The Texas-born Nashvillian previously proved herself a natural translator of honky-tonk’s emotional entanglements; on her long-delayed third record, she makes a complete song cycle out of them.

CAZIMI

Nine years ago, Caitlin Rose released her second album, The Stand-In. The title spliced a couple inside jokes from the first record’s tour: The months onstage had her feeling like an impostor; when she felt like herself, she longed for an understudy. But in the album’s wake, a good number of interviewers and critics turned her into a stand-in for country music: If she wasn’t an alternative to Taylor Swift, maybe she was the inheritor of Loretta Lynn or Emmylou Harris. You can see where they were coming from. Rose is a Texas-born Nashvillian—with all the twang that combo implies—and her parents (a label executive and a songwriter who’s won Grammys for writing with, well, Taylor Swift) are Music Row stalwarts. From the outset, she was a natural at depicting the gnarled emotional entanglements of classic honky-tonk—the misspent desire, the loneliness at the heart of the party—but her interiority was more suited to plaintive indie pop. Monologues, not playlets.
CAZIMI, Rose’s long-delayed third record, makes a complete song cycle out of those entanglements, with each cut reflecting the proper amount of neon. Pick a track: someone’s either breaking apart or barely holding it together. If anyone actually gets through the door, they pull the house down behind them. It could make for a heavy listen if Rose treated these situations weightily, but that’s never really been her approach. “Star-crossed and ridin’ on heaven’s horses/I’ve had enough of these cosmic divorces,” she shrugs on “Modern Dancing,” a blithe and, from the sound of it, severely capoed strutter that plays like “Soak Up the Sun” for nihilists. (Or, I guess, like the Magnetic Fields.) On “Holdin’”—Rose’s second or third contribution to the lamentably small canon of country power pop—her narrator alternates grandiose threats with seething retreats, then gets chased by a lovely jangly counterpoint. “Nobody’s Sweetheart” is a chiming concern troll with a crushing descending figure that recalls ’70s AM gold; fragments of its chorus carry into “Lil’ Vesta” (which crosses the sure-stepping pop of Adam Schlesinger with the romantic fatalism of, honest to God, early Toby Keith) and “Blameless” (the real weeper here, with a chorus that carries as much resigned faith as an evangelical worship ballad).
There’s a convergence between how Rose (who co-produced the album with Jordan Lehning) tinkers with genre and the way she turns her characters’ situations over like a snowglobe. It’s fascinating to compare CAZIMI with her 2010 debut, Own Side Now, which she reissued in September. With the exception of the Northern-soul-inflected “Shanghai Cigarettes”—when Rose appeared on Rhett Miller’s podcast last month, he named it one of his all-time top five—Own Side Now hewed closely to folk-pop convention. The observations were sharp, but they were snugly sheathed in the arrangements. Any stylistic deviations tended toward the self-consciously retro: barrelhouse shuffle, pop-soul balladry, po-faced folk ramble.
Now, she’s pulling off things like lead single “Black Obsidian,” which puffs up the glammy dread of prime Suede with a bell-tolling gothic sensibility, while still making time for twangy turnarounds. “Why in the hell do we keep looking back/With the devil always running after us,” she wails, and the band stops on a dime before unfurling their capes. Or “All Right (Baby’s Got a Way),” a twinkling lullaby of condescension that unexpectedly deploys a full-band middle eight—like a landmine constructed from All Things Must Pass vinyl—at the song’s midpoint. “Why don’t you get up off the ground,” Rose taunts, “If it isn’t where you wanna be?” The lullaby continues; the eruption is ignored, for better or worse, like a partner’s outburst.
In astrology, when a planet’s path takes it too near the sun, it’s in combustion. But get a little closer than that, and that’s cazimi: a brief encampment at the sun’s heart. The light and heat amplify, rather than destroy. One of the bonus tracks on the Own Side Now reissue was a newer tune, a resigned breakup ballad called “Only Lies.” It sounds like a Memphis-era Cat Power demo: The snare has a hitch in its step; Rose wanders into a fog of synth strings and easy-listening piano trills. Revisited here and slotted as the closer, it’s completely rebuilt. Rose and Lehning twist the song around a bottle rocket: a full complement of guitars frantically strumming and digging over a four-on-the-floor kick. At this speed, a split feels like a physical law. “And you ask/How could I be so cruel/To leave you in your cryin’,” she spits, then collapses into a shrug: “Well, we’re only lovers/And/They’re only lies.” It’s resigned and callous and empathetic all at once, an auspicious alignment charted by one of our great songwriters, back at last.


This collection, an audio companion to Brett Morgen’s acclaimed documentary Montage of Heck, assembles half-songs, collages, and spoken word material from Kurt Cobain's home recordings.

Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings

Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings

Watching Brett Morgen’s 2015 documentary Montage of Heck, assembled from Kurt Cobain’s own journals, home-taped monologues, and family home videos, you felt a profound sense of intimacy, even violation. Eavesdropping on Cobain has been a lurid national pastime for nearly 20 years now, from 2003's Journals to the scraps collected on the With the Lights Out box, but Morgen took us closer than even the most brazen imagined we should be allowed to go: Courtney and Kurt, naked and bantering in the bathroom on home video about who gets to play the Reading Festival that year (Courtney, pregnant with Frances, complains jokingly about having to stay home and “get big and fat”). Cobain, nodding off and holding his toddler. Footage of the three band members, teenagers, thrashing around in an Aberdeen shack, watched by two profoundly bored audience members. The very idea that this footage exists, and that we might be given such unfettered access to it, lends the film an uneasy voyeuristic charge.
Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings carries the same unsavory aftertaste as the film, with none of its attendant illuminations. The scraps here were dredged by Morgen and used to wallpaper the film, and he’s rounded them out with some home recordings that didn’t make the movie. Home tapes by iconic artists are a tricky business. They can be revelatory, but they always carry a question: Did we learn enough to justify the intrusion? In the context of the film, the audio was an essential part of the film’s sometimes-unclean sense of immersion. Divorced from the images, the sounds on these tapes are little more than lint emptied out of the last pocket of a life.
"Kurt’s brain was always on,” his sister Kim says early in the film, and Home Recordings sounds exactly like that: What a brain is like when it is on, but not necessarily thinking anything. It’s not like listening to Kurt Cobain’s music; it is like submerging yourself in (what you imagine to be) his mind, with all of the bored fidgets, silly voices, jokes made to oneself, and half-hearted guitar strums this implies. In the film, his first girlfriend Tracy Marander recalls that while Cobain was living with her, he was unemployed and would watch television for hours, strumming his guitar abstractedly. You can imagine that a few of these tracks were recorded in similar states. “Burn the Rain” could have been a song he never finished, or it could just be a blurry version of a bunch of different songs he would eventually write, something he committed to tape and never thought about a second time.
This hits upon the main issue with releasing Cobain's home-tapes: As King Buzzo of the Melvins noted of this film, Cobain was "a master of jerking your chain." These tracks mostly feel like an antic mind entertaining itself, and to enshrine them in this way is mystifying. Consider: There’s a track called “Beans” here, and it’s a minute and 20 seconds of Cobain thumbing two notes and singing about eating beans in a shrieking cartoon voice. There’s another called “Rehash” that consists of him hollering silly songwriter words—“rehash,” “chorus,” “solo”—as he plays some power chords. There are brief audio clips of him playing with sped-up and slowed-down voices. The few early demos—"Sappy", or "Frances Farmer", strummed and mumbled as he worked out the song's skeleton—are so inchoate that lavishing any kind of attention on them feels perverse. They serve to remind us that ephemera provide mute testimony of a life’s existence, but say little about its meaning.
There is a precedent for this sort of release, especially with artists who died young with a slim catalog: 2007’s Family Tree gathered together all of the home recordings of Nick Drake, an artist with a similar predilection for committing all his guitar fumbling to tape and even to recording emotionally revealing monologues. Montage of Heck is like a shaggier version of Family Tree, a voyeuristic document that attempts to plop you down in the living room of a dead hero, and it leaves you with a similar hollow feeling.
Cobain fan sites have complained that the Home Recordings crosses the line into exploitation, but this line was crossed years ago, and has been obliterated and trampled many times since. The Home Recordings marks the point where that exploitation enters the absurd. It’s a sad bookend to a captivating film, and an ignoble use of a trove of material. Its purpose isn’t to give us any new music, but to give us one last grasp at his fading spirit. For most people, this is the last phase of a breakup, or of grief—when you smell the t-shirt, and register sadly that the essence is gone.


The jam-heavy live set captured between Walker’s four-piece band and the Japanese psych-prog quintet is a heady meeting of the minds.

Ryley Walker / Kikagaku Moyo: Deep Fried Grandeur

Deep Fried Grandeur

Ryley Walker’s got jokes. By now, the songwriter might even be as known for his witty, self-skewering online presence as for his increasingly weird, increasingly excellent psych-folk. But one of his recent gags has nothing to do with the former and everything to do with the latter. In 2019, Walker launched Husky Pants Records, a “joke record label” (his words) for a series of minor releases. Was it really just for kicks? Or is Walker deflecting, setting a low bar to relieve some pressure before releasing honest and vulnerable music out into the world? He has blurred that line before.
Either way, Walker’s having the last laugh with Deep Fried Grandeur, which was released on Husky Pants after multiple labels passed on it; the record recently hit No. 1 on Bandcamp’s best-selling list. The album, a live collaboration between Walker’s four-piece band and the Japanese psych-prog quintet Kikagaku Moyo, documents their set from the music festival Le Guess Who? in Utrecht, the Netherlands, in 2018; the album’s title is how they appeared on the festival’s bill. The organizers had asked Walker to choose another artist for a one-time jam, and his pick was no head-scratcher. Walker’s Deafman Glance and Kikagaku Moyo’s Masana Temples, both released earlier that year, shared similar cycles of gentle dis- and re-orientation, a sense of constantly interrupted traction, like getting lost in a huge cavernous art museum and passing through vastly different soft-lit rooms while repeatedly finding and losing the exit route. With only one afternoon to rehearse, the two bands hit the stage and hit it off.
Deep Fried Grandeur, split into two halves for vinyl purposes but really a product of about five independent movements, is an instrumental, krautrock-ish noodle journey that spans the spectrum from tactile texture-crafting to supercharged drives. In the first half of part two, “Shrinks the Day,” the scenery changes dramatically around a hoedown pulse. Ryu Kurosawa’s scorpion-like sitar pierces the quiet, but soon it takes off sprinting into a wide-open field, flipping into a major-key. The pile of sounds from these nine musicians were touched up for the album by Cooper Crain of Bitchin Bajas and CAVE, and comparing the final version to a bootleg of the actual performance reveals modest but shrewd edits: a guitar effect is enhanced here, a transitory section shortened there. It’s still a faithful document, and it sounds better trimmed and toned.
What Deep Fried Grandeur doesn’t have is that back-pocket compass of the best semi-rehearsed, semi-improvised jams, the kind where you have no idea where it’s headed but still give yourself over to it. It’s more like hopping in their backseat while they cruise through some hilly countryside roads that nobody knows intimately well, but aren’t brutally tough to navigate. The shifts are gradual, never on a dime, and the ride doesn’t toy with your memory by returning to melodic motifs after long, digressive stretches. Deep Fried Grandeur has a certain shelf life, but then again, the spirit of its origins was all about bright, short-lived sparks. You savor the brief chemistry, and then part ways, remembering it fondly.
Above all, Deep Fried Grandeur is just a joy to visualize. It’s nice enough to imagine yourself at the scene of two touring-calloused psych bands from opposite sides of the globe colliding on a third continent and immediately having a long, advanced conversation in a shared language. But it’s just as fun to picture the Can, Blue Cheer, and Grateful Dead songs that probably reached their headphones and car stereos at a similar time in Tokyo and Rockford, Illinois, years and years ago, setting the crash course into motion.

