The debut from the downtempo trip-hop duo is how it’s done. Its nuanced production and smoky mood deliver a completely stylish result.

a.s.o.

Given the tossed-off origins of the term “trip-hop”—“hip-hop in a flotation tank,” Mixmag’s Andy Pemberton called it in the 1994 article where he coined the term; “mood muzak for the blunted ’n’ paranoid,” Melody Maker’s Simon Reynolds offered a few months later—the animating idea has proven remarkably resilient. Take a boom-bap beat, paint on a dusky bassline or pitched-down sample, drape it all in echo, turn down the dimmer switch. Usually—not always, but much of the time—there’ll be a singer involved, typically a woman. Sometimes it’s a voice that sounds like lust incarnate; sometimes like your own thoughts tossing beneath a weighted blanket of the heaviest doubt.
In the past three decades, trip-hop has soundtracked innumerable make-out sessions, melted into the wallpaper of countless fast-fashion dressing rooms, produced some indisputable classics, even minted a superstar or two. The fact that it’s never really gone away also means that it’s never had a proper revival. But there have been stirrings of late, as ’90s electronic styles like trance and drum’n’bass have re-entered the lexicon. The debut album from a.s.o. feels like trip-hop’s purest expression in years.
The duo’s members—singer Alia Seror-O’Neill, aka Alias Error, and producer Lewie Day, aka Tornado Wallace, both Australians based in Berlin—initially connected over a mutual love of Kylie Minogue and Madonna, yet their music skews much darker than those influences. It’s darker even than, say, Avalon Emerson’s debut album or CFCF’s Memoryland, two recent forays into electronic pop inspired by a similar assemblage of ’90s touchstones. As Tornado Wallace, Day is typically known for a tropical, laid-back sound; in a.s.o., he’s kept the tempos slow but burned off all the Balearic influence, leaving just skeletal drums wreathed in smoke. Spy-movie guitars add noir shading; Middle Eastern scales snake around the edges; acid synths take tentative swipes in the shadows.
In keeping with its influences—Portishead’s Dummy, Massive Attack’s Protection, Tricky’s Maxinquaye—the mood is sullen and brooding. In “My Baby’s Got It Out for Me,” the bassline scuffs against the root note while flashes of dub siren and doppler-effected synths suggest teeming city streets. But a.s.o. aren’t averse to the occasional glint of brightness. The keys of the opening “Go On” are supple and satiny, swollen with tone, and despite the downcast vibe, the occasional major-key harmony occasionally reveals itself like a half-hidden grin.
Day’s uncommonly subtle productions elevate a.s.o.’s music over most other trip-hop revivalists, but Seror-O’Neill is the group’s true life force. She’s not a showy singer; she often favors a soft, breathy tone, and she sees no need to sing three notes when two will do. But she’s sneakily versatile. She can do dreamy, desiring, and wounded; she’s got the ease of Martina Topley-Bird, the sweetness of Elizabeth Fraser, and the airiness of Julee Cruise. Occasionally, she even offers a hint of Lana Del Rey’s sullen poise. In “Rain Down,” she sticks to the midrange, infusing a taut melodic line with bitterness before leaping up a register and drifting blissfully over a curiously curlicued chorus.
Seror-O’Neill’s voice often functions as pure texture, as in the gossamer ribbons of “Falling Under,” a modish breakbeat track that brings to mind cameras panning across gleaming architectural surfaces at night. (Michael Mann would love a.s.o.’s music.) But she’s a canny songwriter, too. In “Love in the Darkness,” she sketches out a doomed affair—perhaps one that lasted no longer than the song itself—in three koan-like verses arranged around a hidden chorus. For all the knowingness of the duo’s references, there’s nothing ironic about it—it’s just a song for dancing slow and feeling the heat of another person’s skin against yours.
Very occasionally, a.s.o.’s fondness for their influences leads them toward pastiche: The Rhodes keys of “Thinking” and “Cold Feeling” are straight out of Air’s Moon Safari; the bluesy soloing on the latter might as well be a MIDI file from “La Femme d’argent.” But there’s a birdwatcher’s pleasure to be found in spotting many of their sounds, like the twangy guitar and snare rolls inspired by Dummy, or the Fleetwood Mac guitar and drums of “Love in the Darkness,” the album’s most unexpectedly melodic song, and one of its highlights.
For the most part, the self-awareness of their choices helps make a.s.o. so stylish, like a well-curated fashion editorial. Stylishness sometimes gets a bad name; it’s assumed to emphasize surface over depth. But surfaces can be wonderful things—smooth, tactile, inviting. a.s.o. have turned their homage into something like a three-dimensional sculpture of alluring contours and vivid textures, magnetic to the touch. For the retro-sympathetic, it’s an irresistible place to linger.


Alessia Cara's debut album improbably features her debut EP in its entirety. It also does not feature a lot of great songs, despite her truly arresting voice. But the seeds are there for the future if she (or her label) let her rawer instincts breathe.

Know It All

Alessia Cara has become a star very quickly. Her coming out party, which came in the form of the loner anthem “Here,” exposed a receptive world to a soulful R&B sound. Cara’s lament about a less-than-enjoyable party made her a poster child for Introvert Nation at a time when shyness—thanks to writers like Susan Cain and various digital media outlets — has been recast as an identity unto itself.
Def Jam, Cara’s label, soon released more of her songs, several of them country-tinged pop that recall artists like Taylor Swift and Haim. In Cara’s case, that sound tends to go hand in hand with bland, vaguely “rebellious” lyrics. In the pop songs on her Four Pink Walls EP—including the potential megahits “Seventeen” and “I’m Yours”—Cara’s appealing personality is sometimes hard to unearth from under the layers of pop gloss that have been poured on top of her.
But the EP seems to have been what the label was looking for, at least as evidenced by the fact that its five songs have been transposed onto the front of Cara’s debut album, Know-It-All, in the same order, with very few changes made. The speed at which Cara is being groomed and prompted to put out new releases feels distasteful if sadly not unfamiliar, something like an AAU prospect being coaxed to go pro before he’s entirely ready.
In many ways, though, Cara is ready. Her winning personality shines in recent public appearances (watch her slay “Here” on “Late Night on Seth Meyers”), and her voice, with its warmth and character, can transform a so-so song into something far more compelling. She’s able to mine an otherwise simple ballad like “Stone,” from the second half of Know-It-All, as if it were a rich emotional deposit, bringing pathos even to a bland line like, “I think I think too much.”
Though “Stone” is the only song that explicitly features Sebastian Kole, he contributed plenty as one of the album’s producers and a co-writer. Kole, who has been in the factory songwriting system for a little while now also makes his own music. Two things jump out at a first-time listener: his gorgeous voice and painful earnestness. That helps explain why he’s helped construct such compelling vocal showcases for Cara, but also why her punchiness has been overtaken by something more cuddly. (“Wild Things,” which transforms Cara’s grousing into a lame children’s book reference is the most obvious example.)
A Times profile of Cara from May reveals something of Kole’s approach. As a songwriting exercise, he compelled Cara to write confessionals as if they were meant for no one but her — and then email them to him. The sound of those emails may well be reflected in the soppy ballad “Stars.” “I need you, baby I need to, let down my guard, and give you my scars/ Open up my heart and we could be stars,” she sings. It’s easy to see how this form of diaristic writing could be confused with the honesty that made “Here” such a winner. But writing from the heart does not automatically imbue lyrics with depth.
Never is it more apparent that the factory approach is not allowing Cara to fulfill her potential than on “Scars To Your Beautiful.” The first verse is so arresting that I’m tempted to just quote it in full. It’s about a woman who deeply wishes to be beautiful and feels that she isn’t. The verse ends on a showstopping, deeply upsetting line: “She tries to cover up her pain, and cut her woes away/ Cause covergirls don’t cry after their face is made." It is frustrating, though sadly inevitable given Know-It-All’s tendencies, that the chorus then reverts to uplifting pablum. The hook forces itself not only to redeem the devastation of the verse, but to do so cloyingly, without any kind of subtlety or empathy for the subject it rendered so well.
The industry has always wanted its pop stars to be all things to all people, and it’s easier to be kind and inspiring than it is to write songs that can be difficult to hear. But generality is the enemy of good songwriting, which, on some level, Cara clearly knows. She urged her label to release “Here” as a debut single and thankfully they listened. As she gets older, her voice should get stronger, on her own songs, and in fighting to get the right ones made.


Jack and Meg White's first two raucous platters are given the reissue treatment.

