The debut album from saxophonist Joseph Shabason, best known for his work with Destroyer, shows a new side of his instrument. He uses electronics to create a kind of ambient jazz.

Aytche

Reed, metal, and the nature of breath itself conspire to create the saxophone’s distinctive tone—its shriek, its glide, its quicksilver caress. But what if you could mask or morph the instrument’s identity using electronics; how far could you stretch it without losing its essence? The question is at the heart of Joseph Shabason’s approach on his debut album, Aytche. Shabason is best known for his work with Destroyer, where he lends creamy soft-rock soloing to Dan Bejar’s knotty, knowing compositions. Here, however, he tackles a more personal, idiosyncratic sound: a kind of ambient jazz, or maybe pastel noir, inspired by Jon Hassell’s distinctive processed trumpet work and Gigi Masin’s wind-kissed ambient.
Aytche’s nine songs amount to a series of interrelated tone poems in which Shabason’s digitally processed tenor swims amid watery synths, brushed drums, and occasional contributions on bass, trumpet, and guitar. Opener “Looking Forward to Something, Dude” introduces both the album’s mood and its principal theme, one that will be reprised a few tracks later in “Smokestack” and again in the concluding “Belching Smoke”: a soft chorus of saxophones playing a parallel chord progression that ebbs and flows as naturally as breathing. The saxophone is a monophonic instrument, but Shabason’s battery of harmonizers and effects lets him milk rich chords from his horn, refracting sound through circuitry like light through a prism. Even if you’re not well versed in the mechanics of woodwinds, you can tell intuitively that it’s one player, not a chorus of three, by the way his vibrato is perfectly mirrored across the harmonized voices. There’s an unmistakably uncanny quality to the music’s slicked, too-perfect surfaces.
The album proceeds as a series of experiments in expressive veiling. “Aytche” is dominated by syncopated synths that sound almost like a halcyon memory of rave; above them float fluttering streaks of feedback and a muted trumpet solo, courtesy JP Carter. The saxophone is barely perceptible here, and it’s equally subdued in the gorgeous “Neil McCauley,” whose sorrowful keys and neon hues are faintly evocative of the Blade Runner soundtrack. “Tite Cycle,” led by a slow, meditative synthesizer melody, is similar in feel to the title track, with a tri-harmonized sax part woven in like a stoned afterthought. Here and elsewhere, birdsong is audible in the background, lending to the impression that at least part of the album was recorded outdoors. (The recurring motifs—both incidental birdsong and the repeated theme from the opening track—help reinforce the sense of the album as an interconnected suite, rather than a series of standalone pieces.)
Shabason has spoken of wanting to subvert listeners’ expectations of his instrument, to translate his horn into a “dense chordal texture” and avoid the show-offy displays of chops that constituted his training at conservatory. Yet some of the album’s most exciting moments come when the music is tugged in two opposite directions—between sourceless and anonymous ambient sound, on the one hand, and hard-won virtuosity on the other. “Neil McCauley” is essentially a stylish showcase for Bram Gielen’s breathtaking fretless bass playing; JP Carter’s needle-nosed trumpet solo owns “Aytche”; Nic Bragg’s weed-whacker guitar outbursts on “Smokestack” and “Belching Smoke” add grit to an album that tends to drift like dandelion tufts. And Shabason gets his own time to shine on “Long Swim,” the most conventionally jazz-like piece here. Laying down a bed of pure breath, he proceeds to build parallel saxophone parts—one processed using his customary effects, the other a lilting and lyrical solo, unfettered by technology, in which his own melodic instincts take the lead.
Aytche is, for the most part, an easygoing album, but an unsettling undercurrent runs through it as well. The muted thumps and ominous dissonance of “Chopping Wood” play like an ambient riposte to Bitches Brew. And while the drifting keys of “Westmeath” may sound as placid as a rural getaway, snatches of recorded speech hint at darker energies. “My father died in ’76,” murmurs an unidentified man, and though he quickly disappears beneath the surface of the music, stray phrases bubble back up periodically: “The pain was too much for him… last act of individual… days of vengeance…” Shabason has said that the track concerns themes related to Holocaust survivors, degenerative illness, and assisted suicide, but the composer, the grandson of Holocaust survivors himself, doesn’t belabor the point. Whatever personal meaning the music may have for him, he keeps it close, instead leaving the listener to contemplate only the rippled surface of grief—which floats, like the otherworldly sound of his saxophone, above a source that has been rendered all but invisible.


The UK art-rock duo’s first album since the shock of Brexit has the earnest directness of artists whose sense of the world has been nudged into focus.

Open Here

It takes a village to make a Field Music album. Peter and David Brewis, the brothers behind the project, have a penchant for excess, and their richly orchestrated art-pop experiments have called for a sizable cast of guest musicians over the last decade-plus. But while more than a dozen artists left their fingerprints on Field Music’s sixth album, the people whose presence is most felt throughout its eleven tracks are nowhere to be found in the album credits—they’re David’s and Peter’s young children. In press materials, the Brewises explain that fatherhood has helped inspire a new sense of personal and political accountability in their music.  Open Here is too nuanced and complex to be called a kids’ record, but coming from a band whose work has often been clouded by emotional and lyrical ambiguity, it’s remarkably straight-ahead. This album bears the earnest directness of artists whose sense of the world has been nudged into focus in a new way.
The brothers’ experiences of fatherhood go hand-in-hand with a heightened attention to global politics, brought on, in part, by the unflattering spotlight cast on their hometown of Sunderland, England, the first city to vote in favor of Brexit. They reckon with the inexplicable things they will have to explain to their children, and inveigh against those who promote hatred and fear in the world in which they’re growing up. On “Goodbye to the Country,” one of the brothers sings from what sounds like a misunderstood outsider’s perspective in a xenophobic town (“Don’t you worry, I will be fine/With a knife at my neck and my very last dime”). “Checking on a Message” is deceptively peppy for a song about waiting up for news—election results, perhaps—that’s sure to be bad. “Count It Up,” on which the duo catalog several varieties of privilege (“the ever-growing list of things you can’t claim all the credit for”), has perhaps the most direct link to Brexit: David Brewis has said he wrote the song to voice frustration with his compatriots’ failure to see or think beyond themselves.
Writing songs about privilege is a tricky business. A song like “Count It Up,” released in 2018 by a pair of white guys with no notable background in social justice, could read to some as a well-meaning but clumsy effort of the newly woke, or a self-congratulatory reckoning that mistakes awareness for impact. Thinking about the Brewises’ message here with the attentive ears of their children in mind, however, makes all the difference in how “Count It Up” comes across. When the brothers sing, “If people don’t stare at you on the street because of the color of your skin/Count that up,” they’re not patting themselves on the back for having a conscience—they’re looking for the right language to talk about injustice with the young humans whose worldviews they’re tasked with shaping.
“No King No Princess” feels similar in its aim. Addressed to David’s children, it’s at once a jubilant dance party, replete with invigorating horn jabs, and an indictment of traditional gender roles. At the chorus, a pompom-toting choir swoops in with words of encouragement: “You can paint it how you want/And you can dress up how you want/And you can do the job you want/And you can do it.” I listen to this song and see the faces of young girls at last month’s Women’s March, perched on their parents’ shoulders and waving posterboard painted with girl power slogans while nearby marchers cheered them on. They might not have fully understood the context of the gathering, but they were certainly tuned into its energy and the value of their participation. Watching these girls be uplifted in real time was moving; listening to “No King No Princess” and picturing the exchange between Brewis and his children stirs up similar feelings.
Elsewhere, Open Here sets aside plenty of time for play. “Share a Pillow” may be the grooviest lullaby that ever was, inviting the restless kids to sleep in their parents’ bed with a peace offering of baritone sax riffs and sunny, layered vocal harmonies. Opener “Time in Joy” is a frothy, blissed-out ode to companionship wrapped in cascading flutes. Throughout the album, the Brewis brothers toy with the whimsical, outsized arrangements that are their calling card while borrowing bits and pieces of prog-pop and funk, amounting to some of their most expansive and boisterous music yet. Given the state of global affairs, it sometimes feels daunting just to have to be a person, let alone a person responsible for the wellbeing of others. With Open Here, Field Music rise to the challenge with a set of newly crystallized talking points, offered up along with a glorious mess of noise.


Prolific Detroit rapper-producer Quelle Chris offers up his most compelling bout of existential voyaging to date, ultimately catching more than just his own reflection in the mirror.

Quelle Chris: Being You Is Great, I Wish I Could Be You More Often

Catharsis has been such an effective coping mechanism lately that it can be easy to forget what you really need sometimes is a strong sense of meditative focus. Before you can ramp yourself up enough to go out there and Get Shit Done, you need to believe that you're the kind of person who actually can and that it matters if you do in the first place. If you cultivate your chill well enough, you'll be able to bust through barriers and push off antagonists with a sly deadpan and your energy still preserved.
That's been the recent vibe given off by prolific Detroit MC/producer Quelle Chris, a low-key incisive weed-and-brew wiseass whose halting flow deliberates like the underground's rejoinder to mumble rap. Innocent Country, from 2015, was the album that hinted at deeper existential crises beneath the veneer of comedic bravado, a curious interrogation of his surroundings on both a personal and a wide-picture scale. Last year's Lullabies for the Broken Brain highlighted that same sense of walls-closing-in restlessness with a string of bass-rich but sandpapery instrumentals that communicated an insomniac anxiety through kick drums. Being You Is Great, I Wish I Could Be You More Often is the logical progression from both: a bout of existential voyaging that can't help but catch more than just Quelle's own reflection in the mirror.
Single “Buddies” is probably the pull-quote track of the album, an ego trip statement delivered with a calmly bemused, beatifically sincere voice: “I fuck with myself/I fucks with myself/Might bring myself some flowers/I'm in love with myself.” After that hook winds up resurfacing as a reprise once most of the record's portrait has been assembled, it's a bit easier to recognize as the problem he hints at: what is there, really, to love about himself, and does he even fuck with anyone else he knows? So he questions his own intelligence along with everyone else's (“Dumb for Brains”), bites “the bullet, the case, and the trigger” en route to finding some measure of perseverance (“Popeye”), takes on a crew's worth of voices as he both champions and shoots down a rap-game-focused end run around a dead-end living (“The Dreamer in the Den of Wolves”), and generally tries to reconcile the bad stuff with the side of himself that’s worthy of celebrating.
Quelle's heaviness isn't a burden, though. His flow is immersed in a conversational ease, somewhere between classic Madlib and a Hannibal Buress routine, his inflections coming across like emotive gestures—shrugged shoulders, rolled eyes, rubbed temples. He's expressive enough to excuse lines flatter or cornier than the ones he actually brings, but mostly his cadence adds resonance to simple sentiments. When he admits, “Yes, I like to drink/Yes, I like to smoke/Yes it's an escape/I don't like to cope” over a pitched-up quasi-Quasimoto overdub on “Learn to Love Hate,” or takes a breather to rattle off a distilled barrage of pure-lyricist punchline shit-talk on “The Prestige,” Chris adapts to those shifts in tone and intensity with an almost disorienting ease.
He’s got some strong hands on deck for guest spots, too. There are characteristically quotable verses by Roc Marciano, Elzhi, Homeboy Sandman, Jean Grae, and other frequent cohorts, as well as beats by producers ranging from MNDSGN (woozily harmony-driven on “Popeye”) to Alchemist (looping psych-folk wails on “Pendulum Swing”) to Chris Keys (ruminative on three wildly different cuts). But for all the friends around him, Quelle’s personality—fractured as it is—manifests clearly through his own particular quirks. Whether it's a self-produced beat that kicks up dust particles (like the snare-melting trudge of “Fascinating Grass”) or his tendency to put on a voice that threatens to push you away before luring you back in, Quelle's whole approach is a self-examination that cuts both ways. Once you get that whole value-of-the-self situation figured out, Being You Is Great, I Wish I Could Be You More Often bumps enough to pace a purposeful movement out into the streets.


