Animal Collective's transitional 2003 album, recorded in one long take on a porch in the Maryland woods, is reissued on their Paw Tracks imprint.

Campfire Songs

When the newly reissued Campfire Songs first came out in 2003, there was no such thing as Animal Collective. After releasing two albums of warped noise-pop under different combinations of weird names, Avey Tare, Panda Bear, Deakin, and Geologist were still learning how to integrate their distinct electro-acoustic preoccupations. The "Animal Collective" brand was later affixed to it, but Campfire Songs was originally intended to be the album's eponymous title. In truth, it's more appropriate. It's not simply that they hadn't picked a name; they really weren't Animal Collective yet. This was before the "Letterman" appearances and spectrum-wide media interest; before they became the object of hit pieces and big-picture rants in the trenches of online journalism; before Deakin wanted you to help him play Mali-- basically, before Animal Collective got about as formidable, culturally and aesthetically, as a modern indie band can be. This release retroactively stresses how hard they must have had to push to get there.
It was the only time they used the name "Campfire Songs", and the album has other peculiarities. It's the only one featuring this exact line-up (Geologist didn't play, only ran the MiniDisc recorders, on the Maryland porch where the five songs were captured in one long take.) It's much more acoustic than electro, made chiefly of intertwined voices, softly droning guitars, and light natural ambiance. It's an uncommonly easeful entry into their catalog, and an important pivot. The feeling of discovery that attends it is not incidental. "Congregate," they moan portentously on "Moo Rah Rah Rain". The album sounds like a careful group of musicians on the verge of figuring out what they are.
As such, it lacks the authoritative veneer and durability of later records, from Sung Tongs onward. If you'd have said, based on this album, that these guys would be a cultural bellwether in a few years, people would have thought you were nuts (or at least massively stoned). It's difficult now to conceive of Animal Collective without vigorous rhythms, vibrant electronics, and a certain formality to their arrangements of chaos. But in retrospect, Campfire Songs already contains many essential elements that would come to define the band: Glowing vocal harmonies, the fearless use of negative space, the little snips and grafts that always temper their naturalism. The music also illustrates the drift away from masculine beats and toward sensual waves that has been indie music's prevailing current in recent years, as rock influences have lost ground. The ghosts of 1960s psychedelia and British folk haunt the vocal and guitar techniques at times, but this sound was in no way trembling on the verge of broad accessibility. They would take it there with sheer resolve, by broadening their ambition and stretching their comfort zone.
Beyond its canonical interest, Campfire Songs has its own charms. Though rigorously composed, it feels deceptively spontaneous. The atmosphere is both inviting and severe, and startlingly vivid. It's difficult to argue that it's among their best, but it could easily be your favorite, because its allure is so simple and pure. You can feel the crisp air outside where they are recording, and it feels inescapably like nighttime. It's very much like sitting by a campfire, with a hot face and freezing back. While the album's impact is limited on a song-by-song basis, it has a powerful cumulative effect.
It plays out with all the surges of inspiration and subtle modulations of mood of a mushroom trip or whatever kind of spiritual journey you favor, through the scraps of Spanish guitar of "Two Corvettes" and the shimmering "Moo Rah Rah Rain". The trip is beautifully completed with full-bore pastoral "De Soto De Son", where day breaks at last. It's the perfect cap to the record, not just aesthetically, but symbolically. Birds twitter, waking up with everything else, and the tape hiss really does seem to brighten. There's a total sense of calm, renewal, a journey completed, knowledge refreshed. Normal time resumes, and for the conglomerate creature now known as Animal Collective, it's time to get to work.


These vinyl reissues of the Scottish power-pop luminaries’ outstanding Creation Records output showcase a band whose music captures the feeling of living with the music you love.

Teenage Fanclub: Bandwagonesque / Thirteen / Grand Prix / Songs from Northern Britain / Howdy!

Earlier this year, a New York Times study suggested that the music of our teenage years becomes the music we love throughout our lives. The Scottish power-pop group Teenage Fanclub have spent their career testing a similar theory. Their preference for familiar sounds is not just a result of their improbable band name or the fact that the connection between their brand of lovesick, harmony-coated, major-key rock’n’roll and adolescence goes back to “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Since rising out of Glasgow’s C86 scene in the late 1980s, Teenage Fanclub have been fascinated by how our formative influences grow with us, how simple sounds can carry a lifetime of associations. Like no other band, their music captures the feeling of living with the music you love, in all its permutations of euphoria and complacency and companionship.
As trends have come and gone, the members of Teenage Fanclub have maintained a preternatural knack for blocking out the world. To listen to their deeply consistent catalog is to hear a band that never grew tired of its pet sounds: the melodic precision of Big Star; the tight-knit harmonies of the Byrds; the plainspoken hum of Neil Young; the lite psychedelia of the British Invasion. Occasionally, one influence rises above the others. The group banded together and set off to record their debut, 1990’s A Catholic Education, after attending a Dinosaur Jr. concert, and it shows in the music—bathed in feedback and noise, wary toward life outside the studio. But as Teenage Fanclub grew up, they let more light in.
A new series of vinyl reissues, each paired with two hand-selected bonus tracks, expertly showcases this beautiful evolution. Kicking off with 1991’s breakthrough Bandwagonesque and spanning the following decade, each of these records (with the possible exception of 2000’s Howdy!) has its superfans. So simple and immediate is this music that it’s always been easy to slip into hyperbole discussing it. Oft-repeated legends about Teenage Fanclub involve more famous contemporaries cosigning them at the peak of their influence: Nirvana, Radiohead, and Sonic Youth bringing them on as a support act; Liam Gallagher, in his coke-addled Be Here Now-era megalomania, calling them the “second best band in the world” (after Oasis, of course). In 1991, SPIN hailed Bandwagonesque as the year’s best album, beating out Nevermind, Achtung Baby, and Loveless. It should surprise no one that this band’s biggest partisans have always been critics and fellow musicians.
For all the talk of their perfect melodies and pristine harmonies, part of Teenage Fanclub’s appeal lies in their humility. The early word around Glasgow was that they were nothing special: fun guys to hang out with and talk music, but lacking the ambition to really go anywhere. They seemed satisfied with being underdogs. But they also harbored a singular commitment that made them uncommonly self-aware and sustainable. “We take the music and the actual performances very seriously,” Gerard Love pointed out in a 1990 interview. “It’s the idea of being a pop star that we don’t take seriously.… We don’t see ourselves having the answers to anything. We’re not…”
Bandmate Norman Blake finished the thought: “... visionaries of a generation.”
The only three permanent members of Teenage Fanclub are their vocalists and songwriters: Blake, Love, and Raymond McGinley. Unlike the bands they drew inspiration from, the leaders of TFC never seemed to be at war with one another. They never made their White Album or Tusk, to prove their records came from tortured, conflicting perspectives. Instead, their music seems to blossom out of unity, with each songwriter doing his best to further explore the feelings described by his bandmates. On any given album, you might hear each of them singing a variation of “I’m in love with you.” It’s a dynamic that seems almost pre-rock’n’roll, a team of craftsmen laboring, beyond ego, for the sake of the song.
If Bandwagonesque has stood the test of time as TFC’s masterpiece, it might be largely because it came first. Following A Catholic Education and its mostly instrumental follow-up The King, this was their first release for Alan McGee’s Creation Records and their introduction to the wider world, especially U.S. audiences. It’s crucial that the first things we hear on the record are a burst of feedback and a description of a character’s taste in clothes and music. “She wears denim wherever she goes/Says she’s gonna get some records by the Status Quo,” Blake sings in “The Concept.” It’s an iconic opener—not just because the melody is so enrapturing, but also because it sets up the reverie that this band and their fans would inhabit. If the music you love is your means of identification—how you introduce yourself at a party, how you get through the day—then this band was speaking directly to you.
As its comically literal music video demonstrates, “The Concept” works better as a foggy daydream than as an actual character study. This is part of the charm of Bandwagonesque: Its love songs, like the swooning “What You Do to Me,” seem more inspired by the genre of love songs than by actual love. Just as “Metal Baby” or the controlled chaos of “Satan” won’t convince you that anyone in this band has ever actually been to a metal show, the love songs sound like the result of long nights spent alone, listening to Double Fantasy on repeat and imagining what it might feel like to confess your soul to someone you really care about. Real devotion came later in their music—for now, just the idea was enthralling enough.
This is why it’s not Blake’s lyrics in the first half of “The Concept” that make the song come alive so much as the the wordless, weightless coda that follows: A heaven-bound guitar solo wraps around Brendan O’Hare’s slow-motion, lighter-waving drums, as three-part harmonies crash like waves against rocks. When the coda arrives in the music video, the protagonist, without lyrics to guide her actions, starts wreaking havoc in the record store, tearing down posters and knocking over shelves. A better visualization might be starting her own shop. Bandwagonesque is the sound of discovery—of finding your voice and naming your mission.
1993’s Thirteen, its gnarlier, sloppier follow-up, had the disadvantage of coming next. To this day, its reputation is far worse than the actual music. After the whirlwind of Bandwagonesque, critics hated this record, calling it derivative (the title was taken from a Big Star song; the closing track was named after Gene Clark) and brainless (“Norman 3” finds Blake repeating the actual sentence “I’m in love with you” more than 20 times). In the press, Blake came across as bitter and hurt and hilarious, mocking flashier bands like Red Hot Chili Peppers and Stone Temple Pilots, and pointing toward the comparative integrity of his music. “We’re the opposite of ‘muscles and crap tattoos’ music, sweaty music. We’re not sweaty, not on purpose, anyway,” he argued to NME. “We write honest tunes, man… Songs.”
Judged on the strength of its songwriting, and not by its inability to live up to expectations or by its production (this new vinyl edition certainly sounds less muddy than the original release), the album remains an ambitious step forward. Love’s contributions in particular are pivotal. “Gene Clark” is one of the band’s great experiments and one of their finest performances—a “Down by the River” jam that evolves into something as sweet and cyclical as springtime. Other tracks, like the patchwork epic “Hang On” and the defiant “Song to the Cynic,” lack the endearing immediacy of Bandwagonesque but make up for it in confidence. “No offense,” Blake told the NME about the album’s bad press, “But I don’t worry about journalists because we know more about music than most journalists anyway.” Thirteen is the last time they played dumb; they would never sound so young or reckless again.
The albums that followed adopted a more controlled, subdued palate—less denim, more cardigans. Gone are any traces of grunge guitars or ’90s angst; McGinley’s guitar solos become more fluid and melodic, like a flute filtered through a distortion pedal; occasionally explosive drummer O’Hare is replaced by the more sedate Paul Quinn. Arriving as the the Britpop boom brought their set of retro influences back into style, 1995’s Grand Prix is every bit as inspired and stacked with hooks as Bandwagonesque—they’re just prioritized differently. “It’s not music for when you’re about to go out,” Love said. “It’s music for when you get back in.”
If Teenage Fanclub once seemed like a ceaseless rush of endorphins, their new sound was a small plane taking off: It seemed to glide on its own, and, before you knew it, was airborne. “Don’t Look Back,” a highlight from Grand Prix, finds Love admitting there’s little he can say to change someone’s mood; with Blake and McGinley’s harmonies aiding him through the final, triumphant chorus, though, he becomes a hero—stealing cars, lighting up the city. In “Sparky’s Dream,” one of their greatest songs, Love sings about someone just out of reach. “Always tried to keep the feeling alive,” he muses. On Grand Prix, TFC take on the same task: Sometimes they soar, sometimes they volley, and, more times than not, they land straight on the heart.
Two years later, in 1997, they returned with Songs From Northern Britain, a wise and ornate record about domestic life. By now, Blake had gotten married and become a father, and he could write brilliantly unguarded love songs like “I Don’t Want Control of You” and “Start Again,” with lyrics as poignant as his melodies. McGinley’s ballad “Your Love Is the Place Where I Come From” paints a similar portrait, as still and persistent as the fireplace in your living room. In both its thematic concerns and its gentle, pastoral tone, Songs From Northern Britain is an embrace of native terrain. Their contentment sounds radiant.
After 2000’s Howdy!, an album of quiet triumphs—the off-kilter rhythm of “Dumb Dumb Dumb,” “Cul De Sac”’s otherworldly drift—Teenage Fanclub started taking longer between records, retreating even further from the spotlight. They now seemed more willing to put the band on hold to gather new energy from collaborations and side projects. Some of the material on the bonus 7''s included with these reissues points toward later gems, like 2005’s electric Man-Made and 2016’s hushed, autumnal Here. Chosen mostly from their deep well of B-sides, these tracks highlight some of the band’s charming experiments (“Country Song,” “Thaw Me”) and unsung gems (“Some People Try to Fuck With You” “One Thousand Lights”). In these ten rarities, you can hear a succinct summary of all the ground they have conquered, as well as what they have left to explore.
For all their subtle evolutions, Teenage Fanclub have devoted themselves to making records that still feel steadfast and timeless—never going out of style, never losing the feeling. It’s a path they set out upon with their first single, “Everything Flows.” “We get older every year/But you don’t change,” Blake observed, then added a caveat: “Or I don’t notice you’re changing.” Lose yourself in something long enough and it becomes its own marker of time, with all its own sunrises and shadows.