The White Stripes: The White Stripes/De Stijl

The White Stripes/De Stijl

Hell yeah, hot freaks. Jack and Meg White's first two raucous platters are coming back at you in the biggest redistribution by a major label of still-available albums by fake-sibling bands beginning with the letter W since Elektra fancified Gene and Dean Ween's early catalog! For you efficient readers resistant to some patented Pitchfork scaffolding because you spent the night deciding which Gargamel quote to use in your chat profile, here's the quick review: once upon a time, the White Stripes were the half-mortal, half-Godzilla missionaries sent to lead rock to its promised land, and their rekkerds measured up to the hype. These albums contained thunderous, honky-soulful, lacerating pop at various stages of evolution. De Stijl is better, but only by noses. The end! Anyone still Stripe-hungry, read on:
You probably weren't given the choice of not admiring this fine pair. Their charm is so bullying that their fans have become like hog-tied soldiers in the days of impressment, and their sudden crossover ubiquity threatens to vault them into a saturation-backlash a la the Spice Girls. This week's highlights:
BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA: An undergrad Design major turns in her final project-- a giant, circular red-and-white UPC symbol, inspired by the White Stripes' peppermint motif.
SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA: Two nervy fellas with hopes of being Jerry Bruckheimer's production assistants become the it-boys of their apartment building's pool when they pump White Blood Cells; their Aiwa boombox's shuffle feature begins fortuitously with "Fell In Love with a Girl."
CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA: A group of conscientious dropouts walking home from a coffeehouse drumming circle are hooted at by some ballcapping Thads in a Pathfinder. One of the dropouts yells a retort. The Thads park, exit, and dry-gulch one of the group's males, who will require stitches. Blasting from the Pathfinder the whole time: the Stripes' "Expecting."
ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO: Taking his cue from a canny jukebox selection of the treacly "We're Going to Be Friends," a well-meaning mouth-breather out on the town seduces a tat-dappled Zippo-grrl with his knowledge of the White Stripes. When he goes to pee and service his coifed mane, he hears the kitchen staff jamming on "I Think I Smell a Rat."
MTV: Yep.
GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA: After the forced closure of her aquarium store, a girl gets high and goes to a 24-hour Wal-Mart with a permanent marker. Her plans to vandalize the pet department are thwarted by a potty-mouthed fifteen-year-old who runs a shopping cart over her left foot, dismantling her flip-flop and her pinky toe. The cart's sole contents: a copy of Is This It and a notepad listing the Strokes and the White Stripes, with the Strokes crossed out.
WASHINGTON, D.C.: Packed venue Black Cat becomes a hub of debate when a guy, sporting a stocking cap despite the broil, claims that every incarnation of the garage-blues revival is better than the Stripes. A straight-edge female eventually punctures his facade by tricking him into praising a nonexistent Detroit Cobras album.
SOY-BASED AIRWAVES: National Public Radio does a feature bit on the White Stripes. The band's shtick gets more airtime than their music. Fans are reportedly color-coordinating their outfits at Stripes shows, further shearing the curtain between indie rockers and Delta Chi Omegas at homecoming. 'Brother' Jack righteously plugs the blues, and 'sister' Meg joins him in a shout-out to Mom.
EAU CLAIRE, WISCONSIN: General Mills test-markets White Stripes cereal. Participants report a rise in general sexiness; the swagger index quadruples. People greet each other with cool, quick nods, slightly puckering their lips. Mail carriers make devil-horn hand-gestures to suggest that tailgaters pass.
See, Ryan Pitchfork makes us wear these teal beepers 24-7, even if we're going to a waterslide park. I was working at Cinnabon at the mall last week, and he beeped me, and I called him back and he said he wanted to hear me eating a Cinnabun while I talked to him. I reminded him I'm hypoglycemic; he reminded me that he was the boss. He promised me free Barfsurfer and Hymenella promos. I ate for him, and then he said, "Let's review the old Stripes records that Sympathy never sent us." And I said, "What's the point? Nothing new can be said about the Stripes." And he said, "Just compare and contrast, like in high school. Reinforce their greatness. And leave yourself out of the review this time; you're like an aborted fetus trying to win your parents' love. Richard-San doesn't pull that needy shit." Then he asked if there was a Gingiss Formalwear at my mall, because he wanted to hear sequins crumpling next time we talked. "Get gussied up," he said, and I said, "Ai'ight," and he said, "Audi 5000." Cinnabon fired me, but I was tight with this skeezer at Successories, so we just switched aprons.
I'm delaying actually confronting these records because they don't conjure a hunched-before-a-besotted-Compaq vibe. This band's rock is so imposing that you want to be in some kind of motion to describe it. You shouldn't wuss around it, or intellectualize to it. You'll headbang involuntarily. You've got to hear the Stripes' albums; if I explain them to you, you'll picture a novelty band that peaks on a public access talent show. But Jack White's in that league with Isaac Brock; some weird, earnest quantity about their best work (realness, maybe?) deflates irony-dependent artholes, pointing out how lodestone-free our hands and pockets remain. You don't want to be the lame-ass clicking a Microsoft mouse in the presence of this adrenal crunch.
Witnessing White Blood Cells and then De Stijl and then the self-titled debut is similar to watching the undeveloping photograph that begins the film Memento's retrograde arc. The listener can hear how the band leapfrogged to greatness with each release.
The first adjustment that De Stijl requires is that you get used to the guitar not taking up as much awesome space as it does on White Blood Cells. And in places, the first-day-with-the-new-rhythm drums are "Hotel Yorba" sloppy, infinitesimally behind. And Jack sounds nasal every now and then. That said, these strong songs hold their own against Cells, as Jack scrapes the strings here and lets them shriek there-- and when she's on, Meg's channeling of Little Red Riding Bonham leaves potholes. People pounce on the Stripes' Zep-a-billy, but damn, you've got to respect a band that, while covering Son House's "Death Letter," compresses all the atmosphere of stadium dinosaurs into a streetcorner act. No mere duo's made this much noise since Eric B and Rakim.
The acoustic sweep of "I'm Bound to Pack It Up" manages to homage the Who, Floyd, the Kinks and Zep, not to mention its lofty adherence to the rambler-wanderer tradition. The crisp "Apple Blossom" could be a Revolver outtake. The Stripes' blues obsession is more evident here than on Cells; in addition to the dedication to Blind Willie McTell, songs 7-9 feature some mellow, mellow slide leads, and "Hello Operator" rips into a harp solo. These gestures are performed with the same heedful regard as the Stones' similar nods-- a hymnic tone prevents them from oozing into blues-aping caricatures, or the diluted Caucasian appropriations that clog rock history. The wailing vox of "Let's Build a Home" suggest AC/DC's Bon Scott, another blues-influenced metal god whose act was great when it stuck to making brassy rock about the hollowing universals of fumbled desire and spiritual homelessness. You can barely buy the heartbreak because it's delivered so cockily.
I've alluded to a lot of old-school bands (whoops-- left out Sabbath), but I contend that De Stijl is progressively derivative, as opposed to, say, the Mooney Suzuki, who should be paying royalties to a handful of bands, some as recent as Mudhoney. The Stripes' oddly conventional subjects (domesticity, marriage, optimism) distinguish them, and they have heartiness of style to spare. The disc's packaging juxtaposes the band's Willy Wonka fetish with museum pomp; the liner notes contain a manifesto on simplicity, and God comes first on a list of "those who helped in the making of this record." Opener "You're Pretty Good Looking" best combines the band's skills, and hints at Cells' heavy gleam. This song flexes serious pop muscle, and contains the non-sequitur and surrealist touches that give Cells its mystic, mythic penumbra (backs are broken, thoughts are stolen, the year 2525 looms). Only Cells' guitar ballast keeps the legitimately exciting De Stijl in check; the skeleton of the Stripes' breakthrough was clearly already intact.
The debut is, predictably, an altogether more raw affair, with not enough variations on the theme. Meg's balancing presence is the only thing saving the album from induction in the saloon-door-violating big-dick guitarchives. The album's Detroitness is transparent, and its blues aren't nearly as reconciled with its punk. Some of the staccato riffs seem to have speech impediments. No Beatles ghost triggers the Ouija board. A slightly distorted Jack yelps and squeals and sounds tinny by about the twelfth cut, a far cry from the visceral prophecy and pronunciamento of Cells "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground."
The record is saucy, but ultimately not as arresting as the others, even though the arrangements are just as winningly unadorned. Well, except for the tunes where Meg's approaching army tank-tread drums are reverbed, as if the band is masking their spare sound the way straight-to-video horror movies attempt to camouflage their low production values. "Sucker Drips" is uncharacteristically thin, and the sassy plod of "Astro" dates back to the, uh, (cough) Cramps. The cover of Dylan's "One More Cup of Coffee" displays excellent taste and replaces the original's violins (and Emmylou Harris) with some dope organ, but the tempo-- and Jack's half-tribute sinus inflection-- bring the party down.
Colossal offerings abound, though: the three chords that constitute "Little People" embody the sound of rock insisting on its own supremacy. The ode to alienation "When I Hear My Name" is rife with blistering "mmmms" and "whoah-ohh-ohh-ohhs." A different Blind Willie, this one a Johnson, gets an uncredited updating on "Cannon," a rousing rendition of the apocalyptic "John the Revelator." Robert Plant's quivering androgyny gets a thorough reworking on the bratty, double-timing "Screwdriver." Every Brit band who's ever blown an amp before you were born gets amalgamized on "Jimmy the Exploder." And ass is simply kicked by the falsetto twists and Pepsi-bottle percussion breakdowns of "Broken Bricks."
The debut rocks in turbo-increments, but its statement is fussy and loping. A standoffish, reclusive element (manifesting itself in Jack's scream of "don't wanna be social") is more disagreeable and difficult than the entirety of the other, more accommodating records to follow. The puerile veneer that has driven some to judge the Stripes as stunted in their tweens is yet to emerge, although many fans in their thirties have voiced gratitude for a band that can be counted on to help them forget that they have kids to beat and dishes to break.
This scrappy band's not dumb and it ain't a fluke-- the Stripes could do their rock 'n' roll homework in their sleep. They linked underground noise to American roots, validating it at long last! Thank fate that the Stripes are finally making the indie rock lobby less effing stuffy, after all those tweedy, post-Tortoise Ph.D'd doops cramped everybody's style! I want somebody to play their guitar like the four horsemen just unplugged all the teleprompters! Who else could pull off the two-person thing? (Not Swearing At Motorists.) The uniform thing? (Not The Make-Up.) The candy? (Not Sammy.)
Feel no shame in climbing aboard the Stripes' double-decker fanwagon. Just act like you're getting one of these albums for a less-hip friend, or purchase something really obscure along with it, like a Vocokesh or When People Were Shorter and Lived Near the Water album. Hooray for civilization, I didn't talk covetously about Meg's bod! We don't need another hero! Uncross your eyes! There's gravel in the bubblegum! This ain't juvenilia, bitch, it's rawk!


On singer-songwriter Caroline Sallee’s latest EP, everything is transitory—especially life itself.

Ohio River EP

Since she began recording as Caroline Says, a sense of displacement has persisted in Caroline Sallee’s music—a looming apprehension that nowhere will feel like home. Her debut 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong recounted getting lost on the West Coast, while last year’s lovely No Fool Like an Old Fool mourned her dwindling relationship with her hometown. The namesake waterway of Sallee’s new Ohio River EP touches neither her native Alabama nor her current home base in Texas, but geographic location isn’t important here. Everything is transitory, Sallee seems to say, especially life itself.
On Ohio River, Sallee’s top concerns are mortality and time’s tendency to slip away. “I was so young when I left town/But then again, I never felt that young anyhow,” she muses on dreamy opener “Falling Knife.” Death is coming, she reminds us, and it’s coming soon. When she sighs, “One day your body’s in the ground and your soul is in the sky and it don’t take long,” her words sound more like an affirmation than a warning. The narrator of “Ohio River” revisits the small town where they grew up and realizes that they’ve become an entirely different person—a common theme for Sallee. The memories are fond yet pained as the song’s characters turn their gaze to the lapping river. How does one cope when everything changes?
Expanding the electronic and ambient influences introduced on No Fool, Ohio River’s hazy, unassuming dream-pop sounds ever so slightly out of reach. Sallee continues to namecheck classic influences: Swinging breakup tune “Smoke and Mirrors” crosses Pixies with Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart,” while the hypnotic “Year of the Cicada” is indebted to composer John Barry’s vintage James Bond scores. “Falling Knife,” the EP’s strongest point, soars with an electric guitar line and swelling synths inspired by David Bowie’s “Heroes” (co-written by Brian Eno). Sallee’s sound is foggier and more reserved, but “Falling Knife” offers a similar sense of reverie.
“Everything I knew is gone now/But somehow nothing feels brand new,” Sallee murmurs on “Ohio River.” It’s a fitting thesis for the EP, which feels more like a postscript to No Fool than a separate venture. If that album was a starting point, then Ohio River lies somewhere along the journey to Sallee’s next destination.


