Dev Hynes' third album as Blood Orange is a searing and soothing personal document, striking the same resonant chords as Kendrick Lamar’s *To Pimp a Butterfly or *D’Angelo’s Black Messiah.

Freetown Sound

In July 2015, at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, British singer/composer Dev Hynes released “Do You See My Skin Through the Flames?”, an 11-minute assessment of race and self-worth at a time of intense struggle between blacks and law enforcement. “This is not from my forthcoming album,” Hynes asserted, “just some things on my mind.” The cover art depicted an elegant black figure—his back straight, his fingers clutched deep into his own flesh. The image showed strength; on the song, Hynes unpacked the yin and yang of everyday life as a black person: “I’m proud of my name, I’m proud of my dad, I’m proud of my family, but it’s very strange to have to carry that… we all carry that, every black person carries that.” To live black is to live conflicted. There’s the urge to live freely and be accepted, even if the world at large is still uncomfortable with people of color. We feel an innate sense to protect our own kind and hold each other close. We are prisoners of perception; our culture pillaged, our style and vernacular mocked and imitated, only to be told we’re not good enough to be equal.
Freetown Sound, Hynes’ third album as Blood Orange, arrives days after Baltimore police officer Caesar Goodson Jr., who drove the van in which 25-year-old Freddie Gray was fatally injured, was found not guilty on all charges against him. That same day, a grand jury in Collin County, Texas, decided there wasn’t enough evidence to indict former McKinney police officer Eric Casebolt for slamming a black teenage girl to the ground at a pool party. June 25th would’ve been Tamir Rice’s 14th birthday, but he—a black preteen—was shot by a Cleveland police officer who thought Rice pulled a handgun from his waistband. Earlier this month, 49 people died in what’s being called the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, after a gunman walked into a gay Orlando nightclub and opened fire. And just last week, the United Kingdom—where Hynes is from—voted to leave the European Union, sparking chants of racism from liberals.
Freetown feels shaded by all these events, even if public outcry over racial injustice has dissipated slightly over the last year. Hynes offers a broad view of black culture, using vocal clips and spoken-word poetry to craft a multifaceted narrative of historically underserved people. “Black can get you over, black can sit you down,” says a sampled voice toward the end of “With Him,” from Marlon Riggs’ 1994 documentary, Black is...Black Ain’t. On “Love Ya,” we hear author Ta-Nehisi Coates outline a very real conflict facing most minorities: figuring out what to wear—and how to wear it—as to not intimidate others. “How was I gonna wear my pants?” he recalled. “What shoes was I gonna wear? Who was I gonna walk with to school?” Most people take these things for granted, but as a minority, your fashion sense can be seen as a threat. “Hands Up” references the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida, where George Zimmerman—a neighborhood watch volunteer—shot the unarmed teenager and claimed self-defense. “Keep your hood off when you’re walking…” Hynes warns. “Sure enough, they’re gonna take your body.” Throughout Freetown, he speaks directly to those who look like him—the overlooked and under-appreciated, the persecuted and misunderstood—consoling his community while highlighting our collective grace. “Chance” treads the same ground as D’Angelo’s “The Charade,” using self-hurt to dissect racial inequality. “All I ever wanted was a chance for myself,” Hynes moans through a voice steeped in sadness.
Formerly known as Lightspeed Champion, Hynes used to play in punk-rock band Test Icicles before moving on to create folk/pop hybrids. 2011’s Coastal Grooves—Hynes’ first album as Blood Orange—combined new wave and electro-soul, even if the results just barely scratched the surface of what we hear from him now. Freetown is more expansive than 2013’s stellar Cupid Deluxe, but it moves quicker, packing funk and ‘80s R&B into a coherent set. Between his nuanced baritone and creative approach, the album resembles a Saul Williams release, as something overtly political and complex while pulling in many different genres. Songs like “Desirée” and “Best to You” are especially nostalgic, employing festive soul grooves and tropical dance. “Juicy 1-4,” “But You,” and “Thank You” take tonal cues from Michael Jackson, mimicking the optimistic glow of ballads like “Human Nature” and “Man in the Mirror.” In a good way, Hynes is able to pull from these musicians while crafting an aesthetic that’s uniquely his. He takes on a director’s role at times, stepping aside vocally and allowing his features to shine. Hynes mostly sings with and writes for women, which adds another layer of dignity to his art. Nelly Furtado takes the lead on “Hadron Collider” and Blondie frontwoman Deborah Harry sounds perfectly at home on “E.V.P.,” a rubbery funk instrumental seemingly plucked from that band's discography.
The album title pays homage to Freetown, Sierra Leone, the country’s capital city and hometown to Hynes’ father. The recording feels communal despite its political themes, whether he’s sampling particular African dialect, or giving poet Ashlee Haze space on “By Ourselves” to salute femininity. On these and other songs, the words are searing and soothing, almost always at the same time. My in-laws—also from Freetown—speak reverently of the villages and family and friends who still live there. They reminisce about the beach and the sense of togetherness they felt. They acknowledge the extreme poverty and the 2014 Ebola outbreak, but say it’s still a land of true beauty, holding a deep spiritual connection you have to feel for yourself. You sense that warmth throughout Freetown Sound, even if the music doesn’t pull directly from the sounds of the area.
Freetown scans as a capital-B Black record, hitting the same social chords as Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, and Kamasi Washington’s The Epic. Like those albums, Freetown resonates with everyone sagging under the weight of systemic oppression. “My album is for everyone told they’re not black enough, too black, too queer, not queer the right way … it’s a clapback,” Hynes told Entertainment Weekly in a recent interview. Freetown represents the innermost workings of a man wading through his own insecurities, holding his flaws and weaknesses up to the light for everyone to see. He’s trying to make sense of himself, his race and sexuality, while taking a hard look at what this world has become. The future isn’t so hopeless, but we won’t make it if we don’t forge the path together.


St. Vincent, Kurt Vile, Sharon Van Etten, Iggy Pop, and more contribute to this tasteful if predictable cover album, faring best when their own identities shine through the music.

Various Artists: I’ll Be Your Mirror: A Tribute to the Velvet Underground and Nico

The Velvet Underground & Nico is one of rock music’s sacred texts. More than 50 years since its release, its heady cocktail of ostrich-tuned proto-punk, droning viola, and streetwise poetry has lost little of its potency. Part of the fun has always been finding new details within the VU’s history, and now there’s more to sink your teeth into with Todd Haynes’ upcoming documentary and a star-studded tribute to the band’s 1967 classic. The track-by-track cover album I’ll Be Your Mirror is the final project from the late producer Hal Willner, a longtime friend of Lou Reed. The artists Willner invited to the project span large-font festival headliners and up, leaving little room for unpredictability. People have been reinterpreting these songs and smoothing out their transgressive edges for decades, but the best of these covers prove that there are still surprising places to take them.
R.E.M. kept the VU’s torch burning during the 1980s, covering three of their songs, thus making Michael Stipe a natural choice to take on the opening “Sunday Morning.” It’s a pleasure to hear his voice alongside Bill Frissell on guitar, as synths and clarinets lend the song a patient and regal air. Elsewhere, Sharon Van Etten and Angel Olsen slow “Femme Fatale” to the pace of a mournful movie trailer, while Andrew Bird and Lucius transform “Venus in Furs” into twee orchestral pop. The latter ode to sadomasochism no longer sounds especially sexy or dangerous, but the eerie harmonies combined with Bird’s frenetic violin are an effective update nonetheless.
The album’s other team-ups vary in success. St. Vincent and pianist Thomas Bartlett’s take on “All Tomorrow’s Parties” is a far cry from her more radical covers, like her shredding take on the Pop Group. Instead, its spacey ambience and spoken-word vocoder is closer in spirit to “O Superman,” the signature song of Reed’s partner, Laurie Anderson. Thurston Moore, Bobby Gillespie, and Fucked Up drummer Jonah Falco tackling “Heroin” is a thrilling prospect on paper, but after chasing the dragon for seven minutes, it never really connects. Iggy Pop and Matt Sweeney’s “European Son,” on the other hand, is a feedback-laced freakout that sounds just as unhinged as the original.
The artists who fare best on I’ll Be Your Mirror emphasize their own strengths. Dublin post-punk band Fontaines D.C. inject “The Black Angel’s Death Song” with enough yammering snarl to sound like an Irish Mark E. Smith. King Princess puts a queer spin on the toxic jealousy of “There She Goes Again,” while Kurt Vile’s “Run Run Run” lets a choogling outro ride far beyond the original’s rolling chug. The biggest letdown is Matt Berninger’s straightforward stab at “I’m Waiting for the Man,” which has neither the jittery pulse of the original nor the forceful delivery of Nico’s own cover from the early ’80s.
After decades of similar covers, it shouldn’t be surprising that the best songs on I’ll Be Your Mirror are the ones where artists imprint their own identity on the music, rather than aping a band that already inspired countless strains of rock, punk, and experimental music. And while it’s hard to imagine how anyone involved with the VU’s album would feel about this tasteful tribute, its very existence still speaks to the force of the original vision. After all this time, artists are still peeling back layers of the banana.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The pop punk band Basement's latest album is less Warped Tour and more KROQ Weenie Roast: the depressive offspring of Mineral and Jimmy Eat World.

Promise Everything

A Tumblr search of the band Basement's name reveals scores of viral fan-made content, from lyrically-inspired tattoo sheets to manicured shots of attractive young fans rocking their new merch. The Suffolk band's anguished romanticism continues to resonate with fans, primarily because it’s packaged in brooding rock tunes just sweet enough to get stuck in your head, but woozy and frequently dissonant enough to avoid sounding overproduced. After a two-year break, they’ve returned even more eager to explore that melodic direction with their third full-length, Promise Everything. It’s less Warped Tour and more KROQ Weenie Roast: the depressive offspring of Mineral and Jimmy Eat World.
Andrew Fisher’s fluid baritone is easily Basement’s best instrument. It’s plush on the ears, complementary to the guitars, and distinctive in its quivering tone—but on Promise Everything, it becomes the band’s crutch. The frontman relies on little more than his scratchy melisma to fuel the album, wringing every sustained note he can out of vaguely-worded howlers like "All I need for flight/ Is feeling from inside" and "Tear my heart off my sleeve/ And tell me you believe in me."
His bandmates don’t help things, churning out garden-variety grunge riffs as if on autopilot (now and again, they’ll toss some atonal notes into the mix, a bit of catnip to distract from the incessant mid-tempo buzz ballads). When the title track’s chorus rolls around —if your eyes haven’t rolled back in your head first, that is—it’s smirk-inducing: "When I’m high, I’m high/ When I’m low, I’m low." It’s low all right: no manic energy in sight, a cardinal sin on an album rooted in aggression.
Occasionally, the dull roar manifests in some solid rock songs. Awash in knotted fretwork and lilting melodies, "Brothers Keeper" is as good a kick-off–or maybe a kiss-off?–as any, a textured introduction to the album’s acrid ambivalence (epitomized in the chorus' don’t-call-me-I’ll-call-you refrain: "Feelings come and go/ I will let you know.") The fuzzy torch song "Aquasun" delights as well, swathing a vulnerable chorus in bleary, blanketed guitars that recall Disc 2 of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Lastly, there's "Submission," the best show of songcraft by far: At last, the band perk up a bit and play with contrast, pitting airy oo-oo-oos against palm-muted guitars, screams against whispers, lover against lover. But while these standouts quash fears of Basement's creative stasis, they're stilll not enough to give them the gravitas of a great band.


