We learned the first and second laws of thermodynamics in my 7th period physics\n\ class junior year. The first ...

Triple Point

We learned the first and second laws of thermodynamics in my 7th period physics class junior year. The first law of thermodynamics states that, in a closed system, the total energy, including heat, is conserved. The second law states that heat flows spontaneously from a hot body to a cool one, that one cannot convert heat completely into useful work, and that every isolated system becomes disorder with time. I stopped doodling long enough to copy these laws into a free corner of my notebook. 8th and 9th period ruminations didn't make the second law any more comfortable, so I went home and cried. Really.
Loscil is both the basic unit that Csound software uses to build a sampling synthesizer, and the pseudonym that Canadian sound designer Scott Morgan performs and records under when he's not drumming for Dan Bejar's Destroyer. I can only assume that Morgan, who has been active in the Vancouver music and new-media scene for some time, has put more than a few loscils to use; possibly even some loscil3's, which use fancy cubic interpolation schemes.
Triple Point, Loscil's debut record was titled for the point when the vapor, liquid, and solid phases of a material are all in equilibrium. And as it so happens, it's an ambient dub concept album about thermodynamics, created with samplers, synths, and a Powerbook. Sure, the idea has some potential, since the dark promise of thermodynamics' second law can bolster nihilism and elicit a very strong emotional response from humans, but the odds aren't on the side of success. After all, most people don't know much-- if anything-- about thermodynamics, and this combination can quickly equal bad art. Bard College might give 2\xBD credits for interpretive dances inspired by "Fuel Exergy," but that doesn't mean you want to listen to its audio counterpart on the way to work in the morning.
Triple Point begins where the periodic table does: the opening track is titled "Hydrogen." The song starts with a muted beat under a looped two-note synth melody, and then neatly adds elements to this base one at a time. It sounds more like Bergheim 34 at half-speed or Aphex Twin than any primary component of the universe to me, but somehow, the music seems like it might be anticipating something.
It anticipates more of the same. The second track, "Ampere," begins with the exact same formula as "Hydrogen." The drum machine starts with what sounds like a heart beating to a mutant rhythm, while the synthtone keeps the pacing of a respirator. While I wait for more sounds I hit the dictionary. "An 'Ampere' is equal to a constant current which when maintained in two straight parallel conductors of infinite length and negligible circular sections..." I notice a three-note melody of synth cello and a dance beat have been introduced. The last element to enter the song is clanking, irregular percussion. For the first time so far on Triple Point, the metallic beat sounds like something that might have been played by a human instead of processed by a sequencer. And though the sound is flatter and more contained than live drums, the excessively sterile quality of the rest of the record seems heightened when it drops out.
The next song, "Pressure," is actually an IDM cover of that ridiculous Billy Joel number. Oh! That was just my imagination! It's actually just spacy music that might lead one's mind to wander. "Pressure" is sparse, and filled with "pssst" noises that leak out with every long slow synth tone. At this point in the record, it becomes clear that Triple Point is less a musical interpretation of thermodynamics-- or a response to the implications of thermodynamics that some might find sad or frightening-- and more a recording of what these processes might sound like if they were closely miked. Morgan's digital dubs add detail to loops as they build throughout the songs, thus creating the impression of "listening in closer" to hear small bubbles popping and delicate echoes pulsating.
"Vapour" is Triple Point's haunted house. A sharp intake of air trails each programmed gong tone. The low ring shifts pitch as swarms of sound swing in and out. A ping-pong ball bounces once and then dribbles off. If the song was longer, the looped ping-pong ball would quickly become the aural equivalent of Chinese water torture. It brings to mind the work of electro-acoustic tape artist Francis Dhomont, who used samples like balls, chains, and gears almost cinematically to create spaces. While Loscil's work is based in rhythm and meditation unlike Dhomont's free compositions, the dampened beat and sterile synths he repeatedly uses on Triple Point could use some of Dhomont's creaks, cranks and flutters.
The concepts of thermodynamics are difficult to express in writing, music or art. Entropy and heat death are famous for being misused in tacky metaphors to explain chaotic social dynamics, atonal music, and relationships in need of therapy. Thomas Pynchon gave it a shot in his early story, "Entropy," but now is very critical of the piece. He's since written that the concept was so forced that the characters themselves were shortchanged. His advice to others is, "Get too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page." Triple Point might be inspired by thermodynamics, but Loscil's attempts to communicate these ideas through sound are forced. Sure, the placement and timing of the samples is finessed-- Morgan has a clear talent for arranging sound-- but after ten tracks, the muted beats and droning synths just sound dead. But then again, the "triple point" of a material marks a moment of stasis. So that might all be part of his plan.


On her beguiling debut release, the UK musician joins the atmosphere of ambient music with the structure of choral composition and the seeming effortlessness of pop.

Rushing EP

Reverb can be like a drug. It’s easy to overdo it, easy to become dependent upon it. Everything becomes beautiful inside its velvet cocoon; everything feels profound. A few years ago, there was a brief trend for remixes that electronically “stretched” songs into gaseous abstractions many times longer than the original versions, freezing them in a seemingly endless shimmer. The output invariably sounded substantial, no matter how lightweight the source material: A reworking of Justin Bieber’s “U Smile” turned the 16-year-old pop star into a “celestial choirboy.” But what sounded like magic was really just simple number-crunching. The technique involved digitally pulverizing an audio file and sustaining each grain of sound in cathedral-grade reverb, like so many dust motes floating in mid-air. The ease with which this simulacrum of grandeur could be attained demonstrates how easily artifice can become a gimmick, a cheap high.
But newcomer Lucy Gooch belongs to a select list of musicians (Juliana Barwick, Grouper, Mary Lattimore) putting reverb to more artful ends—not simply painting on a veneer of readymade emotion, but using the technique to suggest a dimension beyond our ken. Rushing is the Bristol, UK musician’s debut release, and its five tracks are evidence of an unusually developed aesthetic vision, one that joins the atmospheric quality of ambient music with the structure of choral composition and the seeming effortlessness of pop.
Gooch’s music sounds simple on the surface but teems with complexity underneath. “My Lights Kiss Your Thoughts Every Moment,” which opens the record, begins with airy sounds: the glimmer of what might be church bells, the echo of her voice wafting up to the arches of the nave. Below, a seismic synthesized bass tone rumbles the earth beneath our feet. In between those two poles shimmers a world of echo, masking the sources of her sounds. Turn it up loud enough and mercurial details flash out, like what might be the scrape of electric-guitar strings—part of the arrangement or just a trick of the mixdown? Who’s to say?
The song’s lyrics are drawn from the poems of Rabindranath Tagore: “I have kissed this world/With my eyes and limbs/My life when young was like a flower/That loosens a petal or two/They flock around him like bees.” Gooch’s soft, clear voice is trailed by ghosts of itself; the music is rich with color and alive with movement, as layers of wordless singing swarm around her in slow motion. The feeling of weightless rapture recalls A Feather on the Breath of God, a classic recording of choral work by the 12th century Christian mystic Hildegard of Bingen.
“Sun,” darker and heavier, is reminiscent of gloomy This Mortal Coil songs like “Waves Become Wings.” Once again, a sustained clanging sound hints at church bells in the distance; Gooch sings ominously of a disappearing sun, of arid fields, her voice turned thick and close, as though bouncing off the walls of a dry well: “All the water’s gone to drain.” She returns to the idea of water on “Stalagmites & Helictites,” whose title invokes surreal, biomorphic-looking cave formations formed by dripping water. Sonically, it’s the record’s simplest cut, just a series of stair-stepping vocal harmonies that fade into lengthy shadows, but it may also indicate a well-developed sense of self-awareness, if not outright irony: a song about caverns that sounds like it was actually recorded in one.
The song that might be the record’s best actually downplays Gooch’s favored effect. In “Rushing,” her close-harmonized vocal loops spin in place while she solos on top of them; buzzing organ tones lend a liturgical atmosphere, but this time her voice is dry and untreated, almost as if she were in the same room as you. The lyrics are psalms taken from the Old Testament and rearranged into song form: “In his hands are the depth of the earth/And unfailing love/Do you know how the clouds hang poised?/The skies proclaim the work of his hands.” The subject matter hints at vastness, but Gooch’s songwriting is marked by its ease and intimacy; the arrangement is fleet of foot in a way that feels closer to pop music than ambient bombast. There’s always the risk of overreaching when trying to capture this kind of boundless yearning. But with “Rushing,” Gooch breaks off a small piece of the sublime and cups it in her hands.


Plowing Into the Field of Love finds Iceage growing up on their own terms. Here, they make a radical shift away from their hack-and-slash past and towards what is, for them, unexplored territory—morose piano balladeering, sprightly country-rock figures, distinctly Irish-sounding drinking anthems.

