An unrivaled classic, Supreme Clientele marked a seismic rupture with rap tradition. It’s Tony Starks, invulnerable and silvery, casting stream-of-consciousness hexes from a general who survived hell.

Supreme Clientele

____In the fall of 1997, Ghostface Killah decamped to West Africa. His diabetes had become cataclysmic: dizziness, blurred vision, bloodshot eyes, and concussive headaches. He hadn’t quit drinking, which didn’t help; nor did the joints laced with angel dust he still smoked from time to time.
Even before the diagnosis, he convinced himself of his impending demise, fearing cancer, though more likely AIDS. When medical professionals finally tested his blood sugar it was 500 mg/dl. Anything above 550 is considered fatal.
Wary of Western medicine, Ghostface flew to Benin to be treated by a bush doctor in a remote village several hours outside of Cotonou, the nation’s most populous city. Running water was non-existent. The inhabitants lived in mud huts and slept on the floor. When the RZA showed up to meet Ghostface, he saw his bandmate materialize in a dashiki, full beard, and unkempt hair puffed out. RZA had brought Kung Fu flicks—specifically Blade of Fury—which they watched alone as honored guests, the tribe’s children looking on in awe of them and the village’s only TV.
The spiritual nucleus of Supreme Clientele spawns from that pilgrimage. That’s where Tony Starks wrote “Nutmeg” and several other album tracks in a purge of voodoo spirits, occidental poisons, and crazy visions. It’s a masterpiece of comic absurdity and cosmic exorcisms, existential paradox and mathematic precision.
In an attempt to save his life, he seeks out a medicine man in his ancestral homeland and achieves esoteric and sobering realizations about existence. Sans beats, the Wallabee Champ scrawls countless transmissions snatched from the thundering din in his head. It’s as if Muhammad returned from the cave of Hira to prophesize revelations of seasoned giraffe ribs, Scooby Snacks, dancing with the most sexually vibrant member of the *Golden Girls, *and how his dick made a magazine cover (“count how many veins on it”).
About two years later, a fully clothed Starks actually made the cover of The Source and explained the knowledge self-obtained in Africa.
“Fuck all this Tommy Hilfiger, Polo…all this shit…they don’t give a fuck about none of that over there. Everything is the same,” Ghostface said. “But over here, everybody wanna be better than the next one…They might be fucked up, money-wise, but trust me, them muthafuckas is happy, man. Them niggas in harmony ‘cause they got each other.”
Mind you, Pretty Toney delivers this soliloquy while smoking a Newport in a suite at the Waldorf Astoria in Midtown, Manhattan, wearing an ankle-length, royal blue robe with a custom-embroidered “W” on the back. The entire time he’s enraged that “BET Rap City” isn’t playing the video for “Apollo Kids”—the one where he’s swaddled in mink coats and eating a golden ice cream cone.
This is Ghost, naturally ridiculous, the supreme smart dumb cat, the genius who embodies the innate contradictions of late American capitalism, gobbling Chinese herbs and getting acupuncture during the day and smoking dust and dodging bullets at night, capable of staggering misogyny and deep reverence towards women. He is both yin and yang, not just from song to song, but syllable to syllable.
He continues about his Africa trip:
“You see them kids that’s on TV? With flies on they face…I don’t like to see that. There’s no reason in this world with all this money that we got, for those babies to be over there with…big stomachs and shit like that,” Ghost adds. “I’m one of them niggas that’ll bring them into their muthafuckin’ family, I don’t give a fuck if it’s ten of them. I’ll get them.”
If Ghost ever adopted ten sub-Saharan kids, it was never mentioned on Couples Therapy. Other interviews followed in which he spoke of lofty plans to recruit Oprah Winfrey and Magic Johnson to help him build a school for the indigent children of Benin. And while his follow-through was shaky, his sincerity was unmatched. He also had a good excuse, considering the grave legal turmoil shadowing him during the recording of Supreme Clientele.
Parole Kids Live Rapunzel
The District Attorney threatened Dennis Coles with “five to 15” if he didn’t cop a plea to attempted robbery charges stemming from an incident outside of the Palladium back in 1995. While parked at the venue, someone slashed Ghost’s tires and a brawl ensued between Starks and his crew against the Palladium attendants. One valet claimed that Ghost tried to rob him. None of this ends well.
As his attorney negotiated for better terms, blue and red lights flashed once again. This time, a friend named Dupree Lane got pulled over as Ghost trailed in a caravan behind. Using “disorderly conduct” as the pretext to search Ghost’s car, cops found a .357 Magnum loaded with hollow-point bullets hidden behind the glove compartment. Ironman was wearing a bulletproof vest—another felony charge.
Throughout this entire period, the NYPD and F.B.I. attempted to launch a RICO case against the Wu, who they branded a “major criminal organization.” It’s bizarre to weigh these accusations in the wake of Method Man starring in network sitcoms, the RZA bong-bonging all over Californication, and Ghostface doing full-length collaborations with Canadian jazz prodigies scarcely old enough to sip Alizé. But just consider the abridged list of alleged criminology: illegal gunrunning, weapons possession, homicide, carjackings, and a bi-coastal drug ring. They attempted to pin the murders of two drug dealers on a hit ordered by RZA and Raekwon. According to the Bureau, Wu-Tang Records was little more than a front for laundering money, which ostensibly explains why RZA kept releasing Wu-Syndicate and Sunz of Man albums.
Even before Ghost copped a plea to rot on Rikers Island for four months, Supreme Clientele’s plotline already felt like Martin Scorsese directing Shaft in Africa. As for the incarceration, it’s difficult to gauge its impact beyond the obvious delays. In the press cycle leading up to Supreme Clientele’s release in February of 2000, Starks attempted to downplay its severity.
One MTV interview describes it as a disguised blessing that allowed him to further refine the record. In* Stress Magazine*, he contextualizes it as a cruel but mundane reality that many young American black men are forced to endure. The liner notes dedicate a section to "my niggas in the Belly": Big Un, Ready Red, Mushy Mush, General, Wah aka Freedom, Born, Shaquel Dueprey Allah from the O Building, and Peace Lord.
Most revealing was a SPIN interview, where he explained its physical ramifications—the times the prison guards refused to give him a proper dose of insulin, causing extreme vertigo and sickness.
“I hold on to times when I had to struggle,” Ghost said. “That’s the science of going through hell and having to come out right—because everybody gots to go through hell to come out right.”
Rather than script a conventional narrative about this purgatory, Ghost focuses on the fractured chaos of the world that led him to the pen. On “Buck 50,” he pauses mid-seduction to tell a woman to “check the grays on the side of my waves/I grew those on Rikers Island/Stressed out, balled up in the cage.” In the next breath, he shouts out Clyde Drexler’s hops, Biggie’s Versace’s, Zulu Nation in the ’80s, and how quickly his back got chiseled after two weeks in the gym. Then he quotes Mary Poppins and eats grouper in Cancun. You’re dealing with Supreme Clientele.
This Rap Is Like Ziti
It was supposed to be called *Ironman. *Instead, the RZA insisted that Ghost bestow that name on his debut album because everyone already knew him as Tony Starks. It just made more sense, marketing-wise. So Ironman dominated the fall of late ’96, the last of that royal flush of solo classics leading up to *Wu-Tang Forever. *It clocked over 800,000 CDs and tapes and debuted at No. 2 on the charts. RZA was probably right.
But if you re-listen to* Ironman*, it’s dark and wounded, the opposite of bulletproof steel. “Wildflower” and “Marvel” are scorched-earth breakup songs, all salted wounds and fresh infection. The plaintive “All That I Got is You” transforms the claustrophobic nightmare of the Staten Island projects into a gorgeous hymn about how a mother’s love conquers all. Ghost was still so heavy in the streets that he accidentally led the Delfonics into a shootout on a recording session gone awry. On the cover, Raekwon and Cappadonna receive co-billing, lending it the feel of an Only Built 4 Cuban Linx sequel more than a radical break from the Wu cosmology.
By Woodstock ‘99, critics and fans wondered if Wu-Tang were washed. Hindsight remembers it as a classic, but most reviews indicted the bloat and filler of 1997’s Wu-Tang Forever. A biblical flood ruined RZA’s studio, waterlogging hundreds of beats and hastening his baptism into Bobby Digital. Method Man and GZA’s follow-up albums disappointed everyone without a “W” tattooed on their clavicle, while Raekwon dropped the biggest No. 2 brick since Sam Bowie. The dollar bins of America were strangled with Shaq’s first record, Toad the Wet Sprocket, and innumerable Wu-Tang C-Listers sworn to omertà in exchange for a release date and two True Master beats.
Into the void Ghostface swaggered, inhaling breakbeats of hell, hitting mics like Ted Koppel, cham-punching Mase, and slapping crooked reverends so hard condoms, dice, and dope fell out of their pockets; sticking up rappers for their chains on New Year’s Eve in Cali and divulging no names; sprinkling snow inside the Optimo and sipping Remy Martin on diamonds. Supreme Clientele is Ironman. It’s invulnerable and silvery, the stream-of-consciousness hexes from a general who survived hell. A shade short of 30, Ghostface had been shot three times, survived multiple stints on Rikers Island, a debilitating battle with diabetes, and mourned the loss of two brothers with muscular dystrophy to become chromatic myth. He’d made religious pilgrimages to the motherland, slept on mud floors and hospital gurneys, prison cots, and silk sheets in $1,000-a-night hotel rooms. Now he was being tasked to save the Wu-Tang Clan.
To understand Supreme Clientele is to be humbled by epistemological limitations. You can see, feel, and taste it, but it can only be decrypted to a point. It’s a psychedelic record moored in reality. The ‘90s didn’t really end on 9/11; the ashes got incinerated with the smoke of RZA’s honey-dipped spliff.
Practically nothing is known about its recording process. In NYC, Starks demolished mics at the Hit Factory, Track, Quad Studios and the Wu’s own 36 Chambers compound in midtown. A trip to Miami yielded “Ghost Deini.” Out of a thousand beats, Ghost selected barely over a dozen. They mostly came from RZA, Mathematics, Inspectah Deck, Carlos “6 July” Broady of The Hitman, and Juju from The Beatnuts. All were logical picks if you’re trying to construct a great New York rap album circa 2000.
Out of a sped-up Solomon Burke loop came “Apollo Kids,” courtesy of Hassan of the UMCs, Staten Island’s first major rap crew. His discogs page shows nothing after Supreme Clientele.  A semi-anonymous producer named Carlos Bess furnished his biggest hit “Cherchez La Ghost,” a cocaine opera about Tommy Mottola getting dumped, where U-God brags about busting through condoms and drinking mediocre lime rum. These are the things you can’t account for.
Consider that the beat for “Nutmeg” came from Ghost’s barber, Arthur, who cut hair on Staten Island. Somehow, the only major production credit of Black Moes-Art’s career is one of the hardest beats in history, a clean fade sliced from a forgotten 12” originally cut by Eddie Holman, the falsetto behind “(Hey There) Lonely Girl.” It sounds like he made it for a Saturday morning cartoon about the overcrowded projects of Alpha Centauri where everyone’s hands are semi-automatics; the only currency is angel dust, and the high priest cuts hair in a plutonium suit.
The common denominator was the RZA. He assembled and mixed them, adding uniform layers of grime and radioactivity, bizarre alarms and a dense twisted paranoia. It’s soul music transmogrified into gleaming metal, a tank covered in diamonds. The instrumentals sound like they’re ranting right back at Ghost, who sounds like he’s dripping blood onto the mic stand. As Chris Rock said about those cadaverous scratches on “Stroke of Death,” it makes you want to stab your babysitter.
Supreme Clientele established the template for what Kanye did later on *Yeezus**. *Assemble an arsenal of heat and desecrate it to your personal satisfaction. It’s no coincidence. In Kanye West in the Studio, West claims, “I feel like I got my whole style from Ghostface…my whole mentality about hip-hop.” He later explains that many of the soul-chops that wound up on The Blueprint were originally intended for Ghostface until Jay Z heard them.
A few years ago, Mathematics laid out how it all happened. The RZA protégé never really topped “Mighty Healthy,” the original first single that Kanye lifted for “New God Flow.” It evokes a rare twinkling evil, like some velvet afterlife where you are condemned to sip Ginger Ale and watch Kung Fu movies for eternity. “That whole time period, [Ghostface] had a glow about him,” Mathematics said to HipHopDX. “That was how that whole Supreme Clientele came about. It was because of that glow.”
Maybe that’s the most appropriate metaphor for this album. Ghost had the sort of nuclear phosphorescence that people use to explain what they can’t explain. He rapped like he was a sacred vessel for ancient spirits with a preternatural ardor for Teddy Pendergrass. Ghost says it himself, these are “graveyard spells.” Fog your goggles.
Crushed Out Heavenly
On Supreme Clientele, Ghostface does nothing short of revolutionize the English language. Words like tidal waves drown you as you gulp for air, just trying to tread water and interpret what was said four bars ago. Ears twitch, you catch the aroma of Kansas fried chicken as it whips past, the grievous ululations of mothers mourning their dead sons. It’s like a Weegee photograph of the late Giuliani era, but simultaneously a proto-Adult Swim hallucination where Apollo Kids lounge on gilded thrones, sipping wine coolers in King Tut hats.
“The knowledge is how it sounds,” he said to The Source. “See we funny niggas. I’m a give you a little jewel. A lot of funny niggas know how to rap. The slang that we be saying G, it could mean whatever at that time. We say everything. ‘Lobsterhead.’ Come on man. If a nigga fit that type of category, then he a lobsterhead. It’s just that—slang. It’s real, but it’s what it means at that time.”
If hip-hop’s original rule was the Wild Style, Supreme Clientele shatters every precept while still respecting the foundation. There are scratches, breakbeats, and the (mostly) good-natured insanity to be the greatest. It’s the wildest style, rap stretched to silly putty lengths, as far as you can go without falling off the edge of the needle. There’s the DNA of Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, Biz Markie, Rammellzee, Slick Rick, Ultramagnetic MCs and Kool Keith, but this marked a seismic rupture with tradition. It was art-rap made for the asphalt—the closest that hip-hop ever came to Ulysses, and not only because Joyce described the “snotgreen sea” and Ghost conjured a “booger-green Pacer.” Both Joyce and Ghost understand that basic idea that a “man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”
At times, Supreme Clientele accidentally channels Raymond Chandler translating A Season in Hell. At others, the dirty nasal bark summons Donald Goines on DMT or Lewis Carroll in the slithy toves of Stapleton, where the ambulance don’t come. Ghost intuitively realized what André Breton claimed was the definition of surrealism: the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella. How else to categorize the man who arranged the combination of words, “Dicking down Oprah, jump rope/David Dinkins/Watch the black mayor of D.C. hit the mocha.”
You could spend all day deciphering “Malcolm,” with its snippet of Malcolm X condemning the “corrupt, vicious, and hypocritical system that has castrated the black man.” The description of an anonymous phantom as the one “that cut his wrists, talkin’ bout the cuffs did it/He bantamweight, frontin’ majorly/Eyes like Sammy Davis Jr.” He divines the phrase, “Dream merchant tucked in the cloud,” fingers Pamela Lee, and dares someone to make him “catch a Kennedy.” One skit chronicles the travails of a crackhead named after a World War I President. Another mercilessly threatens 50 Cent. For whatever reason, he finishes “Stroke of Death” by bellowing, “White man scream, SWIM STARKS SHARKS!”
Left off the album was a twisted soul death ballad alternately called “In the Rain,” “Wise,” or “In the Rain (Wise).” Ghost claimed that he wrote it stoned on the beach in Florida during a torrential downpour upon learning that one of his best friends had been murdered. The more he wrote, the more the storm thrashed until it ceased four or five hours later; then he stood up with tears in his eyes, noticed a pyramid in the sand, walked around it three times, uttered an “All praises due Allah” incantation, and returned home. He apparently laid it down in Detroit with The Dramatics, the Detroit Orchestra, and Motown guitarist Dennis Coffey. I only know this from the liner notes of the album that I purchased in 2000. The actual song was not on my CD. The tracklist is completely wrong too. In this parallel universe, it makes perfect sense.
Through this warped and sinistral way, Supreme Clientele is about love. *Ironman *unmasked a scorned Lothario simultaneously trying to establish himself as an elite rapper like Raekwon, Method Man, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and GZA. It’s a competitive record with something to prove. But here Ghost sounds like he just fucking loves rapping. And he loves children in Africa. And he loves ’70s and ’80s New York. And he loves 2Pac and Biggie and Malcolm and Marvin Gaye and anyone who stood for something. He loves mink coats, cognac, baked ziti, and Allah. He’s extraordinarily pro-black, not because he’s anti-anyone else, but because he profoundly loves his people for their soul, strength, and common heritage.
He loves his crew, who roll deep alongside him: from Trife on the outro of "One" to Superb popping up everywhere, to the posse cuts "We Made It", "Buck 50" and "Wu Banga 101.” It’s Ghost’s show, but the experience of recording it doesn’t sound solitary. He loves them so deeply because he’s acutely aware of how quickly this mirage can vanish. On “We Made It,” Starks celebrates another victory by just a thin thread of electric current. Before 2000 ends, one of its guest rappers, Chip Banks became a chalk outline memory in Harlem, murdered over a small cash dispute, barely 30 years old. Eight children left behind. It’s one more reminder that this was his life’s work—not merely something great made in a crazy period, but the only way that period could have ended.
There’s an old Ghostface quote where he simplifies rap to the most basic prerequisite: get “some official beats and say fly shit over them.” Even if that was all that he did on Supreme Clientele, it would still be a classic. But what makes it transformational are those minor details. The almost tossed-off aside where the vivid laser eye guy spits, “West Brighton pool now I’m into iron duels.” It’s a name-check of the neighborhood spot where he used to swim, a sad glint of far-off nostalgia as he considers who might be lurking the next time he steps outside.
This is the duality that remains constant, the fluid superhero transformation as Starks shifts from retina-searing brightness to black and white grit, comic absurdity to adolescent remembrance, revelations spoken through rap. It’s the testament of a mortal god, hoping to save the world, hoping to free himself.


