A decade into the East Nashville rapper’s latest incarnation, he delves into the dark corners of his mind on an album that’s dense, prickly, and full of jarring personal details.

At WAR With Myself Too

There’s a New York Times item from the winter of 2008: “Waiting (and Waiting) for a Big Rap Moment.” The subject, a then 23-year-old rapper from East Nashville, went by the name All $tar, and he was in a sort of purgatory. He’d landed a regional hit with “Grey Goose,” which popped up across different mixtapes in various different remixed versions, featuring combinations of other Southern stars like Yo Gotti, Lil Wayne, and Young Jeezy. He was signed to Cash Money. But his debut album, Street Ball, was nowhere to be found; in the piece, the rapper chalked up the idea that the record might be a hit to “wishful thinking.” He was recording and releasing sprawling, self-flagellating mixtapes at an impressive clip, but when it came to an above-board, bankable career as a rap star, he was waiting (and waiting).
Street Ball never came out. Before long, All $tar, born Jermaine Shute, retreated into the underground and into his own head. He renamed himself Starlito. In the decade since the Times story, he’s put out more than two dozen releases without ever reaching the commercial heights a marquee spot on mid-aughts Cash Money seemed to offer. But in his defense, he’s rarely even tried for that sort of fame: Shute’s music under the Starlito name is dense and prickly, and it leans far away from pop. His three collaborations with fellow Tennessean Don Trip—a Memphis native who was also briefly crushed by the major-label wringer—as the Step Brothers made him a critical darling.
Those Step Brothers records have grim crime tales and sober screeds about American racism, but they’re buoyed by the levity (and joy) that Lito and Trip evidently feel when rapping together. Lito can be a very funny, very sarcastic writer, but on his solo work—there’s tons, nearly all of it worth at least a cursory listen—he often burrows as deep as possible into the dark corners of his mind. His writing is tinged by paranoia—founded fears, like cars parked out front of his house for hours on end or sordid, unglamorous affairs coming to light. His latest album, At WAR With Myself Too, is similarly unsparing.
WAR is nominally the sequel to a mixtape from 2011 and it is, predictably, contemplative and punishing in mostly equal measure. But there are telling contrasts: Today, Lito leans deeper into his voice, which can turn low and guttural to the point of vocal fry when he’s at at his most exhausted. The strongest vocal performance here is on a song called “Crying in the Car,” where Lito raps, as deliberately as if he were on a therapist’s couch, about starting to play basketball again to block out the weapons that cloud his mind’s eye, about quitting prescription drugs, about the pick-up game allowing him to sweat the alcohol out of his system. Where some confessional rap reads as manic or leaves the listener feeling like a voyeur, Lito has a unique ability to drop jarring personal details in a way that seems to reassure and calm his audience.
Yet Lito’s greatest gift as a writer is not his ability to reveal himself through confession, but to condense everything—confession, threat, fear, sneer—into short, clear, stylish couplets. From the album’s closer, “You Don’t Know the Half”: “I was trapped out with my phone jumping, then I cashed out, told ’em ‘Don’t front me’/I was searching for an early exit, tryna back out ’cause I know they’re coming.” The way he raps the first bar, his nerves seem still. Then he confides that he declined the re-up because he could sense the walls closing in. It’s a shoulder shrug that does a ton of heavy narrative lifting. Like the rest of Starlito’s catalog, At WAR With Myself Too is the sound of a man reckoning with the world and with his own worst impulses—and breaking even at the very least.


The Brooklyn quartet's excellent new LP treats the last four decades of rock music like an amusement park rather than a museum.

Open Your Heart

"huh-HAAWWWACK." I don't know if I transcribed it properly, but Chris Hansell's revolting cough, which appeared midway through the Men's 2011 LP Leave Home, was pretty much everyone's favorite lyric from the record. Understandably so. While Leave Home was often ugly and brutal, it felt almost physically necessary, an allergic reaction to the repression of all things abrasive and loud amidst indie rock's digitized echo chamber. The music itself was bracing enough, but perhaps the biggest shock of all was hearing a Brooklyn band that didn’t carry themselves like they were primarily motivated by a desire to make friends.
But for fans of aggressive indie rock as described in Our Band Could Be Your Life, that's an easy image to project on the Men and, as the band told us in a Rising interview earlier this year, not necessarily a correct one. Now a steady four-piece, they're setting the record straight on Open Your Heart, the title of which is so plainspoken and commonplace it's easy to overlook just how much the band backs it up by maintaining every last bit of visceral power of Leave Home while letting in so many more people to the party. Open Your Heart is both tremendously physical and friendly, knocking you on your ass one second, then immediately helping you back up to put a beer in your hand.
And I can't stress the word "party" enough, because it's difficult to remember a rock record that managed to be this much fun without resorting to cheerleading. Most people I've played opener "Turn It Around" for have remarked on its resemblance to Foo Fighters' introductory salvo "This Is a Call". It's pretty on-point: Mark Perro's vocals sound remarkably similar to those of a young Dave Grohl on this particular song, but what's crucial is how they align in spirit. "Turn It Around" comes off like a tribute to the pure rejuvenating powers of rock'n'roll itself by going nuts with all the things that got you hooked the first time: breakneck Zep riffs! Duel-guitar leads! Drum solos!  It's essentially a teenager's highlight reel, and the giddiness of Open Your Heart comes through in ostensibly meaningless slogans like "I wanna see you write a love song!/ I wanna see you go down!/ I wanna see you when you try so hard!/ I wanna see you when you turn it around!" Compare it to the only lyric of Leave Home's opener "If You Leave…": "I would die."
While there's a surface shift in attitude, Open Your Heart shares Leave Home's uncanny ability to balance reverence and irreverence, enthusiasm, and expertise, treating the last four decades of rock music like an amusement park rather than a museum. "Country Song" isn't even the one song on Open Your Heart deserving of that title (that would be "Candy"), but it shows how their minds work. A gummy tremolo riff, whining pedal steel, and an atypical waltz beat are the raw ingredients, but through the Men's artistic prism, it becomes something akin to a Southern bar band saying "fuck it" and letting their freak flag fly for a lengthy last-call jam.  Likewise, is the title of "Presence" an indication that they're trying out the sort of loose, blues-prog of that particular Led Zeppelin album? With its patient, patient build and tamboura-ish drone, maybe it is, but like most of Open Your Heart, the referential recognition is a bonus rather than the end result.
Of course, the question with Open Your Heart is how it can manage to be such a thrill despite conceivably doing nothing actually new. Not to demystify what the Men do here or downplay the artistry, but these guys strike me as fixers and problem solvers. I hear a band analyzing modes that have just become tired and stodgy and delivering them back running smoother than ever. Liked the coed ragers from the last Fucked Up album, but wish it wasn’t neutered by thousands of overdubs? Have a blast with the all-id caterwaul of "Animal". Wish krautrock ditched the metronomic straitjacket and actually rocked? There’s "Oscillation", which hums more like a motorbike than a motorik, punctuated with blasts of pure MC5 ruckus. Want *Isn't Anything-*styled shoegaze with a backbone? An SST throwback without the razor-thin production? Alt-country without having to deal with Deer Tick's obnoxiousness? Enjoy the midrecord trifecta of "Please Don’t Go Away", the title track, and "Candy".
It isn't diversity for diversity's sake, though-- Open Your Heart is smartly sequenced to metabolize genre and morph like a masterful DJ mix, subtly rationing out its true peaks even while seemingly going full-throttle throughout. After the 1-2 headbutt of "Turn It Around" and "Animal", "Country Song" provides a momentary breather and also a swooning leadup to the Men at their most gorgeous and overwhelming, the tail end of which has "Please Don't Go Away" ushering in Open Your Heart's most traditionalist stretch. But just when it feels like Side B is going to be the Men's straight-up indie rock record, they burn that bridge with the willfully destructive two and a half minutes of "Cube", which then builds another one towards the LP's bright and expansive closers. And while "Ex-Dreams" doesn't overtly sound like a curtain call, there are two points during Open Your Heart's finale where everything drops out but a steady, crowd-pleasing drum break and you can all but imagine Perro happily lending the listener a chance to give themselves a round of applause for being such a good audience.
We haven't talked much about what the Men actually say on Open Your Heart-- about half of its 10 songs are instrumentals or something close. To get to its lyrical center, you'll have to go through "Candy", the one I imagine many might consider the dud or at least the outlier on account of foregrounding acoustic guitars. On the toast-worthy chorus, Perro sings "When I hear the radio play/ I don't care that it's not me." Around the same time I stared hearing "Candy", many of my colleagues were pushing "Radio" as the true standout on Lana Del Rey's Born to Die, a song that uses hearing oneself on the airwaves as a means of self-validation and smiting one's enemies. That sort of thing can only help "Candy" to be misread as being another in a long line of "Left of the Dial"-type, anti-mainstream indie rock lectures-- that its drunk-country shamble recalls the Replacements doesn't hurt either.
But when you consider the lyrics that come immediately after-- "Remember the days I'd shout anything for you to see me/ I could never sing now my voice it rings.../ I just quit my job/ now I can stay out all night long"-- it's clear that like most of Open Your Heart, it's not at all angry and, in fact, quite content.  All four members of the Men are at the border of 30, an age where you have enough critical distance from your youth and life experience to really start to figure out what success means to you. If I read "Candy" correctly, it's about being able to make a living off this thing while being a very loud band with no radio prospects whatsoever on a boutique label: the rewards seem modest by most standards, but once achieved it means everything, the sort of self-sufficiency that's inspired indie bands to form since forever.
Before Leave Home became their first widely available LP, the Men's recorded output consisted mostly of self-made cassettes that they recently gave away for free through their website.  They had to play a little rough if they wanted to be heard.  A year later, Open Your Heart is the sort of record that proves while pain and loss are often viewed as great art's true catalysts, bands like the Men can be inspired by the sort of confidence born of the bills being paid and the boss no longer breathing down their necks. And they're passing on the goodwill to everyone who made it possible: if you bought their t-shirt, came to their show, raved about Leave Home on your Tumblr, or seek to carry on tradition by starting your own band, Open Your Heart is the Men thanking you in the best way possible.


On Shy Layers’ second album, his chill-but-adventurous aesthetic snaps into clearer focus. Highlife, funk, Ethio-jazz, and more all swirl together in every measure of music.

