During the gap between A$AP Rocky’s sophomore album, At.Long.Last.A$AP, and his major label debut, his mentor A$AP Yams’ died. With A.L.L.A.—executive produced by Yams, along with Danger Mouse and featuring Kanye, Lil Wayne, Future, and M.I.A. among others—a real sense of identity has begun to coalesce in Rocky’s work.

At.Long.Last.A$AP

We are in the age of the curator, from meticulously-arranged, aspirational Tumblrs to Drake’s recent stint at Sotheby’s. As it’s grown easier to translate our identities through these careful assemblages of stuff we fuck with, good taste has taken on a new leveraging power. A$AP Rocky, the baby-faced fashion killa and primary figurehead of zeitgeist-wheelie-poppin’ Harlem goon squad A$AP Mob, has always understood this better than anyone else in the rap game. As he should: his own success can be directly traced to early promo on his mentor and A$AP Worldwide co-owner A$AP Yams’ highly influential RealNiggaTumblr, one of the savviest indie-to-major reconnaissance missions this century. That triumph of personal taste has been one of the reasons Rocky’s resonated most with this generation of rap fans and beyond, but it’s also led to his most persistent critique: all vibe, no substance. In between the conceptual Instagram stunts and Harry Potter-themed sartorial wisdom, it’s hard not to wonder about the Rakim Mayers beneath the swaggy labels, and if we’d ever get a lasting impression of his point of view beyond the infinite affirmations that it is, indeed, lit.
There’s been a two-plus year gap between Rocky’s sophomore studio album, At.Long.Last.ASAP, and his chart-topping major label debut, during which he dabbled in fashion design, modeled for Ferragamo, and made his acting debut in Sundance darling Dope. But the most glaring change between then and now is the absence of Yams, or Steven Rodriguez, who died this January at 26 of a drug overdose. Yams’ presence was mostly behind-the-scenes (though he’d often appear in the videos, in all his jiggy splendor), but he was the heart and soul of the A$AP Mob, and Rocky’s success is no short of unfathomable without his guidance. With A.L.L.A.—executive produced by Yams, along with art-rap auteur Danger Mouse—he presents to the world one last relic of he and his best friend’s collaborative vision, and though the album was reportedly completed before Yams’ death, it still feels like an elegy to the closest thing the millennial generation had to its own Diddy or Dame Dash.
Rocky remained understandably private in the aftermath of Yams’ passing, but on A.L.L.A., he seems more open than ever: to the healing properties of hallucinogens, to be sure, but also to revealing parts of his personality that go beyond surface-level. To an extent, this may reflect his recent antipathy towards the much-hyped labels with which he once associated. But it seems more likely a result of growing up, gaining steadier footing in the industry his squad gate-crashed, and coming to terms with himself as more than just a sum of his inspirations and logos. At long last, a real sense of identity has begun to coalesce in Rocky’s work.
"Ok, let’s get past all this swag, trapping, and fashion talking," he exhales on back-to-basics Kanye collab "Jukebox Joints". Turns out, Pretty Flacko’s got real shit to say—though not without the buffer of some par-for-the-course bits of pretty-sounding fluff—and he wastes little time getting to it. Album intro "Holy Ghost" serves as an indictment of the Christian clergy, a grasp towards his own jaded conception of a personal Jesus, and a plea to save his admittedly corrupted soul all the same. It’s clear he’s been sharpening his rap skills on a technical level, too. On "Pharsyde", over a screwed-up take on Danger Mouse’s loping Spaghetti Westernisms, Rocky punctuates a sideways glance at his rapidly gentrifying Uptown kingdom with a loaded "Harlem Shake" reference, the kind of nuanced writing absent from much of his older work. On "Max B", he turns a neck-snapping homage to the incarcerated Wavie One into a commentary on remorseless cops and the prison-industrial complex with newfound lyrical command: "Passed away from a stray from some fake-tough guy/ Now this the kinda story that should make doves cry."
A.L.L.A’s recent singles are among its least interesting moments. All that’s missing from "L$D"'s on-the-nose dorm room psychedelia are the dryer sheets MacGyvered around the smoke detector, though the track makes more sense in album context as something of an extended interlude than it did as a standalone. And "Everyday", with its headline-grabbing Miguel/Rod Stewart mash-up, feels like an overt attempt at a "FourFiveSeconds"-style genre-busting flex, though its transitions are as clunky and unresolved as PowerPoint slide changes. Not to say the album isn’t without hits: lead single "Lord Pretty Flacko Jodye 2 (LBFJ2)" is a monster, with its hulking, siren-heavy production from drill production duo Nez & Rio, and "Electric Body", with old partner in crime Schoolboy Q, seems destined for club tenure this summer. Still, it’s one of this year’s growing list of major rap releases—Thug, Drake, Kendrick—seemingly unconcerned with landing anything on the radio.
Even without the overt grabs for mainstream relevance à la "Fuckin' Problems", A.L.L.A. isn’t short on star power, and Rocky’s coaxed some impressive features from his sprawling guest roster. Lil Wayne steadily gathers momentum on "M’$", barrelling downhill through break-neck plug talk and landing breathlessly at a final fuck-you to Birdman ("I love my YM, ain’t no more CM"). On album highlight "Fine Whine", M.I.A. shakes up a syrupy half-time lurch to spit, "Tell your new bitch she can suck a dick!" with a mouthful of bad blood. On the same song, Future Hendrix (who’s been making it cool to be psychedelic and street for years now) delivers his realest post-Ciara guest verse yet. That "Wavybone" revives UGK over a Juicy J co-production—and that Yasiin Bey shows up at all on the closing track—are curatorial flexes in their own right.
But A.L.L.A.’s most unexpected presence is Joe Fox, a previously unknown songwriter and guitarist who Rocky scooped off the streets of London and fashioned into his protege, and who appears on almost a third of the album. It’s a weird move, on an album full of them. Until now, Rocky’s adhered to a painstakingly calculated idea of "cool." On Long.Live.A$AP, you got the sense his eclectic, of-the-moment features roster were a pointed statement as to how he’d like to be perceived, an itemized breakdown of the context in which he envisioned his own artistry. But A.L.L.A. frequently wanders from overt coolness towards choices that are emphatically off-trend: Danger Mouse, Mark Ronson, Rod Stewart, a sample from a '60s Christmas ditty on "Excuse Me". It’s a welcome change of pace for the former Raf Simons Murderer, as the self-aware tastemaking takes a backseat to hopes, anxieties, tremors of sociopolitical unrest—a beating heart beneath the Rick Owens linens. Instead of a hyper-curated tableau of swag, Rocky’s curatorial eye adopts a more intimate gaze, rendering his collage of disparate inspirations more like a mixtape made for a friend than a sterile exhibition space. This is where his late mentor’s influence shines brightest: Yams’ point of view was so piercing and confident it effortlessly transcended the sum of his influences, proving emphatically that you are more than the shit you like.
The last thing we hear, even after Yams’ ranted outro closes with a triumphant "ASAP, bitch!," is what sounds like an encroaching train, or a shrieking hangover due to hit any minute now, or maybe just reality about to set in. After the party, the afterparty, and the acid-fueled marathon orgy thereafter, the most surreal part of a trip is inevitably the moment you have to rub your eyes and go be a real adult. From the sound of A.L.L.A., Rocky can handle that.

A$AP Worldwide / Polo Grounds Music / RCA


On his second album for Nicolas Jaar’s label, the Russian producer continues to move away from footwork, building a gloomy world that is strangely welcoming.

Steals

“A picturesque story of gloomy worlds”—that’s how Moscow DJ Nikita Zabelin recently described his fellow Russians’ electronic music. Citing the alleged “loneliness” of the national character, he ticked off a list of qualities—“perpetual understatements, significant emptiness, an illusion of incompleteness, melancholy, alienation”—that could also apply to the work of Danil Avramov, also known as the prolific producer Vtgnike.
Born three hours east of Moscow in the city of Vladimir, Avramov has ties to the label Gost Zvuk and is a resident at Moscow’s NII (Science and Art) club. When he began producing in earnest near the start of this decade, Avramov was in obvious thrall to the tumbling rhythms and playful sampling of Chicago footwork. But by 2014’s Dubna, his first album for Nicolas Jaar’s Other People, his double-time beats slowly but surely filled up with ambient atmospherics and lo-fi detritus, like a leaky boat taking on water. Steals—his second album for Other People and first since being released from prison on drug charges—is his foggiest, most abstracted music yet.
Opener “Vechermix” shows just how far he’s come: A world away from dance music of any stripe, it’s a brooding miniature in which the primary elements—acoustic guitar, electric bass, and flute—circle each other like weary pigeons. This loop, lifted perhaps from some creepy Italian prog record or other obscure source, lasts barely two minutes, but it is a compelling introduction to Vtgnike’s world, allowing your ears to adjust to the darkness inside.
Things get mazelike from there: “Sentimental Geometry” pays homage to Midwestern American techno producers like Moodymann and Hieroglyphic Being, with a buzzing keyboard sequence bouncing from dissonant jazz piano. “Sweep” immerses harp plucks in a morass of low rumbles and Auto-Tuned a cappella, launching a stretch of fuzzy tracks with the sonics of a dying sound card. Both “Sausemix” and “VVK” recall the UK producer Actress’ queasy fusions of ambient and club music.
Only “Nervnii RnB” picks up Avramov’s old interest in footwork, but his origins are just a foggy memory here, too. The beat sounds like it’s been spliced together from coughs and sighs. After reaching that imperceptible peak, the back half of the album slinks into the murk, luxuriating in bell tones, lo-fi hiss, and disembodied vocal samples. “Enough of that slow shit,” slurs a dubbed-out voice in “Slowshit,” but the joke’s on it, since there’s not a stethoscope powerful enough to detect this pulse. Just like it began, Steals ends with a surprise: “Primechord,” an airy piano étude reminiscent of Debussy heard through concrete walls.
Steals’ release on Jaar’s label recontextualizes the music to an extent, taking it out of the narrower confines of the Russian electronic scene and resituating it along an international axis of electronic producers who don’t really fit in anywhere. There is a certain loneliness here, the sort you might expect to find in Russian electronic music, especially from a producer who just spent two years locked up. But there’s also considerable warmth, resilience, and even humor. Vtgnike’s world might seem hermetic at first, but step inside, and it proves to be surprisingly welcoming.


Producer Pat Thomas's loving Last Word on *First Blues *reissue reveals Allen Ginsberg as a missing link in the East Village's musical pathways, a secret alt-folk hero hidden in relatively plain view.

