The Besnard Lakes’ husband/wife team of Jace Lasek and Olga Gorea aren’t just songwriters who produce pop tunes; they're composers who create musical suites out of sweepingly melodic movements. Their fourth album is their most “composed” to date.

The Besnard Lakes: Until In Excess, Imperceptible UFO

Until In Excess, Imperceptible UFO

The Besnard Lakes make music as elegant as their album titles are clunky. The Montreal quartet’s fourth record, Until in Excess, Imperceptible UFO, is no exception. The group’s co-auteurs, Jace Lasek and Olga Goreas, approach the construction of Besnard Lakes’ LPs with the same level of fastidiousness that Brian Wilson and Roger Waters displayed on masterworks of studiocraft like Pet Sounds and Dark Side of the Moon. Lasek and Goreas aren’t mere songwriters who produce pop tunes; they are composers who create musical suites out of sweepingly melodic movements. Until in Excess is the most “composed” Besnard Lakes’ album yet-- the band worked on different sections of the album’s eight songs, and shifted them around like puzzle pieces until achieving the perfect specimens of epic-osity that Lasek and Goreas heard echoing like an interstellar church choir in their heads.
Which is to say, Until in Excess more or less delivers on the “wow” factor one has come to expect from a Besnard Lakes album. As with 2007’s The Besnard Lakes are the Dark Horse and 2010’s The Besnard Lakes are the Roaring Night, Until in Excess doesn’t skimp on the creamy vocal harmonies, booming drum rattles, cinematic strings swooshes, and wicked David Gilmour guitar solos that explode out of the murk with dependably dramatic elan. Well, actually, there aren’t that many guitar solos on Until the Excess: “People of the Sticks” climaxes with some awe-inspiring six-string heroics by Lasek, as does the slow-building “Colour Yr Lights In”, where the squiggly arpeggios lift the anthemic chorus to the precipice of prog-rock nirvana. But aside from the heavy riffing that grinds throughout “At Midnight”, rock music takes a backseat to loftier ambitions on Until in Excess. Lasek and Goreas instead turn the uplifting expressiveness that Besnard Lakes is known for in on itself, fostering a mood of introspective melancholy on a series of slow, orchestral-like pieces.
Most of Until in Excess resembles “Catalina”, a beautiful slow-motion shoegazer symphony that lards on nearly two minutes of introductory new-age synths before easing into the glimmering, mid-tempo meat of the track. Besnard Lakes reliably fill the vastness of their huge-sounding music with immaculate musical ornamentation, and “Catalina” is a fine example of their impeccable Canadian architecture. (Look out for the dreamy surf-guitar accents laid out delicately in the mix that don’t make themselves fully discernible until the third or fourth listen.) “The Specter” is another stunner, opening with a splashy electric keyboard lick that soon gives way for exquisite guitar-driven counter-melodies and spectral mellotron washes. Neither track seems all that concerned with chorus-verse orderliness, which suits a record that favors atmosphere over punchy songs.
So, yes, Until in Excess is another Besnard Lakes’ album album that stubbornly demands to be absorbed all at once, from beginning to end. Other than “People of the Sticks”, the individual songs haven’t been designed to stick out from the whole; the deliberate pace makes the entirety of Until in Excess feel like one long, woozy track. While the winking title doesn’t exactly do the album justice-- it’s not as “excessive” so much as “dense”-- Until in Excess does lack some of the immediacy of Besnard Lakes’ other records. The album closing “Alamogordo” ends with three attention-killing minutes of ambient noise, finally wearing out the welcome for an otherwise captivating collection. For all its beauty, Until in Excess is a little draggy; the balance of ethereal grace and all-out force that distinguished their breakout Dark Horse has tipped a little too far to the ponderous side. Until in Excess rewards patience, but the roar of old is missed.


As a loose concept record about the many subtleties of love and distance, the Pittsburgh rapper's new release is the most surprising, concise, and accomplished album of his career.

The Divine Feminine

Mac Miller isn’t the Divine Feminine. The Pittsburgh keg-stander turned style-sampling artisan isn’t making a play at defining femininity. This isn’t an attempt to examine feminism in any way. He isn’t being facetious or woke. In fact, he doesn’t even try to explore what being a woman is like in any sense in any of these texts. The Divine Feminine, a concept record of sorts in distinct contrast to September 2015’s GO:OD AM, is an album about love as it relates to the female form and beyond, as Miller has referred to it, “the feminine energy of the planet.” It broaches smaller, bite-sized topics revolving around romance and connection in an attempt to understand the universe at large, bringing to mind a quote from Carl Sagan’s 1985 sci-fi novel Contact: “For small creatures such as we the vastness [of the universe] is bearable only through love.”
When Miller talks about The Divine Feminine, he considers the universe, the distance between persons, and deciphering love on an ideological level. He’s mentioned playing the record for a couple and slowly observing them cut the distance between each other in a room as it progresses. “I want people to put on the record and it’s a date in itself,” he told i-D. “I want people to love to this record and realize they can love to it.” There’s a very real connective tissue to these ideas of space and intimacy. It’s about contact and togetherness, closing the gap between people; about being in unison and growing apart, and all the stages in between. It peels back and exposes the many layers of love—romantic, schmaltzy, sensual, carnal, wilting. It’s easily his most intoxicating release yet, an odyssey of soulful compositions paring down his expansive and eclectic soundboard from the last few years into something distinctly cozy and pleasant.
Mac Miller has put in hard work establishing himself as a Serious Rapper since the release of his emotionally and sonically flat debut Blue Slide Park, putting on his fair share of wordplay showcases and aligning himself with the right people since his sprawling breakout Watching Movies With the Sound Off in 2013, but much of that work came off as pandering or, worse still, overly earnest. He’s gotten more comfortable in his own skin with each release, but that threatened to be an issue here, given the title. Yet, The Divine Feminine is by far the most settled he's ever been. There aren’t any plays to satisfy or ingratiate a specific subgroup of listeners. There aren’t any lyrical exercises or overthought exhibitions of verse structure and execution, no plays to prove himself a rapper’s rapper—frankly there’s almost more singing than rapping. But this is his most nuanced release, a record that forgoes personal narrative and somehow reveals his individuality in the process. He does it all with just a little help from his friends.
The album interlocks a diverse array musicians without losing the main thematic thread. The fingerprints of his sonic soulmate Ariana Grande are all over the record: backup vocals, feature vocals, voiceover work, and her positive influence on him shows. Cee-Lo Green lends his unmistakable vocals and energy to “We,” which simmer just above the surface of crisp drum kicks. Miller and Kendrick move in tandem on the epic closer “God Is Fair, Sexy Nasty” without any competitive tension. Students from Juilliard played strings on the album, and they accent the arrangements well. He even gets noted lothario Ty Dolla $ign to play a gentleman (or at least as close to that as he gets) on “Cinderella,” which is no easy task.
As a group, led by Miller’s pronounced vision, they forge the lover’s guide to the universe, painting in tiny brush strokes from a warm and familiar tonal palette. The Divine Feminine has very specific set of sonic reference points: the rich and heavy funk of Anderson .Paak’s Malibu, flexed into with help from Dâm-Funk and .Paak himself on tracks like “Dang!”; flecks of the Social Experiment’s juke and jazz (especially on “Stay”); even the electro-fused alt R&B of a producer like Kaytranada. It’s heavily indebted to the growing fusion jazz rap movement with contributions from pianist Robert Glasper, Brainfeeder bass maestro Thundercat, and trumpeter Keyon Harrold, sometimes appearing in the record’s margins, but usually as full-fledged performers (the first two also played on To Pimp a Butterfly). The Divine Feminine reins in Mac Miller’s wide-ranging taste, bonding aesthetics and fully realizing his artistry.
It’s worth noting that The Divine Feminine has the fewest tracks of any Mac Miller album and that it is the clearest, most concise record of his career; that’s a correlation, not a coincidence. The project started as an EP, but it became a full album as Miller continued to flesh out its ideas. Across its 10 songs, it observes love as a part of the human experience without forcing any beliefs on the listener, dealing mostly in the building blocks of feelings. “Dang!” and “Stay” play back-to-back and examine loss of love close up. The Grande duet, “My Favorite Part,” is basically the downtempo reprise of One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful.” The album’s emotional and sonic center is “Planet God Damn,” about becoming vulnerable, a sentiment echoed by Njomza on the hook: “Tell the truth/Show me you.”
As the closer, “God Is Fair, Sexy Nasty,” trails off into Glasper piano chords, a widow recounts how she fell in love with her husband, punctuating her story with a mantra: “How important it is to love, respect, and care for each other.” That kind of union is something Miller clearly strives for, something he calls “the best love story in the world.” The Divine Feminine doesn’t just chase that, it bottles the very essence.


The music on the Field's third album may be still be built from loops, but Axel Willner has never orchestrated so many of them so artfully. His dense and infinitely listenable soundscapes put his acolytes to shame.

