Compiled by Nick Cave and founding member Mick Harvey, the massive Bad Seeds retrospective paints a dark, awe-inspiring portrait of all the sex, drugs, love, and death that fill the band's catalogue.

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Lovely Creatures: The Best of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds 1984-2014

The saga of Nick Cave didn’t begin with the Bad Seeds or the Birthday Party–not even with the man himself. Its genesis lies instead in the first chapter of Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita, which Cave’s father, a high school English teacher, read aloud to him shortly after his 12th birthday inside their house in a small town in Victoria, Australia. Cave later recalled his father transforming with every recited syllable, a mortal under the spell of the written word. “I felt like I was being initiated into this secret world,” he said, “The world of sex and adulthood and art.” Cave’s naturally didn’t grasp the intricacies of Nabokov’s masterpiece at his tender age, but the young man’s encounter with Lolita’s sordid romanticism and melodic prose constituted his coming-of-age and his artistic awakening.
Cave’s new box set Lovely Creatures: The Best Of Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds is a testament to the literary soul of his music. The deluxe edition assumes the form of a case-bound, 36-page book of essays and photos (256 pages in the super deluxe edition, packaged separately), bundled alongside 3 CDs and a DVD comprising concert footage and band interviews. While technically a compilation, it’s easier to think of the release as a novel in three parts, detailing Cave’s evolution from obscure goth-rocker, to Americana deconstructor, to rock’s very own Nabokov, all while honoring the Seeds who joined him for the long, slow march to the pantheon.
Disc one details the band’s early years in the mid-’80s and early ’90s and the growing pains therein. The seething title track to 1984’s From Her To Eternity is the perfect opening chapter; the vestiges of Birthday Party’s post-punk in its arrangement (the dread-laden piano plunks, the spooky poetry, the incessant dissonance) show that Cave and company had yet to come into their own. In time, they moved to Berlin, drifting away from rudimentary din to gothic grandeur over the span of their next five albums, whose contents comprise the bulk of the disc. Ironically, the first of these Berlin-brewed albums, The Firstborn Is Dead (1985), marked the beginnings of Cave’s love affair with Southern blues. The romance was inevitable: Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker, et al. were the original murder balladeers, tragedians strumming similar tales of blood, sweat, and sin. Accordingly, 1986’s covers album Kicking Against The Pricks (represented here by the Seeds’ take on Hooker’s “I’m Gonna Kill That Woman”) found the Seeds honoring their thematic forebears.
A few months after the tribute, Cave’s creative loci shifted yet again. Frequently regarded as the band’s opus, Your Funeral, My Trial found the Seeds welding the blues to the pre-existing, cabaret-tinged balladry of his debut, recasting the aloof artist as a funhouse-mirror version of the everyman. Consider “Scum,” the album’s seething indictment of “a miserable shit-wringing turd.” The climactic highlight is typically regarded as Cave’s clap-back at his former roommate, journalist Mat Snow (according to the Snow's account, a disgruntled Cave revealed him as the song's subject during a tense conversation following Snow’s pre-emptive criticism of The Firstborn Is Dead). Upon closer examination, however, the purported autobiography reveals itself as a condemnation of the traitor immemorial, fueled through historical allusion (“Judas, Brutus, Vitus”) and grotesque imagery (“He said that I looked pale and thin/I told him he looked fat/His lips were red and lickin’ wet/His house was roastin’ hot/In fact it was a fuckin’ slum”). With the fluid, genre-blurring, Your Funeral, My Trial, and its follow-up Tender Prey (1988), Cave challenged our notions of the blues as a static art form; its modern incarnation called for innovation, not just appropriation.
Lovely Creatures proceeds on to the band’s halcyon days in the mid ’90s—a period that saw Cave’s apotheosis as a world-renowned auteur. Let Love In (1994) and The Boatman’s Call (1997) are the most well-represented here with four tracks apiece, and for good reason. Along with 1996’s Murder Ballads, these three albums provide the most compelling evidence for Cave’s storied reputation. Here, we observe Cave coming into his own as a storyteller, an echo of the awakening he experienced as a child. His formalistic shift from poetry to prose positions “Do You Love Me?” “Stagger Lee,” and “Red Right Hand” as metaphysical novels rather than songs, where the forces of sex and death grapple for supremacy. The spirit of the old Romantics is alive and well, too: namely, their ceaseless search for sublime love, the only solace in a world of pain. “There’s a man who spoke wonders/Though I’ve never met him,” he groans on “(Are You) The One I've Been Waiting For?” invoking Christ’s chaste wisdom as he anticipates his lovers’ arrival. Two tracks apiece from No More Shall We Part (2001) and Nocturama (2003) round out the proceedings, but their overblown drama pales in comparison to the preceding panorama, the apex of Cave’s compilation, and arguably, his entire career.
By the time their 20th anniversary rolled around in 2004, Cave and company’s primordial madness had long since cooled, earning them a heretofore unimaginable reputation among critics as a beacon of gothic melodrama. In fact, during this interim—2004 to 2013, chronicled on the final disc—the old Seeds ceased to exist. The departure of original keyboardist/guitarist Blixa Bargeld one year prior to 2004’s double album Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus left behind an unmistakable void, particularly on the LP’s intimate latter half (“Breathless,” “Babe, You Turn Me On,” “O Children”). The void deepens with five selections from 2007’s Americana doomsday spell Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, Harvey’s final outing with the band. It’s somewhat of an underwhelming swan song for him, considering the frequency with which Warren Ellis’ violins take center stage (most spectacularly on the LP’s haunting, hymnal eight-minute closer, “More News From Nowhere”).
Four highlights from 2013’s Push The Sky Away ("We No Who U R," "Jubilee Street," "Higgs Boson Blues," and the title track) provide a fitting conclusion to Lovely Creatures’ majestic arc: the polar opposite of “From Her To Eternity,” a profound juxtaposition. And yet, however satisfying the collection’s finale, listeners who’ve kept up with Cave in the four years following Push The Sky Away will undoubtedly walk away from the experience a bit unsettled: not because the music itself is engineered to do so, but because Cave omits Skeleton Tree—his most powerful monument to death and grief—from the Seeds saga. Perhaps, this absence is owed to timing (Lovely Creatures was in progress when Cave’s son Arthur died). Consider Skeleton Tree, then, an epilogue to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ triumphant journey.
All chronologies are stories by definition, but when it comes to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, such a descriptor proves laughably insufficient. Their trajectory encompasses not just a band’s career, but a perversion of the monomyth that resides in all of our brains. Instead of King Arthur or Odysseus, we have Cave, a chain-smoking, gunslinging poet who sees God in the eyes of a woman and bowls of soup; who stalks through Berlin boudoirs with heroin in his veins, daring the devil to take him by the Red Right Hand only to dodge his scythe like a stuntman; who sifts through puddles of blood and piles of money in search of meaning, only to be greeted by the void. “The spiritual quest has many faces–religion, art, drugs, work, money, sex,” he mused, addressing 1998 Vienna Poetry Festival, “but rarely does the search serve God so directly, and rarely are the rewards so great in doing.” Lovely Creatures presents the definitive display of these anguished labors and sweet fruits they bore over twenty years—an unmovable feast, immortalized.


The Los Angeles musician, formerly of Barn Owl, fuses synthesizers and processed guitar into ominous, inky atmospheres that bridge experimental music and ambient dub.

Varispeed Hydra

Until the early 2010s, Evan Caminiti recorded towering drones in the Thrill Jockey duo Barn Owl with Jon Porras, conjuring images of grim skies over endless plains using a spartan two-guitar setup. In recent years, he’s broadened his instrumental palette and shifted his focus to urban landscapes. After Meridian’s focus on modular synthesizer, 2017’s Toxic City Music reintroduced guitar, often processed beyond recognizability, to create an oil-slick reflection of New York. That album felt like a breakthrough, balancing smog-belching industrial textures with hypnotic grooves that were threatening yet seductive. That grayscale sonic metropolis expands on Varispeed Hydra, where new stylistic alleyways lead Caminiti to fading remnants of the natural world.
Some of the first sounds you hear on opener “Hand in Flame” are the cries of birds fluttering distantly above the murky low-end churn. They’re a consistent natural presence throughout Varispeed Hydra, but Caminiti uses these and other natural accents, like the water rushing through “Holo Dove,” to amplify his polluted electroacoustic atmospheres. Like the dense assemblages of Tim Hecker or Jefre-Cantu Ledesma (who appeared on Toxic City Music), Caminiti’s sounds are impossible to pick apart, but as his melted-together blend envelops the listener, inky patterns begin to appear. Some arrive in torrents, such as “Plume,” where a heavy ringing guitar tone rises and crashes in increasingly distorted waves. Others offer an eerie calm, like the bruised synth delicately looping through “Russian Palm”; “For Mika” opens with a jangling insect-like trill before revealing the ghostly echo of a club track buried under mountains of delay. That track in particular offers a pathway into Varispeed Hydra’s most exciting qualities.
Caminiti’s first experiments with techno and dub music go back to the final Barn Owl albums, and Varispeed Hydra reconnects with club music in surprising ways. The grim “Radio Rome” and the laser-dappled “Morphogenesis” recall the icy experimental dub of UK producers like Parris. And much like Helm’s similarly nature-defiling Chemical Flowers, Caminiti’s album loops textures in ways that generate absorbing rhythms without necessarily creating beats. The album was inspired by performances at both the Tokyo nightclub Dommune and New York’s Issue Project Room, a haven for experimental music, and its ability to bridge those very different environments is one of its biggest strengths.
Part of what makes Varispeed Hydra so potent is its relative brevity. Both the dramatic shifts and recurring sounds gain power over the album’s 35-minute span, but they stop short of overwhelming the listener. Caminiti seems aware of the momentum he’s creating as each track pulls you to the next; like a good improviser, he knows when to set up an ending. The closer, “Carnation,” reaches a surreal equilibrium: The synths flare like jazz horns, and the birds circle back. It’s an elegant finish, right down to the abrupt, plug-pulling cut to silence. Caminiti has developed a labyrinthine sound, and navigating it makes Varispeed Hydra a mysterious and enticing listen.


Rhino offers an extensive repackaging of this divisive and, in some circles, much-derided band's six albums, each complemented by a bonus disc of DVD footage and Surround Sound mixes.

