The Chicago guitarist and the North Carolina multi-instrumentalist work wonderfully together and channel many spiritual influences with great warmth and ease.

Keys

The folk and gospel artist E.C. Ball drove a school bus and owned a service station, but what he really wanted to do was spread the Good News. With his wife Orna, he wandered Appalachia during the middle of the 20th century, delivering sermons and singing simple songs he had made up: plainspoken hymns of joy and wonder and faith. On their new collaborative albums, the North Carolina multi-instrumentalist Nathan Bowles and the Chicago guitarist Bill MacKay cover Ball’s lovely ode to the beauty of the natural world, “I See God.” “I see God in everything, on the land and the deep blue sea/In the fields, the meadows, and the pastures green,” they sing together, as MacKay’s guitar and Bowles’ banjo combine into a gentle patter. It’s as simple as a children’s song because the wonder it expresses is so childlike and uninhibited. You could almost read it as an ecological screed: What man could spoil what God has made beautiful?
On a musical level, however, the song locates the sublime in the mundane. It finds something special in what we see around us every day, and that may be fundamentally what folk music is all about. Both Bowles and MacKay have explored this idea on their own albums, which tread a fine line between folk and avant-garde composition. They’re often lumped in with the current American Primitive/guitar soli scene, but their aims transcend those genres. The pair first played together at the Cropped Out Festival in Louisville back in 2018, where they exchanged rough ideas but were still hammering out songs minutes before they took the stage. What might seem like poor preparation was really just a way of maintaining some spontaneity and ensuring there were new things to discover during their performance.
That improvisatory spirit, as well as that sense of something larger between them, carries over to Keys, which contains eight original compositions and two covers. God is in the details on this album: in the low thrum underneath “Dowsing,” in the rising tension of “Truth,” in the subtle wordplay of “Late for Your Funeral Again,” in the halting progress of “Dry Rations I.” They’re both deft and inventive pickers who aren’t terribly concerned with precision or perfection, so there’s a pleasant flow both to their playing and to the sequencing of the album. Keys has all the formality of a front porch jam session on a cool spring night. Because they have such an obvious ease around each other, you often can’t quite distinguish between their instruments—which becomes a small but satisfying pleasure on “Joy Ride,” whose clear melody and jubilant bounce make it sound like a pop song.
Aside from “I See God,” the other cover on Keys is a solemn take on the Sacred Harp standard “Idumea,” and listeners may note its similarities to “Amazing Grace.” It was written by a man named Ananais Davisson, who operated a singing school and published songbooks in the early nineteenth century. Both lush and stark, gentle and forceful, this version proceeds with a spiritual and musical determination, as the banjo and guitar take turns rendering the familiar melody and providing sympathetic flourishes. Like Ball, Davisson seems like a humble man attuned to something far beyond his station, and they share with Bowles and MacKay a belief that a homespun melody or a gently plucked theme or even just two instruments ringing out together might give anyone in earshot a glimpse of God. That’s an awful lot for any album to hold, and at times the music bows under such weight, but Keys never sacrifices its life-size scale nor its humility.

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Having grown from wise-beyond-their-years aesthetes into middle-aged adults, Belle and Sebastian balance parental sentimentalism with a youthful abandon rarely entertained on their early recordings.

Belle and Sebastian: How to Solve Our Human Problems, Pt. 2

How to Solve Our Human Problems, Pt. 2

“We’re the younger generation, we grew up fast,” Stuart Murdoch sang on Belle and Sebastian’s “Me and the Major,” back in 1996. At the time, everything about his band seemed to actively cultivate the impression of a group already wise beyond its years: the wistful black-and-white album covers that sought to preserve a certain bygone innocence in amber; the richly narrative songs that felt like pages ripped from a secondhand novella; the refined record-collector reference points (Nick Drake, Nico, Love) indicative of indie aesthetes who’d retired from the student-disco scene. But on Belle and Sebastian’s latest EP, Murdoch offers a rejoinder that suggests he grew up a bit too fast for his own liking: “It’s tough to become a grown-up,” he cautions; “put it off while you can.”
The line appears in “I’ll Be Your Pilot,” the lead single from the second installment of Belle and Sebastian’s How to Solve Our Human Problems triptych. In the song, Murdoch is addressing his young son, Denny, through the sort of private exchange that plays out in a father’s head as he watches his child fall asleep. But if the song’s oboe-sweetened folk-rock sway plays up the sentimentality of that scene, Murdoch’s lyrics shrewdly illuminate the flip side of such tender moments—namely, the unshakeable unease of raising a child in such a fucked-up time. “I’ll tell you that when you land in the real world/It’s like quicksand,” Murdoch warns, marking the point where kindly parental pep talks must give way to harsh reality checks. And while the song’s chorus—“I will keep you safe, I’ll be your pilot”—may initially elicit an “awww,” the air-travel metaphor also implies that every life will face its share of turbulence.
If “I’ll Be Your Pilot” is a plea to savor the splendor of childhood before the indignities of the outside world inevitably creep in, the rest of the EP gamely heeds the call to stay forever young, as Belle and Sebastian playfully let loose in a way that their buttoned-up twenty-something selves would’ve never allowed. In lieu of a typical brass arrangement, we hear the band vocalizing a fake one at the top of “Show Me the Sun,” as if they were drunkenly trying to hum the theme to some forgotten 1960s TV game show; that faux fanfare gives way to a rubbery bass groove, discordant psychedelic guitar squeals, and a soul-powered lead vocal from Murdoch, with the whole hodgepodge adding up to a spirited “Funny Little Frog” sequel as rendered by the Go! Team (albeit one weighed down by an awkward and unnecessary downtempo interlude). And while “The Same Star” initially finds Sarah Martin slipping into Stevie Nicks’ kimono for a shimmering “Dreams” flashback, it eventually leads us to an exultant brass-blasted outro shot skyward with the help of some sci-fi synths.
Where How to Solve Our Human Problems’ first volume felt more like a random collection of a few great songs scattered among B-side-grade material, this edition more successfully arranges its discrete, divergent elements to flow as a proper mini-album. Even if Stevie Jackson’s “Cornflakes” just plays like an extended remix of the preceding EP’s divine disco standout “Sweet Dew Lee,” it’s a welcome jolt of decadent frivolity following the heartfelt “I’ll Be Your Pilot.” It’s also an effectively over-the-top setup for the curtain-closing “A Plague on All Other Boys,” a song that bears all the hallmarks of a classic 1997-era Belle and Sebastian comedy of manners, with Murdoch lending his delicate voice to a Nebraska student crushing hard on a classmate: “I’m a mess/I’m defeated/My grade-point average went to hell.” Spoiler alert: In this case, the boy doesn’t get the girl—and it takes him a good 10 years to get over it. But, as Murdoch adds with fatherly encouragement, “Suddenly, you realize you’re free to fraternize again.” Even though he’s reached the age where he’s writing songs for his kid, he hasn’t forsaken the lovelorn misfits that comprise the B&S base. He’ll still be your pilot, too.


Collecting two-dozen highlights from 1976 solo sets, this candid document finds the singer sorting through old standards and almost-lost classics at a particularly restless moment.

Songs for Judy

Songs for Judy captures Neil Young at his mercurial peak, writing songs too fast to release and scrapping albums too fast to remember. In November 1976, on a tour backed by the reunited Crazy Horse, he opened with solo acoustic sets at his buzzed and intimate best. Sanctioned photographer and taper Joel Bernstein and teenage rock journalist Cameron Crowe sorted through recordings of that run, compiling a 20-plus-track mix that, when leaked and bootlegged, eventually came to be known as The Bernstein Tapes. Long circulated among fans, it is perhaps the definitive document of Young in his archetypal solo acoustic guise.
Restored to pristine warmth for the launch of Young’s own Reprise imprint, Shakey Pictures, and his recent archival venture, the new sequence makes Young’s surreal ramble about spying Judy Garland in the front row the introduction instead of a stoned interruption midway through (good), uses it for a title (meh), and perhaps captures an ideal performance that balances old favorites with Young’s latest work. For a musician as impulsive and forward-looking as Young, nostalgia has long been an equal presence. Songs for Judy includes many of Young’s core standards, represented on live albums in virtually every decade since, from a yearning version of “Harvest” to the insistent drive of Buffalo Springfield’s “Mr. Soul” and a dreamy “After the Gold Rush,” dedicated to “all the freeways here in Texas.”
But the heart of Songs for Judy is the palpable sense of Young in motion. Three months before these shows, he’d quit a tour with Stephen Stills, departing on his bus in the middle of the night, leaving a trail of dust and a telegram that read, “Funny how some things that start spontaneously end that way.” With Young turning 31 midway through the performances captured here, Songs for Judy has more starting than ending, featuring plenty of songs that would’ve been unfamiliar to the audiences hearing them. (That goes for the subtle organ tease of the then-unreleased “Like a Hurricane” hidden at the start of “A Man Needs a Maid,” too.)
Some of his best new material during this period would remain unfamiliar except to serious fans, demos and outtakes scattered to the winds. Several tunes show up from Hitchhiker, recorded that summer but unissued until last year, like the dreamy breakup number “Give Me Strength” (virtually abandoned after the tour) and the incandescently Richard Nixon-humanizing “Campaigner” (buried near the end of the retrospective, Decade, released a year later). “Too Far Gone” presages alt-country but would stay in the vaults until 1989’s Freedom, the distant piano lament “No One Seems To Know” until now. “It seems every time I tried to record this song, someone stepped in and stopped it,” he says by way of introducing “Human Highway,” the proposed title track from a never-finished Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young album. Here, accompanying himself on scrappy banjo, Young turns in the best of the officially released versions, Young’s fatigue bolstered by brightness.
For good reason, the heroism of being a weary and high dude with an acoustic guitar has faded some since the mid-1970s. Still, Young’s musical presence is one of goofy but deep companionship and hushed moods; it’s ideal for late nights, lonely or otherwise. The cliches about getting wasted and hung-up come early and often (“Too Far Gone” and “Roll Another Number”), and the lyrics sometimes fall far short of profound, but vibeyness is Young’s well-established superpower. “The moon is almost full/except for stars,” he sings on “Give Me Strength,” not totally making sense but illuminating a melody that slides past like a glowing night. Lyrics are well and good, and Young has written great ones, but Songs For Judy is a reminder that—even for a singer/songwriter—success can have as much to do with the rest of it: the settings, the recordings, the performances, the feels.
Recorded during the decadent pre-punk ’70s, and released in the terrifying post-capitalism 2010s, Songs for Judy now feels like a concept album whose concept is just as far out as prog rock, if less flashy and more soothing. It’s a high fantasy of meadows and moons and canyons, of shows that start after midnight, of possessing or creating enough space to let Neil Young play some quiet songs for you.


