Like the Cure’s *Disintegration or Depeche Mode’s Violator, *the Pet Shop Boys’ fourth album transitioned their creators into the ’90s by both refining and breaking from the past.

Behaviour

Pet Shop Boys arrived in the second half of the ’80s to out-gay essentially everybody. Combining Oscar Wilde-ian wit, compositional and lyrical sophistication that harkened back to Cole Porter and Noël Coward, sartorial style that split the difference between uptown chic (singer Neil Tennant) and downtown rough trade (keyboardist Chris Lowe), and a command of ’80s club music that soon proved itself far more comprehensive than most of their contemporaries, this North England-raised/London-based synthpop duo aestheticized gay life long before Tennant came out in 1994. Every LGBT person knew exactly what the pair meant in the chorus of “It’s A Sin,” arguably the angriest and certainly most overtly anti-Catholic chorus ever to top the UK pop chart and reach the U.S. Top 10:

Everything I’ve ever done
Everything I ever do
Every place I’ve ever been
Everywhere I’m going to
It’s a sin

But after becoming one of the most internationally prominent acts of the ’80s with hits like their UK/U.S. #1 “West End Girls,” Tennant and Lowe entered the ’90s knowing their “imperial phase” of uninterrupted success was over: Setting “Ché Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat,” their quintessential manifesto “Left to My Own Devices” stalled at #84 on Billboard’s pop chart in late ’88; their ’89 collaboration with Liza Minnelli, Results, pretty much flopped in North America beyond gay dancefloors, and the ’90 comeback they helped helm for Dusty Springfield, Reputation, didn’t even get a U.S. release—despite all of them doing quite well in the UK.
Following these alternately sunny and frosty records, they released their decidedly autumnal fourth album Behaviour in the fall of 1990. Like the Cure’s Disintegration, Depeche Mode’s Violator, and George Michael’s Listen Without Prejudice, it would transition their creators into the new decade by both refining and breaking from the past. The time was right, for the duo and indeed much of its following were now in mourning. Singer/lyricist Tennant’s longtime best friend had recently died of AIDS. So had Robert Mapplethorpe, who shot some of their Please-period publicity photos, and Keith Haring, who similarly intersected fine art and the club scene. Reported U.S. AIDS cases were well over 100,000, with millions on the way globally, and despite the earliest AIDS drugs like AZT, which in those days often made people sicker, an HIV-positive test result was still pretty much a death sentence. Created in resistance to a mainstream that treated LGBTs as subhuman, the queer culture of defiance and liberation that shaped ’70s disco and much of ’80s pop—particularly PSB’s hybrid of both—was literally dying.
Unfolding like an elegy for much of what had gone before, Behaviour shifted the Boys from sly commentators to reserved-but-pained participants, with its understated but devastating lead track, “Being Boring.” The first verse presents the singer looking through keepsakes, as one does after losing a loved one. He finds a party invite paraphrasing Zelda Fitzgerald’s “Eulogy on the Flapper,” specifically the line “She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring.” Boredom was a prickly subject for the pair: Their early deadpan videos and TV appearances were routinely dismissed by clueless critics as generating it.
Set in the ’70s, the next verse depicts the singer leaving his hometown, a mandatory rite of LGBT passage. He softly declares, “I’d bolted through a closing door,” an image evoking both the end of his closeted adolescence and the beginning of fully realized adulthood. By the third verse, which is set in the ’90s, the singer is self-actualized, but reflective: “All the people I was kissing/Some are here, and some are missing.” That simple rhyme still reduces gay men who lived through this era to tears, for AIDS had sorted our intimates into these two categories—those who died young, and those who might soon follow suit, including ourselves. If you hadn’t seen your gay neighbors and friends and former sexual partners around town, chances were they were dead, had gone home to die, or were nursing the dying just like you. “But I thought in spite of dreams,” the survivor sings of his fallen pal, “you’d be sitting somewhere here with me.”
Fashion photographer Bruce Weber shot the song’s lush B&W video, which features models enacting a fantasy version of the parties Tennant attended in the ’70s. The tension between the freedom of Weber’s imagery and the sadness of the third verse makes the eulogy even more devastating, but some fleeting nudity meant that MTV in America had an excuse not to show it. Still, “Being Boring”—ostensibly a dance track, but one featuring fluttering rhythms, a Larry Heard-style deep house bassline that appears only as the album version fades out, a subtle upward chorus modulation that adds sweetness to the sorrow, and a whirring plastic tube conjuring spectral cries—eventually earned its rightful acclaim. A fan site solely devoted to it dwarfs the official web presence of many bands, and on its 20th anniversary, a Guardian critic proclaimed it the greatest single of all time. Even Axl Rose allegedly bemoaned its non-appearance during the duo’s 1991 tour.
That tour, Performance, their first in North America, transformed the staginess of their videos into opulent theater just as Blonde Ambition did for Madonna the year before; in the Pets’ case, it was so over-budget that the well-attended trek still lost half-a-million dollars. And just as the autobiographical Like a Prayer fed Blonde Ambition, the personal nature of Behaviour lent Performance pathos. The dirge that opened the show, “This Must Be the Place I Waited Years to Leave,” affirmed that, like Madonna, Tennant suffered major Catholic damage. The tune is hummable, but the tone intersects opera and Joy Division as it evokes Catholic mass, freezing rain, and grey architecture. No wonder the Pets eschewed the church for wit and disco.
True to their queer sensibility, PSB are intrinsically contrary, even with themselves, and just as their previous release, 1988’s Introspective, is all 12”-length dance numbers, Behaviour is mostly ballads. Even on overt club cuts, its lead single “So Hard” and “The End of the World,” the dance grooves that defined the duo are muted: No more big ’80s drums, no electro rumble or hi-NRG clatter, even if “So Hard” ramps up the trademark orchestral blasts of their previous hits. Rather than the sample-heavy rave bleeps that ruled 1990 UK pop, the album favors analogue synths overseen by co-producer Harold Faltermeyer, the Munich synth whiz who’d been Giorgio Moroder’s key player and had scored with Beverly Hills Cop’s “Axel F.”
But though the instrumentation is mostly as synthetic as before, it’s less pointedly so; the future was no longer as inviting as it had been in the duo’s formative years, when they dreamt of man-machines and home computers. Embracing their humanism to mirror their messages, the pair often blur the boundaries between synthetic and natural sounds: Mirroring the instability of post-communist Russia, “My October Symphony” fuses banging Italo-house piano, “Funky Drummer” syncopation, Marvin Gaye-esque yearning, and the classical strings of Balanescu Quartet, which all blend with the Prophets and Rolands and Marr’s wah-wah guitar so seamlessly that the hybrid suggests Shostakovich going Blaxploitation. You certainly couldn't call it just “synthpop.”
In the booklet for the album’s 2001 deluxe reissue, Tennant paints the unabashed love aria “To Face the Truth” as the story of a man who cannot acknowledge his girlfriend’s infidelities. But like so many PSB songs, it makes more sense in an LGBT context; that his lover is a bisexual who dodges their emotional bond. Having same-gender sex dictates that you’re homosexual, but loving someone of your own gender makes you gay—a step too far for some. “I wonder if you care and cannot bear the proof/It hurts too much to face the truth,” Tennant croons at the top of his tenor. Having just worked with Liza and Dusty, he’d suddenly become a more expressive singer, one here as adept at conveying sincerity as he’d always been at generating irony. The programmed rhythms hail from ’80s R&B, but his vocal is ’70s Bee Gees; had this been on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, we’d all know it.
Lyrically the most old-school PSB-y song of the lot, “How Can You Expect to Be Taken Seriously?” roasts sanctimonious rock stars who claim to hate fame’s machinations but nevertheless align themselves with the trendiest causes. There’d been plenty of those in the wake of Band Aid, Live Aid, Farm Aid, and “We Are the World,” and they pretty much wiped out the more subversive and often queer “New Pop” movement that spawned the Pets. The album version is set atypically to a New Jack Swing beat, the kind that gave even Boy George a US R&B radio hit with “Don’t Take My Mind on a Trip” the year before, but the seldom heard single/video version remixed it into a more flattering Soul II Soul-style shuffle. Back home, its critique was bolstered by appearing on the flipside of their newly recorded medley of U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name” and the Four Seasons’ “I Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You,” which echoed Boys Town Gang’s shamelessly camp disco-ization of the latter. Bono, who spotted the satirical finger being pointed in his direction, quipped, “What have we done to deserve this?”
As straightforward as “Seriously” is skewed, album closer “Jealousy” goes furthest in a quasi-symphonic direction. Played on keyboards but booming like a massive orchestra, it’s fraught with romantic angst like their earliest work, yet it suits their new phase of unfettered emotionality. The scene-setting opening conjures the outsized ardor of 19th-century art song: “At dead of night when strangers roam/The streets in search of anyone who’ll take them home/I lie alone…” And the rest similarly picks up where Scott Walker’s covers of Jacques Brel left off.
A crooner, not a belter, Tennant sets his vocal understatement against the over-the-top nature of his blinding passion for an unrequited love. This conflict mirrors the LGBT experience itself: You’ve got all this desire that must somehow be contained to a small percentage of the population, lest you find yourself making a pass at someone who might not share your sexuality and who might respond with condemnation or even violence. So you keep your outer voice small and whispery like Tennant’s, but that constant monitoring and muting only intensifies your inner life, and so you bear the burden of these feelings—here represented by the grandness of the orchestration, the despair of the descending vocal melody, the processional horns that bear a stubbornly regal retreat. There’s no apology implied—quite the opposite.
Simpatico women understand this proud juxtaposition: Liza Minnelli considers Tennant and Lowe geniuses akin to Broadway maestro Stephen Sondheim or her dad. Pet Shop Boys critique masculinity the way classic rock bands exude it, but rather than the flamboyance that’s intrinsic to the gay pop star from Little Richard onward, PSB offer the calm control of the outsider looking in, their noses pressed against the shop window.
Having experienced worldwide eminence exactly when their people fell into deeper crisis than ever, they rarely took the easy path, and on subsequent releases like Very’s “Dreaming of the Queen,” they imagined a world in which there were no more lovers left alive. Fortunately, people kept dancing, and Pet Shop Boys still supply their nocturnal soundtrack. Last month, Billboard announced PSB as the all-time top male act on its dance club chart: With last year’s “The Pop Kids,” they landed their 40th hit on that list in 30 years, and 11th No. 1. That they did so with a song as wistful as those on Behaviour makes this achievement truly singular. Embracing disposable pop, they’ve created lasting queer culture just as it was in danger of disappearing. They celebrate the melancholia of being gay.


