The singer/songwriter's new album is stunningly ambitious, veering from R&B to rap, pastoral British folk, psych rock, disco, and more.

The ArchAndroid

Janelle Monáe's The ArchAndroid immediately dazzles you with its ambition. It's a 70-minute, 18-track epic comprising two suites, each beginning with an overture, telling a futuristic story starring a messianic android. It's not even the beginning of the saga-- the first sequence was her debut EP, Metropolis: The Chase Suite. The songs zip gleefully from genre to genre, mostly grounded in R&B and funk, but spinning out into rap, pastoral British folk, psychedelic rock, disco, cabaret, cinematic scores, and whatever else strikes her fancy. It's about as bold as mainstream music gets, marrying the world-building possibilities of the concept album to the big tent genre-mutating pop of Michael Jackson and Prince in their prime. Monáe describes The ArchAndroid as an "emotion picture," an album with a story arc intended to be experienced in one sitting, like a movie. It most certainly works in this way, but at first blush, it's almost too much to take in all at once. The first listen is mostly about being wowed by the very existence of this fabulously talented young singer and her over-the-top record; every subsequent spin reveals the depths of her achievement.
The most impressive thing about The ArchAndroid isn't that it bounces between genres, but that it does so without compromising quality or cohesion. Its most recent antecedent is André 3000's The Love Below, but Monáe and her songwriting partners skillfully avoid that album's overreach and missteps, showing a similar level of fearless creativity but with greater focus and discipline. Despite the style-hopping, the album is sequenced so that many of the songs flow together seamlessly, and the shifts in tone seem intuitive rather than jarring. Monáe's dramatic structure goes a long way toward keeping this from being an incoherent pile-up of affectations, providing a narrative through line that makes sense of the transitions, and implies momentum and resolution even if you're tuning out the lyrics.
The success of the album is also due to Monáe's raw talent as a vocalist. She inhabits each style with natural grace, nailing the subtleties of rapped verses and tight harmonies as well as she can belt out a climax or deliver a punky growl. Much like fellow sci-fi magpie David Bowie, Monáe sings with the confidence of a star, but is essentially a vocal chameleon who places the needs of her songs ahead of her ego. Her performances can be jaw-dropping-- check out the transition from gentle folk phrasing to showstopping vocal runs on "Oh, Maker" for one example-- but she never gets in the way of her songs, which rely as much on her star power as the remarkable versatility of her band.
The ArchAndroid is deliberately conceived as a world unto itself, but Monáe very carefully places herself in a broader cultural context, as much out of ambition as wide-eyed fandom. Her liner notes list off inspirations for each track, ranging from references to Star Wars and Stevie Wonder album art to Salvador Dali and "the atomic bombs in Muhammad Ali's fists." She comes off like an enthusiastic student of the arts, eager to create on the level of her top-shelf reference points. Her naked desire to become iconic is endearing-- mainly because she is actually effective in presenting a look and a sound that is unmistakably her own, even when her influences are front and center. Everything that goes into her music comes out skewed, and even the most familiar elements of classic R&B-- percussive horn stabs, scratchy rhythm guitar-- suddenly seem fresh and modern rather than nostalgic and reverent. Her choice of outside collaborators has a similar effect in creating a context for herself, establishing kinship and aesthetic continuity with the unapologetically bohemian poet Saul Williams, the forward-thinking hip-hop of Big Boi from OutKast, and Of Montreal's flamboyant psychedelic funk.
Monáe's sci-fi mythology is an inspired addition to the rich canon of Afrofuturist art, but it's not necessary to buy into her elaborate high concepts to get the basic appeal of her music. Her imagination and iconography deepen the record as an experience and give her license to go far out, but it ultimately serves as a fun, flashy framework for pop songs with universal lyrical sentiments. The first of the two suites mainly deals with identity and self-realization; the second is essentially a set of love songs. As with all the musical genres blended into The ArchAndroid, Monáe uses the conventions of science fiction as a means of communication, tapping into mythic archetypes for their immediate resonance and power. And where many concept albums run a high risk of being pompous, cryptic, and self-important, Monáe keeps things playful, lively, and accessible. It's a delicate balancing act, but Monáe and her band pull it off, resulting in an eccentric breakthrough that transcends its novelty.


Drawing principally from minimalism, ambient, and krautrock, Swiss producer Benjamin Kilchhofer’s latest is a deeply immersive timbral and tactile experience.

The Book Room

To listen to Benjamin Kilchhofer’s music is to enter into an unfamiliar universe. Working with modular synthesizers, percussion, and the occasional field recording, the Swiss musician creates rippling, finely detailed soundscapes with one foot in the natural world. Repetitive but always morphing, never playing a given loop the same way twice, and interwoven with real and synthetic birdsong, his burbling sequences suggest rushing water, arrays of leaves, fog banks, and dewdrops. Perusing The Book Room’s track titles, meanwhile—“Anzu,” “Chogal,” “Nihic,” “Thorron”—feels like flipping through the pages of a yellowed atlas in a foreign tongue. There’s no indication of what these words might mean, but to say them aloud and savor their strangeness makes a fitting complement to the music’s pervasive air of mystery.
He is in good company. Some of the most exciting music on electronic music’s periphery in the past couple of years has devoted itself to a similar kind of world-building. There’s Masayoshi Fujita and Jan Jelinek’s Schaum, murky as a jungle backwater; Andrew Pekler’s humid Tristes Tropiques, which takes its title from Claude Levi-Strauss’ impressionistic classic of critical anthropology; the percussive thrum of Don’t DJ records like Authentic Exoticism; and Jan Schulte’s Tropical Drums of Deutschland compilation, a survey of wanderlust-filled German new age from the 1980s. Kilchhofer’s shared affinities with this ethnographical line of inquiry are found not only in his samples of birds, rainfall, and drum circles, but also in his visual art, like drawings of tschäggättä masks that resemble etchings from 19th-century textbooks. But Kilchhofer looks for inspiration much closer to home: The tschäggättä is a traditional Swiss celebration—an echo of ancient cultures in contemporary Europe.
Kilchhofer draws principally from minimalism, ambient, and krautrock. The tumbling marimbas of “Plyn,” where a syncopated flute figure bounces over bright wooden tones, call back to Steve Reich’s experiments in overlapping pulses. In beatless sketches like “Anzu,” “Durhi,” and “Thorron,” synthesizer melodies twist like vines captured on time-lapse video. The bulk of the album is resolutely percussive, and his hi-def rhythmic programming nods to both Harmonia’s percolating electronic pulses and Jaki Liebezeit’s knotty timekeeping for Can—though much of the time there are no traditional drum sounds at all. The leathery thwack of real hand drums traces a few tracks, like “Vran” and “Topot,” but for the most part his synths are inseparable from his percussion, with bass tones and whittled-down white noise offering an electrifying illusion of real-world congas and shakers and claves.
It all makes for an unusually tactile listening experience. The shape-shifting textures and careful use of the stereo field paint a three-dimensional picture of artificial space that, when heard on a good pair of headphones, might make VR headsets feel redundant. And while the consistency of his palette—metallic plucks, wooden thwacks, and silvery drones throwing off overtones—means that it can be difficult to differentiate one track from another, his varied tempos keep the 74-minute album engaging all the way through. Some tracks are sleek and fleet-footed like “Hedha” and “Uhta”; others, like the 150-beats-per-minute “Skimo,” dance on the lip between slow and fast, with half-time pulses triggering intricate chain-reactions of delay. Some of his most exciting songs are the slowest, where the woozy tempos create ample open space for his polyrhythms to stretch out. “Topot” is a mind-boggling tangle of micro-pulses, almost claustrophobic in its labyrinthine twists and turns; “Wiwanni,” on the other hand, pairs its loping dembow cadence with a synth melody as refreshing as mountain air.
Ultimately, the only real precedents for this stuff are two prior EPs under Kilchhofer’s name. (There are hints of this sound in earlier material he recorded under the Timoka alias, though those records hew closer to conventional house and techno.) Adding to the album’s alien character, The Book Room is one of those albums that sounds slightly different every time you listen to it. At home, it might settle into a kind of bubbling ambient repose conducive to reading or dining. But when I listened to it on an airplane not long ago, it lent a powerful sense of otherworldliness to the humdrum surroundings—particularly once I landed and weaved my way through the crowded terminal, its liquid, slow-fast pulses bathing the sea of moving bodies in a surreal glow. It was the ultimate music-as-drug experience, tipping the most quotidian experience on its ear. In The Book Room, unfamiliar worlds are right beneath our nose.


Demon City, Virginia producer Elysia Crampton's follow-up to her sumptuous debut American Drift, is a wonder of concision and represents another massive leap forward in her growth.

