On his ruminative and memory-haunted new album, the pianist and singer explores community and the ties that bind us.

Help

The diaspora haunts the work of Duval Timothy, the multidisciplinary artist and pianist who splits his time between England (where he was born) and Sierra Leone (where his relatives reside). On his 2018 EP 2 Sim, Timothy blended WhatsApp voice messages and interviews from “family, friends and peers in Freetown, Sierra Leone” into minimal, piano-focused compositions. In a mix made for NTS Radio the same year, he interspersed these compositions with snatches of sounds captured from Instagram video— Cardi B ranting about racoons, Saul Williams urging young rappers to listen to Rachmaninoff—and grime and hip-hop tracks. On Help, his latest album, Timothy works with a number of collaborators from the London scene—Mr. Mitch, Vegyn, and Lil Silva to name a few—to create a piece of music that takes equally from modern jazz and UK bass. With their help, Timothy sings the song of a community that he carries within him, voicing their past oppressions even in his most abstract pieces.
Timothy constructs a vast castle out of his reference points making music that feels filled with the spectres of the past. “Slave” is a dark room constructed out of looping piano melody, furnished with guitar from Twin Shadow, and illuminated only by the song title, sung by his partner Ibiye Camp. Into this room enters a sampled Pharrell Williams, musing on the fact that it is common for record labels to own the masters of the artists they sign. Timothy is intimately aware of this practice; he only recently purchased back his own masters. To underscore Williams’ point, he hammers on the piano when Williams appears on the scene, as if registering his own assent. Its follow-up, “TDAGB,” goes even further; the title comes from a slowed-down and sped-up recording of Timothy’s sister saying, “Things don’t always get better, it’s not just a matter of time till everything works out.” The words are not a blanket dismissal of change as much as a clear-eyed reading of colonial history. Slavery may be over, but when Prince couldn’t get his masters back from Warner Brothers 30 years ago, he called himself a slave.
On Help, these troubled legacies guide him, prodding him to examine history and memory. On “Fall Again,” the pianist’s triplets are slowly surrounded by Melanie Faye’s wandering guitar, and as the two snake around each other, they are joined by Lil Silva. Reverb expands his voice, creating a choir of one. The lyrics sympathize with the loneliness of wanting to change when you are feeling “cold in the deep and you’re all alone.” Like the gospel songs it evokes, “Fall Again” posits that this feeling is nothing new; saints have made mistakes, too. Listen closely to the ghostly strains of “Like,” a quilt of layered vocals stitched together with piano; it’s a scrambled, halting monologue, degraded until you can only hear the titular word. Though the progressions he plays seem simple at first listen, he manipulates them by adding an extension to a chord here or a spare note there. It sounds like he’s feeling his way through the dark, trying to recover some elusive but crucial memory.
The motif of “Slave” guides Timothy through the ruminative back half of the album. Its rhythm is the basis for Timothy’s improvisation on “Ice,” its chord progression can be heard on “C,”  and its theme can be heard through the digital mist of the Pat Metheny-esque “Morning.” The repeated motifs play into the album’s themes— of history, individuality, ownership. Timothy’s collaborative sensibility comes from a distinct sense of rootedness; the people who made him and the artists he’s listened to are the links that make up his music. He finds liberation in this inescapability and makes himself too expansive to be owned.

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In early ’80s Dunedin, the Chills were at the forefront of an extraordinary little guitar-pop scene. This reissue of their debut—a major document of their early era—extends the album to 24 tracks.

Kaleidoscope World

The Chills took seven years to make their first full album, 1987’s *Brave Words—*seven years of false starts, constantly shifting lineups, and one tragedy that nearly destroyed the band and ended up cementing its virtues. Singer/guitarist Martin Phillipps’ group was at the forefront of the extraordinary little guitar-pop scene in New Zealand in the early ’80s—connected to bands like the Clean, the Verlaines, Tall Dwarfs, and Look Blue Go Purple—and Kaleidoscope World is the major document of their early era. It’s a Katamari of an album, picking up another few songs every time a new edition comes out; since its initial appearance in 1986, it’s progressively bulked up from eight songs to this version’s 24.
The early Chills were inspired by the garage rock of the mid-’60s—their trebly organ sound was usually right out front—and by Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd. But they were gentler and sadder and persistently obsessed with mortality. Phillipps was a prolific songwriter early on, so the band had a substantial repertoire by the time they released their first records in 1982: a shared EP with three other bands from Dunedin, followed by the tormented but chipper single “Rolling Moon.” (“Please oh God don’t take us home,” the chorus went.)
A couple of weeks after “Rolling Moon,” they recorded a basic track for the haunted, keening “Pink Frost,” as part of a proposed EP of songs with colors in their titles. Phillipps was dissatisfied with the results, but before they could re-record it, the Chills’ new drummer Martyn Bull fell ill, and the band went on hiatus. Bull died of leukemia a year later; subsequently, Phillipps completed that original recording, exquisitely, and assembled a new version of the Chills. “Pink Frost” became their best-known song, inspiring the names of a band and a Fugazi song. And, although Bull had really only played with the band for a couple of months, his death became the specter haunting the rest of their existence, and the muted, cavernous tone of “Pink Frost” carried over to their next few records.
“Pink Frost” actually made the Top 20 in New Zealand—not bad for an indie band—and so did its follow-up, “Doledrums,” a cheerful readymade about life on unemployment. That’s where the first iteration of Kaleidoscope World ended, as a brief set of eight songs by a curious little band with an impressive live reputation. Over the next few years, other material from the same era started getting tacked on to it: some live tracks, The “Lost” EP (six featherweight songs from the “Doledrums” period), and “I Love My Leather Jacket,” a 1986 glam-stomp single about Phillipps’ keepsake from Martyn Bull. The new additions to the album’s 2016 incarnation are a brief piano instrumental called “Martyn’s Doctor Told Me,” the frazzled rocker “Smile from a Dead Dead Face,” and early takes of a pair of songs the Chills re-recorded later on, including another premonition of doom, “Dan Destiny and the Silver Dawn.” (All four are flown in from 2001’s Secret Box, a three-disc collection of live stuff and oddities.)
Phillipps had evidently been saving his more “writerly” songs for an album—Brave Words and 1990’s lush major-label follow-up Submarine Bells foreground his voice and lyrics much more than these songs do. In fact, the remarkable thing about Kaleidoscope World, given the band’s subsequent reputation as a singer-songwriter vehicle, is how much more of its focus is on the Chills’ sound than on Phillipps’ songwriting. “Purple Girl” is a near-instrumental in the mode of some of the Clean’s minor-key jams; “Bite” is a ridiculous jeremiad directed at an overeater (“You gotta bite that food! You gotta get it inside you!”). “Hidden Bay” is a tiny sliver of a song (written and sung by bassist Martin Kean, who passed through the Chills on his way to Stereolab) that mostly just flexes the band’s live muscle.
That kind of silliness and spontaneity would mostly be absent from the Chills’ later recordings; Phillipps’ growing earnestness served the band magnificently for a few years, but then over-ripened. As he was ravaged by drugs and illness, his output slowed to a drip. The Chills have, surprisingly, had a stable lineup since 2009, but last year’s Silver Bullets was one of only two full-length albums of new songs that they’ve managed to complete in the past two decades. They weren’t able to live up to the promise of Kaleidoscope World in the long term, but its playful melancholy and somber chime still glisten like sunlight on weathered ice.


The duo’s first album in 17 years is a surprisingly practical gesture, a career-spanning live album that connects the accessible and impenetrable extremes of the Trux discography.

Platinum Tips + Ice Cream

When long-dormant bands reunite, there’s a natural fear that they’ll be unable to recapture the essence of what they once were. But with Royal Trux, that’s not a worry, because that essence was in a perpetual state of flux. In the subterranean sandbox that was ‘90s indie rock, Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema were like those weirdo kids who could flip their eyelids inside out—without warning, they could transform something benign into something grotesque. They would make overtures toward radio-ready boogie-rock one moment, and then expose its innards the next, peeling songs apart into a tangle of feedback, drum-machine spurts, and scrambled voices that sound like they’re coming from a shortwave radio caught between two stations.
Even at the height of ‘90s indie-rock reunions earlier this decade, a Royal Trux reboot seemed highly unlikely. Prior to splitting up at the turn of the millennium, Hagerty and Herrema weren’t just creative partners, but romantic ones, too, a facet that potentially adds a layer of complication to any reconciliation proceeding. And their interim pursuits couldn’t have been any more different: while Herrema has pushed Royal Trux’s sleaze-rock side into the digital age with Black Bananas and embraced her status as grand dame of the underground, Hagerty has decamped to Denver and turned his project the Howling Hex into the world’s strangest norteño band. Even when Hagerty deigned to revisit Royal Trux’s 1990 avant-rock touchstone Twin Infinitives for a full-album performance in 2012, he recruited a ringer to perform Herrema’s parts.
But if Royal Trux’s conspicuous absence from the reunion circuit seemed consistent with their non-conformist legacy, the only way to up that ante was to reunite once everyone had totally given up on the idea. Likewise, the duo’s first proper album in 17 years is a surprisingly practical gesture: Platinum Tips + Ice Cream is a career-spanning live album that connects the accessible and impenetrable extremes of the Trux discography into the same woofer-blowing frequency.
On their ‘90s albums, Royal Trux ran roughshod over classic-rock convention; here, they take the same sacrilegious approach to reinterpreting their own catalog. On the 1992 acoustic elegy “Junkie Nurse,” Hagerty painted a portrait of addiction so stark and unflinching, you could practically feel him get the shakes. On Platinum Tips + Ice Cream, Royal Trux treat the song like a mechanical bull they can hop on and grind for a joyride, blowing out its intimate dimensions and turning it into a meaty, cowbell-clanging southern-rock workout. Feeling strung-out has never sounded so fun.
Platinum Tips + Ice Cream compiles performances from some of the band’s initial post-reunion performances at Berserktown II in California and at New York’s Webster Hall, with Hagerty and Herrema supported by drummer Tim Barnes and bassist Brian McKinley. At times, the in-the-red recording quality, muted audience noise, and improvised, half-remembered lyrics make it sound like you’re actually listening in on a first rehearsal guided by the loosest of muscle memories. But in Royal Trux’s case, being out of practice isn’t exactly a liability, given that their greatest work always felt like it was on the verge of falling apart. Even on “Sewers of Mars”—a choogling highlight from their spit-shined 1995 major-label debut, Thank You—Hagerty and Herrema’s sandpapered harmonies scuffed away at the song’s sturdy, Stones-y foundation. The version here feels like revisiting the same site after almost two decades of rot and decay.
But if Platinum Tips + Ice Cream sees Royal Trux turn their most solid songs into something more collapsible, it also works the other way, transforming early lo-fi singles like “Red Tiger” and “Mercury” into the sort of swaggering, heavy-grooved rock jams the crudely recorded originals only implied. And, in the most radical revision, they manage to rebuild Twin Infinitives’ “Ice Cream” from the maracas up, melting down its arrhythmic discord into a simmering hypno-soul worthy of a Blaxploitation flick’s closing credits roll. Alas, such revelations may be lost on Trux newcomers, who’d be better off tuning into the sleazy psych of 1993’s Cats and Dogs or the alien arena-rock of 1998’s Accelerator for a more immersive introduction to the band’s surreal sound world. But in true contrarian Trux fashion, Platinum Tips + Ice Cream presents a most curious contradiction: it’s a greatest-hits album designed for die-hards.


