Accompanied by bass, piano, and harp, the New York cellist refracts traditional Korean influences though an avant-garde lens, yielding an album as surprising as it is elegant.

Yeo-Neun

A key figure in New York’s avant-garde for 20 years, cellist Okkyung Lee is seemingly on a quest to discover every sound that her instrument is capable of making. She can attack its strings with volcanic intensity before dropping down to a fierce pianissimo, probing the boundary between tonality and noise. She is equally at home improvising alongside electronic and acoustic musicians, seamlessly melding her cello with Christian Marclay’s turntablist chaos, the overtone-rich drones of Ellen Fullman’s long-string instrument, and the abstracted blues of Bill Orcutt’s four-string guitar. Regardless of the idiom she’s working in, Lee is an exceptionally expressive performer, able to conjure rapture as effectively as unrest.
Despite the sweeping range of her work over the last two decades, Lee has never sounded as elegant as on Yeo-Neun, her debut for Félicia Atkinson’s Shelter Press label. These compositions, informed by the Korean traditional and popular music of her formative years, are spacious and patient. They contain playful counterpoint and contemplative melodic tangents, and the arrangements for quartet distill grand musical ideas into a minimalist framework. Lee’s cello is frequently the subtlest element in the mix, and the ensemble (harpist Maeve Gilchrist, pianist Jacob Sacks, and bassist Elvynd Opsvik) operates with eloquence and precision. Even for a musician so focused on extremes, this pivot to chamber music is as surprising as any primal burst of shrieking sound.
A sense of meticulous equilibrium permeates the pieces on Yeo-Neun. Even its most impassioned passages contain a sense of hushed wonder, and moments of collected calm can fluently unravel into dissonance. “Another Old Story (옛날이야기),” with its stately, syncopated ostinato and majestic melodic flourishes, is followed by the sparse, impressionistic “In Stardust (For Kang Kyung-ok),” and the contrast between the two accentuates the heavy melancholy of  the latter’s Morton Feldman-esque piano figures. Even the instrumentation suggests a sense of balance: The cello and bass, capable of long, sustained tones and more varied textural explorations, often provide a foil to the chordal, rapidly decaying sounds of the piano and harp.
The most exciting contrasts come when Lee’s propensity for chaos expresses itself within the confines of more rigid compositional frameworks. Her use of extended techniques—ways of playing an instrument that fall outside established norms—is a defining characteristic of her performances, and on Yeo-Neun it feels revelatory. The creaking, scratchy texture of horsehair grinding away at her cello’s strings on “In Stardust” adds a completely alien dimension to the otherwise muted atmosphere. The penultimate piece, “Facing Your Shadows,” is a slow build that grows from spare, arpeggiated figures into a frenzied rush of scraping strings and bursts of harp: an image of serenity shot through with tumult.
Yeo-Neun is remarkable not only for its sophistication and restrained intricacy, but also as a statement of personal and creative growth. Flowing between formal tonality and structural dissolution, Lee reconciles her traditional musical upbringing with her subsequent expansion into free improvisation and avant-garde composition, and she finds an unusual beauty in juxtaposing the familiar character of popular and traditional music with experimental sound-making’s leap into the cosmic unknown. It’s thrilling to hear work so reflective from an artist often associated with volatility.


Alexandra Drewchin has roughly 100 different voices, and she employs all of them to chilling effect on RIP Chrysalis, her second record as Eartheater. The closest recent comparison would be Cat Power’s Moon Pix, but Drewchin’s songs are more expansive and more free-form, showing hints of her time spent in the psych outfit Guardian Alien.

RIP Chrysalis

Alexandra Drewchin has roughly 100 different voices, and she employs all of them to chilling effect on RIP Chrysalis, her second record as Eartheater. There’s the high, weeping one that turns up at the beginning of the icy psyh-Appalachia ballad "Petal Head"; there’s the bamboo-brittle alto that crackles menacingly at the center of the rippling "Wetware". And then there are all the others, rendered almost inhuman with digital effects: baritone-low and groaning, solemn and choir-like, chattering and mechanized. She layers them several at a time, so that it often seems like she’s in conversation with herself: two Drewchins—one way up high, one way down low—share the melody on"“Humyn Hymn", making lyrics like, "Chemical computer syringe/ Memories are fading away/ Rolling off the side of the bed," seem like they’re written in code that only the two singers understand.
It’s a fitting approach for a record which, as its title implies, deals with personal transformation; later in "Hymn", Drewchin sings, "The more I look back, the more I want to look ahead," and she spends the bulk of the album deep-diving into herself, delivering haunting descriptions of the shapes and spirits she encounters along the way. Arriving just eight months after the first Eartheater record, Metalepsis, Chrysalis displays a startling new firmness and depth to Drewchin’s songwriting. Where her first record felt more deliberately synthetic, making ample use of synthesizers and electronics, on Chrysalis, Drewchin operates from a base of American folk music. Dry-board banjos and plucked acoustic guitars form the foundation of most of the songs, leaving plenty of room through which Drewchin winds her snaking voice. There are still plenty of synths, but on Chrysalis, they augment rather than dominate. It’s as if Drewchin had raided The Anthology of American Folk Music but only absorbed the songs about ghosts. The closest recent comparison would be Cat Power’s Moon Pix, but Drewchin’s songs are more expansive and more free-form, showing hints of her time spent in the psych outfit Guardian Alien. One of the reasons Chrysalis is so fascinating and absorbing is because Drewchin obliterates the notion of song structure, starting from something as time-honored as folk, but bashing down the walls and ceiling around it to create music that feels mystical and searching.
As much as it’s about personal change, Chrysalis also seems to be about discovering new ways of songwriting, one that leaves the borders porous and the time elastic. A fiddle corkscrews at the opening of the title track before Drewchin’s banjo takes over; eventually, the background is filled with the sound of a ringing telephone and a fog of electronics, a bleary canvas of sound that Drewchin’s ethereal alto gradually floats across. She recites the lyrics of the creeping "Wetware"—"Deprogramming false fundamental makeup"—as if she’s casting a spell, while synths pulse like an android heartbeat behind her. And she begins "Mask Therapy" by repeating the words "identity crisis" over rippling, mirage-like guitar, a rhythm track that sounds like a failing air compressor thudding beneath. Songs enter and fade at their own pace, like clouds ribboning out across the sky at dusk.
The album’s title can be read two ways—the tearing of the chrysalis that allows new life, and the death of the same once that new life has begun. On "Ecdysisyphus", she flatly declares, "There’s a first time for everything/ More like, everything is the first time." At first, it seems empty—the equivalent of a dorm room stoner’s bug-eyed command to "Think about it, man." But after hearing the record that follows, it feels like a profound personal declaration. RIP Chrysalis is the sound of someone figuring themselves out in real time, making all of their distinct voices harmonize, and creating new musical forms to share their discoveries.


On his latest sorrowful dispatch, the drill veteran walks the line between reporter and preacher, gangster and citizen.

Just Cause Y’all Waited 2

Who is going to save Lil Durk’s soul? There’s barely a moment on Just Cause Y’all Waited 2 where the drill veteran doesn’t sound on the verge of tears, ready to collapse in the recording booth, his voice trembling with pain. Nobody who has been paying attention will be surprised: Durk has been broadcasting an unvarnished depiction of South Side Chicago communities since around the time of Obama’s first presidential campaign. These are now areas of the city devastated by coronavirus—early reports revealed that black Chicagoans account for more than 70 percent of deaths from the virus, despite making up 30 percent of the population—and most likely to bear the brunt of prolonged economic recession. In this backdrop comes the latest tape from a man burdened for far too long, his spirit finally ready to rupture under the weight of an unjust world.
You can forget about finding a sense of catharsis on Just Cause Y’all Waited 2; Durk refuses to fill his music with false hope or easy answers. Never mind that he claims to be based out of Atlanta these days—his loyalty is to the people of Chi-Town. (Just last month he showed up at Rush University Medical Centre to help deliver meals to frontline workers.) Durk is not the most famous voice in rap to emerge from his hometown, but he’s probably the most detailed, the most compassionate, in his vision. In this latest study of the city, he walks the line between reporter and preacher, gangster and citizen.
The ghosts of lost comrades circle Durk’s music, rendering almost every cut sorrowful and spectral. In his hands, Auto-Tune has a bled-dry beauty; over the piano chords of “All Love,” his digitized voice accentuates the erosion of his spirit. Far from a one-note vocalist, he drops the effect on “248.” Durk has never been particularly interested in virtuosity for its own sake, and here he slides into a conversational style, sounding like he’s slumping back in a chair, recollecting for his biographer.
The elephant in the room doesn’t go unaddressed. About a year ago, Durk Banks handed himself over to authorities after a warrant was issued for his arrest in connection with a February 2019 shooting outside of Atlanta restaurant the Varsity. (Since he was granted bond, some countries have refused him entry to perform shows.) “Turn Myself In” was released shortly before he handed himself over to cops, so its inclusion here a whole year later feels pointed as Durk laments the situation, calls the accusation “false,” and thanks Chance the Rapper for helping to keep his spirits up. It’s not unreasonable to attribute some of the tape’s sense of suffering to the case ostensibly being unresolved.
When the atmosphere becomes suffocating, guest rappers help release the tension. “3 Headed Goat” lives up to its audacious billing as Durk amalgamates with rising Chicago star Polo G and ATL’s Lil Baby. On “Chiraq Demons,” he recruits G Herbo for a double dose of classic drill—all horror movie piano keys, crushing drums, and ample menace.
Just Cause Y’all Waited 2 does have setbacks. The chorus to the unremarkable “Gucci” is derivative of every hook that’s been formed around the luxury fashion brand’s name. And there’s no good reasoning for the inclusion of “Trifling Hoes,” an unnecessary shot of misogyny. It’s out of step with the rest of Just Cause Y’all Waited 2, a set that transforms Durk’s pain into one of his most emotionally potent tapes ever, and confirms what Chicago has known for ages: If you seek to understand the city in the 21st century, listen to Lil Durk.


Donald Glover’s got big hooks and big ideas, but his spiritual largesse is weighed down by impulses carried halfway to their endpoints and moments of frustrating pretense.

