An artist known for his photographs turns his hand to music; his hazy, lo-fi productions strive for the analog warmth of his portraits, but they lack his pictures’ intimacy and empathy.

Playroom

Nathan Bajar’s pictures evoke intimacy through haziness. Just take a look at the Brooklyn artist’s stunning portraits of Lakeith Stanfield, serpentwithfeet, or his own extended family in the Philippines, each imbued with soft, blurred lines and the warm tones of vintage film stock. With a delicate touch and apparent talent for bringing out the tenderness in people, Bajar casts his subjects in a nostalgic glow. His affinity for the warm and romantic extends to his lo-fi funk music, which he ornaments with tape hiss, soothing electric guitars, and weathered drum loops. This attention to detail is apparent in the psychedelic and sprawling production on his debut album, playroom. But it’s hard to know what he’s trying to get across besides just a dreamy vibe.
His taste and his craftsmanship are self-evident: playroom’s layered production is a pleasure to listen to, and it synthesizes a variety of influences. The reverb-washed guitars resembles those in Mac DeMarco’s slacker rock, the funky basslines recall Kali Uchis and Steve Lacy, and the woozy beats sound like they could have been made for the soul-sampling New York rappers MIKE and Medhane. There are also intriguing auxiliary moments sprinkled throughout the project, like the video-game bleeps and bloops in “playroom (lover’s paradise),” the Funkadelic-esque adlibs on “purple hearts,” and jagged saxophone solo and sweeping string parts of “camille.” It’s the kind of album that you could put on repeat and find something new with every listen, as little instrumental bits peek out from the swirling, nebulous tracks.
But Bajar’s lyrics aren’t nearly as evocative as his production. On “the view,” he tries to justify his wandering eye in the tritest of terms: “Wasn’t going to touch/Just enjoying the view.” Then there’s “silver surfer,” whose quasi-romantic lyrics might be found scrawled in a seventh grader’s notebook: “Are you riding/If you say no, girl/You’ll give me the blues.” “purple hearts,” which has a catchy hook and fun, off-beat ad-libs, never quite lives up to its potential because the vague lyrics fail to elucidate the story he’s trying to tell. “Didn’t mean to waste your time/Our love was war/Taking eye for eye,” Bajar sings, using tired language to describe a moth-eaten subject. Though Bajar’s low-key approach helps him achieve nuance in his photographs, it actually ends up doing the opposite in his music.
A handful of songs on playroom are about Bajar’s late father, who passed away suddenly last summer. On “the table,” Bajar reflects on his death: “My father now lives in the sky/One last seat at the table,” he sings with a meandering melody and a thick layer of harmonies that partially obscures his diction. Though it’s a touching tribute, Bajar doesn’t give his words the space to be heard, and too many instruments clamor for attention. With all his experience masterfully capturing other people’s humanity, Bajar seems hesitant to sharpen the focus on his own.


Minneapolis rapper P.O.S is still all about his consciousness, and usefully motivated by anger. But on Chill, d**ummy, he embraces a freed-up feel, with some grooves you might hear in a club.

Chill, dummy

Focusing on trauma has always been a central plank in P.O.S’s artistic platform. He comes by the obsession honestly. That same instinct is a hallmark of the punk tradition, long cited as an inspiration by the Minneapolis rapper. Whether you prefer to apply sub-genre labels like “conscious” or “backpack” to the art of rhyming, it’s obvious that engagement with uncomfortable concepts has been key for a rich lineage of idiosyncratic MCs (both popular and not). P.O.S has called Aesop Rock his favorite rapper; the latter’s mix of emotional vulnerability and technical confidence is a clear influence.
When P.O.S approaches a mood of raw celebration, the route often runs through a hardcore group chant, premised on some opposition to the zeitgeist. This aesthetic has a way of pushing uncomplicated exuberance so deep into the background that it disappears from view. And that demotion of one of hip-hop’s most expressive, universal modes creates a tension with rap’s mainstream, no matter the season.
On his last record, 2012’s We Don’t Even Live Here, P.O.S took shots at a wide array of then-current trends in rap. The disses were on-brand, but the synth-heavy instrumentation sounded less distinct than the punk-rap style that made 2009’s Never Better such an energizing listen. Frivolity can be pretty easy to call out. Creating a suitably attractive alternative tends to be more difficult.
With Chill, dummy, P.O.S avoids retreating into the program of Never Better, while also one-upping his prior outing. His own production—and that of his collaborators—pushes more decisively into some grooves that you might actually hear in a club. There’s even a hint of sensuality, thanks to the slinky, bass-heavy motif that drives “Faded.” It’s new-enough ground for P.O.S that you can hear a bit of a giggle in the mix, right after the first appearance of “I want your body on me.” Though for the balance of the track, the seduction is played for real—Justin Vernon’s guest vocals are some of his best, too.
The lyricism remains captivating throughout. Rapping from the post-op vantage of a harrowing, ultimately successful kidney transplant, P.O.S is still all about his consciousness. But his latest internal critiques prove far more interesting than his evergreen complaints about meme culture. The sometimes prideful concept of “staying in your lane” gets a healthy kick during the chorus of “Lanes,” as P.O.S wonders whether staying true to his style may have stunted his growth. (“I been doin my own thing so long/Or is it/I been in my own way so long.”) This line of thinking leads to one of the most experimental tracks P.O.S has ever created: the eight-minute-plus album finale “sleepdrone/superposition.” He covers a lot of ground here, with grim, sustained synth tones as well as a Kathleen Hanna feature: “You’re supposed to be happy to be alive,” she sings. “You’re supposed to be lucky to be alive.”
Other topics include the killings of Mike Brown and Eric Garner, a general sense of futility, and the concept of “superposition” in quantum physics. That last idea is obviously fairly complicated. But at root, it has to do with multiple, simultaneous potentials for particles of matter: a discovery with clear poetic implications for an artist focused on states of development. The track itself can become almost anything, at any time—courtesy of pivots in rhythm and vocal cadence. In the end, it’s as rousing as P.O.S’s best work, even though it sounds little like anything he’s given us before.
Not everything on the album works on this high level. A couple of the guest-heavy tracks (like “Bully”) feel more muddled in their intent. But the overall tenor of the album has a satisfying, freed-up quality. As P.O.S raps on “Pieces/Ruins”: “Same dude new guts/Literal and figurative lost a couple fucks.” And while he’s openly experimenting with his ideal resting heart-rate, P.O.S is still usefully motivated by anger—a reality you hear clearly on the industrial-tinged opening track “Born a Snake.” It’s healthy to try out new patterns and engage in self-critique, but not everything needs changing.


The hushed and lovely Maryland indie pop outfit's first official release was recorded straight to tape, and the resulting sound world is a reward in itself for hardcore cassette fans. These are warm, reassuring-- if mordant-- songs that recall Elliott Smith, or K Records-era Modest Mouse.

To Be Close to You

For a while, Maryland singer/songwriter Sam Ray was in a group called Teen Suicide that was intensely loved by a few. Ray grew weary of the melodramatic band name, apparently, and all it implied, so Teen Suicide perished, and the hushed and lovely indie pop outfit Julia Brown was born. Ray introduced his new band to his fans with a defensive flourish: "If you liked Teen Suicide 'cause of pop songwriting you'll probably like the new band but if you just liked the really over-dramatic drug addict depression catharsis stuff you'll be disappointed and I'll be glad," he wrote on the Teen Suicide Facebook page. He probably didn't need to issue such a ringing pronouncement; Julia Brown, while softer, explore similar darkness with a sweet sadness that does, in fact, feel grown-up.
To Be Close to You is their first official release. It was recorded straight to tape, an act of aesthetic devotion that ensures singular focus on things like incidental sounds: In between songs, you hear doodly guitar moments, muffled coughs, the muttering and teasing of his band mates. Tape hiss isn't a background element here, it's an instrument: on some songs, it's practically the lead singer. "Recorded at various places over a long period of time," the liner notes indicate, and you can hear, in the busy shuffling of the players and the constantly changing room-space, the tape player being plopped in a series of bedrooms.
For lo-fi or home-taping pop aficionados, this kind of sound world is a reward in itself, and for hardcore fans, To Be Close to You will be instantly inviting. The sound has the blotted, bleedy edges you associate with the tape medium; every sharp edge smoothed out, every sound muffled and half-swallowed. To Be Close to You streams by in a soothing murmur that registers as intimate above all.
The sound is so warm and reassuring that you initially miss the complexity and craft of the music. But on repeated listens, you hear a serious songwriter's mind at work. The glimmering riff on "Library" is based on a simple chord progression, but Ray's dense, arpeggiated playing locates a hypnotically cyclical tune in it that is almost as catchy as his unassuming vocal lead. When the song launches into double time, a sawing viola traces the arc of Ray's melody before he sings it. There are surprising corners to stumble on in the arrangements: the brooding "i will do this for the rest of my life" ends with some skirling backwards guitars, while "i was my own favorite tv show the summer my tv broke" ends in a little pink-blue sunset of viola, cello, glockenspiel, and harmonium. "Virginia" is built on a rickety saloon piano in 3/4 time. A few of the songs repeat themselves in acoustic demo form, just in case you like them better that way, and to give you a better sense of how they were built.
It's also a pleasure to eventually discover Sam Ray's dark, sometimes-mordant lyrics, which are also lying just beneath the cottony yawn of the tape. The bleak "how I spent my summer" opens with a brief recorded clip of someone muttering "I was doing heroin in my car and listening to 'Genius of Love'," the word "heroin" scrambled slightly. The lyrics depict someone reeling from a loss they cannot process: "I will move your clothes from one side of the bed to the other/ I will stay in your bed all day/ Whatever it takes/ Taking Valium." "i will do this for the rest of my life" turns on the shrugging refrain, "I guess you mean more to me than nothing," sung in an upward lilt that sounds like the sentiment from a construction-paper Valentine. In the song's coda, Ryan Wilson mutters "I'm trying not/ To feel anything" repeatedly.
The sweetly unassuming kind of home-made pop music that Julia Brown make is easily overlooked when it is untethered from its home base; so much of indie-pop's magic resides in its locality, and in the connections forged by flyers, 7-inches, and shows. In their Baltimore stomping grounds, Julia Brown seem like they're a big deal. In the great sea of the internet, where one small bauble after another can be plucked and cast back just as quickly, this stuff can have a harder time standing apart. But To Be Close to You rewards any undivided attention you are willing to give it. Ray's gift is as substantial as his touch is light, and at its best To Be Close to You hearkens back to the spirit of some of the broken-hearted, scrofulous sweeties of the Pacific Northwest during the 90s: Elliott Smith, for instance, or Modest Mouse during their K Records years. Ray indicated recently that he had hit the limits of lo-fi recording techniques, and was looking to expand outward: His vision seems big enough to accomodate whatever canvas he works on next.