Following their critical and commercial breakthrough, 2009's Merriweather Post Pavilion, Animal Collective return with a dense and busy album that serves as the more anxious flipside to its blissed-out predecessor.

Centipede Hz

If it's possible to condense Animal Collective's 12-year career in a single line, Avey Tare does the trick when, deep into Centipede Hz, he cries, "Why am I still looking for a golden age?" By all measurable standards, this is Animal Collective's golden age: Their last album, 2009's Merriweather Post Pavilion, capped a remarkable decade-long journey that saw the band evolve from psych-folk recording project to top-billed digi-pop tweakers. But their popularity hasn't made them any more populist. Even as their songs have grown more melodically and emotionally accessible, their music has grown ever more indefinable. Theirs is the rarest, most enviable form of success: one born not of conforming to audiences' expectations but of constantly confounding them. Avey's refutation of his golden age suggests that, for Animal Collective, happiness is a function of never feeling fully satisfied with what you've accomplished, and continually challenging yourself.
Nowhere in the Animal Collective discography has that sense of unease felt so pronounced as on Centipede Hz. The band's latest album is to Merriweather as Strawberry Jam was to Feels-- the anxious flipside to an ecstatic predecessor. But its execution is even more relentless. Animal Collective have always embraced a certain back-to-nature ethos, but Centipede Hz is noticeably urban in feel. Beyond the references to their native Baltimore, these bustling songs are tied together by radio broadcast snippets and ad samples that feel very much like a comment on 21st-century sensory overload (an experience presaged by the band's own recent experiences as free-form radio hosts). Even the album cover looks like an interstitial from U2's Zoo TV multimedia blitzkrieg.
With multi-instrumentalist Deakin re-joining the band after a four-year hiatus, they've never before hit with such blunt force. The rippling rhythms and aquatic ambience of Merriweather is displaced by industrial-strength ballast: Lead-off track "Moonjock" announces itself with a morse-code crunch that could practically pass for Sleigh Bells, while stuttering lead single "Today's Supernatural" closes with the sort of drum-set-toppling flourish that arena-rock acts use to stretch out their last encore. These songs get Centipede Hz off to a deliriously disorienting start, showcasing the band's ability to coax sing-song melodies out of a melee. But as the album progresses, it becomes increasingly apparent that Centipede Hz's over-caffeinated energy comes at the expense of what, for all their restless creativity, has always been Animal Collective's greatest virtue-- their patience.
From Sung Tongs' "Kids on Holiday" and Feels' "Banshee Beat" to Strawberry Jam's "Fireworks" and Merriweather's "My Girls", Animal Collective's greatest moments have conveyed a shared sense of discovery. There's a sense of something special being slowly revealed, of chaotic rhythms, harmonies, and atmospheres gradually cohering into glorious moments of clarity before dissolving into the ether. Centipede Hz, by comparison, feels like someone throwing a burrito on your windshield: The songs hit with a jolt, instantly splaying all their ingredients before you.
The result feels overly busy and static at the same time. And the songwriting here can't always keep pace amid all the percussive clatter and synth-noise splatter jacked up in the mix, the melodic through-lines of ceaselessly twitchy tracks like "Mercury Man" and "Applesauce" getting lost in the whirr. The two contributions from Panda Bear, in particular, underwhelm: "Rosie Oh" is another future-shocked Beach Boys fantasia in the vein of Strawberry Jam's "Chores", but comes to an abrupt, unsatisfying end; the more downcast "New Town Burnout", originally written for his dubwise 2011 solo release Tomboy, is too sluggish and distant to touch the heights of his best Animal Collective songs. And while Deakin's oscillating reverie "Wide Eyed" now makes more sense as a more straightforward mid-album breather than it did as the opening song at the band's main-stage Coachella set last year, his conversational vocal style doesn't have enough character to carry the five-minute song.
Animal Collective have enjoyed a remarkable creative and popular ascent, the sort of trajectory that is almost impossible to sustain in perpetuity. With Centipede Hz, Animal Collective have delivered a cluttered, abrasive album that confirms their naysayers' exaggerated perceptions of the band. But even a patchy Animal Collective album yields several exceptional songs. Beyond the bracing "Moonjock"/"Today's Supernatural" double shot, there's the magnificent "Monkey Riches" (featuring the lyric quoted at the top of this review), where Avey's increasingly exasperated vocal syncs perfectly with the surging, tribal funk.
The resplendent closer "Amanita" arrives with a fanfare fit for a king but also questions its ostentatious surroundings: "What have we done, what have we done," Avey and Panda sing in unison, "Fantasy is falling down." It's a song that seems to acknowledge Animal Collective's unlikely position as a mainstream-breaching phenomenon, before busting open an escape hatch from a world of scrutiny and expectation. As it shifts into its giddy, double-timed denouement, Avey excitedly chants, "What are you gonna do/ Go into the forest/ Until I can't remember my name!" After pushing their maximal, strobe-lit aesthetic to fatiguing extremes, perhaps a retreat back into the wild is just what Animal Collective need.