3.15.20

About 40 minutes into his new album, Donald Glover asks a simple question: “Where are those subtle men?” At times, he’s totally unqualified to answer. The record’s first full song, which I swear is called “Algorhythm,” opens with an industrial groan, as Glover growls: “So very scary, so binary/Zero or one/Like or dislike, coal mine canary/I dream in color, not black and white.” It’s all very the regional manager just watched Blade Runner and wants to talk about it. But a few bars after that passage, “Algorhythm” opens up into its hook—bright, free, danceable in spite of itself. Like all of Childish Gambino’s music since 2013’s Because the Internet, 3.15.20 is studded with little hooks and big ideas that serve as lures. Its spiritual largesse is weighed down by impulses carried halfway to their endpoints and moments of frustrating pretense.
These songs, which were recorded over several years with the Inglewood producer DJ Dahi and Glover’s longtime collaborator, the Swedish composer Ludwig Goransson, move from pulsing four-on-the-floor exercises to Prince-lite. There are times (“32.22”) when he sounds like Travis Scott clearing his throat before breakfast, and others (the excellent “42.26,” previously released as “Feels Like Summer”) when Glover lulls you into a simmering hypnosis. So the album—titled after the date it was originally streamed online, most of its song titles mere timestamps—is not a clear retro pastiche like 2016’s “Awaken, My Love!”, which mined ’70s funk with occasionally dazzling results. But it’s not exactly tethered to the present, either. Dahi, unsurprisingly, says that some early versions of songs had a kind of “The Love Below energy”: “12.38,” which features a nearly four-minute documentation of a mushroom trip, is sort of a riff on André 3000’s “Vibrate.”
3.15.20 comes after a decade of unqualified success for Glover. The 36-year-old, who grew up a Jehovah’s Witness just outside of Atlanta and began writing for Tina Fey’s 30 Rock just as he was graduating from NYU, starred in another NBC sitcom, Community, before creating one of the decade’s most original screen projects in Atlanta. He released more music to increasing critical acclaim (or at least diminishing disdain). And contrary to internet rumor, he did not become the next Spider-Man, but he was cast in the Lion King remake and a Star Wars spinoff. He made the leap from sitcoms and mixtapes to superstardom, all while seeming to reject what superstardom requires.
Yet it always feels as if Glover is in the middle of a game of tonal Russian roulette. He began the decade making clumsy post-Graduation rap, defensive and full of treacly confession. As time went on he became more withholding, on record and in public performance. He announced his departure from Community with a series of notes handwritten at a Residence Inn (“I’M SCARED PEOPLE WILL FIND OUT WHAT I MASTURBATE TO”). He released Because the Internet—a rewardingly messy album with a sly thematic complexity—alongside a bleak screenplay about the suddenness of death. His headlining set at last year’s Coachella felt stiff at first, but gave way to emotional monologue fragments about his father’s passing and about Nipsey Hussle’s, and some sincerely cathartic performances. Glover seems to toggle back and forth between not caring about the artifice of celebrity and mimicking the pose of someone who feels that way. He has learned to use this inscrutability to interesting effect on the screen, but very seldom, so far, on his studio albums.
At its best, 3.15.20 Trojan horses some of that terror into happy surroundings. Played in the background, “47.48” sounds like a locked-in house band; the lyrics are actually about a crushing and ever-present violence, and the tension mesmerizes. That song ends with a conversation between Glover and his young son about love—sweeter than it sounds on paper, chilling given the juxtaposition.
Glover is not always successful at adding dimension to these songs. “24.19” opens with a condescending ode to a “sweet thing” who moves to Los Angeles and can “still believe in fairy tales”; it sounds like something that would get booed out of an open-mic night. The writing can be exasperating. On the way-too-arch “12.38,” he rhymes “tulips” with “two lips”; the hook of the Ariana Grande duet, “Time,” goes, “Maybe all the stars in the night are really dreams/Maybe this world ain’t exactly what it seems.” All of this makes it surprising when Glover does land some of his more poetic bars. There’s something about the way, on “42.26,” he sings about the “men who made machines that want what they decide.” And on “19.10”—an album highlight, a grim song that’s given too much forward motion to brood—he says: “To be happy really means that someone else ain’t.”
That last line is reminiscent of a quote Glover gave to the New Yorker in a 2018 profile. Riding in an SUV with the reporter, a bodyguard, and his Atlanta co-star, Zazie Beetz, Glover defends the trap music on the radio that the others are denigrating. “Y’all are forgetting what rap is,” he says. “Rap is ‘I don’t care what you think in society, wagging your finger at me for calling women “bitches”—when, for you to have two cars, I have to live in the projects.’”
As far back as 2011, Glover was rapping about how hip-hop songs are seldom given more than superficial readings. In “Be Alone” he scoffs at how his music might be wilfully mistaken for Plies’ and, implicitly, at the very notion that that would be an insult. The first music cue in the Atlanta pilot is an OJ da Juiceman song; “35.31,” from this new album, sounds like a children’s version of another one. To be clear, this is an excellent thing. On that song, Glover is playful, knowing, leaning into his gifts for melody and charm—doing all this in service of something much darker or, if you prefer, finding what can be playful within that darkness.


Quality Control’s secret weapon sticks to his crunk roots on his new album while also venturing into the most known unknown.

Duke Nukem

Memphis, like the entire South for many years, was so ignored or disrespected by the rap industry that the city’s scene developed a remarkable sense of self-sufficiency. DJ Paul and Juicy J started off making their own beats; and today, Young Dolph is at the level of a major-label star but maintains independence through his label Paper Route Empire, offering a Black-owned network of support to younger rappers from the 901. That sense of community and self-reliance is, in many ways, the essence of Memphis—the Orange Mound neighborhood was one of the first in the country in which Black residents owned, rather than rented, their homes, allowing for a certain amount of autonomy not afforded to Black Americans. Memphis’ spirit of self-determination and independence is at the heart of the music of Duke Deuce, the slyly emerging secret weapon in Quality Control’s stable who expands beyond the regional acclaim of his Memphis Massacre mixtape series on new album DUKE NUKEM.
Duke, born and bred in Blackhaven, came of age during his city’s most mainstream moment—the era of “Stay Fly” and Yo Gotti’s prolific mixtape run—but his connection to his hometown’s rap goes beyond mere fandom. He grew up in the studio alongside his father, Duke Nitty, a producer for the likes of former Three 6 member Gangsta Blac and Nasty Nardo during the true underground days. Most of Nitty’s credits stem from the turn-of-the-millennium, but at the encouragement of his son, the elder Duke has returned to beat-making. Deuce enlists features from artists outside West Tennessee but still keeps his homegrown sound strictly in the family, as generations of Memphis rappers have done—Juicy J and Project Pat are brothers, after all, and early major label signee Gangsta Pat learned the tools of the music trade from his father Willie Hall, percussionist for Isaac Hayes and Stax Records.
Duke’s album title references the iconic video game character Duke Nukem, who alongside Doom and Wolfenstein solidified the first-person shooter as one of gaming’s hegemonic genres. Nukem retrofitted 1980s action for Generation X, combining the hard bodies of Schwarzenegger and Stallone with an ironic, Simpsons-like smarm and the transgressive, tongue-in-cheek edge of the Attitude Era. Some of Nukem’s most infamous catchphrases are quotes from Bruce Campbell in Army of Darkness and Rowdy “Roddy” Piper in They Live; and the atomic action figure and his bleach-blonde flat-top are physically modeled after Dolph, Van Damme, and pro football player turned failed action star Brian “The Boz” Bosworth.
In the same way that Duke Nukem was a pastiche of action movies past, Duke Deuce draws himself a cartoon persona out of old Southern rap tropes. His relentless beats often sound like military marches, timpanis thumping in-between trap hi-hats, and DUKE NUKEM appropriately has an army theme. “Soldiers Steppin” opens with the ten-hut chants of a platoon before Duke commands you to march, with a finger in your face like R. Lee Ermey. The No Limit-like iconography carries over into the packaging: the futuristic cover by KD Designz, with green plastic army men, Duke’s head fashioned into a nuclear bomb, and his constant and iconic “What the FUUUUUCK!” ad-lib rendered as an explosion; song titles like “Army” and “Soldiers Steppin”; music videos themed around buck boot camp drills and Nukem-inspired video game levels.
While most Memphis revivalists opt for the haunted tongue-twisting of Lord Infamous, Duke Deuce feels more influenced by the pitter-patter flows of Project Pat, a goofy court jester and absolute unit as much as he is a slick-talking player of the game. Duke frequently speaks of himself in the third person, as if he’s the Incredible Hulk about to smash the club up. He has a Bruce Banner side, of course, slipping into something more mournful and soulful on “Army.”
DUKE NUKEM is an album made with the club in mind—as Duke puts it on “Soldiers Steppin,” “2020 fucked up, so we back up on that crunk shit”—but there’s a kind of intricate weirdness to much of the instrumentation and production: the warbling, almost out-of-tune keys on “Duke Skywalker”; a distorted and shuffling loop a little lower in the mix on “Toot Toot”; a grave hum underneath Duke’s voice on “Move.” Duke brings together old and new generations of the 901; multiple tracks are produced by Hitkidd, who in addition to collaborations with Memphis artists like Blocboy JB and former Raider Klan members Xavier Wulf and Chris Travis, has produced for Bladee and Yung Lean, showing the global influence of the Memphis underground sound.
Some of the guests that Duke drafts owe a debt to Memphis: like A$AP Ferg on “Fell Up in the Club,” whose blockbuster “Plain Jane” took its structure from “Slob on my Knob,” or fellow Quality Control comrade Offset on “Gangsta Party”—what was the much-heralded triplet “Migos Flow” if not a refurbished take on Three 6’s dense delivery? Duke doesn’t just draw from the same well of Hypnotized Minds-licensed records—the first sound on the album aside from Duke’s voice, on the 8Ball & MJG-nodding “Into: Coming Out Hard,” is a brief sample of the Stooges’ “Dirt,” directly linking Southern crunk and punk mosh pits. “Fell Up in the Club” is built from a flip of a true regional underground hit that’s probably only known by a few outside Shelby County, EP da PaperChaser and Dow Jones’ “PaperChase,” which I can only imagine would have soundtracked a lot of school dances and parking lot hangs when Duke was growing up, him and his friends trying to perfect the jookin move of the same name.
Unlike so many who bite the mystic style born in Memphis, Duke Deuce was born there, too; it’s not just samples or a flow to him—crunk is an entire culture, and it’s in his blood. So much of rap is built on riffing on or playing off music history, but there’s a thin line between reinterpretation and repetition. Duke Deuce holds to certain traditions while also venturing into the most known unknown. Crunk isn’t dead, and it’s not an undead zombie of its former self, either: Duke knows and respects his history, but he’s detonating it to make way for something new.

