Despite the well-fed egos, Jonathan Pierce and co.'s new album-- one that features ugly, petty, real emotion and multiple references to death or dying-- is a smaller, more intimate record than last year's self-titled predecessor.

Portamento

Like any good TNT show, the Drums know drama. At the tail end of 2010, guitarist Adam Kessler left the band under circumstances that were clearly less than amicable; the band's website stated that the remaining members were "devastated" and were "keeping to themselves and friends at this time." Two weeks later, lead singer Jonathan Pierce told NME that the band had composed "the best song we've ever written" the day after Kessler's departure. It was only a few months' time before Pierce was referring to Kessler's departure as a "blessing in disguise" in UK newspaper The Independent: "We don't know what he's doing or anything. I'm not interested in knowing what he's up to."
In the leadup to the release of the Drums' second album, Portamento, Pierce has sounded dismissive of the band's general career trajectory, claiming that they don't "have a very long shelf life as a band" and that they came close to breaking up this past June following "a lot of shouting matches." Accordingly, that grim outlook is reflected in their most recent work. Throughout Portamento's 12 songs, there are 11 references to death or dying, the most notable arriving on "Days" when Pierce testifies to his past devotion to a broken relationship by casually tossing out the revelation that he "killed myself." Obsessing over mortality is nothing new in indie pop, let alone within the Drums' catalog thus far. Remember, this is a band whose first album kicked off with a song called "Best Friend" that started like this: "You were my best friend/ And then you died."
Clearly, Pierce's ego has been well-fed-- his recent quote-worthy nature in the press reflects that of the leader of a prototypical British buzz band (fittingly, despite Brooklyn ties, the UK has welcomed the band with open arms, more so than the States). Which is why it's surprising that Portamento sounds and feels like a smaller, more intimate album than last year's self-titled predecessor. After all, it's not like they did anything drastically different this time around-- like The Drums, Portamento was largely recorded in a band member's apartment (Pierce's), as well as a few studios in NYC and upstate Woodstock. (For those who bemoaned the production value of the first LP, be warned: Portamento very much sounds like it was recorded in someone's apartment.)
The lack of "bigness" on Portamento most likely owes to the fact that the Drums aren't on a major label anymore (in the U.S., anyway). Here in the States, they've gone to Frenchkiss, a more suitable home considering its strong roster of bands-that-sound-like-a-lot-of-bands. In case you haven't noticed by now, the Drums do sound like a lot of bands, taking in everything from the Beach Boys' controlled falsettos to the loving cloyingness of late Swedish indie-pop greats the Honeydrips. As it turns out, the new surroundings are more beneficial for them: There's not as much pressure to be extroverted for the sake of courting a larger audience. This means that there's no "Me and the Moon" or "Forever and Ever Amen"-- two big, great songs that would sound too anthemic and overblown if they were on this record. In the place of anthems, though, are carefully constructed gems making up a sequencing run so solid it takes a few listens to pick out the exact drop-off point ("In the Cold", in case you were wondering). From the saxes and Theremin-like squeal in "What You Were" to the heart-tugging kickoff of "Hard to Love", it's the small, detailed moments that take you by surprise here-- kind of like life, really.
And, despite all the drama and tortured sentiments, that's what the Drums are all about: real life, and the pains and pleasures (mostly pains) that come along with loving while you still have fresh breath in your lungs. Yes, Pierce talks about selling a gun in "Money", but the song is basically about how he doesn't have enough money to buy a lover a nice present. Being broke (and feeling inadequate because of that) is something we can all relate to, no matter how embarrassing it might be for a bunch of major-label refugees to admit. It's time to stop begrudging these guys for being stylish and faddish, because real emotions like the ones they work in are ugly and petty and hard to bear in public. You can get as many haircuts and buy as many trendy outfits as you want, but you're not going to change the fact that it'll never be cool to feel upset, angry, and alone.


The Vancouver-based producer/vocalist is a merciless industrial-rap experimentalist obsessed with the point where sex and death intertwine.

Death Drive EP

In his seminal 1920 text Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Sigmund Freud proposed the concepts of the sex drive and the death drive. Building off the Russian psychoanalyst Sabrina Spielrein’s concept of the “death instinct,” Freud asserted that alongside our need for survival and sexual reproduction, humans also harbor an innate desire to find the shortest path to decomposition and destruction. Practically, it was an attempt to explain why humans hold aggressive tendencies towards themselves and others, sometimes to the point that they are compelled to kill.
These twin forces consume the music of Debby Friday, a Vancouver-based producer/vocalist who continues in Deathbomb Arc’s tradition of merciless industrial-rap experimentalists like Death Grips, clipping., and JPEGMAFIA. The source of this outward aggression, as she’s suggested in interviews, stems from the oppression and trauma she endures as a queer black woman and Nigerian-Canadian immigrant. Similar to the work of political activist Moor Mother or the diasporic electronic collective NON, she wields the sound of violence as a tool for resistance and empowerment, conveying it in her ferocious “bitchpunk” tracks through screeching demands for sexual satisfaction. On her new terrifyingly seductive Death Drive EP, Friday continues to entangle polar Freudian concepts, underscoring the similarities between brutality and desire, love and carnality.
Friday’s ideas comes through clearest on “Fatal,” an industrial-pop banger about a partner so good in bed they might be deadly. The song grinds along with the same depraved energy as Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer:” “I am your poison and remedy/Why don’t get you come and get some,” Friday sings, positioning herself as both her lover’s source of life and cause of death. It also works the other way around; on “Tear the Veil,” she sings: “I love everything that seeks to destroy me.”
Death Drive also captures the grotesqueness of human bodies, both alive and dead. The beat of “Good and Evil” is built off the sound of a man panting for breath, highlighting the animalistic noises humans make at the height of desire or terror. Meanwhile, “Neight Fictive,” an eerie blues song where Friday sings of killing her own infant, features an instrumental made up of horrifying sounds like the squelch of wet meat, buzzing flies, and the clanking of chains. They serve to illustrate the truly terrifying nature of the narrative, which Friday outlines with a disturbingly sweet coo. As this homicidal mother figure, she continues to present femininity through the most cutthroat and ruthless lens possible. After all, it was a woman, not a man, who thought of the “death instinct” in the first place.


On her new album, the Guatemalan cellist trades her lush, verdant style for moments of austere beauty. She feels more intuitive and confident than ever.

Se Ve Desde Aquí

Mabe Fratti’s music tends to pull in opposite directions, torn between friction and release. On 2019’s Pies sobre la tierra and 2021’s Será que ahora podremos entendernos, the Guatemalan-born, Mexico City-based cellist, composer, and singer spun vast, verdant worlds out of tangled loops and layers. Those albums were notable for their fullness: lilting cello lines and Fratti’s high, plaintive voice, often multi-tracked or run through Auto-Tune, entwined above dense thickets of synthesizer and reverb. Her songs could be chaotic—tendrils of noise, like the buzz of a charred amplifier, might run beneath even the most angelic refrain—but their chief characteristic was an overwhelming sense of yearning, expressed in searching vocal melodies. If those first two albums were lush, leafy gardens, the new one, Se Ve Desde Aquí, is a desert. Fratti’s music has always been beautiful, but this is a different, more daring kind of beauty: stark and severe, capturing the cracked earth below and the radiant sweep of the night sky above.
The shift is immediately apparent on “Con Esfuerzo,” the instrumental sketch that opens the album. Dissonant bows flash out above churning synths, a halting drumbeat, and a burst of dubbed-out acoustic guitar. There’s a sense of something building: spirits being summoned, or a storm coming on. In the past, much of Fratti’s best work manifested when she reached into the zone where the elements bled together, as if she were feeling her way toward clarity; here, the mystery deepens as she pares back.
The following track, “Desde el cielo,” is the album’s first proper song, yet it’s just as skeletal. She plucks a bassline on her cello; the synthesizer sounds like a howling wind. “Fuera, fuera,” she sings (“Out, out”), her voice assured despite its wavering tone. Underneath her, an atonal swirl of sax, drums, and guitar suggests a fusion of free jazz and ambient, charged with the energy of spontaneous creation. Across the album, she’s assisted by a handful of wildly talented collaborators, including multi-instrumentalist Héctor Tosta, electronic musician Carla Boregas, violinist Alina Maldonado, drummer Gibrán Andrade, and saxophonist Jarrett Gilgore, whose spectral, silvery glint illuminates several of the record’s most thrilling moments. However it may have been recorded, it feels like a group of players improvising together in real time. Yet despite the complexity of the tumbling movements on “Desde el cielo,” emptiness yawns between each instrument. It’s less a linear piece of music than a space to enter and inhabit—a dwelling, perhaps a refuge.
Stripped of electronic processing, Fratti’s voice is more forceful than on previous albums; the air of refinement that sometimes clung to her singing has burned off. Her tone is still soft and breathy, and in places even thin, imbued with a quick, nervous vibrato, but she makes bolder leaps, happy to lean into imperfection. There’s a newfound confidence to her songwriting, too. She frequently recalls both Arthur Russell and Kate Bush, not only in her melodic choices, but also in her ability to blend the intuitive with the unknown, to make the alien seem second nature.
Fratti’s lyrics favor simple phrases and unadorned metaphors that blur the lines between inanimate objects and living things. “Cada músculo tiene una voz,” she intones (“Every muscle has a voice”). “Cae el sudor a la tierra/Extiende sus alas” (“Sweat falls to the ground/Extends its wings”). She sings of walls falling, echoes with no source, unfamiliar voices that appear to be speaking in her stead; many of her most memorable lines take the form of questions. “Joven el día pide/¿Será la sed de nuevo?” (“The young day asks/Is it the thirst again?”) “¿Qué es lo que pide mi cuerpo?” (“What is it my body wants?”)
The answer to that question is “stop pushing” (“deja de empujar”). Her voice cuts like a narrow beam through murky discord, and it’s clear from the shift in tone exactly what she means by this mantra: Give in, go gently, and find solace in being swept up by a greater force. These are songs about doubt and self-knowledge, and perhaps also about the creative process. In “Algo grandioso,” the album’s sweetest and most consonant track, she sings of embracing something long-awaited, and as her voice slips into a wordless melody, simple and unburdened, it transmits a mixture of exhaustion and joy—the relief, perhaps, that follows the completion of a long and arduous journey.
Fratti says that here, for the first time, she avoided layering multiple instances of individual instruments, but she breaks that self-imposed rule on “Siempre tocas algo,” the final song. The introduction is even more spartan than what has preceded it; through a haze of synthesizers, her cello creaks like a rusty gate. She describes estrangement and presence in typically plainspoken terms: “¿Qué tan cerca puedo estar?/¿Qué es lo que nos separa?” (“How close can I be?/What is it that separates us?”) Then, without warning, her voice erupts into dazzling multi-part harmony, as though all the inchoate longing of her previous albums had been concentrated into a single swollen deluge. Austere yet never wanting, Se Ve Desde Aquí is an album that empties you and fills you up. There’s a desolation at its core, an intimate knowledge of lack, but also a fervent belief in redemption—even if it lasts no longer than a momentary explosion of color, like parched earth blooming after a long-awaited rain.