Midnight Marker

JD Walsh’s debut album as Shy Layers, two years ago, came laced with déjà vu. He was hardly shy about his influences: There were hints of Arthur Russell in the vocals, African highlife in the guitars, and Kraftwerk in the sweetly cooing vocoders, but, more than any specific reference, you were left with a sense of familiarity that was hard to place. His balmy yacht-pop sounded like the soundtrack to a half-remembered childhood vacation, maybe, or an AM radio humming in the background of a dream. On first listen, you felt like you already knew it, intimately; you just didn’t know why.
Shy Layers’ new album, Midnight Marker, shares many of its predecessor’s qualities: Between its unique blend of analog synths, rippling guitar melodies, and acoustic drum kit, there’s no mistaking it for the work of anyone else. But it also feels less indebted to its inspirations, like Walsh is getting out from under the shadow of his influences and shaking off the déjà vu. Across all ten tracks, Walsh’s aesthetic snaps into clearer focus—even though it’s an aesthetic heavily predicated upon ambiguity.
As before, Midnight Marker’s breezy melodies and lilting grooves make for a nice, chill listen—good morning-coffee music, cooking music, countryside-drive music. But this is nothing like the studied, stoned remove of anything you’ll find filed under “#chill” on any streaming service. His synths have real bite. His drums, recorded with real sticks on real skins, are enviably muscled. Walsh has said that one of his takeaways from both highlife and funk was that the guitar could function primarily as a percussive instrument, and he continues down that path here, backing up more melodically outgoing riffs and runs with plucked pulse and flicker.
His rhythmic sensibility has gotten more adventurous, too, with slow/fast beats fracturing heavy downstrokes into wiggly explosions of movement. The andante bounce of “Tomorrow” works like a springboard, sending Ethio-jazz keyboard runs somersaulting through the air. In “Gateway,” a quickening-and-slowing tremolo gives a synth lead an elastic quality, as though the music’s innards were being pulled like taffy. “The Keeper” uses its half-speed beat to spin a kaleidoscopic array of finely detailed sounds: fidgety bassline, vocoder, chiming keyboards, and what sound like three or four or maybe even five discrete guitar patterns, including one treated to sound like steel drums. In virtually every measure of music on the album, there is more going on than you can actively focus on. Yet at the same time, there’s an overriding sense of simplicity baked into its playfully wistful melodies and harmonies. In that contradiction between complexity and directness lies much of the music’s subtle magic.
Most of Shy Layers’ music remains primarily instrumental, but he does try out new vocal techniques here. On his debut, he took the unusual step of hiring a guest singer off Craigslist; this time, he says, he invited vocalists whose voices he admired, but who he didn’t know personally, and their contributions—Luther Vandross-like bellowing, airy harmonies, even the occasional country tinge—help extend the music’s expressive reach. Throughout, Walsh’s own voice swims through vocoder and talk box, the omnipresent processing even more intricate than before. But the vocals are rarely the focal point; they’re as swirled as his contrapuntal guitar and synth lines.
It was often difficult to tell if Shy Layers’ debut was the work of a full band or a single musician, and the new one muddies the water even further. Midnight Marker inherits the grand tradition of lone weirdos making humble bedroom pop from the materials at hand. Yet, for a solo project, it also feels unusually ego-free, as though all his inspirations had swirled together in a kind of imagined utopia. It’s a singular vision that contains multitudes.


After several albums of traditional, jazzy folk-rock, the Chicago-based singer-songwriter finds a more instinctive voice.

Deafman Glance

Deafman Glance is road-trip music for a car that keeps breaking down. Taking its name from the title of experimental theater artist Robert Wilson’s 1970 play set in a cryptic, menacing world with no sound, the latest album by Chicago-based singer-songwriter Ryley Walker repeatedly collapses into silence only to pull itself back together again, injured but emboldened. Up until now, the 28-year-old guitarist’s work was some of the most traditional and reverential to be released by his generation of forward-thinking Americana acts; his jazzy take on folk-rock felt like a fogged-up tribute to heroes like John Martyn and Bert Jansch. On his new record, he distances himself from those influences and finds a more instinctive voice.
Walker’s lyrics previously served as a mere complement to his winding, pastoral fingerpicking, but now he writes closer to home, describing the familiar landscapes of Chicago and the self-destructive monotony of life on the road. His music is heavier and more complex than it used to be, the arrangements harsher and stranger. And then there’s his singing: Once a competent and breezy instrument, Walker’s voice has evolved into a throaty speak-sing that sounds depleted, as though it’s been scooped out of itself. These shifts give the record a deeper emotional resonance than anything else he’s put his name to. “I’m not flipping through record bins anymore,” he recently declared. “I’m just making Ryley Walker records.”
As so often happens when we leave our trusted guides, things quickly fall apart. After gentle, hallucinogenic opener “In Castle Dome” and the dusky fusion of “22 Days,” the scenery collapses, the sky darkens, and shit gets weird. “Accomodations” is Walker’s most discomforting composition—a cacophony of bad-trip ambience and loopy imagery (“Nothing to eat/Only a pound of flesh”) that echo between caustic refrains. Placed so early on the album, it’s a sign that Walker trusts his audience to follow him into unfamiliar territory.
This adventurous spirit makes Deafman Glance a coherent mood piece and a confident expansion on 2016’s Golden Sings That Have Been Sung. The multi-part “Telluride Speed” is immediately striking, with Chicago jazz fixture Nate Lepine’s flute guiding the song through its dreamy verses, proggy breakdowns, and stomping, psychedelic coda. It’s not the first of Walker’s compositions to resemble a long stretch of quiet road, but it’s the first that takes you somewhere distinctly surprising. This is a trick the album pulls off repeatedly, without losing its thrill. “My word is divine/I control the weather,” Walker once sang, with a hint of self-deprecation. Deafman Glance marks the moment when his work actually has the power to alter the atmosphere around it.
The force driving these songs—from the exquisite slow burn of “Expired” to the instrumental guitar ramble “Rocks on Rainbow”—is an embrace of the unexpected. Melodies and grooves expand in a way that was previously limited to Walker’s famously experimental live shows. The passages that stand out, like the warped soft-rock guitar solo in “Opposite Middle” and the skittering climax of “22 Days,” have the ephemeral quality of improvisation. These moments add up to an album that feels equally thoughtful and spontaneous, restrained and unpredictable.
“Spoil With the Rest” closes Deafman Glance by pairing Walker’s tale of confronting his limitations with a triumphant swirl of guitars. “I woke up with intuition,” he affirms softly, his voice nearly overpowered by the music. It’s not a straightforwardly happy ending, but it sends a hopeful message: Dig through the crates for long enough and you might discover yourself.


On his first ever collection of original solo songs—a companion piece to his recent memoir—the Wilco leader uncovers himself like never before.

WARM

Near the beginning of WARM, Jeff Tweedy sings, “What I’ve been through should matter to you.” Coming from the tenderest reaches of his soft, broken tenor, the line is raised more like a question than a command. But he has a point. While Tweedy’s songbook in Wilco and Uncle Tupelo has obliquely touched on his personal life, his music often feels more like an outstretched arm, a box of tissues slid across the table, a series of words spoken with the implicit follow-up question, “And how does that make you feel?” Scan Wilco’s audience during the opening notes of any song, and you’ll see the response: tears, hugs, the saddest fist-pumps in rock music. It’s a relationship that Tweedy himself observed a decade back when he promised, “Sonic shoulder for you to cry on/Wilco will love you, baby,” in a song called “Wilco (The Song).”
Now the 51-year-old has finally opened up, and it’s not just a confession—it’s an avalanche. His new book, Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), is one of the most engaging rock memoirs in recent years because it dispenses with the assumed responsibility of a quiet, beloved figure like Tweedy. In contrast with his koans of empathy in Wilco, he writes about his family, fatherhood, addiction, and creative process in charmingly unfiltered prose. A companion to the book, WARM radiates with similar openness. Characters and quotes reappear; old influences become newly apparent; words are not minced. A scene from his time in rehab during the early 2000s is retold in the bleary opener “Bombs Above.” “Suffering is the same for everyone,” he sings in a whisper, relaying the advice that once gave him permission to address his own struggles guilt-free. Much of the album follows suit: a moral guidebook from a songwriter who sings with such compassion that even his simplest advice (“Don’t forget to brush your teeth”) can make your eyes well up.
After hearing Tweedy trade riffs and sprawl out with full bands for so long, WARM’s solo setting feels fresh. This is his most threadbare collection of music. Songs drone on as long as he wants or stop abruptly once he runs out of words. This spontaneity allows Tweedy’s wisdom to feel both casual and all-encompassing: worn-in proverbs that just occurred to him, as he elaborates and pokes holes in his own fatalist tendencies. Textured with acoustic guitar, pedal steel, and brush-stroked drums from his son Spencer and Wilco percussionist Glenn Kotche, WARM follows a legacy of reflective, autumnal works like Neil Young’s Harvest Moon. This is music that, in and of itself, feels autobiographical, touching on sounds and themes that have always characterized his work without sounding like a retread.
In the most harrowing section of his memoir, Tweedy writes that Wilco’s impressionistic 2004 album A Ghost Is Born was sculpted during the throes of opiate addiction as an attempt to leave a comprehensive self-portrait for his sons in his absence. Written from a more stable perspective, WARM mirrors that eulogistic process with a more straightforward, less metaphorical bent. “Sometimes we all think about dying,” he sighs in “Don’t Forget.” “Don’t let it kill ya.”
Tweedy thinks about dying a lot on WARM. The recent death of his own father casts a cloud over the record, stopping the clock as he looks at an old photograph during the sparse, slow-pulsing “How Hard It Is for a Desert to Die.” For every stark expression of grief, there’s a search for hope, embracing the inevitability of losing the things that come to define us. “If I die,” he instructs in “From Far Away,” “Don’t bury me/Rattle me down like an old machine.” He treats these songs similarly, like weary vehicles for moving on. In “Let’s Go Rain,” he forecasts the apocalypse as a karmic “act of love,” while the title track defines the afterlife as something that glows within the people we leave behind. None of these ideas are new. It’s his acceptance, his understanding, that feels pivotal.
The album’s most revealing moment is also one of Tweedy’s best songs to date. “Having Been Is No Way to Be” is a statement of self-affirmation that not many songwriters live to make, addressing how Tweedy’s sobriety affected some of Wilco’s fair-weather followers. “Now people say,” he sings to a slow, sturdy beat, “‘What drugs did you take?/And why don’t you start taking them again?’” He’s referring to the oft-discussed shift in Wilco’s music during the mid-2000s, when they stopped aiming to be the decade’s most adventurous American rock band and starting sounding, well, a little more like the Eagles. Here, Tweedy draws a line in the sand. “They’re not my friends,” he continues, “And if I was dead, what difference would it ever make to them?” Alive and inspired, WARM is a different type of reinvention—as daring as Wilco’s early landmarks but more subtle and sustainable. He’s not trying to break your heart. He just is.


The deluxe reissue of Ryan Adams' most beloved solo album highlights that what we loved most about this album isn't misery; it is nostalgia, and fondness for an earlier version of ourselves.

