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 Philadelphia rapper’s 1999 debut, a dramatic and gritty album that brought a new kind of cred to Roc-A-Fella Records.

The Truth

In 1998, Jay-Z had finally accomplished his mission. With “Hard Knock Life,” he’d blown up on the pop charts, taking his Roc-A-Fella business venture into the big leagues and escaping street life for good. Nevertheless, he couldn’t help but feel he’d lost something on the way. He’d donned the shiny suit and mugged into the camera like Ma$e. He’d slowed his flow and sampled a Broadway musical. These compromises nagged at him, and as he sought ways to balance his karmic ledger, the exploding Philadelphia rap scene called to him.
Across North and South Philly neighborhoods, two dozen or so rappers were defining a fierce local style: halting but high-velocity, herky-jerk but smooth, slick but hard. They didn’t race in front of the beat or ride the snare—they dug in and found a pocket, punching hard alongside the track’s low end. They were influenced by New York rappers like Ma$e and the Lox, but they added their own pugnacious spin: Their signature trick was to circle around the same syllable, often the same word, from line to line, like they were softening up a boxer with jabs—“Cats thinking I’m sweet, I ain’t been killin’ in a while/I heard a lot of cats rhyme, I ain’t feel one in a while,” taunted a rapper named Spade on a 1999 song called “I Love Being a Gangsta.” And then, just when you thought they were sputtering, they would switch every word in the rhyme scheme, delivering a clean uppercut. It was a fitting style for a town where it was often said that everyone either boxed, rapped, or both.
If you asked a hardcore Philly rap fan who the avatars of that style were around ’97, they would have pointed to Major Figgas. Formed by first cousins Gillie da Kid and Wallo along with a local named Bump J (unrelated to the Chicago rapper of the same name), they eventually expanded to seven members, including Dutch, Spade, and future Clipse affiliate Ab-Liva. Major Figgas shut down the local Power 99 station with every new freestyle. They were the spirit of the city, heavily favored to finally put Philly on the board.
So when Jay-Z swooped into Philadelphia, he came looking for Major Figgas, haunting neighborhoods and studios. They were, to him, a symbol of all he’d leveraged away. But Jay didn’t leave Philadelphia with Major Figgas. Instead, he signed a roughneck kid, someone nobody had ever heard of before, who had never recorded a demo in his life.
Dwight Grant was not one of the people jostling at the forefront of Philly’s exploding rap scene. He was not a member of Major Figgas. He wasn’t in Philly’s Most Wanted, the group being groomed by Pharrell as Philly’s answer to the Clipse. As far as anyone knew, Dwight Grant was working all-night shifts at a crack spot near the corner of 21st and Sigel Street, writing raps alone while listening to Ron G tapes.
Since being a rapper carried zero status in his neighborhood, he kept his creative pursuits under the radar, battling neighborhood friends and practicing his freestyles over full album tracks with the bass turned up to drown out the other rappers’ vocals. He went by the name “Beanie Sigel”; the name was simultaneously a reference to the nickname his grandmother gave him (“Beanie”), the street he lived on (Sigel Street), and a tip of the hat to the famous gangster Bugsy Siegel.
So when Boo Bonic, one half of Philly’s Most Wanted, offered to let Beanie tag along for his next meeting in New York, Beanie shrugged. He did, after all, have a dog fight to bet on that day. Besides, he was more of a Biggie fan and Jay was his little brother’s favorite rapper. He didn’t even want to go, but when he stepped outside his place that day, he found Mr. Man—the other half of Philly’s Most Wanted—waiting for him. Dismayed, he got in the car.
Jay first noticed Beanie hanging around in back at Baseline. He was recording the Vol 2...Hard Knock Life album track “A Week Ago” with Too $hort. Everyone else in the room was exultant, drunk on proximity to power, but Beanie was fidgeting, looking wary and unimpressed. After the rappers had freestyled, someone encouraged Beanie to go up.
”He kicked about a five-minute rhyme straight, no breaths, nothing,” Jay marveled later on the Hard Knock Life Tour documentary, remembering the first time he heard Beanie rap. He leaned over to the man who called himself Beanie’s “manager” at the time: “Promise me you’ll let me have him.”
But even more importantly, it was clear Beanie had something that maybe no one else in his scene had—a vision. There was a sternness to him, a weight to his presence that went beyond his burly frame. He had a Biggie flow, with Scarface gravitas. Sigel was everything Jay-Z was looking for at that time. Immediately, Jay added Beanie to the Vol. 2...Hard Knock Life posse cut “Reservoir Dogs.” Within a week, Beanie Sigel—an outsider with no demo tape, no local following, and no aspirations as a rapper—became the heir presumptive to the Roc.
After that, Jay seemed to bring Beanie with him wherever he went. Almost immediately, you could hear hints of Beanie’s hard-bitten style surface in Jay’s raps: “Chill with the crew/Real with the crew/4 million sold, look, still with the crew,” he spat on “More Money, More Cash, More Hoes.” And Jay brought Beanie along for the Hard Knock Life Tour, where he came out and freestyled a capella to 18,000 people who might have mistaken him for Jay’s bodyguard. It was Beanie’s first tour.
For Beanie, the disorientation was total. “My life changed overnight, dog,” he said to a camera in 2000 with the dazed look of someone whose life was flashing before his eyes. In a way, it was: When he was in elementary school, he briefly formed a “rap group” called Crash Crew with a friend named Tariq Trotter. Now that his former classmate went by the name Black Thought, Beanie wound up scoring a scene-stealing verse on the best Roots album of all time, Things Fall Apart, all because Big Pun double-parked. All rappers bragged about coming from nothing, but perhaps no one had come so far, so quickly, and from so little as Beanie Sigel. His swift come-up instantly became a cornerstone of his legend: “Met Jay, dropped on an album in a week/Without Unsigned Hype or Battle of the Beats,” he boasted.
An experience like that would make anyone a believer, and Beanie Sigel was Roc-A-Fella’s first true convert. Quickly, he brought as many Philly rappers into the Roc-A-Fella stable as he could: He and Freeway had made a pact when they met at a battle one night to help the other, so Free came first, quickly followed by more: Oschino, Omillio Sparks, the Young Gunz duo of Young Chris and Neef Buck. Suddenly, Roc-A-Fella had its very own version of Major Figgas, called State Property, under its own roof. Jay may have been the mind behind the Roc, but Beanie rapidly established himself as its heart and soul. Whereas before it had been some combination of vanity label and tax shelter, in Beanie’s eyes it was Motown in the ’60s, Philadelphia International in the ’70s.
Appropriately, his albums would help define a house sound for the emergent label that drew heavily on plush soul samples, relics from previous eras of Black American excellence. Beanie started combing through beat CDs to build what would become his debut album, The Truth. From the beginning, he had a special ear for darkness, drama, and grit. The production credits for the first three tracks belong to Kanye West, Just Blaze, and Bink!, respectively—each producer’s first placement on a Roc-A-Fella album. If you had to pick the three pillars for the next half-decade of East Coast rap, it would be difficult to come up with a more definitive list.
But none of that would’ve mattered, none of it would have gelled, if it weren’t for Beanie’s vision and tenacity. By the time he rescued the chopped organ loop of Graham Nash’s “Chicago” from one of Kanye’s beat CDs, multiple rappers had passed on it. But Beanie heard something in it—a spirit of struggle, a hint of desperation—and he breathed fire into it. Over what became “The Truth,” Sigel rapped in lines that neatly matched the structure of a logic proof with the hypnotic repetition of a sermon. “You got to see what I’ve seen, look where I’ve looked/To touch what I’ve reached, to take what I took/You’ve got to go where I’ve gone, walk where I’ve walked/To get where I’m at, to speak what I talk,” he said, sounding completely unburdened by the need to prove any of it.
This composure is rare in any artist—for a brand-new rapper who’s just signed a major label deal, it’s unheard of. He didn’t sound young, hungry, or eager. He sounded calm, somehow certain of our attention, almost patient. This preternatural self-assurance must have been how Beanie Sigel managed to entice Houston legend Scarface, not a rapper known for generosity with his guest spots, to not only appear next to a rookie but to share equal billing. On “Mack and Brad,” Face and Beans go back and forth, the legend and the upstart engaging in a friendly competition reminiscent of Biggie and Method Man on Ready to Die’s “The What.”
The only weak moments on The Truth are the ones where you can hear Beanie Sigel being marketed. “Mac Man” flips tinny Pac-Man sound effects while Beanie strings together a series of lame video-game puns (”I stay going to war with the Latin King Koopa”). You can imagine why somebody thought the track was a good idea—if Beanie had ghost-written it for Bleek, Jay’s hype man might have finally scored a modest hit—but it’s all wrong for Beanie. “Playa” is a rewrite of “Can I Get A…”, with Jay’s then-protégé Amil. Beanie finessed the verses, but the song drowned under a brain-dead chorus that made no sense for anyone involved.
Worst of all was “Anything,” a Jay-Z solo track without Beans that got tacked onto the end of The Truth. It was a bald attempt at Xerox-ing the success of “Hard Knock Life,” right down to the annoying sample of a chirpy kid from a musical on the hook—in this case, Oliver! And it was an early example of what Hova’s complicated version of “artist support” looked like. The inclusion of “Anything” on The Truth was both a dramatic endorsement from the boss and an implicit admission that he didn’t think Beanie Sigel could succeed without his direct intervention.
On one level, of course, Jay was correct: Beanie Sigel was not an easy artist to mass-market. His lyrics were maybe the most violent of anyone on the Roc-A-Fella roster, but he never granted his listeners the luxury of action-movie escapism, lingering with unsettling specificity on the bodily consequences of gunplay like someone processing real-time trauma. In one song, he promised to give one rival “flashbacks to that cold-ass table and them holes I gave you.” On another, he offered another potential challenger a chilling warning: “You’ll never put shorts on.”
Likewise, there had been hundreds of rap songs about prison before The Truth’s “What Ya Life Like,” but only Beanie saw fit to mention “hearing grown men moan at night” or invoking a “push rod toilet sword.” Over a foreboding film-score orchestral loop, Beanie shouted the hook, “My life is real! Everything signed and sealed!” like someone terrified over what they’d lived and seen. To call it “harrowing” would be to miss the point: It was a gauntlet-throw, a dare to other rappers to dig as deeply and go as dark as he did.
A guy like this could never notch a true radio hit. Yes, he could rap the words “champagne” and “VIP,” but they usually turned to ash in his mouth. When it was time for Beanie’s verse on a club record, you never felt that he shared his comrades’ flossy sense of good fortune for a second. If he showed up “all high in VIP,” he sounded like he always did: bruised, angry, wary, watchful. Everyone else was here for a good time; Beanie was here for a bad one.
In the parlance of A&Rs and record executives, Beanie Sigel only made album tracks. These were the songs that cost money, not the ones that generated it. But they were also the sorts of songs that won lifelong converts instead of curious fans, and Beanie made some of the most powerful album tracks in rap history. When he met with label heads Dame Dash and Lyor Cohen to discuss promotion for The Truth, Beanie argued passionately that the first single should be a song called “Die,” a representative stretch of which goes: “Die cause I hesitated to spray that man/Die cause I hesitated to pay that man/Die cause my man passed me an empty tool/Die cause I panicked, I couldn’t keep my cool...Die cuz a nigga was trying to get a name/Or die cause it was just my time to feel the flames.”
Cohen, perhaps not seeing the Hot 97 opportunities unfurling before him, berated Beanie in a typically aggressive CEO fashion. “I’m not telling you to be MC Hammer,” Beanie recalled Cohen saying. “Shit, I don’t know if you can even spell hammer.” Ignorant of Cohen’s position at the company and unaccustomed to being spoken to in this manner, Beanie Sigel pulled out a gun in a Def Jam conference room.
Stories like the Lyor confrontation did nothing to endear him to the higher-ups, and The Truth wound up selling around 155,000 copies in its first week—respectable numbers that would nevertheless render Beanie Sigel little more than a tax write-off in the era of platinum first-week sales. “Beans, I ain’t tryin to change you, just give you some game/To transition from the streets to the fame,” Jay-Z rapped on “Blueprint (Momma Loves Me).” It was classic Jay, mingling infuriating condescension with genuine concern. Jay and Beanie were temperamental opposites, destined to clash—cold versus hot blood, calculation versus bluster, indirection versus full-frontal assault. But they shared one thing in common: Both began as street kids who were ambivalent about having a rap career while secretly yearning to be the best.
Their influence on one another was mutual and profound. Listen to how Jay-Z circles syllables and switches emphases on 2000’s “Squeeze First”—a top-flight Jay solo track, as imperious and masterful as he’s ever sounded: You can nearly close your eyes and hear Beanie Sigel’s voice in his place. Others certainly did: When Nas levied a series of kill shots at Jay-Z on 2001’s “Ether,” he knew how to hit him where it hurt. “Compared to Beans, you wack,” he taunted.
For Beanie, Jay-Z was the man who made dreams come true. The Philly scene he arose from mostly imploded in his wake, at least as far as national press was concerned. Major Figgas never signed a major label deal, and Philly’s Most Wanted only eked out two albums. The brutal winnowing process of a regional scene down to a few national mascots was over. Somehow, Beanie Sigel had stayed standing. As dark as things got for Beans—he would go on to serve non-consecutive prison sentences for federal weapons charges and tax evasion—he always knew he had survived where others hadn’t been so lucky. Young Chris’ cousin was killed by a member of Major Figgas, and the beef between State Property and Major Figgas claimed the life of another promising Philly up-and-comer, Lil Rucie, whose body was rumored to have been found dead in a burned-out car.
Beanie Sigel, by contrast, got to be a hero. Meek Mill would go on to cite him as the artist who made him “love rap,” and his influence lives on wherever a tough-talking rapper decides to get dark. In 2021, Sigel appeared on N.O.R.E.’s Drink Champs, reflecting on the brutal ups and downs of a career that had left him alive, but undeniably scarred. “I’m the perfect example of when keeping it real goes wrong,” he said, his voice a permanent whisper after post-car accident surgery removed a piece of his lung. “But to me, it was real.”