Glasgow indie pop band (is there any other kind of Glasgow band?) follows its slept-on and charming debut Sing the Greys with another assured set of soulful barnburners and aching ballads.

Midnight Organ Fight

On the surface, Scottish trio Frightened Rabbit are like a lot of other bands. You could file them away with other musicians from their Glasgow scene, or other bassist-free groups, or other bands of literal brothers (frontman Scott and drummer Grant Hutchison are siblings). But somehow, despite the fact that their methods are well-worn, their product is one-of-a-kind, as their consistently great second album (in under a year, no less!) attests.
The key here is Scott's urgent-yet-emotive songwriting. Midnight Organ Fight is full of rousing barnburners that flicker with soul, ballads that ache with masculine vulnerability, and Frightened Rabbit's best song yet, opener "The Modern Leper". Built on insistently downstroked guitars and drums that build from a gallop to a thundering crash, this Pixies-go-acoustic track swells with self-loathing. "Is that you in front of me/ Coming back for even more of exactly the same?/ You must be a masochist/ To love a modern leper on his last leg," sings Scott, and rarely has a song with such anthemic, air-drum-worthy fills been shot through with so much personal revulsion.
Grant's muscular drumming is a highlight throughout the record-- and on stage. At a recent New York show, the band hadn't yet made it through two songs before he'd splintered three drumsticks with his powerful pounding. With the absence of another instrument to hold down the rhythm section (guitarist Billy Kennedy does occasionally fill out the low end with keyboard), he uses his percussion-- the satisfying hiss of his cymbals, the breathless insistence of his thudding kick drum, the delicious sizzle of his marching-band snare-- to saturate the empty space in the compositions. Flailing about at his kit, he keeps time wildly yet melodically, controlled amidst the chaos.
Despite the trio's static (and relatively spare) set-up, Scott's songs imbue the band with an elastic identity. Scuzzed up tracks like "Fast Blood" and almost-bluegrass weepers like "Good Arms Vs. Bad Arms" prove that Frightened Rabbit have stretched beyond the melancholic folk-pop of Sing the Greys. But elsewhere-- most notably "My Backwards Walk" and "Old Old Fashioned"-- they re-confirm their dedication to the sound they perfected on their debut, playing electronic and acoustic guitars against each other for stomping mid-tempo gems that pulse with nervous energy and heart-on-sleeve lyrics.
Though nothing else on the album hits the pop high of its opener-- "Leper" is a tough act to follow-- its I'm-not-worthy sentiments are prevalent on all the album's best tracks. On "The Twist", a desperate yet tender ballad built on a similar freight-train piano line as LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends", the protagonist practically begs for sex-- "I can be who you like," he pleads-- while sadly allowing himself to be used. "Whisper the wrong name," sings Scott in his accented bagpipe drone of a voice, "I don't care and nor do my ears." In track after track, Scott expresses that need for the warmth of another, however unworthy he may feel of it.
Those sentiments are also echoed in "Keep Yourself Warm": "You won't find love in a hole/ It takes more than fucking someone to keep yourself warm." He's wallowing, but Scott's cracked voice sells every word, and his band's rousing rhythms and rough-hewn guitar interplay keep the mood from ever getting lugubrious or maudlin. Sure, Frightened Rabbit aren't the first band to explore loneliness, horniness, or emptiness in song, just like they aren't the first set of siblings to decide to jam together, but their jangly melodies claw their way inside your brain just the same, making them latest in a long line of Glasgow bands to effortlessly combine celebratory sonics and miserablist lyrics into something singular.


On her final, posthumously released album, Jones alternates powerful ballads with the upbeat dance numbers that were staples of her live shows, confirming her stature a contemporary soul-music icon.

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings: Soul of a Woman

Soul of a Woman

When Sharon Jones passed away last November after a long battle with pancreatic cancer, she died not as a soul revival artist but as a soul artist, period. The distinction is subtle but meaningful. What sounded in the 2000s like a throwback to the era of 1960s and 1970s funk and R&B eventually became something very modern and of its moment. The Dap-Kings may be one of the best backing bands around, and Daptone Records a more diversified and adventurous label than many people think, but it was Jones who rooted the music in the here and now instead of the there and then. A lot is made of her experience as a corrections officer and armored truck guard, but she worked in wedding bands and did session work for decades before she recorded her first single, at 40 years old, and her first full-length album, at 46. She conveyed an unshakable belief that soul music could speak to this or any other moment in time, and her voice, so insistent and expressive, could transform a song like Janet Jackson’s “What Have You Done for Me Lately”—or even Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land”—into something new and timely.
Remarkably, that voice sounds barely diminished on Soul of a Woman, retaining every ounce of its personality and authority despite how cancer and chemo had sapped her energy, if not her drive. When Jones felt strong enough, she went into the studio and made music with the Dap-Kings. Otherwise, she was either resting or touring. In fact, she didn’t stop playing live until just a few weeks before her death. “I can’t wait too much longer,” she sings on opener “Matter of Time,” which dreams of peace, freedom, and unity. From any other singer, such a statement might speak to the long arc of justice, but in this case Jones sings from the position of knowing she might not live long enough to enjoy the fruits of that struggle. (In fact, she suffered a stroke on election night, which left her hospitalized, unable to speak but still able to sing.)
Yet Soul of a Woman is not an album about facing down death. There’s nothing grim or fearful or despairing in her performances. Rather, most of these songs are lively, even celebratory, as she sings about the age-old subjects of soul music: politics both public and romantic, the state of the world and the state of a relationship. The barnburner “Sail On!” turns the tables on a dismissive lover, the Dap-Kings’ horns blasting around her as Jones works out the moral equation of her situation. “Rumors,” with its effervescent groove and party vibe, wags a soul finger at the gossip mill: “Rumors tell me that you’re no good, baby!”
Soul of a Woman was initially planned to sound very different than it does. Producer Gabriel Roth (aka Bosco Mann) envisioned an album of slower, more lushly orchestrated songs but ultimately decided that Jones’ final statement should include more upbeat dance numbers, the kind that elicited such an excited response at live shows. A few of those original tunes remain: “When I Saw Your Face” shows just how acrobatic Jones’ voice could be, as she soars around in her upper register to convey a sense of romantic ecstasy. “Girl! (You Got to Forgive Him)” throws the kitchen sink at its melodramatic arrangement, but Jones keeps the song anchored in a very real predicament and lends the advice real wisdom and gravity.
By combining these powerful soul ballads with upbeat dance numbers, Soul of a Woman lovingly portrays Jones as an artist with remarkable emotional and interpretive range. Nothing on Soul of a Woman, in fact, suggests that this is actually a posthumous album, that it was recorded by someone who knew she wouldn’t live to see its release. Jones gives perhaps her greatest performance on the final song, “Call on God,” which she wrote decades ago for her choir at Universal Church of God, where she sang before and after she started working with the Dap-Kings. The band provides restrained churchly accompaniment—the gently supportive thrum of the organ, the sympathetic chords of the guitar, the dramatic pulse of the drums—and Jones sounds bigger than life as she sings, “I made up my mind to be with Him all the time/And I won’t let nothing turn me around.” It’s to her credit that it doesn’t sound like a farewell. Instead, the song—the entire album, in fact—is a poignant statement of the determination that motivated her all along.


TikTok’s favorite neoclassical jazz singer gives contemporary heartache a misty, out-of-time quality.

