhere especially new. Instead, they treat the songs as new standards (which they are), pairing them with vocalists. Just as the Dead’s hardcore '60s experimentation dissolved to messy stadium-sized calypso thunder, Day of the Dead is more dancing bears than skull-and-lightning Steal Your Faces. But fun prevails and sunshine abounds, and the set manages to capture a wide range of available Grateful Deads, channeled via Senegalese jazz groovers Orchestra Baobab, noise sculptor Tim Hecker, and many more.
Among the few to really nail the Dead’s communal and conversational bounce, Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks take a reassuring and natural turn through a *Europe ’72-*style “China Cat Sunflower->I Know You Rider,” Robert Hunter’s Joycean psychedelia finding its perfect match in Malkmus’ quizzical tongue-twisting. Other bands apply their own filters, highlighting bands the Grateful Dead maybe even wished they were. Representing the kinder, gentler side of the nu-Dead revival, Real Estate cleanses “Here Comes Sunshine” of its hippie jazz pretensions and buffs it into the AM gold the Dead themselves couldn’t quite conjure for 1973’s Wake of the Flood. On the far left of the dial, Oneida drummer Kid Millions conducts a hyper-condensed realization of “drums/space” that draws a direct line from the Dead’s infamous second-set jam session to present day Brooklyn. Joined by So Percussion for “drums” (who shimmer like Mickey Hart’s most melodic dreams), Oneida tumble episodically from drone to synth swirl to stoned guitar chatter, covering a familiar through-line with an un-Deady focus. It is the centerpiece of one of several Day of the Dead sequences that approximate the Dead’s ever-variable song-suites.
In this way and others, the Dessner brothers find different ways to interpret the Dead, in micro and macro, letting artists stand in for the band’s various sides. During the set’s approximated jam sequences on the second and third discs (Lighting and Sunshine, respectively), the Dead’s weirdness shines through, including a father/son space-dub jam-out by Terry and Gyan Riley on a near total reconstruction of Bob Weir’s “Estimated Prophet” (yes, that Terry Riley). The band’s jam flagship “Dark Star” gets several treatments, including a happening studio improv labeled “Nightfall of Diamonds” and a full pass by the Flaming Lips, where the Oklahoma psychedelicists translate the song’s theme into a krautrockin’ bassline and build a jam that doesn’t so much go anywhere as build a safe space for Dead freakdom in whatever galaxy the Lips are occupying these days.
More than nearly any other act that might be considered for a massive multi-disc tribute, Grateful Dead songs retain a three-dimensional historical presence. Even the most casual fans know that each Dead tune comes available in a range of versions from a variety of periods in the band’s history, at varying tempos and with different collections of musicians and gear and drug habits. Day of the Dead serves a variety of purposes, and at its best engenders genuinely fresh perspectives combined with excellent performances. Like many a Dead show, it doesn’t always hit the mark, but unexpected magic emerges often enough to make the whole operation worthwhile: over here, a spooked Lee Ranaldo/Lisa Harrigan duet on “Mountains of the Moon”; over there, Bela Fleck’s banjofied “Help on the Way/Slipknot” drawing the connections between Garcia’s mid-’70s prog period and his own banjo roots.
Some of the most exhilarating moments come during songs the Dead themselves didn’t give much attention to, like “Rosemary“—nitrous-washed on 1969’s Aoxomoxoa and barely played live—which finds a freaky-folky new setting with Mina Tindle (and Friends) uncovering the song as a melodic precursor to Garcia and Hunter’s more accomplished later work. Providing more subtle renovations, Will Oldham (who previously recorded a gorgeous “Brokedown Palace” for a 2004 tour single) rightly earns three slots on the collection. On “If I Had the World to Give,” played by the Dead in 1978 and dropped, he pulls the rare trick of creating a performance perhaps more definitive than the Dead’s own, stripping the song down to only piano and erasing the '78 Dead’s two-drummer pomp. He doesn’t quite manage the same feat on “Rubin and Cherise” (a solo Garcia staple, played a few times by the Dead in 1991), but finds his own Bonnie turn on the song, yo-yoing from Garcia’s preferred melody but standing astride and moving freely inside Robert Hunter’s magic-touched world in a way that many of the other singers here don’t manage.
What is most surprising, maybe, is that—on a tribute to a fundamentally guitar-driven band—the guitar and its inevitable solos are deemphasized. There are guitar moments, of course, like William Tyler’s Garcia-gone-countrypolitan curlicues that dot Hiss Golden Messenger’s “Brown Eyed Women” and a hypnotic 10-minute “Wharf Rat” fronted and jammed by Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan, though on the latter the guitars themselves are gently blurred into a Nationalist haze. On a live Wilco version of “St. Stephen” featuring the Dead’s Bob Weir, Nels Cline’s unceasing lead torrents stand out, perhaps the closest anyone on the collection comes to Jerry Garcia’s own approach. But it is over the past decade and change, as well, that Garcia has become fully accepted into the alternative pantheon, an audible pillar of American guitar alongside John Fahey, Television, Sonic Youth, and others, and Day of the Dead is a ripple in an already busy pond. A new all-star set Dead tribute could be assembled every year or two and the range of interpretations might never be exhausted, such as on Songs to Fill the Air, an exquisite folk-leaning tribute CD-R issued as part of WFMU's annual fundraising marathon this spring.
In some regards, the only question is how long the current revival can possibly last. With five-and-a-half-hours here that range from art-song rewrites (Anohni and yMusic’s “Black Peter”) to fantasias about what it might’ve sounded like had the Dead said “yes” to Bob Dylan’s request to join them permanently in 1989 (War on Drugs’ “Touch of Grey”), it would seem we may’ve reached peak Dead, if history hadn’t already concluded such a thing to be impossible. But to top it, some of the surviving bandmembers will tour baseball stadiums this summer under the Dead & Co. logo, minus Phil Lesh and accompanied by John Mayer. While they might not be producing new material (other than a jam or three), Dead & Bro, combined with the Dead’s current fashionability, could likewise constitute something large enough for another generation of musicians to define themselves against—at least until they discover Live/Dead and/or LSD. In the mean time, extending the Deadhead tape trading network of the '80s (where live versions of “Touch of Grey” were a hit a half-decade before Arista Records or MTV got their hands on it), the Dead’s songs will continue to flow by their own folkways.


Mozart’s Sister is the alt-pop project of Montreal’s Caila Thompson-Hannant, formerly of Shapes and Sizes. Her debut LP is most compelling as a pop album when it’s not trying to hook you; the rest is promising, but perhaps could do with a little more dementedness.

Being

It seems like it's hard to go a day in 2014 without running into a new purveyor of alt-pop and her new hyperkinetic vision of an alternate-universe top 40 chart. For such a crowded and seemingly welcoming genre, though, the sound itself is hard to get right, but when it is, it’s exhilarating, like the music itself has been subject to a Rube Goldberg machine for beatmaking, with no part too ridiculous to use. The risk is ending up with “pop music for people who don’t like pop music”: too restrained to really sink its hooks in, yet not quite intricate or patient enough for a slower approach, and usually carrying airs of preciousness. It's a trap that ensnares many, from the biggest of pop stars to the most DIY of bedroom producers—but when artists manage to avoid it, the results can be thrilling.
For now, Mozart’s Sister—the project of Montreal’s Caila Thompson-Hannant, formerly of Shapes and Sizes—have sidestepped these pitfalls. Naming herself after the hypothetical auteur from A Room of One’s Own (as she puts it, the B-list to Mozart’s A-lister), Thompson-Hannant taught herself to produce with a demo version of Ableton and worked her way up the equipment ladder. She’s an apt student of tech and vocal tricks, swooping from sotto voce to a diva-like belt at a single hook’s notice. In these ways, she has peers: Grimes—a friend of Thompson-Hannant’s—is an obvious reference point, as is Chairlift's Caroline Polachek on her album from this year as Ramona Lisa, Arcadia, as well as tUnE-yArDs in her less frenetic moments.
But Mozart’s Sister’s riffs and hooks suggest Thompson-Hannant is looking equally toward peers on the other side of the divide. She has this balance in mind from the first track, “Good Thing Bad Thing”: “Give me the body, but don’t sacrifice brains/And give me the brains, but don’t sacrifice the love pains.” As with AlunaGeorge’s Body Music (the paradox of alt-pop albums like this, by the way, is that they’re usually self-consciously the work of auteurs, yet very difficult to talk about without naming peers), it’s a simplified metaphor, but gets at the idea well enough.
Later, Thompson-Hannant drops another line that describes her approach: “Holding hands with the good and the bad simultaneously.” “I think I was trying to make sunny songs, but they didn’t come out that way,” Thompson-Hannant told the *Montreal Gazette. “*Demented is what I’m going for.” While her best tracks aren’t quite demented, it’s fascinating to hear them attempt that ideal regardless. “Faif” resembles a R&B crossover track from 10 years ago wiped out with a chalk eraser until only the fuzzed-over verse and prechorus remain; the lithe melisma and tinny beat of “Enjoy” suggests Thompson-Hannant played Kelela and chiptunes on separate speakers and recreated what she heard. “Chained Together” is like a lowing goose trapped in a chirpy pop song, lending an extra disturbing bit of codependency to the title, while “Do It to Myself (run run)” crafts a subtle hook from skewed backing vocals, synth cowbell and something resembling the cave groans from a Commander Keen game. The main vocal line’s so low in the mix and muttered that it takes a while for the a narrative of domestic abuse, which starts with “Daddy’s got a gun” and gets darker as it goes, to sink in. As with and possibly more so than many similar albums, Being rewards time over immediacy.
But it’s seldom a good sign when an artist admits in interviews that their album’s “unfocused,” and Being suffers as such. Sometimes, a single sonic element grates, such as the unwieldy shrieks of “Good Thing Bad Thing.” Elsewhere, Thompson-Hannant almost seems reluctant to fully commit to the pop song she’s written; the hook on “My House Is Wild” is about half as big as its a cappella frame calls for, and “Lone Wolf” is pleasant enough but has neither an outsider’s stalk nor the gleeful predation of, say, Shakira’s take on the theme.
“Salty Tear” and “Don’t Leave It to Me” are older tracks–the latter appearing on last year’s Hello EP–and accordingly scan as rough drafts included on the record regardless; the latter, in particular, finds its central element, a chantlike “Fear, fear, fear!/ Sex, sex, sex!”, reprised on “A Move” as “Death-love-life-want.” (Perhaps both tracks could've stood to be revised entirely, as the abstract Freudian stuff is one incantation away from a flop-prone Natalia Kills song.) That said, the other three-quarters of “A Move” are stunning, with a drifting croon, a little like mid-career Lisa Germano, so muted it stops entirely toward the middle; parts of “Enjoy” and “Do It to Myself” plumb the quieter end of the dynamic range to the same hypnotic effect. Perhaps counterintuitively, Being is most compelling as a pop album when it’s not trying to hook you; the rest is promising, but perhaps could do with a little more dementedness.


