The latest posthumous album from the groundbreaking artist feels like one of his truest, 19 “demos” that reveal his elegant songwriting, his disregard for genre, and his boundless mind.

Iowa Dream

Arthur Russell came from the cornfields of Oskaloosa, Iowa, a quiet kid who checked out library books on minimalism and psychedelics before running away to a San Francisco commune with his cello and his curiosity. In New York City during the 1970s and ’80s, Russell became a kaleidoscope of Downtown: a prism through which to see almost every fascinating corner of music there illuminated anew. His shyness became a strength, the source of his exquisite introspection, as he created serene music—lovelorn folk-pop, post-disco, classical, power pop—in accordance with his Buddhist logic, borderless.
Russell was a dance-music innovator who sang of “losing my taste for the nightlife.” He used his cello to create a wall-of-sound equally ecstatic and depressive; those who knew him said he quoted ABBA lyrics like romantic poetry. He was Allen Ginsberg’s accompanist; he is believed, by biographer Tim Lawrence, to have played the spiritual music of Alice Coltrane in her touring band. Russell suggested punk could be art and pop could be minimalism. He foresaw the contemporary notion that we need not subscribe to the tyrannies of genre. Through it all, Russell has become a talismanic shorthand for a superpower across time: His name means a way to persevere in accordance with a misfit’s heart and a boundless mind. “Being sad is not a crime,” Russell sang on “Love Comes Back.” His life makes it believable.
Iowa Dream is the latest posthumous Russell release, and it feels in some ways like one of the truest. Unlike the understated beats and pop deconstructions of Calling Out of Context, or the plainspoken country-pop of Love Is Overtaking Me, the 19 tracks of Iowa Dream are presented as demos. But like those warm records, Iowa Dream finds Russell in his singularly comforting singer-songwriter mode: a collection of teardrop piano ballads, sunstruck acoustic songs, and delightfully bewildering studio excursions. As ever, it’s Russell’s voice—clear, graceful, often conversational, with a kind of humility—that makes his music feel like a potential source of enlightenment, no matter the style. He sounds like someone you might know, a friend speaking to you, which is perhaps why so many listeners seem to think they do, sure their personal Russell connection is special. Russell’s vocal turns on “Follow You” are almost painfully gorgeous, as if embodying the “place in the sun [...] a sailboat on the sea” he sings of.
In a recent memoir of their brief affair, the late poet Kevin Killian said Russell’s lyrics were “written right on the very edge of English,” which resonates through Iowa Dream’s quotidian images: riding bikes, driving cars, laying in the grass. Russell’s words here are mostly cut from the same untreated cloth as classics like “Nobody Wants a Lonely Heart” and “This Time Dad You’re Wrong”—testifying to Russell’s belief that everyday English could be elevated in pop. Songs like “Just Regular People” and “I Felt” seem pulled from a childhood diary, reflecting on his parents’ normalcy and feeling “empty” at school. On the moving “I Wish I Had a Brother” he reflects on a fantasy of basketball games on the playground.
Four Iowa Dream songs are from a doomed 1974 session with famed Columbia producer John Hammond, who once said, “When they write my legacy, they’re going to say ‘John Hammond discovered Billie Holiday, Charlie Christian, George Benson, and then Dylan, Springsteen, and Arthur Russell.’” The stark tearjerker “In Love With You for the Last Time” is anguished but calmly resigned, an almost cheekily despondent rock-bottom: “When I start to think, that’s when I start to sink [...] Now you’ve rejected me for the last time/It’s the last time I’ll sit on this fence for you.” Hammond wanted another lone-genius record, but Russell employed a collaborative exchange in his music: Iowa Dream variously features Rhys Chatham on flute and Henry Flynt on violin. The off-kilter dazzle of “Wonder Boy”—“vibes” are credited to Dave Van Tieghem, a future collaborator on Robert Ashley’s avant opera Perfect Lives—is a stunning statement of self. It captures Russell’s inquisitiveness and self-defeat, hope and melancholy, in such an unassuming manner you could nearly miss it: “I’m a wonder boy/I can’t do nothing/The poster was nailed to a tree/And somebody tore it down/Bits of paper nailed to a tree/That’s all I found.” “Wonder Boy” recalls Ginsberg’s description of Russell as Williams Carlos Williams as a singer—poetic and humble at the same time, as Russell’s music so often is.
Many of these songs contain Russell’s wry humor: “I never get lonesome/Especially in the night when you are gone,” he insists through the lightly rollicking “I Never Get Lonesome.” Iowa Dream includes the edges of Russell’s edges, some of his most delightfully odd experiments—like the psych-rock jammer of a title track or “Barefoot in New York,” a Ginsbergian ensemble beat-rap with brilliant full sentences like, “The question is whether or not this kind of music is going to hypnotize you” and “I’ve always disliked the Rolling Stones since I found out what they were up to.” It’s part music-critical essay, part bohemian cartoon. Perhaps this all is what lead the record exec Michael Ostin to once write, on a comment slip now included with Russell’s archives at the New York Public Library: “Who knows what this guy is up to.”
The influence of Buddhism abounds in Russell’s music, but especially on the songs culled from early California tapes, like the luminous “Sharp Eyes” and “Come to Life.” The intimate melody of “Words of Love” channels the emotional candor of Joni Mitchell, but with disarmingly beautiful lines of queer yearning: “Soft as a cherry, round as a peach/Into your pocket my slow hands can reach/To see what you carry up close to your thighs/Reaching and looking right into your eyes.” Russell’s friend and collaborator Steven Hall once said that his and Russell’s radical position as queer artists in the Downtown scene meant that “[p]resenting our lifestyle in our work was our political activity.” “Words of Love” is a glimmer of that fact, a sweet prayer for the power of language when speech must be enough.
In March 1977, Russell laid out some of his personal pop-music philosophies to Soho Weekly News. It was the dawn of punk, but the 25-year-old Russell was describing how he came to see pop as profound, not merely the sound of jocks and commoners in high school. “In bubblegum music, the notion of pure sound is not a philosophy but rather a reality,” Russell said. “In this respect, bubblegum preceded the avant-garde.” He was erasing hierarchies; he saw music and life as inextricable. “If you misuse your capacities as a musician, you’re misusing your capacities as a human being,” Russell explained, “and you’re taking humanity in the wrong direction.” Each new Russell release makes an effort towards the opposite, as his work did, towards more humanity.
One of many Iowa Dream highlights, “You Did It Yourself” was featured in Matt Wolf’s 2008 documentary about Russell, Wild Combination. Russell is seen playing the song in grainy live footage with an acoustic guitar, though here, the song has a lusher, deeper production. In “You Did It Yourself,” Russell seems to be experiencing yet another moment of endearing self-sabotage (“You did it yourself/It keeps you down”) and also reflecting on a “thrilling” film he saw “last night”: “Understood all of it very well/I didn’t like the ending though/Maybe I’m crazy but it just seemed tacked on.” The pieces of his sung critique stream by like a river. Russell was prone to the unresolvable, to the nonlinear, to atmosphere over concrete. The miracle of his catalog is how the seams mend together, stitch by stitch, a different way forward, as if creating no “endings” for himself. Many of Iowa Dream’s tunes instantly find a place in the pantheon of Russell’s best work, though perhaps it’s more fitting to say they create oxygen in his ever-expanding world.


Decades after its release, the industrial innovators’ newly reissued masterpiece sounds as terrifying as ever—and claims its place in history as a bridge between generations of avant-garde art.

Homotopy to Marie

Among the old gods of industrial music, Nurse With Wound reign over the dreamworld. While Throbbing Gristle and Whitehouse often bludgeoned listeners with lyrics that captured real-life horrors, Steve Stapleton’s haunted tape-loop collages infect the subconscious before dissolving like nightmares. A painter first, Stapleton’s greatest inspirations are Dada and surrealism. Like Dalí, he draws directly from dreams, and his ability to sublimate an everyday object into a new form is reminiscent of Magritte’s hypnotically impossible images and Duchamp’s absurd readymade sculptures. In England’s Hidden Reverse, David Keenan’s essential profile of the UK avant-garde, Stapleton makes the connection explicit: “Nurse music is surrealist music.”
Though it has likely inspired plenty of nightmares, Nurse With Wound’s cavernous, newly reissued 1982 masterpiece Homotopy to Marie feels more like sleep paralysis, the hallucinatory, locked-in state in which the mind wakes up before the body. Everyday sounds—barking dogs, TV transmissions, children’s toys, and the wooden creaks and metallic clangs that can sound so alarming in the middle of the night—stretch to form monstrous shapes, while conceptions of time become painfully distorted. The album pummels and manipulates and even laughs at you. It’s the rare record that plays the listener.
Marie is technically Nurse With Wound’s fifth album, but many (including Stapleton) have called it their debut. Formed in 1978 as a trio, the group originally included Heman Pathak and John Fothergill, friends who shared Stapleton’s love for the krautrock of Can and Amon Düül II, the noise freakouts of the Velvet Underground, and Frank Zappa’s studio trickery. When he met an engineer who wanted to record experimental acts, Stapleton claimed to have a band. Despite the fact that they did not play, or even own, instruments, Nurse With Wound were soon recording their first album, Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella. Every subsequent project until Marie was a product of chaos. Both of Stapleton’s bandmates would quit by 1980, leaving him alone to record Nurse With Wound’s third album, Merzbild Schwet. Insect and Individual Silenced followed, with contributions from J.G. Thirlwell, but Stapleton hated it so much, he burned the masters.
Marie marks the first time Stapleton sounds confident alone in the studio—and in his extramusical approach to music-making. Newly free of intra-band tension, he took his time, booking overnight sessions at London’s IPS Studios every Friday for a year and sometimes inviting friends and collaborators to stop by. Stapleton has described this period as “the happiest time I ever had in the studio.”
Long gone is the krauty guitar work on Chance Meeting, but Stapleton makes no effort to fill his former bandmates’ empty space. Album opener “I Cannot Feel You as the Dogs Are Laughing and I Am Blind” begins with metallic crackling and later erupts into hellish screams, but the track is wrapped in stillness and space. Stapleton’s mastery of both extremes far outweighs any typical quiet/loud dynamics. The silence makes you feel hunted. For a record so influential to noise music, Marie is just as effective at making you scan its soundless void for textures and threats. Sometimes apparitions approach; occasionally they attack. The most disturbing moments on “I Cannot Feel You” aren’t the agonized screams but the gentle sounds placed before and after them: a heavy sigh that suggests you’re not alone and then soft yet decidedly animalistic chewing.
Each of Marie’s lengthy passages offers grim imagery steeped in sex and violence. The title track crafts a disturbing exchange between a young girl’s abstract, yet increasingly threatened, statements and a matriarchal voice repeating the same gaslighting command: “Don’t be naive, darling.” “The Schmürz” begins with a hypnotic, looping male chant, evoking fascist images in a way that is uncomfortably soothing.
The highlight of the reissue is its centerpiece, “Astral Dustbin Dirge,” which was removed from vinyl editions due to time constraints and now appears on wax for the first time. The track is a symphony of ghoulish moans, slowed down enough to distort any hint of humanity before splintered screams cut through like a Todd Edwards house vocal edited in hell. Sex subsumes violence as the moans speed up to resemble orgasmic, feminine gasps. Such transfigurations occur throughout the album: On brief closer “The Tumultuous Upsurge (Of Lasting Hatred),” a choked death rattle becomes a chorus of children’s toys laughing maniacally into the silence.
Nurse With Wound’s history is clearly tied to surrealists and experimentalists of the past; the list of influences included on Chance Meeting has become a sacred text of noise music. But this essential reissue demonstrates how Stapleton’s legacy persists into the present—and not just in the foundational mark his albums left on noise acts as different as Whitehouse, Wolf Eyes, and Death Grips.
Marie’s patchwork construction, pieced together through multiple studio sessions, is echoed in labors of love such as Talk Talk’s Laughing Stockand even Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (a comparison that sounds less crazy when you consider that producer Jim O’Rourke both worked on the latter album and collaborated with Nurse With Wound). Nurse With Wound described their work early on as “sound sculpture” rather than as music, a term that has since stuck to Oneohtrix Point Never. And the ghostly power that Stapleton conjures through manipulating voices on tape, Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland summoned with the obscure internet videos they sampled as Hype Williams. It all reframes Homotopy to Marie as not just one of industrial music’s most important documents, but a bridge between two generations of the avant-garde. Once heard, the album’s nightmarish power and suffocating atmospheres can never be forgotten. Consider that a warning.


