This Brighton bass-and-drums duo have swiftly become the most universally deified emergent UK rock band since the Arctic Monkeys first thawed out eight years ago. But by using their muscular might to prop up otherwise featherweight tunes, Royal Blood have effectively built themselves a castle and furnished it with IKEA.

Royal Blood

In the year 2014, the only thing more tired and predictable than mainstream rock is the perpetual reports of its demise. But then, the gatekeepers of tradition need us to believe rock is dying in order to keep selling us a new resurrection narrative, like any consumer product in the mature phase of its life cycle and in need of a good marketing hook. But the audience for rock music never disappeared, it merely pluralized. Classic-rock radio may still play Black Sabbath alongside the Eagles and the Police, but the modern-day descendants of those bands are now funneled through discrete radio formats that serve different demographics. When you consider the combined festival-filling fanbases for metal, indie, and new country (and whatever derisive invented subgenre you’d apply to bands like Magic!), there’s still a healthy demand for songs played on plugged-in guitars and backed by bass, drums, and (budget permitting) pyro. Rock may no longer be the center of popular culture, but it still occupies vast amounts of space around it. When purists lament its supposed death, what they’re really lamenting is not so much the disappearance of guitar-strapping bands as a dearth of ones we can all believe in.
Still, this circumstance has never stopped the British music press from making a weekly sport of anointing new saviors for the country to rally around. And with Royal Blood, they've hit the jackpot: the Brighton bass-and-drums duo have swiftly become the most universally deified emergent UK rock band since the Arctic Monkeys first thawed out a decade ago. (Perhaps not coincidentally, Royal Blood share management with the Monkeys, whose drummer Matt Helders famously endorsed the then-unknown band through a t-shirt shout-out at Glastonbury last year.) Royal Blood’s self-titled album debuted at No. 1 in the UK last month and was nominated for the Mercury Prize shortly thereafter; now that they’re already duking it out on the top of the charts with the likes of Sam Smith and Ed Sheeran a mere year after their formation, Royal Blood are, for many young Britons, not just The Only Band That Matters, but The Only Band, period.
It’s not as if Royal Blood have been actively advertising their messianic qualities; if anything, they’ve been quick to defuse any such hyperbole. And yet, a little self-aggrandizing swagger would go a long way in making Royal Blood seem like they have any aspirations beyond just cranking out proficient assembly-line riffage as if they’re playing a live-action reenactment of Rock Band. Though Royal Blood confine themselves to a limited instrumental palette, the issue here isn’t so much a uniformity of sound: frontman Mike Kerr feeds his brawny basslines through a NASA-worthy dashboard of effects pedals that can make it sound alternately like he’s shredding on an SG or coaxing alien frequencies out of a Korg. And no doubt, Kerr and stickman Ben Thatcher can lock into a crushing, contorted groove with a telepathic sense of connectivity (like with the epileptic lurch of lead single “Out of the Black”), as if drop-and-dragging their favorite bits from the Led Zeppelin, Jack White, and Queens of the Stone Age discographies into a GarageBand file to build the ultimate indestructible riff. It’s the pro-forma songwriting that transpires between those brontosaurus blasts that ultimately proves problematic. By using their muscular might to prop up otherwise featherweight tunes, Royal Blood have effectively built themselves a castle and furnished it with IKEA.
Kerr has been particularly vocal about his reverence for Josh Homme, and it’s as much for his singing as his fretwork; as he told Clash magazine earlier this year, “Queens of the Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf was a massive album for me. That album’s so melodic and so huge, without any screaming.” Accordingly, Kerr’s smooth, steady voice serves as a cool counterpoint to the rockocalypse erupting around him, but unlike Homme’s arch, playfully effeminate delivery, it’s less a subversive device than a subservient one, unable to elevate songs like "Careless" and "Ten Tonne Skeleton" beyond their humourless, all-too-familiar expressions of blue-balled frustration.
The best a young band working with such a well-worn template can hope for is to imprint their own peculiar personality upon it—see: the White Stripes’ theatrical vamping or Alex Turner’s keen, colloquial, observational wit. There are promising flashes of that sort of attitude here: “Figure It Out” and “Loose Change”—not coincidentally the two songs that bust out of the band’s usual slow-motion boogie and accelerate into feverish finales—find Kerr exhibiting a more flamboyant, cocksure pose he should parade more often. But Royal Blood have a long way to go before cultivating a mythos of their own, outfitting mid-tempo chugs like “You Can Be So Cruel” and “Little Monster” with generic girl-done-me-wrong/girl-do-me-right lyrics that readily conform to the thematic expectations of blooze-rock rather than make any attempt to redefine them. That such an unassuming, workmanlike outfit has been so immediately lionized is ultimately less a measure of Royal Blood’s exceptionalism than rock'n'roll’s overblown inferiority complex: If this is all it takes to save rock, then it really couldn’t have been hurting that much to begin with.


The legendary Senegalese band's first album in six years, consisting in part of re-recordings of the group's earlier songs, continues its impressive record of seamlessly fusing the traditional and the modern.

Made in Dakar

The music biz being what it is, Orchestra Baobab never quite got their due in the West. They disbanded in the mid-1980s, just as more and more people were growing aware that there was music being released all over the world, some of it-– gasp!-– not even in English. Still, the Senegalese group had it better than most. During their initial run, at least, Orchestra Baobab ruled West African pop, and their impact and influence were such the group eventually reconvened, at last getting the star treatment not just locally but around the globe.
Orchestra Baobab's aptly titled 2002 comeback disc, Specialist in All Styles, encapsulated many of the ever-evolving group's strengths, in particular their knack for musical assimilation. Equally informed by Cuban and indigenous African musics, not to mention hybrids like Congolese rumba and Senegal's own pop strain mbalax, the disc found them picking up where they left off. Six years later, Made in Dakar continues the voyage with still more seamless style blending. Of course, nothing here is as crass as, say, rap-metal. Orchestra Baobab's fusion is far more subtle, and always rooted in traditional music. While world music elitists might prefer their sounds obscure, exotic, and mysterious, Orchestra Baobab is so smooth, so deceptively accessible, that for once the liner notes actually significantly enhance the listening experience.
We learn that the lead track, "Pape Ndiaye", stretches back to 1968, and marked one of the first modern updatings of a traditional griot song. We see that "Nijaay" was first performed by Baobab back in 1972; the version here features a cameo from Youssou N'Dour, whose own stardom eventually came to eclipse Baobab. "Beni Baraale" is a tribute to Guinea's equally groundbreaking Bembeya Jazz; Guinea guitarist Baba Nabe joins Baobab guitarist Barthélemy Attisso in what amounts to a tip of the hat by way of ethno-musicology.
Each song here-- with vocals performed in Wolof, Portuguese Creole, French, and Malinke-- is equally rich in history, testament to one of the few positive outcomes of European occupation as they deftly incorporate soul and salsa, rumba and jazz, reggae and country, an exercise in cross-pollination made all the more impressive by the near invisibility of the threads connecting it all. That's ultimately what makes Orchestra Baobab such a joy: It's dance music, pure and simple, made for others to have a good time, easily appreciated on the basis of its musicianship alone (Attisso is particularly inspired throughout) but becoming more impressive the deeper you dig into what's actually being done.


Though Stephen O’ Malley, Randall Dunn, and Oren Ambarchi have exhausting rosters of collaborations and contributions, their respective drone-and-doom credits remain preeminent for many. On Shade Themes From Kairos, this trio’s collective résumé turns the preceding four tracks into a wonderland of intrigue, where disparate influences twist and turn into uncanny phantasms.

Oren Ambarchi / Stephen O’Malley / Randall Dunn: Shade Themes From Kairos

Shade Themes From Kairos

Yes, indeed, Shade Themes from Kairos includes a gorgeous metal-plated drone, the sort of 21-minute electric yogic saga you might expect from the triumvirate responsible for this five-track album. Though Stephen O’ Malley, Randall Dunn, and Oren Ambarchi have exhausting rosters of collaborations and contributions, their respective drone-and-doom credits remain preeminent for many. O’ Malley, for instance, is best known for co-founding the metal monolith Sunn O))), a band that Dunn not only records in the studio but engineers and mixes on the stage, too, serving as a shadowed albeit essential auxiliary member. Ambarchi, an Australian multi-instrumentalist with an insatiable taste for new musical idioms and approaches, seems to release another album every quarter; still, to casual listeners, he’s most associated with powerful contributions to the most recent Sunn O))) albums or, at best, a set of LPs released through the band’s own Southern Lord mothership a decade ago.
So, then, Shade Themes satisfies its stylistic prerequisites by closing with “Ebona Pagoda,” an ultra-coruscant reduction of the epics that shape as Sunn O)))’s core. Gently distorted guitars hang like fog over oscillating peals of organ. When those sounds intersect at just the right angle, the hum breaks through the amplified haze like sunlight, the solitary beams refracted into infinity. It’s beautiful, but that’s not the reason you should listen to Shade Themes.
Instead, this trio’s collective résumé turns the preceding four tracks into a wonderland of intrigue, where disparate influences twist and turn into uncanny phantasms. O’Malley, Dunn and Ambarchi initially composed these pieces for Kairos, the film component of an extended multimedia project by Belgian artist Alexis Destoop. In the film, time is mined like minerals and commodified for a society that’s already ruined it. The trio based their score around unedited footage, responding to scenarios and scenes in a process that allowed, Destoop notes, “a blurring of the line between diegetic and non-diegetic sound.” That’s not the only line that the group blurred: This hour of music reaches wide to pull together strands from the trio’s expansive orbit of enthusiasms and experiences.
There’s the aforementioned tidal drone and the occult choogle that Dunn conjures with his own Master Musicians of Bukkake. There’s the space-warping electronica experiments endemic to some of Ambarchi’s best work, and the agile bullying of Nazoranai, O’Malley and Ambarchi’s trio with their spirit guide into directed discursion, Keiji Haino. Throughout Shade Themes, it’s possible to detect dub and IDM, krautrock and Sufi trance, Fluxus-like collage and, of course, a little rock ’n’ roll gusto, all within the same track.
This composite approach especially directs the album’s first half. Opener “The Space Between” disorients Spaghetti Western themes, bending guitar leads around beats that mope like reggae on tranquilizers. “Temporal, Eponymous” balances twitchy noise-rock with a rhythm section that favors hypnotic repetition, casting a spell of unequal parts meditation and agitation. But the most brilliant instance of this stylistic frisson comes at the album’s center, near the middle of “Circumstances of Faith”. For five minutes, the trio works through an electroacoustic mirage, suggesting the pioneering archives O’Malley has reissued of late through Recollections GRM. When Ambarchi’s drums finally arrive, however, he presses against the din until he disrupts it, leaving only a throbbing bass and a coiled wire of noise suspended against the silence. A guitar suddenly moans across the room. The band seems at the edge of eruption. It’s only a tease. Instead of bedlam, tablas percolate, doubling and tripling the meter and pushing the trio toward an unseen drum-jam crescendo.
Sandwiched between these instrumental collages and curves sits “Sometimes,” one of the most surprising pieces in any of these musician’s respective catalogues. The delicate voice of Japanese singer-songwriter Ai Aso arrives like a whisper spoken too loudly. She threads through a lacelike latticework of processed acoustic guitar plucks, microscopic electronic clicks and drums brushed so delicately they barely register. It’s prismatic chamber folk, rendered so as to split the difference between the austere electroacoustic stable of Touch and the deliberate motion of fellow Drag City songwriter Bill Callahan. Again, there are precedents for this sound with all three principals here: O’Malley released Aso’s wonderful Lone earlier this year, Dunn produced Marissa Nadler’s exquisite July, and in 2012, Ambarchi began his own Audience of One with “Salt”, a patient pop stunner that wouldn’t feel out of place sung by James Blake or Bon Iver.  Still, “Sometimes” sits like the solitary bloom in a warzone, a focal point of beauty in a landscape of ordered disorder.
Shade Themes from Kairos arrives five years after this trio first gathered in an abandoned radio studio in Belgium, accompanied by an army of equipment. Given the schedules that these three keep, it seems unlikely that they’ll find a similar furlough and charge anytime soon. Just this year, Ambarchi has already released two albums, while O’Malley is preparing for a reboot of Sunn O))). Dunn is emerging not only as a go-to producer for metal but also for indie acts looking to add more edge and atmosphere. That’s too bad. Together, this trio excels not just at the expected but also delights in the quest to find a common vernacular amid multiple musical languages. That’s the challenge and the charm of Shade Themes from Kairos, a record that minds borders only long enough to maneuver around them.