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Kim Gordon's noise project with surfer Alex Knost shares some qualities with her band Body/Head. In a sense, it's the sound of the most New York woman to ever live returning to her West Coast roots.

Glitterbust

Who is Alex Knost and how did he end up in a band with Kim Gordon? Among the many questions raised by Glitterbust—the debut noise guitar record from this California duo—the most pressing one is also, at least partially, the easiest to parse using Google. Knost is a 31-year-old pro surfer from Costa Mesa, Calif. "I thought surfing was cool because it was an art form and a subculture," Knost once told an interviewer, and he has referred to his single-fin longboard as an art piece itself. Surfer magazine has called Knost "unlike any other surfer in the world," drawing from '60s and '70s technique for a poised, imaginative, eccentric form. "Alex looks like a beat poet," one journalist wrote in 2008, comparing his surf style to "a 1984 Fender Stratocaster about to be beaten against a Marshall stack. In a good way."
Before she became the loft-dwelling, paint-splattering, flip-up-shades-donning embodiment of Warholian, Downtown cool, Gordon was raised in California (where she smoked weed, hitchhiked to Big Sur, and saw the Dead in San Francisco). In a sense, Glitterbust is the sound of the most New York woman to ever live returning to her West Coast roots. The record's five compositions have the corrosive edge and arty temperament that distinguish all of Gordon’s projects, but this impressionistic noise is often mellower, more spacious and atmospheric. Glitterbust has nothing to do with classic surf music, but you could imagine its ritualistic drones and white-heat mantras soundtracking a séance on the beach.
Gordon and Knost have provided no context for Glitterbust. They quietly played a first show at a festival last fall, and they are ostensibly named after a blistering, alarming Royal Trux song (you could imagine "Glitterbust" alongside "Talk Normal" and "Secret Abuse" in Gordon's "Noise Paintings" series, in which she renders the names of noise bands in acrylic on canvas). Knost has played in more conventional rock groups, such as Tomorrows Tulips (also of Burger Records, perhaps explaining the curious label choice for Gordon), but his primary medium is not music. And maybe Gordon—who has often said she considers herself a visual artist first—found a kindred spirit in Knost for this reason. In limitations, they find a world.
Most of these pieces (not all quite songs) use just a few primitive chords; there is a recurring air of dread. Sounds pan dramatically, filling frames like full canvases. Bits of piercing noise drill into your skull and install hooks. The grating dream logic of the dense, windy 11-minute "Repetitive Differ" sounds like destruction and regeneration underwater, like notes swimming at the seafloor while Gordon treads above. Its heavy, enveloping drones are busy with overdriven details that shoot into the red.
The music unspools slowly. This is ambient abrasion, like no wave directed by the cycles of the Sun or Moon. The LP's nine-minute highlight is "The Highline," the most conventionally composed piece here, like a collage of song fragments. It's also the only track to foreground Gordon's painterly, almost-mystical singing voice. Underscoring the whole record's shadowy mood, at the "chorus" Gordon and Knost speak-sing in unison of a "shadow behind the buildings," their voices blending effortlessly. There are bits of spoken word on most of Glitterbust, but you can rarely make them out—"Sometimes I think words are not her primary language," Gordon’s astrologer, Peter Smith, once told The New Yorker, and that's not hard to believe here. "The Highline" shares a name with the touristy park in New York housed within a former above-ground subway platform, which now runs parallel to Manhattan's austere gallery district—the song likewise combines the industrial and the organic, with its blown-out guitar manipulations and wide-open vocal phrasings.
Glitterbust is not unlike Gordon's other recent duo, Body/Head, though less bold. Still, it feels like a gift to spend time in the oceanic space Gordon and Knost summon, letting its nuances wash over you. The experience, like all great noise music, is at once dissonant and, in a peculiar way, meditative and serene. In his epic 2015 surf-memoir, the journalist William Finnegan writes that, "Surfing is a secret garden, not easily entered. My memory of learning a spot, of coming to know and understand a wave, is usually inseparable from the friend with whom I tried to climb its walls." On Glitterbust, you hear a sonic equivalent—two professional outsiders in total communion, knowing and understanding the crest of a wave, becoming inseparable in the process.


The debut from the Chicago post-hardcore group revels in playing with teeth-gritting tension and dynamics, defining their sound by its restraint as much as its rage.

On Watch

There’s only a brief glimpse of true, ear-curdling ugliness on Slow Mass’ debut album On Watch. Picture someone rushing off to work after sleeping through their alarm, and five minutes into their drive, paralyzed with fear: “Did I forget my phone? Is the oven on? Am I wearing two different socks?”  It’s like this as Dave Collis gets cut off between notes while retuning his guitar prior to “Suburban Yellow.” There’s a sense of resolution as Slow Mass pick things up,  but there’s still the stress of feeling something similar the day before and the day after this. Its nagging, persistent chorus is as if Collis and singer Mercedes Webb are roleplaying Jack Torrance in a Slack chat: “There’s nothing like getting up before dawn to start wasting your life.” All work, no play—On Watch trades in that kind of misery, the kind where you gotta work to be this miserable.
The Chicago quartet proudly tout “no shortcuts” as the operating principle on their long-gestating debut—whatever came easiest was just as quickly dispatched until they were “ten moves away from [our] initial instinct.” This is an artistically admirable method that runs the risk of causing a post-hardcore band to go against their audience’s interests, and thus their own—too much AP Calc, not enough phys ed. Slow Mass know the value of fast-twitch violence and also the impact of frontloading it—“Gray Havens” and “Schemes” work in debilitating, disorienting dynamics, reeling from their introductory power drill riffs. And if the screamo-adjacent “E.D.” and “Like Dead Skin” are the result of persistent counterprogramming, Slow Mass’ initial instinct must’ve been something closer to Napalm Death’s “You Suffer.” Both function as necessary release valves—Slow Mass spend most of On Watch in teeth-gritting tension, defined by its restraint as much as its rage.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a post-hardcore album as quiet as On Watch. While Slow Mass occasionally honor the post-everything experimentations of their city (check the credits to see the flute flutters of “Tunnel Vision Quest” are sampled from Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois), the stereo-panned drummers on “The Author” crystallize the prevailing tone of On Watch: when Collis and Webb harmonize, it’s uncannily like hearing slow-core greats Low covering Fugazi’s The Argument in its entirety (or vice versa).
Nearly everything here can evoke similarly breathtaking comparisons from the past 25 years of aggressive indie rock, but part of that is due to Slow Mass not revealing much about themselves beyond their process. In the video for “Blocks,” producer Neil Strauch throws on the vinyl and sits motionless for four minutes, eventually throwing it into the trash—a “Portlandia” gag via Drag City. But there’s a kernel of truth in this video, as the lyrics of On Watch are just as austere and rarely leave a deep impression.
Slow Mass are a photo negative of the fourth-wave emo bands with whom they share stages and contributors—Strauch has engineered numerous projects from Tim Kinsella, while former drummer Josh Sparks lent On Watch the same nimble, stutter-stepping beats once provided to Into It. Over It. before taking a gig with Minus the Bear, whose looping harmonics serve as a comparative point for the “On Watch” interludes. The momentous, overwhelming choruses of “Suburban Yellow” and “Blocks” share that wave’s most potent communal and cathartic stylistic aspects, the accomplishment felt when a half-dozen people finally push a pickup out of a mudhole. If it isn’t joy, it’s at least the camaraderie when misery finds company.


On her second album, the L.A. musician grapples with the death of her mother, placing her playfully experimental approach to sampling and sound design in the service of a more meaningful vision.