DJ Katapila is a Ghanaian DJ who has become known for his marathon sets. His own production borrows as much from early Chicago house and Detroit techno as from Ga dance music, and boasts a remarkable sense of humor.

Trotro

Trotros are to Accra what the subway is to New York, in that neither city would function without them. On Trotro, DJ Katapila pays homage to Accra, and on its title track, he tips his hat to its infamous minibus system. From the song’s outset, a cartoonish voice exclaims, “Makola, UTC, Kaneshie!,” imitating the mates (drivers’ assistants) who lean out the side of the trotros calling out their destinations. That same kind of humor and depiction of daily life runs through much of DJ Katapila’s music, which is a mix of neo/traditional Ga dance music, and old-school house and techno.
DJ Katapila, aka Ishmael Abbey, grew up in the ’70s in the coastal district of Jamestown in Accra, a historically Ga area. The now-40-something became known for his marathon DJ sets, to the point where his tirelessness earned him the nickname “Katapila,” after Caterpillar construction equipment. Yet it wasn’t until several years ago that he started actually producing, and in 2009, he self-released his debut album, Trotro. Since then, a number of his tracks have circulated on bootleg tapes, which is also how Awesome Tapes From Africa found his music and ended up partnering with him to issue this rerelease.
The album was never actually pressed to cassette, yet it still sounds as if it were playing back through a thin layer of dust. This rawness comes in part from Katapila’s own production, in part from the spirit of early Chicago house and Detroit techno, and in part from Ga music. The album is grounded as much by the four-on-the-floor thump of Chicago house as it is by the programmed son clave patterns that are common to so many genres of music across the Black Atlantic, including kpanlogo. Kpanlogo is a type of neotraditional Ga dance music that combines older sounds like gome drumming and street processional music with elements of highlife and ’60s-era rock (i.e., the Twist). It also happens to be a precursor to azonto, whose inflections can be heard throughout Trotro. For instance, on “Sakawa,” the rhythm comes through in the snare, on “Trotro” through the handclaps, and on “Cocoawra” and “Lalokat,” very clearly in the cowbell.
Besides house and azonto though, DJ Katapila also often references other kinds of contemporary, black club music, while still largely staying within the sphere of Accra life. “Nkran Dokunu” refers to Accra kenkey, a corn-based staple food of Ghana. The track bounces along at around 140 BPM and feels almost like a slower, crunchier shangaan electro. Midway through it, as a toy Casio-like figure plinks along over a galloping snare, two cartoon-voiced characters chant in Ga, “Accra kenkey is delicious! We’re eating it!”
By contrast, “Ice-Inc” is a lot darker in mood. It’s a direct line to old-school Detroit techno, complete with 808-sounding electrofunk cowbell, and the time-warped, intergalactic quality of a Kraftwerk song. It may not scream “Accra” like some of the other songs on the album. But as a part of Trotro as a whole, it speaks to the multitude of musical and cultural influences that have been exported and imported to the city over time. That, and the propensity to approach the otherwise unremarkable with a remarkable sense of humor.


Over synth-heavy beats by the co-founder of Philadelphia's Working on Dying collective, the Chicago rapper writes intensely diaristic songs delivered with numb detachment.

WAKE UP LUCKI

Over the last decade, Chicago rap has been characterized by two predominant strands in the popular imagination: drill, with its hard edges and bleeding heart, and the candy-colored stylings of more backpacker-friendly artists like Chance the Rapper, Vic Mensa, and Mick Jenkins. If Keef and Durk are like the Thug and Gucci of Chicago, the scene revolving around Chance resembles more the “New Atlanta” of iLoveMakonnen, Awful Records, and Earthgang. But Lucki, who received one of his first major co-signs from Chance in 2014, has taken neither of those routes; he’s closer in spirit to Playboi Carti, a singular artist who has paved a lane of his own. Fittingly, one of Lucki’s chief beatmakers, and the sole producer of his new album WAKE UP LUCKI, is F1LTHY, founder of Philadelphia production collective Working on Dying and the sonic accelerationist behind many of the brain-melting beats of Carti’s Whole Lotta Red.
While both Lucki and Working on Dying straddle the line between mainstream rap and the most abrasive edges of SoundCloud, on WAKE UP LUCKY, they maintain a measured distance from the limelight. Lucki’s partnership with a certified hitmaker yields a diaristic sketchbook that feels almost invasive to view; his inward focus recalls the seasonal depression of Bladee, one of the first acts F1LTHY produced for, more than anything from his Chicago peers.
Lucki’s sadness and Working on Dying’s futuristic, synth-focused beats have their clear progenitors. Raider Klan and SpaceGhostPurrp are to 2010s rap what the Velvet Underground were to underground rock: To adapt the old adage, it seems that everyone who downloaded a zip file of Blvcklvnd Rvdix 66.6 in 2011 got themselves a cracked copy of Fruity Loops and started making beats. But while so many artists latched onto Raider Klan’s hauntology—the ghostly horrorcore samples, lo-fi recording styles, and ’90s nostalgia—Working on Dying gravitated toward the psychedelic haze, that feeling of taking a tab of acid late at night when you’ve already been awake watching television for 36 hours. There are shades of electronic music in their sound, which sometimes recalls Drain Gang or the beats AraabMuzik was making in his Dipset Trance Party era, but it’s more like hearing a rave through drywall while you slip into a coma than being in the middle of the throng. Working on Dying’s production also frequently recalls another kind of underground music popular on SoundCloud in the 2010s: the endless deluge of Nintendo novelty remixes that layered Danny Brown or Death Grips over the Wii Shop Channel music or Legend of Zelda soundtrack cuts—adorable and even cutesy sounds juxtaposed against jagged and emotional bars.
F1LTHY’s distinctive tread bass sound is dependably thick and pounding across WAKE UP LUCKI, but the synths on top are unpredictably kaleidoscopic: “BUSY DAY” brings in crystalline bells, while “OUTRO” sounds like an off-kilter church organ. Individual synthesizer notes bleed and blur together into a continuous stream of off-kilter sound, like on “WHERE I BE,” where the higher pitches of a keyboard turn eerie and flute-like. In the background of “SPARKS VISION,” pitch-shifted vocal flips turn the human tongue into ribbons of tone, the most EDM-like touch on the album.
While Chance’s early brand of hallucinogenic gospel eventually calcified into wife-guy music that sounds profoundly out of touch with the current moment, Lucki’s own emergent style, which the title of his first mixtape dubbed “alternative trap,” has remained fluid and evolving, imbuing his psychedelic worldview with shades of darkness. Despite F1LTHY’s clout and the similarities Lucki might share on the surface with Carti or Uzi, WAKE UP LUCKI strikes a hermetic tone, a party for two without a feature to be found. Lucki’s career has been marked by addiction, missed opportunities, and isolation, which you can resoundly feel in his flow: While the beats might be brightly shaded, Lucki himself frequently sounds dejected and distressed, with a mind numbed to pain and half-fried thoughts that trail off. His voice is a steady waveform, with dry and raspy intonation that remains at a consistent volume, expressing his affective detachment. When Lucki talks about drugs, he sometimes describes bliss and euphoria, but just as often there are bad trips and bad vibes, hangovers and depressive hazes and dry mouth. While substances are frequently an escape, Lucki also readily admits that they’re inseparable from and woven into his other issues, and a contributing factor to the decline of interpersonal relationships.
There’s no room for cleverness or intense wordplay in Lucki’s blurred reality; it’s the peeled-back frankness of Lucki’s bars that makes them so wounding, like the unadorned confession of “CRYOUT”: “She let me cheat if I’m in it to win/Talkin’ to God, repentin’ again.” Lucki usually raps in an inside voice, not quite mumbling or crooning, but at times disaffected and even dissociative—he sounds more comfortable with hands in pockets, shades drawn, standing in the corner than raging on stage. F1LTHY’s now iconic production tag — “Wake up, F1LTHY”—is befitting of an artist who frequently sounds like he’s trying to escape consciousness. WAKE UP LUCKI is the portrait of an artist who has pulled away from the scene he came up in, the major-label artists who might platform him, and many of the closest people in his life; sometimes, he suggests, it takes isolation to hear your own voice.

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Pairing a world’s worth of traditional instruments with widescreen gestures, the legendary duo explore the myth of a Greek god in an unknown tongue.