Skillfully switching between forward momentum and deep reflection, the Berlin electronic musician’s latest album proves her to be a master storyteller.

ATØ

For several days, I have woken up with Ziúr’s voice in my head: “Now that I’m invisible/I’ll come for you harder.” The Berlin electronic artist delivers the line through a pitched-up cyborg smile on “I Vanish,” from her new album ATØ, extending the syllables the way a child might: in-vis-sib-ble. The approach is deliberate, a way to underline the underestimation—the erasure, even—to which the song’s protagonist has been subjected. The brushed-cotton tones of the lead melody echo the careful placement of Ziúr’s words, paving the way for an extremely effective earworm.
It’s by no means the only one on ATØ. For slow jam “All Lessons Unlearned,” Ziúr teams up with pop veteran Samantha Urbani, who vocally figure skates through an icy landscape of marimba and what sounds like a murmuring chorus of awed infants. “Don’t let go/I won’t do,” urges Urbani over and over, breathily stressing the bond that exists even when life separates you from a loved one. The album’s only other collaboration also yields a sticky couplet. On self-preservation anthem “F.O.E.,” which stands for “Friendship Over Ego,” New Jersey rapper Ash B calls time on an unworthy companion: “’Cause I’m picking me over us/’Cause you have broken my trust.” For extra punch, Ziúr mirrors the rasp of Ash B’s delivery in the crackle and crunch of the track’s breaking-point production.
Guest features have become the norm on producer albums in recent years, but Ziúr breaks the mold by centering her own vocals. While her discography of club-inspired releases stretches back only a handful of years, her musical sensibility has clearly been shaped by her time fronting punk bands as a teenager. “Back when I was a singer/performer,” she said in a 2018 interview, “I ran into the audience, rolled on the floor.” On ATØ, Ziúr channels that performative energy into using her voice in wildly different ways, creating a series of vivid vignettes in the process. On the seductive “Life Sick,” she is swathed in post-punk melodrama, a singer hanging off a mic stand, head bent towards the crowd. Opener “ATØ” frames her as a shadowy figure in a forest setting, issuing life lessons through a veil of mist. And while the exquisite “Laniakea” doesn’t directly feature Ziúr’s voice, the humor and pace with which she handles the lead synth is reminiscent of her intonation on “I Vanish.”
For the most part, the instrumentals are as strong as the vocal tracks, if not stronger. I can’t hear “It’s Complicated” without wanting to trace the shape of every drumbeat and marimba note with my fingers and limbs. It is deserving of many a dance routine video tribute. “Unclaim” is another highlight: A masterpiece of textural dialogue, it opens with plucked strings, makes space for digital severity, and somehow finds a way to bring the two together in a way that negates neither. If I was splitting hairs, the dancefloor-focused “Catch Me Never” and “Fancy Handbag, Broken Zipper” could both have done with some trimming for this album context. The repetition of their patterns feels somewhat stagnant compared with the expressiveness of the songwriting elsewhere.
They’re minor complaints, however, and do very little to dent the achievement of ATØ as a whole. Skillfully switching between forward momentum and deep reflection, its 11 tracks prove Ziúr to be a master storyteller. The album title, it turns out, is an artistic abbreviation of The Alliance to Take Over the World; the record, she says, was made for “people who fight for their existence, every day.” “This Record is not here to please,” she continues in the album notes, “but to disrupt & to connect us in Solidarity.” While that is a noble pursuit, ATØ requires no preamble; the album’s innovative use of space and voice, its formidable sound design, and visionary narratives are their own best advocate. Underestimate Ziúr at your peril.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)


West London band's faux family business actually sounds like a business, one supplying value-added products at discount prices.

Sigh No More

That band name derives from singer/guitarist Marcus Mumford, but the band members aren't actually his sons. Rather, it's a play at quaint family businesses run by real people in real small towns, trades passed down through generations: both independent (yes, as in indie) and commercial. It's a shallow cry of authenticity, but this West London quartet really does sound more like a business than a band, supplying value-added products at discount prices. Their debut, Sigh No More, is stocked with group harmonies straight from the Fleet Foxes warehouse, exaggerated earnestness on consignment from the Avett Brothers, some of the same rock "real"-ness that built the Kings of Leon brand, second-hand drama from that run on Keane a few years ago, and some insistent Gomez rusticisms gathering dust in the back room. It's not spot-the-influence if they're pushing them on you with a salesman's insistence.
Mumford & Sons take an emporium approach, with an inventory that's broad but never deep. By spreading their attention around so many different trends, they aim to do many things adequately-- perhaps to distract you from an inability to do any one thing especially well. They love big moments and acoustic instruments, so you might call what they do hoedown pop, although that might be giving them too much credit: Every hoedown on Sigh No More-- every rush of instruments in rhythmic and melodic lockstep-- conveys the same sense of hollow, self-aggrandizing drama. And they pull that shit on every track.
Among the predictable crescendos, there are some unexpected textures, mostly courtesy of some guy calling himself Country Winston playing banjo and dobro. And they contain hints of Celtic melodies in songs like "Roll Away Your Stone" and "Thistle & Weeds", like they might be trying to update Fairport Convention and Pentangle. But none of these ideas is fully developed or explored, the gestures fleeting at best.
For music that ostensibly prizes the appearance of honesty and confession, Sigh No More sounds surprisingly anonymous, giving a sense of the band as engaged music listeners but not as real people. Mumford paints himself a sensitive guy put upon by insensitive lovers: "Tell me now where was my fault in loving you with my whole heart," he whines on "White Blank Page", as the music swells and ebbs to exonerate him of any misdeed or misunderstanding. Worse is "Little Lion Man", which is already a hit in Britain but sounds overly self-absorbed in its insistent mea culpas, as if admitting wrongdoing is a noble gesture: "I really fucked it up this time, didn't I, my dear?"
When Mumford & Sons stray from their tales of romantic martyrdom, the results are actually worse. Late in the album, "Dust Bowl Dance" kicks up some American Gothic ambience with what sounds like the least believable stab at a murder ballad ever set to record. "I'll go out back and I'll get my gun," Mumford sings, like a man who had never handled a firearm in his life. "I said, 'You haven't met me, I am the only son.'" When the Sons' electric guitars finally kick in, the song descends from ill-advised to downright embarrassing. Live, it's probably their closer, but "Dust Bowl Dance" hints that Mumford & Sons are in the costume business. They're playing dress-up in threadbare clothes.


A mold used in casting needs to be the precise spatial opposite of the desired object. If you want a ...