This 2xCD set compiles the first eight editions of Detroit producer Theo Parrish's "ugly" edits. It's not just a compendium of the wiggly, playful, grimy, irreducible disco edits the man had his way with, but also a fine gateway into his wholly idiosyncratic soundworld.

Uget

It's hard to imagine disco music (much less modern dance music and hip-hop) without the edit, wherein songs had their choice drum breaks extended, were trimmed of excess, or looped for greater duration and danceability. Or as one DJ put it to me, edits arose from the pleasure principle, that "when you hear something great, you want it to continue." Early disco DJs used them as secret weapons for their dancefloors, as did hip-hop's pioneers, spinning familiar songs into alternate universes, but after the heyday of Chicago house masters like Ron Hardy and Frankie Knuckles, the edit as a DJ tool faded from view.
While London's DJ Harvey dropped his series of "Black Cock" edits in the mid-1990s, it was when Detroit producer Theo Parrish's self-deemed "ugly" edits (complete with slapdash spray-painted labels) lurched into view at the turn of the 21st century that the trend came back in full force. Rather than resort to using scalpel and cutting block, the technology allowed dancefloor professionals like Prins Thomas, Pilooski, and even James Murphy to drop such reconfigured tunes. It also allowed newbies and bedroom DJs alike to make their own edits, albeit to diminishing returns.
Theo Parrish's limited disco edits remain in high demand, getting bootlegged repeatedly (a bootleg of a bootleg?) and going for ludicrous sums online. And while this collection has neither "Ugly Edits" nor Theo Parrish's name anywhere on the art, the handy 2xCD set compiles the first eight editions of those edits released over a three-year period. It's not just an affordable compendium of the wiggly, playful, grimy, and irreducible disco edits the man had his way with, but also a fine gateway into his wholly idiosyncratic soundworld, suggesting a common ground between Larry Levan and Brion Gysin.
Always an inscrutable music-maker, with productions eschewing the distinctions erected between house, jazz, funk, avant-garde electronic, and soul music, all of Parrish's traits can be heard in the perfect opening track, a woozy, spiraling edit of Jill Scott's "Slowly Surely" from her 2000 debut album. Starting with a glitching CD, tocking drum machine, and a voicemail from the singer herself, she thanks him for a CD that she has yet to listen to. She talks of her over-protective manager but that polite backpedal transforms into a gently cycling whispered plaint: "I just don't know where I should go." Pillowy soft chords lift and drift back down; a woodblock and some other random percussive moments get foregrounded only to dissipate. Yet somehow 12 of the most effervescent minutes in house music have surely drifted past.
The set's bread and butter is in how Parrish dices and lengthens funk and soul cuts by acts such as the Dells, Minnie Riperton, Willie Hutch, Funkadelic, and Kool & the Gang. He takes Sylvester's "Dance" and boils it down to rubbery bassline, incessant hi-hat, and a pickup line for its first three minutes before the dancefloor release comes. In teasing out Sugarhill Gang's late-period joint "Hot Hot Summer Day", he lobs off all their wack rapping and instead elevates the melted-butter backing vocals from the last third of the song, spinning a nine-minute epic out of it.
Which is not to say he emphasizes only the bright, dancefloor-friendly aspects of tracks. When he takes incidental music from Quincy Jones's score for The Color Purple, a clanging polyrhythmic vocal chant dissolves into a disquieting stab of strings. In reworking slick boogie band GQ's "Lies", he offsets a loop about "a party going on" with a man agonizing, "I got to know why," to a cheating woman.
On the easily recognizable Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes' Philly-Soul classic, "The Love I Lost", Parrish drops us midway into the track. He makes Teddy Pendergrass' honeyed yet gritty vocals bump against the sparse organ and guitar opening of the song (with plenty of vinyl crackle at the edges) before dumping both atop the propulsive middle section. What makes its sloppy nine minutes work is how he swings the equalization to extremes on every component, finding new spaces and juxtapositions where there previously were none. What should be familiar and mere repetition is anything but. As he once told Resident Advisor: "Repetition kind of sets a certain mass in a song… then there's little bits that come in and out and these changes that kinda shift on that pivot. This is where I go in my head sometimes… shifting, spinning, all kinds of stuff." Consider these 18 tracks, then, the results of Parrish's ever-spinning musical centrifuge.


Though the legendary UK grindcore band Napalm Death have scaled back the mach-speed sections of yore, their fifteenth album, Apex Predator - Easy Meat, remains strident in its determination to keep the listening experience kinetically satisfying and altogether disgusting.

Apex Predator - Easy Meat

Napalm Death are one of the most virulent bands in metal: the legendary UK grindcore crew's violent, stream-of-consciousness operates like a punk pandemic. Fed by the cesspools of unrest and corruption in the world, their inspiration flares up and runs wild, feeding off whatever styles are at the ready. Sometimes their visceral sound skews hardcore punk, and sometimes it's more death-metal influenced. On any given record, the approach largely depends on how they approach their muses—the scum of the earth—and fortunately for their fans, there's plenty of scum to be found in today's state of affairs.
Despite some early instability in their ranks—particularly between when they got their start in 1981 and 1992’s landmark album *Utopia Banished—*and the continued procession of new bands on the block, Napalm Death haven’t relented one bit. If anything, their path of destruction has grown ever wider, fueled, as always, by the grotesque workings of the musical and political communities that surround them, drawn increasingly closer together by the mores of the digital age. The band's most recent effort, 2012’s Utilitarian, ripped apart these themes at length, and longtime vocalist Barney Greenway and company’s new album Apex Predator - Easy Meat is similarly strident in its determination to keep the listening experience kinetically satisfying and altogether disgusting.
Three decades in, Napalm Death’s famously mercurial lineup has solidified into a concise unit: guitarist Mitch Harris, bassist (and longest tenured member) Shane Embury, drummer Danny Herrera, and that maniacal frontman Mark "Barney" Greenway. Embury and Herrera are the whiplash-inducing back end, hammering out tempos atop which Harris proudly stands and slashes, bolstering his dissonant chords with high-register yelps and screeches. And, even at 45, Greenway's role as vocal juggernaut remains secure as he continues to gleefully shove aside whatever structures his bandmates assemble in his path. On Apex Predator, Russ Russell’s mixing allows you to catch every strain, every gasp, every last drop of spit. From the way Greenway huffs and puffs on "How the Years Condemn", you’d think the guy was the Big Bad Wolf’s cousin from a nuclear dystopia. A closer look at Embury's lyrics reveals instead an ordinary man, haunted by the friends he's lost and desperate to better his life so as not to sully their memory. Napalm Death's splatterhouse hijinks are rooted in a more profound sense of psychological pain this time around, and that their ability to convey that pain hinges largely on its voice.
What’s more, he remains capable of embodying a dizzying number of roles, adopting the cadence of a murderous carnival barker one moment (on "Smash a Single Digit" and "Metaphorically Screw You") and an unholy clergy member the next (the title track, an almost meditational nod to Swans). Don’t come into this thing expecting a solo spree; aside from John "Bilbo" Cook’s delicious guest riff on "Hierarchies" (touted humorously in the liner notes as the "token guitar solo"), the axework on Apex Predator - Easy Meat skews workmanlike, with Harris welding together hardcore punk, chaotic, hyper-speed grindcore, and just a hint of groove metal to make the acrid medicine go down smoother.
Way back in the mothball-scented archives of YouTube there’s this old TV interview with Jim Carrey in which he half-seriously declares his allegiance to thrash metal, launching into an impassioned parody of Napalm Death. "Some day, this guy’s gonna wanna slow down and do some duets," he grins, launching into a simulation of what that might sound like. What's crazy is that Carrey's mockery ended up being half fulfilled. On Apex Predator, Napalm Death have scaled back the mach-speed sections of yore, specifically with regards to the drums, and the album does feature a screamed duet of sorts with the shattered dialogue of "Beyond the Pale". What’s more, as on 2012's Utilitarian and in other scattered corners of their discography, there are periods of clean singing that would've seemed unthinkable back in the days of Harmony Corruption. Here, it's more interestingly interwoven than in the past. And it’s still a Napalm Death record through and through—which means shredded eardrums and tinnitus for days. After all this time, we’d expect nothing less.


The Minnesota trio’s forlorn second album holds up alongside distorted post-shoegaze classics but stays true to its chilly slowcore roots.

Goodbye, Nowhere!

