After years of kicking against dance music’s strictures, Daniel Martin McCormick delivers something close to a pure techno album. A product of turmoil, it’s a satisfyingly confident statement.

Coconut Grove

Daniel Martin-McCormick’s past always seems to dominate the conversation about his present. No matter how many new groups he’s formed or new aliases he’s tried on for size, his music continues to be evaluated through the lens of his earliest projects. Since 2002, Martin-McCormick has logged lengthy stints in groups like Black Eyes and Mi Ami and recorded solo as Sex Worker and Ital. (Full disclosure: he’s also an occasional contributor to Pitchfork.) Launched in 2016 with a series of five self-released EPs, Relaxer is the New York producer’s latest undertaking, and his new album, Coconut Grove, potentially represents a final, complete break from his noisy post-hardcore roots.
More than 15 years have passed since Black Eyes called it quits, but the band’s yelpy, chaotic urgency has colored the perception of Martin-McCormick’s entire career. While some of Black Eyes’ crazed energy did carry over into Martin-McCormick’s subsequent projects (e.g. the tortured glam-pop of Sex Worker and the highly rhythmic post-punk skronk of Mi Ami), he’s spent most of this decade focused on house, techno, and other forms of purely electronic music. As Ital, his initial releases were notably lo-fi, full of jittery intensity and not necessarily primed for the dancefloor, yet the project underwent a major evolution as he moved beyond his playful initial efforts. By the time that Hellhole, the final Ital EP, dropped in 2017, his music was emotionally deeper, more richly detailed and, most importantly, much better produced. Nevertheless, it often felt like listeners’ expectations of sonic anarchy and disarray were still looming in the background; for many, Ital would always be a former punk misfit making weirdo lo-fi house and techno.
With Relaxer, Martin-McCormick has effectively hit the reset button. Although he initially launched the alias as an anonymous side project, in 2017 he publicly made the switch and officially retired the Ital name. It was a time of transition, and not just in the musical realm. In 2018, he began work on Coconut Grove, creating the album during periods of what he calls “deliberate solitude” throughout a challenging year. Though he hasn’t been any more specific than that, he has described the LP as “an exorcism, or maybe a rebirth.”
Yet Coconut Grove isn’t a morose record. It’s not even particularly dark, especially in comparison to some of the later Ital releases. Martin-McCormick has said that some of the first electronic music that caught his attention, during the mid 2000s, was minimal dub techno, and although he was attracted to the music’s elegance and stripped-down aesthetic, it also lacked the visceral energy and raw emotional release he craved as a musician who was then in his early 20s. More than a decade later, it seems that Martin-McCormick has returned to that particular pool of inspiration, at least in part. Coconut Grove isn’t a dub techno album—the percussion is far too lively for that—but there is a certain patience to the music that feels new for him.
Coconut Grove shows a new level of refinement in Martin-McCormick’s music. Songs like “Steeplechase” and “Fluorescence” are brightly colored washes of ambient tranquility, floating along with all the urgency of a cumulus cloud. There’s a slight layer of Martin-McCormick’s usual distortion in the mix, but its presence provides a sense of texture as opposed to abruptly crashing the proceedings and spoiling the mood. The similarly serene “Agony” may sport an ominous title, but the track’s gliding synth washes feel more introspective than melancholy.
As good as these ambient excursions are, Coconut Grove spends more of its time on the dancefloor, mostly in a space that could be described as dreamy, melodic techno. There’s a genuine warmth to the record, and although Martin-McCormick still favors battered drum sounds, decaying basslines, and crackling bits of static, the music’s low-end heft sits comfortably alongside its hazy, space-age melodies. “Breaking the Waves” is one of the best examples of this equilibrium, its Balearic synth waves drifting above the song’s breakbeat-ish rhythm and the snarling crunch of its bassline. Album opener “Serpent in the Garden” dials up the melodic acrobatics even further, its bold synths sounding downright buoyant—and veering rather close to trance territory—atop the track’s sturdy techno foundation.
The LP does have its more upfront moments. The booming kicks and complex drum patterns of “Um” bring to mind labels like Livity Sound, while the cracking “Born From Beyond” also lets the percussion lead the way, with the help of a sticky vocal refrain and the sort of hovering bass tones that usually populate the background of a drum’n’bass track. Still, these songs don’t feel like outliers, as they retain the album’s warmth and dreamlike atmosphere.
Stylistically and musically, Coconut Grove might be one of the safest releases of Martin-McCormick’s career; it’s also one of his best. It may be “just” a techno album, but it’s also a confident statement from a veteran producer who seems to have settled into a groove after years of intentionally butting up against genre barriers and his own production limits. There’s value in that sort of work, but there’s also nothing wrong with an artist leaving it behind once they’ve carved out their own space. Perhaps it’s a function of maturity or simply getting better at his craft, but at some point, Martin-McCormick stopped being an ex-punk dabbling in electronic music and became a proper techno producer who happens to come from a D.C. post-hardcore background. His music has become subtler along the way, but it has also gotten a lot more rewarding.


On *Shattered—*garage rock veterans Reigning Sound’s first album since 2009 and first for Merge—Greg Cartwright has dialed down the fuzz and cranked up the songcraft.

Shattered

Greg Cartwright’s Reigning Sound came into existence in 2001, just as garage rock was readying an assault on the mainstream that would make Jack White one of the least likely superstars of the nascent 21st century. White, of course, had already been kicking around the garage-rock scene for years— but nowhere near as long as Cartwright, whose résumé stretches back to the ’80s, although he made his first mark with the Memphis band the Compulsive Gamblers in the early ’90s. His subsequent group, Oblivians, became his best known, and for good reason: Like a chunk of bloody meat chucked into a carburetor, Oblivians was a wonderful mess of primitive R&B and punk. But even under all that gunk, one thing was clear: Cartwright was a man who knew how to craft songs and coax melodies. Reigning Sound became the vessel for broadening ability, to the point where their 2009 album, Love and Curses, owed as much to early Elvis Costello as to the Cramps. On Shattered, Reigning Sound’s first album since 2009 and first for Merge, Cartwright has dialed down the fuzz— and cranked up the songcraft— even more.
There aren’t many new elements to Shattered as compared to earlier Reigning Sound releases, but it marks a decided shift in how those elements are employed. Recorded in Daptone’s studio in Brooklyn rather than on Cartwright’s home turf of Memphis, and with a relatively new roster, the album is loose, flowing, and at times downright funky. Ironically, it sounds more like a vintage, Stax-era production than anything Reigning Sound ever did back home. “Baby, It’s Too Late” smothers itself in earthy organ, ventilated by stinging, Steve Cropper-esque licks. “North Cackalacky Girl” is a mod-R&B rave-up with only a tinge of punk ruggedness. For a band that titled its 2004 album Too Much Guitar, there’s a noticeable subjugation of that instrument; Cartwright’s riffs are cleaner, sharper, and more sparingly applied, and they punch harder thanks to that tasteful dynamic.
The fluidity and lyricism in Cartwright’s playing has always been hinted at in Reigning Sound but never fully explored. The same goes for his voice, a husky, charismatic bellow that’s able to dip into a supple, soulful croon. His full range is stretched into thrilling places, though, on Shattered’s handful of roots-rock tracks, some of which solidly straddle the country-soul divide. “Never Coming Home” and “Once More” sport mournful strings, lonely spaces, and the kind of choked-up twang that can overcome even the tritest of lyrics—one of the few major drawbacks of the album. A shining exception is “Falling Rain”, the record’s dizzying apex. Approaching Dylan-and-the-Band chemistry, Cartwright and his current lineup pull together every thread that’s unspooled throughout the album; meanwhile, their leader’s lyrics take homespun, borderline mundane sentiments about the sadness of loss and call forth an inspired, gut-deep pathos that transcends the ostensibly basic blocks it’s built from.
“Starting New” is one of Shattered’s subtlest songs, but also one of its most telling. Introspective and impressionistic, Cartwright rhapsodizes and pitches woo with all the caressed, tender phrasing of “T.B. Sheets”-era Van Morrison. The funk is subliminal; the country comes from nowhere and everywhere. Like an attempt at unified field theory of American music, the song is a leap forward for Reigning Sound, one of many on Shattered. Cartwright’s contemporary, Jack White, may be probing the outer limits of his own domain with his new album Lazaretto. But in a humbler, warmer, more openhearted way, Reigning Sound have risen above themselves—as well as the garage-rock idiom that spawned them— while spiritually hewing true.


Long-delayed and eventually shelved, Jay Electronica’s near-mythical “lost” album finally sees official release after it was leaked. Even slightly unfinished, it is nearly an all-time classic, the kind of record that celebrates an art form while simultaneously pushing it forward.

Jay Electronica: Act II: The Patents of Nobility (The Turn)