Perception

The Doors aren't so much a band as a phase you go through, rarely to be visited again, like so much of the high-school-notebook poetry that Jim Morrison's lyrics inspired. Though their songs could be as transgressive as the Velvet Underground's, the Doors are denied the same name-drop cachet, their legend reduced to a punchline-- no thanks to a 1991 Oliver Stone biopic more self-indulgent than the band itself, and recent efforts by Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger to revive the band with Ian Astbury as the Doors of the 21st century, like some reality-TV-show experiment minus the TV-show part.
Amid these sorry attempts to update the Doors' legacy, it's easy to forget that without Morrison's brooding baritone, there'd be no Iggy, no Ian Curtis, and it's safe to say that Morrison taught Bono more about rocking a Jesus Christ pose than JC himself. So Perception's extensive repackaging of the Doors' six albums (each complemented by a bonus disc of DVD footage and Surround Sound mixes) arrives at a fortuitous time-- not because it coincides with the band's 40th anniversary, but because it helps contemporize a band tethered to a 1960s hippie ideal to which, spiritually, it often stood in opposition.
For all the mythology surrounding the band, the Doors-- like so many 60s garage-rockers-- arguably peaked with their first single. "Break on Through (To the Other Side)" is a taunt and a dare, drawing the line between who was down and who was out. But the 1967 debut album that the song introduced wasn't your typical Nuggets-variety noise, looking to the Weill/Brecht songbook for "Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)" and beyond pop structure entirely for "The End". The 11-minute closer set the standard for the Doors' long songs: Morrison dropping stream-of-consciousness prose in the place where most bands would put the guitar solo, his words gradually wearing down the players' accompaniment before summoning them back for the climax. "The End" is also the song that helped define the Morrison caricature as pabulum-spouting narcissist, but the song's ominous drift-- guided by Krieger's sinister riff and disrupted by Morrison's Oedipal intimations-- remains eerily compelling, and established the sex/death dichotomy that would play out in so many Doors songs. (Also: the song is actually shorter than you remembered: The Doors was originally mastered at a slightly slower speed, due to technical error that's been corrected by Perception's new version-- so you'll get a few seconds of your life back.)

Strange Days* (1967) closely adheres to the debut's winning formula: short songs about love and one long song about apocalypse ("When the Music's Over"). But 1968's Waiting for the Sun shows the first signs of fatigue, opening with the weakest of the Doors' hit singles (the Kinks-nicked "Hello, I Love You"), and weighed down by start/stop multi-sectional three-minute songs ("Spanish Caravan", "The Unknown Solider") that feel more meandering than the band's longest pieces. But it could've been worse: Among Perception's featured outtakes is the 17-minute free-form tone poem "The Celebration of the Lizard", amusing as an anti-pop gesture from a top 40 act, but so portentous that, even at the height of their chemical ingestion, the band still thought it better to edit down its most coherent passage into the pulsating acid-rock throbber "Not to Touch the Earth".

History has relegated 1969's The Soft Parade to the same Spectacular Failure file as the Stones' Their Satanic Majesties Request; the problem, however, isn't the opulent TV talk-show orchestra arrangements (which lend "Touch Me" a schmaltzy charm) but the bloodless, Fat Elvis performances. A DVD performance clip of the title-track suite makes for a fitting summation of the Doors' half-hearted dalliance with symphonic psychedelia and their subsequent abandonment of it: John Densmore and Krieger look bored and embarrassed performing the song's poncey opening passages, before the game-saving swamp-funk finale allows a bloated, bearded Morrison to reconnect with his younger, more dynamic self.
Like so many of their peers, the Doors responded to the post-hippie hangover with a back-to-basics approach (read: the blues, man) that informed their last two albums, 1970's Morrison Hotel and 71's L.A. Woman-- though the significance of this move is overstated by Perception's inclusion of eight (mostly incomplete) consecutive session takes of "Roadhouse Blues" that merely chart the song's evolution from sloppy bar-band jam to somewhat less sloppy bar-band jam (though the between-song banter is amusing). L.A. Woman is also marred by its share of blooze snoozes ("Crawling King Snake") but finds the band effectively shaping up for the hard-rock 70s with the hypno-grooved title track and "The Wasp (Texas Radio and the Big Beat)", the most successful union of the band's bluesy tendencies and Morrison's beat-poet babble. But even if his death was still months away, on "Riders on the Storm" Morrison has already turned into a ghost, lending the song an eternally haunted quality that even the band's detractors can't deny.
When Morrison first urged his fans to break on through, he wasn't asking for their money, he was asking for a commitment. At $120 and 12 discs, Perception is asking for both, but the audiophile end of the fanbase will be pleased by the new masters (as well as engineer Bruce Botnick's gearhead-oriented liner notes). In contrast to the multi-tracked splendor of much 60s psychedelic rock, the Doors made great use of space, a virtue highlighted by the new masters' foregrounding of the two most overlooked Doors: guitarist Krieger, whose finger-picked leads so often took a backseat to Manzarek's organ arpeggios; and drummer Densmore, whose playing hits harder the lighter his touch.
The band's prolific album output means Perception offers little in the way of essential leftovers, but that's more of a relief than anything. The lasting perception of Perception: Had the Doors' six albums been condensed to three-- cherry-picking the best material from The Doors/Strange Days, Waiting for the Sun/The Soft Parade and Morrison Hotel/L.A. Woman-- the band would've had a discography as airtight as Jimi Hendrix's. Instead, each ensuing album-- drawn from increasingly depleted sources of inspired material and an increasingly intoxicated frontman-- put greater stress on the band's internal contradictions: A proto-punk band with baroque-classical aspirations, fronted by a California-dreamy pop idol who really wanted to be a reclusive fat beardo poet in Paris-- a would-be idealist who made a more convincing nihilist.
The singer's decline is laid bare in Perception's DVD clips: While an entrancing 1967 Canadian television performance of "The End" (incest rant excised) focuses on the young Morrison's face to the point of denying the other band members' existence, a grainy 1970 Australian live taping of "Crawling King Snake" seems to be deliberately avoiding his burly figure. By placing these images alongside the erratic artistic trajectory that plays out on Perception's six discs, we see that Morrison was not just a victim of his own excess, but also an early victim of a burgeoning music-business machine that demanded quantity over quality, regardless of the personal or creative toll.


After drifting into ambient drone on his last album, Stephen Wilkins returns to his chill, bucolic stomping grounds.

Ribbons

For a dude whose music is so unflappably chill, Bibio, the British producer Stephen Wilkinson, remains a restless musician. Over the past 14 years his path has zig-zagged between acoustic and digital extremes; it’s only fitting that his landmark album was called Ambivalence Avenue, since Wilkinson cheerfully refuses to stay in any one lane for long. His signature mixture of acoustic folk, hip-hop beats, and easy-listening soul might seem tailor-made for the era of mood-based playlists and legal marijuana, but there’s genuine weirdness to his warbly patina, wildlife field recordings, and fingerpicked six-string, all of which recalls oxidized cassette tapes curling in the heat. With the ambient drone of 2017’s Phantom Brickworks, he drifted into uncharted waters, but Ribbons returns him to his habitual stomping grounds.
Much like 2016’s A Mineral Love, the new album is a light, often carefree listen, the document of a musician firmly in control of his talents and happy to tweak familiar formulas rather than tear up the rulebook altogether. But Ribbons still carves out a new corner of Bibio’s catalog. Interweaving acoustic nylon- and steel-string guitars, mandolin, violin, harp, and banjo with electric piano, sitar, Mellotron, and clavinet, it is the folkiest album he has recorded yet, largely shifting the balance from contemporary collage techniques to old-timey jigs and reels.
Acoustic instrumentals and featherweight pop dominate; breakbeats and sampled loops cede center stage to fingerstyle melodies whose gently worn surfaces suggest old 78s rescued from a country-house attic. He hasn’t entirely turned his back on the 21st century; after the classical guitar opener “Beret Girl,” he quickly cycles through a folk-soul fusion ballad (“The Art of Living”) and a laid-back groover in the style of Silver Wilkinson’s “À tout à l’heure” (“Before”). But the excellent “Old Graffiti,” a sleek romp with the Doobie Brothers written all over it, is the only song here to emphasize the funk instincts so central to 2011’s Mind Bokeh; the majority of Ribbons is less yacht rock than Ren faire.
There are many who have called Bibio’s music pastoral, and Wilkinson earns the description here. He sings of sunbeams and feathers, summer seeds and autumn leaves; in “The Art of Living,” he offers, with no apparent irony, “To view the grass up close/Feels deeper than the most/Well-read story.” But he’s got a sense of humor, too: He packages such Whole Earth Catalog chestnuts with pleas to consider “the wisdom of the cow,” complete with a faint, sampled moo. His playing and his production still frequently outstrip his skills as a lyricist, but occasionally he turns up with a verse of surprising depth: “Write me a note/And fold it in quarters/There’s so little time/We’re safe in the garden,” he sings on the melancholy “Quarters,” an affecting song about forgiveness and acceptance.
Bibio has sometimes run the risk of sounding too safe, simply by virtue of the overwhelming prettiness of his music. While his pitch may wobble and his atmospheres grow cobwebbed, there’s little in his catalog that’s noisy or jarring or confrontational—at least, aside from a one-time stab at power pop that, wisely, he hasn’t attempted again. But on Ribbons, he turns familiarity into a virtue: In channeling sounds of the distant past, he brings something new to his customary swirl of birdsong, babbling brooks, Fairport Convention 8-tracks, and other rural accoutrements. The results are as reassuring as the memory of your favorite counselor picking up a weather-beaten acoustic guitar by the light of the campfire.


This collection of 7"s and compilation tracks documents the band’s formative years, in which frenzied hardcore and proto-screamo was rapidly churning toward more radical strains of noise.

