Fueled by existential dread and exacting sound design, the New York electronic musician’s second album for Dais is gratifyingly menacing and masterfully executed.

A Fossil Begins to Bray

Nicky Mao knows her way around a modular synthesizer, but she isn’t a techno person. She doesn’t really come from an electronic music background, either. A San Francisco native who also spent significant chunks of time in Hong Kong, Mao came of age in the Bay Area punk and DIY scene, but it wasn’t until she moved to New York in 2001 that she fully engaged with electronic music. Even then, it wasn’t dance music that caught Mao’s ear; instead she gravitated toward the dissonant sonics of groups like Gang Gang Dance and Black Dice.
Nearly 20 years later, Mao still likes aural discord, but now she’s the one manipulating the machines. As Hiro Kone, she’s spent the bulk of this decade honing her craft, repeatedly delivering passionate, politically charged bursts of crunching electronics while gradually moving from rudimentary synth and drum-machine experiments into the arcane realm of modular synthesis. (That particular affinity is something Mao picked up in part from frequent collaborator and former Coil member Drew McDowall; the two teamed up on a 2018 EP called The Ghost of Georges Bataille.)
Mao’s latest album, A Fossil Begins to Bray, continues that evolution, yet it also feels like the start of something new. Mao has upped her production game to a point where it no longer sounds like she’s experimenting. The music here is determined, confident, and occasionally downright threatening. Mao has never been shy about her politics—a casual browse through her Twitter feed might turn up thoughts on the BDS movement, Black Lives Matter, wealth inequality, American militarism, police brutality, or a number of other hot-button progressive topics—but A Fossil Begins to Bray feels like the first time that her rage and her dread have been fully harnessed in her music. The LP is the best thing she’s done.
A Fossil Begins to Bray has been billed as a rumination on absence, and more specifically its power in the face of what Mao describes as a “time of looming and unrelenting techno-fascism.” Faced with a world that’s full of noise, much of it downright terrifying, many artists have chosen to embrace chaos or indulge in full-blown escapism. Mao, however, has gone in a different direction, stripping her work down to the studs and leaving only a sturdy, focused framework that packs a hell of a wallop.
That wallop hits especially hard on “Fabrication of Silence,” a track that pairs sternum-rattling bass drops with ominously looming synth oscillations and razor-sharp sound design. “Feed My Ancestors” is another hard-hitting tune, its booming kicks veering into techno territory as slithering static and moody pads add a palpable sense of fear and apprehension. There’s a subtle ferocity to these tracks, yet Mao never lets the music run wild. A Fossil Begins to Bray may be menacing, but the album’s composure never falters.
Much of this can be credited to Mao’s extreme attention to detail. The droning “Iahklu” is a wonderfully grim exercise in controlled chaos; the unintelligible vocal snippets are a particularly unnerving touch. The album’s most technically accomplished offering is probably “Submerged Dragon,” which lives up to its imposing title. Creeping sheets of static and distortion stand in for the creature’s sinister breathing, which intermittently erupts into ferocious blasts of terrifying, Lightning Bolt-esque noise. In the hands of a novice, it would be easy for a track like this to fall flat, but Mao has clearly gotten to a point where her electronics have become a natural extension of her artistic vision.
At times, that vision becomes more cinematic. The brooding “A Fossil Begins to Bray” feels like the soundtrack to the surveillance state, its lurching synths, wispy waves of static, and mournful, vaguely North African strings steadily sweeping back and forth across the song’s churning underbelly. “Akoluthic Phase” takes a similarly widescreen approach, spiraling skyward in a flurry of thundering rhythms and dark synth crescendos. The magic of this album may be in its details, but A Fossil Begins to Bray certainly isn’t afraid of going big.
Mao’s alias is an Iroquois phrase that roughly translates to “I have spoken.” It’s a fitting moniker for an artist as outspoken as she is, but on A Fossil Begins to Bray, her music finally matches the intensity of her message. Mao’s success here stems from her ability to block out excess noise, focus on what’s important, and leave the rest on the cutting-room floor. Absence may have been her inspiration, but A Fossil Begins to Bray is all about essence.

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Covering two sides of the multifaceted Nigerian pop landscape of the 1970s, these two first-rate compilations from Britain's Soundway touch on disco-tinged club music and heavy riff-rock, with a strong undercurrent of funk being the thread through it all.

Various Artists: Nigeria Disco Funk Special / Nigeria Rock Special

Earlier this year, Britain's Soundway Records returned to compiling West African music after a four-year break. Not that those four years were spent lounging about in their pajamas--they reissued 45s from Colombia, Barbados, Nigeria, and elsewhere in that time, put out a couple LP reissues of vintage Afrofunk albums by Sierra Leone's Geraldo Pino, and put together funky comps of music from Colombia and Panama. And the label's founder, Miles Cleret, also spent a lot of time in Nigeria laying the groundwork for a stunning series of compilations of the country's pop music.
The first dropped a few months ago-- Nigeria Special, which focused mostly on highlife and assorted other mildly funky sounds from the 1970s over its two discs, was up to the extremely high standard the label set for itself early this decade with its Ghana Sounds and Afro Baby compilations. And now they've followed it up with two more discs, this time hitting the discotheque and the rock scene to bring some seriously funky music to a wider audience than it was ever afforded in its day.
Like his compatriot Samy Ben Redjeb of Analog Africa, Cleret painstakingly researches every song he wants to reissue and tracks down the musicians, making sure to properly compensate them for using their work-- there's a whole crop of reissue labels popping up now that do this, and it's sort of mind-blowing that it took so long for it to become the norm. Soundway's refreshing ethics aside, the real reason to pay attention to them is simply that Cleret has such good taste-- his intrepid journeys into the heart of West Africa's record industry yield thousands of records, but he's good at being judicious with his track choices. You're getting the cream of the cream here, and your ears won't be the only parts of your body that notice.
Nigeria Disco Funk Special: The Sound of the Underground Lagos Dancefloor 1974-1979 offers nine tracks of deep, quite well-produced groove-- by the late 70s, Nigeria was home to plenty of high-tech studios to give the country's musicians the sheen they required as they kicked their funk into a new disco gear. Cleret makes the unusual (for him) move of repeating someone else with his inclusion of Joni Haastrup's "Greetings", which previously appeared on Strut's now out of print Nigeria 70 compilation, but if you'd heard the song you probably would've repeated it too. This is one of my favorite Afrofunk tracks, with a great psychedelic intro featuring flailing flutes and distant calls from Haastrup that sets up an absolutely sick dancefloor beat that would require a truckload of mirror balls spinning in unison to do it full visual justice.
Otherwise, Cleret goes way off the beaten path. I'm a huge fan of the SJOB Movement's first album (1970's A Move in the Right Direction), but I didn't even know they had a second one. Nevertheless, Cleret sources a slamming disco-funk jam with an avalanche of a synth hook called "Love Affair" from it. Bongos Ikwue & the Groovies' "You've Gotta Help Yourself" is four boiling minutes of wah-drenched guitars, jazzy trumpet, and lyrics that reference "God Bless the Child" in the chorus. T-Fire's "Will of the People" has some of the heaviest drums I've ever heard. This is definitely disco-era funk, but it's still very gritty-- you'd never mistake any of it for Silver Convention or Chic-- and the Nigerian bands tended to add liberal doses of jazz freedom and rock crunch to their dancefloor mixture.
The opposite could be said for Nigeria Rock Special: Psychedelic Afro-Rock & Fuzz Funk in 1970s Nigeria, where the fuzz guitars, trippy vocals, and heavy riffs are spiced with liberal doses of bottom-heavy rhythm. Nigeria's rock scene rose mostly from the campuses of the nation's universities in the wake of the Biafran War, and the bands came from all over the country but were especially common in the East, which had suffered the most from the war. The members of BLO (it was an acronym of their first names) had played with Ginger Baker in Europe for a few years, as had Joni Haastrup, whose rock band Mono Mono is also featured here. These were two of the country's biggest rock bands, and BLO closes things out here with "Chant to Mother Earth" (another Nigeria 70 repeat), a slow, lysergic crawl toward some sort of bliss, chemically-induced or otherwise.
There are a couple of nasty psych-funk instrumentals, including Ofege's "Adieu", which has a great organ lead and a fantastically tangled guitar solo-- Ofege was a very prolific band, and their Higher Plane Breeze album provided one of the Nigerian rock scene's iconic images with its cover shot showing one member squatting amongst his bandmates, middle fingers raised high and proud toward the camera. If you're a dedicated collector of this music, you'll recognize the names Tunji Oyelana, the Funkees and Ofo the Black Company (the heaviest of them all), but it's amazing how many utterly obscure but great bands Cleret turns up here. The Hygrades? Colomach? Tabukah 'X'? The Elcados? These are not familiar names, even to collectors.
None of those unknowns disappoint, either. The Hygrades' "In the Jungle" is a dynamic heavy funk-rock instrumental with a brilliant guitar part played by Goddy Oku-- the guy made his own guitars and the wounds he could squeeze from them recall Hendrix at times, but with Carlos Santana's pinpoint tone control. The Elcados' "Ku Mi Da Hankan" has a great, breezy three-against-four rhythm, Colomach, who were actually a Malian band visiting Nigeria, offer a strange, minimal psychedelic chant with an Afro-Cuban rhythm, and Joe King Kologbo & His Black Sound mix hectic traditional rhythms with a heavy psychedelic chorus for a truly singular track. The most explicitly rock track, Question Mark's "Freaking Out", is still pretty funky, but it's definitely an oddity-- the vocalist sounds like he could have sung for the dB's, and there's an almost punk edge to the playing.
If you're already a fan of funky West African music, I recommend these sets to you without reservation. Go get them. More broadly, anyone into funk in general or the subtle permutations of vintage global pop music would be well-advised to dig this as well. From the royalty structure to the sound to the packaging to the research and of course the music, Soundway gets it right on these compilations. Afrofunk fans could hardly have asked for more.


Recorded with a 60-piece orchestra, the Radiohead member’s score for Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film is as lavish as its high-fashion, old-money backdrop.