Bewitched

Growing up, Laufey Lín Jónsdóttir found that the jazz singers of the past, with their rumbling low registers, resonated more deeply with her than charting pop vocalists. As Laufey, her style falls somewhere between the two, meshing jazz instrumentation and the careful diction of the Great American Songbook with contemporary themes: big city living, social media, the anxiety of being in the “talking stage” with a crush. The Icelandic-Chinese singer-songwriter learned piano and cello from her mother, violinist Lin Wei, and started making a name for herself on TikTok, posting snippets of original music and covers of songs by Chet Baker and Billie Eilish. There, she found a Gen Z audience eager to hear classic vocal jazz made cool again, including Eilish, who reshared her version of “My Future.”
On Bewitched, Laufey’s second full-length, big feelings—eternal hope, unconditional love—take center stage. It’s bolder and more intentional than her 2022 debut, Everything I Know About Love, which felt like a sketchbook compiling the artist’s assumptions and hesitations on the topic. Here, Laufey doesn’t simply let jazz inform the work; she uses it as a vehicle to enact fantasies and ambitions, lending her contemporary musings a misty, out-of-time quality. On opener “Dreamer,” Laufey rolls her eyes at the doom loop of casual dating. “No boy’s gonna kill the dreamer in me,” she sings, leading an arrangement that develops from soft piano to a blithe cloud of bass, glockenspiel, and jazz brushes. More than its literal commentary, “Dreamer” establishes one of Jónsdóttir’s primary artistic impulses: to never sacrifice a sense of wonder, no matter how painful the circumstances.
This sense of wonder translates even when Laufey experiments with pop, as on “Lovesick.” The narrator pines for an absent lover, so enamored with their presence that silence is frightening. When Laufey abandons her guitar and bursts into the soaring chorus, she takes a page from Taylor Swift’s high-romance songbook—think “Enchanted” or “Treacherous.” Laufey counts Swift as an influence and, as a young musician, “the only music [she] listened to that wasn’t jazz or classical.” Emulating her explosive verse-chorus technique allows the song to arrive at an intensity of emotional release that Laufey’s usual, more tender approach rarely does. The interplay between the smooth, ascending strings and rolling percussion mirror a confusing cross of emotions, like excitement and anxiety dueling in the pit of your stomach.
Bewitched includes one classic song, “Misty,” composed by pianist Erroll Garner with lyrics by Johnny Burke. It’s not the first time Jónsdóttir has recorded a jazz standard, nor her first time covering “Misty,” which she described in a 2021 YouTube video as “one of her all-time favorite songs.” While the video take is bare and gentle as a lullaby, the album track is fleshed out with piano, bass, and drums, as Garner originally recorded it. Jónsdóttir’s voice is nimble, her familiar timbre occasionally dipping into richer tones. The production is straightforward and organic, emphasizing clarity and presenting the song with both personal flair and reverence for history. It’s right at home in Bewitched’s lovelorn tracklist.
Laufey often sings about dreaming of a life that’s just like the movies, but all over Bewitched are hints that she loves the mundane just as much. Her appeal lies in how she narrates this dichotomy, best encapsulated in the album’s penultimate track, “Letter to My 13 Year Old Self.” “I’m so sorry that they pick you last/Try to say your foreign name and laugh,” she sings, as muffled piano and plucked guitar gently rock her adolescent self to sleep. Her words are tinged with the heartache of youth, when being different feels like a nightmare. But when the arrangement expands to include strings, it becomes buoyant and dreamy. Even talking to herself, Laufey’s spell is unbroken.


Though she makes the kind of sugary music that might soundtrack a particularly rambunctious children’s show, Rose McDowall will also "cut you with a cake knife." This reissue of the former Strawberry Switchblade singer's '80 solo material is good for murder sprees and/or cuddle sessions.

Cut With the Cake Knife

Everything you need to know about Strawberry Switchblade, the Scottish duo of Rose McDowall and Jill Bryson, is right there in the name. The group, who grew out of the late '70s Glasgow punk scene paired brightly-colored, synth-driven new wave melodies with lyrics that often spoke of sadness and loss. That polarity between light and darkness became even more apparent in the group’s acrimonious dissolution in 1986, just five years after they started. MacDowall had always nursed an interest in the occult, but over the course of the duo's brief run, it deepened, moving beyond a childlike fascination with fairies into the realm of straight-up black magic (in one oft-repeated story, she was so furious with a bad note during the recording of "Let Her Go", she allegedly stared at the tape machine and willed it to burst into flames). Her curiosity only intensified after she and her husband fell in with Genesis P-Orridge, which led to even darker pursuits—in an extensive interview, Bryson claims McDowall developed an obsession with Nazi history, going so far as to hang a Nazi flag in her apartment. While McDowall emphatically denies the claim, her collaborations with suspect artists like Boyd Rice and Death in June in the intervening years seem unwise at best.
Fortunately, none of these matters surface on Cut With the Cake Knife, which McDowall recorded in various locations around the UK in the 1980s, shortly after Strawberry Switchblade’s breakup. Instead, the album’s 11 songs follow the same blueprint that made McDowall’s previous group so bewitching, pairing bleak—and, at times, violent—lyrics to the kind of sugary music that might soundtrack a particularly rambunctious children’s show. Drum machines whirr and rattle, keyboards blink like buggy Lite Brites, and McDowall’s somber alto winds its way through the center like a serpent cutting a path through cellophane Easter grass. On the opening track "Tibet", she seems to be wrestling with Strawberry Switchblade’s breakup, sighing "I don’t want you to go/ But can’t ask you to stay/ I wish I could change your mind/ But wishes sometimes die." The music that surrounds it is a kind of ersatz calypso, with charmingly chintzy rhythms and gurgling keyboards, but the vocal melody is so assured and clear-eyed that the song never feels cloying or saccharine. "Sixty Cowboys" dabbles in the kind of synthetic country that the Magnetic Fields would master on Charm of the Highway Strip, with brittle keyboards filling in for banjos and McDowall’s lonesome voice floating upward like campfire smoke. And while the title "Crystal Nights" takes on an ominous meaning in light of the allegations about McDowall’s hobbies, the song itself harbors no questionable subject matter. Instead, it depicts her in bed daydreaming about her lover as keyboards spiral like fireflies around her.
While its ingredients are undeniably basic—all of the songs are built from a few period-appropriate keyboards and chugging drum machines, and that’s mostly it—what makes Cake Knife so consistently endearing is how effortless it all sounds. That the only bum note is a chirpy cover of "Don’t Fear the Reaper", which comes off like the theme music to an old Commodore 64 game, speaks to how strong the rest of the record is. On Cake Knife, McDowall has created a kind of aural Candy Land, one where she can break off vanilla bark from Jujyfruit trees while she sings about death and despair. The title track—which was originally intended to be a Strawberry Switchblade song—takes that m.o. to its logical extreme. While a comically cartoonish bass and hyperactive synths jitter and pop around her, McDowall beckons a lover closer before announcing in its deliriously euphoric chorus, "I will take you by the hand and lead you/ To my sunny side and I will/ Cut you with the cake knife/ Right between the eyes." In McDowall’s world, cake and chaos go hand in hand. She’s the witch at the door of the gingerbread house, beckoning you inside.


Following their spectacular Sun Giant EP, Seattle-based Fleet Foxes’ full-length debut has a lot to live up to. Luckily, it more than delivers the goods: Incorporating a broad spectrum of styles—from Appalachian folk and AM country to classic rock and SoCal pop—Fleet Foxes create a personal synthesis of the music of their peers, their parents, and even their grandparents.

Fleet Foxes

Fleet Foxes may have a firm grasp on rock and folk history, but they never play to their record collection. Rather than revive a particular scene or recreate a lost sound, the Seattle quintet cherrypick their ideas from a broad spectrum of styles, pulling in Appalachian folk, classic rock, AM country, and SoCal pop to create a personal synthesis of the music of their peers, their parents, and even their grandparents.
The band didn’t leave town to record Fleet Foxes, yet it sounds like it could have been recorded anywhere in the United States—Austin, Minneapolis, Chicago, Brooklyn, Louisville, or more likely some clearing in the woods. That placelessness constitutes an active effacement, considering that Seattle has been a locus for alternative music for nearly two decades. The five-piece is thoroughly embedded in that scene: Their ranks include current and former members of Crystal Skulls, Pedro the Lion, and Seldom. Furthermore, to produce the sessions that created the Sun Giant EP and this debut LP, they hired Phil Ek, best known for his work with Modest Mouse, Built to Spill, and the Shins. Nevertheless, theirs is a studiously rural aesthetic, eschewing urban influences and using reverb like sepia-tone to suggest something much older and more rustic than it really is. The album opens with a short tune (titled “Red Squirrel” on early leaks but not listed on the CD) that could be a field recording sung by a small-town congregation 50 years ago. It ushers us into Fleet Foxes’ old world; after a few bars, the song darts into the heraldic “Sun It Rises,” which sure enough sounds like someone’s idea of a sunrise over an evergreen mountain. But they’re not done yet: Just as the song fades, it rises into a quiet coda that previews two more elements of their sound—the patient guitar lick on “Blue Ridge Mountains” and the vocal harmonies that color numerous songs on the record. All that’s missing are the crackles and hisses of an old LP. (Fortunately, Sub Pop is issuing it on vinyl.)
What follows is surprisingly full and wide ranging, almost as much as the Bruegel painting that graces the album’s cover. Skye Skjelset’s guitar roams wherever it pleases, while drummer Nicholas Peterson keeps the songs in check, allowing the band to move freely but not wander too far into the woods. A flute, half-submerged in the mix, adds lurking menace to the album’s most intense jam, “Your Protector,” and Casey Wescott’s staccato piano rhythm runs through “Blue Ridge Mountains,” heightening the momentum of the chorus.
For all the album’s winding paths and unexpected vistas, Fleet Foxes’ harmonies remain the primary draw, and they’ve written and arranged these songs to showcase their shared vocals. “Heard Them Stirring” has no lyrics, but it’s hard to call it an instrumental. Against a shuffling shaker-and-tambourine rhythm, “Ragged Wood” switches between Robin Pecknold’s lead vocals and the band’s harmonies after each verse, effectively translating classic rock via folk elements. There’s as much Fleetwood Mac as the Band in the song’s rousing finale. On the other hand, Fleet Foxes do restraint just as well: “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song” features only a lone acoustic guitar and Pecknold’s forceful vocals, which switch to a spooky falsetto on the outro.
Vocals play such a primary role in Fleet Foxes’ music that Pecknold’s lyrics at times sound like merely a delivery system for harmonies, with references to meadowlarks, rising suns, and streams bolstering the rural and placeless evocations. However, these are ultimately carefully and well-crafted compositions. On “White Winter Hymnal,” a firelit roundelay that best showcases the band’s vocal interplay, the lyrics convey strange, almost Edward Gorey–like imagery: “I was following the pack/All swallowed in their coats/With scarves of red tied ’round their throats/To keep their little heads from falling in the snow/And I turned ’round and there you go.” Who knows exactly what the words mean, but the fairy-tale menace comes through in full color, and Peterson’s floor-tom beat and the intricacy of the band’s harmonies dispel the threat without diluting the mystery.
Fleet Foxes ends with “Oliver James,” another nearly a cappella showcase for Pecknold’s solo vocals. As he thumps out a soft rhythm on his Martin acoustic, he sings about handmade tables and long-gone grandparents, howling the chorus “Oliver James, washed in the rain/No longer.” The brief snippet of “Red Squirrel” and “Sun It Rises” invites you into Fleet Foxes’ debut, but “Oliver James” doesn’t shoo you out the door. Instead, Fleet Foxes let you linger for a few more bars, leaning forward to catch Pecknold’s last syllable as it fades into the air. They don’t seem to want the record to end any more than you will.


