Rap’s perennial kid brother makes his best album yet—adjusting for expectations.

Good Intentions

Nav didn’t like his first album, either. He claims he’s learned now, that he’s self-aware—in the trailer for his new album, he announced with a straight face that he’d made a “vision board.” There are hints of this fledgling growth throughout Good Intentions. Adjusting for expectations, this is his best album yet, one in which he makes half-hearted stabs at “maturity” and occasionally tries to be in on the joke.
There’s still plenty of standard Nav fare. “Turks,” the lead single, is a stale, neon attempt at a Wheezy banger. “No Debate” is diet trap music anchored in plodding 808s. Throughout, it’s unclear whether Nav is trying to be funny or if his flexes are just too odd and specific to land. He clarifies that he rummages through his fridge for lean, not Sunny D. He invites a woman to quarantine with him, clad in all designer. “I’m part of the money-making committee,” he announces on “My Business,” a clunky boast that highlights his tendency to write garbled work-arounds of generic rap tropes. Nav repeats the same ideas over and over again—he likes drugs, he doesn’t trust women, look at all his money.
When he lurches towards something like maturity, it’s a reprieve from both our boredom and his. This mostly takes the form of limp apologies, confessions that wither by the time he reaches the chorus. “I act the way you see on purpose,” he admits on “She Hurtin,” a quasi-love song where Nav transparently uses a new girlfriend to make an ex jealous. He moans about having “too many options” for lovers on the forgettable “Did You Wrong.” He proves incapable of discussing women without talking about what he can buy them, or, horrifyingly, how he wants to procreate (“If I come inside, she got a king inside her belly,” he warbles, not 30 seconds into the album). The lens is equally narrow when he turns it on himself; in “Brown Boy,” a song weird enough to almost be interesting, he sings about himself from the perspective of a third-person observer, whining about the size of his rings and how his music “feels like drugs.” (He pulled the same trick on 2017’s “Did You See Nav,” and he released another song called “Brown Boy” in 2014.)
The apex of his flexing is that he’s friends with Young Thug, who pops up on the album twice and easily overshadows him. The most fun moments on the album are the ones where Nav gets out of the way. On “My Business,” he’s content to mumble occasionally in the background while Future gallops over the beat for a full minute. Lil Uzi Vert salvages “Status” with a vibrant verse that distracts from Nav rhyming “caught caught caught” with “rocks rocks rocks.” It’s genuinely shocking when the late Pop Smoke appears, his gravelly voice slower and softer than we’ve heard before; Nav wastes the opportunity by rhyming about wearing mink to go ice skating.
Travis Scott appears only briefly, and his AutoTune-slathered influence seems to have waned. Instead, Nav tries to imitate his executive producer and label owner The Weeknd, reducing Abel Tesfaye’s haunted gloom to generic darkness. “Saint Laurentt,” whose extra “t”s seems intended to avoid confusion with the better Wale song, is a corroded, moody heartbreak track, with pitched-down vocals to convey the emotion Nav’s voice can’t carry. He references addiction throughout the album, but uses the glut of pills and bottles more to create an aesthetic than to consider their implications. “When I get depressed, no one can help me,” he squeaks on “Overdose.” “Sometimes I hope I overdose.” It’s a disturbing admission, one that seems to crystalize the sulking despondency that fueled his earlier music, but Nav doesn’t go deeper.
The record ends on “Proud of Me?” a diatribe presumably aimed at people who comment on his social media posts. “I just want to fulfill my dreams,” he chirps, achingly earnest. For a 30-year-old rapper who only recently stopped complaining about his teachers, any semblance of self-actualization seems like growth. But intentions alone aren’t always enough.


On his second album of 2020, the underground New York rapper reaches a new level. The vibe is calm and bittersweet, as Navy Blue sinks deep into the recesses of his mind.

Song of Sage: Post Panic!

Over the course of the last half-decade, the 23-year-old skateboarder, graphic designer, and streetwear model born Sage Elsesser has quietly crafted his own version of the brisk and insular rap currently powering the New York underground. Much of Navy Blue’s recent music—particularly his debut album, 2020’s Àdá Irin—charts paths through familial trauma and grief; his songs scan as holistic diary entries, the literary equivalent of burning sage to cleanse your surroundings. Song of Sage: Post Panic!, Navy’s second full-length album of 2020 released this past December, sinks deeper into the recesses of his mind, fighting greater battles while reaping bigger rewards.
Listening to Song of Sage, the pains and pleasures of Navy’s past feel three-dimensional. Mental cobwebs gather in corners; memories loom like kaiju towering over cities; family and loved ones glow like beacons. The writing is lived-in, spacious and intimate in equal measure: “So many photos on the wall at most the times I was caught/In a web that I had spun myself, the damage did a lot,” he remembers on “1491.”
Yet, across Song of Sage, the past and present blur. Navy often takes an active stance, placing his healing in the center of the frame: “Look myself in the mirror, start tearing up as I reflect/I rearrange my meaning/December days, I recollect, I reconnect through dreaming,” he offers on “Dreams of a Distant Journey.” Even on the celebratory closer “224,” after the blessings and gratitude have taken effect, Navy still acknowledges the need to mend his damaged soul in the present tense.
Lyrically, Navy dances between the specific and the opaque. His writing is descriptive without giving too much of his inner monologue away (“I write for those who know me,” he says on “Deep Water Blue”). On “Aunt Gerry’s Fried Chicken,” he briefly reflects on hearing his mother's screams after his brother has been shot before abandoning the thought. His voice audibly cracks and strains when he mentions crying in front of his partner while “blazing like a comet” on the standout “Self Harm.” Navy wades through oceans of sadness, yet never dwells for long. Hope and gratitude are his rudders, manifesting in his family and his spirituality. “It’s soothing to know the body is just a shell,” he exhales on “Tired,” content to live and learn.
These songs don’t only wring deeper emotional truths than before; they also enhance his craft. He’s experimenting with flows, too, matching billy woods’ zig-zagging bar structure on “Poderoso” and pulling off a double-time delivery on the hook for “Deep Water Blue.” His growth is apparent, expending less energy to hit more potent highs like the soccer players he consistently name-checks.
The bittersweet energy expressed through Navy’s lyrics also seeps into Song of Sage’s production. California rapper/producer Evidence pitches a wailing siren against vocal chants and steady drums on “1491,” creating an anxious sense of speed. New Jersey producer Roper Williams infuses “Dreams of a Distant Journey” and “Self Harm” with soul and sorrow. Rising Montreal producer Nicholas Craven’s four placements—particularly the shimmering “Back to Basics” and the smooth shuffle of “Pressure Points”—are among the best loops you’ll hear on any rap album in the coming year.
Every beat here is a winner, but the standout is Navy’s crunchy guitar loop on the title track “Post Panic!,” a place where words and music become amorphous. Though Navy is responsible for only five of the project’s 18 beats, they gel seamlessly, much like the beats he produced for As Above So Below, the collaborative album he produced in full for DC rapper ANKHLEJOHN. Song of Sage’s beats breathe and crumble with organic beauty, loops falling off the bone like tender meat.
In the face of mental anguish, Navy Blue has created the best music of his career. Song of Sage: Post Panic! is a raw and assured highlight of the continuously morphing New York underground, recontextualizing an old sound for a younger generation. It narrows the degrees of separation between two generations of NY talent—Navy shouts out Ka on “Breathe,” featuring a showstopping verse from fellow Brooklyn veteran Yasiin Bey—while crowning a new disciple in the process. Above all, though, Navy is committed to the clarity of metamorphosis, recreating himself a little stronger and a little more humble every time.

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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 a 1995 album that changed the sound of dancehall while pointing the genre in a newly reflective direction.

