If this Indiana soul band’s debut was the party, the strings come out for these songs about heartbreak and the hope in resilience.

Durand Jones & the Indications: American Love Call

American Love Call

Soul is likely not the first word that comes to mind when you think of Bloomington, Ind. But that’s where saxophonist Durand Jones moved to attend graduate school in 2012, eventually finding his way into Indiana University’s famed Soul Revue. He reluctantly became one of their singers, and his voice fit the genre like a glove—at turns seductive and provocative, always edged with the rasp of experience. Others took notice: Through the Revue, Jones met the rest of the band that soon became the soul-loving Indications. On their self-titled 2016 debut, his anguished, irresistible croon held the quintet’s deeply funky grooves and fluttering rhythms tight.
If Durand Jones & the Indications was the party, their second album and first since signing to Dead Oceans, American Love Call, is the slow dance. Jones and crew trade their infectious bounce for punch-drunk sway, leaning fully into orchestral soul. Gone are Wilson Pickett’s brash horns, replaced instead with the lush strings of, say, Ben E. King, and backing vocals that conjure the dreamy-eyed woe of the Temptations and the Miracles.
American Love Call doesn’t celebrate love so much as interrogate it. Jones bemoans getting the runaround on “Circles.” The song’s baroque strings and gentle flute evoke the 1970s soul family Cornelius Brothers & Sister Rose, but Aaron Frazer’s lilting drums point to Otis Redding and Carla Thomas’ “Tramp,” adding a little flash. On “Walk Away,” Jones fights against confessing his true feelings, even though he knows his silence will mean losing his potential paramour, an outcome that’s just as distressing. For “Listen to Your Heart,” the struggle morphs into advice: “Your heart’s tryna tell you what you already know,” he sings, his voice softening to a scouring whisper. “Tell him that you love him.” A solitary French horn sounds a fanfare—or a warning.
Though the band takes Jones’ name, Frazer leads somber tracks like “Too Many Tears” and “Court of Love” with his Smokey Robinson-esque falsetto. His piercing tone mournfully paints scenes of betrayal. During the latter, which flips marriage’s “long walk down the aisle” into a damning courtroom scene, the band’s distended tempo underscores the song’s pulsing wound, much like the Aaron Neville classic “Tell It Like It Is.”
Soul’s pop structure has often helped facilitate incisive social commentary with widespread appeal, from Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.” The Indications give it a go on opener “Morning in America,” a portrait of different struggles across the country, like the Jacksonville junkie waiting on a “prescription for the pain” or Baltimore nurses heading home after a long shift. Jones’ deflated delivery reflects his exhaustion at the central homophone, or that America’s morning has shifted to mourning. Still, the song lacks teeth, as if drifting through the problems. That dearth of vitality speaks to a larger flaw on American Love Call: Where the Indications’ debut looked to update soul and funk with rock and punk elements, these songs spin their wheels in revivalism, doing little to pull this past into the present.
Not everything here ends in heartbreak. During an ode to platonic love, “What I Know About You,” Jones and Frazer share lead duties. Frazer’s airy vocals contrast Jones’ weighted tone, elevating their nod to friendship from the cheek of bromance to a serious love song. “Sometimes when the load gets heavy/We lock arms and we keep it steady,” they sing. The band closes on a similarly hopeful note, the spacious “True Love.” Jones’ vocals parallel John Legend’s sweet promises, and he makes a pledge to himself: Love is worth waiting for, so be patient. Likewise, the band’s ability to translate classic soul for this moment shows promise, but it’s going to take some time.


Finally: After 35 years, Brian Wilson solves the Smile puzzle, piecing together the fragments that fans have spent the last 3½ decades meticulously researching, speculating over, and attempting to assemble themselves. As the mythical follow-up to Pet Sounds, it delivers, and despite his age, Wilson's voice even sounds fantastic, still carrying the weight of these angelic melodies.

Smile

I was introduced to the Beach Boys by my dad's copy of Endless Summer. It was a two-record compilation from the mid-70s with all their hits, and for many years, was the only thing I knew about them. My sister also had a copy, so I could listen anytime I wanted. The artwork for Endless Summer featured a painted mural of big Beach Boys heads positioned in wavy jungle grass, and I spent hours looking at their grinning, bearded faces, imagining what kind of magic strangeness they were really up to behind "I Get Around" and "Catch a Wave". Later, I found a book about them, and again saw aged, beaten faces, with lots of hair, tacky, yellow pants and inappropriately overweight grown men. I hadn't even heard Pet Sounds yet, but was convinced these people were sad and interesting. And they usually smiled.
Brian Wilson was the son of a songwriter. He was a naturally creative boy, though also prone to the same sunny interests and obsessions as his friends and cousins. He came of age just as thousands of other kids did at the time, learning that this place really could be the land of the free, home of love, peace, self-discovery and where everyone he cared about lived. He loved music. He still does, though at 61, despite the full mane of hair, he doesn't quite sound or write like the same boy who once scored the perfect soundtrack for an American summer. He was obsessed with George Gershwin and vanilla white harmony groups like The Four Freshman; he gave the world "In My Room" and Pet Sounds in return. Brian Wilson is touring Smile right now, with, they say, an unplugged keyboard and the same stiff onstage demeanor he showed during the "Brian is back" days. But then, performance has never been his bag.
Wilson abandoned Smile, his painstakingly planned follow-up to Pet Sounds, in 1967 because he had a nervous breakdown. He was emotionally unfit to continue. He was 24, only a few years older than I was when I bought my first bootleg copy of the music. If you want to know the precise details about how he broke down, there are dozens of accounts available (including mine here at Pitchfork). The short end of it has to do with drugs, growing pains, a new cast of friends, and a dysfunctional family. Brian had too much of all those things in the mid-60s; working on what was supposed to be the greatest record ever made might not have been the most realistic endeavor. Or maybe it would have been, had he surrounded himself with more understanding people. Or fewer drugs. Or better drugs. Or been able to keep his overbearing dad out of the picture. And on and on and on, until being a fan of the guy is more exhausting than it is rewarding. I really don't blame him for staying in bed for the 70s.
I first heard Smile when I compiled my own version of it. The Beach Boys' Good Vibrations box had just come out, containing the first "officially" sanctioned missing pieces of the album. I, like many amateur Beach Boys historians, used them, along with the best songs from the boots to make ad-hoc masterpieces. I'd read how "Our Prayer" was supposed to go first, and it seemed naturally to segue right into "Heroes & Villains". Then I had to decide which versions to use. I strung together the single mix with the "Cantina" version with "Do You Like Worms" (its cousin), using a complex system of cassette deck editing techniques-- that is, I got really good at using the "pause" button. I put Wilson's solo vocal and piano performance of "Surf's Up" last. It ended my tape on a bittersweet note, which I guessed was in the spirit of what Smile would have been. I was wrong. Sigh. A lot of us were.
Darian Sahanaja was right. Wilson's wife Melinda suggested that Brian take Smile on the road, and Sahanaja, keyboardist and backing vocalist in Wilson's touring band (aka The Wondermints) took up the sizable task of organizing the project. He dumped every Smile song and song-fragment he could find onto his laptop, took them to Wilson's house and watched as Wilson proceeded to phone no less an authority than original lyricist Van Dyke Parks when he needed help remembering lyrics. They hadn't really kept in touch for a few years, but Parks was at Wilson's place within 24 hours-- and would stay for five days-- to settle past scores and finish the lost record.
The trio made subtle changes to the music when necessary, and in the spring, Wilson headed to Studio One at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles to make his record. Just as he'd made the original "Good Vibrations" and "Heroes & Villains" there, Wilson gathered his band, strings and brass to record the tracks, cutting the basic arrangements live while doing the vocals on the same tube consoles his old Beach Boys had.
The end result is a great album, albeit one more lighthearted than its myth would suggest. The music I hear is like round pegs in square holes; it's just as insular and manic-compassionate as "In My Room" or "God Only Knows", but filtered through an amiable resolve. It sounds pleasant and assured, lacking the vulnerable, shy wave of hope drenching the old Beach Boys records. Yet, Wilson's voice sounds great. It's a bit lower, and his inflections have lost some subtlety over the years, but it still carries the weight of those angelic melodies (and when it can't, his band helps him out).
And what of his band? The eight musicians who contributed to recording Smile with Wilson not only live up to the material, but also make possible what could not have been all those years ago. They are not the Beach Boys. There is no Carl Wilson. For better or worse, there is no Mike Love. But there is the music, and all concerned parties should be given some kind of musical amnesty award for managing to avoid the pitfalls of posthumous reworking and re-recording. This is no ghost record or bout of nostalgia. Rather than study the lonely, bittersweet passions of Wilson's youth, it celebrates the return of his muse and his gift to the world in the form of a "teenage symphony to God."
Smile begins, as had been expected since Wilson first discussed the album in 1966, with "Our Prayer", combined with a short piece called "Gee", which is, in actuality, an overture to "Heroes & Villains". The choir-like group harmonies of "Our Prayer" are as beautiful as they had been, originally tacked onto the end of 1969's 20/20, but in this case, reveal only the tip of an incredible iceberg. "Heroes & Villains" begins identically to the 1967 single version, and Wilson's band tackles it with gusto. Wilson's lead vocal sounds markedly gruffer in places, though more telling is his complete lack of hesitation in the phrases. He isn't as sensitive as he used to be, but he makes up for it by nailing every complicated counterpoint line and inner harmony voice.
After moving through the song's "cantina" section, the band segues into "Roll Plymouth Rock", which Smile historians will recognize under its former title, "Do You Like Worms?". The galloping tympani is no less a disorienting force here than it had been originally, but Parks' never-before-tracked lyrics (they are said to have been written during the sessions) suggest a clearer narrative rooted in manifest destiny: "Once upon the Sandwich Isles, the social structure steamed upon Hawaii/ Rock, rock, roll Plymouth Rock roll over." This leads to "Barnyard", replete with animal sounds and more new lyrics about chickens and pigpens. The short, sad take on "You Are My Sunshine" (coupled with "Old Master Painter") precedes the climax of Smile's first third, "Cabin Essence". This is the same version as appeared on 20/20, though in this context is euphoric where it had been unexpected before.
The next section begins with "Wonderful", performed with harpsichord and understated orchestration (the brass, unfortunately, sounds synthesized) and Wilson's original arrangement of vocal harmonies. "Song for Children" emerges straight out of that, though fans will recognize it as the first section of a larger piece, "Child Is Father of the Man". That piece follows, and is more famous as the coda to the title track of 1971's Surf's Up album. Here, it wallows in ominous piano arpeggios and strings before introducing "Surf's Up", performed almost identically to Carl Wilson's 1971 production for the Beach Boys. Brian doesn't take the high harmonies on "brother John" anymore, but his voice is surprisingly nimble. Furthermore, Parks' lyrics, once considered too abstract by Love, now seem perfectly in accord with the surreal Americana of Smile. "Canvas the town and brush the backdrop." "Carriage across the fog-two-step to lamplight cellar tune." "The laughs come hard in Auld Lang Syne."
The album ends with a suite of Wilson's most idiosyncratic music. "I'm In Great Shape/I Wanna Be Around/Workshop" form a kind of bizarre interlude for Smile, wherein Wilson pumps up the virtues of "eggs and grits" and wanting to be around when "someone breaks your heart," over the strains of saws and drills. Things get odder as it flows in to "Vegetables", performed as a combination of the song from 1967's maligned Smiley Smile and the one heard on the Good Vibrations box. Wilson pulls out the "Mama Says" refrain ("Sleep a lot, eat a lot, brush 'em like crazy") before moving into "On a Holiday". Fans will recognize this from various boots as just "Holiday", but Parks' lyrics (check the sea-chantey rap (?) of, "Not the rum of Carib scum/ It's Port tonight, drink up and come/ Un-weigh the anchor yank and we will party!") are new.
"Wind Chimes" is the same version as first officially appeared on the Good Vibrations box, but like so many others on the album, seems perfectly suited to this context. When the band rips in during the wordless (but for "do-do-do" and "ba-ba-ba") chorus, I strain to hold back cries of glee. I haven't actually succeeded yet. This leads to the infamous "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow" (also known as "Fire"), the instrumental Wilson once thought so powerful as to cause fires around his city. It still burns with lysergic intensity, albeit refined and featuring none other than backing harmony vocals cribbed from Smiley Smile's "Fall Breaks and Back to Winter".
Smile ends with "Good Vibrations", suggesting in no uncertain terms that Wilson aims to leave listeners grinning. I'll grin. I'll congratulate him. I won't wonder too much what might have happened had this been released way back when. And I'll let this record fall into the my still-churning impressions of Brian Wilson. Better late than never? Yes.