Assisted by producer Dave Sitek, the goth-folk shapeshifter explores a new dimension of her sound, bringing electronic atmospheres and industrial menace to an album about submitting to the unknown.

Chelsea Wolfe: She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She

With a coil of black hair always in her eyes, Chelsea Wolfe is a sibylline force with a voice to match. For the 40-year-old goth rocker—a self-described witch and native Californian, though you’d never guess the latter from her shell-pale skin—her earthly occupation as singer-songwriter has meant making singular Bauhaus-goes-folk music and, too often, drinking to excess, although that habit predated her singing; in interviews, she remembers being 11 years old with a 40 in her hand.
She quit alcohol in 2021, after releasing 2019’s Birth of Violence and before her soundtrack for the scary sexploitation movie X, a collaboration with producer Tyler Bates, came out in 2022. Beneath its shocking darkness, the Ti West-directed feature is about the persistence of desire. She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She, Wolfe’s seventh album and first for Loma Vista Recordings, likewise clears away dirt and empty bottles to find hope. With production from TV on the Radio founding member Dave Sitek, Wolfe zeroes in on the clearest message in her discography yet: surrender your heart to the unknown. Where most of Wolfe’s albums have shown anxious restraint, She Reaches Out yields to hair-in-the-wind havoc with distorted layers of guitar, drum pads, electronics, and piano, a more confident blend of Wolfe’s metal melancholy.
Occasionally, the unknown is monstrous. Wolfe has always demonstrated a predilection for gross and terrible things, including on the particularly sludgy 2017 album Hiss Spun, which abounds in bloody angels, gashes, and groans. Outside of music, Wolfe’s dreams are full of heavy black shadows—nearly every night since childhood, she has been gnawed by sleep paralysis, which can freeze your body and fill your room with imaginary demons. Lyrics on She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She offer a guiding hand through this terror, promising that you can coexist with the monsters. “The Liminal”—sort of a dusty, creepy, eight-legged version of Succession’s theme song—dares you to. As longtime collaborator and multi-instrumentalist Ben Chisholm plunks out a sorry piano melody, Wolfe hisses like a sorceress in the woods, watching you from 10 feet away: “All you ever wanted was the liminal/All you left behind was your exoskeleton.”
Wolfe is good at pointing you closer to strangeness; its pull lies in the all-consuming guitar/synth torrential downpour that soaks the entire album. Sometimes, She Reaches Out drowns in it: Songs like the Lorn-ish dark synth track “Tunnel Lights” feel like they’re marching awkwardly, not forebodingly, wearing all those soggy, indistinguishable layers. More often, though, Wolfe likes indulging in half-seconds of silence, a blink of sunlight before guitarist Bryan Tulao comes in to blow a bullet hole through the mirror. This approach, another way Wolfe honors intangible, in-between space, is most potent on groaning closer “Dusk.” Everything except a misty drum pad drops out for Wolfe to sing a vow—“I would go through the fire/To get to you”—and then, one breath later, Tulao delivers a deliciously simple, traffic-stopping solo.
But Wolfe’s voice comes before any explosion or ectoplasm. Other albums, especially her lo-fi 2010 debut, The Grime and the Glow, shove her glinting voice under industrial whine, forcing it into sleepy Grouper modesty. She Reaches Out, alternatively, places Wolfe at the top of the mix. Even when a vampiric guitar shakes fresh mud over the propulsive “Unseen World,” there’s no mistaking her hypnotic repetition of the song title. The clarity of her voice is most appropriate for this album, which encourages trusting yourself enough to surrender to uncertainty.
"I’ve used a lot of imagery of this egg for this album, this sort of mysterious, large egg that I’m nurturing and protecting,” Wolfe said in a recent interview with The Line of Best Fit. “And the idea is that I don’t actually know what’s in this egg, I just know that there’s potential in there.” It’s the plot of 1985 Japanese art film Angel’s Egg, in which a bed-headed girl navigates a violent industrial society with a massive white egg tucked under her petticoat. Wolfe, likewise, tiptoes over cracks in the sidewalk to prove that she can do it. “I have made it this far/To live this life,” she breathes on the glass-fragile ballad “Place in the Sun. That same type of blind faith lives in you, too, if you close your eyes and let it glow.


The Swiss-born jazz pianist’s second album with bassist Drew Gress and drummer Kenny Wollesen is animated by a spirit of playful experimentation.

D’Agala

Since moving to New York in 1998, the Swiss-born pianist Sylvie Courvoisier has had little difficulty sounding like a native of the city’s downtown scene. In her memorable solo sets, as well as her performances with saxophonist John Zorn and onetime DNA drummer Ikue Mori, she has helped define the sound of the piano for an era and a locale.
Like numerous other contemporary pianists, she plays not only the keys, but also the inside of the instrument—sweeping the strings directly, or plying them with a variety of objects. She can do this with a touch that seems just as informed by jazz balladry as it is by John Cage’s experimentalism. And because she’s a leading improviser in contemporary avant-garde circles, she’s also more than able to distinguish herself in a din factory.
Courvoisier’s displays of power seem all the more forceful thanks to the gorgeous sounds she fashions at the other end of the dynamic spectrum. This adaptability makes her a prized collaborator, but it might also have delayed Courvoisier’s entrance into some of the more familiar formats of small-group jazz.
It took until 2014’s Double Windsor for Courvoisier’s fans to hear her take on the classic piano-trio album. The group behind that debut, which includes bassist Drew Gress and drummer Kenny Wollesen, earned some feverish reviews. Four years later, we have a follow-up. Clearly, the time between releases is not a writer’s block issue, as Courvoisier has remained active in a rich variety of other ensembles (including a 2017 collaborative project with guitarist Mary Halvorson). Instead, it seems likely that Courvoisier has been carefully honing new material for this particular group.
Opening track “Imprint Double (for Antoine Courvoisier)” reveals the album’s affinity for smartly executed pivots. The composition begins with the pianist obsessing over a three-note motif in a gravely low octave. But she quickly complicates the grim feel of these tones by dropping in additional, dense chords that suggest a syncopated strut. When the bassist and drummer join in, the song’s swinging sensibility is securely established. Even when the piece halts its momentum—making space for hypnotic, new melodic fragments—this core sense of playfulness never disappears.
The rest of the album follows a similar strategy, down to song titles that are outfitted with dedications. “Bourgeois’s Spider (for Louise Bourgeois)” allows Courvoisier to range across a wild array of pianistic effects: you can hear strums of the strings, as well as knocks against the instrument’s wooden body. During the second half of the track, the pianist swaps out her pointillistic noises for some gentler clouds of minimalist repetition. Her arrangement allows this unusual sequence of sounds to hover over chilled-out rhythm section grooves. On paper, such pairings may seem abrupt or ill-matched, but the skill of this band resides in the way it makes unlikely reversals seem second-nature.
Courvoisier’s piece “Éclats for Ornette” offers a nod to the late composer and saxophonist Ornette Coleman. In its early seconds, a short, excitable theme bursts out. Traces of the same figure can also be heard in some of Courvoisier’s most out-there stretches, during a subsequent solo. Since Coleman was a widely beloved pioneer of new ecstatic styles in the avant-garde, you can’t invoke his name in a title without some risk. But here, as on much of this album, Courvoisier and her group balance structure and wildness in a way that is easy to admire.


On the sequel to last year’s Listening to Pictures, the octogenarian trumpet player slips into memoirist mode, allowing old tropes from his past to flicker back to life.