Jonny Greenwood: Phantom Thread Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

Since the start of his career, the director Paul Thomas Anderson has exhibited an acute sense of how music can shape a film’s narrative—how cues and leitmotifs come to define not just individual scenes but the entire world being built from scratch. (The Gen-X angst of Magnolia would not be the same without Aimee Mann’s ballads, for example.) Since 2007’s There Will Be Blood, Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood has composed the music for each of Anderson's films. The collaboration between the two has only strengthened the distinctiveness of Anderson’s work: The frantic string compositions of There Will Be Blood and the stoner-rock grooves of Inherent Vice are essential to those viewing experiences. On Anderson’s latest feature film, Phantom Thread, Greenwood’s music appears across the majority of the film’s 130-minute runtime, elevating the director-composer partnership to a new level.
Set in mid-1950s London, in a world of high fashion and faded glamour, Phantom Thread is among Anderson’s most luxurious and romantic period pieces. It follows a tumultuous courtship between the renowned dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) and a waitress and model named Alma Elsen (Vicky Krieps). Greenwood’s compositions are as lavish and lush as the film’s old-world beauty: Aided by a 60-piece orchestra, the scope of the score far exceeds his previous work for film.
Working with such an opulent backing band allows Greenwood to craft truly ornate pieces. He has said that a principal reference point was Glenn Gould’s Bach recordings—the kind of cerebral, minimalist, and “obsessive” baroque music that would fit with the film’s hifalutin mood. But there are also touches of popular jazz and big, bodacious string recordings (inspired by Ben Webster) in the background of the score, to give the film’s setting its appropriately grand feel. The resulting songs are intense and almost comically rich—the sonic equivalent of a caviar and foie gras sandwich.
This is best evidenced by the score’s strongest song and one of the film’s main themes, “House of Woodcock.” It’s the first Greenwood piece to be played in the film, and it soundtracks the morning beauty routine of Reynolds Woodcock: pirouetting piano chords and plush string arrangements move in beautiful, choreographed unison as Daniel Day-Lewis shaves, brushes his hair, and dons a crisp dress shirt. Like slipping on a gorgeous piece of clothing, hearing “House of Woodcock” will make you feel like a million bucks. The same can be said for “I’ll Follow Tomorrow,” where Greenwood’s gorgeous and melancholy piano playing accompanies a thrilling night ride in a luxury car.
But Phantom Thread is not only about beauty. The film’s narrative is even more concerned with obsession and neurosis, and Greenwood renders extravagance in claustrophobic terms. In pieces like “The Hem,” the itchiness of the fast-moving strings can feel cloying and melodramatic. On Phantom Thread, Greenwood is best when he’s subtler, which allows his music to melt into the film more easily. Take “Never Cursed,” a light, almost ethereal string composition that plays during a feverish sequence where Daniel Day-Lewis’ character falls into a hallucinatory illness as his team of seamstresses repair a wedding dress. The swooping, ghostly sadness of Greenwood’s music is pitch perfect here.
Ultimately, the biggest issue with Greenwood’s score is that its sumptuousness can be overbearing: The orchestra whacks you over the head from scene to scene as it telegraphs one emotion after another. The score can run counter to some of Phantom Thread’s most cutting points, and it vanishes during the most important scenes. So much of the film looks at how minuscule gestures, done wrong, can destroy not just routine, but tradition: A slice of toast buttered too loudly or a stitch out of place is equivalent to a disaster. If only Greenwood’s score were as attentive to that sense of restraint. Still, it is impossible to deny how ambitious this experiment is. It further proves Greenwood’s chameleonic skill as a composer—one who can jump across time and space to give sound and life to any kind of situation. As a standalone suite of songs, like a tuxedo you only dust off every now and then, it is beautiful, but only appropriate when the occasion demands it.


Where the Kashmiri rapper’s debut album was a fist-waving call to arms, Azli is a desolate post-mortem of a revolution stalled.

Azli

The future looked bright for Ahmer Javed in the summer of 2019. The Kashmiri rapper—who goes by Ahmer—had just dropped his debut album to rave reviews in the Indian press. Produced by Indian hip-hop pioneer Sez on the Beat and pulsing with righteous anger, Little Kid, Big Dreams was a sometimes funereal, sometimes incandescent record about growing up in one of the world’s most militarized zones. Ahmer hit the road, performing to packed club crowds in Mumbai and Delhi—not a regular experience for independent artists from Kashmir. Momentum building, there was a sense of bigger things on the horizon. But the newly re-elected BJP government in New Delhi had other plans.
On August 5, the Indian government abrogated Article 370 of the Indian constitution, stripping the union territory Jammu and Kashmir of both statehood and the special status it enjoyed as part of its uneasy accession to India in 1947 (it was the only Muslim-majority region to do so at Partition). In the name of national security, the hard-line Hindu nationalist government then proceeded to turn Kashmir into an open-air prison: Thousands of additional troops were rushed in; a total communications blackout was imposed. So many Kashmiris—from political leaders and activists to 15-year-old kids—were detained or arrested under draconian security laws in the next month that the state ran out of space in its jails. In the streets, right-wing Hindus celebrated the verdict, sometimes by attacking a nearby Kashmiri.
On his sophomore album, Azli (Urdu for “endless”), written in Srinagar in the midst of the crackdown and the COVID-19 lockdowns that followed, Ahmer paints a vivid portrait of the mental and emotional trauma of these terrible years, the latest episode in an unending cycle of violence and tragedy.
Like Little Kid, Big Dreams, much of Azli is given over to a grim accounting of the scars of occupation and militancy. His debut record’s anger and despair were tempered by a strong undercurrent of faith in the universe’s moral arc and the power of peaceful protest. Three years later, that faith hangs by a thread, moral certainties shredded by the realities of life under Hindutva authoritarianism: state-supported pogroms, young Muslims being tortured and shot on camera by cops and security forces, collective punishment and apartheid policies. On Azli, the 27-year-old sounds tired and embittered. His voice is ragged, gravelly, as if he’s rapping through a mouthful of ash and smoke. At times—like on the wish-fulfillment fantasy “Kalkharab”—he teeters on the edge, caught in the throes of delayed-onset trauma. If Little Kid, Big Dreams was Ahmer’s fist-waving call to arms, Azli is a desolate post-mortem of the collateral damage from a revolution stalled.
The music—composed by Ahmer, who also co-produces along with a small group of young Kashmiri and mainlander producers—is relentlessly oppressive: Blown-out bass thunders and pummels like distant artillery, minor-key synths keen in funereal harmony, all filtered through a haze of menacing distortion. Snatches of Kashmiri folk song drift in and out, brief flares of light and joy that are quickly extinguished by the storm clouds. Even the brief moments of respite—like the birdsong in the background of an interlude featuring a verse in Koshur (the language of Kashmir) by resistance poet Madhosh Balhami—only serve to highlight the rest of the record’s nihilistic mood.
In front of this grim backdrop, Ahmer intertwines personal and familial struggles with Kashmiri history into compelling witness testimony, documenting physical and psychic violence barely acknowledged, and waiting for justice that is unlikely to come. Rapping in Hindi and Koshur, he grapples with the corrosive effects of his own anger (on opener “Gumrah”), and the shared psychic wounds of growing up in a society where thousands of young men have been disappeared by the state (“Nishan”), all trace of them erased, their families left waiting decades for closure.
“Janaza,” whose title refers to the Muslim funeral prayer, takes aim at another way the Indian state denies closure to Kashmiri families—the secret burial of those killed as militants to prevent funeral processions that often evolve into protests. The three-minute track starts with a distorted vocal sample of a man wailing in Koshur, dogs barking in the background, before a chorus of disembodied voices accompanies Ahmer’s pointed, incisive rhymes about being gaslit by the state. “Aaj phir ek janaza par laash abhi mili nahi/Phir goliyo ka shor, sunna main, chali nahi (Another funeral today, but the body hasn’t been returned/I heard gunshots but they want you to believe no bullets were fired),” he snarls, his tone deadpan but dripping with angry disdain.
Another highlight is “Rov” (“Lost”), a song about the many losses that accompany decades of conflict—of both loved ones and the capacity to love—that revolves around Faheem Abdullah’s haunting, heartbreaking vocals. “Nyuham janaan adijan mea soor goam (They took my beloved [son], and my bones became ash),” he sings, distilling 30 years of intergenerational trauma into one evocative line.
If there is a redemptive thread on Azli, it’s in the way Ahmer and his team of collaborators—young Kashmiris like prxphecy, Junaid Ahmed, and Hyder Dar—sprinkle odes to Kashmiri art and music throughout. Two skits feature Madhosh Balhami, the Kashmiri poet who was imprisoned and tortured by Indian security forces for the crime of singing elegies at militants’ funerals. And pioneering Kashmiri rapper MC Kash (Rousan Illahi) triumphantly returns on “Kun,” making his first appearance on a record in almost eight years.
Kash is an inspiration to Ahmer and other Kashmiri rappers, who grew up listening to his defiant anthems like “I Protest” and “Take It in Blood.” But since grabbing international headlines in 2010, the rapper has been repeatedly targeted by Indian police, who raided his studio, shut down his shows, and eventually forced him into early retirement. To hear him pop up at the end of pugnacious resistance song “Kun”—his verse preceded by a cheeky “Did someone call my name?”—is a poignant reminder of the strength of Kashmiri resilience in the face of occupation, constant dehumanization, and endless violence.
This resilience finds its fullest expression in “Shuhul Naar” (“Cold Fire”), an almost seven-minute Kashmiri folk-rap ballad that transmutes the painful reality of erasure into an iron will to resist. Over lightly strummed folksy guitar and strings, Junaid Ahmed sings of finding strength in defeat: “Na rudum me naav, na rudum zameer/Jaise jee utha hun zinda phir se (They erased my name, they erased my conscience/It feels like I’m alive again).” Ahmer’s voice too, loses much of its venom. “Ye mere haqooq ka naara (This is my broken, shattered war cry),” he raps, with the world-weariness of much older activists who have seen their beloved revolutions falter and fail.
“Kehne nahi wala ye zulmi zamana, kya sehlegha tu aur kya sehne nahi wala/Par kaash, hota ye sach/Hota na sapna ye bas (Tyranny won’t command us and we won’t be enslaved again/Alas, I wish this was the reality/I was this wasn’t a dream),” he continues a few bars later, capturing the enduring tragedy of Kashmiri resistance and resilience. Under the occupation that the world forgot about, resistance stems not from hope or blind optimism, but from sheer determination.