The British-Barbadian jazz saxophonist and his South African players narrate the apocalypse from a distant future, suggesting that in order to build anew, some things will first need to burn.

Shabaka and the Ancestors: We Are Sent Here by History

We Are Sent Here by History

In West Africa, histories have been passed down through generations by griots, storytellers who collect the wisdom of the past in order to help shape our fates. Even after the advent of the written word, such storytellers were the safest manner of recording knowledge—scrolls could be lost, and libraries could burn, but oral histories were shared by the collective consciousness, written in our genes, able to survive individual tragedies to persist through time. In that sense, griots are more than just historians—they’re the library.
We Are Sent Here by History, the second album from Shabaka Hutchings and the Ancestors, is a record steeped in that tradition, a living history looking backward in time from a not-too-distant future. Coincidentally released amid the proliferation of a global pandemic, it takes on new meanings: a collective record of the apocalypse, a sonic time capsule left to be found buried in the sand by some future explorer. The group’s first LP, Wisdom of the Elders, served as a warning of things to come, but this tale reads as a statement of fact, a record of the wrongs and missteps that led to our own demise.
The Ancestors are just one of several projects helmed by Hutchings, arguably the brightest star of London’s surging jazz scene. This group, which mostly hails from South Africa, is a space-age jazz sextet that connects the dots between the various corners of the African diaspora. There’s evidence of Hutchings’ Afro-Caribbean heritage in his sax’s soca stylings (“They Who Must Die”), and Ariel Zamonsky’s double bass—the record’s backbone—claims ancestry from Hugh Masekela’s South African township jazz. The phrasing of the reeds, from Mthunzi Mvubu’s alto sax to Hutchings’ tenor and clarinet, often resembles a tag-team rap duo, with bars intertwined like twisted rope. The performances are virtuosic but sometimes primal, like the horns’ bestial screams on “The Beasts Too Spoke of Suffering” that extend the album’s scope beyond humankind.
But the record is at its most compelling when it explores our humanity, whether examining the roots of misogyny (“We Will Work (On Redefining Manhood)”) or making space for plaintive introspection (“Teach Me How to Be Vulnerable”). At its heart lies the poetry of South African performance artist Siyabonga Mthembu; the song titles and concept are rooted in his words, which are sung in Zulu, Xhosa, and English. The lyrics are delivered calmly amid a storm of righteous rage, a calm narration to the immolation of Rome. “You’ve Been Called” opens with an extended verse from Mthembu: “We are sent here by history/The lighter gave fire, and was present at the burning/The burning of the republic/Burnt the names, burnt the records, burnt the archive, burnt the bills, burnt the mortgage, burnt the student loans, burnt the life insurance/An act of destruction became creation.” It’s less a metaphor than a recipe for a strong foundation, with the understanding that to build something new you must first excise what is rotten.
We Are Sent Here by History is Hutchings’ third release for the Impulse! label, following Sons of Kemet’s Your Queen Is a Reptile and The Comet Is Coming’s Trust In The Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery. The label was responsible for putting out some of Hutchings’ formative influences in the 1960s and 1970s, including John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, and Pharoah Sanders. But this record lies in direct opposition to Sanders’ optimism. The Ancestors are no longer attempting to advise us on how to avoid the apocalypse; instead they ask, now that it has arrived, what will we do next?
As the world reels from the repercussions of the novel coronavirus, We Are Sent Here by History might feel particularly timely, particularly for those in the West typically shielded from the brunt of capitalism and the brutality of colonialism. But the album, recorded in Johannesburg and Cape Town in 2019, is not so much prescient as it is broadly in tune with the plight of the marginalized. As Hutchings has said, “For those lives lost and cultures dismantled by centuries of western expansionism, capitalist thought and white supremist structural hegemony the end days have long been heralded as present with this world experienced as an embodiment of a living purgatory.”
Despite its ominous tone, We Are Sent Here by History is only partially fatalist; even if it accepts the apocalypse as inevitable, it offers a path away from a “tragic defeat.” It’s a reminder that any redemption must first reconcile the lessons of our history, to learn from the mistakes that led to misfortune. It’s also a testament to the beauty of resilience; as an indictment of power, it elicits inspiration rather than depression. This is music that makes you feel less alone in your rage, a chorus to join with your anger and frustration, a funnel to channel that energy. Because as with any future, Hutchings’ foreordained outcome is merely one possible—if likely—fate. If our genes are a record of where we’ve been, then We Are Sent Here by History asks where we want to go. Because even viruses leave records in our genes; Hutchings and the Ancestors make the case that the future will be defined by what we do with them.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The perfectly fine debut from the London R&B singer offers a grip of retro, snappy jams without sounding like a pastiche.

Ella Mai

No one could have sung “Ooooh/Now I’ll never get over you” with quite the same starry-eyed naiveté that Ella Mai does on her unapologetically sprung summer smash “Boo’d Up.” It was a song that both Stevie Wonder and toddlers found easy to love, a four-minute reverie during which everything slips out of focus apart from you and your boo.
Mai has been signed to hip-pop hypeman DJ Mustard’s 10 Summers imprint since 2016, putting a decisive point of view on likeable, if not particularly individual, trap-leaning pop beats, with songs centering on agency, desire, and her early-morning appetite to receive a, kind of, breakfast in bed. Mai’s finger-snapping, perfectly fine debut is billed as a “throwback R&B album,” with dutiful Easter eggs for the genre’s aficionados: a “no no no” reference here, a “little secret” wink there, and a “writing’s on the wall” hat-tip elsewhere. Despite a few obvious reference points, Mai avoids pastiche, although a tightened tracklist would have provided focus to this over-long collection of 16 songs.
Executive produced by DJ Mustard, Ella Mai pays homage to ’90s commercial R&B and Mustard’s own hip-pop signatures while bringing in new sounds, from aerated beats punctuated with the sound of teeth-kissing (the Nana Rogues-produced “Good Bad”) and Majestic Casual-ready synth swashes (“Cheap Shot”). The throbbing “Dangerous” transposes the conceit of the Shangri-Las’ ode to bad boy allure, “Out in the Streets,” into squelchy G-funk with double-time harmonies which cascade like heart flutters.
Ella Mai never quite scales the heights reached by her skippy single “Trip,” or the pristine “Boo’d Up.” Yet Mai’s songwriting can be deft and unexpected, refining the attitude that once led her to declare, on an early EP, “I hope the next girl you love ends up fucking you over” into more nuanced examinations of knotty relationships. Her words are scathing over a partner who’s “chewing with [their] mouth wide open,” but she lays her own flaws bare, too. The acoustic bonus closer, “Naked,” is a challenge for a lover to accept her, “resting bitch face” and all. “Can you love me naked?” she asks, in a song that distances nudity from the context of R&B seduction and reframes it to vibe more with body positivity and mental health.
Not all Mai’s efforts to open up are as successful. The album is threaded, like Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope or TLC’s FanMail, with earnest interludes that riff on her full name (“E” is for emotion, “L” for lust, etc...) which can tend towards vague Hallmark-isms. One of the album’s strongest tracks, the simmering relationship ultimatum “Shot Clock,” ends with a whimper, as Mai intones “Love...full of chuckles and cuddles and sometimes eye puddles,” a saccharine sentiment that should have remained stitched on the gas-station teddy bear it was lifted from.
Perversely, the most immediate song on Mai’s album is “Whatchamacallit,” a peppy two-hander with Chris Brown which essentially copied the Nic Nac-produced beat of Brown’s own “Loyal” to create a carefree-feeling bop. With a different collaborator, “Whatchamacallit” may have brought a welcome, blithe sense of fun to Ella Mai. But, as pop artists are rightfully being held accountable for being complicit with abusers, Mai’s inclusion of Brown raises questions about her own artistic values. It’s tough to swallow Mai’s pro-women message, given her association with an artist who has repeatedly treated them with violence.
R&B is crowded with young artists who use nostalgic soulful sounds as a baseline for their individualistic music, whether H.E.R.’s velveteen soul, Daniel Caesar’s fraught blend of gospel and R&B, or the stately self-interrogations of Jorja Smith. Ella Mai’s raw talent and likeability, and showcased in her spontaneous-feeling Instagram cover versions, got her noticed by DJ Mustard in the first place. But on Ella Mai, her abilities don’t always find an assured direction, and it calls into question just how quickly this record was put together in the wake of “Boo’d Up”’s summer dominance. Mai’s album will likely bring her a couple of radio hits—“Sauce” is an undeniable heater. But a lack of focus means that, on her debut, the instant, infectious rush of Mai’s warm personality proves a little more elusive to find.


The Austin-based duo don’t shy away from signifiers of the past, conjuring the sounds of the late 1960s and early 1970s without succumbing to pure nostalgic pandering.

