In 1985, the esteemed novelist worked with composer Todd Barton to create an album of unheard language and instruments. The reissue highlights the rich, totally immersive art Ursula K. Le Guin sought to create.

Ursula K. Le Guin / Todd Barton: Music and Poetry of the Kesh

Music and Poetry of the Kesh

Ursula K. Le Guin, the master writer who died in January at the age of 88, was best known for her novels The Dispossessed, her Earthsea series, and the best-selling The Left Hand of Darkness, which imagined a planet whose inhabitants have no fixed gender identity. After Darkness was published in 1969, it became a classic of both science fiction and of feminist science fiction, a genre Le Guin helped bore into existence.
“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope,” Le Guin said in a fiery speech at the 2014 National Book Awards. “We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality.”
In her final months, she was preparing the re-release of a 1985 work that had largely flown under the radar. Music and Poetry of the Kesh, her collaborative album with composer and analog synthesist Todd Barton, was first issued on cassette in 1985, bundled with Le Guin’s novel Always Coming Home, a dark-horse favorite among her readers. It’s an expansive, 523-page portrayal of a future tribe of indigenous people living an anti-colonial existence 500 years from now, their lives ruled by nature and the seasons, their story told by Le Guin in fiction, poetry, plays, recipes, ethnography, a glossary, and hand-drawn maps. Even given those wildly melding genres, Le Guin claimed she needed to “hear the music,” too. She enlisted Barton and began an elaborate and carefully considered process that yielded the deceptively verisimilar Music and Poetry of the Kesh.
“Heron Dance,” the first song is one of the more evocative pieces on the album—wordless, electronic, and organic, with synthesizer, handmade instruments, percussion and what appears to be a dulcimer-like instrument. Like the novel, Music and Poetry of the Kesh pulls freely and weirdly and somehow unobtrusively from multiple genres—sacred, choral, poetry, avant-garde, minimalist, and downright New Age. In its original packaging, it resembles some lost Terry Riley collaboration, or a bootleg of John Cage and Merce Cunningham’s first Happening—something forested and futuristic. Barton visited Le Guin on her Napa Valley ranch, the ostensible setting for Always Coming Home, where he collected field recordings. The ambient sounds of creek and crickets feature on “Twilight Song”; campfire and coyotes filter into the female chorus of “Yes—Singing,” the woods encroaching on the studio.
The songs of the Kesh speak to an earth-based spirituality, referencing ceremonies of actual Native Americans: “Sun Dance Poem,” “A River Song,”; there are songs for willow trees, dragonflies, herons, and quail. The titles alone are risky; are these cultural appropriations? In the wrong hands, they could be, of course, particularly if Le Guin and Barton had opted to base them on actual sacred or ceremonial songs. But Le Guin resolved instead to listen not so much to other music but to the land itself, as she had done since childhood.
Le Guin is the daughter of two prominent cultural anthropologists who focused their work on Native American tribes of Northern California, especially the Yahi, a California tribe decimated by genocide. In the early 20th century, Alfred Kroeber made wax cylinder recordings of Ishi, the last known member of the Yahi, speaking and singing in the language that would largely die with him. Theodora Kroeber wrote Ishi in Two Worlds, as well as another, partly fictionalized book based on Ishi’s story.
Undoubtedly, Le Guin grew up hearing Ishi’s recordings and the music of other indigenous people. Native American friends were frequent houseguests at her parents’ “rundown, easy-going” Napa Valley ranch. Her Kesh songs honor the simplicity of hymns and sacred music, but they feel distinct, true to the world of the characters Le Guin created. Barton built instruments that he and Le Guin imagined the Kesh people would have played—a seven-foot-long horn, a flute made out of bone—and then taught himself and ostensibly the other musicians on the album, to play them. When he asked Le Guin if the Kesh spoke English, she responded, “Drat!” and then spent months making up an alphabet, included in the back of the novel, and vocabulary for her lyrics.
You don’t need to “speak Kesh,” or to have read the book, in order to appreciate the idiosyncrasies of this album, but one heightens the understanding of the other. Think of The Music and Poetry of the Kesh as an open invitation to entering another, other-world of Le Guin’s. The album moves through a series of a cappella or sparsely accompanied songs with entrancing choral arrangements of female voices, male ones, and the harmonizing of both. “A Teaching Poem,” delivered at normal speed, will sound most deceptively familiar to listeners of indigenous music; the slowed-down “Sun Dance Poem” casts it in an otherworldly, monastic tone. Listen outdoors and the creek water you hear in Le Guin and Barton’s songs may sync up to the muddy river you’re passing; listen during a city’s winter and the percussive rhythm and bell-like tones will commune with your apartment radiator. These are sounds that seek to speak from then and beyond, to right now.
“The people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California,” Le Guin writes in the opening pages of Always Coming Home. “They are translations from a literature of the (or a) future.” The Kesh’s music and poems, too, are modern and archaic at once—they reach back to ancient hymns for the earth to repair the toxic damage wrought on their own. Pulling from the long ago past to address the people of the not-so-distant past, these songs are celebratory and a clarion call at once.


Jay Mitta adds an incredible amount of detail to the frenetic and kinetic sound of singeli, a blisteringly quick style of dance music from Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania.

Tatizo Pesa

Since its founding in 2016, Kampala, Uganda’s Nyege Nyege Tapes label has been a steadfast advocate for underground music from across East Africa, the kind that doesn’t often find its way to Western record labels. Its rapidly growing catalog encompasses a range of styles, from traditional ceremonial drumming and virtuoso mbira performances to hybrids like Otim Alpha’s electro acholi, a digital update of Northern Ugandan Larakaraka wedding songs, or Jako Maron’s electronic experiments with the traditional Maloya music of Réunion Island. Nyege Nyege is no stranger to the ultra-modern and ultra-globalized: Its sublabel Hakuna Kulala is a showcase for jarringly dissonant, heavily abstracted club music more in keeping with outlets like PAN or Príncipe. But one of the wildest sounds Nyege Nyege has showcased so far is singeli, a blisteringly quick style of dance music from Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania.
To the uninitiated, singeli might sound a little like Latin American merengue played on a cassette deck whose fast-forward button has gotten wedged in place. Tightly syncopated loops of sampled and synthesized drums spin at dizzying speeds while glassy keyboards pump away like the needles of an industrial sewing machine. It’s at once giddy and disorienting, and on Jay Mitta’s Tatizo Pesa, the surprises come fast and thick into something approaching a state of meditative grace.
Nyege Nyege first introduced singeli on 2017’s Sounds of Sisso compilation, a showcase for Sisso Records, a Dar Es Salaam outfit whose unvarnished style is a world away from the glossier strains that can be heard on Tanzanian pop radio. Sisso affiliate Bamba Pana delivered an especially erratic version of singeli with last year’s Poaa, where tempos sometimes reached 200 BPM or more. Some listeners heard an accidental echo of gabber, a pile-driving Dutch strain of trance music, but where gabber’s breakneck cadence telegraphs an unmistakable menace, Bamba Pana’s tones were less violent—less a brick to the face than the prickle of a foot that has fallen asleep.
The fellow Sisso member Jay Mitta’s Tatizo Pesa is less frenetic—the tempo swings between a mere 180 and 190 BPM—but perhaps even more kinetic, given the elasticity of his sounds. Where Bamba Pana’s loops can sound tinny and lo-fi, Mitta’s layers of percussion samples and stabbing synth leads have a hi-def sheen. Early singeli tended to sample taarab, a style popular in Zanzibar that sometimes has the sticky-sweet flavor of keyboard presets, but Mitta’s production is more nuanced: Once your eyes adjust to the glare, there are shadows lurking just outside the perimeter of the neon glow. On “Dura,” synth pads reminiscent of 1980s quiet-storm R&B are buffeted by ping-pong balls and punctuated by declarative acoustic drum fills; on the title track, the 14-year-old rapper Dogo Janja’s rapid-fire chat trails off into an unexpected explosion of dub delay. The staccato “Mpya Singeri” is virtually nothing but drums and a plunging bass synth, suggesting unexpected echoes of UK club music.
Its true pleasure lies in the details. A meowing cat lends slapstick energy to one song, and in another, a melody briefly lands on the refrain from Stevie Wonder’s “Part Time Lover.” Over the course of its 40-minute run, songs don’t go much beyond the three-minute mark, but “Don Bet” stretches to nearly eight minutes, the patterns switching up every few bars: earsplitting synth stabs, dissonant counterpoints, major-key piano chords, all set to that tireless, mechanized hand-drum bounce. That kind of variety plays out across the album as a whole: From track to track, the subtle shifts in tempo and timbre are enough to make each song feel like a whole new world, even though the elements are roughly the same. Every twist of the kaleidoscope brings a fresh surprise.


Making free, internet-giveaway mixtapes suits Charli XCX's image: the dance music association, her debt to M.I.A., and her overall rebellious, anti-authoritarian streak. Super Ultra is her second of 2012, and it's an interesting, if not always successful experiment.

Super Ultra

British electro pop singer Charli XCX's embrace of the mixtape makes perfect sense: It fits her association with dance music acts (a genre that's well suited to the format), her obvious debt to M.I.A. (who released her debut mixtape Piracy Funds Terrorism all the way back in 2004), and the importance of a rebellious, anti-authoritarian streak to her overall image. The free mixtape's direct line of communication from artist to listener, unimpeded by A&R execs, and the anarchic, genre-smashing creative approach that it engenders feel very compatible with the times, and with XCX's internet-mashing creative hybrids. Super Ultra is the second one she's released this year, after spring's Heartbreaks and Earthquakes, and it's an interesting experiment, if far from flawless.
The eight-track EP opens on a low note-- probably its lowest-- with a track featuring internet personality Brooke Candy, who is best known for appearing in Grimes' music video for "Genesis" and has a sideline in being a terrible rapper. The beat has a pleasing blunted feel and a catchy hook driven by a funky keyboard riff, but Candy's contribution sounds like the female half of a discarded turn-of-the-millennium Ja Rule duet, down to the outdated slang and submissive-chick role she plays in her lyrics. With her nasal voice and awkwardly-fitting accent she comes off like the female Mickey Avalon who, much like Mickey Avalon, no-one who actually likes rap music could possibly enjoy in any unironic way. "Heatwave" offers a convincing recreation of a brand of 80s electroclash that's been redone a vast number of times since the genre's heyday, while the droopy "Moments in Love" suggests that Charli might be better off with a supervisory eye looking over her shoulder. (If there wasn't one-- the presence of a link to Atlantic's UK division at the bottom of the page that homes Super Ultra suggests that it's not entirely free of label ties.)
But there are a few bright moments on Super Ultra. "Velvet Dreaming (Luv)" is spacey and ravey in a way that bears more than a passing resemblance to the Orb's "Little Fluffy Clouds", and the ecstatic synthesizer crescendo accompanied by an extended sample of dialogue from True Romance that pops up 30 seconds in would likely have gotten it the axe if she'd tried placing it on an album for a label. The same goes for "Glow", which has a beat that sounds like Clams Casino and a weary, dissipated vocal that doesn't fit the established outlines of a pop star personality.
And then there's the record-closing "Forgiveness", which is legitimately gorgeous and weird. It begins as a plaintive piano ballad before waves of strings and drums sweep over and it transforms into a minor-key dirge. It's awash in vocal effects that suggest some sort of emotional breakdown, along with an insistent cowbell that somehow feels vaguely maniacal and menacing in the context of everything that's going on. Charli's vocals show off all of her star-worthy talents, but the lyrics go deeper than self-doubt, all the way down to self-loathing and a raw, unembellished portrait of a dark psychic space. After listening a dozen times I realized that it most reminded me of of Montreal's epic meltdown "The Past is a Grotesque Animal". "Forgiveness" is a fascinatingly strange song, and who knows if it would have made it onto Super Ultra if it had been intended to shift units on a pop star level. In any case, it's a compelling argument for letting these kind of pop stars off the leash.