On his debut album, the Milwaukee rapper Lorde Fredd33 emerges fully-formed. He is charismatic and nuanced, painting a complex, deeply-personal portrait of black life in America’s rust belt.

Lorde Fredd33: NORF: The Legend of Hotboy Ronald

NORF: The Legend of Hotboy Ronald

The photograph on the cover here is grim. It features a man sitting on the roof of a car, reading Alchemy, the Ancient Science, a 1970s British tome cataloging medieval attempts to transform everyday materials into gold. A young child is perched on the reader’s lap, staring absently towards the ground. Underneath this pair, a masked figure points a rifle out of the window. Lorde Fredd33’s worldview isn’t easy to neatly summarize but this image manages to capture many of his preoccupations. On NORF, he looks out wearily over a broken city, wrestles with fatherhood, unpacks his own childhood and works furiously to spin his struggles into flaxen gold. He is, at once, all three of the figures in the photograph.
Fredd33 has been kicking around the Milwaukee rap scene for a few years; since 2015, he has more or less worked exclusively with Q the Sun, a local producer who’s landed beats for rap blog mainstays like milo and Webster X. Q the Sun’s production, which has one foot in the jazzy, sample-based sound of rap’s past and one in the electronic sounds of today, is compelling if unobtrusive, the perfect springboard for a rapper as charismatic as Fredd33. On NORF, Fredd33 demonstrates an acrobatic command of his craft, switching up flows, mimicking other rappers’ cadences, and contorting his voice into a variety of shapes. Using this vivid palette of colors, he paints a portrait of an artist and the city that shaped him. Kendrick Lamar is an obvious touchstone (particularly, Good Kid, m.A.A.d City), though Fredd33 is far more insular: he is usually the sole subject in his songs.
Milwaukee’s North Side, where Fredd33 was raised, is home to the vast majority of the city’s black residents. In the summer of 2016, the North Side erupted in protest after the killing of a black man by police officers, though the community’s frustration had deeper roots. Consider the statistics: Wisconsin has both the highest black unemployment rate and the highest rate of incarceration for black men, while Milwaukee is the country’s most segregated city. On NORF, Fredd33 shines a light on this divide, drawing correlations between the numbers in the headlines and life at street-level. “50 percent unemployment, that’s just for black men?/No wonder we trapping, wasn’t we born trapped, then?,” he asks on “Reflections.” But later in the song, he admits that some progress has been made, while punching up at a beleaguered icon in the process: “We the ‘New Slaves’? That’s a damn lie/Just rocking Yeezys instead of shackles, damn right.”
Throughout NORF, these same tensions play out on a smaller, more personal scale as well. Fredd33 repeatedly complains about having to pay child support but when we hear a recording of him speaking with his son at the tail end of “Free (Type Shit),” the rapper sounds warm and attentive. “I can’t wait to see you tomorrow, you little peanut head,” he says before signing off. On the following song, he lists, “Have my son draped in gold,” as one of his “Goals.” These are complex—and at times ugly—feelings and Fredd33 gives them voice without judgement. The difficult task of reconciling the rapper’s love for his child with his resentment over the cost of raising him is left to sit with the listener.
Ultimately, Lorde Fredd33 offers up few conclusions on NORF; his Milwaukee is a place of ambiguity, not of moral absolutes. Most complicated of all is our narrator: an artist and father but also, the guy who “might aim at your head” or the miscreant on “9th North sipping lean.” On the album’s final song, “Reflections,” Fredd33 traces his inner conflict back to its origins. “I grew up playing violins, around sirens and violence,” he sighs, reminding us that he is a product of his environment, for better or worse. NORF artfully illustrates the ways that structural racism shapes people, families, and communities. In so doing, Lorde Fredd33 pulls off a remarkable feat of alchemy, transforming pain, struggle, frustration, and love into his debut album.


With biting humor and striking intimacy, the Belgian pop singer’s adventurous third album examines how we humans care for one another—or don’t.

Multitude

In the middle of a French TV news interview in January, TF1 journalist Anne-Claire Coudray asked Stromae whether music had helped him to transcend the solitude he sang about so frequently. A soft piano backing track started, and the Belgian pop star born Paul Van Haver swallowed and began to sing his new single, “L’enfer” (“Hell”), by way of response. You expected the camera to pan back, for Stromae to rise from his seat and join his usual extravagantly coiffed dancers on the studio stage, but no: He sat still and sang his mournful song about suicidal ideation while staring down the camera lens, visibly flinching at the massive ripping synths and choral chants.
Rascally pop stars have always enjoyed making mischief on the news—it’s a basic way of establishing the distance between you and the straight mainstream, as well as efficiently converting offense to publicity. But that wasn’t what Stromae seemed to be doing (though in Europe there was no shortage of the latter). In some ways, televised news was an oddly perfect stage for an artist who frequently sets lyrics about stark social issues—domestic abuse, economic precarity, cancer, colonialism—to euphoric, swarming dance-pop. His lyrics also often inhabit the headspace of shitty men, trying on their self-justification for size and unraveling it with glee and a journalistic eye for hypocrisy and weak logic. Coupled with his old-fashioned commitment to high-concept hijinks, Stromae is a delightfully improbable and inscrutable pop star. His ambition and ability to execute it appear undimmed by the nine years since he released his last album—a gap partially enforced by a debilitating physical reaction to anti-malarial medication and its psychological aftermath.
It’s telling that Stromae chose to perform “L’enfer” in this context when the lead single from his comeback album has a far newsier bent: Mixing elegant cavaquinho guitar with a synth line that squawks like pink elephants on parade, “Santé” (“Cheers”) pays tribute to essential workers in the pandemic—though in true Stromae style, it equally simmers with disgust at the hypocrites who toast their heroism while exploiting their humanity. This choice puts him in the crosshairs of his own unsparing lens on Multitude, his third and most personal album. And, yes, “most personal album” is a cliché, but if you come across any other new releases in which the author forecasts the quality of their day based on the quality of their morning shit (in translation: “I’ll be scrubbing endlessly” versus “no wiping needed”), please get in touch at the usual address.
That isn’t the only time Multitude takes an entertainingly scatalogical approach to intimacy. “C’est que du bonheur” (“Nothing But Joy”) characterizes Stromae’s affection for his young son—a love that he sings saved his life—in terms of diapers changed and vomit mopped, and predicts the inevitable moment when his grown-up kid will have his own kids and have to clean up granny and grandpa’s messes. Taking a sideways look at sincerity—or shittiness—risks collapsing the whole endeavor under the weight of irony, but Stromae’s slinky arrangements and actorly charisma are rich with charm. He sings “C’est que du bonheur!” with deranged euphoria, as if expiring from sleepless nights mid-sentence. The four-bar charango refrain is ticklish and light, although the tempo accelerates and stabilizes unpredictably—such are the vicissitudes of parental joy.
Stromae’s pugnacious 2013 hit “Papaoutai” explored the meaning of father figures (his Rwandan Tutsi father was killed in the country’s 1994 genocide) and familial inheritance. He deepens that interrogation on Multitude, reflecting his shoestring childhood travels with his mother across South America and Africa in rich instrumentation (the stringed Andean charango, Portuguese cavaquinho, and Chinese erhu; the Middle Eastern ney flute and woodwind zurna) and song structures that embrace the steady rhythms of folk musics rather than the battering Europop of his first two albums. At the same time, he’s said that using the two-stringed erhu was equally inspired by the music of Kung Fu Panda—a knowingly inauthentic reference that complicates those ideas. In the post-genre era, many artists have pulled global influences into their music (whether out of sincere admiration or a desire to game foreign markets) and many artists have ended up with indistinct soup at the end of it. Stromae delicately folds these sounds into the melodic percolations that glitter beneath each song and also plays on their individual characters: The erhu that weeps through the knocking chimes of “La solassitude” is as off-kilter as the titular portmanteau (Stromae translates it as “Loneweariness”) and brings real pathos to what might otherwise be a risible tale of a guy who goes through the motions in relationships without ever connecting.
That’s one of Stromae’s greatest skills as a songwriter, this ability to refract the wholeness of a person’s humanity through several, sometimes conflicting, perspectives. On Multitude, his primary theme is care—and how humans use and abuse one another as they seek comfort and turn a blind eye to inconvenient truths if it means getting what we want. He embodies these fables through a litany of rogues, often told with piercing humor: The cheating prick of “Mon amour” tries to justify his infidelities because deep down, “tu les aimes bien les connards” (“you’ve got a thing for bastards”), but he’s left stunned and insecure by rejection—wondering how big his rival’s dick is, and where his ex put his clean underpants. On “Santé,” those quickest to toast pandemic heroes are the ones throwing fits at service workers who don’t meet their impossible expectations. “Fils de joie” (“Son of a Hero”) tells three grimy stories of proprietorial relationships to a sex worker, as told by a client, a pimp, and a police officer, each spliced with affecting, proud cries of defense from her son. Stromae is not exempt, either: On “Déclaration,” he empathizes with his wife (designer Coralie Barbier) for having to bear kids and the mental load—he even subverts Simone de Beauvoir to sing “on naît pas misogyne, on le devient” (“one isn’t born misogynistic but can grow up to become so”)—but admits change might take time since the world benefits so richly from women’s labor. As he skewers societal complacency, he also mourns it with his regretful falsetto, the piercing zurna filigree, and a synth as slippery and pretty as the patterns that form on the surface of oil.
Evidently, this is quite subtle stuff (especially for non-French speakers) and fans of “Papaoutai” and Stromae’s 2010 breakthrough “Alors on danse” (“Now We Dance”) may miss his brazen talent for scaffolding EDM’s volcanic textures to sharp songwriting. But he deploys his trademark punchiness sharply here. There’s that cataclysmic peak in “L’enfer,” the daunting welcome committee at the gates of hell itself; the thrilling “Fils de joie” puckers a brisk string quartet (sampled from the Bridgerton soundtrack) with popped-bubble effects that offer a tart riposte to such courtly airs and graces. And opener “Invaincu” (“Undefeated”) is a fighter’s battle cry, a chest-puffed Stromae rapping vigorously about beating a disease that claimed several relatives, bolstered by gruff backing vocals and an exultant Bulgarian children’s choir. His sense of scale has become more nuanced and idiosyncratic, and more captivating for it.
More than on his 2010 debut Cheese or 2013’s Racine carrée, Stromae turns his distaste for hypocrisy and weak-mindedness on himself. It’s there in his unfiltered take on love for his kid, but also in his stark confrontations with his own pain. “L’enfer” is a devastating song about teetering on a mental-health precipice, yet he still negotiates his guilt for feeling that way and how he stubbornly resists consolation. Multitude ends with a two-parter, “Mauvaise journée” (“Bad Day”) and “Bonne journée” (“Good Day”), which contrast the outcomes of justifying one’s reality with glass-half-empty and glass-half-full attitudes to life (with the accompanying poop-based taxonomies). The former is elegant and laden with appealingly petulant ennui; the latter comes alive with deep bass, adrenaline-spiking trap percussion, and a melodically complex vocal part in which Stromae beseeches anyone listening to recognize the pitfalls of this sort of absolutist thinking. “Comme un idiot, fais les pas de la danse de la joie” (“Learn the steps and move like a fool to the dance of happiness”), he sings, chin up. Looking away—or seeing only what we want to see—is a surefire way to get left behind.