Ryan Adams: Heartbreaker (Deluxe Reissue)

Heartbreaker (Deluxe Reissue)

Remember when Ryan Adams released Heartbreaker* *and confused diehards wondered what happened to the *real Ryan Adams? You know, the lovable fuck-up who made alt-country sound dangerous, *lived the words of "Waiting to Derail" and needed no assistance breaking his own heart? If this scenario sounds too remote, just sub out *Heartbreaker *for “basically *anything *Ryan Adams has done in the 21st century.” Of course, none of those things have achieved the sterling reputation of *Heartbreaker, which makes the album seem like the least interesting choice for a reissue: *aren’t *Rock N Roll and 29 *better conversation-starters? But maybe Adams isn't expecting another round of exaltations with this deluxe repackage: In fact, bundling it with a bunch of wearable merch (i.e., "exclusive 3-inch Heartbreaker patch") might be more a sly commentary on its supposed “authenticity”—even it still towers over Adams’ solo work, it’s no more *real *than 1989**.
The myth of *Heartbreaker *as the realest breakup album ever starts to fall apart the minute you press play: it is certainly the saddest record to contain the line, “a mouth full of cookies,” however. “(Argument with David Rawlings Concerning Morrissey)” presents Ryan Adams as what he’s repeatedly proven to be in the years since—a hilarious trivia nerd and musical advocate. It’s an important part of what makes Ryan Adams Ryan Adams, and the source from which we were given *1984, *the Extra Cheese EP, his long-rumored banjo and mandolin cover of *Is This It?, *and his prog-metal odyssey *Orion. *However, it’s the first and maybe last time he could be that guy without feeling like he was *trying *to make a point. Back then, there was no construct of Ryan Adams, and this presumably *in media res *debate snippet was an effective way for him to establish an identity on his solo debut.
More importantly, it’s an argument concerning Morrissey—not Gram Parsons, not Bob Dylan, not Paul Westerberg. The influence of the Smiths would fully manifest on Adams’ Love Is Hell, and the inclusion of a “Hairdresser on Fire Jam” demo in the bonus material here suggests that maybe his maligned bedsit opus has more in common with *Heartbreaker *than we think. Either way, it’s an important artistic allegiance, linking Adams and Morrissey as the rare artists who can recognize the inherent absurdity in exchanging performative sadness for adoration.
After all, a truly inconsolable song couldn’t possibly be given a title like “To Be Young (Is To Be Sad, Is To Be High).” On it, Adams appears more wise and empathetic than young and sad; note that it’s sung in the past tense. Like so much of *Heartbreaker, *its focus isn’t misery, but nostalgia—its inclusion during the opening credits of Old School, a comedy suffused with longing for a simple forms of self-destructive behavior, made its flexibility all the more apparent. It’s a song that Adams plays at nearly every one of his shows, not to commiserate with the crowd, but to celebrate a past time when its linear logic made all the sense in the world. Think of it as Adams’ “Rubber Ring,” an open invitation to fondly remember that time when you relied on a fucked-up guy like him to save your life.
The introduction is an outlier, though—would Heartbreaker be held in the same regard if it was just wistful folk-rock like “My Winding Wheel?” Even though “AMY” outright names the supposed inspiration behind *Heartbreaker *and is the most striking stylistic divergence from Whiskeytown (prior to the experimental Pneumonia), an album of weeping, floral psychedelia might have been too much, too soon. Though Adams claims that the titling of *Heartbreaker *was a last-second decision made while staring at a Mariah Carey poster, *Heartbreaker is Heartbreaker *for the times it allows the listener sees themselves in its own album cover—prostrate, staring at the ceiling, half-hoping that cigarette drops onto their bed so they can feel something different.
Despair alone never accounted for *Heartbreaker’*s unusual resonance. It isn’t the most dire or confessional account of bad romance; its language is not the most clever. There are all kinds of odd tangents, character is frequently broken, and it’s probably a few songs longer than it really needs to be. *Heartbreaker *isn’t a tidy narrative or song cycle about relationships anyways; otherwise, how to explain the inclusion of the barroom brawl “Shakedown on 9th Street” or the Dylan goof “Damn Sam (I Love a Woman That Rains)?” Even “In My Time of Need” isn’t actually about *Ryan Adams’ *time of need and certainly inapplicable to a broken relationship between an up-and-coming rock star and a music publicist; it’s pretty much a Whiskeytown-style character study about rural financial distress (“I work these hands to bleed, cause I got mouths to feed/and I got $15 hid above the stove”).
No, the power of this album, and the reason it reminds its devotees too much of him, or her, or a past version of themselves, can be found in “Come Pick Me Up.” “Come Pick Me Up” is the that ends most of Adams' concerts these days and probably will for the rest of his career. On a basic level, it could slot alongside petulant, scorned-dude screeds like “Song for the Dumped” or Kanye West’s “Heartless;” it is about a woman who seemingly fucked him over. But the most important lyric isn’t the one about this is the kind of person who would steal your records and screw your friends without the slightest remorse. It’s “*I wish you would”—*the point of “Come Pick Me Up” is not to marvel at this person’s monstrosity and project it outwards. It’s to see yourself in Ryan Adams and remember every single time you’ve allowed yourself to get fucked over and even worse, sought it out.
In every repetition of “I wish you would,” Adams underlines not just the appeal of Heartbreaker, but most breakup albums in general. On some level, they make no evolutionary sense: life is hard enough, why would anyone be drawn to music that lets you relive your most miserable moments? Yeah, there’s jokes and asides and times where Heartbreaker rocks, but those defense mechanisms malfunction on “Call Me on Your Way Back Home” when Adams sings, “oh, I just wanna die without you” and it sure as hell sounds like the truth.
Maybe you wanna die. But you didn’t. And that’s OK. Like Morrissey, or really any singer-songwriter worth hearing on the topic, Adams doesn’t see the occasional heartbreak as a terminal fate, but an essential part of the human condition. In closing one of his performances captured on 2015’s Live at Carnegie Hall**, Adams yells, "THAT’S IT! YOU’RE SAD NOW!!! NOW YOU’RE SAD!!! EVERYBODY’S SAD NOW! YEAAAAHHH!!!!"  Everyone gets the joke. “Come Pick Me Up” isn’t miserable; like Heartbreaker, it’s actually enjoyable knowing you can hit bottom for 50 minutes and still appreciate the view.


Bruce Springsteen's work this decade first played up to listeners' notions of post-9/11 recovery, then conjured up bleak visions of Bush-era America; here the Boss settles into some sense of contentment on Working on a Dream, as if that Dream had already been achieved.

Working on a Dream

Working on a Streak is more like it. First, there's that Golden Globe for "The Wrestler", then a performance at the We Are One concert at the Lincoln Memorial, a handful of Grammy noms for a two-year-old song, a greatest-hits package exclusive from Wal-Mart, this weekend's Super Bowl halftime show, and a just-announced reissue of Darkness on the Edge of Town. So that Oscar snub can't sting too much. In the middle of a pretty amazing month, Bruce Springsteen is releasing his 16th studio album, one whose title sounds more like a campaign slogan than a rock record. Maybe that's intentional: After spending much of this decade playing up to listeners' notions of post-9/11 recovery and conjuring up bleak visions of Bush-era America, the Boss settles into some sense of contentment on Working on a Dream, as if that Dream had already been achieved. In this regard, the album sounds like the final installment of a trilogy he began with The Rising in 2002 and continued with Magic in 2007-- ignoring Devils & Dust, which isn't hard to do, and We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, which remains his best and most freewheelin' late-career album.
Tracing his personal-- and, arguably, our national-- mood from wounded to outraged to somewhat contented, these albums are linked by Springsteen's ongoing collaboration with producer Brendan O'Brien, whose work has grown increasingly capable and adventurous with each release. Despite removing any trace of regional shuffle from these songs, O'Brien puts them across like the proficient bar band they are, roaring through "My Lucky Day" and "What Love Can Do" with professional abandon. O'Brien erects an impressive 1960s wall of sound on "Surprise, Surprise", with its carnivalesque organ and girl-group backing vocals, and in general he streamlines the E Street Band's sound to highlight one central melody or riff. Opener "Outlaw Pete" rides an ascending/descending theme not dissimilar to KISS' "I Was Made for Loving You". Strings protrude from the song at odd angles, Springsteen's vocals echo through what sounds like a deep valley, and Roy Bittan contributes a hyperactive organ as the song spins a yarn about an outlaw so vague he sounds only theoretical. The track is overstuffed with ideas, and at eight minutes, it's a strange, ineffective opener, setting a curiously detached mood for an album that is, for Springsteen, typically engaged.
Of his three E Street Band releases of the 00s, Working on a Dream is the one that most sounds like a solo album, indulging a range of ideas that reveal Springsteen as still musically curious and more than willing to play around with his sound. Another American rock saint-- Brian Wilson-- shows up in the walking bass line on the title track as well as in the Pet Sounds percussion and ba-ba-ba's of "This Life". The scribbly guitar on "Life Itself" recalls the Byrds on "Eight Miles High" more than Nils Lofgren or Steve Van Zandt, providing a tense backdrop for Springsteen's pleading lyrics. The garbled-blues "Good Eye", one of the album's weirdest tracks, ratchets Springsteen's distorted vocals to a yelping beat and electrified banjo, but like his recent one-off download "A Night With the Jersey Devil", it feels like merely a demonstration of studio technique.
Working on a Dream works hard on sound, but sleeps on actual songs. "Queen of the Supermarket" may be the worst thing he's ever written, an overly symphonic ballad about crushing on the stock girl. It's sweet, but there's something about the high-flying strings and the intensity of the imagery ("A dream awaits in aisle number two") that suggests parody. The checkout beeps that help the song out to its car certainly don't dispel the wink. "At night I take my groceries and drift away," Springsteen sings, but here his working-class identifications sound a little condescending and inappropriate. Just as "57 Channels (And Nothing On)" failed to convince anyone that Springsteen watched a lot of TV, "Queen of the Supermarket" can't persuade listeners that he does his own grocery shopping. Now that his big dream has come true, Springsteen doesn't seem to know what to do with himself. So he's trying to do everything.


The new reissue of a landmark album of 1970s funk restores the Los Angeles group’s reputation as multi-cultural pop savants and unstoppable improvisers.