Full-length debut by Baltimore area group comes at hip-hop from an oblique angle, with the rapping holding down the rhythmic pulse while producer Ricky Rabbit's noisy and diverse beats fly all over the place.

Belly

Food for Animals come at hip-hop from an oblique angle. Or, to put it less gently, they do it ass-backwards, inverting the traditional roles of beats and rhymes. MCs Vulture Voltaire (aka Andrew Field-Pickering) and Hy (aka Sterling Warren) hold down the rhythmic pulse with their flows, while the beats-- well, the beats just fly all over the fucking place. Producer Ricky Rabbit's loops sound like a Stan Brakhage Nintendo game-- P.A.-pulverizing fits of chopped and screwed digital squalor that mash up lo-bit Pita-style electronics with breakcore, Baltimore club, dubstep, and techno. But the topsy-turvy ethos and gurgling electronics hardly make Belly-- the group's first full-length-- a headache-inducing mess. Rather, Belly is a giant step forward for the trio in just about every regard. The hooks are stronger, the verses are tighter, the noise is, well, better.
In 2004 Food for Animals were loud and messy. Rickey Rabbit used to perform live by routing his iTunes into a smorgasbord of pedals while Vulture rapped through a delay and a now absent guitarist plucked out circuit-bent Atari sounds. They produced a formidable speaker-cone-busting racket, which-- more often than not-- soundsystems weren't quite up to. Likewise the Scavengers EP-- the group's overlooked first release-- was structurally loose and sonically raw. Ricky Rabbit regularly made use of frequencies so severe that it often felt like your hearing was shutting on and off in time to the music.
On Belly, Food for Animals haven't gone smooth-- the record is still loud enough to shorten the lifespan of your high-range hearing-- but they have tightened up. "Shhhy"'s shattered synth-loop bursts from of a cloud of murmurs and chopped piano samples, with Vulture's rapping anchored by coarse bass thuds. But the tight chorus-- with its layered vocal samples and psyched-out chipmunk octave chant-- is where "Shhhy" will make you lose it like a 14-year-old at a Rage Against the Machine show. "Yeah my generation got clowned and still my surroundings can't even make a sound," raps Vulture. "You look at me nervous with your finger on your mouth-- but you don't have to be so shy."
Vulture's lyrics have also come up a notch since Scavengers. Where old songs might have found the imposing 6-foot-plus beardo rapping about "elephants humpin' in your trunk," on Belly he delivers tighter and deeper rhymes about everything from hot days spent with Arthur Russell records to his mother's untimely death. "Every time I hear the word cancer I need a cigarette/ I'm not sure I get it yet," he raps in a poignant moment on the unexpectedly heavy album closer "Grapes". The arrival of Hy also adds a little more flavor to the proceedings by giving the songs the fuel of another personality.
But it's producer Ricky Rabbit who really pushes Belly's game forward. Despite Vulture and Hy's ample charisma, without the upside-down rhythm, skull scraping buzzes, and stereo-bong samples, Belly might struggle to stand out at a Takoma Park open-mic night. Instrumentals like the gentle and trippy synth-blips of "Grapes (Preprise)" or "Virgogo"-- a slanted pass at Baltimore Club-- show off his talent for taking the navel-gazing sounds of digital minimalism and making them bounce.
Belly may be a weird and noisy hip-hop album, but it's still a hip-hop album, and by that measure it's more 3 Feet High and Rising than Death Certificate. Food for Animals bring the noise, but they don't want to bludgeon you with it. On Belly, they drop some incomprehensible beats, make sounds that recall a box of light bulbs rolling down a flight of stairs, and put down some pretty heavy lyrics-- the name is after all a reference to the belly of the beast, to being pulverized and digested-- but it's not a some head-grinding avant-deathtrip. "I get nice and fuzzy with my buddies cause they funny and I love y'all/ We chuckling and coughing and laugh for no reason while we talkin'," raps Vulture on "Swampy (Summer Jam)", a song that's as much about healing as it is about murky underpants. Belly may be all about getting turned upside down and inside out, but when it's over, all that tumult will leave you feeling pretty good.


The saxophone-and-drum duo’s muscular, distorted, freeform tracks connect the London post-punk and jazz scenes like an arcane new subplot.

WeirdOs

After cutting their teeth playing around London, saxophonist Joe Henwood and drummer Tash Keary linked up to jam during pandemic lockdowns. As gigs returned, O. became an official duo, taking up residence at Windmill Brixton—the South London venue now famous as the incubator for acts like Shame, Squid, black midi, and Black Country, New Road. They caught the ear of Dan Carey, the prolific producer linked to almost everyone in the current UK post-punk boom, and recorded the charmingly titled WeirdOs for his Speedy Wunderground label. But if “post-punk” quickly became a reductive umbrella for the host of adventurous bands percolating in South London, O. represent a particularly arcane new subplot.
While Henwood and Keary came up in London’s equally vibrant and of-the-moment jazz scene, O. are not jazz. They aren’t any one thing, but a collision of Henwood and Keary’s disparate interests, name-checking everything from dub to Deftones, noise to A Tribe Called Quest. The two boast jazz technicality, but perform with the viscerality of punk and metal, while favoring textures and colors more akin to bug-eyed electronic music. Their style is muscular, high intensity, and a little gonzo. Keary’s drumming is typically furious yet precise, Henwood’s baritone sax riffs heaving and monolithic. This was the energy that producer Carey sought to capture: WeirdOs was cut live to tape in two weeks, seeking to replicate the urgency of O.’s gigs.
Everything in O. is about mutation as the duo chase freeform ideas far into the ether. Much of this experimentation is achieved by Henwood’s extensive manipulation of his sax, filtered through an array of effects pedals. On penultimate standout “Sugarfish,” you can feel the bodily heft in his distorted lead, before it turns into something more closely resembling aqueous synths, only to resurface sounding almost like a guitar.
O. pull off similar tricks across WeirdOs. “Micro” sounds like a smeared electronic track, melting Keary’s jungle breakbeats and Henwood’s sax nearly beyond recognition. O.’s fascination with metal shines through in the foreboding rhythms of “Cosmo” and “Slap Juice.” On “Whammy,” Keary switches from blitzkrieg propulsion to suggestive tumbles, Henwood from the natural guttural strength of the bari to more otherworldly and sinuous lines, before the whole thing erupts again in its final act.
While hooks abound, WeirdOs also plays as one big, roiling piece. Like the live jams from which it emerged, the album has peaks and valleys, passages of unrelenting intensity followed by space-out cooldowns that offer the slightest moment to breathe. Those with jazz predilections might hear it as a violent deconstruction of the genre, while followers of London’s rock scene might perceive O. as the most eccentric wanderers to yet grace the Windmill’s stage. No matter how WeirdsOs reveals itself to you, O.’s debut is a testament to Keary and Henwood’s fearlessness and dexterity. They take the limitations of two players and two common instruments, and tell the story in a way never heard before.


The UK band goes from teenage post-punk acolytes to Nick Drake- and John Martyn-loving folkies in one move.

Flaws

Bombay Bicycle Club's debut album, last year's I Had the Blues But I Shook Them Loose, posited the group as imitative but energetic post-punk revivalists, doling out artily precise pop-rockers with liveliness and strong chops. The band now follows that effort with its all-acoustic sophomore long-player, Flaws.
Wait, did I miss a few steps? Since when does a boisterous young rock group make a full-on introspective acoustic move on its second freaking album? This may come as a shock, but Bombay Bicycle Club didn't exactly master its initial sound on its debut (most bands don't manage that feat in just one album). The group's members are barely out of their teens, so perhaps the fickleness of youth explains their inconstancy. In any event, it seems that between records someone fell hard for the pretty folk of Nick Drake, John Martyn, and Joanna Newsom. And by "someone" I mean "probably lead singer Jack Steadman," given the extent to which his words and voice now dominate the proceedings. Kind of makes you wonder how on-board the rest of the band were with this abrupt stylistic shift.
Taking a folkier turn might make sense on paper considering Steadman's voice possesses a nicely quavering element that isn't far off from Devendra Banhart's. Yet the lyrics and arrangments here aren't a fraction as bold or as singular. Flaws is well-produced, many of its songs nicely augmented by fleet drumming and intricate guitar figures, but Steadman's lack of having anything interesting to say and inability to say it distinctively ultimately sinks the endeavor. Sure, the guitars on "Rinse Me Down" evoke Out of Time-era R.E.M. while "Many Ways" offers pleasant Sufjan-ish banjos, but Steadman replaces the incision of those artists with empty floridity and moody romanticism. The group covers Martyn here, and it's telling that they choose the juvenilia of "Fairytale Lullaby". If Steadman and his mates are really so dead-set on being sober young [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| men, someone needs to buy them a copy of Grace & Danger, stat.
Listening to Flaws and knowing what a spirited racket these kids are capable of making, I want to grab all of them by the cheeks like Adam Sandler does to his chubby third-grade classmate in Billy Madison and yell, "For the love of God, you have to cherish it!" There will be plenty of time to become pussies later on down the road.


On the third album from the bedroom-pop duo, Madeline Follin and Brian Oblivion turn their faces toward the sun with songs fuller and brighter than ever before.