Still not old enough to legally drink in most states but old enough to go to war, suburban-Chicago garage-punks the Orwells are fully aware they’re reinventing a wheel that’s been essentially worn down to the rim. Their first major-label outing suggests that the Orwells clearly have loftier ambitions than cracking the Midwest garage circuit.

Disgraceland

When the Orwells appeared on "Letterman" last January, they did exactly what any upstart rock ‘n’ roll band making their network television debut should do: make complete asses of themselves. The suburban-Chicago quintet chugged through the first verse of their single “Who Needs You” without incident—but by the second verse, frontman Mario Cuomo (no, not that one) stopped singing as if defying some non-existent CBS lip-sync policy, splayed himself across the floor in front of his monitors to perform a couple of yoga bridge poses, and curled up on the couch to become Dave’s most non-communicative guest since Joaquin Phoenix. If the point of the spectacle was to show just how little they give a fuck about impressing the public, it failed miserably: not only did Dave and Paul Shaffer enthusiastically applaud the performance, they begged the befuddled band to keep playing, before Shaffer just took matters into his own hands. In that moment, you can see the daunting challenge the Orwells are up against: to authentically reinvigorate a style of music that, after nearly 50 years of perpetual garage-rock revivals, can now be so easily neutered into geezer-embraced showbiz shtick.
Still not old enough to legally drink in most states but old enough to go to war, the Orwells are fully aware they’re reinventing a wheel that’s been essentially worn down to the rim. As if the Black Lips-inspired juvie-punk of their 2012 debut, Remember When, didn’t make their allegiance to snot-rock tradition obvious, the album was laced with samples of old Elvis interviews and 1950s-era preachers railing against the delinquent effects of rock ‘n’ roll. (Interim B-sides, meanwhile, were given titles like “Open Your Eyes (A Misfits Ripoff)”.) The King connection continues with the band’s first major-label outing, Disgraceland, though this time, the Orwells clearly have loftier ambitions than cracking the Rust Belt garage circuit. With the alt-rock production dream team of Dave Sitek, Chris Coady, and Jim Abbiss behind the boards, the goal appears to be nothing less than supply their generation with an Is This It to call their own—a midwest-slacker answer to the sort of urbane, effortlessly cool rock ‘n’ roll records the Strokes stopped making 10 years ago.
For their part, the Orwells have cleaned up their act quite nicely, scraping away the surface scuzz to foreground Matt O’Keefe and Dominic Corso’s radiant but not-too-glossy guitar lines, while filling out their sound just enough to justify the big-budget production. Cuomo’s lyrical concerns, however, remain as puerile as ever—Disgraceland essentially constitutes a repetitive Groundhog Day-esque cycle of boozin’ and cruisin’ for “a handful of ass.” Not graced with an especially melodic voice, Cuomo doesn’t so much sing his songs as barge into them—on “Norman,” the chasm between his belligerent delivery and the song’s “Just Like Honey”-ed sway is so wide that it's like he’s doing karaoke to his own band. But Cuomo knows how to exploit his limited range to rousing effect, from the Jim Morrison-esque howls that give the simmering psyched-out eruptions of “The Righteous One” some extra heat, to the excitable anti-authoritarian kiss-offs that transform “Who Needs You” into the Orwells’ own “Last Nite” (in the no-tomorrow, rather than yesterday-evening, sense).
“Who Needs You” is also one of a handful of songs here that hints at another of Cuomo’s favorite indulgences—firearms—betraying the more sinister side to modern-day teenage kicks. As he admits at one point, “My daddy’s got a 12-gauge/ I hope I don’t find it,” an uncannily topical line that’s all the more striking given that it pops up in “Gotta Get Down”, an upbeat bubble-grunge highlight that proves, even if the Orwells don’t become the next Strokes, there’s no shame in being a 21st-century Spacehog. Ultimately, they're at their most engaging when maintaining an ironic distance between subject matter and tone: in contrast to the song’s congenial jangle, “Bathroom Tile Blues” sees Cuomo already expressing his ennui toward a hotel-trotting, model-shagging rock-star lifestyle he has yet to actually achieve. But Disgraceland also proves there’s a fine line between writing songs about being bored and just being boring: the atypically stern lead single “Let It Burn” is nihilism-by-numbers with a hookless chorus, while “Dirty Sheets” offers nothing more than love-’em-and-leave-’em lechery. And yet, in contrast to the instant messianic complex so many would-be rock saviors seem to acquire, Cuomo is refreshingly honest about his band’s shortcomings. As he sings, “From the east and to the west, we ain’t the worst, we ain’t the best.” By that measure, Disgraceland is truth in advertising.


On the former DNA guitarist’s first album in 13 years, Arto Lindsay conjoins abstract noise and tropicália, clamor and glamour, into something unusually beautiful and distinctly his own.

Cuidado Madame

Arto Lindsay is the least known romantic to ever pick up a guitar, in part because he has never learned to play it. Since yowling his way through the seminal no wave outfit DNA, Lindsay has united his vocation and avocation: abstract noise and tropicália balladry. His career is a fascinating and often rewarding study in contradictions. As half of Ambitious Lovers for much of the 1980s, Lindsay didn’t sing so much as talk delicately, examining the structure of a song like a prowler testing a window over Peter Scherer’s keyboard blasts over several albums.
If his impatience registered as energy in search of a sound, then matters settled on his 1996 solo debut O Corpo Sutil: The Subtle Body. Like David Bowie and Everything But the Girl at the time, Lindsay fell in love hard with drum‘n’bass. On exquisite albums like Mundo Civilizado (home of one of the loveliest Al Green covers I’ve heard), the politest of percussive skitters collided against Lindsay’s guitar, which had lost none of its capacity to repel. By integrating clamor into lissome structures, Lindsay tested the possibility of violence in erotic play; his lyrics avoided smut but his guitar reveled in it.
For Cuidado Madame, his studio first album since 2004, Lindsay has changed not a bit: 11 songs, most less than four minutes long. While musicians his age are supposed to record back-to-basics albums, he’s still skronking up his balladry, still won’t leave his plaints well enough alone. A goddamn racket is his idea of a roots move. Take “Uncrossed,” on which Patrick Higgins’ acoustic plucks share headphone space with the pops and scratches of Paul Wilson and Kassa Overall’s programmed tumult. Mediating is Lindsay himself, armed with lines like, “Come unbridled here/Slide from grammar to glamour” sung in his tentative Winnie the Pooh coo. From Grammar to Glamour—how’s that for an Arto Lindsay memoir title?
Tuneful and sometimes absurd, Cuidado Madame honors its title: tangle with this 63-year-old with the proto-Harry Potter glasses and he’ll unleash poesy or, better, his guitar on you. “Grain by Grain,” its first and best track, is a whole erotic city whose commotion is unceasing. “I love my hand writing your name/On your belly,” Lindsay sings over atonal squeals and a glass-smooth synthesizer line. Song after song depicts lovers dividing and dissolving into each other yet the band’s approach is to sever them; the tension is frustrating and beautiful. Melvin Gibbs’ popping bass figures and Wilson’s staccato piano lines compete for attention in the aptly titled “Tangles,” while those in search of a more traditional Lindsay experience will find “Arto vs Arto” a delight—two minutes of six-string scratches over which Lindsay wheezes, grunts, and quite possibly hyperventilates.
Neither refinement nor fulfillment, Cuidado Madame serves as a refutation. Lindsay’s lyrics are spare and precise enough to work on the page—and that’s a rare compliment. But even if they were woolier, his band’s rabid imagination won’t let these songs congeal into boutique hotel background music. Treating genre as map rather than legend, Lindsay inhabits an ever-shifting space of modern cool that confuses appreciation with amalgamation. From Grammar to Glamour—he's more right than we thought.


Matthew Dear has proven himself one of the more prolific new artists of the year. In 2003 alone, he's ...