Okkervil River’s Will Sheff approached Away like a solo record, collaborating with jazz, folk, and classical musicians. It contains the thrill of listening to a person take risks.

Away

Away is the first Okkervil River album without Okkervil River on it. Will Sheff’s backing band has been a revolving door for a while now, yet even as new faces came and went, they’d always conducted themselves as a real band, especially on the road, where their live shows remained as feverish as ever. But after a tumultuous few years marked by loss and even more lineup changes than usual, Sheff was left questioning whether he even wanted to continue the group. The frontman approached Away like a solo project, writing it on his own and cherry-picking session players to help him record. And as part of that new approach, Sheff turned his back on the frothy rock‘n’roll that had previously driven the band’s finest moments.
To start, on Away, Sheff has said that he tried to avoid working with rock musicians. “I’m not as interested in rock‘n’roll as I used to be,” he said. “I don’t really think of this as rock.” And so for Away he went full Astral Weeks, stacking the deck with jazz, folk, and classical musicians, including members of the orchestral ensemble yMusic and Marissa Nadler, who lends harmony vocals throughout. Drummer Cully Symington is the only carryover from the last incarnation of Okkervil River, and from his featherlight, Connie Kay-esque brush work here, you’d never guess he’s the same guy who’s been drumming for Cursive for the last few years.
Sheff ratifies his fresh start by symbolically killing off the band on the album opener “Okkervil River R.I.P.” “They had some great songs/Must have been a great time so long ago,” he sings on the nearly seven-minute elegy to his past, his creaky voice rising to an early-Dylan sneer as the song is hugged by some familiar Wurlitzer organ. Those woozy organs have been an Okkervil River signature since the very first song of their first record, but here they serve as a callback to something lost, a little more kindling for the funeral pyre.
A nearly seven-minute opener could be an album’s flagship statement, but Away is packed with so many songs that approach or pass the seven-minute mark that none carries more weight than any other. A modestly fit listener could run a mile in the time it takes to get through the gentlest number, “Call Yourself Renee,” a soft parade of strings and woodwinds with the hushed quality of Nick Drake. The twinkling “Judey on a Street” is even longer and in less of hurry. Sheff frames it as a lesson about the virtues of patience: “I’m gonna wait for my girl to come,” he sings, “She always takes a little time.” And so do these songs.
Away’s unflashy, lyrics-first approach marks a correction from Okkervil River’s production-centric last couple of records, 2011’s prickly I Am Very Far and 2013’s openhearted The Silver Gymnasium. The latter album was pitched on a clever gimmick: Sheff took on the big pop aesthetics of his childhood, tapping the same vein of ’80s nostalgia that made Netflix’s “Stranger Things” such a sleeper hit this summer. It was a play for a wider audience, and a spirited one, but the public didn’t bite. Now, a songwriter who once passed himself off as so indifferent to the spotlight that he made an entire record about it—and then a sequel—fears being shut out. (“I’ve been up and down in my career, and I’ve spent time worrying about it,” Sheff admitted to NPR.) Those anxieties come across on “The Industry,” the closest Away comes to a rock song. “I thought that it was us against the world,” Sheff croons, “but now it’s me against something so big and abstract that I can’t tell what it is.”
Sheff isn’t really interested in sour grapes, though. Instead of griping about an industry that’s no longer working for him, he made a change and tested out a new direction. Away doesn’t aim for the rafters the way Okkervil River did on their best albums, when Sheff was unabashedly playing to the crowd. But there’s a sense that he’s making the record for himself, and an attendant thrill that comes from eavesdropping on that. Away’s scope may be personal, but its takeaways are universal. It’s a touching album about moving on, about the satisfaction of leaving the past behind before it leaves you.


Philadelphia Internaional auteurs Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff-- the primary architects of the 1970s' upwardly-mobile orchestral version of soul-- are celebrated on a pair of compilations.

Various Artists: The Sound of Philadelphia: Gamble & Huff's Greatest Hits / Conquer the World: The Lost Soul of Philadelphia International Records

Philadelphia International was a purpose-driven appellation for a record label, the source and the destination both outlined in the name itself. Much like Motown in the 1960s declaring itself "The Sound of Young America", Philadelphia International aimed to conquer the world with a specific, auteur-driven sound steeped in the roots of one major American metropolis-- and the auteurs in question were Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff, who stood as the primary architects of the 1970s' upwardly-mobile orchestral version of soul. Their productions' opulence, smoothness, and chops-- abetted by MFSB, one of the great studio bands in music history-- paved the way for disco, sparked inspiration in Elton John and David Bowie, and acted as the soulful but crossover-friendly counterpart to the decade's wild-assed, post-Sly Stone funk much in the same way Berry Gordy's meticulous empire offset the grittiness of Stax and Atlantic. MFSB's "T.S.O.P. (The Sound of Philadelphia)" had only one line, "people all over the world"-- an echo of the underlying sentiment from one of the label's big early smashes, the O'Jays' "Love Train", but also a clear statement of who, exactly, they were aiming their music towards.
The Sound of Philadelphia: Gamble & Huff's Greatest Hits is a not entirely thorough yet almost unfailingly great cross-section of singles focusing largely on the label's peak years in the early-mid 70s. Just about everything you need to know about the Gamble and Huff approach is covered in the comp's first two songs, both from the O'Jays' 1972 breakthrough LP Back Stabbers-- the optimistic idyll of global-peace dance number "Love Train", and the more cynical (and pragmatic) duplicity warnings of "Back Stabbers". They both feature the songwriting and production team's greatest strengths-- a simple, economic usage of lyricism that worked in both a rhythmic and melodic sense (listen to the way the chorus to "Back Stabbers" unfurls from the slow, sinister glide of "they smiiiiiile in your face" to the rapidfire finger-jabs of "all the time they wanna-take-your-place"), backed with a fine balance of punchy, out-front grooves and almost delicate orchestral ornamentation. All that, with the vocal interplay of lead singer Eddie Levert and backups Walter Williams and William Powell-- well, it's nothing short of world-beating.
The rest of the compilation is filled with songs that hit the top five on both the r&b and pop charts-- Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes' elegiac, gorgeous "If You Don't Know Me By Now" (a career-making performance from the young singer Teddy Pendergrass); Billy Paul's sly yet guilt-wracked infidelity ballad "Me and Mrs. Jones"; the Three Degrees' "When Will I See You Again", which made longing sound strangely peppy. It's telling that seven of the compilation's 14 tracks fall in a two-year span, and once it gets past 1972-1973 things get even more lush and orchestrated, until it flirts with adult contemporary sounds. But given the singers-- the velvety rumble of Lou Rawls in "You'll Never Find Another Love Like Mine", or the old-school street-corner doo-wop flourishes of the Intruders' "I'll Always Love My Mama"-- there's a sense that this sound of middle-class luxury was hard-achieved from the ground floor up. Throw in a couple late-period ballads by Pendergrass ("Close the Door") and Patti Labelle ("If Only You Knew", the only post-70s track in the collection) and McFadden & Whitehead's "Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now"-- disco's greatest moment of populist hubris-- and it's clear that Philadelphia International's peak didn't taper off much. Like many Greatest Hits albums, especially label-centered ones, The Sound of Philadelphia does have that ever-present Catch-22-- the only real weakness in the songs included here is an overwhelming (if comforting) familiarity, but it's also easy to wonder why some equally familiar songs were left out; there's plenty other places to hear the O'Jays' "For the Love of Money", but why not here, too? At least the gaps don't cut out too much context or history; it's a shame we don't get to hear Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes' rapturous lament "Bad Luck" or the euphoria of MFSB's disco blueprint "Love Is the Message" (dubbed by some discophiles and B-boys, in a bit of scene-traversing appropriation, as "Brooklyn's National Anthem"), but their absence doesn't alter the collection's disposition much. There's one regrettably missing track that could've underlined one of Philadelphia International's strongest characteristics-- 1977's "Let's Clean Up the Ghetto", an all-star neighborhood-revival benefit record featuring Rawls, Pendergrass, Paul, the O'Jays, & Dee Dee Sharp, was one of the label's many endeavors set up to give back to their city-- but the rest of the label's unique character is intact.
Or at least the unique character that the Top 40 listener knew. Conquer the World: The Lost Soul of Philadelphia International Records is a counterpart to Gamble & Huff's Greatest Hits-- Philadelphia without the international, a locally focused collection of bands and singers who could lay claim to contributing to the sound of Philadelphia while frequently sounding little like their chart-topping labelmates from the very same area code. Despite the presence of seven songs co-written by either Gamble or Huff (five involving both), their imprint isn't as obvious here, and some of the songs they did write aren't so easily identifiable as such. People's Choice-- also represented on The Sound of Philadelphia by the elastic disco-funk of "Do It Any Way You Wanna"-- deliver some bluesy, full-throated Southern-style soul belting on the Huff-penned "The Big Hurt", Ruth McFadden's "Ghetto Woman (Parts 1 & 2)" features a brassy, fuzz-guitar-drenched arrangement that sounds calculated to one-up every "Theme from Shaft"-geeked coattail rider on the r&b charts, and David "Bunny" Sigler & Dee Dee Sharp's "Conquer the World Together" is a great recapturing of the chemistry that Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell sparked in the studio together.
In fact, it's Sigler who makes his presence known in Conquer the World's most memorable and eccentric moments. As one of Gamble and Huff's longest and closest collaborators, Sigler proved himself to be a versatile lyricist and arranger, not to mention a helluva performer. Aside from "Conquer the World Together", he also delivers on "Everybody Needs Good Lovin' (Parts 1 & 2)", a fiery 1971 single that almost comes across like an answer to Wilson Pickett's 1970 Philly-recorded, Gamble & Huff-penned hit "Get Me Back on Time, Engine Number 9". And Bunny winds up beating Carl Douglas and his trail of kung-fu-alikes to the one-inch punch by a good year or so with 1973's "Theme for Five Fingers of Death", an unofficial title song to the Shaw Brothers classic, punctuated by twangy guitar and percussive backhand slaps and a ton of martial arts pontificating ("I've given you my secret technique for the Iron Fist. Always use it in the cause of justice. Never use it for personal glory"). It's a far cry from getting on board the Love Train.