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Quality Control / Motown / Made Men Movement


Recorded prior to a divesting move to Los Angeles, Laura Marling's fourth album is a vigorously polished, hard-won achievement. Expansive and ambitious, spare but intense, dark but somehow sexy, ...Eagle is a scorching interrogation of her own and other's follies that lifts the veil that once hung over her storytelling.

Once I Was an Eagle

Laura Marling has spent the first few years of her career in a state of perpetual arrival. Alas I Cannot Swim-- her 2008 debut, made when she was 18-- was a bright, brooding collection that set her up as the darling of the latest British folk revival and saw her nominated for the Mercury Music Prize; a feat she repeated with 2010's more polished I Speak Because I Can. On 2011's sprawling A Creature I Don’t Know, she further established herself as an ambitious artist with a widening, sharpening vision. With each release, her talents-- keen songwriter, deft melodysmith, butterfly wing-fingered guitarist-- continued to reveal themselves so steadily as to have a lulling effect, like waves hitting some shoreline where it’s always high tide. But now here comes Once I Was An Eagle, the first of her albums to sound like a vigorously polished, hard-won achievement. It’s expansive and ambitious, and divorced of all the tweedy preening and aw-shucks raggediness the idea of “folk” has accumulated in recent years. It's dark, it’s angry, it’s even sexy, in a sly, subtle way.
Once I Was An Eagle marks another, more literal departure: Making the record in producer Ethan John’s countryside studio was one of Marling's last acts as a full-time Brit. Whether she had plotted her move from London to Los Angeles before she wrote the album isn’t clear, but either way these 16 songs bear witness to the process, embodying the particular catharsis that comes from moving house, the existential tumult that so often accompanies the dismantlement of a material life, all that sifting through the detritus of past and current lives. She digs deep into the far-back grimy corners of herself, examines every scrap and trinket, fully weighs each of the thousand tiny decisions about what to throw out and what to drag along to the new address. (In reality, she took barely any of her possessions to LA.)
This could be called a concept album, or a breakup record, though neither quite seems to suffice; “emotional bildungsroman” comes close, “scorching self-interrogation about the possibility of happiness and unpoisoned human connection in the wake of one or more failed or failing relationships, carried out under the ever-present pall of mortality,” maybe closer. As a lyricist, Marling has always favored a veiled sort of storytelling, her songs never not deeply felt but always more in the vein of short stories than memoir, and executed so supremely that sussing out the “real” from the “unreal” has always seemed beside the point. But this one feels personal in ways the others haven’t; the “I” of the songs is not always clear, as always, but seems closer than ever to being Marling’s own self.
Eagle was made over 10 days, with just a cellist and Johns (on carefully-placed drums, piano, organ) providing accompaniment; Marling recorded her vocal and guitar parts in a single take each, and in one day, though it somehow sounds even more immediate. Present in both her singing and her playing is a ferocity that now seems to have been lurking there all along; at times, too, she’s possessed by a newly emergent serenity, and an astonishing ability to shift between the two modes. This is especially evident on Eagle’s opening tracks, four songs written as a proper suite and a fifth that feels equally of a piece. Together they seamlessly, almost imperceptibly, build from somnambulant finger-picked acoustic to a wild fury of howling cello and frantic tabla-style percussion, “Take the Night Off” leading it off the way a rainshower usually precedes a hurricane; by “Master Hunter”, the suite's cap, Marling is inhaling relationships and spitting them back out as heaving piles of splinters and ash.
The rest of the album is spent digging through the rubble, out of which creatures and names and scraps of ideas turn up over and over: birds and beasts, the devil, water-- and, most prominently, the unnamed “you.” All through Eagle’s first half, this seems to be the same person, the same man: her “freewheeling troubadour,” the dove to her eagle. Some amount of drama has transpired offstage, though the specifics are not made clear, are perhaps too mundane to bother with; what's extraordinary is how Marling handles the fallout. On these songs she interrogates him, indicts him, admits her own cruelty towards him, always stopping short of apology, not even allowing herself to playact the rites of guilt.
Later, after the sparse chill of “Interlude”, the perspective shifts, the cast widens. “Where Can I Go?” obliquely introduces Rosie, a figure perhaps understandable as some fragment of who Marling might have been before all this began. On “Little Bird”, loping with the immense grace of Nick Drake, Marling questions the girl, or herself: “Why did you run from everyone who only tried to love you, Rosie?” Meeting this seemingly crucial, recurring character so late in the song cycle is a jarring development; then again, perhaps that’s the point, to echo the shock of the the singer finding herself again, bloodied but alive at the bottom of all the wreckage.
By this point, the album is circling itself, or the idea of its former self, as if waiting for the thing to die. Bits of “I Was an Eagle” return in “Pray for Me”-- the “preying” becomes “praying”; the climbing and swooping riff, there edged with a sitar-like guitar effect, here just simply thumbed along. Something heavy has been shaken off; some light is breaking through. “You asked me blind once/ If I was a child once/ And I said I’m really not sure,” Marling sang way back on third track “You Know”, in the dusky murmur she increasingly favors; now she finally has a reply, or finally lets herself reply: “I was a child once/ Oh, I was happy young/ When all I didn’t know needed doing had been done.” The question-asker is long gone; Marling doesn’t answer for his sake, but for her own.
Knotting up that loose end seems to make the final quarter of the album possible-- that realization of what needs to be done, and then the doing of it; putting away childish things, which, in the end, seems Eagle’s core concern. “Thank you naivety, for saving me again/ He was my next verse,” Marling nearly barks, on the last track, over a mounting wall of what seems like every instrumental bit to appear on the previous 15 tracks: all that warm cello, palm-hammered percussion, billowing organ, and her steady, spangling guitar. The mess of love, of hate, has been sorted through, purged, sorted and packed away-- not entirely tidily, and not in a way that could protect against any future disasters, but enough for a fresh start somewhere else. Marling is 23; at first, the amount of time she had spent on this earth seemed relevant because nobody in her peer group was making albums like this. With Once I Was an Eagle, it’s because nobody of any age is making albums like this.


The Chicago producer plays with oceanic imagery and a collage-like swirl of influences on a four-track EP that spills over the limits of club music’s conventions.

Organism EP

Ariel Zetina grew up in North Florida, where the Atlantic Ocean was a short drive away. After studying theater at Northwestern University, she moved to Chicago, finding a home in the city’s vibrant performance art and electronic music scenes. And though Lake Michigan is so vast that at times it can feel like an ocean, at the end of the day, there isn’t a tide. There is no movement of the water along Chicago’s coast, not in any daily, measureable sense. But Organism, Zetina’s new EP, is in constant motion: Vocal samples loop and twist around themselves; shuffling beats adeptly bridge the genres and cultures from which she culls her rhythms. For Zetina, the sea pulses and flows through her work, at once a muse and a beacon.
Perhaps appropriately, then, “I Miss the Sea” comes closest to tracing some kind of musical lineage for Zetina: the sparse brukdown rhythms, an homage to her Belizean heritage; the warm, thumping beat of house music from her adopted hometown; the breezy, new-age vocals from trance music, an early obsession. If you were to drop into the middle of the track, the mix of pan flutes, acid house, and spoken-word affirmations might seem jarring. But with an elegance that testifies to her experience as a DJ, each element builds in sequence, making room for the next—the brukdown beat drops out to leave room for the flutes, the flutes for the incantations, the incantations for the acid house—as if her influences were in conversation with each other.
While each of these four tracks is certainly danceable, there’s a sense that they could be taken off the shelf and inspected like sound collage. “Putamaria” is accented by what sounds like knives being sharpened; “I Miss the Sea,” in which the singer breathily pines for the ocean, has an eerie dissonance, like an Enya cover dropped into a kinetic house party.
As a member of the art collective Witch Hazel, Zetina blended her theater experience with her skills as a producer, releasing the Godzilla EP in 2015 with Chicago drag queens Imp Queen and Deven Casey. Where that record used spoken-word recitations, ambient soundscapes, and house music to satirize materialism and traditional notions of beauty, Zetina’s references on Organism are more personal, more abstract, and with more room for interpretation.
Opener “Establish Yourself in My Body” features a striking vocal sample, which Zetina introduces carefully. First, it’s “body,” a word so commonplace in dance music it hits like a kick drum. Finally, after an infectious acid line builds and takes hold of the beat, the entire song cuts out, leaving room for the entirety of the phrase: “Establish yourself in my body!” It’s a demand, a desire, a moment of corporal confusion, commanded with such confidence that you want to figure out the Derridean task of establishing oneself in the body of an other. On “Putamaria,” she samples a chorus of catcallers, who repeat the title phrase with slightly different emphases each time, each iteration further abstracting its context and turning a leering phrase into just another part of the beat.
On the closing track, “Water Nymph,” Zetina finally steps out from behind the DJ booth. The song begins with the warmth of steel drums and vocal samples of bubbly laughter but soon grows quiet, as a pitched-down Zetina sings for the first time on the record: “I wish I could be your nymphomaniac, but I’m just a water nymph.” It’s a twist on the usual virgin/whore double standards, played out at sea, the Auto-Tune rendering her singing wobbly and aqueous. After a pregnant pause, the song starts back up again in earnest, the steel drums replaced by squelching synthesizers. It’s as if Zetina wants to ensure that, even in the sticky heat of a peak-time dance floor, she can still take up all the space she deserves.


Following two grandly orchestral and electronic-infused folk albums, both Mercury Prize nominees, Villagers' frontman Conor O’Brien offers a radically subdued collection that finds the shy Dubliner opening up in a more direct way about his sexuality.