Plowing Into the Field of Love

"All those brash young studs/ They have no idea what it’s like up here," Danish punk Elias Bender Rønnenfelt moans over a rolling midtempo drag on the title track to Iceage’s brilliant third album, Plowing Into the Field of Love. The line first scans as a refined upgrade of the band’s usual alienation—a dark basement swapped for an ivory tower. But it also has the same sardonic self-awareness that coats the instantly iconic video for Plowing’s first single, "The Lord’s Favorite", which featured the really, really, really ridiculously good-looking Rønnenfelt and his youthful comrades smearing lipstick on themselves, taking champagne baths, and enjoying cocktails with (d)ice in their glasses. "Part of me wants to hurt you/ Tear in your hair/ But I don’t do that now," the singer admits, staring into the camera and lighting a cigarette as the band takes on tricky cowpunk shapes underneath his voice; it is, at the least, a unique approach to acknowledging newfound maturity.
Indeed, Plowing Into the Field of Love finds Iceage growing up on their own terms. Up to this point, they’ve developed incrementally, taking a knife to the rough-around-the-edges teenage fury of the 2011 debut LP New Brigade and cutting fresh, sharp ribbons of flesh on last year’s refined sophomore effort You’re Nothing. Essentially a bolder, somewhat brighter update of what came before, You’re Nothing contained few hints of the baroque terrain that Iceage are traversing now. But the dense lockstep drone that closed out that record’s "Morals" suggested that Iceage could slow things down without losing their dead-eyed sense of passion.
On Plowing, Iceage make a radical shift away from their hack-and-slash past and towards what is, for them, unexplored territory—morose piano balladeering, sprightly country-rock figures, distinctly Irish-sounding drinking anthems. Their journey mirrors the transformation that the punks of the '80s underwent when devising the perfect alchemy of hardcore’s youthful burn and Americana’s weary shuffle (see Mekons, X, Meat Puppets). So Iceage aren’t exploring new sounds on Plowing, culturally speaking, but nothing they’ve done in the past five years suggested that they were capable of such a transformation. Despite the new approach, Iceage still sound like themselves, so when Asger Valentin’s mournful trumpet cuts through the rolling stomp of "Glassy Eyed, Dormant and Veiled", the most surprising thing about the instrument isn’t its mere presence, but how at-home it sounds amidst the band’s newly considered arrangements.
A sense of steadiness, a measured approach to abandon, marks Iceage’s transformation from a very good band to a Great Band on Plowing. While New Brigade contained bursts of unexpected melodic sweetness, the gruesome You’re Nothing often sounded like it was held together with little more than congealed blood and matted hair. On Plowing, the band swings to the opposite pole, sounding threateningly tight even when walking the edge of full collapse, similar to '80s-era Sonic Youth’s balance of control and dissonance. Dark piano chords serve as an anchor for "How Many"'s buzzsaw guitars, embracing a half-time tempo change at the song’s midsection that crashes through the burning scenery; "Cimmerian Shade" kicks off with a hollow pound courtesy of drummer Dan Kjær Nielsen, accented by guitars both brawny and thin-sounding that abrasively scrape against each other.
Album centerpiece "Stay" somewhat hilariously opens as a waltz in 3/4 time, speeding up uncontrollably at the command of Rønnenfelt’s most operative, visually arresting lyrical aside on Plowing ("Hands/ Become thundering hooves") before building to a furious burn that stands as Iceage’s finest moment of feral aggression. Plowing’s strangest moment, then, comes in the form of its most straightforward tune: "Abundant Living", the record’s only sub-three-minute song that one could reasonably listen to while skipping down a sidewalk. Jakob Tvilling Pless wields a jaunty mandolin figure over the band’s besotted sway, which takes on a Gaelic punk resemblance as Rønnenfelt promises in a miserable cadence, "I’ll bring it all down here with me/ Soaked in alcohol."
Rønnenfelt’s lyrics are front and center throughout Plowing—partially a result of his improved English, as he told Pitchfork recently—and they paint the type of self-portrait you’d expect from a punkish youth in his twenties: fatalistic, ferociously inquisitive, drunk on the promise of tomorrow and even drunker on whatever’s flowing from the tap at this very moment. Images of absent fathers, prison cells, and drowning are evoked, and the album’s parting line—"I am plowing into the field of love/ They will place me in a hearse"—reads as poetically grim as the limited perspective of youth allows. "I have a sense of utopia/ Of what I truly ought to do," Rønnenfelt proclaims in the middle of "How Many", and that sense of gritted-teeth naïveté comes to define Plowing Into the Field of Love as a whole. This is the sound of Iceage finding a balance between getting older and seeking immortality by way of leaping into an abandoned-lot fire head-first. It’s beautiful and ugly at the same time and, for now, Iceage have found their own unstable sense of peace.


The 20th anniversary remaster of Smith's final solo album before his major label debut highlights its inimitable sound and style: a magical, alchemical mix of intimacy and bombast.

Elliott Smith: Either/Or: Expanded Edition

Either/Or: Expanded Edition

About two minutes into Either/Or opener “Speed Trials,” Elliott Smith’s seamlessly double-tracked lead vocal splits into a two-part harmony. It’s a very subtle gesture, and only lasts for a few seconds—but contrasted with the tight, hushed unison of Smith’s prior solo output, it feels as dramatic as The Wizard of Oz shifting from sepia to technicolor. This moment plays out like a microcosm of Either/Or at large, the sound of Smith conjuring something far bigger than himself and coming into his own as a songwriter, arranger, and performer. The final album in Smith’s catalog before the major label-backed XO and Figure 8, Either/Or marks the last time Smith’s instincts would outpace the studio resources to execute them. It's extraordinary how he embodies a magical, alchemical mix of intimacy and bombast.
By the time Either/Or was released in 1997, Smith was no stranger to the cynical machinations of the post-grunge major label gold rush. A year prior, his former band Heatmiser had been put through that very ringer, an experience captured in Either/Or standouts “Pictures of Me” and “Angeles.” Either/Or sounds like the work of somebody who has zero interest in either conforming to or directly transgressing the “commercial” sounds of the day. It’s too ambitious to read as “lo-fi” and too gritty to read as straightforward pop classicism. Thankfully, this 20th anniversary remaster doesn't smooth out too many of those rough edges—if anything, it brings the unique sound of the record into even clearer focus.
The sounds and words of Either/Or often conjure very specific images, textures, and situations. And yet, Smith—as with many truly great songwriters—used this specificity as a way to explore emotional themes that resonate both deeply and broadly. Nowhere is this clearer than “Between the Bars,” the closest thing to a modern-day standard Smith ever wrote and covered by everyone from Metric to Madonna. It’s not a love song, exactly, and it’s not a song about addiction, exactly. “Between the Bars” is about the ways in which protecting somebody you love turns into the need to control that person. The fact that Smith was able to build this much emotional complexity into a song that sounds at home in a stadium or at a Starbucks speaks to his irreplaceable gift as a songwriter.
Elsewhere, Smith amplifies his well-honed songwriting chops with more fleshed-out arrangements. “Ballad of Big Nothing” propels itself forward with bubbly McCartney-esque bass lines and background vocals that sound like they might have been string arrangements if there were an orchestra handy. “Angeles” and “Cupid’s Trick” provide a back-to-back study in Smith’s versatility as a guitarist, going from intricate fingerpicked pattern to lopey electric riffs. By the time album closer “Say Yes” rolls around, it’s clear that the solo acoustic approach is a specific and purposeful choice, and no longer Smith’s default mode.
This reissue is framed as an “expanded” edition, and the bonus materials included fit the bill nicely. Rather than aiming for comprehensiveness or definitiveness, the bonus tracks provide interesting glimpses into Smith’s growing strength as a live solo performer (some excellent live recordings of album and non-album cuts), sense of humor (a sketch of New Moon track “New Monkey” that sounds like it was played on a baseball organ), and where he would go with his next record (a formative version of XO cut “Bottle Up and Explode!” that shows just how much thoughtful editing and revision went into the final version). And then there’s “I Figured You Out,” a longtime fan favorite that Smith gave to his friend Mary Lou Lord to record because it “sounds like the fuckin’ Eagles.” “I Figured You Out” would have been the most straightforward and polished song on Either/Or, and its omission speaks volumes about how determined Smith was to find his own voice and chart his own path.
In the years that followed the release of Either/Or, Smith managed to do just that, performing “Miss Misery” at the Academy Awards and releasing an uncompromising major label debut. For some of his fans, Either/Or marked the end of Smith’s career as a direct and intimate folk singer-songwriter. For others, Either/Or marked the beginning of Smith’s career as a one-man classic pop band. In truth, Either/Or marks the one moment in Smith’s career when he was truly both.


Sometimes I think it can't be a matter of simple coincidence that sound, when rendered visually, appears as ever-changing ...

M83: Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts

Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts

Sometimes I think it can't be a matter of simple coincidence that sound, when rendered visually, appears as ever-changing green fluctuations stretched over an infinite black void. The power of music to seemingly construct, alter and distort space can be staggering. Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, the second album from French electronic duo M83, nicely epitomizes this: The sound is absolutely huge, its relentless attention to detail eclipsed only by the stunning emotional power it conveys. For fifty-seven glorious minutes, its impossibly intricate tapestry of buzzing techno synthesizers, distorted electric guitars, cheesy drum machines, and subdued vocals generate a sense of bodily movement through a landscape of beauty, disappointment, glory, and decrepitude. Dead Cities not only envelops you, but also affords you room to explore its vast expanse.
One remarkable attribute of Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts is how vastly M83's sound palette differs from the ones most often used to create music possessing this much beauty and depth. Countless musicians have humanized electronic sounds by generating tones that feel warm or organic, but M83 have undertaken a different challenge: to convey beauty through the familiar, filtered buzz of the kind of cheap synthesizers usually found in techno and dance tracks. Paradoxically, the sounds that have constituted some of the most vapid, hedonistic, and forgettable music of our time have now returned to make us cry.
M83 open Dead Cities with one of their most striking misappropriations of trite instrumentation. In "Birds", a tinny sample of chirping birds is combined with swells of synth strings and a computerized voice repeating, "Sun is shining, birds are singing, flowers are growing, clouds are looming and I am flying." The computerized voice is run through an odd, wavering melodic filter that affords it just the right degree of harmonic dissonance with the accompanying synths, and it takes on a decidedly unsettling feel, repeating its mantra-like invocation of the unsteady world you're about to enter.
Once inside, you're exposed to a landscape of seemingly infinite depth and complexity. Rather than just ending, sounds and songs disappear off into the horizon, continually bringing a promise of something familiar but unforeseen to follow. "Unrecorded", the first full-fledged song on Dead Cities, makes clear the reason M83 have drawn so many My Bloody Valentine comparisons. Building upon a foundation of fuzzed-out guitar, rich bass, synth strings, and a drum machine that sounds surprisingly like the acoustic drums of Loveless, the duo layers burbling techno synthesizers into complex rhythmic intersections as the song's vast backdrop slowly fades away. Just as My Bloody Valentine refashioned distorted electric guitars as instruments capable of divine and volatile sound, M83 recast harsh sawtooth waves as voices of reflection and regret. On "Run into Flowers", almost-real strings and whispered vocals are juxtaposed with overdriven drum machine clicks, as an insistent 4/4 beat evokes lush, green fields as easily as abandoned factories and polluted rivers.
This kind of contrast factors heavily into "In Church", as a clear pipe organ and an angelic, reverb-laden chorus are assaulted by blasts of white noise. Finally, a wrenching, synthesized melody enters, providing a profoundly moving counterpoint to the sterile beauty that preceded it. By the time you get to "0078h", it's impossible to tell whether the heavily altered vocals are of human or computerized origin; it's also completely ceased to matter. Oftentimes, the most organic sounds on Dead Cities are the most formless, and the most glaringly synthetic sounds the most emotional.
Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts ends fittingly with the 14-minute epic "Beauties Can Die", which recalls at first the melodic, pastoral electronica of Múm's Yesterday Was Dramatic, Today Is OK. This peaceful opening is soon overtaken by a sound that gradually transforms from a low, earthquake-like rumble into a blast of synthesized static. Synthesizers and harmony vocals are layered and layered until the sound is so explosively, beautifully gigantic that you won't mind it's damaging your hearing. More earthquake rumbles follow, each ushering in even more layers of ungodly gorgeous sound and evoking a stomach-turning combination of fear and excitement. At the crash of a synthesized cymbal, the song descends into submerged ambience, and ultimately into a long silence, before resurfacing with distorted radar blips and shrieks of howling noise.
As "Beauties Can Die" fades, you're left with the feeling that you've just returned from a journey-- that the images passing through your mind for the last hour couldn't possibly have been the result of mere imagination. An album like this extends far beyond your speakers, guiding you through an impossibly rich, detailed world of sound while also giving you room to explore it yourself; you don't listen to Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, you inhabit it.