While Midwest emo may have originated in Middle America during the genre’s late-’90s heyday, it eventually found a home on the coasts. Much like Seattle’s Sunny Day Real Estate and Philadelphia’s Algernon Cadwallader fit into a scene thousands of miles from its epicenter, the band Double Grave gracefully adopted the sensibilities of the late 2010s Northeastern slowcore revival from their home state of Minnesota. On the trio’s second record, Goodbye, Nowhere!, themes of vast physical and metaphorical emptiness provide a backdrop to songs that sullenly grapple with getting older and trying to remedy the pitfalls of adolescence in the rear-view. It holds up alongside distorted post-shoegaze classics but stays true to its chilly northern roots.
Goodbye, Nowhere! Came to life during a period of personal growth and self-imposed solitude for lead singer Jeremy Warden when he and his bandmate-turned-fiancée Bree Meyer took a break from living together for the first time in a decade. Lead single “The Farm” deals with the predictability of recurring desolation, and “Long Drive Home” confronts the difficulty of trying to open one’s heart in a world where stoniness is an essential trait. The lyrics about feeling like pure garbage and its fuzzed-out whammy guitar initially sound like a soundtrack to getting home from school and throwing down one’s backpack in a huff. But the mysticism in the album’s fascination with death and alienation shows that Warden is, in fact, reflecting candidly about the grim realities of transitioning into “real adulthood.”
Goodbye, Nowhere! has strong intentions and great musicianship, but its production value is frustratingly mid-fidelity. It exists in a lackluster middle ground that sounds like the demo of any hard-working but unremarkable bar band playing in the scene of a small city. It sounds cheap, but it never feels thrifty. It’s why the album can play like a New England “type beat.” Having opened for bands like LVL UP and Pile, Double Grave roam in the same sphere as many of the indie rock bands that came before them, and their music at times feels like a derivative of the artists they have shared stages with. While hazy indie is an easily classifiable genre, the best artists within its niche aren’t those that simply duplicate the doomy Duster-style jamming that Double Grave can totter into. The record’s more percussive instrumentals, like “Slime,” play like every song on Ovlov’s first record Am mashed into one.
All this is more or less the byproduct of a band coming into their own sound, an invisible process akin to the worries of aging Warden touches on throughout. The sorrow that churns through the album feels dramatic and forlorn, but the neurosis in Warden’s songwriting gives the record heart. “Hard times keep coming down on me/I don’t know where I went wrong/I try to be cool and friendly/But nobody wants me/Nobody cares,” Warden sings on the stripped-down closing track “Too Late.” This kind of snow-dusted misery throughout Goodbye, Nowhere! is what makes the best slowcore records stand out in an oversaturated scene.

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Rhino reissues the first five albums from this famed Scottish band; each CD has been remastered and includes music videos.

The Jesus and Mary Chain: Psychocandy / Darklands / Automatic / Honey's Dead / Stoned & Dethroned

The Jesus and Mary Chain (henceforth “JAMC”) was the musical project of Jim and William Reid, who were (a) Scottish, (b) brothers, and (c) the foremost technological and scientific innovators of the modern rock era. Before they came along, many people still assumed that in order to make aggressive, energetic noises, the members of rock bands had to actually move around, do guitar windmills, and look engaged. The JAMC did not like this situation, because those poses tended to be either uncool or boring, and often made one look like a complete twat.
But after a brief scientific study of their equipment, it came to the JAMC’s attention that electric guitars, when paired with high amplifier volume and harmonic distortion, could create feedback, thereby producing aggressive noises mostly on their own, and freeing their actual players to stand around looking half dead, depressed, and generally too contemptuous and disgusted to really bother playing-- all of which seemed, in 1985 and in the particular case of the JAMC, totally super-awesome.
Obviously the drummer for such a group couldn’t sit behind a big kit looking like he knew what he was doing, so the JAMC stood Bobby Gillespie (yes, that one) up behind only two drums-- a floor tom and a snare-- and had him bash away like he was pissed off at them but either too bored or too drunk to finish them off. A similar approach was taken to bass guitar and vocals.
If the band had applied these tactics to knotty, difficult music, you would never have heard of them, and Dominique Leone would be reviewing these reissues. Luckily-- intuitively-- the JAMC wrote pop songs, basic three-chord rock’n’roll and all-hook melodies, vaguely in the style of early Beach Boys, girl groups, or the laid-back end of the Rolling Stones. Only...as played by lazy, spiteful, nearly hopeless people who didn’t care one way or the other and therefore covered the whole thing in screeching. (See also: the Velvet Underground.)
And thus we get Psychocandy (1985), the JAMC’s enduring contribution to the annals of rock history.
Sometimes people tell you that a 20-year-old album “sounded like nothing else,” but when you listen with today’s ears, it seems rather quaint and unsurprising. Psychocandy is not one of those albums. Its noise isn’t the thick, tactile noise of the new millennium: It’s thin, trebly, and drowned in indistinct reverb, such that this record still sounds like it’s being played in the apartment across the street at staggering volume while someone intermittently runs glass through a table saw. The music stumbles its way from stoned, lazy beauty (“Just Like Honey”) to speed-freak noise (“Never Understand”) to almost-bouncy pop (“Taste of Cindy”). Jim Reid chants his melodies in the selfish, mostly monosyllabic vocabulary of rock’n’roll (“I’m in love with myself,” “I don’t want you to need me,” “oh yeah,”). And just about every song comes out ideal: You’d think they’d sound like jerks, or toughs, and yet it all comes off so vulnerable, so pretty.
The UK loved it, and it’s worth asking why. One reason, I think, is that people in the stylish 80s were thrilled to see their own personal resurrection of the same rock’n’roll “cool” myth that runs through fellow heroin enthusiasts like the Stones, the Pistols, and Nirvana-- which is to say, a band that doesn’t seem to give a fuck about much, including pleasing its own audience, and thus lets that audience live out its own (sensibly unfulfilled) fantasies of alienated non-fuck-giving and antisocial moping. Psychocandy remains a perfect record for states of feeling so bratty, depressed, or disgusted that you actually start to enjoy it. Also, like with most heroin rock’n’roll bands, there’s an earnest, romantic belief in something beautiful and unattainable in the midst of it, which might be drug-related for them but doesn’t have to be for you. The many fun and pretty songs here still seem tired and hard-won, like the band’s grasping at beauty rather than just claiming it exists.
The JAMC also sent a couple massively influential messages to everyone else. One was that-- as mentioned-- you could make big noises without being or acting big. The other was a reminder that the ethos of a band could be wrapped up not in the notes or the songs they played, but in the actual sound of their records; that stuff could be content, not style. These lessons, put together, account for a good 75% of the shoegazer scene that followed.
With all of that accomplished, the JAMC’s next four albums were spent figuring out what in the world to do next. Decisions were made as follows:*
*
Darklands (1987): With Gillespie gone and replaced by an unobtrusive drum machine, the band turns down the noise attitude and works on developing the back-to-basics pop songs that were always underneath. The singles (“Happy When it Rains”) are a joy, big hooks laced with just the right amount of vintage leather-and-shades cool.
Automatic (1989): Conventional wisdom wrongly calls this the dud. With the band reduced to the brothers only, things go artificial: The drum machine is foregrounded, the bass is played on keyboards, the feedback’s on vacation. In that space, the Reids take their biggest shot at doing full-on pop, something that-- on a global alternative classic like the Pixies-covered “Head On”-- feels like a career peak. The rockier album cuts get pretty turgid, and both Reids start to feel like parodies of themselves, but at points they fall into a synthetic rock grind that’s almost industrial-- fascinating, in a time-capsule kind of way.
Honey’s Dead (1992): Conventional wisdom wrongly calls this the return to form, mostly because they got a drummer and wrote some lively tunes. The problem is that the well-recorded feedback and effortful Jagger yowling here sound like two guys straining to be cool, the exact thing that Psychocandy evaded. It’s also their first fully contemporary grunge-era record, so if you wanted to hear a rock band try, you could just buy something current.
Stoned and Dethroned (1994): Back to the beauty thing-- the band breaks out a few acoustic guitars and settles gracefully into a bunch of drawling Stones-type numbers. How convenient that William was dating Hope Sandoval, of popular acoustic drawlers Mazzy Star: Her duet with Jim on "Sometimes Always" really is a standout.
And these five discs offer those five records, each remastered, and each with a DVD face on the flipside containing all relevant music videos and a hi-res album version.
There is only one warning that must go with them: Do not try this at home. Since the turn of the millennium, a staggering number of rock bands have put a staggering amount of effort into seeming like they don’t care. Some have studied the poses and sounds like engineers; others have reduced themselves to the point of intolerable blandness, all because actually trying something might leave them open to embarrassment, open to criticism. Don’t try this at home: These days we could use more of the opposite end of the 80s, the unembarrassed striving and the unselfconscious quirk.


After four albums, an EP, stray tracks, and some videos, the Books called it quits this year. You couldn't ask for a better send-off than this lovingly compiled box set that collects all of their released music on vinyl and mp3 along with a DVD of their videos.

