Jay Reatard’s early band Lost Sounds veered from rock‘n’roll primitivism into synth-punk futurism, but the result wasn’t dance music—it was panic music.

Black Wave

For much of his career, Jay Lindsey’s reputation for being prolific was matched only by his reputation for antagonism. And the artist better known as Jay Reatard was a fighter to the end—in his final tweet, typed out 36 hours before his body was found in January 2010, he was issuing a bounty on the heads of the New Jersey garage band Liquor Store. But at the time of his passing, Lindsey’s volatile public persona had begun to contrast sharply with his artistic maturation. The album that proved to be his swan song, 2009’s Watch Me Fall, found him trading adrenalized punk for Flying Nun-inspired jangle pop, and those in his inner circle say he had designs on venturing into mellower Neil Young-style country-rock territory and retiring the Reatard moniker altogether. But if Lindsey’s late career was marked a growing disconnect between his creative and destructive impulses, these two sides fused perfectly in Lost Sounds.
Active from 1999 to 2005, Lost Sounds seemed destined to live up to its name until Lindsey became a hot underground property with his 2006 solo debut Blood Visions. A team-up with his then-girlfriend Alicja Trout (formerly of indie-pop hopefuls the Clears), Lost Sounds took a sharp left from rock ‘n’ roll primitivism into synth-punk futurism, a reaction to the aesthetic conservatism Lindsey encountered in the garage trenches with his notorious first band, the Reatards. But even during the garage-rock and post-punk crazes of the early ’00s, Lost Sounds slipped through the cracks—they were too feral, too strange, too bleak. If the Meet Me in the Bathroom era served in part as an escapist response to 9/11, Lost Sounds stewed in the distress of the times. This wasn’t dance music—it was panic music.
Shortly after Lindsey’s passing, Lost Sounds were commemorated with a best-of compilation and collection of rarities that introduced their music to newer fans who were still making sense of his vast catalog. In comparison, the timing of this reissue—a no-frills remaster of the band’s 2001 double-album, Black Wave—feels more random. Still, it reaffirms the confrontational and visceral qualities that made Lost Sounds’ music seem marginal at the time and vital now. Black Wave—the title a half-joking nod to new wave and black metal—became a double album simply because Lindsey and Trout were writing songs at too furious a rate to contain. The record feels like a 19-round challenge to see who could push the group to even more ferocious extremes while adhering to pop-song orthodoxy.
Black Wave’s cover image— the band running through empty city streets, fleeing a sinister alien force looming overhead—suggests 9/11 paranoia, but the terror within is more psychological: Trout’s throat-shredding screed “I’m Not a Machine” sounds like a prescient rallying cry against encroaching technocracy, while Lindsey repeats the title of the electro-shocked “Do You Wanna Kill Me” with the blood-curdling hysteria of a young Black Francis.
And yet, through the album’s black-mold production, it’s clear that Jay isn’t merely engaging in nihilism-by-numbers. Throughout his life, both his combative attitude and do-or-die work ethic were attributed to his hardscrabble upbringing in the rougher parts of Memphis. And nowhere in his bottomless discography is that impetus more evident than on “1620 Echles St.,” named for the semi-detached home where, while babysitting his little sister, a young Jay overhead a rape happening in the house next door. (As he recounted in the documentary Better Than Something, the incident ended with cops kicking the shit out of the perpetrators and inviting the kids on the block to pelt rocks at them.) When he cries, “Is this the life for me?,” it’s the desperate plea of a scared kid for whom making music would never just be some idle pastime.
But for all its relentless aggression and suffocating sense of doom, Black Wave yields early signs of the manic melodicism that would flourish on Blood Visions: the stormtrooper stomp of “Heart Felt Toys” blindsides you with a chorus that sticks out like a puff of cotton candy floating in a pool of black tar, while “Dark Shadows” could be a warm-up for a better known, similarly titled song in his canon.
The bridge to Blood Visions would be further fortified on Lost Sounds’ subsequent, increasingly refined two albums, but Black Wave is less a portrait of a future indie-rock star finding his voice than one being pushed to the next level by an equally industrious foil. While Lindsey may have embodied Black Wave’s agitated essence, Trout’s contributions—from the berserker B-52’s bomp of “Lost and Found” to the goth-metal convulsions of “I See Everything” to the ’60s go-go swing of “Soon This Tomb”—brought depth and character to their monomaniacal attack. In 2017, Trout and fellow surviving members Rich Crook and John Garland rebooted Lost Sounds under the name Sweet Knives, following the emergence of a wave of groups—from fellow Memphis noisemakers Nots to Aussie icons Total Control—carrying the torch for dystopian synth-spiked punk. Now, with his death even further in the rearview, it’s easier to see that Lost Sounds was more than just a pit stop on Jay Reatard’s road to infamy. They were a visionary group with a legacy all their own.


Yumi Zouma’s first album closes a longtime distance between its members and delivers bright, complex disco-rock.

Yoncalla

Distance has long defined Yumi Zouma. Two of the group’s founding members moved away from their native New Zealand after the devastating 2011 Christchurch earthquake, forcing them to piece together tracks across land and sea. It makes sense that gaps between people, both physical and emotional, served a central role across their first two dreamy, disco-accented rock EPs, which caught the attention of Lorde and Chet Faker.
The four members of Yumi Zouma recorded Yoncalla, their debut full-length, in the same place while on tour, marking the first time they’ve worked in a room together. Closing the ocean-sized distance works, not surprisingly, to their advantage; it’s a polished record on which their balmy dream-pop remains intact, sweetened by new intimacy. Their music has always sounded suited for warm climes, existing in the same sun-dappled terrain as JJ’s poppier cuts or Air France’s Balearic-tinged escapism (the latter of whom Yumi have covered), and Yoncalla features some of their brightest songs to date, from the dazzling synth-pop of “Short Truth” to the Fleetwood-Mac-indebted strut of “Yesterday.”
Yumi Zouma also push their dance inclinations in more directions now, starting with the opener, “Barricade (Matter Of Fact).” It’s a delicate number built on airy keyboard notes and singer Christie Simpson’s rousing personal pep talk: “Just breathe/Just breathe/And then over the barricade,” she cajoles, the music beneath her building like an anticipatory deep breath. Beneath the breezy guitar playing and dance floor-ready rhythms, Yoncalla’s lyrics find Simpson in a contemplative mood; “Text From Sweden” is a woozy meditation on travel and how it affects relationships, while “Short Truth” embraces pessimism and frank talk to oneself. Many dream-pop numbers seek escape from the outside world, or at least foster a place to wallow, but Yumi Zouma have little time for either.
Yoncalla’s swift pacing ensures that moments of joy balance lurking regrets, and “Haji Awali,” the most guitar-centric inclusion here, finds Yumi Zouma pinpointing just where to start their recalibrations to optimism. Plus, Simpson has a great sense of humor about it, which lifts the tension a bit. (“I’m screaming in my dreams like it’s going in and out of fashion,” she drawls on “Yesterday”). Yoncalla highlights all the best elements of Yumi Zouma, wrapped up in some of the prettiest music they’ve made yet. Hopefully this leads to more face time together for them.


The Seattle black metal duo Inquisition's first album for major metal indie Season of Mist follows 2011's excellent Ominous Doctrines of the Perpetual Mystical Macrocosm. It's another impressive collection, one that's about as catchy as a pure black metal record has any right to be.

Inquisition: Obscure Verses for the Multiverse

Obscure Verses for the Multiverse

Inquisition’s last album, 2011’s Ominous Doctrines of the Perpetual Mystical Macrocosm was hailed as an instant classic, and rightly so. The Seattle black metal duo had been quiet for several years before its release; since then, though, they've thrown themselves into the business of being a full-time band. Their recent signing to major indie Season of Mist is a satisfying notch on the bedpost for vocalist/guitarist Dagon and drummer Incubus, who've reacted to their alliance with a “big label” by changing nothing whatsoever about their music or their approach towards occult exploration. Fans never expected them to react any differently, and the great wailing and gnashing of teeth that usually accompanies the announcement of a beloved underground band stumbling into the spotlight has been absent. After all, as even the webboard warriors seem to know, a new album is another opportunity for the band to stalk in and show everyone else how it’s done.
Obscure Verses for the Multiverse picks up where its predecessor left off. As usual, Dagon’s guitar work blends seamlessly with Incubus’ drums, and they remain merrily bass-free. Like some bizarro-world version of (until recently) bassless grind savants Pig Destroyer, they’ve hit upon and perfected a formula that would leave a lesser band sounding flat and soulless. Inquisition built their reputation upon a small selection of ironclad riffs and dynamic devices—every note follows a predetermined script, one that they’ve had memorized for decades, and it works.
Consider “Darkness Flows Towards Unseen Horizons”. A characteristic down-tempo melody opens the song, which hurtles immediately into a relentless blast, then back again. The band’s fondness for a good mid-song tempo shift has become one of their calling cards, and an Inquisition tune bereft of its appearance feels a bit off-kilter. Groove-laden tracks like “Master of the Cosmological Black Cauldron” and “Inversion of Ethereal White Stars” are beefy head-nodders that feature some of Dagon’s best guitar work as he manipulates and torments his strings into all manner of eerie tones. Outside of his propensity for note-bending, it’s worth noting the man’s uncanny knack for molding a gloomy shred of melody into an improbable earworm. While there are no obvious “hits” like on Ominous Doctinres, the album is still about as catchy as a pure black metal record has any right to be. A triumphantly powerful melodic break forms the centerpiece of a “Spiritual Plasma Evocation”, a track that despite its lack of ravens or winterdemonry, emphatically gives legs to the Immortal comparisons that have dogged the band for years.
The songs’ carefully cultivated atmosphere and aim towards an organic-sounding production leaves plenty of room for Dagon’s esoteric tales of space, time, and the Devil to unfold. This album is focused even more heavily on the cosmic and the metaphysical than past efforts, and the lyrics are an absolute trip. As the title track goes, "Only darkness in the skies/ When you came light was shined/ Wisdom from cosmic snakes of dimensions you create/ Spawning humans as a slave serving kings of astral thrones." Here’s hoping you can understand them, though, since Dagon’s infamous vocals are in full display.
His froggy croak may sound like a direct descendent of Abbath’s own strangled ribbeting, but comes from a far more evil place; it’s the former’s effort to sound as inhuman and alien as possible to accompany their occult cosmic ceremonies. In truth, though they began life as a thrash band, Inquisition still predates Immortal by several years. While the two bands developed and released their first important works during the same time period, it’s worth noting that Dagon was already croaking up a storm before Abbath even donned the paint. It seems almost passé to make a reference to the Norwegian demons here, but the parallel between the two entities’ melodic make up (not to mention that voice) is undeniable.
As the story goes, Inquisition originally formed while Dagon was living in Colombia in 1989, predating the famed Second Wave’s most active period and ensuring that the band’s early days would be spent learning from greats like Reencarnación, Blasfemia, and Parabellum. They’ve been there since the beginning, and will be here making outstanding records long after the rest of their peers have given up the ghost. Dagon’s 1996 move to the United States only aided them in their mission, and now, it seems as though this cult favorite is finally beginning to reap the rewards of a lifetime of hard graft and black magic.