New reissues of the Fall’s first two albums find the band hungry, angry, and taking switchblades to a grim future.

The Fall: Live at the Witch Trials/Dragnet

Live at the Witch Trials/Dragnet

When the Fall’s “Industrial Estate” plays during the closing credits of High-Rise–Ben Wheatley’s new big-screen adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s classic novel–it’s more than a case of similar subject matter. True, the film is about urban malaise, and so is the song. But Ballard’s vision of a tower block turned hermetic, ingrown, incestuous, and cannibalistic unfolds with a clinical exactitude. On the other hand, “Industrial Estate” is a spew of dissonant chaos, fugue-state chants, and malfunctioning carnival organs that inhabits the liminal space between punk and post-punk–just like the rest of album it appears on, the Fall’s 1979 debut Live at the Witch Trials. At the time, the first wave of post-punks were taking Johnny Rotten’s “no future” rant and parsing it like surgeons, laying it bare and reducing it to its components like Ballard. The Fall were no exception but, where many of their contemporaries used anesthetic and scalpels, they packed switchblades.
Witch Trials came out in the spring of 1979, Dragnet in the autumn of 1979. Accordingly, these albums (newly reissued) are very much spring and autumn records, inasmuch as such acutely urban records can have ties to nature. The Fall came together in Manchester in 1976, the year punk conflagrated across England. Its working-class founder Mark E. Smith and his crew immediately hopscotched over punk, delivering an EP in 1978 (Bingo-Master’s Break-Out!) that tapped into everything from the Seeds’ keyboard-slathered garage rock to Can’s elemental clatter.
Witch Trials was both a step ahead and a step back with true punk bangers like “Futures and Pasts,” two-and-a-half minutes of eye-gouging and haranguing that unravels in hyperventilating gasps. That deconstruction quickly morphs from cheeky to sinister. “Rebellious Jukebox”—one of the first self-aware Fall anthems—churns and stutters, thrown into each successive moment by a serpentine bassline that coils like inside-out dub. Smith is all sneers and snarls, delirious as he struggles against and succumbs to rock’n’roll entropy. “We are The Fall/Northern white crap that talks back,” he taunts, chewing the microphone on “Crap Rap 2/Like to Blow.” Soon after, he takes a leap into the cosmic void: “We are frigid stars.” By the time the eight-minute closer “Music Scene” crawls its way into oblivion—en route, beating Public Image Ltd’s similarly distended “Theme” and “Fodderstompf” to the punch by months—the Fall had already established themselves as something far more wobbly and toxic than the emerging post-punk mass.
You can pogo to Witch Trials; you can’t to Dragnet. Where Witch Trials is wiry, Dragnet is weighty. The eight months separating the release of the two albums saw a huge lineup change, setting the pattern of perpetual upheaval that would become the Fall’s constant. Most notably, guitarist Martin Bramah left, and his empty space was filled by existing bassist Marc Riley and new recruit Craig Scanlon. On Dragnet, Riley and Scanlon echo each other just out of sync, rezoning the rhythmic domain of the songs. “Before the Moon Falls”—an eerie track that hints at such contemporaries as Pere Ubu and Swell Maps—jangles with urgency and decay. “I must create a new scheme,” Smith vows, a dirtbag urchin with a brain too big for his skull.
Dragnet can be overwhelmingly dense, folding in viola-like guitar like John Cale’s queasiest recursion (“Muzorewi’s Daughter”) and then Krautrock-leaning funk spiked with garbled demands and harsh glossolalia (“Put Away”). But the heavy hand lightens by “Choc-Stock,” a singsong slice of feral nonsense akin to Syd Barrett with a head cold and a hangover. There’s an answer to Witch Trials’ “Music Scene” in the form of “Spectre vs. Rector,” but it’s nothing like its predecessor; its sludge and subliminal menace practically invented post-rock as an afterthought. The track is visceral, reeking of spilled pints and machine oil, evoking the industrial scum-scape that incubated it.
In a 2011 interview, Smith said that Ballard’s 1962 post-apocalyptic novel The Drowned World was the only book by the author that he liked. Even then, he referred to it only as “that one where the world’s underwater.” Erudition in the formal sense is never what Smith or the Fall were about, and that’s made plain on Witch Trials and Dragnet, where Smith’s loathing of cultured, mannered learning oozes from every fracture. Instead, the albums are celebrations–if not exhortations–of working-class precocity and street-smart intellectualism cobbled together from thrift stores bookshelves and stolen snatches of philosophy. Hungry, angry, and ugly: that’s the post-punk proclamation of the Fall’s first two albums, a flag that would fully unfurl with the release of band’s masterpiece, Hex Enduction Hour, three years later. But for a fleeting few seasons in 1979, in the hands of Smith and his gang of urban mutant malingerers, all that mattered was feeding the future to itself and seeing what got puked back up.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the 1997 album from a hype-man turned MTV star whose kinetic flows and boundless energy electrified the world of ’90s hip-hop.