’Til Shiloh

“Strangest feeling I’m feeling/But Jah love we will always believe in/Though you may think my fate is in vain/’Til Shiloh, we chant Rastafari’s name.”
These two lines, delivered in a fervent a cappella, comprise the entirety of the first track on Buju Banton’s 1995 album ’Til Shiloh. The legendary deejay’s raspy voice—until then typically heard booming from the towering 10,000-watt sound systems of open-air dancehall sessions—seemed instead to conjure the resonant wooden chancel of a church; the way it rose in tone, from hushed to beseeching, gave it the unmistakable contour of a prayer, an entreaty aimed at once inward and skyward. Taken on its own, it might easily be heard as a snatch of gospel music, yet the divine names Jah and Rastafari placed the song squarely outside the strictures of mainstream Christianity.
Banton was then Jamaica’s most prominent artist and reggae’s rawest voice—whether measured in the sheer volume of his thundering basso or the unfiltered sex and violence of his lyrics. But “Shiloh,” just 18 seconds long, signaled a shift. If this first track contained within its mesmerizing tranquility a half-formed question about what sort of album might follow, the second—“’Til I’m Laid to Rest”—offered a definitive answer. Opening with wordless vocalizations reminiscent of Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s traditional Zulu harmonies, it was anchored solely by Nyabinghi hand drums.
Atop this self-consciously traditional accompaniment, Buju unveiled a vocal declamation that was shockingly inventive in form, adapting his signature deejay style—a gruff baritone polyrhythm more closely associated with dance-friendly catchphrases—to a classic protest song: “Oh, I’m in bondage, living is a mess/I’ve got to rise up, alleviate the stress/No longer will I expose my weakness/He who seeks knowledge begins with humbleness.”
The effect was electrifying, combining the gritty emotional pull of a blues lament and the mystic aura of the best roots reggae with the rhythmic dexterity and extemporization of a soundclash champion. Producer Bobby Digital would later issue this rhythmic bed as a juggling riddim, featuring other vocalists over a filled-out arrangement with rhythm guitar and a harder kick and snare pattern, called the “Kette Drum” riddim, but when Buju wrapped his constantly modulating double-time around this slow, stripped-down version, most listeners had never heard anything like it.
At the time of ’Til Shiloh’s release, dancehall had been recognized as its own art form, something more than just a subset of reggae, for less than a decade. Buju, at the ripe old age of 22, was its undisputed king. He began deejaying seriously in the late ’80s, hanging around Kingston sound systems like Rambo Mango and Culture Love, waiting for a chance to hold the mic, then haunting studio gates, hoping to record. Although “The Ruler,” for producer Robert Ffrench, was the first Buju 45 pressed to vinyl, his 1991 breakout hit “Stamina Daddy,” for Winston Riley’s Techniques label, established his star persona: a lanky beanpole of a youth assuming the macho swagger of a bigger man, complete with a deep, gravelly voice that emulated his namesake, the older sound system star Burro Banton.
In 1991 and 1992 he followed “Stamina Daddy” with a seemingly endless string of hits including “Quick,” “Bogle,” “Battyrider,” “Love Me Browning,” “Love Black Woman,” and “Bonafide Love,” featuring Wayne Wonder. Mr. Mention, his 1992 debut for producer Donavan Germain’s Penthouse label, broke sales records, and the same year he also broke the standing chart record for No. 1 singles in Jamaica, previously held by Bob Marley & the Wailers.
He did so, seemingly, by carrying Jamaican music in the exact opposite direction from Marley’s visionary songwriting, specializing instead in rapidfire delivery, a sexual braggadocio beyond his years, and courting all manner of controversy. The central conceit of “Browning,” for instance, made a play on the similarity between the Browning semi-automatic pistol and the slang term for a light-skinned woman. Read as either promoting gun culture or stigmatizing dark skin, the song caused such a backlash that Buju quickly followed it up with “Love Black Woman” on the same rhythm track to make it clear where his true affections lay. Thus managing to have it both ways, he capitalized on the scandal and then quelled it with his own answer record.
Just as this wave of success led to a major-label deal with Mercury, however, Buju’s seemingly magical ability to be outrageous without repercussions failed him with the unexpected release of “Boom Bye Bye.” An early lyric penned when he was 15, then re-recorded for Shabba Ranks’ manager Clifton “Specialist” Dillon, “Boom Bye Bye” was calculated for pure, sophomoric shock value, simultaneously playing up the taboo subject of gay sex and exhorting graphic violence against its practitioners. Jaw-droppingly offensive lyrics were par for the course in dancehall at the turn of the ’90s, a milieu of “slackness” in which Little Lenny compared STDs to a “Gun in a Baggy” (baggy = panties) and Admiral Bailey got himself banned from radio with “Two Year Old,” which seemingly sexualized toddlers.
If shock was the goal then “Boom Bye Bye”—released on Dillon’s Shang imprint just as Buju was reaching an international audience that would hear his words with very different ears—succeeded beyond his worst nightmares. The violent lyrics were reprinted in the New York Post and denounced by GLAAD. His international shows were met with protests, and Buju was summarily dropped from the bill of England’s WOMAD festival. Buju distanced himself from the song and issued a public apology—but then undercut it by suggesting in interviews that he was being censored and misunderstood by outsiders to dancehall and Jamaican culture.
Some critics and academics pushed back on the way Buju and other dancehall artists were portrayed in the international press. Professor Carolyn Cooper of the University of the West Indies has argued that a xenophobic double standard is applied to dancehall, writing: “Homophobia is one part of dancehall but… I don’t think it incites people to violence. I think people understand the power of metaphor.” Nonetheless, rights organizations like J-FLAG documented a frightening rise in all-too-real violence against LBGTQ Jamaicans during the same period that homophobic lyrics became a trend in dancehall.
Buju eventually signed on to the Reggae Compassionate Act, renouncing all violent and homophobic lyrics, and ultimately scrubbed “Boom Bye Bye” from his catalog altogether. In 1993, however, the unfolding firestorm of mutual mistrust undoubtedly hampered the reach of his major label debut, Voice of Jamaica, which attempted to marry a more mature melodic dancehall sound to rap and R&B (including a cameo from a newly solo Busta Rhymes). But if the easy violence of his youthful lyrics had come back to haunt him on the verge of international stardom, it seemed karma was not done with Buju yet. It was while touring behind the album in Japan that he learned of the murder of his friend and fellow deejay Pan Head, formerly a specialist in gunman tunes, under murky circumstances in the Maverley section of Kingston. He poured his anguish into the lyrics of the plaintive “Murderer,” which charged the wistful melody of reggae’s classic “Far East” riddim with new gravity: “Yes, you can hide from man but not your conscience/You eat the bread of sorrow, drink the wine of violence/Allow yourself to be conquered by the serpent/Why did you disobey the first commandment?”
“Murderer” captured the collective spirit of the times. It wasn’t just a massive hit in dancehall culture; it was a phenomenon, often credited with single-handedly changing the genre’s trajectory. Sherman Escoffery, a nephew of Winston Riley who had recognized Buju’s potential early (and along with his cousin Kirk Riley recorded and leaked “Stamina Daddy” before the elder Riley had a chance to say no) witnessed firsthand the effect Pan Head’s death had on Buju and his dancehall contemporaries Capleton and Beenie Man, each of whom recorded their own Pan Head tribute songs (“Cold Blooded Murderer” and “No Mama, No Cry,” respectively).
“When Pan Head died it was kinda like one of those moments of enlightenment,” Escoffery recalls in a new interview. “The violence is still there. Being a deejay, being a popular guy is not gonna protect you. But also they had gotten to a certain age where they weren’t children anymore. They were now grown men and they had to start taking responsibility for the things that they say, the things that they put out there. It was the same thing with ‘Boom Bye Bye.’ That was something that started off as a joke, but people are dying now, people are getting beaten up for being gay. Now your words have taken on flesh.”
In the same period, Buju publicly converted to Rastafari and started to grow his hair into dreadlocks. Released as a 45 single in ’93, “Murderer” was included as the third track on the CD version of ’Til Shiloh, followed by “Champion,” another established club anthem with a faster pace, more in line with conventional dancehall expectations. These two songs connected the album’s bold vision back to the voice that Buju fans already knew well and confirmed that he wasn’t going to let ’Til Shiloh’s neo-roots experimentation supplant the hits-packed model of Mr. Mention. In fact, of its 16 tracks, at least nine became certified dancehall classics that still play regularly on sound systems, including combinations with singers Garnett Silk (“Complaint”), who had also tragically passed away scarcely a year before the album’s release, and Wayne Wonder (“What Ya Gonna Do?”). Even the less anthemic cuts on ’Til Shiloh aren’t so much skips as sleepers. Repeated listens reveal how the lyrics of the quieter “Chuck It So,” for instance, build upon the album’s profound anti-violence theme.
The wealth of singles charts an evolution in Buju’s voice and sound, leaning toward more ecstatic themes and a jubilant, double-time steppers tempo best heard on “How Could You,” “Wanna Be Loved,” and “Hush Baby Hush.” In that sense it is a uniquely satisfying dancehall album, a document of what was actually happening on dancefloors and sound systems; an unprecedented rejection of violence, experienced and expressed collectively in real time through music.
Yet it is also more than that, as the songs already known to Buju’s fanbase are exponentially heightened by their placement within the frame of ’Til Shiloh’s original material. “Untold Stories” is another example of Buju’s newly unveiled vocal approach, this time setting that inimitable rising and falling flow to an unadorned acoustic guitar groove that recalls Marley’s “Redemption Song” or perhaps even a Tracy Chapman ballad. Here, Buju outdoes himself lyrically once again, delivering a searing testimonial on behalf of those trapped by the structural violence of Kingston’s garrison geography: “Who can afford to run will run but what about those who can’t? They will have to stay/Opportunity a scarce-scarce commodity in these times I say/When Mama spend her last and send you go class/Never you ever play.”
Applying the intricate rhythmic improvisations of the deejay’s art to such emotionally raw subject matter, Buju arrived at a vocal form with the immediacy of personal testimony, pouring forth in a stream of consciousness that could also, paradoxically, hypnotize with the chanting quality of a prayer. Though also released on 45, “Untold Stories” could hardly be called a typical dancehall single: It touched on something more intimate and sacred, if no less communal.
Along with “Til I’m Laid to Rest,” “Untold Stories” is the keystone statement of ’Til Shiloh, effectively bringing the artistic arc documented on the previously released singles to a crescendo. It demonstrated that the wiser, more compassionate side Buju revealed on “Murderer” was not simply an in-the-moment reaction to tragedy but a lasting change in his artistic voice, bringing to bear the same skill he had previously applied to gun talk or the latest dance step on themes of eternity, redemption, and purpose.
Neither the depth nor the artistic evolution were lost on critics and fans. In their 1998 book Reggae Routes, music historians Kevin O’Brien Chang and Wayne Chen summed up the critical consensus this way: “Artists like… Buju Banton and Luciano give hope for the future. Indeed, many critics saw Buju’s 1995 album ’Til Shiloh as the genre’s first masterpiece….” “Masterpiece” was not too strong a word. A quarter of a century on, ’Til Shiloh stands as one of those rare albums wherein the intensely personal expression of an artist at the height of their powers aligned perfectly with a larger cultural shift. A wave of neo-roots followed in its wake: digital reimaginings of reggae’s golden era that paired drum machines with strumming acoustic guitar lines, crafted by producers like Buju collaborator Bobby Digital and Philip “Fatis” Burrell. Buju’s long-player also changed dancehall’s relationship with the album form, which prior to ’Til Shiloh was often just a compilation of an artist’s latest 45s. If Sizzla, Luciano, and Capleton each forged their own equally original versions of neo-roots, their debt to ’Til Shiloh is most evident in the expansive, longform visions they reached for on Black Woman & Child (1997), Sweep Over My Soul (1999), and More Fire (2000), respectively.
Just as tellingly, with the possible exception of Super Cat, none of the reigning badmen who had ruled dancehall before Buju’s rise (Shabba, Ninjaman, Cutty Ranks) scored a solid hit after ’Til Shiloh. Its impact can even be traced outside the realm of reggae. If ’Til Shiloh’s sonic palette had something of an antecedent in the Fugees’ 1993 debut Blunted on Reality (especially the original album version of “Vocab,” which set breakneck raps to a drumless acoustic guitar riff) it was almost certainly a precedent for Lauryn Hill as she mapped out her solo reinvention on 1998’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, most audibly on “To Zion,” which unfolds like a swelling neo-roots hymn in all but accent.
Most of all, however, it was the moment that the artist who could credibly call himself the Voice of Jamaica fully grew into his own voice. In Escoffery’s view this growth represented not so much learning to avoid controversy or ignore criticism as it did a hard-earned perspective on which reactions mattered. “If you’re offending the politicians for the sake of the people, the people are always going to be on your side,” he observes. “You will get some backlash for calling out the powerful… but that’s good backlash. You’re offending the right people.” ’Til Shiloh still resonates not just for its musical innovations and virtuosic command of craft, but also as a portrait of an artist coming into full knowledge of their own creative power—to harm or to heal.


Providence-to-Portland duo the Body's second of two collaborations with New Orleans’ Thou is a match made of mania and menace. During the last decade, both of these doom metal squads have issued records at startling clips, and You, Whom I Have Always Hated is a remarkably cohesive and singular album.