Dionysus

Is music now too small for the long-running duo of Dead Can Dance? Are we really meant to enjoy their grandiose statements via tinny white earbuds rather than earth-quaking sound systems? And how will their forthcoming tour fare its medium-sized concert halls, rather than the Roman amphitheaters such enormous music deserves? At least Dionysus—the band’s ninth album and first since 2012—is the rare record that took two years of research and recording to make and actually sounds like it needed every one of those 730 days. Its epic proportions suggest a work chipped out of marble.
Since forming in Melbourne, Australia, in 1981, Dead Can Dance have shown the kind of towering ambition that has given them purchase in goth-rock circles and among filmmakers looking for windswept gravitas. By 1993, their reputation was so strong they could put out Into the Labyrinth, an album of classical legend and global folk, and sell half-a-million copies. Even by Dead Can Dance’s own outsized standards, though, Dionysus is an album of radical ambition, a work of scholarly pursuit and musical depth that explores European folk traditions, the boundaries of language, and Latin American bird calls. A two-act record representing “different facets of the Dionysus myth and his cult,” it is divided across seven tracks, each meant to share a new phase of the god’s saga. During the first piece alone, “Sea Borne,” Brendan Perry turns his hand to instruments including the shrill zourna, the haunting gadulka, and the creeping sustain of the bowed psaltery; he eventually employs everything from the gong to the gaida (a bagpipe from Southeastern Europe) to weave together this rich sound.
Perry and singer Lisa Gerrard have long been uninhibited in the search for musical inspiration, borrowing everything from Gregorian chant to Middle Eastern progressions. But whereas their last album, 2012’s Anastasis, was at least tethered by Perry’s cavernous rock vocal to some sense of pop, Dionysus has no such space. During Act 1, scattered voices provide texture rather than melodic leads, while the vocals on Act 2 tracks “The Mountain” and “Psychopomp,” where Perry and Gerrard duet, are rendered in an invented tongue that she once called “the language of the Heart.” The effect is one of primal emotion unencumbered by the baggage of words, so feeling eclipses thought.
For a band blessed with one of the most exquisite singers in rock, rivaled in dramatic range and enigmatic tone only by the likes of Cocteau Twin Elizabeth Fraser, this might feel like a waste. But Dionysus compensates with its widescreen sound, a towering musical synthesis that is unafraid to pair the Brazilian berimbau with the Russian balalaika on “Dance of the Bacchantes” or the Bulgarian gadulka with Aztec flutes on “Liberator of Minds.” Likewise, the sampled voices form a patchwork quilt of global influence, ranging from a North African souq to an Andean ritual, all supported by field recordings of a Swiss goatherd and Mexican bird calls. “World music” is a rightly pilloried term that broadly ghettoizes non-Western musicians. But Dionysus aims to reclaim it, defying simple geographical origin in search of a pan-national synthesis that has its roots everywhere and its home nowhere.
You could live off these magnificent textures alone, though Dionysus webs them around rousing melodies. The tempestuous string line on “Sea Borne” plays against a pattering zither, like blustery wind against a storm’s first tentative drops of rain. The gorgeous vocal interplay on “The Mountain” hinges on eternally rousing harmonies that linger somewhere between benevolence and threat; the sound wordlessly scores the fear of god. Best of all, though, is “The Invocation,” where a heartbreaking choral lament meets a strutting beat from the Iranian daf and the Turkish davul drums, emphasizing the “Dance” of Dead Can Dance.
Moments like these lift Dionysus way above the dusty academic exercise that a two-act reflection on the cult of a Greek god could be. That the album addresses such lofty concepts is admirable. That it does so in a work of visceral, accessible music that rewards surface listening and prolonged exploration is doubly so. This is music of grandeur and grand humanity.


Assembled from years of recordings made on the road, the Armenian British producer’s debut LP for Four Tet’s Text label flips traditional instruments and captured moments into dancefloor thrills.

Bolts

Hitting play on Hagop Tchaparian’s debut feels like opening an old journal. The first thing you notice is its texture—every synthesizer sounds as if it’s fraying at the ends, each field recording seemingly covered in dirt, a marker of the miles traveled to reach your ears. Bolts was assembled from stray recordings Hagop Tchaparian collected over 15 years, from street musicians and wedding videos to small towns where his father’s family took refuge after being exiled from Musa Dagh, an ethnically Armenian region in present-day Turkey. Though it’s the first full-length album from the British-Armenian producer, it demonstrates the confidence of his vision, tackling the dancefloor with an invigorating, lived-in energy.
Tchaparian’s path to dance music has been unusual: His most notable musical output prior to this came from his time as guitarist in the short-lived British pop-punk band Symposium in the ’90s. Since then, he’s been orbiting London’s club scene, recording the occasional remix in between tour managing for acts like Hot Chip and Four Tet. It’s the latter who brings Tchaparian’s debut to us via his Text label, and whose own cerebral approach to electronica offers a lens with which to understand Tchaparian’s music. Bolts can be deceiving at times—its highs are breathless house assaults, yet Tchaparian’s debut is a largely restrained experience, one that’s less concerned with dominating a festival crowd than with enveloping the listener in its rich, grainy world.
Bolts is filled with instruments from Tchaparian’s Armenian heritage, and he folds them into his tracks with the instincts of a seasoned pro. When “GL” roars to life with its flailing zurna, it fits so naturally that you might not even notice the ruptured bass note tearing through the middle of the track. After swelling like this for a good minute and a half, the whole thing finally caves in with a decimating techno thump, as stampeding dhol drums careen into a crushing finale. The transition from that into the relatively calmer synths of “Escape” is like the moment you step out of the club drenched in sweat, only to be greeted with your own foggy breath in the cold night air.
That headier, more measured space is where most of Bolts makes its home. As the deep groove of “Raining” slowly kicks in, Tchaparian shrouds the track in wobbly, Stott-ian distortion, slowly gaining momentum as the synthesizers seem to fold back on themselves in reverse. Often, Tchaparian sounds like he’s just having fun seeing what he can weave out of his personal bank of recordings. “Ldz” begins with the sound of fireworks booming over a whistling crowd before Tchaparian chops it up and spins it into its own miniature groove. Compared to more attention-grabbing tracks like “GL,” or the garagey sci-fi stomper “Round,” he regularly opts to let his tracks simply simmer, even if the results don’t always gel into something fully fleshed out. “Flame,” the album’s longest song, plays like a volcano threatening to erupt without ever fully doing so; it wanders through different zones, coasting between tranquil ambience and tense passages of escalating hand drums, occasionally arriving at a steady house groove before dissipating into a cloud of floating synthesizers. As the track ends on a recording of what sounds like a scribbling pencil, you can sense Tchaparian sketching out his own concepts in real time too, seeing what sticks without worrying if it’s completely developed.
If there’s one moment where all of Tchaparian’s ideas come together to form a magnificent whole, it’s on “Right to Riot.” Tchaparian launches out the gate with his tumbling dhol drums, raising the intensity one notch after another until that shrieking zurna returns once more to signal a pummeling, crowd-annihilating drop. As he charges through the track, you can practically feel his urgency as he pushes his samples deeper and deeper into the red, twisting them up and unleashing them with a determined, violent ferocity. At his best, Tchaparian welcomes us inside these scattered moments from throughout his life, transforming them into personal and collective catharsis.


Clouds Taste Metallic, newly reissued in a 3xCD set, is the last album where the Flaming Lips just sounded like some oddballs from Oklahoma. It stands as the peak moment in a fantastic four-album run that began with 1990’s In a Priest Driven Ambulance.

The Flaming Lips: Heady Nuggs: 20 Years After Clouds Taste Metallic

By 1995, the post-Nevermind dream that any eccentric rock outfit could follow Nirvana’s path from indie outsiders to chart-toppling insurrectionaries was officially dead. The '90s mainstream would not be transformed in the image of the '80s underground after all, and, as it turned out, Sonic Youth weren’t festival-headliner material. By mid-decade, many artists pegged as the next Nirvana had either deliberately swerved from the spotlight or swung for the fences and whiffed, thus ensuring that no used-CD store was ever lacking for multiple copies of  Exit the Dragon and Let Your Dim Light Shine.
For a moment there, the Flaming Lips seemed destined to join the also-rans. Released in the fall of 1995, Clouds Taste Metallic was the band’s seventh album, but the first to arrive with any commercial expectations. After a decade on the fringes, the Lips struck paydirt with 1993's Transmissions From the Satellite Heart, whose fluke hit single—"She Don’t Use Jelly"—drove album sales into the low six figures and earned the triple crown of '90s TV appearances. Understandably trying to capitalize on this momentum, the Lips loaded Clouds with more cheery and catchy songs about girls doing strange things with foodstuffs. But album sales floundered and, by the fall of 1996, reclusive guitarist Ronald Jones—whose swirling screech was so crucial to the two aforementioned records—had left the band, reportedly out of frustration with drummer Steven Drozd’s worsening heroin addiction.
Clouds Taste Metallic is the last album where the Flaming Lips just sounded like some oddballs from Oklahoma, before Wayne Coyne, Drozd, and bassist Michael Ivins refashioned themselves as studio scientists and transformed into the blood-splattered, laser-shooting, Miley-collaborating freak show that’s topped festival bills since the dawn of the millennium. But the record stands as the peak moment in a fantastic four-album run that began with 1990’s In a Priest Driven Ambulance. It's a sturdy wood-paneled shrine to the band’s teenage rec-room touchstones, channeling the shortwave frequencies of Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the fuzz-toned boogie of The Slide**r, the rustic splendor of After the Gold Rush, the thundering thrust of Houses of the Holy, and a Revolver-like balance of kid-friendly frivolity and strobe-lit freakery. Clouds' sad-eyed opener, "The Abandoned Hospital Ship", charts the Flaming Lips’ early '90s evolution in miniature: A creaky Coyne serenade (click-tracked by a wheezing film projector) gives way to a volcanic sludge-rock eruption, but the maelstrom is eventually smoothed over by merry church-bell chimes and swooning choral harmonies. It’s the musical manifestation of what would later become a common Lips lyrical motif—even in the midst of chaos, everything’s going to be okay.
Here, the Lips use distortion to exhilarate rather than annihilate: "Psychiatric Exploration of the Fetus With Needles" may rumble like a rocket launching out of your floor, but its perma-grin melody invites you along for the ride. Coyne and Jones’ guitar noise is infused with character and humor, like the spasmodic riffs that personify a patently absurd song like "Guy Who Got a Headache and Accidentally Saves the World" or the buzzing surges that power "Lightning Strikes the Postman". And there’s also something reassuringly earthbound about their sound—amid the high-octane blast of "Kim’s Watermelon Gun", Jones drops in countrified fills like he’s plucking an electric banjo, while the cuteness of "Christmas at the Zoo" is kept in check by a George Harrison-style refrain that emulates the weepy tone of a pedal steel.
But if Clouds Taste Metallic pushes Coyne’s lyrical whimsy into overdrive, it also provides the first inklings of the more emotionally charged songwriting that would flourish on 1999’s orchestro-rock opus The Soft Bulletin. Rather than merely invoke outer-space imagery for trippy effect, stargazing songs like "Placebo Headwound" and "When You Smile" find Coyne simultaneously awed and humbled by his infinitesimal place in the cosmos. And the alternately rousing and defeatist "Evil Will Prevail" resonated all the more deeply in the aftermath of the April 1995 domestic-terrorist bombing in their native Oklahoma.
The songs that fill out this expanded three-disc 20th-anniversary edition—part of the band’s Heady Nuggs reissue series—likewise capture the Lips at their most down-to-earth, evincing an intimate charm that’s since been vanquished from the band’s increasingly futurist, high-concept music. Even though, post-Transmissions, the Lips were an MTV-approved major-label rock band touring with the likes of Tool, Stone Temple Pilots, and Candlebox, they were more spiritually in tune with the lo-fi pop and skewed, tape-manipulated psychedelia bubbling up from the American indie underground in the early '90s.
The wonderful 1994 EP Due to High Expectations… The Flaming Lips Are Providing Needles for Your Balloons (included here in its entirety) is anchored by an early, slightly scruffier version of future Clouds closer "Bad Days", but mostly imagines a parallel '90s where the Lips were signed to Drag City instead of Warner Bros. Woofer-blowing sing-alongs ("Jets Pt. 2") collide with honky-tonked Alan Vega revamps ("Ice Drummer"), shout-outs to a then-unknown Bill Callahan (via the live in-store performance of Smog’s "Chosen One") and impromptu Christmas carols ("Little Drummer Boy"). The Needles EP is supplemented here by corrosive covers of Bowie ("Life on Mars?"), Bolan ("Ballrooms of Mars"), Sinatra ("It Was a Very Good Year") and other ephemera, but collectively the bonus material reinforces the lo-fi maxim that a great song can withstand the most unforgiving production.
No song makes that case more persuasively than "Put the Waterbug in the Policeman’s Ear", a piano ballad that sounds like it was recorded into a dictaphone that is nonetheless one of the prettiest, most poignant songs in the Lips canon. It also serves as a reminder of a time when Flaming Lips songs required two-minute preambles from Coyne to explain their meaning (in this case, a half-true story about his stoned brother’s paranoid freak-out at a grocery store, and his imagined superhuman ability to telepathically summon insects to attack meddlesome cops). But where the post-Bulletin Lips thrived by translating serious songs into circus-sized spectacle, back in the mid-’90s, Coyne had a special gift for making the most outlandish concepts seem logical and oddly relatable.
Heady Nuggs’ third disc—a bootleg-quality document of a May 1996 show in Seattle—is hardly lacking for expository banter, though the real novelty is hearing the Lips rip through a set untethered to the ceremony and choreography that defines their shows today. It’s a grainy-but-radiant snapshot of the mid-'90s Lips live experience, and the performances—particularly the awesomely interstellar version of In a Priest Driven Ambulance’s "Take Meta Mars"—capture this version of the band at the peak of their brain-scrambling powers. (You may not be able to see the twinkling pinwheel Christmas lights that smothered their stages at the time, but you can more or less hear them.)
But a telling moment emerges from the epic distention of "Psychiatric Explorations" that closes the set proper. After stretching what was originally a three-minute song past the nine-minute mark (and seriously straining Coyne’s voice in the process), the Lips sputter out, and within months, their entire guitar-powered aesthetic would follow suit. Ronald Jones was gone just a few months later, and before year’s end, the band had turned into something else entirely. Compared to what followed, the Flaming Lips that made Clouds Taste Metallic were just a rock'n'roll band. But this reissue reminds us of what a uniquely wondrous and marvelous rock'n'roll band they were.