War: The World Is a Ghetto: 50th Anniversary Collector’s Edition

It was a simple idea: Combine the everyday music of Long Beach and nearby Compton with the ascendant sounds of funk, soul, and R&B, and shape it all into something that would sound right coming out of a radio anywhere in the United States. By the time they released The World Is a Ghetto in 1972, War had the levels dialed in perfectly.
The Long Beach party band had spent 1969 banging around Los Angeles County playing heavy R&B as the backing band for future NFL Hall of Famer Deacon Jones when producer Jerry Goldstein caught their live show. He thought they’d be a perfect match for English singer Eric Burdon, who was just beginning his solo career following the dissolution of the Animals. The interracial band—Burdon and harmonica player Lee Oskar were white, the rest of the band was Black—had a hit by mid-1970 with “Spill the Wine,” a talky pastoral funk song that set Burdon’s Kinks-indebted lyrics against a snapping rhythm. The singer would leave the group following 1970’s regrettably titled The Black Man’s Burdon, but the spirit of multicultural brotherhood—and the freedom from genre expectations it would provide—remained. Working closely with Goldstein, War became both a heavyweight live band and a sophisticated pop machine, slicker than Sly and the Family Stone and more down to earth than Funkadelic.
Five decades later, War are primarily remembered for 1975’s “Low Rider,” an all-time great song that’s been licensed so frequently and decontextualized so thoroughly it now feels like something of a novelty. Rhino’s new reissue of The World Is a Ghetto—the best-selling album of 1973, with a single that shipped a million copies—not only restores War’s reputation as some of the savviest and most omnivorous pop composers of the 1970s; its bonus disc of in-studio jams suggests they might have rivaled Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters as one of funk’s greatest groups of improvisers.
The World Is a Ghetto was originally intended to be a stage play that War percussionist Papa Dee Allen was developing about a character named Ghetto Man. One night, while the band was jamming in their Long Beach warehouse, he hit upon a revelation, as co-founder and keyboardist Lonnie Jordan recalls in the reissue’s liner notes. They’d been playing around in Malibu and Santa Monica, and had seen firsthand that wealth and privilege didn’t necessarily guarantee a great life. In their view, Ghetto Man wasn’t any different from the guy with the beachfront property who still struggled with addiction. And that changed how they saw the world: “The world is a ghetto.”
This was only one year after Marvin Gaye reached toward a better world on What’s Going On, a year after Isaac Hayes stepped out with Shaft. Singing about oppression and personal confusion, and finding inspiration and power in Blackness, was clearly artistically and commercially viable. But War were more dedicated to interracial harmony than Black liberation. Their debut album depicted two disembodied forearms connected at the bicep, one Black and one white, each flashing a W sign. “Our mission was to spread a message of brotherhood and harmony,” the band said.
For them, to declare that the world was a ghetto wasn’t a political statement, it was a reminder of the universal nature of suffering—or, as drummer Harold Brown once put it, rich people’s toilets clog up, too. “Wonder if I’ll ever find happiness,” B.B. Dickerson sings on the title track. He draws out his verses over glowing stacks of soul harmonies, singing like he’s measuring the distance to a future he can almost glimpse. When the chorus comes, his voice hardens and the melody flattens into a simple statement of the present: “Don’t you know that it’s true, that for me and for you, the world is a ghetto.”
While their music isn’t as emphatic in its politics as some of their contemporaries’, their emphasis on a collective brotherhood of man allowed them to recontextualize virtually all music as street music. Doo-wop harmonies, marching-band cadences, Latin percussion, country guitar, banging salsa piano, front-porch harmonicas: If it can be played by one person outside of a studio, it has a home on The World Is a Ghetto. “Where Was You At?” is an earthy, shuffling funk song in the Meters’ lineage that, appropriately enough, began life as a jam on the New Orleans band’s home turf at Tipitina’s. But as Lee Oskar honks away at his harmonica over a bed of handclaps, the song shifts subtly into mid-’60s R&B and Chicago blues, drifting in the direction of the Capitols’ “Cool Jerk” as it crests. “Beetles in the Bog” struts at a parade pace, with Funkadelic-style gang vocals, steel pans, and snares all moving in sync over Dickerson’s cyclical bassline; a flourish of prog-rock keys lights up the song’s bridge.
While the fluid nature of the music makes The World Is a Ghetto feel loose and spontaneous, it’s often meticulously crafted. On the set’s bonus disc of alternate takes, the band works out different approaches to “The Cisco Kid,” the album’s opening track, which moves atop a chassis of conga, kick drum, and bass. One attempt is dismissed as sounding too much like “Shaft,” leading someone in the band to suggest they call their version “Shift.” The version that made the record is one of the era’s definitive rhythms. Jordan matches the groove with his keyboard, which he runs through distortion, and picks out notes one by one. Together, it feels like a thousand little stipples of percussion ducking effortlessly in and out of one another, a minor miracle of precision played with the good-time vibes of a few guys jamming in the sea breeze at Bluff Park on a Saturday afternoon.
“City, Country, City,” which was originally composed for the 1973 film A Name for Evil, shows War at their most conceptually ambitious. As the title suggests, the song rambles back and forth between a cowpoke country-gospel mode and a long funk jam played at freeway speed. The former might be the album’s best moment. It feels bathed in the glow of a long sundown, with Oskar playing a slack harmonica line over clip-clopping drums. When the band bursts into pacier sections, Charles Miller’s reverb-drenched saxophone takes the lead. He doesn’t match the battering of the rhythm section so much as smooth out their chopping, gesturing toward overblowing without ever quite getting there. It’s a strange mix—it makes the song feel plump at the edges and thin in the middle; one wonders what a more active sax player might have done with it.
While The World is a Ghetto is a collective triumph, the individual band members’ personalities come through more strongly on the jams collected on the bonus LP. While “L.A. Sunshine” would eventually find its way to 1977’s Platinum Jazz in dramatically different form, the embryonic version here is a showcase for Jordan’s piano playing. In a flourish, he moves from an absurdly fast and mechanically precise salsa rhythm into a solo that flits through R&B triplets, hammered chords that nearly predict house music, and an eloquent run of notes that begins as Debussy and resolves into the blues. Behind him, Dickerson’s bass and Howard E. Scott’s guitar chase one another around a palindrome of a riff, nearly oblivious to the rest of the band. It’s an incredible moment, more inventive and sprightly than anything that made its way onto the final album. Jordan lets loose again on “Lee’s Latin Jam” with a waterfall of notes, while on “War Is Coming,” the whole band generates a hazy desert blues and basks in its heat.
The reissue package also includes three LPs of side-long tracks that stitch various jams, work sessions, and studio chatter into more or less coherent chronologies of how each of the original album’s six songs came together. While it’s interesting to follow the album’s evolution, and the production makes the narrative flow of each song’s history surprisingly easy to engage , it’s hard to imagine anyone who isn’t already living deeply inside of these grooves returning to them after a preliminary listen.
War made themselves singular by celebrating the many cultures that surrounded them—not synthesizing diverse inspirations into a perfect union so much as giving it all equal space to shine. The World Is a Ghetto is a landmark album of ’70s funk, one that deserves to be remembered alongside the best work of the Meters, Parliament-Funkadelic, and Sly and the Family Stone. The group’s signature sound was amorphous, and the depth of their impact isn’t as obvious as that of those bands. But the syncretic funk they forged, which reached its pinnacle on The World Is a Ghetto, is a personal and musical realization of the social harmony they spent their career fighting for.


The young Atlanta rapper’s debut mixtape finds a cloudy and economical mood and stays there, but it’s Carti’s magnetic confidence that turns just enough into plenty.

Playboi Carti

Whatever Playboi Carti lacks in substance, he makes up in sheer audacity. For the better part of two years, he kept his fans waiting for a full-length project, held over by a handful of songs, guest verses and previews. “Less is more” is the Atlanta-native’s mantra, and the arrival of his eponymous debut is only further confirmation.
Playboi Carti is an exercise in efficiency—more beats, less words in number and variation. It’s an exaggerated take on an old formula that all but guarantees his tracks will become earworms, which they do. Verses and hooks smash into each other with repetition, as his signature ad-libs command space in a way not even Jim Jones or Young Jeezy could’ve imagined. Here, they aren’t just highlights or devices to advance the song’s conversation; they’re the main attraction. Ad-libs become parts of hooks, outlines of lyrics and, sometimes, simply just are the lyrics.
When Carti does rap, his syllables stack on themselves, and the rhymes seem to float between the production rather than on top of it. His punctuated flows discard of conventional song structure to allow his beats to breathe—“Location” becomes a celestial trip, and “No. 9” feels exotic and regal. Showing up for lyricism is a mistake when this is all about atmosphere. Nothing is heavy-handed or contrived. When he slurs “this is not pop, this some rock” nearly 30 times on “Half & Half” or rhymes most of “Other Shit” with the name of the song, it’s simply an economical method of getting from one “Yuh” and “Ooh” to the next. But Carti is tactful in discerning where and when he can get away with letting the instrumental ride and when he needs to rise to the occasion.
Earlier this year, he attributed some of his tape’s delay to his search for a producer that could help him develop “Carti’s sound.” It seems he’s found it in Pierre Bourne who helps the rapper balance cloud rap with straight up bangers. Playboi Carti’s immediate standout comes only two songs in with “Magnolia” (previously known as “In My Sock”). It rumbles infectiously, accented by a summery flute, as Carti gives a charismatic performance on par with his 2015 breakout “Broke Boi.” They find the magic again on “woke up like this*” with an able assist from Lil Uzi Vert whose natural energy upstages his frequent collaborator.
Though Uzi and Carti have both been tagged with the “mumble rap” descriptor, Carti is only a rapper by loose definition. He’s decidedly more interested in a rapper’s lifestyle and fashion a la his mentor A$AP Rocky (who offers a show-stealing verse on “New Choppa”) than he is the raps themselves. Music is a means to an end, but in this overcrowded landscape, it’s Carti’s magnetic confidence that turns just enough into plenty. Even when he seems more interested in his hiccuped “WHAT” ad-lib than the bars themselves, curiosity and intrigue are reason enough to keep listening.
The hype that surrounded Playboi Carti before and after its release is a testament to the near mythological anticipation it generated and sustained. Minimal and on brand, the rollout utilized everything good about rap’s internet: leaked snippets scattered across YouTube and Twitter functioned as free and continuous marketing; Soundcloud informed the aesthetic and kept it relevant while the continued indecision around the release took on a meme-like life of its own. Outside of the internet, Carti signed a deal, earned a few high profile co-signs, and kept up appearances in the fashion world. The mixtape is ultimately part of a larger Carti branding campaign which has boosted his star considerably. But when it came time to finally put it out, he wound up sharing a release date with Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. The competitive nature of rap rendered the two inadvertent rivals, but Carti isn’t the nemesis here—he’s the comic relief.
Playboi Carti feels like a break from life, the soundtrack to a mindless good time. Women, money and all types of drugs are everywhere, but mostly Carti’s just flexing so that his listeners can do the same. That this mixtape wasn’t totally eclipsed by King Kendrick speaks to the perpetual draw of lifestyle rap and personalities that transcend rap. People don’t just want to listen—they want someone to model themselves after. But perhaps more importantly, Carti reflects the demand for music that exists simply because it can, music that lends itself to some much-needed escapism.


The fourth album from the literary Detroit rock band Protomartyr is sinuous and allusive, dense and at times dizzying. It contains a constant sense of unease about the world and its future.