Black Pumas

Black Pumas sounds like a band name coined at the twilight of the soul era, when R&B turned grittier, trippier, and funkier. It’s a name that evokes that of the Black Panthers, the African-American activist group who defined militant protest during the late 1960s and early 1970s—which is not coincidentally the period that the Austin-based duo of guitarist/producer Adrian Quesada and vocalist Eric Burton consciously conjure on their eponymous debut album.
At no point on Black Pumas do Quesada and Burton shy away from signifiers of the past. Rhythms roll with the tight precision of the Hi Records rhythm section, “Fire” is punctuated with horns straight out of Stax, “OCT 33” finds Burton obliquely nodding at Otis Redding’s “Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song),” the title of its opener “Black Moon Rising” echoes Creedence Clearwater Revival’s doomsday classic “Bad Moon Rising.” Black Pumas are too clever to succumb to pure nostalgic pandering, though. They pointedly avoid the pitfalls that plague well-intentioned retro-soul records, favoring feel over authenticity, playing as much for the head as the heart.
Chalk much of this heady aesthetic up to the duo’s origins as a studio project. A longtime Austin fixture—he played guitar in Grupo Fantasma, who won a Grammy for Best Latin Rock Album in 2011—Quesada started assembling tracks at his studio Electric Deluxe, casting a net for a suitable singer once his ideas took the shape of a song. Friends connected him with Burton, a singer/songwriter who busked his way through the West Coast before settling in central Texas.
Possessing a voice that can slide into the slipstream with ease, Burton lends an elegant elasticity to Quesada’s tightly layered productions. Occasionally the producer/guitarist performs this trick in reverse—“Sweet Conversations,” the album’s dreamy denouement, draws upon a demo Burton recorded at home—but the core of the album lies in how the singer helps shape aural paintings into songs, providing them with warmth and a slight trace of spaciness.
Burton may command attention with his sweet, plaintive voice, but Quesada’s densely woven tapestries are the key to Black Pumas. Inspired by RZA’s crate-digging productions for the Wu-Tang Clan extended universe, Quesada relies on scratchy drum loops, hits of strings, funky electronic pianos, and fuzz guitar. Actual samples may be rare but the fact that the guitarist cobbled together all of this on his own is admirable, particularly when he marshals all of his skill on one cut. The minor-key march “Fire” gains gravity from its blend of ghostly organs and guitar twang, “Stay Gold” shimmers with the sultriness of a heat wave, and “Black Moon Rising” unfurls with a hushed sense of spectacle.
At these moments, which are the best Black Pumas has to offer, the duo’s flair for drama is so stirring, they can seem acutely cinematic. As appealing as this Technicolor sound may be, it can’t quite hide the seams created when the duo stitched their two sensibilities together in the studio. Burton’s misty introspection can give Quesada’s soulful prowess an ethereal edge, yet it can sometimes suggest the whole enterprise is little more than snazzy pastiche. While there may be pleasure in such a patchwork of sound, particularly when it’s done with such style and verve, the assemblage bears a pointed sense of insularity. Burton sings about interior voyages and the tracks were usually constructed by no more than two musicians; it’s music made at home, for home listening. That’s all well and good, since the duo has considerable skill, but this existential lonerism underscores a chasm between the pair and their influences. Unlike the icons of the era they find so inspiring, Black Pumas rarely look outside of themselves.

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Hearkening back to her queer nightlife days, the xx singer and guitarist pays homage to the euphoric dance-pop of the 1990s and 2000s.

Mid Air

As a teenager, Romy Madley Croft burned CDs to play in gay clubs, loading them with unabashed floor-fillers like Ultra Naté’s cathartic house hit “Free” and Ian Van Dahl’s elegiac Euro-trance anthem “Castles in the Sky.” She later went on to become guitarist and co-lead singer of the xx, the influential indie band she founded with her school friends Oliver and Jamie. Together, they were masters of the spaces in between, their intimate ballads built around sparse guitar riffs and fleeting tableaux. But she cast her mind back to her queer club days—when pop was appreciated “without cynicism or irony”—after she started writing for stars like Dua Lipa and Halsey, in collaboration with EDM collagist Fred again.. (real name Fred Gibson). Somewhere along the way, she began to realize that she wanted to keep some of these euphoric hooks for herself.
On her debut solo album Mid Air, Romy works with Gibson and Stuart Price, the producer best known for his work on Madonna’s Confessions on a Dance Floor, to capture some of the heady magic of those early nightlife experiences. The result is a meticulously crafted homage to the strobe-lit, chart-topping dance music of the 1990s and 2000s—though, at times, it misses some of the tension that made Romy’s songwriting with the xx so vital. Jamie xx reunites with his former bandmate for the ebullient come-up of “Enjoy Your Life,” a Beverly Glenn-Copeland-sampling banger that might also have sounded at home on his own 2015 debut, In Colour. There are thumping Euro-trance homages in the form of “Strong” and “Did I,” where wisps of Romy’s vocals dovetail with acidic synths. Elsewhere, over the mournful Balearic pulse of “The Sea,” her sighs stretch out like glimmers of light on the surface of the Mediterranean.
Romy’s translucent vocals are the connecting thread between the xx’s vulnerable emo-R&B and the dance-pop of Mid Air. They often evoke the rawness of Cassandra Fox or Everything but the Girl's Tracey Thorn, carrying a humanity that roughens the glossy sheen of the production behind it. On “Twice,” her voice is sumptuously layered as she urges: “Pull back the covers/Let me feel the warmth of your skin.” It’s at once fragile and strong, her tactile delivery foregrounded over the insistent, choppy beat behind it. In moments like these, simple lines are elevated to something piercingly real. At other points, the record comes off clunky, like on the U-Hauling anthem “Weightless,” where she sings awkwardly of “Bending over backwards/Under my skin” and hurries to fit unwieldy longer phrases into a breath.
The album soars where it manages to elegantly contrast Romy’s vulnerability with the mirrorball dazzle of the production. This is the case on Mid Air’s two best songs: the sultry piano house opener “Loveher” and the unreservedly joyful disco closer “She’s On My Mind,” produced with techno experimentalist Avalon Emerson. On the latter, Romy tells a familiar story of being hopelessly in love with a friend, and in the song’s final act, the instrumentation drops to a murmur as Romy delivers a twist: The friend confesses her love, too. The arc of the song is simple, sweet and effective, and it highlights what is missing from some of the record’s less satisfying floor-fillers. Just as its music video holds steady on a single image (Romy hugging her cousin, both of them united in a shared experience of grief), the pounding “Strong" clings to one repeated lyrical idea (“You don’t have to be so strong”).
Romy is at her best when her songs—rather than radiating one straightforward, effusive emotion—have some element of contrapuntal friction, similar to that of the xx’s earliest sketches. On “Loveher,” she sings of holding hands with a lover under the table, not because of shame, but because “some things are for us.” These delicate, whispered lines oscillate between the competing desires to stand proud in your identity and to keep your intimacy intimate. While writing for the xx, Romy avoided using gendered pronouns in her songs—it’s notable that she not only uses them, but makes them central to the songs on Mid Air. In the UK, we are living through a period of increasing bigotry, with anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes on the rise, and transphobia poisoning the well of the government and mainstream media. Romy's voice may be hushed, but in this climate, her message is loud and clear.


The Southern Florida rapper’s new mixtape is a zippy distillation of his regional roots, mixed with a few standout wrinkles.

Trapnificent

Until 2018, Trapland Pat’s dream was to be a football star. But a drug charge led the small Indiana college where he played wide receiver to revoke his scholarship, sending him back to his hometown, Deerfield Beach, Florida. Eventually, he picked up rap, and in early 2021 scored a modest breakout with the gleefully chaotic “Big Business.” A part of Pat’s appeal was his wild-ass look. Bonks, a hairstyle popular in South Florida’s massive Haitian community, sprout from his head like tree branches; his eyeballs damn near pop out of the sockets like a real-life Looney Tune. This larger-than-life image was offset by grounded raps largely centered on memories of running around the streets of Broward—memories that were rarely cartoonish, and almost always based in reality.
Of the multitude of musical styles fashionable in the state right now—Jacksonville’s drill-leaning scene, Rod Wave–like heavy-hearted crooning, Michigan-inspired punchline heat checks—Pat’s music is most indebted to the croaky melodies of Kodak Black. His newest mixtape, Trapnificent, is a distillation of his South Florida roots, mixed with a few wrinkles that make him stand out from the many other Kodak descendants existing in the area. The bounce of the beats and the way Pat casually delivers hardened street tales can be traced to late ’90s B.G. and Mannie Fresh records: “Free All My Zombies” is an exciting glimpse at that influence, with his vocals switching between plain-spoken and lightly melodic over sputtering percussion and a funk bassline.
It’s a well that Pat goes back to again and again with good results, whether solo or with like-minded rappers in his orbit. His rapping is sharp on “Put That Shit On,” swinging back and forth between designer-flaunting and wistful recollections, all delivered over a slinky instrumental. “4 & a Baby” is similarly full of color, dropping listeners right into one of his former days on the corner. He bonds with Baton Rouge’s Fredo Bang on the hard-hitting “Astronaut Status,” as they thread together their mutual influences and coast on charisma.
What holds Pat back, though, is that he isn’t a consistent lyricist. His stories of drug dealing and fast money occasionally suffer from poor scene-setting and lyrical banalities. Tracks like “Mad” and “Hellcat,” the weirdly out-of-place collaborative track with Brooklyn drill artist Eli Fross, are so generic that it would be impossible to tell where he hails from if you didn’t already know. On the best Trapland Pat songs, it’s easy to identify that he’s a South Florida rapper even if outside influences are in play. Usually it’s a small touch: the smooth interpolation of Rick Ross’ “Stay Schemin’” on “Motions,” or the way his Florida drawl becomes more pronounced during the woozy lilts at the end of “Losses.”
But, for the most part, what gives the tape its hyper-specific regional feel is fellow Broward County–bred Haitian Pepperjack Zoe, who produces a bulk of the project. His beats incorporate the Cash Money–inspired grooves and piano-driven elements popular in the South, but the most memorable ones have a bright, twitchy feel that recall kompa rhythms. On “Dream,” it’s the fast, danceable tempo; on “Boondocks” it’s the way the synths merge with the skittering drums. Rapping over these beats, Pat sounds at ease unloading Kodak-inflected tricks—the signature singsongy flow, the moody lyrics paired with breezy vibes. It’s extremely regionally and culturally specific, like so much exciting and promising new rap music. It may not be football stardom, but it’s a good pivot.


A double reissue of late-1980s albums by the Can co-founder and the synth-pop savant finds them laying the groundwork for years of ambient music that would follow.