The short but well-developed debut from the Polish singer features close collaborations with the trip-hop luminary as they conjure a hushed, alluring atmosphere.

Marta Złakowska / Tricky: When It’s Going Wrong

When It’s Going Wrong

In 2017, on the opening night of his European tour, the British trip-hop veteran Tricky quickly needed someone to fill in on vocals. A promoter suggested Marta Złakowska, who was then working at a bar in Krakow. Marta, a well-trained jazz singer, was a quick study and joined Tricky first on that tour, then on recordings with his label False Idols. With this partnership, Marta joined a decades-long line of storied trip-hop producer-vocal pairings—most famously, in Tricky’s case, Maxinquaye with Martina Topley-Bird. Comparisons between the two singers abounded and seemed near-inevitable: their similar origin stories, their smoke-curl voices. But Marta is an even more low-key presence, almost ephemeral. On her arrestingly spare debut album, she’s found a sound to match.
When It’s Going Wrong does a lot with very little. The nine-track album lasts barely over 19 minutes—a downright astonishing runtime, given how developed and complete it sounds. Tricky’s arrangements, inventive and fast-shifting as ever, account for part of this, but the credit also lies in Marta’s gift for beckoning you into the mood. The album follows a fairly direct line from Tricky and Marta’s 2020 project Fall to Pieces, and the two records’ lead tracks—here “Intro,” then “Thinking Of”—are remarkably alike, sharing a stark arrangement of a few low synth notes repeating pendulum-like. But on “Intro,” Tricky slows and pares back the production even more, the riff reduced to two notes from three. Marta’s vocal is fast and insistent alongside it, pushing against the arrangement until that arrangement abruptly goes silent.
This is the album’s feel: all tension, little climax, and little need for it. “When It’s Going Wrong” is a study in almost agonizing restraint, with instrumentation that sounds more like insinuation and lyrics that leave most things unsaid. When Marta sings “Call me when it’s going wrong,” murmuring over a creeping, unchanging tempo, it sounds like an omen—maybe even a threat. In these sub-two-minute tracks, Tricky’s production somehow finds room to shift and intensify the mood—a string interlude on “Nowhere,” a few sudden moments of drum-and-bass on “Today”—and also to fall quiet all of a sudden, as if someone’s changed their mind. On “Swimming Away,” the album’s slinkiest and most uptempo track, Marta and Tricky trade spoken-word lines over what sounds like the faintest possible disco. It, too, grows hushed in its final moments.
When It’s Going Wrong is less emotionally raw than Fall to Pieces. Instead, almost every lyric imagines moving without progressing: pushing through water, sinking into quicksand, going nowhere. Perhaps this theme is what drew Marta to the first of two covers on the album: “Today,” a downtempo version of a Jefferson Airplane cut that’s part glowing love song, part confused revelation. Marta pulls the track away from its folk-rock sunshine into a dimmer place. Simply by replacing the choral backing vocals with Tricky’s husky whisper, the original song’s singalong becomes something more like a private confession.
The second cover closes the album: “Czarno Czarny,” a Polish folk song. Suddenly a brighter tone is set: a major key, a bell line chiming in unison with the melody, a runtime that’s among the longest on the album. The simplicity brings to mind something Tricky said, talking up his collaborator: “Marta doesn’t care about being famous, she just wants to sing.” It’s exactly how she works: casually conjuring a seductive vibe, then just as nonchalantly letting the tension fade.


On his first album for Warp, the South London musician mixes grunge guitars with drum’n’bass breaks and claustrophobic atmospheres, seeking uneasy catharsis.

LOGGERHEAD

On his 2021 single “South,” Wu-Lu (aka Miles Romans-Hopcraft) burst through a blocked emotional dam and into the spotlight. Raging against being priced out of his South London community, the Brixton artist mounted a forceful grunge-rap blitz—a surprising but welcome shift for a musician whose earlier releases—lush downtempo under the influence of Los Angeles beat music—would have struggled to send a ripple through a mosh pit, much less open one up. The song’s bruised emotions mapped a restless mind in flux, hinting at Wu-Lu’s ascendance as a genre-breaking force.

With the arrival of LOGGERHEAD, Wu-Lu’s Warp debut, it’s clear that Romans-Hopcraft isn’t interested in being the punk prophet of the anti-gentrification movement. Instead, he channels his energy inward, harnessing the turmoil at the heart of “South” to drive out his demons. Suffused in cut-up breakbeats, glowering basslines, and claustrophobic atmospheres, it’s the sound of your brilliant but quiet friend learning to say it with their whole chest for the first time, even if they’re still practicing in front of a mirror.

LOGGERHEAD’s most compelling moments are when Romans-Hopcraft allows his fury to surface. “South” remains the gold standard; no lyrical moment delivers as staggering a gut punch, or as visceral an image of urban decay, as its opening couplet (“I used to live in South London/There isn’t much of it left”); no vocal outburst cuts as deeply as the blood-curdling scream that forms the song’s chorus. Penultimate cut “Times,” a grungy thrasher featuring a monstrous drum performance from generational talent Morgan Simpson, of black midi, comes closest to giving “South” a photo-finish challenger. Simpson’s explosive power behind the kit imbues everything, including Romans-Hopcraft’s drawling vocal delivery and searing guitar hook, with an awe-inspiring swagger that makes the record’s longest song fly by like it’s the shortest. “These are tuff times for my mind and its design,” he sings, his voice confidently dragging behind the surging beat. Feeling the pressure but in no rush to respond, Wu-Lu bends but doesn’t break.
But it takes him quite some time to build up the necessary anger to push the record toward catharsis. Despite their forceful drums, the first four songs are hazy and emotionally evasive, hamstrung by uneven and cluttered mixes that push Romans-Hopcraft’s voice way down in the murk, and light on insight. Clichés like “Be careful what you wish for, it might just come true,” on plodding, perfunctory opener “Take Stage” only add to the risk of the audience nodding off before the curtain fully rises. The sullen, aimless drum’n’bass of “Facts” is the weakest of this opening stretch, and the most startling example of sonic mismatch. Elsewhere, Romans-Hopcraft proves his talent as a versatile and commanding vocalist, but his mumbled delivery here, buried beneath jittery drums and distracting electronic flourishes, makes you wonder if he feels anything about “watching TV, seeing my ideas jacked.”
Thankfully, once the album gathers the necessary steam, LOGGERHEAD’s world-weary portraits of survival take on a sharper focus. The hypnotic, largely acoustic “Calo Paste” is intense without being volatile: Romans-Hopcraft and guest vocalist Léa Sen circle around Mica Levi and Raven Bush’s gorgeous, minimal string arrangement with the chanted refrain, “I don’t want to see your mental health go to waste,” their multi-tracked voices washing ashore together in a disarming flood of tenderness. “Slightly” wraps self-doubt (“I don’t feel the same/And I’m weak when I pray”) in a deceptively lithe trip-hop groove; the harrowing “Blame” (“Eyes shot red/Couldn’t see my best friend/Soul was dead”) is a delirious yet strangely tender take on noise-rap.
In the introduction to closer “Broken Homes,” Romans-Hopcraft recites a short poem with straight-to-camera seriousness, lamenting the impossibility of “reasonable thought” when “anxious frames of guilt” constrain “everyday reality.” Live, the song’s wiry groove emerges from an extended feedback jam, but here, he’s cloaked in nothing but a gently swelling string drone. After spending an album with his guard up, there’s something distinctly human, even sweet, about his vulnerability. Then a seething post-punk groove whips up clouds of dust, and he tears into a free-associative meditation on doubt and resilience. Even as the music rages around him, it’s clear that he’s finally lowered his shield.


Soaring Swedish indie rockers Makthaverskan deliver anthems of heartache that anyone could love on their third album.