Elysia Crampton: Elysia Crampton Presents: Demon City

Elysia Crampton Presents: Demon City

Five years after the Continental Congress declared independence on July 4th of 1776, over three thousand miles to the south of Philadelphia, an Aymaran (the indigenous peoples of the Andes and Altiplano) abolitionist and revolutionary named Bartolina Sisa was at the head of an army of some 40,000 in revolt against the Spanish colonial powers in Bolivia. She led a six-month siege of Bolivia’s colonial capital, La Paz. The siege was broken by colonial troops in September, and on the fifth of that month, Sisa was captured, and brutally and publicly humiliated and executed in the Colonial Square. In what seems like an almost mythological punishment, her body was cut into pieces, and was cruelly showcased throughout villages around the Bolivian countryside as a grim reminder of imperial power. Sisa has become a legendary figure in the Bolivian and South American imaginary, a martyr  for a kind of indigenous sovereignty which is still precarious and unsure in Bolivia and elsewhere in South America. Her date of death, September 5th has been the International Day of the Indigenous Women since 1983. Sisa’s legend is at the heart of Elysia Crampton’s second album, Elysia Crampton Presents: Demon City.
Crampton, in her own right, has been one of the leaders of a revolution happening in electronic music. The defiantly heterogeneous genderqueer aesthetic of artists like Arca, Rabit, Lotic, and Crampton comprise an increasingly borderless, intelligent, and expansive sound that is hard to describe but radically visceral in effect. Her debut, American Drift,* *is an astounding document that conjoined explorations of Virginia’s history with urgent and spiritual excavations of brownness, otherness, and being a Latina as a sort of geology, deeply ingrained into the very soil beneath the floorboards of our homes, built on top of a generations of racist and colonial history.
She has described this second album as an epic poem, and it is a companion piece to a theatrical production called* Dissolution of the Sovereign: A Timeslide into the Future*, which premiered at Oberlin earlier this year. The play, which Crampton has said is a “DJ production incorporating dialogue and playacting,” is a coda to Sisa’s story, told from the perspective of her severed limbs. The play moves between the past that Sisa’s body observes and a utopian future where the sun has died, the prison industrial complex has been destroyed, and trans-humanoid arachnids rule the world. It’s a techno-futurist story in the style of writers like Octavia E. Butler or Samuel R. Delany, where the possibilities of radical queerness are explored through the lens of science fiction. But it also is a good way to see what she calls the essential “clowniness,” of her art, a certain sense of wild free-play that treats strains of culture and narrative equally. She is after all, one of the musicians who can comfortably blend together Justin Bieber and Steve Reich.
After finishing up *American Drift, Crampton moved from Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley to Pacajes, Bolivia to help care for her grandmother Flora. The music was written between Bolivia and Northern California, and even more so than her last album, it invites an entire community of artists to contribute. Rabit, the Danish producer Why Be, the London DJ Lexxi, and Chino Amobi are all present and as Crampton would have it, the Demon City *is as much their work as it is hers. She has said that “the album is a testament to [her] friend’s involvement in [her] life.”
Artistically speaking, *Demon City *represents a leap forward in terms of Crampton’s musical growth. *American Drift *was like a sumptuous glass overflowing, but Demon City is a wonder of concision, with songs that mostly fall under four minutes. *Demon City *also does away with words or vocals, a key element of *American Drift. *The booming baritone “transvangelist” prayers of her regular collaborator Money Allah are not to be found here, and if anything replacing the trancelike effect of those sermons is unifying thread of hypnotic percussion. When she still went under the moniker of E+E, the writer Adam Harper described her production technique as “epic collage,” and in *Demon City *she gives credence to that by creating songs with her collaborators that are more densely textured, and  more danceable than anything she’s made before.
The opener, “Irreducible Horizon” (made with Why Be) skillfully blends together ominous minor key pianos with hiccuping hip-hop drums and ominous ambient drone, smashing together genres into a track that incites exciting confusion and possibility. “After Woman (for Bartolina Sisa),” her collaboration with Rabit, is one of the most painterly songs she’s made—a vertiginous whirlpool of colorfully splattered noises. In the album’s title track, also made with Rabit, they make MIDI horns feel almost religious. The two songs that follow-up “The Demon City,” “Children of Hell” (made with Chino Amobi) and “Esposa2 2013 (No Drums)” (made with Lexxi)  count as the album’s most joyful and cinematic  moments. In “Children of Hell” she and Chino smash clouds of static with guttural laughs and goofy horns, creating a collage that pulls together the ambient pleasures of her work as E+E into the massive scope of her recent work. “Esposas” is a palatial, with swooping strings and horns that sounds sourced from fantasy epics. It is victorious in so many ways.
Overall, the sound of *Demon City *is one of the best showcases of Crampton’s ability to invite the historical sounds of huayño, cumbia, and many more sonic vernaculars into a vast electronic landscape. In this album she finds the perfect middle ground between the archivist's sensibility and the futurist’s optimism. Her music has always made one feel a little lost in time and space, and in *Demon City *she’s created a special extraterrestrial zone that barely lasts half an hour, where if you just listen you can get a glimpse into a realm of possibility you desperately want. A place in the world where difference is celebrated, and healing and growth are givens.


The London slowcore band’s second album is a gentle refinement with an atmosphere of loss.

Less

Tiernan Banks has declared that deathcrash’s new album is “more emo” than their last one and…hold on a minute. The album with “Wrestle With Jimmy”? The album with a nine-minute twinkle odyssey culminating in the lyric, “And if you die by suicide my blue heaven/Then thank you just for telling me/And doing all you could”? But while the despairing emotional tenor has held firm since 2022’s Return, deathcrash have largely done away with everything else that likened their previous work to Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Slint, Codeine, Mogwai, and many, many other titans of maximized minimalism—the supersized song lengths, spoken-word passages, eerie patches of silence punctured by blistering distortion, multi-part suites, anything that stands between the audience and Banks’ wounded words. As a title, Less is both promise and provocation, certainly to the listener, but more to deathcrash themselves.
“Pirouette” opens in a state of convincing vulnerability, slowly exploring whether deathcrash are in an introductory jam or putting together a proper song. As they do throughout Less, Banks’ vocals tentatively enter, tracing out a melody as if trying to find a lightswitch in the dark. Over the next five minutes, “Pirouette” becomes a compelling staring contest within the band, operating at a far greater intensity while only barely raising the volume. In the past, someone would inevitably blink and hit the distortion pedal, a post-rock reflex to deliver the emotional payload. It comes eventually, though, halfway through the next song, and even then, “Empty Heavy” holds true to its promise—it’s more of a hollow, throbbing pain than cathartic release.
While “less” is the M.O., “loss” is Banks’ muse; whether it’s the spare, practically see-through arrangements or the fact that it’s nearly a half hour shorter than Return, everything underscores that something once present is now gone. “I play dead/You wake up/Don’t pretend at all,” Banks sighs at the end of “Pirouette,” establishing the recurrent theme of passing through, of processing. Less is haunted by an uncanny vision of ghostly beings, the drowsy optimism of very early morning, or the muted reflection of a night that hasn’t ended yet. The flashpoints that create loss—death, separation, tragedy—all happen off-screen.
Less isn’t the type of music that usually gets described as “warm,” the implication being that joy or sympathy are primary emotions capable of radiation. Rather, Banks’ worn and welcoming voice projects both loneliness and a desire for intimacy with subtle cues, like a barfly strategically keeping a seat open as they nurse a beer in deep thought. Banks’ lyrics spare on particulars (“I broke my promise,” “You went away”), refusing anything that would prevent a listener from occupying their own space within Less. Of Banks’ many descriptions of heartache, the chorus of “Distance Song” is the most evocative: “It doesn’t hurt/It just won’t stop bleeding out,” he seethes, though a backing vocal lower in the mix suggests a deeper desire to just scream, to fight back against the constant drain of grief.
Though the essentialist approach of Less results in a more coherent and individual expression of a band once overwhelmed by RIYLs, it’s also a bit of a trade-off. The audacious sprawl of Return always impressed on the whole, even when the individual songs lacked definition. The latter still can hold true on Less, as its stirring choruses and poignant guitar harmonics are patched together by verse melodies that can feel like afterthoughts when delivered in Banks’ expressive, but limited, longing exhales. If the songs themselves occasionally feel stretched beyond their means, it’s reflective of the creative process as a whole; deathcrash admitted that Less was originally planned as a transitional EP before it metastasized into a bigger project. This aspect of Less doesn’t just calibrate expectations but also serves as a reminder that deathcrash emerged from the South London art-rock scene that birthed Black Country, New Road, black midi, and caroline—all prolific, shapeshifting acts that have used their studio albums as snapshots of their creative process rather than definitive works to be rehashed again and again for the next two years. If deathcrash intend to capitalize on Return’s word-of-mouth success with a more traditional leveling up, maybe that will come with time. For now, the call and response in the chorus of “Duffy’s” serves as an operating principle, a reminder for both deathcrash and Banks not to take on the full weight of hype or human suffering: “Don’t do too much.”


The Shins' James Mercer teams with producer and Gnarls Barkley member Danger Mouse for a melancholy pop record.

Broken Bells

It's been a while since Danger Mouse or the Shins did anything to change your listening habits, let alone your life. In the past decade, Danger Mouse's landmark Grey Album mash-up and membership in Gnarls Barkley helped anticipate indie rock's increasing openness to hip-hop and R&B crossovers. A couple of years earlier, James Mercer paved the way for future indie crossover success stories with the Shins' Garden State contribution and controversial Olympics-aired McDonald's commercial. That the pair's paths might eventually cross was more inevitable than unexpected.
Mercer and Danger Mouse's debut as Broken Bells is not quite up to the level of either's best projects, but in its own quiet way, it hits its marks. The pair first worked together on the David Lynch/Sparklehorse project Dark Night of the Soul, and Broken Bells picks up the sadsack spirit of that record-- it's a deceptively catchy album centered on personal loss. It's unclear whether we're supposed to trace Mercer's lyrical malaise to a shattered relationship with his band (Mercer split with Shins mates Marty Crandall and Jesse Sandoval in 2008), a lover, or both. But this much is certain: Something has ended.
In the album's brightest moments, there are enough swooning harmonies, replayable choruses, and psych-baked production elements that you might not even notice Mercer's dark thoughts. Besides, the singer is clearly attempting to move on here, taking advantage of this fresh setting to try on new looks: film-score orchestration and acid flange meet a Pet Sounds-like vocal odyssey on "Your Head Is on Fire"; "The Mall & the Misery" opens with Springsteen-ian Americana and then veers off into post-punk guitar stabs; "Sailing to Nowhere" is a horror-show waltz; and Mercer's nearly unrecognizable falsetto on album standout "The Ghost Inside" recalls the high, cracked croon of another Danger Mouse collaborator, Blur/Gorillaz singer Damon Albarn.
An early version of the record included a nicely gloomy song with Knife-like vocal effects that's been replaced by the sumptuous psych-pop balladry of "Citizen". "Trap Doors", already one of the album's catchiest songs, benefits from some extra synths and backing vocals, and "October" has a few new lyrics.
Still, unlike its creators' best prior accomplishments, Broken Bells doesn't seem prepared, or even attempting, to cross over. Nor does it feel like a new direction or outlet for either artist-- it's more of a nice detour. In one of the record's more cheerful moments, amid the shambling acoustic guitar and slithering keyboard of "October", he shares some helpful advice: "Don't run, don't rush, just float." It's what he and Danger Mouse do here, and while that's hardly a recipe for breaking new ground, the results are rarely less than pleasant.
Note: This piece as originally published was based on an earlier version of the album. The retail version includes differences that do not materially change the reviewer's opinion of the record. They are now accounted for above. We apologize for the oversight.