Leave Luck to Heaven

Matthew Dear has proven himself one of the more prolific new artists of the year. In 2003 alone, he's released a pair of EPs on Spectral Sound (the more house-oriented arm of Ann Arbor's Ghostly International label), recorded for Richie Hawtin's Plus 8 imprint (as False) and Markus Nikolai's Berlin-based Perlon label (as Jabberjaw), and now finally delivers his debut full-length, Leave Luck to Heaven. It's no wonder that Dear allows his work to be represented by a wide range of labels, from Ghostly's electro-pop, to Plus 8's minimal techno, to Perlon's tech-house-- his music blends elements of each of those genres.
So, yeah, more eclecticism, then? Not really, Leave Luck to Heaven is more like alchemy. Instead of genre-hopping from track to track-- substituting some sort of focused vision and sound for a lack of ideas dressed up as a surfeit of them-- Dear boils down his wide-ranging influences and combines elements of his own more catagorizable work. The result is his most satisfying release to date and (along with Ricardo Villalobos' Alcachofa) another techno-dub record that deftly straddles the line between home listening and the dancefloor.
Comparisons to Hawtin and Villalobos arguably flatter to deceive at this point in Dear's career, but they're far from unfounded. In a sense, Dear is creating sounds that blend the same elements that Hawtin used as building blocks on his Final Scratch-assisted mix CD Decks, EFX & 909. And, like the Chilean Villalobos, Dear takes cues from the Teutonic trends toward mixing the spatial qualities of dub with traditional house beats while retaining an outsider's ear.
As a result, Leave Luck to Heaven is an attractive listen for causal electronic listeners. Its ebb and flow of soothing melodies and lubbing beats-- and its blend of vocal and instrumental tracks-- keeps things lively and creates a sense of balance and dynamics. When the record peaks it's often when Dear stays closer to Detroit techno roots such as the invigorating stripped-and-clipped jaunt of "Just Us Now" or minimal second-wave melody of "The Crush". Elsewhere, gently snapping beats and gracious stabs and eerie washes of synths color Dear's deceptively complex rhythms, creating palpable sensations of tension and release on tracks such as "An Unending" and "You're Fucking Crazy", each of which twitch and hum with hollowed-out nervous energy.
The vocal tracks, sung in gentle falsetto, veer closest to machine-age electro and the deep, rolling basslines of Detroit's second-wave techno. They also provide the highlights of the record: "It's Over Now" and "Dog Days". The former brings life during wartime to the disco. It takes the infectious repetition and sense of communality of the dancefloor, and alternates between sarcastically joining calls to arms ("I don't want to feel left out") and hoping that that isn't the bomb that brings us together ("Why can't we work it out?"). "Dog Days" is better still, a flat-out infectious electro-pop gem, a rope-skipping sing-song of synthetic horns, Dear's cyclical vocals and a see-saw of pulsating tones and beats. "Tell another story," Dear repeats, enthusing the beat to go on and on-- which it does for six head-bobbing minutes. It could have gone on for another six. In a year in which Dear has written his share of stories, "Dog Days" is the standout chapter.


Accompanied by a newly published journal, this collection of synth odds and ends offers the rare opportunity to hear directly from an undersung icon of San Francisco’s gay disco scene.

Mechanical Fantasy Box

Before his death in 1982, the producer and musician Patrick Cowley was best known for electronic disco productions that defined San Francisco’s gay hi-NRG scene. He was one of the first entertainers with national impact (if not the first) to die of AIDS (his “Menergy” and “Megatron Man” hit the top of Billboard’s club chart in 1981). The party line is that his “career began to rise as his health failed him” (words cribbed from his Bay Area Reporter obit), and the music he made in his final year had a starry slickness to it suggesting even better things to come. The last song he cut with Sylvester, “Do You Wanna Funk?,” would go on to become his most widely known, somewhat ironically, after its inclusion in 1983’s Trading Places. That movie was a vehicle for Eddie Murphy, who told virulently homophobic jokes in his standup at the time; his landmark special Delirious, from the same year, opens with an extended bit about “faggots.” In the ’80s, Murphy was a mainstream icon; Cowley was an all-but-forgotten cult figure. The disparity in the cultural volume of their voices is a small illustration of how gay history worked for decades.
Josh Cheon, former member of the queer DJ collective Honey Soundsystem and mastermind behind the reissue label Dark Entries, has worked to flesh out Cowley’s legacy with an archival series of posthumous releases. By now, he has shepherded more releases into the world than were available when Cowley was alive. Cheon’s excavation work has exposed less frenetic, ambient-leaning and weirder sides of Cowley’s music. The three previous solo Cowley releases on Dark Entries largely contained material he composed for gay porn flicks—sleazy synth work whose sheer oddness could easily have been lost on consumers who had, ahem, other things to focus on.
The latest compilation, Mechanical Fantasy Box, was released on what would have been Cowley’s 69th birthday. It spans the years 1973 to 1980 and has less of a conceptual framework than earlier collections, offering 12 previously unreleased odds and ends mostly sourced from 10-inch reels of Cowley’s synth work juvenilia. It’s unclear if Cowley ever intended this material for release, and as such, will likely appeal most to fans hungry for more excavation of Cowley’s legacy. While not without its charm, Mechanical Fantasy Box is the last place those unfamiliar with Cowley’s work should go exploring.
“His early process was often shooting in the dark and seeing what happened,” wrote early Cowley collaborator Maurice Tani, and there is a sense of playfulness to Mechanical Fantasy Box. An arpeggiated squiggle flirts with the right ear in opener “Out of Body (Intro)” before hard-panning to the left as other synths whistle and clunk like a swimmer hitting his head on a boat underwater. Many of the songs contain one, if not several, high-pitched and twitchy sounds that repeat anxiously, but there’s an overall sense of motion here—these aren’t looped compositions, they’re sound designs that mutate over time as parts fade in and out. The best example of this is “Moving Bodies 1,” which starts out dissonant to the point of seeming hostility before, out of nowhere, it all coheres into an unlikely groove.
“Right Here, Right Now” is the Mechanical Fantasy Box cut with the most bodily immediacy, pummeling through its arpeggiated bass line, drums that pop and sizzle, and synths that mimic cosmic phasers. It’s the closest thing to hi-NRG here, though a little too fast and woozy to be a proper dance track. The amusingly titled “Lumberjacks in Heat” has the insistence of a John Carpenter score with the terror-prog energy of Goblin’s Suspiria main theme. It doesn’t sound like sex music to me, but Cowley had a voracious appetite and a vivid imagination; if anyone could make this work in a sexual situation, it was probably him.
I get this sense, mind you, after reading the sex journal Cowley kept (at times sporadically) from 1975 to 1980, which Dark Entries is publishing and releasing in tandem with this new compilation. It’s also called Mechanical Fantasy Box, after Cowley’s somewhat oblique term for San Francisco’s public sex scene during the first wave of mass gay liberation in the United States. In brief, sometimes poetic snapshots of his encounters, Cowley evinces a poignant shamelessness about loving sex with men.
To hear him tell it, Cowley was enthralled by the sex he was having—so many great asses, so many great cocks, and such prowess. “I could never take the fuck I give,” he brags. In addition to the graphic sex, his writings contain sprinklings of romance and momentary ambivalence regarding his fast lifestyle (“The churning, crowded heat of men in a sexual banquet crowds in on me and the forced-by-circumstances emotion-lacking atmosphere drives me away”). There’s also a real sense of the brotherhood that the ritualistic scene could foster for a lapsed Catholic like Cowley: “I’m on my knees worshipping Phallus. All around me are the other similarly engaged. I feel the one-ness of our activity. Silent yet all things understood.”
Some passages are breathtakingly moving coming from someone who had no idea that his life would be taken from him in a few short years. “This is a sweet sex and the feeling flows with the juices. Let the feelings flow. The longer you love, the longer you live,” he wrote in 1976. In ’77, he recalled telling a partner, “I know I’m going to be 50 yrs old and be able to look back and say, ‘I spent what I had to spend and used what was mine to use as it was intended.’” Cowley, who didn’t live to see 33, then wrote, “I loved it up.”
The book is also the rare opportunity to hear directly from Cowley; because interviews with him are not easily accessible online, much of what there is to learn about his life comes only through secondhand accounts of the people who knew and loved him (and many of them, of course, have also since died). To his fans, he’s existed as a myth. The one-two punch of the Mechanical Fantasy Box release and the journals represents a balanced portrait of the way Cowley lived, to hear some tell it. “He really didn’t have much of a social life. It was just music and the baths, music and the baths,” said Cowley collaborator Frank Loverde, quoted in Joshua Gamson’s 2005 biography The Fabulous Sylvester. Though this sounds like quite a social life to me, this quote suggests that Cowley did not compartmentalize his sexuality. It was imbued in his essence.
There’s a legendary story, recounted both in Gamson’s book and a 2016 New York Times piece on the Cowley revival, in which an AIDS-ravaged, wheelchair-bound Cowley looks down from a balcony at the Galleria at a dancefloor filled with revelers at a tribute party thrown in his honor, and says, “Those stupid queens, don’t they know?” And indeed, even a few years ago, Cowley’s accounts of the storm might have read as prelapsarian, even tragic. But in an age when proper access to antiretroviral therapies can keep people from contracting HIV and keep people with HIV healthy, Patrick Cowley’s sex journal is a voraciously readable historical document, a seminal text in every possible manner of the phrase. Over 40 years ago, Cowley was a forbearer of the kind of unapologetic sexual liberation that’s currently throbbing through many queer urban centers. His transmissions have made it all the way to the future to culture that is defined in no small part by the potentially lessening grip of HIV, a culture whose history is now becoming a mandatory component of some states’ public-school curricula. “It seems that life is there for the taking and I took my share,” he wrote in his journal. Even today, Cowley is as insatiable as ever.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Darcy James Argue's big band meets “The Daily Show” in an ambitious, wholly fascinating look at American politics and propaganda.