Jon Hassell: Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two)

Asked about his time playing with Miles Davis, saxophonist Gary Bartz once said of the jazz icon’s many sonic shifts, “Everything around him changed, but he didn’t change.” Trumpeter and composer Jon Hassell, himself a lifelong fan of Miles, has embraced that philosophy. Across a long career that found him at the birth of American minimalism and then, on Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, the summit of art rock—not to mention in creative dialogue with Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel—the 83-year-old Hassell has always sounded irreducibly like himself. His tone voice-like and alien, earthy and phantasmal, vacillating between a child’s yip and an elephant whinny, Hassell’s electronically processed horn and its bioluminescent smears have interacted with Brazilian percussion, computer glitches, West African drums, and more. While the scenery has consistently shifted over the past 50 years, he has remained a catalyst for dynamic fusions.
Hassell returned from  a nine-year absence with 2018’s Listening to Pictures (Pentimento Volume One), an album of cracked electronics and flinty miniatures. While he had always operated at the fringes of experimental, world, and jazz music, in his time away, artists like Destroyer, Oneohtrix Point Never, Visible Cloaks, Sam Gendel, and others had brought his sensibilities toward more popular acceptance. Leaning into familiar ideas while also forging ahead, Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two) is the far warmer of the two works, despite titles that allude to Iceland and Saturn’s frozen moons. In its most mesmerizing moments, Hassell slips into memoirist mode, allowing old tropes from his past to flicker back to life.
The telltale drums on “Moons of Titan”—like a distant rainstorm, yet interior as a pulse—will be familiar to fans of Hassell’s early ’80s work like Dream Theory in Malaya, as will the high trilling of his horn between them. But there’s more space for an ethereal electronic haze to rise, making it feel even more dreamlike. “Delicado” and its skipping CD rhythm are closest in texture to Volume One, full of neo-noir ambience shot through with Hassell’s lyricism, cool yet unpredictable, a Chet Baker hologram on the fritz.
On the longer tracks that bookend the set, Hassell works with a wider canvas to immersive effect. The eight-minute “Fearless” lies somewhere between Oval’s Systemisch and Miles Davis’ “He Loved Him Madly.” A quintet piece featuring violin, electric guitars, and bass clarinet (though you’d be hard pressed to identify each liquified element), it allows Hassell plenty of space to growl and wax elegiac as the music ever so slowly dissolves. On “Lunar,” each element warps around Hassell’s horn and harmonizer, creating a sound that feels both triumphant and nauseous, as if flag-planting on a distant planet just as your oxygen runs out.
“Timeless,” another eight-minute composition, originally appeared on the Dreamy Harbor compilation for Berlin’s Tresor, where Hassell was slotted alongside techno luminaries like Terrence Dixon, Juan Atkins, and Moritz von Oswald. Gently reworked here with additional percussion from Adam Rudolph, quivering strings, and glissades of piano, the piece bubbles and flutters, neither rising nor increasing in intensity, but growing more exquisite as it goes along. Back in April, Brian Eno started a GoFundMe for Hassell, who as a cancer survivor is at high risk of severe COVID-19 infection. Hassell is now out of intensive care, but he’s still well short of his fundraising goal, and one wonders how much more music lies ahead for the octogenarian artist. In that light, the fittingly titled “Timeless” takes on additional resonance as a portrait of the master musician, unbowed and still considering every expressive breath.


What comes across as moralistic sermonizing from lesser MCs here is the work of a rapper with a humane, often-troubled conscience.

Us

A girl whose first sexual experience was a molestation is encouraged to overcome her trauma and learn to feel real love. White Americans are confronted with their role in the legacy of slavery and their responsibility for the cultural and social structures it left behind. Immigrants, a child of divorced parents, and a self-hating gay teenager get a keep-your-head-up. The ostracized, leprous son of a plantation owner learns to sing from the field hands, only to reject his family's adulation of his talents when he realizes they won't let those same field hands inside their house. These are some of the ways Brother Ali focuses his storytelling talents on Us, and I just wanted to mention that as soon as possible because some people may prefer an advance warning when a rap album is filled with what is perceived as moralistic sermonizing.
But this isn't "moralistic sermonizing" where Brother Ali is concerned-- it's displays of a humane, often-troubled conscience. For an MC who has so many tracks which denote his "bad motherfucker" status, his persona's dominated by a welcoming strain of populist empathy, an attitude that offers an accessible solidarity just for listening. And unless you happen to be someone who thinks he's a better MC than Ali is, this man will not actually talk down to you, no matter how sociopolitically agitated he gets. If rap didn't exist, he'd be the greatest high school guidance counselor in Minneapolis. But as a talent in a scene that holds decades' worth of some of the most sensitive identity politics of any popular culture movement in the last 50 years, Brother Ali has had to put that populism to good use.
The political material on Us is powerful without being self-righteous: "The Travelers" runs through every dehumanizing abuse in the slave trade in its gutwrenching first verse, then spends the second hinging on culpability, complete with an admission that he's been "terrified to admit it's wrong/ 'Cause I'm hiding in the ruins of a legacy that still lives on." The blues-cadenced "Breakin' Dawn", meanwhile, works in both a literal and allegorical sense, with the story of the master's son taught to sing by the slaves a fable that also hints at latter-day whitewashing in the music industry (and, by potential extension, that theoretical listener who bumps Brother Ali without paying heed or respect to his influences). And while "Games" resembles your typical get-off-the-corner message rap on the surface, Ali puts himself on the hustler's level instead of scolding him. Still, the man does have his limits: "House Keys" has his family moving downstairs from the second floor of a duplex only to find that his new upstairs neighbors are a bunch of noisy, bickering small-time drug dealers, a problem which he addresses by sneaking into their place when they're out, stealing all their shit, and selling it.
He does have moments where he makes himself the subject, whether needy and heartbroken on "You Say (Puppy Love)" or rolling his eyes at haters on "Crown Jewel". And there's still plenty of times-- "Bad Mufucker Pt. II", "'Round Here", "Fresh Air"-- where he seems content to rattle off gratitude-swagger testimonials to his own career, a tendency that's served his style well from the beginning. I've read a few dismissals of Ali's style as a blatant copy of Pharoahe Monch's, and I don't quite hear it beyond the subtle debt practically every indie rapper ever owes Organized Konfusion: Ali's lyricism forgoes Monch's rewind-provoking abstraction for an approach heavy on straightforward scene-setting, willing to sacrifice complex internal rhyme schemes and rimshot metaphors if it means he can paint you a clearer picture. With those strengths, he's somewhere between the intense street-scholar style of Freeway-- who appears, along with Joell Ortiz, on the shit-talk highlight "Best@it"-- and an eloquent everyman like Murs, who has a non-rapping cameo telling an amusing story about how Brother Ali's mere presence cooled down a tense situation. Dude can still be pretty acrobatic when he wants to-- "The Preacher" makes for a hell of a skeptic-converter-- yet there's also a clarity and non-pretension to his lyrics that, coupled with the smooth rasp of his voice, makes them fully attention-commanding.
It should be noted that this album's original title was Street Preacher, a concept that still manifests in a few spots (like the Chuck D intro and the track it segues into, "The Preacher"). And ANT, who's produced nearly everything Ali's spit over since his Rhymesayers debut, Shadows on the Sun, turns in a characteristic set of clean, crisp modern soul that accompanies his usual 1970s-skewing R&B touchstones (mournfully-glimmering minimalist g-funk on "Slippin' Away"; slinky Bar-Kays strut on "Fresh Air") with a gospel-soul current. It's a proper backdrop for an album that stands as the most deeply thought-provoking work of Brother Ali's career, an album that draws its strengths from the simultaneous expression of sympathy toward the people in the songs and anger toward the shit they've gone through. The album's title track is gospel personified-- a choir, handclaps, and a rapt MC laying down his idealistic vision of an America that still feels a long way off: "Can't nobody be free unless we're all free/ There's no me and you, it's just us."


Dave Longstreth guides Dirty Projectors toward their most human and least ornate release yet. It's an album of deeply appealing simplicity that mixes subtle folk protest and gorgeous paeans to young love.

Swing Lo Magellan

If you've only tuned in for parts of Dirty Projectors' decade-long run, it's entirely possible that you've viewed bandleader Dave Longstreth and his ever-evolving band line-up as a gimmick. After all, though Longstreth had been releasing music as Dirty Projectors for years, the band finally inched toward a critical mass in 2007 on an album that reinterpreted Black Flag's Damaged from memory. The album found Longstreth replacing Rollins' gruff bellow with alien, elastic vocals, anchored to the zigs and zags of West African guitar. Two years later, Bitte Orca used a trio of female vocalists-- mainstays Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian and newcomer Haley Dekle-- to bait often abstruse arrangements and hard-to-parse lyrics. When Questlove posted a backstage video of the Projectors performing an unplugged "When the World Comes to an End" after a "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" appearance, internet commentators concurred that people simply shouldn't be able to sing like that. Between the intercalated harmonies, Longstreth's own sometimes-stringent tone, and his counterintuitive approach to guitar, Dirty Projectors occasionally could be reduced into a menagerie of eccentricities-- possible to enjoy, but sometimes difficult to internalize.
Swing Lo Magellan should help rectify that: The band's least ornate batch of songs to date builds upon Longstreth's most direct and identifiable lyrics ever. Which means that Dirty Projectors have upped their emotional and structural accessibility all at once. Culled from a batch of roughly 40 demos, these tunes explore vulnerability and vexation, sweetness and cynicism with more manageable musical complications than ever before. For instance, the gorgeous "Impregnable Question" finds the seam between Heart of Gold-era Neil Young and late-1960s Serge Gainsbourg; it's a love song between Coffman and Longstreth, her coos helping him to soften his voice above a warm acoustic shuffle. Over handclaps and a ragged, wrapping riff on "Dance for You", Longstreth offers one of his most intuitive and immediate hooks. There's gusto and playfulness here, too, from the way Longstreth clears his very-warped throat before launching into the first verse of opener "Offspring Are Blank" to the brilliant decision to record Coffman and Dekle mocking some of Longstreth's most impenetrable lyrics toward the end of the irrepressible "Unto Caesar". When he sings "Down the line/ Dead, the martyrs' morbid poetry," Coffman teasingly answers, "Uhh, that doesn't make any sense, what you just said." You want to be in the room with this band.
There's also a folk-song seriousness at work on some of the standouts, especially the tragic "Just From Chevron". Structured so that Coffman and Dekle play the part of a Greek chorus while Longstreth sings the dying narrator's plight in soliloquy, the song is a fitting one for this year of Woody Guthrie centennial celebrations. Chevron-- or any company, for that matter-- has brainwashed its employee so that, as he lays dying due to their own mechanical failure, he needs his love not to know that he loves her but that his death is worthwhile, because it's part of the company's quest to power the world. A devastating fact in a field of general abstraction, it's as poignant and profound as anything Dirty Projectors have ever released. The title track works a similar mode, with its buttoned-up rhythm section holding steady alongside lyrics about the clutches of conformity and the liberation of self-reflection. "In the grid, aware their position," Longstreth sings, any possible scorn swallowed in genuine worry. "Unconcerned with intuition."
That's not to say that all of these arrangements are exactly intuitive. After all, this is still Dirty Projectors, and this is still an album whose first single, "Gun Has No Trigger", is an unnerved look at the way things might have been and whose rhythm doesn't shift once. The tricky meter that underpins "About to Die" is quintessential Dirty Projectors, as are the two-part harmonies bouncing against Longstreth's young-love paranoia. "Maybe That Was It" even inches toward psychedelic rock. Longstreth's falsetto comes refracted through a web of effects, providing a suitable counter for the Crazy Horse-like stumbling stagger and craggy electric lead. Even the straightforward Dirty Projectors are still a mighty complex unit.
Swing Lo Magellan is a confident step into the spotlight that neither depends upon public expectations nor shies away from them. It's well-made but certainly not over-produced, idiosyncratic and intricate but very rarely obtuse. But as compelling as these tunes and these performances often are, what's most intriguing about Swing Lo Magellan is the way it suggests that, even after a decade, we still don't know everything about Longstreth or his band. If, in the past, he or they sometimes seemed like a freak show, they come toward Earth just enough here to feel like a proper rock band working in service of songs about love and confusion, anxiety and celebration.
In a society of by-the-second news updates and endless information all the time, it's strangely reassuring to feel as if a songwriter who's been endlessly interrogated, analyzed, and publicized is still something of a stranger. Longstreth himself seems to serve as the narrator of "Dance for You", an ebullient account of an odyssey for a grail that exists but has yet to be found. "There is an answer," reckons Longstreth, his voice rising optimistically over film-score strings. "I haven't found it/ But I will keep dancing until I do." This far into a career, that's a good thing not only to hear a songwriter sing but a mantra to hear him create by, too.