Looping State of Mind

The title of the Field's third album, Looping State of Mind, might have you thinking that producer Axel Willner is getting back to basics. Especially after he strayed, with only intermittent success, from his instantly recognizable template on his 2009 sophomore record, Yesterday and Today. After all, at its simplest, techno is music that can be built with just a few loops. And Willner's first few records certainly made effective use of the form, layering shimmering loops of voice and synth and guitar on each track until he'd built a fluffy and infinitely soothing wall of sound.
Immersive and repetitive, the Field's first singles and 2007 debut album, From Here We Go Sublime, were like ambient records disguised as both experimental techno and luscious pop. So is Looping State of Mind a return to that sound, the one that made the Field a crossover favorite with rock kids a few years back? Not exactly. In a few instances it's barely recognizable as "the Field" at all. It may be still be built from loops, but Willner's never orchestrated so many of them so artfully into such dense and infinitely listenable soundscapes.
Good thing, too, because the last few years have seen a lot of bedroom producers become briefly famous for ambient records disguised as pop, for amorphous electronic doodles disguised as songs. Instead of coasting, as one of the inadvertent models for the current "chill" thing, a producer who'd probably earn infinite props just for repeating himself, Willner decided to put 99 percent of his acolytes to shame here. True, there are still tracks, like "It's Up There", that recall Willner's best-loved stuff, but even they feel richer, like the early Field in 3D and high-def. "Arpeggiated Love" is on the one hand a dead-ringer for the propulsive, ecstatic sound-wash of From Here We Go Sublime. But Willner now fleshes it out with shiver-inducing soul music harmonies that owe less to sleek German techno than gospel-tinged American house. True, he was quoting classic soul group the Flamingos as early as Sublime, but he's never been so overt in dipping into dance music's global history.
As that might suggest, Looping often strays far from the Field we know, into territory that recalls deep house, post-punk, shoegaze, noise-rock, and cosmic techno. And he manages to swirl them all together in a way that makes his earliest attempts to fuse ambient and trance feel like gorgeous apprentice work. Yesterday and Today sometimes sounded hesitant, as if Willner didn't quite know how to make his music fresh for a second time. On Looping he packs all seven tracks with curveballs, and each new direction feel successful, vital, surprising.
At one point on opener "Is This Power", everything drops away except for an eerie bass twang that recalls Joy Division or the Cure circa "A Forest", but when the boogie bass finally drops back in, you're not only reminded that this is dance music, it's easily the funkiest Field tune you've probably yet heard. The rhythms on Looping are more varied than anything the Willner's done before. Though he hasn't entirely abandoned that programmed motorik pulse that drove Sublime, his work with live bands over the last few years has clearly fed into Looping. "Then It's White" summons a Yorke-less Radiohead, with the way the drums subtly mesh human fluency and digital tech. And that's not even counting the Amnesiac-like mix of pensive piano and mournful, computer-warped vocals.
Despite the sometimes winning simplicity of his music, Willner was no slouch as a producer before. Yet listening to this album, there's no doubt he's grown way more assured and inventive over the last two years. And he's brought all his skill to bear on Looping, as composer and arranger and texturologist, in order to build something this simultaneously sweeping and subtle, deep and immediate. It could still alienate those perpetually pining for copies of "A Paw in My Face" or "Sun and Ice". But if they listen more deeply, they might just hear Willner’s masterpiece-to-date.


Working with operatically trained vocalist Alison Skidmore, the Manchester producer has humanized his sound, made it more beautiful and richer on the surface while further accentuating its dark heart. The new dynamic leads to another big leap forward.

Luxury Problems

Andy Stott took his time getting here. The Manchester producer spent a good part of the last decade turning out solid tracks under his own name and under the alias Andrea. Though he always returned to dub techno, he flirted with a range of genres, from juke to house to dubstep, and some of his music was very good. But Stott never quite zeroed in on a unique voice. That changed in 2011 with the release of two short albums, Passed Me By and We Stay Together. Stott left behind the quicker tempos of dance proper, and slowing down allowed him to sink deeper into his music, where he found a new world of atmosphere and texture. Passed and Stay were heavy records that highlighted something new about the expressive power of bass. Dub techno, stretching back to its origins with the early-1990s Berlin project Basic Channel, tends to view the low end as a mysterious black sludge. Where bass in Skrillex-style EDM is a precision weapon, with drops punctuating the tracks and jacking up the mood in an instant, the bottom octave in dub techno is more of an enveloping presence. It's murkier, more oppressive, colder, something you wade through and push against. Which is why the inertia of the relentless 4/4 beat signifies energy whatever the tempo.
On his two 2011 releases, Stott found an unusual musicality in deep, foreboding bass. His music throbbed with the sooty remnants of industry and had obvious appeal for those interested in dark ambiance of any stripe; its all-consuming nature gave him a new audience beyond the realm of dance music. With his new album, Luxury Problems, he adds a few more wrinkles, and his music has become simultaneously more complex and more accessible. Working with operatically trained vocalist Alison Skidmore (Stott met her as a student when she taught him piano), he's humanized his sound, made it more beautiful and richer on the surface while further accentuating its dark heart. The new dynamic leads to another big leap forward for the producer.
Skidmore's voice is a versatile instrument in its own right, but Stott's looping and processing gives it even more flexibility. Though Luxury Problems has a consistent overall mood, the feel and structure of the individual tracks vary quite a bit, and the pieces featuring Skidmore find her singing pulled into all kinds of interesting shapes. The album opens with her in her most glassy and ethereal, as repetitions of her singing a single word, "touch," float through space like soap bubbles. The "ch" phoneme is looped and becomes the hi-hat on the track, and gradually the sounds assemble themselves into a ghosted version of a conventional dance rhythm. But when Stott's machine bass pulse enters just under halfway through, we realize we're in for a world of serious contrasts: "Numb" is delicate and gorgeous but has an undercurrent of menace, and the tension between these qualities is the record's essence.
If "Numb" is Skidmore at her most spectral, "Hatch the Plan" finds her sounding more grounded, almost in the mode of a singer-songwriter. The choral-like layering on "Plan" brings to mind School of Seven Bells and even Throwing Muses. But it's the longest track on the record and is purely instrumental-- mostly a deeply unsettling mix of bass churn and machine noises-- for its first two minutes. That it moves from pure soundscape to something close to a proper song is further evidence of Stott's confidence; none of these tracks feel like they have to be any one thing, they're always growing and changing and defying expectations.
"Lost and Found" has a similarly melodic approach, unspooling in a Middle Eastern mode and bringing to mind Dead Can Dance at their most subtle. We can hear Stott drawing lines between 4AD-style gothic new wave and dub techno, building bridges between sounds and ideas based on his understanding of the elements and moods that connect them. Elsewhere, on "Expecting", he goes further into abstraction, constructing an intensely dark and ominous atmosphere that bring to mind the ice-cold isolationist drone of Thomas Köner. The excavation of electronic music history takes a more unusual turn on "Up the Box", which plays with a snippet of what sounds like the "Amen" break. But the familiar splash of jungle snares and cymbals is transformed by Stott into something of his own own, as he mixes the tricky rhythms with his now undeniable bass signature, a groaning maw flecked with distortion that feels like it's rattling everything within earshot. Stott has a rare ability to pull sounds from different places and fit them into his album conception.
Two records from the past offer antecedents for Stott's breakthrough: Luomo's Vocalcity and Burial's Untrue. It's not that Luxury Problems sounds like either of these releases-- the mood and textures are vastly different in each case. But there's a spiritual connection between the three, all of which found producers working within the confines of a specific genre of electronic music discovering a way to turn their music inside and out and broaden its appeal through the manipulated voice. But if Vocalcity was a digital refraction of house music and Untrue took early UK dubstep as a jumping-off point to express post-club emptiness and yearning, Luxury Problems is more internally focused, an evocative and immersive soundtrack for a sustained look within. It's the headphones album of the year from a producer with a long history who has come into his own.


Covering Bill Evans and riffing on Moroccan gnawa and classical minimalism, the 10-piece Harlem band embraces a global vision infused with jazz’s searching spirit.

Autogenesis

New York City teems with creative instrumentalists on the run—toward one another, and away from stylistic constraints. They seek tighter connections and a looser environment in which instruments don’t play assigned roles, electric and acoustic are not opposing factions, and “composition” means whatever ends up in the mix. This ideal is neither new (Miles Davis epitomized it a half-century ago) nor uncommon. Still, when realized with elegance and wit, as on Autogenesis, the debut release from N to the Power, it leads to fresh and distinct sounds that straddle our usual categories. This music embraces a global vision, conveying both the edge of experimental music and the buzz of electronica, all the while infused with jazz’s searching spirit.
This creative process began with informal jam sessions between multi-instrumentalists Blake Leyh and Tony Jarvis, who are Harlem neighbors. Leyh, who grew up in England, is best known as a film composer and sound designer working with the likes of John Waters and Jonathan Demme; as music supervisor for David Simon’s HBO shows, he was responsible for the lovingly curated live-music sequences in Treme. Jarvis was born and raised in Madison, Wis., where he studied early on with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians co-founder Roscoe Mitchell. His professional experience spans enlightened punk (Tar Babies), updated funk (Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings), and straight-up Afrobeat (the Broadway musical Fela!).
Maybe there’s too direct a hit of Fela’s infectious, laid-back beats on the “Marrakesh Memosphere,” yet that track achieves the propulsion and buoyancy of the Moroccan Gnawa music that inspired it. This group shares Mitchell’s collectivist vision. Here, as foregrounds and backgrounds shift like savvy cinematography, the community comes off like an indie film’s ensemble cast, with Jarvis’ bass clarinet as the character we’re all rooting for. Rarely does one instrument steal the scene. “Supertonic” assembles a master shot sequence. Flurries of notes from Bruno Coon’s trumpet and Jarvis’ bass clarinet are processed into reverberant halos. Next, Coon, on guitar, sounds out rhythm more than melody, much like a djembe would. Patterns coalesce, lent shape and texture by terse figures from Leyh’s electric cello and glowing long tones from Yusuke Yamamoto’s vibes. Sonic murmurs and suggestive echoes frame the action, their sources manipulated beyond identification. The effect is simultaneously alluring and disorienting.
If that track’s overlapping cycles initially suggest minimalism (Steve Reich’s Different Trains), they also shimmy well enough to shake off comparisons. Setting aside the force and grace of cellist Yves Dharamraj’s playing, and of Jarvis’ (primarily on bass clarinet, sax and flute), this music doesn’t stress technique: Many of these parts could be played with just rudimentary skills. The focus is on establishing and disrupting persuasive moods and inviting grooves through instrumental figures played in real time, then chopped and sculpted into charming, oddly shaped forms. Guitars and compelling rhythms abound, yet there’s hardly a chord heard, and no trap set in sight (beats come mostly from hand percussion, cymbals, and plucked strings).
This music relies on energy flows, sometimes suggesting rapid motion and other times repose. “The God Particle” starts with a simple flute gesture and grows into something like a New Orleans second-line parade in outer space, its beats heavy but its feel weightless. A 12-and-a-half-minute version of “Peace Piece,” which jazz pianist Bill Evans composed mostly upon a simple ostinato, is elevated by Dharamraj’s expressiveness on acoustic cello and Leyh’s tender touch on a fretted electric one. Its loops reinforce the circular nature of Evans’ concept. In 1962, Evans told a Time magazine reporter that, after playing it at a club, a teenage fan rushed up and said that “when he heard it he felt like he was standing all alone in New York.” This version, offered in the midst of forced social distancing, has the opposite effect: It suggests much-needed communion.