III

Makthaverskan make music for the margins. Formed by a group of schoolmates from Gothenburg, Sweden, the dream punk band rejects the ultra-slick production and cloying cuteness that dominates their native country’s famed pop machine. Instead, they lean on the angsty melodrama of ’90s Swedish rock group Broder Daniel, who were in turn influenced by the Velvet Underground and the Jesus and Mary Chain’s feedback-soaked pop. But despite some major aesthetic differences, Makthaverskan do share a crucial belief with artists like the Scandinavian hitmaker Max Martin, who once said that “a great pop song should be felt when you hear it.”
Chasing that deceptively simple goal, Makthaverskan vocalist Maja Milner pens her lyrics quickly, in an effort to preserve the urgency of an experience. Her wistful confessionals and biting “fuck you”s create tension with the more uplifting guitar melodies that swirl around her. If the group’s ferocious last album, 2013’s II, was akin to ripped flesh, then III finds the band picking at the scabs of cauterized wounds. Though it is certainly a darker listen, III is largely about the same concepts as its predecessor: unquenchable desire that eclipses reality, the ruthless blow of rejection, and the struggle to remain afloat even when “humanity equals misery,” as Milner sings on the lyrically-fatalistic and sonically radiant single, “Eden.” But on tracks like “To Say It as It Is” and “Days Turn Into Years,” Milner and her bandmates—bassist Irma Krook, guitarist Hugo Randulv, and drummer Andreas “Palle” Wettmark—dip into slow-burning dramas, revealing a new type of bareness along the way.
Milner’s quest for love is blocked at seemingly every turn on III. “You don’t even see it in my eyes/You are all that I want,” she sings on opener “Vienna,” her voice swelling with yearning before revealing a harsh reality: “But now you’re dead/You’re gone!” On the album’s low-key highlight “Leda,” Milner struggles with a lover who ignores her (and everything else), but chooses not to take it personally. And on the Roy Orbison indebted “In My Dreams,” love is only possible as a fantasy. Yet in typical Makthaverskan fashion, all the crashing hi-hats, fuzz pedals, and soaring hooks make heartbreak sound triumphant. These are songs of survival, not misery.
Perhaps because Milner spends so much of III in the grips of factors beyond her control, her reclamation on the wildly carnal “Witness” feels like a gigantic triumph. First released as a single two years ago, the song is a radical departure for Makthaverskan, a hardcore call to the pit. While the band indulge in a self-described Iron Maiden moment, Milner relishes a foe’s eventual downfall, her voice a dramatic, determined foil to the band’s pummeling onslaught.
Penultimate track “Comfort,” meanwhile, is an ominous post-punk number that feels like a follow-up to II’s “No Mercy,” which became a rallying cry of sorts due to its empowered chorus: “Fuck you for fucking me when I was 17.” Here, Milner guides someone else through a shared trauma as best she can: “His mistakes took our youth/… To ease the pain what can I say, it will never go away.” Returning to the idea that a song’s emotional pulse should be immediate, the song’s haunting guitar riff communicates as much pain as the anguished chorus. Every note is felt.


The Texas rapper’s second album shows a great talent struggling to find her place while focusing on what she does best: aggressive, take-no-prisoner bars.

Pressure

Black women’s bodies have always been an easy target in mainstream hip-hop. Our physicality is continually used as a tool to extract pleasure or inflict pain, and it’s so ubiquitous that for a listener, the effect barely registers. The past few years, though, have signaled other (i.e., more feminist) possibilities. In the age of Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s rise to superstardom—which is, of course, indebted to predecessors like Trina, Lil’ Kim, and Nicki Minaj—the sexual pleasure of women promoted by women is, almost unbelievably, commercially viable. At the same time, the commodification of rap music steered by women—in an environment still dominated by men—has made the lines between agency and objectification or sex positivity and sexual exploitation murky, to say the least.
Beaumont, Texas native Big Jade’s second album Pressure finds itself caught in the maelstrom of this identity crisis. Powerful men in the industry still openly ascribe to sexist norms, which complicates the strides made by women in recent years. Two months before the album dropped, Jade revealed in a radio interview that she refused to sign a deal with Migos rapper Offset (also Cardi B’s on-again, off-again partner) because of a stipulation to “get [her] body done.” Meanwhile, BeatKing, the first person to take a chance on Jade and the producer of seven out of 10 tracks on her album, specializes in club-ready, sex-charged bops that tell women exactly what to do with their bodies. In the music video for a collaboration with Ludacris released earlier this year, BeatKing plays a doctor administering butt injections.
So where does this leave Big Jade? It’s a question Pressure struggles to answer. Jade’s signature hard-hitting and crazy-fast raps, best showcased in her at-home freestyle videos, are abundant and flawlessly delivered on the project but often seem at odds with the Houston Club God’s languorous and predictable production. Even when she’s explicitly making pussy poppin’ rap, she sounds less than enthused. The result is an album that displays a great talent struggling to find her place.
This isn’t to say that she has to choose between being sexy or hard. That kind of binary thinking only reinforces stereotypes. Jade’s debut album Bsbbj (spearheaded by BeatKing) was full of raunchy tracks with fun and sexually fluid takes on pussy-rap (“I hate a bitch that’s fake gay/Bitch, this ain’t no playdate,” she spits on “Period Pooh”). Similarly, on Pressure, “Dem Girlz”—a rare instance in which an early-aughts flip (in this case, David Banner’s “Like a Pimp”) avoids coming off as lazy and uninspired—recalls the playfulness of Jade’s earlier project; it’s ready-made for warm weather debauchery. But the rest of the album indicates a desire to move away from twerk anthems. She can still tear the club up, but lyrically, she seems to be reaching more for a “Dreams and Nightmares” effect than a “Back That Azz Up” one.
The bulk of Pressure reflects what Jade does best: aggressive, take-no-prisoner bars that assert her ability to whoop your ass on the track and in person. Her breathless raps on “Jade Wins” and unhurried, almost casual threats on “Pressed” reveal her impressive range and vocal control over beats that play to her strengths. Elsewhere, bland production constricts Jade’s raps rather than propping them up. It’s too easy to tune out what she’s saying on “No Hook,” especially after the beat switches. “Up Now” is simply boring, and the slow trudge of “Respectfully” is uncomfortable and could’ve used an extra Jade verse instead of BeatKing’s standard strip club bars.
Big Jade may only be 5’2, but her freestyles have shown that she lives up to her chosen moniker. While Pressure doesn’t match the bar set by her one-offs, it affirms that she is bigger than formulaic club beats. That said, a real summer might finally be upon us, and I’ve never wanted more than to drunkenly throw it back. I’d happily do it to Big Jade, but I’d rather not just move to her music. I want to listen to her, and it’s clear she still has a lot to say.

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Drawing from two long-out-of-print compilations from the mid 1980s, this abridged reissue documents experiments in fusion—mixing post-punk, electronic, and fourth world—that sound both as strange and as relevant as ever.

Terra Incognita

The best compilation titles are as evocative as they are explanatory: Valium Orgasms, Someone Got Their Head Kicked In!, The Philosophy of Sound and Machine. When Spaniards Ani Zinc and Javier G. Marin released two compilations entitled Terra Incognita (“unknown territories”) on their Auxilio de Cientos label in 1985 and 1986, the name was both succinct and suggestive. Few eras of music remain as muddy and confounding as the early-to-mid ’80s, when the lines between post-punk, industrial, no wave, new wave, fourth world, and other styles became nearly impossible to parse.
While recent comps may have explored this period in greater detail (some of the better ones include The Minimal Wave Tapes and Oz Waves), Terra Incognita I and II are two of the earliest. They have languished out of print for over three decades, with both volumes trading online for ludicrous amounts. On this affordable, single-volume edition, the British reissue label Emotional Rescue cherry-picks tracks that have eluded compilers over the years. Today, Terra Incognita remains wondrously arcane, with thrilling new sounds from around the globe—France, Belgium, Spain, America, Africa—lurking around every corner.
No matter the year or the context, “Criola,” the collaboration between the Congolese/Belgian duo of Denis Mpunga and Paul K, would be a standout: It is a startling mash-up of Mpunga’s heavenly warble and a rockslide of drum machines, explosive hand percussion, and effervescent marimba lines. The heady mixture was basically a one-off (though the Music From Memory label recently unearthed extra tracks from this session). Its only real antecedent from that decade came from French composer Hector Zazou and his Congolese collaborator Bony Bikaye, who in 1983 teamed with French electronic duo Cy 1 to make an audacious amalgam of African rhythms, drum machine, and experimental electronics on Noir Et Blanc. Zazou and Bikaye contribute “Komba” to this set, and the duo again sounds like little else from that era: Melding Bikaye’s earthy vocals to a weightless synth backdrop, they create a woozy sort of lullaby. Zazou also appears in another enchanting collaboration on “Stranger in the New Light,” which finds him working with the Congolese singer Ray Lema and a mysterious figure named Nodland, their ethereal voices casting spells over dribbling hand drum and crepuscular keys.
Other acts featured on the comp are even more obscure, but while these artists may not have wielded much influence at the time, these mutant noises feel particularly resonant today. Right now, somewhere in Bushwick, some band is probably seeking to emulate Mal’s whiplash synth-punk or the Belgian husband-wife duo Bene Gesserit’s drunken machine din and howling, whispering gibberish. While they might have only made one cassette in 1984, the Poe-referencing entity called La Caida de la Casa Usher suggests what Arca might sound like if he had come up as an early-’80s punk, with Spanish-language vocals snarling over drum machines that flay like a whip.
It doesn’t all anticipate the future, or even hold up very well. The flanged, lo-fi guitars of Image Pour Image and the muffled funk-punk weirdness of Instead Of sound pretty much like any other stumbling rock-not-rock act, no matter what peculiar production choices they made. But nothing here is as strange as American outsider Danny Alias and his answer record to Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman.” Alias’ first single, “Civil Defense,” caught the ear of no less than Chicago house legend Ron Hardy, who created an edit of the tune. Here, “Big Brother - The Answer” mimic’s Anderson’s vocodered delivery, intoning cryptic phrases (“Hello, this is the clinic/Are you queer?”; “Big Brother said/You’re not the first/But you’re not the last”) as synths and woodwind lurch in the background. By turns paranoid, vicious, gorgeous, perverse, and silly, it hints at even stranger musical terrain that still remains unexplored.


On her full-length debut, the R&B singer expands her musicality and lyrical confidence. The album is ambitious in its scope even as it treads the oft-wandered territories.