Loom

Katie Gately’s second album wasn’t supposed to sound like this. The Los Angeles artist had nearly finished an entirely different record, with a different working title, but after receiving the devastating news that her mother had been diagnosed with a rare form of terminal cancer, Gately left that album behind.
For a while, she left her life in L.A. behind too, moving back to her family home in Brooklyn to help care for her mother. Wracked with grief and suffering from insomnia as she watched her mom slowly slip away, Gately began work on a new album, one centered around “Bracer,” a song that her mother had identified as a favorite.
Gately’s mother passed away in 2018, and Loom was finished in the months that followed. It’s an album about death, loss, and saying goodbye; it’s also the finest thing that Gately has ever done. The new LP takes a dramatic turn away from Color, her impressive 2016 full-length debut for Tri Angle. That record was a ball of kinetic energy, a collection of brightly shaded, hyperactive pop flirtations that reflected her background as a sound designer. Rapidly cycling through various moods, samples, effects, and sound palettes, Color at times sounded like Gately doing her best to express 10 different ideas simultaneously, but there was something inviting about its mania.
Loom is noticeably more focused, although it’s not without its twists and turns. Sound design still plays a major role; the LP features samples—many of them heavily manipulated—of earthquakes, screaming peacocks, howling wolves, a car crash, shaking pill bottles, a coffin closing, a shovel digging, and more. There’s even audio from her parents’ wedding. Gately’s compositional approach is just as idiosyncratic. “Bracer,” the album’s centerpiece, clocks in at more than 10 minutes and is something of a rollercoaster, opening with little more than her solemn voice and ending with a towering, grief-stricken crescendo of soaring synths and hammering percussion. Along the way, it also winds through a passage of what sounds like haunted carnival music and another movement that evokes the brooding piano lounge of bands like Black Heart Procession.
This could make for a disjointed listen, but “Bracer” (like Loom in general) has the advantage of following a very specific vision. Where Color was fueled by a playfully experimental spirit—listening to the album, it’s easy to imagine her repeatedly asking, “What would happen if I tried this?"—Loom puts her personal narrative front and center. Her production chops and intense attention to detail are still there, but they’re no longer ends in themselves; instead, they act in service of both the music’s heavy emotional core and Gately’s vocals, which have become more prominent in the mix.
It’s easy to draw comparisons between Gately and contemporaries like Zola Jesus and Holly Herndon, but on Loom her voice sounds a lot more like Kate Bush or PJ Harvey. She’s not a trained singer, but there’s a dark, bedazzling quality to her vocals; during the closing passage of “Waltz,” Gately almost seems to be channeling the famous “Song of the Witches” from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. A similar sort of necromancer vibe emanates from the swirling chorus of “Tower,” a pomp-filled song written from the perspective of her mother’s cancer medicine. Elsewhere, Gately’s voice takes on a reverent, almost religious timbre, most prominently on “Allay” and “Flow,” both of which weave her vocals into rich, soaring choirs.
Sacred music was a familiar part of Gately’s upbringing. Her mother was a former nun, and though she’d left her calling (and religion in general) after meeting Gately’s father and growing disillusioned with the Catholic church, she nonetheless filled their household with Gregorian chants and other spiritual sounds. Some of that aesthetic has clearly seeped into Loom, which contains numerous nods to religion (and her mother’s former life). Interludes “Ritual,” “Rite,” and “Rest” form a sort of devotional triptych, while “Bracer” gets a bit more literal with refrains like, “Sin sin sin sin sin for the win” and “Take my sin and shove it into yours."
Gately has often commented on her struggles with depression and anxiety, but on Loom she sounds confident and self-assured. Her mother is all over the album, but Gately herself is the main character here, and the journey she takes is riveting. It’s her pain, her sorrow, and her memories—both good and bad—that fuel the record, and though the experience of her mother’s passing must have been harrowing, death does have a way of underlining what’s really important. Loom feels like the first time that Gateley’s technical prowess and songwriting are fully on the same page. The album may be rooted in loss, but Loom’s success lies in the clarity of vision that she has found.

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In just three years, Lamont “Bim” Thomas, who's played drums in V-3, Bassholes, This Moment in Black History, Puffy Aerolas, and others, has cranked out three albums plus EPs and singles as Obnox, pouring his energies into burning-red noise-punk blasts. His newest, the blazing Louder Space, is the first he recorded in a studio.

Louder Space

Ohio has produced so many good garage and post-punk bands in the past few decades, picking a list of the best would be close to impossible. But one thing’s certain: Lamont “Bim” Thomas would show up a lot. He’s played drums in V-3,  Bassholes, the Unholy Two, This Moment in Black History, and Puffy Aerolas; the latter two still enlist his services regularly. But his most important project is turning out to be one he does on his own. In just three years he’s cranked out three albums and a bunch of EPs and singles as Obnox, pouring his experiences, influences, and considerable energies into burning-red noise-punk blasts.
Obnox has been prolific because Thomas works quickly. His 2011 debut I’m Bleeding Now was recorded on his own four-track in a week, and subsequent releasess have followed suit. ("I just bang it out fast, like the record business used to be,” he once said.) I’d bet it didn’t take him a ton of time to put together Louder Space either, but there was one significant difference in the way it was made: as the title implies, Thomas recorded for the first time in a studio, Columbus’ legendary Musicol.
The timing of this move was perfect, as Thomas’ songs have gotten wider and deeper, and thus ripe for being rendered in finer detail. In other words, he was ready for his close-up. But sharper clarity doesn’t lessen the abrasive thrust of Obnox’s attack. He’s still painting in, as he describes it, “sheets of rhythm,” and Louder Space is piled high with them. Those layers are even more powerful when you can sift through them carefully. Part of the fun of listening to Obnox in higher-res is how easy it is to focus on a blazing guitar line here or a detonating drum beat there, without losing sight of Thomas’ forest-sized din.
That din is more surprise-filled than before, due to Thomas exploring more of his musical obsessions. Louder Space is based in punk rock, but he continually leaps from that center toward less expected modes. So on “Red I”, soulful horns are buried under guitar fuzz; on “Molecule”, chopped-up metal chords buttress a chant; and on “Raindrops”, grunge riffs slide under sugared vocals. Most noticeably, Thomas’ love for hip-hop and R&B shines through all the buzzing churn. The wiry guitar loop of “How to Rob (The Punk Years)” could circle a Public Enemy tune, while “Bitch! Get Money!” hides a funk saunter inside its frantic amp-bleed. There’s even a gospel tint to the album’s only slow song, a near-ballad bluntly titled “Feeling Real Black Today.”
Thomas’ style-melding is so smooth, it gives Louder Space a sheen of confidence. His music has never exactly been shy, but here he sounds like he knows he’s reached a new plane and isn’t afraid to say so. “You never find a fuckin’ ounce of fat on me!” he insists at one point; later, he chants posi-mantras in “Mecca Son Shine”—“Gotta chase my own glory/ Gotta write my own story/ Gotta grind my own dollars/ Gotta solve my own problems”—as if his brain is pumping iron. His throat does calisthenics too: Thomas jumps his voice through hoops, crooning, rapping, and ranting in perpetual call-and-response with himself.
All of this may make Louder Space sound like brazen boasting, and at times it is. But Thomas’ boldness is more about assured self-confidence—more about belief in his own sonic mission—than vain puffing of feathers. And besides, he's earned the right to stick out his chest a bit. Louder Space transcends not only his previous work, but much of the scene that he’s ensconced in. That makes it something worth bragging about.


Joined by his brother, father, and the Vietnamese musician Minh Nguyen, Ruban Nielson throws off his habitually weighty themes and digs into a refreshingly raw, heady session of psychedelic rock.

IC-01 Hanoi

Over the past two Unknown Mortal Orchestra albums, Ruban Nielson has tackled thorny topics that fall well outside the scope of most indie-rock outfits: primal urges, modern alienation, consumerism, and most notoriously, polyamory. At times, these investigations produced some of UMO’s most fetching music to date, though they also resulted in a discomfiting sense of nakedness. Nielson’s emphasis on these themes in his songwriting, along with forays into genres like soul and R&B, at times overshadowed his formidable talent for conjuring psychedelic realms with his six-string and an array of effects.
While recording Sex & Food in far-flung locales like Auckland, Reykjavik, Seoul, and Portland, Oregon, Nielson, brother Kody, and father Chris (as well as UMO member Jacob Portrait) also spent a period of time in Hanoi. Holed up in Phu Sa Studios, one July night they all jammed with local musician Minh Nguyen. IC-01 Hanoi presents a visceral, smoky, casual session that cooks together fairly tumultuous moods over the course of its concise runtime.
You can hear the steam being blown off in the roiling opener “Hanoi 1” as Nielson shreds with a newfound sense of freedom, no longer hemmed in by his own songs and arrangements. If only such rage lasted longer than 80 seconds. From there, UMO and Nguyen amble through many different moods. “Hanoi 2” moves like a post-meal stroll, giving plenty of space for Nielson’s wah-wah-heavy exploration. His playing here feels less like a solo and more like a soliloquy, toggling between earthy and spacy. On the disco strut of “Hanoi 4,” his string scrapes become another rhythmic and textural element.
That the press sheet cites electric-era Miles Davis is no surprise, as Nielson’s guitar throughout hews closest to the former’s muted trumpet tone: fuzzy, smeared, yet also oddly tactile. At certain points, his guitar tone lacerates like some lost session from A Tribute to Jack Johnson. And when it’s not Nielson’s guitar doing the heavy lifting, then it’s Chris Nielson who sends his saxophone and flugelhorn through a battery of effects (as on “Hanoi 5”), creating a swirling, disorienting soundworld. Beyond the horns and effects, the band also emulates Davis and his penchant for exploring brooding, fulminous moods. Nguyen’s eerie sáo trúc solo on “Hanoi 3” even brings to mind the flute-laced dark ambience of Davis’ “He Loved Him Madly.”
That brief entrance of sáo trúc also reveals that IC-01 Hanoi goes well beyond the basics of the pat East-meets-West cultural exchange (see any 1960s rock album with a sitar thrown on top). Even when Nguyen switches to the bullfrog twang of the đàn môi, it’s not to showcase another exotic sound against the UMO psych-rock backdrop, but to add a strange and swampy depth to the proceedings, pairing well with the shrieking saxophone and thrumming bass at the furious climax of the epic exploration “Hanoi 6.” While not necessarily essential to the UMO catalog, Hanoi finds the band reveling in its psychedelic roots and exploring a primeval darkness that their songs often only hint at.


Following Music From Memory’s Outro Tempo, a collection of Brazilian obscurities, the label turns the spotlight on a forgotten composer who fused cello and guitar with the sounds of the rainforest.