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Reflexions

Tony Shhnow’s music camps out at the intersection of hard-earned life lessons, money counter adlibs, and #vibes. Play any Shhnow song and you’re as likely to be captivated by the beat as much as anything he’s saying, a testament to the golden ear he’s developed as a key player in Atlanta’s plugg rap scene. It’s initially bizarre to hear Shhnow comparing himself to a mathematician for the way he holds his gun on the corner over beats that would sound at home on an episode of Steven Universe, but his ability to flow over just about anything has kept his prolific streak interesting. His grim stories and silly metaphors sound just as comfortable over CashCache and scene veteran MexikoDro’s airy synths as they do over the warped samples of New Jersey producer GRiMM Doza. That ability has made him one of the most exciting rappers working, it’s genuinely exciting to hear what sound he’ll tackle next, a chameleon in Bape fatigues.
For all the different sounds Shhnow has rapped over, most of his projects tend to focus on one specific style at a time. There isn’t much on Reflexions, his second release of 2022, that differs from his previous work, but the project is the first to display it all in one place. Considering his expanding profile, Reflexions feels like a Tony Shhnow sampler, an audible photo dump of his capabilities. Candy-colored plugg beats sharing space with sample-based production might cause whiplash in anybody else’s hands, but it all comes together with the confidence of Shhnow’s voice.
Take opening song “Summer Off Relaxxx,” which begins with producer FwThis1Will’s slinky sirens and 808s before smash-cutting to Braezonday’s deep-fried flip of John Legend’s “Prelude” from his 2004 debut album Get Lifted. Shhnow not only offers up clever lifeisms (“I Velcroed all my shoes, it ain’t no day that I’m gon’ trip”) and vague allusions to his drug-dealing past; his delivery morphs from rigid to lethargic as the beat switches, maintaining momentum without derailing the song. Shhnow’s malleable voice plays a huge part in the unpredictability of his songs. He can be loud and glued to a rhythm like he is on “Show U,” or he can be mellow and jog a half-step behind like he is near the beginning of “Park My Car.” During the middle section of his verse on “Go!,” his delivery gets breathy and high-pitched but no less forceful. He’s clearly having fun with pushing the boundaries of his sound, which gives each song on Reflexions the colorful and unpredictable air of a gumball machine.
As a rapper, Shhnow trades in punchlines, flexes, and grim stories about his days in the trap. He isn’t revolutionizing rap by any stretch, but his non sequitur songwriting is both clever and thoughtful as each song demands. Sometimes, like on “Bape ☆” or “Park My Car,” he’s in pure Gucci Mane floss mode, dashing his way through ultra-saturated production that cascades like digital raindrops. On “Nothing 2 My Name,” he sprints from a playing-card-based word scheme (“Take your queen, shut down the club off a face card”) to flashbacks to the block and quips about a woman being built like cursive handwriting over the span of one verse.
But no matter how his words bounce across Reflexions, the beats always push them into another dimension. Producer Dilip’s vocal sample, synths and pounding drums on closing track “Fye Up Da Kush” sound like mid-2010s Jahlil Beats reinterpreted by Lex Luger. Beats shatter (“Park My Car”), float by on piano keys (“Last Chance”), and smolder with quiet storm synths (“Keep N Touch”). Remarkably, none of them sound out of place. Cohesive and raw, it’s one of the best batches of beats I’ve heard on an album all year.
The level of lyrical and musical comfort Shhnow displays on Reflexions is almost unnerving. There aren’t very many other rappers who can rhyme next to ZelooperZ, Matt Ox, and OJ Da Juiceman on the same album and have all three sound at home, but he manages with a cool smirk. The plugg rap revival may have been how Shhnow got his start, but Reflexions is proof that he’s ready to fly wherever his boundless imagination and golden ears take wing.
Correction (April 3, 2023): The John Legend sample featured on Tony Shhnow’s “Summer Off Relaxxx” was produced by Braezonday, not Sparkheem.


The second album from the Maryland singer-songwriter is sharp and beguiling, carried by Katie Von Schleicher’s innate and economic pop instincts.

Shitty Hits

Internships typically end with a handshake, a letter of rec, and a modest happy hour on the company dime. Katie Von Schleicher’s got her a record deal. A few years back, Ba Da Bing label head Ben Goldberg made his then-charge an offer: make a record and the label might just put it out there. Much to Goldberg’s delight, Von Schleicher returned with Bleaksploitation, a small-yet-staggering collection of full-throated lo-fi lamentations recorded entirely by Von Schleicher—also of cracked Americana combo Wilder Maker—herself. Bleaksploitation had something, and Goldberg made good on his word. Two years later, and we have Shitty Hits, a record that more than delivers on Bleaksploitation’s early promise, deepening its emotional excavations and expanding on its scraped-knee sonics. Von Schleicher needs maybe a half-dozen words to conjure up all-too-familiar scenes: unbridgeable distances between bedmates, deafening silences between old familiars. She’s at her sharpest, though, when she’s staring directly into that mirror, waiting for something to snap into focus.
Recorded to tape at her childhood home in Maryland with a few familiar faces—her Wilder Maker bandmates, plus multi-instrumentalist Adam Brisbin, Baroness bassist Nick Jost, and Ava Luna drummer Julian Fader—Shitty Hits is a kaleidoscope in grayscale: creaky chamber-pop, dirge-driven doom-folk, hushed solo piano works. Self-deprecation aside, Von Schleicher has rather sturdy pop instincts, and, as that title would suggest, no qualms about subverting them. While several tunes betray a fondness for the ambling basslines and roundabout George Harrison leads of the post-psychedelic Beatles, Shitty Hits spends as much or more time in the shadows: long, listless mornings spent with the shades closed, seeking some clarity in the half-light.
Von Schleicher is never less than beguiling. Sweeping one minute whittled down to a whisper the next, her full-spectrum tone fills in every furrow and frustration in her unembroidered lyrics. Occasionally, the trickier arrangements stand between Von Schleicher and her meaning; once they’ve made room for the sax, and the bass, and the drums, and the synth, the finer points Von Schleicher’s digging into here can get a tad muddled. But, as with Bleaksploitation, she manages to hold onto the unvarnished edges of home-recorded music while shooting for something far bigger; besides, if the music she’s making is grander than the machine she’s making it on, that’s little more than an equipment issue.
Not sure it even passes the Be Sharps test, but as titles go, Shitty Hits suits Von Schleicher. It’s a record that revels in contradiction: pop songs too scratchy and subterranean for the radio, pocket orchestras a touch too big for one four-track to contain. Hers aren’t “stick in your head” melodies, they’re “haunt the edges of your psyche” melodies, buoyed by shoestring arrangements and Von Schleicher’s captivating vocals. Equal parts brittle and brazen, Shitty Hits is the work of a well-past-promising newcomer. Interns of the world, unite and take over.


Depeche Mode's thirteenth album sounds like it could be a set of outtakes from 1993's Songs of Faith and Devotion. On Delta Machine, they don't even bother pretending technology has opened up any possibilities for recorded sound in the past 20 years.

Delta Machine

People who make machines use the term "delta" to mean "change." Depeche Mode aren't so keen on that any more. Another kind of delta is the home of a strain of blues that's associated with more intense emotion and simpler technology than the synth-pop that made Depeche Mode famous. They got interested in playing with that kind a couple of decades ago, and it served them well, at first.
But the partnership of singer David Gahan and songwriter Martin Gore can't escape the machine they've become, or the holding pattern they've gotten stuck in. (And then there's third member Andy Fletcher, who...Anyway!) The last album they made with more than two songs that have persisted in their live repertoire was Songs of Faith and Devotion in 1993. Since then, they've been on a steady regimen of releasing a studio record every fourth year, followed by a tour where they play a whole lot of songs from the era when Designing Women was on the air.
Delta Machine, like Playing the Angel and Sounds of the Universe before it, was produced by Ben Hillier, includes three songs with lyrics by Gahan, and sounds like it could be a set of outtakes from Songs of Faith and Devotion. The word "soul" appears in five of Gore's songs here, not including "Angel" or "Heaven" (which shouldn't be confused with the earlier "Halo" or "Judas" or "Sacred" or "Jezebel" or "Martyr"). It's old news that Gore's favorite lyrical topic is sin and salvation, and that's historically been a pretty fertile topic for songwriting in general. Unfortunately, there's no line here as sly as "Strangelove"'s "I give in to sin/ Because you have to make this life livable," and no sense that Gore's idea of sin extends to anything other than mildly kinky sex.
Then there's the blues stuff, i.e. loops of bluesy guitar licks, as on "Goodbye" (which might just as well be called "Personal Jesus XIV: The Personalizing"). Another one turns up in "Slow", repeating endlessly as Gahan sings Gore's lyrics about taking it nice and easy in bed these days. The requisite Gore vocal here, "The Child Inside", might have the most embarrassing extended metaphor he's committed to date (tears turn into a river that overflows and drowns the loved one's inner child?). As for Gahan's own songs-- this time, their music is by Kurt Uenala-- they're generally a reasonably convincing imitation of middling Gore. His "Should Be Higher" is yet another on the pile of ex-junkie lyrics; his "Broken" is a pale Silly Putty copy of "Behind the Wheel".
It's not a totally dull record. Gahan and Gore are singing as well and hyperdramatically as they ever have. "My Little Universe" is a clever piece of minimalism, constructed around a bare handful of acid-synth riffs-- effectively a companion piece to their 30-year-old "Leave in Silence". "Soft Touch/Raw Nerve" is catchy enough that its rhyme of "helping hand" with "understand" is forgivable. "Angel" will sound pretty good on their next greatest-hits collection, as long as they don't sequence it too close to "I Feel You".
Still, what made Depeche Mode work, when they worked, wasn't just the contrast between Gore's dry detachment and Gahan's dorky innocence (up to, let's say, Music for the Masses) and the late-breaking badassery that replaced it (from Violator onward). It was their constant pushing forward of their sound-- expanding the vocabulary of what electronics could do in pop songs. Their records were packed with cross-talking hooks, ingeniously knotted melodies, noises that blurred the border between pitch and percussion. They made rules for themselves, which made it more fun when they broke them.
But they stopped pushing forward long ago, and now they don't even bother pretending technology has opened up any possibilities for recorded sound in the past 20 years. Now they're just extruding a new album once in a while, reconfiguring the grooves and keywords of the albums from the period when they were a force in pop, without the push toward new noises and uncertain feelings that made that music powerful. There is not a single moment of shock or freshness on Delta Machine, and it's enormously frustrating to hear what was once a band of futurists so deeply mired in resisting change.


Since abandoning his Final Fantasy guise to make music under his own name, Owen Pallett's treated his work like a logic maze; on his latest, which features contributions from Brian Eno, he steps free of his own labyrinth, resulting in his most pleading and open vocal performances.