Darling Arithmetic

"It took a little time to get where I wanted/ It took a little time to get free/ It took a little time to be honest/ It took a little time to be me," sings Conor O’Brien on the first track to Villagers’ new album. As opening lines go, it’s hard to get more direct than that. It’s fitting then that the song itself is called "Courage"—a phenomenon that the Villagers’ frontman describes as "a feeling like no other, let me tell you." The song is a kind of pat on the back for O’Brien but also a way of steeling himself to open up and reveal what the album’s remaining songs have yet to say—namely, that romance is the pits no matter who you happen to fall in love with, but romantic love is not nearly as hard as coming to terms with your own mysterious and complicated self.
Previous Villagers records—2010’s Becoming a Jackal and 2013’s *{Awayland}—*were much busier affairs, each Mercury Prize nominees in which O’Brien’s grandly orchestral and electronic-infused folk music is supported by a full band and a preponderance of big ideas. Darling Arithmetic, by contrast, is a radically subdued affair—nine mostly acoustic-based tracks that O’Brien recorded at home alone, playing every instrument and mixing the record on his own. It makes sense then that the record is also the most strikingly personal he’s ever made—an emotional missive about love and relationships—in which the notoriously shy Dubliner finally opens up in a more direct way about his own sexuality.
Earlier this year O’Brien spoke to the Irish Times about the motivations for his new record by saying, "It’s not a news story: ‘Man is gay.’ I don’t want that to be the main focus. I wanted the album to be a human love album because everyone in the world feels those emotions at some stage. I really wanted to make sure that anyone who was listening could relate to the songs. I didn’t want to cut anyone off or make it seem as if I was only singing to my younger self."
While O’Brien’s goal of speaking to the universal experience—rather than simply making what could be ostensibly pigeonholed as a specifically "coming out" record—is understandable, his lingering reticence leaves some of the material wanting. Tracks like "Dawning on Me" and "No One to Blame" are undeniably pretty—understated bits of finely distilled yearning—but they suffer from an intentional vagueness, the genderless and pronoun-free lyrics occasionally treading a fine line between charmingly sweet and frustratingly precious ("Excuse me while I die/ A million times before I meet your eyes with mine").
For an album of mostly acoustic singer/songwriter fare released only weeks after Sufjan Stevens’ stunning Carrie & Lowell, the simple loveliness of Darling Arithmetic doesn’t always feel like quite enough. O'Brien is a deft songwriter with a wonderfully emotive voice, but it’s only when his lyrics become more pointed—as they do on "Little Bigot"—that the record soars. Addressing a sort of of everyman asshole, O’Brien advises his would-be hater by singing that "It’s okay to be tired/ So take the blame, little bigot/ And throw that hatred onto the fire." Elsewhere, on "Hot Scary Summer", he charmingly recollects a lost love—"Remember kissing on the cobblestone/ In the heat of the night/ And all the pretty young homophobes/ Looking out for a fight"—before getting to the real heart of the matter: "We got good at pretending/ Then pretending got us good." For anyone who might have spent years grappling with their own idenity—or logged countless hours loving the one who didn't quite love them back the right way—the song hits every perfect bittersweet note.
The need to stop pretending—to admitting one’s deepest insecurities and wants—seems central to Darling Arithmetic, an album that delivers a gorgeous, if somewhat restrained, step forward. It’s a document of quiet, if not necessarily earth-shattering, revelations. "In the darkness and the light/ I give you every side," O’Brien sings at one point, in what seems as much a promise to a lover as to the listener. Regardless of whether or not O’Brien chooses to go further down the troubadour path of working solo or will fall back into a full band scenario, one can only hope that making this record has proven to be a kind of emotional throat-clearing, a way of moving into potentially murkier and possibly even more personal waters. "How did I get here?/ Am I ever gonna get back?" he asks on the album-closing "So Naïve" as if revealing oneself so fully has stranded him in uncharted territory. That needn’t be a bad thing though. Previous Villagers records too often felt like puzzles—layers of densely-packed metaphors that, when unraveled, didn’t always add up to much. If Darling Arithmetic is the sound of someone dipping their toes into the waters and finding it to their liking, then perhaps the next Villagers record will be the sound of O’Brien diving in headfirst—even more fearlessly himself.


Rufus Wainwright has quite the life. After he cut his first demo with producer Pierre Marchand, his father, Canadian folk ...

Poses

Rufus Wainwright has quite the life. After he cut his first demo with producer Pierre Marchand, his father, Canadian folk giant Loudon Wainwright III, passed it on to legendary arranger Van Dyke Parks, who in turn saw that it found its way to Dreamworks executive Lenny Waronker. With a simple glance at the Dreamworks logo on the back of Poses, I trust you can connect the dots for yourself. If only it could be that easy for everyone, right?
Oh, wait. I guess I forgot to mention that Rufus Wainwright deserves it. On his 1998 self-titled debut, Wainwright managed to pull together myriad strands and meld them into a grand, cohesive vision. And now, with Poses, he takes that vision and refines it, resulting in an epic album that speaks with grand gestures and a refined eloquence rare in young songwriters.
Of course, it never hurts to have a killer cast of collaborators to help you achieve your vision, and Wainwright has certainly assembled one for this record. Drummer Jim Keltner (Elvis Costello, Ry Cooder) returns on the traps, trading off spots with Victor Indrizzo (Chris Cornell, Redd Kross). Paul Weller cohort Pete Wilson mans the bass, and Dennis Farias (Burt Bacharach) provides colorful trumpet accents. Propellerhead Alex Gifford, Ethan Johns (Ryan Adams, Robyn Hitchcock), and Damian LeGassick (Blur) combine for production that veers effortlessly from the dark strings of "Evil Angel" to the beat-infused "Tower of Learning," and widely across a lot of terrain in between.
Poses opens and closes with the Tin Pan Alley tribute "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk," recalling some of the Divine Comedy's more playful moments with its ode to subtle addictions and the way our compulsions rule our lives ("If I should buy jellybeans/ I have to eat them all in just one sitting"). In between, we get everything from a Ouija board session with the ghost of Jeff Buckley ("The Consort") to the faithful and endearing cover of Loudon's classic "One Man Guy" that proves Rufus has at least a touch of dad's folk roots in him.
The album's title track stands as one of Wainwright's finest songs, with an aching melody and Spartan piano backing. It also illustrates how far his voice has come since his debut. He's become far more expressive in the last few years and his voice is a bit less of an acquired taste than it used to be. The funky "Shadows" is coated in thickly layered vocal harmonies that betray a definite debt to vocal jazz, though the swelling strings might sound a little more at home on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. Still, it's pretty fantastic stuff, and Rufus takes pains to breathe life into his Frankensteins, never letting them degenerate into limp genre exercises.
"Tower of Learning" is more impressive still, opening wide up in the second verse over programmed beats in an arrangement that looms over the rest of the album. Barring the reprise of "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk," Poses is closed on a somber note with the beautifully simple "In a Graveyard," a soulful reflection on moribund themes that momentarily leaves the oboes and strings at the door for a direct heart-to-heart with the listener.
It's always refreshing to see a recording this singular find its way out the door of a major label, and it's heartening to know that Wainwright probably has a secure home at Dreamworks. With Poses, he proves that he's swinging for the big leagues, and that he has every right to be there.


Keita Sano is the Japanese producer's most grounded and focused work yet. These tracks fit into no particular paradigm or scene; they are stuffed with ideas, all of which hope to make you dance.

Keita Sano

Keita Sano seems unsettled. This is true both in the producer's releases—15 singles and now four albums on 14 different labels, in two-plus years, and that's just accounting the physical releases—and his productions, which veer wildly from gnarly disco-based house to noisy, almost experimental techno to downtempo groove. The Okayama, Japan-based artist is probably most closely aligned with labels like Mister Saturday Night and 1080p, North American labels with a DIY spirit and a fondness for off-kilter statements, but even in that light Sano has proven himself a singular presence.
Keita Sano is Sano's fourth album, give or take, and it arrives via Rett I Fletta, a sub-label of Prins Thomas' Full Pupp imprint, because for Sano anything worth doing is worth doing obtusely. Still, Keita Sano feels like the producer's most grounded and focused work yet: seven long tracks aimed at the dance floor, each one a treatise on how varied and dauntless Sano has become. These are tracks that fit into no particular paradigm or scene; they are stuffed with ideas, all of which hope to make you dance. Sano's debts to both house and techno are obvious—Thomas remarked he was drawn to how he “somehow managed to merge the playfulness of disco with the physical impact of techno”—but feel beside the point. Sano isn't a politician crossing the aisle, he's just grabbing whatever works.
Accordingly, the tracks on Keita Sano are as familiar as they are hard to pin down. Squelchy acid licks (“Leave the Floor,” “Full of Love”) rub shoulders with filtered disco (“Honey”) and percussion loops of unknown origin (“Sucker Pt. 2”). “Vood” clangs with hissy industrial energy for more than three minutes before opening up into a calm, looping melody. Sano's tracks are long and evolving but there's very little psychedelia or escapism in his sound; everything is very physical and present, and his peculiar choices prevent you from losing yourself. Only on the closer, “None of Your Business,” when Sano slips into a kind of contented, deep house formalism, does Keita Sano fail to feel fidgety, strange, and emotive.
This is, to a large extent, music for the heads: Sano is a precocious and enigmatic producer but Sano is unlikely to convert agnostics. For anyone inclined, though, Sano is a true talent, an artist for whom “sticking to his guns” is great because his guns are so much different than everyone else’s. Keita Sano is his calmest and most manageable work yet, a fine place to start tracking an artist who seems unlikely to sit still for long.


The veteran DJ confirms his status as a treasured keeper of Detroit techno’s flame on an album balancing resolute functionality with a subtly psychedelic, expressive dimension.