Neil Young's troubled, long-fabled "Ditch Trilogy" is finally released in full alongside an unexpected, mercurial coda.

Neil Young / Crazy Horse: Time Fades Away/Zuma

Time Fades Away/Zuma

Neil Young boasted of steering his career into “the ditch” in the early 1970s, choosing to make sad, lonely, difficult records in the wake of Harvest’s wide success. The “Ditch Trilogy” (as Young enthusiasts dubbed it) of Time Fades Away, Tonight’s the Night**, and On the Beach marks his creative peak—yet for decades, this era was neglected and incomplete. On the Beach only made it to CD in 2003, and Time Fades Away was never reissued digitally.
Thanks to the vinyl revival, the trio is finally available. Rereleased initially as a pricey Record Store Day box set, and now as individual LPs, the “Ditch Trilogy” records—plus its sunnier epilogue, *Zuma—*are back in print for the first time since their original releases. So while On the Beach and Tonight’s the Night are well-established masterpieces, now’s the time to consider the on-ramp and the off-ramp to the Ditch, and understand how Young entered that dark spiral and how he escaped it.
Time Fades Away is the album Neil Young didn’t want us to hear; in several interviews over the years, he’s bluntly referred to it as his “worst album.” In Waging Heavy Peace, Young’s 2012 memoir, the 1973 live album is mentioned exactly twice, which is approximately 1,000 times fewer than his electric Lincoln and his Pono music service. Even when major missing pieces of his ’70s catalog were patched in 2003, Time Fades Away was left to rot in the archives.
Several theories have circulated to explain the conspicuous snub, most often returning to the cursed fog that hung over Young’s 1973 tour. Originally, the band was supposed to include Danny Whitten, Neil’s guitar foil in Crazy Horse—but, fighting drug addiction and alcoholism, Whitten couldn’t hack it at rehearsals in fall 1972, and he was fired and sent back to Los Angeles. That same night, he was found dead from an overdose of alcohol and Valium. Whitten’s death cast a shadow over the tour, which started the following January and wormed its way across the United States in a rigorous 62 shows in 90 days.
The stories from the tour, as regaled in Young biographies, are like a nightmare version of Almost Famous, replete with drug indulgences, money arguments, audience riots, medical issues, and technical problems. Two-thirds of the way through, Neil’s vocal cords were shot, leading to show cancellations and inclusion of David Crosby and Graham Nash, to no great help. Young’s band the Stray Gators, the murderer’s row of session musicians from Harvest, didn’t translate to basketball arenas; drummer Kenny Buttrey had the worst time of it, with Young asking him to play louder and louder until he literally bled on his drums. Legendary producer and arranger Jack Nitzsche, playing piano, self-medicated his stage fright with alcohol; for his own part, Young spent the tour chugging tequila and trying out a new Gibson Flying V guitar instead of his totemic Old Black, his dissatisfaction with the sound leading to endless soundchecks and after-show spats.
So this wasn’t exactly the tour you’d want to commemorate for eternity with a live album—but at least initially, Young was perversely excited to reflect its chaos, and left the recording mostly free of the overdubs that glossed many live albums of the era. “Money hassles among everyone concerned ruined this tour and record for me, but I released it anyway so you folks could see what could happen if you lose it for a while,” Young wrote in the liner notes of 1977’s Decade.
But in retrospect, he was too harsh. The Stray Gators were one of Young’s most interesting bands: they were fragile, straining, and desperate. One could easily see where their heavier material, such as “Yonder Stands the Sinner” and “Last Dance,” would have fit Whitten-era Crazy Horse. Here, pedal steel wizard Ben Keith levels up from a classy hired hand on Harvest to assume Whitten’s role, his instrument providing wobbly, intoxicated howls that amplify the haunted mood. Nitzsche plays a deceptively clunky piano that turns “Time Fades Away” into a chicken-wire saloon and creeps with tinkling anxiety around the edges of “Last Dance.” When Crosby and Nash show up, they create an alternate-dimension CSNY that uses their harmonies as a weapon instead of a balm, with Young and Crosby’s “Yonder Stands the Sinner” choruses particularly deranged.
Coming on the heels of the slick Harvest, Time Fades Away was a crucial swerve for Young, and it established the proudly flawed aesthetic that has kept his work immediate and powerful for decades. These are weary, acidic songs about the hollowness of stardom—recording them during a tour from hell is an asset, not a flaw. Even the crowd noise between songs heightens the despair—blissful, oblivious applause from an audience too remote to see Young’s naked pain. Songs previously lost on Time Fades Away are key parts of Young’s story. “Don’t Be Denied” is one of Young’s best autobiographical songs, wistfully telling the story of his Canadian childhood through Buffalo Springfield’s early days. “L.A.” is a wonderfully cynical kiss-off to the city where that band found stardom, a land of dreams beset by earthquakes, traffic, and smog.w
Because Zuma was packaged with the trilogy for the Record Store Day vinyl box set, there’s been some recent chatter of a “Ditch quadrilogy.” But Zuma is a poor fit with the other three; it’s a record made on a beach instead of On the Beach, a happy reunion and fresh beginning for Crazy Horse, and a goofy boys’ club hangout released only five months after Tonight’s the Night’s tortured slog. It hits the reset button in many ways—most literally with its opener, “Don’t Cry No Tears,” which recycles the melody from “I Wonder,” one of Young’s first recorded works with his high school band, the Squires.
It also marked Young’s decision to reform Crazy Horse for the first time since Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, with new guitarist Frank “Poncho” Sampedro filling the big rhythm guitar shoes of Danny Whitten. That Young could even stomach replacing Whitten, two years after his death, signaled that the session in Malibu would be one of recovery and rebirth. That period was particularly debauched, with the recently divorced Young and his bandmates enjoyed the company of California girls and Colombian powder, and the party carried over into the “studio” (essentially just a room in producer David Briggs’ rental house). There, the new Crazy Horse got to know each other over some hastily written material, simplified to work with Poncho’s rudimentary guitar.
This lackadaisical formula explains the uneven nature of Zuma, which is equally filled with classics and duds. “Cortez the Killer” and “Danger Bird” are two triumphantly moody, electric epics—lesser cousins to the “Down by the River”-style sprees of the first Crazy Horse, but still spacious opportunities for Young to revive his trademark lacerating guitar tone. It’s here that the sludgy Crazy Horse known today takes shape: the trade-out of the communicative Whitten for Sampedro’s simpler style creates that blunt sound. The rhythm section of Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina lurches menacingly through “Cortez” and “Danger Bird,” and Sampedro’s blocky guitar caddies for Young’s lengthy soloing.
The album’s two other highlights revive a breezy, poppy Young that had been missing since After the Gold Rush. “Don’t Cry No Tears,” is simple twangy country-rock well in the Horse’s wheelhouse, gilded with innocent backing harmonies. “Barstool Blues,” despite being a fairly shameless rip of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” is a convincing and catchy depiction of drunken euphoria—and a pretty accurate portrait of Zuma’s making. On the less lovable side of the endless party, “Stupid Girl” is nowhere near good enough to justify its casual misogyny and title swipe from the Rolling Stones, and “Drive Back” is barely a song beneath its mighty riff and creepy piano. Leftovers tossed in from Homegrown (“Pardon My Heart”) and the aborted second CSNY record (“Through My Sails”) don’t quite fit the mood, presaging the less cohesive and spottier records over the rest of Young’s decade.
Still, if Zuma is an epilogue to the Ditch Trilogy, it’s also a prologue to the rest of Young’s career, kicking off his fickle, impulsive zig-zagging between genres and volume levels. That restlessness would keep Young vital long after his peers faded—and it can be traced all the way back to the stoned sunsets of Malibu, where Young decided to cry no more tears and move onward down the road, swerving all the way.


Twinkling riffs collide with dial-up static and blown-out drums on a collaborative album from the bit-crushing electronic maximalists and the South Korean dream-pop darling.