A drum-free but otherwise identical new version of Random Access Memories brings the saga of Daft Punk’s 2013 album to a curious, unfulfilling end.

Daft Punk: Random Access Memories (Drumless Edition)

What are we doing here? Honestly, what are we doing with this “drumless” edition of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories? What possible lessons can we learn from 2023’s second re-edition of Daft Punk’s third-best album, in which every sonic detail is the same, other than the absence of drums? Why on earth did Daft Punk, one of the savviest musical duos in modern memory, choose to release a largely superfluous album, when they could have simply ridden the residual good vibes of RAM’s 10th anniversary reissue from earlier this year? Why would anyone choose to listen to Daft Punk’s meticulously crafted fourth studio album with the work of two of the world’s best session drummers wiped from the surface?
In the absence of an official explanation, speculation has thrived. Some fans claim that RAM Drumless is intended for DJs and producers who want to create their own RAM mixes and bootlegs, a logical enough idea that doesn’t account for the pricey Drumless merch or the major-label system and its outright revulsion for copyright-busting fan-made remixes. The big news is that Random Access Memories (Drumless Edition) really is just that: Random Access Memories with the drums removed. There’s no slinky disco hi-hat on “Get Lucky,” no explosive snare fills on “Contact,” no gentle cymbal taps on “Within,” not even a click track on “Giorgio by Moroder.” If this were another group you’d suspect a radical art prank, a sardonic comment, maybe, on the importance of drums to the house and techno music with which Daft Punk made their name. But Daft Punk don’t seem the type.
Stripping the glossy RAM productions of their percussion does give other musical elements room to breathe—the bass, for example, feels a lot more prominent on “Giorgio by Moroder,” and you can really pick out how Todd Edwards’ brilliant microsample patchwork on “Fragments of Time” relates to the song’s bass and guitar lines. My own theory around Random Access Memories is that Daft Punk’s fourth album is, in effect, two records: a disco/soft rock/house album that houses the radio hits and a much more interesting, proggy, swirly record that lies alongside. By and large, the disco tunes—“Get Lucky,” “Lose Yourself to Dance,” “Instant Crush”—sound bereft of life in their Drumless versions, a low-carb diet beer watered down within an inch of its life. But the prog-leaning songs—“Within,” “Beyond,” “Motherboard,” etc.—fare a lot better.
At times the transformation is revelatory. “Beyond” and “Motherboard,” in particular, feel the breath of new light on RAM Drumless. Shorn of their percussive shuffle, the two songs’ Drumless versions allow the astral swoon of Greg Leisz’s pedal steel guitar to drift to the surface, creating a blissed-out ambient country music to rival The KLF’s classic Chill Out (or, indeed, RAM’s Japanese bonus track “Horizon”), while the subtle orchestral touches in both songs feel flush with vivid color. The cat’s cradle cobweb of acoustic guitar and increasingly elastic one-note bassline that briefly surface in “Motherboard (Drumless Version)” are enough to make this the definitive version of the song, even if it took a decade to get there.
There are exceptions to the disco/prog rule of thumb. The sprawling “Touch” should thrive when detached from percussion and allowed to dissipate. But removing the drums from the song’s upbeat middle section robs “Touch” of its shape-shifting, sun-blessed heterogeneity, making it a one-paced beast. On the other hand, Panda Bear collaboration “Doin’ It Right,” an electro-pop number that fit awkwardly on the original Random Access Memories, finds its home as a minimal, hypnotic pop duet on RAM Drumless, driven by the textual interplay between Daft Punk’s robotic backing vocal and Noah Lennox’s childlike (and largely effect-free) voice.
A drum-free album is really pushing the limits in a music business that has never been shy about overselling fans on albums they already own. At its worst, Random Access Memories (Drumless Edition) feels like a concept album so theoretically pure that it didn’t need to exist, a joke without a punchline. But brief moments of drumless enlightenment and acoustic revelation are just about enough to rescue it from the vast cosmic bin of pointlessness. Neither victory lap nor walk of shame, RAM Drumless is a curious, unfulfilling end to the RAM saga. And while a Drumless Version of RAM 10th-anniversary bonus track “Infinity Repeating” would be an intriguing prospect, now, surely, is the time to let Daft Punk’s fourth studio album take a well-earned rest.


Ambitiously remaking a 2002 ambient-glitch album with clarinet, vibraphone, cello, and other acoustic instruments, New York composer Joseph Branciforte discovers new depths in a minimalist classic.

Sti.ll

Why remake a classic? Comparison to the original is likely to cast even an extraordinary achievement in a bad light. Or so thought the composer and engineer Joseph Branciforte when Taylor Deupree approached him with the grandly ambitious—or perhaps wildly misguided—idea to create an acoustic version of his 2002 album Stil.. That record was a high water mark of the glitch movement, born of the moment in the late ’90s when personal computers became home studios. Deupree endlessly looped a handful of electronic samples slightly out of sync, allowing tiny digital artifacts to phase in and out of time like a Steve Reich composition at microscopic scale. Stil. is remarkably warm-sounding and emotive for such resolutely digital music, but impossible to imagine being played by actual humans. And yet, on October 10, 2021, Deupree sent an email to Branciforte requesting just that: “not sure if you’re familiar with the album... it’s very very repetitive... and i’d want it all played... not played for a bar and looped in pro tools.” Branciforte reluctantly agreed—on the condition that he could back out if it didn’t work.
Though it’s Deupree’s name on the spine of Sti.ll, Branciforte is the mastermind behind the scenes. Only after they began did Deupree reveal that he no longer had the mix files for Stil.. Branciforte would have to rely on the finished recording itself for his transcriptions, a daunting task that required painstakingly isolating different frequency ranges for each track. Branciforte then recruited an ensemble of expert instrumentalists to pull off his exacting scores, including Madison Greenstone, whose extended techniques for clarinet are largely responsible for the album’s timbral character, and Ben Monder, a guitarist whose initial response to the proposal was simple: “That is a terrible idea.”
Let’s put those doubts and misgivings to rest. Sti.ll works. The track that convinced Branciforte to keep going was “Temper,” Stil.’s busy, gyrating, IDM-inspired third track. He set about transcribing it for clarinet, dividing it into 16 layers and meticulously notating each one (an example of his extreme precision: Layer 11, titled “beeps,” has a tempo of 56.48 bpm, a level of specificity likely not perceptible to the human ear and certainly not playable with any degree of accuracy). Greenstone replicated the song’s thrumming static and jittery clicks with a range of techniques. For one layer, she used the clarinet’s keys to create percussive thumps of bass, and for another she continually pushed water through the mouthpiece to simulate the track’s crackly undercurrent. The results were revelatory: This was “Temper,” but it was something else too, a contemporary classical composition of arresting beauty.
The otherworldly hum of “Stil.” also gets a single-instrument treatment. Branciforte translated the piece for vibraphone, playing with different rhythms, mallets, and microphones. Once these layers are stacked, the track begins to hover, and then to float. Soon, the listener is levitating too. “Recur” is more complex and required extra instrumentation, including Christopher Gross on cello, Laura Cocks on flute, Sam Minaie on double bass, and Monder, now enthused, on acoustic guitar. It lurches along at two different tempi, sounding like a glitching CD even though played live.
On Stil., “Snow/Sand” consists of a single loop repeated for 15 minutes, though its length changes throughout. The musicians on Sti.ll recreate this woozy effect through sheer attentiveness and patience, with chiming vibraphone and finger snaps marking the phrase’s shifting boundaries. If ever there were a time to loop a track in Pro Tools, this would be it. But the refusal to do so defines Deupree and Branciforte’s approach—there is no cheating here. So why remake a classic? Branciforte found out only after he’d finished recording. Sometimes, if you set out to do the impossible, you actually achieve it.


Composer, designer and programmer Tristan Perich uses very small objects—microchips—to pose very big questions about art, music, and the state of the “album.”

Noise Patterns

The last two major releases from New York composer, designer, and programmer Tristan Perich only really “ended” only when the three-volt lithium watch battery powering them gave out. In 2010, Perich’s 1-Bit Symphony connected a silver cell, an ON/OFF switch, a fast-forward button, a volume knob, an eight-inch audio jack, and a one-bit chip with beautiful arcs of black wire, all permanently affixed inside a transparent CD case.
Flip the switch, and the chip generated five occasionally transcendent pre-arranged movements, music that hinted at Philip Glass composing for a RadioShack centennial. Forget to push the switch back to the left, though, and “Movement 5” would never stop, its overloaded drone suggesting a broken church organ whose sound stretched to the sky, forever and ever. Perich’s new Noise Patterns—which applies the same high design to the sounds of, say, Merzbow rather than the masters of ecstatic minimalism—turns the same infinite trick: Keep your headphones plugged in and never kill the switch, and “Section 6” will eternally wash you in a flood of pulsating static, as if you’ve been integrated into and obliterated by the simple circuit itself.
This is, of course, Perich’s clever approximation of a classic vinyl feature—“the locked groove,” or a short snippet of music at the end of a record’s side that repeats until the needle is lifted. In 2007, Perich debuted with 1-Bit Music, the first self-described “circuit album,” a colorful and less seemly tangle of wires that played 11 tracks from inside a CD case. Questions of categorization appear paramount to Perich; his triptych of related releases—1-Bit Music, 1-Bit Symphony, and Noise Patterns—tease the binary between “album” and “instrument” in ways that the similar Buddha Machine or even Brian Eno’s Bloom could not.
In an era when our sense of the album is loosening, or where Kanye West can continually tweak a playlist and still call it by the same name, Perich moves in the opposite direction. He permanently fixes his parts to one platform (in the case of Noise Patterns, a sixteen square-inch black matte circuit board, cradled for convenience in a cardboard-lined CD case) and completely exposes the innards and limitations of his operation. You can control the output, but only to a limited extent; each moment has been meticulously built, evidenced by the printout of Perich’s code that accompanies the board. Like its predecessor, Noise Patterns makes and contains the sound all at once. It is programmed, but its very physical nature provides the illusion that it is somehow playable, too. This is defiantly offline media that still feels mutable.
Even without its itinerant conceptual or engineering trappings, Noise Patterns is a fascinating record that produces a lot of sound with a very small source. Perich never peels the glitch-and-hiss mayhem too far from the meter, so that even the harshest passages here pulse and throb with interesting rhythms. He’s constantly splitting or slowing them, quickening or collapsing them. At one point, “Section 3” hits a deep but brief four-on-floor groove before pivoting between short rests and big blasts of static in separate channels; it feels a little like an EDM drop, a swollen reservoir of sound suddenly being emptied across a still scene below. “Section 1” suggests the ever-expanding, ever-contracting pulse music of Steve Reich, rewritten for a dystopian world of strobe lights and antiquated electronics. “Section 5” recalls the colossal industrial quakes of Author & Punisher, another inventor and musician that has recently used customized objects to test boundaries between the player and the played, the input and the output.
For the last decade, Perich has used very small objects to pose very big questions about art, how it’s made, and how it’s perceived. His one-bit obsession has spawned performances or recordings with percussion duos and pianos, string quartets and accordion quintets, chamber ensembles and viola trios. At a time when an overabundance of sounds, processors, sequencers, and effects can be harnessed with a single cell phone, let alone an actual laptop, Perich has elected to see how much musical versatility and adaptability he can get from a simple bit attached to a circuit board, an almost laughably rudimentary premise. Noise Patterns is cacophonous proof that he’s not finished turning such demanding ideas into surprisingly delightful, diverse music.


