The second album from the Toronto indie pop band is nothing but thoroughly accomplished songs. Alvvays have sharpened their focus without losing sight of themselves.

Antisocialites

Oh Archie, what have you done? It’s been three years since Alvvays’ self-titled album, a most auspicious indie-pop debut that doubled as a dog-eared short-story collection. Its breakout track was “Archie, Marry Me,” the rare proposal that could rhyme “matrimony” with “alimony” and still sweep people off their feet, but acerbic wit and heart-tugging melody could be found all through the succinct nine-song set. You pronounced their name “always” because you expected them to last.
Alvvays themselves have hardly been gone at all. The Toronto band spent most of the past few years playing bigger and bigger stages, including Glastonbury in 2015 and Coachella in 2016, not long after lead singer Molly Rankin joined the Jesus and Mary Chain onstage at a festival in Australia. They’ve also been road-testing new material. The band’s second album, Antisocialites, conspicuously lacks an “Archie,” whether musically or romantically, but it’s another batch of thoroughly accomplished songs. Alvvays have sharpened their focus without losing sight of themselves.
Rankin, who grew up on the East Coast of Nova Scotia as part of a famous family of Celtic folk musicians, certainly wasn’t brought up on the NME cassette compilation that became synonymous with winsome, ’60s-dappled guitar pop. She and Alvvays guitarist Alec O’Hanley bonded over Scotland’s C86-descended power-pop heroes Teenage Fanclub, but both understandably seem to bristle at being pigeonholed. In one recent interview, they noted how acclaim for Alvvays’ debut sometimes treated it as almost a guilty pleasure. “I just really like to write pop songs and I don’t really care what genre that is,” Rankin said in another.
The musty ambience of Chad Van Gaalen’s production on their debut has turned bright and clear on Antisocialites, with O’Hanley co-producing alongside John Congleton, who’s overseen big-ticket indie albums from artists including Future Islands and St. Vincent. Alvvays can still kick up a piercing dream-pop din, but now it’s less muffled by reverb and digital distortion. The reference point here is less “Archie” than another Alvvays single, “Party Police,” with its mournful synths and weary entreaty, “You don’t have to leave, you could just stay here with me.” Apparently, this person has left, but Alvvays’ endearing songcraft is intact.
“Dreams Tonite,” a live staple since early last year, showcases this slight shift toward synth-y melancholy, but for all its insistent hooks, Rankin also analyzes a broken relationship from a wealth of vantage points, introduces the album’s title phrase, and indulges in lovelorn wordplay (“So morose for me, seeing ghosts of me, writing oaths for me”). Better yet, in a similar vein, is “Not My Baby,” an aching and ethereal song that bum-bums like the answer to the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby.” These iterations of Alvvays could get booked for the Roadhouse on “Twin Peaks: The Return.”
Antisocialites isn’t all downtempo and forlorn. “Your Type,” a song that has been around since before the debut album, is an uproarious garage-rock tune about a conspiracy theory-spouting art-museum ejectee who feels molecularly incompatible (“Let me state delicately/You’re an O and I’m AB”). Surf-tinged single “Plimsoll Punks” bops up against the barriers of scene and genre as Rankin, channeling the Television Personalities’ proto-C86 classic “Part Time Punks,” vividly skewers unspecified stick-in-the-muds (“You’re the seashell in my sandal that’s slicing up my heel”). Alvvays broaden their palette on these faster songs, too, evoking Stereolab in the motorik freakout of “Hey,” which is memorable for introducing a drunken alter ego known as “Molly Mayhem,” but more powerfully insists, “It feels like forever since you held me like I was a human being/And I am a human being.” We’re human, and we need to be loved.
It’s interesting to hear how Alvvays nod to their vaunted indie forebears while also stretching against the limitations of being too closely associated with the past. Lovelorn opener “In Undertow,” one of the best tracks here, features none other than Teenage Fanclub’s Norman Blake on backing vocals. “Lollipop (Ode to Jim)” nods toward her JAMC stagemate Jim Reid through Psychocandy-like screeches and a sunny ditty about an acid trip, as Rankin sharply implores, “Alter my state to get through this date.”
Another way to consider Alvvays’ preferred place in the music landscape is through their usual choices in covers. They’ve done Kirsty MacColl’s “He’s on the Beach,” also performed by the Lemonheads, solidifying a connection to both vivid lyrical narratives and fuzzed-out guitars. They’ve adapted a song by the C86-adjacent band the Primitives and taken a Deerhunter B-side “Nosebleed” and made it their own. Those aren’t the most varied of selections, but like Alvvays stagemates Big Thief and Courtney Barnett, they push toward a larger narrative. “Archie, Marry Me” looked at eternity through the lens of the mundane. Antisocialites’ finale “Forget About Life,” a gorgeously spare singalong that’s sure to highlight future live sets, only wants to find respite tonight, drinking cheap wine amid the condos. Archie was worried about mounting student loans and stagnant wages, but now there are more existential problems. Alvvays have grown, too.


On his debut for Third Man, the prolific Nebraska rocker tames his wild side but still lands some magnetic songs.

David Nance & Mowed Sound

David Nance seems like a true rock’n’roll apostle. Tell him about a record you love—especially in his personally fertile triangle anchored by Neil Young, MC5, and Faust—and the mid-Nebraska native might reveal his secret codex of deeper cuts with glee. For a decade now, Nance’s own music has gushed from that same wellspring, a torrent of two dozen LPs, EPs, and singles that map his many enthusiasms. On 2016’s More Than Enough, he slipped from New Zealand pop bittersweetness to full-choogle vamps in half an hour; he started 2022’s wonderfully warped Pulverized and Slightly Peaced with a two-minute, anti-capitalist barnburner about sandwiches and ended with a curled Crazy Horse jam about the crumbling New Age. Nance has even taken to making barely rehearsed, full-length covers of touchstones: Beatles for Sale, Doug Sahm and Band, Lou Reed’s Berlin. If Midwest boredom can create a vacuum, Nance’s now overflows with the blessed zeal of a beatific lifer.
But David Nance & Mowed Sound—the self-titled debut of his newest configuration of familiar Omaha friends—suggests a limit to this vintage discipleship for the first time. This is Nance’s debut on Third Man, following appearances on Ba Da Bing! and Trouble in Mind that were occasionally so intoxicating they intimated the rise of some anachronistic latter-day rock star, gloriously unkempt and unbound. These 10 songs survey Nance’s usual range, with doffs of the beard to Canned Heat, the Kinks, Skip Spence, and Gram Parsons.
It also feels circumscribed and safe, though, as if Nance and a band capable of truly cutting loose tried to make their own modern classic rock LP by forsaking the weirdness and wildness that made them special. (This same band, Nance included, is much sharper on Bite Down, the forthcoming LP from Rosali Middleman.) Ever zoom in on a soft-focused picture that appeared magical from a distance, only to find its charm diminished as the supposed details never actually resolve? This record confirms Nance’s work has always been that way—better blown out or faded away, not up close and clean like they are here.
To be clear, there are absolute jams here, searing reminders of or mighty introductions to Nance’s antiquarian power. “Mock the Hours” barrels from the gates like an Allman-powered anthem, Kevin Donahue’s drums kicking the shit beneath Nance’s crosscut riff. Howling from rock’s under-funded fringes about outlasting long odds, Nance sounds like the leader of some mid-’90s alternative-rock band whose regional hit somehow broke big. It’s an inescapable tune, its sharp hook set into place by piano that pokes like fingers to the ribs. “Credit Line” turns a similar trick, its lithe little lick seemingly exported duty-free from some Mississippi roadside dive. It scores Nance’s lament perfectly. The compulsive mantra of “Cure Vs. Disease,” the winking fuck-you refrain of “Side Eyed Sam,” the rhythmic moan of “Cut It Off”: There is no doubt on Mowed Sound that Nance can write and lead a tune. Each song is a crosshatch of touchstones iconic, obscure, and everything in between—ZZ Top to Otha Turner, John Lee Hooker to Little Feat. Here is Nance’s record collection as potent distillate.
Longtime Nance accomplice James Schroeder recorded Mowed Sound in bursts that stretched nearly 18 months, meaning the band didn’t decamp to a lavish studio with hired hands on account of its well-heeled new label. It does, however, sometimes seem so, with performances that always stop short of escape velocity, as though afraid to exit some imagined radio land. The lick and groove of “Side Eyed Sam” sound predestined for infinite repetition and variation, but the band fades out after three minutes. The smoke dissipates just when you think you see the fire. “Credit Line,” likewise, frames a playground for the tangled guitars of Nance and Schroeder, but they squeeze in a few succinct duets before drifting away. This take is listed as “Variation #5,” and Nance roared on a mighty live version captured and released in late 2022. As with half the great songs on Mowed Sound, it’s hard not to hear what feels like a half-there take and think, “Please, go on.”
The eccentricity is, instead, crammed into corners this time—ride cymbals that land like little earthquakes during “No Taste Tart Enough,” for instance, or the brief and ecstatic tape piece, “Molly’s Loop.” Nance includes two country ballads here, partnering with Pearl Lovejoy-Boyd to conjure Parsons and Emmylou Harris on Grievous Angel for “Tumbleweed” and closing with the Southern exile torment of “In Orlando.” These are exquisite and aching songs, suggesting that Nance has found yet another avenue for exploration. But on Mowed Sound, these anomalies squander momentum and take up the space where this band could and should be opening up, taking these open-ended songs for extended escapades across Nebraska flatlands.
When the David Nance Group released a single on Third Man in 2019, it was tempting to picture Nance as a spiritual successor to The White Stripes and The War on Drugs. Those bands, after all, reached wide audiences with versions of rock that long ago went endangered, in part because they believed in the form so much. So, obviously, does Nance. But as good as it often is, Mowed Sound reinforces what, in retrospect, has been Nance’s conundrum all along: He remains the clerk across the record store counter, gushing about all the things he loves without being able to tell you the one he likes best, the one he would forever commit to calling his own.


On her fifth full-length, Ou, experimental electronic artist Lucrecia Dalt explores uncertainty with a record whose title literally translates to "or" in Portuguese. Her inquisitive, abstract music draws emotional depth from daily banalities and plays with our basic concept of time.