Working alongside the multidisciplinary troll Freeka Tet, Berlin experimental club duo Amnesia Scanner sound as playful as ever, but there’s a gnawing sense of anxiety behind their fits of delirium.

Amnesia Scanner / Freeka Tet: STROBE.RIP

STROBE.RIP

Nina Sun Eidshem begins her 2019 book The Race of Sound with a concept she calls “the acousmatic question.” When you hear a voice and you’re not sure of its source, your nervous system lights up, asking, Who is this? Who is speaking? Or, in the case of Amnesia Scanner and Freeka Tet: What the fuck is that?
Since their 2018 debut album, Another Life, the Berlin-based electronic duo Amnesia Scanner have coaxed uncanny vocalizations out of a suite of artificially intelligent software they call Oracle. Similarly to Holly Herndon’s AI chorus Spawn, Oracle sings both like and unlike a person: Its phonemes come out nasal, serrated, and tinny, too stiff and jagged to sound fully human, too warm to be completely machine. It cradles enough of its organic source material to catch the ear with a spark of recognition, but corrodes that human kernel until recognition sours into dread. Upon hearing it, the body softens and then flinches in a matter of milliseconds: There’s someone else here, but something’s all wrong.
On their latest release, STROBE.RIP, Amnesia Scanner team up with the New York-based multidisciplinary troll Freeka Tet, whose sardonic work similarly teases out the frayed seam where viscera meets machine. A video of a 2018 performance at MUTEK shows Freeka feeding his face into an algorithm that deadens his eyes and smears his mouth like a bugged-out PS2 avatar. Both Freeka and Amnesia Scanner delight in smashing misaligned elements together into grotesque new forms. In collaboration, they birth plenty of monstrosity, but also plunge deep into an eerily wistful current—a mood that has long coursed behind the flashbangs of Amnesia Scanner’s music. The questions both projects raise with their perceptual distortions—is that another person? Is it like me? Is it something else?—are fundamentally lonely ones. With STROBE.RIP, Freeka Tet and Amnesia Scanner embrace that frigid isolation in between their usual fits of delirium.
Oracle surfaces throughout the album in a mode that’s far more withdrawn and melancholic than the confrontationally playful stance it held on Amnesia Scanner’s past two albums. “I need to learn to say no/I don’t wanna go/I don’t wanna go,” it sings on the lurching, slimy “Giggle,” the vocals wispy and buried in the mix. Against the dusty piano loops of “Bounds,” Oracle takes on a deflated register, singing out from the bottom of a depressive pit: “I’m living it out of bounds/You can’t help me.” The album hits its peaks when Oracle and Freeka Tet’s vocals tangle together. On “Damon,” Freeka’s metallic screeches undergird Oracle’s creeping whine over nu-metal guitar chugs. The uneasy, polyrhythmic “Ledge” drags Freeka’s compressed glossolalia into the heart of the mix, while offsetting the intricate beats with a repeating triplet that splits the difference between voice and drum: percussive but not quite percussion, vocal but not exactly a voice.
Nothing here feels quite so lonely as the calm before the storm that closes out the record. “Clown,” whose treble leads pirouette over a bass throb indebted to Massive Attack’s paranoid “Man Next Door,” bleeds into the shadows of “Abandoned.Club,” whose big-band breakdown meshes Oracle’s unintelligible wails with gossamer guest vocals from Bea1991. The smoke clears for “Scorpions, Bats & Spiders,” a spoken-word confrontation by artist and Instagram phenom Jaakko Pallasvuo, who also wrote the micropoem on STROBE.RIP’s cover. With oblique barbs of language, Pallasvuo satirizes attempts, like the one I’m making now, to render the bodily experience of this kind of music into expository language. “Club abandoned/Deconstructed/A panel discussion,” goes the voiceover, pronounced with perfect classroom diction. Behind these words, Oracle lilts in a treble register, its voice swirling through syllables empty of syntax.
That cerebral mood melts inside the album’s inferno of a finale. The one-two punch of “Cat” and “Merge” satirize EDM’s most obvious elements and savor their blunt pleasure at the same time. The stomping, sneering “Cat” punctures its walls of sawtooth bass with New Jack Swing orchestra stabs and simulated moans from Oracle—the closest this particular AI has come to a sexual awakening. On “Merge,” Oracle’s bristling adolescent howls keep trying to crystallize into language, but never get there. They sputter and squall, rearing up over Freeka’s low growls, demanding all attention within earshot and then spurning it with gibberish.
If you type the name of this album into your web browser, press enter, and click past the demon, you’ll end up at the video for “Ride,” along with a slew of comical error messages that pop up whenever you click the background. Directed by Freeka Tet and Ruby Aldridge, the video offers a first-person view of a white-gloved DoorDasher rushing through New York, dropping off various goods wrapped in shiny black plastic. At the end of the clip, the courier parks their bike and goes home to their apartment. Everything inside—the couch, the modem, the logs in the fireplace—is mummified in the same plastic. Like a lot of good punchlines, its resonances are terrifying. The role you perform in public seeps into who you are in private; daily entanglement with platform capitalism changes you at the root. When Freeka Tet and Amnesia Scanner drop you into their whirlwind of unnerving questions—“What is that? Is it human?”—they prime you for one better: “Am I?”


The second installment of Italians Do It Better's After Dark compilation features muscular updates on their buzzy neon template by the likes of Chromatics, Glass Candy, and Mirage. Its assembly line nature also reminds us that while some strains of classic dance music were meticulous and expert, many were cheap and quick.

After Dark 2

When it arrived in 2007, Italians Do It Better's After Dark compilation provided a way forward. "Italo survived electroclash," wrote Marc Hogan; indie rock had too. Six years later, dance music has pervaded that genre to the point where discussing specific movements no longer feels relevant; it's just there, and After Dark had a part in that. Its status as a modern indie/dance classic makes it easy to forget to how thin and stitched-together it felt, how delicate its papier-mache disco. Putting aside the compilation's home-printed artwork and lack of jewel case, the album was rife with cover songs, demos, and remixes. Johnny Jewel's return last year with Chromatics and Symmetry was notable for the music's quality but also for its scope: confirmation, finally, that the Italians Do It Better label had gas left in the tank.
There's always been a factory feel to Italians Do It Better, Jewel the enigmatic visionary farming his disco labor out to acolytes and hangers-on. The cast of characters assembled on After Dark 2 supports this; primary vehicles Chromatics and Glass Candy account for nearly half the tracks, but many contributions come from IDIB B-teamers recording their first music in years. If there's an exemplar of the odd IDIB universe, it's Mirage (officially the 24th artist to adopt that moniker according to Discogs) who show up with only their third-ever track; the first two being available only on the original After Dark.
The assembly-line nature of Jewel's productions provides a counterpoint to Daft Punk's Random Access Memories, reminding us that while some strains of classic dance music were meticulous and expert, many were cheap and quick. Jewel's ability to pump out quality tracks with a host of collaborators connects him to the faceless electro/disco producers of the 1980s; presenting the tracks as glammy punk-noir fantasies contemporizes him. Jewel is an expert stylist, able to project fashionable cool without exclusivity or mightiness. Never more so than on After Dark 2; the songs here are big and warm, tighter, more muscular updates of the originals, and they make common sadness-- the search for love, forgiveness, intimacy-- feel heroic and communal.
The IDIB rhythms and affectations-- thrumming Italo disco, icy female coos-- are largely unchanged, but the analog boil beneath them is robust. This is important when working with vocalists whose charm lies largely in their steely contempt for excess. Having Glass Candy back in the fold is crucial. Singer Ida No's flat, artless vocals are a perfect foil for Jewel's metronomic synthesizers. She's also the most compelling songwriter: the resplendent "Warm in the Winter" is the headliner, but "The Possessed" and "Beautiful Object" deliver pleasantly sighing choruses. Chromatics sound at home on the wistful "Cherry", and they parry their last album's title track with the nervy "Looking for Love": "I'm still/ Still looking/ Looking for love," killing for it having failed, apparently.
It's in this context that contributions from Farah-- severe and menacing-- and Desire-- easy and sweet-- can be lovely diversions, and that instrumentals from Mike Simonetti and Jewel (as Symmetry) can feel like luxe interludes. The vocoder funk of Mirage's "Let's Kiss" and Twisted Wire's husky piano house offer crucial variety. Lesser lights are afforded the opportunity to be lesser, in other words. They can thank the compilation's album-like feel: After Dark 2 plays more like Johnny Jewel & Friends Present... than a compendium of disparate acts. It updates the IDIB sound without losing its buzzy neon charm, which remains a hugely attractive mode.


Pulp got together back in 1978. Frontman Jarvis Cocker was 15. He's now 38. Yes, that's a damn ...