Offering

Toward the beginning of Cults’ 2011 self-titled debut, singer Madeline Follin made a revealing confession: “I am afraid of the light.” That lyric alone speaks volumes about the group’s music. On the debut and 2013’s Static, the duo of Follin and guitarist Brian Oblivion has crafted vibrant pop songs flecked with bits of darkness. Their inescapable breakout hit “Go Outside” is a buoyant track that wouldn’t seem out of place piping through speakers at the Gap, despite the fact that it opens with a sample of infamous cult leader Jim Jones. Other standouts from Cults’ back catalog include a song that likens falling in love to bleeding out, and one titled “No Hope” whose message is every bit as pessimistic as you’d expect.
This time around, Cults have started to turn their faces toward the sun. The songs on Offering are fuller and brighter than they’ve ever been, leaving behind sinister samples and moribund imagery and making good on the promise of uptempo revelry that “Go Outside” offered. The album’s tone is set by the opening title track, which rumbles to life with a warbly synth hook and anthemic stadium-rock drums. Follin’s offering of love is made from atop a mound of plush synthetic sound, plucky guitar strums, and breathy descants. Sheer magnitude makes “Offering” one of the album’s most memorable tracks, and it’s followed by another: “I Took Your Picture,” which features a buzzing earworm of a bassline and is populated by dozens of Madelines, multi-tracked into a cloying choir. On late highlight “Nothing Is Written,” the celestial “ooh” of the chorus is backed by a galaxy of synth. Gone is the hollow echo that sometimes engulfed earlier Cults music—the eleven tracks on Offering are rendered in high fidelity and bursting with sound.
Songs this lush don’t necessarily demand lyrical complexity. In fact, the pop songs that stick often work with simple premises expanded to monumental dimensions by heady production. This is what makes, for example, Carly Rae Jepsen’s songs so satisfying and memorable—they hone in on a single feeling, a stable concept that gives you something to hang onto when its soundtrack surges through the roof. Cults’ lyrics here aren’t so focused. They sprawl, painting in broad strokes but avoiding specific imagery, like on “Recovery,” where opaque metaphor abounds (“You learned to swim/Before you had learned to sink/And that’s not as easy as you’d think”), or “Natural State,” where Follin imagines escape or victory (“Closed your eyes and thought we’d won/Blind believing that we’d never be outrun”), but offers no details that indicate from or over what.
Follin’s vocal style doesn’t help matters. She sings, as she always has, in a tone that’s youthful and pure but relatively undynamic. Before, this level delivery acted as a tool for pointing out the grim humor of Cults’ music—a sort of vocal deadpan that accentuated the irony of fizzy songs containing such darkness. Now that the band has mostly retired edge from their playbook, the modicum of range and intensity in Follin’s voice feels more like a shortcoming than a stylistic choice, and makes it hard to trace the emotional trajectory of Offering. Combine all of this with the fact that the lyrics are sometimes entirely unintelligible, as on “I Took Your Picture” (I cycled through several nonsensical interpretations before learning that the lyric is actually, “Close to someone’s reject/Long play is the enemy”), and the meaning of these songs fades from view, dissolving into something both undeniably catchy and impermanent.


The solo debut from one of the Dublin rap group NUXSENSE’s core emcees, backed by ghostly beats from producer Sivv, represents the clearest iteration of the group’s aesthetic yet.

Hueco Mundo

Has a rap group ever boasted broader geographical roots than NUXSENSE? The collective’s various origin stories cover more terrain than a Mission: Impossible movie—four continents, at least. Living and thriving in Dublin, a bunch of school kids drawn together by their shared immigrant experiences and a love of hip-hop became a defining force in the Irish capital’s youth culture. Recent years have seen the city progress into a more multicultural arena, and a group like NUXSENSE—with their blend of region-neutral sounds, gloriously garish street fashion, belligerent live shows, and diverse backgrounds—represent a diamond-clear expression of the cultural exchange that’s happening in the city’s small venues and homemade studios.
Highly visible in Dublin’s local rap scene NUXSENSE may be, but as recording artists, the group—emcees Luthorist, Jehnova, Prophet Goon, Rem$ (fka Yung Pe$o), Bogzy, and Al-i, plus beatmaker Sivv—has been content to drop loose tracks here and there. (See the easily chantable crew-rap tune “Reign,” or Jehnova’s journey down an Earl-esque rabbit hole, “Striped Pyjamas”). Luthorist’s solo album represents the clearest iteration of the group’s cracked sonic philosophy. Hueco Mundo is 24 minutes of bugged-out bars and soil-noir production that rings with its own languid kind of beauty. And though the hooks may be softer than the material in NUXSENSE’s Adidas track pants, they do stick.
The record opens with a next-station announcement familiar to anyone who rides Dublin’s tram network, the Luas. It’s about the only evidence of the record’s true birthplace. On Hueco Mundo, the sound of public transit snatches you into Luthorist’s alternate vision of the city. In the Manga series Bleach, Hueco Mundo is an alternate dimension of infinite nights and never-ending white deserts. Similarly, Luthorist’s world is one of eternal twilight, but his stoned stylings evoke images of a hazy, 4 a.m. stumble down a shadowy street of smoky gutters and neon lights.
Much of the warped atmosphere comes down to producer Sivv, who blesses all the beats with his hushed, trance-inducing synths and eerie electronica. On “Astral,” Luthorist sips on juice and gin, that classic rap nectar. But Sivv’s swirling sci-fi keys sound like the bar is on one of Neptune’s moons. “Wafer” features a spooky synth flutter that’s reminiscent of Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop,” but it’s matched with music-box plinks and familiar cellphone bleeps (one of Sivv’s signatures). Bringing together so many odd, potentially incompatible elements into one of the album’s cheeriest beats encapsulates his mean ear for loops and instinct for assembling them.
On the mic, Luthorist proves a brilliant foil for Sivv’s languid vibes. The rapper, who is of Brazilian descent, has an penchant for listless vocals, slowing his voice to a deliberate crawl, sometimes seeming to opt out of all consonants to let his flow run like liquid metal around the beats. See how he twins his speech with a screwed-down vocal on “Prism” for maximum druggy effect. Over the twinkling keys of “Tokio,” Luthorist name-drops to a certain friendly phantom: “Moving like a ghost, I’m feeling like Casper.” When he tunes his voice to its most wavy, Luthorist really does sound a specter: translucent, like he’s disappearing into the walls. It’s a voguish sound, delivered by very young men who are channeling juvenile energy and borderless creativity into a new age of Irish art unlike anything before it. That’s something worth celebrating. Let the new generation of kids reign.


Broken Social Scene associates Stars return for a third set of beautiful, eloquent indie pop.

Set Yourself on Fire

Stars are a pop band who sound best on a rock equalizer setting. They aren't loud and don't need to be-- their third and best album, Set Yourself on Fire, is a great example of sonic efficiency. Its songs are packed like a Geo Tracker for a cross-country road trip, yet nothing gets crushed or stuffed or buried. It might be the best orchestral pop album of the past year, only it doesn't sound orchestral, at least not according to the outsize string-and-reverb model favored by bands like Oasis or Spiritualized. If you find me a recent album that towers higher with fodder so virtuosically managed and manipulated, I'll give you 20 dollars and jump in a foreboding body of water from a height.
It took me two months to plow through Heart, Stars' 2003 sophomore effort. Two songs, "What the Snowman Learned About Love" and "Elevator Love Letter", sailed so high above the rest, I demurred at the possibility of imperfection. The album relied on standout riffs and jags of cathexis; it was, in essence, a collection of rifftastic one-liners, and one-liners sometimes fall face first. Set Yourself on Fire is more full-bodied; nothing is so singular it isn't worth fleshing out or adding to, which bolsters the weaker songs without watering down the cream.
The album opens with a disquieting epigram: "When there's nothing left to burn, you must set yourself on fire." A procession of lugubrious strings gives "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead" the hugely premonitory feel of Heart opener "What the Snowman Learned About Love" without its flimsy grandiloquence. Amy Millan may whisper the refrain, "live through this and you won't look back," but the song is no chore; in fact, it's an apt segue into the astonishing title track.
"Set Yourself on Fire" takes Millan's mandate and soars with it. A lo-res synth arpeggio carries the song alongside a propulsive drumbeat and cascading strings. The song performs a nimble time change in its bridge before staking a final salvo-- "20 years asleep before we sleep... forever"-- over an icy coda. You might hear it on a Peter Pan bus, north of New Haven all industrial barrens, sunny cold mid-December afternoon after leaving your girlfriend, and you might cry.
The subsequent two tracks defibrillate the heartbroken. "Ageless Beauty" will sell Arts & Crafts' first ringtone, just watch. Its simple changes are dusted with zippy auxiliary lines playing peek-a-boo. "Reunion"'s chorus is so bathetic it's entrancing: "All I want is one more chance," sings Torquil Campbell, "to be young and wild and free." Rather than a second refrain, they give us a spry guitar lick that could make its chorus and secede if it wished.
Set Yourself on Fire is about breaking up and breaking down, and as such the album feels wontedly cathartic, like the moments right after you hit your emotional nadir and start getting your shit together. Stars handle the mood delicately with few slip-ups; my only complaint is that they never handle much of anything else. Save "The Big Fight"-- which is tame, slow and lounged-out-- there's no controversy, only half-smiles and the soggy aftermath. But even the dearest numbers have faint, nagging undercurrents. The band make no effort to avoid the inevitable charges of over-sentimentality; in fact, they indulge the calls: "The cold is a vindictive bride," reads their website bio, "she'll trap you between her thighs and turn your heart to ice if you're not careful." Despite overblown romanticism run rampant, Stars somehow remain understated. It's the "Soft Revolution", as the terrific penultimate track declaims. Hop aboard.


With poignant writing and irreverent humor, Sarah Tudzin’s second album as Illuminati Hotties plays like a demonstration in the art of persistence.