Forest in the City

Tierra Umi Wilson has been preparing for her close-up. Her 2021 EP Introspection Reimagined was, at first glance, a premature step by a new artist—a revisitation of her 2020 EP Introspection, where she was accompanied by a live band. A re-do felt like unnecessary filler in a still nascent career, but UMI wanted her listeners to experience the stages of her artistic maturation in practice—to see the constant shifts in real time. On her debut album, Forest in the City, her expanded musicality and lyrical confidence make it clear what comes to fruition when an artist’s development is central to their position as an entertainer. Her influences—Erykah Badu, Brandy, SZA—are obvious without falling into mimicry, and her growth is both exciting and compelling.
Spanning 15 songs, the album is ambitious in its scope even as it treads the oft-wandered territories of self-discovery, stifling lethargy, and complicated relationship dynamics. On the standout tracks, slivers of truth meld into fictional songwriting just enough for listeners to catch her reflection. “I wanna be happy with my own path/I wanna be good to the friends that I have” she sings on “sorry,” her syncopated oohs and ahhs holding the lyrics in a soft frame. “I wanna be a stoner with my own pad/I wanna be cool with my motherfuckin’ dad.” The vibe is chill while still being very real, an atmosphere that permeates the record. “too late” grapples with the circumstances of revealing too much too soon in a relationship, while “moonlit room” deals with the complicated longing that comes after separation. On the latter’s chorus UMI delivers her lines with rapid-fire control and clarity, projecting ambivalence while still feeling sentimental.
Similar to her 2020 EP, UMI wrote all of the songs on Forest in the City. While producers Logiksmind and Psymun appear both here and on her last project, she takes a stronger hold of the reins and pushes her sound in a more dynamic direction. On “wish that i could” she experiments with heavier bass and an electronic twist to her voice that’s been stretched to achieve a danceable but still steady lilt. And there’s plenty of summer jam potential on “what would you do,” a song for those pleasantly buzzed club nights. As she deliberates taking a lover home or simply chilling alone, her vibe is cocky and assured, a departure from the earnest ballads of her earlier work. In this space, she’s nonchalant about the dating game, observing its monotonous routine and predicting the eventual outcome—meeting, hanging out, someone leaving, someone staying, and repeat.
Halfway through the album, the length starts to feel like a weight; some tracks feel padded on without a discernible purpose. Singles like “whatever u like” and “birds eye view” are pleasant but forgettable—her layered harmonizing on each shows the ease with which UMI can coast over a beat, but we also hear her pen at its most uninspired. “everything will be alright” has UMI starting off in Japanese before switching to English, signaling the ways she effortlessly moves from one to the other, and masking the labor it takes to express yourself with equal insight and power in multiple languages. But the track feels obligatory and tailor-made to punctuate fleeting captions about living your best life.
Even so, she pulls us right back into her orbit with “lost and found” which builds off all the facets that shape her art: intimacy, reflections, minimal production. UMI has a subtle, slow-building voice, one that can fool you into thinking you can play it in the background while you go about your day. But then you hear a revealing lyric and catch a sweeping note that commandeers your attention. On Forest in the City, UMI makes the case that we are all our own forests moving through cycles of growth and decay. She has been learning about herself while sinking into her music, and this new chapter shows an artist who will not be rushed—who’s ready to be seen because she’s done the heavy lifting.


Aimée Argote's band Des Ark oscillates between thrashing noise rock and hushed folk. Everything Dies is her most unified project, and for all the turmoil it confronts, it creates a sense of safety. Nearly every song extends a hand to the abused, the subjugated, or the otherwise marginalized and reassures them they’ll be all right.

Everything Dies

Des Ark's Aimée Argote can shred with the best of them when the mood strikes, though on Everything Dies, it doesn't. For most of the last decade, Argote's band has existed as a Jekyll/Hyde operation, oscillating between thrashing noise rock and hushed folk. Depending on her lineup, a Des Ark show might find her making a mockery of ear plugs, contorting her body into impossible positions to force the cruelest sounds from her instrument, or playing for a crowd seated on the floor, inviting them to squeeze in closer in order to hear her over her unplugged guitar.
Argote makes either extreme feel like her natural state on stage, though capturing both on the same record has proved more of a challenge. 2011's Don't Rock the Boat, Sink the Fucker positioned scorching punk uncomfortably against pretty but sometimes overworked songs that lost some of the intensity of Argote's solo performances. On Everything Dies, she avoids that whiplash. Though it was recorded in bits and pieces at six studios in five states over a span of several years, with a range of collaborators including Swans' Thor Harris, Engine Down's Jonathan Fuller, and Saddle Creek journeyman Andy LeMaster, it coheres like the product of a single session.
No track benefits more from this unified approach than "Ties". Argote has been kicking that song around since at least 2007, when it first appeared under the misleadingly silly title "Covert Conspiracy of Spanish Speaking Cats" on a solo session Argote recorded for the Durham station WXDU. On its Everything Dies' update, she's accompanied by imposing guitars and drums that give the song thrust, underscoring Argote's violent imagery without drowning out the dread in her voice. It's the most devastating song she's ever written, a chilling documentation of the tolls of loving an addict—the promises they might break, the things they might steal, and the bruises they might leave. "Here it is," she sings, "The bathtub where you'll find the love of your life, choking up his own blood." The words seem to fight her as they leave her mouth.
Not all of Everything Dies is so bleak—it couldn't be. "French Fries Are Magical" plays like a prolonged hug, as does the album's most unabashedly pretty number, "Street Woods". And the one song on the record that does live up to its irreverent title, "Don Taco & His Hot Sauce Toss", is downright gleeful, a communal rejoice that falls somewhere between the Polyphonic Spree's rainbow sing-alongs and the radiant pop of Feist's The Reminder.
As on Don't Rock the Boat, there are moments on Everything Dies where you can't help but wonder how a songwriter this good has existed so far below the radar of so many listeners. In a recent interview with After Ellen, Argote shed some light on why that might be, explaining that she prefers to play queer-friendly venues and safe spaces removed from the threats and harassment that women face at traditional venues. "I don't really feel like I need to cultivate a male audience," she explained. "My songs are written for women and they're written for queer people; those are the people I've been closest to in my life, who I obviously want to share my music with … Really what I would like to do is create spaces that are safe for everybody and since I identify as queer I think it helps."
Those comments sparked some distracting backlash from male commenters somehow upset that a woman might want to target her music at her own community, but they reveal a lot about these songs. For all the turmoil it confronts, Everything Dies really does create that sense of safety. Nearly every song extends a hand to the abused, the subjugated, or the otherwise marginalized and reassures them they'll be all right. "I'll bandage up your arms, your legs, and leave you where the wounded lay," she offers a lover on "Coney Island Street Meat". Argote cycles through nearly every emotion imaginable in these songs, but the one that drives her the most is concern.


Reissued on vinyl some 40 years after its initial release, Don Cherry’s sprawling, free, ecstatic masterwork defined what came to be known as “world” music.

Brown Rice

After the seismic 23 months (1959-1961) in which the Ornette Coleman Quartet flipped the jazz world on its ear, Coleman, drummer Ed Blackwell, bassist Charlie Haden, and trumpeter Don Cherry scattered to the winds. In the decades that followed, Coleman jammed with everyone from the London Symphony Orchestra to his ten-year old son Denardo to the Master Musicians of Joujouka. Ed Blackwell drummed for Eric Dolphy and Yoko Ono while Haden wed Spanish Civil War folk songs to jazz. And Don Cherry set about traversing the globe in search of what he deemed “organic music.”
Today, you can find the word “organic” in any Kroger or corner bodega, but in the early ‘70s it was as alien as yoga, world music, and a macrobiotic diet, all concepts that would inform Cherry’s approach to music for the rest of his life. Uprooted from Oklahoma to the Watts ghetto in California when the oil boom destroyed the family land, Cherry was attuned to societal ills from an early age. And while his work was rooted in jazz improvisation, Cherry sought a level playing field in his work that could unite Indian classical, African township jive, Indonesian gamelan, Arabic folk, electric Miles, early minimalism, orchestral music, skronky noise, and more, sometimes all at once. Cherry’s childlike vision of inclusiveness pioneered what would soon be known as “world music.” But rather than a sippable café soundtrack, Cherry’s music was sprawling, free, ecstatic, and devout.
Most of his ‘70s albums came in the form of concert recordings that captured him in the heat of the moment, but 1975’s Brown Rice is a thrilling exception. Cut across two studios in New York, the four compositions here present the most focused vision of Cherry’s muse, resembling his wife Moki Cherry’s carefully assembled tapestries rather than the paint splatters of live performance. Featuring Haden on bass, old Coleman drummer Billy Higgins, fiery saxophonist Frank Lowe, and Moki on tambura, with glints of vocals and electronics, the album is searing and psychedelic, pulsing and deeply hypnotic. Abstract, visceral, and deeply personal (the cover photo shows Cherry at Watts Towers), Brown Rice anticipates the boundary-free future of music. But it wasn’t always easy to hear; never reissued on CD in the US, this vinyl reissue comes some 40 years after its original release.
In the opening minute of “Brown Rice,” Cherry’s world-embracing vision is made clear. An ode to a time in Cherry’s life when he subsisted only on brown rice “to remind myself there were starving people in the world” (though Julian Cope suggests it might be about heroin instead), it speaks to the two extremes of Cherry, that of the spiritual seeker and the junkie jazz musician. Two electric keyboards chime in tandem, emulating either Chinese classical music or gamelan, while Haden’s wah-wah bass interlocks with electric bongos and forms a groove. Vocalist Verna Gillis purrs an inviting and skin-prickling “ooh.” As it all starts to percolate and cook, Lowe’s bluesy outbursts lance the tapestry and Cherry calmly utters the titular phrase and other ingredients like “miiiiso,” his intonation making that bulk grain sound at once wholly sensuous and slightly sinister.
“Malkauns” references one of the oldest raga forms in Indian classical music. Moki Cherry’s tambura acts as a resting breath beneath the expansive composition, slow and deep, as Haden takes an extended solo that’s contemplative, poignant, and unhurried. When Cherry and Higgins enter nearly five minutes in, the piece moves from calm to urgent, casting off the strictures of Eastern and Western musical forms and cresting towards a sumptuous peak.
“Chenrezig” is the closest Brown Rice ever gets to sounding like straight jazz, though purists might disagree. Nearly as long as “Malkauns” and with a gaze similarly affixed towards infinity, it’s named for the most revered of all Bodhisattvas (the Dalai Lama is considered to be his reincarnation). After opening chimes and Cherry’s growled incantation set the ritual in motion, his trumpet flutters around Lowe’s melodic, vibrato-heavy solo, leading towards a tranquil center some 8 minutes in. The piece then turns ferocious; ecstatic blues chords from pianist Ricky Cherry urge the song forward and Lowe plows ahead with a shrieking, stratospheric solo, Don Cherry joining him with high-register runs and vocal ululations.
Closer “Degi-Degi” suggests a liminal space between German kosmische, Afrobeat, jazz fusion, and electric funk, powered by Haden’s incessant bass and Cherry’s high-arcing solos and whispers about “the goddess of music.” Relentless and incandescent, it rebuffs the notion that spiritual music must be placid. Much like Coleman, Albert Ayler, and John Coltrane did in the ‘60s, Cherry suggests—as Alice Coltrane did in the same era—that true spiritual awakening stems not always from a state of peace but from tumult and upheaval. In its balance of noise and bliss, beauty and chaos, Brown Rice is true world music.