Ou

Experimental electronic artist Lucrecia Dalt explores uncertainty. It's what she does best, with curiosity and a self-effacing confidence; it's no coincidence that the title of her fifth record literally translates to "or" in Portuguese. It’s an album of options, expectations, and the lingering hope that occurs when there’s a possibility of something better. Dalt repurposed her studio as a makeshift theater to screen films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Helke Sander, and other New German Cinema greats and Ou's cinematic feel is the direct result. "When I have input from outside, I start to see more surprises in what I’m making," she told Julia Holter in conversation for Electronic Beats. For her, movies act as personal creative partners, and the four-track LP and its subsections are a live unraveling of all the surprises that come from the process.
The first step is removing herself from the vocal spotlight. Opener "OVER UNITY" sees her whisper one indecipherable line, chop it up, and feed it through vocal effects to intensify each word. That’s the album’s only lyric. Meanwhile, a soft beep ticks like a metronome. She uses that constant element to contrast alternative forms of timekeeping in the piece, like the sputtering synths in the background. Dalt bypasses realism to pursue sounds rarely experienced in reality, a point she underlines on "OVER UNITY" when she reshapes the piece into a traditional song structure midway, drawing out asymmetrical melodies and an unconventional bassline.
As fascinated as it is with time, Ou is too ravenous to explore any single perception in depth. "IOT" breaks into three parts: "Roto," an anxious pulse of downbeats that closes with bashful clarinet; "Quebrado," a collection of broken telephone beeps and pitched-down gasps mimicking church bells; and "Suelto," a loose percussive arrangement accented with keys. The way Dalt sees it, time is an object passing through various forms of sound. Why waste it standing still when you can see it through a dozen lenses?
She does this by replicating Shepard tones throughout the album. Like the swirling stripes of a barber’s pole, these tones—a play on pitch where a note appears to move upward or downward—is an auditory illusion that plays with perceived direction. They’re superpositioned sine waves separated by octaves, swelling like that stale hum of an airplane lifting off or the rising and falling notes of THX’s infamous sound effect. The only piece exempt from this sound is also Ou’s darkest, "FLOTO," where ominous saxophone and wobbling bass recall the soundtracks of low-budget alien invasion flicks.
Like Laurie Anderson and those before her, Lucrecia Dalt is concerned not with upholding traditions, but reorganizing them—just like the label releasing the record, Care of Editions, which pays listeners to download its albums. On "ELEANORE," she combines wind chimes, cold percussive slaps, and descending string sections to draw emotional depth from daily banalities the same way the album’s artwork—sunlight leaking through a window shade like visual sine waves —does. Consider it disembodied pop where Dalt, a civil engineer who specialized in geotechnics, patiently reworks theories until they become scalable to the average listener. As a result, Ou sounds like a test of specific temporal concepts that is best observed from a distance. If you listen too close, its concept thins, and you lose your grip on the very abstract ideas Dalt is exploring.


Matmos have drawn inspiration from many far-flung and mundane sources, and on Ultimate Care II they source every sound from the Whirlpool washing machine of the same name.

Ultimate Care II

In his recent book The Other Paris, Luc Sante describes an annual ritual of the city's laundresses, who numbered close to 100,000 by the end of the 19th century: "Every lavoir would elect a queen and all the employees would parade, merrily borrowing the finest accoutrements that had been left with them for cleaning." Nobody outside of detergent commercials dances up to a washing machine. We sweat through clothes on Saturday night; we reluctantly clean them Sunday afternoon. But the ambient sounds at a laundromat, those wetly spiraling colors, the unconscious motions of loading and folding and wringing—are they so easy to divide away from clubbing? Not according to Matmos, whose new album Ultimate Care II was entirely generated by the Whirlpool washing machine of the same name. They hit the appliance, massaged it, processed it, and jolted it with samples of its own noise.
It's not such a strange instrument for Matmos. Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt, partners in all things, have wrung electronic music out of surgical tools, a cigarette burn, Björk reciting Wittgenstein, and quivering crayfish. Lots of it you can even dance to. Their practice became more abstract in recent years: Supreme Balloon only used synthesizers, while 2013's The Marriage of True Minds was determined by a series of parapsychological experiments. "High-concept" is the wrong phrase for something so tactile, but the new album does take inspiration, in classic Matmos style, from a deadpan joke: Ultimate Care II is the machine, and the machine is Ultimate Care II. (It could also be the name of a monthly rave circa 1989.) Daniel and Schmidt have always been fascinated by texture, and here they focus on it intently, exploring dozens of ways that water can fall, slosh, churn, or hiss. During calmer interludes, drones move past as if floating through an amniotic sac.
Like Manuel Göttsching's techno opening E2-E4, Matmos sequenced Ultimate Care II as a single 38-minute-long track, elaborating on itself over the length of a standard cycle. The first moments are relatively straightforward, considering that we're talking about an album recorded from a washing machine: Somebody turns the dial, and the chamber floods. Polyrhythmic drumming slowly intensifies, before subsiding into amphibian breathing noises. There's this coarse timbre that resembles a wildly overblown saxophone—fingers rubbing the chassis, sensuality experienced as agony. For long minutes rhythm fades away, leaving a reverie of computer signals inside the machine's brain, and then returns to deluge them, seizing up briefly with a muffled conk. What follows must be the first piece of music braiding together free jazz and the sewer level from "Sonic the Hedgehog 3."
Ultimate Care II ends in thrilling panic, a squall of rapid percussion moving over glitchy effects: drum-and-bass that's hard and wet, like the misted breakbeats on A Guy Called Gerald's Black Secret Technology. But the real un-climax comes just before that, when Matmos allow the rinse cycle to run through with only minimal filtering. It lasts for four minutes yet feels boundless. I thought of Virginia Woolf's The Waves: "The spray, leaping high, spattered the walls of a cave that had been dry before, and left pools inland, where some fish, stranded, lashed its tail as the wave drew back." Time seems to leak out everywhere, as if you looked away from Matmos' knotted loop to find, feet slickly adrift, that the machine had sprouted a river.
John Cage realized there was no such thing as silence when he visited an anechoic chamber insulated from the rest of Harvard and heard two sounds, one high and one low: the pulse of his nervous system and the circulation of his blood. "There is always something to see," he said later on, "something to hear." (It was probably actually tinnitus, but that makes the omnipresence of music even clearer.) I imagine Matmos glancing around their laundry room and deciding that any space could hold a dancefloor, or a DIY noise show—a basement is a basement, after all. Caressing obsolete technology, they've parodied labor's drudgeries as play. Ultimate Care II is a daydream of domesticity, a chore ignored. Call it the revolutions of everyday life.


On this charity compilation, the Swedish label best known as the home of rappers like Yung Lean and Bladee dives deeper into electronic music and the golden-hour euphoria of trance.

Rift ONE

Swedish label YEAR0001 originally made a name for itself with rap-adjacent acts like Sad Boys and Drain Gang, but as its presence has expanded, the experimental Swedish music hub has increasingly bent toward electronic music. The RIFT One compilation—the first in a series benefiting community bail funds, mutual aid groups, and racial-justice organizing—features contributions from the rappers who have become its brand names: Bladee, Thaiboy Digital, and Yung Lean (appearing under a pseudonym closer to his government name, jonatan leandoer96). But overall, RIFT One is more interested in the intricate loops and extended grooves of dance music—specifically, the rave culture of the turn of the millennium—than in hip-hop.
The compilation showcases a broad spectrum of overlapping and interconnected styles. The so-called “trance revival”—spearheaded by artists like Lorenzo Senni and Ejeca’s Trance Wax remix project—is in full effect on RIFT One, which features a few tracks that Diddy could conceivably get down to at Ibiza. Dutch producer Torus builds a glittering entrance to the YEAR0001 universe out of stuttering synths and haunted shards of human voice on opening cut “Circles,” while Chariot gets the first anthemic beat drops in with “Sky Wheel,” effortlessly channeling the work of ATB or Ferry Corsten. PC Music-affiliated songwriter Namasenda imagines a nihilistic rave fantasy on “I Could Die,” her pitch-shifted, effervescent voice floating above glistening loops and thunderous beats.
Despite the label’s collective interest in bygone subgenres, RIFT One is fairly forward-thinking, weaving Auto-Tuned vocals, ambient textures, and rap flows into the sounds of dance-pop’s past. Beijing-based MC Bloodz Boi contributes a lowkey trap ballad with “Mist,” flowing gently over aching strings and the sampled sound of breaking glass. The compilation also highlights a number of UK-based producers, including Palmistry, whose “Basho Dew” is a hissing little piece of haunted speed garage, and Mssingno, who collaborates with HXE on “MXE,” a gritty club track with shades of South Africa’s gqom sound. XL-signed Dark0 works with composer Graeme Norgate—the hand behind the iconic electronic scores for games like Donkey Kong Land, GoldenEye 007, and the TimeSplitters franchise—on “Scrapyard 1v2,” which recalls video games not just in its level-like title but its raging hardcore sound, the kind of thing to which you could conceivably play Doom 64.
Much of the music released by YEAR0001 has the feeling of a video game soundtrack, borrowing tropes and textures from various subgenres of electronic music and reconfiguring them. Quiltland’s “Still” has a gently repetitive, bubbling quality, a piece of music that could accompany your explorations of a computer-generated world just as easily as it could dictate the movements of your body in the club. In the same way that the work of Yung Lean or Bladee introduces recognizable elements of American rap music to a new environment, the RIFT One compilation is less rave revivalism than rave re-imagination. This is a blast from another dimension in which the mix never ended, fusing the musical optimism of another age with a colder spirit of experimentalism.

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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 debut album by the Cramps, true believers who recast rockabilly in their own outrageously camp image.