In Conflict

Owen Pallett's 2010 album Heartland marked the first appearance of "Owen Pallett" in his own music. Before that, he operated under the pseudonym Final Fantasy, until Square Enix rights holders objected. The "Owen Pallett" of Heartland, however, was still a figure essentially rooted in fantasy: the album told the first-person story of Lewis, a self-aware fictional character who does battle with the God of his universe. (The God's name? Owen Pallett.) Pallett's presence was a dramatic construct, in other words, meditating on authorship and agency, and the fact that the songs were set in Spectrum, a 14th-century country Pallett invented, added another distancing tool.  There was powerful, communicative pop songwriting on Heartland, but Pallett built the album like a logic maze, perhaps so we could never locate him inside it.
On In Conflict, Pallett mostly steps free of his own labyrinth. The album is mournful and restrained in tone, featuring his most pleading and open vocal performances. The lyrics, meanwhile, veer often into excruciatingly personal territory:  On "The Passions," he invites us into his bedroom while someone goes down on him. "You hook your pinkies in my jeans/ I'm 28 and you're nineteen," he croons. If Heartland had him tentatively dangling a foot in autobiography, In Conflict finds Pallett taking a running leap off the dock.
"I was inspired by my interactions with John Darnielle while on tour with the Mountain Goats," he told the New York Times' T Magazine about the decision to dig deeper into his own soul. "He has this apparatus in his brain that turns the most inconsequential life events into magic." "Apparatus" is a very Pallett-ian word choice, offering a peek into how his mind grasps the minds of others. He thrives on processes and structures; his music can sometimes feel like a series of rigged gizmos. To see Pallett live is to be equally dazzled and mowed over—looping violin lines in real time, singing and playing and stomping pedals and band leading and dryly joking, all at once. You are so astonished that sometimes you forget to be moved.
He's less concerned with dazzling us this time around, and as a result he moves us more. His looped violin is still the DNA of the music, but the giddiness has been carefully siphoned from it: The arrangements are far simpler and cleaner, highlighting his beautiful, long-breathed melody writing. On "Song for Five and Six", he croons "The sun has set on me," in a delicate head-voice, the rising melody cutting straight to bone. That same effortless falsetto lifts the stepwise melody of "Infernal Fantasy" heavenward and invests the big power ballad arc of "The Secret Seven" with profound ache. If nothing else, In Conflict is a fantastic argument for Pallett's virtues as a pure pop singer.
Even in "confessional" songwriting mode, however, Pallett is still heavily allegorical and occasionally inscrutable.  For every straightforward-sounding admission, like "I'll never have any children/ I will bear them and confuse them" from "I Am Not Afraid", there are stretches like this, from "On A Path": "Dig, dig for silver in the name of keeping the order/ Silver is nothing more than the displacement of water/ It's a trick of the light on the face of your daughter and/ Or your son." Pallett's lyrics teem with thick bands of language that act like yellow lights in the listener's rush to associate him directly with any of the album's narrators.
By the end of In Conflict, it's not clear which of the album's characters is Owen Pallett—or, if they're all just mini-Owens carrying pieces of Pallett with them. At least one of them calls him out directly: "Owen, where were you to stop the fire?" he wails on "Infernal Fantasy", a song that talks, as many of these songs do, about tortured lust. The overall effect is less layers of a brilliant puzzle and more shattered mirror shards.
There are traces of blood here, too, and at least some of it is Pallett's. "The world will forget any good you have done," he assures us bleakly on "The Riverbed". "There's a gap between what a man want and what a man will receive," he muses on "Song for Five and Six". "You stand in a city that you don't know anymore/ Spending every year bent over from the weight of the year before," he sings on "On A Path," a line that becomes, slowly, "I stood for a city but I don't know anymore."
Over time, In Conflict reveals a series of oblique takes on volatile private emotions—sexual need, spiritual exhaustion, reflections on mortality. It's fitting that Brian Eno, the original oblique strategist, joined Pallett for these sessions; besides gracing the album with some clear Eno touches (the tumbling chorale of "By bill, by vote" on "On A Path," the Remain in Light-reminiscent chanting "Wait for sunlight" on "Infernal Fantasy"), he shares Pallett's belief that the best way forward is at an acute angle. In Conflict might not be an autobiography the way you or I would write it, but make no mistake: the deeper you look into it, the deeper Pallett himself stares back at you.


On his first album in eight years, the Alabama singer-songwriter turns from folk music to synths, drum machines, and internet speak, but the sorrow at the heart of his music is timeless.

Enderness

Auguste Arthur Bondy has never been one for the modern world. He once described his time in the alternative rock band Verbena as like being “an infant in a crib full of bats.” After that band folded, his solo records eschewed the glossy electronics and rousing crescendos popular in the late 2000s. Instead, he wrote unfashionable, blues-steeped country. Try as they may, placements of Bondy’s songs in popular television shows like “Friday Night Lights” couldn’t lure him from the margins, where he was content to play intimate rooms—just a simple guy with a guitar, a harmonica his only shiny thing.
It’s been eight years since Bondy last released a record, and his distaste for the present day has intensified. But rather than avoid popular sounds, on Enderness he gathers and subverts modern tools to construct his indictment of the modern world. With an arsenal of synthesizers, drum machine, sparse electric guitar, and a skeptic’s pen, he builds a plodding dystopian story of living death stoked by internet anti-reality, big pharma conspiracy, and environmental apocalypse—aka 2019. It’s existential dread as mid-tempo cradlesong, the music of our worst sleepless nights. “Stranger if you come/Know that much is broken/I forget the way/Surrender is spoken,” he sings on album standout “Images of Love,” bass pulses driving the caustic groove.
On “Diamond Skull,” Bondy strings tragic and worrying subjects of popular obsession into a stream-of-consciousness phantasmagoria over a simple guitar riff, like Nick Cave on “Higgs Boson Blues.” Observations about white nationalism, spiritual charlatans, and hollow celebrity worship spill into internet speak: “OMG sea to sea/L-M-F-A-O,” he sings with a knowing wink. Like so many who simultaneously bemoan and fuel the simulation—tweets and grams as a form of self-flagellation—Bondy is both in on and imprisoned by the joke. Case in point: He tweeted for the first time in February to promote Enderness, and he’s dropped only seven breadcrumbs since. “#TBT to when my house burned down,” he posted on May 2 with a photo of himself in Christ pose, standing amid a melted stove and other charred debris. The fire happened the day after he finished the album.
Three wordless meditations—“The Tree With the Lights,” “Pan Tran,” and “Enderness”—separate the movements of the album’s greater statement, across which Bondy seems to change perspective. First he writes from a character’s viewpoint. Then, he's an omniscient narrator. With "Lost Hills," toward the end of the album, he's in the first person. He describes destruction in California, where his house burned down, and the literal and figurative emptiness left behind: “Apocalypse from every highway/The places that we fled/As I return to California/My spirit underfed.” The title track recalls a new-age-inspired channeling of the ocean’s waves via rolling synthesizer effects, reflecting all that washes over us in our day-to-day existence with crushing and renewing force—a fitting conclusion to an album of absurdist brain-spill.
Twelve years ago, Bondy expressed his sorrow in sparse, strummed and finger-picked acoustic guitar. Today, he uses a mesh of electronics, alternately celestial and hellish in tone and tempo: beautiful, sad-bastard music sourced from lonely sojourns down the information superhighway. It isn’t so different from his standard posture, mercilessly grabbing at the heart with earnest (and at times heavy-handed) narratives sung in an alluring, unvarnished voice. With Enderness Bondy brings us squarely into the present, where our homes are on fire and all we can do is tweet.


The self-taught Chicago polymath follows his own odd muse on his GOOD Music debut, whispering consumerist sweet nothings over sparse, menacing beats.

GOOD Job, You Found Me EP

It’s a good bet that that “How?” and “Why?” are recurring questions in Valee’s inner monologue. As a child, the precocious Chicagoan would toy around with his home’s electrical wiring. In a fit of inspiration—and in a moment of divine intervention, considering its riskiness—he managed to reroute a light switch through his parents’ surround-sound receiver, so that when the bass kicked in, the lights flashed on. He’d rapped occasionally in high school, but after graduation the cat-curious polymath started a business doing low-level repairs for Chicago-area schools. An impulsive trip to a Guitar Center spawned a home recording studio and, a few experimental years and six mixtapes later, a contract with Kanye West’s GOOD Music. With GOOD Job, You Found Me, Valee’s unique style, honed during cloistered, solitary sessions in his loft apartment, gains the audience it dearly deserves.
Valee (“Vuh-lay”) sounds like a housecat pacing on a narrow windowsill. Or maybe he sounds like Michael Jackson’s pinpoint footwork on a magical, light-up sidewalk in the “Billie Jean” video. Or maybe he sounds like a light rain on a corrugated steel awning. His nearest analog is 21 Savage, but where the Atlantan’s barely-vacillating monotone lands with the force of a baseball bat on a windshield, Valee’s voice seems to gambol weightlessly, a fluffy white cloud amid crisp blue springtime skies. On the ribald, wildly catchy “Shell,” his voice is delicate, bordering on conspiratorial. Were he not backed by the kind of thunderous beats that would’ve made the lights flicker in his childhood home, his music might be denuded of its menace.
Just as intriguing as the incongruity of Valee’s downy voice and heavy instrumentals (typically produced by Rio Mac or ChaseTheMoney) is his hardcore punk-style commitment to brevity: GOOD Job crams six songs into 14 concise minutes, and the longest, a remix of “Miami” featuring Pusha T, falls just short of the three-minute mark. For an artist whose lyrics have an uncomplicated relationship with consumption—he’s in favor of it, particularly as it pertains to drugs, designer clothing, and, surprisingly, RC cars—the self-restraint is fascinating. He’s not subverting trap-rap form with overwrought showpiece onanism or any outward political awareness, but self-abnegation. Most songs are a single verse, if there’s a verse at all; the airy “Vlone,” which comes nearer to avant-garde dance music than it does to any particular rap subgenre, is just a chorus. Once he’s fully expressed an idea, Valee moves on without fireworks or fanfare.
Unfortunately, half the ideas on GOOD Job were used on previous projects. This version of “Shell,” with a rare-for-Valee second verse, appeared on his 1988, and his biggest hit, the rumbling “I Got Whatever,” was on 12:12 Again, as was the original of “Miami,” only modified here by a fairly staid Pusha T verse. Though the EP is largely excellent, with fewer than seven minutes of new material it struggles to serve its two opposing masters. Ostensibly, GOOD Job is art unmolested by corporatist interest. But functionally it doubles as a press release meant to introduce Valee to West’s audience—a painfully normal crowd likely unattuned to rap’s odder, underground offerings. But Valee’s capture could prove valuable for GOOD Music, a label otherwise bereft of young, intriguing talent (and historically unable to nurture it). If they allow the dreadlocked Chicagoan to follow his most outré instincts, and encourage him to whisper consumerist sweet somethings for two minutes at a time, they could have their first bona fide new star in recent memory.