Refusing to be hemmed in by quarantine, the veteran improvisers took the unusual path of recording separately: drums first, then overdubbed guitars. The results are genuinely life-affirming.

Chris Corsano / Bill Orcutt: Made Out of Sound

Made Out of Sound

Bill Orcutt spent the 1990s as a member of the experimental hardcore trio Harry Pussy, but since returning to music in 2009, he has mostly performed solo. His playing is a fountain of ideas; whether he’s on acoustic or electric, he generates enough notes to sound like an entire band. But something special happens when he partners with veteran improvising drummer Chris Corsano. Their last LP, 2018’s Brace Up!, featured 12 tracks that zipped by in 33 minutes, and each abrasive jam had its own character. Sometimes it came over as a noise-music spin on primal rock’n’roll—James “Blood” Ulmer covering the Ventures, say—and sometimes it veered into soundcape territory. You could hear Orcutt singing and moaning along as they bashed out the tunes in the room, capturing moments when his mouth realized where the music was going next before his fingers did. Its energy and playfulness had you wishing for another collaboration, and soon.
With Made Out of Sound, Orcutt and Corsano return with a slightly different kind of record. They recorded the album in 2020 during the pandemic, so instead of raising a holy racket together in one space, they played separately. Corsano cut his drum parts on his own and then sent them to Orcutt, who improvised while listening to what Corsano had laid down. In notes with the release, Ocrutt says, “I was watching the waveforms as I was recording, so I could see when a crescendo was coming or when to bring it down.” Orcutt overdubbed an additional guitar, relegating one to some notion of “rhythm” and another “lead,” though what you hear doesn’t match any conventional idea of that distinction.
So Made Out of Sound is a hybrid piece—improvised, but with advance warning of where the music is going, which brings an element of composition. And it turns out that this combination of approaches makes for some gorgeously life-affirming music. These pieces are certainly prettier and less aggressive than those on Brace Up!, and that’s mostly up to Orcutt. During more relaxed moments, they bring to mind the spindly probing of the Tren Brothers, the Dirty Three side project comprising guitarist Mick Turner and drummer Jim White. Corsano’s free playing seems at all times to hover in the space between a steady beat, an explosive roll, an exploratory warm-up, and an ecstatic solo; he hits his kit with the same pace and force as their last outing, but here it’s a touch less pugnacious, perhaps owing to the room he recorded in. And Orcutt’s guitars are less cutting and sharp, with a warmer tone that rings and clangs while notes hang in the air, as if we are hearing a recording of a giant wind chime left outside during a hurricane.
Together, they make a rare kind of racket—music where the precise form is hard to apprehend while the obvious beauty comes pouring through. On “Some Tennessee Jar,” Corsano pays particular attention to cymbals, his hands falling on the metal in dense waves, as Orcutt plays a sustained repeating figure on one guitar while the other climbs up and down the neck to outline a melody that is exuberant yet shaded with a darker atonality. On “Thirteen Ways of Looking,” Orcutt creates a withering mass of bent notes, sometimes lurching higher for a single piercing tone, while his partner moves from dense pounding to light caresses on cymbals. And on “Man Carrying Thing,” Orcutt’s dual guitars solo furiously, either fusing into a single line or clashing dissonantly, while Corsano makes his snare and toms sound like a brick of fireworks exploding.
It’s a joyful noise. This is one of the more uplifting records of experimental music in recent memory. There’s something about how Orcutt and Corsano push each other that leads to work that pulses with the life force—these pieces bring to mind sunlight hitting a maple leaf, cells dividing under a microscope, a deep thirst quenched. Along with his 2019 solo album Odds Against Tomorrow, Made Out of Sound makes an excellent introduction to the gorgeous and challenging work of Orcutt’s second act.

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Music for yoga may be an ambient cliche, but the Los Angeles synthesizer musician largely avoids new-age pitfalls on this album of unabashedly functional background music.

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: Tides: Music for Meditation and Yoga

Tides: Music for Meditation and Yoga

To make beautiful music to chill out to is a simple concept. But those simple things can prove the most beguiling. A quick scan of ambient music in the 2010s reveals a cornucopia of immersive headtrips, icy expanses, sorrowful collages, high-concept inversions, and no small amount of kosmische synths, yet an album of light-as-a-feather music for yoga still scans as a bit gauche. One imagines digital djembes, sappy flutes, and seashore cover art staring you down from the CD rack at a local health-food co-op. New age’s earnestness was both its greatest asset and its Achilles’ heel, spurring artists to radical spiritual goals while often blinding them to their own corniness. But on Tides: Music for Meditation and Yoga, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith keeps things in check. Commissioned in 2013 by her mother as background music for her yoga practice, the album elegantly sketches nine pieces with a minimum of means—just Smith’s Buchla synthesizer and a few field recordings. This is functional music, and as with the best functional music it finds freedom in getting out of its own way.
Tides is lean. It’s a testament to its economy that the ascending melodic noodle central to the opening track feels grandiose after a few spins of the LP. True to its name, Tides slowly ebbs and flows, moving with a gradual deliberateness that has nothing to do with tension and release. Instead you wade into it, floating on its bobbing waves until you’re ready to come out. The tracks are just distinct enough to keep monotony at bay, but cohesive enough that you might not catch when one ends and the next begins. Put it on loop and go about your day and you’d be hard pressed to notice when you were in the fourth, fifth, or eighth rotation.
That said, Smith really hits her stride as the album develops. “Tides I” may serve a mood-setting purpose, but it hews a little too close to children’s music. Its buoyancy grates every so slightly, telegraphing serenity with perhaps too much eagerness. But soon enough, the music stretches out, melting into something more sublime. “Tides IV” gently slows time with a warbly melody and warm whooshes of static, while “Tides V” bathes in lush, consonant drones.
This wind-down, from the bustle of the day into the still center of a deep stretch, casts a spell regardless of context, but true to its nature it works best when played in the background. When listened to without distraction, the album felt somehow lacking—I kept searching for a foreground that never appears. But when you put it on and forget about it, it can transform a room. In this sense, Tides succeeds as ambient music in its purest form.
I’m often struck by a suffocating optimism that keeps cropping up in modern pop. In cafes, advertisements, and seemingly anywhere millennials congregate, I hear choruses of wordless whoa whoa whoa-ing—a plague of ambitions and superlatives. At moments, Tides edges in this blandly pastel direction, nudging its round synth tones into treacly affirmations. But at its best, it truly does soothe. Often, the purely pleasurable gets a bad rap in music. As critical listeners, we may feel uneasy with the inviting, the humorous, or the purely fun. Darkness, ambiguity, and innovation are wonderful, but do we need them while doing yoga? Tides requires no justification for its existence beyond its own warmth. Take it or leave it, but as its final track dissolves into three minutes of bird calls and chimes, I doubt you won’t feel better than when you put it on.


Loud, playful, and full of smoldering angst, the hyperpop rapper’s new album feels emblematic of the moods and textures that this scene aspires to capture.

COA

At the core of “likewise,” a standout off ericdoa’s thrilling new album COA, is a massive, messy breakup made messier by stray heart eyes and the tease of celebrity. Singing with a scummy scowl, ericdoa channels all the hubris churning inside him, careening between late-night drives and money dances, bloodshot eyes and wads of cash on the nightstand. It’s what I imagine having your world shattered as an almost-famous teenager feels like.
That’s the energy throughout COA, which vaults ericdoa into an unmissable presence in the glitchy, amorphous wave of online rap that Spotify curators want to call hyperpop. Loud, playful, and full of smoldering angst, it feels emblematic of the moods and textures that this scene aspires to capture.
Then again, ericdoa himself is representative of what a hefty chunk of this crowd looks and sounds like: He’s 18 years old, deeply online, a disciple of Lil Uzi Vert, Bladee, and Lil Peep, and he lives in Georgia by way of Connecticut. His snarl sounds transplanted from a Hot Topic in 2005. In “movinlikeazombie,” one of his most popular songs to date, his bit-crushed alter ego Dante Red is drunkenly stumbling down store aisles, holding $3,000.
That sort of absurd, imagistic writing isn’t entirely lost on COA—Dante makes a return on the delirious “do or die (interlude)”—but it takes a backseat. The record is instead caked with thick slices of melodrama, like the cavernous “self sabotage,” where ericdoa sings of screaming from rooftops about an ex he’s not over yet. Nearly every song on COA is about an ex that he’s not over yet: an ex pulling him in too close (“deep end”), an ex who tried calling him eight times (“2008”), an ex that texted him at 2 p.m. asking if he’s up yet (“thingsudo2me”). This surprisingly works in service of the record, rendering it a brisk, 23-minute gulp of teenage angst.
The production, too, feeds into that feeling. COA is constantly twitching, lurching, finding new ways to shape and interact with ericdoa’s voice, which is tuned in different ways, layered, even chopped into tiny pieces. These producers—chief among them glasear and kimj, who contribute to eight of the 11 tracks—share the frantic mindset that no element of the beat is safe after ten seconds. The drums switch up a half dozen times on “mistake,” touching on EDM, drum-and-bass and arena-sized rock. “loose ties” fully unravels from ericdoa’s towering chorus into a soft, synthetic bed for Grandma’s verse.
It’s an unhinged, indulgent record that can teeter on being overwhelming. ericdoa gets lost in the noise on “ivy,” where his verse is drowned out by the blaring drums. The opposite isn’t exactly appealing, either. The closing track, “plea,” is a sappy, cheap-sounding acoustic ballad clearly meant to function as some sort of grand turn or unveiling. But the bulk of this album operates in a sharp, controlled chaos that ericdoa thrives within. For a hyperpop scene still finding its footing (and itself) COA may prove to be a foundational work.

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Reviving Untold’s Hemlock label from a four-year slumber, the UK producer returns with an EP of stripped-down basement tracks bridging dubstep’s early years with club music’s future.