Scattersun

Fax Gang’s hyper-compressed songs sound like murmurs transmitted from virtual reality. The multinational collective—currently made up of Philippines-based vocalist PK Shellboy and producers GLACIERbaby, maknaeslayer, and kimj—are known for bit-crushing Drain Gang-esque vocals and electronics into distorted masses of sound. Parannoul, meanwhile, is a pseudonymous South Korean artist who crafts fuzzy sketches using synthetic instruments like MIDI guitars. Within their insular worlds, each act explores feelings of insecurity and depression through different processes, yet both produce similarly raw music.
Fax Gang and Parannoul’s new collaborative album, Scattersun, bursts outward with messy energy. The way Parannoul’s heavy-lidded voice drifts above the sparkling keys of opener “Quiet” might resemble After the Magic, but the song’s movements are volatile and sharp, cresting in sudden explosions that mirror the artists’ anxious mindsets. Written and produced entirely over text, Scattersun is constantly cracking open, expelling static hiss, breakbeats, and stray metallic clangs from its airtight casing. Any space for quiet is often crammed with soundbites, like the rev of a motor or a screwball saxophone solo.
To match the blown-out landscape, Fax Gang explore alternatives to the flattened vocals of their previous work. On the twitchy stream of consciousness “Double Bind,” PK Shellboy switches between a partially bit-crushed effect and their unaltered voice, squeezing out enough dread to match the UK garage beat’s foreboding shuffle. Though outclassed by South Korean rapper Mudd the student’s verse on “Wrong Signal,” PK Shellboy’s wheezy rambling is more convincingly paranoid. Their unease sounds visceral: “Time keeps on passing with every day/Yet nothing gets better,” they gasp, voice tense and filled with trepidation.
Parannoul remains a characteristically demure presence, anchoring the record with faint keys and a hushed voice. His balmy verse on “Lullaby for a Memory” offers a reprieve from PK Shellboy’s anxiety about growing older, even as it’s pelted with harsh breakbeats. Only on “Soliloquy” does Parannoul’s voice rise to a full-throated scream, a forceful moment overshadowed by the surrounding noise. If PK Shellboy raves about turning into the devil, Parannoul sounds like just one resident of Hell.
The lure of Scattersun is its contrasting textures—twinkling riffs against dial-up static and explosive synths over hollowed-out drums. Occasionally, the many layers fuse into a monolith. The title track’s 10-minute span recalls “White Ceiling,” from Parannoul’s To See the Next Part of the Dream, but where that song laboriously built to catharsis, “Scattersun” stitches several ideas together, each demanding equal intensity. “Sometimes/I feel like I’m in a car crash/Nothing I can do to stop it,” PK Shellboy announces at the top. The track’s spontaneous turns from apocalyptic rave synths to gliding four-on-the-floor to condensed noise might replicate the vocalist’s turbulent moods, but those same abrupt changes can be draining to listen to. More dynamic than either artist’s work alone, Scattersun pushes them into the burning wreckage of reality, where everything feels brilliant yet overwhelming.


Will Oldham and Faun Fables’ Dawn McCarthy come together on an album of duets that pays tribute to songs originally recorded by the Everly Brothers. They steer clear of the harmonizing duo's most famous tracks and focus more on obscurities by other songwriters cut after their 1950s chart peak.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy / Dawn McCarthy: What the Brothers Sang

What the Brothers Sang

The “Brothers” up there are the Everlys, Phil and Don, who in the 1950s set an impossibly high standard for pop harmonies with hits like “Bye Bye Love”, “Wake Up Little Susie”, and “All I Have to Do Is Dream”. Working under mentor/guitar god Chet Atkins, the brothers were a versatile duo who played pop, country, rock, folk, and R&B with equal ease, and they helped launch the careers of numerous songwriters, including-- perhaps most notably-- Felice and Boudleaux Bryant (“Love Hurts” and “Rocky Top”, among many others). While they couldn’t quite sustain the success of those singles in the late 50s, the Everlys weathered the 60s and 70s, and their legacy now spans literally every rock-and-roll generation. Their songs have been covered by Simon & Garfunkel and Bob Dylan, by R.E.M. and Eddie Vedder, by Cat Power and Neko Case.
By recording a full album of Everly covers, Faun Fables’ Dawn McCarthy and Bonnie “Prince” Billy join a long line of musician-fans who've paid tribute. What the Brothers Sang isn’t their first collaboration. McCarthy played Oldham’s vocal foil on his 2006 album The Letting Go, and since then they’ve recorded an EP, Wai Notes, as well as a gently demented Christmas-themed seven-inch, Christmas Eve Can Kill You. Of all of Billy’s many female co-vocalists, few such an easy rapport with him as McCarthy. Many, including Cheyenne Marie Mize and Angel Olsen, counter Oldham’s studied detachment with a warm engagement, which worked well on Among the Gold and Wolfroy Goes to Town, respectively. But McCarthy can sound just as out there as Oldham himself; he voice is dry and husky, with a subtle expressiveness very much like his. Rather than churning the kind of sexual energy that has driven so many duos from Parton/Wagoner to the Civil Wars, theirs is more of a Platonic tension.
In other words, McCarthy and Oldham haven’t re-gendered the Everlys’ songs for co-ed vocalists. Rather than two lovers having it out in songs, they sound like two friends drinking over shared memories and commiserating over separately broken hearts. Oldham is her “best unbeaten brother,” to quote his own song. With no driving interpretive concept here, the focus is largely on the Everlys’ adventurous taste in songs. Most of the tunes on What the Brothers Sang hail from the 60s, well after their heyday; hits are passed over in favor of deep catalogue cuts.  “Milk Train”, by Tony Romeo (most famous for writing the Partridge Family’s “Hey I Think I Love You”), is told from the point of view of a train switchman; “Poems, Prayers & Promises”, by John Denver, could be a hippie anthem, which is about the furthest thing from the Everlys’ clean-cut image of the 50s. Still, all of the songs on What the Brothers Sang sound like they might have sprung from the same pen, bottling up all the complexities of broken hearts and presenting them with languid, sophisticated country-rock arrangements.
While it occasionally saps these songs of some of their tension, that sense of camaraderie enlivens the album and energizes the performers. Oldham hasn’t sounded quite so animated as he does on the cover of the Everlys’ cover of the Spencer Davis Group’s cover of Jackie Edwards’ “Somebody Help Me”, although even his invested, in-character vocals can’t quite sell the period piece “Milk Train”. Every bit his equal, McCarthy thrives in this austere setting. Without the distractions of the Faun Fables’ Americana drama, she displays a remarkable range, belting like the Heart sisters one minute, sounding indistinguishable from Oldham the next. Still, What the Brothers Sang is best when it’s simplest and most direct. “Devoted to You” and “So Sad” are all the more powerful for being so spare in their arrangements, as though illustrating the power of a small country bar band. On the other hand, “Omaha” has an exurban sprawl that sounds out of place among these more private meditations, and the rustic psychedelica of “My Little Yellow Bird” distracts from rather than reinforces the wistful melody and the lyrics’ immense longing.
Ultimately, What the Brothers Sang is a tribute to what the brothers sang, not necessarily how they sang it. The album’s true subjects are the many songwriters behind the Everlys-- an incredibly wide and eclectic sampling. McCarthy and Oldham wear the weight of that history lightly-- perhaps too lightly. This is a spirited album, yet somehow slight. It’s a modest monument to their heroes, although perhaps that is the whole point: Perhaps What the Brothers Sang is specifically intended to leave you wanting more substantial, in order to inspire listeners to dig deeper into the Everlys’ catalog and beyond.


An understated landmark of underground house, Galcher Lustwerk’s 2013 DJ mix receives a remastered 2xLP release. His defiantly unchanging beats feel charged with the knowledge that every party ends.

100% Galcher

For once, the system worked: Galcher Lustwerk uploaded a mixtape to the internet and it made him famous. It was 2013; nobody outside his circle of friends in Providence and New York knew anything about the Cleveland-born producer or his music. But White Material, a label run by his buddies Young Male and DJ Richard, had recently turned a few clued-in heads with its first two vinyl releases, and the label’s word-of-mouth acclaim was enough to secure Lustwerk—an alias that the recent RISD grad had gotten from an internet CAPTCHA—a slot with Blowing Up the Workshop, a fledgling online mix series.
Lustwerk’s set, published around the time that his debut EP dropped, was 12th in the series, following mixes from under-the-radar artists like Helm and Tuluum Shimmering. Instead of recording a standard DJ session, he opted for a production mix—that is, a set composed entirely of his own tracks. (Hence the title, 100% Galcher.) The songs, ruminative deep-house head-nodders all, were low-key; so was the anonymous artist’s self-presentation. By way of an introduction, he merely offered, “Some tracks and stems from 2012 compiled into a promomix.” None of it—the suggestion that these were rough drafts; the lack of an artist photo; the cheery signoff, “Hope you enjoy!”—augured an imminent breakthrough. The internet, after all, is awash in free mixes; other Blowing Up the Workshop sets have slowly accumulated play counts in the low four digits. But nine years and nearly 200,000 streams later, 100% Galcher is a milestone in that decade’s underground house music. With nothing more than pitter-pat 808s, powdery synths, and his own drowsy baritone rapping, a dark horse of deep house came up with a style that didn’t sound like anything else in dance music—not then, not before, not since.
The set launched Lustwerk’s career, paving the way for three full-lengths under his main alias and more from various side projects. It also spawned its share of imitators. But while standout cuts like “Parlay,” “Put On,” and “I Neva Seen” turned up on subsequent EPs, much of the material in the mix never came out commercially: Lustwerk accidentally fried his laptop and lost half the tracks in the process. Ghostly’s 2xLP version of 100% Galcher marks the first time that all 15 tracks—rescued from the damaged hard drive and remastered—have been released in their full-length, unmixed versions. If you’ve listened to that mix once, you’ve probably listened to it a hundred times, which gives the reissued 100% Galcher a feeling of familiarity shading into deja vu; it’s reasonable to ask if anyone other than DJs should care about the reissue. After all, this kind of music is created largely for the purpose of being mixed—the DJ set is its natural habitat. Why sit through 32-bar intros when you can cut right to the chorus?
Yet not only do the tracks hold up as standalone pieces—not just building blocks but real songs—the album breathes in a way that the mix doesn’t. The fleshed-out tracks suit Lustwerk’s deeply repetitive style; the longer his skeletal drum patterns stretch out, the more consequential the most trivial filter tweak feels. The extended ambient interludes are miniature worlds unto themselves, casting an unearthly glow over the heads-down dancefloor cuts, like the sun coming up over an afterparty in its final throes. Josh Bonati’s remastering job is subtle but significant, bringing out crucial depth and detail without sacrificing the songs’ atmospheric murk, and highlighting the idiosyncrasies of Lustwerk’s production.
Much iconic electronic music boils down to the uniqueness of its palette, and with 100% Galcher, Lustwerk hit upon a mix of sounds and timbres that referenced classic deep-house producers like Larry Heard while still sounding singular, even otherworldly. His drums are dry and grudging, with short sustains and quick decays, offering just enough envelope to reveal each sound’s identity—hissing shaker, crackling woodblock, clipped snare—before letting the surrounding silence swallow it again. His synths, on the other hand, are soft and yielding, morphing like lava lamps between gentle sunrise chords and coolly fluorescent leads. Everything is richly tactile, right down to the coarsely ground purr of his voice.
Lustwerk’s voice is his music’s secret ingredient, reeling off casually rhymed couplets in a way that’s neither intrusive nor reticent. Aside from 1980s hip-house, there’s little tradition of rapping in house music, which meant the terrain was his for the taking. (In a text accompanying the reissue, he credits his signature blend of levitating house beats with short, catchy phrases to a long, stoned night playing Basic Channel records back to back with Juicy J cuts.) His lyrics might not look like much on paper, but to fall under the spell of his sing-song cadence is to dissolve into a lysergic stream-of-consciousness that’s remarkably faithful to the feeling of a long, blurry weekend of clubbing. Lustwerk says that he wrote this music after an intense period of partying with friends in DIY spaces, and those subjects are at the forefront of the songs, which zig-zag from the dancefloor to the driver’s seat to the sidewalk outside the club, an endless circuit settling into a blissfully subdued groove. They’re not so much stories of nights out as staccato visions glimpsed with each flash of the strobe.
But this isn’t party music, exactly. “I wanted to feel like you were tripping, maybe having a bit of heatstroke, or dehydration,” Lustwerk writes of his inspirations for these tracks. “Your body feels detached, your jaw clenched. People become furniture. Light becomes the main character, surfaces show their age in real-time. Wabi-sabi shit.” Those sensations come across in pulsing synths that shimmer like mirages, basslines that seem to hover several feet off the ground, hi-hats that evaporate like sweat off the back of your neck. Despite the frequent references to drugs, these tracks never feel particularly hedonistic: By turns jubilant and brooding, they amount to a snapshot of youthful freedom, encapsulating the fleeting feeling of being independent and unencumbered, with no more pressing concern than which record to put on next. Maybe that’s also why such a powerfully wistful undercurrent runs through the music. You can hear it in the way the chords of “Put On” linger in the air, scented with the sorrowful suggestion of ephemerality. Lustwerk’s defiantly unchanging beats feel charged with the knowledge that every party ends; every high fades. Eventually, the plug gets pulled, and you find yourself on a cracked vinyl seat in the back of a yellow cab, reconstructing disconnected moments already dissolving into memory.