When Disaster Strikes…

The track didn’t bang or knock. It tiptoed. It wiggled. When Busta Rhymes first heard it during the recording sessions of his second solo album, it was unlike anything he had ever rapped on: sinuous, low-key, minimal. A former rapper named Shamello found the sample—a high-calorie AM-radio confection called “Sweet Green Fields” by Seals & Crofts—and his partner, Buddah, sheared off the soft-rock blubber, leaving behind only a single twitching muscle.
Busta must have glimpsed his future in the song, even if he was unsure how to rap on the beat without trampling it. A “Busta Rhymes verse,” up until now, had meant limbs flailing, eyes bugged, spittle spraying. He’d become famous for roaring like a dungeon dragon, both with his teenaged group Leaders of the New School and on countless posse cuts and cameos, but this seemed to require a different approach. It was Puff Daddy who gave him the advice he needed: Calm down. Don’t scream. “You alienating the girls, playboy,” he advised. Nobody wants to dance up close to a dungeon dragon.
Consider that Busta Rhymes thinks of “Put Ya Hands Where My Eyes Can See”—one of the most antic hip-hop songs ever, a riot of cross-rhythm and color and jibbering end rhymes—as his “calm” song. He found its success disorienting: “Do I need to get caught up in doing all my records calm?” he asked genuinely on VH1’s Behind the Music. This should give you a keyhole glimpse into Busta’s struggles as he endeavored to have what no one in his position ever had: a career. As a protégé of Public Enemy, Busta watched Flava Flav, perhaps hip-hop’s greatest hype man, up close. He was all too aware of the fate of a hype man without a foil: By 1991, Flava had lost custody of his children and was sinking into addiction. By 2000, he would be scalping Yankees tickets for extra cash. The lesson wouldn’t have been lost on Busta; The guy who riles up the crowd gets left out in the cold.
To hear Busta tell it, he never wanted to be on his own. For years he’d been happy trading lines and high-kicking with his friends Charlie Brown and Dinco D, the other members of Leaders of the New School. Busta met Brown and Dinco in high school shortly after his family relocated from Brooklyn to Long Island, and together with Busta’s cousin Milo as DJ, they started playing local parties and skulking around 510 South Franklin Street, the headquarters of Public Enemy, hoping to get noticed. Finally, Chuck D took them under his wing and began to school them, drill-sergeant style—he used to make them run while rapping, just to test their endurance and commitment.
Busta had already given everything he had to the group, dropping out of school at 17 to record their first album. His father, an electrician, disapproved of his son jumping around and yelling for a living, but Busta was all-in. When his high-school girlfriend got pregnant, the band kicked into high gear, running from one sweat-soaked show to the next all over the five boroughs, sometimes racking up two or three a night. Success was the only option, but Busta had his brothers. “Suffering with a team, y’all can still help be each other’s support system,” he mused once. “Suffering on your own…that’s a whole ’nother ball game.”
But Busta’s charisma had other plans for him. He had a body that moved as if jerked by wires, a megawatt smile that cameras drank up. He was one of six flailing rappers onstage on the Arsenio Hall Show when A Tribe Called Quest performed their hit “Scenario,” and he didn’t even make his way onto the couch for the interview afterward. Nevertheless, he was the only guy anyone remembered, leaping around in stripes and turning his hat inside out as if to produce a rabbit.
Eventually, his charisma won: Demand for solo Busta became so constant and exhausting that it crowbarred the group apart. Charlie Brown, fed up with being an also-ran in the group he started, essentially quit Leaders of the New School on live television during a Yo! MTV Raps interview in 1993. Busta waited outside Brown’s apartment for hours, begging his bandmate to rejoin. Brown never came down to speak.
Thus, one of the longest and most prolific solo careers in rap began out of lonely necessity. As 1994 rolled around, Busta Rhymes had no group. Two years earlier, his baby had died after premature birth, and his second child, T’Ziah, was still in diapers. Busta was going to have to be a solo artist, and he would have to figure it out as he went. When he signed with Elektra Records and went into the studio, it took him a humiliating seven months for inspiration to kick in. When it finally arrived, it was from some of the earliest recorded rap music: The Sugarhill Gang’s “8th Wonder,” with Big Bank Hank’s ebullient refrain of “Woo-Hah! Got you all in check.” The song’s preternatural innocence unlocked something, reminding him of the disco on the radio in his East Flatbush youth.
”Woo-Hah! Got You All in Check,” his debut solo single, went platinum in about a month, based largely on the Hype Williams-directed video. Without Williams, it seems fair to say, there might never have been a solo Busta Rhymes. But the reverse might also be true. Before Busta, Williams was a journeyman, bringing better-than-average filmmaking chops to unremarkable clips by acts like Positive K and Blackstreet. Busta seemed to shake something loose in him. Beginning with “Woo-Hah,” Hype Williams videos became, well, Hype Williams videos—color palette by Dr. Seuss, low angles and flying fists courtesy of Marvel comics. It’s one of his first uses of the fisheye lens, which soon became his signature. With one video, Hype Williams instantly became an auteur, and Busta was his first muse.
But “Woo-Hah” was not a career plan. “Woo-Hah” was the three-minute exhilarating yawp of a class clown who has just locked the principal in the janitor’s closet. It was like Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” or Flava Flav’s “911 Is a Joke”—a wild card’s brief foray into the sun. What is the game plan, an exit strategy, for a guy like this?
”Put Ya Hands Where My Eyes Can See” was the answer. Released in August 1997, the track hit No. 2 on the Hot R&B/Hip Hop Songs and helped When Disaster Strikes… go platinum in about a month. In the video, also directed by Hype Williams, Busta sported red leopard print and accompanying face paint in front of a blood-red curtain. Dancers in full regalia seemed to wind themselves up and down to the time of the irregular beat. It was Busta’s tribute to Coming to America, which was playing on mute in the studio during mixing.
If he played the jester on “Woo-Hah,” on “Put Ya Hands” he was the ringleader. His flow, spry and slippery, sounded like someone chuckling to themselves. In “Put Ya Hands Where My Eyes Can See,” you can hear a dungeon dragon learning to purr.
Today, the rhythmic tattoo of “Put Ya Hands” is a piece of hip-hop history, as instantly recognizable as the “Shook Ones Pt. II” beat or the “Apache” break. Syleena Johnson sampled it in 2001, inviting Busta and the rappers comprising his Flipmode Squad for the remix. When JAY-Z and Beyoncé wanted to telegraph their status as Black royalty on 2019’s The Lion King: The Gift, there was only one song to reach for: “Mood 4 Eva” interpolates the sample and Jay and Bey pay homage to the video. In 2018, a young rapper named Snowprah broke out of New Haven, Connecticut with an exuberant street anthem called “Yank Riddim.” As she ran through the streets of her neighborhood, waving a Jamaican flag, the “Put Ya Hands” beat twitched in the background. Busta grew up in a household that revered reggae music; now he had put his name on a modern-day riddim.
The next big single from When Disaster Strikes… repeated the formula for “Put Ya Hands,” but went bigger. Rashad Smith, the same producer who flipped a disco-rap record for him on “Woo-Hah,” gave him “Dangerous,” a flip of an electro record. The accompanying video (Hype Williams again) parodied Lethal Weapon this time, another film that, like Coming to America, always seemed to be playing somewhere on television. For good measure, they threw in a brief scene of Busta dressed as Sho’Nuff from the kung fu blaxploitation flick The Last Dragon. For years, everyone was telling Busta Rhymes he was a superstar, and on MTV, he finally found his perfect medium.
The camera loved Busta Rhymes, and he loved it right back. He was made for another generation when technologies were more primitive so the personalities had to be bigger. Even his tip-toe flow has something emphatic about it, like a silent movie actor. Embracing his mascot status among MTV video programmers, Busta carved out his role within mainstream rap. He was the trickster, the pop of color, the light that threw the dark into relief. A hype man again, in other words, but this time for all of hip-hop.
Over the next four years, Williams and Busta would churn out several versions of this video. On “Gimme Some More,” he paid homage to Merrie Melodies cartoons over Psycho strings. On “Fire,” he got swept up by a CGI tornado. In Janet Jackson’s “What’s It Gonna Be,” he imitated the liquid-metal robot from Terminator 2 (the video’s price tag, reported around $2.5 million, made it one of the most expensive of all time.) None of them matched the visual wit of “Put Ya Hands Where My Eyes Can See,” but they helped turn Busta Rhymes into a universally beloved household name, a rapper with ironclad cred your mother might recognize.
If he was flashy on MTV, the Busta Rhymes of his studio albums has always been humbler. Who was Busta Rhymes without a camera, in the harsh light of 17 or 18 tracks? What else could a calmed-down dungeon dragon do? His first three albums tried to find the answer in apocalyptic imagery, at a time when major-label rap mostly concerned itself with celebrating and guarding material success. His debut, 1996’s The Coming, hinted at themes of rapture, and on the intro to When Disaster Strikes..., we are warned of a cataclysm that will scour the Earth. “Store your food!” a voice bellows. His next album, 1998’s Extinction Level Event, would take the apocalypse theme even further, with monologues about the slow death of the human race interspersed with his usual slate of party bangers.
It was an unusual fixation for a class clown, but Busta was raised in a Seventh-Day Adventist home, a sect of Christianity with a literal interpretation of the Second Coming. (He gave up the religion as a young man when he discovered the Five Percent Nation, but he never lost his fascination with end-of-days: Along with Method Man, Busta was one of the most enthusiastic believers in Y2K.) Perhaps because he was backed into his career out of desperation, there’s always been a ticking-time-bomb sense of paranoia and doom lurking in Busta’s party music. He rapped—and entertained—like he was certain the wheels were minutes from falling off. His intimation of apocalypse might have just been his own flop-sweat writ large. One question hovered over every album: “How long can I keep this up?”
No matter the skits, album covers, or packaging, Busta Rhymes songs remain primarily receptacles for Busta’s inexhaustible energy. He’s a hypertechnical MC, with a grab-bag of flows and cadences so bottomless that he seems to hear six potential songs in each beat. He played drums as a kid, and when he auditioned for Chuck D with Leaders of the New School, he played the kit while Charlie and Dinco D rhymed. “My flows got so much rhythm, substitute the drummer,” he spits on the first verse of “The Whole World Looking At Me,” and no rapper has ever rapped more like a percussionist. The freedom and joy of Busta’s rhyming came from a sense that he could pick up any part of the beat, any pattern, and run with it as far as he wanted to. In his mouth, words aren’t words—they’re snare heads.
The flip side of this is that when you examine his words on a page, you’re sometimes left with a transcribed drum solo. For every line that squiggles beautifully across your eardrum—“Ha-ha, laugh at ya, oh, me and my passengers/Flip-ass niggas over quick like frying pan spatulas,” from the title track—there is a clunker like, “While you coughing I be flossing like a fucking dolphin,” or a puff of hot air like, “Rhymin’ Rastas eating enough exotic pasta.”
The best songs on When Disaster Strikes... don’t try to burden Busta with irrelevancies like concepts, narratives, guest hooks, or context. “Rhymes Galore” gives him a rubbery sample and a canvas bright enough to suit him, and then clears the decks. Over a flip of Rufus Thomas’s “Do the Funky Penguin,” he pogos off every available space, saying—what? Nothing, anything, everything. He yells “Jumpin Jehovah’s Witness” and rhymes “ampere” with “chandelier.” The hook—“Rhymes galore! Rhymes galore! Rhymes galore!”—is also the message. It hints at the anarchic album artist he might have been, more intriguing and subversive than what he eventually became.
Rap was growing darker, lonelier, the stakes getting higher. The consummate survivor, Busta was intent on keeping up, so he got tougher. On “Things We Be Doing for Money,” Busta does his best version of Life After Death-style street opera, full of merciless bloodshed and bodies left in the streets. The Mobb Deep-style gloom of “We Could Take it Outside” is convincing, but there’s something dispiriting about it; Busta Rhymes threatening to bash in your head was about as much fun as being juxed by Bugs Bunny.
In the second half of the ’90s, rap was approaching terminal masculinity. It might be hard to imagine today, when people like Young Thug casually wear dresses on their album covers and one of the biggest stars in hip-hop is out, but back then, Busta was the only male rap star willing to play with gender lines. Everyone in Hype Williams videos was dressed in bright colors, but Busta was unafraid not only to dress in bright colors but act like he was dressed in bright colors—he was the only one willing to dance, move, gyrate, smile wide enough for toothpaste commercials. His gender play was surface level, strictly vaudevillian—in fact, he’s shown a long and nasty streak of homophobia—but in 1997 he was the only one willing to get on stage in a dress next to Martha Stewart.
Today, Busta Rhymes is earthbound, maybe celebrated a little more than he is heard. His voice has lost its elasticity, and his demeanor is closer to youth basketball coach than living cartoon. He is an elder statesman of the genre, telling all the best stories on morning shows and interviews. Jay-Z has called him the greatest performer of all time; Phife Dawg called him “the James Brown of hip-hop.” He can still pick up the phone and get anyone to appear on his records, at any time, on the strength of his name: His independently released 2020 album E.L.E. 2: The Wrath of God featured Eminem, Kendrick Lamar, Rakim, Pete Rock, Mariah Carey, and Q-Tip—with Chris Rock acting as narrator.
Poignantly, the album also features some unreleased audio from the late Ol’ Dirty Bastard, chatting in the studio. “I wanna do more smooth rhymes and shit, man, know what I'm sayin’?” Dirty jokes. In the background, Busta gives a laugh of appreciation. An acknowledgment, maybe, of a fellow wild card in hip-hop, one who survived paying tribute to one who didn’t. When Disaster Strikes… was the turning point, the moment Busta Rhymes became the Joker of the deck that got to stay in the game.


Seer

Jonathan Sielaff and Matt Carlson of Golden Retriever look toward the cosmic and the karmic, favoring set-it-and-forget-it synth jams that seem ripped from 1970s Germany; they’re scientific and mechanical in their construction, but they still imbue their work with emotion. Perhaps because they come from free improv backgrounds, Golden Retriever’s early cassette and CD-R releases leaned toward steady-state, circuitous instrumental pieces rather than the dramatic engagement of their recent work. Seer, their second record for Thrill Jockey and third LP overall, seems particularly laser-guided in its looping and loping melodies. It continues the careful editing that they practiced on 2012’s Occupied With the Unspoken: synth and bass clarinet lines pop in and splatter the void, and tracks are given room to breathe and unfurl, but they’re never lackadaisical or laborious. Sielaff and Carlson may cop the aesthetics of Klaus Schulze, but on Seer they’re content working on a smaller canvas.
The duo’s increased discipline is most readily identifiable on the interlocking and overlapping instrumentation on “Flight Song”. Carlson sets up an asteroid field of pinging synth parts that Sielaff casually weaves through and around, embracing the reedy squeals of his instrument instead of obscuring them with a mountain of effects. On “Superposition”, Seer’s lengthy closer, the duo wrangle serious timbral diversity out of their creaky gear, as Sielaff’s processed clarinet peals make conversational counterpoint to Carlson’s crystalline atmospherics. Before Carlson launches into the sweeping arpeggiation that gives the song its dramatic momentum, it’s the most relaxed moment on the record, but even when the duo stretches out—on “Superposition” and “Sharp Stones”— it never feels like they’re padding time or wasting space. When Carlson slows down the tempo and Sielaff’s work becomes more protracted, these spacier segments set up the more propulsive sections.
Golden Retriever has carved a niche that’s not strictly indebted to post-Berlin School ambient or to the more organic work of new age composers but rather snags details from both aesthetics. It’s transportive stuff when it’s done well, and on Seer they’ve distilled each of the five tracks down to its basest parts, making each feel like a succinct and potent journey in its own right. Albums in this vein can seem like an argument for sprawl, but Seer makes a case that a wondrous interstellar trip can still be focused.