The Body / Thou: You, Whom I Have Always Hated

You, Whom I Have Always Hated

The Body and Thou must get bored easily. During the last decade, both of these delirious doom metal squads have issued records at startling clips, the pace sometimes so speedy it’s as if they’re desperate to outrun the doomsdays of which they so often yell. Apart from a brief pause two years ago, New Orleans’ Thou have offered a few titles a year, many of them splits or EPs that rerouted their sludge through small new capillaries. Despite several dozen releases, they’ve managed but four (intriguing, at worst, and inescapable, at best) full-lengths.
Much the same holds for Providence-to-Portland duo the Body. To date, they too have favored splits or collaborations with pals old and new, instead of records entirely dependent upon their spartan if seismic guitar-and-drums configuration. Since their 2010 breakthrough All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood, itself a close hybrid with a hometown choir, they’ve released a few good splits, a terrific EP and only one album, the strangely self-satisfied Christs, Redeemers. Instead, some of their best work has arrived through a full-length collaboration with noise sculptor the Haxan Cloak and now their second of two collaborations with Thou*,* You, Whom I Have Always Hated. It is a match made of mania and menace.
The six-song set is available as a limited-edition record through Thrill Jockey, the Body’s most recent and stable home. The 10-track CD and digital editions, however, warrant the most attention, especially if you missed last year’s Released from Love. That four-song EP captured the two bands holed away in a Louisiana studio at the beginning of 2013. The results are included here not as a prequel but as a necessary companion to the recent arrivals. Those Southern sessions made it clear that this is a painful and powerful fit for complementary brutes. Perhaps because of their economical configuration, the Body often affixes parts that aren’t noise, drums, guitars, or screams to the ends and beginnings of songs. The more versatile Thou, however, allow for more engrained subtlety. During opener "The Wheel Weaves as the Wheel Wills", Thou’s Bryan Funck delivers imprecations in his deep, full scream. Behind him, the Body’s Chip King squeals like a wounded animal, his high pitch offering a sliver of contrast to the mid-range, mid-tempo melee. A later cover of Vic Chesnutt’s "Coward" seems as terrifying for the singers as it does for the listener. In his raspy falsetto, King yells the opening lines like a death cry. The band builds behind Funck as he bellows the chorus—"I, I, I, I, I, I am a coward"—until they collapse in exhaustion around the sound of that last word. A counter-riff adds drama to the stentorian march of "In Meetings Hearts Beat Closer", while mutated bridges afford misdirection to the aptly named "Manifest Alchemy". Thou and the Body could be wider and wilder together than separately.
The new material springboards from that same synthesis. Recorded in Providence during the middle of a shared July 2014 tour, the second batch hits hardest when these two bands land as one. There’s perhaps no better example than their reverent but explosive take on Nine Inch Nails’ "Terrible Lie". The crews reanimate the industrial architecture of the original, with guitars and bass turning the melody into a mess of forceful chords and corrosive feedback. And the beat gets massive, punched down as if both drummers were born wielding sledgehammers. The sound is as colossal as the Body’s but as sharp and severe as Thou’s—a combination that makes the 1989 template feel, by comparison, like little more than a stripped skeleton. Though "The Devils of Trust Steal the Souls of the Free" begins like the Body with more guitars or Thou with more drums, it captivates when King and Funck again split vocals. The song’s commandments, like "Reach out and find nothing," only get shocking when it seems as though the whole world were yelling them at once. The pair slips when the results are expected, as if you’re listening to two bands play the same song at once rather than finesse the parts as one unit. "Her Strongholds Unvanquishable" and "Lurking Free" both stumble toward that mire, if not in it altogether. Tricks that make the Body and Thou’s own records interesting can start to feel like unnecessary crutches when they overcrowd the same shared space.
But those are aberrations for this collusion. Taken as a full-length by two groups that treat the format with some suspicion, You, Whom I Have Always Hated is a remarkably cohesive and singular album. Though it shows signs of both responsible parties, it also proves their inherent restlessness, as they’re both willing to bend toward one another to create something richer than they might have rendered themselves. It’s important that You, Whom I Have Always Hated marks the shortest effective span between successive LPs from either the Body or Thou. Perhaps together, they can continue to avoid boredom.


Duppy Gun’s latest, organized around the songs of I Jahbar, finds the Jamaican crew boldly charting their own course.

I Jahbar & Friends: Inna Duppy SKRS Soundclash

Inna Duppy SKRS Soundclash

Ruellia tuberosa, known in Jamaica as Duppy Gun, is a flowering plant native to the tropical Americas but now distributed around the world. If you add water to (or just spit on) their mature seed pods, they explode within seconds, flinging stinging seeds outward as if possessed by a trigger-happy ghost. It’s a mysterious and powerful plant used as a health tonic and aphrodisiac, but it can also pop safely in a child’s hand. It’s a wonderful namesake for the Jamaican collective formed in collaboration with Los Angeles producers Cameron Stallones (Sun Araw) and M. Geddes Gengras, one which continues to cultivate a bracing take on modern dancehall as sensitive to the outside world as the titular flower.
On Inna Duppy SKRS Soundclash, Duppy Gun showcases Jamaican riddims alongside contributions from the British Columbia-based Seekersinternational (aka SKRS). The album also functions as a debut of sorts for I Jahbar, nephew of “Ashanti” Roy Johnson of the Congos and a vocalist, local party host, and engineer at the Duppy Gun studio in Spanish Town. Building on—and drawing from—the far-flung collaborations on 2018’s Miro Tape (a few tracks from which appear here again), Inna Duppy SKRS Soundclash collects nine songs, one remix, and two “mixtape megamix” sides, each devoted to one of the two production crews involved, soundclash-style.
Of the two, the SKRS productions feel more studied and conservative. “DemNoBad,” for example, pushes the needle into the red in a manner reminiscent of time-honored Jamaican recording techniques. But the Canadian crew depart from convention on “DuppyKilla,” a manic track continually interrupted by edits and effects, where the production sometimes wholly submerges Buddy Don’s voice.
The Duppy Gun productions by Velkro and Bigflite come across as more unhinged and original, if still rooted in reggae aesthetics. Slow burner “Turn Up” combines detuned chords and sustained, distorted tones that sound like a distorted guitar shacked up with an airhorn. Bizarre little licks and synth smears create a woozy texture, anchored by I Jahbar’s steady flow. The album is a showcase for Jahbar, who projects menace on the whisper-sung “Ipy Ipy” and turns “Weed Patrol” into a captivating saga of spiriting ganja across the island, dodging police road blocks and ducking from sirens, imploring friends across the island to help out. He even slips into a faux-British accent at the end of “Sniper Rifle” to lighten up the proceedings, reminding us that when Jamaican artists invoke murder, they’re often talking about music.
The album alternates between Duppy Gun and SKRS productions, while the megamixes allow each production house to be heard on its own. The mixes perhaps offer the most engaging tour through the global crew’s sprawling sound. They are doing something unique: Edgy dancehall has been produced outside of Jamaica for decades, but rarely do such productions involve artists still located in Jamaica and playing to home crowds. (Some of the songs on the album have apparently attained singalong status at Chopdawg Sundays, a regular party and stage show in Portmore.) This sort of collaboration between outside enthusiasts and local artists can be mutually beneficial, bypassing traditional gatekeepers and allowing unorthodox sounds to flourish. The sound of Portmore, aka Gaza, has been so strongly imprinted by Vybz Kartel and Popcaan in recent years that it’s refreshing to hear a different crew ignoring current trends to find common ground with a wider world.


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 eclectic Texan’s 1987 album, a terrific showcase of his subversive and idiosyncratic country style.