On their first record in five years, Ty Segall’s proto-metal power trio dig into the fundamentals of their sound, captured in crisp audio-verité style by Steve Albini.

III

Barring any late-season surprises, 2020 will pass without a new Ty Segall album, something that’s only happened in one other year since his 2008 debut. Of course, even an off year for the industrious California rocker still requires periodic updates of his Discogs page: Segall kicked off 2020 by unveiling a new noise project, Wasted Shirt, with Lightning Bolt’s Brian Chippendale, and he killed some quarantine time by recording an EP of skewed Harry Nilsson covers. Now, in lieu of a proper Segall record, we have the next best thing: a new album from Fuzz, the psych-metal power trio he formed in 2011 with longtime accomplice Charles Moothart. After dropping two albums in quick succession mid-decade, Fuzz seemed to go the way of so many Segall side projects, in that it took the backseat to yet more side projects, like GØGGS and the C.I.A. But Fuzz’s return after a half-decade hiatus is fortuitously timed: After Segall swore off making guitar-based music with 2019’s bouzouki ’n’ koto-speckled First Taste, Fuzz marks his return to raw, guitar-powered rock music (technically, anyway—in Fuzz, he plays the drums while Moothart does the heavy six-string lifting).
With III, Fuzz hit the reset button. On their 2015 double album II, Segall, Moothart, and bassist Chad Ubovich stretched the parameters of their proto-metal sound in all directions like a game of Cat’s Cradle played with a rubber band, but on III, everything snaps back into its original shape. There are no Eastern psychedelic flourishes, no string arrangements, no extended space-jazz odysseys, and no lead-vocal turns from Moothart or Ubovich. The focus is squarely on the trio’s elemental strengths: brontosaurus-sized riffs, maximal choogle, and Segall’s acidic melodies, which suggest John Lennon if he had spent the early ’70s hanging with Tony Iommi and Bobby Liebling instead of Elton John and Harry Nilsson. Essentially, what you get here is a Ty Segall album with a beefier bottom end, as the grungy Big Star strut of “Spit” and Thin Lizzied fuzz-punk blitz of “Mirror” snugly sidle up alongside recent Segall rippers like “Break a Guitar” and “She” at the unrulier end of his catalog.
As such, III feels more like a sequel to Segall’s sludgetastic 2019 live set Deforming Lobes than Fuzz’s II. And as Deforming Lobes proved, when it comes to documenting a band in its most natural, primal state, there’s no one better to have on hand than Steve Albini, who captures the action here in a crisp audio-verité style that brings this group’s insolent personality to the fore. Even though Fuzz revel in amped-up aggression and bone-crushing heft, their energy is ultimately less macho than mischievous: The marauding opener “Returning” is both as comforting as a wood-paneled rec room and as complicated as a calculus quiz, frequently locking into a stuttering break as if the song were being tazed. On “Nothing People,” the trio send a propulsive Can rhythm crashing headlong into an oncoming Grand Funk boogie, but drop in an uncanny “oooh oooh oooh” hook to soothe the impact. And even when Fuzz veer perilously close to lapsing into blues-rock convention—as in the noodly opening tract of the two-part “Time Collapse”—the musicians seem hyper-aware of their transgression, and deploy everything in their arsenal (be it Segall’s glammy vocal exultations, Ubovich’s restless rhythms, or Moothart’s increasingly outré noise textures) to shake it off.
Albini’s live-off-the-floor, overdub-resistant recordings really bring a visceral punch to III’s jammier passages, ensuring that the moments where Moothart peels off for a solo are just as much a showcase for the rhythm section rumbling underneath. And where II’s 13-minute title-track closer saw Fuzz drifting aimlessly out into the unknown, III rallies for a satisfying full-circle finale with “End Returning,” which, over its seven-minute span, cycles through doomy Sabbath lurches, fleet-fingered proggy convulsions, and explosive hardcore outbursts, before climaxing with a triumphant bookending quote of the opening “Returning.” Rather than serve some grand conceptual function, the reprise feels like the sort of callback that a band might drop during an encore medley to cap its live show. But in this case, the most salient sentiment of “Returning” is worth repeating: “There is no sum greater than one,” Segall exclaims, a blood-pact reaffirmation from a long-dormant band whose whole remains greater than its parts.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Houston rapper reprises his Sauce Ghetto Gospel series, bringing his booming baritone to diaristic confessions and slick songs of celebration.

Sauce Ghetto Gospel 3

Most Sauce Walka songs adhere to the same basic blueprint, regardless of their themes. The Houston rapper’s voice starts out at conversational levels—well, the type of conversation you have with your loudest friend at a moderately turnt party—and usually ends with every bar landing at full force, like a preacher booming from a pulpit of fire and candy paint. Walka (born Albert Mondane) has used that template since he began spitting under that name in 2014—a framework that he’s applied to a dizzying array of beats, from trap and Miami bass to early aughts New York boom-bap. But he’s also had a fascination with soul and gospel samples that stretches back to his very beginnings as A-Walk in the late 2000s. 2018’s Sauce Ghetto Gospel was the first time he devoted an entire project to rhyming over gospel samples. It’s undeniable that his powerful vocals, slick wordplay, and storytelling shines over these sounds, and the third entry in the Sauce Ghetto Gospel series proves he’s as potent as ever.
Walka is a singular presence on the mic, but a bold voice and bravado can only take you so far. Luckily, he matches that intensity with storytelling that builds on big emotions and tearful confessions, finding a middle ground between vintage Boosie and younger bleeding hearts, like YoungBoy Never Broke Again. There are moments where he imagines never seeing his children or feeling sunshine on his skin again (“First Testament”), and others where he calls out rappers for faking lean addictions, only to descend through the memories of his own paralyzing addiction (“I Dropped It”).
His attention to emotion and detail is further magnified on songs like “Brothers Story,” where a drug deal gone bad leads to squeezed triggers and rivers of blood. At first, the track seems to chronicle someone else’s narrative, with Walka rapping in the second person. But the scope widens gradually to reveal Walka is referring to his own brother’s death, as he self-administers a tongue-lashing: “This ain’t [Grand Theft Auto:] San Andreas/You got your lil’ brother murdered tryna get some head/And on top of that, you tried to finesse him like he was gettin’ bread.”
Lyrically, the Sauce Ghetto Gospel series is designed to purge demons, but there are a handful of lighter moments to ease the pressure. Walka brings the same conviction to “Slab Holiday,” a thunderous celebration of Houston car culture, and the blow-a-bag-on-your-shawty anthem “Good Coochie.” Songs grind to a halt when Walka becomes a little too relaxed; occasionally, he falls back on ill-informed hot takes and boorish language that goes from absurd to offensive. It’s unfortunate to hear Walka delve into the struggles of people hardworking people in the first half of “GG3 Intro,” only to default to boneheaded theories on Black-on-Black crime and then claim that Kanye West was “crucified” by the media. He puts his foot in his mouth often enough for it to leave a bitter taste, but not often enough to fully derail the album; they are awkward bumps on an otherwise smooth ride.
Walka has proven time and time again that he can rap over anything, but there’s a reason that he’s committed to the Sauce Ghetto Gospel series enough to pump out three volumes. His words land with more purpose over these beats; the flows become more unpredictable, and, for a while, his perspective is the only one that matters. Much like the Daringer-produced beat he rapped over during his spotlight appearance on YouTube freestyle series From the Block last year, Sauce Ghetto Gospel 3’s best songs are intoxicating because they draw from the well that inspired Walka to rap in the first place—of all the beats he’s tamed, these are where he’s most willing to bleach the bones of his past and cruise around in souped-up cars for the pure joy of it. It’s hardly revolutionary, but Sauce Ghetto Gospel 3 is a reminder of just how satisfying the bread and butter can be.


These reissues from the Feelies train a new lens on the band's late middle period, when they honed their caffeinated energy, settling gracefully into their signature sound.