Chance the Rapper and Jeremih’s surprise release is a Christmas album for the final yuletide of the Obama administration: one last bastion of hope in an uncertain and fraught time.

Chance the Rapper / Jeremih: Merry Christmas Lil’ Mama

Merry Christmas Lil’ Mama

When Chance the Rapper performed “Sunday Candy” with Jamila Woods and Nico Segal at the National Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony, there was something distinctly special, and spiritual, about it: A prodigious and cheery “mixtape rapper” singing modern psalms and praises on the national stage at the behest of the first black President of the United States in his last days; the convergence of a God Dream and the American Dream. It felt like something to soak in and savor, to get nourishment from—both because of its almost absurdly uplifting energy and because it was something we might never see again, on any count. Chance seemed to linger in the moment, as if recognizing and relishing its significance; for many, next Christmas will feel much different, and this ceremony will probably look different, too. Next Christmas will be a white Christmas.
The sentiment echoed weeks later on “Saturday Night Live” when Chance and Kenan Thompson performed a sketch called “Jingle Barack,” its politics laid plain in its lyrics: “It’s the last Christmas with Barack still here,” the foreshadowing clear, the successor’s agenda unspoken. Both Chicago natives, Chance first met Obama when he was 8 years old, his father a staffer for the POTUS during his Senate years. It isn’t too much of a stretch to suggest that Chance’s songs can often embody the hope Obama campaigned on—sources of inspiration for those coloring outside the lines, and also, to paraphrase Kanye, those who are colored and deemed out of line. Perhaps it’s only a coincidence that Chance is coming into his own as a lightning rod and leader as Obama departs, but it isn’t a coincidence that he identified this Christmas as a necessary time for healing.
As if realizing the magnitude of the moment, or just never one to miss an opportunity to be merry, Chance and fellow Chicagoan Jeremih surprise released a holiday marvel called Merry Christmas Lil’ Mama, a Christmas album for the final yuletide of the Obama administration: one last bastion of hope in an uncertain and fraught time; a sonic snow globe where unflinching altruism, glee, and love (both neighborly and sensual) rule; a priceless gift celebrating the season of giving.
And it isn’t just for President Obama—or for Lil’ Mama—it’s for all of us, too. It’s functional Christmas music that’s somehow also music for any function, set at Christmas. Where holiday tunes are typically hokey, decidedly old-fashioned, and predictable, Merry Christmas Lil’ Mama is actively (and perhaps instinctively) animated and stimulating, not satisfied with just conveying the spirit of the season but breathing life into it; it’s warm, natural, and even familiar in spots.
This is the rare Christmas album that breaks from convention without defying tradition, using A Christmas Story snippets, a “Carol of the Bells” rework, and an “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” interpolation as blueprints to create the most refreshing festive songs in recent memory. But more than anything, it’s frolicsome and jolly, in keeping with the theme. The album captures Christmastime joy with juke, and jive, and the Jackson 5. About three minutes in, Hannibal Buress asks for Travis Scott effects on his vocals, and he gets them. There’s something for everyone.
Over nine songs that sound like they were as fun to make as they are to listen to, Chance and Jeremih move in intervals and in tandem, complementing each other and operating in sync without losing their distinct voices. Chance’s path is mostly a righteous one (“The Pontius Pilates judge my bundle of joys/I know my bronze is gorgeous/Know who the birthday boy is”), and Jeremih’s a naughty one (“Know you cold, let’s bundle up/I’m just tryna get some love”), but they frequently find the overlaps or trade roles, as on “Snowed In” and “Joy.” In Jeremih’s capable hands, holiday staples become innuendos: sleighs and slays, hos, silent nights and unwrappings, sliding down chimneys, etc. Chance can turn a club into a nativity scene. Together they are an unstoppable force of good will and glad tidings wrapped in radiant melodies and scat raps.
Merry Christmas Lil’ Mama scans Chance’s acid rap, steppers R&B, robotic soul, the gospel lite of Coloring Book, and Teklife juke and footwork seamlessly, adding streaking string arrangements, distorted Auto-Tune vocals, choirs, standout Zaytoven keyboard fills, and production from DJs Spinn and Gantman. They enlists help from rappers Lud Foe, King Louie, and Noname (who delivers another show-stopping verse on “The Tragedy” with raps like “Our heathenous appetite, ever and after/Like Christmas will save us and bathe us in rapture”). The songs are sincere and unpretentious, and are encapsulated by a single Jeremih lyric: “Your presence is a present for me/For Christmas or just because.”
The album crescendos into “I Shoulda Left You,” a lively anthem for anyone looking to ditch toxicity in the godforsaken year that was 2016. “Rest in peace to great David Bowie/Please can we get back Prince?” Chance pleads in a half whine before beaming brightly, stifling laughter; there’s still fun to be had. The song serves as a larger metaphor for progress and optimism, avoiding stagnation, and cutting off unhealthy relationships. Its cheer feeds its mentality, seemingly suggesting better days ahead. A few minutes earlier, on “Joy,” Jeremih insinuates that we must create that brighter future ourselves. “They tend to forget about love,” he sings. “Let’s get right back to the joy.” And in these moments, where everything is snug and safe, it seems possible—probable even. On Merry Christmas Lil’ Mama, Christmas is restorative. No matter what, hope endures.


Leipzig's Gunnar Wendel, better known as Kassem Mosse, abandons his house music background for thorny synthesizer sketches—fistfuls of gurgle and ping, sometimes beatless, and maddeningly absorbing.

Disclosure

Leipzig's Gunnar Wendel, better known as Kassem Mosse, has built up a tidy reputation as one of leftfield dance music's most respected figures while keeping his person completely out of the equation. Despite using a number of aliases—KMOS, Paid Reach, Seltene Erden, the Siege of Troy—Wendel has never made an effort to stay anonymous, exactly. He's never cultivated mystique, never used his aliases as a shield. (That might precisely be the reason he's been spared the scrutiny that Burial's William Bevan has faced.) He sits for the occasional interview, though there doesn't seem to have been a new one in English in five years, and speaks thoughtfully and in great detail about his processes and his philosophy. He even maintains a Facebook page. Yet he's clearly content to remain at arm's length from contemporary dance music culture. He prefers living in Leipzig to joining the crowded techno scene in Berlin, and it makes sense; music like his requires a certain measure of isolation.
Even at its most straightforward, there's always been an element of mystery in Wendel's work. Loping house grooves may trundle ahead at 120 BPM—he's no stranger to the floor-filling anthem—but the background swims with wraithlike shapes, with creaks and clanks. Figuring out how a given track may have been made is largely guesswork, and largely irrelevant, too. The elements in his music seem less a matter of intention than tidal happenstance, like barnacle-studded scraps of plastic washed up on the beach after a storm.
Wendel used to specialize in beaten-up and broken-down house, favoring figures suggestive of a note hastily scribbled in the dark—the torn scrap of crumpled paper bag smoothed flat against the knee of someone's Levi's, the ballpoint pen poking halfway through the rough, pulpy edge—yet still legible as dance music. But he has increasingly abandoned dancefloor conventions as he has moved further out. On Disclosure, his first album for London's Honest Jon's label, and his first long-form studio output since 2014's Workshop 19, he might be mistaken for an entirely different artist than the one who produced warm, bittersweet tunes like “578” and “Thalassocalyce.”
The album covers plenty of ground, from his typical slow-motion house ruminations to tumbling, footwork-tempo dynamos, but nearly half the album's tracks are thorny synthesizer sketches—fistfuls of gurgle and ping, sometimes beatless, sometimes accompanied by tangled drum-machine patterns that tie the math-processing parts of the cortex up in knots. The opening “Stepping on Salt” gives us an idea of the kinds of tones to expect: sizzling, squelching analog waveforms yoked to broken-clock arpeggios over which the spirits of Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire loom large.
Even the most overtly rhythmic cuts here warily skirt the edges of the dancefloor. “Phoenicia Wireless” is the kind of pensive, toe-scuffing house track that Wendel can probably crank out in his sleep, but the beat doesn't start up in earnest until nearly two-thirds of the way through, and it's forever on the verge of being swallowed up by hi-hat bursts that clatter like mid-century newsroom typewriters. Woe to the careless DJ who throws on “Aluminosilicate Mirrors” without taking a good, hard listen first: A few minutes in, the tempo starts drifting upward without warning, turning the frenetic footwork groove even more hair-raising.
“Collapsing Dual Core” is one of the album's fastest, most unencumbered cuts, playing contrapuntal synthesizer lines against a TR-707 programming, and there's no arrangement to speak of, just a ceaseless series of tweaks to a few fixed patterns—a live jam par excellence. It tells you a lot about Wendel's method. Many musicians might have used what he's assembled here as the building blocks for something more finessed; they might have added more elements, woven emotive samples into the mix, teased out a harmony or two. Not Wendel: What you hear is what you get, and even the spindliest, most skeletal jam is exactly that and nothing more. It has no interest in meeting you halfway.
And that's one of the things that's so weirdly satisfying about Disclosure: It feels honest, and it feels true to the standards that Wendel has set for himself throughout his career. For all its quirks and austerity, Disclosure doesn't feel like the work of someone who's being intentionally difficult. He's simply following his own path. The rest of us are free to follow if we wish.