The chilling and provocative new album from the electroacoustic producer is a work of speculative sonic fiction, reimagining the sounds of ancient Mayan musical history.

The Long Count

Stand in front of the Kukulkán pyramid at Chichén Itzá, clap your hands, and a strange chirping sound rings out—a sound that sonograms have confirmed is nearly identical to the call of the quetzal, a bird considered sacred in ancient Mayan culture. Tour guides have for years entertained tourists with the curious phenomenon, and in 1998, acoustic researcher David Lubman finally discovered the source of the mystery: the design of the pyramid’s staircase. Academics debate whether the sound is intentional, an ingenious feat of acoustical engineering—“The Mayans may have made the world’s first audio recording a thousand years ago,” gushed The New Scientist—or merely an architectural happy accident. But there is no doubt that music was central to the pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica; we know from frescoes, codexes, and archeological artifacts that it played a key role in ritual and ceremonial life.
The Mayans developed a vast array of musical instruments: clay whistles, conch trumpets, gourds filled with seeds or pebbles, turtle-shell drums played with antlers. Some of these instruments were strikingly complex: One ocarina unearthed in Belize boasted three hidden chambers and could generate 17 notes. Sets of differently pitched bone flutes may have been played together in harmony. But we don’t know what this music sounded like. No musical notation system has been discovered; the collapse of the great Mayan cities in the 8th and 9th centuries, followed by two centuries of genocidal Spanish conquest, wiped out the ancient culture’s musical traditions. But The Long Count, a provocative work of sometimes harrowing electroacoustic music by the Mexican-American musician Delia Beatriz, aka Debit, attempts to revive the sound of instruments that fell silent more than a thousand years ago.
Much of Debit’s music until now has focused on rethinking club orthodoxy. Animus, her 2018 debut LP, balanced brittle grime with unsettling ambient, while 2019’s System EP delved into the triplet-heavy tribal guarachero of her native Monterrey. But The Long Count, which takes its title from the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, abandons all traces of conventional dance music. Though ambient in form, it’s far from mood music as commonly conceived—it might better be called a work of speculative sonic fiction. To create the music, the New York-based artist utilized the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México’s archive of Mayan wind instruments, using machine learning to develop a set of digital instruments modeled on her cryptic source materials.
Though it’s not immediately clear what role machine learning played from simply listening to the music—my guess is it has something to do with wrangling playable digital patches from whatever limited acoustic samples were available from these rare, fragile instruments—there’s no mistaking the otherworldly quality of The Long Count’s sounds. Long, breathy tones waver in pitch, rising and falling like distant signals carried on a humid breeze. Sometimes they take the form of mournful solo cries; at others, they tangle in eerie dissonance. Musicologists believe that ancient Mayan musical scales were much different from our own, and Beatriz’ frequencies are appropriately alien.
In places, the music takes on a mournful quality evoking ritualistic laments: The seasick pitches of “1st Night” are soft yet unsettling, like an overture to the dead. Other tracks are more atmospheric: “3rd Night” immerses wheezing, whistle-like sounds in soupy drones, while “2nd Day” sets birdlike chirps against groaning sub-bass and cenote-sized reverb. There’s little in the way of recognizable melody or rhythm; The Long Count often feels less like a musical composition than a field recording of an unfamiliar landscape in which the tape has picked up unexplained transmissions.
Despite its hushed volume and muted sounds, The Long Count stands apart from most ambient music. Like the work of Eliane Radigue, its unfamiliar frequencies can trigger odd psychoacoustic effects: Turn “7th Day” up loud enough, and your head feels encased in a cage of invisible buzzing wires. Like the isolationism of Thomas Köner, its emotional register is tuned not so much to garden-variety melancholy as nameless dread, suggesting something vast and shapeless looming just beyond the limits of your perception.
The fundamental strangeness of Debit’s approach feels like more than merely a stylistic choice (even if it is right at home on Modern Love, a UK label known for doomy electronic music). Instead, it reads as an acknowledgement of how much we don’t know about ancient Mayan musical history. Its severe austerity might also scan as an act of post-colonial resistance, especially at a time when ambient music often dissolves into soothing, palliative kitsch, and New Age spiritualism sends European DJs on ayahuasca pilgrimages.
Debit’s album, in contrast, refuses to pander to mystical fantasies. Yet it would not be a stretch to say that there’s a spiritual dimension here—just one that’s a world away from tourist-friendly cliches. Some archeologists have argued that for the ancient Maya, musical instruments were not just objects to be played; they were the physical embodiment of divine entities, conduits for celestial presence. On The Long Count, Beatriz undertakes a radical act of exhumation—a transubstantiation of electricity into breath, and vice versa—using artificial intelligence to unlock the life force from a long-dormant being. That’s not something to be taken lightly, and you can detect Beatriz’ own sense of humility and responsibility in her chilling, awe-struck tones.


The Australian instrumentalists have always used their breathtaking technical dexterity to craft songs that feel like little worlds. Their fourth album fills those spaces with emotion.

New Bodies

At some point during the first three albums by Australian instrumental quintet Tangents, you’re bound to get a bit breathless. Tangents don’t write songs so much as they create little worlds, each one a microcosm teeming with separate but symbiotic ideas, like samples of fertile soil viewed under a microscope. An unorthodox ensemble of keyboards, drums, bells, cello, effects, and electronics, they front-load their pieces with varied sounds: bits of warm folk melody and cold string drone, buoyant trip-hop rhythm and tessellated gamelan percussion. It’s easy to feel buried beneath all these elements or swept away in their inevitable landslide.
On Tangents’ 2013 debut, I, my breathless moment came early, when drummer Evan Dorrian climbed atop a cello-and-circuits din to dance with his kit; on 2016’s Stateless, it was the rising action of “N-Mission,” when drums and electronics coiled repeatedly around a loping pizzicato cello line, teasing a deliverance that never came. Their fourth and best album, New Bodies, overflows with these sensations—of being overpowered and delighted, of being buoyed up and washed away by Tangents’ seemingly endless ideas.
Tangents began as a strictly improvisational ensemble, recording their first two records in single sittings. I documents the first time they ever played together. But for Stateless, they elected to edit that spontaneous energy, clipping and rearranging their improvisations into sophisticated, interconnected pieces. On “Oberon,” they summoned the slow, accretive approach of Australian instrumental elders the Necks, while “N-Mission” recalls the way Four Tet uses florid little themes as the anchors for rising rhythms. But the album sometimes came off as too scripted and fastidious, sucking the early improvisational air from the editing room.
The band takes a similar compositional approach to the seven pieces on New Bodies, but that lost beginners’ energy has returned and even grown. “Immersion” again evokes the Necks, but this time you feel as if you’re in the room with Tangents, lifted in real time as their controlled commotion rises. Serene closer “Oort Cloud” moves like a daydream, with whispering electronics and persistent piano suggesting a minor breeze that rustles the hair on your arms. It is lovely and carefully constructed music that also feels casual and conversational. If you didn’t know these were edits of improvisations, you might assume they were simply remarkable, complicated compositions.
This emerging seamlessness seems to have made Tangents less self-conscious, too. They’ve started to shed their preference for compositional austerity or coolness. “Swells Under Tito” is the most outwardly joyous and funky tune in their catalog. Ebullient drums and a cello that flits between rubbery bass and restless smears lift a West African guitar line, which flashes like a roadside sign inviting you to an all-night party. The guileless tune suggests a discarded Akron/Family or Dirty Projectors demo, meticulously sculpted by a third party into its final prismatic form. During the back half of “Terracotta,” a tune that initially invokes Four Tet’s repetitive ecstasy, pianist Adrian Lim-Klumpes dips into a trio vamp with Dorrian and cellist Peter Hollo, whose plucking somehow elicits the robustness of an upright bass. The passage sounds like Keith Jarrett righteously commandeering the keys of Medeski Martin & Wood. Tangents never seemed the sort to make Saturday cookout tunes, but they sound spectacular testing the edges of their accessibility.
Still, the most significant shift on New Bodies—and the mature move that could push Tangents beyond the realm of instrumental esoterica, like their Temporary Residence labelmates Explosions in the Sky—is a nascent emotional resonance. “Gone to Ground” hinges on the group’s technical excellence. A prepared piano rattles around a bleak landscape of distended drones and disjointed beats, alternating with sections where stately progressions sit inside the rhythms’ rests, finding a bona fide groove. But those threads tangle late in the 11-minute odyssey, forming a knot of rumbling bass, anxious percussion, and aching countermelodies. With its push and pull between rest and restlessness, “Gone to Ground” is a sophisticated musical map of ordinary frustration, complete with a requisite this-too-shall-pass comedown.
Absorbing opener “Lake George” captures the exhaustion that follows a long-cohesive group’s split, without warning, into distinct factions. For the song’s first half, Tangents seem to drift through a reverie, with echoing guitar notes lacing around low cello and steady drums; then, the kinetic Dorrian sprints headlong while the band stands still, dismayed by the sudden departure. As the song fades into what feels like an exhalation, you might be struck by the familiarity of this kind of relationship—a situation that’s contentious to the point of collapse. For years, an emotional narrative like this one would have seemed superfluous for Tangents, a quintet devoted to technical dexterity and clarity. On New Bodies, they allow those sharpened skills to inhabit emerging human forms, a move that speaks as powerfully to the heart as it does to the brain.


On her the acoustic Unknown Rooms, Los Angeles musician Chelsea Wolfe attempts to reconnect with her folk roots, allowing a few sunrays to poke into the gothic sepulchre she built on 2011's Apokalypsis. But this isn't exactly her campfire record.

