The songwriter’s latest great long ode to himself is at once bloated and transcendent, boring and mesmerizing.

Mark Kozelek

“The Mark Kozelek Museum” appears on Mark Kozelek’s new album Mark Kozelek, his latest collection of songs as Yelp reviews. It is a ten-and-a-half minute inventory of Mark Kozelek heirlooms: crystals taken from a chandelier at Jim Morrison’s Florida State University house, the “innocent memory” of hearing “I just fucked my favorite lead singer” during a consensual tryst in the ’90s, a guitar solo in the style of Yes’ Steve Howe, an experiment with the melodic qualities of the word “diarrhea” and a backstage encounter with his “brother in music” Ariel Pink. “No one can accuse me or Ariel Pink of ever being boring,” he croons and “The Mark Kozelek Museum” is by turns psychedelically boring and mesmerizing. It’s about nothing and also somehow everything.
Mark Kozelek is nearly an hour and a half monument to nothingness. Can even the most diligent curators of the Mark Kozelek legacy justify its existence after five releases of nearly the same exact style in 2017 alone? As he reaches a prolificacy that would give Robert Pollard a stress ulcer, the challenge lies in discerning the incremental differences between one dispatch of songs about sandwiches and Scarface and boxing and another.
The most important thing to know about Mark Kozelek is that it really is truth in advertising—whereas all of his collaborations were essentially Kozelek doing his thing over exactly what you’d expect (distended doomgaze with Jesu, post-rock abstraction with Jim White and Ben Boye), here it’s just him and his latest new toy, looping devices that allow him to recreate the thump of his drum machines on album highlight “Live in Chicago” and stretch “diarrhea” into a ten-second rhythmic bed. It is kind of a pretty word when stripped of its meaning.
At least for now, it appears that he’s lost interest in the 8-bit synths and boom-bap that turned some of Common as Light and Love Are Red Valleys of Blood into appointment listening, the closest thing we’ll ever hear to an actual Sun Kil Moon rap album. That record’s tenuous adjacence to hip-hop results in this self-titled album’s most self-mythologizing moment—Kozelek happens upon someone listening to Common as Light and Love on Spotify, who not only doesn’t recognize Kozelek, but Kozelek doesn’t recognize it himself. This whole delirious exchange is a result of Kozelek being in the grips of a sunstroke caused by him getting a little too careless, dancing in his backyard with his weed whacker (commemorated on “Weed Whacker,” naturally).
It has a lot of competition for this album’s moment of peak of absurdity—he quotes a stray line of 2Pac dialogue from Biggie & Tupac because he runs out of words following a riff about Al Gore’s thoughts on Donald Trump, a fan working at a bookstore jokes about them going to Panera Bread and another patron calls their bluff by saying there actually is one in San Francisco now. Kozelek ends up getting kicked out the store. It’s a long story itself and a longer story about how it fits perfectly into the gorgeous devotional “My Love for You Is Undying”—it takes about 13 minutes to tell it.
And yet, the idea that we’re supposed to be laughing at Kozelek underestimates the cagey brilliance that often accompanies these songs. On “Live in Chicago,” the specific resonance of playing his own song, the heartbreaking “Needles Disney World” in Orlando is soon overshadowed by the uncomfortable introduction of a song giving tribute to the Pulse nightclub victims a year after the fact. Most songwriters would struggle to find the proper metaphor or conceptual framework to honor the victims of gun violence and our desensitization to its regularity without sensationalizing it—Kozelek trusts common language over poetry, looking at the hearty succulents that serve as memorials and “the contrast of the beautiful Florida sun and its laws supporting guns.”
Who else is writing songs about the way a devastating sports outcome can affect the local economy? Kozelek claims to be too ignorant of football to comment on the Saints’ catastrophic playoff loss that happened about four months before this album’s release, but he’s able to rattle off a reminder of their contributions to food and music as consolation (specifically, “crawfish etouffee and Phil Anselmo and Lil Wayne”). Sure, the personification of the San Francisco fog on April’s ”Lost Verses” was heartbreakingly gorgeous, but saying it’s “like [how] Bon Scott’s soul hovers over Perth” and “like a bunch of grandmothers moving through Woolworth’s” is something no one else would even attempt.
About 75 minutes in, Kozelek introduces the penultimate song with a line from the Mark Kozelek Lyric Generator: “Eating a po’ boy at Mothers next to a photo of a young Riddick Bowe,” The photo inspires some soul-searching about the nature of his itinerant lifestyle, the resonance of A Confederacy of Dunces, and a treasured art deco lamp, which spins off riffs that are touching and tragicomic—his New Orleans home used to be decorated solely with that lamp and his mattress, and after years of lighting his songwriting, book-reading, and lovemaking, it ends up breaking due to an unnecessary window inspection. He’s bummed out and his girlfriend demands he do something with his day—which brings him right back to the first line and explains why he’s eating a po’ boy at Mothers next to a photo of a young Riddick Bowe—the structural integrity of “Young Riddick Bowe” is pretty fucking mind-blowing for a song that sounded made up on the spot.
Moments like these explain why Mark Kozelek backs up its creator’s boast of never being boring despite lacking anything in the way of traditional hooks or dynamics. I have absolutely no idea where any of these songs will be 20 seconds from now, which is how it holds my attention constantly, in contrast to the times I find myself zoning out during traditionally-structured three-minute songs that attempt to be memorable. It’s a quality that Benji had to an extreme degree, so why does it feel like “Young Riddick Bowe” will suffer the same fate as “Philadelphia Cop,” “Butch Lullaby,” “Needles Disney World” and the other songs from 2017 that seemed equally revelatory at the time and forgotten by the time he released his next project? As with any recent Mark Kozelek record, it’s easy to feel cheated here—he has a voice that maintains an actorly mastery of modulation and inflection, his observational genius and constantly evolving guitar playing inspired younger acts like Joyce Manor, Snail Mail and Phoebe Bridgers that could not be further removed from the stereotypical “guys in tennis shoes” he mocked only six years ago. Imagine if he could apply these gifts into these things called songs, or even if he downshifted production to two albums a year like in his 2012-2014 rejuvenation period.
But at this point, Kozelek clearly is someone who believes songwriting characteristics like verse/chorus alternation or cadence or repeated hooks are vestigial things that prevented him from the most direct and freeing form of communication—everything he releases now is a new Mark Kozelek album, but also his de facto Twitter feed, a bonus disc of stage banter, a beautifully-soundtracked podcast, an Instagram, a Yelp elite account. Despite Kozelek’s technophobic rep, Mark Kozelek is a thoroughly modern album, one doesn’t separate the art from the artist but collapses the two completely.


Possessed by a genuine love of classic dark electro and vintage electronics, the new Italians Do It Better label reimagines the Italo-disco of the 1970s and 80s as stark, retro-futurist noir electro. Sparse, skeletal, and consumed by a constant sense of creeping dread, After Dark is the sleek soundtrack to lives of moral ambiguity in post-urban shadows. Rising stars Glass Candy, the Chromatics, and Mirage appear.

After Dark

A compilation like this has been a long time coming. In 1997, Holland-based DJ/producer I-F basically invented electroclash with his underground dance hit "Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass". Two years later, he helped catalyze the ongoing Italo-disco revival with one of the genre's most essential compilations, Mixed Up in the Hague, Vol. 1, a DJ mix that pulled together defining cuts like Mr. Flagio's vocoder-fronted "Take a Chance" and Klein & MBO's "Blue Monday"-influencing "Dirty Talk". Since then, other DJ mixes such as Morgan Geist's Unclassics have kept vintage Italo on turntables, while I-F's Italo-focused Cybernetic Broadcasting System has deepened the canon for real devotees.
2007 may be remembered in some circles for its dance-rock hybrids: Klaxons and Justice, "nu rave" and "blog house," each ably filling in for the dance-punk and electroclash of previous trend cycles. But it's also a year when significant numbers of contemporary artists have embraced Italo's Giorgio Moroder-styled synth arpeggios and brought them into the new millennium. Sweden's Sally Shapiro and Cloetta Paris are breathing new life into the wispy synth-pop of Italo singer Valerie Dore, while the UK's Kathy Diamond is making beardo synth-pop with producer Maurice Fulton. The enigmatic Black Devil Disco Club's 28 After could've been made any time in the past 30 years. In the icy winter afterglow of Shapiro's Disco Romance, Portland, Ore. acts Glass Candy and Chromatics helped keep Pitchfork HQ's Italo love aflame with their first releases for Italians Do It Better, a new label from Troubleman Unlimited founder Mike Simonetti. Viva Italia.
On After Dark, the fledgling imprint assembles mostly vinyl-only or previously unreleased tracks by its current roster, which also includes Farah, Mirage, and Professor Genius. Produced in substantial part by Glass Candy guitarist Johnny Jewel, the comp is practically a Mixed Up in the Hague for present-day Italo, only with the darker ambiance its title implies. Where its precursor could at times play up Italo's proclivity for cheese (once experienced in the U.S. via minor Eurodisco hits by the likes of Falco and Taco), this album wisely eschews ironic winks and kitsch-for-kitsch's sake. Shapiro might find an indie pop romance in Italo, but After Dark lovingly re-imagines the style as retro-futurist noir-- a sleek soundtrack to lives of moral ambiguity in post-urban shadows.
The best tracks on the compilation embody that eerie slant on the old Italo throb/pulse without letting an air of minor-key reflection lapse into air quotes. On the extended 12" version of Chromatics' "In the City", the crackle of vinyl, distant synth swoops, skeletal drum patter, and singer Ruth Radelet's narcoticized murmurs about "midnight workers" and a "concrete river" evokes rain hitting sidewalks. Glass Candy's Italo coming-out, "I Always Say Yes", is conspicuously absent, but their hazy "Rolling Down the Hills (Spring Demo)" opens the disc with horns and singer Ida No's deadly cold vocal presence.
After Dark's other acts approach the compilation's dusky Italo aesthetic from similar perspectives. New Jersey-based Professor Genius homes in on the dystopian synth work of Vangelis and the upbeat expressiveness of Alexander Robotnick on instrumentals "La Grotta (Demo)" and album-closing "Pegaso". The vocoder makes its sole appearances on two tracks by Italy's Mirage ("Lady Operator", "Lake of Dreams"), but Mirage uses the instrument to enhance singer Julius' alienation, not to dish cheap nostalgic thrills. Texas-based Farah keep up the metronomic beats and analog cascades, but "Dancing Girls (Suite 304 Demo)" adds a section sung in Persian, while the spoken-word monologue of "Law of Life" sounds like a scripture reading from a church of the damned. It's one of the few moments on After Dark that seems stilted as much as reverent.
For plenty more reverence, look to the album's cover versions. Though occasionally distracting, After Dark's updates of older compositions are good signposts: Glass Candy's relatively direct take on Kraftwerk's essential 1981 "Computer Love", or a lavishly orchestrated rendition of Paris-based Eurodisco group Belle Epoque's 1977 "Miss Broadway" (later sampled by rapper Special Ed on 1990's "Come On, Let's Move It"). Not quite a cover, but Mirage's remix of Indeep's 1982 classic "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life" adds evocative Italo synths to the original's spare, post-disco bass line and early hip-hop vocals.
In addition, both Glass Candy and Chromatics cover songs by ex-DNA member Robin Crutchfield's Dark Day, particularly suiting Glass Candy's shift from no-wave to disco. A tinny analog synth rotates through slight arpeggio variations without giving way to a shift in mood on Glass Candy's cover of "The Chameleon", haunted by suicide and unnamed attackers. The steady snare thwack and detached atmospherics on Chromatics' version of the catchy "Hands in the Dark" suggest Chromatics' MySpace quote-- "Night Drive"-- fits them even better than it does Jan Hammer riffer Kavinsky's recent "Testarossa Nightdrive", though here it's surely a drive headed toward despair.
So there it is: Italo survived electroclash. And the recent explosion of Italo disco-inspired acts culminating (for now) in After Dark probably suggests the style will survive current indie-dance trends as well. In an interview for Australia's Rave Magazine, Simian Mobile Disco's James Ford (who produced the latest releases by Klaxons and Arctic Monkeys) says of his own dance-pop outfit's swooning single "I Believe": "We've been getting into loads of slow, dreamy disco stuff-- the Emperor Machine, and a pair of bands in particular called Chromatics and Glass Candy-- and it partly came about like that." Just don't look for Justice to follow suit quite yet.