Foxes (aka Louisa Rose Allen) sang the hook on Zedd's pristine EDM super-hit "Clarity" but has struggled for solo momentum.  After listening to All I Need for the first time, nothing remains or sticks with you, which is maybe the most damning thing you can say about a pop record aimed at big international markets and radio takeovers.

All I Need

If your first foray into capital-P Pop didn't do as well as your label expected—even though you won a Grammy—how do you bounce back, especially when you’re only in your mid-twenties? Prepped and primed to be a star with "indie" sensibilities, Foxes (aka Louisa Rose Allen) debuted in 2013 with Glorious, a synth-pop record that didn't quite manage to win over international hearts. Though the record and its singles charted decently in the UK, Foxes is perhaps more recognizable when you realize she’s the voice on Zedd’s 2012 pristine EDM super hit "Clarity." As a solo act, Allen was set to be a low-key star without any fuss; she had the vocal talent without any of the frills of a generic pop star. No dance routines, matching outfits, or expensive-looking music videos. Maybe Allen and her team hoped this sort of 'realness' could appeal to a generation that prefers One Direction’s lack of conformity to boy band standards like, say, the Backstreet Boys.
Two years later, Allen’s sophomore effort All I Need shifts the focal point from synths to her vocals. However, they're still not enough for this record to be memorable. All the ingredients for a pop hit are latent, but unrealized. Tracks like "Feet Don't Fail Me Now" have a repetitive hook, strong vocals, and a familiar story of lost love, but it just doesn't stand out the way a meticulously crafted earworm should. After listening to All I Need for the first time, nothing remains or sticks with you, which is maybe the most damning thing you can say about a pop record aimed at big international markets and radio takeovers.
The record has cohesion and was clearly written to generate hits, but it’s lacking almost entirely in oomph. Co-written with Dan Smith of Bastille (another band that churns out synth hits but similarly manages to underwhelm), "Better Love" manages to hark back to '80s sensibilities, something monotonous and exhausted within the modern British synth-pop sphere. There are inevitable shifts in tone on All I Need but they prove to be small risks that don't pay off. One instance is marked with insipid piano ballad "On My Way," which was co-written by Jesse Shatkin, one of the collaborators on One Direction’s rather weak single "Perfect." Another example is R&B and dancehall crossover "Cruel," which just sounds cheaply produced—think SoundCloud bro with a MacBook Air and a pirated copy of Logic Pro X.
It’s unclear as to what Allen’s (and her label’s) objectives are for her career—is she supposed to be a mainstream hit or are they just fine with her doing reasonably well? Working with a "mindie" artist like Smith and a One Direction collaborator like Shatkin makes this record feel lost. Additionally, the middle-of-the-road "mindie” shtick proved to be close to career suicide for Carly Rae Jepsen with E•MO•TION, but the difference here is that Jepsen had good songs (and much-deserved critical acclaim) by her side. Being successful without seeming successful is a difficult medium to achieve and maintain; it’s why Frankmusik is nowhere to be seen despite propelling Myspace protégé Ellie Goulding to global superstardom.
As much as you want to root for Foxes to find her feet, there’s nothing rule-breaking or remotely interesting about this record. Of all the shifting demands on pop stars and hits over the years, catchiness is the one element that remains unchanged, and it's completely missing here. Anonymity isn't a virtue: Even singers who aren't nearly as gifted as Allen (Jennifer Lopez, Kylie Minogue) have managed to break into the music industry with a lot of success because they had catchy tunes behind them. What makes All I Need even weaker is that it doesn’t offer you something else in lieu of big, brain-sticking instant anthems. It's just kind of a "nothing" record. Considering Allen hails from a country that has bred synth-pop darlings like Ellie Goulding and the inimitably cool Charli XCX in recent years, All I Need had the potential to be so much more than mediocre and forgettable.


The D.C. punks channel their hometown scene’s confrontational spirit on a debut album that backs its progressive politics with a fierce belief in the necessity of joy.

pink balloons

Before moving the tassel on his graduation cap from right to left, Liam Hughes started a punk band with his best friend, Jael Holzman. For Hughes, the group doubled as a graduate thesis and a sneaky way to access American University’s recording studio. For Holzman, it was an opportunity to vent. She sang openly about her experiences as a trans woman, and those lyrics felt like a beacon for incoming band members Miri Tyler and Guinevere Tully. After releasing a 2022 EP under the name Ekko Astral, the Washington, D.C., punk outfit expanded into a five-piece with more on the line than just a framed degree: Ekko Astral’s community-building efforts in the local scene transformed them into a sounding board for DIY fans who felt seen.
If Ekko Astral sound brash and impulsive, there’s a good reason: When she’s not behind the mic, Holzman works as an energy and climate reporter, staring down headlines like “The Flooding Will Come No Matter What” even as her rights are increasingly being stripped away. Words spew out of her mouth as though the concept of a filter were laughable. But the band isn’t as reckless as its songs suggest. They quite literally sat down to brainstorm ways that their debut album, pink balloons, might foster a better future. What Ekko Astral produced was a collection of experimental punk and noise-rock songs that weld together two ideas: We’ve got to stop softening our opinions just to minimize others’ discomfort, and we’ve got to start having fun again. Ekko Astral apply those tenets wholesale to dinner-spoiling conversation subjects—the pain of aging, murder and death, the wretched anxiety of being terminally online—with beatific results.
pink balloons’ noise-punk barrage hits like a stray elbow in the mascara moshpit. Ekko Astral smear raw punk, distorted pop hooks, and experimental noise like they’re wiping dirt on their lids in place of eye shadow. Coursing through them is the distinct charisma of D.C. bands past: the chaotic unpredictability of Black Eyes, the palpable urgency of Fugazi, the commanding vocal control of Priests. Opener “head empty blues” is abrasive and unrelenting, stacking Tully’s thick bassline atop Tyler’s racing drums and the stabbing guitars of Hughes and Sam Elmore. There’s barely a second to catch your breath before “baethoven” begins, its ominous organ whirring behind a post-punk rhythm that catches fire the way a Gilla Band song douses itself in gasoline. Ekko Astral cut and push and warp, sneaking in panning vocals and submarine beeps that work thanks to Pure Adult’s Jeremy Snyder, who allows the band to level up with clean, layered production that doesn’t sacrifice their punk spirit.
Ekko Astral tear through their songs furiously, avoiding the post-punk cliches prevalent among their peers: social justice messages so obvious they’re annoying, repetition as a form of sarcasm. Instead, the band has mastered the art of casual erudition, doling out lines that are incisive but never forced—think Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner or Gilla Band’s Dara Kiely, both of whom Holzman admires. In “on brand,” Ekko Astral go noise-pop while calling out women who submit to manipulation, romantic or capitalistic, in the name of boredom. “She’s got a pair of cheetah print pink pumps made by federal prisoners/She likes to wear ’em to the seventies club, wax nostalgic about racism,” Holzman sings melodramatically, puckering the answering refrain of “so, so, so bored” until it turns to mush. Even when she uses others’ words, it feels like a handmade collage; in the unnerving spoken-word track “somewhere at the bottom of the river between l'enfant and eastern market” (Yes, that’s a reference to La Dispute, darling), Holzman excerpts a friend’s poem about the necessity of tense conversations, however uncomfortable, before building to a recorded chat about mortality with her late grandfather.
When Ekko Astral drop names, they couldn’t care less about appearing in the know or accruing social capital. Holzman quotes AC/DC and Kreayshawn alike, and references Lite-Brite and Molly Shannon without goading anyone to prove they get it. She takes a crack at mispronouncing Bon Iver 13 years after the internet overdid that joke on Grammys night, and uses Frank Ocean, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Carly Rae Jepsen as wordplay. When she does jab at pop-culture shibboleths, it’s with reason, like shading communist consumers who gobble up brunch and blast Beyoncé songs about hustle culture. Hearing a singer who isn’t preoccupied with topical jokes or outdated trends is refreshing. As Holzman explains on “Sticks and Stones” over a bassline fit for 13 Songs: “Nothing’s funny anymore/I wanna laugh at all the things/I don’t care about.” Though Holzman churns out plenty of zingers on pink balloons—“He skipped just one of her episodes and now he’s completely lost the plot,” she deadpans on “uwu type beat”—it’s “devorah” that uses every word carefully and cleverly. What appears as a serious, six-minute call for solidarity with Indigenous peoples subverts itself until it’s a parody of a parody, squirming at the idea of falling victim to your own hypocrisy through a checklist of blood-soaked goods: expensive shampoo, Taco Bell mild sauce, the fabric of a ratty college couch.
To position pink balloons as a trans bildungsroman is to misread Ekko Astral’s statement on our collective modern experience: Trying to be present and relaxed in an era of nonstop collapse and overstimulation only breeds disunity. The band leans so far past self-pity or righteous declarations that any mid-song statements that resemble queer trauma—“lots of us don’t make it home,” “dead kids in their bedrooms,” “I’ve got stalkers outside”—morph from personal earnestness into numbing realities. It’s bleak out there, but Ekko Astral aren’t trying to make you aware of it; they know you know. The power in their songs lies in the way the music gurgles up, emulating the acidic paranoia gnawing at us and encouraging the urge to fight it back down. Take from it what you will that Holzman shares a first name with Jael, an Old Testament heroine lauded for tyrannicide. When Sisera, the commander of King Jabin’s army in Canaan who’s holding people hostage, enters Jael’s tent and asks to be nursed, she picks up a hammer and smashes a tent peg through his skull, killing him instantly. At no point does she hesitate—is that even an option when liberation is on the line?
A brief flash of twee graces pink balloons in “Make Me Young,” where Holzman and Tully sing in tandem about trying to curb their pessimism: “Life looks down with sincerity and yells, ‘Mostly great but sometimes pain!’ and that’s fine.” This is the future pink balloons proposes: one where we can exist with the highs and the lows, but when it’s time to hit the sack, at least we’re still existing. Ekko Astral won’t waste your time recounting everything that’s gone to shit when the notifications pinging your phone already have that covered. Over the course of half an hour, Ekko Astral invite you to react to the news however feels right; so long as you’re reacting, the levity will follow.