As a member of Duster and Built to Spill, Jason Albertini was often in the background. The latest album from his own band feels like a chance to come up for air.

This Devastating Map

As one-third of San Jose slowcore icons Duster—and bassist for Built to Spill from 2012 until 2019—Jason Albertini is well-versed in indie rock that peers inwards to find a way out. As the core member of Helvetia, a project that he has helmed since 2005, his pining lo-fi multi-instrumentalism delves deeper still. Alongside a rotating cast including Built to Spill alumni Scott Plouf and Jim Roth, records like 2007’s The Acrobats and 2015’s Dromomania packed in sleepyheaded guitar-pop that Albertini awakens on his tenth full-length, This Devastating Map.
When Duster returned in 2019 after almost 20 years away, Albertini, Clay Parton, and Canaan Dove Amber were both seasoned industry vets and somewhat anonymous. Recorded in Albertini’s Portland home last summer, This Devastating Map shirks the urge to recede any further, and feels more substantial than the wiry 4-track musings of Fantastic Life, released in January. After years spent reflecting just slightly beneath the surface, its candor feels like a chance for Albertini to come up for air.
Still, there’s a sunken, almost submerged quality to many of these songs—the kind of thrifty reverb glow and soft-focus hiss that makes Albertini’s studio seem to be situated not just in his basement but far below it. Stretching this quality to its outer reaches, Albertini—backed by ex-Built to Spill drummer Steve Gere and Tiburones’ Samantha Stidham on bass—fills out a sphere of sound. Fizzling melodies nestle in the furthest reaches of each channel on opener “Devastating Map,” sounding like North Carolina indie rockers Polvo on Ambien. On “Inverted,” Alex G-esque guitar shapes and tumbling drums sound like they’re climbing over each other, clamoring to be heard.
Insofar as it can be parsed, Albertini’s loose, candid lyricism has always seemed to center on first thought, best thought. Which is why, even 10 full-length LPs in, there’s still room for shortcomings and sore points. “Love Me” cuts to the chase right away: “Love me and I’ll do anything for you,” Albertini pleads. Sedate, at times foreboding tonal shifts take center stage here and on “Echo Location,” where a slow, unsteady crawl finds its feet across four minutes. In a statement accompanying the song’s video, Albertini offers some curt but telling context: “[It was] the first song I recorded after rehab. A march to the sea where I accidentally end up at some cliffs and call the whole thing off.” Sketching a giddy scene of “clean living,” sun-split lead single “Reaktor” underscores the prevailing sense of returning from the brink to hard-won domesticity. Reeled off above scorched wah-wah leads reminiscent of Doug Martsch, dishwashing and taking one’s daughter to the dentist sound akin to bliss.
If the self-described “desperate, purring distress” of Duster’s paeans to summer days spent inside your head felt uniquely slo-mo, This Devastating Map almost comes to a grinding halt. But like meteors in the night sky, even the briefest songs leave lasting impressions. Maybe it’s that the stakes seem so low, or that the songs demand so little, but the way Albertini teases out quiet, spindly majesty from dread feels vital. As “Long Beach” tails off with a parting minor-key bob evoking fellow Portlanders Quasi, Helvetia’s inward-peering mystique is at all-time low, and Albertini’s growing willingness to be seen looks all the more compelling.

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On her first official release, the 17-year-old songwriting prodigy offers six slickly produced electronic dream pop tracks whose streaks of misery feel discernibly teenage.

Hana Vu: How Many Times Have You Driven By EP

How Many Times Have You Driven By EP

Small acts of public vulnerability feel radical today: crying at the supermarket, crying on Instagram, crying at the club. With the megaphones in our pockets, we have grown accustomed to amplifying our personal sadness, to subverting the idea that emotional excess is weak or wrong. “Crying on the subway send tweet” is about as universal as human sentiments come. Hana Vu wrote a song about that.
“Crying on the Subway” is the lead track from her EP, How Many Times Have You Driven By, a coolly minimal collection that the 17-year-old recorded and produced on her own. Following three-and-a-half years of self-released material from Vu—who has used Bandcamp like an emotional diary, in the vein of Frankie Cosmos and Soccer Mommy—How Many Times is her first release for the label Luminelle Recordings (run by the folks behind the still-kicking MP3-download-era blog Gorilla vs. Bear). Her version of bedroom pop is one that clearly aspires to a slick, sophisticated level of production, like that of Jay Som. Vu’s primary mode is electronic dream pop with streaks of misery that feel discernibly teenage: “I’m always on the phone/I’m always doing nothing,” she sang on the 2016 album Sensitive, which included a collaboration with Willow Smith called “Queen of High School.”
How Many Times spans such styles as loungey downbeat pop and yearning indie rock balladry, but it is all tied together by a charmingly droll vibe and Vu’s deep, soulful voice. Her elliptical sensibility makes “Crying on the Subway” more subtle and restrained than you’d expect. The song doesn’t convey the claustrophobia so typical of city music, like Chandra’s “Subways,” nor does it contain the gut-wrenching despair of girl-group weepers. Instead, “Crying on the Subway” is emotionally vacant in a way that feels real. It is a muted daydream with a wobbly bass sway, the sound of quiet longing and a resigned single tear, of a person who really is trying to just get by. “In my dreams I’m in that gray room/In my chest I’m feeling dark blue,” Vu sings, evoking the colors of her mood music. “Take the red line into downtown/I’m trying to escape you.” Her richly layered vocals feel like a long sigh, like infatuation steadily deflating, like a cold stare. The entire song conveys loneliness and comfort at once.
Across the minor keys and twinkling chords of How Many Times, Vu sings about mundanity, failure, disappointment, and fear. “426” has a melancholic, retro shuffle with shades of Lana Del Rey cool. “Cool” is Vu’s understated loner anthem about hiding out and staying home to work on yourself: “It’s OK to be alone/’Cos I’m gonna make it happen,” she sings. “Gonna make it perfect/Better than it has been.” When Vu proclaims, wisely, “I’m tryna make it cool/....Don’t tell me that I’m wrong/’Cos ain’t nobody right,” it feels like her personal aesthetic thesis. The focus of How Many Times attests to it.
On the whole, Vu’s knowingly detached vision feels cohesive, and her productions shine. But in terms of lyrics and melodies, nothing else on the EP resonates quite as strongly as “Crying on the Subway,” and often the smoothed edges threaten to turn these songs into chilled-out indie muzak. When the rapper Satchy adds a sleek verse to “Cool,” their voices sound complementary, but it’s a bit of a disruption. Still, How Many Times is an intriguing glimpse of an artist at the beginning of a skillfully carved path—even if it leaves you wondering what it was that made her cry in public in the first place, what makes her tears dry.


The second album-length remix collection from HEALTH finds artists like Pictureplane, Crystal Castles, and CFCF re-working songs from Get Color.

Disco2

Though HEALTH improved on the Boredoms-inspired sound of their self-titled debut with last year's more melodic Get Color, they still shine brightest on their remix collections. They followed up the 2007 release of HEALTH with Disco, a surprisingly coherent collection that re-jiggered their sinewy, abrasive tunes. On Disco, artists like Pictureplane and Nosaj Thing channeled HEALTH's chaotic rhythmic power into tight, four-on-the-floor tracks and created sweaty, spazzy, and sexy songs from the noisy source material. And most importantly, Disco seems to have influenced them in making new music. Get Color found HEALTH taking cues from those remixes, growing in a more streamlined, synth-heavy, groove-oriented direction.
Which brings us to Disco2. You could say that it's a remix album of a studio collection that was influenced by a remix album. But rather than becoming an indistinct photocopy of a photocopy, the album brings HEALTH's strengths sharply into focus. Though the heavy tribal pounding and drum freak-outs of the originals are mostly stripped away, the new beats highlight how central rhythm is to these songs. The remixes also give a newfound heft to Jacob Duzsik's reedy, almost-feminine voice, which is already higher up in the mix on Get Color than on HEALTH. Javelin's version of "In Heat", for example, uses Duzsik's otherworldly vocals as its jumping off point, cushioning the singing in a funky bass line. Fleshing out the productions, the album is carried forward by waves of shimmering synth figures, many of which are ripped from HEALTH's originals, an approach that shines a spotlight on the band's underestimated way with hooks.
Though Disco2 is ostensibly a collection about HEALTH, it also serves as a nice survey of some of the more interesting producers on the scene. Montreal-based artist CFCF takes on "Before Tigers" and gloms onto the ethereal vocal melody that lurks beneath the guitar squall of the original, turning it into a bittersweet, shimmering song marked by nostalgic 80s synths. But British producer Gold Panda's version of the same track is completely instrumental, a hypnotic stew of repetitive reverberations and glottal percussion. And while both Denver electro-punk Pictureplane and Black Moth Super Rainbow's Tobacco take on Get Color's best track, "Die Slow", their versions-- the former an astral rave jam of Balearic beats, the latter a syrupy psychedelic concoction of squelching synths-- couldn't be more different.
There is one new HEALTH track on Disco2, "USA Boys", and the band was smart to kick the album off with it. With its dark, cyclical synth riff, droning, outer-space vocals, and gothy dancefloor melody, "USA Boys" not only fits in amongst the cleaner, glossy-electronica vibe of the record, but is also one of its best tracks. This promising development suggests that Disco2, like its predecessor, may be a bridge to the next phase in HEALTH's evolution.