Mavis Staples presents her signature hope on the taut and lively If All I Was Was Black, another collaboration with Jeff Tweedy. But it doesn’t come as naturally as it once did, as she makes clear.

If All I Was Was Black

Does Mavis Staples sound a little angry on “Who Told You That,” one of the 10 highly topical tunes on her new album? The song is less about everything that makes us angry at the moment and more about how we respond to it all, as the 78-year-old singer addresses those too timid to take a stand and take it to the streets. “We don’t want to rock the boat? Who told you that?” she asks, as Jeff Tweedy’s guitar stomps in the mud. Her voice dives deep into her lower register, and it definitely sounds like there’s some fury in her questions, as though she’s squaring off against anyone who types “thoughts and prayers” without taking the action that might answer someone else’s thoughts and prayers. Written by Tweedy, who produced three of her last four albums, the song reveals a darker, more outraged side of Staples than we usually see.
If you’ve pissed off Mavis Staples, then you’re doing something seriously wrong. Nicknamed Bubbles for her sunny disposition, she’s been singing professionally since the late 1940s, when her father Roebuck “Pops” Staples formed a family gospel band. Her career with the Staple Singers and later as a solo artist paralleled an especially tumultuous few decades in American history, from civil rights to the first black president. Through it all she’s maintained an unwavering faith in her country and its people that shone through in ebullient songs like “Heavy Makes You Happy” and “If You’re Ready (Come Go With Me).”
That sense of hope carries over to If All I Was Was Black, but she makes clear that it doesn’t come as easily or as naturally as it once did. It’s now something she has to practice, something she has to work at. “Don’t do me no good to pretend I’m as good as I can be,” she sings on “Try Harder,” which is addressed to herself as much as to anyone else. It might be her age, although neither her voice nor her animating spirit seems especially diminished. Or it might be the times. “Something is wrong—it’s all gone haywire,” she told the L.A. Times recently. “I get angry… This man Trump, talking about ‘Make America great again.’ Well, I don’t think America has lost any of its greatness. But we do need change, and these songs are gonna do it—they’re gonna bring us together, make us love one another.”
If Mavis can be considered a bellwether of the national mood, then If All I Was reflects bleak times indeed. Rather than dour or defeated, her mixed emotions make these songs sound livelier, more determined, more rousing. Tweedy keeps the music taut and minimal, augmenting her solid touring band with Spencer Tweedy on drums, Glenn Kotche on percussion, and backing vocalist Kelly Hogan. Unlike their previous records together—2010’s You Are Not Alone and 2013’s One True Vine—the music is less grounded in gospel and geared more toward a loping ‘70s funk-folk, with occasional flourishes of distortion and dissonance evoking the violence she’s singing about. The guitars duel from the left and right speakers on opener “Little Bit,” as though taking sides in an argument. “Build a Bridge” rides a laidback groove that only hints at larger tensions mentioned in the lyrics: “When I say my life matters, you can say yours does, too,” Mavis sings. “But I bet you never have to remind anyone to look at it from your point of view.”
With that, If All I Was Was Black is an album about American perspectives and the compassion it takes to see the world from someone else’s point of view. Tweedy understands that his songwriting credits might lead some listeners to think the album represents his perspective rather than Staples’. “I don’t think I put anything in Mavis’ mouth that she didn’t want to sing,” he told the L.A. Times. “Tweedy knows me,” was her response. A singer of remarkable power and expression, Staples essentially rewrites these songs simply by singing them, imbuing each line with fine gradients of emotion and authority. She emerges as the active agent in the project, delivering these songs from her perspective as a black woman, as an artist, as a daughter and sister, even as a Christian.
Anger is a part of that perspective, as are compassion and love. “When they tell their lies, spread around rumors,” she sings on “We Go High,” and she might be talking about Fox News commentators or she might be talking about your racist friend on Facebook. But then she adds, “I know they’re still human and they need my love.” It’s not easy to practice love in the face of hate, but Staples is not giving up on us yet—or on herself.


The Wilkes-Barre hardcore band blends singalong accessibility, purgative heaviness, and thoughtful craft into songs about the disconnect between dreams and reality.

One Step Closer: Songs for the Willow EP

Songs for the Willow EP

One Step Closer’s music overflows with emotion. On their new three-song EP Songs for the Willow, the Wilkes-Barre hardcore band layers guitars so thick and textural that you can’t see the bottom; they’re churning and breathless, driven by a biting rhythm section. Vocalist Ryan Savitski is raw and unrelenting, not so much yelling as crying out, like he can’t stop until something is expelled.
Yet the secret to their sound, hidden amid the deluge, lies in its nuances. They use barely audible harmonies, unexpected melodic twists, and glistening buried riffs to build a stronger emotional structure than a simple heavy barrage would. There’s a similar richness to Savitski’s lyrics; while they occasionally lack subtlety, a common and generally forgivable pitfall in hardcore, he can offer moments of truly striking imagery. On opener “Dark Blue,” he sings, “The months go by and the blue jays fly to the apple trees tonight.”
This EP is One Step Closer’s first release since their debut LP, 2021’s This Place You Know. That album, written during the pandemic, was about a longing for escape, whether from a physical place or a general feeling of dissatisfaction. If they could just get out, their songs suggested, a new, rosier life would await. Get out they did; their victory-lap touring schedule after This Place You Know included every corner of the U.S. and several trips to Europe. On Songs for the Willow, Savitski grapples with the idea that achieving what he wanted didn’t really solve anything. All three songs are torn between living the dream of success and the heartbreak of seeing life slip through your fingers.
On “Dark Blue”—a song that takes place on the van ride to the next tour date—Savitski ponders a faltering relationship back home while watching the scenery fly by. “Home is not worth missing,” he realizes. And on “T.T.S.P.” he admits, “This dream just clouds all my way.” The hardcore community tends to romanticize the road warrior’s quest—an almost religious pursuit of cathartic purity, a rejection of everything that isn’t hardcore punk. But on Songs for the Willow, 23-year-old Savitski pulls the cover back on how hard and conflicting that can be for a young adult finding their place in life.
There are lots of pleading requests in Savitski’s lyrics—“Turn to me,” “Stay with me,” “Please hurry home.” Delivered with his wounded howl, they convey a feeling of overwhelming desperation. The end section of “Dark Blue” does the same thing musically. There’s a feeling of chaos and turmoil in the weighty guitars bouncing off each other; Savitski punctuates clean backing vocals with his screams, both sides mixed low enough to sound like they’re battling with the instruments behind them, desperate to be heard. Similarly, when “T.T.S.P.” kicks into gear, dropping like an anvil after a foreboding intro, it emits an enveloping cloud of hopeless gloom. “Turn to Me” harnesses a surge of energy on the chorus, as the tempo picks up and an ultra-catchy (yet no less tortured) clean vocal comes in.
The crowd reaction is built into hardcore songs, and these moments will send fans at future shows berserk—you picture it as you hear it, bodies flying and colliding, fingers pointing as contorted faces spit words back at the band. One Step Closer are exceptionally good at blending singalong accessibility, purgative heaviness, and thoughtful craft; it’s impressive for a hardcore band to tick all of those boxes at once and so well. Songs for the Willow cements the young band’s transition from promising newcomers to undeniable force.


The third album from the 25-year-old UK fire-spitter is a wickedly assured, highly entertaining, coming-of-age marvel.

GREY Area

Little Simz is still seeking a sense of direction on her wondrous new album GREY Area. The “grey area” in question is her mid-20s, a “strange place” she’s eager to navigate through and out of, by the sound of it. “I just wrote the album from a place of confusion,” the rapper born Simbi Ajikawo recently told Noisey, making the uncertainty of a quarter-life crisis seem like navigating the fog of war. A similar search for certainty ran through her second album, 2017’s Stillness in Wonderland, a Lewis Carroll-based introspective adventure throughout which she sought a better understanding of self. Armed with lessons from that stumble down the rabbit hole, she is far more assured on GREY Area. It is a coming-of-age marvel.
Wonderland was tangled and overwrought. The album was full of ideas and unsure how to express them. But working on GREY Area, Simz uncovered the source of her disorientation: she was taking in too much outside noise and losing her bearings. In her effort to solve the impossibility of being young and indecisive (coupled with the sensory overload of trekking across Europe), she has improved as a songwriter and storyteller. She is so grounded in her perspective that even her examinations of societal decay feel deeply personal. She buoys these probing looks into the heart of darkness with intimate glimpses from inside her life in motion. The drudgery of touring, the struggle of modern relationships, processing the trauma of a friend getting murdered, each handled with a delicate and deft touch that never dulls her piercing flows. These are the songs of a woman responding to a nebulous time by making her own way forward. “Sometimes we do not see the fuckery until we’re out of it,” she explains on “Therapy.” “Some people read The Alchemist and still never amount to shit.”
The entire album was produced by Simz’s childhood friend, Inflo. Using more live instruments in place of sampling—guitars, strings, pianos, and drums, mostly—they never settle into one space. No two songs on GREY Area sound the same, even when they’re similar the objectives vary, as she probes into their many grooves. “I’m JAY-Z on a bad day, Shakespeare on my worst days,” she snaps through the scuzzy bass and strings on “Offence.” “Therapy” seems to invert that song’s template for something more downtempo and cleansing. By the time the album settles into the gorgeous bed of “Flowers,” which reunites Inflo with singer and guitarist Michael Kiwanuka, Little Simz has already proven herself a master of her universe.
At turns both acerbic and unguarded, GREY Area feels like the grand culmination of everything Simz has been puzzling out to this point. She’s a preternaturally gifted lyricist, a prodigy who recorded her first raps at nine and released her earliest tapes in her teens; it simply took a while for her to apply that acuity to her songcraft. She delivers her wonted precision here, but she doesn’t just slash all beats to ribbons. Sure, there are still savage songs like “Venom,” which finds her darting through sharp, fast-moving bow strokes and claiming the spot in the rap hierarchy the patriarchy sees fit to deny her, but even amid those shows of strength, she sees her ideas through. Little Simz is learning that taking things step by step is the best way to plot a course, and retracing those steps is the easiest way out of the labyrinth.


