Ritual in Repeat finds Tennis continuing to mature and highlight their strengths with the help of a prominent producer, Spoon’s Jim Eno. It's a nicely confident album, one that takes a simple formula to a few unexpected places.

Ritual in Repeat

Tennis are still a young band, but their career to date would make a great case study for those trying to understand the multi-faceted, oft-destructive power of narrative in the world of contemporary music coverage. Patrick Riley and Alaina Moore emerged as the summer of 2010 started to take on heat, armed with a handful of breezy, weightless singles and a story that seemed salvaged from a rousing game of Indie-Pop Mad Libs: a young couple (insert relationship) from Denver (city) bought a sailboat (unconventional vehicle) and recorded an album about a journey on said vehicle, working under the name Tennis (sport). That album, Cape Dory, was released in January 2011, and could’ve been knocked over by a stiff sea breeze: the melodies within were pleasant but thin, and the cute story that lay at the album’s core wasn’t enough to render the music it inspired particularly compelling. The band has had a hard time escaping that plot point in the years since Cape Dory was released; it’s hard to find an interview or piece of coverage that opens with something other than a mention of Tennis’ stint on the waters of the Eastern Seaboard.
It’s too bad, because the band has largely moved on from the sound and sensibility of their early career; in fact, much of their work since has felt like a reaction to the story that lit a spark under them in the first place. They added a drummer, James Barone, and embraced bittersweet, autumnal melodies that paired well with lyrical darkness and a touch of fuzz. Subsequent releases like 2012’s second full-length Young and Old and 2013’s fine Small Sound EP were brought to life with help from well-known producers like the Black Keys’ drummer Patrick Carney and indie rock vet Richard Swift, and their best moments (“Origins”, “Mean Streets”) hinted at a level of craftsmanship and depth their early material sorely lacked. Their new record, Ritual in Repeat, finds Tennis continuing to mature and highlight their strengths—Moore’s growing voice, an ear for melody—with the help of yet another prominent producer, Spoon’s Jim Eno.
Ritual in Repeat is a nicely confident album, one that takes a simple formula—play Moore’s sweet, thin voice against sour, brooding arrangements, and eventually break open into sticky, yearning choruses laden with harmony—to a few unexpected places. The influence of the complex, emotionally ambiguous pop music of the late ‘60s and ‘70s (a period that casts a shadow over much of the band’s work) is still present, but there’s also tendrils of slinky funk (“I’m Callin’”), contemporary dream-pop (“Viv Without the N”), and spectral thesaurus-folk (“Wounded Heart”) snaking their way through the album. Almost every song has a muscle and weight to its arrangement that complements Moore’s vocal work. She’ll never have the power or gravitas of some of her contemporaries, but she’s gotten much better at writing material that suits her skill set, namely agility and an ease with harmony.
The agility comes in handy, because Ritual in Repeat occasionally sounds a little too cluttered and dense for its own good. The band and producers pile fragments of melody and instrumentation on top of each other, and it can become tough to pick out the most rewarding musical thread. It’s a record that could benefit from the application of what could be termed the Chanel principle, an adaptation of the designer’s famous quote about getting dressed: before you leave the studio, look in the mirror and take one thing out of your song.
Tennis has matured on the lyrical front in recent years, too: Ritual in Repeat focuses on complicated relationships and self-examination, rather than the vagaries of travel or the various meteorological events that marked the band's early work. The album's characters are always looking for validation, whether from a partner or some higher power; they look to their lovers, in the mirror, and to the heavens for some sort of sign that they're doing things right and moving forward. Sighing opener "Night Vision" finds Moore ably setting the scene for the latter kind of search—you can see her sitting on a wooded porch, staring in vain into the middle distance, thinking about mistakes she's made and people she's left behind. Her voice hangs with the quiet, private dissatisfaction of people who seem to have everything they could ever want, and it imbues the band's songs with a nuanced, compelling sadness. This very specific feeling is only occasionally obfuscated by her diction, which is showy to a fault; songs like "Needle and a Knife" and "Wounded Heart" are literate to the point of distraction, stuffed with ten dollar words where they could be simple and sharp.
Tennis are clearly capable of that level of acute writing, because they use it to succinctly sum up their band's appeal on back-half highlight "This Isn't My Song": "Only simple melodies/ Find their way into your memory...It's nothing profound/ Just a sweet sound." It's a smart reading of their strengths, and even a little cheeky when taken alongside Ritual in Repeat's cover and larger subject matter: if you're inclined to Tennis negatively, they look like a group of blank people offering bland sweetness devoid of deeper meaning. While the band might've fit that description at one point, they've since grown past it, so if you're one of the listeners who dismissed their earlier work as banal and bourgeois, know that Tennis has since earned another chance.


The Syrian dabke icon’s latest album is slicker and less varied than his earlier releases, but its breakneck rhythms and euphoric synths still pack a joyful punch.

Erbil

It’s been a turbulent few years for dabke-techno king Omar Souleyman. In 2021 the Syrian singer was arrested in Urfa, the city in southeastern Turkey where he had been living and running a bakery since escaping Syria’s civil war in 2011. Accused of being a member of the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) militia, which authorities in Ankara consider a terrorist organization and an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), Souleyman was held for a little over 24 hours before being released without charges.
Aside from touching on themes of exile on recent albums, Souleyman’s music has never been overtly political (a choice that has sometimes drawn criticism from fellow Syrians). But growing up as a Sunni Arab in Syria’s culturally diverse al-Hasakah region, he absorbed Kurdish, Assyrian, and even Turkish and Iraqi influences, often singing in Kurdish and collaborating with Kurdish artists, such as his former longtime keyboard player Rizan Sa’id. Since leaving Turkey after his arrest, Souleyman has found a new home in Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdish Region, and it is to this ancient city—which, in contrast to the repressive regime in Turkey, offered him solace amid its diverse cultural milieu—that he dedicates his fifth studio album.
Erbil, his third full-length for Diplo’s Mad Decent (and one of over 500 albums overall, if you believe the lore), celebrates the new experiences and friendships that Souleyman encountered there. For non-Arabic speakers that’s hard to know, because the label supplies no lyrics or translations—a notable omission, considering Souleyman’s international audience. But in a way this follows the same patterns that have characterized his trajectory since he was first plucked from relative obscurity in Syria and presented to the rest of the world. For many, Souleyman may be the only dabke artist they ever come across. Decontextualized and inscrutable behind his dark sunglasses, he projects an aura of unknowability and distance.
Since Souleyman’s international breakthrough in 2007 with Sublime Frequencies’ compilation Highway to Hassake, he’s amassed hundreds of millions of YouTube views and become the face of dabke in the Western world, collaborating with a varied bunch of artists, from Björk to Gorillaz and Four Tet. On Erbil, he sticks to the time-tested formula that has propelled him thus far: his emotion-filled baritone gliding over a cascade of whirling saz lines, (mostly) electronic simulations of instruments such as oud, mijwiz, and arghul, and rock-solid, trance-inducing beats.
If anything, since his first “official” studio album, Wenu Wenu—recorded in a Brooklyn studio and produced by Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden—his sound has been repackaged in ever more polished, homogeneous ways, losing some of the overdriven, distorted energy of the early days. Make no mistake, this is still very fun music. Just about every one of the eight tracks on Erbil could be a standalone hit, their breakneck rhythms and euphoric synths more than capable of whipping up a festival crowd. The fierce saz, propulsive handclaps, and synthesized mijwiz of “Mahad Yadri” and the dizzying polyrhythms of “Maet Ala Shoftha” are potent catalysts that transform Souleyman’s emotional intensity into the ultimate party music.
But taken as a whole the album feels repetitive rather than hypnotic, a monochromatic kick drum thudding its way through almost every track, keeping Souleyman’s psychedelic tendencies anchored to the club floor, when they could be reaching for other dimensions. Propelled by clean, sharply defined drums, each track follows a well-trodden structure—a torrent of traditional melodic riffs and dabke rhythms, electrifying leads, build-ups, and drops. “Rahat Al Chant Ymme,” with its heart-pounding riff and massive reverb claps, is perhaps the epitome of this EDM-ified Souleyman. Here he again teams up with keyboard player Hasan Jamo Alo, who adds a recurring squelchy synth bass to heavily filtered keys that seamlessly intertwine with the electrified timbres of traditional instruments. Leaning into the gaudiness with hedonistic abandon, the song is laser focused on its purpose: to get people dancing.
Erbil doesn’t leave any space for the slower, more emotional interludes that supplied previous albums with a moment of respite, nor does it muster quite the same freewheeling energy of his earlier work. But it does offer the same unbridled joy, the same soul-stirring and body-moving power that helped him transcend borders in the first place. And right now, maybe that’s enough.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a tense, beautiful, lo-fi landmark from the second wave of black metal.

