On Peripheral Vision, Turnover move past their pop punk origins into sighing, wistful indie*.* The best songs still sound like Turnover’s application to Captured Tracks finishing school, but retain pop punk’s main lyrical drivers of social and sexual insecurity.

Peripheral Vision

Though it’s a warm and often gentle record, not much about Turnover's Peripheral Vision is subtle. Start with the cover, which is a pretty girl in a field, her image washed out, soaked in amber and obscured by a spiderwebbed glass. She’s real, but she’ll be forever out of reach, and this is exactly the kind of feeling Turnover evoke over and over again here, with just enough reverb and treated guitar to create distance and depth around every pensive daydream. If you’re into the idea of planning a mix to commemorate the girl that will get away, there's about seven songs here that can get you started.
Quite the coincidence that Peripheral Vision shares a very similar name as Title Fight’s risky, triumphant reinvention Hyperview, as well as its producer. In each instance, a traditionalist punk band goes headfirst into more aqueous forms of indie rock, but retain qualities which put them at an advantage over the countless wan, limp bands who decided to sound like the Smiths from the beginning.
In Turnover's case, their pop punk past is nipping at their heels: Their self-titled debut EP justly earned the tag, and even after 2013’s Magnolia smoothed out some of their more Warped Tour affectations, they were doing shows with Dashboard Confessional 2.0, This Wild Life, and the perpetually short-pantsed, hair-gelled schlubs in New Found Glory as recently as last month. But you can tell that they come to their new sound from a realm that prizes vocal, lyrical and sonic clarity—Austin Getz's vocals are unusually upfront and legible for this style of music, and Will Yip’s production is crystalline and sleek. "Radio-friendly" is mostly theoretical in 2015, but Yip tends to work with bands who've managed to find young, dedicated, merch-buying audiences who still believe in the idea of big-tent alternative rock as a refuge.
And so you hear a lot of atypically crowd-pleasing, extroverted maneuvers here—the gorgeous opening reverie of "Cutting My Fingers Off" is blown open by a bridge of pulse-quickening drum rolls similar to Brand New’s "Sic Transit Gloria…" or any given Explosions in the Sky song. The chorus of "Take My Head" is florid, AP English self-pity delivered as a pop punk shout-along, "Humming" is sophisticated bedsit pop that expresses the same desires as "Dixieland Delight" or "Chattahoochee", minus the geographical signifiers.
But just as often, the gap between where Turnover is and where they want to be is painfully obvious. Throughout, Getz's lyrics are either effective or seriously awkward and there’s very little in between. He's earnest enough when he's fussing over his transition into adulthood ("New Scream", "Hello Euphoria"), but just as often, he's reading off Robert Smith flashcards, his imagery full of dissolution, disintegration, dizziness, disappearance and descent—you get pretty much all of the above during "Dizzy on the Comedown", which reveals the wisdom of bands like Wild Nothing who purposefully go blank on lyrics.
Despite its stylistic reverence, Peripheral Vision can actually be novel when Turnover most resemble their previous incarnation. On "Diazepam", Getz emasculates himself as a preemptive strike against the inevitable—"Your father doesn’t like me ‘cause I’m not into sports/ And your mother won’t approve because I’m not of the cross/ I took an upper before your sister’s wedding just to help me pretend," creating a heretofore-unfathomable nexus between Blink-182 and Galaxie 500. And then there’s "I Would Hate You If I Could". Think of your favorite Real Estate song. One of the really chill ones like "Green Aisles" or "Pool Swimmers". And then, instead of a chorus reminiscing about the simple, bittersweet pleasures of suburban life or the challenges of fatherhood, how about the bitter memories of rough sex with your ex, pinning her against the wall and trying not to wake her roommates. They still sound like Turnover’s application to Captured Tracks finishing school, but retain pop punk’s main lyrical drivers of social and sexual insecurity.
It's hard to figure out an appropriate emotional reaction to the raw, honest, and unsympathetic character in "I Would Hate You If I Could". Perhaps the message is that even as your tastes in music mature, getting fucked over in a relationship hurts as much as it does when you’re 16. That’s not supposed to be the enduring message of Peripheral Vision, at least not according to Getz. He explained the album’s overarching theme as, "I always remember things better than they were and miss people more than I should." Those are the feelings this music is meant to convey, but as a document of a young band in a sharp and tricky growth spurt, Peripheral Vision still can’t hide how messy and complicated real life can get.


Citing albums by Kraftwerk, Joy Division, and Roxy Music as influences, the Gutter Twins/ex-Screaming Trees vocalist's first solo album since 2004 incorporates drum machines and oozing synths into the mix.

Blues Funeral

If you value melody and visceral thrills as a listener, it must be weird to see critics engage with the latest Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen records as if they're park rangers describing protected national treasures-- they tend to speak solely in terms of topography, remarking upon jagged outcroppings and bottomless lodes of capital-t Truth hidden in those crevasses created by years of erosion from hard living and hard liquor. Me, I don't necessarily give growling old white men the presumption of wisdom. Point being that even though Mark Lanegan will be all but grandfathered into that Hall of Fame in 20 years and will look swarthy in men's magazines proclaiming Blues Funeral to be the testosterone-boosting antidote to wimpy indie rock and fashionista hip-hop, he has every bit the obligation to avoid cliché and actually come up with good songs as everybody else. Can an album named Blues Funeral, of all things, actually make good on that?
Unfortunately, it's closer to something like Machete, where the majority of the pleasure was derived from seeing grizzled and badass charcter actor Danny Trejo doing grizzled and badass things in a lead role, plot or character development be damned. But then again, that voice. It really is something to behold-- while the aforementioned greats have vocals that are nearly utilitarian in function, worn down to an essentialist nub, Lanegan's is as lustrous, supple, and thoroughly American as a well-oiled baseball mitt. When given the proper material-- which in the past has often come from wisely chosen collaborators such as Greg Dulli, Isobel Campbell, Josh Homme, and PJ Harvey-- the results are almost invariably powerful on a sheer physical level. Do lyrics like, "With piranha teeth/ I've been dreamin' of you," sound any less ridiculous than they look on paper? Not really, but it's the impossibly thick riffs and Jack Irons' feral drumming that drives "The Gravedigger's Song" toward Queens of the Stone Age's hot zone between the monster-truck muscle and race-car seduction.
Lanegan doesn't stay in there long. Based on title alone, it's tough to associate "Bleeding Muddy Water" with any word besides "turgid," but the six minutes of the song itself, much of which finds Lanegan leaning hard on a line like "loooooord, now the rain done come" without creating context for its payoff, is more than content to follow suit, becoming one of Blues Funeral's many dirges that simply drag. But even the more uptempo material is hamstrung by strangely dated production that makes it come off like one of those "genre bending" roots rock albums from 1999 that tried to incorporate electronica and hip-hop touches. As a result, Blues Funeral sounds adrift both sonically and lyrically, chippy drum machines and oozing synths backing Lanegan's verbal merry-go-round of rising suns, avenging gods, and pitiless oceans. Something like the crawling blooze of "St. Louis Elegy" should be hard as nails, and its chorus of, "If tears were liquor/ I'd have drunk myself sick," tries to get there. But it's an exemplary Lanegan lyric in how repetition reveals its inherent clumsiness rather than depth. And while mentions of whisky are never too far away from descriptions of Lanegan's output, amidst the pumped-up kick drums and soloing guitars that never stop once during "Riot in My House", you feel like some retired NFL coach is about to give you a lecture on the significance of widemouth cans and frost brew liners.
Though a mixed bag, Blues Funeral does have its moments: "Ode to Sad Disco" is ostensibly the furthest stretch for Lanegan, a chintzy New Romantic backing that immediately recalls Erasure's "Chains of Love" and flows easily where the similarly lengthy epics on Blues Funeral buckle under their own assumed weight. As a song, it's nothing amazing, but more important is the acknowledgement that it "works." Weirdly, the less overt the stunt casting, the more awkward it sounds: "Harborview Hospital" and "Deep Black Vanishing Train" have seemingly the most personal and poetic lyrics on Blues Funeral, but their dime-thin orchestral arrangements hew closer to Collective Soul's "Run" than resonance. And while "Quiver Syndrome" isn't too far away from the Brit Invasion bands that influenced Screaming Trees, it's the one time Lanegan is simply overwhelmed by the jet-setter production: Competing with disembodied female "ooh-oohs" and laser-light sound effects, Lanegan huffs, "The moon don't smile on Saturday's child/ Lyin' still in Elysian fields/ I don't know what the doctor he did/ Now I'm all day long with my body in bed," like a winded Lizard King, proof that surrealistic nonsense can become its own kind of cliché.
Lanegan recently gave an interview to the Quietus where he namedropped albums by the Bee Gees, Kraftwerk, Joy Division, and the Gun Club as lifelong influences-- while it humanizes Lanegan in a way his obtuse and daunting lyrics rarely attempt to, it also makes you wish he went even further on Blues Funeral, so it could risk spectacular failure rather than mild disappointment. Indeed, Blues Funeral isn't ever bad per se, or even unlistenable. But back on Screaming Trees' 1996 album Dust, Lanegan sang, "all along, I've been a traveler," and while he's done an often-admirable job of embodying that mission statement, the drifter isn't so compelling when they sound as directionless as he does here*.*


The Venezuelan singer-songwriter’s 11th album tackles grief and melancholia with the kind of endearing eccentricity only he can.