Big Boi returns with a collection of shiny bangers unbothered with modern trends. With Killer Mike, Snoop Dogg, Organized Noize, everyone here sounds a little out of touch and just fantastic.

Boomiverse

“As long as I have a job, he’ll always have a record deal,” L.A. Reid once said about Big Boi. It sounded nice; it’s the sort of thing we like to imagine hardened moguls saying about their sentimental favorites. It was around the time that Big Boi’s first solo record, Sir Lucious Leftfoot: The Son of Chico Dusty, was struggling publicly to escape Jive’s corporate ledger into the world. As the recording sessions, bills, and tensions mounted, the album began to feel like a toxic, troubled asset, which made it all the more surprising when the exhilarating, endlessly replayable final product finally leaked into daylight: This was the album everyone was so worried about?
Seven years later, Big Boi’s solo career feels if not adrift, then circling the same spot. He’s definitely not coasting, but his solo career is still a goodwill project. Sir Lucious is still unstoppable whenever you cue it up, a massive, liberating party going on behind a door you forgot to open for seven years. But 2012’s Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors was a step backward, a genial and middling album full of collaborations that didn’t quite gel. Boomiverse is closer in spirit to Sir Lucious: He’s steered the ship back toward the straightforward, funk-infused party territory. The producers are a straight-flush of dependable collaborators, from Organized Noize to Mannie Fresh to even Scott Storch, who also worked on Sir Lucious and whose name doesn’t pop up on that many big-name rap records anymore.
Boomiverse doesn’t have the same freewheeling, blitzkrieg energy as Sir Lucious, but it reestablishes Big Boi as a dependable record maker who will always make music worth checking for, no matter what else is going on around him. He’s not really in a position to be competing against Migos on rap radio, and he doesn’t want to, at all—“The Super Bowl ring hand is full,” he told Pitchfork in 2012—so he embraces his parallel universe. Everyone on Boomiverse sounds out of touch and fantastic. Snoop Dogg, Killer Mike, Kurupt—they are all leaning into the pits and crags in their voices, embracing their age as a sort of superpower. Big Rube pops up on the opening, Organized Noize-produced “Da Next Day,” and he sounds approximately six thousand years old: “True fusion only occurs at the heart of a star,” he rumbles, which is not really a sentiment for the squeaky-voiced anyway.
You can tell that Big Boi is still in love with the sound of his voice, and still fascinated by finding places it can drop into busy productions: “This type of paper just don’t fold or get thrown in the booty club, flexing/We hoody-hoo them hoes and have them glued to the section/Ain’t nothing new, that’s just us oozing perfection,” he hop-skips on “Order of Operations.” “I put the bottle down, hit the throttle, got’em now/Sodom and Gomorrah, deplorables all around my style,” goes a section on the Fresh-produced “Follow Deez.” He sounds like he’s sipping from the same fountain of youth as E-40, whose enthusiasm for his art could power city blocks.
There are a couple of moves here that land on twisted ankles: “Mic Jack,” produced by DJ Dahi and DJ Khalil, sounds like a Justin Timberlake solo cut translated from Hungarian, with bar mitzvah-worthy synthesizers, Adam Levine awkwardly crooning, “The dancefloor tells no lie,” and Big Boi proclaiming, “I build a bear before I build a bitch.” “Kill Jill” pairs a haunting little vocal sample from the virtual anime pop star Hatsune Miku with Killer Mike and Jeezy; it’s a strong cut, but it’s hard not to wince a little when Big Boi muses, out of nowhere: “They say Cosby gave them roofies/Now who know what the truth is?” It would be repugnant if it wasn’t so half-hearted; he doesn’t even have the bravery to stake out a position, he just indulges in some drunk-uncling.
This is exactly the kind of avert-your-eyes old-guy grumbling he’s normally so adept at avoiding. As usual, he takes a bar or two to remind us how seriously he takes his lyrics—“I’m gone keep on pushing this pen, I don’t write on no iPhone” (“Made Men”), or “I tend to overthink when I ink these bars, but y’all don’t even try” (“Overthunk”)—but his touch is nimble and he never lingers on a point or gets bogged down. On “Order of Operations,” he talks about buying land over Lexuses. On “Da Next Day,” he calls himself “rap’s Underground Railroad” and leaves a dollar tip for a Waffle House waitress in the same breath. This is Big Boi’s mind in motion—jokes, insights, insults, wisdom, and confessions all shooting out of the nozzle of a fire hydrant. There’s room in his party for human-sized feelings.
There is exactly one potential pop hit on Boomiverse: “All Night,” a singing-in-the-shower romper with a rollicking piano line that feels like something D.R.A.M. might be doing. Check the credits, and lo and behold, it’s none other than Dr. Luke behind the boards. The song has none of the lacquered, assembly-line sheen of his usual work, providing further evidence that Big Boi at his best is a top-shelf collaborator, someone who instinctively knows how to draw vital energies out of unlike minds. Boomiverse probably won’t alter his trajectory, but there are several songs here that I would not be the least bit irritated he played at a festival. For a guy whose catalog includes “Rosa Parks” and “Bombs Over Baghdad,” that is not faint praise.


On its debut album, the Mississippi synth-punk band hones a sound characterized by unlikely combinations: frenzied rhythms and tranquil synths, blistering riffs and hopeful lyrics.

Post-American

Without hearing their music, it would be reasonable to assume MSPAINT is a hardcore band. The Hattiesburg, Mississippi quartet spent the past three years opening for the likes of Soul Glo, Militarie Gun, and Gel with a fervor that goes toe-to-toe with the headliners. But MSPAINT come from a college town known for “lighthearted” music, and their synth-punk is an unlikely contender for the co-sign of national hardcore bands: “I feel like a jester up there, watching people fucking spin-kick each other to our music,” vocalist Deedee recently admitted. On their debut album Post-American, MSPAINT introduce themselves as a band whose barked vocals are better fit for retro synths, experimental electronica, and blown-out bass. Consider them an industrial art-punk group that sits with the Doc Marten anarchists at the cafeteria table.
Exhausted by playing in rock bands, all four members of MSPAINT—vocalist Deedee, bassist Randy Riley, drummer Quinn Mackey, and Nick Panella on synthesizers—founded the project on a two-part promise: no guitars, and, apart from Mackey on drums, everyone picks up a new-to-them role. That decision led to their experimental sound and 2020’s self-titled EP. The confidence to pull it all off, however, didn’t arrive until now. Post-American is self-assured in its sound and direct in its approach, often thanks to its aggressive rhythm section. Riley cranks his fuzz pedal so loud that you can hear a bit of feedback in “Titan of Hope” from his bass’ volume alone. Combined with Mackey’s hard-hitting fills and emphasis on upbeats—particularly on “Hardwired” and “Decapitated Reality,” which features Pierce Jordan of Soul Glo—MSPAINT’s status as the token alternative act on hardcore bills makes sense: How could Riley’s blistering riffs and Mackey’s racing drumbeats on “Information” not start a mosh pit?
Post-American is rooted in punk rhythms as a guiding spirit; the synths and electronic add-ons are a complement to Deedee’s hopeful lyrics, a method that pays homage to artists like DEVO and SOPHIE who viewed synths as a storytelling instrument. Taking cues from childhood technology, like the dissonant screeches of dial-up and alien zaps of fax machines, MSPAINT incorporate sounds from the past to image a more peaceful future. Panella’s synths morph from jaunty ’80s chords in the Ian Shelton-featuring “Delete It” to melodic drones fit for stoner prog on the title track, leading the band to jokingly describe their genre as “post-modeM.” In “Flowers From Concrete,” a tranquil synth intro flutters like a harp before speaker-rattling bass explodes and Panella switches gears, transitioning to wavy notes that sound like the neon beam of a campy alien abduction and finally, by the end, a straightforward keyboard interlude to slow your heart rate. This is MSPAINT’s secret skill: casting a strangely placating effect despite the rhythmic frenzy and gruff hollers holding their music up.
Despite his urgent bellow, Deedee isn’t singing from a place of anger. Following the unbothered flow of underground hip-hop, his syllabic meter gives lines like “Guillotine will decide who’s separated in classes” or “Inherit death like a birthright/Eyes open up but your spirit stays closed tight” the casual feel of an MF DOOM track, no matter how loudly he’s shouting. For a guy with such a booming voice, Deedee seems bent on using it to spread some good. He sings about what the future can and should offer, instead of lamenting what the present lacks. On “S3,” Deedee compartmentalizes thoughts in a push for self-growth. Throughout “Titan of Hope,” he waxes positive nihilism in a game of contrasts meant to inspire. Deedee’s penmanship is the final garnish on an album defined by unexpected combinations. His presence as a frontman instills a humble profundity in MSPAINT’s music, a feeling that lingers after the dust settles from all the unintended mosh pits it spawns.


The Morning Benders return with a new name and a new sound. This collection draws inspiration from leader Chris Chu's childhood obsession with R&B groups like Boyz II Men and synth-heavy pop artists like Madonna.