Darcy James Argue's Secret Society: Real Enemies

Real Enemies

Composer Darcy James Argue has often found joy in quixotic ideas. Starting a big band, more than half a century after they fell from popularity, is clearly one. Giving that group the name Secret Society and titling an early collection of compositions Infernal Machines only added more attitude to the enterprise. His pluck aside, Argue’s calling card thus far has been an ability to combine his love of jazz’s past with more contemporary sonics like indie-influenced electric guitar and bass, as well as arrangement tricks culled from his study of classical music. He’s clever without being arch, a syncretic creator who avoids obvious imitation.
Real Enemies is his most varied album yet, and his most thematically ambitious. Because it was originally conceived as a multimedia stage show for the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, it has both the length of a play as well as a dramatic conceit, as it promises an exploration of “the paranoid style in American politics.” (That famous 1964 essay by Richard Hofstadter is quoted, in a slightly adapted form, toward the end of Real Enemies, in a narration by actor James Urbaniak.)
This is a savvy choice of topic, and not just because of our era of “post-truth politics,” or due to the range of conspiracy theories that have found purchase among different voting coalitions. The central masterstroke of Real Enemies is its realization that instrumental music can prove a useful forum in which to explore the shadowy manipulations of propaganda and state secrecy. The overtly American sound of a big band—particularly one updated with aspects of other modern song styles—becomes an ideal way to channel both vintage Cold War scaremongering and contemporary unease over cell-phone data harvesting. In this way, Real Enemies often shows how moods can wield more influence than words (or logic).
Argue and his band leave few conspiratorial airs unexploited in this giddy, often explosive 78-minute suite. There are discordant touches of noir (inspired by scores of politically cynical ’70s films like The Parallax View), as well as minor-key warnings that reference Philip Glass’ writing for the Errol Morris documentary The Fog of War. And there’s plenty of music that feels original to this idiosyncratic composer and his well-drilled ensemble.
Coming after a quiet, unsettling introduction, and a strutting follow-up track that suggests a detective pursuing a case, “Dark Alliance” is the album’s first mind-blower. In this brilliant piece of hybridism, Argue creates an opening groove from a vintage-sounding synth line and rhythm guitar funk strumming, both of which call to mind early-’80s rap. (A clip of Nancy Reagan’s anodyne anti-drug speechifying—“say yes to your life”—confirms the era under review.) Then there is a shift to Latin jazz: specifically, an adaptation of composer Luis Enrique Mejía Godoy’s “Un Son Para Mi Pueblo,” an anthem written in celebration of the Nicaraguan Revolution. Argue’s pivot here isn’t random—instead, it’s a narrative choice that points to the contradiction between the Reagan administration’s domestic “war on drugs” and its simultaneous eagerness to undermine the Nicaraguan Revolution by working with the Contras. A government review later conceded that the CIA turned a blind eye to cocaine trafficking by its allies during this particular foreign policy episode. (And the title of the song is a reference to a controversial series of articles that first raised this issue.) The slickness of all this commentary wouldn’t be half as powerful if the musical execution was less than stellar, but the Secret Society displays their startling virtuosity in these genre shifts.
Elsewhere, Sebastian Noelle delivers an electric guitar feature full of spindly menace during the medium-tempo introduction of “Trust No One,” just before a clip of onetime Senator Frank Church discussing the ill effects of CIA narratives planted in foreign media. Once the government audio-drop is over, the full band digs into some powerful ensemble writing by Argue, while Carl Maraghi’s bluesy baritone sax solo carries an even greater sense of alarm. In “Best Friends Forever”—a piece about the military industrial complex—the martial, Glass-style triads lead to an alto sax solo from Rob Wilkerson that at first seems darkly resigned, until Argue’s introduction of a bass-drum thump prompts lines that sound more like combat heralds.
Argue mixes references to conspiracies that actually happened with glimpses of infamous false rumors (like the “birther” controversy directed at President Obama). On “Casus Belli,” Argue composes swinging music as a comic counterpoint to some of former Vice President Dick Cheney’s grimmer assertions. If the pairing of text and score sometimes seems a bit flip, it’s useful to recall that matters of grave political importance don’t always inspire the seriousness that they deserve from the public, either.
Despite all these references, the album’s goal isn’t to be any sort of history lesson. Instead, it’s a stylish evocation of the wild (and sometimes seductive) incoherence that flows from crises in which key evidence is either obscured or invented. Given this, Real Enemies feels, at its root, like a plea for greater civic trust and more rigorous thinking. For all its crazy quilt patterns and disparate musical inputs, there are telling hints of this suite’s carefully considered structure: The minimalist patterns of “Best Friends Forever” are echoed later, in “Apocalypse Is a Process,” while the synth from “Dark Alliance” is brought back during “Never a Straight Answer.”
The album’s liner notes offer visual collages and context clues for each of the album’s 13 tracks, providing a hint of the original multimedia stage production. But the suite doesn’t really need them, as it’s sufficiently engrossing and cogent all by itself. You’d almost think it impossible for a big band album to do all this in 2016—but here’s all the evidence, right out in the open for you to inspect.


The title can work both ways. For the band, "all that you can't leave behind"\n\ implies facing up ...

All That You Can't Leave Behind

The title can work both ways. For the band, "all that you can't leave behind" implies facing up to their platinum salad days of the Edge's trademark echo shimmers and Paul "Bono Vox" Hewson's Lexus-honk vocals. For the general public, the title reifies our struggle to leave behind the image of Bono hatching from a disco lemon, dressed in that rayon six-pack t-shirt. For a band settled into four-letter pseudonyms from their 1980 debut, breaking up never seemed like an option. From day one, U2 was a rock constellation-- a warplane-- and we expected epics. It's an early affair, a hazy infatuation, that has since bloated into comfortable taking-for-granted. As with all ubiquitous products, the familiarity of logos, slogans, and icons eventually supplants whatever original feelings we may have had.
U2 are, indeed, a universal product, much like the Catholic Church Bono humbly admires. The swoosh on The Edge's skully cap, and the golden arches of Bono's glasses spring to mind. Song titles and lyrics on All That boldly declare familiar, safe dogma and generic commandments, such as "Grace", "Peace on Earth", "I believe in you," "Won't you take me, take me please," "I know it aches, and your heart breaks," etc. This new batch of songs heralds a conscious and welcome revocation of dance-inflected bubbleglam, but scales back too far. In searching so hard for their souls, U2 have hacked away their flesh and skull, leaving a lobotomized approximation of glory.
"Beautiful Day" opens with bombast after a cheeky keyboard tease, and peaks with Bono's cracking voice in the shouted coda: "What you don't have/ You don't need it now!" And so the album climaxes at 3\xBD minutes. The gospel ballad, "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of", maintains the buzz admirably, again peaking in the coda with Brian Eno's faux-brass keyboard belts. Elsewhere, Eno's fingerprints remain undusted. The album could have benefited from more of him; apparently, it takes Brian Eno + Berlin to = renaissance.
"Elevation" slaughters hope with reckless chops of the hackneyed sword, as Bono commits songwriting faux pas #1: rhyming "sky" with "fly" and "high." The details will be spared, but you can work it out. Damn you, God and aerodynamics, for making altitude a necessity for flight, in the sky, which happens to be above us. As the album's sticker proclaims, "Walk On" is locked and loaded as the second single. Epic midtempo should always follow punchy power-rock, you see. Nice, but unexciting. Here, Bono seems dead set on ruining U2's return with clichés. Minutes after the aforementioned poetic gaffe, he returns with, "A singing bird in a cage/ Who will only fly/ Fly for freedom." That little bird is you, guys! Free yourself from your cage! For freedom!
The record stomps around in this valley before mounting another two-song peak with "In a Little While" and "Wild Honey". On the former, the vulnerability of Bono's "vox" makes a welcome return from minute 3:30 to inject some heartfelt emotion into the tingling doo-wop. "That girl!/ That girl!/ She's mine," Bono bellows with larynx scratches, evoking the dead spirit of Van Morrison. "Wild Honey" similarly ob-la-dis like a giddy Van, and somehow escapes the shame of Bono declaring, "I was a monkey." Testament to the band there.
But it's back into the dark nadir until the album's closer. Bono joins hands with Sinéad O'Connor in healing the world on the tepid carol, "Peace on Earth". "Jesus, can you take the time/ To throw a drowning man a line," Bono asks. Hey, if the world is so dark, take off your sunglasses. Bono's Healing Heart takes a "look at the world" on the next track, and discovers that people "feel all kinds of things." Indeed.
But not even Tom Waits' grizzled pipes could salvage the atrocity of "New York". Over one of the best musical beds he's ever been offered, Bono weaves a Hallmark lover's tale, in the city where "Irish, Italians/ Jews, and Hispanics/ Religious nuts [and] political fanatics/ [Stir] in the stew/ Happily/ Not like me and you." Subtle breakbeat drumming and glistening guitar be damned, Bono will ruin a song. And so the story goes for the entire album-- one of the band's finest, if not for the tweeting and hooting of The Fly and his grating lyrics. Beautiful day, certainly, but the rest of the week was all jetlag and rain. Can't The Edge sing, too?


Grievances is the third full-length by San Francisco’s Kowloon Walled City, a post-metal group fronted by Scott Evans. It's a glorious trainwreck of AmRep-style noise rock sculpted into minimalist shapes, with a structure that becomes a metaphor for hollowness of all kinds.

Grievances

No one but a person who’d experienced abject powerlessness and the passive acceptance of degradation could have created Grievances. It’s the third full-length by San Francisco’s Kowloon Walled City, a post-metal group that Scott Evans fronts as both singer/guitarist and producer. Wearing that many hats in a band suggests a position of authority, but you’d never guess that listening to Grievances. Evans subsumes his riffs within vast, oppressive swathes of empty space. He submits his voice to a process of industrialized monotony. His guitar doesn’t gently weep—it curls up, plays dead, and still isn’t able to halt its cataclysmic spasms.
Yet Grievances sounds anything but weak. Kowloon’s last album, 2012’s Container Ships, showed a shift toward refinement that felt more like a half measure, but here, Evans and crew have hit on something profound. It isn’t a concept album per se, but it does have an overarching theme: the psychic, social, and spatial anxieties of the modern workplace. But Grievances isn’t about run-of-the-mill disgruntled employment as much as it’s a haunting meditation on humanity’s disassociation from the product—or, in our increasingly cyber-centric world, the service—of its labor.
"You sell it like a poet," Evans howls on "The Grift", the centerpiece and high point of the album. It’s an accusation of self-commodification, seemingly aimed both inward and outward. It’s more than that, though; as a trainwreck of AmRep-style noise rock is sculpted into minimalist shapes, that structure becomes a metaphor for hollowness of all kinds. "The fiction sells," Evans reiterates, and when he slams the "confidence game" of modern interpersonal commerce, his sardonic use of "confidence" is even more lacerating than his sly insinuation of melody.
At just over three and a half minutes, "The Grift" is the runt of the album. Song lengths stretch onward from there, including Grievances’ title track, which crawls along for nearly seven minutes’ worth of forlorn rage. While Evans levels the charge "No love/ No memory/ Just admit it", fellow guitarist Jon Howell locks into a pneumatic, dehumanized groove that sputters out in gasps of dead air. Bassist Ian Miller chugs and claws; drummer Jeff Fagundes (replaced by Julia Lancer since this recording) puts the brakes on spacetime. If Godflesh and Codeine had ever conspired to hybridize, it might have come out like this: bleak but bare, mechanistic yet melancholic.
Grievances is inalienably heavy, but it’s not sludge in the conventional sense. On "Your Best Years", the distortion is more clotted than fuzzy, with immaculate slabs of dissonance left dangling overhead. But it’s "Backlit" that sums up the huge step forward Kowloon has taken with Grievances. Arid and static at first, it builds into a monument to grim resignation that feels weathered and ancient right out of the gate. "Wear out your weaknesses," Evans half-commands, half-implores; later he adds, "Wear all your weaknesses." Resistance is futile, but in that steadfast futility there is strength.


For more than a decade, the Glaswegian indie-pop band Camera Obscura have made consistency a virtue. Their fifth album, featuring guest vocal harmonies from Neko Case and Jim James, clears out the symphonic pomp of 2009's My Maudlin Career to double down on classic beach music and soul underpinnings.