The debut album from Mary Timony's new band is the record of the summer, albeit one that's arrived two months too late—a collection of perfectly lean power-pop tunes that evoke Tom Petty and the Runaways while conjuring the unruly energy of contemporary mid-fi bashers like Thee Oh Sees.

Rips

You have to hand it to Ex Hex: they didn’t waste any time. Around this time last fall, the Washington, D.C.-based garage-pop trio, lead by guitarist/singer Mary Timony, had yet to play its first show. The only real evidence of the band’s existence was an early mix of the song “Hot and Cold”, which Timony posted online, then quickly removed. Within a month, the band–which also includes bassist/singer Betsy Wright (Childballads) and drummer Laura Harris (Aquarium, Benjy Ferree)—had joined up with Merge. By spring, “Hot and Cold” had been remixed and released on a three-song single.
And now, only a year in comes Rips, Ex Hex’s debut full-length. It’s the record of the summer, albeit one that's arrived two months too late—a collection of perfectly lean power-pop tunes that evoke Tom Petty and the Runaways while conjuring the unruly energy of contemporary mid-fi bashers like Thee Oh Sees. Rips sounds fine on headphones or at home, but it’s best enjoyed in the car where it’s possible to feel more perfectly tuned into the music’s steady velocity. The production is clean, but not polished, and the performances are tight. It doesn't sound like a record that was made in a hurry.
An active musician since the early ’90s—first in Autoclave, then in Helium, and then as a solo artist—Timony hasn’t gotten her due in the last decade and change. After two solo records—Ex Hex (2005) and The Shapes We Make (2007)—were met with muted reactions, she mostly called it quits on touring, popping up only sporadically in groups like Garland of Hours and Soft Power. In 2010, she joined Wild Flag, a bi-coastal quartet that featured former Sleater-Kinney members Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss, and seemingly caught a second wind. The band released one well-received full length and traveled extensively, but quietly parted ways last fall. Wild Flag was a potentially tough act to follow for Timony, partially because of the band's high visibility, which was given extra charge through the ascendance of Brownstein’s comedy sketch show "Portlandia".
So, it’s heartening to find that Ex Hex is, in a lot of ways, a better band. Wild Flag's membership was split between D.C. and Portland and, perhaps unintentionally, the band's songwriting sometimes seemed to ping-pong between different sensibilities. Timony, Harris, and Wright seem more stylistically attuned to one another—after all, they have a closer geographical relationship, which enables them to practice regularly—and Wright's two contributions to Rips, “How You Got That Girl” and “Radio On”, both slot perfectly into the record's uniform, neo-roller rink vibe.
The songs look back to ’70s radio rock with some amount of yearning, but Rips isn’t purely motivated by retromania. There’s a bit of environmental pressure built into this record: garage rock is adaptive music, where minimum resources can yield maximum impact, and it can thrive where rents are pricey and practice space is in short supply. You can write it with the people who are around, it plays well in a basement and also on a stage, and it’s easy to know when it’s working. If you can remember a garage rock song two minutes after it’s over, then it’s probably a good one.
All the genre demands is excitement, and Rips is definitely exciting. It’s stripped down, fast, and physical; the songs mostly revolve around scrubby, disappointing dudes and their failings, but the message is never maudlin or tragic. Timony spent years speak-singing, performing lyrics in a cool and detached tone that wavered in and out of pitch. But in Ex Hex, she’s developed a more overtly melodic delivery. As a guitarist, she’s playing a bit below her chops, but her solos are tasteful and on point, pitching up the emotional heft of a song once words won't cut it anymore.
Over the years, Timony's own musical style evolved into something fairly distinct, a witchy-sounding and modestly mystical music that bred progressive rock and ’70s British folk with elements of D.C. post-punk. Some of that sound exists in Ex Hex, too, particularly in the modest pace of “Hot and Cold”, but Rips mostly finds the band walking away from Timony's established voice and pushing toward something more direct and energetic*—*embracing the past, but also blowing things up and starting again.


The L.A.-based singer-songwriter recorded the first album under his own name from the trenches of chemotherapy and a breakup, but the result is an exercise in gentle vulnerability and winsome grace.

Ryan Pollie

Bleomycin is a cancer drug that makes your hair fall out. The songwriter Ryan Pollie opens his self-titled debut album with a gorgeous choral recording named for it. Pollie finished the record in the trenches of chemotherapy, and his opener almost threatens to frame it as something precious. Instead, Ryan Pollie is mostly an exercise in gentle vulnerability.
Up until last year, Pollie was releasing dreamy bedroom pop under the confusingly generic name Los Angeles Police Department, and his songs were often so breezy that they obscured his talent. His first album under his own name feels more direct, and the songs function more like darts than lobs. Ryan Pollie isn’t a sprawling biography as much as a capsule of his cancer, a breakup, his relationship with his parents, and his late 20s. The album ends with another choral piece: his “Saturn Return.” It sounds like something he needed to get out of him.
That all of this comes out as lightly as it does is a testament in part to Pollie’s production, which veers close to inoffensive toe-tapping territory before a well-placed left-field element tilts it askew. His comfort zone is a folky blend of California pop and country, which keeps most of the songs sounding bright. “Get Better Soon” is a quirky Hallmark card of a love song; “Getting Clean” is a tender, almost cloyingly resolute meditation on depression.
Pollie’s voice is thin and pretty and sometimes trembles in his throat, as if it never found a place to hold onto. It can give the effect of offering up a lyric for consideration instead of setting it in stone. On “Only Child” he quips his way through chemo with an obvious comedic timing, but also like someone quietly unraveling. “I’ll try to speak in phrases that sound self-assured,” he sings in a meek, unconvincing lilt. The song chugs forward in playful bursts—there’s a banjo break and a flute cameo—and it functions more like a self-soothing lullaby than a showy diary. “My hair is falling out/My parents are calling now,” he sings.
The plodding piano ballad “Aim Slow” is a more sober, grand-scale meditation on death. It’s an arms-out, open-ended pulse check of a song that lands over and over on Pollie’s tormenting comfort of a refrain: “My God’s insane.” Early on he sings a promise to himself: “This time I will take time to say what I mean.” It’s an obvious thesis for any autobiography, but Pollie performs it with grace, thinking big thoughts about life and simplifying them all in the face of mortality.


With their ninth studio album, Radiohead move beyond the existential angst that made them music’s preeminent doomsayers, pursuing a more personal—and eternal—form of enlightenment.