Pontiac

While reflecting on the sexual politics of small-town Texas life, the novelist Larry McMurtry once mused on the stunted emotionality of the cowboy: “The tradition of the shy cowboy who is more comfortable with his horse or with his comrades than with his women is certainly not bogus… The cowboy’s work is at once his escape and his fulfillment, and what he often seeks to escape from is the mysterious female principle, a force at once frightening and attractive.” For male flatlanders, whose development can be as arrested as the arid land they inhabit, the two things can sometimes get confused for one another: women seen as wild beasts to be broken into submission, horses as precious creatures deserving of respect and affection, both treated with a certain caution lest you break your heart and bust your ass.
Like so many Texan poets laureate before him, Lyle Lovett’s songwriting has long been fixated on those two primary neuroses: the emotional relationships of men to the women they love—what he once bluntly characterized as “the male-female thing”—and the emotional relationships of men to the livestock they tend to. In a 1988 Rolling Stone profile, Lovett quipped that he would have been a cowboy, had he not been deeply afraid of cows: “My uncle had a dairy farm. I used to help milk them and stuff. But you get kicked a couple times and it sort of makes you get gun-shy.” The interviewer couldn’t help but make the obvious prod about Lovett’s bovine anxiety: “Sort of like with women?”
“If I Had a Boat,” the opening track to Lovett’s second album, 1987’s Pontiac, expresses that perpetual Peter Pan syndrome as a wistful cinematic fantasy: “If I was Roy Rogers, I’d sure enough be single/I couldn’t bring myself to marryin’ old Dale/Well, it’d just be me and Trigger/We’d go ridin’ through them movies/We’d buy a boat and on the sea we’d sail.” If the folky melody felt like it came from a much older place, the kind of big-rock-candy-mountain daydream a hobo might have strummed a generation ago, that’s because in some way it was. The song originated almost a decade before it was recorded, during Lovett’s tenure as a journalism student at Texas A&M University, written while playing hooky from history class. “If I Had a Boat” immediately felt like a country standard, destined for the secular hymnal every picker carries around in their head, if only because Lovett had played it so many times before he ever recorded it—the words and images came effortlessly, but he still took years to make sure they were just right.
Though his 1986 self-titled debut had made for a successful enough introduction to Nashville, it was Pontiac that announced Lyle Lovett as not just a voice worth listening to, but a vivid writer who wormed his way into your imagination. There was an old-fashioned twang to the swinging rhythms and weepy steel guitar of Lyle Lovett, but its production was also very of the time, electrified and synthesized and ready for the stage at Farm Aid. Pontiac stripped it all down to the core, developing the warm, organic sound Lovett would continue to refine, a blend between the acoustic intimacy of coffee-shop folk and symphonic jazz. By embracing his many idiosyncrasies as both a performer and persona, Lovett only seemed to make himself more loveable, and the unsinkable eccentricity of Pontiac made it a surprise hit outside country. The record may have had hybrid appeal, but it was still unmistakably Texan; somehow, Lovett’s refusal to take his boots off no matter where he roamed made him all the more appealing, even exotic, to those who might normally look down on cowpokes.
As a long, tall Texan born of upstanding Lutheran stock, Lovett had a surprising capacity for subverting relationship tropes in country music. In Lovett’s songs, the trappings of cowboy life can function as fetish objects. From the opening fiddle licks of “Cowboy Man,” the Western-swing wet dream that introduces his debut album, he gleefully embraced innuendo, turning a cowhand’s trusty lariat into an instrument of sexual bondage. The narrator of 1996’s “Don’t Touch My Hat” clings to his Stetson like a waifu body pillow, willingly choosing a hat that fits right over romantic fulfillment; the premeditated murderer of “L.A. County” finds platonic companionship with a firearm who “did not say much” on the drive to their deadly final destination. In the universe of Lovett, like the woeful wooden “Kaw-Liga” that Hank once sang of, objects are personified and persons objectified: the bleary-eyed bar patrons “unplugged” like a neon sign on “Closing Time,” or a woman played with like a turntable on 1994’s “Record Lady.”
There’s a casually absurd, almost childlike surrealism to Lovett, a man who has written songs about his affection for penguins and his distaste for pants. That borderline cartoonishness extended to his visual presentation, namely his hair, which from the inauguration of his career would be discussed by critics almost as much as his music itself. Robert Draper’s iconic 1992 Texas Monthly profile of Lovett would devote lots of ink not just to the “thatch of nuclear-radiated alfalfa sprouts” atop his head, but his face, which “suggests the elegance of an elephant tusk.” A review of Pontiac for the Associated Press posited him as “more like a Pet Shop Boy than an Oak Ridge Boy,” while Hank Hill put it more bluntly on an episode of King of the Hill: “Get out of my way, rooster boy.” When k.d. lang first met Lovett backstage at the Country Music Awards, she allegedly asked him, “Did you get into Eraserhead for free?” No matter which descriptor you chose, Lovett’s hair stuck out like a water tower on the horizon, far too large to be contained by even a ten-gallon hat. In some way, he seemed to mock his home state’s preoccupation with its own perception of big-ness, his hair an obelisk to the stubborn and endlessly self-mythologizing Texan, climbing ever higher alongside the oil wells and windmills and rockets that reach into the sky.
Music Row might have been afraid of Lovett, but they couldn’t look away. Playing songs from his debut album on a 1987 episode of Hee-Haw, he made for a dark contrast to the program’s yum-yucking y’all-come humor, a shifty-eyed drifter with a crooked grin staring straight into your soul. Hollywood couldn’t shake his gaze either. Lovett wasn’t fit to be a debonair leading man like Kris Kristofferson, or even Dwight Yoakam, but his mug was made for character acting, and Robert Altman would use him—much like Michael Mann employed Willie Nelson in Thief, or Tom Waits in the films of Jim Jarmusch—as a bit of local color in later-period works like Short Cuts and The Player. Lovett would also provide the toe-tapping Western swing score to Altman’s slight romantic comedy Dr. T & the Women, about a Dallas gynecologist whose wife has a psychotic break—a protagonist right out of a Lyle Lovett song.
For all his nose-thumbing at convention, Lovett held fast to certain traditions, like a shadow you just can’t shake. In spite of the bright Hollywood lights and Nashville bigwigs that courted him, Lovett has continued to live all the while in his hometown of Klein, a once-rural and now-suburban community just north of Houston, founded in the 1840s by Lovett’s own German immigrant ancestors. By the time of Lovett’s childhood in Klein during the tail end of the baby boom, the land had been completely remade by oil and its interests. The Texas mud gave rise not only to thunderous swells of petroleum, but a metaphorical range war of simmering resentments, between the roughnecks who rushed after oil and the ranchers who wanted to hold onto the old ways. Lovett grew up somewhere in between, learning how to rope and ride on his uncle’s farm while his parents worked at Exxon. The rhinestone cowboys he sang of on “Farther Down the Line” and “Walk Through the Bottomland” may have been colorful characters, but theirs was a reality Lovett was never too far removed from, as a lifelong breeder of horses and competitive rider inducted to the Texas Cowboy Hall of Fame in 2012. Much like Larry McMurtry, Lyle Lovett may have at times traded the ranch for high society, but you could never quite take the ranch hand out of him.
Lovett approached his development as a singer-songwriter almost like a practical apprenticeship. As a reporter for The Battalion, Texas A&M’s student paper, Lovett profiled Texan songwriters like Willis Alan Ramsey, Michael Martin Murphy, and Steve Fromholz, booking many of those same acts at clubs on campus—usually with himself as the opener. Lovett used his assignments for the school paper not only to pick the brains of his idols about their craft, but sometimes even to learn songs directly from them. For all his eccentricities, Lovett approached songwriting like a journalist, detailing scandalous crimes and human interest stories alike with a mindful precision, always careful of the word count. The result landed somewhere between magical realism and creative nonfiction. Looking back at Pontiac in 2018, he explained that “Simple Song” was written like an assignment for English class: “It was the five-paragraph paper. Opening paragraph, three more paragraphs, and then one that closes. I wondered if I could write a song that way.”
His idols like Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt may have had more name recognition outside of Texas, but many of Lovett’s most beloved songwriters were practically artistic hermits, decidedly disinterested in whatever the music business could sell you. The city limits of Austin might have become synonymous with live music, but each corner of the state bore forth its own unique musical traditions: the electrified rockabilly and sparse Flatland songwriting of West Texas, the slick cowtown countrypolitan of the North Texas Panhandle, the 12-bar blues and Cajun flavors of deep East Texas, and the raucous Tex-Mex brew of the South Texas borderland. Lovett was an active inhabitant of this statewide musical ecosystem, regularly performing at events like the prestigious Kerrville Folk Festival.
Though it was his breakthrough to the pop charts, Pontiac felt like an elegy to something that would soon be gone, with Lovett’s face blurred into grayscale obscurity; that monochromatic design has marked his album covers ever since. The video for “If I Had a Boat” chaotically intersperses the song with Errol Morris-like interviews with the aging residents of Klein. “They’ll still be running cattle in Harris County in 25 years,” one of them opines. “It might be in the shade of a 20-story building, but there will still be some cows here.” The album’s title track sees the world through the tired eyes of one of these nameless old men, who luridly fantasizes of telling a young girl about all the Germans he killed in the war.
In both voice and instrumentation, Lovett sounded like his peers about as much as he resembled them. After a few too many critics described his style as “big band,” he began referring to the ever-growing orchestra that supported him as his “Large Band.” Their lush arrangements could have fit at the Cotton Club and the Armadillo World Headquarters alike, fiddle breakdowns rubbing shoulders with funky backbeats. The spirit of Bob Wills was regularly invoked by reviewers of Pontiac, but Lovett stood apart from the era’s neat-and-tidy neo-traditionalists, a proudly sore thumb next to the Sinatra-esque schmaltz of George Strait or the souped-up party music of Asleep at the Wheel. On a song like “M-O-N-E-Y,” Lovett swings at a slowly swaggering tempo, moving to a beat more suited to sweaty pelvic grinding than the nimble footwork of a line dance.
When not performing with the Large Band in their full form, Lovett is often backed by a minimalist ensemble, recalling a jazzier version of an old-time string band like the guitar and “hillbilly cello” combo of Norman and Nancy Blake. With a deliberate sparseness, the outfit works in hazy watercolors, underscoring “Pontiac” and “Simple Song” with a dewy glisten: velveteen acoustic guitar, Bruce Hornsby-esque clear piano lines, light brushstrokes of percussion, the resonant baritone of cello strings, and steel guitar that occasionally stretches out with the spaciness of post-rock. Whereas so many of his heroes sang with voices weathered and worn, Lovett’s felt more like cool creek water, clean enough to drink but not clear enough to see through.
Emotionally and musically, Lovett tends to work in extremes. For every comic romp or densely arranged composition, there was another more restrained and clear-eyed, heartbreakingly tender or haunting or somehow both. Maybe his tales of violence were all the more unsettling because of that gentle vulnerability, the shyness and self-effacing humor that made him seem like such a raised-right and well-mannered man. “L.A. County” is a tale of parallel road trips, as two pairs of “old friends” set off in search of something they’ve long dreamed of: the first, a woman and her silent male companion, who find love in each other's arms after arriving in California and make a plan to wed; the second, a man—maybe a jealous ex-lover, maybe the angel of death—and his “coal black” pistol. For both sets of pilgrims, the far-off “lights of L.A. County look like diamonds in the sky,” the twinkling promise of a long-held dream finally within sight. Like The Graduate gone wrong, the man arrives just in time to observe the blissful scene—“Her face was bright as the stars a-shining/Like I’d dreamed of all my life”—before piercing it with a bullet, the crumpled bodies “kneeling at the altar.”
Lovett’s brand of humor was hardly new to Nashville country, but something about the way he piled on the irony while staring straight into your soul, lip twisted and hair tormented, gave songs like “She’s No Lady” a Lynchian menace. Because of his willingness to embody flawed male characters, at times not just unsavory or unsympathetic but downright lecherous, early albums like Pontiac were met with occasional accusations of misogyny—there was the spiteful violence, sure, and his willingness to mock a potential dance partner’s appearance on a song like “She’s Hot to Go” certainly didn’t help either. But like the scathing satires of Randy Newman—an influence who he would collaborate with later—Lovett would hand over the song’s perspective to more unsavory characters than himself. The protagonists of “God Will” or “I Married Her Just Because She Looks Like You” are unreliable narrators, imperfect men unable to overcome the cruel vanities of self-pity and pride to let love in. On Pontiac’s Tex-Mex-accented “I Loved You Yesterday,” Lovett pleads for his lover to take him back, yet places the blame for their relationship’s failure solely on her shoulders and takes no responsibility himself. That “fear of the mysterious female principle” Larry McMurtry once identified rears its head in songs like “Give Back My Heart,” in which a domineering redneck Jezebel towers over a shrimpy cowboy like an R. Crumb cartoon. (Per usual, Lovett acknowledged the perception of his gender politics only dryly: “Lately I’ve been thinking about taking some time off from the music thing and opening up a chain of misogyny parlors,” he joked in Rolling Stone.)
But the surface impression of misogyny doesn’t match up with the reality of Lovett’s music, which frequently emphasizes and even privileges the female perspective, not just in lyricism but in collaboration. The women who have lent Lovett their voices—like Emmylou Harris on “Walk Through the Bottomland” and “L.A. County”—are often high up in the mix, as true duet partners and not just backup singers. After Lovett’s long-time duet partner Francine Reed first sang on the Sunday morning service of 1986’s “An Acceptable Level of Ecstasy,” she was promoted to a featured player on Pontiac—she appears on “Give Back My Heart,” “M-O-N-E-Y,” and “She’s Hot to Go”—and subsequent albums would increasingly highlight her as an irreplaceable pillar of Lovett’s sound. Performing  “Here I Am” alongside Reed on The Tonight Show, Lovett steps back and lets her take the lead like she’s the real star of the show, with nothing but adoration in his eyes. Johnny Carson was reportedly so captivated by the pair’s musical chemistry that he made the rare call to invite them back for a second performance only weeks after their first.
Beneath all the literary narratives and affected characters, it’s that unrestrained joy in group collaboration, the effortless electricity that crackles when performers are perfectly in sync, that Pontiac captured like lightning bugs in a jar. “If I Had a Boat” told of a man and his steed alone against the currents, but Lovett could have never existed in isolation—he needed other hands to pitch in and help raise the framework of his wooden universe. From those long hot afternoons in the late ’70s picking bluegrass tunes with his Texas A&M classmate and fellow songwriter Robert Earl Keen on up to the intricate spectacle of his well-oiled orchestra, Lovett’s music has always been a patchwork affair, passed around like an exquisite corpse as individual sensibilities combine anew. The years have a way of altering perspective, and Lovett now looks much more like the “weathered gray-haired seventy years of Texas” he sang of as a young man. But well-crafted songs are built from something sturdier than old front porches, and time has been gentle to the songs of Lyle Lovett.


