Chad Ubovich is already a proven guitar hero, having played in Fuzz and with Mikal Cronin. His second Meatbodies album is a mellower, full-band effort with more psychedelic textures than before.

Alice

As California garage rock was recently enjoying a hot streak of sorts, Meatbodies emerged with a 2014 debut that asserted them as wreckers to be reckoned with. Songs like “Disorder,” with its fast, beefy, infectious hook, could hang with Ty Segall’s most rabid material. (It helps, of course, that Segall himself played bass and drums on that track.) It was an album with layers—one where earworm hooks and massive guitar solos wove together with gradual, acoustic psychedelia. Frontman and Meatbodies mastermind Chad Ubovich was already a proven guitar hero from his tenure in Fuzz and Mikal Cronin’s live band. With Meatbodies, he showed that he was an artist who could craft a strong rock album all on his own.
On Alice, Meatbodies test the limits of their capabilities by wading into murkier waters: they made a concept album. The overarching story isn’t exactly spelled out, but the album is filled with strange characters and over-the-top symbolism. Alice, from the title track, leaves men bloody and foaming on the ground. “Disciples” is sung from the perspective of a king who declares himself “the idol,” relishes the fealty of his apostles, and demands his subjects keep their feelings to themselves. Sisyphus, Bethlehem, martyrs, rolling stones, bombs, burning oceans, and translucent flesh are all ingredients in Alice’s narrative slurry. Near Biblical images of torture come before concerns about whether or not to check your texts first thing in the morning. There’s likely some allegory in there, but in the chaos, it’s difficult to parse what exactly they’re going for.
It’s fine, though, since the lyrical fire and brimstone is a natural fit for Meatbodies’ well-honed thrash. That said, the band behind Alice is a different beast than the one on Meatbodies. The debut album’s massive sound fell largely on the shoulders of Ubovich, who played most of the instruments himself (with an assist from Segall). Alice is a proper full-band effort. While Ubovich still plays multiple instruments, and his guitar solos take a good share of the spotlight (especially the monster that opens “Disciples”), drummer Erik Jimenez keeps things frantic. Bassist Kevin Boog is responsible for the band’s monolithic low end this time. The biggest wrinkle in the band’s makeup comes with the addition of Patrick Nolan (of Walter), who trades lead vocal duties with Ubovich throughout. More voices means more variety, and the full band pack even more psychedelic textural experimentation than before.
While there are a few livewire moments that recall Meatbodies’ most exciting work—the triumphant riff from “Touchless,” for example—Alice doesn’t exactly come out swinging. It’s a more sedate record; mellow grooves and acoustic strumming make up its core infrastructure. On “Kings,” big, fuzzy guitar solos are largely just dressing—they sit alongside the synths, adding atmosphere instead of maintaining focus. “Gyre” is caked in fuzz and leads with a high drama guitar solo, but the song’s seven-minute runtime drags as the melody and instruments thin out. Several songs go on for a little too long, and the added guitar fireworks rarely overcome the repetitive, less interesting melodies. There’s not a standout hook that’s as immediate or exciting as 2014 tracks like “Him,” “Mountain,” or “Disorder.” That’s ultimately the trouble with Meatbodies’ concept record ambitions. A muddled narrative isn’t a big deal, but with Alice, Meatbodies have snuffed out a little too much of their old fire.


Kurt Wagner and co.'s masterful 11th album is one of the best to emerge from their strange, modest universe.

Mr. M

For the first 20 seconds of Mr. M, all the listener will hear is the sound of a string section, gliding, pretty, and warm, like something from an old Disney movie. The strings are followed by brushed, rolling snare drums. Soon, Kurt Wagner, the band's singer, stumbles into the mix. "Don't know what the fuck they talk about," he sings. His voice sounds beery and disoriented. It seems possible that he's in the wrong room.
Coming from some singers, the line might sound like a challenge, but coming from Wagner, it's a simple admission. Lambchop is a band that has spent the past 20 years in Nashville building its own idiosyncratic universe. For better and worse, the current state of music, its trends and its innovations, pass them by completely. Even during the days when alt-country seemed like a viable art form, Wagner's ornery sense of humor-- the kind that drives you to cap your album with a 40-second-long song called "I Sucked My Boss' Dick"-- made them seem totally out-of-step with their supposed contemporaries. In a lot of ways, Lambchop is a band that seems committed to its own irrelevance.
Irrelevance, though, isn't a burden for Lambchop as much as it is a jumping off point for what makes them them. "I see your Pitchfork I-rock saviors," goes one line on 2006's Damaged-- "I'm sorry, I still prefer Jim Nabors." If you aren't sure who Jim Nabors is and you're still reading our reviews about I-rock saviors, you've unknowingly participated in Wagner's self-definition: He hears the conversation going on but damn if he'll take part in it.
Nothing on Mr. M is designed to pop, not in the conventional sense of the word. To describe the band's current style is to invoke genres with an almost negative cultural cachet: lounge, 1970s country, Burt Bacharach-- styles so fixated on sounding high-class that they run the risk of feeling trashy. On paper, Lambchop is a band that would appeal primarily to grandparents and drunks.
Wagner's voice is a low, wounded-sounding instrument whose character has only deepened with time (though Wagner, in his self-effacing Wagnerian way, has attributed it to cigarettes). At root, he's a crooner, but his croon sounds alternately fragile and gruff-- the elderly neighbor who returns your lost dog one day and commands you to step off his azaleas the next, spittle hanging from his lip.
His lyrics are a mix of minor, concrete observations and poetic flights. "We have crawled among the elements, taking pictures of our phones" is one. "Sleep makes you possible" is another. His writing has the power to transform the everyday into a mystery, but his voice-- and the music behind it-- attempts to transform the mystery into something unplugged and emotionally direct-- to make "The wine tasted like sunshine in a basement" sound a little bit like "I love you."
If Lambchop's music bears some essential ambition, it's to marry ambivalence and sentimentality. My favorite turn on Mr. M is on "Buttons", a portrait of a small-town loser by a narrator who seems to neither love nor hate the man he sings about. "Been better times for those that are in trouble," Wagner sings, "and maybe there'll be better times for you. The weight you've gained has made your head a bubble, and your button eyes are brown and not her-- black and blue."
On the last words-- "black and blue"-- Wagner's voice warps into an almost grotesque croon, like he's either about to giggle or weep over the string section, and yet the image in my head is of a pudgy, small-town loser and the woman who he may or may not have beaten with his own sad fists. What we are supposed to do with these mixed emotional cues, I have no idea. It's to Lambchop's credit that their music avoids comfortable resolutions. Instead, it hangs there, no moral, no judgment.
Apprehending Mr. M does not take a genius, nor does it take an English degree, nor does it take 180-gram vinyl and an $800 Scandanavian turntable with counterweights made out of rare geodes. What it does take, I think, is patience. I like tarted-up, throat-grabbing music as much as the next frantically inattentive twentysomething. I also find a deep satisfaction in Lambchop's subtlety, which never makes the mistake of thinking that being high-minded or instructive will get us over to their weird team. Nobody, not even the most depraved among us, needs to be slapped on the wrist in order to see beauty. And still, despite Wagner's protests that he doesn't know what the fuck they talk about, Mr. M sounds aware of itself as an argument-- an argument for the kind of patience the music on it demands.
And so we return to this idea of Lambchop's irrelevance. For the purpose of barroom reductions, Mr. M sounds like a bunch of guys tapping delicately on acoustic instruments from deep within a mausoleum, or the sound of wind blowing gently through the pages of an open book resting on a front-porch rocking chair. But how rare is it that a band asks you to listen to so little, and how much rarer is it that they make it sound like so much?


The auspicious debut from the Chicago indie rock trio has the spontaneous feel of close friends bonding before the universe has a chance to pry them apart.

Bodies of Water

When a close friend moves out of town, it can feel like a great song cutting off. Maybe you didn’t even realize you were being carried by the current of a friendship until its waves suddenly went flat when they left. Zoom could launch free hologram-conferencing; Apple could implant iMessage into our corneas; it wouldn’t make a difference. Life isn’t as good when they don’t live within 45 minutes.
“Ferry,” the centerpiece of the auspicious debut album from the Chicago indie rock trio Moontype, is a slow and sweeping song about this feeling. “I miss you before you’re gone,” murmurs singer and bassist Margaret McCarthy, before opening up into a chorus so full of yearning that the rest of the album seems to orbit around it. Throughout the album, McCarthy sounds like she’s haunted by those she can’t reach out and touch, by friendships unraveled by distance. She sings about friends who take incessant pictures of each other on “About You,” and who watch each other’s hands maneuver a venue’s mixing console together on “3 Weeks.” These moments comprise a compositionally busy but conceptually tight guitar album that’s less about what it means to be there for someone than what it means to actually, physically be there.
McCarthy, guitarist Ben Cruz, and drummer Emerson Hunton knew each other as classmates in their small midwest college music program, but only joined forces after reconnecting in their current city. Bodies of Water has the spontaneous feel of close friends bonding before the universe has a chance to pry them apart. But this theme only emerges with time. What you notice at first is Cruz’s aptitude for acrobatic jazz licks and steady rock melodies. Propelled by his skill, Moontype push in all different directions. At least four of these 12 songs dive into difficult time signatures as McCarthy, Cruz, and Hunton take turns leading an advanced game of Mirror Me, the others matching their wild gestures and pivots with ease. Cruz butts into the last 30 seconds of “Alpha” and “Stuck on You” with solos that take the songs on haphazard piggyback rides; the “Alpha” solo almost perfectly mimics hysterical giggling.
So when they pull back into solid 4/4, it’s remarkable how natural it sounds, as if to imply they could crank out whole albums of strong pop songs if they wanted. On the Ex Hex-esque “About You,” Cruz and Emerson coordinate a whiplash switch from tip-toeing staccato eighth notes to ringing chords and cymbals, like they’re flex-and-busting out of straitjackets. “3 Weeks” dials the volume all the way down for an acoustic moment, where McCarthy sings clearly and specifically about complicated platonic love, emulating Jens Lekman out of nowhere. After flaunting math-rock chops impressive enough to build a whole identity around, they abandon it for a folk song that you might hear on mainstream radio. It’s risky to stretch this far, but Moontype sound honest and unforced in both modes.
McCarthy’s lyrics paint in soft strokes, establishing the stakes without insisting on the details, while the band colors in the rest of the picture. On “Your Mom,” Cruz plays in dreary grayscale, alternating between light-raindrop notes on the verses and thunderous chords on the chorus, while McCarthy narrates the scene of a friend in shambles. A supportive but unwilling witness, she never spells it out, but you get a few ideas of what might have happened, and none are pretty: “Your mom is here for the day/And she’ll make sure that you’re OK/And hold you like she did before,” she sings. Cruz’s range and McCarthy’s economy are impressive, but the song’s emotional honesty comes from a place deeper than skill. The album radiates with appreciation for the simple but irreplaceable power of a friend in the room—whether that’s a present reality or a distant memory.