In a 2010 interview with Jeff “Chairman” Mao, Jay Electronica admitted that the mystique around him was confounding. “I don’t get why people say that,” he said. “I be on Twitter, I be on Facebook. The people that know me, I’m open with them. I don’t know where the mystique thing is coming from. I’m a pretty open person.” And indeed, 10 years later, he never really went away—his tweets became infrequent, and the album never materialized, but he never went too long without appearing on a guest feature or dropping a loose single, often a highlight from the announced but unreleased Act II: The Patents of Nobility.
In reality, the only thing mysterious about Jay Electronica was why, having been anointed as rap’s second coming in the wake of “Exhibit C,” he would sit on what was by all accounts the next hip-hop classic. Fans and critics alike struggled to understand why someone with his considerable gifts would resist the industry’s beaten path to stardom, why a rapper with a critical mass of accumulated hype would decamp to London and hole up with an heiress, his magnum opus languishing on a hard drive, collecting dust.
Now that Act II is here, the answers to those questions have come into sharper focus. But Jay did not release it willingly. Almost 11 years after its originally announced release date, it leaked online late last week after an unnamed group allegedly raised about $9,000 to purchase it from hackers. He admitted to attempting to block its release, but in the wake of March’s A Written Testimony, the critically acclaimed LP that served as his “official” debut, he seems somewhat at peace with its release to the public, even in its unfinished form. Perhaps he’s matured; perhaps the weight of expectation no longer burdens him, having shed the albatross he’s worn in public for the past 10 years. Whatever the reason, within days of the leak, the samples had been cleared and the album officially released, with Jay expressing gratitude for the immediate response.
The track list arrives almost exactly the same as it was announced in 2012, with the sole exception being the Charlotte Gainsbourg-featuring “Dinner at Tiffany’s,” now spun off from the original “Shiny Suit Theory.” It very much feels like the sequel to his 2007 breakthrough Act I: Eternal Sunshine (The Pledge), a 15-minute suite that abandoned conventional form and structure, built atop Jon Brion’s score for the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Act II opens with “Real Magic,” a sparse production featuring a plaintive piano melody and bass line that offers a glimpse into the structure of his intended trilogy. A magic trick—as Michael Caine so helpfully explains in the 2006 film The Prestige—consists of three parts. The Pledge, in which the illusionist displays something ordinary; the Turn, in which they do something amazing with that ordinary object; and the Prestige, in which they deliver the seemingly impossible. “This is the Turn/they ain’t ready for the Prestige yet” he raps, laying out his intent for what follows.
He largely delivers. Though the album is clearly unfinished, many of its songs sound complete, and it only peters out in the final quarter with rough-hewn demo-quality beats and reference vocals. It’s easy to see why he wouldn’t want songs like “Rough Love” and “Night of the Roundtable” to see the light of day; in their current form, they blunt the impact of the album’s climax somewhat. Still, it’s not hard to imagine a finished version of Act II with no real misses. And it features some of the strongest work of his career, official or otherwise.
“Better in Tune,” originally released as the single “Better in Tune With the Infinite,” is more evidence that his mystique is mostly the manifestation of an image projected onto him by others. A masterstroke of his signature style, laying quotes from Elijah Muhammad and The Wizard of Oz atop a Ryuichi Sakamoto sample, the lyrics in its single verse are at once poignant and revealing, almost directly answering questions surrounding Act II’s delayed release: “It’s frustrating when you just can’t express yourself/And it’s hard to trust enough to undress yourself/To stand exposed and naked, in a world full of hatred/Where the sick thoughts of mankind control all the sacred.” It’s a place familiar to any writer staring down a deadline: with each passing day, you change, the world changes, and the increasing volume of your internal dialogue can be paralyzing. Who is this for? Do others need to hear this? Should they? The longer the paralysis, the further the moment recedes into the rearview, dulling its potential impact.
To that end, it’s a minor miracle that we get to hear this record at all, because the style he’s honed and crafted on Act II feels unique. A Written Testimony remains essential and representative of his lyrical talent, but compared to Act II, it’s relatively conventional. Jay’s use of his source material is reverent and intimate. He will often insert his voice into existing songs as if he were in the room collaborating with the artist when it was recorded, rather than digging in a crate to find a long-lost melody or break. There’s an intense dissonance at play in “Bonnie and Clyde” for anyone already familiar with the original ’60s cut by Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot; were it not for his signature applause sample, one might temporarily forget they’re listening to a Jay Electronica record. But three minutes in, and it feels like Serge wrote the song for him with 50 years of foresight—the percussion buried in the mix, the string melody swirling around his voice. Even when he samples Ronald Reagan—on “Real Magic” and “Road to Perdition”—he seems to twist the late actor and American president’s words to suit his own needs, as if they were spoken in service of his art.
The album’s leak and forced release will likely leave fans wondering what could have been. Consuming it in 2020 after having lived with many of the songs for years, we’ve been robbed of the experience of newly hearing them all for the first time, instead forced to revisit familiar puzzle pieces assembled in their new context. There’s a lesson to be learned here about procrastination, self-doubt, and the common writer’s pitfall of getting in one’s own way, of self-examination devolving into self-destruction.
Act II is nearly an all-time classic LP, the kind of record that celebrates an art form while simultaneously pushing it forward. In its current form, with much of the LP’s strongest material floating around for years before its release, and sequencing that builds to a climax that never arrives, it remains a nearly completed draft that was filed away, abandoned to the archives while the world moved on. Yet it remains an artwork that no one else could have created, let alone finished.

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An extended investigation of the electric guitar solo, the latest record from Ben Chasny’s experimental project is graceful and surprising.

Six Organs of Admittance: The Veiled Sea

The Veiled Sea

There was exactly one moment when it was possible to briefly state the kind of music that Ben Chasny makes. It was in 2005, when his uncharacteristic singer-songwriter album School of the Flower caused his seven-year-old experimental project, Six Organs of Admittance, to be linked with the acoustic psych-pop fad known as New Weird America or, somehow even more embarrassingly, freak-folk. But the former term was a particularly odd fit for him. Like the guitarist Jack Rose,  Chasny’s acoustic fingerpicking looked beyond folk idioms and toward influences like the Indian raga, which he fused with drone music. This wasn’t stuff you’d sing around a campfire, and even Chasny’s least hermetic tunes felt distinct from the ersatz standards, sea shanties, and court songs that became associated with freak-folk.
Chasny’s high, almost elfin voice is a presence on some of his other albums, too, although it’s as likely to serve purposes of color or rhythm as to be the central focus. Though his music is always marked by certain tensions—between the mystical and the meticulous, the extemporized and the exacting—he has never done the same thing twice. He keeps turning over new facets of his singular preoccupation with the guitar, the fixed point in a questing body of work that spans the crustiest noise and the most winsome folk-pop. As his playing has deepened, he has expanded his practice to incorporate everything from rewired amplifiers to four-track tapes he’d buried in his yard. He’s traveled a long way from the starting point of guitar-explorer exemplars like Sir Richard Bishop, over rhizomatic paths both traditional and abstract, to a place where genre breaks down into stray fence posts on an open range.
Though Chasny’s compositions typically blend the edges of close-miked guitars into vast, low-lying washes of sound, the instrument looms especially large over his latest album, The Veiled Sea—though not, of course, in a way it has before. It’s the rare, and perhaps only, Six Organs of Admittance LP that features no acoustic guitar. It is an eloquent series of essays on the electric guitar solo—as Platonic object, as mythic measure, as harmonic structure and cultural construct. Each of these five tracks (after a brief prelude, “Local Clocks”) sounds like a rock god’s spontaneous outpouring as heard by some superior being, with seconds stretching into minutes, turning impulses into decisions. It’s a creative choice that would probably feel tiresome if Chasny weren’t such a skilled guitarist and tactful composer, and he mostly manages to boil down the macho bloat of his sources to graceful essences without underplaying the pomp.
Deep with occult concepts, Chasny’s music always gives the impression of something you might play with miniatures on a Dungeons & Dragons map. The highlight “Somewhere in the Hexagon of Saturn” evokes the cosmic choogle that Brian Eno and Robert Fripp constellated in the ambient classics No Pussyfooting and Evening Star, which is just what you’d expect from Chasny’s turn to guitar heroism. “All That They Left You,” which heads earthward over a very exciting drop, is what you’d least expect: a big, four-on-the-floor homage to 1980s hair metal wailer Steve Stevens, of “Dirty Diana” and “Top Gun Anthem” fame, topped with a corroded alt-rock hook. “Last Station, Veiled Sea” wrings misshapen melody from a clangorous guitar effect. Only the cover of “J’ai Mal aux Dents,” which sounds like Jon Spencer jamming with Spacemen 3, wears out its welcome. Your mileage may vary, but I find the song’s endless chanting monotonous when Faust does it, which isn’t mitigated by the glossier setting of Chasny’s interpretation.
Though Chasny tends to work best in subtle, quiet folds, these songs are far from his first attempt at speaking up; the music comes nowhere near the splintering fury of Hexadic, part of a trilogy of albums based on the Cagean conceit of composing with a deck of playing cards. Instead, it continues a turn away from obscurity and toward popular forms that has been evident in recent albums such as the indie-guest-riddled Burning the Threshold in 2017 and last year’s brilliant, inviting Companion Rises. It’s a valuable addition to a varied yet cohesive body of work whose growth shows no sign of slowing. This is experimental music that never treats the word “experimental” as a fixed adjective: Chasny always remembers the fluid verb at its root.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Matthew Friedberger's latest is an instrumental effort with Sebadoh (and sometimes Fiery Furnaces) drummer Bob D’Amico. The best moments have Friedberger's antic playfulness and melodic gift.

Libras

Matthew Friedberger’s career is ripe for rediscovery. Though he hasn’t been invisible since Fiery Furnaces went on hiatus in 2011, he has kept the lowest possible profile available to an indie star with a penchant for releasing as many as eight albums in a year. Given all the liner notes and promotional prose that can be read as both funny and intentionally confusing, he may sometimes appear unserious about holding your attention. Yet he has not lost his rare talent for melody.
Vinyl-only sets like Napoleonette and Old Regimes—as well as a 2015 Bandcamp release—all feature memorable stretches that can go lick for lick with beloved Furnaces compositions from Bitter Tea or I’m Going Away. (See: saloon piano on “I’ll Ride Right Up On My Mule,” charming rockers like “I Met the Queen of the Night in the Daytime,” the harp hypnosis of “She’s Relieved, Actually,” or else the synth lines in “I Wasn’t Working.”)
He can also flummox his most committed listeners. A double-album collage that used the “Solos” LPs as source material cannibalized some of his most interesting post-Furnaces music in the service of an exhausting, scatterbrained aesthetic. But for anyone interested in pop as well as modernism, it’s worth checking in on Friedberger—and cherishing the moments when the fractured song structures find communion with his core catchiness.
Libras is the first release from Friedberger’s duo with Sebadoh (and sometime Furnaces) drummer Bob D’Amico. It’s all instrumental, though it's not particularly experimental or dense. The opening track, “Walking Through the False Door,” has a brittle, goofball feel playfully at odds with the title’s reference to ancient religious thought. (The duo’s name, Saqqara Mastabas, is also steeped in Egyptology.) But starting with the next number—“Fixed by the Tiny Talons of the Vulture Goddess”—Friedberger and D’Amico loosen up a bit, with the drummer laying free-improv fills over Friedberger’s slowly repeating chord progressions.
Despite the set’s focused reliance on synths and drums, the best tracks conjure a welcome variety of styles. “No Escape for the Serfs on the Surf” begins with grid of programmed beats and acoustic percussion, as bell-like timbres carry the melody; eventually Friedberger’s keyboard playing slides into more ecstatic, rushing figures, while the percussion invokes Indian classical music.
The usual Friedberger hybridism is here in force, though the sequence of ideas tends to be well paced, with no individual concept sticking around for too long. The freneticism occasionally manages to create an unexpectedly chill profile, too—as in the early going of “Uto on the Upswing” (which eventually turns gonzo, before finishing on a placid chord). Motorik funk and a descending, four-note earworm drive “The Failure (Of the Fencing of the Underground Apart from the Apartments’ Part).” And “The Cosmetician’s Knife” sounds like a dance-mix rethink of Friedberger’s “I Wasn’t Working.”
A couple of the shorter numbers sound comparatively insubstantial—more akin to video-game background music than standalone compositions. And nothing quite reaches the heights of Friedberger’s recent, pop-song solo work. But Libras does make for a consistently engaging half-hour of oddball riffs and themes. And it’s also a reminder of what Friedberger is capable of when he clicks with another talented collaborator.