The Feelies: Only Life/Time For A Witness

Only Life/Time For A Witness

It's still difficult to imagine the Feelies in the rising fury of late '80s alt-mania. They never quite fit in, the boys and girl with perpetual nervousness from Haledon, New Jersey who'd influenced members of R.E.M. and Yo La Tengo in the late '70s before dissolving into a blaze of homespun spinoffs. But new reissues from Bar/None of 1988's Only Life and 1991's Time For A Witness train a new lens on the band's late middle period, after their 1986 Good Earth return and before their two-decade dissolution. As part of the second generation of CBGB bands, they first became known for their caffeinated energy, but these two albums found the now-stable quintet coming into stylistic maturity, settling gracefully into their signature sound: reliable Velvet Underground chug, rust-burning solos, occasional acoustic guitar, and their distinct double-drummer rhythm section featuring Dave Weckerman on a smaller second percussion set-up.
Even 28 years later, this combination of Weckerman and kit drummer Stan Demeski continues to distinguish the Feelies from the jingle-jangle velvet rockers they'd influenced via R.E.M.. Stripping extraneous cymbal crashes and replacing them with any number of other colorations, sometimes not immediately obvious, the two make inventive frames for chief songwriter Glenn Mercer's increasingly monosyllabic rumination and fat-toned lead guitar. The band's obsessive percussive roots can be heard most clearly on *Only Life'*s "The Undertow": Beginning with a drum/woodblock polyrhythm and a slow guitar fade-in, the insistent layers turn together like jittering clockwork, a meticulously arranged through-line to the band's pepped-up Crazy Rhythms-era minimalism featuring former Pere Ubu drummer Anton Fier. The effect is cathartic, neuroses drowned in motion.
The wild Feelies beat can be heard clearly, too, on the earlier album's "Away," Mercer's slide guitar surfing cooly on Demeski's brilliantly metronomic snare. A Jonathan Demme-directed video for the song was filmed at Maxwell's in Hoboken, home to Coyote Records, the indie label belonging to club owner Steve Fallon, who'd released 1986's The Good Earth. The two albums capture a band consolidating the wild fun of Crazy Rhythms and the living room-epiphanies of their earlier iteration as the Trypes into a cohesive musical vision that didn't require total deconstruction between each album.
Unlike Nirvana or Dinosaur Jr. or many other up and coming guitar-wielders on the club circuit, the Feelies remained grounded in the un-scorched earth of a pre-metal/pre-hardcore world. Despite this, there is a surprisingly grunge-like angst coiled inside Mercer's songs. Arranged for a different rhythm section and pumped up by Andy Wallace, the repetitive half-sentences of "What She Said" could be a Kurt Cobain lyric (and even slightly anticipate Nirvana's "Breed," released later that year). Live, the Feelies' rhythms might've engendered moshing in the go-go '90s, but even when they tag a cover of the Stooges' "Real Cool Time" to Time For A Witness, Mercer's invitation still seems considerably more chill than Iggy's bare-chested crowd-surfing come-on. The Feelies rock hard, but they rock for themselves, on a course of their own.
"I don't talk much 'cause it gets in the way, don't let it get in the way," Mercer sang quite articulately on "Crazy Rhythms," an early signature song. By the time of Time For A Witness, Mercer's songwriting persona spoke less and less, too, chiseling his lyrics down to phrases that traded between terse, profound, and nearly generic recombinations drawn from rock's lingua franca. Sometimes, it serves the band well, as on "Doin' It Again," perhaps the closest they ever veered to pop. With only one couplet about a party on a lawn, Mercer transforms the otherwise-vague lyrics of "Invitation" into a specific memory of a long-ago evening. But in many other places, the songs feel less like individual expressions and more like convenient platform for the Feelies to lock into their now-signature groove.
The eight digital bonus tracks split between the Only Life and Time For A Witness reissues are all from the band's third and most recent period, live and acoustic versions of songs from the two 1988 and 1991 albums plus a few covers recorded since their 2008 reunion. And while the new studio renderings of *Only Life'*s wisdom-dispensing title track and 1991's "Find A Way" are fairly exquisite, and the live tracks are good fun, the absence of contemporary supplementary material is a little bit of a bummer. One show from the period available on BitTorrent sites finds the Feelies in France in 1989, recorded on a well-mixed soundboard, Glenn Mercer's guitar achieving a gorgeous and barely-contained bell-clear tone, recalling Another Green World-era Robert Fripp, a voice all but missing from the two studio albums. A fierce live band, their personal intensity transmuted into collective joy, songs from the two albums returned to the Feelies' repertoire when they returned, hardly a band to revert only to their acknowledged classics, but unfussily recovering their unacknowledged classics, too.
Correction (3/16 8:45 a.m.): An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the lyric, "I don't talk much 'cause it gets in the way, don't let it get in the way," came from "The Boy With The Perpetual Nervousness." It was in fact from "Crazy Rhythms."


PWR BTTM is a queer-identified garage punk duo of guitarist Ben Hopkins and drummer Liv Bruce. Formed after the two met at Bard College in upstate New York, the duo make very loud and occasionally very messy music that makes complicated statements on what it means to be young and queer and confused and somehow othered.

Ugly Cherries

For those of us queer music lovers who came of age in the 1990s seeing Pansy Division—one of the few visible gay punk bands of that era—opening for Green Day on 1994’s Dookie tour was a kind of surreal, watershed moment. Though it seemed crazy at the time, it actually wasn’t the world’s most unusual pairing—both bands had at one point shared a label and each made pop punk songs that were equal parts snotty and catchy—but Pansy Division were an overtly and aggressively gay band with a cult following, while Green Day were riding high on their mainstream major label breakthrough. Even though Green Day's audience seemed flummoxed by Pansy Division—I remember people around me asking ‘Are they serious?’—the fact that it was happening at all felt pretty revolutionary. Indie rock was still mostly the unwelcoming domain of straight white dudes. With the occasional exception of seeing Pansy Division, God Is My Co-Pilot, or the mighty Team Dresch, being an openly queer person at a mainstream rock show still felt like an open invitation to getting your ass kicked.
It’s hard not to think about Pansy Division when listening to PWR BTTM—the gloriously queer garage punk duo of guitarist Ben Hopkins and drummer Liv Bruce. Formed after the two met at Bard College in upstate New York, queer-identified PWR BTTM make very loud and occasionally very messy music without ever adopting some kind of faux masculine posturing. In fact, that band pretty much eviscerates said posturing with their live sets, in which the two loudly rip through their arsenal of pop-punk missives while flaunting a very rudimentary kind of drag—thrifted dresses, globs of glitter, and kabuki smears of makeup. What saves the whole enterprise from just being a well-played bit of cultural commentary is PWR BTTM's music—they write really catchy songs and they play the shit out of them.
The eleven tracks on Ugly Cherries, PWR BTTM’s full-length debut, mostly vacillate between two-minute rave-ups about boys ("I Wanna Boi", "All the Boys") and two-minute ruminations on the lack thereof ("West Texas", "C U Around"). On "I Wanna Boi" Bruce recites a list of needs for potential partners ("I want a boy who thinks it’s sexy when my lipstick bleeds/ I want a boy who can go all night without stopping/ I want a boy knows exactly what he needs") against a stomping guitar/drum track that wouldn’t sound out of place on an early White Stripes record. He even goes as far as to share his email address just in case any qualified applicants want to get in touch. The song, like much of the rest of Ugly Cherries, is certainly funny, but it isn’t a joke.
In fact, the record is hearteningly earnest. The band’s best songs are about articulating the goofy, anything-goes joy of being young and open, quite literally, to anything. And while the basic guitar/drum setup doesn’t allow for much subtlety, Hopkins and Bruce manage to wring impressively dynamic tunes out of the most basic power riffing. "We can do our makeup in the parking lot/ We can get so famous that we both get shot," Bruce sings on "Dairy Queen" as the song morphs into a loud/quiet/LOUD jam. On "1994"—a track that, not coincidentally, sounds like it could have been recorded in 1994—Hopkins sings that "These days it pays to be so strange and I’m like nothing" before the song cracks open into a series of falsetto’d "ooohs," handclaps, and arena-size guitar shreds.
And though it all seems simple and sweet enough at first, Ugly Cherries’ real strength lies in the way it addresses the fears and foibles of the young and queer-identified, both for better and for worse. While the glee expressed on the record feels like a middle finger aimed directly at the hetero establishment, there is an endearing vulnerability at work as well—an understanding that the world is not always your friend. On "Serving Goffman" the duo celebrate the merits of being unafraid to make a fool of oneself in the name of making art and finding love, while acknowledging that it comes at a cost. "I held my breath in a suit and a tie because I didn’t know I could fight back," sings Bruce, "I wanna put the whole world in drag but I’m starting to realize it’s already like that." Elsewhere he notes that "I found out people aren’t that mean but it still feels like they're laughing at me/ When they're just saying hello." The world has certainly changed, but there is still always a price to be paid for simply being yourself.  Their songs aren’t just a prolonged wink and a nod, but rather complicated statements on what it means to be young and queer and confused and somehow othered.
"Why are you so handsome, gaymazing, and nice?" asks Hopkins of a lover on the record’s closing track. It’s the kind of question that might have been impossible to ask in a non-ironic way back in 1994 and it’s exactly the kind of thing that makes Ugly Cherries such a special listen. The record is not only catchy as all hell, but it’s also sweet and openhearted and not one bit cynical. It’s a queer record to be sure, but mostly it’s just a really fun rock record—and one would hope that at this point in time, those two things shouldn’t be mutually exclusive.


In just over a decade of work, French Montana has gone from hanger-on to something more vital and far more interesting. MC4 is a reminder of why he’s been able to survive a couple sea changes in rap.