Natty Light

Black Dice started out as a malfunctioning hardcore band. Formed by RISD students in 1997, their earliest incarnation bore all the markings of the era’s DIY punk scene but churned with an itchy, art-school weirdness that set them apart. In just a few years the band would be completely unrecognizable from its original state, but between 1998 and 2000 the group operated within the conventions of punk while simultaneously clawing at its prescribed norms. Natty Light compiles their recorded output from that inchoate phase, documenting Black Dice’s crude interpretation of hardcore and illustrating how quickly it unspooled.
Originally released as one-off comp tracks and 7"s on revered labels Gravity and Vermin Scum, the first half of Natty Light finds some aesthetic common ground with the frenzied proto-screamo of labelmates like Antioch Arrow or Angel Hair. Blown-out practice-space recordings sound rushed and garbled; minute-long songs with grindcore tempos fall apart more than they finish, and a whine of impatient guitar feedback floods any open space in the assault. The second half is made up of material from a self-titled EP released on Troubleman Records in 2000, sometimes known as Number 3. Recorded just months after the sessions that yielded the first batch of 7"s, Number 3 gave in completely to chaos. “Long Arm” abandons rhythm entirely, dismantling the anger and frustration of the band’s composed songs into stuttered bursts of freeform drums, feedback, and feral howling. “Pinsteaks” disintegrates from raging, Void-like brutality into a duet of chirping electronics and drums. “Reps” lasts all of 49 seconds but still overstays its welcome with the same riff repeating in nauseous chunks. When working within the confines of songs, Black Dice were volatile. When form and structure boiled away they sounded utterly inhuman.
With a creative metabolism hungry for the next idea before the first one was fully formed, these 18 songs devolve from blast beats and doomy breakdowns into circuit-bent scrapyard noise in under half an hour. In the months surrounding the recording of Number 3, Black Dice relocated to Brooklyn, shifted their lineup, and quickly diverged from their early sound. They never returned to their punk roots, but the dread and alienation that writhes on Natty Light would sink into the cracks of everything that followed. Even as their records took turns toward trance meditations or demented cartoon electronics, the caustic energy of their early years lurked somewhere below the surface.
Through all their changes, Black Dice have stayed consistently about five years ahead of the curve, exploring the raw materials other artists would eventually find success refining. Close contemporaries Animal Collective came up working in the same queasy electro-organic territory as Black Dice’s 2002 masterstroke, Beaches & Canyons, and would rise to worldwide acclaim by adding pop structure to the primal freakout. The refractions that rippled out from that direct influence would later inform the wave of tie-dyed punks that included No Age, Fuck Buttons, HEALTH, and basically any indie band using a sampler at the end of the aughts. To a lesser degree, the fried trash techno emerging as early as 2005’s Broken Ear Record predicted the claustrophobic zones of producers like Container and Oneohtrix Point Never. In the phase showcased on Natty Light, Black Dice collaged the impenetrable harshness of noise with the unhinged aggression of a punk show. The ugliness of these early recordings would help set the pace for the darkest sectors of the noise and extreme-music scenes as they mutated over the next decade.
Part of the legacy of this era is the confrontational live shows, which could see the band physically attacking the audience and each other as they thrashed through 15-minute sets. While plenty of hardcore bands expressed themselves with anger and aggression, Black Dice were intent on bloodshed. The band’s early gigs threatened to explode into violence at any moment, and on record, that antagonism translates into music that still feels legitimately scary.


During the three years since their last release, the Portuguese trio have built a soundworld of peculiar synths, drum machines, and samples, all in pursuit of hard-to-define moods.

Apologia

Over the past seven years, Lisbon label Príncipe has become closely aligned with the dynamic style known as batida, a homegrown hybrid of Afro-Lusophone diasporic sounds like kuduro, tarraxinha, and kizomba. A little like Chicago footwork, it has gained a global foothold despite marginalized origins, turning producers like DJ Marfox, Nídia, and DJ Nigga Fox into artists of worldwide renown. But Príncipe’s remit extends beyond batida: The label’s second release, issued the same year as DJ Marfox’s debut, came from Photonz, a techno producer with a soft spot for early-’90s trance. The Portuguese electronic trio Niagara soon stepped up with five tracks of wonky, lo-fi house music steeped in Italo disco.
Niagara put out another EP, Ímpar, in 2015—virtually the only non-batida release to appear on Príncipe in the years after the their label debut—and now they are back with their first full-length album. But something has changed in the past three years. Where the toe-scuffing Ímpar tipped its hat to Metro Area and DFA, Apologia finds them building out their own soundworld, one that has less to do with established categories than chasing hard-to-define moods.
As is the case with a lot of questing, imaginative electronic music from recent years—Jan Jelinek, Andrew Pekler, Visible Cloaks—it’s not always easy to tell if this stuff is old or new, or even its hemisphere of origin. Zigzagging synth arpeggios drizzle over rudimentary drum-machine grooves, and conga taps arrive with the slow, steady drip of a leaky faucet; out-of-phase patterns circle each other like a dog chasing its own tail. It’s rickety but beautiful, janky keyboards and intercepted radio signals shot through with stumbling thumb piano and graceful synth pads. With instrumentation heavy on hand percussion, harp-like glissandi, and other new-age trappings, a tropical vibe prevails.
Despite the relatively high humidity, Niagara don’t seem interested in standard-issue chillout. Unease lurks below the surface of their blissfully lopsided machine jams. In the opening “França,” a manic, distorted voice—like Donald Duck on a bender—cuts against placid chimes and rippling ride cymbals. On “6:30,” mismatched synth loops and a dully repetitive groove spin in wobbly circles, while pastel chords flare up in the background, cartoonish and wistful.
Niagara find a certain strength in withholding. Many tracks feel like they could kick off at any moment; throw in a heavy bass drum, and you could confuse them for nightclub barnstormers. But the trio seems to realize that to lean too hard on the drums would be to overwhelm the music’s intricate architecture of interconnected loops. Take “Momento Braga,” in which screen-door squeak, pinball ping, R2-D2 chirps, and earthy marimba weave together seamlessly and glisten in midair, like a spiderweb. An echoing voice bobs at the center of it all, something caught within the song’s sticky matrix.
The most captivating material verges upon pure ambient. That goes for the beat-less “Senhora do Cabo,” just two synth chords drifting above vaporous tones, and the pulse-heavy “Damasco,” where a lilting synth lead trips over leathery congas. It has rhythm but no real forward motion, spinning in place like a mobile. “Via Garibaldi,” a bonus cut not included on the vinyl edition, pairs the tape-delayed synths of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Vol. II with a ring-modulated voice that sounds like a garbled radio transmission snagged straight from space. (There are four such bonus tracks, and they are among the best here; choose your format wisely.) “O Astro,” another bonus, might be a field recording played back on a malfunctioning reel-to-reel deck.
Niagara’s resourcefulness suggests a castaway’s ingenuity, using unconventional techniques to unlock new territories. Cobbled together out of ethnographic recordings, distant shortwave signals, and idiosyncratic synths, Apologia sets its sights on an elusive state of transcendence. Consider it an escape vehicle to spirit listeners away from the failures of what more efficient, more expensive methods of music-making have wrought.


The Chilean rapper and singer’s unbreakable optimism and political conviction power an album animated by fresh explorations of pop ballads, reggaeton, and Afrobeats.

Vida

Chilean artist Ana Tijoux cites this motto as inspiration for Vida: “Our best revenge against death is life.” Her first album in a decade is a joyous look at grief in all its forms, and Tijoux’s unflinching optimism remains one of the most refreshing parts of her work. Working with longtime producer Andres Celis, Tijoux returns with an effervescent blend of thumping hip-hop and Latin American rhythms, leaning into pop balladry alongside her deft rapping.
After starting her career with Chilean rap group Makiza, Tijoux found international success as a solo artist. The title of her album 1977, released in 2010, marked the year that she was born in France to Chilean parents who’d fled the Pinochet dictatorship. Its introspective songs explored her family’s eventual return to Chile with a calm, decisive flow and jazzy production rooted in ’90s New York hip-hop. On 2011’s La Bala, Tijoux turned her focus outward, decrying economic inequality and referencing contemporary political movements including Chilean student protests, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street. On 2014’s Vengo, Tijoux brought Indigenous pride to the forefront. prominently featuring Andean flutes and making space for collaboration with other artists from the Global South, notably Palestinian rapper Shadia Mansour on the solidaric “Somos Sur.” With Vida, Tijoux continues to extend the invitation to fight injustice alongside her.
While recording Vida in her new home city of Barcelona, Tijoux said, she spent time with a friend who’d worked as a clown to comfort people living in refugee camps across the Middle East. His ability to sustain hope inspired the slogan at the heart of the album. Though Vida is hardly rose-tinted, Tijoux is attuned to the promise of resilience and camaraderie. She champions this mentality on “Tania,” an ode to her late sister. What starts as a sentimental exploration of words left unsaid opens up into an electric cumbia celebration. Tijoux sings of channeling her sister’s warmth into her own daily life, whether planting a sunflower or dancing until dawn. She understands how a party can be a sanctuary—a place to exhale.
Tijoux’s unwavering earnestness can sometimes take her into well-trodden territory. Empowerment pop like “Bailando Sola Aquí” (“Dancing Alone Here”) is a stale look at self-acceptance, depicting familiar images of searching for a partner to fill the void without the cheeky fun of a song like “Yo Perreo Sola,” Bad Bunny’s ode to twerking solo. “Millonaria” (“Millionaire”) reminds us that money doesn’t buy happiness—not a message that inspires the same fervor as the cries for class solidarity in 2020’s “Antifa Dance.” Despite a few duller moments, Tijoux keeps it interesting with a new embrace of reggaeton and Afrobeats on songs like “Cora” and “Dime Qué.” She can save the occasional clunky lyric with her effortless delivery.
Tijoux’s collaboration with iLe of Puerto Rican hip-hop group Calle 13 on “Busco Mi Nombre” (“I Search for My Name”) is an affecting highlight. The duo commemorates the people “disappeared” by the dictatorship in Argentina in the late ’70s and early ’80s with a powerful preface from a member of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group of women who founded a longstanding resistance movement. The song’s power lies in its specificity, conjuring images of undercover government agents breaking door locks to pull citizens away. Atop a soaring orchestral arrangement, Tijoux sings of carrying their collective memories with her. While the pain lingers, she insists it isn’t a burden: She’s ready to outrun the darkness.


A gathering of jazz avant-gardists and a new generation of players produces a tossed-off album with a spirit of celebratory tradition.