On Tilt EP

When poker players are on tilt it’s generally not a good thing. Their decisions are clouded by emotion; they make reckless plays, misjudge their luck, and tend, eventually, to spiral out. But it can be thrilling, in the most visceral, addictive way imaginable. There aren’t many analogues between casinos and nightclubs (not the good ones, anyway), but that sense of effervescent tension would be one. It’s also a decent frame through which to appreciate Beneath’s brand of dance music: Typified by the kind of moody, tense energy that’s best broken by either tears or laughter.
Beneath, real name Ben Walker, has quietly wielded pretty enormous influence on UK club music over the past 10 years or so. In the early 2010s he offered a darker, denser take on something resembling UK funky, cutting a singular groove with his own No Symbols white-label imprint. The label later morphed into a series of DIY nights in South London. (Walker moved to the capital from his hometown of Stoke-on-Trent, via Sheffield, both former industrial towns in the north of England.) These were gatherings infused with the energy and creative optimism of the city’s early dubstep parties, and later birthed a run of cassette releases, sharing set recordings from the nights. But amid all this, the previously steady clip of Beneath’s own musical output became sparser. On Tilt is his first solo release since a two-track 12" for Blackest Ever Black offshoot A14 back in 2018. Its arrival is timely, not only rousing Hemlock Recordings—the post-dubstep label that unleashed the likes of James Blake and Joy Orbison in the late noughties—from a four-year slumber, but landing after a year in which the UK’s shuttered clubs have been sanitized by nostalgic rose-tints and the language of parliamentary petitions. On Tilt’s dense array of basement club tracks provides a reminder that, sometimes, joy is found in the grit of things, and in the nervy, clammy-handed moments that jostle with unblemished euphoric bursts.
“Bone Hum,” with its side-winding flute-synth melody over staccato drums, shows off Beneath’s knack for the sort of melody that can just as easily soundtrack the early hours of the club as the scenes six hours later when sweat is pouring down the walls. He dips a toe into acid waters on “Lesser Circulation” to enchanting effect, drawing a direct line between the bright-eyed days of UK hardcore and his own inkier iterations on drum-heavy dance music. On “Shambling,” he pitches down a double reed clarinet (a zamr or mijwiz, most commonly found in the countries of North Africa and the Middle East) and weaves it between bouncy kick drums and reverberating rim shots. It’s a sound that slots neatly into the emergent strains being pushed by the London-based but globally-facing Nervous Horizon label and its founders Wallwork and TSVI—but longtime dubstep fans will undoubtedly hear shades of old Cyrus and Digital Mystikz records in there too.
Beneath manages to toe the delicate line between an obsessive reverence for what’s been and a concerted dedication to what might come next. But there’s never the risk of a chinstroke. Case in point: “Dark Waters” pays homage to the meditative expanses of early dubstep music, revelling in all the reverb-laden detail—but never so much that, in the right circumstances, ravers wouldn’t happily lose their shit to it. Because where’s the fun if you’re not slipping out of control from time to time?

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Holy Ghost!'s first new music in years is a bright, tight, tense mini-epic, solidifying the band as one of the pillars of the mid-'00s disco resurgence.

Crime Cutz

While James Murphy and his cohorts in LCD Soundsystem are busy touring the globe while positioning themselves as voices of a generation that may have partied a little too hard for a little too long, their DFA labelmates Holy Ghost! are engineering a notable return to form with Crime Cutz, their first EP of new material since their 2013 sophomore record, Dynamics. Up until now, Holy Ghost!'s arguable greatest achievement was their debut single, "Hold On," a track brilliant enough to carry the band from its release in 2007 to their debut album four years later. The four sprawling, joyous dance tracks on Crime Cutz finally follow up "Hold On" with something equally substantial. It's a bright, tight, tense mini-epic, solidifying the band as one of the pillars of the mid-'00s disco resurgence.
The EP's titular opener begins with a drudged-out minute of spacey synths before bursting into full-fledged disco: arpeggiated synthesizers, falsettos, super-dry guitar riffs, an angelic choir of diva vocals, and a hands-to-the-heavens chorus of "You lift me up and up! Up and off the floor!" Many of these elements could be regarded as pure retro revivalism, but Holy Ghost!'s touch is light enough to make the song transcend its obvious crib notes.
Crime Cutz doesn't draw only from disco, however. There's a distinct '80s-pop aura permeating the record, courtesy of over-the-top pop arrangements and frontman Alex Frankel's earnest blue-eyed R&B vocal style. "Stereotype" recalls old-school dancefloor staples from the likes of Colonel Abrams, Rockwell, and even Jermaine Stewart, gems from the post-Thriller R&B boom that produced countless hits. Frankel sings with the uninhibited glee of someone karaoke-ing "P.Y.T." at a high school house party circa 1984. "I know I'm a stereotype," he croons, "don't be so critical […] Let go." You'd expect nothing but seriousness from a band that is this on top of their history, but they understand that half of what makes this type of music fun is its abandon.
Another highlight, "Compass Point," adds another instrumental layer with a welcome and  unexpected surge of horns near the end. If anything, Crime Cutz's weakness lies in its lack of diversity—you spend a lot of the record hoping for something to take them even further over the edge, but they continue to pull back until the very end. "Footsteps," the record's closer, is the only track that slightly misses the mark, leaning a little too heavily on all the touchstones mentioned above. It barely touches the overall effect of Crime Cutz, though, and if this EP is indeed a precursor to a new full length,we have reason to be excited.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a pure  and quiet record from 2002, when the Dixie Chicks were the most righteous band in country music.

Home

As the summer of 2001 drew to a close, Natalie Maines invited her bandmates—the sisters Martie Maguire and Emily Strayer—to play some bluegrass in her living room in Austin, Texas. They’d been off the road for a few years, and their plan was to hang out, catch up, and remember how good it feels to hear their voices blend in harmony, for no audience but each other. Earlier that year, they’d sued their label for withholding royalties from their first two blockbuster albums. In the years after, they’d find themselves in a righteous battle against the industry, leaving their future as a band uncertain. But for now, they were enjoying the most relaxed, unburdened creative experience of their lives.
It was Maguire on fiddle, Strayer on banjo and dobro, and Maines with a voice like a gut-punch. No amplifiers. No drums. One song Maines suggested they try was Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide,” a classic rock staple that Stevie Nicks wrote at the age of 27. Maines, who had just turned 27 herself, found new resonance in its words after the birth of her first child and she thought she could hear her bandmates’ voices in its bittersweet sunshower of a melody. Also on the setlist were two songs written by the folk artist Patty Griffin. One was about speaking your mind in the face of public dissent; the other was about winding up on your deathbed with a long list of regrets.
They weren’t planning on making an album. And even if they were, because of the lawsuit, they figured they couldn’t release it anyway. As the music started coming together and Maines enlisted her father, behind-the-scenes steel guitar legend Lloyd Maines, to produce the sessions, they brainstormed a couple of strategies. After the surprise success of the bluegrass soundtrack to the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, they thought maybe these songs would be served best in a film. They contemplated going indie. They considered breaking the mold and sharing the music directly on their website for free, a way to thank the loyal audience they’d amassed as a major breakthrough act in the late ’90s.
At the time, their lawsuit with Sony was the biggest controversy the Dixie Chicks had ever faced. But it was far from their first battle. By now, they were used to fighting for everything they wanted. There were problems with their Little Feat-inspired band name: the label didn’t like “Chicks,” other corners were uncomfortable with “Dixie.” At least one sound guy refused to plug in their instruments at a show, assuming them to be mere props. In the studio, there was the man who thought the iconic title track of their 1998 major label debut Wide Open Spaces wasn’t country enough for them to track; and then there were the industry people who thought it was too country and asked for a remix without banjo and fiddle. Their answer, of course, was hell no. They learned quickly their instincts were right.
When their follow-up, Fly, arrived a year later, the Dixie Chicks’ merging of country and pop had been accepted by the mainstream. But their subject matter hadn’t. There was the sex talk in “Sin Wagon.” (“That’s right, I said mattress dancing,” Maines sang, using her southern twang to tug the vowels of each word, like she was making sure the conservatives at country radio heard her correctly.) There was also “Goodbye Earl,” a singalong anthem about murdering an abusive husband without a tinge of regret. It’s their signature song, their unsubtle twist on the genre’s legacy of male-narrated murder ballads about cheating wives and no-good women. To make their stance clearer, they paired the single with an ironic B-side cover of Tammy Wynett’s “Stand by Your Man.” Men with powerful positions at radio stations weren’t crazy about that one either. Maines laughed it off: “We always figured whoever was complaining must be beating their wife.”
As the whirlwind cycle behind Fly calmed down, things got more personal. The band claimed the label was withholding over four million in royalties and tried to terminate their contract. The label countersued. The band sued back. In the end, they re-signed to Sony with a few conditions. They would get their own imprint (Open Wide Records), an increased royalty rate, and, most symbolically, they would effectively banish the men who had signed them and produced their first two records. “We felt like we were fighting a battle for our industry,” Maines explained.
This was all happening in the background as they worked on the pared-down story-songs that would comprise their third album together, Home. But they didn’t let it affect the process; Home became a state of mind, the place where no one could reach them. Recreating the living-room feeling of those early demos, they worked at a studio in Austin, within an hour of all their houses. They decorated it with candles and kept the mood light. “They’d be looking at catalogs of baby clothes and home furnishings,” Lloyd Maines recalled of the sessions. There were no deadlines, no demands. Family members stopped by regularly. “It just seemed like the next phase,” Natalie Maines said. “Just be laid back.”
They recorded tributes and inside jokes, love songs and lullabies. “Little Jack Slade” is an instrumental dedicated to Maines’ newborn son. It’s not just a sign of who the Dixie Chicks were becoming—proudly virtuosic, uninterested in trends, a family operation—but also a nod to where they began. In the late ’80s, the group formed as a quartet featuring Maguire and Strayer, costumed in cowboy hats and fringed jackets, playing bluegrass on street corners for passersby: a markedly old-fashioned vision of country at a time when people like Garth Brooks were starting to take the genre to commercial and theatrical extremes. After the original vocalist and guitarist quit in the mid-’90s, the sisters enlisted Maines, a younger singer who grew up surrounded by country music but gravitated more toward Madonna. She had a similar influence on the group, pushing them toward brighter, wider terrain.
The only song on Home that all three members wrote together is “White Trash Wedding,” an upbeat breather that was inspired by an episode of Jerry Springer. “I shouldn’t be wearing white and you can’t afford no ring,” goes the chorus, which is funny but also telling of the characters they were now interested in. These are songs that pit romantic idealism against blue-collar heartache, that establish American archetypes as settings for hard lessons and disappointment. “It was a broken dream right from the start/Bless their tortured, tangled hearts,” Maines sings at one point about a doomed couple miles from the sweeping romance of hits like “Cowboy Take Me Away.” The story in the opening track, “Long Time Gone,” takes the optimism of “Wide Open Spaces” to its logical conclusion; the narrator winds up embittered but at peace back in his hometown, where big dreams go to die and the country music on the radio sucks.
In the last verse of that song, Maines aligns herself with outlaw heroes like Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash as opposed to the genre’s more modern torchbearers. It’s a stance she would echo when she found herself in a feud with the country jock Toby Keith, of all people, and his awful, xenophobic “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American).” Maines hated the song: “It’s ignorant,” she said, “And it makes country music sound ignorant.” Keith, who had somehow positioned it as a tribute to his late father, took her criticism personally, calling her a “commie heathen” and projecting a photoshopped image of her with Saddam Hussein at his concerts. He was not alone in this sentiment. At the 2003 CMAs, where Maines performed in a shirt that read “F.U.T.K.,” the audience booed when the Dixie Chicks’ name was spoken.
“This is our version of a good patriotic song,” she would say in concert while introducing “More Love,” a ballad on Home’s meditative second half. With a rocking-chair tempo and an insistence on empathy above all else, it’s a song about the tension between two people, only zooming out in its closing verse to address a country spiraling toward extremism. It’s sequenced on the record right before “I Believe in Love,” which the group first presented at a televised benefit concert in the weeks after 9/11. Their performance was one of the quietest of the night, as they sang about silence, solitude, and truth, huddled together, surrounded by candles. You can watch their performance and see the roots of the record they would make.
The sound is wistful and hushed, with a deeper focus on harmony. But the words remain pivotal, and the vision is strangely prescient. The two songs written by Patty Griffin, one of the band’s formative influences, serve as the heart of the album. In “Truth No. 2,” Maines belts in her powerful soprano how “you don’t like the sound of the truth coming from my mouth.” Without the direct narrative of their previous anthems, they mediate instead on the moral of these stories. Maines would become well-known for making enemies by speaking her mind; “Truth No. 2” would become the centerpiece of their songbook,
The other Griffin composition, “Top of the World,” finds Maines narrating from a haze between life and death, lamenting “a whole lot of singing that’s never gonna be heard.” The arrangement is the album’s most elaborate. Its orchestral swell is punctuated with dramatic pauses that stretch it out past the six-minute mark, as if the song itself is fading in and out of consciousness. It threatens a long, eerie quiet, an afterlife to be avoided at all costs.
The Dixie Chicks named their tour after that song. The original plan was to bring the album’s rootsy sound to small theaters, joined by a rotating cast of like-minded artists: “We’re thinking Lilith Fair with men and without politics,” Maines joked. They tested out a few shows in this style after the album’s release and eventually decided to take it to arenas. Full-band, big crowds. They kicked things off in London in March 2003. Before playing their latest single “Traveling Soldier,” Maines addressed the Iraq War that would officially begin in just nine days. She told the audience calmly that the band did not agree with the war and that they were embarrassed to be from the same state as George W. Bush. The crowd applauded; the band counted off and started the song.
In an alternate universe, the show goes on and everyone agrees with Maines that the war is a disaster. But because this is country music in the 21st century, because they are women, because of Bush’s approval rating post-9/11, because of Toby Keith and the angry American, they find themselves facing a violent backlash. There are death threats. Radio stations stop playing their music and urge fans to destroy their CDs. Sales decline. Sponsors drop. “I mean, the Dixie Chicks… They shouldn’t have their feelings hurt just because some people don’t want to buy their records when they speak out. Freedom is a two-way street,” Bush comments. “What a dumb fuck,” Maines responds, staring directly at the camera in a documentary called Shut Up and Sing.
The film, which documents the response to that night in London, also explores the making of Taking the Long Way, their follow-up to Home. A complicated, often autobiographical rock album produced by Rick Rubin, it plays like a new start—their first record on which every song featured a writing credit from a band member—but also a farewell. “Do you really think we’re going to make an album for you and trust the future of our career to people who turned on us in a day?" is how Maines explained their abandonment of country music. The first single, “Not Ready to Make Nice,” remains one of their best songs, an explosive ballad about standing by your beliefs. When the song was first presented by songwriter Dan Wilson, it was an apologetic, crowd-pleasing track called “Undivided.” Maines had some edits.
By the time they performed the song at the 2007 Grammys, where they won every category in which they were nominated, the public perception of Bush and the war had changed. But the band still suffered the consequences. Album and ticket sales had fallen short of the label’s expectations, with little support from the radio stations they had previously relied on. The performance that night marked their last for years, as the members embarked on quiet side projects. It wasn’t until they heard a cover of one of their songs by Taylor Swift—and the massive response it got from her audience—that they decided to embark on a full comeback tour in 2013.
In their absence, the Dixie Chicks’ story was amplified and widespread. There’s Swift, of course, who found her own voice in their sugar-sweet melodies and arena ambition. (She also turned to their aesthetic decisions when it came time to face the world and reclaim a public controversy). Miranda Lambert dreamed of being her generation’s equivalent, and Kacey Musgraves, who waged her own battles against a sexist industry, cited them as an evergreen inspiration. Equally inspiring is how their influence traveled outside the genre: Indie songwriters like Katie Alice Greer and boygenius have covered them, while everyone from Beyoncé to Soccer Mommy heard their own stories in their songs. It’s a legacy tied both to their music and their message of integrity.
Despite what it came to represent, Home is not a political record. At the same time, it doesn’t sound like the gesture of domestic contentment the band initially presented it as. Instead, it plays like a refined but deeply unsettled record, one that envisions the years to come as contentious and dark, full of silence and loss, a drought of morality we’d all have to face together. “I don’t think I’m afraid anymore,” goes a lyric in “Truth No. 2.” The way Maines sings it, you could hear it as a kind of manifesto, something to roar along with and celebrate. And it is. But she also wants you to hear the hesitance, the questioning, the heavy dissonance in following your intuition to its loneliest corners. It might also be what struck her about “Landslide,” another song written in a moment of transition, where the word “afraid” is given as much weight as “love.” The Dixie Chicks figured the truth could always be found somewhere between the two.