The drone-metal titan’s “imaginary Western” fleshes out his talents as a storyteller, but this album of mostly solo electric guitar doesn’t feel as fully realized as his band Earth’s best work.

Conquistador

During the last quarter-century, Dylan Carlson has helped reshape the electric guitar’s possibilities not once, but twice. In the first phase of his band Earth, Carlson stood at the center of the duo’s colossal drone tide, with his creeping riffs and masterful control of distortion seeming to trace the outer reaches of infinity itself. Those records are landmarks and baselines. When Earth returned nearly a decade later as a full band, Carlson’s riffs were thin and refined, each elegant note landing like a pastel ray of light. He had found a new context for his regal, slow-motion language, one that underscored the drone inherent in primal blues. Those records are guideposts, a reminder that an innovator can always be reinvented.
During the last five years, Carlson has entered another restless phase and turned to albums of primarily solo electric guitar, where the occasional collaborators are there mostly to add texture to his themes. As Drcarlsonalbion, he has mined European ballads for cycles of instrumental folk songs and scored a Western film. Now, at last under his own name, Carlson has taken the next logical step and written what he calls “an imaginary Western,” which wordlessly traces the historic story of a conquistador exploring what is now the American Southwest a half-millennium ago. The 32-minute Conquistador feels slight, especially against the landmarks of Carlson’s career, but it does open at least one intriguing avenue for future exploration.
Conquistador unfurls like a screenplay. The title track is an extended invocation in which a simple, central riff coils and loops and warps against a rising web of noise; we are, in essence, meeting the characters and imagining the tangle of possible plotlines and misfortunes they could encounter. With “When the Horses Were Shorn of Their Hooves,” the drama arrives in earnest. Carlson’s guitar is agitated and irascible, the riff practically showing its teeth and shaking its fists. Something very bad is bound to happen. But first, there’s a forced pause, a brief interlude for plucked lute and scraped cymbals. This is the itinerant widescreen scan of the foreboding scenery. You can imagine the rolling tumbleweed or hear a lonesome whistle in the distance.
In Act II, things happen quickly: During “Scorpions in Their Mouth,” things go from bad to worse, and that stately theme from the opening “Conquistador” goes to battle. Carlson’s tone is bulbous and barbed, its growl harking back to those young, angry days in Earth. Then, at last, there’s an escape from danger to the halcyon coast, beautifully rendered in “Reaching the Gulf.” Carlson’s guitar seems to smile as it sighs, as our hero licks wounds that could have been much worse. Carlson is an efficient, effective storyteller, a trait that was never quite clear in Earth’s enormous impressionism.
But Conquistador, like much of what Carlson has done outside of Earth, feels only like a second draft of an idea from his sketchbook, the transitional point to something that could be truly magnificent. The album suggests a full story, but it still seems paradoxically fragmentary. After its slow burn fades, after our hero has returned home, what’s best about Conquistador might be the sense of possibility it poses. Having scored an actual Western film with minimal guitar vignettes, here he has shaped his amplifier worship into an auditory Western largely for solo guitar.
So what’s next in that stepwise process? A through-composed score for a big-budget Western or an actual Cormac McCarthy adaptation? Perhaps, but it’s more tantalizing to imagine Carlson taking the trail of fellow guitar hero Bill Frisell, who has turned troves of old portraits or scenes from the Mississippi River Flood of 1927 into fully realized, entirely immersive stage shows. Here’s a free idea for an expensive production for any ambitious arts presenter, then: Commission Carlson to fully realize his 21st-century Western. Otherwise, his ideas may continue to drift in this middle distance, and he’s too good for that.


The Canadian producer and DJ’s second album pays tribute to her father’s memory, fusing home-video recordings with ambrosial disco, soul, and dance-pop.

Guy

DJ, producer, and scientist Jayda G makes effervescent dance music with a wealth of deeper meaning. On her second album, Guy, she explores grief and renewal through ambrosial disco, soul, and dance-pop dedicated to her father, William Richard Guy, who passed away when she was 10. Understanding the extent of his illness, William documented his life in several journals and 11 hours of video interviews with Jayda’s older sister. Roughly 20 years after his death, Guy embarks on a journey of danceable self-discovery that rides this high tide of familial love and memory. Between sharp whirs of fast-forwarding tape, William’s recollections form the basis for Jayda’s songs, which balance catharsis with her allegiance to the boogie.
Dance music carries people through the darkest of times, and Guy’s early tracks outline stories of resilience and empowerment. “Scars” distills William’s memories of standing up to childhood bullies through synth-pop that showcases some of Jayda G’s best singing to date. Her vocals on 2019’s Significant Changes often sounded as if she had recorded them as far away from the mic as possible. Now, the message of redemption bursts through an undercurrent of lyrical melancholy: “And I’ve got scars/And I’m burning and exploding,” she sings, bubbly and full of hope. “Blue Lights” is grounded in her father’s memories of dodging cops during the 1968 race riots in Washington, D.C., becoming a bearing line for Jayda G to retrace her hereditary sense of survival. In connecting to her father’s past, she finds solace, purpose, and fearlessness in the present.
She also injects Guy with the unbreakable positivity that inspired William to record his stories in the first place. “Heads or Tails” begins with a delicious smattering of drum’n’bass, followed by punching keys and claps that swirl in anticipation of a daydreamy, prescriptive chorus: “Hold it, toke it, pass it ’round/Rollin’ backseat windows down.” These reminders to relish in life’s fleeting joys aren’t there to distract from the pain throughout Guy. They’re there to hold its fragmented pieces together, like a glittering disco ball. Jayda’s dance fever boils over on “Sapphires of Gold,” where she spins her lust for life into a golden thread of pop bliss. Chanting “I have fallen in love with living,” her vocals smudge like sweated-out makeup in the music’s tropically humid atmosphere.
Jayda G has always taken inspiration from life. She holds a degree in environmental toxicology, and on Significant Changes, she paired odes to oceans and orcas with splashes of disco and house. Guy represents Jayda’s next phase of alchemizing personal knowledge into dance music, though you won’t find anything quite like “Both of Us” here. The production on Guy is more understated and elusive, and at times the memories get obscured in the mist. The ’80s-inspired “Your Thoughts” presents the album’s most direct statement of intent, but a repetitive and overworked structure depletes its energy reserves. And the laid-back, Toro y Moi-esque shuffle of “Lonely Back in O,” about William’s stationing in Thailand during the Vietnam War, feels a bit too nebulous to translate as dance music or historical testimony.
On Guy, personal reconciliation takes priority over satiating the club crowd. The tragic, gorgeous closer “15 Foot,” which tells the story of Jayda’s final goodbye to her father, lands like an anchor in the chest. The music, however, is weightless: a delicate lattice accented by acoustic guitar, chimes, and trembling strings. The unifying properties of Jayda G’s sumptuous, aquatic dance-pop—and the new emphasis on voice—brings her audience close to her experience, whether or not you know the grief of losing a parent during childhood. On Guy, she takes time to steady herself to her inner metronome, finding her voice with her dad’s help.


From clumsy stadium rock to unacceptable ska, Logic’s overly ambitious album is a painful slog.