In 2004, Katy Davidson infused her indie-pop project Dear Nora—an influence on the likes of Girlpool and Joyce Manor—with a windswept folk sensibility. Her most complex album is newly reissued.

Mountain Rock

At the turn of the millennium, the Pacific Northwest’s embrace of grunge and riot grrrl was quietly being replaced by a soft introspection that arose from the area’s lush and cool environment. Led by bands like the Microphones, Mirah, and Little Wings, this scene recognized the vastness of the world and explored their place within it: “But I’m small, I’m not a planet at all/I’m small, I’m small, we’re all,” sang Phil Elverum on 2001’s The Glow Pt 2. They appeared in each other’s projects, released each other’s music, and generally evolved together as a community.
Katy Davidson became embedded in this world after moving to Portland in 1995 to attend the liberal arts college Lewis & Clark. It was there, in the summer of 1999, that she formed Dear Nora alongside her classmates Marianna Ritchey and Ryan Wise. Crafting speedy jangle-pop that cherished emotional earnestness, the early Dear Nora sound was strikingly similar to the music of their Magic Marker labelmates Tullycraft, All Girl Summer Fun Band, and the Owls. After releasing a debut LP, We’ll Have a Time, in early 2001, Davidson moved to San Francisco where she continued performing and touring under the Dear Nora moniker.
To construct her second album, Mountain Rock, in 2003, Davidson retreated to her birthplace of Arizona. There, her childhood home was a geodesic dome built by her father on the side of a mountain in the Sonoran desert. Returning to Arizona allowed Davidson to unlock an innate intimacy. (Joan Didion once said of her own native California, “I am easy here in a way that I am not easy in other places,” and the sentiment seems to apply.) Coloring this natural bliss, however, is terror. The songs of Mountain Rock were penned in response to George W. Bush’s election, 9/11, and the early days of the Iraq War. A sensation of impending dread floats through them. Take the first words sung on opener “The Lonesome Border, Pt 1”: “I know it’s gonna be a strange time/Well it can’t possibly be any stranger than the present/’Cause now it is said, there’s a change/And I sensed the change in me.”
Then there is “People, Don’t You Know?,” which feels like a 40-second brief of the 2015 New Yorker article “The Really Big One,” about a mega-quake that will devastate the Northwest. (“And won’t it be weird/When the dust storms appear/And all life is obliterated,” Davidson sings with a shrug). On “Hung Up,” Davidson buckles under existential worry: “That I will never change/That I am not changing.” Perhaps it’s the struggle to see oneself during a period of surreal transition that helps make Mountain Rock feel so pertinent in 2017.
Communing with the desert changed Dear Nora’s sound from sing-song indie pop to windswept, serene mysticism. The reissue is composed of 20 barebones tracks (there are three new additions) that recall the folk sensibilities of the Roches, Judee Sill, and Elverum, but it also contains traces of the Beatles’ dreamy dissonance found in Rubber Soul or Revolver. There’s certainly a psychedelic vibe to Mountain Rock—not in the “turn on, tune in, drop out” sense, but in the willingness to submit oneself to introspection. Davidson’s focus on the spartan acoustic guitar allows her to replicate small moments, like wind whistling across rocks, the movements of a bird. Every pluck feels purposeful—microcosmic echoes of the world slightly shifting its weight. This effect is heightened by the atmospheric, instrumental interludes scattered throughout: “Living Song” is a mesmerizing drone, “West Nile!!” is an extraterrestrial-sounding guitar loop, “The Climb” is a sleepy piano piece. “Departure Song” is a spare improvised track recorded among the steel curvature of a Quonset hut, which gives the song its vast, cavernous reverberations.
Mountain Rock is largely one tranquil note, but what a beautiful note. The rare moments of tonal difference are not disruptive; rather, they fit the varying moods of life. “Give Me Some of Your Love” is a rare upbeat moment on the album—a blast of twee that Davidson claims in the liner notes is meant to be mocking—but it’s difficult not to take everything on this album at face-value when there is so much apparent vulnerability. “Here We Come Around Again” is another lighthearted track, though it is upfront about its emotional omniscience.
“Oxygen & the Mellow Stuff” is Mountain Rock’s peak. The chorus comes together in a huge way; it recalls nature, like a geyser exploding or a sunrise. It draws a direct line to the charmed beltings of indie-pop duo Girlpool, who referenced Davidson’s project on their 2015 album Before the World Was Big (with a titular song, “Dear Nora”). In quieter moments, like on the wispy “You Are a Bear,” Mountain Rock points towards successors like Girlpool and New York’s Frankie Cosmos; they deliver lines so intimate they necessitate a scrunched face and closed eyes. In 2016, heart-on-sleeve punkers Joyce Manor also listed Dear Nora as a guiding light for their album Cody, and while these nods did not necessarily galvanize the reissue, they attest to Dear Nora’s still-growing influence. Mountain Rock earns it, an album devoted to the inner self and the struggle to find one’s place. As a teenage Susan Sontag once wrote of Fritz Busch’s compositions, “If I could always hear them, how resolute and serene I would be.”


Natural Information Society is a shifting collective led by bassist, composer, and improviser Joshua Abrams, and they turn out to be the perfect collaborators for the drifting, new age-inspired Bitchin Bajas. Automaginary feels thoroughly modern, but also ancient.

Bitchin Bajas / Natural Information Society: Automaginary

Automaginary

It would be tough to find a more cosmically inspired pairing than Natural Information Society and Bitchin Bajas. So, it’s a happy coincidence that both happen to reside in Chicago.
Natural Information Society is a shifting collective led by bassist, composer, and improviser Joshua Abrams. A long-time presence in the Chicago jazz and experimental music community, he's spent the past five years releasing albums—including Natural Information, Represencing, and the recent double LP Magnetoception—that have concentrated on meditative, pulse-driven music. Rather than a traditional upright or electric bass, on these records Abrams favors a three-stringed North African lute called a guimbri. The instrument’s percussive but rubbery tone provides a foundation for fluid and hypnotic embellishments on percussion, guitar, autoharp, and harmonium.
Lead by Cooper Crain—of Chicago-based krautrock revivalists, Cave—Bitchin Bajas’ music draws inspiration from the minimalist and new age records of the late '60s and '70s. On last year’s Bitchin Bajas and this year’s Transporteur EP, the group crafted patient and serene zone-out music that made heavy use of vintage synthesizers and tape loops.
As a collaboration, Automaginary flatters both parties. Bajas’ music often relies on the embellishment of looped phrases, be they short keyboard figures, guitar riffs, or abstract sounds. Working with an improvising ensemble allows the band—represented here by Crain, Dan Quinlivan, and Rob Frye—the chance to operate in a more dynamic setting. Throughout the compositions musicians drop in and out, switch melodies, or shuffle the phrasing of their riffs, allowing the music to feel organic and alive in a way that’s tough to replicate with a static loop. In turn, Natural Information Society’s scope is expanded through Bajas’ tastefully curated collection of old keyboards, whose hazy tones reinforce the music’s airy and meditative sensibility.
On the nearly 20-minute drone opener, "On No Fade", bowed upright bass tones slowly give way to humming keyboards and piano flourishes. The music is melodic, but never in a concrete or hummable sense and while it gradually increases in density, the band avoids a clear climax. It’s very peaceful listening. The subsequent compositions are more in line with Abrams’ recent records. The guimbri is at the center of the music, providing a pulse to guide the other musicians. The music grooves, but never quickens—maintaining a steady and consistent energy throughout. There are no solos and while the players wander and evolve their lines, they always remain in complementary positions to one another.
Bajas and Abrams both find serenity amid perceived stasis—making music that sounds repetitive, but is constantly undergoing subtle scene shifts and mutations. More than that, both make music that sounds strangely timeless. The lack of complex harmony helps to diffuse Abrams’ relationship to much modern jazz and while Bajas' music pays homage to a certain group of composers, those musicians were looking back toward even older traditions. Automaginary works because both excel at making music that feels thoroughly modern, but also ancient.


On a pair of interlinked albums—one performed with a jazz quintet and the other with a string quartet—the composer-guitarist finds new context for her singular style.