Traxman practically wrote footwork's rulebook over the last three decades. The second volume of his Da Mind of Traxman series is trimmer and more muscular than its predecessor, even as it maintains his signature playfulness.

Da Mind of Traxman Vol. 2

As footwork’s gained a certain cachet of “cool” over the past handful of years—swelling gradually from regional curiosity to global movement—there’s been a refreshing lack of “cool” surrounding Traxman. It’s not the fact that he’s been in the game longer than just about anybody: he practically wrote the rulebook, DJing and producing over three sprawling decades of mutations that Chicago house’s DNA underwent, gradually percolating into juke and abstracting into footwork and blurring the lines between all of the above. There’s a cheeky-yet-deadly earnest wink to much of his work, the kind that sits parallel to irony but couldn’t be further from it; in a sphere that rewards overt humor—see DJ Rashad and Freshmoon’s doofily hysterical “Everybody”, built around a meme from the TV show "Intervention", or snarky DJ Slugo numbers like “Wouldn’t You Like To Be A Hoe Too”—Traxman’s sense of humor has persistently tended towards kitsch. He’s not into the long sell, since people are supposed to stay dancing while listening to this stuff, remember?
The first volume of Da Mind Of Traxman, his 2012 Planet Mu debut and arguably the first great solo footwork full-length, reveled in these kinds of tenderly shlocky moves, forgoing esotericism for pointedly ham-fisted and ultimately democratic gestures—ideologically, the precocious lovechild of Dilla’s samplemania and 2 Chainz’ knee-slappy dad punchlines. For the owner of one of Chicago’s most renowned record collections, encyclopedic and meticulously organized, Traxman’s never been one for going over his audience’s heads, even when shit gets weird. That would be inefficient, and besides, he can do weird all by himself; that album’s most surreal moment, “Let There Be Rockkkkk”, was built from a cock-in-hand AC/DC sample.
Da Mind Of Traxman Vol. 2 is trimmer and more muscular, even as it maintains his signature playfulness. Where its predecessor threw the whole fridge in the blender and delighted in making his friends drink it, here Traxman seems interested in doing more with less, probing the limits of each individual component, experimenting with song structure. Samples misbehave and are duly punished, though there’s an obvious tenderness with which they’re handled even as he brutalizes them. Sticky, honey-coated bursts of Rhodes and horns and xylophones over-eagerly trip on each other, threaten to fall out of sync, then jump back in line on opening track “Time Slip”. “Let It Roll Geto” is an ungodly mash of chopped “Sunglasses At Night”-y synth arpeggios and ghostly, gargled mermaid-soul, all of which gets shoved around by stuttering ghetto-house vocal tics, exponentially accelerating into barked orders like a long-lost Tae-Bo video where Billy Blanks tries PCP.
Footwork cuts typically end up either "garish" or "great", with very little room in between those two poles—and there’s certainly a bit of the former here too. “Bubbles” aims for restraint but grows mind-numbingly repetitive, and not in the transcendent, mantra-like sense of footwork and juke at its most effective (like, say, “15416”, hypnotizing in its deceptive simplicity). “Tha Edge Of Panic” starts off intriguingly enough, a gracefully gut-wrenching sequel of sorts to “Let There Be Rockkkkk”, but unravels into brutal hysteria, a nightmare of roid-rage grindcore. That’s the tax for taking these kinds of try-anything-once risks, one that’s fairly inevitable in an 18-track album of any sort, but especially with footwork. By their nature, footwork tracks tend to exist in and of themselves, specific tools in a set moreso than cogs in a unified machine; in heavy doses, they can overwhelm a casual listening session (namely, while multi-tasking and sober).
All the same, continuing to classify footwork as a primarily functional art form in 2014 presents something of a paradox. At its core, the claim rings true, and always will—above all else, this is music for dancers who want to be challenged and DJs eager to oblige—but it can also be limiting, particularly taking into account the past four or so years of full-length releases that have aimed not to alter the genre, but to let it transcend its intended context for a bit. It begs the question: what exactly does a great footwork album—a whole greater than the sum of its parts—entail, if it’s even possible? Double Cup, the late DJ Rashad’s 2013 magnum opus, is proof enough that it is; at the very least, it’s the closest a footwork full-length has gotten to perfection. Da Mind Of Traxman Vol. 2, for the most part, is a stellar collection of songs—playful, ballsy, informed by the past but living very much in the present—but they’re songs that relate more as cousins than as siblings.


Royce 5’9” has done his most visible rapping as a plus-one. Trying to move beyond that supporting role, he loads his sixth solo album with big-time producers, skits, and careful introspection.

Layers

Royce 5’9” (formerly Royce da 5’9”) has done a lot of his most visible rapping as a plus-one. His first appearance for many was on Eminem’s The Slim Shady LP as one half of Bad Meets Evil on a song of the same name. He caught his second wind years later as one of the senior members of the major label castoff Voltron that is Slaughterhouse (with Joe Budden, Crooked I, and Joell Ortiz). Most recently, he’s functioned as DJ Premier’s rapping partner in PRhyme. Royce is an excellent supporting character, but things never came together for any of his solo records, which tend to drag.
His sixth studio album, Layers, isn’t much different, albeit not for lack of trying. Royce checks all the boxes on paper here, fully loading it with big-time producers, skits, and tons of careful introspection, the typical keys to a success for any traditionalist rap album. But this lyrical marathon falls short by any conceivable benchmark, unable to really get going or sustain momentum until the very end. There’s also plenty of rapping about how good at rapping he is, which is almost always boring.
The main difference between Layers and past Royce records is supposed to be the newfound commitment to full-fledged storytelling, and it’s easy to hear those gears turning on songs like "Startercoat" and "Misses." On the former, he defends 2Pac's place in history, in response to the omission on Billboard's Greatest Rappers of All-Time list from last year (“If Pac ain’t on your list then you ain’t fucking logical”), using a UNLV Starter jacket as a symbol for the influence Pac had on him. On "Misses," he writes about his relationship with his wife, implying it’s difficult being a married rapper. While these are functional stories with interesting plot points, they also prove he has a knack for overthinking (and oversharing), which torpedoes some of the strongest technical rapping on Layers. On “Tabernacle,” he tells the heartbreaking story of losing his grandmother and meeting his newborn son within hours at the same hospital. But he is incapable of building suspense or changing his tone, and what should be an epic tale is reduced to the songwriting equivalent of turn-by-turn navigation—taking readable steps toward a predetermined destination. He’s prone to rapping in bulk, and thus wants to narrate every detail of a story in a linear timetable, telegraphing outcomes; sometimes it’s like a nonfiction book on tape.
When he isn’t attempting to retell his story in extreme detail, Layers is still packed wall-to-wall with Royce's filler-filled rap style, relying heavily on knotty, tightly-packed cadences. This can be dazzling, like on “Off” (“Look in the sky there's a fly sorcerer/ Eyeballing me from a flying saucer/ And my mind is like a full clip/ And my competitions' magazines are running low like the Source and Vibe offices”), and it can also be cringe-worthy, like on “Wait” (“My son got on them 350 boosts Kanye West is dressed in Bape/ Askin' me questions 'bout gettin' to second base/ Wifey textin' SMH”). Then there are outliers like "Shine," where he takes a swing at singsong raps and misses, and "Hard," a song that doesn't even know what story it's trying to tell.
That doesn’t mean that Layers is a complete misfire, though, or that Royce doesn’t have outings where he rattles off some truly impressive performances. The verses on “Gottaknow” are clinical. The Rick Ross and Pusha T-featuring “Layers” and the somber “America” are clear standouts. The album ends strong, from "America" to closer "Off," but much like most of Royce’s solo catalog, there aren't many songs on Layers that really reward replaying or close listening.


Moses Sumney has a gorgeous voice that is as intricate as it is intimate. His latest EP comes and goes too fast, but is still a welcome window into the electro-soul folk singer's private world.