Supermarket

Four minutes into “Bohemian Trapsody,” the hamfisted opener of Logic’s new album, Supermarket, and you find yourself inside a never-ending Pro Tools session. The track’s acoustic guitar and four-on-the-floor bass—which sound ripped from a karaoke instrumental of a Gorillaz song—have faded away to make room for a trip-hop drum break that then falls into a stuttering trap drop.
In all, “Bohemian Trapsody” contains three beat changes, no rapping, and a space-rock chorus. It is also nowhere near the most ridiculous thing recorded for a project that also features an acoustic A Tribe Called Quest cover, multiple Thom Yorke impressions, and two Mac DeMarco features. From clumsy stadium rock to reggae-tinged ska, Supermarket is a painful journey across guitar music of the past five decades and makes Lil Wayne’s Rebirth look well-thought-out in comparison.
The album stems from Logic’s novel of the same name, which quickly became the No. 1 bestseller on Amazon despite the rapper admitting that he’s not much of a reader. That sort of chutzpah has always been at the center of his artistry, which is based around regurgitating the styles of abstract, genre-pushing MCs into earnest, easier-to-digest forms. This dumbing-down process has allowed him to reach younger audiences who crave the wordplay of golden-age hip-hop but aren’t necessarily interested in its grittiness. It’s also given him free rein to be as nerdy and uncompromising as he’s wanted to be, from releasing an album that takes place in outer space 100 years in the future to a record narrated by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson to a Wu-Tang Clan tribute featuring every living member of the group. But the vital difference between those projects and Supermarket is that his rubbery rapid-fire delivery, the one skill that earned him enough points as an MC to continuously reinvent himself, is almost entirely absent here.
In its place are long stretches of dull, dried-out singing by a guy who can’t sing. Logic’s frail hum mostly comes off lethargic, like on the monotonous “Best Friend,” a glossy Southern rock track without any drama, or the title track, a pre-fab alt-rock anthem that imagines a world where Thom Yorke was a literal creep: “I’m a weirdo, I’m a freak/I wish I could watch you in your sleep.” The Maryland MC is shameless in his desire to recreate the sounds of influential bands, at some points going so far as to clumsily call them out by name. Rather than coming off like his frontman idols, though, he resembles the lead singer of a cover band on a cruise ship, failing to capture any of the magic of the original material.
On “Lemon Drop,” for example, he hilariously tries out the funky scat of Blood Sugar Sex Magik-era Red Hot Chili Peppers, only to come off more like Weird Al’s 1993 impression of the band. And then there’s the two DeMarco-produced tracks, which could serve as parodies of the Canadian singer-songwriter’s sound in how formulaic and insular they sound; it’s like Logic is singing over looped versions of past releases rather than working with DeMarco to create something new.
But the most egregious moments on the album come when Logic tries to tack on hip-hop elements as afterthoughts, most painfully on “Can I Kick It,” a soulless A Tribe Called Quest cover. There’s also “Baby,” the millionth rework of Biz Markie’s 1989 classic “Just A Friend” and probably one of the worse versions yet, as well as a handful of trap drops slapped on the backends of songs, as if during the album’s mastering session Logic had some last-minute concerns about the viability of dropping a project without any hi-hats. In that moment, maybe he realized his unchecked ambition had finally gone too far.


The Syrian American producer lingers with grief and horror on her past while the music accelerates into the future.

The Quanta Series

On many songs on her debut album The Quanta Series, K Á R Y Y N serves as her own accompaniment, her own chorus. Her coos echo on “Mirror Me,” a song comprising only her voice and a reverb effect, cascading in foggy layers. Elsewhere, her voice grows restless. It shudders like tectonic plates colliding  in the first moments of “Ever,” stutters as she recites strings of ones and zeroes on “Binary.” In her work, the voice is not a solitary character bracing against its environment. It is the environment.
Descended from survivors of the Armenian genocide, the Syrian American producer and vocalist weaves the legacy of generational trauma into music that carries a futuristic sheen. The album's earliest songs were written in 2011 while K Á R Y Y N was mourning two family members who died in Aleppo.  She sings from a place rooted in the past, but always seems to be accelerating into the future: “Ambets Gorav,” is a solemn rendition of an Armenian folk song against a low electronic drone that funnels her voice into pixelating machines. The effect is dizzying, as if K Á R Y Y N were asking her listeners to gaze into vanishing points at opposite horizons.
Many of the songs on The Quanta Series were released in previous years as singles. Sequenced into an LP, they carry more dramatic weight. K Á R Y Y N's CV includes score work for games and films, and she composed music for the experimental opera Of Light while studying under performance artist Marina Abramović—she’s well-versed in the intricacies of narrative and the productive confusion that can arise when a story starts to blur. In college, she was also a student of the pioneering experimental electronic musician Pauline Oliveros, whose chaotic influence shivers across The Quanta Series.
K Á R Y Y N begins stories and then unstitches them, sending her words tumbling across icy electronic production. She's fond of puns and double meanings in her lyrics, swirling together “I” and “eye,” playing on the polyvalence of the word “tongue”: the body part and the language it produces. “Tongue is the word I want to have with you,” she sings on “Binary,” making a simultaneous bid for communication and sensuality. Often, her semantics break down in favor of pure sound. On “Aleppo,” she leaps up into her head voice, punctuating her lines with wobbling electronic bass. “I console your memory protect,” she sings, “I console your/Recall.” Her enjambment is strange, her language impressionistic. The words are vessels for her voice and not the other way around.
In the holes she leaves open throughout the album's production, the rests and pauses and empty spaces, K Á R Y Y N hints at a history of ruin. “Today is the saddest day for me,” she sings on “Today I Read Your Life Story 11:11.” “I’m missing you all the time/I have the stories you wrote one time.” She barely sings above a whisper and corrodes her voice with an effect that makes it sound as though she is crying out across a faulty phone line.
Amid the loss she mourns, the late family members and the lacunae in their histories, K Á R Y Y N locates a passage forward. She is still alive to carry her family's story. “Segmen & the Line,” a melodic continuation of “Life Story,” concludes the album on a placid note of resolution. “You are the segment/I am the line,” she sings. “Now that you're gone/I can breathe again.” Death hangs heavy over the record, but in its shadow, K Á R Y Y N projects herself into the future. An upbeat percussive glitch spurs on “Segment & the Line,” shoving her forward even as funereal drones tether her to the past. She does not close the record by allowing its grief and horror to dissipate. She lets them linger but quickens her pace, proving herself capable of carrying their weight.


The follow-up to this year’s wild Fear of the Dawn is a stripped-down songwriter record, but often the songs don’t resonate as deeply as the sounds.

Entering Heaven Alive

“Taking Me Back,” the song that closes Jack White’s fifth solo album, also opened his fourth. The version on Entering Heaven Alive, whose title carries the parenthetical “(Gently),” offers White’s workmanlike take on the gypsy jazz of the 1930s, brisk and lilting, complete with a see-sawing violin solo a la Stéphane Grappelli to kick things off. The previous version, from April’s Fear of the Dawn, is mutant stadium rock, furious and bludgeoning, stacked with electric guitars that sound like synthesizers and synthesizers that sound like electric guitars.
The contrast between the two, illustrative of a broader divide in approach between the mellow acoustic ensembles of Heaven and the frenzied studio experiments of Fear, is striking. But so is their similarity. At its core, “Taking Me Back” is about as barebones as it gets: Two sections of two or three chords each, a lyric that mostly consists of minor variations on the title phrase. The captivating stuff, in both versions, is in the accouterments: instrumental breaks that sound like a band gracefully falling down the stairs on Heaven, and deliberately choppy digital edits redolent of “Robot Rock” and Run-D.M.C. on Fear.
This has always been White’s way. With a few notable exceptions, the most memorable moments in his catalog are not songs per se, but riffs, grooves, solos, and aesthetic choices. Even the rough-and-ready sound of the early White Stripes albums was such a choice, albeit one born partially of necessity. His greatest gift is as a guitarist, and his second—leaving aside his talents for self-mythologizing and entrepreneurship—may be as something like a producer or an arranger. Those words conjure a certain slickness that may seem antithetical to his old-school affectations, but it’s true: Even when his songs aren’t at their liveliest, he usually knows how to dress them up in just the right way, or at least in a way that makes them a little more interesting. He brought that skillset to the forefront—perhaps too far—on Fear of the Dawn, and on Boarding House Reach, its similarly tinkered-over predecessor, albums with lots of bells and whistles but few lasting songs.
On its surface, Entering Heaven Alive indicates a reversal of that dynamic: a stripped-down songwriter record, with most tunes built around acoustic guitar and piano. But again, that setting is a conscious choice. And again, the bits that stick with you are not from the meat of the songs—lyrics, melodies, chord changes—but the sauce on top of it. Entering Heaven Alive has plenty of wonderful flourishes: the tender guitar-and-synth break of “If I Die Tomorrow”; the stately strings of “Help Me Along.” The instrumental hook of “A Tree on Fire From Within” puts bass guitar in an unusual lead role, played high on the neck in unison with piano. “All Along the Way” manages to downshift from pensive folk-rock into loping minor-key reggae without feeling forced or gaudy.
White’s skill as an interpreter of his own material is evident from these passages, but the material itself only occasionally holds up its end of the deal. “If I Die Tomorrow” is a tender and vulnerable highlight, confessing White’s fear that he’ll pass on before his mother and be unable to take care of her in old age. “Help Me Along” is similarly sweet, drawing on the childlike naiveté of “We’re Going to Be Friends” but updating its stripped-down singalong into stately chamber pop. More often, the songs don’t resonate as deeply as the sounds. “Love Is Selfish” features some impressive fingerpicking, but its chord changes feel like they’ve been recycled from older, stronger White compositions, and its lyrics reach for a wisdom about romantic relationships that they can’t quite grasp. (“I’ve got a sailboat with her name painted on it/But I don’t know how to sail,” goes one particularly awkward couplet.) The album’s biggest outliers, “I’ve Got You Surrounded (With My Love)” and “A Madman From Manhattan,” are lithe and funky, and could have just as easily appeared on Fear of the Dawn. They waste their grooves on insubstantial sloganeering in the case of the former and near-nonsense faux beat poetry on the latter.
White wrote and recorded Entering Heaven Alive in tandem with Fear of the Dawn, and he has positioned them as yin-and-yang companion pieces. Your choice of favorite between them will probably come down to whether you prefer White the earnest balladeer or White the maximalist mad scientist. For me, Heaven suffers because its settings imply a compositional weight that the songs just don’t carry; Fear has a clearer sense of itself as a collection of shiny amusements. In a recent Consequence profile, White said he’s no longer interested in producing for other artists, which is kind of a shame. It’s clear that he still knows how to craft a hot record. But it might help if someone else were writing the songs.