Songs the Lord Taught Us

Even the Cramps’ covers were original. In August 1980, in a performance filmed at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium for the documentary Urgh! A Music War, they played “Tear It Up,” a cover and a classic from their recent debut, Songs the Lord Taught Us. The first “Tear It Up” is a twangy staple of Memphis rockabilly, recorded by Johnny Burnette and his Rock’n Roll Trio in 1956. The Cramps’ version comes from a different planet: It’s loud, fast, raw, so distorted as to be almost psychedelic. There’s no bass, but it feels like there is.
Six-and-a-half feet tall in heels, Lux Interior looms over the crowd, twitching and thrashing. He doesn’t sing so much as shriek, leaning on the original lyric—“C’mon little baby, let’s tear the dancefloor up”—until it becomes “let’s tear this damn place up.” Poison Ivy Rorschach stands stage left, mirthless, possibly chewing gum, and bends the central guitar riff through the song’s moods: fast to start, slower, fast again, then slower still as Lux sucks the head of the microphone into his mouth, gasping rhythmically and sliding his hands over his latexed crotch.
Normal people can’t do this; couldn’t make it look hot; are too chickenshit to try. If you can, well, welcome to the Cramps: They made sexy music for people who didn’t buy mainstream sex appeal, peering back at ’50s rockabilly and R&B through a big, dirty punk magnifying glass. Even Ivy’s name for the band has a sneer to it, a whiff of “female trouble,” sexual frustration, and constraint. She and Lux were obsessed with early rock’n’roll and all the contemporaneous artifacts of lowbrow culture: B-movie sexpoloitation flicks, serial killers, pin-up girls, the type of comic books that represent a contributing factor to juvenile delinquency. The things they left to the imagination—werewolves, UFOs, man-sized insects—were more fantastic still. And like John Waters or the Rocky Horror Picture Show, the Cramps attracted a cult following. Their work, Lux once said, was “a rallying point for certain kinds of people to come together and for certain kinds of people to stay out.” Songs the Lord Taught Us is the point of no return: the foundational document of psychobilly, a loud, theatrical, noticeably unpolished album with the tongue-in-cheek sense of the macabre that became the band’s signature.
There were always four members of the Cramps, but Lux and Ivy’s bond made everything possible. The couple met in California, where a young Erick Purkhiser claimed he’d picked up Kristy Wallace hitchhiking. They hit on a shared love of the New York Dolls, moved in together, and started collecting records, combing junk stores for ’50s doo-wop, R&B, and the sped-up, country-fried sound of white Southern rockabilly bands. “I’ve just always liked obscure things, strange names—and once I found rockabilly I just couldn’t listen to anything else,” Lux told NME. To Lux and Ivy, early rock’n’roll held mystic power. It was visceral, erotic, almost transcendental. “Rockabilly should have inspired something to happen that was so great, so passionate, so sexual that it should have taken us to another place,” argued Lux. That it had instead faded out, been rendered obsolete by the likes of Pink Floyd and the Eagles, seemed unjustifiable.
Lux could sing deep and smooth, garnering comparisons to the similarly shirtless Iggy Pop, but he studied the judders and hiccups of ’50s singers like Carl Perkins, who wrote “Blue Suede Shoes,” and Charlie Feathers, who wrote “Can’t Hardly Stand It,” another song the Cramps would claim for their own. On Songs the Lord Taught Us, he’s wired and fried, hoodling and howling his way through come-ons that sound like threats. “I use your eyeballs for dials on my TV set,” he smirks on the opener, one of the album’s actual originals. Ivy, a self-taught guitarist, modeled her playing on rockabilly icons Link Wray and Duane Eddy, but her tastes ran deeper. “What I think of as the really raunchy rockabilly most people didn’t hear,” she explained to the Los Angeles Times. “It was underground music. The real wild stuff was either obscene or messy-sounding. I mean it’s beautiful, but I don’t see how anyone could have heard it unless they were in the town where that record came out or where that nut lived. The real filth, that’s what we listen to.”
For Lux and Ivy, rock’n’roll peaked at the moment when the word itself connoted sex, vulgarity, and moral panic. They wanted the Cramps’ blend of rockabilly, garage rock, and blues to inspire the same, and they hit on “psychobilly,” the word Johnny Cash used to describe a crazy-looking mismatched Cadillac on 1976’s “One Piece at a Time.” It was intended as a slogan, not the genre tag it became; as Ivy would point out, “There’s nothing new about combining horror with rockabilly.” Much like the Cramps, early rock’n’rollers gobbled up the babes-and-monsters aesthetic, and for every famous song, like Link Wray’s “The Shadow Knows” or Bobby Pickett’s “Monster Mash,” there were dozens more obscure: Terry Teene’s bone-chilling rendition of “Curse of the Hearse” (B-side: “Pussy Galore”), or Ronnie Cook’s flesh-eating fantasy “The Goo Goo Muck”—better known for a Cramps cover that swaps out the words “looking for a head” in favor of “looking for some head.” Not that the sexual possibilities were a big leap, exactly. “I think that all rockabilly was psychobilly anyway,” surmised Ivy.
The salacious content and crude production of their favorite music convinced Lux and Ivy they could play it, too. The couple were living in Lux’s home state of Ohio when they read about CBGB in a rock magazine and figured they’d found their calling. They moved to New York and started rehearsing cover songs, classics and deep cuts, in the basement of a record store on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where Lux recruited his coworker Bryan Gregory as second guitarist. Gregory had never played in a band before, but his gaunt, skull-like visage ensured he looked the part. “Lux sent me an autographed photo of the Cramps—just the three of them—before there actually even was a band,” remembered record producer Miriam Linna, who briefly served as their drummer before she was replaced by Nick Knox of Cleveland protopunks electric eels.
The Cramps arrived later to the scene than the more famous Ramones and Talking Heads, and New York’s rock cognoscenti viewed them with skepticism more appropriate to a weirdo novelty act with a hillbilly fetish. The band happily returned the favor: In their opinion, rockabilly was misunderstood and under-appreciated, and so, by extension, were they. In any case, after a few years of gigging, they still couldn’t seem to land a record deal. One of the few people to take an interest was power-pop icon Alex Chilton, recently of Big Star, who invited the band to his hometown of Memphis to record. Chilton was more familiar with the Cramps’ tastes and, crucially, less interested in influencing them. When the band returned from its first UK tour with an album deal backed by Police manager Miles Copeland’s Illegal Records, they enlisted Chilton as producer and headed to the studio of Memphis’ legendary Sun Records.
The album sessions were difficult. “We didn’t get any respect by the studio. They’d look at us like we weren’t a serious recording act,” Ivy complained. “The mixing was a problem too ’cos we couldn’t get any engineers that could stand to listen to this music. They’d sit there and say ‘How can you listen to this distortion all day?’ And any time Alex wanted to put his hands on the board to move the faders, it was ‘How dare you?’” In defense of Sun’s engineers, Chilton often appeared intoxicated, demanding multiple retakes and agonizing over the mixes for months after. Meanwhile, Bryan Gregory was growing increasingly dissatisfied with his bandmates and struggling with a heroin addiction; he’d soon vanish from their California tour. In the end, the Cramps were unhappy with some of Chilton’s track selections, and Ivy pronounced the final mixes “too muddy,” though even she had to admit that “it definitely had a creepy atmosphere, and that has a certain kind of appeal to it.” The night before the album was set to be mastered, Chilton called up and suggested they re-record the whole thing; Lux and Ivy turned him down.
The Cramps’ music was familiar, elemental: Nick’s pounding toms, Bryan’s bleating rhythm guitar, Ivy’s prickly rockabilly attack, Lux’s impassioned moan. Their references were clear on purpose, a breadcrumb trail for fellow record fanatics to follow: “The Mad Daddy” (a tribute to Lux’s childhood hero, madcap Cleveland radio jockey Pete “Mad Daddy” Myers) was reminscent of their cover of “Surfin’ Bird,” the unhinged garage-rock classic by the Trashmen, who nicked it from doo-wop quartet the Rivingtons, whom the Cramps also covered. Even the band’s new compositions often adapted a lyric or a saxophone part from a film or a classic 45 record—sometimes three or four at a time. Yet to critics, Songs the Lord Taught Us sounded like nothing else. “It unleashes a noise so loud, so uncontrolled, so jittering and shivering with the nightmares of a thousand-and-one restless nights, that one may be moved to run in panic, switch on the lights, and cower in the nearest closet,” wrote Robot A. Hull for Creem. “These guys play all this trash so deadpan you feel like an anthropologist who’s found an otherworldly culture that’s been developing rock & roll along parallel musical lines but utterly divergent social ones,” quipped Dave Marsh in Rolling Stone.
There are more covers on Songs: Jimmy Stewart’s “Rock on the Moon,” Dwight Pullen’s “Sunglasses After Dark,” the Sonics’ “Strychnine,” Little Willie John’s “Fever,” and a generous quote of Dale Hawkins’ “Tornado” on “What’s Behind the Mask?”—but the other best parts of the Cramps were made-up. “I was a teenage werewolf/Braces on my fangs,” shudders Lux in the opening lines of “I Was a Teenage Werewolf,” reveling in the tawdry, self-evidently ridiculous premise of a 1957 B-movie horror film. Ivy’s surfy melody is sharp enough to sting; Gregory’s second guitar buzzes like a downed wire. The whole band kicks up at the bridge, growling and Link-Wray-rumbling through a distorted blues that’s almost loud enough to conceal the howls. As in the movie, the lupine affliction is a simple metaphor for puberty, but the message arrives with real outsider pathos—which Lux, then in his mid-30s, still plays up for maximum outrageousness: “All my teachers thought/It was growing pain, oh no no/Somebody stop this pain!”
On the frantic highlight “Zombie Dance,” Lux’s arch, clipped vocal sounds a little like David Byrne (the latter co-wrote “Psycho Killer,” the former wrote John Wayne Gacy directly). A song called “Zombie Dance” feels like a gag, same as the “Monster Mash,” and it is, except zombies can’t dance: “They do the swim face-down/Down at the zombie pool!” But Cramps songs are hardly ever just jokes, and these stiff-bodied buzzkills aren’t just a send-up of humorless New York hipsters either. Consider another pun, the one that sounds oddly like a moral judgement: “The kind of life they choose/Ain’t life at all.” It’s language more often used to condemn drug fiends or sexual deviants; here in Zombieland, the Cramps flip it on its head. The zombie dance is the whole wide straight world, the uptight moralizers who don’t know how to let loose, the tragedy of a life lived like you’re already undead.
With the Cramps, it’s less about the shock value than the thrill of discovery, less about the pruriency of the interests than the joy of pursuing them. It’s all there in “Garbageman,” the album’s rudest and sludgiest song and maybe its best. With the sly, bluesy innuendo of Muddy Waters’ “Garbage Man,” a shout-out to “Louie Louie,” and a gnarly sounding toilet flush, the Cramps simultaneously declare allegiance to rock’n’roll and lay out a manifesto for mutant music. “Do you want the real thing or are you just talkin’?” Lux jeers. Against two grinding guitars and Nick Knox’s relentless pounding, his breathless, fourth-wall-breaking verse captures the heart of its own appeal:

Yeah, it’s just what you need
When you’re down in the dumps
One half hillbilly
And one half punk
Eight long legs and one big mouth
The hottest thing from the North
To come out of the South
Do you understand?