Garden Party

Several months after a group of inveterate, predominantly southern jazz musicians—Alvin Fielder, Kidd Jordan, Kelley Hurt, Christopher Parker, Chad Fowler, and the sole northerner, William Parker—gathered in New Orleans to record Garden Party, the drummer died. At 83, Alvin Fielder was a legend, neither entirely unsung nor given enough due for his conversational, free jazz-inflected style. Fielder left some of his most indelible marks in Chicago, as a founding member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and a collaborator with Roscoe Mitchell and Sun Ra. Yet it’s fitting that his career ended in the Louisiana bayou, the birthplace of jazz, with a group that does not stray as far from the genre’s roots as the improvisational pedigrees of its most notable musicians might lead one to expect.
Like Fielder, tenor saxophonist Jordan and bassist William Parker are avant-gardists—Jordan carries the torch for improvisation in New Orleans, a city that has largely eschewed the more chaotic developments in 20th-century improvisation for a continued embrace of the big-band sounds of its past. A longtime denizen of downtown Manhattan, Parker is famous for his adventurousness, which led him into the loft scene of the 1970s, through an accessible, revelatory series of recording sessions with the William Parker Quartet at the turn of the last century, and most recently to tour and record with the AquaSonic waterphone, a multifaceted, “mystic” instrument designed by artist Richard Waters. Garden Party is the latest result of his relentless touring and recording, a tossed-off album with a spirit of celebratory tradition that befits its name.
Like most parties, this one is best when the attendees are spontaneous. Opener “C Melody” is a soup of muted improvisation, filled with toms and based around pianist Christopher Parker’s impromptu ostinato. Along with “Dopolaria,” “Father Dies; Son Dies,” and the title track, it forms a suite of songs sequenced to lead the listener from the loose interplay of instruments at its start toward the tautness of the human voice. Kelley Hurt’s lightly dissonant, Donald Byrd-esque vocals elevate the harmonies of “Dopolaria,” while alto saxophonist Chad Fowler’s “Father Dies; Son Dies” showcases the band at its most clamorous. All of this is a prelude, though, to “Garden Party,” in which Hurt’s spoken lyrics serve as the album’s guiding philosophy. “The bunnies would come out. And they’d chase the birds and the squirrels. And they’d all run around playing tag with each other,” she says, describing a wildness that Dopolarians allude to, but never quite reach.
Sometimes the repetitive fragments that center Garden Party’s improvisations seem like a crutch, but if the band never achieves the same freedom that some of its most formidable members achieved in the past, perhaps that’s beside the point. Five of the six tracks are credited to Fowler, Hurt, and Christopher Parker, younger musicians who locate their ability as soloists not within free jazz, but within a decidedly NOLA-bred sense of structure. “Dopolarians” is derived from the Italian dopo l’aria (after the aria), a reference to the moment in an opera when the singer bows, the applause ends, and the plot goes on. Recorded before an enduringly influential percussionist took his final bow, Garden Party plays like an album of afters. Half of the players in Dopolarians already changed jazz. Now the younger generation throws them a party—one more placid, beautiful gathering down home.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On his latest record, Aaron Maine explores the feelings of confusion and numbness that follow the end of a relationship. It’s an ambitious record that can get a little lost in itself.

Ricky Music

Aaron Maine’s debut as Porches, 2013’s Slow Dance in the Cosmos, was perfect if you were young and falling in love for the first time. The album was an indie-rock dream sequence where Maine imagined himself kissing his best friends and going down on his girlfriend before she headed off to therapy. It was funny, earnest, and sweet; it felt like the start of a promising career helmed by a doe-eyed musician who knew a thing or two about writing scrappy rock songs. Porches’ latest, Ricky Music, is in some ways a return to those early days, albeit not through the lens of indie rock. Dealing largely with the idea of being in love at the very end of a relationship, the record is the most human piece of music Maine has released in years. He’s also never sounded so lost.
The hardest part of ending things with someone is never the actual breakup. It’s what follows: Your bed suddenly feels too big, and you no longer have someone to blow off work and drink cheap beer on the roof with. This is the universe that Ricky Music evokes. As though meant to capture that sense of a world suddenly made strange, Maine’s arrangements here are his riskiest to date. He dabbles in Auto-Tune, turning his mopey tenor into something more chromatic, and he fleshes out his synths and drum machines with jarring patches of dissonance. At their best, 2016’s Pool and 2018’s The House were dance records; at their worst, they felt anonymous. Ricky Music is more diaristic, like it was written alone and in the dead of night. It’s also more ambitious, not sticking to any specific sound or mood. It dabbles in ballads, slap bass, house beats, and new-wave synths and guitars. But in reinventing himself as a songwriter, Maine hasn’t really fleshed out what he wants to say or what he wants to sound like.
Opener “Patience” reads like a letter you write to an ex but then toss before putting in the mail. “I don’t think anything is fine/But I want you to know/I’ve been thinking about you now,” he bleats, heaping on the feelings. Lynchian synths balloon in the background, and Maine hides behind a layer of gauzy Auto-Tune and disorienting tempo changes. “Lipstick Song” feels equally monotonous. Maine looks back on the early days of his relationship. “Thought of you and your friends/Thought of the apartment/Thought of the make-up kit,” he sings, taking mental inventory of how things felt before it all went bad. It’s an evocative line that is washed out by its scenery. Sluggish and repetitive, the song’s chintzy bassline weighs down Maine’s vocals.
That glacial pace characterizes the whole album: Its 26 minutes feel twice that. And where Maine aims for melodrama, too often the effect comes off as merely humdrum. Ricky Music borders on voyeuristic, like peeking into someone’s notebook and finding endless doodling in place of emotional revelation. “Hair” might be the album’s most straight-up beautiful moment, but the lyrics—“Loosen up/You’re always so fucking high-strung/Can you take me back”—are at odds with the sweetness of the melody.
The only time Maine manages to rouse himself from his funk is “Madonna,” which dazzles like a night out on the town. Mitski sings hushed backing vocals, and synthesizers fan out like a royal flush. It’s too bad the rest of the record can’t match its energy. Still, even as a series of sketches and fragments, Ricky Music captures the essence of a breakup album. As he sings in “PFB,” “It’s looking bad/It’s looking bad/It’s looking pretty fucking bad.” After “Madonna,” it’s the album’s most upbeat song, and it cuts off after just 33 seconds. As anyone who has endured a broken heart can attest, sometimes there’s nothing else to be said.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Prince’s best album of the ’90s, a funked-out opus mired in extra-musical drama.

The Gold Experience

The first half of the 1990s was a frantically productive time for Prince. After stumbling out of the gate with the disastrous Graffiti Bridge movie, over the next five years he released five albums, toured extensively, opened (and frequently performed at) his own chain of nightclubs, closed one record label and created another, issued a groundbreaking interactive CD-ROM and a longform home video, launched two self-published magazines, worked with the Joffrey Ballet on a piece set to his music, and claimed his first-ever No. 1 single in the UK.
But no one remembers any of this. What they remember is when Prince changed his name.
On June 7, 1993—his 35th birthday—Prince informed the world that he was now to be known as an unpronounceable symbol that, in one form or another, had entered his iconography in recent years. (It was the title of his previous album, generally referred to as the “Love Symbol” album and he had been signing autographs with the mark for some time.) People went nuts: Was it a joke? A scam? How could he have a name that no one could say? Hadn’t he gone far enough already with all those silly “2”s and “U”s instead of real words in his titles? The greatest artist of his generation immediately became a punchline.
With the announcement came a proclamation that The Artist Formerly Known as Prince (the nomenclature that many settled on) would no longer be performing any of his old songs, as they belonged to the old name. Having already asserted, about six weeks earlier, that he was retiring from studio recording, many speculated that the name change was an attempt to finesse his way out of his contract with Warner Bros.—a deal he had signed less than a year earlier, with a potential payout of $100 million that was trumpeted as the biggest in history. And largely lost in all of this confusion was The Gold Experience—Prince’s finest album of the decade, an imperfect but rewarding record that became a casualty of extra-musical drama.
I had a front-row view of this dizzying era in Prince’s career. In early 1993, I reviewed the opening of the Act I tour for Rolling Stone and received word that he wanted to meet me. We spent the next year getting together off-and-on—in San Francisco, New York, at Paisley Park—before he agreed to an interview for Vibe magazine (where I was then working), his first time going on the record in print in almost five years.
We convened in Monte Carlo in May 1994; he was parked there for several days to receive honors at the World Music Awards. He spoke at length about his frustration at not being able to release music when and how he wanted to, how Warner Bros. couldn’t keep up with his output; soon he would be writing the word “slave” on his cheek in more provocative protest. He was also surprisingly thoughtful and serious regarding the name change.