David Sylvian / Holger Czukay: Plight & Premonition / Flux & Mutability

When David Sylvian set about making his first solo album, 1984’s Brilliant Trees, he enlisted a handful of former collaborators, including Yellow Magic Orchestra co-founder Ryuichi Sakamoto as well as his Japan bandmates Steve Jansen and Richard Barbieri. The most crucial contributions, though, came from an artist with whom he had never worked before: Holger Czukay.
Surprisingly, Sylvian’s interest in the German artist’s work derived not from the latter’s tenure in the pioneering krautrock band Can but from his solo albums, particularly his 1979 release Movies. There’s a clear connection between the warped rhythms of that record and the equally off-balance funk of Brilliant Trees’ “Pulling Punches” and the fluid pop of “Red Guitar.” Czukay’s contributions—guitar, vocals, and samples played on old dictaphones—added just the right touch of tumult to Sylvian’s generally straightforward tunes. Where Czukay left his most lasting mark was as an improviser. As Sylvian told the British publication Fourth Door Review, “Holger’s approach was… joyful enthusiasm, wild invention, much paint thrown at the canvas to see what sticks.”
Those qualities, and the two men’s friendship, kept their paths intersecting through the 1980s. After expanding upon their freeform compositional ideas on 1985’s Alchemy - An Index of Possibilities, Czukay and Sylvian went on to collaborate on a pair of fantastic albums—1988’s Plight & Premonition and 1989’s Flux & Mutability—that presaged not only the more experimental turn Sylvian’s career would take in the 2000s but also the ambient strains taken up by 21st-century artists like Loscil and Grouper.
Those albums, newly remastered and re-released as a single two-disc package by Germany’s Grönland Records, each feature two long instrumental works built around drones from a synthesizer or guitar interrupted by random shortwave-radio intrusions and occasionally disorienting tape edits. But in keeping with the dynamic nature of the two musicians’ artistic relationship, the sessions for each record, and the moods they conjure up, were dramatically different.
In the case of Plight & Premonition, Sylvian initially visited Can Studio in Cologne under the pretense of recording a vocal for Czukay’s 1987 solo album Rome Remains Rome. Instead, the two men spent a pair of long nights improvising. Sylvian held court in the main recording space, teasing out melodies and drones on harmonium, synthesizer, piano, or guitar, while Czukay played loops and samples for him to respond to. Whenever Sylvian started falling into a pattern or found a hook, Czukay would encourage him to try something else. As Sylvian recalls in David Toop’s liner notes for this reissue: “He’d only wanted the process, the uncertainty, the ambiguity of the searching out of ideas.”
“Plight (The Spiraling of Winter Ghosts)” reflects that recording experience. The track starts in medias res with a harmonium and a bit of tape both coming to life. Some interwoven drones and a small piano figure float by before a brief sample of what sounds like a chorus line of cartoon skeletons collapsing in a heap bursts through. It’s a jarring moment, but it sets the tone for the piece, which feels meditative yet active—like listening to an ambient record on headphones at such a low volume that the background noise of the metropolis bleeds through. Floating chords and long stretches of chilling beauty find a rough harmony with police sirens and bits of radio broadcasts.
“Plight” benefits from Czukay’s judicious tape edits and processing. “Premonition (Giant Empty Iron Vessel),” which takes up the B-side of the album, is beautiful but far less exciting. Recorded as it was performed, the 16-minute track rolls steadily by with more radio sounds and little swells of electronic noise interrupted by Sylvian’s piano embellishments that are pleasant but almost intrusive to the otherwise enrapturing atmosphere.
Flux & Mutability was another collaborative effort—after a fashion. “‘Flux’ is Holger’s piece and ‘Mutability’ is mine,” Sylvian told The Wire’s Richard Cook in 1989, meaning that while the two men worked together on the album, each took conceptual charge of one sidelong track. Czukay’s side is the more active of the two. Driven by a small drum pattern played by Can percussionist Jaki Liebezeit, the piece is evocatively subtitled “A Big, Bright, Colourful World.” Its light synth drones and radio noise are illuminated by the lens flares of Markus Stockhausen’s flugelhorn and then slightly darkened by some fragmented guitar figures added by another Can member, Michael Karoli.
Sylvian’s side of the album is, again, not as impactful or challenging in comparison. It feels of a piece with the work that he and his collaborators had created for his solo albums Gone to Earth and Secrets of the Beehive—lovely washes of melody played on synth and guitar that drift to the surface before slowly sinking into the depths again—but with the pop elements stripped away. The subtitle (“A New Beginning Is in the Offing”) is apt, however. Looked at within the span of Sylvian’s 40-year career, the piece marks a turning point. He would better realize some of the same free-flowing ideas that he cultivated with Czukay into his next recordings, including Rain Tree Crow, his reunion with three of his Japan bandmates, and his work with King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp.
Much of Sylvian and Czukay’s respective work, either as solo artists or in collaboration with other musicians, has been re-released or cherry-picked for compilations in recent years, but somehow this material never seems to make the cut. The albums’ return to print feels like a footnote to Czukay’s death in 2017 and the career-spanning box set Cinema earlier this year. The albums aren’t treated poorly; Grönland has remastered them warmly and wrapped them both up in new packaging that emphasizes photos of the two men together. But hearing them now and sensing the connection these records have to similarly minded modern efforts by Mirrorring, Liz Harris and Jesy Fortino’s dream-folk project, and Brian Eno’s recent studio collaboration with pianist Tom Rogerson, this reissue, while welcome, highlights the ways in which many of these ideas were more successfully executed by subsequent artists.


The hermetic Swedish bedroom-pop auteur spins out songs of electric uplift and dreamy solitude on his first international release.

Wooh Dang

You probably haven’t heard of Rude, Sweden, a sylvan enclave several hours north of Stockholm, and that suits Daniel Norgren just fine. You probably haven’t heard of Daniel Norgren either. Depending on who you ask, the 35-year-old Swede is some kind of hermit, mystic, bedroom-pop musician, or all of the above. With multiple home-recorded LPs released on his own Superpuma Records over the last decade and countless shows played across Scandinavia and Western Europe, Norgren happily exists as an outsider among outsiders, and he weaves the joy he finds in isolation and in nature into his songs.
His latest, Wooh Dang, is his first international release, and it demonstrates the same unadorned simplicity as all of his work. Norgren’s first musical love was Blind Willie McTell, whose pre-war blues he discovered on imported vinyl, and though he brings a range of instrumentation to Wooh Dang, the album shares a sense of rustic refinement wrought from self-imposed limitation. Norgren incorporates blues, folk, country and psych rock into his quietly profound songs, and Wooh Dang plays like secular worship music, or maybe animist gospel.
Like the bulk of Norgren’s catalog, Wooh Dang contrasts concise, poignant songwriting with abstract, ambience-setting sketches. “Bummin’ ‘round, trying to find the flow,” Norgren sings on lead single “The Flow,” laying out his mission statement with a voice seemingly liquified via a Leslie amp. He’s deployed “The Flow” in his live shows for a few years, and here it feels live, too, the sound of the room—a century-old farmhouse close to Norgren’s house—delineating the song's sonic space.
“Something is waiting down the line,” Norgren sings in “The Power,” “waiting to find you and show you what you are.” It's a song of affirmation, like the subsequent “Rolling Rolling Rolling,” both of which stand among Wooh Dang’s strongest. “Let Love Run the Game”—quite possibly an optimist’s rejoinder to Jackson C. Frank’s indelible “Blues Run the Game”—is a chant of electrified uplift, Norgren singing the story of walking in the woods and hearing a bird impart the titular words of wisdom.
When Norgren works in standard verse-chorus-verse structure, his songs move from mesmerizing, genre-less impressionism to sharply defined, soulfully rendered declarations. On Wooh Dang he spans the spectrum. Singers have sung about nature’s power and the curative transcendence of love since songs were invented, but Norgren’s perspective somehow feels brand-new.


The Kingston-based dancehall crew’s fourth album presents a world of inside jokes and outsize characters set to slyly experimental beats.