On the latest album from his ambient alter ego, Baths’ Will Wiesenfeld uses fuzzed-out guitars and tape-warped textures to conjure a blissful sense of refuge.

The Anchorite

Will Wiesenfeld loves anime, manga, video games, cartoons—all media with the potential to open up a fantasy world. The Southern California producer often seems to see his music the same way, not least on his 2017 Baths album Romaplasm, a definitive combination of his taste for high fantasy and his gift for gripping romantic and erotic narratives. If that record was like one of the Ghibli or Pixar films Wiesenfeld holds dear to his heart, his releases under the more prolific Geotic name are like hardbound books of concept art, showing the landscapes he’s capable of conjuring before he populates them with his characters. His new Geotic album The Anchorite creates a small and pleasant patch of woods within this universe.
An anchorite is a religious recluse, and accordingly, Wiesenfeld creates an atmosphere of sylvan solitude across these 12 tracks, keeping his vocals to a hushed and wordless murmur at the margins of the music. In the foreground is an omnipresent field of static, which Wiesenfeld uses not to obscure his music so much as to create a rugged and spiky texture; the crackles and pops reach out of the mix like the grasping branches in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Electronics are deployed sparingly, and what few drums Wiesenfeld uses tend to plod like thick workboots through mud. The primary instruments are electric guitar, treated with effects so it sounds a bit like Bibio’s, and piano, which Wiesenfeld sidechains on “The Wood of Corridors” so it seems as if it’s being consumed by an avalanche. It sounds a little bit like folk music, but not quite.
The wood-hewn textures are the most striking thing about The Anchorite, but once it’s over, the melodies are what you’re most likely to remember. Wiesenfeld has a strong pop instinct, and “The Going” and “The Monastic Quiet” are plenty catchy. The music rarely strays far from major keys, and it never hints at much mystery or danger, instead preferring to inhabit a place of certainty and peace—the perspective of the anchorite, perhaps, who has spent a long time here and sees it as a place of refuge, not secrets. Those who like their ambient moodier might find it a tad saccharine, but those on the same wavelength of artists like the Album Leaf, Eluvium, Ulrich Schnauss or Adam Young’s Port Blue project will find more than enough to enjoy.
The Anchorite is most intriguing when it takes us into the more overgrown thickets of Wiesenfeld’s mind. “The Injury” is a lovely backwards guitar sketch that suggests that if ML Buch ever makes a Suntub remix album, Wiesenfeld should be one of the first names she calls up. But even after all the different effects heard across the album, “The Lime of Stars” comes as a shock, erupting into a dense wall of overdrive halfway through, as if Wiesenfeld’s character has suddenly taken a wrong turn into the enchanted woodlands of the black-metal imagination. A few more moments like that might’ve helped The Anchorite feel more expansive, but even at 50 minutes, the album seems finite: a small patch of land with defined borders, sketched lovingly by Wiesenfeld in the margins of the ever-expanding map of his world.


Singing in English and Mandarin, the Berklee-educated vocalist and experimental musician uses oddball pop melodies, distorted breaks, and swirling drones to explore themes of anxiety and selfhood.

夢之駭客 Dream Hacker

Lane Shi sings with the voice of a shapeshifter. Flitting from croon to shriek with ritualistic caprice, the Haining-born vocalist played Boston basements with Berklee art punks DENT before graduating in 2016; these days, her voice is the driving force behind Flenser-affiliated Elizabeth Colour Wheel, projecting powerfully over their sludgy din. DENT’s “Eyeballs” is early proof of the needly extremes to which she can push her instrument, prefiguring the visceral screams that feature heavily on Sightless Pit’s “Flower to Tomb,” released earlier this year.
With her solo project otay:onii, Shi often employs a gentler, almost brittle vocal delivery. Her previous two albums, NAG and 冥冥 (Míng Míng), melded bilingual lyrics with electronic experiments and atmospheres, pitting human fragility against technological imperfection. This fragility is physical: A tour-fuelled smoking habit once led to nodules in her vocal cords, bringing her face to face with the contingency of her own voice. But it is also spiritual, manifesting in meditations on the tenuousness of her cultural identity. Born and raised in China but moving to the U.S. at 16, she found her connection to her mother tongue weakening as she began work on 2021’s 冥冥 (Míng Míng). Her latest record, however, comes after a three-year stint in China during the COVID-19 pandemic—the first time she’d been back in 13 years. On 夢之駭客 Dream Hacker, she offers a more optimistic outlook, using oddball pop melodies, distorted breakbeats, and swirling drones to transform her anxieties into a renewed sense of self.
That self has a whimsical—and scatological—side, as it turns out. “W.C. 公共廁所” begins with a fake-out, with Shi’s voice in full ceremonial form, a distorted ball of nails hurtling through cavernous space. Through the noise, even Mandarin speakers might be hard pressed to confirm that yes, she’s indeed singing about shit. But then the beat drops, and along with it, the fart sounds—and surprisingly, it actually works. Singing from the perspective of a toilet as a “home” for excrement, it might be a double-edged jab at Western notions of the “shithole country,” and quite danceable to boot. It’s a testament to Shi’s ability as a practicing sound designer-slash-artist, having done her fair share of tinkering at Berklee as well as for exhibitions in Beijing and New York, to transform weird sounds in potent ways.
Other tracks on 夢之駭客 Dream Hacker channel a similar carnivalesque feeling, in opposition to the solemnity of 冥冥 (Míng Míng). On “Overlap 重疊,” Shi’s voice floats alongside ’80s stadium-rock drums, tabla, and a synth progression from an abandoned carousel ride. Singing of growth and decay, she teases out a tension between light and dark that lurks throughout the record, just one of many axes along which Shi situates her sound and themes. By the final track, “Good Fool 愚美人”, however, these tensions have resolved to a message of love. Between mind and heart, it’s the latter that has the final say: “矮小與偉大 / 只不過 / 一波來去 / 愛的呼吸” (“The lowest and the greatest are all but waves that come and go from a breath of love”). On 夢之駭客 Dream Hacker, Shi slips between ruptures in voice, electronics, and identity, finally finding what was inside all along.


Across three discs of rough-hewed yet honeyed music, this three-disc set captures the cosmopolitan scene of Africa’s post-colonial Upper Volta in the 1960s and ’70s.