Amaryllis / Belladonna

When recounting her origin story, Mary Halvorson often emphasizes a piece of advice she received from two early mentors, Joe Morris and Anthony Braxton: The most important thing is to find your own voice. More than perhaps any other guitarist working today, in jazz or elsewhere, she has succeeded at that deceptively simple aspiration. Hear her play once and you’ll recognize her anywhere: as a soloist, as a leader or accompanist in any number of ensembles, in duos with players from the worlds of avant-garde improvisation or warped indie rock.
On one hand, her tone is clear and declarative near the point of affectlessness, maintaining a sense of calm deliberation even as she spins out increasingly elaborate melodic fractals, stoic in the eye of her own gathering storm. On the other, aided by her trusty Line 6 DL4, she turns the guitar into something slippery and alien. Individual notes seem suddenly to lose their footing, ringing confidently at first, then slipping and wobbling out of tune. Licks pile up on top of each other until they become a single undifferentiated mass, iridescent and oozing out past the margins. When recording, she generally places one microphone on her amp and another directly on her unamplified strings, capturing both sounds at the same time. The effect establishes an unlikely holism between her two approaches to the instrument: bringing out an uncanny quality from the quietude of her clean playing, and grounding her more boisterously outré passages in a certain naturalism.
As a composer and arranger, Halvorson treats each of her albums as an opportunity to create a new context for her singular voice as a guitarist, a practice she continues with Amaryllis and Belladonna, a pair of records released simultaneously and intended as a “modular and interlocking” pair. On Amaryllis, she follows an existing throughline in her catalog toward ever-larger ensembles, leading a newly established quintet—Patricia Brennan on vibraphone, Nick Dunston on bass, Tomas Fujiwara on drums, Jacob Garchik on trombone, and Adam O’Farrill on trumpet—and augmenting the core group with the Mivos string quartet on the album’s second side. On Belladonna, she strips away the jazz band, leaving only her guitar and the strings. By releasing them as separate-but-related projects, Halvorson allows listeners to find their own path through an imposing collection of music: Take each disc on its own, or both together as a double album, in whichever order you choose. I prefer Amaryllis first, then Belladonna, hearing the former as a raucous culmination of Halvorson’s recent bandleader albums, and the latter as a first glimpse of the misty and uncertain territory on the other side.
Amaryllis begins in media res, as if you’ve just wandered into a rehearsal space where Halvorson and the band started jamming an hour ago. Vibes, bass, and drums circle a confounding groove: funky, but with an elusive downbeat, inviting you to dance and then repeatedly pulling the rug out from under you. Halvorson’s guitar joins with a stuttering, asymmetrical line that sounds like a skipping record. Is this the main theme, or just a bit of pointillistic improvisation? Then the horns join her in emphatic unison, and a melody that at first seemed disjointed comes to sound inevitable, even a little triumphant. Halvorson’s compositions often work this way, playfully undermining and deconstructing themselves as they go, unsettling your expectations about what’s a tossed-off thought and what’s the main event.
Halvorson is an inventive and generous arranger, organizing Amaryllis in such a way that it never feels like a mere vehicle for dazzling solos, though there are plenty of those. She has a painterly approach to sonority, attuned to all the rich colors at the ensemble’s disposal. Many of the album’s most beautiful moments come with the dramatic addition or subtraction of a particular instrumental shade, like the way her guitar drapes Garchik’s trombone with gauzy reverb on “Night Shift,” offering an eerily sensuous counterpoint to his brassy declamations. On the title track, guitar and bass charge manically while the horns offer a relaxed countermelody; if it weren’t for Fujiwara’s powerhouse drumming keeping everyone corralled and headed in the same direction, you might think they were playing two different pieces entirely. Later in the same track, strafed on all sides by shards of percussion and mangled guitar, O’Farrill rides a four-note figure up and down the range of his trumpet. The effect is purely analog, but it resembles one of Halvorson’s delay-pedal excursions in the way it turns a stray gesture into a furious idée fixe.
Belladonna removes the buttress of Amaryllis’s horns and rhythm section. At times, the guitar and string quartet move like a single amorphous organism, untethered from any particular pulse. At others, one voice will offer a steady ostinato as a home base for the others to wander away from and return to at will. Melodic lines drift in and out of focus and cohesion. Allow your attention to soften for a while and you may return to find that a figure you’d taken for granted as simple accompaniment has emerged at some point as the music’s central focus. These qualities were all present on Amaryllis but are even more pronounced here, the sparser instrumentation allowing the music to dissolve almost completely before coming together again.
The spectacular “Haunted Head” begins with a three-note line on Halvorson’s low strings. When she adds a couple of higher pitches, the violins immediately take them up too, sounding as one with the guitar, providing her percussive picking with ghostly sustain. These sorts of unison lines are all over both albums, and by now—“Haunted Head” is Belladonna’s penultimate track—we know that Halvorson will likely complicate the simple gesture as the piece goes on. Sure enough, as the figure repeats, the strings slowly grow more dissonant, floating further away from the key the guitar has established. But they remain locked in with its rhythm, preserving the illusion that you’re hearing a single mutating voice, rather than the gradual building of a chord.
For 10 minutes, the piece proceeds in this way, taking a previously established element and elaborating on it unexpectedly, bringing the music someplace new. Halvorson’s initial low-string line eventually becomes the seed of a soaring melody for the entire ensemble, then the cello picks the initial version back up in pizzicato while Halvorson takes a jaunty solo. Music that began as vapor, sparse and spectral, has become a sort of alien parlor dance, joyous and irrepressible. And thanks to the way Halvorson embeds a bit of each previous gesture within the next one, the shift has happened in a way that feels natural, without a single jarring left turn.
Amaryllis and Belladonna are distinct statements; one could hear either album on its own without a sense that something is missing. But they are most powerful when taken together, like a landscape and its reflection in rippling water. The clearest moment of synchronicity between the two comes with a rupture at the end of each: Halvorson clicking on the distortion pedal and starting to burn—finishing with a solo whose intensity far exceeds anything that’s come before, clearing a path toward whatever’s next.


With sincere, resolute songwriting and a more accessible sound, the latest album from the New York quartet feels more suited than ever for the ecstasy of a crowded club.

Sympathy for Life

Even at its brawniest, Parquet Courts’ music has always explored questions of knowledge and the self, freedom and desire, responsibility and autonomy. Where some bands might sink in such existential quagmires, the New York quartet have only been propelled by their inquiries. With every album since their 2012 breakthrough Light Up Gold, their aperture has widened, allowing them to take in blues, western noir, and even some dub. Though the lyric sheet is still loaded with questions about the often unreasonable nature of life in the 21st century, on their latest album, Sympathy for Life, Parquet Courts abandon the fiction of certainty, take the elevator back to street level, and get the people moving.
They’ve flirted with drum machines and dance rhythms before—see, for example, their unsettlingly weird 2018 performance on Ellen—but the big beats on Sympathy for Life feel more suited than ever for the ecstasy of a crowded club. Much of the album was written during lengthy jam sessions that the band later stitched into coherent tracks, giving it a starry sense of possibility they’ve previously reached for but have never quite been able to grasp. Co-frontman Austin Brown leads the way, continuing to push his bandmates beyond the kraft-paper textures of their early records. The group luxuriates in the open space of the title track, allowing drummer Max Savage’s acid-house beat to pump until its three minutes feel as dilated as a 12" dance mix. A coda of switchbacks and mild sound-collaging turns co-frontman A. Savage’s “Trullo” into the kind of song the Beastie Boys tagged onto their mid-period records, bongos and all. Producers Rodaidh McDonald and John Parish give the band a much broader sound field—this is the first Parquet Courts record you’ll want to hear on good headphones—and they take full advantage of the space, Brown’s vocals wandering its edges in “Plant Life” while a melodica and piston-pumping beat keep the song grounded.
Like any good groove, the songs on Sympathy for Life are powered by tension. The album balances critique and celebration, allowing each to spill into the other. In “Application/Apparatus,” Savage frames a rideshare driver as an “operating mechanism” at the mercy of both the instructions given by their phone and the larger systems of war, migration, and capital that forced them into the car in the first place. The song glides by on a beat so precisely engineered and so brightly spangled with noise, it takes several listens to internalize the linguistic and ethical complexity of the story. Even then, it’s hard to deny the pure rush of joy that comes when the drum machine pushes the beat into overdrive. Both songwriters are interested in how it feels to have your sense of self manipulated by technology, how a pristine feed of recommended shows, music, and products can be both flattering—if you like interesting stuff, you must be interesting—and dehumanizing at the same time. “Algorithm waltz sets the pace/Indicates an authentic taste/Tell me what I love,” Savage sings in “Just Shadows.” He frog-marches his words through a melody so jaunty and upbeat it feels like he’s leading a sarcastic parade, the song’s forced cheeriness mirroring the way it can feel to scroll the Instagram Explore tab, searching for a jolt of adrenaline.
As he often does, Savage writes about wandering through New York City, hoping to shake loose some bit of understanding. Twice he decides to take in a movie. Wherever he goes, he’s hounded by his chosen isolation—“How many days of life will I spend underground?” he asks—even when it offers him solace, as when he wanders into La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s Dream House, removes his shoes, and centers himself among the glowing pink and purple lights and the buzzing microtones. At home, he runs out of things to watch and is both debased and liberated by the experience, his empty queue making him feel “like an inmate that’s finished his term.” Throughout Sympathy for Life, he’s chased by the specific dread that comes when you try to get a clear view of yourself in the reflection of a dark screen.
Though Savage’s attempts to come to grips with himself provide some of the album’s greatest moments of insight, they have a strange way of feeling almost beside the point, vestiges of a way of life both he and the band are in the process of shedding in an attempt to become more open-hearted. When Savage connects the impulse behind the consumerist present to the brutality of the colonialist past in “Homo Sapien”—both have been “hardwired to your desire”—Sean Yeaton’s bass drops with the realization; it’s a level of emotional awareness that goes beyond the righteous anger they cultivated on Wide Awake!. These songs aren’t merely interested in how bad things can be, they’re searching for liberation in syncopation.
Compared to the rest of their catalogue, Sympathy for Life feels broadly accessible—“Plant Life” suggests Lorde isn’t the only artist who’s been spinning Screamadelica—but that accessibility seems driven by a sense of responsibility. “No city, it’s all community,” Brown sings between calls to action in “Marathon of Anger,” a stark contrast with Human Performance’s “One Man, No City,” which carried essentially the same message but padded it in self-conscious snark. Sympathy for Life treats it more like a mission statement: The places we live aren’t just the sites of our consumption, they’re also the spaces we share, and that means we have to understand and help one another. “We’ve got the power,” they sing together, and they mean all of us.
It can be strange to hear a band who made their name by refusing to be pinned down sound so sincere and resolute. But like Talking Heads before them, the move from punk to dance has meant not only an expansion of what Parquet Courts sound like, but also of what they mean, who they are, and, crucially, who they want to be for. Though the band may still have their hangups, this album shows they know when to stop thinking and when to start moving.

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Multi-instrumentalist Jay Watson tours with Tame Impala. Compared to that band's IMAX-scaled productions, his latest solo record G**lamorous Damage is like the 8-bit, Nintendo video game adaptation of a blockbuster film—an offshoot that can’t possibly match the grandeur of its esteemed affiliate, but possesses a quirky charm all its own.