Basic Tools

Following solid solo efforts from members Gavsborg, Time Cow, and Shanique Marie, Equiknoxx’s Basic Tools is the fourth full-length from Jamaica’s most endearingly experimental ensemble since Ward 21. While not as outré as Time Cow’s Glory—a remarkable EP released in June with vocalist Craig “Giark” Dixon, bringing Jamaica’s outernational forms back home by mixing up post-punk, Compass Point grooves, and steppers-style reggae—Basic Tools finds the group back in a comfy pocket: distilling studio vibes and creative camaraderie from Kingston to Manchester, Birmingham to New York. Buttressed by additional vocalists Bobby Blackbird, Kemikal Splash, and a host of guests, the crew’s members all take their turns and let the seams show, leaving studio banter and mis-cut samples in the mix, and going with inspired, single-take vocal performances in order to evoke the excitement and back-and-forth of classic dancehall and hip-hop mixtapes. But while the album may have an off-the-cuff quality, the “offness” always seems deliberate and the cuffs are crisp.
Working their wry humor into the sort of deadpan affect so common in dancehall, Equiknoxx’s latest presents a world of inside jokes and outsize characters, of hilarious if nearly inaudible ad-libs, of the joys of turning language and sound into music through bare repetition. Take, for instance, “Was Not Initially Called Make iT Stop,” which leads with the funny premise that a sample of a voice saying “stop” every two beats can drive a song forward. An extended metaphor from Groundhog Day points back to the repeated “Good morning!” that opens the song, using Bill Murray’s cursed plight to riff on pandemic life (and sex). This accompanies a straight-faced proclamation of being “the new Jacobins” with “revolution hidden in hymns,” while what seems like a sly allusion to Papa San’s classic “perdominant” fast-chat routine winks from behind a rhyme scheme that spans “permanent chill,” “bourbon is chilled,” and “suburban appeal.” It’s an impressive turn on the mic from Jamaican filmmaker Storm Saulter, and such multilayered moments typify the group’s irreverent referentiality, often aimed right at the top of listeners’ heads and threatening to sail right on over.
Through the Equiknoxx looking glass, a “thing”—a favorite lyrical conceit—can become a girl or a gun or a pun, and it’s never all that clear when a banana is just a banana. The album begins in medias res, to say the least, halfway through a sentence broadcast on Kingston’s Irie FM, triggering group snickering before the beat drops. An odd inclusion—never mind introduction—it’s inexplicable and a tad unsettling, and it sets the table for all manner of truncated samples to pop across the album, zero-crossings be damned. The next vocals we hear insist, with unremitting repetition, that “you (and crew) nuh keep it real,” which seems a plausible charge even after the verses give us amusingly stuttered d’s (“You be dead-d-d-ded… Gwaan in your bed-d-d-ded… Baldhead or dread-d-d-ded, we have something for you all, copper, lead-d-d-ded…”) and mildly threatening chants of “shala-mala-moo, shala-mala-ma… calla-lala-loo, calla-lala-la.” Between each verse lies a dead-on Drake impersonation, right down to the muted drums, washy synths, and Auto-Tuned moans.
Balancing out the looser, liver elements on Basic Tools is an attention to sonic detail that underpins the Equiknoxx approach, and it sets up some of the album’s best, if subtlest, punchlines. On “Urban Snare Cypher,” it’s not clear whether the snare we hear is the same as the one ridiculed in the lyrics (“I can bet say your snare named ‘urban’…”), but it pops out of the beat’s spartan texture, dripping with reverb in contrast to a clipped, unhurried guitar loop. “Thingamajigama” walks a line between humorous and haunting. The song’s playfully stylized but violent lyrics find funereal accompaniment in the form of sampled choral singers, chopped and reversed into dirgelike loops. In the final seconds, the sample plays out straight, revealing a melodic fragment from the old spiritual “Go Down Moses” set to the literary cliché “It was a dark and stormy night.” What sort of revolution hides here, we can only wonder. Is it a joke about rum drinks too? And how does the tongue-in-cheek send-up of “Jerk Pork Reggae”—a pitch-perfect parody, if a little undercooked—help us to parse what all of this means?
Equiknoxx never let up in the ways they play with powerful sounds and symbols. And cymbals! Stuttering, unquantized cymbals. Flams abound on Basic Tools, played on drums and guitars and other sonic objects, bringing Dilla-esque touches to bear on classic dancehall minimalism. In fine Jamaican style, Equiknoxx draw on a fluency in global currents and cutting-edge production techniques. Propelled by a buoyant bassline and some swinging 2-step drums, “Basic Tools Live” is a convincing UK garage outing, placing Jamaican accents at the center of things once again. “This Song iS Not About Labeling Cables,” meanwhile, combines a bubbling synth line that recalls Cajmere’s immortal “Percolator” riff with a slinky bassline straight out of early ’90s dancehall anthems like Terror Fabulous and Nadine Sutherland’s “Action.” The combination suggests an entire subgenre possibly worth pursuing, even if it’s just an afternoon’s idea that might have as easily been scrapped.
Observing reggae tradition, the album is filled out by the “versions,” or instrumentals, for each of the eight vocal cuts. These sparse tracks hold their own, showing their quirks more clearly, and though as standalones they might have benefited from a little more active dubbing, they reveal a group with a firm sense of its sound. While the Equinox crew continues to expand its musical remit through the members’ individual projects, Basic Tools captures the spirit of this slyly unconventional group as a whole—and the magic that happens when they stick together.

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The new album from singer-songwriter Mackenzie Scott is her most ambitious work by an order of magnitude. It’s an electric-electronic hybrid that is lush, physical, and full of contradictions.

Three Futures

“Writing just to save my life/You stretch barelegged across each line/What ghost crawled inside my guitar?” sang Mackenzie Scott on her debut album as Torres, cutting a familiar figure: a singer with a thing for stripped-down arrangements and a propensity for autobiographical brooding. She slotted her bruises and her confessions into a singer-songwriter mode with a distinctly 1990s air—snaky guitar figures, smoldering feedback, the intensity of an interlocutor laying a sudden hand upon your forearm—and on the follow-up, Sprinter, she grew into that mold, perfected it. Her indie-rock sound filled up and spilled over; her private ghosts cavorted with wisps of Nirvana and PJ Harvey, and she even picked up a few of the latter’s collaborators to help her achieve her vision. She got more ambitious with her songwriting—trying on new personas, folding in literary references, even daring to assume the voice of God (no small thing for a young woman raised Baptist in Macon, Ga. who still professes to follow and fear her Creator). She got more ambitious with her voice, too: exploring its strength and its frailty, learning her way around its pockmarks and potholes, soaring one minute and in the next, treating a cracking note as gingerly as a tree climber might tread upon a broken branch.
More than a continuation of that trajectory, Three Futures feels like a quantum leap. There are more voices, more perspectives—In “Three Futures,” she’s a tumescent teenaged boy getting “hard/In your car/In the parking lot”; in “Righteous Woman,” she’s an “ass man” spreading her knees wide on the subway—and her writing is more vivid than ever. In the opener, the Brooklyn-based singer finds her Southern roots in “A peach cobbler sunning/Belly-up on the granite/The kind that’ll make your/Tongue slap all your brains out.” And her penchant for frank self-analysis has gotten less prosaic and more probing. Throughout Three Futures, you can hear her rethinking what kind of artist she wants to be, and she has evidently arrived at the decision that “singer-songwriter” need not be synonymous with fingerpicking and first-person testimonials. The opening song crests like an orange sunrise, and over the course of the record, that luminous sound envelops you in a mantle of buzz and shimmer, an electric-electronic hybrid that is lush, physical, and full of contradictions.
Torres has typically written about relationships—romantic ones as well as the bonds between daughter and family, between supplicant and God—but this time out, she says, she had bodies and pleasure on the mind, and Kraftwerk and Can on the stereo. It’s an unexpected plot twist, but the shift is immediately apparent in the programmed drum machines and ruminatively looped floor toms. Scott says that she actually plays more guitar on this record than ever before, but you’d never know it—the white-hot filaments of tone snaking through the frame might be guitars masquerading as synths, or vice versa. PJ Harvey’s percussionist and producer Rob Ellis, who co-produced Sprinter, is back, but little of that record’s indie-rock naturalism has been carried over. There are glitches that sound like Oval and supple synth melodies reminiscent of Music for the Masses-era Depeche Mode. This is music that cloaks its sources, that revels in the possibilities afforded by the recording studio.
“Fun” is not a word anyone would attach to Torres’ previous albums, but you can tell that Scott and her collaborators had a ball making this one. “Helen in the Woods” is a hoot: The story of an unhinged stalker and the small town agog at whatever must’ve “made her whiskers curl,” it looms as large as a Hollywood adaptation of a Stephen King novel. Shouting and spitting, Torres might be a heavy metal singer or a speaker-in-tongues—savor the way she dredges the bottom of her range as she rumbles, “Helen’s funny in the head.” Elsewhere, she attacks breath like a sculptor might marble, chips flying as the words take shape beneath her chisel. It’s hard to overstate how much pleasure they’ve baked into the production—the strobing helicopter noises that lend “Helen” its silver-screen excess; the Brian Eno-like guitar filigree that fills the second half of “Marble Focus” so seductively, you barely notice her voice has gone quiet.
The sumptuousness of the record is such that it carries you even when her lyrical conceits fly wide of the mark. Some of her imagery is so specific that it can feel like paging through a journal that has been written largely in code. And sometimes, in her desire for drama, she oversells it: Her cock-rock inflections on “Righteous Woman” only point up the slightly underwhelming subject matter—long-distance booty-call fantasies that don’t merit the overblown treatment. But when she nails it, she really nails it. The languid, tentative title track would be beautiful no matter what the lyrics; that it turns out to be the rarest kind of love song—one addressed to a lover she abandoned—and is so full of regret and empathy (“I hope what you will remember/Is not how I left, but how I entered”) only makes it that much more awe-inducing.
As ever, she saves the best for last. The closing song, “To Be Given a Body,” is a quiet tour de force. Over a soft, ambient flutter, she takes one of the album’s most intensely personal memories—a succession of snapshots, a suggestion of paths taken being measured against paths not—and spins it out into one of the record’s most universal sentiments. “To be given a body is the greatest gift,” she intones, and then, a few lines later: “Laugh until I can’t breathe/Laugh until I can’t breathe.” She has said that it was the last song she completed, “as it was the one I was avoiding writing the most,” and you can hear that hesitant reckoning in her faltering voice. “I start to write once I’ve been made to feel powerless in some way,” she said around the time of Sprinter; “I like to subvert that and have the last word.” Here, though, it sounds like she is tiptoeing beyond that need for control. Torres ended with a would-be jumper asking a waterfall if it ever regretted taking the leap; Sprinter found her drowning under her own fear of mortality. But this, a song about bodies that verges on disembodiment, feels like letting go. Here, at the end of a daring and remarkable album, it feels like she’s earned it.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit a 1987 goth rock masterpiece, a dramatic and winkingly macabre record from the mind of a man who thought it was all sort of a joke.