A Blaze in the Northern Sky

In the fall of 1971, a child is born in a remote village in Norway. He will one day rechristen himself Fenriz, after the Earth-swallowing wolf, Fenrir, who appears in Norse mythology and the Satanic Bible. But for now, he is Gylve Nagell, being raised by his grandmother, spending inordinate amounts of time alone. The pivotal moments of his childhood occur while listening to records, music introduced to him by an eccentric uncle named Stein. Pink Floyd catches his ear; a few songs by the Doors hold his attention; but it’s the English progressive rock band Uriah Heep that blows his mind. He’s entranced by the heavy organ sound, the cryptic lyrics, and the mysterious men with long hair who appear on the album’s cover. He cherishes the triple-fold LP like an heirloom from a past life, spending entire days in front of the record player. Soon, Uncle Stein is no longer invited to the house.
When he starts elementary school, Gylve quickly falls in with the older kids, the class clowns, and discovers the magnetic pull of having a good sense of humor. As the ’70s draw to a close, a new genre of music is exploding, giving wild, communal voice to his young outlaw mentality. There’s a band in America whose members wear makeup and stick their tongues out on stages lit by flames; there’s another group from Australia penning youthful odes to breaking the rules. The guitars are loud, the lyrics are filthy, and the teachers don’t get it. “It’s like the dreams you had when you dreamt you were in a candy store and could take all that you wanted,” Fenriz will later reflect. “But metal was real, it was there.”
It becomes his entire life. Eventually, his love for Kiss and AC/DC gives way to Iron Maiden and Slayer. At 15, he decides to start his own band. Gylve acquires a drum set, like all the crucial things in his childhood, through his Uncle Stein, and he invites his friends to record some songs under the name Black Death. Their music is sloppy and ridiculous. (Example lyric: “I was sitting in the living room watching the telly/Then something evil formed in my belly/Pizza, pizza, pizza monsters are bad.”) Reviews in the underground zines show no mercy. A writeup in Slayer Magazine—written by one of his most trusted penpals, no less—is mostly comprised of laughter and insistences to burn the tape in a garbage can.
It does not deter him. Instead, the young metalhead learns a valuable lesson. In the not-so-distant future, he will proudly refer to Darkthrone as “The Most Hated Band in the World.” He’ll use interviews as opportunities to namedrop his favorite bands lost to obscurity, besmirching the tenets of modern, commercial metal. As a teenager, he is slowly falling into those ideologies; in his forties, this is what he’ll mostly write songs about. But for now, his primary drive is just to make more music and get better as quickly as possible.
Gylve finds his match in 1988 when mutual friends introduce him to a guitarist from Oslo named Ted Skjellum, a misanthropic teen who will eventually call himself Nocturno Culto. They talk about music on the phone for an hour and decide to meet up at the train station afterward. Gylve tells Ted to “look for a strange bloke with rattail hair and a scarf.” He looks a bit like a pale, sickly, Scandinavian Slash. “It was not very difficult to point him out when I arrived,” remembered Ted, who, with his long blond hair and a chilling voice, would take on vocal duties in the band.
The first great song they make together is called “Snowfall.” By this point, Black Death have changed their name to Darkthrone—based on a song title by Celtic Frost, the brilliantly inventive Swiss band who would serve as their most lasting source of inspiration. The group consists of Gylve and Ted, as well as guitarist Ivar “Zephyrous” Enger and bassist Dag Nilsen. They have an illegible logo that looks like a tangled pile of twigs coated in ice and dripping blood—among the first in a style that would become the standard for extreme metal. At the center, near the top, is a pentagram.
The sound of the band is eerie and intense and fairly derivative. They find their voice as a death metal band, a style of music that’s popular in Florida and Sweden, defined by low, growling vocals and dissonant melodies that require a substantial amount of technical proficiency. Even without vocals, “Snowfall” shows the potential of the genre, winding through its movements like a compact showcase of the chemistry that would define Nocturno and Fenriz’s music together, conjuring images of barren landscapes and wind through shaking branches. They sound serious because they are serious. Upon completing the recording, Fenriz drops out of high school to devote himself to music, as if he had been simply waiting for the right song to convince him.
Off the strength of their demo, Darkthrone start attracting attention. They accept a deal with an English label called Peaceville—because they want to share a label with their favorite death metal band, Autopsy—and set off to record their debut full-length at Stockholm’s Sunlight Studio—because they want it to sound like their favorite death metal album, Entombed’s Left Hand Path, which was recorded there. The album they make, 1991’s Soulside Journey, is a thrilling if uneven record. As soon as they’re finished with it, they start recording a more ambitious sophomore album, which they plan to call Goatlord. The music on Soulside Journey is gaining traction—far more than any other metal out of Norway at the time—but the band is changing their interests.
“We hate that LP. It’s a silly, trendy death metal record,” Fenriz says in one of the few interviews he granted during the band’s early days. “Our first album is called A Blaze in the Northern Sky and it’s out before ’92. It’s gonna be one of the most evil and darkened albums ever! You’re all gonna hate it!”
This is the moment when Darkthrone decide to become a black metal band. Where death metal is a labyrinth littered with quicksand pits that suck you under, black metal is an icy wind that pulls you heavenward. Death metal sounds like the plumbing of some hollowed-out lurching machinery; black metal is sheets of glass fed through a wood chipper. Death metal bands sound like they practice; black metal is a ritual. Death metal riffs are burbling and low; black metal riffs are played on the highest strings, quickly like staccato notes during the tensest part of a slasher film. If you squint, it’s kind of beautiful.
It’s difficult to pinpoint what exactly changed between Soulside Journey and A Blaze in the Northern Sky, pushing Darkthrone to embrace black metal completely. They downgraded their gear and sanded their riffs down into simpler, gnarlier shapes. And unlike Soulside Journey, A Blaze in the Northern Sky was recorded close to home, in a studio in the back of a shopping mall in Kolboton, Norway. Half of its songs were revised ideas from their death metal days (“Paragon Belial,” “A Blaze in the Northern Sky,” “The Pagan Winter”), while the stronger half comprised brand new compositions in the black metal style (“Kathaarian Life Code,” “In the Shadow of the Horns,” “Where Cold Winds Blow”).
The album’s wide range of material makes it all the more compelling. Fenriz’s drumming is simplified and sharpened—no more rolling toms, no jazzy flourishes. He recorded all his drum and a few vocal parts (some gurgled incantations, a shoutout to his bandmate in the second track) in just a few days and then passed out drunk while Nocturno did his vocals in a room filled with black candles. According to at least one report, they wore corpse paint while recording.
While A Blaze in the Northern Sky lacks the intensity of its follow-ups—the masterful Under a Funeral Moon and the snowed-out hypnosis of Transilvanian Hunger—it is no less of a revelation. At this point, Darkthrone sounds less like their eventual peers—Mayhem, Burzum, Emperor—and more like a nightmarish collage of all the things they love. There are old-school riffs, gurgling spoken-word interludes, noisy solos that grind up against the infernal blast beats in a kind of sonic battlefield. “In the Shadow of the Horns,” their single greatest song, is replete with a devilish sound effect—created by Fenriz stuffing a cowbell with toilet paper—and a guitar part that sounds like Motörhead speeding down the side of a cliff on a motorcycle falling apart. Their brand of black metal had yet to be codified; on A Blaze in the Northern Sky, it is merely a feeling.
Peaceville had no idea what to do with it. It’s late 1991, death metal had never been more popular, and these abstract blasts of noise might not appeal to the growing audience that was still just discovering Soulside Journey. The label suggested a remix; the band threatened to leave. The label conceded. Before the album was released, Peaceville included “In the Shadow of the Horns” on a sampler titled Vile Vibes II. Among songs by contemporary death metal bands like Impaler and Baphomet, Darkthrone sounded even more alien. Rob Curry, aka Death Dealer of the Australian metal band Vomitor, tells a story of hearing the tape on a tour bus and listening to Darkthrone’s song on repeat for the entire four-hour ride.
This would be Darkthrone’s initial legacy: a well-kept secret among touring bands, zines, and extreme metal enthusiasts. In the United States and Europe, black metal wouldn’t make the rounds until later in the decade when gruesome circumstances brought it to people’s attention. A scene had situated around a Norwegian record store called Helvete, founded by Euronymous, the guitarist of Mayhem. Frequented by members of all the notable black metal bands, it became a toxic social circle where the tenets of white nationalism and Nazism spread, largely due to the increasingly radicalized Varg Vikernes of the one-man band Burzum. In 1993, after spearheading a series of church burnings in Norway, he murders Euronymous, goes to jail, and becomes a dark figurehead for metal’s most hateful tendencies.
In the liner notes, Darkthrone dedicate A Blaze in the Northern Sky to Euronymous, “The king of black/death metal underground.” The scene was splintering. Nilson and Nocturno move deep into the wilderness, due to a growing disillusionment with what they describe, somewhat diplomatically, as a boys club. As the decade wears on, Fenriz’s rhetoric begins sounding a good deal like Varg’s, using the word “Aryan” to promote his music and “Jewish” as a pejorative. In 1994, Peaceville refuse to promote Darkthrone’s latest album and their relationship with the label—which they once dreamed of being on—ends unceremoniously.
In a famous Kerrang! article that helped bring black metal to American audiences, Cronos, frontman of Venom, distanced himself from the Norwegian black metal movement that cited him as a primary influence. “When you talk about Satanism relating to Venom, it’s about worshipping yourself, giving yourself freedom of choice of love and hate, good and evil,” he explained. “It’s not about being beholden to a deity. It’s about being the best you can be. All of this is very sad.” By the turn of the century, Fenriz found himself creatively stagnant, falling into depression and isolation.
If the story ended there, Darkthrone’s first decade of music might feel like an artifact of a troubled time and place. But eventually, they found their voice again, reborn as a duo of just Fenriz and Nocturno. After taking a defensive stance through the ’90s, Fenriz eventually apologized and disowned his behavior both in his words and his actions throughout the 2000s. He tore down the mystery and antagonism that once defined him and the second wave of black metal he ushered in. He granted every interview requested of him and used his platform to spread the word for good new bands. In the liner notes of a career retrospective box set Black Death and Beyond, he acknowledged his regret over the language he used in the ’90s. “There is no excuse,” he wrote.
Nocturno still lives in the woods and has a day job teaching; Fenriz works in the postal industry and exhibits his passion for Norway’s wilderness by taking long hikes, going on camping trips and, briefly, holding local office. The 2010s have been among their most consistent decades, touching on all the subgenres of metal they hold dear, with the notable exception of black metal. Some fans aren’t into it. Darkthrone accepts that. “We change as all on this planet changes,” Fenriz explained. “In a natural way.”
When you listen to A Blaze in the Northern Sky, it’s impossible to ignore all the violence that followed. But deep in its foggy, impressionist landscape, you can also hear the excitement, the inspiration. You can see kids in corpse paint in a recording studio in the back of a shopping mall crowded around the speakers playing a Black Sabbath album for reference as they try to bring a vision to life. You can imagine misfits traveling in vans dreaming about where on earth this sound was coming from. And you can envision a lonely kid somewhere with an entire world opening from the speakers, who might bask in its silence after the record ends, look out the window and see something bright and strange and burning somewhere far away.


The "doom wop" project of Nick Thorburn (Islands/Unicorns), Ryan Kattner (Man Man), and Joe Plummer (Modest Mouse) offers a focused, engaging debut. Rather than serve as an outlet for their well-documented eccentric streaks, Thorburn and Kattner's good-cop/bad-cop dynamic yields some of the most tightly focused songs either principal has produced.