A Moon Shaped Pool

Radiohead, who titled their ninth studio album A Moon Shaped Pool, have a unique grasp on how easily profundity can slip into banality. Their music is obsessed with the point where great truths harden into platitudes, where pure signal meets wretched noise. In the past, Thom Yorke has sharply peppered his lyrics with everyday cliches to suggest a mind consumed by meaningless data, but on the new album, he largely moves beyond cynicism. He is now considering simpler truths in a heretofore-unexplored register: wonder and amazement. “This goes beyond me, beyond you,” he sings on “Daydreaming.” “We are just happy to serve you.” There is no concealed razor under Yorke’s tongue as he offers this thought, or in the pearly music that surrounds him. It sounds for all the world like the most cloistered and isolated soul in modern rock music opening up and admitting a helplessness far more personal than he’s ever dared. Yorke has flirted with surrender before, and on A Moon Shaped Pool, that submission feels nearly complete.
The album is framed by two older pieces of music that act as gateways to the darker, unfamiliar waters within. Opener “Burn the Witch” has been floating around, in some form or another, since Kid A. “This is a low-flying panic attack,” Yorke announces, explicitly linking to the bad old days of air crashes, iron lungs, and wolves at doors. (In fact, several of the song’s lyrics—“avoid all eye contact,” “cheer at the gallows”—first appeared in the album art to 2003’s anti-Bush polemic Hail to the Thief.) Meanwhile, Jonny Greenwood’s brittle modernist string arrangement reinforces the angst, turning the orchestra into a giant pair of gnashing teeth. It’s a vintage splash of Radiohead stomach acid, a cloud of gnats unleashed in your cranial nerves.
It also feels like an exorcism for what follows: a plunge into something scarier than the military industrial complex, or the insidious nature of propaganda, or human nature’s disturbing tendency towards unquestioning obedience. Yorke separated from his partner of 23 years and the mother to his two children last August, and on “Identikit,” he sings “Broken hearts make it rain” and “When I see you messin’ me around, I don’t want to know.”
That isn’t to say that this is necessarily a “break-up album.” Separations (particularly those involving children) take place in the harsh light of day, with lawyers’ appointments and checklists and logistical arrangements. Radiohead albums are the stuff of dreams and nightmares, and the band retains a healthy resistance to clarity; their music is a maze of signs you can peer into any way you like. Even so, the impact of trauma, a sort of car crash of the soul, is palpable. The music here feels loose and unknotted, broken open in the way you can only be after a tragedy. “There’s a spacecraft blocking out the sky,” Yorke observes on “Decks Dark,” as choral voices pass overhead. The scene is straight from 1997’s “Subterranean Homesick Alien,” but here Yorke doesn’t sound “uptight.” He sounds utterly drained, as if impending invasion doesn’t concern him at all.
A song title like “Glass Eyes” hints at many of the band’s longstanding morbid preoccupations—the semblance of humanity in something cold and dead, or the violation of the biological body by foreign objects—but the song is a bloodflow of strings straight into the heart. “Hey it’s me, I just got off the train,” Yorke sings, and it’s a strikingly ordinary image: the Paranoid Android himself, picking up the phone and calling someone to tell them he’s just arrived. “I feel this love turn cold,” he confesses as the ballad draws to a close, the phrasing an echo, subconscious or not, of his Kid A sign-off “I’ll see you in the next life.” A throbbing cello appears like a lump in the throat; the song fades away.
Throughout the album, Yorke’s everyday enlightenment is backed by music of expanse and abandon. The guitars sound like pianos, the pianos sound like guitars, and the mixes breathe with pastoral calm. “The Numbers,” a song about the impending apocalypse brought on by climate change, meanders along, its groove as wide as an ocean. Even the malevolent synth wave that passes through “Ful Stop” sounds like a visitor, a momentary darkness rather than a caged spirit. As the song builds, the band works up a coursing groove that will feel familiar to longtime fans, with its interlocking guitars and an arterial bustle of rhythms serving to launch Yorke’s wordless moan. It’s a sound that Radiohead has spent the last decade honing, but the payoff here is deeper and more gratifying than it has been in a while.
The added dimension comes from Yorke, who pumps fresh oxygen into these songs, many of which have existed in sketch-like forms for years. On the lonely folk hymn “Desert Island Disk,” he sings of an epiphanic experience: “The wind rushing ‘round my open heart/An open ravine/In my spirit white.” As a vision of transformation, it feels like the inverse to *Amnesiac’*s “Pyramid Song,” where his only companions were the dead; here, he is “totally alive.”
And then there’s “True Love Waits.” It’s an old song, one that has been around in various forms for over two decades, but unlike “Burn the Witch” or the other teased sketches and scraps that Radiohead diehards pick apart on forums, it’s long been a part of their canon. It appeared on the 2001 live album I Might Be Wrong and, dragged into 2016, feels like a relic from a different geological era. “I’ll drown my beliefs,” Yorke sings, “just don’t leave.” It is the message they leave us with, this very open-hearted song that has always felt like an open wound in their discography, a geyser of feeling erupting out of scorched earth. Its very inclusion is a striking moment of transparency.
The version here is just Yorke and a piano, so reverberant and echo-drenched that it feels like we’ve stuck our heads inside it. Yorke croons tenderly, never opening up into his chest voice. It’s sung to one person this time, not crowds. In its mundane visions of “lollipops and crisps,” the lyrics purposefully skirt doggerel, an acknowledgment that cliches can be, in fact, where all the action is. “I’m not living/I’m just killing time,” the 47-year-old admits. You can write a line like that and set it to music; you can perform it for years in front of adoring millions; you can carry the idea around in your heart and mind. But it might take a lifetime for it to strike, as it does here, with a newfound power. The truth, as always, lies in plain sight, right there in the kicking and the squealing, the panic and the vomit. Some truths just take longer to see than others.


The duo’s refurbished EP gets the typical sequel treatment, with new characters and a glossy finish that makes you miss the gritty original.

Denzel Curry / Kenny Beats: Unlocked 1.5

Unlocked 1.5

The real Denzel Curry and Kenny Beats cannot come to the phone right now. According to the lore of their last album Unlocked, they are trapped deep in cyberspace while evil doppelgangers roam the world in their stead. It was Bad Denzel and Bad Kenny who “leaked” Unlocked last year. Now, the nefarious rapper and producer duo have roped in unsuspecting collaborators to remix a handful of songs from the record. Unlocked 1.5 presents a selection of seven tracks, reworked by artists like Robert Glasper, Georgia Anne Muldrow, and the Alchemist. Well wrought as they are, some of these additions feel a bit slapped-on. Unlocked is trim and scrappy, but its 1.5 update gets the typical sequel treatment: all-new characters, unnecessary plotlines, and a glossy finish that makes you miss the gritty original.
That 1.5 has too many ideas isn’t an indictment of each one, more so a question of whether or not they all make sense on the same EP. When Denzel and Kenny cut Unlocked, they recorded it over a frenzied three-day period, and the immediacy of that work is captured in the original version—it’s a lean-and-mean little project, all muscle, no fat. The addition of multiple skilled rappers and producers, each introducing their own style, tends to drown out the scruffy charm rather than enhance it. Pianist and producer Robert Glasper outfits “So.Incredible.pkg” with a drifting Tropicália vocal melody and key pulses that recall his work with Flying Lotus and Thundercat. The sound sits distinctly in the neo-jazz world Glasper is a part of (in the goofy trailer for 1.5, Glasper offers to “add a few things” after hearing the album. Kenny responds, “He’s gonna put a saxophone”).
Glasper and Georgia Anne Muldrow’s contributions—the latter on “Track07”—present beautified versions of Denzel and Kenny’s music. The components they impart are gorgeous, particularly Muldrow’s powerful, non-lexical singing, but they don’t feel of a piece with the album as a whole. Verses from British singer-songwriter Arlo Parks—whose voice is particularly light and sweet—feel especially out of place. On its own, “Track07” is a great song, but I wonder if it makes sense within the context of the EP as a whole. On the other hand, Smino’s drowsy verse on “So.Incredible.pkg” is a perfect foil to Denzel’s rasp. (Hearing Smino coyly squeak, “Huh, me? Little old me?” is a delight.)
At worst, some of these remixes defang Denzel a bit—his robust, jagged flow is often cleaned up and glazed over with slick production. Charlie Heat’s rendition of “Take It Back” and Sango’s “Pyro” remix suffer most from this issue. Their add-ons are unmemorable. Though both Glasper and Muldrow’s reworks were distracting, they were distractingly good—Heat and Sango’s offerings aren’t bad, but they don’t enhance the source material. Heat tacks on a soul sample, percussion, and a handful of bells and whistles. Sango smooths out any rough edges in the original. Both crowd the space Denzel once had to really stretch out and flail.
The most effective additions to 1.5 are supplied by veteran producer the Alchemist and Griselda MC Benny the Butcher. Benny’s time on “DIET_1.5” yields the best guest verse on the record, his springy cadence bouncing off Kenny’s aluminum beat like a hard rubber ball. On “‘Cosmic’.m4a,” the Alchemist beefs up the track with warped, bulbous synths and piano measures that sound lifted from a slasher score. Joey Bada$$ dishes out fierce bars on par with Denzel’s vigor, and the song ultimately feels elevated, each new element enhancing Denzel’s presence instead of overpowering it—an upgrade in the truest sense of the word.

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


One-man noise-pop project Nathan Williams delivers on his first widely released LP.

Wavvves

Wavves is the one-man noise-pop project of 22-year-old San Diegan Nathan Williams. Since his homemade cassettes and mpfree turbulence started damaging ears last year, Williams has become the focal point of what reads and feels like a maelstrom of chatter. Once something of a left-field mystery, the hype around him has built steadily throughout this young year. Now with drummer and a press photo, Williams has probably played about as many shows as he has songs to be heard. A spate of recent outings in New York a few weeks back had the scene in such a tizzy, The New York Times sent a dispatch to bear witness. And, just a few days later, to capitalize on the swell, his new label expedited the digital release of Wavvves , his second full-length in just four months.
Without delving too deeply into the muck of Williams' proper (and purely self-titled) debut LP, Wavves , it's worth noting that each of his twin long-players share more than just a menu of goths, weeeeeeed, demons, breakers, and vintage skate photography. While his second is the marginally less abrasive, more realized of the two efforts, both feature the same roach-encrusted punk pop. Be it in the opening power chords of "Beach Demon" or "To the Dregs", there's a couple of fried amps' worth of trusted guitar tropes and distortion-- tricks borrowed from the Wipers and Sonic Youth-- enveloping Williams' carbonated choruses. The vocal hooks themselves come fast, usually propelled by titanic drumbeats nicked from 1960s girl group music. It's not immediate--- and hardly the "pop" record that some have characterized it as-- but deep in the froth of highlight "No Hope Kids" lurks more than just a thick dose of teenaged ennui or even volume. There's thrilling evidence of compelling, thoughtful craftsmanship as well.
Wavves' no-fi bent has been compared to No Age's. But while those guys tend to reach far outside of their own feedback for spaces more expansive, Wavves' music feels more insular, self-contained, and unsettling. These aren't shouts from a house party, but from a solitary bedroom. And Wavvves ' outbursts are often tempered and sandwiched between clipped electronics (opener "Rainbow Everywhere" and "Goth Girls") or experimental noise ("Killer Punx, Scary Demons") that help congeal the album as a whole.
As the hubbub surrounding his music and name game began to gather serious cybersteam over the past few months, the San Diego native wisely moved his signature from small-time imprint De Stijl, to the bigger, much more historically distinct Fat Possum. Business measures and consonant gimmicks aside, the hop down South makes perfect aesthetic sense-- this young man is most certainly singing the blues. Hopeless stoner/loner incantations are scattered throughout, though two of the album's most bulletproof moments are also it's most deliciously bleak. Next to the pains of "No Hope Kids" (no car, no friends, no family, no friends, no girl), "So Bored" leaves memorable blisters. It's the record's one slam-dunk earworm, and it's a total bummer. Over three melted chords and his own back-up oooooooh's and aaaaaah's, Williams' moans a mantra that's bled into every track: "I'm sooooo booooored, I'm sooooo boooored." Not for much longer.