Glamorous Damage

As a multi-instrumentalist for the touring lineup of Tame Impala, Jay Watson has rode shotgun on Kevin Parker's accelerated ascent from acid-rock purist to synth-pop aesthete. But Watson's pursuits outside that band have veered in all sorts of directions. His other group, Pond, is the unbridled id to Tame Impala's steely superego, a band that feels no shame in giving songs titles like "Heroic Shart" or compunction in flipping between blown-out narco-rock and new wave in the space of two releases. Likewise, in just a year, Watson's solo alter ego GUM has hot-wired the grotty psych-pop of 2014's Delorean Highway into the block-party prog of sophomore effort, Glamorous Damage.
What ultimately unites Watson's constellation of bands is a desire to divorce '60s psychedelia from period details and infuse it with other temporally dislocated sounds, be it '70s art rock, '80s electro, or '90s lo-fi. Compared to Tame Impala's IMAX-scaled productions, Glamorous Damage is like the 8-bit, Nintendo videogame adaptation of a blockbuster film—an offshoot that can't possibly match the grandeur of its esteemed affiliate, but possesses a quirky charm all its own. And where Tame Impala's super-sized sound swaddles Parker's intimate lyricism, GUM's downsized dimensions can barely contain Watson's eccentric, multi-voiced personality.
Watson may double down on cheeky '80s signifiers here—arcade-game laser blasts, boombox beats, falsetto hooks, high-pitched cathode-ray frequencies—but they're the foundations that support his freakery, like the skull-piercing synth drone that overwhelms the Princely funk of "Anesthetized Lesson". Where Delorean Highway featured a wobbly but ultimately faithful cover of Genesis' 1980 pop crossover hit "Misunderstanding", Glamorous Damage deviously twists synth-pop until it turns into prog-rock: The brief opening snippet "G.U.M." introduces a budget Chemical Brothers bass groove that reappears in extended form as "R.Y.K.", where it ultimately serves as the canvas for a splatter of Kraftwerkian synths and smeared guitar solos.
Glamorous Damage succeeds so long as that impulsive energy is given enough space; when Watson stays locked in a single gear—like on the pastoral goth of "Greens and Blues", or the Ariel Pink Floyd reverie "She Never Made It to Tell" or the spoken-word title-track throwaway—the album stalls. Of course, even GUM's most fanciful gestures will feel modest next to Tame Impala's interstellar overdrive. But there's enough synthetic psychedelic splendor on Glamorous Damage to soundtrack a DIY planetarium laser show under the covers with tinted flashlights.


A new compendium of music Lou Barlow and John Davis created for the 1995 cult film Kids brings a piece of prescient indie rock experimentation—and sleeper hit “Natural One”—to streaming in full.

Music for KIDS

No album screams “1995” like the soundtrack to Kids, Larry Clark’s voyeuristic, vértité-styled document of New York City youth gone wild, aka the Euphoria of its time. While Kids is best remembered today as the film that unleashed the anarchic sensibilities of screenwriter Harmony Korine and introduced Chloë Sevigny and Rosario Dawson to the big screen, its soundtrack signified a distinctly mid-’90s musical moment when the dusty veneer of hip-hop began filtering into the hermetic, bedroom-bound sound of DIY rock. This was a post-Beck landscape of beats and bongs, where the Beastie Boys were leading alt-cultural arbiters and Kim Gordon was launching streetwear. Still, even as this rhythm-driven sea change was pulling in noisemakers like Jon Spencer and the Butthole Surfers, it was strange to find Lou Barlow standing at the center of it.
For much of ’90s, Barlow was indie rock personified: the bespectacled avatar for the genre’s scrappy energy, resourceful ingenuity, and unfiltered expressionism. Following his infamous ouster from Dinosaur Jr. in 1989, Barlow poured his creative energies into a number of home-recording pursuits, the most notable of which—Sebadoh—eventually evolved into a potent fuzz-pop power trio. By 1994’s Bakesale, the eccentric tape-manipulation strategies that initially defined the Sebadoh catalog had given way to the streamlined songwriting and heartfelt address that would turn Barlow into an emo icon, but his penchant for mischief would find a new outlet. Around the same time, he and fan-turned-friend John Davis introduced the Folk Implosion, whose very name—a self-deprecating riff on Spencer’s braggadocious Blues Explosion—advertised its low ambitions. The duo’s 1994 debut, Take a Look Inside, was built on the same rickety foundations as Sebadoh’s earliest records, but its quirk-punk song sketches felt closer in spirit to the lo-fi lunacy of Ween. Nothing about this venture suggested it would soon be the incubator of Barlow’s first and only Top 40 hit.
But after developing a pen-pal relationship with fellow outsider-art aficionado Korine, Barlow and Davis suddenly found themselves in a proper studio—Boston’s Fort Apache—scoring scenes for what would become Kids. Flanked by TV/VCR set-ups, the duo took full advantage of the facility’s instrument inventory (saxophone, synth, vibraslap) and ventured down musical dark alleys inspired by the film’s gritty urban milieu. As they swung between dubby dirges, Satie-sampling beatscapes, and cabaret-jazz squawks, they hit a bullseye with “Natural One,” a psych-funk confection that momentarily transformed Barlow from indie rock’s foremost sensitive soul into its unlikeliest dancefloor seducer. Despite not actually appearing in the film, the song became the centerpiece of the soundtrack album, and its surprising chart success would make Kids’ musical companion a staple in every discerning college student’s 5-disc CD changer.
As an underdog victory story and an exemplar of alt-rap aesthetics, the Kids soundtrack has long stood as the ultimate mid-’90s time capsule—a fate reinforced in recent years by its spotty availability on streaming services. In its original incarnation, the Kids soundtrack resembled a Barlow-curated mixtape, with various Folk Implosion pieces complemented by songs from Daniel Johnston, Slint, and Sebadoh. The album’s release through Polygram subsidiary London Records made it the first major-label-affiliated product on Barlow’s CV, though the Folk Implosion never signed to London directly. In the ’90s this was a coup: They could benefit from a big label’s promotional muscle without being under its thumb. In the streaming era, however, old soundtracks featuring various artists affiliated with multiple labels face a complicated path to our listening queues (and those that make it often appear with key tracks grayed out due to digital-rights issues). Kids’ fragmented history on DSPs—with different partial permutations of the record available on different services and in different regions, if at all—has diminished the commercial high-water mark of Barlow’s career into a faded, did-that-actually-happen memory.
Music for KIDS rights that wrong, by filling the hole in the Folk Implosion’s digital catalog and clearing the way for the long-overdue addition of “Natural One” to your Essential ’90s Alternative playlist. But this is not a reissue of the original soundtrack album; rather, it’s a collection of all the music that Folk Implosion created in this period, including tracks heard in the film, stuff that got left on the cutting-room floor, songs that would find their proper home on later releases, and a couple of alternate versions that uncork the material’s latent club-hopping potential. (Few words so expediently transport you to a specific time and place like remix credits for UNKLE and Dust Brothers.) Taken as a whole, Music for KIDS is less a totem to Clark/Korine’s cult flick than an illuminating glimpse into the evolution of Barlow’s very own proto-Postal Service—a beat-driven side project that, for a brief moment, outshone his main gig.
At the very least, this collection reaffirms that Folk Implosion deserved to be a two-hit wonder. “Nothing Gonna Stop” takes the “Natural One” template and jacks up the pulse: Davis’ drums lock into a sampled Silver Apples bass loop to forge the missing link between those ’60s hypno-psych innovators and the after-midnight breaks of DJ Shadow, providing a relentless, pulsating counterpoint to Barlow’s slackadasical rap-speak. By comparison, the incidental instrumentals lack the same sense of frisson, either ending too soon (the strung-out psychedelia of “Jenny’s Theme”) or going on too long (the bongo-powered, synth-blitzed jam “Nasa Theme”). But by liberating these recordings from ’90s purgatory, Music for KIDS highlights their uncanny prescience: The stark, stalking “Crash” points the way to a post-rock future, while the collection’s other Silver Apples tribute, “Simean Groove,” feels like a blueprint for the sort of wiggy, percussive workouts that Caribou would master years later.
As Barlow tells it, the success of the Kids soundtrack had no significant impact on the Folk Implosion’s long-term commercial fortunes (or lack thereof), but they did emerge from these sessions a changed band. You can hear it in the rhythm-forward tracks here that would later surface on 1997’s Dare to Be Surprised, an album situated at the precise midpoint between songcraft and soundscaping. Where a track like “Burning Paper” may begin as a typically fraught first-person address from Barlow (“I wrote you a letter but I threw it away”), its percolating beats, slinky groove, and chanted hooks position it as a forerunner to 2000s indie pop/R&B crossovers like Dirty Projectors’ “Stillness Is the Move.” But most impressive is “Insinuation,” which blows up the boom-bapped indie-pop sound of the Kids soundtrack to an even grander scale, by rolling the duo’s churning guitars and dramatic string drones into a tense, slow-burning masterwork. As the ’90s wound down, indie rock would gradually outgrow its roots as punk’s geeky younger cousin to mutate into a more sophisticated, richly textured artform, and in hindsight, the Folk Implosion’s Kids experiments provided a distant early warning of the shifting tides. For years, streaming obstacles have tethered this music to its time. But now, Music for KIDS sounds way ahead of it.


Laughing Matter

The visual language of psychedelia is awash with tie-dyed skies and third eyes, but nothing is so psychedelic as emptiness. On their fifth album in six years, Wand demonstrate their understanding of this truth. Their first three albums came out in a neon blur, spilling over with ideas, but as they slowed down, their music opened up. They used the extra time between releases to subtract, not add, and Laughing Matter continues the band’s elevation via excision. Though a few Byrds-like pastoral flourishes remain, the tough, slinky rhythms and vast negative spaces of the first two tracks, both stunners, set the album somewhere closer to the world of Can.
Opener “Scarecrow” is primitive yet sleek; it sounds like Evan Burrows is playing his drums with dinosaur bones. There’s a sinister elegance to the vocal and the sidewinding melody, offset by the nervy synthesizers. Second track “xoxo” offers a similar off-kilter trance, but this time with a pitch-slider effect that evokes Clinic. The grooves in both are deeply syncopated yet feel brutally, hypnotically flat.
But the softer folk elements of 1000 Days also flourish, usually with the predictable elements hollowed out so something strikingly weird can take their place. “High Planes Drifter” is a beautiful, lonesome ballad shot through with erratic horse hooves. In “Wonder,” a filthy, blown-out riff opens up into a dewy idyll, like Jon Spencer were having a gentle shroom epiphany. “Evening Star” wrangles no-wave guitar skronk into something between Rufus Wainwright and Pavement. Whatever form the songs take, the careful removal of extra elements distinguishes them. As they pare away at their sound, Wand move further away from psych-rock and closer to true psychedelia.


Anyone hoping that ANTI might be Rihanna’s opus, some grand declaration of intent, is likely to be underwhelmed. ANTI is a fun and conflicted pop record, at its most interesting when it’s at its smallest and most idiosyncratic. If the album has a narrative arc, it’s about disappointment: the ways in which the people you trust can still come up short in the end, and how lonesome that can feel.