Flying Wig

Devendra Banhart has never shied away from the esoteric. On “Für Hildegard von Bingen,” from 2013’s Mala, he recast the eponymous 12th-century Christian mystic as a “VJ on rotation” over a playful disco-rock groove. “María Lionza,” from 2009’s What Will We Be, is a dreamlike guitar and saxophone instrumental that references the Venezuelan syncretic deity by name. For Banhart’s 11th album Flying Wig, the once-king of freak folk softens his purview into something resembling a meditative peace chant. Produced by Welsh art-rock songwriter Cate Le Bon, the 10-track collection tackles heartbreak, forgiveness, and melancholia. Taking inspiration from “This Dewdrop World,” a poem by Japanese lay Buddhist priest and “Great Four” haiku master Kobayashi Issa, Banhart approaches somber themes with whimsy. Songs about losing phone chargers, or tales written from the perspective of nuns on the run, take on unexpectedly profound meanings.
While Flying Wig does indeed ascend, it never quite lands on solid ground—which feels like the whole point. Here, the one-time king of freak folk continues his avoidance of the campfire setting and acoustic instrumentation of his early work in favor of ethereal, synth-driven cuts and sleepy slacker rock. The focus on synthesizers results in a warm and pervasive hum, a floaty fantasia that threatens—in gentle, low whispers—to nod off at any moment.
Banhart’s first solo record in four years is funny and endearingly weird, even as it sings of life’s heaviness. The influence of Le Bon, who also played synth, guitar, percussion, bass, and piano on the album, is palpable in the slow-thudding drum machines on “Fireflies” (which plays out like a Beach House B-side) and quietly anthemic single “Twin,” both bolstered by a droning synth. Banhart has praised Le Bon for pushing him to new heights, and you can hear what he means in the album’s subtle moments of transcendence. “Charger” wraps a tender reflection of love lost in a silly, overarching metaphor (“It looks like I’ve lost my charger”) that gives way to a heavenly choir. On the title track, he assumes the perspective of a wig hanging off a mic stand, describing himself as “alone/Dancing naked/On an eye/Without a head.”
Banhart’s contemplative yet easygoing approach strikes a kind of surrealist gold. This levity isn’t new territory for him, but it allows Flying Wig’s strange images and Morphean soundscapes to vibrate on a higher plane. He also tapped into the divine feminine, donning a sky-blue Issey Miyake gown and his grandmother’s pearls throughout the recording process. The dress has been present at recent live shows, most notably last year’s Caracas’ Cusica Festival, his first-ever show in Venezuela. In press materials, Banhart explained that writing and singing in the dress parallels experiences from his childhood, when he would don his mother’s gowns: “It wasn’t about sexuality, just connecting with my feminine side and feeling that I had permission…It felt like a power. And that’s a very safe and comfortable place for me.” In its enveloping comfort, Flying Wig mirrors that feeling of safety.
Banhart has been drawing from queer aesthetics for years, a known follower of androgynous Haight-Ashbury ’60s collective the Cockettes who has set songs in the Castro district of San Francisco and written others as a femme. As he continues toying with gender, genre, open-hearted expression, and some of his most oblique songwriting yet, perhaps unintentionally, his work expounds on a crucial tenet of queerness: liberation in lightness and in unabashed optimism.


Hey, did you hear? Hip-hop is a world phenomenon now! Yes, spend some time poking around your favorite music magazine ...

Original Pirate Material

Hey, did you hear? Hip-hop is a world phenomenon now! Yes, spend some time poking around your favorite music magazine's website and I'm sure you'll find a heavy handful of hip-hop-gone-global thinkpieces. Read profiles of angstful teenagers rapping about life in Israeli-occupied Palestine, Cuban kids protesting the oppressive state police in rhyme, even Greenland b-boys composing bouncy anthems about caribou and snow.
So it should come as no surprise that the British, notorious for chewing on our music before spitting it back over the Atlantic in a shiny, new form, have also turned their sun-starved faces to the arena of hip-hop. There's just one small problem: simply put, British accents just don't sound particularly right in the context of syncopated rap-speech. To put my tweed linguistics jacket on, the American tendency to cheat on pronunciation fits in perfectly with the wordplay of hip-hop, while the stubborn British habit of perfectly enunciating every syllable makes things sound rather, well, formal. Or to put my Degrassi Jr. High pop culture jacket on, British rap can't help sounding like the dope flow of the immortal Murray Head on "One Night in Bangkok."
Which is why the first time you put on Original Pirate Material, you might find it awfully hysterical-- especially if the name had you assuming it was going to be another Strokesian garage act. The giggles will eventually give way to a bit of discomfort at the slightly awkward delivery-- the words here are jammed into measures like an overstuffed couch. You'll wince at a chorus like, "Geezers need excitement/ If their lives don't provide it, then they incite violence/ Common sense, simple common sense," bursting at the seams of its tempo. Then, about 48 hours later, you'll realize it still hasn't left your head.
One-man MC/DJ package Mike Skinner has an obvious talent for forging damn sharp hip-pop hooks that supercede his inherent verbal handicap. Unashamedly revealing a taste for 80s soft rock, the smooth-sung chorus and reverbed Rhodes of "Has It Come to This" is highly reminiscent of fantastically hair-styled pop giants Hall & Oates-- and believe it or not, I don't mean that as a putdown. "It's Too Late," meanwhile, features a sugared melancholy duet with a dreamy British lass between the verses, and tracks fortified with more canned orchestra than a late-period Flaming Lips album.
All of which would leave things a bit flaky, if it wasn't for Skinner's flair for nervous, metallic beats (The Streets' percussion is inventive enough for the album to be erroneously labeled as 'electronica' in the critic's bible All Music Guide). Whether changing speeds or dropping out unexpectedly beneath the ominous strings of "Same Old Thing," trampolining playfully in "Don't Mug Yourself," or rolling along completely oblivious to the piano loop rhythm on "Weak Become Heroes," they're catchy and inventive enough to make one forget the accent for a bit. It's not all successful (the slow-reggae bounce of "Let's Push Things Forward" is, ironically, pretty backward and tired), but it usually is-- and even when it's not, it's at least trying to be.
Which leaves us with the lyrics, tales of English street life provided entirely by the very proper-sounding Skinner. Now, if the phrase "English street life" makes you bristle, hold on a sec-- anyone who's ever read an Irvine Welsh novel (half-credit if you've seen Trainspotting) should know that life for the British working class is hardly Buckingham Palace. So while the lingo takes some getting used to ('geezas' instead of 'niggaz,' 'birds' not 'bitches,' etc.), it'd be incorrect to write off The Streets as either poseur or gimmick, and in a genre where unique lyrical perspective is especially important, the UK vibe is an intriguing element.
Plus, let's face it, Skinner's race and nationality will probably earn The Streets a spot on the "safe hip-hop for indie rockers list" this year, possessing, as it does, that certain unplaceable, familiar aura that appeals to mild hip-hop-ophobes such as, well, myself. As such, I'm not real sure where it would fall along the critical spectrum according to a genre expert (paging Sam Chennault, Sam Chennault to the OR, please), but Original Pirate Material seems to be remarkably solid. And given the fact that it does, eventually, manage to overcome the horrific-sounding concept of British hip-hop, it seems pretty reasonable to give it a recommendation. Bloody good show, I say.


A nice little addition to last year’s breakout Hood Hottest Princess, the St. Louis native’s EP is packed again with filthy, horny, sex-fueled shenanigans.

In Sexyy We Trust

If you were hoping that the filthy, horny, sex-fueled shenanigans of Sexyy Red would forever be stuck in the summer of 2023, I have bad news for you. She’s got another one with In Sexyy We Trust. Sure, last year’s Hood Hottest Princess (damn-near all bangers) can’t be replicated, as part of the appeal was getting caught off guard and going from Oh, that song where she goes “My bootyhole is brown” is funny to Hold up, did she just drop one of the great rap mixtapes of the year? basically overnight. It was such a polarizing sensation that I wouldn’t have been surprised if her follow-up scaled up too much, in a quest to prove that Hood Hottest Princess wasn’t a flash in the pan. But thankfully, Sexyy does not give a fuck. You’re gonna’ get homages to Gucci Mane and Chief Keef, graphic sex jokes and puns, and vulgar-ass quotables required to be shouted anytime you have a drop of alcohol in your system.
About half of the tracks on In Sexyy We Trust should be summer anthems. “She’s Back” is a full-throttle DJ set cheat code; if it was up to me I would ban Rihanna’s “Birthday Cake” from being the soundtrack of the cake-cutting and replace it with Sexyy’s “It’s My Birthday.” The St. Louis native has a flair for these fun and rowdy songs that feel nostalgic for Southern and Midwest rap of the past without being pure pastiche. A good example of that is the lead single “Get It Sexyy,” where she howls a few Keef-inspired ad-libs and describes her physical attributes with more detail than an NFL draft scout, all in a hummable singsongy flow. Another is “Sexyy Love Money,” in which her verse starts off hot with an explosive, Waka Flocka-coded opening line (“Got my money up, bitch, I can’t act right”) and doesn’t let up. Her energy is cool yet so contagious that even a buzzkill guest appearance by Chicago drill newcomer VonOff1700 and a couple of punchline clunkers by her (“Higher than a motherfucker, eyes lookin’ like ching-chi”) don’t ruin the exquisite paycheck-hitting-your-bank-account-on-a-holiday-weekend vibe.
Fame (going on tour with Drake, photo-ops with Lana Del Rey) hasn’t stopped Sexyy from saying whatever she wants. “Let’s go half on a baby, shoot the club up,” she raps casually on “Boss Me up,” as if she’s talking about splitting the bill at Applebee’s. On the cranked-up “Ova Bad” she blurts out the visual, “Drop and hit some splits, bitch, I wanna see that cameltoe.” Sometimes, though, the shock value can be a little try-hard. For one, the sexual moans on the chorus of “Outside,” the Brazilian funk-infused dud, are just annoying. Then, her duet with Lil Baby “Lick Me” wants to be freaky so bad, but they have such little chemistry that it’s more uncomfortable than sexy.
But Sexyy Red’s worst chemistry is actually with Drake. Last year on Drake’s For All the Dogs, she stole the show with her New Orleans bounce-esque flow on “Rich Baby Daddy,” though he brought nothing to the table. Now on “U My Everything” he’s doing too much. It’s a silly, kind of sweet love song, her cracking melodies making it feel so earnest until Drake appears and instantly steamrolls the lovey-dovey mood by switching the soulful bounce to Metro Boomin’s A.I.-sampling (yawn) Drake-diss “BBL Drizzy.” It’s a troll-job, a way of signaling to Metro that he is unbothered. I do not care. Please, enough of this mid-life crisis rap beef, now it’s taking away the attention from Sexyy Red on a Sexyy Red mixtape, the worst thing you could do.
Sexyy doesn’t need any of that fuss as long as she has her horndog bars and a thumping beat. Tay Keith’s instrumentals are nothing special, blending early 2010s ATL with modern Memphis bounce, but do a decent job of just giving her a blank, danceable canvas to run wild. And she does: From the stripped-down, trash-talking “Fake Jammin’” to the rattling “Awesome Jawsome,” where she comes up with countless different ways to get across that she’s getting head: “I’m on my period, it’s blood drippin’ down his face.” It would be kind of gross if it wasn’t funny, if she didn’t have so much personality, if I didn’t want to rap along. (OK, it still is kind of gross.) She’s no fad, she’s a rap star.


On their third album, the dubby band’s feel for a groove remains intact, but they often render vibrant sounds from all over the world as impeccably stylish mood music.