On his debut album, the Berlin musician sets aside his techno proclivities in favor of a moody journey into a more innocent era of electronic music.

Blurry

There are few things as surreal as watching the cyclical maw of nostalgia slowly swallow itself whole. If we’re to believe in the 20-year rule, right about now we should all be getting ready to cast off our throwback Matrix rave gear and Y2K-worshiping pop idols to make way for a roaring return of the dreadful Bush years. Yet it feels as if our window for reassessing the past has gotten smaller and smaller. With the last two decades of pop culture merely a thumb swipe away, much of our recent zeitgeist has been defined by how we’ve chosen to reconfigure images of the past in a way that suits our present selves. The divides between scenes, genres, and styles have become blurrier and messier as every last cultural artifact has been turned over to see what hidden jewels might lie underneath.
Luka Seifert, aka RIP Swirl, feels like a product of this pop-culture ouroboros. The Hamburg-born producer has all the traits of a typical underground DJ, having spent the last few years orbiting Berlin’s club scene both as part of the Einhundert art collective and through his own Paradise House parties, even scoring runways for prominent fashion brands along the way. He’s left behind a string of cassette-torn house tracks with a tastefully retro quality to them, but his more extended releases for Public Possession have given a deeper peek into his mindset, filtering his hypnotic electronic music through a dense haze of lo-fi guitars and muffled, alien dream pop.
Despite his techno proclivities, Seifert comes off like a ’90s alt kid at heart. He counts Duster and Dinosaur Jr. among his favorite bands, and the enigmatic name of his project is a veiled reference to The Larry Sanders Show. After the pandemic put a halt to his DJ bookings, Seifert retreated to the alternative music of his youth and set out to record his debut album, Blurry. Pulling influences from trip-hop, shoegaze, and movie soundtracks (specifically Lost in Translation and Trainspotting) that now feel like charming relics from indie cinema’s great boom, the resulting album is a moody journey into a more innocent era of electronic music. It’s a remarkably confident change in direction for RIP Swirl, its nocturnal mood capturing the playful sophistication of early-’00s electronica as seen through the fashion-damaged club culture of today.
While much of Seifert’s native dance-music culture revolves around a utopian ideal of communal, hedonistic release, the styles he draws on here are much more subdued. This is headphone music for late-night bus rides—the lonesome soundtrack for the long drive home after leaving the club a bit earlier than everyone else. After revving up with the snapping breakbeats of the title track, Seifert immediately drops us into full Maxinquaye territory with the snaking groove of “Love Song,” layering his acoustic snares with a shroud of hanging guitar feedback. He takes lessons from Yves Tumor’s big-beat revival and George Clanton’s washed-out Y2K pop, building many of Blurry’s tracks around perfectly concise drum loops that feel strangely timeless in their booming simplicity. Even when Seifert calls on guest vocalists, as he does with Clayjay on “Smiling Dog” or Ydegirl on “Pass Out,” these moments feel less like songs and more like impressions of bedroom pop condensed into narcotic loops.
For most of Blurry, however, Seifert wisely avoids the classic producer mistake of over-relying on guest vocalists, placing most of the focus on his own richly textured production. On “gUts,” he slows his rhythm down to a disassociated crawl, turning the sound of his hand sliding up and down the neck of his guitar into a mesmerizing downtempo pattern. With its delayed, head-nodding hi-hats, “Better” channels the intimate beatmaking exercises of experimental hip-hop acts like Prefuse 73, while “Alone Awake” rides along on a Four Tet-style slide, driven by a chalky drum pattern and Seifert’s layered, slithering guitar. Much of Blurry is instrumental for the better—until Seifert’s own vocals emerge on the penultimate “Slipping My Mind,” bringing the album to its climax with a druggy, disaffected chiller anthem that sounds like a forgotten cut from the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind soundtrack. In its reversed synths and gently epic sway, the entire song is infused with the same psychedelic awe Caroline Polachek has been dabbling in lately; it’s a wonderfully primitive embrace of the kind of wide-eyed sincerity that we seem to have lost somewhere down the line.
Culture has continued to evolve, whether we’ve been locked inside or not, and there’s a growing unease that the world we enter post-pandemic may not entirely resemble the one we left behind. RIP Swirl responded to his own isolation by simply returning to the music that made him and figuring out how to make it work in a post-rave landscape. By playing with the nostalgia of sounds that haven’t been reassessed yet—without giving into pure genre gimmickry—Seifert has created an album that marries the electronic underground of today with the dreamy guitar music that has endured in our cultural mythos. For all its murkiness, what makes Blurry stand out is how refreshingly earnest it feels.


The Glasgow-based graphic artist's mostly instrumental Regional Surrealism brings together half-remembered childhood memories, severe dreams of the future, pastoral-electronic wistfulness, and a guest spot from Mogwai's Stuart Braithwaite.

Regional Surrealism

Tom Scholefield has created his own brand of hyperreality in his work as a graphic artist, forming a world where the real and the synthetic pile-up through colossal stacks of imagery. Human skulls, machinery, plant life, broken-down cars, barnacles, teeth, and satellite dishes all feature in his work, which includes the monochromatic cover art for Oneohtrix Point Never's Rifts and the more colorful 3D animation of Kuedo's video for "Ascension Phase". For the cover art of this debut album under his Konx-om-Pax moniker, Scholefield imagines a space where mountainous terrain is chiseled out to host to a large factory building, which in turn is under threat from reedy, grass-like tentacles slithering up around its metal façade. He stops short of imagining a future where these elements can peacefully co-exist, instead creating an anarchic face-off where humankind, machines, and the natural world are all straining to gain the upper hand.
It's a feeling that seeps into the music on Regional Surrealism, a mostly instrumental album caught somewhere between the chillwave-plundered "half-remembered childhood nostalgia" trope, impossibly severe dreams of the future, and the pastoral-electronic wistfulness of Scholefield's fellow countrymen Boards of Canada. That flitting back and forth between styles is emblematic of his wider work in the art and design fields, which has taken in projects with fellow Glaswegians Hudson Mohawke, Rustie, and Mogwai (whose Stuart Braithwaite features on "Zang-Tumb" from this record). Konx-om-Pax feels like various strains of abstract thought circling one another, with only the loosest of ties binding them together. It takes place in a juncture between the big and the small, the real and the unreal. On the vast "Pillars of Creation" Scholefield constructs a fantastic glacial empire all of his own; on "Let's Go Swimming" if feels like he's straining to see a reflection of himself in a tiny, muddy puddle.
That fissure quickly opens up when Regional Surrealism begins and never closes up into anything that could be described as a hermetic Konx-om-Pax sound. This material has been collected from various points in the past six or seven years according to an interview Scholefield recently gave to the Quietus, which helps explain its scattershot whims. "Intro" encroaches on the kind of plastic pining Joe Knight regularly conducts under his Rangers guise, while "Slootering" is a slavish piece of Perrey/Kingsley worship that directs the album down a surprisingly quirky detour following the growing feeling of atrophy that precedes it. "At Home with Mum and Dad" best represents the latter feeling, with a series of loops shifting lugubriously across the same axis of yearning/darkness that Demdike Stare try to bridge, where the sound moves so sluggishly that it resembles the actions of someone scaling a mountain with a sack of rocks tied to their back.
The abundance of gloom shouldn't be a total surprise-- the name "Konx-om-Pax" is taken from the title of a series of essays published in 1907 by famed occultist Aleister Crowley, himself a beloved reference point for myriad musicians from many different backgrounds over the years. Regional Surrealism is only loosely anchored in that domain, but it's when Scholefield crawls into those blackened corners that he can divine his most impressive material. "Glacier Mountain Descent" is particularly striking, offering a subtle twist on Werner Herzog's opening for Aguirre: The Wrath of God that hints at an ambition for Konx-om-Pax that far outstrips more frivolous material like the Braithwaite-featuring "Zang-Tumb". Those hints of humor are often symbolized in Scholefield's artworks, but here they have an unbalancing effect, only serving to detract from the portentous musical renderings of the uneasy symbiosis between digital glitch and the natural world. The potential for Konx-om-Pax feels boundless if he can find a way back to that latter space more often.


On her debut album as Cruel Diagonals, the Oakland experimental musician Megan Mitchell turns samples sourced from ethnomusicological archives into ambient music that’s both expressive and empathetic.

Disambiguation

The title of Megan Mitchell’s debut album as Cruel Diagonals seems ironic at first. Disambiguation suggests a process of clarification, yet Mitchell’s music is full of mystery. Her songs often retreat, with sounds fading soon after they emerge, and silence always threatening to overtake her atmospheres. It’s tough to make out the words in her shadowy, disembodied singing, if there are words there at all. Her track titles acknowledge all this in terms such as “oblique,” “vague,” and “liminal.”
Yet in one crucial respect, Disambiguation is loud and clear. That’s Mitchell’s use of bold, distinct beats. Nearly every track centers on a prodding pulse, providing skeletons for other sounds to float around like a ghost’s billowing sheet. To make those sounds, Mitchell used field recordings and samples from the ethnomusicology archives at the University of Washington, where she studied Library and Information Sciences. As a result, her rhythms seem to arise from the depths of nature. It’s as if you can hear wisps of history inside their spellbinding echoes.
Because Mitchell’s beats are so strong and willful, they give Disambiguation a lot of force. Everything moves forward deliberately, and soon enough all the sonic obscurity becomes a tool with which to express emotion and build ambience, instead of a cloak to hide behind. Rather than pushing you away, her subtle music beckons you to come closer. Naturally, there is some loneliness and even desolation emanating from her restrained approach, but there’s also a lot of empathy. The feeling of solitude she creates is honest in a way that can make you feel less alone.
Disambiguation’s enveloping moods develop gradually. On the best Cruel Diagonals tracks, Mitchell starts slowly, establishing an aura before infusing it with a rhythmic arc. On “Oblique Ritual,” long tones make room for a minimal beat, which eventually rises to meet Mitchell’s vocal hums. A far-off drone gradually works its way into focus on “Render Arcane” before transferring momentum to the kind of chiming repetition often associated with Steve Reich’s loops. Mitchell can also hit the ground running: “Enmeshed” begins with a bounding rhythm that’s soon echoed in her foggy moans, which are so haunting it sounds as if it she recorded them during a previous lifetime.
Mitchell’s sonic environment evokes some other dark electronic music (particularly the murky concoctions of Demdike Stare), but mostly it feels singular. The danger in building such a unique sound world is the possibility of stripping the archives she samples of their original cultural contexts. But she treats all of her sounds with such care and thought (much like her direction of Many Many Women, an index of women and non-binary sound artists) that her process of reworking respects her sources rather than exploiting them. The result is music that’s both sonically and thematically inclusive. By the end of Disambiguation, what’s left isn’t so much an impression of Mitchell’s own identity as her ability to meld it into something bigger than herself.