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After fusing J-Pop and heavy metal to great fanfare, the duo recruit international guests to expand their sound into even more unlikely hybrids.

Metal Galaxy

On their unruly 2014 debut, the Japanese pop-metal outfit Babymetal pinballed from blastbeat belligerence to chiptune clap-alongs, adding a trap interlude for extra cultural currency. Two years later, they fortified the follow-up, Metal Resistance, with power ballads and alt-rock anthems. Their indiscriminate approach to approachability worked: Babymetal count Robs Zombie and Halford as fans, and their brutally cute ode to chocolate ranks as one of this decade’s essential viral oddities. On the day they released their third record, Metal Galaxy, they headlined The Forum.
Metal Galaxy is a loose concept album about being dispatched to a distant part of the universe. “We are on an odyssey to the Metal Galaxy/Please fasten your neck brace,” they greet us over a Sleigh Bells-sized, guitar-and-sequencer stomp. But then, that thread mostly disappears, and the real conceit emerges: After touring the world, Babymetal recruit a half-dozen international collaborators to widen their musical net even further. There is a guest verse from Thai rapper F.Hero on “Pa Pa Ya!!” and faceless growling from Canadian grunter Alissa White-Gluz on “Distortion,” which sounds like a Hot Topic-commissioned cover of Taylor Swift. Without the help of guests, Babymetal nod to Bollywood and the Miami Sound Machine. It is an exultant, near-absolute mess.
Now a duo after the mysterious departure of Yuimetal last year, Babymetal are still at their best when they hover around their initial idea—harnessing the energy of metal and J-Pop into high-flying hybrids. Metal Galaxy’s closing stretch of songs do just that; the arcing “Kagerou” boasts one of their most undeniable choruses, and you can visualize the epic sweep of stage lights and lighter-wielding throngs on “Shine.” Babymetal have rarely sounded as natural or convincing as they do in these moments.
Otherwise, Metal Galaxy teems with embarrassing gimmickry. At the start of “Night Night Burn!,” keyboards mimic mariachi trumpets and the vocalists duet with cumbia drums, shouting “Hola! Ma, Mamma Mia!” like they’ve just emerged from a Gloria Estefan nightmare. During “Shanti Shanti Shanti,” they intone in Sanskrit over tamboura drones and sitar samples, offering a cringey Bollywood approximation.
At least those songs are listenable. “Oh! MAJINAI,” an abomination with Joakim Brodén, the lead singer from power metal cosplayers Sabaton, suggests the Dropkick Murphys playing mean at Halloween. “Let’s make a wish!” they yell together in pirate patois. OK, then: Here’s hoping this never happens again.

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The debut album from the Young Thug protégé is an exhilarating opening salvo by an artist who only occasionally seems in full control of his considerable talent—which is half the fun.

DFTK

So few things of interest happen in the text of Yung Kayo’s music that it must be by design. References to fashion labels (constant) and guns (occasional) seldom create any narrative tension, and are instead mere mise-en-scène for songs that reach for what is communicable only through sound design or pure performance. In fact, for someone so nominally obsessed with the things he can buy and wear, the physical world can seem like an impediment to Kayo. Take the way he raps on “no sense,” one of the many dreamlike songs from his debut album, DFTK: “I had to look at my neck/The chain is so heavy it's holding me down,” as if this VVS anchor is the only thing to stop him from simply floating away.
Still a teenager, Kayo (as in K.O., as in “knockout”) recently moved to Los Angeles from his native Washington, D.C., where his father was a go-go DJ. He began rapping around 10 years old when an older brother purchased a microphone; by 15, he was releasing singles and walking in runway shows. But where a decade ago this sort of high-low tension—Kayo’s Vogue appearances and Yak Gotti collaborations standing in for A$AP Rocky’s Rick Owens and Lord Infamous obsessions—led to frenzied press campaigns and breathtaking record deals, Kayo has spent the last few years refining his array of vocal styles and taste in production largely out of view of the adult world and the industries it controls.
His first creative breakthrough came in 2019, on a song called “Glitch.” Produced by Warpstr—who would become a reliable collaborator, and who handles virtually all of DFTK—that song sounds somehow both busy and stripped to the bone, using ad-libs used as architecture in a way that makes “Glitch” seem to breathe on its own. It intrigued Young Thug, who flew Kayo to L.A. and recorded with him for several weeks, eventually signing the young rapper to his YSL imprint. From “Glitch,” Kayo evidently went searching for a style of contemporary rap he couldn’t master, flitting between white-hot growls, round-edged crooning, and exultant singing.
DFTK is not a comprehensive survey of everything Kayo can do as a vocalist. It smartly excises the flatter, more predictable modes he occasionally lapsed into on his earlier EPs, instead finding him at his most concentratedly chaotic, a steady dose of ungovernable energy. Like “Glitch” and his better work from the intervening years, it sounds like a computer booting up from deep in hell; it has as much in common with PC Music as with Swamp Izzo tapes. (Its most arresting guest spot comes not from the buzzing Portland rapper Yeat, but the experimental producer and vocalist Eartheater, who wails halfway through “hear you.”) It’s an exhilarating opening salvo by an artist who only occasionally seems in full control of his considerable talent, an impression that makes the already jittery DFTK all the more unpredictable.
While his writing only rarely carries thoughts to anything like their natural conclusions, Kayo’s phraseology is slyly engaging. As with the chain that keeps him tied to Earth, the banality of certain stock expressions sometimes underlines just how badly he wants to reach some higher, more emotionally honest plane. See one of the album’s best songs, the desperate “believer,” where the couplet “We was supposed to link up/It was supposed to be us” hinges on how insufficient “link up” is for communicating the connection he feels—or seeks—with someone else. On “crystal clear,” he warns that his shooters will “kill for the blue bills,” a description of hundred-dollar notes so odd it’s like he’s only seen them only once or twice. (That song also has one of the album’s only funny moments: “Your homeboy, he run out of Oxys/Me and my bitch, we keep doing the opposite,” an utterly bizarre, yet deeply effective structure for a boast.)
But DFTK is best experienced as a fugue, where one gut feeling dissolves into another the way a robbery on “over” is forgotten nearly as soon as it’s mentioned. Kayo’s music is a study in impulse, and occasionally in excess: opener “down (one kount)” seems as if it might teeter into preening pop-punk revival, but lands closer to his mentor’s best experiments in digital pop. At a time when teenaged songwriters are being praised for their emotional acuity, this—an album that opens and closes with the artist comparing himself to the Joker—is perhaps the most interesting artifact, a reminder of the depth that can be found in what we cannot strictly say.


The Chicago producer’s 2013 album Legacy affirmed his place in footwork’s vanguard. On a new collection of archival work, his loop-heavy tracks sound as raw, dizzying, and psychedelic as ever.

Legacy Volume 2

It’s a bold move to title your first album Legacy, but by 2013 Kavain Space had earned the right. The Chicago producer, better known as RP Boo, was already legendary in his hometown, having spent the mid ’90s DJing for the House-O-Matics dance crew at parties across the South Side. In 1997, he released “Baby Come On,” which many view as the origin point of the frenetic footwork style. The track features syncopated drums churning around 160 bpm, the preferred tempo of footwork producers, and an Ol’ Dirty Bastard sample chopped and looped ad infinitum. Boo released the mixtape Dude Off 59th Street in 2007 and contributed two tracks to Planet Mu’s essential 2010 collection Bangs & Works Vol.1 (A Chicago Footwork Compilation). Legacy, though an archival release, was a complete statement of purpose, a crucial document of his madcap ability to sculpt snarky vocal taunts, jagged chunks of pop hits, and skittering drums into otherworldly club cuts.
A decade later, RP Boo offers us Legacy Vol. 2, a sequel equally worthy of the title. Vol. 2 returns to the beginning of the millennium, collecting pieces recorded between 2002 and 2007 (both “Eraser” and “Total Darkness” appear on Bangs & Works). Though he would later begin composing in Ableton, Boo made all of his early work with the minimalist arsenal of an Akai MPC and a Roland R-70 drum machine, and he leaves the songs’ seams visible, which can feel jarring at first. Some loops lope haphazardly, ending with the staccato click of a digital artifact; it often sounds like Boo is triggering samples in real time. He deliberately sets clashing sounds against each other, like the horror-movie drone and “Live and Let Die” vocal sample of opener “Eraser,” and adjusting to the lurching, hyperactive rhythms can take some patience. Though the music sprang from Chicago house, footwork deliberately deconstructs that genre’s quantized, four-on-the-floor grid—the guiding pulse just isn’t there in most cases.
But that slipperiness is what makes RP Boo’s music—and footwork in general—so spellbinding. Taken out of the context of the dance battles Boo would DJ, the odd time signatures and unpredictable bass drops meant to confuse and challenge dancers wash into a mind-bending blur. “Heavy Heat,” which samples the theme from the 1964 film Mothra vs. Godzilla, crushes the horn melody into a quick succession of fluttering stabs. Boo underpins the frantic sample with sub-bass triplets, an off-time kick, and stuttering snares. It’s completely intense, but after a while, the relentless repetition takes on a woozy, psychedelic quality.
Boo’s production is just as disorienting when slowed down. On the mid-tempo ballad “B.O.T.O.,” elements slowly merge into each other like beads of mercury. A lopsided sample from Diddy’s “All About the Benjamins” initially sounds as if a drunk partygoer keeps bumping into the turntable, but Boo fills the extra spaces with claps and hi-hats. Once a gorgeous sitar sample comes in, “B.O.T.O.” coalesces into a dreamy groove; it’s impossible to remember the song’s off-kilter beginnings.
Though RP Boo pioneered footwork, many producers have followed his lead and expanded the genre. The late DJ Rashad’s classic Double Cup presents footwork as the soundtrack to neon-lit hedonism; Jlin’s compositions on Dark Energy vibrate with palpable ferocity and anger; Jana Rush’s Pariah sends footwork rhythms through a warped Venetian Snares lens. The tendrils of RP Boo’s innovations also reach beyond the dancefloor. Chicago drill’s cavernous bass and ricocheting percussion bear markings of Boo’s experiments. The insistent, anxious handclaps in much contemporary Milwaukee rap echo RP Boo tracks like “Azzoutof Control.” His impact continues to reverberate past the limits of his hometown and genre—RP Boo’s groundbreaking legacy, though still being written, is unimpeachable.