We Love Life

Pulp got together back in 1978. Frontman Jarvis Cocker was 15. He's now 38. Yes, that's a damn long time to be in a band, but surprisingly, the group's only original member wears it well. Having withstood 23 years and an indeterminable number of line-up changes, you'd think that Pulp would long since have started repeating themselves. But if there's anything these Yorkshire gents are not, it's stale. In fact, it's possible that on We Love Life, they're fresher than ever. Part of the reason for this is that they've always embraced change, constantly pushing in new directions.
Jarvis Cocker is still speaking up for the outsiders and freaks of the world, and the overt sexuality that's always informed his delivery is still a presence, but its context has changed completely. Cocker's worldview has moved to an alternate plane since the libidinous come-ons of Different Class (perhaps their last album, the ultra-dark masterstroke This Is Hardcore, excised all of those urges). Now, Cocker and the band seem to have grown into their station in life, the misfits stuck in the middle of the limelight.
Pulp worked with the legendary British producer Chris Thomas (who has produced everyone from the Sex Pistols to Roxy Music to John Cale, as well as playing session keyboard on the Beatles' White Album) for both 1995's Different Class and This Is Hardcore. And they attempted to work with him again on We Love Life, but with the sessions half-finished, the band decided to scrap the tapes and start over. They quickly decided on another British legend: songwriter Scott Walker, a man known for his seedy song topics and baroque instrumentation. This switch in producers, having changed nearly everything about the band's sound, is immediately evident.
We Love Life marches in with "Weeds" on top of Nick Banks' militaristic snare drum and unexpected layers of acoustic guitars. For his part, Cocker essentially addresses the double standards that exist in our lives, driving especially hard at the image-conscious upper class who "still come around to visit us when [they] fancy booze and drugs."
This segues seamlessly into the trip-hoppish groove of "Weeds II (The Origin of the Species)," over which Cocker delivers one of his trademark spoken monologues. Over a strangely EQ'd bassline, he deals in metaphors wherein the common folk are the weeds of society. "Weeds must be kept under control or they will destroy everything in their path," he sneers. That's not an idle observation, either; it's delivered like genuine threat to some abstract authority figure. The groove pauses to emphasize the point, evaporating briefly into an ambient ether before the band picks back up.
The album's other spoken track is even better, revolving around a recounting of a visit to the spot where a river has been diverted under a city. Somehow, Cocker manages to conjure all of the dirt and grit of the littered sidewalks and faltering buildings without ever directly referencing them. His personal changes are evident here, as well. In 1995, he wrote to his boyhood crush, "Let's all meet up in the year 2000/ Won't it be strange when we're all fully grown?" Now that the year has come and gone, he seems resigned to the fact that he can never meet up with his lost loves or salvage the past. Rather, he has to content himself with visiting the dam where they met, fantasizing about taking a trip down the river, beneath the city and the people living in it.
Elsewhere, we're treated to some of the best traditional songs that Pulp have ever written, in "The Trees" and "Bad Cover Version." A brilliant string ostinato anchors the groove of "The Trees," in which Cocker laments a lost love, similarly coming to terms with the fact that trying to get it back just isn't a possibility. "Might as well go and tell it to the trees," he sings, and it's at this point that you first realize that he seems to be seeking real emotional commitment far removed from the lascivious sportfucking that his older songs favored.
"Bad Cover Version" addresses roughly the same theme from a different angle, with Cocker smirkingly comparing his ex's new boyfriend to himself, offering that "a bad cover version of love is not the real thing." The band's sense of humor enters the fray in the coda, and they even get in a jab at their own producer, likening "the second side of Til the Band Comes In" (Walker's fifth solo album) to an off-brand box of cornflakes and sugar substitutes. Other targets include "the Stones since the 80s," the "Planet of the Apes" TV show, and the late-period "Tom & Jerry" episodes where they could talk.
This is followed by "Roadkill," an acoustic reflection on a trip to the airport to pick up the other half of a doomed relationship. The narrator catches sight of a deer dying in the road, and in retrospect, takes it as a sign that the relationship was doomed to begin with. From this emotional low point, though, comes the phoenix of "Sunrise," the album's stirring closer and one of the most optimistic songs Pulp have ever recorded. "I used to hate the sun/ Because it shone on everything I had done," begins Cocker, ultimately summing up the band's entire career: "You've been awake all night/ So why should you crash out at dawn?" Pulp's long night may be over, but the day looks just as promising.
On their seventh album, Pulp have pulled off yet another remarkable reinvention of their sound and outlook, while simultaneously making their most organic album since their full-length debut, It, was released almost two decades ago. The cheap synths that made their last few albums so delightfully sleazy are almost completely absent, replaced by Mark Webber's well-developed guitar melodies and a more peripheral role for the electronics. And that's all good, because the last thing I'd want is for Pulp to get stale on me. On this evidence, it seems likely that they'll stay fresh well into the new century.


For anyone who has ever fantasized about dissolving into the dancefloor, the debut solo album from techno artist Sam Barker is as close as it gets.

Utility

There is a small but significant faction of the dance-music underground that seems bent on teaching us that drums are overrated. There’s the UK’s “weightless” contingent, led by Mumdance and Logos, whose productions smear grime’s glassy accents into a viscous shimmer punctuated only by the occasional gunshot; there are flickering, arpeggiated tracks from Actress and Kassem Mosse that take lo-fi aesthetics to a new extreme, suggesting beaten-up cassette tapes where all the heavy bits have simply shriveled up and flaked off. Lorenzo Senni has reimagined trance music as an exercise in pure geometry, unaccompanied synth stabs bobbing as nimbly as knitting needles. And a recent Resident Advisor mix from Objekt, a reigning headliner of the global techno underground, was stitched together entirely from what he calls “no-kick rollers”—heavy-hitting club tracks with no anchoring bass drum.
Sam Barker is the latest to take up this idea, and his debut solo album, Utility, might be its fullest and most satisfying realization to date. The music resembles techno in all the style’s outward characteristics: the pulsing chords, the rippling high end, the gut-punching oomph of the bass. But where you might expect to hear techno’s usual percussive trappings—hardened kick drums, metallic cymbals, meaty snares—there are only the soft, fluid curves of his synthesizers. The closest that Barker comes to techno’s traditional drum palette is when he focuses a spray of white noise into a crisp, chattering attack akin to staccato hi-hats.
In its rose-tinted mood, the album often resembles mid-1990s ambient techno at its most wistful, like Larry Heard’s Alien or John Beltran’s Ten Days of Blue. But where classic ambient techno took club music’s signature elements and made them gentle enough for afterhours comedowns, Barker’s Utility does the opposite, borrowing ambient’s billowing forms and reinforcing them for the needs of the dancefloor. These tracks are weaponized clouds, cotton candy wrapped in Kevlar.
The record begins on a dreamy, romantic note with “Paradise Engineering,” drizzling a honeyed synth melody over buoyant chords, but it quickly turns tougher: On “Posmean,” taut, rubbery synths seem to send calls for help in Morse code; “Hedonic Treadmill” hits you in the chest like a sack of gold dust, even as the fizzy high end mimics the bag’s contents dispersing in slow motion.
For anyone who has ever fantasized about dissolving into the dancefloor, Utility is about as close as it gets. On highlights like “Models of Wellbeing” (which nods to Rhythm & Sound’s aerated dub) and “Utility” (redolent of the fragrant Balearic staple “Sueño Latino”), Barker puts minimalist techniques to opulent ends, conjuring ecstatic visions out of just a handful of sounds, and teasing vast shapes out of a silvery mist. Behind the album’s title lies a crucial irony: By using ambient materials to remake techno, Barker has come up with the exact opposite of a purposefully percussive DJ tool. Instead of rote functionalism, Utility is distinguished by its surfeit of feeling.


The Toronto group set oddball existential queries at the center of a shapeshifting rhythm section, collaging together pop fundamentals with a vast collection of musical knick-knacks.

Eau de Bonjourno

The rules of nature that keep the world in order can just as easily put it in disarray: The same physics that bring clean water pouring from the kitchen faucet are also responsible for the coffee that slides down the side of the pot and pools on the countertop. A similarly intricate force seems to power Eau de Bonjourno, the third album by Bernice. Under the guidance of bandleader and vocalist Robin Dann, the Toronto group collage together pop fundamentals with musical knick-knacks sourced from a vast palette of synthesizer textures and rhythms that cover every corner of pop and R&B, from lo-fi recordings to the Billboard charts. Like beads of rain dashing across a windshield, Eau de Bonjourno is unusually mesmerizing with its movements, connected by the natural spirit of chaos.
Dann’s spiritual and existential observations lie at the core of the band’s shapeshifting rhythm section. On early highlight “It’s Me, Robin,” she introduces herself in plaintive terms (“I thought if I just expressed this/You might let me be me, and accept that I’m here”), then makes a chorus out of the query, “Who are you?” The question spirals from the listener back to the singer, as the song spreads out into a wide sweep of saxophone and piano. With “Infinite Love,” Bernice sneak a heartfelt endorsement of a radical love ethic into an arrangement that scans like a bedroom-pop sex jam. But when Dann sings about a love that feels “amazing,” she’s not merely addressing earthly bodies—it’s something cosmic, all-encompassing, a connection felt on the atomic level.
Similarly, a song called “Personal Bubble” is less a timely comment on plague-year etiquette than a rarefied invitation to a private world. By the time the novelty of the title starts to erode, the music pivots: a change of rhythm transforms it into a galactic combination of heavily reverbed slap bass, a topsy-turvy sax solo, and a thicker, weirder beat. The record is full of such odd turns, like “Big Mato,” an effervescent expression of vulnerability wrapped in a salad metaphor that takes its title from...a big tomato. Examined piecemeal, the Eau de Bonjourno recipe seems like it shouldn’t work—but it does.
It’s all too easy to apply an “experimental” tag to the type of kinetic, amorphous songs that appear on Eau de Bonjourno and throughout Bernice’s catalog, but the band are no twee tinkerers. Amid the webs of synths, processed guitars, and saxophones, Dann’s writing is intensely focused on the events of the natural world. On “Lone Swan,” she hones in on the titular bird, as well as a beaver gnawing on red bark, a loud waterfall, a hermit thrush building her nest beside a dry riverbed, and a sick maple tree tended by park workers. Though opportunities for quiet communion with nature are fleeting, they are, miraculously, everywhere. It is the contradictions and juxtapositions that make life possible. Eau de Bonjourno takes them in stride, accepting the mess of it all as a benediction.

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The ambient guitarist and the breakcore wizard bring diametrically opposed instincts and skill sets to an album that strikes an uneasy balance between calm and chaos.