“It’s fun to draw a line in the sand and say, ‘Things change here,’” he said during rehearsal, backstage at the Monte Carlo Sporting Club. “I don’t mind if people are cynical or make jokes—that’s part of it, but this is what I choose to be called. You find out quickly who respects and who disrespects you. It took Muhammad Ali years before people stopped calling him Cassius Clay.”
Back in his room at the historic Hotel de Paris, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, Prince played me portions of two albums in progress—one, titled Come, would carry the old name, and the other, then called The Gold Album, would be released under the new moniker. At the time, Come struck me as a solid, unsurprising Prince record (whatever that means), while The Gold Album felt looser, more exciting and experimental, which he was visibly more enthusiastic about.
Come was released a few months later—with a cover shot at a cemetery and emblazoned with the words “Prince 1958-1993”—to general disinterest. But it would be almost a year and a half until the other record, eventually renamed The Gold Experience, finally surfaced.
The truth is, The Gold Experience never had a chance. Prince held the album hostage in his negotiations with Warner Bros., telling the press that “it’s the best album I’ve ever made, but it probably won’t come out” and projecting the cover image behind him at live shows with the words “Release: Never.” Though he was playing much of the material in concert, by the time the record came out in September 1995, the myth around it had created impossible expectations.
Listening with some distance from the narrative—or for the first time—reveals a musician rediscovering his extraordinary power, his unparalleled ability to synthesize genres and styles and then flawlessly execute his musical vision. The album displays range from slow-jam ballads (“Shhh,” which he had previously given to young singer Tevin Campbell, who had a Top 10 R&B hit with it, and “Eye Hate U”) to the glam-rock kick of “Endorphinmachine” and shimmering power pop of “Dolphin.” No one else had the tools that Prince commanded, but it had been a while since he put them to good use.
One anchor is the featherlight, Philly-soul-style “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World”—which had been a Top 5 hit in early 1994 when Prince released it on the independent Bellmark label—but the album is otherwise heavy on the funk: The swinging horns on “Billy Jack Bitch” and the loopy groove of “Now” offer some of the set’s finer, under-appreciated highlights. (Most of the material was recorded in late 1993 and early 1994, and the song selection changed many times; the version I heard in Monaco contained the loping, bass-heavy live favorite “Days of Wild” and the extremely raunchy reggae jam “Ripopgodazippa,” which would have made things even funkier.)
Prince also reconnects with the guitar on the album after a few years of wilful restraint. He flashes his Eddie Van Halen-level chops on “Endorphinmachine” and the concluding “Gold,” a big swing of a power ballad that’s a bit too corny and obvious to reach the peaks of “Purple Rain.” Clocking in at over an hour, The Gold Experience starts to drag in spots, but moments like the carnal, metallic punch of “319” (first heard in the notorious so-terrible-it’s-delicious movie Showgirls!) stand with his best.
After reconfiguring the rock-based Revolution on Sign o’ the Times in 1987, Prince expanded his touring band to bring in horns and additional musicians on the magnificent Lovesexy shows. Since introducing the New Power Generation (NPG) on Diamonds and Pearls (1991), he had maintained the larger arrangements but skewed more toward groove. On this album and the live shows that led to it, the sound was stripped back to a harder-edged slam.
“The Lovesexy band was about musicality, a willingness to take risks,” Prince told me in Monaco. “Since then I’ve been thinking too much. This band is about funk, so I’ve learned to get out of the way and let that be the sound, the look, the style, everything.” (When we first met and he brought me onstage during soundcheck, he said, “I love this band, I just wish they were all girls.”)
Prince wasn’t only fighting with his label during the ’90s; he was battling hip-hop, the new, dominant form of Black pop music. For someone raised with such a strong commitment to musicianship, and so superhuman in both talent and discipline, the move away from instrumentation, chords, and melody was clearly confusing: He worked with such giants as Chuck D and Ice Cube (and toward the end of his life was in communication with Kendrick Lamar) but most of his attempts to bring hip-hop into his own music involved grafting the pedestrian Tony M onto the NPG for nonsense like “Jughead.”
On The Gold Experience, Prince finally reaches some kind of peace with hip-hop. In Rolling Stone, Carol Cooper perceptively noted that “as usual, the attempts at rap come off as part satire and part celebration of the form.” But the spoken word flow on “P. Control” and the (admittedly already dated) new jack swing-y beat of “We March” are examples of actually integrating the new form, using it for a purpose rather than just out of some sense of obligation to a young audience.
Speaking of new forms, The Gold Experience is presented as a mock virtual reality trip, with keyboard clicks and a robotic female voice introducing some of the songs (“This experience will cover courtship, sex, commitment, fetishes, loneliness, vindication, love, and hate”). It’s awkward but ahead of its time, and illustrates how Prince’s love/hate relationship with technology—like his battles with his record company—could be prophetic. “Once the Internet is a reality, the music business is finished,” he told London’s Evening Standard in 1995, four years before Napster.
Not surprisingly, the unifying theme that lurks within the lyrics of The Gold Experience is freedom. Sexual freedom, of course, had always been present for him, but other expressions of liberation appear throughout: creative control (“You can cut off all my fins/But to your ways I will not bend/I’ll die before I let you tell me how to swim” in “Dolphin”), political protest (“We March”), even feminism. “P. Control”—“Pussy Control,” until Prince was told stores wouldn’t stock a record printed with that title—is clunky and easily misread; one review called it the album’s “weakest, most juvenile and most sexist track.” But the subject is a successful businesswoman who turns down a rapper when he asks her to sing on his track, saying “You could go platinum four times/Still couldn’t make what I make in a week.”
The story of Prince’s career—well, a story, at least—is the tension between his desires for the freedom of a cult artist and the popularity of a rock star. “The thing the public has to understand is he’s done the big thing, the ‘Purple Rain’ thing,” NPG guitarist Levi Seacer said in 1993. “He’s seen those big sales and been on top of the world. But an artist has to be able to grow, feel like they’re moving forward. You have to let the artist keep going or they’ll die.”
The Gold Experience feels like the last time Prince, or The Artist Formally Known as Prince, tried to walk that tightrope, doing weird stuff like “Shy,” a dreamy tale of a female gang member, or the unhinged vocal on “Now,” while still assuming the pop audience would follow him. Soon, these directions would bifurcate: on the one side, the cynical, Santana-style all-star-guest strategy of Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic or the calculated throwback sound of Musicology, and on the other, five-CD box sets and instrumental or religious-themed albums.
So even though The Gold Experience was the first release under a new name, it was really the end of an era. By the time the album came out, almost two years after recording began, The Artist Formerly Known as Prince seemed bored with it and didn’t do much to promote its success. It climbed to No. 6 on the charts anyway, and picked up its gold certification. Prince found his way out of his Warner Bros. contract and moved on to other matters.
But in the middle of the maelstrom, there was a time when the fate of The Gold Experience felt critical. “People think that this is all some scheme,” he told me back in 1994, while people were losing their minds over the notion that he had lost his mind. “I don’t have a master plan; maybe somebody does.”
That didn’t make his intentions any less serious, though. “There’s no reason for me to be playing around now,” the once and future Prince said with a laugh. “Now we’re just doing things for the funk of it.”


On this mini-album, the K-pop girl group struggle to maintain the audacious energy that first put them in the spotlight.

Guess Who

The K-pop girl group ITZY debuted two years ago with the brazen and lively “DALLA DALLA.” The song bore a resemblance to their forebears and contemporaries—2NE1’s domineering vocals, TWICE’s group chants, Momoland’s triplet-rapped breakdowns—while establishing the quintet as a massive new force in the industry. Their cute yet fiery electropop put dubstep wobbles against bright synths and trap drums against cheerleader chants. More memorable was the message, with lyrics full of self-love and explicit, endearing encouragement: “Keep your chin up! We got your back!” The chorus’ anthemic cries of “I love myself!” were directed both to you and themselves; it was instructive pomp.
ITZY have always matched a contagious confidence with audacious songwriting; singles like “ICY” and “WANNABE” have prismatic beats that make them runway-ready pop spectacles (it’s fitting that they’re the sole K-pop group with production credits from SOPHIE). Disappointingly, their latest mini-album, Guess Who, often strays from the formula, eschewing genre-blending panache for the tediously straight-ahead. Lead single “Mafia in the Morning” is the biggest offender: There’s a Cardi B lilt in the verses, but it otherwise feels like BLACKPINK without the stadium-sized grandeur. ITZY’s labelmates Stray Kids have aimed for bombastic hip-hop too, but the results have never been as stilted and one-dimensional. Whenever K-pop borrows ideas from Black music and whiffs this hard, the results are cringeworthy—there’s no empowerment here, just secondhand embarrassment.
Guess Who exposes ITZY’s kitchen-sink approach as a necessity; without it, their songs fail to dazzle. Their rapping, for example, is rarely impressive, so it’s best when it’s included as a minor element. “KIDDING ME” makes this exceedingly clear: Built on murky bass lurches, the song has a brain-rattling chorus drop and the album’s very worst rap verse, both technically and lyrically. Still, by diversifying its individual parts, the song redeems itself: The pre-chorus is all EDM balladry and build-up, and its last 15 seconds find wonky electronics adorning the beat, like a final blitz onto the dancefloor. It’s a much more convincing hip-hop track than “Mafia in the Morning,” largely because it refuses to be just that.
Most deserving of lead-single status is “Sorry Not Sorry.” It’s built on a country-rock guitar riff that exudes the braggadocio of the lyrics. Such brashness is offset by dreamy pre-choruses: “I’ll show you, are you ready for me?” they sing. It’s a vulnerable moment—an announcement that they’ve quietly been waiting to show themselves off. They do just that on the chorus: With brass blazing, their sung and rapped vocals strut along to rapid-fire kick drums—they sound like shrapnel when howling “I-T-Z-Y.”
Guess Who’s other tracks are paltry and bloodless. “SHOOT!” is Travis Scott meets “Hotline Bling,” and while a perfectly fine mood piece, it’s too short to feel like anything but an odd curio. Given Scott’s influence on Korean music for the past half-decade, “SHOOT!” ends up feeling both unadventurous compared to other idols’ songs and less catchy than Korean rappers’ more faithful reproductions. “Wild Wild West” has a country veneer but is limp, corny, and unconvincing in its tepid handclaps and “bang, bang, bang” shouts. “TENNIS (0:0)” is even more frivolous: an acoustic guitar-driven love song with a gliding bassline that fails to inject any verve—think Korean superstar IU without the charm. ITZY built themselves up as one of the most exciting groups in K-pop, but they’ve somehow become more uncomfortable being themselves in the process.
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From synth pop to new wave to disco, the shapeshifting rock band goes all in on its keyboard album.

Intercepted Message

It’s always a toss-up which style of guitar music John Dwyer and his rotating cast of Osees collaborators will lean into with each new album. Last time it was hardcore, but sometimes it’s prog or krautrock or metal. Dwyer has vowed to make music at a prolific clip for as long as possible, taking inspiration from old punks who claimed they wanted to die onstage. Perpetual engagement with Osees (or Oh Sees, Thee Oh Sees, OCS, or however else he decides to spell it) means weaving with the ever-shifting tide of Dwyer and his collaborators. His primary co-conspirator on Intercepted Message is “keyboards guru” Tom Dolas, whose taste and style defined the album’s overall vibe. “This record should have Tom’s fucking face on the cover,” Dwyer recently underlined. The songs vacillate between synth pop, new wave, disco, garage rock, and post-punk; synths and keys take the opening hook of the first three songs. Put snappily, it’s the band’s keyboards album.
The essential Osees elements are still very much accounted for: the assertive hammering rhythm guitar riffs, the scrambling chaotic lead guitar solos, and the seemingly instinctive “ow”’s and “woo”’s that Dwyer yelps before a big drop. This lineup’s two drummers, Dan Rincon and Paul Quattrone, propel these songs into the stratosphere, creating a monolithic attack when they play in unison and a chaotic landscape when they drift apart. At its best, Intercepted Message harnesses all that adrenaline with exacting precision. “Blank Chems” opens with a rigid, driving synth that provides an underlying current to rapidly climbing guitars that amplify anxiety. What makes the song, however, are the swaths of open space. Guitar chords are left to ring out; big open mouth staccato breaths become prominent percussive textures. The gulfs between the action emphasize some of the best reasons to listen to this band—to delight in every jolt, every thrash, every “ow, ow.”
Osees’ other secret weapon is their proficiency at locking into a groove, and “Die Laughing” showcases one of their best. On paper it shouldn’t work: this L.A. band fresh off a punk album making a grimy dance song that sounds like a late ’70s New York City melting pot of punk, disco, funk, and no wave. The rhythm’s danceable enough on its own, and it’s an ideal canvas for both drummers to spread out. Dwyer’s voice is muffled to oblivion as he rattles off fever dream dance instructions beneath scuzzy guitar stabs and outer space electronic chirps. “Submerged Building,” while substantially less ramshackle and more of an Oh Sees-circa-2012 rock song, follows that essential formula—a solid rhythmic foundation that lays the groundwork for synth experimentation.
Intercepted Message has flashes of the band at its best, and it also has a song where Dwyer uses his trademark goblin voice to sing about gooning. It’s repetitive and has some lazy rhymes, but “Goon”’s key sin is that it sounds like some Zappa shit when Dwyer boasts about being a “Main Street ’bater” who uses a baseball bat to get off. Lyrics aren’t generally the album’s strong point: Dwyer’s vocals come across as vibes-first impulses, broad gestures to the general emotions he’s trying to convey like the “tears on your face” brokenheartedness of “Always at Night.” The edginess often feels like a tossed off non-sequitur: Why exactly is the king a “cunt” in the title track’s chorus, and for that matter, who is he?
The disparate vibes don’t always gel, either. “Unusual & Cruel,” glossy ’80s synthpop worship peppered with Dwyer’s trademark abrasiveness, is sandwiched between “Die Laughing” and a skronky (plus frankly corny and unnecessary) cover of Blurt’s 1981 post-punk jam “The Fish Needs a Bike.” The closing moment is a rendition of the vaporwave telephone hold banger “Opus No. 1.” The best songs will be welcome additions to their live repertoire; it’s already riveting to watch them play these songs at full dual drummer power. But the threads that bind these songs are loose and inconsistent, which might be a given for a band that moves fast and jumps from one subgenre micro-era to the next.