Lamentations

Moses Sumney came to the 2016 Pitchfork Festival with a guitar, some effects pedals, and not much else. He truly didn’t need more than his voice—a wafting, pitch-perfect falsetto that floats around space before tunneling deep into your soul. I remember watching his performance from the crowd, mesmerized by how he constructed such a gorgeous mosaic without over-the-top theatrics. Sumney stood up there alone, cracking a few jokes along the way, unpacking his methodical blend of electro-soul and folk. His vocals are so strong that he never has to form actual words; Sumney’s voice is its own instrument, a stunning mixture of Prince and Bilal, set against a rustic sonic backdrop the likes of Beck and Sufjan Stevens.
Over the past few years, though, Sumney hasn’t given us much to absorb. He’ll drop a song or EP here and there, but not yet a full-length album. But when Sumney does put out new work, it tends to stick with you: “Seeds,” a lo-fi campfire song, has a transformative quality that kicks in when the chorus hits. “How can I reconcile the seed/Once sown but never grown in me?” He follows the question with an exasperated moan, as if crushed under the weight of self-imposed pressure. On “Everlasting Sigh,” Sumney brightens the mood, emitting a regal aesthetic: “If you’re a god, made from a god/Let your whispered word be divine.” Sumney is an intricate writer who pens fiercely introspective songs, all of which play like the innermost thoughts of a fiercely private man. They’re sometimes weaved within layers of synthetic sound, forcing you to lean in a little closer to decipher the meaning.
On “Worth It,” a highlight of Sumney’s new five-track collection Lamentations EP, the singer takes on an alien-like quality, filtering his voice through a heavily-pitched vocoder to effuse a supernatural energy. The video is equally resonant. In it, Sumney mostly lurks in the shadows, reaching out toward a mysterious figure that he eventually holds in his arms. Despite the visual and aural effects, “Worth It” is a love song on which Sumney grapples with his own self-worth. “You accept all I do,” he croons, “but I don’t know if that is wise.” Sumney isn’t saying anything that hasn’t been said by other musicians, but when he sings it, his voice feels much closer to the words.
“Lonely World,” with its resounding bounce and layered wails, might be Sumney’s best song yet. It features Thundercat on bass but, in this instance, he disappears within Sumney’s majestic vocal arrangement. The song builds quickly, each note piled atop the next, composing a massive wall of noise. It’s the clear centerpiece of Lamentations, which in turn is an album that offers another brief glimpse into Sumney’s world. But in what’s become the norm for him, the music breezes by too quickly, leaving just another snippet of the singer's potential. Maybe that’s the idea? Who knows. Sumney is elusive that way.


On his promising debut, the Nigerian star has figured out exactly how he wants to sound, but he hasn’t quite nailed what he wants to say.

Rave & Roses

Despite capturing the world’s attention in 2019 at just 19 years old, Nigerian Afropop star Rema has shown virtually no growing pains in the past few years. With the bubbly Afrobeats crowd-pleaser “Dumebi,” from his self-titled debut EP, Rema turned his melismatic ad-libs, teenage locs, and dangly earrings into an immediate signature. Subsequent singles have leaned more towards sub-Saharan rhythms, holding court with the best of Afropop’s elder statesmen, but he’s also dabbled in emo-trap to remind us that he is a millennium baby after all. Just shy of his 22nd birthday, Rema now sports some visible tattoos, and based on how explicit his lyrics have gotten, he’s in the throes of a sexual awakening.
Even with these changes, Rema sounds just as confident and irrepressibly youthful as ever on his debut album, Rave & Roses. Shepherded by plush and detailed production that spans romantic Afropop, booming dembow, hedonistic synthpop, and hints of amapiano, Rema’s vocals play double dutch with the beats, showing off a spirited playfulness and incredible skill. Here, he finds unexpected notes in the nooks and crannies of the arrangements, spinning them into catchy hooks, charming micro-runs, or layering them to create harmonies that fuse together with such parity, either one could serve as the main melody. It’s a promising debut that functions as a showcase for an artist with grand ambitions reveling in the capabilities of his own talent.
Nigerian producer London has production credits on all but two of the album’s 16 tracks, and the synergy between the duo is palpable. The production feels tailor-made for Rema’s voice, and every song plays to his strengths. The unrushed percussive stride of “Dirty” and its soft sax lines make his horny whine sound appealingly sultry, reminiscent of WizKid’s latest album. “Calm Down,” a supreme earworm, takes the staccato delivery Rema introduced in “Dumebi” and builds the whole chorus around it; his vowels ricochet against a deceptively simple guitar loop, providing a foundation for the beat to crest and fall like the bubbles in a soda bottle. On “Soundgasm,” an early album single and obvious hit, the guitar reappears, where it provides cushion for Rema’s impressive falsetto to climax with ease.
Rema shows significant range without feeling like he’s pandering to trends. “Jo” is almost impossible not to get up and dance to and feels like an ode to the P-Square heyday of Nigerian pop, with its uplifting melodies, propulsive rhythm, and generic, lovestruck lyrics that sound like they were made up on the spot. “FYN” gets its juice from a hip-hop groove, while “Carry” toys with amapiano’s trademark log drum. But the biggest stylistic jump comes on “Addicted,” where Rema channels both Travis Scott and the Weeknd, with vocals doused in studio effects and propped up by ’80s pop drums.
Critics of Rema and Afropop as a whole insist on pointing out a lack of lyrical depth. Rema anticipates this criticism on “Are You There?” and gets candid about why he chooses to make party music. “I no fit focus on the negativity inside my country,” he contends with chest-pounding energy over a beat Bad Bunny would fight to have. Rema acknowledges the ambivalence we all struggle with, bearing witness to a broken political system and simultaneously ignoring it in the pursuit of good times. The observation feels especially poignant coming from Rema, who during the height of anti-government protests in Nigeria, in since-deleted tweets, called on the state to investigate the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of his father, a former senior member of a major political party.
That said, the irony of Rema’s pushback is that the song itself demonstrates that he can go deeper lyrically. A few lazy rhyme schemes (on “Calm Down,” he wants to say hello to a mellow girl dressed in yellow) prevent great songs from being excellent. And sometimes the raunchy energy that permeates the album can feel a bit silly and unconvincing, like a middle schooler lying about their sexual exploits. References to “sloppy sloppy” (“Dirty”) and likening clitoral stimulation to killing a bug (“Soundgasm”) would be funny if he didn’t sound so serious.
Rema has figured out exactly how he wants to sound, but he hasn’t quite nailed what he wants to say. Maybe these are his growing pains. Regardless, Rave & Roses barely suffers for it and remains a stellar debut for an artist so early in his career. If anything, it shows that the best is yet to come.


Even though Buffy the Vampire Slayer had worn itself out by the time it ended, only a year later, it ...

Uh Huh Her

Even though Buffy the Vampire Slayer had worn itself out by the time it ended, only a year later, it's startling how quickly the premise-- that a young girl can fight and defend herself just as well as a man-- has vanished from the airwaves. Just the next year, two of the biggest television events were the biopics of Elizabeth Smart and Jessica Lynch, two young, helpless girls who exist only to be rescued. We got a flashback to what we were missing when the Buffy spin-off Angel ended its own run. In one scene, a red-faced demon stalks up to a skinny, defenseless-looking brunette and taunts, "Take your best shot, little girl"; the brunette, unimpressed, reels around and throws a fist right through the chauvinist demon's face, killing him instantly.
PJ Harvey's fans are waiting for her to do much the same thing. Every time a new album's announced, part of her audience hopes she'll step up again as the loudest, boldest female guitar hero. It's not that Harvey sounds tame these days: Her confidence on stage and her edgy glamour have kept pace with her voice, which she has developed into one of the most powerful and seductive in rock. But the blaring guitars of Dry and unusual meter of Rid of Me were a quicker fix, and without them, Harvey's studio work grew cloistered and difficult.
Since 1995's To Bring You My Love, each of her albums has turned off some chunk of her fanbase. The subtle character studies and trip-hop backdrops of Is This Desire? struck some as cold or dissonant, and her John Parish collaboration, Dance Hall at Louse Point, is (wrongly) dismissed as erratic and avant-weak, even as it showcases her most striking vocals-- at turns chilled and self-absorbed, shriekingly gruesome, or tortured by rapture. And Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea won Britain's Mercury Music Prize, but even some diehards called it slick and easy; and post 9/11, Stories actually sounds creepy, whether for the references to helicopters over New York, the song "Kamikaze", or that duet with Thom Yorke, which is hairlessly erotic like newts 69'ing.
Now, four years later, Uh Huh Her-- with its guttural title, punk-ugly cover and its advertised guitar-focus-- is billed as a "return to form." But even if guitars dominate Uh Huh Her, the album ignores all expectations. Harvey plays everything but drums, and you can recognize her rough and earthy tone on the electric, played like she's molding clay. But even the buzzing distortion is focused and spare, mounted the way a collector hangs a precious Japanese sword. It actually resembles Radiohead's Hail to the Thief, a guitar album that also succeeded because of its mood-- not because the mood saves the songs, but because the terse, simple writing makes the album so intimate.
The scenes of sexual tension and crisis here resemble those of Is This Desire?, but this time they don't require names or places. "The Pocket Knife" resembles a folk murder ballad, with a simple, perfect guitar part and lyrics like, "Please don't make my wedding dress/ I'm too young to marry yet/ Can you see my pocket knife?/ You can't make me be a wife." Harvey murmurs "The Desperate Kingdom of Love" over a gentle acoustic, and the delicate imagery enhances a straight-up love ballad; and if the final song, "The Darker Days of Me and Him", promises recovery after a bad break-up ("I'll pick up the pieces/ I'll carry on somehow") the tone stays grim, and Harvey's not patting herself on the back for knowing better.
Yet as careful as the atmosphere sounds, Harvey's ready to tear it apart at any time. "Cat on a Wall" actually sounds murky and misplaced, but "The Letter", the album's first single, builds in sharp bursts and terse riffs under the shrewd sexual imagery: "Take the cap/ Off your pen/ Wet the envelope/ Lick and lick it." And the two-minute tantrum of "Who the Fuck?" devolves into the caveman-talk promised by the album title-- for example, the bridge: "Who/ Who/ Who/ Who/ Fuck/ Fuck/ Fuck/ You." Britain's Guardian newspaper cites this as proof that Harvey's a "certified lunatic," probably because they don't get the concept of "catharsis."
By the time you hear the accordion-and-guitar interlude, or the full minute of seagull calls, it's clear that Harvey isn't making a "rock" record per se. And maybe to preserve the mood, Harvey doesn't give us her most striking material. Outside of a few tracks like "The Letter", "Pocket Knife" or "The Desperate Kingdom of Love", the album is stronger than the sum of its interludes. But if you take it as a whole, Uh Huh Her is deeply engrossing: Harvey has never explored the minimal-verging-on-primitive side of her music so thoroughly, or captured so exactly the sound of a mood swing.
And once again, unlike many of her peers and fellow 90s veterans, she refuses to categorize herself. Her recorded work shows her not as a diva singer, or a rock goddess-- no matter how much her fans, or the world, want that-- but as an artist, who will seize the world or retreat from it completely if it serves her ends. Harvey has never recorded a weak record, or even a transitional album; nothing set the audience up for this disc, and we may wait another four years until she's satisfied with the next one. And that one probably won't sound like Dry, either.