Floodland

The Sisters of Mercy were pure evil right from the jump. Their sound was so identifiable, so simple and evocative, that it formed its own strand in the DNA of goth music. After a run of increasingly well-crafted singles and EPs, the Leeds band’s 1985 full-length debut, First and Last and Always, crystallized this identity: a drum machine that plinked like icicles dripping on a cave floor; warped guitar riffs that seemed beamed in from ’60s psychedelic rock; menacing basslines that were as memorable as the guitar parts; lyrics of alienation sung in a vampiric yawn that could seduce and mock and yearn.
Where do you go next? Fire the whole band. Bring on Meat Loaf’s songwriter and the guitarist who shredded on “Addicted to Love.” Incorporate a 40-person choir and a climactic sax solo. Write a piano ballad about childhood. Treat the drum machine so that it sounds like Rocky hitting the punching bag. Shoot an expensive video in the desert so that the Sisters of Mercy look like rock gods, wandering the earth in search of a sweeping vista to suit their newfound ambition.
On paper, Floodland should be a polarizing cautionary tale: an act of hubris that rejects the humble, visionary qualities that endeared a loyal audience to an underground, artsy group of misfits. Instead, it’s the masterpiece that defines them. Andrew Eldritch, the band’s sole remaining member by the time of its release in the fall of 1987, was driving himself nuts poring over demos alone in his adopted home of Hamburg. Driven by a burning desire to prove himself—and to propel his story beyond his old friends and new nemeses—this album had to be a grand gesture. Something undeniable.
An auspicious turning point for a band that started as a joke. “A very, very, very, dry joke,” Eldritch clarified to an interviewer in the early ’80s. His idea back then was to embrace the most ridiculous aspects of strung-out rock showmanship and marry them to music so exasperatingly bleak that it formed a meta-commentary on making art in an inhospitable world. The sense of humor came through their sulking covers of unlikely songs—say, ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)”—and their occasional insistence on style over substance. Here was a band who crafted their own logo and merch before ever recording a song. (“I thought T-shirts were the key to this,” Eldritch reflected in 2019, “and I have not been proven wrong.”)
Of course, Eldritch’s self-deprecation was always part of the act, and the truth was that the Sisters of Mercy were significantly more talented and devoted than they let on. Their live shows were emotionally draining, and their recordings were meticulous and full of atmosphere: a sound often imitated but never matched. And yet, it’s the songwriting that helped distinguish them from their peers. Breakthroughs like 1983’s “Temple of Love” showcase Eldritch’s studious attention to the structures and melodies of the classic rock era while expressing the necessary gloom to fit in with the post-Joy Division post-punk boom.
Eldritch refined his songwriting by drawing common threads between all acts of barbarism, whether artistic or romantic or political. The band’s most recent album, 1990’s Vision Thing, is named after a term George H.W. Bush floated to describe the elusive quality that makes a candidate’s platform feel marketable. Eldritch—whose plan-B if the music thing didn’t work out was to study language at Oxford—always seemed attuned to this type of rhetoric. The group’s first greatest hits collection was called A Slight Case of Overbombing, his attempt at nailing the tone himself: the way that overly confident people present their dangerous ideas to a receptive audience.
Or, in other words, rock’n’roll. “We are the children of Altamont,” Eldritch has said of the Sisters of Mercy, which pinpoints their genesis to the very moment when things started falling apart: hippy utopia ushered out by actual violence; rock stars positioned as ill-equipped spokespeople for the chaos in their audience. If there’s an aspect of the Stones that the Sisters of Mercy internalized—outside of their ice-cold cover of “Gimme Shelter—it’s Mick Jagger standing on stage at Altamont, interrupting “Sympathy for the Devil” to urge his fans to “just cool out” as pandemonium spread. The disenchanted look on his face in the accompanying documentary says it all. The ’60s were over; the damage was done.
“There was a time,” Eldritch sang in the ’90s, “but it’s long gone.” Here is the perspective from which he writes best. Bars are always closing, the heat of the night fades into the heat of the day without distinction. Floodland represents the apex of Eldritch’s voice as a writer. He quotes T.S. Eliot, Percy Shelley, and Bob Dylan; he refers directly to the ongoing Cold War and indirectly to an oncoming apocalypse; he makes numerous barbs at his former bandmates and a couple devastating pleas to an ex. Sandwiched between their original classic lineup and the beefed-up rock band he assembled the following decade, it’s the closest thing to a solo album he made—an expression of his solitary vision. He played no shows to support it.
Because Sisters of Mercy have only made three albums—“three very good albums,” Eldritch interrupted a journalist to specify—there is a lot of weight on each one. I’d pinpoint Floodland as their greatest, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. In fact many feared the story had ended when the band disassembled years before its release. Guitarist Gary Marx left to form Ghost Dance; Wayne Hussey and bassist Craig Adams formed the Mission. Eldritch now stood alone (or alone with the drum machine, which he named Doktor Avalanche). In the UK press especially, the breakup was documented with a venom that painted their work firmly in the past tense. “We’d done what we wanted to achieve,” Hussey said. “In doing that we’d lost the original essence of it…. We’d lost the joke of it. Because that’s what it was originally meant to be. A joke.”
Floodland is no joke. But there is a kind of humor to the way the whole thing played out. Prior to its release, when Eldritch heard that Hussey and Adams were starting a new band under the very cool and very official-sounding name the Sisterhood, he had no other choice but to rush out an album under this moniker before they could. And so the true predecessor to Floodland is actually 1986’s Gift, Eldritch’s sole album as the Sisterhood. It is nobody’s favorite record in his catalog, and it’s what Larry David might call a “spite album,” a project whose entire purpose is to inconvenience someone else.
And yet, Gift did introduce some important characters into Eldritch’s work. One is Patricia Morrison, the Gun Club bassist who played on the record. She appears on the cover of Floodland and all its accompanying videos despite allegedly not playing a note on the actual record. There is also the music of Gift itself, which was hastily assembled but formed a crucial part of Eldritch’s evolution. With less focus on the guitars, he favored a murky, synthy blend that placed John Carpenter’s horror scores alongside his personal canon of Motörhead and the Stooges. This would become the bedrock of Floodland, an album that swells and sweeps in one long suite, songs interconnected by bursts of feedback and recurring lyrics. Two songs—“Flood I” and “Flood II”—appear on either side of the record, spinning an imagistic vision that makes you imagine the whole record as some grim fantasy in the bedroom as the world spirals out of control outside the window.
The whole record flows beautifully, and there’s no track that doesn’t add to its majestic stature. But when we talk about Floodland, we talk about three songs. One, of course, is the eternal “This Corrosion,” the closest thing the album had to a hit single, and an idea that originally emerged around the time of Gift. But as the song evolved—with its neverending build and incessant, singalong chorus—Eldritch realized it was a card he should keep up his sleeve for maximum impact. This was the composition that encouraged him to set up shop at New York’s state-of-the-art Power Station studio, where he enlisted a team of session musicians, backing vocalists, and Meat Loaf collaborator Jim Steinman—the crowd-pleasing writer of Bat Out of Hell and “Total Eclipse of the Heart”— to polish his missive into a full-on dancefloor-filler.
The second single was “Dominion/Mother Russia,” which opens the album as a call to arms. Its seven-minute runtime introduced Eldritch’s new favored mode of songwriting: patiently riding a groove like a surfer on a towering wave, finding little slivers of quiet to squirrel away each clipped phrase. In the second half of the song, he builds tension with an almost spoken delivery, gaining momentum as the words start to avalanche, all set to a pounding, insistent rhythm that shows why, a few years later, Public Enemy would seem a natural fit for tourmates. (“America still has a big problem with white crowds and Black crowds in the same place at the same time,” he explained after the tour’s abrupt cancellation. “In addition to which, our record company is thoroughly useless and doesn’t like Black bands.”)
And then there is “Lucretia My Reflection,” the closest thing Eldritch ever crafted to his own classic rock anthem. It’s got the single best riff in his songbook—played on the bass, of course—and some of his most unforgettable lyrics. “I hear the roar of the big machine,” he announces, all bravado and momentum and impending disaster. Each chorus culminates with an invitation to “dance the ghost with me,” sung just before the song whips into a fiery, electric groove that still lights up the crowd at every festival this band plays.
Which is to say, 30-some years later, Andrew Eldritch is still playing festivals as the Sisters of Mercy. Which means Floodland worked. It allowed him to record and tour and keep the story going on his own terms, a boon for an artist who always fought against being seen as a cult act. But it also brought new trials. As the ’80s switched to the ’90s and alternative rock became a catchall term to replace the hyper-specific regional scenes from which he emerged, Eldritch felt boxed in by his reputation. He felt inspired by R.E.M.’s slow, shapeshifting ascent toward mainstream success: “But I can’t get my record company… to understand that I am Michael Stipe and not Ozzy Osbourne,” he said in 1993.
In the decades since, Eldritch has given up being Michael Stipe or Ozzy Osbourne; sometimes he doesn’t even seem like he wants to be Andrew Eldritch. He regularly writes and performs new material in concert, some of which his fans hail alongside his best work, but has yet to make another album. (“I’ve got other stuff to do, man,” is how he recently justified the decision. “I’ve been watching a lot of anime.”)
As someone who has studied the rise and fall of so many rock heroes before him, Eldritch sometimes gives off the impression of a dedicated music snob who somehow gained entry into the kingdom. In the mid-’90s, he got the chance to interview David Bowie, one of his heroes, around the release of Outside, the Brian Eno collaboration that many fans and critics saw as a daring return-to-form. Eldritch was unconvinced.
They engage in several long back-and-forths that endear you to both artists despite their firm differences. On one side is Bowie, endlessly inspired by youth culture and filled with optimism for the future; on the other is Eldritch, so tethered to his specific set of aesthetic principles that even entertaining the idea that Nine Inch Nails were worthy of attention seems to fill him with ire. Finally, Eldritch sums up his line of inquiry with a loaded question: Let’s say Outside is as good as everyone says it is. Do you suspect it could have the same impact as your ’70s work? Bowie admits the answer is probably no. Eldritch: “Then why put it out?”
Here is the defining principle of the Sisters of Mercy: to move people, to change the atmosphere in a room, to redefine yourself every time you step to the mic. To win. And if you can’t do that, what’s the point? In Mark Andrews’ essential biography, Paint My Name in Black and Gold, ex-member Gary Marx tells the story of his first time hearing the 10-minute version of “This Corrosion” blaring over the PA at a venue before his new band was supposed to go on stage. From the sounds of it, Marx knew right away it would become a hit. “Other people in the dressing room looked on wondering how I might react when it ended, if it ever ended,” he remembers. On one side of the curtain, Marx and his bandmates were getting a terrifying glimpse of the new competition; just outside their reach was an audience in pure rapture. And through the speakers was Eldritch, living his dream: a disembodied voice with a message that could echo through the ages, a ghost that would haunt whoever it reached, a dark joke that would only become darker and funnier the longer it went on.