Compiled from a marathon run of shows at the Fillmore Auditorium, this live set is a joyful, relaxed, and abundant journey through Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ personal rock’n’roll history.

Tom Petty / The Heartbreakers: Live at the Fillmore (1997)

Live at the Fillmore (1997)

By 1997, Tom Petty had achieved his wildest rock’n’roll dreams and then some. He’d released nine albums with the Heartbreakers as well as two million-selling solo albums; morphed into an improbable MTV favorite with a succession of delightfully idiosyncratic videos; toured internationally with Bob Dylan as Dylan’s opening act and his backing band, simultaneously; and he’d played the role of Charlie T. Wilbury Jr., the kid brother in the classic rock supergroup the Traveling Wilburys. Even with all of that, and perhaps because of it, he was restless. After decades of playing arenas—venues where “you do feel compelled to play them the most popular songs,” as he told critic Joel Selvin—the music business hamster wheel of album-videos-tour-album felt uninspiring. This is the point at which, historically, bands either self-destruct or break up. Instead, Petty decided they’d play 10 shows at San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore Auditorium, which expanded to 20 shows by the time the tickets were done selling out. The Heartbreakers hadn’t played live in more than a year when they got together for a couple of rehearsals beforehand, coming out with a list of almost 60 prospective entries for the setlist, everything from bluegrass to covers to, yes, some of their hits. (“We do like those as well,” Petty told Selvin.)
The 20 nights were a joyful, relaxed, and abundant journey through the musicians’ personal rock’n’roll history, mixing the beloved covers they’d started out playing alongside thoughtful revisitations of the songs that got them here. It was a Hall of Fame-level set by a band who still had a lot more history ahead of them. Petty and the band played the music they loved in front of a Fillmore audience that combined devoted fans (many who returned night after night) alongside everyday Bay Area rock’n’roll devotees. There were special guests, inside jokes (Petty referred to the band one night as “the Fillmore House Band” and the promoters quickly made up hats), live broadcasts, and given the history of the building, probably a few ghosts. The last six shows of the stand were recorded professionally, and it’s from there that Live at the Fillmore (1997) was assembled.
As is de rigueur these days, there are multiple configurations available, but it’s the 4xCD deluxe that’s most of interest, as it provides the essentials, the rarities, and the special guests—57 tracks in total, 35 of which are covers or guest performances. But those numbers don’t adequately convey the strength of the release. Live at the Fillmore sounds and feels vibrant and inviting, and it is curated with obvious attention and care. The first two discs present a version of the core set that evolved after the first few nights, the third disc showcases special guests the Byrds’ Roger McGuinn and John Lee Hooker, and the last disc presents the back half of the show, the energetic and emotional coast to the end. It feels like it all could have been one single performance, and it almost could have been, given the extent of the band’s output across those 20 nights. They played close to 30 songs almost every show, about a third of which were classic rock—including Little Richard (“Lucille” or “Rip It Up”), J.J. Cale (“Call Me the Breeze”), the Rolling Stones (“Satisfaction”), and even “You Are My Sunshine,” which Petty mentions he’d learned at summer camp.
It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve heard “Free Fallin’,” the epic opener of 1989’s solo release Full Moon Fever: Here you get to hear Petty rediscover his own composition, to hear the Heartbreakers act like the finely tuned machine that they were (even with new drummer Steve Ferrone behind the kit), and to appreciate a huge song in the intimacy of a small club. Elsewhere in the set, someone in the audience yells a request and Petty responds, with some measure of disbelief: “Did somebody just say ‘Heartbreakers Beach Party’? What key is that in, Benmont?” and the Heartbreakers proceed to perform a song they’d never played live. It doesn’t matter that the song is a silly in-joke, a non-LP B-side written to accompany a 1983 MTV special that hasn’t been seen since; the band plays it with attention and care. It’s a hilarious, fantasy moment that could never happen in an arena, but it’s exactly the serendipity you hope for in this kind of setting.
McGuinn had long been one of Petty’s personal heroes, and although this isn’t the first time they’d performed together, it’s a great document of their affinity and connection. Hooker (whose Boom Boom Room was across the street from the Fillmore) got invited over to delight both backing band and audience, connecting the dots from the Mississippi Delta to rock’n’roll, and specifically the marriage of the blues and the British Invasion that Petty and the Heartbreakers embodied. Like McGuinn’s set, this isn’t a vanity appearance; everyone on stage stepped up, and that motor was purring by the time they get to “Boogie Chillen,” as guitarist Mike Campbell, Petty on harmonica, and then (as Hooker introduces him) “the 88 man,” keyboardist Benmont Tench, get a chance to stake their claim.
One of the best moments on the release isn’t a special guest or a rare cover, but in the chorus of “You Wreck Me,” from 1994’s Wildflowers. It’s in the lead-in to the first chorus, not lyrics, just a “whoa-oh-oh/yeahhh,” but the crowd sings along perfectly, on time and in tune. It’s genuinely affectionate, warm, and almost tangible. “You Wreck Me,” an absolute gem of a song, was still a new addition to the Heartbreakers’ set. This moment of call-and-response, energy reflection from the band to the crowd and back again, is emblematic of the intimate charm this release captures. “I just want to play,” Petty said before the shows. “We want to get back to what we understand.” What Petty wanted was connection, that intangible ingredient that you can’t fake, predict, or force. It vibrates out of every track of this set.


The gritty and elusive Hempstead MC caps off a decade of profound influence with more photographic narratives, gnarled slang, and evocative soul samples.

Marcielago

After stalled apprenticeships with Pete Rock and Busta Rhymes, Roc Marciano arrived with 2010’s self-produced Marcberg, a grayscale triumph which blended elements of Only Built 4 Cuban Linx and Dah Shinin’ into an intricate and nearly impenetrable statement of purpose. Landing just before iTunes began ceding ground to Spotify, Marcberg showcased an auteur who never broke character, an unsentimental diarist nevertheless obsessed with thread counts and lacquer finishes. The drums snapped and the samples felt three-dimensional; when Marci described the temperature, you felt it in your knuckles. Hazily rooted in blaxploitation slang, cocaine-’80s touchstones, and outer-borough ’90s grit, the Hempstead provenance of Marciano’s bygone New York makes sense once you consider that the Notorious B.I.G.’s childhood home currently rents for $4,000 a month.
For a few years, it seemed that Marcberg and its follow-ups would endure as brilliant aberrations, suggestive of an alternate timeline in which Mr. Smith and Life After Death were never released, and gloss never visited hip-hop’s birth city. But as rap labels cratered and New York City’s primacy waned, his records became foundational texts for a wave of neo-classicists from declining industrial burgs. Among the immediate disciples of Marci—marketed less like rap stars than outsider artists—are Buffalo’s flamboyant Griselda collective; Newark’s Mach-Hommy; Crimeapple, a Colombian-American oddball from Hackensack whose flow lands a good half-beat behind the snare; and Marci’s Hempstead neighbors SmooVth and Hus KingPin, whose drawling rasps are more Corleone than Wu-Tang. Even more than their mechanics and taste in samples, these rappers owe Marciano their narrative scopes. The scenes rarely develop into full sagas, but they’re photographic in their detail.
Marcielago serves as a capstone for Marci’s decade, a mix of evocative soul samples and stripped-down loops paired with his trademark gnomic flow. There are few hooks or melodies in any traditional sense, and he prefers soft percussion when he doesn’t forgo it entirely. He remains an artist for whom scene-setting remains the platonic ideal: You’re never left wondering what kind of sauce bathes the filet, or what show’s playing on the fuzzy TV in the corner. Sometimes, his narratives seem shaped by the dictates of the rhymes themselves.  On “Richard Gear,” the arrival of a borrowed Sentra renders a victim’s t-shirt magenta; on “Choosin Fees,” a “lady of the evenin’” elicits the theory that “if we had babies they’d be heathens.”
The opening verse of “Puff Daddy” is an exemplary study in narrative economy. It’s also the one track on Marcielago that might sound at home on another artist’s record: The distorted piano chords and Bad Boy-referencing title feel nicked from the Griselda playbook, itself so heavily predicated on Marciano’s work. But when Griselda frontman Westside Gunn appears on “Boosie Fade,” the contrast between the two vocalists is electric—no torch-passing moments here. Marciano’s ground-level camera homes in on the subtle details that tend to elude his contemporaries, and he remains the most colorful character to appear in front of his own lens.


With shades of late-’90s New Orleans and mid-aughts trap, the Detroit rapper’s newest mixtape casts an ominous spell even when his writing isn’t at its strongest.

War Lord

Since the days when Doughboyz Cashout were the hottest names in Detroit rap, the city’s cold and direct drug-dealing chronicles have owed a lot to Atlanta trap forefather Jeezy. These days his influence is everywhere: The way Peezy rattles through tales so economically. How BandGang Lonnie Bands and Masoe convey menace and moral stakes at the same time. How Los and Nutty’s lyrics are descriptive enough to script a seedy crime drama on Tubi. Similarly, Talibando—one of the young guns of a loose collective of Detroit rappers that also includes Babyface Ray and Veeze—has a patient and pragmatic edge to his rhymes that screams Jeezy. His newest mixtape, War Lord, may not be as emotionally complex, but gels because of his sharp ear for beats and cold-eyed intensity.
The catalyst of War Lord is the production: skittish and ominous instrumentals that pull as much from late-’90s New Orleans and mid-aughts trap as Michigan heritage. On opener “Birds Talking,” Flee and Finn’s laser-beam beat sounds like one of the Cash Money homages you could find on Real Boston Richey’s Public Housing, but at nearly half the speed. “Still scorching, 400 Degreez, just like Juvie,” Talibando raps, acknowledging the reference point. Later, producer 2 Side’s bassline on “Chitlins” is chilly enough to suggest there’s a slasher around the corner, and Talibando’s unusually uptempo delivery carries shades of Detroit rapper Damedot’s mafioso sensibilities. The few brighter beats don’t kill the spirit, but they feel out of place, like when Talibando is nearly drowned out by the jolly soul sample on “The Way It Goes.” The Babyface Ray-assisted “Swim Team” is an exception thanks to two verses packed with fun details: Ray cites The Irishman (“My boy paint houses just like Jimmy”) and Talibando competes to be the fastest bill-thrower at the strip club.
I do wish Talibando had more standout individual lines. It’s not always evident, because War Lord runs on vibe rather than writerly ability, but some tracks call for the chops. “Deja Vu” features the kind of brooding, piano-led beat that Icewear Vezzo always makes work because he’s the colorful lyricist that Talibando isn’t. Sandwiched between Veeze’s wisecracking wisdom and Lucki’s attention to detail on “Millions,” Talibando fades into the background. His lyrics hold together better when there’s a narrative. Even when the plots are half-baked, he moves them along fast enough to stay exciting: “I think the feds doin’ a stakeout, it’s time to move everything/We need to switch up the safehouse,” he raps on “Steakout.”
But what War Lord is missing in intricacy, the tape makes up in atmosphere. While they’re in your earbuds, Talibando’s hard-nosed kingpin raps will make you want to thump your chest. If your idea of feeling good is riding around in a Jeep with roof off like Nino Brown in New Jack City, or cackling on the sidelines of a high school basketball game like Birdie in Above the Rim, then this is feel-good music. Talibando is not Jeezy but he’s internalized an essential part of his approach: Rap as a mood piece.


