The drugged-up R&B project returns with its second free album, picking up where House of Balloons left off and adding some new twists. There's the same ineffably skeezy vibe and a genuine sense of the album-as-journey, and the production is slightly harsher and streaked with violence, befitting the lyrical content.

Thursday

It sounds a bit ridiculous to say that the Weeknd avoid the sophomore slump with Thursday, given that the Toronto crew's first release arrived just five months ago. But not many artists, especially in the Internet era, show up with such a well-developed aesthetic (a very foggy, of-the-moment variation on mainstream radio's slow jams) and something as self-assured as the House of Balloons mixtape. And those that do probably don't have a Drake co-sign and such a carefully managed cloak of anonymity. Months later, all we really know about the Weeknd is that there's a singer named Abel Tesfaye with an earthy The-Dream-like voice and a lecherous persona that's both repellent and compelling. We've seen a few smoky, black and white photos disseminated via Tumblr that perfectly fit the music's bad vibes; there have been a couple of live dates; and apparently, the project has two associated producers helping to craft a sprawling, drugged-up R&B sound: Doc McKinney, best known for Esthero's Breath From Another and another guy named Illangelo. Beyond that and a handful of "unofficial" but suspiciously high-budget videos, we have the music on these two mixtapes.
Though there's less breathing space on Thursday, and fewer melodic hooks, it still feels of a piece with House of Balloons. There's the same ineffably skeezy vibe and a genuine sense of the album-as-journey, brought upon by smart sequencing and Tesfaye's willingness to complicate his devilish, drug-addled Lothario persona. The production is slightly harsher and streaked with violence, befitting the lyrical content-- "Life of the Party", the best and most disturbing song here, is based around doom-like guitar riffs that suggest something truly terrible about to happen. The guitars burst forth during Tesfaye's mocking chorus ("you're the life of the party"), sung as he casually convinces a girl into a group-sex situation. Other songs are tinged with similarly abrasive sounds: drill'n'bass noises rattle around in the background of opening track "Lonely Star"; "Rolling Stone" begins with a blustery chunk of heavily processed guitar; and the final track, "Heaven or Las Vegas" (not a Cocteau Twins cover) features a late-song interruption by screeching effects and heavy echo. For contrast , the only jarring touch to the production on the fairly one-note House of Balloons is the title track's Siouxsie and the Banshees sample. So the world here, in addition to being more sonically varied, feels just a little darker and a little more dangerous.
Oh yeah-- and Drake shows up on this one. He delivers an end-of-song verse on "The Zone", very much in his "I'm on One" mode. Which means he's full of confidence and rapping in a manner that lurches forward and then slows-up, teasing his melodic, every-dude croon but never giving into those R&B impulses. The Weeknd and Drake have been linked for a while now, first through a series of blog and Twitter co-signs and now as proper collaborators, so it's interesting to finally hear the superstar step into this far more debauched world. Surprisingly, he remains himself, talking about not having fun at a strip club ("Whoa, all these broken hearts on that pole") and later on, advising a groupie to "be you." Even when Drake seemingly stumbles into an encounter in which he does indeed, fuck "your girlfriend," he isn't devilishly smiling about it, and there's no question of consent as there often is on many of the Weeknd's drug-fueled seduction songs. The introduction of anything resembling an ethical point of view is jarring and underlines the stark differences between these collaborators.
Drake gets mileage out of being conflicted and in over his head, while Tesfaye sings from the perspective of an unabashed creep who doesn't care what people think, and waits for the moment when everything's at a tipping point and people's guards are down. Part of the odd appeal to the Weeknd's music is that by spending this much time with a predator, the vulnerable inconsistencies in an image trying hard to armor itself with coke, pills, and cynicism start to show through. Repeating the days of the week on "Thursday" slowly comes off as pretty pathetic, even a tad OCD, and "Gone", a hypnotic, purposefully stagnant epic, feels a lot like being at a party near a guy content to tell you how fucked up he is, over and over again. The gorgeous "Rolling Stone" contains meta references to Tesfaye "smoking til' [he] can't hit another note" and concerns that his mystery is fading. It's almost sympathetic, though it's just as likely that this is some new, more nefarious form of seduction by way of self-deprecation; after all, the last words crooned on the album are, "I am God."
When Thursday comes to an end, you have to wonder where the Weeknd go from here. This is the danger of anonymity and telling of the way Internet hype programs our cheapest impulses: We're ready to ask about the next thing before this other thing, even though it's quite good and rewarding, has come to an end. The Weeknd, however, know what they're doing, and so, in a few months, another new release, Echoes of Silence, is due to arrive, and our strange, dysfunctional relationship with their damaged R&B will start all over again.


The second album by Inter Arma is a bleak picture of danger, apocalypse, despair, and dismay. But the Richmond, VA, band's energy and obvious enthusiasm for their unlikely alchemy of influences-- such as Zeppelin, Lightning Bolt, and Sleep-- make Sky Burial a truly exhilarating listen.

Sky Burial

On the second full-length from Richmond, VA's heavy psychedelic alchemists Inter Arma, danger and apocalypse always loom nearby, casting long shadows over everything within sight. In these eight songs, the destroyer becomes the vaunted creator. Humankind sends the earth into a vortex of despair and decay. End-times gloom represents a lone currency of hope. The music is made to match, too, with salvos of rapid-fire black metal and plumes of foreboding instrumental drift lightning the lantern toward darkness.
Listening to Sky Burial, however, is one of the most exhilarating experiences you might hope to have with a record, largely because its creators sound so obviously intoxicated and energized by the possibilities of music itself. As these five multi-instrumentalists and experimenters work through creaking doom and obliterative marches, smoldering introductions and scowling grooves, the sense that they’re loving every moment of this is pervasive. They foreground their enthusiasm and counter the darkness with contagious élan. Appropriate for an album so obsessed by the beginnings that endings can bring, Sky Burial’s misanthropic heart is inspired enough to make one, well, happy.
At nearly 70 minutes, Sky Burial is a massive stylistic crucible where unlikely influences and aspirations bleed and blur into one another. Inter Arma represents a convergence of disparate traditions-- Led Zeppelin and Lightning Bolt, Pink Floyd and Pentangle, Immortal and Enslaved, Sleep and the Staple Singers. Though all these strains share the same space, Inter Arma never sounds claustrophobic, meaning they give each component its due before showing how it can cooperate with the next approach. Acoustic interludes in the midst of loud rock records, for instance, certainly aren’t novel ideas, but when Inter Arma push away from the amps and drop the howls, the acoustic instrumentals don’t function as mere sideshows. Lined with sighing steel guitar and sustained piano notes, the four-minute “The Long Road Home (Iron Gate)” shows similar development to the 10-minute epics that bookend it. Inter Arma opens its successor, “The Long Road”, with more than seven minutes of rising rock ’n’ roll action, reaching the It Still Moves-sized limits of My Morning Jacket before catapulting, without hesitation, into a malevolent Scandinavian-influenced blast. At one point, “Westward” flips from a patchwork of noise and grindcore into the sort of open-wheel blues metal you’d expect from millennial Allman descendants.
One could counter, of course, that being stoked on making music isn’t enough to make said music good. The teenager enlisting friends to join a basement rock band is certainly zealous, but that doesn’t mean their tunes are worthy of your time. But Inter Arma isn’t just ardent. Rather, these songs are both well designed and well executed. The ingenious “’sblood” rides the same riff and rhythm for most of its six minutes, while Mike Paparo shouts four repetitive lines about the limits of the earth. He breaks the lines into pairs, though, a device that the band uses to create a tripwire of tension as the audience awaits the conclusion. Opener “The Survival Fires” might be the band’s best dexterity showcase to date. Drummer and instrumental cleanup man T.J. Childers works through demanding patterns; he rolls into stuttering beats and lumbers into distended grooves. The guitars match the action, countering the central theme with grinding dissonance and sudden breakaways. In metal, this sort of spirit without the skills to match can be a missed opportunity, while the skills without the spirit can be worse still. Musically, Inter Arma is good enough to manage all of these sounds; emotionally, they are excited enough to make them work in one righteous exhortation.
Sky Burial will likely land as one of the year’s great breakthroughs for a heavy act, standing, at least in my mind, as the same sort of pay-attention proclamation as the Body’s All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood in 2010 or Pallbearer’s Sorrow and Extinction in 2012. That’s good news for Relapse Records, the venerable metal syndicate that picked up Inter Arma after their fine full-length debut, Sundown. But listening to Sky Burial, you get the sense that an escalation of notoriety won’t change Inter Arma so much. They are, after all, already making music that doesn’t make sense on paper. Segue the Southern rock instrumental into Second Wave black metal screech? Sure. Volley from tightly wound prog into swaggering stoner land? OK.
The root of Inter Arma’s creative success seems to be their delight in stubbornness, their willingness to indulge what they’d like to indulge, with no need to negotiate genre expectations. In this post-everything moment, where multiple sounds often arrive at once, it’s common for young musicians to exist as magpies, collecting stylistic scraps only to display them as their own piece. It is, however, much rarer for those results to seem so wholly synthesized, even as the individual parts don’t buckle under the weight of their accoutrements. Sky Burial does just that, brandishing erudition just enough to arrive at a crossroads of inspiration and innovation.


The influential jazz bassist assembles an ambitious tribute to the songs of Curtis Mayfield, featuring contributions from Amiri Baraka, Hamid Drake, and more.