Do you understand? Garbage is the best stuff we’ve got. “To us it isn’t garbage,” Lux would insist. “To us it’s the center of what life’s all about.” By now, the Cramps’ take on vintage rock’n’roll is vintage in its own right, but it’s still electrifying, still outré, still underground. It’s the reason their legacy lives in both directions: backwards with the shine they brought to obscure ’50s artists collected on fan compilations like Songs the Cramps Taught Us, and forwards in the prolific career of Bryan Gregory’s eventual replacement Kid Congo Powers and the many psychobilly-styled bands in the U.S., Britain, and all around the world, particularly Mexico and Latin America. Their influence feels present, too, in other power duos whose music only touches on psychobilly yet still hits the same notes: the Raveonettes’ rainy, reverb-slicked bubblegum; the White Stripes’ professionally refurbished, bass-less electric blues; Quintron and Miss Pussycat’s wild-eyed swamp kitsch.
The most important thing about the Cramps: They didn’t play the sideshow. When Songs the Lord Taught Us is campy, exaggerated, and lewd, it’s in the spirit of carnival, the realm of real freaks. It’s a perfect album for Halloween, but it’s true all year: You can gather up the detritus of this rotten culture and invert it, turn it into something that’s both endlessly familiar and terrifyingly new.

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Moody synth-poppers from Philly, whose contributors include members of Xiu Xiu and Prurient, make an impressive full-length debut.

Love Comes Close

If vampires are as cool as I'm told they are right now, Cold Cave would've cleaned up at the Teen Choice Awards this year. Consider: Dark, synth-splashed pop songs with enough of an industrial bent to validate any flashbacks you might be having of watching Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie stalk the club for fresh meat in The Hunger. And though pack leader Wesley Eisold (also known for his work in the hardcore outfit Give Up the Ghost) does have the spooky Peter Murphy vocal thing down pat, Cold Cave sound more realized than the one-off pleasure project they look like on paper. By enlisting noise goblin Ian Dominick Fernow (Prurient) and Xiu Xiu-graduate Caralee McElroy to pitch in, their full-length debut*, Love Comes Close*, manages to stand out as a successful collaborative effort with a clear sense of purpose.
Synth-pop, post punk, new wave, atmospheric industrial-- all these references, which came and went and were fashionable again a half-decade ago, somehow manage to feel fresh here. It's probably because the songs on Love Comes Close are consistently catchy and well constructed-- once you have that down, genre concerns become secondary. Still, these are some awfully icy landscapes, and Cold Cave do have a way with mood. Take, for instance, opener "Cebe and Me", which exhibits a pulsing, Ambien-addled dry cold that threatens to wear thin if over-exercised. But this track turns out to be an entry-level teaser, as album highlight "Love Comes Close" chimes in right on time, an inspired, bittersweet New Order-style dance-pop track that's as morose as it is curiously uplifting, constantly refreshing itself on that earworm of a guitar hook. From here on out, Love evens out, outfitting those creepy, dead-eyed synthetics in more pop-friendly garb.
The presence of Fernow is apparent and welcome, seasoning the Human League pop pulse with big, bright slices of Throbbing Gristle abrasion on cuts like "Heaven Was Full" and "Cebe and Me". Cold Cave have the chops to be a depraved batch of noise warriors with a Blade Runner fetish, but I'm guessing that those crystalline new wave hooks they're capable of were just too juicy to ignore. There's an overwhelmingly disaffected quality to this music, but in the sense that even the darkest parts have been treated with Cheer® Dark Colorguard®. So maybe it's McElroy's vocal contributions that are to credit, sweetening dance-ready tracks like "Life Magazine" and the splendid "The Trees Grew Emotions and Died" (both of which sound much like two very reined-in Crystal Castles singles).
But Eisold proves to be the noble, well-versed synth-Svengali of the whole operation, his devilish baritone channeling the vocal reticence of Ian Curtis one moment and the yearning of the National's Matt Berninger the next. True, he sometimes allows the lyrical content to wade a bit too far into chic discontentment for some ("A synthetic world without end," interjects McElroy on the Eastern Euro disco joint "Youth and Lust", "sheds a tear of plastic deception"), but Love Comes Close is all about that world anyway and makes no apologies, so you might as well just roll with it. Besides, most of the pretenses presented here can't overshadow the sexy fun of a little black lipstick on the collar. Twilight fans, let's cut the shit: throw on a little Cold Cave and get down to business already.


Multimedia artist and turntablist Philip Jeck creates loops from worn vinyl, locating passages in old records that others don't hear; with Sand, his eighth album, he manages to do his work in large part from edits of live performances.

Sand

One way to learn about a culture is to retrieve and study what it throws away. The multimedia artist and turntablist Philip Jeck, then, is an excavator. He finds worn vinyl records, tinkers with their surfaces, then plays them on any number of old, sturdy turntables, allowing their layers and loops to build and fall while he folds in bits of keyboard or other effects. Jeck hears things in those old records that others don't hear-- a short, banal passage might be fed through a pedal just so to create a startling new sound, or a saccharine bit of Disneyfied strings might bubble up from a dark cloud of overpowering surface noise. He takes old, discarded junk and sends it back to us like a reflection.
Sand is Jeck's eighth solo album and, like many of its predecessors, it's constructed in large part from edits of live performances. He dedicates it to his late mother, and there's a famous quote inside from Emily Dickinson about death, so it's about mortality on some level. I also hear Sand as a political record, because of the combination of the album's title (a possible allusion to the Middle East) and the prominent use of the patriotically charged "fanfare" motif in three tracks. "Fanfares", "Fanfares Forward", and "Fanfares Over" are the glue that holds the record together. An element in each is Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man", which Copland composed in 1942 as part of series that commissioned new works to uplift a nation at war. "Fanfares" takes a short segment of the original, a whoosh of string and horns all warbly and tumbling over itself, adds bits of delay and noise, and gradually folds the various elements into a constantly shifting drone of overlapping loops.
It's a powerful track because it triggers so many feelings simultaneously. On one level, the sterling pomp of the "fanfare" is the institution you want desperately to believe in. It's Cub Scouts learning how to fold the flag, the winner's circle at the Olympics, a moon landing-- music designed to make the heart swell. But Jeck, through the use of surface noise, processing, and editing, dips the sentiment into the acid bath of reality. Sometimes, the passages he samples are assembled to sound like "Taps". Indeed, you can feel something ending when you listen to "Fanfares", a way of life crumbling, some sort of dream slipping away. It's easy to be swept along by the mournful horns, but the constant sense that something is wrong pervades. "Fanfares Forward" shoves the whole burning city of the earlier track underwater, slowing things down and drowning it in an aquatic space with the high-end rolled off. And the closing "Fanfares Over" begins with a broken, dubbed-out calliope, returns to the main theme, and then explodes the whole thing in a perpetual flange filter that feels like strafing jet fighters. These are terrifically complex and layered pieces that are among Jeck's best.
Unlike parts of Stoke and 7, there's never a moment here where you are unsure that you are listening to turntables. Beyond the "fanfare" pieces, Jeck finds passages of twinkling, almost sentimental beauty lifted from records of orchestral works ("Chime Again") and infuses them with poignancy through layering and repetition. He also takes bits of indeterminate sound and stretches them into thin, eerie drones that almost sound like a field recording ("Shining"). You could say that these other tracks find Jeck in his classic mode. On a purely sonic level, however, Sand isn't his most appealing album. It's packed with mid-range information and sometimes comes over as blaring, which might suit the material but can be a little tiring to listen to. Still, in terms of its composition and the power of the music, Jeck continues to function at a high level, and he seems to have stepped up his game in terms of emotional complexity. Throughout Sand you can hear opposing forces-- grandeur and loss, beauty and ugliness, clarity and ambiguity-- bumping against each other, and the tension makes for some seriously rich listening.


Another competent effort from the former twee band, now practitioners of Coldplay-like dramatic ballads.

Eyes Open

Earlier this month, Snow Patrol debuted at the top of the UK album chart with their fourth full-length, Eyes Open. Glasgow's finest Zippo-rockers held the top spot as if consoling a lover, fending off Pearl Jam before givin' it away to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Led by singer/guitarist Gary Lightbody, Snow Patrol first went major with 2004's Final Straw, which led to the huge UK top five single "Run" and a slot opening for Ireland's most overrated Nobel Peace Prize nominee (and friends). The quintet had come a long way from their roughshod early recordings for indie label Jeepster-- and more importantly, they were better.
If Eyes Open lacks the vivacity of its breakthrough predecessor, it remains an assured example of a band still paying more than lip service to the notion of rock music as a vital pop form. On an album of sparks and explosions, Lightbody signals his world-stopping ambitions: "For once I want to be the car crash/ And not just another traffic jam." Lyrically, Lightbody continues to be transfixed by the personal. His specialty is the Wile E. Coyote phase of new love-- the stomach-fluttering poignancy of stepping off that happy cliff and trying not to look down-- and he details it with the emotional acuity of his hero, Lou Barlow. This time Snow Patrol's bustling power-pop sounds almost as close to the 1990s radio fodder of the Gin Blossoms as to Sebadoh's antisocial din, but strings, finely layered guitars, and even a choir help the band achieve its chosen mood: "We need to feel breathless with love," Lightbody prescribes in falsetto.
Opener "You're All I Have" sets the chugging pace with simple, subtle lyrics and oohing background vocals. There's a pleasingly self-deluded sophistry in a chorus like, "I have no fear/ Because you are all that I have." The more muscular second track, "Hands Open", begs for feedback-painted forgiveness-- "It's hard to argue when you won't stop making sense"-- with an equally radio-friendly hook. In a subdued moment you'll either love or hate, Lightbody namedrops your 50-state overlord, Sufjan Stevens. Call me insufficiently elitist, but I find power in the idea of tens of thousands of young listeners discovering a wider musical world thanks to one tightly packed pop song. (And frankly, anyone bugged by this should have found new ways to feel superior by now.)
At its aching best, Eyes Open takes the style of Final Straw to its shiny, populist conclusion-- not that it will completely free the band of comparisons to similarly anthemic mediocrities like Keane. Massive ballad "Chasing Cars" is a bland follow-up to "Run", with uncharacteristic platitudes rather than the original's bare drama; "Set the Fire to the Third Bar" features Martha Wainwright's elfin vocals but gets overwhelmed by its own deadly seriousness. Still, the skywalking heartburst of "Beginning to Get to Me" and music-box melancholy of "You Could Be Happy" at least atone somewhat. If it's hard to imagine the name "Suff-yawn" being sung in arenas, try imagining a band that once called itself Polar Bear somehow playing there.