MC4

Exactly halfway through MC4, “Lockjaw” hits, and you start to think of French Montana as a rap star. Kodak Black, the preternaturally talented teenager from South Florida, does lots of the heavy lifting, but the song is too potent to simply be the product of good A&R work, or lucky proximity. In just over a decade of work, French has gone from hanger-on to something more vital and far more interesting; on this February’s superb Wave Gods, he reimagined the world at large as an extension of his knottiest late-’00s mixtapes. It had all the stunt casting you’d expect from a rapper of French’s social stature, but it was a genre experiment. MC4 was supposed to be the capital-A album to solidify him as a mainstream force.
Instead, an August release date came and went, the record pushed back for “sample clearance issues” that were later unmasked as low pre-order numbers. All this despite a Drake-assisted single (“No Shopping”), a cameo on Fat Joe and Remy Ma’s colossal “All the Way Up,” and despite “Lockjaw” entering the stratosphere. Three months later, it surfaced on the internet with little ceremony and even less promotion.
Where are all the French Montana fans? There’s a chance that the anemic promo run kept MC4 from cutting through the election-year din, that French Montana album cuts never make it to the right years. But his debut album, 2013’s Excuse My French, flopped painfully despite an eye-popping guest lineup and a genuine hit. It also wasn’t his best showing: it had little of the woozy imagination he’d shown in the half-decade prior, and he hadn’t yet learned how to translate those interesting threads to a bigger stage.
MC4 falls short of Wave Gods, but is a leaps-and-bounds improvement over Excuse My French. That it doesn’t appear to be the commercial breakthrough he needs is not the problem, per se—the thing that hampers the record at points is the impulse to shoot for a middle and shore up the base. The Miguel-assisted “Xplicit” crosses itself up from the jump, trying to marry a sleepy sex jam to something more Gothic and getting lost on the way. “Play Yaself” is closer to French’s wheelhouse, but the vocals and his writing are more or less anonymous. And even with best intentions, “Check Come” ends up less experimental than it is malformed.
But the highs are a joy. “Brick Road” catches French in not one, but two of his best roles: somber-but-still-witty formalist on the front half, Autotune-guzzling serpent on the hook and on the back end. “2 Times” is an update on the Coke Wave DNA; “I’m Heated” is a bizarre and nearly-brilliant blend of Gotham rap styles from the Giuliani and Dinkins eras. “No Shopping” is an obvious hit that holds onto a bit of menace. “Have Mercy” enlists Jadakiss, Styles P, and Beanie Sigel for a preposterously fun posse cut that—thankfully—sounds distinctly like a French song. When MC4 succeeds, it does so like a bulk of his best work: with minor keys and big beats that let some air seep into the crevices.
MC4 does struggle to develop an atmosphere of its own; “Lockjaw” and the Kanye- and Nas-featuring “Figure It Out,” both holdovers from Wave Gods, are two of the three strongest songs. So maybe the (mostly arbitrary) “mixtape” distinction will serve the record well, allowing it to live as a loose collection of component parts. It’s not going to build the sort of fervent fan bases that his collaborators enjoy, but it should remind his core audience of why he’s been able to survive a couple of sea changes in rap.
And then there’s “Max & Chinx / Paid For.” The first half of the nine-minute, two-part closer is interspersed by phone calls from Max B and by a prayer that French shares with Max’s mother. French raps about Max’s son, about praying for mercy from God and from circuit court judges, about the 75-year-sentence that hung over Max’s head for years of incarceration. Max’s verse on the second half, “Paid For,” was one of the last he recorded before reporting to serve his sentence; Max’s engineer played it for French for the first time just last year. It’s followed by a turn from Chinx, who was murdered in 2015. French invokes Stack Bundles’s name—another fallen friend. He raps about depression, about bouts of insomnia and impromptu mosque visits. If the sorrow is tempered by anything, it’s Max’s voice:
“You're blessed, you know I'm saying? And all you gotta do when you feel like that: Look at my situation. You know I'm saying? Think of my situation, n*gga.”
If that still seems hopeless, well, think of his situation. Two months ago—between MC4’s announced release date and the time it actually surfaced—French shared the news that Max’s sentence has been reduced, and that he should be home in two to six years. A father and son will be home decades before anyone could have reasonably expected. It’s a hollow victory, but a victory nonetheless. And so French Montana keeps his head down and keeps working.


This four-disc set recorded just before Cheap Trick’s ascent to stardom captures the power-pop icons at their most manic and muscular, sounding more like hungry punks than arena-ready heartthrobs.

Live at The Whisky 1977

Cheap Trick built their legend on a live recording: 1978’s At Budokan, a single-LP distillation of two Tokyo performances that transformed the Rockford, Illinois, quartet from power-pop pranksters into classic-rock icons. Originally intended as a limited-edition promo souvenir, At Budokan sparked a shockwave of Japanese adulation that reverberated all the way back to America, where an official release eventually racked up triple-platinum sales. But the snapshot of Cheap Trick that At Budokan captured was highly selective, if not a little misleading: Its taut 10-song tracklist presents a showbiz-savvy act complete with their own readymade entrance theme and rollicking old-time rock ‘n’ roll covers to complement a bounty of crowd-pleasing pop singles. The truth is Cheap Trick was also the strangest and surliest band to sneak its way into the ‘70s arena-rock pantheon. The new four-disc box set Live at the Whisky 1977 highlights the freaky flipside of their split personality, making the case that these FM-radio heroes were more like a nihilistic punk-rock band in ’70s-heartthrob clothing.
Two years before At Budokan lodged them in the Billboard Top 10, Cheap Trick were upstart Epic Records signees with one commercially underperforming album under their belt, but enough word-of-mouth clout to land the opening slot on KISS’ 1977 summer tour. To get into road-warrior shape—and to test-drive songs from their next two studio albums, In Color and Heaven Tonight—the band booked five shows over a single June weekend at L.A.’s fabled Whisky-a-Go-Go, four of which were recorded on a mobile studio provided by the Record Plant. But the tapes were put on the back burner once At Budokan blew up.
Though some of these recordings have already turned up on a 1996 box set and a 2020 Record Store Day release, Live at the Whisky 1977 is the first set to reproduce the residency almost entirely, complete with wildly varying setlists, guitarist Rick Nielsen’s peculiar stage banter (sample: “This is a real sad song about a friend of ours who killed the shit out himself”) and repeated drunken audience requests for first-album favorite “He’s a Whore.” Short of a time machine or costly VR headset, these ferocious recordings offer the most vivid experience of what it might have been like to stand directly in front of a PA speaker while Cheap Trick laid waste to a small venue in 1977.
Cheap Trick would introduce refinements like piano and harpsichord on their next studio albums, but the band onstage at the Whisky was still running on electric-guitar malevolence and adrenaline, prioritizing bravado and intensity over proficiency. Even as they were testing out certain setlist strategies that would soon become permanent features of their playbook—like combining the swaggering “Hello There” and the swooning ”Come On Come On” into a one-two opening hit of anarchy and ecstasy—they were still figuring out how the songs actually go. On its journey to power-pop immortality, the latter tune soars skyward only to briefly nosedive with a flubbed first chorus. If the Cheap Trick heard on At Budokan was a well-oiled machine, this version of the band ran so hot, they frequently overheated the engine: Each of the Whisky shows is dotted with extended between-song pauses that are long enough to necessitate their own track designations.
But these sorts of gaffes are small prices to pay for the illicit thrill of hearing the Trick in their primordial prime, rampaging through the darkest and most deranged songs in their repertoire: the psycho-glam boot-stomper “ELO Kiddies,” the paranoid lonely-boy blues of “Ballad of TV Violence,” the perverse suicide-encouragement anthem “Auf Wiedersehen.” Recorded before the radio-friendly likes of “I Want You to Want Me” and “Surrender” made their way into the repertoire, the Whisky sets capture a band forging the missing link between the scathing satire of Sparks and the gnarly essence of the Sex Pistols. None of the band’s studio recordings truly capture the muscular menace that bassist Tom Petersson and drummer Bun E. Carlos display here. Occasionally, they even teeter on the brink of post-punk: Where the album version of “You’re All Talk” is steeped in southern-rock boogie, the frenetic versions heard here have a serrated disco edge that’s closer in spirit to ESG than ZZ Top.
At the same time, Live at the Whisky also highlights the qualities that kept Cheap Trick at a remove from their punk spiritual kin: namely, a genuine appreciation for old-school rock ‘n’ roll showmanship and craft. While Cheap Trick’s original songs depict a post-hippie generation of teens stoned on television and corrupted into degeneracy, their cover selections betray a nostalgic reverence that defied punk’s nihilist year-zero ethos. Certainly, a group eager to jam on songs by Fats Domino (future Budokan centerpiece “Ain’t That a Shame”), Dylan-via-Manfred Mann (“Please Mrs. Henry”), and Jeff Lynne’s pre-ELO psych-pop combo the Move (“Down on the Bay”) weren’t all that concerned about scoring cool points with the CBGB set.
And even in those moments when the Whisky sets threaten to fly off the rails into noisy chaos, frontman Robin Zander activates his inner McCartney like an emergency brake: amid the sludgy spasms and theatrical vocal contortions of “Daddy Should’ve Stayed in High School,” his melodious “ooohs” instantly soothe. Likewise, the sugar-coated pre-chorus hook he drops into the pugilistic “He’s a Whore” is almost enough to make the song’s contemptuous sleaze-bag protagonist seem sympathetic. More than a decade after these recordings were made, Cheap Trick’s effortless fusion of classic pop melodies and roughed-up hard rock would make them heroes to grunge titans like Nirvana and Melvins. After listening to Live at the Whisky 1977, the distance between ’60s Liverpool and ’90s Seattle has never seemed shorter.


The Brazilian DJ-producer translates the livewire energy of his viral videos into an album of impish, wildly unpredictable baile funk.

Sexta dos Crias

Rio de Janeiro-born producer DJ Ramon Sucesso has evangelized experimental music fans around the world to baile funk with frenetic viral videos in which he pounds away at MIDI pads and distorts turntable scratches into banshee wails. Each Sucesso video has a signature visual touch: When the bass hits, the camera vibrates in an uncontrollable fit, almost like you’re smack dab inside the pounding heart of a subwoofer. There is no baile funk without the raucous underground bailes that gave birth to the sound, and these gonzo clips capture the genre’s aliveness better than any conventional album could.
The 21-year-old DJ’s official catalog is pretty slim. He has produced a few more straightforward funk tracks, including on his fairly subdued collaborative EP Contenção with vocalist MC Torugo, which mixes Latin trap beats with sparse conga drums. As evidenced by the success of his videos, Successo’s real strength is not creating sounds from scratch, but manipulating existing sounds until they become new. His new 12-inch Sexta dos Crias—a dubplate mix with two 15-minute cutting and chopping frenzies on either side—highlights not just the gymnastic dexterity of Sucesso’s fingers, but the possibilities of the DJ controller as an instrument unto itself.
“Sexta dos Crias” is the slightly more restrained half, but it’s still wildly unpredictable, full of cartoonish Fruity Loops effects, jagged samples, and kick drums that chirp like a chorus of frogs. One of Successo’s trademarks is the “beat bolha,” or “bubble beat,” a squishy drum effect that sounds like he’s mashing buttons made of slime. Voices are chopped into staccato chants while he drags the tempo knob up and down on his controller, manipulating the speed of the beat and your body like a gleeful puppetmaster. Sucesso’s own trigger-happy style is influenced by Brazilian mixmasters like DJ Zullu, who bring turntablist Olympics into the era of MIDI pads and Serato controllers.
The B-side—“Distorcendo a Realidade,” which literally translates to “Distorting Reality”—is a blur of pure sensation. Successo throws you off balance, always impishly toying with the pitch or introducing a chaotic new element into the mix—wailing horns, chiptune blasts, and pounding bass—until sounds are felt more than heard. Distorted voices laced with a dubby tinge of echo chatter over one another, competing for your attention. Words are reduced to percussive syllables, as Sucesso twists guttural voices into beatboxers in his distorted orchestra. When he spins the turntable, it doesn’t sound like a scratch, but a squeal or even a scream, as tracks dissolve one to another with a forceful squeegee wipe.
But no matter how distorted the sound gets, Suceso never forgets his crucial role as a party conductor; his own voice is what keeps us grounded, with boisterous shout-outs and amped-up crowdwork. Sexta dos Crias emphasizes baile funk as a living and energetic music; much like the hip-hop pioneers who reverse engineered their parents’ turntables, or Jamaican dub pirates constructing ziggurats out of speakers, the defiantly experimental new wave of baile funk artists like Ramon Suceso expand the possibilities of the DJ controller, transforming a musical playback device into a generative instrument all its own.


Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward return with an album of covers. Unsurprisingly, they are faithful to the source material and they keep the focus squarely on love songs, tucking a wide range of romantic ups and downs into this starry-eyed and glamorous little record.

Classics

She & Him might need a time machine. After three albums and a Christmas record, the duo’s pretty, uncomplicated pop songs keep harkening back to decades they were too young to experience first-hand; a bit of 1960s Loretta Lynn country here, a bit of '70s Carpenters’ sunny pop there. So it was hardly surprising when M. Ward and Zooey Deschanel announced that their next release would be Classics, a cover album of 13 of their favorite old-school songs.
So, what makes a classic song? For She & Him, classic songs find their roots in country, soul, and jazz orthodoxy, and they’re culled from the eras in which these genres were arguably the most golden—the '30s, the '50s, the '70s. Clearly, a classic song is a love song. From Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s flirtatious duet "Would You Like to Take a Walk?" to Johnny Mathis’ sadly hopeful "It's Not for Me to Say", She & Him tuck a wide range of romantic ups and downs into this starry-eyed and glamorous little record.
She & Him aren’t trying to surprise anyone with these covers; there’s no off-the wall instrumental experimentation, no dramatic shift in lyrics. Instead, Classics is charming and sleepy in a '60s samba sort of way, filled with whispering percussion, light electric guitar solos, and string arrangements worthy of the silver screen. "This Girl’s in Love With You", a slight twist on Herb Alpert’s "This Guy’s in Love With You", is highly reminiscent of the original, with a retro brass and woodwind arrangement. It would make delightful title music if Deschanel ever wants to star in a version of "New Girl" set in the mid-'70s.
Even when She & Him push their sonic boundaries a little, the effect is still subtle and sophisticated. On "Teach Me Tonight", they manage to move the 1954 classic further into the past, painting the soulful tune with a sped-up '30s flare, layering back-up "oohs" and "aahs" under Deschanel’s lead vocals into a Boswell Sisters-worthy harmony. They take "Unchained Melody" to an absolutely haunting place, featuring just Deschanel and Ward’s guitar, her words echoed by a ghostly ensemble choir.
A cinematic quality reverberates throughout Classics, and songs like "She", "Unchained Melody", and "We’ll Meet Again" were featured in or made for series or films. The songs themselves play like romantic mini-dramas, with pleas for lovers to stay and odes to loneliness. That said, some narratives call for a singer with more force. While Maxine Brown and Aretha Franklin belt the chorus of "Oh No, Not My Baby" in a gesture of soulful refusal, Deschanel opts for tender restraint, so that the song’s metaphoric head-shaking suddenly becomes a limply apathetic shrug. And Dusty Springfield’s jangling "Stay Awhile" is muted considerably in She & Him’s rendition, as Deschanel’s voice takes a somber turn.
Even though they're working with dated lyricism by 2014’s standards, saccharine lines like "When you’re strolling through the wherezis, you need a whozis to lean upon" don’t sound contrived or silly in She & Him's hands. "Funny, each time I fall in love," Deschanel sings on Bing Crosby’s hit, "It’s always you." If Classics proves anything, it’s that these songs stick around for a reason.


The Japanese experimental musician’s score for the lauded new film by Ryusuke Hamaguchi possesses a cool remove, mirroring the film’s glacial profundity with organic nuance and contemplative improvisation.

Eiko Ishibashi: Drive My Car - Original Soundtrack

Drive My Car - Original Soundtrack

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car is a staggering exploration of grief, betrayal, and acceptance. The loose adaptation of a Haruki Murakami short-story follows Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a stage actor and director, as he mourns the deaths of his young daughter and his screenwriter wife, Oto (Reika Kirishima). Two years after Oto’s death, Yusuke relocates to Hiroshima where he will direct a production of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.” Upon arrival, he is assigned a quiet female driver named Misaki (Toko Miura). Throughout many long drives in Yusuke’s vintage Red Saab, the two gradually open up about their individual sorrow.
Now nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best International Film, Drive My Car is a profound masterpiece made all the more entrancing by its score, written by Eiko Ishibashi. The Japanese multi-instrumentalist and composer is best known for her experimental solo work, which ranges from jazz fusion to the imaginative dream pop heard on a recent tribute to a Law & Order character. Like the film’s protagonist, Ishibashi’s score possesses a cool remove and, alongside an ensemble that includes her frequent collaborator Jim O’Rourke, Ishibashi creates a soundtrack that is as moving as the film itself.
In the film, Yusuke’s theatrical method requires his cast to internalize the play’s text by running through the script without emotion before they are allowed to begin acting. (Yusuke rehearses his own lines by driving in his car and listening to cassettes of Oto reciting the other characters’ dialogue.) This emphasis on close listening and organic nuance is reflected in Ishibashi’s score, which is structured around variations of two themes, “Drive My Car” and “We’ll Live Through the Long, Long Days, and Through the Long Nights.” The eponymous core theme is set in motion by an opening burst of percussion and tumbling keys imbued with a certain thoughtfulness. This soon evolves into an upbeat and idyllic melody featuring yearning strings and the synthetic squawk of a melodion. However, this whimsical track is not the first piece of music heard by the audience. That would be “We’ll Live Through the Long, Long Days… (Oto),” a ghostly ambient track that abandons the score’s melodicism in favor of stillness, the falling of rain, and the muffled whooshing of passing cars.
In the same way that Yusuke suggests that a good driver allows their passenger to relax, Ishibashi’s score, even removed from the context of the film, allows the listener to sit back and enjoy the ride. Some of Ishibashi’s contributions suggest the transportive effect of driving in a concrete way. “Drive My Car (Cassette)” opens with a tape being inserted in a deck and the sounds of ambient traffic before it drifts into a pensive piano reverie. Meanwhile, Yusuke’s theme, “Drive My Car (Kafuku),” opens with the squeak of a seat being lowered before spiraling into rumination. “Drive My Car (Misaki)” also begins with an automobile sound as the titular character opens the Saab’s creaky front door and turns on the Saab’s ignition. This interpretation of the theme incorporates tumbling piano notes, brushed drums, and the steady thump of an electric bass; that such a reserved character is bestowed a warm theme underlines the idea that her wall of ice will someday melt, given the correct conditions.
Drive My Car’s second theme, “We’ll Live Through the Long, Long Days, and Through the Long Nights,” is more contemplative than its companion. There is an initial melancholy inflicted by strings so sorrowful that each note wavers like a dying breath. The “... (Saab 900)” version of the theme is the closest the score gets to a car crash: Percussionist Tatsuhisa Yamamoto’s fast and furious playing is layered atop the original theme’s piano melody with interjections of droning electric guitar and crashing cymbals. The arrangement is dusted, again, by vehicular ambience: the beep of a locked car, the slam of a door, and the click of a seatbelt. If the score’s other tracks capture a character or existential statement, “... (Saab 900)” is the titular car’s inner monologue as it drifts, and at one point, narrowly avoids getting side-swiped. “…(And When Our Last Hour Comes We’ll Go Quietly),” whose title is pulled from a soliloquy that arrives at the end of “Uncle Vanya,” features guitar work from O’Rourke that changes lanes from downcast meditation to hypnotic climax smoothly, as if there’s not a single bump in the road. And in its last moments, after a few final piano notes, Ishibashi’s glorious Drive My Car score goes quiet.


On his new solo mixtape, the Flatbush rapper spits with the kind of ease and flash that starts block parties.

Sleepy For President

Sleepy Hallow and Sheff G, Brooklyn’s best rap duo, may have both grown up in Flatbush, may be known to wear matching Puma sweatsuits, and may have both dropped Great John-produced 2019 solo mixtapes that feel like an extension of each other—but they aren’t the same rapper. Sheff G, with his thunderous voice that sounds like a bowling ball hitting the ground, is the technician. On his May mixtape, One and Only, there’s not a pocket he can’t catch or a verse he doesn’t rap with life-or-death intensity. Sleepy Hallow is not as fine-tuned, on his new solo mixtape, Sleepy for President, whether he’s reflecting on his trauma and paranoia or puffing out his chest, he spits with the kind ease and flash that starts block parties.
Listen to Sleepy Hallow’s early 2020 single “Deep End Freestyle,” and it’s straightforward: a single verse, no hook, the beat a simple looped vocal sample. But the song, clocking in at under two minutes, is perfect for endless replays, and has become the viral soundtrack for TikTok dance videos, a treasure chest of New York quotables (“My body different”) and the biggest Brooklyn drill song not made by Pop Smoke. Sleepy Hallow shines when he keeps it minimal like this.
The Brooklyn-raised twenty something has a refreshing style. Like Polo G—though not nearly as melancholy or polished—he blends the rushed cadence of traditional drill rapping with a rugged singing voice. On the gloomy “Anxiety Freestyle” he delivers his bars with an appealing looseness that makes pain sound like a good time: “Pop a perc now I’m back to life.” On “All In,” he tackles a flip of Weldon Irvine’s “Morning Sunrise” that has been done better before—Just Blaze’s iconic “Dear Summer” beat comes to mind—but his vocals are sharp and infectious. On the introspective “Bad Luck,” Sleepy smoothly delivers evergreen reflections about living in fear of death, “Demons at my door say ‘they just wanna come inside’/Shots fired, opps shot, another opp died/Cops shot another black guy”—lyrics that resonate harder than usual as the current wave of protests against police brutality continue.
But Sleepy’s sound is so bare that one misstep derails the entire track. Typically it’s because of New Jersey producer Great John, whose acoustic guitar-sampling beats—“6 AM in NY” and “Bankrolls”—lack the country soul of similar production behind Deep South singing rappers like Rod Wave and Rylo Rodriguez. Sleepy’s forced duets with Fivio Foreign and Jay Critch, pale in comparison to the tape’s three collaborations with Sheff G. The duo complement each other perfectly: their seamless back-and-forth “Water” and “Molly” should be spilling out of Flatbush car windows in no time. Then, there’s “Don’t Panic,” which follows in the fiery and relentless footsteps of the four previous songs in their “Panic” series—each Brooklyn drill essentials in their own right. Right now it’s clear that what needs to happen is the inevitable Sleepy Hallow and Sheff G joint mixtape. But until then, *Sleepy f
or President* will keep their celebration going just fine.