ANTI

Part of Rihanna’s appeal is aspirational: survey the photographic evidence, and she seems to spend a pretty good chunk of her time wearing jewelry on yachts, smoking terrifically robust marijuana cigarettes, and making goofball faces at jokers trying to stealth-snap pics of her as she parties deep into the night.
Yet somehow, those hijinks don’t lessen her seriousness; they merely amplify it. Rihanna’s sureness regarding her presence in the world—in the work that she’s made, in the ways in which she has earned the right to palm a cocktail and chill on a beach—is bold and motivating, like Actual Confidence always is. Hearing her deliver a line like "Don’t act like you forgot/ I call the shot-shot-shots" (from 2015’s "Bitch Better Have My Money") with a kind of preternatural calm—it’s hard to imagine anything ever feeling better than that. It is hard to imagine anyone inhabiting a pop career with more ease or aplomb.
Still, ANTI—her very-long-awaited eighth LP—arrived tentatively, almost meekly. The build-up, of course, was extraordinary. There’d been rascally fake-outs, three singles (none of which made it onto the actual album), whole social media accounts teasing its release. Then, last Wednesday afternoon, a track listing appeared (that a gang of disembodied song titles still constitutes a noteworthy breach surely indicates something about our desperate times), followed by the announcement that ANTI would be streaming exclusively on Tidal for its first week of release (who cares)—two meager dribbles of intel that were quickly overshadowed, perhaps rightly, by Kanye West hollering about pants.
Then, suddenly, the album appeared in full. Anyone hoping its delayed release might suggest something about its ambition, that the three-years-in-the-making ANTI might be Rihanna’s opus, a grand declaration of intent, is likely to be underwhelmed. ANTI is a rich and conflicted pop record, at its most interesting when it’s at its most idiosyncratic. It’s not crammed with bloodthirsty, dance-oriented jams and feels distinctly smaller, more inward-facing than her previous records, as if it were intended as a kind of spiritual stock-taking, a moment of reckoning for both Rihanna and her fans. Her grainy, mesmerizing voice is paramount here, the sun in ANTI’s universe, the thing everything else orbits: "I got to do things my own way, darling," she announces over a stuttering, distorted beat in opener "Consideration," a prickly collaboration with the R&B singer SZA. The sentiment feels deliberately placed, meant as a way to read everything that follows.
Ironically, if the album has a narrative arc buried underneath the fuck-off, broad-strokes empowerment now so omnipresent on pop radio, it’s about disappointment: The ways in which the people you trust can still come up short in the end, and how catastrophically lonesome that can feel. It’s also about self-isolation, and how being good at being on your own ("I can be a lone wolf," she sings on "Desperado," her vocals deep, crackly) can become its own kind of albatross, a cage that bars from the inside.
The dancehall and dub-indebted single "Work" hints at an intimacy in what is otherwise a fairly transactional Rihanna single: Drake is here, sounding weirdly buttoned-up and too articulate, like a grown man wandering onto the beach in a pair of ill-fitting jeans. The hook is Rihanna babbling about getting it done—"work-work-work-work-work-work"—her vocals devolving into something more instinctive than language, as if it gushed forth from some underground spring instead of her throat. But the words suggest that another Rihanna, a more wounded and wary version, is hovering nearby.
Do we need access to that girl? Maybe not—there’s plenty here that feels high-stakes and revealing. Rihanna talks more convincingly about sex than almost any other pop star, and some of ANTI’s most striking tracks are also its nastiest: "Love on the Brain" is a retro-leaning doo-wop jam with a crew of backing vocalists that takes an unexpected turn toward the dark: "It beats me black and blue, but it fucks me so good," Rihanna chants, her voice suddenly flinty. Her deployment of "it" feels deliberate, painting her partner as a disembodied force, less a person than a ghost she can’t escape.
"Yeah, I Said It," co-written and co-produced by Timbaland, is a crawling, steamy ode to two people slamming up against a wall (literally): "Yeah, I said it, boy, get up inside it/ I want you to homicide it," Rihanna purrs over a sparse, hazy beat. "Never Ending," which nicks a vocal melody from Dido’s "Thank You," is a gooey, vulnerable dirge that reiterates how Rihanna experiences love, how it helps her navigate and recognize her physical self, the way she feels its absence physically: "I knew your face once, but now it’s unclear," she sings. "And I can’t feel my body now."
But it’s "Higher," the record’s penultimate track—it really should be its coda—a two-minute imploration to a distant lover, asking him to just come over, already, that feels the most revelatory. The track was co-written by Bibi Bourelly, the 20-year-old electropop artist from Berlin who also wrote "Bitch Better Have My Money." "This whiskey got me feelin’ pretty, so pardon if I’m impolite," Rihanna sings, her voice raked, raspy, desperate over collapsing strings. Whatever had been holding her together until then—it broke. "I wanna go back to the old way," she admits. "But I’m drunk and still with a full ashtray, with a little bit too much to say." And then, as if it had never happened—as if she deleted the text, pulled the blankets up and went to sleep—the song ends, unresolved.
Correction (2/1/16 at 11:44 a.m.): The original version of this review misquoted a lyric from “Work” that has since been removed.


On his debut album, Toronto R&B singer Daniel Caesar looks to gospel for a roadmap to the complexities of romantic love.

Freudian

Daniel Caesar knows gospel. Twice on Freudian, the Toronto R&B singer folds in interpolations of well-known gospel songs: On “Hold Me Down,” he refashions the familiar melody and wispy soprano of Kirk Franklin’s “Hold Me Now” into a testament to romantic loyalty, and a few songs later, on “We Find Love,” he does it again with Kyle David Matthews’ “We Fall Down.” These instances are more than merely Easter eggs for gospel music fans; they’re also emblematic of the synergistic relationship between gospel and R&B, which Caesar embraces throughout his debut LP.
The line between the two genres can be thin: Their similar tempos and lyrical themes lend themselves to interchangeability (see, for instance, the shift from Musiq’s “Love” to Trin-i-Tee 5:7’s “Lord”). It’s no surprise many singers have dabbled in both. In Caesar's world, love is a holy experience sullied by human imperfection. As often as he basks in the beauty of romance, he repents at the altar of a broken heart, performing with an unflashy sincerity more in line with spiritual offerings than R&B melodrama.
Freudian opens with his breakout single “Get You,” a saccharine honeymoon-phase jam featuring Kali Uchis.  “Best Part,” which features H.E.R. is equally dulcet. The warmth of those two songs stands in stark contrast to a song like “Loose,” a poetic vent about letting go that’s backed by celestial organs and is reminiscent of one of Frank Ocean’s interludes. Similarly, the piano-driven ballad “Blessed” finds Caesar trying to make amends for his shortcomings (“Yes I’m a mess but I’m blessed to be stuck with you”). His cottony voice, complete with falsetto flourishes, adds emotional depth to his lyrics.
On past projects, Caesar has generally worked alone, but with Freudian, a number of key collaborators help bring the album into focus. The features are a who’s who of female artists remaking soul music in their own images: Kali Uchis’ retro groove, Syd’s chilly futurism, H.E.R.’s updated traditionalism, and Charlotte Day Wilson’s folksy elegance. Providing balance to Caesar’s narrative, they serve as the subjects of his fawning and the elusive lovers to whom he atones. The quiet heroes, though, are CaDaRo Tribe, the go-to choir throughout Freudian. The trio offers its angelic vocals on five of the six songs without features, each time to different effect. On “Neu Roses (Transgressor’s Song),” they lay down throwback street-corner harmonies (complete with the infamous nayhoo). On “Hold Me Down” and “We Find Love,” they’re the melodic foils that make the samples work. Together, the generous spread of women’s voices makes the album feel like a continuous conversation across the seasons of a relationship rather than a one-sided musing.
Caesar’s balance between sacred elements and secular sentiment—an opposition brought to life by Toronto natives and frequent collaborators Matthew Burnett and Jordan Evans, who produced all of the songs—is what sets him apart. There’s something visceral about the sound of an organ or a polyphonic choir, or admitting to a lover that they “saved [your] soul like Jesus.” Put those things next to bluesy guitars and expressions of carnal desire, and the result feels as contradictory as love itself—divine and discordant at the same time. This is right where Freudian lands.
In doing so, Caesar desparts considerably from the atmospheric R&B that Toronto is known for, to say nothing of the wildly popular “trap&B” style. Synths and 808s are replaced with pianos, guitars, and choral arrangements; some vulgarity remains, but he never gives in to shallow simplicity. There’s much here that blends well into this 1990s-obsessed era, but Caesar’s gospel background is his not-so-secret weapon. While he’s surely not the only contemporary R&B singer who grew up in the church, he doesn’t shy away from bringing the full range of his influences to his music. Caesar’s willingness to use all of the tools at his disposal—to explore his own id and superego right alongside love’s heaven and hell—elevates his craft. “Isn’t it nice?/Human sacrifice/I hate consequences/that shit’s too expensive/you keep chasing delight,” he sings, achingly, on the hidden track that closes the album. “I take the easy way out every time/I don’t deserve my own life.” Caesar’s honesty only drives home Freudian’s power: These are gospel truths that sinners and saints alike can get behind.


At just seven songs, Tinashe’s newest album is as stylish and focused as a runway walk.

BB/ANG3L

Independence looks good on Tinashe. With former label RCA firmly in the rearview, she’s been free to indulge: On 2019’s Songs for You and 2021’s 333, her first albums to be self-released, she swapped out the moody sonics and went all-in on genre experimentation (drum’n’bass on “Shy Guy,” retro-futuristic funk on “Perfect Crime”), swapping between singing and rapping with hedonistic fervor. She’s been in a constant honeymoon phase since striking out on her own, and her latest project, BB/ANG3L, maintains that spirit while making a few tweaks. At only seven tracks, it’s less sprawling but just as confident: as stylish and focused as a runway walk.
Romance is evergreen in R&B, but Tinashe handles each side—messy sneaky links, brash come-ons, throbbing heartbreak—with care. She’s either cozied up with or thinking about a paramour on each of these songs, flitting between love, lust, and inhibition. On opener “Treason,” she’s running red lights, willing to risk it all for a new lover. Two songs later, on the wavy single “Needs,” she’s demanding top from a fling before immediately creating distance: “Don’t call me,” she coos with a smirk. “I can’t be ya one and only.” Against producers Royce David and JonnyMade’s breezy hyphy swing, she sounds like she’s giving orders from a beach chaise.
Tinashe can play all these roles, but BB/ANG3L skews warm and seductive—the kind of songs you might hear in the champagne room or the private suite instead of the strip club. “Uh Huh,” a slow-burning, velvet-sheeted sex jam that sounds airlifted from an mid-aughts Mariah Carey album, is most blatant, but the feeling comes through in the livelier cuts too. “Talk to Me Nice” moves at a steady clip, but Tinashe’s whispers and head voice land like breath on the nape of neck. On “Gravity” and “None of My Business,” her voice is subsumed by soft swells of ambient synth. She’s giving herself over to the moment in more ways than one.
BB/ANG3L is her most streamlined work to date, a lean and eclectic showcase in the vein of projects like FKA twigs’ 2022 mixtape CAPRISONGS. “Treason,” produced by North Carolina’s Machinedrum, and “None of my Business,” co-produced by Royce David and Platinum Libraries, backdrop Tinashe’s balladry with bubbly synth arrangements. “Gravity,” produced by Finnish ambient-techno savant Vladislav Delay, sounds like an homage to Kelela’s Raven. Its angelic harmonies and frenetic drums dovetail nicely with the nervy energy of Nosaj Thing and Scoop Deville’s work on “Talk to Me Nice” and Machinedrum’s footwork-esque beat on closer “Tightrope.” But whether icy, seductive, or lovelorn, there’s an earnestness to every song that keeps BB/ANG3L down to earth. “I want it to feel like this album is whispering in your ear,” Tinashe said in an interview with Dazed. It’s that sense of intimacy, combined with her thriving confidence, that makes BB/ANG3L so potent.