Mordechai

A little over a month ago, Khruangbin marked the impending release of Mordechai by relaunching their official playlist generator. On a website called AirKhruang, fans can specify a duration and choose from a wide range of activities, then receive a custom-generated mix via Spotify or Apple Music to enhance the vibe of whatever they find themselves doing. The song selections reflect the laid-back cosmopolitanism that has turned this largely instrumental Houston trio into theater-filling stars, with fans including both JAY-Z and your Phish-loving cousin. Generate a playlist for reading and you might be served French jazz fusion and Thai electro; choose “beach hang” instead and you might get Somalian disco and Sierra Leonean maringa. Khruangbin’s eclecticism clearly stems from real devotion to music from outside the Western pop-rock canon, and their willingness to direct listeners toward their influences shows an admirable lack of pretense about where it all comes from. But Mordechai rarely accomplishes anything these playlists don’t do better: rendering vibrant sounds from all over the world as impeccably stylish mood music.
Mordechai, Khruangbin’s third proper album, is the first to prominently feature vocals, with all three members contributing. The introduction of singing suggests a new interest in songcraft, a welcome development for a band whose past records can feel like evocative but unpopulated landscapes, heavy on languid atmosphere and light on compositional substance. And Mordechai’s most memorable tracks are the ones with the most singing, like the poolside disco of “Time (You and I),” and the highlife-inspired pop of “So We Won’t Forget.” The best is “Pelota,” whose sun-baked guitar licks and surrealistic Spanish lyrics don’t point so clearly to any particular genre reference, offering a lively possibility for what Khruangbin might sound like when they’re not trying to be anyone but themselves.
But Mordechai doesn’t quite commit to delivering fleshed-out songs, or to synthesizing Khruangbin’s influences into something new. It’s too busy to settle fully into your subconscious like the intercontinental ambience of Khruangbin’s 2018 breakout Con Todo El Mundo, but not substantial enough to satisfy more active listening. On “One to Remember,” guitarist Mark Speer plays meandering jazz leads above a dubby one-drop rhythm from Ochoa and drummer DJ Johnson, an intriguing combination that might rise above its Pat Metheny Meets Rockers Uptown pastiche if Speer didn’t sound so tentative about whether he’s taking a solo or hanging in the background. The vocals consist of a few chanted words, appearing as occasional reverb-drenched accents. It’s a clear nod to the way dub producers reduce melodic lines to ghostly echoes, but without its careful attention to negative space or its suggestion of depth beneath the surface.
Opener “First Class” channels the shimmering-asphalt aura of Roy Ayers’ immortal 1976 jazz-funk track “Everybody Loves the Sunshine,” a platonic ideal for the sort of music Khruangbin are making here: quietly swaggering, more groove than song, belonging to no particular genre but evoking several, conjuring a singular mood from a few simple elements arranged in just the right way. Khruangbin’s failure to catch the elusive magic of the original may be an issue of historical fetishism. Ayers wasn’t studiously recreating the feeling of a decades-old cratedigger gem. He was just playing what he wanted to play.
In a recent New York Times profile, Khruangbin’s label head compared the experience of hearing them for the first time to coming across a mindblowing rare record: “I couldn’t place it—was it a lost psych-funk classic from a far-off land?” You get the sense that Khruangbin like it this way. They are almost as much like DJs as they are a band, as driven to curate as they are to create. Like their previous albums, Mordechai is distant and murky in its production, heavy with nostalgia for a nonspecific time and locale. It sounds as if it’s already been plucked from a dollar bin, fawned over by an exclusive cult of collectors, uploaded to YouTube, and eventually reissued, before it was ever released in the first place.
It is difficult to imagine Khruangbin existing before the internet, at a time when digging for lost classics might have meant pawing through records in crates around the world. Their music is borne from the abundance of streaming, and also borne toward it, its tastefully unobtrusive good vibes purpose-built for playlist placements and Netflix syncs. But Khruangbin also belong to several older and woolier traditions. Their semifrequent guitar solos and emphasis on instrumental interplay make them something like a jam band, which may help explain their runaway success, granting them access to a uniquely loyal base of concertgoers. And their repurposing of Caribbean, African, and Asian sounds as lush easy listening has antecedents as varied as Thievery Corporation and Les Baxter—though, to be fair, they engage with their source material much more seriously and transparently than the exotica artists of the ’50s and ’60s.
A few decades later, those exotica records took on their own status as kitschy collector’s items, and perhaps Mordechai will fare similarly. Down the road, it might look less like a collection of music from across global history and more like a flawed but fascinating reflection of our relationship to that music at this particular moment in time. Nearly everything is available, and everyone is a connoisseur, a state of affairs that can be both enlivening and depressing. There’s nothing like the excitement of finding a great old record you’ve never heard before on YouTube or Spotify, and nothing like the promise of another on the horizon to keep you from spending much time with the one you just found. Mordechai is a symptom of this condition as well as a kind of antidote: it gives you everything at once, without asking for much at all in return. All you have to do is chill.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Correction: *A previous version of this review misstated the origin date of the playlist. The language has been adjusted to reflect that he playlist existed before the launch of the album. The review also stated that bassist Laura Lee Ochoa mostly handled lead vocals. It has been updated to say that the entire band sings on the album, which better reflects the nature of the vocals. *


The long-dormant rapper/producer Edan is coaxed out of hiding by Homeboy Sandman, one of rap’s most irreverent characters, for a short, playfully psychedelic album.

Humble Pi

Edan’s Beauty and the Beat was a glorious record. A full clip of kaleidoscopic samples, rumbling electronics, and streetwise bars rooted in the classic lyrical tradition, it encapsulated the inventiveness of independent rap in the early 2000s, before labels like Definitive Jux evaporated into dust. I threw Beauty and the Beat on recently and can happily report that the album is aging beautifully, 13 years after its release. (To its great credit, the label behind the record, the small UK outfit Lewis Recordings, still has its doors open). But as underground hip-hop crumbed beneath his feet, Edan disappeared into the soil. The short 2009 mixtape Echo Party is his only release since his sophomore record dropped. So like Master Yoda, forced into exile on Dagobah to wait for another opportunity to strike, the rapper/producer’s been biding his time. Waiting. Training.
Does that make Homeboy Sandman Luke Skywalker? Not quite. Angel Del Villar II is no apprentice, with a prolific, decade-long recording career that’s earned him a reputation as one of rap’s most irreverent characters—an emcee not minded to shed his lunatic tendencies for anyone (not that he could if he tried). Sandman’s strong three-part Lice series alongside Aesop Rock has already proved how buoyant he can be when teaming up with a fellow alt-rap king. On paper, joining forces with Edan makes perfect sense, and the elusive star is tempted out of hiding for Humble Pi, a short record that shows flashes of both artists’ indomitable abilities.
Rap has shuffled through many cloaks in his period away, but little has changed in Edan’s galaxy. He produces all seven cuts on Humble Pi, all of which boast his trademark proclivity for grubby loops and off-kilter grooves. The beats are layered and complex, and they never stop evolving. On “Grim Seasons,” Edan plays with rugged spaghetti-western and kung-fu movie flavors, throwing in some electric guitar squiggles halfway through to keep his orchestration mutating. The twisted, psychedelic “Rock & Roll Indian Dance” works in an interpretation of Roy Ayers Ubiquity’s “Everybody Loves the Sunshine,” one of the most sampled records ever. But Edan’s song is a unique voyage, riding a pinging, almost abrasive metallic pulse before releasing that building tension with Ayers’ warm words on the hook. It’s a fine example of how Edan can alchemize a rap arrangement in ways that would never flash into another musician’s brain.
Edan and Sandman’s easygoing chemistry is palpable: On “Rock & Roll Indian Dance” they pass the mic like a hot potato, their voices interlocking with zero friction. Edan’s lyrical contributions are sparse, though, with Sandman picking up the slack. Some of his most grabbing moments come on the brawny boom-bap of “#NeverUseTheInternetAgain,” an amusing smackdown of social media, blogs, and other online portals. It sounds like Sandman likely recorded his verse before the controversies that hit Facebook earlier this year, and he mostly sticks to the kind of arguments college freshmen unleash at parties when asked for their usernames—social media kills productivity, dating websites are impersonal, and so on. Sandman is deeply pissed off here. His berzerk tirade sounds half righteous, half hilarious.
Ultimately, the album is held back by its lack of ambition. Kanye West’s spotty Wyoming odyssey wasn’t the strongest argument for the validity of the seven-track rap album, but it’s clear that diamond-cut records, like Pusha-T’s Daytona, can work if the focus is laser sharp and no motions are wasted. But not all of Humble Pi is as strong as its best moments. “The Gut,” with its swarming 8-bit electronics, lacks the breeziness of Edan’s best cuts, while there’s a straight misstep on “Unwavering Mind,” with Sandman’s double-time rapping refusing to fuse with the rasping beat, which resembles a cymbal falling to the floor on repeat. With the slight running time, these flaws are magnified. Not to worry, though. Humble Pi might be thin, but there’s enough here to spark hope that this is the origin point of Sandman and Edan’s cracked journey, and not the final destination.


With his penchant for poetic over-sharing, Drake is an apt avatar for the era of reality television and 24-hour self-documentation. Backed by lush and moody beats, Take Care finds him putting his talents to use on his strongest set of songs so far.

