With intricate layers of field recordings, the New Mexico-based artist lets small details become the pillars of her patient folk songs.

Time~Lapse Nature

Diatom Deli’s Time~Lapse Nature tips its hand in the first minute with a speed-run of sonic folds taking shape like an origami crane. The first thing we hear is a field recording of lapping ocean waves. Then, Deli’s mom quickly checks in with a voicemail, imploring her to “give me a call when you can.” She rings back with a melody on her acoustic guitar, following the current of the rolling tide rather than breaking against its waves. Before she even sings a note, it feels as though the song has already begun and she’s arrived fashionably late. Deli isn’t simply using nature sounds as embellishment; she’s communing with them as if on a spiritual journey.
With her third album, Time~Lapse Nature, the Taos, New Mexico-based artist lets these small details become foundational pillars of her songs, wrapping her spectral voice and classical guitar around their slender frames like a cloak. The rumble of thunder and wash of rainfall weave in and out at regular intervals on “Massive Headships of Centering Tiles,” keeping time like a backing band as her guitar skips along the surface. She’s accompanied by the twitter of birdsong on “False Alarm.” The chirruping becomes almost percussive, propelling the track as her guitar shifts and shimmers like sunlight through a canopy of trees. On “Disarray,” her own voice feels incidental, breaking into a breathy shiver that gradually disappears as the melodic threads unwind.
Deli’s strength lies in layering intricate tapestries so her music seems to evolve in slow motion; as a result, the moments when those contours are missing can feel a bit lacking. The penultimate track “Deandre” is the most spartan folk number, leaning on Deli’s voice and guitar to build up its ambience. It’s pleasant, but it feels unadventurous compared to what came before. The similarly straightforward “Sonrisa” nearly suffers the same pitfall, but the raucous sample of cheering children that steadily creeps to the fore provides a much-needed wrinkle that gives the track some fun texture.
As Time~Lapse Nature draws to a close with “Thank You, Maya,” it feels like a reverse of its opening moments. “Now I breathe love into my life,” Deli chants repeatedly as she plucks a refrain like she’s trying to cast a spell. The incantation succeeds, and a miniature diorama of singing birds and buzzing bugs rings out in the final moments; she cedes the stage to the found sound that shaped the record as a show of thanks. It’s fitting that Deli takes her name from diatoms, the microscopic algae that produce nearly a third of the air we breathe. She knows that the smallest, sometimes imperceptible things can do a lot of heavy lifting.


On his fourth album, the Afro-fusion giant drops his guard and invites listeners into his chaotic inner world, with mixed results.

Burna Boy: Love, Damini

Throughout his decade-long career, Burna Boy has spun doubts, controversy, and slights to his ego into an undeniable body of work. Each successive album has propelled him farther along on his journey from Afro-fusion innovator to global pop star. Charting his path from the boisterous pride of 2018’s Outside, his major-label debut, to the regal posturing that frames 2019’s African Giant and then the brash overconfidence of 2020’s Twice as Tall, it was only a matter of time before Burna realized that he no longer had anything to prove.
So it’s refreshing to see him put his guard down on Love, Damini. His most personal project to date, the album invites listeners into his chaotic and imperfect inner world. Across a marathon 19 tracks, heartbreak, grief, anxiety, politics, sex, and love all take their places on the stage, to varying effect. The singer’s emotional motivations feel genuine, and his shortcomings movingly human, but they can’t disguise the album’s painful flaws.
Never one to shy away from genre leaps, Burna has insisted on labeling his sound Afro-fusion, but he shows his most intriguing vocal and emotional range on productions that more traditionally hew to the modern Afrobeats sound. On “Jagele,” he adopts a strained falsetto to communicate his deep yearning for a love interest who remains just out of reach. On “Whiskey,” he skillfully drops back down an octave, his tone sober and measured, to convey the devastating impact of environmental pollution in his hometown. Elsewhere, on “Science,” over uncharacteristically dark production from Wizkid go-to P2J, Burna Boy leans into the song’s menacing tones with his voice, mimicking an oncoming siren at the end of a twisted tale of seduction.
An exceptional host, Burna plays to the strengths of his features, at times letting them steal the show. Victony, of “Holy Father” fame, sounds immaculate on “Different Size,” a doozy of a track that uses an amapiano remix of a Squid Game sound bite (from TikTok, of course) to wax foolishly about surgically enhanced asses. But the clear standout is “Cloak & Dagger,” which brings J Hus out of hibernation to remind us of his endlessly innovative rhyme schemes.
After an energizing first half that includes the standout singles “Last Last” and “Kilometre,” the squarely Afrobeats songs start to lose steam dramatically. “Common Person” sounds like a B-rate version of “Dangote,” without the inherent class tension that gave the latter heft. Burna loses all distinguishing features on “Vanilla,” which in its flat repetitiveness feels like Afrobeats on autopilot. When the music video, presented by Ray-Ban and Meta, appeared, I couldn’t help but wonder if the song or the brand deal came first.
The rest of the production veers into Afro-inflected, radio-engineered, tragically boring emo-pop. While he shows more vulnerability here, moving away from club bangers into slower examinations of anxiety, anger, and grief, it becomes clear that one of Burna Boy’s weaknesses includes a disinclination to edit himself.
The most confusing misstep comes on the Khalid-assisted “Wild Dreams.” Coasting on the singer’s tender vocals, the song desperately wants to be an anthem, and it might have resonated in a hotboxed studio with the volume turned up. But the feeling of yearning is contrived, and it’s undercut by the confounding closing line: “Martin Luther King had a dream, and then he got shot.” The attempt to bolster such a lackluster pop song by extracting associative value from the civil-rights icon isn’t just reckless, it’s outright disrespectful. As if that weren’t enough, “How Bad Could It Be” unwittingly lives up to its title, as celebrity friends like Naomi Campbell, Swizz Beatz, and Jorja Smith offer tips on how to deal with a bad mood. What might have been inspiring instead gives real rich people, they’re just like us! energy, which is a shame—particularly given that Burna’s reflections on the song are, for the most part, candid and self-aware.
These glaring errors keep Love, Damini from reaching the heights of Burna Boy’s prior work, but his intentions are admirable, even when the execution goes awry. Modern Afropop is the poster kid for good times, but with this ambitious yet flawed album, he reminds us that it can be a space to work out much messier emotions. Whatever its failings, Love, Damini paves the way for other artists in the scene to take bigger emotional risks.


Kneedelus is a collaboration between the Cali beat scientist Daedelus and the Grammy nominated funk-jazz outfit Kneebody. It's a powerful fusion of abstract hip-hop and modern jazz, and at its highest points you can't really even tell where Kneebody ends and Daedelus begins.

Kneedelus

Under his Flying Lotus codename, Steven Ellison continues to push his distinctive strain of abstract hip-hop into the direction paved by his Great Aunt Alice and Great Uncle John. You could hear the family history coursing through the interstellar spaces he explored with his cousin Ravi on 2010's Cosmogramma and that Herbie Hancock jam on last year's You're Dead!. But Ellison's advancement of creative jazz has been more crucial as curator of the Brainfeeder label, which he founded in 2008 as an outlet for himself and his buddies down at Low End Theory in Los Angeles.
Kamasi Washington's The Epic hinted at FlyLo's A&R prowess, and Kneedelus puts an exclamation point on the imprint's new direction. The relationship between exploratory, Grammy-nominated funk-jazz outfit Kneebody and pioneering Cali beat scientist Daedelus (born Alfred Darlington) goes back almost a decade, evidenced by remixes on Bandcamp and a stage collaboration at the Jazz à Vienne Festival in 2009. Kneebody saxophonist Ben Wendel and Darlington are high school friends, while Darlington and Flying Lotus go back to 1983, Ellison's debut, and Darlington's indelible remix of the title track.
What all of this six-degrees business adds up to is this supernova of a record, rounded out by Adam Benjamin on keyboard, Shane Endsley on treated trumpet, bassist Kaveh Rastegar, and drummer Nate Wood. As a collaborative unit, the friendship between the parties undoubtedly lends itself to the fluidity of these 10 original compositions. In some cases, as on tracks like the rugged "The Hole" and the hypnotic "Move", you can't really even tell where Kneebody ends and Daedelus begins. Darlington's deft rhythmic impulses come to the fore on "Drum Battle", but in other moments, the invincible horn section of Kneebody runs the show. On "Loops", Endsley's trumpet is cat-like and cool, as the group takes the scrambled-signal breakbeat Daedelus delivers to the snapping point around the horn's calm center like a hurricane eye. On "Platforming", meanwhile, Wendel's fantastic Art Pepper-esque tenor work is transformed into a wild, distorted-violin sound. Elsewhere, its Benjamin who is leading the charge on the seven-minute *Mwandishi-*flavored space-out "Thought Not", and the haunting processed upright piano he plays on "Not Love".
Yet its when Kneebody and Daedelus fuse that Kneedelus achieves its potential. And perhaps no other track really embodies that idea more than "Home", the album's deep modal center that simmers together Tubby dub, TNT-era Tortoise, and Lalo Schifrin. It's no matter of happenstance the cover of Kneedelus is a shameless emulation of the design format of another game-changing jazz record label, ECM. This album exists in a very similar atmosphere to some of Manfred Eicher's bolder production moves throughout the last 40-odd years (dig that Jack DeJohnette box set for proof). And above all, it's a vision offering one last reminder before the year is out that Brainfeeder is very serious about its place in the jazz world.


The Montreal band grows up on their third album, crafting well-made, emo-adjacent songs all while trying to summon enough energy to stare down looming adulthood.