This unique African band pals around with the Ex and Tortoise and creates something of an accidental update on Bazombo trance music.

Congotronics

It is entirely possible that an amplified, slightly distorted likembe creates the most awesome sound on earth. There's no other sound quite like it, and there's no other band like Konono No. 1, the assemblage of Bazombo musicians, dancers, and singers from Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) that makes the likembe the center of their sound. It's something of an accidental update on Bazombo trance music, and it's thrillingly unique stuff, a torrent of kinetic sound that straddles the line between the traditional and the avant-garde. The likembe is commonly known in the West as a thumb piano, and there are variations of the instrument in different cultures across Africa-- perhaps the most well-known is the mbira, which is used across Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and parts of South Africa. The instrument has a pinging tone that is practically designed by nature to sound awesome with a bit of amp fuzz on it.
Konono employ three electric likembes-- each in a different register-- and the amplification is very makeshift. The band formed in the 1980s to perform its traditional music, but soon found that being heard above the street noise of Kinshasa wasn't a going concern as long as they remained strictly acoustic. Scavenging magnets from car parts, they built their own microphones and pickups, and they augmented their percussion section with hi-hat and assorted scrap metal. Vocal amplification came from a megaphone, and the accidental distortion they drew from the likembes cemented their distinctive sound. Though their music is still traditional in style and content, recent trips to Europe have turned them on to how avant-garde what they're doing is, and they've fallen in with musicians like the Ex, Tortoise, and the Dead C.
Congotronics is actually the second Konono record to receive international distribution-- last year's Lubuaku was a live recording from a European tour-- and it's bound to win them a following amongst noiseniks, experimental music buffs, and open-minded worldbeat fans, though most other people will likely find it merely interesting. The record opens with "Kule Kule" and a reprise of the same, and these tracks stake out the sound of what follows quite precisely. "Kule Kule" is hauntingly subdued, with the three likembe players locking in with each other on a series of choppy riffs and bursts of crazy melody (anyone familiar with the Ex's "Theme From Konono" from last year's Turn will recognize the themes and riffs), while the reprise adds vocals sans megaphone. The four remaining songs all sound as though they were recorded live, and there is in fact some applause between a few of them.
The themes laid out on the introductory songs surface repeatedly over the course of the album, lending it a suite-like feel. "Lufuala Ndonga" comes crashing to an end, and its conclusion becomes the introduction of "Masikulu", on which the frantic chants are swept up in swirling currents of percussion. The most stunning song is the instrumental "Paradiso", which puts the likembe interplay front and center, their distorted, scattershot melodies ricocheting from side-to-side over a thumping backbeat, skittering hi-hat, and some amazing snare work. It's funky in a sort of incidental manner-- obviously meant for dancing-- but hitting on a sort of deep funk rhythmic sensibility without really even trying.
Konono No. 1 are the kind of band that remind us that music still possesses vast wells of untapped potential, and that there's virtually no limit to what can be developed and explored. There's little precedent for a record like Congotronics, even as the music at its core goes back many generations and predates the discovery of electricity by some time. It's important to note that these are not pop songs in any sense of the word-- this is traditional trance music with an electric twist, and should be approached as such. That said, it's among the most fascinating music I've heard and deserves a listen by anyone with even the remotest interest in the possibilities of sound.


The fast-rising rappers team for a fun but inconsistent joint album that’s most effective when their verses weave together to feel like one.

Last Ones Left

Longtime Memphis rap emissary Yo Gotti is on a quest to become the next Birdman. And since the days before Juvenile’s 400 Degreez turned Cash Money into a behemoth, the New Orleans-bred bossman has believed in the power of the rap duo: from the Big Tymers to Like Father, Like Son, from Drake and Wayne to Young Thug and Rich Homie Quan as Rich Gang. Birdman’s philosophy seems to be, if you have two hot artists on the same label, put them together and they’ll get even hotter. Yo Gotti appears to have adopted that ideology on his CMG imprint’s latest release Last Ones Left, an occasionally exciting joint album between two fast-rising rappers in Detroit’s 42 Dugg and Louisville’s EST Gee.
Dugg and Gee complement each other well enough: They’re both hugely influenced by rap scenes in the South and Midwest, and they both tell hardened drug-dealing stories that blur the lines between reality and myth. Specifically what works about them as a pair is the way their voices clash, as Dugg’s brash high-pitched delivery, which slightly brings to mind Webbie, ricochets off Gee sounding like a ghost whispering through the walls. The highlights are the tracks where their verses weave together to the point that they feel like one. On “Ice Talk,” Dugg and Gee are in complete sync, building off each other’s last lines every time they pass the mic. I particularly like “Free the Shiners,” when Gee ends on a meditative note about love and Dugg follows with an unhinged and considerably less heartfelt mood change.
The chemistry wanes a bit when the two take on a more traditional verse one, verse two structure. Sometimes, the tonal shifts are off-putting: I tend not to always take Dugg that seriously, meanwhile Gee sounds like he has maybe laughed once in his life and it was at a kid falling off his bike. On the piano-driven “Skcretch Sum,” Dugg’s skittering chirps feel inconsequential while Gee is rattling off cold-blooded nightmares: “We gon’ send him back holding his hat with decompressed lungs/God helped me relax, I throw two back, help my depression.” On “Thump Shit,” Dugg brags about being able to sell literally anything you typically need a prescription for (like the Wolf of Wall Street “sell me this pen” scene but for drugs), but it fits oddly next to Gee rapping about violence with a level of cruelty that is borderline horrorcore. It works on “Everybody Shooters Too,” though. Over one of the best, pummeling Enrgy beats since AK Bandamont’s 2021 tape Soul Controller, Dugg and Gee are in full heat-check mode, culminating in the moment when they rap “They say it’s all for nothing, but I’m going for it, fuck it” in unison. It’s maybe two seconds, but it’s an amazing two seconds.
As the tape goes on, it veers off course from a Dugg and Gee joint album into promotion for the new artists that Gee and Dugg are pushing. I get it, but it feels about as underwhelming as when you’re watching a TV show and they sneak in a backdoor pilot. Still, Last Ones Left holds together despite its inconsistencies. Even if 42 Dugg and EST Gee aren’t the most organic duo, it’s hard not to have fun with two scorching-hot rappers going toe-to-toe.


After the discord of The Beatles, the group sought to get back to basics with a rock LP and a film about its creation. This was the eventual result.

Let It Be

As the 1960s wound down, so did the Beatles. The symmetry was perfect: youthful energy, optimism, and camaraderie had given over to cynicism, discord, and looking out for number one. As the decade's final year began, the White Album was still riding high on the charts and the Yellow Submarine soundtrack was days away from release. But the Beatles were in serious trouble. Nothing about being in the band was enjoyable or easy. The power vacuum left by the death of manager Brian Epstein a year and a half earlier had never been satisfactorily filled; Apple Corps, the multi-media company started by the band a year earlier, was bleeding money; and toughest of all, the once-Fab Four didn't generally enjoy being in the same room together. All were either married or close to it, closing in on 30, and tremendously weary of all they'd been through.
Paul McCartney, the most devoted of the gang to the notion of the Beatles (Ringo Starr called him the "Beatleaholic"), thought that the group needed a special project to bring it together. Another White Album-style scenario, with the songwriters in the band working alone in separate studios, enlisting each other to serve as a de facto backup band, was bound to fail. Too much good will and trust had been lost. They needed something big they could all submit to. Several ideas were proposed, most involving a return of some kind to live performance: perhaps a live album of new songs or a huge show in a remote place; maybe the band would charter an ocean liner and make an album on it. Ultimately, it was decided that the band would be filmed on a soundstage rehearsing for a show and developing material for a new album-- a document of the Beatles at work. The theme for the project would be back-to-basics, a return of the group as a performing unit, sans overdubs, emphasizing their inherent musicality. Working title: Get Back.
It was an awful idea. First, no one was sure exactly what he was supposed to be doing. Glyn Johns was there, a new presence behind the boards, but he never quite figured out if he was producing or just engineering. Regular producer George Martin was technically on board, but his participation was minimal. While Let It Be was initially meant to be a return to simplicity, Phil Spector's later involvement (he was brought in to "reproduce" the tracks, adding extra voices and instruments to thicken arrangements and remix the record, a decision made without McCartney's input) killed that angle.
Organizational chaos aside, the sessions were painful. We all know what it feels like to be around people we don't like for days on end; if reality television has taught us anything, it's that a camera crew in a room full of such people does nothing to ease tension. The time the Beatles spent recording and filming was described by all as supremely unpleasant, despite a later uptick when they'd returned to finish up at Abbey Road. And when they finished, no one really liked what they'd laid down on tape. So not surprisingly, the essential nature of Let It Be is that it feels incomplete and fragmented; it's a difficult album to peg because the Beatles were never sure themselves what they wanted it to be. So the best way to approach it is as a collection of songs by guys who still were churning out classics with some regularity. It may not succeed on the level of the Beatles' previous albums, but there's enough good material to make it a worthy entry in their canon.
Outside of the title track, there's little here that feels consequential to the Beatles' legacy. The easy acoustic shuffle of the John Lennon and Paul McCartney duet "Two of Us" has appeal, though, as do the prickly rhythmic drive of George Harrison's "For You Blue" and the bubbling Booker T-isms of McCartney's "Get Back". The swampy "I've Got a Feeling", possibly reflecting McCartney's recent interest in Canned Heat, is intriguing because it sounds so classic rock 70s. And Lennon's "Across the Universe", recorded during the White Album sessions and sounding like it was beamed in from somewhere else, has a certain ringing brilliance. For balance, there's "Dig a Pony" and the boogieing "One After 909", the latter actually written by Lennon and McCartney as kids in the fifties. Still, for plenty of good bands, the best of these would be career highlights.
Recorded without joy, set aside for months while a better album was assembled, and finally remixed in a way that enraged one of the band's principals, Let It Be finally saw release in May 1970. But by that point, the Beatles break-up had been official for several weeks. There's since been a live album, compilations, digitization, trolls through the archives, and an ocean of ink spilled about this little band that made it very big. And now there are these CD issues, done beautifully. But there never was a proper reunion, and we can assume that there will never be another Beatles.
[Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.]