Alec Ounsworth’s latest album is a world of divorce, substance abuse, callous indifference to murder, and also bittersweet nostalgia for that bygone indie-rock era that gave him a platform in the first place.

New Fragility

Alec Ounsworth admits to having written only one political Clap Your Hands Say Yeah song in the band’s previous 15 years of existence—though, to be fair, it’s one of his most popular, 2005’s “Upon This Tidal Wave of Young Blood.” Ounsworth has never been a particularly candid lyricist either, his intentions usually assumed through his staunch commitment to independence and occasional antagonistic streak. These qualities once epitomized an indie-rock era of peak preciousness and pacifism, and taking this same approach on CYHSY’s first album since 2017’s The Tourist wouldn’t just be dated, it’s basically inconceivable; artists, or really any empathetic being, are expected to be engaged, enraged, and open to expressing exactly how that feels. Ounsworth is no longer living in the abstract on New Fragility, the first CYHSY album in dialog with the outside world—and it’s a world of divorce, substance abuse, callous indifference to murder, and also bittersweet nostalgia for that bygone indie-rock era that gave him a platform in the first place.
Of course, your Facebook feed since 2016 tells you how this might go: being newly emboldened to say something about the accelerated decline of America doesn’t equate to having something new or profound to add. “Thousand Oaks” is an impassioned and righteous response to “an American massacre in Southern California,” inspired by the mass shooting at Borderline Bar and Grille that left 12 dead and 16 more injured. But like nearly all impassioned and righteous songs written in response to mass shootings, “Thousand Oaks” makes a sarcastic invocation of “thoughts and prayers” that feels as limp and cliché as the real thing, if exponentially less pernicious. Yet with stories like the ones in “Thousand Oaks,” Ounsworth’s point about how quickly mass casualties are forgotten only becomes more poignant.
He’s more compelling when taking an oblique approach in his politics. On “Hesitating Nation,” Ounsworth’s nervy delivery captures a kind of exhaustion that will feel familiar to just about anyone alive today. “All of god’s children are useless to me now,” Ounsworth moans midway through, merging his newfound idealistic zeal with the breathless urgency of CHYSY’s beloved debut.
New Fragility finds many other ways to impart Ounsworth’s contrarianism. Its title is taken from an essay by Twitter’s newfound bête noire David Foster Wallace. For the most part, New Fragility fixates on specific and footnoted memories of a devastating relationship, the kind of personal crises that refused to be put on hold no matter the threat of extinction-level events. The most striking lyrics are shot through with a startling bitterness at an ex’s expense: “You made a scene there at the festival/A European spectacle,” “I miss that lazy comedy of pulling you off the lawn.” But Ounsworth’s autonomy also results in “Went Looking For Trouble” getting completely derailed by the line, “the rain is falling and chases us like a rapist,” which is hardly a strong enough simile to justify itself.
On the whole, Ounsworth’s candor gives New Fragility a necessary charge as he leans into balladry. His voice is a natural fit for the theater: piercing, dramatic, and capable of far more emotional modulation than would’ve been expected in 2005. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah has forever been a DIY indie rock band, but the bravura vocal runs and ornate arrangements of “Went Looking For Trouble,” “Mirror Song,” and “Innocent Weight” prove Ounsworth’s visions go far beyond that. But he loses sight of the memorable melodic structures that propped up his most rickety arrangements. The no-fi closer “If I Were More Like Jesus” could be seen as a callback to the divisive intros of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Some Loud Thunder. But while those albums included the experiments right at the beginning when the listener’s patience and goodwill were at their peak; “If I Were Jesus” arrives after No Fragility’s longest stretch of tedium.
Ounsworth actually does bring the whole project full circle on “CYHSY, 2005,” a song diehards have probably been waiting for since the debut. Not because it’s a real reversion to that album in any meaningful way. But after years of trying to put his band’s unfathomable rise to blog-rock royalty behind him, Ounsworth boldly takes us there, doing away with the legend and printing the mundane—there’s no mention of David Bowie or David Byrne or the National, just emotional breakdowns in a Maine phone booth, dreary drives from Little Rock to Memphis to Texas. “All I wanted to do was stay home/But who am I to question fate/There I go again setting up the next stage,” Ounsworth sings, capturing the mixed emotions of a guy given the Golden Ticket, living the dream, and quickly realizing it was someone else’s.

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The 23-year old singer-songwriter Winston Yellen, blessed with jump-out-of-the-gym vocal athleticism, recorded Night Beds' debut in a Nashville house once owned by Johnny Cash. It's a sad, beautiful collection showcasing a young talent loved and lost beyond his years.

Country Sleep

"Well, you wonder why I always dress in black." "I wear black on the outside, 'cause black is how I feel on the inside." Six of one, half dozen of the other, right? And yet, what do we have to show for the past three decades of trying to find common ground between the barroom and the bedsit? Ryan Adams' Love Is Hell? Pernice Brothers? Hell, don't sleep on a couple joints from the first Pete Yorn album. But is that gonna cut it? Whether you think it's more promising from an artistic or a commercial standpoint, Night Beds' Country Sleep shows you just how wide open this lane really is. Upon first listen, you're struck with the thought of "Wow, this could be really popular." Because for a lot of people, nothing cuts through the noise like a 23-year old singer-songwriter who wants to tell you over either acoustic guitars or weepy, reverbed ones how he drank, loved and lost beyond his years. Winston Yellen, essentially the creative body of Night Beds, does both. And in a lot of ways, Country Sleep delivers while still making you feel like it's playing on your vulnerability, the Pavlovian response to this stuff: It wants you to feel your own pain as much as it allows you to feel Yellen's.
That said, Yellen is kind of the real deal. His past couple of years have been itinerant, dropping out college, having been relieved of both jobs and girlfriends, traveling across the country and eventually writing Country Sleep in a Nashville house once owned by none other than Johnny Cash himself. Dude had to take out some loans to get it done, but I swear, labels should be giving out scholarships for this sort of thing if you've got a voice like Yellen's. The guy is blessed with jump-out-of-the-gym vocal athleticism and throughout Country Sleep, it's unclear whether he's a showoff or if he's still trying to figure out how to corral it. Though there’s a fair share of C&W formalism and cask-aged drawl, Yellen's more of a Buckley or even a Banhart in terms of his ability to work without strcuture. A diva, in other words. That much is clear from a cappella opener "Faithful Heights", which ascends from a maudlin moan to a holler by its end. On the opposite side, there's "Even If We Try", audio lemon meringue that's little more than a couple of fluffy chords and Yellen's tart falsetto in waltz time before shifting to a fiddle-led reverie.
It's all very disarming and Country Sleep talks a good game and looks the part like the beautiful, new stranger in town. And it all comes down to whether or not you want to ask it the tough questions. "Ramona" is an instantly ingratiating piece of twang-free alt-country, rollicking acoustic strums, gliding lead riffs on guitar rather than pedal steel and a good ol' "fuck" thrown in to seal the alt- deal. But as you listen to him describe this girl, stunted by religion and a vague social anxiety, flawed in all the right ways and salvageable through Yellen, you start to get Manti Te'o on the brain and wonder, has he actually met someone like Ramona? Or is she just a construct that makes for a narrative that's easy to grasp? In fact, is the guy singing this song real? I dunno, but judging from that billowy coda, she sure is pretty.
So yeah, even if it's steeped in genres whose appeal often rests on the authenticity of one's sadness, it's beautiful enough for you to feel guilty about refusing to totally suspend your disbelief. The guy might strive to present himself as a Heartbreaker, but he's much better playing the softie. While "Lost Springs" and "Was I For You?" are certainly breakup balm, it's the over-the-counter stuff. He repeats "I don't wanna feel this," towards the end of the former, though my guess is that you actually do want to feel this. It's a kind of lovesickness that feels manageable, even somewhat attractive. And hell, you're probably already inspired to make your next crush playlist, which will include tracks from Country Sleep. A propulsive, be-quiet-and-drive song at its core, the hushed "22" drops the top to let in the sound of crickets and sparkling strings. Likewise, after an untethered falsetto introduces "Wanted You In August", everything stops for Yellen to intone "I want you" and the stars go blue, evoking the humidity and romantic allure of southern, summer nights-- the double meaning of the word "pine" practically invented Yellen's lyrical style.
But while he plays the part of a guy born into an abundance of inherited sadness, how much of it is his own? It's a question that keeps arising from a musical and a lyrical standpoint. Point blank, if you locked Ryan Adams in a room for an hour with an acoustic guitar and demanded he write five songs, one of them would probably be 97% like "Cherry Blossoms". The five-minute closer "TENN" suggests it's the most autobiographical song on Country Sleep, but it's one where you need to retrofit his bio so that its epigram-- "sorrow stole my youth/ what's left I'll give to you"-- hits the way it should. For the time being, Yellen nails letting the sound and emotional tenor of Country Sleep give us the gist: we were supposed to rise above, but we sink into the ocean, he's waiting to derail, he loves the feeling when he goes out, dancing with the women at the bar. Yellen might not have too much to say about his Nashville city nights that we haven't heard before, but Country Sleep works as a personal work about the shared experience of…how'd that song go? You were young and man, you were sad.


The Moscow electronic musician and vocalist’s third album treats the haphazard textures of everyday life with a refreshingly playful sensibility.