Gulfer

When lead singer and guitarist Vincent Ford swore, “I'll stay the same old man,” on Gulfer’s 2018 album Dog Bless, it sounded like a tongue-in-cheek salve for being anti-social. He’s making good on that promise. Instead of clinging onto their youth—the oft-chosen path for emo-adjacent guitar bands of their ilk—the Montreal quartet face the realities of entering your late-20s on their new self-titled album, from the dissolution of underwhelming friendships to the comfortable cadence of self-doubt. There’s no listing off of complaints or self-pitying displays of narcissism. In its place, Gulfer use the album as a sounding board for the quotidian fears of adulthood while grounding themselves in musical and lyrical maturity.
Ford, singer-guitarist Joe Therriault, singer-bassist David Mitchell, and drummer Julien Daoust collaborate in a way that makes the moral quandaries on Gulfer sound communal. There’s the omnipresent weight of a college-dropout inferiority complex, generational disagreements about the effects of climate change, and nostalgia for the naivety of childhood. In “Heat Wave,” Therriault recounts the uptick in performative conversations with friends that turn prosaic, as if prevaricating due to ego as opposed to masking imposter syndrome. “Biking home I wonder why/You say you’re working class when it feels right,” he repeats, his deadpan lilt verging on dejection. Scattered throughout are the type of declarative statements that increasingly ring true throughout adulthood: “You go out of your way to stay the same,” “It’s easy to say it should have been better in the end,” and, most bleak of all, “I belong in my house.”
Gulfer raise a bunch of these questions across the album but never really offer an answer. It’s refreshing, particularly because that humility prevents their “issues” from being blown out of proportion, like on“Forget (Friendly),” when Therriault develops a crush on someone while in a monogamous relationship. Wracked by guilt, he ping-pongs ideas about how to ethically support both people while riff after riff crashes into the downbeat. These are the moments that define Gulfer; when the melodrama of teenagerdom and the pessimism of young adulthood subside, and resignation guides the long run ahead. To really draw that emotion out, Gulfer turn to their most impressive skill: dexterous finger-tapping and complex drum shuffles. Something as simple as a stringy guitar melody on “Flashing” or syncopated rhythms on “Trips and Falls” distill math-rock elements into digestible pop hooks that punch up their stories. On “Letters,” a restless sugar-rush of a song, the four-piece nod to fellow Canadians the Most Serene Republic with indie-rock-indebted drum rolls, a musical mirror of its lyrics about the temptation to upend your life altogether.
Gulfer’s maturity shines in the album’s mixing, too, in part thanks to Great Grandpa’s Dylan Hanwright manning the boards. It recreates a dialed-in basement show, a fitting stereo setup for a genre that’s best experienced when you can hear kids screaming along over the vocalist. Across the album, the band is more certain of their uncertainty, and consequently more bummed out than ever before in their eight-year career. They’ve entered adulthood, and they’re already more level-headed about what that means than most of emo’s forebearers were.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On his latest record, Will Oldham enlists the help of Faun Fables vocalist Dawn McCarthy to create a record that presents the humor, dread, and resignation that inform his best music in blissfully unfiltered form.

The Letting Go

Though Will Oldham began his musical career while in his early twenties, he's never exactly sounded young. From his first releases as Palace Music, Oldham's whiskey-soaked vocals and lyrical obsessions with death, sex, and religion have made "maturity" something of a non-issue. And yet, with his most recent couple of releases as Bonnie "Prince" Billy, the aesthetic antiquity of his earliest recordings seems to have slowly given way to a more mundane sense of age. On The Letting Go, the humor, dread, and resignation that inform Oldham's music are presented in blissfully unfiltered form, and whether the proximity one feels is to person or persona is ultimately irrelevant; either way, The Letting Go feels close.
With its pristine recording and prominent female backing vocals, opener "Love Comes to Me" evokes Oldham's 2003 album Master and Everyone. Thankfully, the sound of The Letting Go proves to be more inviting and striking than that of its predecessor, as Oldham and Faun Fables vocalist Dawn McCarthy invariably find their way to beautiful moments-- even when the songs themselves aren't particularly engrossing. A late autumn stroll through the woods might not be the most exciting metaphor for an album, but it's a rare treat to hear something this organic and cozy.
In fact, The Letting Go is so confident that its strangeness could easily go unnoticed. But this is, in many ways, one of the weirdest records Oldham has ever released. McCarthy's vocals never really coalesce into a distinct relationship with Oldham's-- she slips in and out of harmonies, backing parts, doubles, and absences. The album's arrangements are similarly elusive-- the string swells and ominous drums on "The Seedling" wash incongruously against McCarthy's vocals. And yet, nothing ever seems jarringly out of place.
Generally speaking, this is true of the album's sequencing as well. Though the more lo-fi and bluesy "Cold & Wet" is a noticeable shift from the rest of the record, it's by no means unwelcome after the perhaps-too-understated "No Bad News". On the whole, The Letting Go is amazingly consistent, Oldham and McCarthy meandering tunefully through subtle but effective changes in texture and tone. Unlike Oldham's best work, The Letting Go doesn't pull you into its own emotional world; it doesn't ask much, and you're free to take as much from it as you'd like. The beauty and eccentricity of The Letting Go doesn't provoke deep absorption or self-reflection so much as a kind of fond familiarity.


Four albums released between 1994 and 1996 showcase the Cantopop icon (and Cocteau Twins collaborator) confidently moving beyond adult-contemporary and toward her own singular voice.

Faye Wong: Faye Wong: 讨好自己 Please Myself / 菲靡靡之音 Decadent Sound of Faye / Di-Dar / 浮躁 Fuzao

讨好自己 Please Myself / 菲靡靡之音 Decadent Sound of Faye / Di-Dar / 浮躁 Restless

Wong Kar-wai’s feverish and charming 1994 romantic drama Chungking Express features the director’s greatest needle drop: The vibrant guitar riff of the Cranberries’ “Dreams” leads into a Cantonese cover by singer and actor Faye Wong that spills open over a montage of her character, a snack-bar worker who daydreams of escape, replacing every memento of a love interest’s ex with tokens of herself. The line between Wong, the performer, and Faye, the character, is already shaky—both possess a boyish, offbeat cool—but the former’s cover version mirrors the latter’s intention to assume another’s place. The guitars burn a bit brighter and the drums fold a little flatter, and though Wong adjusts to a convincing echo of Dolores O’Riordan’s warble and yodel, her voice sounds a touch more refined—her delivery similar, yet never quite identical.
Wong, who would later become heralded as the “queen of Cantopop” and also establish a noteworthy Mandarin discography, frequently reimagined other artists’ work in the early period of her career. After she signed to Cinepoly in 1989, the label held her to the standards of Hong Kong’s Cantopop; her early albums sandwiched uninspired renditions of Japanese and American hits between treacly adult-contemporary ballads. Adapting foreign hits in Cantonese had become a reliable method of generating mainstream success in Hong Kong, yet hints of a more innovative approach were audible in covers like Wong’s take on “Dreams.” Wong’s final four albums for Cinepoly, newly reissued on vinyl, showcase the maturation of her voice as well as her deepening desire for artistic freedom as she embraced idiosyncratic sounds and themes of escapism; they trace her evolution from competent copyist to singular talent.
In an interview, Wong pointed to the malleable nature of the voice as an instrument, and hers constantly morphed alongside her changing interests. After becoming dissatisfied with the direction of her career, she traveled to the U.S. for vocal lessons and demanded greater creative control upon returning. Subsequent releases between 1992 and 1993 showcased a heavy flair for R&B, with full and brassy tones, before she pivoted into pop-rock, her voice strained and willowy on covers of the Police and Tori Amos. In 1994, Wong embraced a more alternative sound with 胡思亂想 Random Thoughts—the parent album for her popular Cantonese “Dreams” cover—and ventured further afield with a pair of covers of Scottish dream-pop pioneers Cocteau Twins that closely recreated their style, Wong bending to match Elizabeth Fraser’s rolling trills.
While those records emulated Wong’s wide-reaching influences, 討好自己 Please Myself, her final album of 1994, sharpened her artistic identity. Up to that point, her covers had been faithful to the point of imitation, but here, Wong’s version of the Sundays’ “Here’s Where the Story Ends” offers a glimpse of her own vision. More dream than jangle, the cover flips the specificity of the original’s bittersweet narrative into a relatable lovesick sigh, and as Wong’s voice rises over the rattle and shimmer of the guitars, it sounds clear, bright, and full of infatuation. The rest of the album dresses Wong in a similar palette of dazzling dream pop and fond adoration.
The pair of songs Wong wrote for 討好自己 Please Myself suggest an artist growing weary of the Hong Kong entertainment industry. The slippery title track hints at future themes of escapism, but outlier “出路” (“Exit”), a weird one-off spoken-word experiment, and the only track in Mandarin, is one of Wong’s most direct statements: “I’m impatient, nothing satisfies me… I hate being a star, but I want to attract attention,” she mutters over its clomping bassline. Arranged by Dou Wei, then-boyfriend and former member of the influential Chinese band Black Panther, these tracks were ripe with apprehension and coincided with her increasingly frequent contact with Beijing’s rock scene along with her shift toward the Mandarin market.
Wong’s next albums are more self-assured, and, as a result, more captivating. 菲靡靡之音 Decadent Sound of Faye, from 1995, is a tribute album to Taiwanese legend Teresa Teng, who died midway through the album’s recording. One of Asia’s most eminent vocalists, Teng possessed a voice that was dulcet yet robust and resonant. Wong emulates her sweetness, but does away with much of the grandeur of Teng’s tradition-bound performances; Wong’s voice is instead airy, lofty, and lithe. Contrasted with Teng’s originals, 菲靡靡之音 Decadent Sound of Faye takes a more modernized and Westernized approach. Wong flips weighty arrangements into string-led chamber-pop pieces, like her take on the standard “但願人長久” (“Wishing We Last Forever”), shaping them to be lighter and livelier. Elsewhere, on tracks like “初戀的地方” (“Place of First Love”), her voice gallavants as electronic ornamentation swirls and prances. Wong’s renditions come alive with motion.
In contrast, Di-Dar, her second album of the year—as well as Wong’s final (and finest) Cantonese album—is more atmospheric, almost psychedelic. The spectral dream pop of “假期” (“Vacation”) pairs flickering synths with gothic guitar licks, while “(無題)” (“Untitled”) is a burbling trip-hop ballad that layers Wong’s gossamer falsetto over a sputtering electronic beat and tabla-like percussion. Even its most radio-friendly songs, like the radiant commercial success “曖昧” (“Ambiguous”), adopt orchestral arrangements that give them similarly vivid and sumptuous textures. Di-Dar coheres like an extended dream, yet beneath its haze are vignettes that sketch a deteriorating relationship. The album’s lyrics (with the exception of the Mandarin closer) were written by close collaborator Albert Leung, who fixates on the unease Wong presented on 討好自己 Please Myself, suffusing the album’s romanticism with a sense of anxiety and the burning desire to disappear.
These themes feature heavily on Wong’s last album for Cinepoly, 1996’s insular 浮躁 Fuzao—which best translates to “restless” or “impetuous.” Making no concessions to mainstream tastes, she was more creatively involved on this album than anywhere else in her career. For 浮躁 Fuzao, she pulled away from her frequent Hong Kong-based collaborators, instead turning to Dou and another Beijing rock musician, Zhang Yadong, for arrangements. Despite his lack of involvement for the record, her longtime producer, Alvin Leong, facilitated a working relationship between her and the Cocteau Twins, who had become interested in collaborating after hearing her faithful renditions of their work. They contribute two original tracks that land at the wispier end of the spectrum of their work. While the songs still fit firmly within the group’s oeuvre—the resplendent highlight “分裂” (“Divide”) floats over a bed of gentle synths and dainty coos, while the ghostly “掃興” (“Spoilsport”) staggers atop murky guitar textures—Wong makes them her own, her clearer enunciation lending substantive meaning to a band famous for its cryptic lyrics. Wong composed the rest of the album’s songs, often borrowing liberally from the Scottish group’s style. On “哪兒” (“Where”), she hums, coos, and babbles in incoherent syllables, her voice an extraordinary instrument that imbues each note with joy amid the turmoil.
Yet 浮躁 Fuzao isn’t simply a pastiche of the Cocteau Twins; the album’s producers steep the music in the sounds of Beijing’s nascent rock scene. Dou condenses a decade’s worth of styles into the miniature world of its opener as the song weaves from shimmering guitar to sharp, probing downtempo synths. Zhang’s lighthearted production on the title track is a sweet callback to Wong’s brief infatuation with jangle pop. Her voice bounds between jubilant shouts and apprehensive coos, ripping the song apart until it dissolves into electronic froth. It’s not just those outside influences that set her apart—her reserved yet playfully mischievous nature permeates the album.
Wong would never be afforded the opportunity to do another 浮躁 Fuzao. On her later blockbuster albums, she was forced to balance her idiosyncratic tastes with her label’s commercial objectives. But on these four records, she resists easy categorization, at once ethereal and eccentric, and refreshingly free of the straightforward romanticism of her period peers. Wong pulled the unfamiliar to the surface by highlighting sounds rarely explored and anxieties frequently left untouched, yet her elegant voice offered soothing, intimate comfort. Wong’s music of this period represents a welcome embrace of the undefined.