The latest installment of the Bootleg Series excavates live recordings and demos from Dylan’s infamous, fruitful, and polarizing era as an evangelical Christian.

Bob Dylan: Trouble No More: The Bootleg Series Vol. 13 / 1979-1981

In the autumn of 1978, Bob Dylan began performing a new version of “Tangled Up in Blue.” In addition to a complete melodic makeover, he updated a lyric that had previously referenced an unnamed Italian poet to address a more specific source text: “She opened up the Bible and started quoting it to me/Jeremiah, Chapter 13, verses 21 and 33.” Debuted during the tour behind his directionless Street Legal LP, his new arrangement of the beloved track offered a glimpse at Dylan’s next reinvention: You can hear a white light starting to seep in.
Right around that time, Dylan introduced a new song to his band called “Slow Train Coming.” That track appears in four vastly different versions on Trouble No More, the fascinating new Bootleg Series release covering his fruitful but polarizing era as an evangelical Christian songwriter between 1979 and 1981. The earliest rendition on the collection stems from his ’78 tour rehearsals when the verses were not yet finalized and Dylan mostly just hammered in the chorus: “There’s a slow/Slow train coming/Around the bend,” he sings over and over again as his backing vocalists’ performance grows increasingly dramatic with each repetition. It’s a stirring, uncanny document of an artist discovering his new sound—an ominous take on gospel to which he’d devote himself for the next three years.
”Slow Train Coming” would become the title track to the first entry in Dylan’s “Christian trilogy.” These albums, which draw on the grainy, burnt-out blues sound he’d adopt more fully in the 21st century, remain the most mysterious items in one of rock music’s deepest, most daunting discographies. On principle alone, they turned off multitudes of fans who once admired Dylan’s staunch individualism and leftist politics. But for Dylan, they signified a rebirth, both creatively and personally. By the end of the decade, his longevity as a rock icon was unprecedented: Elvis was gone; The Beatles had been broken up as long they’d been around; the “new Dylans” like Springsteen were now welcoming their own disciples. When the “old Dylan”—just pushing 40—found himself uninspired on what had become known as his “Las Vegas Tour,” the Bible offered a way forward, even if it didn’t provide the answers he might have wanted.
For the most part, the songs on Trouble No More do not reflect the hope or contentment usually associated with praise music. They are as venomous and full of doom as Dylan’s more celebrated writing on war, politics, or love. Neither as warm and embracing as Cat Stevens’ nor as spiritually wise as Leonard Cohen’s, Dylan’s religious work seems to come from a place of fear—borderline paranoia. Inspired by the best-selling Hal Lindsey book The Late Great Planet Earth, he constantly pairs his acceptance of Jesus with warnings of an imminent apocalypse. In a catchy song called “Precious Angel,” propelled by a bouncy, pinched Mark Knopfler guitar riff, he looks to the future and sings of “darkness that will fall from on high/When men will beg God to kill them and they won’t be able to die.” In many songs, Dylan quotes directly from the Bible. In others, he sings as first-person “I,” instructing “you” to follow his lead and make a change or risk facing unthinkable consequences: a strange play on the messianic presence he’d assumed in the lives of his fans. “I told you the answer was blowing in the wind, and it was,” he allegedly announced at a show, “I told you the times they were a-changing, and they did. And I’m telling you Christ is coming back—and he is!”
To perform this material live, Dylan pressed reset on his songbook, ignoring the nearly two decades of work that preceded Slow Train Coming. He was debuting new music at every concert—songs that would eventually appear on the sharply focused Saved in 1980 and the more eclectic Shot of Love the following year. In the absence of his hits, he fleshed out setlists with faithful covers of devotional songs like Dallas Holm’s “Rise Again” and hymns performed by a four-person gospel choir who toured with him. Fans were perplexed. Throughout a stunning San Francisco performance of “Pressing On,” one of his finest gospel songs, the audience remains silent. They refuse to clap along during the a capella break, inadvertently bringing the hard-won battle in its lyrics to life. There’s a captivating tension in hearing an artist so revered, so evangelized, preach to empty seats—an energy that pervades the set and makes this one of Dylan’s most haunting and vulnerable collections of music.
Trouble No More exists in several editions. The most comprehensive set includes two live shows from the era; two discs of tour highlights; two discs of outtakes and rarities; and a bizarre concert film interrupted by newly filmed scenes of actor Michael Shannon reciting sermons in a vacant church (likely in the absence of Dylan’s own between-song sermons, which have mysteriously and perhaps mercifully been edited out). These recordings beat out their studio counterparts at nearly every turn. Stemming largely from live shows and rehearsals, they avoid the tinny production and glossy pastiche of the records, highlighting this era’s latent strengths: the unnerving conviction in Dylan’s vocals, his killer backing band, and, most of all, the underlying strength of the material.
Songs that previously felt like hidden gems in Dylan’s catalog become centerpieces. A live rendition of “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar” features bombastic, blazing guitar solos from guest performer Carlos Santana as Dylan spits his way through the lyrics, making its surreal narrative even more impassioned. “When He Returns,” the closing track on Slow Train Coming, appears in stark, definitive form, on solo piano and organ at a 1980 show in Toronto. Dylan’s voice sounds beautiful, fanatical, and somewhat insane, which is exactly how this material should be delivered.
Unlike other editions of the Bootleg Series exploring Dylan’s mythically productive studio sessions, the outtakes are not the main draw here. The slow, stately “Making a Liar Out of Me” comes closest to a lost classic, though the band’s performance is too tentative for it to truly transcend. Less ambitious tracks like “Ain’t Gonna Go to Hell for Anybody” and “Ain’t No Man Righteous, No Not One” are pleasant but steer close to “Schoolhouse Rock!” levels of singalong didacticism. While Dylan was writing prolifically at this time, his relentless output felt more like a search for the right words as opposed to an overflow of inspiration. For the most part, the best songs all ended up on the albums. What’s more interesting is how the material evolved from its early forms to the studio renditions and onto the stage. With key tracks appearing in multiple incarnations, the set examines how Dylan reapproached this material the longer he lived with it: how “Gotta Serve Somebody” ascended from a bitter confession to a twisted roll call, or how the livestock in “Man Gave Names to All the Animals” slowly disassembled over the course of the tour.
By 1981, Dylan eased up on his evangelism. He introduced decidedly secular new material to his shows—like the excellent “Caribbean Wind” and the not-so-excellent “Lenny Bruce”—and welcomed back old favorites like “Maggie’s Farm” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” Soon, he would disown this entire era. He abandoned its material in later setlists and denied he’d ever even been a Christian, citing it as just another example of the media’s unfair insistence on labeling him at every turn. “I mean, nobody cares what Billy Joel’s religious views are,” he spat at one interviewer, who could have responded by pointing out that Billy Joel never wrote a song called “Property of Jesus.” Regardless of his true beliefs, Trouble No More offers living proof of Dylan’s commitment at the time. Across these 102 tracks, he sounds as devoted to his work as ever, puncturing a style of music built to offer definitive answers with his own heavy brand of cosmic nihilism.
The era came to a close with “Every Grain of Sand,” the final track on Shot of Love. Allegedly written fully-formed at the piano in the summer of 1980, it remains one of his most powerful compositions: If the sole purpose of his religious search was to lead him here, then the journey was worth it. The track appears twice on Trouble No More, as an intimate rehearsal midway through the tour and a full-band performance on its very last night, before he took a three-year break from live shows and mostly abandoned religious music (at least until his 2009 curio Christmas in the Heart). Between those two takes, Dylan’s voice lowered and the song’s pace slowed, trading its epiphanic intensity for a comforting sense of foresight and calm. Together, they summarize the story told throughout Trouble No More: one man’s path from fear to acceptance, obsession to understanding, getting born and pressing on.


Luca Guadagnino’s remake of a horror classic features Yorke tackling a broader range of styles and ideas than any of his previous solo work, and all of them shine.

Thom Yorke: Suspiria (Music for the Luca Guadagnino Film)