The extended monologue of addiction and plummet contained on this CD is so wall-to-wall tragic that I reckoned it could ...

The Young Machines

The extended monologue of addiction and plummet contained on this CD is so wall-to-wall tragic that I reckoned it could only be assessed via method acting. But after countless listens, I realized that drinking four Clearchannels (one-third organic apple juice, one-third expensive gin, one-third cheap saki-- the kind with an "intended for cooking" sticker) wasn't enough. To truly pull a Clinton on this album's pain, I would have had to freebase suppositories, disown my circle, and score some fabric softener so the noose wouldn't burn as much.
The good folks at Texas Instruments helped to determine the rating above, based on an average calculation of the 9.9 this release deserved for its conception and off-putting bravery, and the 3.9 it earns due to par loops and too-precious delivery. The Young Machines will rank among your favorite albums if you're someone's mortifyingly jaded ex, but if you come to it craving electronic vocal-pop keeping pace with anything north of Jimmy Tamborello's shoulders, you'll end up frustrated by the simple and repetitive violin bits that drive the big retro beats of "Tech Romance", "Girl Problem" and "My Girlfriend's Boyfriend". These stately, neutered forays into gangsta's paradise don't do enough with their chamber-hop, though "Boyfriend"'s choral punk-out at least adds variety. Lest you think any kind of rap reference is a sad stretch when discussing Her Space Holiday: the album was not just released on the primarily underground hip-hop label Mush, but its liner notes' brief shoutouts additionally thank Aesop Rock, Atmosphere, The Streets, cLOUDDEAD, and The Neptunes. This ain't your father's digital shoegaze.
Mark Bianchi's life was in the shitter, if his lyrics can be trusted, yet his blippy backing tracks, despite their limitations (his own songs sound like his remixes of others' songs, etc) remain oddly ascendant in tone-- some of these could serve as Muzak for a tourist-town's rainforest or seahorse exhibit. The title track (and what a title, awesome in its own right, and suggesting such triumphs as the Young Fresh Fellows, Marble Giants, Gods, People, legend Neil, TV on the Radio's Liars, The Constantines' "Lions", and Pavement's Gary) is a stunner, a kind of IDM take on The Ice Storm's score, with anime musicboxery, and are those voices saying "let go" and "save me?" Avant-guardians will ruin my fun by crying Moby, but dig the layered reprise on "The Luxury of Loneliness".
"Meet the Pressure" is a bitchslap to Bianchi's negative reviews and reviewers. I sympathize with the man's point: the de-evolution of labor involved in blurbiage and its reception is disheartening.
1. An artist labors to fashion an album.
2. A critic half-labors to fashion a review about how the album wasn't messianic.
3. A webboarder calls the critic a bald ugly fag.
4. A lurker misregurges the webboarder in an IM to his cousin: "Don't download that band; their junk'll be stoops."
Bianchi's song is about meanness, revenge and lyric-misquoting. He includes a sample from an answering machine about his "Internet press" after he says some crits are "hoping that their viciousness will boost traffic on their site." But then he ruins his complicated rumination on the indie "media" with a fantasy (?) about the critic being cuckolded. I had to think of some of the disses my inbox has weathered (from artists I like, such as Ween and Cex) and the sensitivity expressed by other artists (Aereogramme and Songs: Ohia, who asked for my address-- I cling every night to my crossbow, Molina, with a Cape Fear tripwire around my lhasa apso).
So if you're up to hearing what Kurtis Blow would sound like on Saddle Creek, or if you love cinematic self-vigilantism, or cover artwork that places engine gears in women's wombs, or if you've been waiting for a breakdown album since Kramer's The Guilt Trip, or if you can dig how "Japanese Gum" conjures a mood by suggesting Black Black brand (Engrish fans know their slogan "Hi-Technical Taste and Flavor!"), buy The Young Machines. Few albums about druggies dealing with the death of a grandmother are as stark. Bianchi even admits to missing his mom at one intermittently moving point. But when his liner notes claim he doesn't deserve any of his fans, he's being way too hard on himself. Hopefully his devotees know their suicide watch etiquette.


With new collaborators and a little psychedelic aid, the sculpted rhythms and dark-hued instrumentation of Angus Andrew’s long-running art-rock project feel like a summation and a fresh start.

The Apple Drop

For most of Liars’ 20-year career, Angus Andrew, the blur of moody charisma that holds the chameleonic electro-rock band together, avoided listening to contemporary music lest it contaminate his vision. At their best, Liars sounded like aliens who’d heard some rock, classical, and whale songs shot into space on a gold NASA record and discovered they had a weird knack for Earth music. In this light, their tenth album, The Apple Drop, is striking in its normalcy. It could often pass for Nick Cave as produced by John Carpenter, which is the sort of gloss these Mute lifers usually repel, yet it’s striated with layers of their past and their characteristic strangeness. It’s the best thing Andrew has done in at least a decade.
Liars began as part of indie rock’s storied class of 2001, when Brooklyn’s Bedford Avenue was briefly the center of the known world. There was Andrew, a very tall Australian walking arm in arm with Karen O, in the mascot couple of Williamsburg lofts. “All he knew was I was the other dude around who was into ESG,” the Rapture’s Luke Jenner recalls in Meet Me in the Bathroom, Lizzy Goodman’s essential oral history. That affinity fueled Liars’ debut, They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top. A lump of furious noise-funk coal, it was one of the earliest significant recordings from its Brooklyn demimonde, and it got out in front of the national dance-punk fad that ensued when a new generation discovered the agitprop style and sprechgesang of Gang of Four and Wire.
Though Liars were too odd and shifty to reach the popular heights of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Strokes, or Interpol, they’ve had a longer or more consistent history than their peers, even after squandering goodwill with 2004’s They Were Wrong So We Drowned, which sounded like Trench had been balled up wet and then left somewhere cold to dry. (“Unlistenable,” SPIN. “[D]isturbingly rooted in the what-the-fuck? tradition of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music,” Rolling Stone.) In 2006, they rallied with Drum’s Not Dead, on which Andrew, with bandmates Aaron Hemphill and Julian Gross, forged effects-laden ceremonial drums and coldly rapturous falsetto chants into something ancient, ahistorical, and sublime.
That drum-forward production and tortoise-brained bass looms over The Apple Drop, as do the sounds of Liars’ other two arguable masterpieces, 2007’s garage-rocking self-titled record and 2010’s cinematic Sisterworld. But the creative partnership of Andrew, Hemphill, and Gross, which bore the self-appointed strain of constant reinvention, started to show wear in the spartan electronics of WIXIW before falling flat in the dance-pop of Mess. The band amicably split, leaving Andrew—now living in a remote part of Australia—the last Liar standing. It took him two lost and lonely solo albums to grieve the partnership, the fruits of which are so lucidly digested on The Apple Drop that it feels like both a summation and a fresh start.
“Star Search,” where Andrew’s voice and plunking piano are repeatedly engulfed in firestorms of electronic harmony, is said to relate to the opaque thematic concept at the center of Drum’s Not Dead, though who could tell? And Andrew has said that “King of the Crooks” is a song he never quite cracked in that era. The standout track, “Sekwar,” sounds like what Mess could have been, boiling down EDM until only big drums, volatile bass, and sheer frills of guitar remain. “The Start” is like a chilled-out Nine Inch Nails, with an avuncular alt-rock vibe that also floats through songs like “Big Appetite.” While the moods range from atmospheric to aggressive, sculpted rhythms and dark-hued instrumentation lead this suave tour of Liars’ history and offer a glimpse of its revitalized future.
The music was refined and clarified by some recent realizations for Andrew, turning points the laconic musician has been relatively voluble about. In 2019, he served as a judge for the Australian Music Prize, and having to hear new music changed his mind about his monomaniacal process. Longing for a musical community, he enlisted jazz drummer Laurence Pike and multi-instrumentalist Cameron Deyell to play studio material that he could recompose on the computer. Mary Pearson Andrew, his wife, helped to refine his quicksand lyrics, which appear meaningless on the page but somehow fill with meaning when Andrew sings them, whether in a deep, slow croon, a diffident bark, or a fragile pleading. The collaborators seem to corral and contain his chaotic energy into uncommonly orderly songs, though one more thing also helped: the newfound benefits of replacing anxiety medication with psilocybin, which Andrew described as a key to making this album. That’s right: He made his least trippy album by tripping. How Liars is that?

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Collaborating with noise musician Lasse Marhaug, the Welsh producer doubles down on both the spirituality and the mechanical ferocity of her work. It feels both like a left turn and a culmination.

LP.8

Kelly Lee Owens has apparently elected to skip making her third through seventh albums and proceed directly to number eight. The post-physical era of the music industry inspires gambits like this, from retail mixtapes to 20-minute albums, and Owens’ might be the most outlandish since A. G. Cook dropped two “debut” albums, one after the other. But it works for LP.8, an imagined dispatch from the future of the Welsh artist’s career that feels both like a left turn and a culmination. It’s easy to imagine a sequence of albums in which Owens—unguarded and facing the camera on her self-titled debut, haunted and hair-hidden on 2020’s Inner Song—slowly abstracts into the silver blur on the cover of this one.
Owens’ work can be cold and steely, yet it throbs with an undercurrent of spirituality. LP.8 doubles down on both of these aspects and finds ways they can work in tandem. The low end is exaggerated until every kick drum or sub-bass tone blurs and shakes the entire track, and at times the album approaches such a high-volume, high-pressure extreme that it sounds like she was trying to make the new-age Yeezus or Daytona. (Her co-producer was Lasse Marhaug, whose work on Jenny Hval’s The Practice of Love attempted a similar mind-body unison.) The most awe-inspiring track is “Anadlu,” where Owens conducts a breathing exercise over the meanest kick drum of the year. “Breathe,” she commands in Welsh, filling the margins with inhales and exhales as if to set an example, as the kick pounds away with mechanical ferocity. It’s like the reverse of the life-sucking machine from The Princess Bride, a system of great weights and pulleys working, in this case, to heal the listener.
Inner Song was Owens’ most complete integration of her sound’s techno and pop poles. Of the nine tracks here, only “One” has anything like a hook, and even that song dissolves into repetitions of cryptic phrases halfway through. Instead, Owens prefers to use her voice as a rhythmic element, as on opener “Release,” or as a running commentary of sighs and whispers that sound like plumes of smoke drifting between Brutalist beams and pillars. Talkier tracks like “Quickening” and “Sonic 8” are halfway between guided meditations and the brainy techno-missives of AGF or Marie Davidson. “Divide and conquer,” she repeats on the latter, stretching the last syllable with playful vocal fry, as if wondering what it’d be like to flex a little power for a change.
The fearsome symmetry and formidable concision Owens attempts here is a high-risk, high-reward strategy, and while the first half of the album comes on strong, the second half is a little more prone to interrupting itself. “One” is sequenced second to last as the album’s pop climax, but with its clipped repetitions of short melodic phrases, it’s nowhere near as developed as similar cuts like “Re-Wild” on Inner Song. The energy craters at the album’s midpoint, where the tough synths and atmospheric vocal layering of “Olga” are followed by “Nana Piano,” a nearly six-minute improvisation on an out-of-tune piano where every flaw and creak is emphasized. It feels like an unnecessary diversion, something you might expect to find on a low-stakes Bandcamp release rather than a bold, futuristic statement such as this. But Owens course-corrects with “Quickening,” which sounds for all the world like a video-game boss-battle cutscene. A bell rings through a vast space; a disembodied whisper haunts the landscape; we hear what sounds like the wet uncoiling of some great beast; and for a second, we can see Owens emerge in her frightening final form.