Back in '97, El-P released Funcrusher Plus with his seminal group Company Flow. The album's tense, hypercreative backdrops laid ...

Fantastic Damage

Back in '97, El-P released Funcrusher Plus with his seminal group Company Flow. The album's tense, hypercreative backdrops laid such a sturdy foundation for the underground hip-hop world that it still echoes five years later, and has since been widely recognized as one of the genre's greatest achievements. Unfortunately, after only a few additional singles and an instrumental album, Company Flow was officially sent off last year with a blistering farewell show in Boston. And while El-P's remained busy with production work (most notably Cannibal Ox's The Cold Vein) and running a record label (the estimable Def Jux), heads have been hungry for the man to step back up to the mic.
Now, after a series of frustrating delays, El-P's finally kicked out his first solo LP and exceeded the expectations of everyone who anxiously awaited its arrival. Fantastic Damage is an unrelenting, end-to-end burner that not only heralds the resurrection of El-P, but also provides a milestone for post-millennial underground hip-hop. The music is carefully constructed and sonically intricate. Distorted guitars, cacophonous, high-pitched ringing, and spiraling screams comprise its musical motifs. Lyrically, El-P eschews hip-hop's straightforward style for fits of associative word clusters (a la Kool Keith, or even early Pavement) that sound like a freestyle battle between a Marxist pamphlet and a technical manual. "Motherfucker, does this sound abstract?" El-P howls on one early track. "I hope that it sounded more confusing than that."
Like Funcrusher Plus, the themes on this album are predominantly political. "I am not a mechanism borne for the state," he spits, "I had to be trained." In "Dead Disnee," he fantasizes about visiting a post-apocalyptic Disney World-- a bleak prospect considering recent threats from the al Qaeda network. El-P even takes a sharp-witted stab at the Star Wars phenomenon on Fantastic Damage's title track, charasmatically ranting, "Operate catapults and goosestep over the innocent/ Vagrant of Reganomics phase with books to burn at the pod race.../ This is that Bronx magic, without Lucas Arts graphics/ Crayon colored green monsters and horrible child actors."
But while anti-capitalist anthems have always been his specialty, El-P's greatest accomplishments on this album are his newfound lyrical abilities, at once emotionally resonant and conceptually creative and consistent. On "Stepfather Factory," he fuses his personal and political rage and delivers the record's most fully realized concept song. Affecting the voice of a CEO for a corporation manufacturing abusive guardians, El-P softens his caustic howl as he rhymes over a dark, looming beat that vividly conjures a corporately oppressive near-future.
If Sly Stone phoned up Stockhausen for a presidentially mandated collaboration with 10,000 hours of government-granted studio time at Abbey Road, they still couldn't have crafted a soundscraper this abrasive, complex, and primal. An infectious retro-futurism informs the parting beat of "The Nang, The Front, The Bush and The Shout"; the chorus of "Dead Disnee" is what Devo might sound like after spending a few days spun on PCP and meth; and "Lazerfaces' Warning" approximates industrial circus funk. Then there are the guest appearances: while Aesop Rock comes on with a surprisingly disappointing verse, Vast Aire drops another nugget of noir swagger on the "Dr. Hellno and the Praying Mantis."
As tight as Fantastic Damage is, subtlety is definitely not its strong suit, and its esoteric and indulgent moments might have been better executed with a little smoothing over. Still, with a sphere of oppression and violence hanging over this country, El-P's trenchant examination of our environment and inner space is like manna in a desert of irony. No doubt, El-P has delivered both what we'd hoped for and what we need right now. This is his statement for these times, and it's one of the finest hip-hop records I've heard all year.


Daft Punk's TRON: Legacy work gets remixed by an odd crossection of producers, including Moby, Paul Oakenfold, Photek, and the Crystal Method.

Various Artists: TRON: Legacy Reconfigured

TRON: Legacy Reconfigured

A sad fact of Daft Punk fandom: Once exemplars when it came to making dance albums that played like pop albums, for the past five or six years the duo's often been more enjoyable once they've been remixed, or when they venture into the visual. Their last proper album, 2005's Human After All, was poorly sequenced and way too long, full of tracks that were just blandly, grindingly repetitive. It was almost anti-pop but not in a truly out-there way. Good for DJs, in other words, and bad for those of us playing along at home.
Given their lack of interest in making pop records now, it's been unsurprising that much of Daft Punk's activity over the last half-decade has been about crafting raw material for remixing (including masterfully remixing themselves on 2007's live-album-meets-DJ-mix set Alive) and the cinema (including their foray into art-house territory in Electroma from 2006). Here then is an album that combines the two. When it was announced that DP would be recording the score for the TRON reboot, it seemed like the natural next step in the duo's 21st-century trajectory. A slick pop science fiction film, with a Disney-sized budget lavished on its special effects, would surely provide their lushest visual accompaniment yet. And while the symphonic elements of the TRON: Legacy soundtrack made it very different from Human After All, as a home-listening prospect it played out in much the same way. Not so much fun to listen to minus the film's visual razzle-dazzle, and primed for creative remixers to turn the results into something closer to pop.
TRON: Legacy Reconfigured succeeds as much as most remix projects do, which is to say about 50% of the time, and without Daft Punk's name attached to the project it's doubtful it would have attracted much attention. The list of remixers sure doesn't inspire much confidence, at least if you're not afflicted by a serious case of 1990s nostalgia. From Paul Oakenfold to Photek to Moby to the Crystal Method, it's full of names whose best work (using the phrase very loosely in some cases) is a decade or more behind them. If Daft Punk shaped a lot of the past 10 years, whether via indie kids glomming onto Discovery or brutalist dance-rock producers picking up from Human After All, much of Legacy Reconfigured seems sonically stuck in the late-90s era of super-clubs and "all-star" remixes on CD single.
The best tracks here are hugely unsubtle pop-dance tunes with big acid-meets-electro riffs-- in other words not too dissimilar from from what DP were peddling circa Homework. That's not a negative, of course. The Crystal Method's redo of "The Grid" is cheesily anthemic and unabashedly big in a way that's sadly rare these days, and Oakenfold's "C.L.U." has a sturm-und-drang epicness that the original soundtrack approached rarely. Much of Legacy Reconfigured is what many of us were actually hoping for from the actual Legacy score, and from Daft Punk in general: grandiose electronic pop full of bombastic hooks, without the genteel orchestral touches that felt like a lame cop to Hollywood tradition.
Unfortunately, Legacy Reconfigured can't keep that intensity up across a whole disc. Plenty of these remixes are just inert filler. Oddly, many of the weakest remixes are by younger producers, like Teddybears' "Adagio For Tron", which could be any squelchy and interchangeable French dance single of the past five years. Who knows, maybe the new jacks were cowed by working with material from a group they consider a formative influence rather than just peers. In any event, taken as a whole, what we're left with is a solidly middle-of-the-road project building off a solidly middle-of-the-road movie score. The best you can say is that Legacy Reconfigured is less disappointing than Legacy itself. No one expects much from Paul Oakenfold these days, so it's a pleasant surprise here. But it's hard not to expect more from Daft Punk, even with how often they've missed in the last decade.


It's hard to imagine that the least satisfying thing Johnny Marr could ever do would be launching a solo career, yet here we are with Playland, the second official solo album by the former Smiths guitarist. The oppressive truth lurking behind almost every tired lick and lazy lyric of Playland is that Marr can, and has, done so much better.

Playland

In the Smiths, Marr was the preeminent guitar stylist of his generation. Glam, folk-rock, post-punk, funk, rockabilly, and a certain ineffable Marrness— that ringing, swinging, intricate, atmospheric, hook-dripping soul— all dovetailed into a sound that still stuns. But while his erstwhile Smiths-mate Morrissey has taken his own primrose path down self-parodying mediocrity with this year’s World Peace Is None of Your Business, Marr is doing the same on a lesser scale with his solo career. Which makes sense: Marr never had as high a profile or ego as Morrissey, and that low-key humility has made him a fan favorite.
But who knew that the least satisfying thing Johnny Marr could ever do would be launching a solo career? Yet here we are with Playland, the second official solo album by the former Smiths guitarist (or third, if you count Boomslang, his 2003 album released under the name Johnny Marr & the Healers). There’s not a sizeable difference between Playland and last year’s The Messenger. Both feature listless songcraft, lackluster vocals, and a dull pulverization of every Britpop trope imaginable (not that imagination had anything to do with the making of this record). Worst of all, though, is the oppressive truth lurking behind almost every tired lick and lazy lyric of Playland: Marr can, and has, done so much better.
We root for him, though, and in return he gives us “Easy Money”, Playland’s lead single, a silly, clumsy fumble of a song that can’t click into shape. Is it supposed to remind us that money is a bad thing, or that it’s ironic how millionaire musicians still feel the need to sing about it? It doesn’t matter, because the song's only notable element is Marr’s perpetually dated musical taste, as the slashing, squelching rock of “Easy Money” feels about as fresh and inspired as Kaiser Chiefs.
Playland isn’t all bad: “Boys Get Straight” is as breakneck as the Smiths’ “London”, and that energy almost carries it over the finish line, despite a poverty of hooks. “Little King” isn’t any more original—its sinuous intro could be a page in the Echo & the Bunnymen songbook, an nearly funny gesture seeing as how the Bunnymen were one of the Smiths’ chief rivals in the '80s— but Marr spins that into a tuneful, propulsive bit of diversion anyway. The album’s title track is its only glimmer of Marr’s worship of vintage glam, but what might have started out as filthy, flashy rock in the practice space has been pasteurized to the point of blankness.
Marr’s tendency to sing like his former Electronic bandmate, New Order’s Bernard Sumner, might be flattering to Sumner but proves embarrassing otherwise; the pinched, boyish, breathy style serves Marr adequately on tracks like “Dynamo” and “The Trap”, but it doesn’t come across as conveying emotion and melody as much as it does him doing vocal exercises. If his curious status as a New Order/Joy Division fanboy is in question, he titles two consecutive tracks on Playland— either consciously or not — after Joy Division songs: “Candidate” and “25 Hours”. They do exhibit a trickle-down trace of that same dark, stark atmosphere, but rather than coming across as an homage, the resemblance seems fawning at best, insecure at worst.
A lack of effort isn’t the main problem with Playland; if anything, there’s been too much effort put into it. It’s been fussed over so much that any spark that may have spurred it has been smothered. As Marr continues to staple pages to his résumé—and the prospect of a Smiths reunion becomes even more remote—the disconnect between the iconic architect of '80s indie and the journeyman who’d rather follow than lead grows. In an interview with the NME, Marr cited “boredom” as a big inspiration on Playland, and all it takes is a listen to prove it.