Venetian Snares / Daniel Lanois: Venetian Snares x Daniel Lanois

Venetian Snares x Daniel Lanois

Despite the fact that pioneering electronic acts are annually left off the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ballot and few guitarists ever grace the stage at Ultra Music Festival, guitars and electronics aren’t always diametrically opposed. Nile Rodgers’ upstrokes helped Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” achieve ubiquity, and six-strings pop up everywhere from Boards of Canada to Ben Frost; even Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour once took a trip with the Orb. So a mutual appreciation society between producer and pedal-steel conjuror Daniel Lanois and breakcore/modular synth freak Aaron Funk (aka Venetian Snares) isn’t the strangest of pairings, but it’s pretty damned close.
Despite press photos that look like the duo just rode Harleys across the Trans-Canada Highway together, both men operate at distinctly opposite ends of the musical spectrum. Lanois’ pedal steel evoked a gravity-free state on ambient touchstones like Brian Eno’s Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks, while his Grammy-winning production on U2 albums feels both gradual and grandiose. But even at his most restrained (as on 2005’s classically informed Rossz Csillag Alatt Született), Funk’s music is teeming, always wiggling to fill out every available space.
The collab stems from Lanois reaching out as a fan, and in 2014, the two Canadians set about playing together in Lanois’ Toronto studio. Venetian Snares x Daniel Lanois makes for a sonic speedball, a breakdance routine in the middle of a kabuki performance, a Kaws skull smack dab in the middle of a Mark Rothko canvas. Given their drastically different approaches to space, the album doesn’t quite balance out as a true collaboration, but as an overlay of their sensibilities, it still provides for some striking moments.
Rather than stake out a middle ground between their two positions, more often than not the album finds Lanois pulled into Venetian Snares’ formidable gravitational field. “Mag11 P82” opens with Lanois laying down bucolic swells and vibrato tones that evoke soaring eagles and mountain vistas. Funk makes a low-key entrance full of satellite pulses and sparse hits before going haywire just over a minute in, building, deconstructing, and reconstructing breaks all around Lanois’ hovering chords. As much space as Lanois can conjure, Funk fills it all in.
The dizzying, nine-minute “United P92” is the headiest track of the set, a free fall through space junk as Funk stretches out his bleeps, snares, and squelches. That addition of a sliver of extra time between each sound is just enough to allow Lanois’ discombobulating ambience to come to the fore. In moments like this, the duo conjures the AI telepathy of Autechre’s recent work, wherein humanly impossible rhythms are melded to melodic yet melancholic undercurrents.
The sparseness of “Bernard Revisit P81” turns downright eerie, with piercing, chilly tones lacerating the seeming calm. Against the furious churn, robot chitchat, and backspins of “Mothors Pressroll P131,” Lanois can barely break through Funk’s Tasmanian Devil din. The late-night lonesomeness cast by Lanois at the start of “Night MXCMPV1 P74” is also soon dispelled by Funk’s ceaseless contortions. Despite the omnipresent intensity of Venetian Snares’ contributions, the collaborative project does offer a kind of panacea for the hectic pace of modern life. Lanois and Funk demonstrate that even the briefest pause can reveal a more becalmed state of being lying just beneath all the noise and bustle.


The Athens, Georgia group Pylon were one of the great unsung heroes of '80s post-punk, and Live captures them in December 1983 at the peak of their local popularity.

Pylon Live

In the 33 years that have passed since their initial dissolution, the Athens, Georgia post-punk outfit Pylon have become one of the best-remembered forgotten bands, a group that initially survived through namedrops—notably, from their far-more-famous local contemporaries in R.E.M. and the B-52’s—before a late-2000s reissue campaign from DFA Records and cover-song endorsements from Deerhunter more firmly entrenched their place in the canon. While hindsight may position them as the missing link between the caterwauling poetry of Patti Smith and the pin-pricked grooves of PiL, Pylon’s mix of vigor and verbosity has reverberated throughout 21st-century indie rock, informing early-‘00s eccentrics like Life Without Buildings and Love Is All, all the way up to the propulsive polemics of modern-day descendants like Savages and Shopping.
Pylon parlayed some of that renown into sporadic reunions over the ‘90s and 2000s, but their DFA-abetted resurgence was abruptly cut short with the sudden 2009 death of guitarist Randall Bewley from a heart attack. Seven years later, this release—willed into existence by Chunklet publisher/super-fan Henry Owings—belatedly serves to outfit Pylon with a proper tombstone, through the ultimate mode of canonization for rock legends: a double-live album. (The album’s release date of July 25 falls on what would’ve been Bewley’s 61st birthday.)
Contrary to the long tradition of posthumous concert documents—like the Velvet Underground’s Live 1969 or the Stooges’ Metallic K.O.— that showcase unsung bands performing for small or unsympathetic crowds, Live captures Pylon in December 1983 at the peak of their local popularity. From the get-go, the band receives a hero’s welcome from the roaring, boisterous crowd, who had congregated at the Mad Hatter club for the taping of a PBS pilot project called Athens Shows. Sadly, this moment of triumph was also a swan song: citing creative stagnation, Pylon disbanded shortly thereafter, and—coincidentally, but fittingly—the entire TV series was aborted. But for one night at least, Pylon got the close-up they deserved.
At the time, Pylon were touring in support of their sophomore effort, Chomp, which massaged the taut disco-punk dynamic of their 1980 debut, Gyrate, into more playful art-pop. Live draws equally from those two records, but any sonic distinction between them is obliterated in a performance that emphasizes the band’s innate, white-knuckled intensity and sinewy rhythms. It opens with a wheel-greasing version of Gyrate’s “Working Is No Problem,” and Pylon put that maxim into action with an all-business, no-banter set that sees them streamroll through 20 songs in 70 minutes with assembly-line precision: bassist Michael Lachowski and drummer Curtis Crowe lay the foundation, Bewley sculpts it into strange shapes with his surgical guitar lines, and singer Vanessa Briscoe-Hay splatters her mantric messaging on the walls like a spraycan-wielding prophet.
While first-wave punk produced its share of female icons, Briscoe-Hay was lamentably one of the few frontwomen in an American post-hardcore landscape dominated by dudes—so she worked doubly hard to carve out her place within it. A restlessly inventive singer, Briscoe-Hay couched her sardonic, speaking-in-tongues sloganeering (“Everything is! Everything is! Everything is cool!”) in a voice that could slide without warning from disquieting docility to hyperactive hysterics. This robust-but-grainy recording may not be the ideal forum to appreciate those qualities: While you can certainly feel the tonsil-shredding force of Briscoe-Hay’s performance here, the clarity of her words is often obscured by the band’s momentum.
However, as a snapshot of an influential band in their prime, Live is undeniable, and the set serves as an especially effective tribute to Bewley’s crucial contributions. A devout disciple of the Andy Gill school of guitar-scraping, Bewley also infused Pylon’s greyscale post-punk with luminous streaks of color, whether dropping windmill-worthy, open-chord strums atop the authoritative thrust of “Cool,” or blowing open the motorik pop of “No Clocks” with the sort of radiant refrains that Pylon’s one-time tourmates U2 would eventually ride to Red Rocks.
By the time Live reaches its five-song encore stretch, that sort of looseness has infected the band as a whole: Chomp thumper “M-Train”—with its crowd-abetted “woo woo!” hook—emerges as a spiritual precursor to Blur’s “Song 2,” while the shindig-worthy non-album instrumental “Party Zone” shows that Pylon shared more than just a zip code with the B-52’s. And in this marathon set’s dying moments, Pylon summon their last ounce of energy for, of all things, a bastardized version of the Batman theme. It’s an odd note for such a notoriously steely band to go out on, perhaps. But, like Live itself, it’s a reminder that we can all be heroes, if just for one night.


The Portland rapper’s buoyant new project sounds like a controlled sugar rush, folding elements of pop and dance into his bright raps.

TwoPointFive

Sunniness has always been a part of Aminé’s image. His 2017 breakout hit, the horny summer anthem “Caroline,” was propelled by synths, drums, and cowbells as warm and yellow as the shorts he’s wearing in the song’s music video. Armed with a sense of humor befitting a millennial raised on TRL and Quentin Tarantino movies, the Portland rapper often uses levity and bouncy melodies to keep even his heaviest songs afloat. Take his 2020 sophomore album Limbo, which conspicuously focused on legacy: “If I die, roll out the yellow carpet/if you fuck with me,” Aminé says on the opener, “Burden.” Whether contemplating death or the responsibility of having kids, he can’t help but throw the gauntlet down with at least a smirk.
Considering all this, it’s no surprise that Aminé would follow his most introspective album with a concentrated burst of color like TWOPOINTFIVE. The sequel to 2018’s ONEPOINTFIVE—both of which are snarkily dubbed as “EP/LP/mixtape/album” to prod at the nebulous nature of retail rap projects in 2021—maintains the low stakes of the first while tinkering with the formula that led him to stardom in the late 2010s. If Aminé’s 2017 debut album Good For You was sunny, TWOPOINTFIVE is saccharine enough to cause tooth decay. The beats, primarily handled by producers Lido and longtime collaborator Pasqué, fold elements of pop and dance into Aminé’s bright raps that jolt and jive on the border of chaos. TWOPOINTFIVE sounds like a controlled sugar rush, an experiment as short, sweet, and stretchy as a fun-size piece of Laffy Taffy.
Critics and fans have compared TWOPOINTFIVE to hyperpop, and the project does contain examples of the burgeoning microgenre. Giddy synths and bells zoom and splash on songs like “Colors” and lead single “Charmander,” and there’s plenty of pitch-shifted vocals and offhand pop culture references. The difference is that much of what’s considered hyperpop is jagged and harsh, turning its syrupy sound palette into audible rock candy. For all the compression and chirpiness, TWOPOINTFIVE is too clean, its drum programming deep, smooth, and firmly rooted in contemporary rap. It honors the scene’s energy without fully conforming to its principles and will most likely serve as a gateway to edgier work for curious fans destined to spend hours laughing at Hyperpop Daily posts.
So it isn’t exactly 100 gecs or Glaive, but Aminé still covers a considerable amount of ground in just under a half-hour. The fast and loose nature of the POINTFIVE series—accented by interludes from comedian and returning host Rickey Thompson—lends itself more naturally to the sugary aesthetic on display in TWO than the drab and hollow atmosphere of ONE. Lyrically, he’s focused on sexcapades (“YiPiYaY”), taking care of his people (“Dididumduhduh”), and securing his bag (“Mad Funny Freestyle”). “Colors,” a glimpse into isolation and loneliness, is the exception to the project’s rule. Otherwise, he’s crooning about sipping Casamigos on a boat near George Clooney’s house over the synthetic marching horns of “NEO” and being with women crawling on the floor like NAVY Seals on “Mad Funny Freestyle.” There’s little pressure to focus on the weighty themes of Limbo, and it offers him room to climb through Lido and Pasqué’s elaborate playhouses without restraint.
The POINTFIVE series is ultimately a lark, a series of “creative freedom projects,” as Aminé recently told Billboard. Nevertheless, TWOPOINTFIVE is an improvement on the original. There’s a sense of life and wonder in these songs, with Aminé and his collaborators lightly bouncing against their boundaries like pinballs. It may be slight by design, but TWOPOINTFIVE understands that “low stakes” doesn’t have to mean running in place.