The Ithaca, N.Y. rapper/producer Sammus writes at the intersection of race, womanhood, sexuality, and nerdiness. Pieces in Space is her strongest work to date.

Pieces in Space

When something gets tagged as nerdcore rap, the implications are clear: this is for the Star Wars diehards, the sub-Redditors worried about the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s continuity with canon, or as Alex Trebek once put it on “Jeopardy!,” “losers.” It’s less MF Doom coolly retconning a comic supervillain into an enigmatic rap persona, and more Childish Gambino’s “Freaks and Geeks.” Nerdcore rap evokes the awkward and gangly, completely at odds with traditional rap bravado but still unknowingly, clumsily pantomiming its gestures nonetheless. To a point, it has long been insinuated that nerdcore rap is mostly just a safe space for introverted white males to write artlessly hypertechnical verses of Guardians of the Galaxy fan fiction and the like.
Enter Sammus, a Cornell PhD student and rapper/producer named for the Metroid heroine, making what she calls “black girl nerd rap.” Her strongest work to date is Pieces in Space, a weird and confessional collection of songs about being weird and confessional. Sammus’ music represents an under-reached subset of geek fandom: it’s made for black feminists trying to quietly coexist in the gaming and comic subcultures. But as the recent GamerGate scandal proved, this can be a culture of sexism and anti-progressivism, and it exists within a larger world that already belittles and diminishes black women specifically. Sammus’ writing converges at the intersection of race, womanhood, sexuality, and nerdiness, doing so with a subtlety lost on most in the subgenre, who rap like they’re mashing every button on a controller at once to do a combo. She’s just as influenced by hardcore nerdcore trailblazer Mega Ran as she is Kanye West. Sammus is a passionate idealist and craft-first poet, penning the kind of wordy marvels that rap annotator types fawn over; she is self-described as “living in the land of keystrokes and passwords/Cheat codes, amiibos, and actors.”
On the surface, the reference points for Pieces in Space are obvious and in keeping with the subgenre’s framework, dealing primarily with characters in the geek lexicon: MMOs, Nintendo, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Sega with mentions of Loki, Luke Cage, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Lakitu, and Majin Buu. But a closer reading reveals understated and sharp critiques about the ways we relate in the digital age, and how they often rob us of true connection. In the margins, these themes continuously arise: Talking to Siri when no one will listen, sharing a Netflix account with an ex you never talk to, being attacked by anonymous lynch mobs of trolls and fire-starters in comment sections. It documents life online as a black female gamer, and in turn reveals how the internet is dehumanizing us.
On “Comments Disabled,” a tightly-coiled chronicle about the pervasively toxic and antagonistic internet culture that now extends all the way to the White House, Sammus dismantles trolls. “I’m thinking you should invest in collecting a best friend,” she raps, “Who won’t let you press send/To someone you just met/Through Twitter or Sirius XM.” On “Perfect Dark,” she examines the lack of women of color in comics, games, and anime, sending a simple message: black girls want to have heroes, too. Alongside Jean Grae (a skilled lyricist who herself is named after a comic hero), “1080p” finds Sammus writing about the hardships of balancing grad school, an indie rap career, and interpersonal relationships when trying to communicate emotions through phone and computer screens, an idea fittingly conveyed by the concept of seeing things in higher resolution.
What unfolds in Pieces in Space is a tale of personal identity and perspective that provides interesting insights on micro and macro scales. Sammus paints a complete and complex self-portrait while exposing truths about the subculture she wades through, and the greater world at large. She’s a ferocious and thoughtful MC whose flows call to mind the solving of a Rubik’s Cube, especially on songs like “Headliner” and “Genius.” Her hooks can leave something to be desired; they’re usually too long-winded and chewy to be earworms, sticking out like sore thumbs. But at any given moment, she’s liable to rattle off a bar like “Gotta spit so sick that you drain Big Pharma/Get your skin so thick you don’t get stigmata” on “Cubicle.” She’s as likely to rap about phosphates and integers as she is to name-check Serena Williams or Emmitt Till. Her delivery is piercing, her perspective refreshing. She ends up becoming the role model she once set out to find.


Drew McDowall spent time in Psychic TV in the '80s and Coil in the '90s, during which time he honed his potency as a manipulator of synthesizers, samples, and esoteric sounds. Collapse is his debut full-length under his own name, and on it he taps into a deep wellspring of ritual, apocalypse, and neopagan awe.

Collapse

Like anyone involved in the intricate network of bands that sprang from Throbbing Gristle, Drew McDowall has contributed to a number of projects over the past few decades. He’s most notable for his tenure in Psychic TV in the '80s and Coil in the '90s, during which time he honed his craft as a manipulator of synthesizers, samples, and esoteric sounds. One thing he’s never done, though, is release a solo album—that is, until now. Collapse is McDowall’s debut full-length under his own name, arriving 37 years after the first recorded appearance by the Poems, the Scottish punk band he formed with his then wife, and future Strawberry Switchblade member, Rose McDowall.
It’s been a long journey from teen punk to avant-industrial vet, but on Collapse, McDowall sounds anything but spent. The album’s five tracks—instrumental, save for a smatter of vocal samples—tap into the same deep wellspring of ritual, apocalypse, and neopagan awe that fueled Coil, only with a fuller and more focused sense of dread. Nowhere is that as evident as on "The Chimeric Mesh Withdraws (Parts 1-3)", the 20-minute triptych that anchors Collapse with an arcane gravitas straight out of McDowall’s greatest achievement with Coil, 1999’s Astral Disaster. But where Astral Disaster folds ambience and emptiness into its spellbinding substance, "Chimeric Mesh" wields those elements like hammers. The result is cinematic, insectoid, and foreboding, even as it morphs gently from movement to movement in a fugue of skittering static and fractured blocks of noise.
Another through line of McDowall’s work over the years is psychedelia, inasmuch as it intersects with the finer pulverization of industrial. "Hypnotic Congress" takes a while to settle into its mesmeric groove, but when it does, its rhythmic cascade of echoing pulses, looped chants, and submarine blips segues into a mind-dissolving wash. There’s a ceremonially circularity to "Through Is Out" and "Each Surface of Night", each of which phases into a sequence of krautrock-like pings and oscillations by song’s end—McDowall has admitted to being warped at the age of 12 by an impulse purchase of The Faust Tapes—that tensely countermands their eerily organic, almost folk-like undertones. But the most starkly psychedelic stretch of Collapse is "Convulse", a staccato salvo of hollowed-out power electronics whose chilling sampled voice—"I convulsed," intones a woman, clinically—comes across like a radical dub reworking of Joy Division’s "She’s Lost Control", told from the perspective of the song’s subject, and played at the bottom of the ocean.
In recent years, McDowall has collaborated with numerous artists, including Tres Warren of Psychic Ills in the blissful drone project Compound Eye. On Collapse, McDowall is joined by Nicky Mao (of Effi Briest and Hiro Kone), who contributes violin, unspecified samples, and splices to the album’s beckoning mix of recursion and unease. In any case, those contributions are seamless; as a whole, the collection comes across as a unified meditation that channels an atmosphere of doom, morbid curiosity, and the perplexing pluralism of modernity. It’s also frequently beautiful, even if that beauty is undermined by a vagueness that might have been more sharply defined by wider dynamics. As a solo statement, though, Collapse is a winner—a field recording of the psyche of an extreme-music journeyman who’s finally started to settle in and harness his own dark voice.


The genre-bending New York synth-funk septet create a glorious mess on their full-length debut.

Ice Level

On the first couple passes, Ava Luna's Ice Level seems an almost impenetrable mess, charting a dizzying course between the itchy art-funk of the Dismemberment Plan, Tim-and-Aaliyah's future-perfect R&B, Dirty Projectors' forays into slip-sliding harmonics, and a generous helping of funky old soul. But even after you've traced out the many roots of the New York "nervous soul" septet's gnarly genre-bending, you'll find there's simply no telling where they'll take it from one minute to the next. With his band restlessly undulating around him, Ava Luna frontman Carlos Hernandez coos about calculus, coming off a little like The Soulman Who Fell to Earth. Still sounds like a bit of a mess, doesn't it? Sure is; and a glorious one at that.
Hernandez, son of a soul DJ with a background in noise-punk (among other things, he produced the Stateside version of Fucked Up's "Year of the Pig" 7"), belongs to the post-Prince school of falsetto-forward vocalists. Which is not to say he's a particularly studious singer; as much as or more than the man from Minneapolis himself, I'm reminded of the clear-eyed, chameleonic croon of Multiply-era Jamie Lidell, particularly when, like Lidell, Hernandez's love for the music comes across closer to full-absorption rather than simple idolatry. He's got quite a foil in Becca Kauffman, who takes a couple of striking Aaliyah-inspired solo turns here; with both Babygirl's all-knowing tone and her incredible reserve, she slips neatly into these clattering beats, where Hernandez wobbles around them. Kauffman, Felicia Douglass, and Anna Sian can often be found joined in zig-zagging, out-from-nowhere harmony, more than a little reminiscent of the vocal derring-do Angel Deradoorian and Amber Coffman brought to the Dirty Projectors' still-spectacular Rise Above and Bitte Orca. But with so much going on in, under, and around them, Ava Luna never allow themselves the time to fix on any one element; not only do they they sound like a lot of things, they manage to sound like most of them all at once, an impressively deft balancing act atop an ever-shifting platform.
Beneath the vocals, Ice Level's fidgety future-funk seems forever on the verge of flying off the rails, accruing-- then discarding-- an endless stream of whirrs and gurgles. Ice Level's made up of little moments, its unapologetically wriggly, cacophonous caterwaul providing one tiny thrill after another. With all that racket swooping in from all angles, the initial impression is that of utter chaos, one some listeners may never be able to quite settle into. But cock your ear to Ice Level a few times, and it begins to develop its own sort of machine logic, all these bursts of noise propping up Hernandez and co.'s abstracted come-ons and spaced-out soul-searching. Locating the songs themselves amidst these impossible shapes isn't always the easiest, but Ava Luna manage to wrangle the careening elements into a series of sweet spots well-suited to their attention-deficient dalliances with dance music, past and future. Note the ease with which "Ice Level" glides from late-1990s pop radio to sweltering strings of Isaac Hayes, or the way the skittish Destiny's Child nod "Wrenning Day" always seems a second away from spinning itself out. Songs bend, dip, double-back; that "whoa, what was that?" feeling you'll get listening to Ice Level? It persists, no matter how much time you've spent puzzling it all out.
Restlessness aside, I suspect most folks'll find their trouble with Ava Luna is located in the back of Hernandez's throat. Though his love for R&B's slippery side is readily apparent from the first time he opens his mouth, there are moments when he bends so far into a note, it comes off as slightly parodic, a little closer to Beck's winking Prince homage "Debra" than the man himself. These moments are fleeting, though, and they're smartly counterbalanced by the liquid-cool trio of Douglass, Kauffman, and Sian. And, with so much else going on, it's a feeling that, like almost everything else about Ice Level, seems fleeting. Ice Level's willingness to take so much on at once can be more than a bit discombobulating-- you throw this much at the wall, not all of it's going to stick-- but there's a real sense that if they could settle things down just a touch, there'd be a little more for the listener to grab onto from one spin to the next. But, while Ice Level's an awful lot to process, it's the finest sort of overload; listen closely enough, and you can almost hear your circuits being rewired.