Desire Lines

For more than a decade, the Glaswegian indie-pop band Camera Obscura have made consistency a virtue. Their songs stick to comfortingly familiar forms, and every single one is about love. Not many bands could build a devoted indie following by plowing such a narrow, unflashy vintage row. But not many bands have a singer like Tracyanne Campbell, whose plainly beautiful voice is sluiced through a series of refined lilts, catches, and gulps that have come to trigger a nearly Pavlovian adoration in fans. This constant musical sweetness is balanced by Campbell's eye for the dark clouds reflected in every silvery lake, and even her most starry-eyed love songs tend to be shot through with presentiments of doom.
Camera Obscura's distinctive outlook on generic terrain becomes apparent only via intimate familiarity, like how every forest trail looks the same except the one you've walked a hundred times. A cursory pass over their catalog might make it sound like all one piece, where a baseline loveliness is spiked with absurdly disarming highlights such as "French Navy". But a dogged, calculated growth can be traced from record to record. The folksy early-Belle & Sebastian style of Biggest Bluest Hi Fi (produced by Stuart Murdoch) was perfected, and tinged with dreamy 1950s rock, on the classic Underachievers Please Try Harder. The departure of vocalist John Henderson tilted the band away from cuddly duo songs and toward more lonesome, focused showcases for Campbell's vocal performances on Let's Get Out of This Country and My Maudlin Career, which bloomed with stronger electric instrumentation and bolder shades of country, orchestral pop, beach music, and soul.
Desire Lines is the first Camera Obscura album that doesn't seem to bring much new to the table, though it's hard to complain when they have vocal melodies as infectious and thoughtful as those in the verses of standout "William’s Heart". Here, Camera Obscura clear out the symphonic pomp that overgrew Maudlin to double down on classic beach music and soul underpinnings. Jeremy Kittel's strings swoop through a 30-second intro and then out of earshot for most of the album, discreetly reappearing to add translucent harmonies to the stirring ballad "Cri De Coeur" and the jubilant deep cut "I Missed Your Party", where Motown goes to the sock hop courtesy of a horn arrangement by Mark Gonzales. Neko Case and Jim James add unpresumptuous vocal harmonies to several tracks, easing into the low-key setting. The flicker and caress of Kenny McKeeve's tastefully reverbed guitar never gets much rowdier than on the rollicking trifle "Do It Again"-- sadly not a Beach Boys cover, but with some of that same nostalgic feel. There's not a bad cut here, though it's hard to imagine what a bad Camera Obscura cut would sound like at this point.
It isn't tough to write lyrics about the very beginnings and endings of relationships, when feelings are large and roles are relatively clear-cut. Campbell's gift is to capture the murkier middle regions, especially at transitions or reckonings-- times of acute vulnerability, a quality her voice seems custom-built to transmit. In the first proper song, "This Is Love (Feels Alright)", she draws a scenario that is purely flirty and romantic; the kind of helpless, unthinking giving-in that eventually leads to the hard questions posed on the stunning "Fifth in Line to the Throne": "How am I going to tell my king that I don't trust his throne anymore?" Campbell sings, caught once again, like a moth in a screen door, between staying and going. She's wonderful at lightly sketching the complex dynamics between people who won't say what they both know. "I've been cool with you," she confides on "New Year's Resolution". "The sooner you admit it, I will, too."
On the same song, Campbell makes two resolutions: to "write something of value" and to "kiss you like I mean it." The two are directly related for a songwriter who captures hot feelings in cool songs, and perhaps nod to the relatively long four-year wait for Desire Lines. More deeply satisfying than extraordinary*,* it seems unlikely to displace anyone's favorite Camera Obscura record, but neither is it a negligible entry in one of the smartest and most loveable discographies in contemporary indie-pop.


The Orwells recognize the need for a space where the ground rules of Weezer’s “In the Garage” still have merit, where knucklehead behavior is allowed and encouraged, so long as no one gets hurt.

Terrible Human Beings

The Orwells are five dudes from the suburbs of Chicago playing a codified style of garage rock, like so many suburban dudes before them. But despite what you may have read about the impending obsolescence of groups exactly like this one, the Orwells signed to a major label before they turned 21 and were quickly thrust towards enviable font size on festival lineups and a career-making performance on “Late Show With David Letterman.” There’s clearly an under-served audience for a band like the Orwells, and Terrible Human Beings caters to their needs and lets everyone else know they can fuck right off. These guys wisely recognize the need for a space where the ground rules of Weezer’s “In the Garage” still have merit, where knucklehead behavior is allowed and encouraged, so long as no one gets hurt.
“Told me ‘Act your age’/That’s why she’s underage,” Mario Cuomo shouts on “They Put a Body in the Bayou,” which will only raise an eyebrow if you’ve never read a single thing about the Orwells up to this point. The two things most people know about the Orwells is that they are young and they like to start shit, twin concerns summed up nicely on the chorus: “Good boys come in last/Bad girl by my side/Poppin’ pills on the fly/Cold grave when I die.” Considering their sound, their look, their name, the zippy hooks and laddish malfeasance—and not even counting the BBC and NME namedrops on “Ring Pop”—the Orwells probably would’ve been called rock’n’roll’s new saviors at least twice over by this point if they were British.
They might as well be, with Jim Abbiss behind the boards here. He was one of the three heavyweights responsible for producing their 2014 album Disgraceland**, along with TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek and Chris Coady (Beach House, Future Islands). Abbiss, meanwhile is best known for helming the Arctic Monkeys’ canonical debut, as well as Kasabian and Editors albums you probably haven’t heard if you’re American. He knows how to get a song to sound like it belongs on satellite radio, but this just leaves Terrible Human Beings in a netherworld between the Black Lips pisstakes of their earliest work and the Black Keys commercial ambitions of their present.
Terrible Human Beings can still be cherry-picked for catchy singles bound for algorithmic playlists, but  it’s impossible to overlook how much of the Orwells’ appeal is bundled into their persona as enfants terribles. And since there’s absolutely no way for them to generate the violent potential of their live shows here, Cuomo has to bring it second-hand: “Heavy Head” is a weirdly sanitized hostage narrative, and the song called “Black Francis” includes a nod to California street gangs plucked directly from Pixies’ “No. 13 Baby.” The borrowed menace is awkward on many levels, but it mostly underlines how wholesome these guys feel in 2017. This is an album called Terrible Human Beings with a naked woman on the cover, but like so much of what lies herein, they suggest malevolence without much to show for it.
Rock music doesn't have to be “dangerous” to be thrilling, of course. Rock music is still relevant, in large part because it can do other things besides conveying suburban angst—it can comfort, confound, speak for marginalized voices or give people the energy to get the fuck out of bed. But the Orwells aren’t here for any of that. “I don’t think it’s going to bring rock back,” guitarist Matt O’Keefe said about the record. “I just think it’s a rock record that maybe some people will enjoy.” It’s best to take O’Keefe at his word—if you don’t expect too much from them, you might not be let down.


Sharon Van Etten invites a handful of artists to cover songs from her 2010 album epic. These new versions—played by Fiona Apple, Lucinda Williams, and more—reveal the music’s healing power and complexity.