Once again fusing R&B and retro synth pop, the Toronto duo’s third album revels in the impermanence of intimacy. The production and singing dazzle, even when the emotions feel hollow.

Wildest Dreams

For Majid Jordan, love lives in a neon-lit nightclub. In their world, you close your eyes and move your hips and fall for someone with one kiss, a life’s worth of passion unfurling in a burst of MDMA-like euphoria. Meshing new-wave R&B and retro synth pop, the Toronto duo’s excellent 2017 sophomore album, The Space Between, located the sweet spot between romantic abandonment and woozy heartache, a nexus well suited to their genre-hybrid sensibilities. But on their third record, Wildest Dreams, Majid Jordan are all abandonment, all the time. Even when they leave the party, they long for the thrill of sweaty bodies and shimmering lights, reveling in the impermanence of intimacy without experiencing any of the consequences.
It’s easy to forgive Wildest Dreams for repeatedly hitting the same note, because the songs here are consistently flawless. The slightest turn of the knob might jeopardize their mathematical quest for pop perfection. Jordan Ullman’s spacious, atmospheric, expertly crafted production creates glitzy, synth-oriented spotlights for singer Majid Al Maskati to shine. As ever, his vocals are understated yet evocative, nimble enough to switch registers at precisely the right moment. On lead single “Waves of Blue,” spacy riffs and up-tempo drums lay the foundation for Al Maskati to croon one of the album’s most addictive hooks: “I’m in love with the thought of being in love, in love with you.” Two other standouts, “Been Through That” and “Life Worth Living,” boast gorgeous vocal runs, propulsive basslines, and grooves designed to make practically anyone, anywhere, bob their head and hum along.
Even the duo’s more traditional R&B songs have a sunnier palette than on records past. Despite blatantly lifting the melody of Usher’s “Climax,” the title track is a sultry and sensitive sex jam that advises a nice-and-slow approach. Guitar ballad “Forget About the Party” dazzles, too, but it exposes a weakness in Al Maskati’s songwriting: He tends to reach for the nearest platitude rather than explore what’s under the hood of a feeling. “I’ll give myself to you like it’s a habit,” he sings, distancing himself from further introspection. On the Drake-assisted “Stars Align,” a hollow yearning to “last through the night” and “get the job done” mutes the song’s already minuscule stakes. The hues may be brighter but the image is fuzzier, substance and specificity sacrificed for good vibes and catchy one-liners.
But let’s not ask too much of Majid Jordan. It’s cleansing to spend time with a record as resplendent and sensuous as Wildest Dreams, where the only demands are that you dance the night away and have endless, carefree sex with your (maybe?) soulmate. Still, nearly 40 minutes of impeccably engineered synth pop can feel like having a conversation with an artificially intelligent love interest; they’re saying all the right things and making you feel pretty good, but then you remember you’re talking to a robot.
When Majid Jordan co-wrote and produced Drake’s 2013 single “Hold On, We’re Going Home,” the ’80s revival in contemporary pop was just taking off. It’s hard to remember how radical the song sounded at the time—aerodynamic and timeless, like it had always been there, waiting. Majid Jordan have a bone-deep understanding of pop and R&B, and they’ve succeeded in subverting, and sometimes innovating, within these spaces. Wildest Dreams doesn’t break new ground as much as it activates familiar pleasure centers, tapping into whatever hardwired circuits convince us to dance long after the party ends.

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The Buffalo rapper sticks largely to hard-boiled genre conventions, while German beatmaker Wun Two leans toward the abstract and atmospheric.

Palermo

It’s tempting, in the aftermath of Westside Gunn’s purported swan song And Then You Pray for Me, to consider Griselda’s dissolution. Gunn is now, by his own account, more interested in fashion and moguldom than recording or performing—the Art Basel crowd, it happens, has little use for Trap-A-Holics tributes. His half-brother Conway the Machine, meanwhile, is still rapping like the rent’s due. The group’s most accomplished and pragmatic technician, Conway offsets sleek major-label outings with austere works for hire, his sprawling solo catalog eschewing a neat trajectory. He cuts hard-boiled tapes with neighbors, unsung DJs, and streetwear brands, a master sculptor insisting upon the bluntest of tools.
Conway sticks largely to genre conventions on Palermo, although producer Wun Two makes a valiant effort to break the mold. A German beatmaker best known for his lo-fi instrumental projects, Wun Two conjures an assured, hypnotic mood reminiscent of DJ Muggs. Where past collaborators Big Ghost Limited and the Alchemist outfitted Conway with ornate samples, Wun Two foregrounds distinctive percussion, washing his drum patterns with isolated chords and hazy stereo effects. On “Carduni,” ambient cymbals approximate uncanny static; a delicate melody sneaks in around the halfway point of “Mind Tricks,” propelling the track forward while maintaining its creeping tension.
A series of interludes embellishes the ambience with a transatlantic drug trafficking theme, but Wun Two’s cues are lost in translation. Conway stays close to home, his tales of ascendance—I used to do X, now I do Y—often confined to individual couplets. The anecdotes range from amusing (“Look, we was baggin’ all day to serve in the spot/We had shit jumpin’ like Shawn Kemp’s vertical hops”) to obligatory (“Used to bag ounces up in twenties, I would scrape the plate/Chop until the razor break, look, they say he great”), his rhyme patterns rigid and monosyllabic. The performance is buoyed by Conway’s instincts, which are, as ever, exceptional. He stretches his limbs in whitespace, lounging in the drawn-out chorus of “Carduni,” extending the outros of “Mind Tricks” and “Bianca” into ad-libbed monologues.
There’s precious little rapping on Palermo—most tracks feature a single verse with padding on either side—and Wun Two relishes the lack of structure, his unhurried tempos blooming into roomy instrumental breaks. In lieu of quotables, he centers the performers’ expressive quirks: Conway’s Heath Ledger-as-Joker cackle does as much lifting as the sinewy rhymes. Fellow Buffalo native Goosebytheway is an invaluable supporting player, warbling raspy hooks like a grizzled 50 Cent. Still, the tasting-course format imposes a low ceiling. The diffuse jazz-club instrumentals on “Cold Dish” are among the album’s most evocative, yet Conway seems to lose interest midway through a sparse 16 bars. Goose bookends the verse with a loose chorus, but it plays like a reference track, more of a teaser than a song.
Having fulfilled his contracts with Gunn’s and Eminem’s record labels, this might be a liberating moment for Conway, a chance to be a working artist instead of someone else’s idea of a rap star. Restoring that hunger—while maintaining some semblance of quality control—is a separate needle to thread. Palermo is aimed at an existing audience, but paradoxically, it takes that audience for granted.


Though he’s still got style on the mic, Ferg’s latest is a regression into the gleeful ignorance that colored his earlier work.

Still Striving

A$AP Ferg’s last LP, Always Strive and Prosper, was a portrait of the artist in a state of reflection, considering his life and work in the wake of his friend’s death and his own success. In some ways, it represented the New York rapper Ferg’s maturation—the wizened perspective of an ascendant rapper with a little bit of work under his belt. In that sense at least, his latest LP Still Striving is a regression into the gleeful ignorance that colored his earlier work.
The line between “mixtape” and a proper “album” has long been inexorably blurred, with the distinction lying mostly in how the artist chooses to refer to it. For Ferg, it appears to be an indictment of the record’s quality, or perhaps how much time he spent on it. Like Ferg Forever, his latest tape feels light and loose, a collection of mostly throw-away verses and guest features that serve more to flex Ferg’s network than anything else. Of the 14 tracks on Still Striving, only three are without guest verses, and with few exceptions (Cam’ron, Busta Rhymes), most of the guests are lyrical lightweights that avoid showing him up. More than anything else, the crowded real estate takes some of the pressure off of him as a writer; he rarely contributes more than a single verse and a hook.
This is Still Striving (and Ferg’s) biggest strength, and most glaring weakness: His style is his substance. He attended an arts high school (NYC’s High School of Art & Design), and is an unabashed student of visual art and fashion. His father, Darold Ferguson, owned a Harlem boutique, and even designed the iconic Bad Boy logo; Ferg briefly followed in his footsteps, selling custom belts before his rap career took off. To this day he’s still got one foot in the trap and one on the runway and fits well within an A$AP aesthetic that embraces influences from Atlanta and Miami as much as it does those from NYC. But as he synthesizes these myriad references, any distinct identity gets lost in the shuffle. On “Plain Jane,” Ferg tips his cap to Juicy J’s ode to misogynoir, “Slob on My Knob,” which almost 20 years later has lost its shock value; On the Migos collabo “Nasty (Who Dat),” he awkwardly flips JT Money’s rowdy singalong “Who Dat” with a darker, digitized drone.
While much of the tape is forgettable, Still Striving is not without its standout moments. “East Coast Remix”—a one-off single turned posse cut that regrettably drops original collaborator Remy Ma—benefits from a competitive fire stoked by stacking big name rappers (Busta Rhymes, A$AP Rocky, Snoop Dogg) atop a filthy DJ Khalil & Tariq Beats beat. But Ferg is at his most interesting when he drops his guard and gets personal, like when he laments his grandma’s arthritis (“Plain Jane”), or the various contraband family members have stored in their mattresses (“The Mattress Remix”). And on album closer “Tango”—the best Frankie P production on a tape chock full of them—Ferg is at his strongest, reflecting on his life and losses. Free of guest verses and tough-guy posturing, the twinkling ballad offers a rare glimpse of Ferg’s narrative skills:

Speak to Yams’ mom on the daily, beautiful lady
Feelin’ of her losing her baby drivin’ her crazy
She say that I remind her of her son
She make arroz con pollo and cook every time I come
I get the ’itis, she tell me to go sleep in his bed
And maybe some of Yams’ visions come to your head

It’s a touching moment from an MC that rarely offers a peek behind the curtain—and perhaps, a hint at what could be in store once the bright lights fade and the swag subsides.