Liminal Soul

Fun is a central tenet of Yana Kedrina’s music. Liminal Soul, the Moscow-based producer and vocalist’s third album as Kedr Livanskiy, is defined by a wide-eyed, magnanimous playfulness, an openness to quirk that doesn’t inhibit the seriousness of her message. Listen to the way the chirp of birdsong seems to jumpstart a clattering footwork beat on “Celestial Ether,” or the way that, seconds after the album’s final synth aria seems to have drawn to a close on “Storm Dancer,” it returns for one more bar, a tiny, winking encore. These are vignettes that, like a viral video of a puppy riding a duck, feel unprompted and unaffected, born from a less cynical place than most things of this world. In Kedrina’s music, as in life, moments of spontaneous joy blossom with the randomness and beauty of wildflowers from pavement.
Kedrina has been finding ways to suffuse experimental electronic music with the pleasantly haphazard textures of human life since her earliest records. Even the most meticulous producer can’t predict how their tracks will be heard in real life—how environments and substances might make a song sound entirely different from one person to the next—and Kedrina’s music reflects that uncertainty: one of the most disarming moments on her January Sun EP is when “Winds of May” slips into a higher pitch and back, like a tape changing speed; the reverb-heavy vocals on 2019’s Your Need constantly flicker in volume and tone, drifting as if carried on the wind from an entirely different song.
On Liminal Soul, Kedrina’s sleight-of-hand spatial tricks have become even more deft. A burbling synth line buried deep in “Teardrop” feels nestled in the song’s periphery; the first time I noticed it, I thought it was coming from an entirely different audio source. Many of these songs sound as if composed from elements of the world around you, an effect heightened by the fact of Kedrina’s voice, which echoes as if she’s calling to you from some far-off point in a sparse wood.
There’s an exception to Liminal Soul’s enveloping sound, and that’s “Boy,” the album’s only English-language song, and Kedrina’s first song written entirely in that language. Over a plush 2000s pop breakbeat and an arpeggiated synth line gently affected to sound like an acoustic guitar, Kedrina sings some of her most straightforwardly romantic lyrics: “I’m not lying to you boy/I don’t know why but/I can’t be with you boy.” In contrast to her default lyrical style, which focuses on nature and is laden with symbolism, “Boy” is almost comically vague. But that might be the point: Much of Liminal Soul feels designed to chart out the atmosphere of a natural landscape, and “Boy” plays like a pop song intruding on that vista, the hikers next to you blasting English-language pop from a UE Boom. Of course, Kedrina gets to have it both ways—“Boy” still succeeds as a pop ballad, the balletic grace of Kedrina’s voice lending the song appropriate pathos.
The irregularities of Kedrina’s music have, in the past, made it hard to clearly identify her contemporaries. Not so on Liminal Soul: Centering on communion with nature, this album feels of a piece with recent electronic records that embrace the embodied, humanizing potential of dance music. Like Kelly Lee Owens’ Inner Song and Grimes’ Miss Anthropocene, Liminal Soul uses elliptical structures, fragmented vocals, and airy, naturalistic tones to implore listeners to reacquaint themselves with the beauty and healing power of the natural world. It’s slightly less enamored with the textures of rave and techno than past Kedr Livanskiy records, and that’s a good thing: Kedrina allows moments of stillness, like the dubby final 40 seconds of “My Invisible” or the limpid choral parts that introduce “Teardrop,” to provide much-needed breathing space amid the wash of breakbeats and acidic synth lines. There’s new room here for Kedrina’s vocals—a necessary feature, considering how instructive they often feel. “Look at the sky, look at the sky, look at the sky,” she chants on “Stars Light Up,” as if leading a guided meditation. On “Night,” she flees the staid city, finding cleansing power (“The wind is my friend/Forgives everything”) in the countryside. Every kind of natural landscape seems to converge on “Teardrop”; Kedrina places you in the center of it all, singing in Russian:

There are comets and stars below
There’s water and a stone island above
Behind is a desert, a hundred kilometers
There are only lands of eternal snow ahead
The copper compass will guide you
And by the warming breath flowers will blossom in scarlet
The flowers of April cover white snow

Kedrina’s focus on the restorative properties of nature, along with the record’s pleasingly glacial, occasionally trance-y palette, feels redolent of, amazingly, ’90s new-age compilation Pure Moods. Liminal Soul is a little more modern, and dead serious in contrast with Pure Moods’ chintzy gloss, but both albums feel designed to put you back in your body and back in the real world, presenting “a proposal to make life easier, more fantastic, purer,” as Mina Tavakoli wrote of Pure Moods last year. The difference is that Kedrina’s album is semi-didactic, not just palliative. In the world of Liminal Soul, that purer life is possible, as long as you’re willing to gaze at the stars and feel the embrace of the wind, to ease into the lushness of breakbeats and birdsongs. It’s not that deep, Kedrina seems to say—just have fun with it.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The singer and composer Diggs Duke channels '90s hip hop and soul greats with his light, mulifaceted sound. Civil Circus feels remarkably spacious for its 26 minutes, and it has a  yearning, almost gospel touch. This is music about being honest and vulnerable.

Civil Circus

Across several albums and EPs, the singer and composer Diggs Duke has channeled the greats of '90s hip-hop and soul, with a multifaceted sound touching lightly on D’Angelo and A Tribe Called Quest. In 2012, he caught the attention of British DJ and tastemaker Gilles Peterson, who included the musician’s "Nine Winning Wives" on Brownswood Bubblers Nine and signed Duke to his Brownswood imprint in 2013. Duke released long player Offering for Anxious on the label that year, and made what I thought was a nice splash on 2014’s The Upper Hand & Other Grand Illusions, a quick EP that dissected the power struggles in romantic relationships.
On Civil Circus, Duke reverts to the soulful sound he employed on Anxious, yet the vibe here is firmly rooted in jazz. Album opener "Busker", with its mix of saxophones and live drums, works well in intimate spaces and carries a strong hip-hop knock. While some of the tracks are traditional in scope, others have an alternative slant that fit alongside artists like Thundercat and Flying Lotus, both of whom put esoteric spins on funk, EDM, and rap.
Civil Circus is full of shape-shifting compositions that make the album feel longer than its 26-minute runtime in a good way. The music feels remarkably spacious, and Duke’s songwriting is equally abstract and observational: Civil Circus conveys Duke’s innermost thoughts, no matter how vast or disconnected they might be. There’s a voyeuristic aspect to the album, and Civil Circus feels like a deep chat with a close friend. It’s almost gospel-like, and "Compensation"—a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar—hits the theme head-on: "God, in his great compassion/ Gave me the gift of song." "Stoplight Lessons" speaks to the newness of life and uncertainty of growing older. "Old enough to crawl," Duke hums atop an acoustic guitar, "but speech evades your grasp."
The album's structure gives way to a loose instrumental procession toward the end: "Street Preacher" and "Bumper to Bumper" stamp the LP’s panoramic view; "Damn Near Home", with its light horns and scenic moans, sets the scene for album closer "We Don’t Need Love", which chides superficiality. It’s a fitting end for the album and the impressive career Diggs has built so far. Civil Circus is about being honest and vulnerable. It's about looking up to observe the small things that make life so fruitful, and taking the time to appreciate what's normally taken for granted.


Finnish producer Sasu Ripatti aka Vladislav Delay returns with his house-oriented Luomo alias. This time out, the focus is less on songs than groove and his typically intricate, hypnotic arrangements.

Plus

First you notice what's missing: gone are the gently echoing dubscapes, the shivering multi-tracked female vocals, the heartsore melodies, the insectile arrangements, the billowing evocations of desire. Finnish producer Sasu Ripatti's Luomo is nominally his "house" project (as distinct from excursions into stripped-back dub-techno or fractured ambience) but to date it has consistently flirted with an idea of house-- as feminine, gentle, lovelorn, ostentatiously emotive-- quite distinct from the often quite blunt realities of the genre. Plus, then, is Ripatti's first album of house qua house: specifically the cooler, big-room sound of tech-house circa 2006, equal parts Michael Mayer and Carl Craig.
If Luomo's previous work often could feel like the sound of the "body speaking" (to steal the title of one of his best tracks), the colder and harder surfaces of Plus are positioned between the body and the dancefloor, less the sound of movement than the sounds that make you move. Song takes a backseat to groove: while most of the tracks here feature gentle "Computer Love"-style male vocals (courtesy of the Chicago Boys), they are less the music's emotional center than a framework around which Ripatti can weave his typically intricate, hypnotic arrangements. Only on the fragile, trebly new wave of "Form in Void" and the seductive schaffel of "Immaculate Motive" does Ripatti gesture toward the glittering disco-pop of his prior work.
This feels like a deliberate aesthetic shift. Previously, many of Luomo's finest tracks featured late-blooming hooks that would carry the tune's second half in euphoric or melancholy new directions. By contrast, the best moments on Plus tend to turn inward, homing in on the beat until its urgency is almost too close to your ears. The effect can be like sitting in the front row at the cinema, the peripheral details of melodic color and vocals overwhelmed by the abstract throb of the hyper-percussive, multi-tiered groove. In particular, the massive climaxes of "How You Look" and especially "Make My Day" (by some distance the album's finest moment) feel designed to burn out your senses with an overload of physical intensity.
These tracks stand and fall on their own robust physicality: "Happy Strong" features an inane vocal hook and almost no melody to speak of, but its immense, banging groove (all slamming snares and delectable hand-clap counter-rhythms) makes it an album highlight. Only on "Good Stuff" does Ripatti's new aesthetic veer off course entirely, spending nine minutes trying but failing to achieve lift-off through chattering Chicago-house revivalism. Here, the groove isn't compelling enough to distract from the perfunctory song it props up.
If Plus ultimately is only the fourth-best Luomo album (after 2008's Convivial and certainly Ripatti's peerless first two albums under the moniker), it's because maintaining that level of intensity across entire tracks, let alone a whole album, is near impossible, while the moments in between the peaks no longer can coast on the singularity of the producer's sound. The less-exciting stretches on previous albums at least might have boasted a bruised-sounding bassline or delicately mutated vocal harmonies to establish a sense of unity with the climaxes. On Plus, the periods in between the climaxes can slip more easily into the category of fine-- but rather less-distinct-- German-sounding tech-house.
The importance of this criticism depends on how invested you are in house as dancefloor music first and foremost: Ripatti's music demands to be judged purely on the terms of the genre it inhabits, and the way that genre interacts with the bodies of dancers. If you come looking for house with an obvious point of difference, this decision seems puzzling, but if you're prepared to forget the name "Luomo" and simply lose yourself in the groove, then Plus is as involving and engaging as any dance music you'll hear this year.


Both playful and spare, the second solo LP from the Red River Dialect songwriter and ordained Buddhist chaplain finds warmth and comfort in scenes of decay.