epic Ten

Sharon Van Etten opens her second album, epic, in a register of grounded wisdom. “To say the things I want to say to you would be a crime/To admit I’m still in love with you after all this time,” Van Etten declares on “A Crime.” She weaves her verse into a tangle of seduction and toxicity before landing on a clear thought that becomes a promise and a refrain: “Never let myself love like that again.” Van Etten sings herself into and out of these seven self-preserving words. Each syllable becomes a life raft for anyone who needs it.
epic’s seven songs of survival and becoming marked the firm arrival of then-29-year-old Sharon Van Etten from New Jersey to Brooklyn and the forefront of indie rock. With a lingering twang from five turbulent years in Tennessee, epic was her first time playing with a full band, and she sounded newly poised. In interviews, she spoke openly about the partner she’d left behind, who discouraged her songwriting and worse. “I had just come from an abusive relationship [...] and I was really lost,” Van Etten says in a short documentary that accompanies this 10th-anniversary epic reissue. “I played music because it made me feel better.”
Her healing path brought complexity and depth to epic—where there’s a grave narrative, there’s an empowered hook; where there’s horror, there are peace signs—and this revelation rings through every note. There’s comfort in her radiant harmonizing with folk singers Meg Baird and Cat Martino, in the intensity and warmth of her melodies, in the sunstruck instrumentation that builds on the best of Tusk-era Fleetwood Mac, and the harmonium that graces “Love More”—it’s all relief. Van Etten was building her confidence and learning to trust other people, a process she said extended to her studio collaborators, including members of She Keeps Bees and the War on Drugs; her label, Ba Da Bing, where she was an intern-turned-signee; and the community at Zebulon, the Williamsburg venue where these songs first took flight. As Van Etten states in the epic Ten film, letting people in is a difficult step in moving forward as a survivor, but a crucial one. epic is the sound of interconnection and growth.
When epic turned 10 last year, Van Etten decided to honor this pivotal moment by inviting even more people into it. She assembled a covers album featuring foundational artists of her life, like Fiona Apple and Lucinda Williams, as well as eventual peers like Justin Vernon and Aaron Dessner, who helped amplify her profile in 2010 when they covered “Love More” live (before the album was even out). It’s a testament to Van Etten’s craft that her songs bloom in so many contexts, from Vernon and Dessner’s ripping rock take on “A Crime” to St. Panther’s sleek R&B remake of “One Day.” The gnarled cover of “Peace Signs” by UK pub-rockers IDLES is not listenable per se, but that might be the point—their version underscores the essential aggression of brutal lyrics like “I told you I could no longer see,” the marching rhythm and stakes of Van Etten fighting back. “I am not afraid,” she sang on “Peace Signs.” “I am something.”
There was already a disarming openness to epic, and the best covers find new horizons in these songs still. Courtney Barnett, accompanied by Vagabon, lays bare the shattering narrative of “Don’t Do It,” urging a friend to hang on. Shamir reimagines the impressionistic drone of “DsharpG” as an incandescent ballad, layering glittering acoustic guitars over a low-end rumble, spinning out their virtuosic vocals, pitching the whole song skyward.
Two towering epic Ten recordings play like tacit acknowledgments of influence. The original “Save Yourself” is animated by Lucinda Williams-style no-bullshit resolve and her same defiant skepticism, which makes the experience of hearing Williams croon it herself doubly thrilling. “Don’t you think I know you’re only trying to save yourself?/Just like everyone else” is about as empathic as an eye roll gets. To be broke, adventuring, outsmarting your heartache—these are big Lucinda themes, and they echo through “Save Yourself.” Like many great songwriters, Van Etten grew up listening to Williams, and this cover sits at the center of a timeless creative equation: when you listen to an artist, you are always, to some degree, listening to every artist who inspired them to be one. Or as Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker reflects of her college years in the liner notes to epic Ten: “Sharon’s words, melodies, and rawness, became my words, melodies, and rawness, and permeated the sea of moments I was living in, making them more bearable [...] Her way of writing changed my way of thinking.” epic Ten charts this musical-emotional continuum in both directions.
If you were a fan of Van Etten before epic, maybe you remember the excitement of seeing that distant, grainy live clip of Justin Vernon covering “Love More” in high falsetto in 2010, knowing this important artist would soon be reaching many more people. Maybe you also remember that in 2010 it was less common for a woman in indie music to be talking unguardedly about her experience of being in an abusive relationship. Van Etten put this reality and its aftermath at the heart of “Love More,” a five-minute hymn of resilience that is the anchor of epic and her songbook. “You chained me like a dog in our room,” she sings in her low register over the gentle harmonium drone. “You were high, when I was doomed.” Van Etten has called “Love More” her “most revealing song” about this exceedingly difficult time, and said it was also about “two friends who pretty much saved my life when I was at my lowest point.”
It’s hard to imagine a more apt meeting than Fiona Apple and “Love More.” Apple has been galvanizing listeners to speak their truths with conviction since she was a teenager in the 1990s—when Van Etten was also a teenager, listening to Apple in her bedroom. “Love More” is filled with a raw emotional strength and honesty that is practically synonymous with Apple, who channels it here with otherworldly bolt-cutting power.
For the first time on a recording, Apple plays the ashiko hand drum—an instrument that, like Van Etten’s harmonium, you pull close to your body. The harmonium is traditionally used in Indian devotional music, and it creates healing vibrations; the reverberations of the ashiko drum have a similar visceral resonance. Apple puts gravity into her arrangement, fortifying Van Etten’s words: the elongated “chained,” the clipped “high,” the booming “doomed,” as if to say she understands them. Apple has always been open about the fact that she is a survivor. In her “Love More” cover, every careful note is a potential expression of solidarity.
Van Etten and her collaborators made “Love More” float on what she once called “a river of harmonies,” which reaches its widest opening in Apple’s cover. If Van Etten’s “Love More” evokes sun finally pouring through a window, then Apple’s is the renewed clarity of stepping out into the light. “Love More” is a song about regaining control of one’s life, the finale to a feminist album about reclaiming one’s voice and returning to love in the wake of trauma. Apple’s cover makes these ideas lucid and real, in her taut a capella vocalizing and her rapturous self-harmonies. It’s an anthem for anyone who has embarked on that journey. Joining “Why Try to Change Me Now” and “I Want You” in the pantheon of classic Fiona Apple covers, her “Love More” contains a powerful alchemy of both autonomy and connection, of inner strength as well as the assurance that anyone who has survived is not alone. As Apple communes with Van Etten’s words—“She took the time to believe in what she said/She made me love, she made me love, she made me love more”—she offers abiding proof.

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Inspired by the FX drama Pose and the flush of new love, the London indie trio uses its third album to cosplay as the house band of a fantasy discotheque.

Prestige

For Prestige, their third album, London indie trio Girl Ray dabble in the art of the concept album. The idea emerged as singer-guitarist Poppy Hankin, bassist Sophie Moss, and drummer Iris McConnell were crammed in a bus on a post-Brexit tour of Europe at the start of 2020. Hankin had just binged Pose, the FX drama about New York City ballroom culture, and she began recording demos inspired by its soundtrack to battle her malaise and distract herself from her faraway girlfriend. As she sketched out each song, Hankin imagined them blaring at an imaginary nightclub called Prestige. Girl Ray are the house band of this fantasy locale, pumping out nu disco until dawn.
Beyond the immediate influence of Pose, Prestige is steeped in the current disco-pop resurgence, steering Girl Ray away from their twee roots and new-wave experiments. Roused by the music of Jessie Ware and Róisín Murphy, as well as Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia, Hankin penned hi-def tracks stacked with twangy bass and prickly, Chic-like guitar. Falling in love was another catalyst for Hankin’s newfound poptimism, and the lyrics are all wine and roses—joyous, but terminally cliche at times. On the mid-tempo “Give Me Your Love,” Hankin recalls “Searching for your hand/Walking in the sand,” while on “Love Is Enough,” she spills out this couplet: “Time will tell my love/On the wings of a dove.” Three songs contain “love” in the title, lit up like a marquee, and the word is uttered some two-dozen times across the album’s 42 minutes. Fortunately, Hankin’s breathy, droning voice helps divert from the Hallmark language, as does her melodic expertise.
Each track is sparkling and memorable, and likely to lodge itself in your hippocampus. Playing “True Love” at top volume feels like whirling around a roller disco, where hot pants and synchronized clapping are mandatory. A liquid Moog solo from Mark Bencuya twists and turns like Mountain Dew coursing through a curly straw, a sweet and slick finish to the bubbly tune. The ’70s-flavored pop cut “Easy” takes a cue from Warren Zevon, pairing brightly pulsing piano with bulbous bass and spare drumkit a la “Werewolves of London.” Hankin wrote the song on a trip to New York, where she wandered the streets solo and shot billiards. On “Hold Tight,” Hankin’s foggy tenor floats over congas and Wurlitzer as she asks her crush to “get a Coke and sit on the wall.”
Hankin has said she’s more accustomed to writing about unrequited romance, which might be why her happiest songs can verge on treacly. But on “Tell Me,” she wades back into familiar waters. The song is spring-loaded with funk bass and soars on a falsetto chorus soft as feathered hair. “Baby fill my cup,” she pleads, adding, “reading your mind is like foreign TV.” Hankin wrote the track with producer Ben H. Allen, and the pair chose to focus on a withholding partner—a theme that contrasts with Prestige’s abiding air of bliss. The synth-driven “Begging You Now” is another rare case. Hankin admits to getting “jealous fevers,” and hints at codependent behavior. It’s a refreshing dose of reality on a record crammed with sunshine melodies and candy-heart prose.
Just as many of Prestige’s love-inspired songs bleed together thematically, a good chunk of its tracks sound awfully similar, and that can be a problem. “True Love,” “Up,” “Everybody’s Saying That,” and “Love Is Enough” bob to the same Chic formula: skanking guitar, twangy bass, canned strings. It’s a solid formula, but the textural sameness makes more idiosyncratic tracks like “Give Me Your Love” stand out. The song was recorded with Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard and Al Doyle, who let Girl Ray ransack their studio toys and tinker with a vocoder. They adorned the song with steel drums and hand bells, layering in robot vocals and synth arpeggios. It’s a fruitful collaboration, one that nudges Girl Ray out of their comfort zone. At Club Prestige, even the house band needs to shake up their setlist to keep people dancing.


Phish is not known for their studio work. But for a group of musicians whose sole value has always been the simple pleasure of making music, everyone here sounds noticeably vacant.

Big Boat

The best of Phish’s music aims for transcendence. It’s at the heart of any jam band, or really, any kind of improvisatory outfit: an attempt to find language beyond language, to go somewhere you could not go alone. It’s why the length of any given Phish song in concert might stretch deep into the double-digits, and why their loyal legion of fans feel an instinctual desire to see as many of their shows as possible. Despite their massive audience, Phish remain a countercultural force, and their goofy, shroomy jams resonate as an aural rejection of the monotonous sobriety of suburban adolescence. For much of Phish’s fans, the band is akin to the class clown who’s also the smartest kid in the room. Their energy is infectious and vital; when you’re with them, you feel better about yourself. It’s an escapist fantasy.
On Big Boat, the band’s thirteenth album, Phish openly promise salvation from the get-go. In “Friends,” the dumb-as-rocks, vaguely triumphant opening number, drummer Jon Fishman forecasts the coming of the Lord, descending upon the Earth in “some fiery fashion.” But Fishman offers an alternate exit, escaping to the hills and collecting his like-minded compatriots aboard the titular “big boat.” As an opener, it offers a mission statement not dissimilar to My Morning Jacket’s “Victory Dance,” an enthusiastic, if overly simplistic song aimed squarely at the already-initiated. Keyboardist Page McConnell bashes dramatically along his keyboard, like a parody of Roy Bittan on Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell, as Fishman’s toms roll and Trey Anastasio’s fingers glide along his fretboard. Incessant and noisy, “Friends” opens Big Boat with the promise of a Phish album armed with purpose and energy.
That is not the album that follows. Big Boat is at times overwrought and half-assed, gratingly silly and embarrassingly self-serious, both tedious and underwhelming. In other words, it’s a new Phish album. Even still, the lowest points of Big Boat manage to sink lower than just being bad-for-Phish; Big Boat is made even worse by not sounding enough like Phish. The turgid prog-pop of “Waking Up Dead” could be mistaken for any number of anonymous, post-Phish, local jam acts. “Tide Turns,” with its nauseating Jimmy Buffett sleaze, doesn’t even fail for Phish trying to sound like a soul group; it’s more akin to members of Phish begrudgingly joining a wedding band. Somewhere along the way, you get your expected share of underwritten ballads, overly complicated funk wipeouts, and multiple tracks whose runtimes come suspiciously close to the 4:20 mark.
If you love Phish, the release of a solid studio album has likely never been a requirement to stay onboard, even when their releases were fun and relatively consistent, like 1996’s Billy Breathes. Had Big Boat never been released, the live staple “Blaze On” would still find its way to their blissed-out crowds, as it has on the last several tours. And while “Blaze On” is no latter-day classic like, say, “So Many Roads,” its inclusion here and on their setlist does represent an example of Phish updating their repertoire without resorting to the tried-and-true album-and-single cycles they’ve always existed squarely outside of.
As such, Phish exist in a number gray areas. They are an indie-minded band with mainstream appeal; a classic rock group who rejects the genre’s radio-focused populism; an enormously competent outfit who use their expertise to promote their euphoric brand of anti-intellectualism. If Phish were to embrace their unique position in the industry, one could imagine them penning albums that were, if not definitive, then at least approaching coherence, like modern-day Wilco. Instead, Big Boat is another failure in a discography full of them. Without a unifying identity, it whiffs on nearly every statement it tries to make. For a group of musicians whose sole value has always been the simple pleasure of making music, the members of Phish sound noticeably vacant in these recordings.
Still, none of the album’s weaknesses (like McConnell rhyming “losing my interest” with “just scanning Pinterest”) would be half as disappointing if Phish weren’t almost aging gracefully. The last several years have had some undeniable high points—from the simple, nostalgic rock of 2009’s Joy through 2014’s Fuego, easily the band’s most inspired record since the ’90s. On Big Boat, they come up with a few winning moments. Trey’s guitar solos throughout the otherwise rote balladry of “Miss You” are genuinely moving in a way his humdrum vocals and plainspoken lyrics could never be. McConnell’s “I Always Wanted It This Way” is the album’s peak, a defiant Motorik jam that wouldn’t sound out of place on a 21st-century Yo La Tengo album. The album closes strikingly with “Petrichor,” an immaculately arranged prog opus. It might not be a track to convince the naysayers (or even, with its thirteen-minute runtime, to necessarily warrant a second play). But it’s the only moment on the album when Phish shows—and not just tells—that transcendence is possible, and that they’re willing to go there with us.