Loop-finding-jazz-records

A mold used in casting needs to be the precise spatial opposite of the desired object. If you want a piece of iron that looks like a human foot, you need a mold with empty space shaped like a human foot. It's obvious-- as the material is cast, matter becomes space and space becomes matter. This image comes to mind as I listen to Jan Jelinek's Loop-finding-jazz-records; this album is like hearing the mold used to cast proper pop. It's a perfect inversion of conventional music, a sonic negative. Everything that would typically be foreground is moved back or pushed off the screen altogether, and the flecks of sonic debris that would normally be covered by other sounds are left to carry the melody and rhythm.
These thoughts came to me the first time I heard "Do Dekor," which I would swear is the negative image used to imprint the "AFX Fast Mix" of Seefeel's "Time to Find Me." The rhythm is just as relentless (and nearly identical, beat-wise), but Jelinek's percussion of choice is not drums or even a drum machine, but tiny rips of static pasted into place. Taking the same idea even further is "Them, Their" which uses a single microscopic click as a substitute for a snare drum, as the full bass outlines a funky rhythm a half tick from hip-hop, and dreamy out-of-tune keyboards seem lifted from some distant memory. It's so computerized it hurts. And yes, it's fucking gorgeous.
The title here is meaningless, a joke coming from a guy who named a track on one of his records (under his Farben alias) "Live at the Hollywood Bowl." Some of the noises here may well have been sourced from jazz records, but you'd never know it. Besides, the palette here is similar to Jelinek's last album as Gramm, even though the goals are quite different. Gramm's personal_rock (which you should definitely check out if this record interests you) was more intent on exploring Jelinek's microsound ideas in the context of 4/4 dance rhythms-- something Loop-finding-jazz-records only touches on with "Rock in the Video Age" and "Tendency." With these tracks, Jelinek works territory similar to Wolfgang Voight's Gas project, anchoring his amorphous textures with the familiar house groove. The bulk of Loop-finding-jazz-records is given over to a more idiosyncratic pulse, which sheds more light on what Jelinek is doing with his peculiar mixing ideas.
That Jelinek would create his deep anti-pop for Stefan Betke's ~scape label makes sense, as Pole is definitely the most apparent reference point. Though his ideas are similar to a degree, Jelinek has far surpassed Betke in terms of expressiveness. Among the current spate of glitch artists, Germany's Jelinek designs his tracks with an ear for emotion. Part of this comes from the textures he chooses, which veer toward the liquid and organic, and part of it has to do with the manner in which Jelinek operates. The natural inclination with music this minute and detailed is to pay very close attention to the individual sounds, and a palpable intimacy emerges from the listener's proximity. Call me what you will, but I find this album to be incredibly sensual. It's like lying naked in a bed of freshly washed flannel sheets, rolling back and forth, feeling massaged by every strand of cotton. This is the real digital love, baby.


After the apocalyptic overtones of their 2021 breakthrough album, the Vietnamese experimental music collective finds hope in the fusion of rave music and eco-futurism.

*1

When Boiler Room touched down in Ho Chi Minh City last year, genre-agnostic promoters Nhạc Gãy tapped experimental music collective Rắn Cạp Đuôi to warm up the club with three drummers and a blanket of guitar fuzz. After their initial ruckus, Rắn Cạp Đuôi debuted unreleased material that would become their latest album, *1, club-testing four tracks (“Bloody,” “What Cherubs,” “Pressure,” and “Straws”) that ended up on the final release. Now *1 arrives courtesy of Gãy’s associated label, combining the electronic jetsam of Ngủ Ngày Ngay Ngày Tận Thế (meaning “sleeping through the apocalypse”) with rave-inspired optimism. *1 features the same mode of rapid-fire digital collage as Rắn Cạp Đuôi’s breakthrough, but this time, instead of hitting snooze on the end of the world, they dance towards its salvation and provide a dewy glimpse of what might lie on the other side.
“Bloody” has both dance and dew. The first half, all blistering breaks and distorted kicks, propels us to the second, a drumless interpolation of Baroque harmonies that dissolves into a tranquil, watery abyss. An earlier version of “Bloody” served as the soundtrack for SỐNG VỚI LŨ, a 2021 short film by Gãy in response to art platform CIRCA’s question: “Where do we go from now?” The title of Gãy’s film translates to “living with flood,” an acknowledgement that Southeast Asian countries are already facing the brunt of the impending climate apocalypse. The early version includes howling by Ngo Phuong Linh accompanying a frenetic montage of rave footage and videos depicting Vietnam’s increasingly vicious monsoon season.
The album’s maximalism recalls the cybernatural sonics of eco grime and Martine Tucker’s insect electronica. While there are quantized rhythms in most of these tracks, the songs’ stochastic textures mirror the seeming randomness of ecological field recordings. “What Cherubs” opens with an angelic chorus interspersed with birdsong that sounds almost digitally generated, pausing for a bit of guitar tuning that ushers in the drop. “Nhộng Tằm” (which translates to “silkworm pupae,” a popular street food in Vietnam, Korea, and other countries in Asia) presents a palimpsest of sounds that blur together, a presentation of the sample folder as a digital biome. A byproduct of the silk industry repurposed for nutrition in the face of poverty, the silkworm pupa might be the perfect biofuturist metaphor for the entanglement of humans, technology, and nature.
These themes come to a blissful head on “Pressure,” the album’s standout track. After a short bout of scene-setting whirrs and strings comes an absolutely stunning segment of what I can only call shoegaze breakcore, a revelation of a melody emanating through the din of glitch and drums. The breaks give way to layers of kèn bầu drone; not the funereal kèn bầu that marked their last record, but a celebratory use of the instrument that marks a new beginning. As with all beginnings, there are some rough patches—the dark underbelly of “Pressure” rears its head in its outro, and an anguished scream punctuates the eco-futuristic ambience of the next track, “Mang Theo Tôi Nữa.” But the closing “Bugs Life” reprises the transcendence of “Pressure,” breaks and all, carrying that optimism forward with narration from Vũ Hà Anh that prefigures an astrally projecting trance melody. The cool pessimism of Ngủ Ngày Ngay Ngày Tận Thế turns to light, and the only way to go from here is up.


The ambient noise artist Jefre Cantu-Ledesma moves towards shoegaze on his beautiful new record, which engenders a feeling of pure optimism.

Jefre Cantu-Ledesma: On the Echoing Green

On the Echoing Green

Like a lot of ambient music concerned with repetition and decay, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s work tends to dilate time. A four-minute track from his extensive catalog, built primarily out of guitars, synthesizers, and tape machines over the past decade and a half, can unspool like a staggered half-hour movement. Recent releases like 2014’s Songs of Forgiveness focused on the erosion of repeated musical phrases—a technique William Basinski pushed to its extreme with the seminal Disintegration Loops. On his new album On the Echoing Green, though, Cantu-Ledesma edges confidently into constructing songs, not just atmospheres.
Perched on the seam between ambient and rock music better known as shoegaze, Echoing Green engenders a pure optimism. Much of Cantu-Ledesma’s work until now could feel as though it drifted in from an impossible, treacherous distance, or as though it were calling to something across that same length. But with its warm basslines, tuneful guitar riffs, and (on “A Song of Summer” and “Tenderness”) prominent vocals from Argentinian singer Sobrenadar, Echoing Green centers itself in the immediate.
Abrasive elements still hover around the edges of the album, and its placidity can often seem as though it’s on the verge of collapse. Lumbering opener “In A Copse” pitches down a piano riff to an ominous register, while “Vulgar Latin” wreathes Evan Caminiti’s guitar playing in static. The 88-second interlude “Autumn” contrasts industrial noise with thin, trebly guitar chords that sound something like Mac DeMarco noodling around the fretboard while trapped in a rusted shipping container that’s sinking off the coast of the Antarctic. The hypnagogic closer “Door to Night,” meanwhile, strangles contextless vocal syllables through meshes of noise and scattered drum beats before a single note calms the scene.
Feedback strains against the euphonious chord progressions of “The Faun,” which starts to decompose compositionally by the four-minute mark. Static whizzes over the mix as the guitars gradually fade from earshot, as though Cantu-Ledesma grew weary in his attempt to keep his regular chaos at bay. Even the most openly beautiful track, “A Song of Summer,” holds details that threaten to destabilize the arrangement. Over Cantu-Ledesma’s thickly padded guitars, synth figures pinwheel just slightly off the beat, inducing a sense of vertigo amid the dazzle.
This duality of lush, sensual guitar music and entropic noise resonates with the album’s implied textual theme. Its title derives from the William Blake poem “The Ecchoing Green,” which depicts a group of children playing in the park as elderly people watch them, recalling their own youth. The sun sets by the end of the poem and the children go home to sleep, a microcosmic premonition of the end of youth and life. Blake gives an impression of time folding in on itself; the elders watching the children are children on the same green in a different time, and the children are already the elders watching themselves play. The degradation that fringes Echoing Green’s sweet and nearly innocent melodies captures that same collapse of temporality. In a sense, everything mortal is already dead.
It’s likely no coincidence that Echoing Green is Cantu-Ledesma’s first album to come out since he became a father. When he began recording it, “I had just started to feel settled in New York, and my partner and I knew we were pregnant and going to have a baby,” he told Bandcamp. “So there’s no way that that’s not somehow a part of it.” Transitioning into parenthood—bringing another person into a world, a being inclined to fragility and suffering—might be the purest expression of anxiety-tinged optimism. The debris keeps rattling, but the light still pours through.