A Dot in Time

The Books met over Shooby Taylor. "It was pretty random," co-founder Nick Zammuto told Pitchfork in an interview in 2003. "I met this girl Julie up in Williamstown, and we were both working the field of art conservation. She ended up getting a job with the Guggenheim and I followed her down to New York where she got this apartment with her sister. Her sister was friends with Paul [de Jong, cellist and co-founder], and so we ended up living in the same building together. I remember the first time I went over to his apartment. He pulled out this Shooby Taylor record."
Taylor was a musical oddity known for his energetic, one-of-a-kind scat singing. He was profiled in Irwin Chusid's Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music. And the fact that his music was in the room when Zammuto first met cellist and fellow sound collector Paul de Jong makes perfect sense. Taylor's music was something that was lost, found, re-discovered, and shared. It was weird and it had an uncertain context and the people who passed those records around created new ones. Such odd gems are rescued from obscurity and passed around by people like de Jong and Zammuto. And that drive provided the initial inspiration for the Books.
That was the beginning of the last decade, and now the Books are no more. After four albums, an EP, stray tracks, and some videos, the Books called it quits this year. Nick Zammuto was somewhat evasive as to why, but it doesn't really matter. It feels right for the Books to wind things up. They had a brilliant idea, they created a sound around it, they bent and shaped and explored that sound as best they could. And then eventually it came time to put that sound away. You couldn't ask for a better send-off than A Dot in Time, a lovingly compiled and gorgeous box set that collects all of their released music on vinyl and mp3 along with a DVD of their videos.
The Books had a distinctive sound that was like nothing else when it arrived on the scene in 2002. It sounded so bizarre and alluring in part because it was the perfect music for a very specific time and place. If it'd have arrived five years later, it wouldn't have made nearly as much sense. In 2002, Google was firmly in control of the web search game, but information in general still seemed overwhelming, random, unknowable. There were fewer ways to focus attention on a single nugget of culture. And the Books were founded in part as a way to take a stream of artifacts and re-assemble them into something new. Which is another way of saying that the Books made less sense in the post-YouTube world; once everyone became an archivist and the fragments of culture were available to all, someone coming to the Books for the first time did so without the same sense of wonder.
But all that was a few years away. First, we had Thought for Food, one of the most startling and original debut albums of the 00s. With this project, you didn't know where one element started and another began. What was sampled? What was played? Where did these sounds come from? Was the young child being told, "You have no mother and father," and being asked not to touch his father in the song "Motherless Bastard" "real" or was this from a movie or was it staged? It was hard to know, and this lingering sense of strangeness and unknowability suited the music perfectly. Without access to the details of authorship, you could only let the sound wash over you, and it was a beauty. Subtle guitar and banjo, bits of cello, some voices. We were just coming out of the peak era of Chicago post-rock, and the Books' approach to sound bore some relationship to the thoughtful, understated, cerebral, but still deeply felt expression of Jim O'Rourke, one of the lynchpins of that scene. A decade on, Thought for Food still works its peculiar magic.
The Lemon of Pink is that odd follow-up album that finds a band refining and honing its sound but losing the element of surprise. The technique is almost identical, but Zammuto and de Jong had a better understanding of how to wield their instruments and samples for maximum impact. As is sometimes the case, for the Books, each of their first three albums has an almost equal number of fans who think it's the best. And in these cases, a lot depends on which you heard first. The Lemon of Pink showed them growing slowly into the more song-oriented direction they would develop later, but the samples are as fresh as ever, words and syllables plucked from who-knows-where and allowed to settle in your brain and grow into a new kind of meaning.
Lost and Safe was the breakthrough, the album that moved the Books out of the realm of small cult act. They'd become an enjoyable live band, and they found a sort of community in the world of bookish coffee shops and NPR. Many fans like Lost and Safe best, and in retrospect I feel I underrated it upon its initial release. It was one of those cases in which what I wanted from the band was different from what they were interested in doing. The Books were heading further in the direction of proper songs. Since Zammuto's voice is limited, his muted sing-speak-whisper integrated very well into the clips from instructional records and ancient news broadcasts. Coming as it did after the 2004 presidential elections, a difficult time for progressives in the United States, Lost and Safe had a political undercurrent that further bound the Books to this community. "I can feel a collective rumbling in America," went a line in "Be Good to Them Always", the album highlight and arguably the greatest single track the Books ever made. It's a song that contained so much: surface beauty, intricate construction, subtle commentary. And if the album as a whole didn't quite deliver on that promise, it was the third winner in a row from a group that didn't necessarily seem like they could sustain things that long.
Between Lost and Safe and their final album, 2010's The Way Out, the books released a collection of scraps called Music for a French Elevator. That EP has been greatly expanded with 32 additional tracks, and the set as a whole is unexpectedly satisfying and offers a different angle on the Books' world. Without the careful editing and thematic unity of their albums, French Elevator mostly shows how musical they were, and how adept they were at making simple guitar and cello patterns pack an emotional punch. Some of these extra tracks are just instrumentals played by Zammuto and de Jong and some are just samples, but they do illustrate the consistency of their aesthetic, how they were able to shape different textures so that they fit with with their overriding sound.
And then came The Way Out, a more playful and free-wheeling album. In retrospect, The Way Out is easily the least satisfying of the four, though it still has its charms. Experimenting with steadier beats and grooves while going heavier on the jokes, The Way Out ultimately feels like a dry run for Zammuto's solo work than a wrap-up to the Books proper. But heard here, in the context of their career as a whole, it's as good an epitaph as any. Something feels right about this box set, from the beautiful design to the fact that it feels a bit like a tombstone. As markers of the dead go, it's a beautiful one. May it live and decay and be covered with weeds and, eventually, be unearthed and dusted off by some young creative person still finding their way. And may that person pass it on to someone else and find a way to share something new with the world.


The London producer's new EP is an unabashedly beautiful, even sensuous 17 minutes of music: He's a startlingly clear new voice, and here, he's just clearing his throat.

Meantime EP

The London-based singer/producer Kwes has the kind of personality you used to find all the time in old-school R&B but that you rarely find now: courtly, tender, sensitive, self-effacing, romantic. "I'm so bashful," he sings over a song named for the shy emotion, right before he actually offers the girl in question a cream soda. He's not a twee, toe-digging type, however: His presence and his voice are clear, calm, disarming. "I mean when I say/ You're beautiful," he sings tenderly on "lgoyh", and there is a glowing sincerity in his voice. For a soft-spoken 24-year-old, he carries himself with remarkable confidence, which radiates through his music with a kind of healing quality.
His new EP, Meantime, is an unabashedly beautiful, even sensuous 17 minutes of music: Sound layers are introduced like deal clinchers in a slow seduction. Kwes began as a producer of other people's music (Speech Debelle, Micachu) before he decided to become the focus of his own productions, and Meantime breathes quietly with his attention to detail. Beneath a serene surface, all four songs bubble intricately. Listening to it in headphones lets you appreciate Kwes' understanding of spacing in the mix, the comforting swirl of these songs.
To comfort seems to be one of Kwes's main goals as a songwriter. On "Bashful", he's meeting the gaze of an older woman head-on and telling her, "I know I may be young to you, but I want to prove/ You may think what I say isn't true." On "lgoyh", he croons, this time to a seemingly younger woman, "Don't waste too many tears/ On those energies/ You have too many years ahead of you/ And not too many before you." He's capable of more than just sweet nothings too: the surreal "Honey", the only other full song, appears to be sung from the perspective of a head of cabbage longing for the jar of honey a shelf above it (as Ryan Dombal noted in his interview with Kwes).
Meantime has only four tracks, and one of them is a two-minute sound collage. When Kwes releases more music, he's going to make a formidable impression. He's a startlingly clear voice, and here, he's just clearing his throat.


The Parisian duo’s debut full-length harnesses controlled chaos, offering an engrossing introduction to their prismatic synth pop.

Touch the Lock

The Parisian duo UTO’s electronic concoctions leave sharp, lingering afterimages in the mind. The couple known as Neysa Mae Barnett and Emile Larroche began making music together in 2016; Barnett wrote and sang and Larroche handled production on their playful debut EP, released in 2017. While Broadcast’s featherlight psych-pop melodies and Portishead’s flinty trip-hop are obvious influences, UTO deftly make the sound their own: Barnett will occasionally unleash a surprising, guttural howl, or Larroche will trigger a sudden shift in tempo that hits like a roundhouse kick. On Touch the Lock, the group’s debut album, the pair cohere these styles through murky electronic music and sprightly electro-pop, backed by more mature songwriting and a clear-cut sense of individuality.
The bouncy highlight “À La Nage” is the most pop-minded song here, but UTO add a twist by looping wordplay lifted from novelist Georges Perec over a chorus of chirped backing vocals and jubilant keys. “Take It All” marches in the opposite direction, drawing together watery chimes and a queasy drumbeat; the vocals echo Kim Gordon’s whispery, tantalizing hooks, as Barnett intones about “giving you my best heartbeats” with a pitch-shifted inflection. Many of Touch the Lock’s lyrics drift toward off-kilter, oblique poetry as Barnett switches between French and English. On the airy highlight “Souvent Parfois” (“Often Sometimes”), she uses ecological imagery—the stars, the woods—to ground herself in the face a bout of mental uncertainty, securing the anguish with a solid center of gravity.
UTO’s propulsive tracks are more restless, built around textured polyrhythms and noisy production. “Row Paddle” delivers a driving, delirious drumbeat and synth combo that sounds directly inspired by Yeezus’ messy, anarchic spirit. Later, on the standout “This New Phase,” clattering percussion swarms over Barnett’s muted, staccato delivery: “Your new tales, your absence, all the mess that leaves love,” she murmurs rapidly. “How I miss your old laugh/How I miss your presence.” Barnett wrote the song about watching her grandmother succumb to illness, and the repetitive verses crank up the tension before the production veers into a sudden choral section, dropping listeners directly into a swirling, stunning expression of grief.
Not every experiment on Touch the Lock lands with the same vigor. The album’s midtempo songs alternate between the dreamy and evaporative (“Délaisse”) or the overly dreary (“Elisa”). Yet when they excel, it’s hard to resist the duo’s obvious sense of controlled chaos. Though it feels rough around the edges at times, Touch the Lock is delightfully slippery in execution, rich with innovative, percussive quirks that expand UTO’s sound while amping up their sly personality, making for an engrossing introduction.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the banal ennui of vaporwave with its pioneering document from 2011.