William Parker: I Plan to Stay a Believer: The Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield

When Curtis Mayfield recorded his last album in 1996, he did it lying on his back, singing a line at a time. He had no choice-- he'd been paralyzed since a 1990 lighting rig accident. He was near the end of a life and career that saw him become one of the most influential songwriters and performers of his generation. He was a multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter, producer and thinker who had his hands in a lot of amazing music, and was among the first black pop artists to inject the ideas and hopes of the Civil Rights movement into his work, doing it subtly at first with the Impressions with "Amen" and "Keep on Pushing" and then much more directly later on.
Jazz, of course, got to openly supporting Civil Rights and expressing black pride before pop music did. Max Roach's 1960 Freedom Now Suite is a good example. Charles Mingus' 1959 classic "Fables of Faubus" was a sly and sarcastic takedown of Arkansas governor Orval Faubus after the Little Rock Nine incident-- the list is pretty long. Part of the reason jazz got there before Mayfield is that Mayfield was working within the constraints of pop radio, which is where all his record labels were aiming. In 1960, he couldn't have done what Max Roach was doing for the simple fact that no one would have given him the chance.
Jazz bassist William Parker was getting his start in the early 70s just as Mayfield went solo with a series of albums that very directly addressed issues of race, equality, and black pride. These themes have run through Parker's work as well for decades, so a tribute to Mayfield seems natural and fitting. Parker isn't simply interpreting or covering Mayfield's songs on I Plan to Stay a Believer, though. He's extending them, treating them as living documents, and adding new content that dovetails with Mayfield's political thoughts. Parker's notes on the recording explain his belief that every song has an "inside song" waiting to be reborn, and he implies that these are the songs he heard inside Mayfield's music.
Parker and his collaborators began work on this project nearly 10 years ago, and this final document is a live compilation of sorts, bringing together performances from 2001, 2002, 2007 and 2008 into a basically seamless whole that presents a panoramic exploration of both Mayfield's music and modern black identity over two discs. Actually, the recording dates are interesting, because three of these tracks were recorded in Italy just days before the election of Barack Obama, and there is a sort of old-school Civil Rights thrust to the additional poetry contributed by Amiri Baraka-- post-racial this is not, and it's sort of a pre-acknowledgement that having a black president won't automatically erase all of the nation's tormented racial history.
Looking across the two-disc track list is a little intimidating-- eight of the eleven tracks are over ten minutes long, with "If There's a Hell Below" topping out at 21:23, so you know up front that this won't be a casual listen. These songs twist and turn, invariably opening with musical motifs from Mayfield's originals-- the creeping bass line of "Hell Below", the funky riff of "Freddie's Dead", the ebullient horn fanfare of "Move on Up", here slowed, rounded off and made significantly darker-- and from there, it's anyone's guess where the energy of the performance will take the band. Gospel, bop, soul, funk, post-bop and free music are all part of this mix, and the band spends a lot of time between them as well. For instance, the 10-minute version of "This Is My Country (New York)" on disc two takes on the feel of an out-of-control revival, ultimately flying off the rails into an ecstatic muddle of squealing sax, shouting, and tumbling drums.
It has the feel of the type of project Charles Mingus might have taken on had he lived to see this century, ambitious and quasi-historical, but still swinging and loaded with content that takes many listens to unpack. The band is amazing. Several tracks feature choirs (including a choir of 90 children on two of those tracks), but they blend right in, adding to the dual vocal attack of Baraka and singer Leena Conquest, a long-time Parker collaborator who dances through these tangled arrangements and the heavy subject matter with tremendous grace. Asim Barnes plays guitar on only three tracks, but I could spend a whole paragraph breaking down why what he does is thrilling, and drummer Hamid Drake is strictly next-level on every song. The way he switches between a slow, swinging beat and a double-time stomp on "Move on Up" is breathtaking and helps transform the song into a living, pulsing beast-- Conquest riffs on "Keep on Pushing" as the song begins to break down and head off into freer territory, and if you've spent any amount of time digging Mayfield in the past, you will love the way she does it.
I wish I could've seen some of these performances in person, because the amount of energy the band packs into them surely must have flowed right into the crowd. Even here, pressed onto little plastic discs, the band practically explodes toward you. I have no idea what Mayfield would think of these versions of his songs, but it's hard to imagine him being anything but flattered by the immense thought and planning that clearly went into these arrangements. To pull and stretch these songs so much and still preserve their essential identity is a true feat of art.


Four months after “drivers license,” pop’s newest star offers a nimble and lightly chaotic collection of breakup tunes filled with melancholy and mischief.

SOUR

Few people on Earth can know how Olivia Rodrigo feels right now; even by today’s standards of viral fame, her rise has been exceptional. On January 7, she was playing in the celebrity minor leagues, the not-quite-18-year-old star of the Disney+ show High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. By January 12, she had smashed streaming records and blanketed TikTok with her debut single, “drivers license,” a piano-driven power ballad steeped in suburban malaise and teen anguish. Since then, she’s graced magazine covers, sung at the Brits, and become the subject of an SNL sketch. Then she was invited on as the musical guest.
But most of us can know how Olivia Rodrigo felt when she wrote her debut album, Sour: so gutted by heartbreak she simply couldn’t talk about anything else. “drivers license” outlined a crushing breakup, the contours of which became clearer in subsequent singles. A gossipy real-life backstory aided—though certainly did not precipitate—the song’s rise. (If you must know, it’s said to be about Joshua Bassett, Rodrigo’s HSM:TM:TS co-star, who has since been linked to another Disney star.)
The matter of failed romance is central to Sour, a nimble and lightly chaotic grab bag of breakup tunes, filled with both melancholy and mischief. Rodrigo’s first trick: Seconds into the lugubrious strings that open the record, she and her producer, Dan Nigro, abruptly switch to grunge guitar and distortion. Abandoning both the gossamer falsetto and the emotive belt that power “drivers license,” Rodrigo adopts a wry sprechstimme on “brutal” to rattle off her grievances: self-doubt, impossible expectations, her inability to parallel park. “Where’s my fucking teenage dream?” she snarls, wisecracking about the way pop culture romanticizes youth. It’s not particularly elegant—it’s not meant to be. Bucking expectations about the kind of sounds she might gravitate toward? That’s just part of the fun.
When she was little, Rodrigo and her mother made a habit of grabbing records indiscriminately from the thrift store, exposing her to the mistiness of Carole King and the muscle of Pat Benatar. Born two years post-Napster, two years pre-YouTube, Rodrigo grew up with music of all varieties at her fingertips. The range of her taste, and her disinterest in choosing a lane, animate Sour; queue up a track at random, and you might hear pop-punk fireworks à la Paramore (“good 4 u”), dewy-eyed soft balladry à la Ingrid Michaelson (“1 step forward, 3 steps back”), or alt-rock squall à la the Kills (“jealousy, jealousy”). Like any teenager, Rodrigo is trying on identities. The fluidity of her approach creates a sense of play that balances out the record’s more sullen moments—the self-righteous sprawl of “traitor,” for example, or the sinister extended metaphor of “favorite crime.”
Of Rodrigo’s many influences, she’s most obviously styled herself after Taylor Swift, whose work she praises often and emphatically. Like her idol, Rodrigo treats emotional turmoil like jet fuel, and laces her lyrics with specifics—a Billy Joel song she and her ex listened to together, the self-help books she read to impress him. She’s said that the shouty bridge in Swift’s “Cruel Summer” directly inspired her own in “deja vu”; “1 step forward, 3 steps back” interpolates the reputation song “New Year's Day.” And publicly inveighing against a heartbreaker, then sauntering off with the last word? How very Swiftian.
But there’s more to Rodrigo’s writing than revenge; Sour gives her occasion to examine her own insecurities. “I wore makeup when we dated ’cause I thought you’d like me more,” she sings over fingerpicked guitar on the tearful “enough for you.” It’s a shot at her ex for underappreciating her, but also a hard lesson about not making concessions. On “happier,” a sweet-and-sour ballad that appeared in demo form on Rodrigo’s Instagram in early 2020, she grapples with the faulty narrative of female rivalry: “And now I’m picking her apart/Like cutting her down will make you miss my wretched heart.” It was this song that captured the attention of Nigro, a former emo band frontman who’s written with Carly Rae Jepsen and Conan Gray. It’s easy to hear what he heard in the homemade snippet: a gently tumbling melody, Rodrigo’s flute-like lilt, a winning balance of pettiness and wisdom.
Meanwhile, Rodrigo is still very much a part of the Disney ecosystem, reprising her role in the second season of HSM:TM:TS, which debuted just last week. To anyone familiar with the history of Disney darlings and the morality clauses that typically bind them, the profanity that peppers Sour will stand out as a break from type. This minor subversion of expectations has given Rodrigo a low-key rebel status. Like her seeming newness, her earnestness, the heartbreak baked into her ascent, it’s one of the qualities that make her easy to root for. In a way, the flattening effect of the internet has worked in her favor, allowing her—someone who has been on TV for roughly a third of her life and is signed with the biggest record company in the world—to slip into the role of the underdog.
Rodrigo avoided the major-label treatment when Universal left her and Nigro largely to their own devices to make Sour. But the effort to preserve the authenticity of Rodrigo’s voice also leaves her shortcomings more exposed. The flatness of the melody on “traitor” is especially noticeable alongside the movement of “drivers license”; “enough for you” is oversung. On a record largely centered around a single story, Rodrigo can fixate on select plot points (like the amount of time it took her ex to move on), rather than seeking out new angles. She sometimes settles for simple rhymes and self-evident phrasings: “You betrayed me/And I know that you’ll never feel sorry.” In moments like these, she seems more invested in content than in craft.
Of all the songs on Sour, “hope ur ok” feels most connected to her Disney lineage. Over a twinkly instrumental, Rodrigo sings directly to a victim of child abuse, a queer girl rejected by her family, and to outcasts more broadly. In its message of love and acceptance, the song calls to mind the empowerment anthems churned out by a previous generation of Disney stars. But as Sour’s closer, “hope ur ok” is limp. An outward-looking loosie tacked on to 10 songs about the world inside Rodrigo’s head and heart, it reads as a last-minute effort to demonstrate perspective and maturity. Someone out there might feel genuinely comforted by Rodrigo’s words, and that matters. But, as the success of “drivers license” shows, there’s a certain magic to be found in embracing your own mess.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Common’s dissonant, politically-charged new album Black America Again finds him angry and off-balance—which feels like it’s exactly where he should be.