Take Care

In 1976, Marvin Gaye holed up in his Hollywood studio and began recording Here, My Dear, a brutally candid album-length dissection of his divorce from wife Anna Gordy. The soul great found beauty within the wreckage, and the album doubled as an emotional exorcism that pushed out pain, anger, regret, spite, vengeance. "Memories haunt you all the time/ I will never leave your mind," he threatens on a song called "When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You". Reviewing the album upon its release in 1978, critic Robert Christgau wrote, "Because Gaye's self-involvement is so open and unmediated... it retains unusual documentary charm."
The same could be said of Drake, whose unrepentant navel-gazing and obsession with lost love reach new levels on his second proper LP, Take Care. Running with Gaye's ghost, Drake offers a profane update of his forebear's twisted heart: "Fuck that nigga that you love so bad/ I know you still think about the times we had," he sings on the insidious hook of "Marvins Room", a song recorded in the same studio where Gaye originally exposed his own unedited thoughts more than three decades ago.
In this age of reality television, 24-hour celebrity news, and second-to-second documentation-- where behind-the-scenes sagas mix with what's on screen and on record, creating an ever-morphing, ever-more-self-aware new normal-- Drake is an apt avatar. Naturally, he knows this, too. "They take the greats from the past and compare us/ I wonder if they'd ever survive in this era," he contemplates on the album, "In a time where it's recreation/ To pull all your skeletons out the closet like Halloween decorations." We can thank Kanye West for legitimately kicking off this open-book hip-hop era, and it's increasingly apparent that Drake is the most engaging new rap star since Ye. While fame causes some to withdraw and cling to what little privacy they have left, this 25-year-old Canadian's penchant for poetic oversharing has only been emboldened by his success. When he's not making the most epic drunk-dial song in pop history with "Marvins Room", he's openly pleading with former flame Rihanna on the record's title track, or duetting with Twitter wife Nicki Minaj on "Make Me Proud" only to call out such publicity-baiting "relationships" two tracks later, where he raps, "It look like we in love, but only on camera." With its startlingly frank talk and endless heartbreak, Take Care often reads like a string of especially vulnerable-- and sometimes embarrassing-- Missed Connections.
This time around, Drake has a better grasp on his own notoriety and the mind-fucks that come with it. While he expressed wonderfully wounded trepidations about his sudden rise on Thank Me Later, he's learning to embrace it more here. "They say more money more problems, my nigga, don't believe it," he raps on closer "The Ride". "I mean, sure, there's some bills and taxes I'm still evading/ But I blew six million on myself, and I feel amazing." And on "HYFR (Hell Ya Fucking Right)", he all but gives away his hand, turning his sadness into strategy: "What have I learned since getting richer?/ I learned working with the negatives could make for better pictures." And while he claims "I think I like who I'm becoming" on "Crew Love"-- about as ringing an endorsement you'll get from a guy so bent on exposing his own disappointments-- he's still more interested in contradiction than triumph. Even when staring at a pair of unnatural breasts, he highlights the incision rather than the size: "Brand new girl and she still growing/ Brand new titties, stitches still showing/ Yeah, and she just praying that it heals good/ I'm 'bout to fuck and I'm just praying that it feels good."
Just as his thematic concerns have become richer, so has the music backing them up. Thank Me Later banked on a sonic tableau that was slow and sensual and dark-- equal parts Aaliyah and the xx-- and Take Care takes that aesthetic to an even more rewarding place, spearheaded by Drake's go-to producer Noah "40" Shebib, who gets a writing and production credit on almost every song. While the bombastic style of producer Lex Luger's work with Rick Ross and Waka Flocka Flame threatened to turn the tide on Drake and 40's moody atmospherics last summer, the pair stick to their gut here and delve further into smooth piano and muffled drums, fully committed to the idea of doing more with less. This is sensuous music that breathes heavy somewhere between UGK's deep funk, quiet-storm 90s R&B, and James Blake-inspired minimalism. (Drake reportedly had a vinyl copy of Blake's debut LP on display in the studio while recording Take Care.) Its subtlety is a direct rebuke to the rash of in-the-red Eurotrance waveforms clogging up radio dials. Even the more upbeat tracks take pains not to rely on a simple thump. "Take Care" features Rihanna and a four-four beat, but the singer shows off her little-heard whispering delivery and the instrumental comes courtesy of the xx's Jamie xx, who nimbly tailors his remix of Gil Scott-Heron's "I'll Take Care of You" for the occasion.
Drake's worked on his own technical abilities, too, and both his rapping and singing are better than ever here. Notably, he only brandishes the hashtag flow he quickly became famous (or infamous) for over the last few years, turning it into a knowing knock on copycats: "Man, all of your flows bore me/ Paint drying." And he breathlessly runs through the opening verse on the vicious "HYFR" at a speed that would likely garner respect from Busta Rhymes. And then there's "Doing It Wrong", a brilliant, barely there slow jam that borrows some lyrics from an unlikely source (Don "American Pie" McLean's twangy 1977 track "The Wrong Thing to Do") and features an unlikely guest in Stevie Wonder. Fitting the album's classy, unshowy demeanor, Wonder is tapped not to sing but play harmonica-- and uncharacteristically downcast harmonica at that-- for the track's crushing denouement. The song has Drake chronicling the conflicting emotions of a difficult breakup and giving us his finest singing to date. His words are simple, universal, true: "We live in a generation of not being in love, and not being together/ But we sure make it feel like we're together/ 'Cause we're scared to see each other with somebody else." Elsewhere, André 3000 references Adele's unimpeachable "Someone Like You" in one of the album's many well-placed guest verses; "Doing It Wrong" deserves to follow that song as pop's next Great Heartbroken Ballad.
The cover of Take Care shows its star sitting at a table, dejected and surrounded by gold, like a hip-hop Midas. Considering some of the money-doesn't-buy-you-happiness sentiments inside, the picture is apropos enough. But it's much too obvious to truly represent what Drake and his crew have done here. A better image would be the grainy, amateur photo he released with "Marvins Room" when he originally leaked it in June, which shows the rapper walking away from a group of private jets, his face obscured by a puff of smoke making its way up to an overcast sky. It lets his reality do the heavy lifting while Drake stands by, taking it all in.

Cash Money / Young Money Entertainment / Universal Republic


Eric Burton’s latest album is a logical extension of his to 2015 album Communion,  an experimental world of dissolving certainty where all light is gradually leached out of the landscape.

Les Fleurs Du Mal

In the first few minutes of Rabit’s Les Fleurs Du Mal, the gloomy Texan producer (aka Eric Burton) does something unexpected: He cracks a joke. At least, that’s one interpretation of a scrap of found sound that flutters briefly above the ambient din. “Possessed,” the album’s first song, begins in medias res: A low rumble, inaudible voices, bursts of what might be police scanner. “Chop it up,” commands a low voice, threatening and authoritative. From the snatches of conversation we overhear—“Break that off, that’s a whole cookie”; “You got the money?”—it seems likely we have dropped into the middle of a drug deal. A sampled cello scrapes circles around the outline of a melody; the atmosphere could not be more ominous if this were a scene from Antoine Fuqua’s Training Day. A woman murmurs in French; another woman bellows about the devil. Out of this bewildering murk, a man’s voice pipes up in a reedy Southern drawl: “This is the beginning part.” Amid all that humid terror, it’s practically a knee-slapper: a signpost that serves to highlight the dimensionless and disorienting sound-world Burton has conjured.
Burton titled his album after Charles Baudelaire’s volume of nihilistic poetry, and it’s not hard to understand why; his suffocating air of self-loathing is an obvious inspiration for the toxic depths of Rabit’s airless, album-length tone poem. The record’s 12 tracks swirl together into an unsteady whole, and the usual structural elements—melody, rhythm, lyrics—are largely absent. In their place, a freeform sense of drift, muggy and narcotic, prevails. Much of the album has an explicitly filmic cast: “Roach” throbs with explosions, plangent strings, and chattering electronics like a dystopian supercut of Hollywood soundtracks; “The Whole Bag” groans under a similar kind of THX-driven ear pressure, as clanking metal tiptoes out to the border between representational and abstract sound. In “Humanitys Daughter,” there’s a glowering, pitched-down reference to Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” while electronic tones cascade like freezing rain; if you could record your nightmares, they might well sound a lot like this.
In many ways, Les Fleurs Du Mal feels like a logical extension of Rabit’s last album, 2015’s Communion, in which the sounds of gunshots and breaking glass were stitched into an eerie approximation of club music. To follow Rabit’s artistic development is to enter into a world of dissolving certainty, where all light is gradually leached out of the landscape. Ever since Burton’s first records, which imitated the sounds of the UK’s “weightless” strain of instrumental grime, he has gradually stripped his music of all references to conventional dance music, and with Les Fleurs Du Mal, that process becomes terrifyingly complete. The press release suggests the new album shares kinship with Elysia Crampton’s Demon City and Chino Amobi’s Paradiso—deeply original albums about identity and alienation that created their own haunting sound worlds—and the comparison holds up. (Burton contributed to both those albums, and Amobi reappears here, along with Coil’s Drew McDowall and an artist known simply as Cecilia.) But Burton’s album, in its willingness to jettison so many musical hallmarks in pursuit of an experience of pure formlessness, might be the most radical of the three.
It reaches a terrifying nadir a little before the halfway mark with “Dogsblood Redemption.” The track opens with the wails of a baby over horror-movie rumble; brief snippets of heavy metal and bits of movie or television dialogue slice through the darkness. There are wails and moans of pain. And then, louder than anything else, the clearest statement on the entire record comes bellowing through the speakers, mixed conspicuously louder than everything else: “You’re all a bunch of fuckin’ slaves!” The track ends with a passage of German-language dialogue and what sounds like coitus, and abruptly cuts off in mid-sentence—a jarring short-circuit even in an album full of discontinuity.
Despite the omnipresent grimness, though, Les Fleurs Du Mal can also be strangely beautiful. “Bleached World,” a skeletal and meandering fugue that utilizes just one synthesizer sound, summons the same stark grace as Arca’s music does. “Ontological Graffiti” sinks into slowly bowed drones as evocative as the buzz of airplanes high overhead, and the closing passage of “Prayer II (Gemme)” and “Elevation” make for a pillowy denouement: Strings sweep backward and a voice speaking in French is slowed and shrouded in whispers, sounding druggy and dreamlike. It is an elegant conclusion to an album that feels at once as oppressive as a lead blanket and as diffuse as a wisp of incense. However you might choose to approach the album—as ambient music, radio play, fetid sustenance for misanthropic shut-ins—it is a singular piece of work, and a bold step forward for Rabit’s inky aesthetic.


Solange’s new record is stunning, a thematically unified and musically adventurous statement on the pain and joy of black womanhood.