The artists formerly known as Viet Cong return with a harrowing, ferociously alive rock record that nods to Swans and Echo and the Bunnymen.

Preoccupations

It took seven months for the members of Viet Cong to pick a new band name, but it appears to have been time well spent. On their first album as Preoccupations, they live up to their moniker to an almost scary degree, sounding engrossed in thought to the point of pathological obsession. “With a sense of urgency and unease/Second guessing just about everything” sings Matt Flegel to open the album, in a song called “Anxiety.” Internal stress marks every track, in phrases like “spinning in a vacuum,” “falling into mania,” “so close to exhaustion,” “overwhelmed, and it’s coming from all angles.” By its words alone, Preoccupations reads like fodder for major therapy.
What makes Preoccupations much more than a circular exercise in self-analysis is the vitality of the music. There’s a tense, nervous energy running through all the tracks, which connect to each other like wires that spark electrical currents when they meet. The same could be said of the band’s self-titled album as Viet Cong, which also crackled with highly-concentrated vigor. But there’s something tauter, snappier, and even more melodic about Preoccupations.
Maybe it’s that the group has embraced some of their influences more openly. The first Viet Cong EP included a cover of Bauhaus’ “Dark Entries,” but the ghosts of ’80s post-punk are stronger on Preoccupations. The band seems particularly infatuated with the catchier end of that spectrum: many of these bass-driven, shimmering guitar tunes evoke Echo and the Bunnymen, Psychedelic Furs, and Teardrop Explodes. There’s even one super-catchy song, “Stimulation,” that could pass for an early Cure track, albeit updated to fit Preoccupations’ strengths. Its high-speed hooks makes Flegel’s chants of “We’re all dumb inside/All dead inside/All gonna die” sound positively enthusiastic.
Even with tunes as bright as that one, Preoccupations is an intense listen. Flegel’s lyrics are relentlessly dark, laser-focused on heavy, troubling issues. At times, his barks and howls combined with the band’s rhythmic pummeling (one tune is even called “Monotony”) are almost too much to handle, approaching the harrowing feel of early Swans. Take when Flegel sings “You’ve been made irrelevant by a suicide machine/Mechanically modified to muffle out the screams” over the stark percussion of “Forbidden.” But throughout Preoccupations, the music’s sharp jolts make Flegel’s words not moribund but full of life. He’s not sitting in a corner feeling sorry for himself, but fighting hard to shed an emotional straitjacket.
Whether he ever actually breaks out of his shackles is a moot question, but Preoccupations does end with some success on that count. The record’s prettiest tune, “Fever,” closes the album with the semi-triumphant declaration, “You’re not scared/Carry your fever away from here.” Still, the power of Preoccupations lies not in some victory but in the battle. All the wrestling and strife inside these songs are the musical equivalent of blood blasting through veins and nerves raking skin. For Preoccupations, if you’re not struggling, you’re not living.


The veteran Chicago producer's Planet Mu debut is an album more concerned with footwork's past than its future: it's a loving musical history set on loop.

Da Mind of Traxman

Dance music is a futurist's game, and footwork is no different. When the music bubbled up out of Chicago's South and West Sides two years ago, listeners took notice in part because of the undeniable newness of the sound. Since then, conversation has focused on where footwork is going, especially on where forward-thinking artists both here (Sepalcure, Machinedrum) and across the Atlantic (Kuedo, Addison Groove) are taking the sound. Planet Mu releases by Chicago artists like DJ Diamond, DJ Nate, and DJ Roc ensured that the scene's progenitors got their due, but those albums-- especially Diamond's Flight Muzik-- strove for rhythmic and melodic complexity foreign to the scene's established M.O.
Traxman is the latest Chicago artist to record a full-length for Planet Mu. Da Mind of Traxman is notable in part because it's an album more concerned with footwork's past than its future. A godfather of the style, Traxman came up in the 1990s ghetto-house scene and fostered the genre through collaborations, DJ sets, and mixes without building up much of a catalog under his own name. Da Mind of Traxman sounds like its title, the pent-up musings of a veteran spilling onto wax. The conversational powers of footwork shouldn't be underrated: Those whirring vocal samples are a language game waiting to happen, and the genre's unapologetic, unmonitored sampling culture allow it to interact with other musics in ways that house and techno often can't.
Traxman syncs footwork to its Chicago lineage-- juke and house-- but more interestingly to soul, funk, and rock. Opening track "Footworkin on Air" features what sounds like a wooden xylophone competing with a pointillist sequencer and blocky bass. It's as light and frothy as footwork gets, and it has as much to do with Aphex Twin as Dance Mania. Traxman often downplays his drum machines; I get the impression he cares as much about Rhodes pianos as he does 808s. "Itz Crack" and "Rock You" contrast lilting jazz/soul melodies with quick, non-invasive percussion. On the infrequent occasions where he slips into vulgar ghetto-house mantras, he sets them against his weirdest compositions. "Going Wild" (a collaboration with Rashad and AG) is schizophrenic, vacillating between chirpy irritants and half-time bass distensions, all keeping uneasy pace with a wordless, Eastern vocal melody. It sounds like paint flakes off of Flying Lotus' drywall. "1988" pays homage to the sci-fi synth ropes of vintage Detroit techno.
Of course, there's nothing particularly "footwork" about the Dilla-isms of "Lady Dro" or the tin-roof patter of "Sound Filed", but that hardly seems the point. When, on "Lifeeeee Is For Ever", he stirs Prince's organ-backed monologue from "Let's Go Crazy" into a stuttering frenzy, it feels less like album-closing pathos and more like a producer saying, "oh yeah, I forgot, I really love Prince, too." Listening to Da Mind of Traxman is a little like staring at a page of .gif images: Those short, repeating animations have a way of revealing detail. And when they don't it's still comforting to know that they'll spin there in perpetuity. Da Mind of Traxman is Traxman's musical history set on loop, a conversation held in stunted, loving bursts.


Trent Reznor shuns radio-friendly alt-rock and settles into his role as a cult star, releasing a complex record about a dystopian near-future.

Year Zero

For all his nihilistic tantrums, Trent Reznor always wanted to be loved by as many people as possible. After the multi-platinum bloodletting The Downward Spiral exploded in 1994, the depressive frontman froze, stuck in a drug-addled mindfuck of heightened expectations. And while he took eons deciding whether he wanted to be the next "voice of a generation," a fickle pop zeitgeist passed Nine Inch Nails by. Ten years and just one (insular, commercially toxic) album later, 2005's With Teeth had Reznor turning familiar tricks while desperately groping for the mass adulation of old. But, even by regressive NIN standards, the album was too lock-step, causing die-hards to question their favorite troubled teen trapped inside a 40-year-old brute's body. "A lot of what I've done as Nine Inch Nails has been governed by fear," admitted the singer two years ago, and With Teeth sounded like the product of a man paralyzed by his looming cultural expiration date.
But something clicked while Reznor & co. toured the world over the past couple of years-- he learned to stop worrying about MTV and love the cult. When I saw the band on Long Island last summer, they were riveting, raged, and refreshed. Brutally aggressive yet artfully dramatic, the performance was anything but staid; it got me genuinely excited about NIN for the first time in ages. And apparently, the tour got Reznor amped too. A mere two years after his latest full-length (a mere blip on the NIN timeline) comes Year Zero, a disquieting apocalyptic vision largely recorded on the road. The songs still deal with Reznor's tried-and-true topics-- including the destructive powers of addiction, religion, and authority-- but the record's framework is new. Instead of just chronicling his own fatalistic tendencies, this time Reznor is taking on the entire world's hastening downward spiral.
It's not the most original dystopian yarn. An amalgam of ideas taken from no-future tales like 1984, The Matrix, and The Wall, Year Zero takes place on a scorched earth 15 years from today: The war on terror has escalated into a full-blown fanatical religious struggle, the American people are sedated by government-sanctioned drugs with names like Parepin and Opal, and a violent underground resistance movement is trying to usurp the totalitarian U.S. regime. It's a perfect shitstorm for Reznor to do what he does best: depict ceaseless brutality with the tactless force of a bunker buster.
But instead of leaving it up to the listener to fill in the nameless pronouns and vague themes within Year Zero, he's hired Alternate Reality Game experts to help him concoct a sprawling hypertext scavenger hunt aimed squarely at obsessives. The online game's unabashed intricacies reiterate Reznor's new appreciation for his smaller, devout fanbase: There's no way a casual fan can could hope to keep track of the myriad hidden websites, endless message board speculation, and spectrograph analysis (seriously) required to crack Year Zero's expanded storyboard. Thankfully, none of that knowledge is necessary to enjoy the album's combustible backdrops.
Low on anthemic hooks and heavy on riotous noise breaks, Year Zero finds Reznor waving his digital hardcore flag high. Instead of wallowing in monotonous refrains as he did on With Teeth and parts of The Fragile, Reznor offers Bomb Squad-meets-Merzbow sonic blasts on tracks like "Vessel", "My Violent Heart", and especially the apocalypse-now back-end of "The Great Destroyer"; these fuzz buckets double as yellow caution tape for all "Hurt"-loving passerbys. The album's ever-mutating drums and off-kilter arrangements show this plug-in wonk is still a master programmer. Then there are the words, which remain somewhat less than masterful. But, for every repetitive mention of "down on your knees" submission and corrosive godheads (there are many), Year Zero squeezes out some intriguing ambiguities.
Though it's clear Reznor favors the anti-establishment warriors in his invented battle-earth, he offers multiple sides to the story-- and even some shades of gray between good and evil. There's the torn military man at the center of "The Good Soldier" who's trying to believe his actions are just ("God is on my side/ I keep telling myself"), the apathetic bystander who only asks "can we stop?" when it's too late on "Me, I'm Not", and voices representing god-complex propaganda from both government ("The Greater Good") and anti-government ("My Violent Heart") players. The set-up hides Reznor behind his characters to an extent, but lines like, "Don't try to tell me how some power can corrupt a person/ You haven't had enough to know what it's like," from the broad anti-Bush swipe "Capital G", could also describe the deadening corruption he himself faced by-way-of fame and drugs once upon a time.
In 1996, Reznor told Spin, "The idea of politics is just so uninteresting to me-- I don't believe things can really change. It doesn't matter who's president." Now more mature and sober, he's finally aware of the world around him-- and, not surprisingly, he's not too pleased. While Year Zero gets bogged down in stock themes, 2-D imagery, and the occasional too-long come-down, its cult-ready appeal is pure. The fan-artist communion reaches a peak on the post-doomsday finale, "Zero-Sum", a welcome addition to the lofty tradition of NIN album-closing ballads. "And I guess I just wanted to tell you," says Reznor in a conspiratorial whisper, "As the light starts to fade/ That you are the reason/ That I am not afraid." It's the end of the world as he knows it, and he feels (relatively) fine.