Somewhere Else

While it's tempting to connect Sally Shapiro's reticent persona to her fragile, vanishing music-- supposedly she’s too shy to perform on stage or let producer Johan Agebjörn join her in the studio-- it's a red herring; some of music's most extroverted voices belong to reclusive singers, and her albums from Disco Romance on down are just as easily explained as the product of a ghost-girl persona as that of a Giorgio Moroder fan getting really into Tigermilk one night.
Somewhere Else isn't quite a departure from Sally Shapiro's last two albums, but in among the sequencers and identikit drums are instruments from a more muted palette: flute, saxophone, and beats that skitter rather than shimmer. The evolution was probably inevitable. The influence of Belle and Sebastian has long been palpable on Shapiro's work, and plying feathery vocals over disco is a gimmick that can't work forever; she and Agebjörn have often cited Italo divas Katy Gray and Valerie Dore as inspirations, but theirs is a genre is full of one-hit wonders. Gray, for instance, only had the one song. By Shapiro's second album, 2009's My Guilty Pleasure, people were calling Shapiro's formula samey; something had to give.
There's enough here that sounds of a piece with her last two records. The effervescent "All My Life" and "If it Doesn't Rain" soar like lost Disco Romance tracks, and the title of "This City's Local Italo Disco DJ Has a Crush on Me" certainly fits. Those songs were done solo-- much of Somewhere Else is farmed out to outside producers, another new development. They're either artists reprising their roles from Agebjörn's solo-ish album Casablanca Nights (which had enough Sally Shapiro tracks that it was basically Disco Romance 2.5), or pretty good outside bets, like the Drive soundtrack-boosted Electric Youth.
As on Casablanca Nights, the returns vary. Lead track "I Dream with an Angel Tonight" seems like Shapiro's normal fare-- boy meets girl, girl comes to love boy, boy was never meant for girl, who realizes this on the dancefloor-- until the track concludes in the musical equivalent of a sigh. At least the quiet-breakup track "Sundown" brings a foregrounded sax solo out of nowhere, which eventually comes to mimic Shapiro's voice, a neat trick. "What Can I Do", meanwhile, is your common or garden twee pop song. If you heard it in isolation, you'd never guess its singer once put out an album called Disco Romance.
Le Prix collaboration "Architectured Love" is fittingly titled, chilly and gorgeous as an ice palace. The New Wave-y "Don't Be Afraid" first appeared on French producer Anoraak's solo debut Wherever the Sun Sets, and has barely been changed here-- though it's charming enough that the cross-promotion can be forgiven. That's not the case with Electric Youth's "Starman", a passable-enough bit of hero worship that turns out not to have a hook. It's not terrible, just uninspired, and only goes to show that the disco romance formula is both harder to pull off and more singular than you'd think.


Recorded in Nashville, the spare set of songs taken from his last three solo albums is a minor but revealing statement from the graceful singer-songwriter.

Bill Callahan: Live at Third Man Records

Live at Third Man Records

The five years since Bill Callahan put out Dream River have marked his longest hiatus yet in a career defined by momentum and steady changes—the deepening of his voice, the magnificent refinement of his writing. His few recent transmissions have all spoken to the same tranquil state of mind. There was a curio of dub remixes, a paperback book of collected lyrics, a slow and smoky contribution to a Grateful Dead tribute album. A few months after the release of Dream River, a newly affianced Callahan revealed to Pitchfork, “I love life more than I ever have, and I’m comfortable.” Soon after, he became a father. In the 52-year-old songwriter’s own words, when things are beautiful, just keep on.
Callahan’s latest release, a live set recorded at Jack White’s Third Man Records in Nashville in the fall of 2017, doesn’t quite signal a return to action. Its six songs are all selected from his last three solo albums, a trilogy of releases between 2009 and 2013 with an emotional resonance that seems to grow with every year. Coming from an artist whose body of work feels almost sociopathically well-considered (“There [are] no extra songs—I’m not an amateur,” he once said of his writing process, which, for at least one album, involved a literal quill and ink), Live at Third Man does have a slightly off-brand feel to it. Compared to his first live album, 2010’s immersive Rough Travel for a Rare Thing, his installment in Third Man’s ongoing series can’t help but feel like a minor statement.
That being said, the opportunity to revisit Callahan’s music in different settings and under different circumstances is part of his appeal. Any song or lyric, or even just the utterance of a word, can hit you differently with any listen. Without new music to highlight, Callahan’s recent shows have explored the depth of his songbook, binding disparate pieces together and allowing him to find new authority as a storyteller. Since 2013, I’ve seen him play three times, each atmospherically distinct but equally satisfying: once with a band, once solo acoustic, and once accompanied by guitarist Matt Kinsey. The latter incarnation is the one documented on this album.
Kinsey’s playing can be just as beautiful and plaintive or as jarring as Callahan’s lyrics. He builds a psychedelic helicopter squall during the climax of “Spring,” then plucks atmospheric trills through the transitions in “Jim Cain.” There’s an improvisatory flow to their performance, evident as they let the dramatic pause in “Drover” linger just long enough so the final refrain can ring with well-earned victory. “Tonight we’re gonna test out some old material,” Callahan tells the audience early in the show. It’s a joke, but not really.
If Live at Third Man feels uniquely revealing coming from Callahan, it’s down to the way the music sounds somewhat out of control—a night captured at random, for better or worse, for posterity. With the arrangements stripped bare, you notice inflections you haven’t heard before on his records: a phlegmy growl in “Ride My Arrow,” the desperate tug in his throat as he mimics a pleading audience in “Riding for the Feeling.” Just over eight minutes into a ten-minute take on “One Fine Morning,” his granite voice fails completely, breaking into a squeak as he sings the word “part,” in, “Yes, I am a part of the road—the hardest part.” Like all his most memorable moments, it sounds like an accident, just inches away from a punchline. And somehow, it feels just right.


On their seventh full-length (and Sub Pop debut), Sleater-Kinney hook up with producer Dave Fridmann to fully realize the sound they've been inching towards on their past two albums. The result is their most streamlined and confident album yet, resurrecting the righteous fury of their first great albums (Call the Doctor and Dig Me Out) in the name of classic rock titans like Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and Jimi Hendrix.

The Woods

By now you probably don't need to be told the particulars of Sleater-Kinney's new album, The Woods: about how they signed with Sub Pop, making it their first album since 1995's Call the Doctor not released by Kill Rock Stars; about how they hired Dave Fridmann to produce and recorded it in rural New York instead of Washington State; about how they wanted a heavier sound that mines classic rock like Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and Jimi Hendrix for inspiration; about how one song is more than 11 minutes in length.
So it should come as no surprise that The Woods marks a significant transformation for the band-- one they first hinted at on 2000's All Hands on the Bad One, and crept closer toward on 2002's One Beat. Nor should anyone be shocked that, despite the new song structures, guitar solos, and drum fills, Brownstein's guitar still roars wildly, Weiss's drums still thunder, and Tucker still wails with a primal urgency that is one of the most compelling sounds in rock music today. What hasn't necessarily been made explicitly clear is that, even in the face of its cock-rock trappings, The Woods most closely recalls the righteous fury of their first great albums, Call the Doctor (1995) and Dig Me Out (1996).
The brash economy of punk, for Sleater-Kinney at least, has always been just a short step away from the lumbering behemoth of hard rock. "The Fox", however, seems to say otherwise. Opening the album, this piece of Aesop rock is about a fox and a duck, and I think it just might be allegorical. But it's loud and it thrashes and Tucker shouts to be heard over the din. It's ferociously uninviting, but it works both as a context-providing preface to the nine songs that follow and as a deterrent for weak-eared listeners. Those who make it to "Wilderness" will have passed a test of sorts.
"Wilderness" and most of "What's Mine Is Yours" sound like prime Sleater-Kinney, as does much of the rest of The Woods. Fridmann's presence is far from disruptive; you can hardly hear him in the mix, except for a little sludge in the low end-- a nice substitution for a bass player. Instead of weighing them down with single-mic'd Flaming Lips drums or Delgados density, he simply steps out of the way and allows them to sound larger, louder, and looser.
Turning their crosshairs away from the overt political issues of One Beat, Sleater-Kinney's amplification here sounds like a reaction to the current wave of backwards-looking boys-club bands that idolize post-punk dramatists like Joy Division and the Cure and abstractors like Gang of Four and Wire. (And anyway, weren't the women of Elastica working this same nostalgia, like, 10 years ago?) On "Entertain"-- the first single, no less-- Brownstein chides the eyeliner brigade righteously: "You come around looking 1984/ You're such a bore, 1984/ Nostalgia, you're using it like a whore/ It's better than before."
But Sleater-Kinney are looking backwards too, albeit to a different time in rock history and to different styles, as well as with a greater open-mindedness and self-awareness. Many of the hard-rock trappings of The Woods sound self-conscious: Leading into the album-closing "Night Light", the 11-minute guitar solo on "Let's Call It Love" is just that-- an 11-Minute Guitar Solo. The badass breakdown on "What's Mine Is Yours" is just that-- a Badass Breakdown. But the point of "Let's Call It Love" is the equation of music and sex as Brownstein sings, "I've got a long time for love" and then proves it with her guitar. And the point of "What's Mine Is Yours" is, as the lyrics reveal, not the breakdown but the recovery: As Brownstein's guitar squawks boisterously and arrhythmically, Tucker stitches it together with a low Led Zep riff and Weiss wraps it up with a big drum beat, all three of them literally creating music from chaos.
In other words, this hard-rock transformation sounds like an extension of all the meta songs they've been writing since before "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone"-- rock-about-rock songs that chronicle their experience as an all-woman band and that deploy that self-reflexivity as a weapon against industry double standards and general ignorance. In the past, this self-awareness often resulted in songs that sounded closed-off, each with its own extremely precise meaning that related but didn't always connect to other songs around it. The Woods, on the other hand, is their most album-like album since The Hot Rock, each song building on the previous and leading to the next. With its artificially sweetened melody, "Modern Girl", for instance, almost sounds saccharine ("My whole life is like a picture of a sunny day"), but coming after "Jumpers", a song so empathetic it considers suicide a viable act of defiance, "Modern Girl" takes on deeper meanings. The pair are two sides of the same woman, the ultimate predicament: To survive these days, you have to be either suicidal or superficial. Sleater-Kinney, meanwhile, get by simply sounding fucking supersonic.


Burial returns with his first new solo work since 2007; it walks the emotional terrain as his past work yet subtly pushes his sound in new directions.