Relatives in Descent

In the middle of Protomartyr’s fourth LP, Relatives in Descent, frontman Joe Casey’s phone rings. It’s a telemarketer named Lazlo dialing in from Bangalore, or maybe Mahabalipuram. Most of us would probably send Lazlo straight to voicemail, but then again, Casey isn’t most of us. So he and his faraway friend get to chatting. “All calls are answered,” Casey explains. “I just wanted to talk.”
Here’s a non-exhaustive list of topics broached on Relatives of Descent: talking horses, night-blooming cacti, the Flint water crisis, the glum sterility of gentrified neighborhoods, the long-awaited irrelevancy of garbage-brained Bukowski acolytes. I could go on; Casey certainly would. Few bands offer up quite as much text as Protomartyr do. The Detroit foursome’s fourth album is, like every Protomartyr album before it, a loose-lipped, allusion-loaded saga, the sound of a scarily smart dude plunging the vast recesses of his mind, looking to make some sense of an increasingly senseless world. Recorded in Los Angeles with producer Sonny DiPerri (Avey Tare, Dirty Projectors), Relatives is probably the least Detroit-centric Protomartyr release yet. Though the band has often bristled at the notion that they’re strictly a Motor City concern, past albums have found them conjuring a kind of half-mythical Detroit with burned-out buildings and street-corner sages.
Most of Relatives was written in the wake of the 2016 election, with the abhorrent situation in nearby Flint never far from Casey’s mind. Direct references to Trump aren’t exactly easy to pluck from the maelstrom of Relatives, but there’s an overarching sense of unease about the future—“dread 2017-18, airhorn age, age of horn-blowing,” he offers on the especially rambly “Here Is the Thing”—permeating the album’s every dark corner. Casey has said his lyrics here are largely concerned with the unknowability of truth, the cloud of uncertainty that seems to hang over everything in this era of fake news and real shit.
But the so-called Paris of the Midwest still casts a shadow over the proceedings. “Windsor Hum” sees Casey gazing wistfully across the Detroit River into Canada, wondering how much better things really are in the country to the north. But the temporary relocation to Tinseltown seems to have widened Casey’s perspective. “Caitriona” finds him touching down in County Galway—he’s been reading Máirtín Ó Cadhain—while snarling closer “Half Sister” flits from ancient Palestine to a South Carolina racetrack to a northern Michigan horse farm.
This expansive lyrical tack is met more than halfway by Casey’s bandmates. The grisly, subterranean propulsion of Protomartyr’s early records now sports more twists and turns than Detroit’s mazy Outer Drive. Guitarist Greg Ahee’s roundabout leads buzz and flash of neon on wet pavement. But wherever the band can get a word in edgewise, they add new wrinkles. Flickers of strings, dead-of-night synth washes, stereo-panned drum work from Alex Leonard—it’s all in there somewhere, each element elbowing its way into the fray as these songs double-back on themselves. Lyrical motifs recur all the while; Relatives is somehow an even windier affair than 2015's byzantine The Agent Intellect, the band matching Casey tangent-for-tangent.
Protomartyr songs don’t always contain a clear beginning, middle, and end. Casey is less interested in story than backstory, in explaining exactly how his subjects became so fucked. When it works, it’s brilliant as ever; when it doesn’t, it can feel unknowable, disjointed, a series of red herrings taking the approximate shape of a song. And by inching away from the Detroit-centered world-building of previous Protomartyr records, Casey’s sacrificed a certain amount of the thematic consistency that’s helped past records hold their center; these songs here, for better and worse, splay out all over the map.
It’s been said that Protomartyr records don’t really click until after the fifth or sixth listen. The same is no less true here; it takes time to catch every reference. But every second song takes a sharp left each time Casey takes a badly-deserved breath, and Relatives gets to feeling a bit muddled. A couple of Relatives’ more straightaway rockers lose a little Casey in the mix, while the bordering-on-proggy constructions of some of these tunes can feel scattershot. The band’s tenacity has always made for a solid counterpoint to Casey’s frequent lyrical detours. On Relatives, they’re nearly as prone to digression as Casey, and the effect can be dizzying. Closer “Half-Sister” is up there with Protomartyr’s finest: a rumbling bassline, a gnashing guitar lick, Casey gone intercontinental. It works so well largely because the track doesn’t attempt to outdo Casey, egging him on without crowding him out.
On the one hand, bless Protomartyr for making records like these: wordy, sinuous, all but designed to buck the modern one-and-done listener. Until you take the time to pore over Relatives at a near-forensic level, the whole thing's likely to feel a bit intimidatingly dense. But there are no casual Protomartyr fans—Protomartyr fans, as a rule, are not the casual type—and Relatives is destined to be the favorite of some diehards. For those whose interest in the band stops just short of obsession, there’s something to be said for the punchiness of the earlier, more compact work. As long as the world keeps crumbling around us, though, Protomartyr won’t want for material, and Relatives is another solid entrant in a catalog well worth poring over. Still, it’s easy to come out of the wildly exhaustive, borderline exhausting Relatives feeling a little like poor Lazlo, your ear talked clean off your head.


In her soundtrack to the choreographer Wayne McGregor’s DNA-inspired dance work, the post-footwork producer moves from her serpentine IDM toward a new style informed by ambient minimalism.

Autobiography

Jlin’s Autobiography is a contradictory beast. It is, technically, the Gary, Indiana, producer’s third album, following 2015’s Dark Energy and 2017’s Black Origami, although the label and the artist herself are framing it as a collaborative work that sits outside of this timeline. Meanwhile, the title refers not to Jlin’s life but to that of Royal Ballet choreographer Wayne McGregor, who commissioned Autobiography to soundtrack his high-concept dance piece of the same name.
Perversely, though, in soundtracking someone else’s intimate work—Autobiography uses McGregor’s DNA to select the dance sequences the audience will see—Jlin has produced a record that serves as a recap of her whirlwind career, one that has seen her trade the footwork-indebted beats of her early productions for an intricate, pan-global drum funk that nods to the serpentine spirit of IDM without bowing to its often dry delivery.
Autobiography was recorded at the same time as Black Origami, and it is little surprise that that album’s crisp mixture of acoustic-sounding instrumentation (leaning heavily on the sounds of the Indian subcontinent) and drum-machine fury returns periodically. “Kundalini” rides in on the evocative drone of a sārangī, with stirring string lines completing the sense of cinematic adventure, while “Blue i” uses a percussive palette straight out of Black Origami, all galloping tabla drums, echoing claps, and gliding shakers. Best of all, though, is “Carbon 12,” a song full of air, flight, and fancy, which takes a circular marimba melody and straps it to Jlin’s rocket-fueled funk, creating the first Jlin song I can imagine a drum circle jamming to as the sun sets on a Goa beach.
At other times Autobiography feels like more of a throwback to Dark Energy’s coal-black menace, thanks to the presence of sawtooth synth lines—“Mutation” and “Permutation,” in particular, seem to share the same rasping patch—diamond-hard bass drum smack, serrated hi-hat shuffle, and, on lead single “The Abyss of Doubt,” chilling vocal samples. Listening to these songs is akin to enjoying latter-period Aphex Twin, where the pleasure lies not so much in hearing an artist break new ground but in appreciating a producer in total command of his or her element. The drum programming is so well worked here, like Squarepusher raised on footwork and trap rather than jungle and techno, that it makes the impossible feel graceful and the contorted serene, much like ballet itself.
But the most revealing side of Autobiography comes in the handful of songs where Jlin leaves her back catalogue behind in favor of new pastures, delivering music of open spaces, hazy recollection, and the lurking peril of nature, rather than urban intensity and horror-stricken dreams.
In “Anamnesis (Part 1),” a shifting, unresolved piano melody worthy of Brian Eno’s Ambient series dissolves into a rainforest haze, the odd piano note breaking through the sonic gloom like sunbeams through a thick leaf canopy. Six tracks later “Anamnesis (Part 2)” takes up the theme, the melody now reduced to disparate notes that poke through the curtain of forest sounds like an abandoned temple throttled by jungle vines. Elsewhere, this minimalist approach is more stylistically alluring than physically gratifying. “First Interlude (Absence of Measure)” and “Second Interlude (The Choosing)” work within the context of the album—and, you imagine, as part of the ballet—but feel a little bare for repeat listening, as if grieving their dance accompaniment.
That Autobiography is ultimately not the equal of Dark Energy and Black Origami is perhaps to be expected. Those two albums were shockingly new, an injection of pure Jlin that stung like a bath of iced water, while Autobiography feels party to the tale that McGregor’s ballet will tell. Even so, it is an accomplished album full of puckish invention, singular production twists, and ambient murk that offers scintillating hints at where Jlin might go on her third album proper.


The latest from Syria’s Omar Souleyman comes via the Mad Decent label, making him labelmates with the likes of Major Lazer and Riff Raff. He works with producer Hasan Alo for a sleek, hypnotic sound.