Floral Shoppe

In a 2011 interview, Claire Boucher described her then-new project Grimes as “post-internet,” an attempt to put a name on the unique experience of discovering and making music in the digital age. “The music of my childhood was really diverse because I had access to everything,” she said, putting into words something an entire generation raised on Napster, SoulSeek, LimeWire, and other file-sharing programs was beginning to realize they had in common. To young producers, “everything” quickly proved to be a winning formula as the internet compressed every imaginable genre of music into an easily accessible folder.
By  2019, that optimism has long faded, and the internet’s sense of access has turned on us in ways that range from existentially overwhelming to outright terrifying. Social media has distorted reality with global consequences, giants like Spotify threaten to reduce music to Muzak one mood-generated playlist at a time, tragedies are live-streamed, and we all get battered into numbness by a feed we can’t really turn off.
Not long after Grimes’ 2011 interview, the album Floral Shoppe first surfaced online and everything about it felt utterly incomprehensible. Credited to the mysterious Macintosh Plus, it was festooned in garish Pepto Bismol-pink art with mint green Japanese type, a glossy cityscape, and a marble bust staring vacantly upward —the music inside only made less sense. Cheesy saxophones melted into ooze, easy listening skipped and tripped over itself like a buffering YouTube video, and vaguely human voices were slowed into breathy, bland moans. The first time I hit play in the spring of 2012, it stopped me in my tracks. I stared at my iPhone wondering if it was broken or if the file was corrupted. It sounded like the musical equivalent of a computer virus, as if all the exciting ideas at the time about “post-internet” music had soured and gone flat.
By no conventional logic should Floral Shoppe have made it beyond the deep-internet realms it emerged from. But like candy-colored mold, its power has rapidly spread while its then-teenage creator Ramona Xavier, the Portland artist now known as Vektroid, has remained an elusive figure, simultaneously a pioneer and an outlier. Her album remains one-of-a-kind in its depiction of anxiety and crisis rendered through waves of numbness that range from deeply unsettling to artificially ecstatic. Now approaching its 10th anniversary, Floral Shoppe stands as a touchstone of millennial art. Every year the world slips a little further into chaos, it only seems to make more sense.
Vaporwave, the genre Floral Shoppe came to define, is music designed to be ignored. Often built from corporate Muzak samples, it lingers in your perception, the way something might flicker in the corner of your eye. If Brian Eno conceived ambient music as something one could choose to focus on or comfortably let slide into the background, vaporwave turns that prescriptive power against the listener. It pushes you out with banality only to pull you back in, creating a trancelike state truer to the grind of daily life. As critic and early vaporwave champion Marvin Lin wrote in 2012, “It doesn’t matter whether or not you think you’re heard ‘vaporwave’ before. Trust me, you have—in hotel lobbies, in the opening sequence of a training video, over the phone waiting for a customer service representative.” For a younger generation raised in an increasingly corporatized music culture looking to rebel, creating a self-sustaining, defiantly unmarketable scene of literal Muzak feels like one of the most punk acts of this era, even if the music was anything but.
Floral Shoppe reflects a mind raised on IDM and classic Warp records. In a 2015 conversation, Xavier explained to me that by middle school, “I’d listened to all my Autechre and Boards Of Canada and Squarepusher and my Aphex. Then I tried to get into the finer points.” The album also feels like a natural progression of what was called hypnagogic pop at the time, impressionistic, hazy tunes that recalled the state between waking and sleeping. As some streamlined the style to find genuine pop success with what was cynically rebranded as “chillwave,” others looked for darker avenues.
Leading the scene with their explorations of dystopian Muzak jingles were L.A. experimentalist James Ferraro and Oneohtrix Point Never with the surreal, endlessly looped Top 40 song samples he nicknamed “eccojams.” Both are musicians whose influence is felt far beyond their divisive initial reception, but their conceptual ambitions feel small against the pure emotional impact of Floral Shoppe. The album’s sample sources include Sade, cheap New Age, Diana Ross, forgotten AOR, and the soundtrack to a Nintendo 64 game, all tuned to Xavier’s own, surreal frequency. If hypnagogic pop was often described as listening to a cassette tape melting on the dashboard, Floral Shoppe is like calmly listening to a Spotify playlist while your computer is on fire.
The album begins with “Booting,” a cut-up of Sade’s “Tar Baby” that loops like a GIF and builds into a spiraling anxiety attack. If hypnagogic pop or chillwave utilized loops as windows into a blissful eternity, Xavier cuts hers disorientingly short, turning them into walls gradually closing in on you. In its final moments, the track unspools even more violently, simultaneous slowing down further as sped-up versions echo in the background. It’s the musical equivalent of hyperventilating and it’s Floral Shoppe’s bleakest moment, broken just as abruptly by its most ecstatic.
The title to the following song, “Lisa Frank 420/Modern Computing,” fits like a mood board for Floral Shoppe as a whole, and its chirpy, euphoric groove has become its calling card. It repurposes Diana Ross’ version of “It’s Your Move,” but Xavier pitch-shifts the pop icon’s voice to a murky smear, draining its flirtatiousness and amplifying its desperation. The song is appropriately druggy, but in a way that feels more out of a necessity to insulate, a dizzying nosedive into a painful euphoria. It inadvertently recalls dub, where the mix functions as the lead instrument, building in echoes and dizzying audio pans as sounds bounce erratically from channel to channel. In a curious moment of vaporwave infecting the real-life corporate world, the luxurious track even became a viral hit appearing in countless email chains as the soundtrack to hypnotic footage of factory assembly-lines simply dubbed “The Most Satisfying Video In The World.”
Floral Shoppe’s transformative power only grows stronger as the songs it samples get more obscure, such as a handful from Pages, the unsuccessful first band from Mr. Mister co-founders Steve George and Richard Page. Their 1978 song “If I Saw You Again” aims (and misses) for the kind of chart success Supertramp were enjoying, but Xavier is only interested in its short intro, a bouncy flutter of synths and drums. It gets turned inside out over the three minutes of Floral Shoppe’s title track, where she bends and folds the sample in on itself until it becomes labyrinthine. “Library” meanwhile zeros in on the hook taken from the group’s “You Need A Hero,” turning its breathy sensuousness into a hot night in the uncanny valley. It works in other ways too, like when the panic attack which opened the album bubbles back to the surface on “Geography,” a musical snippet from N64 shooter game Turok: Dinosaur Hunter stretched to eerie, unsettling lengths.
From there, Floral Shoppe passes a point of no return. The majority of its final tracks all sample the same early ’90s New Age group Dancing Fantasy, unifying the second half into a suite. The sprawling “Chill Divin’ With ECCO” repeats faceless synth washes and empty guitar riffs ad infinitum, but the result is stunning and Floral Shoppe’s peak balancing act of banality and transcendence, like taking MDMA only to stare at a Weather Channel forecast. It’s followed by the soothing comedown of “Mathematics,” a scrambled fog of synth bleeps and pillowy saxophone that floats for over seven mind-clearing minutes. “I Am Pico” and “Standby” are both immaculate hold music, short vignettes that seem to drift even further into a faceless oblivion, before the closing “Te” anchors Floral Shoppe with a return to reality.
“Te” is the only track on Floral Shoppe without samples and hits like a breath of fresh air after staring at a computer screen too long. Its melody shows no signs of the elongated slowdown or scrambled editing that preceded it, and as birds chirp in the distance it brings a sense of peace and balance the rest of the album dismantles so expertly. It also suggests the direction Xavier would begin to move in the future. She followed Floral Shoppe with increasingly dense projects under other one-off names such as 情報デスクVIRTUAL and Sacred Tapestry that dove even deeper into Muzak before evaporating altogether. When she returned on New Year’s Day in 2013 under her earliest moniker Vektroid (the name she continues to use today) it was with “Enemy,” a 10-minute colossus of a track that brilliantly fused Muzak, industrial, IDM, and video game music with distorted vocals coming from an actual human collaborator, Moon Mirror. Abandoning samples almost completely, Xavier’s work has only grown more potent and exciting, including an ongoing hip-hop collaboration producing for Houston rapper Siddiq.
It all stands as a reminder that for the tremendous power Floral Shoppe commands, it was the work of a very talented young producer finding her voice and at times its reception threatened to overwhelm that voice. Though Vektroid has reimagined and fleshed out some of her early work, Floral Shoppe remains untouched and the Macintosh Plus moniker hangs on the shelf for good reason. Nothing could change or improve its sound which, even after thousands of soundalikes, has lost none of its perception-shattering power. Its ability to channel personal ennui, despair, isolation, hope, and stupefying overstimulation into a new musical language once felt like looking at a funhouse mirror, but years later feels as crisp as an iPhone selfie. The thing about growing up in the heyday of internet file-sharing is that for all the isolation it instilled, it was easy to forget that there really was a person on the other end of the screen. We were separated, but connected, in the same paradoxical way that makes Vektroid’s masterpiece as personal as a diary and as universal as a meme. Floral Shoppe is no longer just hers, it belongs to an entire generation.


On his debut solo album, the Hiss Golden Messenger member finally lets out his voice—a cool, soulful thing filled with deep reverence for the road, if some cynicism about the myths it’s spun.

Blue Rider Songs

When you’ve been traveling as long as Scott Hirsch has, you know better than to expect easy revelations from the road. In the mid-’90s, the California native formed the noise band Ex-Ignota alongside his friend MC Taylor. By the end of the decade, they had broken off as the Court and Spark, an alt-country group that presaged their spiritually inclined outfit Hiss Golden Messenger. Initially, the duo was roughly split into Hirsch’s music backing Taylor’s lyrics, though it became the latter’s project over time. Hirsch took on more of a live role, and after a year of heavy Hiss touring in 2015, he moved from Brooklyn back to California, opened a studio, and started work on his debut solo album. It’s taken a long time for him to let out his voice—a cool, soulful thing filled with deep reverence for his source material, if some cynicism about the myths it’s spun.
In 2013, Taylor and Hirsch teamed up with Steve Gunn for one-off collaboration Golden Gunn, which riffs on JJ Cale’s logo on the cover. This generation of pickers doesn’t hide their influences, fearing accusations of unoriginality, but foregrounds them, confidently establishing themselves as part of a trailblazing lineage. Hirsch is especially overt in this respect, referencing Cale in “Blue Rider” (“they call me the breeze”), and the “weed, whites, and wine” of Little Feat’s “Willin’” on “Sundown Highway,” influences than manifest deeper in the music. His guitar choogles closer to Lowell George’s “Honest Man” than any Little Feat staples, and channels Cale’s spry equanimity and rickety drum machines. (Given Hirsch’s canonical approach, it’s also probably no accident that Blue Rider Songs arrives through a Tulsa label, Scissor Tail.) Like Phil Cook (pulling organ duties here), Hirsch finds ways of enlivening tradition, dusting on spacey synths to spotlight country funk and dub’s common rhythms, and injecting soulful vocal harmonies to lift the gorgeous, humid atmosphere.
Over the past year, several of Hirsch’s peers have been out searching for meaning on America’s interstates. Cook’s Southland Mission fled to remember the value of belonging, while Gunn’s oblique Eyes on the Lines reflected Walt Whitman’s admiration in “Song of the Open Road,” “You express me better than I can express myself.” Just as William Tyler’s Modern Country surveyed the margins, warning against forgetting the “cultural geography of this vanishing America,” Hirsch’s Blue Rider Songs also veers from the beaten track. It steers onto the “blue highways” described in travel writer William Least Heat-Moon’s 1982 memoir as the periods at dawn and dusk “when the opening road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.” Hirsch’s narrator is lost, seemingly exiled, but it’s not the kind of self-indulgent searching where he expects to be handed a pearl somewhere along the line.
He sets his compass on “Loss of Forgetfulness,” gently establishing the self-deceit of those who believe in free will while clinging tight to symbols that seem heaven-sent. Hirsch’s tone is never admonishing, the communal backing harmonies and horizontal groove doubling up as a kind of reassurance: Who wouldn’t want to believe in self-determination while holding out hope that some greater power could come and clean up our messes? But Hirsch knows that the hard work is all his to do, and ventures out into a landscape saturated by pink light, gold houses, and purple diamond suns. Men are “shitty diamonds, cut from the earth” who have to be sent out “to find their worth,” on “The Sun Comes Up a Purple Diamond,” a reprisal of an understated Golden Gunn song that he turns into a soulful romp coated in rusty shimmer.
Although everything here sounds familiar in one way or another, Hirsch has a finely tuned ear: the harmonica on “Sundown Highway” flares like distant coyote calls, and spare centerpiece “Raga of the Sea” distills the moment where loss makes its gravity known. “Who thought this would be easy?” he asks amid luxurious peals of guitar on “We Took Back Roads (Blue Highways).” “It’s a heavy weight.” On Blue Rider Songs, Hirsch debunks the idea that redemption is ever a cakewalk, and finds something more truthful and lasting in the pursuit of accepting responsibility.