Origens Da Luz

Even the most committed students of Brazilian music might not have been familiar with the work of composer Priscilla Ermel until 2017. That was when Music From Memory released Outro Tempo: Electronic and Contemporary Music From Brazil, 1978-1992, introducing a number of obscure Brazilian artists who were making music at the tail end of the country’s military regime. Ermel described that era as not just “another time” but “another tempo,” inspiring compiler John Gómez to title the anthology after her phrase.
Ermel has called recordings from that period “portals through which stories, people, and cultures can be revealed.” It’s an apt metaphor for the uncanny soundworlds glimpsed in Origens Da Luz, a crucial compendium of Ermel’s singular work, drawn from the four albums she released between 1986 and 1992. Born and raised in São Paulo, Ermel, who studied cello and guitar, was reared on Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos and bossa-nova master Tom Jobim, and both sensibilities filter down to her own music. Just as crucially, while researching for her master’s thesis, Ermel traveled to the Amazon rainforest to study the songs of the indigenous Cinta-Larga and Ikolem Gavião people, for whom music is inextricable from storytelling.
A similar sensibility runs through Ermel’s astonishingly layered work, whose arrangements unfurl more like short stories than pop songs. “Luar,” which opens the compilation, begins with the sounds of birds and chirping insects, situating us in a twilit landscape. Ermel’s strong, clear voice crests at the midway point, and as she falls silent, her guitar and melodica are rejoined by the sounds of the rainforest. Those chirps and calls are present in many of the songs, turning any negative space in the music into an open window—as though to suggest that the natural world is ever-present, and one need only become silent to become aware of it. Even when she isn’t directly incorporating the ambient chatter of the wilderness, the rattles and bamboo flutes that Ermel deploys emulate natural sounds; on the title track, so does her own wordless voice, whose squawks, howls, and purrs sound almost primal.
It often seems as if Ermel is striving for an equilibrium between her own music and the beautiful, chaotic density of the rainforest. But even in the absence of field recordings, her songs are strongly evocative of a sense of place—even if no such land exists anywhere but in her own music. “Meditação,” featuring her gorgeous cello, piano, and acoustic guitar, starts off like an English folk ballad before wandering further afield, while “Campo De Sonhos” conjures two worlds at once: The synth line moves like Indonesian court music while the cello is worthy of a modern classical recital. An elegant braiding of piano and keyboards, “Cristal De Fogo” toggles between smooth new age and soap-opera soundtrack.
The gem of the original Outro Tempo, the masterwork “Corpo Do Vento” is also the highlight of Origens Da Luz. Translated as “Body of the Wind,” it remains the finest amalgam of Ermel’s classical upbringing and ethnographic studies. Atop bombo and cultrun drums, Ermel adds ocarina, Chilean chirimia, and Nepalese flute; after letting the piece build for five minutes, she introduces piano and viola caipira, a Brazilian 10-string guitar, playing themes redolent of modern classical composition. By the third act, the hand drums and woodwinds return, quickening to a ritualistic climax. It feels like a condensation of the Brazilian composer’s own story into 16 spell-binding minutes—and a portal to another world.

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On the final and best album from the acclaimed producer and overlooked singer/songwriter, a new intensity and urgency line even the most upbeat songs.

The Hex

Fearless exploration defined the work of Richard Swift as a producer and collaborator. Working mostly at his National Freedom studio in Cottage Grove, Oregon, he guided singer/songwriters toward their most otherworldly music (Damien Jurado, Kevin Morby) and helped more whimsical acts evolve into wilder forms (Foxygen, the Shins). The records he released under his own name, though, were more straightforward and solitary, if not necessarily somber. Playing nearly everything himself and singing through stoned, self-deprecating asides, Swift cracked jokes about his record collection, his frustrations with the industry, and how his Quaker upbringing might have doomed him from the start. Swift’s immersive and ornate indie pop suggested he saw himself as a tragic soldier facing a battle larger than himself. Since his death in July at the age of 41, the lyric that’s echoed in my head rings like an epitaph: “My name will go missing/But the songs will be here.”
The Hex, the final album Swift completed before he died from causes related to alcohol addiction, is no different in its grim scope: He’s said goodbye to us before, but it’s rarely felt so definitive. Swift’s signature sound often reminds me of a tie-dye swirl of black-and-white, or perhaps Super 8 footage of a tornado. There’s a feeling of a truncated transmission, like he can only offer us this darkened glimpse of the real colors in his head. His voice—which recalls Daniel Rossen’s mannered ghost-story howl in Grizzly Bear—comes layered in whispers and falsettos over clipped instrumentals and crisp drums. As he simultaneously shares his darkest thoughts and shades them with psychedelic soul, the music sounds like a coping mechanism.
What makes The Hex Richard Swift’s strangest—and, ultimately, strongest—record is its intensity. There’s a cumulative feeling as he collects his various modes, from warped girl-group nightmares (“Wendy”) to sprawling psych-pop (“Broken Finger Blues”) and pensive ballads (“Sept20”). Suddenly, everything is more urgent, less tentative. Take “Dirty Jim,” the most upbeat song here. Its arrangement shares a thread with the 2007 rallying cry “The Songs of National Freedom.” But where that song’s darkness was cut with messages of hope, “Dirty Jim” sees no way out. The bouncing ragtime melody conveys the weight of inevitability; life goes on, but our troubles don’t budge.
The Hex is often not an easy listen. The deaths of Swift’s sister and mother inform the closing suite, anchored by the emotional climax of “Nancy.” Swift sings over drums that crash like a thunderstorm with the power to shatter windows and keyboards that quiver like candlelight in that storm’s wind. In the chorus, Swift reminds himself over and over again, “She’s never coming back.” The two mostly instrumental tracks that follow suggest that the breakdown has left him speechless, somewhere far away. On an album predestined to be understood in the context of Swift’s death, it’s eerie to hear him working through his own grief, showing us how loss can sound inconsolable and ever-growing.
Swift announced The Hex in May through his final Instagram post, referring to it as “11 songs performed by me for family and friends.” It’s a classically Swift kind of joke, implying the music was a tribute to his community while also acknowledging the baggage of dedicating something so wounded to those who care for him. For those new to his work, The Hex serves as a fully realized glimpse of the universe he spent his career mapping. But there’s also a sense he’s speaking directly to a select few. The album ends with a sparse piano ballad, written to his wife on the occasion of their 21st anniversary this month. “Death do us part, sickness and health,” he sings sweetly, pledging to fix himself and his outlook. “All the angels sing/Que sera, sera,” he sighs at the end. His playing hushes, like he wants us to listen closely. Then, silence.


Holographic Violence

Holographic Violence is the third album in six years from Seattle’s Grave Babies, and it amounts to a costume change for their usual reverb-drenched, hollowed-out guitar noise: They've gone from garage to gothic. And we’re not talking a subtle nod to the Sisters of Mercy or Killing Joke sprinkled here or there. No, this would be candle-lit-bat-cave, Peter-Murphy-drinking-merlot-out-of-a-human-skull levels of goth. Generally, this switch serves the album well, as Grave Babies' earlier work felt a bit lost in the shuffle of the Bay Area garage rock revival of the late '00s. However, with song titles like "Pain Iz Pleasure" and "Punishment (Only a Victim)", it's not so clear where appreciation ends and pastiche begins. That's not a dig, actually—few scenes are more susceptible to parody than goth music, and for good reason; it can always feel embarrassing to celebrate negative emotions, but that's also what makes it deliciously indulgent.
Grave Babies' music has always flirted with darkness, but the alienation and misanthropy of Violence feels new. Part of this shift may be attributed to personnel: Sometime between the releases of Crusher and Violence, frontman and songwriter Danny Wahlfeldt overhauled Grave Babies' permanent roster with Bryce Brown of Crypts on bass, Claire Haranda on synths, and the key addition of Mark Gajadhar from cult post-hardcore poster boys Blood Brothers on drums. Gajadhar duly takes his place as Violence's MVP, his precise, no-nonsense style (intertwined throughout the album with drum machines) propulsing everything forward, step by step, as Wahlfeldt's controlled chaos shudders and swirls around him.
Violence opens with the near-shoegaze distortion of "Eternal (On & On)", with layer upon layer of guitars and synthesizers washing over Wahfeldt's echoing, distorted baritone: "A life that leaves without a purpose/ And on and on and on it goes..." It would be easy to imagine it as the soundtrack to a sci-fi film where teenagers in bondage gear roam a dystopian wasteland. "Try 2 Try" brings the tone even lower with heavy, syncopated guitars swamping through the mix as Haranda's keyboard line struggles to pop through. It works, giving the music the needed edge to create density without slog. "Something Awful" owes a whole lot to Disintegration-era Cure, or even Peter Hook, as Brown's buoyant bass takes center stage, carrying the album into its middle stage, which, like with many goths themselves, can get awkward. It's not a lack of direction, or even musicianship, that causes Violence to ultimately lag. It's perhaps not even a lack of tunes, as "N2 Ether" and its warbly vocal hook make for a welcome pick-me-up further down the tracklisting.
It's just at some point, the album loses its flavor, and songs begin to mash and bleed into each other in a not-exactly-purposeful or interesting way. It's not unlistenable, far from it, it just gets slowly (very, very slowly) bogged and drowned under its own ideas. In a landscape where bands are encouraged more and more to play it safe and appeal to their same couple thousand Twitter followers over and over again, it's commendable that Grave Babies took this leap of faith and changed their direction so drastically. In the end, though, Violence comes off as transitional, a building block for a bigger, darker, blacker record that may be in Grave Babies' future.


The eternally youthful McDonald brothers celebrate their band’s 45th anniversary with a signature blend of pristine melodic craft and garage-band insolence.