To Syria, With Love

When Sublime Frequencies’ 2007 compilation Highway to Hassake (Folk and Pop Sounds of Syria) introduced Syrian singer Omar Souleyman to the West, one could write about the jalabiya and keffiyeh-clad artist with perhaps only a side mention of his home country. Besides its secondary status during the Bush era as an extension of the “axis of evil,” Syria was otherwise not part of the nightly news cycle. But as Souleyman made inroads in pop culture—his coarse voice finding itself alongside the likes of Björk and Gorillaz in the studio and on festival stages with Yeah Yeah Yeahs and MGMT—Syria and President Bashar al-Assad occupied more of the news feed. Since the start of its civil war in 2011, news of chemical warfare, the millions of refugees fleeing the country, its festering humanitarian crisis—not to mention its status as part of a new president’s travel ban—Syria may yet plunge into all-out international conflict.
How did Souleyman and his gruff plaints of love and heartbreak become the sound of Syrian music in the west? Souleyman works in the musical form of dabke—primarily line-dancing fare for weddings throughout the rural parts of the Levant. As DJ/rupture noted in his 2016 book Uproot, “ignorance of dabke is a prerequisite for his success… plucking an artist from a scene and repackaging him or her for wider consumption is as old as the music biz itself.” A decade after being introduced to Souleyman’s music, I’ve yet to hear another dabke artist, which may be by design. Even if he’s the exception that proves the rule, in foregrounding the electronic stomping beat that powers modern dabke, Souleyman has gained access to a Western dance music culture that few from his and other regions could possibly imagine. Since a split with Sublime Frequencies earlier this decade, Souleyman has found himself in a wide range of company: Four Tet, Gilles Peterson, Legowelt, Modeselektor, and Trilogy Tapes-associated producer Rezzett. On To Syria, With Love, Souleyman now counts the likes of Major Lazer, Baauer, and RiFF RAFF as labelmates. It’s a peculiar fit.
To Syria also marks the first time that Souleyman hasn’t had his right hand man Rizan Sa’id handling the bank of synthesizers and drum programming. Instead he works with Hasan Alo, who, like Souleyman, is also from the Hasaka region and displaced by the war. Like most of Souleyman’s work, few of the song topics touch upon current events, instead depicting the never-ending war that is romance. Lyrics come from longtime collaborator Shawah Al Ahmad and even amid the sleek club squiggles and beat bombast of “Ya Boul Habari,” Souleyman sings of the heart’s pain. “You are the incarnation of love and beauty,” goes one line. Though when Souleyman sings “You’ve been holding my soul captive for a year/Send me your news, at least once a month,” it seems eerily close to a different kind of hostage situation, especially considering Al Ahmad’s own recent brush with Daesh. (He was imprisoned by the group near his home in Aleppo and had his flock of sheep taken away from him.)
Dizzying polyrhythms make “Ya Bnayya” one of the album’s most hypnotic tracks. The needling synthesized mijwiz tones that Alo provides alternate across it: sometimes sounding tightly-wound to the beat, other times wobbling with wild abandon. But too often, the sonic palette that Alo puts behind Souleyman lacks the subtle blend of coarse and silken that Sa’id could toggle with the nimblest of moves. The heavy kick that thuds through each track here feels anonymous and monotonous, making the album a slog to push through. Amid the high warbling of “Khayen,” Alo somehow manages to shoehorn in even more tech-y squelches. The dramatic piano flourishes of “Aenta Lhabbeytak” offer up a change of pace. But the canned beats and whooshes that comprise the song’s backdrop make it seem like it could come from any shiny shirt nightclub from Athens to Beirut.
The last two tracks are where Souleyman truly changes up his approach, both songs serving as pleas for peace. Closer “Chobi” retains its firecracker percussion and canned synth tones, but Souleyman thinks not of love when he growls “we are in exile, and our nights are long.” As the penultimate track suggests, the slower, more agonized songs best reveal Souleyman’s strengths. Often in his back catalog, Souleyman’s voice has evoked the cries of a desperate man at the precipice of unbearable heartache, no doubt the work of a great singer embodying his role in detailing the pain of love. But on “Mawal,” it cuts closest to home for the displaced Syrian: “Oh, I’m tired of looking for home/And asking about my loved ones/My soul is wounded.” An entertainer in exile, Souleyman’s voice embodies the thousands from his land who are now refugees, who simply want to return home whether it’s been leveled or not, the grain of his voice as wearied and fraught as anything you will hear all year.


Atop a base of field recordings made near her home, the Australian composer layers pensive piano and electronics into a meditation on perception and memory.

Spectral

“A Memory, Blown Out,” the tender opener of Madeleine Cocolas’ Spectral, gradually expands from a lone hum into a vibrant array of vocals and electronics. This slow unfurling, driven by a sense of tension and release, forms the album’s backbone. In a note accompanying the album, the Australian composer describes the music as “a subtle shift in memory” and a “recolouring of the world we think we know.” Its sustained tones and poignant, evolving melodies explore how tiny motions can create larger shifts in perspective.
Cocolas’ inspiration for Spectral initially came as she made field recordings near her home, capturing birdsong, crickets, storms, and conversation. But Cocolas’ music rarely foregrounds specific, place-setting sounds or details. Instead, she uses her recordings as a jumping-off point for her pensive music, swirling doleful piano and electronics into an expansive, nostalgic sound.
Spectral’s gauzy palette and structure feel similar to 2020’s Ithaca, which meditated on the idea of home in upbeat rhythms, but here, Cocolas takes on darker tones, often dealing in hollowed-out sounds and haunted musical motifs. “Enfold” exemplifies these themes: It begins with a static cloud, gradually adding electronics, echoey vocals, and melancholy piano chords that rise and fall. While much of the track feels suspended in time, these elements provide movement, swinging from poignancy to hopefulness and back again.
Many of Spectral’s tracks move in sweeping waves that can sometimes feel vague and distant. But “Northern Storm” and “And Then I Watch It Fall Apart” render spacious dimensions in vivid terms. The back-to-back pieces both feature crescendoing forms that eventually burst. On “Northern Storm,” sporadic beats lie beneath a sustained tone, eventually swallowing it in a dramatic gulp; on “And Then I Watch it Fall Apart,” faraway drones lie beneath resonant piano and buzzing electronics, growing in volume and then fading away. Different elements dart to the top of the mix and fall to the bottom, morphing into different shapes and highlighting the subtle motion that makes Cocolas’ music come to life.
Much of the album feels forlorn and wistful, but the final track, “Rip,” offers a surprising conclusion: Here, Cocolas strums a bright chord on an electric guitar while piano flutters around it. There’s a feeling of resignation, and a pulse—those two strums continue to beat, creating an unmistakable sense of time marching on. After all the amorphous sound, Cocolas gives us something concrete to grasp, leaving us with one final moment of clarity.


With intricate guitar playing, vulnerable songwriting, and a surprising turn toward free-jazz exploration, the Grizzly Bear multi-instrumentalist reintroduces himself on his full-length solo debut.

You Belong There

Several months after the release of his 2012 solo EP, Silent Hour/Golden Mile, Daniel Rossen turned 30. That’s when his brain planted the seed of self-doubt that has hindered the Grizzly Bear co-frontman and multi-instrumentalist’s intuitive approach to making music ever since. “Everything became a constant interrogation: Is this any good? What are you doing, and why are you still doing it?” Rossen recalled. “It sucks. It never ends.” The next year, he ditched the indie rock scene in Brooklyn and moved to rural upstate New York with his girlfriend. He wanted to escape the city’s claustrophobic, productivity-obsessed mindset, but he couldn’t find peace, even in remote pockets of nature—an inevitability he anticipated but wasn’t quite ready to accept. And so, Rossen caved and welcomed change: He recorded 2017’s ambitious Painted Ruins with Grizzly Bear, moved across the country to New Mexico, and married his longtime partner, with whom he is now raising a daughter. If he couldn’t outrun the unpredictability of life, he might as well take it in stride.
Rossen embraces this vulnerable state of mind on You Belong There, his debut full-length. Over 10 songs, he uses sweeping woodwind harmonies and his customary intricate guitar work to color in tales of self-sovereignty, creeping anxiety, and the daunting open-endedness of adulthood. In the past, Rossen has tended toward cryptic minimalism, but emotional honesty suits him. The warmth of his voice counterbalances the darker moments he recounts, with lyrics exploring the isolation of rural living, his vaguely spiritual connection to nature, and the way new fatherhood led him to reconsider tendencies inherited from his own parents. “Deep red seething anger/It is natural, all too familiar/That legacy is yours and mine to own,” he sings on “I’ll Wait for Your Visit.” In Grizzly Bear and Department of Eagles, he often deferred to his bandmates when it was time to pen lyrics. On You Belong There, Rossen places the spotlight on himself: It feels like a reintroduction.
During the last two years, Rossen taught himself to play upright bass, clarinet, and other woodwinds from the comfort of his home studio. But his most dazzling work occurs, as always, on the guitar. Rossen is a virtuoso, and his influences—Brazilian folk, blues, classical, ’70s jazz—melt together in a hypnotic way. It’s no wonder that he was drawn to Elliott Smith, Nick Drake, and Jim O’Rourke as a teenager; all three use atypical chords in unconventional tunings, an approach rooted in the desire to push the guitar to its limits. For Rossen, these techniques allow him to experience amorphous chords, dissonant progressions, and unpredictable tension with a sense of discovery. On songs like “Celia” or “I’ll Wait for Your Visit,” Rossen never experiments for obscurity’s sake; he seeks melodies that sound like they’re on the outside of pop music looking in. It’s the closest he has ever come to composing classical guitar pieces that stand up alongside his heroes.
With his deft touch on drums and percussion, Grizzly Bear’s Chris Bear adds chamber pop complexity to You Belong There. “It’s a Passage” and “Shadow in the Frame” in particular recall the elegant arrangements of Yellow House. Their collaboration shines on the jazz numbers, an unexpected evolution in Rossen’s songbook. Drawing from the mid-century LPs his parents played and new-to-him discoveries like Brazilian musicians Egberto Gismonti and Baden Powell, Rossen melds his influences to pursue skills beyond formalist composition. Take “Tangle,” where Rossen delivers a flurry of hectic piano runs, spirited upright bass notes, a smirking clarinet line, and slightly discordant vocal harmonies. Bear’s thundering drumrolls and ominous cymbal crashes hover like storm clouds above it all. The two almost transform into a free-jazz ensemble in the title track and “Keeper and Kin”—the former roots itself in improvisation as a means of inquisitive exploration; the latter is a foggy, ambient synth drone reminiscent of Sung Tongs. It’s a bold new direction for an artist who could have remained in his comfort zone of expansive indie rock, where freeform passages and gorgeous production are common embellishments but rarely the focus.
Two years ago, in the midst of writing You Belong There, Rossen revealed a humble ambition: “How do I get back to the thing that, in the first place, drew me to music? Why was it so life-changing?” With the spiraling, finger-plucked guitars and cozy vocal hums of “Unpeopled Space,” he captures that enchanted feeling. As Rossen sings about retreating to the woods, the pace accelerates and new instruments emerge, ushering a rush of blood that evokes the feeling of escaping a crowded place, the cleansing scent of pine trees, the ominous realization that you’re truly all alone. Not until the quiet, remorseful piano chords that conclude the song dissipate does its full weight sink in. More than ever, Rossen is performing with his heart on his sleeve, imbuing his labyrinthine guitar parts and jazz flourishes with a sense of sheer awe.


A pair of new singles from London’s Whities label demonstrate that there are few better places to take the pulse of adventurous UK club music.