Working alone with just a nylon-string guitar, Mark Kozelek takes a new tack under his Sun Kil Moon alias.

Admiral Fell Promises

This is an odd question to be asking in 2010, after he has spent nearly 20 years making music: What makes a Mark Kozelek solo album different from a Sun Kil Moon album? For most of the 2000s, the distinction was more than just words on a jewel-case spine, as he debuted new material under the Sun Kil Moon banner and then reinterpreted it in live or demo settings as a solo artist. Musically, it always sounded like a matter of electric versus acoustic, full-band versus solo guitar, jammy versus intimate. It's the two sides of a man who has turned himself into a cottage industry through his Caldo Verde label, releasing scores of companion EPs and limited-edition live LPs that keep his old songs alive. But the split between Sun Kil Moon and Kozelek has never come across as merely a sales gimmick. Instead, it's a way to document the complex lives of his songs, which are never quite finished but always hold the potential for rebirth and transformation.
With Admiral Fell Promises, his fourth LP as Sun Kil Moon, Kozelek has flipped the script. Instead of downcast Crazy Horse epics like Ghosts of the Great Highway and April-- albums rich with electric tones, roomy arrangements, and landscape-painting lyrics-- this is literally a solo record: just Kozelek alone with a nylon-string guitar. Furthermore, the title track dates all the way back to 2001's White Christmas Live, released under his own name. So this stands as an anomaly within his catalog, not only for its artist credit but also for its music, which finds him wandering into new territory and entertaining new ideas.
On this site last May, Kozelek said he'd been listening to a lot of classical guitar music, specifically name-checking Kaki King and Croatian musician Ana Vidovic. They seem to be the primary inspiration for Admiral Fell Promises, which showcases a classical picking style rather than his usual strumming. Kozelek's playing is supple and nuanced, swift in its fingerings and hypnotic in its repetitions of riffs and phrases. Despite the Nordic muse of the title, opener "Ålesund" possesses a flamenco intensity, as Kozelek adds fluttering fills to the main themes, and on "Australian Winter", he creates an ominous repeating rhythm that plays up the restless tension of the lyrics. If the instrumental codas that cap almost every song become a bit predictable, this style fits his songwriting well, allowing him to punctuate the short verses of "Half Moon Bay" with sympathetic filigrees of sound and to create hidden coves on closer "Bay of Skulls".
As usual, Kozelek's songs are inspired as much by places as by people-- or, perhaps, by places that let him contemplate the people who are no longer around. Mostly those places are in or near San Francisco: Half Moon Bay down the coast, Sam Wong Hotel in Chinatown, the intersection of Third and Seneca. Whether he's watching the city from his window or taking a long, lonely walk along the beach, he sketches out his surroundings in fleeting details, noting the reassuring presence of boats in the bay or gulls overhead before retreating deep into his own memory. "Oh, Catherine drifts again into my mind," he sings on "Sam Wong Hotel". "Freezing the tide, she visits me still." Despite some lyrical clichés and careless redundancies ("Come out from the burning flame" being the most glaring example), Kozelek's songs change mood fluidly, and the contrast between the serene settings and his own tumultuous thoughts raises even the most languid instrumental passages above mere aural wallpaper, lending it the gravity of his best work while giving it a character all its own.
Regardless of how it's credited, Admiral Fell Promises treats music as a retreat, allowing Kozelek to stand apart form the world and nurse his own disappointments. That safe haven, even more than his descriptive songwriting or eloquently downcast vocals, is crucial to his appeal, allowing the listener to slip into his perspectives, to see these vistas through his eyes, and to feel the ache of his regrets. For an artist who's notoriously difficult to pin down, that sense of refuge is remarkable, as is the fact that two decades into his career, Kozelek is still finding new inspirations.


Originally conceived as one part of Robert Wilson's ambitious, avant-garde opera The CIVIL warS, this 1984 work is being issued for the first time on CD, with the addition of eight previously unreleased tracks and dense liner notes by David Byrne himself.

The Knee Plays

The CIVIL warS: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down was set to be experimental theatre director Robert Wilson's most massive achievement to date. Best known at the time for his 1976 five-hour operatic collaboration with Philip Glass, Einstein on the Beach, Wilson was leading troupes from six countries in the production of CIVIL warS, a 12-hour avant-garde opera that would premiere at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Although Wilson lost funding before staging the full production, several smaller versions of the play were individually performed around the world. "The Knee Plays", the American contribution scored by David Byrne, premiered in Minneapolis in April 1984, and had its vinyl release on avant-jazz label ECM the next year.
"Knee Plays" is Wilson's own term, contrived to describe the connective vignettes that link the larger sections of a production, allowing for set and costume changes. Byrne signed on to produce the interstitials for CIVIL warS, and his subsequent performances have been comprised solely of the adjoining sections, which hold together rather well-- as well as one of Wilson's non-narratives can, at least. Nonesuch's current release of Knee Plays-- for the first time on CD-- adds eight previously unreleased tracks and a dense recollection of the pair's mind-meld by Byrne himself.
In many ways, a collaboration between Byrne and Wilson was perfect. Most obviously, Byrne's work with Twyla Tharp and Jonathan Demme on The Catherine Wheel and Stop Making Sense, respectively, indicated a keen interest in similar sorts of theatre, as well as the ability to pull off a collaboration with often wonderful results. The pair's stylistic and procedural similarities run deep as well: Both Byrne and Wilson had gained reknown by mastering the use of patient, tourettically clipped and repetitive phrases and gestures; they also shared a fascination with antisociality (at times, mental illness) and the mundane realities of everyday life. They even looked similar, in a tall, geekily dashing sort of way.
Originally envisioning a Japanese drum ensemble, Byrne instead opted for music more in the vein of New Orleans' Dirty Dozen Brass Band-- a perfect fit for a play inspired by the Civil War and scored by Byrne, at this point seemingly fascinated by all art with strong cultural resonances. From the opening track, "Tree (Today Is an Important Occasion)" to the quintessentially Byrnian spoken-word closer "In the Future", the music is variously light, dramatic, authoritative, and empathetic. Byrne's ethnomusicological streak in full force, several sections of his score were adapted from traditional music: "In the Upper Room", "Social Studies (The Gift of Sound)", and "Things to Do (I've Tried)" are faithful gospel adaptations, and "Theadora Is Dozing" comes from the Bulgarian folk tradition.
Byrne, like Wilson, treats simple behaviors with the utmost delicacy and curiosity. In the essay included with the Nonesuch re-release, Byrne discusses his decision to accompany the music with narration (by himself, of course) as part of the Dadaist and Surrealist traditions: "None of these (text pieces) was directly related to Bob's 'story' and they were certainly unrelated to the stage action...to 'illustrate' things that are happening on stage with music or text is redundant." Anyone familiar with the liner notes to Stop Making Sense will recognize the narration over "Upper Room", for instance: "Being in the theater is more important than knowing what is going on in the movie." Similarly, "Things to Do" is a numbered to-do list ("Number 25. Putting houses next to bumpy things/ Number 26. Shaking things next to other things"), and both "Tree" and "Social Studies" approach everyday activities from the perspective of a stranger to Western culture. The most successful of these is the original closer "In the Future", on which Byrne shows off his knack at predicting technological and social trends, ending with "In the future there will be so much going on that no one will be able to keep track of it." That statement seems applicable to most any historical era, but who's quibbling? He's right.
The most striking characteristic of The Knee Plays reflects the most overlooked quality shared by Byrne and Wilson. Both artists are deeply invested in appeals to their audiences' most basic human sympathies, yet their approaches are often misunderstood as cold by those who can't meet the work on its own terms. Extracted from its theatrical roots, Byrne's score holds up remarkably well, a testament to his unique vision at the time of its composition-- coming at the end of one of pop music's most fascinating creative streaks.


At the turn of the century, Radiohead released two albums that forever altered their identity. Now, Kid A and Amnesiac are reissued as a pair, along with whatever worthy B-sides, alternate versions, and outtakes they can find.