Returning to the series of instrumental self-portraits he began in 1979, the German experimental rock pioneer, now 86, sounds reflective and at times melancholy, braiding peacefulness and pain.

Selbstportrait Wahre Liebe

Hans-Joachim Roedelius has led a remarkable life. He was born in Berlin in 1934 and appeared in films as a child. During World War II, his family moved to rural Germany to escape the fighting, and they were impoverished after the war. Roedelius was conscripted into the East German army as a teen, and later attempted to defect to the West; he successfully made it across in 1961, after two years in an East German prison. When he began making music in the late ’60s, it came out chaotic and primal, but over the following 50 years, both solo and as a member of Cluster and Harmonia, Roedelius has been one of the most influential and prolific members of the original wave of German experimental rock. His music is charming and pastoral in one moment, amorphous and mysterious the next. It is defiantly delicate, quietly radical.
Some of Roedelius’ most lasting work on his own has been his Selbstportrait (Self-Portrait) series, from 1979-80. Realized with minimal equipment—mostly Farfisa, drum machine, and tape delay—the original trio of releases is intimate and beguiling, bringing to the fore the complexities of his musical personality. Self-portraits can be a connective thread between what we know of an artist’s life and their creative work, offering a glimpse into how they make meaning out of their experiences, their body, and their imagination. The music on Roedelius’ self-portraits, grounded and gentle, shows an artist moving forward from a tumultuous past into a peaceful, stable present, with whispers of melancholy barely audible but consistently implied. It’s hard to extricate his life story, with its escapes to the countryside punctuating moments of social upheaval, from the music he makes.
Forty years after those definitive recordings, an octogenarian Roedelius returns to the Selbstportrait series. Selbstportrait Wahre Liebe (True Love) is remarkably similar in style, tone, and timbre to the original trilogy. As sentimental as his compositions can be, Roedelius continued to push himself into new sonic territory during his fifth decade of making music, primarily through collaborations with innovators like drummer Jon Mueller, C.M. Von Hausswolff, and Stefan Schneider of To Rococo Rot. The nostalgic bent of Wahre Liebe, his first solo release in nearly a decade, reveals a willingness to come full circle.
On Wahre Liebe Roedelius is able to conjure many different moods without deviating from the round, bell-like tones of the Farfisa, an instrument he returns to after years of primarily working with acoustic piano and digital processing. “Geruhsam” is airy and buoyant, with a slow, playful melody that intuitively unfolds over bouncing organ pulses. “Winterlicht,” a plaintive piece performed without conspicuous overdubs, fills a similar niche as “Inselmoos,” from the original Selbstportrait LP, with its rubato tempo and overtly romantic flourishes. There’s a nebulous feel to “Nahwärme,” in which tones shimmer and bubble in waves of blissful ambience. Such disparate moods are what makes these self-portraits so insightful and fascinating; each piece reveals new aspects of Roedelius’ musical personality, adding new layers of emotional complexity.
The album’s final track, “Aus weiter Ferne,” makes for a strangely irresolute ending, removed from Selbstportrait’s sonic origins but very much in its spirit. The 15-minute piece, by far the series’ longest, drifts in and out of wispy dissonance, slowly pushed forward by a hesitant, improvised melody and droning organ. The music is undefined and hard to grasp, moving through strange, disjointed chordal patterns. These are echoes of darkness, an acknowledgement of the irresolvable complexities of growing older, of reflecting on a life lived in its entirety. It may not be a satisfying ending, but it feels true, like an acknowledgement of pain that seamlessly flows from peacefulness and back again, obscured by time and memory. From that seed of ambiguity blooms the wisdom of Roedelius’ accumulated years.


On his first solo LP in six years, the noise architect lingers inside a series of haunted scenes, animated by the surreal sounds of homemade instruments.

Nate Young: Volume One: Dilemmas of Identity

Volume One: Dilemmas of Identity

At various points during Volume One: Dilemmas of Identity, it becomes difficult to tell what Wolf Eyes founder Nate Young is doing, or how he gets the seemingly alien sounds that shape his first proper solo album in six years. What are those robotic rhythms of “The Weeping Babe” or the liquid ripples of noise that drip between the beats? Is that actually a pedal steel wrapped around the scattered piano chords of “Vents of Blue,” or is it only a sculpted ray of feedback? The textures on these nine tracks are uniformly familiar and strange, just skirting the rules and roles you might expect, as if you’re taking a long walk through a world where the rules of gravity occasionally start to bend.
This is not a new sensation for the music of Young, who has been turning traditional instruments like his voice and guitar inside-out for two decades with Wolf Eyes. “When I first started playing music, I started with a guitar, and someone stepped on it so that was over,” he quipped to FACT in 2013. “So I started looking around for whatever else I could play.” On Dilemmas, those “whatever elses” are modular synthesizers and a panoply of homemade chimeras—distortion units appended to discarded tape decks, triggered hammers that tap frame drums and metal pipes, circuit-bent orbs of unknown provenance. There is some guitar, as with the strangled solo that twists and juts and claws around the beat of “Dribbling Insane.” But even that strikes as exotic, the contrast highlighting the surreal nature of most everything else here.
These nine pieces hover in their own worlds for four or five minutes at a time, establishing both a mode and mood in their first few seconds and then lingering there, as if breathing the air Young has made. This is intentionally framed incidental music, snippets of would-be scores fleshed out into fascinating little songs. “Crumpled Body” stares into the distance and ponders the void, curves of noise rising repeatedly through a torpid industrial beat only to vanish and begin again. “In the Shadow Of” exists as an endlessly cyclical sunrise, with fluorescent tones peeking over horizons of organ haze and receding as if they were never there at all. On the gorgeous and wistful “Vents of Blue,” piano chords and pedal steel function as the conjoined ends of an ouroboros, one sound always passing through the other. It reflects the sensation of staring at stacks of old family photos and feeling lost forever in the reverie.
Young has hinted at that kind of slow-motion diligence before on his solo records, inward turns from the triumphant paroxysm and managed chaos of Wolf Eyes. But where 2013’s Blinding Confusion seemed to kowtow to Young’s reputation for harsh sounds and sinister moods, Dilemmas is guileless and honest. He sorts through confusion, sadness, anxiety, and urgency with instrumental candor. These songs feel like private meditations on themes, his emotions articulated through methodical exploration of the instruments at hand. In that way, they recall the mid-1960s Takoma landmarks of guitarist John Fahey or the sparkling wonder of computer music innovator Laurie Spiegel’s 1980 debut, The Expanding Universe. Nothing on Dilemmas lands like a high or a low; on the album and within each track, there’s no clear climax or dénouement. These are pure states of being, subtly evolving testaments to the continuing evolution of a true architect of the modern avant-garde.


Chance the Rapper compatriot Towkio sometimes raps great, vivid tales about his life in Chicago. Sometime’s he’s funny and weird. And sometimes he falls victim to cruddy trap beats and generic lyrics.

Community Service 2!

Situated on the corner of Chicago’s Western and Addison avenues is Lane Tech College Prep High School, the largest high school in the city’s public school system and the alma mater of Savemoney member, Towkio. Or, as he is also known, Preston Oshita, on-and-off again star quarterback for the Lane Tech Indians—a factoid that the Savemoney crew rapper discretely references on Community Service 2’s best track, “Intro (My Calling)”: “I break the huddle, yeah/I run the spread.”
“Intro (My Calling)” is one of a few, vivid standout tracks on an otherwise colorless EP. Over a frenetic footwork beat, Towkio takes the listener on a hyperspeed tour of his city. It’s a narrative rich with details that are brought to life by Towkio’s incomparably earnest voice. He takes the tone of someone trying not to lose his temper while pleading his case. “Before that Paypal, I had them custies, I fronted out back/Call that the steakhouse, call my cousin, bet he vouch that,” he implores. Too soon, the earnestness cools and is supplanted by an altogether different Towkio than the heady 20-something that laid down starry-eyed rhymes on 2015’s *.WAV Theory**. *In its place is a pushier rapper who insists he “ain’t playin’ fair” and is prodded along by an aggressive beat from Smoko Ono replete with over-stylized bass drops that harken back to the days when EDM invaded trap.
Variations on that same beat continue throughout “G W M,” “Therapeutic,” and “Feel Me Doe” to varying degrees of success. Same goes for the lyrics. “Feel Me Doe” stands out above the rest thanks to Towkio’s staccato delivery that softens and slows across the final verse as the beat recedes beneath it. And “G W M,” despite its laundry list of celebrity callouts, entertains every so often–like when Towkio connects lean to Bill Withers, or references astral projection. More of that weirdness could’ve given this album the singular point of view it deserves.
The soulful, hush-hush side of Towkio that’s in full swing on Chance the Rapper’s “Juke Jam," only appears as an echo on “Tear Drop.” And Oshito, though meaningful in moments, too often mistakes platitudes for poetry: “The truth is your face, no filter.” Broad strokes don’t make for lasting impressions. What does is an anecdote grounded in a place and time. “We used to roll at the rink/I used to talk way too much/You used to know everything,” to quote the aforementioned “Juke Jam.”
*Community Service 2 *ends on a high note with the delirious banger, “Work 4 Me.” On the track, copious amounts of cacophony give way to catchiness. Producer Peter Cottontale's beat crashes sirens into cash registers and lets the resulting clang ring out like a bell at the beginning of a boxing match. It arrests the listener just in time for Towkio to punch his way through the intro, alternating the emphasis between three words—work for me, work for me, work for me. It’s jolting, as if the wires within the song crossed and put the vocals on the fritz.
The record could’ve fared better had Towkio delivered the same kind of energy and specificity that he brought to the EP’s bookends. Instead it failed to complete its thought. Only when Towkio avoided abstractions and zoomed into what was happening on the corner—at Addison and Western, inside the huddle—did the music reward fully.