Swedish singer-songwriter Jens Lekman returns for his genre-conquering second album, encompassing baroque pop, Northern soul, and Swedish beach-party disco. Like the Avalanches if they sang their own tunes, Lekman constructs lush, romantic worlds from vinyl-crackling LP samples, while his wry, melancholic lyrics-- his sharpest and most endearing yet-- prove him the true successor to indie's ultimate lovesick cynics, Jonathan Richman and Stephin Merritt.

Night Falls Over Kortedala

Jens Lekman, the sample-happy Swedish singer-songwriter with the boyfriendable baritone, isn't an artist who changes much from record to record. On his second proper full-length, Night Falls Over Kortedala-- out in Sweden now, and in the U.S. on Secretly Canadian early next month-- Lekman's deadpan style of singing, sunny melodies, and wittily lovelorn lyrics are a lot like what he's been doing since 2004 debut LP When I Said I Wanted to Be Your Dog, and on the EPs compiled on 2005's Oh You're So Silent Jens. "So if you liked that, you'll love this," Jonathan Richman once wrote. Lekman quotes the phrase on his blog.
On the other hand, Jens Lekman isn't quite Jens Lekman anymore. He logged out of MySpace for the last time in February, dissatisfied with the impersonality of the medium. The new Lekman is a 23-year-old American who so far has only one friend; he joins impostor Lekmans already populating Facebook and Friendster. The actual Lekman apparently finds something beautiful in these false copies of himself, and he's come to embrace them. "Just like I've lately embraced all the misinterpretations in the media," he explains, again on his blog.
It all goes to show: Pop's true meaning is whatever we construct for it ourselves. Not just critics or obsessive music lovers, but you, me, and anyone to whom a song means anything. Lekman's stunning Night Falls Over Kortedala embraces this idea more fully than any release of the past few years-- more even than Girl Talk with his memory-pricking laptop references, Kanye West with his canny reuse of classic hooks from Curtis Mayfield and Daft Punk, or mash-up artists with their many one-trick tracks. Like the Avalanches if they sang their own tunes, Lekman borrows liberally from his memories and surroundings, then uses them to create a lush and romantic world worth misinterpreting again and again.
It's a world set mostly within the confines of a Gothenburg, Sweden neighborhood called Kortedala. For this, Lekman has called the album a failure; he'd intended to traverse more ambitious terrain. Whether through samples, stylistic appropriations, or simply lyrics, Kortedala is a globe-conquering record regardless. Its vinyl-crackling arrangements span the baroque pop of Scott Walker, the upbeat rhythms and bright harmonies of Northern soul, and the beach-party disco of fellow Swedish artists Air France, Studio, and the Tough Alliance. Along with wry, sometimes melancholic observations worthy of Richman or the Magnetic Fields' Stephin Merritt, these elements make for Lekman's best record, one likely to captivate even those who were skeptical of his previous releases.
The new album introduces Lekman draped in timpani, strings, and horns on "And I Remember Every Kiss", which samples classical violinist (and gatefold-sleeve inventor) Enoch Light. While recalling late-1960s Walker, the majestic opening also picks up where the Blueboy-sampled orchestration of When I Said... finale "A Higher Power" left off. "I would never kiss anyone/ Who doesn't burn me like the sun," Lekman proclaims here. A track later, though, he admits to sometimes nearly regretting his first kiss: "I see myself on my deathbed, saying, 'I wish I would have loved less.'" But that's when Willie Rosario's orchestral cover of Jimmy Webb's "By the Time I Get to Phoenix"-- also used by the Avalanches-- hits, in all its blissful glory. Love can lead to anguish and shame, but in "Sipping on the Sweet Nectar", the feeling is worth it.
With that, the voyage begins. Current single "The Opposite of Hallelujah" visits 1960s Motown by way of Glasgow chamber-pop; beats sampled from the Tough Alliance take the harp-twinkled melancholy of "I'm Leaving You Because I Don't Love You" to a club in the tropics. "Shirin" brings up the Iraq war as fact, not just political issue; it tells of an immigrant hairdresser at Kortedala Beauty Center (also the name of Lekman's home studio). On the slower "It Was a Strange Time in My Life", a portrait of the artist as a shy and self-loathing young man, a sample of an infant Lekman leads flute and chiming electric guitar into the not-so-distant past. "I had a good time at the party when everyone had left," Lekman sings; throughout the album, backing vocals by El Perro del Mar's Sarah Assbring and Frida Hyvönen ensure his loneliness never overwhelms his charms.
And these are considerable. If rock'n'roll is "the art of making the commonplace revelatory", as critic Greil Marcus once wrote, this fey crooner is a rock'n'roller on par with the Streets' Mike Skinner. Lekman can sing about asthma inhalers, avocados, and a heart "beating like Ringo"; on the aching standout "A Postcard to Nina", he describes an awkward conversation with a girl's stern father who makes clumsy jokes about lie detectors. All of it works. Over sampled a cappella doowop on "Kanske Ar Jag Kar I Dig" (Swedish for "Maybe I'm In Love With You"), Lekman just rambles for a while about something stupid he saw on TV. "This has of course nothing to do with anything/ I just get so nervous when talking with you," he finally admits.
Though not twee exactly, Kortedala may require an appetite for schmaltz-- another way Lekman makes "the commonplace revelatory." If his Four Seasons falsetto on "Shirin" sounds suddenly chic thanks to this year's great Pilooski re-edit of Frankie Valli's "Beggin'", then the unabashedly sentimental "Your Arms Around Me" might be the stumbling block for some listeners. (Its ukulele riff has already been compared to Hanson's "MMMBop".) It really doesn't matter; based on the Situationist concept of détournement, Lekman's song about an unfortunate kitchen mishap is a subversion of any bland source material. Besides, none of us can escape what's least cool about our past-- no matter what influences we list on our MySpace pages, it all informs our experience of pop. Or I could just be misinterpreting again.
Admittedly, no individual moment here quite rises to the heights of early single "Maple Leaves", which hinged on a mistake of its own: "She said that we were just make believe, but I thought she said maple leaves." As an album, however, Kortedala represents the most cohesive statement yet from an immensely talented artist whose early EPs once made him seem like a rebel against the LP form altogether. Like the Renaldo & the Loaf-sampling "Into Eternity", it's a record about moments (and kisses) we take with us-- moments that we (or Lekman) may never have experienced: Our own Kortedala.
So, is "Shirin" the true story of Lekman's hairdresser? Is jaunty "Friday Night at the Drive-in Bingo" really inspired by Lekman's time working what he's described as "the shittiest job in the world"? Did he even actually give up MySpace for good? Lekman takes great records down from their pedestal and reuses them in his art; it could be that he shows as little undue reverence for the facts of his own biography. Lekman follows an admonition from the Tough Alliance song sampled here, which they in turn lifted from 1980s UK left-wing skinhead band the Redskins: "Take no heroes, only inspiration." I can't wait until someone rips off this album.


The Virginia producer Elysia Crampton's debut album is only four songs long, but it represents a monumental undertaking. She has described it as an exploration of Virginia's history as well as a meditation on brownness, on being Latina, and as a kind of geology. Her epiphanies feel hard-won, and they shine all the more brightly for it.

American Drift

Elysia Crampton's debut album is only four songs long, but it represents a monumental undertaking. She has described it as an exploration of Virginia's history as well as a meditation on brownness, on being Latina, as a kind of geology—"as mud, dirt and mineral, enmeshed in lithic, vast time scales." Those are big, provocative ideas, but anyone who has ever logged serious mileage crossing the continent will have devoted at least some thought to the bonds of landscape and identity, and Crampton has covered more ground than most. She grew up between Southern California and northern Mexico; these days, she makes her home in Weyers Cave, Va., a small town (pop. 2473) in the Shenandoah Valley.
Specific places and the vastness of the continent itself both give shape to American Drift, an album of luminous digital synths and jarring samples whose title suggests tectonic plates and manifest destiny and maybe even car racing (not impossible, given Crampton's interest in monster trucks and the culture of car stereos). "Axacan" gets its title from a 16th-century Spanish mission in present-day Virginia whose personnel were killed by the members of a native tribe (who were, in turn, massacred by Spanish reinforcements sent up from Florida). "American Drift", the album's meditative opening track, takes the form of an invocation: over tolling bells, a solemn voice rhetorically unites heaven and earth in unmistakably carnal terms—"O talus-sloped speared summit/ O earthwork and eyeball/ Varicose and branched…" It's heady stuff, complete with references to the 17th-century Christian allegory Pilgrim's Progress.
But the encyclopedic references also work on a purely visceral level. Sonically, the album is like a hillside that's been worn away by erosion to reveal a sedimentary record of the millennia. "Petrichrist" is steeped in the chorused grunts of DJ Mustard and his trap imitators, and Lil Jon's trademark yelps are spread liberally across "Axacan". That song gets its loping triplet cadence from Andean huayño—a nod both to Crampton's Bolivian roots and to her time in Mexico, where she delved into huayño and cumbia via the local tribal guarachero—and its counter-rhythms come from the unsteady pulsing of crickets, suggesting a natural heartbeat beneath all those gleaming digital surfaces. And what a jagged gleam: all four tracks bristle with dissonant MIDI horns, speed-dial touch-tone bleeps, subwoofer-testing explosions, shell casings clattering to the ground, and all manner of FM radio special ef-ef-ef-ef-ects, like a morning show on steroids. As much as it is a record of the landscape of the Americas, American Drift is also, I think, a communion with the airwaves, an investigation of the ways that radio has contributed to the development of sonic dialects up and down the continent, shaping the way different communities hear not just sounds but frequencies, from the wash of white noise to the THX-worthy rumble of deepest sub-bass.
It is not easy listening. Crampton's music never has been. Previously, as E+E, she developed her voice as a collage artist, layering R&B vocals with cumbia beats and explosive digital effects in a way that suggested standing in the middle of a television showroom in which every flatscreen was tuned to a different channel and every 5.1 system pushed deeply into the red. Likewise, listening to American Drift requires work to make sense of it all; it can be physically fatiguing. But it can also be exhilarating. Turn up "Wing" loud enough, wrap yourself up in the woodblock rhythms and trap chants and coruscating organs and a melody that sneakily resembles Shannon's "Let the Music Play", and the effect is overwhelming in the best way. There is a deeply ecstatic spiritual dimension to Crampton's work, and it invests her futurism with much more power than the usual techno-futurist's pose. As a self-proclaimed "transevangelist," her concept of futurism is deeply invested in gender, in transformation, and in the process of becoming one's true self, and that, in turn, invests her music with an undeniable honesty and urgency. Her epiphanies feel hard-won, and they shine all the more brightly for it.