Fueled by off-the-cuff bars, absurdist maximalism, and elastic flows, the artist’s new mixtape is a welcome blast of rowdy Atlanta rap.

Queen of the Land

Thanks to Whole Lotta Red’s generational impact, nostalgia for the outliers in Gucci Mane and Young Thug’s catalogs, and the enduring influence of Chief Keef, a new wave of rowdy and absurd Atlanta underground rap has emerged. There are Lazer Dim 700’s blown-out, stream-of-consciousness spectacles, which are dingy in the best way; 2Sdxrt3all’s screamed ad-libs, which sound like the devil on his shoulder come to life; Bear1boss’ overloaded AutoTune melodies; and L5’s psychological interpretation of drill, to name a few. Not all of it is that interesting—for instance, Baby Kia’s new age horrorcore is tryhard edgy—but what all the music has in common is that there is no restraint in sight. The same goes for Queen of the Land, a raw new mixtape by Glorygirl2950.
There are a few facts to know about Glorygirl2950. For one, she really likes Keef—her name is a callback to his imprint Glory Boyz Entertainment. She is 5 foot 5 (she points this out a lot), hates malls (fair), and doesn’t use parking lots (her car is too fast to abide by any speed limits, of course). This isn’t the most personal music; being as wild and cool as possible is the only clear goal. That would be more vapid than it is—somewhat like Ken Carson’s X, which basically had the same mission—if Queen of the Land wasn’t actually wild and cool. This mixtape is full of so much shrill-voiced wailing, gunshot sound effects, unexpected, acrobatic flows, and seemingly improvised vocal warbles and gibberish that it can be overwhelming. In a way, it recalls the foundational yet flawed Thug tape I Came From Nothing 3, where he engineered a style so wacko that you weren’t even sure how seriously to take it.
However, you should take Queen of the Land seriously. Like ICFN3, this is fun yet messy ATL rap. Over a collection of beats that pull from plugg and vintage trap music, Glorygirl constantly stretches melodies to their breaking point and veers off course just because she can. She delivers off-the-cuff bars like “A bitch get popped in her BBL butt” on “Slang for Me,” her flow so slurred it feels as if she’d downed a six-pack before hitting the booth. The background ad-libs sound like the squeaks of a mouse stuck on a trap, but then her delivery accelerates out of nowhere. It’s both extremely erratic and extremely replayable. So is “WNBA,” in which she’s popping and fluttering her lips for the first 25 seconds; fast forward a little and suddenly she’s onto an Adam and Eve diatribe that would make RXK Nephew proud. She makes choices randomly and recklessly, like on “2950,” the ragiest of the tracks, where it sounds like she’s rapping with a wad of gum in her mouth. Or take “Molly X,” where, in a cracked screech, she brags about all the cows she owns. Obviously bullshit, but good bullshit.
Queen of the Land’s pitfalls and strengths are mostly a result of the same issue: There is no toning Glorygirl down. Sometimes that makes for songs that are straight-up abrasive and annoying. Think of the ear-splitting shoutfest “Glory Freestyle,” or consider “Fireball,” where she can hardly get through a line without mimicking the sound of a chirping bird. It gets unbearable fast. A label might have given her the advice to chill out a bit, though that’s the kind of note that may have sanded down the thrills, too. What’s made Atlanta a longtime creative hub for independent, underground rappers is that the city’s environment often pushes artists to go big with their most rash ideas, even if they wind up faceplanting half of the time. One thing’s for sure: Queen of the Land couldn’t have come from anywhere else.


The power metal band’s second album is full of fallen kings and cosmic deities, intricate world-building and violent action sequences. Every second of the music aspires to be the show-stopping climax.

Ravening Iron

The heavy metal band Eternal Champion are led by singer Jason Tarpey, whose vocals share a bellowing timbre with Ozzy Osbourne in the ’80s, and whose ideas cannot be contained by his music, so he has to flesh them out with fantasy novels with titles like The Godblade. His are stories of fallen kings and cosmic deities, full of intricate world-building and violent action sequences. When you see the band live, he can often be found center stage, raising a huge, glimmering sword toward the heavens.
Ravening Iron is the Texas band’s second album, following 2016’s The Armor of Ire, but they already feel like lifers. Tarpey is also the vocalist of Iron Age, while guitarist Blake Ibanez plays in Power Trip and the other three members—bassist Brad Raub, guitarist John Powers, and multi-instrumentalist and producer Arthur Rizk—are members of the similarly epically scaled Sumerlands. Together, they treat Eternal Champion as a kind of fantasy camp: Their job is not simply to replicate the atmosphere of their favorite ’80s metal but to transport themselves to those landscapes to carve new ground.
The songs on Ravening Iron are the band’s best yet, and their strength largely comes down to their presentation. The production is cleaner and fuller than The Armor of Ire, and the songcraft is tighter and more immediate. “Skullseeker” involves a carefully plotted sex scene between two warriors from opposing armies (“Wait for the painting!,” Tarpey notes), and the song itself is pure adrenaline, a narrative matched by the music. Tarpey has explained that the title is derived from the name of its lead character, carved into his axe, but you get as much from his delivery (“He was… SKULLSEEKAAH”) and the steady, marching drumbeat.
Other highlights, like the frantic title track and the chugging “War at the Edge of the End,” a revamped song from their early demo, find the band increasingly focused on melodies, evident in their dueling lead guitars and penchant for soaring, singalong hooks. When they sprawl, as in the closing “Banners of Arhai,” their ambition is less for proggy, complex arrangements than to make each individual part sound like the show-stopping climax: The song opens with a blistering guitar solo before the lyrics even begin, and they challenge themselves to make that energy span the entire six minutes.
Eternal Champion operate in a long lineage of melodic, conceptual metal bands from Cirith Ungol to current practitioners like Visigoth and Crypt Sermon, but their own fingerprint is becoming increasingly visible. And if Ravening Iron rarely sees them venturing beyond their comfort zone—they continue their tradition of spacey, instrumental interludes with the synthy “The Godblade” and an acoustic coda in “Coward’s Keep”—it still feels like a step forward. “Thousands of swords/No one can take them from me,” Tarpey belts in the title track. It’s pure fantasy as usual, and yet the triumph has never felt so real.

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The intricate compositions on the band’s fifth album are bound tighter than ever, evoking distant images and emotions that continually shift in and out of focus.

Painted Ruins

The most interesting aspect of Grizzly Bear, at least since they gelled into a democratic band instead of Ed Droste’s project more than a decade ago, has always been the playing. That sounds like an obvious thing to say about a group that’s as prog-folk as they are chamber pop, whose lyrics are like a gorgeous looking puzzle with half the pieces missing. Each member—vocalist Droste, drummer Chris Bear, plus Daniel Rossen and Chris Taylor on vocals, guitars, and a bevy of other instruments—is an exceptionally skilled musician. Culminating with the dark intricacies of 2012’s Shields, Grizzly Bear’s evolution has seen them move from the looser, moodier side of folk-rock, to records defined by their more latticework approach to vocals and instrumentation—modern “headphone listening” music.
With their first new album in five years, Painted Ruins, Grizzly Bear offer another record with many gorgeous layers to parse. But this band also knows the pitfalls of making music that continually chooses the scenic route: “Given that our albums aren’t necessarily like, you listen to it once and you love it, I always want to give an album at least five listens,” Droste recently told Pitchfork. “Because it unfolds upon you. You keep discovering things.” There’s a touch of sensory overload to the instrumentation, and individual melodies don’t quite get their hooks into your brain. For some, the moving target of Grizzly Bear compositions is part of the fun, an endless string of unexpected decisions. For others, it will make for aggressively tasteful and well-produced music that can fall flat, like a smile you give to a co-worker in passing.
Consider this: Though Painted Ruins is Grizzly Bear’s most synth-heavy and beat-driven album to date (short of the Horn of Plenty remix collection), there’s nothing here that approaches the pluck of “Two Weeks,” one of the catchiest hits of ’00s indie rock. “Mourning Sound” certainly aims for a similar strain of driving pop power and comes as close to it as the album gets, with new wave synths and a steady beat. But for once, perhaps what sticks with you most is the lyrical imagery, with Rossen cooing about city street noise.
Some bands use their sprawling instrumentation to work up to anthemic choruses (think early Fleet Foxes), but that has never really been Grizzly Bear’s approach. Their arrangements are weighty and crumpled, creating songs that aren’t open roads so much as a series of switchbacks. When their opaque lyricism vibrates on the same frequency as their performances, the story of the song tends to come into soft focus. (I couldn’t tell you what Yellow House’s “On a Neck, On a Spit”—one of Grizzly Bear’s great unwieldy runaways—is specifically saying, but I do have a clear picture of the contented isolation it’s trying to convey.) “Neighbors,” one of Painted Ruins’ singles, is an exhilarating drive through the Swiss Alps. As the guitar comes barreling around a tight bend and the beats hit the gas, it creates this sense that someone’s gaining ground behind you. The scene is apt, as Droste sings about appreciating some distance from a partner while being pulled closer to them.
Though part of Grizzly Bear’s charm lies in the odd textures, tunings, and tempo shifts, their best songs don’t get lost in the details or the unconventional structures. At their best, they reel in and reel out martial indie rock on “Cut-out”; they cohere into something grand on “Losing All Sense,” a five-minute cut that teeters between a jaunty doo-wop and a half-time synth-psych reverie. The shape of that song approximates the gear-shifting dissociation Droste sings of, finally sounding a little more alive in his voice (Rossen swoops in nicely, too). It’s only occasionally when songs lose the big picture, like on”Systole,” that you’re wondering why you took the long way in the first place, as the song plods along without destination.
A colleague once referred to Grizzly Bear as “widescreen sound” because it’s difficult not to think of them in cinematic terms. They are purveyors of mood, evokers of their own time and place. It’s like some of these prestige television shows, with their slate-blue filters, expensive set pieces, and crisp dialogue. Such series are supremely well constructed, made by creators of great skill and taste, but there’s something lacking in the heart department, something a bit hollow. Painted Ruins, cursorily an album about battling demons, can feel a little like prestige music. But there’s this moment at the end—a spot where Grizzly Bear records routinely reach their heights—that reminds listeners that tangible realism can be a necessary counterpoint to the quartet’s impressionism. Atop a briny wave of guitar distortion, Droste offers up a closing shot you can still picture hours later when he calmly and clearly repeats a few times, “Since I was a young boy, it was always there/Inside me growing, none of it seems fair/I’ve come to accept it, let it take the stage/And leave me helpless, watching far away.” Suddenly the music is close to you, as Painted Ruins finally zooms in on an emotion, a beautifully composed moment that captures the haze of what came before.