Calvin Harris didn't create disco, duh. He didn't create electro-house, either, but in a year full of cranked synths, proud hedonism, and Daft Punk shows, the UK music-buying public has decided to befriend the Scottish producer and singer-songwriter.

I Created Disco

The creation of disco was one of its most exciting phases. In New York in the early 1970s, you could go to the Loft and hear David Mancuso play anything from the funky Spanish rock of Barrabas to the soon-to-be B-boy breaks of Babe Ruth's "The Mexican". Over at the Gallery, Nicky Siano might've been spinning the Bahaman rhythms of "Exuma, The Obeah Man" or the soulful storytelling of Bill Withers' "Harlem", alongside such Philadelphia Sound standards as MSFB's "Love Is the Message". Other innovators-- Larry Levan, Tom Moulton, Walter Gibbons, Arthur Russell, and more-- also helped define disco without limiting it to the most common definition.
All that's not to point out that Calvin Harris didn't create disco, because, duh. He didn't create electro-house, either, but in a year full of cranked synths, proud hedonism, and Daft Punk, the UK music-buying public has decided to befriend the Scottish producer and singer-songwriter. At only 23, Harris enjoys the kind of Cinderella success story that recently drew British reality TV audiences to singing cell-phone salesman Paul Potts: After a move to London failed to provide a job, Harris went back to stacking supermarket shelves in his hometown of Dumfries until a MySpace page brought major-label executives a-calling. Harris has since scored two top 10 UK singles and recorded with Kylie Minogue.
James Murphy shouldn't worry about losing his edge just yet. DFA's dance-punk figures prominently in Harris' cheeky full-length debut, I Created Disco, which peaked at #8 in the UK this summer and recently arrived in America. So do the Daft-punk'd electro-house of fellow Scottish producer Mylo and the same "borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered 80s" that inspires Montreal/New York electrofunk duo Chromeo. Trouble is, Harris has only one move, and it's not even convincing. But it's all in good fun, supporters protest-- sorry, not enough fun, and stop bogarting that stash.
Oh, sure, plenty of great music can be superficial. I Created Disco mistakes superficiality for greatness. There's very little variation between (or even within) tracks: a vapid vocal hook usually repeats over a simple bass groove and drum programming, with kitschy falsetto and synths, either zapping or distorted. Boringly often, there are boilerplate references to drugs: "Drug-taking at my place," Harris boasts matter-of-factly on latest single "Merrymaking at My Place", which repeats "my house" enough times for LCD Soundsystem's Murphy. Nearly as often, there are equally perfunctory references to the opposite sex. On previous single "The Girls", Harris follows the Rolling Stones' "Some Girls" template about as regrettably as Louis XIV did on 2005's "Finding Out True Love Is Blind", except with Scottish attempts to sing like Murphy singing-uh like Mark E. Smith-uh, instead of American attempts to sing like Marc Bolan. "I like them Asian girls/ I like them mixed-race girls," Harris explains.
I'm usually just outside of Barstow in the album's neon desert when the first single, "Vegas", kicks in. It's got both drugs and girls. I know this because Harris sings, "I've got my drugs, and my stuff, and my pills (when I go to Vegas)/ I've got my girls and my boys and my girls". In a blind taste test with follow-up UK hit "Acceptable in the 80s", four out of five of coke heads would make the choice of a new generation-- though there isn't much difference between the two tracks other than the words in Harris' apathetic vocals.
Between the singles, I Created Disco is padded with repetitive, frequently instrumental tracks. Reassuringly, the guy at least seems to have a sense of humor; the spoken-word title track makes it clear he's only goofing about disco-creating and possibly everything else. The problem is, he's not particularly witty, or, even with knowledge of his overnight success story, remarkable. Witness "Colours", which over-extends Harris' tired 80s obsession by suggesting you wear neon instead of black-and-white.
When Harris ventures into a wah-wah slow jam on "Love Souvenir", the slight reprieve is appreciated, even though it ultimately turns into another four minutes of aimless looping. Finale "Electro Man" suggests the young artist might one day reimagine himself as an urbane, Hot Chip-style romantic. Still, it's not sophistication Harris requires, necessarily. The fatal flaw of I Created Disco isn't that Harris works with a style he didn't create, it's that-- after a 2007 in which LCD Soundsystem matched Murphy's head for hips with heart, when Justice rendered synths metallic and Simian Mobile Disco made them child's play-- Harris reduces pop's limitless possibilities to one-joke self-parody, his youth his most distinguishing characteristic, an unremembered yesterday always more vibrant than today. You know "Crank That (Soulja Boy)", lately the biggest American single? That dude was born in the 90s. The kids really are coming up from behind.