Devonwho is part of the Klipmode collective that includes Leaving records labelmates MNDSGN and Knxwledge. His take on blunted instrumental hip-hop favors the wobbly synths of the early ’80s.

Luz

Matthew McQueen’s Leaving Records is quickly becoming one of the most diverse labels going. His own music swings from hip-hop to ambient, and McQueen has found common ground between those dueling interests, releasing a stream of disparate records ranging from the new age of Laraaji, SunPath, and his own Matthewdavid moniker to unclassifiable records by Guy Blakeslee, Seiho, and Deantoni Parks and a steady stream of off-kilter hip-hop in the mode of Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder imprint. Luz, from L.A. producer Devonwho, is the latest Leaving release to continue the trend, drawing on R&B, funk, and hip-hop.
Devonwho (born Devon Fox) is part of the Klipmode collective that includes friends and Leaving labelmates Mndsgn, Knxwledge, and Suzi Analogue, and their vision for hip-hop shares both influences and an ideological point of view, celebrating the synth-driven nostalgia of the early ’80s. Luz is situated in a wobbly aesthetic of Zapp-style synths, with a blunted haze hanging on top of everything.
At its best, Luz presents Devonwho as a fresh new voice, with a handful of standout tracks that argue that even today there’s still gold to be found in the g-funk swamps. The moody “Trueandyou” has a pulsing, emotive synth and a stuttering hi-hat beat, and “Andthentherewas” comes off like a lazy brother of “Still D.R.E.,” featuring a similarly plinky melody. Both tracks recognize the value of melody over squelch, and Devonwho drapes a lovely overlay of synths to complete the picture. “Alphaloop,” “Trio,” and “Anti-ragequit” mine a similar vein, with the latter sounding like it could have been the anthem to a different, more Dazed and Confused version of Stranger Things.
On two of Luz’s weaker tracks, Devonwho brings in vocalists, perhaps as a way of advertising his production to beat-seeking rappers. As uninspiring as the vocal cuts are, they present a welcome change of pace on a record with a relatively limited palette and a handful of boring snoozes. At a relatively economical 39 minutes, and with 11 of its 13 tracks being instrumentals, Luz amply showcases Devonwho’s chops as a producer. But as a listening experience, it lags well behind this fall’s more consistent and inspired Body Wash from Klipmode compatriot Mndsgn.


Tim Rutili's Chicago collective outdoes itself on this record, which sounds like ancient mountain and Delta traditions synthesized-- scratched up, muddied, and re-imagined for an America more reliant on machines than the grace of God.

Roots and Crowns

Anyone craving a quick schooling in vintage Americana can spin Harry Smith's The Anthology of American Folk Music or Dust to Digital's Goodbye, Babylon, memorize Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings, or waddle through In the Shadow of Clinch Mountain, the Bear Family's gorgeous, heart-skewering Carter Family box set. But if you're more interested in hearing ancient mountain and Delta traditions synthesized-- scratched up, muddied, and re-imagined for an America more reliant on machines than the grace of God-- curl up with Califone's Roots and Crowns, the Chicago collective's staggering homage to starts and finishes, computers and cornfields, dirty feet and throbbing foreheads.
Roots and Crowns is Califone's most sophisticated record to date, a natural-- if lighter-- extension of 2004's Heron King Blues, and a coherent aesthetic declaration (which is even more of a triumph considering it was recorded in chunks with new gear, after frontman Tim Rutili packed up for California and the band's instruments were raided during their last tour). This is Califone's climax: Roots and Crowns blurs all lines between the organic and the synthesized, and is as much a product of the gut as the mind, with each perfectly placed skronk-and-twitter hitting its intellectual and emotional targets.
Over the course of eight full-lengths, Califone have proven their prowess for improvisational out-jazz and melodic scrap-folk in equal measure-- Roots and Crowns sees both impulses at play, over some of the band's best-written songs. Longtime engineer (and former Red Red Meat member, and part-time Califone percussionist) Brian Deck orchestrates the loops and squeaks, piecing distinct, synthesized bits into cohesive pictures, and ensuring that the end result still sounds like something your dog dug up in the backyard and spit out, slobber-slicked and gummed, on your front doormat.
Lyrically, Rutili favors tiny, imagistic vignettes over narrative arcs, and these songs read more like prose poems than stories-- which, given the hyper-fragmented sound-collage of Califone's instrumentation, makes a certain kind of sense. In addictive opener "Pink and Sour", Rutilli talks-- twice-- about losing his language over rollicking tribal drums and slide guitar ("Along your skin/ Lost my language," "Cotton in the calm along your side/ Lost my language"), and his bandmates compensate in full, slipping in vivid percussive flourishes that speak remarkably well in his absence. On the whimsical "Spiders House", fellow Chicagoans Bitter Tears lend brassy toots, muted trumpet and trombone sighing, resigned and tired, while Rutili's rusty pipes spew abstract laments: "After the quiet bleeds peel and age familiar/ Peace in the pain." "The Orchids", lifted from former-Throbbing Gristle outfit Psychic TV, is, according to Rutili, the record's inspiration, and is beautifully rendered here-- Rutili' s voice is cottony and vaguely-love-struck, while wisps of harmonica weave in and out of his coos.
Califone have always been stupidly underappreciated, and the further we stumble into the 21st century, the more this music starts to feel both familiar and necessary: Roots and Crowns is bluesy and soulful without reverting to revivalist schtick, and experimental without relying on blind cut-and-pasting. It is old and new, dirty and clean, alienating and accessible, sweet and ugly, organic and industrial, doting and vicious. It is one of the most quintessentially American records imaginable.


The Spanish producer’s evocative debut album exists in an interzone where the natural world seems forever on the cusp of swallowing up the constructed one.

Reclaim

The Spanish DJ Pépe started producing tracks when he was 16, a full two years before he was of legal clubbing age. Years later, his music still has the dreamy quality of an imagined dancefloor, an idealized space far more vivid than reality. While still a teenager, Pépe had his synapses rearranged by Marcel Dettmann during a pilgrimage to  the hallowed Brighton club Patterns, where he would eventually become a resident: “I had come from Valencia, which at the time had nothing like that happening,” he marveled. His music glows with the wide-eyed energy of a convert.
Like Dettmann, Pépe smuggles subtle warmth into the echoing spaces his music populates. His synth pads are taffy-like and warmly pliable, while the drum hits, glistening mallets, and shimmering keys all seem to have a little moss creeping up their sides. His evocative and propulsive debut LP, Reclaim, glitters in a slipstream between worlds and genres. Synths like thrown scarves suggest house music. Breakbeats evoke harder, more forceful genres—dubstep, garage. No matter where you think you are in one of Pépe’s mercurial tracks, the weather is shifting beneath, and a blinding change is underway.
The album title refers, he says, to the way nature “strives to regain ground, once humans are removed from the streets.” Pépe has expressed interest in architecture that allows for flora, in cities covered in green—a redemptive embrace by the natural world of the constructed one. He seems drawn to the spot where bustle gives way to calm, where a packed landscape suddenly seems to empty out. On “Katta,” a smeared synth like a truck horn dissolves abruptly into chittering and peeping, as if the camera had panned abruptly beneath a superhighway to the insect kingdom below. Blaring sirens, a few cents sour, echo off of the implications of bare concrete on “Optical: Activate” before being submerged from below in a warm bath of long tones. It’s a phantasmagorical landscape, one where you can never be quite sure whether you’re squinting down a chipped-brick alley or breaking cloud cover in a sea plane.
It’s hard to maintain this level of rapt attention over 10 tracks, but Pépe’s ear for detail is so fine that each new sound arrives with the urgency of a clue. The pianos that pierce through the milky light in the last minute of “Act III: ‘Compact City Dream’” sound almost too beautiful to be real, while the oscillators on “Resonant Bodies” seem to take you upward with them. Some of his juxtapositions are so radical as to be blinding. On “Goma (Prime Mix),” a musty breakbeat, redolent of Burial and seasonal allergies, finds itself drowned by chlorine-blue synths and assailed by pink plastic mallet percussion. You are forever just about to discover your true location in Pépe’s music, only to be mistaken.
Implicit in Pépe’s beatific vision of a “post-human future,” of course, is widespread death and destruction. The longer you spend within Reclaim, the more the serenity begins to feel deceptive, even ominous, as if it were smoke emerging from the crater of a blast site. Near the end of “Resonant Bodies,” wraith-like synths rise up, with melodies shooting through them like headlights through mist. It recalls nothing so much as Vangelis’s score for Blade Runner, which hinted to us at the vast reserves of beauty awaiting us even in the most blasted and dim of corridors.


This compendium of odds and ends from the Canadian singer and sound artist may be his most incisive and convincing album yet, thanks to the way his voice finally becomes one with his machines.