Black America Again

At 11 albums strong, Common’s career has passed through so many stages that he’s got a trail of shed skins, including two or three different rappers (and half a rockstar) along the way. So when his later-period albums, from 2014’s tough and sorrowful Nobody’s Smiling to this week’s striking Black America Again, are called a return to form for the Chicago-bred MC, it may be important to clarify which form he’s returning to, and establish some signposts for hearing an album as momentous as this one is.
Back in 2014, Common’s frequent collaborator Questlove called for a revival of protest music in the wake of a grand jury’s decision not to indict the police officer who killed Eric Garner. Scarcely two years on, ugly racial rhetoric has characterized a seemingly endless campaign season, outrage over extrajudicial police killings has taken on a sort of sick rhythm, and it’s actually hard to remember a world where there was a shortage of protest music. D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly and Solange’s A Seat At the Table, among others, have upended expectations and reinvigorated and expanded the category frames (hip-hop, soul or simply black music) placed around them.
This is important context for listening to Black America Again, partly because great albums from the Okayplayer/Soulquarian family seem to come in waves—and there is a strong case to be made that Black America Again is to Black Messiah what Like Water for Chocolate was to the 2000-era classics Voodoo and Things Fall Apart.  Some of the big-room soul flourishes (courtesy of John Legend and BJ the Chicago Kid) trend toward the thematically safer sound that characterized Com’s Oscar winning Selma song; a touch expected—corny, even—if still emotionally stirring. But overall Karriem Riggins’ gritty, moody production provides Com with his most eclectic (and apt) sonic backing since Kanye's production on Be. It may also be the angriest—and not coincidentally, sharpest lyrically—we've seen Com since his Ice Cube dis “Bitch In Yoo”—warmed-over beefs with Drake notwithstanding.
Yet there is clearly more to Black America Again than just ripped-from-the-headlines timeliness. After all, in a season when #BlackLivesMatter is at the front of the public consciousness, pretty much every artist who shows up to the BET Awards (and a bunch who didn’t) has adopted the appropriate signifiers of Woke-ness—right down to erstwhile Rubber Band Man T.I.—without necessarily touching artistic greatness. It is, in fact, the way the current mood dovetails with Common’s personal story arc that gives it its power. After prophetically calling on America to “Impeach [Bush] and elect Obama” on Jadakiss’ 2004 “Why” remix, Com has arguably spent the Obama years seeking a worthy opponent for his battle skills—and failing to locate one. The bloodshed and racial tension of 2015-16 have finally focused his considerable firepower. It also doesn’t hurt that it was helmed by the brilliant Karriem Riggins, the Detroit-based drummer who has been a staple of Common’s live band for years—and who has truly stepped into his own with his production work here.
Riggins works firmly in the post-metric genre-verse first explored by J Dilla, but he is one of the few beatmakers who can truly hang with the master. His sonically grungy, emotionally and rhythmically complex arrangements push Com’s flow into an off-balance, never-quite-slipping dance that will be familiar to longtime fans as Com’s zone. From the moment he stepped on the scene in the early ’90s, Com has been a sharp battle rapper, noted for laying down bars in solid combinations of gut-punches like a prize fighter, yet capable of a sort of tipsy whimsy when he allows himself to be loose.
This is exactly the side of Common that Riggins’ compositions bring out of him, and for the first 10 tracks or so, the album flows along flawlessly. Frenetic drum patterns rush ahead of the beat even as noodle-y electric jazz textures and screwed vocal samples pull backward at different speeds, interrogating the meter of  “straight” time in ways that recall Dilla’s drunken drums. Bilal’s vocals add another layer of virtuosic dissonance to several tracks while Common’s Yoda-like constructions (“As dirty as the water in Flint the system is”) create internal rhyme schemes and tripping-into-the-next bar rhyme schemes in counterpoint with the off-kilter beats.
The chemistry is so right, in fact, it’s enough to make you re-evaluate Com’s career arc, at least since 2000. For many fans his artistic growth peaked in the Soulquarian era, then spun out on Electric Circus where he maybe got a bit too loose. In this reading of Common’s story arc, recent outings (2011’s The Dreamer/The Believer; 2014’s Nobody’s Smiling) are less comeback triumphs than back-to-basics bootcamps, or the solid road-game victories he needed before he regained the confidence to stretch out and loosen up a little again.
The single and title track “Black America Again” is a brilliant case in point; huge piano chords overpower a drum break that is EQ’ed into such crispy upper reaches of the treble range that it threatens to disappear, an inversion of all conventional pop or hip-hop logic. Even Stevie Wonder’s relentlessly melodious voice is chopped and phrased in unexpected ways and Com’s delivery channels the spoken-word of his idols the Last Poets in a way that stands alongside his very best verses: “You know, you know we from a family of fighters/Fought in your wars and our wars/You put a n***a in Star Wars/Maybe you need two/And then maybe then we’ll believe you.”
Momentum falters a bit on “The Day Women Took Over” a well-meaning narrative that posits woman-power as the solution to all problems but reduces them to embodiments of abstract virtues, rather than identities or agents of their own desires, reminiscent of Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq. But Common finds his footing again with “Little Chicago Boy” (the requisite variation on “Pop’s Rap”) and “Letter to the Free,” which serves as a sort of closing argument. If it ends the album on a more sedate note, the choice feels deliberate, reminding us that in his most inspiring moments, Common is swinging at the Big Questions of our time, and that even his loose improvisations are still part of a larger project.
It’s very much worth unpacking that project, since it both dovetails with and cuts against the grain of modern Black activist thought. Common has in fact taken heat for suggesting in interviews that Black people should respond to racism by “extending my hand in love.” Even as he gives voice to his hurt and anger and eloquently runs down the undeniable crimes committed against Black Americans, he seems to be asking again throughout the album’s lyrics what freedom could even look like in this America—and time and again he suggests that freedom itself is an act of improvisation, of imagination, that begins now: “We write our own story.”
It’s in the context of these bigger ideas that Com lands some of his biggest gut-punches of all time, while rapping in his simpler, prize fighter mode: “No consolation prize for the dehumanized/For America to rise/It’s a matter of Black lives/And we gon’ free them so we can free us…”—bringing home again the sheer magnitude of the forces he’s been dancing with all along.


On wide-ranging Canadian producer Ryan Hemsworth's first solo LP and second major release of 2013 after the Still Awake EP, he remains stylistically daring, but shows off a newfound focus. The material still meanders, though with more purpose, sharper hooks, and lusher instrumental textures.

Guilt Trips

In the growing body of writing about how disastrous millennials are supposed to be, people throw around phrases like “severely shortened attention spans” as an insult, but the twentysomething producer Ryan Hemsworth is proof that this assumed failing can, in fact, be a great strength. Over his short but industrious career he’s displayed an almost pathological inability to stick with any one particular style of music for more than a few minutes at a time. He’s remixed everyone from Cat Power to Waka Flocka Flame to Danish pop duo Quadron, and his DJ sets bounce nimbly between disparate styles: radio rap into ambient electronics, slick 90s R&B into aggressive dancehall.
In his own productions he’s been relatively more consistent, but still wide-ranging. His original works tend to consist of a rap beat, often one that uses the rhythms of trap rap and sounds that could've been lifted off the laptop of an experimental electronic musician, layered with washes of synthesizers and manipulated vocal samples that deliver the same benzo bliss as Clams Casino and Shlohmo, albeit with a more ragged, deconstructed feel. With subtle tweaks to his formula he can evoke Tangerine Dream or the-Dream with equal ease.
On Guilt Trips, his first solo LP (after an album length collaboration with the rapper Shady Blaze) and second major release of 2013 (after May’s Still Awake EP), he’s still stylistically daring, but shows off a newfound focus that’s uncharacteristic but successful. There’s more clarity here than on his past work—production-wise he’s removed much of the haze that some of his other releases swam in, and the songwriting shows considerably more forethought than previous compositions, which often just wandered around for a while then ended.
His new stuff still meanders, though now with more purpose, sharper hooks, and lusher instrumental textures. They’re most apparent on the several tracks here made for vocalists like avant-rapper Lofty305 and R&B singer Sinead Harnett. “Still Cold” lays a plaintive vocal by Baths over an electropop arrangement that hints at both the Postal Service and some of Brian Eno’s more accessibly quirky 70s material, and is way more hummable than any of Hemsworth’s old stuff.
This new straightforwardness is even more apparent on “One for Me”, featuring up and coming singer Tinashe. It sounds far less like the experimental twists on radio R&B he’s made his name on, and more like something you'd straight up hear on the radio, with a popping bass line, skittering hi-hats, and Tinashe’s voice stacked in Mariah-like formations. As pop’s become increasingly enraptured by blends of rap, R&B, and dance music, pop producers have taken an interest in artists like Hemsworth and his sometimes collaborators like Shlohmo and Supreme Cuts who specialize in these sorts of combinations. A few recent largish albums have shown what seem to be clear signs of their influence. Whether it’s a conscious decision or just the result of his evolution as an artist, Hemsworth’s starting to return the favor, and in the process is looking more than capable of competing in the pop field.
A few small things would need to change in order for that to happen, though. His mixes, while substantially less murky than on his previous recordings, are still a little too unpolished. While there’s something idiosyncratic and slightly rebellious about his tendency to keep the low end just shy of where it should be, it also keeps the songs from being fully satisfying.
One thing he shouldn’t have to adapt is his stylistic peripateticism. Like his DJ sets, Guilt Trips is all over the place genre-wise, but it never feels dilettantish. He has an astute ability to figure out what makes different styles tick, and to replicate them in his own work. The tracks here suggest that along with trap rap, Chicago house, electropop, and the dozen or so styles that get vigorously nodded at over the span of 10 songs, he’s also starting to get a grip on the rules of composing the kind of stuff the Hot 100’s made from. Where he goes from here, whether up into the pop world or laterally off to into some new genre experiments, seems to be totally up to him.


The 11 irresistibly fun songs on Brooklyn indie rockers Ava Luna's new Electric Balloon are as eccentric as anything the band has ever done, but they stick in your head in a way their earlier material didn't.