Pop Etc

Two clichés that seem to pop up a lot in writing about music: One artist might "know his lane and stay in it," while another "moves outside of her comfort zone." There is virtue in both approaches. On the one hand, it's admirable to know what you do best and parlay that strength into a work to match (see the Ramones or Beach House). On the other, it's hard not to respect when someone decides to do something different with the hope that his or her audience will follow along (see Beck or Joni Mitchell).
The Morning Benders, a Brooklyn-via-San Francisco outfit, were for two albums a workmanlike indie rock band, and on their last effort, 2010's Big Echo, they brought in Grizzly Bear's Chris Taylor to produce a solid collection of wooly chamber rock. This year, they changed their name to POP ETC after discovering that the word "bender" has an offensive homophobic connotation in the UK, and they made a shift in sound that was just as radical. Instead of widescreen guitar rock, the newly christened band would draw inspiration from leader Chris Chu's childhood obsession with R&B groups like Boyz II Men and synth-heavy pop artists like Madonna. We're talking neon keyboards, plenty of Auto-Tune, songs with titles like "I Wanna Be Your Man". Is the band's self-titled album under the new moniker a brave change-up? Sure. Is it any good? Not even a little. Forget staying in their lane; the Band Formerly Known as the Morning Benders have drifted into the median, jumped the guardrail, and tumbled end-over-end in the direction of a sheer cliff.
It's not as if twee-leaning indie that incorporates R&B and synth-pop is unheard of. Bands like Passion Pit and, on a smaller scale, the Vampire Weekend/Ra Ra Riot side project Discovery found ways to channel the brashest sound of the radio into something that felt personal and distinctive. But Discovery emanated warmth and affection while Passion Pit get over on exuberance and songwriting chops. POP ETC have none of these qualities. This is unbearably cloying music in the vein of Owl City's "Fireflies", a mix of scrubbed-clean earnestness, bright-eyed naiveté, and some of the dopiest lyrics this side of Zach Attack.
There are two types of singers in the world: those who can sell a chorus like "Rock your body quick and get up, get up," in a song that starts, "I came here to party don't bring me down," and those who cannot. Justin Timberlake can certainly pull it off. Chu, well... when you miss the mark as badly as he does here, you end up with a dangerously annoying flesh-eating earworm. And so much of what's wrong here really does come down to how he uses his voice. It's not that he's a bad singer, at all; it's all in his tone, and how it works in this setting. In the fuzzy and mellow world of Big Echo, Chu's voice took on a hint of mystery and ambiguity. In POP ETC, he comes over like a breathlessly enthusiastic YMCA counselor with no self-awareness trying to impress 10-year-olds with wacky pop-culture appropriations. Which might be possible to overlook if the melodies and hooks were good enough, but they're functional at best and sometimes ("Keep It to Your Own") downright awful.
"We've committed to our new sound, and we're not ashamed," Chu said in an interview with Pitchfork. "We're not trying to sneak anything by anybody. We are what we are-- and, hopefully, you'll like it." I like this attitude. Chu is right that he's got to follow his muse and he and his band have to go where their interests take them. But such a decision wouldn't be commendable if success were assured. Albums like this remind us why we look up to those who take risks. Here's hoping that the next one POP ETC take works out much better.


The Australian trio’s zonked lo-fi electronica and dub pop beams in from an alternate dimension where the primary building blocks of pop music are melodica and drum machine.

Elixa

It’s easy enough to identify Th Blisks’ component parts—trip-hop, torch song, post-punk, bedroom pop. It’s harder to pin down the distended, discombobulating result. Troth’s Amelia Besseny and Cooper Bowman and Low Life member Yuta Matsumura make washed-out indie dub pop songs that sound like old train cars rattling along, faded boom-bap loops and metallic post-punk guitars taking the place of dinged-up tracks and twanging overhead wires. The Australian trio made its new album, Elixa, remotely while living in Hobart, Newcastle, and Papunya, a small community outside Alice Springs. But if Elixa doesn’t quite belong to any one real place, its peculiar ambiance evokes a sprawling, desiccated urban landscape of the mind.
How So?, Th Blisks’ 2022 debut, felt similarly unclassifiable: from the mondegreen-ish band name and song titles—“A Sylph,” “Taipei Dubble”—to the album cover, which featured (I think) portraits of each band member made of pebbles, it felt like an entryway into an alternate universe where the primary building blocks of pop music are melodica and drum machine. Elixa provides a clearer picture of whatever weird liminal zone Th Blisks are transmitting from: The textures and core materials are largely the same, but it feels more spacious, less lo-fi.
Besseny’s vocals are still largely illegible, but occasionally a fragment of what she’s saying adds to Elixa’s air of laid-back benevolence: “It’s not without, it’s not within,” she sings on “Enchancity,” her reedy voice drifting over the beat; on “Knuckledust,” she sings of “a good place to start” over a track that sounds like “Steal My Sunshine” after a collective barbiturate overdose. The positivity within Besseny’s lyrics—“Looking for a faith/Without all the fiction,” she sings on “Do You Bless It?”—speaks to a primary appeal of Elixa: This sideways and detuned music nonetheless still conveys brightness. That’s not all it contains, though: The cavernous dirge “No Know” and the ghostly processional “Umbrah” temper Th Blisks’ warmth with a sinister, creeping edge.
If you were to test a sample of Elixa’s DNA, you might trace its genealogy back to sensuous, strange ’90s artists like the Japanese trip-hop singer Poison Girl Friend or fogged-out Melbourne band Hydroplane. Th Blisks also feel like contemporaries of fellow Australians a.s.o. and YL Hooi, who releases music via Bowman’s Altered States label. Besseny’s vocals sometimes recall Grimes circa Geidi Primes. That swath of references is mostly to say that Elixa belongs to a broad canon of music that seems to exist a millimeter or two outside the space and time in which it was actually released: the soundtrack of a city that doesn’t exist and probably never will.


BRMC’s eighth album continues to prop up the rock-historical establishment. It offers more of the same, but at least it’s more of the same in a fairly compelling way.

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club: Wrong Creatures

Wrong Creatures

In the 1953 film The Wild One, a woman asks Marlon Brando’s character, “What are you rebelling against, Johnny?” He takes a quick moment to consider the question, then responds, “Whadda you got?” Black Rebel Motorcycle Club took their name from Brando’s biker gang in that film, but they also took their unfocused defiance as well. Even on their 2001 debut they were as much a stance as a sound, both of which were rooted deep in the past, not only old counterculture flicks but old rock’n’roll as well: the Velvet Underground, Suicide, Ride, the Jesus & Mary Chain. Since then they’ve hissed and shaken fists at the establishment, each album a carefully calibrated pose of rebellion based largely on past examples. But they’re so musically conservative that it’s impossible to be truly defiant; they’re too busy propping up the rock-historical establishment to break free of anything in any meaningful way.
On one hand, they understand that their bundle of musical reference points and the poses they’ve been striking all mean something different at different points in time. That hasn’t made Black Rebel Motorcycle Club any less predictable, but it does give their music some much-needed heft. On the other hand, their “Whadda you got?” attitude means they’ve never really engaged very closely with any particular historical moment they’ve lived through; their rebellion remains general and unspecified. Even during the Bush era, when artists were looking to the past to comment on the present, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club wrote songs that were too vague, too wishy-washy carry any real subversive power. This is a band that actually had a tune simply called “U.S. Government.”
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club have built a long career more on spit and perseverance than on vision, and with nearly 20 years behind them, they’ve become a thing of the past themselves: a historical influence, a rock touchstone. Perhaps that’s their final form, their intended destination. Despite it sounding exactly how you’d expect, the fact that they are releasing their eighth album in 2018 is a respectable accomplishment in and of itself, especially when you consider the tribulations they’ve faced just over the past decade: the backstage death of bassist Robert Levon Been’s father in 2010 and, more recently, the slow yet determined recovery of drummer Leah Shapiro from a Chiari malformation that affected her balance and rhythm.
Wrong Creatures is, of course, more of the same, but at least it’s more of the same in a fairly compelling way. The guitars still shriek and moan, the drums still pound out steady trance rhythms, and Hayes and Been still sing with a sneering detachment that makes it all too easy to ignore their lyrics. Some songs are ridiculous for familiar reasons: “Little Thing Gone Wild” sounds like turn-of-the-century garage rock, a slightly slowed down Vines, but at least it doesn’t perpetuate old-school sexual politics like that title seems to indicate. Other songs are ridiculous for new and refreshing reasons: “Circus Bazooko” tiptoes around the fairway on a trippy music-box organ riff that’s silly rather than sinister.
There are no big new ideas on Wrong Creatures, but there are enough small new ideas to give the album its own identity within their catalog. In particular, Hayes frequently uses his guitar to puncture the band’s minor-key drones with compact riffs or random asides, as though having a conversation with himself. The album is lousy with anthems, and one benefit of their plodding tempos is that those rousing moments sound earned. “Echo” opens with a bassline like someone’s faint memory of “Walk On the Wild Side,” and it ends up sounds like any given Coldplay tune from the 2000s. To their immense credit, the band is equally unapologetic about both reference points, which makes “Echo” the most startling and satisfying song on the album.
They can’t muster the same rousing energy on “Calling Them All Away,” and by the time they get to closer “All Rise,” the climactic push sounds scripted, obvious, rote—ending the album with a thud. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club don’t sound like a band winding things down on Wrong Creatures. While they’re not radically altering their own musical DNA, they are still in their own way trying to figure out what they can and cannot do. While that probably sounds like a backhanded compliment for these rock‘n’roll veterans, it might actually be the secret to their longevity. Maybe they’ll even figure out what they’re rebelling against.


As Overmono, the UK techno duo of Tom and Ed Russell shift their focus away from club-friendly 4/4 kicks to tracks with looser architectures. Their second EP feels gutsy and modern.

Arla II EP

Overmono is the collaborative effort of Tom and Ed Russell, UK techno’s foremost biological (as opposed to chemical) brothers. For the last half-decade, they’ve worked under several aliases—Tom most prominently as Truss and MPIA3, Ed as Tessela—and have been among a small cadre of producers to emerge from the London bass scene with fresh takes on their country’s lineage of dark, grimy techno. Gear savvy, club-focused, and deceptively playful, this informal group—which also includes Blawan, Untold, and Pariah, among others—took the industrial muscle of Surgeon, Regis, and the Downwards label and added a wink to the grimace.
Arla II is the siblings’ second EP as Overmono, following last year’s Arla and a track as TR / ER in 2012. They’ve used the project to shift their focus away from club-friendly 4/4 kicks to tracks with looser architectures, favoring whirring percussion and yelping vocal samples. In both tone and construction, these Overmono tracks seem informed by shadowy mid-90s rave music and the eerie IDM it mutated into.
The opening “O-Coast” (which, coincidentally or not, shares a name with a popular new synthesizer) sounds like a Boards of Canada track on two hyperactive mitzis and with a busted ankle, whisking childlike vocal abstractions into a coiling synth line. Subby kick drums sit behind the mix, more rumble than rhythm. It’s a potent, tricky concoction that is notable for its lack of utility: too abstract and inattentive for the dance, too manic and paranoid for the comedown. Arla II’s four primary tracks (it contains two short interludes as well) all mostly function in this manner. “Telephax 030” is particularly stressful, two vocal samples disagreeing against a hissy, reverberating cymbal—like a domestic argument and the resultant shattered window, looped in perpetuity.
“16 Steps” is Overmono’s finest piece yet, a shuffling thicket of a breakbeat and oxidized utterances set over foghorn bass blasts. It’s over before your feet or your stomach figure out how to handle it, a metallic taste left on your tongue. The closing “Powder Dry,” with its aching pads, feels sentimental and plodding in contrast, the only time Arla II feels easy for either the artists or the listeners. Still, this represents a step forward for the Russell brothers. These tracks feel gutsy and modern even when their influences and lineage are apparent, and they conjure paranoia and anger without resorting to hissy industrial aggression. Tom and Ed plan to perform these pieces as part of a live show, and that seems like an ideal way to experience this music: with a loud, blasting club for these loud, confounding tracks.