Tapping his background in industrial and EBM, the Berghain resident delivers a steely set of cuts tailored for maximum impact inside the club.

Scanning Backwards

Few techno institutions are more celebrated than Berghain. First opened in 2004, the vaunted Berlin club has since become the effective gold standard for international nightlife, not to mention a bucket-list destination for even casual clubbers—assuming they can actually get in. There’s a mythology around the place, and while it’s been exaggerated over the years (sometimes to the point of cliché), there’s no denying Berghain’s influence on electronic music, fashion, visual art, sound systems, door policies and all kinds of how-to-run-a-club-properly minutiae. In short, it’s reshaped the idea of what nightlife can—and should—be.
Berghain is at the center of Scanning Backwards, the second full-length from New York-reared, Berlin-based artist Phase Fatale (aka Hayden Payne). A resident DJ at the club who specializes in mixing techno with industrial, EBM, and post-punk, he has said that every track on the new LP was specifically tailored to sound a certain way inside Berghain’s walls. Dark, heavy, and impeccably engineered, the record can’t be described as minimal, but it’s certainly been stripped down to the essentials. Where Payne’s last album, 2017’s Redeemer, ladled thick layers of noise and distortion atop a techno foundation, here he’s left unnecessary flourishes behind in favor of maximum potency. Upping the impact is his decision to keep the tempo relatively slow (the fastest track on the record clocks in at 123 BPM, and Payne frequently dips well below that); the extra breathing room makes each beat hit that much harder. In terms of its utility, the album is an unqualified success.
Musically, though, Scanning Backwards is entering a crowded field. Although Phase Fatale’s own industrial and post-punk bona fides are impeccable—he played in several post-punk and cold wave groups after first cutting his teeth at NYC’s long-running Wierd parties in the late 2000s—he’s also releasing his highest-profile album to date at a time when the latest industrial techno boom has arguably crested.
You can’t fault Payne for sticking to his creative guns; he’s not someone who hopped onto the industrial techno bandwagon after hearing a few Blawan tracks in 2012. At the same time, there just isn’t much room for Scanning Backwards to say something new, particularly following a decade in which artists like Silent Servant, Helena Hauff, Broken English Club, Paula Temple, Perc, Regis, Vatican Shadow, Veronica Vasicka, and so many others have all been such a prominent part of the techno landscape. Those artists’ success has contributed to a surge of interest in prior generations of industrial techno experimenters, such as Surgeon, Sandwell District, Adam X, and British Murder Boys, not to mention industrial and EBM originators like Front 242, Nitzer Ebb, Throbbing Gristle, DAF, Cabaret Voltaire, and others too numerous to list. Techno has become inundated with industrial sounds, especially at clubs like Berghain, and Scanning Backwards, which might have sounded more impressive two years ago, doesn’t do quite enough to innovate or build upon that style.
Scanning Backwards does include one track which is truly transcendent. Album closer “Splintered Heels” is a raw, powerful cut led by a sinister bassline and the sort of blunt, hard-hitting percussion that powered old Wax Trax records. Yet this is no simple dancefloor stormer; a haunting, shoegaze-esque melody lends the track a spooky, cinematic feel and a subtle (albeit dark) pop vibe. The contrast reflects a newfound elegance in Payne’s work.
Other highlights include the ominously churning “De-patterning,” the sludgy metal haze of “Polystyrene,” and the thundering stomp of “Binding by Oath.” Scanning Backwards is by no means a friendly album—Payne has said the LP is conceptually rooted in weaponized sound and psychological manipulation—but there’s something invigorating about its menacing nature. For fans of industrial techno, it's a solid album, better than most, even. It’s not difficult to imagine just about any track from the record tearing the roof off at Berghain. But outside of that environment, the music loses some of its magic, largely because so many of its notes—even its strongest ones—have been heard before.


The lavish In the Loop 6x7” box set collects A-Trak’s remix work. Listening to all of them at once reveals that he often tried to please everyone, and also that he intermittently succeeded.

A-Trak: In the Loop: A Decade of Remixes

In the Loop: A Decade of Remixes

“Making a song from alpha to omega is challenging,” A-Trak told Forbes last November. “It's from a song that has already worked in some capacity. You're taking a piece of something that is already catchy at in some way and you are decorating it with your production.” Perceiving the art of the remix as mere decoration might be anathema for its finest practitioners—be they François K., Ricardo Villalobos, or Puff— but in ’00s dance culture, A-Trak’s work and sensibilities served as an amped-up gateway for a new generation. Whether they checked his Soundcloud because of his connection to Kanye, because they loved southern hip-hop but not Ed Banger (or vice versa), or because of festival-friendly remixes of big indie rock acts, A-Trak’s work ethic blurred genre lines.
Culling a decade of remixes (with over 180 remix credits to his name), the lavish In the Loop 6x7” box set marks the first time that many of these digital-only remixes have been available in a physical format rather than Beatport-only download. The opening remix of Architecture in Helsinki’s “Heart It Races” (back when A-Trak still used the handle Trizzy) showed that from the start A-Trak had a knack for tearing down the mid-’00s walls between indie rock, mainstream hip-hop and electronic dance music. He takes Neptunes-type drum stutters, adds hip-hop backspins, a touch of steel pan and keeps the noxious yip of vocals intact, yet it all winds up sticking together.
Listening to all these remixes at once reveals that A-Trak often tried to please everyone, and his knack for picking over myriad genres often meant he felt the need to shoehorn everything in with each remix opportunity. His remix of Scanners’ “Bombs” is the equivalent of a dogpile: compressed rock guitar stabs, multiple sped-up vocal samples saying “drop,” rave synth swoops, voices minced until they become hiccups and then—why the hell not?—some cowbell dumped on for good measure, as if to make sure every box gets ticked.
His remix of Sébastian Tellier’s “Kilometer” seems similarly intent on touching on every trend in French dance music. A-Trak filters the kick down to a muffled throb redolent of “Around the World,” before bringing in a swell of disco symphonic strings and electro squelch, ranging from Ed Banger filter house to Daft Punk then back to Québécois disco. Similar sensibilities get applied to Phoenix’s “Trying to Be Cool” as he builds the opening keyboard figure into something bombastic. Visit a section of the song that doesn't have Thomas Mars’ telltale voice and one would be hard-pressed to distinguish it from any other track of the past decade.
What A-Trak delivers in spades is big, simple pleasures. For Boys Noize’s “Oh!,” he devastates with little more than that titular shout, vocodered growls, dancehall sirens and a feverish beat. He wasn’t the first one to have a go at the Yeah Yeah Yeahs late-period dance move of “Heads Will Roll,” but his remix is undeniable. Jacking up Nick Zinner’s tepid goth synth stabs until it’s brawny enough to fill a Coachella tent, he cuts away the band’s ineffective rock moves and instead replaces it all with leaner electronic components. A-Trak remakes Karen O into an icy electro queen, surrounding her with only the finest fromage: lasers, claps, 303 squelches and gaudy builds.
Give him the keys to another Brooklyn dancepunk band though—in this instance the Rapture— and the same tricks don’t pan out. On the piano-house-meets-gospel glory of “How Deep is Your Love,” A-Trak doesn't have the patience to give the song time to unfurl, shortening the song by a third, getting right to the dramatic build and then adding heaps of neon and rave lights. For the remarkable range of artists that In the Loop displays, A-Trak’s ability to mash together different genres and sounds into a crowd-pleasing amalgam also means that—much like a great night out—the distinguishing characteristics blur together into an undifferentiated mass.


The Toronto-based composer and her wonderfully dynamic voice sail into poppier waters on her second album with huge, lush arrangements that have a tendency to weigh down the songs.