Sarah Howells’ latest project is simple and sweet; its lower stakes fit an album about finding peace of mind amid sensory overload.

The Volume of Things

This is not the first time Sarah Howells has been on the brink of larger success with a smartly written, well-arranged pop record. The Volume of Things, her second album as Bryde, is the latest in a line of projects stretching back to the early 2000s, all constantly on the verge of stardom before a change in course feels necessary. Her previous band, Paper Aeroplanes, released the kind of friendly, folksy records that rarely find critical acclaim or commercial success, but manage to develop a modest fanbase anyway via niche folk blogs and rotation on BBC’s adult contemporary station Radio 2 next to Bear’s Den and Billie Marten. The praise still came with caveats like “old-fashioned” and “hardly in vogue”. Howells’ work in Bryde was darker, culminating in the moody breakup album Like An Island in 2018. Bryde. But The Volume of Things once again embraces the sweetness of her Paper Aeroplanes work. It feels smaller, but the lower stakes fit an album about finding peace of mind amid sensory overload.
It’s not a groundbreaking album (this is a record that rhymes “fire” with “desire” within its first 30 seconds, then does it again several songs later), but on an album that feels designed to be accessible, that’s the point. The best lyrics on the record narrow the scope to a search for connection, viewing love as a way to be unburdened: “Another Word for Free” repeats, “Would you be the weight off my shoulders?” while on “Paper Cups,” Howells wants to “Sip on your sympathy” to free herself. The words are about feeling free, but the music is restrained and straightforward.
Thomas Mitchener’s production rarely involves more than a basic band setup, and even when the occasional synth makes an appearance it’s more often the focal point of a song than window dressing. By design, the album rarely gets too ambitious, but the songwriting is strong enough to make every moment distinct. The best hint at something denser; lead single “The Trouble Is” follows its chorus with a wordless, dreamy collection of “heyayayayayahs.” “Handing it Over,” the lone song helmed by Teenage Fanclub and Mogwai engineer Paul Savage, is a glimpse of something bigger.
Having an edge is largely unnecessary on an album like this, but the album could take some risks. The arrangement for “Outsiders” feels like it’s working through a checklist for Haunting Indie Ballad instead of building with the song’s love story. When a song like “Flies” actually aims for a dramatic crescendo, the brightness of the production mutes the impact. For better or worse, anything more dramatic would ruin the album’s aesthetic; the closer is a “Blue Bucket of Gold”-style ballad without the discomfiting ambience of Sufjan’s music, yet “discomfiting” was never the intention.
There’s barely space for albums with modest ambitions like The Volume of Things anymore, given the actual volume of music currently available. Pop-rock like this doesn’t have the same success it did even a few years ago when someone like Ingrid Michaelson crossed over to the Hot 100. It’s accessible, but for a market that may not exist beyond the same stomping grounds as Paper Aeroplanes, barring a Spotify playlist or two. In a crowded industry, being well-written and smart isn’t enough to stand out, even if ideally it should be. Especially right now, it’s difficult for even relatively successful bands to make music full time, so if there was any leeway for Halflight in 2004 or Paper Aeroplanes in 2010, there’s almost none for Bryde in 2020. But there should be an avenue for albums like this to be successful—an unstable industry has made a record this unshowy difficult to make, but if one person connects, Howells has accomplished her mission.


The New York singer-songwriter infuses aesthetics of indie pop with the rigor of his opera training. Sung by a small crew of friends, his cryptic lyrics feel like a snapshot of his social circle.

Tyrannical Vibes

Mike Kolb moved to New York City in 2012 to study opera at Brooklyn College, but it wasn’t until he became immersed in the borough’s DIY scene that the singer-songwriter found an outlet for the feelings he sought to express. In 2017, he began home-recording songs under his own name, infusing the quaint, bare-bones aesthetic of classic indie pop with the rigor of his classical training. While these two elements of his style might seem like opposing forces on paper, in practice they form a delicate symbiosis. On early efforts like 2018’s Making Moves EP, Kolb emoted with the ease of a marathon runner’s warm-up jog, offsetting his theatrical, Morrissey-esque instincts on the mic with a muted, warbly instrumental palette.
On his latest LP, Tyrannical Vibes, Kolb broadens his once insular creative scope, enlisting a small crew of friends and former collaborators to provide lead vocals in his place. Though he does sing on a few tracks, Kolb slips into the background for the majority of the album’s runtime, meticulously arranging vocal harmonies around his own lyrics to draw out hidden flavors, or weaving jazzier instrumental threads into the fold. Performed by an ensemble cast, his signature lyrics, volleying cryptic questions back and forth, feel less like an internal monologue and more like a surreal peek into Kolb’s real-life social circle.
It’s Kolb’s unaccompanied voice, however, that kicks off opener “Cruising” with a cheeky “hello” before he lays down a staccato acoustic guitar riff—the sort of plunking phrase you’d hear on an early Beat Happening record. When the verse arrives, his vocals feel more understated than in the past, slipping into a faint, high-pitched register that allows them to quiver and yelp without dominating the mix. On the hook, Kolb’s guitar plucks ripple out into chords, while gleaming keys and intricately braided backing vocal rounds performed by Ani Ivry-Block and Carolyn Hietter fill in the interstitial space. You may not notice all these details in passing, but there’s a bustling network of tiny harmonic interactions operating beneath the surface, informed by the years he spent in a Catholic church choir.
These components emulsify even better when Kolb works around Hietter’s lead vocals. Though she is primarily a saxophonist, her voice’s cordial yet slightly deadpan timbre suits the gently sardonic tone of Kolb’s writing. On “I Guess I’m Lucky,” she plays a character whose partner has yet to show up to dinner: I’ll give you ‘til a quarter to six/To make your way through the door/I’ll bet that they kept you late/To go and mop up the floor,” she lilts, sounding resigned. The saxophone solo she wedges into a brief interlude bolsters the scene, winding around peppy guitar chords and frail, chiming keys as if scoring a ’70s sitcom’s opening credits.
Her sax briefly appears again on the record’s best track, “I Love to Play the Game,” this time in a supporting role, bookending each verse with a swift melodic flourish. Kolb has said that Tyrannical Vibes was inspired by karaoke sessions, and it shows: The prevailing mood is downright celebratory, cowbell clinking like a toast as Hietter, Kolb, and his roommate Max Brown lay down criss-crossing vocal takes that overlap at strange, revelatory angles. Even the guitar solo is perfectly in tune with the raucous, sloppy energy, hammering on a pair of notes before it sputters out in a maniacal daze. It’s easy to get caught up in the reverie.
Kolb’s momentum only falters when he slows the brisk pace on “Jean-Luc,” a floaty tune that staggers on a half-formed groove. Though its individual elements—a feathery drone played on an electric guitar’s highest strings, handclaps, a gentle bassline to nudge things along—don’t quite gel, the track’s still not without potential. Invoking the late New Wave auteur, it playfully revels in espionage and grayscale paranoia (“birds chirping in code”), but, as the only true solo outing here, it lacks the record’s unifying sense of camaraderie.
Tyrannical Vibes is an idyllic escape for both performers and listeners. Like the after-work karaoke that brought Kolb’s band together, it’s a temporary reprieve from headier ventures like opera or avant-garde jazz: low-stakes and a bit silly, but tinged with just enough academic expertise to set it apart from the indie landscape’s ubiquitous bedroom pop. At a compact 25 minutes, the record is a cozy indulgence, like a rerun of that imaginary ’70s sitcom. The cast feels strangely familiar, its jazzy intonations warm and comforting. Despite Tyrannical Vibes’ title, its atmosphere is inviting—never oppressive.


These whimsical, at times absurdist songs from the former Lounge Lizard’s gently quixotic HBO series seem designed to channel the beautiful weirdness at the heart of the human experience.