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Featuring the slickest production of any Bright Eyes album to date, Cassadaga is a logical continuation of Conor Oberst's country-rock evolution.

Cassadaga

At 27, Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst already has enough career behind him to establish a trajectory. His rise has been uncannily similar to writer Dave Eggers': Both came under public scrutiny for self-conscious, ego-driven Artistic Statements-- Eggers with his meta-memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius; Oberst with his meta-album Fevers and Mirrors. Soon after, both creators shifted focus to more worldly concerns, and have struggled ever since to imbue their work with the empathy and nuance that its often-political leanings demand. Both have heartfelt ambitions that frequently result in Holden Caulfield-like jabs at consumer culture, religion, and U.S. militarism. And both were generally more fun when they were hermetic.
As Oberst's lyrical themes broaden, his music is following suit. Cassadaga, taking its name from a spiritualist camp in Florida where Oberst spent some time, is a logical continuation of his evolution from haunted lo-fi auteur to country-folk traditionalist, and with it comes the slickest production of any Bright Eyes album to date. Oberst, while retaining the feverish quaver that's become his calling card, finds more mannered ways to express emotion here than sliding in and out of key. The arrangements are unapologetically grand, laden with strings, blaring guitar, and mournful pedal steel. Even the record's packaging seems to declare it an event-- the "spectral decoder" included with the disc translates the artwork's squiggly gray lines into all sorts of pictures and text.
The ambitious arrangements strike just the right balance on some songs: The orchestral work on old-fashioned ballad "Make a Plan to Love Me" never overburdens the song's pliant lilt, while the marching strings in the last verse of "Hot Knives", and the organs that eventually sweep in on the barren "No One Would Riot for Less", provide an acute sense of drama. They also allow Oberst to venture beyond his comfy trad-folk niche: Organic hand percussion, electric piano, and vibraphone bring a Middle Eastern influence to "Coat Check Dream Song" without crossing into caricature-- although the droning Arabic chant at the end comes uncomfortably close to the kind of world music-pillaging we've come to dread from our aging rock stars.
Elsewhere, Oberst's arrangements overreach: "Four Winds", with its squealing guitars and fiddles, sounds like a honky-tonk version of "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town", and the otherwise affecting "If the Brakeman Turns My Way" is held back by its overwrought roots-rock chorus. And the smugness latent in some of the arrangements becomes overt in the problematic lyrics, which cast a shadow over even the best-sounding songs. If only that spectral decoder could reveal hidden depth in lines like, "Heard loud and long the river's Om/ Time marching on to a madman's drum."
This balancing act between obscurity and directness is an attribute Bright Eyes fans are used to: "Don't forget what you've learned, all you give is returned/ And if life seems absurd what you need is some laughter," which at least is an attribute Bright Eyes fans have become accustomed to. But the unbearable condescension masquerading as empathy in "Soul Singer in a Session Band" crosses a line: Does having "a lengthy discussion on The Power of Myth with a postmodern author who didn't exist" really make Oberst "just like" the soul singer in a session band?
The political lyrics are the most troublesome. In his earlier efforts, Oberst was always hard on himself-- the problem is that he's adjusted his scope without adjusting his tone, and now he's just as hard on everyone else. In fact, he hardly appears in these songs, and the self-immolating advice he used to dispense ("Don't degrade yourself the way I do") has given way to self-excluding left-wing boilerplate, all sound and no thunder. "Clairaudients (Kill or Be Killed)", one of several apocalyptically minded songs, gives us "Get your revolution at a lower price"; elsewhere we get banner-wavers like "Little soldier, little insect" and "the madness of the government" that seem to be little more than applause signs. The anti-religion rocker "Four Winds" is particularly egregious, with its cursory references to great Satans, whores of Babylon, and slouching towards Bethlehem.
Political art is necessary given the current world climate, but empty rhetoric and moral superiority aren't going to do the trick. The simplistic, self-righteous thinking that's at the root of today's political impasses is exactly the sort of thinking Oberst engages in here. This is a shame, because on the songs in which Oberst actually casts himself-- the subtle, lovely "Lime Tree", for instance, which is about loneliness and longing and everything he truly understands-- his musical gifts and emotional intelligence come to the fore. If he would address the political through this personal lens, exploring his own complicity in the military-industrial complex he currently lambastes from a false outside perspective, he might arrive at commentary that's more about insight and confrontation than moral flattery.


Maya Bouldry-Morrison’s album is a celebration of the qualities—intimacy, ambiguity, physicality, release—that lead to dancefloor catharsis.

Resonant Body

“I loathe crowds,” the novelist Edmund White wrote after visiting the Flamingo, one of New York’s first gay discos. “But tonight the drugs and the music and the exhilaration had stripped me of all such scruples. We were packed in so tightly we were forced to slither across each other’s wet bodies and arms; I felt my arm moving like a piston in synchrony against a stranger’s—and I did not pull away. Freed of my shirt and my touchiness, I surrendered myself to the idea that I was just like everyone else.” Dance music promises relief from self-consciousness, even while the class system reified by many clubs inflames it. Resonant Body, the new album by DJ and producer Octo Octa, celebrates moments like that night at the Flamingo—when temporary intimacy coaxes the bashful into gasping emotion.
Octo Octa named her last record Where Are We Going?, a note of ambivalence that echoed through its tracklist: “Adrift,” “No More Pain (Promises to a Younger Self),” “Fleeting Moments of Freedom (Wooo).” Maya Bouldry-Morrison had just come out as a trans woman, and her songs kept circling discursively, as if feeling their way beyond anxiety. Resonant Body sheds any lingering unease, beating in time with the palpitations of euphoria. Lead single “Spin Girl, Let’s Activate!” is a wry joy, looping together get-on-the-floor vocals before teasing the tempo down again. When Bouldry-Morrison introduces piano stabs, the chords race endlessly upwards, growing more ardent each time they return. “Imminent Spirit Arrival” shows off that ear for dynamics: A shouted “go!” cuts through the bass’s lustrous darkness, like some neon sign flickering briefly to life, until she strips everything back to the hi-hats alone. It’s the shiver of recognition amid collective bliss.
Resonant Body finds words for its exuberance in a raucous chorus of vocal samples. The title phrase of “Move Your Body” blares out over and over, refracted into many parallel variations—a banger that works your subconscious. “Can You See Me?” pinballs around between breakbeats, always returning to the same line: “I know exactly how you feel.” The message could be house music’s oath, but by isolating that intensely tender vocal, Bouldry-Morrison deepens its ambiguities. Resonant Body celebrates 1990s rave anthems with a bittersweet sense of vanished time—the party ended long ago, the dancers shut their eyes against daylight, but balloons still float around the room on inherited breath.
That spiralling ecstasy gets relieved by a late interlude, “My Body Is Powerful,” which calls back to the earlier, more introspective Octo Octa. Its sound world of trilling birds and ambient tones feels both haunting and comforting, an ecosystem recreated from memory. As distant chimes broke the tranquility, I thought of a passage in Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Spell, when the shyly dorky narrator goes clubbing for the first time: “The music possessed him, he lived it with his whole body, but his ear had become so spacious and analytic that he could hear quite distinctly the hubbub of everyone talking, like the booming whisper of tourists in a cathedral.”
At the end of Resonant Body, every lone voice merges into a loud multitude. One short snippet in “Power to the People” comes from a 1980s ACT-UP rally, but otherwise the protest marchers that Bouldry-Morrison samples chant inaudible words. Letting them drown each other out, she captures that moment when individuals become the masses, a divinely ordinary transfiguration; you can even hear an organ playing. Solidarity is the work of relating to strangers, understanding people who might have nothing in common besides a shared cause. Until it finds a sympathetic form to resonate against, music is only noise.


The classically trained 19-year-old musician stands out less for her bars than for intricate melodies and lush soundscapes that push the boundaries of popular rap and R&B.

the One EP

There’s a moment in Hawa’s first music video, released in October 2018, when she pushes back the long sleeve of a baggy red tee to reveal her boney, brown wrist. “See these rocks on my wrist, yeah they real son,” she sing-raps in an accent that’s a melange of the Guinean, French, German, and American voices she’s heard growing up around the world. The thing about her wrist, though, is that it’s bare. She boasts about keeping $50 million in the safe and “a chopper tucked” in her waistband, but there’s no sign of wealth or a weapon. There’s just a rascally teenager having a good time.
Now 19 years old and based in New York City, Hawa is releasing her debut EP, the One, with b4, an imprint of the venerable indie label 4AD. She’s still flexing, but across the eight-song collection, her boasts feel less real than her preoccupation with romance and lust. Her bars, swaggy but often unsurprising, aren’t what’s most impressive. Instead, it’s her commitment to escaping the trappings of popular rap and R&B with intricate melodies and lush soundscapes, helmed by producer Tony Seltzer and a small, eclectic group of beatmakers.
In the fifth grade, Hawa intercepted a letter to her parents she feared was filled with bad news about her behavior. Instead, it was an invitation to join a New York Philharmonic composition program for children. She enrolled, and she excelled. By 15, ensembles in China and Venezuela were performing her pieces. Perhaps this is why Hawa’s low yet airy voice sounds made to be manipulated—to be pitched up, brought down, layered and harmonized. The One proves she’s a composer first and a songwriter second; lyrics about love and bad bitches eventually begin to feel repetitive.
But Hawa’s melodies are so strong and so smooth that it’s easy for boring lines like, “I’m making her wet, wet like a sink” to go uninterrogated. The One sounds thoughtful and unified, a series of tiny worlds within the same universe of delicate keys, billowing synths, and subtle 808s. Producer Cadenza leans into his bashment and dancehall expertise on the sultry “My Love,” building record scratches, twinkles, and chimes into a tropical playground. Producer Carlos Truly, who plays guitar and synthesizer in the indie band Ava Luna, uses both with groove and restraint on the EP’s dreamy “Outro.”
Hawa has predecessors in style and subject matter: When she makes threats, her droney sing-rapping calls to mind Dej Loaf. Her simple rhymes about loving women echo Kodie Shane’s Young HeartThrob. When she murmurs lines like, “She in love, but I just pretend,” her caddish tendencies resemble those of Brent Faiyaz. Yet, the One feels new because Hawa approaches these moments from different angles. It’s both tender and bold, both atmospheric and focused. Hawa’s classical training gives her a unique perspective on these contrasting elements, and her natural musical acuity allows her to navigate them with uncommon grace.