Allen Ginsberg: The Last Word on First Blues

The Last Word on First Blues

Apart from a few stray months in the ‘60s, it's hard to imagine any period in which Allen Ginsberg's *First Blues *might have found commercial success, the present one included. But in a somewhat more liberated world, Omnivore's *Last Word on First Blues *box set makes more sense now than any time since the double LP's 1983 release on John Hammond's eponymous indie label. A radical in Ronald Reagan's ‘80s as much in Dwight Eisenhower's ‘50s, Allen Ginsberg's open, gleeful, and articulate queerness bursts through here as clear as ever, a poet dancing with all the legal freedoms earned when a California State Superior Judge declared that Ginsberg's groundbreaking 1956 poem “Howl” was of “redeeming social importance,” and therefore not obscene—freedoms Ginsberg had declared himself to possess long before. While the poet's wobbling voice remains a hard sell in the 21st century (ditto, to some listeners, his sexploits), producer Pat Thomas' loving Last Word on *First Blues *reissue reveals Ginsberg as a missing link in the East Village's musical pathways, a secret alt-folk hero hidden in relatively plain view.
Recorded over three sessions in 1971, 1976, and 1981, the new *First Blues *comes with a third disc of supplementary material, including appearances by Bob Dylan on bass and jazz hero Don Cherry on kazoo. It opens with the Dylan-abetted sing-alongs “Going to San Diego” and “Vomit Express,” both sounding as if Ginsberg had visited Big Pink for a session in the Basement. Amid the surreal-hootenanny atmosphere, in which Dylan jams alongside Arthur Russell, Ginsberg's voice finds a comfort zone. But, just as much as Dylan, First Blues carries forward the sloppy and joyous folk-rock of Ginsberg's East Village neighbors in the Holy Modal Rounders and the over-the-top poetry of his friends in The Fugs, whose co-founder Ed Sanders appears in *Last Word *session photos from 1971. At the heart of the later recordings, too, is Steven Taylor, Ginsberg's long-term musical partner, who fixes the poet's anarchic spirit and wandering melodic tendencies amid a solid folk-rock sparkle—and who would go on to join the The Fugs when that band reunited in 1984.
Though released as one album, *First Blues *also represents three separate slices of Ginsberg's musical career: sex-positive folk romps like “Jimmy Berman (Gay Lib Rag),” word-crammed investigative poetry anthems like “CIA Dope Calypso,” and less classifiable specimens of wise cosmic folk. The lines are blurry, but it is the latter category that is perhaps the most refreshing. Though Ginsberg isn't a singer by most traditional measures, he is a surprising and capable songwriter, finding charming melodies he can only get across in the broadest way, as on “Vomit Express” (from 1971), aided by big gang vocals on the chorus, and the Rounders-like “Old Pond” (from ten years later).
For all his legendary lack of inhibition, Ginsberg's singing is sometimes a bit (ahem) stiff, more a crooning poet than a singer-songwriter. The 1976 band is the most supportive, featuring David Mansfield on elegant pedal steel and Arthur Russell on cello, achieving an easy, swaying grace on “Gospel Novel Truths” and a cool existential swing on “Broken Bone Blues.” These songs and others seem primed for covering by a new generation of free weirdos, including the rambunctious “Guru Blues” (“I can't find anyone to fuck me in the ass”), the solemn “Father Death Blues.” It is on the demos disc, too, that the bed bugs and speed freaks of “NY Blues” provide a through-line to the hyper-local topicality of contemporary East Side songwriter Jeffrey Lewis, fitting in comfortably next to “Scowling Crackhead Ian” and other characters of Lewis' recent Manhattan.
Perhaps a more natural and capable freak-folker is Ginsberg's hubby, the poet Peter Orlovsky, who punctuates his ode “You Are My Dildo” with a game jug-band falsetto, and (on the bonus disc) delivers his fellatio-lovin’ “Penny's Farm” rewrite “Feeding Them Raspberries To Grow” in a convincingly olde-tyme warble. At their best, the players in the three different session bands featured here make a spot for Ginsberg and his voice to become one with the music, as on the 1976 outtake “Slack Key Guitar,” an anti-colonial nu-exotica lullaby that recalls a more chilled-out Van Dyke Parks.
For its numerous charms, Ginsberg's sexual openness continues to make *First Blues *an eyebrow-raising experience three-and-a-half decades after its recording. Nor is it without its complications. “Everybody's just a little bit homosexual whether they like it or not,” Ginsberg sings on the first line of the provocative and Fug-ly “Everybody Sing,” but “everybody” in the song's cosmology doesn't seem to include females. (Orlovsky is a bit more equal-opportunity.) As in his visionary poetry, all of Allen Ginsberg is on display during the the two-and-a-half hours of recordings, intentional and not, but always (and still) vital. As responsible for pop music's turn to poetry as anyone, Allen Ginsberg had more than a few songs of his own.


On her debut EP, South East London singer and DJ Blane Muise combines venomous lyricism with tar-boiling industrial beats to inhabit a fierce, sexual, pathologically impatient, and deeply cathartic alter ego.

Cruel Practice

South East London singer and DJ Blane Muise recently explained that her Shygirl moniker had nothing to do with timidity. The alter ego Muise inhabits on her debut solo EP, Cruel Practice, isn’t afraid to approach others—she’s simply “not down for small talk.” In Shygirl’s world, “time is precious.” She hates when people waste hers, and it shows in a dark, seething persona that combines venomous lyricism with tar-boiling industrial beats.
That impatience has been Shygirl’s trademark since 2016’s “Want More,” her first release as one-quarter of London’s NUXXE collective. The single is a fierce declaration of what she does and does not like: “You wanna go slow, I ain’t into it,” she drawls. “You wanna fuck fast, I’m into it.” Her vocals hang back a bit from the top of the mix, and her bravado is still in the development stage, but the song contains all of the major elements of her style.
As he did on “Want More,” Shygirl’s NUXXE compatriot and go-to producer Sega Bodega fills Cruel Practice with enigmatic, anxious beats that traverse the horror spectrum, from Super Mario’s haunted mansion to Hitchcock. EP opener “Rude” begins with a nod to the iconic shower scene from the filmmaker’s 1960 classic Psycho, but this rendition makes the screeching strings sound bouncier and more pliable, primed to give way to the blown-out bass and stuttering grime sway that follow.
In contrast to the intense atmosphere Sega cultivates with his production, Shygirl’s vocals are unwaveringly deadpan without ever coming across as bored or passive. On the twitchy single “Gush” (co-produced by Sega and Dinamarca), Muise is as cutting as “Gossip Girl” queen bee Blair Waldorf: “If I was feeling you before, I’m not feeling you today/Or any other day/ In my feelings, that OK?” she asks, then adds, “I don’t need you to say.”
There’s an urgency to the assertiveness on display in all five tracks on Cruel Practice—a compulsion to outlast you, to let you know she won’t take your shit, to make sure you understand she’s a good fuck. No matter the circumstance, Shygirl is in complete control. Lead single “O” showcases her ruthless flow, unshaken by Sega’s clanking drums and synths that screech like a Jurassic Park Velociraptor. “Don’t get slack or I’ll ignore you,” she warns, savoring the momentum of the chase. On the EP’s final and best track, “Asher Wolfe,” she plays the scheming villain: “I got you right where I want you/Leave you where I got you/No one to help you.” It’s her eeriest track to date, but Muise wields her sadistic power with ease; her delivery sounds more fluid than ever.
At first listen, Shygirl can come off like the Regina George of grime. She wants to cause chaos. She likes to be underestimated. Cruel Practice could be the manifesto of a horror-movie psychopath. But the record and the character behind it are captivating because what they’re really doing is celebrating the agency of their creator. Dripping in fresh apathy, Shygirl’s blunt lyrics are self-protective shields more than weapons. When Muise feels out control and worries she’s lost her sense of self, songwriting is an outlet. She sees her music as a way of dispelling bad energy by pushing back at it. Muise isn’t transforming into a demon on Shygirl’s debut EP—she’s slaying them.


Japan's early house music scene has only found its way to the West in bits and pieces. Once Upon a Time in Japan, a new compilation, aims to change that. For new listeners unacquainted with early '90s house, the set could easily scan as just a dope set of unheralded tracks that thumped far from the fare of "Club MTV."

Various Artists: Brawther & Alixkun Present Once Upon a Time in Japan

The sound of Japan’s early house music scene has only reached the Western hemisphere in the last few years. Even then, we only catch it in glimpses: An RBMA Radio show dedicated to pioneers like Ecstasy Boys and Frankie Knuckles' production partner Satoshi Tomiie; Rush Hour's illuminating Sounds From the Far East compilation, which gathered the crucial productions of Soichi Terada. But there is a wealth of Japanese deep house and dance music that never made it off the island, much less across the Pacific. Add to it now this set from two French DJs, Brawther & Alixkun, who have dug up their favorite tracks for ハウス Once Upon a Time in Japan, spanning the heyday of the Major Force label in the early '90s to the late '90s.
Scrub the ID tags off of the 15 tracks that comprise this set and you’d be hard-pressed to differentiate between these tracks and their U.S./UK counterparts, so expert is their mastery of house music tropes of the era. For new listeners unacquainted with early '90s house, the set could easily scan as just a dope set of unheralded tracks that thumped far from the fare of "Club MTV." T.P.O.’s opener "Punk Inc. (Hiroshi's Dub)" dates from 1989, when the group was pivoting away from conscious rap toward hip-house (and a few years on, into deep house). Those hip-hop drums are subsumed on the remix in favor of a percolating kick and a phase high enough to give you a nosebleed.
Dig into some of the backstories behind these tracks and it gets slightly odd. The vocalizing that goes with Yutsuko Chusonji’s "Blessing (Magic Ware Remix)" scans as gospel house in the vein of the Sounds of Blackness, made all the more baffling by the fact that Chusonji is known as a famous mangaka rather than as a dance music producer. For those taken in either by the pan flutes and saxophones of Mood Hut (or, you know, Biebs), check YPF’s lone single, "Trance of Love (Tokyo Offshore Mix)" which scans as Balearic house complete with sax solo. Or else check the lovely flute that wafts over Akiko Kanazawa’s "Sawauchi Jinku (Terada Mix)." Tethered to a tough beat courtesy of Soichi Terada, it’s the most overtly Japanese-sounding track here, as Kanazawa is an enka singer whose career dates back to the mid-'70s.
The echoing piano figures that opens the Ecstasy Boys’s transcendent 10-minute epic "Chi Chi Chi Gan Kanon" could slot into almost any attendant Frankie Knuckles remix of that era. Which makes sense in that the trio of Mitsuru Kotaki, Shiro Amamiya, and Tatsuro Amamiya did have singles on N.Y. house labels Quark and Strictly Rhythm, and could have factored into the sets of the day. Throughout the track, the snares stutter, dive and then climb skyward, building until the midway point, wherein that piano returns and takes the track even higher. And even as the track slowly ebbs away, those drums reverberate and shoot up and down like swallows at play. As these 15 tracks suggest, no one comp can serve as a catchall for that country's dance history, but it's a thrilling overview nevertheless. One hopes that the story behind Once Upon a Time in Japan continues to be told.


The Detroit band brings a light touch to the melancholic alt-country songs on this album, which emerged from a spontaneous session in the woods.