The Glaswegian band recently signed to Atlantic, and the State Hospital EP seems a strange experiment in this context. It's never too far from what you might expect from them, yet often comes off as unnecessarily simplified.

State Hospital EP

Intimacy is the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about what makes for a great Frightened Rabbit song. It's true in multiple senses of the word-- much of their work is concerned with physical coupling or the pain derived from the lack thereof, and even when shooting for hackles-raising anthems, they're never playing for the cheap seats. Grand as they were, "The Modern Leper", "I Feel Better", and "Skip the Youth" still came off like an animated barfly keeping the regulars enrapt with their latest tale of romantic futility. But when thinking about their superficially pleasing qualities-- Scott Hutchison's handsomely burred vocals, their scrappy acoustic interplay, and unapologetically heartsick emoting-- you start to wonder if there's any reason that couldn't be as popular as softbatch, Stay-Puft stadium filling like Snow Patrol or Mumford & Sons. S**hould they be as popular? The Glaswegian band is signed to Atlantic now, and the State Hospital EP is a strange experiment in this context, never too far from what you might expect from the band, yet presented in an emotionally and sonically cohesive way that makes the songs here come off as unnecessarily simplified.
It would be easy enough to attribute that to the rich, luxurious production of State Hospital, but The Winter of Mixed Drinks was a pretty glossy album, even if it couldn't completely suffuse the activity of Frightened Rabbit's musicianship. State Hospital continues the trend of redistributing the depth of the rhythm section on The Midnight Organ Fight to everywhere else and often it detracts from their more immediate talents-- Grant Hutchison's stick-breaking drumwork, the nimble guitar-picking of his brother Scott and Andy Monaghan. This stuff is easy-paced, pure hangover balm, in the mode of "Poke" or "Good Arms vs. Bad Arms".
While State Hospital lacks for pure visceral pleasure, Hutchison can still convey such a deep, muscular ache in his vocals, indicating that Frightened Rabbit still know their strengths. The title track is a rare example of Hutchison writing about a lack of fulfillment from the other side of the sexual divide and problems that go deeper than an inability to get one's rocks off-- in this case, presumably a girl born into poverty with the attendant pall of domestic abuse, emotional detachment, ineffective schooling, and the lack of expectations thereof. Her skin and blood are "thicker than concrete," and as "State Hospital" wells up, the indignities do as well-- the death blow occurs as Hutchison reveals her fate "to keep warm the arms of a plumber/ Bloody and balding/ Who just needs a spine to dig into/ Just for the head and a hand for the holding." By "Boxing Night", Hutchison is back playing the victim as hi-hats and backup vocals jangle nervously, finding the hopelessly lovesick narrator "at home/ With a drink to ill health/ Just me and these walls and a beaten up chair." In a previous live version of "Boxing Night", he was "drinking to death."
It's an auspicious start to State Hospital even if it doesn't display how Hutchison can turn some less admirable human qualities-- bitterness, sarcasm, alcoholism-- into endearing and often funny little songs. The only humor on State Hospital is supplied by Aidan Moffatt's stein/torch-passing guest spot on "Wedding Gloves" ("A melting of morals/ A solder of souls/ As sexy as lace/ But with just as much holes"). This is Frightened Rabbit sounding as emotionally meek and needy as their name might suggest, which gets a bit grating towards State Hospital's back half, where it gets hitched to some worryingly perfunctory songwriting.
Frightened Rabbit have always had a thing for big, soppy metaphors-- the biblical self-loathing of "The Modern Leper", baptismal rebirth on "Swim Until You Can't See Land". They weren't necessarily clever, but Frightened Rabbit made those their own through sheer commitment. Too much of State Hospital feels like songwriting exercises on loan, asking to borrow a feeling. "I might never be normal again" is the climactic admission in "Home From War", and it's not enough of a payoff to endure the latest tour of duty in "Love Is a Battlefield". Meanwhile, "Off" finds Frightened Rabbit stealing from their own supply-- "Off" is nearly the exact same song as The Midnight Organ Fight's "Old Old Fashioned", stripped of its spirited folk-rock stomping and charming specificities.
Title aside, The Winter of Mixed Drinks gave us the indication that being perpetually soused and sex-starved was starting to wear on Frightened Rabbit as artists and people-- Hutchison admitted that he couldn't make another "breakup record" after The Midnight Organ Fight, one of the finest of recent vintage. But did opening for Death Cab For Cutie teach them the lay of the land? Let's not forget that band's Atlantic debut (and best-selling record) was the aching, insular and glassy Plans. Whether Hospital finds them following the same path, at least for now it indicates the triumphs of "Living in Colour" were short-lived, or at least strangely ill-fitting for Frightened Rabbit's next, and likely less intimate phase.


This second, much improved La Sera collection finds Katy Goodman translating what she brings to Vivian Girls into top-shelf songwriting.

Sees the Light

It's impossible to imagine Vivian Girls without "Kickball" Katy Goodman. Her high harmonies take a number of the songs from sloppily catchy to pop-friendly. Her bass playing often provides the most hummable melodies. At shows, while frontwoman Cassie Ramone plants herself at stage right, practicing strangulation on the neck of her guitar and testing the limits of her reverb pedals, Goodman can be found stage left, stepping to the mic for those aforementioned harmonies, jumping up and down, and smiling broadly. As gratifying as all of that sounds, Goodman had the understandable impulse to create things on her own: Last year found her taking the reins on a self-titled album as La Sera with mixed results. It was a pretty album, one that felt speckled with glitter, and it was faithful to the girl-group bliss for which her main group is known, but at times it felt a little too faithful-- catchy but lacking a distinct identity, airy and pleasant almost to the point of superfluousness.
These problems have been more than corrected on on her sophomore La Sera collection, Sees the Light. Take "Break My Heart" and lead single "Please Be My Third Eye". Delivered at warp speed and full volume, both songs are punchy punk numbers that sound like well-produced takes on Goodman's short-lived All Saints Day project. But while those older songs clearly invited comparisons to the buzzsaws-cutting-through-corroded-metal sound of Vivian Girls and plenty of bands that came in their wake (particularly early Dum Dum Girls), these new tunes benefit from how Goodman separates herself from the pack. Her smooth alto-- pushed refreshingly high in the mix-- is a perfect fit for some of the record's other tracks. Here, the elegant, almost ethereal singing contrasts with the fuzzy distortion in a way that's infectious and unique. There are other departures as well: "Drive On" adopts a spaghetti-western guitar line that plays out dramatically, and "How Far We Come Now" is measured and heavy-- both sonically and emotionally-- sounding like a grunge band covering Carly Simon.
As a result of Goodman's knack for classic pop melody and structure, even the songs that bear a resemblance to La Sera are an improvement. They burst with personality and feeling: Closer "Don't Stay" carries a particularly lonely drift, while the blooming arrangements and Shop Assistants-indebted feel of "I'm Alone" nestles closely to the same C86 and twee comparisons her Vivian Girls bandmate so vehemently rejects. Songs like "Love That's Gone" and "It's Over Now" coast gorgeously with an acrimonious undercurrent. These ballads find Goodman dismissing herself from a relationship in a way that's heartbreakingly apologetic, the musical equivalent of sending a Dear John letter attached to a floral arrangement.
At a lean half-hour, there's no room for filler here. Every song on Sees the Light is exquisitely crafted and overflowing with personality. It's a record so enjoyable and expertly sequenced that it demands repeat listens before it's even over. But most importantly, it shows Katy Goodman can translate what she brings to Vivian Girls into top-shelf songwriting.


Carrying forth the Southern sound of Saint Cloud, Katie Crutchfield does it again. Her dazzling, piercing songwriting is perfectly in tune with the band behind her.