Electric Balloon

Ethan Bassford, the fatefully named bassist of Brooklyn art-rock oddballs Ava Luna, got into a few arguments with singer/guitarist Carlos Hernandez while they were writing their 2012 debut album, Ice Level. Couldn't they at least try to write a song with a chorus?, Bassford wondered. As the freewheeling, compositionally adventurous Ice Level attests—the answer was a resounding no. But Bassford persisted. "I was like, 'Carlos, don't worry,'" he recalled in a recent interview. "'It's still gonna be weird. Having a chorus doesn't make it not weird.'"
After hearing Ava Luna's taut and irresistibly fun new album Electric Balloon, it's hard to disagree. Its 11 songs are as eccentric as anything this band of merry weirdos has ever done, but they stick in your head in a way their earlier material did not. Ava Luna are a kitchen-sink band, whose richly cluttered songs pull from a variety of influences: dance-punk, funk, doo-wop, and R&B. (They've summed it up in a perfectly succinct Bandcamp tag: "nervous soul.") They're one of very few current indie bands (in New York or anywhere else) reaching back to the lineage of no-wave; Hernandez often sings in a trembling falsetto but his acrobatic yelps sounds like nobody so much as James Chance. Because of their punchy and tightly arranged female backing vocals, Ava Luna often get compared to Dirty Projectors, but that parallel is more appropriate for the figures at the center of those bands. Like Dave Longstreth, Hernandez is an intelligent, almost-too-ambitious maestro who over time has learned how to embrace playfulness and shine a spotlight around his equally talented ensemble.
Ava Luna wrote and recorded Electric Balloon over two different two-week-long working vacations sequestered in a house in upstate New York; every evening, they'd cook, crack jokes, and then channel their energy into nightly after-dinner jam sessions. The result of this process—"more like culling than just writing," as Bassford says—is a much looser album than Ice Level, which was carefully arranged to the point of sometimes feeling stiff or aloof. But there's an inclusive, kinetic vibe to the best songs on Electric Balloon (which was produced by Hernandez and drummer Julian Fader), like the spunky shout-along "Sears Roebuck M&Ms", or "Plain Speech", which morphs halfway through from jittery funk to dazzling AM radio gold. Ava Luna are an exhilarating live band, and Electric Balloon is the first thing they've done that comes close to bottling that energy.
Since Ice Level, Ava Luna have shrunk from a seven-piece to a five-piece, and this streamlining has cleared out some (though not all) of the clutter in their sound and benefited the band dynamic. Felicia Douglass (vocals/keyboards) and Becca Kauffman (vocals/guitar) are both more active presences on Electric Balloon—and this is a very good thing. Ava Luna are now a band with not one but three distinct lead singers, each with unique but complementary personalities. Hernandez's songs, like the opener "Daydream", are often driven by a frayed, manic intensity. (The "nervous soul" tag is definitely most apt when he's at the helm.) It's an enjoyably wild ride, but it might be too much to take were it not balanced out by quieter moments like the ballad "PRPL", Douglass's stunning and velvety lead vocal turn.
But, as long as you like your choruses weird, the breakout star of Electric Balloon is Kauffman. She vamps and woooops! through "Sears Roebuck M&Ms" like a kid riding a sugar high, and spews mesmerizing gibberish throughout the title track, which channels the brief moment when the B-52s were too strange for the radio. That last song was written most spontaneously of all, when Kauffman stepped up to the mic and started riffing on a vocal idea she had during one of the after-dinner jam sessions. The rest of the band tried to join in but they weren't quite sure what she was saying: "Shock me with electrical uhh?" "Shopping with electric balloon?" None of the guesses amount to much sense—but damn if that mysterious hook isn't stuck in your head for days. Ava Luna are still speaking in tongues, as they always have been, but this time they're inviting you to sing along.


Abi Reimold is a Philadelphia artist whose dark voice bears similarities to Mitski and Angel Olsen, yet sticking a singer/songwriter tag on Reimold feels like a disservice. Reimold isn’t just playing her music; she’s living it, and it sounds goddamn exhausting.

Wriggling

Abi Reimold's voice is ripe with pure emotion. On her debut full-length, Wriggling, the 23-year-old Philadelphia singer wields the instrument like a crooked sword she only just learned she's rather good at using. There are surface similarities to Mitski and Angel Olsen's dark delivery, yet sticking a singer/songwriter tag on Reimold feels like a disservice. She isn't just playing her music; she's living it, and it sounds goddamn exhausting. The album art, an open can of worms—yes, they're wriggling—in tight focus, mirrors her sound well. There's slime, dirt, and awkwardness in all 12 tracks, and hearing her crawl through the tangle to confront depression and self-worth is both harrowing and invigorating. Statements like "Fuck this and fuck me" roll off her tongue mid-song easily and without emphasis, and for good reason. At 23 years old, that's a mantra, not a one-time thought.
Reimold wrote much of the material two years ago when she came into legal adulthood. Wriggling carries that intimacy, the wide-eyed fear of what's to come after the façade of teenagerdom disintegrates, particularly in the record's folkier moments. "An illusion of an elevator: how we create our creator," she sings on "Machine," somewhat hopeless, before continuing: "Grant me my mortality, make me blind so I won't see/ That there's no scheme, there is no plan, we grow where our seeds happen to land." On "Vessel," she claws at her own organs with diaristic imagery ("Perhaps the bolts themselves will tighten/ Sit on my ass waiting for you to ripen") and eventually turns to instruments like pedal steel on "Trap" to create the fullness of a '60s country-rock song.
When Reimold switches to electric guitar, she locks into late '90s alt-rock mode. "Bad Seed" starts full throttle with help from Philly neighbors Mumblr for the rhythm section. Things turn heavier with "Clouded" and "Mask," songs that could easily be mistaken for early Speedy Ortiz demos, as she reverts to thick riffs and sings through a delay pedal for vocal distortion. Throughout the album, Reimold communicates the sensation that she's working through memories in real time, ones that are clearly still fresh enough to punch her in the gut. It gives her songs the feel of being performed right in front of you.
Combining those two styles of songwriting can feel lopsided, but she pulls it off. The mix of rock and folk is soldered with lo-fi recordings of intimate moments: a room's silent hum while someone texts, a passing car whose music can be heard through closed windows, a playground in the distance where children shriek during a game of tag. Those poetic inserts never take themselves too seriously.
Wriggling's darkest moments recall the gloominess of Cat Power's quieter material or Torres' Sprinter. Two-minute track "Dust" finds her beating herself up repeatedly. The song's only two lines ("I will learn what dust tastes like/ I am not immune") change shape each time they leave her mouth. Each repetition is cushioned by new sounds, switching from bedroom guitar strums to guitars overcome with shrill feedback. Like many of her Philly peers, from Hop Along to Radiator Hospital to every self-described DIY band in between, Reimold guards her confessional lyrics with punk attiude, but her delivery sets her apart from the rest. Her voice is just coarse enough to sound painful, but soft enough to sound private. If it weren't for the tender heart beating in her songs, Reimold's music would be brutal. Luckily for us, life has already claimed that title—and she's still in the process of learning that it won't let up anytime soon.


College Dropout Mini-Course Syllabus
Week 1: Allow Myself to Introduce Myself. Backstory. Discuss humble beginnings making beats in bedroom, car ...

The College Dropout

College Dropout Mini-Course Syllabus
Week 1: Allow Myself to Introduce Myself. Backstory. Discuss humble beginnings making beats in bedroom, car accident in October 2002 that nearly killed him. Consider rise to fame: Currently has three singles in the Top 20 ("Slow Jamz", "You Don't Know My Name", "Through the Wire") bearing his name. Compare/contrast rise of hip-hop artist/producers with singer/songwriter movement of 1970s; Is Kanye West Neil Young or Neil Diamond?
Week 2: Chitown, What's Going On? Discuss the failure of Chicago to produce a bona fide hip-hop star despite possessing more than enough fertile neighborhoods of racial segregation and socioeconomic difficulty. Uncover reasons why Common and West needed to move NYC-wards to attain widespread success.
Week 3: First Nigga with a Benz and a Backpack. Analyze the fast-disappearing line between mainstream and underground hip-hop, as personified by College Dropout's guest appearances, and West's personal rap style. Compare/contrast to analogous rock divisions, in regards to how rock collaborations of similar caliber (Nickelback ft. Xiu Xiu?) would be greeted with indignant horror by fans.
Week 4: School Spirit. Engage the anti-education themes of College Dropout's songs and skits, discussing why this particular message is greatly emphasized by West. Acknowledge the groaner irony of discussing an album's anti-intellectualism in syllabus form.
So many extracurricular angles, so little time; so let's just suffice it to say that College Dropout is the first great hip-hop album of the still pre-pubescent 2004. Runner-up in its first week on the Billboard album charts only to Ravi Shankar's jazz-waif kid, the record is poised to be a huge coming-out party for one of the top producers working today, possibly even winning him the Outkast Triple Crown of acceptance from pop radio, hip-hop purists, and reactionary rock critics. Frequently delayed, retooled, overdubbed, teased on the mixtape circuit, overloaded with skits and guest stars, and dispersed in multiple misleading forms over the Internet, the retail version finally takes the form of a flawed, overlong, hypocritical, egotistical, and altogether terrific album.
In a way, it's strange that West would be the first of the current producer bumper crop to find such success with his own name on the spine, with The Neptunes and Timbaland having colonized the charttops for a much longer period of time, and with much more adventurous and characteristic sounds. West's style is far less future-vision, as he typically reworks old records with the playfulness of a kid enthralled by playing 33s at 45. You can write it off as a safer or less original approach, but the sugar-high soul technique tends to be an addictive substance in West's hands, as anyone who's had the hook from "H to the Izzo" stuck in their head for a week or eight can attest.
But Kanye's success through the studio glass is more drawn from his surprising abilities as an MC: He possesses a sizable amount of his Rocafella boss' charisma while hiding his occasional technical shortcomings with his gift for comedic timing. Mixtape downloaders have known this for a while, thanks to his whip-smart verses on "Heavy Hitters" and "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly", but College Dropout brings a new evidence file, whether he's probing creative tax accounting on "We Don't Care" or puncturing the air bag of designer materialism in "All Fall Down". And when words fail, Kanye can always fall back on his day job, camouflaging even less-inspired lyrical moments with affably absurd beat constructions like the vocoder/strings/handclaps amalgamation that carries "The New Workout Plan" past its lyrical juvenilia.
One begins to wish there were even more examples of Kanye's mic-work, as the album is also laden with distracting guest appearance speed-bumps-- spots that safety-net the album's bottom line but dilute the spotlight on its lead performer. Strangely, the biggest names fare the worst, with Jay-Z already sounding groggy from retirement on "Never Let Me Down" and Ludacris sounding groggy from something less legal on the hook to "Breathe In Breathe Out". The small names of Kanye's Chicago crew fail to impress as well, with GLC and Consequence's laconic verses deflating the menace of working-class lament "Spaceship".
As a result, the mid-level MCs steer around the flank to steal the show, particularly on the quietly tense "Get 'Em High" where Kanye coaxes Talib Kweli into lightening up and fellow Southsider Common into getting serious. Chart-topper "Slow Jamz" appears in a slightly longer (and slightly weaker) form featuring overkill Jamie Foxx and depleted Twista, but if you haven't reached your quota yet, it remains the best getting-it-on song ever written about getting-it-on songs. The ferocious "Two Words" up-ramps a Mandrill sample into an ominous choir and violin-fed war cry flexibly savage enough to allow Mos Def to spit about his politics, Kanye about his Grammys, and Freeway about Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Steven Seagal.
That "Two Words" is sequestered (along with the chock-full-of-clever "Through the Wire") behind a painful stretch of three clunker skits in four tracks (with the song island, "School Spirit", one of the album's weakest) shows that Kanye hasn't quite soaked in the lesson of the Jay-Z album that made his reputation: less skits = longer shelf life. Fortunately, listeners can take the editing into their own hands in this age of the iPod, also axing the once-interesting, twice-tiresome biography speech that fills out the 12-minute "Last Call". Deleting the skits also cuts down on the strange logic of the album's anti-college stance-- someone should tell West that not everyone on the street has the ability and/or luck to make a living in the music biz. (Full disclosure: Your reviewer may be biased by the fact that he'll probably be spending his lifetime in the Ivory Tower.)
Bloated tracklist, guest star overload, lyrical paradoxes: It all might sound a bit critical for an 8+ album, but College Dropout's flaws tend to only help make Kanye West all the more personable as an artist. With the fat playlist trimmed, the album lays down a sky-high standard for hip-hop challengers in '04, featuring enough singles in reserve to fill out the calendar year. Ideal weather conditions of Chicago's rap void, producer name-dropping, and mainstream/underground bleedover may have handled the advance work for Kanye West's arrival, but College Dropout doesn't muff the kick.