A Piece of Beyond

Eric Dulan has been doing his own thing for over 20 years now. Staying true to the essential principles of Detroit techno as passed down by his elders Derrick May and Jeff Mills, he has released record after record of steel-capped dancefloor movers, mostly on his own label, Subject Detroit. Doggedly independent and devotedly underground, he maintains a connection with the classic Motor City sound, balancing relentless forward momentum with a certain serenity and poise, and boasting the ability to turn simple ingredients into a heady, psychedelic soup by dint of sheer repetition.
Despite, or perhaps because of, his classic stylings, Dulan has enjoyed a surge in popularity in recent years. He has slotted into a gap that’s appeared in the market as older Detroit DJs wind down their touring careers, steadily enlarging his fanbase through masterful, highly technical DJ sets. A Piece of Beyond is Dulan’s second full-length as DJ Bone, after 2007’s Out of Knowhere, a hard-to-find CD-R release. It’s also a swift follow-up to last year’s It’s Good To Be Differ-Ent LP, released under the name Differ-Ent. Through that alias, he dug into the anger and melancholy he felt after the death of his mother, transforming his darker emotions into more experimental material on several records for the London-based label Don’t Be Afraid. The experience of communicating through an alter ego seems to have expanded his vision; there’s an obvious grandiosity to this triple-vinyl release, even as he settles back into a more streamlined sound.
The record starts boldly with “It Begins,” throwing a delicious squiggle of interplanetary bleeps over soaring, faux-choral pads—it’s a quirky track, recalling the muddy thrills of early UK rave, and it could only work as an opener. Likewise, the closing track is an outlier: a gospel house teardown featuring the vocal acrobatics of Aaron-Carl Ragland, a Detroit producer and singer who died in 2010. Dulan reanimates one of Ragland’s unused vocals for an emotional final curtain, his close-harmonized falsetto reaching back to Detroit’s peerless R&B history.
Aside from those obvious markers, A Piece of Beyond doesn’t waste a second on scene-setting or ambient diversions—this is end-to-end dancefloor material, and its hour and fifteen minutes pass in a breathless sprint. Most tracks draw their power from a careful balance of darkness and light: tough, expressive drums overlaid with increasingly psychedelic, time-shifting layers of melody and harmony. As a rule, all the working parts are visible, yet they fit together to create something mysterious. You could recreate it, but it would never be the same.
The album’s highlights seem to prove this suspicion. On “Dreamers 9,” Dulan turns the simple thwack of the 808 into sturdy scaffolding for layers of drunken organs: sleek and functional, it occasionally strips down to just a solid kick, exposing the manufacturing process before rebuilding again. “Power Outage” offers livewire danger through the crackle of a broken connection, like a substation with its doors blown open in a storm. “Sweat” is sheer mechanics, as skull-cracking drums and woozy organs take us deep into the warehouse rave zone. But despite the engine-powered efficiency, the mood is far from inhuman: “Workings of the Inner Circle” brings squelching, soulful chords, while “All My Heart” is an ecstatic romance running on an 808 throb and oxytocin-laced synths as a voice whispers those three little words, over and over.
The worship of Detroit techno can spill into fetishization too easily: This idea of a futuristic, sci-fi sound emerging from a post-industrial wasteland verges upon “ruin porn” as we imagine the ghostly clang of machinery pealing through the broken windows of the Packard Plant. But despite its many imitators, it’s hard to argue with the feeling that Detroit techno just sounds best when it comes directly from that lineage. By dint of circumstance, raw talent, and endless persistence, DJ Bone has become a treasured keeper of the flame.


The English psych-punks turn down the distortion and face their demons with a new, synth-y sound on their third album.

Microshift

Feedback and distortion are the training wheels of indie rock—obfuscating agents that provide nervous upstarts with a sense of confidence as they face the public, secure in the knowledge that no one’s really going to be able to decipher what the hell they’re singing about. On their first two albums, Leeds quintet Hookworms rode those wheels down to the rim, whipping up a psych-punk squall that was heavy on the overdriven drone and extended meltdown fade-outs. You could sense they had an excitable, charismatic frontman in Matt Johnston (a.k.a. MJ), but his blown-out vocals often sounded like they were in competition with the garage-grimed organs and fuzzed-out guitars to see which could push the needle furthest into the red. Still, it didn’t really matter—by seamlessly melding that surface scuzz to adrenalized motorik rhythms, Hookworms had forged their own brand of stoner rock for people too wired to get stoned.
The band’s third album, Microshift, is similarly an exercise in relentless forward motion and joyous abandon. But the means they use to achieve those ends have changed dramatically: Like the reformed partier who now gets their endorphin rush from morning jogs instead of amphetamines, Hookworms have traded in chaos for clarity. The adherence to krautrockin’ repetition remains, but the proto-punk engine has been replaced by electronic loops and glacial synths. Suddenly, a band that once sounded most at home in strobe-lit basement dives now sounds primed for a late-afternoon slot at your roving summer festival of choice.
It’s not just the sonic upgrade that makes Microshift perhaps this year’s most ironically titled record. In the absence of the band’s once-omnipresent din, we hear lyrics that are as emotionally messy as the music supporting them is precise and pristine. For a long time, in interviews and on his open-book Twitter feed, MJ has been disarmingly frank about his mental health struggles (not to mention the 2015 flood that destroyed his studio and temporarily sidelined the band). But on Microshift, as never before, he grapples with some serious business head-on: death, heartbreak and body image, to name a few. What’s most striking is not the candor with which he broaches sensitive subjects, but that he sounds so eager and enthused to slay those dragons.
Take the opener, “Negative Space,” a song inspired by the passing of a dear friend—but also one of the most exhilarating, exuberant indie rock songs of 2018 so far, an electro-rock Mt. Olympus whose step-by-step ascent mirrors Sound of Silver, but whose insistent vocals scream Superchunk. And where previous Hookworms songs would be content to hammer a repeated riff into oblivion, “Negative Space” showcases a newfound facility for surprise melodic changes and sublime structural shifts, like when the song’s white-knuckled energy peaks partway through and is released through a dreamy disco denouement that suggests closure. Not so: “Negative Space” is merely a warm-up for the mighty seven-minute exorcism that is “Ullswater,” where MJ eulogizes a failed relationship atop a bubbly synth-pumped beat, before calmly admitting “I wish I held you tight before” and unleashing all that pent-up regret in a climactic, guitar-charging rock-out that’s up to Hookworms’ previous paint-peeling standards.
As we get deeper into Microshift, it becomes clear that Hookworms’ evolution from unruly noisemakers to art-pop sophisticates isn’t purely aesthetic—it’s a rebuke of the male aggression that guitar-based rock’n’roll has traditionally encouraged, and an embrace of greater sensitivity and emotional honesty. This goes beyond the band’s first proper ballad, “The Soft Season,” an aching post-breakup farewell that suggests Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space as commandeered by Ben Gibbard. On “Opener,” MJ doesn’t just lament the inability of men to be candid with one another, he summons the song’s blissfully buzzing organs and gliding momentum as a way of melting such insecurities away, like an emo Stereolab. And in “Shortcomings,” he gives voice to a condition rarely addressed by male performers: insecurity over one’s onstage appearance. Because even though punk taught us anyone can do it, that’s no protection from deeply ingrained notions of how rock singers should look while they’re doing it. “I feel guarded/I feel less than strong,” MJ admits. “Here where our bodies don’t belong.” But as he demonstrates throughout Microshift, anxiety should never get in the way of ecstasy—and as “Shortcomings” rides its psychedelic disco groove into the sunset, he makes good on that promise.


Hailed often as the Dead’s best shows of their career, this massive box set showcases the band at their tightest and most accessible—it’s perfect for beginners and lifelong Deadheads alike.