Lydia Ainsworth: Darling of the Afterglow

Darling of the Afterglow

It’s difficult to parse the myriad influences of Toronto-based composer Lydia Ainsworth. At the time of the release of her Juno-nominated 2014 debut Right From Real, she was as likely to pay tribute to the three-part harmonies of Bulgarian folk singers as she was to the Spice Girls. As if challenging herself to come up with an even more disparate set of touchstones to describe her new LP Darling of the Afterglow, Ainsworth offered up her most mystifying set of references yet, characterizing the album’s lead single “The Road” as “a marriage of Enya and the Weeknd.”
This unholy matrimony is, surprisingly, an apt descriptor for many of the 11 songs on Afterglow. While Right From Real showcased her taste for baroque orchestration with a minimal electronic backbone, they were all a bit too off-kilter to be described as bona fide pop songs; “Malachite” and “White Shadows” were far too mystical and ethereal to draw comparisons to Max Martin’s pop. Although Ainsworth has said that some of the songs on Afterglow were in gestation around the same time that she was writing her debut, she composed others during a brief stint in L.A. while writing pop songs for other artists. Her embrace of more mainstream songwriting is evident even in the first few seconds of opener “The Road,” as dramatic piano chords sustain over dark synths that phase beneath her newly confident voice.
Ainsworth’s more traditional vocal performance is one of the most striking evolutions of her sound. Whether heavily processed on “Hologram” or spliced into sharp daggers on “Moonstone,” Ainsworth’s voice sounded interwoven into Right From Real’s ornate symphonic textures. On Afterglow, she centers her voice to sound more expressive and lucid than ever. On “Ricochet” Ainsworth stretches her voice to its limits, ascending to a soaring falsetto, luxuriating over the softness of her consonants, and in a more familiar vein, pitching it down to harmonize with itself. While this would seem to be an unequivocal step forward, Ainsworth can succumb to melodrama; the twinkling guitar and whispered double-track vocal that composes the first half of “Open Doors” evokes the broad, histrionic effect of a band like Evanescence perhaps more than Ainsworth would like.
While the appeal of Ainsworth’s debut existed in its refined hybrid of orchestral synthpop, here Ainsworth confoundingly falls back on cheesy banjos (“What Is It?”) and crunchy guitars (“I Can Feel It All”) to embellish her already fussy arrangements. The latter song, another one of the album’s high points and one of its more strictly synthpop numbers, seems to reach a climax in the last quarter when she unleashes blaring, rich synthesizers that rumble beneath her coos. The arrangement is already over the top, but Ainsworth’s stadium-ready guitars overload the song entirely.
When the so-called “left-of-center pop” album is executed well, it’s exhilarating (see Ainsworth’s Arbutus labelmate Mozart’s Sister or fellow synthpop seductress Jessy Lanza for recent examples). Ainsworth’s tightened up her songwriting, emoting more profoundly than ever before, but she’s abandoned the more restrained instincts that once made her spectral music so lustrous. She hasn’t yet sorted out the particular combination of influences that fit her strengths, and few of the songs’ melodies are compelling enough to overcome the album’s strangely stale take on alternative pop. Ainsworth is clearly a knowledgeable composer with endless sources of inspiration to work with, but Afterglow proves that finding the perfect formula is sometimes more complicated than one might imagine.


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 the Rolling Stones’ 1981 album, a blueprint for how to exist as an aging, internationally famous rock band.

Tattoo You

The Cockroaches arrived in Toronto at the end of February 1977, in need of a quick break from being the Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band in the World. They’d been together for a decade and a half, their masterpiece album was five years behind them, and the three LPs they’d released since were not quite as spectacular. But they were richer and more famous than ever. Their most recent tour of North America, in 1975, had helped set the era’s standard for silliness and excess. There were six straight nights at Madison Square Garden, and five at the Forum; a flying trapeze for the singer, a confetti-breathing dragon, and an inflatable penis that stood as tall as two men when it wasn’t suffering from chronic mechanical dysfunction.
The band was planning on releasing a live album culled from these concerts, but there wasn’t enough worthy material. This is where Toronto came in: two secret shows booked at a tiny venue, under a fake band name, for a crowd of 300 unsuspecting fans, with a recording truck parked outside to capture the sort of energy that only arises when those fans are smashed into close contact with their idols. These would be the band’s first club gigs since they rocketed to worldwide stardom shortly after forming in the early ’60s. After all that glitz and decadence, perhaps becoming the Cockroaches was a way to get back to being the Rolling Stones.
It didn’t quite work. Typically for the era, the spectacle of the March 4th and 5th shows at Toronto’s El Mocambo tended to overshadow the music. Keith Richards, whose ever-deepening heroin addiction probably had something to do with the declining quality of the recent records, was arrested with about an ounce of it almost as soon as he arrived in Canada. Margaret Trudeau, the young and newly estranged wife of the Canadian prime minister, was seen cavorting backstage with the band, leading to slobbering speculative coverage from international tabloids. Love You Live, the resulting live album, wasn’t very good. But onstage, the Stones were finding their spark again, providing at least one glimpse at the unlikely musical resurgence they’d make over the next several years.
The Mocambo shows included the live debut of a neon-lit R&B vigil called “Worried About You,” marking the first public performance of any song from 1981’s Tattoo You, the last great Rolling Stones album. Each of its two sides presents an aesthetically distinct vision of the Stones. The first, led by “Start Me Up,” finds them settling into their role as a legacy-oriented stadium rock band, grabbing the essence of the sleazy blues-based music they’d perfected a decade before and blowing it up to Jumbotron proportions.
The second side, opening with “Worried About You,” briefly drops the world-conquering posture and allows them to appear as weary and middle-aged as they actually were at the time, with a stretch of bedraggled late-night soul music that’s both distinctly Stonesy and also not quite like anything else in their catalog—or anyone else’s. The production, in some liminal zone between ’70s analog warmth and ‘80s digital chill, only heightens the elegance of the performances. Tattoo You’s first side guaranteed the Rolling Stones’ sinecure as a hugely profitable enterprise for decades to come; the second side is their final gasp of brilliance before those profits became more important than anything else.
By the early ’80s, some of the fissures of the previous years had closed for the Rolling Stones, but new ones were beginning to open. Richards was (mostly) off heroin, prompted in part by his narrow avoidance of a long potential jail sentence after the Toronto bust. His (relative) sobriety allowed him to take a renewed presence in the Stones’ music and business affairs around the time of their hit 1978 album Some Girls, and according to Richards, Jagger wasn’t happy about that. The camaraderie at the center of the band they’d started as teenagers in 1962 would sour considerably in the coming years, eventually prompting a handful of ill-advised solo projects and a seven-year hiatus from performing live. But for now, they had a massive tour booked for the end of 1981, with no new album to promote and hardly any new material to record.
That Tattoo You exists at all is largely thanks to Chris Kimsey, an audio engineer who’d begun working with the band on 1971’s Sticky Fingers. “Tattoo You really came about because Mick and Keith were going through a period of not getting on,” Kimsey told an interviewer years later. “There was a need to have an album out, and I told everyone I could make an album from what I knew was still there.”
Kimsey and Jagger spent three months searching the band’s archives for recordings of rejected and forgotten songs, jams, and sketches from previous sessions, going as far back as 1973’s Goats Head Soup and as recent as 1980’s Emotional Rescue. They took the compiled instrumental tracks to a warehouse on the edge of Paris and recorded vocals and a few additional overdubs there—a process that could have been finished in a few days, according to Kimsey, but instead took six weeks due to Jagger’s extensive social commitments in the city. Assembled for commercial reasons, from a backlog of unused material, at a time when the players involved were beginning to hate each other and the singer often couldn’t be bothered to come to work, Tattoo You didn’t have any reason to be particularly special.
“Start Me Up” is the first track, and the last of the Rolling Stones’ signature songs. The thwack of its backbeat and strut of its opening riff are so familiar today that it’s difficult to fathom its earliest iteration as a reggae song, a product of the Stones’ extended flirtation with Jamaican music in the mid-’70s. They labored over “Start Me Up” unsuccessfully for years, trying something like 70 cumulative takes at multiple different studios before landing almost accidentally on the final version, playing it as a charged-up rocker on a lark for the first time ever. Richards hated it. According to Kimsey, the guitarist went as far as ordering him to wipe the recording from the tape. “So of course,” Kimsey remembers, “I didn’t wipe it.”
The final version was recorded on the same day the Stones also nailed Some Girls opener “Miss You,” and there are echoes of that discofied hit in “Start Me Up”’s piston-pumping rhythmic drive. But “Start Me Up” belongs to the stadium, not the dancefloor. It’s the first Stones song that seems specifically designed to reach the highest bleachers and get tens of thousands of people clapping along in time. Fittingly, it became a sports arena staple. It frequently opens setlists on the band’s ultra-professional latter-day tours, where even the cheap seats are pretty expensive. It soundtracked the launch of Microsoft Windows 95, netting the Stones several millions of dollars in fees and providing the groove for a few of the world’s richest people to execute a few of the worst dance moves ever captured on video.
If “Start Me Up” is a real-time document of a feral band of outsiders mutating into a bloodless big business, it’s also one of the most undeniable rock’n’roll songs ever recorded. Scrape away decades of overexposure and it’s still possible to hear the improvisatory rawness of those early demos in the finished version, especially in Bill Wyman’s bass playing, which still carries the faintest whiff of subterranean dub, and in the frenzy of yelps, grunts, and wheezes that constitutes Jagger’s vocal take. The tension between the off-the-cuff source recordings and their glossy final presentation is part of Tattoo You’s distinct charm. For an album with such muddled origins, it has a consistent sonic quality, with crisp echoes that are distinctly of its early-’80s era. Even that effect is stranger and more human than it seems, achieved not with any fancy technology, but by playing the tracks back in a studio bathroom and capturing the echoes from the tiles.
“Slave,” rides a slow-motion blues-funk groove that sounds like it could go on forever, and nearly does: a bootleg of the raw take runs to 11 minutes, cut down to five for the album. Its chanted and spoken vocals surely had something to do with Jagger’s newfound love of disco as a frequent patron of Studio 54, and its swaggering rhythm is a reminder that Richards spent his time off from the Stones in this era jamming with reggae and funk heavy-hitters like Sly & Robbie and Zigaboo Modeliste. Though their paths were diverging, 20 years after they initially bonded over a mutual love of Chuck Berry and John Lee Hooker, both Mick and Keith were still devoted students of black music.
Recorded at a time after guitarist Mick Taylor had left the Stones, but before Ronnie Wood formally replaced him, the initial “Slave” session featured marquee guests like Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, and frequent Stones collaborator Billy Preston on keys. Beck’s contributions were likely scrubbed from the final version, and no one seems to agree whether Townshend was playing guitar or just adding backing vocals. The unlikeliest contributor is Sonny Rollins, the master tenor saxophonist, whom Jagger invited to overdub solos on “Slave” and several other songs after seeing him play at a New York City jazz club in 1981.
Rollins’ phrasing is carefree and conversational throughout Tattoo You, sounding perfectly pleased to be playing circles around these guys. His participation is a poignant image of human connection from the otherwise fractured process of adding isolated new takes to previously existing recordings. Jagger remembers: “I said, ‘Would you like me to stay out there in the studio?’ He said, ‘Yeah, you tell me where you want me to play and dance the part out. So I did that. And that's very important: communication in hand, dance, whatever. ” But the pairing was too brilliant to last. Rollins never collaborated with the Stones again, leaving drummer and jazz aficionado Charlie Watts lamenting that he was on a record backing up one of his heroes without ever having actually played with him.
On Tattoo You’s flickeringly transcendent second side, the Stones sometimes sound like they’re shooting for Al Green or Prince (who opened a couple of gigs on the subsequent tour and got booed offstage at least once), and always like they’re a little too sad, loaded, and British to pull it off. Blues and country are here too, but only as shadows and reflections. The guitars are airy and transparent; the rhythm section softly works the pocket; Jagger whispers and convulses, using plenty of falsetto. It’s like the disarrayed intimacy of the classic Some Girls ballad “Beast of Burden” has been expanded into a five-song suite; only now, the burden has become much too heavy to bear.
In bootlegs from the Cockroaches’ Toronto ’77 shows, “Worried About You” is loose and jammy, nearly formless, stretching out to about eight minutes, with Mick Jagger audibly cueing the band through a sparse set of changes. In the studio version the public heard four years later, the changes were essentially the same, but the compositional arc had become clearer, and the bleary 5 a.m. atmosphere more vivid: Jagger channeling the spirit of past hedonism while reckoning with its effects in the present; tension building through ticking hi-hats and glowing electric piano toward a chorus that’s over almost as soon as it begins. “I’m worried, and I just can’t seem to find my way,” Jagger admits as the band sighs back into the verse behind him. That very moment captures the feeling of a halcyon period reaching its close.
The languor reaches a peak with “Heaven,” one of two entirely new compositions on Tattoo You, recorded by a skeleton crew version of the band—just Jagger, Watts, possibly Wyman, and Kimsey helping out—on a late night in Paris during the particularly cold winter of 1980. Kimsey recalls being able to see Jagger’s breath as they worked. The music is likewise swirling and vaporous, barely even there, far more psychedelic in its way than anything recorded during the band’s brief acid rock period of the late ’60s, and at least as erotic as any of their more openly hip-thrusting material. Jagger mumbles half-intelligibly, as if entranced, in the throes of sexual or religious ecstasy or both. Kimsey has been quoted as saying he “played alleged piano” on “Heaven,” which may be the result of a journalist’s bad transcription—there is some electric piano audible at the edges—but the odd phrasing is nonetheless appropriate for the rare Stones song that works by suggestion rather than demonstration, a half-formed memory or fantasy of events that may never have transpired at all.
Tattoo You closes with “Waiting on a Friend,” an ode to platonic companionship that’s among the most purely sweet songs the Rolling Stones ever wrote. From today’s vantage, it looks like one final expression of boyhood love between Jagger and Richards before the years of business-driven bitterness that would follow. As it fades into the mist with some Jagger falsetto and a beautiful sax solo from Rollins, it’s possible to close your eyes and imagine the Rolling Stones chose to wrap it up here, allowing the entire ’60s rock era to draw gracefully and finally to a close.
But they didn’t. After Tattoo You, there were bigger and more remunerative tours and public spats between Mick and Keith about music and money and penis size. Many albums took the backward-looking approach of Tattoo You as a figurative starting point, but without any of the sweat or ingenuity. “It’s almost as if Mick was aspiring to be Mick Jagger, chasing his own phantom,” Richards wrote scathingly in his 2010 memoir Life about his old friend during the post-Tattoo You ’80s. If you were feeling equally uncharitable, you could say the same about the band as a whole.
Shortly after the album’s release, a Rolling Stone interviewer expressed to Keith that he hoped the band would continue to exist and create music for another 20 years. “So do I, because nobody else has done it, you know?” Richards answered. “It’s kind of interesting to find out how rock & roll can grow up.” According to Billboard, the Stones’ 2019 “No Filter” tour grossed $415.6 million, placing it high on the list of the most profitable tours of all time. Their latest album, 2016’s Blue and Lonesome, is a collection of classic blues songs of the sort the Stones began their career by covering, another trip into the past.
And despite everything, on a good night, it’s still possible to catch the spark and recognize the Rolling Stones are still the Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band in the World. It’s no wonder they once chose to rename themselves after a famously persistent prehistoric household pest for a few shows, intent on getting back to basics and recapturing the old glory. Cockroaches can live through anything.