John Lurie: Painting With John (Music From the Original TV Series)

“Old Man Dancing,” number 18 on the 56-track double album Painting With John: Music from the Series by John Lurie, opens with John Lurie exhorting listeners to get moving. “Dance like no one is watching,” he beseeches over funk guitar and saucy horns, winking at the inspirational adage. “Even if you have a show on HBO!”
“Old Man Dancing” shares its title with an episode of Painting With John, a meditative and beautiful series that blended Lurie’s exceptional talent for storytelling with close-ups of his brushstrokes as he painted watercolors, along with the occasional surrealist skit. On the show, the song accompanies images of Lurie in basketball shorts and a tank top, dancing on a rock in the sun, flapping his arms between camera pans to his black sneakers. (In the same episode, he tells a story about scoring a Barney’s commercial for Glenn O’Brien, while drawing a bird with a fountain pen.) Was the song born first, or the scene? It doesn’t matter—the meta nature of the whole project underscores that to Lurie, the lines between each medium are porous. This might lend the album a self-referential quality for devotees of the show, but on its own it translates to a lovely and sprawling collection of intrepid banjo and deep-groove polyrhythms full of the spontaneity and deadpan humor that have defined Lurie’s work since he taught himself to play harmonica in the late 1960s.
Lurie is perhaps best known as the saxophonist of the Lounge Lizards, the experimental group that was active from 1978 to the end of the 20th century, and which he forged in downtown New York when living downtown in New York still meant something. Lurie has also, simultaneously, been an actor, visual artist, film scorer, and author—his 2021 book, The History of Bones, is one of the best-written musical memoirs I’ve read—and in 1991 created Fishing With John, the cult show in which Lurie took guests like Tom Waits and Dennis Hopper out on the water. Painting With John, which unfortunately ended in 2023, after just three seasons, was a slightly more hermetic show than its predecessor, though no less generous or ingenious. Much of its appeal was its fluent, often surprising soundtrack, and its portrayal of the way Lurie's life has shifted in recent years. Diagnosed with Lyme disease and then cancer, Lurie relocated to an undisclosed island in the Caribbean to reconstitute. He was unable to play music for a time. Now 72, he seems to think of this release as punctuation: In press materials, he said that the Painting With John music “may be the last thing I do. I want it to be beautiful.”
It certainly is beautiful, both a retrospective and temperature check of his current artistic yen. Lurie has traded his alto saxophone for banjo and guitar, shifting his melodies to a lower register. The album includes a handful of tracks from prior projects that were featured on the show—the melancholy clarinet melody “Goodbye to Peach” and a few others from the 1998 film scores African Swim and Manny & Lo; and “Small Car” from a 1999 album by the Legendary Marvin Pontiac, a fictional blues outsider that Lurie invented. The resurfaced songs thread Lurie’s earlier musical ideas—full of whimsy and acted-upon impulse, “first thought/best thought” in motion—into those he cultivates now, which can be simpler, sweeter, and funnier. On “Pygmy With Dog Barks,” a song as absurdist and literal as his paintings, a recording of a dog barking acts as a kind of rhythm section behind Lurie’s lightly plucked guitars—perhaps a reference to the music of the Central African Pygmies, one of his many musical passions. “Boomba!” is a 30-second vocal spurt that layers his distinct basso rasp with a wee-ooh-wee-ooh-we sound, invoking both Tuvan throat singers and a speeding toy ambulance. “Cowboy Beckett Jaunty Guitar With Hoo-Hahs” is exactly that—an Ennio Morricone-style guitar gallop with “hoo-hah” shouts on top. His penchant for naming these songs literally is as delightful as the songs themselves, though how a “song” should even be defined seems to be part of the question they pose; the latter is 18 seconds long, perhaps a gag on Morricone’s long spaghetti sagas, yet just as hypnotic, the abbreviated point still made.
Always a fulcrum for a dynamic cast of collaborators, Lurie’s curation here includes former Lounge Lizards—Steven Bernstein on trumpet, the late Curtis Fowlkes on trombone, Doug Wieselman on guitar, Michael Blake on tenor sax and Calvin Weston on drums—as well as cellist Jane Scarpantoni and trombonist Clark Gayton, among others. The instrumentation might suggest jazz—“fake jazz” being a designation Lurie invented and then regretted throughout his career—but what transcends genre is just the pureness of the jam, not to get too woo-woo. There’s a playfulness in these songs, and a purity of intent, that seems to channel the human experience in all its beautiful weirdness. “A Goat Says Fuck” invites the listener to comtemplate whether goats’ bleats are hidden curses; its corresponding painting implies said goat is wracked with indecision between, maybe, hieroglyphics and inedible plants.
"I Don’t Like to Stand on Line,” from Marvin Pontiac’s Greatest Hits, is a dirge or a death knell, Lurie wailing the title sentiment over an ominous and frenetic banjo twang. Alongside his painting of the same name, he reframes an everyday frustration as an existential question, a kind of black hole of time and the futility of the mundane. But, as with much of his music, it might also just be a lark. Painting With John’s final song, “The Invention of Animals,” is over 18 minutes long—the longest song here by six—and full of abandon, its percussion going ham in a mesmerizing fugue until the group collapses into a sweet flutter of sax and builds back up again. It’s brash and cacophonous, but there’s a tenderness to it, a fullness in the moment. The heart and the absurdity catch up with you.


The Buffalo trio’s Shady Records debut doesn’t sacrifice an ounce of their gritty and ruthless throwback aesthetic.

WWCD

Give Eminem credit: As a label head, he learns from his mistakes. It’s been eight years since Shady Records stopped Yelawolf’s career cold with Radioactive, a misguided bid to repackage the rough-edged rapper as a crossover star, and since then Marshall Mathers has stopped treating his signees as lottery tickets. He’s taken an especially hands-off approach with Griselda, the bloody-knuckled Buffalo trio whose Shady Records debut never veers from the hardcore hip-hop of their self-released solo projects and mixtapes. While their mastery of mid-’90s-worshipping East Coast rap has earned them a devoted following, Shady has bowed to the reality that the gritty trio is an inherently niche act. No Skylar Grey feature or Alex da Kid production is going to broaden their appeal.
Brothers Conway and Westside Gunn and first cousin Benny the Butcher don’t even bother with choruses, stitching their coke-dusted, bullet-riddled crime tales together with ad-libbed gun sounds instead. Griselda’s first full group outing, WWCD offers something their solo efforts only featured intermittently: interplay. On “Chef Dreds” and “Scotties,” the relatives trade bars and finish each other’s thoughts, playing Westside Gunn’s nasally shit talk against Conway’s cold slur and Benny the Butcher’s bruiser swagger. These three are at their best at their most untamed, and WWCD is the crew’s most unrelentingly raucous showcase yet.
In keeping with its predecessors, the project was produced by Griselda’s house beat makers Daringer and Beat Butcha, Wu-Tang evangelists who serve the same dependable meal again and again, never offering a twist. On the crew’s solo projects, that monotony could begin to tire, but here it keeps the focus where it belongs, on the trio’s brutal wordplay and sour back-and-forth. These three have no problem sustaining intrigue on their own.
Griselda is hardly the only crew nailing the feel of ’90s hip-hop, but they also conjure the heightened reality of the era in a way few of its imitators do. Without succumbing to silliness, they push the violence to fantastical extremes, half horrific, half cartoonish (the interlude “Kennedy” is just 42 seconds of Westside Gunn repeating “blow your fucking face off” and making boom noises). They don’t skimp on the punchlines, either, especially Benny: “I’m 5’8” but 6’11” if I stand on my bricks,” he boasts on “Moselle.”
Most of the album’s guests slot themselves seamlessly into the mood, including Raekwon, who offers a symbolic cosign of the crew on the spoken opener “Marchello,” and 50 Cent, who relishes rolling around in the mud on “City on the Map.” The glaring exception is the most high-profile one: Eminem, who does his equivalent of Diddy dancing in Bad Boy videos on the album-closing remix of the Conway track “Bang.” For 46 showy bars it’s all about Shady as Eminem runs through his greatest hits, spitting hyper-technical dick jokes and reminiscing about the great beefs of his TRL heyday. It’s not ideal—the verse feels pumped in from another plane of existence, and it undoes the grimy mood the rest of the record sets so meticulously—but it’s easy enough to skip. And if Eminem’s star power is what it takes to introduce this trio to a slightly wider audience, then so be it.


Kevin Shields did a live online interview on AOL in February 1997. The obvious question was asked first: When can ...

Lost in Translation

Kevin Shields did a live online interview on AOL in February 1997. The obvious question was asked first: When can we hear some new material? Shields responded, "Definitely sometime this year or I'm dead," and then later, "I really am dead if I don't get my record out this year." Six and a half years after that interview there's still no follow-up to the landmark Loveless, but Shields is very much alive, working with Primal Scream and doing the occasional remix. He recently admitted that the pressure of following what many consider to be a perfect record is what did him in. He couldn't bear to put the My Bloody Valentine name on something inferior to Loveless, and so he kept his tapes in the vault. There was no next chapter and probably never will be; life continues.
Perhaps the enormous weight Kevin Shields has been living under has been lifted. My Bloody Valentine exists only as history and now, on the soundtrack to Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, Shields gives his own name a try. Lost in Translation contains four new Shields tracks, his first original work in more than a decade, and though there are eleven other songs here, the Shields material is the drawing card.
He first appears on the second track, "City Girl", his lone new vocal song. On first listen it sounds like a demo of a pre-Loveless track, possibly from the You Made Me Realise era. It's mid-tempo, with an unusual repeating melody and a two-note chorus. The guitar is simple and rough, a bit garage-rock, bouncing over characteristically buried drums that seem an afterthought. This is Kevin Shields the pop songwriter, the guy with a collection of rare Beatles bootlegs who puts on "Strawberry Fields" when he's feeling down. The sound of the thing could be anybody-- no exploration on that front-- but the melody and voice are familiar and welcome.
The next two Shields tracks are pretty instrumentals that feel more like film cues (which they are) than proper songs. "Goodbye" has a wispy synth texture and a vaguely Celtic bent, and sounds somewhat Eno-esque but more emotionally manipulative, like it must play in a scene geared to leave a lump in your throat. The faint glide guitar textures gently snaking through the drone offer evidence of its maker, but the signature is subtle. Then there's the 98-second "Ikebana", which consists of lightly plucked electric guitar over gentle synth washes. It's not boring, exactly, just nondescript. If you Invisible Jukeboxed me, I might guess I might guess Mark Knopfler's soundtrack to The Princess Bride.
Finally, there's the odd "Are You Awake?" The most sonically interesting of Shields' tracks, "Are You Awake?" combines the steady pulse of a cheap Casio drum machine with some echoing, dubby guitar effects. It reminds a little of pre-Autobahn Kraftwerk and the surprising motorik rhythm combines wonderfully with his gauzy guitar texture, but it's painfully short at a minute and a half. I get the sense that Shields is on the verge of tapping into something deeper here, some combination of his guitar depth and cheap instrumental overlays, but "Are You Awake?" doesn't give much to go on.
As to the rest of the soundtrack, Shields' presence extends beyond his new songs. Maybe I'm just filling in blanks, but aspects of the sound he perfected can be felt throughout. There's a My Bloody Valentine track ("Sometimes"), a My Bloody Valentine forbear (Jesus and Mary Chain's "Just Like Honey" closes), and an unexpectedly great My Bloody Valentine impression (Death in Vegas' ethereal "Girls"). Squarepusher's short ambient ditty "Tommib" even seems vaguely connected somehow.
Other highlights include Air's mostly acoustic (guitar and piano) "Alone in Kyoto", which echoes the competent mood music of their recent collaboration with Italian author Alessandro Baricco (sans the narration), and Kaze Wo Atsumete's "Happy End", which sounds like a fine Aluminum Group AM radio tribute sung in Japanese. There are odd selections (Phoenix's "Too Young" sounds like an 80s power-pop track that might have soundtracked a Michael J. Fox flick), but for the most part, the tracks hang together and flow relatively well, orbiting the shimmering dreampop mass that serves as the record's unstated inspiration. The man at the center of that universe sounds unsteady, but a tentative first step back into the songwriting world is better than nothing. Here's hoping he makes it a bit further next time.