Wolf Parade’s latest album plays like the big leap the band could have attempted last decade—without ever quite recapturing the odd, jittery intensity that made them so beguiling.

Thin Mind

Wolf Parade will always live in the shadow of their debut. 2005’s Apologies to the Queen Mary was one of the great statement albums of indie rock’s blockbuster era, paving the way for years of similarly jittery, nervy bands and launching an entire multiverse of Wolf Parade spinoffs and side projects: Sunset Rubdown, Handsome Furs, Swan Lake, Divine Fits, Operators. It’s a wonder they never burned out. Not all of the records Spencer Krug and Dan Boeckner recorded in the wake of Queen Mary were essential, but all of them delivered moments of inspiration.
And yet for all the dependable music these two have released over the years, for casual fans looking for a quick Wolf Parade fix, the go-to will always be Queen Mary. In hindsight, Krug and Boeckner’s prolificacy has cut against them. If they hadn’t so thoroughly flooded the market, perhaps there might have been more excitement around Wolf Parade’s 2017 reunion album Cry Cry Cry (casual fans may never have noticed the group’s 2011 hiatus). Their default has always been to keep the music flowing, though, so just a year and a half later, they’ve followed up that album with a similar one. Like Cry Cry Cry, Thin Mind is perfectly calibrated to evoke nostalgia for Queen Mary without ever quite recapturing the odd, jittery intensity that made that record so beguiling.
Thin Mind is the band’s first album since the departure of longtime guitarist Dante DeCaro, but that absence hasn’t shrunk Wolf Parade’s sound any. Returning producer John Goodmanson makes sure of that. He’s quietly become one of indie rock’s great maximalists, almost incapable of recording an instrument that doesn’t pop. He leaves every surface so sleek you can see your reflection in it. Especially if you’ve sat out a few Wolf Parade albums, it can be a shock to hear the rusty, lo-fi patina of the group’s Isaac Brock-produced debut replaced by the crystalline guitars of an Interpol record.
With that radio-rock sheen, Thin Mind ironically plays like the big leap the band could have attempted in the wake of Queen Mary, during the years when alt radio still looked to blogs as a farm system for the majors. Their sound now feels less like a paranoid revision of ’80s synth-pop and more like an homage to ’80s rock at its most direct. “Under Glass” opens the record with the charging gusto of Elvis Costello’s new wave stompers, while “Wandering Son” rides the dopamine-spiked power chords of a Rick Springfield hit. Dramatic pianos tease “As Kind as You Can” with “Don’t Stop Believin’” pomp, and a thick coat of synthesizers lacquers everything.
It’s all bright and spirited, but also a little obvious, which is disappointing coming from a band that once ran freely with its most left-field impulses. Krug’s songwriting, too, has also grown more direct. “Julia Take Your Man Home” gender-flips the setup of Rae Sremmurd’s “Come Get Her,” swapping out the dancing party girl for a drunkard carving dicks into the bar and prattling on about cocaine. It’s fun on paper, but the premise wears thin well before the song ends.
Thin Mind periodically feels like Wolf Parade’s own Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, a conversation between buddies from a fading era unsure of where they fit in now. “I’m not in love with the modern world,” Boeckner sang on Wolf Parade’s signature song. Fifteen years later, the world isn’t any less modern, and the band isn’t any more at home in it. “Up and down the street there’s a grey procession, they’re going to have a funeral for your profession,” Boeckner sings on “Wandering Son.” It’s almost too apt: a mid-’00s band singing about obsolescence. Wolf Parade’s sound was once state of the art, but Thin Mind captures only intermittent reminders of how wild and wonderful their moment was.

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On his eighth album, Lupe Fiasco relinquishes his sanctimonious impulses and refocuses his vision on phonetic thrills and poignant reflection.

Drill Music in Zion

Sometime after 2011’s Lasers, Lupe Fiasco the ornery scholar overtook Lupe Fiasco the musician. Instead of the high-concept, accessible lyricism of his early days, the rapper ditched attempts at mainstream palatability, a result of fatigue from Chicago violence, label battles, and artistic compromises. Beginning with 2012’s Food & Liquor II: The Great American Rap Album, Pt. 1, his albums became as sanctimonious and unwieldy as they were musically sterile, with grand ideas being stifled by mediocre execution and generic production. Essentially, the music started to resemble required listening for some heavy-handed lesson plan.
Lupe tidies up on Drill Music in Zion, a concise project that distills his best tendencies with a focus unseen in years. Driven by poignant reflection, labyrinthine bar work, and high-wire rhyme schemes, Drill Music in Zion is Lupe at his most efficient. It’s laced with atmospheric jazz that evokes isolation and clarity, courtesy of production from Soundtrakk and Lupe himself. At 10 tracks, the LP is the shortest of his career, and the length helps: Instead of fixating on overarching concepts he doesn’t offer resolutions for, his approach is more episodic. He leans into his strengths early on, and it saves him from the trap of monotony, convolution, and self-seriousness.
Along with phonetic thrills, Lupe’s greatest skill remains his ability to weave disparate ideas into mosaic parables. On “Ghoti,” he connects a Christopher Columbus reference, superheroes, and Neuralink technology for a sprawling yet succinct meditation on capitalism, morality, and the ethics of scientific advancement. Over the mellow instrumentation of “Precious Things,” Lupe gets cheeky and profound, offering a metaphor about frayed friendships and responsibility: “Give scissors to my paper, we not on the same page/We was bat, catcher, and pitcher, now you don’t even wave.”
Lupe continues to flaunt his knack for storytelling on “Ms. Mural,” the final entry into his “Mural” trilogy. On the track, one painter’s conversation with a condescending customer becomes a rumination on Lupe’s fraught relationship with the music industry. It’s personal, but it’s also an existential study for artists everywhere.
Sometimes Lupe trades elaborate wordplay for exposition and blunt force, with mixed success. It’s most effective on the subdued production of “On Faux Nem,” which offers a foundation for Lupe’s simple, emphatic declaration: “Rappers die too much/That’s it, that’s the verse.” From there, he unleashes searing bars about the culture of drill music. In a world where authenticity is typically prized above all, he wishes that drill artists were actually lying in their lyrics.
Lupe’s conversational technique feels a little strained on “Kiosk,” where he raps from the perspective of a tricky vendor trying to sell jewelry to aspiring high rollers. It’s fine, until he lapses into a spoon-feeding third verse that veers off topic. The track is part of a three-song run (from “Precious Things” to “Ms. Mural”) where the beats and one-note tonal inflections melt into one another, rendering a drab slog of colorless sounds.
While the production on Drill Music in Zion is cohesive, it’s not the most adventurous. There isn’t the futuristic psychedelia of “Just Might Be OK” or the euphoric escapism of “Kick, Push” here, so no one song matches the widespread appeal of Lupe’s best work. Still, the overall impression makes up for that lack of dynamism; the understated tracks give his intricate riddles room to breathe and Drill Music in Zion gives Lupe’s humanity and command of language plenty of space to exhale.


The Columbus quartet approaches hardcore from weird and skronky angles, but they tear shit down because they have a specific vision for what they want to see in its place.

In Spite Of

For Your Health have been variously and accurately described as screamo, post-hardcore, and of course, “genre-defying.” But more than any specific sound, the Columbus, Ohio quartet is defined by a gleeful antagonism, and it’s fair to say that the anticipation surrounding In Spite Of is due to For Your Health’s reputation for being equally preening and vicious in all their affairs.
The mere title of “I Slept With Wes Eisold and All I Got Was an Out of Court Settlement” pretty much summarizes For Your Health’s entire M.O.; a mashup of the Cold Cave frontman and a From Under the Cork Tree deep cut and a reference to Eisold suing Fall Out Boy for copyright infringement. In the week or so since the release of In Spite Of, For Your Health have taken aim at the surviving family of Rush Limbaugh, landlords, shoegaze, specific music websites, and also all music critics. Amid these provocations and proclaiming In Spite Of the best album of 2021, Hayden Rodriguez explained “I Slept With Wes Eisold” as a response to “people that talk shit about us while simultaneously doing nothing interesting LOL.” That “LOL” is doing a lot of the work in that sentence, suggesting that talking shit is justifiable if there’s interesting art to back it up.
Take 2019’s Death of Spring split with Shin Guard, a landmark in modern screamo whose reputation has only been burnished by each band’s almost immediate pivot away from screamo; Shin Guard reconfigured their lineup, rechristened themselves Hazing Over, and recently dropped Pestilence, an EP rife with deathcore influence. Meanwhile, For Your Health’s hate5six performance from last November previewed material from In Spite Of and also great showmanship for a relatively unknown screamo band who hadn’t played any shows in over eight months. At one point, drummer Mike Mapes drops a stick and continues playing with his hand. This was a band that had its sights set on much bigger rooms.
This still holds true on In Spite Of, even if they’re still more likely to play Minecraft festivals than clubs for the foreseeable future. There are few moments that could legitimately be considered pop, and I do mean moments—the flashes of mall-punk melody on “Abscess Makes the Heart Grow” and “You’re so United Ninety-Three, We’re so Flight One Eighty” are an illicit thrill, like stumbling upon your still-operational MySpace page that hasn’t been updated since 2006. But In Spite Of tends towards accessibility, a remembrance of a not-too-distant past when skronky, proggy, and altogether weird punk bands like Blood Brothers and At the Drive-In could slide into MTV and Fuse playlists.
Opener “Birthday Candles in the Effigy” introduces For Your Health as a band with a clear post-hardcore heritage and no patience for the elitism of taste. The song at times evokes ...Burn, Piano Island, Burn and/or Take This to Your Grave, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge and/or Fear Before the March of Flames’ Art Damage. In For Your Health’s perfect world, these albums were all playing the same game, quasi major-label punk from bands with a distinct fashion sense, proudly pretentious lyrics, and hyper-referential song titles. If you can imagine a disapproving older brother walking in on you while this plays and then immediately walking out, all the better.
For Your Health’s music is all edges: panic chords and fractured time signatures, serrated vocals and poison-pen lyrics. Rodriguez delivers every word with literary gusto, chewing the scenery even as they’re gargling glass: “Latticed bodies bear creeping vines,” “Obsidian eyes lay stoic against construction paper skies,” and on “Everyday at 13:12,” even the curb-stomping of a cop can have a baroque flourish.
For Your Health recognize the impact of brevity in their music; what sounds like the most thrilling shit in the world for 90 seconds loses its impact over the span of 40 minutes. If In Spite Of never stays in the same place for long enough to achieve a true synthesis of their influences, all of their constituent elements cohere like a layered Rice Krispie treat. “Day of the Black Sun” spends nearly two minutes trying to free itself from detuned sludge before it emerges as the dance-punk snot-rocket “Save Your Breath, You’re Gonna Need it to Blow My Head Off”; imagine Liars’ debut played in reverse and fast-forwarded to 10x speed. The seamless transitions throughout In Spite Of somehow make it feel shorter than its 17 minutes, particularly as the boundaries between songs start to feel arbitrary.
Even if For Your Health’s online persona yells “we’re not here to make friends,” In Spite Of is intended a triumph for a community they’ve fostered out of mutual respect. The backup vocals from the similarly progressive Hazing Over and SOUL GLO are almost impossible to recognize without the credits, but the solidarity implied by their existence matters just as much. And as with many of the bands cheering them on—Callous Daoboys, Portrayal of Guilt, awakebutstillinbed, Dogleg, to name a few—their catholic approach to all forms of aggro music is oddly utopian. For Your Health are tearing shit down because they have such a clear plan for a world they’d like to built in its place—one without abusers, clout-chasers, dishonest artists, cops (obviously), and most of all, genre.