The Australian punk band refuses to forgive and forget on a nuanced, ambitious punk record.

Punter

Nathan Burns’ furious howl is the sound of someone who’s been screaming relentlessly for days in an otherwise empty room. His home city of Melbourne, Australia holds the record for world’s longest COVID-19 lockdown, totaling almost nine months. In a manifesto included with the album, anarchist punk band Punter describe their self-titled debut as an attempt to unpack a chapter of history that’s quickly being swept under the rug of “back to normal.” Punter didn’t care for whatever “normal” was before, and they are furious about how pandemic restrictions excused harsh police tactics against underprivileged citizens and enabled the government to pass out special dispensations and lucrative private contracts to corporations. (Their manifesto is also pointedly pro-vax and social distancing.) Written at home during the thick of it, Punter’s thesis is succinct: They did not forget and will not forgive.
Burns’ screams about his friends losing their wits in isolation while “essential workers build essential suburbs” cement the album as hardcore in both its politics and burly relentlessness. For all their heft and pummel, Punter are remarkably nimble. “Retirement Simulator” careens, with Burns’ power chords and Bella Steel’s basslines bouncing from peak to valley and back. Just as the song begins to feel established, they drop the hook in favor of a complementary earworm. Several times across the album, Steel and drummer Nathan Revell provide backing vocals that add melodic dimension and contrast to Burns’ rougher approach. Meanwhile, Burns is full of surprises. Several times, his scream subtly morphs from a tuneless bark to a wail, and suddenly he’s hitting actual notes. Even on Punter’s most repetitive songs, like “Curfew Eternal,” Burns howls like a wolf and then lets loose with a guitar solo that utterly whips.
Light on its feet and full of sharp turns, Punter is also a record of emotional multitudes. Rage and depression are balanced by humor, especially when Burns sets his sights on the rich, the “little shits,” and of course, the pigs. The album’s introduction is an elevator music rendition of “What the World Needs Now Is Love” overcome by a squall of feedback. The anti-gentrification protest “A Minute’s Silence” takes an ironic survey of the values the band’s late countrymen died to protect at the World War I Battle of Gallipoli: suburban sprawl, Chemist Warehouse pharmacies, and regional chain stores in trendy brick structures. Burns closes “State Breakfast” by grunting not one a cappella “yeugh,” but eight. It’s like he couldn’t decide which loogie was most spitefully hocked and realized they were all perfect.
The standout track of Punter—simultaneously the best illustration of their pandemic manifesto and their musical ambition—is “A Year’s Silence.” Burns is screaming again, disgusted by a lockdown-era stadium crowd, ripping into the capitalist structure that keeps the general public isolated, divided, and coasting on autopilot. After one of his best guitar solos, Burns and his bandmates find an anthemic hardcore melody that brings to mind the more theatrical inclinations of Fucked Up. The band rollicks as Burns sounds equal parts angry and weary: “I don’t wanna stream another funeral again,” he sings. The word “stream” bottles a timestamped feeling of loss made more terrible by insurmountable distance. Many are eager to forget the darkest and most absurd days of 2020; these enraged and commanding punks seem to remember it all.


On his album debut, the South Florida rapper (and former XXXTentacion associate) employs a playful approach to celebrate style over substance.

Stokeley

Ski Mask the Slump God is “runnin’ around the city in a toga eating noodles”; he’s as sharp as “baby alligator teeth.” Flipping the pages of his debut studio album, Stokeley, is a thrill because at no point can you predict what’s coming next; its energy is the only constant. In unambitious hands, this could be exasperating, but Ski Mask skillfully navigates the constant flux. A vast database of pop-culture references injects sparks into an expansive album that is heavy on flash and light on substance. It works, for the most part.
Ski Mask isn’t as much an artist as he is a vessel channeling the voices of a horde of souls. He croons like a drunken uncle on the porch, screams choruses like he’s shaking off a straitjacket, and raps as dizzyingly quick as Twista—all sometimes on the same track. He came up on Busta Rhymes, Missy Elliott, and Jamaican music, so this isn’t a surprise. Hailing from Florida, he was the best friend and frequent collaborator of the late XXXTentacion, who also sat on the outskirts of traditional rap. Ski Mask’s debut album was created with XXXTentacion’s approval in mind and builds on the strange mannerisms that Ski displayed on his long-delayed May mixtape Beware the Book of Eli.
Stokeley’s production feels plucked from the farthest corners of the multiverse and, along with Ski Mask’s voice, plays into the constantly morphing atmosphere. Album opener “So High” pairs soothing, clean-toned guitar with a lazy 808 while Ski Mask gently trills as if he should be strumming a harp. “Nuketown” deflects attention from a mid-tempo, bass-heavy beat and allocates it to his jittery cadence. Each song feels like its own world. “Adult Swim” and “Far Gone” share stylistic similarities in their beats, but Ski Mask’s flow is a shape-shifting rap delivery on the former—he slurs his words and finds power in the resulting clumsiness—and a more restrained, melodic singing style on the latter.
One of the most stimulating things about Ski Mask’s approach is the way it injects fresh air into rap tropes like tales of the struggle, threats of violence, and braggadocio. He liberally sprinkles pop-culture references over Stokeley, often as a means of infusing  color into a typical punchline. On “Adults Swim,” he compares marijuana to “ogre nut” and the size of his girl’s butt to the “diaper booty” on Cupid. On “Cat Piss,” he’s carrying so much money, he says, that it looks like he’s got Poké Balls in his pocket. A modicum of wit elevates his lyrics over the standard litany of “water jewels” and dripping wrists. But when he takes on serious subjects, he stumbles. He lacks the ability to give deeper emotions the gravitas they deserve. He fully drops the clown mask on “Save Me, Pt. 2,” an update to XXXTentacion’s 2017 track “Save Me.” As he raps about the relationship between drug addiction and mental health Ski Mask’s rapping clumsily gallops when it should walk.
Stokeley throws everything at the wall and, for the most part, it sticks. The album’s power comes from its unpredictably, which never becomes stale. Despite his mercurial instincts, his commitment to goofy punchlines never sways. And there’s a method to his madness; his pop-cultural flourishes are more than just popcorn and string. Stokeley is a manifesto for style over substance. That cuts both ways. His “Kids Next Door” and “Transformers” references are plenty memorable, but his anti-government jabs carry less water. But then, that’s true to character: The rapper’s real-life accessory is a Chucky Doll—not a textbook.


Pairing undulating synthesizers with cycling grooves, the Bay Area electronic musician’s first album in 14 years calls back to the ambient techno of the late 1990s.

Beauty Is Useless

Both solo and alongside Maxwell August Croy in the duo En, James Devane makes ambient music that is soft as moonlight and hard as a struck bell. The drone has typically been his lodestar, piercing through a luminous fog that feels like the sum of all frequencies vibrating in shimmering agreement. But the San Francisco musician’s new album for Croy’s Umeboshi label is different. His first solo LP in 14 years, Beauty Is Useless retains the pastel hues and creamy swirl of his previous work; his billowing atmospheres could still pass for one of Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner’s nebulous seascapes. But this time, he drops a heavy rhythmic anchor in the storm-tossed harbor.
Beauty Is Useless’ nine tracks are all based on a single idea, pairing undulating synthesizers with driving beats. They remain infused by the essence of the drone, but where movement in Devane’s music was previously a matter of micro-particles drifting imperceptibly, these tracks are propelled by muscular kick drums and flickering hi-hats. As rhythmic as they are tonal, chords pulse at regular intervals, like bursts of flame from an industrial furnace.
The division between tone and groove is generally fuzzy. It’s unclear exactly what he’s doing to his source materials, but his processing tricks tend to blur the distinctions between each element in his songs. In the opening “In Your Time,” a slow-motion riff on classic dub techno, the hi-hat pattern manifests as pinpricks of light perforating the shirred fabric of Devane’s chords. “Sudden Oak Death” arrives like a rumor from the opposite end of a drainpipe, its lumpy downbeats shrouded in muck. Only on one track, “Fences In,” do drums, bass, and pads seem obviously to emanate from different devices; for the most part, his textures are vague as grave rubbings.
Beauty Is Useless may inspire a sense of déjà vu. Devane seems intent upon invoking a style of ambient techno that flourished between the late 1990s and the mid 2000s. Taken as a whole, the album feels like a survey of tropes and tendencies that were then in vogue; some of his reference points are remarkably specific. In the slow-motion chug of “In Your Time” and the elliptical loops of “Sudden Oak Death,” there are echoes of Wolfgang Voigt’s M:I:5 alias—a highlight of Profan, Kompakt’s predecessor label—and also the Kompakt-signed Dettinger, both of whom used sampling to generate dizzyingly off-kilter loops. The smeared chords and muffled kicks of “Bygone Trouble” recall Voigt’s more famous alias GAS, while the controlled ecstasy and coiled forward motion of “Somatic Marker” and “Fences In” are reminiscent of yet another Kompakt artist, the Field. “Can’t Be Here,” meanwhile, suggests a tantalizing fusion of Vainqueur, an underrated alchemist from Berlin’s Chain Reaction stable, and Luomo, Vladislav Delay’s deep house alias, pairing the former’s ethereal wash with the latter’s writhing basslines.
It’s refreshing to hear these influences revived in this way. Many of Devane’s touchstones are sounds that have lain dormant for more than a decade; if they haven’t fallen out of fashion, exactly, they have gradually faded into obscurity, and they’re ripe for rediscovery. Like the projects that inspired him, which often were predicated upon chance or error, Devane also seems interested in the aleatory: These tracks feel less like carefully plotted-out compositions than the mechanical output of complex systems. In part, that’s what makes them so hypnotic. What seems on the surface a simple pairing of chord and pulse opens up, upon closer inspection, to reveal a wealth of granular detail. Outwardly static forms give way to perpetually shape-shifting evolutionary processes. In that sense, Devane’s techno plays the same perceptual tricks that his drone music does—every straight line a labyrinth, every dot of solid color a polychrome explosion of possibility.


The Copenhagen producer’s debut LP reaches beyond the city’s trademark fast tempos to explore woozy slow-motion jams, pensive ambient sketches, and pulse-racing breakbeat trance.