Tigers Blood

Before Saint Cloud, the scale of Waxahatchee’s music matched the intimate venues it was often found in—living rooms full of friends, small corner stages, crowded basement venues with iffy plumbing. But on her 2020 album, which Katie Crutchfield recently estimated doubled the size of her audience, she burned the fog off of her arrangements and raised her voice. The sound that emerged was closer in spirit to Americana than late-’90s indie rock.
Sometimes background changes can have startling effects: Framed in this light, Crutchfield sounded a bit more like her hero Lucinda Williams, the tang foregrounded in her vocals. More bluntly, she sounded like a “star,” a cheap and transactional term that nonetheless describes a unique phenomenon. There was suddenly miles of space around her, and nowhere else to look but directly into her eyes.
Tigers Blood continues the work of clearing room for this new, 8-foot-tall version of Crutchfield. Saint Cloud producer Brad Cook is back, surrounding each instrument with a wooly ball of room tone as substantial as the felt pads of a piano. Crutchfield’s character from Saint Cloud returns, as well, a complicated, warmly combative woman bristling at specific grievances. One of the most indelible hooks on Saint Cloud came from a song called “Hell,” in which Crutchfield sang, “I’ll put you through hell.” Her voice was rueful and affectionate, convincing you both that she did exactly as she said and that for whoever her target was, it was worth it.
Joining her this time, on guitars and backup vocals, is the Asheville singer-songwriter MJ Lenderman, whom Crutchfield first invited to contribute to lead single “Right Back to It” and then asked to stay for the duration. You can hear why. Over Phil Cook’s banjo on “Right Back to It,” Lenderman and Crutchfield sound like their own version of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, lifelong musical partners instead of first-time collaborators. Like most indie rock artists in the 2020s, Lenderman’s music enjoys an easy affinity with roots-rock tempos and temperatures, and his rangy harmonies slot neatly behind Crutchfield’s voice across multiple songs.
Most of Tigers Blood is powered by the same roughly strummed acoustic guitar that lit Saint Cloud, with the electric guitars relegated to playing in either soft shuffles or piquant licks. These decorative fills put semicolons, dashes, and full stops on Crutchfield’s endlessly barreling thoughts. Her mind is alive and humming, and her language leaps out at you with its hunger. The repeated refrain of “Bored”—a song about trying and failing to keep yourself still—is, simply, “I get bored.” But the way Crutchfield sings the words sounds like a death sentence, and it’s the only moment across Tigers Blood’s 12 songs where that warm voice constricts and turns thin with fear.
The song’s mid-tempo chug summons memories of Sheryl Crow’s “If It Makes You Happy,” another barroom rocker played for the 11 a.m. crowd. These are back-porch arrangements, but Crutchfield is not a back-porch type. She is a city dweller at heart, eager to get right up close to people, the better to observe their faults and turn those crosshairs back on herself. The lyric sheet to Tigers Blood brims with avid self-recrimination: “I get caught up in my thoughts/For lack of a better cause/My life’s been mapped out to a ‘T’/But I’m always a little lost,” she confesses in “Lone Star Lake.” At one point, she describes herself as “overly confident,” rhyming this word with “my skin is airy thin”; at another, she seethes that “all my life I’ve been running from what you want.”
Her furious and tangled diction—running from what you want?—made me think of Elvis Costello, an otherwise distant stylistic cousin. As with Costello’s songs, it often feels like you are desperately hanging onto an impassioned, self-justifying argument between two people you do not know. There’s both too much and not enough information in a line like, “There’s a lock on the door that costs more than my car, babe” or, “You swerve to hit a dead deer/A girl like that would bore you to tears, baby” for you to parse the meaning. Nonetheless, the emotional specifics feel somehow both maddening and familiar. Crutchfield writes like someone who feels a rock in their shoe and needs you to feel it, too.
There is a trick Crutchfield uses, both on this album and the last, where she hollers the word “I” and stretches it across multiple syllables. The first person becomes just “ahh,” a primal yodel that swallows everything else. She did it on Saint Cloud’s “War” and “Can’t Do Much,” and she repeats it here on the chiming “Crowbar” and on “Bored.” On the stunning late-album acoustic ballad “365,” she turns the word into a sharp intake of breath, the involuntary sound of sudden pain. In Crutchfield’s songs, the self, and its messy relation to others, is a battlefield, one capable of inflicting real and grievous harm. She has spoken openly about her journey to sobriety, which may have inspired some of the songs’ subject matter. But anyone who has fought a battle with themselves will feel a chill of recognition at hearing Crutchfield’s war cry of “I”: It is the sound of introspection as rite and ritual, a cleansing and savage weapon to be brandished, respected, even feared. It is exclusively hers, and now it is big enough for the whole world to hear.


Metal supergroup, led by Mick Barr, creates something for fans of black metal, noise, and drone to all love.

Dimensional Bleedthrough

Dimensional Bleedthrough, the second album from New York metal supergroup Krallice, is the sort of record that should find favor in at least a half-dozen listening circles. Its relentless squall-- rapidfire drums, riff-and-raze guitars, and back-and-forth electric bass, plus the serrated screams of co-founder Mick Barr-- could appeal to devotees of classic black metal bands Burzum, Immortal, and Emperor. The distended shapes Krallice's pummel takes might work for fans of U.S. black metal marathon men Wolves in the Throne Room. Or for those who get lost in the massed guitar works of Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca or in the overtone hysteria of composers like La Monte Young, "Untitled" flits around one note. Darkly radiant and completely mesmerizing, those eight minutes of drumless glow feel like a musical cocoon, an alternate version of Barr's work on Orthrelm's OV. And for noiseniks, there are harsh, finessed impasses, too, like the prelude to "Aridity", where feedback and split octaves howl and groan.
What's more, Barr and Colin Martson (Dysrhythmia, Behold... the Arctopus), comprise a fairly infallible guitar duo. Their playing here is as complex as it is controlled and deliberate. Sidewinding riffs and rapidfire progressions scream above the dense rhythm section. Dimensional Bleedthrough's seven pieces twist and halt, lurch and sprint, shifting rhythms and directions without warning. It seems like a shoo-in as a new favorite for prog and math-rock zealots. And, for those living for death metal, there's "The Mountain". At three minutes and 14 seconds, it's the album's shortest track by nearly a third and its most direct by a mile. Bassist Nick McMaster takes the vocals this time, spitting the words above a brutal churn, his deep, irascible bellow recalling Suffocation and Cryptopsy.
Whereas Krallice thrive at a rarified intersection of death and black metal, noise abandon and prog precision, pedestrian grit and academic commitment, it seems a lot of listeners might be afraid-- or too territorial-- to follow. At times, it seems too mathematical for metal kids, too tough for the avant-garde set, and too oriented for the noise dudes. It eschews those pretty passages that have long been Wolves in the Throne Room's popular bait, and it's certainly not setting out to terrify, either.
Forget all of that, though, and keep listening-- closely. Dimensional Bleedthrough isn't and doesn't aim to be a headphones masterpiece. Its 77 minutes are almost uniformly brutal, and digesting it at such close proximity is bound to fatigue. But it is arranged and engineered to offer more than the benchmarks of second-wave black metal, or even the shock-and-tone tactics of a lot of noise and industrial acts. Notice the way the guitars pull against each other within the first two minutes of the splendid title track, tugging each other through the riff's hairpin turns, or how one guitar veers into a skuzzy, distorted counter to introduce Barr's vocals nearly four minutes in. Or listen for the way the progression of "Autochton" slides with Barr's growled glissando, especially in the first minute. It's those details-- and, of course, Krallice's gargantuan sound-- that make Dimensional Bleedthrough bigger and better than most other metal hybrids around.


The Austin duo’s hushed and unassuming double album is a capstone to their career so far, a scrapbook of moments of love and loss from a life well-lived.

Hovvdy

Countless playlists and anthologies have collected the greatest songs about a first kiss and a last goodbye; mourning a parent and becoming one yourself; best friends and mortal enemies. As for the cultivation of these relationships, there’s a 256-page book trying to reteach people how to hang out, but pop music isn’t going to be much help. Hovvdy isn’t going to tell you how to navigate these things either. On one song, they’re letting loved ones know that their time together mattered, and on the next they’re setting boundaries. They might reach out to a friend in quiet agony or chastise themselves for not doing so earlier. They’re figuring it all out as it comes, just like the rest of us, and the endlessly generous Hovvdy doesn’t attempt to be a manual for living, but a scrapbook of moments of love and loss from a life well-lived.
A band’s self-titled fifth album can either announce a complete rebrand or a reassertion of identity. Hovvdy is something in between, the culmination of co-songwriter/vocalists Charlie Martin and Will Taylor's decade-long process of refining and broadening their sound. 2016’s Taster introduced the duo as “pillowcore,” which, like all genre coinage, was silly and also quite descriptive. Taster accurately predicted a future where slowcore, Buzz Bin blockbusters, rootsy bedroom-pop and station-wagon country became the primary colors of indie rock—they’ve since earned the respect of heavy-hitters like Zach Bryan and boygenius. Hovvdy’s music was charming, not crucial, nostalgic without evoking any specific era or age of their own, content to offer a shoulder if someone else wanted to spill their guts.
Despite its relatively supersized specs—19 songs, nominally a double-album—Hovvdy doesn’t see itself as an epic. It doesn’t sprawl; it stretches its legs, kicks its feet up. The boldest experiments all ended up as singles; “Forever” is contented adult commitment in sentiment, MTV Spring Break in sound as Martin experiments with a half-rapped cadence over Dust Brothers record scratches. In a good pair of headphones, the riff of “Jean” imagines “Jessica” getting a microhouse cuts-and-clicks treatment. The giddy and gooey “Every Exchange” is part “Butterfly Kisses,” part “Fireflies” and all heart. “Til I Let You Know” is initially a spare sketch in the middle of Hovvdy until it gets reprised as the album’s climax on “Bad News,” recalling any number of bloghouse bangers that gave someone their third wind in the late aughts.
Hovvdy has released albums called True Love and Billboard for My Feelings, but they never quite embodied those concepts as wholly as they do on “Meant,” which recasts their cover of Coldplay’s “Warning Sign” as proof of concept for their own Klieg-lit power ballad. A singles-only version of Hovvdy would still be seven tracks and a sci-fi lark where the band time travels across the last 25 years of recombinant alt-rock. Within the greater fabric of Hovvdy, they are joyous peaks, proof of how songs mocked in a more self-conscious time can be rehabbed and heard anew through a cunning needle drop, a class reunion, or just through the ears of a kid.
After 17 tracks, Hovvdy is ready to reveal its thesis statement: “We’ll do a whole lot of talking/Don’t a lot have to happen,” Martin sings on the aching “Angel.” In moments like these, Hovvdy’s primary artistic analog might not be other musicians so much as Richard Linklater—another Lone Star sentimentalist who lets his work unfold at life’s pace, cobbling together a series of scenes and characters that vaguely resemble a plot. Linklater’s films are often considered comedies, though from an older, more cynical perspective, they might actually be psychological horror films with the prospect of adulthood looming offscreen like an invisible, airborne monster. The video for Hovvdy’s finest song, 2019’s “Ruin (my ride),” was their “party at the moon tower” minus the buzzkill brawl, with Martin, Taylor, and their friends doing an increasingly drunken Texas two-step late into the summer night, living out the happy future that no one in Dazed and Confused or Everybody Wants Some!! got to see for themselves.
Yet the five years since has rendered “Ruin (my ride)” a bittersweet memory as well. Hovvdy are no longer the inseparable buds implied by the album cover—Martin lives in St. Louis, and Taylor in Nashville. Though Hovvdy toggles back and forth between lead vocals, the perspective is fairly consistent, earnest optimism spiked with just enough conflict to make it all feel earned. Taylor and Martin’s vocals top out at a frustrated exhale, yet they know how to bite down on expressions of absence—“I swore you left town, maaan” or “My bad I ghosted again.” Martin rues the limitations of his brotherly love on “Bubba,” and when he repeats “God I hate it,” it has the jarring impact of a black metal howl.
In talking about Hovvdy to another longtime fan, I speculated that you could make a drinking game out of every time they say “love” or “light,” or the name of a family member, or a local landmark, or a Southern interstate. It was meant as a joke, but that’s kind of the point of Hovvdy; taking the time to truly savor the warm glow of a friendship maintained over time and space, service to the suffering rendered gladly, or just a day where you took the long way home just because that’s what your teenage self might’ve admired. It’s almost too easy to quote the climactic line from Linklater’s coming-of-age opus Boyhood: “The moment is constant, the moment seizes us.” But Martin and Taylor don’t think in opuses, in grand gestures and proclamations, in magic or illusion. Hovvdy simply slows down time just long enough to capture the beauty in the moments that always threaten to float away if they’re not captured immediately and cherished.