Thom Yorke is an unexpected choice of composer for Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Suspiria, Dario Argento’s 1977 horror classic. The original’s iconic soundtrack came from Goblin, an Italian progressive-rock outfit who brought a wild, cacophonous aesthetic to Argento’s moody mind-fuck of a film. Shoveling all manner of seemingly incompatible ideas into the blender—Baroque harpsichords, synthesizers, tabla, splatter funk, even intimations of death metal—they yielded a score even gorier, in its sticky dissonance, than Argento’s gaudily fake blood.
Yorke, on the other hand, is, well, Thom Yorke—the brainy, sensitive possessor of a falsetto and a perpetual melancholy that lingers like a head cold he can’t quite shake. To call him “anemic” might sound unkind, but a scene from Argento’s film comes to mind: Protagonist Suzy, following a faint and a nosebleed, is prescribed bed rest, bland food, and a nightly glass of red wine. “It builds the blood,” enthuses the unctuous doctor, and one suspects he’d probably want to get Yorke on a regular Sangiovese regimen as well.
But unlike Argento’s film, with its almost cartoonishly supersaturated, blood-red hues, Guadagnino’s remake favors a drab, wintry, washed-out palette, which is precisely what the Radiohead frontman does best. Just listen to something like “There Is No Ice (For My Drink),” off his last solo album, Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes: In Yorke’s hands, even muscular club tracks come off sounding like vaporous sighs. (For what it’s worth “suspiria” is Latin for “sighs”; the film’s title comes from Thomas de Quincey’s essay “Suspiria de Profundis,” or “Sighs from the Depths.”)
However it may work in the film, on its own, Yorke’s score tackles a broader range of styles and ideas than any of his previous solo work, and all of them shine. There are appropriately cinematic, minor-key passages for piano and strings; great sheets of electronic buzz; gorgeous choral miniatures with a whiff of Arvo Pärt’s arctic grace; brooding, gothic Americana; and striking forays into pure electronic abstraction, the kind of thing you might have found on the German experimental label Mille Plateaux in the late 1990s.
There are even a few bona fide songs. “Suspirium,” a lilting ballad largely for piano and voice, wouldn’t sound out of place on a Radiohead album, and though the lyrics gesture at some of the film’s themes, they’re oblique enough to stand on their own, and spooky enough to sound haunting even outside the context of the movie. “Unmade,” a stately showcase for Yorke’s voice at its most moving, is cut from similar cloth, and “Has Ended,” a droning dirge set to a hurdy-gurdy grind and a slow, almost funky drum shuffle, is even more compelling, if only for a Mellotron-like solo about halfway through. It’s only some 15 seconds long, but it has a powerful impact, transforming sullen trip-hop into something transcendent.
While Yorke’s score doesn’t sound anything like Goblin’s, you can hear the influence of their spooky central theme—a minor-key melody for celeste and bells that Argento deploys as a means of anticipating moments of awful violence—in a handful of skeletal melodies that lend cohesion to the soundtrack, primarily in the form of piano figures pacing haltingly against an orchestral morass, tritones hanging in the air like echoes of a scream.
Despite the tension between songs that could pass for Radiohead’s repertoire and more soundtrack-like material, the whole album flows remarkably well, particularly given its 80-minute running time. Tracks run together, connected by viscous strings and unsettling sound design; the “proper” songs float along a vast expanse of half-frozen slurry. Occasional Foley effects—footsteps, rustling, ominous groans—serve a function similar to the muffled screams of Goblin’s score, infusing the music with a subliminal pedal tone of terror. Yorke has said much of his compositional process entailed extensive studio tinkering, and that’s borne out in the richness of many of his sounds here—particularly in “Olga’s Destruction (Volk tape)” and “Volk,” where brooding piano and synth melodies dissolve into eerily detuned fugues reminiscent of Aphex Twin’s microtonal experiments.
Of all the obviously cinematic pieces, as opposed to “singles” like “Suspirium” and “Unmade,” one stands out: “A Choir of One,” a 14-minute study for voice and, presumably, electronics. For nearly a quarter of an hour, wordless vocal harmonies float like some sulphurous vapor hugging the treeline of a haunted forest, queasily rising and falling in pitch, with a dark shimmer reminiscent of Ligeti or Xenakis. It is shapeshifting, almost formless; it sprawls like a glistening oil slick, and it serves as the album’s de facto finale. It’s followed only by a handful of short sound-design experiments, which conclude with “The Epilogue,” a brief collage of organ drones, Foley effects (traffic noise, a ticking clock), and, after a fade to silence and a false ending, a deep, rumbling analog throb, a sound as bleak as the void itself. I’d imagine—I hope—that’s what’s playing when the credits roll. In its minimalist opacity and Vantablack depths, it’s the polar opposite of Goblin’s playfully neon-hued approach, and it’s in going to that extreme that Yorke has made Suspiria his own.


The Congolese ensemble pairs with the Angolan-born producer Batida, and their best moments resemble a Ferris wheel spinning off its moorings, letting grooves careen and rumble as they might.

Konono N°1 / Batida: Konono N°1 Meets Batida

Konono N°1 Meets Batida

Congotronics, the 2004 album by the Congolese ensemble Konono No. 1, resonated with Western ears in part because it didn't hew cleanly to any one region or genre. Sure, they deployed traditional instrumentation, but their likembés were amplified via car batteries as well as percussion hammered out on scrap metal. The scrappiness and noisiness seemed to situate them along a punk and industrial axis rather than a world music one: Konono No. 1 got compared to Einstürzende Neubauten, toured with The Ex and Tortoise and recorded with Björk. And that was before they found themselves mashed with the likes of Andrew Bird, Glenn Kotche, and Micachu & the Shapes on a peculiar remix set.
So while Konono N°1 Meets Batida might scan as yet another cultural exchange, Konono has actually moved closer to the sound of their home country now. Batida, the alias of Pedro Coquenão, is Angolan-born and Lisbon-based and most sympathetic to the ensemble’s sound, since he does similar work, but updates Angolan music with software rather than metal. In addition to the group, Batida also recruited guitarist Papa Juju, vocalist Selma Uamusse and MC AF Diaphra, though the passing of founder Mingiedi Mawangu no doubt hangs over the group. It's an impressive influx of new talent, but you would be hard-pressed to hear it for most of the album.
Batida’s beats give "Nlele Kalusimbiko" a firm foundation, and Diaphra’s verses give the number a velvety growl, before the likembés flare to the fore for the last half of the song. A pitter patter of drum machine opens "Kuna America," which seems rather thin at first. But when the distorted melody buzzes to life nearly two minutes in, the polyrhythms and whistles give the track the feel of a moveable Carnival. The new members tuck into Konono’s sound well enough, but don’t do much to differentiate it from albums past. One might not be able to suss out the collaborative part of the album, mistaking it instead for initiates into the ensemble finding their way. Some of the songs do little more than tread water until the likembés lurch into earshot.
For all of the music that the Congolese group has released in the past decade, songs were never really Konono’s forte, so much as building up a headful of steam and letting things careen and rumble as they might. Their finest moments remind me of a ferris wheel gone off its moorings, the likembés making a metallic churning that cycles in ever widening patterns; it's an astonishing sound that both mesmerizes and rolls over everything in its path. So the most effective track here is the eleven minutes of "Nzonzing Família," where it sounds like Batida stands to the side, deftly fills in some of the spaces with small sounds and just allows the group churn towards the horizon. Perhaps that’s Konono’s fate, to always be taking their collaborators for a ride but never getting taken to some new destination.


Stones Throw reissue and expand this 2003 through-the-mail collaboration between Madlib and the late Jay Dee.

Champion Sound: Deluxe Edition

It shouldn't have worked. And maybe, in 2003, it didn't: When a series of through-the-mail beat trades between Madlib and Jay Dee eventually coalesced into a full-length collaboration, the final result felt a little gimmicky at first. A pair of producer/MCs taking turns rhyming over each others' beats is unconventional enough, but when both of them had such disparate approaches at the time-- ever try listening to Jay Dee's smooth, uncluttered banger Welcome to Detroit and Quasimoto's blunted, dubbed-out The Unseen back to back, much less shuffled together?-- it was hard not to feel initially disoriented. Many critics (this one included) originally saw it as an enjoyable if disjointed effort, then eventually forgot about it once Madvillainy dropped a few months later.
Stones Throw's reissue of Champion Sound, then, seems to work largely as a "hey, remember this?" nudge, coming off the heels of the recent deluxe edition of Dilla's Ruff Draft EP in a similar bid to reestablish the value of an underheard record. Unlike Ruff Draft, Champion Sound was a widely-released, full-fledged album-- more slept-on than scarce-- and it's aged a bit better than early reviews might've anticipated. More than a few underground rap albums these days have shot for Champion Sound's stoned-in-the-club vibe and fallen short, while Stones Throw has become indie rap's "it" label in recent years with albums much like this: collaborative efforts infused with Madlib's unpretentiously avant-garde spirit, weird enough to stay on the margins of current pop culture but accessible enough to stick on Cartoon Network's [adult swim] (where it seems a bit less bizarre next to willfully batshit stuff like "Saul of the Mole Men").
The main thing to keep in mind about Champion Sound is that the two main artists involved adapted to each other's production styles just as much as they contrasted. It's easy to theoretically pit Madlib's muddy, crackly, blown-out organics as a barely-compatible counter to Dilla's pristine digital precision, but there's a stylistic bleedthrough that seeps both ways. Madlib's beats here lack much of the skewed jazz eccentricity that his more familiar Quasimoto and Madvillain productions do. Instead, he fine-tunes his approach so that his more far-out tendencies-- reassembled bop flotsam and beats that have a hard time staying put-- are left to sneak in through the margins. There's odd little touches like the title track's Bollywood vocal (which, post-"Addicted", didn't skew too far away from the mainstream anyways), the piercing, slightly warped-sounding sustained string note that runs through most of "The Mission" and the Asian/Middle-Eastern horn that trills through "Survival Test". But like the best Dilla tracks, the bass and drums are at the forefront and do most of the heavy lifting, and a couple of Madlib's beats, like the booming fist-pump rhythm of "McNasty Filth" and the insistent stutter-thump of "Strapped", feel like low-fi versions of Jay Dee's Slum Village work.
Dilla's tracks don't rewrite his own plan as much-- which makes sense, since many of them preceded the idea of the collaboration in the first place-- but they're a bit filthier than usual, his glowing digital bass pushed until it strains; not for nothing is his best beat on here, a heavy slab of big-bottomed g-funk built around a disembodied soul wail and a airlock-tight drum loop, repurposed for a track called "The Red". And there's a few points that pick up the slack for the prog-fusion bizarreness Madlib pushed to the background: the melody for "React" is based around what might be a guitar riff or a clarinet sped up to a hummingbird tempo, "Raw Shit" hammers away at a tinny Farfisa that sounds like it's on its last legs, and "Strip Club" features a giggly steel drum that's about as sexy as a coconut bra.
Even if they're not much worth commenting on lyrically-- "Shoulda never been allowed in the game/ All y'all fake gangstas now" and "My thug niggas know what I mean/ A live bitch, that's what I need" are typical Jay Dee lines, while Madlib's appeal is mostly in his muttering, halting delivery-- the vocals also fit their productions in a complementary way. Jay Dee's elementary rhymes seem as loosely-assembled and grimy as Madlib's beats, while Madlib returns the favor by vocally skulking across Dilla's precision engineering with his conversational counter-rhythms. A few guests keep things switched up: Kweli's turn on "Raw Shit" has more value in his endearingly ridiculous half-sung hooks than his unremarkable verses, Frank-n-Dank give "McNasty Filth" the confident swagger the tear-the-club-up beat requires, and Percee P throws out so many acrobatic battle-rap turns of phrase on "The Exclusive" ("Perce is nice, worth the price, every verse entice/ one of the most praised men to surface twice on this earth since Christ") that it's easy to forget he's only rapping for about 40 seconds.
Along with the requisite bonus disk of instrumentals and a couple hard-to-find bonus tracks (including the hilarious Madlib-helmed "Pillz"-- "Oh shit, I just took an X pill/ now I'm ready to thwoop"), the supplemental material includes a handful of remixes that don't quite fit in with Champion Sound's original vibe. The beatbox-driven remix of "The Official" and the rework of "Champion Sound" that sounds like "Whole Lotta Love" on a busted harpsichord have their place on the second disc, far out of reach of their superior originals, but might not be enough to justify a purchase for fans who already got the CD first time around. Given its single-disc price, the Deluxe Edition of Champion Sound, like most reissues, has the most value for those who haven't gotten around to hearing the CD until now-- and they're coming to it at just the right time.


Revisiting electronic pioneers Autechre’s earliest albums, now reissued, is like returning to a previously uninhabitable planet and being startled to find residents living and thriving there.