On the first album of a four-part series, the Venezuelan-born, Barcelona-based artist offers her most accessible music to date, channeling her signature sounds into sharply focused avant-pop.

KiCk i

In the overlapping spheres of pop and electronic music—spaces long populated by queer artists moving beyond narrow preconceptions of gender identity—Arca has become one of the most visible figures exploring what it means to transition in public. On KiCk i, the first in a proposed series of four albums, she navigates the spaces in between worlds, languages, genres, and genders. Where her previous releases often felt rooted in melancholy and discomfort, emotions that spilled forth as operatic vocals on 2017’s Arca, KiCk i radiates with self-possessed joy. It contains her most accessible music to date, scooping up her glitchy, slippery textures and chiseling them into hard definition. It’s pop, it’s avant-garde. It’s both and it’s neither.
Opening track “Nonbinary” presents Alejandra Ghersi at her most direct and pop-primed. She’s fierce, self-possessed, in it for the thrill: “I don’t give a fuck what you think/You don’t know me—you might owe me,” she purrs, tasting every syllable. Over clanging pipework and videogame machine guns, she acts out the perverse thrill of doing whatever you want and knowing that someone hates you for it: “What a treat it is to be nonbinary, ma chérie, tee-hee-hee—bitch!”
With each track, Arca applies a different costume—a different skin, even—moving through effervescent electro pop on “Time,” which could be the beginning of a Robyn ballad, and into experimental club rhythms, steamy torch songs, and her own ragged, industrial take on the reggaetón that she encountered as a kid in Caracas. On “KLK,” she and co-producer Cardopusher add extra ballast to a pounding reggaetón production with the growl of the furruco bass drum, a Venezuelan folk instrument that Ghersi learned at school. Elsewhere, the electronic sounds feel familiar enough from the abstract universe of Arca—noises that have no real-world index, but make you think of stuff like latex and metal, volcanic rocks and collapsing buildings—but each element has been sharpened and accentuated.
More than on previous records, Arca bends her voice into multiple shapes and characters. The operatic mode we’ve heard from her before returns on the romantic closer, “No Queda Nada,” and “Calor,” a shuddering love song for her partner: “Eres el dueño de todo mi ser” (“You’re the owner of my whole being”). On “Mequetrefe,” the bashed-up skeleton of a reggaetón rhythm offers an unstable base for her processed voice, which crumbles into metal shards as she imagines herself as a head-turning woman on the hunt for her man: “Ella no toma taxi/Que la vean/Que la vean en las calles” (“She doesn’t take a taxi/Let them see her/Let them see her on the streets”). “Rip the Slit” is also fueled by a combination of shredded reggaetón and treated vocals, this time pitched up to helium-femme proportions.
In addition to Arca’s voices, three guest singers appear, while SOPHIE lends production and voice on “La Chíqui.” Shygirl casts a cold glance over “Watch,” dismissing the night’s options in a world-weary Londoner’s monotone: “No feelings, no exclusive.” It doesn’t take much to flip Rosalía’s flamenco tones into something approaching sheer glossolalia, and on “KLK” the bare-bones lyrics are simply a way to generate sound through the Catalan singer’s quivering soprano as she repeats short, scrappy phrases: “Qué es lo que tú crees?” (“What do you think it is?”) and “Bendecida, bendecida” (“Blessed, blessed”).
Lacking much of a hook (save for a loop of the Dominican slang phrase “Que lo que”), “KLK” feels more like a studio experiment than a pop song, despite the A-list guest singer. Perhaps that’s the point. Björk appears, singing in Spanish, on “Afterwards,” underscoring the extent to which KiCk i is inspired by the Icelandic musician’s ’90s albums, from the sound—cutting-edge club music combined with pop-facing vocals—to the cyborg cover art, which would surely get the nod from Homogenic art director Alexander McQueen. What Björk once brought to the table, though, was songwriting—image-rich, personal, laden with memorable hooks and emotional landscapes. “Afterwards” has a touch of that (the lyrics, lines from a poem by Spanish modernist Antonio Machado, are about a dream where “golden bees” make honey “inside my heart”) but the duet slips away like sand between their fingers, never settling on a distinct melody; the song feels restless and unresolved.
The lack of proper songs, for want of a better term, is a mystery. There have never been so many lyrics on an Arca album before, yet, “Nonbinary” aside, they’re mainly used as textural elements rather than vehicles for ideas or stories. This is a shame, as Arca is known for the sharpness and wit she wields in two languages—another duality unpacked on KiCk i, as she flips between English and Spanish. In a recent interview, she made the point that language is prone to “glitches,” misunderstandings that arise when people disagree on the meaning of a given word. “You can have two people arguing about identity politics and gender,” she said, “screaming at each other with both of their faces red, thinking that they’re right.” But the inevitable “glitch” is to be welcomed as a kind of productive dissonance, she added, “because it favors a life that is more unexpected, vibrant and full of possibility. Who doesn’t want that?”
Arca’s music has always incorporated various kinds of glitches, conceptual as much as technological, making electronic ruptures and spasms into her signature sound. Perhaps the same suspicion that meaning is never fixed or certain helps to explain Ghersi’s treatment of voices throughout, as they flicker like radio static, failing to communicate. That will be disappointing for those who were expecting a star-studded pop-crossover album on a par with her guests’ best work. Still, compared to the rest of Arca’s catalogue—including the forbidding twists and turns of @@@@@, the hour-long mixtape from earlier this year—KiCk i marks not only a giant leap towards a bigger audience, but one taken on her own terms.
As she put it in another interview, KiCk i can also be heard as a rallying cry, inviting listeners “to recognize the fact that there’s an alien inside of each of us.” She sets her own inner alien free on the album cover and in other recent images, where she appears almost naked, strapped into prosthetic claws and stilts, or six-breasted, attached to inscrutable devices—a being of her own creation, beyond traditional binaries, part human and part machine. Using the camera and her body to reinvent herself for our (and her) pleasure, Arca joins a long line of musical chameleons. The emancipatory promise of Arca’s project—a world beyond binaries, categories, and convention itself—remains thrilling, even when her tottering steps don’t quite reach that wished-for horizon.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Correction: A previous version of this review implied that Björk wrote the lyrics to “Afterwards.” It is been updated to reflect the lyrics were written by the poet Antonio Machado.


The Soundcloud rapper’s latest album offers a natural point of entry to his gripping aesthetic, distilling his virtuosity in a series of distinct, yet successful cuts.

Chain of Command

WifiGawd uses digital portals to manifest in different regions, tripping through time and space like a rap game Bill & Ted. Raised in Washington D.C.’s  Rasta community on profound amounts of reggae and classic New York hip-hop, Wifi doesn’t discriminate musically. Instead, he funnels familiar elements from all of rap’s historically powerhouse regions into his own psychedelic world. In this way, WifiGawd represents a vision of post-region rap that never really happened. In an era of algorithmic gatekeepers, he feels like a maverick.
To the uninitiated, the scope of WifiGawd’s body of work might seem daunting. He’s been recording prolifically since the mid-2010s, building a phenomenal collection of hectic tapes that rumble and surge like they were forged during hypnotic all-nighters in the studio. Because he moves so seamlessly between styles, it’s tough to single out any WifiGawd song as representative of his ethos. His new album Chain of Command offers a natural point of entry, distilling what makes Wifi such a gripping virtuoso in 11 distinct but successful cuts. The fact that it’s his first album to be pressed on vinyl solidifies the feeling that this is the deepest version of WifiGawd to date.
Though in the past he has often favored operating with a single producer per project, here Wifi assembles a crack team of collaborators. The result is one of the strongest batch of beats boasted by an underground rap record in recent memory. Wifi favors dense soundscapes and chaotic collages, all presented in a lo-fi, decayed manner. The intro of Chain of Command, co-produced by Wifi and Maryland’s AMAL, is built around what sounds like the iconic riff from the Isley Brothers’ version of “Summer Breeze,” with splashes of piano keys and orchestral stabs filling out the sound. Appearing later in the album, the Tyris White-produced “365” features buzzing synths and sampled strings; it feels like a classic West Coast beat that’s been left out to bake under a blood-orange sun.
WifiGawd might have a highly tuned ear for beats, but his real gift is synthesizing his performance to the music. Finding comfort deep in the mix, his voice can sound dank and translucent, like you’re spacing out at the end of a party and he’s speaking to you from the opposite corner of the room. But while he might seem content loitering in the background of his own songs, Wifi is one of the most innovative rappers to come out of the Soundcloud generation. There is the bugged-out “4 My Skaters,” where he forms part of the percussion by rapping with a steady pulse, managing to find time to talk about his life-long crush on Nia Long and explain the benefits of Covid-19 lockdowns to a criminal. On “Fuck The Law,” he transforms into a spectral presence, floating gently above a cheesy sax line.
A confirmed disciple of Kid Cudi, Wifi is versatile with his melodies. On the beautiful and stirring “Kawasaki,” he switches from swagger rapping to bled-dry singing, making the transition feel seamless. Then there’s the romantic and strangely affecting “Slide Thru,” where a laidback WifiGawd sounds like he’s cruising towards a sunset in a convertible sports car, the ringing of a cell phone highlighting the urge he has to speak to his sweetheart.
The topics are familiar, but WifiGawd’s frequently cracked writing is solidly funny. On two-minute flexing classic “God of War,” he depicts a neighborhood tear-up by threatening to turn the block into a warzone and send his enemies to Lucifer—“Shout out to the cell/If you try to cross ‘em I’mma send yo’ ass to Hell”—before bigging up his propensity for making merry: “I’m the big dog/Step into the party everybody blast off.” It’s simple stuff, but presented with compelling confidence, sardonic charm, and zero cliché.
The only disappointment here is that there’s no track where WifiGawd opens his chest and spits full throttle like we know he can. A song like this would be have completed his quest to show every side of himself, and reasserted the feeling that Chain of Command is the jewel in the baseball cap. That omission notwithstanding, the collection of songs here weave together like rich fabric, forming an expert piece of underground rap. He gives you a glimpse of his indelible presence before jetting off into the next otherworldly realm.