Full Circle

Three or four years ago, Copenhagen became known for a particularly speedy strain of dance music. Its breakneck drum programming packed an industrial-strength wallop; its glistening synths channeled ’90s trance. Most people just called it “fast techno,” though that dryly utilitarian term fails to capture the style’s eye-widening psychedelic aura. Kasper Marott is no stranger to quick-stepping tempos, and he has released on Kulør, a Copenhagen label central to the sound’s development. But Marott doesn’t share the air-punching ferocity of some of his peers. His 2018 single “Keflavik” filtered the scene’s pogoing grooves through the rubbery funhouse shtick of vintage Italo disco, scrawling a giddy smile in place of fast techno’s clenched-jaw grin. And on his 2019 Kulør single “Drommen om Ø (Forever Mix ’19),” he switched things up entirely, slowing the tempo and diving into 14 minutes of weird, weightless bliss—rosy as a sunset, humid as a rainforest, squishy as a waterbed.
On Full Circle, his debut album, Marott continues to push against techno orthodoxy from multiple angles. He tackles a wider range of tempos, styles, and moods than ever before: woozy slow-motion jams, pensive ambient sketches, pulse-racing breakbeat trance. The common denominators are ultra-vivid sound design, super-saturated colors, and a subtle sense of humor. There’s nothing jokey about these tracks, but they’re distinguished by a lightness of spirit and a trickster’s instincts. Multiple times in the middle of “Missing Link,” a thundering drum’n’bass tune, the beat drops out. Marrott typically fills those pauses with squiggles of electronic noise, but the final time it happens, he simply cuts to silence for 11 long seconds—what must feel like an eternity to the startled DJ, scrambling to cue up the next track, who thinks the song has come to a premature end.
The standout tracks take the fast-techno ball and run with it. “Mr. Smiley” opens the album with a gentle aurora of softly flickering synths, but once the beat kicks in, there’s no hiding from the song’s peak-time fervor. Both drums and hyperactive bassline place emphasis on the upbeats, lending the groove a nervous, hiccupping energy, which only grows more unhinged across the course of its nine-minute run. But despite the goes-to-11 intensity, “Mr. Smiley” has a hypnotic grace that’s missing from many similarly full-on club tracks. For all its cartoonish force, there’s plenty of subtlety in the mixdown and just as much surprise in the arrangement, which finds a neat dichotomy between the rolling groove below—bassy, unceasing, regular as your heartbeat—and the mind-melting synths that pitch and dive unpredictably through the upper register, gibbering like deranged birds.
Several tracks mine similar territory. “Mini Trance” marries warm Detroit synths to a stiff, stomping beat and fleshes out the space around them with glittery metallic accents; the sun-kissed “Sol,” the album’s highlight, applies the same approach to a rolling breakbeat house foundation, surging forward and then falling back in oceanic waves. Among these uptempo tracks, only “Kun for mig” (“Just for me”) feels wanting; like its companions, it aims at a kind of billowing catharsis, but the beat and bassline fail to achieve liftoff.
Some of the record’s most unexpected moments happen when Marott abandons the high BPMs. “Mere” offers an oddball take on UK garage, with a stumbling rhythm that feels even slower than it is; like “Mr. Smiley,” it makes the most of contrast—in this case, between the crispness of the drums and the gloopiness of the bleeps above. “Hvad er det” (“What is it”) layers ambient textures over the sort of slow-motion groove once common among ’90s acts like Soul II Soul and Ace of Base, then throws a wrench in the works by looping a misshapen breakbeat in an odd time signature. “Top Soap” and “Pling” both use marimba to evoke warm tropical atmospheres—the former over a crisp dembow rhythm, and the latter tapped out in rippling triplet patterns reminiscent of classical minimalism. That many of these songs are just two or three minutes long doesn’t lessen their impact. These shorter, more sketch-like pieces nicely complement Marott’s trance-inducing epics; their low-key nature makes his anthems hit that much harder.
As a genre, fast techno doesn’t seem to have suffered much during the pandemic; scene stalwarts like Ibon, Rune Bagge, Funeral Future, and Repro have continued to push trembling needles into the red. Still, the style remains inextricably bound up with the experience of nightlife, and as the pandemic drags on and clubs remain shuttered, club music’s entire raison d’être becomes increasingly notional. Divorced from the functional requirements of moving bodies, what is dance music for? Full Circle offers a number of possible answers, stimulating the imagination as much as the limbs. This is music for dancing but also music for dreaming—and, crucially, music to stimulate dreams of a time we can dance again.

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Nudging their sound forward on their third LP, the married duo of Indra Dunis and Aaron Coyes offer a swirl of psych, synth-pop, reggae, and dub that incorporates the voice and presence of their son, Mikko.

Lucifer

Is Lucifer Peaking Lights' children's album? One song, "Beautiful Son", is apparently about Mikko, the baby born last year to duo Indra Dunis and Aaron Coyes. And the child "sings" on another, "Lo Hi", mixing his gurgles with mom's soothing hums and dad's homemade synths. But Mikko's role in Lucifer highlights something that's been there all along. Built with simple loops and easily memorized hooks, Peaking Lights' music has always been kid-friendly. And they've always been smitten with repetition, like a toddler happy to watch an episode of "Yo Gabba Gabba!" over and over. If this Peaking Lights album is for kids, all of them are.
More interesting than whether youngsters will dig Lucifer is what that possibility says about Peaking Lights' Technicolor swirl of psych, synth-pop, reggae, and dub. Their approach taps into something childlike without sounding artificially crude or annoyingly naive. The way they spin together strands of cycling bass, pulsing keyboard, and reverberating voice echoes how kids are fascinated by things adults take for granted. In the process, Dunis and Coyes find energy in relaxation, vitality in letting things take their course. Maybe that's why a song as beatific and sun-staring as "Beautiful Son" seems to have a pumping heart, even though Coyes never injects it with a beat.
Still, this album is called Lucifer, so maybe don't bring it to your friend's baby shower. Coyes claims they picked that title because "it means 'Venus, bearer of light' and is the first sign of the sunrise." But it also hints at some darkness beneath the sunny exterior. The album opens with the rattling "Moonrise" and ends with the hazy "Morning Star", suggesting this journey happens at night. And things get murkier as the album approaches dawn. Later tracks such as the throbbing "Midnight (in the Valley of Shadows)" and the dense "Dream Beat" mimic earlier songs in structure, but conjure a foggier atmosphere, as sounds slowly blur and fuse into thicker layers.
Those denser moments evoke artists on the farther edge of dub-riding sound: High Places, Sun Araw, Gang Gang Dance, Excepter. On the poppier end, I can hear Stereolab, Tom Tom Club, even Blondie in Lucifer's bouncier jams. These comparisons aren't meant to degrade Peaking Lights' individuality, but enhance it, because none of the above straddle simplicity and complexity quite the way this pair does. When they mold melody into mantra on something like the ethereal "Cosmic Tides", they give off both a broad universality and an inimitable personality.
Perhaps that's where Peaking Lights' kid connection severs a bit. Where a child is personality in flux, this duo's musical character came out of the womb fully formed. Lucifer is just their third album, and yet it's unmistakably drenched in their specific brand of patience and calm. If that suggests stasis, well, maybe that's not such a bad thing. For me Lucifer nudges their sound forward, but even if it were just a repeat-- another great loop, so to speak-- Peaking Lights are still a long way from the bottom of their self-made musical well.


Sheffield band follows its record-breaking debut with another assured album that seems to glimpse the possibility of greatness even when it fails to attain it.

Arctic Monkeys: Favourite Worst Nightmare

Favourite Worst Nightmare

No longer can Arctic Monkeys be considered underdogs; given the notoriously fickle English music scene, perhaps that means they should be. Last year, the Sheffield quartet’s Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not became the fastest-selling debut album in UK music history, spawning two No. 1 singles and winning the Mercury Prize. The band's early press clippings, like those for Gnarls Barkley, Lily Allen, and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, highlighted their rapid netroots success story as much as their music, which is a traditionalist brew of observational storytelling, post-Libertines meat-and-potatoes guitar rock, and the heady enthusiasm of youth.
Fifteen months later, Arctic Monkeys’ sophomore effort is already receiving a royal welcome at home, though the premature use of words like “comeback” underscores the precariousness of the group’s situation. As for the Arctics, they’ve come back tougher, sharper, and bleaker, even if to non-fans of this brand of no-frills Britrock it probably still sounds pretty much the same. Favourite Worst Nightmare is in some ways better and in other ways worse than its breakthrough 2006 predecessor, but above all it’s the assured statement of a self-conscious young band determined to deserve their acclaim. Eventually, maybe they will.
In interviews, singer and lyricist Alex Turner stays low-key about his abilities. “You never think, like, ‘We’re amazing, aren’t we?’,” the 21-year-old recently told Mojo. Nevertheless, Favourite Worst Nightmare flexes Arctic Monkeys’ considerable songwriting and musical muscle with a confidence that sets the group apart from their UK rock peers; the latest songs seem to glimpse the possibility of greatness even when they fail to attain it. Turner finds new emotional depth on songs like breakup anthem “Do Me a Favour,” which climbs patiently from baggy drums to a searing, guitar-led crescendo. Gradually shifting from the man’s perspective to the woman’s, he concludes, “How to tear apart the ties that bind?/Perhaps ‘fuck off’ might be too kind,” his raggedly bereaved croon adding Damon Albarn to the list of plausible vocal comparisons alongside Morrissey and Noel Gallagher. Similarly, the drum-less and bass-less “Only One Who Knows” is another big step forward for the band, taking a more deliberate, atmospheric view of a dying relationship: “They made it far too easy to believe/That true romance can’t be achieved these days.”
If such heartache is a fresh addition to Turner’s songs, so too, it seems, is the feeling that makes the pain possible. Real affection glimmered through the bickering on the debut’s “Mardy Bum,” but the girls on that album are mostly fake-tanned participants in meat-market mating rituals (“I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor,” “Still Take You Home”). By contrast, Favourite Worst Nightmare unveils one of Turner’s first proper love songs: The closing “505,” draped with an apparent Ennio Morricone organ sample, poignantly if none too adventurously describes Turner’s longing to get back to a hotel room where his lover awaits. “I’m always just about to go and spoil the surprise/Take my hands off of your eyes too soon,” Turner admits, displaying his usual gift for vivid imagery.
However, some of Favourite Worst Nightmare continues in the unfortunate direction of last year’s Who the Fuck Are Arctic Monkeys EP, which found the band coming unappealingly to grips with fame. Turner’s obsession with poseurs has always been the least likeable thing about his lyrics, but songs like “Fake Tales of San Francisco” at least reflected a nagging desire not just to repel phonies but to crave something true and real; here, with the band’s debut certified as the “fifth greatest British album ever” by the NME, Turner’s unrelenting bitterness makes him sound like one of the petty fakes he despises. It doesn’t help that first single “Brianstorm”—ostensibly about a T-shirt-and tie-wearing industry creep the band met in Japan—shows the Arctics at their least melodic, swapping out the Supergrass “Richard III” riff that opened the debut and replacing it with pummeling, double-speed aggression. “Teddy Picker” heaps scorn on “professional pretenders,” comparing the music industry to the toy crane machines in arcades, and mocking kids who “dream of making it, whatever that means.” Check the mirror, dude, though Turner also squeezes in what sounds like a pointed jab at the music press: “When did your lists replace the twist and turn?” Fair play; the twist and turn here is, indeed, fab.
Favourite Worst Nightmare flirts, too, with the notion of the Arctics as an indie-dance group, enlisting the guidance of Simian Mobile Disco’s James Ford (who also produced the recent debut album by Klaxons). The throttling playing of drummer Matt Helders has been a big part of Arctic Monkeys’ appeal since the beginning, so the differences here are subtle: A thick bass groove on the Dr. Suessian “This House Is a Circus” (“berzerkus”?), four-on-the-floor beat on the Wizard of Oz–steeped “nostalgia” critique “Old Yellow Bricks,” or repetitive fuzz-tone guitar jerkiness on fast-paced “If You Were There, Beware.” While Ford coaxes commanding performances from the band, he modifies their trad-rock trajectory only slightly; Arctic Monkeys and Klaxons were never as different as the UK press suggested.
If Favourite Worst Nightmare is notably lacking something, it’s another song like the debut’s standout, “A Certain Romance.” Arctic Monkeys have now traveled the world, and their new material veers from such detail-rich tales of growing up in provincial England, at times focusing instead on subject matter Blur pursued with sharper wit (and only slightly sharper hooks) on The Great Escape. “Fluorescent Adolescent,” the current album’s most obvious hit, shares a festival-ready ska rhythm with the debut’s “Mardy Bum” (which shares it with Sublime’s “Santeria”), but the new song describes something Turner can hardly know much about: a middle-aged woman’s dreary sex life. “You used to get it in your fishnets/Now you only get it in your night dress,” Turner cleverly sympathizes. Sure, Arctic Monkeys may no longer belong to their old world of kids wearing “knackered Converse,” drinking underage, and getting accosted by bouncers, but they’re still too boldly tuneful not to find yourself rooting for them.