Mackenzie Scott's voice conveys raw, urgent desperation. Veering between rangy indie rock and hushed folk, the 22-year old Nashville vocalist and guitarist's self-recorded debut conjures the hypnotic hurt of the earliest, best Songs:Ohia or Cat Power.

Torres

Mackenzie Scott's voice conveys raw, urgent desperation, the sort we flinch from instinctually and are attuned, on a primal level, to heed. It is an "I haven't eaten in three days" sound, pitched between stray-dog growl, moan, and sigh. If this voice appeared on a 3am voicemail, your blood would freeze. Like its owner, it fairly lunges to be heard.
Scott, a 22-year-old from Nashville, records as Torres. This is her first album. She recorded it mostly in single live-band takes, close-mic'ed, and many of the album's 10 stark, stunning songs are set for nothing more than a single electric guitar. The lyrics are full of tricky, messy subject matter-- loaded poses of female need, abjection, subjugation, dominance-- and Scott handles it deftly, furtively, like hot stones slipped from palm to palm, or a lighter flicked under a wrist. Her sure touch with these explosive subjects immediately puts her in the league of artists like PJ Harvey or EMA. Like them, she paints in whole-hand smears when the moment calls for it. Her ability to capture and sustain a single a spellbinding mood conjures the hypnotic hurt of the earliest, best Songs:Ohia or Cat Power. Her record is an overwhelming rush of feeling, and it connects with throat-seizing immediacy.
"Honey, while you were ashing in your coffee/ I was thinking of telling you've what you done to me," she murmurs on "Honey", over three muted implications of power chords. It feels like a depiction of a long-unhappily married couple, maybe, confined to a pair of armchairs, the woman silently glaring a hole in the man's oblivious head. The bass in Scott's voice deepens as the guitar flares, but the song never crosses over from "thinking of telling" to catharsis. "Everything hurts, but its fine, it's fine/ it happens all the time," she mutters; the woman remains rigid in her chair, teeth clenched, leaving claw marks on the arm rests. Often on Torres, Scott plays a coiled, hurt figure willing herself to find the courage to transform into a 50 Ft Queenie, and not quite succeeding.
The songs on Torres, accordingly, are not anthems. Scott recorded the album with minimal resources-- a touch of keyboard here, a cello stab there-- and the skeletal backing band feels less like an unfortunate imitation than the album's single best decision. Songs build and build and build and then die, gazing longingly at exhilarating emotional peaks just outside their reach. Like the woman in "Honey", they would explode, if only they had a little help.
The feeling is echoed everywhere in the lyrics, which take baleful stock of emotional wreckage like so many groceries strewn open on the lawn. "Moon & Back” is addressed from a mother to a baby she gave up: "I'm writing to you from 1991, the year I gave you to a mama with a girl and a son," she croons. Check the year and do the math; this isn't Scott’s baby, but this feels like her story nonetheless. "Little baby, if you're reading this/ You're probably all grown, the way most babies do/ I'm sure your eyes are still that pretty blue," she sings, and by the time the song reaches its emotional center-- "Your new family knows/ I did this all for you/ maybe one day, you'll believe them too"-- the song has has joined the Pretenders' "Kid" in a devastating lineage of songs: in which beleaguered moms sadly explain the inexplicable to their children.
The songs veer between rangy indie rock and hushed folk, unspooling in unhurried five and -six-minute lengths. They never insist on their structure, but eventually it becomes clear that they dip and surge at odd, intuitive moments, suggesting a creative songwriting mind. The music on "Chains" is little more than a single, baleful groan of cello, while scraped guitar strings that feel like ligaments tearing ratchets up tension in the background. The song drops off into a muffled-heartbeat blankness of a drum thud; Scott murmurs "Don't give up on me just yet," her voice hooded. The moment hangs, and you wait for the curtain to drop. It doesn't; the end comes two minutes later in a rude snip of the tape that startles me even at the tenth hearing. The mesmerizing lamp-glow of finger-picked guitar that opens "November Baby" could have shown up on an early Modest Mouse record. It is supported by nothing more than a handful of bass guitar notes, and each one hits at a moment of such breath-held sustained tension that it taps you in the solar plexus.
Corralling all of this is Scott's jugular-direct, impressionistic writing. She reels off gorgeous images like this one, which opens "November Baby": "His skin hangs on me like a lampshade/ keeping all my light at bay." Natural images fill her lyrics-- trees, rocks, seasons-- but they are subject to the same disappointments and rejections as the human world: on "When Winter's Over", leaves drop wearily off of sorrowful trees. On the closer "Waterfall", Scott eyes the ceaselessly tumbling water and sees suicide: "The rocks beneath they bare their teeth/ They all conspire to set me free/ I set my teeth and contemplate/ All the possibilities," she sings. The album fades out right before a Big Leap, fading out in a hum rather than a burst. As the tremolo'd guitar behind her dissolves into a fine mist, she either has or hasn't jumped, permamently suspended between doubt and release: "Do you ever make it halfway down and think 'god, I never meant to jump at all'?"


The carefree California rapper’s debut is an exceedingly joyous and self-aware slice of pop rap.

Light of Mine

Seventeen months have passed since KYLE launched his exuberant single “iSpy” into orbit. A bouncy portrayal of online flirting, it rocketed to No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100, earning the Ventura rapper his first and, so far, only smash hit. It cemented his place in the happy-rap ranks—a world inhabited by Aminé, Chance the Rapper, and DRAM where songs are made of cartoon nostalgia and cheerfulness is a commodity. But with his debut album Light of Mine, KYLE peels back another corner of his rose-colored veil to expose the obstacles to his joy.
On “Ups & Downs,” he raps about his big breakout year, how he “nearly had a mental breakdown and eight months later I had a hit.” His cadence flutters like a nursery rhyme and, combined with his lisp and nasally tones (his “soccer mom voice” he called it), make even his most dour lyrics sound caked in hope. The message is clear from the outset: He’s going to smile anyway, even if it’s forced. Lil Yachty, his “iSpy” co-conspirator, reprises his role as a Jiminy Cricket-esque conscience who aims to keep KYLE from wallowing as he embarks on his glo-up. With his cards on the table early, KYLE spends the rest of his debut foraying into buoyant pop rap.
“Playinwitme,” with its piano-driven production more fit for Nickelodeon theme than a love song, creates the perfect space for his personality. Kehlani makes for an ideal complement as the two riff about their lady interests wasting precious time. Even the hardships of courting sound like sugar when KYLE is serving them. Similarly, “iMissMe” is a fluorescent break-up anthem which finds him crooning alongside the ubiquitous Khalid. He has one of the stronger singing voices of his peppy peers, and he deploys it liberally across the album. Despite assists from formidable vocalists like acclaimed gospel sextet Take 6 or former “The Voice” contestant Avery Wilson, KYLE does much of the heavy lifting himself.
But it isn’t the ability to snake between singing and rap or between rap and pop that anchors him. It’s his self-awareness. Whatever you think of KYLE, he’s already beat you to it and is somewhere figuring out a way to play it up in a song. “Games” features an on-the-nose production that is quite literally made of arcade sound effects as he likens his success to, well, games. “It's Yours” is a woozy narrative lifted by his fizzy rhymes about his first time having sex with a girl. It comes out like a whimsical version of J. Cole’s “Wet Dreamz,” complete with references to himself as a “loser” and a so-ridiculous-it’s-funny victory speech to close out the track. That’s how his weapon works: KYLE is so confidently corny it eventually morphs into charm.
He is the sun and breeze peeking through the darkened haze of drug-addicted SoundCloud raps and hood politicians burdened by an eternal cynicism—entertainment that is free of collateral damage. It can be hard to take this brand of over-the-top mirth seriously when it’s coming from someone who grew up in a beach community, as if happiness is something to be earned only by hardship. But tragedy has never considered zip codes, and a genuine smile is contagious no matter where it comes from. KYLE is peddling joy because he knows the world needs it—because he, himself, needs it. Almost like a cautionary tale, he exists in a land of giddy synths and animated piano and syrupy melodies, but he’ll always remind you none of it is real. One-liners about how he almost lost himself in the façade of it all are sprinkled throughout the album. On the sleepy “ShipTrip,” he waxes about the pressures of his life while the dreamy “Clouds” is his own optimistic reminder to breathe it all in and offer himself as much love as he offers the world.
With the bubbliness somewhat dialed back compared to his 2015 mixtape SMYLE or 2013's Beautiful Loser, Light of Mine is still more carefree than most current rap. It’s far too pop for fans who like their lyrics with edge, but how else can such an inoffensive disposition, such unabashed levity thrive? More than a few of us could use a page from KYLE’s book on finding your own light and then refusing to dim it for anyone.