Let Me Do One More

Sarah Tudzin opens her fantastic second album by ribbing herself mercilessly for underperforming. “In every life there is a bell,” the Illuminati Hotties wiz sings in “Pool Hopping,” the opening track of Let Me Do One More. “One rounded curve of time or tell/I’m on the left half looking over.” Soon enough, she hints at what’s got her feeling so insecure: She’s mid-breakup, just at the point where everything is up in the air. But the way Tudzin tells it, she’s ready to let the melancholy roll off her back, romping through a night of clandestine hookups, ice cream dates, and hotel pools. In other words, her life finally feels like her own again.
Reclaiming one’s own authority is a central topic for Let Me Do One More. The album follows last year’s FREE I.H.: This Is Not the One You’ve Been Waiting For, a mixtape Tudzin self-released in order to buy her way out of a frustrating label contract. FREE I.H. was scattered with pointed barbs about the music business (“Hold onto your masters, folks!”), and while Let Me Do One More doesn’t home in on that theme so explicitly, Tudzin’s sharp tongue and rebellious tendencies remain in full force. “You think I wanna be a part of every self-appointed startup?” she hollers on the blistering “MMMOOOAAAAAYAYA,” shapeshifting her voice like she’s playing five characters in a single Cartoon Network show. The songs on Let Me Do One More were written prior to FREE I.H., so with the understanding that this album is the one you’ve been waiting for, the brasher moments become triumphant.
Since her promising debut, 2018’s Kiss Yr Frenemies, Tudzin has affectionately described her clever, scrappy style as “tenderpunk.” Though her punkiest moments can be politically relevant (“The DNC is playing dirty!” she warns on “MMMOOOAAAAAYAYA”), her tender side is more prominent than ever. FREE I.H. was supposed to set her free—but on the eve of its release, Tudzin’s mother died of cancer, rendering the task of poring over hard drives to finally assemble the real album debilitating. Though the songs on Let Me Do One More predate Tudzin’s loss, her poignant, self-aware writing is keenly aware of life’s curveballs and unanticipated traumas. More importantly, it feels like a demonstration in the art of persistence.
Let Me Do One More is full of high highs and low lows, but thanks to Tudzin’s extensive experience as an engineer and producer (Pom Pom Squad, Weyes Blood), the two extremes—and they are often extreme—are meticulously balanced. The mid-tempo chug of “Knead” bridges the gap between the fired-up “MMMOOOAAAAAYAYA” and a bittersweet, socially conscious love song called “Threatening Each Other re: Capitalism.” (“But if you’re not too embarrassed of how I go out in public/Do you think that we could make a deli run?” goes one of the album’s most endearing lines.) A tongue-in-cheek monologue from Big Thief’s Buck Meek leads the surfy rocker “u v v p” into “Protector,” a dreamy, wandering ballad in which Tudzin questions a relationship’s staying power: “I am not sure that you’re my nightly news,” she coos. Then, just when you think she’s toned it down, she crashes into the ferocious barnburner “Joni: LA’s No. 1 Health Goth,” a “Rebel Girl”-esque ode to California’s contemporary social elite: too trendy and health-conscious to honor you with a passing glance. Paced like the year’s quippiest, most rewatchable rom-com, Let Me Do One More pivots through moods and musical palettes with irreverent sincerity.
On the final track, the spare, acoustic “Growth,” Tudzin’s voice drops to a near-whisper as she describes grieving for previous phases of life. “I guess being an adult is just being alone,” she sings, voice wavering. In the final seconds, you hear her mutter the album’s title, seemingly dissatisfied with the take. It’s her final sleight of hand: turning a phrase that suggests the eager anticipation of tequila shots or diving board jumps into a soft acknowledgement of perceived inadequacy. Presumably the next take wasn’t any better—but Let Me Do One More isn’t preoccupied with perfection. Tudzin knows how deep the pit of insecurity goes, which is why her record seems to say: Imagine what could happen once you get back on your feet.

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Silence Yourself is one of rock’s most commanding and ferociously poised debuts in recent years, the work of a new band with an outsized confidence and sharp clarity of vision.

Silence Yourself

Before their show in Seattle last month, London four-piece Savages posted a sign around the venue that laid out a couple of ground rules: no Instagramming, no video, no tweets-- in short, "SILENCE YOUR PHONES." This could be seen as a part of a growing trend of bands pointing out how sick they are of looking out into a sea of smartphones rather than human faces (the Yeah Yeah Yeahs posted a similar missive at their recent New York homecoming show), but it felt more like an extension of Savages’ overall manifesto. And no, “manifesto” is not too dramatic a word; especially in contrast with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ sign, which tempered its message with chatty humor (“PUT THAT SHIT AWAY!...MUCH LOVE AND MANY THANKS!”), Savages’ fiery imperative read like something hammered onto a door. "OUR GOAL IS TO DISCOVER BETTER WAYS OF LIVING AND EXPERIENCING MUSIC,” they wrote (caps theirs). “WE BELIEVE THAT THE USE OF PHONES DURING A GIG PREVENTS ALL OF US FROM TOTALLY IMMERSING OURSELVES." Ironically, their ability to see the value of silence in a world of noise might make Savages the most web-savvy band of the year. People have been tweeting and tumbling about their live shows the way that people used to talk about live shows: something you just have to see for yourself.
If you've paid even the slightest attention to Savages in the year leading up to their debut Silence Yourself, you know that this is how they do things-- in fact, it's very likely you knew something about their philosophy before you heard a note of their music. Whether you find it profoundly refreshing or a little tedious that Savages draw lines in the sand, none of this would be worth mentioning if the music didn’t live up to the force of the message. Silence Yourself proves that Savages are more than just talk. It's one of rock’s most commanding and ferociously poised debuts in recent years, the work of a band whose outsized confidence and sharp clarity of vision doesn’t correlate with the short amount of time it’s been together.
Savages' music feels out of step with current trends-- which I'm sure they'd take as a compliment. With its tumbling, tom-heavy percussion, singer  Jehnny Beth's Siouxsie-summoning battle cries, and the compositional emphasis placed on Ayse Hassan’s bass (in the moments when Beth is silent, the bass feels like Savages’ lead singer), post-punk is Silence Yourself’s most obvious sonic reference point. And it doesn’t matter that they missed the post-punk revival by about a decade. While the bands that dominated indie rock in the early aughts looked to Joy Division and Gang of Four for reasons that had mostly to do with rhythm, Savages’ music finds kinship with post-punk’s oppositional politics, thematic darkness, and anxiety about the dehumanizing effects of technology-- the spirit is the same, but it’s been adjusted to reflect the times. Savages’ distaste for experiencing life through a screen comes from the same place as, say, Wire’s sardonic take on viewers whose idea of adventure was living vicariously through “the Lone Ranger”; after all, if “Ex Lion Tamer” were written today, it’d probably go, “Stay glued to your iPhone.”
Which is not to say that Savages are writing scathing songs about shitty service providers; their lyrics are boldly stark, elemental, and timeless. (The titles alone hit with a blunt force: “She Will”, “Hit Me”, “No Face”, “Shut Up.”) Beth has said that the band’s writing process is less about addition than subtraction, paring each song down to its most essential shape. All of the best songs on Silence Yourself derive their power from this kind of focused intensity, from the driving, dissonant “City’s Full” to the creeping, percussive lurch of “I Am Here”. The chorus of “Husbands”, a phenomenal single first released last year, sharpens that focus down to a single word. “I woke up and saw the face of a guy/ I don’t know who he is,” Beth sings in the song’s paranoia-inducing opening moments. A Savages song is about challenging the ideas, words and desires we consider “normal”, and they’ve found that repetition is an effective way to get that point across. “Husbands, husbands, husbands, husbands, husbands, husbands,” Beth chants in a manic whisper; with each intonation, the meaning erodes from a word that’s ostensibly meant to evoke comfort, protection and familiarity until it feels faceless.
Savages really show promise and range on the slow-burners. The moody dirge "Waiting for a Sign" and goth-cabaret closer "Marshall Dear" aren't the most immediate songs on the record, but over repeated listens, they bloom. If Hassan and Faye Milton's punishing rhythm section takes the helm on the more frantic numbers, Savages' downtempo moments allow Gemma Thompson and her scuzzy Fender to shine. On the excellent "Strife," she holds back as often as she strikes, underscoring Beth's most brutal lines with perfectly timed jolts and filling the song's winding corriders with thick plumes of distortion.
The mix allows each band member’s contribution to smolder with equal intensity and lends a palpable physicality to Savages’ sound. Milton handles her toms and bass drum like a boxer going at a punching bag; Hassan’s bass strings pulsate like a throbbing tendons; Thompson’s guitar cuts with a goosebump-inducing tone that recalls a chainsaw, and Beth shrieks like she’s resetting her own bones. Combining in a constant pendulum swing between tension and release, it all provides the perfect atmosphere for the darkly sensual themes that Silence Yourself explores.
As a lyricist, Beth says she’s inspired by the “awkward places” from which “twisted, original desires” spring. “Hit Me”, a sub-two-minute tornado of squalling noise, isn’t about domestic abuse, as some people assume, but is instead about a consensual encounter described by the porn star Belladonna. (Beth: “I hate it when women are turned into victims.”) Savages might make political pronouncements in interviews and on album covers, but their songs come from a lived-in perspective as Beth inhabits her different characters’ states of mind-- and forces the listener to do the same.
"How old are you, really?" a voice asks in the opening seconds of the album; it hovers in the air without an answer. It might be a knowing sneer at critics who think Savages are just recycling post-punk’s signature sound, but ostensibly it’s also a salute to an artistic kindred spirit. The line is from Opening Night, a 1977 movie by John Cassavetes-- a filmmaker who also saw a kind of beauty in emotional brutality and was prone to spouting off humanist manifestos. “My films are expressive of a culture that has had the possibility of attaining material fulfillment while at the same time finding itself unable to accomplish the simple business of conducting human lives,” he said. “What is needed is reassurance in human emotions; a re-evaluation of our emotional capacities.” Substitute “films” for “songs” and those words could almost be lifted off the cover of Silence Yourself. The album cuts through a world of chatter and distraction because it practices what it preaches, transmitting its message directly through the primal, bone-rattling force of its songs.


The eighth album from the wildly experimental Brooklyn metal group doesn't quite blaze trails on par with the band's classic catalog, but they are still genuinely searching for new expressions.