On their collaboration, singer-songwriter Joan Wasser of Joan as Police Woman and Benjamin Lazar Davis of the chamber pop outfit Cuddle Magic bond over their fascination with big, mainstream pop.

Joan as Police Woman / Benjamin Lazar Davis: Let It Be You

Let It Be You

In their respective careers, singer-songwriter Joan Wasser (AKA Joan as Police Woman) and multi-instrumentalist Benjamin Lazar Davis have both flirted with pop accessibility while also keeping their distance. Of the two, Wasser has hewed closer to traditional pop forms, while Davis has taken a more academic approach with the chamber pop outfit Cuddle Magic. But on their first collaboration Let It Be You, Wasser and Davis indulge themselves, revealing a shared sweet tooth for bubblegum bombast that will likely shock each of their fanbases.
Aside from her work with Anohni, Rufus Wainwright, and Lou Reed, Wasser’s solo output repeatedly demonstrates her natural affinity for songcraft. In particular, she’s shown a knack for borrowing from mainstream pop music in a way that preserves its dignity. Her heavily soul-inflected work, arty as it may be, reminds us of a time when pop tunes wound up in jazz clubs without losing anything in translation. Unlike so many of her peers, Wasser never comes off like she's slumming, instead working deftly at the porous border between whatever separates “highbrow” and “popular” art.
Meanwhile, Davis—who has a much more playful, high-energy presence—brings an explosive spark to the material. Where Wasser's bittersweet chords on piano and guitar reflect the full, often messy range of everyday feelings, Davis tends to lean towards more childlike expressions. One would expect these differences to create fertile ground on an album that addresses relationships so much. But the pair undercuts the human element of the music by play-acting at singing big and bold for the people way up in the cheap seats.
On the aptly named “Overloaded,” the chorus scrapes the adult-contempo stratosphere by mimicking the familiar production style of huge-budget R&B-inflected pop music. Here and elsewhere, Davis and Wasser play off of one another, egging each other on to dial up the schmaltz and clearly having fun in the process. They sound positively giddy, but the results almost completely sideline the moodiness that drives the spirit of both Cuddle Magic and Joan As Policewoman.
Case in point: the Let It Be You version of “Overloaded” oozes with outsized melodrama—you’d believe it if someone told you it had been written with Katy Perry in mind. Cuddle Magic’s rendition, on the other hand, hits more subtle notes by enticing you to read between the lines. On Let It Be You, the song becomes somewhat faceless, one of several love songs that wear heartbreak like a neon-colored stage costume. And generic turns of phrase like “It hurts so bad how much I love you/Makes me wanna die when I'm thinkin’ of you” (from “Hurts So Bad”) make it hard to tell whether Wasser and Davis are mocking or celebrating the pop vocabulary they’re employing.
Sonically speaking, Let It Be You is undeniably rich, and there are moments where Wasser and Davis weave around each other like seasoned dance partners. The title track, for example, starts with a bit-crushed melody line and handclap samples that reference the Central African Republic Pygmy rhythms that initially brought the pair together. At first, Wasser faux-rhymes in a flat-pitched, finger-wagging tone like she's doing her best Luscious Jackson impersonation. But when she and Davis harmonize together on the chorus, the song soars to a more sublime place—where most of this album should aim.
Let It Be You shows what it could have been on the final track, the ultra-solemn “Station,” which starts with Wasser singing accompanied only by watery electric guitar for several verses. The funereal vibe is so jarring—and convincingly heartrending—that at first it sounds as if a Joan As Policewoman tune ended up on the wrong record. Perhaps “Station” would have been better served set aside for one of Wasser’s own albums. Here, it feels like a glimpse of foregone possibility on a lower-stakes project, the sound of two pros blowing off steam by proving they can recreate Top 40 spectacle. It might be a good time, but good times aren’t what got Joan Wasser and Benjamin Lazar Davis where they are.


Norway's Jenny Hval makes a breakthrough on Innocence Is Kinky, her second album for Rune Grammofon. In the past, her music has tended toward subdued art-pop; as this title suggests, her new album is more direct, more brazen, more aggressive, and more provocative, both conceptually and musically.

Innocence is Kinky

On “Mephisto in the Water”, a standout off her second solo album for Rune Grammofon, the Norwegian singer/songwriter/novelist/critic/academic/provocateur Jenny Hval bends her voice into unusual and unexpected shapes. Over a disquieting Möbius strip keyboard line, she performs a wordless fanfare, sing-chants the verses, and splits into a choir of singers on the vocal hook. “Hey, what do you hear?” she asks coyly. On the protracted bridge, her voice warps and mutates and turns the syllables into pure sounds. Hval goes deliberately flat, savoring the pulsating dissonance, until all that is left is a high, tensile note that wavers in either distress or desire. Rather than alienating, it’s actually inviting: a strange and powerful performance. Innocence Is Kinky thrives on such moments, when Hval’s primary instrument sounds like it’s disentangling itself from her body and swooping around the ether of the song.
First under the stage name Rockettothesky and later under her real name, Hval has been a mainstay in the Oslo scene for several years now, but little in her catalog-- which includes a handful of albums as well as two novels, several sound installations, and a master’s thesis on Kate Bush-- signaled the breakthrough she makes on Innocence Is Kinky. In the past her music has tended toward subdued art-pop, full of plaintive beats and hushed vocals; at her best such subtlety was commanding, even if it occasionally threatened to settle for decorous passivity. The new album, as that title suggests, is more direct, more brazen, more aggressive, more provocative, both conceptually and musically. Recording with producer John Parish, Hval explores some enormous, unwieldy concepts that tend to pop up more often in textbooks than on turntables.
Opening with Hval watching internet porn and closing with her discovering a new way to inhabit her body, Innocence Is Kinky examines thorny issues of gender identity and commodified sexuality. She gives her songs titles like “Death of the Author” and “Amphibious, Androgynous”. Mythological figures wander in and out of these songs: Mephisto does his best Ophelia, Oedipus blindly wanders the streets of Oslo, and Pinnochio takes communion. By far the most significant figure among these songs is also the most human: Renée Falconetti, the silent-film star whose close-up in 1928’s The Passion of Joan of Arc is one of the most indelible images in the history of cinema. “The camera is a mirror, but mine, not yours,” Hval sings as an organ thrums in the background and a low bass note pulses on the downbeat.
She’s obviously having a blast throwing these figures and narratives against one another, and her irreverence suggests a playfulness that dispels any hint of pretension. Yet, she keeps the focus squarely on her commanding vocals, which means you don’t need to know Carl Theodor Dreyer from Laura Mulvey to appreciate this album. In fact, the most fascinating ideas on Innocence Is Kinky are the musical ones. While rooted in the same art-pop as Laurie Anderson, Yoko Ono, and pre-“Sledgehammer” Peter Gabriel, Hval paints with a broad palette, not only deploying an array of sounds and styles but setting them against each other to create jarring juxtapositions. As “Mephisto in the Water” fades to its close, a few raw guitar chords introduce the stomping psych-pop of “I Called”. “Oslo Oedipus” opens with a Middle Eastern chorale, layered moans swaddled in reverb, before transitioning into a poetry recitation set to a clangorous beat. Based on a sound installation called “A Continuous Echo of Splitting Hymens”, “Give Me That Sound” is composed of belches of frazzled distortion and bent vocals that make for an arresting interlude before Hval launches into “I Got No Strings”, the album’s truest rock song. The seams between the songs speak as loudly as the songs themselves, giving the album the shape of a journey. It’s less a critical essay than a picaresque: a woman leaving the dirty white glare of her computer and wandering around Oslo.
Ultimately, the album’s heady diversity originates in Hval’s malleable voice, which alters style, approach, timber, and tone from one measure to the next. One moment she addresses the listener in a slyly conspiratorial whisper, as if to draw you into her curious world. The next, she lets loose a full-throated wail that shakes that world apart. Not content to merely test the limitations of musical genre, of sound, of her own voice (and, by virtue, her body), Hval knowingly transgresses those limitations as she explores what’s just beyond her range. That bold tack gives Innocence Is Kinky its unique aesthetic, but it is also, oddly enough, what keeps the music so grounded in the physical and the human.