The work of classically trained electronic composer Suzanne Ciani effortlessly bridges the commercial and the avant garde. This compilation, spanning 1968-1985, is a perfect introduction to the far-reaching nature of her talents.

Lixiviation

The music of electronic composer Suzanne Ciani has quietly crept into many people's lives at some point. Her work effortlessly bridges the realms of the commercial and the avant garde, barely recognizing the distinction between the two. Ciani is a classically trained composer who studied with computer music trailblazer Max Mathews and worked with Don Buchla, the latter being the inventor of a frequently used tool in her musical armory, the Buchla 200 synthesizer. In the early 1970s she formed Ciani Musica, Inc. in New York, through which she produced soundtrack work for commercials by Merrill-Lynch, Clairol, Skittles, and GE among others (go here for some examples). Ciani's sound-effects work on Meco's platinum-selling disco version of the Star Wars soundtrack brought her unannounced to a wider audience, while her own career has positioned her as a proto-synth guru, a doyen of the new age musical movement, and, in more recent times, a noted classical musician.
Anyone looking for an entry point into Ciani's elastic career will be well served by Lixiviation, a compilation spanning 1968-85 from the always intriguing B-Music label. Here, the vaults of Ciani Musica have been plundered, with her peppy compositions for companies including PBS, Atari, and Coca-Cola documented, alongside ahead-of-their-time electronic pieces that hint at her later drift into new age. It's a perfect introduction to the far-reaching nature of her talents, but it's also useful for illustrating how music notionally thought to be "underground" often happily floats into family homes every evening. Through her commercial work, Ciani was prying open a door that led to unlikely collaborations further down the line, including Aphex Twin's work with Pirelli and music lent to a jeans ad by Sunn O))). In the sleeve notes, she indicates how her commercial work helped fund her creative pursuits-- another harbinger of how the music industry would ultimately evolve.
What binds Ciani's eclectic pieces on this album is the lucidity of her vision, which is emphasized further in those comprehensive sleeve notes. She talks of never using the word synthesizer ("it had strange and inappropriate connotations"), of spending "weeks just living with the machine, always on," when using her Buchla. It's not hard to romanticize her existence back then, buried under a deluge of wires and circuitry. This is a whole world she created, where brightly blinking synth noise flowed into fracturing swells of bass ("Lixiviation"), where a piece created as a choreography ("Princess with Orange Feet") sounded like great bursts of light collapsing into one another. The closing "Second Breath", recorded during Ciani's time at UC Berkeley circa 1968-70, is a precursor to the harsher, ever-repeating drones krautrock legends Cluster would appropriate as their central stylistic thrust a few years later.
It's easy to hear the hallmarks of that darker sound in some of Ciani's commercial work-- the "Clean Room" ITT TV spot has the same kind of density as John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 score, with sturdy prods of bass synth and a sparse, ricocheting beat providing the grounding for her to layer sunnier parts over the top. But Ciani was also enamored with the playful side of the instruments at her disposal. On the dainty clicks and whirrs of "Sound of a Dream Kissing", there are traces of the frivolous zing of Pierre Henry's classic "Psyché Rock". Her work for Atari and Coca-Cola are similarly buoyant, with the four seconds of bubbles, pop, and fizz she created for Coke forming a delightful piece of fluffy, synthesized mimicry.
It's telling that Ciani's music was deemed suitable for commercials and TV spots all over the world just as the public was getting to grips with a possible forthcoming computer age. Not just because of the obvious sci-fi components, but also because it bears a perfect blend of urgency, anxiety, and technological utopianism, straddling contrasting feelings of slack-jawed optimism about the future and all the Cold War-era jitters prevalent at the time. Her work for the PBS show "Inside Story" sounds like a dramatic precursor to receiving an impossibly bleak news update on our impending armageddon, while her corporate tag for Atari rushes assuredly into the future, embracing all the innovation around it. That ability to flit back and forth between styles and feelings no doubt made Ciani an attractive client to her corporate employers. But Lixiviation also goes some way to forming links between her disparate worlds, showing off more reflective work through what she describes as her "very feminine" synthesized waveforms, and demonstrating how such material bled through to the mainstream in unexpected ways.


The Charlotte, North Carolina rapper's debut finds him in his sweet spot—alone and rapping with the anarchic energy of a tasmanian devil.

KIRK

DaBaby hasn’t turned down a check since the Fourth of July. On that night, Dreamville debuted “Under the Sun,” a record that features the Charlotte, North Carolina rapper sounding like a local drug dealer that found God. Since that moment, nearly every pop-rap hit has gotten the DaBaby touch. This summer alone, the 27-year-old landed on tracks from Chance The Rapper, Lizzo, Lil Nas X, and Post Malone. In return, DaBaby, who a year ago was stuck in regional-rap-star purgatory, has become one of rap’s most visible stars.
With that visibility has come slight DaBaby fatigue; constant exposure to his breathless, high-energy flow will do that. Beginning with March’s Baby on Baby, DaBaby has flooded the internet with different iterations of the same song—you know the one. But it’s important that we note: DaBaby is really good at making that one song.
In DaBaby’s six months or so as a pop-culture figure, one thing that we know for sure is that he likes to rap. Like, really rap. He’s not spitting traditional lyrical-miracle 16s, but he is joyfully filling up every inch of available space, and on KIRK, R&B hooks and sing-rap harmonies are an afterthought. His rapping is relentless, and he doesn’t ride a beat so much as he steamrolls it.
KIRK offers some moments of unexpected depth. On “Intro,” he reveals that he learned “Suge” went No. 1 on Billboard’s mainstream R&B/hip-hop charts the same day he learned of his father’s sudden death. “Same time I got the news, my shit went number one, that’s fucked up,” he says, over a warm instrumental that sounds like it was made in a hip church’s Sunday school. For the first time, he effectively works an emotion besides “I will punch you in the face” into his formula, and it fits him surprisingly well.
DaBaby doesn’t stay in the reflective mindstate for long, though. After he pays respects to his father and comes to terms with his own trauma, he’s back making the sort of music that I imagine plays in his head while he punches a showgoer mid-bar and throws hands at the mall. On “Off The Rip,” DaBaby raps about eating at a restaurant with his kids and mother with the same chaotic spirit he brings to verses about robbing local drug dealers. DaBaby is self-aware, which goes a long way in hip-hop. He goes in over bass-heavy beats that are similar, but not the same, most notably from homegrown Carolina producer Jetsonmade. “Straight off the rip, you know I don’t wait for the drop,” he says, commenting on his penchant for rapping at the 0:01 timestamp.
KIRK’s momentum is disrupted by the number of guests that can’t hang with DaBaby (See: Nicki Minaj and Migos). DaBaby’s similarly anarchic long-time partner Stunna 4 Vegas and Kevin Gates are the lone guests that sound at home—which makes sense considering that Gates’ deadpan delivery has probably influenced DaBaby. But much of KIRK is DaBaby in his sweet spot: alone and rapping with the untamed aggression of a tasmanian devil, on a beat that could destroy a 2001 Toyota Corolla from the inside out if played too loud. Change is overrated.


The singer-songwriter’s latest album features a sweeping backstory about supernatural queer lovers on the run and a lurid, cinematic new sound.