Stevie Wonder capped off his classic era with the ecstatic 1980 album Hotter Than July, a tour of summer sounds that encompasses all the meanings of heat.

Hotter Than July

I find that summer—particularly summer vacation—is what’s truly wasted on the young. Even in the summers where I worked 20 or 30 hours a week at some fast-food spot or convenience store, I still took the relative freedom of the days for granted. I still got to wake up late, stay out later, fuck around for most of my waking hours, and do it all again. Stripped of what I now appreciate as that exhilarating freedom, summer on the other side of adulthood can leave much to be desired. I don’t so much mind the increase in responsibilities, or the earlier alarm, or the more-constant temptation of sleep. But, like so much nostalgic longing, there’s a feeling that I can’t as easily access. Yet I know that even as you read this, you know that feeling, or something like it, even if our definitions of the feeling aren’t the same. It can be unearthed, sometimes, in a scene: a sunset, the taste of a drink, a waning bonfire, and yes, a song. Something to interrupt what otherwise might as well be a long series of hot days that keep getting hotter by the year.
I like the word heat far more than I like the feeling of it. I like the word because I’m from a place where it holds multiple definitions, more than any four letters should. So many that it swells at the seams. In 1980, Stevie Wonder was, perhaps, feeling a few of those definitions hovering over his career, most notably the definition of heat as a type of immovable pressure. What Stevie Wonder accomplished between 1972 and 1977 is astonishing. Baffling to the point of near-impossibility if there weren’t the touchable material to inform a listener that they did not dream it. And with impossible triumph comes impossible expectations. I won’t dwell on 1979’s sprawling Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants here but to say that it is an album that, in quality, nearly matches its overwhelming ambition. But needless to say, after one of the greatest runs of albums there has ever been, Secret Life of Plants fell relatively flat. Motown didn’t promote the record with the same ferocity as Wonder’s previous albums. Secret Life of Plants entered at No. 4 on the album charts, in part due to Wonder’s immense hold on the commercial landscape at the time, but only one of its singles made a mark, and reviews were mixed.
What can’t be undersold about Secret Life of Plants, amid its somewhat forgotten history, is that it was one of the first albums to be digitally recorded, which opened up a new window for Stevie Wonder, always the tinkerer, always seeking the newest and greatest tools to add to his expansive toolbox. Wonder spent 1979 and early 1980 holed up in the studio, toying with new digital recording equipment from Sony, locked in with engineers helping him navigate the technology to best suit his needs. He had purchased an old Hollywood radio studio—the C.P. MacGregor Studio—which was so old that it predated home television, so old it even predated magnetic tape. It had been abandoned for years, but Wonder had an ear for the acoustics of the place, and a feel for its history. Because there was no real recording infrastructure, Wonder had to also purchase a remote recording truck, and have cables run from the truck to the inside of the building. It was, once again, Wonder attempting to find the perfect intersection point between innovation and ambition. Reinventing himself by dragging the past into the future, at any cost.
To speak of heat in the most literal sense, it must be said that it was, indeed, hot in the summer of 1980, in the months right before Stevie Wonder released Hotter Than July, the album that he’d been working on as a career re-shaping step into the new decade. Not hot in the sense of overly romantic summer nostalgia: The 1980 Heat Wave had its most vicious impacts in the Midwest and through the Great Plains. The heatwave began in June and didn’t relent in many areas until September. It was reported to have claimed at least 1,700 lives. There were droughts and agricultural damage. In Kansas City, temperatures were over 100 degrees for 17 days straight. In early August, there was a brief reprieve, only due to a hurricane.
The heatwave made its exit in mid-September, just a week or so before Hotter Than July made its entry. The album’s title—which comes from the opening lyric of the first single, “Master Blaster (Jammin’)”—aligned with the month that the heatwave reached its peak. On the cover of the album, Stevie Wonder is made to look as if he’s survived the heat (that most literal definition, again) that others didn’t. His mouth is half-open somewhere between awe, exhaustion, and pleasure. There is a glint on the edge of his red-rimmed sunglasses which might suggest that he’s turned towards the sun—a suggestion that feels more on-point when one clocks the beads of sweat cascading down his face, towards his neck and bare shoulders. It is an image that gives off a humidity, and the relief that comes with escaping it, even briefly.
There are many ways for a song, or an album, to feel like summer, and Hotter Than July encompasses a small series of examples. Its (highly underappreciated) opening track, “Did I Hear You Say You Love Me,” begins with a slow buildup of voice, a shout that originates from a far-off elsewhere before fighting its way to the front of the sonic line, a slow and steady “…ahhhhHHHHHHHHHHHOUUUUU” and before the music hits, the feeling hits. This is what I mean: There is a buildup and then a release. Confronted with the pleasure and excitement of whatever newfound freedoms (small or large) that summer might offer you, what is there to do but shout something loud and indecipherable to everyone but you. The shout kicks open the door for a slow-trickling groove of guitar and bass interplay and then, through the gaps, come the bursts of horns, steady as sunlight through a cracked curtain of sound. “As If You Read My Mind” is lush, danceable pop, so fluorescent that it might bury the lyrics if not for its infectious chorus that demands to be sung breathlessly, mid-movement. “Do Like You” is a showcase of Wonder’s greatest vocal ability, to bend a single word until it feels like it is unraveling into several words, and to pursue lyrical repetition not for the sake of repetition, but to reach for something greater, more urgent with each rotation of language, so that by the end of the song, when he is fully committed to the circular presentation of the words “show me how to do like you,” there are pauses and ad-libs where you think he might be done before he jumps right back in. The lyrics become first an earnest question, and then one dripping with envy or ferocity, before they circle back to a type of awe.
In these moments, the greatness of Hotter Than July is in how relentlessly Stevie Wonder reaches for the ecstatic—a shift after releasing a high-concept encyclopedia of an album right before this one. At times, Hotter Than July feels like running into a sweltering day; at times it feels like drinking a glass of something cold after coming inside while still smelling like outside; and at times it feels like the slowness that falls over a summer day as it winds down.
For that latter feeling, there is “Master Blaster (Jammin’),” which served as the album’s first single. During Wonder’s creative exploration in the ’70s, he had become friends with Bob Marley, playing live shows with him throughout the latter half of the decade. Reggae had begun to make its way into his sound bank. “Master Blaster” is a slow-swaying ode to Marley, even shouting out the legend in the lyrics. It also uses Marley’s 1977 song “Jamming” as a musical template, taking the sparse guitar and percussion that ran through the original’s backbone and aligning it with Wonder’s expanded imagination, adding layers and pace, but not giving up the song’s feeling of ease. “Master Blaster” signaled a return to Wonder’s status as a hitmaker, staying atop the Billboard R&B charts for seven weeks, and peaking at No. 5 on the pop singles chart.
Hotter Than July is also an album that holds two distinct movements within it. Its final two songs, “Lately” and “Happy Birthday,” work almost as an encore; not entirely separate from the album’s overarching thematic and sonic concerns, but slightly wandering into different territories of emotional purpose and mission, and also robust enough to feel like they are carrying their own weight. The former is a classic Wonder ballad, the artist and piano and a palpable sense of longing (forgettable to me, but only because of Wonder’s singular ability to pull this type of song off in various ways throughout his career).
And then, there is “Happy Birthday.” If you have the record of Hotter Than July, and you unfold all of the gates of the album, that, too, presents an exercise in duality. Directly opposite the cover of Wonder appearing breathless and sweating out the ecstatic pleasures of the sun, there is an image of a piano on fire, in the same color landscape as the cover itself. The two panels on the bottom half are in black and white.
On one side, there is a large portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. against a black background. Above the photo, the date of King’s birth and the date of his death are printed in white lettering. On the opposite side of the sleeve, there are five photos: across the top, a photo of a city divided by a six-lane highway, both sides of that highway encased in smoke, touched by the aftermath of a riot. Across the bottom, a photo of white police officers with white helmets and weapons at the ready, appearing to advance on Black protesters standing in nonviolent defiance. In a photo to the left, there is a Black boy being pulled by the limbs. Two police officers on each arm, and one on his leg. In a photo to the right, a Black man is in a pool of his own blood outside of a store. Another Black man is crouched against the wall, looking away in agony. In the foreground, a police officer in a white helmet stands with a hand on his hip.
The photo in the center is of Martin Luther King Jr., leading a march. The link between the center photo and the surrounding photos is vital, particularly within the American imagination that has limited King to palatable quotes and vague concepts around unity. This photo, surrounded by the other photos, gives context to the engine that pushed King towards his work, and gives context to a society that wanted him gone then, and would still want him gone now. While I have gratitude for the words of King, I have little interest in a framing of him that relies solely on those words—which have, by now, been manipulated and defanged in too many ways, by too many bad-faith actors and institutions. Instead, I desire this kind of presentation: one that shows him in solidarity with other Black people, at the center of America’s chorus of chaos, and Black people’s fight to both survive within it, and tear it apart.
Accompanying this layout is a small message from Wonder, urging the public to join him in pushing for the national recognition of King’s birthday. To those efforts, the song “Happy Birthday” arrives as the landing point for Hotter Than July. In a run of tunes already overflowing with exuberance, it is the album’s longest and most exuberant track. To first note that I don’t necessarily believe that “corny” is a pejorative, one great miracle of “Happy Birthday” is that it survives the somewhat corny pleading of its verses due to the everlasting and constantly refreshing pleasure of the chorus. The verses are, understandably, individualized in a way that makes clear the song’s mission statement. In the verses, there is a very specific you that is being spoken of, but when the chorus is extracted, the you becomes anyone in a room surrounded by people who love them, people in the mood for celebrating.
To exit here as we entered—considering the many modes and energies that encompass the feeling of a “youthful” summer, fleeting for some of us wandering the endless caverns of adulthood. I often return to a story from the summer of 2020. What stands out most in my memory about the uprisings in and around my city is how exhausted people were by the end of each day. With the exhaustion came some sense of gratitude for not having been swept away in a cop car, or having survived the gas sprayed into crowds, or whatever other violence the police decided to inflict on those gathered in the streets. The balm for this exhaustion, often, was someone dragging a speaker into the middle of a road at night, well after the cops decided they were done for the day, when the streets belonged to whoever still had it in them to celebrate getting through the hot, chaotic, rage-filled hours.
These were my favorite times, largely for how they unlocked that elusive myth of youthful freedom—nowhere to be, nothing to do except take advantage of space and a clock that felt slowed down. Someone would play songs, and Black folks would dance, and laugh, shout lyrics, and fall into each other. One day in August, someone was celebrating a birthday, which I only remember because when it came time to sing “Happy Birthday,” no one asked which version would be sung. Not many Black folks I have been around ever ask such a foolish question. The answer is already known. From out of the speakers came Stevie Wonder’s “Happy Birthday” and when the chorus hit, the singing was loud enough to echo several blocks in every direction, carried on the backs of clapping hands, as it often is.
This moment, on the streets after protest, was merely one of the latest in a wide range of moments defined and earmarked by Stevie Wonder’s “Happy Birthday,” and—more broadly—by Hotter Than July. The reality is that, had Stevie Wonder never made another album after Secret Life of Plants, what he’d already given the world would have been generous enough. A bounty to last several lifetimes. It is narrow and erroneous to consider Hotter Than July as only a “comeback” album, or a response to skeptical critics. It doesn’t come across, to me, as an album obsessed with proving worth, or even all that obsessed with showcasing the individual talents of the artist. For all that can be said of Hotter Than July’s legacy, what stands out the most is that it is an album of seemingly endless abundance. An album that asks not only “How do you want to feel?” but also, “How do you want to survive?” and then turns us towards the expansive forest of ever-shifting answers.