While They Were Sleeping

Of all the heavy bands that get credit for having “jazzy” tendencies, few have legitimately ventured into jazz as deeply as Candiria. More than two decades ago, the Brooklyn quintet forged a remarkably cohesive blend of metal and hardcore with post-bop, fusion, hip-hop, and ambient noise. The timing is key, as Candiria emerged during an especially fertile period for metal, when the genre was being throttled into a kind of creative hyperdrive by musicians eager to find new angles on heaviness. It speaks volumes that Candiria’s twists on the form stood out so much given the climate—and that the band was able to sustain its hunger for exploration over a deliriously inventive five-album run from 1995–2002 .
On While They Were Sleeping, Candiria’s first album in six years, the transitions between chunky deathcore riffs and toe-tapping swing parts with horn arrangements may feel less dazzling than they once did, but that's only because the band performed them so flawlessly in the past. The execution remains as seamless as ever. Tellingly, Candiria only ever come off as dilettantes not when they resemble Mahavishnu Orchestra or Converge, but when they veer close to the radio-friendly melodies the Deftones have come to rely on far too much lately.
Like on their last two albums, 2004’s What Doesn't Kill You... and 2009’s Kiss the Lie, guitarist/songwriter John LaMacchia and frontman Carley Coma at times risk vocal cliches that are diametrically opposed to the death metal and hardcore grunts upon which Candiria staked a reputation. Thankfully, several distinguishing features guarantee that the songs on While They Were Sleeping will not end up on Active Rock radio anytime soon.
First, the new riffs don't have the polished sheen of the last two albums, hearkening instead to the slashing tones favored by the band's one-time contemporaries in street-tough hardcore acts like Madball, Merauder, and Biohazard. Likewise, subtle trimmings in the arrangements and mix ensure a richness that belies the music’s outer accessibility. The quintessentially anthemic “Mereya,” for example has not one but two jazz-flavored bridge sections with horns—each distinct from the other in the way the horns are first mixed up-front and then smeared to the outer edges of the stereo field to create a dreamlike atmosphere.
And even if While They Were Sleeping doesn’t quite blaze trails on par with the band’s classic catalog, the flute on “Wandering Light” and the radio static on “The Cause” show that Candiria aren’t merely reaching for novel sounds but genuinely searching for new expressions. Given how many times they’ve sculpted songs out of ambient noise in the past, the fact that “The Cause” breaks new ground in spite of its pedestrian ingredients—sound effect, riff, distorted screams, drum beat—shows what an achievement Candiria’s song structures truly are.
Lastly, there’s Coma’s breathtaking range, his voice essentially pulling the weight of half a dozen singers. And yet, even with Coma’s fluidity, the band makes room for vocalist Andrea Horne, whose backing vocals give the music that one extra push away from convention and towards transcendence—a critical ingredient in the album’s emotional impact given the insularity of its lyrical concept.
If you find Coma’s lyrics about a character named Mereya hard to fathom, you’re not alone: Even LaMacchia and longtime bassist Michael MacIvor have openly expressed their resistance to writing music to fit Coma’s storyline about a failed musician who rebels against New York City’s ruling monarchy. Inspired by current events like the Ferguson riots, Coma clearly intended for the concept to work on a metaphorical level. But Coma’s vision of New York isn’t as universally relatable as the substance underlying his central idea.
Sure, the riffs on this album recall the distinctly urban vibe of ’90s-era New York hardcore. But the fact is that Candiria have too much to offer to pin themselves to the mythology of the five boroughs. That said, the concept doesn’t intrude as much as Coma’s bandmates feared. When Coma sings, “No way I’ll go back to a beggar/So pay it up to hear me sing/Melodic waterfalls/Get with the protocol” on “Mereya,” it’s a fairly transparent indictment of the music industry. It’s also deliciously ironic that he’s doing so on a song where he and the band flirt with the commercialism they’re decrying.
Candiria has built up more than enough credibility to strike this kind of balance without stumbling. But after two albums where the band came close to losing touch with its essence, While They Were Sleeping goes a long way towards restoring its reputation as one of the most convincingly flexible acts that metal and hardcore have ever seen.


While her work has always had a kind of horizontal drift, the Danish composer’s latest is more song-like and elaborate. It is the most intricate and ambitious music she has released.

Holotropica

Listening to Sofie Birch’s music can be like lying supine on a grassy hilltop, watching clouds drift across a cerulean summer sky. The boundaries between tones are porous; nothing keeps its shape for long. A held chord might turn inside out; an icy arpeggio might melt into liquid; distant birdsong might harden into bright, clear chimes. If at any given time you pause to consider the panorama arrayed before you, you may vaguely realize that it is not the same as it was the last time you checked, yet find yourself at pains to explain what is different, or why.
Most of the Danish composer’s work over the past five years has fallen toward the gentlest end of the ambient spectrum. Across a handful of albums, both solo and in collaboration, Birch has experimented with ASMR, collaged field recordings from her travels into an “audio postcard,” and improvised on a country-house piano at daybreak, inadvertently capturing the clucking of hens in the background. Like its predecessors, Holotropica is marked by a sense of horizontal drift. But where before it was easy to imagine Birch’s music as something naturally occurring, emerging unbidden from the interplay of the elements, Holotropica is more song-like, elaborate, and labored over. It is the most intricate and ambitious music she has released.
This is still ambient music, but where much of Birch’s previous work was loosely minimalist, Holotropica thrums with detail. Her chords have thickened and grown more complex; they modulate in new ways, taking on richly iridescent hues. Her use of acoustic instruments in places evokes the fluid lines and timbres of Nala Sinephro’s 2021 album Space 1.8. On the opening “Observatory,” Nana Pi’s saxophone tentatively seeks out a melody, then falls into a swaying lockstep with a muted synth bass figure. On “Hypnogogia,” clarinet gives way to a slow, pumping pulse, like half-speed dub techno, which falls away to reveal Dolphin Midwives’ harp, glistening like a dewy spiderweb.
What Birch carries over from previous recordings are her instincts for shape-shifting evolution and lateral sprawl. Take “Humidity”: The title is well chosen, as the chords suggest the fecund scent of tropical flowers in bloom. It begins, as so many of these tracks do, with soft, shimmering chords, then blossoms into a lilting arpeggio. Shakers and birdsong flesh out the margins, while a ghostly hint of saxophone gives way to rhythmic bleats and, finally, freeform squeals. Where most ambient music maintains a steady burble, “Humidity” crests to an enormous climax that cuts off with violent abruptness. It's a rare moment of drama for a musician typically given to understatement. “Tide Rose” is subtler but just as mutable. It emerges from a matrix of deeply reassuring cyclical pulses—foghorn peals, chirping frogs, the echo of an alarm clock ringing from the other side of a dream—but an oddly timed arpeggio tilts the axis of this imaginary world, throwing everything gently out of whack and depositing you at a point far from the one where you began.
Birch, a student of meditation, has spoken of her belief in sound’s therapeutic effects. Here as before, her music tends to instill a sense of calm; you suspect she would not be upset if someone discovered it via a self-care playlist. But Holotropica isn’t saccharine—the more you listen, the more nuances you discover. Even at its quietest, there’s a sense that dynamic systems are spinning away, just out of earshot. Tiny, quivering movements jostle in the shadows of each note, and burnished surfaces gradually reveal a world of vibrating detail. It is placid but never numbing; meditative, yet not afraid to linger on a dissonant frequency or uncomfortable thought.
Birch describes her vision of Holotropica—which derives its title from a term meaning “moving toward wholeness”—as “a point behind closed eyes… where nothing happens and everything is.” She began work on these pieces several albums ago, in 2018, when a friend’s pregnancy inspired a two-week retreat in the forest, where the Danish composer meditated and laid down sketches for the record. Birch herself became pregnant in 2021, as she was finishing work on the album. Given that background, it becomes easy to understand Holotropica as a meditation on gestation—on the way that things and ideas come into being, both through our actions and also in ways impervious to them. In the music’s nexus of intent and accident, Birch lays bare the delicate balance between the events we can control and those we cannot. What makes art vital, she suggests, is what happens when opposing forces—singularity and interconnectedness, or stasis and change—collide.


Merchandise's latest and first for new label home 4AD is so determinedly mild-mannered, it essentially amounts to a declaration of war: against dominant notions of cool, the act of hiding your feelings behind a wall of noise, and the idea that anti-pop experimentation is inherently more noble and challenging a practice than writing a simple, emotionally direct love song.

After the End

We tend to measure the speed of 21st-century living by the furious rate of cultural output, but an even more accurate gauge is how quickly once-entrenched ideals can change. To wit, in a July 2012 interview with Pitchfork, Carson Cox of Tampa post-punk outfit Merchandise offered up this definition of success: “There’s a new warehouse space called Cyborg City, where we just played an amazing show. There were a ton of fucking people there. There were, like, 70 fucking people.” Fast forward two years, and that same guy has just released an album that sounds like it was designed for stadium crowds of 70,000.
Of course, Merchandise are hardly the first punk-schooled band to eventually pursue loftier aspirations. But where many big-label debuts from former indie darlings often amount to putting lipstick on a pig, Merchandise are using their promotion to 4AD to, as Cox recently put it to the NME, “start a new band with basically the same name.” And he’s not just talking about the group’s expansion from a drum-machined trio to a proper five-piece. Rather than nudge themselves toward the center by subtly sanding away the edges of their texturally dense art-pop epics, on After the End, Merchandise catapult themselves to the rightmost reaches of the dial, and, in the process, transform into their idea of what the archetypal mainstream rock band should be—which is actually so far off the mark from what mainstream rock actually is in 2014 that it positions Merchandise as far away from centrist pop-culture as they were when they were playing gigs in storage units.
Merchandise’s continually surprising evolution and capacity for challenging their core assumptions have mirrored those of another band of once-evasive hardcore exiles who have grappled with growing up and out of punk (and who are led by an outspoken frontman with a penchant for endlessly scrollable interviews): Fucked Up. Except instead of embracing 1970s rock-operatics, Merchandise have become greatly enamored with the Big Music of the mid-’80s and the buttoned-up college-rock of the early ’90s. (In retrospect, last year’s debut single for 4AD—the unwieldy 14-minute Spiritualized-scaled behemoth “Begging for Your Life/In the City Light”—now feels like a last-gasp exorcism of their arty eccentricities.) On After the End, the band downplay their perennially fashionable Smiths/Cure/New Order influences and tether themselves to more unabashedly populist signposts that have, thus far, proven resistant to hipster reclamation: Post-I.R.S. R.E.M., pre-Spirit of Eden Talk Talk, the more meditative end of the Pearl Jam canon.
After the End is a record that is so determinedly mild-mannered, it essentially amounts to a declaration of war: against dominant notions of cool, the act of hiding your feelings behind a wall of noise, and the idea that anti-pop experimentation is inherently more noble and challenging a practice than writing a simple, emotionally direct love song. If the preceding Children of Desire and Totale Nite saw Merchandise concealing their ever-irrepressible new-romantic hearts under thick layers of squawking saxophones, wailing harmonicas, and droning repetition, here they are laid bare and encased in brightly lit glass boxes like a gallery installation.
An album this guileless is bound to be polarizing, for the very fact that it resolutely resists the urge to provoke. (The tranquil opening instrumental “Corridor”—featuring, no shit, wind chimes—essentially functions as a citronella candle to ward off any indie ideologues lingering about from proceeding further.) But whether or not you accept Merchandise’s makeover, one thing is indisputable: This album sounds fucking fantastic. And remarkably, just like Merchandise’s previous releases, it’s a home recording. (Most of the band live together in the same house, Monkees-style.) But if much of After the End was laid down in Cox’s bedroom, it sounds like the band are performing a concert on the roof, absorbing the twinkle of the stars, the hum of crickets, the vapor trails of planes flying overhead, and the endless expanse of the sky above. The shimmering acoustic guitars sound like they have dew collecting on the strings; the smooth synth textures reflect the warm nocturnal glow of the city at night.
But like the War on Drugs’ recent Lost in the Dream, After the End chisels through the surface pleasures of baby-boomer-baiting soft-rock to coax out a deep-seated distress. When a once-volatile band slows down and cleans up its sound, it tends to signify that a certain degree of contentment has entered their lives—that past pressures and stressors have been cast aside and the ease into middle age has begun. After the End, however, highlights just how messy and painful that process can be, that severing ties with one’s past—whether it’s romantic partners, local music scenes, or entire belief systems—inevitably results in broken skin and frayed nerves.
Cox isn’t merely singing in a lower register for sexy-crooner effect; he sounds positively beaten down, as if a drowsy drawl is all he has the strength to muster after dealing with the fallout of his decisions. (As he sings on the lush and languorous “Looking Glass Waltz”: “Won’t someone please help me/ I’m too young to feel this old.”) And unlike previous Merchandise albums, he doesn’t allow himself the luxury of working out his frustrations through extended, cathartic hypno-rock jams: the seemingly easy-going jangle pop of “Enemy” fades out mid-verse, as if to suggest the tensions simmering within remain unresolved; the tightly wound “Little Killer” sounds the alarm for when the light that’s never supposed to go out starts to flicker.
At times, the disconnect between therapeutic function and clinical form is too vast to reconcile—the chipper, snap-along saunter of "Telephone" doesn't so much ease the anguish of waiting for an important call that never comes as conjure the dad-rock muzak you hear when your dentist's office puts you on hold. And the weight of all this anxiety and self-doubt starts to drag down the band—and the album—by the time we reach the penultimate title track, whose melodramatic, piano-pounded lurch neither erupts into chaos nor yields to ecstatic release. (“The sky is falling all around us,” Cox sings in his best Mark Hollis-ian moan, and the forecast doesn’t improve from thereon out.) But the beatific closing serenade “Exile and Ego” suggests Cox has found, if not inner peace, then at least the resolve to move on. “I ain’t no cowboy, I got no six guns,” Cox sighs, rejecting the outlaw mythology of another slick acoustic ballad about going it alone. Because as After the End reminds us, the best way to disarm your adversaries isn’t with weapons—it’s by staring them right in the eye.