The California foursome follow their pop-punk breakthrough Never Hungover Again with the more grown-up and measured Cody.

Cody

In 2014, Joyce Manor released a truly amazing pop-punk record called Never Hungover Again, which positioned the Torrance, California foursome as kin to pop-punk greats like Blink-182, Weezer, and Jawbreaker. Like those groups, they share the same penchant for suburban ennui, self-indulgent melancholy (“I hate the way I feel like dying when I’m alone”), and loud anthems cherished by quiet people.
But for their fourth record, Cody, Joyce Manor decided to change their process a bit and take a few risks. They replaced drummer Kurt Walcher with Jeff Enzor and teamed up with producer Rob Schnapf, who has worked with Elliott Smith, Guided by Voices, and Saves the Day. They holed up with Schnapf for two months and made a tight, complex record that still manages to cram 10 songs into about 25 minutes. A telling detail is frontman Barry Johnson’s admission that Cody is influenced by Dear Nora, a Portland indiepop project led by Katy Davidson. Though it seems safe to say that very few Joyce Manor fans listen to Dear Nora (maybe they heard the name in a Girlpool song), the former’s newfound affinity for the gentle band is not that much of a surprise: at Cody’s core is a deeper degree of tenderness than they have displayed before.
Joyce Manor’s songs follow a pattern of communicating through brief emotional blasts. In every two-minute story, the stakes are high, and this pushes each track to discover some sort of clarity by the conclusion. On Cody, these realizations are rarely happy, and Joyce Manor ask their fans to follow them to a darker place than before. Take the would-be epiphany at the end of “Last You Heard of Me”: “And in the moment I see everything/Start to finish sad defeat/Shivering lying naked next to you/And that’s the last you heard of me.” Even opener “Fake I.D.,” which comes off as the silliest song on the record with its “What do you think about Kanye West?” line ends on the sobering final note, “Because my friend Brandon died/And I feel sad/I miss him he was rad.” The reference to the late drummer of Wyoming’s Teenage Bottlerocket is also a plea to look past the surface and see the pain coursing beneath everyday existence. “Fake I.D.” itself shows off the lessons learned from their time with Schnapf—it’s abrasive, swaggering pop that sounds modern rock radio-ready but not far from Joyce Manor’s first three records.
But all sort of bands can work with that Big Studio Money and emerge with an excessive mess. Joyce Manor know themselves, they know their audience, and they know better than to overdo the production. If anything, they’ve slowed down and pulled back. For the first time, a Joyce Manor album includes an acoustic track and a song over four minutes. The former is a quick duet about addiction between Johnson and Phoebe Bridgers called “Do You Really Want to Not Get Better?” On the opposite end of the spectrum, “Stairs” thumps along patiently as Johnson gripes, “Yeah, I’m 26 and I still live with my parents/Oh I can’t do laundry/Christ I can’t do dishes.” Johnson wrote those words when he was 19 but came to re-appreciate them while on an acoustic tour with Hop Along’s Francis Quinlan (whose mug appears on the cover of Never Hungover Again). Lyrically, the revamped track verges into creepy territory, as its narrator becomes overcome with protective paranoia for his love: “You are like a magnet for all evil ’cause there is so much good inside you.”
Cody finds a more grown-up Joyce Manor, but every track contains enough blunt expressions of existential despair to tie them to their angsty past. “I feel so old today,” Johnson declares on “Eighteen,” and then immediately after on “Angel in the Snow” he muses, “How come nothing amazes me?” These might sound annoying, but buoyed by the immediacy of their music, they simply feel honest. When you watch videos of Joyce Manor concerts, it’s easy to see that the audiences connects with the band, as if they’ve never had the words to express what they are feeling. Those same people will not be disappointed with Cody; there’s a lot of cathartic emotion to revel in. Joyce Manor have proven that they are ready and willing to grow, but they’re still open to saying, “this song is a mess but so am I.”


Arve Henriksen / Strønen/Storløkken: Chiaroscuro / Humcrush

Chiaroscuro / Humcrush

Earlier this month, I flew across the country to see Norway's Supersilent play their first North American concert, at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. Maybe I made the trip to remind myself that there are still bands worth making big, expensive trips for; maybe I was just excited for the experience of watching the band in person. The quartet plays completely improvised music that's wrestled into shape by four distinct musicians; on record, it's difficult to tell how the players interact. At the show, I felt like a car-illiterate driver popping his hood just to stare at the engine: I wanted to watch the pieces working together, even if I wouldn't know what was going on inside of them.
If Supersilent has a frontman, it's Arve Henriksen, who sat on stage between keyboardists and noise generators Ståle Storløkken and Helge Sten. In addition to playing trumpet into one of two mics (one had more distortion than the other), Henriksen also sings wordlessly, high and close to how I'd imagine an adult castrati would sound. Unlike a chamber singer, he sounds untrained, airy, and wholly naked: a broken plea stops your breath.
Henriksen has rarely used his voice on recordings with Supersilent, but it becomes a crucial instrument on his new solo disc, Chiaroscuro. After working in monk-like solitude on his first album, Sakuteiki ("a treatise on garden making"), he collaborates on Chiaroscuro with two notable Norwegian musicians, percussionist Audun Kleive and sound artist Jan Bang. The thick but passive atmosphere they create warmly blankets Henriksen's trumpet and vocals.
The album's most striking moment is its first track, "Opening Image". After a trumpet performance on which he struggles for breath-- making the brass instrument sound almost like a reed or a bamboo flute-- Henriksen emits a pure cry. It's such a personal revelation that you'd think professional training would ruin him-- not because it would strip away his beauty but because you'd know what to expect from note to note, and that would ruin the importance of his telling it to you.
Chiaroscuro could have been a late '70s ECM date-- from Kleive's ambiguously world influences to the enveloping moods to the sameness of the songwriting. It's so obviously beautiful that you don't feel challenged but right when you drift off, it creeps up on you: Kleive plays an inventive pattern-- for example, the hand drums on "Parallel Action"-- or a melody starts to sink in. If the album had more variety or used these fragile-sounding elements less cautiously, this would be an exceptional session.
At the concert, Henriksen also revealed a rougher side, first singing garbled scat vocals into his trumpet, and then using actual words, which was unexpected from an act as abstract as Supersilent. During a skronky noise piece, Henriksen screamed at us about the recent election: "OHIO! OHIO! WHY?! MOTHERFUCKER!" It may have grounded the musical flights but in blue state-housed Frisco, everyone loved it.
On the other hand, Ståle Storløkken almost disappointed me. On the Supersilent albums, it's hard to separate Storløkken's contributions from Sten's. He usually reveals himself by playing melodic synth lines while Sten sticks to brutally neutralizing tones that can raze any assertion down to an ambiguous grey. Storløkken is more colorful, so in this context he risks being banal by trumping the band's subtle compromises: His loudest riffs on 6-- the solos on "6.1" and the dominating statement that ends "6.4"-- suit the pieces, but just barely. In concert, Storløkken locked in brilliantly with Sten when they played loudly but in the slow sections, he almost started to noodle-- to play lines that were merely pretty.
But maybe I had an eye on him because I had just heard Humcrush, his new duet with drummer Thomas Strønen (Food). Humcrush gallops like a circus-- the first track is called "Acrobat"-- and it doesn't mind easy gestures: For example, the track called "Japan" sounds stereotypically Japanese. Both men use electronics to generate layers of beats, with Strønen adding rhythms that sound like playing cards on a window fan, but the live (in the studio) recording keeps even the densest textures frantic.
I love Storløkken's signature analog synth, even though every time I hear it I picture a little plastic spaceship being pulled across a movie screen on a wire; when Storløkken deploys it, he smears fusion-like lines across the top, while at others times-- like "Sport'n Spice"-- he uses a quick, digital jabbing sound to grapple head-on with Strønen. While different moods emerge, Humcrush is one of the least reflective discs in the Rune Grammofon catalog: It breezes by instead of lingering, which is not a bad thing when you're listening to such proficient musicians dance each other in knots.
Henriksen, Storløkken, and Helge Sten (as Deathprod) all released solo or duet records this year, and while each one has its strengths, Supersilent remains greater than the sum of their parts. The unique tension between their players creates something unique and frequently awesome. The humanistic, almost New Age-y Henriksen and the grimly neutral Sten especially become stronger when their different approaches are at odds with one another. But together or by themselves, live or on record, the members of Supersilent still have more to reveal, more corners they haven't explored. Hell, next time I might even fly to Oslo.


Django Django see themselves in the lineage of late-'60s, early-'70s pop weirdos, but they listen like modernist samplers and crate diggers. The songs on their second album present themselves as physical challenges, a demonstration of what Django Django can do rather than what they have to say or how they feel.