Michael Benjamin Lerner spent two years learning about vintage synthesizers and forgetting about guitars and drums. Though he sought a new sound, the resulting Ad Infinitum sounds surprisingly like classic Telekinesis.

Ad Infinitum

Michael Benjamin Lerner spent two years learning about vintage synthesizers and forgetting about guitars and drums, but the resulting Ad Infinitum sounds surprisingly like classic Telekinesis. Lerner's flirtation with synths and machinery began on his 2013 album Dormarion, hinting that that he might someday trade indie pop for synthpop. As far back as his 2009 debut, he pled for the attending physicians of "Calling All Doctors" to "replace my heart with a machine." With Ad Infinitum, the operation is complete.
Detailing his transformation in a piece for Medium, he says he spent much of the past two years amassing and learning how to use a collection of vintage synths, as well as hook them up with newer technology to make new music. "This proved to be incredibly time-consuming and, at times, a ridiculously difficult task," he writes.
All of that ridiculous difficulty was time well spent: he has made some beautifully textured music with moods that recall the original '80s heyday of synthpop. "Edgewood" sounds like an outtake from Speak & Spell and the instrumental "Ad Infinitum, Pt. 1" recalls the grandeur and evocative melodrama of the first side of Disintegration.
Lerner also produced the album—a first for him—with some assistance from Eric Elbogen of Say Hi. But the problem with taking on so many new responsibilities is that something's got to give. In this case, it's the lyrics. They're often vague and seem like they were the final pesky pieces that he fit into the process. He utters the word "forget" in more than half of the songs with lyrics, and "future" on three separate occasions. Though Lerner has learned well how to make these sounds, he doesn't elevate the form enough.
"Sleep In", with its light hip-hop beat and elfin ba-ba-ba-ba-ing is Ad Infinitum's most innovative track. Lerner gets in his own way on this song though, when he employs an actual Speak & Spell machine. Whether it's a nod to the aforementioned Depeche Mode debut or not, it feels forced. (Though it doesn't induce as much of an eye roll as Limp Bizkit's Speak & Spell experimentation, it's not quite as cool as what Robyn and Röyksopp do with the machine.)
Despite all of this, the songs still sound very much like Telekinesis. Lerner's songwriting is direct and even with all of this gadgetry he has a knack for a simple, effective melody. The harmony on "Farmers Road" is locked in tightly, and "Ad Infinitum, Pt. 2" feels like it's threatening to break into "Shining Star" in the chorus. The tunes are sturdy, and depending on how ambitious Lerner is with this tour, he could easily put any of these songs into his comfortable power trio arrangement. He could even do them on an acoustic guitar, as he is wont to do.
Lerner has reportedly said that he started collecting vintage synthesizers because he felt like he had already gotten all of the songs out of the guitar that he could. The songs he summons from the synths offer proof that there were more songs left in him, but he's still digging in the same mine. Ad Infinitum might be the sound of an artist challenging himself, but it's not the sound of an artist challenging his listeners.


Brighton's the Go! Team show signs of evolution on album #3, as their stylistic range broadens ever so slightly.

Rolling Blackouts

You have to wonder if Ian Parton ever regrets naming his recording project/collective the Go! Team, let alone affixing it with an exclamation point for guaranteed bonus exuberance. Few bands have gone to such great lengths to forge a connection between their name and their sound. Since its inception, the group has reconstructed sounds that are all about inspiring motion-- cheerlander chants, rollerskate jams, breakdance beats, cop-show chase themes, 90s mosh-pit rock-- into a brass-blasted wall of squall. But the side effect of constant movement is fatigue-- in this case, on the band itself, which charged through its 2007 sophomore release Proof of Youth with the same gusto heard on its dazzingly 2004 debut, Thunder, Lightning, Strike. Compounding the exhaustion on Proof of Youth is Parton's unwavering deference for high-pitch-frequency productions that sound like they're blaring out of an old Zenith, tenuously walking the line between ingratiating and just plain grating.
From the outset, Rolling Blackouts provides little relief: opener "T.O.R.N.A.D.O" announces itself with all the subtlety of an air-raid siren, as lead MC Ninja wages a losing battle against a torrential blitzkrieg of horn breaks and scratch effects. The song essentially serves the same function as the opening themes to the 80s action shows Parton was raised on: it's the Go! Team advertising itself, an instant reacquainting device to remind you of what you're tuning into. But thankfully, Parton proves much more willing to change up the script. His cut-and-paste aesthetic is still very much in effect; he just uses it to assemble more varied and satisfying songs.
There's always been a latent appreciation of 60s girl-group pop buried beneath the Go! Team's hyper-funk ballast, and that quality is given more time and space to shine here, whether in the Motown-by-way-of-Tokyo sweep of "Secretary Song" or the "Ready Steady Go!"-worthy "Ready to Go Steady". Most successful of all is the band's wonderful collaboration with Best Coast's Bethany Cosatino on the fuzz-pop delight "Buy Nothing Day". But even the typical jump-rope exercises ("Apollo Throwdown", "The Running Range") are leavened by acoustic-based sonics and congenially melodic choruses. Meanwhile, Parton's sound world now absorbs everything from endearingly schmaltzy soap-opera soundtracks ("Yosemite Theme") to Yo La Tengo-style dream-pop reveries (the title track). Of course, "Back Like 8 Track" closes the album by returning to the group's familiar schoolyard terrain. Hopefully, Rolling Blackouts marks the moment in the Go! Team's career where the idea of moving forward becomes less of a literal concept and more an artistic one.


On their first EP of new material in six years, Wolf Parade aren't asserting themselves to the world so much as reintroducing themselves to each other.

EP 4

In a literal sense, Apologies to the Queen Mary* *has become 2005’s most essential record; shorthand for a set of qualities that defined a year considered to be indie rock’s artistic and cultural zenith. If you’ve been nostalgic for those times—and it seems like plenty are—it’s easier than ever to empathize with an already wearied Dan Boeckner when he slurs his first words on Wolf Parade’s debut LP: “I’m not in love with the modern world.” And yet, the hyperspeed production, distribution, consumption and coverage of music allows Wolf Parade to make a comprehensive “triumphant comeback” despite only taking six years off. Hell, even the release strategy of *EP 4 *is similar to the one used by the stars: the short-lead, quick drop of highly-anticipated material.
*EP 4 *is no “appointment listening", though. Its 12 minutes of new material almost immediately got overshadowed by Chance the Rapper, Brand New, new Ariana Grande singles and whatever Kanye got himself into last week. This likely worked in favor of Wolf Parade, since *EP 4 *feels ancillary to their return rather than the focus. This isn’t the sound of Wolf Parade asserting themselves. It’s Wolf Parade reintroducing themselves to each other after Spencer Krug and Dan Boeckner built massive catalogs that now makes their original band a supergroup in reverse.
Wolf Parade had originally promised something with a “heavy glam vibe,” suggested Krug was taking the spiritual lead here—in all aspects, vocally, sartorially, lyrically, he’s the theatre kid in Wolf Parade and, moreover, his songs are the ones that work best with crowd participation. Turns out those reference points were simply meant to signify a leaner, more trebly and immediate version of Wolf Parade, scaling back on the thick, proggy arrangements that defined the lesser-loved At Mount Zoomer* *and Expo 86**.
It’s much easier for Krug to find his “Wolf Parade mode”: he simply has to be more reined in than Sunset Rubdown, Moonface or Swan Lake, which means writing songs that are about three minutes instead of six—“Mr. Startup” and “C’est La Vie Way” are satisfying, jittery New Wave that could’ve just as easily been attributed to Boeckner. The streamlined, aerodynamic sound of *EP 4 *has much more in common with Boeckner' work in Operators, Handsome Furs, and Divine Fits.
Enjoyable as it is, *EP 4 *does seem like smart risk management, a test run that confirms that whatever the group comes up with won’t be a Pixies-style disaster.  As such, the rewards are modest: “Floating World” pleasantly hovers, never aspiring to the moon launch of “Yulia.” The frenzied midsection of “C’est La Vie Way” recalls “Fancy Claps”, but only briefly before pulling back. The most instantly lovable parts are the “2005!” sonic easter eggs: the second verse of “Mr. Startup” works the hi-hat on the 2 and 4, which defined the sound of mid-2k indie rock almost as much as the word “angular.”
But EP 4 is missing the friction between Krug and Boeckner that allowed Apologies to the Queen Mary to instantly combust within Isaac Brock’s compressed production: the cadences, mannerisms and subject matter between the two frontmen are almost indistinguishable here. More likely, it’s the general sense of yearning that has yet to be rediscovered, the ambition to transcend *something *that defined not only *Apologies to the Queen Mary *but many of its celebrated peers in the Class of 2005. Maybe that will come in time: even if Wolf Parade aren’t in love with the modern world, they’re learning to live in it.


On their debut album, the UK rock group separates themselves from their peers, imbuing their post-adolescent rage with wit and, crucially, a self-effacing awareness that they may never succeed.