The legendary band reissues and remasters its debut, and still arguably best, album, adding a bonus disc that marks the first time a full R.E.M. show has been released on CD

Murmur [Deluxe Edition]

One of the talking points about R.E.M.-- one of the traits listed to distinguish them from many other bands of the 1980s, mainstream or otherwise-- was their stringent democracy. Each member received equal songwriting credit on each track on each album, and reportedly each member not only had equal voice in decisions, but the band would do nothing unless everyone agreed unanimously. Theirs was a "unique four-person democracy that in practice maximalized the talents and insights of four people rather than just one leader calling the shots," writes I.R.S. Records co-founder Jay Boberg in the liners for this new 2xCD reissue of Murmur, the band's first and best full-length. When the band triumphed, all of its members shared the acclaim; when it failed, everyone shouldered the blame. This was an atypical business model, but R.E.M. displayed a seemingly contradictory mix of egolessness and ambition. The group pointedly didn't appear on its album covers or inner sleeves; instead, R.E.M. remained confident that a kudzu-covered ravine or a folk-art painting could speak more strongly about their music than their own presence ever could.
Coupled with that air of mystery, R.E.M.'s practical democracy simultaneously stemmed from and extended to their music. They treated each instrument as essentially equal: Bill Berry's no-fills drums, Peter Buck's spiky guitar, Mike Mills' melodic bass, and Michael Stipe's grainy voice. Because these elements were characters in an equally weighted exchange, the remastering on this version of Murmur (overseen by Greg Calbi) makes it more than simply an anniversary repackaging, but a careful reconsideration that not only changes the lines of dialogue, but alters the entire conversation. Every unique strike of Berry's high-hat and snare becomes discernible, giving his rhythms greater urgency and force. Likewise, Mills' bass gets lower and richer, and his keyboard adds intricate textures to these songs: "Pilgrimage" is layered with reverberating low-end piano and vibraphone, and his honkytonk piano gives "Shaking Through" its country transcendence. Mills' backing vocals are emphasized to reinforce their point-counterpoint interplay with Stipe on "Radio Free Europe" and "West of the Fields". This new remaster doesn't throw off the band's equilibrium: The instruments are somehow now sound even more equal.
It does, however, shift the discussion slightly away from some of the typical influences ascribed to the band-- namely, the Byrds-- and toward the more strident sounds of British postpunk acts like PiL and Gang of Four, whom the band has cited as part of their inspiration but are often overlooked. This dimension of their sound is most apparent in Buck's fretwork; sure, it jangles, but that term has lost some of its evocative sheen through overuse. His guitar also chimes and shuffles and burrs and bellows its way through Murmur, giving "9-9" and "West of the Fields" their jitteriness.
Stipe sing-speaks aggressively through the former but, fortunately, the remaster does nothing to elucidate his vocals. No longer the mumbler heard on the Chronic Town EP, he enunciates more clearly on Murmur, yet there remains an unpracticed quality to his performance. Stipe switches between a wordless careen and a precise croon, reaching into his upper register on "Radio Free Europe" and into his lower on "Catapult". He indulges a slight yodel on "Moral Kiosk" and ends "We Walk" with a strange hiccup. Over the course of the album, his slur is more pronounced but still inscrutable, and he covers his lyrics in layers of ambiguity.
There's a historical component to Murmur that often gets lost: In 1983, R.E.M. sounded unique. No bands were combining these particular influences in this particular way, which made this debut sound not only new but even subversive: a sharp reimagining of rock tropes. Twenty-five years and 14 albums later, our familiarity with R.E.M. means that Murmur has lost some of what made it revolutionary upon release. Fortunately, rather than collecting obligatory bonus tracks and outtakes-- most of which would have overlapped with Dead Letter Office-- the set includes a second disc documenting a show in Toronto from July 1983, just after the album's release. It marks the first time a full R.E.M. show has been released on CD (LIVE, from 2007, was culled from two nights in Dublin), and judging by the intensity with which the band run through old and then-new songs, it could have held its own as a separate release.
It's startling to hear some of these songs stripped down to their four basic elements, with no keyboard or guitar overdubs. Likewise, it's a bit odd to hear only polite applause after "7 Chinese Brothers", which would appear on Reckoning a year later, and surprising to hear people scream for "Boxcars" and a cover of the Velvet Underground's "There She Goes Again" (which they play) and especially "Shaking Through" (which they don't). Live, Stipe deploys an even wider arsenal of vocal tics: vamping on "Just a Touch", growling the chorus of "Talk About the Passion", and sing-speaking through a jaw-dropping "9-9", all while Mills' backing vocals soar overheard and Buck's guitar chimes reliably on every song. Because they were known primarily as a live band, and because they built their identity as such when the industry avenues of promotion failed them, this live disc, much like the remaster, goes a long way toward re-creating for listeners the context in which R.E.M. introduced themselves and making these familiar songs once again excitingly unfamiliar.


The indie-pop band’s first album in 13 years summons the same mix of erudition, introspection, and intense emotion that has inspired cult-like devotion since the late 1990s.

Thanks to You

Rocketship have long been the type of slightly below-the-radar act that fans connect with in a fiercely personal way. In part this sense of intimacy probably stems from the Sacramento band’s connection with indie pop, which prizes community and handmade sweetness. Like fellow pop kids from Belle and Sebastian to the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Rocketship were inspired by Felt, the ’80s project of reclusive UK indie auteur Lawrence. But Rocketship’s 1996 debut album, A Certain Smile, A Certain Sadness, was ambitious and well-crafted to a degree that belied their scene’s reputation for insularity and amateurishness.
Afterward, Rocketship disbanded, and then all but vanished. The sole constant member, singer and guitarist Dustin Reske, followed with a couple of Rocketship albums—1999’s ambient-leaning Garden of Delights, 2006’s more eclectic Here Comes… Rocketship—so low-key that they were off most radars entirely. Now based in Portland, Reske has convened a new lineup for Rocketship’s first album in 13 years, Thanks to You. Arriving again with little traditional publicity push, it’s also Rocketship’s first album with widespread distribution since last century. And it’s shockingly good. Rocketship’s triumphant return still feels intensely personal, only now it’s a bit like reuniting with an old friend and finding they’ve grown into an erudite and beguiling stranger. Whatever else has changed, Reske has shown, once again, that bold aims and modest scale need not be opposed.
The hypnotic organ and crashing guitar on Thanks to You will be familiar to admirers of Rocketship’s early work, but Reske isn’t simply relying on nostalgia. Instead, Rocketship sound more ambitious than ever, the youthful exuberance of the debut giving way to a louche and alluring sophistication. The most obvious difference is the addition of Ellen Osborn, whose past work includes singing in an all-female Bee-Gees cover band, as the lead vocalist on a sizable majority of the album’s 10 songs. She’s both versatile and formidable, her voice crystalline here and feathery there, as the occasion warrants. But most of all, she sounds gamely in control of whatever the compositions throw at her. That’s important, because what’s especially fun about Thanks to You is how packed with ideas these songs are.
A Certain Smile had droning interludes that pointed the way toward the atmospheric instrumentals of its follow-up, Garden of Delights, but Thanks to You goes further. Each of these songs feels as ornately appointed as miniature rooms, with trap doors and spiderwebs that show up as you spend some time living within them. The spacey keys, pinprick bass, and layered harmonies of “Nothing Deep Inside” open up to a French-language spoken-word passage and one of the year’s more poetic guitar solos this side of Big Thief’s “Not.” On “What’s the Use of Books,” a lascivious lunar-lounge cruise suddenly lunges into a stomping, screeching frenzy. There’s yearning dream pop (“A Terrible Fix”), an orchestral-tinged synth workout bringing to mind recent Rest-era Charlotte Gainsbourg (“Outer Otherness”), and whatever you call a song with the jangling riffs of Johnny Marr, the shoegaze whorls of Kevin Shields, and the organ-soaked detachment of Laetitia Sadier (“Broken Musicbox”).
This expanded scope also applies to the songs’ lyrics. “Drunk, I’m always drunk/When I’m with you,” Osborn sings as the autumnal opening track, “Under Streetlights Shadows,” rushes to a start that feels in medias res. “When I asked for rent, you sold my amp,” she chides on “Nothing Deep Inside.” Amid the shrill drum-machine thump of “Milk-Aisle Smiles,” Reske pleads with a lover by way of a reference to Joanna Newsom’s Milk-Eyed Mender, rhyming “laissez faire” with “touch you there.” On “City, Fair,” which veers from Pentangle-style folk to Fleetwood Mac-worthy sing-along, Osborn leaps just just as adroitly from Ren Faire “o’er” to all-too-contemporary “black ops on the street.” It’s a lot, and delving into it all is a treat.
“Thanks to You is for all the fucked up children of the world,” Reske has said. “In my lyrics now I use a broader lexicon, yet the subjects reflect much of the same longing for love and connection through dysfunction and alienation as always.” That constancy is easiest to grasp on the songs where the lexicon, lyrical and musical, is most direct. “I Just Can’t Get Enough of You” lacks the innocence of Rocketship’s classic “I Love You Like the Way That I Used to Do,” but it’s still a giddy rush of noise, melody, and emotion. Or take finale “I Don’t Know Why I Still Love You,” a back-and-forth duet that conjures up the Cure and Saint Etienne meeting at a rave. “Love a lie, you auto-replay ‘One Man Guy’ now,” complains Reske, citing Loudon Wainwright. ”I wave my fuck-it flag, you wear your love like heaven now,” Osborn spits back, quoting Donovan. It’s all as confused and emotionally extreme as a teenager, but as complex and fraught with references as an adult.
Thanks to You is a long way from Rocketship’s irresistible debut single, 1994’s “Hey, Hey Girl,” and yet it’s not so far at all. Reske, who has a business bicycling around Portland and doing yard work with only hand tools, still knows how to make something with lofty artistic goals seem as human and sustainable as cultivating a garden. The fucked-up children of the world might turn out surprisingly well.


Liz Harris' newest collection of charred ambiance is a companion to 2008's Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill recorded during the same period. The gorgeous and haunting The Man Who Died in His Boat shares many of that earlier record's characteristics and essential appeal.