Solo albums by rock frontmen are often a safe space to play with ideas too indulgent for the main gig. But Conrad Keely's Original Machines does the opposite; it is a clearinghouse for modest songs nowhere near indulgent enough for his band ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead.

Original Machines

...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead divided one of their albums into suites by guitar tuning and convinced a major label to greenlight this video. They are also named ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead. I can’t imagine Conrad Keely hears "no" a lot within the context of Trail of Dead, or even at all. So it stands to reason that Keely releasing his first solo album this far into his career wouldn’t serve the same purpose as most ventures of this sort, i.e., to provide a safe space to play with ideas too indulgent for the main gig. Original Machines does the opposite, a clearinghouse for modest songs nowhere near indulgent enough for Trail of Dead.
At the very least, it confirms the sneaking suspicion that Keely could’ve been a Buzz Bin hitmaker had he been born a decade earlier. He writes zippy melodies perfectly suited for his keening, try-hard voice, one that cuts through any amount of distortion and compression with nasal EQ-ing that can recall either Billy Corgan, Liam Gallagher, or Perry Farrell. The mere hint of bongos throughout the breezy "Warm Insurrection" is apparently all it takes for a Keely song to pass as Porno for Pyros.
In addition to the extravagant musical ideas expected of Trail of Dead, Original Machines rids Keely of the necessity to attach high-art pretensions to his lyrics. It’s likely that Keely would consider every Trail of Dead song to be personal to some degree, though the emotions were often filtered through another's perspective, be it Maxfield Parrish or Michael Jackson. Nothing hits as squarely as Worlds Apart’s overtly autobiographical "The Summer of ‘91," though there are allusions to travels through his current home in Cambodia, while "Warm Insurrection" and "In the Words of a Not So Famous Man" immediately establish Keely’s muse as the process of songwriting itself—this just lets you in on the fact that Keely has been living in Cambodia and writing a bunch of songs, information that requires no familiarity with Original Machines beyond its tracklist.
There’s only so much talk of restraint that can surround a record that also happens to contain 24 tracks. Then again, the longest (and slowest) track is three minutes and 48 seconds and everything careens into each other in a way that reminds you that Keely is a Guided by Voices fan—the highlight of otherwise career nadir So Divided was a cover of "Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory" that imagined if Robert Pollard spent his Matador advance money on a string section rather than beer.
Keely can write songs every bit as punchy and abrupt as GBV, but while the latter’s were frequently, if not always, dashed off, they always sounded done. Original Machines doesn’t necessarily face the presumption that these are meant as demos, yet every aesthetic choice (or limitation) keeps raising the question that otherwise wouldn’t have been asked. Drum machines, keyboards, thumbed bass—just about everything besides Keely’s guitar and vocals—have the eerie inhumanity of synthesized presets, the appearance of placeholders chosen for their immediacy rather than texture. The production as a whole should be familiar to anyone who’s played a demo on a mid-to-high-range home digital recorder, providing a clean, crisp, but flat character that renders an unfortunate double meaning from "CD Quality."
There’s not much friction in really any aspect to provide for a spark on *Original Machines—*the forays into trip-hop, psych rock, and folk are far too tentative for a record that has to answer to no one besides its creator and the diehard Keely fan who will pay for it. But what’s truly missing from Original Machines is a sense of stakes; this quality is what distinguishes his best work in Trail of Dead’s as well. Source Tags & Codes arrived in the middle of the ironically named New Rock Revolution holding the torch for Drive Like Jehu, Sonic Youth, and Fugazi, ready to burn down the whole thing down. Worlds Apart was maligned for having its facile, Clear Channel-friendly hooks, anti-Clear Channel sentiments, and batshit visual ideas coexist in the same space, but its brash self-assurance in the face of astronomical expectations from both the Internet and Interscope was admirable. Since Trail of Dead is still chugging along with a more streamlined approach not all that dissimilar to Keely’s here, what’s at risk? What does he have to prove? The ephemerality of Original Machines assures that Keely never gets bogged down in any bad ideas, but often times, those are his most interesting ideas.


A career compilation that highlights the gentler side of White, some in a stripped-down Detroit setting and others in a homespun Nashville setting.

Jack White: Acoustic Recordings 1998-2016

Acoustic Recordings 1998-2016

Detroit is a city of extremes—of Fortune 500 wealth and epidemic poverty, of beautiful art-deco landmarks and ruins that are so apocalyptic, they’ve spawned a mini-tourism industry. Native son Jack White has likewise displayed a fondness for blinding contrasts, and the White Stripes’ candy-cane dress code was the least of it. Over the years, White has gamely pit bluesy authenticity against bullshit artistry; virtuosity against amateurism; punk credibility against Hollywood celebrity; small-business boosterism against Coca-Cola shilling. He’s a garage-rocker who’d rather chill on the front porch, a man who can write songs that fill football stadiums even though sports might just make him miserable.
Those paradoxical qualities have ultimately elevated White’s songbook above mere blues-rock revivalism. That tension is baked right into his music, where the scorching six-string pyrotechnics have routinely been hosed down by soothing sing-alongs. He’s an electric warrior and eccentric warbler, a Page and Plant in one perfect rock-star package. If he didn’t exist, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction committee would have to will him into existence.
However, a new collection wants you to think of White less as a self-mythologizing guitar god and more as a humble storyteller. Though its title may suggest a bounty of rough-draft demos, Acoustic Recordings 1998-2016 is really a straightforward, chronological cherry-pick of the songs in White’s discography (peppered with alternate mixes) that don’t feature electric guitar as the primary instrument. It’s White without the red, a Starbucks-worthy sanitization of a scuzz-rock icon. But even though it lops off one side of White’s split personality, *Acoustic Recordings *still provides a vivid portrait of White’s evolution over the past 18 years; like a phantom limb, the absence of noise becomes a form of presence.
As the compilation reasserts, White has been writing on an acoustic since day one, however, the kinds of acoustic songs he writes have changed considerably over the years. On the first White Stripes album, “Sugar Never Tasted So Good” offered White a chance to exhale between garage-rock grunts, though this suggestive serenade was spiritually in tune with that record’s devil-music worship. But already on 2000’s De Stijl, White was using the acoustic format less as an unplugged antidote and more a foundation for experimentation. With the radiant “I’m Bound to Pack It Up,” he used modest Zeppelin III means to telegraph Houses of the Holy ambitions. And on White Blood Cells hits like “Hotel Yorba” and “We’re Going to Be Friends,” the Stripes’ acoustic side became as crucial to constructing their childlike fantasias as their block-rockin’ rave-ups.
Acoustic Recordings’ first disc—charting the backwoods path to the Stripes’ 2007 swan song Icky Thump—could essentially be replicated by any Stripes completist dragging album tracks into a playlist. (The lone prize find is the hushed Get Behind Me Satan outtake, “City Lights,” the rare acoustic White tune to showcase the sort of guitar wizardry he brings to his electric repertoire.) So it’s appropriate that the more revelatory second disc should kick off with the first official release of “Love Is the Truth,” the winsome 2006 Coca-Cola jingle that symbolically came out around the same time White finally ditched Detroit-scene politics to set up shop in Nashville, heralding his transformation into a multimedia mogul. (The move also coincided with the formation of his supergroup the Raconteurs, represented here by countrified alternate takes of “Top Yourself” and “Carolina Drama.”)
Once the timeline reaches White’s 2012 solo debut, Blunderbuss, the Acoustic Recordings concept practically becomes moot, as the 90/10 ratio of electric/acoustic songs that once governed White Stripes records had effectively reversed (perhaps because White was channeling his most aggressive impulses to the Dead Weather). If White’s early acoustic material conveyed a certain bedsit intimacy, the vibe here is more communal kitchen-party hootenanny. With a wide cast of Music City pros at his side, tracks like “Hip (Eponymous) Poor Boy” and “On and On and On” key in on the homespun spirit of the Band, the Faces, and Exile-era Stones. At this point for White, stripping down means gussying up: with its barrelhouse piano, fiddles and gospelized backing vocals, the “acoustic mix” of the Lazaretto romp “Just One Drink” is essentially honky-tonk glam-rock.
In his journey from the Gold Dollar to the White House, the blues has remained foundational to White’s acoustic songwriting, though, these days, it’s less about the bare-bones style than an existential state of mind. His acoustic catalog used to be a space where he could reveal a more gentle, whimsical side. But in his sometimes fraught adjustment to A-list celebrity—with all the publicized fistfights, divorces, shit-talking, and lawsuits that have come with it—White’s conversational writing has, at times, turned more tense and terse. “I want love to/Change my friends to enemies/And show me how it’s all my fault,” he seethes on *Blunderbuss’ *“Love Interruption” like a man scorned, and that wariness would become further entrenched on Lazaretto’s “Entitlement”: “Every time I’m doing what I want to, somebody comes and tells me it’s wrong/Whenever I’m doing just as I please, somebody cuts me down to me knees.”
More than just showcasing his tuneful side, Acoustic Recordings is a shrine to White’s self-sufficiency, in both the musical and ideological senses. After all, White has always been one to take matters into his own hands, whether he’s building guitars from some spare wire and wood, opening his own record press, or ensuring aliens have access to a turntable. And until he can get off this godforsaken planet and join his records in space, Acoustic Recordings stockpiles a great American songbook that can endure even after we’re all forced to live off the grid.


Nina Nastasia’s new project with guitarist Jeff MacLeod is a lonesome, deliberate meditation on memory, freedom, and loss.