Redd Kross

If there’s one thing Redd Kross are famous for, it’s having famous fans. Years before Sonic Youth made Madonna their own, brothers Jeff and Steve McDonald were showing Kim and Thurston how pop culture pin-ups could be reframed as punk iconography. They got Sofia Coppola to pose nude on an album cover and inspired her brother Roman to essentially build a feature film around their kitschy ’70s style. They illuminated the path for Stone Temple Pilots to move beyond mosh-pit machismo toward glammy swagger. They reissued their ’90s catalog through Jack White’s Third Man imprint. And Jeff married a Go-Go. There is, however, one notable alt-rock star who resisted Redd Kross’ charm offensive.
You’d think Redd Kross would’ve been right up Kurt Cobain’s alley: Both he and the McDonalds came of age with record collections where the Beatles were filed next to Black Flag, and both were charter members of the American Shonen Knife fan club. But according to mutual friend Dale Crover (the one guy who’s drummed for both Nirvana and Redd Kross), an unimpressed Cobain walked away from a 1987 Redd Kross gig in Tacoma complaining that the McDonalds seemed “too happy.” After seeing Crover tell that story in an early cut of director Andrew Reich’s new Redd Kross documentary, Born Innocent, Steve McDonald wrote “Way Too Happy,” a bittersweet power-pop number that appears deep into Redd Kross’ new self-titled double album. “What did he mean?” Steve asks with audibly wounded pride, before responding with an uncannily Cobain-esque sneer, as if he were still being taunted from beyond the grave. But the McDonalds aren’t looking to reheat old beef—rather, “Way Too Happy” serves as a renewed mission statement for a band that has always embraced joy as its superpower.
As indie rock’s original poptimists, Redd Kross elevated fandom to an artform, imagining a world where ABBA and the Partridge Family could be placed on equal footing with Germs and the Stooges. But after decades of plundering rock’n’roll’s past like a thrift-store discount rack, Redd Kross are now fixing their retro-gazing lens on themselves. Redd Kross is part of a 45th-anniversary celebration campaign that includes Reich’s documentary and an upcoming memoir (Now You’re One of Us), and it’s a self-reflexive exercise in every way, from the cover art (a ruby-tinged makeover of the Beatles’ White Album, the first record Jeff bought as a kid) to the uncharacteristically wistful, introspective songwriting. But seeing as Redd Kross are the rare band who can celebrate 45 years in showbiz while one founding member is still in their 50s, the eternally youthful McDonalds are still committed to chasing new glories. They may no longer resemble the androgynous provocateurs of old, but their pop savvy remains.
Redd Kross provides a thorough immersion in the McDonalds’ multi-dimensional sound world, giving equal airtime to sleazy rockers (“Stunt Queen”), glamtastic power ballads (“The Witches Stand”), and jaunty pop numbers that sound like the theme song to some saucy late-’60s British sex farce (“The Shaman’s Disappearing Robe”). While the White Album framework may suggest an anarchic, free-ranging pastiche, Redd Kross aren’t radically reinventing themselves here: Listening to the record feels more like rifling through a cherished collection of classic 45s. Recorded in collaboration with ex-Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Josh Klinghoffer (who produces and plays drums for a recuperating Crover here), Redd Kross is a hit parade that perpetually walks the tightrope between the McDonalds’ pristine melodic craft and their innate garage-band insolence.
Even when limiting themselves to pop-single proportions, Redd Kross can traverse entire universes. A rare duet between the brothers, “The Main Attraction,” begins as an existential acoustic lament before hotwiring their voices together and using their natural harmonic power to launch the song into space. If Redd Kross are the definition of a cult act, then “Good Times Propaganda Band” is their indoctrination theme, a tiki-lounge psych-pop excursion that suddenly drifts into KISS pyrotechnics. And in just over two minutes, the softcore porn-inspired “Emanuelle Insane” uses a backward loop of Redd Kross’ 1981 circle-pit standard “Annette’s Got the Hits” to forge an unholy alliance between groovy ’60s sitar-psych and brooding ’80s post-punk.
But Redd Kross is ultimately a testament to what one song refers to as the “Simple Magic”: “Three sacred chords,” Jeff sings, “Their power shouldn’t be ignored!” And so the McDonalds spend the bulk of Redd Kross kicking out the jangly jams with the effortless expediency of the Beatles if they cut their teeth in the late-’70s L.A. hardcore scene. (AI technology will do no better job of recreating the voice of John Lennon than Jeff McDonald does on the rousing “What’s In It for You?”) But Redd Kross spikes the McDonalds’ well-worn cheeky attitude with a healthy dose of sincere gratitude, particularly on the album’s closing autobiographical anthem “Born Innocent.” An origin-story myth set to windmilling Pete Townshend riffs, the song suggests that if the brothers aren’t satisfied with the documentary and memoir, they already have the anchor track for a Redd Kross jukebox musical.
“Born Innocent” is, of course, named after Redd Kross’ 1982 debut, an ironically titled document of corrupted youth that opened with a song about a former child star busted for cocaine possession. As the Born Innocent documentary illustrates, the McDonalds have endured a lot of crazy shit that could irreparably break less sanguine spirits, from a 13-year-old Steve being abducted by a woman nearly twice his age, to Jeff’s substance abuse in the ’80s, to their band’s chronic commercial misfortune. But on Redd Kross, the McDonalds are still very much those Hawthorne kids getting their minds blown with each flip on the turntable, forever gazing at the Paul McCartney and Paul Stanley posters in their bedrooms and dreaming of one day hanging alongside them. “We are all born innocent,” the McDonalds declare in unison, and after nearly a half-century of making music together, they’ve magically managed to stay that way.


Dan Snaith’s joyous new album as Daphni lets its first-thought-best-thought spirit shine. Bar for bar, this might be the most fun there is to be had on a dance record this year.

Cherry

Daphni was born out of necessity. Back in the late 2000s, when he wasn’t out on the road as Caribou, Dan Snaith was spinning marathon DJ sessions, and he needed tracks to flesh out his setlists. Taking a page from artists like Theo Parrish, he’d chop up bits of funk or Afrobeat into breezy floor-fillers. But unlike a lot of the material produced during the edits craze of the 2000s and 2010s, Daphni tracks never felt overly derivative of their source material. Even when the sample was obvious—as in his mix of the 1973 single “Ne Noya,” by the obscure Togolese group Cos-Ber-Zam—his edits were more like epiphytes than parasites, blossoming into colorful and extravagant forms that rested elegantly on the branches of the originals.
Cherry is Snaith’s third full-length under the alias, not counting a 2017 Fabriclive mix built largely out of tracks that followed a few months later on Joli Mai, the most recent Daphni album until now. He’s moved on from the edits of the early years, but Daphni tracks remain sketch-like in form. The Canadian-born, London-based producer makes a habit of whipping up one or two rudimentary loops every day: He estimates that he worked from a folder of some 900 snippets to create 2020’s Suddenly, the latest Caribou album. In Caribou productions, the initial loop may be little more than scaffolding that’s eventually stripped away to reveal a fully composed piece of music, but Cherry’s songs let their first-thought-best-thought spirit shine. Many of the most thrilling tracks are cobbled together out of the merest handful of ideas—but what fascinating ideas they are.
Take the album’s eponymous lead single, which arrays rickety FM synths over a bare-bones house shuffle. The drums are a model of efficiency, yet the arpeggio teeters around the beat as though it could go off the rails at any moment, imperiling the smooth-sailing groove with every stumble and lurch. From the haphazard timing, it sounds like Snaith might have banged out the off-kilter pattern in a matter of seconds and then, instead of fixing what another producer might consider a fuckup, just left it alone. Yet the irregularity and the spontaneity are precisely what make it so gripping. “Always There” is even simpler—just a sampled loop of Latin jazz, sped up so fast that it makes Alvin and the Chipmunks sound like trip-hop. The effect is part diggers’ epiphany, part gonzo flourish: The pumping chords carry a hint of Underground Resistance’s silvery menace, yet an extended horn solo sounds almost cartoonish, like a musical mosquito. It’s audacious, yet the ferocity of the groove that Snaith layers underneath makes it clear that he’s not fooling around.
Most tracks barely make it past the three-minute mark, and some are positively skeletal: “Crimson,” a pinging arpeggio stretched across a wispy suggestion of white-noise hi-hats, sounds like a club anthem that’s been sun-bleached until only the faintest streaks of color are left. “Falling” loops a four-bar snatch of what might be ’80s soul, a little bit like one of Oneohtrix Point Never’s Chuck Person jams, but a rolling filter sweep wrings hidden harmonics from the sample; starting out high and hissy, it plunges to deep, chest-massaging sub-bass. Every time the sample loops, the kick drum makes itself felt exactly once, and it’s hard to overstate how satisfying it is when it hits home. Even on the simplest songs, Cherry’s sound design is uniformly stunning, with worlds of detail lurking in the shadow of every hand-carved break and modular gurgle.
The mood is overwhelmingly upbeat; bar for bar, this might be the most fun there is to be had on a dance record this year. “Mania” flips Todd Edwards-style vocal chops and a fidget-house beat, of all things, into beatific dub techno. “Cloudy” drizzles on jazz piano runs like maple syrup, recalling the quicksilver Rhodes soloing of Daft Punk’s “Disco Cubizm” remix. “Take Two,” a highlight, is a thundering filter-disco anthem greased by bent notes and propelled by hip-hop crowd chants of “Go! Go! Go!”—an unexpected grace note that tips the mood from euphoric to outright giddy. The lush keys and dandelion-tuft vocal loops of opener “Arrow” would have made a lovely, if unsurprising, downtempo ballad. Instead, Snaith opts to push the BPMs and lace the rhythm with lacerating hi-hats. Cherry is often as sweet as anything Snaith has recorded under either alias, but it’s clear that for now, energy is front of mind. Unlike club music meant for DJ mixing, whose patient intros and outros are wont to prod home listeners to reach for the skip button, these bite-sized pieces invariably leave you wanting more.
A lot of electronic music, even when it’s made for dancing, is complex, byzantine, knotted up in heady concepts. Cherry is none of these things. A tour de force of dancefloor intuition and emotional release, it has no point to prove; pleasure is the chief, perhaps the only, concern. The music is breathtakingly simple but also sneakily and refreshingly adventurous. Listening to the carefully wrought songs on Suddenly, I wished that Snaith had given freer rein to his experimental instincts. On Cherry, he cuts loose.


Beth Jeans Houghton’s second album as Du Blonde sorts through the messiest aspects of desire and revulsion with cathartic finesse, purging her past while leaving her strange, spiky magic intact.