Grateful Dead: May 1977: Get Shown the Light

May 1977: Get Shown the Light

While nearly every Grateful Dead freak has an opinion on the matter, the Dead’s May 8, 1977 show at Cornell University’s Barton Hall has achieved the unofficial status as their best show ever. Regularly topping collector polls in fan bible DeadBase, Barton Hall has been added to the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry, remixed in 5.1 surround sound by audiophile tapers, pressed to vinyl in the recent bootleg LP revival, replicated by cover bands (and released as a live album in its own right), and earned its own truther conspiracy theory, all before the show’s first official release, just in time for its 40th anniversary.
With Cornell’s 25-minute “Scarlet Begonias” into “Fire in the Mountain” as a joyous centerpiece, a pristine-sounding 11-CD/10-plus hour/four-show box set extravaganza finally elevates the mythical 5/8/77 from the long-existing Deadhead trading network to the officially streaming ecosystem. Though Cornell ’77 is neither the Dead’s most adventurous nor creative performance, it also remains arguably the Best Ever for several enduring reasons. Perhaps chief among them is that it is live Grateful Dead at its most accessible, with the Dead sounding vivid and tight and full of pep, characteristics shared by all four shows on May 1977: Get Shown the Light. Compared to most Grateful Dead shows, Cornell ’77 (and its chronological neighbors) are excellent places for (some) newbie listeners to start.
Though an ongoing critical reassessment of the Dead has been based on their woolly psychedelic jam experiments of the ’60s and sweeping Americana of the early ’70s, the revered May 1977 model was perhaps the most conservative of the band’s long career. Those hoping to find evidence of the boundary-pushing Acid Testers should first seek recordings from earlier eras, but those looking to appreciate where those boundaries settled will find them here. It’s a conservatism some Dead freaks can’t abide, their interests fading in parallel with the band’s sense of serious exploration. Cracking only short windows into open-ended jamming, the band had put their psychedelic space opus “Dark Star” on ice during their year-and-a-half touring hiatus in 1975, and quickly abandoned the fusion experiments of that year’s Blues For Allah. While still containing the core band that regularly went on extended free improv tangents a half-decade earlier, the return of second drummer Mickey Hart set the course for the arena thunder that would follow. Jerry Garcia’s voice still retained much of its youthful sweetness, and—key for casual listeners—the second-set anchoring “drumz/space” jam hadn’t been invented yet.
Even more crucially, in spring of 1977, the Dead had also just spent the early part of the year with Fleetwood Mac producer Keith Olsen, shaping what would become Terrapin Station, released that July. Olsen, who stayed on the road with the band for late-night/off-day mixing sessions until just before the box’s start, reportedly told the band’s two drummers to tighten up. They did. Though Terrapin wasn’t the hit that their new label boss Clive Davis of Arista Records wanted when he signed the band, Olsen’s influence was arguably even more important, the last piece feeding into perhaps their most legendary tour.
When the curtain rises on Get Shown the Light—on the 12th anniversary of the proto-Dead’s debut at a Menlo Park pizza parlor—the Dead sound ebullient as they crack into Chuck Berry’s “The Promised Land.” Almost inadvertently, the band created a new kind of greatest hits album on every night of the spring ’77 tour, churning out different combinations of classics and concise jams, plus a small handful of new songs. The result was a much-loved conceptual box set available for years exclusively via the Deadheads’ non-commercial alternative distribution network of tape traders. Instead of one mainstream smash, Keith Olsen yielded the band many more underground hits. And counting Get Shown the Light, 19 of the tour’s 30 shows have now been officially released.
Alternating songs led by guitarists Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir, the band virtually never worked from a setlist, though in 1977 they still occasionally repeated songs from show-to-show. Subsequently, *Get Shown the Light *winds up with four versions of Weir’s brand new paranoid space-reggae jam “Estimated Prophet.” On the former, one can very clearly hear the Dead’s creative process unfolding. Over the first three nights, “Estimated Prophet” stands alone, as it had during the previous 15 versions since its February debut, Garcia’s Mu-Tron III pedal giving his quizzical solos a whoa-his-guitar-is-talkin’-to-me tone, surely translatable by some Deadheads. On the last night of the box though—May 9 at Buffalo’s Memorial Auditorium—Weir lets the rhythm tension slack, the band shifts easily and thrillingly into the time of no-time, and (too soon) segue into the decade-old triplet-powered improv vehicle “The Other One.” By the year’s end, “Estimated Prophet” had settled permanently into its new second set slot, its non-ending a portal for the band’s evolving second set jam suite.
The vast majority of the box showcases an improvisation of a different kind, though: the sound of the band changing slowly over time, fixed only temporarily as their 1977 selves. This is especially evident during the shorter songs of the first sets whose arrangements remained fairly constant from year to year. Introducing several albums worth of new material during Mickey Hart’s half-decade touring absence from the band, the band was still adjusting to his return. On Garcia favorites like “Bertha” and the traditional “Peggy-O” (both played all three nights besides Cornell), the band’s groove is in the process of shifting. The former’s barroom jaunt is taken over by a heavier two-drummer backbeat, the latter’s sparse ghost-folk is likewise taken over by a heavier two-drummer backbeat. It’s something of a motif. Elsewhere, as during the rippling and cresting “Mississippi Half-Step” at Boston Garden on May 7, the drummers create an even bigger sound for Garcia to ride.
To Deadheads, each of the four shows of Get Shown the Light has its own personality. Defined predominantly by the shows’ big jams and song suites, all the tiny long-term changes in the band’s complexion find their biggest outlet as they mix with the real-time creative decisions of the musicians. Like Cornell, New Haven’s second set centers around the then-new pairing of “Scarlet Begonias” and “Fire on the Mountain”, a 23-minute combination that opens into a quiet valley, tethered by Mickey Hart’s chattering cowbell and the Allman Brothers-like twin guitar figures Garcia and Weir use to climb out. May 7 in Boston builds a narrative around a rare triple-shot of Garcia songs, as the breezy hippie-jazz groove of “Eyes of the World” gives way to a brief-by-later-standards Mickey Hart/Billy Kreutzmann drum session before finding deep space in “The Wheel” and redemption in “Wharf Rat.” And Buffalo on May 9 (which many Deadheads prefer to Cornell) features a sharp reading of the tricky “Help on the Way”/”Slipknot!”/”Franklin’s Tower” suite, along with the aforementioned “Estimated Prophet” to open a sequence that works its way to one of the all-time great readings of Garcia’s soulful “Comes a Time,” itself capped by an ineffable, lyrical solo that builds from a duet with Keith Godchaux to a screaming crest and back to a tender quiet. Nearly all of it was music to make Deadheads and civilians alike dance and spin and twirl and noodle and get real high, primary purposes of these performances in their original context.
But Cornell really does carry an extra magic. There is the “Scarlet Begonias”/”Fire on the Mountain” pairing to begin the second set, of course, with its upper register Phil Lesh bass slides and the rising harmonized piano figure that extrapolates itself into a jam. But that’s far from all the wonders of Cornell ’77. Nothing supernovas into psychedelic cataclysm ala “Dark Star” or “Playing in the Band” from 8/27/72 (arguably a more worthy Best Ever, released as 2013’s Sunshine Daydream), but that’s okay, too. The music is less like the transportation of an LSD peak and more akin to the long, soft glow of a psilocybin comedown, veritably emitting an everything-in-its-right-place pronoia, where the universe conspires in one’s favor.
Besides driving Dead staples like “Brown Eyed Women” (one of the few songs to survive the two-drummer transition intact), the first set closes with a 16-minute “Dancing in the Street,” the disco’d up Motown cover sounding pretty goofy until, like most Dead songs, it turns into a platform for Garcia’s guitar to converse and weave. The back-half of the show features more of that in a 16-minute version of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away”, an oldie that could sometimes run on autopilot as if Garcia’s guitar were simply reading the intergalactic phonebook. But at Cornell, Garcia luxuriates in bright themes, spinning off multi-colored yarns atop the drummers’ slow roll, the jam eventually flying into a no-time of its own. And what Cornell has especially that the other three shows of the box don’t (nor most of the shows in ’77) is “Morning Dew.” A folk cover the Dead adapted for their first album, the song was likewise the process of gradual improvisation, slowing from the uptempo 1967 arrangement to a dramatic showcase for Garcia, the sentiment of his voice and guitar interchangeable. At Cornell, the solo/jam rises from a troubled lover’s whisper to a life-affirming scream into the void, Garcia’s guitar fanning open into the song’s final refrain.
Hailed as a Deadhead favorite from the first fan-made recordings that began to circulate immediately after the show, Cornell’s legend only really began in the late 1980s, when a number of tapes recorded by former sound engineer (and Deadhead saint) Betty Cantor-Jackson were purchased from a storage locker auction by Deadheads. With the Dead themselves yet-uninterested in releasing archival live material, Deadheads restored and disseminated the recordings for free. The effect of the so-called Betty Boards was as if the band released dozens of high-quality vintage live albums simultaneously, almost unquestionably furthering the success the band achieved with “Touch of Grey” and In the Dark, their only top 10 single and album, in 1987. With its dashing performance, neither too weird nor too loose, Cornell became a dorm room staple. Only recently did the band acquire the master recordings, now able to put the show into the proper Dead canon.
Forty years later, Cornell serves as an artistic achievement in its own right, an assertion that an unofficial live recording could be just as enduring as a studio album, and just as important to the band’s popular success. Cornell ’77 and its surrounding tour now represent an almost Platonic ideal of the band, and almost certainly solidified the way Deadheads thought about the Dead.
And like many classic albums, the band created it under increasing stress. Both Lesh and Kreutzmann, the heart of the band’s rhythm section, wrote in their memoirs about their own isolating substance abuse problems that began during the band’s 1975 hiatus year. Jerry Garcia, as director of the far over-budget and overdue Grateful Dead Movie filmed at the band’s “farewell” shows in October 1974 and finally released in June 1977, had fallen into a heroin habit that would follow him until his death in 1995. In the spring of 1977, in part because of the financial chaos wreaked by the Dead Movie, the band had stripped his salary to $50 a week. He was starting to forget lyrics in ways he never had previously, too, and in the next years his prodigious songwriting output would dwindle, his voice would change, and the Grateful Dead would continue to evolve.
But in May of 1977, the Grateful Dead were just exactly perfect, a state they’d experienced before, and which many Deadheads would swear they never deviated from afterwards. And while those arguments might be valid for some segment of the Dead’s vast audience, Cornell and the spring of ’77 is one of the last places where one might find a consensus among listeners, before the Dead’s music transformed from something vaguely recognizable as mainstream rock into an even-more-secret language. After the tour, drummer Mickey Hart would crash his car, seriously injuring himself, and breaking the particular spell the Dead and Keith Olsen had cast on themselves earlier that year. It would be the last summer without a Dead tour until 1996. But May of 1977 is forever.


With its macabre textures and sinister flows, the fifth installment of CEO Trayle’s Happy Halloween series unspools the rapper’s fears and sorrows into one of the most original rap albums of the year.

HH5

On the ninth track of CEO Trayle’s HH5, the rapper is at war with himself. The song, “Alter Ego 2,” pits the sensitive and reasonable Trayle against his twisted counterpart C4, a voice in his head that moves like he has a death wish. A 2013 home invasion that left Trayle with seven gunshot wounds is the center of this track, and it continues to haunt him, even though he wants to move on. Telling C4 that he has a son and a future in rap now, those days of fear and bitterness are gone. But C4 is set on dragging him back into the mud. “Nigga must think you Superman, them seven shots ain’t teach you nothin’,” he raps with a slithery inflection, a ghoulish echo lingering in the background. The pressure doesn’t go anywhere; the song ends anti-climatically with the promise of money snapping Trayle out of his daze, temporarily pushing C4 to the back of his mind. Most CEO Trayle songs aren’t structured this way, and it illustrates why HH5 is an adventurous and bonkers dissection of the thinking you normally try to bury.
Trayle doesn’t hold your hand on “Alter Ego 2,” which is easily one of the best rap songs of the year. Though C4 is fictional, he’s not cartoonishly evil, just a mix of anger and paranoia. The concept is also strangely funny: He’s pretty much on the same wavelength as Danny talking to his imaginary friend Tony in The Shining. These are the complexities that Trayle is working with for much of HH5, an album where nearly every flow, cadence, and strain of thought is unpredictable. No song can be boxed-in to a single mood or feeling; reality and delusions are blurred.
Trayle is a nomadic rapper by definition. For the first 13 years of his life, he lived in the Bronx, eventually moved to Alabama, and then settled in Atlanta a couple of years later. His music doesn’t have roots in a specific city: You can hear traces of Gucci Mane, Lil Wayne, 50 Cent, Young Thug, No Limit, and Chief Keef, and the latter feels like the inspiration behind his insularity. Ultimately, the lyrics are so personal, the fast-switching flows so irreverent, and the tone so uniquely offbeat, that comparisons to other rappers can’t tell the whole story.
Across HH5, almost every track centers around a different one of his strengths. The album is effective because no single song is a perfect snapshot of his subtleties. On “Mathematician/Blackout,” his delivery gradually evolves over the eerie instrumental; he tiptoes at first, then eventually transforms into a possessed member of the Migos. With “Chainsmoking,” the mood skips all over the place: The hook sounds stressful, a few of the reflections are chilling, and a couple punchlines just sound sleek. He laments his drug dependency on “Chokehold,” running through all of his remedies to the point of hypnosis. “I Love You, But…” has the heartbroken lyrics of a mid-2010s Future mixtape cut (“Bitch, I love you, but we can’t keep doing this/If I don’t got these Percocets, might end up losing it”), but his creeping flow gives the song an uneasy bent.
Despite CEO Trayle’s range, HH5 does have a sense of cohesiveness. It’s mostly because of how he invites us into his psyche, a feeling rarely captured outside of a novel told in first person. Trayle doesn’t write ahead of time, an approach that produces a true stream of consciousness: Timelines converge, unrelated thoughts thread together, and the mood shifts drastically. That lyrical process can feel meandering if it’s not all clicking: For example, on “Craxk Flow,” Trayle’s whispery lilts doesn’t add any flavor to the track, and on “Unusual,” he’s drowned out by an 808-heavy beat that sounds like it’s been churned out by the Quality Control assembly line. But these problems don’t appear that often. The beats, crafted by a collection of familiar, if unheralded names (Stribb, Section 8, and Trauma Tone, who co-produced one of Chief Keef’s masterpieces, “Blew My High”), don’t jump out at you. But they do form the album’s anxious and sinister backbone.
The sound of HH5 brushes up against the melodies of the YSL orbit, the intensity of Chicago drill, and the soul cleansing of the Deep South, but it’s so specific and unconventional that he’s also slightly removed from those influences. Trayle’s nuances come through most clearly on “Pass It On”; he describes a woman who wants him, rapping, “She tryna eat my flesh and bone.” That should have been a throwaway line, but, instead, it’s instantly memorable, putting a freaky spin on an ordinary rap flex. That’s HH5, nothing is ordinary. Trayle unfurls new flows erratically, his fears threaten to oust his conscience, and somehow, like the best horror movies, it’s all deeply serious and darkly funny at the same time.