The audacious composer Max Richter has created an eight-hour piece meant to serve as a sleep aid. But it is more than that. For these 31 uninterrupted pieces, Richter accepts the extraordinary challenge of not only aiding sleep but also translating the act into art. If you listen while you’re awake, many of these pieces conjure dreamy states, where ideas seem fluid and flexible and the world around you seems somehow softer.

Sleep

It is hard to know what to make of Sleep, the new eight-hour album and therapeutic project from the perennially audacious British composer Max Richter. On one hand, the purpose is simple: Richter intends for the listener to press "play" on the full-length digital version, nod off to sleep somewhere between the patient piano chords of "Dream 1" and the vocal-and-organ ululations of "Path 3," and re-emerge after eight hours of music to a gentle crescendo of stretching strings, wordless harmonies, and long-tone bass near the close of "Dream 0". By consulting with famed neuroscientist and past collaborator David Eagleman, Richter has created a slow-motion, electronics-and-chamber-ensemble hybrid meant to reinforce and reflect natural sleep cycles. "An invitation to dream," Richter has called it.
On the other hand, the third-of-a-day span between the beginning and the end isn’t some inert, sustained tone, simply meant to maintain a snooze. Instead, it’s an ever-shifting set of meticulously performed pieces that both affirm and expand Richter’s reach as a composer. He webs together string quartets and electronic drones, tense duets for piano and violin, and somnolent keyboard meditations. Richter brings most of his interests as a composer to bear here, too. He blends an Arvo Pärt-like sense of motion with deep, low notes and shimmering drones that reflect his past in electronica and adoration of Brian Eno. His love of high-minded concepts, previously reflected by the likes of his essential The Blue Notebooks, meets his exquisite, human touch as a pianist.
So should you use Sleep as directed, as "a landscape … where people could fall asleep"? Or should you sit upright and let the beguiling Richter ease your daylight hours? Can you actually do both?
Richter, of course, is not alone in his quest to help listeners rest better. Sleep is an active avenue of both art and commerce—in large part, it would seem, because we do not get enough of it. The ceaseless streams of social media feeds and on-demand entertainment have intensified that diagnosis. According to Sleepless in America, a National Institutes of Health-supported documentary aired last year by National Geographic, the average person now dozes thousands of hours less than they once would have, a condition that comes with profound physical and mental symptoms. Instead, we spend billions of dollars every year on ways to get more sleep, from medicines that induce it and conditions that foster it to beds that support it and systems that monitor it. We write books meant to reward children for falling asleep, and in a rather Orwellian twist, we weed out employees whose sleep disorders might disrupt productivity.
And when we do get it, we brandish it, whether bragging about how good it felt, analyzing our dreams, or funneling pieces of the experience into art. A recent show in New York sampled centuries of art inspired by hypnagogia, that surreal state of mind just between wake and sleep; in 2013, the hotel chain Ibis introduced a feature to guests that tracked their nocturnal movements and transformed them into a lysergic piece of "Sleep Art". Sleep fascinates exactly as it frustrates, creating a reflexive cycle that never actually ends.
For these 31 uninterrupted pieces, Richter accepts the extraordinary challenge of not only aiding sleep but also translating the act into art—that is, he scores a scene he sets himself. If you listen while you’re awake, many of these pieces conjure dreamy states, where ideas seem fluid and flexible and the world around you seems somehow softer. "Aria 2", which arrives in the piece’s final third, turns a sublime piano phrase into a seemingly infinite maze, as though you could follow it forever and never go anywhere. Strings and electronics wash around the melody in waves, oscillating glacially between a few glowing notes like Sigur Rós at their most romantic or Stars of the Lid at their most staid.
"If You Came This Way" suggests the sweeping, soaring motion of a symphony, though muted and slightly distant, as if it were being played in another room of the same building. The action grows grand only for an instant, testing the limits of your reverie only to galvanize it a moment later. And the gorgeous "Song / Echo" seems to do for chamber pop what Grouper has long done for folk rock—disassemble it and scatter the elements in a cloud, making something so wide and gentle that you think you might be able to live inside it. You can snooze in any of these songs. Just don't think about all you will miss.
In talking about this eight-hour nightlight of sound, Richter has often lamented the pace of the modern world and the torrent of information that many of us must face each day. "We have to curate our own information space and that’s quite a big deal to do," he told The Quietus. "You’ll still have to make tons and tons of choices and spend so much of the day reading all these different messages which will give you tons of reading. So sometimes a pause is a good thing."
That idea aligns Richter with the researchers and marketers trying to give people a chance to check out for eight consecutive, recuperative hours, yes. But his use of the word "pause" also reflects the way I’ve enjoyed Sleep the most—not as a sleep aid but instead as a relaxing agent. Most of this music is indeed calming not to the point of boredom, where I need to sleep through it, but so that I simply want to sit still and listen and ponder. And though Richter took considerable pains to make Sleep seamless, the payoff of hearing it as a whole (a rather exhausting proposition, ironically) versus the resources required to do so is incredibly low. The music shifts between and slowly recycles parts, so you consistently wind up at some place very close to the start. Instead, I like to push "play" in random places and listen for an hour or so, a move that allows me to hear Richter at glorious work and gives me the chance for the restorative "pause" for which he’d hoped. This music is absorbing. You'll want to pay attention, to shut out other concerns. The stretch between the narcotic "Chorale / Glow" and the twinkling "Non-eternal" is perhaps my favorite segment for this reason; it’s an immersive sampler of Richter’s past successes and some new ideas, blurring into one.
Sleep, then, is simply too didactic as a name. It’s a command that tells us how to enjoy something that clearly has other uses. That handle, combined with Richter’s conceit, has turned the record into a kind of clickbait story, too, which seems entirely antithetical to Richter’s point. ("That 8-Hour Sleep Album—Explained," offers the Time headline.) Pause and Rest come closer to Richter’s ultimate goal of simply taking some time out from the whirlwind around you. At its best, Sleep feels like compositionally rigorous new age music. It’s a place in which you can settle for a while, with or without a pillow, and emerge only when you are ready to rejoin the restive world.


A quarter-century on from its 1979 release, The Clash's London Calling remains one of punk's defining documents. Now it's been given its proper due from Epic, who today are releasing an expanded three-disc edition that covers the original LP, a set of 21 demos (including five previously unheard tracks), and a DVD containing The Last Testament, Clash documentarian Don Letts' film about the album's creation. And that's not even getting into the set's lavish fetishist packaging.