The UK producer’s new record pulls apart the seams of dance music, trading four-on-the-floor beats for meditative chaos and boundless expansion.

Eulo Cramps

Something secret is happening in JR Seaton’s work as Call Super. Over the last decade, they have developed a private language for their largely instrumental electronic music, which skirts the edges of the dancefloor like a small woodland creature slinking through the underbrush. Pay attention to the track titles, and weird patterns and semi-rhymes emerge—apparent series like “Okko Ink,” “Ekko Ink,” and “Ekkles,” or Arpo and “Arpo Sunk”; vowel-heavy names like Suzi Ecto, “Sulu Sekou,” “Fluenka Mitsu”; the aliases Elmo Crumb and Ondo Fudd. These mysterious, staccato words and phrases, occasionally nodding playfully to Harpo Marx or Elmer Fudd, suggest a code that might unlock the secrets of the UK musician’s invented universe, if only we could crack it.
On Call Super’s fourth album, Eulo Cramps—there’s another one of those cryptic titles—this trail of breadcrumbs leads not out of the woods but deeper into it. Seaton started out in the early 2010s making stern, barnstorming club tracks, and they’ve never completely abandoned their dancefloor tendencies—just see the lush, quick-stepping “Swallow Me,” from last year, or the sparkling floor-fillers of 2021’s Cherry Drops I and II. But Call Super’s three previous albums have frequently strayed far from club convention, swapping four-on-the-floor beats and crowd-moving riffs for serpentine clarinet melodies and crinkly textures of tin foil and bubble wrap. Those motifs, indebted to both Jon Hassell’s ambient jazz and the electric-typewriter rhythms of early IDM, have become signature elements of Call Super’s music. On Eulo Cramps, they render their most holistic and beguiling vision yet.
The new album is part of a broader multimedia project, Tell Me I Didn’t Choose This, that will combine text, painting, and music. But even experienced in isolation, Eulo Cramps feels like a culmination of ideas that have been bubbling in Call Super’s work for years. It’s shot through with acoustic or acoustic-sounding instruments: piano, congas, drums, bells, and harp strings. Melancholy clarinet melodies—played by Seaton’s father, then multi-tracked into eerie harmonic clouds, or twisted and pitch-shifted into surreal, synthetic ribbons—form the tonal center of many tracks. Sounds jostle together, collide, and sometimes fuse, endowed with an unusually tactile heft. In some moments, it feels as if Seaton has daubed on keys with a sponge or putty knife, yielding thick, gloopy streaks; the high end bristles with metallic shards and wooden splinters. It’s the most vivid sound design of the producer’s career.
Three tracks toward the beginning tap into Call Super’s powerful rhythmic instincts: The rippling “Fly Back Stork” sounds like a forceful response to Ricardo Villalobos’ classic “Fools Garden (Black Conga),” while muscular drum fills propel “Sapling” and “Illumina Spin” along their rolling journeys. But little here sounds like typical dance music, and the deeper the album goes, the more things pull apart at the seams. The harp strings and clarinets of “Glossy Bingo Stain” proceed haltingly over uneven hand drums whose rhythm is difficult to parse. “Coppertone Elegy,” which sounds like the Cure’s Disintegration remade for the experimental techno set, layers scraping textures over glowing pads, acoustic guitar, and indistinct murmurs; there’s no center, just a boundless expansion. Occasionally, the crackle of an audio cable in a socket will interrupt the flow of a track. In the dirgelike “Clam Lute Wig,” it sounds like Seaton is reaching into the murk, rooting around to see what lurks there, and stirring up meditative chaos.
Even the album’s guest vocalists convey a similar sense of fragmentation. In “Sapling,” Canadian singer Eden Samara’s voice is split across the frequency spectrum like light through a prism; every so often, an intelligible phrase (“Your taste concealed”) will surface amid all the dappled accents. Something similar happens to Julia Holter’s high, breathy voice in “Illumina Spin,” vaporizing it into a lustrous mist. Even the spoken words of Berlin’s Elke Wardlaw, which run through the core of “Goldwood,” are processed in a way that suggests pulverization, lending her assonant rhymes an atomized, pointillistic feel.
This fractured aspect goes to the heart of the album’s underlying themes. Seaton has discussed Eulo Cramps in autobiographical terms, hinting at youthful traumas: They have said that “Coppertone Elegy” is about the multiple selves within us, while the closer “Years in the Hospital” engages the memory of a long period of illness. Beyond a stray word here or there, these inspirations may not translate to the listener, but that hardly matters. What’s clear is how carefully Seaton has approached every sound on the record, always avoiding the familiar path in favor of the one that burrows deeper inward, the better to flesh out the contours of their inner psyche. Eulo Cramps is that rarest of albums in dance-adjacent electronic music: a record as personal as it is original.


The multilingual East African rapper embraces a crisp, confident sound on her second full-length.

Yallah Beibe

MC Yallah doesn’t sweat getting lost in translation. The Kenya-born, Uganda-raised rapper shoots off high-speed rhymes in Luganda, Luo, Kiswahili, and English, sometimes keeping pace with 300 bpm singeli beats. “Even if they don’t understand, it’s the impact that I leave on them,” the artist said of her English-speaking listeners last year. “Music speaks to the hearts of the people.” On her second album, Yallah Beibe, the MC stretches and snaps her elastic flow across icy beats by producers Debmaster, Shigge, and Chrisman. With her distinct phrasing and charming bravado, MC Yallah is an exhilarating voice emerging from Kampala’s Nyege Nyege Tapes collective.
Born Yallah Gaudencia Mbidde, the rapper has been involved in the East African hip-hop scene since 1999, issuing a handful of singles over the following decades: 2008’s “Abakyala (Women),” 2012’s “Ndeete,” 2017’s “Mpambana,” and 2018’s “Ting Badi Malo.” In 2019, she finally released her debut album, the eerie, static-smeared Kubali, an 11-song project made entirely with Debmaster. On that record, Mbidde draped her rich voice around Debmaster’s jagged beats to a quiet, slightly muddled effect. On Yallah Beibe she embraces crisper production, and her swift, cocky verses explode from the mix. She sounds refreshed and confident.
The mainstream rap world is slow to honor non-Western artists, so Mbidde spends a chunk of the album singing her own praises. Amid the rapid-fire bars of “Sikwebela,” she demands her crown over trap hi-hats and plinking keys that recall John Carpenter’s score for Halloween. On “Miniboss,” she christens herself as HBIC; swaggering across a programmed flute loop and tinny percussion, her hard consonants pop like pressurized champagne corks. Mbidde has honed her unique meter over the years by revisiting her prior work. “I inspire myself by listening to myself, listening to my flow,” she told Resident Advisor in 2020. “When you tend to listen more to music by other rappers it corrupts you a bit.” When she writes, Mbidde cycles through all four languages in her arsenal, testing out the cadence of each tongue before committing her vocals to tape. If she raps in Lugaflow, it is not only to shine more light on the Ugandan scene, but to maximize the musicality of Luganda.
MC Yallah commands the stage all by herself, but her collaborative tracks are just as captivating. She invites Ugandan dancehall star Ratigan Era on the Chrisman-produced club cut “Big Bung,” and his velvety, Auto-Tuned voice is a perfect foil to Mbidde’s sharp and springy inflection. On the goth industrial “No One Seems to Bother,” Mbidde is joined by Lord Spikeheart, singer for Kenyan metal band Duma. His gristly screams tear through Debmaster’s dungeon synths and disperse like shattered glass under Mbidde’s verses. “I’m fed up of all the evil that I see on the cable/Brothers killing brothers, Cain killing Abel,” she snaps in English. Mbidde recorded the song after the murder of George Floyd, and she details the tragedies that plague her own country. “Greed, corruption, human sacrifice,” she raps, before citing poverty as an undeserving target of disdain: “The Disease of materialism is cutting deeper/If you have not, then you’re treated as a leper.”
Mbidde navigates the darkness with energetic bars and creeping beats. Some of the best songs on Yallah Beibe, like “No One Seems to Bother,” sound broadcast from a shadowy S&M club. On “Baliwa,” Shigge spits out drum machine beats as brittle as icicles, while Mbidde pitches her voice to demonic depths. As a pipe organ sample blares in the background, she multitracks her phrases into a sinister chant: “Always hating... Always laughing.” Mbidde strikes a delicate balance across the album, but on “Baliwa” her incantation sounds more frightening than usual: a haunting litany that transcends language.


Fog's Minnesota driver's license is inscribed with the name his mama gave him (a comparably unromantic Andrew Broder ...