Jolie Laide

As a young girl from Southern California, Nina Nastasia found her sense of freedom on the Pacific Coast Highway, a stretch of road that promised picnics on the beach, lazy heat, and days that felt oceanic and undefined. Nastasia was confronted with freedom once again in her mid-50s, when she relearned to drive and returned to the Pacific Coast Highway in search of a home that no longer existed. Jolie Laide, Nastasia’s new self-titled project with guitarist Jeff MacLeod, is a kind of travelogue that traces the line between freedom and empty aimlessness: a child’s oceanside liberty that becomes an adult’s existential terror.
Prior to her trip, Nastasia had lived the majority of her adult life in New York City, sharing a small apartment with her partner and musical collaborator Kennan Gudjonsson. From the late ’90s to the mid-2000s, she earned a cult following for her songwriting—part gothic, part Americana, full of emotions that confused and contradicted one another. John Peele and Steve Albini counted Nastasia among their favorite musicians. She released her sixth album in 2010 and then, for over a decade, seemed to disappear. In 2022, she released Riderless Horse, her first album in 12 years, which was written in the immediate aftermath of her partner’s death and partially explained her absence. Riderless Horse was a spartan, frenzied retrospective of the couple’s complicated years together, plainly and painfully transposing Nastasia’s grief.
She re-learned to drive and soon after reached out to MacLeod, a musician she’d met some 20 years earlier, when he played with the dark dream-pop outfit Cape May. MacLeod is a largely improvisational guitarist, riffing on and subverting well-worn Americana tropes. The electric guitar features sporadically across Nastasia’s previous output, but it’s at the center of the mix on her first project with MacLeod; his playing adds a sense of place and cultural topography to Nastasia’s cross-country roadtrip. On Jolie Laide, MacLeod digs into the repertoire of American popular song to represent West Coast musical history and dredges up sludgier tones for Nastasia’s desert dirges. His guitar adds a sense of sweetened dread to Nastasia’s emotional realism, an inventive expression of her internal world.
“Back to the west,” Nastasia begins the album, singing in her breeziest voice. MacLeod’s guitar is similarly buoyant, but each upstroke introduces a sense of creeping dread. The songs’ lumbering sense of tension is keenist on “Away Too Soon,” a song that Nastasia and MacLeod perform with a touch of heaviness, as if trying and failing to drag themselves out of a dream, searching for a satisfying burst of energy that never comes. Nastasia’s voice is like a stress ball; no matter how much pressure she applies, it always returns to its original, equipoised form. Similarly, MacLeod’s guitar goes back and forth between major and minor, two oppositional forces canceling out.
Jolie Laide has a clear narrative and novelistic form. In the West, Nastasia finds a lover, someone to “move her along,” a brief and unsustainable source of hope. “We’ve got horses to ride,” she sings on “Moves Away Towns,” gesturing back to Riderless Horse. By the album’s middle, romantic disequilibrium gives way to the volatility of alcohol. MacLeod’s guitar grows hazier, Nastasia’s voice more lethargic. She trades existential emptiness for an empty horizon, recreating the small world of childhood through the routine of bar-hopping and blacking out. “Drinkin’ us thin till we both fade away,” she sings on “Why I Drink,” MacLeod’s guitar veering between a tottering riff and a drunken strum. He provides an irreverent foil to Nastasia’s downward journey on Jolie Laide, bringing a dynamic frisson and exchange that deepens her storytelling.
In the album’s final act, Nastasia is no closer to finding her home nor closing in on her terrible freedom; she feels only the familiarity of a hangover on the strangeness of the road. With all sense of lightness abated, her voice lowers to a sneer. It’s in this darkness—and particularly on “Isolation View,” the album’s grimmest song—that MacLeod and Nastasia allow themselves a moment of release. MacLeod’s glowering counterpoint stands against Nastasia’s powerful weariness and achieves a kind of exhilarating devastation. “Your isolation tank is like a bubble,” she scoffs, abstracting the home she sought to find into an almost unintelligible image, her once bright-eyed view fuzzed over. In freedom, she finds herself, finally, alone.


[The following is a partial transcript from the third and final debate between Republican Presidential candidate George W. Bush and ...

At the Drive In: Relationship of Command

Relationship of Command

[The following is a partial transcript from the third and final debate between Republican Presidential candidate George W. Bush and Democratic Candidate Al Gore:]
Jim Lehrer: Okay, gentlemen, you know the rules as established by the Commission of Presidential Debates. The questions will come from citizens in our audience. You have two minutes to answer each question; your opponent may then offer a rebuttal. I will then ask a follow-up question at my discretion. The next four questions pertain to At the Drive In, a rock music group from Governor Bush's home state of Texas. The first, to Governor Bush, will be asked by Clara Thompson. Where are you, Ms. Thompson? ...There you are.
Clara Thompson: Uh, yes, Mr. Bush. Do you think that At the Drive In's new album, Relationship of Command, matches the intensity of the band's live show?
George W. Bush: Thank you, Ms. Thompson. As Governor of Texas, I'm proud of these young men from El Paso. I take both young people and the arts very seriously, as I think my record shows. But, uh, the question here, really, is: who do you trust, and who do you think will get things done? I am a uniter, and not a divider. Also, you can't hear At the Drive In's afros on record.
Jim Lehrer: Mr. Vice President.
Al Gore: I'm glad you asked this question, Ms. Thompson, because this is an area in which Mr. Bush and I differ. While no album can ever approximate the complexity of the live concert experience, the sonic intensity of Relationship of Command makes it a good second choice. Andy Wallace mixed the album, and if that name doesn't ring a bell, let me remind you that nine years ago, he mixed an album called Nevermind by a band called Nirvana. The punch his mix brings to these guitars is impressive. So, while Relationship of Command doesn't quite compare to seeing this group live, you'll surely want to mosh-dance in your bedroom when you listen to this recording.
Jim Lehrer: Moving on, this question comes from Mr. Frank Lee and is for Vice President Gore.
Frank Lee: If you are elected president, what do you propose to do about the inconsistencies of Relationship of Command?
Al Gore: Well, yes, I do think this album is largely inconsistent. Right now, music is the most innovative it has ever been in the history of the universe. We have many, many options open to us in these times. Under the Clinton administration, we have brought music into a period of growth, of expansion, of limitlessness. But I'll tell you this: if you want a country filled with records like Relationship of Command that are light on memorable riffs from bands steeped in punk and 70's classic rock, [gestures to Bush] this... is your man.
Jim Lehrer: Governor?
George W. Bush: Creativity in music is up right now, yes. But rock music for pure rock purposes has suffered under the Clinton administration. They're trying to muck up our loud, old fashioned noise with their Washington politics and fuzzy math-rock. Now, these boys... the singing... either you love it or you hate it. But the important part is, it gets by. It gets by on a handful of truly catchy, anthemic rockers. "One Armed Scissor" is the most arena-ready of the songs on Relationship of Command. It has an infectious vocal hook. It has a punchy riff on the chorus. It gets into your subliminable mind, and it more than makes up for the quavering, affected vocalizing on the verses.
Jim Lehrer: The next--
Al Gore: Can I just say one thing about that?
Jim Lehrer: No, I'm sorry, that's--
Al Gore: Okay, alright.
Jim Lehrer: The next question will be asked by Ms. Sandra Hartford, and is for you, Governor Bush. Ms. Hartford, where are you?
Sandra Hartford: Mr. Bush, do you feel At the Drive In frontman Cedric Bixler's vocals are in need of reform?
George W. Bush: Well, I certainly won't claim to have... uh... invented them. [gasping laugh]
[polite laughter from audience]
George W. Bush: I, uh... no. I think the man is very intense. And intensity is a great thing. If I am elected President, I can promise you, it will be very, very intense.
Jim Lehrer: Vice President.
Al Gore: Ms. Hartford, I'm glad you asked this question because this is an area in which Mr. Bush and I differ. Intensity can be a great thing, but is not always. Cedric Bixler has two main vocal styles. Now, one of those is a punk rock bark that recalls Rage Against the Machine's Zack de la Rocha. The other is an operatic wail that resembles Ronnie James Dio. The self-conscious aggression of the de la Rocha bit is tiresome, I find, but the Dio channeling is odd and occasionally fun. Take "Sleepwalk Capsules," if you will, for example. In the song's chorus, he's in full-on metal god mode. You could even say his soaring pitch conjures the image of a youthful Tom Cruise sitting in the cockpit of an F-15 fighter. But under Governor Bush's plan, it would not. What he proposes is that we strip Tom Cruise naked, kill his family, burn his house and shoot down his fighter. Now, I see a time when--
Jim Lehrer: Mr. Gore, your time is up. Governor, do you have a rebuttal?
George W. Bush: Well, no.
Jim Lehrer: Then, on to the next question. This comes from Mr. Hannity Colmes and will be fielded by Vice President Gore.
Hannity Colmes: What song on Relationship of Command do you feel most encapsulates its strengths and weaknesses?
Al Gore: Definitely "Invalid Litter Dept." The slower passages of this song are really not what the American people need at this time, with its 80's metal guitar tone and know-it-all spoken word vocals. And honestly, you'll find yourself wanting to hate it. Tipper certainly hated it. But the chorus of the song is such a fist-pumping, singalong triumph you'll find yourself returning to it again and again. And that's really this album in a nutshell: alternately annoying and powerful.
Jim Lehrer: Governor Bush?
George W. Bush: In the great state of Texas, we have a saying: people with afros should be shot. [gasping laugh] People need to have consequences for their afros, and that consequence is death. During my term as Governor, I've fried hundreds of men, and it wasn't always easy. You know, sometimes the switch jammed, or we'd get low on power or something. But I know one thing: there cannot be a harsh enough penalty for bad hair. Now, technically At the Drive In have not committed a crime, but what would you do if it was your hair? What would you do if your four year-old daughter came home from school, crying, with all them products dripping down her cheeks? I'm sure you'd want the maximum penalty implemented. I know I would...


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Bill Callahan’s masterful 1999 record as Smog, a breakup album about discovering new ways of being in the world.