Various Artists: Bobo Yéyé: Belle Époque in Upper Volta

Bobo Yéyé: Belle Époque in Upper Volta

They may appear to be hardy and resilient, but music cultures are fragile things, threatened by drastic shifts in society and political climates. Tropicalia, for one, lasted less than a year in Brazil due to punitive measures like AI-5 instilled by the junta. Club culture in New York City was starved to near extinction in the 1990s by then-mayor Rudy Giuliani’s reinstatement of a severe and obscure cabaret law. And when a coup brought Thomas Sankara into power in Africa’s Upper Volta in 1983, he changed the country’s name to Burkina Faso and installed drastic changes, including a city curfew and a law preventing musicians from charging money for concerts. Almost overnight, the vibrant music scene in Bobo Dioulasso evaporated.
Were it not for the vinyl records pressed (and photographs snapped) during the short-lived existence of post-colonial Upper Volta, there would be almost no trace of the rough-hewed yet honeyed music made by the Voltaic musicians of the 1960s and ’70s. After centuries of colonial, tribal, and political clashes, these decades saw a country only recently freed of French colonial oppression, struggling to find footing with their own slippery national identity (the region is home to over 60 ethnic groups). When Upper Volta achieved full independence by 1960, it marked the beginning of a rather peaceful time in the country, which allowed the cosmopolitan music scene a chance to take root and flourish. While Numero Group has a knack for unearthing micro soul scenes in U.S. cities and weird private press albums from dollar bins, the deluxe audio and visual packaging of Bobo Yéyé: Belle Époque in Upper Volta marks their first foray into the motherland. It also makes for a worthwhile exploration of the landlocked African country, oft-times overshadowed by neighbors like Mali, Ghana, and Niger.
The influence of French colonialism is evident from the start. Upper Volta’s earliest orchestras took cues from a band comprised of French colonial businessmen and Western instruments like the guitar, trumpet, and saxophone. American R&B, rhumba from the Congo, and (as the title suggests) the yé-yé of French ’60s pop—the bands of Upper Volta drew on all of it. No doubt, the titan of African pop, Franco Luambo’s O.K. Jazz—from the Republic of the Congo and the biggest African star on the continent—had a considerable influence on one of the earliest and most prolific bands to arise in the new country, Volta Jazz.
Founded by bandleader Idrissa Koné, Volta Jazz is one of the savannah’s greatest musical exports, releasing a full-length album and some 20 singles during their lifespan. Their output is collected on the first disc of this set and is boisterous and simmering in equal measure, drawing on their native Bobo heritage and mixing in the many rhythms from outside their borders—most crucially, the Cuban music that found its way into the country on 78s. The upbeat rumba “Air Volta” displays an exuberance that threatens to outstrip the fast pace, the horns and electric guitar racing around the hand percussion breakdown at the center of the song. “Mousso Koroba Tike” displays the stinging guitar tone of late ’50s American R&B transposed to a rollicking African polyrhythmic backdrop. Meanwhile, the gentle ballad “Djougou Toro” shimmers like a desert mirage, with Dieudonné Koudougou’s steel guitar rippling in ever widening circles.
As the ’70s wore on, Volta Jazz member-turned-bandleader Tidiani Coulibaly groused that the ensemble had not evolved beyond their supper club tuxedos and repertoire to keep up with the changing times. And so, he broke off and formed his own group with five other Volta Jazz members called L’Authentique Dafra Star de Bobo-Dioulasso, who comprise the second album on this set. Dafra Star was a more nimble ensemble and ranged widely (even touring in Mali and Canada), utilizing the traditional timbres of the ballaphon and mixing it with Cuban tumba drums, the double-picked guitars of Zoumana Diarra and Soma Bakary, and electric organ. The tricky interplay of ballaphon, horns, and percussion on “Dounian” anticipates the kind of post-rock tropes that Tortoise would deploy decades and continents later, while “Si Tu Maime” is a slow-burner of a ballad with dramatic organ accents.
Okay, heretofore unknown music—from a country we might not be able to easily pinpoint on a map of Africa—dusted off and compiled for consumption is no novel thing. And as much as I enjoy the groups here, I might sooner reach for sets from Franco, Balla et ses Balladins, Rail Band, Star Band de Dakar, or Golden Afrique for future listening pleasure. But where Bobo Yéyé excels beyond those is in how it widens our gaze, showing us not just the music of Upper Volta, but the people who got gussied up on a Saturday night to sweat and dance to it. In this way, it makes for one of the most personable African reissues of the past decade.
Parallel to the establishment of Koné’s Volta Jazz group, his cousin Sory Sanlé got his hands on a camera and set up a makeshift studio, documenting the bands and their fans. Along with the 3xLP/CDs, Numero included an 144-page hardbound book of Sanlé’s black and white portraiture, which makes it an indispensable document. In the introduction, Sanlé writes that the Voltaic used to throw photographs of people away once they had died, thinking they were pointless if the person wasn’t present. But then there was a shift: “People began to understand that by looking at old photos, the person was recreated... without photos, it’s like nothing happened.” Sanlé’s intimate photos show his friends and neighbors as fierce and innocent, defiant and bizarrely posed, cool and ridiculous. They catch his subjects in the act of becoming. The participants of Upper Volta’s music scene dress up as soldiers, as distant cousins of the Jackson 5, as tribespeople, as gangsters and b-boys, as musicians trying on different identities, making their presence known, if only for the blink of a shutter. Were these their actual roles in society? Or were they just trying on costumes for play? In looking upon these stunning photos, it’s more fun to just enjoy the enigma of these individuals.
Writing about the Mali photographers Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé last year in The New York Times, Teju Cole noted that such African portraits offered “a vivid record of individual people, largely shorn of their names and stories but irrepressibly alive… ripostes to the anthropological images of ‘natives’ made by Europeans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.” Cole added, “Something changed when Africans began to take photographs of one another.” That statement extends to Sanlé’s own eye, and the Bobo Yéyé collection as a whole. While their country’s golden age lasted less than 20 years, the look, attitude, and sound of the Voltaic remains, even if the culture that originally nurtured it is no longer.


Balancing the familiar sweetness of her vocals against bruised club beats, the debut EP from Kero Kero Bonito’s Sarah Midori Perry traverses newly dark emotional terrain.

Icarus EP

Cuteness brings out dark things in people. If you’ve ever wanted to squeeze something adorable until it bursts, you’re not alone—there’s a direct correlation in our brains that links seeing cute things with violent urges, an emotional redirect that serves as an outlet to deal with our intensely affectionate instincts. But there’s more to it than that: On some level, being confronted with innocence is a reminder of how sweet it is to not yet know how painful the real world can be. That innocence is something to be admired and protected, but it’s also something we yearn for, crave, and even mourn. It’s enough to make you want to grab something cute as tightly as possible and pinch it by the cheeks.
For most of Sarah Midori Perry’s musical career, this multifaceted understanding of cuteness has remained buried beneath the surface. With Kero Kero Bonito, she’s occasionally tucked more mature subject matter into the band’s kawaii-lite style, be it the end of the world on their Civilisation EPs, or the destruction of her childhood home on Time ‘n’ Place. But the music itself has always been a smiling ray of sunshine, cheerful as a Saturday morning cartoon. While half of KKB’s production team emerged from the transgressive PC Music collective, the band’s own mission seemed to strip away the layers of horror and irony coursing through that label’s hypercute aesthetic, presenting something more pure and sincere in the process. If the music hasn’t been as groundbreaking, they’ve made up for it with ear-wormy hooks and joyously bouncy production.
Icarus arrives like an ominous cloud spreading across the KKB universe. Until now, Perry has primarily used her Cryalot moniker for skull-rattling happy hardcore DJ sets—but on her debut EP under the name, it’s a vessel for sounds and emotions more gutwrenching than anything she’s touched on with Kero Kero Bonito. Instead of singing over a miniature symphony of Donkey Kong Country MIDI flutes, she and producer Jennifer Walton opt for something a little more “Ponyboy”: screeching nu-metal sub-bass thrashes and stomps its way through these songs, while bruised club beats provide a searing anchor for Perry’s childlike vocals to glide overhead. It’s as though she’s swapped out her colorful graduation gown for a shopping spree at Dolls Kill. Fortunately, this new skin hasn’t come at the cost of her knack for earnest, touching pop songwriting.
As with all her music, Perry performs Icarus as if she were narrating a fairytale, albeit one much gloomier in tone. Conceived during a period when Perry was experiencing intense depression, Icarus is filled with references to angels and demons, to eternal spirals of damnation and redemption. The EP takes the form of a song cycle revolving around its titular Greek myth, but in contrast to the story’s origin as a cautionary tale, Perry recasts Icarus’ flight as a powerful moment of self-actualization. “Let me touch the sun/Wanna have it all/I don’t care if I fall/I accepted it all,” she sings over a pounding beat on “Touch the Sun,” swelling to a moment of heavenly club catharsis while glitched-out replicas of her voice cyclone all around. It’s Perry’s biggest dancefloor track yet, made all the more intense by how her silk-soft voice counterbalances the eruptive sounds happening all around it.
This contrast between dark and light is key to the best moments on Icarus, particularly when Perry leans fully into her new fascination with metal. The verses on “Hell Is Here” are peaceful and inquisitive, with Perry and Walton adorning the song’s J-poppy melody in cooing harmonies and gently twinkling piano. Before long, the chorus brings everything crashing down, with gutturally screamed vocals and a rubbery, wobbling bass tone that would make Datsik proud. Though Perry isn’t the first artist to navigate the intersection between experimental club music and screamo, she shows enough mastery of tension and release to make it satisfying (she pulls off a similar trick on “Labyrinth,” a tender power ballad whose glitching, yeule-y intro explodes into a cybernetic wall of rich, blasting synth chords).
The record’s inversion of the Icarus myth never approaches anything as profound as it seems to suggest (the final track “See You Again,” essentially a five-and-a-half-minute dramatic monologue, has no business being the longest song), but as with Kero Kero Bonito, Perry’s biggest strengths as Cryalot don’t lie in her innovation, but in her craft. The best moments on Icarus feel as if they were tailor-made to be spun at the next HEAV3N party, but Perry transcends the project’s trendy exterior with the same legitimate vulnerability that’s made her a cult star in the first place. In exploring the scarier sides of her cutesy approach to pop music, Perry uncovers emotional depths that once seemed unattainable in her main project, prodding at an unsettling underbelly that she’s never let us see so fully before. Perhaps it’s a good thing that she finally decided to let those violent urges out.


Reaching back to the 1950s, this collection highlights the New York School composer’s fragmented, conversational style, as well as his music’s patient, intuitive qualities.

Christian Wolff: *A Complete Anthology of Solo and Duo Violin Pieces *

Since he began composing in the 1950s, Christian Wolff has made the embrace of the unexpected a central part of his work. As just a teenager studying with John Cage, the Nice-born composer became the youngest member of the influential New York School, a group of composers exploring indeterminacy and chance. Instead of dictating exactly how their music should be performed, these composers left crucial decisions up to the players; no two presentations of the same piece would sound the same. These tenets have colored Wolff’s compositions, which have an openness to letting the music go wherever the performers choose to take it. That’s especially evident throughout A Complete Anthology of Solo and Duo Violin Pieces, a new compilation of Wolff’s work for solo and duo violin that highlights the freedom inherent in his music, as well as the connectivity and communication that drives it.
Recorded by String Noise, the New York-based duo of Pauline Kim Harris and Conrad Harris, A Complete Anthology of Solo and Duo Violin Pieces surveys Wolff’s works for violin, zig-zagging between periods of his career. “Bread and Roses,” a solo violin work from 1976 that exemplifies of Wolff’s use of protest music, opens the album; 1950’s “Short Suite” and “Four Small Duos” come just a couple of tracks later, representing some of his earliest indeterminate works. Later on, we’re dropped into Wolff’s present: “Small Duos for Violinists,” composed in 2021 for String Noise, highlights the fragmented, conversational style he’s recently championed. When placed side by side, these pieces illustrate the twists and turns of his compositional life, but also reveal his persistent interest in writing patient, intuitive music.
Throughout “Duo for 2 Violins” (1950), Wolff’s first composition written under the tutelage of Cage, each violinist trades notes back and forth, exploring the patterns that can be formed with just three notes that are a half-step apart. It feels simpler than what he’d compose later on but shows a spark that would carry throughout his practice. The music often hovers in place, playing with varying textures almost imperceptible changes. Buoyant plucks erupt from long, bowed tones, moving from grainy to taut and back again. Forgoing dramatic vibrato in favor of a direct, resonant sound, Wolff finds meditation and grace within restriction.
Later pieces, like “Six Melodies Variation” (1993) showcase a wider range. A tribute to Cage composed in 1993, this piece finds inspiration in his mentor’s 1950 work “Six Melodies” and the music of William Billings, an American composer whose music appeared in Cage’s “Cheap Imitation” pieces. Springy plucks and effervescent bowing tumble out and fall into restful pauses, as in his earliest duos. But here, each violinist explores the highs and lows of the instrument, employing squeals and rumbles in equal measure. The music is structured around intricate, delicate counterpoint driven by each player’s interaction with the other.
Wolff’s solo works convey a sense of interiority, asking the violinist to dig deep to convey the feeling of the music. In “Bread and Roses,” whose melody comes from a protest song that was sung during the 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Wolff abstracts and distorts his source material, exploring the violin’s ability to play rich rolled chords and wispy, high-pitched sounds. Performed here with an appropriate defiance and vigor, it feels akin to the yearning of a solo Bach sonata, requiring the violinist to pack each note with feeling, whether the most vibrant double stop or the gentlest harmonic.
But Wolff’s ideals come through strongest in “Small Duos for Violinists,” which he composed for String Noise in 2021. Here, he finds power in economical ideas: Each duet is a tiny snapshot built from small motifs, which the players develop by reacting to and with each other. It often scans as a conversation, with one violinist playing a pattern and the other following with repetition or a response. At times, they link together in counterpoint, but their lines often feel at odds, like two people talking over each other, until each comes together at a point of resolution. A deep communication drives the music and helps give the piece its spirited voice, fully leaning into the composer’s long held interest in counterpoint, listening, and social music-making.
Much of Wolff’s music is guided by serendipity. Nowhere is this clearer than during the fleeting 28 seconds of “Small Duos for Violinists 7,” an arresting moment that features a series of open chords that shine like a beam of sunlight. They appear in near stillness after earlier chatter, wading through dissonances and never quite resolving. It’s the greatest surprise on a winding record, a movement that seemingly appears from nowhere and quickly falls back into the ether. Wolff has spent his career embracing the unknown and the beauty that emerges from it in performance. More than 70 years in, he’s still finding more.