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L.A. singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers’ debut LP is a collection of songs about intimacy, documenting how our relationships affect the way we view ourselves and interact with others.

Stranger in the Alps

Phoebe Bridgers’ career has been propelled by fellow musicians. Ryan Adams, Conor Oberst, and Julien Baker have all sung the praises of the 23-year-old Los Angeles singer-songwriter, leading up to her full-length debut Stranger in the Alps. Fittingly, the album itself is also populated by other artists: Bridgers writes about lost legends like Bowie and Lemmy down through the local hobbyists who haunt their hometowns like ghosts in faded band tees. In “Scott Street,” she reads into how an old flame tells her his drums are “too much shit to carry.” In “Motion Sickness,” one of the year’s most exquisite breakup anthems, she lands her harshest jab in the chorus: “Hey, why do you sing with an English accent? I guess it’s too late to change it now.”
Stranger in the Alps is a collection of songs about intimacy, documenting how our relationships affect the way we view ourselves and interact with others. The crux of Bridgers’ writing arrives in small details: a casual exchange of words, a song played on a long car ride, the moments we relive in our heads once we get back home. Bridgers’ voice has a breezy, conversational flutter that helps her stories of heartbreak and loss avoid morbidity. She sounds best when she double-tracks it in layers of light falsetto: an effect that, depending on what she’s singing, can sound sweet and soothing or scalding like feedback.
The old cliche about artists having their whole lives to make their debut rings true here. The earliest composition, “Georgia,” dates back to Bridgers’ teenage years, when she crafted her own lyrics out of a misremembered Feist track. Telling the story of an early relationship, she builds to dramatic moments of catharsis like an artist attempting to win over an audience by the end of the song. “Smoke Signals” and “Motion Sickness,” meanwhile, reflect recent events in her life. They’re more patient and refined, unfolding to subtler moments of revelation. The span of time these songs cover can make Stranger in the Alps feel overwhelming and occasionally incohesive. Playing it from front to back comes with the intensity of scrolling all the way through someone’s Facebook photos.
Accordingly, some of the images you’ll find are not especially flattering. “Demi Moore” is an intense song about getting high and sending nude pics. Over gentle, hypnotic fingerpicking, Bridgers travels the terrifying line of thought from feeling sexy and desired to feeling vulnerable and alone, wishing you could delete your texts like tweets before anyone can see them. “I don’t want to be stoned anymore,” she repeats solemnly in the chorus. In “Funeral,” she tries to learn a lesson from the death of a friend but can only summon self-laceration and momentary distraction. “I woke up in my childhood bed, wishing I was someone else, feeling sorry for myself,” she sings, “When I remembered someone’s kid is dead.” Both songs—which are sequenced, somewhat jarringly, next to each other—feel exquisitely raw and revealing.
Bridgers’ tendency to risk heavy-handedness for the sake of emotional honesty brings to mind the recent work of Mark Kozelek, whose 2013 song “You Missed My Heart” gets a faithful reimagining at the end of the album. While its dream-logic murder fantasy ties back nicely to Bridgers’ breakout song “Killer,” Kozelek’s ballad falls short as the de facto album closer. (It’s followed by a brief, wordless reprise of “Smoke Signals.”) Along with the Conor Oberst–featuring “Would You Rather,” this final stretch of songs puts Bridgers at a distance, instead showcasing the musicians she admires and draws inspiration from. It’s a slightly deflating end to an album that succeeds through its unnerving, unflinching personality. By now, the most interesting characters in Bridgers’ story are the ones she puts on the page herself.


Conceived, recorded, and ultimately abandoned in 1966 and 1967, SMiLE was to be something like Brian Wilson's Sgt. Pepper's, his attempt to make the great art-pop album of the era. The original tapes were assembled for this official release, finally giving Wilson's epic story an ending.

The Smile Sessions

It's a rite of passage for students of pop music history: At some point, you learn that the Beach Boys weren't just a fun 1960s surf band with a run of singles that later came to be used in commercials; at their best, they were making capital-A Art. The record that convinces most is Pet Sounds, that understated 1966 masterpiece that articulates a specific kind of teenage longing and loneliness like nothing before or since. Once you've absorbed that record, you find yourself going back through songs like "Don't Worry Baby", "The Warmth of the Sun", and "I Get Around", finding a deeper brilliance where you once heard only pop craftsmanship. As you make these discoveries, you come to learn about the auteur at the center of it all, Brian Wilson, who shouldered the burden of being the creative force in one of the most successful and musically ambitious pop bands of the era. And then you find out about SMiLE.
Conceived, recorded, and ultimately abandoned in 1966 and 1967, SMiLE was to be something like Brian's Sgt. Pepper's, his attempt to make the great art-pop album of the era. He followed his muse to the ends of the earth, putting a grand piano in a massive living room sandbox, outfitting another room with an Arabian tent, making session musicians wear fireman's hats for the recording of a song about the elements, freaking out when an actual fire broke out down the street from the studio around the time of recording of said track, and, no surprise, taking enough drugs to amplify the whole scene and turn it into something terrifying. But the record was not to be. The music recorded for SMiLE was too far-out for the rest of the band (lead singer Mike Love hated the lyrics penned by Wilson's collaborator, Van Dyke Parks, an opinion he still holds) and Wilson had trouble finishing tracks. Eventually, he shelved the record for good and the band issued the low-key, weird, and supremely stoned Smiley Smile. By setting the record aside, Wilson became afraid to indulge his talent, and his contributions to the Beach Boys would never again be central to the band.
If you're wired a certain way, once you learn the SMiLE story, you long to hear the album that never was. It looms out there in imagination, an album that lends itself to storytelling and legend, like the aural equivalent of the Loch Ness Monster. And the songs from the sessions that eventually made it out on other records-- "Surf's Up", "Cabin Essence", "Heroes and Villains", and more, including material on the 1993 Beach Boys career-overview box Good Vibrations-- were so brilliant that the lack of proper release becomes almost painful. So you might start hunting down bootlegs, poring over the fragments, and finding competing edits and track sequences, which only feeds your desire to know what the "real" SMiLE could have been.
Only in 2003, when long-time Beach Boys fanatic and tape trader Darian Sahanaja and his band the Wondermints collaborated with Brian on a live version of SMiLE and 2004's Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE album did the lost record assume a definitive shape. But as exciting as that record was at the time, the lure of the originals never went away. So there was naturally a great deal of excitement when, early this year, we heard that the original tapes were being assembled for official release. This epic story finally has an ending, and it's a very happy one. As archival projects go, SMiLE is as surprising, generous, and successful as anything in recent memory. The version of the album, based on the Wilson/Wondermints sequence, feels remarkably complete and whole, even though it was largely built from unfinished scraps.
During this period, Wilson and Parks were working on an enormous canvas. They were using words and music to tell a story of America. If the early-60s Beach Boys were about California, that place where the continent ends and dreams are born, SMiLE is about how those dreams were first conceived. Moving west from Plymouth Rock, we view cornfields and farmland and the Chicago fire and jagged mountains, the Grand Cooley Damn, the California coast-- and we don't stop until we hit Hawaii. Cowboy songs, cartoon Native American chants, barroom rags, jazzy interludes, rock'n'roll, sweeping classical touches, street-corner doo-wop, and town square barbershop quartet are swirled together into an ever-shifting technicolor dream.
Befitting an album concerned with history, SMiLE feels strangely adrift from time, using the technology of the day and an avant-garde approach to pop song form to make the past look both familiar and strange. In 1966 and 1967, old-timey music, if you squinted at it just so, could be imbued with a haze of psychedelia. And this is a deeply psychedelic album, though disorientation mostly comes from its juxtapositions, how the orchestral miniatures (or "feels," as Wilson called his modular melodic ideas) bump into each other and find their way from one song to the next, the "Heroes and Villains" refrain here, the "Child Is Father of the Man" refrain there.
The 2004 sequence divided the album into three "movements," with songs connected thematically, and this reissue wisely puts each on its own side of vinyl (if you want only the record proper, the 2xLP, with key outtakes added on the fourth side, is absolutely the way to go). Each movement has at least one pop masterpiece. On the first, there's "Heroes and Villains" and "Cabin Essence", both exploring western themes in Parks' bent style. Here and especially on side two's "Surf's Up", the level of Parks' writing is astounding. He had the sound-driven jumble of imagery of contemporaneous Dylan, but his words were far tighter and more disciplined. He also understood the power of a good pun. Sounds are slurred together to take on new meaning through clusters that extended beyond the spaces between the words. So, "The music hall, a costly bow," in "Surf's Up" also sounds like, "The music holocaust," and lines like, "canvas the town and brush the backdrop," layer image atop image with breathtaking efficiency.
Each side's arc also serves to push forward the record as a whole. Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE has made this sequencing seem canonical, and there were enough raw materials in the vault available to piece together a worthy approximation. Once in a while, you can hear a stitch or shift that would have no doubt been done over later, but those moments are rare and ultimately only add to the record's charm. By the time the tense and throbbing neo-classical piece "Fire (Mrs. O'Leary's Cow)" comes along in the third movement and then leads into "Love to Say Dada" (mostly an instrumental, it was meant to have lyrics; they were added for Brian Wilson Presents Smile, the song titled "In Blue Hawaii") and then to the extended "Good Vibrations", the strength of the album as a full piece is staggering.
But part of the allure of SMiLE will always be the pieces, and the deluxe box has a lot of them. There's almost a full disc of "Heroes and Villains" fragments and another entire CD with bits of "Good Vibrations". Given the nature of this release, the extras are illuminating, arguably more essential than most outtakes included with bonus albums. Having source materials hints at roads not taken, and also offers insight into the difficulty of actually creating a record on this scale, given how much we've heard about all the bouncing and layering that SMiLE entailed (the complexity of which is partly to blame for the project's being late and ultimately abandoned) and how many of the basic tracks were recorded live in the studio with a dozen or more musicians at once. There were only four and eight tracks to work with on the tape of the time, so one of them would need multiple instruments just to have voices and overdubs added later. Not to mention that these modular sections were eventually going to be stitched together with tape and razorblades. Beyond the fragments, there are brilliant single performances, like the two demo versions of "Surf's Up". To my ears, the song is a high-water mark of pop songwriting, positively haunting with its melodic twists and turns. And Brian's vocal performances, with wild leaps into the upper reaches of his falsetto, give the track an almost unbearable poignancy. It's incredible to think that "Surf's Up" would remain in the vault for five years, until it appeared in re-worked form on the 1971 album of the same name.
On the sessions material, you also get to hear Wilson running the show in the studio, and apart from a few asides where he talks about hash and LSD, he sounds excited, patient, and kind, offering encouragement about mood, timing, and tempo. He surely wasn't an easy guy to work for, but hearing his voice on these tapes, it's remarkable how together he seems and how willing he is to work with these musicians to make something great. Most of all, his studio patter provides a nice counterbalance to SMiLE's prevailing narrative, of a crazed genius unraveling in the face of trying to create his masterpiece. We love crack-up stories. There's something in the Western psyche that loves to romanticize the alleged connection between madness and genius. And someone like Wilson-- fragile, paranoid, childlike, and dreamy-- fits one template of the crazed genius to a T. Never mind that he was a student of music, put in twice as many hours of extremely hard work as anyone else in the band, and relied greatly on collaboration and outside inspiration. When thinking of SMiLE, the guy in the fireman's hat thinking his music could burn down buildings is who we remember. But now we have the full picture. SMiLE was never finished, and it still isn't, but we can safely say this is as close as it'll ever come. What's here is brilliant, beautiful, and, most importantly, finally able to stand tall on its own.