Will Oldham's latest could be the evil twin of the singer/songwriter's career peak, 1999's I See a Darkness: If that 90s record plumbed the bleakness of life, Lie Down in the Light finds peace in the modest pleasures of friends, family, and music.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy: Lie Down in the Light

Lie Down in the Light

Dependable isn't a glamorous adjective for a musician, and reliability doesn't sell a lot of records, but Will Oldham, through his arsenal of aliases, has been creating consistently good music for nearly two decades. At least once a year, he releases an album, EP, mini-LP, or collaboration-- and it's almost always worth hearing. At his worst, he drops a bomb like The Brave & the Bold, his covers album with Tortoise; at his best, as on his defining 1999 album I See a Darkness (recorded under the name Bonnie "Prince" Billy), he completely uproots American musical traditions. The upside is a career with an even trajectory-- rising only slightly but never falling off-- and the freedom to chase any rabbit he wants. The downsides: His albums all sell about the same; his audience, while loyal, neither grows nor dwindles; his followers (Iron & Wine, Pinetop Seven) sometimes surpass him; and his presence within indie rock generally comforts rather than excites.
At first blush, the most interesting aspect of Oldham's latest album (another as Bonnie "Prince" Billy) is its Raconteurish release strategy. Emphasizing digital downloads over jewel-cased CDs, Drag City rushed it to stores with little warning and nothing in the way of a promo blitz, bypassing critics' previews, promotional mp3s, and all the rigmarole that typically sells an indie album. Similar endeavors by more mainstream acts have yielded disappointing returns, but Oldham's audience will seek him out. And while Lie Down in the Light may not actually change his career arc, it should find a very loyal listenership beyond his fans.
For such a reliable artist, Lie Down in the Light is good enough to be actually exciting, perhaps Oldham's best since Darkness, which could be its evil twin. If that 10.0-worthy record plumbed the bleakness of life, Light finds peace in the modest pleasures of friends, family, and music. "I like the places where the night does not mean an end," he sings on "You Remind Me of Something (The Glory Goes)", "Where smiles break free and surprise is your friend/ And dancing goes on in the kitchen until dawn/ To my favorite song that has no end." At times on this album, Oldham sounds like he's found just that place.
Musically, these meticulously crafted songs-- produced by Mark Nevers of Lambchop-- give the impression of front-porch spontaneity, their purposefulness made to sound like serendipity. Oldham mines many of the same musical veins as he has on previous albums-- these songs are heavy with old gospel, country, folk, and other Americana sounds-- but he tweaks them in new ways, adding twists and turns that even some of his most ardent fans may not expect. The free-wheeling "Easy Does It" opens the album with a churchly jangle in which Oldham's band (which includes mainstays Paul Oldham and Emmett Kelly, along with scads of Nashville musicians) trade solos. A Bakersfield guitar passes the plate to a barrelhouse piano, which yields to a melodica, and all the while Oldham hums like he's in a jug band. It's as if the instruments were introducing themselves so you'll recognize them in later songs, but that doesn't account for the clarinet that goes off on a wild tear on "For Every Field There's a Mole", adding a jazzy element that sends the song careering in a new direction, namely a rewrite of Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 ("To every thing there is a season..."). Similarly, a mournful pedal steel punctuates "You Want That Picture", and the ambient woodwinds and percussive acoustic guitar give "(Keep Eye on) Other's Gain" an almost psychedelic sensibility.
Lie Down may be Oldham's most country record of new songs in years, and it's also one of his most accessible and least academic records. In its loose narrative-- of a relationship forged and broken, and of lives reassured-- the Loretta Lynn to his Conway Twitty is Ashley Webber, whose full-throated, feminine roar contrasts with Oldham's old-man croon. "So Everyone", with its solemn horns and ratchety percussion (either a washboard or spoons), relates the excitement of new love through a plea for public oral sex, but there's neither a giggly nudge nor an admission of transgressiveness. In fact, the song sounds positively romantic. Of course, their second duet, "You Want That Picture", portrays a romance in shambles, each accusing the other of betrayal in a he-said/she-said dialogue.
Oldham certainly sees a darkness, but Lie Down ends basking in holy light. A Baptist organ illuminates the hymnlike closer "I'll Be Glad", a paean to God's own reliability. As it reaches its final refrain, a full choir joins Oldham for a few short, sweet chords that serve as a sort of benediction. Coming at the end of an album full of moral, romantic, and sexual gray areas, those closing notes sound genuinely redemptive-- not just a preordained conclusion, but a powerful and hard-won finale. If Lie Down in the Light sounds like the distillation of the themes and sounds Oldham has been tinkering with throughout his career, the result, as he sings on "Easy Does It", is "good earthly music singing into my head."


The newly reissued 1989 collaboration between Liza Minelli and the Pet Shop Boys is a fascinating, addled mix of show tunes, strings, and 808s that coalesces in a mood of chic Upper East Side regret.

Results

At the height of their 1987-1988 imperial phase, Pet Shop Boys had a surplus of material awaiting the proper vessels. The first were Eighth Wonder, fronted by model/actress Patsy Kensit. Thanks to Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe’s “I’m Not Scared,” the quartet scored their first British smash in the spring of 1988. What a delightful thing it was too: a staccato sample of Kensit singing “ah-ah-ah,” clouds of Europop synths, a rat-tat-tat beat and Kensit herself telling somebody to take these dogs away from her—I hope Liam Gallagher heard her loud and clear in divorce court a dozen years later.
Buoyed by its success, Tennant and Lowe moved to their next client. Liza Minnelli might have been a charming Oscar-winning actress and a singer with a physical and emotional range as considerable as her mom’s, but she had never shown interest in pop. It was her pal Gene Simmons of KISS who took credit for nudging her to the Pet Shop Boys. She considered it; she had liked their 1987 UK hit “Rent.” The Boys accepted the challenge. “I went into the studio, but there were only Neil, Chris, Julian and me,” she said at the time. “I asked when the musicians would arrive. And Neil said: ‘Are you mad? There are no musicians: it’s all machines, darling.’”
An addled mishmash of show tunes, covers, original material, strings, and the polite wobble of 808s, Results is 1989’s most conspicuous outlier—nothing sounded like it—yet it was the quintessential Pet Shop Boys album. They might’ve assumed, correctly, that Results would be a hit on fumes alone, but they programmed the garish effects and wrote the purple lyrics that market calculations forced them to omit from their own work. And Minnelli, strutting always like the biggest hen on the farm, inhabits what Tennant called in an interview the “power woman” tropes that the Boys wrote for her. Bringing years of syllabic precision learned at concert halls across the globe, Minnelli sounded like no one in transatlantic pop: too florid for Paula Abdul material, too light for theater. Now that Results exists remastered and expanded with several acres of okay remixes, fans who’ve carried the thin-sounding original CD around for years can appreciate the labor.
Exposed yet committed to surfaces, Minnelli is fascinating in Cabaret; she was a more volatile Sally Bowles than Christopher Isherwood envisioned. The Minnelli of 1972 wouldn’t recognize the Minnelli of 1989. Keep that in mind when listening to British top ten “Losing My Mind,” written by Stephen Sondheim for Follies, released a year before Cabaret. Over an ebb-and-flow electronic backdrop, Minnelli nails the tumult of romantic obsession. The telling moment occurs at 2:37, during which Tennant and Lowe add a high keyboard squiggle straight out of Italo disco. She doesn’t sound upset—she sounds like someone acting upset, which makes all the difference. The same goes for the thwacking “Don’t Drop Bombs,” in which Minnelli dishes out tough talk about a boyfriend taking out other girls on his expense account: Results is about and for the 1 percent. Tennant and Lowe sneak in two climaxes: a refrain with rising synth string chords centered around the couplet “When you’ve erupted/You’re totally destructive”; and Minnelli’s high notes as she sings the five-note keyboard hook. The switch in tones and colors, dictated by the arrangement, is wizardly; this was the risk Tennant and Lowe took hiring a professional, and it paid off.
The centerpieces draw upon the full reserves of Minnelli’s strengths. A despairing lyric set to a major key chorus, “So Sorry, I Said” shows a comity between performer and material so hushed and intimate that it’s like walking in on a nude person dressing. In typical Tennant fashion, “So Sorry, I Said” builds to the tossed-off inversion of subject and verb. Covers of the Pet Shop Boys’ own “Tonight is Forever” and “Rent” and Tanita Tikaram’s “Twist in My Sobriety” deepen the mood of chic Upper East Side regret—of confidences exchanged in private cars inching north on Lexington Avenue. Benefitting most from the aural upgrade is “If There Was Love,” a six-minute-plus take on the acid house lite with which the Pet Shop Boys had experimented on B-sides like {The Sound of the Atom Splitting.” In keeping with Chris Lowe’s ew-gross-guitars approach, Courtney Pine contributes a hysterical soprano sax solo.
In retrospect, the clues were easy to spot, but the best indication that Lowe and Tennant weren’t straight was their choice of clients. Thanks to “Opportunities” and “Shopping,” fools thought that by mocking the young male characters addicted to Issey Miyake the Boys weren’t also sympathizing or envying their shallowness. A star as huge as Liza Minnelli was the proper emulsifier. A career in decline lent Results the requisite air of ravaged grace—a Marianne Faithfull who really had been in every VIP room from Bali to Boston. She committed to the project, she said, because Pet Shop Boys material often sounded “poetic and vaguely cynical and Aznavourian.” She knew what she wanted. After Results, the Boys returned to Dusty Springfield; Minnelli moved on to Stepping Out. As their album’s prophetic title indicated, a reprise was unthinkable.


Instead of a reinvention, the London band’s latest album jumps at the chance to blend in with every other rock act on the festival circuit.