Crowd-pleasing anthems come naturally to the Korean superstar DJ. If only her debut album had more of them.

I Hear You

Has any DJ played the game quite like Peggy Gou? Plenty of DJs are influencers, but it’s rare they have a catalog of stylish deep house 12"s to their name. Some are fashion models, but have they been on multiple covers of Vogue, Dazed, Elle, and Harper’s Bazaar? There’s always that one percent of superstar DJs bopping between Vegas, Ibiza, and Dubai on their private jets—but only one of them is a 32-year-old Korean woman who insists on managing herself.
Gou has gone from zero to 500 mph in the years since she swapped a fashion career for dance music, ticking off every conceivable goal for a rising celebrity DJ: the first Korean woman to play Berghain, headline sets at Ibiza’s superclubs, a crossover hit on a cool indie, a clothing line backed by Virgil Abloh, a Kylie Minogue remix to promote three new flavors of Magnum ice cream. Most impressively, last year she released “(It Goes Like) Nanana,” a frothy ’90s house bagatelle that went to No. 1 in five countries and has been streamed nearly 500 million times. This is not the sort of thing that happens to DJs, unless their name is Diplo, David Guetta, or Calvin Harris.
Now, eight years after her first single, she releases her debut album on XL Recordings, home to big-league dance acts from the Prodigy to Overmono. Drawing heavily on the ’90s club music that Gou says “changed her taste” during lockdown, I Hear You operates in the same mode of retro fantasia that generated “Nanana,” cherry-picking iconic sounds from house music’s ’80s and ’90s heyday. In rough historical order, we’ve got glassy Italo synths, super-sized syndrums, pumping organs, plasticky MIDI horns, the fierce thwack of the TR-909, several saggy breakbeats, and one tasty jungle loop.
Gou is good at stirring up rosy nostalgia for some long-lost Disco Europa, a mood that strikes a chord with a generation longing for the imagined freedom and optimism of dance music’s golden era. Her breakout tracks—2018’s “It Makes You Forget (Itgehane)” and “Han Jan”—were defined by their space, restraint, and melody. What they lacked in over-ratcheted builds and drops they made up for in cosmic detailing: bongos, twinkling bells, aquatic basslines, and a uniquely dreamy femininity imparted by Gou’s faux-naive speak-singing in a mixture of Korean and English. I Hear You strikes a frustrating standoff between these two versions of Gou: It lacks the authentic quirkiness of those earlier hits, yet never lets loose the confetti cannons and fishbowl cocktails promised by “Nanana.”
That song is a perfect Frankenstein of familiar club moments: Korg M1 organs, the pitch-bent lick from ATB’s “9 PM (Till I Come),” a polyglottal chorus a lot like A Touch of Class’ Eurohouse hit “Around the World.” What else to say about this neatly welded banger? It’s simply too effective to care what you think of it. It would also be remarkable for Gou to pull off the trick a second time on the same album. “Back to One” is a fun attempt, packed with pumping organs and tacky brass, but the vocals don’t take off and her fake laughter suggests the opposite of carefree euphoria. “1+1=11” is plastic Balearica, mixing a sparkly synth-guitar line with a breakbeat here, an acid wiggle there. “Lobster Telephone” plays to Gou’s strengths with its flamboyant ’80s touches, and might even be a sly dig at Western fans’ noncomprehension of her Korean-language vocals: The lyrics are apparently surreal nonsense (hence the Dalí-referencing title), which makes the meaning equally foreign to everyone.
The rest, to borrow an idea from a house classic, is a land of confusion. There are two collaborations (duets, in fact): one with an internationally recognized pastiche-rock god who just turned 60, the other with a trans rapper from Puerto Rico known for a 2023 collaboration with Latin Grammy-winning producer Bizarrap. What connects Lenny Kravitz and Villano Antillano? Well, they’re both on this album. “I Believe in Love Again” is as syrupy and sincere as its title suggests, grooving along at a radio-friendly tempo. The chorus has a vacant, Random Access Memories disco slinkiness, but Kravitz’s smug squeal is such a powerful turnoff I’ve since been using it as a contraceptive—and I actually like the guy. Meanwhile “All That,” showcasing Antillano’s Spanish-language raps over a slowed-down “Think” break, could have been a spritz of campy mystery and romance, but instead feels like an earnest slog.
In the filler zone of tracks seven to nine, Gou doubles down on her signature moves, adding bigger builds and acid-burst drops (“I Go”) and following Moby’s formula for melancholy exotica (“Purple Horizon”). “Seoulsi Peggygou (서울시페기구)” is much more likable, juxtaposing a folkish melody on Korean gayageum (probably played by Gou herself) with salsa horns and a jungle loop intelligent enough for LTJ Bukem. But the East-West fusion doesn’t go further than that—it’s no “Sumo Jungle Grandeur,” for example—and the experiment is dropped after two and a half minutes.
But whatever! It’s a ’90s-inspired dance album, we’re here to have fun and down a few piña coladas, are we not? If only Gou had the same idea. The problem really starts with the opening track. “Your Art” is a portentous introduction, with Italo storm clouds gathering under a spoken-word salad of Instagram affirmations and vague political soundbites. “Create your universe anew… be present,” she says hypnotically. “Look up, look down… what do you see?” These words are adapted from a poem by Olafur Eliasson, an artist and eco-activist once known for installing an artificial sun in London’s Tate Modern; he also designed the strange mirrored headpiece Gou wears on the album cover.
“We have colonized, industrialized, modernized,” she continues, improbably. “We have forgotten self-respect, and to listen to ourselves.” This is a planetary-scale reach for an artist who, for one thing, must be among the music industry’s biggest carbon emitters (did nobody inform Eliasson?). And unless there are some revolutionary slogans hidden in the mix, nothing on I Hear You engages with art or politics or nature in any graspable way.
By prefacing her debut with this meaningless own goal, Gou undermines her brand as global party girl in chief and reminds us of everything we’d rather forget while we’re on our fizzy beach holiday: the poisonous waste produced by the fashion industry, the lethal emissions generated by the private jets and luxury cars she likes, the murderous regimes that use electronic music festivals to culture-wash their reputations. The “leave politics out of music” brigade might be annoyed that any of this is even mentioned in conjunction with their fave, but look—she started it.
Gou is blessed with talent; she writes, produces, mixes, plays her own instruments, is an exceptional DJ; she’s born to win. As her Billboard interviewer recently noted, she has “a business acumen that could be characterized as corporate hustle if it didn’t also happen inside dark techno clubs.” There’s no point in throwing around grand concepts like so much glitter in order to feel like a serious album artist—just turn up the “nananas” and keep the piña coladas coming.


The singer-songwriter’s second album is headier and more dynamic than her Mercury Prize-winning debut, but its sharp writing is often blunted by its temperate sound.

My Soft Machine

At some point over the past decade, young singer-songwriters got the memo that specificity is key. It’s the details that draw in a listener, that make the personal vividly universal: the forgotten scarves, acne pits resembling moon craters, an ex tying their new lover’s shoelaces. In the best scenario, these observations are guided by the songwriter’s truest tool, perspective. Often, though, the effect can be less like storytelling than listmaking. Where Lorde’s sublime “Supercut” dramatized being overwhelmed by recollections of a failed love, many of her descendants simply dumped their camera rolls and assumed that the poignancy can be taken as read.
Arlo Parks’ debut album often succumbed to the latter pitfall. Collapsed in Sunbeams, released in 2021, won the British singer-songwriter acclaim (and the Mercury Prize) for her cocooning lo-fi arrangements and flashes of intimate poetry: “I’d lick the grief right off your lips/You do your eyes like Robert Smith,” she sang on lockdown favorite “Black Dog,” its thumbed acoustic chords like shafts of light through closed curtains. But it was the best of a surfeit of songs that blandly consoled troubled peers—as if the subjects of each verse of Kelly Rowland’s angsty 2002 ballad “Stole” got their own spin-off—her stories flattened further into guidance counselor-core by emollient choruses and Radiohead To Chill Out To arrangements.
Easy reassurance is harder to come by on Parks’ second album, My Soft Machine. The writing, if not the music, is all the better for a more myopic focus, less concerned with the trials of her generation (though still there, on “Purple Phase” and “Puppy”) than documenting the 22-year-old Londoner’s new life in Los Angeles: a freshly minted pop star falling in and out of Escalades with her fellow pop-star girlfriend. She feels "hyper-real" when she glows in someone's gaze, but desolate when that gaze is denied, when all she can do is suck dry the memories of good times: “There are sandflies in the champagne,” she sings on “Weightless,” paradise spoiled. It’s simultaneously darker and more joyful, both as a result of the sometimes druggy, sometimes desperate stories she’s telling and the heady way Parks tells them, telescoping from euphoria to panic as subtly as the dusk sky darkens.
Frustratingly, these adrenaline spikes of desire are often muted by hazy, Vaseline-coated arrangements. There’s more color here than on Parks’ debut: an amiable golden-hour wash of loose funk, fizzing drum machines, and sleepy boom-bap, plus flickers of the dance music that limn her new nocturnal adventures. The combination works on “Impurities,” a honeymoon-phase reverie that shimmers with the idle glitter of feeling newly comfortable around someone. But this doggedly breezy mode can leave the appealingly conversational Parks floating like driftwood in the shallows, blunting her lyrical immediacy. “Room (Red Wings)” has bars—“Ghosting me hard for a kick/Blowing me up when you need it/My wings are clipped and my head’s in bits” is a perfect summation of the casual cruelty of leaving someone on read—but the sweetly bleary, Frank-as-aesthetic production only outlines the hope of loving someone who always lets you down, not the agony.
That sense of Parks’ sharp lens being diluted is most galling on “Blades.” It’s a dispatch from a party after an argument, where Parks maintains an exhausting vigilance on her girlfriend, and her lover’s traits become all the more arresting to her for how painfully remote they are in the moment: “And you laugh the same/Hand on mouth ‘cause you hate your teeth/And I love your teeth/And I’m scared to speak as I catch a whiff of your rose Diptyque,” she sings in a hesitant yet rapturous run-on. Yet the cirrus-cloud funk and puckish bubbling synths make the song sound less like a heart-in-mouth dispatch than a soundtrack to any old party.
The few deviations from the dreamy production are hit and miss: When Parks reaches for chugging guitar on “Devotion,” the effect is less brazen than boilerplate. (At this point a pop-punk detour seems obligatory for any synth-pop album.) “Pegasus,” a two-step lullaby featuring collaboration magpie Phoebe Bridgers, is a welcome, if extremely sappy, change of pace. “Puppy,” though, tries something totally different: steamy, warped bass straight out of a Jai Paul song and distorted guitar, bringing out the bleakness of Parks’ realization that pain is inevitable.
One highlight reveals what it takes for Parks to keep those feelings at bay. “I’m Sorry” captures a moment of confession: Parks apologizes to a loved one for being distant as she admits, “It’s easier to be numb,” over cool drums and honeyed synths. And yet, she resists that kind of desensitization, noting the smell of “petrol in the air, wisteria and scrambled eggs.” Suddenly the effort behind her alertness to the flashes of beauty and innocence that litter the rest of My Soft Machine—the loose cherries, blue jewels, and flexing deltoids—becomes apparent: the spoils of her hard-won outlook. Parks is a sweet-hearted songwriter obsessed with the alchemy of devotion, how care and touch can make you melt, radiate like a star. Her evocative words still want for that magic touch.