The Clash: London Calling: 25th Anniversary Legacy Edition

The 25th anniversary reissue of The Clash's London Calling is satisfyingly thick and protected by a thin plastic sleeve. The package sits fat at three stories high; the spine is broad, smooth and silver. Pennie Smith's unfocused, emblematic cover shot remains intact, with Paul Simonon's bass hovering, vertical and doomed, between Elvis-baiting pink and green text. Stacked inside are three separate discs: the original 19-song album, a 21-track disc containing rehearsal sessions for the record ("the long lost Vanilla Tapes"), and a DVD of The Last Testament, Don Letts' 30-minute, after-the-fact documentary about the making of London Calling. Here, neatly lined up: preparation, realization, hindsight. Finally. This is how they did it.
For those who came of age in the late 80s and early 90s, calling The Clash a punk band was (and remains) more a matter of affect than honesty-- in 2004, wholly and completely divorced from a context that never fully resonated with a global audience, The Clash are a rock band, and 1979's London Calling is their creative apex, a booming, infallible tribute to throbbing guitars and spacious ideology. By the late 70s, "punk" was more specifically linked with rusted safety pins, shit-covered Doc Martens, and tight pink sneers than any steadfast, organized philosophy; The Clash insisted on forefronting their politics. This album tackles topical issues with impressive gusto-- the band cocks their cowboy hats, assumes full outlaw position, and pillages the world market for sonic fodder and lyric-ready injustice. A quarter-century after its first release, London Calling is still the concentrate essence of The Clash's unparalleled fervor.
As always, London Calling's title track holds steady as the record's cosmic lynchpin: Horrifyingly apocalyptic, "London Calling" is riddled with weird werewolf howls and big, prophetic hollers, Mick Jones' punchy guitar bursts tapping little nails into our skulls, pushing hard for total lunacy. Empowered and unafraid, Strummer reveals self-skewering prophecies, panting hard about nuclear errors and impending ice ages. He also spitefully lodges some of the most unpleasantly convincing calls to arms ever committed to tape, commanding his followers-- now, then, future-- to storm the streets at full, leg-flailing sprints. Even if The Clash were more blatantly inspired by the musical tenets of dub and reggae, "London Calling" unapologetically cops the fury of punk's blind-and-obliterate full-body windmilling, bypassing the cerebral cortex to sink deep into our muscles. From "London Calling" on, The Clash do not let go; each track builds on the last, pummeling and laughing and slapping us into dumb submission.
And now, we get to watch how it fell together: Using only a Teac four-track tape recorder linked up to a portastudio, The Clash inadvertently immortalized their London Calling rehearsal sessions at Vanilla Studios (a former rubber factory-gone-rehearsal-space in Pimlico, London) in the summer of 1979, several weeks before the album sessions officially opened at Wessex Studios. One set of tapes got left on the Tube. Another got crammed into a box.
The intricate (and generally convoluted) mythology of the "long lost recording" is embarrassingly familiar to rock fans-- even non-completists are awkwardly prone to chasing down bits of buried tape with insane, eye-bulging intensity. With precious few exceptions, the anticipation of a hidden, indefinitely concealed secret generally supercedes the impact of the actual artifact. Still, the possibility of stumbling into transcendence keeps the search heated, and sometimes stupidly dramatic. Earlier this month, Mick Jones bravely explained to Mojo's Pat Gilbert exactly how he uncovered the tapes: "I sensed where they were and that took me to the right box. I opened it up and found them... It was pretty amazing."
Snicker all you want at the supernatural, sixth-sense implications, or at the idea of Jones' third eye blazing hot for misplaced Clash recordings-- the 21 tracks that the constitute The Vanilla Tapes are just revealing enough to justify all the smoky mysticism. The tapes feature five previously unheard cuts-- "Heart and Mind", "Where You Gonna Go (Soweto)", "Lonesome Me", the instrumental "Walking the Slidewalk", and a cover of Matumbi's version of Bob Dylan's "The Man in Me", plucked from Dylan's 1970 album New Morning and reproduced in full reggae glory-- and together they reveal producer Guy Stevens' influence on the final sound of London Calling: muddy, raw, and insistently vague, The Vanilla Tapes see The Clash working hard, but also grasping for a muse.
Professionally, Guy Stevens was best known for "discovering" The Who and producing a handful of Mott the Hoople records, but it was his recreational exploits that carved the deepest cut into Britain's collective pop memory. With a frenzied halo of tightly curled brown hair and a penchant for destroying property, Stevens came to rule Wessex Studios, hurling chairs and ladders, wrestling with engineers, and famously dumping a bottle of red wine into Strummer's Steinway piano. Fortunately, Guy was far more concerned with encouraging "real, honest emotion" than with achieving technical perfection (true to form, London Calling has its fair share of slipped fingers), and consequently, the band's determination at Vanilla, coupled with Stevens' shitstorming, led to London Calling's odd and glorious balance of studied dedication and absurd inspiration.
And if The Vanilla Tapes aren't enough to satisfy your voyeuristic tendencies, there's more. For The Last Testament, documentarian/DJ Don Letts (also responsible for Clash on Broadway and Westway to the World) weaves together bits of live footage, interviews with punk pundits and band members (they spout tiny clarifications between snickers and cigarette huffs), promotional videos, and a few small, grainy glimpses of the band recording at Wessex. The studio shots were culled from footage that, like The Vanilla Tapes, had been unknowingly cardboard boxed for years-- in early 2004, former manager Kosmo Vinyl up a crate containing 84 minutes of hand-held footage of the London Calling sessions. Most of the film turned out to be unusable, but Letts salvaged some revealing shots of Stevens in fine form, wrestling with ladders and banging around chairs, in a curious reversal of classic producer/band hijinx.
As an instruction manual, the 25th anniversary edition of London Calling offers up bits of helpful, ordinary wisdom (he who fucks nuns will later join the church, no one gets their shit for free-- and "Balls to you, big daddy!" is an infallible exit line), but the album's biggest lesson is still spiritual. Like a bit of good gossip or a dog-eared copy of On the Road, Clash tapes tend to get passed around, and wind up forming countless intimate, enduring, and cathartic bonds. That Joe Strummer's handwritten lyrics and modest scribblings have finally been tucked into the liner notes is only appropriate: London Calling is just as precious.


The British singer-songwriter’s debut fortifies her early promise as a confident young voice of country-charred rock

Jade Bird

Jade Bird is hardly the first Brit to be smitten with America, but the 21-year-old singer-songwriter has her own agenda. As a teenager in Wales, she taught herself to play her grandmother’s guitar and found herself drawn to classic Americana storytellers, from Dolly Parton to indie-folk duo the Civil Wars. Near the end of her tutelage at the legendary BRIT School, she holed up in a pal’s bathroom to record a demo tape, which landed her a management deal and recording session with the Felice Brothers’ Simone Felice, producer for the Lumineers and Bat for Lashes. Bird emerged from the studio with an EP, 2017’s Something American, asserting herself as a confident young voice of country-charred rock. While she may not yet be a household name in the States, her 2018 single “Lottery” reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Adult Alternative Songs chart.
Jade Bird, her self-titled debut, fortifies that early promise. Again recorded with Felice, the album’s 12 tracks are all written by Bird and flit easily between country, folk, pop, rock, and blues. As Bird’s star has grown, she has made an admirably pointed effort to maintain authority on her musical identity. “I don’t want a middle-aged white man telling me how to write my feelings,” she told The Guardian. “It’s not gonna work for me.” As such, her songwriting often centers on a personal quest for clarity in the face of heartache. “And I mean it when I say that/I’m not sure who I am,” she tells a lover on opening number “Ruins.”
When Bird reveals that existential unease, she also divulges Jade Bird’s greatest asset: her gigantic and gravelly voice. She has named powerhouse singers like Patti Smith and Alanis Morissette as influences, but one might hear hints of Hop Along’s Frances Quinlan, whose prodigious rasp can wring epiphanies from single words. Bird busts out her pipes in anthemic bursts, as on “Lottery.” Opening with cutesy wordplay over a jaunty guitar, the song blooms into a guttural declaration of passion. Though the chorus metaphor is sophomoric (“Love is a game but/You got your numbers and you’re betting on me”), Bird sells it with infectious, playful vigor. The rollicking “I Get No Joy” follows a similar pattern, verses sailing by smoothly before Bird pulls the ripcord for the chorus.
Some of these big numbers, however, rely on cheesy tropes that lack a degree of empathy. On “Good at It,” a twangy appeal to a cheating lover, Bird wryly pits herself against a “goddess” of a rival. But she never quite reaches the desperation of “Jolene” or the venomous rage of “Before He Cheats,” instead lingering in an ambiguous middle ground. Barnburner “Uh Huh” does a better job at evoking other-woman cattiness, injecting Courtney Barnett cheek into Miranda Lambert fierceness (“Talk about the guys at work so you feel ego central/Like fancy cars and football teams is she, like, continental?”). The country-fried “Going Gone” relies on a hokey count-off refrain, and when Bird goes in for the kiss-off, it’s half-baked: “Acting big and talking shit, get over yourself… But I hate to inform you’re still living in your mother’s house.” After the overflowing confidence of “Lottery” and “Love Has All Been Done Before,” the two-dimensonality of her character on “Good at It” and “Going Gone” comes as a letdown.
That’s not to say that Bird isn’t powerful in more vulnerable moments. “Does Anybody Know” floats by on a barely-there guitar strum as she likens the loneliness of an unfamiliar city to romantic disconnect. On the melancholic “17,” she pleads with a lover for forgiveness, voice crumbling as she reveals that her tough exterior was merely a defense mechanism. “I have walls that have stood before you ever loved me,” she belts, spiraling into heartbreak. It’s a monumental moment that demonstrates the emotional depths Bird can plumb when she permits herself. In a sea of songwriters overshadowed by overshot production and forced authenticity, Bird stands out as a self-assured voice.


Lupe Fiasco doesn't give you anything straight: Not a verse, a simile, or a song, and certainly not an album. As an artist, he's helplessly drawn towards perversity. His latest is his most relaxed, rewarding effort in a while. At its best, it feels like a re-introduction to a promising artist who spent some time in the wilderness.

Lupe Fiasco: Food & Liquor II: The Great American Rap Album Pt. 1

Lupe Fiasco doesn't give you anything straight: Not a verse, a simile, or a song, and certainly not an album. As an artist, he's helplessly drawn toward perversity, and despite his immense gifts-- a curious, darting mind, a silver tongue, a rich imagination-- his career has at times resembled a performance-art dare to see how far one can coast on unearned goodwill. By the time his fans had rallied to petition Atlantic Records to release what turned out to be 2011's transparently awful pop-rap debacle Lasers, Lupe was looking less like a savior than a charlatan.
So give Lupe credit when it's due: This time around, he's trying to give it to us straight. His new album is called Food & Liquor II, overtly promising a return to his first and still best-loved album, and most of its production comes courtesy of his old standbys (Soundtrakk, 1500 or Nothin'). Save for the usual nu-metal hard-rock vocalizing on many of the choruses, it is his most relaxed, rewarding effort in a while, and at its best, it feels like a re-introduction to a promising artist who spent some time in the wilderness. At its worst, it's plagued by the same empty cleverness and strident moralizing that has always dragged down Lupe's music. The full title says it all: Lupe couldn't just leave it Food & Liquor II; he had to subtitle it The Great American Rap Album Pt. 1, rendering the album title so cumbersome and silly that only Lupe could have thought of it. It's like he can't help himself.
Lupe's dexterity remains his greatest asset, and he's at his best on songs like "Put Em Up", where his mind lights on unusual ideas and piles up surprising images: 80s babies get eaten by dingos while cars get flipped "like the ribs on the Flintstones." On "Around My Way", which controversially samples the same instantly recognizable sax line as Pete Rock and CL Smooth's "T.R.O.Y.", he hops from "emaciated models with cocaine and blood pourin' out they nostrils" to "human-body sandbags" to "the mixed girl in your math class" in the space of one verse. It's an exhilarating reminder of his sheer, unbounded ability.
It's when Lupe is pinned down by his subject matter that he starts fumbling. Thumping, strident beats like "Unforgivable Youth", "Audubon Ballroom", and "Ital (Roses)", resemble the most overwrought of Lasers' rafter-clanging productions, and they encourage his worst tendencies. The moral of "Ital (Roses)" is a sound one (don't buy what you can't afford), but Lupe can't get the point across with sounding didactic. "It's called being fiscally responsible," goes one especially difficult-to-swallow line. Big Boi, for contrast, hit this same message square on the head years ago on Outkast’s "Aquemini", with a single line that drew both blood and a guffaw: "Let your paper stack, instead of going into overkill/ Pay ya fuckin' beeper bill, bitch." Which one do you think gets through to more people?
Lupe's impulse to sermonize is inseparable from his music, but sermons that lack empathy or drift into condescension are useless. On "Bitch Bad", he mounts a from-all-angles investigation of the word "bitch" with a multipart character study that paints vivid images of a young girl whose self-image is skewed by internet rap videos, and a boy whose mother sings "bad bitch" song in front of him. But by the third verse, Lupe oversimplifies and figuratively pats the girl on the head, intentionally or no, with the moral: "He trapped in a reality, she trapped in a confusion." After all that skilled storytelling, the song winds up just another pitying, paternal "good girl lost" number. Conscious rap fans might protest that gangsta rappers' dubious messages never receive this kind of scrutiny, and it's true, there is an unfair double standard. But while Lupe remains admirably unafraid to wade into the hip-hop-and-cultural values discussions that usually lead to everyone screaming at everyone else, his touch is so shallow that it ends up feeling crass: cultural crusading as SEO tactic.
His most affecting moments remain his rare flashes of humility. "I don't know what really matters anymore," he admits early on, in "Strange Fruition". On "Hood Now", he celebrates hip-hop culture's ability to infiltrate and transform everything it touches, from fashion shows to professional sports, and offers this sly kicker: "Y'all know me, I don't vote/ But the White House? It's hood now." His admission touched off a small firestorm, but it's one of few places on the album where Lupe allows himself to seem truly human.