Chelsea Wolfe: Unknown Rooms: A Collection of Acoustic Songs

On her acoustic record Unknown Rooms, Chelsea Wolfe allows a few sunrays to poke into the lightless sepulchre she built on 2011's Apokalypsis. That record, with its gothic, bloodstained imagery and bleak post-punk guitars, carried all the warmth of a medieval hex: It opened with a gurgling, feral scream that sounded like something peeling off your skin with its incisors. Wolfe's vocals channeled PJ Harvey in full Rid of Me "lick my injuries" mode, and earlier she'd released a cover of the cheery Burzum number "Black Spell of Destruction". It spooked a lot of people to attention.
Unknown Rooms, as she told Brandon Stosuy recently, was her attempt to connect to her "folk roots," citing a love of Townes Van Zandt and Hank Williams. But this isn't exactly her campfire record, unless that campfire is surrounded by plague and marauders: Wolfe has kept the kernel of eerie blankness and premonition even as she tones down the vampy theatrics.  Ironically, she digs even deeper into your skin than before. Sometimes a lullabye can freak you out even more than a midnight horror flick.
Her voice, in these wide-open arrangements, emerges as stunning: Her whispered, wispy high notes on "The Way We Used To" and "Spinning Centers" are lovely and convey unsettling frailty, like a hurt creature lurking in a corner that you aren't sure you should touch. The imagery isn't accidentally chosen: Wolfe seems powerfully drawn to vulnerability-- hers, yours, ours-- and she finds multiple ways to make you taste this unease. One of those is to make herself sound weak, trembling: She floats tiny, wordless harmonies in the background on "Spinning Centers", multi-tracking her close-mic'd voice into a pale, enervated choir. Around her, bowed string harmonics sigh dryly, drawing her further out of her body into the surrounding ether.
The songs themselves are stark, still, often nothing more two open chords strummed in common time. Surrounding them are a violin or two, muted horns, and acres of the white space. In their fidgety stasis, the songs capture some of the poetic nervousness of early Cat Power: When Wolfe whispers "Boyfriend, be careful if you can," on "Boyfriend", drawing the word "boyfriend" haltingly, like an extraterrestrial voicing its first English word, I was reminded of Marshall's "Nude as the News", where news of a pregnancy is delivered as end-times prophecy: "I've got a son in me/ And he's related to you/ He is waiting to meet you/ He is dying to meet you." Wolfe's Unknown Rooms contain some of the same mundane menace, and it's a refreshing reminder of the horror to be mined from the good old boring everyday world.
Unknown Rooms is a short album, but its nine songs capture and sustain free-floating fear and menace. And even a few pockets of tenderness: On the quietly expansive "Flatlands", over two-finger-picked chords, Wolfe sings, "I never cared about anything you ever owned/ I want flatlands, I want simplicity/ I need your arms wrapped hard around me." On closing track "Sunstorm", Wolfe pounds two major chords on piano with brittle force, crooning, "I remember/ everything you said," until she dissolves. Unknown Rooms might be a stylistic sidestep for Wolfe, a dalliance with a simpler set-up, before she plunges back into the icy black again. But even if she goes full-on Carrie-at-the-prom next, it seems likely she'll only continue to gather force.


On their harrowing and strangely cleansing second album, the Brooklyn-based vocalist and poet grapples with depression, anxiety, and identity.

WAHALA

At one point on “Francis," a song on the Brooklyn-based vocalist and poet YATTA’s second album WAHALA, a loop of the ubiquitous ice cream truck jingle pops up. Depending on your mood, it will either stir idyllic childhood memories or set your teeth on edge. YATTA excels at inspiring these kinds of polarizing emotions on WAHALA, whose title translates from Krio into “a state of worry, trouble, a terrible mess." Short lines of improvised poetry and fragmented phrases are manipulated with a loop pedal and sent swimming across the ambient backing tracks. Over all of this, YATTA grapples with depression, anxiety, and identity, and ultimately tries to convince themselves of the near-impossible—to just buck up and be happy. When the album ends after 30 minutes, it’s like you’ve been listening to the therapy session going on inside someone else’s head. The experience is both harrowing and strangely cleansing.
WAHALA is dominated by YATTA’s voice—or, rather, YATTA’s voices. Armed with a toy box of digital tricks, their vocals are pitched up or down to represent various parts of their personality competing for space in the same psyche. Deeper, distorted tones represent the dark side; a child-like lilt hints at optimism. Loops and glitches applied to these words become part of the project’s metronome: On opener “A Lie”—which begins with the advice “Hey, don't let yourself ruin/Run the show!”—the latter part of the word “survive” is repeatedly triggered to conjure a sense of rhythm.
This experimental production gives WAHALA an undulating texture that’s complemented by YATTA’s own fluid voice. On “Cowboys,” which adds wavering guitar to the hazy mix, YATTA sings “Cowboys are black/And techno is too,” and layers the sentiment with a demonic, guttural voice proclaiming “Artsy black girls are like Pokemon/Gotta catch ‘em all.” These juxtaposed fragments land like slogans from an unearthed Basquiat painting—they’re a cue for your mind to wander off into the imagery.
A quote from YATTA accompanying WAHALA explains that the album is inspired by “being black, being trans, and being African on foreign land,” along with psychosis and depression, rage and pain, tension and confusion, and the cyclical nature of these intermingling factors. But the music and the message don’t play out in a tidy linear unpacking; these facets cannot be dealt with one at a time under the auspice of the increasingly commercialized concept of self-care. The soul of WAHALA is about accepting that all these different feelings can be felt at once. YATTA inches towards this realization on the album’s concluding song, “Underwater, Now.” Set to a soothing, submerged choral backdrop, YATTA throws off the processing effects and speaks in their natural voice, expressing something we can all relate to: “All I know is that it all fucking hurts.”


Italian producer Donato Dozzy's contemplative new album is built entirely around the sound of the mouth harp. It's an arcane concept, but Dozzy—whose most common mode is techno—is no stranger to constraints.

The Loud Silence

The history of the mouth harp is vast: It is believed to have originated in Asia, possibly as early as the 4th century BCE, and its spread extends from Vietnam to Finland, from Siberia to Cameroon. The Dutch musicologist Phons Bakx has compiled a list of more than 1,000 names for the instrument, including the English-language terms trump, gew-gaw, mouthfiddle, Omaha flapjack, and marranzano pancake. It's most commonly known in English as the Jew's harp—a name whose etymology has flummoxed scholars for decades. Spaniards have called it the pio pollo ("squeaking chicken") and the Dutch, the Gedachtenverdrijver ("thought dispeller"). But among its most evocative names might be the Italians' scacciapensieri, or "worry killer"—a name whose meditative connotations go to the heart of the Italian producer Donato Dozzy's contemplative new album, which is built entirely around the instrument.
It's an arcane concept, but Dozzy—whose most common mode is techno—is no stranger to constraints; his last LP, the Spectrum Spools-released Sintetizzatrice, was made using only the singer Anna Caragnano's voice, run through kaleidoscopic, dubwise processing. His approach is similar here, wreathing the instrument's gravelly flange in an airy filigree of reverb and delay. Sometimes he sets the mouth harp front and center, as with the opening "Personal Rock"; Dozzy has described how he recorded the album on the slopes of mountains and overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, and "Personal Rock", bookended by buzzing bees and distant thunder, swims in that sense of place. On "For Arnaud", the instrument's steady plucks are stretched and warped by subtle delay and chorus effects; the brightness of the tones and the brisk, skipping pulse are light and invigorating, like an early fall morning.
Elsewhere, Dozzy opts for abstraction. "Cross Panorama" sounds like it comes from the same tapes that yielded "Personal Rock", but this time electronic echo all but swallows the source material, and the reverb's resonance throws off great, yearning harmonics. In "Concert for Sails", the instrument is nearly eclipsed by the gentle creaking and slapping of ropes in the harbor. And in "The Net", short, clipped tones are tossed down a ricocheting delay chain, evoking the influential dub techno project Vainqueur, while the grinding title track might almost be a cover of Aphex Twin's iconic "Digeridoo".
It's generally a meditative set, and only on the album's final track, "Exit the Acropolis", does Dozzy return to the sound with which he's most closely affiliated: Tapping out clicks like 808 hi-hats, and weaving three or four layers of mouth harp into enveloping contrapuntal pulses, it's the perfect approximation of Berghain-styled techno. In his notes on the album, Dozzy speaks of trance states and all-night rituals, and here, he successfully unites centuries, if not millennia, of tradition into a hypnotic whirlwind. Not bad for a sound made entirely from a strip of bent metal.


The Australian DJ made her name with crowd-pleasing house anthems full of cheeky basslines and pop immediacy, but her debut LP aims for sophistication over quirkiness.

Mother

Logic1000’s breakthrough track “DJ Logic Please Forgive Me” is a clever idea well executed. An archly titled edit of an already famous song, it kicks in with the chorus of Deborah Cox’s much-sampled “It’s Over Now” before dropping the kind of cheeky bassline that can send a small club in an English university town into pint-chucking meltdown. Yet these qualities—pop immediacy, winking humour, brash confidence—are in low supply on Logic1000’s first full-length, which aims for sophistication over quirkiness and ends up adrift from both.
Samantha Poulter’s musical journey since her debut has been one of increasing focus—or, perhaps, a steady narrowing of parameters. On her debut EP, along with that ’90s R&B flip (dubbed “one of the big tracks of 2019” by Four Tet), Poulter tooled around with the easy touch of the Zen-minded beginner, exploring the hinterland between reggaeton and 2-step, shaken-up Middle Eastern drums, even stripping out rhythms to expose negative dubspace. But by 2021’s In the Sweetness of You EP, a furrow was emerging: well-behaved rave, taking bits of house, garage, and reggaeton and rendering them in soft pastel shades on remixes for artists like Glass Animals, Fever Ray, and—an obvious influence—Caribou.
Among Mother’s 12 tracks, a solid vocal house EP lurks: three trim, catchy songs with slick pop vocals, not hard or hip enough for underground dancefloors but miles classier than anything blaring out over the stairmasters at your gym. “Every Lil” is the best of them, tapping into the heat of Miami’s Latin club scene through MJ Nebreda’s soft-stroke vocals, a reggaeton-house rhythm, splashy drums from DJ Plead, and—why not?—the chord progression from “Music Sounds Better With You.” It’s smart; it works. The other two are sturdy singles, but could have been made any time in the last decade: “Self to Blame,” with California singer Kayla Blackmon, provides punchy dance-pop on the Disclosure-to-Dua Lipa continuum, and “Promises” is polished to a shine by Kaytranada collaborator Rochelle Jordan.
What’s left over is puzzlingly anonymous. Pushed further and deeper, this material might’ve been its own record—a set of supple, deep house for well-groomed dancefloors, all moisturised and minty of breath. “Heartbeat” turns simplicity to its advantage, ping-ponging around a chiming bassline redolent of Jaydee’s ’90s house classic “Plastic Dreams.” “All You Like,” with its dreamy minor chords sighing around an insistent vocal, is in thrall to Caribou and Four Tet—but without the quirks and tics that gird her elders’ oddball genius. “Grown on Me” serves up the same sort of soft-boiled UK bass, lacking in structure beyond the usual build, rise, drop, repeat. Even cranked up loud, this just isn’t functional dance music—there’s an empty space where the oomph should be.
With a title like Mother, you might expect a more biographical slant, or maybe a return to the archness of that first hit. It’s one of those deceptively simple words with infinite associations, from ball culture slang to Darren Aronofsky’s most divisive movie. And Poulter’s own life story offers plenty of dramatic material, from recent motherhood (as discussed on her podcast, simply titled Therapy) to depression, psychosis, and even a near-death experience after a car accident. Yet Poulter’s presence barely registers, perhaps overshadowed by the steering hand of her producer-partner Tom McAlister (who releases dance music as Cop Envy and Big Ever) and the lyrical thrust of her hired singer-songwriters.
As can often happen with house and techno albums, Mother feels like it’s been willed into existence as a milestone on a CV rather than an urgent statement of artistic intent. If it’s a bid for dance-pop stardom, then the big singles—finely crafted though they are—are too few, too timid. If it’s meant as a deep-house long-player, it’s paddling in the shallow end. The cult of house music can be precious, and yes, a touch snobby, but we know how we want it: raw, hard, messy, uplifting, joyous, transcendent, bizarre. And isn’t that the very stuff of motherhood?