It's rare that any artist gets her studio discography reissued all at once, but such is the case with alt-country belter Neko Case. Mint Records is reissuing her debut, *The Virginian*, which it originally released in 1997; the Vancouver-based label also put out her early records with Maow as well as side projects the Corn Sisters (with Carolyn Mark) and, yes, the New Pornographers. In addition, U.S. label Anti- is reissuing last year's *Fox Confessor Brings the Flood*, as well as two of her previous albums, 2000's *Furnace Room Lullaby* and 2002's *Blacklisted*, both of which were originally released by

Neko Case: The Virginian / Furnace Room Lullaby / Blacklisted / Fox Confessor Brings the Flood [Bonus Disc Edition]

It's rare that any artist gets her studio discography reissued all at once, but such is the case with alt-country belter Neko Case. Mint Records is reissuing her debut, The Virginian, which it originally released in 1997; the Vancouver-based label also put out her early records with Maow as well as side projects the Corn Sisters (with Carolyn Mark) and, yes, the New Pornographers. In addition, U.S. label Anti- is reissuing last year's Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, as well as two of her previous albums, 2000's Furnace Room Lullaby and 2002's Blacklisted, both of which were originally released by Bloodshot Records. Of the four albums, only Fox Confessor gets any bonus material-- a sampler disc with one new track and four old ones, which reinforce the retrospective aspect of this set. Neither Anti nor Mint is simply reselling Case's music; instead, in an unintended partnership, they're repackaging her as an established career artist, one whose previous efforts deserve your attention as well as your money.
Generally considered the redheaded stepchild of Case's canon, The Virginian is an eclectic collection of original material and covers that hews closely to the alt-country model of the late 90s, with two country-swing numbers that haven't aged particularly well ("Honkytonk Hiccups" and "Karoline") and some sparsely arranged ballads that have ("Jettison" and the title track). Covering songs by Loretta Lynn and Ernest Tubb, Case takes vocal cues from Lynn Anderson, Kate Pierson, and all those punk singers she emulated in her previous punk bands. Her rollicking cover of the Everly Brothers' "Bowling Green" and her 10-story take on Scott Walker's "Duchess" feature some of her highest-flying vocals, the kind so bold and surefooted they sound almost too easy, like anyone can do it. Modest but punchy even ten years later, The Virginian retains much of its feisty charm, but Case's subsequent albums would abandon this joyful musical release for darker matters and lonelier sounds. In this sense, The Virginian is a useful complement to Anti's re-releases, because it shows not only how far Case has come in 10 years, but what was lost and what was gained along the way.
Furnace Room Lullaby (which is, incidentally, the only Case album that hasn't been reviewed previously on this site) sounds weightier than its predecessor, each song touched by personal tragedy. "Whip the Blankets" and "Mood to Burn Bridges" are rare rave-ups that feature the road-tested Her Boyfriends and a fierily defiant Case, but as fast and as fun as these songs are, they're propelled by a peculiar desperation that streams through every song, even the breezy "No Need to Cry" and the Tacoma-loyal "Thrice All American". This sense of unspecified loss culminates on side one with "Twist the Knife", which showcases Case's close dynamic with Her Boyfriends, and on side two with "South Tacoma Way", a tearjerker that eloquently evokes the aimlessness that follows deep grief. Case's startlingly soulful performance and the songs' lyrical specificity make Furnace Room Lullaby both a fiercely local album and her most satisyfing collection.
If Furnace Room Lullaby sounds inspired by real heartbreak, then Blacklisted considers death as an abstract concept, a nocturnal entity that haunts interstates and plane crashes and demands moody music with few hooks. Dropping Her Boyfriends from the bill, Case wrote almost every track herself-- in fact, the only songs she doesn't get sole credit for are the two covers. This new development is important, as it signals a shift in her music from country-soul numbers with concrete imagery and more-or-less traditional structure to less defined songs with impressionistic lyrics and even bleaker themes. On "Deep Red Bells" and "Lady Pilot", Case intently fashions new mythologies from the Pacific Northwest soil, a fascinating project that serves these songs well. However, with Calexico (and some of her former Boyfriends) accompanying her with just the right amount of eeriness, Case's songs ramble repetitively or cut off abruptly. Blacklisted is unsettlingly open-ended in a way that demands multiple listens but lacks the pay-off that Furnace Room Lullaby so easily achieves.
Despite their notably different approaches to the same source material, Blacklisted and Furnace Room Lullaby seem intrinsically linked, right down to their covers depicting Case as a ravished victim of some unspoken violence (now rendered in digipak form instead of so-yesterday jewel cases). Neither of these reissues contains bonus material of any kind, and although there's a wealth of obscure Case releases from which to draw such enticements (including her home-recorded Canadian Amp EP), there's something reassuring about their austerity. These albums will someday deserve deluxe, deeply researched, multi-disc editions, but for now these reissues preserve the works in their original state, with no inferior tack-ons to diminish the impact of those final notes on those final songs.
In this foursome of reissues, only Fox Confessor gets a bonus disc, which has five tracks but only one new song-- "Behind the House", which appeared in a different form on Live from Austin, TX earlier this year. Despite its classification as a demo, the song sounds wholly developed even at this reportedly early stage, with a one-two drumbeat and tremolo guitar underscoring her reverb-swathed vocals. "Behind the House" is a spiritual sister to "Deep Red Bells" and especially "Star Witness", a Fox Confessor stand-out whose fatalistic tone and lucid lyrics evoke car-crash death scenes like half-formed memories. There's an intriguing rustic-goth tone to Case's country, a murky twilight mood that draws from the soulfulness of Lullaby and the weirdness of Blacklisted and here is perfectly executed by her backing band, which includes the Sadies and Calexico. The album's sparkliest bauble, however, is Garth Hudson's piano, which curlicues throughout "Margaret vs. Pauline" and the rumbling gospel "John Saw That Number". Despite Case's fearless performances on "Dirty Knife" and "Maybe Sparrow", Fox Confessor often pours on the atmospherics too thick, giving it a truncated, unfinished feel too similar to Blacklisted. It is an album with more great moments than great songs, capping the first decade of a career that promises to have many more of both.


Moving beyond his label’s grounding in UK soundsystem styles, the Wisdom Teeth cofounder shows newfound devotion to melody, texture, and feeling.

Blush

A year on from first being told to down tools and go home en masse, people in the UK find themselves in the perverse situation of comparing lockdowns. Despite the nearing possibility of being able to do things like go to the pub or dance in a club, there’s a creeping nostalgia for the not-so-distant days of sourdough starters and DIY haircuts. London-based producer Facta, aka Oscar Henson, will remember those early days of the new strangeness with an acute affection. Working reduced hours at his day job (the magazine he works for had paused its monthly print runs) meant he was able to focus for a while on something else. Namely: sitting on his balcony, drinking coffee, and writing an album. The result, Blush, sounds exactly like that blissful setting.
Facta launched his Wisdom Teeth label (co-founded with his friend K-Lone, whose own debut LP was one of last year’s highlights) in 2014. It served as an outpost not just for his own productions, but also those of a nebulous cast of acquaintances with a shared interest in the unexplored creases between soundsystem staples like dubstep, grime, UK funky, garage, and jungle. This brief, nameless, yet productive movement was always more about trying new things than being restrained by tempo or technical prowess. Wisdom Teeth’s output has embodied this same considered omnivorousness, and the soundsystem influences are all present on Blush too (in the Silkie-esque pulse of “Verge,” the joyous funky lurch of “On Deck,” or the almost autonomic weave of “Blush”).
More significant, though, is Facta’s own newfound devotion to melody and, for want of a better word, feeling. Tracks like “Iso Stream” and “Blush” are almost generative in the way each element swirls in and out of the dance, led by nothing more than melodic curiosity. There’s a tendency to be a little noodly at times—opener “Sistine (Plucks)” risks veering into video-game loading-screen territory—but this matters less than it otherwise might in the album’s broader, exploratory context. A select palette hems the thing in, and he shows a conscious effort to thread each track together, maintaining a kind of reverence for the album format in the process. Vibraphone, delicate but expansive pads, and intermittent fizzes of white noise appear throughout. “Iso Stream” and “Diving Birds” (a collaboration with Parris) are both visited by the same cooing vocal sample: chopped like a garage hook, but soft and folksy in its timbre. The drums are delicate and organic, rather than being engineered to exacting club-system specs, and the songs themselves cast off the structural expectations of DJs dependent on neat intros, drops, and breakdowns.
Blush unfurls slowly, like the first spring blooms. And just like those buds poking up through the soil, it’s guided by its own small sense of daring exploration. This is most typified by “Brushes.” The track glides on an exquisite groove, building and building like a maximalist trance record, but with all the bluster stripped out—leaving, instead, wire-brush synths and gorgeous, gloopy kick drums. Just like snowdrops in March, the result is something modest in its own beauty—and all the more charming for it.

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After the relative darkness of Arm's Way, Islands welcomes back original member Jamie Thompson and makes a welcome return to the sound of their debut.