Björk's ninth proper full-length, filled with lush arrangements and some of her most powerful singing, can be slotted among the most human, emotionally candid, even functional of art forms: the breakup album.

Vulnicura

Björk has logged nearly 30 years of increasing artistic cred and platform-omnivorous ambition, and she has the enviable ability to anticipate sonic and technological waves just before they crest. But her albums over the past decade have underwhelmed, despite their reach and sense of craft. Part of it’s how Björk, as she’s grown as an artist, has grown inward; at her best (parts of Medúlla and Biophilia), her albums come off like slivers of some grand unrealized possibility—undeniably dazzling, but intimidating for everyone who isn’t Björk. At her worst (parts of Volta), those slivers are contorted, Procrustes-style, into the easy templates she left behind somewhere around Debut.
But part of it’s the tendency to make Björk into other, false versions of herself: Björk the wayward pop figure, Björk the wearer of the outfits that became memes, Björk the metaphor-smitten New Ager, Björk as the quirky vessel for her male collaborators, rather than the person with complete creative and curatorial control over all aspects of her music. Even Björk the genius, who works in the abstract, disconnected from, as she once sang, "the exchange of human emotions." But for all her classical ambitions and hyperextended metaphors, the best Björk tracks express startlingly direct emotional truths, blown up to their towering real-life scale.
Nowhere is this more clear than on her ninth album proper, Vulnicura. Co-produced by Arca (Kanye West’s Yeezus, FKA twigs’ LP1, his own Xen) and the Haxan Cloak and drawing on Björk’s split with artist Matthew Barney, the album places itself among the most human, emotionally candid, even functional of art forms: the breakup album. Its position is deliberate; in conversation with Pitchfork, she called Vulnicura a "traditional singer/songwriter thing," suggesting something plainspoken, modest, even folksy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Vulnicura is none of these things, but it’s simultaneously her most mature feat of arranging and almost psychosomatically affecting. It’s also, as was widely reported, with us a few months early. While it’d be wrong to say it’s for the best that Vulnicura was leaked then rush-released—no one in Björk’s position would welcome that—the leak does her an inadvertent service: it makes Vulnicura the first Björk album in years to come into the world untethered by museum exhibitions, movie tie-ins, iPad apps, or promo cycles involving Timbaland. We receive it simply on its own iconoclastic terms.
Vulnicura is loosely arranged around the chronology of a relationship: the period before the breakup, the dazed moments after, the slow recovery. It’s a sense of time that’s both hyper-specific—in the liner notes, Björk places each song up until the two-thirds mark in an exact point on the timeline, from nine months before to 11 months after—and loose, with half-moments that span entire dramatic arcs. "History of Touches", for example, is a near-forensic exhumation of the precise time of relationship death. The song begins and ends upon the narrator waking her soon-to-be-ex-lover, and Arca’s programming develops in slow motion as Björk’s vocal and lyric circle back upon the scale and warp the timeline: "The history of touches, every single archive compressed into a second." There’s some "Cocoon" in there, in the post-coital setting and smitten sigh, but there’s also the unmistakable sense that everything Björk describes is expiring as she speaks it. It’s luxuriant and bleary and sad, something like sleepwalking infatuated through an autopsy. Skip to several months after in the record's progression, album centerpiece "Black Lake", a masterwork of balancing elements: Björk’s requiem strings leading to Arca’s tectonic-plate percussion and vocal patches, cuttingly crafted (in unmistakably Björk fashion) lines like "I am bored of your apocalyptic obsessions" giving way to lines far more unadorned and unanswerable: "Did I love you too much?"
What keeps these questions from sounding maudlin are those flashes of rueful wit (elsewhere, on "Family": "Is there a place where I can pay respects for the death of my family?") and Björk’s vocal delivery; she’s at least twice expressed her admiration, at the pure musical level, of fado singer Amália Rodrigues, and you can hear it in how she leans into syllables, indulging feelings then dissecting them. Rarely does Vulnicura sound anything but seamless; her palette blends in drum-and-bass loops, flatline effects, groaning cellos, pitch-warped echoes by Antony Hegarty. The more Björk has grown as an arranger, the less dated her albums sound; closer "Quicksand" initially scans like it’s approaching over-timely Rudimental territory, but it’s a little late in the album for that, and this is soon subsumed into a string reverie that’s unmistakably hers.
In Björk’s discography, Vulnicura most resembles Vespertine, another unyieldingly cerebral work about vulnerability and being turned by love to besotted viscera, and also an unmistakably female album. Vulnicura doubles down on these elements, from the choir arrangements to the yonic wound imagery of the cover, like Björk’s attempt at a grand unified photoshoot of female pain, to Vulnicura’s echoes from the first track ("Moments of clarity are so rare—I better document this") of the long tradition of women artists thinking and rethinking their own life stories, in public, until they coalesce into art. Fittingly, when Björk dispenses with the breakup framework (and timestamps) two-thirds of the way through the album, Vulnicura becomes about more. "Mouth Mantra" is part glitchy nightmare of grotesque imagery ("my mouth was sewn up… I was not heard") and part reassertion of her artistic identity: "this tunnel has enabled thousands of sounds."
It isn’t just her. "I want to support young girls who are in their 20s now and tell them you’re not just imagining things," she told Pitchfork, and on "Quicksand" Vulnicura shifts finally from personal documentation of one person’s rough year to words for those who’ve stayed for it all: "Every time you give up, you take away our future and my continuity—and my daughter’s, and her daughters, and her daughters," Björk sings on the track, just before it cuts off mid-string cadenza. It’s possible to hear this as resignation, but it’s also possible to hear it as a note of hope, that there is a future after coming out of such an emotional wringer, if not quite one that’s reassuring. The ambiguity feels honest.


In 1984, Purple Rain turned Prince into a global superstar, and the 3xCD remaster of the canonical record adds an entire disc of previously unreleased music cut during the same period.