Longwave

Sometime last spring, the four members of Detroit’s Bonny Doon fled to a house in the woods of Northern Michigan for a creative retreat near the auspiciously named Mystic Lake. Over the course of one very productive week, the band wrote their second album, Longwave, a sober, spartan folk-rock record with a spontaneous feel. “Sometimes we’ll just go up and bring and a tape machine and record sessions for four or five days,” said Bill Lennox, one of the group’s two singer-songwriters, in an interview last year. Remote in the wilderness, away from their routine, this verdant little album was abruptly born.
This narrative is so familiar that it’s made The Onion: “Man Just Going to Grab Guitar and Old Four-Track, Go Out to Cabin in Woods, Make Shittiest Album Anyone’s Ever Heard” was a howlingly funny headline as early as 2011. But Longwave, thankfully, is much less hackneyed than its framing device, and Bonny Doon exhibit less irritating self-seriousness than might be expected of a band that found its muse in the trees.
Lennox and his co-writer, Bobby Colombo, bring a light touch to their melancholic alt-country songs, staying moody but avoiding the overly stern or solemn. The surface appeal of their sound—the breezy, imperturbable nonchalance, what Lennox has called their “stoned sort-of minimalism”—has more to do with California than Detroit. Even so, darker tones of despair and casual cynicism come through in the lyrics. “And I should be happy, but I’m not/But I’m not/And I should be grateful, I know, but I’m not,” Lennox sings airily on “A Lotta Things.” On “Part of Me,” they make an effort to derive from the misery a kind of lesson: “Appreciate the harder times/To know what it feels like.”
After their wilderness writing session, Bonny Doon returned to record the album at the Key Club studio in Western Michigan, aiming to capture the vibe from the lake house as simply as possible. In this they’ve succeeded: There’s a stark immediacy to the production on Longwave, rendering the band’s simple arrangements and basic chords without a shade of embellishment. They’d much rather use negative space than a dynamic flourish.
A less generous listener might hear this album’s loose, easygoing quality as carelessness, and the band does little to dispel that impression. “Walkdown,” the closer, meanders on for three unfulfilling minutes. “Saved,” at nearly six minutes the album’s longest track, sputters into near-silence midway through before picking back up into an aimless several-minute jam session. The press release, tellingly, highlights this almost-flubbed take as “a candid moment that encapsulates the spirit of Longwave.” Their commitment to spontaneity is admirable, even if it’s not always fruitful.


TK

Rocket Power

Listening to “Greatness,” the closing track to Quavo’s second solo album, Rocket Power, it’s easy to imagine him removing his trademark designer shades and staring himself down in the mirror. The song is one of the album’s several tributes to Takeoff, Quavo’s nephew and one-third of the Migos, who was murdered during a dispute at a Houston bowling alley in November 2022. But unlike the visceral single “Without You,” “Greatness” looks to the future. Over producer Al Geno’s mournful trumpets and skipping drums, Quavo interrupts his reminiscences on the trio’s early days with a command to not dwell on the past. But he can’t help himself—and why should he? Near the middle of the song, he splits the difference, saluting his fallen kin with as much confidence and lyrical agility as he can muster: “Never forget that the Migos amazin’/Look at the ice and the knot in my pants, you know that them young niggas made it.” It’s a lot to face behind a mic, and the tinges of sadness in his voice linger like tear streaks on glass. This tender balancing act marks “Greatness” as one of Quavo’s most affecting songs and a microcosm of Rocket Power at its best. The Migos we knew will never return, but Quavo honors them with old and new riffs on the flex rap that made them stars, and he honors himself by digging a bit deeper into his emotions.
Takeoff’s death looms large over Rocket Power—that’s his nickname, Rocket, in the title, and he’s featured on three songs. Beyond that, he is referenced or alluded to in some way on every track. Quavo is an athletic rapper who can stretch syllables as wide as the backseat of a Wraith, and it’s jarring to hear those schemes serve writing geared around his emotional grief. Quavo raps about crying himself to sleep thinking about Takeoff (“11:11”) and relapsing into a Xanax addiction because of his passing (“Disciples”). When you pair that pain with a fun-loving song like “Patty Cake,” where Quavo and Takeoff come closest to recreating the familial magic of their 2022 collaboration Only Built for Infinity Links, their easy chemistry makes a mundane call-and-response heartbreaking: “I won’t tell another nigga name,” Quavo says, to which Takeoff quickly responds, “Who is buddy?/What his name?” Even in a posthumous recording, it’s evident how much fun they had playing off each other.
Vulnerability is not a trait that’s often associated with Quavo, but Rocket Power suggests he’s been reflecting on his own life more than usual. His thoughts come up most explicitly in “Mama Told Me,” which builds on the hook from Migos’ 2017 single “T-Shirt,” as he lists off childhood memories and motherly advice that have guided him throughout life. On “Hold Me,” a ghostly vocal sample and reverberated keyboards echo as he solemnly calling on family members dead and alive to show him the way. But there’s only so much he’s willing to share, and eventually he defaults to factory settings: flashy, silly metaphors and designer flexes delivered in that choppy, AutoTune-slathered flow. He’s resolved to work through the pain, and as a result, some of Rocket Power plays like a slightly more engaging version of his 2018 solo debut, QUAVO HUNCHO.
At least Quavo sounds more comfortable handling songs by himself now, even if some of his ideas feel like they’ve been jogging in place for years. “Who Wit Me” and “Turn Yo Clic Up” sound like vintage Migos, and Quavo’s delivery is more animated than the generic nods to fashion brands and “[turning] your bitch up.” Most of the color and intrigue on Rocket Power comes from its production, which gives Quavo more musical avenues to explore. Alex Lustig and Pooh Beatz bring an Afrobeats-influenced shuffle and glittering keys to “Galaxy” that give Quavo’s quips about having sex in the back of Maybachs an urgent, anxious rhythm. “Back Where It Begins” and “Not Done Yet” lean into Polo G- and Juice WRLD-style pop rap, giving him space to belt and croon instead of his usual sing-rap cadence. None of them quite sound like hits, but it’s nice to hear Quavo moving outside of his comfort zone, shaking things up just enough to avoid the monotony of HUNCHO.
What Rocket Power makes most apparent is that Quavo has reached a crossroads. He earned superstar status by making his ascent seem as breezy and effortless as Versace linen, but the dissolution of the Migos and the death of Takeoff are cataclysmic events that have forever altered the course of his career. Listening to him navigate those raw emotions while staying the diamond-encrusted course makes for some of his messiest and most mature music yet.


Originally released in 1970, the Velvet Underground’s fourth album, Loaded, is a perfectly conceived rock'n'roll album. Like the previous box sets in the Velvets’ current reissue campaign, this expanded 6xCD Re-Loaded collection is less about unearthing rare tracks than getting the story straight.

The Velvet Underground: Loaded: Re-Loaded 45th Anniversary Edition

Loaded is a perfect rock'n'roll record: 40 minutes long, five songs to a side, and not a single wasted note. Originally released in 1970, the Velvet Underground’s fourth album marked the moment where Lou Reed’s early gig as a Pickwick Records song doctor ceased to be an amusing footnote to the band’s story and became their governing principle. Loaded is the sort of proper album that feels like a greatest hits collection, with each track thoroughly inhabiting and mastering a dominant rock archetype: the hippy-dippy, harmony-rich singalong; the sneering, street walkin’ prowler; the cheeky honky-tonk throwback; the wedding slow-dance standard; the dirty blues grind; the lighter-waving, anthemic grand finale. Loaded remains the one Velvets album you can put on at a house party among mixed company without killing the vibe or sending people running for the door, and it contains the only song in their repertoire—"Sweet Jane"—that you have any hope of hearing on an oldies station today.
But being a perfect rock'n'roll album is a very different thing than being a perfect Velvet Underground album. Part of what makes the Velvet Underground’s official discography so unique is that each of the four dramatically different albums they released between 1967 and 1970 could be considered their definitive statement, and yet each could also be considered the outlier. However, in the latter sense, that distance is amplified with Loaded, and not just because Moe Tucker—the pounding heartbeat of the band—sat out the sessions to tend to her pregnancy, necessitating a drumming-by-committee approach. When stacked against the dark, droning psychedelia of The Velvet Underground & Nico, the flesh-melting distortion of White Light/White Heat, and the disarming quietude of The Velvet Underground, there’s nothing overtly contrarian about Loaded. It’s the album that plays least into the myth of the Velvets as transgressive avant-rock outsiders and speaks most loudly to their reality, as a working band playing half-empty bars, desperate to deliver a hit to their antsy major label minders.
That pressure was baked into the very title of the record, a directive from their Atlantic Records bosses to produce a record "loaded" with potential hit singles—and the band delivered on every count, except, of course, the sales part. In that respect, Loaded stands as one of rock’s first truly meta artifacts, prefiguring such label-baiting in-jokes as Neil Young’s Everybody’s Rockin’ rebuke to Geffen Records and Nirvana’s "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter". This is, after all, a rock 'n'roll album that advertises its populist intent with a song about rock'n'roll called "Rock & Roll". Past provocations gave way to carefree kicks: "Head Held High" is "I’m Waiting for the Man" fresh out of rehab; "Train Round the Bend" is "Sister Ray" sent to the confession booth. But while Loaded may constitute a concerted effort to play by the rules, the Velvets come off like boarding school-bound delinquents who spend their class time stifling giggles and sneaking snarky notes. Whether answering the Beatles’ optimistic "Here Comes the Sun" with the withering "Who Loves the Sun?" or crashing the Byrds’ country-rock rodeo on "Lonesome Cowboy Bill", Loaded feels as much like a sardonic comment on pop’s ruling class as a bid to join its rarefied ranks. Atop the immortal riff of "Sweet Jane", Reed declares, "me, I’m in a rock'n'roll band," before adding a "huh"—and, after a million listens, it’s still hard to tell if it’s being delivered with a smirk or a shrug.
Alas, all that contradictory tension proved emblematic of deeper fissures running through the band. As this six-disc box set expansion of Loaded makes clear, the Velvets’ most airtight album ironically bears telling signs of their unravelling. Compiling remastered stereo and mono versions of the album, demos, alternate mixes, outtakes, a surround-sound DVD album mix, and two live sets, Loaded: Re-Loaded 45th Anniversary Edition highlights the painstaking tweaks and tinkering that went into making a seemingly effortless rock'n'roll album. Like the previous box sets in the Velvets’ current reissue campaign, Re-Loaded is less about unearthing rare tracks (much of the bonus material here first surfaced on 1997’s Fully Loaded) than getting the story straight, and properly contextualizing the output of a band whose official albums have been overwhelmed by a continuous stream of posthumous live albums, rarities compilations, and bootlegs. In the case of Loaded, the stereo and mono mixes don’t exist merely to satisfy differing listener preferences, but to present conflicting visions for the album. The former contains the extended versions of "Sweet Jane" and "New Age" that were eventually pared down for the official November 1970 release, much to Reed’s chagrin; he had left the band shortly after recording was completed, effectively sealing the album’s doomed fate before it even hit stores.
Tellingly, on Loaded, Reed already sounds like he’s handing the keys to the band over to bassist Doug Yule, who sings lead on four of the album’s 10 songs and plays much of the instrumentation. In contrast to John Cale, the band co-founder he replaced in 1968, Yule was never so much Reed’s foil as his eager understudy, with a more naturally melodic voice that buffed away Reed’s rough edges. But that’s no slight: Yule’s smooth-talker act yields the album’s most subversive moments, whether selling the bitter cynicism of "Who Loves the Sun?" as shiny, happy, ba-ba-da-ba pop, or playing the hotel bar-prowling hustler on "New Age" who sycophantically woos a faded movie star for a one-night stand only to cruelly discard her as "over the hill." And as the outtakes disc reveals, "I Found a Reason" could’ve easily wound up as a straight Dylan rip, before Yule’s angelic harmonies helped transform it into the most gorgeously celestial ballad in the Velvets’ canon. (Partially due to outstanding contractual commitments, Yule would soldier forth under the Velvet Underground name without any other original members for 1973’s largely forgotten Squeeze, an album unlikely to enjoy its own 45th-anniversary box set moment.)
More than just a collection of song scraps, Re-Loaded’s demo stash lets us imagine how Loaded might’ve turned out without the hitmaking ambitions, from the rough-hewn takes of future Reed solo standards like "Satellite of Love" to the organ-swirled fantasia of "Ocean" (the most prog the Velvets ever got) to a molasses-slow version of "Sweet Jane" that anticipates the Cowboy Junkies’ codeined cover. Meanwhile, the first live disc—a remaster of Live at Max’s Kansas City—offers a glimpse of the arena-ready powerhouse the Velvets had become just prior to Reed’s exit. (The two sets that make up the show—one devoted to rockers, the other to ballads—were recorded by Factory regular Brigid Polk on August 23 1970, reportedly Reed’s last night fronting the band; the version included here omits two tracks from the 2004 double-disc reissue of the complete concert, presumably to make it fit on a single disc.) If Loaded is the closest the Velvets ever got to becoming the Rolling Stones, on Max’s Kansas City they practically turn into the Who, as Doug’s brother Billy propels "I’m Waiting for the Man" and "Beginning to See the Light" with thundering Moon-shot drum rolls. But the recording is ultimately a faded snapshot of a live act in peak form at a career nadir: from the infamous intrusion of Jim Carroll trying to score some Tuinal to the idle audience chit-chat about the movie Patton that overwhelms "Candy Says", the Velvets are rendered as mere background noise even for the few devotees who bothered to come out to their shows.
The second concert included here—and of most interest to Velvets completists—predates the Max’s Kansas City show by a few months, but exudes an even greater degree of finality. Recorded by a fan on a reel-to-reel, the May 1970 set at Philadelphia’s Second Fret club sees Reed, Yule, and guitarist Sterling Morrison performing without a drummer (though Yule would hit the skins on a couple of songs). The stripped-down, slackened presentation greatly distinguishes it from other live Velvets documents of the era, while emphasizing certain subliminal textures, like the krautrock pulse running through "Cool It Down", or the tremolo wash on "Train Round the Bend" that essentially invents Spacemen 3 a good 12 years early. (There’s also a rare Reed-sung version of "New Age" with considerably different lyrics.) These curios aside, Live at Second Fret is the sort of moldy bootleg you probably only need to hear once, that is, if you can even make it all the way through—the recording has the fidelity of a pocket-dial. But the decaying, desolate presentation feels like an appropriate way to capture a band on the verge of disintegration. The set ends, as Loaded does, with "Oh! Sweet Nuthin’", and the two versions crystallize the album’s story in miniature: one is the grandiose statement of a band with chart-topping aspirations, the other is the lonesome sound of a band that ain’t got nothin’ at all.