The latest EP from the versatile young singer is a harmless taste of pop-inflected R&B, a style in which Khalid sounds largely unremarkable.

Suncity EP

No one hears a Khalid song and is like, “Yo, turn that shit off!” It’s harmless, nobody is mad at it. It’s like switching between radio stations in a car, passing over one for playing a song I hear too often, and another for commercials, before finally settling on a song that makes me shrug—it’ll do. Since arriving on the scene with “Location,” Khalid’s music has always felt like settling. The El Paso, Texas singer has talent: he can jump from genre to genre, his voice is strong, and he even has some charm. But where’s the fun in music made to appease everyone, music that only incites feelings of “I guess so?” Khalid’s new Sun City EP doesn’t escape that feeling. It’s pop-inflected R&B that is so extra-medium, finding reasons to care is difficult.
Khalid prides himself on versatility, a stylistic range that is showcased throughout the EP—no two tracks are the same. But that versatility also weighs down Khalid exposing how he’s not exceptional at one single thing but just pretty good at a bunch. On “Saturday Nights,” a guitar ballad that sounds like the ending credits on a CW teen drama, Khalid’s juvenile lovestruck songwriting comes to surface: “All the things that I know, that your parents don’t.” The song follows in the path of another Charlie Handsome acoustic guitar production, Post Malone’s “Go Flex” but with none of the edge. Khalid’s most successful branching-out moment is when he becomes the latest artist to jump on the money-printing reggaeton bandwagon for a bouncy track with Empress Of and background vocals from Spanish singer Rosalía. Khalid sounds at home having another vocalist to bounce off of and not having to carry the future hit on his own.
But Sun City is lighthearted to a fault. Khalid wants to be taken seriously on the R&B end but drops “Salem’s Interlude” which has to be the first R&B voicemail interlude to not be petty and hurtful. It transitions into “Motion,” a light and glimmery smooth jam that features Khalid without any vigor whatsoever. His voice is sharp and the melody is clean but it only makes me want to press pause and spin a Miguel cut, something with momentum. Khalid is a pop star, he’s capable on the R&B end, it’s just not where he’s most comfortable. “Vertigo” is proof that when Khalid slides into the pop alleyway—the song is reminiscent of the strange pop era when Coldplay ruled the world—his broken-hearted vocals fit perfectly into this world: “But I love you in the moment/I was happy, I was not/I’ve been learning, I’ve been growing/But the worst is yet to come.”
For as popular as Khalid is, he’s still trying to figure it out. The purpose of Sun City doesn’t seem to be a cohesive project but a vehicle to throw seven different sounds into the world and see what sticks. Khalid comes out of the project, mostly the same, still the least controversial pop star we have right now—which, in this moment, we need more of. Khalid is going to stumble into hits, as he should, and when it comes on the radio I’ll probably have little reaction just the usual shrug and a sway.


An expanded new mix of an overlooked, misunderstood 1975 electronic “biomusic” opus—featuring mysterious contributions from Jerry Garcia, David Crosby, Phil Lesh, and others—finally gives the record its due.

Seastones

While there were bushels of pioneering electronic composers active in the mid 1970s, few modular synth players performed their compositions to full arenas and put out nationally distributed quadrophonic LPs. When Seastones, Ned Lagin’s sole album of “biomusic,” was released in 1975, it received enough FM radio play to edge into the outer boroughs of Billboard’s charts despite its pressing in SQ quad, one of three quad competitors that would die in brutal mid-’70s format wars. Though the mix promised stereo compatibility, most turntables rendered a murky presentation of Seastones’ already obtuse music. A 1990 CD realization, meanwhile, accidentally deleted the track breaks. But a crystalline new mix, available only through Lagin’s website, presents a vastly expanded and rearranged two-CD iteration of Seastones, gorgeously reanimating one of the most misunderstood and literally misheard projects in the rock/experimental family tree.
Between 1970 and 1975, Lagin and Seastones arrived at what Brian Eno and others would later call “generative music.” Running modular-synth signals through chains of effects and gates—often involving other musicians as filters—the M.I.T.-trained biologist created what he called “moment forms,” not intended to be listened to in any fixed order. Broken down for the first time into 83 unnamed individual tracks, ready for shuffling at the highest possible fidelity (or cherry-picking one’s favorites) the new Seastones is an ever-changing carousel of surprising sound sculptures, tangible and visceral, often exquisitely delicate—and nearly all unsuited for anything other than total foreground listening, linear only if a listener is willing to commit to a stroll through Lagin’s creations. While some moment forms seem to anticipate Eno’s own experiments with atmospheric music, they disappear into Seastones’ constant reminders about the beauty, power, and sometimes discomfort of pure sound.
Though the original Seastones would find an audience among experimental-music heads and noise connoisseurs, it would likewise remain in the record-collecting memory due to its other feature: an all-star lineup, albeit one with a major caveat. It features significant participation by the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, and Mickey Hart; Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick; the ever-game David Crosby; and others. As the Dead’s in-house modular-synth genius, Lagin performed with the Dead live—check out 9/11/74—and in the studio, and these appearances would cement him as a glowing avant-garde node within the Dead’s music when the band got hip again around the turn of the 21st century. Throughout 1974, Lagin and Lesh would perform unannounced through the Dead’s mammoth Wall of Sound speaker array, making music that was often a combination of minimalist, rumbling, and disconcerting, sometimes moving from harsh and expressive noise to sublime space jazz.
Yet, with a few notable exceptions, these marquee names are virtually unrecognizable except as their most distilled musical personalities, their egos subsumed into the larger creation. On the original, not even Lagin’s name was on the front cover, with Lesh receiving a large-font second billing on the LP sticker itself, though not here. Originally issued on Garcia and Ron Rakow’s independent label Round Records, Lagin’s music would confound generations of Deadheads, though it would also inspire at least one Ph.D thesis chapter and the detailed chronology NedBase.
Perhaps best listened to in the dark on headphones, or sitting directly between properly cranked speakers, Seastones offers a variety of synaesthetic vistas: cybernetic pebbles skipping across a digital pond and over the event horizon (“Track 79”); interdimensional pipe-organ swells (“Track 57”); modular synth beats only a knob-tweak (and bass drop) away from a modern dance floor (“Track 05”); conversations in impenetrable tongues (“Track 06”); cackling insect reveries (“Track 80”); an all-too-brief three-minute movement of Yayoi Kusama-like dots (“Track 70”); bursts of fine-grained static (the 17-second “Track 17”); the rush of ocean in a seashell (“Track 54”); and much more. Very occasionally, recognizable human voices emerge, like the unmistakable quizzical smokiness of Grace Slick, delivering Joycean wordplay (“Track 20”). The double album’s pick hit, as it were, is “Track 66”: Jerry Garcia intoning half-sung poetry (in variations on the original LP’s back cover), a performance as psychedelic as it is tender, his voice merging seamlessly into Lagin’s electronic tapestry.
The culmination of a half-decade of work at M.I.T., Brandeis, and in the wilds of Marin County, the new edition of Seastones is Ned Lagin’s opus, a vast and beautiful musical universe. Ranging from seven seconds to 10 minutes, the 83 non-linear segments of Lagin’s “open form mobile composition” are microcosmic windows into his world. In expansive liner notes peppered by quotes from ecologist-activists like Rachel Carson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lagin patches the long-tail forces of natural history to the moment-form technical specs of his sound-making tools—including modular synths by E-mu and Buchla, a pair of Arps (2500 and Odyssey), and an Interdata 7/16 processor that Lagin programmed directly in machine code and assembly language.
All of it comes glowing with the optimism of the age, combining 20th-century modernism with the San Francisco psychedelic renaissance. The latter was then reaching its apex, rock’n’roll’s pre-punk aspirations still pointing towards the society-changing visions of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog as much as the avant-garde atmospheres of Seastones, with its musical ecologies and systems harmonies. It was all destined to go awry. Lagin would walk away from the Dead world only months after the album was released, resurfacing last year with his first new public work since the ’70s in the form of new photographs, art, writing, and an eclectic, beguiling album called Cat Dreams, less like the atonality of Seastones and perhaps more like what Jerry Garcia might have done had he pushed more rigorously into the age of MIDI.
A quiet and almost secret coda to an age of unimaginable creative ambition, Seastones remains an island of sound removed from the classic-rock archipelago, hewn by waves and now separated by time. “Seas tones,” as Lagin sometimes spells it, the moment forms collected along the shore. The music remains fully mysterious, but no longer impenetrable. Cleaned up, with nearly a half-century more of electronic pioneers behind it, the 21st century Seastones is more knowable than ever—sensations to link the ear and brain on an even more faraway beach.