To date, Dave "Avey Tare" Portner’s projects outside of Animal Collective have leaned toward the intensely introspective. His new band, Avey Tare's Slasher Flicks, resemble Animal Collective in stripped-down, garage-band, power-trio formation: not quite as densely textured and sonically adventurous, but more than capable of generating the same sense of euphoric abandon.

Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks: Enter the Slasher House

Enter the Slasher House

Centipede Hz may have been Animal Collective’s response to unwittingly becoming a Top 20*-*charting act, but the subsequent tours behind the record revealed there was, in fact, a limit to their perpetual game of playing hard-to-get. Where the quartet has traditionally treated concerts as public practice sessions to air out works-in-progress, their 2012-13 setlists charitably balanced out the Hz with the hits (meaning that the band’s newer fans no longer had to dial up YouTube clips from 2007 to experience “My Girls” in a live setting). This generous spirit seems to have carried over to primary vocalist Dave “Avey Tare” Portner’s current interim pursuit, which offers a glimpse of the kind of band Animal Collective could be if they gave into populist demand more often.
To date, Portner’s projects outside of Animal Collective have leaned toward the intensely introspective, whether he was making blissed-out, backward-looped soundscapes with then-wife Kría Brekkan (2007’s Pullhair Rubeye) or fractious, click ‘n’ cut digi-dirges to address their subsequent separation, the death of his grandmother, and his sister’s struggles with cancer (2010’s Down There). His new band, Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks, was born of a similarly stressful circumstance—Portner was sidelined by strep throat for a long stretch last year—but it also serves as a therapeutic, adrenalized antidote.
Supported by ex-Dirty Projector Angel Deradoorian and former Ponytail drummer Jeremy Hyman, Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks effectively resemble Animal Collective in stripped-down, garage-band, power-trio formation. They're not quite as densely textured and sonically adventurous, but more than capable of generating the same sense of euphoric abandon: the bouncing-ball momentum of opening track “A Sender” follows in the foot-stomps of two totemic AC openers—Feels’ “Did You See the Words” and Strawberry Jam’s “Peacebone”—while “Duplex Trip” packs the woozy tropical punch of Centipede Hz's more mango-flavored material. (The sporadic flashes of high-beam harmonies from Deradoorian likewise yield a potent I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-Panda Bear effect.) But Slasher Flicks gradually develop their own peculiar personality, most notably on “Little Fang”, the album’s lead single and the most atypical track here.
In contrast to the rhythmic clatter and electro squiggles that usually accompany Portner’s voice, the Slasher Flicks position "Little Fang"’s engaging call-and-response hook atop a silken 70s soft-rock groove that resembles a bygone ELO hit refracted through a funhouse mirror (while also betraying Portner’s debt to the phantasmagoric pop of Pure Guava-era Ween). And in their most concise, frenetically funky moments— “Blind Babe”, “Modern Days E”, “Strange Colores”—Slasher Flicks pump out better Jane’s Addiction songs than anything that band has come up since reuniting (an outcome that doesn’t seem so ridiculous when you consider Portner and Perry Farrell’s mutual appreciation of tribal-percussion, rapid-fire wordplay, and the Grateful Dead—heck, the Jane’s cover of “Ripple” could practically pass for a dry run for "Fireworks").
As Portner admitted in a recent Pitchfork interview, the Slasher Flicks concept was born of a desire to mess around with the sort of 60s garage-rock and horror-movie tropes that yielded novelty hits like “Monster Mash.” (For more on this phenomenon, watch this disturbing documentary.) On Enter the Slasher House, that influence proves to be mostly implicit. You won’t find any ditties here about ghouls and ghosts hosting graveyard soirees, but the songs craftily split the difference between cheeky and creepy, pitting innocent nursery-rhyme-like melodies against mutating, hallucinogenic backdrops. (The ecstatic Afro-pop of “Catchy (Was Contagious)” even serves as a reminder of how the terminology used to describe a song’s likability factor can also be applied to communicable diseases.)
Slasher House actually becomes a lot less inviting in those moments where it lays on the carnivalistic clamor and shock tactics too thick; when would-be centerpiece tracks like “That It Won’t Grow” and “The Outlaw” start bashing their half-baked choruses into submission with all the subtlety of an oversized cartoon mallet, the album threatens to just turn into Millipede Hz. Compared to the revelatory melodicism on display in songs like “Little Fang”, it’s a bit wearying to hear Portner revert to an esophagus-shredding yelp as his default mechanism whenever the songs seem to be running out of gas. Perhaps the act of screaming himself hoarse is Portner’s way of saying “fuck you” to strep throat, but Enter works best when it's not begging for an ENT.


The Sleater-Kinney/Helium/Minders supergroup's self-titled debut invokes first-wave punk, post-hardcore indie rock, and other styles, but Wild Flag aren't so much trying to relive a particular era or movement as re-stoke the kind of passion, commitment, and fandom in listeners that allowed those movements to coalesce and flourish in the first place.

Wild Flag

On Sleater-Kinney's 2005 single "Entertain", Carrie Brownstein summed up her dissatisfaction with pop-cultural stagnation and new-wave nostalgia by asking, "Where's the black and blue?" She repeats the question three times in succession, each one increasingly maniacal, as if to illustrate her own point: Art can evolve only when it pushes forward, provokes, and leaves bruises. Alas, in the five years since Sleater-Kinney fell silent, nostalgia has become such a pervasive condition in pop culture that entire books are now devoted to analyzing the phenomenon. But Brownstein has not relented in demanding her black-and-blue, whether using her NPR Monitor Mix blog to lament the preponderance of sensitive, soft-rockin' beardos in contemporary indie, or skewering hipster fauxhemia alongside SNL's Fred Armisen on the IFC comedy show Portlandia. So for a vocal cultural critic-- and shit-hot guitar player-- like Brownstein, the act of forming a new band isn't a simple matter of course; it's a declaration of war. But rather than point fingers from the sidelines, with Wild Flag she's leading by example.
The name Wild Flag amounts to more than just a distant echo of similarly imposing Black and Pink varieties; it represents something to rally around, at a time when the internet has broken down traditional musical allegiances in favor of all-you-can-eat consumption. As per its members' pedigrees (Brownstein is joined by fellow S-K veteran Janet Weiss on drums, ex-Helium front-woman Mary Timony on second guitar, and Rebecca Cole of Elephant Six affiliates the Minders on organ), Wild Flag variously invoke first-wave punk, post-hardcore indie rock, 1960s girl-group pop, Nuggets-vintage garage, Stonesy FM-radio raunch, and even flashes of proggy psychedelia. But Wild Flag aren't so much trying to relive a particular era or movement as re-stoke the kind of passion, commitment, and fandom in listeners that allowed those movements to coalesce and flourish in the first place.
Brownstein and Timony previously collaborated in late-1990s side project the Spells, but where their voices tended to blend together within that band's lo-tech indie-rock sound, here their personalities are much more pronounced and distinct. For much of Sleater-Kinney's existence, Brownstein played the more mild-mannered foil to lead shrieker Corin Tucker, before asserting herself more forcefully on 2002's One Beat and 2005's The Woods; on Wild Flag, she essentially picks up right where she left off on "Entertain", pushing her voice toward more brash, flamboyant extremes. Timony, meanwhile, sounds as if she's still immersed in the fantastical reveries of Helium's 1997 swan song The Magic City, her familiarly conversational tone having an infectiously calming effect on the band.
But in their own peculiar ways, both singers strive to express their irrepressible awe for the power of music and the effect it has on them-- nearly every song here hinges on the connection between sound and movement, and the relationship between what happens between the ears and below the belt. Brownstein's "Romance" and "Boom" are impassioned testaments to rock'n'roll's sensuous allure, translating inner desire into public manifesto; Timony sings of music's essence in more mythic terms, equating it to a magical artifact (the psychedelic set piece "Glass Tambourine") or cult ritual ("Electric Band", as in: "Come on, join our…") as if she were the friendly fairy godmother on some subversively trippy Saturday-morning kids' TV show.
The considerable contrast between the two singers gives Wild Flag a somewhat predictable ebb and flow, with a song-by-song trade-off between Brownstein's rambunctious, locomotive rockers and Timony's more quirky, complex compositions. Credit Weiss and Cole for effectively mediating between these disparate sensibilities: Wild Flag never sound more together than when they're being led off the rails by Weiss' Keith Moon-worthy breakdowns and Cole's wandering "Sister Ray"-style organ lines, as they push the wiry "Short Version" and charmingly cheeky "Racehorse" into joyous full-band jams and sing-along chants. For all the ideological intent fuelling the Wild Flag mission, the band rarely sacrifices the rock'n'roll fun-- they no doubt deliver that elusive black-and-blue, but it's a hit that feels like a kiss.


Aztec Camera's 1983 album High Land, Hard Rain showcases frontman Roddy Frame at his most blissfully unaware, creating soulful post-punk with pieces that weren’t neccessarily supposed to fit together. This 30th Anniversary Reissue includes B-sides, remixes and live radio sessions from the period.