Prince / The Revolution: Purple Rain Deluxe — Expanded Edition

Purple Rain Deluxe — Expanded Edition

In so much of his music, Prince seemed fixated on contradictions. He used the album format to position seemingly alienated concepts against each other—spirituality and sexuality, of course, but also isolation and collaboration, minimalism and maximalism, life and afterlife. He longed to connect these ideas, to isolate the points at which they melted into each other. The soundtrack for his 1984 movie Purple Rain represented the most precise implosion of his internal contradictions—sex, religious devotion, empathy, alienation. The album is a kind of geode of identity, a product of remarkable individual pressurization.
Purple Rain — Deluxe Expanded Edition is the first reissue produced by the deal Prince signed with Warner Brothers in 2014 in order to regain ownership of his masters. This edition’s approach to the original LP is to kind of unfold it from the edges by including unreleased songs and extended mixes that both expand and complicate the record’s essential character. Purple Rain was Prince’s commercial flashpoint, an album- and feature-length metaphor for his arrival on a national stage; in the last 33 years, it has been written about breathlessly (Carvell Wallace reconsidered it here just last year, one of a series of reviews published after Prince’s death), and it has been contemplated down to its skeletal details. The remastering job heard on this edition, apparently overseen by Prince, adds a clarity and fluorescence to an album whose elements already sounded carefully distributed. Prince’s screams in “Baby I’m a Star” take shape in three dimensions, and the interlaced guitar lines in “Darling Nikki” sound as if they're radiating their own humidity. The songs feel heavier and fuller and conversely, the void surrounding the guitar chord that introduces the title track feels as if it’s been expanded into an even vaster loneliness.
As good as the remaster sounds, the primary attraction of this edition is its second disc, 11 tracks from Prince’s vault of unreleased songs, all cut between 1983 to 1984. Prince wrote and recorded constantly for his entire career, and only a fraction of his music has found its way onto his official records. He only issued two archival compilations in his lifetime, 1998’s Crystal Ball and 1999’s The Vault: Old Friends 4 Sale, where many of the songs recovered from the archives were altered, remixed, or re-recorded. Original versions of vault songs have tended to circulate among Prince fans through bootlegs or live recordings, where they would appear full of crackling and hissing artifacts, or would seem to be playing from a considerable distance, muted and cottony, as if they had barely escaped their source. (My bootleg mp3 copy of the 12-minute “Computer Blue” only occasionally verges on listenable.) On the Deluxe Edition of Purple Rain, the vault tracks sound like fully-formed Prince songs—animated, vibrant, reflexive, fluid, almost vehicular in their design and velocity, as if the motorcycle on the album cover were sculpted according to the songs’ sleek and slightly alien shapes. Whether Prince is constructing busy hydraulic cylinders of funk (“Love and Sex”) or drawing a few scribbles in empty space (“We Can Fuck”), one hears every detail with a previously inaccessible focus.
There’s a playfulness that animates tracks performed entirely by Prince; “Electric Intercourse,” a decaying piano ballad in the mold of “The Beautiful Ones,” is sung almost entirely in the unstable region between his falsetto and his scream. On “Possessed,” his vocal seems to never reach the earth, weaving a sinuous arc through the air. “Gosh, I love it when the horns blow,” he says just before the breakdown, “Everybody watch me dance!”; the drums recede and the “horns” turn out to be a synth figure pulsing in the center of a vacuum. But as much as Purple Rain is the sound of Prince achieving critical and commercial supremacy, it’s also the sound of his band, the Revolution, solidifying as a unit, reshaping Prince’s music as they played it. The best of the unreleased songs either feel intended for the Revolution or involve them directly, seeming to form their compositions out of the electric and ambiguous flow of the band’s interplay.
Among the most startling moments in this vein is found on “Our Destiny / Roadhouse Garden,” when the strings and drums evaporate and Revolution keyboardist Lisa Coleman says, “Look, I’m not saying let’s get married or nothing, I’m not ready to settle down, and I don’t want to have your baby, but you’ve got to be the finest specimen I’ve ever seen.” Prince, Lisa, and Wendy Melvoin share buoyant harmonies on the perfectly-named “Wonderful Ass,” in which subject of the song is so lost in peripheral distractions (“You do not understand my quirky ways/My crazy logic leaves you in a daze/You think my neurosis is just a phase”) that the chorus— “You’ve got a wonderful ass”—almost feels like a non-sequitur. The complete, 12-minute version of “Computer Blue,” the only song on Purple Rain credited to Prince, Wendy, and Lisa, digresses into a series of melting guitar solos, and then again into a more formal funk exercise, and then dissolves further from there into a kind of short story, told by Prince, in which he describes someone who lives in a house with many hallways. “It was a long walk to his bedroom,” Prince says, “because to him each hallway represented an emotion, every one vastly different from the next.” He assigns each hallway its appropriate emotional designation: “lust,” “fear,” “insecurity,” and finally, “hate.”
The most revelatory track from the vault is “We Can Fuck,” which appeared later in a different form as “We Can Funk” on the soundtrack for Prince’s movie Graffiti Bridge. To listen to the Graffiti Bridge version and then to its original 10-minute arrangement is to hear the song unfold backwards through time. Prince worked on the song from 1983 to 1990, adding and subtracting different textures; the Graffiti Bridge version is ultimately aided by George Clinton, a horn section, and an additional chorus which aligns the song with the more communal design of a Parliament-Funkadelic song. The original “We Can Fuck,” however, gets so deep into Prince territory that its pre-breakdown section ends with him arranging his voice into harmonized screams. “Oh, the Kama Sutra,” he sings against a slowly developing groove that eventually consumes the entire song, “I can rewrite it in half as many words.” It builds and falls apart and builds again, synths whirling and floating with the choreography of leaves, flowing around Prince’s multiplied voice and transforming what once felt like a minor funk digression into one of his best tracks. Its placement, before Prince’s somber and sinuous recording of a piano piece his dad wrote (“Father’s Song”), gives the second disc the integrity of a lost Prince album, one in which the listener seems to follow him beyond his hits and even his album-length statements, to the very edges of his sensibility.
The third disc of the set focuses on another dense layer of Prince’s discography, the 12-inch mixes that considerably expand and warp the shape of his singles. Where extended versions of songs initially served a utilitarian purpose for DJs—longer versions of songs allowed for more relaxed and precise transitions—Prince saw the space afforded by a 12-inch as a kind of Möbius strip; his extended remixes tend to drift and twist away from themselves as they go. Listening to these songs, one has the feeling of rocketing through membranes, the compositions always opening up onto some new internal space. “Erotic City,” a B-side that inadvertently ascended into radio playlists, is stretched out into seven-and-a-half minutes of sheer mechanical austerity in its “Make Love Not War Erotic City Come Alive” mix, where the composition is often reduced to synthetic and percussive blinks, vocals curving through the empty space between each snare. The extended remix of “I Would Die 4 U” is 10 minutes long and weirdly doesn’t play at all with the original recording’s texture; it’s a live performance taken from one of the Revolution’s rehearsals. The song builds relentlessly, always seeming to unlock an extra room of itself, particularly when Eddie M’s saxophone starts fluttering through the substance of the track.
The third disc also includes single edits, which are less imaginative and constantly unfolding than they are extremely, arbitrarily folded down. Prince reportedly prepared at least 100 songs for Purple Rain, so the new set is hardly comprehensive, and one wonders what else could’ve been included in lieu of a 7-inch edit of “Take Me with U.” The reissue specifically lacks “Wednesday,” which appeared on one of the earliest configurations of the Purple Rain tracklisting, as well as the full 11-minute version of the title track, performed at a 1983 show at First Avenue, out of which Prince carved the album version.
That legendary concert was the Revolution’s first show with Melvoin; she plays “Purple Rain”’s central chord progression, engineering and manipulating all of the emptiness around it. In the narrative flow of the album and film, which migrates from desire to jealousy to personal and professional breakdown, Prince finally embraces an expression of empathy, which also seems to flow inexorably from all of the previous expressions. There’s no radical shift in structure in the 11-minute recording; it just sort of wanders through its changes forever, one’s sense of time dislocating around it. In the center of the performance, Prince’s concerns about beginnings and endings, of birth and death seem to dissolve and fold into its ambulatory drift. This is Prince’s afterworld, the timeless space he sought to access in his own music, and it’s as close as he ever got to portraying it in performance and on record.


Bob Dylan's 36th studio album is a collection of old jazz crooner standards most closely associated with Frank Sinatra. While it may prompt some exasperated debates, Shadows in the Night represents a lifelong appreciation for Sinatra, and Dylan is toasting a very specific era in pop songwriting.

Shadows in the Night

Is Bob Dylan trolling us? His 36th studio album, Shadows in the Night, is a collection of old jazz crooner standards most closely associated with Frank Sinatra. It’s an idea seemingly as weird as his phlegmy Christmas album or his leering Victoria’s Secret ad. In the '60s, Sinatra was arguably for squares; entrenched in Vegas and disdainful of rock'n'roll (which he had called "the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear"), he represented the establishment against which the counterculture was kicking, and that made him a kind of anti-Dylan. And then there’s the fact that crooning is all about the voice—making it smooth yet expressive, agile yet graceful. Just as Dylan’s songwriting exploded the notion of the tightly structured pop tune, his voice has roundly rejected the notion that pop singers must sound pretty.
While it may prompt some exasperated debates, Dylan has in fact been teasing this project for years, if not decades. A few of the songs on Shadows in the Night have appeared sporadically in his setlists since the 1990s, and in his 2004 memoir, Chronicles, Volume One, Dylan even professed his fandom for the Chairman of the Board, even if he subtly admitted that the crooner wasn’t exactly a popular figure among the folkies in the Village: "When Frank sang ["Ebb Tide"], I could hear everything in his voice—death, God and the universe, everything. I had other things to do, though, and I couldn’t be listening to that stuff much."
In other words, Shadows in the Night represents a lifelong appreciation for Sinatra, but more than that, Dylan is toasting a very specific era in pop songwriting. He’s not interested in aping the man’s vocal style (which would be laughable) or retreading his signature tunes (which would be redundant). There’s no "Strangers in the Night" or "My Way" on here, nor is there a single dooby-dooby-doo. Instead, Dylan digs deep, picking personal favorites rather than obvious hits. "Some Enchanted Evening" and "That Lucky Old Sun" may be familiar to many listeners, but others, like "Stay With Me" and "Where Are You?" are more obscure, which allows Dylan to put his stamp on them without sounding like he’s falling back on that late-career cliché: the standards album.
Rather than mimic the robust orchestral arrangements that define Sinatra’s catalog, Dylan strips these songs down considerably. According to a statement on his website, he’s not covering them, but "uncovering" them: "Lifting them out of the grave and bringing them into the light of day." There are some gentle horn charts on "The Night We Called It a Day", but they’re generally unobtrusive, included less for dramatic effect and more for simple ambience. His small band accompanies him sensitively and sympathetically, often playing so quietly that it sounds like Dylan is singing a cappella. The lead instrument here is Donny Herron’s pedal steel, which is so crucial to the album’s moonlit ambience that it might as well hang the stars from the night sky.
And what do you know, Dylan can actually sing. Without sounding overly reverent, he croons persuasively, especially on "Why Try to Change Me Now". That song, recorded by Sinatra in 1959 for his album No One Cares, resonates powerfully on Shadows in the Night, with a performance so assured you might think Dylan wrote it himself. And perhaps that’s why Dylan gravitates to these tunes. Never the most confessional songwriter—he dodges more than he professes—he has remained guarded about his inner life, making him both the most studied songwriter of the rock era and also the least known. But "Why Try to Change Me Now" may be one of the most revealing tunes he has sung in the twentieth century, allowing him to settle into the role of the lovable curmudgeon, a man who understands he’s a mess but is too old to change. It’s the best reason he’s given for recording this album.
Because these songs seemingly reveal some new facets of Dylan’s character and celebrity, they comprise a fascinating and conceptually rich object whose meaning will be debated and dissected for years to come. In particular Shadows in the Night asks us to hear these crooner anthems as folk tunes, as though Sinatra was Seeger with a tux and a stint at the Sands. While ignoring social or political dilemmas, they speak to certain emotional conundrums common to everyone: how to live with love and heartbreak, how to survive on whimsy and regret. Trying to explain the nature of attraction on "Some Enchanted Evening", Dylan offers a sly wink as he sings, "Fools offer reasons, wise men never try." Especially in such a popular tune, the line takes on fresh gravity in the context of Dylan’s career, as though he could be quoting one of his own songs.
And yet.
Shadows in the Night may pose some compelling questions for the Bobophiles who scrutinize every line and every word of every Dylan song, but for the more casual, less obsessive listener, it can be a bit of a snooze. The songs are well chosen and certainly revealing, but Dylan and his band play them all pretty much the same, sacrificing any sense of rhythm for stately ambience. Once they strike a mood on opener "I’m a Fool to Want You", they never stray from it. That gives Shadows a distinctive identity in Dylan’s catalog, but it also has a leveling effect. Each song hits the same tempo and strikes the same tone, so that swoon quickly turns somnambulant. As the album progresses, the songs sound more and more emotionally muted, as though this style of American pop songwriting was good only for providing ruminative ambience rather than sophisticated humor, feisty insight, or infectious rhythm. Say what you want about Sinatra, but at least the man could swing.