A Seat at the Table

Solange Knowles turned 30 in June, and it seems clear that her Saturn Returns manifested in an artistic surge. A Seat at the Table, her third full-length album, is the work of a woman who’s truly grown into herself, and discovered within a clear, exhilarating statement of self and community that’s as robust in its quieter moments as it is in its funkier ones. Even though it’s been out less than a week, it already seems like a document of historical significance, not just for its formidable musical achievements but for the way it encapsulates black cultural and social history with such richness, generosity, and truth.
To this point, Solange has been trying on styles and stretching out into her own skills as a songwriter. Having spent her early teen years singing backup and writing songs, she debuted as a solo artist at just 16, with Solo Star. Very 2003, it was a gleaming, hip-hop-informed album that slinked over beats from the likes of Timbaland and the Neptunes; even with plenty of great tracks, the production outweighed her presence. After a five-year break as a solo artist—during which she got married, had son Julez, moved to Idaho, got divorced, starred in Bring It On: All or Nothing, among other films, and wrote songs for her sister Beyoncé (whew!)—she returned in 2008 with Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams. That album was clearly immersed in a deep love of ’60s funk and soul and its attendant politics, and she rebelled against expectations (see: “Fuck the Industry”), eager to fully express her individuality. She fused her musical impulses in the easy, ebullient grooves of 2012’s True EP, which eased a glossier vision of pop into the soulfunk groove she had ingrained.
Even with such an impressive resume, though, A Seat at the Table is on a different plane. It’s a document of the struggle of a black woman, and black women, in 2016, as Solange confronts painful indignities and situates them historically. Many of these songs draw from current reactions to the seemingly unending killing of black women and men at the hands of the police, but the scope of the record as a whole is much larger than that, with Civil Rights hymnals encompassing centuries of horror black Americans have been subject to, including that inflicted on Knowles’ own ancestors. But even when Solange offers her narrative in first-person and incorporates her family’s past through interludes with her mother Tina and father Mathew, she does so with such artistic and emotional openness that this album feels like nothing but a salve.
The quick sketch “Rise” opens slowly, on a sweet piano and with layers of Solange’s voice in jazz modulations, as a sort of blessing and a placid encouragement to thrive despite it all. “Fall in your ways, so you can crumble,” she sings. “Fall in your ways, so you can wake up and rise.” The word “rise” lands on the high note, but the song lays out the album’s central tension between pain, pride, sorrow, and fierce dignity. This leads directly into “Weary,” a ginger, breathy document of exhaustion, and the deceptively euphoric “Cranes in the Sky,” which, taken as a “Weary”’s counterpart, illustrates two stages of sorrow. What’s so touching about “Cranes,” though—intertwined with the airy, peaceful beauty of its video—is the way Solange specifically documents her process of coping, down to the smallest escape mechanisms. On a warm bass strut, she sings about drinking, sexing, running, and spending in an effort to be free from “those metal clouds,” making visible the kinds of mundane things we all do in the service of a temporary reprieve. Naming these actions feels radical in and of itself, but by the time she flies off her own cloud of a Minnie Riperton-level aria, she seems to have freed herself from the routine, and transcended it.
Solange has said that it was important to her to articulate her roots, and so along with the recordings of her parents, she made the bulk of A Seat at the Table in New Iberia, Louisiana, “based on that area being the start of everything within our family’s lineage,” the place where Tina Knowles-Lawson’s parents first met and then fled after being “run out of town.” In terms of production, her song structures, and melodies, she celebrates the whole history of black music. But the result is never derivative; when you recognize the spirits of artists like Riperton, Zapp, Angie Stone, Aaliyah (lyrically, in “Borderline (An Ode to Self Care”), Janet Jackson, Stanley Clarke, Lil Mo, Herbie freakin’ Hancock and so many more, it feels more like a musical nod or a wink.
The master musician and bandleader Raphael Saadiq serves as co-producer; Saadiq meets Solange in the juiciest middle, both bridging their instincts between classic instrumentation and futuristic funk. The arrangements are voluminous, loose and tight at once, but Solange’s voice is always at the front of this proscenium; each shows restraint as they lean into her collective vision. The sound they conjure is chill-inducing, an easy sound for subject matter that’s as real and tough as it gets. The excellent “Don’t Touch My Hair” (with a feature by Sampha) and “Mad” (her second collaboration with Lil Wayne) specifically address the way black women are devalued, and the songs meet that with resistance. Solange’s voice is a palliative for the pain she describes, as she names truths to divest them of their power.
A Seat at the Table offers a hearth to black women as much as it asserts Solange’s right to comfort and understanding. And in terms of her lived experience, the table of the album’s title, metaphysical and physical, rests in her home of New Orleans. In several interludes, the rapper, label head, and entrepreneur Master P threads the album with musings on No Limit’s runaway success as a black-owned record label (landed him on the Forbes list, baby). That particular segment leads into “F.U.B.U.” ("For Us, By Us"), a honey-dripped slow-grinder of black affirmation, with tubas that sound inspired by NOLA’s Second Lines as Solange mews, “This shit is for us/Don’t try to come for us.” Her sumptuous harmonies build a protective forcefield: “Some shit,” she sings, “you can’t touch.”
A Seat at the Table’s nature is beneficent, but at its spiritual core it is an ode to black women and their healing and sustenance in particular; in writing about herself, Solange turns the mirror back upon them, and crystallizes the kinship therein. She harmonizes with Kelly Rowland and Nia Andrews that “I got so much magic, you can have it,” but the song that perhaps best encapsulates this outstanding work is “Scales,” a slow-burning duet with Kelela near the end of the album. Their harmonies are heavenly and create almost a meditative effect, a mantra of healing kindness in a syrup-slow synth progression. It’s a sex jam, I think, but it can also serve as a shine-theory jam. “You’re a superstar,” they sing together, letting the “star” part roll around a bit in the lower part of the vibrato. “You’re a superstar.”


Modest Mouse follow the unlikely success of "Float On" by recruiting former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr and gently nudging toward new directions. The Shins' James Mercer guests.

Modest Mouse: We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank

We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank

For all of the pandemonium over the indie rock gold-record mainstream-radio-play explosion, few of the bands who breached Clear Channel's glass ceiling were actually longtime members of the small-label fraternity. The Shins and the Arcade Fire, to pick two of the bigger success stories, had relatively short histories before raising their profile beyond college campuses, while more seasoned groups with major-label money-sacks like Built to Spill and Mercury Rev never cracked the Billboard top 50. I could get all crotchety and bemoan this trend as the Johnny-Come-Latelies pulling the rug out from underneath the old vets, but it's more likely just a matter of younger bands sounding more enthusiastic on their second or third record and working with a fresher formula.
Of course, Modest Mouse are the exception to this generalization, having scored in the hit-song jackpot 10 years and four full-length albums into their career. Perennially relegated to the second tier of the 90s indie-rock league (I still remember mis-learning of them as a BtS spinoff), modern rock chart-topper "Float On" allowed Isaac Brock to have the last laugh on his former indie label brethren, as he enjoyed the kind of crossover hit that's eluded so many major-label recruits since the heady days of grunge. What was even more astounding was the fact that Modest Mouse-- mob cries of "sellout!" notwithstanding-- didn't really compromise their sound for mass consumption: Brock's weird yelp-shout retained its volatile quaver, the band's punched-up rhythm section still sounded sharp and vital, and the hunt for cosmic guitar pedal settings still sounded like their driving passion.
The album that gave birth to "Float On", Good News for People Who Love Bad News, was similarly unmitigated down to its mouthful title, but indicated that Brock wasn't treading water either, tweaking his sound to incorporate a touch of programming and the Tom Waits worship of his Ugly Casanova side project. We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank continues that measured consistency, preserving the core Modest Mouse sound despite the recruitment of historic guitar figure Johnny Marr while gently nudging toward new directions.
Ironically, the most successful track on We Were Dead is the one that pushes hardest against the group's established formula: the almost gaudy single "Dashboard". With Modest Mouse's trademark itchy guitars all but drowned out by brass fanfares and slurring strings, "Dashboard" is the Vegas version of "Float On", and it works as an experiment to see just how far they can push the dissonance of Brock's multi-tracked barking against slick, commercially ambitious surroundings.
Had the rest of the record gone further down this path of orchestration indulgence, it would've been either a classic or a disaster (just ask Trail of Dead, who've spent their time since Source Tags and Codes trying and utterly failing to create a similar kind of symphonic indie hard-rock). But instead of that dice-roll, We Were Dead continues to refine Brock's aesthetic, producing another solid (if not necessarily great) record. The development is clear in the way "Parting of the Sensory" smoothly evolves from foul-mouthed acoustic lament to boxcar-hobo hoedown, or on tracks like "Fly Trapped in a Jar", which takes an abrupt left turn halfway through from a dark, bristly screamer that echoes their earlier work to a jagged but dancey post-punk groove. Those latter moments are likely where Marr's much-anticipated influence is most obvious, but even then it's subtle; rather than impossibly sounding like the Smiths all of a sudden, the band has fun pilfering the rhythmic sheets of mid-period Talking Heads on songs like "Education" or "Invisible".
So yes, despite the hefty presence of Marr, it's still undeniably Brock's band, and his development as a frontman is most apparent in his impressive inventory of vocal characters: There's ornery/shouty Brock, Waitsian-growl Brock, spoken-word proselytizer Brock, wounded/reflective Brock, and countless permutations of all of these. Many of those personae appear in the same song or even the same line, singing backup to each other on opener "March Into the Sea" or allowing the singer to play call-and-response with himself on "Parting of the Sensory". And when Brock can't modulate his throat quite as sweetly as he'd like, he calls in the Shins' James Mercer, whose counterpoint on "Florida" and the excellent "We've Got Everything" help put a couple of strong follow-up singles in the can.
Unless my radio barometer is totally out of whack, 2007 should be another banner year for the disorienting experience of hearing Modest Mouse sandwiched between Fergie and Fall Out Boy, not to mention covered on "American Idol". There's no reason this development should be met with scorn; if anything, Modest Mouse should be championed for exposing a larger audience to a sound in line with classic indie rock, rather than aiming for more traditional rock sounds like many of their more accessible indie contemporaries. That a window has briefly opened in the greater cultural consciousness to make room for Modest Mouse on the airwaves would have been unthinkable at the start of the decade; that they've remained so true to their core aesthetic in light of the temptation that success undoubtedly brings is rarer still.


On a fascinating and flawed new album, PJ Harvey yokes the siren-like catchiness of her last great America-influenced album, Stories From the City… to the swamp-tarnished filth of her classic first three records.