In his review of Swedish electro duo the Knife's 2006 meisterverk *Silent Shout*, Pitchfork's Mark Pytlik waxed ecstatic about how Olof Dreijer worked his sister Karin Dreijer Andersson's vocals through sickly FX, making her nursery rhyme delivery sound like it was coming from the bottom of a slimy well. But Dreijer's crude palette of old-school electro/techno sounds managed to exert a feeling of anxiety all on their own, picking under the scab of never-ending 1980s retro-kitsch until pus bubbled up from underneath. Now a little more than a year later, Mute repackages the album with a DVD featuring a spectacle

Silent Shout Deluxe Edition

In his review of Swedish electro duo the Knife's 2006 meisterverk Silent Shout, Pitchfork's Mark Pytlik waxed ecstatic about how Olof Dreijer worked his sister Karin Dreijer Andersson's vocals through sickly FX, making her nursery rhyme delivery sound like it was coming from the bottom of a slimy well. But Dreijer's crude palette of old-school electro/techno sounds managed to exert a feeling of anxiety all on their own, picking under the scab of never-ending 1980s retro-kitsch until pus bubbled up from underneath. Now a little more than a year later, Mute repackages the album with a DVD featuring a spectacle of a live performance from Stockholm in 2006, where the visual aesthetic mines a similar vein of nostalgia for the heebie-jeebies that out-of-date technology can induce, plus 11 music videos and an extra CD containing the audio track from said live performance. For those of us who bought the record the first time around, it's basically your chance to buy a new Knife DVD, and if you're a fan, it's pretty much worth owning two copies of the same CD.
The DVD, Silent Shout: An Audio Visual Experience, begins in an inky blankness broken by audience screams, as the emergency alarm bleeps and astringent arpeggios of "Pass This On" are slowly assembled. When the duo are finally revealed-- androgynous in what look like janitor's uniforms and bathed in cerulean light, with Olof jerking at his machinery and Karin pulling nervous mime moves-- they come off like a sinister cross between Devo's unsatisfied twitches and Daft Punk's studied roboticisms. Backed by exploding neon lights and arena-sized video projections, when Karin begins snapping her fingers and awkwardly swaying during "You Make Me Like Charity", she looks like an android go-go dancer or a space alien who has intercepted transmissions of late 80s episodes of "Club MTV". Even the human element of the Knife's performance feels artificial, some approximation of humanity knocked together by machines that's as intensely unnerving as their records.
An Audio Visual Experience isn't so much a concert film as a 50-minute music video that's been extensively edited and tarted up after the fact, with enough quick cuts at jarring angles to feel as epileptic as the video games you can hear in the band's music. Orchestrated by Andreas Nilsson and Ossian Ekman, it's as decadent as cyberpunk Weimar cabaret. Rough-hewn digital imagery blurs into repurposed Super-8 home video, simple geometric paterns flare into life and spin across the screen like a perverted planetarium's laser light show, and throughout there's that pervasive unease. Like Boards of Canada with the queasiness cranked to 10, all those smudgy faces from someone else's home movies, pixilated effects from the days of 8-bit computers, and other visual tropes you half-remember from growing up mingle with the band's sour, often operatic black forest overhaul of synth-pop to radiate discomfort. An Audio Visual Experience isn't wholly successful; parts of it veer uncomfortably toward the feeling that you could be watching old Nine Inch Nails performances with the sepia-tinting replaced by deep blues and purples. But there are enough indelible images-- the Atari snowflakes that begin falling during "Heartbeats" for instance-- to give it more replay value than your average multi-angle concert film.
The 11 music videos (and one short film) included on the DVD have a broader range and a lighter touch than the concert's unrelenting Grand Guignol. Culled from across the band's discography, they flit from the whimsical domestic scene (literally) sketched out in "N.Y. Hotel", to more crude CGI and home movies for "Heartbeats", to a heavily eyeliner-ed take on "You Take My Breath Away" that would almost feel like a parody of 80s revivalism if the band didn't really sell those leather jackets with ostentatious shoulder pads. "Handy Man", with its hyperreal colors and talking hammers, likewise feels like a loving pisstake of the pounding cheese that Euro-pop has been crapping out for decades and that you can still see weekly in U.S. gay clubs, and the dancing skeletons of a second take on "You Take My Breath Away" are so bargain basement that they briefly made me nostalgic for those charmingly crappy "psychedelic" computer animations of early 90s rave videos.
And despite its forward-thinking rep, the Knife is clearly a pretty nostalgic band, too. As two twentysomething Swedes, these 80s and 90s visual signifiers are the broth their brains were boiled in while growing up. The siblings' enduring fascination with the evocative powers of primitive electronics, whether musical or visual, combined with the florid gothic streak that bloomed on Silent Shout, has resulted in a pretty rich stew. While the inclusion of the original album is superfluous and the second disc capturing the music of the live Stockholm performance is pointless, Silent Shout Deluxe Edition is worth picking up for its near pitch-perfect visual rendering of the band's appeal-- creepy but seductive images from the decade's most unexpected purveyors of bad dreams.


Now a duo, Kevin Martin and Roger Robinson strip away all the excess and most of the reggae, yielding a desolate snapshot of heartbreak framed in stark, largely beatless drones.

Solitude

Kevin Martin’s music has always pursued extremes. Throughout projects like the Bug, Techno Animal, and God, the veteran UK producer has taken up diverse genres—jazz, metal, hip-hop, dub—and set out to push them to new levels of heaviness. That’s why the unveiling of King Midas Sound felt like a surprise. Debuting in 2008, Martin’s new group drew on the influence of reggae and its romantically inclined British offshoot lover’s rock, weaving a misty urban soul not a million miles from Massive Attack. It made you wonder: Was Kevin Martin mellowing in his middle age?
Solitude confirms that this is not the case. King Midas Sound’s fourth album feels like a plunge into the abyss. Without exaggeration, it is one of the bleakest testaments to heartbreak in the annals of recorded sound. Its atmosphere resembles that of a collapsed star—black, isolated, unfathomably dense. These 60 minutes pass like a dark night of the soul, stretched out to eternity.
Yet Solitude is not a heavy album, at least not conventionally so. Here, King Midas Sound—now boiled down to the core duo of Martin and vocalist Roger Robinson—shuck off old genre signifiers, drifting into territory more abstracted and amorphous. There were signs of this on King Midas Sound’s Edition 1, a 2015 collaboration with the Austrian ambient musician Fennesz that sometimes verged on the incorporeal. But Solitude goes further still. Martin’s production here has the quality of dry ice, a pale fog disturbed only by the rudiments of rhythm—the clack of a wood block, or the dull crack of a snare. Absent entirely is the Korean vocalist Kiki Hitomi, previously the third member of the King Midas Sound project, although in context it’s hard to imagine what role a second voice might have played on an album that draws its power from such stark isolation.
Really, Solitude is all about Roger Robinson. An English-Trinidadian poet and playwright, Robinson has for the last few decades been one of the key documenters of the black British experience. His voice has a rich, earthy grain that imbues his words with deep gravity. Here, though, Robinson stands vulnerable and exposed. Solitude traces a narrative of sorts: the collapse of an all-consuming love affair and its apocalyptic aftermath. “You Disappear” sets the scene. There’s a ghostly clamor of strings, descending tones drip like rain on a windowpane, and Robinson muses on the way things once were. Like Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” it is a vision of a life of comfortable domesticity that has withered. “We float through different parts of the house like a chess game,” he intones, gravely. But he and his lover are merely going through the motions: “For all our efforts, the fire would not burn bright.”
A sense of world-weariness hangs over Solitude, but signs of past passion dot the record like scorch marks. On “Zeros,” Robinson recalls the couple’s fiery bond, forged in opposition to the world: “We were unhappy with everything except each other.” On “In the Night,” he tries to fill the void with frantic action; he craves the taste of raw meat, does push-ups in a public toilet, travels to the Scottish Highlands and bellows his former lover’s name into the wilderness. But it is all for nothing, and gradually, isolation takes hold. “Too much time on your own makes the eyes look hollow,” he mutters on “The Lonely.”
On “Who,” he turns sleuth, sifting clues to his new lover’s movements (“I knew she booked a flight to Jamaica… I got a letter about inoculations… I wonder who’s she’s sleeping with now?”). At moments like this, Solitude feels like a challenge—as if he’s daring you to turn away, to treat him as a pariah or a leper. Still, the power of Robinson’s words and the poetry of his phrasing keep you locked in his orbit. Towards the end of the record, Robinson’s voice disappears from view for protracted periods, as if receding into Martin’s impenetrable drone; a sort of sonic analogue to photographer Daisuke Yokota’s striking monochromatic cover art. On “Missing You,” he remains silent—either stoic, or simply absent—and here, Martin’s music strikes a rare note of beauty, sounding a somber elegy.
When making a record like this, many artists would be tempted to toss in some pitch-black humor. But there is not a glimpse of levity here, save perhaps for the record’s release date (giving Solitude as a Valentine’s Day present might be a bold way to kill off a relationship for good). Solitude is the sort of record it’s hard to recommend wholeheartedly. Certainly, some—even those who have found pleasure in its makers’ earlier work—will find it too severe, too unrelenting. But Kevin Martin has long made it his mission to go deep and dark, and Solitude goes deeper and darker than he has ever gone before.


The Los Angeles band used to make lithe, multifaceted songs that wrapped daring pop melodies in bristling noise; now, they seem content to complain into a murky hybrid of trip-hop and metal.