Songs of Praise

On Sunday afternoons, one of the BBC’s oldest running shows, “Songs of Praise,” fills certain British living rooms with the angelic choirs of the country’s church services. It is an institution—traditional, stuffy, and royally approved. The fact that Shame’s debut LP shares the name indicates the quintet’s sense of humor. Songs of Praise threatens to storm into those god-fearing living rooms like an uninvited black sheep, staining the image of safe Britain with post-punk hymns of disgust. Emerging from the same South London pub that housed the squat-chic reprobates Fat White Family, Shame are also indebted to the Fall and Gang of Four. Like FWF, they’re cocky enough to reanimate their ancestors’ corpses.
But in their fight to distinguish themselves from every other white male British guitar band, Shame imbue their post-adolescent rage with wit and, crucially, an awareness that they may never succeed. From the opening murky “Dust on Trial,” frontman Charlie Steen is fixed on the idea of remaining unheard: “What’s the point of talking if all your words have been said?” He preempts the inevitability that British critics will herald them as saviors of the scene by rejecting the construct. “The idea of a rock star is offensive,” he told the Guardian in a profile that was splashed across the paper’s front page.
Steen is uneasy with inspiring anyone besides his bandmates and he doesn’t seek your pity. “I hope that you’re hearing me,” he bawls eight times on “Concrete” but then self-lacerates one track later. “My voice ain’t the best you’ve heard/And you can choose to hate my words/But do I give a fuck?” he asks on the anthemic pop of “One Rizla.” He gives a fuck, but only about not giving a fuck. Shame don’t consider themselves special or important. Their sound isn’t all that inventive, their anger isn’t all that new. The latter, however, is as hot as a blue flame. It grows brighter as Steen repeats lyrical phrases again and again on almost every track until you’re forced to register his anguish.
If Shame belong to a generation of mobilizing British refuseniks teetering on an uprising, Songs of Praise is its soundtrack, whistling like a kettle coming to the boil. From beginning to end, its motorik riffs course through you the way a vat of dirty water journeys from a grimy cistern into an overrun toilet bowl. Steen’s knack for sordid imagery exalts him beyond his peers. Knowing the limitations of his gender and genre, he’s fine-tuned a charisma that hoodwinks you into listening to his enchanting tales from the underbelly. On “Gold Hole” (an indelicate descriptor for vagina), he tells the filthy story of a lecherous older man having an affair with a younger girl. “Sweat stains the wrinkles/Tongue touches the hole,” he roars, with a mix of Ian Dury cheek and the comical menace of Begbie from Trainspotting. “She feels so dirty, she knows that it’s wrong/But she feels so good in Louis Vuitton.” The luxury brand has never sounded less aspirational.
Steen is a playful vocalist. He spits in fits on “Lampoon” and “Tasteless,” he screams and pants nonsense on “Donk,” he narrates like a bored pervert on the standout “The Lick” (think Blur’s “Parklife” for a youth born too late to care what “Vorsprung durch technik” meant), and he laments tenderly on ballad “Angie,” an ode to a girl who committed suicide. While searching for the source of his fury, he conveys that there’s more layers to his ilk than meets the eye. Shame’s three years’ gigging experience has bolstered his confidence while earning them a reputation as the most thrilling new hope in London’s burgeoning guitar scene. Translating that to record is no mean feat. They made it in ten days. It’s taut but it’s also a shambles; cramped and ready to rupture with the despair of five unruly lads.
It’s a question of whether this brutish machismo is worth even a fraction of what it used to be, or if it’s needed anymore in rock‘n’roll. Look closer, though, and you’ll find a savvier model of man that speaks out against womanizing and has little interest in debauchery. “I may be cursed by company but at least I get to speak/And my tongue will never get tired,” threatens Steen on “Lampoon.” Does 2018 call for more white male aggression? No. But Shame aren’t asking you to worship them, only to listen to their unholy racket and feel provoked into shrieking or moshing along. “I am trying to exist/In a momentary cyst,” goes “Friction,” anticipating that when the bubble containing that puss-filled rage of young Britain bursts, everything’s gonna get a helluva lot uglier.


For a quarter-century, the Canadian chamber ensemble has made hold music for awaiting a revolution. Suddenly, on their seventh album, they sound hopeful it could come.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor: G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!

G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!

For a band boasting so many members, Godspeed You! Black Emperor spent an awfully long time straining beneath the weight of their own concepts. During their first decade-long phase around the turn of the millennium, they were a proudly shambolic chamber ensemble making post-rock protest music; the specific quality of the strings or seamlessness of the samples mattered less than the apocalyptic alarms their gestalt sounded. The work suggested a stirring Dada pedigree, where the feverish expression of some revolutionary idea mattered more than the nuances of execution. Indeed, the sheer audacity of the enterprise and Godspeed’s unwavering commitment to unarmed musical confrontation felt truly awesome, making 1997’s F♯ A♯ ∞ and 2000’s Lift Your Skinny Fists motivational landmarks. But how much staying power could such willful imperfection hold?
Since Godspeed’s return a decade ago, they have dutifully addressed that question by making records that, by and large, sound more sophisticated and better played while maintaining their political ballast. During their time away, Godspeed recruited a powerful new drummer, and its members woodshedded in a dozen different projects. Their records since 2012 have been rendered with a combustible mix of force and detail, allowing Godspeed to lift their insurgent ideas rather than be saddled by them. G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!—their first album in four years and the fourth in this second phase—not only epitomizes this new dynamic but also emerges as a timely career triumph. The four suites of music here sound incredible, capturing the grandeur, aggression, and power of their symphonic punk with perfect clarity. And it feels incredible, too, as it endures passages of oppressive darkness to step at least toward a new dawn.
State’s End could initially be seen as some outburst of hope, especially as the wealthiest parts of the world vaccinate ourselves out of one crisis. The opening 20-minute suite feels like fight music, after all, a battle anthem built around a blade-sharp riff and marching drums; it fades into a victorious afterglow, where a dance for strings feels like a sigh of relief. And there is no moment more radiant or galvanizing in Godspeed’s discography than the third piece’s finale, “Ashes to Sea or Nearer to Thee.” It’s hard to hear it without smiling, without imaging yourself winning a race or beating back whatever long odds you certainly have. The string-and-static dénouement, “Our Side Has To Win (For DH),” possesses the same aspirational romanticism as its name, with Sophie Trudeau’s choir of violins arcing ever upward.
More than glibly hopeful, though, State’s End feels honest about the nonlinear shape of progress, or how winning the war to build a better world inherently entails a lot of devastating loss. Recorded under cover of masks, these four pieces exist in a world of anxiety, where any optimism is always backlit by some danger. The opening riff emerges from a long prelude made by sampling the signals of shortwave radios; it’s a pointed reminder of the multiplying distractions you have to overcome just to get in the fight, let alone win. And the third suite only reaches that righteous climax after 15 minutes of assorted anguishes—more sampled cacophony, lachrymose strings, a disoriented rhythm section that pulls itself together long enough to play a dirge that begins to feel like a nervous wreck.
And though “Our Side Has to Win” ultimately drifts toward redemption, it first weeps like an elegy. The band works through impossible emotional burdens in the same steady way as composer Gavin Bryars or his spiritual descendants in the Stars of the Lid, teetering at the crooked line between salvation and suffering. With the exception of the resolutely downcast “Fire at Static Valley,” these pieces function like a series of ouroboroi, defeat and victory locked in a cycle of mutually assured destruction and rebirth. There is enough momentum here to break that spell, or at least aspire to it.
Maybe State’s End hints that Godspeed have grown soft as they near the 30-year mark. They’ve won prestigious prizes, after all, and opened arena-filling tours. Their sound skews more pro than am these days, and they’re more into inspiring resolve than simply telling us the car is on fire, with no driver at the wheel. But no, they realize that the government is still corrupt, that the machine is still bleeding to death. They have smartly recognized that, in 2021, none of this is any more shocking than the sight of a 10-member punk symphony.
They no longer need to chart out the financial ties between record labels and warmongers on album covers or soundtrack endless doom when there’s Twitter. Instead, they’ve opted to acknowledge a world of seemingly infinite struggle and offer a well-earned, well-timed score for continuing the fight. Godspeed You! Black Emperor spent a quarter-century making hold music for awaiting a revolution; why shouldn’t they bask in signs of its potential sparks now, however limited or fleeting they might be?

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An eclectic star of the Japanese beat scene tilts toward the aggressive spirit of gabber and hardcore, largely leaving behind the stylistic markers of footwork.

GVVVV

Japan’s juke community refuses to slow down. About a decade after an Osaka-based DJ launched the Booty Tune label, marking a starting point for a new twist on the Chicago-born style, Japanese creators of all sorts have tried finding their own mutations. While these producers generally remain respectful of the sound’s origins, often collaborating with Midwestern juke heavyweights, much of their best work has come from the instinct to warp it in new directions.
Hiroshima producer CRZKNY’s career has been marked by a particularly eclectic approach. While his catalog boasts plenty of dissected samples and frantic beat patterns reminiscent of RP Boo and Traxman, he’s also created slow burners and politically-tinged sample collages. Alongside Foodman, he helped organize the influential 2012 scene overview Japanese Juke&Footworks Compilation and the darker Atomic Bomb Compilation series. Last year, CRZKNY dropped the three-disc Meridian, featuring an album’s worth of minimalist juke countered by another of grungy tracks that suggested Keiji Haino spending a winter by Lake Michigan. On his latest release, GVVVV, CRZKNY frequently abandons juke entirely in favor of gabber.
It’s not a totally random pivot. CRZKNY’s juke has always leaned towards the aggressive—see his claustrophobic contributions to Atomic Bomb, or watch him physically wail on a piece of equipment at a live performance. Still, this album moves farther than ever from skittery patterns and vocal samples in favor of blown-out four-on-the-floor bass drums, embracing the stark punch of the early Rotterdam scene, with little time for any Technicolor flair. While the actual BPMs come in on the lower end of the spectrum (about 170, a mere warmup at Thunderdome), the spirit of gabber pounds through clearly on tracks such as “Guts” and “Peak.” These are forceful numbers that only slow down when CRZKNY cuts the beat to build tension, which makes the inevitable return slam all the more potent.
Mostly, then, GVVVV barrels ahead. While small differences pop up between songs, the album overall settles into a pattern of distorted drum hits plowing through everything, which can prove tiring when taken all at once. Still, the gabber-inspired highs show CRZKNY knows his hardcore. “Fuck” is the most intimidating beat here, a warped-out smash accented by an acid bass line. CRZKNY fades that sound out briefly midway through the track, underlining just how forceful the combo sounds. Check album closer “Void” for a similarly delirious mash-up of cracking drum machine programming and acid bass, resulting in another of GVVVV’s most upbeat moments. The jolts of euphoria that cut through this LP, like the distorted yelps on “Scum,” remind that hardcore and gabber weren’t simply punishing dance variants, but a real source of joy for many.
GVVVV is a serviceable hardcore album with some nice nostalgia brushed on. Its strongest moments are those that draw new connections between gabber and juke, often landing close to average footwork speeds. These less intense moments ultimately aren’t all that far removed from CRZKNY’s noisier creations—they just have a different beat structure. The potential of this approach is even clearer on songs where distinct rhythms collide, such as on “Cell,” which introduces a breakbeat cutting against the main pound, or even the warped vocal sample that shows up on “Club.” Flashes of inspiration like these suggest exciting new avenues for CRZKNY and his peers as they move between footwork and the harder corners of dance music.