Robyn presents her first solo album in eight years subtly, with slight builds and light hands. But her masterful command of emotions on the dancefloor slowly reveals itself across another enthralling record.

Honey

Robyn’s work urges on our braver selves. Without sermonizing, she shows us the dignity in our sorrow—throwing her heartbreak onto the dance floor, gulping in its neon glow like photosynthesis. Through her music, we discover our loneliest moments are no longer just valleys to suffer and endure: They are deeper, even beautiful, glimpses into our humanity. It seems possible that these moments are essential turns in our own journey, and that we are indestructible in them after all.
Throughout her career, Robyn has thrived by rejecting the pop music machine. Her genius was too great and too peculiar for the frothy Max Martin ditties of her youth, despite her early success with them in the ’90s. She had the prescience around the turn of the century to reject a deal with Jive Records, embrace her edgier club influences, and start her own imprint. (Jive’s rebound signee, Britney Spears, was never afforded the same route.) Robyn’s rebellion has made her pop’s avatar of exceptionalism: Her path whispers that we can be extraordinary, too, after rejecting the strictures that keep us docile. She cuts a powerful, needed figure in pop music, reasserting the autonomy of women in a genre that labors to keep them disposable; in particular, she subverts and updates the stereotypically male idea of the auteur, whose authenticity comes from a wellspring of self-reliance and removal.
And so Honey, Robyn’s sixth solo album and first in eight years, also carries the sheen of being created on purely individual terms, on a singular timeline. With its diaristic tracklist—sequenced in the order songs were written—the album builds a bridge from its predecessor, the bionic Body Talk, into a place of new conviction and warmth. It addresses several causes of the 39-year-old’s solo hiatus, from the death of her longtime producer and friend Christian Falk to her split and eventual reconciliation with her boyfriend, while extending the previous record’s conversation: What does it mean to forge human connections, to persevere, to be generous to yourself in loss and present for others in love?
But unlike the often frosty empowerment of Body Talk, these dialogues are presented casually, with slight builds and light hands: Airy house beats waft in benignly, a far cry from the martial four-to-the-floor of her past; snatches of chipper, tinny phone conversations unfurl over unhurried tropical house with the casual aplomb of a jam session. Still, Robyn presents them in a way that makes her resolutions feel both instinctive and deeply traveled; melodies and emotions resolve simultaneously, slowly, and imperfectly, without editorialized conclusions.
Honey opens itself gradually, as if in the half-life of Body Talk. The sterile, sober “Missing U” is threaded with fresh heartbreak, in the same school of cinematic beat drops that made her “Dancing on My Own” and “Hang With Me” such cathartic floor-fillers. It’s Honey’s most melancholy song, familiar in its duress, and Robyn’s voice carries the evolution: Where she once stripped her tone of cheeky inflections and small breathy affectations—singing with a sort of level sturdiness that amplified her plainspoken pain, Scandinavian to the marrow—here she is borderline gasping; her falsetto is sighing and acrobatic. Bewildered, she echoes in the vacuum between kickdrums, reaching blindly into “this empty space you left behind,” simply existing in loss. This realm is so eerie and empty it sounds post-apocalyptic, as synths interject like torturous memories, and the drums insist on their dull throb of grief, pushing home the devastating coda: “All the love you gave/It still defines me.” As she’s done so slyly in the past, her instrumental emotionally mirrors her words, deepening the cut of both.
Robyn’s path soon turns sunnier and softer; for an artist who brought such empathy to the ostracized role of the Other Woman in “Call Your Girlfriend,” there is no melodramatic, obsessive devotion to be found on Honey. On “Because It’s in the Music,” producers Joseph Mount and Klas Åhlund volley up a glittery, morose disco shuffle—like Giorgio Moroder after 10 spins of “Holocene”—as Robyn laments a song she shares with her ex-love, one she still spins with self-flagellating regularity to his empty side of the bed. But her compulsive behavior is more restrained now, quicker to ask for mercy: “Baby Forgive Me” is the rare Robyn song to ask something of anyone else. Her songs usually relay her experience of dancing alone without urging you do the same; she promises she’ll be “Indestructible” in love without mobilizing the masses behind her. By presenting how she processes her trauma alone, she opens a community to those who need it. (And an eccentric one, to boot: Hear the odd, yawping backing vocals here and marvel at the island of misfit toys Robyn can assemble at whim.)
“Send to Robin Immediately,” with its slow synthpop burn and sample of Lil Louis’ 1989 dance hit “French Kiss,” captures the tentative first steps of assertiveness after heartbreak. “If you’ve got something to say/Say it immediately,” she coos, not unkindly, over producer Kindness’ loping, snowballing pulse. But as it happens, Robyn and her beau won’t be doing much talking: “Honey,” object of so much fan beseeching, arrives next, like a sunbeam. This version, which Robyn labored over for years, is breezier than it was in its tentative debut on Girls; her throaty vocals, like her libido, command the room with full liberty. As she purrs her infatuation—“Every breath that whispers your name/It’s like emeralds on the pavement”—and follows it to the bedroom, the classic house beat gallops to match a racing pulse. The synths melt outward mirroring the euphoria of the lyrics; serene in her lust, she directs her lover to the flower “stuck in glitter strands of saliva.” It’s hazily gorgeous and excessively horny and dreamily decisive, with Robyn as the lone director and receiver.
Robyn and her love’s happy, third-act reunion feels inevitable after the thrall of “Honey”—though she briefly diverts to a ’90s house party on “Between the Lines,” and skitters off to the shore in an electro-samba ditty called “Beach 2k20” in which she basically speak-sings to a group WhatsApp thread about a waterside restaurant hang. (There’s also a sly, blink-and-miss-it vocal nod to her 1995 hit “Show Me Love.”) Its humidity nicely sets up the closing track, “Ever Again,” in which Robyn chirps she’s “Never gonna be brokenhearted/Ever again,” like Scarlett O’Hara clutching a drum machine. It’s as classic a Robyn narrative as any on the album: A passionate peak, full of loopholes, left to resolve offscreen with messy realism.
And so Robyn rides into the sunset, after nearly 15 years spent capturing the nobility of loneliness. It’s such an alluring idea that “Ever Again”’s bittersweet top-note (“Never gonna let it happen/Then it would be all for nothing”) leaves just a glancing blow. But here, finally, is the real romance of Honey: Instead of willing her relationship to be infallible, she’s banking instead that she can bear future pain without shattering. It’s a turn from the grand narrative of moving alone through the world, faltering a little less with each step until euphoria takes over. It’s joyful to hear that Robyn’s found this peace, and as ever, she champions us toward the same.


Muse frontman Matt Bellamy jokingly described his band's sixth studio album as a "christian gangsta rap jazz odyssey, with some ambient rebellious dubstep and face melting metal flamenco cowboy psychedelia." If only.