The Man Who Died in His Boat

Always different, always the same. This phrase was used by the late John Peel to describe his favorite band, the Fall. His observation about the Fall captures a broader idea about music fandom, describing what it's like to follow along with a gifted artist who has created her own style but is no hurry to move outside of it. Always different, always the same. It's a phrase that comes to mind for me when I listen to the charred ambient music of Liz Harris' Grouper. Her body of work is of a piece. She layers ethereal vocals that feel less like floating in the clouds and more like sinking into the dark earth, possibly while inside of a coffin; her music is a downcast mix of strummed acoustic guitar and defiantly analog sounding drone and noise-makers. With this small clutch of elements, she's made more than a half-dozen full-lengths and a number of singles and EPs, all of which sound like they could come from no one else. Indeed, the distinctiveness of Grouper is easy to take for granted. There are so many people making music that could fall under the broad heading of "dream pop," but nobody sounds like Grouper.
There is one record in the Grouper catalog that, while certainly cut from the same frayed cloth, stands just slightly outside of the rest. Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill, first released in 2008, mostly forgoes the drones and minimalist experiments of her other work and focuses on Harris' voice and strummed guitar. It's her "folk" record, in a way, even though it slots in easily next to her more drawn-out and noisy releases. It is also her best album, a classic of subtly devastating songwriting (it's also an album Pitchfork initially underrated). Around the same time she was recording Deer, Harris cut a handful of songs in a similar vein for a planned album that was never released. Five years on comes The Man Who Died in the Boat, a companion record to Deer (which Kranky is also reissuing on vinyl) that shares many of its characteristics and essential appeal.
Grouper's most obvious contemporary is Julianna Barwick, but while the latter's music has a certain formality and sense of communal ritual, Grouper is disconcertingly interior, as if you're listening in on something private. That feeling is reinforced by the more abstract moments here, which often feel like something tinkered with over many hours in a dark room. The opening "6" finds Harris' voice on a damaged tape, bubbling up from the depths and mixing with swirls of feedback. The haunted "Vanishing Point" consists only of warbly metallic pings over a deep bed of tape hiss. The instrumental interludes aren't necessarily much to listen to on their own (and Harris' personal stamp on them is not as strong), but they do serve a purpose on the album, mixing up the flow of acoustic songs that might otherwise start to bleed together. But placed in relief by the abstracted bits, the individual character of the acoustic songs becomes apparent.
Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill had one of the more striking album covers in recent memory. It's a photo of Harris as a small child, wearing heavy makeup and a black dress that could look like a witch's costume. Though she doesn't generally seem interested in conveying the exact meaning of her songs and leaves a certain amount of that to the listener, the unsettling side of childhood innocence is a pervasive theme in her music. On the best of the songs here, like "Clouds in Places", the title track, "Cover the Long Way", Harris sounds very much like she's taking sing-song rhymes from childhood and running them through a cracked and ashen filter. They radiate a beauty that is simultaneously light and dark, with bright melodies draped with the inevitability of death.
The title of this release extends that idea, alluding to a scene from Harris' childhood where she and her father came upon an empty boat that drifted to shore after the person in it disappeared. It's one of those flashes from long ago that stays with you, an early brush with the idea of mortality at a time when you're not capable of understanding exactly what it means. That sense of confusion, the difficulty of processing and articulation, seems built into Grouper's art. Talking to people about her music, people who are typically ready to share half-formed opinions about music of any kind, I find they often have trouble coming up with words; when it really hits, as it often does here, the music of Grouper creates a feeling that can only be defined as awe, an uncanny mixture of wonder and dread that nobody does better.


To adjust for the departure of lead singer Daniel Blumberg, indie rock outfit Yuck get further and deeper into their referential personal canon on their new LP Glow & Behold with mixed results.

Glow & Behold

There isn’t a lot of precedent for what Yuck’s doing on their sophomore LP Glow & Behold.While it’s not unusual for groups in more moneyed genres to survive the departure of their lead singer, they tend to bring on a hired gun—Brian Johnson, Sammy Hagar, Peter Cetera, whoever’s singing in Journey right now. But typically in indie rock, when the frontperson’s done, the band is too. So here’s Yuck, not only carrying on without Daniel Blumberg, but also making the rare internal promotion in guitarist Max Bloom, who sang on one track last time out (“Operation”). And yet, Yuck seems like a good candidate to pull this off, because their inexhaustibly replayable self-titled debut from 2011 was nothing but precedent—they were the best Yo La Tengo, Superchunk, Built to Spill and Dinosaur Jr. songs you may have heard in years, but done with enough spirit, melody and grace to serve as tough competition for the originals. This isn’t to denigrate the contribution of Blumberg, after all, he co-wrote and sang the vast majority of Yuck. But as long as they didn’t ditch their CD collection, they’re still Yuck, right? Well, on Glow & Behold, Yuck do indeed get further and deeper into their personal canon. The problem that while Yuck was an excellent facsimile of excellent bands, Glow & Behold is a pretty good facsimile of pretty good bands, a multiplication of fractions.
Or, to put it another way, they’ve exhausted the A-list of 90s indie rock and are now modeling themselves after the next tier: we’re talking Lush, Buffalo Tom, the Lemonheads, maybe Teenage Fanclub if we’re being generous. As a result, Glow & Behold just sounds like Yuck on muscle relaxants much of the time —“Lose My Breath” and “Middle Sea” boast the same kind of fuzzed-up leads that made the guitars of  “Georgia” or “Get Away” as easy to sing along with as the vocals, but little of their frazzled energy. Meanwhile, “Memorial Fields” avoids getting too close to Yuck’s hangdog ballad “Suck” simply by insulating itself with synthesized strings.
This shift was inevitable from a physiological standpoint, as Yuck traded Blumberg’s nasal sneer for the more soft-palate lilt of Bloom. The ostensible maturation of their sound was also abetted by the production of Chris Coady, who helped guide Smith Westerns from a raw and tuneful debut into a more lush, distinctly British aesthetic (though on their first album, Yuck was a British band that sounded extremely American). For all intents and purposes, this sounds like their major-label debut: whereas a trumpet solo bisected “Suicide Policeman”, there are horns on Glow & Behold and keyboards often take the place of pedal-altered guitars for a means to add ambience. As a result, there are a few keepers that indulge in sounds that weren’t available to Yuck on their self-produced debut; “Rebirth” is palpably lush shoegaze, while the honeyed college rock of “Lose My Breath” a convincing candidate for primetime 1995 MTV play rather than "120 Minutes." But for the most part, Coady and Bloom combine to smooth out songs that lacked edge to begin with and Glow & Behold sounds far more homogenous than its predecessor even if boasts a near equal array of acoustic strummers, wandering instrumentals and indie rock classicism.
The bigger issue is that in losing Blumberg, Yuck aren’t just missing their lead singer, they’re missing a true frontman, someone who can actually speak for them. Yuck wasn’t much for idiosyncrasy, but it did have a personality—it just so happened that the alternately bummed and bristling indie rock of the 90s served as a perfect conveyance for Blumberg’s lyrics, which found him dumped or just kinda in the dumps. While being every bit as plainspoken, Bloom is harder to read*—Glow & Behold*’s song titles (“Out of Time”, “Lose My Breath”, “Somewhere”, “Nothing New”, “How Does it Feel”) suggest a topical generality and without much elaboration, it’s difficult to figure out what inspired the members of Yuck to create Glow & Behold besides the urge or necessity to make a second album.
Since the split between Yuck and their erstwhile frontman doesn’t seem all that amicable, it’s tempting to view Blumberg’s debut as Hebronix in competition with Glow & Behold. They’re about even, but the comparison is deflating because it confirms exactly what you’d expect: Unreal had shambling charm for days (or at least 35 minutes), but lacked structure and melodic guidance, whereas with Glow & Behold, it’s vice versa. Or, while Yuck made listeners nostalgic for the first Clinton term, Glow & Behold will just make you wish it was 2011 again.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the Oakland rapper’s imperial ’90s peak with the Dangerous Crew, a slick and funky landmark of pimp rap.

Too $hort: Gettin’ It (Album Number Ten)

Gettin’ It (Album Number Ten)