Gonjasufi's Callus is an album that's disorienting at its catchiest, harrowing at its ugliest, and more than willing to run both of those modes at the same time.

Callus

Ever since A Sufi and a Killer sent his scarred wail out into a wider world, Gonjasufi’s future has seemed pretty open-ended. What path would his hip-hop-influenced psych take?  Subsequent releases—especially 2012’s *MU.ZZ.LE**—*veered closer to a series of confrontational wake-up calls than the inner voyage of the mind than “psychedelia” typically suggests. Jay Z’s “Nickels and Dimes” might have lifted the hook from the Gonjasufi cut of the (almost) same name, but its mournfully introspective spirit was something too bare-nerved to co-opt, the catharsis of *MU.ZZ.LE *pared it down to just the “psych-” and laid bare just how many far more unsettling things could be attached to it as a suffix.
*Callus *is deliberately abrasive proof of this: an album that’s disorienting at its catchiest, harrowing at its ugliest, and more than willing to run both of those modes at the same time. Gonjasufi’s described this album as a document of his effort to embrace hate and pain, not out of nihilism or defeatism but as a way to endure what he sees as a surplus of the stuff getting dumped on everybody’s heads so he can return it as love. The album title says as much—it literally suggests growing a thicker skin—and the record’s mode feels like a much-needed endurance test in turn. It’s harsh and raucous and even oppressive, despite the fact that it ventures only rarely (and briefly) into uptempo trad-aggro turf. It’s both a call for confrontation and a search of positivity.
And there’s more “we” than “I” in that confrontation. Gonjasufi’s lyrics feel more than ever like they’re sung in his characteristic wobbly, mutating wail because that piercing tone is the best way to reach out to people. Entreaties like “Is anyone else tired/From working on a slave ship?” (from opening cut “Your Maker”), declarations that “Babylon hates me/And they want me killed” (“The Kill”), and demands to “Forget your story and fake glory/Get your devils off of me” (“The Conspiracy”) are the words of someone reckoning with his fears and traumas in public to feel less alone. “Everything’s fucked” isn’t exactly a rare sentiment this year, though, and some stress is better empathized with when it’s felt rather than spoken, so he’s still riding on a tendency to show-not-tell his through tone. There’s a lot of distortion and overblown, in-the-red bass smothering the clarity of his words—even as it boosts the intensity of the voice delivering them. (The way his breathless, fuzz-drenched repetition of “stay out” melts into a caustically dissolving analog synth is borderline horrifying.)
The mood of *Callus *comes off as embattled and mercurial as the mindstate of anyone trying to get their shit together and find a way through. And the music, filled with reverb and fuzz and gristle and the smell of ozone, demands both your attention and your resilience. Some fuss has been made about the appearance of former Cure guitarist Pearl Thompson, who shows up a few times (heard best on “The Kill”) to grind out some fuzz-toned squalls of noise. But it’s all of a piece, with the Special Guest Star moments subsumed into a bigger wall of noise. There’s King Tubby dub bleeps echoing into the distance (“Your Maker”), lo-fi guitar sludge lodged somewhere between Neu!’s “Super 16” and the murkier reaches of early Sub Pop (“Maniac Depressant”),  industrial machine-gun synth-drums (“Afrikan Spaceship”), EWF kalimbas swamped by doom-metal bass/organ churns (“The Jinx”), and a bonafide modern-day goth dancefloor filler (“Vinaigrette”). The atmosphere might get oppressive, but it never feels stuck. Besides handily proving that it’s a fairly straight line from Gaslamp Killer-style acid-funk crate-digging to the grimier pages in Adrian Sherwood’s portfolio, *Callus *is also a healthy reminder that it takes some strikingly noisy stuff to actually hold up against his voice. Get used to it; even when it sandpapers your ears, it just makes the path to your mind that much clearer.


The witch house poster band's brand of slowed-down, blown-out, culturally mishmashed electronic music has proven divisive, but it was always meant to be.

King Night

Salem trade in apathy. In an article for Butt magazine last year, band member John Holland copped to a past lifestyle of heavy drug use and teenage prostitution-- then he offered the interviewer some speed. The band was featured in The New York Times Arts section's fall preview this year, but one member couldn't be bothered to wake up on time for the interview. When Times writer Ben Ratliff pressed the band on the lyrics to early single "Trapdoor", Holland replied, "It doesn't really matter to me whether people know what the lyrics are or not." Even when XLR8R's Brandon Ivers recently asked Salem about their much-blogged-about disaster of a FADER Fort appearance at last year's SXSW-- a performance that could be featured in the dictionary as the definition of "not giving a shit"-- band members Heather Marlatt and Jack Donoghue claimed not to have seen the video, while Holland later stated about the band's live presence, "I don't even care. I totally don't."
So it's safe to say that Salem aren't concerned that the slowed-down, culturally mishmashed electronic music on their debut, King Night-- referred to by some as witch house, drag, or haunted house-- has its share of supporters and detractors alike, and has inspired endless arguments about authenticity, cultural sensitivity, and whether "witch house" is a pretty stupid fucking name for a genre, anyway. But when you actually listen to King Night, it's easy to be amazed that these dickheads made a record so interesting and sonically detailed. Their early original material and Gucci Mane remixes spawned a legion of imitators who attempted to replicate the formula with shoddy craftsmanship; King Night, accordingly, finds Salem pushing their sound far enough to create artistic distance from the rest of the pack.
They pull this off mostly by way of increased fidelity, which, thanks to the mixing talents of Dave Sardy (Marilyn Manson, Oasis), teases the sonic depth out of these songs. The title track didn't need its "O Holy Night"-lifted melody to sound like it was recorded in an Austrian cathedral, but there's that chorus, their voices being abused by the debris launched in the air by the track's low-end explosions. Album centerpiece and highlight "Release Da Boar" starts out with a city-street pulse and midnight tones, and slowly opens to reveal a brutally beautiful void where Marlatt's dead-eyed vocals hover in an amniotic haze. Even "Redlights"-- aka the "FADER Fort YouTube Video Song"-- is lent a spacey atmosphere, its slow burn not too far off from vintage Slumberland noise pop.
Despite what some say, this is music, and it's music made by people with wide-ranging tastes. The aforementioned Slumberland similarity is only one of the genre signifiers employed during the course of King Night, as the band traffics in crawled-out rave-recalling synth lines ("Asia"), low-riding Houston lean ("Sick"), grime-flecked trip-hop ("Trapdoor"), and the hollow, thudding rhythms of juke and footwork ("Hound"), just to name a few. That they're able to incorporate these disparate sounds in a recognizable fashion proves their ability; the fact that, through it all, Salem still sound like themselves and no one else is a testament to their vision.
And if you don't think Salem have done something impressive here? That's okay. Honestly-- and this gets lost in the hype cycle that most fresh-sounding new acts get sucked into these days-- this music is not for everyone. Not because of its "Werewolf bar mitzvah" affectations, but because it's just not the easiest thing to bump in your headspace. Some will take issue with the EQ'd-to-shit click tracks, or the sheer noise that's being produced here. Personally, I'm not a fan of the pitched-down, chopped-and-screwed rapping that pops up periodically-- not because of the arguable minstrelsy, but because I just think it's an aesthetically ugly add-on this music could do without.
However, considering that snatches of decipherable lyrics reveal threats of rape and murder, as well as excessive use of the word "bitch," maybe we're better off not knowing what they're saying, regardless of how they go about it. These are the contradictions you run into when inhabiting the world of King Night. And while it's possible that discussion of these contradictions might end up outlasting the music itself, it's hard to deny that the group has carved out an original and compelling niche.
Editor's Note: This review contains a list of the various names that have been used to describe the music of SALEM and/or other similar artists, among them "drag" and "witch house." It originally also listed "rape gaze," a term coined by Michigan band CREEP, as formerly listed on their MySpace and reported in the New York Press. The band today disowned the phrase and will no longer be using it, expressing to The Village Voice, they "would never want to advocate sexual violence against any human being. It was a play on words which we never expected to be used as an actual genre."


The Montreal producer's latest release is built extra lush and cushiony, with heavy R&B inflections.