Transangelic Exodus

For the past decade and then some, Chicago-raised songwriter Ezra Furman has burrowed his way into the seams of Americana and inflamed the genre with his crackling, tenacious voice. He’s not content to simply reenact the work of titanic American songwriters like Woody Guthrie and Bruce Springsteen, though he uses plenty of the same tools—saxophone, harmonica, fiddle, nylon-stringed guitar, sing-along melodies, a healthy distrust of authority. It’s more like he’s digging up what those big names left behind in the dust. Furman, a queer, Jewish artist with a tenor like a blowtorch, likes to pick at the scabs of the identities that cast him out from the mythos of all-American masculinity, wailing about God, love and mental illness with unhinged fervor. His fourth solo album, Transangelic Exodus, is his most thematically cohesive work to date: a loose narrative about supernatural queer lovers on the run from the law. The misfit feelings surging through his back catalog crystallize here into detailed imagery, giving the album a lurid, cinematic sheen.
Of all the lovers Furman has sung to across his songs, the vampires and the slackers and the zeroes, none appears more vividly than this album’s Angel. He’s introduced on the first track, “Suck the Blood From My Wound,” as a hospital escapee, tearing bandages from his broken wings and bleeding all over the passenger seat of a flashy red Camaro while a guitar riff borrowed from “Baba O’Riley” announces his triumphant jailbreak. “I’m in love with an angel, and a government is after us, and we have to leave home because angels are illegal,” Furman explains in a statement accompanying the album. Ultimately, though, knowledge of that fictional backstory is more or less superfluous to understanding the paranoid thrust of the lyrics. The personal pronouns he uses throughout the album are enough to communicate the urgency of this escape, as is the lust for unmitigated freedom in Furman’s voice as he belts, “Angel, don’t fight it/To them you know we’ll always be freaks.”
The sentiment behind these words, sung in a tone of liberatory joy and not shame, splashes across the album like a glitter bomb. Furman’s freak flag flies directly in the face of the relentlessly heterosexual and unflappably masculine American outcast rendered in John Wayne movies and Elvis Presley songs. If he invokes the trope of a rebel cruising west in a muscle car, it’s only so he can hollow it out and fill it back up with enough lipstick and sequins to supply a season of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” But all that color and shine is about more than what we call “pride”; Furman is well aware of the price tag attached to his freedom. On the haltingly upbeat, synth-squiggled “Maraschino-Red Dress $8.99 at Goodwill,” he glances furtively at a thrift store’s cashier while weighing the decision to buy or not to buy. “Sometimes you go through hell and you never get to heaven,” he muses later in the song, entertaining a strain of fatalism common to artists who dart outside heteronormative paradigms. “This whole world is no place at all/No place for a creature like me,” he reiterates on “No Place.” Being openly queer can earn you weird looks at best and a death sentence if you’re unlucky, but forcing it down and pretending it’s not there is a death in itself. Better to choose the path that offers a shot at life. Better to be a creature without a home than not to be a creature at all.
“I don’t mind if I lose my limbs or die/I’ve built a home inside his eyes and I ain’t leaving,” Furman howls on the album’s second track, “Driving Down to L.A.” New production elements bolster the abandon in his words: huge, apocalyptic drums clatter behind him, buoyed on by swells of electronic bass. Transangelic Exodus folds an industrial edge into Furman’s all-American rock palette, deepening the darkness that closes in around his lyrics. So there’s some release at the very end of the album, when the gloom peels away and Furman starts singing about an early sexual encounter with a boy on “I Lost My Innocence.” He doesn’t sound ashamed or even burdened; it’s a light song with a silly melody, a postscript to the album’s narrative, sung as easily and with as much humor as “Jessie’s Girl” or “Cecilia.” He could have left it off the album, could have kept the tracklist focused on its core drama, but he didn’t. After that long, dark drive away from the world, Furman’s earned the right to a jingle about falling for a boy in a leather jacket. He’s kept his spark of wild hope burning so long it’s finally starting to look like a firework.


Matthew Dear’s contribution to the DJ-Kicks series is his most engaging commercial mix yet. Intricately and intuitively mixed, it incorporates a handful of his own unreleased tracks.

DJ-Kicks

Multiple identities are common in dance music, but Matthew Dear has taken his ego-altering further than most. In the early years, his aliases—False, Jabberjaw, and Audion, along with his real name—served as proving grounds for subtle tweaks on a single, overarching vision of techno in which texture, groove, and hook all held equal weight. But the gulf between the different aspects of his personality has steadily widened, particularly as he has settled on two main projects situated at opposite poles. As Audion, he makes cavernous, big-room techno that trades in weaponized euphoria and supersized sensation. Under his own name, he has become a singer/songwriter of knotty, nuanced electronic pop—the possessor of a sultry, Bowie-indebted baritone and a bandleader with the swaggering stance to match.
His DJ-Kicks mix is credited simply to Matthew Dear, but it actually represents a third aspect of his musical persona: the DJ. It is not his first commercial mix CD. As Audion, he recorded Fabric 27 in 2006, and as Dear, he delivered the seventh installment in Get Physical’s Body Language series in 2008. Like those mixes, DJ-Kicks focuses heavily on the present moment: Nothing is more than two years old, with the exception of a 1980 synth-pop rarity that turns up in a newly edited form. Given the ways that dance music has changed in the past decade, there’s a temptation to read the new mix as survey of its moment, much in the same way that Fabric 27 represented the minimal scene at its mid-’00s peak and Body Language Volume 7 captured a snapshot of the EasyJet-set—the tech-house axis of London, Berlin, and Ibiza—at the end of the decade. But Dear’s DJ-Kicks feels less like a cross-section of a scene or a snapshot of a moment in time than a core sample of his own idiosyncratic sensibility. There’s more character in this mix than in the previous two; it’s weirder and more engaging. The others could sometimes get tripped up by their own linearity, but this one is more charged, more unhinged, and riskier; it’s also more intricately and intuitively mixed. It’s a vision of house and techno that’s sleazy, druggy, and disorienting—also sneaky, whip-smart, and fun.
Dear’s specialty is the controlled urgency of the peak time, and that’s precisely where the bulk of the set dwells: deep in the chugging, roiling murk, with blunt machine grooves stirring up melodies the color of bruise blood. He opens on a more contemplative note, though, with an elegiac solo-piano piece from Nils Frahm that launches us into a new, previously unreleased song of his own: “Wrong With Us,” a bittersweet, Koze-like vocal number that neatly captures the weariness of a relationship going off the rails. It’s the only time we’re treated to Dear’s singing voice in the mix, but voices actually constitute a crucial through-line. Across the set he has scattered snippets of dialogue with his friends and family—off-the-cuff fragments, slowed to a narcotic (and largely incomprehensible) crawl, that serve as sinewy connective tissue from track to track. They lend the impression of moving through a crowded dancefloor where scraps of truncated conversations whip around your head as you move—a kind of Nightclub of Babel.
While few songs here foreground sung melodies, nearly every track uses vocals as a textural or rhythmic element: the cut-up, head-turning double entendres of Markus Enochson’s “Hot Juice Box”; the choppy, panned, and filtered gurgles of Kreon’s “Silo Sol”; the booming, crowd-stoking commandments of Italojohnson’s “ITJ10B1.” As a singer, Dear has always been as interested in the heft of the voice as he is in lyrical meaning, so it makes sense that he’d gravitate toward club cuts that work in the same way. And for listeners, his varied selections—juggling high voices and low, rough and smooth, garbled and clean—carve out an unusual space in between vocal and instrumental dance music. These aren’t voices we sing along with, necessarily; they aren’t the garish “toplines” garnishing commercial EDM. But they add nuance and mystery, drawing you in past the stern, occasionally forbidding contours of the rhythms Dear favors—snapping, mechanical vortexes full of sharp edges and jutting angles.
Dear’s mixing is a treat. Unless you know the tracks inside and out, it’s virtually impossible to tell where they begin and end; he favors long, careful blends, and rarely leaves a given track to play out by itself for long. His selections benefit from the hands-on style. Pay attention to the way energy pulses between two cuts running in parallel, and you imagine the motion of a pinball as it ricochets off bouncers and flippers: wildly kinetic and keenly controlled.
The smartly paced set switchbacks between minimalist drum tracks and deeper, more atmospheric house, and it climaxes with two previously unreleased Audion cuts and an interlude. Following the “Flat Eric”-like bassline of Soulphiction’s “Sky So High,” “Live Breakdown” wipes the slate clean with an extended stretch of granular vocal processing drawn out into a gravelly fit of pique. “Starfucker” rebuilds momentum with a rolling groove and a sharply syncopated hook, and it all comes to a head with the unhinged “Brines,” an improvised modular-synth workout playing rapid-fire snare rolls off dial-tone squeal. The set’s real highpoint, though, comes a few tracks earlier, when Dear mixes Simian Mobile Disco’s “Staring at All This Handle” into Pearson Sound’s “XLB,” one of 2016’s biggest techno tracks. As Resident Advisor’s No. 2 track of the year, it’s by far the highest-profile selection in the mix, but its notoriety isn’t the operating factor here; it’s the way Dear plays the two tracks’ hooks off each other.
Each one is considerably powerful on its own. Simian Mobile Disco’s sounds like a Foley artist’s thunder sheet being suddenly liquefied, as if by some arcane chemical process; Pearson Sound’s is a barrage of neon tracers cutting through darkness. Together, they evoke an image like something out of a John Woo film—a hail of bullets in an actual hailstorm. It’s such an intuitive pairing that you wonder why all DJs don’t always play these two tunes together. But it goes deeper than that. With the two descending sequences snapped into a kind of double helix formation, we’re presented with a schema of what Dear listens for when he’s putting together a mix: an X-ray of the structural underpinnings of his DJ sets. DJing is often characterized as an active, even athletic undertaking, whether that means rapid cross-cutting or vulgar fist-pumping. But in Dear’s hands, it can also be a more contemplative one: a case of setting up two tracks and letting them play out in a way that allows us to hear them anew. Locked into his listening, we let his ears guide ours.


The xx producer and percussionist Jamie Smith takes a stab at recontextualizing Gil Scott-Heron's excellent 2010 album, I'm New Here.

Gil Scott-Heron / Jamie xx: We're New Here

We're New Here

Gil Scott-Heron's 2010 album, I'm New Here, was his first of original material in 16 years and best in three decades. But though it was a joyful return to the living for the once-homeless recovering addict and pivotal figure of pre-South Bronx talking blues, the album is defined by pallor. It's grim stuff, built around Scott-Heron's ashes-to-ashes baritone and XL founder Richard Russell's skeletal production, caked in grime and rust. It's essentially a podium for Scott-Heron's remarkable voice, ever-wheezing and cracking, that both supports and condemns his life choices with its grippingly dark magnitude.
Jamie Smith, percussionist and producer of the xx, has become a minor celebrity of the post-dubstep Brixton scene, earning a reputation as a DJ with his MPC mastery and as an ace remixer, crafting memorable, expansive edits of songs by Adele and Glasser in recent months. Smith, like many liners-scanning millennial sound nerds, is a massive Scott-Heron fan, and at Russell's suggestion has taken a stab at recontextualizing I'm New Here in service of changing sounds-- you can practically hear him cycling through subgenres track-to-track.
It's too dangerous to question either the necessity or the motivation behind such a project-- 22-year-old wunderkind cinches cred with resurgent iconoclast, perhaps?-- but it will come up. Do your best to ignore the impulse, because the residue of death that lingers on I'm New Here is wiped clean from We're New Here. It's replaced with brightness, an energy, and a historical milieu. Smith samples older Scott-Heron songs and works them into these newer songs. He takes a rare moment of singing, recorded for but not included on the initial album, and turns it into the Kieran Hebden-indebted "My Cloud", a gorgeous and redolent centerpiece. He turns a broken man into a recombinant diva.
Smith recently cited the likes of Rjd2 as both a pillar of influence, and the music of his youth-- and you can hear turn-of-the-century collagists like Rj, DJ Shadow, and El-P all over his constructions. Smith also samples and chops unlikely vocal sources, notably a snatch from Justine "Baby" Washington's lone hit, 1963's "That's How Heartaches Are Made", for the intro to "The Crutch", before it erupts into a drum'n'bass burst. Here, Smith's finicky, hard-charging production trumps Scott-Heron's voice, overpowering it with ideas, if not focus. But there's a go-for-it quality to Smith's production that suggests fearlessness over reverence. On the opener, "I'm New Here", he lifts a quickened dash of Gloria Gaynor's "Casanova Brown", giving the voice some shape and depth, and slyly nodding to a polar contemporary of Scott-Heron's. This feels like quite a distance from disco, and yet Smith shortens the gap between Scott-Heron's proud missives and exuberant dance music.
Each experiment is a gamble; some of these spoken-word recitations were meant to be without a speed or brightened exterior-- a reconsideration of I'm New Here standout "Me and the Devil" is noticeably absent here. And this isn't a simple "Is it better?" proposition. The sonorous, Bernard Hermann-esque "NY Is Killing Me" is such a far cry from the hand-clapping original that there's hardly any comparison at all. Only rarely does something like "I'll Take Care of U" happen. That song, the closer, is the purest distillation of Smith's taste for spacious melodrama and cinematic sweep-- it'd have fit nicely on xx. These two men only discussed the music here, briefly, in handwritten letters. That much shows, though putting them in the same room is the next logical step both for Smith, who claims he has no interest in a solo album, and Scott-Heron, who is now back in the consciousness and ready to be pushed hard. Here's to reunions.