Subtitled "Songs for Kids of All Ages", this Paper Bag compilation features indie artists such as Sufjan Stevens, Broken Social Scene, and Junior Boys performing children's songs.

Various Artists: See You on the Moon!: Songs for Kids of All Ages

It's hard to keep up with the kids these days. They're getting so...old. Finding a job and having a mewling child or two used to mean saying goodbye to the days of obsessive-compulsive music snobbery. Now the internet cuts out the conventional legwork and here's a clever compilation of kiddie pop for aging indie-yuppies, with more reportedly on the way.
Yes, folks, See You on the Moon!: Song for Kids of All Ages leaves Raffi in the deep blue sea and lets Kidz Bop float on, all right, already. It's definitely better than the old For Our Children disc-- featuring Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, and Debbie Gibson-- I remember hearing once or twice in the parental Toyota Previa. But as that effort showed, merely hiring A-list talent (and Debbie Gibson) doesn't guarantee success when trying to rock the cradle. Paper Bag's compilation enlists some Pitchfork darlings-- most notably Broken Social Scene and Sufjan Stevens-- and a few lesser-knowns for a brilliant marketing gambit that actually turns out not to suck.
The best entries on See You on the Moon! are steeped with a sense of practical-minded wonderment. Great Lake Swimmers' "See You on the Moon" runs eagerly through a list of possible careers, indulging a child's attention to detail ("I'll drive my tractor in the sun/ While the chickens go bawk, bawk, bawk/ and the cows go moo, moo, moo"), while catchy acoustic guitars ring, ring, ring. "Be Nice to People With Lice", Low's Alan Sparhawk's solo acoustic opener, similarly features an easy sing-along melody and adult-friendly one-liners (cf. the title), but it's marred by the sounds of grown-up laughter and "best-song-ever" half-sarcasm. Lice are deadly serious, dudes. Parents just don't understand.
Broken Social Scene's spacey, subtly psychedelic "Puff the Magic Dragon" cover is a cause for Honah-Lee frolicking. Meanwhile, Sufjan Stevens does his usual Jesus thing (but seriously, stop asking him about it, you vultures), turning in a toy-orchestra take on French carol "The Friendly Beasts"-- also featured on his Christmas album triad. Mark Kozelek's "Leo and Luna" is a slow, Red House Painters-like lullaby that also makes for a nice two-minute subway oasis, but Hot Chip's uncharacteristically boring "I Can't Wake Up" forgets that kids have awesome bullshit detectors. And heck, FemBots' growly Waits/Beefheart polka on "Under the Bed" gives me nightmares.
As with any children's compilation, See You on the Moon! has a few tracks parents will want to skip. The kids' shouty chanting on space-age double-dutch "24 Robbers", by BSS member Apostle of Hustle, is cute but gets old even faster than children do-- try the Go! Team instead. Kid Koala's "Fruit Bat", featuring Lederhosen Lucil, gets nicely cartoon-like, but be warned I'll step on any toddler I hear repeating its chorus of "I 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, ate you".
Montag's three brief instrumentals, though, are soothing, culminating in the glistening "Bonne Nuit Etienne". Rosie Thomas' lovely, dream-like "Faith's Silver Elephant" is a real children's song, tucking an achingly sung story of a girl and her magical mammal pals into a bed of softest down. It also evokes the weird, unspoken fantasy behind buying an indie kid's-music comp in this age of ubiquitous over-parenting: "Wait and see/ I'll be the coolest kid around."


On this expressive and singular new album, Chuck Johnson gives his steel pedal guitar the starring role, and creates a kind of country post-rock. It feels like a universe unto itself.

Balsams

Pedal steel guitar is such an evocative instrument that just one chord emanating from its strings can suggest entire worlds. Often that’s exactly how it is used: one chord at a time, doled out sparingly to enhance moods already established by other instruments. But what if you give pedal steel guitar the starring role? That’s what Chuck Johnson does on Balsams, an album that’s drowning in waves of pedal steel, accompanied only by sparse, time-marking bass tones. It’s a simple formula, but Johnson mines it for rich music that feels infinitely expressive.
This isn’t exactly a shock, given that Johnson was already pretty great at creating moods with a guitar. He’s made three previous albums of subtle finger-picked acoustic work, as well as a full-band effort—last year’s Velvet Arc—that used pedal steel more traditionally. But there’s something singular about what he’s done on Balsams. It feels like a universe unto itself, one where each slow, patient strain of pedal steel builds on the previous one. Individually, none of the album’s six tracks sounds very different from each other, but as a whole they create a three-dimensional sonic space that expands and evolves.
In that sense, Balsams is more an ambient album than a folk-based guitar record. Think of it as country post-rock: Johnson’s hypnotic music conjures cinematic landscapes as strong as those evoked by Stars of the Lid or Flying Saucer Attack, but his guitar’s gentle twang sounds more like a desert with wafting tumbleweeds than a sky with drifting clouds. Whatever images the album might inspire, there is definitely a lot of weather happening in Balsams’ widescreen scenes. You can feel air moving, sand sifting, and sun baking as Johnson’s guitar chords gradually stretch across the horizon.
In the album’s best moments, those chords regenerate and deepen, making it hard to tell where one sound begins and another ends. During “Riga Black,” guitar tones continually emerge and fade in overlapping circles; in “Moonstone,” rising chords spawn textures that trail each other. At times, Johnson’s sounds transcend standard associations with the pedal steel guitar, as on opener “Calamus,” whose long echoes resemble a bowed violin or a soaring synth as much as metal sliding across strings.
Within this guitar-heavy environment, Johnson’s bass notes at first feel like afterthoughts, but they turn out to be crucial. Often they provide steps for the pedal steel to climb, their short durations propelling longer atmospherics that climb higher with each passing tone. This recalls the way Labradford often used simple notes to carve a path for grander tones, and Johnson proves just as adept at that move. His approach shines most vividly during “Labrodite Eye,” where the up-and-down crests of pedal steel are pulled by bass like gravity tugging at tides. It’s a supporting role, akin to the reassuring tick of a clock, but once you’ve let Balsams fully mesmerize you, it’s hard to imagine any of Johnson’s songs without that transfixing metronome.
It seems that Johnson’s main goal here is to transfix—perhaps not just the listener but himself as well. It must have been tempting for him to swerve from his devout sonic path, adding a drumbeat here or a voice there, or even just a three-note guitar solo somewhere. But part of the beauty of Balsams is that it entrances not in spite of its homogeneity, but because of it. In one sense, it’s an experiment to see what pedal steel guitar can do when it’s asked to do it all. But the results make Balsams more than that: a fully realized sonic world, and one worth visiting for a long time.


John Lydon’s public persona remains as contrarian as ever. But on PiL’s first album in eight years, his voice remains captivating—and, occasionally, surprisingly moving.

End of World

John Lydon has made a career out of being contrarian, so it seems less surprising that some fans had written him off as a frustrated old reactionary tarnished by his pro-Trump and pro-Brexit views than that he should follow up with something as moving as this year’s “Hawaii,” a tender ode to his wife Nora Forster and her struggle with Alzheimer’s. Just as strikingly, Public Image Ltd, the group Lydon has fronted on and off since 1978, entered the song in Ireland’s national selections for Eurovision 2023, placing fourth behind simpering pop band Wild Youth—a further bizarre twist in the often frustrating, always captivating path of the former Sex Pistol.
“Hawaii,” released in January, was the first taste of End of World, PiL’s first album since 2015’s solid, if underwhelming, What the World Needs Now…. You might assume Lydon’s attention would have been elsewhere during the new album’s protracted recording process. It’s been in gestation since 2019, a time in which Forster’s condition worsened (she died in April 2023) and Lydon became embroiled in a court case against the other former Sex Pistols. Remarkably, this situation seems to have concentrated Lydon’s mind. “Hawaii” is one of his best songs in a long while, combining the desperate pain of PiL’s 1979 song “Death Disco”—inspired by watching his mother die of cancer—with a melodic, wistful edge that evokes life slipping away in a fog of morphine and sunshine.
Crucially, Lydon’s bandmates are also at their best on “Hawaii,” which serves as the album’s moving conclusion. The song was birthed from Lu Edmonds’ mournful Hawaiian guitar licks, while Bruce Smith’s drums roll like waves against the shore, making it the rare PiL song since their 2009 reunion where the music lives up to the vocals’ ingenuity and character. The same could be said for “End of the World,” which combines stentorian singing with a semi-disco beat, sauntering bassline, and a screeching guitar riff that hits like a splash of cold water to the face. The song is obtuse, lovely, and swaggering: the apocalypse on poppers, like classic early PiL. “The Do That,” seems to have borrowed from swing jazz, an unexpectedly jaunty turn from a band that sounds liberated from what people might expect from them. “Being Stupid Again” would have been better as an instrumental, with Lydon’s strawmannish and wearisome caricaturization of student politics—“All maths is racist,” etc.—distracting from a menacingly nebulous guitar effect that swirls and contracts like a toxic cloud.
A disappointing vocal is a rarity, though. In his nearly five decades as a singer, Lydon has rarely been less than compelling. His performances have balanced fury, drama, compassion, and pain, with the intensity and sheer belief dialed up to 10. And he is largely in snarling, triumphant form on End of World: The acrid intensity of his voice on “Penge,” delivered with the berserker fury of a raiding Viking, elevates the song above its rather mundane riff, while the multi-tracked payoff to “L F C F” (“Liars, Fakes, Cheats, and Frauds”) is a masterclass in theatrical shade, ripping through the speaker like an explosion of street preachers.
Lydon has always sung because he has to; his singular voice couples acute distress with an almost physical sense of relief. But he is at his best when he meets his match, be it in the thuggish intensity of Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones, the hypnotic low-end power of bassist Jah Wobble, or Keith Levene’s spidery anti-blues guitar. End of World is hellishly inconsistent, its mid section adrift in ’80s funk-rock sheen, like INXS being harassed by an angry wasp. But when it works, End of World, more than any other recent PiL album, offers the winning combination of instrumental oddity and vocal drama. Lydon could put his voice to almost anything, musically, and it would be worth a listen; but it’s far better when it’s like this.