Much-derided and hyped UK band takes an unexpected, and rewarding, left turn on its second album. Portishead's Geoff Barrow co-produces.

Primary Colours

Hype works both ways: Just as it encourages the overestimation of underdeveloped bands, it can also result in the knee-jerk dismissal of any upstart act with the (mis)fortune of being plastered on the cover of NME before the debut EP's even been recorded. Of course, East London quintet the Horrors didn't do themselves any favors by presenting themselves in a conceptual wrapping that seemingly had all the staying power of last night's mascara, mining a well-tapped vein of ghoulish American garage-rock, prancing around in cartoonishly goth get-ups, and putting on sloppy, self-sabotaging 15-minute sets, all for the amusement of their celebrity guest list. But the band's media-saturated ascent distracted from the fact that the Horrors had actually done their homework: Their 2006 debut EP featured covers of two Joe Meek-produced, Pebbles-approved classics and on the subsequent tour, the band's pre-show PA mix included tracks by the Seeds, the Cramps, and Gun Club. And after struggling to keep the shock-rock shtick fresh over the entirety of 2007's Strange House full-length, the Horrors were smart enough to recognize garage-rock's aesthetic limitations-- and that the very sort of garage-rock purist who would appreciate a good cover of Screaming Lord Sutch's "Jack the Ripper" had probably already written them off on the basis of their poofy haircuts.
And so the Horrors' desire to make campy, B-movie-inspired punk-rock seems to have died along with Lux Interior. Their second album, Primary Colours, contains no haunted-house Farfisa organ drones, no blues-rock riffing and no songs about graveyards or murderers, a change reflected in their choice of producers; where Strange House was helmed by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner, the expansive sound of Primary Colours was fashioned by the trio of Geoff Barrow (Portishead), Craig Silvey, and video director Chris Cunningam. The recently released first teaser from Primary Colours, "Sea Within a Sea", sees that production tandem's cinematic sensibility in full effect, with eight minutes of steely Krautrock propulsion that recasts lead shrieker Faris Badwan as a lovelorn crooner. On first listen, the song seems antithetical to the Horrors' patented goth-garage gimmickry; but the amazing thing about Primary Colours is that, by the time "Sea Within a Sea" appears as the album's come-down closer, the transition feels like a natural outcome.
There is, of course, clear precedent in transforming gothic gloom into psychedelic drone: After all, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Spacemen 3 and My Bloody Valentine-- all of whom loom large on Primary Colours-- were all big fans of the Cramps and the Birthday Party. But unlike downcast contemporaries like Crystal Stilts, the Horrors translate the influence of those avant-rock icons into swaggering, mass-appeal pop music: "Three Decades" may lean heavily on MBV-style flange-pedal contortions, but its driving momentum and Badwan's full-blooded delivery lend it an anthemic, open-road abandon, matched by uncommonly optimistic lyrics: "Forget your regrets/ Don't lose your purpose, this is your heart!" The song provides the first glimpse that, beneath his vampy visage, Badwan fancies himself a romantic. "Do You Remember" may sound like a readymade soundtrack for student-disco one night stands, but within its decadent, Suede-ian glam groove is a promise for long-term commitment, and in the beautifully brooding ballad "Scarlet Fields", the Horrors appropriate the melody of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" but use it to convey hope instead of resignation.
The Horrors' shoegazer makeover aside, the real story here is Badwan's growing confidence as a singer, and his willingness to sound more scared than scary. Primary Colours loses its radiance when he reverts back to bogeyman type: "New Ice Age" sounds like a musty Strange House holdover, while "I Can't Control Myself" is a rewrite of Spiritualized's "Come Together" that-- in the absence of Jason Pierce's gospel choir and backing orchestra-- simply grinds its repetitive riff into the ground. But such regressions are a distant memory once we get sucked into "Sea Within a Sea", which, after you get beyond the "hey, we bought a Can record" novelty, proves to be something much more than a mere clinical exercise in record-collector rock. Rather, the song plays out as an analogue of the Horrors' own spiritual rebirth, its hypno-rock pulse turning more ominous and intense before a synth-triggered denouement introduces a melodic levity that breaks the song's air of despair and completes the Horrors' aesthetic liberation. For a band that's endured no lack of skepticism for their pre-fab packaging, it turns out the freakiest thing about the Horrors is that they're for real.


Releasing a live album of freedom songs on this election day is a deliberate gesture for Mavis Staples; it's a well-deserved one, too, capturing the longtime social justice warrior's ferocity and approachability.

Mavis Staples: Live: Hope at the Hideout

Live: Hope at the Hideout

However tomorrow's presidential election turns out, Barack Obama's candidacy is itself a victory. That's what Mavis Staples-- a longtime social justice warrior who marched alongside Martin Luther King, Jr., and soundtracked, with her Staples siblings and father Pops, the civil rights movement-- would likely tell you. Releasing a live album of freedom songs on this election day is a deliberate gesture, but maybe a more nuanced one than people might expect. Staples (like a lot of us), may fervently hope for an Obama win and would probably be the first to enumerate the items remaining on the civil-rights task list, but the gospel/R&B/pop legend has always favored King's peaceful progressive-Christian theology that privileges the "good news" over the agitating, even when good news is scant and there's plenty to agitate about.
Sounding like a charismatic preacher, Staples frames her performance for the audience, "We've come here tonight to bring you some joy, some happiness, inspiration, and some positive vibrations! We want to leave you with enough to last you for maybe the next six months". The crowd that converged on Chicago's cozy, laid-back Hideout this past June are enthused, but polite (and probably a bit awestruck), as she launches with gusto into protest-era standard "Eyes on the Prize". For its well-mannered, highly expectant air, it could be an Obama rally.
Subdued audience aside, Staples-- even at 69-- is a geyser of ferocity and depth. Her voice gets a little grizzly performing "Wade in the Water" in the sub-basement of her (already low) natural range, and she requests crowd participation to bolster her understandably weary pipes on finale "I'll Take You There", but her energy is gobsmacking. Following a raucous rendition of "Freedom Highway", which the three-piece band plays as a runaway bus on a rural road, culminating in much cymbal smashing and jubilant howls, Staples apologizes, "I get so all up into it. You know, when the spirit hits you, you've got to move!"
But Staples is no saint. In contrast to her demure, choir-backed performance on 2007's superlative studio album We'll Never Turn Back, she sounds lusty and provocative over "This Little Light"'s scruffy guitar riffs, veering often in the same phrase between outrage and "joy-- joy, joy, joy!" "Light" and blues moaner "Down in Mississippi" support-- like most great R&B-- he tenet that the sacred and secular, spiritual and carnal aren't mutually exclusive, and that passion is passion whether exercised as faith, anger, love or lust. Considering that these days Staples' fans probably include just as many of the godless as the church-going, her knack for translating religious experience makes her music ecumenical and inclusive unlike, for example, much contemporary Christian rock. That said, probably the most overtly religious number on her setlist, "Will the Circle Be Unbroken", a traditional song closely associated with the Carter Family-- and the first Pops taught his Staples brood to perform-- receives the Hideout audience's warmest embrace.
Throughout the performance, Staples' band and trio of backup singers are ideal support players-- tight, professional, and mostly unobtrusive, never threatening to upstage Staples the way some of Ry Cooder's (admittedly spectacular) Never Turn Back production fireworks do. Of course, Staples has never been one of those velvet roped-off divas. If Live: Hope at the Hideout captures something her studio work doesn't, it's her approachability, her genuine audience rapport. Like all the great politicians, Mavis Staples has a gift for the common touch.


On their eighth album, the Followill brothers desperately cling to a sound that has stopped working, trying to write songs that soar but capable only of ones that wallow.

When You See Yourself

It’s hard to pinpoint when Kings of Leon stopped enjoying themselves. They were never the most profound band of the aughts rock revival, but they were the ones who bought in most completely, dressing like the group from Almost Famous and living like an audition for a Behind the Music special. Yet once they achieved their hard-fought arena stardom, the obligations of running a rock band as a major enterprise sapped any residual freedom and impulsivity from their music. Their records grew bigger while the personalities behind them shrank. It’s been 10 years since the last Kings of Leon song anybody wants to karaoke, and the band is still chasing the shadow of their mammoth late-’00s hits.
The group’s eighth album, When You See Yourself, briefly teases what a winning Kings of Leon album could sound like in 2021. Surprisingly light on its toes, opener “When You See Yourself, Are You Far Away” is bright with pinging polyrhythms. It’s the most jubilant the band has sounded in years, and while it’s not their normal lane, it suggests there might be a path forward in shamelessly pilfering from the perkier, neon-painted corners of contemporary alternative. This band has been old beyond their years for so long, maybe it’s time they skewed young for once.
But When You See Yourself isn’t that kind of album. It’s the only kind of album Kings of Leon know how to make anymore, which is a minor variation of the last one, and the one before that. The most, if not only novel thing about this album is that it is the first album in history available as an NFT, a cryptographic way to sell art and music online. Forget about the Southern Strokes or the Southern U2. They’ve now spent most of their career as the Southern post-Antics Interpol, a band desperately clinging to a sound that’s stopped working, trying to write songs that soar but capable only of ones that wallow.
Lending to that unwelcome sense of déjà vu is returning WALLS producer Markus Dravs, a Brian Eno disciple who’s engineered records for Coldplay and Arcade Fire. As a For Your Consideration Grammy submission, his work is impeccable—almost every track sounds like an expensive technical feat. But in practice, his production competes with these songs more than it complements them, eclipsing them like skyscrapers oblivious to any lakefront view they may be blocking. The mix saves the worst of its wrath for Caleb Followill, whose voice it continually finds new and cruel ways to bury. On “Fairytale,” Followill’s unloved yowl is reduced to a red wine stain trying to stand out against a busy carpet.
Followill has never been an easily decipherable vocalist to begin with, but the lyrics that are audible place him inside a dreary mid-life rut. On the cosmically forlorn “Time in Disguise,” one of the record’s many tracks pitched at the tempo of mid-period Coldplay album cut, he can’t shake his own obsolescence: “Close your eyes and what do you see?/Is it a man or masked machine?” Even more dejected is the country-hued “Supermarket,” where Followill promises “I’m going nowhere, if you’ve got the time.” Followill is 39, but from these songs, you’d think he’s workshopping one of Rick Rubin’s end-of-life albums.
Is this what anybody wants to hear from this band? While Kings of Leons’ early albums left plenty to nitpick—namely the repulsive 1970s sexual politics—they had a guy’s-night-out energy that could be infectious if you bought into a particular fantasy notion of masculinity. When You See Yourself, on the other hand, packs in all the carnality of a weekend run to The Container Store. It’s hard to imagine the wild-maned early incarnation of Kings of Leon even wanting to listen to a band like this, let alone play in one. In truth, their current iteration doesn’t sound all that thrilled about it, either.