Vapours

When Jamie Thompson and Nick Diamonds started their second post-Unicorns collaboration-- the first was Th' Corn Gangg, remember?-- it made perfect sense that they should call it Islands. With breezy calypso rhythms, honeyed country-acoustic guitars, bubbly/silly synthesizer effects, and summery melodies, their debut, Return to the Sea, was a wonderful getaway soundtrack, obscuring its death-haunted lyrics with bright arrangements and rich, coconut-scented production. On Islands' second album, however, storm clouds descended: Arm's Way found the band down a member-- Thompson amicably departed before its recording-- yet ballooned into a six-piece, and the bloat was audible. Melodies (previously the shivery highlight of their songs) were buried in meandering guitar solos, baroque, melodramatic strings, and gloomy, silvery keyboards for a dark, proggy effect that bled the band of much of its fun and levity.
The good news is that the clouds seem to have parted; on their third album, Islands are sunny once more. Perhaps it's due to the return of Thompson, back in the fold after his one-album hiatus, or just a product of stripping the instrumentation down to its most basic structure (in many cases, just synths, drums, and guitar) in service of memorable tunes, but Islands have made a welcome return to form. While those hoping for Return to the Sea's Afro-Caribbean flourishes and guest rappers will be disappointed, Vapours' comparably spare synth-pop is replete with the juicy hooks and major-key bounce that were so lacking from their last effort.
The album kicks off with "Switched On"'s repetitive shimmying guitar figure, squishy 1980s synths, and swooning, hiccuping vocals. The title track struts like a peacock, showing off a big, swaggering chorus ("It's the bassline in your mind/ It's a sexy way to cry/ You know I've had my share of doubt/ Until I saw the vapours in your eyes") over a four-on-the-floor stomp and brassy, confident horns. And "Tender Torture" is not only the most lyrically literal interpretation of Islands' earlier beachy ethos but also, with its whirring suction-cup synth effects and gooey "ooohs," the apex of their futuristically sweet sound. That's not to say Islands have given up their penchant for darkness-- after all, we're talking about guys whose main lyrical concerns have long been bones and ghosts. Moody numbers-- like "No You Don't" with its spare percolating keyboards and lyrics that warn, "Don't buy dope from a man you don't know"-- still abound. But built as they are on tightly wound mechanical beats and free of rococo arrangements, these murkier moments feel more visceral for their restraint.
What made Islands' debut so thrilling (and saved Arm's Way from its grandiose ambitions) was the expansive, creative way they wrapped up their classic pop hooks in unexpected instrumentation or imaginative production. And Vapours, though more stripped down than either of its predecessors, continues in that tradition. Surely, many criticisms of the album will include a mention of Islands' Auto-Tuned "Heartbeat", but with organic, galloping guitars and whimsical synth flourishes underscoring their most vulnerable vocal melody, Diamonds' mechanized voice adds a dash of synthetic style and keeps things from devolving into the realm of the overly sentimental. Though there is an overall whiff of the 1980s about Vapours, it sidesteps the traps of either sounding trendily vintage or indistinguishable from the rest of today's Reagan-era impostors. It works best, however, to think of the album as a return to Return to the Sea, only, as its title suggests, in a hazier, less opaque form. It's as if that album's liquid-y tracks have evaporated, leaving only wispy traces of synthesizer melodies and quirky pop choruses wafting through the air.


Speedy Ortiz's Sadie Dupuis steps out with a self-produced solo album that's all about positivity, in all caps and probably punctuated with multiple exclamation points.

Slugger

While working on Speedy Ortiz’s last LP, 2015’s Foil Deer, Sadie Dupuis was emerging from an abusive relationship. But rather than reflecting on the experience, Foil Deer was a concrete decision to grow stronger. “I’m not going to write any songs about this person because they’re a piece of crap who doesn’t deserve my mental energy,” Dupuis told Pitchfork at the time. Slugger seems to be still processing past pain but it takes “Raising the Skate”’s “I’m not bossy, I’m the boss” mentality and multiplies it by 100: what results is a guide to loving oneself, surviving, and supporting others.
This empowering attitude should not come as a surprise for any fans of Speedy Ortiz. While touring Foil Deer, the band started a “help hotline” to encourage safety and accountability at their concerts. That same year, they raised money for Girls Rock Camp Foundation through an all-ages tour. But sonically, Slugger is 180 degrees from the scuzzy guitars and tangled wordplay of Speedy; Foreboding simmering is replaced by sparkling keys, dissonance is made danceable, and maybe there’s a keytar in there, who knows. Dupuis wrote and recorded the songs that would form Slugger over a two week period while living in the Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia. Her original concept was to home-record each song before entering a studio and  allocating each song to a different producer. Luckily, Dupuis avoided what could have been a chaotic collage and decided to produce the album herself, adding an additional layer of autonomy to a record all about positivity, in all caps and probably punctuated with multiple exclamation points.
In some ways, Slugger is more accessible than any Speedy release. “I wanted to make songs that were the opposite of ‘Genie in a Bottle’ or ‘The Boy Is Mine,’” Dupuis has said, and Slugger definitely succeeds in this mission. Its messages are loud and clear and little is left unexplained. The downside of this is that sometimes listening to Slugger can feel like being hit over the head. Considering that every two minutes an American is sexually assaulted, this explicitness is perhaps not a bad thing, but there’s a fine line between showing and telling, and Slugger does a lot of the latter.
Take lead single “Get a Yes,” a giggling and shimmering number that spells consent out quite plainly: “I say yes if I want to/If you want to you’ve gotta get a yes.” This message perhaps seems obvious to anyone listening to Slugger; that doesn’t mean it’s not an important idea to express. “Just a Friend” works in a similar way. “Put to bed your old ideas about my friend Ben,” Dupuis chirps over a swirling sea of blips before demanding, “If you’ve got a girl who says she’s just got a friend, then you should just believe.” The song concludes with the tongue-in-cheek call to “objectify these boys,” an idea that is unfortunately left at the end. “Hype” is a protest regarding labeling and pitting women against each other. “‘Cause I just wanna hype my best friends, man. I just wanna hype my best girls.” Slugger’s transparency raises the question “just what is the album trying to accomplish?” Is it simply offering anthems to an audience who already believes and agrees with these politics? Is there anything wrong with that?
The less instructive and more oblique songs on Slugger include “<2” and the infectious “The Sting,” the former of which sounds like it could be a Speedy song. “Krampus (In Love),” which was previously released as a demo, is a holiday jingle that feels applicable and listenable year-round with truly poignant lines and imagery like “If beauty is a terror, will the snow cover the evidence of love as something beautiful?” Closing track “Coming Into Powers” is perhaps the most interesting track, a literal “fuck you pay me” declaration of empowerment. Ithaca, NY rapper Sammus joins Dupuis at the tail-end of the track, offering a welcome change in tone.
“Sure, there’s sexiness to mystique, but when it comes down to it, it’s a really dangerous way to interpret what someone wants,” Dupuis told DIY magazine. Seemingly in protest against this mode of thought, Dupuis has left little within Slugger for listeners to unpack. One of Speedy Ortiz’s strengths is that beneath all the instrumental layers, there’s a narrative puzzle to unpack. Sad13’s Slugger solves its puzzle for you, but in the hope that you will be able to go at it alone in the future.


Trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith's latest is an expansive and politically charged suite that pays tribute to official national parks as well as cultural zones not yet recognized by government decree.

Wadada Leo Smith: America’s National Parks

America's National Parks

Though trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith is a leading maestro of abstraction, he loves a straightforward concept as much as anyone else. Over the last decade, he’s composed The Great Lakes Suites, as well as the expansive Civil Rights-themed project Ten Freedom Summers (which drew from avant-jazz and modern-classical languages). For his 2016 album with pianist Vijay Iyer, Smith wrote a tribute to the African American contralto Marian Anderson.
Musical dedications are now as much a part of Smith’s process as the experimental nature of his fiery improvisations. But these historical shout-outs are not just creative prompts that he uses to get his writing hand going. Smith’s monuments often develop into sly editorials. When the composer extends his Civil Rights-era meditation to include 21st-century events, it’s his way of diagnosing the lingering nature of vintage prejudices.
America’s National Parks clearly fits in among these trends in Smith’s latter-day output. The double-album contains the veteran jazz quartet that helped power Summers, and adds in the impressive cello work of Ashley Walters. While the ensemble’s size is smaller than that of the group that recorded Summers, this lineup has the same jazz-plus-classical range of instrumental attack. And Smith’s commentary resides in his choices of grounds to celebrate. These include national parks already in operation—like Yellowstone—but also hallowed cultural zones not yet recognized by government decree.
The title of the opening movement, “New Orleans: The National Culture Park USA 1718,” references the pre-American nature of the city’s founding by the French Mississippi Company. Yet the loping quality of the opening groove shows that Smith is commending this location as a potential national park on the basis of its relationship to jazz. The tempo is slow, and sometimes makes way for beat-free stretches of sound. But overall, it still has a finger-snapping, swinging feel—thanks to the way bassist John Lindberg and drummer Pheeroan akLaff emphasize the underlying pulse.
At first, the mood occupies a middle ground between celebration and solemn observation—as Smith’s trumpet switches from bright lines of heraldry to subtler harmonizing with Walters’ bowed cello lines. Then, a few minutes in, a faster beat arrives. Smith responds with a muted-trumpet solo full of pristine, bluesy poise. Eventually, the pianist (and excellent composer) Anthony Davis gets a lengthy feature that closes with an impressionistic, dreamy cadenza. At this juncture, the opening track is barely half over—and it’s already given listeners a trio of distinct, memorable worlds.
As with other ambitious projects from Smith, America’s National Parks wants your focused attention, and your time. But the rewards it offers can make those substantial requests feel justified. The most dramatic mix of styles comes during the half-hour piece “The Mississippi River: Dark and Deep Dreams Flow the River—a National Memorial Park c. 5000 BC.” Grim piano chords and ominously bowed strings suggest a potential for violence, before the album’s most powerful stretches of free-improv bashing make good on the threat. (Smith describes this “park” as “a memorial site which was used as a dumping place for black bodies by hostile forces in Mississippi.”)
Elsewhere, the stark, sometimes violent majesty of the natural world is conjured by imposing blocks of atonal modernism, during “Sequoia/Kings Canyon National Parks: The Giant Forest, Great Canyon, Cliffs, Peaks, Waterfalls and Cave Systems 1890.” And a tender beauty is fostered in the chamber music writing of Smith’s most abstract, conceptual idea in this series: “Eileen Jackson Southern, 1920-2002: A Literary National Park.” (Southern was the Harvard musicologist who wrote The Music of Black Americans, among other important works.)
The album isn’t quite the overwhelming achievement that Ten Freedom Summers was, though the refined ensemble playing of Smith’s newly convened “Golden Quintet” is consistently ravishing. And the duration of the set gradually proposes a unique charm. Once you travel all the way to a monument, you don’t take a quick look and then leave. In similar fashion, these extended tributes create a persuasive argument regarding the attention still due to a nation’s history, and its cultural variety.


R.E.M.’s most unstable album never quite arrives in any one sound for more than a track at a time. Born of a chaotic and stressful tour, it translated not only the energy of their shows but the transience and unreality of life on the road.