Street Halo

Burial puts out music seldom enough that when he does, it's an event. It's a scarcity thing: Instead of flooding the market with music, he keeps fans wanting, and he and the labels he works with know how to capitalize on that desire. A limited, vinyl-only collaboration with Thom Yorke and Four Tet, on the latter's Text Records, was released with only a week's advance notice and sold out in no time. With the exception of the limited, vinyl-only pressing, Hyperdub followed a similar strategy for this release, Burial's first new solo material since 2007, and label boss Kode9 helped build the anticipation by premiering tracks on Benji B's BBC radio show.
Not many electronic producers can command that type of hype. Fortunately, Burial hasn't disappointed us. Anyone who feared that he might have moved on to a new sound-- perhaps, like James Blake, embracing pop songwriting-- can breathe a sigh of relief: This is the same melancholic Burial we've known and loved from the beginning. But listeners who wondered if the formula might be wearing thin, diluting itself amidst all the rainy pitter-patter and tear-stained chords, can also breathe easy. While sticking to the emotional terrain he's known for, Burial also subtly pushes his sound in new directions.
"Street Halo" is the closest Burial has come yet to the straighter cadence of house and techno, with shuffling hi-hats and a crunchy handclap/fingersnap sound accentuating the 4/4 pulse; the middling tempo backs off dubstep's quick snap and eases into a relaxed, rolling house groove. The backbeat bassline even recalls, however unconsciously, Ricardo Villalobos' "Dexter", which isn't necessarily as absurd as it sounds: Both artists have a thing for accidental syncopations and splintering percussion. As always, Burial's beats are oblique, with a hazy percussive clatter lurking behind crisp, timekeeping accents. And again, he has made mournful, a cappella vocals the melodic focus of the track, and everything is suffused in a suggestive layer of static and grit. But he's a masterful arranger, frequently switching up elements-- focusing one minute on a blunt, rave-inspired bassline, and the next on supersaturated vocal harmonies that sound like overdriven Cocteau Twins. The track follows a counterintuitive logic, abandoning the predictable structure of breakdowns and buildups in favor of twists and turns you don't see coming, including a fake fade-out at the end.
The second track, "NYC", is even better. It's got all the yearning you could want from Burial, thanks to its keening vocal lead and stately synthesizer pads. Taking his virtual razor to a long strip of female vocals, he seems to have cut and pitch-shifted it in such a way that it hangs in the balance between meaning and pure sound, with slippery nonsense syllables giving way to clearer phrases ("...when I'm around") loaded with ambiguous emotion. Rhythmically, Burial takes up the staggered cadences of UK garage, long a favorite of his, but he slows the tempo to around 115 bpm. It's a brilliant move, giving garage's whipcrack syncopations an additional spring in their step; when combined with those floating keyboards and vocals, the groove feels almost deliriously buoyant. (As a visual analogy, I'm reminded of the underwater acrobatics in the video for Portishead's "Only You", which turns out to make a superb visual accompaniment to Burial's screwed kinetics.) It's strange to think that so few producers have explored grooves like this at similar tempos; in Burial's hands, it's a perfect merger of the pensive and the sensual.
"Stolen Dog" is also based upon a mid-tempo house groove, but the rhythm is less urgent than on the other two tracks, its elements restricted to a thumping kick drum, faint hi-hat tick, and faint, syncopated rimshots signaling the distant ghost of 2-step garage. There's a sing-song feel to the lilting synthesizer melody and the layered vocals over the top; it feels almost like a lullaby, with soothing chord changes doing their best to keep the darkness at bay, as dissonant bursts and ghostly clatter loom in the background. It might be the least essential of the three tracks here, but it's every bit as carefully thought out. Somehow, despite a sound bank that has long since become familiar, Burial keeps finding new ideas to animate his worn, mournful samples.


Kevin Devine and Manchester Orchestra’s Andy Hull used to record collaborations that sounded like reworkings of their respective catalogs, but they’ve finally articulated what this band is about.

III

Both Kevin Devine, the Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter, and Andy Hull, frontman of Atlanta band Manchester Orchestra and sole member of Right Away, Great Captain!, have been around longer, sold more records, and played bigger venues than their collaborative side project, Bad Books. In 2010, the longtime friends (and the rest of Manchester Orchestra) partnered up to workshop one another’s ideas under a new moniker. Instead, they wound up writing material that sounded like reworkings of their respective catalogs: alt-leaning indie folk, deceptively mopey rock, and heartstring-tugging acoustic songs. After a seven-year break, Bad Books return with III, the album that finally articulates who, and what, this band is about.
Created during scattered sessions over the past two years, III fills the gaps left open by 2010’s self-titled debut and its 2012 follow-up, II. The first album grappled with religious ideology and deep-seated regrets; the latter explored fictional stories through self-reflective characters. Both zigzagged abruptly, swerving from peppy alt-rock to barren ballad without much regard for flow. Devine and Hull wrote catchy songs independently, but—perhaps as a symptom of the distance between them—their collaboration struggled to find a singular focus. (Even they admitted as much.) Now they’re on the same page.
Shedding the keyboardist, bassist, and drummer of their previous incarnation, Devine, Hull, and Manchester Orchestra member Robert McDowell use a few acoustic guitars, a bare piano, and the occasional keyboard to set their scenes. Recording with just three members results in intimate, hushed storytelling reminiscent of Devine and Hull’s early days sharing the stage—so honed in and aware of the other’s movements that onlookers fell silent, entranced. The stripped-back approach allows “UFO,” a song about suicidal ideation, to swell with layered vocal harmonies just as the lyrics turn confessional. By comparison, the emotional nine-minute closer “Army” sounds like an explosion, slowly building the acoustic instruments to a breaking point, when the protagonist, a soldier, takes his own life.
Within a comforting, relaxed musical space, Bad Books reach beyond B-side material, using this platform to wrestle with previously untouched topics. Devine and Hull, both new fathers, wax poetic on the joys and anxieties of raising a child. Hull’s haunted whispers tell a horror story on “Neighborhood,” a graphic condemnation of homophobic violence. Meanwhile, Devine’s songs—“Myths Made Plain” and “I Love You, I’m Sorry, Please Help Me, Thank You”—are consumed by political inequality, parental failure, and a blurred sense of self. These aren’t road-trip singalongs the way “Forest Whitaker” and “The After Party” were. They’re confidential poems descended from one-on-one conversation—a natural approach, given that Devine and Hull regularly speak on the phone. There’s a refreshing candor to III, especially when it comes to the heaviest subject matter. Bad Books are getting honest, even if the truth—“I’m a seven-page laundry list of sinful deeds I swore were not me”—is unflattering.
At the end of “Wheel Well,” there’s a lull where the music subsides and Devine’s voice floats in like a raft: “No one’s alone/Or it’s the one thing we are.” Solitude suits Bad Books; it’s what allowed Devine and Hull to become comfortable starting from scratch. Without the hooks of their previous albums, never mind those of their better-known bands, the songs on III take a while to sink in. In return for the slow approach, Bad Books offer a serious body of work that can stand on its own, a testament to the friendship that brought them together in the first place.


Raphaelle Standell-Preston’s operatic vocals and a string ensemble help the Canadian trio evoke the rush of new love, though some experiments go awry.

Euphoric Recall

You’ll be tempted to turn off Euphoric Recall halfway through the first song. The fifth studio album by Montreal pop experimentalists Braids begins with an inauspicious flashback to Shadow Offering lowlight “Snow Angel”—the same goofy rap cadence, the same stale #ResistanceTwitter platitudes. Raphaelle Standell-Preston actually utters the words “orange man,” leaving you barely any time to recover before rhyming “Dems and Hollywood stars” with “suckin’ blood and pluckin’ newborns: kid farms.” Wait out these insufferable opening minutes, though, and the strings rise up, the drums come in, and Standell-Preston’s voice spills from stilted talk-rap into her trademark operatic float. It is, in music, that moment when you set your phone on the nightstand, screen down, and turn to your partner in bed. It’s just lovely.
And so, for the most part, is the rest of Euphoric Recall. Standell-Preston recorded this album in the throes of new love, which explains why the lyrical content is about as substantial as angel food cake. One song likens a lover to “a little perfect Golden Retriever” with “pretty star eyes.” The grit and gloom of Shadow Offering is nowhere, except those first ugly minutes. Everywhere else, the band is in fine, focused form, buttressing their synths with a string ensemble. In critical moments, the cello leaps in, low, to lend some heft to the album’s featherlight, honeymoon feel.
Standell-Preston’s meditative delivery grounds these songs, even in the electric crackle of new relationship energy. She repeats certain words and phrases, rolling them around in her mouth to refine them: sweet-ness, sweet-ness; cake, cake, cake. The album’s most mature and fully realized song, the late-night dream-pop ballad “Lucky Star,” rests on the repetition of, “I miss you all the time/Even with you.” Standell-Preston sings like someone who’s unafraid to look stupid by saying “I love you” too soon: She hasn’t been in it long, but she is all in.
Braids have long been charged, not inaccurately, with mimicry of influences like Animal Collective. (Second track “Apple” is, in particular, the best Feels outtake this decade.) What Braids have that their peers don’t is Standell-Preston’s capacious, athletic voice. The joy of listening through their discography is hearing just how much her delivery has matured. She knows more now about how to wield a musical phrase, when to ascend from an alto valley and hold onto a high note.
Euphoric Recall falters when the band forgets that her voice is the main event. That QAnon-baiting rap isn’t the only offender. “Evolution,” all canned beats and programmatic ringtone flourishes, sounds like a bad remix of a better song. It begs for a heavier, sweatier backing track, something worthier of the lyrics’ pulsing anxiety. The instrumental of “Millennia,” likewise, is such a poor match for the vocal track that at times the pairing sounds accidental. The inept aping of Age of Adz that opens “Left/Right” is another unwelcome distraction. When the sound-collage chaos gives way, minor-key piano makes a far better fit for the song’s carnal, animalistic imagery. The closing title track, however, rights these wrongs: a highlight that consolidates all of Standell-Preston’s best and most surprising phrases—the yelps, the coos, the octave leaps. Over a decade into their career, Braids may still be searching for a distinct identity. But what Euphoric Recall makes clear is that Standell-Preston knows her voice better than ever before.


Sophomore album from this Brooklyn-via-Tennessee singer-songwriter improves on her debut with classical songwriting and a confident, ethereal delivery.

Epic

This past April, Bon Iver's Justin Vernon stood alone on stage at Memorial Hall in Cincinnati and played a song entitled "Love More". It was not a new Bon Iver tune but a cover culled from the songbook of Brooklyn's Sharon Van Etten. The way Vernon wandered through the slow, often overwhelming beauty of that song, one walked away from it feeling as if he needed to hear more from and about Van Etten. It's a song that seizes you.
Van Etten came to Brooklyn by way of Murfreesboro, Tenn., and her parents' basement in New Jersey. Her first album, the self-released Because I Was In Love, was a tuneful set of simple, spare, acoustic-based travails. It wasn't remarkable, but at its heart was a voice that begged to be uncovered: an instrument as chilling as it was opaque, as wounded as the title of the record seemed to suggest. Epic, her first wide release, feels like the unveiling of her full talents. Classic songwriting with an ethereal delivery is central to her appeal, but it's her sense of confidence that really sells it, as the first lines of opener "A Crime" attest: "To say the things I want to say to you would be a crime/ To admit I'm still in love with you after all this time/ I'd rather let you touch my arm until you die." On paper, those words might read a bit like coffee-shop fodder. But the cool grace with which Van Etten belts every line, and the dangerous force with which she strums every first count, make for an explosive sound that didn't seem possible from her earlier. She sounds as though she's arrived.
From there, Van Etten doesn't loosen her grip. As Epic progresses, her vocals couple with an array of sonics and styles (see: the pedal-steel country saunter of "Save Yourself", the electric punch of "Peace Sign"), though it's the slower, more atmospheric numbers that remain the album's most arresting. "DsharpG" is one gorgeous, six-minute crescendo, Van Etten's voice haloed by Mellotron and kick drum. Lyrically, she explores relationships from a number of vantage points, and Epic was recorded so intimately that Van Etten sounds as close as she does gutted. It all comes together on the hopeful tones of "Love More", as her voice pirouettes and heaves over a story of learning to love again in spite of pain: "Tied to my bed, I was younger then, I had nothing to spend," she sighs. "But time on you, it made me love, it made me love, it made me love more." And so the titular mantra unfolds. It's one of the more emotionally draining songs I can remember hearing, and yet as soon as it's over, it turns out I want to listen again.