Knock Knock

The small South Carolina town of Prosperity, pop. 1173, didn’t necessarily seem touched by God’s good grace. It was a strange place for a musician with a growing international following to wind up, but then, Bill Callahan had bounced between a lot of strange places. Born in 1966 in Silver Spring, Maryland, and having spent part of his childhood in the North of England, where his parents did some kind of clandestine work for the NSA, he’d shuffled from city to city—Sacramento, California; Buford, Georgia; Dover, New Hampshire—rarely sticking around for long. Noncommitment came naturally: A three-time college drop-out, he’d picked up the guitar as a teen, given it up out of frustration, and then tried again. By 1997, when he landed in Prosperity, it seemed like the only reason he came was to find a reason to leave.
By this point in his career, Callahan had built a tidy little reputation as Smog. Beginning in the late ’80s, he had put out a handful of self-released tapes on his own Disaster Records, named after one of his zines; by 1992 he’d graduated to Drag City, a fledgling Chicago label cultivating a roster of acts like Pavement, Royal Trux, and Silver Jews—bands that took the willful ethos of American underground rock and flipped it into stubborn high art, scruffy and proudly nonconforming. Not exactly an outsider but definitely not an insider, he occupied a liminal space—making out-of-the-way sounds in out-of-the-way places, forever trailing rock music’s dominant strains the way a decommissioned highway shadows a six-lane interstate.
Callahan had grown up with a transistor radio pressed to his ear at night, listening first to soft-rock AM stations and then the hardcore punk he discovered at the far left of the dial, and it showed: His taste for low volumes had been tempered by the former, and his fondness for scabrous textures forged in the fires of the latter. In the beginning, Smog’s music fit the moniker: gray, formless, acrid. When Callahan played guitar, he might have been attempting to decipher hidden messages from moldy John Lee Hooker records. But over time, the outline of an actual songwriter started poking through the haze of busted stompboxes, pause-button edits, and Dadaistic pranks.
On albums like 1995’s Wild Love and the following year’s The Doctor Came at Dawn, the guitar tone became cleaner, the stereo field more uncluttered, the words darker and more biting. “I’m gonna be drunk, so drunk at your wedding,” he taunted in one song; in another, he sighed, “Maybe you should have a drink/I don’t know why you ever stopped anyway.” He could channel real ugliness, speaking the language of ne’er-do-wells and abusers, but the tenderness in his music could be as unexpected as the bile. In “To Be of Use,” he admitted in a sad, honeyed voice, “Most of my fantasies are of/Making someone else come.” As masculine myths of young adulthood go, it was the oldest story in the book: the class clown with a curdled heart, just waiting to be made whole.
Callahan’s lyrics gradually grew from post-adolescent expressions of garden-variety self-loathing into something far more unusual and often more ominous, in the sense that they seemed wrapped around actual omens—magic phrases throbbing with eerie portent. He sang of blood-red birds, a headstone on a wharf, a widow’s ghost driving a horse cart full of apples. Often, an object or a turn of phrase would keep turning up across the course of a record, like a bad penny. These imagistic verses felt like fragments of something essential and enduring, splinters of the Old Weird America that had burrowed under Callahan’s skin and burst into strange, spindly blossoms.
Callahan had come to Prosperity in 1997 to live with Chan Marshall, better known as Cat Power. The two of them were shacked up in an eight-room farmhouse next to a used-car lot, surrounded by green fields and old machines gone to rust; the rent was $425 a month. Callahan was fresh off the Jim O’Rourke–produced Red Apple Falls, an expansive breakthrough in his catalog. Marshall, to hear her tell it, had given up music for good, despite having a string of sublime and unsettling records under her own belt. But at some point in their cohabitation, things went south; Callahan drove north. He’d later say that he wrote an album’s worth of material on the drive from Prosperity to Chicago, sitting behind the wheel of his Dodge van, staring into the middle distance. Those songs would become Knock Knock, his ninth full-length as Smog, and his sixth for Drag City.
Knock Knock anticipates the openness of Callahan’s later albums, particularly the ones under his own name. The languid Red Apple Falls was a head record, a pastoral daydream of piano laments and pedal steel, flecked with French horn and fingerpicked acoustic guitar; Knock Knock is a road record, smooth as worn asphalt—a record about motion, distance, flying blind. Where before his gaze had often been fixed on lovers, exes, or his own scowl in the mirror, here he looks outward, at the world, as well as more reflexively, even beatifically, inside himself. If Red Apple Falls was a misfit’s badge of honor, Knock Knock is an unburdening, a breakup album about discovering new ways of being in the world.
Again, Callahan recorded with Jim O’Rourke; this time they spent 10 days in the studio, twice what Red Apple Falls had taken them. Drummer Thymme Jones, a Chicago fixture who had played on the previous album, returned for the new one, joined by Vandermark Five drummer Tim Mulvenna. Plush’s Liam Hayes, a session player on numerous Will Oldham records, handled guitar on some songs, while the prolific post-rock guitarist Loren Mazzacane Connors took top billing in the credits. (The lyric sheet doesn’t specify who played on what.)
To record with a full band was exhilarating, Callahan would recall: “It’s a different energy when you have three or four people playing. Knock Knock was intoxicated with that feeling. I was taking some of the responsibility off my back, and having more fun.” It didn’t hurt that O’Rourke, who also contributed guitar, bass, and piano, actually liked Callahan’s music, and was creatively invested in a way that previous studio engineers—like the one who methodically worked his way through a six-pack during recording, barely acknowledging Callahan’s presence—had not always been.
Accordingly, Knock Knock often sounds bigger and more ample than its predecessor. O’Rourke kept his experimental tendencies in check, ceding the spotlight to Callahan’s voice—warmer and fuller than it had ever been recorded before, a reluctant river of feeling lit by purple dusk—and rounding it out with gentle strokes of cello, Velvets-style motorik chug, and classic-rock choogle. The album could hardly be described as minimalist, but it is economical to the extreme; no song admits anything beyond the bare necessities required to express itself. The one indulgence they permitted themselves, in addition to a string quartet, is a children’s choir that turns up on a couple of songs, lending the grim “No Dancing” and the determined “Hit the Ground Running” an air somewhere between Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” and a camp-town revival meeting.
Callahan called Knock Knock his album for teenagers, though it’s hard to know how seriously he meant it; this was the era when he still preferred to conduct interviews by fax, and journalists often came away grumbling that they’d been made fools of. (In truth, his answers were simply smarter than the vast majority of their questions.) He told interviewers that the record cover—with its jagged lightning bolt and peevish-looking wildcat—was meant to represent objects that young folks like. “Some of the themes are things I associate with teenage years—having big plans, thinking you can live like a gypsy,” he told the Chicago Reader. “There’s a lot about moving and traveling on the record. Most adults let that die.” Even the hand-drawn text on the sleeve had a vaguely heavy-metal shape, like a band logo a kid might scrawl on his Trapper Keeper.
No stranger to classic rock, Callahan had previously sampled the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women” and referenced AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.” This time, he said, he wanted to make anthems, and he did. “Held” is an incandescent swamp rocker. Palm-muted guitars give “No Dancing” the feel of something you might have heard emanating from pickup trucks doing donuts in parking lots, the weeds littered with empties. “Hit the Ground Running” is a straight-ahead mid-tempo Southern rocker, wrapping an inspirational chorus about fleeing the country for the open road around a far bleaker frame: “Bitterness is a lowest sin/A bitter man rots from within/I’ve seen his smile, yellow and brown/The bitterness has brought him down.” Its finale, complete with perkily ascending strings and that jubilant children’s choir, is an infallible day-brightener.
These riff-heavy songs gave Knock Knock a quality that people weren’t used to hearing from Smog albums: It sounded fun. That was especially true of “Cold Blooded Old Times,” a highlight on a record that hardly wants for stellar songs. Like Callahan’s best work, “Cold Blooded Old Times” is sneaky, smuggling the evil that men do inside a deceptively appealing, practically quaint frame. Picking up the ’60s-flavored skip and shuffle of Red Apple Falls’ “Ex-Con,” it sounds at first almost peppy, a straight-up dance number complete with an irresistible, indelible chorus. (That catchiness carried it all the way to 2000’s High Fidelity soundtrack, where it featured alongside songs from the Kinks, the Velvet Underground, Elvis Costello, and Bob Dylan.) But listen past the strumming and the handclaps, and a darker picture emerges: It’s a story of abuse, of a father—whether the song’s subject’s, or someone else’s, it’s not clear—who beat his wife, terrified his children, and possibly carried out even more unspeakable acts. It is a chilling song wrapped in a cozy sweater of a chord change, with one of the all-time great lines in Callahan’s oeuvre: “Cold blooded old times/The type of memories/That turn your bones to glass.” It’s an image so vivid, so tactile, it seems almost like something you could hold in your hand—a small, glinting monument to cruelty and shame.
These uptempo tracks, even when they hid ugly secrets, were a punchy riposte to the many critics, especially in the UK, who seemed to find Callahan an incorrigible downer. One descriptor had followed him across the broad stretch of the 1990s: “miserable.” The word often took the form of “miserabilist,” an odd back-formation, kin to “ventriloquist” or “illusionist,” suggesting a person uncommonly skilled in the art of despair. And, OK, sometimes that characterization was actually kind of true. But on Knock Knock, even the slowest, softest tunes pulsed with life. Just consider “Teenage Spaceship,” a wistful song loosely based on Callahan’s adolescent habit of wandering his neighborhood in the small hours, when everyone was in bed but him. Imagining himself as a flying saucer, he describes flying around the houses at night, remote and alone, untouchable; “Landing at night/I was beautiful with all my lights,” he sings, his voice dropping down to gravel, drawing out “lights” into two exquisite syllables.
The song’s four hushed, reverent minutes are full of possible meaning. “I was a teenage smog/Sewn to the sky” calls back to one of Smog’s first albums; it also anticipates, however unknowingly, the day that Callahan would eventually abandon the alias in favor of his own name, against the protestations of his label. (“The word ‘Smog’ meant nothing to me—just like symbols on a slot machine, like a cherry or a horseshoe,” he would later say. “I realized that’s what I was broadcasting, that’s the face I was giving to people.”) Hovering eerily between his past and his future, “Teenage Spaceship”—one of the gentlest, most beautiful songs in his entire catalog—comes to appear like a beacon that cuts through time and space.
As would become standard procedure on many of Callahan’s albums, both as Smog and under his own name, Knock Knock’s 10 songs fit into a loose narrative arc. He had experimented with recurring themes on Red Apple Falls, but this was something new: an implicit story, with a beginning, middle, and end. “Let’s Move to the Country,” the opening song, sketches the broad outline of the tale: A wandering man is ready to settle down. Over skeletal, clean-toned guitar and an ostinato cello pulse, the song’s protagonist lays all his cards out on the table:

Let’s move to the country
Just you and me
My travels are over
My travels are through
Let’s move to the country
Just me and you

For a while, it’s smooth sailing. There are songs about finding security (“Held”), about confronting anxiety (“No Dancing”), about solitude (“Teenage Spaceship”). The circle closes with the album’s final, three-song stretch. By “Hit the Ground Running,” Callahan—or at least, the Callahan of the song—is behind the wheel, crossing state lines like they were sidewalk cracks. “I Could Drive Forever” is the hushed yin to “Hit the Ground Running”’s ebullient yang: a measured rumination on regret, a fuzzy dream of an infinitely receding horizon. “I should have left a long time ago/The best idea I ever had,” he sings, his voice strengthening against a watery tremolo backdrop. Weary and resigned, “Left Only With Love” wraps up the album with a farewell to the person that he has left behind, a soft expression of regret. Callahan’s unsteady voice is nearly naked but for threadbare guitar strings and velvety reverb. It is the mirror opposite of the opening song’s boundless optimism.
Of course, these songs are never simply “about” their subject or their themes, much less dependent upon the particulars of Callahan’s own existence, however much a given lyric might have been rooted in something he lived. The joy of them is in their fabric, the warp and weft of truth and lies. In moments both loud and quiet, Knock Knock feels luminous, phantasmal, hovering three feet off the ground—a thing not quite of this world. How could anyone pin such a creation on something as unremarkable as one man’s quotidian existence?
“Autobiography is not something I’m interested in,” Callahan told a blogger in 2001. He reiterated to The Independent, “I try to keep myself out of it as much as possible.” Nearly a decade later, he was still shooting down questions about the veracity of his songs, sometimes to the point of annoyance. “It really has to be that either everything is autobiography or nothing is autobiography, with nothing in between,” he told The Quietus in 2010. “That's the only way to deal with this age-old question of which I am, pardon my French, not remotely interested in.” That same query just kept coming, until finally he relaxed into something resembling a zen mindstate. “It’s music,” he told City Pages, as though such a thing might not be obvious. “It’s a creation. They’re songs. Songs are about music. They’re musicbiographical.”
One of my favorite songs on the album is the one most difficult to interpret, at least within a biographical framework. On the surface, “River Guard” is about a prison guard who takes his prisoners to a swimming hole. The mood is contemplative, daydreamy. He sits in the grass, watches them floating on their backs, then looks away. Is he toying with the idea of letting them escape? When he hauls them back in, he tells us, “They always say/Our sentences will not be served/We are constantly on trial/It’s a way to be free.” It’s a cryptic line, and a good one, good enough for him to repeat the final couplet again at the song’s end. I don’t know what it’s supposed to mean, honestly. But particularly in the context of later songs like “The Well” and “Writing,” where Callahan takes evident pleasure in grappling with the creative process itself, I wonder if it isn’t in some way about the act of interpretation. Perhaps the prisoners are his songs. “We are constantly on trial,” they say. “It’s a way to be free.” The lifeblood of a song depends on deferring final judgment, making sure the gavel never falls.
There’s another lyric on the album I come back to a lot. It’s in “Held,” a song about contentment, trust, the security of being held “like a big old baby.” There’s a lot going on in its 15 slim lines, including a blanket of ants and a jet plane exploding in the sky. But at the song’s climax, Callahan marvels, rapturously, “For the first time in my life/I am moving away moving away moving away/From within the reach of me.”
Nearly two decades later, Callahan would admit that these were not his best years. “I was kind of a little putz,” he said. “Inchoate. Wandering. I didn’t know how to be honest with myself and others, for the most part. Or at least there were certain personalities I couldn’t deal with in a healthy, self-preserving way. You can slip through the cracks and have a lot of adventures for a long time and when you get older you wonder if that was good for you, necessary, or a waste.” Whatever else “Held” might be about, it sounds like a song about growing up, or at least trying to—shedding dead skin, escaping his worst tendencies, even if just for a spell. Callahan wasn’t leaving Prosperity in order to find himself; quite the opposite. The whole album was a disappearing act. Callahan, the man, had dissipated, like a blanket of smog scattered by the north wind. What was left—what is left—were these songs: a testament to the endurance of the work, and the irrelevance and impermanence of all other concerns.


Despite fans ranging from Trent Reznor to Thom Yorke to the Coen Brothers, this L.A. neo-shoegaze band never crossed over. Six years later, they finally return.

Transit Transit

If what they say about patience is true, Autolux are amongst the most virtuous motherfuckers alive in Los Angeles. Two of its members served in Failure and Ednaswap-- respectively, some dudes who had a cup of coffee in the Buzz Bin with "Stuck on You" after the post-Nevermind boom and the band who wrote and first recorded Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn". Drummer Carla Azar had what was feared to be a career-ending elbow injury in 2002 but a risky surgery and eight screws allowed her to get back on the skins. And despite having vocal cheerleaders ranging from Trent Reznor to Thom Yorke to T-Bone Burnett to the Coen Brothers, their sophomore bow Transit Transit follows up an album that came out six years ago. For some perspective, when Future Perfect was released in 2004, Silversun Pickups was best known in L.A. as a liquor store.
Problem is, they ask the same patience of the listener on Transit Transit, without being really explicit about where the payoff lies. They occasionally dip into a bag of digital trickery-- in particular, the title track is a gripping introduction of unpredictable drum machine rattle with longing trumpet and vocal sighs akin to Radiohead's "Videotape".  For the most part, though, Autolux hone in on the same iterations of shoegaze as the Pickups. Yet despite the MBV worship, they also haven't forgotten about Swervedriver or Ride. Guitarist Greg Edwards forgoes fuzz tones almost completely, preferring gnarled, forceful chords that, combined with Azar's metallic clatter, can give Autolux some brawn. And yet, they're too hesitant to step on the gas and Transit Transit maintains a puzzling lack of urgency for an album so long in the works.
You can get an occasional jolt from the steel-girder riffs of "Census" or "Audience No. 2", yet the tempo never gets past a slow boil. Hushed electro ballads like "Highchair" and "The Bouncing Wall" could conceivably work on a subliminal level, or they can just as easily be tuned out. The sparse self-production does them no favors either, stripped down and dry as a bone but lacking the warmth and intimacy of a live performance.
It's a shame because you hate to use the term "professional" to describe a record's best asset. In a festival setting, I imagine Autolux's technical proficiency is vice tight and visceral, odd because a record like Transit Transit that (intentionally?) lacks strong hooks is usually considered one that benefits from close listens. But ultimately, it all comes back to the idea of patience in the face of a lack of memorable songs-- at some point, you have to demand to be heard and Transit Transit is the sound of three skilled musicians being all too careful not to step on each other's toes.


The third and best installment of Mexican Summer’s collaborative EP series pairs two soft-focus psychedelic bands to righteous effect.

Myths 003 EP

The charm of Marfa does not take long to take hold. On a recent weekday afternoon, I drove to the West Texas town, leaving the rugged peaks of the state’s pie-slice panhandle behind on long strips of flat blacktop that cut across the scrubby Chihuahuan Desert like tightropes. Maybe it was the blessed mix of sunshine and breeze or the pregnant stillness that seemed to lurk in the streets of the community of about 2,000 people, but everything felt suddenly at ease and open. During the last several decades, Marfa has become famous as an unexpected artist’s outpost, where city folks (sometimes controversially) move to make a permanent vacation of their vocation. And so, the outlandish happens—massive minimalist sculptures stand amid the chaparral, edgy art galleries thrive in abandoned adobe buildings, and an evocative Prada store simulacrum stands 30 miles outside of town. Wandering the streets, having a drink, or even buying groceries, I got the inexplicable sense that everything was possible, that here people had space and time to ponder something different.
That sense of sacred possibility presides over Myths 003, a little seven-song wonder conceived and cut by members of Sweden’s Dungen and Brooklyn’s Woods in 2017. It is the third and best edition of Mexican Summer’s annual Myths series, each of which has been recorded together by two acts during a weeklong residency ahead of the label’s Marfa Myths festival each spring. The event is a bit like a post-South by Southwest exhalation, a smartly conceived escape from the grab-bag madness of Austin; like its host, this festival seems more concerned with creativity than commerce.
Tourmates a decade ago and friends ever since, Dungen and Woods are both soft-focus psychedelic bands who love sharp hooks but have very distinct impulses. Woods tuck their idiosyncrasy into the crevices of their pastoral pop-rock songs, hiding their intricacies like Easter eggs. Dungen is more obviously aggressive and extroverted, splitting harmony-heavy tunes with drum solos, fantastical flute vamps, or one of Reine Fiske’s lysergic guitar solos. Those differences become shared assets here—it’s the rare collaboration where each band actually adds what it does best to the other’s song. Dungen supplies frisson to the typical drift of Woods during “Turn Around,” from the spiraling guitar lead that starts it to the piano that pounds at the horizon. Surrounded by harder edges and higher dynamics, Jeremy Earl’s slight falsetto sounds that much sweeter; it is one of the most magnetic Woods songs in years. And on the muted, Dungen-led “Jag Ville Va Kvar,” Woods insert filaments of noise and distortion, providing depth and ballast to a song that might have otherwise floated in the clouds.
Speaking of the sky, five of these seven tracks are instrumental (or, at least, wordless, sometimes deploying distorted vocals as an astral texture), suggesting stony jams simply cut to fit on an LP. But they share more direction and narrative tension than that. “Marfa Sunset” and “Morning Myth,” for instance, are a complementary serenade and aubade, fitting one another as opposite sides of a shared cycle. During “Sunset,” rays of guitar noise and glints of keyboard melodies bounce from the sides of a loping groove, fading into the distance after a busy day. But “Morning” is jittery and caffeinated, its rubbery rhythm and stunted West African guitar line practically bounding between a duet for Gustav Ejstes’ flute and Earl’s refracted vocal samples. Both tunes are concise and controlled, in accord with their functionality as music for ending or beginning the day. Even “Saint George,” the album’s six-minute epic, is well-scripted, as the bands steadily work a funk beat into an intense krautrock lather. They never lose you in the expected haze, never sacrifice the momentum of the rhythm and riff for overindulgence, even as sheets of distortion wash over it all like a flash flood. This is a righteous instrumental anthem.
For a decade, the much-missed series “In the Fishtank” pulled two bands into the studio for a few days and challenged them to make something new, to take a risk by breaking from their customs. There were, almost by design, some misses, but several of those records still feel like unexpected gifts from known quantities, as when Low met the Dirty Three or Tortoise sparred with the Ex. Three albums into the series, Myths is close to reaching those heights. On Myths 003, both Dungen and Woods seem to have found a new spark. These songs are both more urgent and exploratory than the last albums by either band, though they were both very good. There’s a real sense of shared wonder here. Maybe it was the mild heat of the high Texas desert or the spell of the mystical Marfa lights. More likely, it was four sympathetic musicians being given the space and time to do whatever they want, in a town that seems to demand only that.