Autechre: Incunabula / Amber / Tri Repetae

Incunabula / Amber / Tri Repetae

The past few years have been both a bounty and something of an endurance test for Autechre fans. This past May, the duo of Rob Brown and Sean Booth released elseq 1-5, over four hours of new material. It earned comparisons to dumping off a bag of clothes at a second hand store and a Netflix show binge. That followed on the heels of last year’s AE_LIVE, which was over nine hours of live shows and 2013’s Exai, which ran for two hours (though still under the length of a modern superhero film). It sounds daunting—and yes, what the duo conjures up sounds daunting—as Autechre is shorthand for a type of difficult strain of electronic music once deemed “intelligent dance music.” There’s a good chance the word “algorithm” will be used when writing about their music, and despite their longevity, they remain at the vanguard, the Cecil Taylors of their field.
But for all that impenetrability, there's a lifelong friendship and dialogue that takes place between the two, regardless of the fact they now live in separate cities, building and swapping MAX patches from a distance. It’s a dialogue begun back in the late ‘80s, when they were electro-obsessed teens coming up in Manchester, swapping ideas and tracks on cassette tapes, jamming on analog synths and drum machines in their flats. It’s a dialogue that you can parse on their earliest albums, Incunabula and Amber, finally reissued on vinyl after they’ve changed hands online for three-digit sums. That complex and private language is evident from the start, situating Brown and Booth as the Poto and Cabengo of techno.
“Eggshell,” from their 1993 debut Incunabula, subtly reworks “The Egg,” a track from the epochal Artificial Intelligence comp that forever saddled them with the “intelligent dance music” tag . The Incunabula track locates a purgatory between the graffiti-friendly snare and hi-hats and disarmingly gorgeous, slow-moving synth line that evolves almost without notice behind the beat. The landscapes they evoke can seem post-industrial and dystopian, but the chord progression of “Kalpol Introl” still feels melancholic and definitely human. And while its approximately 75-minute length is unwarranted—the acid squelches of “Windwind” exhaust with their 11-minute runtime—there are both time-stamped presets as well as plenty of clues as to their evolution embedded in the album.
An early highlight, “Bike,” finds Autechre at their most songful, the bolts-on-concrete sounds of the 808s giving way to a beautiful ambient passage before that metallic beat returns. Even odder is “Basscadet,” a fan-favorite hit of sorts back in 1994. Built from what sounds like a hand drum tattoo and featuring a cheeky vocal sample saying “I don’t have any idea ‘bout what’s going on,” it features the abrasive electronic tones and scoured-metal aesthetic that would soon become the keystone to their future work.
Next year’s Amber might most closely resemble Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92, but even then it shows them subtly begin to slide away from their techno roots. Some of their most ambient tracks are here, though it also finds them favoring darker, more industrial timbres that earned those early Cabaret Voltaire comparisons. It’s still disarming to see them use real words like “Glitch” and “Montreal” rather than the semantic jumble that would soon define their tracks. “Foil” builds with a beat that sounds like a whip against the titular material, the turbid washes decidedly more malicious than on their debut. The synth melodies of “Slip” haven’t aged very well, and the sharper aspects of “Glitch” and “Piezo” feel dulled and gentle in hindsight, knowing just what nasty and brutish sounds they would soon wring out of their gear.
What makes Amber fascinating to revisit decades on is to hear vestigial organs and sonic cul-de-sacs that Autechre would bin almost immediately after. Brown would look back and deem these melodic bits “cheesy” but if anything, it proves that at one point the duo was human after all. “Silverside” might be Autechre’s most haunted five minutes, even if the surge of orchestral soundtrack strings and distorted voice are two tricks that we’d never hear again. “Nine” might be the closest they ever got to the placid sounds of new age while “Further,” with its slow heaving minor key swells are as emotive as anything Autechre ever released. The flickering lullaby melody and spare pads of “Yulquen” reveal a soft, contemplative side that few could even identify as an Autechre track.
With 1995’s Tri Repetae, Autechre obliterated all that they—and most of their Warp roster mates—had done before. Rather than cut away vestigial parts, they scoured off all flesh and “cheesy” bits entirely, trash-compacted their hard drives and went full cyborg instead. While Aphex Twin used a dentist drill-high frequency to wheeze atop his single “Ventolin” earlier that year, Autechre made it their entire aesthetic, reconfiguring each component of their productions with that same level of sonic intensity. From the deep, sawing sinewave and rockslide of low tones that open “Dael” to the metallic thrums and chilling hiss of closer “Rsdio,” Tri Repetae served as Autechre’s superhero origin story, revealing a monstrous new power while also obliterating any trace of their previous selves. Rather than be able to trace the twisted metal of Tri Repetae to old Detroit techno singles and Mantronik sides, the lineage goes directly to Merzbow’s white-knuckle noise and the hammered metal of Einstürzende Neubauten. They’d push into more experimental and complex music for the next twenty years and never quite be as gentle or linear as those first two efforts.
The pewter sleeve bereft of any markings, the images of metal shafts and casings suggest that the humans behind Autechre were replaced not with robots but rather old radiators instead. Since then, experimental and dance artists alike—be they on labels like PAN, Tri Angle or Editions Mego—have absorbed certain aspects of Autechre’s sound. Whether you go for Oneohtrix Point Never, Arca, Holly Herndon, Russell Haswell, or Powell, they inhabit a world that Autechre helped make conceivable, so that even the cold metallic tones of their third album have somehow warmed with time. The bass growl that lurches forth on “Clipper” now feels triumphant rather than menacing, the whinnying frequencies of “Rotar” slowly tease out a melodic line. The spaceship vibrations of “Eutow” bears a low-rider beat at its center and the factory clatter of “Gnit” still reveals something quirky behind all the machinations. Revisiting Tri Repetae twenty-one years later is like returning to a planet previously filled with sulfuric acid clouds, volcanoes and liquid mercury pools. A hostile, post-human sound at the time of its release, it’s now startling to find residents living and thriving there.


Underneath the ill-advised MLK quotes, you’ll find an earnest pop album that unearths the charisma and agility that helped make Bieber a star.

Justice

Justin Bieber’s decision to open his sixth album, Justice, with a sample of a Martin Luther King Jr. speech—and to plop in another one halfway through—is revealing, but perhaps not for the reasons he intended. In the half-century following Dr. King’s assassination, liberalism has turned him, a revolutionary figure once hated by the majority of white Americans for his commitment to racial, religious, and economic justice, into a convenient accessory through which to signal a vague, corporation-safe message in support of Black people. And if Bieber is anything, he is a corporation; perhaps that is why I don’t find it especially jarring to hear King’s exhortation for radical sacrifice juxtaposed with a song about being horny enough to walk through fire. On Instagram, I see this style of cognitive dissonance, or willful cynicism, deployed almost daily by media companies, influencers and celebrities, people I knew in college, even an Etsy plant store. This is just how we communicate now. Leave it to Bieber to, however unintentionally, hold up a mirror to a culture that doesn’t want to see itself.
Paradoxically, behind the cringeworthy MLK controversy is a surprisingly compelling record, an earnest pop album that unearths the charisma and agility that helped make him a star to begin with. Bieber, now 27, seems to be having fun for the first time since his well-documented pubescence. After all, he is in something like the spring solstice of his life, having emerged from a period of distress that included heavy drug use and suicidal ideation into a well-adjusted millennial adulthood, grounded in the joys of marriage and the salvation of Christ. Whereas his last album, 2020’s R&B-led Changes, was burdened by the compulsion to prove to an antagonistic public that he’s no longer the baby-faced teen they first met nor the tempestuous shithead he soon became, Justice shows Bieber experimenting with ideas that are new to him, even if they are not new to the pop landscape.
It’s buoyed by surprises at every turn, but never loses focus. The stadium jaunt “Die for You,” featuring Floridian pop parvenu Dominic Fike, ventures into pop-rock territory, a completely novel mode for Bieber. The synth-pop single “Hold On” begins as a ballad until the beat drops and curls around a serpentine bassline. “Ghost,” a song about grief, launches with a UK garage-lite beat, swells into a colossal hook, and eventually settles over a folky acoustic guitar. There might not be a hit on here the size of “Sorry,” but that's partly by design: This is Bieber's smoothest album-length statement to date.
The absence of Poo Bear, Bieber’s primary songwriting collaborator since 2013’s Journals, is conspicuous. Instead of falling into the predictable, adult contemporary-style R&B they made together, Bieber is marching decisively towards capital-p Pop. Justice dances between collaborations with post-genre singers including Khalid and the Kid LAROI, production from Post Malone hitmakers like Andrew Watt and Louis Bell, and songwriters like Rami Yacoub and Gotye. With songs like “Somebody” and “Hold On,” he even indulges in the power-poppy ’80s nostalgia that has recently transitioned from the fringes of pop to its main stage. While he hasn’t fully abandoned the diasporic sounds that granted him some of his farthest-reaching hits, they aren’t his center of gravity; the breezy collabs with the dancehall artist BEAM and the Afropop superstar Burna Boy are serviceable, if not brimming with chart-topping promise.
Bieber is not a powerhouse vocalist, but he is a compelling one, casually dropping in a stray yodel here, a Mariah Carey-indebted set of runs there. His voice has a palatable smoothness; he’s mastered push-and-pull dynamics, and he swings effortlessly from a placid chest voice to a zephyr of a falsetto. That litheness and control are on full display across Justice. Even when the songwriting is spiritless and the production rote—and it occasionally is, as on the confessional “Unstable” and the saccharine “Deserve You”—he still sings the hell out of it.
In fact, Justice delivers some of the strongest, most tightly controlled vocal performances of his career. Two standouts are the piano slowburn “2 Much” and the acoustic-guitar ballad “Off My Face,” a play on his newfound sobriety that is sweet, full-hearted, and entirely convincing, in spite of the cliché. The singles “Holy” with Chance the Rapper and “Peaches” featuring Daniel Caesar and Giveon, share warm instrumentation, a swinging beat, and a lived-in sense of groove that suits him. In recent live performances, accompanied by the five-piece We the Band, he even tested out jazzy interpretations of the songs; his NPR Tiny Desk set is almost transcendent, imagining a future in which Bieber might deliver an artistic statement that functions as a complete thought.
Where Justice fails is, of course, that it is not really about justice at all. The surtext is marital bliss, the subtext is worship. Religious references abound: “I get my light right from the source,” he sings on “Peaches”; “Heaven is a place not too far away,” he promises on “Hold On”; “You prayed for me when I was out of faith,” he trills on “As I Am.” Nebulous references to a generous and all-consuming love are the stuff of both Bieber’s style of pop music and the contemporary praise of his post-Hillsong Christianity. But even when it’s unclear whether Bieber is singing about his wife or his god, the renewed vigor in his performance points to the transformational potential of love, be it terrestrial or heavenly.

Buy: Rough Trade
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