Out of Love

Eight years ago, the smart money would've bet against Nick Thorburn becoming one of the more industrious alumni to emerge from the early-2000s Canadian indie-rock uprising-- his endearingly unstable former band, the Unicorns, could barely make it through a set without experiencing some sort of breakdown (be it technical or psychological). But while he has since emerged as the autonomous creative force behind the prog-pop ensemble Islands (tellingly, it was his face alone that graced the cover of 2009's Vapours) and recently released a low key solo album under the name Nick Diamonds (I Am an Attic), Thorburn has not forgotten what made the Unicorns so special: the alternately cheeky and tense dynamic between himself and ex-bandmate Alden Penner. As such, Thorburn has never shied away from the opportunity to match wits with a creative foil, teaming up with Jim Guthrie for the countrified Human Highway detour and, now, squaring off against Ryan Kattner-- aka Honus Honus of Philly carnival barkers Man Man-- in Mister Heavenly.
Thorburn, of course, is no stranger to high-concept side projects (namely, his flirtations with hip-hop in Th' Corn Gangg and Reefer) and, on paper, Mister Heavenly initially reads like a similarly orchestrated lark. The band-- rounded out by Modest Mouse drummer Joe Plummer-- was reportedly devised around a self-explanatory sub-genre they dubbed "doom wop." The stunt-casting of actor Michael Cera as the band's bassist during their spring 2011 tour reinforced the assumption that Mister Heavenly would be a casual, low-stakes endeavor with which Thorburn and Kattner could amuse themselves before returning to their main gigs. But Mister Heavenly's Sub Pop debut proves to be something far more lasting and rewarding: Rather than serve as an outlet for their well-documented eccentric streaks, Thorburn and Kattner's good-cop/bad-cop dynamic yields some of the most tightly focused, immediately engaging songs either principal has produced.
Ironically, it's Plummer's band that seems to wield the most influence on the outset, with Thorburn's ominously quiet verses on the opening "Bronx Sniper" yielding to an immodest, un-mousey grunge crunch and an especially Isaac Brock-ian howl from Kattner. But, as bracing an introduction as it is, the song's angst-rock ballast does not provide the best showcase of Mister Heavenly's charms. These are more readily revealed when the band settle down and put their modernist spin on early, pre-Beatles rock'n'roll balladry and 1960s tropical pop. Parallel-universe golden-oldies like "I Am a Hologram", "Diddy Eyes", and "Hold My Hand" may not fully live up to the transgressive promise of the "doom wop" descriptor but, like fellow 1950s-rock enthusiasts Black Lips and King Khan in their gentler moments, Mister Heavenly approach their AM-radio inspirations with just the right balance of devotion and deviance. (To wit, on the winsome title-track-cum-band-mission-statement "Mister Heavenly", Thorburn is not so much claiming to be the man of your dreams as resigning himself to the impossibility of living up to the matinee-idol ideal.)
Out of Love's playful spirit sometimes crosses the line into unnecessary indulgence-- the rocksteady rhythm of "Reggae Pie" sounds like it'd be fun to groove on in the practice space, but probably didn't need to be featured as the album's longest track (complete with false ending), while the 98-second song that actually bears the title "Doom Wop" doesn't even attempt to honor either half of the equation. (Oddly, its sludgy slop-rock sounds uncannily like a tossed-off Ty Segall demo.) However, at no point does it feel like the players are simply using Mister Heavenly as a dumping ground for leftover song scraps they couldn't work into their primary projects: Every song here comes off like a true, collaborative union of the singers' singular personalities, with Thorburn's calm, childlike voice and Kattner's wizened old-soul rasp trading verses and choruses in surprisingly complementary fashion. The effect is mutually corrupting-- by the time we reach the wonderfully warped pen-pal exchange "Pineapple Girl", Thorburn sounds like the creepy one while Kattner acts as the stabilizing force. Really, no one would ever accuse Islands or Man Man of lacking character and presence, but once Thorburn and Kattner return to their bands after this dalliance, you'll be excused for thinking they'll sound a little bit incomplete without one another.


Even with its imposing length and deep roster of collaborators, the ecstatic new album from Thurston Moore is arguably the most accessible entry point into his boundless experimental canon.

Spirit Counsel

For 40 years now, Thurston Moore has maintained dual citizenship in the worlds of rock and the avant-garde. But where he spent his three decades in Sonic Youth straddling the line between those discrete realms, he’s spent much of his solo career jumping from one side to the other. For every tuneful acoustic collection he’s issued under his own name and every searing set of guitar jams he’s kicked out with his Thurston Moore Group, there are literally over a hundred small-run micro-label releases and one-off collaborations where Moore has indulged his unabating loves of improvised noise, free jazz, spoken-word poetry, and black metal without interfering with his official indie-rock discography.
By contrast, Moore’s songs in recent years have hewed more conventionally classic rock, while his sideline pursuits have turned more extreme. But even though Moore is following up his most straight-up rockin’ album to date—2017’s Rock n Roll Consciousness—with a three-disc box set consisting of three mammoth instrumental movements that collectively run for over two and a half hours, he’s using the opportunity to build a bridge across the avant/rock divide instead of a wall. Even with its imposing length, Spirit Counsel is arguably the most accessible entry point into Moore’s boundless experimental canon.
The three works that comprise Spirit Counsel showcase vastly different methodologies, but each pays impressionistic tribute to influential figures in his life and art. The first, “Alice Moki Jayne,” is named for spiritual-jazz master Alice Coltrane, Swedish visual artist/musician Moki Cherry, and political poet Jayne Cortez, three women who, perhaps not coincidentally, established singular artistic identities outside the long shadows cast by their famous husbands (John Coltrane, Don Cherry, and Ornette Coleman, respectively). But unlike Moore’s more explicit tributes to the female avant-guardians of yore, “Alice Moki Jayne” channels their radical spirit implicitly into a work that’s perpetually reaching for a higher level of consciousness while embodying the struggle to achieve it amid the disorder and distractions of modern life.
“Alice Moki Jayne” is a rarity among Moore’s improvised releases, in that its personnel—namely, guitarist James Sedwards and My Bloody Valentine bassist Deb Googe—overlaps with his regular rock-band formation, and it feels like an extension of sounds and themes mined on Rock n Roll Consciousness. Here, we’re treated to a supersized version of the Thurston Moore Group with third guitarist Jen Chochinov and electronics wizard Jon Liedecker, a.k.a. Matmos/Negativland associate Wobbly, while the band’s usual drummer, Steve Shelley, is replaced by Róisín Murphy’s touring drummer Jem Doulton. But where it’s not uncommon for Thurston Moore Group to zone out past the 10-minute mark, here he employs his players in service of a monumental work that feels like nothing less than the eternal psychic tug-of-war between hope and despair rendered as a 63-minute, 12-string guitour de force.
Following a few minutes of ominous, cymbal-washed ambient haze, “Alice Moki Jayne” starts to take shape through a shimmering refrain that provides a distant echo of Pink Floyd’s “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” in both its repeated four-note melody and willingness to let it slowly evaporate into the late-night air for a seeming eternity. But from there, the work acquires a step-like structure, answering its psych-rock ascensions with meditative plateaus. One-third of the way in, after a steady build, the group locks into a hypnotic, warmly lit melody and lingers on it for several minutes, providing the track with the closest thing it has to a chorus. But half an hour later, the tension between the group’s rock formalism and lawless exploration has turned to all-out war: following a free-form, drum-less passage of flatulent guitar spasms and electronic indigestion, the group drops some truly startling blasts of distortion that trigger a heavy-metal meltdown. All of which is to say, “Alice Moki Jayne” demands a lot of your time, and rewards your patience handsomely.
Spirit Counsel’s second work is as intimate as its predecessor is expansive, with a relatively lean 29-minute runtime. “8 Spring Street” is named for the former address of Moore’s mentor and spirit guide into avant-underworld, the composer Glenn Branca. As the missing link between punk rock and Steve Reich, Branca’s densely layered guitar symphonies were foundational to the Sonic Youth sound. But instead of paying overt tribute to his late friend by attempting to replicate Branca’s heart-racing grandeur, “8 Spring Street” is a solo guitar piece that’s seemingly more interested in recapturing their moments of personal and musical connection in that SoHo apartment.
As Moore recently revealed, when hanging at Branca’s apartment, the two “would listen to the rotary fan in his window in the summertime. We would listen to the overtones, and he would say, ‘that’s what we need to sound like.” Tellingly, Moore spends much of “8 Spring Street” furiously strumming and jabbing at his instrument, conjuring the choppy rhythm and blurring motion of fan blades cutting through air—though when he activates the distortion pedal around eight minutes in, the effect is more like exploding warplanes crashing into an ocean. But “8 Spring Street” navigates its way through periodic stormy sections to arrive at a transfixing ambient-drone conclusion that functions not only as a somber farewell to a transformative figure in Moore’s life, but also a fading memory of a bohemian Manhattan that no longer exists.
If “8 Spring Street” finds Moore communing with his past, and “Alice Moki Jayne” showcases his band at full strength in the present, then Spirit Counsel’s final act points to his possible future. Recorded at London’s Barbican theater in April 2018, “Galaxies (Sky)” finds Moore leading an ensemble of 12 players on 12-string guitars for a cosmically themed composition inspired by a Sun Ra poem. The roster includes, among others, some familiar faces (Googe, Sedwards), old friends (Susan Stenger of Band of Susans, Alex Ward of N.E.W.), more recent road-mates (Rachel Aggs of Shopping/Sacred Paws, Jonah Falco of Fucked Up), the esteemed musicologist David Toop, and, perhaps most improbably, singer/songwriter James McCartney (son of you-know-who).
Clocking in at 55 minutes, “Galaxies (Sky)” is the most demanding of Spirit Counsel’s pieces, and the one positioned furthest away from Moore’s rock vernacular. Prior to the performance, Moore admitted that he had never met some of the players before; as such, he gives his charges a little extra time to get to know each other in an extended opening free-for-all where the guitars plink and plonk like mangled kalimbas, purr like a sleeping wildebeests, and clang like cast-iron wind chimes. But at the 11:30 mark, all those random noises coalesce into an ecstatic, 144-stringed drone that clears a path for a vibrant, “Street Hassle”-style pulse to take hold.
Compared to the more sectional construction of “Alice Moki Jayne,“ “Galaxies (Sky)” evolves through a more fluid, organic process, where the subtlest changes eventually have profound effects on the course of the piece. Over its second half, the psychedelic, trance-inducing qualities gradually give way to doomy dissonance, reaching particularly nauseous extremes around the 37th minute. But fitting for a release intended to coincide with International Peace Day (Sept. 21), Moore steers his troupe toward a calming come-down, harnessing the squall into a hypnotic feedback hum with lion-tamer poise. And, in the piece’s dying moments, all the guitars start ringing out like a thousand alarm clocks going off at once, a finale that feels less like self-implosion than a celebration—as if the seated players were giving themselves a string-strangled standing ovation. As the full-circle conclusion to a box set that mirrors Moore’s personal journey from avant-garde acolyte to rock-band ringleader and back again, “Galaxies (Sky)” reaffirms that, after all these years, he’s still traveling down the expressway to yr skull—it’s just expanded to a 12-lane superhighway.