Backed by beats ranging from wistful chipmunk soul to oppressive, bell-rattling NWA jacks and hypnotic electro bounce, Cam'ron bids adieu to Roc-A-Fella.

Purple Haze

Less than a week after the early-December release of Purple Haze, Jay-Z became the president of Def Jam Records, and that company made arrangements to seize control of Roc-A-Fella Records, the subsidiary that Jay started with his onetime friend Damon Dash. Dash left the label completely, announcing his plans to start another label called Roc-4-Life. Cam'ron, Dash's friend and one of Roc-A-Fella's flagship artists, attempted to leave the label as well, saying that Roc-A-Fella hadn't given Purple Haze an adequate promotional push-- which is strange considering the album had been in stores for less than a week.
Cam's departure from Roc-A-Fella is still in doubt. But if he isn't contractually obligated to stick it out with Def Jam, this is the end of an era-- a time when a word-twisting surrealist amoral prince had the resources of rap's most successful imprint at his disposal-- and Purple Haze is its last document.
Purple Haze creates its own world both sonically and lyrically. The beats range from wistful chipmunk soul to oppressive, stripped-down, bell-rattling NWA jacks to hypnotic, muted electro bounce. But whether the producers are dishing out the swirling operatic vocals of "Killa Cam" or the chopped-up hair metal guitars of "Bubble Music", they add up to a frozen, prismatic creep, a slow, hard, cinematic bed for Cam's magnetic flow.
And Cam's flow is a thing of beauty. His bored, arrogant voice rolls syllables around until he's hit just about every possible permutation, transforming hard consonants into thrown rocks and idly toying with drug metaphors like they're Rubik's Cubes. In Cam's world, he's the king of Harlem, moving kilos, dispatching foes, and throwing around money with Machiavellian cool. Cam has the warped eloquence of an MF Doom even when he's bragging about violence ("Observe, cock, and spray/ We hit you from a block away/ Drinking saki on a Suzuki in Osaka Bay") or conspicuous consumption ("I park in the towaway zone, chrome/ I don't care; that car a throwaway, homes").
Occasionally, he veers off into pure gibberish: "Wreckx-N-Effect, zoom zoom, poon poon/ Since the movie Cocoon, had the Uzi platoon." The ugliness of Cam's world is never more evident than when he's talking about women: "Any girl I get, I totally open 'em/ Brain and they legs, cokin' and dopin' 'em". Cam's misogyny comes through the speakers like a slap; it's jarring and frightening and sad. But Cam isn't heartless; a few of the songs have an air of weary lamentation, like Tony Soprano driving home after killing his cousin, wondering how it came to this: "I give you a earful, it's tearful/ Told my mother I hustle, and she said, 'Be careful'.
Purple Haze is like a Takeshi Kitano gangster movie; every moment of transcendent musical or linguistic beauty is shadowed by the spectre of death, an end so inevitable that Cam doesn't even let it get to him anymore. There's no sense of joy or exhilaration in his spending and shooting and fucking, but it's the only thing he knows.


The London producer’s latest EP is both his least dancefloor-minded release and his most satisfying by design.

Slipping EP

Peter O’Grady is smitten with the plasticity and inherent gibberish of the voice. Yes, the South London producer adopted the handle Joy Orbison (a play on the dramatic ’60s crooner and “Caruso of Rock”), but it’s all right there on 2009’s “Hyph Mngo,” the dubstep anthem that introduced him to the dance music world. Built from the giddy thrill in toggling between “ahh” and “ooo” as it climbs to a precipitous drop, it remains one of the defining tunes of the 21st century, creating a playground for the likes of James Blake, Jamie xx, and Floating Points along the way.
What followed was unrivaled dominance in electronic music worldwide, a string of smash singles that came to define EDM. Or rather, that’s what could have happened had O’Grady not instead spent the past decade dodging easy labels, preferring to take every available detour. He eschews most interviews, gigs only when he feels like it, and has never dropped a proper debut album, instead releasing a string of collaborations with Boddika and exploratory EPs on Hinge Finger, the label he runs with Will Bankhead. His most recent EP, Slipping, caps a prolific 2019 that’s found him providing gurgly g-funk to spoken-word artist James Massiah’s “Ride for Me” and making a peak-hour anthem with Overmono. Each celebrates the voice in a different way.
Slipping is both his least dancefloor-minded release and his most satisfying by design, reveling in the kind of freedom that comes from loosening expectations. It opens with guest vocalist Infinite’s soulful “ooooo,” which gets truncated and run through again, the tape still running as he takes another stab at the elongated vowel. Other little sounds skitter around: the rustling of the mic, a clink like a lighter knocking against a pint glass, O’Grady stifling a giggle and saying “again.” It’s not a perfect take, but after about 30 seconds he runs with it anyway, triggering a deep globule of bass and percussive elements that aim towards a stepper beat, only to scatter like spilled mercury. Rather than a stab at a proper club banger, “Burn” feels like O’Grady hanging out with his mates, the end result pleasantly slapdash and happenstance.
That casual feel carries across Slipping. The cover art features O’Grady’s nan and a young O’Grady slumbering on the couch, giving the impression of a more personal release even if the details are kept vague. “W Dad” is exactly that: his dad chatting away in a manner that recalls Aphex Twin’s ability to weave the sound of quotidian home life into exhilarating tracks without missing a beat. While there’s a sense of pop structure, the vocals stumble in from all directions, overheard rather than centered. Hear how Orbison’s beat slushes around Keyah/Blu’s slurred “fuuuck you, dahling” on “Under,” making it the perfect downtempo R&B singalong after a pill and two flutes of champagne.
Slipping smears everything together, pairing gnarled noise and dancehall riddims on “Breathe In,” or overheard radio and close-mic’d whispers on “Walworth Waltz.” The sounds briefly cohere into songs before oozing apart again, making Solange’s influence clear—O’Grady is a fan of When I Get Home. As the producer explained in a recent interview, the mercurial nature of this work allows him to “get close to where I want to be… [even though] I don’t think I actually even know where that is.” Slipping entices because of that intangible quality: not quite knowing how to say it but letting it out anyway.


Stranger to Stranger is arguably the best album of Paul Simon's uneven post-Graceland solo career. His reliably melodic songwriting is buoyed by his most adventurous arrangements in years.