By 1991, Too $hort was the foul-mouthed face of Oakland rap. He was fresh off a massive three-album run—1987’s Born to Mack, 1988’s Life is…Too Short, 1990’s Short Dog’s in the House—that went a long way toward solidifying the Bay Area as a regional mecca for rap. His infamous pimp persona—originally inspired after he watched the 1973 movie The Mack—leaned and sprawled over seismic 808s, and laid the foundation for the future of mainstream rap on both coasts. And yet, his engineer and producer Al Eaton had bigger dreams. After a meeting with Felton Pilate—one of the producers behind the otherworldly rise of MC Hammer, whose third album, Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ’Em, went diamond that April—Eaton picked up the pop-rap blueprint that had bankrolled Hammer’s enormous staff, private jet, and 19 racehorses. That money was different.
In 1992, still months before Dr. Dre would release his blockbuster debut The Chronic down in Los Angeles, Too $hort pulled up to Eaton’s studio to get to work on his next album, Shorty the Pimp. The engineer had a crossover plan. “Al gave me a speech about how he didn’t want anyone to say the n-word in his house,” claimed Too $hort in a 2012 interview. “And he didn’t want to make any ‘ghetto’ music.” Too $hort flat-out rejected Eaton’s “corny wack-ass pop” pivot: That wasn’t him. But Eaton wouldn’t budge, stalling studio sessions for days hoping $hort would give in.
Eaton had forgotten that hip-hop’s roots remained regional, even as the commercialization of the genre had already begun. From moving cassettes out of the trunk of his car in the early ’80s to swapping stories with E-40 in a particularly feel-good 2020 Verzuz showdown, $hort has almost always prioritized putting Bay Area culture on wax, uncut, and that is partially why he’s experienced the sort of longevity that’s uncommon in a genre where aging isn’t celebrated. “I make more now than I did in 1989,” said Too $hort in 2021. “When I go do a show they pay way more than ever.” Blatant pop-rap songs have turned into relics; Too $hort held onto his locality and his music became timeless.
Too $hort, born Todd Shaw, was raised primarily on three things: the violent, profanity-fueled thrills of Blaxploitation cinema, the outsider funk of George Clinton, and talking his shit at all costs. He came of age in East Oakland, where pimp culture was unavoidable and crack was beginning to decimate the blocks as the Reagan administration left Black communities out to dry. Schooled on New York imports like the long-winded narratives of “Rapper’s Delight” and Spoonie Gee’s dirty player anthems of the 1980s, $hort was a slick and nasty rhymer from the jump. He laid down anecdotes about local pimps and small-time drug dealers with vivid detail and outrageously dark humor in an unhurried flow, the way a teacher might read a story to their class. (Don’t forget his catchphrase “bitch,” said in a one-of-a-kind squeal.) His commercial breakout albums Born to Mack and Life is…Too Short are packed with X-rated tales and his own brand of social commentary, like when he imagines getting blown by Nancy Reagan on 1988’s “CussWords.” His music got more textured at the tail end of the ’80s, with deeper bass and brooding synths forming the early sketches of mobb music, the funk-influenced sound that took over Northern California in the 1990s.
Giving in to Eaton by cleaning up the harsh realities, crude chronicles, and low-down funk of his music would have meant not only selling out but, worse, turning his back on Oakland. He did exactly the opposite. In the next five years, Too $hort cut four of the filthiest and most psyched-out albums in all of 1990s West Coast hip-hop. He started his hot streak as a mid-20s trendsetter on 1992’s rebirth Shorty the Pimp and ended as a 30-year-old elder statesman who’d given more than half of his life to hip-hop on 1996’s mid-career triumph Gettin’ It (Album Number Ten). And to get to Gettin’ It, he had to drop Eaton and surround himself with like-minded musicians operating on the same wavelength, just like his hero George Clinton would have done.
In the early ’90s, $hort officially debuted the Dangerous Crew, a clique of rappers and, most crucially, producers and nomadic instrumentalists who provided the engine for $hort’s imperial era. They came together like a group of mercenaries in a men-on-a-mission movie. First up was the indispensable Ant Banks, the Funkadelic-minded East Oakland producer with a knack for trunk-rattling drums. The man behind the electro grooves of MC Ant’s The Great and the blunt mobb music force of Pooh-Man’s Life of a Criminal, he became an in-demand Bay Area beatmaker in the late ’80s. $hort ran into Banks at the cable company while they were paying their bills, and after exchanging numbers, Banks was brought on to take over the reins of Shorty the Pimp.
Next was Shorty B, a Washington, D.C.-bred multi-instrumentalist who cut his teeth in go-go bands before trouble made him relocate to Oakland. He jammed on the bass with Funkadelic and fell in with Shock G and the revolving door of the supergroup of hip-hop outlaws Digital Underground. And Shorty B wasn’t just a musical outlaw: When he met $hort he had a bookbag full of guns and heroin. Later, at the Acorn projects in Oakland, Shorty B ripped some P-funk for $hort and was invited to join the Shorty the Pimp sessions. Rounding out the main players was Pee-Wee, a Richmond, California keyboard wizard who grew up playing in church and also eventually linked up with Digital Underground. He was recruited into the mix by Shorty B. With a production and engineering whiz and two groove merchants as a rhythm section, the Dangerous Crew band was set. Too $hort became their conductor, keeping them in check: “All of them had one fault, they all liked to hear themselves and what they did, a lot,” he said.
The band’s fusion of Ant Banks’ sampling techniques and knob-turning sorcery with live instrumentation that put improvisatory spins on spiritual funk odysseys of the past—from George Clinton and Bootsy Collins to Kool and the Gang and the Ohio Players—fueled Too $hort’s five-year bender. It sparked his sharpest and most granular storytelling, and it was fun as hell, too, this deep pocket of style and sound that never bent over backward for a crossover hit. It all led up to Gettin’ It, a grand, reflective finale where $hort grapples with his rap game mortality and legacy—sometimes thoughtfully, other times recklessly—while keeping the raunchiness and sub-bass sound of mobb music intact.
To reinforce the grizzled, weathered aura, Too $hort loosely billed Gettin’ It as a “retirement” album, one of the first of its kind in hip-hop. Of course, like Master P’s MP Da Last Don, or Jay-Z’s The Black Album, it turned out to be more of a dramatic hiatus. He doesn’t even make it through the whole album before definitive statements on the intro like “We gonna’ kick it like this on the last album” turn to hedges by the penultimate track: “This might be the last album I make y’all.”
It does feel like the end of an era, though. By 1993, $hort had settled into his new home in Atlanta—on the album he says it’s because of violence, today he claims it was because Freaknik was so lit—and you sense him second-guessing whether he’s lost that connection with Oakland. On “That’s Why,” over a groovy bass lick and hypnotic synths, Too $hort reminds the younger generation of his Bay Area bona fides, which includes having “sixteen hos/Suckin’ ten toes” and a warning to newer rappers trying to replace him, specifically the duo Luniz: “When you was in the fourth grade I had a record deal/You got one hit record now you ballin’/You make one fake album and you’ll be fallin’.” He flashes one of the coolest parts about getting older in rap: more room to self-mythologize.
That’s true of “Survivin’ the Game,” too, where, in between a few political statements, $hort sounds like the seasoned cowboy in a Western reflecting on the fruitful days before the railroads were built. His nostalgia makes him sound like he just turned 60, not 30, which I guess makes sense in hip-hop, but he owns it: “I’m 30 years old, and far from done,” he spits, silky as ever, once again forgetting that he’s contemplating retirement.
Even his verses about getting ass have that one-last-job feel to them. He treats one more dirty mack on “Bad Ways” as if it’s Derek Jeter’s final at-bat. He admits to wanting to get his ass licked on “Nasty Rhymes,” the type of confession that a hypermasculine rapper would only make if he thought he was peacing out. And also “Nasty Rhymes” finally reckons with Too $hort’s rampant and long-running misogyny. Sort of.
He addressed it in the most half-assed way on “Thangs Change,” a cut from 1995’s Cocktails. There, he drops the pimp character as if he’s ready to own his words but instead cops out, ranting about how society has lost all morality and he’s just giving the masses what they want. “Nasty Rhymes” is almost like a re-do, except he still fails to say anything truly worthwhile. The gist is that an anonymous woman lobs him a couple of questions in a smoothly sung R&B hook: “Too $hort why you say those nasty rhymes?/How come you be dissin’ all us girls?” To which Too $hort, in character, goes on for three verses that could be shaved down to: He doesn’t give a shit.
Of all the vile, unsanitized archetypes in rap, the pimp persona might be the most complicated. Artists like $hort—and Snoop, Suga Free, Dru Down, etc.—weren’t simply reciting old Iceberg Slim novels, or Blaxploitation excerpts, or neighborhood legends, but performing as the pimp. So you get the full scope of pimp culture, including the cars and the fashion, and also the predatory ruthlessness, in an act that intentionally blurs reality and fiction. At its worst the persona is used as a scapegoat to excuse wildly demeaning and offensive attitudes about women, and at its best it can enable extremely theatrical storytelling, such as “Blowjob Betty,” from $hort’s ’93 album Get In Where You Fit In. The few straight-up pimp-rap tracks on Gettin’ It like “Fuck My Car” or “Take My Bitch” (a failed “I Used to Love H.E.R.”-style metaphor) have nothing going for them.
The player’s ball feels compulsory this time around anyway; he’s still plenty funny and pornographic without it. But this is a victory lap after all, a ticker-tape parade in celebration of all Too $hort’s conquests. He’s kicking some stress-free tough talk with Erick Sermon and MC Breed at his side on “Buy You Some.” He’s ceding the floor to Baby D, a rapper who is “not even 10 years old” and it’s way better than it has any right to be. Even the monologue $hort pulls out on “So Watcha’ Sayin’” is inexplicably replayable, as he brags about how he changed the way the next generation enunciates “bitch” over a bounce that could make a glass of brown liquor magically appear in your hand. He’s in one of those zones rappers get into every now and then where they turn bullshit into gold. What better way to pretend to bow out of the game?
As for the Dangerous Crew, they were on their last leg; money, jealousies, and distance tore them apart. They’re still ripping it up and down Gettin’ It, but their instrumentals have a melancholic tinge. If the nostalgic piano riff of “Survivin’ the Game” or Shorty B’s hearty bass flicks on “I Must Confess” played while you were flipping through a childhood photo album, you would tear up. The exception is “Gettin’ It,” which feels like everything Too $hort and the guys had been building to over the previous five years. Joined by George Clinton and his P-funk comrades, the whole gang jams out with their idols for almost six minutes as $hort heads down memory lane. “Gettin’ It” went on to become a Billboard-charting hit and West Coast anthem—and Too $hort didn’t have to intentionally tone down anything to get there.
In 2005, nearly ten years after Gettin’ It, Too $hort was still living in Atlanta and officially out of “retirement” since his comeback album in ’99. Meanwhile, back in the Bay Area, mobb music had bloomed into the upbeat, funk-infused musical style and subculture known as hyphy, pushed forward by artists like Mac Dre and Keak Da Sneak. In that moment, Too $hort teamed up with Atlanta producer Lil Jon and they paid homage to his region’s next wave with “Blow the Whistle,” a hyperactive 2006 joint that gets just about any party jumping to this day. “I come from East Oakland where the youngstas get hyphy,” $hort raps at the end, repping his city from thousands of miles away. At 40, he was doing what he’d always done, making a local anthem that’s so hot it could travel anywhere. His age wasn’t a hindrance, either—if anything it was a celebratory full-circle moment for Bay Area rap and the strength of a connection time could not dilute.


The twin-brother jazz duo are experts at channeling the sounds of light and ease, and there’s something almost alchemical about their mutual precision.

Paradise

Humble ambitions are easier to realize. Opening a blank document and aiming for one perfect sentence is less daunting than aspiring to a Pulitzer; so too for the component parts of a song, where one lyrical nugget or breezy lick can become an accessible entry to a denser, polished whole. It’s easy to imagine the Mattson 2, Californian twins Jared and Jonathan Mattson, espousing this ideology as they shaped the songs on Paradise. Theirs is a variety of jazz more liquid than jagged, more 10cc than Charlie Parker, and their latest, the brothers’ second venture with Chaz Bear’s Company Records, doesn’t feign loftiness.
Paradise is chill and accessible by design, and it voyages to fewer far-out places than its predecessor, 2017’s ambitious and collaborative Star Stuff. This is “a record to throw a frisbee to,” the Mattsons write, and it’s practically suffused with the San Diego sunshine seeping into their recording studio. Jared’s guitar works sinuous loops around Jonathan’s tight cymbals and staccato snares, and like so many famed sibling outfits (think the Carter Family, the Montgomery Brothers, or the Knowles sisters), there’s something almost alchemical about their mutual precision, the way these songs feel as structurally intertwined as DNA. This sense of sequence and intuitive flow pervades the entire record, one song merging seamlessly into the next; it’s made for holistic listening over its full 32-minute runtime, rather than as plucked-out singles.
The most conventionally structured and accessible songs are, counterintuitively, the album’s least memorable moments. Tracks like “Essence” and “Shell Beach” mark the duo’s first recorded foray into vocals, and while the abstracted lyrics and affectless delivery cohere with the stoned, West Coast aesthetic, the traditional pop framework fences in some of the band’s weirder, jazzier capabilities. These tracks are by no means bad—as its title would indicate, Paradise is the equivalent of a sunny stretch of coastline, and even when the tempo ratchets down, there’s nothing to complain about. Still, it’s hard not to think of Star Stuff’s excellent “JBS” and wish for a little more intensity, for the edible to wear off so you can swim out deep again.
Lyrically, the brothers’ sentiments are standard relationship fodder. “Your energy just seems so impersonal,” they sing on standout track “Wavelength,” before plunging further into an embellished riff. “Let’s take a walk into the dark and find the light.” The song succeeds because it manages to wiggle between both poles, the dark and the light, riffing in a place that feels more like the powerful sweep of an ocean current than an unbothered amble through the park. These moments, scattered throughout Paradise, are its best and most textured. The Mattsons are experts at channeling the sounds of light and ease, but it’s when they orient them within melancholy, distress, or oddity that the contrast is most striking. “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in,” sang Leonard Cohen, and when Paradise transcends chill, its fissures offer a glimpse at what the Mattson 2 are capable of.