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If anyone out there is still wondering just how Ryan Adams can be so prolific, maybe it's because the ...

Love Is Hell, Pts. 1 & 2

If anyone out there is still wondering just how Ryan Adams can be so prolific, maybe it's because the urgency of his situation compels him to strike while the iron is hot. It took his former band, Whiskeytown, seven years to release a trio of critically revered albums, and his first solo record, 2000's Heartbreaker, was in the works for half that. But when Heartbreaker saw release, and was promptly met with virtually unanimous critical praise, Adams clearly became inspired and quickly turned out sixteen new tracks for a sophomore record-- the rushed, overproduced Gold-- which came with a bonus disc sporting five tracks in the more stripped vein of the album's predecessor. And when that album scored Adams a commercial alternative radio hit in the well-timed "New York, New York", he descended into a recording fervor that continues, unabated, to this day.
Irrational outbursts and public meltdowns aside, Adams is, at heart, an extremely gifted songwriter who just doesn't realize that what he really needs is to take a deep breath and slow the fuck down. During the course of the past two years, he's released a collection of demos (Demolition), and a 21-track side project called The Finger with ex-D Generation frontman Jesse Malin (the "double-album" We Are Fuck You/Punk's Dead Let's Fuck). He's currently planning a box set titled Career Ender, which will be crammed with five discs of the songs he's discarded since Gold dropped two years ago. And that's not even taking into account the four-tracked blues version of The Strokes' album Is This It that he's said to have recorded. Did I mention his collaborations with Beth Orton and Emmylou Harris? How about the track he co-wrote for the Counting Crows? His session work with Lucinda Williams and Alejandro Escovedo? His production work on Jesse Malin's solo album? I think you get the point. The question is: why doesn't he?
Adams originally intended Love Is Hell as his official third full-length, but his label, Lost Highway, scoffed when he handed in the tapes. Initially, he planned to rework it, but then agreed to dashing off a glossy, radio-friendlier full-length (the disasterous Rock N Roll), provided the label would also make room on their release schedule for a secondary release for Love Is Hell. It's easy to see why Lost Highway balked: an insincere, smugly posturing Ryan Adams who lives up to his stage persona by creating an album like Rock N Roll simply had to have been preferable to the miserable, slobbering woe-is-me shtick he plays up here. At least when he was wearing the proverbial alt-country tag, his balancing act of conceitedness and overemoting was halfway convincing. Unfortunately, just as the caricature-laden excesses of Rock N Roll aped garage-rockers and postmortem Rock Hall of Famers, Love Is Hell reaches for the dripping, maudlin sentimentality of Rufus Wainwright or a mock Jeff Buckley.
It's a shock, given that the press surrounding the Love Is Hell sessions had pegged the record as Adams' return to the sparse, two-in-the-morning flair of his debut-- and when Lost Highway postponed the recordings, calling them "too dark," it only heightened the expectations of optimistic fans hoping for a stark, brooding future classic. Of course, it did seem something of an enigma as well: Adams' music, after all, had always faired best with pared-down arrangements making room for his own brand of confessional singer/songwriter groveling (e.g. Heartbreaker standouts "Call Me on Your Way Back Home" and "Come Pick Me Up"); shelving Ryan Adams for being too dark seemed to make about as much sense as shelving Kraftwerk for being too German.
But while it's safe to say that these EPs are certainly dark-- at least in contrast to Rock N Roll and even parts of Gold-- they fail to capture the striking imagery and confident vocals of which Adams seemed a master on Heartbreaker. For example, Love Is Hell's opening, piano-led "Political Scientist", replaces Adams' confessional, first-person narratives with a third-person tale that indicts the government for supplying cocaine, and candy factories for poisoning the environment. Conspiracy theories aside, playing Greenpeace spokesman is not Adams' strong suit; he attempts the political profundity of a Thom Yorke and comes off like a diet Chris Martin.
And if Adams fails to adopt Yorke's political relevance, he'll settle for the Radiohead frontman's melismatics-- Love Is Hell is riddled with Adams' unabashed aping of Yorke's signature fragmented lyrical style. On the lethargic lite-country stomp of "This House Is Not for Sale", Adams repeatedly pleads, "Calm down/ Just calm down," the emotional resonance of which verges on laughable. Meanwhile, the sleepy, acoustic blather of "Afraid Not Scared" has Adams repeatedly confessing that he is "really dying in here," and just wants to be "let down," sounding about as genuinely distraught as Ja Rule sounds genuinely "gangsta."
The eight songs that constitute Love Is Hell, Pt. 1 seem intentionally built around a studio version of Adams' infamous live staple, a cover of the Oasis hit "Wonderwall". Acclaimed Smiths producer John Porter unfortunately buries Adams beneath a sobering wall of reverb, which drains the song of its spirited pop ingenuity and transforms its nonsensical lyrics into some sort of momentous, self-important dirge. Consequently, "Wonderwall" seems emblematic of the rest of the disc, a collection of preposterously cheerless (and charmless) songs that try much too hard to achieve a poignancy-- or anything, really-- that might hide their complete insignificance.
As Love Is Hell, Pt. 1 resoundingly proves, Adams is at his finest when he sticks to the subject matter he knows best: broken hearts and bar fights. Given this, it's no shock that the highlight of this entire project comes with the Dylanesque Beth Orton kiss-off "English Girls Approximately". Appearing halfway into Love Is Hell, Pt. 2, the song is classic Adams, brimming with his smug wit (sample lyric: "You said you didn't love me, it was right on time/ I was just about to tell you, but ok, alright") and unabashed, acoustic guitar-driven ecstasy. As Marianne Faithful lends her austere vocal harmonies to the chorus, it serves as a breathtaking reminder of the chemistry Adams shared with Emmylou Harris on Heartbreaker's divine ballad, "Oh, My Sweet Carolina".
Another highlight of Love Is Hell, Pt. 2 is its closing R&B; vamp, "Chelsea Nights". Over a bed of radiating Wurlitzer chords and bluesy guitar fills, Adams narrates a night spent aimlessly wandering New York City's unfeeling winter streets, searching for the love he always manages to lose. The track, which peaks with Adams' plaintive confession, "I played your song/ I got the melody all wrong," is filled with the self-awareness, irony, and despondency that's made Adams' best work so moving, all the way back to his Whiskeytown days; it's a shame he forces his listeners to wade through a glut of unsalvageable crap-rock to arrive at it.
Indeed, these two tracks are anomalies-- happy accidents, or moments of clarity-- amongst the overbearing melodrama of the bulk of material contained on Love Is Hell, Pt. 2. "Thank You Louise" serves as the harrowing antithesis to these diamonds in the rough, an atrocious slice of sloppy sentimentality in which Adams sings, over an unnecessarily bloated string section, of a mother receiving news of her son's death. For a guy who's attained uncommon levels of infamy by simply being a sarcastic fucking prick all the time, he pours on the schmaltz here like he studied under Air Supply. The Joy Division rip-off "City Rain, City Streets" is so bereft of any humor that its megalomania challenges even Conor Oberst: Adams crams nearly four minutes of distorted new-wave guitars and gratuitous reverb into this shudder-inducing display of shamelessness, proudly spouting disasters like, "I fucked you over a million times," and, "You died, you died, you really died."
Listening to these discs, one can only imagine the myriad reasons Lost Highway decided to release the Love Is Hell sessions not as one spiraling, abysmal full-length, but as a pair of EPs (let alone why they shelved it to make way for Rock N Roll instead). The obvious, cynical answer is that it wouldn't detract from the publicity they were expecting Rock N Roll to receive. But it's also easy to envision the label's creative heads considering how spreading the material out might help conceal the songs' alarmingly empty sentiments. The sad fact is, no marketing strategy, no matter how savvy, could conceal this collection's bathetic, overwrought travesties and gruesome failures. In the midst of this mess, both Adams and Lost Highway come out losers: one critical car-wreck might have been manageable, but they may not recover from two.


The Delta-tinged garage band's latest record-- created with producer Danger Mouse-- was originally conceived as a collaboration with the late Ike Turner. What remained following Turner's death became the foundation of their fifth and most adventurous album to date.