PJ Harvey: The Hope Six Demolition Project

The Hope Six Demolition Project

In 1992, an NME writer asked PJ Harvey about the political resonance of her work. "I feel uncomfortable with myself at the moment because I feel I’m neglecting that side," she replied. "I’m not concerned enough about things." She worried that the critical attention she had received for her debut album, that year’s Dry, was making her introspective. "It could get really dangerous if I don’t do something about it soon," she said. "I could develop a huge ego or something." Instead, Harvey, then 22, suffered a breakdown, the result of moving to London from rural Dorset, her first big breakup, and the pressure of being the scrutinized center of a rapidly popular band (as the PJ Harvey Trio were then). From then on, her interviews became opaque. She refused to explain her lyrics or discuss much of her personal life. It frustrated journalists, but her records spoke for themselves, centering sexual and biblical apocalypse in the body of a middle-class white woman with a filthy sense of humor and a preternatural gift for the blues.
But 14 months ago, Harvey pulled off an unprecedented reveal for the making of her ninth album. She and her band recorded behind one-way glass in the basement of London’s Somerset House, as paying spectators looked on. Last October, she showcased the finished songs live, along with poems (available as a book, The Hollow of the Hand), and Seamus Murphy’s photographs from their research trips to Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Washington D.C., which formed the record. Her creative process has never been more transparent, yet somehow, her intentions remain totally inscrutable—she’s given zero interviews since announcing the project, and considering the noncommittal dispatches she offers from these places, it's hard to know what point she's trying to make.
On 2011’s groundbreaking Let England Shake, all roads led back to England and its role in various 20th century international conflicts. If there’s a unifying thread between the desolate global vignettes of The Hope Six Demolition Project, it’s that Washington has a tendency to leave its business unfinished. The U.S. wades into communities at home and abroad in the name of improving conditions, whether through toppling dictators or tearing down unsafe housing projects, but ultimately disenfranchises them, amputating the infected limb and driving off with the crutches. This is her Let America Shake, if you will.
However, she can be strangely thoughtless here, in ways that aren't easy to parse. She’s already run into trouble for the album’s opening track, "The Community of Hope," which offered a dispiriting portrait of the D.C. neighborhood Anacostia. Local activists denounced her characterizations of the local school as "a shithole," and the addicted, homeless populace as "zombies." "Or at least, that’s what I’m told," she sings, making clear that those were her tour guide’s words. Perhaps she’s pointing out the subjectivity of perception, but there’s a frustrating reluctance on her part to assign any value or judgment to the things she sees, other than a few trite comparisons between haves and have-nots—not least a terrible faux-deep portrait of a homeless, disabled indigenous woman drinking in a Redskins cap.
Whatever her geopolitical intentions, The Hope Six Demolition Project is her most exhilarating rock album in years, yoking the siren-like catchiness of her last great America-influenced album, Stories From the City… to the swamp-tarnished filth of her classic first three records, Dry, Rid of Me, and To Bring You My Love. It’s leering, brash, and dissonant, but also not without its warmth: Despite the bleakness of the guided car tour in "The Community of Hope," there’s a driving optimism to its droning guitar and steady drums.
At Hope Six’s most thrilling points, Harvey delves back into the influence of her parents’ record collection to channel the swagger of Captain Beefheart, John Lee Hooker, and Howlin’ Wolf. The use of this carnal, hurting tradition feels both apt and transgressive as a basis from which to examine human desertion. "The Ministry of Social Affairs" is hooked around the refrain from Jerry McCain’s "That’s What They Want," in which the blues singer oozes, "Oh yeah, money, honey"—likely a warning against tax collectors or gold-diggers, but also an eroticization of need. The guitar from his song evokes the soupy traffic that Harvey sees around her as she witnesses beggars taking shelter against the wall of the welfare building, but then the song’s unsteady foundations slip into a hellish, squalling cabaret, and Harvey and her band turn McCain’s line into a demonic chorus line. "Medicinals" is more defined, her saxophone ascending through a neat scale, but she licks the end of each line of lyrics with an acidic flourish, like a whip from her old feather boa.
After the eerie high registers of Let England Shake and 2007’s haunted White Chalk, it’s bracing to hear Harvey almost back to using her voice to its fullest range. You get the sense that she’s never going to unleash ze monsta again, but she switches between full-blooded confrontation, evil cunning, haunted falsetto, and forlorn laments, bringing great zeal to her often affectless choice of language. She’s often backed up by her all-male band, who lend depth and community to a record with a very isolated perspective. They add particular soul to "River Anacostia," humming its deep, smouldering melody, before chanting it at the end: "Wait in the water/ God’s gonna trouble the water." It’s one of the album’s more inventive phrasings—many of these songs started life as poems, and they haven’t all translated well to song. On "The Ministry of Defence," the stilted verses are interspersed with thunderous, industrial clangs to fantastic effect. But elsewhere, there’s a sense of square pegs being jammed into round holes: the band’s cry of, "Oh, near the memorials to Vietnam and Lincoln," isn’t going to trouble a festival crowd near you any time soon.
And Hope Six definitely suffers from ideas being transferred between mediums without being refashioned to fit. Along with the poetry book, photographs, and album, there’s still a feature-length documentary to come. It’s hard to think of a project that fundamentally says so little being stretched across so many outlets. It buzzes with life and thought, but it feels as if Harvey is still working out what she’s seen; or, for some reason, that she’s sublimated her gift as a lyricist. Only a few songs here feel fully written, with the requisite lens twist or intimacy to elevate them beyond attempts to translate Seamus Murphy’s photographs into words. "Near the Memorials to Vietnam and Lincoln" is one of them, and one of the album’s few violence-free images: A young boy pretends to throw seeds so that the birds will scatter, evoking the more literal portrayals of salvation denied elsewhere on the record. On "The Wheel," as a swing chair ride turns and its child passengers flash in and out of view, Harvey is reminded of the children who died in the Kosovo War: "Now you see them, now you don’t," she declares in a chilling, strident tone, over more tarnished saxophone.
But these moments of clarity are matched by an equal number of perplexing, muddled ones. For good or ill, it's impossible to know where Harvey's narrator stands in these vignettes. Occasionally we teeter on the brink of her worldview, but she always pulls away: "A restlessness took hold my brain/ And questions I could not hold back," she sings on "The Orange Monkey," but hold back she does. On "A Line in the Sand," she states, "What I’ve seen—yes, it’s changed how I see humankind," a promise of insight that dissolves in her mealy-mouthed assessment of international involvement in Kosovo: "I make no excuse—we got things wrong, but I believe we also did some good." Is she even singing as herself?
Harking back to Let England Shake, maybe her dispassionate storytelling is making a point about how we easily condemn past atrocities while failing to recognize history repeating itself before us. Questions of perspective, and how we bear witness, feel central to The Hope Six Demolition Project. We were voyeurs, watching her make a record about being a voyeur. Is it a deconstruction of the protest record? By pointing out the problems in these three communities, but proposing no solutions, is she just as responsible for their desertion as the global powers that came before her? You sense that the record is part of an ongoing inquiry, not a destination. Fortunately, the music often feels like salvation itself.


The second full-length from the rocking side project of Low's Alan Sparhawk builds nicely on the sound of their debut LP.

2

Retribution Gospel Choir, the more rocking part-time gig of Low frontman Alan Sparhawk, have a harder hill to climb on their sophomore record. For one, their 2008 LP reprised some songs that, though first played live by RGC, debuted on record on Low's 2007 LP, Drums and Guns. The differences between the versions was fascinating, as was hearing RGC release all the tension that Low so carefully maintain. It made sense to finally document a project that had been running for a few years. And there was the added novelty of hearing Alan Sparhawk singing and playing guitar in an honest-to-god rock'n'roll band-- and the surprise of hearing him pull it off. But the novelty is not an issue on 2. RGC now have to justify themselves as a stand-alone act-- and fortunately, they acquit themselves just as ably as they did on their debut.
It's a record of sharp hooks and slick production, with several anthemic and instantly memorable choruses, all evident from the very first track. "Hide It Away" blends chest-beating harmonies and moments of quieter guitar jangle with the band's familiar surging 4/4 rock. It's as sweetly melodic as anything Sparhawk has written, but with unfettered, audacious confidence and a guitar solo gliding on heavy reverb-- more stumping on their campaign to become a current-day Crazy Horse. "Your Bird" follows up on the teeth-gritting bile of their debut with some added catchiness. And "Working Hard" toys with rock convention without inhabiting it completely, toning down the verses to a quieter shuffle and adding slyly nihilistic lyrics while still milking the handclaps and blue-collar guitar chug of the chorus for all they're worth.
While 2 may not be as consistent in mood and tone as the debut, it diversifies the band's otherwise guitar-dominated sound in the album's second half. The strum of a banjo adds texture to the distorted chords of "White Wolf". Cello is used on two songs, the epic eight-minute reach-for-the-cheap-seats of "Electric Guitar" and the following comedown of the Low-like closing track "Bless Us All". a song marked by acoustic plucking, choral harmonies. "Something's Going to Break" goes all the way into using studio as instrument, sounding both muffled and feral in its first two minutes before abruptly shifting into the heaviest head-down riff of the record. The resulting explosions are still the band's raison d'être.
But if 2 is slightly more dynamic, it isn't a dramatic departure from the debut, which the band nods to in its bone-simple title (another tweak on rock convention) and in the similarity between the album covers. What you see is what you get here, and while this record is as hard and heavy-- sometimes more so-- 2 bears all the slow, subtle refinement of Sparhawk's better-known projects. Slowly getting better at what you do isn't the most exciting story ever told, but it's one that has yet to get old.


The country crossover star’s excellent songwriting is raw and evocative, and though he continues to hone his sound, the total emotional experience of the album sometimes wears a bit thin.

Zach Bryan: The Great American Bar Scene

The Great American Bar Scene

Some songwriters have a direct line from their open wounds to the pen on the page, and then there’s Zach Bryan. His 2019 self-produced, self-released debut album, DeAnn, was named after his mother, who died of complications related to alcoholism when Bryan was 20. Recorded during his time as an aviation ordnanceman in the Navy, its ragged songs detail grief and regret, devotion that leads to violence, family curses and hard-won redemption. Bryan’s passion and pathos garnered him a cult following that turned him into a stadium-filling superstar, and though he now records and travels with a full band—not to mention guest stars like Maggie Rogers, Bruce Springsteen, and the “Hawk Tuah” girl—his work still carries the stark intensity and emotional bareness of a heart-to-heart with a stranger after one too many beers.
His new album, The Great American Bar Scene, adds to the Zach Bryan formula by taking on a wider lens, weaving his personal struggles and triumphs into the greater legacy of lost souls and camaraderie found in America’s watering holes. This can lead to exciting new lyrical territory for him, like on “Oak Island,” a tightly wound character song about a railroad worker whose brother’s gotten into trouble with some boys from New Jersey. His protagonist, Mickey, also appears on the title track—this time as a nod to malt liquor—in a story that starts off with getting played by a bookie from Philly, winds through a police chase in Cheyenne, and ends with swaying to Johnny Cash with some sweet young thing under neon lights. In the background, you can hear the ambient sound of balls clanking in a game of pool, timed to the strums of the guitar.
It’s all very Nebraska, a comparison that’s hung over Bryan since his early lo-fi releases. He even tries to get ahead of the punchline here, with references to “State Trooper” and “Reason to Believe” and a duet with the Boss himself on “Sandpaper.” Ironically, the sound of Bar Scene is the most full-bodied of Bryan’s career, building upon the heartland rock that he explored in his 2022 major-label breakthrough American Heartbreak and the self-titled follow-up from last year. Bryan makes the kind of production choices here associated with someone gaining a lot more money and creative control in a short amount of time, deploying mariachi horns, gospel choirs and, yes, a John Mayer guitar solo to complete his vision. They mostly work, though maybe not surprisingly, Bryan’s folksier instincts shine the most: the moments of lonesome pedal steel and guitar-pickin’, the skilled harmonies with Noeline Hofmann on “Purple Gas,” and the showstopping harmonica on “Pink Skies.” That song, an account of DeAnn’s funeral, is so meticulously constructed that you can see exactly why, against all odds, it was picked as the album’s lead single.
Bryan has expressed stubbornness, even pride, in continuing to release albums that extend past an hour. While the drawn-out onslaught of emotions can set up a uniquely cathartic experience, it starts to wear thin on Bar Scene, where well-crafted tracks bump up against half-baked ghosts of past Bryan songs. “Bass Boat” sounds like an attempt at recapturing the magic of the two-part ballad “Jake’s Piano - Long Island” from last year, but apart from one particularly devastating line—“I was raised by a woman who was hardly impressed/And I carry that shit real deep in my chest”—it never quite reaches the same heights. Bryan sometimes trades jarring specificity for more general platitudes, such as, “Don’t get angry, listen to the sounds/Them good times will find their way back around,” on “Better Days.” Even when he gets into the details, he tends to lean on nostalgic signifiers—Beale Street and Elvis quotes, old Fords and Tom & Jerry, Trans-Am and Kodachrome—in place of more substantive meaning.
There have been many comparisons made between Bryan and Morgan Wallen, the other streaming giant of country music, unabashedly more conservative than Bryan but also a fan of long albums, wistful reminiscing, and authentic presentation. But there are arguably many more similarities between him and Tyler Childers, the Appalachian singer-songwriter whom Bryan shouts out on the very last line of Bar Scene, or Colter Wall, the gruff-voiced plainsman from Saskatchewan, whose song “Motorcycle” Bryan recently covered on his Instagram Story. All three of these men combine a reverence for country traditionalism with the outlaw attitude of the 1970s, to the extent where, when Bryan rails against “808s” infiltrating the country charts on “Bathwater,” it feels redundant.
But if artists like Bryan can match, or even surpass, the stardom of Nashville’s revolving door of country-pop singers, then what exactly is he rallying against? Bryan is now, reluctantly or not, the biggest crossover success in the industry, long past the point of being able to call himself an underdog. “I’m a mechanical bull, throw a quarter and watch me go,” he mutters, with a shrug, early on Bar Scene. You get the sense that, if given the chance, Bryan would fast-forward through all this “fame” business and become a barroom staple, with the kind of songs that people sing along to because their parents did. Only time will tell if he ever reaches that point; as Bryan would know, it takes a few decades to earn a permanent spot in the jukebox.