Stranger to Stranger

Of all the baby-boomer heroes to make it past 70, none have been old longer than Paul Simon. Raised in Queens to first-generation Hungarian-Jewish immigrants, he copyrighted his first song, “The Girl for Me,” with Art Garfunkel when he was 14, an indication both of his preternatural ambition and a belief that art is as much a business as it is a means of self-expression. He never rebelled, never played to fashion, never seemed as interested in the dangerous divinations of rock‘n’roll as in the quiet diligence of songwriters from the 1930s and ’40s, who kept short hair and bankers’ hours. He has claimed that he tried to be ironic a few times, but it didn’t work. His first crime is mildness; his second is thinking. He might be your parents’ favorite musician, but your grandparents probably thought he was a pretty decent guy too.
The same qualities that made Simon seem square as a younger artist made him durable into—and beyond—middle age. His second solo album, Paul Simon, invented the literate, introverted style we now call indie-folk, and beat Oscar the Grouch by two years in suggesting that melancholy isn’t a weakness, but a form of insulation against even worse emotional weather. In the ’80s, when Bob Dylan was making kabuki disco albums and Simon’s other ’60s peers—the Rolling Stones, for example—were getting lost in the open ocean of too much encouragement, Simon recorded Graceland, an album whose South African sound was both middlebrow and radical, universally likable and yet alien to Simon's typical audience. (For further listening on this subject, visit the compilation The Indestructible Beat of Soweto, released just around the time Graceland came out. It endures.)
Simon’s lyrics, which had always been less about people being free than people getting by, were maturing: He was more aloof now, but funnier, too. Take this, the first verse of a song called “Gumboots”:
"I was having this discussion in a taxi heading downtown/Rearranging my position on this friend of mine who had a little bit of a breakdown/I said, ‘Hey, you know, breakdowns come and breakdowns go/ So what are you going to do about it? That’s what I’d like to know.’”
Twenty years earlier, he would’ve zeroed in on the breakdown and thrown an orchestra at it; now it was relegated to a couple lines on an album with a host of other problems to compartmentalize. Here was someone stepping into the tempered disappointments of being 40 like they were shoes bought just a little too soon. This, he recently told a class at Yale, is when Simon says he was finally comfortable admitting he was an artist.
Simon’s post-Graceland career has had its embarrassments, but as with a lot of older, canonized artists, critics seem to take an unusual kind of glee in magnifying them, when, near as I can tell, he bothers the public far less than the rest of his graduating class. There was The Capeman, a musical about the Puerto Rican gang member Salvador Agron, which is one of those sub-middling projects nobody would’ve heard about if it wasn’t coming to us from Paul Simon, but since it was coming to us from Paul Simon, people heard about it a lot more than they needed to. (Several writers—myself included, I admit—have noted how unconvincing Simon is when using the word “fuck,” which he attempts several times on the soundtrack.) There was 2006’s Surprise, which found him working with Brian Eno, an artist of related but incompatible genius whose deference to atmosphere tended to wash out the quiet precision of Simon’s songs.
So Beautiful or So What from 2011 was a lot better, and, for an artist of Simon’s stature, surprisingly weird—the sound of an elder statesman settling into his own idiosyncrasies, seemingly unconcerned with legacy or relevance. More than anything, Simon in the ’00s reminds me of the Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso, himself a national treasure whose albums have only gotten leaner and more enigmatic as he keeps making them.
Which brings us to Stranger to Stranger, a compact, often jittery album populated by schizophrenics, disenfranchised teenagers, musicians locked out of their own gigs, and some kind of avenging werewolf coming to kill the rich. I’ve always attributed part of Simon’s enormous popularity to how good he is at teasing out life’s silver linings, at softening disappointment with bittersweetness, regret with nostalgia. Even his saddest songs contain the implicit bromide that life goes on.
Here, things feel less reassuring, more open-ended. Several of the album’s songs—“Street Angel,” “In a Parade,” “The Werewolf”—are bemused and overstuffed, rickshaw rides down busy, unfamiliar streets with people you can’t quite get a read on. Even the album’s friendliest moment, a light, West African-style folksong called “Cool Papa Bell,” is shadowed by lines about “the thrill you feel when evil dreams come true.” (It also contains Simon’s most convincing use of the word “fuck” yet.) Here, Simon’s voice—always boyish, always a little bit distracted—takes on the ominous warmth of Albert Brooks in Drive, who isn’t slitting your wrist until he is.
The shift here is from wisdom to prophecy, from certainty to contingency. Musically, it’s his most adventurous album since Graceland, filed with strange rhythmic kinks and a junkyard’s worth of barely identifiable sounds. Simon’s appropriation of new styles has often had the unfortunate effect of making it seem like he’s domesticating them, making them palatable for the king’s court. (This was, of course, a big debate around Graceland.) Here, he gets as close as he’s ever been to the romantic ideal of kids gathered on a corner banging on what they found in the alley, or of the weird old guy bumping down the road in a wooden cart filled with treasures unknown, from the chimes of “The Clock” and the accidental ambience of “In the Garden of Edie” to the vocal sample on “Street Angel,” flipped and processed to make it sound like a clogged drain. (The sample comes from the Golden Gate Quartet, a proto-gospel group who Simon also sampled on So Beautiful or So What, and who invented what in my estimation is the safest anti-depressant on the market.)
Simon has claimed inspiration in part from the American composer Harry Partch, who envisioned a scale that broke up the customary 12 tones into 43, creating slippages and interstices and little gradations of sound that might seem like dissonance to Western ears but that have an oblique, mysterious beauty. Simon borrows a couple of Partch’s homemade instruments here—the zoomoozophone, the chromelodeon—but also borrows a little of his spirit, of a transient life, of quick fixes and no clear plan. My favorite lyrics sound thrillingly unwritten, raw footage of wit in action. Consider it a corrective to a career of smoothing things over: Stranger to Stranger is unpasteurized, mongrel music.
Simon has always been subject to criticism for a certain kind of exceptionalism. Two of his biggest songs, “I Am a Rock” and “Sounds of Silence,” deal with characters who wear their alienation like badges, dark lords of their own personal libraries left with no choice but to turn their faces heroically away from the sheeple who surround them. This was a guy who responded to the news of his partner going to work on a movie in Mexico by writing a song called “The Only Living Boy in New York,” never mind the other 6 million people living there.
As his career wore on, the alienation mellowed into casual arrogance. By 1983’s Hearts and Bones, which Simon himself has acknowledged as an artistic dead-end, he had become the kind of guy who shows up at the party but never has a good time, bored by life but willing to smirk at it, who thinks he’s better than you but is too polite to say so.
We see some of that guy on Stranger, just as we see him on every Paul Simon album—that’s part of what makes it a Paul Simon album. The musician on “Wristband,” for example, who draws an analogy between his own frustrations getting back into the VIP area and what poor people must feel on the brink of a riot. Personally, I see it as satire, the portrait of someone who has mostly lost touch with reality but still has to answer to it eventually. My guess is many will see it as condescension.
Then again, pop has always been nicer to artists who portray struggle than relative ease, more welcoming of emotional engagement than emotional detachment, and increasingly hostile both to intelligence and ambiguity. Simon is all these supposedly bad things and worse. For every one of him, there are 10 guys waiting to stuff him into a locker—that’s how it is, and probably how it’ll always be. “It turns out to be a great thing for me, I don’t worry/I don’t think,” he sings at the beginning of “Cool Papa Bell.” “Because it’s not my job to worry or to think. Not me. I’m more like—every day I’m here I’m grateful.” Anyone familiar with Simon's music knows he must be talking about someone else; his genius is being able to sell the line anyway.


The British rapper’s third album is likely to be his most polarizing: He trades rapping and electronic beats for ballads and rage rock. The results are largely underwhelming.

Ugly

Good luck trying to ignore Slowthai. Over the course of his short yet eventful career, the British rapper has never shied away from bold choices, audacious pronouncements, or confrontational antics. He’s the type of guy who can walk into an awards show as the “hero of the year” and become the most hated man in the room by the time he’s escorted offstage by security. This antagonistic stance hasn’t just made headlines, though: From the moment he dropped the hard-nosed “T N Biscuits” in 2018, it was clear Slowthai would become one of the biggest personalities in English rap. He was quickly named the “voice of a generation” (he seems to prefer “Brexit bandit”) after dropping his debut album, 2019’s Nothing Great About Britain, which addressed the UK’s overlapping political crises through street-level tales. The follow-up, 2021’s TYRON, felt like an intentional retreat—more personal, less political—though it was unusually focused for a double album and only served to fortify his fanbase. With album three, the rapper born Tyron Frampton squares up for a fight with that very fanbase. What better way to upset rap fans than with a rock record?
Two caveats worth mentioning about Ugly: The record doesn’t abandon beat music entirely, and there’s plenty of precedent for Slowthai’s detour into rock. He was one of the first British rappers to embrace the blown-out, aggressive sounds of SoundCloud rap, a movement with plenty of punk in its DNA. He’s peppered his albums with throbbing post-punk instrumentals, jumped on stage with IDLES, and even covered Elliott Smith (poorly). So while the kids moshing at his shows won’t be scandalized to hear guitars on these songs, they may be surprised by the album’s overall shape. Ugly features as much singing as rapping, a number of slower ballads, and little of the grimy futurism that defined Slowthai’s compelling early work.
Slowthai takes a lot of big swings on Ugly and a few of his experiments connect. Album opener “Yum” is the closest thing here to a traditional Slowthai song and its bacchanalian subject matter (“I won’t stop ’til I’m in a coma”) and industrial gallop play to his strengths. “Feel Good” aims for the dumb fun of mall punk and hits the mark with chipmunk vocals, a bouncy bassline, and a repetitive chorus. “Sooner” splits the difference between synth-pop and sock hop: The jaunty instrumental undercuts Slowthai’s self-deprecating muttering and lends the album some welcome verve.
As a rapper, Slowthai has plenty of technical ability and charisma but the same can’t be said for his singing. One of his signature moves is to change the pitch of his voice mid-line, a trick that makes for an unmistakable rap delivery but sounds like poor pitch coming from a singer. The result is that many of the songs on Ugly feel almost like karaoke performances. “Falling” aims for Pixies but is sorely missing Black Francis’ impassioned mania (the title track, which features Irish post-punks Fontaines D.C., pulls off this sound more successfully). “Tourniquet” answers a question no one asked: What would a Radiohead ballad sound like with hardcore vocals? “Never Again'' weaves a tale about a chance encounter with an ex that ends in tragedy—it’s clearly meant to be the record’s poignant centerpiece. But the song, which features choruses sung by Ethan P. Flynn and verses rapped by Slowthai, feels disjointed and awkward, like an imaginary, shelved collaboration between David Bowie and Mike Skinner.
Ugly’s worst song isn’t even a rock song. On “Fuck It Puppet,” Slowthai contorts his voice into various shapes while rapping over a dry, boom-bap beat. But the song’s conceit—Slowthai engaging in a shouting match with the suicidal voice in his head—brings to mind his least flattering comparison: Eminem. In the years following Slowthai’s debut, SoundCloud rap mutated into “rage rap,” a subgenre that dials up the (almost exclusively) male aggression in a manner that’s clearly indebted to Slim Shady. But that sound is now already past its sell-by date and its principal architects are moving on. It would be perfect timing for an artist as thoughtful as Slowthai to interrogate or at least complicate rap’s infatuation with male anger. Instead, on songs like “Fuck It Puppet,” he just lets the rage flow.
This lack of vision is what makes Ugly so disappointing. Slowthai’s work as a rapper is far more dynamic and vital; there’s no real sense for why these songs needed to be rock songs. On Nothing Great About Britain, Slowthai’s anger—against institutions, injustices, and his own rough upbringing—felt righteous and representational. Here it feels vague and nihilistic (“I’m sick of thinking there’s a reason I’m here/We’re just puppets in a simulation,” he muses on “Ugly”), far less nuanced than the reflective bars on 2021’s TYRON. It’s possible to make heavy music that directs its anger toward worthy targets, tackles introspection with maturity, or doesn’t rely on rage for catharsis at all. Ugly sounds like something far less interesting: the sort of generically angsty guitar music that only a ’90s major label executive could love.


For 1980’s End of the Century, the Ramones abandoned their tough, fast and loud dynamic to work with Phil Spector. It was one of the oddest pairings in punk history.