The Penguin Cafe Orchestra successors’ fifth album is a tribute to pandemic perseverance that’s long on uplifting strings but short on experimentation.

Rain Before Seven...

For most of its existence, the Penguin Cafe Orchestra didn’t much resemble an orchestra. They sounded more like the house band at a bacchanal in an imagined, druidic British past, and no matter how much jazz and classical and African music they folded into their sound, listening to songs like “Air à Danser” and “Pythagoras’s Trousers” still felt like attending a party where everyone knew how to play an instrument. On 1993’s Union Cafe, the final album before leader Simon Jeffes’ death in 1997, the band explored a stately, string-oriented sound better suited to a parlor than a party. Penguin Cafe, the successor led by Jeffes’ son Arthur, has largely continued in this vein while hinting at the folky exuberance of the earlier work. It’s funny that they should drop “orchestra” from their name given how much more they sound like one.
Arthur Jeffes plays a dozen instruments on Penguin Cafe’s new album Rain Before Seven…, not least the balafon, a West African xylophone with a terrifically raspy tone. Yet just as crucial to the record’s sound is Oli Langford, a string arranger with a steady gig supplying violin to the soundtracks of such blockbusters as The Batman, Divergent, and Pokémon: Detective Pikachu. This is a man who knows a thing or two about making music that sounds “cinematic,” and Rain Before Seven… plays like a compilation of the themes that accompany small-town protagonists as they arrive in cities bigger and grander than they ever imagined. This is music written in the language of excitement and adventure, all sawing strings, insistent rhythms, and curious mallets.
All this uplift leaves little room for mystery, psychedelia, or experimentation. Though Jeffes’ balafon and Andy Waterworth’s Eberhard Weber-like bass diddles inject pleasing eccentricity, tricky decisions like the 15/8 beat on “Galahad” barely register beneath the music’s twinkling cheerfulness. Even some interesting moments are defused by the album’s relentlessness, as when a crisp-sounding drum machine on “Find Your Feet” is immediately subsumed into a wall of strings cranking out a tried-and-true pop chord progression. With strings occupying nearly every inch of available space, there’s little sense of spontaneity or camaraderie between the players. The PCO had a way of convincing you their music sprung spontaneously from their heads, even when it was rigorously composed; Penguin Cafe songs sound like the product of endless rehearsal, a formality less conducive to the experimentation that led to serendipitous wonders like “Telephone and Rubber Band.”
Jeffes is not shy about labeling this music “optimistic,” and a Bandcamp statement equates the album’s tone with the English “national character,” the stoicism and perseverance the Brits are reputed to show in the face of a crisis—such as the COVID-19 pandemic, during which Jeffes found himself on lockdown in hard-hit Italy. The album’s lush but low-key tenor suggests a relief that collaborative big-band music like this can exist after the pandemic made it risky for musicians even to share a room. Rain Before Seven… is designed to feel hopeful and positive, reassuring rather than challenging: music for the world that should or could be, rather than the grim reality. But it’s ultimately a vision of a heaven where nothing much happens.


On his third album as Call Super, Joe Seaton’s compositions feel more casual, introverted, and low-stakes than previous efforts.

Every Mouth Teeth Missing

For fans mapping the output British-born, Berlin-based producer Joe Seaton, his Call Super handle was slotted for his pummeling house and techno output, while the Ondo Fudd alias was reserved for his weirder excursions into electro or ambient. But the club-ready Eyes Glide Through The Oxide 2x12" from last year as Ondo Fudd found that legend now inverted, his Call Super releases now more on the low-key end of the spectrum. His third album (and first for Anthony Naples’ Incienso label), Every Mouth Teeth Missing continues along a trajectory first laid out in a Red Bull Music Academy chat where Seaton envisioned “making stuff that is less to do with clubs” and it feels more casual, introverted, and low-stakes than previous efforts.
Truth in advertising, “An Unstable Music” opens with a jumble of disconnected sounds that jostle around with no attempt at coherence: distorted guitar, jackhammering noise, hushed piano, ponging electronics, and a sound like rummaging through a drawer of costume jewelry. Even when the sound palette is more coherent, a sense of restless skittering remains. The title track builds its rhythmic foundation from ever-shifting, rather dissimilar, elements: closed hi-hats, squelching electronics, crisp snares, a shutting door, chimes, distant rustling. The rhythm never quite coheres into something sure-footed or tactile, but something slippery as quicksilver, the commingled sounds closer to a mosaic, disparate yet all of a piece.
Zooming in, the craftsmanship is nuanced and highly detailed, but when you pull back, some of Missing’s tracks flow by without commanding too much attention or notice. On 2017’s Arpo, Seaton was already favoring twinkling sounds over bombast, drums that sound the size of contact lenses rather than oil barrels. But on Missing, he retreads similar ground to diminishing returns. His father, painter and Dixieland player David Seaton, again contributes clarinet and oboe. These woodwinds have become an earmark of many of Seaton’s productions –either as Call Super, Ondo Fudd, or in collaboration with Beatrice Dillon– the clarinet making a track like “Pay As U Glow” feel whimsical and light. But charming as it is to have father and son collaborating in the studio, it’s become such a common feature of his tracks that one wonders about Seaton casting a slightly larger net. What would Call Super’s circuitry sound like in dialogue with cello, harp, or saxophone (as when Joy Orbison grappled with reedman Ben Vince on a Hessle Audio 12")?
A glimpse of dramatic strings comes in on “Mouth Bank Bed,” a track that finds Call Super turning over new stones and taking a few risks. A garbled, disjointed voice emerges and recedes, with bits of electronics slithering around the edges. If Robert Ashley’s Automatic Writing was just two minutes long, it might sound something like this. “Sleep All Night With Open Eye” draws from a similar sonic palette, the mood tipping towards the brooding and anxious, full of fidgeting little sounds. Even with the appearance of handclaps, they feel less celebratory and more like nervously picking at your cuticles.
For as often as Missing teems with a dizzying array of little glints of sound, the most effective track is also the simplest. “Welcome New People” is centered by little more than a slow arpeggiation lazily rising and falling, with flickering, ghostly chords hovering around the edges. There’s no obvious peak to it, no discernible melodic figure, but Seaton gives its atmosphere just enough of a charge. At a time when there’s no hope of safely entering into a claustrophobic, stale-air warehouse space, it makes sense that Seaton instead crafted something strange and insular, with nothing whatsoever to do with the clubs.

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Beauty Pill Describes Things as They Are is the first Beauty Pilly album in 11 years, as creative leader Chad Clark battled with heart disease. It is a smorgasbord of angles, melodies, loops, pockets, and fractal surfaces that nonetheless refuse to deviate from Clark’s longstanding bailiwick: the mythic power of the pop hook.