More than a decade after his last album, the UK singer-songwriter grapples with an intense period of personal upheaval in songs that return to the melancholy, idiosyncratic sound of his early work.

The Night Safari EP

Patrick Wolf’s resounding baritone easily conjures up gravitas, lending his best songs a combined air of theatricality and raw emotion. The English musician’s first two records were tightly wound, explosive with pent-up angst, and beguiling in their ornate instrumentation, poetic lyrics, and damaged electronics; when Wolf trended toward a more mainstream sound—as on his last album of new material, 2011’s disco-spangled, lovesick Lupercalia—he traded the strange charms of his early work for the ill-fitting patina of generic radio pop. Management and A&R troubles made things even more complicated for the London singer-songwriter. (“If I think about Lupercalia now,” he said recently, “it’s like hands around my neck.”) Wolf’s 2012 acoustic album of reworked songs became a way of cleaning the slate that also, as the years went on, looked more and more like a career sendoff.
Wolf’s first new music in over a decade, then, has baggage to unpack. The Night Safari EP was crafted out of an intense period of personal upheaval, including bankruptcy, a struggle with addiction, and the passing of his mother. Wolf understandably turns inward, purging bouts of anxiety and depression through diffuse, melancholy electro-folk. It’s a welcome return to his earlier sound, embellished throughout with electronic wrinkles and the deep, rich tones of his viola. Early standout “Nowhere Game” clips by with clattering percussion and pitch-shifted vocal rhythms, capturing the cyclical nature of addiction in references to “the danger that keeps you alive”: “Dying to be living proof/Of something survived in your youth,” he sings mournfully over the chugging beat, adding to its acute sense of hopelessness.
The title track further recalls the sullen music of his early breakthroughs. Here, Wolf creates a gentle build of plucked Celtic harp over an eddying piano melody for a disquieting look at those late-night moments in bed when your mind chews over every anxious thought imaginable. “Don’t you lose sleep/Pay no mind to me unraveling,” he pleads as the song loosens into a digitized, cut-up rhythm. It’s a more successful approach to playing with familiar sounds than “Archeron,” which uses a 7/8 time signature to evoke a fractured headspace; Wolf delivers a cryptic, chanted monologue inspired by novelist Robert Graves amid ominous organs and strings, jerking back and forth between quiet and bombast. It’s effective in its jarring delivery, but feels stiff and out of step with the rest of the EP’s carefully arranged tableaux.
Still, Wolf’s ear for melody and imagistic lyrics remain strong, knifelike features of his music. Although The Night Safari’s sweeping dramas can be dour, Wolf’s voice, sonorous and commanding, is only growing finer with age. On “Dodona,” with its gorgeously cinematic viola solo and sorrowful piano, Wolf is at his most moving, stretching his voice from a low growl to a scratchy, throaty high. “His tongue is rattling,” Wolf sings of his protagonist, a “whipping boy” overwhelmed by trauma: “But broken bells don’t make a sound/No matter how hard you hit ’em.” Like the rest of The Night Safari’s most enthralling songs, it gives way to a well-earned, bruising form of catharsis.


The debut release on Dutch label Queeste is everything you could wish for in an ambient soundtrack to humid midsummer nights, its melodies as graceful as a swallow’s arc.

Wandelaar

Small record labels don’t enjoy quite the tastemaking status they once did, but the debut release on the Dutch label Queeste suggests that it will be an imprint worth watching. Queeste is a new venture from one of the people behind the Hague’s Wichelroede, a short-lived mail-order outlet and cassette label that, for a couple years in the middle of this decade, carved out a nice little niche for experimental club sounds. It was an obscure operation, for sure, but their C90s brought together acts like Beatrice Dillon and Ben UFO, or Cloudface and Powder—the kind of names likely to perk up the ears of a certain type of curious househead with a taste for obscurity—on split mixtapes that traced the outer limits of DJ culture.
Haron, too, is Dutch. Not long ago, he was banging out lush yet lo-fi techno, soaked in emotion and tape saturation, in the company of peers like Legowelt and Aurora Halal. But his debut album forsakes beats altogether. For long stretches, Wandelaar is even bereft of electronics. Much of it could be mistaken for a private-press recording from the 1980s; it is both minimalist and sentimental, a pensive descendant of Ryuichi Sakamoto, Harold Budd, the Catalan composer Frederic Mompou. Right now, in midsummer, it sounds like everything you could wish for in a spacious soundtrack to humid nights, its melodies as graceful as a swallow’s arc against a sky the color of a nectarine. It’s safe to say that, come winter, the album’s environmental properties—its ability to both blend in with its surroundings and heighten the senses—will be just as evocative.
It’s not news that ambient, new age, and Balearic styles have recently been solidifying their footholds in leftfield electronic music, despite the fact that each is decades old; it’s no secret, either, that they are all easily caricatured and frequently faked. But Wandelaar (the title translates as “Walker” or “Hiker”) is a reminder that vision and musicianship will always carry the day. It is a quiet, understated album in which compositional rigor and improvisational expressiveness neatly dovetail.
Wandelaar isn’t entirely without electronics. After “Lotuseter,” the searching 10-minute piece that opens the album, in which short, agile runs are bathed in echo and faint synthesizer—a meditative sojourn, a series of questions without answers—the A-side takes a succession of gentle left turns. First there are fluttering string pads, then a tentative electronic glissando that sounds a bit like a pitched-down THX “deep note”—both markers of a distinctly cinematic style, one quite different from the airy naturalism of the opener. As “Maangerij” seamlessly gives way to “Caverne” (though titled separately, they are essentially two parts of the same composition), the sounds freeze and fracture, echoing some of Oneohtrix Point Never’s disorienting strategies. Finally, the short “Selenieten” closes out the record’s first side with dull thuds and digital trickery: an atonal palate cleanser before Haron returns to the unabashedly sentimental style with which he begins the album.
The B-side’s three long tracks all build on the sound and techniques established with “Lotuseter.” An air of mystery prevails. The ghosts of Debussy and Satie hang like a pastel mist over languid, lyrical melodies, as unexpected modal runs keep the music from tipping too far toward the maudlin. Judicious electronic processing lends a subtly surreal touch. Shifting slapback delay suggests a piano recital staged in an auditorium whose architecture keeps morphing; reverb comes and goes in bursts, tugging against the music’s meandering flow and keeping the listener slightly off balance, like the uneven surge of a chemical flashback.
“Music for Elbows” ends the record with a coda of sorts. This time the halting runs of “Lotuseter” play out more like a forearm mashing keys, in quick, unfussy strokes. If you’ve ever seen the experimental director Chris Marker’s moving 1990 short “Cat Listening to Music”—a three-minute video of his cat sleeping on a keyboard, set to Mompou’s “Pajaro Triste”—you will recognize the mood here: calm, unpretentious, peaceful. Restrained, soothing, but never bland, Wandelaar never tries to be anything it’s not. It’s a canny stylistic shift for Haron, and a wonderful first record from Queeste: a minor miracle disguised as a soundtrack to a catnap.


The composer Peter Broderick assembles a 35-strong choir of professional and amateur singers, and the results are like a secular church service: rough around the edges, punctuated with laughter, and joyous.