Lung Bread for Daddy

“There’s a sick pleasure to be found in writing honestly and grotesquely,” Beth Jeans Houghton has said, and it rings true: On the unflinching and uneasy Lung Bread for Daddy, the truth will set you free and make you queasy. More than ever before, the Newcastle singer-songwriter grubs around in the messiest, muckiest moments of her own past and digs up the kind of ugly memories most people would rather leave buried underground forever: the doomed relationships, the grisly fights, the moments of weakness when you should know better. On the cover of her last album she wore nothing but a fur coat and merkin, but it’s on these songs that she feels truly exposed.
Houghton suffered a nervous breakdown in 2012 after releasing her otherworldly psych-folk debut, Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose. She scrapped an album, ditched her band, and was eventually reborn as the punky, puckish Du Blonde on 2015’s Welcome Back to Milk. Its songs were often sleazy and messy, and she sang them with a hell-raising gusto, like she was telling juicy war stories at a dive bar. The self-produced Lung Bread for Daddy is grubby but less gleefully lurid, that fuck-you fury now curdled into something sourer. “Pull over babe, I want out,” she sings on the dingy opener, “Coffee Machine,” yet her zombie-ish drawl betrays how little stomach she has for the fight. She howls with frustration, only for the noise to stick in her throat; her guitar explodes into a ratty solo that tramples over everything in its path for 90-odd seconds, until it sputters to a stop. Even when you want out, it doesn’t mean you’ll actually make it.
The first few songs on Lung Bread feel slightly rough and squalid, the sonic equivalent of battling through the fug of a hangover. The hilarious and horrifying “Holiday Resort” dumps Houghton in a late-twenties crisis: Romance is a crock, her doctor says her eggs are dying, she can’t even drive. “I spend my days in the solace of my room,” she sings over a gnarled, fuzzy riff, “pulling pubic hairs from the crotch of my swimming costume.” Not for the last time, she’s lonely and longing for a deadbeat old boyfriend—the men here are as wretched as Milk’s rogue’s gallery of exes but harder to leave in the past, even though she knows the pitfalls of going back for more. When she lusts after a former lover on “Peach Meat,” there’s little comfort, just seedy memories and throbbing synths so filthy you’ll want to bathe in bleach.
A clumsier artist might turn this self-excoriating streak into something brutally caustic, stripping back the layers until only rawness remains. Houghton resists that impulse on Lung Bread’s later songs, purging her past while leaving her strange, spiky magic intact. “Baby Talk” is filled with the spooky wail of a haunted-house organ, as if she’s being chased by an old flame’s malevolent spirit, while “Heaven Knows” mixes her smoky vocal with lavishly doomy strings, like 1960s bloody-chamber pop. On the poisonously pretty “Acetone” she reveals the misery behind a Stepford Wife smile, the sugared melodies jarring against the image of her scrubbing at her wounds in a tub of blood and chemicals.
Thankfully, though, Lung Bread is not without epiphanies. Roughly halfway through, there’s a quick one-two punch that leaves Houghton reeling but clear-headed. First is “Angel,” a petulant and grungy blast of noise that shocks her into realizing her sweet-talking boyfriend’s big promises were bullshit and blarney; it’s followed by the dirty chug of “Buddy,” which finds her trying to save a dying relationship but ultimately scornful of his suggestion that they remain friends. They might sound like small victories, or pyrrhic victories, or barely even register as victories at all, yet they’re grasped like hard-won prizes, a reward for wading through the mire. When you’re struggling to see past bad mistakes and worse memories, those moments when the scales fall from you eyes are to be savored.


Since the White Stripes split, Jack White's work has become fuller, but his idiosyncrasies have dimmed a bit, too. Lazaretto, then, makes all of his other projects sound a bit scrawny by comparison. It’s the densest, fullest, craziest, and most indulgent that White has sounded with or without Meg.

Lazaretto

Whenever he talks about the White Stripes, Jack White always stresses Meg White’s importance to the band—and how could he not? She was the only other person up on stage. In the current issue of Rolling Stone, he says, “I would often look at her onstage and say, ‘I can’t believe she’s up here.’ I don’t think she understood how important she was to the band, and to me and to music. She was the antithesis of a modern drummer. So childlike and incredible and inspiring.” That quote is a bit uncomfortable in its patronizing and primitivizing attitude toward Meg, but the White Stripes emphasized the “childlike” in nearly every aspect of the band, from their red-and-white wardrobe to their imaginative videos, to songs like “We’re Going to be Friends”.
Her chops might have been rudimentary, but Meg kept Jack’s guitar virtuosity in check and kept their music from being merely a display of technique. He soloed frequently but never pointlessly, and indulged none of the ostentatious jamming that defines blues rock: no white-boy blues face, no standing at the lip of the stage, no look-how-deeply-I-am-feeling-these-notes bullshit. That playful sound is what made the White Stripes so revolutionary in the 2000s. The blues has always prized instrumental prowess, but blues rock typically equates that trait with authenticity of emotion. After so many generations of Eric Claptons and Jonny Langs, it was refreshing at the turn of the century to hear someone have fun with the form again. Like first-gen punks, the White Stripes proved you didn’t have to be good to be great, that your limitations could enable rather than hinder expression. Theirs was a little room, as Jack sang on White Blood Cells, but they still found many corners.
Since the White Stripes split, however, Jack moved into a bigger room, surrounded by musicians who are capable in the traditional sense of the word. His work has become fuller, of course, more elaborate and more conventionally ambitious; his idiosyncrasies have dimmed a bit, too, so his music is less subversive, less culture-shaking, less special. Despite their pedigree, the Raconteurs never really figured out their mission (although hiring country singer Ashley Monroe might be mission enough). The Dead Weather can be admirably heavy and darkly savage, but also dour and claustrophobic, as though the riffs are closing in on you. White’s debut album, 2012’s Blunderbuss, reportedly inspired by his divorce from Karen Elson, sounded uncharacteristically bilious, especially from the man who wrote “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground”. In fact, nowadays White might be most compelling as a label impresario who releases new singles via balloons and coaxes Neil Young to record a covers album in a modified phone booth. It’s the one role where he displays the same sense of childlike whimsy that motivated the White Stripes.
Lazaretto makes all of his other projects sound a bit scrawny by comparison. It’s the densest, fullest, craziest, and most indulgent that White has sounded with or without Meg—almost pointedly so, as though he’s trying to shake the minimalism that defined the White Stripes. It’s an almost self-consciously busy-minded album, chockablock with ideas and sounds, all colliding violently and sometimes brutally. There’s a lot of pedal steel, a lot more barrelhouse piano, some folksy strumming, some rock-rapping, and the persistent buzz of White’s guitar. The most decorous and over-the-top song on Lazaretto (and arguably the standout) “Would You Fight for My Love?” plays like an exquisite corpse: It opens with a low, Lynchian hum, the kind you hear in your bowels, then morphs into something like a rock ballad, with Ikey Owens pounding out power chords on the piano. With its flatulent bass, the bridge sounds like Goblin scoring a murder scene, complete with spooky disembodied vocals. The song ends up in a Celtic honkytonk, somehow.
The instrumental “High Ball Stepper” is loaded with Bernard Hermann anxieties, while “Temporary Ground” elaborates gently on rural folk music, opening with a violin dancing gingerly around Maggie Björklund’s pedal steel (the song was reportedly inspired by gigantic lily pads that can support a man’s weight). “Just One Drink” plays like a Coca-Cola jingle; “Entitlement” is stately C&W. Not everything fits together fluidly, but that might just be the point: These disparate sounds are not just accessories to be applied to blues rock, but rich veins of tradition that compete for primacy on Lazaretto. White invites us to see the craft here, to notice the seams, to consider the contrasts—not necessarily out of any self-congratulatory impulse, but out of awe for the endless permutations of American popular music.
White comes across like a man out of time on Lazaretto, a role that proves more sympathetic and relatable than the embittered lover he played on Blunderbuss; he seems to be having a lot more fun yelling at the kids to get off his lawn. “There are children today who were lied to, told the world is rightfully theirs,” he sings on “Entitlement”, a countercultural anthem that political midpoint between “Signs” and “Okie from Muskogee”. “Don’t they feel like they're cheated somehow? I feel like I've been cheated somehow.” His is not necessarily a generational complaint, though; instead, he just can’t understand why something given could ever be as precious as something earned.
In its volleys of nimble-fingered riffs and its willy-nilly combination of styles, Lazaretto is all about virtuosity, with White reverting back to the idea of blues rock as a form of emotional confession: a space where you can project feelings and re-enact age-old dramas. Yet, White sneaks in a few jokes at the idea. Witness this scene from “The Black Bat Licorice”: “She writes letters like a Jack Chick comic, just a bunch of propaganda/ She makes my fingers histrionic, like this [paint-peeling guitar riff] and this [paint-peeling guitar riff]!” It’s a funny little moment in a song that otherwise sounds leery of desire, wary of love, simultaneously burdened and freed by sex. Somehow, even with White rapping his lyrics like leprous carnival barker, it’s a great, nervy track, both sugary and sour. Still, the song provides another reminder of White's past glory days, as it might sound better stripped down to guitar and drums.


A speculative-fiction multimedia project imagines the future sounds of South Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, using an apocalyptic future to pay tribute to the border region’s resilience.