Recorded using only plastic material, the concept of the latest Matmos album is undergirded by the compositional integrity, the quality of the sound, and the sickeningly beautiful idea of it all.

Plastic Anniversary

Each Matmos album has a concept of some kind—music paying tribute to queer icons, music made from the sounds of an operating room, music made through telepathy. It’s easy to get caught up in the audacity of it all and marvel at how formal limitations can lead to such emotional work. The knowledge that, say, a deeply moving piece of drone music was sourced from the sound of a bow drawn across the wires of a rat’s cage—empty, because the rat had recently died—has several layers of poignancy. You can enjoy the shriek as sound, enjoy it as concept, enjoy it for the pictures the contextual information, like its title “For Felix (And All the Rats),” puts into your head. And on top of that, Matmos make you hear—really hear—the materials used for their music’s creation. Beyond how they are transformed into music, there is a sense that objects and ideas have sonic properties as distinctive as fingerprints.
For their new album, Plastic Anniversary, Matmos tackle the ubiquitous material named in the title. We already know that plastic has a sound. On the one hand, “plastic” means “fake,” and music described as such is thought to be cheap, artificial. And yet creative uses of plastic are everywhere. The sound of plastic makes me think of a familiar sound of the city—kids on the street who play drums on buckets. I think of Ornette Coleman, who played a plastic saxophone throughout his rise in the 1950s and ’60s, at first because it was more affordable, and later because he came to prefer its harsher tone, which he felt made it sound closer to the human voice. Plastic leaves space for ingenuity, because it’s constantly being repurposed, and it’s constantly being repurposed because it never goes away. Plastic objects will retain their structural integrity long after our bodies have withered into dust.
So the material is a natural fit for a Matmos album, and Plastic Anniversary makes you realize that the sound of plastic is wider than you might have imagined. It is bouncy, percussion-heavy, and tuneful, with the group’s playful rhythmic sense in the foreground. On “Fanfare for Polyethylene Waste Containers,” they enlisted the drumline from Montana’s Whitefish High School Marching Band for a rolling beat on garbage cans, while a cast of musicians plays an ominous descending theme on plastic horns. The album’s gorgeous title track also includes plastic wind instruments but goes from a bittersweet lament to a rollicking overture. These tracks hint at orchestral music, while “Silicone Gel Implant” and “Extending the Plastisphere to GJ237b” both have elements of early electro, with percolating sequencers and squelchy lead melodies.
With the help of Catalonia Institute of Space Studies, a version of the latter track was beamed from a high-power radio tower in the direction of the named star system. The liner notes spelling out the how and why of Plastic Anniversary show gestures that range from simply playful (the sounds on “Breaking Bread” were recorded as the group destroyed records made by the easy listening group of the same name) to the pointed (“Thermoplastic Riot Shield” was sourced from recordings of a device used by the Albuquerque Police Department, and includes links to information about how to make riot shields inoperable), and as the sounds and references pile up the album becomes a mass of possibilities, each pointing toward ideas to explore in more detail later.
There’s always a risk that an album like this one will be received as novelty music, but the compositional integrity is there, and the music is engaging purely on the level of sound. But Plastic Anniversary’s ultimate resonance comes when you take in everything—ideas, sounds, images, links. On the album’s back cover is a heartbreaking photograph of a sea bird decaying on a beach, its body almost gone while the plastic material that had been in its stomach—and presumably had caused its death—remains. The colors are sickeningly beautiful, like this album at its best.


The Brooklyn singer-songwriter’s music is measured, slow, and focused, allowing space for complex emotions to bloom.

Greenhouse

Any digital native worth their salt knows that the most effective tool for checking up on one’s ex is not Facebook or Insta or even finsta. It’s Venmo, where unguarded users drop emoji-riddled breadcrumb trails to who they’re spending time with. On “Horrible Person,” a highlight of her new record, Greenhouse, the 32-year-old Brooklynite Caitlin Pasko finds herself on the receiving end of such unwanted scrutiny. “Please stop texting me...When you see that I’ve moved on/After looking me up on Venmo,” she sings.
There is a certain grim humor in the idea of human relationships being distilled to a string of mundane transactions, but if this lyric sounds like a droll punch line, it’s one delivered with an exceptionally straight face. So is the blunt assertion that gives the song its title: “You know you are a horrible person/I shouldn’t have to explain it to you.” Across Greenhouse, Pasko rejects and moves on from the emotional labor demanded by a manipulative partner—the sort of person who prefers digging up painful memories to being forgotten, who feigns innocence when confronted with their faults.
Pasko’s delivery minimizes her words’ humorous potential; rather than make a quick joke of someone else’s awfulness, she holds space for a more vulnerable response, letting her words linger without disrupting their tension. “Walking is hard/When you have to lift your legs, your quadriceps,” she sings on “Unwell,” a song about fighting to meet a baseline of human functionality. Songwriting is also hard. Pasko’s lyrics call attention to the procedure of taking a step; meanwhile, her sparse arrangement invites us to consider the mechanics of every chord change. Right foot, left foot, right foot. A major, E minor, D major.
Measured and effortful, with minimal instrumentation—piano chords and drones, largely—Greenhouse is a record that rewards patience and focus. Pasko tends to interrupt herself by breathing mid-phrase, to let her sentiments balloon out across many measures, requiring listeners to lock in for extended periods of time in order to derive meaning from her words. But in spite of their slow speed—and sometimes even because of it—her sharpest lines can induce whiplash. On “Quiet Weather,” she sings, “When I think of you, I take a sho–,” drawing out the vowel. Your brain might autofill a “t” to finish the protracted word, thinking she’s reaching for a liquid cure for heartache. But the real lyric is much more gruesome, and startling when she gets to it: “I take a sho–vel to my chest, and dig as deep as I can get.” There’s much talk about diaristic songwriters who self-excavate; usually, they aren’t quite so literal about it.
The shovel is a fitting tool for Pasko. Greenhouse is named for a structure that preserves plant life; on “To the Leaves,” she imagines one erected inside her body to protect her mind. Pasko’s affinity for the natural world is laced into the imagery she often reaches for: A peach in the leaves, a lake, the sun, snowfall. But even more than nature’s symbols, she invokes its processes of recovery and replenishment. “Today I thought about how it must feel to give birth/And to look in the eyes of yourself,” she muses, her own voice twinning itself, drawing out the idea of regeneration. Elsewhere, she realizes that “that growth and letting go are so complexly intertwined.” As any gardener knows, you have to prune away dead leaves to make room for new buds.
This emphasis on growth is particularly pronounced on the back half of Greenhouse, giving it a narrative arc even while many of the specifics remain out of focus. “Ooo Happy,” a brief interlude on which Pasko’s light soprano bobs like a kite catching a breeze, proves pivotal in this respect: It serves as a bridge between the record’s more somber opening and more generative conclusions. Remember Pasko’s struggle with her legs? On the second half of the album, a version of the same scene recurs. “Today I spent my time/Walking around a neighborhood that's not mine,” she sings in the earlier iteration; “Today I remembered/What it feels like to go walking/… In a city that's not my city,” in the later one. Feeling separates the second instance from the first; it signals an opening up to the possibility of sensation and discovery, where before she was just miserably marking minutes. It’s a quiet sort of progress that doesn’t call attention to itself—but meaningful, all the same.

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Woods' latest is another solid record that finds them returning in spots to the experimental vein explored on earlier records and in their live show.

Sun and Shade

When I first caught on to Woods with 2009's Songs of Shame, they'd already been around for a few years, releasing albums in limited editions, sometimes under the name Woods Family Creeps. Songs of Shame was immediately enjoyable, as it spun together strands of folk-rock, ramshackle indie, and sunshine pop into something that felt handmade and fresh. But listening to it, I didn't peg Woods as the kind of band that would keep turning out remarkably well-realized and consistent albums on a yearly basis. Maybe it was the casual nature of their time-keeping, where all the songs amble at a loose, oblong gait. Or maybe it was the general nature of their lo-fi pedigree, where quantity of output is often prized over quality. But nothing about Woods at that time said "consistent album band" to me.
Two years and two full-lengths later, "consistent album band" describes Woods very well. Last year's At Echo Lake didn't have a weak song on it and showcased the strength of their songwriting on the most fundamental terms. I still find myself humming tunes from it at weird times, even when I haven't listened to it in months. Now they return with Sun and Shade, another very solid record that finds them returning in spots to the experimental vein explored on earlier records and in their live show. They haven't changed their sound in the least, but they're demonstrating that there's a lot more to be done with it than might have been expected.
The experimentation comes in the form of two longer instrumentals that take up about 17 of the album's 44 minutes. "Out of the Eye" is a Krautrock homage constructed from the basic ingredients of Neu!'s "Hallogallo", but slowed down by a third and with a Middle Eastern tinge in the guitars. Where bands like Stereolab built something driving and forceful around the iconic motorik groove of the Neu! original, Woods' rickety aesthetic can't help but keep human imperfection in the mix. These guys don't do "robotic," and no one will ever mistake the laid-back percussion on a Woods record for a drum machine. Which means that the shadowy steady-state psych of "Out of the Eye" unfolds patiently and isn't afraid to meander a little. But when it closes abruptly with a quick drum roll seven minutes in, it gives the impression that the preceding was more of a sketch or one-take jam rather than anything designed for a specific effect, which slightly undercuts its power.
The nearly 10-minute "Sol y Sombra" is the other long track, and it features spare hand percussion, acoustic guitars, and some distant electric guitar leads. It still scans as "1970s Germany," but here the basic model is the pastoral psych of Popol Vuh from the middle of that decade. They both manage to capture a mood and wring feeling out of them, but "Sol y Sombra" and "Out of the Eye" sometimes have me reaching for the "skip" button. That's partly because Woods continue to craft such memorable tunes when working in guitar-pop mode.
Like "Pushing Onlys", the early single from Sun and Shade, which has chiming guitars and a classic pop melody catchy enough to hang with 60s confections by the Turtles or the Hollies. While Jeremy Earl's cracking voice is in the long line of "sounds kinda like Neil Young" high tenors, Woods' Aquarian Age references often lean toward the bouncy and optimistic bubblegum of the era. Here, that spirit comes to the fore on the elegant shuffle "Who Do I Think I Am?" and "What Faces the Sheet", which is built around a guitar riff vaguely reminiscent of "Then He Kissed Me". Folkier songs like "Be All Be Easy" and "Wouldn't Waste" bring to mind the sound of folk-pop heroes growing into singer-songwriters, a spirit best exemplified by Graham Nash, whom Woods covered on Songs of Shame. In whatever mode they're working, the take-away is that Woods are good at all these sounds, and they seem to be striving to get even better. Despite their ultra-slack style and prodigious output, nothing about them says "half-assed," so it's another year, another fine Woods album.