The Austin garage rockers continue tidying up their sound and refining their songwriting on their third LP, a collection that adds piano and politeness to the mix.

Live Music

Cleaning up your act is tricky for any fuzz-minded garage band, and Austin's the Strange Boys have been weathering that transition a bit roughly. Their demented 2009 debut, The Strange Boys and Girls Club, combined punk and country and even doo-wop into a bold and bird-flipping sound that proved fast wasn't the only way to convey agitated. On last year's Be Brave, they tidied up their sound and refined their songwriting, but lost so much of what made them strange in the first place. And now Live Music takes them further in that direction, adding piano to their guitar-drums-bass-and-sometimes-harmonica lineup. The problem with this trajectory: Every album so far sounds like a transition, pointing to big things but never quite producing them.
The title of the Strange Boys' new album is surely intended to be ironic: Live Music attempts to separate the instruments and create some depth in the production, but it may be the least live they've sounded. Gone is the lo-fi spontaneity and fuck-it-all atmosphere; instead, we get a newfound professionalism that translates to midtempo plods and something like self-reflection. The album is restrained, surprisingly low-key, and-- at its lowest points-- polite. The songs ask for but never demand your attention, then respond with a sociable thank you and good day.
Even so, the Strange Boys' garage remains enormous, with plenty of room to stack boxes of honky-tonk, rockabilly, R&B, and classic rock. That inclusive approach has always been their greatest asset and most distinguishing trait, although for the most part Live Music compacts these competing urges into a very generalized Americana that never takes advantage of their Texas roots. They're not synthesizing disparate styles in the great tradition of Austin, but skimming the surfaces of ideas they once explored more deeply. In this setting, Ryan Sambol's voice, which has been compared to Dylan and any number of Nuggets frontmen, sounds more like Tom Petty, but without the classic rocker's signature deadpan.
When the tempos pick up, so does the album. "Omnia Boa" adapts a train-song chug-a-lug for a subtly menacing groove, and "Punk's Pajamas" is a jumble of guitars laced together with a gangly harmonica theme. "You can study the past or dig the future," Sambol sings on the latter, "but the present will never leave you." It's a sharp insight that hints at the Strange Boys' goals: to incorporate rock history into a sound that isn't defined by nostalgia or innovation for the sake of innovation. They're trying to find a way to live in the moment, which is certainly commendable. As Sambol unravels that theme across these 14 songs, the album grows more endearing, if never quite exciting.


A few years ago, I made the fatal mistake of trying to introduce my\n\ grandparents to the joys of ...

Internal Wrangler

A few years ago, I made the fatal mistake of trying to introduce my grandparents to the joys of rock. I figured, you know, they're pretty hip for old people-- they usually win at bridge, and they drive at night. Perhaps it'd be easier for me to relate to them if we had at least some sense of musical common ground.
So, my grandfather entered into a pact with me: he would listen to a Beatles record if I would sit through the classic 1942 James Cagney Musical, Yankee Doodle Dandy. It seemed like a glimmer of hope, but it wasn't meant to be. The agreement quickly dissipated and my grandfather returned to blasting the "noise" that I listen to. "It all sounds the same anyhow," he said.
Immediately, I was on the defensive. I was prepared to rip my poor, defenseless grandpa to bits with my biting wit and immense store of rock knowledge. But instead, I found myself stumbling for something to say that could explain the differences between rock bands to an 80 year-old man who still considers Lawrence Welk "cutting-edge." Of course rock bands sound different! I mean, to say that the Beach Boys and AC/DC are virtually identical just seems off the mark.
But for the most part, rock is defined by the presence of a few distinct elements-- mainly, the guitar/bass/drums setup. Plus, rock music hasn't traditionally broken out of fairly standard tonalities-- the majority of rock music, especially popular rock music, has always centered around a pretty limited number of chords and scales. And yet, out of these elements have come not only such a wide range of sounds, but a startlingly wide range of quality. Some bands have attained this by honing in on particular aspects of the rock sound-- one could very easily say something to the effect of, "I like band a because of their x." (Example: "I like Don Caballero for their drummer," or, "I like Britney Spears for her full, heaving melodies.")
But the best rock music has very little to do with having one standout element. Not to slip into gestalt or anything, but the best rock truly is that which manages to be infinitely greater than the sum of its parts. It's an inexplicable quality, really, but the most important in rock. It's what sets apart the true playas from the sucka MCs. And Clinic has it in truckloads.
There's nothing particularly "experimental" or ground-breaking about Internal Wrangler. Guitar, bass, and drums are the predominant instruments, with flourishes of organ and tinny drum samples thrown in. There are no microtonal guitar solos or squelching analog synthtones. The true beauty of Clinic is that they have, using a relatively standard rock vocabulary, constructed a truly distinctive, energetic, and magnetically appealing sound.
"Voodoo Wop" opens Internal Wrangler with layers of drums, including bongos, which build upon a slinky bassline and snippets of ambient noise. Coupled with budget reverb that lends a garage-rock aesthetic, the track creates a wall of tension and uneasiness. But it isn't until the record's second track, "Return of Evil Bill," that Clinic unleashes their secret weapon: lead singer Ade Blackburn.
Blackburn's delivery melds the drony expression of Lou Reed with the fragility of Sigur Rós frontman Jón Thór Birgisson and the instability of Thom Yorke; he employs his voice not merely as a vehicle for lyrical expression, but as an entirely separate melodic and percussive element. One of the album's many peaks comes with Blackburn's incoherent ramblings on "The Second Line." As opposed to the "yeah yeah yeah's" that have become such a trite aspect of rock music, the mess of vowels and consonants that Blackburn spits out during the course of the song serve as a visceral outlet for his amazingly expressive voice.
Clinic aren't interested in studio sheen and perfected instrumentation, which is exactly what makes them innovative. In a world of anally retentive college boys who spend hours at the mixing board to assure that every note is flawlessly delivered, in key, and not a 16th of a second off beat, Clinic's degree of spontaneity lends them an air of complete originality. To them, it's not about the production qualities, the change-up, or the nit-picking. It's not about anything other than playing the music itself. And more than anything else, that's what comes through on Internal Wrangler. Their delivery captures a mind-blowing live performance, despite its studio origins.
It's tough to pick a single best moment from the record. Initially, I was drawn to the "Heroin" and "Motion Picture Soundtrack" hybrid, "Distortions." Over a nicely sequenced drum machine beat and hollow organ, Blackburn cries through a straitjacket of vacuum-sealed production, "I want to know my body/ I want this out, not in me," as a lone trumpet releases a shrill yelp in the distance. As the song progresses, the lyrics become more cryptic and moving, culminating with indelible lines like, "You cannot know how often/ I've pictured you in coffins/ My baby in a coffin." As the lyrics grow bleaker, the song takes off, its rhythm increasing slightly as the trumpet returns with unfocused blasts.
The closing ballad, "Goodnight Georgie," is the most sparse track on Internal Wrangler, and one of the best. Relying almost exclusively on a gently strummed guitar, Blackburn's deeply affecting vocals, and occasional flourishes of trumpet, piano, and tambourine, the song brings into focus the band's astounding melodic sense, showcasing one of the most perfectly constructed vocal melodies to grace a record in years.
But the brilliance of Clinic is not relegated to quasi-ballads like "Goodnight Georgie." Sloppy garage punk tracks like "C.Q." and "Hippy Death Suite" crank out raw, clanging noise, utilizing the same elements as their slower, more consonant counterparts, never sacrificing their seemingly inherent sense of dense rhythm and soaring melody.
Many bands spend their entire careers trying to find a signature sound and perfect it. Clinic, on the other hand, have accomplished this feat with their debut full-length. Passionate, visceral, and immensely moving, Internal Wrangler is a landmark achievement not only for Clinic, but for all of rock music. It's the perfect testament to why rock will never die-- there will always be groups like Clinic who cannibalize their influences, pick out the tastiest bits, and reconstruct them into something that is not only completely their own, but embodies all the primal appeal of rock and roll. Internal Wrangler is that kind of album-- so engaging and well-executed, I can't imagine how anyone could not love it. Except, maybe, my grandpa.


Sprained Ankle is a solo, singer-songwriter album, but very little of it would be considered "folky." Julien Baker's extremely intimate songs operate in existential ultimatums—life or death, hope or despair, oblivion or epiphany. These are redemption songs that sound as raw as they feel.

Sprained Ankle

If Julien Baker wasn't cracking something close to a smile on the cover of Sprained Ankle, I wouldn't be certain that it was meant for public consumption. Much of the album was written in isolation—after Baker left Memphis for Middle Tennessee State University, she worked on these songs in a soundproof booth within the campus music building. It was recorded in Richmond's Spacebomb Studios, a destination du jour that birthed lusciously orchestrated countrypolitan records from Matthew E. White and Natalie Prass this year, but these one-mic and one-take songs could have easily been tracked in an MTSU bathroom. Listening to it can occasionally feel like a violation of her privacy.
This voyeuristic appeal plays a minor role in distinguishing Sprained Ankle, though. More important is how Baker operates in existential ultimatums—life or death, hope or despair, oblivion or epiphany. It cuts through the bullshit rather than piling onto it, and its clarity and honesty has instantly helped Baker reach across aisles. She recently opened for Touché Amoré, a post-hardcore band of blazing intensity and extreme devotees that was previously on 6131 Records and more indicative of the music on Baker's label. By the end of November, she'll be joining the tasteful-indie double bill of EL VY and Wye Oak.
Sprained Ankle is a solo, singer-songwriter album, but very little of it would be considered "folky." She professes David Bazan, mewithoutYou's Aaron Weiss, and Ben Gibbard as idols, but her guitar playing bears more of their influence than their vocals. She's a minimalist, playing bassy clusters of melodic thirds, flicking silvery harmonics, palm-muting chords. It's gorgeously recorded and yet, there's still the suggestion that these might've been demos—the scant overdubs of drums or harmonized vocals just drive home how lonely Baker is, that she may have meant these to eventually be full-band arrangements one day.
There are traces of other current acts in her sound—the album title is inspired by a lyric ("Sprinter learning to wait/ Marathon runner, my ankles are sprained") that instantly brings up the similarly ecclesiastical bloodletting of fellow Tennessean Torres, while her thick, close-harmonizing recalls Sharon Van Etten.  But considering her formative listening experiences and punk roots, by the time she reaches the high notes over an aggressively strummed, stock descending chord pattern in "Everybody Does", her most apt comparison might be Dashboard Confessional. Before Chris Carrabba became a caricature of himself and an avatar for emo-as-a-Halloween-costume, there really wasn't much else like him for the hardcore kids. Baker has the same kind of magnetism to get lines like, "I am so good at hurting myself", sung by a crowd of young acolytes. Baker's metaphors can also be similarly excessive and clunky at times ("I know I am a pile of filthy wreckage you will wish you never touched").
Obviously, these songs are about resilience, but Baker acknowledges her willingness to wallow in despair. "Good News" plays on the double meaning of hysterical: "It's not easy when what you think of me is so important/ And I know it shouldn't be so important...I'm only screaming at myself in public/ I know I shouldn't act this way in public." Later, she asks to be swallowed and smothered by the parking lot as you drive away, an echo of Morrissey's operatic curtain call during the 190-proof melodrama of "I Know It's Over".
And like Moz, Baker isn't without a sense of humor about herself. "Wish I could write songs about anything other than death" isn't the sort of thing you say unless you're self-aware. But it is important for people to see someone struggle through some serious shit to get to that point, and if you prefer redemption songs to sound as raw as they feel, Sprained Ankle could bring you to your knees.