Once content with tantrums, the Boston grunge-pop outfit Krill are now flirting with an almost anthemic sound. On their latest album, A Distant Fist Unclenching, frontman Jonah Furman remains self-deprecating, but there’s a purgative quality to the music that feels almost joyful.

A Distant Fist Unclenching

There was a time when you might have confused Krill with a band who cared more about actual shit than giving one. "Turd", from a 2014 EP released by the grunge-pop Boston slackers, found frontman Jonah Furman imagining himself as the titular piece of fecal matter. "If I could just be ate/ At least someone might say I was worthy," he sings, resigned to a life as an undigested peanut.
So yeah, Krill are a little juvenile and a lot insecure—the title of that EP, Steve Hears Pile in Malden and Bursts into Tears, refers to Krill’s admiration for (and low-key jealousy of) fellow Bostonians and Exploding in Sound label-mates Pile. On Lucky Leaves, Krill’s borderline-paranoid 2013 album, Furman defended the right to feel like a failure. But in the year that followed the release of Steve, something changed. "I was thinking about how Lucky Leaves had all of this sad shit, and I believed in it and totally agree with it, but I wanted to see where you could go after that," Furman told Rolling Stone last month. The result is the band’s best album to date, the bigger, brighter and bolder A Distant Fist Unclenching, which locates a weird confidence in the universality of our individual anxieties.
Pile-worship aside, Fist finds more evident kinship with another band just a few hundred miles north: Montreal's Ought, whose More Than Any Other Day was one of last year’s finest indie rock releases. Both Furman and Ought’s Tim Beeler deal in open-ended questions and nervous tics, suggesting worried young men striving for uncommon lives. Though Fist has more passion than anything Krill have done, Furman is still a dyspeptic figure, asking God to grant him strength to deal with his "brain problem."
But for all of Furman’s neuroses, there’s a purgative quality to Fist that feels almost joyful. It helps that the band has become powerful enough to lift Furman out of his own head for a little while, boosted also by cleaner production and more distinctive guitar work. Their secret weapon remains drummer Ian Becker, whose dynamics and off-kilter rhythms keep everyone on their toes. Once content with mere tantrums, Krill are now flirting with an almost anthemic sound, with songs like "Squirrels" and "Brain Problem" climaxing in ways big enough to inspire listeners to keep their fists not only clenched, but aloft.
Fist will present a few sticking points for some listeners, the most notable being Furman’s voice. Like an unfortunate cross between Eef Barzelay and Jeremy Freedman (plus a little Bobcat Goldthwait for when he gets really riled up), it scans anywhere from vaguely comical in its jittery frogginess to weirdly precious. And while he's deft with odds turn of phrase, Furman is often too reliant on metaphors either too simple ("It Ends") or too open-ended to connect. But when they get it right, like on the stuttering S&M allegory "Torturer", everything clicks into place.
Above all else, A Distant Fist Unclenching is an album about embracing clarity in the face of constant, nagging doubt ("To be given one shot, and to know I could blow it," Furman wails on "Squirrels"). On seven-minute centerpiece "Tiger", the titular unclenched fist appears "in the distance," but "in the nearness," Furman sings, "there is a bad day ending." Though Krill aren’t quite ready to let go of the anxieties that inspired them to write their eccentricities in excrement in the first place, Fist suggests that there is light at the end of the sewer drain.

Exploding in Sound / Double Double Whammy


Working with producer Mark Ronson to get the best 1960s-style production sound money can buy, Black Lips have crafted a very solid album.

Arabia Mountain

There comes a time in every rock'n'roll band's career when they have to decide whether to get out of the garage or stay mired in the grease. Black Lips seem to want it both ways. With the release of their fourth studio album, 2007's Good Bad Not Evil, the Atlanta rockers saw their audience expand well beyond the garage-punk underground, thanks to a new alliance with Vice that yielded fawning New York Times profiles, Conan O'Brien appearances, and Virgin Mobile ad placements. At the time, a Hives-sized crossover success didn't seem out of the question, but the Lips seemed to handily kibosh that possibility with 2009's 200 Million Thousand, a sprawling mess that seemed designed to prove Black Lips could still out-scuzz and out-slop the lowest of the lo-fi.
The band's decision to record Arabia Mountain with Amy Winehouse producer Mark Ronson is surprising, not because they're at odds aesthetically-- the two camps do share an affinity for 1960s retro recording techniques-- but because of the timing: hooking up with an A-list producer is the sort of move that would've made more sense two years ago, to capitalize on Good Bad Not Evil's mainstream-breaching momentum. But whether they're responding to Vice's vocal dissatisfaction with 200 Million Thousand or following the example of their late friend Jay Reatard-- whose 2009 swan song Watch Me Fall saw him cleaning up his buzzsaw-pop sound without compromising his essence-- Black Lips seem more eager to play ball this time around. And unlike previous cautionary examples of garage-rock bands teaming up with Top 40 hitmakers (the Hives and Pharrell, the Mooney Suzuki and the Matrix), Ronson thankfully doesn't try to make Black Lips into something they're not.
Though an early single had the loaded title "New Direction", Arabia Mountain sticks to the same Nuggets-style playbook that's governed all previous Black Lips releases. Ronson, who produced nine songs and mastered another two recorded with Deerhunter's Lockett Pundt, simply gives the band the most faithful faux-60s production money can buy. If anything's changed here, it's Black Lips' point of emphasis on the Nuggets spectrum: Arabia Mountain draws less from the sinister psychedelia of the 13th Floor Elevators or the deranged blues of early Beefheart, and more from the toga-party-rockin' likes of the Sonics and the Premiers. So it favors the more amiable aspects of 60s garage-- frathouse-rocking saxophones, songs inspired by comic-book superheroes and baseball mascots, and grooooovy singing saw-- over anti-authoritarian attitudes and fuzzbox abuse.
Black Lips have never been shy about showing off their playful side, but in the past, these moments (Let It Bloom's poignant, poor-boy ballad "Dirty Hands", Good Bad Not Evil's outsider anthem "Bad Kids", 200 Million Thousand's sober-up pledge "Starting Over") nicely complemented their more raucous rave-ups, revealing a sincere softer side to the band's notorious delinquent image. With Arabia Mountain exuding a mostly cheeky and cheerful demeanor, you do lose some of the oppositional tension between innocence and insolence that always distinguished Black Lips from the garage-punk pack. And with a somewhat bloated 16-song tracklist, the album's abundance of open-roof Thunderbird anthems-- "Go Out and Get It", "Time", "New Direction"-- starts to feel somewhat interchangeable.
But Arabia Mountain's chiseled production and considerably tighter songcraft provides a better forum for showcasing the band's subversive sense of humor. The best songs here play up the dichotomy between their retro sound and modern preoccupations: bad acid trips at the Louvre (the Yardbirds-ish freakbeater "Modern Art"), exotic fad diets (the breezy Beach Boys-via-Ramones romp "Raw Meat"), and post-recession survival tactics (the spot-on country-Stones send-up "Dumpster Diving"). And in anticipation of those old-school fans who might view Arabia Mountain as a calculated act of careerism, the Lips throw a late-game curveball with the queasy closer "You Keep on Running", a creepy haunted-house trawl that finds Cole Alexander issuing the title's warning in a high-pitched squeal that's equally unnerving and silly. Its inclusion sends a none-too-subtle message to anyone who thinks they've got Black Lips all figured out: Arabia Mountain may be poised to push this band further over-ground, but they're not going up without a fight.


On their new album, Fifth Harmony are at their best when grappling with the age-old girl-group concern of how to reconcile independence with love.