Beauty Pill: Beauty Pill Describes Things As They Are

There are two tracks titled "Ann the Word" on Beauty Pill Describes Things as They Are, the first album by Beauty Pill in 11 years. The difference between the two speaks volumes. The first "Ann the Word" is an original composition by Beauty Pill’s creative leader and core member, singer/guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Chad Clark; it features Clark’s longtime Beauty Pill partner Jean Cook on ghostly lead vocals as a shamisen is plucked, jōruri-style, in the background, accompanied by prickly dissonant and haywire electronics. The second "Ann the Word" is a cover of a song by Lungfish, a group that was Clark’s labelmate back when he fronted the Dischord Records outfit Smart Went Crazy in the late '90s; here, the primordial dread of the original is scooped out, and the void is filled with sample-heavy layering. After Clark chants Daniel Higgs’ eschatological poetry, Cook comes in at the end and gets angelic, repeating, "The world vanished in a gentle breeze."
In recent years, Clark himself almost met his end, and not so gently. In 2007 he was diagnosed with a viral heart ailment that he battled, off and on, for the next few years—up to and including multiple open-heart surgeries. For months on end, he didn’t have the strength to play the guitar. His struggles put the brakes on Beauty Pill, whose lone full-length for Dischord, 2004’s The Unsustainable Lifestyle, continued in the art-pop direction that Clark had established in Smart Went Crazy—with muddled results. But in 2006, Clark began exploring a new direction for Pill with a demo of "Ann the Word" (his song, not the cover), which broke from guitar-bass-drums to probe the freer domain of laptop arrangement, electro-acoustics, and samples.
On D**escribes Things as They Are, he finally fulfills the promise of this direction, which proves fruitful and wise. The album is a smorgasbord of angles, melodies, loops, pockets, and fractal surfaces that nonetheless refuse to deviate from Clark’s longstanding bailiwick: the mythic power of the pop hook. He loves to unfold his songs as if they’re some kind of four-dimensional puzzle; "Ain’t a Jury in the World Gon Convict You Baby" launches on an almost industrially severe beat before the organic squish of drones and symphonic surges trickle in. It’s a big-screen anthem that addresses nationalism in a cultural climate of paranoia and recrimination, but it also packs scads of auditory information into a streamlined slither. Rather than milk his life-threatening illness for all of its lyrical worth, Clark uses it here more as a catalyst than source of raw material. In fact, in the few instances where he does address his illness—as on "Near Miss Stories", where he sings breezily over disembodied guitar, "Stethoscope on my chest, he says we better do this fast/ One of these beats of your heart is gonna be the last"—he speaks through hints and distances, and even a punch line: "The surgeon once practiced on a blood orange in an art class."
Clark performs his own kind of surgery all over Describes Things as They Are, which is filled with punchy, brassy scrambles of samples and skittering drums. *"*Drapetomania" sounds like Art of Noise spliced with New Jack Swing. But for every manic experiment there is a pulsing, pretty, pop collage like "Dog with Rabbit in Mouth Unharmed". Clark’s postmodern pedigree shows on "For Pretend", a clatter of percussion and pinging guitar that also sports one of Clark’s most arresting melodies. If there is a drawback to Describes, it is that a few songs rely a little too heavily on Beauty Pill’s limited back of sonic tricks, whose impact dims slightly after prolonged exposure.
"Ann the Word" isn’t the only cover song on Describes Things as They Are. Clark and crew also offer a rendition of Arto Lindsay’s "The Prize"—only in this case, it’s highly faithful, right down to the muscular beat, lush strings, and faint brushes of Tropicália. Compare this reverent cover to his radically deconstructed take on Lungfish, the album's only visible link to Clark's past, and you can see where Clark's inclinations lie. In "Exit Without Saving", he sings, with taunting sweetness, "You recognize that this is noise, right?/ You still want it?" Clark had to wait over a decade to offer us his vision for what Beauty Pill could be, and he poses this question on Describes Things as They Are with delicacy and daring. The restless, breathless music makes clear that whatever the answer might be, he's not waiting around for it.


The comedian and musician’s breakthrough HBO special is full of songs about familial trauma that work just as well in an album format.

Whitmer Thomas: Songs from The Golden One

Songs from The Golden One

At 18 years old, baby-faced skate punk Whitmer Thomas decided to chase a dream, moving to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career. Shortly after, tragedy struck: Thomas’ mother passed away due to complications from alcoholism. In her final moments, she dubbed her youngest son “the golden one,” which, Thomas notes in his debut HBO special of the same name, “was awkward, because my brother was standing right next to me.”
The Golden One finds the now-30-year-old comedian returning to his hometown of Gulf Shores, Alabama to reckon with the unresolved familial trauma surrounding his mother’s death. Thomas filmed the special at the Flora-Bama Lounge, a beachside bar where his mother and her twin sister served as the house band under the name SynTwister, and he draws parallels between their artistic ambitions. Executive produced by Bo Burnham and co-directed by Thomas’ frequent collaborator Clay Tatum, The Golden One is one of the most unexpectedly moving comedy specials in recent memory and introduces Thomas, who has self-identified as a “pre-cum Jim Carrey,” as a bonafide star.
Songs From the Golden One is a compilation of expanded versions of the songs Thomas performs in the one-hour show. Though the album is perhaps best experienced after watching the special for the sake of context, it also works as a collection of great standalone songs. It’s worth pointing out that Thomas was a musician before he was a comedian; When he was a kid his mother helped him learn his favorite Green Day songs and he later performed in a variety of emo and hardcore bands in Alabama. His imitation of Blink-182’s melodramatic angst is so skillful that he ended up playing in a one-night-only cover band with Mark Hoppus. Setting jokes to song ends painfully more often than not, but Thomas’ songwriting talent carries him through.
Both Thomas’ comedy and music frequently go to dark places very quickly. The 10 songs on Songs From the Golden One cast him as a therapist’s pet project: he’s a codependent enabler laden with sexual performance anxiety and an abundance of trauma. But Thomas is self-aware, which saves his work from becoming self-pitying. “My identity is ‘my mother died’/Anything to distract from being straight and white,” he declares on opener “Hurts to Be Alive.” Though Thomas has a perfectly lovely natural singing voice, he tends to shift it down to the glowering, moody depths of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis or John Maus as a means of detachment. “Assuming the character of a rock’n’roll guy helps me get through it without having a meltdown,” he recently told AV Club with an uncomfortable chuckle.
Perhaps Thomas’ greatest skill as a comic and musician is his ability to let the tragic and comedic coexist. The lyrics of “Partied to Death,” a song about the effect of his late mother’s addiction on his identity, are painfully blunt: “Mommy drank herself to death/I know she tried her very best/Now I can’t party because my mommy partied to death.” And yet, thanks to a bunch of MIDI effects and some AutoTune, the song becomes a morbid singalong.
On “Dumb in Love,” which manages to evoke both “Strawberry Fields Forever”-era Beatles and landfill indie dance-punk, Thomas yearns for the blissful ignorance of a life unconcerned with the world at large. “Do I have to call my congressman?/I don’t even fucking know them…2016 didn’t affect me at all,” he sings with a snotty whine, sounding like a Peanuts character on MDMA. While the approach is obviously satirical—in The Golden One, Thomas performs this track after reminiscing about the often narrow-minded simplicity of Southern living—his delivery is earnest. “Hopes and Dreams,” a synthy surf-rock song about his father’s commitment to getting his act together and re-entering his sons’ lives, attests to the power of rehabilitation; It ends with the line “I hope my father knows he raised a little bitch,” just in case anyone was getting misty-eyed.
The record’s understated highlight is the organ-driven “The Golden One,” a meditation on the comedian’s life. What Thomas sees is imperfect: a floundering, sentimental comedian with a broken car and an obsession with The Dark Knight. And yet, he manages to find something resembling acceptance in the cards he’s been dealt: “I wipe away the steam and look at me/I’m just no fun/My mother’s son.” Songs From the Golden One concludes with “He’s Hot,” a cover of SynTwister’s would-be hit about a staggeringly sexy stud. Thomas has said that he recently found the band’s original tapes and plans to remaster and release them as a means of giving his mom her long-overdue moment in the spotlight. With this moving tribute, Thomas hits home the heart of Songs From the Golden One: it’s a labor of love and reflection.

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Picking up the baton from acolytes like !!! and LCD Soundsystem, Brit-funk originals ACR enter their fifth decade with an energized take on an old sound.

1982

A Certain Ratio took to slap bass like Petrarch did to the sonnet. At the dawn of the 1980s, while many white UK artists emulated the endorphin rush of disco, the Manchester combo sounded more like lower Manhattan acts like Material, or the David Byrne of The Catherine Wheel. Fascinated by punk’s abrasiveness, they laid harsh guitars over flippy-floppy syncopations. Once a while they boogied, especially when Martin Hannett stopped producing their albums (the same thing happened with New Order); singles like “Bootsy” served up a serviceable secondhand shimmy. Alas, singer Jez Kerr makes Bernard Sumner sound like Nona Hendryx. ACR have kept at it, though, and 2020’s ACR Loco was a vibrant little surprise. Frenetic, well-paced, haunted by memories of sweltering clubs and new 12" singles, their new album 1982 is their best album since 1986’s Force.
The album sounds fabulous: It gleams like a freshly cleaned dancefloor. Every hi-hat hiss and rhythm lick asserts itself. Re-imagining themselves as a benign interstitial force between their influences and imitators like !!! and LCD Soundsystem, ACR enter their fifth decade with the vigor of a young opening act confident about kicking the headliner’s ass; it’s as if the UK group crafted a response to “Losing My Edge” two decades later, reasserting that no, in fact they haven’t lost one iota of it. And they have questions. “Am I just going through the motions?” guest vocalist Ellen Beth Abdi asks in “Afro Dizzy,” a vaguely Afro but not very dizzy track whose highlights include a call-and-response trumpet line and a clavinet solo. “Are you moving forward or are you on a constant curve?” goes a line sung over the chirping electronics of “Constant Curve,” a line they might’ve asked themselves in 1982 itself. On the “Fame”-like “Samo,” Kerr declares, “Jean-Michel and Andy was right,” as the song’s instrumental swirl invokes the totemic glamor of those figures.
Attractive in its distillation of received pleasures, 1982 functions as a history lesson about a fecund era, and, boy, they own the warts too. ACR aren’t one of those acts for whom listeners can separate the occasional clunk in the lyrics from the sinuosities of the grooves: The flattest tracks sport the worst lyrics (“A Trip in Hulme”), the shit-hot tracks are the funnest to sing along to (Donald Johnson’s percussion bed in “Holy Smoke” is a delight on headphones and definitive in the living room). A small-scale attempt at self-mythology, “Ballad of ACR” ends the album with a demonstration of what these people do best. A folky acoustic section eases into relaxed free jazz while Kerr poeticizes the artistic wanderlust of a band that in a knavish era risk failure for the cause of white funk. Most importantly, no bass guitars were harmed in the making of this track.


The Florida band's first proper release since early 2010's Astro Coast is a modest effort featuring four sturdy pop-rockers that breeze by in 15 easy minutes and introduces a bit of Anglophilia into the power pop mix.