Kid A Mnesia

Kid A and Amnesiac, released eight months apart, have always had a big brother/kid brother relationship. They were recorded at the same time, during the same sessions, but Amnesiac inevitably became seen as a repository, the place where the music that wasn’t on Kid A found a home. As a standalone album, its reputation has been unsettled since the minute it was released—in a glowing New Yorker profile that same year, Alex Ross watches them tersely correct a hapless young MTV News reporter who accidentally refers to Amnesiac as the “outtakes.” “Try again,” snapped Phil Selway.
The band separated the two releases because they wanted to avoid releasing a double album, that most tired and bloated of rock-excess beasts. At the time, avoidance of all rock-star gestures had become something of a survival mechanism for the band. They had been touring, more or less continuously, for the past seven years. Six months into the long, punishing tour for OK Computer, Thom Yorke had briefly slipped into catatonia. They were getting more successful, and it felt awful: Watch the 1998 documentary Meeting People Is Easy and you’ll see what rock stardom felt like to Yorke’s nervous system—dull, pointless torture, like being detained for eternity by airport security.
When they began the fitful, labored studio sessions that would produce both Kid A and Amnesiac in late 1999 and 2000, Radiohead knew very little about what they wanted, only that they did not want to be “rock stars” anymore. Their new music, whatever else it might be, must accomplish that singular objective: All rock-band gestures were to be isolated, rooted out, and erased. They wanted to, as the song title had it, disappear completely.
A Radiohead axiom is that whatever the band set out to do, they usually wind up accomplishing the exact opposite. When they went in to record OK Computer, Thom Yorke declared confidently that they were about to make their first “positive” record. And when they released Kid A—the album meant to chart a new course away from the rock-star treadmill—it became their first-ever album to simultaneously top the U.S. and UK charts. Even more than “Creep,” which had only blown up Stateside, Kid A was now their big hit. Eight months later, Amnesiac would reach No. 2. They had gone as far away from guitar-based rock music as they knew how to go, and at the end of it, not only were Radiohead still a rock band, they were a generational one. All roads led back to the arena stage, even their escape route.
In the last five or so years, the band seems to have come to terms with its status—Selway and Ed O’Brien graciously accepted the band’s nomination into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. In 2017, they entered their commemorative re-release phase with OK Computer OKNOTOK 1997 2017, which collected the band’s foundational third album along with its ephemera. Now, they have finally released that long-avoided double album: Kid A Mnesia, which unites the two studio albums, along with whatever worthy B-sides, alternate versions, and outtakes they can find.
Like many of their recent gestures—putting their music on Spotify for fans, years after Yorke memorably dubbed the streaming service “the last desperate fart” in the music industry’s “dying corpse”; releasing hours of their demos for OK Computer after someone hacked their MiniDiscs from the sessions—it feels like an act of both generosity and capitulation. They have long since stopped fighting, but these albums capture the band when the stakes felt mortal; in recording these albums, they were fighting for their lives.
During the recording sessions, the band was frequently aimless, frustrated, certain only that they were accomplishing very little. On the online journal he maintained on Radiohead’s website during the recording sessions, O’Brien worried publicly that the band was steering itself toward oblivion. “It’s taken us seven years to get this sort of freedom, and it’s what we always wanted,” he wrote. “But it could be so easy to fuck it all up.” At times, it seems like every one of them was casting about in different directions, returning with half-cooked pieces of music that nobody else quite knew what to do with. They didn’t know what kind of band they were supposed to become, but they all knew they were tired of the band they were currently in. None of them had one clear, resounding idea for a new direction.
One of the earliest songs they struggled with was “In Limbo,” which layers guitar triplets over straight 4/4 drums, both of which slid off the surface of the underlying 6/4 meter. Rhythmically, it created a featureless expanse with no distinguishing marks, and the song’s pulse resembled ocean waves more than any sort of backbeat. Perhaps in a nod to the song’s maze-like rhythm, perhaps in acknowledgment of the quicksand they felt underneath, they called the demo “Lost at Sea.”
Meanwhile, Jonny Greenwood was fooling around with modular synthesizers, playing patches of radio static and snatches of electronic music records over rudimentary drum machine patterns, searching for a moment of inspiration. Yorke listened to it patiently, and found only 40 seconds of usable material—four refracted synth chords from the American composer Paul Lansky’s computer piece “Mild Un Liese.” The seeds of “Idioteque” were planted.
In all this seeming directionlessness, Radiohead were zeroing in on the most primal essence of their art—sound. Critics at the time knocked Kid A and Amnesiac for seeming half-formed, or sketch-like, but the de-emphasis on things like bridges and middle-eights seemed strategic. The members were seeking textures and tones, spaces expansive and inviting enough that they might stay awhile. In doing so, they reinvented the timbral palette for a rock band.
It was on Kid A and Amnesiac that they became in love with almost recognizable sounds. What was born out of a desire to erase—and Yorke used this word more than once, suggesting a vigorous desire, naming his solo album after this impulse—became an opportunity to transfigure. The standard rock instruments became the ghosts—nothing in Kid A sounds so otherworldly as the guitars, or Yorke’s voice. On “Morning Bell,” Greenwood scraped the strings with a coin to produce keyboard-like sounds.
The disembodied guitar sounds mingled eerily with the ondes Martenot, an instrument Jonny Greenwood mastered after becoming obsessed with the music of French composer Olivier Messiaen. Messiaen employed the ondes Martenot in his celebrated large-scale 1948 work Turangalîla-Symphonie, which generated ecstatic, alien textures from the full orchestra and the early electronic instrument’s disembodied whine. The ondes Martenot is everywhere on these two albums—whining alongside the string section in “How to Disappear Completely,” doubling the guitar and vocals on “Optimistic.” It is deployed as a forbidding chill whenever the textures threaten to get too familiar. Likewise, it’s the non-rock instruments that are allowed to breathe, to exist in a recognizable shape as themselves—a harp glissandi, for instance, or a harmonium, both on “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” or the wailing New Orleans brass band on “Life in a Glass House.” These are the warmest textures on albums that defined digital-age paranoia, and they predate electricity completely.
Kid A was the first Radiohead album released in the harsh light of the Napster era, the dawn of music’s digital age. Because of that, the songs that would come to comprise Amnesiac were already pretty familiar to Radiohead fans who had been trolling P2P servers for new material. Live and demo versions of “Dollars and Cents,” “You and Whose Army?” and “Pyramid Song” were freely traded over Napster, as were a few of the outtakes that didn’t make either album.
This means that none of the bonus material on Kid Amnesiae, the third “bonus” disc accompanying the two studio albums, has the same revelatory quality as the inclusions on OK Computer OKNOTOK 1997 2017. The tracklist is padded out slightly with the isolated string tracks for “Pyramid Song” and “How to Disappear Completely,” as well as a murmured two-minute take on “Morning Bell” that sounds like a rehearsal for the version that appeared on Amnesiac. There is no “I Promise,” no “Lift,” no bolt-from-the-blue alternate history that redefines our understanding of the band that wrote the album material. “Follow Me Around,” which was billed as the big inclusion on this re-release and the “holy grail” for Radiohead fans, is a song that most Radiohead hardcore faithful know extremely well—it was included in a pivotal scene of Meeting People Is Easy.
Another “lost” Radiohead song from these sessions, “Fog,” is a little more intriguing. It was one of those nakedly vulnerable ballads that slipped out of Yorke from time to time, seemingly against his will. The grief-haunted lyrics mingled tenderness and dread—a child, possibly dead, runs forever up and down a hallway, while a luminous fog belches up from the sewers.
They first premiered it at a concert in Israel, where it was known as “Alligators in New York Sewers,” in July 2000. The live version is a simple, arresting two-minute piano ballad. The original studio version, which found its way into the world as one of the B-sides to the “Knives Out” single, preserved this intimacy, but was marred by a slightly out-of-time tambourine and an uncertain-sounding guitar part. The version they include here isn’t as good as either, with overly bright synth patches and a non-committal vocal take. It underscores the trouble that Radiohead have often had with their tender songs. If there is anything comical about the band, it is their distrust of their own instincts to write beautiful songs, and the agony and prolonged discomfort it seems to provoke in them.
If not for this slightly adolescent distrust of prettiness, however, Kid A might never have been born. “It annoys me how pretty my voice is,” Yorke famously griped, and the last 20 years of their music can sometimes be seen as a battle between Yorke’s uglier impulses squaring off against the choirboy lilt of the instrument he’s stuck with.
Yorke’s impulse to deform himself on record, however, led to moments of wild creativity. On Amnesiac’s “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors,” seven years before Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop,” he intentionally mangled his voice with Auto-Tune. As an entire generation of hip-hop performers would go on to do, Yorke mumbled into the machine, allowing the pitch-corrector to randomly assign a key and a melody to his words.
Perhaps no single song encapsulates this mix of aimlessness and invention, the will toward prettiness and the losing war against it, as neatly as “Like Spinning Plates.” In the studio, they were grimacing their way through another demo—the chord progressions were somehow insulting, too obvious. Thom Yorke, always quick with a withering aside for their own material, dubbed it “dodgy Kraftwerk.”
They couldn’t stop messing with it, however. No idea the band generated, no matter how wispy or maddeningly incomplete, seemed to stay away forever. (Yorke apparently wrote the bassline for “The National Anthem” when he was 16, and it sounds like it.) Their song fragments were like sick dogs that wouldn’t stop limping after their masters. So there was Greenwood, messing around with the latest playback of that pretty ballad. Out of boredom, a fit of pique, whatever, he played it backwards.
Yorke, who was nearby, was transfixed. He crossed the room and demanded to hear it again. The track, played backwards, sounded like it was sucking nearby debris inward and pulling everything down with it. Yorke sat down and wrote a new song on top of his upside-down old one. But the backwards/forwards vortex seemed to have inspired a fever. So he sang his own lyrics backwards, on purpose, live. Then he reversed them so we heard them forwards—a subliminal message, just like the hysterical censors told us there would be when we played our records backward. But there it was, floating on the surface like a plastic bottle on the ocean.
That original upside-down song was a pretty ballad called “I Will,” which they would go on to rework, yet another time, and release for 2003’s Hail to the Thief. Radiohead fans have long tried to sync up the two versions themselves, re-reversing “Like Spinning Plates” and laying the vocal take from “I Will” atop it to recreate that “dodgy Kraftwerk” demo that is lost to history.
Kid Amnesiae does not include that original “I Will” demo, which, given the juvenilia and ephemera the band has allowed to see the light of day by now, suggests just how much Yorke must still hate it. The “Like Spinning Plates” version on the bonus disc layers the grand piano arpeggios familiar from the version on I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings atop the backmasked effects of the studio version. Notably, Yorke adds a verse that brings his desire for escape at the time into urgent focus: “Why us? Why not someone else?/The cameras are turning off.” Like Bob Dylan post-motorcycle crash, doing everything he could to discourage the press and his fan’s interest only to increase his enigmatic appeal, Yorke struggled against the straitjacket of his band’s grandness only to feel it pull tighter.
Decades later, the grandness of those sounds is what lingers. This is Radiohead’s ultimate gift as a rock band—the transmutation of sound into sensation, the way an unnerving bit of audio can play upon our nerve endings, up-end us ever so slightly. The searching language of the chorus to “Like Spinning Plates” (“This just feels like…Spinning plates”) nailed the curious, uneasy feeling that sound can give us, and the way those feelings translate into our other senses. It was the indelible sounds they made on Kid A and Amnesiac, more than any of the album’s digital age paranoia or its baleful view of the future, that comprise the band’s enduring legacy. Those sounds break free of anything you might want to attach to them.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


Mild High Club's glam rock-y Timeline on Stones Throw imprint Circle Star isn't a bad record per se, but if this is musical pointillism, then the dots are just too big.