7/27

If “The X Factor” has done one good thing in its many years of manufactured drama and purposeful audition mockery, it’s near-singlehandedly keeping alive the decades-old tradition of the pop girl group in the West. While they never disappeared worldwide—girl groups and their alumnae dominate J- and K-pop, for instance—the only two Western girl groups with consistent pop clout are the UK’s Little Mix and the States’ Fifth Harmony, both products of their respective countries’ “X Factors.”
There are some downsides to this. Most groups that get far on “The X Factor” are assembled from failed solo auditions, and while plenty of girl groups are unglamorously cobbled together via some backstage machination or other, it’s one thing to know that and another to watch five solo hopefuls get rejected on live-TV and then jettisoned into a band with three consecutive names slapped onto it, one of which was a Bruno Mars family act and one of which was a Musiq Soulchild song. And while the “X Factor” process selects for vocal talent and marketable personality, it rarely selects for the two together; what you end up with are a lot of singers with indistinguishably winning voices and #winning presence. Fifth Harmony’s early singles sounded less like the work of a coherent group than a diva scrimmage, each singer trying to outperform the rest—inevitably, because that’s literally what they came on the show hoping to do.
It’s been several years and hits since then, though, and Fifth Harmony’s had some time to grow into themselves. The first track on *7/27—*the day the group originally formed—is as good a State of the Cowell-Administered Union as any. It begins like a retread of past hit “Worth It,” down to the deliberately squawky sax beat, but soon becomes a pep talk for fans complete with cheerleader whoops, a call to (immaculately toned) arms, and a showcase for each vocalist, now with discernibly individual personae: Ally on lead and Dinah on backup, Normani with the near-rap, Lauren’s cool alto balancing Camila’s Ring Pop of a voice. (Rumors of the latter being groomed for a solo career, at least as of this album, are exaggerated; 7/27 is as vocally egalitarian as any girl-group album of the past decade or so, and better for it.) It’s easily the best potential single the group’s ever released.
It also sounds exactly like 2003—specifically, like a cut off Christina Aguilera’s Back to Basics or Mya’s Moodring. An even eerier flashback comes with “Not That Kinda Girl,” which rehashes the look-don’t-touch theme that was everywhere in pop in ‘03 and adds Missy Elliott, who as usual lately is operating at maybe 50% of peak but is welcome nevertheless because 50% of peak Missy is still pretty damn good. The echoes of early-'00s R&B radio  seem to say more about the length of the pop nostalgia cycle than anything about Fifth Harmony in particular, which points to a larger issue: For all the group’s done to establish each singer vocally, they’ve yet to pin down a sonic identity, nor a lyrical identity beyond vague empowerment, and 7/27 dutifully triangulates every trend and radio format of the past couple years. There’s stuttery, pitch-shifted EDM with “The Life.” There’s the fake r&bass track “Work From Home,” wherein Dr. Luke protégé Ammo imitates rap producers imitating DJ Mustard. There’s even diluted reggae and Fetty Wap collaboration, both on “All in My Head (Flex),” which samples Mad Cobra’s “Flex.” About half the tracks have tropical-house synths stuck in like cocktail umbrellas.
Unsurprisingly, the trendier the track, the worse Fifth Harmony showcase it proves. Several of the songs also suffer from brutally protracted lyrical metaphors that function as near-parodies of pop song form. It’s not entirely Fifth Harmony’s fault, for instance, that r&bass ceased to be a thing well before “Work from Home,” or that everyone missed Jordin Sparks’ near-identical 2015 single called “Work From Home,” or even that everyone (somehow) missed a certain megastar’s No. 1 single about work-work-work-work-work-work. It’s definitely their fault that this single involves a lot of metaphorically sexing up the freelance life, which is perhaps the least sexy labor arrangement in world history. (More accurate first verse: “worried about basically everything, wearing ripped pajamas”). Or that only Ty Dolla $ign—whose verse is one big leadup to a T-Pain-esque “put in overtime on your *booooddddyyyyyyyy!”—*takes the material as seriously as he should, which is to say not at all.
Like most girl groups, Fifth Harmony trades in the kind of pop-cultural press-quote feminism where the group can say they are out squash gender roles and “gender-institutionalized thinking” while recording a fantasy of a stay-at-home sexter reassuring the household breadwinner that he’s the boss at home. And like girl groups historically, they grapple with how to reconcile that independence with love. The original girl groups were as liable to record love songs as wistful, even macabre cautionary tales. Modern groups Little Mix and Spice sing love songs, but they couldn’t be more obvious that their heart belongs to their besties. Destiny’s Child, with few exceptions, repudiated love entirely: “if you ain’t in love, I congratulate you.”
7/27, though, approaches the subject with full abandon. “I Lied” thoroughly rescues its conceit from Michael Bolton hell and turns it into a sighing, feverish surge reminiscent of “Countdown.” Bonus track “Dope” is even more crushed-out, with a track that sounds like jittering through the whole runtime of a slow jam and lines delivered like so many words to stumble over en route to the big confession: “I don’t know what else to say, but you’re pretty fucking dope.” It strikes that rarest of balances for crush songs—confident but skittish, sure of one’s exact feelings but clueless about what to do next, independent but nevertheless absolutely swooningly done for—and also feels like a first. Mediocre girl-group material is a cartoon simulation of women’s lives. Good girl-group material reflects them. Great girl-group material recasts them in 3D with all the color cranked up. Finally, albeit in flashes, there are hints that Fifth Harmony may reach that peak.


The Big Thief drummer excels at creating ambient worlds, and his second release under his own name evokes the spine-tingling sensations of ASMR as well as a persistent anxiety.

James Krivchenia: A New Found Relaxation

A New Found Relaxation

James Krivchenia’s second record under his own name, A New Found Relaxation, creates a sterile, imaginary world of spa days and mineral baths, and was largely recorded near the New Mexico town of Embudo. The community of approximately four hundred along the Rio Grande, where the Big Thief drummer lived for a year and a half, is not a wellness getaway by any means. But because Krivchenia melds his recordings with Muzak, spa radio, and clips designed to induce Autonomous Meridian Sensory Response (ASMR), A New Found Relaxation suggests a New Mexico healing experience that’s both IRL and online. The samples move quickly, spiking the ambience with appropriate doses of anxiety.
Krivchenia recorded some of the album’s 500 fragments at home, while messing around online with his computer plugged into pedals and effects processors. His resulting patchwork of gurgling internet rips and field recordings is expertly arranged, which makes sense, considering Krivchenia’s pedigree as the recording engineer for Big Thief's debut Masterpiece and the most recent album by the underappreciated Mega Bog. He’s put out deconstructed dance music under the alias 1000000000s, and on 2018’s No Comment, he reworked body-camera audio of warfare and gun violence into a discomfiting collage. Like No Comment, A New Found Relaxation is a conceptual record.
But while No Comment was full of doctored samples that bore little relation to their disturbing source material, the stems on A New Found Relaxation are evident underneath layers of loops. It’s drumless and fairly placid, in keeping with the new-age theme. Water predominates, and the song “Legendary Liquids” even shares a name with a hugely popular ASMR video. Yet instead of trying to elicit a euphoric, physiological response, Krivchenia undercuts the world of wellness with consistent drones. The stereo panning on “Loveless But Not Joyless,” for example, feels paranoid, as though a sedating video is playing in one ear while dissonant noise rumbles through the other. Talking ruins the sensory experience, as anyone who’s spent time exploring ASMR videos knows. Krivchenia’s soundscapes seem to mumble away like a nervous internal monologue.
He certainly isn’t the first contemporary electronic musician to comment on ASMR’s spine-tingling sensations and the YouTube stars commited to provoking them. Composers like Holly Herndon and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith have approached the phenomenon with eyes toward satire and reverence, respectively, while fetishizing the videos’ audiophile-grade sounds. The relative scrappiness of Krivchenia’s take centers the same source material around his life in New Mexico. Perhaps tellingly, he left the region for Los Angeles at the end of 2019. Listening to the album, it’s easy to imagine him jittery in Embudo, trying to stay calm and appreciate his surroundings. Feeling preoccupied in a remote location of natural beauty is a singularly disorienting experience. Is the problem with the area and its culture? Or is the problem with you? A New Found Relaxation never answers these questions, which makes it work as music, rather than wellness philosophy: Krivchenia passes us through all of the necessary, agitating trials of the self before we can breathe our first sigh of relief.


Nic Oogjes’ lounge-lizard alter ego makes heady, gleefully ridiculous no wave pastiche held together by flamboyance and a predilection for showmanship.

Cong!

As de facto leader of Melbourne dance-punk collective NO ZU, Nic Oogjes is known as a party starter: a singlet-and-suit-clad frontman who yaps and yowls as the sometimes 10- or 11-piece band behind him whips up frantic, ESG and Liquid Liquid-indebted grooves. Over the past decade, NO ZU and their self-described “heat beat” have developed a cult audience on the Australian touring circuit—a feat that, for Oogjes, has come with drawbacks. “NO ZU has become a big beast with (perceived) expectations associated and a lot of members to organize,” he said last year. “I really needed a more immediate, free-er and efficient outlet.”
He found it in an alter ego anagram, Cong Josie: a cokey, coquettish lounge lizard more likely to be found prowling the club after the other partygoers have gone home. On Cong!, his first album as Cong Josie, Oogjes eschews NO ZU’s hot-blooded funk influences in favor of touchpoints from the chillier end of the no wave spectrum—namely Suicide. Drawing from the sounds of downtown New York in the 1970s but littered with references to ultra-specific Australian iconography, Cong! is a heady, gleefully ridiculous piece of genre pastiche held together by Oogjes’ flamboyance and predilection for showmanship.
Oogjes wears his references so proudly, and wrings so much out of them, that Cong! risks coming across as little more than hero worship. He is a clear Alan Vega Martin Rev devotee: Most every track on Cong! is anchored by chintzy synths and hard-edged, plasticky basslines that give the whole record an insistent, strung-out atmosphere. “Leather Whip,” a louche highlight, feels like “Diamonds, Fur Coat, Champagne” with a little less sparkle—“Rhinestones, Velour, Cava,” perhaps. Like Alan Vega drooling out signifiers of nightlife luxury until they’re little more than sounds, Oogjes repeats the song’s title with an elastic, rockabilly quiver in his voice, a distended parody of sadism and machismo.
Produced by Oogjes and written with NO ZU’s Cayn Borthwick, Cong! covers a surprising amount of ground within its relatively spare palette: the sax-gilded stomp of “Flamin’ Heart” is a theatrical, villainous highlight, while “Wedding Bells” sounds like ’60s girl-group pop remade as slow, rimy EBM. A lot of the album is extremely funny, too, toying with the absurdity of Australiana, as on “Snake Oil Speeder,” a largely unintelligible track in which detached bits of animal names—“goanna,” “red-headed,” “thorny”—float to the surface like pond scum. You can practically picture Oogjes on QVC, a soused, gimlet-eyed hustler selling tonics made of echidnas and spiders to unwitting city folk.
On “Cong the Singer,” one of the record’s best tracks, Oogjes narrates one of Cong Josie’s misadventures as if he were some kind of rock god, peppering the story with painfully mundane markers of Melbourne suburbia—the EastLink freeway, Springvale Road—as if they were Sunset and Vine. Delivered in an ocker deadpan instead of his usual rockabilly moan, the monologue is a charming, edge-softening moment: It recontextualizes Cong! as not just a piece of no wave fetishism but a pulpy fantasy dreamed up from the suburban fringes—a vision wherein the gray suburban roads of Oogjes’ youth led to electrifying avant-garde nightlife, rather than linoleum-floored RSL clubs and drab strip malls.
Even if you can’t connect to this very Australian—and, in a sense, very Gen X and millennial—subtext, Oogjes is still a consummate entertainer, and even at its most parochial, Cong! is enjoyable, tightly produced EBM that never takes itself too seriously. The energy that made Oogjes such a magnetic bandleader in NO ZU is plain to see: Whether he’s delivering his words in a porny, sweat-dampened shudder or a rubbery, drunken wail reminiscent of Chris Isaak, his presence is undeniable. His tone often seems to be more important than the lyrics, which are frequently lost among his slurred croons. Sometimes, a phrase comes through (“With you, I’ll never never be blue,” he sings on “Persephone,” a touching song written for his daughter) but even when they don’t, the vibe is never lost. Cong! runs on karaoke principles: If you sing with enough feeling, do words even matter?

Buy: Rough Trade
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