End of the Century

The Ramones’ debut 1976 album was a perfect, explosive introduction. The Queens band stripped rock‘n’roll back to the studs with powerful, fucked up songs about huffing glue, Nazis falling in love, and bat fights. It didn’t chart well in the U.S., but they had a cult following, and when they toured England, Johnny Rotten and Joe Strummer showed up. Two more classics followed: Leave Home and Rocket to Russia. With just three albums, the Ramones canon was strong and their formula was unwavering. This was punk's ground zero.
Then, Tommy Ramone resigned as the band’s drummer—life on the road wasn’t treating him well—and decided to do what he did best: produce Ramones albums. With Marky Ramone behind the kit and Tommy behind the boards, they made 1978’s Road to Ruin. For all its high points, it was their weakest effort and biggest commercial flop to date. Contemporaries like the Talking Heads and the Clash were about to reach new heights; the Ramones decided that a change was in order. For 1980’s End of the Century, they dumped Tommy—their guiding hand in the studio since day one—and hired Phil Spector.
Consider that for a minute—the beacons of rock‘n’roll restraint hired the “wall of sound, little symphonies for the kids” wildcard. Marky Ramone described the producer rolling up to his hotel room with a cape, bodyguard, bottle of kosher wine, and unprompted tirade about the 1966 death of Lenny Bruce. He was an untethered, erratic, odd man, and that’s sugarcoating it heavily. This was the same Phil Spector who kept Ronnie Spector locked in a closet, shot a bullet into the ceiling of John Lennon’s studio, and held a gun to Leonard Cohen’s neck.
It’s amazing to think that anyone would hire him at that point, but they had their reasons: Sales were slipping, Spector persistently offered his services, and their label was willing to pay the legend’s rate. If the Ramones were interested in becoming more popular, why not roll the dice with a guy who made “Be My Baby” and “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling”?
After he reached his creative and commercial peak in the ’60s, Spector briefly left the business when Ike & Tina Turner’s “River Deep —Mountain High” failed to become a bigger hit. He returned to the game at the request of the Beatles. He was responsible for finishing up Let It Be (to the disdain of Paul McCartney) and co-produced two of the best solo Beatles albums: Plastic Ono Band and All Things Must Pass. There was the aforementioned fraught Leonard Cohen album Death of a Ladies’ Man. His other projects, with their huge production value, weren’t all that visible—records with Cher (including a Nilsson collaboration), Dion, Ronnie Spector, and Darlene Love.
Given his penchant for schmaltz, there was no reason to expect Spector to show interest in punk. But at the urging of close friends Dan and David Kessel (sons of Wrecking Crew legend Barney Kessel and fans of L.A.’s punk scene), Phil saw the Ramones at the Whisky a Go Go in 1977. Every time the Ramones came through L.A. after that, he’d attend their shows, meet them, and give them the same line: “Do you guys wanna be great or good? ‘Cause I’ll make you great.”
Spector’s infatuation with the band definitely made sense. The Ramones were loud, back to basics rock‘n’roll in an era of disco, yacht rock, prog, the Eagles, Journey, Boston, and Kansas. Their song structures were simple and the harmonies were there. Early ’60s pop was a key part of the band’s DNA—some of their first covers were “California Sun,” “Let’s Dance,” and “Surfin’ Bird.” It was gnarly music unafraid of being pretty, and while their nuts-and-bolts songs appealed to Spector, he also loved how irreverent they were. (For reference, ctrl+F the word “fuck” in Spector’s 1969 interview with Rolling Stone—dude had a filthy mouth.)
While Marky Ramone described Spector as a drinking buddy and friend, his bandmates had a far more acrimonious relationship with the producer. Dee Dee and Phil hated each other. The bassist and songwriter was taking lots of sedatives at the time, which may have contributed to his paranoia about Spector’s guns. In his memoir, he told a story about Phil pointing a gun at his heart before forcing the band to stay all night at his house while he sang them “Baby, I Love You.” Marky would later deny stories about the Ramones being threatened or held hostage by Spector, though Dee Dee always remained firm in his account. The drummer confirmed that multiple guns were present throughout the recording process: Spector apparently carried four on his person at any given moment, which doesn’t include what his bodyguards had on them or the turrets mounted to his house.
Johnny, the band’s general who instituted fines for lateness, was not a fan of Spector’s studio perfectionism and verbal abuse. One of the most famous scenes from the album’s sessions transpired when Spector forced Johnny to play the opening chord of “Rock‘n’Roll High School” repeatedly for hours on end. It was an attempt to get the same sustained chord effect from the “Hard Day’s Night” intro, and it was taking forever. This band was used to bashing out albums quickly, and now, they were being asked to draw everything out—to ponder the resonance of every chord. At some point, after appearing to grow increasingly agitated with Johnny’s performance, the producer started laying all of his guns out on a table in the studio. “After he shot that girl, I thought, ‘I’m surprised he didn’t shoot someone every year,’” wrote Johnny.
Joey was clearly the reason why Spector wanted to work with the band at all. Phil loved Joey. The first time Phil met the gangly frontman, he showered him with praise, calling his voice “one in a million.” David Kessel hypothesized that the two hit it off over rock history and their common “New York street-corner” upbringing. Spector would refer to the band as “Joey and the Ramones,” which obviously irked Johnny (who especially hated the producer saying “it’s all you, Joey”). There were private, late night vocal coaching sessions, and at least two different people present for their interactions claimed that Phil saw Joey as “a male Ronnie Spector.” It’s hard to fathom what that means, especially considering Phil’s horrific relationship with Ronnie, but that vague insight helps explain why Joey ended up singing one of the most famous Ronettes songs.
Even with a full understanding of End of the Century’s context, “Baby, I Love You” is jarring. Coming directly off the scorched earth “fight for fun” mercenary basher “Let’s Go,” the B-side of the record opens with this lavish, white gloves string section. Joey’s voice teases, pouts, and pleads; everything feels saccharine. The Ramones had tons of success with ballads in the past. “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend,” for example—Johnny’s guitar sound was still tough, and Joey’s performance, while sweet, was stiff. Now, assisted by Spector’s wall of sound arrangements and hours of vocal coaching, Joey was singing his heart out—hitting high notes and emoting broadly. No other Ramones appear on the track, which means there’s no Johnny Ramone guitar crunch or nearly-flat Dee Dee Ramone harmonies to offset Joey. It’s all billowing, pillowy softness: wedding music.
It’s the most plain example of Spector’s influence over the band’s sound, and it illustrates his narrow understanding of what made the Ramones great. Yes, Joey Ramone was a treasure whose instrument was unrivaled, and in that sense, Spector was right to try and pull out the best performance from the singer. But his focus on Joey seemed to undercut how he approached the rest of the band, who were readily swapped out with session players. “To this day, I still have no idea how they made the album End of the Century or who actually played bass on it,” Dee Dee quipped in his book.
Several times throughout the record, songs are forced to face the bar set by previous versions. Spector’s “Rock‘n’Roll High School” lives in the shadow of the original Ed Stasium version from the film. Next to the comparably crisp, direct original, Spector’s wall of sound vocal recordings gives the track a soupy, echoing effect—not the ideal soundtrack for Riff Randall blowing up her school. Then, in a move highlighting the band’s status as students of the game, they wrote sequels to Ramones songs. (There are several precedents in rock history for the sequel song: Buddy Holly’s Peggy Sue got married, Lesley Gore got her revenge on Judy, Chubby Checker twisted again like we did last summer, and so forth.) “The Return of Jackie and Judy” is a subpar Ramones song that continues the narrative of a great Ramones song. The same thing happens on “This Ain’t Havana,” which is a goofy, worse flip of “Havana Affair” that’s built around Joey singing the word “banana.”
The Dee Dee and Richard Hell-penned “Chinese Rock” was already recorded, masterfully, by Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers in 1977. Early on, Dee Dee’s bandmates rejected the song because they wanted to avoid recording more drug songs. (This begs the question: Why draw the line at Carbona, glue, and daddy’s dope?) When they were picking out songs for End of the Century, the Ramones came around on the song, which makes sense—it’s one of Dee Dee’s best. It’s easily the best example of the band’s old instincts kicking in, as the End of the Century version is faster, heavier, and more frantic than the Heartbreakers’ original. Frantic is a good look for “Chinese Rock,” especially because “everything is in the pawn shop” is a perfect line about living in junkie squalor.
The narrative about End of the Century is convenient if you just look at “Baby, I Love You” and “Chinese Rock”—that the ballads are lousy and the aggressive punk songs rule. It’s not that simple. “Danny Says” is the best song on the album and maybe one of the best ballads in Ramones history. It’s a gentle, beautifully performed song where Joey complains about touring. The thrill of meeting fans at record stores and hearing their songs on the radio is nothing compared to having a full day off. This is the exact zone where the Ramones work best—where sentimentality is cut with cynicism and where Joey’s cooing vocals are met with Johnny’s beefy guitar.
Spector labored for about six months on the album’s mixing, and right to the very end, he was drunk and abusive. Some of his work paid off, with songs like “Do You Remember Rock‘n’Roll Radio?” sounding appropriately enormous and triumphant with its sax skronk, radio announcer, and pulsing organ. Elsewhere, it seems like he was just overthinking it, and in the process, undermining a lot of what made the band powerful to begin with. Throughout “I’m Affected,” there are these big, thunderous drum fills that momentarily eclipse everything else. Where a few chords from Johnny could break up the melody and move the song forward with power and authority, Phil instead opts for a big production moment that swallows the band’s guitar sound. It’s a detail, but one that makes an otherwise powerful band sound feeble.
The Ramones had worked longer and harder on End of the Century than any album before it. They dealt with Spector’s fits, drunken rage, and firearms. Aside from Marky, the band wasn’t excited about the final product. Johnny hated “Baby, I Love You” and talked about how embarrassed he was by the song. The album technically did its intended job—it charted higher than any Ramones record that had come before it. Granted, it peaked at No. 44 and was outshone on the charts by the band's peers (the Clash’s London Calling, Blondie’s Eat to the Beat, etc.)
The album also marked Spector's unofficial retirement; he would stop working in the studio pretty much altogether after the death of John Lennon. His final production credits came on a 2003 Starsailor album, and that same year, he was arrested on suspicion of Lana Clarkson’s murder. He went to prison in 2009. Marky Ramone made an appearance in the courtroom to support his old friend.
It’s a record that sits at an interesting crossroads—the post-Tommy Ramones seeking the guidance of an almost-retired, wildly unpredictable, potentially dangerous Phil Spector. The result is a disorienting album with broad jumps in quality and tone from song to song. Where the first Ramones albums could shift seamlessly from ballad to banger (from “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” to “Chain Saw”), End of the Century never seems to find its connective tissue. It had some of the Ramones' flimsiest songs, and too often, key Ramones weren’t involved in their creation.
On “Do You Remember Rock‘n’Roll Radio,” Joey seems to summarize his conversations with Spector—a song about how good rock music used to be. This conceit is where the Ramones lose the narrative. On early efforts, they condensed “California Sun” into a punk rock blast—using the language of the past to create something contemporary and vital. Their cover of “Baby, I Love You” is a museum piece—a pound-for-pound attempt to relive Spector’s golden years. The Ramones even romanticize old Ramones songs, revisiting their own mythology instead of carving out new narratives. “It’s the end, the end of the ’70s,” sang Joey. The Ramones lamented the end of their most unstoppable era, and then they refused to move forward.