The London post-punk band’s lists and non sequiturs expose the absurdity of modern life from the inside.

Dry Cleaning: Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks EP

Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks EP

If you use a notes app for more than just passwords and grocery lists, it quickly becomes a chaotic archive of dream interpretations, draft texts, and years-old epiphanies. Florence Shaw, vocalist of post-punk quartet Dry Cleaning, turns those notes into lyrics about finding connection in an apathetic world. On the band’s new EP Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks, Shaw picks up where August’s Sweet Princess EP left off, confronting loneliness and desire through lists and non sequiturs. She comments on duvet covers, an abandoned fridge, hot people, a banana. Spread across six tracks, these observations represent more than just banal references to personal history. They track a practice of looking, one that places the everyday under a microscope to find out what lies within.
“Do you believe that hard work is what it takes to be successful?” Shaw asks on opener “Dog Proposal,” and without lingering, opines: “Hard work has very little to do with success.” The line acts as an overture, inverting one contemporary western belief in preparation for a larger attempt to expose the absurdity of the most trivial aspects of modern life. Repeating the lyric, “I’ve joined a gym, I’ve joined a gym close to the office,” Shaw creates a loop of professional small talk that turns meaningless conversation into a critique of itself.
Shaw never sounds removed from the behaviors she observes. “Stream, stream, stream my favorite shows/Just tell me who dies and who finds love,” she sings on “Spoils,” as if watching with glassy eyes. She portrays herself as stuck, not unhappily, in a life of monotonous routine, attached but disinterested at the same time. She dissects her own emotional states with equal coolness. In the latter half of “Viking Hair,” she asks a lover: “Stick up for me/Do what you’re told but sometimes tell me what to do as well/I just want to sexually experiment on a nice safe pair of hands/Don’t judge me, just hold still.” The relentless push of electric guitar and drums lends her words both a sense of confidence and the surreality of a film soundtrack.
Shaw’s habit of poking fun of the life she leads, yet leading it nonetheless, loses its humor on the aptly titled “Sombre One.” Over ascending and descending notes on electric guitar, she delivers lines detached from narrative in a slow, heavy monotone. She repeats phrases, telling herself that “everything is easy to get out and put back quickly” as if seeking consolation in the pages of an instruction manual. Reciting a to-do list, she whispers, “Don’t get burnt by the sun’s rays.” Against spare guitar and a dull drumbeat, the line feels pregnant with self-reproach, as if Shaw is ashamed to remind herself to do so little.
“Sombre One” imbues jagged, stream-of-consciousness lyrics with melancholy, and it almost falters under the weight of its own self-seriousness. But before the song ends, the instruments fade away, and Shaw’s voice is heard from a distance, delivering a mix of lyrics from other songs like spoken-word poems. It’s a self-reflexive moment for the band, one that turns their signature re-purposing of phrases (“Rest in heavenly peace,” “Amazing voice, amazing body”) back on themselves. By treating language as a machine to be taken apart, Dry Cleaning crystallize experience with just a few images and turns of phrase. It’s enough to make you sift through the minutiae of your own life in search of meanings you’ve overlooked.


The maestro behind the Gangsta Grillz mixtapes gets a major-label shot to replicate his ear for the Now-- including fantastic tracks by Outkast and Project Pat.

Gangsta Grillz: The Album

He calls himself "Barack O'Drama" more than once on wax, but DJ Drama's got a lot more in common with Mike Huckabee: Vaguely inoffensive, vaguely southern, affable, entrepreneurial; the kind of simple-minded dude who synchronizes everyone-gets-a-seat-at-the-table warmth with jaw-dropping blunders (denying the science behind evolution/befouling the video reunion of UGK).
The political analogy continues. On the inside cover of Gangsta Grillz: The Album, Drama poses unnervingly close to the fish-eye close up, the plane of hands perpendicular to the ground, thumbs up, caught in some unclear gesticulation that could symbolize an awkward approximation of a booty, a square of china white, or just a square. He's supposed to look hard, serious, "so focused." Drama doesn't rap, sing, produce, or mix. So why are so many fizzy pop rappers and A-listeners flocking to him? Because behind all the stunted veneers and posing rests the most important person the modern economy: the middle man. All he does is shout over beats and bring people together.
His series of Gangsta Grillz mixtapes have been both buzz-forming and buzz-maintaining for a few years now, aiding everyone from Little Brother to Lil' Boosie. For many, Lil' Wayne's Dedication 2, a Gangsta Grillz entry, has become the unofficial demarcation of his ascent to rap's top tier. Drama is a fixer. His in-house producers (Don Cannon, most readily) have benefited from the endless series of canvasses too, spring boarding onto 50 Cent and Young Jeezy production credits. Like a good agent, getting in bed with Drama gets you in bed with the right people, or, at the very least, the best people willing to work with you.
Don't misunderstand, DJ Drama has made some fantastic mixtapes. He'll hopefully make more. But about 25% of Drama's overall skill set translates well to major label album-length hip-hop. Sadly, Gangsta Grillz: The Album has to exist for us to learn that. No single narrator or speaker to guide and anchor. No fixed regional style to diverge and return to. Just overstuffed tracks like loosely spooled nylon or hastily booked professional wrestling matches (Jeezy! Twista! Joc! T.I.! Diddy! Nelly!-- on one song). Skits red-line embarrassment; Katt Williams going on for three minutes too long about Kush, Diddy just smiling and shouting shit on that annoying DJ Clue self-echo. The singles are baubles, and Jazze Pha ones at that ("5000 Ones"). Sonically, not a producer on here ever met a Visigoth bell sequence or predictably "explosive" drum roll he didn't like.
Two jewels get lost in the blather. Everyone already knows about Outkast's "Art of Storytellin' Part 4"-- it's great, lovely to hear the pair together, and Andre 3000 is the only MC who can rap about the war (though I'd like to know how he'd capitalize it), and it's Drama's platform at its finest: Giving space to something instant right at this very second. Even though the collaborative "187" is a song very different from "Storytellin'", it's a satisfying enough shuffle of related yet previously uncombined parts. Project Pat gets to play Ford to 8Ball and MJG's collective Nixon. And B.G. should croon hooks more often; he pouts and flicks through this one.
Sadly, and mostly, Gangsta Grillz also forces a lot of crow down the throat. Those who got behind the opaque, effortless Houston aesthetic are going to have to grit their teeth through "Gettin' Money", and it's frightening to hear Clipse sound like monotone MCs who just read a lot of Italian and Japanese Vogue (the album closing "Cheers"). I'd chide Drama for not helping, not standing in front on his product, but when your Rolodex and your open door are the only tools you bring to the job, all there is to do is politic.


Brooklyn-based musician Kam Tambini layers roaring guitars, Latin rhythms, and his own low-pitched, sighing vocals to explore the mundanity of city life.

Sin Miedo EP

No city has ever saved 33-year-old Kam Tambini, better known as Tambino, from the exhaustion of 21st-century existence. The clave rhythms that pepper his new Sin Miedo EP stem from Tambini’s childhood in Bogotá, Colombia and his birthplace of Lima, Peru, while his distorted guitars, clattering drum machines, and glistening synths recall cramped Brooklyn venues where the sound guy is learning on the job. Tambini’s blend of shoegaze, indie pop, and electronic touches on everywhere he’s been, but his sound isn’t as simple as his own label for it, “cumbiagaze.” Its charm lies in the way he layers roaring guitars, Latin rhythms, and his own low-pitched, sighing vocals to explore the mundanity of city life. He sounds drained but resilient: Sin Miedo is a reminder of the pockets of contentment in the most frustrating of modern eras.
On “NY Daze,” Tambini unleashes a slow-moving tidal wave of overdriven power chords and deadpans, “Some are getting out of here/I won’t leave New York City, ’cause/Kids, I’m in it/’Til the end.” He sounds anything but convinced, and the rest of Sin Miedo presents a familiar citydweller’s dilemma: Can you feel consistently worn down by a place, yet enchanted enough to stay? On opener “Estos Dias,” Tambini paints a picture that could be inspired by any U.S. city in summer 2020: “Estos días/A miles ví/En las calles de marfil” (“These days/I saw thousands/In the marble streets”). His chorus chant of “Nos mata la policia” (“The police are killing us”) sounds resigned, yet his double-time percussion and bursting guitars feel inspired enough to join the crowd. Even when he’s emotionally worn thin, he finds a glimmer of hope.
Sin Miedo sounds somewhat, though not entirely, clearer and more mobile than 2020’s Tambino EP (both produced by Michael Beharie), and the faint lucidity elevates the moments when Tambini most strongly feels the weight of it all. “Standing on the corner/I can’t speak/Drunks on the subway,” he quasi-raps in the background of “Las Tardes,” nearly indiscernible through the whirring guitars underlying his brief yet vivid description of a metropolitan Friday night. “It’s all coming down on my head,” he continues, his mumble emphasizing his rapidly diminishing emotional capacity. The music cycles between stretches of rapid low-E string plucking and swirls of icy synths accompanied by shaking maracas, all sides of his upbringing in the mix: Wherever he goes, there he is.
Tambini reports his reflections with honest yet simple words—the kind that likely don’t go through any revisions after he writes them down—and his groaning guitars and vocal production suggest a foggy mindstate. So when the crystalline keys and clipped vocal samples of “Deseo” break through, it’s shocking. Click-clacking, reggaeton-tinged percussion dances around chilly synths and Tambini’s echoing, ever-detached voice: “Bailabamos/Con el trago y mi dolor/Yo te daría mi vida” (“We were dancing/With a drink and my pain/I would give you my life”). It’s a new sound for Tambino and a classic city picture: Strong feelings lost to the club yet still present in the morning.

Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


Mark Linkous’ second album as Sparklehorse shines an old light on impossible things. He found the purity of pop music and then lacerated it with the quirks and imperfections he cherished.

Good Morning Spider

In a 1998 documentary, Mark Linkous holds up an old hollow-body guitar. “This one...do you want to smell it?” he asks his interviewer, who’s standing somewhere behind the camera. “It smells so good.” She obliges, and asks what the smell is. “Just that old wood, old lady smell,” Linkous says in his slight drawl. “It belonged to an old lady who played it in church, that’s how I got this one. It’s 1960.”
The house they’re in is over a hundred years older, built in 1860 or 1840, Linkous isn’t sure. He’s living in Andersonville, Virginia, at this point, in an old farmhouse with his wife Teresa and a few dogs who scamper in and out of the frame. He’s got a recording studio he calls Static King set up in one of the rooms, insulated enough from the rest of the house that he can spend hours experimenting in there without Teresa hearing him. The camera pans across the studio. It’s a mess—gnarls of cables crisscrossing over old amplifiers, old tape decks, tiny Casio keyboards from the ’80s, scratched guitars stood up in the corner. It looks less like a recording studio and more like a patch of woods in the Virginia green outside, where vines dangle from trees and the grass bustles with insects.
Good Morning Spider, the 1998 album Linkous recorded in this 19th-century house, teems with a similar life. Its songs bleed in and out of each other: an organ drone ends one track and begins another; a strand of tape hiss winds through the work. You can hear machines starting up and stopping again, fingers squeaking across the frets of an acoustic guitar. Linkous had a tendency to sing close enough to the microphone that you could hear the spittle crackling off his teeth, like he’s whispering in your ear or through a tin can strung up with twine.
Linkous recorded the album, the story goes, after dying for the first time. He was opening for Radiohead on tour in England and after taking too much Valium, or alcohol, or heroin (he doesn’t remember and the story changes), he passed out in a London hotel room with his legs pinned underneath him. The potassium build-up stopped his heart once paramedics straightened his legs out, and he died for a minute or three; at the hospital, his tour manager was led to the grieving room where doctors would deliver bad news. But there was none, and Linkous got to live again. He even got to keep his legs, despite what the doctors told him when he woke up.
“It must have changed your life profoundly,” the documentary interviewer says of the experience, which strung on for three months in 1996 at St. Mary’s Hospital while Linkous’ legs healed. He pauses, and then, haltingly, replies. “Well, it made me notice a lot more. It made me be a little more perceptive to small things, more, after that, I think. You know? People, babies, animals, insects. Things like that.”
Born in Arlington, Virginia, to a coal mining family, Linkous moved to New York and then Los Angeles after high school to become a rock star instead. He tried to learn Led Zeppelin songs on guitar as a kid and almost gave up on the instrument because they were too hard. Then, “I saw on the evening news, a news flash from London: punk rock!” he says. “And I was like, man, I can definitely do this.”
Linkous joined a power-pop band called the Dancing Hoods in the ’80s. They put out two albums and broke up, and Linkous moved back to Virginia, where he began making music by himself under the name Sparklehorse. He gave up on being a rock star; he even gave up on the idea that he was the one making the music coming out of him. “My songs? I don’t feel like they’re even mine,” he tells his interviewer. “I’m just a conductor.” He likens them to the bugs crawling around in the grass on his property. They’re in his space, but there’s no way they could ever belong to him. They just pass by.
Good Morning Spider, Sparklehorse’s second album after 1995’s Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot, retains some of the punk rock fervor that pushed Linkous to both coasts in his late teens and early twenties. “Pig” is the closest Sparklehorse comes to a raw punk song, and “Cruel Sun” sees him shouting against the full lurch of multi-layered guitars. “Happy Man,” a song Linkous bisected with the ambient organ number “Chaos of the Galaxy,” could have been a pop punk chart-topper in a corporate producer’s hands. But if punk ran on spontaneity, coarseness, and attitude, Sparklehorse found life in the details punk ignored.
Linkous constantly approached the purity of pop music and then lacerated it with the quirks and imperfections he cherished. “Happy Man” has a populist enough hook: “All I want is to be a happy man,” Linkous wails. But that line only releases the tension he’s been building up in the verse and pre-chorus, a tension built on lyrics like, “I woke up in a horse’s stomach one foggy morning/His eyes were crazy and he smashed into the cemetery gates.” That’s not radio fodder, not even in the strange ’90s milieu that made hits out of Marcy Playground’s “Sex and Candy” and Butthole Surfers’ “Pepper.” Who wants to see the world from the inside of a horse?
Though signed to Capitol from the first album, Sparklehorse never found the broad audience Linkous hoped it might. It found fans, though, in people like Thom Yorke (who collaborated with Linkous on one song, a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here”) and Daniel Johnston (whom Linkous covers on Spider) and Tom Waits (who sang guest vocals on Sparklehorse’s next album It’s a Wonderful Life) and PJ Harvey (ditto). And it found listeners in weird kids around the country who bought Sparklehorse’s CDs or (more likely) pirated them from peer-to-peer networks. Sparklehorse was Soulseek rock, the kind of thing you let trickle through your headphones on your rough nights but didn’t ever really play for your friends. When he sang, he sang for you and no one else, except maybe the june bugs in the grass.
According to Linkous, it’s a rural thing, a facet of artists who live in houses, not apartments, who have to cross miles of winding road in a car to get anywhere. It’s why he made his albums from equipment salvaged from junkyards and purchased from eccentric characters, not on professional equipment in a glossy urban studio. “Country people, being so isolated, they have to kind of improvise with things they have access to,” he says. “Always thought that was a really admirable trait of country people.”
Drive through Virginia enough and you’ll start to see what Linkous saw, all the layers of time and memory that go into making something as delicate and complex as his music. Vines swallow trees, moss swallows gravestones, the hum of bugs blankets the haunted emptiness of Civil War battlefields. It’s a place pulsing with the memory of violence, serene now but weighted by what’s been done there. There’s nowhere in the country with more ghosts.
Sparklehorse’s songs tend to follow you like ghosts, especially the ones on Good Morning Spider, Linkous’ best and most intricate work. I’ll be driving for hours in the dark and find myself thinking of the refrain to “All Night Home”: “We’re gonna drive/All night home,” a companion piece to Roy Orbison’s “I Drove All Night” that works more like a prayer for safe arrival. On “Come on In,” Linkous modifies the children's prayer “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep,” removing references to the Lord: “I pray my soul to keep/If I die before I wake/I pray my soul to take.” That shift from soul as object to soul as subject feels impossibly lonely, the presence of God implied but not spoken to, unless that’s who Linkous is pleading with when he sings, “Come on in/Take me home tonight.”
These big, ambiguous concepts—loneliness, souls, sadness—populate the album as characters in the near-absence of people. There’s the stray reference to a “you” in there, a few mentions of “he” and “she”, but the majority of living beings here are animals and ideas. The “he” on “Ghost of His Smile” is a pet lizard who died at Linkous’ home; the Joe in “Hey, Joe” belongs to Daniel Johnston. In Linkous’ rendition, clearer and more fleshed out than Johnston’s original, Joe and Jack and the rest of the names fade in the light of the stars above them.
Johnston’s line—“There’s a heaven and there’s a star for you”—appeared on sparklehorse.com after Linkous’ death, the real one, in March 2010. His family put it there as a footnote to their statement on his passing. I don’t know if they thought he wrote it or if they knew it meant a lot to him or if it was just the most resonant language to appear on his albums in the wake of his death. He died in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he’d been living in his last months. He killed himself in an alley you can find on Google Maps, if you really want to.
In the documentary, Linkous talks about being in so much pain after his ’96 hospital stay that Teresa had to hide his guns. It’s eerie, now that he’s dead, to hear him talk about suicide all those years ago. Maybe he knew; maybe he could feel the totality of his own life the way he felt the everything-ness of the spaces he lived and worked in, the details of a place from its bugs to its mountains.
I’d like to think that whatever conducted these songs into being is still here. In a dream a few months after his death, when I was living in D.C., Linkous told me to look for him in the color green. I don’t want to make too much of it, but I saw hawks floating over the highways all that summer, too, and I remember how he wrote about hawks, how “Hammering the Cramps” from Vivadixie was written about a wounded hawk he picked up off the road in Virginia and drove home on his motorcycle. One hand on the handlebars, one hand cradling an enraged hawk, for miles.
Good Morning Spider carries so much melancholy inside of it, but it’s the kind of melancholy that’s existed long before people were around to experience it and will be there long after we’re gone. More than anything, the album shines an old light on the impossible things that happen all the time: dogs coming back from the dead, spiders building webs, the moon yanking the sea around the earth. The bugs that are dead all winter and suddenly not dead at the first hint of green. Human love for the non-human. “It’s a hard world for little things,” Linkous sings on “Ghost of His Smile.” The catch is there’s nothing living that isn’t little.
Here’s another prayer from Linkous: “I’m so sorry/My spirit’s rarely in my body/It wanders through the dry country/Looking for a good place to rest.” He sings it on “Hundreds of Sparrows,” a song about birds and intimacy and coming back to your body after drifting away from it for hours. I think of it when I neglect my friends, which is often, or when I’m not listening to someone speaking to me because my mind’s somewhere else. Then I hear Linkous’ voice in my head and I return to my body while I have it.