The 2nd Law

When Muse released the "trailer" for The 2nd Law, it was the kind of preemptive shock tactic you typically expect from a record that has a lot riding on it. "MUSE GOES DUBSTEP!!!" created a minor firestorm, albeit one that was containable because it was utterly predictable. Of course Muse fans would storm the YouTube comment section with bloodthirsty vengeance. However you think Muse fits into the lineage of Queen or Rush musically, they've benefited greatly from establishing themselves as a last bastion of technically boastful and very popular prog-rock that's always implicitly held unkind attitudes toward synthesizer-based music. On the other hand, of course Muse would eventually glom onto EDM. It's the last frontier for a band that's only now integrating those sandworm basslines but whose music has always provided listeners with equivalents of "the drop"-- a glass-shattering falsetto run, Wagnerian crescendos, solos that are gunning for the one tab per month in Guitar World that's from the last decade. Having seemingly mastered all modes of excess, you'd think The 2nd Law would be Muse's unimpeachable triumph. It's not, and the problem isn't that Muse have gone too far... they haven't gone far enough.
Wait, this is Muse we're talking about, right? Hear me out, because the first half of The 2nd Law does indeed indicate that Muse have absolutely no interest whatsoever in staying within the boundaries of good taste. For about 45 seconds of "Supremacy", they actually sound like a real band, immediately after which hushed military snare rolls, chesty timpanis, and anticipatory string wells lead you to believe Matt Bellamy has unwittingly sauntered into a Michael Bay movie or Metallica's symphonic tragicomedy S&M. And titans shall clash as Bellamy speaks with the conviction of a man who is either going to tell us they'll never take our freedom or to release the kraken. With dramatic flair, he intones "your true emancipation is a fantasy," which... OK. But "the time..." Go on. "...it has come," that "it," perfect. "To destrooooyyyyyy..." Destroy what? Make sure you put your drink down as Bellamy screams "YOUR SUPREMACYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!" because all of a sudden having The 2nd Law only in audio form feels pathetically inadequate-- next time you will place it against footage from Starship Troopers, although the closest visual equivalent to this batshit moment is a dinosaur with a cowboy hat manning a F-15 and blowing evil aliens to bits while scoring the game-winning touchdown in the Super Bowl. That's not even the most ludicrous part-- wait until that bit of spy guitar comes in at the end, bearing no melodic resemblance to what just transpired and inferring Muse believes they've made their James Bond theme. No, really.
And that's the jumping off point for The 2nd Law, which wields its unlimited studio resources and chops like a stockpile of nuclear warheads, all implicit intimidation and explicit explosion. You think wimps like Purity Ring and James Blake are taking dubstep to stadium status?  Peep the genius, stuttering hook and vacuuming bass of "Madness", which serves as a reminder that Muse's pop instinct has them and not Mars Volta headlining Coachella. "Panic Station" reimagines the Red Hot Chili Peppers as multimillionaires back in the "Fight Like a Brave" days, bolstering a pelvic bassline with the finest in gated Linn snares and fake orchestra hits. There's obviously a "Prelude" here, and because this is Muse, it's actually the fourth song, not the first. And "Survival" totally needs it.
"Survival" is by far the most ridiculous song on The 2nd Law, if not Muse's entire career, meaning it's the most successful. Just imagine Watch the (Game of) Throne(s) or if Queen tried to write "Ogre Battle" and "Bicycle Race" at the same damn time. As Jess Harvell noted in his review of The Resistance, Muse have an "us vs. them" perspective that's always fit well in the gamer lifestyle, and this one's for all the Mario Kart heads using Wario to troll the shit out of Princess Peach-- Bellamy bellows, "Life's a race! AND I'M GONNA WIN!" He's soon surrounded by a mock Greek chorus, hamming with operatic haughtiness, "I'll light the fuse, and I'll never lose." And you cross your fingers, sincerely hoping, "please Lord, make him rhyme it with Muse." He doesn't, and it's the first time Muse draw the line. At its best, The 2nd Law is sort of like spending a week in Dubai, the ostentatious excess is simultaneously offensive and weirdly comforting for its mere existence in this economically depressed state.
So what the hell happens? As you might be able to tell from song titles like "Save Me" and "Follow Me", Muse's insatiable quest for sonic largesse is anchored by an equally consumptive messianic streak. This in and of itself isn't much of a problem, seeing as how Muse do create superhero music. (Imagine Christopher Nolan roping in Bono to play Batman and you get an idea of where Bellamy is coming from.) Sure, they're capable of saving the world with their own two hands, but only out of a sense of grim, solemn duty that's recognizable only to adults who've aged out of wanting to be a superhero-- Bellamy's too damn sincere about the fate of the planet to go full-leotard, leaving no space for any humor, sex, or any escapism, really.
"Animals" and "Explorers" are anti-topical enough to leave something to the imagination, but it doesn't give you anything to work with either. They're also where Muse ditch the pyrotechnics for actual piano-tinkling prog and remind you that they're still not that far off from Showbiz, their charming debut of slavish OK Computer worship. You can see the iceage coming on "Big Freeze" from two towns over and every time Bellamy pushes for a higher note, you can imagine him being yelled at by a weightlifting spotter. By the time the trailer-leaked "The 2nd Law: Unsustainable" pops up toward the end, the panicked transmissions about our energy crises are handled as delicately as The Dark Knight Rises' Occupy Wall Street overtones and are every bit as enjoyable.
Truth be told, The 2nd Law superficially succeeds for the same reasons as that movie-- the whiz-bang technical effects and relentless soundtrack is overwhelming, a justification of "you gotta spend money to make money." The problem is that it's not any fun at all, and the "message" feels like an unnecessary overcompensation for the campy streak that draws people into this kind of comic-book stuff in the first place. Sadly, there's a greater chance of Christian Bale dancing the "Batusi" than Bellamy writing a song about big asses for the hell of it. Both seem like a dead end or at least a point where, contrary to the cliché, if it gets any bigger, it will fail. When saving the world feels this much like a chore, you just wish for "Apocalypse Please".


A long-lost recording captures the Ethiopian organist and his band at the Hilton Addis Ababa in 1975, laying down deceptively breezy jazz songs steeped in nameless longing.

Tezeta

In the mid-1970s, the Hilton hotel in Addis Ababa was a refuge, for those who could afford it, from the political turmoil that was otherwise wracking Ethiopia. The Derg military regime seized power over the country in 1974, and soon began imposing restrictions—like a curfew and a prohibition against performing popular songs—that choked out the capital city’s formerly thriving nightlife scene. But the cosmopolitan atmosphere was still strong inside the Hilton, thanks in part to its American ownership and international clientele. Well-connected locals mingled with out-of-towners in the lobby, or relaxed by the pool. The sounds of the Walias Band, led by Hailu Mergia’s effervescent electric organ, drifted in and out like a warm breeze. The Walias held a residency at the Hilton for almost a decade, sometimes performing until sunrise, so that attendees could leave the show without risking detainment under the previous night’s curfew. In 1975, the band released Tezeta, a cassette of instrumentals they recorded at the hotel during off hours from performance. If the recordings are any indication, an evening with the Walias might have been enough to forget the era’s troubles until morning, if you were lucky enough to attend.
Tezeta had been lost to time until a recent reissue by Awesome Tapes From Africa, the label that has helped to spearhead a late-in-life career renaissance for Mergia, who had retired from performance for decades until a 2013 reissue of the 1985 album Shemonmuanaye (under the new title Hailu Mergia and His Classical Instrument) found him new listeners outside Ethiopia. By the time he made that album, he had moved to Washington, D.C., where few people knew he was a musical pioneer in his home country, and was working on his own in relative isolation, layering an idiosyncratic blend of accordion with electronic keyboards and drum machines. Tezeta, by contrast, is a document of Mergia and the Walias during the prime of their performing career. They were among the earliest acts in Ethiopia to combine the country’s traditional and classical songs with the swing and drive of American jazz and funk, and the very first, according to Tezeta’s richly informative liner notes, to make an album of purely instrumental music. Despite the band’s trailblazing status, Tessema Tadele writes, Ethiopians shared “an overwhelming consensus that [instrumentals] were merely produced as background music,” and Tezeta did not sell particularly well. However, in a country with strict limits on speech, there was a good reason to play music without words, whose ambiguity made it a tough target for censorship.
The Walias were both a band of fearless musical innovators and a cocktail-hour lounge act, playing music that was traditional and modern at once, for privileged audiences who might receive it as unobtrusive atmospheric enhancement or unspoken protest against oppression. Tezeta holds all these contradictions, not attempting to resolve them, but allowing their tension to animate its grooves. It’s true that the music settles comfortably into the background, if that’s where you prefer to keep it. The tempos are brisk but not bracing; the playing is stylish and confident but not brash. There are no jarring dissonances or dynamic shifts. Most tracks vamp on a small handful of chords—sometimes just one—across understated refrains and compact solos. It’s very easy to imagine the crowd at the Hilton, sipping drinks and making polite conversation, maybe even doing a little dancing.
Tune in a little closer, though, and you’ll find music of much depth and invention. Mergia unspools a series of infinitely nested curlicues on the keys, never content to step from one note to the next without spiraling across a cluster of others in between. (He apparently drew this approach from the fluid melodic embellishments of Ethiopian folk musicians on instruments like the krar and masinko). His restlessness never threatens the music’s overall composure. The effect, for me, is like water flowing through a creek: The water is always moving, but the creek stays still. Mergia is the clear star, and the only soloist on many tracks, but the other players also find ways to reach out toward the listener. When guitarist Mahmoud Aman takes the lead during the back half of “Zengadyw Derekou,” he barely steps out of the pocket, but the swagger and spaciousness of his simple lines are electrifying nonetheless. With a repeated lick at the end of his solo on “Tezeta,” flautist Moges Habte strains gently but insistently against the chord, testing its boundaries without breaking them. That approach—committed exploration within the limits of a well-defined framework—is indicative of the album as a whole.
In addition to being the name of the classic Ethiopian ballad the Walias tackle to open the set, the title of Tezeta also refers to the feeling of longing for memories past, and to an entire compositional form meant to evoke such nostalgia. According to the liner notes, many of the Walias’ instrumentals found unlikely second life as bumper music on Ethiopian television, until music from newer groups supplanted them. “Only then did those of us feeling a certain sense of loss started inquiring about ‘that music from TV’ at record stores,” Tadele writes, describing an avenue of nostalgia that Mergia and the band surely didn’t have in mind as they recorded this music. Similarly, in anecdotal experience, I’ve noticed music by Mergia and tezeta-minded contemporaries like Mulatu Astatke popping up with unusual frequency on the vibe-curated playlists of certain stylish restaurants recently—echoes of the Hilton lobby—or when an unrelated album ends on Spotify and the algorithm wants to keep me drifting into daydreamy oblivion. The songs never fail to cut through the circumstances of their presentation, tugging me toward sensitivity and alertness even when they’re used as aural wallpaper. Their very unobtrusiveness, I think, is one reason for their lasting adaptability, the way they can make you feel deeply without calling much overt attention to themselves, and in places so far removed from where they were made. Tezeta may be background music, but in the hands of an artist like Mergia, background music is a powerful thing.

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