Tarot Classics EP

"I'm not ready to look the other way," Surfer Blood frontman John Paul Pitts lets loose halfway through "I'm Not Ready". So it would seem. "Ready" launches Tarot Classics, Surfer Blood's first proper release since early 2010's Astro Coast. Title aside, it's a modest effort, four sturdy pop-rockers, 15 easy minutes. Blithely confident, Astro Coast's sunsoaked power-pop found Surfer Blood blowing through one breezily bulbous hook and escapist lyric after another. Tarot Classics finds Surfer Blood throwing a little shade.
With its so-bright-you'll-squint melody and bummer-in-the-summer vibe, "I'm Not Ready" would've fit just fine almost anywhere on Astro Coast. But its crisp handclaps and neon guitars belie a serious compositional sophistication, a seemingly endless string of bridges charting the path to the song's bounding hook. "Your mouth is running off now that you've seen a few things," Pitts admonishes, and "don't get too big for your britches" seems in some ways Tarot Classics' guiding principle. As on Astro Coast, they seem confident in their every move but unwilling to take on more than they can handle.
First single "Miranda" is a bit of a blur, highlighted by its a rousing guitar break, its one-word chorus (hint: it's a girl's name), and a more-than-passable Morrissey impression from Pitts. The hints of Anglophilia that emerge on "Miranda" and through the rest of Tarot Classics are, in many ways, their biggest step away from the distinctly American roots (Beach Boys, Weezer, Cheap Trick) of Astro Coast. Pitts' voice wears this somewhat dolorous tone every bit as well as he did Astro Coast's shouty Brian Wilsonisms, and the band follows suit, lending a richly textured, slightly overcast New Romantic lean to the proceedings that feels deeper-- if a bit less retina-searing-- than the brasher Astro Coast.
"Voyager Reprise" takes off slowly, eventually settling into a shuffly, somewhat morose melody and dance-night-at-the-pub groove pitched somewhere between the Strokes and those early Cure singles. It's aching melody amplified by that newfound gravity in Pitts' voice, "Voyager" certainly feels like Surfer Blood's first truly sad song, the longing in its simply stated chorus impossible to miss. Closer "Drinking Problem" is alternately Tarot Classics' highlight and its least characteristic track, a lush, staggering bit of New Romantic pop that finds Pitts switching out the Moz for a Bernard Sumnerian swoon not unlike that of Kisses frontman Jesse Kivel. A shimmering synth melody buoys the aching Pitts, reassuring himself with, "at least I know who my friends are," every utterance sounding less and less convinced of itself.
A year and change on the road finds Pitts seeming a bit guarded, picking at the long-term scars of short-term affairs, questioning everyone's motivations, starting with his own. But if he's undergoing some crisis of confidence, it's not shared by his bandmates; like Astro Coast, Tarot Classics' popcraft proves well beyond promising, and these songs are certainly sturdy enough to handle their lusher productions and knottier sentiments. Tarot Classics once again fixes the spotlight on Surfer Blood's insidious melodies, refining-- rather than reconfiguring-- their self-possessed sound. It's still summer where Surfer Blood come from, it's just a little colder there now.


Originally recorded a decade ago, these contemplative sketches are full of the complicated wisdom that only comes with time.

Wayne Phoenix: soaring wayne phoenix story the earth

soaring wayne phoenix story the earth

In the hushed monologues that fill Wayne Phoenix’s debut album, the pianist, composer, and producer describes his stormy inner life with halting half-thoughts. He “doesn’t know what it means to be secure.” He’s “been living without the earth beneath [him].” He rejects the grandiosity of romantic love; he mulls the nature of loneliness. He doesn’t expand much on the circumstances that inspired these ruminations—nor has he publicly offered much biographical information about himself—which lends the record a ghostly quality. It’s a bit like finding an old photo album with most of its pages torn out. Phoenix trusts you to fill in the empty spaces.
soaring wayne phoenix story the earth is mostly muted and forlorn. Phoenix intones gravely at the start of the opening track “Mood” that he’s “singing the story of my life so far,” accompanied by washes of white noise, lapping electronics, and a vocal sample stretched and warped into an inhuman wail. Occasionally, he evokes the rain-slicked desperation of Leyland Kirby, and some of the synth work feels as cold and gleaming as those of his compatriots on Rabit’s Halcyon Veil label. But the way Phoenix treats his samples and sounds, swaddling them in blankets of hiss or warping them into unrecognizable forms, makes them feel personal and unique.
Only three of the record’s nine tracks are longer than two minutes, which lends the record a flickering, quicksilver energy, as if Phoenix’s mind is working too quickly to stick to a single thought. You can hear this restlessness in his vocal passages, the way he gives up on sentences halfway through, grasping for the right ideas, then undercutting himself by fading the volume in moments where it seems like words might fail him. This energy is what separates soaring wayne phoenix from ambient music; for as much meditating as Phoenix does on this record, he rarely sits still.
This approach allows Phoenix to try out more emotions than the overwhelming sadness of these compositions might suggest. While his spoken-word pieces often mirror the music, he also strikes notes of peace and hope. “Burn False Messages” opens with the assertion that he doesn’t “want to be anyone’s beloved,” but it closes with a reflection on the necessity of interdependence and the endurance of the human spirit. “Alone,” surprisingly, considers the happiness and sense of ease one can find in isolation.
According to an account provided to Boomkat, this music spent 10 years “filed away in a drawer.” Whether this was meant literally or not, there’s something poetic about these pieces sitting forgotten for so long. They are full of the complicated wisdom that only reveals itself with time. It’s the sound of a person slowly figuring the world out for themselves.


The Boo Radleys mastermind returns with a suave, sophisticated, rhythmically robust pop record whose swagger belies deep-seated feelings of disillusionment, self-doubt, and paranoia.

New Shapes of Life

On his 2014 album The Breaks, Martin Carr sang, “I got no money in my pocket/But it’s a lucky life for me.” It was a suitably humble declaration from a musician who, as the mastermind of Merseyside psych-rock alchemists the Boo Radleys, briefly joined Britpop’s class of 1995 at the top of the UK album charts—and who has since steadfastly refused to cash in on 1990s nostalgia by hopping aboard the reunion-tour circuit. Whether under his bravecaptain moniker or his own name, Carr has favored a more low-key, home-brewed approach on an increasingly sporadic series of solo releases. The Breaks was Carr’s first full-length release since 2009’s Ye Gods (And Little Fishes), and after a half decade away, he understandably reverted to what comes naturally to him: jangly, effortlessly melodic pop tunes sourced from the Rubber Soul/Forever Changes school of baroque ‘n’ roll. But as Boo Radleys fans know, Carr is at his best when he does what comes supernaturally. Where many of their Britpop peers were content to just sound like the Beatles, Carr and the Boos strived to be the Beatles—that is, a restlessly experimental outfit that could draw on sounds and textures from beyond the rock canon and mold them into instantly familiar yet thrillingly alien pop songs.
The Breaks enjoyed a positive reception from the British press, but one harsh critique stands out: “To me it sounded like an old man playing old man’s music for old men.” And Carr wouldn’t disagree; he’s the one who said it. It’s natural for artists to be hyper-critical of their own work, but Carr’s comment comes more from a position of authority than insecurity—one colored, perhaps, by the fact that he’s just put out a solo record that reminds us he’s not only one of the most redoubtable tunesmiths of his generation, but one of its most adventurous sonic architects as well.
For Carr, the wake-up call came in 2016, when he both lost one of his musical heroes—David Bowie—and watched his country whip itself into a xenophobic fervor over leaving the EU. Inspired by Bowie’s Plastic Soul phase, he reemerged this past spring on Brexit day with “Gold Lift,” a sprightly synth-funk salvo that cheerfully skewered the nationalist rhetoric and one-percenter politics peddled by the likes of Nigel Farage and Donald Trump. That song doesn’t feature on Carr’s new album, but its audacious, subversive attitude remains: With New Shapes of Life, Carr has come up with a suave, sophisticated, rhythmically robust pop record, but one whose surface swagger belies deep-seated feelings of disillusionment, self-doubt, and paranoia.
Amplifying that sense of instability is the temporally dislocating quality of Carr’s productions. His songs come overstuffed with detail—on the opening track alone, he draws on bongo-disco grooves, meditative prog-folk melodies, sci-fi-flick synthscapes, and random jazzy squawks. But, remarkably, he makes these clashing elements sound like complementary qualities, smoothing out the cracks with a 1980s art-pop sheen redolent of Prefab Sprout and mid-period Talk Talk. As he did with the Boos, Carr never lets his experimentation overwhelm or topple his song structures; he’s more interested in seeing what he can get away with in the confines of a four-minute tune.
The eight songs on New Shapes of Life clock in at a tidy half hour, and sometimes you wish he’d give himself the space to stretch things out further: The ruminative piano ballad “Future Reflections” feels like the extended build-up to a big moment that never quite arrives, instead leaving us with a dramatic open-ended question (“Will the mind betray the body, or will the body betray the mind?”) that feels like an unresolved cliffhanger. But for the most part, New Shapes of Life leads us down a yellow-brick-road path from solitude to splendor: On “The Main Man” Carr builds a minimal beat and acoustic strumming into a grandiose, 21st-century glam anthem that ranks among his best with the Boos; the reflecting pool of Wurlitzer tones that opens “A Mess of Everything” gives way to hand-drummed raga rhythms and a gilded gospel chorus.
With its ironically ecstatic chorus (“I’ve made a mess of everything!”), the latter song marks the moment where New Shapes of Life’s internal tensions hit a fever pitch—this is an exquisitely crafted album made by a man on the verge of breaking down. Carr has admitted that making the record waxed a heavy emotional toll that at one point required a doctor’s intervention, and nary a moment goes by here when he’s not pondering his past or fearing for the future. At several points, Carr references living a life “behind the glass”: On the tense, bass-buzzed “Damocles,” it’s an allusion to the invisible prison of living with mental illness; on the spirited saunter of “Three Studies of the Male Back,” it’s a comment on the narcotic, disassociating effects of screen addiction. But the album’s most striking visual metaphor comes on “The Van,” which could pass for a string-swept early-1970s McCartney serenade, if the former Beatle had been wracked by an existential crisis. “Lost myself in the tall grass of time/Fixate on the errors of my past,” Carr sings, before delivering a dispiriting chorus—“Keep on ‘til the van comes/To take me away”—that speaks to both the drudgery of a touring musician’s life and the inevitability of death. But whether Carr’s trapped staring out a window, at a screen, or into a mirror, the vibrant, vivacious sound of New Shapes of Life presents him with a big, brightly colored brick to smash the glass.


This 23-track career overview is a great primer for new Beat Happening fans, and as it turns out, an excellent reminder for those of us who’d kind of forgotten about the Olympia indie pop band.