The nascent pop star attempts to move beyond reggaetón on his latest album, but he never fully commits to any particular direction.

Vice Versa

Much like hip-hop’s turn-of-the-century acceptance into the U.S. pop charts, reggaetón has been fully assimilated with the current Latin pop mainstream. Its cultural impact has been palpable, legitimizing a genre historically pushed to the margins, branded vulgar and low-class by the upper crust of Latin American society. Pop charts freed from gatekeepers in terrestrial radio are now dominated by the reggaetón riddim, so much so that some of its biggest stars make great strides to embrace grittier sounds more in line with the sound’s underground origins. But most artists still feel pressured to stick to the formula, churning out generic reggaetóncitos until they have enough clout to experiment and find their voice.
So for Rauw Alejandro, a nascent pop star with gifts as a singer and dancer surpassing most of his contemporaries—including bellwethers Bad Bunny and J Balvin—the challenge becomes not how to get reggaetón on the charts, but how to get on the charts without making reggaetón. And indeed, while Alejandro dabbled in some new directions on his debut LP Afrodisíaco, much of that record hewed closer to the watered-down reggaetón and trap that dominates the Latin charts. Yet its success has emboldened him to further experiment on his latest LP, Vice Versa, albeit with mixed results.
For better or worse, Vice Versa is presented distinctly in Alejandro’s voice; historically a prolific collaborator, he largely eschews features. Outside of Anitta’s turn on “Brazilera,” the most prominent guest on the record might just be the Daddy Yankee sample on “La Old Skul.” Alejandro is also listed as a producer on five of Vice Versa’s 14 tracks, evidence that his confidence in his own vision extends behind the boards, too.
The most forceful example of this is album opener “Todo De Ti,” his declaration that he is veering from the standard pop formula du jour—the Latin one, at least. And while it’s certainly a surprising direction for a young artist who came up on reggaetón and Trap&B, it’s also somewhat dispiriting that the big tonal shift comes from a track that would sound more at home on the boring half of a Dua Lipa LP, a lifestyle ad in audio form with a saccharine melody that appears to be lifted from Fergie’s biggest hit. “Desenfocao’” feels modeled after the contemporary Weeknd, softening a Michael Jackson-via-Max Martin take on rock music with a slick pop sheen.
This expanded range has also yielded some fascinating results, mostly at the higher tempos. After hinting at an affinity for Euro club music on Afrodisíaco’s “Quimica,” he further experiments here with UK rave and drum’n’bass. “Cosa Guapa” begins innocently enough as a standard pop reggaetón, then teleports to the floor at Fabric; “¿Cuándo Fue?” lulls listeners in with familiar syncopation before dropping them into a vortex of skittering snares and deep, pulsing synthesized bass. It’s the most thrilling moment on the record, an injection of unbridled energy that fades much too quickly.
Unfortunately, most of the actual reggaetón numbers, like the lovers daydream “Nubes,” skew generic and boring. Even “La Old Skul”—a transparent attempt to pay tribute to reggaetón’s roots with a sample of one of its more enduring hits—falls flat, failing to capture any of the irreverent spirit that made the movement so exciting. And while it’s cool that Anitta and Brazil’s baile funk are getting shine on a mainstream pop record, the smooth surface of “Brazilera” betrays much of the wild, frenetic energy that makes that music so appealing.
Vice Versa is ultimately pop experimentation with trepidation; Alejandro wants to expand the palette available to a successful Latin pop star, but seems to believe that change will be slow to come—better to play it safe with some bankable beats, just in case. And it appears to be a shrewd move, business-wise, at least: Vice Versa and “Todo De Ti” debuted at or near the top of several charts, racking up streams in the hundreds of millions. But if he truly wants to help shift the sound of pop music, he’ll have to take a leap of faith.
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The excellent album from the Long Island singer-songwriter Jade Lilitri is sharp and radiant, a massively catchy guitar record about trying to walk the straight and narrow.

Basking in the Glow

Any cynic can make a resolution to be more positive. It’s another thing to suppress the eye-rolls triggered by all the clichés that come with it—“first things first,” “focus on the good.” This is the challenge Oso Oso frontman Jade Lilitri has taken on—“radically committed to letting the light in”—for his third album, Basking in the Glow. Accordingly, the music is relentless, almost ruthless in its melodic radiance, both a testament to the power of positive thinking and a poignant reminder of its limitations. “Sometimes you do what you feel/Well most times I feel like shit,” he sings on Basking in the Glow’s penultimate track, one that vividly names Lilitri’s white-knuckle grasp on serenity—it’s called “Impossible Game.” You’ve been told “fake it til you make it,” but what if you’ve made it and it still feels fake?
Or, think of Basking in the Glow as Lilitri considering his newfound success and adulation, acting out the anime butterfly meme: “Is this happiness?” Lilitri achieved minor notoriety with the short-lived Long Island emo band State Lines, after which he released his first album as Oso Oso in 2015 to a handful of positive blog reviews and filled in as a second guitarist for the Hotelier in 2016. In order to keep that small-time hustle going, he envisioned a future very similar to his present: living with his parents and saving just enough money to finance his recordings and maybe break even on tour. His breakout album, 2017’s The Yunahon Mixtape, was only called a mixtape because Lilitri couldn’t find a label to release it, so he dropped it on Bandcamp for free. But it achieved the same desired result for any mixtape from an unheralded artist: it created enough buzz to get people to actually pay him to make and play music.
Basking in the Glow appears to follow the M.O. of pop-punk scions Jimmy Eat World on Bleed American, making a “disgustingly catchy and straight-ahead” album as revenge against an industry that was content to ignore them only two years prior. Lilitri has said he’s not fond of the whole dog and pony show of putting out records, but Basking in the Glow has enough potential pop singles to sustain a year-long album roll-out campaign. The melodies were always there for Oso Oso, but here Lilitri achieves the rare feat of making a more maximalist, cinematic album without piling on overdubs, string sections, or convoluted song structures. On the only song that wouldn’t qualify as a radio single, “Intro,” Lilitri reminisces about running his hands through blades of grass and staring at clouds, his words made almost redundant by the kind of dreamy, swelling guitar tones found on early Death Cab for Cutie songs.
Otherwise, Lilitri honors the heightened expectations and trust of his new label, Triple Crown, by embracing his showmanship; “pop” is more of a verb than a genre. The chorus of “Impossible Game” flowers up from a thicket of thorny, minimal guitar lines; the last chorus of “The View” sprints forward from its restrained bridge like a revved-up toy race car; “A Morning Song” and “Wake Up Next to God” have hooks that are both preceded by a split-second break where the guitars drop out. When Lilitri lands on the other side and speeds on, it’s like a little jolt to the chest.
Lilitri’s dedication to concision and coherence doesn’t come at the expense of subtle, sharp songwriting. On the delirious chorus of “The View,” there are certain phrases that he pronounces more clearly and naturally than others. Maybe your ears only catch the words “My eyes lit up when I saw it” or “...everything I wanted” or “...in love with it.” Ostensibly, it’s a song about a crush guided by impulsive infatuation. But dig into the chorus further, and “The View” is Lilitri’s love song to another person’s apathy—looking for “a way out from everything I wanted,” nihilism disguised as Buddhist philosophy.
But as “The View” kneels over for a slight breather during its bridge, Lilitri starts to feel those old wants again, the pull of playing tiny house shows, the songs that only come on at 4 a.m.: “I’m falling into old habits/I’m stepping over the cracks again.” A few minutes later on the title track, he yells, “I hate these songs I sing, this empty drink, do I even give a fuck?” over a glam-rock strut. Otherwise, he’s “making progress in microscopic strides,” “watching optimists drink half-empty cups,” hating how much he misses the one he loves, weighed down by warm memories, dipping only one foot into the lake, each a carefully balanced binary proving either side can only get a temporary upper hand in a never-ending battle.
Similar to Sparklehorse’s Good Morning Spider, Liltiri makes a commitment to becoming a happier man only after emerging from a sea of static on “One Sick Plan.” It’s a complete outlier on a record produced to a glimmering, late-summer brilliance by Mike Sapone, sounding like a demo cassette fished out of a flooded basement. The lyrics read like a directive he wrote to himself at a much younger age, anticipating the self-doubt and cynicism that can creep in when outside validation is scarce. “I see my demise/I feel it coming/I got one sick plan to save me from it,” he sings over harshly strummed, no-fi acoustics, most likely sick in the Long Island skate-kid sense of the word. It’s also the most vulnerable and dewy-eyed love song he’s written under the Oso Oso name: “Don’t stop chasing what you want...I need heaven, I need you/I need your perfect point of you.”
Lilitri repeatedly circles back to the metaphor of a “narrowing road” on Basking in the Glow, one frequently used in 12-step recovery to describe the way people are less likely to swerve towards temptation with time. “So long, hollowed, narrowing road/I think I’m turning back, it’s the only way I know,” is a frightening thing for Lilitri to admit, but “The View” musters every fiber of its being to propel itself towards “Impossible Game”’s brief and beautiful moment of zen -  “I got a glimpse of this feeling, I’m trying to stay in that lane,” Lilitri shouts, teeth gritted, clutching the steering wheel, but committed to moving ever forward towards the light, even if it’s one microscopic stride at a time.