Todd Rundgren’s new album seeks to represent him in a holistic light. It’s a genre-spanning collection that finds him pairing with artists new and old—Robyn, Trent Reznor, and Daryl Hall among them.

White Knight

Who are Todd Rundgren’s peers? While his fellow artists from the classic rock era have long solidified and embraced their legacy, Rundgren remains elusive. As a producer, he assisted the evolving sounds of the 1970s’ most innovative acts (New York Dolls, Patti Smith, XTC), but he was equally involved in its more commercial moments (Meat Loaf, Hall and Oates, Grand Funk Railroad). As a songwriter, he gave us some of the era’s most earnest love songs and its most confounding piss-takes—several defining albums and many obscure left-turns. In recent years, Rundgren has remained gloriously all over the place. He’ll follow familiar routes, like making a trad-blues covers album or performing a canonical record on tour. But he’ll also run in stranger directions, like dabbling in EDM, acid house, and remixes—all while working at a pace that makes Neil Young look refined by comparison.
Rundgren’s latest album seeks to represent him in a more holistic, reflective light. White Knight is a genre-spanning collection that finds him pairing up with artists new and old to highlight his myriad gifts and to demonstrate the reach of his influence. But even if White Knight makes for Rundgren’s most marketable album in ages, it’s characterized by the cozy, homemade sound that’s defined all his work since 2004’s Liars. This is not the music of an artist attempting to prove himself to a new audience or to reacquaint himself with old fans. Instead, it’s the sound of one of music’s most restless listeners inviting others into the world he built—playing off them like instruments at his disposal.
The album’s greatest moments are often its simplest. Robyn provides lead vocals on “That Could Have Been Me,” and their connection is immediately apparent. Together, they focus on well-worn territory—lonely nights, broken hearts, empty beds—and embellish them with a sadness that feels distinctly their own. Fellow Philadelphian Daryl Hall shows up on “Chance for Us,” and the two pal around over an infectious disco beat, leading to a saxophone solo that feels both inevitable and triumphant. Other tracks put the spotlight on Rundgren’s songwriting. The chugging, Cheap Trickisms of “Let’s Do This” elicit a warm rush of familiarity, while “Fiction” breezes along with stuttering sci-fi synths. Like any of Rundgren’s best-loved work, *White Knight *is full of pop gems beneath its conceptual framework.
The album’s relaxed charm makes it an easy, endearing listen, but some of its collaborations don’t transcend their novelty. While it’s easy to see what Trent Reznor loves about Rundgren’s music, their track “Deaf Ears” feels disappointingly flat. Reznor and Atticus Ross’ trademark drones fail to spark Rundgren’s imagination, inspiring lyrics that do little more than verbalize the dystopian atmosphere of the music (“We enact The Hunger Games/It’s raining ashes”). The Donald Fagen-assisted “Tin Foil Hat” is a well-meaning protest song, but its surface-level jabs feel like punching down from two of the ’70s’ sharpest songwriters. “He’s writing checks to his accusers/With those tiny little hands,” Fagen sings, and even he sounds exhausted by the futility of these kinds of jokes.
Of course, Rundgren is nothing if not self-aware, and throughout White Knight, he’s quick to laugh at himself. In the faux-Prince funk of “Buy My T,” Rundgren admits to the increasing negligibility of album sales, hawking his own merchandise to stay afloat on tour. Even funnier is “Look at Me,” a mid-album interlude that finds Rundgren barking rhymes with a hypeman who introduces him as “M.C. T.O.D.D.” “I’m a spectacle of myself,” Rundgren shouts to a roaring crowd, “I’m electrical as all hell.” It sounds like his critique of aging artists trying to keep up with the times—demanding their audience view them with the same reverence they did back in the day. Or maybe it’s totally sincere, a testament to his individuality in an industry that demands artists choose a lane and stay in it. Either way, it’s classic Rundgren: weird, charming, and dotted with his favorite kind of jokes—the kind that only he’s in on.


The debut full-length from the celebrated filmmaker collages genres with abstract ambition, but it often lands with unnerving headiness.

V O R T E X

Terence Nance is genre non-compliant. The writer, artist, filmmaker, and musician from Dallas, Texas is most celebrated for his Sundance-premiered film An Oversimplification of Her Beauty and the HBO television series Random Acts of Flyness, stream-of-consciousness tragicomedies that subvert and satirize contemporary Black American narratives. On his debut full-length album V O R T E X, mirror-eyed soul and R&B experiments abound, embracing the “consistency of change” to achieve catharsis.
The album showcases over 10 years of epic compositional structuring with the help of co-writers and producers, including Nance’s brother Djore, Solomon Dorsey, Nick Hakim, and Nelson Bandela. Over 11 tracks, indie folk, pop, hip-hop, orchestral, and musical theater elements fluctuate against an undercurrent of funk, soul, and R&B. Nance, who performs as Terence, Etc., successfully plugs listeners into a circulatory system of textured stories about relationships, but the record is often intentionally cerebral and unnerving—at times only understood by its creator.
The third track, “In Contemplation of Clair’s Scent,” is where Terence, Etc. feels most harmonious. The ballad skips into focus across hot pavement, a mise-en-scène composed of brass horns, drumline percussion, and a winding electric guitar, blending 1970s Latin jazz and Afrobeats in celebration of Black femininity. After a glorious eruption of samba, the track’s pulse slows in reflection. Nance modulates his vocals, singing, rapping, manipulating his pitch, and sprinkling in Auto-Tune in reflection of his multiplicity. “She brighter than the darkest dawn/So I found the spot where my body born/Found the spot that I suckled on,” he intones, meditating on his relationship to the feminine. Before long, this heady energy shifts into a groove, and then harpist Brandee Younger swaddles us into a heartbreak lullaby.
Terence’s precise vocal performance acts as a lighthouse, guiding tracks with somber themes and oracular production. Emmy Award-winning actor Reg E. Cathey offers a gravelly spoken interlude to preface the metallic, pattering rain driving the elegy “Stay.” This reflection on the emasculation of unrequited love is a bitter concession, as Nance weeps: “The past too long/And the future’s/Already gone/With no children.” The string arrangement on this track anxiously punctuates each acerbic cry, flowing into the indie meltaway track “Infinince or Infinity?” Synths, strings, and horns glide until a glitch of bright horns and electric guitar reveals Nance’s shadow side in the lyrics: “Inconvenient I know it sounds glum/I’m easier to dream about than I am to love.”
The latter half of this album follows the liquid mechanic laws of its namesake. A vortex describes fluid rotating around a center of gravity, its particles slowly decreasing in size, causing the angular movement to speed up and expel matter. Musically, that means the melodrama runs stale after “Sanity Envy,” and it’s hard to stay with Terence, Etc. in what follows. The themes are relatable, but his inner monologue is abstract, the strings are dizzying, and the scream-singing is discordant. The experience revels in abstraction, echoing the “whole war inside of [his] head” described in “I Miss Things I Never Had.”
Beauty lies in the eye of the V O R T E X: its stunning production buoys the spirit of its sobering lyrical contents. Terence Etc. thinks in highly detailed cinematic terms, building complex worlds from experiential and hopeful collisions. His full-length musical debut is a cleansing mechanism, casting the weight of sparse emotions and memories to the sea, forever in flux and in motion. Even as it intends to strike a balance, the concentrated, maximalist components require a sense of patience and submission. Art aficionados will stay along for the ride, but casual listeners may be stranded, overstimulated, and at Nance’s mercy.


Will Oldham’s first collection of new songs as Bonnie “Prince” Billy in several years focuses on simple pleasures and persistence.

I Made a Place

On January 13, 2018, an emergency alert lit up phones throughout Hawaii, warning of a ballistic missile approaching the island. “SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER,” it read. “THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”  Among the recipients were Will and Elsa Hansen Oldham, who had recently arrived at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park as artists-in-residence and who were suddenly preparing to spend their last moments together. Calmly, the couple ate some THC-infused blueberries that they had been gifted by a friend—why let them go to waste?—and Will began writing a whimsical new song to calm his nerves. “When life is tough and very scary,” it went, “My wife and I/We chomp a blueberry.” By the end of the song he distilled its message to just three words: “We’ll be fine.”
And so they were. About forty minutes after the alert was sent, it was revoked; a result of human error. Life went on. When the Oldhams returned home to Louisville, Kentucky, Oldham painted his entire body blue and shot a video for “Blueberry Jam,” a song whose giggly absurdity in the face of death turned out to be the only rational response. It was not the only thing he wrote during his time in Hawaii, but for the time being it was all he felt comfortable sharing. A full album was coming together—his first official collection of new Bonnie “Prince” Billy songs since 2011’s Wolfroy Goes to Town—but he had mixed feelings. With a deep hatred toward streaming services and the internet’s infinite content scroll, he described his reluctance toward releasing new original music like a parent leaving a teenager at a party. It felt irresponsible.
Now that he’s released it, I Made a Place gives insight into his trepidation. It’s careful, contemplative music. But that doesn’t mean it’s unguarded. While peers and collaborators like Bill Callahan and Phil Elverum have evolved toward songwriting that lays bare their most primal worries and beliefs, Oldham has only burrowed deeper into life’s mysteries. His work remains defined by its complexity, as many of these 13 songs take the form of advice delivered like riddles. “Put your body on and get a new memory box,” goes the chorus of its opening song. “I got the eye of the squid/It ain’t not there, it’s just hid,” is another. Early in his career, Oldham’s merging of traditional folk music with his willfully obscure persona felt like the epitome of indie dedication: his invite-only universe away from the status quo. In 2019 it feels arguably even more anachronistic.
The band he assembled for these songs helps bring him down to earth. The always-riveting duo of singer-songwriter Joan Shelley and guitarist Nathan Salsburg offer a soothing counterpoint, like concerned friends during a bad trip. Take “You Know the One,” an autumnal highlight, where he sings about devotion to “the one” that could be either spiritual or romantic (“Complete transfiguration is what the one is bound to bring”). Shelley’s soft, resolute harmonies and Salsburg’s trilling riffs expose the warmth in these words—what true connection feels like. The darker, second half of the record is buoyed by Jacob Duncan’s clarinet and saxophone, making it pleasantly difficult to tell where one song ends and the next begins.
The lived-in sound of the record belies how different some of this music is for Oldham. “Look Backward On Your Future, Look Forward To Your Past” is a song unlike anything in his deep catalog, a morality tale that seems to take inspiration from both John Prine and William Faulkner. You don’t expect a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end from Oldham’s songwriting (even the song title, repeated throughout the record, seems to fight against this formality). But with his lively solo acoustic delivery, he makes it feel as natural as a country standard. Often his writing is best at its simplest. “Dream Awhile,” which shares a melody with “Triumph of Will” from his 2013 self-titled release, prescribes combating stress with a good night’s sleep, a jar of cookies, and a loved one to spoon. It is the most settled Oldham’s work has ever sounded.
So while “Blueberry Jam” doesn’t actually appear on the record, its themes of simple pleasures and persistence echo through the music. In the last few years, Oldham became a father, and he has noted how these songs were the first that his daughter heard. His message of hope to the next generation rings clearest in “Building a Fire,” a psalm-like ballad that closes the record. His best work in this style includes some of his barest love songs—say, “I Gave You” or “I Called You Back”—but this one follows a stranger path through the darkness. “Yesterday was a lark/And today is a bear,” he sings. “Tomorrow is an octopus/You can look for me there.” It’s a funny send-off to one of Oldham’s most complicated albums, but it’s also poignant in its way. If you’re left confused or disoriented, that’s exactly Oldham’s point. Welcome, he seems to say, we’ve been waiting for you.