Sunday Songs

If you had gone wandering along North Mississippi Avenue in Portland, Oregon, on a Sunday morning a couple of years ago, as you strolled past Taquería Por Que No on your way up to Mississippi Records, you might have heard the muffled sounds of singing filtering through the walls of a white clapboard building. The sound came not from one of the neighborhood’s storefront houses of worship, however, but from inside Beacon Sound, a community-minded record store where, for a year or so, the composer Peter Broderick assembled a few dozen people to break bread and sing together—a kind of secular service, like church without the praying.
Broderick has a serious pedigree: He’s a member of the Danish chamber-indie group Efterklang as well as Kill Rock Stars’ indie-folk band Horse Feathers, and his own releases have appeared on labels like Erased Tapes (home to Nils Frahm and Ólafur Arnalds) and Simon Raymonde’s Bella Union; he recently published his first volume of sheet music for solo piano. Beacon Sound, despite its down-to-earth profile—its Facebook page is pretty evenly split between store news, activism, and local politics—puts out heavy hitters like Terry Riley and Jóhann Jóhannsson on its in-house label.
But the Beacon Sound Choir is an amateur affair that welcomes singers “regardless of musical experience.” Portland singer-songwriter Alela Diane is a member, and so is Broderick’s sister Heather Woods Broderick, also a member of Horse Feathers and Efterklang, but it’s immediately apparent from the ensemble’s swollen tones that this is no professional choir. On the group’s first recording, a 10” on the Berlin/Glasgow label Infinite Greyscale, they didn’t even sing words. Hence the title, Sunday Morning Drones: After coffee and chitchat, with the group standing in a circle, one singer would strike a note and the rest would gradually join in, first in unison and eventually moving up and down the scale before finally coming back to the root note together.
The results of that record were transportive—at once monolithic and vaporous, with nebulous clusters of frequencies and overtones swirling in mid-air like murmurations of starlings. They continue those drone experiments in one song on this short but captivating album, and on the side-long “Sea of Voices,” a remix by the Dutch electronic musician Machinefabriek, their wordless singing is stretched and smeared into a 16-minute opus reminiscent of Stars of the Lid. On the rest of the record’s songs, the group has graduated to actual lyrics, but the project remains an informal, proudly untutored affair.
The sound is thick with the atmosphere of its untreated room. Heavy with natural reverb, footsteps, and the occasional cough or cleared throat, it sounds a lot like a rainy day spent indoors. The opening “Spring Song,” a playful, close-harmonized ode to the end of winter, begins with someone counting off the beat and snapping fingers in time, and it ends with a flurry of giggles. Wind chimes tinkle quietly in the background of “Drone 3,” and if you listen closely to “Can’t Wrap My Head Around It”—a collision of Philip Glass or Meredith Monk and ragged Appalachian folk—you might briefly make out the gurgling of an infant’s coo.
Despite the music’s traditional feel—some pieces sound almost medieval, while others resemble camp meeting songs’ melodies—all were written specifically for the group by members of the choir. “The Perpetual Glow” is a simple lullaby, kind of a psychedelic take on “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” (”Weeping stars go flying/On their way to play/You’ll catch a ride and fly out/To the heavens of your mind,” runs the first verse) for which Broderick devised a basic notation system to enable non-musicians to read the music. “Spring Song” is the result of a songwriting exercise in which the choir broke into three groups, each of which wrote one verse before coming back together to sing the whole song. The final verse perfectly encapsulates its off-the-cuff origins: “Winter’s over/Moods are lifting/Let it glow/I don’t know.”
A few songs are mere fragments, like rehearsal sketches, and these, too, are likely to break off into murmurs. “I completely forgot where—I had a melody in my head!” exclaims a voice in “Watermelon Sugar,” interrupting a soft, wordless chord, and bringing the song to a premature close. No one seems to mind; we hear chuckles, a smattering of applause, and another voice saying, “I loved that so much!”
All these imperfections are part of the record’s charm—particularly the frequent laughter, perhaps because it’s such a palpable reminder of the actual physical joy of making music, particularly singing music, with other people. But the singers can command more serious moods, too. Slipping between major and minor keys, “Fortunate Ones” (written by Holland Andrews, aka Like a Villain) sounds faintly like Georgian polyphony; its somber tones are as rich as the smell of incense. “We are the fortunate ones/Who get to be whole again,” they sing; it is a kind of psalm whose open-ended meaning could just as easily apply to the act of singing itself.


The Australian-born, UK-based musician hones her songwriting and polishes her production without losing the atmospheric qualities that made the first two albums in this trilogy so captivating.

Penelope Three

Trilogies often don’t end well. The Godfather Part III, The Rise of Skywalker, The Matrix Revolutions, and The Dark Knight Rises were all major disappointments, and that’s just a partial list—even The Hangover Part III failed to stick the landing. For Australian-born musician Penelope Trappes, the stakes may not be quite as high, but her new album Penelope Three, the closing chapter of a series that includes 2017’s Penelope One and 2019’s Penelope Two, does arrive with a certain amount of pressure, as it’s clear that she’s made a significant effort to level up her craft.
Before releasing Penelope One, Trappes logged the better part of a decade as one half of electro-techno outfit the Golden Filter, a group that emerged from NYC during the late-2000s bloghouse boom and impressively survived the trend’s precipitous crash. The duo found a smattering of success, but it wasn’t exactly a vehicle in which Trappes—who was then a thirtysomething mother—felt free to fully express herself. Her solo material, however, which she began developing in earnest following a move to the UK in 2014, is intensely personal and emotionally naked; it’s no coincidence that the artwork for several of her releases have revolved around nude portraits of Trappes herself.
Musically, Trappes’ work is heavily stepped in the dreamy sounds of classic 4AD, particularly bands like This Mortal Coil and Cocteau Twins. In many ways, Penelope One and Penelope Two were more like mood boards than collections of actual songs, with hazy soundscapes and richly emotive (albeit somewhat unintelligible) vocals, her reverb-soaked melodies drifting like tendrils of smoke in a dimly lit room. There was a distinct sense of intimacy to those records, and Trappes luxuriated in the quiet as she reckoned with love, loss, and the frustrations of growing older in a youth-obsessed industry.
Those issues are still present on Penelope Three, but they’re no longer swirling in the ether. Although the new LP won’t ever be mistaken for a glossy pop record, its production is notably bigger and brighter than Trappes’ previous efforts. Dazzling first single “Nervous” sounds closer to FKA twigs than Mazzy Star, and aside from being one of the most electronic tunes in her catalog, it also displays a newfound sense of theatricality that pops up repeatedly throughout the album. “Red Yellow” sounds like an updated version of Portishead’s sultry trip-hop pageantry, and album closer “Awkward Matriarch” is another big swing, with Trappes’ vocals triumphantly soaring atop a crescendo of strings and guitar fuzz before the song suddenly peters out in the final minute, leaving behind only the sound of the howling wind and an empty room.
Between the reverb and raw emotion, there are similarities between Grouper’s work and Penelope Three, but even during its starkest moments, there’s a lushness to the LP that makes albums like PJ Harvey’s White Chalk feel like a more appropriate reference. That record dealt in a sort of gothic, piano-centric chamber pop, and Trappes explores similar territory on melancholy songs like “Blood Moon” and “Fur & Feather.” The latter, a clear highlight, was inspired by both Celtic mythology—more specifically, the tale of the Selkie—and the impending departure of Trappes’ only daughter, who left home earlier this year. As such, there’s a tangible sadness to the music, but Penelope Three is ultimately more about processing than wallowing.
Trappes is now in her forties, an age when the music industry—and popular culture in general—tends to start nudging women aside, or ignoring them altogether. Penelope Three pushes back, but not by delivering facile empowerment anthems. Trappes simply takes ownership of who and where she is in life, ruminating on family, femininity, motherhood, and her own body, regardless of whether or not society is interested in those things. It’s a bold choice, and her confidence lends the album a notably weighty feeling.
The record’s fortified production also helps on that front. Album opener “Veil” showcases Trappes’ vocal range—in her younger days, she actually studied opera—while “Forest” and “Northern Light” both employ ominous strings to ratchet up the drama. Her compositions have become less ephemeral, and while there’s still a haunting, dreamlike quality to the work, Penelope Three never attempts to skate by on aesthetic alone. Perhaps some lo-fi charm has been lost along the way, but these are proper songs, and Trappes has centered herself in the narrative while solidifying a sound that was already spellbinding to begin with. It’s difficult to know how audiences will respond—added polish isn’t always appreciated in independent-music circles—but if Trappes was all that concerned with what people thought, she likely wouldn’t have finished this trilogy in the first place.

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


Recorded at the same time as 1986’s masterpiece World of Echo, this posthumous collection offers an essential glimpse into Arthur Russell’s haunted, luminous sound.

Picture of Bunny Rabbit

Like his friend and colleague Julius Eastman, Arthur Russell was an artist with no spiritual homeland. He was a composer who made pop music, an introvert who haunted discos, an Iowa native who was neighbors with Allen Ginsberg. Also like Eastman, Russell has proven slipperier the harder we’ve grasped for him. No matter how many unheard works emerge from the vaults, there is the sense that we will never truly know him. Whether it’s country, dance-pop, or cello improvisation, a serene inscrutability beams out at you from his music, his only true signature.
The person who knew Russell most intimately was his partner, Tom Lee, and our vision of Arthur Russell, however spectral, is largely a product of his work. Russell was widely admired in his lifetime but only managed one studio album—1986’s World of Echo—and never took full advantage of his connections to figures like Ginsberg or Philip Glass. After Russell’s death from AIDS in 1992, Lee tasked himself with sorting through the thousands of poorly labeled tapes Russell left behind. Working with Steve Knutson of Audika Records, Lee has fleshed out Russell’s catalog with extraordinary care.
The albums that Audika has released—including masterpieces like Calling Out Of Context, Love Is Overtaking Me, and Iowa Dream—have redefined what it means to tend to a musical legacy. Each release feels like a coherent piece of a larger picture—a remarkable feat, considering that it doesn’t seem to be at all the way Russell worked. He never stopped working on music that always sounded unfinished, switching endlessly between projects. But Lee and Knutson have taken his unruly, wide-ranging muse and transformed it into a catalog. The result feels less like a discography than a neural map of Russell’s creative process.
For evidence of their grace, consider the fact that the pair waited until 2023 to release this. The nine pieces on Picture of Bunny Rabbit closely resemble the by-now-hallowed World of Echo, both in sound and in spirit. Russell wrote and recorded many of the pieces in the same sessions, and they feel like an extension of that album’s haunted, lunar sound world, with Russell’s voice and cello sending lonely ripples out to die on an ocean of reverb. Picture of Bunny Rabbit offers the chill of encountering more of a beloved artist’s classic work in the moment they made it.
There’s something near-holy about overhearing Russell in this magic half-light again. This was the first atmosphere in which many of us first encountered him—dust motes spinning slowly in light, air stilled, his voice and cello the tenor of murmured prayers. You can almost never make out precisely what Russell is saying, save for alluring phrases that come through crystal-clear: “The very idea,” from “Telling No One,” or “It’s the only day” from “Not Checking Up,” a song in which Russell seems to mumble dreamily about watching an old loved one from afar. Russell was enraptured by ambient sound—blenders, buses, subways, whirring fans—and it seemed important to him that his music fold into the hum of everyday life. “Do you want to know who this person is?” Russell sighs on “Very Reason,” before drifting away again. His music is like a fish tank, his voice swimming mutely by, fixing you with its wide unreadable eye.
When we listen to Picture of Bunny Rabbit, we hear Russell as Knutson and Lee hear him, and many works on the album bear the unmistakable mark of their co-creation. The numbered “Fuzzbuster” pieces that break up the tracklist come from a test pressing unearthed by Russell’s mother and sister. They fit intuitively, like Terrence Malick shots of clouds and sky in between dialogue. “In the Light of a Miracle” is a stunning creation, and it wouldn’t exist without Knutson, who edited and shaped its sublime seven minutes out of a much longer improvisation. Who knows how many unproductive hours and minutes Knutsen logged listening to these tapes before his ears perked up: the bouncing bow pattern, the high vocal melody, seemingly calling from across a distant hill. But the piece, as it exists here, is an exalted clearing, a revelation among a discography of revelations: “Holding in the light/Reaching in the light,” Russell repeats, his voice dancing like a wisp out of your peripheral vision.
For Russell, World of Echo was just one tributary in a vast river of music. It was one mode, one style. He didn’t make academic distinctions, and he didn’t make emotional ones, either—his dance music is suffused with the same unearthly longing as his composed works. All of his work pointed to the same luminous spot in the distance—a hazy glowing light that it seemed like only Russell could see.