Wyld Love Songs

In his work with Red River Dialect and on his solo records, David John Morris—the British singer-songwriter and ordained Buddhist chaplain—has written about journeys both sacred and profane. In songs that ride the line between meditative folk and intricate post-rock, Morris writes about an ongoing search for community with romantic partners, bandmates, and co-religionists, like the monks who inspired his 2021 solo debut, Monastic Love Songs. It was a collection of open, simple songs, heavy on atmosphere, sung with the confidence of a man rediscovering his calling after spending a year in a Nova Scotian monastery. But when Morris came back to London in its wake, he had little money, few possessions, and nowhere to stay. So he took a room in what is known as a guardianship: a condemned building (in this case, a North London nursing home) rented out for cheap, to dissuade squatters and fill space until the building is torn down. Morris only intended to stay until he could put together the rent for his own apartment, and in January 2020, he began to record demos for a follow-up, with the plan of fleshing them out in a studio.
Like most stories around this time, Morris’ plans were massively disrupted, and during the subsequent lockdowns, he hunkered down in the guardianship and kept writing. The temporary home became a newfound community, and the demos became Morris’ second solo record, Wyld Love Songs. Written with only an acoustic guitar and a drum machine, the resulting album is both spare and playful, each song built around Morris’ high tenor and delicate fingerpicking. For the first time he also embraces unexpected electronic textures: Squelchy synths drive the queasy sway of first single “Pebble,” while “Karaoke” achieves a kind of lo-fi jangle pop, its buzzing arpeggios and insistent drum machine pulsing around the story of a late night karaoke party. The muted electronic backbeat on “TT’s Surf School,” meanwhile, carries the song from soaring folk with a kind of digital intimacy, restrained and beautiful as a vintage Magnetic Fields tune. If prior records sought to evoke live-band interplay, the effect here is more artificial and homey. These are folk songs that find warmth and comfort in decay and decline, like a faded brick wall covered with a handmade quilt.
Wyld is full of little stories from life in and around the guardianship: ping pong games, movie screenings, and the little rituals that arise at the start of a courtship. For Morris, these details take on a gleeful mundanity, expanding into thoughts of impermanence and the interconnection of all life. “Black Kite” creates a strange analogy between his own overwhelming emotions and the plight of the first monkeys to cross the ocean between Africa and South America: “Winds and currents carry me,” he marvels, “to a land beyond belief.”
This approach peaks during the loping “Ballad of Ross Wyld.” The song begins with Morris imagining his dream home, with pink walls, a long veranda, and a garden with a cherry tree. Over the following eight minutes, his thoughts turn to lockdown parties, deaths that haunt the building, and, eventually, a screening of the 1991 Robin Williams movie Hook. As Morris acknowledges, he is working to free himself from “a songwriting mode that feels tired and old”—to move on with his artistry and his life. Toward the end, Morris describes taking a break from writing to have a coffee in the guardianship’s garden, where he looks up and notices, for the first time, a cherry tree, triggering the realization that he is at home and the answers are right before him, even if they, too, “will disappear/like all the things.…I’m looking for.” In a press release, Morris notes that Wyld Guardianship has been torn down since his time there and its community has dispersed. All things may be transient, these songs suggest, but music can stick around.


Giveon’s debut album seeks to scale the highs and lows of love and heartbreak, but more often sounds like he’s cruising on autopilot in the center lane.

Give or Take

Giveon’s warm ballads sound like he’s trying to find a happy medium between the loverboy appeal of Brian McKnight and the sultry stylings of D’Angelo. His honeyed baritone is among the most distinctive in contemporary R&B, with a quality that makes his lulled chorus on Drake’s “Chicago Freestyle” the most exciting part of the track. But more often his nasally, aloof rumbles lack the soul and technical skill to make it consistently fragrant. Whereas the dynamic vibrato that lit up Giveon’s stellar 2020 debut EP Take Time made his tales about falling in love too quickly more endearing, its follow-up, When It’s All Said and Done, reeks of lazy vocals that distract from what he’s singing about.
Still, Giveon tries to match the vocal flair of his forebears. His 2020 cover of D’Angelo’s consummate “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” is a respectable attempt that dilutes the strengths of the original: the improvisation, the call-and-response, the piercing vocal delivery, the way D’Angelo’s shout at the end of the song can be mistaken for a praise break after a divine spirit fills the sanctuary on a Sunday morning. Giveon’s version, by contrast, has all the spiritual vigor of a partner who sends you a lengthy good morning text every day; it’s just not that stimulating. The Long Beach crooner’s full-length debut, Give or Take, faces a similar problem: As his expansive ballads seek to scale the highs and lows of love and heartbreak, Giveon more often sounds like he’s cruising on autopilot in the center lane.
Ahead of the album’s release, Giveon cautioned fans to keep a box of tissues nearby. This is not necessary. Across 15 gloomy tracks, he paints a very familiar story of a hopeless romantic who’s searching to understand their flaws and solve their relationship woes in the throes of newfound fame. There’s no shortage of this narrative in contemporary R&B: In the soft, intricate runs of rum.gold’s debut Thicker Than Water and the old-school shimmer of Lucky Daye’s Grammy-nominated Painted, the challenge of being a self-aware lover is illuminated with a lush variety of soul-baring vocal arrangements that would make love’s most dedicated critics become open to understanding the possibilities of healthy romance. But Giveon’s narrative doesn’t land.
Take “dec 11th,” where Giveon laments a missed connection with a fan who caught his eye in Houston. The single is backed by an alluring acoustic guitar that doesn’t pair with his unvarying baritone delivery and instead makes the song sound more clinical, which conflicts with its charming lyrics. His limited range overwhelms the meaning of what he’s saying. The dull, drawn-out two-syllable patterns on “Tryna Be” make Giveon sound like he was dragged out of bed to the recording studio when he’d rather go back to sleep. When the sensual flair of “Make You Mine” calls for dreamy melodies, Giveon defaults to stoicism. Falling head-over-heels in love is enough to make anyone want to sing, but it takes skill to use your voice in a way that makes one actually believe you—think Jodeci on “My Heart Belongs to You” or Brian McKnight on “One Last Cry.” “For Tonight,” Give or Take’s lead single, is the lone song where Giveon really sounds like he’s ready to go there.
The album’s most convincing moments arrive when he stops acting like a passive bystander and addresses his relationship drama head-on. Giveon knows his tendency to fall in love so quickly can get the best of him. On “july 16th,” he admits that he needs to alter his too-eager approach to a new connection (“It’s only been 14 days/And I already adore the way you are to me/I wanna ignore and take it slow/’Cause I know where this can go”). On Boi-1da-produced “Scarred,” Giveon acknowledges how the heartbreak he’s endured in the past has led him to bitterness in the present: “My last love was cold/So now I gotta be the coldest.” It’s an honest refrain from his sappy love songs and explores the source of his toxic traits.
But lyrical vulnerability isn’t enough to lift the dreary cloud of Giveon’s static vocal performance that hangs over the album like a TV show that should’ve ended three seasons ago. The dull midtempo rhythms and runny guitar lines are equally uninteresting. Give or Take is stacked with songs that add minimal variation in cadence and tone that make his honest musings on love sound unconvincing. The Giveon of Take Time experimented with melody and challenged himself vocally; Give or Take stunts that growth in favor of secluding himself in his comfort zone.


On his melodious debut album, the pop-rap icon flaunts his verve and star power, all while a sense of isolation lives at the music’s brighter edges.

Montero

At the start, Lil Nas X courted controversy by accident. The Atlanta native seized the world’s attention in 2019 with the country-rap juggernaut “Old Town Road,” which country zealots tried to exile from the charts. Nas’ success (and the several, increasingly bizarre remixes) made the complaints moot: After 19 stunning weeks, it took Billie Eilish, another burgeoning pop phenom, to finally dethrone him, and Nas’ song remains Billboard’s longest-running No. 1. He put out a stopgap EP that didn’t move the needle for him as an artist or a viral celebrity, and found himself in an awkward spot: Country and rap devotees both had him marked as a gimmick.
The whiplash between public attacks and chart-topping success took its toll, especially after Nas came out while “Old Town Road” was still No. 1. Now he was a Black queer man deciding to fully express himself through his music, which made him an easy target for bigots who only knew him through his kid-friendly first single (“i am not gonna spend my entire career trying to cater to your children,” he succinctly replied. “that is your job.”). Having just exposed the racialized gatekeeping on Billboard’s charts, now he was airing out everyone’s homophobic laundry, too.
On his debut album, MONTERO, the country’s most popular gay pop-rap star is quick to let you into this roiling headspace. Nas maneuvers through different genres in an attempt to unload some of his heavier baggage: A fractured family life and lingering self-doubt from spending most of his years in the closet weigh on the 22-year-old’s mind. He wants you to know he’s been smoking himself to sleep. Even when he’s singing to the rafters, he’s sad as hell.
It’s a jarring perspective to take for one of the most hyped debuts of the year. The rollout for MONTERO was a lesson in irreverent marketing made entirely on Nas’ terms, this time with the controversy courted by design: giving Satan a lapdance in a big-budget music video for the title track that ignited delight from queer fans and fury from conservatives; making out with a male backup dancer during a performance at the BET Awards that stoked more of the same from those crowds for obvious reasons; then, finally, a telegenic spread in People magazine announcing his “pregnancy” with the album that—well, you get it.
All of the tongue-in-cheek promo leads us to MONTERO, titled after the artist’s given name, Montero Lamar Hill. Over polished production largely handled by regular collaborators Take a Daytrip, Lil Nas X flaunts his verve and star power alongside some of the biggest names in pop, all while that sense of isolation lives at the music’s brighter edges. For an artist capable of gleefully reducing online trolls to dust with a single tweet, his anguish is revealing though not altogether surprising. Lil Nas X has discussed his struggles living in the public eye before. “The idea of ‘He’s a cool gay person; he’s an acceptable gay person,’ I used to see things like that as a compliment, but it’s not,” he told Variety. “I wanted to be even more authentic in my music and let people into my life.” MONTERO pries open that door through angsty pop-punk, introspective guitar ballads, and brash pop-rap, making for a mostly filler-free, engaging album that doesn’t seem to reveal the true soul of Lil Nas X, but certainly comes close.
MONTERO’s first half is the victory lap, loud with pep-rally pop built on blaring horns, 808s, and boasts. Even more than the Kanye-co-produced “Industry Baby,” the vivid “Dead Right Now” evokes West’s widescreen vision, as Nas offers up an origin story with a hard-nosed chorus: “You know, you never used to call/Keep it that way now/I’ll treat you like you dead right now.” The enthusiasm starts to grate by “That’s What I Want,” a yearning pop-rock song and clear successor to “Hey Ya!” with a similar call-and-response hook that instantly and regrettably brings T-shirt launchers to mind.
Yet Lil Nas X’s lyrical confidence is a noticeable and welcome upgrade from 2019’s halfhearted 7 EP. On “Scoop,” featuring Doja Cat, he snarls come-ons that honor his former life as a card-carrying Barb: “I ain’t talkin’ guns when I ask where your dick at.” When so many mainstream pop stars still rely on euphemisms for gay sex, it’s a joy to hear Nas openly embrace it. The brisk title track remains one of his best, with flamenco-tinged guitar loops and throbbing bass as the bedrock for Nas’ frank exploration of gay desire. “I want that jet lag from fuckin’ and flyin’,” he demands, adding a dash of menace to his charm. “Shoot a child in your mouth while I’m ridin’.”
The album’s more contemplative moments shift his point of view into a darker, death-driven focus. The brooding pop-punk highlight “Lost in the Citadel,” focusing on a toxic relationship he can’t help but return to, bridges the gap between the all-out pop songs and the guitar-focused second half. He tackles growing up in a broken home on the deceptively upbeat “Tales of Dominica” before things get bleak on “Void,” when he hits a low point over grungy, strummed guitar. “I’d rather die than to live with these feelings,” he confesses, “Stuck in this world where there’s so much to prove.” The pressure those expectations have on Nas can make MONTERO feel a little confined, but in his vulnerable performance and lyrics, it allows you to become more invested in Nas the person rather than the celebrity.
That approach—and the album’s brisk sequencing—also makes the more sentimental songs go down easier. “One of Me,” in which he gives voice to his bloodthirsty inner critic (“Even if your album OK, it’s flopping, that’s a promise,” he growls), keeps things light with a gentle beat and Elton John’s subtle piano, a moment that feels like a brief passing of the torch from another gay icon who’s no stranger to controversy. “Sun Goes Down,” a letter of support to Nas’ high school self (and, by proxy, the thousands upon thousands of queer kids who will listen to this album), is also an affecting ballad by the time it shows up toward the end. “I know that you want to cry,” he sings over 2000s-nodding, percussive acoustic guitar, “But there’s much more to life than dying.”
The hopeful ending is in line with Nas’ vision—this is the same guy who made a supercut of his videos in the garish style of Marvel movies, after all. Yet even with occasional missteps, the album fulfills the promise of a new kind of pop star: an out, Black rapper and singer who combines his omnivorous, genre-hopping music, forthright lyrics, and social media savvy to triumph in an industry that threatened his authenticity from the jump. His music is still radio-primed to work well beside Olivia Rodrigo’s pop-punk or Doja’s earworm rap, but he’s using both his music and celebrity to carve out a unique space explicitly for queer people who feel as alone as he did growing up and emphatically insisting on a better future. With MONTERO, he’s already building it for them.