Ether Teeth

Fog's Minnesota driver's license is inscribed with the name his mama gave him (a comparably unromantic Andrew Broder), and the shrewdest Minneapolis hipsters might recognize him by his club moniker, the farcically straightforward DJ Andrew, but on Ether Teeth-- his second full-length-- he is, conveniently, all Fog. Broder's latest alias is an appropriate metaphor for Ether Teeth's eleven wispy, befuddling tracks: alternately gorgeous and jarring, soothing and repetitive, Ether Teeth is a hypnotic, moody collection of experimental guitar wails, lush piano, eclectic sampling, and ethereal, hissing blank space.
Bursting forth from the collage-driven DJ tradition (Prince Paul to Kid Koala), Fog is obviously well-versed in the process of snatching and reusing, infusing his tracks with occasionally ironic spots of found sound. The general problem with found stuff-- be it a Diana Ross backbeat or a canary-- is that the act of recognition is not an especially artful endeavor in and of itself. Recontextualization is hip-hop's founding principle, but it's a tenet based on the idea that sampling should involve skillful arranging and sequencing, not straight up cutting and pasting. Appropriation and transplanting requires ingenious tweaking in order to deserve a stamp of reinvention; to become the painting-- not just the wall it's hanging on.
Fog, fortunately, realizes this-- his snagged material, which can consist of anything from film dialogue, to conversations, to fragments of old songs, to birds, birds, birds-- are placed over alarmingly beautiful, droning guitar chords and splatters of piano. Despite a couple of rough spots, Ether Teeth is largely composed of sublime moments in which the sound becomes part of the song, complimenting the melodies and functioning cohesively rather than extraneously. "Plum Dumb" is a heart-stopping, expertly assembled opener that layers rich guitar plucking over a Casio-looped classical drone and buzzing, almost-human turntable slips. A creepy choral refrain of "which nobody can deny!" eases in like a second melody; soon, a meandering piano line snakes through, building to a thunderous, overwhelming climax before easing back out and ending on a breathtaking choral sample, now louder, stranger, and throatier.
The foot-stomping "What a Day Day" is more straightforward: snarky, sarcastic and fueled by aggressive acoustic guitar, Fog's charmingly haphazard singing finds a contextual home here. After an unpredictable two minutes, it bursts into a chorus on par with the best melodramatic piano ballads from the 70s: "If you need me, call my lawyer." Another archaic vocal sample pops up at the end, warning everyone to "get out of Terrible Town" and "go on to Lovelyville."
"The Girl from the Gum Commercial" opens with some nicely obnoxious open-mouthed gum mauling; these smacks sound oddly percussive against a rudimentary piano melody and quiet guitar strums, like sticky, high-pitched drums. Fog's voice sneaks around the tune, sometimes loud, sometimes inaudible, but the track vehemently refuses to follow any sort of logical, linear path. It's a dynamic trick: if you've got the patience to stick it out for five minutes, the alarming turntable debauchery halfway through should substantiate the investment for most.
It's the winning (if anything-but-cheery) "Cheerupcheerily" where Fog's isolated misery is most dramatically defined. As an ambient swell-- almost certainly snatched from a U2 track, and quite possibly the instrumental "Korova 1"-- loops repeatedly, the song gradually builds into a clarinet-dotted wail of distortion so focused and thin, it threatens to tear a hole through your line of sight. Like cinema's recent Americana melodramas, it's a meditation on ache and desire that's at once aware of its insignificance in the scope of things.
Ether Teeth sags briefly midway through-- "No Boys Allowed" and "Apologizing to Mystery" are both half-conceived-- but immediately after, the 11-minute "Wallpaper Sink or Swim" seems a clear and devestating revelation. After five minutes of its barely-there piano and jutting left-channel samples, a thundering melody harkens a new beginning, killing itself on an odd chord before rising again as a dramatic, ascending progression. Hushed jazz drums begin to stutter and fall all over the track as horns, tones and samples wander around Fog's constant chant, "Goats will eat tins cans," an apparently meaningless repetition that has a surprising function: the lyric is the grounding melody around which an orchestra of instruments circle, a moment in which hip-hop's tradition of juxtaposition meets music theory.
Fog lays down some skillful, ambitious, and certainly curious foundations on Ether Teeth, but his coloring book isn't completely filled in. But that he's made such a tremendous leap from his amateurish if promising debut to this highly developed, emotionally attenuated sound manipulation speaks to his future. For its sometimes uneven composition, Ether Teeth brings reality closer to your ears than most music ever hope, melding folk, hip-hop and psychedelia to produce a few of the finest tunes you'll hear this year. Surprisingly personal and emotionally resonant, Ether Teeth is potent inspiration, undeniably captivating in its moments of brilliance.


A second collection of unheard material from the German new wave band reveals its voguish attempt to transition into the 1990s.

1992

Saâda Bonaire were lost and found twice. Formed in 1982, the German new wave band had only one single to its name before getting dropped by a label that blew its budget on a young Tina Turner. Thirty years on, Captured Tracks released a compilation of previously unheard 1980s material that satisfied a cult following, revealed a hidden Mideastern influence, and unlocked songs that deal with queer love affairs. Now, the label has unearthed a new trove of unheard tracks from the band’s even lesser-known second lineup.
In 1990, producer and string-puller Ralph “Von” Richthoven set sights on restarting the project, recruiting vocalist Andrea Ebert to replace Claudia Hossfeld, who’d left in 1985, alongside returning frontwoman Stephanie Lange. Keeping in vogue with the new decade, they threw out the new wave synths and boogie guitars in favor of baggy trip-hop breakbeats, quiet storm breeziness, and Chicago house productions. The group were noticeably paying attention to recent hits from Soul II Soul, Crystal Waters, and Deee-Lite (even lyrically nodding to R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion”), though 1992 opens with their covers of early ’70s selections from James Brown and Stevie Wonder.
In Saâda Bonaire’s hands, Brown’s appreciative single “Woman” sinks into a loungey instrumental, as if what’s a revelation for the Godfather of Soul is, for Ebert and Lange, just a known truth that bears repeating. Their cover of Wonder and Syreeta’s duet “To Know You Is to Love You” brings its sexual undertones full-frontal, thanks to a background mix of impish giggling, breathy moans, and hushed whispers. With two female voices, the sapphic suggestion is there for the taking—“lesbian chic” became an American phenomenon in 1993 with an era-defining k.d. lang magazine cover, and the track might have seemed ripe for fetishization. But not even that fad could hand Saâda Bonaire a wide release, and the tapes from this period were stowed away and, until recently, thought to be lost.
It’s a shame, because Middle Eastern instrumentation was still a staple in the band’s ’90s incarnation, and the album’s Turkish vocalists and saz guitarist steal every scene gracefully, even if just for an introduction. Arabesque flute wraps around the coiling bassline of “Running” to give an otherwise temperate track some much-needed flair, and returns in the breakdown of the eight-minute “So Many Dreams.” Swapping in and out vocal hits, horns, and funk guitar against rich Italo-disco piano, the track also encapsulates the desert festival-readiness of 1992’s production: sun-bleached with a hint of psychedelia, sobered by the headspace of open air.
The production serves to parry the vocal blemishes that have become a semi-endearing characteristic of the group’s work. But quiet storm tracks demand allure, and Lange and Ebert sometimes create the opposite effect. “Lovelife” interjects with grievous vocal scatting, and in the chorus of “Extremes,” the two struggle to keep in time and on-tune. Mercifully, these tough listens are short-lived.
In the time between the band’s ’80s and ’90s lineups, Richthoven worked as a club DJ in Bremen, which helps to explain the shift towards New York and Chicago house in the record’s latter half. “Your Prince” and “7th House” echo the styles of Louie Vega and Kenny Dope, respectively, with the former propelled by rattling shakers and carnival whistles, while the six-minute successor pairs more cavernous sounds with a blubbery bass groove. As they turn towards the dancefloor, Saâda Bonaire’s distinct Eastern influences fall by the wayside. To bring so many facets of then-contemporary popular music together on one plate is valiant, but 1992 misses the first album’s fascination with weaving Eastern sounds into Western pop. Richthoven and co. could have created house thumpers with their hands and feet sewn together, but when they displayed more curiosity, they found a sound that outlasted trends.


Stripping away the dancefloor euphoria of his most recognizable work, Andy Butler’s latest is a moody left-turn highlighted by some winning collaborations with ANOHNI.

In Amber

Andy Butler’s fifth LP arrived with a telling press quote: “In all honesty, based on [the] initial soundscapes, I did not know this was going to be a Hercules and Love Affair album.” And from the onset of In Amber, it’s abundantly clear what he means. “Grace” starts off with punchy kick drums, twinkling piano loops, and deep bass notes, but it’s all taken a few steps away from the dancefloor Butler has long called home. Everything moves just below 120 BPM and the mix is light and spacious, leaving plenty of room for his unassuming baritone to tell his story of self-empowerment. Straddling the line between experimentation and reinvention, Butler strips away the project’s usual club music trappings to highlight weightier themes and darker personal expression.
For a producer and songwriter who’s spent nearly a decade and a half sculpting the golden eras of disco, house, and techno in his own image, Butler makes a bold change of direction across these 12 songs. Flourishes of post-punk, goth, industrial, and the edges of 1980s rock are scattered throughout the production, paired with uniquely varied vocal performances. Most notable is the return of ANOHNI, who—14 years after her performance in “Blind” helped define the sound of H&LA—brings an essential energy that ranges from despondent to furious. In “Christian Prayer,” ANOHNI denies ideas of an afterlife as she shouts through searing guitar feedback and rumbling drum fills, “When I die, do not appeal to your godhead.” Then in the simmering anthem of dismissal “Contempt for You,” she repeats like a rousing mantra, “Sure am glad I survived, but I’ve got nothing but contempt for you.” The rage isn’t hopeless: Somehow, the raw conviction makes her words feel uplifting and communal.
There are also spaces for reflection and calm, which are often where the album falters. Icelandic singer Elín Ey lends the downtempo “Dissociation” a gentle poise, though her placid delivery sounds anonymous compared to ANOHNI’s injured tremble on the stripped-down elegy “Who Will Save Us?” The funeral march of “You’ve Won This War” fixates on a two-chord progression around which the fluctuating arrangement orbits, as Butler oscillates between grim talk-singing and a sort of regal chant. But despite its cutting dynamics and diversity of sounds, the song’s six minutes of sullen Ren Faire theatrics seem to plod aimlessly. Butler uses a similarly linear structure with “The Eyes of the Father” and elevates his ideas with a string section, lyrical guitar leads, electronic noise, and stirring vocals. The music feels meditative, and its layered arrangement swells and contracts alongside the lyrics’ emotional uncertainty.
Butler has always sounded most confident when writing for the dancefloor, so it’s no surprise most of the standouts fall in that comfort zone. At its core, “Killing His Family” smartly blends distorted percussion with a bouncy house bassline, which Butler uses to shift between moody, deconstructed verses and poignant, earwormy choruses. The acerbic “Poisonous Storytelling” is a severe, drum-heavy pop ballad that’s equal parts industrial techno and angelic chamber music. For all the genre blending and production flair, there’s nothing kinetic or buoyant enough to stand alongside his best-loved floor-fillers, though “One” comes closest. The song embraces their foundational strengths, built around an insistent, detuned bass loop and ANOHNI’s most magnetic and rousing performance here. It’s the kind of emotionally charged, genre-invigorating classic that Hercules and Love Affair has become known for. On In Amber, Butler may have found a handful more peaks and his share of valleys, but few can emerge from the shadow of what came before.