VOL. 4 :: SLAVES OF FEAR

Jacob Duzsik sneers the words “Life is good” on HEALTH’s 2015 single “New Coke,” slithering downward on the third word, cracking it into two syllables. His voice, processed through a metallic filter, runs thick with irony. An acerbic synthesizer chord rises like smoke at his proclamation. It’s not the most subtle strategy, a cheery bumper sticker slogan with pleas for guns to go off and bombs to explode, but it lends the song some dimension. In three words, Duzsik undercuts the forced optimism that seeps from every Coke commercial and bank ad, every shallow rendering of a bought life. Consumerism’s plastered smiles make an easy target, but HEALTH’s aim is true all the same.
VOL. 4 :: SLAVES OF FEAR, the L.A. band’s fourth original studio album, loses the thematic and musical density packed into their first three. Gone are the complex, ferocious rattles of percussion that pitched HEALTH toward the toothier end of late-aughts neo-psychedelia; instead, heavy, slogging drumbeats keep time one sledgehammer wallop at a time. Gone are the crystalline synth trills that seemed to always cluster around Duzsik’s cybernetically androgynous voice. Even the frontman’s usually translucent delivery sounds clouded and dulled, like the record’s pervasive, muddy low end is dragging him down. SLAVES OF FEAR marks the first new HEALTH album since founding member Jupiter Keyes split from the band in late 2015, and his absence wears through every song. HEALTH used to make lithe, multifaceted songs that wrapped daring pop melodies in bristling noise; now, they seem content to complain into a murky hybrid of trip-hop and metal.
Distorted power chords abound throughout SLAVES OF FEAR, but they tend to come in ones and twos, not progressions. “FEEL NOTHING” breaks up its vocal segments with a chugging fart of a guitar riff, the kind you’d hear choked out of a flying V and a practice amp at Guitar Center. The lyrics are no less blunt. “We didn’t choose to be born/Under a dying sun,” sings Duzsik. “Let’s get numb/Till we don’t feel nothing.” I suspect the song got stuck with the name “FEEL NOTHING” because there’s already a nu-metal track called “Numb,” and while this isn’t the place to discuss the relative merits of Linkin Park, their take on the time-honored tradition of freezing away existential pain at least came with four whole chords and a hook.
HEALTH have never directed much attention to their lyrics—even on the more pop-oriented DEATH MAGIC, where the vocals rose higher in the mix, they rang more as textural accent than focal point—but so little happens musically on SLAVES OF FEAR that the ear tends to fall on what Duzsik is actually singing, which is scrambled magnetic teen poetry. “Life is not but rocks and dirt and bitterness now,” he seethes on the stuttering, hollow “LOSS DELUXE.” “Life is but to burn and rot and stink in the ground.” (Pretty sure that’s called death, my guy!) On “THE MESSAGE,” he speaks to the generational ennui of a sweeping “we”: “Bored when we’re young/We can’t wait to grow up/We get old, we give up/Then we pray to grow young.” The life cycle of the perpetually miserable folds in on itself. “Life/A mystery/Euphoria and misery,” Duzsik muses on “STRANGE DAYS (1999),” nodding to the complexity of human existence and then immediately splitting it into two experiential poles.
While HEALTH’s messaging, such as it is, has varied in the past from “New Coke”’s smirking anti-slogans to the ambiguous but arresting declarative “YOU WILL LOVE EACH OTHER,” now the band seems content to throw up their hands and just die. Certain metal bands take pervasive suffering as lyrical impetus, but when it works, the muscle of the music pushes through even the most totalizing despair. A well-written metal album takes suffering as its starting point and punches through the lid of its coffin, finding joy, catharsis, release by way of sick riffs. SLAVES OF FEAR forgoes riffs and instead just wallows. This shit does not shred.
At least HEALTH had the decency to slap SLAVES OF FEAR right on the cover of the thing so that everyone would know this was the type of band to take slavery as a metaphor for contemporary alienation. “We want to be different/But we don’t want to try too hard,” Duzsik sings on the title track. The “we,” it seems, refers to the slaves, the slaves of fear, and if I try any harder to connect the dual sensation of edginess and laziness with slavery, the all-American institution that killed and brutalized millions of people for hundreds of years, I am going to have to take a long walk into the sun.
Fear pervades the present moment, as does sorrow, angst, and helplessness. HEALTH is not wrong that the past few years have been a big, steamy bucket of suffering. But SLAVES OF FEAR offers only a closed loop: It invites you to suffer because of the existence of suffering, to look upon the despair of the world and despair. There is no fight in these songs, not even the faintest stab at hope. There’s just empty moaning, and a lone, feeble guitar that chugs for all eternity in hell.


All four members of the Barcelona band Mourn are still in their teens. On their cathartic self-titled debut, which was reportedly recorded live off the floor in two days, rawness is as much an emotional quality as a musical one.

Mourn

The cover of the debut album from Barcelona-based foursome Mourn bears an uncanny compositional resemblance to that of another debut album by another young, petulant quartet with an M, O, R, and N in their name. The band logo emblazoned in white all-caps, the grimly grayscale urban backdrop, the dark-haired subjects clad in leather jackets—Mourn’s reverence for the Ramones couldn’t be more obvious if they wore their t-shirts in their press photos. (Oh wait.) But despite a shared affinity for 90-second tunes, Mourn are drawn to the Ramones more as a model of aesthetic purity than a sonic template to emulate; though all four members are still in their teens, their scabrous sound feels less like a hyperactive buzzsaw assault than a series of steely knife nicks on the arm. And while, like the bruddahs, Mourn’s songs can be simplistic to the point of absurdity, for them, rawness is as much an emotional quality as a musical one.
Mourn was reportedly recorded live off the floor in two days, a tactic that emphasizes both the band’s feral energy and the isolated, claustrophobic uneasiness that ties these 11 songs together. More so than the surface Ramones similarities, what’s ultimately most striking about that cover shot is the fact that vocalists Carla Pérez Fas and Jazz Rodríguez Bueno are seen in a protective embrace, suggesting that this band is less an innocent adolescent pastime than a necessary sanctuary from a cruel world. That said, Mourn aren’t so eager to fit in with the normals at school, pledging allegiance to artists who died before they were born or who are old enough to be their mom, if not their grandmother; in the few interviews they’ve done so far, they’ve talked about having their music mocked by classmates, and the dispiriting experience of encountering a potential new soulmate in a Nirvana shirt, only to find out the person wearing it thought Nirvana was just the name of a clothing brand.
As such, Mourn is the sound of outcasts congregating in a basement on a Friday night and making a savage racket to forget about the fact they weren’t invited to the big house party that all the popular kids from school are attending. It’s loud, cathartic, and boiling over with disdain for those who’ve done them wrong; when they start naming names on "Jack" and "Marshall", you can practically picture Fas and Bueno hunched around a computer, subjecting those guys’ pictures to unflattering Photoshop makeovers. Their music is anti-social media: Mourn don’t so much write songs as status updates—"you think you’re awesome/ I say you’re boring/ you called me a baby/ I just say ‘fuck you!’"—that most people would be rushing to delete the morning after, but Mourn turn candor into sport, dropping truth bombs and reveling in the emotional fallout. (And as if the album proper didn’t serve up enough unfiltered honesty, this stateside issue of Mourn tacks on a bonus single… called "Boys Are Cunts".)
But for all their impulsive lyricism, Mourn are an impressively patient band, with a keen sense of dramatic dynamics and gritty groove (courtesy of Bueno’s 15-year-old sister Leia and drummer Antonio Postius Echeverría) that belies their primordial teenage garage-band beginnings. (In particular, the opening "Your Brain Is Made of Candy" is a masterstroke of sustained tension that builds from a stark, solitary strum into a raging, stomping beast that abruptly cuts out the second it hits its feverish peak, transforming that titular sentiment from coy come-on to brutal kiss-off.) And for a record that whips by in just 24 minutes, Mourn exhibits a refreshing breadth that makes it feel like a complete album rather than an overstuffed, undercooked EP—while punkish toss-off tracks like "Misery Factory" and "You Don’t Know Me" feel like remnants of a formative phase Mourn have already outgrown, the "Jane Says"-like sway of "Marshall" and the goth-psych eruption "Silver Gold" respectively assert the band’s accessible and experimental potential. More than a simple clash of teen-angst noise and old-soul poise, Mourn’s debut album is a reminder that a big impetus for the former is the frustration of wishing you were old enough to savor the latter.


The irreverent and charismatic Charlotte rapper's Interscope debut is just as wild as his mixtapes.

Baby On Baby

There are 13 songs on DaBaby’s Interscope debut, Baby on Baby, and on those 13 songs, he starts rapping at the following timestamps: 0:00, 0:07, 0:08, 0:16, 0:00, 0:00, 0:01, 0:00, 0:00, 0:02, 0:02, 0:06, and 0:11. This is the fundamental appeal of DaBaby’s music—it’s aggressive, energetic, obsessed with forward motion. The Charlotte native can turn a colorful phrase and sell rote ones through sheer charisma.  There are no moody beat shifts or lofty gestures: DaBaby is not trying to be played in museums or at brunch.
But what the 27-year-old shirks in on-record gimmickry he more than embraces on the promotional front. He famously popped up on the streets of Austin wearing nothing but a diaper during SXSW 2017. (This was shortly after he’d changed his name from Baby Jesus.) Recently, his music videos have become funnier, weirder, and more viral. There’s “Next Song,” where DaBaby gets pulled over, hotboxing his car and getting head from the passenger, and placates the cop by telling him to check out DaBaby on Apple Music; there’s the breakout hit “Walker Texas Ranger,” where DaBaby swerves up and down a mountain in a Dodge Ram, watching twerking videos on his iPhone from behind the wheel; there’s “Mini Van,”  his collaboration with the Memphis rapper Blocboy JB, where they turn the titular vehicle into the headquarters for a very pleasant-seeming crime syndicate. Just yesterday he dropped the clip for “Suge (Yea Yea),” where he impersonates the Death Row CEO (complete with a muscle suit and a comically large cigar) and a crooked mailman.
None of which is to say that DaBaby or his music can be written off as a simple joke. Songs like the Rich Homie Quan-assisted “Celebrate”—or earlier songs like “No Tears”—are undergirded by betrayal and grim stakes. There’s also the matter of the fatal shooting at a Huntersville, North Carolina Walmart last fall, which left a 19-year-old man dead. (DaBaby says he was shopping with his two children and their mother when a man attempted to rob him; he has not been charged with a crime.) DaBaby is funny, sure, but he is also dead serious.
There are brief moments that remind you DaBaby exists in the contemporary rap landscape. The album’s penultimate song, “Backend,” veers closer to the melodic, lightly AutoTuned sing-song that has dominated rap radio for most of the decade than it does to his usual gruff cadence. “Best Friend,” which appears here as a remix featuring Rich the Kid, interpolates the late XXXTentacion’s “Sad!” But for the most part, Baby is clear and precise, even staccato, an athletic rapper who can whip songs into a frenzy through sheer force of will.
Baby on Baby comes in the middle of a prolific period for the rapper: the mixtapes Baby Talk 5 and Blank Blank, released in June and November of last year, respectively, both underscored his regional popularity and national crossover potential. But while DaBaby seems, in interviews and through his ambitious videos, to be committed to the whole fame thing, the music is refreshingly without pretense or artifice, concerned less with the way it will play in boardrooms and more with the way it will play out of trunks.