Thresholder

At a glance, the music of Canadian singer and sound artist Ian William Craig may seem to hinge on a gimmick. During most of this decade, Craig’s crackling drones have spilled slowly beyond the contemporary avant-garde thanks to an ingeniously seductive technique: Craig sings ribboned melodies in an arcing falsetto, then routes the sound through, beneath, between, and around pathways of customized tape machines that in turn rend, mutilate, erase, or otherwise mangle his pristine tone. It is a novel but physical effect, a hands-on approach to distortion that mirrors the visceral grip of the din it makes and tends to elicit a consistent how-does-it-work wonder.
But Craig is also a classically trained singer, something evident from his mannered restraint, and an esteemed printmaker who finds deep aesthetic connections between his visual and musical work. He is also an emotive singer-songwriter in the Bon Iver mold and a piano player who favors the steady ascendance of chunky chords. Still, his wider artistic scope has typically been overshadowed by one appealing idea, his multitudes reduced to a single mode.
More than any of Craig’s past albums, though, Thresholder pulls together those overlooked threads with his seraphic tone inside of those tape decks. Thresholder should dispatch any lingering notions that Craig’s best-known premise is limited or inflexible, symptoms of a design that has become a crutch. Instead, on 11 tracks he recorded but never released between his dual breakthrough albums, 2014’s A Turn of Breath and 2016’s Centres, he wields his voice-and-tape technique as an adaptable compositional tool. Just as Philip Jeck uses turntables, GAS fills four-on-the-floor skeletons, and Julianna Barwick arranges her own voice into folds and spirals, Craig’s premise becomes a starting point, not a fixed end.
Where “Idea for Contradiction 1” uses subtle processing to suggest the Vienna Boys’ Choir performing in the hull of some docked cargo ship, “Idea for Contradiction 2” crowds and clouds those murmurs with rhythmic clicks and corrosive hiss from a looped spool of tape. It’s as if that mammoth vessel were collapsing upon its return to sea. His falsetto blends in perfect, damaged harmony with his machines on “Sfumato” but becomes a hapless victim of their industrial design on “Some Absolute Means.” Craig oscillates between the harsh and the heavenly here, the balance too true to life to favor either side.
Most of these pieces are not fragile but delicate, their layers woven together with obvious attention. But there are surprising moments of power here, pieces that afford everything else a sense of topography and scale. “Some Absolute Means” is an essential addition to Craig’s repertoire. Step by step, the keyboardist pits an outsized church organ battered by effects against his crisscrossing coos and a cycle of brittle dissonance that seems to cut crevices into the surface of both. It sounds like Tim Hecker producing the outré Jónsi Birgisson album many expected but never got as Sigur Rós’ star rose.
There has long been a trace of escapism to Craig’s work, the sense that the singer is not satisfied with the body or finesse of his own voice; the electronics are a magic hatch, a space meant for hiding. But listening to these 11 tracks, it seems that Craig is not avoiding reality so much as he is reckoning with the inherent distortion and disruption of our own machine-mediated times. He takes care to never omit his voice, the music’s human core, from any of these pieces; instead, its movement is the source of light, the thing you squint through the dark to decipher.
During the transfixing centerpiece, “And Therefore the Moonlight,” you can hear the faintest trace of a gorgeous vocal melody beneath a groaning drone, as if your headphone connection were popping in and out of its socket while some twilit chamber piece played. You strain to hear the signal, and, just then, it appears, Craig singing beautifully of what must be celestial love. You mourn for the parts you missed, recognizing anew his skills as a songwriter. Likewise, one of Thresholder’s most captivating moments comes near the end of “Discovered in Flat,” where a gentle roar parts to make room for his refracted mewl. He weaves in and out of his machines’ distortion, bits of his voice always stuck to the tape like old taffy clinging to a wax wrapper. At last, though, his ululations drift slowly into the noise, spinning away like flotsam vanishing into deep space. It is a beautiful absence of sound.
Craig’s music is not concerned merely with his gadgets or the way he wants his voice to be. Thresholder is, instead, a summary of the way his voice might be heard or ignored or interpreted in a universe where activity and entropy only increase without bound. If there is a gimmick there, it is one of our own doing and not his, one where we’ve made the signal and the noise inexorably and inflexibly bound. Thresholder is a curved mirror, reflecting that reality back in a feedback loop where technology and humanity continually meet.


The reissue of Matthew Herbert's landmark 2001 album Bodily Functions gathers period remixes and a few new versions in one package. But the real star is the album itself, which is arguably his finest.

Bodily Functions

Matthew Herbert likes processes, rules, and parameters. He has a manifesto for how he records music-- no sampling other artists, no drum machines, no synths. It sounds mighty ascetic, but the prolific Brit has been responsible for some of the past decade-and-change's most natural-sounding dance music. 1998's Around the House saw him incorporating household sounds; 2001's Bodily Functions moved inward, building songs from samples of the human body. It was easily Herbert's most audacious idea at that point.
Bodily Functions is even more stretch-your-legs-out luxurious than House. The beats don't sound like flatulence, belches, or growling stomachs, but there is something very organic about the record. The drums feel squishy, the rhythms are padded, and everything moves with an elegance that most house could only dream of (no drum machines, remember). "Leave Me Now" and "You Saw It All" are relatively raucous stompers fashioned from gasping snares and wet rattling, while the very strange "Foreign Bodies" is like early Ricardo Villalobos mapped out in human flesh.
It's as much of a jazz album as a house album. Around the House already had plenty of jazz leanings, but this record makes them explicit-- horns that sigh like deep exhales, scrumptious, meaty bass. The album is punctuated by brief meanderings away from house, like the cocktail lounge opener "You're Unknown to Me" or the straight-up "I Know", which is four and a half minutes of pure jazz vamp with Herbert's own delectable piano work. These pieces serve to open the album up into its inviting, expansive whole.
Bodily Functions also continued Herbert's fruitful collaboration with Dani Siciliano, a smooth singer whose jazzy inflections go well with this album's tasteful house. She's as much the star of Bodily Functions as Herbert is, her pleasantly husky voice inhabiting the album's warm atmosphere. Her calm, gently emotive personality makes tunes like the masterful "It's Only" agonizingly ambiguous. She wrings layer upon layer of feeling from the wry kiss-off "Leave Me Now," commanding "never call again" but later asking "be the friend I never knew." The lyrics are equally clever, mixing the lexicon of life science ("Foreign Bodies") with subtle commentary on relationships and interpersonal interactions.
Bodily Functions' supple texturing, smooth demeanor, and pop songcraft have made it timeless, a gem so well-polished you couldn't ever imagine it accumulating scuff marks. So the reissue acts as more of a reminder than a rediscovery, packaged with a second disc that includes compilation track "Back to the Start" (which could have easily landed on the album), as well as a number of period remixes. Highlights include a stunning cover by Jamie Lidell and strong remixes from Matmos and Plaid.
For well-versed Herbert fans, the reissue offers few revelations, though it is nice to have the whole period collected into one package. There are a few new bits, however, including a Dave Aju remix of "Foreign Bodies" and two remixes from Pampa boss and consummate weirdo DJ Koze. His take on "You Saw It All" capitalizes on the album's odd movements and springy textures, but it's his version of "It's Only" that really hits home. Koze's work here is pretty transparent: he hollows out the beat and mixes up the vocal, and then puts a monster bassline underneath, sloping down at a sharp right angle just when you expect the chord progression to ascend.
With Bodily Functions, Herbert made a gorgeous jazz-pop album from recordings of human bodies and a few instruments-- but he also made one of last decade's most important dance albums. An enduring album that still sounds singular, Bodily Functions floats far above the trend-obsessed nature of dance music.


Tackling a range of R&B radio hits from the 1980s and 1990s, Meshell Ndegeocello treats the practice of covering another’s songs as an act of intimacy and empathy.

Ventriloquism

Some songs are rooms within rooms, vast interconnected musical systems. Meshell Ndegeocello gets this; many of her own compositions end at a considerable distance from where they began, teleporting freely from chord to chord. But Ndegeocello understands that songs can also be rooms unto themselves. Sometimes they are even less than a room—they can be a closet, or a corner.
Over the last 25 years Ndegeocello has merged soul, rock, and hip-hop to make a kind of R&B that is at once cerebral and interstellar. She has devoted space on each of her last three studio albums to taking another artist’s song and bending it into new configurations, inverting its structure, seeing how much she might alter its appearance without disturbing its inner grooves. She doesn’t perform these songs as much as she renovates them from surface to center, peeling away wallpaper, pushing furniture around, crumpling and discarding any unnecessary dimensional space until she figures out what kind of room the song is.
Almost 10 years ago, during the sessions for her 2009 album Devil’s Halo, she revisited Ready for the World’s crystalline slow jam “Love You Down.” The original recording of the song is a lovely and faithful replica of a slow-motion Prince ballad; it delivers itself to the listener as a shelf of dry ice delivers fog into the air. For her own version, Ndegeocello shaved down all of the fog and extra space and filled it with silence. Then she shaved the vocal itself down, carving a soft, defeated sigh from Melvin Riley’s shivery tenor. She ruthlessly edited out every unnecessary gesture, removed every distraction and ornament until only the original feeling remained. A desperate plea disintegrated into a whisper; a room was reduced to a corner. As a result, the “Love You Down” that appears on Devil’s Halo occupies an extremely narrow and tender inch of emotional space.
Ndegeocello’s newest record, Ventriloquism, adds 11 new R&B and R&B-adjacent covers to her catalog; in its song selection, it examines a period of music from 1982 to 1994, during which the genre expanded and contracted itself into several different forms—disco shrank down into boogie, new jack swing slit electro-funk into narrow strips and stapled them back together out of order. The songs Ndegeocello studies on Ventriloquism aren’t deep cuts. They’re radio hits, some of which crossed over and most of which still radiate softly in throwback quiet-storm playlists. Ndegeocello refrains from adjusting the pronouns in her covers, so the songs written by men for male singers generally end up queerer than they started—the sensibility that inspired her to preserve the lyric “All that really mattered was you were my girrrlfriend” in “Love You Down” is also felt in her cover of Ralph Tresvant’s “Sensitivity”: “You need a man with sensitivity/A man like me.” (“Sensitivity” is one of three songs on the record, along with the Force MD’s “Tender Love” and Janet Jackson’s “Funny How Time Flies (When You’re Having Fun),” that were written by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, who at one point in the 1980s were on the verge of fusing R&B and synth pop forever.)
The greater transformations on the record are structural, as on Al B. Sure!’s “Nite and Day,” a breezy, fluttery new jack swing song that Ndegeocello converts into an ocean. She softens the hits of percussion until they glow and tremble like distant beacons. Without the discrete drum-machine thwacks establishing the song’s boundaries, it flows shapelessly into the space beyond them. It’s as if Ndegeocello picked up on the song’s inner buoyancy, tore out its floor, and installed a pool.
Covers, when they surface over the course of an album or an artist’s career, may seem unnecessarily digressive—light filler, in other words—or even opportunistic; how better to add a sense of legitimacy to your project than by quoting someone who already passed through the same territory? But as soon as you begin to sing someone else’s song, there are innumerable unconscious and invisible adaptations that the song must immediately go through. How can you convey an established idea with a different voice, different instruments, different sensibilities, in a different time and space? How do the words of a song change when, instead of being sung, they are spoken, or whispered?
Some of the covers on Ventriloquism are as cubist in approach as Ndegeocello’s “Love You Down.” Her version of “Sensitivity” seems to have spliced in some DNA from the Beatles’ “Wild Honey Pie,” particularly in the insistent, arthritic banjo strum that underpins the chorus; her cover of Sade’s “Smooth Operator” sounds as if she knocked the song to the ground just to see what fractals would form when it shattered. Her cover of TLC’s “Waterfalls” most directly realizes the ambitions of the album’s title, of Ndegeocello trying to reanimate compositions and characters she didn’t originally design. The song’s primary bass riff is rerouted through an acoustic guitar; the rest of the arrangement gradually paints itself around Ndegeocello’s voice. What sort of room is “Waterfalls”? Well, it’s probably an island, maybe even a particularly isolated neighborhood—it could function as any shrunken microcosm of society. Ndegeocello swivels between the different perspectives embedded in the lyrics, sinking through each window of the neighborhood: a mother who can’t reach her son; a son who is murdered in the midst of a drug deal; a pair of lovers, one of whom has inadvertently transmitted AIDS to the other. “I’m so sorry I hurt you so much,” she sings as the boy. His words are immediately countered by his mother: “Can’t keep yourself out of trouble,” Ndegeocello repeats gnomically, as if sighing and shaking her head at the meaningless circularity of the scene, the way these individual human dramas continually replay themselves on radio and in reality.
The most striking variation on the record is one in which Ndegeocello’s adjustments are minor but mood-expanding. Her recording of “Sometimes It Snows in April” is relatively faithful to Prince’s original; it merely transposes the notes Prince played on the piano, each of which sounded gently stirred out of sleep, to the electric guitar, which makes the song not only blurrier but somehow lonelier. “April” is a different song now. It changed when it migrated from Prince’s mind to the piano, and it changed again when Prince died almost two years ago. When I listen to it now, it sounds like a monument to a suddenly blank space. Ndegeocello’s cover is first and foremost a recording of this change. “Always cry for love,” she sings, and then her voice drops, loosening from the rhythm of the verse and slowing into speech, as if the song were too painful to resume singing. “Never cry for pain,” she says, her voice crumbled into a trembling husk. Throughout the length of Ventriloquism, in Ndegeocello’s hands, no cover is ever mere lip service. A cover is an act of scholarship, an act of criticism, an act of intimacy. An act of love.