Toning down some of the experimentation of Evil Urges, My Morning Jacket return with an album that touches on highlights from their earlier work.

Circuital

My Morning Jacket have always been something of a mythic outfit. Back in 1999, when the band released its debut LP, The Tennessee Fire (and again in 2001, after the release of At Dawn), its legend was whispered quietly, like a ghost story: Kentucky, grain silos, reverb, that high, liquid voice. As 2001 was the apex of a certain kind of dark, New York City cool-- with the Strokes and Interpol slouching around the Lower East Side in threadbare t-shirts and tiny ties-- My Morning Jacket were steeped in a warm, eerie other-ness that culminated, cathartically, with Jim James howling "All your life/ Is obscene." Well, sure.
In the ensuing decade, the band became legendary for its heroic live show (in 2008, they stormed through a near-four-hour set at Bonnaroo), but its studio work has always been a little less triumphant. On record, My Morning Jacket can sometimes sound like a band struggling against its own best interests, purposefully eschewing the exact thing-- huge, ghostly, terrifying rock'n'roll-- it does so disarmingly well. Accordingly, the reigning press narrative surrounding Circuital, MMJ's sixth LP, has been focused on the band's supposed "return to form," a response that feels like a direct reaction to its title (or, more likely, to 2008's falsetto-addled Evil Urges, easily the band's most divisive record).
But what are they returning to, exactly? My Morning Jacket’s early discography is rooted in oddball experimentation: Despite the open-mouthed riffing, impenetrable reverb, and whipping hair, they’ve never really been a straightforward rock band, especially on record. Jim James' penchant for psychedelic soul is constantly manifesting in new ways, and while Circuital is closer, certainly, to 2005's Z than Evil Urges, it doesn’t feel like a step backwards, or even like a lateral hop.
The record opens with James tooting a half-serious introductory "horn" riff that belies a goofy sense of humor. James has always been something of a jokester (cue the whispered "Shaaa!" at the end of "Circuital" or the line, "They told me not to smoke drugs, but I wouldn't listen/ Never thought I'd get caught and wind up in prison," from "Outta My System"), but his voice is so naturally dramatic that even silly bits can sound like earnest proclamations. That's why-- and this is unique to MMJ-- he often sounds best when he's delivering vague platitudes.
Still, anyone who's ever heard James wail in concert is likely to be frustrated by the eternal underuse of his voice in the studio, even when the songs were ostensibly recorded live. There are a few tracks here where producer Tucker Martine captures it in all its intoxicating splendor-- the acoustic lament "Wonderful (The Way I Feel)" especially-- but most only hint at what James is capable of delivering in person. His falsetto (contentious since the days of "Highly Suspicious") comes back for "Holdin on to Black Metal", a bizarre bit of jam-funk that alternates between pleasantly spirited and genuinely stupid (it's a cautionary tale about not growing out of black metal fandom, and ends with a shout of "Let's rock!"). On "Slow Slow Tune", James sounds remarkably vulnerable, singing to his future progeny over a barely there, bubblegum guitar figure that recalls the Everly Brothers before transitioning into a Flaming Lips-style burnout.
Like nearly all of their studio albums, Circuital may not reach the heights of the band's live show-- a good MMJ concert can recalibrate your gut, it can change you-- but it’s a remarkably solid step for a band that's never stopped evolving.


The English art-rock duo’s concept album about history post-World War I isn’t worth taking half as seriously as it takes itself.

Making a New World

For their eighth record, the English art-rock band Field Music have made a concept album about the aftermath of World War I, aka the 20th century. Originating at London’s Imperial War Museum, Making a New World begins with a song based on a graphical recording of the last shots fired in the war and goes on to cover everything from women’s suffrage and Tiananmen Square to the invention of the sanitary napkin. “A Change of Heir” is about Dr. Harold Gillies, who pioneered skin grafts for injured soldiers, while “Money Is a Memory” is about a German treasury officer preparing documents for—
You know what, I’m sorry, but I can’t. Who listens to pop music and thinks about stuff like this? How do they do it? True, World War I is a hot topic, with historical relevance to current nationalist successions and Russian shenanigans, not to mention 1917 storming the Oscars. It is interesting that Gillies performed one of the first gender affirmation surgeries, and that Germany paid its last WWI reparations in 2010. But I only know this from reading about the album, which I only did in order to write about it.
Music is the best way to learn about emotions, but the worst way to learn about facts. Without context, which Field Music’s medium can’t provide, you’re left perplexed by the obscure narrative perspectives and wondering why on earth these guys are singing about menstruation. The music, though lively enough, feels distant in its concerns. The album’s fussy construction, with lots of small instrumentals and half-songs, is tiresome. By the end, it’s hard to remember much of what happened.
To be fair, there are some good ideas here. Opener “Sound Ranging,” an interesting blend of beauty and terror, is one of the best instrumentals, with a beat like distant artillery fire. But there’s still the desultory throat-clearing of “Silence” before the record finally gets going with “Coffee and Wine,” which tenses and glides through a bouncy groove, sparkling politely, like the Clientele trying to be Franz Ferdinand. There’s plenty of slinky, string-bendy rock and junkyard percussion to come, much of it tinted with lemony vocal harmonies redolent of Africa, or at least of David Byrne. And when the Brewis brothers aren’t funking it up, they like to climb high into incomprehensible almost-falsetto regions, in prog rock’s “maybe this is a melody?” tradition.
Near the end, the short tracks almost take over: There’s a little synth interlude, a little piano, someone practicing a guitar scale for 30 seconds; it’s as if the album is crumbling away. Then, speeding out of the tuneless electro-rock of “Nikon, Pt. 2,” comes “Only in a Man’s World,” a big Peter Gabriel moment. “Why should a woman feel ashamed? Why, why, why?” David Brewis wails. “What kind of civilization/Has made the necessary/Conditions for procreation/A luxury?” He goes on to conclude, “Things would be different if the boys bled, too.”
This is patently ridiculous—not the idea itself, but him singing it, in this setting. This is a product of the gap between what the album purports to say and what it could possibly say about its subject matter, and here ridiculousness breeds. There’s a familiar, overriding sense of a couple of guys reading something about history and having a lot to report. If you don’t mind the idea of These New Puritans as your dad after a Ken Burns binge, you’ll find signs of life and creativity within Making a New World’s overall confusion. If not, no one could blame you for moving on.

Buy: Rough Trade
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For five years, PC Worship have been the sort of amorphous New York ensemble that can only be defined by a series of question marks. Social Rust finds the band evolving into their most realized semblance of a "rock band" yet, collaging decades of downtown New York dissonance while sludging into the future.

Social Rust

For five years, PC Worship have been the sort of amorphous New York ensemble that can only be defined by a series of question marks. Is this an improv noise collective? A "mutant soul band"? A casual experiment in home-recording? If so, why is their loft called Le Wallet? Did they really all meet as New School jazz majors? Is it true they build their own instruments? And why is one called "the shitar"? PC Worship is, in essence, a twisted, low-pitched vision of subterranean psychedelia—variously made of bad-moon-lit trash-punk, droning minimalism, prepared pianos, and Albert Ayler-worshipping sax freak-outs—as imagined by one Justin Frye, who handled vocals, guitars, tape manipulations, and keys as the writer, recorder, and producer of this latest behemoth, Social Rust. Frye has played back-up for experimental synth-cyborg Gary War as well as Baltimore weirdos Teeth Mountain, both of which offer only a surface idea of PC Worship's frayed, pummeling avant-gardism. The questions have no direct answers—though who would want them?
Social Rust sees PC Worship evolving into their most realized semblance of a "rock band" yet, collaging decades of downtown New York dissonance while sludging into the future. Along with Frye, the core group is guitarist Michael Etten (also credited for "sax?" parts), bassist Jordan Bernstein of the Dreebs, and drummer Shannon Sigley, as well as numerous contributors of backwards violin lines learned from John Cale, homemade noise generators, circuit-bent tape players, creative piano solos (in other words, running one's hand across the keys lawlessly), bass clarinet, and organ. Frye, along with another PC guy named "Bongo Dan" (credited here for adding percussive flourishes "on something, somewhere"), have both worked at NYC museum MoMA PS1—and perhaps they took notes on the cut-and-paste junk sculptures by contemporary artists who carry Dada forward. PC Worship's adventurous style of art-punk is spiritually not dissimilar to that of Butthole Surfers, though it seems more interesting to draw connections to PC's peers: Andrew Savage, of studious New York traditionalists Parquet Courts, is co-releasing Rust on his label, Dull Tools, and the two bands just announced that a supergroup called PCPC will tour with a godfather of similarly Beat-obsessed bohemian punk-noise, Thurston Moore.
PC Worship's journey from tin-can-recorded live jams of squalling feedback, free jazz exploration, and meditative cello to the more formally-realized Social Rust is not unexpected—as early as 2010's Millenial Kreephaus tape on Night-People, they've incorporated heavier punk riffs and conventional drum/vocal structures, despite the tendencies for crackling radio hiss and a gurgling, ghostly, cinematic distance. The organization of sound has been gradual over 2011's Dread Head, 2012's Toxic Love, and 2013's Beat Punk, the ideas all crystallizing to a hyper-present maelstrom on Social Rust. The music of PC Worship's past pulled and pinched at your brain, requiring patience, and now it is more immediate, but no less weird. Instead of collapsing into one another, ideas are given proper canvases.
Social Rust is a masterful act of trickery. The first half works through PC Worship's most accessible material to date—"Odd" and "Behind the Picture" have heavy, visceral, hummable grooves with valleys and explosive swells. The hooks have a throbbing backbone; you could do a stoned headbang to them. "I'm feeling odd," Frye and co. sing, in unison, over—relatively speaking—a thick, soaring grunge riff. The layered vocals are possessed by an otherness in their deranged multiplicity. "Odd" opens with caterwauling, terrifying shrieks, which sound ripped from a horror film, and most of the song glides through a calmly sinister, low-tone poem: "Smoke dripping, heat seaking, dust breathing." "Picture" features a peculiar tempo change at its midpoint, racing off to an endless, kraut-shaped contortion. A lit, dragged cigarette opens the air-tight, claustrophobic highlight, "Rust", which dirges with monotone, free-associating lyrics, capturing all of PC Worship's best ideas in four minutes. (Amusingly, "Rust" features a hypnotizing swarm of atonal violin drones by the Dreebs' Adam Markiewicz, who—on the other side of the dim-lit New York spectrum—also put down some of the sophisticated strings on Mr Twin Sister's recent clubby, cosmpolitan night-crawl.)
The mystical tape mutation of "Gypsy" opens with a creepy cackle, before summoning clouds of patchouli-scented incense smoke, and it paces Social Rust for the dusty strummer, "Baby in the Backroom". "I look at everybody and think about hell/ I wonder if hell's bad?" Frye subtly taunts over his most directly pleasing, wearied, and clear-sounding chorus, which still sounds like it ought to be blaring from a shitty boombox. And just then, this melodious side of Rust ducks out: a 44-second attack clears the way for a heavily-saturated closing trio of monolithic exercises in Swans-like endurance, ecstasy, venom, and dread. PC Worship ease listeners in with hooks, then whip them to a pulp.
There's always humor in purposefully derailing a conventionally good thing, especially when it comes by way of quaking no-wave monsters. As such, PC Worship are committed to their ideas—or the perpetual destruction and rebirth of them—but they do not take themselves too seriously. When I saw them last, at the soon-defunct Williamsburg venue Death by Audio, cymbals were pushed over, pointillist sax blurts were mixed with manic cassette fuckery, and an acoustic guitar with at least one broken string was "prepared" using a crushed plastic cup.
Among PC Worship's dizzying smatter of tapes and CD-Rs, Social Rust appears to be their fifth LP, but who knows? Their prolificacy seems intended to confuse. PC Worship are analog rock eccentrics who visibly enjoy skewing information—even basic details on their website can take the form of abstracted poetry, and it wouldn't be surprising if they secretly released a whole unknown album on VHS tape with carrier-pigeon distribution. For a band so keen on obfuscation, the notion of making complex musical ideas more palatable isn't just an aesthetic shift, but also an ideological one. Nonetheless, Social Rust proves that real experimentation does not require impenetrability at every turn. Referencing Meat Puppets, Frye writes in the credits, "I bought Too High to Die on CD from a thrift store and listened to it while I drove across the desert, then someone spilled Cherry Coke on it, which dried, sticky to the CD and I frisbeed it into a thunderstorm sunset outside of Phoenix." Music is everywhere, and the expanses are chaotic, and understanding the cocophony of sound (and life) is futile. Now, though, freaks of all-ages and places can hear Social Rust and feel that giddy sense of hope crawling in their skin—these out-sounds are being twisted from someplace new.