The classic Blink-182 lineup reunites to huff the fumes of their best material.

One More Time...

Blink-182 have always been living on borrowed time. “I wish that Earth clock/Could often just be stopped,” Tom DeLonge sang on the 1993 demo Flyswatter. To trace the band’s obsession with aging through their discography—“Lemmings,” “What’s My Age Again?,” “Good Old Days,” “Blame It on My Youth”—is to trace the journey from arrested development to desperate self-delusion. Their Peter Pan syndrome is an act of self-preservation: The absurdity and vanity of youth are the generative forces of pop-punk, a genre built on dick jokes and being mad at your parents. For a band like Blink-182, aging—or acknowledging it—would be tantamount to admitting defeat. And so, night after night, fans participate in a collective fantasy that Mark Hopppus is still 29 years old and thinks it’s funny to sing about elderly incontinence (admittedly, it slaps live). Disbelief became harder to suspend in 2021 when Hoppus was treated for stage 4 lymphoma. With the threat of oblivion breathing down their necks, Hoppus, DeLonge, and drummer Travis Barker—who had not recorded together since 2012’s surprisingly affecting Dogs Eating Dogs EP—returned to the studio to cement their legacy. The resulting album, ONE MORE TIME…, clamors with the frustrated energy of a band too engrossed in its own mythology to innovate on the form it helped create.
Blink-182’s inward collapse had already begun on 2019’s NINE, their last record with Alkaline Trio guitarist Matt Skiba, where they quoted their own hits on songs like “Blame It on My Youth.” On ONE MORE TIME…, they don’t even try to couch nostalgia with in-jokes. Take album opener “Anthem Part 3,” the capstone to the trilogy of 2001’s “Anthem Part Two” and 1999’s “Anthem.” It starts with a guitar and drum pattern nearly identical to “Part Two,” establishing an uncanny valley of sentimentality that lingers throughout the album. It’s a lazy shorthand for the time lost between releases, a suggestion that if you close your eyes, you too can be transported back to the Mark, Tom, and Travis of 2001. “Work sucks/I know” was transcendent in its minimalism. Here, they feel the need to spell things out explicitly: “When your job has gone to deep shit/If you’ve fallen off of that list/When you’re clenchin’ both of your fists.” Blink-182 have a lot more to say, even if they’re not saying anything.
Since their last full album as a trio, 2011’s Neighborhoods, the most perceptible shift in the Blink-182 dynamic has been the emergence of Barker as a pop-punk svengali, paving the rap-to-rock pipeline for artists like Lil Huddy and Machine Gun Kelly. His overstuffed, cheap-thrills approach to production—starting with drum fills that occupy every inch of breathable air—has seeped into Blink-182’s empty hooks. “Dance With Me” (after Tom’s intro, which made me miss the days of old Blink) channels Machine Gun Kelly’s unrelenting onslaught of guitars and nasal screeching. Whereas previous albums were primarily written by the band members, ONE MORE TIME… adds a bevy of songwriters, including Kelly collaborator Nick Long and OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder. It feels disjointed and bloated, not to mention heavily indebted to the band members’ existing discography. “Terrified,” originally written for Barker and DeLonge’s side project Box Car Racer, is almost identical to the sound of that band’s biggest hit, “I Feel So.” “You Don’t Know What You’ve Got” strips the haunting guitar riff from “Adam’s Song” for parts, just different enough that you might miss it at first. When they run out of their own material, they turn to their inspirations: The cloying “Fell in Love” opens with a synth line based on an interpolation of the Cure’s “Close to Me,” which could have felt inspired if it didn’t force such unflattering comparisons to the old Blink song actually featuring Robert Smith, 2003’s sparse and subtle “All of This.”
The Blink lore-as-lyric bottoms out with “One More Time,” a maudlin ballad that addresses head-on Hoppus’ battle with cancer and Barker’s near-fatal plane crash in 2008, crises that eventually led the trio to reconnect. “It shouldn’t take a sickness/Or airplanes falling out the sky,” Hoppus sings. The story is one of enduring friendship, reduced to vacuous balladry that reads like a high school poetry assignment. But it’s the third verse that determines how you’ll likely feel about Blink’s latest dispatch: If the thought of Mark and Tom harmonizing “I miss you” in obvious homage to their massive 2004 single seems charming, then by all means, let them serenade you back to the George W. Bush era. Such a bald reference softens the blow of having to learn new lyrics and chords, both for fans and the band. But if it sounds self-congratulatory, like a band doing cheap covers of its own songs, the rest of the album is unlikely to convince you otherwise. “Edging,” the Dropkick Murphys-esque single named for the sexual practice of which Barker is an avowed fan, rips a lyric practically wholesale from DeLonge’s other band Angels and Airwaves. To fans who’ve followed Blink-182’s side projects over the years, the similarities are almost offensive, as if those albums were merely practice for their eventual return.
Blink-182 have never shied away from putting songs about prank calls next to serious discussions of depression and suicide, the immaturity of the former serving as a hedonistic outlet for the latter. On “Turpentine,” they attempt both at once and fall flat: It’s hard to take verses about existential despair seriously after hearing DeLonge sing, “Slide your mom on top of me.” Across the album, the deep end is shallower and the shallow songs feel strangely like they are actually beneath Blink-182. They take their singular obsession with youth to illogical conclusions until the songs become immortality word salad. “When We Were Young,” released to coincide with the band’s headlining appearance at the Las Vegas emo festival of the same name, barely tries to make sense: “When we were young/Are you still riding free like every other?” On album closer “Childhood,” the nostalgia snake catches its tail: “Remember when we were young/And we’d laugh at everything?” DeLonge and Hoppus ask in unison, unable to finish the album without referencing an earlier song in its tracklist. By the end of 17 tracks, they sound exhausted, as if worn down by their own charades.
Occasionally, Blink-182 still manage to sound like they’re enjoying themselves: “Blink Wave,” their take on new wave, hums to life with a glimmering synth and blessedly minimal drumming from Barker. It could fit well next to songs from both Hoppus’ project +44 and DeLonge’s Angels and Airwaves, and their radically different registers both work surprisingly well over the energetic bassline. “’Cause the same old fights, they just won’t do,” DeLonge sings in the chorus, his strange So-Cal glissando fighting for the high notes. It’s a shame that it seems that the same old melodies and lyrics will do just fine. Blink-182 want to find eternal life in a state of permanent regression. It’s kind of funny until it’s not.


The biggest-selling album of all time returns on a gold-plated 25th edition that reminds us of its frequent briliance and adds both a DVD and bonus tracks featuring Kanye West, Akon, will.i.am, and Fergie.

Michael Jackson: Thriller: 25th Anniversary Edition

Thriller: 25th Anniversary Edition

Thriller is the biggest-selling album of all time; it says so on the cover of this reissue package. What it doesn’t say is that, on a worldwide scale, it outpaces the Eagles, Pink Floyd, and Celine Dion by more than just a marginal million or so: At 100 million+ copies sold, it’s estimated to have sold more than twice its nearest rival.
And so people try to concoct explanations. The album was focus-grouped for broader appeal—but then why haven’t focus groups worked so well since? Jackson made the racial crossover breakthrough on MTV—but once that door was opened, why didn’t the sales crossover work for others? Jackson’s stunning dancing and videos exploded pop’s visual formatting—but the Thriller album, until DVD-era reissues like this one, wasn’t a visual experience.
When Thriller opens, those 100 million sales feel just. “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” is pure confused, shocked teenage rush. So there’s another theory: Thriller is the best-selling record ever because it’s the best record ever. That one holds up for six minutes and two seconds, during which Jackson and Quincy Jones mix the tension of rock’n’roll with the rapture of disco and hit perfection. But then you get “Baby Be Mine”—one of the original tracks that wasn’t a single—and the momentum fades: On the heels of “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’”, it should maintain the temperature; instead, it goes nowhere, starts nothing.
Thriller is inconsistent in style, which gives it something to appeal to everyone, but it’s oddly tough to listen to even the great bits sequentially—its peaks are from different mountain ranges. “Thriller”’s joke-shop horror segues well into Eddie Van Halen’s headbanging guitar on “Beat It.” But to follow that into the paranoid celebrity funk of “Billie Jean,” the meltingly tender “Human Nature,” and the smooth R&B of “P.Y.T.”? These are all brilliant singles, though; Thriller’s greatness lies in its great songs not in it “working like an album.”
For this edition Jackson called in some current big guns to provide remixes, and sadly they do provide the consistency the originals gloriously lack. Will.i.am sets the tone: He takes Macca off “The Girl Is Mine” but decides it can’t work without someone sounding like an idiot and steps manfully in himself. There’s a general reluctance to use what these guest stars are good at: will.I.am is a consistently slick, inventive pop producer but nobody wants to hear him rap, whereas on Kanye West’s “Billie Jean” a guest verse might have added dynamics to the mix’s clumsy claustrophobia. Fergie’s gift as a pop star is the way her crassness shifts into oddness—so on “Beat It” her nervous reverence is a waste of time. Only Akon comes off well, flipping the meaning of “startin’ somethin’” and turning the song into a joyful seducer’s groove, and here it’s Jackson’s own mush-mouthed new vocal that spoils things.
The remixes aren’t a missed opportunity—they’re an imaginative way to wring bonus material from sessions overseen by a notorious perfectionist. It could be a lot worse. The last time Thriller got reissued it included “Someone in the Dark,” a horror from the E.T. soundtrack showcasing Jackson’s most saccharine side. We’re spared that, and the token MJ rarity here is “For All Time,” recorded during the Thriller sessions (and then later rejected for Dangerous). A glistening, slightly overdressed piano ballad, it might have made a nicely sappy album closer—if we didn’t already have the subtler, understated, and underrated “The Lady in My Life,” possibly Jackson’s most soulful solo performance on the record.
The DVD footage, with all the videos you’d expect, is much better. Watching the famous Motown 25th Anniversary performance of “Billie Jean” in particular I’m struck by how angular Jackson’s dancing is, how tense: Knees and elbows spiking out, body freezing into indecipherable alphabets. And then how beautiful, the way he simply flows out of each position, the release that made his music so joyful given kinetic form.
The biggest-selling album of all time, then, and you should probably take the “of all time” literally. His highest-clout guest stars here have shifted around one-twentieth the copies Thriller has, and in a dwindling industry it’s hard to imagine anything similar happening again. Fluke it maybe was, but as a unification move it worked—the last time, maybe, one person could incarnate almost all of pop, all the corny and all the awesome in one mind. We live now in the world of the “long tail”—Thriller was the big head.