Attack & Release

The Black Keys seemed doomed to linger in the long, black-and-red shadow of the White Stripes. That's perhaps unfair: Akron's Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney have perfected their own brand of Delta-tinged, garage minimalism. But after four albums, even they seemed to realize they had hit a creative wall. Luckily, in 2007, they were tapped by producer Danger Mouse for a collaboration with Ike Turner, though when he passed away last December, the project left the duo with a host of material. This became the foundation of their fifth and most adventurous album to date. Maneuvering between the King of Rhythm's joie de vivre and their crestfallen, crossroads-blues heritage, Attack and Release subtly expands the Black Keys sound.
An auteur raised on hip-hop, DM keeps the record from staying overly loyal to the Creedence or Free templates. This is a small but crucial difference from 2006's Magic Potion. He colors the band's no-frills narratives with futuristic accents or, on the opposite end, rural flourishes of psychedelia and folk. On each track they add a bolt of surprise that amplifies the pitch-black mood and message. Take the flutes and feedback of "Same Old Thing", which in combination suggest a childlike innocence peeled away by a cold, indifferent world. Likewise, a tension opens between the peppy xylophone and world-weary, Waitsian tremolo on "So He Won't Break". Longtime Waits and Elvis Costello guitarist Marc Ribot lends his powers to this song and to the anguished 6/8 masterpiece "Lies". Here (and elsewhere: "Psychotic Girl", "I Got Mine", "Strange Times") Danger Mouse's layer of backing vocals imbue these earthly stories with a beyond-the-grave air, taking lost-love themes to an eerily literal but quintessentially blues-y level. The unexpected organ line of "All You Ever Wanted" feels like a police ambush on this jilted-John ballad. We almost forget that, in light of the band's uniformly lo-fi discography, nearly every fresh sound on Attack & Release should strike us as alien.
A sequence of slow burns, the record's tempos allow you to relish the details and the textures. "Remember When (Side A)", with its eddies of reverb, envisions nostalgia as something dim and meticulously crafted, with a touch of the fantastic. Speaking of the past, the raw, amplified wallop of the Black Keys' old days is still here, too. Given that Ike Turner was partly responsible for rock'n'roll's love affair with distortion, it would have been wrong for Attack & Release to discard fuzzy riffs. The other side of "Remember When" will sooth anyone longing for their sinewy Nuggets rave-ups. Fans of previous BK records will find this song and the first single, "Strange Times", the bluntest weapons here.
"Things Ain't Like They Used to Be" leads the album to a grim finish. Auerbach's sluggish, hung-over melodies, echoed by teenage protégé Jessica Lea Mayfield's distant singing, carry an air of defeat. Addressed to an old lover, the lyrics describe a happier past, overgrown yards, a man blindly walking into battles, and other ingredients of lament. Yet Carney and Auerbach know that there's more to the blues than bad news. These men are stoics to the fingertips. "It doesn't mean a thing to me," Auerbach repeats on the chorus. The jaded ex of "Same Old Thing" speaks the same language: "It don't matter where you been." We know better.


Lana Del Rey’s second album of the year is a sweeping survey of her talent as a songwriter, stripped of the aesthetic borders she often places around her work.

Blue Banisters

In the decade since her major-label debut Born to Die, Lana Del Rey has worked so quickly and consistently, navigating so many passing controversies and thorny conversations, that it has been easy to take for granted her steady evolution as an artist. The 36-year-old musician recently took a break from social media, allowing herself an uncharacteristically quiet press cycle, and there she sits on the cover of her second album of 2021, Blue Banisters, nestled between two German shepherds, serene and pastoral, removed from the world. Things, for the moment, seem peaceful.
So let’s take this opportunity to check in on the state of her art with a standout track called “Black Bathing Suit.” The subject matter remains in her wheelhouse. She admits to being complicated. She self-identifies as a “bad girl,” someone with a price on her head, living on borrowed time. She writes with a casual sense of fatalism about loneliness (“If this is the end, I want a boyfriend”) and ennui (“When I’m being honest, I’m tired of this shit”), drawing our attention to the titular item of clothing with a sense of focus that, when applied in horror films, generally leads us to believe this object will later be used to identify a body. This is all Lana 101.
But there are crucial updates. Unlike the Great Gatsby roleplay of her early work, all the action takes place in the present day—which we recognize instantly because the opening line goes, “Grenadine, quarantine, I like you a lot/It’s LA, ‘Hey’ on Zoom, Target parking lot.” And while it was once easy to label Lana a pop artist—someone whose songwriting worked with tight structures and hooks, accompanied by fancy videos and dance remixes—“Black Bathing Suit” breaks from any confines. As she moves from verse to pre-chorus to chorus, she lets the seams show, each section finding its own distinct atmosphere with ghostly harmonies, off-time cymbal taps, and, near the end, a hoarse, Fetch the Bolt Cutters wail. Eventually, you start to feel like you’re in the studio alongside her, listening past the fade out as she tweaks and ornaments the music to keep herself interested.
There is a sense of playfulness, unguardedness, and freedom to Blue Banisters. If its predecessor, Chemtrails Over the Country Club, was Lana’s most traditional singer-songwriter affair—a somewhat monochromatic collection of mid-tempo songs played on piano and acoustic guitar—then these 15 tracks share a more boundless vision. One of its highlights, the closing “Sweet Carolina,” pairs a stunning, delicate vocal performance with a set of lyrics possibly dedicated to her sister. And then, out of nowhere, there’s a verse that goes like this:

You name your babe Lilac Heaven
After your iPhone 11
‘Crypto forever,’ screams your stupid boyfriend
Fuck you, Kevin

It’s funny and real, a reminder that the people we love most aren’t just the ones to whom we dedicate our earnest love songs—they’re often the recipients of our dumbest jokes.
This freewheeling tone also informs the structure of the album. Placed among modern transmissions like “Black Bathing Suit,” “Sweet Carolina,” and “Text Book” (“There we were, screaming, ‘Black Lives Matter,’” she reflects) are songs like “Living Legend” and “Cherry Blossom,” titles that have circulated among her fanbase in unofficial form for years. These recordings, which date back as far as the sessions for 2014’s Ultraviolence, constitute about a third of the tracklist, stretching the runtime past an hour and making the whole thing feel slightly unwieldy, off-balance, lacking the cohesion of her best albums.
And yet, these qualities also make the record stand out: a survey of Lana’s gifts, stripped of the aesthetic borders she often places around her work. It’s an approach that aligns her with the legacy artists she has always drawn from—Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen, craftsmen constantly digging through the archives to recontextualize their mythology. But there is also pop precedent. Were Lana less obsessive about her body of work, she might have sequenced the newer songs onto a deluxe edition of Chemtrails; were she more savvy, she might have issued them as an interlinked companion release to close out the year.
Fortunately, Blue Banisters stands on its own, encompassing the many styles she has by now mastered: The edgy Miles Kane collaboration “Dealer” returns to the psych-rock hypnosis of Ultraviolence, while the spare “Beautiful” draws from the same well of aspirational standards as 2017’s “Love.” Her collaborators include familiar names (Rick Nowels, Zachary Dawes) and literal family members (her father and sister, co-writers on “Sweet Carolina”), alongside ex-boyfriends and producers like Mike Dean. Still, the whole thing flows with a breezy, self-contained hum. For those unfamiliar with the pivots and scenery changes from album to album, you might not even notice the time-jumps.
Despite the wide range of moods—the unbridled howl of “I don’t wanna live” in “Dealer,” her old Hollywood quiver returning for “Nectar of the Gods”—the clearest evolution is in the writing. Sometime around 2019’s high-water mark Norman Fucking Rockwell!, Lana made a shift from character studies and archetypes (best exemplified here in the classic-sounding “Thunder”) to first-person musings on celebrity, inextricable from her own life in the public eye. On Chemtrails, she sang about “coverin’ Joni and dancin’ with Joan,” and now she writes about her family, her creative process, and her personal struggles, most directly in “Text Book.” For all the sadness and desperation across her songbook, an early lyric in the song, “I didn’t even like myself,” feels like her barest, most wounded confession.
When Lana released the piano ballad “Arcadia” this summer, she instructed her fans, “Listen to it like you listened to ‘Video Games.’” On one hand, she might have been trying to game the system, encouraging listeners to boost the streaming numbers to match those of her past work. (Born to Die remains her only album to spawn a Top 10 hit.) But maybe she was asking for something more personal. After all, her debut single was likely the last time that Lana could release music to zero expectations, introducing herself to the world on her own terms. Like a lot of people who feel misunderstood, she is a chronic over-explainer, and Blue Banisters sprawls and elaborates past the point where we can place our own projections onto it. We know too much. But at its best, this music offers an even more rewarding thrill: It manages to entertain, enrapture, and even surprise because of how well we know Lana Del Rey—and how much there is still to learn.

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The Kentucky folksinger’s fifth solo album strips down to acoustic instrumentation and her softly luminous voice, carving out a refuge where love and nature find solace in each other.

Joan Shelley: Like the River Loves the Sea

Like the River Loves the Sea

The fifth solo album from Joan Shelley, the Kentucky folk singer-songwriter, arrives with the promise of sanctuary. Like the River Loves the Sea is a 12-track dispatch from a carefully cultivated microclimate in which the worlds of nature and love coexist and co-depend, each offered a fighting chance to blossom away from the persistent clamor of the everyday. On paper, perhaps, it reads like a retreat. (Shelley calls it “a haven for overstimulated heads in uncertain times.”) In practice, it sounds like a bolstering of defenses—strong and unapologetic.
Over the past five years, Shelley has subjected her music to a process of rewilding. The noisier post-rock terrain of earlier albums, notably Electric Ursa, has been grassed over to create something naturalistic and unadorned. Aided by her core collaborators, James Elkington and Nathan Salsburg, she has pared down her songs to the base elements of acoustic instrumentation and her softly luminous voice: cool, unshowy, conversational. Now and then there are drums, marking time rather than disturbing it.
Yet with each step she adds a new flavor. On her last album, 2017’s Joan Shelley, the surprise ingredient turned out to be a wholesome pinch of Jeff Tweedy, who added bass and guitar and produced Shelley at his Loft studio in Chicago. This time Shelley and her bandmates recorded in Reykjavik, and although the sound is fashioned from an intricate blend of guitar, piano, and keyboard, the emphasis has changed once again, primarily due to the violin and cello orchestrations of Icelandic sisters Þórdís Gerður Jónsdóttir and Sigrún Kristbjörg Jónsdóttir. Their contributions lend these songs their wings. On “Cycle” and “Stay All Night,” the tensile shimmer recalls the high-wire tumble of strings at the climax of Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks.”
Large parts of the album are almost overwhelmingly beautiful. On “Teal” and “High on the Mountain,” the melodies tumble down like mountain water, at once fresh and familiar. These are summery, late-1960s folk-pop songs left to meander in the meadows. Other tracks are tougher than tree trunks. “Coming Down for You,” a rigid, crackling, minor-key bluegrass tune with vocals shared between Shelley and her fellow Kentuckian Will Oldham, firmly rebuffs any whiff of the bucolic.
On a record where the smallest movements matter, both musically and lyrically, Shelley proves hyper-attuned to the twitch of the moment. On “Teal,” she recalls the instant when “the bones of my neck lifted.” On “When What It Is,” a distant rattle of harmonium somehow conjures the precarious nature of commitment. Several songs track shifting romantic fortunes via the changing seasons, recognizing that change is hard-wired. “The Fading,” where she is again joined by Oldham, links broken-down love to the inevitable churn of harrow and harvest, drought and flood. On “The Sway”—a sepia country-blues, reminiscent of Cowboy Junkies—fences fall and rivers turn to mud, just as the many forms of love investigated here are similarly buffeted by outside forces. All that’s left to hold on to is the certainty that what has changed now will in time change again.
In the flux, coupling becomes a matter of sacred communion. On “High on the Mountain,” Shelley recalls a time “when the bed wasn’t mine but ours.” On “The Fading,” the outline of a lover’s form remains after they are gone, both comfort and curse. “Tell Me Something” makes explicit the raw carnality underpinning many of these songs: “Take me to the bed, shake me to my knees,” she sings, as a lone viola slices through the pheromones, “where I can find a piece of you, and you can have a piece of me.”
There are other moments where the animating spark is less present, when the simple nursery-rhyme cadences of Shelley’s melodies feel a little too homespun. “Awake” is almost cutesy, “Any Day Now” a routine jog. Mostly, Like the River Loves the Sea succeeds in elevating Shelley’s ruminations on “the ground I am bound to” and “the tender things around me” to matters of universal resonance.