On violin, guitar, saxophone, percussion, and keys, the quartet pieces together a carefully arranged mixture of jazz, ambient, folk, and classical minimalism.

Jusell, Prymek, Sage, Shiroishi: Fuubutsushi (風物詩)

Fuubutsushi (風物詩)

Seasons change in the mind and the body before they change in the world. Anyone who has felt spring bloom in their hearts on the first false day of sunshine, or been transported to autumns past by the crunch of a stray brown leaf on a late-summer afternoon, knows that climatological reality is not always in sync with our perception of how things should be. The Japanese word “fuubutsushi” refers to this gap, capturing the feeling of longing for a new season at the first signs of its emergence. After months of life looking like one thing, fuubutsushi marks the moment when you believe it may begin to look like something else.
That feeling—not the out-of-time displacement of hope, so much, or the rush of anticipation, but the embodied understanding that things are about to change—suffuses this collaboration between violinist Chris Jusell, guitarist Chaz Prymek, percussionist and keyboardist Matthew Sage, and saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi. All four are prolific composers who have hooked up in various configurations in the past, often playing challenging takes on jazz and ambient music. For Fuubutsushi (風物詩), which was recorded remotely with each musician in a different U.S. state, they piece together soothing bits of jazz, ambient, folk, and classical minimalism with the ease and grace of a group of pals working on a jigsaw puzzle over warm cider. Listening to it can feel a little like relaxing in the home you imagine as you unpack your belongings in a new apartment: Everything is expertly placed and arranged with care.
Fuubutsushi’s spacious production highlights the performances of the individual players, which in turn makes their interactions ring more clearly. In “Along the Causeway,” Sage’s piano rolls forward like a ball losing momentum uphill, falling back into a figure that recalls both the clipped phrases of Ethiopian classical music and the good cheer of Joe Hisaishi. Shiroishi takes the cue and flits alongside at the same pace, the early-morning hoarseness of his tone matched by Jusell’s violin. This focus on clarity recalls the famed production style of ECM Records, but Fuubutsushi is almost entirely lacking the high-minded stakes that underlie so much of that label’s work. This is less a conscious shot for posterity than a conversation among intimates.
Still, that conversation frequently touches on the profound. On album opener “Bolted Orange,” whose kindheartedness recalls Sam Wilkes’ WILKES, they patiently fill space with the softest of interactions, as if they’re passing around a Fabergé egg. Jusell’s melodic sense reaches a peak in “Hayao’s Garden,” bringing to mind the stark drama of Björk, while flickering backmasked samples light up and are gone in a flash of poignance. Even “Watch the Time,” a “Hallogallo”-esque krautrocker that’s easily the album’s most upbeat song, evolves into something like Steve Reich’s Different Trains scaled down to living-room size. True to its title, nostalgia and longing permeate the album, along with a prevailing remembrance of how thin the present moment can be.
In the hands of lesser artists, all this focus on the fleeting nature of beauty and the quiet erasure of time could easily drift into the saccharine, carried along on a stream of sentiment like a plastic bag on the wind. Jusell, Prymek, Sage, and Shiroishi seem to know it, and they willingly puncture any potential fragility with good humor, excellent pacing, and reminders of the world outside, an approach that reaches its apotheosis on album centerpiece “Freedom and Crap.” While the quartet tinkers with a miniature, two unidentified people speak about their experiences in some kind of prison. “I was kinda wistful for what was outside of the fence,” a female voice remarks, while a male voice concludes his story by saying, “I can’t imagine anybody liking it or having positive images of being locked up.” While the group treats this material with the reverence it deserves, they never slip into the po-faced. Without being avoidant, they create a soundscape that’s playful and loose; it’s like visiting Ernest Hoods’s Neighborhoods on a drizzly day. Rather than sensationalize the stories, the subdued mood highlights how tragically common they are.
At this stage in our year of quarantine, it seems impossible not to empathize with those who are subject to incarceration. The need for true human connection has never been more obvious, and the intimacies we can achieve with one another have rarely felt so precious. Recorded a few months into lockdown, Fuubutsushi glows with this awareness: that even in our present darkness, there’s something beautiful, mysterious, and vital that’s generated when old friends find new ways to come together again, against all odds and as natural as can be.

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Mysterious Italo-disco singer returns with the follow-up to the exquisite isolation of her debut, Disco Romance.

My Guilty Pleasure

Sally Shapiro's wilting-wallflower persona has always been as central to her appeal as the actual music that carries her (fake) name is, and that's okay. It's okay because this is one of those situations where the story and the music feed into each other and complement each other beautifully. The persona, whether it was ever really real or not, wasn't part of the noise that kept us from hearing the music; it was as central to the music as her actual voice. And anyway, her actual voice told her story better than any press bio.
So here's the story: Sally Shapiro is the stage name of a Swedish woman whose real name we don't know. We don't know her name either because she's painfully shy or because she just doesn't want us to know. Before Disco Romance, her incandescent debut album, she wouldn't let strangers photograph her, and she wouldn't sing her songs with her producer in the room. And yet she and her producer, Swedish Italo-disco dude Johan Agebjörn, got each other perfectly. He fed her airy, delicate minimal dance tracks, and she cooed over them in her barely there wisp of a voice. That voice implied so much: Sadness, nostalgia, devotion.
And now the follow-up. When Disco Romance came out, I compared Shapiro to Belle and Sebastian, whose early-on reticence similarly defined them and gave their music context and weight. Shapiro's in a little bit of a Boy With the Arab Strap situation now. There's still an air of mystery surrounding her, but it's been depleted a bit. She's done some interviews, she's let dance producers manipulate her songs on a pair of remix albums, and she's even gone on a quick DJ tour. Since that tour, Shapiro and Agebjörn have announced that touring just ain't her thing, but it's done. She's out there. She's got a Twitter, for fuck's sake.
I'm not sure if I should read the general watered-down quality of My Guilty Pleasure as a symptom of Shapiro being out in the world or what, but that sense of exquisite isolation from Disco Romance is gone now. The songs are shorter and packed with more activity. The tempos are faster. Shapiro's voice is still slight and sometimes wounded, but it doesn't fully give into titanic emotion the way it did on Disco Romance [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| . Instead, it's an album of vaguely slight dance-pop songs. That's fine, but it's not great. Disco Romance was great.
The good news: These dance-pop songs, slight as they are, are sometimes very good. Agebjorn is mostly working with the same materials as on the last album-- twinkly synths, vintage 4/4 drums, Moroder bass oscillations-- but he's using them to fill more space, not letting them fade into the background the same way. "Moonlight Dance" has slap-bass, which is weird. The pitched-up "Save Your Love" track is fast and bubbly enough that it could almost be Latin freestyle. These tracks gleam, but they don't necessarily sound perfectly suited to Shapiro. Often, it's easy to imagine someone her opposite (like mid-decade Madonna, say) singing over them.
As for Shapiro, her voice still has a perfectly evocative quality, and so, sometimes do her lyrics. She's looking at the stars tonight and only thinking of you. Someone she loves turned her down, and she didn't feel her head touch the ground. That kind of thing. You get some of the weirdly poetic sentence-structure that only seems to come from people who aren't native English speakers: "I walk the streets I used to live upon with you." "Dying in Africa" seems to just be about being dumped, and then she drops this tiny bombshell: "I won't get over you, even if I died in Africa." Huh? She never tells. Well played.
But My Guilty Pleasure doesn't have the same sense of character and place that Disco Romance had, and it also doesn't succeed as the straight-up dance-pop record it seemingly wants to be because the melodies aren't there. (Disco Romance would've made a much better straight-up pop record if they'd sped it up a bit.) It's a sad case of an artist forgetting what makes her great, settling for what makes her merely good instead.