The Virginia singer/rapper D.R.A.M. exploded into the public consciousness with "Cha Cha", a song that sampled "Super Mario World", had Beyoncé dancing, and influenced Drake’s "Hotline Bling". The Gahdamn! EP is his second release in a year and it's a breezy sprint through multiple styles.

Gahdamn! EP

The Virginia singer/rapper D.R.A.M. positions himself as a larger-than-life character. On the cover of his new Gahdamn! EP he appears in comic-book form, standing several stories tall and smacking down a Godzilla-type creature. In the middle of the EP is a "Redemption THEME", which sounds like the music you would hear as Mario finally rescues Princess Peach after many unsuccessful tries in other castles. In this narrative, he's a righteous hero who exploded into the public consciousness with a song that sampled "Super Mario World", had Beyoncé dancing, and, directly or not, influenced Drake’s biggest hit since 2013.
This triumphant storyline makes a lot of sense, but since D.R.A.M. has remained under the radar since, it’s a fair question to ask: Can he escape "Cha Cha"? The Gahdamn! EP, much like this year’s previous #1 Epic Summer EP, isn't designed to answer questions. It's a fun, high-energy record that crisscrosses hip-hop, R&B, soul, electronic music, and even rock for about half an hour. Nothing is as immediate as "Cha Cha", but D.R.A.M. has other things up his sleeve. The remix of "$" replaces the original’s minimal piano and reverb with a bombastic horn section that builds around the earworm hook, "this be that shit that make a nigga get off his ass and get money." It’s a swelling, giant moment that seems to fit squarely with the persona D.R.A.M. is selling and the company he’s keeping.
However, he also goes some weird places. On "Wit the Shits", D.R.A.M. resembles no one more than Biz Markie, a punch-drunk presence on the mic who speak-raps his way around a song about doing drugs with a girl who also likes doing drugs. On the sweet, vintage-sounding R&B cut "I’ll Be Back Again" he toes a line between silliness and earnestness, singing the line "I really be contemplating on coming inside of you," punctuated with a "woo!" He recalls (and maybe parodies) the lighthearted bluntness of the most honest "baby-making" soul songs. ("I really be contemplating on making new life with you" is another great line here.)
SZA gives voice to the implied female presence on the other end of the gorgeous "Caretaker", which originally appeared as an interlude on Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experiment’s Surf. This moment, expertly sequenced as the EP’s penultimate track, underlines the artist I think D.R.A.M. wants to be—an outsized musical omnivore who mixes Maxwell-style neo-soul with Too $hort-style frankness. He ends with the mission statement "Okden", expressing a wish to collaborate with Kendrick Lamar ("but it must be special"), touching on working with Rick Rubin, and managing a quick line about his appearnce: "I step in places all dreaded like ‘he must be ghetto,’" which is the closest we get to glimpsing the "real" D.R.A.M. outside of viral hits and the self-conscious weirdness.
Gahdamn! is D.R.A.M.'s second release in the year that feels playful and low-stakes, and it would be nice if he made something that felt more... complete. But even when he doesn’t re-capture the madness of his biggest hit, he ignites a few other fires. Gahdamn! is a breezy sprint through many styles, demonstrating a multi-faceted artist putting all his influences in a basket, shaking them around, and seeing what comes out the other end.


Devendra Banhart and Priestbird's Greg Rogove team up for a record that falls firmly in the "screwing around" category of side projects, with the duo unleashing styled silliness as well as some genuine treats.

Surfing

Corporations nebulously define the word 'goodwill' as the value of a company not captured by its measurable assets: customer lists, public perception, iPhone pics of a rival CEO in women's lingerie. Just like most other assets, goodwill decreases over time, and to many, so too has Devendra Banhart's. "Fuck Enron," Banhart sings on Surfing, his new collaboration with Priestbird's Greg Rogove; it'd be funnier if his public reputation hadn't taken a similar nosedive.
Banhart also sings "Fuck Abe Lincoln" moments later during "A Gun on His Hip and a Rose on his Chest", and follows that song with an "Earth Angel"-style slowdown titled "Chicken Titz", so some of the skepticism here might be warranted. Surfing falls firmly in the "screwing around" category of side projects, with the duo unleashing all manner of styled silliness: "Duck People Duck Man" muses about Trader Joe's hummus; "Adam and Steve" knowingly bites the Strokes' "Hard to Explain" and Wham!'s "Careless Whisper"; "Hamman" vamps rudely about the availability of...ham. "Gun on His Hip" is a sloppy Xerox of "Bo Diddley" and the most likely to offend: In addition to aforementioned gems about Enron and Abe Lincoln, we're treated to "Fuck the president/ Iiiiiiin his asshole."
Whether this sounds stupid will likely depend on your feelings toward Banhart, but regardless, it's more compelling to hear him err on the side of nonsense than hard art: Toss-off "Duck People" can be a decent tune and a bad joke or the reverse, but it's easier to take than last year's "Sea Horse", an eight-minute, multi-part suite about, among other things, sea horses. In fact, SoCal goof fits Banhart pretty well: Think Frank Zappa with (way) less musical chops.
The record does offer some genuine treats. The vaguely Brit-poppy "Theme From Hollywood" seems like a play on Banhart's semi-recent run of publicity, with a chorus that minces up "Too much fun in Hollywood" with "Too much fucking Hollywood." Opener "Crop Circle Jerk '94" offers a loping guitar riff and a sighing chorus, and, importantly, doesn't seem to have much to do with its title. "Lavender Blimp"'s thin, trebly guitars blanket a gallant chorus. "Hamman" is alternately forceful and beguiling. The title track is a drawn-out paean to escapism and rehab ("Surfing/ Never alone/ Surfing/ Your mind is blown"), but its undulating piano chords seem like a hearty nod to Animal Collective.
Alas, Surfing troublingly ends with three plodding failures (including the seven-minute "Sayulita") that feel at odds with the record's fuck-all spirit. Too much of Banhart's bothersome wordplay-- "eat your yeast infection," "chode-alicious"-- falls far south of "having a good time." What Surfing does do well is present a more relaxed Banhart-- a let-the-tapes-roll collaborator with bad-in-jokes and sly pop instincts. Megapuss has the feel of a short-lived side project, but it may ultimately prove a blueprint for the type of left-field, anti-hero path for which Banhart seems suited.


Longtime NYC band suspends its Sonic Youth and MBV worship and makes a record of all pillowy electro-balladry.

Penny Sparkle

There's room for both innovators and curators in indie rock, and if you appreciate the latter, perhaps you've found time for Blonde Redhead over the past two decades. Not all of us could be there to experience No Wave, SST-era Sonic Youth, or My Bloody Valentine as actual recording artists firsthand, but as Blonde Redhead stated on their 1997 album, Fake Can Be Just As Good. The group has always strived to be a gateway to cool and, as such, would probably take it as a compliment to suggest they never sounded like they could've been from anywhere other than New York.
That comes to an end on Penny Sparkle, an album whose quest to evoke a more comfortable point in our collective lives almost qualifies it as chillwave. Yet it's not the sound of "the beach" or "youth" that Penny Sparkle embodies, but rather our last economic boom period, a time that inspired countless chill-out compilations and dubious record deals from labels who swear they found their more radio-friendly Portishead. If you happen to be a music coordinator for Banana Republic, Penny Sparkle is an early Christmas gift. For everyone else, you're left to wonder whether 2010 will produce a more profoundly boring album from a band who actually had a reputation to uphold.
This shift doesn't come wholly unexpectedly-- songs like "The Dress", "My Impure Hair", and "Heroine" leaned toward pillowy electro-balladry, but they served as important contrast between the Loveless worship. Here, it's the only side of the story being told, and it's being told with the kind of BPMs that could knock out a speed addict. This kind of stuff is derisively called background music, and rightfully so, since every member of Blonde Redhead here sounds afraid to step forward. Singer Kazu Makino is almost exclusively merely casting shadows over everything, and transitions from verses to choruses are merely implied. This is not the kind of stuff you need to hire Alan Moulder to mix for you.
Outside of a distorted vocal on "Not Getting There" and a slowly blooming and surprisingly gripping waltz ("Everything Is Wrong"), the arrangements seem done up like hospital rooms, every sound picked for maximum sterility. If you're in a forgiving mood, you can liken it to a chloroformed late-90s Depeche Mode or an honestly failed attempt at the frosted sensuality of Vespertine. If you're in a realistic mood, you'll hear Amedeo Pace carelessly whispering through the soft-focus reggae of "Will There Be Stars" and imagine Roxy Music stuck on a Carnival cruise.
Penny Sparkle could be approached from a cynical perspective, an admission that after 15 years, Blonde Redhead have realized they'll never be called "like Loveless, but better," and have decided to work in a field that isn't exactly brimming with luminaries. But there's a right way (see: School of Seven Bells' Disconnect From Desire) and a wrong way (see: the nearly identical shift of Asobi Seksu's Hush) to reconcile your shoegaze past with downtempo, pre-2k electronic pop: and a big part of the trick is that if you're going to drop the big, whooshy guitars, it helps to remember it was the vigorous Ray of Light that went multi-platinum, not Morcheeba.