This Sacred Bones LP is Margaret Chardiet's most high-profile Pharmakon release to date, following a series of hard-to-find CD-Rs and cassettes. It takes cues from Throbbing Gristle, Swans, and Whitehouse among others, and proves a bodily, antagonistic listen.

Abandon

It starts with a scream. Not just any scream, but one that sounds like it's shredding all the muscle tissue in the vocal cords of Margaret Chardiet, the 22-year-old New Yorker who records as Pharmakon. It's more a warning than an introduction, a line drawn in the sand that forces you to either cross and face the consequences or turn away and go about your pleasant day. Chardiet outlined her backstory in a recent Rising feature; the daughter of punk parents, highly active on the DIY scene in New York, uninterested in cultivating any kind of online presence. She says Abandon is about "fiercely holding on to what's true and unapologetically abandoning what's not." Getting to the heart of Chardiet's truth is an ugly process, full of pain and suffering and confrontation spilling outward, forming an unwavering commitment to her art that's both commendable and distressing at the same time.
This release for Sacred Bones is the most high-profile Pharmakon output to date, following a series of hard-to-find CD-Rs and cassettes. The music hovers around the noise and power electronics genres, taking cues from Throbbing Gristle, various phases of Swans, and Whitehouse among others. Like those bands, Chardiet isn't interested in music as a passive listening experience. Instead, Abandon is a brick hurtling through the windshield of a moving car, a purposefully antagonistic act that forces you to fully focus on the moment. Pharmakon's most frightening moments rarely involve a complete noise blackout. This is a carefully worked set of lethargically paced songs, sometimes passing from a chilly machine hum to dull thuds of metallic percussion ("Ache"), sometimes taking pitch-shifted vocal passages and layering them over drones that sound like bombs tumbling out of the sky ("Crawling on Bruised Knees").
There’s a thread of body horror loosely strung through Chardiet's work. A prior release included a track named "Mound of Flesh, Cavern of Fluids"; this record depicts Chardiet covered in maggots on the cover and includes "Crawling on Bruised Knees"; one of her older tracks, "Xia Xinfeng", is named after a woman who literally kissed her lover to death by passing him a capsule of rat poison when their lips met. Similarly, the music carries a strong sense of disease and decay, of things nearing a point of total breakdown. The fascination with bodily atrophy makes sense here, anchored to work so physically draining for both listener and performer. Abandon isn't at all about creating distance or putting up boundaries. Chardiet often forces audience members to look her directly in the eyes during live shows, sucking participants down into her despair in an unnervingly direct manner.
The arc Abandon takes feels deliberately mapped out, heading from an overpowering form of aggression at the start and gradually sinking into more studied material later on. "Pitted" borrows some of the clarity Swans found circa Children of God, where noise started to feel like a dead end and tracks like "New Mind" represented a solemn trudge out of the mire. Chardiet's vocal bears a similar authoritarian tone to the one Michael Gira possesses; when she sings, you shut up and listen. It's helped by the fact that her multi-octave voice can rise and plummet so effectively, something driven home by "Pitted", where no amount of harsh electronics can compete with the full-tilt power of her vocal. It's the one slip of the mask here, the one moment where a form of deathlike beauty is stirred into the swill, momentarily hinting at a place somewhere outside of Pharmakon's defiant battle mode.
In a recent Wire interview with Wolf Eyes, the band's John Olson discussed the gradual cessation of musicians working in all-out noise, resulting in more meditative electronic artists such as Oneohtrix Point Never and Emeralds. Olson likened the move to a shift from external to internal impulses, a retreat from the outright purge of Wolf Eyes into something more inward-looking. Chardiet's work as Pharmakon spills all its guts out onto the floor and leaves them hanging for close inspection, but this isn't entirely a return to external outpouring. As noted in the aforementioned interview, there are times in the Pharmakon live show where she's "disappearing into her own head." Those moments are apparent here, too, making it feel like Chardiet oscillates between being lost to the world and thoroughly bruised by it. Getting forcibly pinned down in her personal cycle of attack and retreat is a dark, visceral, utterly compelling thrill.


Emerging as a pop star from Nigeria’s Afrobeats scene, WizKid’s stateside debut is a potent crossover album that blends pop, R&B, dancehall and features Drake, Trey Songz, Ty Dolla $ign and more.

Sounds from the Other Side

Nigerian pop star WizKid planted his flag firmly in North American soil after guesting on Drake’s UK funky-celebration “One Dance.” With Drake, communion is often interpreted as wave-riding—or, more unflatteringly, cultural appropriation—but this wasn’t his own discovery. He was paired with WizKid by grime impresario Skepta, when they both hopped on a remix of WizKid’s 2014 “Ojuelegba.” This collaboration wasn’t about Drake looking for another trend to engage with, it was about WizKid’s globalist, genre-hopping vision. That point of view hits with precision on WizKid’s stateside debut Sounds From the Other Side, a world party blending pop, R&B, dancehall, and Afrobeats, a descendant of the West African funk genre Afrobeat (no S) popularized by Fela Kuti.
This fusion has caused some derision. Fellow Nigerian pop star Davido, who is also experiencing some crossover success, lambasted Sounds From the Other Side for being “pon pon,” or leaning too heavily on music styles outside of Afrobeats to appeal to an international audience. But pop’s global harmony—or, hegemony, depending on how you look at it—means learning how to blend and, look, even Davido is making tracks with Rae Sremmurd and Young Thug.
There are traces of pure Africa on Sounds From the Other Side, however. WizKid cites “Sexy” as a track indebted to his home continent, but he is happy to build a castle in other genre’s sandboxes. The guest roster alone is a veritable fête of R&B-bro feature go-tos. Trey Songz glides on downcast closer “Gbese,” a track about finding a girl so irresistible, you’re willing to go broke just to dance with her. (“Gbese” translates to “debt” in Yoruba). Fellow studio rat Ty Dolla $ign hops on two songs—“Dirty Wine,” a DJ Mustard-produced dancehall ode a little bit too impotent for the neck-breaking dutty wine it pays tribute to, as well as “One For Me,” an Afrobeats track that tinkers heavily with contemporary R&B, down to an SWV-interpolating hook.
Their ability to occupy different genres together had already been proven on dancehall upstart Kranium’s overlooked song of the summer contender “Can’t Believe,” but WizKid and Ty on Other Side is indicative of how fun and exploratory they are together. It is a pleasure that’s laid out across the record, whether it’s on Drake collaboration “Come Closer,” the UK funky-adjacent “All For Love” featuring South African R&B vet Bucie, and with Major Lazer on the sunny “Naughty Ride.” Even when Chris Brown, unfortunately, shows up, there is the sound of joy at the album’s core. Brown may invoke bile from music listeners, but his indestructible pop acumen precedes him. He is malleable and fits in anywhere. As with the other guests on the release, WizKid’s is a world where everyone shines.
On his own, this world is even stronger. Tracks like single “Daddy Yo” and the romantic gestures “Picture Perfect” and “Nobody” shed some of the fusion pop trappings for more Afrobeats-centric production. Percussion is paramount, but as opposed to 808s or trap beats, he nods to Yoruba and Afro-Latin rhythms, keeping it firmly grounded in WizKid’s roots. It is a party that should act as a door-opener for further global authenticity in pop so people like Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee go to No. 1 for “Despacito” on their own, not with the help of Justin Bieber. The Biebz helping to achieve the first Latin pop hit since the “Macarena” in 1996 is a small penance for his dembow-siphoning “Sorry” generating the misnomer tropical house. But it also signals that there is an interest on American radio for diaspora pop in Rihanna’s “Work,” and the continuing crossover success of Popcaan. WizKid is primed to carry Afrobeats to great heights.


Sade’s fifth album trades the band’s signature luxuriance for a sparser, knottier sound. They turn up the natural sensuality of a winding breeze and a low, gibbous moon.