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The German house producer’s sound is warm and welcoming, fusing four-to-the-floor grooves with the spacious atmospheres of Jamaican dub.

Building Bridges

Germany has an impressive, almost counterintuitive, record of mixing dub with electronic music, from Basic Channel’s icy minimal techno to Pole’s spectral glitch. Move D—aka Heidelberg’s David Moufang—is a lesser-known figure in this line of Teutonic dub explorers, working the crossover between dub and house music on tracks like 2006’s “Silk Dub,” and employing subtly shifting repetition, echo, and space to devious effect.
The songs on Building Bridges, Moufang’s debut album for Will Saul’s Aus Music, were recorded between 1999 and 2019, and they largely share “Silk Dub”’s mixture of undulating 4/4 beats, echoing effects, and basslines that sit somewhere the funk imperative of disco and the spacey wanderings of dub. Within these limited parameters, however, Moufang manages to wring impressive variation, from the dubbed-out French touch of “Cycles” to “Perpetual State,” where house music is a dilated, glitchy memory found in the suggestion of a drum pattern.
It helps that Moufang’s sound is warm and welcoming by nature, a mixture of light melodic touches and gently pulsating drums that reeks of indolence on a sunny day. There is something particularly well rounded about this album—a smoothly tactile quality that glides like well-varnished wood under stockinged feet. Only on the title track, a collaboration with the American house producer Fred P, does this sonic benevolence spill over into something cloying, as a voice makes banal pronouncements about people coming together that end up sounding trite, to the detriment of the crystalline drum production.
Luckily, this doesn’t detract too much from an extremely elegant album that makes its mark with whispered tonal shifts rather than bothersome handbrake turns. “Cycles” is a wonderful musical tease, distilling a sense of perpetual motion out of a handful of subtly modulating sonic ideas and a rippling bassline, like peak Motorbass; “One Small Step” (featuring Jonah Sharp and Thomas Fehlmann) is a leisurely paddle of guitar noodle, submersed bass, and percussive sound effects that could soundtrack a dolphin’s waking dream; and “Perpetual State” suggests house music slowly dissolving over a crackling open fire, helped along by a spidery suggestion of melody.
This strain of caramel-smooth production has little to do with the raw speaker-rattling sound of classic 1970s dub productions. But what Move D has done, much like Basic Channel, Pole and the Orb before him, owes plenty to the genre's exploration of the spaces between infinite shades of reverb. Building Bridges represents the exquisite suggestion of dub, the airborne arrival of the Jamaican sound upon German shores in a breezy triumph of experimentation.

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Cross-cutting sample collages, beat tracks, and free improv with wryly surrealist DJ banter, the Chicago musicians’ fictional mixtape celebrates the revolutionary promise of pirate radio.

Damon Locks / Rob Mazurek: New Future City Radio

New Future City Radio

Since the broadcast spectrum was cordoned off and commercialized a century ago, pirate radio stations have been sending their signals like phantoms through the airwaves. Sequestered on anonymous city rooftops and boats anchored offshore, unlicensed amateurs reclaim their slice of the ether in the name of freedom of expression. By its very nature, pirate radio is illicit, boundary-defying, and hopeful, a David-versus-Goliath story of resistance to corporate consolidation. A decentralized network of low-wattage transmitters provides a blueprint for alternative modes of communication and, perhaps, better ways of living. Damon Locks and Rob Mazurek’s concept album New Future City Radio imagines a clandestine broadcast from a not-so-distant future, playing up pirate radio’s utopian impulse in order to raise alarm bells about the present.
Locks and Mazurek have worked together since the late 1990s in the subsection of the Chicago music scene where jazzy improv meets rebellious post-punk. Locks became the vocalist in the rotating cast of Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra before leading his own massive group, the Black Monument Ensemble. Both projects recently found a home with Chicago’s International Anthem, a label better defined by politics than genre conventions. Though it’s nominally a jazz label, any given release might draw from Latin music, hip-hop, or gospel. As Locks and Mazurek’s first duo project, New Future City Radio fits squarely in this milieu, blending sample-based electronica with improvisatory jazz and adapting Afrofuturist themes of Black liberation and revolutionary spirit. Like labelmates Angel Bat Dawid and Irreversible Entanglements, they are clear-eyed about the state of the world but insistent on the potential for change.
The album takes the form of a mixtape recorded off the radio during an unspecified crisis, juxtaposing full songs with snippets of beat tracks and DJ voiceovers. Its announcers address the collapse of society with cool professional detachment. In one vignette, listeners can win theater tickets by answering the question, “What happens if we just let things run their course?” The topic of a call-in talk show is “El edificio está en llamas. ¿Dejaremos que se queme?” (“The building is on fire. Are we going to let it burn?”) Despite impending disaster, the duo’s music is defiantly optimistic. On lead single “Yes!” Locks describes the forces of darkness arrayed against us only to introduce his plan: “You ask me if I can form myself into a giant robot and swallow up this black hole and free the entire universe?/My answer to you is, ‘Yes.’”
At their best, Locks’ ultra-busy collages and authoritative vocals combine Guillermo Scott Herren with Gil Scott-Heron. The micro-chopped samples of album standout “Flitting Splits Reverb Adage” are a throwback to One Word Extinguisher while his bassy stream-of-consciousness monologue about cosmic villains sounds like a space-opera take on I’m New Here. Mazurek’s samplers and synths also join the fray, but his trumpet, on songs like “Your Name Gonna Ring The Bell” and “Droids!,” more forcefully imprints his style, elevating workmanlike lo-fi backing tracks with exhilarating improvisation. At times, these elements come together perfectly, as on “The Concord Hour.” After a Welcome to Night Vale-style voiceover (“Brought to you by Redistribution and Preparation. We reconfigure, recalculate, and never replicate”), driving synths and electronic percussion propel chanting voices until all dissolves in favor of a plangent trumpet solo.
The pirate-radio conceit simultaneously buoys and constrains an album bursting with ideas. Its themes help rapid-fire changes in direction cohere, but fully fleshed-out tracks sit awkwardly within a headlong spin across the radio dial. Brilliant snippets like the celebratory, reggae-driven “New Future” beg for further development. Meanwhile, “Twilight Shimmer,” at 10 minutes long, occupies fully a quarter of the running time but merely drifts prettily along a lazy river of bird chirps and languid horn lines. This makes for an uneven listen. But when Locks and Mazurek hit on the right frequency, New Future City Radio hums with a sense of possibility.


Monk Parker  traffics in a twilit Americana, drifting between Phosphorescent's sun-drunk aphorisms and Castanets' moonlit chill. He has worked off and on since the '90s under a variety of names, but How the Spark Loves the Tinder feels more ambitious and more fully realized than any of his earlier work.

Monk Parker: How the Spark Loves the Tinder

How the Spark Loves the Tinder

Monk Parker's How the Spark Loves the Tinder is fall music—languid, heart-wrenching, suggesting pangs of transition. Singing unhurried minor-key songs burnished with horns, weeping organs, and steel guitar, Parker traffics in a twilit Americana, drifting between Phosphorescent's sun-drunk aphorisms and Castanets' moonlit chill.
The man at the helm here is an itinerant writer and musician named Mangham "Monk" Parker. He went by Parker Noon in the early '00s, when he was based out of New York City and played with his then-girlfriend in a duo called Parker & Lily. After their breakup he relocated to Athens and launched the Low Lows, a rotating collective of musicians with its name taken from a Parker & Lily album.
For the last five years Parker's lived in Austin, where he put together his latest band. The credits to How the Spark Loves the Tinder list 20-some players and several recording studios in New York (including NY Hed, the studio run by Jon Spencer collaborator Matt Verta-Ray) and Austin (including Parker's home), and it feels more ambitious and more fully realized than any of his earlier work. Perhaps that's the reason for Parker's current moniker and why Spark is billed by his label, UK-based Bronze Rat, as a debut.
Parker's lyrics read like poetry, with images of floating stars and nighttime winds and endless skies. "Idle in Idlewild", at seven-some minutes the longest song on the album, contains this perfect triplet: "Some strange April/ When all the stars stall and stay still/ And the days fly by." Parker practically gives each word its own breath.
The arrangements are rich in color and nuance: Opener and lead single "Sadly Yes" builds from a dirge to a big, brassy climax over nearly six minutes, achieving hard-fought catharsis while a Theremin-like wail cuts through. A mournful, elegant suite of clarinet and strings opens "I Am a Gun" before it segues into a kind of chamber-country waltz. There's an extended moment in the middle of "The Happy Hours", a song ostensibly about existential dread in Rapid City, Iowa, where horns and strings assume a density as vast and uplifting as an orchestra.
For all of this life-affirming beauty, the album's operative emotional state is resignation. Parker's songs find solace in the ability to accept defeat—lost love, unfulfilled potential—and present this ability as a form of wisdom. This is the sort of mind state achieved only from age and experience. Far from depressing, the exquisite dejection of How the Spark Loves the Tinder is almost celebratory. After all, you can't fight the changing seasons.