High Land, Hard Rain

In a BBC interview conducted last year in honor of the 30th anniversary of Aztec Camera’s High Land, Hard Rain, the band’s frontman Roddy Frame talked about how “Walk Out to Winter,” his favorite song on the album, drew from an odd jumble of influences. A fan of the 1977 punk explosion, the aspiring singer-guitarist was inspired by the spirit of the Slits and the Fall even as he began picking up on the clean-toned intricacy of jazz guitarists Wes Montgomery and Django Reinhardt. He also loved soul. In fact, as he confesses in the BBC interview, the silky chord progression of “Walk Out to Winter” was swiped from the Motown classic “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough". Seeing as how Frame was 15 when he began writing High Land and 18 when he recorded it, “precocious” is a word that gets thrown around a lot. But the title of album’s opening track, “Oblivious,” could be read as equally telling. Flush with youth, Frame seemed blissfully unaware that these pieces weren’t supposed to fit together. Either that or he didn’t know it was supposed to make a difference.
Frame wasn’t entirely alone. Orange Juice—Aztec Camera’s close comrades on the Glasgow indie label Postcard Records—had already combined some of these same elements before Frame made his Postcard debut, the 1981 single “Just Like Gold.” And the NME’s famous C81 cassette compilation included, alongside Aztec Camera and Orange Juice, Scritti Politti’s “The ‘Sweetest Girl’”, Green Gartside’s first foray into post-punk soulfulness. Rather than an outgrowth of grayish post-punk, though, Aztec Camera was a negative afterimage rendered in pastels. By the time “Pillar to Post,” the group’s first single for Rough Trade, came out in 1982, Frame and crew had become labelmates with another young quartet that featured jangling guitars, crooned vocals, and a snappy rhythm section: the Smiths.
“Pillar to Post”, “Oblivious”, and “Walk Out to Winter” comprise the trio singles released off of 1983’s High Land, newly reissued in an expanded, 30th-anniversary edition. Even if they were the only good songs, the album would still be a milestone. But every track is stellar. Buoyant and joyous, yet italicized with clever melancholy, “Oblivious” is the most punchy of the three. Frame’s jazzy guitar runs and jubilant arpeggios add a jittery energy to his teenage angst. Unlike Morrissey, he doesn’t have a mean moan in his body. He doesn’t have Morrissey’s depth, either, but that’s easily overlooked when “Pillar to Post” saunters up with funk-pop hook and plants the thoroughly Smithsian sentiment “Once I was happy in happy extremes” on the lips like a stolen kiss. “Walk Out to Winter” is the most sophisticated of High Land’s singles. A whirling, bitterly cheery paean to the death of punk, as Frame explains in his recent BBC interview), it wonders where all the young miserablists of his generation will go now. Singing like a pimply, gum-chewing Glenn Tilbrook, Frame answers his own question.
Singles aside, standouts abound. From the pastoral-folk guitars and jogging bass line to the saucy handclaps and modified Richard Hell line (“Love comes in slurs”), “The Boy Wonders” is more barely coded speculation about what happens when adulthood leaves a child-shaped void in one’s soul. Same goes for the pensive “The Bugle Sounds Again” and even the album’s naked, acoustic closer, “Down the Dip,” a pub-busker anthem that slides a hint of Frame’s leftist, Red Wedge politics—never very pronounced in his songs—in among an atmosphere of spilled pints. The reissue of High Land comes with copious bonus tracks, including the original single version of “Pillar to Post”, which sounds raw and robust compared to the album version’s clean, sharp shimmer. Of the three single B-sides included, “Queen’s Tattoo” is the most intriguing, a twangy, galloping romp that predates Morrissey’s first flirtation with rockabilly, the Smiths’ “Rusholme Ruffians”, by three years. On the other end of the spectrum are the 12” dance mixes of “Walk Out to Winter” and “Oblivious”. As curiosities go, they demonstrate just how pliable Aztec Camera’s riffs and rhythms were; as new-wave floor-fillers, they don’t hold a candle to any given album track by, say, Spandau Ballet. The handful of live radio sessions, on the other hand, capture a barely-legal Frame at his immaculate, brassy best.
Following the success of High Land, Frame had to grow up quickly. He did so, but always in a good way. For the rest of the 80s, Aztec Camera became a more calculated concern, with a rotating cast of session musicians that would include everyone from members of Dire Straits to—perhaps inevitably—a future (if fleeting) guitarist of the Smiths, Craig Gannon. By 1986, the Postcard-inspired C86 movement was splitting the difference between Aztec Camera and the buzzsaw punks that preceded them. Frame responded by removing his own guitar almost entirely from the equation with Aztec Camera’s biggest hit, 1988’s “Somewhere in My Heart.” Despite a back-to-basics rally in the 90s, Aztec Camera folded in 1995; Frame, now fifty, still enjoys a respectable solo career. High Land is not only his first statement of intent as a songwriter, it’s his most innovative, his most influential, and his most timelessly vivid. Peaking early can be bittersweet, but the album is all the better for it.


On her first official EP since leaving Crystal Castles, Alice Glass clears more room for her voice and words, softening the jagged edges that had characterized her previous work.

Alice Glass EP

Throughout Crystal Castles’ first three albums, Alice Glass sang like a woman drowning. On songs like “Love and Caring” and “Doe Deer,” she whipped syllables around like they were weapons, fighting to be heard. It’s strange, now, to hear how deeply her vocals are buried in the mix, how distorted they are and how few words come through, even on her last LP with the group, 2012’s lyrically minded (III). About nine months after announcing her departure from the electroclash band in 2014, Glass released the standalone single “Stillbirth,” whose pummeling electronics buoyed her vocals rather than smothered them. “I want to start again,” she sang then in one of the first instantly discernible lines she’d ever laid to tape. Co-produced by former HEALTH member Jupiter Keyes, Glass’ self-titled debut EP clears even more room for her voice and words, softening the jagged edges that had characterized her previous work.
Upon releasing “Stillbirth,” Glass also disclosed that she had survived an abusive relationship for years, and much of her debut EP reckons with the dynamic of loving the one person who hurts you most. She addresses that person directly on multiple songs, like the lead single “Without Love,” where she asks, “How are you going to lie about me now?” and, “Was I a stray just waiting to be found?” In the end, she decides to retreat entirely—if love is the equivalent of being caged like an animal, she’d rather do without it. “Got to be without love,” she repeats at the chorus, as though if she can just sing it enough times, it’ll make her isolation bearable.
While the melody of “Without Love” pads around a square pop chord structure, “Natural Selection” shatters into abrasive noise. “Get the fuck off of me,” Glass screams between detuned slabs of bass. Her voice here is as corroded as it was in Crystal Castles, but more present; her words are unmistakable even as they’re being slashed apart. The EP’s strongest track “White Lies” contrasts her breathy, clean singing with a thorny pulse of garbled vocals, often layering both on top of each other at the same time. Glass sounds simultaneously vulnerable and aggressive here, like she’s trying to let you in but can’t help reflexively lashing out.
Almost three years after leaving her old band, Glass responds directly to her years as its frontwoman on her first solo release. “Tell me what to spit/Don’t tell me what to swallow,” she sings in an especially pointed moment on “Without Love”—a direct reference to the hazy closer of Crystal Castles’ self-titled debut album, “Tell Me What to Swallow,” whose lyrics, in retrospect, scan as a transmission from the inside of an abusive relationship: “Through the wall he threw me/I know he’d never hurt me.” Alice Glass can feel more like an exorcism than an evolution, a digestion of past trauma rather than a new chapter. But processing this stuff takes years, and sometimes a six-song “fuck you” is exactly the catharsis you need to start anew.


The girl-group’s brisk, club-inflected pop songs cement them as one of the most interesting K-pop acts working today.

Get Up EP

NewJeans arrived on the K-pop scene last year unannounced, a bold move in an industry obsessed with drawn-out lead-ups to artist launches. The day after releasing “Attention,” their breezy, ’90s R&B-indebted debut single, the K-pop quintet unveiled four music videos for their ebullient future-bass follow-up “Hype Boy”; the heartfelt ballad “Hurt” came 48 hours later. This was the first taste the world had of the Korean girl group, guided by industry veteran Min Hee-jin. Their music is noticeably laid-back, defined by gauzy sonics and diaristic talk-singing; their music videos and choreography eschew aggressive cuteness and imperial pomp—the K-pop standards—for down-home bonhomie.
On their second EP, Get Up, NewJeans channel the ecstasy of self-love and infatuation through lively dance music. “Look it’s a new me, switched it up who’s this,” they sing on the opener “New Jeans,” and later the skipping 2-step rhythm morphs into pounding kicks and fluttering harps. “Super Shy” is an iridescent liquid drum’n’bass song about faraway yearning that transitions into Jersey club stutters. The energetic, genre-blending production mirrors the nervousness and giddiness of longing—like Carly Rae Jepsen, the girls are eager to feel. When they repeat “You don’t even know my name, do ya?”, the line transforms from a dejected accusation to the reason they’re so compelled by their crush in the first place.
R&B singer-songwriter Erika de Casier has writing credits across Get Up, and her effortless melodies and unfussy interiority come through especially on the shimmering UK garage number “Cool With You.” NewJeans convey feelings towards a lover in direct, plainspoken language, affirming them with playful ad-libs: “You know me like no other, see me like no other.” They talk through a friend’s relationship problems on “ETA,” the EP’s brilliant highlight. It takes horns from the Baltimore club classic “Samir’s Theme,” throws in something akin to a Think break, and adds a bed of cozy synths. It feels like NewJeans’ interest in club music—the Jersey club kicks on “Cookie,” the Baltimore club balladry of “Ditto”—has been leading to this moment.
“ETA” is a song about telling someone you love to dump their boyfriend, delivered with the congeniality of a lifelong pal. It’s this cozy intimacy that makes NewJeans thrilling; their music lowers your guard. Such is the case on Get Up’s sweet closing track “ASAP.” The girls sing about crushing in all its woozy delight, hanging up the phone only to call again, as glistening synths usher the song into fantastical realms. “So much to do and lots to see,” the girl gently sing, as if reminding us to savor all of life’s small joys.


The Brazilian psych band transition from the oft-playful homage and stage-ready jams of previous releases to a serious attempt at tight, kaleidoscopic grooves.