Forest Drive West / Pugilist: Blue 05 / Blue 06

Blue 05 / Blue 06

When the dance-music site Resident Advisor named Whities one of the best labels of 2016, the London imprint was keeping a pretty low profile: It had put out a scant four records that year, adding to the five it had released since launching in 2014. Since then, the label, founded by Nic Tasker, has dialed up the pace. Its catalog is now three dozen releases deep, but it still prefers the shadows to the limelight. Most Whities artists are known primarily to fans on club music’s fringes, if they’re known at all; the biggest names on the roster (Avalon Emerson, Lanark Artefax) got a significant boost in the wake of their Whities debuts.
There are few better places to take the pulse of adventurous UK club music, and that’s especially true of the Whities Blue sublabel, which maintains a slightly more dancefloor-oriented focus than its parent label. Until now, Whities Blue had been dedicated to split singles, but the latest two in the series, from Forest Drive West and Pugilist, respectively, break that mold.
Forest Drive West, aka East London’s Joe Baker, active since 2016, is the better known of the two artists. A typical Forest Drive West production is a good reminder of why dance music tends to use the term “track” in place of “song”: His drum programming stretches out in long, steely, unswerving lines, hi-hats flashing like railroad ties. Rhythmically, his two cuts here are as linear as anything he’s done, but the atmosphere around his drums is in constant flux. “Other” is the heavier of the two tunes, built around booming toms and a beefy, syncopated groove; despite the ample force of his low end, there’s a wealth of high-end detail that lends an electrifying dynamism. (Listen closely and you might hear an echo of Plastikman in the triplet figures rippling across the surface of the mix.) “Time” takes a similar approach into vast metallic clouds of reverb, with taut plucked tones glinting dully in the fog. If the Cure’s “A Forest” were reborn as minimal techno, it might sound something like this.
Melbourne’s Pugilist, aka Alex Dickson, is a relative newcomer; his early productions, from 2017 and 2018, tended toward classic, half-speed dubstep with a decidedly mid-aughts feel. But lately he’s been quickening his tempos, bringing him more in line with his UK bass contemporaries. “Descendant,” the opening track on his EP, recalls Forest Drive West’s linear shapes while incorporating an almost Latin sense of swing; every so often, rushing breakbeats burst like geysers through the surface. For a bass musician, he knows how to make the high end sing: The treble register is a turbulent field of nonstop motion—metallic shrieks, flayed hi-hats, and alien wibbles. It’s a powerful, peak-time track that plays the long game rather than going for the easy payoff, and so is the more hypnotic “Undulate,” where 808 depth charges plunge through an aquamarine swirl of keys and drum hits. With “Encrypted,” Pugilist tries his hand at a new cadence, toying with the 160-BPM pulse of drum’n’bass while letting dub’s dragging anchor slow the tempo to a crawl. It sounds almost like a contemporary take on Seefeel’s doleful clang.
A little-known fact about Whities Blue is that the label began as a response to Brexit. When the British pound dropped precipitously in the face of uncertainty as to how, exactly, the UK was going to extricate itself from the EU, the price of manufacturing and shipping records shot up—especially for a label like Whities, with its lavishly printed full-color record covers. Sporting generic sleeves, the Whities Blue series—the name is a subtle reference to the European Union’s flag—became a means of putting out records more cheaply and quickly. There’s no solution to Brexit in sight, but on these two releases, Whities Blue maintains its resolutely international perspective, drawing together sounds from the U.S., Germany, Latin America, and the Caribbean into a cosmopolitan web of influence and exchange. Like the best dance music, it makes an airtight case that we’re stronger together than alone.


Working with producers including Flying Lotus and Gaslamp Killer, vocalist Gonjasufi has created a fascinating slab of hallucinogenic head-nod music.

A Sufi and a Killer

The best description of Gonjasufi's voice may have come from Flying Lotus, who gave the new Warp artist a high-profile appearance on Los Angeles deep cut "Testament". FlyLo called it "timeless, incredible filth," which reads more laudatory than descriptive, but there's something about that voice that escapes simple specifics. On "Testament", Gonajsufi lost himself in the track's wispy, ghostlike soul, but on earlier self-pressed records like Dead Midget on Stilts (Crutches) and Flamingo Gimpp (released under the name Sumach), his voice had a gruff, restless quality. His singing can sound raw, maybe a bit off, but his ability to pull off a frail falsetto and ragged rasp in equal measures gives him a serious depth of range.
In pairing with L.A. producer Gaslamp Killer, Gonjasufi has found a powerful outlet for his otherworldly strain of singing. Together they've created A Sufi and a Killer, one of the most fascinating slabs of hallucinogenic head-nod music to arise from Southern California's post-hip-hop vanguard. Unlike the digital bleeps and squelches of SoCal contemporaries FlyLo and Nosaj Thing, however, Gaslamp Killer and Gonjasufi draw from their hip-hop background to create an LP that could as easily fit on the Stones Throw roster as well as it does IDM-centric Warp. The beats knock, but for every moment of b-boy-friendly atmosphere, there's another moment-- or a simultaneous one-- that makes like 21st century acid rock.
Gonjasufi's vocals are both haunting and haunted, coolly assertive yet frequently fixated on mortal matters, and they bleed vividly through Gaslamp's corroded analog wall of zero-fi psychedelic noise. The results are stark: Brooding, bad-trip laments ("Kobwebz"), a doo-wop number punctuated by spacey twang ("Duet"), a warping of the blues ("Ageing"). Even the more straightforward stuff has a grimy quality to it, particularly the heavy soul of "Change", the bar-jazz tension of "Advice", and the woozy "Kowboys & Indians" with its Eastern vocals looped against a rust-covered revision of club rap beats circa 2003. A couple of previously issued tracks helmed by other L.A. producers sneak into Gaslamp Killer's showcase as well: Warp 2010 comp selection "Ancestors" maintains the psychedelic mood with a sitar-driven Flying Lotus boom-clap, while both sides of last year's Mainframe-produced "Holidays"/"Candylane" single contribute mini-Casio chirpiness and roller-rink funk. Even with the additional producers and the stylistic elasticity, it all coheres nicely.
And if the production on A Sufi and a Killer proves anything, it's that Gonjasufi can stitch himself into the beat whether it's a heavy banger or a quiet ballad. "Sheep" is the most notable example of the latter, as well as a testament to both the singer and the producer's ability to salvage a potentially corny concept: The lyrics are a vague and contradictory metaphor about wanting to be a sheep instead of a lion, but Gonjasufi sells it expertly with a fragile, subtly harmonic multi-tracked voice. And in the more impassioned moments-- "She Gone", "DedNd", "Stardustin"-- his off-kilter wail pushes an already surreal junkshop-rock aesthetic into a kinship with Safe as Milk-era Captain Beefheart. There are plenty of times where the mix renders the exact words elusive and indistinct, and a track or two where you might wish they'd stay that way, but the meaning comes clear enough. And what the words don't hold, that incredible, filthy timbre does.


The cloudy grooves of the Oakland singer’s second full-length album showcase both her voice and her clear-eyed approach. These are love songs about all the forces that make and break romance.

It Was Good Until It Wasn’t

Three days after the Valentine’s Day release of Kehlani and YG’s lovebird duet “Konclusions,” Kehlani uploaded an anti-Valentine to SoundCloud. By design “Valentine’s Day (Shameful)” has the dour feel of an uprooted flower bed, a gnarl of dirt and worms and grit. The song is nominally a breakup ballad, but tucked between the kiss-offs and spilled tea is a quiet grace. “Ain’t no regrets ’cause I’m proud that my heart was so pure/And I’m never ashamed of my love,” Kehlani sings, consoled by her honest effort.
It Was Good Until It Wasn’t expands that poise into an ace R&B showcase. Less explicitly autobiographical and triumphant than her previous music, the album’s emphasis is on immersion. Kehlani takes emotions and situations and bathes in their contradictions and tensions, often arriving at clarity rather than catharsis. This results in love songs that are more about the mechanics of relationships, how and why they work (or don’t), rather than their discrete participants. The album feels like a subtle rejoinder to the aughts obsession with phones and miscommunications, mining all the other forces that make and break romance.
The record begins with “Toxic,” an ode to a partner who Kehlani likens to tequila for the way he unhinges her. Built on reluctant praise, 808s, and dulled chimes that pulse like a headache, the song introduces the thesis of the album. “I get real accountable when I’m alone,” Kehlani sings as she yearns for a problematic lover. For Kehlani, accountability is separate from resolution. When she looks into the dark heart of this toxic arrangement, she recognizes that its danger is precisely what she wants.
That sense of love as risk is a feature of Kehlani’s music, but It Was Good Until It Wasn’t has a sharper sense of the specific stakes of taking the plunge. “Bad News” distills the thug-love trope to its anxious essence: “Don’t wanna get no call with no bad news,” Kehlani sings frankly. It feels like a prediction more than a plea. “Tell your girlfriend that you single,” she demands on “Can I,” flipping Aaliyah’s coy “Come Over” into naked lust. On “Everybody Business,” she deflects ambient gossip into a warning to the naysayers: “Don’t make me feel bad for lovin’.” In all these instances, love has ramifications beyond the feelings of two people.
Isolation and distance are recurring themes, giving the record’s timing an eerie relatability. On highlight “Hate the Club,” Kehlani’s harmonies swell and shimmer as she watches the clock and the door, drinking to endure the arrival of an estranged lover. Jahaan Sweet and Yussef Dayes’ lush, loungey production laces the scene with sweet irony; it’s as if the mere thought of her amour showing up makes the night bearable. On “Can You Blame Me,” that intense craving for affection produces one of the strongest couplets Kehlani’s ever written: “I would rather argue than me sleep alone/Rather call you out than no one call my phone.” The line conveys the underlying cravenness of affection, its ability to melt away reason and indulge the lonely human within.
Coincidentally and intentionally, R&B artists have made some of the strongest songs about separation during quarantine, but It Was Good Until It Wasn’t is best understood as a continuation of the genre’s longer tradition of probing loneliness. The production here fits that pursuit, replacing the sunny, poppy swells of SweetSexySavage with cloudy grooves that rock and sway rather than ascend and drop. This shift allows Kehlani to layer her voice as well as flex it, an approach that works wonders on “F&MU,” where her background vocals trace the main melody as well as Jahaan Sweet’s synths. She’s alone but she isn’t.
The lack of distinct characters in Kehlani’s storytelling can make the conflicts and hookups at the heart of her songs feel diffuse, as on “Grieving,” where it’s unclear whether James Blake is playing the ex mentioned in the first verse or himself. Likewise, the lover praised on “Water” just sounds like some schmuck who gave a good lay. But she’s becoming an increasingly agile performer, rapping, singing, and everything in between. It Was Good Until It Wasn’t channels all those skills into sterling R&B that feels like a homecoming of sorts. Just a few years ago she declared, “I don’t even make R&B.” Change is good.


Uniform's sound is a marriage made in industrial-punk Hades, draping righteous pique over a grind lashed together from guitar groan and staple-gun electronics.

Ghosthouse

Michael Berdan has a brawler’s voice, spittle-flecked and dissolute. Those nagging vocals seized center stage on Perfect World, the blistering 2015 debut LP from Uniform, Berdan’s duo with multi-instrumentalist Ben Greenberg. Theirs was a marriage made in industrial-punk Hades, draping righteous pique over a grind lashed together from guitar groan and staple-gun electronics. Over the course of six songs—capped by churning, spoken-word downer “Learning to Forget”—the NYC-based pair forged a bracing, singular sound as strong as its Bad Religion-esque logo, strong enough to sustain a cult career.
With Ghosthouse, Berdan and Greenberg demonstrate a healthy willingness to interrogate and even upend that sound. The duo’s core certainly remains in place: that punishing glower, that pounding thump, those declamations. But as the title track convulses, it is overwhelmed by a smear of effects, a mutation that might have sat in the background on their first album suddenly assuming center stage.
Crazed Sabbath cover “Symptom of the Universe” represents Ghosthouse’s most significant departure. Thundering pop-metal riffs cement the song’s melodic backbone, ultimately exploding into the kind of frenzied, epic soloing that fell out of mainstream favor a decade back; effects skitter and sizzle at the margins, while Berdan’s chants are yanked backwards through vocal filters. Rob Zombie and Mastodon may be the last touchstones you expect to encounter on a Uniform record, yet they apply here. This, after all, is what the EP format is truly for: to bravely dip a toe into the unknown, to strain a bit against the boundaries of what listeners have come to expect. Sophomore LP Wake In Fright arrives early next year; we know, now, to anticipate anything and everything.