Look Around

The Olympia, Wash., trio Beat Happening were a band often labelled "twee" or "love rock" because of their stripped-down instrumentation and childlike art direction and song titles, but their music had a darker cast. I remember seeing them perform at Wetlands in New York City in the 1990s, and how unnerving it was when bandleader and K Records cofounder Calvin Johnson made eye contact with the crowd and held you in his gaze while he rubbed his belly and sang in his deep baritone. Johnson's presence carried weight. Beat Happening toured with Fugazi and were covered by Seaweed. Kurt Cobain got a tattoo of the K Records logo. There was an edge to this music, and it’s still there.
Beat Happening's lyrics, which included images of hand-holding and hot chocolate, scan as innocent, but the guy in "Hot Chocolate Boy" got his name because he’s "deep sweet and bitter," watching TV alone and wishing he had a girlfriend. The songs are populated with zombies, witches, blood sucking. Even on their most famous song, "Indian Summer", with its idyllic sense of longing, they are eating their breakfast of apples and cherry blossoms in a cemetery.
History is never complete, which is why compilations like Look Around are helpful. Easy downloads and streaming can definitely bring into question the need for compilations—why buy a collection of previously released songs when you can find most of them online? But what you’re paying for—or at least scanning the track list for—is the curation. The 23-song Look Around is perfect in that regard. There will always be favorites missing—it’s the nature of compilations—but there are no major oversights or head-scratching inclusions here. It’s a great primer for new Beat Happening fans, and as it turns out, an excellent reminder for those of us who’d kind of forgotten about them. The songs are presented in chronological order, so it feels like a distilled time capsule, and it offers a chance to watch patterns emerge and themes continue in time-lapse.
It’s not the first compilation to focus on the band. There was the now out-of-print 7xCD Crashing Through box set contained all their albums, plus some rarities. The 15-song Music to Climb the Apple Tree By, which focused on just B-sides, felt a bit thin. Here we get a taste of each era. The selections are pretty evenly distributed, with a few songs from 1985’s self-titled debut (the one with the cartoon cat driving a rocket ship on the cover), 1988’s Jamboree (featuring a drawing of a heart-shaped strawberry), 1989’s Black Candy (a simple drawing of black candy), 1991’s Dreamy (the only album featuring the band on the cover), and 1992’s You Turn Me On (which featured a tasteful artistic nude). They’ve also appended 2000’s "Angel Gone", from a single produced by Phil Elverum (the B-side, "Zombie Limbo Time", appeared on Music to Climb the Apple Tree By). These songs still sound fresh. Maybe because the arrangements are so basic and stripped down, without any overzealous studio tricks or instrumentation that ties it to a particular year, they feel timeless. Or, more accurately, out of time. I think the emotion is important, too, because these lyrics focus on simple human situations most of us have probably experienced.
For a lot of people, 1991’s International Pop Underground Convention in Olympia, a six-day festival organized by Johnson and his K co-founder Candice Pedersen that featured performances from Fugazi, Bikini Kill, Built to Spill, Unwound, L7, Bratmobile, Mecca Normal, and others, made more sense, and had more of a mythology to it, than Nevermind, which first hit later that same year. Beat Happening and their cohorts represented a part of the Pacific Northwest scene that was less interested in playing bigger venues or making it on MTV.
And this still matters now, in part, because 30 years after the release of their debut, there’s a lot of music that hearkens to the band and the K scene they helped spearhead. You can hear them in Girlpool, Frankie Cosmos, Quarterbacks, and in other bands who release a couple of songs and then disappear. You’ll hear them name-dropped in interviews by artists like Carrie Brownstein. This collection contains many of their best and most memorable songs, but their real legacy is found in basement venues and DIY spaces and groups just learning how to play but not being afraid to do so in public.


The biggest K-pop group in the world try to move their sound forward but spend too much time leaning on their past.

MAP OF THE SOUL : PERSONA

BTS are the superheroes of K-pop, a group of seven young South Korean men—RM, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V, and Jungkook—who have carried the boy-band torch into the global arena. Formed in 2013, BTS cut their teeth making rap-centric tracks at a time when hip-hop was just beginning to dominate the Korean music scene. Fans were quickly drawn to their musical self-sufficiency, socially conscious messaging, and the high-art references of their visuals. Last year, their studio album Love Yourself 轉 ‘Tear’ became the first Korean album to ever top the U.S. Billboard 200 chart, earning them a new level of acclaim rarely seen by “international” artists; the superheroes won the day.
With the seven-song MAP OF THE SOUL : PERSONA, BTS are trying to blaze a path forward, further securing their foothold in commercial pop while proving to diehards that they’re still high-minded outsiders who preface their music videos with Herman Hesse quotes and reference Carl Jung with the best of them. But the album suffers from sequel syndrome and suggests that the Bangtan Boys are too willing to lean on their past accomplishments. The arrangements on PERSONA are busy and convoluted, and many lyrical highlights are buried in meta, self-referential schlock rock.
The album is bookended with songs built around the kind of inelegant instrumentation you’d find in royalty-free music or internal corporate videos, with big guitars and drums that sound as if they’ve been airlifted in from a downloadable sampler pack. In the case of “Intro : Persona,” the production is built around a recycled beat from the opening track of BTS’ 2014 debut. But to a new listener lacking context, the song comes across as sour and stale, which is a shame considering bandleader RM waxes poetic about his imposter syndrome and recapturing his motivation to pursue music. Meanwhile, “Dionysus” moves from stadium-ready fuzz to a shoehorned trap section to a contrived breakdown, with the members sounding as if they’re being dragged along rather than leading with their voices. And yet this closing track contains the most fascinating lyrics of the whole project.
Like Kendrick Lamar’s “Swimming Pools (Drank),” a meditation on alcoholism that was co-opted by hedonistic teens, “Dionysus” is a moment of existential introspection disguised as a party-starter. The bridge, rapped by Suga in an Auto-Tuned drawl a la Travis Scott, comments on the banality of stardom, as he applies the drinking metaphor to his desire to create lasting art. “Breaking new records means a fight with myself, raise the glass for a shot but I’m thirsty as I ever was,” he proclaims. The obnoxiousness of the production might be the whole point, but the song’s otherwise compelling concept is rendered largely inert by the grueling music that guides it.
Where past BTS albums have been anchored by strong verses from the rappers (RM, J-Hope, and Suga), PERSONA feels more disparate. On the forgettable “Mikrokosmos,” members hop on and off an expensive but rickety synth-pop treadmill, never reaching the desired emotional apex. Jungkook, Jin, and J-Hope try to craft a dramatic ballad on “Jamais Vu” but again, the rapping doesn’t feel in lockstep with everything else that’s going on.
In contrast, “HOME,” the album’s highlight, demonstrates how thrilling BTS can be when all the members are on the same page. The flows are dynamic, the interplay effortless. There are callbacks to lyrics found in the band’s debut single (“No More Dream”), but you don’t need to trawl the BTS catalog to find “HOME” captivating, a song about pining for a real connection in the face of outward successes. Elsewhere, the collaborations are enjoyable, but far from spectacular: Halsey (minimally) guests on lead single “Boy With Luv,” and Ed Sheeran (thankfully) stays behind the scenes on the R&B tune “Make It Right.”
PERSONA is not a failure, but it’s tough to call it a triumph. BTS have a deeper understanding of how to capture global audiences than most K-pop groups would ever dream of: Together, the seven members are a mesmerizing unit. When they sound fully in control of their music and in tune with one another, BTS transcend language and culture barriers. PERSONA falters because the band and their producers lose sight of crafting airtight songs in an effort to further the mythos they’ve built within their massive audience.
The best superhero stories are written for the whole world: They speak to both diehard fans and newcomers, tackling the human condition while throwing in nerdy references, delivering an epic experience that unifies people who might otherwise not have anything in common. BTS have already proven themselves, but on PERSONA, the band spends too much time looking back and not enough time being the K-pop superheroes the world deserves.


Toronto musician Daniel Lee’s second solo album delivers a dark and relentlessly funky set of proto-industrial grooves with a sleek dystopian edge.

The Fink

A decade ago, Toronto band Hooded Fang specialized in the kind of jovial, sun-kissed indie pop that flourished in the mid-to-late aughts. Their 2010 debut, Album, was full of cheerful garage rock smoothed over with handclaps and horns; an accompanying music video featured colorful shots of a puppet playing the xylophone. Yet by the mid-2010s, the band had left the Sesame Street cosplay behind, dousing their sound in jagged noise-punk aggression on 2016’s Venus on Edge.
One missing link in that evolution: Water Palace Kingdom, singer Daniel Lee’s 2014 solo release under the name Lee Paradise, a bleak and underappreciated gem steeped in chilly krautrock precision and Silver Apples minimalism. Six and a half years later, Lee Paradise has finally delivered a follow-up. Yet neither Hooded Fang’s slide into dissonance nor anything Lee has done previously could quite prepare fans for The Fink, an uncommonly funky set of proto-industrial grooves topped with emotionless vocals drained of all discernible human qualities.
The album’s sleek dystopian edge may be fortuitously well-timed in 2020, but it’s not by happenstance. Lee’s goal was to summon the sound of “a wasteland where the sun doesn’t shine and humans have long ceased to be relevant beyond contributing to their own self-destruction.” In the tradition of generations of anxious punks before him, he succeeds in making such a grim vision danceable, plunging into staticky dance-punk (“Boogie”), an uneasy approximation of dub (“Maintaining Platitudes”), and queasy synths that shriek like those not-quite-real emergency alarms in disaster movies (“Positive Manifestations”).
But Lee’s main interest here is rhythm. His grooves have grown heavier and more sophisticated since Water Palace Kingdom, and with the help of some unlikely influences—the 1970s disco-funk of producer Walter Whisenhunt, early ’80s dub records by Scientist, the hard-hitting rap beats created by the Alchemist—The Fink trembles and quakes with a relentless, trance-like pulse. On “A Present to Ponder,” the musician prophesies a disturbing vision of climate apocalypse (“Oceans filled with bones of machines/All its guts in disarray”) over thick snare crashes and synth screeches worthy of the Psycho score. “Message to the Past” is even funkier; it’s got a taut, slithery bassline and a hypnotic vocal melody that resembles Damo Suzuki at his most disciplined. Clouds of alien noise hover around the fringes of the mix.
Lee has described the album as “cyborg-funk,” but owing in large part to its emphasis on kick and snare drum samples, the music isn’t synthetic or stiff. You can imagine it emanating from a group of warm-blooded humans onstage, and in fact these tracks took shape during live performances with Hooded Fang drummer Jonathan Pappo and Toronto electronic artist Michael Butler (aka Beta Frontiers), who squeezes squelchy textures out of a Yamaha CS-5 synthesizer. The analog aesthetic has plenty in common with another recent release from Canada’s Telephone Explosion label, Freak Heat Waves’ Zap the Planet. Only when Lee abandons the guiding funk pulse, as on the muddled, indistinct “Medicinal Magic,” does The Fink start to lose its charm.
Yet the album’s buzzing dread never quite lets up. Lee sounds like a grim soothsayer, forecasting a sunless world on “A Present to Ponder” and exhorting his followers to “run, run, run till the blood runs out” on “Maintaining Platitudes.” Play this stuff back-to-back with Hooded Fang’s sunny debut, and it’s like staring at opposite sides of a “me in 2010 vs. me in 2020” meme. On the bright side: Who knew the apocalypse would be this funky?

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Free of her stifling major-label contract, the Bay Area rapper sounds rejuvenated, delivering fiery screeds on self-reliance of all sorts.