R.E.M.: New Adventures in Hi-Fi (25th Anniversary Edition)

At what point is a band officially cursed? R.E.M.’s 1995 world tour, a grueling 11-month sojourn that was also their first tour in six years, certainly made them appear so. At a show in Switzerland, drummer Bill Berry suffered a brain aneurysm and collapsed onstage. A few months later, just as Berry had recovered enough to drum with the band again, singer Michael Stipe and bassist Mike Mills each required surgery for different ailments. Somehow not completely defeated by the experience, the band entered the studio as soon as the tour ended, excited to finish an album they’d stubbornly begun during the ill-starred trip; they’d been capturing new songs during soundchecks and performances and in the bleary hours between them, hoping the music would translate not only the energy of their shows but the transience and unreality of life on the road.
One song, “Be Mine,” was written and recorded on a tour bus in the middle of the night, and the original recording is included on the bonus disc of the 25th anniversary reissue of R.E.M’s 1996 album New Adventures in Hi-Fi. While the version on the record ended up being a full-band studio recreation, it’s the bus recording that channels the half-asleep, delayed awareness of time and reality brought on by a long drive through nowhere. You can hear it in the quietness of Stipe’s vocal, singing as if he’s trying not to wake anybody up, accompanied only by Buck’s guitar, the drone of an organ, and the sounds of the bus moving through a world turned upside-down and emptied of people.
New Adventures is the most displaced R.E.M. record, never quite arriving in any one sound for more than a track at a time, humming through a harsh and unforgiving landscape like wires between electrical towers. The material’s only unified by the half-conscious state in which much of it was made, where a song as muddy and slippery as “Undertow” can hang near the glow of “E-Bow the Letter”’s lamp-lit dusk. Most of the album and its B-sides were taken from or built on top of recordings from the ’95 tour; “Zither,” a short, frothy instrumental that could accompany a faint figure ambling down a desert road, was recorded in a bathroom at the Spectrum arena in Philadelphia, and the most furious and punkish compositions on the record, such “The Wake-Up Bomb” and “Departure,” sound like lightly cleaned-up live recordings. As quickly as R.E.M. were committing new work to tape, they were also stretching out, covering Jimmy Webb songs like “Galveston” and “Wichita Lineman”—the latter of which appears on the new reissue—reaching for records that also felt pulled from the wavering air of the road. Like New Adventures, these songs embody the feeling of driving through vast stretches of nothingness, eagerly awaiting the arrival of the next moment because the current one is intolerable.
This aspect of the road seeped into Stipe’s lyrics as well; all of the obsession with image and artifice in the Monster era dissipates in a desert of abstraction on New Adventures. “This fame thing, I don’t get it/I wrap my hand in plastic to try to look through it,” Stipe sings on “E-Bow the Letter,” the album’s first single and as lonely and alien a thing as R.E.M. ever recorded, Patti Smith’s voice welling like tears in the chorus. Stipe’s writing throughout the album is made up of disconnected phrases that feel untethered from anything larger, like the fragment of CB radio chatter that leaked onto the tape when they recorded “Be Mine.” The words proceed from a nameless and singular mood, a fragmented insomniac haze where all life’s endeavors seem to amount to a shadow slipping across an uninhabitable desert. Though it was written rapidly in the studio, the opener, “How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us,” feels haunted by the tour, a disordered sequence of dramatic events that Stipe keeps out of focus: “I made a mistake/Chalked it up to design/I cracked through time-space, godless and dry.” And when Stipe writes in character, continuing a tradition he started on Monster, the songs are full of people trapped in fugue states, ricocheting between feelings of frustration and loss that religion and its alternatives can’t entirely repair. One of his tenderest and most ambiguous sets of lyrics, “New Test Leper,” is told from the perspective of a talk show guest going through either a half-hearted religious conversion or a nervous breakdown, desperately trying to be heard in a room where the hostile and embarrassed responses of the host and the audience are so inevitable they might as well be scripted.
At the center of the record is “Leave,” the longest song in the R.E.M. catalog, where Stipe’s voice sounds like it’s fighting to be heard amid a torrent of sirens and overdriven guitar riffs, while an e-bow, a guitar effect used throughout the record, vibrates a sound out of Buck’s strings that hangs in the air with the eerie shimmer of car exhaust. Stipe’s lyrics get even more fragmented in this section of the record, like they’re being obscured by whorls of static: “Shifting the dream/Nothing could bring me further from my old friend time.” An alternate version of the song, released on the soundtrack for A Life Less Ordinary in 1997 and also included in the new reissue, hushes it down to a sleepy trip-hop pulse, a photonegative of the original with all its darks and lights reversed. It’s like trading the loneliness of a crowd for the loneliness of an empty room—they’re just variants of a single alienation.
Affixed to their roughest-edged and most unstable record, the title New Adventures in Hi-Fi always felt a little sarcastically posed. It might’ve been better served by a title from an earlier R.E.M. album, Document, as it’s undoubtedly a document of the 1995 tour and the exhausted but inspired band they were afterward. The reissue hammers this home by incorporating several early live versions of album tracks that are fascinating for being only a few missing lyrics away from their final incarnations; they display the band’s confidence in the material, in what they were managing to create out of chaos and catastrophe.
New Adventures is also a document of a band that effectively ceased to exist after its recording. On the first day of sessions for their 1998 album Up, Berry, no longer willing to endure the grind of touring after his aneurysm, decided to quit, and the remaining members had to reshape their sound around the absence of their founding drummer. They’d do so by bringing in electronic textures and Beach Boys-influenced harmonies, both in their way tributes to Berry, the post-punk skip he placed in the band’s pulse, and the chamber music-like constructions he brought to their songwriting. But for all the individual merits of the R.E.M. albums after New Adventures in Hi-Fi, for better and often for worse, they were never the same.

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If you’re into neat categorizations, the Londoner Louis Carnell is a grime producer. But his debut album, billed as “a personal portrait of anxiety,” squirms out of all such neat categories. With it, he's succeeded in making a statement that's not just a flexing of experimental techniques, but something rich and human, too.

Safe

Louis Carnell, if you’re into neat categorizations, is a grime producer. But his debut album Safe squirms out of all such neat categories. Hailing from suburban south London, Carnell is of grime’s second generation, scholarly about its history but not hidebound by its rules. His more conventional productions have leant towards the energetic and darkside—see his 2013 track “Snakes”, the murky swing of its beats accompanied by the crack of gunshots. But increasingly, Visionist has shed conspicuous genre trappings and shucked off layers, too, tending towards something more minimal, introspective and haunted. His two I’m Fine EPs, released on the New York-based label Lit City Trax in 2013 and 2014, were ethereal and virtually beatless, barely grime at all. They explored, said Carnell, the five stages of grief—the journey from denial to anger to acceptance, known to psychiatrists as the Kübler-Ross model. About the precise nature of his loss, though, Carnell was keeping schtum.
Since, Carnell has joined forces with Bill Kouligas of the Berlin-based label PAN to create a new sub-label Codes—a sort of reboot of his earlier label Lost Codes, dedicated to outliers in the grime matrix. And now the debut Visionist album appears on PAN, and comes with a theme not unlike I’m Fine—billed as “a personal portrait of anxiety” that traces the onset and passing of a panic attack. This subject came as a little bit of a surprise, as I interviewed Carnell in 2014 and he struck me as coolly self-assured in that way that you might easily read as arrogance. Still, reflect on the crisp meticulousness of his music—those deft flurries of icy melody, vocal samples diced as if by scalpel—and perhaps you can perceive a telltale tension in his hand, a yearning for precision and control.
As with the I’m Fine EPs, Safe finds Carnell working extensively with the human voice. Broadly, his approach with vocals recalls that of Burial: both filch acapellas from pop and R&B records before bending them out of shape and turning them to new ends. In Burial’s productions, though, vocal lines generally remain vocal lines, while what Carnell does with them feels rather more baroque. On Safe, these voices are assembled as melody lines – cloned, layered and pitched way up until they form a fluttering polyphony, or glitter like jewels in a crown. (Perhaps a closer reference point for Carnell’s sampling technique would be Fatima Al-Qadiri’s Asiatisch; indeed, the pair collaborated on an earlier Visionist track, “The Call”, their breathy melodies arranged as point and counterpoint).
The track titling—“Tired Tears, Awake Fears”, “Let Me In”, “Constraint”—indicates something of the territory that Safe seeks to cover, a landscape in which love equals imprisonment and feelings skirted or repressed. Around beautiful melodies, Carnell arranges more dissonant sounds to imply pain or unease. On the opening “You Stayed”, a diva's cry is encased in a prison of cascading, pointillist melodies and queasy timbres. On “Victim”, metallic percussion pounds without mercy, while up in the higher registers, synthesized strings sketch out a sad elegy and voices curl into gasps, sobs and whimpers. Sometimes, vocal lines repeat themselves, numbly circling as if frozen in some kind of Stygian limbo—see the closing refrain of “Too Careful To Care”, a cry of “In my head…” that repeats over and over, pitched alternately high, low and midrange, as if in search of some sort of escape route. Elsewhere, Carnell’s disembodied cries strike more graceful notes, as if their wordlessness allows them to softly alight on truths over which mortal sentences clumsily stumble.
Key to Carnell’s style is a sense of spaciousness, although Safe is more filled out, less minimal than the I’m Fine material. Still, it is seldom predictable. The breathtaking, gothic “1 Guarda” moves forth on ticking hats and dull rumbles that sound like rotating granite pillars, and where there are beats, they upset expectations. Floor-trembling bass bombs erupt spasmodically throughout “Constraint” and "Safe", while “Let Me In” rolls forth on the sort of booming trap undercarriage you might expect to hear blasting from a passing jeep—although everything above that is a mirage, a weave of woozy strobes and hiccupping voices. Here and there, Carnell does pare things right back, and this is where Safe is at its very prettiest. “Sleep Luxury” is a washed-out grime lullaby adorned by twinkling harp and the ripple of running water, while the cold chimes of “Sin-cere” appear to fantasize a music box sculpted wholly from ice.
This year has been a banner year for producers working at grime’s outer reaches. On the one hand, the likes of M.E.S.H. and Rabit have released records that intensify grime’s alien skitter into something harsh, mechanical, and abstracted. In parallel, the “weightless” tendency, pioneered by Mumdance and Logos’ Different Circles imprint, pulls away layers, lifts grime off the road and into the stratosphere. Safe draws on elements of both, but more than any of his peers, Carnell has succeeded in making a statement that feels not just a flexing of experimental techniques, but something rich and human, too. Perhaps its closest recent antecedent is Arca’s Xen, another record dealing with the desire to shed one’s skin, slip free of this prison of the flesh. Diaphanous of texture but heavy of spirit, Safe revolves upon this tension, the pressure point of a soul under strain.