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Singer-songwriter recruits members of 31Knots and Norfolk & Western to help her mold this intelligent and devastatingly downbeat "relationship" album, released on Mark Kozelek's label.

Corrina Repp: The Absent and the Distant

The Absent and the Distant

Holy "Hans Christian Andersen's original represssed-homosexuality version of The Little Mermaid in which Ariel feels like she's dancing on knives," Pitchfork does not pay me enough to listen to this album one more time. Corrina Repp went and recruited members of 31Knots and Norfolk & Western to help make one of the most intelligent and devastatingly downbeat "relationship" albums of this herky-jerk decade, for Mark "Professionally Sad" Kozelek's all-but private label. I planned a half-dozen detached ways to navigate this review. I considered typing about this one time at the beach when females were suddenly honest about the peanut butter & canine cunnlingus urban legend (admitting "girls are sick fucks"), which hopefully would have tapped into this album's "wouldn't-you-like-to-know" Virgin Suicides mystique. Or maybe about how one of this album's most why-people-cut-themselves anthems, "All", is named after the most grandiose of the whole insane range of grandiose names for laundry detergent. But The Absent and the Distant will not let me dodge its "emo"-- okay, rebuke cutesyness, I mean "emotional"-- tractor beam.
Every song on this album, even (perhaps especially) the instrumentals, is a magic, killer, killer bullet that might only work on a small percentage of the shopster populazzi. You have to be prayerfully anticipating the last time that you fail someone. You have to have recently been accused of masturbating with a towel lying atop your computer even though it was for navelgazer tears and snot. You have to have imagined that corpse-bog from Lord of the Rings filled with your exes. You have to be so consumed with a decision about a partner that all other decisions got left unmade; you have to have once felt so "fixed" by a significant other that all else in your life fell into disrepair, even as your brain scrambled "disrepair" to spell "diaper, sir."
I've used the weak, unvivid verb combo "has/have" eight times so far in this review, but only because Corrina Repp uses it so sharply, in re: not being able to be "had" or to "have" someone else. She recklessly examines the point at which wanting to "have" another person lapses into a tyrannical ownership fantasy, which then lapses into an existential realization about how we barely have ourselves. Repp also menacingly abuses the pronoun "it" without letting it modify anything in particular. She does so most violently during the monogamy-shuffling "Anyone's It," which I can't continue to talk about.
Repp's recipe involves a churchy minimalist piano pattern overlaid with cold-chill trilling at the chorus from either a mandolin or another piano track or epically reverbed percussion. Her directness is disarming during this cultural moment that places such a high premium on gimmicks and obfuscation. Her huge vocals take up so much space in the mix that they'll remind you of the days when horror movies weren't about the body. Repp's a better balladeer than many of the bearded boys imagined to own the mode, and the songs often opt out of an easy sad/happy dynamic to shoot for double-edged truthiness: "What if that safe place has secrets no one understands?" "You hurt because you love someone." Friends of a new couple "wonder why we're both a little gone." Every conventionally sweet moment collides with a line measuring the loneliness love causes: "Wait for me/ I'll wait for you/ O the things that we have lost." The stately pose of Repp's used-to-be-human delivery prevents the lyrical sincerity from embarrassing itself, perhaps too often.
Again, you probably have to doff your savvy consumer-armor and sit around in your sentimental fishnets to truly experience this album's captivating stillness, its relaxing sense of risk, its Broadcast-and-Patsy-Cline-make-a-folk-album-with-This-Mortal-Coil scope, and its portraits of lovers who anchor each more deeply in direct proportion to their insistence on remaining adrift. If you already sit around in sentimental fishnets all day, trust that you will not be able to handle The Absent And The Distant; it will have dismantled you long before the hymnic "That Which Has No Remorse" visits pews kept warm by 1970s Bob Dylan and 1990s Daniel Johnston. As a distraction from this disc's power, maybe shout "deez nuts" once per track, and keep CSS or something similarly silly-assed handy on your iTunes playlist.


This gospel set covers a wide range of approaches: from contented to contemptuous, sessions to field recordings, fevered shouts to ruminative moans.

Various Artists: Fire in My Bones: Raw + Rare + Otherworldly African-American Gospel, 1944-2007

Fire in My Bones makes its intentions known within its first three songs. This 3xCD gospel collection opens with the spry, graceful instrumental performance of the traditional hymn "Peace in the Valley", recorded in 1963 by ace lap steel player Rev. Lonnie Farris. It's not the obvious choice for an opener, but serves as a kind of overture. Immediately following is "Rock and Roll Sermon", in which Mobile, Alabama's Elder Beck enumerates the evils of secular music and its degenerative effect on good Christian society. Amazingly, the song itself rocks hard, as Beck improvises on Bill Halley's "Rock Around the Clock" and an unknown guitar player fires off ferocious hellfire licks. After that Spirit-fueled sermon comes "If I Could Hear My Mother Pray Again", a professional recording by Rev. Anderson Johnson that manages to be both restrained and massively moving, his smoothly expressive voice effortlessly conveying his orphan angst.
In just three songs, Fire in My Bones covers a range of musical approaches and emotional expressions: from contented to contemptuous, from professional sessions to field recordings, from fevered shouts to ruminative moans. Gospel, this collection insists, is not one thing but many. The term itself constitutes such a wide umbrella that it may have more to do with the performers and their intentions than with the noises they make. That mission explains some of the curious aspects of the collection, which was curated by writer, archivist, and Pitchfork contributor Mike McGonigal. First, there's that unhelpfully long time frame, which spans the height of World War II through the last days of the Bush II era. What can you say about gospel and its development throughout the 20th century if you're painting with such broad strokes? As a history of the form, Fire in My Bones offers little insight into how it developed across these 63 years. To be fair, though, McGonigal is after more than a simple chronicle of the genre. He eschews the post-war heyday th [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| at many compilers and historians emphasize, setting his sights on the margins of the gospel mainstream.
Those margins are lively and rambunctious, which makes Fire in My Bones an often mind-blowing listening experience-- a Nuggets-style mix from a guy with a deep knowledge of the subject. Disparity is the key theme: On "Wasn't That a Mystery", the Madison County Senior Center Singers deliver a mighty call and response, while Rev. G.W. Killens and the Mt. Calvary Congregation achieve a full upswell of wordless sounds-- a truly joyful noise, but also one filled with dark warning. The Abraham Brothers' "Spirit of the Lord" possesses a gravitational sway that isn't too far removed from the rockabilly rhythms of the Radio Four's "How Much I Owe". Not so much in their subject matter but in the quality of their performances, these recordings make clear these are first and foremost worship songs, but there are many ways to praise God: extolling His power to others, recounting personal experiences and commitments, and deploying a brand of scare tactics that might seem ugly if not set to such rollicking and urgent music.
The musical and emotional diversity of this collection speaks to the range of circumstances under which these songs were performed and recorded, as well as to the variety of African-American experience throughout the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st. These artists made music using whatever resources were available, for whoever was devoted enough to hear them: a professional studio, an archivist's reel-to-reel, a congregation that can double as an instrument, or just a beat-up harmonica. As Tennessee singer Joe Townsend exclaims, "If I could not say a word, I would just raise my hand." For showing the many different ways people can raise their hands, Fire in My Bones is an invaluable introduction to the power and breadth of gospel, as wide and disparate as "rock'n'roll" or "hip-hop." But that lesson isn't this collection's greatest quality. Rather, its true selling point is the intense power of these individual testimonies, which rock, roll, and revel with passion and real fire.


Steve Gunn is a sometime-guitarist in Kurt Vile's Violators, and one half of the Gunn-Truscinski Duo. Time Off is a collection of six loose, spiraling guitar songs that give more than they ask: generous compositions, gently presented, recalling the Grateful Dead, JJ Cale, and Bert Jansch.

Time Off

Over the last decade, a spate of pastiche-fiends have been mining previously dormant genres for inspiration-- and as a result, dudes like Bruce Hornsby and Nile Rodgers are now serving unexpected, late-career stints as alt-touchstones. “Jam bands,” though-- long the presumed terrain of white people in dreadlocks and homemade pants-- stay largely unsung; maybe there’s something too dopey about the contemporary scene, or something too ambitious about the virtuosity high-caliber jams require. The Grateful Dead remain the grand exception, a band that’s somehow both an embodiment of and an outlier within their field. The Dead’s best live jams are emotional, melodically dizzying romps, rightly treasured for their ability to insulate a listener from whatever shitty things might be transpiring elsewhere. There’s safety in those songs. Getting close to it can feel euphoric.
Steve Gunn, a sometime-guitarist in Kurt Vile’s Violators and one half of the Gunn-Truscinski Duo, is offering the same kind of shelter on Time Off, a collection of six loose, spiraling guitar songs that give more than they ask: These are generous compositions, gently presented. Gunn’s a descendent of the Dead, but also of J.J. Cale and La Monte Young and Bert Jansch and Frank Hutchinson, and his guitar playing has a mesmeric quality, a tender circling that feels almost like being swaddled. Which is not to belittle their potency, or Gunn’s craft: he’s a nimble, expressive guitarist and a pleasantly lackadaisical vocalist, singing, as he does, about his Brooklyn neighborhood, or water bumping a waterwheel into motion, or taking a certain path through a field. There’s an unrefined, organic quality to Gunn’s work that occasionally recalls Chicago stalwarts Califone or early Red Red Meat-- a reinterpretation of “Americana” that allows for plenty of ingenuity (and requires no costuming).
Gunn’s voice is rambling and soft, but he’s a welcome guide wherever and whenever he shows up-- like a third of the way into “Street Keeper”, when his vocals hitch onto a sweet guitar refrain, or on “Water Wheel”, where he sounds, momentarily, like the late Shannon Hoon, mewing placidly about a river. There are bits here that feel improvised-- or at least slack enough to suggest improvisation-- but Gunn’s songs still rely on patterns and interactions that were clearly composed with care. It helps that his backers (John Truscinski on drums and Justin Tripp on bass) are as comfortable with a groove (see “New Decline”, especially) as they are with hoisting up Gunn’s guitar.
Like all acoustic guitarists with extensive record collections, Gunn has endured plenty of comparisons to John Fahey, but the association feels almost too facile to perpetuate: While Gunn’s produced some more explicitly cerebral work (for a time, he was into manipulating tapes of field recordings), Time Off’s biggest asset is its ease. There’s a real sense, listening to these tracks, that everything could be a little simpler if we all stopped trying so hard. It is deeply mellow in a way that the famously cantankerous Fahey would have likely found confounding.
It’s also a record that happens to make tremendous sense right now, on the precipice of summer, when we’re all anxious to uncurl a little. On “Lurker”, Gunn sings repeatedly about finding “a spot to kill time and look around,” and while it’s ostensibly an innocent observation of a neighborhood drifter, it ends up feeling more like a directive-- advice to heed. Find a spot, kill some time. Look around.