Lovers Rock

Even on Sade’s official website, you have to dig around to properly see the woman herself. The lead image presents Sade Adu on stage and in silhouette, shot from somewhere below. The bright, disembodied heads of her bandmates—Stuart Matthewman, Andrew Hale, and Paul Denman—float behind her, a rich supporting cast. More light lands on the bodypack hanging at Adu’s hip than on her face itself. And what a face it is; for the first half of the band’s nearly 40-year career, the dancing, almond eyes and wide, perpetually rouged mouth of its frontwoman marshaled multi-platinum after multi-platinum album. By 2010, though, Adu had famously turned away; for the cover of Soldier of Love, Sade’s most recent release, she offered the camera her back.
But that retreat had begun in earnest on Lovers Rock, a decade earlier. The band’s fifth album was the first whose cover didn’t spotlight Adu’s full face. Instead, it’s her side profile, eyes looking down and away, that form its impression. Its 11 tracks share that understated energy, trading Sade’s signature luxuriance for a sparser, knottier sound, landing beautifully between the pastiched, jazzy pop of fellow ’80s UK breakouts like the Style Council and Everything But the Girl and the growing neo-soul bloc giving an edge to R&B in the late ’90s. Across Lovers Rock, Adu’s vocals, thick and low as always, recede into a breezy landscape of acoustic guitar, reggae bass, and simple percussion. “It’s less about the surface and more about the roots,” she said at the time.
Of course, the roots had always been there, in the form of Adu’s unusual melodies, razor-sharp lyrics, and the band’s lush grooves. But on Lovers Rock, Sade gives them space, wisely surrendering Matthewman’s velveteen saxophone, the signature instrumentation that threatened to calcify them as a relic of the ’80s easy listening cohort. Instead of the sumptuous boudoir Sade had unintentionally helped turn into a cliche with the ubiquity of songs like “Smooth Operator” and “Your Love Is King,” they turn up the natural sensuality of a winding breeze and a low, gibbous moon. Adu’s instinct for sexiness carries across Lovers Rock, this time her lower register hinting at the kind of intimacy that comes from gentle restraint and sustained eye contact.
Sade’s prolonged hiatuses now function as a social contract between the band and its fans, the gap steadily growing between each album. But the eight years between Love Deluxe and Lovers Rock was unusually long, even for the market demands of the pre-streaming era. In Sade’s case, the ’90s equivalent of “drop the album” memes manifested as gossip: that Adu had deep psychological or addiction issues, that only something dark and catastrophic could explain a desire for privacy. The rumors were so persistent, and so vague, that even in 2020, YouTubers can draw in hundreds of thousands of views to videos promising to explain Adu’s sabbaticals. In fact, Adu says, she was simply living, collecting personal life experiences to use as the source material for Lovers Rock. Slivers of those years are evident across the album: in the electricity of new love on “Flow,” the transformative joy of motherhood on “The Sweetest Gift,” and the torturous anticipation of heartbreak on “Somebody Already Broke My Heart.”
The abandoned literary ambitions of Adu’s youth found a home in her songwriting, which eschews conventions such as rhyme and verse-chorus-verse structure and yet manages to translate and illuminate swathes of the human emotional landscape. In her hands, love is an outstretched hand: “When you’re on my outside baby, and you can’t get in, I will show you, you’re so much better than you know,” she promises on lead single “By Your Side.” Despair is almost noble, as on “King of Sorrow,” and pain is an accomplishment. “It’s down a rugged road you’ve come/Though you had every reason, you didn’t come undone,” she sings on “It’s Only Love That Gets You Through,” summing up the Capicornesque nurturing and Earth mother-sagacity that exemplifies Adu in the public’s imagination.
As Sade had done before, like on the famine-referencing “Pearls” and the racial story of “Tar Baby,” Lovers Rock further expands the conventional understanding of love in pop music. Adu places social, humanist love right alongside romantic and interpersonal love. “Slave Song” and “Immigrant” are among the most moving of the band’s oeuvre: “Teach my beloved children, who have been enslaved, to reach for the light continually,” Adu prays on the former. “Isn’t it just enough how hard it is to live? Isn’t it hard enough just to make it through a day,” she begs on the latter.
The cultural influence of Caribbean Britishness had long shaped Sade, but here it’s literalized. The album’s title and the sounds throughout point to the specific style of romantic reggae that shaped much of London youth culture in the 1970s. Lovers Rock was also, for Adu, who was then approaching middle age, a full circle meaning: She was spiritually indebted to the genre, as her career in music had accidentally been kickstarted by a chance run-in at a lovers rock concert. And the relationship that underscored much of it had led her to spend years in Jamaica during that sabbatical. I’ve always been compelled by the absence of a possessive in a noun (Lovers) that often requires it.
The album stood out all the more in 2000, as pop became a shiny, slick vision of some imagined, tech-mitigated Jetsons-style future. Unlike other ’80s acts desperately seeking reinvention in the trends of the day, Sade avoided obvious dialogue with the charts. There are nods to hip-hop in the drums on “Flow” and digital experimenting in the synths on “By Your Side,” but for the most part, the band opted out. And yet Lovers Rock proved to be predictive. Echos of its style, the kind of mellow, vibey pop that could very well be described as Sade-core, have been palpable throughout the past decade, from the rhythmic R&B of Jessie Ware and Rhye to an entire generation of rappers. Among the most obviously indebted to Sade is Drake, whose grotesque registry of commemorative tattoos includes two of Adu’s face. The “dark, sexy” sound he introduced early in his career are direct reflections of the band’s influence. “I’ll call them ‘Sade moments,’ where you hear it, it hits you, and you feel something,” he told MTV in 2010.
Though Adu never quite had a punk phase, she told the writer Michael A. Gonzales in 1992 that her proximity to the community and its ethos encouraged her to seek out an alternate career model and a non-traditional rubric for success. She landed on one that has been driven by artistic intuition and creative whims, not financial motivators. It helped that her model included negotiating an unusually large royalty share of what would be tens of millions of albums sold and the accompanying freedom to pursue a self-directed career, long and unhurried.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


The Ontario musician slings revolutionary sentiments and blood lust for authority over bittersweet alt-rock.

Home Made Satan

A Chastity lyrics bot would get banned from Twitter in about 15 minutes. “If you want to show the world love, kill a cop,” Brandon Williams smirks on “I Still Feel the Same,” pausing in the middle of that thought for just a moment so it sorta sounds like a joke. You know, he’s just kidding...unless you’re gonna do it. Cops are at the top of Williams’ very explicit and lengthy hit list on Home Made Satan, along with the military, Andrew Scheer, Justin Trudeau, Donald Trump, the Christian right, #notallmen apologists, the Ku Klux Klan, and bankers. Oh, and there’s a “special place in hell” for his conservative-voting parents. If Chastity sounded like metal or made hip-hop, Home Made Satan might be under government investigation. But he comes off as something a lot more unnerving to right-wingers: a violent radical hiding in plain sight, posing as a suburban centrist.
“You call me commie like it’s a bad thing,” Williams shouts over music that recalls a cash-flush period of alt-rock that wasn’t opposed to much of anything—the gains of Kurt Cobain’s pyrrhic revolution sustained by Dave Grohl’s pragmatic centrism. The guitars are technically distorted, but they feel as clean and gleaming as a beam of pure sunlight off stainless steel. Even when Williams is shouting, his voice projects upward like he’s in a reclined position, not yelling at you. Though a loud, androgenic form of pop, it’s pop all the same, and on 2018’s Death Lust he sounded a bit spooked by his proximity to it, hinting at big hooks and roaring crowds just off screen. In most cases, it would be a slight to liken anything to Foo Fighters ca. There Is Nothing Left to Lose, but in the case of lead single “Sun Poisoning,” it’s Chastity fulfilling its potential.
But while Williams embraces a violent populism in opposition to the “austerity in my country,” Chastity tends to lack the follow-through or commitment for decisive actions. “Sun Poisoning” has the windup of an alt-rock smash but not the delivery, squandering its biggest chorus on the album’s most inscrutable lyric (“Can’t you see how easily my teeth bleed?”). Conversely, “The Girls I Know Don’t Think So” and “Anxiety” can’t quite land a melody to equal the punch of their concepts. Home Made Satan is an even leaner record than the half-hour Death Lust—10 songs clocking in at 27 minutes—but discards hooks instead of bridges, verses, and other superfluous appendages of longer songs. “Spirit Meet Up” is a welcome blast of aggro post-hardcore amidst the otherwise-staid tempos, before swerving into a wheel-spinning grunge riff; “Bliss” mirrors Williams’ fruitless search for anything greater than a momentary joy.
The songs that hit the most squarely are the ones where Williams is alone, turning his hatred inward when there’s no easy target where it can be directed. “I stay home/I make sure I’m not going to hell/I hear their pleasure, I wish them well,” Williams sighs on “Last Year’s Lust,” not wanting to die but not really stoked on living.
Home Made Satan arrives quickly on the heels of the well-received Death Lust, which countered its suicidal ideation with visions of suburban uprising (“Sadness is the danger of being young/Dreaming of the days still to come”). It’s reasonable to expect Home Made Satan to be the follow-through, the leveling up, but it holds no such interest in rebuilding. “You wave a burning flag, I still feel the same,” Williams sweetly sings towards the album’s end. Perhaps Chastity is interrogating the utility of indie rock as revolutionary art, or just the realism of revolution itself after the past decade of wearying in-fighting and fleeting gains. Either way, he sounds less like a dissident and more like someone sitting this one out.


Thanks to a performance on "Late Show With David Letterman" that went viral, Future Islands are now ready for their close-up. Their fourth album does not disappoint. This is pop music distilled, something Future Islands have been working at since their earliest lo-fi electro-punk records.

Singles

Future Islands frontman Samuel T. Herring has an energy, a physical aura, that moves along a single line. On one end is a hangdog character with tucked-in shirt and pleated khakis and on the other is an ursine man-monster wresting primordial sounds from his heart. Until recently, we could find Herring only in the small clubs where Future Islands relentlessly toured. With Herring as ringleader, these shows got pretty rowdy for a three-piece synth pop band. Everyone would push around to his metal vocals of “Tin Man” and sway along to “Inch of Dust” — their former marquee song from 2010’s In Evening Air — all while Herring waved his arms like a man conducting a symphony of giants.
When Future Islands recently performed their new marquee song on “Letterman”, the stunning “Seasons (Waiting On You)”, the secret was out: Here’s this guy, this dude with a tucked-in shirt, khakis, and a receding hairline bobbing and weaving, grinding gears in his throat, giving a “fuck yeah” gesture before a perfect pop modulation takes him to the chorus. He had that kind of uninhibited spirit the internet loves to protect and preserve. If he had a more garrulous social media brand, no doubt he could take this moment and amass an army of fans, the hashtag Herring Task Force, retweeting Vines of people wearing tucked-in shirts and khakis doing “The Herring”.
The landmark performance was far and away the most viewed musical segment on “Late Show With David Letterman” and it was certainly the most surprising moment of Future Islands’ career. And now, following the storied live shows, the memes, and their move from Thrill Jockey to 4AD comes their fourth and possibly best album, Singles. These songs finally invite us to participate in Herring’s world, one shaped by geological heartbreak events and their epochal reflection periods, told with nothing more than the simple truth. It’s pop music distilled, something Future Islands have been working at since their earliest lo-fi electro-punk recordings.
Singles is a great balance of pop and melodrama. It’s built around the sturdy new wave beat, almost always four on the floor, giving Herring a comfortable frame in which to sing. Its themes are also symmetrical, as Herring plays with antithesis like an eager English student: day and night, sun and moon, summer and winter, man and woman. His words are the sort of thing that would tumble out of your mouth if you were told to write a love poem right now in eight seconds. “She looks like the moon/ So close and yet so far” or “My sun every morning/ My star of the evening” are just two couplets that look goopy on the page but sound so impulsively romantic when he sings them. Which is to say that the setting for these songs is nothing fancy, but if they were any busier than cool nights in the tall grass with the moon hanging just so, it would ruin the music’s delicate relationship with Herring.
Herring’s presence draws from Wham City’s theatrical charm, but Future Islands also work on a much grander scale. From their debut up to 2011’s On The Water, bassist William Cashion was the group’s Peter Hook, as he offered distinctive lines with an actual personality behind it. But on Singles, Cashion and the band nod toward the stadium-ready anthems of early U2. The moody synth drones have been replaced with ergonomic melody and the band has tightened up accordingly. On songs like “Spirit” and the parting words of “A Dream Of You And Me”, when Herring’s passionate delivery carries him into those heavenly choruses, you can all but see the flood lights flash in the arena when he gets there. He sings with his eyes open, still searching, still trying to reconcile love, and still a little pissed off.
The album isn’t as taut as it could be in the back half—“Like the Moon”, for example, is a predictable and rather long four-and-a-half minutes. But Future Islands compensate for the occasional dull patch. Just after “Like the Moon” comes the album’s highpoint, the post-mortem ballad “Fall From Grace”. It could be a Beach House song with its below-freezing tempo and a spotlight on Cashion’s guitars, but then Herring gets to thinking about one of those heartbreak events and it all comes rushing back above this overdriven baritone guitar. He unknots all the emotion that has only bubbled up until now and asks one last question about their love and basically Hulks out: “was it ALL INSIDE OF ME?” The moment is arresting, and in the context of the sometimes mushy poetry of the album, these four words are blinding and absolutely unforgettable.
If this all seems a bit much, well, it is. That’s the point of Future Islands, to invite this impulsive and unfettered behavior into the lives of listeners, both at home and at their shows. Singles is risky, but the strength of the songwriting carries it over. It reminds me of that video from Sasquatch 2009 of the shirtless guy dancing to Santigold, which has since gone mega viral. Herring acts on impulse—at no point does he sound calculated or clever—offering an open invitation to the uninhibited, to the goofy, and the sentimental.