The boisterous UK trio adds polish to its organ house and bassline rap, balancing lyrical economy with over-the-top boasts and catchy choruses.

Charva Anthems EP

Rowdy bassline rap trio Bad Boy Chiller Crew were tipped for stardom in 2020, with a UK-wide tour and plans to travel the world, but things obviously didn’t quite pan out that way for MCs Kane, Clive, and GK. Instead, the Crew regrouped on their new sprawling farmstead outside of their hometown of Bradford, in the Northern UK county of West Yorkshire, and channelled lockdown boredom into what they do best: making bangers and going on benders. Since last year’s aptly titled Full Wack No Brakes, there’s been the twinkly 2-step of “Needed You” and a nudging, winking Christmas single called “White White Christmas,” as well as lager-assisted tattoo roulette and a digger-powered slip ’n’ slide. Earlier this month, a steady groundswell helped nudge them into the UK Top 40 with the wildly catchy lead single from Charva Anthems, “Don’t You Worry About Me,” a song that sounds like an alcopop tastes: sweet and fizzy, with a neat bit of bite. If you have enough of them, you’ll feel great and then a little bit sick.
Having been snapped up by a major label, the Crew have polished up their organ house and bassline sounds, and some of the references have had an upgrade too—more Grey Goose than Smirnoff, BMWs swapped in for dirt bikes—but mostly the ingredients stay familiar: namely, getting licked and moving quick. “Forget Me,” “Don’t You Worry About Me,” and “Get Out My Head” all follow a similar formula. There’s an outsourced female vocal chorus that sounds instantly familiar on first listen (most of them are lifted, royalty-free, straight from Splice), which is paired with punchy, sidewinding verses. It’s a setup that works best when the chorus is kept brief and aloof, letting the snappy verses do the heavy lifting (“Up late, got flake,” from “Clothes,” is economical lyricism at its thriftiest).
Kane, the best MC of the three and a remarkably understated talent in his own right, takes center stage across the EP. His persona is the most reserved—more chiller than bad boy, you might say—but he’s still endlessly entertaining, and switches flows with the ease and frequency of British weather. Clive’s no slouch either, and GK has bags of charisma; not many people can carry off a lyric like “These lot know I’m a dog like Marley/Drive like Ken and I fuck these Barbies.” Like a hangover fry-up, it just works. Most of the time, anyway.
“She’s My World” is a bit of a dud, with its awkward chorus and out-of-place (if catchy) Auto-Tuned elements. The beat is a plodder, and the heartfelt crooning is forgettable in the same way that drunken rows at kicking-out time tend to be consigned to history by the morning after. But the group have been open about their intentions to reach a broader, more commercial audience, and break out of an otherwise hyperlocal music scene. Their transparency, unlikely star power, and undeniable ear for a hooky flow are probably why so many people are willing them on already. Some new fans might need a glossary—10 points (or pints) to anyone in the U.S. who knows what a charva is—but with gear this moreish, the boys from Braddy might just make good on their global ambitions this year.

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Cobbling together styles from Top 40 and the dance underground alike, Vol. 2 raises the question: Can a microgenre that’s all self-consciously hyper-“contemporary” veneer sustain itself long-term?

PC Music, Vol. 2

Three years out from PC Music’s inception, it would be rash to deny the label/genre/cultural microphenomenon’s influence—not just in terms of the sheer number of think-pieces generated in its wake, but in the trickle-down of its aesthetic signatures. Take, for example, the breathy single “3 Strikes” by maybe-Kylie Jenner-fronted teen-pop act Terror Jr. The song’s otherwise unimaginative pop skeleton (lilting beat, insipid lyrics) is rendered magnetic through chilly vocal manipulation and melodic elements, which are at once dreamlike and austere. In other words, it sounds like an A.G. Cook production on a fistful of downers. This is not to mention the expertly-constructed hype around the band itself: an anonymous female vocalist, a debut via a lipgloss advertisement—straight from the PC playbook.
Gradually seeping into the mainstream is par for the course for electronic music subcultures, but Cook and company are a bit more insistent in the totality of their goals. By one description, 2016 is the year that PC Music “grabbed the mainstream by the throat and made it take notice.” But listening to the PC Music, Vol. 2 compilation, I felt less subsumed and more worn out. Is it feasible for a microgenre that’s all candy-coating, all self-consciously hyper-“contemporary” veneer, to expect to sustain itself long-term? And, while this perhaps overestimates the sincerity of PC Music’s mission, is it possible that such mainstream-seizing objectives are built around a faulty understanding of how culture flows?
In any event, PC Music, Vol. 2 collects 10 tracks, most previously released, which follow the blueprint laid out by last year’s Vol. 1. Though the tracks clock in at varying degrees of hyperactivity (GFOTY’s full-throttle “Poison” perhaps the worst of the bunch for the high-BPM-averse), each reaches for anthem status. The productions cobble together and iron over a mix of styles appropriated from both the dance underground and Top 40, with results that are structurally varied, but with a uniform surface. Among the better offerings is easyFun’s “Monopoly,” whose bouncy hook is propelled by clean synths and infantile vocal manipulation. Felicita’s “a new family” seethes, horror-film whispers emerging from underneath the sort of crunchy torrent of sound favored by so-called post-club producers. Some songs bridge directly into a stylized take on radio pop—Danny L Harle’s Carly Rae Jepsen-featuring “Super Natural,” for example, a disquietingly innocent hit that could easily have been underwritten by the Disney Channel. If this compilation evidences any real evolution in the PC Music sound, it’s in this assimilated direction: less sinister, more widely marketable.
As a conceptual project that embraces HD aesthetics wholesale, PC Music has always felt dated to me; it’s in this context that comparisons to post-internet art—variously unflattering to either camp, depending on your vantage point—seem most apt. Its desire to comment on the hypermediated nature of being young today is similarly tiresome: lyrics often conjure a lonely girl on her phone, waiting for a notification to advance the plot, a rather flattened image of sexuality and longing. Can’t we agree by now that, however smooth our screens, technology tends more often to reveal and amplify an inherent messiness in human relationships? This is not to mention the genre’s overwhelming whiteness, or its tendency to treat women as avatars, recurring points that rather definitively undermine PC Music’s critical capabilities.
But a masterfully constructed pop song can be indelible, and if you peel back the ill-advised art-project histrionics, there are a handful of those here. Harle’s “Broken Flowers,” first released in 2013, is an excellent piece of cyborg house, addictive but never overwhelming. “Only You,” by Chinese pop star Chris Lee—one of the biggest-ticket names and a rare non-white collaborator, it is worth noting, for a group of producers so transparently indebted to East Asian pop culture—builds at a treacly pace, as the minimalist structure fills with textural scrawls that cut the sweetness. It’s this, not the messaging, that is worth hanging onto.


Singer and songwriter Maya Bon’s bedroom-pop dirges are both intimate and removed, filled with understated yet strangely meaningful detail.

Nastavi, Calliope

Maya Bon paints quotidian misery with a palette of callbacks and namedrops. On “Crossword,” a ghostly, plinky standout from Nastavi, Calliope, her latest EP as Babehoven, she acknowledges feeling guilty for not replying to her long-absent father’s emails before noting that someone named Ella is whimpering. Two tracks later, we learn that Ella is a dog. Reveals like this, alongside specific references to the names of people in Bon’s life, make Nastavi, Calliope feel like a nesting doll of autobiographical remembrances. Subtly and unsubtly, her lyrics allude to minor tragedies that she and those around her have suffered and survived.
Even more than 2020’s Demonstrating Visible Differences of Height EP, Nastavi, Calliope’s midtempo bedroom-pop dirges sound muffled and foggy, both intimate and removed. Bon’s collaborator and co-producer Ryan Albert returns on bass, drums, and some guitar and vocals; together, they create an ideal backdrop for Bon’s diaristic lyrics, typically delivered in a mumble-sing that highlights their understated yet meaningful details. On “Orange Tree,” a song primarily focused on someone named Robin, Bon introduces another character—Joey—who gestures vaguely at some sort of shock. His story is never completed, and the loose end dangles off the song’s compressed arrangement like a frayed rope.
Bon uses specificity to sketch outlines with ample negative space. A lyrical highlight of “Orange Tree” comes in a passing mention of the once-omnipresent online game Words With Friends, which Bon uses as an excuse not to do anything else. It’s an endearingly slapdash inclusion that feels inextricable from an earlier lyric about using puzzles to avoid communicating with her father on “Crossword.” By the EP’s end, Bon’s narrator is preparing to see her dad for the first time in more than a decade. On the only upbeat tune, the dreamy “Alt. Lena,” a friend named Lena tells her that she’s brave to meet him again. Lena, Bon tells us, loves chocolate milk, sex, boobs, fire, swimming, “sipping beer on hot days.” Though she reminisces fondly about their experiences together, these surface-level qualities are all we learn about Lena herself; Bon fleshes out the character only enough to support her own story.
“Alt. Lena” is an outlier; Nastavi, Calliope more often feels resigned, even glum. “It’s hard to talk about it being a bad week/When it’s been a bad week/For a long time now,” Bon sighs on opener “Bad Week,” sounding as though her week has lasted a year at least. It’s the rare instance when her lyrics seem to speak not just to her personal sphere but to the wider world as well—evoking how, for many people, 2020 seemed to drag on indefinitely. It’s one of her few references that’s equally bleak and humorous, and Nastavi, Calliope’s cloudy rearview mirror would shine brighter with a few more laughs. But, as Bon clearly understands, these moments of levity are hard-won.