Working alongside her partner Damon Reece, the Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser delivers her most substantial musical statement in a quarter century.

Sun’s Signature

In the quarter century since the Cocteau Twins broke up, Elizabeth Fraser’s career has resembled that of an athlete whose natural talent throws off their decision-making. Fraser’s voice, a heavenly glissando swoop that could charm a butterfly from its chrysalis, is so exquisite that her irregular guest appearances (notably on Massive Attack’s “Teardrop”) and one-off songs have rarely disappointed. But her solo work has lacked focus, with no definitive statement to lift her out of the Cocteau Twins’ lengthy shadow. Sun’s Signature, an eponymous five-track EP from Fraser’s duo with percussionist and romantic partner Damon Reece, is her most substantial undertaking since the Cocteau Twins. It proves worth the wait: a display of rarefied skill scaled to surprisingly human proportions.
The origins of Sun’s Signature lie in the ANOHNI-curated London Meltdown Festival in 2012, where Fraser and Reece debuted embryonic versions of four of the five songs on the EP. (“Underwater,” the trip-hop-adjacent and slightly pat opening track, was originally released in 2000 as a Fraser solo single, although the Sun’s Signature version has been fleshed out with new elements, remixed, and remastered). Over the following decade, the perfectionist duo painstakingly worked up their material, re-editing and refining every element to create a work of incredibly rich—and often unexpected—detail. Reece cites Bernard Herrmann and John Barry’s soundtracks as inspiration for Sun’s Signature’s intricate sound, and there is a widescreen element to the duo’s music, which takes in vibraphone, mellotron, Moog, cimbalom, and more, sounding in places almost like Moon Safari.
Added to this is a healthy and rather unexpected dose of prog rock, with former Genesis member Steve Hackett providing crackling sustained guitar to “Underwater” and standout “Golden Air”; his work sets psychedelic fire to “Golden Air” like John Lennon and George Harrison’s overdriven solos on the Beatles’ “It’s All Too Much.” Hackett also contributes Spanish guitar to the beatific closing track “Make Lovely the Day,” while Reece opts for some interesting percussive choices. “Bluedusk” starts with stately timpani, and a rolling, millipede-like tom-tom line on “Golden Air” adds an unexpected rhythmic twist.
The result—the underwhelming “Underwater” aside—is an atypical and richly baroque musical bed that is, finally, worthy of Fraser’s singular talent. The Scottish singer’s voice is so richly alluring that it can feel like a cheat code for producers, a way of bolting ready-made elegance to any structure, from Oneohtrix Point Never’s collapsing electronics to Sam Lee’s orchestral folk. But Reece’s sparkling productions feel specifically tailored to her voice, which finds its reflection in the swoon of a Moog or the gentle touch of an acoustic guitar, music and voice amplifying each other’s considerable charms.
Fraser is in predictably fine form. Her voice has matured considerably from the slightly jagged tones of her Cocteau Twins debut, when the band sailed close to punk rock and goth; here, she lands on a tone that is higher, fuller, and more recognizably human in register. Her lyrics, often indecipherable at the Cocteau Twins’ peak, are recognizable and even relatable on Sun’s Signature, speaking of love, nature, and the passing of the seasons. To write the lyrics, Fraser made collages of words borrowed from various literary sources, which might explain esoteric phrases like “Sing-ho, Oriole/Tretemolo, Empemblon/Skyliblong” (from “Apples”). But other lines—“Summer is gone/The autumn of my life”; “Daughter, I kiss you/Always hold you”; “See him rise and make lovely the day”—suggest profound and poetic universal truths. This combination of personable voice, discernible lyrics, and grown-up themes suffuses the EP in a warm maturity that Cocteau Twins fans will recognize from the band’s penultimate album, Four-Calendar Café, although Sun’s Signature take a more adventurous approach than Cocteau Twins did on their excellent, if rather meat-and-potatoes, major-label debut.
The crowning glory of Sun’s Signature is the songwriting, a skill that was often eclipsed by Cocteau Twins’ impeccable sonics. The vocal melodies of “Golden Air” and “Apples,” in particular, tumble with acrobatic grace, while the duo’s off-center arrangements explore unpredictable peaks and troughs. When the two combine, as on the rapturous climax of “Golden Air,” the result is ecstatic.
Comparisons to the Cocteau Twins are inevitable. But whereas Fraser’s iconic group brought an otherworldly, almost incomprehensible beauty to much of their music, Sun’s Signature’s charm is surprisingly empathetic. It feels hospitable and lived in, binding earthly emotion with musical grace. That’s not to say the album is humdrum or common: Fraser’s voice remains an extraordinary instrument, while the production is impressively diverse. But this is the mortal magic of a smile as opposed to the astral wonder of the stars: Sun’s Signature is among Fraser’s most illuminating and eloquent music to date, the work of a flesh-and-blood person rather than the chimerical Cocteau Twin of myth.


On his new trap- and hyphy-inflected mixtape, Ty Dolla $ign stumps for Hillary—and he's pretty psyched on Jack Johnson, too.

Campaign

This election season has been dystopian enough to force YG into touring the country with a Trump piñata. Now the Compton rapper’s day-one bro and producer Ty Dolla $ign—an artist not usually known for his politics on anything beyond “these hoes”—offers his own pro-Clinton statement in a new mixtape, Campaign. In its skits, distorted vocals argue in favor of voting as damage control. “She gotta fix these jail policies and everything…but…If all votes count, I’m voting for Hillary. Fuck it,” an uncredited YG declares at the end of “Hello.”
Despite the PSAs, Campaign doesn’t represent a major overhaul of Ty Dolla $ign’s talking points—or the L.A. singer/songwriter/producer’s sound, for that matter. Tracks like “Zaddy” represent the comfort zone of the mixtape: mid-tempo, trap- and hyphy-inflected tunes about responding to booty calls while faded on pills. While Ty’s debut studio album from last year, Free TC**, was overrun with enormously catchy, even pestilential hooks, Campaign’s sordid refrains are more of the first-thought-best-thought variety.
Still, Campaign’s most acerbic songs are rewarding after an acclimation period; Ty remains obsessed with bending grating and unlikely sounds to his will, as he has been since his breakout days. The Travis-Scott-featuring “3 Wayz” features some of the most oddly detailed synth layering you’ll hear in hip-hop this year against a backfiring electronic drum loop that never quite springs into action. Much like TC’s Hot 100 hit “Blase,” it scans like a flair-less dirge on first listen but gradually takes on a creeping, narcotic appeal.
Elsewhere, against all odds, Ty continues to sell unlikely pop/R&B Jack Johnson posturing, as he perfected on TC’s lascivious, Tish Hyman-penned guitar ballad “Horses in the Stable” (“That I-I can ride/Anytime”). On “Campaign,” he makes a garden-variety Future hook—a retread of his “wicked, wicked, wicked” cadence—shine by juxtaposing even more prurient interruptions. And, most notably, as he did on the TC highlight “Miracle / Whenever,” Ty arranges an a cappella track by his brother TC, who is incarcerated on a life sentence: “No Justice” hits hard, a testimonial to the long-term effects of police discrimination.
It’s nice to see Ty continue to complicate the Mustard-wave script, but also rewarding to revisit the elements that made those songs—even with their collar-tuggingly softcore content—undeniable in the first place. Coming in Campaign’s third act, “Pu$$y” has the satisfying quality of a desperate, last-call room service order. It incorporates all the key ingredients of the original, wiry, subs-busting Dolla/Mustard/YG-originated recipe, with an expected vintage of chorus: “At the end of the day, it’s still my pussy, my pussy, my pussy...” (ad infinitum). Performing his most impressive trick, Ty somehow gets the temperature just right for his frequent collaborator and label head Wiz Khalifa to be bearable—even welcome—in his cameo.
By 2016, pop’s biggest names are no longer hesitating to acknowledge their underground benefactors: Ty is getting features on Top 10 singles as well as songwriting checks. This gives him leverage; Ty is clearly making the music he wants to make, even if the stakes for it remain low. (Free TC debuted to little fanfare at No. 14 on the Billboard Top 200.) Campaign outpaces his recent efforts like $ign Language and Airplane Mode but, still, mostly just preserve Ty’s musical bottom line. At moments, its political truisms seem to reflect back on that persistence: “It get hard for all of us, but we campaign,” he murmurs on the intro. “It’s easy to quit, or say no, turn the other cheek…nah, we campaignin’ though.”


One half of Super_Collider reinvents himself as a 21st century soulboy, capturing the spirit of classic Motown and Stax.