Shoals

Can I be sure that Palace didn’t share an NME cover with Elbow and South in 2001? Did they not arrive in America as an opening act for Travis or Doves? I swear they could’ve gotten into a minor press beef with Embrace or Athlete, or maybe it’s a foggy memory of spinning “Heaven Up There” alongside Starsailor at the Sam Goody listening booth. It’s been nearly 20 years since the UK was flooded by bands with similarly functional names that sounded a lot like Palace: lush, languid, lovelorn, and satisfying ongoing demand for Jeff Buckley-esque falsetto flourishes after Radiohead discovered the Warp catalog. Palace have mostly had this space to themselves since their 2014 EP Lost in the Night fast-tracked them to endemically UK forms of hype: getting handpicked as an opener for Jamie T’s comeback show, playing the John Peel Stage at Glastonbury months before their first LP was released. But with their third album, Shoals, the London quartet undertake an admirable and ultimately pyrrhic quest to blend in with every other British rock band on the festival circuit right now.
Had Palace started as a typical, trend-conscious buzz band rather than a Y2K throwback, they might have ended up here a decade later anyway. Lead single “Gravity” tipped their hand: “I’ve got sleep deprivation,” Leo Wyndham moans as Palace somnambulates through five minutes of psychedelic soul pumped with quaaludes and dry ice. It would’ve filled the gap left by Darkside in the eight years since Psychic had an actual Darkside album not shown up one month earlier. “Fade” veered in a different direction, a brisk krautrock/dream-pop hybrid clearly modeled off DIIV, though infused with a magisterial vocal and production aesthetic that’s otherwise the polar opposite of Oshin. Taken together, “Gravity” and “Fade” demonstrate the range and the boundaries of Shoals, a modernized but familiar variety of the heavy-lidded strains of R&B and vibey rock that serve as the working definition of “indie” on most Spotify playlists.
These updates on their sound still don’t address the main shortcoming of Palace’s two previous albums: For a band of their stature, they are curiously averse to big chunes, and Wyndham’s windblown delivery inflates their meandering melodies to a tenuous grandeur. That’s still the case on Shoals, where the festival flag-wavers are equally sedative as the songs where the vocals stretch into pure texture. Leo Abrahams’ stylish production steers the discussion toward his previous work with Brian Eno and Jon Hopkins, even if Shoals just as often makes me think of a weighted blanket or paint roller soaked in aloe vera.
This outcome is likely preferable to Palace “fearlessly embracing our pop side” or whatever bands say before their synthy pivot, since the album’s most grating moments arise from the dissonance between Wyndham’s maudlin vocals and his increasingly conversational lyrics. He spends much of Shoals in that half-falsetto, half-chest moan that makes voice coaches wish James Blake and Bon Iver never made it past 2010, an approach suited to the self-explanatory “Friends Forever,” “Lover (Don’t Let Me Down),” or rhyming “insane” with “pain” on a song called “Give Me the Rain.” It also turns Shoals into unintentional parody whenever its lyrics sheet reads like a gooey IG caption: “You elevate the heart of me/You’ve ghosted my negativity.”
More than any new musical influence, Palace have found inspiration in the pandemic, probably the album’s most contemporary aspect. While the massive success of their first two records could easily be taken for a mandate for more of the same, the quartet were given the opportunity to rethink a process they’ve kept in place since they formed as 13-year-olds. Wyndham contracted COVID and had legitimate concerns that he would never sing or even breathe normally again: As he told NME, “When music was taken away, I started to wonder what my purpose was,” and he tried to put aside simple love songs to reckon with existential dread, childhood trauma, and mental health. Palace now quote Nelson Mandela in their press materials and describe the band as a union of four autonomous artistic entities. Opener “Never Said It Was Easy” is the boldest evidence of Palace’s ambition, as Wyndham traces his path from the physical maladies of his youth to his mental struggles of today over layers of sampled, unquantized piano and textured harmonies. The best song on Shoals follows immediately: “Shame on You” is the kind of sweeping, weeping power ballad that Coldplay perfected and then spent the past 20 years trying not to write anymore. This is what makes Shoals truly a product of its time: Instead of seizing the opportunity for a complete overhaul, Palace jumped at the chance to get back to normal.

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The latest from free-folk journeyman Matt Valentine delves into lysergic funk and psychedelic self-reflection.

Warping All by Yourself

Matt Valentine and Erika Elder are the picture of domestic psychedelic bliss, steering their country-fried caravan MV & EE from a log cabin deep in the Vermont woods, where they also raise a young daughter. Two decades into their career as madcap folk songwriters and kaleidoscopic jammers, the couple continues to release music at a prolific rate, largely through their in-house Child of Microtones CD-R imprint. Occasionally, the pair will poke their heads above ground with releases on higher-profile labels. Such is the case with Warping All By Yourself, the latest album from Wet Tuna, the project initially formed by Valentine and guitarist Pat “P.G. Six” Gubler. Working with the psych-focused label Three Lobed, Valentine pours a generous splash of funk into the homebrewed elixir, offering one of his most accessible entry points in years.
Valentine started on this path immediately after high school, co-founding indie/shoegaze group The Werefrogs in the late 1980s. This began his collaboration with Gubler in experimental configurations such as the Tower Recordings, Memphis Luxure, and most recently, Wet Tuna. Oddly, Gubler doesn’t appear on Warping All By Yourself, but the music exists firmly in the territory they charted together as innovators of the genre that became known as “freak folk.” In 2003, Valentine launched the Brattleboro Free Folk Festival, where Crazy Horse guitar jams, raga drones, and spiritual jazz could meet in an ecstatic embrace. Since then, Valentine has compared his ceaseless pace to author Philip K. Dick, who maintained a steady output whether or not he achieved financial success. By releasing proper albums alongside the jammier outtakes, the patterns in Valentine’s vast constellations have become increasingly lucid.
One of Valentine’s latest fixations is lysergic funk, an influence that has colored recent highlights such as “Disco Bev” from Wet Tuna’s 2019 LP, Water Weird. Warping All By Yourself is bookended by two versions of “Raw Food,” an ode to avoiding cheeseburgers, featuring violinist Samara Lubelski. Valentine borrows a few tricks from Don Cherry’s Brown Rice in these songs’ mesmerizing, slow-motion grooves, and near-whispered delivery. With backing vocals from Mick Flower and Doc Dunn, “Ain’t No Turnin’ Back” includes some of the album’s funniest lyrics, as these reclusive weirdo artists sing about what it’s like to be a reclusive weirdo artist: “Free folk is a motherfucker/Shit, you’re a big freak/So many reamers let me be/So many punishers in between.”
“Sweet Chump Change” is the album’s funkadelic crown jewel, a duet featuring the sundazed intonations of Erika Elder. Its lyrics are a free-associative stream of rhymes (“Unicorn blood/Down at the pub” and “Dankazoid jam/Dial-up scam”) that could become grating if you’re not used to hearing a middle-aged dad rapping in the woods. As Valentine lays down slinky keys, hand percussion, and soaring guitar solos, it starts to sound like Herbie Hancock covering the Sopranos theme song—in the best way possible.
Warping By Yourself drifts to a close with the languid ambience of “Been So Long” and a reprise of “Raw Food,” drizzled with Stevie Wonder-style clavinet. These elements, borrowed from funk and soul, are strikingly different from the country-folk side of MV & EE’s extended universe. At the same time, Valentine has always worked like a voracious record collector, looking to expand upon his old staples. No matter who’s along for the ride, each new release dives deeper into his obsessions, and these warped grooves are a perfect place for newcomers to wade in.


The surprise release collects unheard material originally meant for “Twin Peaks: The Return”; though slighter than this year’s Digital Rain EP, it might be Jewel’s strongest soundtrack work yet.

Themes for Television

The air of mystique surrounding Johnny Jewel often means that, when it comes to his musical output, nothing is quite what it may seem. That’s certainly true of Themes for Television, a surprise release that dropped at the beginning of this week. The 56 minutes of music collected here were allegedly meant for David Lynch and Mark Frost’s “Twin Peaks: The Return.” Jewel reportedly composed 20 hours of music for the show and submitted somewhere between five and seven hours to Lynch for potential use.
But despite being billed as a collection of unreleased music taken from those sessions—Lynch ultimately decided not to use Jewel’s work, save for the title track to last year’s Windswept—some of Themes for Television has appeared elsewhere in other forms. Besides a “minimal” edit of “Windswept,” there are also alternate versions of “Shadow” and “Saturday,” two songs that Jewel’s Chromatics performed in “Twin Peaks”’ iconic Roadhouse venue; the twinkling theme of “Shadow” is sorta-reprised on “Waking Up,” which itself bears close resemblance to Windswept’s “Heaven.” Similar to the streaks of nostalgia that occasionally emerged in “Twin Peaks: The Return,” the general makeup of Themes for Television elicits pangs of familiarity noticeable only to those who paid close enough attention in the past.
Despite these shared traits, it’s perhaps best (and, considering the inimitable Angelo Badalamenti’s contributions to the series, fairest) to experience Themes for Television through a sonic lens divorced from Lynch and Frost’s beautiful and terrifying creation. Think of this release as another window into Jewel’s approach to score composition—a vista that, granted, listeners are more than familiar with at this point. Over the past four years, Jewel’s soundtracked Ryan Gosling’s directorial debut, Lost River, as well as the 2016 Belgian drama Home and the previous year’s A Beautiful Now. (This isn’t counting his appearances on the iconic Drive soundtrack, or “imagined soundtrack” releases like Windswept, the 2016 EP The Key, and “The Other Side of Midnight” from 2015—documents not explicitly attached to other properties, but all bearing the “Film” logo on their cover art.)
Although it stands as comparably slight when measured up to Jewel’s lovely, ambient Digital Rain LP from earlier this year, Themes for Television might be the strongest collection of Jewel’s score work to date. Fans of his work know what they’ve come for—rippling synths, dark ambience, the occasional melodic swell, and a mournful saxophone line or two—and Jewel certainly does not disappoint.
The “(Opening Titles)” edit of “Shadow” emphasizes the original’s triumphant elegance, Chromatics’ performance of which served as a dazzling stinger to the second episode of “Twin Peaks: The Return”; the scorched static of “Caffeine” gives way to John Carpenter-esque tick-tock tones, while the synthetic bath of “Self Portrait” possesses a weightlessness that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Oneohtrix Point Never’s 2010 breakout Returnal. The relative brevity of these tracks (most of which not pushing past the three-minute mark) means that their staying power depends almost wholly on the listeners’ predilection for atmosphere. But while they’re in the air, it makes for a nice sonic space to live within.
Themes for Television’s highlights effectively double as a showcase for Jewel’s impressive sense of arrangement and mood-setting. “Windswept (Minimal)” is anchored around placid keys and close-mic’d woodwinds, every figurative breath echoing throughout the track’s mix to create a truly chilling feeling, while “Embers” breaks into a skyward major-key ascent before settling beautifully on a minor chord, like a feather hitting hard ground. The latter is a simple and subtly devastating trick that, in others’ hands, would risk approaching cliché; in Jewel’s hands, the approach retains power in the purity of its straightforwardness.
It’s possible that Themes for Television’s strengths originate from Jewel’s own intimate personal connection to the “Twin Peaks” franchise. Last year he told Consequence of Sound that he stopped following the original series during its early-1990s run after a friend he watched it with committed suicide; he didn’t return to it until moving to Montreal and meeting a band member from Italians Do It Better outfit Desire years later. So besides being a fine placeholder release as Jewel’s fans wait for that record, perhaps Themes for Television is best viewed as an invitation into the mind and heart of an artist who, like “Twin Peaks”’ enigmatic co-creator himself, is content to remain just far enough out of reach.