On their ethereal debut EP, the Norwegian electro-pop trio treat romance with a stylish, if sometimes frustrating, remove.

Do You Mind EP

Sassy 009 have a fraught relationship with romance. The Norwegian electro-pop trio—Sunniva Lindgaard, Teodora Georgijevic, and Johanna Scheie Orellana, friends based in Oslo—demonstrates as much throughout Do You Mind, the group’s ethereal, often melancholic debut EP. They sing of being smitten and they sing of being hurt. They lament their suffering at the hands of a callous lover, then insist it’s all right; they urge someone close out the door, then two songs later agonize at the thought that he might leave. Joe Strummer wanted to know if he should stay or if he should go. Sassy 009 seem displeased with either option.
Over the brief course of its 16 minutes, Do You Mind describes the arc of a love affair in turbulent decline. It begins with “Summin’ You Up,” a striking introduction: Reverb rolls in like thunder and distortion churns like a storm cloud while blown-out, heavily treated vocals air bitter accusations. “You’re tearing me down/You’re tearing us down,” they sing, frostily. No matter the vitriol, Sassy 009 remain impassive, acerbic but cool. Indeed, they skewer the notion that heartache should move anyone to sorrow at all. “They show no remorse/There is no regret,” they intone after recounting a lover’s indifferent cruelty. “We’re equal now/Why the distress?”
Do You Mind is not a breakup record, even though many of its songs address the desire to break up. “Promise me that you’ll leave me one day,” the band sings, without feeling, on “Feel Me,” above muted synths and distant, echoing oohs and aahs in the style of early Grimes. “Embarrass me then turn it around/And say ‘It’s not me, it is you.’” And yet after that promise, Sassy 009 seem surprised to find the lover following through. “Are you leaving me now?” they ask on the following song, called, naturally, “Are You Leaving.” “Don’t get away now/Don’t get away now,” they continue to chant—uncertain as ever of what they want, emotionless about the result either way.
Sassy 009’s ironic detachment—they’re miserable, but resigned to it—perfectly complements their aesthetic. Perhaps too well: The glacial, almost apathetic character of the music has a tendency to meander, particularly as the lead vocals, background vocals, and delicate electronic instrumentation mingle into the same vacant and vaguely dispassionate haze. Bedroom-pop keys float airily, largely directionless; the occasional flourish, such as the lovely flute riff on “Are You Leaving,” gets lost in the overall muddle. The sound can be exquisite, but it feels thin, without momentum or emphasis.
Even at only a quarter of an hour, Do You Mind has a tenuous hold on the listener’s concentration. Their utter lack of affect precludes niceties like brio and panache—it’s as if writing a dynamic song would somehow compromise their sangfroid. Granted, this placid air clashes with the lyrics to interesting effect, giving even the odd romantic cliche a nicely vicious touch. But it makes for a flat and fairly monotonous listening experience. One wishes the songs themselves were as well written as the sentiments they express, or, indeed, that the range of feelings they encompass were reflected in Sassy 009’s musical range. For now, their coldness only inhibits their promise.


Babyfather is the name of the latest project by the elusive British musician Dean Blunt. It is a painfully raw, emotionally generous, politically charged, intensely intelligent, sometimes unlistenable album.

BBF Hosted by DJ Escrow

Dean Blunt is the kind of musician who inspires even the headiest of critics to admit in think pieces that their take was "doomed from the start." He is the kind of musician that has been dissected, questioned, and subject to the wildest interpretations, theorizing, and speculation. Even as he invites all this, Blunt remains nearly impervious to any kind neat conclusion. And on April Fools day of this year, like only Dean Blunt would do, he is releasing a new album called BBF: Hosted by DJ Escrow, under the banner of a possibly fictitious group called Babyfather. It is over 50 minutes long and stretches to an impossible 23 tracks. It brandishes a jaw dropping pièce de résistance of a cover depicting a Union Jack-decaled hoverboard overlooking a hazy London skyline.
From the title, it seems that Blunt is playing an obscure joke of some kind, maybe flicking his nose at the mixtape culture found on Datpiff and Livemixtapes. In BBF, Blunt (I think) alternates between a high-pitched Quasimoto-esque flow and his low baritone drawl. The squealing rap voice that haunts most of this album delivers some of the most important moments, specifically a refrain that occurs three times ("Stealth," "Stealth Intro," and "Stealth Outro") in the album: "This makes me proud to be British." This line is repeated over and over and over  again, surrounded by a wash of saccharine strings, and it verges on numbing. This refrain opens up the album, and it stretches on painfully for several minutes, a point at which most sane people would just stop listening.
The rest of album splits itself between two attitudes, a stream-of-consciousness confessional and a potpourri of ironic tropes directed at American hip-hop. It boasts some very snazzy features, namely appearances from Arca and Micachu. But these tracks are red herrings; they prick the interest of someone scanning the tracklist, but for the most part are extremely forgettable. In "Killuminati" he repeats "another one," an obvious joking nod to DJ Khaled. He hints at "exclusives" in "Prolific Demons" and tries on a mask of bravado in "Meditations" [ft. Arca]:  "20 bands everyone can see/20 bands don't stand for me/20 bands got me up in the sky...Get these white girls out of my home." This for the most part does not work for Blunt, and the theme takes up more than half of the album. It might be the album’s narrative thrust and conceptual core, but like a lot of Blunt’s concepts, it’s overstated and hangs very loosely.
When Blunt does make himself available and emotive it’s hard to ignore. These are the spots where the album starts to work. On "Escrow 3" he admits "trust is a luxury I cannot afford" and he doubts the veracity of his friendships: "I couldn't tell who was real and who wasn't."  His voice almost cracks as he asks "If I die/would you cry?" It's cathartic and feels vaguely shameful to be witnessing. The moment underscores that beneath the irony, this is as vulnerable Blunt has ever been. It is a painfully raw, emotionally generous, politically charged,  intensely intelligent, sometimes unlistenable album.The project is, most of all, a fascinating peek into the psyche of man who we are still miles away from understanding, and when I listen to I can only see a man in the distance getting farther and farther as I try to get closer.


The Los Angeles group’s second album is a soul-scouring emotional purge that sets a new bar for screamo—and confirms the genre as one uniquely suited to a year as harrowing as this one.

Nuvolascura: As We Suffer From Memory and Imagination

Nuvolascura’s As We Suffer From Memory and Imagination, which the Los Angeles band recorded in December 2019, sounds like an emotional purge—an attempt to shake off the end of a bad year, a bad decade, maybe even a bad life, one that frontperson Erica vividly describes as a “lab test gone wrong.” (Nuvolascura don’t use last names; they’re severe like that). But the group’s second album now joins a growing list of groundbreaking releases that have turned screamo into 2020’s most vital and prescient form of punk rock, one especially suited for a time when being stuck in our homes might have us all feeling like screamo singers—alternately paralyzed and powered by nervous energy, looking for any outlet for release.
Even among the leading figures of modern screamo, Nuvolascura remain a uniquely inscrutable act, refusing to provide the typical peace offerings of post-rock expanse, metalcore musculature, or clean vocal melody. The 21 minutes of As We Suffer From Memory and Imagination are split into 13 tracks, but they might easily have been broken down into twice as many. Songs that last barely 100 seconds still function as collage, flipping the smallest possible fragments of math-y dissonance, ascetic post-hardcore, technical metal, and caustic Midwestern emo before moving onto the next riff. Almost none of it follows a typical song structure. Instead, their songs play out like cinematic knife fights—fluid, intuitive, and carefully scripted in ways that defy comprehension. The carnivalesque tapping riffs of “Pixel Vision Anxiety” might be their very own Kill Bill: a celebration of hyperbolic, stylized brutality.
Though also produced by Jack Shirley, Nuvolascura’s self-titled debut bore the dank, claustrophobic ambience of the DIY spaces where they had honed their sound. The heightened fidelity of As We Suffer has emboldened Nuvolascura as an instrumental unit, one more willing to take risks with technical dazzle and dynamics. The clean guitar figures that introduce the album are Nuvolascura’s one nod toward a traditional post-hardcore arc, preparation for an inevitable full-band crash. But when that does come, Nuvolascura play so punishingly loud that it initially sounds wrong—at least until “As the Mask Slips” maintains the same crushing intensity for its duration. Erica begins “Disguised in Scintillations” cursing her depression, sounding like she’s ducking behind the drum riser before rushing towards the mic seconds later: “Break locks, walk down train tracks,” she rages. “Burn, pine, perish for a moment of euphoria.” The song doesn’t outwardly advocate for burning a LAPD cruiser, but it also doesn’t not. The relatively quiet moments feel like a band in a state of shock, surveying an eerie absence of violence—erratic Morse code bleeping, hollowed-out arpeggios wafting like smoke after the American Football house gets burnt to cinders, the clean-tone guitars of “We’ll Never Know the True Extent of Our Loss” closing As We Suffer with two minutes of bloodletting.
At the center, Erica is constantly on the verge of becoming a casualty in the asymmetrical war of modern life. “Keep your distance/Long for connection/Patterns emerge/If I smile you’ll fuck me/Wear all black/Avoid eye contact,” she shrieks on “Apyrexy.” When hell isn’t other people, it’s a prison of isolation or self-medication: “Remember when I didn’t need 50 pills to function? Remember when my body turned against me?” This is all impossible to discern from the singing itself, and the band’s political beliefs are best discerned from the lengthy syllabus of charitable causes in the album credits. Yet As We Suffer From Memory and Imagination is inherently and timelessly political in the way all screamo is, where anarchic destruction has to come before the message can be absorbed. “Let the chips fall where they may/I’ll never have faith that anything will be OK,” Erica screams midway through, a timely pledge of solidarity to everyone done with trying to settle for “OK.”

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