Futuro Conjunto

What might our future look like viewed through the lens of the past? For scholar Jonathan Leal and producer/filmmaker Charlie Vela, both musicians and natives of the Rio Grande Valley region of South Texas, it looks like Futuro Conjunto. A sci-fi narrative “transmedia” project set 250 years hence that features audio, video, animation, and fictive found objects, Futuro Conjunto focuses its gaze on the RGV, a 100-mile floodplain along the Texas-Mexico border that follows the Rio Grande to its terminus at the Gulf of Mexico.
Packaged in a multimedia website and accompanied by a digital album available on Bandcamp, Futuro Conjunto tells the story of a young man seeking, finding, and listening to a damaged bootleg recording of a concert that took place in 2120 in an abandoned rocket facility in Boca Chica, Texas. The concert was produced by a mutual-aid network formed during the Second Mexican-American War, which began in the wake of a massive hurricane that reshaped the Rio Grande, and in turn, the U.S.-Mexico border. In the year 2200, a young man visits a repository of knowledge called El Centro Conmatizque looking for information about a concert that, according to family lore, his great-great-great-great-grandmother once played. It’s there, at the ECC, that the narrative begins.
Futuro Conjunto’s speculative sci-fi is rooted in plausibility, its story driven by events that feel like fiction only because they haven’t happened yet. The website offers an expository timeline that places the record within its context; the fictional group MUNDO’s song title “Futurasquache” is explained as the philosophy of the Colonia Cosmica, a sustainable self-governing settlement that recycles technology; breakthroughs in “tachyon modeling and quantum computing” lead to an AI revolution that includes AI musicians, one of whom, JUL/3Z, performs on “The Run Pt. II.”
It’s all incredibly nerdy, with the kind of attention to detail and historical nuance expected of a postdoctoral fellow studying “race and ethnicity through intersections of literary criticism, ethnomusicology, and performance studies.” At Stanford for his Ph.D, Leal first reached out to Vela after seeing As I Walk Through The Valley, the documentary Vela made with Ronnie Garza on the RGV’s musical history. Skeptical at first—having fielded plenty of suspect requests for access to Valley musicians after the release of his film—Vela eventually opened up once he realized that they could use academic grants to support his local scene. Their first project together, Wild Tongue, was a compilation of local acts that served as a snapshot of the area’s music scene—hip-hop, electro pop, country, indie rock, tejano, and rancheras—rooted in the artists’ experiences in the Valley.
Futuro Conjunto’s music was largely written and performed by Leal and Vela themselves, who then brought in many of those same musicians to perform as members of the fictional bands they created. Their influence on Vela and Leal is undeniable; you can hear echoes of Wild Tongue in Futuro Conjunto, projecting the POV of the Valley’s artists, scholars, and activists onto an imagined pseudo-apocalyptic future.
Though marked by tragedy, that future is far from dystopian; it’s marked by an underlying current of resilience, an enduring hope that there will always be a resistance. “Futurasquache” champions the Colonia Cosmica’s “Basura Bandits,” who hijack garbage trucks and dump their toxic contents on the doorstep of the elite gated community whence it came. Amid squealing guitars and electronic feedback, they find truth in the trash, building an entire worldview from recycling refuse. “When they tried to bury us/They didn’t know what we’d dig up/We know the truth because we’ve seen the past/It’s out there, buried underneath a hundred thousand plastic commemorative Selena cups!” Considering the Valley’s long-running intersection between activism and music, it’s fitting that the first song we hear would be a fiery missive from eco-bandits that battle the rich and powerful.
Despite the tone of that opening track, there’s a cheekiness throughout Futuro Conjunto that hints that its creators don’t take themselves too seriously. And it’s not immune to some mild cheese, either: CODEX’s “The Run Pt. II (ft. JUL/3Z)” is an overt nod to El-P and Killer Mike’s hip-hop buddy comedy, doing their best to ape El Producto’s SkyNet battle hymns, an admittedly impossible task. And the hurricane that decimates the Valley, re-shaping the landscape and setting the stage for a second Mexican-American war? Hurricane Narciso, as in Martinez, the father of conjunto music; La Mosca No Muere pay tribute to him with a song titled after his affectionate nickname, “El Huracán del Valle.”
The album’s strongest tracks are less overtly tied to the fictional universe, yet still speak to the Valley’s past and present. Simonada’s “Heatdeath” uses gorgeous multi-part harmonies and a chirping horn to channel Beach House’s melancholic malaise. And XXochitl’s ”La Madre de las Estrellas” features a prominent accordion melody from the son of Valley legend Esteban Jordan. The only song not written by Leal and Vela is a choral rendition of Fernando Z. Maldonado’s classic “Volver, Volver,” which serves as a coda to the fragmented livestream bootleg, arriving just before the police break up the concert.
Even removed from its narrative context, Futuro Conjunto still serves as a time capsule for the thriving independent arts and music scene in the Rio Grande Valley. The perspective is Leal and Vela’s, but few others are as well positioned to document this particular moment in time, and Vela’s studio has served as a creative hub for many of the Valley’s musicians. More importantly, each of the fictional events that make up “The Flickering Century”—the 100-year period from 2020-2120 that the project covers—is rooted in a fundamental understanding of history, the Valley, the U.S., and humanity at large.
The timeline ends with measured hope: While the war ended with a cynically named “Treaty of Unbinding Illusion,” the citizens on each side of the re-shaped river form a new cross-border community called Rio Cristal, and a communal decree establishes El Centro Conmatizque, founded with the intention of retaining every piece of submitted data in perpetuity. It’s what allows the seeker to find the recording of the concert, spurred by a memory passed down to him through generation after generation. In the indigenous Nahuatl language, Conmatizque means “They will remember.” Futuro Conjunto represents the hope that our future salvation might be found in the remnants of our own history.

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Featuring the groundbreaking pop hits ”Smalltown Boy” and “Why,” the 1984 debut album from the British synth-pop group was a transgressive moment—defiant, queer, and full of hooks.

The Age of Consent

To watch Britain’s music program “Top of the Pops” in 1984 was to witness masculinity wipe off the last of the spit and sawdust. You had blond, black-gloved geeks like Nik Kershaw and Howard Jones, bouffy matriarchs Queen and Ozzy Osbourne, white-teethed go-go boys Wham!, leathered-up imps Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and slinky queen Boy George—not a donkey jacket between them. When Bronski Beat made their “TOTP” debut on June 7, 1984, they were radical because they looked so normal—behold 22-year-old singer Jimmy Somerville’s green polo shirt and severe army-issue haircut. The last thing anyone would have expected from Somerville’s cartoon good-boy face was a diva-strength lament for runaway gay youth. Add in Steve Bronski and Larry Steinbachek’s HI-NRG rhythms and desperately forlorn keyboard motif, and their debut single “Smalltown Boy” was kissed with the melancholy transcendence of its disco forebears: Sylvester in suburbia. It was perfect.
Somerville looked awkward on that “TOTP” appearance, singing live and holding his arms stiff until a tentative boogie during the reprise. But when Bronski returned to perform their second single “Why?” that September, they knew what to do. Most acts still lip-synched on “TOTP,” so this time Somerville focused on performing, rather than sustaining his fierce cri de coeur about pride in the face of a hate crime. With the camera at crotch height, he seduced viewers at home and pointed saucily down the lens, perhaps emboldened by the band’s discovery of the BBC’s alleged basement glory hole toilets, which Bronski claimed to have visited whenever they played “TOTP.” The moment hasn’t been memorialized the same way as Bowie’s iconic visit on the show 12 years earlier, but it had to be a “Starman” revelation for at least a few hundred closeted British kids who couldn’t relate to the more outlandish subversions of masculinity rampaging elsewhere on the show.
British pop had never been queerer. In January 1984, Frankie’s “Relax” had been yanked off air by a BBC Radio 1 DJ who suddenly realized what it was about. Receptive fans yearning for signals in the dark were wise to the implications of the Smiths’ “Hand in Glove,” released a year earlier. But there had never been a band as plainspoken about their sexuality and its political ramifications as Bronski Beat, which SPIN deemed “perhaps the first real gay group in the history of pop.”
By age 23, Jimmy Somerville had been born three times: In Ruchill, Glasgow, to parents who were actually quite understanding about their son’s sexuality, given the era; in a local club called Shuffles, dancing alone to Donna Summer’s A Love Trilogy as a 15-year-old, a pilgrimage that made him so nervous he vomited on the bus there, and in 1979, when, fed up of Scotland’s limited gay scene, he bought a one-way ticket to London. He sold sex around Piccadilly Station and joined LGBTQ advocacy groups where he met fellow Glaswegian Steve Bronski and Hackney’s Larry Steinbachek, all working-class gay men. In 1982, they participated in the London Lesbian and Gay Youth Video Project’s documentary about Londoners’ perceptions of homosexuality. Framed Youth: Revenge of the Teenage Perverts needed a soundtrack, but as the group couldn’t afford licensing fees, Somerville recorded a short piece about how society’s judgement, his desire, and confusion made him want to scream. He never actually screams on the raw, mumbled track—which sounds almost like a Gavin Bryars piece—but it unlocked something inside him, and his new friends suggested that they should give this music thing a go.
Named as a riff on Roxy Music, Bronski Beat played their first gig at the gay benefit September in the Pink in fall 1983, and performed just eight more times before being signed by London Records in 1984. Producer Trevor Horn and journalist Paul Morley’s Zang Tuum Tumb had also offered them the treatment that Frankie Goes to Hollywood got when Bronski said no. “Morley’s idea was to have us wear and market t-shirts that basically said that we were gay, because they’d have words like ‘QUEER’ or ‘POOF’ printed on them,” said Somerville, who was uninterested in controversy or reductiveness. For Bronski Beat, singing candidly about their sexuality wasn’t a means of provocation, but drawing attention to the still-very-real oppression that pervaded public life under Margaret Thatcher’s government. They valued activism over agitprop, and knew that the personal was political, qualities that made their first two singles their most urgent and enduring.
”Smalltown Boy” remains a perfect song. It is nimble and crushing, forlorn and relieved, frail yet determined. In just a few lines, Somerville sketches the plight of the young queer kid in suburbia, beaten up by bullies but refusing to cry in front of them; concerned about how his mother will respond to his disappearance, but certain that he has to save himself first. Steinbachek and Bronski briefly slow the tempo, trapping the listener in the sense of purgatory that Somerville distills, but then add a hand-slapped congo that hits like a rush of adrenaline as a new life comes into view. Although Somerville’s liberation is palpable, he’s not interested in happy endings: The song ends with him repeating the line about leaving in the morning “with everything you own in a little black case,” acknowledging the thousands of young people who would make the very same journey. The inner groove of the 12-inch was etched with the number of the London Gay Switchboard.
If “Smalltown Boy” is about running away, then “Why?” is about firmly standing your ground. It’s Bronski Beat’s response to the proposed Police and Criminal Evidence Bill of 1984, the “sus law” that would give police enhanced powers to apprehend anyone they deemed to be disturbing the peace. Young black men were arrested simply for driving cars (to name just one absurd example), and gay men for embracing in public. Somerville casts the gaze that he would later wield on “TOTP” in two directions, at the perpetrators of hate crimes and criminalization and his lover and brothers in arms. The two sides meet, for a second, in a single glorious line: “Never feel guilty, never give in,” he purrs, a lustful celebration of defiance and desire. Bold horns mirror his raunchy delivery, a whirlwind of ricocheting marimba channeling his exhilaration. But nothing in Steinbachek and Bronski’s arsenal is any match for Somerville’s piercing scream, which demands “WHY?” as if sheer force could elicit the answer. Although he was a natural falsetto, you can hear every nerve clenched in the service of his protest.
According to the Police and Criminal Evidence Bill, Britain’s outdated consent laws, and the impending Section 28 legislation (which forbid the so-called “promotion” of homosexuality in schools), the simple act of loving in public made gay men into potential aggressors. So Somerville turned his voice into a weapon, a weedy Scottish boy’s superpower that made him seem 100-feet tall. He’s said that his only vocal training was singing along to Donna Summer and Sylvester records. Apparently, this was strong enough to turn a short redhead from Glasgow into a bona fide diva, who recognized the transgressive potential of reclaiming this style from the female singers who made gay culture unthreatening to the mainstream. Not that it stopped Bronski Beat from crashing it, too: “Why?” peaked at Number 6 in the UK, and “Smalltown Boy” at Number 3.
Given Somerville’s vocal distinction, it’s strange that Bronski Beat’s subsequent debut, The Age of Consent, lacks more of their trailblazing belters. It’s a strange, small record, its curious choice of covers and influences, and sledgehammer politics, speaking to either an unrealized concept that lingers just out of reach, or a hasty race to capitalize on their singles. There’s nothing else like “Smalltown Boy” or “Why?” here; the closest to their personal tumult is “Screaming,” a finished version of Somerville’s song for Revenge of the Teenage Perverts. It’s gloomy and art-damaged, primal therapy rather than pop statement, and stretches the limits of Bronski and Steinbachek’s innovation as producers.
Britain’s queer activists of the 1980s recognized that their fight had to be intersectional, understanding the common oppression between their community and people of color under the sus laws, and Thatcher’s determination to villainize LGBTQ people and striking miners alike. Bronski Beat were standard-bearers for these causes, speaking out in interviews, performing at benefits, and listing international ages of consent in their record’s liner notes to show how backwards Britain was. But they were far less successful at putting them into song on the rest of the album, where they seemed to forget the personal intimacy that gave their singles such insurrectionist stake, opting instead for some surprisingly bland sloganeering.
The shadowy, muted “No More War” lacks all the defiance of “Why?” and meekly requests an end to conflict—which one is unclear—by asking “please,” a word that has no place in a protest song. The production of “Junk” is overly dramatic compared to its obvious message linking drugs, television, and processed food, and sounds sillier still when a sample of an American dog food commercial pipes in, promising “beefy bits and bits of egg.” There’s more aggression in “Love and Money,” assets that Somerville ties directly to pain and exploitation. Again, it’s fiercely simple, but Steinbachek and Bronski’s sultry backing makes the allure of these toxic quantities plain, and Somerville’s experiences with sex as currency for survival darken its hue.
More subversive are Bronski Beat’s songs about desire, each delivered in a distinct feminine mode. “Ain’t Necessarily So” is a cover of the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess song about doubting the bible—the implication here obviously being its statements on homosexuality—reinterpreted as a slice of sophisticated percolation more akin to fellow 1984 breakout star Sade than gritty British synth-pop. “Heatwave” finds Somerville playing at being Peggy Lee (another of his childhood obsessions), updating “Fever” as a steamy come-on fit for the beaches of Fire Island or Venice. It sounds a million miles from London’s dank clubs and Glasgow’s damp streets, a sheer fantasy that makes Somerville an agent of lust, rejecting yearning diva worship with its nose pressed up against the glass.
The Age of Consent ends with Somerville’s ultimate act of centering gay desire, with covers of Donna Summer’s “Need a Man Blues” and “I Feel Love.” A year earlier, Summer, a born-again Christian, had allegedly denounced her mammoth gay fanbase at a gig in Atlantic City. She would dispute this, but the damage was already done, and gay fans rejected her right back. Bronski Beat got flack for doing these songs, but described their covers as an act of reclamation, a two-fingers-up at a star who seemed to think she could sanitize her own legacy. The symbolism, however, is stronger than the covers themselves.
Two copper-bottomed bangers aside, perhaps that’s also true of Bronski Beat. The Age of Consent was released in the UK on October 15, 1984, and would be their only album to feature the original line-up. An unexplained fallout led Somerville to leave the band in early 1985 and form the Communards with Richard Coles. We can lament the missed opportunity for them to develop their sound together: Steinbachek and Bronski becoming more sophisticated producers, Somerville coming into his power as a vocalist and spokesman alongside his formative allies. But despite the roughness of their debut, they more than fulfilled their function. Bronski Beat formed to play a benefit, raising money for LGBTQ charities’ defense costs. Over the original trio’s year in the public eye, they gave queer kids who were alienated by society and extroverts alike their own subtle form of armor.