A$AP Worldwide / Polo Grounds Music / RCA


Dylan's latest installment in his long-running Bootleg series is one of the shortest, the highlight of which is his collaboration with Johnny Cash.

Bob Dylan: Travelin’ Thru, Featuring Johnny Cash: The Bootleg Series Vol. 15

Weighing in at a mere three discs—last year’s More Blood, MoreTracks was twice that size—Travelin' Thru is a relatively trim installment in Bob Dylan’s ongoing Bootleg Series. Instead of opening a door onto a secret history, it adds color and texture to an already well-known story: Dylan's late-’60s sojourn in Nashville, the period in which he recorded John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline, capped off by his performance on The Johnny Cash Show in 1969—his first television appearance in nearly five years.
Dylan knew precisely what he wanted for the Harding sessions: just his guitar, bass, and drums. Producer Bob Johnston brought bassist Charlie McCoy and drummer Kenneth Buttrey into the studio, persuaded Bob to add steel guitarist Pete Drake to a couple of tracks, and the entire thing was finished within nine hours. The swift session means there were only a handful of outtakes left behind. Just seven alternate takes made the cut for Travelin’ Thru and apart from Dylan fussing with a few words, these aren’t far removed in form or feel from the versions that made the final album. The outtakes from Nashville Skyline—which includes the unheard song “Western Road,” a loose-limbed blues that happily plays with some well-worn tropes—also aren’t markedly different than what made the cut on the finished LP. The differences here are subtle—”Lay, Lady, Lay” seems a bit muted without its busy percussion and sighing steel—but it’s fun to hear Dylan groove along with these Nashville pros, working up a head of country-funk steam on “Country Pie” with the help of guitarist Charlie Daniels. Unfortunately, there aren't many of these Nashville Skyline outtakes. A bunch of masters were lost when CBS Records Nashville neglected to pay the fees for a storage facility, and while Sony recovered some tapes in a 2008 auction, many reels are still missing, which means the eight cuts on Travelin’ Thru are all that could be salvaged for official release.
All this means that the heart of Travelin’ Thru lies in the session Dylan held with Johnny Cash on February 18, 1969, just after he finished work on Nashville Skyline. The pair tested the waters the day before, stumbling through a version of Cash’s “I Still Miss Someone” and playing Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” simultaneously with Johnny’s “Understand Your Man,” a song that lifted the melody from “Don’t Think Twice.” It’s a clever idea, albeit slightly confusing in practice—at one point, Dylan messes up his lyrics and slyly suggests he should be singing Cash’s words instead—but the mash-up illustrates how the two icons were operating on a similar wavelength. More than that, they were on equal footing in 1969. Each had spent the past decade changing the sound of American music by deviating from conventions, each building an image that verged on mythic. What's appealing about their duet session is how it deflates those myths: it’s merely two mutual admirers figuring out how to play music together.
Raised on old folk, country, and blues tunes, not to mention rock & roll, Dylan and Cash shared a similar vernacular, but speaking it in a sympathetic fashion took some effort. Although a version of “Girl from the North Country” wound up opening up Nashville Skyline, the duo generally avoided Dylan’s songbook. They also attempted “One Too Many Mornings” and Bob unveiled “Wanted Man,” a tune he wrote specifically for Johnny that played upon Cash’s Man In Black mythos. This tentative, good-humored read-through is the only known recording of Dylan singing the song, and it arrives fairly close to the end of the session, after the pair realized Bob didn't know how the country standard “The Wreck of the Old 97” went and that he couldn’t remember the words to Cash’s “Guess Things Happen That Way.” Discovering such gaps was part of the process, as was Cash feeding lyrics to Dylan: on the old Appalachian folk tune “Mountain Dew,” he instructs Bob how to deliver a line so it has the impact of a punchline.
Hearing Cash and Dylan attack the same lyric from different angles provides a striking insight regarding the pair's vocal styles. Cash barrels forth, commanding attention with his booming baritone, while Dylan sounds slippier, as if he’s suppressing a laugh. These two join together on the chorus but they don't harmonize, exactly: they’re fellow travelers on the same road, headed to the same destination but getting there at different speeds. This scenario repeats itself throughout the session, as the pair trade lines and graciously make space for their partner, yet neither willing to abandon their own stylistic quirks. Where they find common ground is on a selection of spirituals, standards, and Jimmie Rodgers tunes, plus a lively reading of “Matchbox” featuring Carl Perkins, who wrote the song back in 1957. None of this amounts to a cohesive session, so it's not a surprise that it was largely shelved in 1969. Yet its genial raggedness is the very reason to listen to it decades later; it feels bracingly human.
Dylan and Cash reunited a few months later when Bob stopped by The Johnny Cash Show.. Dylan was plugging Nashville Skyline, singing “I Threw It Away” and reprising his “Girl From The North Country” duet with Johnny, and it’s remarkable to hear how at ease he is here.. The same crew supported Dylan a couple of days after this May 1, 1969 taping, playing “Ring Of Fire” and “Folsom Prison Blues” with a similar gusto and bonhomie, a vibe that carried Dylan through to the clutch of 1970 recordings with bluegrass banjoist Earl Scruggs that close off this set.
Comparing the Scruggs cuts and the funky, swampy Cash covers with the austere John Wesley Harding outtakes that begin Travelin’ Thru is illuminating. When Dylan began his Nashville years, he was cautious, a sentiment befitting an artist who purposely withdrew from the spotlight, but the singer on the 1970 sessions is playful and alive, clearly enjoying the company of other musicians. Dylan may not have returned to Nashville to record—as the title suggests, he was just passing through the town—but he kept that communal spirit close at hand in the music that he’s made over the years.

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Following the recent turn toward acoustic instruments in his soundtrack work, the UK electronic polymath investigates neoclassical modes on an album inspired by climate change.

Playground in a Lake

Twenty years is a long time to do anything, no matter how well you do it. Even for an artist as restless as English electronic polymath Chris Clark, 20 years of poking and prodding at his hybridized sound might lose its zest. Connecting the dots of Clark’s sizable discography, almost entirely released by Warp Records, is like clocking an earthquake tremor. Where the stylistic variances between early records Clarence Park and Empty the Bones of You are slight, the seven albums from 2006 masterwork Body Riddle to 2017’s Death Peak are all over the map. Noodling modular sequences, heavily processed rap samples, deconstructed live drums, bucolic acoustic guitars, haunted piano themes, loungey jazz vocals, blippy chiptune synths—Clark seemingly never had an idea that wasn’t worth trying at least once. In recent years, however, the pings on his seismograph have been landing much closer together.
There’s at least one reason for the increasing cohesion in Clark’s output. In 2015, the producer landed his first soundtrack gig scoring the grim crime-thriller series The Last Panthers. He was, perhaps unsurprisingly, very good at it. Besides his track record conjuring complex emotional heft from bleak atmospheres, Clark has always told elaborate, if inscrutable, stories across his albums. The Last Panthers OST was no different, and stood on its own as a winding musical narrative evoking thick fog, scorched earth, and brief clearings in the murk. Clark continued his film work with the 2018 drama series Kiri and the 2019 horror film Daniel Isn’t There, whose soundtracks hewed closer to their sources’ narratives. They were also increasingly reliant on classical instrumentation, a fascination of Clark’s that soon colored more of his personal music.
“Harpsichords are the original rave hoovers,” he said about 2018’s E.C.S.T. T.R.A.X., a frenetic two-song dance record featuring harpsichord and piano, respectively. Apparently, traditional film-score arrangements were reinvigorating this seasoned producer’s creativity. But where “Piano E.C.S.T” found new possibilities in familiar sounds, the classical experiments on 2019’s Kiri Variations tapped out somewhere around wobbly dissonance. Playground in a Lake—Clark’s first non-soundtrack album since 2017, which he calls “a story about real climate change, but told in mythological terms”—takes the next logical step in his relationship with classical music: reverence. Opening track “Lovelock” is essentially a cello solo by frequent collaborator Oliver Coates; then comes “Lambent Rag,” a spritely piano suite given wings by subtle, uplifting synths.
Clark’s repositioning as a neoclassical composer is not entirely unexpected. Piano has appeared on Clark albums from the beginning, albeit in short flourishes. And the IDM musician’s unconventional musicality and innovative sound design share affinities with composers like Nils Frahm and Max Richter. Playground in a Lake sounds most natural to Clark when it’s a mutual exchange of old and new ideas. The synth-driven “More Islands” uses wavering, detuned tones that date back to Clarence Park, now arranged like the doomed symphony on a sinking ship. When actual strings appear in the coda, they might as well be lush pads and rolling basslines. On “Entropy Polychord,” what sounds like a generative music system made from orchestral tape loops becomes dense, synthetic, and controlled—clear skies consumed by grim thunder clouds. Clark has always excelled at making his electronics feel tactile and gritty, and it’s equally satisfying to hear his live instruments sound ethereal and illusory.
Whether on cellos, clarinets, pianos, or keyboards, Clark’s fingerprints are largely recognizable throughout Playground in a Lake, allowing him to swap out instrumental palettes mid-piece for a striking tonal effect. The best tracks, like the apocalyptic “Earth Systems” and soft-spoken “Citrus,” merge these sounds to varying degrees. More importantly, they push their ideas toward the fringes. Less successful are the straight putts. There’s a toothless austerity to the way the strings in “Forever Chemicals” roll along unadorned and uninterrupted, which can also describe “Suspension Reservoir.” Its piano sounds automatic, indifferent, as if pulled from a generic film cue library. “Emissary” feels detached as well, albeit for different reasons. Clark sets the violin melody slightly askew from the piano notes, and it’s not so much disorienting as cold and unappealing. Not necessarily a bad approach, if only it had been used as punctuation in a more dynamic composition.
The whole of Playground in a Lake suffers from the flatness of its instrumentation and emotional range. Some of that seems intentional—such as the robotic vocals, self-playing pianos, and dusty strings—yet it’s no less at odds with an existentially themed body of music. “I’m like an animal trapped in a flood,” sings a choirboy near the end of “Emissary,” which on paper reads like the emotional low point for an album about the inheritors of global warming. In practice, he might as well be reciting lines fed to him by a hypnotist. The moment of palpable dread does eventually come—not in the dry follow-up “Comfort and Fear,” but its counterpart “Shut You Down.” Synths growl as much as they tremble, kick drums plummet like meteors, and the tumult underneath threatens to rip a chasm into the earth. On an album that struggles with effective articulation, this is where Clark bellows the loudest, and in an unmistakable voice.

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