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Blending misty ambience with introspective folk songwriting, the Los Angeles artist’s full-length debut is less about specifics than the way it all smears together.

Quiet the Room

With just two EPs and a couple standalone singles, Helen Ballentine, the Los Angeles singer-songwriter who records as Skullcrusher, has honed in on a sound that’s both familiar and bracingly distinctive. The market for vulnerable, downtempo acoustic music is a crowded one, but with her focus on the ambient side of folk—songs as haunted whispers, emphasizing texture over structure—Ballentine has carved out her own dusky niche. Shades of Elliott Smith, Nick Drake, Phil Elverum, and Phoebe Bridgers exist not within some anxiety of influence, but as benevolent force ghosts: a comfortable and comforting presence on the periphery. Ballentine is engaged with this constellation of forebears, but she’s only ever beholden to her own vision.
Quiet the Room, her debut full-length, is the clearest look yet at that vision, interspersing hushed, resonant sonics with a few genuinely staggering moments of songwriting. Ballentine’s strengths are most apparent in the feel of this album, which is consistently rich and gauzy. Even the clearest acoustic guitar licks are somehow buried beneath a persistent field of sustain and mild distortion. On “Whistle of the Dead,” one of a few instrumental tracks, garbled recordings of a toddler’s voice share the air with chirping crickets and slow, filtered piano. Around the midway point of “Window Somewhere,” Ballentine ditches language altogether, turning prolonged “oohs” and “aahs” into another element of a spare, misty backdrop.
The production on “Lullaby in February” takes cues from windblown Grouper albums like Grid of Points and Shade, and its lyrics allude to a similar kind of blustery remove; in the wintery, light-suffused world Ballentine conjures, one is always “looking,” always “picturing.” She is keenly attuned to the quiet magic of perception—she’s concerned not just with the thing experienced, but with the act of experiencing. “Late at night I hear a name I don’t recognize/I’m in my bed but it feels weird/Where is my body?” she sings on “Pass Through Me,” capturing the feeling of temporal dissociation, a kind of sensory lag. Right around the album’s midpoint, a song called “Could it be the way I look at everything?” explores the question of subjective experience atop skeletal fingerpicked guitar. Though Ballentine’s lyrics often cast the world as distant or out of joint, that pervading sense of disconnection is ultimately less about specifics and more about the way it all smears together: the ghostly afterimages you’re left with in the quiet, the impressions that linger when the world feels out of focus.
The best moments on Quiet the Room—the propulsive folk bounce of “Whatever Fits Together,” the exhilarating final minute of “It’s Like a Secret”—are also the most engaging. It’s when the music retreats into airy, diffuse corners that it can start to feel untethered. “Sticker,” although pretty, scans as syrupy and indulgent, its sense of stasis unearned. The same goes for “Building a Swing,” which taps into a vein of puddly ambience and never quite finds its shape. In these wispy, drawn-out lulls, I found myself craving more substance: On the excellent “Song for Nick Drake,” released early last year, Ballentine knew exactly what she wanted to say; here, she’s content to keep things more abstract. In that sense, the fact that Quiet the Room feels like a weighty mission statement turns out to be a double edged sword. It’s one thing to announce yourself; where do you go once you’ve arrived?


The shoegaze band’s third album is another portrait of addiction and recovery, but this time there’s no suggestion of a victory lap. The lyrics may wallow, but the music soars.

Deceiver

Just a year after DIIV released its sophomore album, Is The Is Are, frontman Zachary Cole Smith conceded it was predicated on a lie. That record purported to be a portrait of addiction and recovery, a tidy narrative culminating in “a light at the end of the tunnel,” but recovery is never as easy as merely willing it, and in truth Smith says he hadn’t committed to sobriety, let alone mastered it. In hindsight, the album’s messaging “really trivializes what people go through,” Smith apologized in a 2017 interview. “Getting sober and staying sober is fucking hard.” He spent much of that year in inpatient treatment, living in rehab facilities and a sober living house, coming to terms with the reality that the light at the end of the tunnel was more distant than he admitted.
In a sense, then, DIIV’s third album Deceiver is a do-over, an atonement for a record that, while a triumph on a technical and artistic level, didn’t get the truth right. Like its predecessor, Deceiver is a portrait of addiction and recovery, but this time it’s not quite as tidy, and there’s no suggestion of a victory lap. It plays like the last record’s darker shadow. As with every DIIV album, it sounds timestamped from the year that punk broke, but the mood is heavier, louder, queasier. The guitars jangle less and brood more.
The band workshopped many of these songs on the road with Deafheaven, which may account for some of the newfound muscle, but mostly the bluster feels like a natural extension of Smith’s remorseful lyrics. Over knots of Sonic Youth guitars on “Skin Game,” he offers a more unflinching account of self-destruction than anything on Is The Is Are: “Sunken ceiling and a sideways grin/We lived to use and we used to live.” On “Between Tides” he channels Elliott Smith’s falsetto sigh as he sings of living with shame: “Apologize to all I see/For everything I used to be.”
Deceiver is trimmer than its predecessor—a relatively compact 10 songs spread over 44 minutes—yet it feels bigger. The luscious shoegaze overtones of the record’s early tracks gradually give way to the creeping unease of Unwound’s autumnal masterpiece Leaves Turn Inside You as Smith's focus turns from the damage he’s done to himself toward the relationships destroyed during “the years I lived in vain, chasing the pain with pain.” In its second half, the record burns hotter and blacker as it stretches toward its seven-minute closer “Acheron,” the dirge that most bears Deafhaven’s influence.
That track doesn't quite go full metal, but the lyrics get close: “Hate the god I don’t believe in,” Smith seethes. “Heaven’s just a part of hell.” It should be too much, but isn’t. Smith spends the entire album flirting with self-hatred, dwelling on lies, guilt, and burned bridges. And yet Deceiver never succumbs to miserabilism—even at their dingiest, these songs radiate with a beatific serenity. The lyrics wallow, but the music soars. For a record about regret, Deceiver is an unbridled pleasure.

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The dusty twang of M. Ward’s guitar and his whispered singing paint a picture of souls in transition, hinting at the reasons people choose to leave their country for another.

Migration Stories

Under the Donald J. Trump administration, singing about migration is an explicitly political act. But M. Ward is constitutionally predisposed towards mystery and understatement, so his Migration Stories sidesteps protests and outrages. The album, Ward’s 10th as a solo artist, unfurls at a deliberate pace, luxuriating in a dreamworld conjured out of memories, shared stories, and flights of fancy.
Though 21st-century headlines may have been Ward’s initial inspiration for Migration Stories, he declines to write about current controversies. Instead, they’re a context for Ward’s grander design, which is focused on the emotional and spiritual motivations for migration. Some of his intent stems from his own family history, specifically his grandfather’s journey from Mexico to the United States at the dawn of the 20th century. Ward doesn’t tackle this story directly. He instead evokes that era through a dreamy cover of “Along the Santa Fe Trail,” a tune written for the 1940 western film Santa Fe Trail, which he initially encountered in a version by the singing cowboy Jimmy Wakely.
Ward moves “Along the Santa Fe Trail” away from its origins and toward the spacy, untethered roots-rock that’s been his calling card for the better part of two decades. He traveled to Montreal to work with producer Craig Silvey—the first time he’s cut an album with a co-producer—at Arcade Fire’s studio, recording with band members Richard Reed Parry and Tim Kingsbury. All the new collaborators don’t radically reshape Ward’s music so much as expand its parameters. The difference between the new and old is made clear by the handful of tracks Ward recorded and produced on his own. “Chamber Music,” along with the instrumentals “Stevens’ Snowman” and “Rio Drone,” are delicate and contained, where the rest of the record seems to spread out across a starry sky.
Much of this picturesque quality stems from the subtle contributions of Parry and Kingsbury or, in the case of the album opener “Migration of Souls,” the spectral supporting vocals of the Lost Brothers. Harmonies float through the songs, intertwining with gossamer slides of synthesizers, the arrangements accentuating the dusty twang of Ward’s guitar and his whispered singing. Often, these sounds are felt as much as heard, adding depth and dimension to a collection of songs that suggest a faded nocturnal transmission from a mid-century radio station deep in the Southwest. Unlike 2016’s More Rain, the tempo never quite quickens (“Unreal City” is the only song with a propulsive pulse, but even that is muted) and the volume never rises. Nor is there a sense of levity—a quality that surfaced on 2018’s What a Wonderful Industry, Ward’s otherwise barbed letter to the music business. Migration Stories simply drifts along at its own lazy pace, letting its pretty textures become the connective tissue.
Sometimes, Ward’s words break through the haze. Images of families and lovers striving to reconnect, either in this world or the next, float to the surface, as do visions of traveling shows, David Bowie’s Major Tom, and displaced wanderers searching for a home they’ve seen only in dreams. All these passages paint a picture of souls in transition, literally and spiritually, hinting at the reasons people choose to leave their country for another. Ward’s decision to not directly confront the immigration horrors of modern times isn’t cowardly; it’s entirely in character. As a singer and songwriter, he specializes in miniatures and suggestions, taking indirect routes to simple truths.