Phantom Vibrate EP

Jacques Greene makes house music for lovers. His latest release, Phantom Vibrate, is built extra lush and cushiony, inflected with R&B. But Greene has always been meticulous with his implementation of that genre into dance music. Various strands of dance music and R&B have been fraternizing almost forever, though, whether it’s the Aaliyah apparitions made popular by Burial’s “In McDonalds” and Usher’s big box EDM. But in 2014, R&B has become somewhat of a boutique concern in the indiesphere, despite the OGs still knocking it out of the park elsewhere. (See: Toni Braxton and Babyface’s phenomenal collaborative heart tour Love, Marriage, & Divorce, released earlier this year.) The commingling of R&B with indie has been a thing at least since Tom Krell’s bedroom-recording project How to Dress Well gained traction in 2010 and Frank Ocean went further on another track in 2011, and the influence hasn’t left the conversation. But few get the mix right.
Montreal’s Greene has always had a feel for R&B, whether it’s dropping Mya’s “Ponytail” in DJ sets or wistfully reimagining Ciara’s remix of “Deuces” on his track “Another Girl”. With Phantom Vibrate, he’s taken his interest to a delicate new level. The EP’s opener and first single, “No Excuse”, elevates “Favorite Girl” by Marques Houston (of Immature and annoying next-door neighbor Roger from "Sister, Sister"), with Greene taking the overwhelmingly sweet cut and flipping it into a celestial paean by way of crunchy percussion, ascendant synths, and intermittent sweeps of bells.
The emotional swell of “No Excuse”, the A-side, towers over the rest of the release. "Feel What” and “Night Tracking” have a willowy, less emphatic texture than “No Excuse”, but Greene has proven to have a strong grasp on how varied house music can embody the emotional weight of R&B. “Feel What” is a nimble collage of varied tempos, the vocal sample blending into the hodgepodge of skittering, revved, and staticky synths. On paper that sounds like a nightmare drafted on Ableton, but with Greene as the technician, it’s seamlessly meditative. “Night Tracking” is the closest to classic house and the EP’s quietest cut. It almost seems to fight with itself at points, different grooves trying to be the most dominant on the track, intertwining and acquiescing with tranquil aggression before zipping into silence.
Had “No Excuse” been the closer, it would have given the short collection a more substantial climax. Instead, the EP’s downward tonal slope plays out an emotional arc of a blossoming romance into its ultimate dissolution, down to the wielding of vocal samples. What’s clear and unruffled at the beginning becomes absent toward the end. Greene has done robust heartbreak before with last year’s ebulliently elastic “On Your Side” featuring the aforementioned How to Dress Well singing about loving desperation. Even when that song’s lonely lyrics are gutting, the beat never feels vacant. With Phantom Vibrate, Greene breaks it down further, separating feelings into their own parts, narrating with sound how you get from allure to familiarity to the void.


The Nigerian rapper and singer’s easygoing charm guides this lush and freewheeling collection.

UY Scuti

In 2010, the Nigerian musician Olamide introduced himself with colorful, relatable rhymes, a breathless flow, and youthful swagger. His breakthrough single “Eni Duro” displayed his undeniable confidence, confirming the then-21-year-old artist, who raps in both Yoruba and English, as a star in the making. More than a decade and a dozen releases later, he has become an emblem of Nigerian hip-hop, a self-proclaimed “voice of the street” with introspective tales of struggle and loss that extend hope to a new generation of listeners.
When Olamide’s label YBNL, home to Fireboy DML, inked a deal last year with U.S. music franchise Empire, it was unclear how his foray into the international music space would unfold. Prior to that moment, he’d rarely seemed interested in collaborating with artists outside his native country or in seeking recognition beyond his tight-knit scene. He tested the waters with 2020’s experimental 999 EP, which swayed more toward his rap tendencies. He followed it with the more varied and successful Carpe Diem, featuring singles like “Infinity” and “Loading” that would soundtrack plenty of outdoor parties.
On Carpe Diem, Olamide’s sound underwent a reconstruction, moving from his gruff early style toward a more soothing tone, with mid-tempo beats accompanying his tales of love, hustle, and celebration. The project had an aura of freshness, suggesting a restart in his career. His latest album, UY Scuti, takes a simpler approach but furthers this evolution. In the past, he has alternated between love songs and pop bangers laced with street lingua. UY Scuti condenses his sensibility to a chill, moody flow. The 10-song project is rife with romantic tales and emotional honesty, softened by Olamide’s melodic voice and easygoing charm.
Reunited with producer Eskeez, who also worked on 999, Olamide’s shapeshifting vocals are supported by a dynamic array of beats, ranging from the solemn “Need for Speed” to the fiery “Jailer.” Beneath the grandeur of the music, however, there is a vagueness that is hard to ignore. These songs conjure a gentle current of lushness, but some tracks feel lukewarm, lacking a spark of creativity. The highlight “Rock” resonates because of Olamide’s heartfelt lyrics, but when he approaches similar subject matter on “Cup of Tea” and “Want,” the writing lacks depth.
The guest artists attempt to enliven the music but sometimes fail to hide its flaws. Rising Afrobeats talent Jaywillz lights up the bouncy “Jailer” with his energetic, unrestrained flow, and Olamide’s longtime collaborator Phyno—who has made appearances on each of Olamide’s past four projects—offers vivid imagery on “Somebody.” But the casual tone of Olamide’s writing rarely provides the energy required to make these songs stick. The soul-baring singer Fave slides in with some smooth lines about desire on the rambling “PonPon,” but the overall effect is bland.
“My priority is to express myself freely like a bird right now,” Olamide recently told The Guardian, and you can hear the freedom of his approach throughout the album. He hops on dancehall beats (“Rough Up,” “So Much More”) and stretches beyond his comfort zone (“Julie”), testing the waters of new genres. This freewheeling mode, however, deprives UY Scuti of a concrete identity. He’s not sticking to his usual themes of struggle and hustle, or the party-anthem templates of his previous hits, but it’s unclear what exactly he wants to replace them. With its thematic variety and creative freedom, UY Scuti finds Olamide in a transitional stage, with plenty of room for improvement.

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A hip-hop head’s presumptive fantasy, this compilation by the Gangster Doodles illustrator gathers loosies from cult favorites and a few new artists.

Gangster Music Vol. 1

Marlon Sassy’s Gangster Doodles, drawn in Sharpie and highlighter on Post-It notes, are strikingly simple. It’s the former office manager’s ability to pick and choose what icons to caricature—whether it’s Detroit beatmaker J Dilla or neurotic “Seinfeld” schmuck George Costanza—and images to reference that’s earned him an online cult following, a hardcover book with a Shia LaBeouf foreword, and now his very own compilation on Dublin label All City. But his apparent knack for curation fails on Gangster Music Vol. 1, a hip-hop head’s presumptive fantasy. Its astounding tracklist encompasses beloved rappers and producers from multiple eras and scenes, from the early 2000s West Coast underground to Diplomats-era New York. The songs themselves are far less interesting—Vol. 1 is mostly the sound of talented artists clearing their MacBooks of stray files.
The project’s most disappointing efforts come from its most notable guests. While Montreal producer Kaytranada’s samples are sparkly and hard-hitting on the instrumental “Well I Bet Ya,” the track lacks the driving groove and rubbery bass of his best work. It’s a rough sketch of his talents, an approximation of the goods. Stones Throw Records alum Jonwayne, meanwhile, hits cruise control with his production on “Welch’s Grape,” built around mouth pops, bright keyboards, and an unchanging melody that has the feeling of hold music. And while it’s always exciting to hear beatmaking brothers Madlib and Oh No together, “Big Whips” is a boilerplate version of their blunted sound, seemingly using the string sample already heard on a 2014 Madlib track with Freddie Gibbs.
“Flash Dance,” from incarcerated Harlem rapper Max B, should be a highlight—its funky, organ-driven beat and sleek street boasts make it one of the more compelling compositions here. But by rap standards, it’s an archaeological find, having been issued on the mixtape circuit a decade ago. Max even shouts out Byrdgang, a group he left in 2008 after an infamous feud with leader Jim Jones. Its inclusion—along with “Cruel,” a 2017 loosie by Awful Records frontman Father—clouds the identity of the compilation, shifting it from a collection of original songs to something more akin to a video game soundtrack, meant mostly to invoke a mood.
And maybe that’s the purpose. The vinyl packaging, after all, is beautiful, with its record sleeves wrapped in hundreds of Sassy’s colorful characters. If there’s one thing Sassy has accomplished with Vol. 1, it’s cultivating a cozy aesthetic for rap nerds, like an old record store full of crates to dig. Placing cult heroes like Max B and Madlib alongside deep-cut favorites like Canadian rapper Madchild and Likwit Crew associate Defari on one project—pressed on hot-pink wax, no less—is candy for any listener whose early taste might have been informed by anything like the Stones Throw message board.
But Vol. 1 never really outperforms this nostalgia, except perhaps on “KCRW,” a small gem by Los Angeles group Dream Panther. Near the end of these 27 tracks, its four-on-the-floor drums, whirling guitars, and hazy vocals gradually crumble into a blob of amp hiss and saxophone wails. At barely two minutes, it’s somehow the most inventive track on here. Rather than seeking scraps from big-name artists, perhaps Sassy should have sought out more obscure talent like Dream Panther—not necessarily a quick sale, but a better record.


His latest EP proves he’s still a master of melancholic detail, but thematically and sonically, the Atlanta superstar has hit a wall.