Rivers Cuomo pays tribute to his hermit orchestral-pop heroes, name-checking Harry Nilsson, Serge Gainsbourg, and Pet Sounds. But of course, it's all Weezer in the end.

OK Human

Weezer were supposed to cosplay 2020 in the image of Rivers Cuomo’s pop-metal idols Van Halen: after forays into lounge-pop, Jay-Z homage, trap production, and Toto covers, the self-explanatory Van Weezer promised “back to big guitars,” an album-length prologue for barnstorming baseball stadiums with fellow Monsters of KROQ Fall Out Boy and Green Day; the yearlong delay of both tour and album suggests that they’re a package deal, and that if Hella Mega Tour has to once again reschedule its optimistic July kickoff in America, there might not be a point in dropping Van Weezer either. In the meantime, here’s OK Human: crafted in the image of Cuomo’s orchestral-pop hermit heroes, announced and released within the span of two weeks, an album that owes its lyrical content and entire existence to pandemic living. But no matter how many obvious differences exist between OK Human and Van Weezer, it’s really just splitting hairs—it all ends up being inevitably and unmistakably Weezer.
Mind you, OK Human is not the “Weezer” that still exists as a reference point for any new alt-rock act toying with fuzz pedals and self-deprecation. This time, Cuomo entrusts a 38-piece orchestra with fleshing out a collection of demos, showing all-in commitment to a new bit after years of mimeographing his own sound. Cuomo references Serge Gainsbourg, Francoise Hardy, Harry Nilsson, and, of course, Pet Sounds as sonic ideals, though he never quite convincingly taps into a spiritual connection with those artists. More telling is Weezer’s choice of collaborators—Jake Sinclair and Rob Mathes, the producer/arranger tag-team best known for their work with Panic! At the Disco, a band that, like Weezer, recognizes the value of cringe virality. But though “Numbers” or “Playing My Piano” show that Cuomo is surprisingly well-suited to candelabra-lit balladry, there’s just as much material here that uses strings and horns to replicate their stock power chords and vocal-doubling guitar solos.
It turns out that it doesn’t really matter if Cuomo is writing for synthesizer, guitar, harpsichord, string section—through sheer endurance, Weezer transcends sound. “Weezer” is a perspective of the world that belongs exclusively to Rivers Cuomo; a pop-culture obsessive with an extremely limited capacity to take on new information; a man with an insatiable creative streak that requires almost no artistic spark. Give a play-by-play of “Grapes of Wrath” and there’s no question as to its author: the chorus pump-fakes the melody of “Electric Avenue” and immediately reveals itself as product placement for the Audible app. In the lyrics, Cuomo confounds a perfectly relatable impulse—coping with the crushing mundanity of lockdown by escaping into literature—with a reading syllabus of Catch-22, 1984, Moby Dick, and Lord of the Rings that most have grudgingly checked off before high school graduation. As always, it feels like he’s trolling us. Yet, there’s more than 25 years of Weezer music like this, outlining a squareness so pure that it’s virtually avant-garde, so how can anyone doubt that he means every word of it?
And so judging OK Human on subjective ideas of “quality” feels about as futile as it would for a cleaning product; the only question is whether it gets the job done, and after hearing “Aloo Gobi” or “Grapes of Wrath” once, I anticipate that in 2041, I’ll either hear them in a Ralphs or rattling around my brain whether I want them to or not. OK Human is Cuomo’s ideal of pop as a craftsman’s pursuit, songs that aspire to the universality and utility of jingles. And yet, Weezer songs most often feel like self-driving cars on cruise control until Cuomo decides to steer the thing off a cliff—throwing in an ill-considered rap cadence, a reference to BLACKPINK or the Morton Salt girl that immediately questions whether Cuomo is writing for anyone other than himself. It’s the Hollywood adage of “one for them, one for me” playing out on a second-by-second basis.
Yet even as he writes about dodging Zoom interviews and what he ate for dinner, it still feels as impersonal as water-cooler small talk; both effortless and try-hard at the same time. “Numbers” or “Screens” or “Aloo Gobi” or “Here Comes the Rain” say nothing novel about living in 2021 (i.e., social media is an endless, no-win competition; we spend even more time on our phones; even enjoyable routines can become exhausting) aside from confirming that Rivers Cuomo still lives amongst the rest of us. The common threads celebrities try to establish with civilians have proven to be pretty flimsy throughout the past year, but they’re enough to give OK Human an emotional binding missing from nearly every album they’ve made in the past 20 years. Even if “an orchestral COVID album” makes OK Human the most gimmicky Weezer album (of original songs) twice over, it gets across why Cuomo keeps the brand going. “Playing My Piano” finds Cuomo at his most quarantined, staring at the keys to the point where his wife, children cease to exist, or, true to form, “Kim Jong-Un could blow up my city, I’d never know.” Cringe in second-hand embarrassment or hear it as a clumsy, endearing part of him fumbling through the only means of communicating with the outside world. Either way, that’s Weezer for you.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


Third full-length from these garage-blues tag-teamers exhibits a newfound confidence that results in their first truly ambitious and carefully planned release.

Rubber Factory

Now that The Black Keys have solidified themselves as ranking contenders in the garage-blues tag-team division (a recognized and surprisingly competitive weight class), they've got a whole field of challengers to fend off. I'm thinking primarily of me, the critic, looking to measure their latest effort against its vaunted predecessors, counting the faults, tallying the improvements, making a decision. But the band has garnered a sizable fanbase indifferent to prior allegiances-- mud-caked Bonnaroo jam fans, NPR-driven blues boosters, and fist-pumping hard rock loyalists have all been trampled under The Black Keys' roots-chewing corduroy stomp. So really, it makes little difference what I have to say; most of you have already decided these guys are the real deal. Those who haven't, however, can rest assured that, in judging The Black Keys' budding discography, Rubber Factory beats their previous two by TKO.
That's because it picks up right where Thickfreakness left off-- outside the bar in the gravel parking lot, swinging aggressively with Dan Auerbach's ferocious six-string and Patrick Carney's cymbal-and-snare seizures-- and brings the noise one step further. There's more of an album feel to Rubber Factory, a conscious song-by-song progression rather than the visceral, overwhelming vibe that forged their debut, The Big Come Up, into a seething wrecking ball. When Auerbach settles down with a lap steel on "The Lengths", it's no mere diversion-- there's true conviction behind his country blues balladry. In its rosy tenderness, "The Lengths" is the biggest departure from the band's studied template. Auerbach sings, "Please yourself/ You don't have to be afraid," and it seems obvious he's convincing himself that he and Carney have carved out a niche deep enough they can break out of it with confidence to deliver something totally unexpected and achingly sweet.
"The Lengths" isn't the album's only curveball-- The Kinks cover "Act Nice and Gentle" finds The Black Keys tuning into the FM side of the dial. Where Ray Davies' original is twangy, sugary pop, The Black Keys give it a honky-tonk swing, as Auerback plies the slide and Carney's fireworks fade to a gentle sizzle. "Grown So Ugly" is a tragic prison blues penned by Robert Pete Williams and covered in the 1970s by Captain Beefheart. Auerbach tears into the standard with typical grit, but halfway through, pulls back into a short-lived vocal break that merits his position in the Fat Possum pantheon.
Those three tunes stand out as impressive tangents that skillfully mediate the rest of the album's oldtime Black Keys thunder. Songs like "Stack Shot Billy" and "Girl Is on My Mind" show the memorable songwriting that made Thickfreakness a standout. "When the Lights Go Out" opens Rubber Factory with a Bonham-esque bass pulse and an ominously pealing guitar, while closer "Till I Get My Way" lays one line of primitive Auerbach distortion over another more genteel melody until the two eventually swim together beneath Carney's splashy cymbal work.
And then there's "10 A.M. Automatic", Rubber Factory's first single and easily one of the most radio-ready indie anthems of the year, next to Modest Mouse's "Float On". It's the song most likely to show up in a Guy Ritchie flick next summer, a cool-as-fuck, hormone-laced dose of rock 'n' roll ecstasy. Here, Auerbach's voice attains that archetypal blues fever that induced the birth of rock 50 years ago; melody and rhythm mesh into a primal force that's raw and pure.
The Black Keys have consistently sought to keep their distance from modern blues, calling themselves a rock band above anything else. But we all know the blues resides at the core of rock 'n' roll. Rubber Factory sways back and forth almost imperceptibly between the two idioms, revitalizing the essence of both.