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Gathering newfound lyrical confidence, the Halifax slack-rockers trade the sparseness of their early material for gentle guitar chords and gleaming Mellotron harmonies.

Snapshot of a Beginner

Nigel Chapman spends a lot of time singing about his own inability to take action. Whether seated on the couch at a party or pacing the desolate streets of his hometown, the Nap Eyes frontman habitually falls back on restless indecision, spinning stories about his own passivity in the face of existential concerns. The best Nap Eyes songs offer a subtle shift to the active tense amid this anxious, wine-drunk detachment, with sparse, lo-fi arrangements that split the difference between the Velvet Underground and their many ’90s alt-rock descendants (Pavement, Sebadoh, Yo La Tengo). On Snapshot of a Beginner, their fourth studio album, Nap Eyes build on these moments of solipsistic brilliance, pairing a newfound lyrical confidence with sharper, more intentional arrangements that lend the project fresh weight.
In the process, Nap Eyes take risks that would have once seemed at odds with their reputation for starry-eyed introversion. “Mark Zuckerberg,” a humble ode to the awkward tech overlord, bypasses the armchair critique of social media to cast the Facebook founder as a kind of folkloric legend: “Is Mark Zuckerberg a ghost? Maybe, maybe/Where are his hands? And why don’t you ever see them in public?” Chapman’s voice bears a startling resemblance to Soft Bulletin-era Wayne Coyne, while the band trades the sparseness of their early material for gentle guitar chords and gleaming Mellotron harmonies.
Chapman’s songwriting, long the driving force of the project, finds new footing in the album’s emphasis on arrangement. “Primordial Soup” introduces a synthesizer into the mix as Chapman rehashes a familiar subtext of Darwinian evolution: If the entire universe is the result of a “billion simple molecules” combined in precisely the right way, where does that leave God? As clean guitar loops and synth pads give way to thundering distortion, Chapman inches closer toward a definitive answer. “Might feel frustrated but does it mean anything?/Might feel lonely but what’s the meaning?” he shouts. It’s a sentiment familiar to anyone who’s struggled to capture an emotion in words, yet one that’s representative of Chapman’s approach to songwriting, which finds an implicit universalism in these moments of clumsy ineptitude.
Where earlier albums achieved this feeling through lyrics alone, Snapshot of a Beginner incorporates songwriting into a wider vision, one that feels truer to the band’s intentions. “Fool Thinking Ways” pulls the steady acoustic strum of earlier songs like “Boats Appear” into a hushed meditation that waxes and wanes with Chapman’s spirit, rising with the excitement of a breakthrough before deflating at the recognition of his own subconscious habits. “And that’s when it happened to me/That the change in my thinking set me free,” he sings, guitars soaring higher to match his mood.
Like much of the album, the track feels like a concerted response to the occasional aimlessness of Nap Eyes’ previous material, even as they try—and mostly succeed in—maintaining the same lightness. “But now I think again/Because I’m sick of making my process the subject of my songs,” Chapman sings on album closer “Though I Wish I Could.” Yet for every moment of heady introspection, there’s an equal and opposite song about Zuckerberg or The Legend of Zelda, punctuating an album otherwise dominated by Chapman’s inner monologue with moments of genuine charm. It’s a testament to his songwriting versatility and a new benchmark for Nap Eyes at their most ambitious.


Although Yndi Halda use every post-rock cliché imaginable on their long-awaited sophomore LP, they use them sparingly, along with more daring instrumentation and their first use of lyrics.

Under Summer

Post-rock bands aren't bound by the same rules that rock bands are. Take Yndi Halda, from Brighton, England. They completely ignored that old rock aphorism that "you have your whole life to make your first album and six months to make the second." Nearly a decade after their debut, Enjoy Eternal Bliss, the band are finally releasing their second LP. But post-rock bands do have their own set of boxes to check off albeit ones that are slightly more specific. Twinkling guitar and bass harmonics? Present! Songs that sprawl uniformly over ten minutes? Absolutely! Moments of quiet that build toward overwrought crescendos? Just look at the wavelengths of these songs on SoundCloud!
Although these traits are all present on Under Summer, they are used sparingly, alongside new aspirations of a band who are clearly challenging themselves and the very conventions of post-rock. Like its predecessor, Under Summer contains only four songs, each more than 10 minutes in length with distinct movements. The elegiac violin that created a niche for the band with the first album is still here too. But the biggest difference is the appearance of vocals, and not just the choral la-la placeholders of Enjoy Eternal Bliss. The lyrics here are mostly outdoorsy and naturalistic, with moments of powerful simplicity.
But there are also occasional dropped articles—"We sneak out at night, in time with owl cry"—and crammed syllables. This occasional awkwardness is the only aspect of Under Summer that feels tentative. A heartfelt line like, "It's something I know, not just something I believe," on Under Summer's final track, "This Very Flight," should sting with spiritual conviction, especially alongside the orchestral intensity of the moment, but the line is delivered demurely like they don't trust the importance of what they're saying.
Yndi Halda's growth shouldn't simply be measured by the fact that they're singing now, though. Enjoy Eternal Bliss felt like a band studying the post-rock playbook, and its consciously mournful songs felt forced. Here they take more risks, like taking a sharp turn at what would have logically been a swelling crescendo on "Helena," the album's sole instrumental number, and deciding to pull into a Fender Rhodes piano groove. Or using what sounds like a banjo and slide guitar. How very un-post-rock! And the last four minutes of the album are gently strummed major chords on an acoustic guitar accompanied by elementary—but nevertheless inspired—piano. With a more adventurous spirit and less rigid adherence to rules than its precursor, this album seems more concerned with expressing feelings than manufacturing them.


Recorded live at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the avant-garde saxophonist offers two hours of uncompromising experimentalism that’s been developed and sharpened to an atomically fine point.

Roscoe Mitchell: Bells for the South Side

Bells for the South Side

“Music is 50% sound and 50% silence,” said Roscoe Mitchell in a 2005 interview. On his new double album Bells for the South Side, this may be an understatement. The record opens with a pause, a lingering moment of space which is then patiently ornamented by figures that seem to emerge from and dissolve back into the void. Mitchell stretches his improviser, composer, and conductor chops throughout, leading 12 musicians through two hours of heady dissonance, zig-zagging structures, and austere avant-jazz. But even at their most rip-roaring, you can feel the silence looming in the background. It’s always there.
Bells was recorded live at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the pioneering avant-garde collective of which Mitchell was an early member. This might suggest a tidy career retrospective, a cheery lifetime achievement award ceremony for one of the few left standing of a generation of iconoclasts. Yes, it’s true the museum was hosting an exhibition that celebrates and reinterprets Mitchell and his peers’ legacy. And yes, the ensembles on Bells pulled old percussion rigs used by Mitchell’s most famous group, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, out from cold storage. And yes, there’s a lovely performance of the AEOC’s  “Odwalla,” from 1973. But Bells feels utterly contemporary, the work of a master, aged but energized, still pushing forward into the unknown.
If you’ve never heard of Mitchell, the AACM or the AEOC, well, Bells may not be the best place to start. It’s not for lack of quality, it’s just that Mitchell has been running circles around many of his contemporaries for half a century, building a unique musical language that’s as rewarding for devotees as it is impenetrable for noobs. His career began in the wake of the early free jazz trailblazers like Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, and John Coltrane, taking the raw possibilities of ’60s fire music in bold new directions. With the doors blown open and the rule book ripped up, there was the question of where to go next with all this freedom. Mitchell and co. answered it with a rich, exploratory body of work that combined jazz idioms, cutting edge experimentalism, global instrumentation, graphic scores and, in the case of AEOC, lots of face paint. Five decades later and Bells is a sink-or-swim kind of work, two hours of an uncompromising experimentalism that’s been developed, honed, and sharpened to an atomically fine point.
Difficult though it may be, it is also great. The pieces explore the various corners of Mitchell’s work, and the scope of his vision is impressive. Opener “Spatial Aspects of the Sound” could be mistaken for one of Morton Feldman’s earlier pieces in its soft, murmuring dissonance, while “Panoply” rides waves of rippling free jazz. “Prelude to the Card Game, Cards for Drums, and the Final Hand” has the type of somber bowed strings that Ligeti would admire, but they’re soon swapped out for an extended section of tumbling, swinging drums. Fluttering, miasmic drones (maybe a bass sax, or perhaps electronics, it’s hard to say) steal the show on the title track, answering an opening of peeling reeds with creepy, oscillating groans.  The clean, linear horn lines on top are like arrows shot over a battlefield. Busy but unadorned, most of the players sit back as the percussion quietly explodes all around you, half chorus-of-church-bells, half gamelan-ensemble-falling-down-a-carpeted-stairwell.
Without dedicated players, this approach would fall flat on its face, but Mitchell’s devotees are fully up to the task. The performances are uniformly excellent—listen to the way the ensemble builds up the middle of “The Last Chord,” thwacking drums like exclamation marks in a wheezing, darting exhortation before exhaling into a tumbling groove that then drops into a perfectly timed sax solo. It’s the kind of liftoff-and-divebomb that countless improvisers dream of pulling off.
But Bells is only tangentially related to the average skronk session. Rather, it explores the raw qualities of sound, its material essence more than its symbolic, storytelling qualities. Though a mournful, expressive mood pervades, Mitchell seems fascinated to the point of obsession with the revelatory aspects of the unexpected. Over the years he’s opted for a difficult, occasionally ugly palette. His aim, however, hardly feels confrontational or antagonistic. Rather, these 11 pieces, like all of Mitchell’s work, are genuinely experimental, wringing affecting work from unexpected combinations, structures, harmonies. When the group wraps up with the smoky, catchy melodies of “Odwalla,” it’s not nearly as contrasting as you might think. Sure, it’s a gimme of a closer, but it serves to underscore Mitchell’s fundamentally expansive approach. No matter how far out he goes, it’s all part of the same musical whole.