The music legend returns with a companion piece to 2001's Love and Theft, offering new tracks of jazz-inspired, rockabilly-scamming, ragtime-aping rock'n'roll, more heavily indebted to blues and honky-tonk than Woody Guthrie and Folkways.

Modern Times

As an artist and a conundrum, Bob Dylan is well-versed in semi-hysterical critical hyperbole. With each new record since 1997's stellar Time Out of Mind, music writers and editors have been tripping all over themselves trying to sputter out the best, most dramatic encapsulation of Dylan's rebirth (which, given the relative late-career flops of his peers and his own 1980s shitstorm, still seems strange and thrilling). Now, 45 years into a perfectly studied, over-anthologized, well-chronicled career, even talking about the cult-of-Dylan seems clichéd: Analysis of Dylan-love, Dylan-backlash, Dylan-histrionics, and Dylanology is moot. Books have been published, academic treatises have been defended, documentaries have been ordered and directed, cover stories have been savored and parsed-- but every time Bob Dylan cranks out a new record, we still try, again, to figure out what it all adds up to.
Modern Times is Bob Dylan's 31st studio LP, and an obvious companion piece to 2001's Love and Theft, offering new tracks of jazz-inspired, rockabilly-scamming, ragtime-aping rock'n'roll, more heavily indebted to blues and honky-tonk than Woody Guthrie and Folkways. The record does little to persuade disbelievers, will continue to infuriate those who cheered when Pete Seeger jerked the plug at Newport, and isn't entirely unfamiliar: Anyone who's seen Dylan play in the past five years will recognize the silhouette here, hunched over a keyboard, all crags and angles, brambles of hair puffing out from under a big black hat, pencil mustache combed into place, pounding keys, infinitely more compelled by his fellow players than his sycophantic audience. Unsurprisingly, Modern Times is musically intricate, thick, and expertly played, more the product of a well-rehearsed-- but still gorgeously mellow-- band than an auteur. It also contains some of the softest, funniest, and most charming songs of Dylan's late career, as he snickers to himself, cooing about love, God, and doing it ("I got the pork chops/ She got the pie").
Dylan recently spat a series of (now-notoriously) curmudgeonly comments to Jonathan Lethem in Rolling Stone, pining that nothing sounds like shellac-- and while his complaints seemed depressingly stodgy, they were also promptly misconstrued and yanked out of context; as it were, Dylan was deriding contemporary production/studio techniques and not the whole of modern music, which becomes instantly and weirdly obvious to anyone who listens to the lyrics to raucous opener "Thunder on the Mountain" ("I was thinking about Alicia Keys, couldn't help from crying/ When she was born in Hell's Kitchen, I was living down the line/ I'm wondering where in the world Alicia Keys could be/ I been looking for her even clean through Tennessee"), or considers the fact that Dylan produced this record himself (under favored stage-name Jack Frost).
Still, it's obvious that Dylan's most beloved songs are old ones, and he borrows gleefully from Nina Simone, Memphis Minnie, Carl Perkins, Muddy Waters, and, in the grand tradition of AP Carter and John Lomax, plenty of unnamed songwriters whose work long ago slipped into public domain. "Rollin' and Tumblin'" (Muddy Waters famously recorded the song in 1950, but its origins date back to at least 1929) is given a new workup, infused with Dylan's signature clatter and wheeze and punched up with peppery guitar and even spicier lyrics ("I got trouble so hard, I just can't stand this dream/ Some young lazy slut has charmed away my brains"). Meanwhile, "Nettie Moore" (a well-worn 19th century ballad) is staggering, a spare blend of vocals and light, airy instrumentation, Dylan's decaying pipes tut-tutting sweet proclamations of love: "When you're around me/ All my grief gives way/ A lifetime with you is like some heavenly day/ Everything I've ever known to be right has been proven wrong." "Workingman's Blues 2" is similarly gentle and lapping, and "The Levee's Gonna Break", with its familiar Zeppelin-via-Memphis-Minnie refrain ("If it keeps on raining/ The levee's gonna break"), seems almost self-referential ("I paid my time/ And now I'm as good as new…Some of these people are gonna strip you of all they can take").
The biggest disappointment here is that Modern Times is probably Dylan's least-surprising release in decades-- it's the logical continuation of its predecessor, created with the same band he's been touring with for years, fed from familiar influences, and sprinkled with all the droll, anachronistic bits now long-expected. Dylan's voice, sinking further into grit, is all wheeze and mew, rolled in salt but still instantly recognizable. And now that he's eyebrows-deep in the rock'n'roll canon, maybe the heart-stopping appeal of Bob Dylan has less to do with his output-- which, tangentially, remains outstanding-- and more to do with his cowboy boot-saunter. Maybe we all want a little bit of Dylan's superhuman restraint, and whether it's real or brutally calculated doesn't actually matter: The fuck-off detachment, the unconcerned genius, the squinty-eyed disdain, the arid, gut-punching humor, the total (if feigned) disinterest in his growing superhero status. He's the boy who doesn't love us back, the one everyone yearns for, the Holy Grail, the last American hero.


The band's sixth LP demands more seats at the table. It's a powerful folk concept album from a Nuyorican runaway who grew up obsessed with West Side Story before being liberated by Bikini Kill.

The Navigator

Alynda Lee Segarra, the creative force behind Hurray for the Riff Raff, spent her formative years crisscrossing the country on greyhounds and freight trains. She climbed from the streets of New Orleans to the airwaves of NPR with a washboard and a banjo, a Horatio Alger narrative for the Americana set. Her last LP, Small Town Heroes, felt like a thesis presentation from a student of American folk music. She’d spent years studying the form and its practitioners, a product of a community that helped lift her from street corners and coffee shops to international tours and a record contract. While searching for herself, she also imitated others, living inside classic folk, roots, and country songs while shaping her own powerful voice.
In that sense, The Navigator represents a departure—she hasn’t abandoned those sounds, rather she’s graduated to something singular. It's roots music for the immigrant ID, a folk concept album from a Nuyorican runaway who grew up obsessed with West Side Story before being liberated by Bikini Kill. They lay bare the conceit in the album’s Playbill-themed packaging: The songs are presented in two “Acts” that follow her alter ego, a Puerto Rican street kid named Navita Milagros Negrón, who visits a bruja at the end of Act I looking for an escape from the oppressive confines of her city. When she wakes up from the bruja’s spell at the start of Act II (40 years later), everything she knew is gone, and she begins to realize what she’s lost.
Navi is a character, but she’s also very much Segarra. She puts years of telling others’ stories to work telling her own; in “Living in the City,” she sets the scene for the first act, a snapshot of life in the PJs for a young girl. Navi brushes off casual harassment with a shrug, watches friends self-destruct with drug abuse, and sneaks into stairwells for fleeting moments of intimacy. The city is a thinly veiled but unnamed stand-in for New York, a city and culture Segarra fled from the day after she turned 17.
The Navigator is ostensibly a rock’n’roll record, but it expands Segarra’s palette beyond the folk/country/blues lane she’s thus far occupied. Her boozy, morning-after croon is still gorgeous, but now there’s elements of Puerto Rican bomba and salsa, son cubano, doo-wop, and even the spoken-word poetry of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe she haunted as a teen. Her band has gone through a variety of lineups, but this one feels like a clean slate. Her longtime creative partners Sam Doores and Yosi Perlstein are nowhere to be seen—in their place, she’s recruited five hand percussionists, a trio of doo-wop backup singers, and Yva Las Vegass, a Venezuelan folkie from Brooklyn. She even samples the ghost of Pedro Pietri, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe co-founder whose “Puerto Rican Obituary” serves as a bridge between the two movements of her piano ballad showstopper, “Pa’lante.”
In the few moments when she strips away the beer-soaked barroom blues of “Life to Save” and the acoustic spiritual “Halfway There,” she almost sounds like her old self. But when the bongos break in on “Rican Beach,” and she begins to list “our” things that “they” stole—language, names, neighbors, streets— she’s in a different place. Like many Latin-Americans, she’s somewhere in the middle, colored not just by her ancestors but the stimuli of the diaspora: The places she’s seen, the people she’s met, the music she’s loved. The Navigator, which reclaims folk’s protest roots and marries them to the sounds of the Caribbean, is a statement of that identity.
Segarra speaks to a broader reconciliation with the assimilation engrained in the American Dream, an acknowledgment of the limited perspective that comes with the white history taught in schools. She never learned Spanish and admits that for years she carried an inexplicable shame of her heritage. While writing this record, she pored through the Fania records back catalog, fell in love with the Puerto Rican poets Julia de Burgos and Pedro Pietri, and learned the history of the Young Lords and their newspaper, Pa’lante. Like Navi, the city Segarra returned to after traversing the country was unrecognizable from the city she left—the culture she once took for granted now fading away. When the “Fourteen Floors” of her old project building come crashing down, she wistfully remembers her father’s tales of the long journey from Puerto Rico, a haunting whisper of “it took a million years.” It's the universal dilemma of the displaced—where do you go when you can’t go home again?
Segarra’s first big foray into activism came with the feminist murder ballad “The Body Electric,” the centerpiece of Small Town Heroes; she would later re-release her 2013 Trayvon Martin tribute “Everybody Knows” as part of the Our First 100 Days project. But the most declarative statement she’s made yet came in the form of a scathing blog post admonishing the silence of her peers in the folk scene, near demanding that they use their art to join the struggle of their black and brown brothers and sisters whose bodies have been on the front lines of a civil rights movement that never really ended.
The Navigator’s activist bent leans mostly towards systemic symptoms of colonization and gentrification, issues at the heart of both Navi and Segarra’s story. If the call to arms of “Pa’lante” is the spiritual heart of the album, “Rican Beach” is an angry protest, a condemnation of both the villainous and the apathetic: “Now all the politicians/They just squawk their mouths/They say ‘We’ll build a wall to keep them out’/And all the poets were dying of a silence disease/So it happened quickly and with much ease.”
La gente del barrio has always had a voice, but too often it has been silenced. Not unlike Solange did on her stunning 2016 opus, Segarra uses The Navigator to demand more seats at the table for those voices that have always existed, but simply went unheard. And as she rallies the troops for the fight to come on “Pa’lante,” “From El Barrio to Arecibo…from Marble Hill to the ghost of Emmett Till” she unites the struggle of all the survivors of white supremacy, and urges them onward, together.