Got It Made

Kamaiyah has had a tumultuous time since her Good Night in the Ghetto. In 2016, the Oakland rapper’s vibrant debut mixtape seemed to announce a star in the making. She signed to Interscope later that year, but her album was repeatedly delayed, and eventually shelved entirely. By the following year, she’d self-released the mixtape Before I Wake in mutiny against the label, a move she now calls a mistake. She was arrested after a TSA altercation, and for firing a gun in a private movie screening room.
On her new mixtape Got It Made, released independently on her own Grnd.Wrk label after her departure from Interscope, Kamaiyah sounds newly refreshed and self-reliant. Half act of self-care, half immeasurable flex, it places her in the lineage of Oakland mack rappers like Too Short and Dru Down. The tape is a multifaceted consideration of self-sufficiency—escaping the thumb of domineering labels, ignoring bad boyfriends, and confronting haters. As she puts it on “Pressure,” “I love myself, yeah, I trust myself/Don’t need nobody else/I don’t need nobody’s help.”
She does get some help from a crack team of local producers familiar with her uncomplicated, optimistic, and referential style. Produced primarily by Oakland’s CT Beats, the mastermind behind her biggest hit, 2016’s “Why You Always Hatin’?” with YG and Drake, and featuring additional production by Swish, DJ Banks, DJ Official, Trackademics, and more, Got It Made builds upon her established sound, which brings local music of the past into the present day. She slides through minimalist, oscillating reanimations of classic Bay Area rap forms, ghost riding the whip through the town she still has every intention of taking over.
Kamaiyah is far less melodic than on past releases here—the only way she seems to be holding back on Got It Made. For about half the tape, she is bars first, and for the rest, she isn’t singing so much as chanting, one note at a time. On A Good Night in the Ghetto, her buoyant singsong made casual moments of hood escapism sound like bliss, elevating Dionysian songs about staying out all night, cruising around, and emptying bottles. This time around, she takes a bare-knuckle approach, allowing you to feel the impact of every punch. “No you ain’t active/You just pop off the lips and that’ll get yo ass smacked quick/I’m relaxin’, big maxin’/And I talk my shit ’cause I can back it/That’s facts, bitch,” she snaps on “Intro,” absolutely swaggering.
“Still I Am” is a post-separation reestablishment of personal identity. “I done took plenty losses/That’s why I feel like I deserve to keep flossin’/This shit is exhausting/When you boss up and run your own office,” she raps. In her estimation, being independent isn’t just valuable for the freedom it provides, but also the ability to take responsibility for oneself. That’s the subtext of “Whatever Whenever,” a slow-rolling slapper about having a plan, executing it, and defending your position. She raps like a woman ready to bury anyone trying to take the plot of land she’s worked for. “Mood Swings” is trapped in an argument spiral with a toxic partner; “Set It Up,” a vengeful team-up with Trina, is about getting the compensation owed from a boyfriend’s cheating by robbing him. At nearly every turn on the mixtape, she reevaluates what it means to be reliant on others, and she sounds liberated doing it.
Got It Made is at its best when it shows its reverence for Oakland. Kamaiyah gets J. Espinosa, the official DJ of the Oakland Raiders, to scratch all over the bass-propelled “Get Ratchet,” an incredible twerk song. She matches the tune and tone of rising local yowler Capolow on the strutting, pick-up-line-filled “Digits.” On the mixtape’s centerpiece “1-800-IM-Horny,” she gets twerk expert and forefather Too Short to talk his shit over an interpolation of his own classic 2003 track “Shake That Monkey.” It feels like a passing of the baton: Oakland’s longest-reigning mack inducting the next great one.


Tobiasz Biliński's (aka Coldair) previous efforts were gentle Nick Drakean serenades. But his third album (and first in the U.S.) is full of frosty synth drones, icy 808s, and synthetic handclaps, transforming him from humble troubadour to the high priest at black mass.

The Provider

The city of Warsaw has two (equally dour) associations in rock history. It was the original name of a certain morose Mancunian post-punk band before they got all inside-baseball with their World War II references, and it was the inspiration for "Warszawa," the haunting ambient symphony that heralds the foreboding second act of David Bowie's Low. As the first Warsaw-based musician in years to plug into the North American indie industrial complex, Tobiasz Biliński doesn't do much to dispel those grim allusions. He may possess the gentle voice of a sensitive folksinger and the byzantine mind of a composer, but at the core of his music beats the blackened heart of a goth.
The Provider is Biliński's third album as Coldair, but the first to land in the U.S. (through a publishing and digital distribution deal with Sub Pop). And from an aesthetic standpoint, it may as well be his proper debut, because it's less a full realization of what he's been working toward than a wholesale reformulation of it. Coldair's previous efforts were more like warm gusts: gentle Nick Drakean serenades guided by winsome, wandering melodies and buttressed by brass fanfares. But 2013's Whose Blood suggested a creeping unease, with digital jolts and foreboding, Swans-like percussion that poked black holes in the scenery. On The Provider, Biliński reaches into those fissures and tears them wide open, allowing that darkness to become all-consuming. Listen close and you can still hear the acoustic strums and trombone trills that underpinned his earlier work, but here they're subservient to frosty synth drones, icy 808s, and synthetic handclaps that sting like smacks to the face on a winter's night. As the arresting opener "Endear" emerges from a misty haze into an urgent, industrial-grade throb, Biliński is transformed from humble troubadour to the high priest at black mass, complete with an ominous church-organ hum that powers the song's intense finale.
But there's a bit of a Wizard of Oz effect at play on The Provider—the songs may project a majestic ultraviolet glow, but the dry ice eventually clears to reveal the lonely, wounded soul pulling the levers behind the curtain. Biliński's language has become brutally direct: "My whole life is falling apart so fast," he sings at one point, and The Provider can be heard as his attempt to put the pieces back together, resulting in songs that seem both fragile and imposing in their construction, all jagged edges and exposed wires. The overwhelming mood of distress is reflected in the unsettled arrangements—electro-shocked beats clash with militaristic drum fills, pianos and shoegaze guitar drizzle rub up against anxious tick-tock rhythms, meditative melodies hover above dirty dancefloor grinds. But that internal tension dissipates when the songs start to sprawl out, as on the synth-smeared title track or the sputtering bombast of "Suit Yourself."
The Provider is most compelling when its textural expanse induces claustrophobia. Beneath the clatter, The Provider elicits the discomfiting sensation of eavesdropping on Biliński's private conversations—with family members, with ex-lovers, with himself—about his feelings of inadequacy in the face of parental and societal pressures. But his voice remains as light as the subject matter is heavy, and is often double-tracked into angelic harmonies that help smooth over the songs' corrosive surfaces. And even when working with electro-sonics and brittle beats, Biliński's classically-trained approach to songcraft prevails—on strobe-lit standouts like "Perfect Son" and "Denounce," he builds big hooks out of scraps and shards, skilfully layering and arranging his minimal elements to maximize their dramatic impact. Ironically, the more oppressive environs of The Provider prove to be a more effective showcase for Biliński's emotionally charged songcraft than his heart-on-sleeve folkie phase. Because that's the funny thing about cold air—when the weather turns so frigid that your exhalation produces visible vapors, it feels like you're breathing fire.


Fueled by frontman Alexander Kent’s raging declamations, the Los Angeles band’s sprawling, 96-minute album is an incendiary fusion of noise, post-punk, metal, prog, and drone.

Sprain: The Lamb as Effigy or Three Hundred and Fifty XOXOXOS for a Spark Union With My Darling Divine

Across the 96 minutes of The Lamb as Effigy or 300 XOXOXOs for a Spark Union with the Darling Divine, Sprain’s Alexander Kent curls and shrinks and shrivels. He is consumed with guilt the way that a building is consumed with fire. Sometimes he throws it off in a fit of rage or pique, strengthened by the incredible, ugly heaviness his band generates. Sometimes, he cowers in the beneficent presence of the patient, gorgeous drones that hum the album into a temporary state of serenity. But mostly, Kent ruminates in long, uncomfortable, occasionally tedious passages, the urgency of his emotion goading him into singing more than he seems to want to. He strikes out at God and at the titular Lamb, who may or may not be the same being, but every dart he hurls skyward inevitably returns to pierce his head. He is Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, trying to tamp down his anxiety long enough to declare that a criminal’s conscience will inevitably cause him to suffer.
If that makes The Lamb as Effigy sound off-putting, uncomfortable, overwrought, and maybe a little boring, well, so is Dostoevsky. Sprain began as the somnambulant slowcore project of Kent and bassist April Gerloff, a style that suited the apartment setup where they recorded their first EP. They expanded to a quartet for 2020’s harsher As Lost Through Collision, and now, with The Lamb as Effigy, they appear to reject restrictions of any kind—genre, narrative cohesion, and the general principles of how an album should be constructed. But don’t let the pair of 24-minute songs fool you: While Kent’s lyrical vision is sometimes obscured by the steam his frustration generates, The Lamb as Effigy is expertly crafted. It’s symphonic in scope, operatic in delivery, and no wave in attitude.
Sprain have cited the intensely difficult music of Iannis Xenakis as an influence, and you can hear the blood-soaked chaos of the Greek composer’s Persepolis in the abyssal screeches of The Lamb as Effigy’s “Margin for Error.” Throughout the album, rapid streams of noise flood and overwhelm things, bursting the boundaries of traditional post-punk and either carrying the songs into oblivion or allowing them to stagnate in the heat of Kent’s anger. In “Privilege of Being,” unhappy electronics, rusty violins, and woodwinds whistle like suffering birds, their shivers echoed later in the twisted and pulsing guitars of “God, or Whatever You Call It.” These moments are chaotic, but they speak to the band’s ability to develop a musical idea over the (very) long scope of the album. When hollow keyboards phase across the opening of “Margin for Error” like Steve Reich’s Four Organs re-scored for a horror film, it feels like blame being shifted between two people.
But these ambitions also make The Lamb as Effigy an occasionally frustrating listen. As a singer, Kent is capable of channeling Serj Tankian’s righteous sputter, the spiritual rage of Isaac Brock, the direct provocation of Chat Pile’s “Why,” and the inarticulable bitterness of Gilla Band. But as a lyricist, he has a tendency to turn his back to the audience, falling so deep into misery that he sometimes struggles to get a message back up to the surface. Paranoia and surveillance dominate the lyric sheet, and listening to Kent rage can feel like watching guilt, fear, and self-loathing tumble together under a microscope: You get uncomfortably close, but it’s not always clear what you’re looking at.
Still, this is an album concerned with what can’t be said, and it’s at its best—and most nuanced—when it stops trying to explain itself. “Margin for Error” and “God, or Whatever You Call It” act as backstops for the album’s first and second halves. In both songs, Sprain work their way into massive drones that seem to glow with benevolence. They’re buoyant—candy-flecked and jewel-toned. But the longer the band plays them, the more their good charm starts to feel like a trap, their warm smile stretching into a rictus grin. Like someone whose good behavior masks a rotten interior, the beauty of the drone ultimately becomes oppressive. Without them saying a word, it’s Sprain’s strongest argument against the thumb that’s holding them down.