The Parisian pop experimentalist Camille sounds awed by language as a brilliant, living thing on her latest album. Inspired by the psychedelia of motherhood, she doubles down on her sharp playfulness.

OUÏ

Camille Dalmais doesn’t so much wear her intelligence lightly as fashion it into excellent costumes. The 39-year-old Parisian graduated from the prestigious university that produced a majority of the last eight French presidents, and at least the latter four of her five albums have been both wildly experimental and genuinely entertaining. She’s played around with vocal drones and beatboxing, with a cappella singing and feral shrieks; she once challenged Mariah to a falsetto duel. On 2011’s Ilo Veyou, she invited a scammer to a banquet where his ex-lovers would dine on his “tiny, erect dart” in a “single and languorous mouthful.” (The invitation sounds more appealing in the original French.) If Dalmais has a recurring theme amid all this mischief, it’s the body. Ilo Veyou and now OUÏ were both inspired by her experiences of birth and motherhood—psychedelic, transformative states that she explores by doubling down on her sharp playfulness rather than submitting to anything as boring as maturity.
Admittedly, Ilo Veyou was fustier than her previous records, drawing on traditional medieval arrangements that may have stalled some listeners at the gate. But OUÏ—implying both yes (oui) and hearing (l’ouïe)—is more inviting, both outlandish and intimate. As with 2005’s brilliant Le Fil, which was threaded by a low vocal tone, a sub-bass heartbeat runs through every song, interwoven with deep Moog accents and minimalist drumming. Dalmais plays both lead singer and loopy backing choir, her panoply of voices leaping like water jets in some rococo fountain. Initially she intended to make a political album about the recent tragedies that have struck France, but instead, she decided to pursue something more rooted in openness and fluidity of sound and spirit. Even if you can’t understand a word of the lyrics, the idea resonates in her voice and its slippery language, which makes puns and double entendres of French’s elegant homonyms. Most importantly, the underlying concept rarely strangles the pop potential of OUÏ’s 11 songs.
There’s plenty of pure pleasure hits for non-Francophones. “Twix” pits Dalmais’ plosive skittishness against a rhythm of jumpy, sampled voices. The nervous energy mounts and explodes in a tirade of tortured vocal splatter and crude bass, recalling the manic highs of Le Fil’s “Ta Douleur.” Not that aggressive outbursts always serve Dalmais well. “Les Loups” (“The Wolves”) turns an old folk rhythm into a discordant clatter, hooked around a voice that appears to be imitating a barking didgeridoo. “Lasso” is more dynamic and better for it, and could be Dalmais’ own contribution to the folk canon with its syncopated claps, sweeping gait, and concerned voices singing in the round.
It’s a shame there’s no such thing as a subtitled listening experience because OUÏ is rich with brilliant, funny ideas about conception, nurture, and identity. Lead single “Fontaine de Lait” puns on how Dalmais’ child-bearing body transformed sperm into milk, filled with frothy, comic imagery. “And now I make/A fountain of him,” Dalmais sings (in French), “And here I am/A fountain of milk.” A flirty, wobbling woodwind sound and a soft, sandy beat map the path of these intricate biological processes, a choir of backing vocals cooing in awe. “Piscine” is just as playful and surreal, Dalmais impersonating a lonely swimming pool that longs to break free and reconnect with the ocean. The beat is surreptitious and sneaky, as if plotting its escape, and a choir calls out to the water. “Aller à la mer,” she sings—“I want to go to the sea”—or is it “aller à la mère,” mapping her path to motherhood? The potential meanings are just as fun as the sound.
Dalmais’ love of linguistic elasticity finds a bolder purpose in “Je Ne Mâche Pas Mes Mots” (“I Don’t Chew My Words”). She pairs two traditional French styles, yearning chanson and shuffling rap, bringing a sense of urgency to goofy lyrics about how good words taste in her mouth—like apple jelly, honey, artichoke, and strawberry coulis. By marrying tradition and first-generation innovation, and turning a notoriously rigid language upside down, she makes a subtle statement about free speech, and kicks back at prescribed definitions of French identity. OUÏ ends with “Langue,” and Dalmais chanting a word that could mean language or tongue, finding sing-songy sweetness in the slight tweaks of pronunciation. She sounds self-possessed, as awed by language as a brilliant, living thing as by her body’s transformative potential.


A frequent collaborator of ambient musicians like Laraaji and his brother Brian Eno, the British composer presents a collection of wistful solo piano pieces shaded by strings.

The Turning Year

Roger Eno creates pastoral landscapes in sound, letting each simple melody unfold with patience. In a career stretching back decades, the British composer has collaborated with a number of prominent ambient artists, including his older brother Brian Eno and new-age multi-instrumentalist Laraaji. On The Turning Year, he steps out solo, showcasing a keen sense for delicate, unornamented melodies that serve as vehicles for reflection.
The Turning Year features compositions both new and old, each illuminating Eno’s knack for creating sweeping palettes. Every piece follows a similar pattern: Lush strings played by Score Berlin swirl around simple, melancholic piano melodies reminiscent of one of Eno’s favorite composers, Erik Satie. It’s cinematic music, driven by sprawling harmonies and fluid motion. Rather than dreaming of the future, these nostalgic pieces feel as if they’re looking back at the past, taking in a bird’s eye view of the change that occurs throughout life.
Much of The Turning Year builds from short, looping piano phrases that become enveloped by warm strings. Opener “A Place We Once Walked” is emblematic of this style: It begins with a pensive melody that slowly tumbles and repeats, each time with a little more emphasis than the last. Gradually, the piano melds with vivid strings that add richness and glow to its stark, introverted melodies. Eno utilizes a similar tactic throughout, but it works best on the radiant "The Turning Year," where the bright keyboard melody and deep, full-bodied strings combine in a particularly bold, resonant way.
But the instruments come unglued at other points, leading to a sense of restraint, even hesitancy. In these moments of disconnection, Eno’s overarching structure falters. “Something Made Out of Nothing” grows from a slow piano melody full of pauses and echoes, while strings appear like a wispy cloud around it, soft but far too thin. It feels as if none of the performers are sure what comes next. This uneasiness comes through elsewhere, too, like “On the Horizon,” which introduces a clarinet in stilted conversation with the piano. In its uncertainty, the piece lacks the slowed-down, reflective feeling that makes Eno’s music compelling.
In the moments where each element clicks together, though, Eno succeeds at grasping the way that music can mimic memory’s fluidity. As though attempting to color in recollections that have grown fuzzy, his nostalgic compositions and suspended motion often emulate the feeling of trying to recall memories that have lost their shape. His drifting waves of sound gloss over details, blurring the mechanics of his melodies and leaving us only with their wistful spirit.


In 2009, a dance imprint located in Uruguay began issuing a string of mysterious, uncredited singles, each treading the ground between downtempo and nu-disco. Most were later revealed to be the work of labelhead Mark Barrott, who recently released the third installment of his Sketches From An Island series and the two-song "Bush Society" single.

Mark Barrott: Sketches From An Island 3 / Bush Society

In 2009, a new dance imprint located in Uruguay and called International Feel began issuing a string of mysterious, uncredited singles. Soon followed a parade of artists with names like Rocha, Efeel, the Sonic Aesthetic, Bepu N’Gali, Parada 88, Boys From Patagonia, and Young Gentlemen’s Adventure Society, each treading the squishy ground between downtempo and nu-disco, favoring the sorts of sounds that Europeans on holiday would recognize as "Balearic." A few years on, the imprint up and relocated to the island of Ibiza and soon after, most of these works were revealed to be the work of labelhead Mark Barrott, who went with his own name for last year’s breezy Sketches From An Island, which compiled two earlier EPs.
Recently, Barrott announced the release of the third installment of his Sketches From An Island series via the Drip subscription service, explaining the digital fan club thus: "For me, my ‘moments of joy’ come from making music in a studio and then attempting to reach out with that music and communicate with like minded souls to form a connection." The four-song EP, which is now getting a physical release via International Feel, continues along the same trajectory as the previous album, to the point where the library funk of opener "Right 4 Me" brings to mind SFAI’s opener "Baby Come Home", right down to the melody being conveyed via a flute plug-in. Charming as the ditty is, it feels like a retread.
Titlewise, "The Mysterious Island of Dr. Nimm" scans as a sequel to the prior album track "Dr Nimm's Garden of Intrigue & Delight". But while the latter is taken at a leisurely pace, this EP track features darker bass and layers of clattering percussion, bamboo flutes, chimes, and bird calls, reminiscent of jungle foliage. The other two tracks favor the kind of polyrhythmic pulses that bring to mind Music for 18 Musicians as rendered at a luau, gentle as a sea breeze, or on closer "Der Stern, Der Nie Vergeht", Cluster had they lived in Ibiza rather than in rural Germany. While the EP is pleasant enough, it doesn’t stake out much in the way of new terrain.
If anything, it’s a slight step back after Barrott released a two-track "Bush Society" single earlier this spring. Although most of its components are light and buoyant, "Saviours or Savages?" carefully builds tension, its percolating rhythms never quite releasing. The 10-minute "Bush Society" is the most ambitious and successful of Barrott’s tracks to date. Like many of his songs, it begins with ambient bird calls and a distant thunderstorm, then adds rattles and hand percussion. It suggests the brightness of a Brazilian track (think Airto) but the bass synth growls that lurk beneath the percussion give it a sinister edge. Between a vocal sample evocative of the Mbuti Pygmy chants from the Ituri Rainforest and the menacing acid underpinnings, "Bush Society" sounds light and dark at once. Its 10 minutes bring to mind island life itself, in that time feels both suspended and passing far too fast.