On its second album, the Austin quartet balances complex, technical arrangements with playful moments of levity.

Pocket Fantasy

It’s easiest to connect with Mamalarky at odd angles. The songs on the indie quartet’s 2020 self-titled album married structured choruses with brash, jangly interludes. This approach made for a few inspired peaks (the cheeky psychedelia of “You Make Me Smile”) but also tended to fall back on tired formulas and melodies that didn’t quite stick. In these less distinctive moments, Mamalarky felt like a band still very much in the process of figuring itself out. Their new album, Pocket Fantasy, smartly doubles down on the proggy quirks and little incoherences that make them such a unique force while still maintaining the effortless charm of their previous music.
The band’s first full-length was released at the height of the pandemic, but Pocket Fantasy is the product of time spent all together, cooped up in a rented home in Atlanta. The exploratory nature of the songwriting reflects that closeness: You get the sense many of these tracks arose from jam sessions, without a particular destination in mind. “Dance Together,” a velvety highlight, begins in a shimmer of guitar. There’s a trancelike quality to bandleader Livvy Bennett’s voice as she sings about “glittering fractals moving across the roof.” But just as soon as the dreamstate arrives, it’s gone—a spiky, off-kilter chorus bleeds into high-pitched background squeals, and the keyboard and drums launch into what sounds like a frenetic take on elevator music. That’s not a knock on the sound of this record; Mamalarky are at their best when they’re messing around, riding melodies that spin and spiral into each other before they ever quite come to rest.
While nothing feels labored, the music is consistently complex. That Pocket Fantasy is a fun, breezy project doesn’t detract from the maturity of its arrangements or the technical qualities of the playing itself. (Bennett has made a point of emphasizing her chops, even outside of the music: Last year, she taught a series of instructional videos for Fender’s YouTube channel on subjects like fingerpicking and barre chords.) The irregular geometry of “Shining Armor” feels indebted to math rock, and “Little Robot” dabbles in wonky meter before resolving into one of the album’s prettiest codas—a moment of glittery respite in the wake of stabbing, anxious guitar.
Despite all the experimentation, Mamalarky are never fussy. These songs are sophisticated, but they aren’t overly serious or difficult. There’s no mistaking the playfulness of a band that features Uglydolls and friendship bracelets so prominently in their visuals. The lyrics, too, balance high-minded affectations (“Technology and nature tied/There is no reason we should hide,” goes one line on the opener, “Frog 2”) with earnest declarations—odes to friendship (“Mythical Bonds”) and nostalgic pleas for just a little more time with loved ones (“Now”). Even on tracks like “It Hurts,” where comfort feels far away, Bennett conveys her feelings plainly. “I know it’s bad timing but I need you very badly/And it seems that you can’t give that much,” she sings. The accessibility is part of what makes Mamalarky so immediately appealing; in their world, what’s complicated is never too intimidating.


Three years after the still-wonderful Echoes, the former DFA band team with Paul Epworth, Ewan Pearson, and Danger Mouse to helm a more meticulous, cleaner version of their once-gritty indie-dance sound.

The Rapture: Pieces of the People We Love

Pieces of the People We Love

Oh, what a heavy burden the Rapture must bear. When "House of Jealous Lovers" dropped out of the sky like a bomb filled with hi-hat and cowbell, it set in motion dual music-crit ripples: The rise of the internet's ultimate game-of-telephone hype, and the promise of a chiropractic procedure on the stiff spine of indie rock. The resulting frenzy over dancepunk or discopunk or indie-dance or many other compound words powered the band into a contract with Universal and buoyed the release of 2003's Echoes, still the definitive statement of 21st century indie rock rediscovering dance music.
Then, almost immediately, things began to fall apart. The internet, fickle mistress that it is, began dissipating the aura around the Rapture as quickly as it had conjured it up, with listeners speculating that they were mere puppets for the DFA, or plagiarists of the early 80s, or merely the Emperor's New Hipster Jeans. Meanwhile, dancepunk went on to disintegrate before our very eyes, flaming out even faster than most hastily-classified genres, with nobody digging past the most obvious influences (read: Gang of Four) to do more than echo Echoes. As the general opinion of the heady dancepunk days of 2003 faded into disdain, the Rapture-- as the sound's most-recognized face-- took the brunt of the negativity.
Into that unwelcome environment comes Pieces of the People We Love, the Rapture's third full-length and very patient followup to Echoes. Even with the three-year vacation, Pieces seems destined to face a tidal wave of righteous anger from those who felt scammed by dancepunk's brief promise, a piñata to absorb the beatings of the jilted. Fortunately for the band, Pieces turns out to be a strong (at times even spectacular) album, one that finds the band evolving from where they left off with Echoes while restoring some of the old hope that indie kids have, indeed, learned how to dance, and no longer have to be quite so obvious about it.
What the Rapture have returned with is a sound less concerned with retaining the raw, gritty punk half of the equation: From the fade-in harmonies and discrete four notes of bass-synth that announce the album, it's clear the group is going for a cleaner sound, surely helped by Paul Epworth and Ewan Pearson, who man the boards for eight of 10 tracks. While nothing on Pieces reaches the velveteen club-readiness of "I Need Your Love", the band's previous muddy immediacy is replaced by a more meticulous approach: the keyboards polished to a glossy sheen, the guitars eased back into a supporting role, percussion real and programmed blended seamlessly.
It's impressive then, that even with this newfound attention to detail, the Rapture still maintain a flailing energy and enthusiasm that most of the other dancepunk bands could only fake. The idea that one can, you know, actually dance to the Rapture is sometimes mocked, but tracks such as the sharp, sax-supplemented "Get Myself Into It" and the delirious Afro-funk guitar vs. merrily popping bass of "The Devil" approach that elusive concept known as "groove." As with Echoes, Luke Jenner helps the songs he sings drop their inhibitions with his loose-hinged voice, building to a fake-orgasm crescendo on "The Devil" that's absurd yet logical.
"The Devil" keeps getting mentioned, since it's one of the standout tracks on Pieces of the People We Love, all of which share a common feature, or more accurately, familial resemblance. The Talking Heads were, suspiciously, largely absent as an influence upon the dancepunk boom of 2002-03, but here the Rapture are avid pupils of their teachings, specifically mimicking the punk-to-funk transition period. I'll leave it to the caretakers of music propriety to hem and haw; the Rapture do the tribute thing well, most noticeably on "W.A.Y.U.H." where the band bottles the itchy guitars, ringtone keyboards, and pseudo-tribal chants of Remain in Light.
However, what ultimately makes Pieces a step or three down from Echoes is a drop off in consistency, reflecting a higher percentage of songs that fail to ignite. Two of these are the tracks produced by Danger Mouse (the Cee-Lo-guesting title track and "Calling Me"), which are content to coast along on fairly pedestrian beats. Even though the group sticks mostly to what they know (read: songs about dancing) and they've stopped drawing inspiration from "The Ladybug Picnic", the Rapture still sometimes trip on the untied shoelaces of their lyrics; for instance, the incessant groove of "First Gear" would eventually win listeners over if not for Matt Safer endlessly stuttering with irritating dyslexia "my-my-my Muh-Muh-Mustang Ford." Ambition also tends to get the better of them, like the "Setting Sun" vs. "Firestarter" electronica-hit pastiche of "The Sound", or the dopey psychedelia of "Live in Sunshine" (this album's counterpart to Echoes' equally out-of-place departure "Love Is All").
These missteps aren't deal-breakers, though, and for lovers of schaudenfreude expecting a Hindenburg of hype, Pieces of People We Love will be a disappointment. The time for a statement on behalf of dancepunk is probably long past; it surely died when LCD Soundsystem spat "Everyone keeps on talking about it/ Nobody's getting it done," or when it morphed into colorful dance-not-punk from the likes of the Go! Team or Cansei De Ser Sexy. But Pieces nevertheless makes a statement on behalf of the Rapture alone, that they're a group with the exuberance, the right producer rolodex, and the right ear for influences to string together multiple albums that will persist long after their newsworthiness fades.