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Natalie Mering’s fourth album is a grand, sentimental ode to living and loving in the shadow of doom. It is her most ambitious and complex work yet.

Titanic Rising

In the face of catastrophe, Natalie Mering always finds serenity. Throughout her fourth record as Weyes Blood, tides are surging, trees are falling, the internet is ruining romance, capitalism is pushing workers to the brink of exhaustion, and reality is breaking her heart. In the wake of all this, Mering continues to search the stars for salvation. Belief—in oneself, in another, in myths—is Titanic Rising’s only request. “I want to make sure everybody feels like they deserve to be alive,” she told Pitchfork. “I hope you could have a smile during the apocalypse.” Building on the psychedelic chamber-folk of 2016’s Front Row Seat to Earth, these convictions push the 30-year-old songwriter towards her most ambitious and complex work yet.
Titanic Rising approaches these modern-day problems through a distinctly sentimental lens. Mering has referred to herself as a “nostalgic futurist,” and here she leans into that title by examining the strange ways technology has shaped modern romance through the earnest lyrics and golden, gigantic arrangements of 1970s pop songwriters. But unlike Joni Mitchell or the Carpenters, whose love affairs were clouded by plain old anxiety and desperation, Mering’s love affairs are clouded by algorithms. As she seeks true love on the jaunty “Everyday,” Mering’s desire for companionship bursts forth like a geyser. When she bellows “I need a love every day” over a baroque clavinet, it’s with a herculean determination.
Even at her most optimistic, Mering grounds herself in reality. On the majestic opener “A Lot’s Gonna Change,” Mering yearns to return to the purity of childhood, a time when the world seemed to swell with wonder and possibility. But she cuts her fantasy short and admits that since progress is impossible to escape, why not focus on what matters right now? Later on “Mirror Forever,” she is her most blunt: “No one’s ever gonna give you a trophy/For all the pain and things you’ve been through/No one knows but you.” This advice comes off as almost gravely urgent and upholds Titanic Rising’s acceptance of difficult truths.
Midway through the album, Titanic Rising moves into the murky realm of the subconscious through its instrumental title track, like a sunbeam finding its way to the ocean floor. On the subsequent “Movies,” Mering sounds as if she is singing from the album cover’s sunken bedroom, her voice wobbly and distended. As phosphorescent synthesizers swirl around her, Mering ponders cinema’s emotional shaping of our collective psyche, ultimately finding acceptance in the fantasy. “Movies” might be a melodramatic outlier on the record, but the song exemplifies the way Mering considers the world: as a constant renegotiation of self and place. If the record’s first half was built on swooning dreams, the second half faces the world with a melancholic but hopeful heart.
The truth that lies beneath Titanic Rising is that love blossoms and love wilts. This law of nature is mirrored in the emotional arc introduced by “A Lot’s Gonna Change.” “Everyone’s broken now/And no one knows just how,” she murmurs on the monumental “Wild Time.” The songs are more stoic and elegant even when Mering sings of apocalyptic imagery like a “million people burnin’.”
But Mering’s business is not of misery, but of faith. She suggests dystopian images, but insists that with action, beautiful results are possible. Titanic Rising comes full circle with the instrumental closer “Nearer to Thee,” which borrows the string arrangement from “A Lot’s Gonna Change.” The song’s title alludes to the hymn that the Titanic’s house band supposedly played as the ship sank. Here, as it was then, Weyes Blood can’t help but offer one last breath of hope as she gazes towards an uncertain future.


Harry Styles hides himself inside of a mystic pop-rock record that keeps us away from who he is as a songwriter and fledgling rock star.

Fine Line

In a Rolling Stone profile earlier this year, Harry Styles recalled how he kept watching this interview with David Bowie on his phone for inspiration. In the clip, Bowie offers this chestnut about creativity: “Always go a little further into the water than you feel you are capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. When you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”
Styles was invoking his own artistic process, illuminating the lengths to which he hoped to travel on his second solo album, Fine Line. He was also demonstrating the invincible oblivion of even our most charming pop stars. For Styles, Fine Line is the sound of an artist plumbing the abyss. For us, it’s the sound of a celebrity sticking his toes in the sand. It’s ostensibly his freedom record, one that indulges his every musical and psychedelic whim. It is also removed enough from One Direction to finally not be judged in relationship to them (unlike his spare and often lovely self-titled debut from 2017). By corralling a new flock of influences—from ’70s power pop and Laurel Canyon folk-rock to the sort-of soul of Coldplay—Styles showcases his gift for making music that sounds like good music.
Which is to say the actual sound of Fine Line is incredible, and most songs have at least one great moment to grab hold of: the clusters of background harmonies on “Golden,” the synth sweeps throughout “Sunflower, Vol. 6,” the strange and alluring pre-chorus on “Lights Up,” a song that embodies Styles’ fluorescent charm, his swagger, his desire to be both weird and adored. He has talked recently about his fear of making music after he left One Direction, the pressure of finding a radio single. But to hear him sing sun-warmed, folk-tinged acoustic rock backed by only a handful of musicians is refreshing. There were easier, more callow roads for him to take.
While the music wades into the mystic, his songwriting, pointedly, does not. Fine Line, in part, deals with Styles’ breakup with the French model Camille Rowe, but he renders their romance in the primary colors of needing you, missing you, and remembering you. Emotional beats rise and fall with all the stakes of a refill on a glass of water. Styles doesn’t have the imagination of Bowie or another pop-rock touchpoint here, Fleetwood Mac, who took their lives and transfigured them through cosmic fantasia or Victorian grandeur. Styles’ attempts at this mode worked slightly better on his more austere debut, but in this rainbow-parade of psychedelic pop, the dullness is cast into sharp relief.
The same Styles who sang the unforgettable line, “Even my phone misses your call, by the way” just one album ago, can’t muster a memorable flourish, a vivid image, or the same diaristic self-dramatizing wink as Taylor Swift. Instead, feet firmly planted on the shore, Styles simply summarizes and apologizes and reflects as if he were just telling this story to his mates. During the stretch of ballads that comprise the middle third of the album, he sings, “I’m just an arrogant son of a bitch who can’t admit when he’s sorry,” and, “What if I’m someone I don’t want around?” What these earnest text messages reveal about Styles is that he has a desire to do right, to be a good person, or at least to be seen as one. And that’s it—we remain no closer to understanding him as a songwriter or solo artist.
The musicians here—including songwriters Kid Harpoon and Jeff Bhasker, producer and multi-instrumentalist Tyler Johnson, guitarist Mitch Rowland, among others—summon a retro live-band sound, no producer tags, no chart-storming aesthetics. But Styles treats them more like a collection of instruments than an actual band, which makes the anonymous two-minute guitar solo at the end of “She” seem pretty meaningless on a Harry Styles solo record. Even more infuriating is “Treat People With Kindness,” an awful chimera of Jesus Christ Superstar and Edgar Winter Group’s “Free Ride” that confuses hand-claps with happiness. Each song is a new outfit for Styles, hoping one will carry his reality-competition voice and illuminate his reality-competition lyrics.
There are glimpses, like in “Canyon Moon,” of the sort of intimate connection Styles hopes to forge. It’s one of those running-with-a-kite-down-a-grassy-hill songs, covered in ringing acoustic guitars that evoke his bright smile. “Cherry” rises out of the cliche and into something darker and lasting and Swiftian: “I noticed that there’s a piece of you in how I dress/Take it as a compliment.” Styles is here, buried underneath the fame and the fear. I hear his sweetness, his charm, his elegance. But mostly I hear a guy who’s still afraid he’ll never make a David Bowie record.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The British composer works with multiple detuned pianos on this hauntingly elegant record of dreamlike miniatures.

Max de Wardener: Music for Detuned Pianos

Music for Detuned Pianos

On Music for Detuned Pianos, the British composer Max de Wardener (best known for his work with Gazelle Twin and Mara Carlyle) shows he is not one to take the easy path. The ten pieces on this wonderfully stubborn album are performed by jazz pianist Kit Downes on acoustic piano, an instrument that is notoriously disinclined to unorthodox tuning. The painstaking process resulted in two years of technical challenges and constant re-tuning.
De Wardener used four different types of detuned pianos, each detuning inspired by a different American composer, alongside those tuned to the conventional, equal-tempered scale. On two album highlights—“Doppelgänger” and “Deranged Landscape”— de Wardener tuned the same piano twice, in slightly different ways, then overlaid the recordings, emphasizing the music’s otherworldly feel. De Wardener later added a sprinkling of electronics—the synth washes on “Redshift,” the shade of distortion on “Color Cry”—to give body to the work without overwhelming the acoustic ambience.
Perhaps the best compliment you can pay this hauntingly elegant record is that it never feels like the product of back-breaking toil. After laborious preparation, many of the pieces themselves were recorded in single solo takes, with de Wardener leaving the piano space to weave its unfussy melodies in a way that is reminiscent of Erik Satie’s deathless Gymnopédies. There’s something enchantingly dreamlike about Music for Detuned Pianos, as if the music has been nudged from reality rather than torn from the here and now. “Blueshift,” for example, starts with a jaunty, nautical piano motif which slowly sags out of tune like vinyl left in the sun.
The shadow of Richard D. James hangs heavily over this album. Songs like “Foxtrot” and “Deranged Landscape” suggest the itchy horrors of Selected Ambient Works 2 rendered in echoing acoustics, the physical reality of the piano reinforcing the nature of the unease. “Bismuth Dream,” meanwhile, shares an air of unsettling melancholia with Aphex’s most straightforwardly beautiful piano piece, “Avril 14th.”
At times—notably the slightly dull opening halves of “Spell” and “Star Song”—Music for Detuned Pianos sails too close to convention. But the album partly draws its weight from these oppositions: Music for Detuned Pianos is classical but experimental; relaxing but unnerving; background music that demands your attention. In leaving these discrepancies unresolved, de Wardener and Downes have created an album of immediate impact and lasting emotional depth, a pleasing mess of contradictions that is as beautiful as it is misshapen.