Irish folk-pop artist Conor O'Brien is getting a lot of NPR/mainstream attention for his emotionally nourishing music.

Becoming a Jackal

Conor O'Brien, slight-framed leader of earnest folk-rock project Villagers, tells his publicist he's "terrified of bands." No wonder: The Dublin-based singer and songwriter's former group, the Immediate, imploded three years ago over "existential differences." In February 2009, hometown label Any Other City released Villagers' The Hollow Kind EP. There's a YouTube video from around the same time where O'Brien can be seen fronting at least a quartet, and the performance is stirring, though the guy looks a bit like Conor Oberst and Tracey Thorn in a "how would their kids be?" Photoshop mash-up.
Much as Oberst has wrestled with his own identity crises, shifting from Bright Eyes and Desaparecidos to his given name, Villagers' debut album obsesses over the gap between electric band and acoustic troubadour. In a recent appearance on "Later... With Jools Holland", O'Brien performed solo; in fact, he plays almost every instrument on Becoming a Jackal, and his portentous lyrics, falsetto-prone quaver, and Simon & Garfunkel tunefulness are essential to the album's appeal. At the same time, the record is a bit more varied than the typical singer-songwriter drabness-- check the Battles-battling drum break at the end of mask fable "Ship of Promises", the bossa nova lilt to the Leonard Cohen breakup of "Set the Tigers Free", or the jarring crash that ends orchestral-pop opener "I Saw the Dead". O'Brien promises to "meet you in between what I say and what I mean," and he's savvy enough to know the difference.
It seems significant that Villagers signed to Domino, a label better known for Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys, and Animal Collective; O'Brien recently told Brooklyn Vegan that Cass McCombs, another singer-songwriter with indie-rock appeal, was the matchmaker. So sure, O'Brien's falsetto-prone quaver suggests the righteous sincerity of Irish vocalists from Bono to Damien Rice and Glen Hansard, but Becoming a Jackal's title track-- also its first single-- keeps 21st-century disillusionment beneath its sepia-toned teenage dreams: "Before you take this song as truth/ You should wonder what I'm taking from you." In a recent Resonant Frequencies column, Pitchfork's Mark Richardson talks about the thin line between maudlin and sublime, and to be sure, effort-laden over-seriousness occasionally combines with a tendency toward lazy rhymes here to put dirges like "The Meaning of the Ritual" and "To Be Counted Among Men" slightly on the wrong side of that divide.
Still, if you're willing to follow O'Brien over the top, there are glimmers of I'm Wide Awake It's Morning, or even that fleeting moment on Funeral when the Arcade Fire break out into a Motown bounce. "Pieces", the song Villagers perform in that old live YouTube clip, reappears on Becoming a Jackal, still exploring that line between band and balladeer, but also person and persona, emotion and cheap sentiment. Amid doo-wop piano and lofty strings, O'Brien describes the dilemma of the public artist who airs private confessions: "There's a way down/ That I wish I had not found/ You split yourself in two/ One for them and one for you." Shoring these fragments against the ruins of modern-day romance, O'Brien before long starts howling like a wolf, or a jackal, or a singer-songwriter, or a band leader. It's worth watching to see what he-- and Villagers-- will become next.


The K-pop superstars’ second album of new material in 2020 fixates on the frustration and grief of life in quarantine, sifting through the blurry days to construct a new form of intimacy.

Be

You have to at least want to root for BTS. The supergroup’s global dominance has been a rare constant in a year of upheaval, a pulse of pure joy through all this muck. There they are on The Late Late Show With James Corden, handing each other presents while crooning into their hand mics. There they are on TikTok, plopping a bouquet in a hand-lettered vase and offering it to their fans. BTS has broken so many records, at such a frantic pace, that any effort to tally them becomes almost instantly obsolete. Their new album, Be, devotes a full three-minute skit to celebrating the rise of “Dynamite,” their first all-English single, to the top of the Billboard charts. (“Don’t you think this is what happiness is like?” RM asks.) By the time the album itself was released, its first track had also reached the top of the U.S. charts, making BTS the first K-pop group ever to hit No. 1 on the Billboard 100.
That level of fame has not come without its costs. As a band—and a brand—that prizes authenticity, BTS haven’t shied away from addressing the tolls of megastardom and growing up in general. They’ve trained their pristine pop machine on sweeping philosophical ideas—the Jungian concept of the soul, a Herman Hesse bildungsroman—with varying degrees of success. On Be, the Bangtan Boys fixate instead on life in quarantine. In a year when profundity is woven into the mundane, when the rote tasks of getting through the day have taken on new intensity, BTS soften and shine.
“The entire year got stolen,” Jimin croons in Korean on the shimmering “Fly to My Room,” before the group lilts about lying in bed with a bloated stomach, a pile of takeout containers, and the constant blare of a TV. Frustration and grief animate these songs, but it’s their simplicity and specificity that make them compelling. On “Blue & Grey,” Suga wonders if “that hazy shadow that swallows me up” classifies as anxiety or as depression. “I just want to be happier,” the group cries over delicate, bleeding strings, their voices whittled down to pleading rasps.
The record’s thematic center is “Life Goes On,” a flickering prayer for pushing past 2020. Artists have struggled with how to construct a record about self-isolation—Charli XCX opted for the glitch and quiver of How I’m Feeling Now, while Drake danced alone through his massive, frigid house. BTS pluck minutiae from the blur of days trapped inside: “On my pillow, on my table,” they sing, “life goes on.” In the past, BTS have used their songs as vehicles for feel-good messages (“I love, I love, I love myself! I know, I know, I know myself!” they shouted on Wings’ “Cypher 4”); here, they build hope in real time. Each gradual glimmer of layered vocals, every lush harmony that streams over the delicate backbeat, stitches together an intimacy. I kept the song on repeat while I churned through my daily tasks—I pruned my inbox, pushed a Swiffer across my floor. By the seventh or eighth play, I realized I’d been crying.
That intricate balance of confession and consolation dissipates later in the album. RM, the group’s unofficial leader, worried that “Life Goes On” would sound “bland,” and other parts of the record try to compensate with aggressive sheen. The raps on “Dis-ease” shuffle over a mellow hip-hop beat, breezy and infectious but flimsy compared to the harder-edged juggernauts of past songs like “UGH!” The neon-drenched “Stay” meanders into middling EDM, with twitchy drum kicks and a siren-like blare; the beats sound like they were ripped from Steve Aoki’s hard drive in 2010.
“Stay” ends with a flourish of reverb that glides into the gloss and throb of “Dynamite,” a song that, on its own, achieves slick competency: a jumble of funk and handclaps and eminently palatable one-liners. (“Cup of milk, let’s rock and roll!”) Of course, “Dynamite” also functions as a monument to BTS’ global reach, but to the group, it’s more of a gift to fans. “We call this our own recharge project,” RM told NME about the single, “and we hope that it will be able to recharge your own batteries, even if it’s only for a moment.” That’s part of the fun of BTS—you get the sense that they earnestly want to root for you, too.

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