The all-star collaboration between a producer, a saxophonist, and a symphony is a celestial event. But it’s Pharoah Sanders’ playing that holds it all together, a clear late-career masterpiece.

Floating Points / Pharoah Sanders / The London Symphony Orchestra: Promises

Promises

In a 2020 interview with The New Yorker, saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, who turned 80 last October, said he hadn’t been listening to records for a while. “I listen to things that maybe some guys don’t,” he said. “I listen to the waves of the water. Train coming down. Or I listen to an airplane taking off.” For most of Sanders’ career as an improvising musician, he was in a studio or on a stage with other musicians, and they listened and played together in real time. But he’s a listener as well as a player, able to respond to what he’s hearing and create beautiful art under different circumstances. His adaptability allowed him to work in a multitude of settings over the years, from harsh free playing through groove-heavy spiritual jazz and excursions into popular song.
In the past year, Sanders worked with Sam Shepherd, the British producer and composer who records under the name Floating Points, on a sweeping, nine-movement piece called “Promises.” Shepherd composed the music, played various instruments, electronic and otherwise, and enlisted the London Symphony Orchestra to perform it. Sometimes the piece is so quiet you might check your volume setting to see if it’s still on, and other times, when the strings hit a crescendo, it’s earth-shaking. In the middle of this tapestry is Sanders, his warm tone and fluid technique undiminished even at 80 years old, listening to his surroundings and finding brilliant patterns to stitch the work together and thus elevate it.
There are clear antecedents to this record. As far as strings and an improvising saxophone, there was Ornette Coleman’s 1972 Skies of America, also recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra—though his arrangements had a biting edge of atonality that would break the spell cast here. Alice Coltrane’s Lord of Lords from the same year has a similar spiritual underpinning, and her arrangement of “Going Home” on that record shares some feeling with this piece. And the combination of squelchy jazz-informed electronics from a young DJ and acoustic improvisation from an elderly master brings to mind Kieran Hebden & Steve Reid’s 2007 record Tongues, and work by Flying Lotus, but those are beat-driven projects and Promises is about melody, harmony, and texture. There’s patience and focus to this piece, all powered by Sanders’ horn.
Throughout its emotional 46 minutes, Promises stirs feelings that can be hard to name. The first sound we hear is one that courses through the entire piece—a brief, seven-note refrain played by what seems to be a harpsichord, sometimes accented by a bell-like tone that could be the celeste. The cluster of sounds begins in silence, and we can hear the creak of wood and some shifting objects in the room where it was recorded, and it repeats every nine seconds for almost the duration of the piece. It’s a small twinkly loop that brings to mind the feeling of awakening, as if something that was unclear is now understood, there to be rediscovered with each cycle. And that repeating fragment holds the composition together, and every sound exists in relation to it, even if we can’t quite sense how they fit together.
When Sanders enters early on, his tone is clarion, melodic but harmonically free, hovering near that central cluster of notes without sounding bound to it. His opening solo, set against a quiet backdrop, is slow and searching, alternating between held notes that convey melancholy and short trills of melody that suggest hope. In “Movement 3,” when the strings enter, soft at first, then more shrill, Sanders shifts his playing to meet their register, and the piece gets spacier, even a little psychedelic. Something about that central loop, the strings, Sanders’ lines, and Shepherd’s subtle synthesizer drones makes me think about seeing a planet spinning on its axis from somewhere in orbit. And then as “Movement 3” bleeds into “Movement 4,” Sanders’ sets his horn aside and begins to vocalize wordlessly, offering small flutters of syllables closely into the microphone.
The effect of his naked voice is disarmingly intimate and moving. Amid this carefully composed and engineered piece, and following virtuosic soloing from one of the living masters of his instrument, we hear the simple sound of a human utterance—the most basic unit of interaction into the realm of a dream. Through “Movement 5” Sanders plays with more intensity, a cello solo follows in “Movement 6,” as the symphonic elements gather force. In “Movement 8” Shepherd folds in bits of trilling Alice Coltrane-like organ runs, and then in “Movement 9,” following a violin solo, the orchestra briefly rattles and shakes in a sharp but brief climax, and then Promises is gone, returning to silence.
The arc of Promises needs time and space to unfold, and the length and continuous nature of the piece is central to its impact. If it were 20 minutes long—or 60—it wouldn’t have the same force. Nothing is rushed, but nothing is lingered over for too long, either. And as gorgeous as Shepherd’s music and arrangements are, I keep circling back to Sanders, his horn now quieter but just as emotionally powerful as when he wielded it alongside John Coltrane at age 25, when he was ripping terrifying blasts of sound that could peel paint. He’s always been quiet as far as the press goes, doing few interviews and letting his playing do the talking. On this piece, a clear late-career masterpiece, it’s saying plenty.

Buy: Rough Trade
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With the grime revival in full swing, one of the genre’s elder statesmen returns with an album that’s torn between his UK roots and his affinity for American hip-hop.

Raskit

In 2008, with exquisite timing, Dizzee Rascal released the Calvin Harris/Chrome collaboration “Dance Wiv Me” and confirmed, some five years after Dizzee's classically bleak debut, Boy in Da Corner, that the mainstream British public was ready to embrace the electro bounce of pop grime. But Dizzee’s acute temporal nous didn’t last. By 2013, when he released The Fifth, his firebrand talent had drifted into blandly transatlantic commercial rap. British audiences were bemused by the presence of figures like will.i.am; American listeners were unimpressed. When Skepta unleashed the thrillingly skeletal grime banger “That’s Not Me” to global acclaim about eight months later, Dizzee’s creative choices on The Fifth seemed particularly inopportune.
The early hype had it that Dizzee’s sixth studio album, Raskit—a misty-eyed reference to a moniker Dizzee employed on his early recordings—would see the East London MC return to his grime roots. This proves to be somewhat wishful thinking: True, Raskit is largely free of The Fifth’s blatant pop choruses, “special” guests, and tired commercial production. But it retains that album’s deliberately divided identity, with beats that fall between grime’s crude electronic minimalism and trap’s skittering intricacy. Dizzee has long been inspired by American hip-hop. In 2016, he told Complex that “I Luv U” was “me doing Three 6 Mafia,” and there is something refreshing about his insistence on avoiding the low-hanging fruit of the grime revival. But doing so means that Raskit needs to be special indeed if it is to avoid stumbling in between the twin demands of grime and rap audiences, neither of whom are exactly ill-served for trunk-rattling beats in the summer of 2017.
At times Raskit succeeds. There are no obvious hits, but Dizzee is on head-spinning verbal form throughout, his frenetic flow and condensed rhyme schemes combining with the swagger that marks many of his best tunes. Fans of UK slang will be in for a treat, too, thanks to lines like “Driving me crackers/You bloody spackers/Should get off my knackers” (on “Space”), while references to old beefs with Wiley and Megaman leaves plenty for students of grime history to chew on.
Considerably more interesting, though, are the moments when Dizzee surveys the inequalities of modern Britain, providing some of his most profoundly moving lyrics since the street-level laments of Boy in Da Corner. The reflective “Slow Your Roll” is a particular highlight, as Dizzee reflects on the gentrification tearing the soul out of modern London over mournful, filtered chords: “Foreign investment raising the stock up/So the rent got propped up/And it kept getting topped up/So the heart got ripped out and rinsed out.” His brilliant (if slightly exhausting) lyrical craftsmanship is let down only by the occasional leering crudity of lines like, “I should have had her in the back seat of the Jag” (from "Way I Am”).
But the production, which comes largely from American artists such as Valentino Khan, Salva, and Cardo, struggles to match his verbal inventiveness. There are moments of musical brilliance, like the monolithic synth stabs on "Wot U Gonna Do?,” the finely tuned sample cut-ups on “The Other Side,” and the haunting shapes on “Ghost,” which expands Raskit’s rather limited sonic palette by sampling the Israeli Marine Corp Brass Band. Elsewhere, on the meandering “Space” or the grime throwback “Sick a Dis” (produced by the English singer Donae’o), the production does just enough to provide Dizzee with a base to launch his thrilling verbal tirades.
But these moments are weighed perilously against a number of tracks where the overly slick specter of The Fifth raises its coiffured head. “Bop N’ Keep It Dippin’” and “Man of the Hour” are weak G-Funk retreads, while “She Knows What She Wants” starts with a horrible Auto-Tuned hook that sounds even worse given Dizzee’s gripes about the pitch-correction tool Melodyne on “The Other Side.” These poor production choices are particularly painful from an artist who has, in the past, shown both wild production chops (notably on Boy in Da Corner) and the ability to cherry-pick other producers’ best beats (such as Youngstar on “Stand Up Tall” or Armand Van Helden on “Bonkers”).
Of course, if Dizzee wanted to show his affinity with American hip-hop in 2017, then releasing an album so severely need of an edit is a note-perfect move. But grime at its best is defined by its steely economy, which makes Raskit’s rambling length and diluted focus frustrating. As a platform for Dizzee's flashy lyrical dexterity, Raskit does more than enough to shift the bitter aftertaste of The Fifth. With more of the laser-eyed focus that marked Boy in Da Corner, it could have been a triumph.