On his latest project, the jazz drummer and innovative producer brings the heart of the famous Blue Note catalog into the present.

Makaya McCraven: Deciphering the Message

Deciphering the Message

By the time Blue Note gave Makaya McCraven access to their archives to use as the foundation for his new album, the self-proclaimed “beat scientist” had already been swimming in it for years. The catalog is so essential to the jazz canon—and McCraven’s style in general—that he had already worked with some of the tracks, like trumpeter Kenny Dorham’s 1961 hard bop tune “Sunsets.” The theme persists throughout Deciphering the Message; McCraven is not just exploring Blue Note’s catalog, but his own relationship with it.
With such a sprawling collection of work to pull from, McCraven narrowed his focus to records from the ’60s and earlier, which helps Deciphering the Message maintain the consistency of a single session despite pulling from more than a dozen different records. Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers form the connective tissue; McCraven uses vocal samples from Blakey’s records as a de facto MC, like the “Pee Wee Marquette Announcement” from A Night at Birdland, Vol. 1 or “Introduction by Art Blakey” from At the Jazz Corner of the World, Vol. 1. And sitting at the center of his own orbit of talented contemporary musicians, McCraven spends as much of the album in conversation with Blakey—the drummer, the bandleader, the mentor—as he does with his music.
Through the second half of the 20th century, Art Blakey’s band served as a finishing school of sorts for some of jazz’s brightest young stars, offering early platforms to the likes of Lonnie Liston Smith, Terence Blanchard, both Wynton and Branford Marsalis, and many, many more. Here, McCraven manages to assemble a virtual all-star band from Jazz Messenger alumni (Horace Silver, Kenny Dorham, Hank Mobley, Wayne Shorter) and his own crew of contemporary virtuosos (Jeff Parker, Junius Paul, Marquis Hill, Greg Ward). He intentionally obfuscates the line between samples and new recordings, between drum machines and drum kits. The result is something familiar yet otherworldly, an album full of collaborations between young talent and old legends, some of whom passed long ago.
Collaborative as it is, Deciphering the Message began as a solitary process, with McCraven digging through Blue Note’s crates alone to build a foundation. He’d pull loops and rearrange parts, then overdub bass, keyboards, and drums. It mirrors the workflow of a hip-hop producer, not unlike J Dilla and Madlib, who serve as his closest contemporary analogues. He’d send those sketches to friends like Parker, Paul, and Hill, who would record their parts and send them back, giving him another pass at the arrangement with fresh material informed by the originals.
There’s a scholarly approach to the record, a study in non-linear composition, and while there are infinitely more vibes here than an academic text, a closer look reveals a thesis on McCraven’s philosophy of using the recording studio as an instrument. He eases into this on the first track, inserting his own drum, bass, and percussion tracks into saxophonist Hank Mobley’s 1966 song, “A Slice of the Top.” McCraven’s rhythms inject new energy, propelling old songs into the new millennium with a beat-driven, hip-hop feel. And Joel Ross’ vibraphone, Jeff Parker and Matt Gold’s guitars, Marquis Hill’s trumpet, Junius Paul’s bass, Greg Ward’s alto and De’Sean Jones’ tenor saxophones...they all feed off of it, sometimes blending into the original composition, sometimes piercing through the mix to demand attention, like the familiar intonation of Parker’s electric guitar on Kenny Dorham’s “Sunset,” which rises and falls like a horn with a squeal filtered through a distortion pedal.
McCraven carved out his own space in contemporary jazz on In The Moment (2015) and Universal Beings (2018), sampling his own band’s improvised sessions, then pulling, stretching, and rearranging the pieces until it shaped something new. And his stunning recreation of Gil-Scott Heron’s I’m New Here gave new context to the incendiary words of the famous poet and musician. With each subsequent project, he continues a lifelong conversation with the music that’s shaped him, leaving his own mark on it in turn.
Deciphering the Message takes it further: it blurs the line of what a “real” band is. Is it a group of people in a room, or can it stretch across time, including both the living and the dead? McCraven said he wants to introduce a new generation to these records that were foundational not only to him, but to music itself. These artists helped draft a blueprint for the way contemporary musicians improvise; soaring and swerving in and out of the pocket, yet always pulled back in by the gravitational pull of the rhythm section. With these improvised riffs, they forged building blocks for an entire wave of hip-hop—these are the records that MPC maestros like Pete Rock and DJ Premier, or Madlib and J Dilla would pick through with tweezers when making the beats that would come to define a generation. Deciphering the Message helps connect these dots. But it also plays like a fantasy come to life, a dream set at the Blue Note, with long-lost titans beaming in from the afterlife to sit in with the young blood, like proud parents watching their children surpass them.

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


The Latinx artist reimagines traditional Mexican ranchera folk songs with a goth edge and a lavish, telenovela-style production.

La Luz de la Esperanza

In August of 2015, Lizette Anabelle Gutierrez fled the San Francisco Bay for her aunt’s farm in Jalostitlán, Jalisco, Mexico. In San Francisco, she had hosted a monthly goth/industrial/punk/drag party called Dark Room, and as San Cha, she made the kind of music you might hear at that party. But she arrived in Jalisco defeated and downtrodden, emotionally drained by a toxic relationship with a mentor who turned on her. It was at this nadir that the idea for La Luz de la Esperanza was born.
Encouraged by her tía, she embraced the region’s rancheras, traditional folk songs that originated in the Mexican countryside. Her aunt liked to remind her of Pepe Aguilar, a legendary ranchera artist who at one time aspired to rock’n’roll stardom; it was only once he embraced rancheras that he became a star. As they did for Aguilar, these Mexican folk songs helped Gutierrez find her voice, pushing her outside of her comfort zone to realize that she indeed had the range.
Enamored with the beauty and drama of the telenovelas she grew up with, Gutierrez conceptualized her own, using the rancheras as the vehicle for her own novela. But the scale of her ambition exceeded her means, and it would be a dream deferred. She shelved the novela and focused on writing what would become Capricho del Diablo (“The Devil’s Whim”), a stunning cumbia goth EP that told the story of the mentor that tortured her and drove her from the Bay in the first place.
Capricho del Diablo christened a new sound for San Cha, and its success opened up new opportunities. Supported with studio time and funding, she was able to manifest her dream at the Red Bull Music Festival Los Angeles, staging the multi-act novela in a converted church complete with the full band, background singers, elaborate sets, costumes, and makeup she originally envisioned. La Luz de la Esperanza is the realization of that dream.
The story follows Dolores, a domestic worker at an opulent estate who falls for a suave aristocrat named Salvador. It queers the telenovela trope of a poor girl falling for a rich man: Dolores is poor but elegant, bathed in sunlight. She’s inhabited, but not haunted, by the spirit Esperanza, the embodiment of hope; when she finds true love it’s not with a handsome prince, but with a femme ghost. In many ways, the record serves as a metaphorical backdrop for San Cha’s life and career. Dolores is romanced by the prospect of a better life, only to find herself caged, abused, and ultimately rescued by a ghost.
Musically, the songs on La Luz de la Esperanza feel like modernized rancheras with a rock edge and a goth sensibility. You can hear these disparate influences on tracks like “Por el Horizonte,” with its choral harmonies, thumping bassline, and layered guitar tracks that wail as dramatically as a telenovela character finding out their lover is in a coma. “Prettiest Thing” injects an electric charge into a ranchera guitar, with dreamy atmospherics that capture the weightlessness of falling in love.
Throughout the record, San Cha effortlessly mixes Spanish and English, acoustic and electronic sounds, rock riffs and towering, operatic vocals. Her voice is a revelation, immensely powerful; it evokes wondrous beauty as she plumbs the depths of tragedy. She could always sing, but those classic rancheras her tía pressed her to sing helped her realize her voice’s true strength. It’s the perfect vehicle for her talent.
This may not technically be San Cha’s first record—she released the industrial goth-rock LP Off Her Throne! in 2013—but it is still very much a debut. It’s a work of art that took her entire life to make, the synthesis of years of struggle and growth, a style forged on the ranches of Jalisco and in the queer clubs of San Francisco. La Luz de la Esperanza is San Cha’s journey of self-actualization, empowered by the spirits of her ancestors to crush her demons into a fine powder and then use it to beat her face with a perfect smoky eye.


The fast-rising Santa Cruz hardcore band attack their new LP with a murderous intensity, transforming genre tropes into killer hooks.

Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress

Gulch have reached a rarefied status in hardcore where outsiders who haven’t heard their music still might have heard things about them—frontman Elliott Morrow’s demonic intensity, or maybe the group’s now-legendary This is Hardcore 2019 set, in which they imported the gleeful, cartoonish physicality of the Santa Cruz scene to a roomful of burly East Coast punks. The band’s merch is notorious, too: their logo adorns Sanrio-themed hoodies and rugby sweaters that usually sell out within hours and fetch over $500 a pop on resale sites. None of this necessarily makes Gulch unique within hardcore, where even the best albums risk redundancy next to to the live experience. But there is no live experience of any kind right now; Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress is all Gulch have to sustain their hype in 2020, and they invest themselves in their debut like the quarantine could last the rest of their lives.
Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress isn’t meant to replicate the grim, grubby spaces where Gulch might have been playing in a simpler time. Jack Shirley’s always-sharp production removes the murk that suffused 2019 Promo (two tracks of which show up here) and allows the band’s ugly, ugly vision for hardcore to come into relief. Even if there are no pits to open the fuck up for the foreseeable future, Gulch still acknowledge the value of showmanship and scarcity—they dropped Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress with mere days of advance notice on July 24 and unintentionally provided entertaining contrast for people who find space for hardcore and folklore. For all of their fans’ superlatives like “unhinged” or “chaotic,” Gulch are very much intentional about how they present themselves: as with 2018’s Burning Desire to Draw Last Breath, Boone Naka’s strikingly beautiful and bloody art graces the cover.
On first exposure, Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress is 15 minutes of flailing limbs and demonic howls held together by centrifugal force, intended to be confirmed by two or three-word assessments of its intensity. The group is equally adept with the pure speed-freak flash of the ultra-technical Botch and Dillinger Escape Plan, the sheer ugliness of Emperor or Rotten Sound, and the antisocial populism of any given Sound and Fury headliner. Not much is intelligible, save for self-explanatory title shouts of “Lie, Deny, Sanctify” and “Cries of Pleasure, Heavenly Pain,” whose theme is more literally explored in “Fucking Towards Salvation.”
Subsequent listens reveal actual nuance and craft, words that might imply an egghead’s vision of hardcore. But even though the word “cerebral” is in the title, all such activity here is in service of intimidation and dominance. The brevity of Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress may honor hardcore’s structural rules, as Gulch understand 15 minutes is about as long as anyone should last making a scrunched face. It’s also a decision that gives specific meaning to every single blow to the skull. Gulch elevate traditional hardcore signifiers into killer hooks—on the title track, they pitch and stereo-pan feedback into a conversational melody, underscoring Morrow’s best impersonation of an overdriven amp. They throw an evil tritone over the brief militaristic pomp of “Cries of Pleasure, Heavenly Pain,” making Morrow’s howls of corporeal annihilation feel earned. They slow down and bring back their nasty riffs, thereby making them nastier. Each 90-second burst of malevolence here is a writhing, breathing being that Gulch have fully under their control.
Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress ends with a cover suggesting Gulch might have their sights set on bigger things. The closing “Sin In My Heart,” relatively epic at three and a half minutes, isn’t a particularly obscure or counterintuitive cover choice for a hardcore band. Gulch have wisely identified the Siouxsie and the Banshees song that already came equipped with a hardcore bassline and a hardcore lyric sheet (nearly half is just the title being repeated). They aren’t breaking the mold or expanding the horizons of hardcore, just providing an infusion of vitality when the genre should feel paralyzed; if the pit ever opens again, they’ll be ready when we are.

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


For his first album under his own name, the ever-wild guitar renegade lampoons the posers and newbies while again rewiring rock’n’roll until the circuits almost short.

Spencer Sings the Hits!

If there’s been a constant in Jon Spencer’s 30-year journey from garage-punk attitude monster to Baby Driver car-chase choreographer, it’s been his fascination with trash. For Spencer, disposability is the ultimate marker of authenticity. He’s built his musical empire from pop-culture detritus too strange, lascivious, and threatening to be absorbed into the mainstream. It’s there in the scrap-metal beats of Pussy Galore, in the B-movie sound design of the Blues Explosion, in the porno-mag packaging of Boss Hog, and in the band he calls Heavy Trash. At this point in his career, that zeal has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Despite the Blues Explosion’s brief flirtation with Beastie-abetted arena tours and movie-star-laden videos in the 1990s, Spencer has effectively been expunged from the modern indie rock narrative, just as his hell-raising heroes Hasil Adkins, Andre Williams, and R.L. Burnside have been excluded from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
If contemporary culture has consigned Spencer to the rubbish bin, the least he can do is make a dance move out of it. His first-ever album under his own name, Spencer Sings the Hits!, opens with a directive to “Do the Trash Can,” a floor-quaking stomp that’s part Fred Schneider, part Frankenstein. The track hinges on the maniacal spiel and sweaty stench of the typical Blues Explosion grind. But, in lieu of Judah Bauer’s slinky swagger, Quasi keyboardist Sam Coomes delivers a synth-buzzed fuzz that doubles as phantom bass. And in sharp contrast to Russell Simins’ funky struts, drummer M. Sord’s clamorous, caveman beats burrow a subterranean path back to the garbage-can clang of Pussy Galore.
Spencer spent last winter rummaging through a junkyard near his recording locale in Benton Harbor, Mich., searching for pieces of scrap to accompany traditional drums. He found his holy grail in the form of a gas tank from an old Chevy. For Spencer, the metallic sound is no simple throwback device or gimmick; it’s his way of asserting an elbow-greased work ethic in a culture that’s become reliant on push-button convenience. On Spencer Sings the Hits!, Spencer isn’t so much playing rock’n’roll as scientifically reanimating it, welding and wiring the debris together into a mechanistic monstrosity that’s perpetually on the verge of short-circuiting.
Spencer Sings the Hits! is, of course, an ironic sales pitch. While riding the dollar-store Stones riff of “I Got the Hits,” he spends more time cheekily boasting of his chart-topping potential (“So many emotions! So much passion! Crazy melodies! So many hits!”) than actually demonstrating it. In Spencer’s case, the “hits” are more of the clenched-fist variety, as he devotes a good deal of the record to taking shots at posers who would dare take the easy route to rock infamy. On “Fake,” he hammers at “counterfeit punk” with an industrial-blues mallet, while the zombie a-go-go of “Beetle Boots” digs its pointy heels into upstart groups that put fashion before passion: “You think it’s easy being in a band/Wrong priorities, misguided intentions/Ironic distance just reinforces convention!” The song would have felt more relevant 15 years ago in the post-Strokes/Stripes era of garage-rock opportunists; it’s not like the market is currently overrun with armchair Back from the Grave fetishists. Still, Spencer oozes enough authoritative contempt to make “imitation leather and plastic zippers” seem like crimes worthy of a bench trial.
Even as pop culture continues to diverge sharply from Spencer’s definition of cool, he remains too spirited and unhinged as a performer to harden into cranky-old-man bitterness. He’s more like the neighborhood freak at the end of the street who’s less interested in scaring the kids off his lawn by wielding a shotgun than in weirding them out with all bizarre junk he’s hoarding on the porch. On “Wilderness,” he hops aboard a chugging “No Fun” groove but flips Iggy’s ennui into a celebration of holding onto whatever makes you feel good in an ever-changing world: “Stick your head in a cave/Stick your head in a hole/Rockabilly, disco, punk, soul/Trousers with flares/The noise, the noise, the noise!” Fashion is fleeting, but trash is forever.


The bounce queen’s latest EP marks her return to the unctuous, mechanized mother tongue of New Orleans.

3rd Ward Bounce EP

Big Freedia is the gender non-conformist darling of New Orleans bounce music who has made waves in the crossover markets of cable television (as the star of the Fuse series “Big Freedia Bounces Back”), mainstream pop, and rap. Freedia’s star has risen since her bellowing timbre laced Beyoncé’s “Formation” and the 2018 Drake single “Nice for What.” Her success is a testament to her ability to beat the odds. She has grown from the Third Ward’s Melpomene Projects to become the most popular ambassador of bounce music—a hybrid of electronic and rap named for the action it elicits from anyone with a little junk in the trunk—on the international stage. The wins Freedia has enjoyed, however, have been countered by legal trouble and family tragedy and it would not be a stretch to wonder whether Big Freedia had enough gas in the tank to bounce back. True to the hometown tradition of resilience, 3rd Ward Bounce marks her return to the unctuous, mechanized mother tongue of New Orleans.
Freedia’s five-track 3rd Ward Bounce EP follows her 2016 holiday album A Very Big Freedia Christmazz as the polychromatic fruit of her first major label deal with Asylum Records. Though lead single “Rent” draws parallels between the lyrical content and Freedia’s housing-related legal issues, the song is more a close cousin to Lauryn Hill’s “Ex-Factor,” demanding reciprocity from people that pay her little more than lip service. That sentiment is the wide foundation of the project. Though “Rent” delivers its message through the lens of a relationship with a freeloading paramour (she dresses down with the adlib, “Bitch, I’m your landlord”), the point could apply to anyone that has ever taken Freedia or the artform of bounce for granted. Big Freedia’s response, appropriately, is “Talkin’ talkin’ talkin’ talkin, yada yada yada yada.” It seems fairly simple as far as she is concerned. You either you show up for the party or you don’t.
Big Freedia dials back the crisp exploratory pop on 2014’s Just Be Free to embrace the wobbling down-home slappers that have long been her bread and butter. Leveraging the momentum of the 2017 Mannie Fresh collaborative track “Dive,” Freedia pairs with singer Lizzo on the bubblegum and bass-tinged “Karaoke.” She’s back at fighting weight when she says, “I showed up on time/Leave hoes shook inside,” at which point Freedia drops the title track—a hometown roll call that should assuage any fears she’s gone Hollywood. Then there’s “Bomb,” plied with a cacophony of electronic claps that drown the mix, and heavy-handed in its borrowing from the traditions of trap, Miami bass, and EDM.
Big Freedia rebounds and caps her homecoming with the Goldiie-assisted “Play,” which picks up where her “Formation” monologue left off. In an attempt to ride the wave of that gigantic look just a bit longer, Freedia pens a song that reinforces the “I did not come to play” mantra of the latter. Conflating a cheap attempt to extend the shelf life of the moment with a signature drop wastes an opportunity to double down on the ace writing that opens the EP. The soulful run on the refrain is a familiar crutch by the end of the release. While it would be refreshing to hear Freedia carry a project without a singer, the addition of a crooner has historically proven effective in making rap (and bounce) palatable to pop consumers. Given Big Freedia’s stated intention to slay, the decision is an understandable concession on an otherwise solid release that makes the proliferation of New Orleans bounce music her top priority.