Born Under Saturn

On their Mercury Prize-nominated self-titled 2012 LP, Django Django revived a very specific "sound of the future", defined around 2000 by a cluster of "forward-thinking" UK rock bands like Super Furry Animals, Clinic, Simian, Badly Drawn Boy, and the Beta Band, and ushered it into the present day. Django Django's hodgepodge approach and affectless harmonizing made the Beta Band reference, in particular, hard to avoid (it probably didn't hurt that drummer/producer David Maclean’s brother used to be in Beta Band). But as a jumping-off point, these influences are limited, and the possibilities of the sound taper off the second you start to repeat yourself or lose your sense of irreverence. On Born Under Saturn, Django Django fall into both traps.
Even so, their range of raw skill is impressive. The songs present themselves as physical challenges: Can Django Django give Stereolab’s "Metronomic Underground" a jamband reworking? "Giant" says "yes." Can they repurpose surf-guitar riffs without actually making surf-rock? "Shake and Tremble" pulls off that trick. Can the juddering bassline of Big Boi’s
"Shutterbugg" coexist with monklike harmonies? "First Light" answers in affirmative. But can Django Django juxtapose starched-stiff British accents against vibrant Caribbean rhythms? There’s a thirteen-minute stretch stuck right in the middle of Born Under Saturn, from "Reflections" to "Shot Down", that emphatically states "no."
More so than their woolier debut, Born Under Saturn is a demonstration of what Django Django can do rather than what they have to say or how they feel. The almost-constant harmonizing of Vincent Neff’s staid vocals surround these songs in a case of stained glass, lovely but nearly impenetrable. Hammer away enough at the album and some kind of center emerges: "High Moon" might be about restorative nocturnal powers, "Shot Down" might be a crime narrative, and maybe the album title is meant to suggest a motif of planetary influence and rebirth that gets vaguely touched upon throughout.
But Neff lends not a speck of vibrato, grit or inflection to anything, and thus, not a speck of urgency or instability or any emotional resonance. The busy arrangements and serious frontloading make Born Under Saturn’s 54 minutes a demanding investment, and the effort it takes to simply get any sort of visceral pleasure out of it makes it feel twice as long.
And so the best record Django Django may end up putting their name on is 2014’s Late Night Tales compilation. It tells you everything about the band that Born Under Saturn does: they see themselves in the lineage of late-'60s, early-'70s pop weirdos, but they listen like modernist samplers and crate diggers—witness the inclusion of Bob James’ endlessly resourced "Nautilus". A telling and exciting three-song stretch includes Massive Attack’s supervillainous cover of John Holt’s rocksteady classic "Man Next Door", TNGHT’s "Bugg’n" and Stankonia deep cut "Slum Beautiful". All of those acts have likewise been lauded for their omnivorous artistry and loved because their songs have distinct character and hooks. Django Django are clearly inspired by them, but when I think about how they fit amongst their most frequent comparisons in the UK Class of 2000, I remember SPIN's infamous pick for album of the year: something that also packed an incredible amount of musical information in a small space but was only as lovable as its input. It was "your hard drive", and unfortunately, that might be the best likeness for Django Django.


Even when she’s singing about self-loathing, the 18-year-old pop star and dancer exudes a swagger. Her full-length debut proves she’s capable of transcending online virality.

I Used to Think I Could Fly

Tate McRae’s a tortured romantic, burdened by bad lovers and friends who don’t understand her. Despite being one of the most egregious “indie pop voices” in recent memory, she’s a strong singer, as comfortable slinking across broody pop-trap as she is belting over piano-driven ballads. Her sound is sandwiched somewhere between Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo, and, like Rodrigo, McRae revels in heartbreak, surveying the pop landscape to see which style best suits her sad-girl anthems. Her full-length debut, i used to think i could fly, announces McRae as a legitimate pop star capable of transcending the online virality that launched her career, but she’s often too beleaguered to take it all in. “You say I should be on top of the world/But I’m not feeling much,” she sings on “go away,” and the admission seems intended to resonate beyond celebrity and reach any number of people struggling to find a silver lining.
Like so many before her, McRae was discovered on YouTube. A competitive dancer and content creator living in Calgary, she found her initial breakthrough at 14, when she posted a video of an original song, “One Day,” which has since amassed almost 40 million views; the official release was certified gold in Canada. The song spurred a label bidding war won by RCA, which vowed to support McRae’s dance career and, for her first EP, gifted her a song co-written by Eilish and Finneas. She landed a hit in 2020 with “you broke me first,” a triumphant trap-infused ballad that tore through TikTok in the early months of the pandemic. But the song’s stratospheric success—a billion streams and counting across all platforms—didn’t translate to megastardom. Without the Disney Channel fame and off-camera love triangle that bolstered Rodrigo’s “drivers license,” McRae’s song appeared to be just another viral smash. It was good, maybe even great, but the lack of narrative momentum stifled her bid for placement beside nascent icons like Eilish and Rodrigo.
i used to think i could fly proves she has more big songs in her. Working with a team of hitmakers including Greg Kurstin, Charlie Handsome, and Blake Slatkin, McRae tries her hand at the type of pop suited for an Abercrombie store—AI-generated pop-punk, Kid Laroi-style soft trap, etc. She’s adept at sliding between sounds, exuding a swagger even when singing about self-loathing. Standouts “hate myself” and “feel like shit” both manage to extract meaning from suffering. On the latter, McRae’s voice soars with anguish, capturing the theatrical agony of a breakup: “I won’t lie, I thought I might die…And maybe I’ll get used to it, but right now I just feel like shit.” It can be cathartic to give into grief, even if the concession is fleeting, and McRae’s acceptance of this pain reads as vaguely empowering.
The album’s not always so introspective. Often, empowerment comes in the form of vindication as she thrashes exes for being spineless and stupid. On tracks like the “Ride Wit Me”-interpolating “don’t come back” and the alt-rock-inflected “what would you do?”, McRae’s almost giddy with bitterness, shifting her sadness into sneering resentment. “Never left your dad’s basement/Now you’re mad that I made it,” she sings on “i’m so gone,” feigning pride to momentarily mask the debilitating hurt she expresses throughout the record. There’s an authenticity to this sort of self-delusion; McRae’s nursing her ego, convincing herself she’s superior to her ex. It’s only when her language becomes impersonal that the empowerment turns trite. On the painfully flat “boy x,” heartache warps briefly into narcissism: “There’s a billion of boy x, but, babe, there’s only one of me.” On an album stuffed with incisive insights into failed romance, moments like this feel out of step.
In a recent interview with Zane Lowe, McRae discussed the difficulty of developing an artistic identity as an industry-anointed pop star: “I probably did a million writing sessions this summer with a million different people,” she said. “That was the hardest part—actually having the confidence to speak up and [say], ‘No, no, no: this is what my album’s about.’” Apart from some missteps—like the excruciating Finneas-produced “i still say goodnight”—i used to think i could fly soars with confidence, a record that remains absolutely sure of itself even as McRae’s emotions vacillate between bravado and self-immolation.


After many delays, Game returns with an utter mess of an LP, one heavy on guests (Drake, Rick Ross, Tyler, the Creator) and light on inspiration. The perverse thing about The R.E.D. Album is that amidst this unsightly storm of star power is the backbone of what could've been a coherent album.

The R.E.D. Album

When Game got himself kicked out of G-Unit in 2005, he effectively became a ward of the record industry. He existed, so somebody needed to take care of him. That responsibility fell on the shoulders of the Interscope/Geffen tandem, who, like bad foster parents, decided to remedy their problems with him by throwing unseemly amounts of money in his direction. In theory it might make sense, as Game's career has long been based on a simple formula: Surround him with artists more talented and famous than him, provide him with an envious selection of beats, then get out of the way and hope for the best. Up until about 2009, you could actually tack "profit" onto the end of that list, but the last few years haven't been too kind to rap's foremost tragic clown.
Game last released an album three years ago, and like The R.E.D. Album, it seemed destined to be a commercial failure. But along came "My Life", a Lil Wayne collaboration that became Game's biggest hit since 2005, and so the project, and his career, were salvaged. But that was a time when pretty much anything Wayne touched ended up making somebody some money, unless you were Brisco or Cassie. It was the Lil Wayne Feature Bubble of 2008, and unfortunately for Interscope, Game has turned out to be Pets.com.
The R.E.D. Album arrives in stores as a monument to the twisted logic and dire business practices of the modern rap industry. It has cycled through as many "lead singles" as the total number of radio hits that Biggie had in his whole career (yes, including posthumous releases). Its Wikipedia page could almost be printed and published as a 33 1/3 book. At a mere 21 tracks long, and featuring 17 different artists, the final product is one speedboat away from being a DJ Khaled album. Guests include Drake, Young Jeezy, Snoop Dogg, Rick Ross, Lil Wayne twice, Dr. Dre five times, and Nelly Furtado, who must've wandered into the wrong recording studio and froze up like George Costanza when she tried to find an excuse to leave. It's almost as if the rap and R&B world got together to do a benefit album, although considering the state of Game's career, that might not be too far off.
On one side of the coin is a work that's an utter monstrosity, and whose best moments appear very sporadically. The other side is an album that is almost-- almost-- too big to fail. Where some collaborations here feel like the result of Game spinning a prize wheel and taking his stuffed Lloyd, "Heavy Artillery" (featuring Ross and Beanie Sigel) and "Speakers on Blast" (with Big Boi and E-40) sound like they were conceived with consideration to how the artists might sound together and how the tracks would fit into Game's gritty aesthetic. In what might be the album's two greatest successes, "Martians vs. Goblins" finds Game putting on a worthy audition for Odd Future (complete with a hilarious Lil B crack) and "Drug Test" rides a beat that thrillingly turns the clock back to when G-Unit wasn't merely an investment firm.
The perverse thing about The R.E.D. Album is that amidst this unsightly storm of star power is the backbone of what could've been a coherent album. A number of tracks lean on soulful production that provides an appropriate (though maybe too on-the-nose) backdrop for Game's hyper-personal verses. Others dip into storytelling or flesh out a bit of Game's personal history. At the very worst the album wouldn't feel like one of those fake leaks that haphazardly packages together an artists' singles and random features into one large .rar file. But of course, Game's whole career is based on the hypothesis that he can't sell records on name or talent alone. So instead, the album smothers itself in R&B choruses sung by people like Chris Brown and Mario, and nobody wants to hear that, including, surely, Chris Brown and Mario.
The R.E.D. Album will likely fade into obscurity immediately upon arrival, but if it doesn't raise some eyebrows around major label offices, then this is a failure of not just one person, but also of an entire industry. As Watch the Throne lords over the genre, its antithesis is here: a strategically and artistically directionless album, built around a desperate, forgotten MC, foisted upon a public that has made it very clear that it wants nothing to do with him. Game told MTV's Shaheem Reid that the album's title referred to his re-dedication to hip-hop but, in a taunting, delicious bit of irony, it more appropriately reflects the project's balance sheet. We can pretend the album never existed, or better yet, joke about it for years to come. Jimmy Iovine, on the other hand, isn't so lucky.