Multiply

I first heard Multiply a few months ago, via mp3, without any accompanying press releases or literature to help contextualize it. A significant break from Jamie Lidell's prior work both as a solo laptop artist on Warp and as one half of Super_Collider (Chilean techno terrorist Christian Vogel carries the other half of that amulet), its breezy soul had me dreaming up back stories. Maybe these were all guest vocalists. Maybe Warp's promobot purposely mislabelled some old Stax record to put me off the scent. Maybe Lidell did some Logic voodoo on a vault of old soul reels and repurposed a bunch of lesser-heard Motown gems to fit a glitchier, Warp-friendly palette.
The real answer was simpler than that. Nearly five years in the making, Multiply represents Lidell's dramatic transformation from a knob-twiddling laptopper to a red-blooded soul singer. Where Lidell's prior solo work enjoyed a well-earned reputation for being difficult and forbidding, Multiply is among the most accessible records Warp has ever released. Backed by instrumentation from the likes of Berlinite squatters such as Mocky and Gonzales, and fleshed out by Lidell's robust, full-bodied voice, Multiply has the spirit of classic Motown and Stax. Whether in the breezy, sun-drenched title track, the soulful creep of "This Time" or the closing ballad "Game For Fools", it's obvious that Lidell isn't afraid of channeling (or repeating) history.
But while the song structures and Lidell's vocal style owe boatloads to the 60s and 70s, there's also a modern programming style at work here that separates him from modern day revivalists like, say, Sharon Jones. Listen to Multiply once and you'll be struck by how reverent it is; listen to it three times and you'll start to notice the microscopic digital artifacts and subtle tweaks that give it personality and pop. For all the talk about it being a throwback record, it's also true that a handful of these tracks probably couldn't have been made in 1995, much less '65. The wet funk of first single "When I Come Around" takes glitchy liberties with its percussion track and includes a stunning middle-8 where Lidell's vocal gets chopped, sliced and sprinkled over a merry-go-round; the goofy "A Little Bit More" sounds like nu-soul run through a slapstick plugin; the delirious funk of "Newme" is a nine-layer cake of boom-bap, Rhodes and horns, about six levels of which had to have been built after the fact, in the studio, on a computer.
Anyway, if the Maximo Park record wasn't enough to signify the end of days for the Warp of old, this should do the trick. Not just because it's one of the label's most commercially viable releases in forever, but because it goes to great lengths to lovingly namecheck the very strands of soul (i.e. Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Stevie Wonder, etc.) that the old Warp very fastidiously avoided. While I'm not sure that people have as strong a sense of brand loyalty to Warp anymore, this is probably still going to go down in electronic music circles as one of the year's most polarizing records. But don't let the naysayers keep you from hearing this before the winter rolls around; boasting 10 gorgeous songs over a trim 40 minutes, this is exactly the kind of record you need in your summer.


Techno producer Ricardo Villalobos and longtime experimentalist Max Loderbauer were given full access to Munich jazz/out label ECM's vast catalog. The resulting two-disc, two-hour offering is not a remix collection, but rather a rich, complex suite of compositions that converse with ECM's history.

Ricardo Villalobos / Max Loderbauer: Re: ECM

Re: ECM

Ricardo Villalobos is the undisputed winner of the last decade's minimal techno movement. He released two of the period's finest long players (Alcachofa and the still underrated Thè au Harem d'Archiméde) but also established himself as an in-demand festival-packing DJ. Unlike his incredible run between 2004 and 2006 (when Ricardomania was so obvious that Philip Sherburne made note of it, mid-review), his releases these days are thin on the ground, limited to a single here, a remix there. His work has grown more historical as it's grown scarcer. It's not his own history he's concerned with, but the varying strands of musical DNA comprising his ropey, winking techno. "Enfants (Chants)" featured communal chanting, while this year's excellent Joli Chat EP was conversational and punchdrunk. His last "album" was a pre-mixed LP of his own productions. He's collaborating more. It's as if, having found his perfect beat, he's seeking its perfect context.
Re: ECM sees Villalobos reach out to longtime experimentalist Max Loderbauer (who has a host of credits to his name; recently and notably he has played in the Moritz Von Oswald Trio). At issue is the varied output of fabled Munich jazz/out music label ECM (Edition of Contemporary Music). The two artists were given full access to ECM's vast catalog, and label founder Manfred Eicher oversaw the mastering process. The "Re:" ("regarding") in the work's title is important: These are not remixes but rather compositions that suggest and converse with ECM's history. Villalobos and Loderbauer make no attempt to tie the works to beat-driven techno. The catalog is a quarry of sounds from which the duo extract loops and beats that range from ornament to animal.
It's not necessary to be intimately familiar with ECM's catalog to enjoy Re: ECM (your reviewer is not); suffice to say that the label has housed most permutations of jazz and improvisational music since its inception in the late 1960s. Jazz and electronic music make natural partners; it's a pairing that many have explored previously, from Moodymann's dusty Black Mahogani releases to Four Tet's work with drummer Steve Reid. Both styles fascinate themselves with sustained textures and place a premium on sublimating the artist to the form (both also lack rock music's obscene physicality, which has allowed jazz musicians and electronic producers to stay creative late into their careers).
Villalobos and Loderbauer don't seem interested in jazz's harmonic infrastructure so much as the vast array of tones used to produce it. Hissing hi-hats, voluminous stand-up bass, and damp woodwinds are placed decoratively next to one another. If I'm feeling cynical I start to think of Re: ECM as aural feng shui, its 2xCD, two-hour structure better suited for inattentive mood-setting than true exploration. But there's nothing easy or simple here; the artists' restraint provides plenty of airy space, but between that air are sounds that are almost uniformly rich and complex. It feels minimal but unbalanced. If Re: ECM were to soundtrack a dinner party, it would have to be of the newfangled, slightly sadistic variety in which the chefs have lots of tattoos and serve mostly foie gras and bone marrow.
Re: ECM stands out not just for its depth but for its variety, for the sheer number of musics it incorporates. Jazz is the primary focus-- it has been for the label-- but the duo also touches on tribal blues ("Reannounce"), choral ("Rekondakion"), Eastern drone ("Requote"), and lounge ("Recat"). If Villalobos has ported over one element from his techno work, it's an uncanny ability to fashion rhythms that are both crisp and deep; the sounds here will buzz and twitch with his unmistakable style, but they'll do so less predictably.
Applaud ECM for letting Villalobos and Loderbauer run amok; this album is a symptom of a process that has allowed ECM to remain relevant since its inception. For Villalobos, it's another tie, however oblique, to the musics that birthed his style. As a new generation of electronic producers-- notably Nicolas Jaar-- takes cues from his seminal works, Villalobos continues to reach backward. If he makes the past seem half as thrilling and rewarding as he once made the future seem, the next generation won't be the only one that owes him a debt.


Mogwai's soundtrack to the French drama of the same name rarely comes off overly dramatic or leading. While the musical structures are often simple, continually recasting the central motif with xylophone, piano, and guitar, they push individual sounds to disquieting levels.

Les Revenants

"Les Revenants" ("the ones who came back"), a French TV program for which Mogwai provides the soundtrack, is a gorgeously subtle, harrowing drama that explores the reality of loved ones returning from the grave. These "zombies" aren't grisly maniacs hungry for flesh, but humans in their pre-death state who return to their tiny community, a twin town to Twin Peaks nestled in the crook of some mountains and swaddled in perpetual night, as if they'd just popped out for air. The soundtrack album Les Revenants contains not a shred of the terror Mogwai is capable of wreaking, and it works terrifically-- it rarely comes off overly dramatic or leading, and matches the unsettling feel of the show.
Mogwai had only seen a few English scripts for the drama before they started on the music. "We were aware of trying to keep it not as a typical soundtrack, more just music that doesn't necessarily do anything that has a bit of presence," guitarist John Cummings told the Quietus. That's underselling it a bit; there's no need to see the TV show (though I'd highly recommend it) to appreciate the subtlety of Mogwai's score. While the musical structures are often simple, continually recasting the motif featured in "Whisky Time"-- which plays as a coach-load of school children crashes over the edge of a winding cliff road in the first episode-- in xylophone, piano, and guitar, they push individual sounds to disquieting levels; the xylophone nursery rhyme-like tinkling that opens "Hungry Face" is so concentrated and piercing that it's quite painful to listen to, trilling at an unholy pitch, and again on "Fridge Magic", where slab-like bass shifts act as the foil to the xylophone's wandering curiosity. The way the repeated motifs falter matches how the presence of the undead in "Les Revenants" makes the electricity fizzle and splutter.
Rather than any of their previous soundtracks, or the highly visual, macabre work of one time Rock Action artist Umberto, Les Revenants often sounds like Clint Mansell's haunting soundtrack to Duncan Jones' (son of David Bowie) existential sci-fi film, Moon-- on the heavy piano and clipped pulse of "Jaguar" in particular. In a recent interview with the Guardian, Mansell said that his soundtrack work was initially heavily influenced by Mogwai, and emphasizes that, when he started, "post-rock and film scoring were almost becoming interchangeable."
In the past couple of years, post-rock has been usurped in the film sync stakes by arpeggiated synthesizer jams with an eye on the past; Kavinsky and Chromatics' work in Drive was a bellwether for the shift. The synthesizers on Les Revenants dominate like monoliths rather than dynamic forces or stylistic turns-- on "This Messiah Needs Watching", a heavy grind anchors the piano's skyward ascent, which reaches a hilt on the only shlocky track, the syrupy "Special N" with its annoyingly tentative, celestial optimism.
Closer "Wizard Motor" is the only point where Mogwai even remotely approach their trademark crusty textures: It plays over the titles of "Les Revenants", where a butterfly pinned inside a case starts to tremble, breaks free of its stake, then smashes the glass, escaping with no clearly indicated destination. That question of what the returned undead do next is key to "Les Revenants"; when a young girl who apparently died in the coach crash returns home, unmarked, her mother tries not to let on that they thought she was dead, and calls the girl's father, who's in the middle of a meeting to plan a memorial for the children.
The only vocal number is a cover of Washington Phillips' gospel standard "What Are They Doing in Heaven Today?" that was originally intended for a tribute album to Jack Rose. The cover has a slightly awkward, hymnal air, as if the words were sung by a secular community given rare cause to sing together. Stuart Braithwaite leads the chorus: "What are they doing in heaven today/ Where sin and sorrow are all done away?" Nobody knows what happens on the other side, but, Mogwai's uneasy, affecting soundtrack implies, what happens when they come back is an even more unnerving prospect. Hardcore will never die, and apparently you might not, either.