Dave Longstreth is on a madcap quest for personal and political salvation on his latest album, reviving a more hopeful, chipper kind of songwriting of his past.

Lamp Lit Prose

Last year, the least visceral artist in indie rock slung his guts on the table. Dirty Projectors cataloged the shrapnel of Dave Longstreth’s breakup, enshrining his memories in indie-rock, hip-hop, and whatever other styles took root. What came out was a record so calculating and emotionally ugly that Longstreth found it impossible to tour behind. Instead, he tinkered with a follow-up, Lamp Lit Prose, which backgrounds first-person narratives and revives a more hopeful, chipper kind of songwriting.
Whether it’s a convincing renaissance isn’t quite the right question, because, as ever, Longstreth is firing in every direction at once. Political specters loom—“The sky has darkened/Earth turned to hell,” the album begins—and in their shadow, the redeeming possibilities of music and love overlap until the chorus of tragedy, defiance, and relief resolves into triumph. On opener “Right Now,” flanked by cavalry brass, Longstreth wails, “There was silence in my heart/But now I’m striking up the band!” It’s a dual statement of purpose, reintroducing live instruments to his core setup and, more broadly, rebuilding the ruins of his collapsed group, love life, and nation.
It’s a bold project, this madcap quest for personal and political salvation. But when Longstreth throws caution to the wind, Lamp Lit Prose is wonderful. “Ask now, I’m in love for the first time ever,” he chirps on “I Found It in U,” a lyric just naive enough to transmit the dumb sparkle of lust. After a few verses hopping between radio-rock guitars and assault-course percussion, he alights upon another beautiful lyric: “All the painful dreams I failed to extinguish/Were the footlights down dark aisles I’ve taken/Now they’ve led me to you.”
How remarkable, then, that such an adroit student of romance could also have written “Break-Thru,” a lead single that heaps superlatives on a “deadpan, unimpressed” character who Longstreth apparently covets for her inscrutability alone. She’s a “breakthrough,” an “epiphany,” and “no one can lock her down,” he sermonizes, landing somewhere between the language of love and a tech symposium. Paired with nods to Archimedes and Julian Casablancas, this is perhaps Longstreth’s idea of a grand narrative, splicing old and new culture to suggest that love, in its first flush, feels epochal—historic as much as personal. But it’s hard to sympathize with a narrator who spends so much time concocting romantic riddles and so little articulating the selfless magic of devotion.
To his credit, there are no such problems elsewhere. While deeply impressionistic, Lamp Lit Prose inverts its predecessor’s emotional black hole, largely thanks to its revival of airy Bitte Orca-style compositions and a pick’n’mix guest list. Perfect harmonies congregate in dark corners: Empress Of lends primal headbanger “Zombie Conqueror” a supernatural gravity; Syd calmly anchors “Right Now”’s wildfire optimism; an imploring Haim leaven “That’s a Lifestyle”—a catchy lament for the crumbling empire—and Robin Pecknold and Rostam gather around for some open-heart balladry on “You’re the One.” “We wholly depend on our hope and love, received and sent,” Longstreth sings, sincerely, on “I Feel Energy,” and the philosophy bears out in the record’s spirit of collaboration.
For all its grandiose anxiety, the most rewarding moments here boil down to a simple reprieve: love and art can empower the meek to stare down the apocalypse. “Soon the Earth may dissolve like snow/We’ll meet again in the air, all bound to glow,” Longstreth sings under a pirouetting 12-string riff on “Right Now,” a blue-sky vision of nuclear armageddon. The recently heartbroken have a tendency to overstate the transformative power of love, not least in times of crisis. But it’s infectious to hear Longstreth on this strange honeymoon, persevering until lust or terror wins out.


After a 2021 debut that used deconstructed club music as an autobiographical frame, the London-based producer’s rhythmically focused new EP feels less revealing—but just as disorienting.

Lip Flip EP

aya’s music is a dizzying tunnel system of itchy scratches, whispered desires, fried zaps, and unsettling sounds so tactile they seem to almost puncture your eardrum. At times, the London-based experimental producer’s debut, im hole, resembled gothic ASMR, or an open-heart dissection of a DAW, using tiny scalpels to pull apart, pinch, and rearrange sound layers. aya’s first solo release in over two years, Lip Flip, is a fundraiser for her facial feminization surgery, but it’s also a celebration. Where aya’s early tunes reimagined future-pop like SOPHIE as music for dissociation rather than dancing, this EP sounds built for a disorienting club night.
There’s a screwy buoyancy to these songs that makes Lip Flip feel like a fusion of im hole and her more adrenalized 2023 collab EP with BFTT, the co-founder of their label YCO. aya’s ingredients often feel so characterful and carefully chosen as to seem anthropomorphic: bright dings that seem to smile, metallic synths winking like they’re playing patty cake. On “Essente!,” Ugandan rapper Ecko Bazz somersaults between flows and languages, his fierce energy transforming aya’s spasming beat into a neon playground. The title track, which features her alter ego LOFT, ratchets up tension with the tight pulse of a Two Shell song and then explodes into a barrage of abrasive yet groovy low end primed to jolt dancers into off-kilter movement.
The biggest change on this EP is the near-absence of aya’s voice, which acted as a kind of phantom tour guide through im hole’s haunted manor house of deconstructed club. Lacking her characteristically surreal imagery and slurred rhymes, these tracks feel slightly more anonymous, as though any oddball with a knack for madcap sound structures could’ve patched them together. There’s also less of the negative space that made the hypnotically menacingsongs built around her creaky vocals and industrial bleeps sound like spoken-word poetry for a scary game score. Without any sort of narrative to cohere around, Lip Flip sometimes hits like a faceless flood of wonky sound shards—chipmunk gurgles and kawaii-ified chants on “Leftenant Keith,” clipped breaths and thudding drums on the title cut.
But even with its frenetically pristine sheen, the music is still cheekily weird, the rhythm always shifting. Like the ’80s British band it’s named after, “Dexxy Is a Midnight Runner” is a tribute to an ADHD medication: lisdexamfetamine (commonly known as Vyvanse, apparently a favorite on the club circuit in Australia, where hard drugs are difficult to obtain). But its lattices of paranoid plinks and progressively eerier cut-up vocals are practically the inverse of Dexys’ passion pop. The final section’s fusillade of rubbery percussion makes me picture a single tiny pill sprinting at cartoonish speed like Crazy Frog. Whether the music is demented or danceable, aya’s killer ear for tone and texture makes every fragment sound hyperreal.


Audion is the minimal-techno guise of Matthew Dear, and often a vent for his most antic impulses. Alpha jettisons the wilder stuff for a sleek, toned-down, crisper affair.

Alpha

Over his long, evolving career, Matthew Dear has distinguished himself from America’s indie-electronic world through his outsized, wry personality and absolute open-mindedness to pop, whether under his own name, or as Audion, his louche techno guise. Starting with his very first single (“Hands Up for Detroit,” co-written by the late Disco D) through his first taste of “crossover” success (his inaugural vocal turn on 2003’s “Dog Days”), he’s never been afraid to make music that’s both artful and catchy.
Since relocating from Ann Arbor to the New York area in the mid-’00s, the music Dear’s made has increasingly unshackled itself from genre, embracing wider ideas of song and rhythm, ending up somewhere in the Bowie/Talking Heads/late-period Depeche Mode territory—as “electronic” as it is “industrial” and “post-punk” and “goth,” but really only adjacent to all of these. At the same time, he’s never pretended to abandon dance-music, and Audion has often served as the release of Dear’s techno Id. In the dozen or so years he’s been banging out lascivious and catchy tracks under that moniker, Dear has used it as a playground where hooks interact with techno’s progressive sonic ideologies.
Contradictory though it might at-first seem, “fun-first minimalism” has been Audion’s modus operandi from the get-go. The keeper on the 2004 EP Kisses is called “Titty Fuck,” seven minutes of filters and percussion patterns piled upon a two-part skeletal hook that’s driven into the ground until everyone in earshot’s gone mental. Much of Audion’s ensuing catalog turned that example into gospel (and set a tone for labels like Dirtybird): hard, repetitive dance tracks with a dirty-ish mind, a grimy sonic gleam attractive to both newbie ravers and veterans, more funky earworms and hookup stimulants than philosophical tracts. Even Audion’s release formats spoke to notions of pop immediacy, with the 2005 album debut Suckfish followed only by an army of singles (many not even pressed to vinyl for optimal legacy quotient), all featuring Will Calcutt’s hypnotic designs.
Another of Calcutt’s trademark patterns adorns the cover of Alpha, but besides that, few things around Audion’s long-gestating second album seem familiar—not its soft-focus darkness, not its pensiveness, not the minimalism with the negligible payoff. Instead, Alpha sounds like the character that once recorded a nice throbbing jack entitled “Just Fucking” has curtailed his libido and dragged out his Jeff Mills records for inspiration. (The most instantly magnetic one here, “Destroyer,” even has a title harkening back to one of Mills’ classic Underground Resistance co-productions.) This is a wonderful conceit but not the reason people come to Audion in the first place, and leaves the album fighting a catalog’s worth of pre-conceptions.
Yet if Alpha means to reposition Audion’s place in the world, it undersells this new perspective. The opener, “Dem,” downplays its beat in favor of a dank, echo-laden horrorcore, excellently setting up a downcast tone, but then instantly veers into a conveyor belt of stripped-d0wn bangers. They are crisp and marvelously engineered, but the catchy bits are nowhere to be found. Tracks such as “There Was a Button” and “Traanc” are acceptable as minimal-house DJ tools, but as greater parts of a long-playing whole, they seem lost for a broader context—a context Dear previously had no trouble offering.
Only at Alpha’s tail end does Audion’s (and Dear’s) personality assert itself. The hook of “Zunk Synth” is a grey-noise gurgle EQ’d in and out of the fog, as synth-pads and a percussive varietal built on tambourines and hi-hats puddle around playfully. And “Sicko” uses the album’s brightest keyboard line, plus a 909 bass punch, to build-up to the album’s biggest payoff, akin to the sound of an old-school disco dub. Unlike anything else from the prior hour, it closes the proceedings in wonderful style, Dear’s sound of Audion remembered. One just wonders: Why did it take so long?