Sombrou Dúvida

The word psychedelia originates from the Greek “the animating principle of the universe”— or whatever one calls that metaphysical sum greater than the total of its parts. Boogarins, hugely popular in their native Brazil, are one of several modern torch-bearers of psych music, playing a strain that sounds of tropicália and musicians who unselfconsciously noodle. On their latest album Sombrou Dùvida, they transition from the oft-playful homage and stage-ready jams of previous releases to a serious attempt at tight, kaleidoscopic grooves, and the results are akin to a pleasant, cerebral trip—a little more potent than the edibles sold from wagons in Dolores Park, but nothing quite Leary-caliber.
Lyrically, many of the songs (translated here from Portuguese) reference subversion, engulfment, and trance, coupling with seamless, driving instrumentation that mimics a hallucinogenic trip. “There is a dazzle of the fools/Fake and splendid/It is that which already engulfs you/I am suspect of the habits/I only trust the avidly living,” sings Dino Almeida at the end of the title track, whose name means “shadow or doubt.” These liminal spaces—shadows, doubts, and states of mind—are the record’s main concern, and its instrumentation is often an interplay between sunny, jangling melodies and synths that border the abrasive. This toggle between poles also extends to the band’s sensibilities, and at its best, Sombrou Dùvida toes the line between accessible pop and sonic experimentation, gussying up standout tracks like “Dislexia ou Transe” with wobbly distortion and a menagerie of interwoven riffs.
But where “Dislexia ou Transe’s” ratcheting build and oddball flourishes deliver on the promise of a trance, tracks like “A Tradição” travel at a sleepier pace. It covers well-tread psychedelic terrain without much novelty, and if anything, it dilutes the impact of the songs that bookend it, driving as they are. “Nós,” which immediately follows, is a clinic in layered sounds, a pastiche of discord that flirts with outright noise but rests just inside the confines of a brooding pop song.
Boogarins aren’t reinventing the genre, but like 2013’s As Plantas Que Curam or 2017’s home-recorded Lá Vem a Morte (which translates to “here comes death,” more straightforward than shadowy), this album expresses the group’s devotion to this particular wall of sound, pioneered by fellow countrymen Tom Zé, Os Mutantes, and others embroiled in Brazil’s late-’60s political tumult. On standout tracks, like “Passeio” and “Dislexia ou Transe,” they’re modernizing this quintessential 20th-century style with contemporary embroideries that feels distinctly in the spirit of their musical forebears. Played outrageously loud, as it ought to be, with the windows open and a joint rolled, Sombrou Dùvida is transportive, even if the only place you’re going is to an appreciation of a righteous shred under dissolving synths.


The 25th anniversary reissue of Paul Simon's Graceland shows how the album gave a human face to the perception of South Africa during apartheid by synthesizing geographically disparate musical strains that turned out to be remarkably complementary.

Paul Simon: Graceland: 25th Anniversary Edition

Graceland: 25th Anniversary Edition

As I prepared to review the 25th Anniversary Edition of Paul Simon's Graceland, I thought a lot about what the album means to me. It's a more complicated question than it seems. This is an album that's sold more than 10 million copies worldwide and was vigorously protested in certain quarters on its release. It has sat at the center of arguments about cultural exchange, cultural imperialism, and whether Simon was right to skirt the United Nations' cultural boycott of South Africa in order to record with black musicians from that country-- arguments that remain part of the record's story even as the tragedy of apartheid fades further from the headlines.
As unignorable as the context of the record is, there's no doubt in my mind that its songs transcend the context as listening experiences. These songs are astute and exciting, spit-shined with the gloss of production that bears a lot of hallmarks of the era but somehow has refused to age. Taken as a whole, the album offers tremendous insight into how we live in our world and how that changes as we get older.
The stories Simon tells on Graceland wouldn't have been told without the collaboration of the mostly South African musicians he worked with on the record. Their music sparked Simon's imagination after the commercial disappointment of 1983's Hearts and Bones, and the jam sessions he recorded with them in South Africa gave rise to all but a few of these songs. Simon learned to write differently by homing in on the ways guitarist Chikapa "Ray" Phiri varied his playing from verse to verse, and by grounding his vocal melodies on the basslines of Bagithi Khumalo. Khumalo's playing has such fluency and personality that, at least on the five songs he's a part of, this is nearly as much his record as anyone else's. On the brief disc of outtakes included in this set, there's a version of "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes" that's stripped down to just vocals and bass, and his line so completely frames the song (rhythmically, harmonically, and melodically) that the other elements of the album version's arrangement are barely missed.
So we get songs where the groove came first, and the lyrics long after. Simon considered writing political songs about apartheid but quickly concluded that he wasn't very good at it and owed it to the other musicians involved to stick to his strengths. Still, the album's opening song, "The Boy in the Bubble", is a thriller that ties together threads of technological progress, medicine, terrorism, surveillance, pop music, inequality, and superstition with little more than a series of sentence fragments, all tossed off in the same deadpan delivery. The song sets a monumental stage on which the small dramas and comedies of the other songs can play out, and it also establishes the record's unsettled tone-- out of all these songs, only "That Was Your Mother" is sung from a settled place, and even that one is a reminiscence about itinerant life.
To have Simon's songs mingling with mbaqanga, township jive, shangaan music, zydeco and chicano rock, all played by their real practitioners, complemented the themes of dislocation, misplaced identity, and the meeting of worlds. "You Can Call Me Al" traces Simon's own arc on his trip to South Africa, beginning in confusion and ending in ecstatic realization-- he goes from"far away, in my well-lit home" to, "He sees angels in the architecture, spinning in infinity/ He says 'amen' and 'hallelujah.'"
Graceland was the first many of Simon's fans had heard of South Africa's black music. When I saw that this set included a two-hour documentary on the album, I wondered whether it would shy away from the issue of Simon's violation of the cultural boycott on South Africa, but to its credit, it doesn't. In fact, director Joe Berlinger uses a one-on-one conversation between Simon and Dali Tambo, the founder of Artists Against Apartheid and a one-time vocal critic of Simon, as a framing device for his story.
But more than Simon's single-minded devotion to his art and Tambo's ideological politics, the experience surrounding this album is best conveyed by the musicians who made it. They were violating the boycott, too, just by participating in a dialogue with non-South African musicians, and there's a moment where Ray Phiri describes a meeting he was called to in London with African National Congress officials while touring to support the album that speaks volumes. The ANC officials told Phiri that he was violating the boycott and had to go home, and his response was that he was already a victim of apartheid, and to force him to go home would make him a victim twice. In the end, Simon's assertion that Graceland helped put an emotional, human face on black South Africans for millions of people around the world doesn't seem off the mark. This set also comes with a DVD of the concert Simon and these musicians played with South African exiles Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba in Harare, Zimbabwe, in 1987, and the joy visible on stage and in the audience certainly speaks to that.
It's easy to overstate what Graceland was. It wasn't the first world-music album, as some critics claim. But it was unique in its total, and totally natural, synthesis of musical strains that turned out to be not nearly as different from each other as its listeners might have expected, and the result resonated strongly around the world and across generations.


Loretta Lynn's first album since 2004's Jack White-produced Van Lear Rose reflects poignantly on her past. She makes a grab-bag late-late-career album feel not only emotionally grounded, but like a powerful choice.

Full Circle

It shouldn't come as a surprise that Loretta Lynn, even over half a century into her musical career, has made another strong album. There are few to zero significant aberrations in the Kentucky-born country singer's 55-strong discography; no arranger or producer (admittedly, she mostly stuck with the same one) has ever managed to obfuscate her deeply ingrained musical personality, which is always a little bigger than the specific song she is singing. Most of her albums—her last, 2004's Jack White-produced Van Lear Rose, being the primary outlier—only feature three or four of her much-remarked-upon originals, and her latest, Full Circle, is no exception. As always, the unmistakable, self-assured perspective of her original music is present in her delivery of others' material, making her able to breathe new life into songs country fans have heard dozens of times.
There are countless popular-music legacy figures out there who continue to tour and record every five years, even though they are millionaires several times over, seemingly out of habit or because they don't know what else to do. Sometimes they do so in flagrant opposition to doctor's orders, and we're left with trails of YouTube documentation of vocal deterioration. The situation couldn't be more different for the equally persistent 83-year-old Lynn, whose voice remains miraculously well-preserved. Its slight fluctuations are commensurate with her age and a lifetime of ardent performing, relatively untouched by overexertion or hard living (Lynn has always prided herself on staying well away from that). Throughout Full Circle, she often hovers in the airier middle range on her voice, choosing her throaty power notes wisely.
This elegant and tenuous note in her singing provides a new poignance. Her slight, ribboning strains of vibrato make the revisits of earlier hits included here—"Fist City" and "Whispering Sea," the B-side from her first single—feel like meaningful recastings rather than retreads. Stripped of golden-era Nashville glitz, they affectionately and winkingly recall of the attitude that made Lynn an instant anomaly and sensation when her first records hit radio circulation at the dawn of the 1960s.
Full Circle's covers also reflect back on Lynn's past. "Always On My Mind" was a cross-genre hit for soul-disco diva Gwen McCrae before it became a standard for Elvis and Willie Nelson; here, Lynn presents the malleable song—a wistful portrait of a troubled-but-passionate relationship that ended as suddenly as it began—in the guise of country-gospel. Lynn's controversial amour fou relationship with her husband Oliver, or "Doo," has been widely documented—most notoriously by Tommy Lee Jones in the popular 1980 film adaptation of Lynn's first memoir, *Coal Miner's Daughter—*and one can't help but recall Lynn's many bittersweet descriptions of the marriage while listening. The ballad is the most affecting of several songs on Full Circle which find the narrator, with an air of finality, reflecting back on a life they lived as best they knew how. Others, like the distinctly modern Nelson duet "Lay Me Down," directly contemplate mortality—in the context of this record, somewhat discomfitingly.
If Van Lear Rose found Loretta making a bid at updating her sound, Full Circle finds her assembling a time capsule. The album is a snapshot, intimate and largely acoustic, and made to sound out of time. It's fitting that the record was realized with the assistance of a Carter Family relative (co-producer John Carter Cash, son of June and Johnny), since the record marks the first time Lynn has recorded early Appalachian folk and country music. '50s and '60s Singer Kitty Wells is often cited, even by Lynn herself, as the direct inspiration for Lynn's combination of traditional "mountain"-style singing and "honky tonk" C&W; however, it's clear from listening to the two Carter Family tunes Lynn covers here the easy command she has on their more austere, folksong-influenced style. Lynn sounds just as natural singing these centuries-old melodies as her own. The upbeat "Black Jack David," recorded by the Carters in 1940, turns out to be one of Full Circle's most spirited vocal performances, and the lovelorn, Autoharp-driven "I Never Will Marry" its most moving.
However, you don't need to appreciate the lineage of the music, or know anything about Lynn's life or career, to sense the breadth of time and musical tradition reflected here. Lynn's deft phrasing and bold delivery, which has influenced several generations of country-pop singers from Linda Ronstadt to Reba McEntire to Miranda Lambert, is sustenance enough. Only a interpreter as shrewd and tasteful as Loretta Lynn could find the inherent commonalities in these songs, and make a grab-bag late-late-career album like this feel not only emotionally grounded, but like a powerful choice.