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This Oregon-based, politically informed punk band return with their grandest, loudest, and most electrifying record to date.

The Thermals: The Body, The Blood, The Machine

The Body, The Blood, The Machine

Portland, Oregon natives the Thermals have been hovering on the periphery since their 2003 debut, delivering solid records to undersized acclaim. The band's third album, The Body, The Blood, The Machine, conjures an America piloted by some sort of Christian-fascist regime ("They'll pound you with the love of Jesus...They'll own your days/ They're only God's babies/ They follow, they know"), and traces the frantic, fiery flight of an ex-pat and his girl ("I can see she's afraid/ That's why we're escaping/ So we won't have to die, we won't have to deny/ Our dirty God, our dirty bodies"). The Body's story is just vague and gruesome enough to be weirdly terrifying, totally Orwellian, and grander, louder, and more electrifying than anything the Thermals have spit out before.
Original drummer Jordan Hudson ditched the band in 2005, meaning that during the recording of this album guitarist/vocalist Hutch Harris and bassist Kathy Foster were twitching for three, bouncing around from instrument to instrument, filling in the gaps, injecting percussion, keyboards, organs, bass, and plenty of guitar into their lo-fi basement punk. Produced by Fugazi drummer Brendan Canty, The Body is appropriately reminiscent of the Thermals' previous two full-lengths, but far more ambitious in narrative and sound-- the production is cleaner, Harris' vocals are less prickly and more impassioned, and every slammed chord soars. Both in theory and execution, The Body, The Blood, The Machine hits like a less playful, less suburban American Idiot, its apocalyptic, heavily religious iconography conveniently layered over pounding, Ramones-style pop-punk.

The Body*'s unrelenting lyrical gravity is also its single biggest strength-- this isn't the first time the Thermals have gotten political (on 2004's Fuckin' A, Harris bleakly instructed us to "Pray for a new state/ Pray for assassination"), but, from the opening organ chord of "Here's Your Future", it's clear that this is the band at its most somber-- when Harris seethes "So here's your future!" a few beats after inciting "the new master race," it's impossible not to feel like you should transfer all the energy you'd usually waste pogo-ing around your living room into scrawling letters to elected officials. "Returning to the Fold" employs a classic post-grunge melody, Harris' big, punchy wails poking through his guitar-web like it's 1994 and you're watching "120 Minutes" in your parents' basement. "St. Rosa and the Swallows" is a thorny ode to escape ("Passing the corners, we kissed in the rain/ Passing the old rusted warning signs/ What did they say?/ I think they said run!"), while closing cut "I Hold the Sound" is spare and weirdly engrossing, the closest the band comes to recreating the impossible catchiness of "No Culture Icons", before bowing out in a haze of feedback.

Foster's drums and Harris' weird vocal syntax (which contains echoes of the Mountain Goats' John Darnielle) are nicely propulsive, and The Body, The Blood, The Machine cuts off before it runs the risk of getting too repetitive. But the results of its 38 minutes are still chilling. Harris' imagined landscape is severe and grisly, leaving us all to sprint for cover, curling under desks, hands over heads, fingers crossed: These tracks land like bombs.


The Calgary dancer and singer’s second album strikes a tough pose but offers mostly forgettable trap-pop ballads.

THINK LATER

When Tate McRae punctuated her debut with blunt ruminations on teenage love and coming of age, the dance competitor turned pop singer was heralded as Canada’s answer to Billie Eilish. For her second album, THINK LATER, McRae toughens up that first impression by becoming a Canadian Sporty Spice, trading neon sweatshirts for hockey gear. It’s a classic formula: Good girl goes man-eating badass, and she’s ready to make that jerk regret losing her. Too bad she’s still hung up on him—and THINK LATER is full of homogeneous trap-pop ballads devoted to one-dimensional introspection.
To showcase a “feistier” version of herself, McRae assembled a roster of prominent pop writers and producers, including OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder, SZA’s SOS collaborator Rob Bisel, and Ariana Grande associate ILYA. They land on a style that’s undeniably indebted to Bangerz and the 2010s obsession with trap-pop, updated to iterate on SZA’s love-hate yearning and the Weeknd’s atmospheric alt-R&B. On “run for the hills,” McRae explores the lure of an unhealthy relationship under a looming cloud of synth that’s pierced by single words in her head voice, like Grande rapping “gimme the loot!” on “7 rings.”
Most of the album is similarly concerned with presenting McRae as the give-no-fucks bad girl. “It’s not a good night if you don’t take it too far,” she winks on the arena-stomping title track (which sounds a little like M.I.A.’s “Bad Girls” itself). The Timbaland-inspired “greedy,” one of the first and best songs on the record, is McRae at her most empowered and exciting. At other times, the pettiness is just tiring. “we’re not alike” is a pop punk-lite temper tantrum about a friend who breaks girl code; it’s as if McRae attempted to emulate Eilish’s “Copycat” without the bite.
Throughout THINK LATER, McRae’s narrator yearns for the kind of toxic romance that makes Harley Quinn and the Joker look restrained. “You’re the only one who can boil my blood/And make that shit cut,” she warbles on the clunky, mid-tempo “messier,” which sounds like a good reason to finally dump him. Then she goes starry-eyed: “’Cause you know that I’m always yours/I’m so in love.” Where SZA might plot a murder, McRae threatens to make a scene at dinner. The cycle is vicious but worse, it’s dull. Has Tate McRae ever considered protecting her peace?
There’s another school of thought that likens McRae to Britney Spears, recognizing a dancer’s magnetism and competitive edge. McRae’s inability to produce equally compelling music leaves her in a bind. The more comparisons she earns, the more THINK LATER feels anonymous: stuck romanticizing the negative in an attempt to prove her seriousness as a singer. Her music is strongest when she tosses the ballads in the bin. When she rode into the impeccably choreographed “greedy” video on a Zamboni, she looked like a budding star, and when she sings about a random guy who asks if she’s aware of her powers, her response is perfectly dry: “I said, ‘Lemme check.’” Sucks that the rest of THINK LATER can’t muster the same easy confidence.


The Black Moth Super Rainbow frontman returns with a more rough-edged and driving record that features two guest-spots from Beck.

Maniac Meat

The longer some formerly hi-tech sound has lingered, the easier it is for some current musician to warp it into a purpose completely at odds with its original ultra-modern innovation. Last generation's gleaming chrome-and-plastic tomorrow gets fed through a chemical bath by some junkshop customer with a home recording studio, and it comes out the other end as a shambling wreck of digital decay, Frankenstein-stitched into discolored reveries or blown-out squalls.
Black Moth Super Rainbow frontman Tom Fec has been on both the mellow and the noisy sides of that mutation process. And where BMSR's last CD release, Eating Us, was a loud but frequently pretty collection of woozily psychedelic prog-pop, Tobacco's second solo album Maniac Meat is all fuzz and snarl, tar-pit bass and rusty-hinged drum machines smashed into corroded analog synths that sound like they were found in a backwoods scrapyard. Think of Boards of Canada's bucolic science-filmstrip wispiness run through a grease-caked doom metal/funk filter, or El-P's noisier productions with the dread and horror replaced by giddy bewilderment. I don't namedrop lightly-- it's actually a familiar, comfortable ride if you keep previous experiences with Geogaddi or Fantastic Damage at the forefront of your head while listening to this.
That's more of a case of kinship than replication. Tobacco shares those artists' samples-and-synths methodology towards similar hip-hop-skewing ends, but he tends to keep a finer balance toward both sides of his "ugly beauty" approach. Tobacco's inhuman, vaguely menacing but mysteriously cheerful filtered voice has a lot to do with that. It's the source of much of the album's decayed-future personality, drawing ambiguous threats, damaged come-ons, and grotesque accusations through unsettlingly fragile vocoder whispers: "Lick the witch/ Make a friend tonight"; "You got sick from a lolly lolly lollipop/ You feel free when you're killing me". It's not the only voice, of course: a pair of Beck cameos on "Fresh Hex" and "Grape Aerosmith" feature the same postmodern lyrical ambiguity that made him famous, and evoke the mutant electro of his circa-Midnite Vultures B-sides. But Fec's tone of subtly unhinged, deceptively naïf-like menace-- or deceptively menacing giddiness, depending on what you've just fed into your system-- runs the show.
That goes double for the motley collection of jury-rigged electronic debris he funnels his music through. Synthetic and live drums alike are both amplified to the point of borderline physical discomfort, basslines melt into riffs that growl like oversized predators, and the treble end is dominated by distorted analog buzzes that sound more like Nintendo superbikes than any kind of easily-graspable hook. But then a bright keyboard melody will jump out-- a Cars-like siren wailing over the hopped-up punk racket of "Constellation Dirtbike Head"; a glimmering electric chime piercing the machine-shop boom-bap of "Motorlicker"; soul pianos and fluttering synths that make "Six Royal Vipers" sound like the Tron version of Willie Mitchell's Hi Records sound-- and the ghosts of prog rock, g-funk and new wave past manifest into a recollection of how audacious those old sounds used to be in the first place. It doesn't take a lot to make old technology sound damaged and creepy. But taking the next step and making that creepiness sound appealing is what makes Maniac Meat the feel-weird hit of the summer.