SAVE ME EP

For better or worse, Future has released the same album for nearly five years now. Whether it’s the slightly-more-romantic HNDRXX or the slightly-more-polished BEASTMODE 2. It’s all made from the same recipe, one for an enticing dish that’s slowly started to worsen with each forkful. SAVE ME, a quick seven-song EP, is no different. While it proves that he’s still a master of melancholic detail, dissecting his self-inflicted misery with little jewels of profundity, there’s nothing new or groundbreaking here. Sonically and thematically, he’s hit a wall.
Which is a shame considering the project’s single, “Love Thy Enemies,” contains some experimental elements. Over wispy guitar strums that sound like they were ripped straight off a hard drive from the Blonde sessions and woodblock clicks, Future’s pitch-corrected moan is left to fend for itself and, as a result, feels more vulnerable, with each cry, coo and choke (he audibly coughs at one point) given space to sink in. “You wasn’t considerate to my feelin’/How am I explain this to my children?” he gripes.
The rest of the project is less ambitious. “Please Tell Me” is anchored by the same hissing flutes heard on his 2017 hit “Mask Off,” as well as any number of sparse trap songs of the moment (“Effortless” by Chicago upstart Polo G comes to mind). On “St. Lucia,” clever lines about his vices—“Tried to talk to the pastor, found out he doin' the same thing/ Been havin' a secret relationship on his main thing”—are tarnished by cardboard instrumentation, a puddle of melodic layers that fail to stand out. And “Government Official,” with its garden-variety hi-hats, lack of hook and low-mixed vocals, could be swapped out with any of Future’s archetypal bangers on Spotify and no one would notice.
While pockets of his songwriting remain both brilliantly petty and self-deprecating, the ignorance shown in others is tiresome and, even worse, boring at times, like he’s playing a caricature of himself. On the aforementioned “St. Lucia,” for example, he starts the chorus by crowing brazenly, “I’m a big dawg, I can fuck a bitch out in France now,” and kicks off his first verse with the leaden “I got one that's Chinese, she a ten/I made my Hong Kong girls wear snakeskin.”
At other points, he comes off plain lazy: “My wifi lit, ten thousand feet off the ground,” and, “Ten thousand feet up, we get wifi,” are two separate lines delivered on different songs not far from each other on the track list. This is after he included a song called “WIFI LIT” on last year’s BEASTMODE 2.
But maybe the toughest moment comes on the opener, the predictably titled “XanaX Damage,” which sounds half-finished. Strange gaps of silence are sprinkled throughout the mix, with a hard fadeout arriving only a minute and a half in, ending the track abruptly. It’s an otherwise beautiful song, with a tender guitar riff, pitched-down vocals and the most original hook of the project, with Future gently muttering, “Baby, when the sun is out, it's like I'm not myself.” It’s a flash of greatness bogged down by poor execution, which could stand as a theme for the EP as a whole.


On her latest album, the eclectic Bay Area artist weaves introspective themes into frantic, experimental pop music.

Apricot Angel

Blending skittering, sequenced percussion with jazzy chords and wonderfully bleary vocals, Kashika Kollaikal’s debut album as Flung, 2020’s Shaky But My Hair Is Grown, struck a psychedelic balance between the Books and Person Pitch-era Panda Bear. A split release from DIY labels Citrus City and Topshelf, it was a strong experimental pop record that flew under the radar. Since then, Kollaikal has kept busy, associating herself with a community of artists subverting the familiar indie pop tropes. She’s produced an album from fellow avant-pop up-and-comer Blue Toed, collaborated with percussionist Gabe Stout in the duo Honey Oat, and shared stages with Florist and Time Wharp. The 12 songs on Flung’s new record, Apricot Angel, reflect this restless creative energy. Fusing polyrhythmic arrangements and lyrics that grapple with themes of gender identity and placelessness, Flung further develops the distinctive sound that made Shaky But My Hair Is Grown approachable yet gripping.
The most immediately striking element of Apricot Angel is its ornate instrumentation. Kollaikal is a producer whose output feels equally suited for hippy communes and art school dance parties. On “Tress Thing,” featherweight chords drift over a clattering groove until the song bursts into a climax of cascading synth leads. The title track alternates between burbling lows and a wonky hook that calls to mind sentient robots trying to harmonize a number from a Broadway musical. “Froth” uses galloping drums to lay the framework for muted vocal samples, helping the song land in a universe inhabited by like-minded genre-benders Body Meat and draag me. Kollaikal’s work has never been predictable, but Apricot Angel is especially hard to pin down. With unplaceable tonalities and rapidly shifting structures, the tracks rarely stay in one place for long.
On Shaky But My Hair Is Grown, which came to life over three uncomfortable weeks at the start of the pandemic, inspiration from Black philosophers like Fred Moten and Nathaniel Mackey helped provide a wider sociopolitical context for the music. The tone of Apricot Angel is more intimate, as Kollaikal opens up about increasingly personal subject matter. The interplay between the vulnerable lyrics and the boisterous musical textures is tethered to Kollaikal’s experience as a queer person. These senses of both acceptance and empowerment are especially palpable on the propulsive, heady “Hands and a Carpet.” “Fluttering through/Sparkly things when you’re just not healing,” she sings in a descending melody. Due to the heavy processing that underlines Flung’s unique mixing style, you can’t always decipher the words, but her singular vocal patterns shine through even the most oblique moments.
Flung’s music is marked by a surreality that gives it a shimmering, almost mystical energy. Kollaikal’s writing can be vague, but contrasted with her frantic, maximalist composition style it can also be alluring. “We were early in the day, you were water gorgeous/Lay low, lay low, they got a new orbit, oh they got a new orbit,” she sings on “Ebb,” over hypnagogic synths and shuffling drums. The self-exploration that courses through Apricot Angel is not always easy to parse, and occasionally that’s the point. “That’s part of, for me, having a solo project: It is just so personal, and so much an extension of my life,” Kollaikal recently told Oakland’s Lower Grand Radio, when asked how her Bay Area home shaped this record. Apricot Angel flaunts both introspection and pride, a dichotomy that places Flung’s music in its own eclectic realm.


Trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith crafts a late-career highlight with pianist Vijay Iyer. Cosmic Rhythm is a frequently gorgeous, sometimes-roiling set that plays to both musicians' strengths.

Vijay Iyer / Wadada Leo Smith: A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke

A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke

After John Coltrane’s death in 1967, the improvisational avant-garde found itself asking: Now what? Wadada Leo Smith’s discography stretches back to this critical moment in American experimentalism. As an early member of a Chicago collective, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (or AACM), the trumpeter worked in a trio that included saxophonist Anthony Braxton and violinist Leroy Jenkins—a group documented on the landmark 1968 release 3 Compositions of New Jazz.
On that album and other recordings from the period, Smith’s performance aesthetic signaled the arrival of a confident and original voice. He could craft mournful melodic lines that suggested the folk music of his Mississippi Delta youth, before quickly steering into rough-sounding yet controlled smears of notes. Then, in the midst of an improvisation, he would allow stretches of silence to enter his phrasing. In contrast to New York’s consistently in-the-red style of free-jazz, Smith and other AACM figures also experimented with world music instrumentation and modernist chamber composition in between passages of fiery blast.
In this scene, there was nothing strange about being a blues musician, a composer of classical music, and a free-improviser with a recognizable attack. And this example has proved a durable influence on younger jazz innovators like Vijay Iyer, a pianist who spent time in Smith’s early-21st century quartet (before his own career as a bandleader took off). In interviews, Iyer is often eager to credit the AACM as an inspiration behind his own mobility as a composer and soloist.
Since signing to ECM, the storied jazz-and-classical label, Iyer has continued to vary his creative practice. The album Mutations found him composing for a string quartet, while Break Stuff—the most recent set from Iyer’s celebrated jazz trio—included an acoustic tribute to Detroit techno innovator Robert Hood. On A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke, Iyer reconnects with Smith in a studio for the first time since appearing as a sideman on the trumpeter’s 2009 album Spiritual Dimensions. Their meeting here results in a frequently gorgeous, sometimes roiling set that stands out in each artist’s catalog.
The opener, “Passage,” was composed by Iyer, and works well as a platform for Smith’s range of instrumental techniques—with wisps of balladry leading to harsh and piercing moments. Some of Smith’s more surprising exclamations may initially seem like unmusical provocations, just before he wrings a demonstration of magic from his trumpet—as when he keeps a seemingly unstable drone alive for seconds, or when he creates a winning melody from an unlikely opening intonation. Iyer’s performance on piano lends dramatic shape to the track, though he’s just getting started.
The set’s centerpiece is a seven-part suite that also provides the album’s title. Inspired by the Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi—her drawing graces the cover—this nearly hour-long stretch of music often finds Iyer switching seamlessly between acoustic piano and an electronic setup. “All Becomes Alive” begins with simmering traces of digital sound behind Smith’s high-register, incantatory playing. Near the track’s conclusion, Smith contributes tart, pointillistic figures as Iyer uses a laptop to produce a bass-heavy pulse (while keeping both hands on his piano). In the middle section, Smith responds to Iyer’s flowing, legato progressions with a mellow soulfulness.
The players occasionally push each other into less familiar zones. The first three minutes of “A Cold Fire” reveals Iyer playing more “out” than on his past ECM recordings, while on “Labyrinths,” his joint interest in Indian classical composition and American minimalism guides Smith into fixed-tempo riffing of a kind that is unusual in the trumpeter’s catalog. And when Iyer switches to Fender Rhodes for “Notes on Water,” the musicians mine the mood of Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis, while still sounding like themselves.
In conceiving such far-ranging explorations of texture, the risk for musicians is that the end result might wind up seeming like a catalog of possible approaches—a look-book to be skipped through by sound designers searching for film-music cues. But the rapport between Iyer and Smith ensures that this music always feels compositionally sure-footed, even when parts of the suite are being discovered as they play.  No matter its track-to-track variance, Cosmic always sounds harmonious as an album-length statement. In doing this, it also recalls Smith’s early-career desire to integrate “all forms of music,” as stated in a 1969 interview with the French magazine Jazz Hot.
Appropriately, the closing track here is a Smith composition titled “Marian Anderson”—a dedication to the African-American contralto who broke the color barrier at the Metropolitan Opera in 1955. After the meditative theme, Smith’s conjuring of a historic opera singer’s legacy seemingly gives him license to reveal some of his most songful, pure-tone playing. “Everything and anything is valuable,” Smith told the European magazine in 1969, as the first wave of AACM players was capturing the imagination of audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. More than four decades later, Smith is still demonstrating the wisdom of this approach—reaching back into American art-music history for inspiration while keeping himself open to the new sounds being proposed by the next generation.