Iron Reagan are a Richmond band composed of members from notable crossover thrash groups like Municipal Waste and Darkest Hour. Their latest album is a thirty-two minute blitzkrieg that fires off short, potent riffs at a workmanlike pace, letting the listener sort out the mess for themselves.

The Tyranny of Will

A decade after his death (two since he left office), former president Ronald Reagan continues to be a subject of many a musical effigy, but it's been a while since the hardcore community had him as its muse. Enter Iron Reagan, a Richmond band composed of members from notable crossover thrash groups like Municipal Waste and Darkest Hour, who are the jellybean cowboy's latest invokers. While their sound places them as political punk in the vein of Wasted Youth or the Crucifucks, Iron Reagan's lyrical tendencies skew nihilstic and violent with a dash of odd humor. Where Black Flag once instructed the crowd to “Rise Above”, Iron Reagan proudly declare, "I Ripped That Testament a New Asshole”. It’s a shock-driven approach, sure, but when it comes to expressing displeasure with the status quo, have punks ever bothered to clean up nicely and say “please”?
The quintet's latest, The Tyranny of Will, is a thirty-two minute blitzkrieg that surges forth like the blood spurting from the politician's neck on the album cover. Iron Reagan stick to what they know best: firing off short, potent riffs at a workmanlike pace, and letting the listener sort out the mess for themselves. In interviews, frontman Tony Foresta hasn’t tried to hide the fact that he and the rest of the guys are, largely, winging it: “We suffer from A.D.D. pretty hard—almost everyone in the band,” he revealed recently to one reporter with a laugh, “so we make music that comes across faster, and more to the point."
In other words, they’ve got the punk mindset already hard-wired, and so it naturally follows that nine of the album’s songs blow by in under a minute. On the album's most immediate cut, “Eyeball Gore”,power chords stamp and stomp as the band make their impassionately sadistic demands: “All we want is eyeball gore RIGHT NOW!” Think of the song as the album's elevator pitch: the violent fervor of protest music used to incite social change and knife parties. Of course, there are jabs at the cops and the one-percenters (see the hilarious “U Lock the Bike Cop”, in which Foresta warns a policeman that his fixie’s going to get jacked). Most of the time, however, Iron Reagan simply release their furor with no target in particular. “Broken Bottles”,  a twisted take on Adolescents-style skate punk, captures the sentiment of that band’s essential cut “Bloodstains” and leaves it to simmer, resulting in a chugging frenzy topped off with a tottering solo. Sometimes, they can’t seem to tell exactly who or what they’re mad at; “Your Kid’s an Asshole”, short and pointless, might as well be the musical equivalent of a typo-laden insult from an email exchange between two soccer moms.
A significant portion of The Tyranny of Will was written while Iron Reagan toured with GWAR, not too long before Dave Brockie (aka Oderus Ungurus) passed. According to the band, the late frontman lent Iron Reagan some inspiration, going as far to contribute gory gross-out ideas for the album, and listening to The Tyranny of Will, a number of similarities emerge between the two entities. Foresta’s podium-side barking bears kinship to Brockie’s theatrical delivery, and while the former has yet to perform in blood-soaked costumes exposing prosthetic genitalia, he plays a comedic villain with aplomb. “I’d rather just set fire/ Than be left to die,” he threatens on “Miserable Failure”, his energy essential in keeping the group's bare-bones, repetitive fretwork fresh.
For diehard thrash heads who possess patience and a sick sense of humor, The Tyranny of Will should prove satisfying; most listeners, though, will probably find the record's attention-challenged songwriting grating by the fifteen-minute mark, and as the album plays on, the pummeling punchlines don’t hit as hard as they're intended to. As is the case with most overstuffed hardcore albums, The Tyranny of Will lends itself well to a cherry-picking approach; keep some riffs and ideas, and toss the ones that don’t stick. Essentially, it's ample license to take part in some musical mudslinging—and The Man could always stand to take a good mud-and-blood pie to the face.


Haley Fohr's newest songwriting persona doesn't mince words–but she also leaves her full potential unknown.

Jackie Lynn

Haley Fohr is a dramatic storyteller. The music she makes as Circuit Des Yeux channels complex narratives and emotions, fueled by slow-burning arrangements and her dark, evocative voice. With all the scenes and characters she conjures, taking on a new persona–especially one with an intensely detailed backstory–could be overkill. Why add another layer to a musician who already has so many?
Fohr’s new solo project, Jackie Lynn, answers that question pretty clearly. Inventing this character has emboldened her storytelling, producing more direct rock songs with sharper plots. Jackie Lynn is a woman on the run, perhaps even an outlaw. We often encounter her in the middle of a trip–Fohr continually mentions highways, locales, and means of travel–and watch her take decisive action at every step. She confronts obstacles without flinching in Fohr’s most tough-minded lyrics to date.
Two songs are particularly vivid, as our heroine exacts revenge for wrongdoings. On “Franklin, TN,” Lynn’s hometown punishes her outspokenness with three lashes (including one "to make sure I never came back”); she vows to return with three bullets and a gun. An even harsher comeuppance emerges in “Smile,” as Lynn gets so fed up with men’s comments–“I’m so sick of these jocks with their little tiny cocks/Thinking I’d shine my shoes and show my pearly whites”–that she imagines immolating one of them as he sleeps. But Fohr’s protagonist can be vulnerable, too: in “Alien Love,” she falls for a guy in the span of a bus ride. Later, in “Jackie,” she regrets being “a pawn in his foolish game” over the plaintive electric guitar of Marisa Anderson.
Fohr imbues Lynn’s travelogues with melodies that constantly move. Circuit Des Yeux songs usually build gradually with pauses, but most of Jackie Lynn progresses at a steady clip. Adding synths and drum machines, Fohr gives these songs a bright catchiness. Still, this isn’t a sunny record; it’s music of many hues, and most of them tend toward darkness. So does Fohr’s suggestive voice, which remains impressive in shorter, pithier doses than the average Circuit Des Yeux track.
In fact, *Jackie Lynn’*s only significant weakness is that, even though individual songs benefit from brevity, the record is too short. Its eight tracks take up only 22 minutes, and two of those tracks are micro-length instrumentals; it’s half an album at most. Perhaps Fohr has exhausted Jackie Lynn’s potential already, or maybe she’s holding back. Considering her track record of rich, compelling art, I’d bet on the latter.


The first song on guitar wunderkind Ryley Walker’s fourth album might be the best thing he’s ever done. Then there are the other seven songs.

Ryley Walker: Golden Sings That Have Been Sung

Golden Sings That Have Been Sung

It’s always risky when a young artist opens an album with an unexpected gambit that either sounds remarkably better or different than the rest of the songs that follow. Going for the shock of the new is understandable, but there’s the danger that listeners could fall in love with that first moment and then become disappointed when the rest of the record fails to stack up. Such is the case with Golden Sings That Have Been Sung, the third studio album by Illinois guitar wunderkind Ryley Walker.
On his past two records, Walker fetishized the sounds and aesthetics of quasi-mystical British folk of the late 1960s and early ’70s; everything about 2015’s Primrose Green, from the songs, to Walker’s vocals, to even the photography and font on the album cover screamed “revivalist.” However, on Golden Sings opener “The Halfwit in Me,” Walker tones down those influences while shifting things back home to the late ’90s baroque folk of Chicago artists like Gastr del Sol and Jim O’Rourke. The song pulls from the successful elements of Walker’s previous work while embracing these newer (albeit still “retro”) influences and melding it all into a beautiful, pensive six-minute suite that seems to declare the official arrival of an artist who’s on his own path.
Unfortunately, none of the other seven songs on Golden Sings sound anything like “The Halfwit in Me.” Part of what makes that track successful is the way Walker uses his spindling guitar melodies to carry it forward at a brisk clip, showcasing delicate instrumental interplay and allowing his serviceable voice to complement rather than dominate the song. Disappointingly, four of Golden Sings’s eight cuts slow things down to a dirge-like pace that de-emphasizes the value of his playing. These songs also put his voice and lyrics front and center—like he’s hoping to dazzle us with the strength and passion of his pipes and the inspired poetry they sing, a la Van Morrison. But while Walker’s vocals are considerably improved from Primrose Green, they’re still more equipped to serve as an accompaniment rather than the star of his music.
Also, considering Walker’s rep as a guitar savant, the decision to minimize the fancy playing is a bit of a head scratcher. On the piano-driven “Funny Thing She Said,” the weakness is especially apparent as the song just crawls and bores. Additionally, the languidness draws undue attention to Walker’s occasionally overwrought lyrics, which often just hang and die in the air awkwardly. In light of these glacial jeremiads, the buoyant, saccharine folk-pop of “I Will Ask You Twice” feels almost desperately welcome, despite the fact that it more or less sounds like an outtake from Jewel’s Pieces of You.
It’s not all glum though. Golden Sings offers one other winning track with the bright and beautiful “The Roundabout.” Setting the stage with a warm, slightly droning guitar riff, the song succeeds at advancing Walker’s desire to position himself as a successor to the British folk legends he so obviously loves. Relating a tale of the comforting time spent at reliable local bar, the repeating guitar line emphasizes the sort of hypnotic brainlock that a powerful moment of nostalgia can offer. He succeeds lyrically as well, with amusing lines like, “I want to buy you a drink, but my credit is quit shit/We can all laugh and have tap water.”
It’s evident that Walker is talented and brimming with ideas—and there are moments on this record that mark the best music he’s ever made. But he needs to get a better understanding of his strengths if he wants to become more than just another nifty live-guitar throwback.