Austin-based rock heroes And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead follow the glorious noise and epic urgency of Source Tags & Codes with this sadly pompous, overreaching monstrosity.

...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead: Worlds Apart

Worlds Apart

Did Source Tags & Codes deserve a 10.0? That's not for me to say, but Matt LeMay rightfully counted it as one of indie rock's truly epic albums. By now, "epic" has grown stretch marks-- the term is thrown around whenever tracks buy into a concept, or break up into movements, or simply push past four minutes. Really, to be epic is to have a grand purpose, a destiny, and to fulfill it-- not out of desire, but out of necessity.
But necessity means struggle, and when I listen to "Another Morning Stoner" or "Baudelaire", I hear a band fighting to keep pace with its own colossal compositions. I hear a rhythm section buffeted by uncompromising tempos. I hear a gun held up to the head of Conrad Keely-- maybe the world's most terrible singer-- and a masked man telling him to sing pretty or die. It's not the band or the songs, but the curious life-or-death stakes by which the band played the songs that deserves the rating the album was awarded.
Understandably, Austin's Trail of Dead didn't have a fucking clue what to do for a follow-up. On 2003's The Secret of Elena's Tomb EP, they tried reprising ST&C; ("All St. Day"), reverted to their early days as a Sonic Youth cover band ("Mach Schau"), and even turned in a poor man's "Iris" ("Counting Off the Days"). No band wants to hear it can't top itself-- an implication that shadowed every perfect rating ST&C; received critically-- and Trail of Dead seemed anxious to abandon their defining opus, which was already beginning to dwarf the band itself in importance.
Worlds Apart is an aspiration, an apology, the sound of confusion. The Interscope tag continues to be Trail of Dead's biggest asset and affliction: The label allows them the freedom to distance themselves from their past achievements, and access to Jimmy Iovine's in-house PR machine, which can win the interest of major media conglomerates, commercial radio and MTV; but the band aims too high as a result, apparently convinced that they have the power to change pop culture from the inside, to engage the public with seemingly radio-safe rock stylings that actually conceal one deceitful, potentially winning twist. Unfortunately, for Worlds Apart, that twist is once-off gimmickry: hamfisted "subversive" lyrics, pointless pastiche, and outrageous self-parody.
Count first single "Worlds Apart" among the thousands of boring three-minute commercial rock songs that-- get this-- criticize commercial rock. The lyric "Look at these cunts on MTV with cars and cribs and shit/ Is that what being a celebrity means?" is this palm-muted, mall-punk schmaltz-waltz's only surprise, passable on first listen and grating thereafter. It doesn't get laughable until the cursing kicks in-- essential to the band's "points"-- and keeps the song off radio.
In several website manifestos (since removed), Keely complained that music lovers consume songs without actually listening to them. He claimed we reduce albums to genre, and artists to their influences, uninterested in finding a song's meaning and unwilling to appreciate their unique human nuances. One such manifesto came packaged with promo copies of Worlds Apart, in fact, as if Keely could convince us to ignore the fact that "The Summer of '91" sounds like the Counting Crows, "Let It Drive" sounds like the Gin Blossoms, "The Rest Will Follow" sounds like Bright Eyes, "All White" sounds like Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie, and the verse melody of "Caterwaul" is the band's most soluble MBV-meets-Sonic Youth rip yet. Much of Worlds Apart plays like a boring mid-90s alt-rock radio mixtape-- so why sit through this shit just to get the band's "jokes"?
Here's the worst joke: Trail of Dead spend so much time being "Worlds Apart" from themselves and the pop culture they engage to overthrow that they only manage one good song. The album's least self-conscious cut, "Will You Smile Again", charges out with a mammoth 5/4 riff, loud and snarling and far more theatrical than the cartoonish "Ode to Isis". Keely sings poorly on "Will You Smile Again" as he does throughout Worlds Apart, but here he turns his biggest challenge into a compelling performance, letting the notes explode into untoned gutturals when they outstretch his range. The seven-minute song's not life-or-death stakes-- it's something bigger, something more confident, but for now a fleeting fancy. Seconds into the title track that follows, Trail of Dead follow a sample of children yelling "YAY!" with Keely sniping, "HEY, FUCK YOU MAN"-- which, of course, makes the kids laugh. This easy switch-up-- kitschy but not considered, cunning but never heartfelt-- is the album's epitaph.


The Swedish folk duo’s fourth album is a showcase for their sweet harmonies, with some bold stylistic departures.

Ruins

As far back as their 2010 debut album, The Big Black and Blue, First Aid Kit distinguished themselves not only with their singing voices but with their shared songwriting voice. Klara and Johanna Söderberg emerged from YouTube, where they were discovered singing Fleet Foxes songs, and quickly revealed a handy facility for penning folk and country tunes that sounded old in their sounds but new in their sentiments. As teenagers, the sisters had absorbed generations of influences, and now that they’re both in their twenties, they’ve sharpened that sensibility with each new album. “Emmylou,” from 2012’s The Lion’s Roar—a starry-eyed rumination on the lure of Gram, Johnny, and the women who sang with them—is particularly emblematic of their philosophy. Persuasive even in its overly romanticized glow, it’s a country song about why they love country songs.
Ruins, their fourth album, continues that twangy trajectory with songs like the elegant honky-tonk number “Postcard” and “Distant Star,” which shows off rougher-hewn harmonies. Both add new twists to the duo’s sound, refining rather than redefining First Aid Kit. Elsewhere, the Söderberg sisters push further. “Hem of Her Dress” is a dramatic departure—a mash note to Neutral Milk Hotel complete with caterwauled vocals and quavering brass. It might come across live, with a crowd singing along, but on record it can’t escape the shadow of its obvious influence. “Fireworks,” on the other hand, is a genuinely affecting torch song, grounded in early rock and old soul rhythms. The guitar arpeggios sound like Buddy Holly, the rhythm section like “Earth Angel,” and the sisters sing with a new fortitude and clarity. (The video, meanwhile, foregoes their usual Laurel Canyon caftans for ’80s prom dresses and some great big hair.)
After working in Omaha with Mike Mogis on The Lion’s Roar and 2014’s Stay Gold, the Söderbergs ventured further west to Portland, Oregon, to record with producer Tucker Martine (Decemberists, case/lang/veirs). Their aesthetics ought to be an ideal marriage: Martine is known for bringing a shimmery sound to contemporary Americana without rendering it slick or reverent. He helps them move fluidly between styles and sounds, even corralling a loose group of backing musicians that includes McKenzie Smith of Midlake and Peter Buck (perhaps returning the favor after First Aid Kit recorded a sharp cover of R.E.M.’s “Walk Unafraid” for the 2014 film Wild). In doing so, however, Martine buffs away some of their eccentricities. Songs like “To Live a Life” and the title track skate by with no real spark and no real demand on your attention.
That’s due as much to the singers as to the producer. Musically adventurous as they are, Klara and Johanna can rely too much on platitude and convention when it comes to lyrics. “It’s a Shame” picks over the bones of a dead relationship, but realizes there’s “no point in wasting sorrow on things that won’t be here tomorrow.” First Aid Kit have always had a fatalist streak, which adds gravity to most songs—they like to point out the dark cloud attached to every silver lining. That makes “Nothing Has to Be True” a beautifully open-ended closer, but it also makes the coda of opener “Rebel Heart” feel a bit heavy-handed. “Nothing matters,” they sing bitterly, “all is futile.” That statement is so blunt, so general that it almost sounds like self-parody: a minor crisis rendered melodramatically.
But only almost. That qualifier is appropriate because it’s Klara and Johanna singing those lines. Their voices complement each other so naturally and so gracefully that it’s easy to forget how much craft there is in these songs, and how much ingenuity they put into their vocals: the way each sings wordlessly on “Fireworks” to reinforce the melancholy of the other’s lead vocals, the way they both roughen up their voices on “Distant Star,” the way they stretch out vowels like taffy on “It’s a Shame.” Theirs are active harmonies—not merely decorative, but always doing something intriguing, pointing to the breadth of styles on the album. The most impressive thing about Ruins is how they make every style under their vintage-store belts feel like an extension of the same history, the same creative urge, their same tastes.


SeeFu Lilac consists of outtakes and fragments from a never-finished Black Moth Super Rainbow album. It's musical ephemera at best, perfectly suited for the rabid BMSR fanbase, but not much else.

SeeFu Lilac

For an artist, consistency is a murky indicator of success. What looks like the honing of craft and technique via repetition can easily be confused for homogeneity and a Clive Cussler-esque predictability. You run the risk of being trapped on an artistic treadmill if you don't decide to throw some of your old tricks in the garbage. And it's awfully hard. But in all arts, be it writing, or the making of psychedelic pop music, sometimes you have to kill all your darlings.
Last time we saw Black Moth Super Rainbow it was 2012, and they were riding high off the spoils of Kickstarter booty and an album that was an index for how far they had come. In* Cobra Juicy*, Tom Fec and his merry band of freaks seemed to have finally revealed the intimations of a more mature musical project. Fast forward to November of last year: With no sixth album in sight, Black Moth Super Rainbow decided to unload, in their own words, "neon flavored outtakes from a 6th album that doesn't yet exist." SeeFu Lilac is just that, outtakes and fragments, musical ephemera at best, perfectly suited for the rabid BMSR fanbase but not much else.
Clocking in at a scant 19 minutes, SeeFu Lilac is a collection of nine songs which slavishly adhere to the sounds and tropes which made BMSR famous in the first place. The ubiquitous vocoder vocals and the patina of vintage synths are all here, along with the same self-satisfied, isolationist nostalgia, which to some paints BMSR as refreshingly authentic and to others gimmicky cranks who haven't listened to an album made after the year 1993. When the band released a stream of the record on Facebook, they proudly rallied against trendiness or marketability, proclaiming "no glam shots, no press releases, no problem."
The one thing that separates SeeFu Lilac from previous BMSR efforts is the noticeable change in disposition. The record as a whole feels sunnier and the nostalgia is less sinister and somehow saccharine. Gone is the seething pop evil that coated Cobra Juicy. Instead of toeing the line between beautiful and grotesque, in these sketches of songs BMSR is trying to sound more subdued and much prettier. Seefu Lilac's most exciting moments come in small instrumental bursts that are calming and melodic. In the album's title track, a ruminative acoustic guitar is put in conversation with a wall of warm synths, and the result is nicely organic and effortless. It gives a hint of the sound BMSR might want to work with in future records.
They benefit from uncluttering their music and removing the fading drapery of distorted effects and wonky inversions, because it showcases what made BMSR so interesting earlier in the 2000s: vintage gear and earnest analog sentimentalism. But this sentimentalism is the very reason why this record is so uninteresting: It's a love letter to their previous work.
I wonder if Fec should toss the vocoder aside. The same suite of effects used to achieve the throaty and warbled vocals hasn't changed at all since Dandelion Gum. At this point, it wouldn't be unfair to say that it's become a gimmick, especially when deployed to tackle subjects like love or loss. The vocoder flattens and parodies whatever emotions a song might be meditating on. In "Since You've Seen Her," it's hard to take Fec seriously as he sadly croons "make a wish" over and over again.
In a recent interview addressing the album, Fec said that he thought a lot of contemporary music felt "so desperate." He made sure to backtrack and soften this statement, saying that: "Maybe I am kind of a recluse, and maybe..I don't have the greatest perspectives of everything." Fec has painted himself as an outsider for years, and it's not surprising that he finds so much of music just outside his lair unrelatable; you can hear it in the music he makes. It's the product of living in an echo chamber and not paying attention to the changes in both DIY and synth-driven music in the last four years. Fec has admitted to a certain amount of frustration with the sixth proper BMSR album, and the release of SeeFu Lilac is music he "needed to get out of [his] head" because it didn't fit in where he was going artistically. Hopefully Fec and friends have exorcised their nagging demons with SeeFu Lilac, and move forward into something very different.