Mirabella Karyanova’s debut EP for Nina Kraviz’s Trip label pairs playful Russian-language vocal manipulation with woozy electronic pop modeled after minimal techno’s trippy specifications.

nikolai reptile

If the shady Russian spies from “Stranger Things”’ telekinetic netherworld made electronic pop, it might sound a little like nikolai reptile, Shadowax’s debut EP for Nina Kraviz’s Trip: mysterious, disorienting, and faintly ridiculous. This is a record that dares you to understand it, safe in the knowledge you will never quite get the measure of its shifting sands.
For some, initial confusion may be shaded by the Russian-language vocals, the work of Mirabella Karyanova, whose recordings as Ishome mix ambience, techno, and IDM. But there is something in nikolai reptile’s wonderful whirl of disorientation that goes beyond language into the very timbre of the voice. The chorus of the brilliantly topsy-turvy title track uses the call and response between a somber, apparently male voice and a clipped female tone as its understated but powerfully sticky hook. “What About Me” wrings maximum discomfort out of a ghostly whistle and stuttering vocal effect; “Ochen” is an exercise in the rhythmic potential of the larynx, with vocal samples clipped, layered, and shifted until they spray like hits from a drum.
This vocal manipulation is reminiscent of Shadowax’s previous excursion on Trip, “I Want to Be a Stewardess,” a sulphurous, coiled highlight of the 2018 compilation Don’t Mess With Cupid, ’Cause Cupid Ain’t Stupid. But where that track built to a frenzy of boiling breakbeats, the first three songs on nikolai reptile are marked by an economy that is comparable to the best minimal techno—yet here that precision is compressed into four-minute pop songs rather than stretched paper-thin over k-hole epics.
These three tracks consist of little more than vocals, bass, and drum machine, each element there because it has to be, rather than for unnecessary effect. Such restraint allows the listener to revel in the brilliance of the individual ingredients Karyanova has assembled: the undulating bass tone on “nikolai reptile” that swarms like a cloud of hungry locusts; the shuffling drum pattern and percussive bass echo on “What About Me”; the gulping kick drum on “Ochen.” Each creates its own sublime, if unlikely, hook; each is just the slightest bit silly, like the best pop music should be.
Just as you think you’re getting to grips with nikolai reptile, though, it changes gear abruptly. Closing track “Mortal Talking” sounds like a mischievous clone of 1990s acid trance: all galloping kick drums, clattering snare rushes, sinus-clearing hi-hats, and spiraling TB-303 lines. Dusted with an inkling of Karyanova’s vocal trickery and rhythmic invention, it’s sufficient to suggest the song belongs on the EP even without a clean connection with the other tracks.
Such a radical left turn may come at the expense of the EP’s overall listenability—my fingers tend to hover over the skip button as “Mortal Talking” comes into view—but after “I Want to Be a Stewardess” and 2018’s A & B EP, where Karyanova covered old-school Russian hip-hop in a skeletal tech style, it only enhances the producer’s burgeoning reputation as a mastermind of beautifully erratic moves. Much like “Stranger Things” itself, nikolai reptile is a brew of unlikely individual ingredients, but its heart bleeds pure pop.


The comedian and musician brings his dry absurdity and taste for 1970s singer-songwriters to a novel venture: a fake breakup album.

Tim Heidecker: What the Brokenhearted Do...

What the Brokenhearted Do...

As a singer-songwriter, Tim Heidecker maintains an intimate connection to mankind at its most pathetic. This extends to the most powerful men—his 2017 set of protest songs about the president—to the most mundane. On 2016’s In Glendale, he set music to the kinds of banal stories you reserve for lulls in conversation around people with whom you have very little in common: the time you ran into a celebrity in Los Angeles, that morning when you were too hungover to go into the office. Where Tim Heidecker the comedian is interested in exploding these familiar scenes with surrealism, nihilism, or his trademark is-he-even-kidding-anymore dickish persistence, his songwriting presents adult life in the dry, unromantic scenes it’s mostly filled with. The joke is that there is no joke; start getting used to it.
A breakup album seems like the logical next step for this fascination. It helps that Heidecker’s musical influences—Los Angeles heroes like Randy Newman, Harry Nilsson, and Warren Zevon—are known for making their ugliest thoughts sound clever and sweet. Produced by Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado to sound like the spur-of-the-moment brainstorming session that it probably was, Heidecker’s latest album, What the Brokenhearted Do…, captures vignettes of the newly divorced in all their moments of crisis and stasis. You sense that he sourced his pain from a long history of classic rock bummer anthems, and there’s something inherently entertaining in hearing him carve out a space among them.
Of course, there’s one thing that all those breakup albums have that Heidecker does not: actual heartbreak. He’s been clear about this record being “non-autobiographical.” It was inspired by a rumor spread by right-wing trolls about his wife leaving him, and the pain in the songs rarely feels like more than just a writing prompt. In the place of emotional specificity or raw nerves, he gives us spot-on genre exercises (the On the Beach drag of “Finally Getting Over,” the sunny jangle of “Insomnia”) and a few keyed-in moments of inspiration. “When I Get Up” is an incessantly upbeat pop song that makes a point of going nowhere. As with his brilliant comedy series “On Cinema at the Cinema” and “Decker,” Heidecker’s dry delivery and the seemingly strict template belie how much craft is actually going on under the surface. The pose of rudderlessness and effortlessness, as always, suits him.
Spreading this mood across 11 folk-rock tracks, Heidecker seems to take a “Well, how hard can it be?” approach to songwriting—an openness to cliché, stream-of-consciousness, and the first rhyme that comes to him. It’s a tendency that also shows why he is particularly gifted at parodying (and forecasting) the late-career work of artists like Bob Dylan. (“As great as he is,” Heidecker once observed, “He only has so many moves.”) His own songwriting takes similar short-cuts, as he limits his scope to the immediately visible and moves as swiftly as possible from one idea to the next. In the music video for “When I Get Up,” Heidecker plays himself pitching an elaborately choreographed visual accompaniment, only to be told that the budget is not nearly big enough to accommodate the concept. “We’ll figure something out,” he mutters in defeat, conceding to the low stakes of this type of project as a whole.
Even with its humble aspirations, Brokenhearted makes a compelling case for Heidecker as a musician, beyond his more recognizable creative outlets. His career has long been defined by an instinctual drive to not repeat himself; as soon as one of his ideas starts to gain traction in popular culture, he’s often moved onto something new, in a different medium, with different collaborators. This deep-rooted adventurousness and indifference to popular perception actually aligns him more with fellow indie artists on Jagjaguwar than any comedian he came up with in the ’00s, and by this metric, Brokenhearted is his fullest musical statement yet. In mining songwriting’s most fruitful subject matter for its most unglamorous revelations, Heidecker leads us toward a punchline consistent within his catalog: it’s a breakup album, with all the heart scooped out.


The pair’s second record of lo-fi rap collaborations is technically bulletproof, the bars masterfully patterned and relayed with gusto. Still, the songs don’t always fulfill their potential.

$mokebreak EP

Fly Anakin is a marvel to behold, the kind of lightning-in-a-bottle technician who makes you drop what you’re doing to better absorb his enunciation, syllable placement, and superhuman breath control. Panama Plus, his 2017 outing with fellow Richmond, Virginia rapper Koncept Jack$on and producer Tuamie, was the best sort of scene record, a distinctive DIY showcase for a group of eager upstarts. His Mutant Academy crew has since unleashed a torrent of collaborative tapes, cultivating a spontaneous sound built on rough soul samples. FlySiifu’s, last year’s full-length collaboration between Fly Anakin and Pink Siifu, was one of the collective’s most deconstructed efforts to date, with 22 short, discursive tracks approximating a dorm-room haze.
For his part, Pink Siifu is a trenchant songwriter and a creator of ambitious, genre-fluid concept records. He’s also somewhat enigmatic; his rap delivery is laid-back nearly to the point of abstraction. The contrast between his muted presence and Fly Anakin’s breakneck bars could be a compelling Thunder-and-Lightning routine, but lack of structure made FlySiifu’s hard to pin down. It’s a problem that’s plagued Fly Anakin’s recent work—he’s an unforgettable performer, yet the songs themselves don’t leave much of an impression, with a combination of choppy loops and free-associative bars hanging in dull suspension. Even “Live at the Barbeque” had a hook.
The pair’s 10-track follow-up $mokebreak adds a number of guests to the equation, which helps break the monotony. But often, it’s a case of one step forward and two back. The songs are longer and more lethargic than virtually everything on FlySiifu’s. “3 Dope Boys” and “Remote Relocation” have bright chords and evocative samples, but the marathon verses feel interminable; the Chuck Strangers production “Oatmeal” has a chorus, but, alas, no drums. Fly Anakin in particular sounds compromised by the slackened pace—he’s starting to resemble Pro Zay and SeKwence, a pair of raspy oddballs who until recently were lesser disciples.
With features from Mavi, Yungmorpheus, and Richmond natives 3waySlim and Big Kahuna OG, $mokebreak assembles a pretty staggering amount of talent. These guys are collectively way too good at rapping for the record to be a total letdown, and from a technical perspective it’s bulletproof, the bars masterfully patterned and relayed with gusto. Still, these songs aren’t really about anything—not only are the verses incohesive, the bars themselves feel disjointed. “Tha Divide” is a five-and-a-half-minute mélange of sex raps and battle rhymes; you could transpose practically any of the couplets and it wouldn’t make any difference. One wonders if continuity was yet another casualty of coronavirus, if distance prevented the collaborators from effectively bouncing ideas off each other.
In the wake of Earl Sweatshirt’s Some Rap Songs, a flood of bookish rappers embraced the lo-fi aesthetic, finding the style apt for somber autobiography. Neoclassical acts like Roc Marciano and Griselda have long used one- and two-bar samples as stripped-down templates for colorful theatrics, ensuring their performances remained in the spotlight. But there’s a fine line between minimalism and disregard, and it’s a little perplexing that rappers as meticulous as Siifu and Anakin consistently opt for such anonymous production. At times it feels like a deliberate rejection of frilly gimmicks, their ability to redeem sludgy breakbeats further proof of their brilliance. Just hearing them rhyme is all the proof anyone should need.

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