Committing to a bit that isn’t entirely convincing, the actor and singer-songwriter takes performative pleasure in the broke-down love affairs and ritzy sound of 1980s and ’90s country pop.

Lady for Sale

At the start of last year, Lola Kirke was struggling to find work as an actor or a musician. The star of Mistress America was told that her body and age would be a problem—explanations she understandably found to be “crazy-making.” There’s some irony in the fact that she turned to country music to find creative freedom: In the genre’s mainstream incarnation, at any rate, the standards imposed on women performers are hardly less punitive or limiting than those of Hollywood or pop. But then everything about Kirke’s second album, Lady for Sale, is a bit of an anachronism.
Kirke has written off her debut, 2018’s stately Americana effort Heart Head West, as “dour,” and said that the joy of ’80s and ’90s country is where her heart really lies. We may be in the midst of a Shania-aissance, but on Lady for Sale, Kirke leaps back further to the era of Wynonna Judd, Pam Tillis, and Real Love-era Dolly Parton. This is big, blousy, country pop that buffs its pedal steel to a chrome gleam, offsets snappy production with misty-eyed longing, and doesn’t ever quite feel complete until it’s soundtracking a big-city movie full of promise and power-walking. It’s a sound full of nostalgia and with it a built-in sense of comfort.
While Kirke didn’t approach traditional country labels with the album, she found that most indies weren’t interested, either: Lady for Sale falls between the cracks of the capital-R Realness of guys singing about trucks/beer/fishing/etc. and the small-r realness of songwriters who stake their work on earthier types of autobiography. Although her lyrics about misaligned relationships feel hard won, Kirke sees the magic in the performative pleasures of this ritzy sound, how its AM glory brings a little heroism to a domestic life, making pain you should have dodged and longing you should have got over feel spotlight-worthy for a few minutes. It makes sense, too, that she found a home at Third Man, a label built on the urge to embody an aesthetic to its fullest extent.
And Kirke goes for it on Lady for Sale’s great opening run. “Broken Families” encompasses steady disco-ball sparkle, pedal steel curlicues that feel as though they should trace condensation love hearts in the sky, and a chorus that could be an anthem. A duet with Courtney Marie Andrews, it’s an emphatic, bruised account of two lovers trying to use one another to heal their broken pasts: “We’re two wrongs trying to make it right,” Kirke observes, beautifully, through a mouthful of pathos and twang. The pace peps up: “If I Win” practically saunters, in thrall to Belinda Carlisle’s saltwater-fresh pop and Cyndi Lauper’s strut, but it’s lonely, too. Laying out her desires for a lost opportunity, Kirke dials up the suggestive side of her voice until it becomes slightly pinched: She’s made weary by the limitations of the fantasy, “drunk enough to think you think of me too/But not drunk enough to believe it’s true.” She pivots again with “Better Than Any Drug,” a saucy, sparky, straightforward come-on full of Dolly coquettishness and the supreme confidence of a last look in the mirror before heading out. It’s pure pastiche, right down to the cheesecake spoken-word admission of infatuation in the middle eight, and pure delight.
But Kirke’s wholehearted commitment to the bit doesn’t always work. She does a nice line in vocals that are beseeching or cheeky, yet often lurches towards a degree of Dolly cosplay that feels egregious for a woman who grew up in New York City, especially the distractingly affected warble of the title track. Although its lyrics about the need for women to self-commodify lest someone else take advantage are sharp, it’s hard not to think of Parton’s own “9 to 5,” a song on the same subject that has endured for 42 years, while Kirke dates hers with references to TikTok and OnlyFans. A few lovely choruses aside—the dusky twinkle of “Pink Sky” lives up to its name; the raucously glass-all-empty “Stay Drunk” would get a bar full of strangers singing along within a minute—Kirke and producer Austin Jenkins’ genre-first approach is diluting. “The Crime” buries her in bizarre zydeco production; the concluding power ballad one-two of “No Secrets” and “By Your Side” becomes digressive and wan. Despite real moments of fun, the project ends up feeling shy of its influences, stopping short of a full buy-in.


Using just a bass and a drum machine, Eva Moolchan's punk is bare and hypnotic. On her first record on Merge, she maintains her raw sound in the powerful space she built for herself.

It's a Myth

Brevity defines the music that Washington, D.C.’s Eva Moolchan makes as Sneaks. On her new album It's a Myth, Moolchan logs ten tracks across 18 minutes. On her debut Gymnastics, she didn't pass 14 minutes. Her take on post-punk is minimalist and sparse—music that proves there's a virtue in being concise. These details suggest that it would be unnatural for Moolchan to accommodate anything beyond 20 minutes, and the transient nature of her work means there is little to compare her to both past or present.
It's a Myth represents the first Sneaks record for Merge since the label signed Moolchan eight months ago. Sneaks was born out of the desire for full creative control after playing in the short-lived Shit Stains whose first performance to five people included Katie Alice Greer of Priests. Greer introduced Moolchan into the capital's DIY scene, becoming a fixture in the community, while coming up with Priests themselves, Flasher, and Downtown Boys.
For It's a Myth, Sneaks recorded the album with Mary Timony (Helium, Ex Hex) and Jonah Takagi, with Timony producing it at her D.C. studio. Extra hands mean more instrumentation and allow for exploring new textures to create a more fluid album. It's a Myth is not a huge leap in sound because Moolchan opts for refinement rather than repurposing the roughness of Gymnastics. According to her Bandcamp tags, they fall within “cold cut,”(?) “zing zong” (??), and “violent vibes.” These descriptors allow Moolchan's music to be flexible in her expression and secure her experimentalism.
The Sneaks template is no more than bass, a drum machine, and vocals. Despite the minimal approach, Moolchan’s voice extends beyond the half-rapping, half-singing approach on Gymnastics. On “Inside Edition,” she delivers a hypnotic mantra that becomes the song’s groove and uses her voice as a melodic tool. That new feature of her work enables the creation of “PBNJ,” in which Moolchan’s voice sounds distant, and the music behind her sounds like it’s in a trance state. Moolchan’s lyrics are elliptical and playful, suggesting that she writes them in line with a song’s rhythm or to her voice’s melodic sensibilities.
Moolchan’s music may not appear to be as overtly political as the acts around her, but that’s not to say she is apolitical. On “Hair Slick Back,” Moolchan sings, “You think you’ve got a lot to say/No you think you need a bigger stage/You think I can’t contain my rage.” The words could be a taunt at the males that dominate DIY scenes. “When you go to a show, and it’s filled with all these punk bros,” Moolchan told The Media in 2015. “We should be taking up the space, and not these guys.” Moolchan’s presence alone is an act of protest, but with “Hair Slick Back” she offers a statement to rebut those with privilege who think they need more visibility.
Because of Moolchan’s devotion to concision, a three-minute song like “Look Like That” is a rare example of when Sneaks expands beyond her realms. It’s unfamiliar territory, and as a result, the song is less taut and impactful. It’s a Myth is the natural progression from Gymnastics, and so across the record, Moolchan refines her sound within these limits. Inside and outside of the music, she embraces the self-built space that she crafted for herself.
Correction: A previous version of the review misidentified label on which Gynmastics was released.


Kompakt's annual, too-overlooked ambient series picks up where it left off last year, with 10 of the same artists represented-- including the Field, Wolfgang Voigt, Markus Guentner, and Thomas Fehlmann.

Pop Ambient 2008

Kompakt's Pop Ambient series is in some kind of impressive stasis. The label's prominence and a growing critical reputation have yet to elevate the awareness of the series to those not predisposed to German electronic music. But Pop Ambient 2007 offered the previously unthinkable: a breakout star. The Field's "Kappsta" was the standout track on PA07, nominally the album's least ambient tune but its most pop. "Kappsta" helped kick-start the Field's impressive 2007, a year highlighted by as much crossover indie success as a low-key sound architect could ever expect. If ever there were a year for the Pop Ambient series to stake a bigger foothold in the experimental and pop music consciousness, 2007 would've been it.
It's perhaps with this missed opportunity in mind that Kompakt constructed Pop Ambient's 2008 edition, which with 10 of its 12 tracks provided by artists featured on last year's model (including, no joke, "Kappsta 2") is as much Pop Ambient 2007: II as an entirely new entry into the series. It's clear, though, that Pop Ambient is less a showcase for new talents and more an annual hello from the draftiest corners of Kompakt's roster. Pretty flowers, pretty tones, etc.: Pop Ambient volumes have always benefited from an homogeneity of tempo and wordless sprawl, such that they have always felt very "album-y."

PA08* is no different, though if it differs from the other volumes-- even PA07-- it is due to an ever so slight shift towards rhythm and beats. The warm, sunrise tones that so many of Pop Ambient's tracks have employed are still present, but they more often congeal into patterns that suggest a throbbing or pulsing, if not propulsion or percussion. All (Wolfgang Voigt)'s "Sag Alles Ab" is a sly, hypnotic break; Thomas Fehlmann's "Camilla" bandies about before finally welcoming in a shallow bass pounding. Markus Guentner's "Oceans Day" is all treated guitar brushing against a long drone, but the lapping click that sits under the surface sets it apart. "Kappsta 2" improves on its predecessor by sharpening the lines of the vocal loop and adding a muffled kick drum sound to further distinguish the track's linear movement.

Elsewhere, the composers play with the seasons and sort of generally make good on the ornate foliage that adorns the cover: Klimek's "The Ice Storm" is the most aptly named track here, and perhaps the most dynamic as well. A string section waxes in and out of focus as a sharp, high-pitched melody plays over the top producing an effect not unlike William Basinski's looped orchestrations. DJ Koze provides a summery counterpoint with "Nymphe Und Schäfer", using a similar loop but placing it under vinyl crackle and an unobtrusive field recording of insects.
Still, though, with the weight of seven preceding volumes on its shoulders, PA08 can't afford the uninspired soundwash of Ulf Lohman's "My Pazifik" or Popnoname's "Fembria". Pop Ambient has grown into a bit of institution, a haven for listeners dipping their toes into accessible ambient music or for dedicated electronic fans seeking calm water. PA08 does nothing to distract from this purpose, nor does it expand upon it. Stasis, right: Pop Ambient's glacial progression as a series mimics the "nothing to see here folks, move along" rallying cry of the artists it houses.