Despite the Roman numerals and German words in its title, Lamb of God’s seventh album is a satisfactorily settled, gimmick-free record. VII: Sturm und Drang, featuring a guest spot from the Deftones' Chino Moreno, is also the metal stalwarts' most alluring album in years.

VII: Sturm und Drang

We do not live in a golden age of major-label heavy metal. Gone are the days when many of the worldwide form’s biggest innovators earned large budgets from still-larger companies or bidding wars occurred for the most brutal new prospect. Though there are exceptions, most modern metal backed by largesse aims so squarely for genre rigidity and predictability that it’s hard to believe it requires humans to make. It’s as though the stuff comes from a factory in some anonymous and once-economically depressed flyover town, conveniently produced in five-band package tours that are almost impossible to distinguish but easy to absorb. Meanwhile, the new metal records that seem destined to matter as masterpieces, like Tribulation’s recent Children of the Night, arrive largely from the indie fringes. After three decades under Rick Rubin’s aegis, even the mighty Slayer have decamped to an indie for the forthcoming Repentless.
During the past decade, Lamb of God have struggled with such a fate. Since signing to Epic Records for their third album, 2004’s Ashes of the Wake, they’ve often seemed a rather regimented metal band. Every two or three years, they would churn out another 10 or so songs, with big grooves and death metal outbursts decorated by lots and lots of guitars. Randy Blythe was a rampaging frontman, the kind who encouraged that you get loud with his tirades. But Lamb of God always teased the edges of their sound, trying to push beyond their meat-and-potatoes metal reputation with each release. It’s as if they felt guilty about their well-heeled position on Epic and tried to use it to gradually inch away from stylistic and financial safety, somehow back toward the fringes. By the time they issued 2012’s Resolution, such distractions had wantonly diluted their strengths, resulting in an abysmal record of mediocre hooks and banal studio gimmicks.
Despite the highfaluting combination of Roman numerals and German words it takes as a title, Lamb of God’s very good seventh album, VII: Sturm und Drang, is a satisfactorily settled record, arguably their first such effort in a decade. Sturm und Drang takes decidedly few chances. Instead, it sticks mostly to up-tempo numbers, countered only by a clean-singing ballad that soon enough heads for the pit and a righteous stomper that eventually sublimates into something like shoegaze with the help of Deftone Chino Moreno. All of these songs are studded with enormous refrains and driven by a sense of urgency that Lamb of God have forsaken in recent years. When Blythe’s distended scream rips across howling amplifiers at the start of "Still Echoes", or when "Delusion Pandemic" snaps right into a belligerent stomp, it’s as if they’ve finally got too much to say to fuck around with being fancy. By not trying to be overly interesting or involved, Lamb of God have made one of their most alluring albums in years.
The newfound energy and efficiency seem to stem, in part, from between-album trauma: In 2012, months after the release of Resolution, Czech police arrested Blythe in a Prague airport. He spent five weeks awaiting trial for a manslaughter charge after he pushed a teenaged fan, who subsequently died, off the stage at a concert there two years earlier. Blythe was acquitted, but the process hung like a cloud around the band. They scrapped plans for shows and talked about taking a long break. Rather than languish, however, Lamb of God reassembled in the studio and got to work on several songs that examined the frontman’s time in prison and his rather hostile feelings at large.
The obvious approach worked: "Still Echoes" explores the Nazi history of Prague’s Pankrác Prison, his anger for the subject animating the song with feeling. The guitars twist and scrape like the anxious hands of a very nervous person. It smartly points to Blythe’s prison time without exploiting it, powerfully suggesting that his stint inside allowed him to think about the rest of the world’s problems just as much as his own. And though the irrepressible "512" is named for the cell where Blythe spent some time, it’s penned from a much broader perspective. He serves not as the prisoner but as the spokesmen for them. "My hands are painted red/ My future is painted black/ I’ve become someone else," he screams in one of the band’s best choruses ever, deflecting much of the blame at a society that creates its own criminals. He lodges similar criticisms during the bracing-and-racing "Footprints", a song about environmental degradation, and the wonderfully thrashing spree "Delusion Pandemic", a madman philippic on Internet culture. As laughable as Blythe’s hook about mockingbirds being fed to wolves may be, it’s an irresistible moment.
As with the other numbers about self-immolating heroes, Nazi assassins, or media distortion, every song on Sturm und Drang feels like an outburst unmitigated by extraneous tinkering or trials. The production is dense, thin, and minimal, the guitars and drums pushed tight to give all these lyrics extra oomph. The fancy features are limited to a talkbox solo here and a Henry Rollins-like spoken-word bit there. Rather than distract from the hooks, they only reinforce them through contrast. No, Sturm und Drang isn’t a landmark of major-label heavy metal, but it is a reminder of just how very good one of its biggest bands can be when they have something to worry about other than trying so hard to be important.


On their fourth record, the succinctly titled IV, BADBADNOTGOOD rein in their jam-band impulses, delivering a velvet-crushed portrait of an effervescent lounge act in the 21st century.

IV

Five years ago, Canada’s BADBADNOTGOOD, then a trio, uploaded a shaky black-and-white clip of them playing jazz interpolations of Odd Future songs onto YouTube. (Most prominent among them was raucous rendition of “Orange Juice.”) They played the suite for their professors at music school to a chilly reception. Bad grade and all, things turned out well, and they caught the eye of Tyler, the Creator, who became their first supporter, sharing their “Odd Future Sessions” on social media. Just a year later, they uploaded yet another video—Tyler, the Creator running through “Orange Juice” with BBNG as a backing band. The band’s technical prowess and smooth sound cushioned Tyler’s snarl. Their drummer, Alex Sowinski, is clad in a creepy pig mask, and Tyler stalks around the room with a Colt 45 in hand. Filled with whimsical vulgarity and instrumental pyrotechnics, it was visual candy for college-aged boys.
BBNG was essentially on their way to becoming world’s most successful hip-hop jam band. In the last five years, their solo work has focused on a mix of original compositions and covers of famous hip-hop instrumentals. In that way, like the myriad Phish cover bands that flock to our continent’s music schools, chops do not compensate for bad taste. Last year, they produced a record with Ghostface Killah, titled Sour Soul, which more or less served as a breakthrough moment for them. (The band sprinted way past Killah with their mercurial speedball pace.) On their fourth record, the succinctly titled *IV, *they’ve reined in their jam band impulses, delivering a velvet-crushed portrait of an effervescent lounge act in the 21st century.
They’ve now added a fourth member, the multi-instrumentalist Leland Whitty, who’s been a sideman with the band for years, playing guitar and saxophone. In keeping with BBNG’s growing boundaries, they’ve invited features for the first time. In IV, they managed to rope in Future Islands’ Sam Herring, Kaytranada, Colin Stetson, Mick Jenkins, and the Toronto R&B singer Charlotte Day Wilson. And it’s in the features that you can get a real sense of how much more flexible and relaxed BBNG have become as a band.
The best of these is Sam Herring’s contribution, “Time Moves Slow,” where his gravelly voice pairs nicely with the sounds of the Crumar electric organ. It was the first indicator here that BBNG were moving away from their hip-hop roots to a more lounge-y R&B style. This continues in featureless songs like “Chompy’s Paradise,” which includes an incredibly slinky and plasticine sax solo from Whitty. It recalls all the music from The Pink Panther to “Gilligan's Island”—the sunny attitude of mai-tais by the pool, the elegance of donning an exquisitely crisp trench coat. On the ballad “In Your Eyes,” Charlotte Day Wilson strikes a middle-ground between these two dispositions. Her voice generates the murmur of a foggy room draped in cigarette smoke and the clink of martini glasses. But the surrounding instruments around her can air towards the pleasantly goofy, mixing in flute and acoustic guitar, conjuring up images of that infamous scene from *Anchorman. *
In fact, the jazz flute liberally peppered throughout IV offers large swaths of the music a very special brand of cornball poise. “Speaking Gently,” for example, would sound fantastic as theme music for a Vincent Price horror film. “Cashmere” collages together Dave Brubeck-inspired pianos with Bossa Nova percussion, and it’s the best example of slacker grace that these guys have been able to cultivate. It’s something that would be played in the classier sections of Rob Gronkowski's party cruise.
IV teeters between bland and anonymous fare. The new fusion jazz sounds they’ve adopted make their weirder tendencies more muted, or at least commiserate. It’s hard for BBNG to strike the balance between straight-up beauty and a freewheeling spirit. In the title track, for example, Whitty’s frenetic sax work and Matthew Tavares’ hyperactive Rhodes piano mashing can feel claustrophobic and luxuriantly cheesy. And there are true missteps that seem like headscratchers on paper, like the features with Kaytranada or Colin Stetson. The composition with Stetson, “Confessions Pt. II,” is probably the most disappointing song on *IV. *It hones in on the disparity between masterful technique and compositional restraint that BBNG has always struggled to balance. Stetson and Whitty’s dueling saxophones are skillful without a doubt, but this is the also where the band retreats back to their rote jam band noodling.
BBNG can still be frustrating, but IV is a sign of a band hitting its stride. It’s their most jazz-forward album, and it’s filled with some markers of magnificent growth. BBNG move between instruments and sounds effortlessly. And they are distinct but generous enough to make vocal guests feel natural in their particular environment: bro sophistication.