Timeline

In 2009, the funk maestro Dâm-Funk released Toeachizown on Stones Throw, reinventing his career, and delivering a kick in the ass to a storied label that had floundered after the death of J Dilla in 2006. He also released an odd, anomalous single in the same year, "It's My Life," on the brand new label, Circle Star Records.
Six years later, Circle Star has returned and it's become easier to understand why it exists. In Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton, the documentary about Stones Throw, there's a period during which it seems that the label's founder, Peanut Butter Wolf, has completely lost his interest in hip-hop. As he starts flirting with glam rock, AM radio redux, and other, weirder stuff, the loyal fans of Stones Throw can't understand what's going on. "For all of us frickin' die-hard, hip-hop, b-boy type people, we were just a little confused," the Gaslamp Killer says of the period.
The siloed existence of Circle Star Records is an explicit effort to clear up that confusion. Its artists don't fit neatly into Stones Throw's traditional output, at least when it comes to genre. Alex Brettin, who performs as Mild High Club, is a good example; he's just released Timeline on Circle Star. It's a record full of psychedelic soft rock that draws strongly from White-album era Beatles and T-Rex, with swirls of '80s-indebted synthpop.
Like Dâm-Funk, Brettin is a musician's musician, whose bona fides, for those not familiar with his technical ability, are communicated by his associates: Wire, Ariel Pink, Mac DeMarco. Occasionally, there are strong echoes of Pink and DeMarco on Timeline but Brettin ends up sounding more like their tame cousin. As the artist name suggests with the word "mild," Timeline is largely missing those moments of heightened intensity that make an album memorable. There are nods to the Zombies and Jim Croce; it's uneventfully easy listening all the way through.
The most exciting tracks here have rougher reference points. The undergirding riff on "Rollercoaster Baby", brings out the Marc Bolan in Brettin, making for a slightly more charged experience. On "Undeniable", he confidently assumes the mantle of his psychedelic forebear, Arthur Lee with some fantastic, buzzing guitar work.
Spot the Influence can be a critic's shell game, a way to sort of triangulate a new artist without actually engaging with his or her work. But the fact that Brettin's many reference points are so obvious suggests a problem with the music of Mild High Club: the act's identity is so loose that listeners will have trouble ignoring its artistic antecedents. If this is musical pointillism, then the dots are just too big.
None of this comes as a total surprise. Peanut Butter Wolf has always had a huge admiration for oddball creatives with vast technical ability, and has never seemed concerned with originality, per se. His feeling appears to be that giving talented people room to record is enough; and maybe he's right. After all, nothing about Timeline is bad. It's a pretty strong release for a brand new imprint to build on. But if the same record were released from, say, Stones Throw, we might sigh, and chalk it up to another good-but-not-great album from a label that still hasn't quite figured out a unified new direction.


The former Shoreline Mafia member launches his solo career with a concentrated dose of what he does best: rap music for the height of the party.

Geezyworld

You might know Alejandro Coranza (aka OhGeesy) as a key lieutenant of Shoreline Mafia, the apparently disbanded L.A. group that evolved out of the city’s graffiti scene. Geesy’s raspy flow, master-crafted hooks, and ability to inject melody into every corner of the music was vital in bringing bounce to the collective’s infectious sound. There are no failed experiments on Geezyworld, his debut album. He’s launching his solo career with a concentrated dose of what he does best: rap music for the height of the party. Without his former bandmates diluting him, we’re learning that you can’t have too much of this particular good thing. On the single “Get Fly,” he declares, “I ain’t Scottie Pippen.” The message is obvious: He’s playing second fiddle to nobody.
Geesy is well placed to thrive as a lone star. Geezyworld is a quintessential L.A. rap record—its catchy bars and gummy beats align with the heroes of DJ Mustard-led ratchet music, such as Kamaiyah, RJ, and Cam & China. The crisp, hi-fidelity sound honors the city’s long-standing audiophile-in-chief, Dr. Dre. Geesy is in the tradition of the smooth, rhythmic G-funk era rappers, with Warren G in particular coming to mind. Take “Keeper,” which features a hook and verse courtesy of A Boogie Wit da Hoodie. The programmed bass and prominent snares are as crisp as a freshly printed 100 dollar bill. Geesy’s melodic cadences—his voice hushed, raspy, and always gratifying—blends with the smooth beat into a concoction that’s pure silk on the ear. A lot of the choruses on Geezyworld feel like repurposed bars, which is fine when every rhyme you spit feels like a hook.
Lyrically, Geesy keeps to sticky sex raps and chest-beating braggadocio. His manifesto is pretty much established on “Intro”: Geesy describes lurid encounters, brags about his gun collection and capacity for weed smoking, and signs off with the punctuation, “The world is mine for the taking.” Then comes “Who Else,” an ode to his sexual propensity. It’s reasonable to say that Geesy’s writing could sometimes be sharper. On “Coochie,” the weakest song in the deck, he rhymes “bitch” with “bitch” a lot. But Geesy comes across as a rapper who would rather put words together on instinct than workshop his bars from notebooks. For the most part, that sense of informality serves him well.
The guest spots are well chosen. Evoking the classic fairy tale over Ron-Ron The Producer’s pinging electronic riff, “Big Bad Wolf” predictably sees Geesy share great chemistry with YG, another star who can do sticky Cali rap like it’s nothing. UK rapper Central Cee’s style synthesizes with Geesy beautifully on “Startn Up,” adding a whole different ripple to the record. Recent controversy surrounding DaBaby may suppress the single “Get Fly,” which is a shame for Geesy as the Spanish guitar riffs and booming drums would make an elegant party track for balmy summer nights.
At 11 cuts, Geezyworld is lean, and as an album-making exercise, you could criticize its lack of variety. Yet this narrowing of the lens makes it a better album than Shoreline Mafia’s debut album Mafia Bidness, and solidifies OhGeesy as potentially one of L.A. rap’s next generation stars. His ambition here was to make one kind of song, and he did it extremely well.

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


Mgła are the exemplars of Polish black metal. Exercises in Futility, the duo's majestic, nihilistic, and euphoric third full-length, doesn't just set the standard for black metal in their home country, it's one of the finest black metal albums this year.

Exercises in Futility

Mgła are the exemplars of Polish black metal. They play melodic black metal that isn't immediate in its beauty, though a dark elegance does surface. Groza, which they released in 2008, was a promising debut, and on 2012's With Hearts Toward None they began to come into their own in terms of composition and lyrics. Exercises in Futility, their third full-length, improves upon Hearts' template, with guitarist/vocalist Mikołaj "M." Żentara and drummer Maciej "Darkside" Kowalski delivering their most spirited performances to date. It doesn't just set the standard for black metal in their home country, it's one of the finest black metal albums this year.
As its title implies, Futility is focused on a pessimistic, defeatist worldview. The opening line is "The great truth is there isn't one," a tone-setter if there ever was one. If we're to believe them, Mgła would prefer to be in hell shouting at the devil, not the purgatory of life. As M. laments on "II": "I wish it was classic fire and brimstone/ But clearly there is a very special plan/ Paved with havoc and shattered virtues/ As if there were any other paths." Futility's lyrics are a cut above basic sadboy depressive tropes, especially in a section of "V" masked as an ode to the working class: "Blessed be the tailors, the masks are cut to fit/ Blessed be the woodworkers, the crosses and the gallows/ Blessed be the forgers of iron, and the spikes and the barbwire/ Blessed be the stone cutters, it took a quarry to bury the dreams."
They're lyrics don't offer much hope, but M.'s guitar work suggests anything but failure: his playing draws from metal's wells of depression as well as the affirmative lights that can coexist with it. Mgła are the true heirs to Dissection's style of black metal; the melodies are huge without dipping into the saccharine. Even when M. gets into his nastiest playing, it never feels like he's wading in the tar pits of despair for despair's sake.
Mgła also balance their bursts of nihilistic euphoria with mid-paced sections that show discipline without sacrificing majesty. "II" uses this contrast as a springboard—the slower melody naturally builds into the brighter, faster vortex where hypnotism is a means of getting towards something bigger, not an end unto itself. "V" is another master study in these shifts—the slower sections are their darkest grooves, and when they race off, they run farther and faster than anything on the record. You imagine the duo would hate to be compared to post-rock, but both post-rock and black metal also-rans could stand to learn a lot about dynamics from them. Mgła's emphasis on the mid-paced is one testament to Celtic Frost's continued influence on black metal; it also lets the beauty of the riffs exfoliate, and those who got into black metal for its prettier, more accessible side would find much to appreciate here.
M.'s riffwork puts Mgła above most black metal groups, but it's Darkside's drumming that launches them into a class of their own. His cymbal work is key, bringing with it a formidable delicacy. "II" begins with a drum fill that serves as Darkside's own mini-suite, with the rides and crashes pinging louder than his tom fills. Maybe it's because we're not used to hearing cymbals used so prominently that they resonate this much; Darkside sees his kit as an extension of M.'s melodic prowess and not just an anger-management tool. Where most black metal drummers focus the most energy on bass drums or snares, he transfers that intensity towards guiding cymbals into a nervous dance. On "V", M.'s ecstatic melody becomes a light of rapture with Darkside's touch, elevating what's already seemingly in the heavens. Across Futility, he brings detail you'd expect from a solo project headed by drum-focused multi-instrumentalists like Leviathan or Panopticon.
It's rare to see two players so clearly meant for each other, and Mgła's accomplished performance on Futility transforms the lyrical content into a call to action. Great metal can harness strength from hopelessness; turning that strength into art is a blustering triumph. "The great truth is there isn't one" may be a swift roundhouse, but it's one that it will sober you up to find your own purpose. And on "IV", M. howls "Every empire/ Every nation/ Every tribe/ Thought it would end/ In a bit more decent way," a sentiment that can be applied to more than the collapse of states; it's the radical acceptance that there is no such thing as a clean break. No, Futility doesn't sell you the promise of a better world taken like gummy vitamins. But by offering no promises, it does open you up to take control for yourself, and what's more positive than that?