The experimental music of SOPHIE relaxes into new forms on her debut album. It is sprawling and beautiful, while still keeping the disorienting, latex-pop feel of her fascinating production technique.

Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides

Since 2013, SOPHIE has carved out an instantly identifiable musical vernacular based on synthesized bubble sounds, brash treble, deep bass, and distended, anonymous vocals. Listening to early singles like “Lemonade” or “Vyzee” could be a disorienting (and thrilling) experience, because SOPHIE’s music sounded like a latex-coated version of radio pop: It followed many of the same rules that governed the mainstream, but all the textures were too taut, too perfect, too unreal. But in the self-directed music video for “It’s Okay to Cry,” SOPHIE appeared in front of the lens of a camera and introduced an element of vulnerability to her work. Her own voice appeared on that track, and though still digitally altered, it sounded tentative and cracked through with subtle flaws. Finally, one of the most intriguing new presences in experimental pop had fully materialized.
SOPHIE’s debut album, Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, adapts many of the technical strategies heard on her previous work to looser, more sprawling compositions. Instead of chaining together compact singles as on 2015’s Product, the album builds and releases narrative tension. Beat-heavy romps like “Ponyboy” and “Faceshopping” nestle together at the top of the tracklist after “It’s Okay to Cry,” giving way to celestial swells of synthesizer and voice. Where SOPHIE’s early singles exhibited a keen feel for economy and a killer sense of humor, Oil makes a bid for transcendent beauty.
One of the album’s most astonishing tracks, “Is It Cold in the Water?,” brings SOPHIE’s music to a newly searching place. “I’m freezing/I’m burning/I’ve left my home,” a voice sings in breathy soprano. Cycling synthesizer chords build in volume throughout the verse and then drop away by the end of the first chorus. The voice sings the song’s title, stretching out the word “cold” across a series of notes, as though it belonged to someone standing at the edge of the ocean, wondering if they should jump. It’s the clearest image to arise from a SOPHIE song to date, and it sets the rest of the album in motion.
The rotating chords continue into “Infatuation,” a low-key number about admiring someone from afar, only now it’s a processed human voice singing the notes instead of a synthesizer. Then the song structures to which SOPHIE had been beholden for most of her career dissolve. The abrasive, chaotic interlude “Not Okay” opens up into “Pretending,” a six-minute ambient murk entirely unlike anything SOPHIE has put her name to before. Its formlessness, and the inclusion of stray, garbled voices towards the end suggests a primordial becoming, a vacancy from which structures can emerge. Out of the fog comes the refrain of the next song, gleefully repeated over handclaps that land on every beat: “Immaterial girls!/Immaterial boys!”
The transition from amorphous noise to giddy rallying cry ranks among Oil’s most satisfying moments. With self-affirming lyrics (“I can be anything I want”) sung through elastic pitch-shifting software, “Immaterial” sits at the album’s thematic core. It’s the molecules of a Madonna song filtered through a new context, speaking to how desire informs selfhood, how wanting to be something—a gender other than the one you were assigned at birth, say—is a big step in the process of becoming it. It may be the only step. “Immaterial” indulges desire the way the smartest pop songs can, by both inviting and challenging it. Its voices dance along irresistible melodies, and then they get distorted into impossible ones, twisted beyond their “natural” ranges into new, disarming shapes.
“Immaterial,” alongside Oil’s storming, nine-minute conclusion “Whole New World / Pretend World,” speaks to a conception of gender, being, and selfhood that feels increasingly resonant. By complicating the naturalness of the human voice and corrupting established pop structures, SOPHIE also complicates the supposed naturalness of gender, which has always been inextricable from music. Her work is a sphere where will and impulse take priority over fate and legacy. Nothing is preordained; everything is always in flux. When, on “Whole New World,” the distorted, feminized voices that have become her trademark shout out the song’s title one syllable at a time—“whole! new! world!”—it sounds almost like a manifesto, a political demand. It sounds like the kind of phrase you’d shout in a crowd while clamoring for the freedom to be whatever it is you already are.


The Glasgow producer Rustie surprise-released EVENIFUDONTBELIEVE, his third full-length, last week. It is a rawer, scrappier record than either of his prior LPs, and the way he flips the bird at conventional notions of fidelity is almost punk.

EVENIFUDONTBELIEVE

It's strange to think that Rustie's debut album came out only four years ago; so much has changed since in its wake. When Glass Swords appeared, in the fall of 2011, it was measured primarily against dubstep's yardstick, praised in part for how far it had stretched the limits of that form. Nobody talks about dubstep any more. These days, as far as swaggering, hard-knuckled electronic music goes, trap rules the roost—thanks in no small part to Glass Swords, which along with Hudson Mohawke and AraabMuzik proved that Southern rap beats plus needle-nosed synths could make for an even more invigorating rave soundtrack than dubstep did.
Glass Swords wasn't just a dubstep or trap album, of course; part of its genius was the way that it spun so many sounds and ideas into a bright, high-energy electro-funk whose central contradiction—brittle in sound, pliant in structure—turned out to be visionary. (Rustie deserves some credit for dreaming up the sound that SOPHIE and PC Music would run with: Without "Hover Traps", there'd be no "Lemonade" or "Hard".) Perhaps that inventiveness is why it took the Glasgow producer nearly three years to come up with a follow-up: last year's Green Language, a mixed bag that balanced his giddy hyper-funk instrumentals with relatively standard-issue trap. Distancing himself from that album, Rustie now complains that it was "too A&Red," his vision compromised by managers and outside influences. And just a little more than a year after that album, he's back with a new one, the surprise release EVENIFUDONTBELIEVE, and it represents a hard left turn back towards Rustie's carefully tended turf.
There is no doubting who is in control of his vision this time around. There are no cloud-rap forays, no ballads, no grime MCs, no features at all—well, not unless you count the five songs credited "(feat. Rustie)," in which the producer sings and plays guitar (not that you would necessarily know it from listening to the songs). Tongue-in-cheek though the gesture may be, the funny thing about the distinction is how little difference is detectable between the songs "featuring" Rustie and those that are just by him. Both incorporate vocal chops frothed to high heaven, like towering Everests of Cool Whip; both are topped by soaring, tremolo-shaken synth leads; and both are driven forward by churning rhythms that split the difference between hardstyle's 160-BPM kicks and trap's lumbering syncopations.
It is a rawer, scrappier record than either of his prior LPs, and the way he flips the bird at conventional notions of fidelity is almost punk. The high end often has the crinkly cellophane quality of low-bitrate MP3s, and there's so much information being stuffed into the treble register that it occasionally registers as buzz. His drums are plenty forceful—his kicks and snares, in particular, sound like they've been pushed deeply into the red and then run through even more distortion, just for fun—but it lacks the sub-bass of most trap, preferring to muster all its energies for a mid-range wallop that thumps you in the sternum. The rolling toms of "Big Catzzz" sounds like he's recorded them off Fury Road with his iPhone.
If his sonics are idiosyncratic, his structures are less so. A typical track consists of a minute-long introduction, 30 seconds of the main theme, a minute of pullback, a 30-second return to the main theme, and, finally, a tidy denouement and fadeout. Everything in the song—the rolling drums, the looped voices, the smeared synths, the crescendos of white noise—leads up to that big hit of adrenaline. What's even more striking is how similar the main themes sound, once you subtract all the surrounding flotsam and jetsam. If you placed the album's biggest hooks side by side, it'd sound like one song, uniform in mood, instrumentation, and tone color.
Is that a problem? It all depends upon your tolerance. If the idea of mixing Pop Rocks in your breakfast Mountain Dew sounds good to you (or if, like Rustie, you listen to happy hardcore to go to sleep), then EVENIFUDONTBELIEVE will be right up your alley. For the rest of us, there are some genuine thrills (sorry, thrillz) here: "First Mythz", with its dolphin clicks and bullet-riddled hi-hats; the calmer "Atlantean Airship", which sounds like Glass Swords-era Rustie curdled by acidic distortion. "Peace Upzzz" is one of the few songs that actually refuses a big payoff: It's all crescendo and no climax, and better for it.
For those who aren't fully on board with Rustie's aesthetic, exhaustion sets in quickly, and the slope of diminishing returns is steep. And that's probably just fine with him, because this is a one-man rollercoaster, from the "features" to the credits ("Written by Rustie/ Produced by Rustie/ Extra vocals by Rustie/ Guitar by Rustie/ Art direction by Rustie/ Photography by Rustie"). There is zero daylight between the artist and his vision, as he pounds tirelessly away at one very specific idea. It is less an album than a set of 15 variations upon a single theme. It is the Rustiest album possible, and you have to respect that kind of doggedness.


The veteran singer-songwriter sets aside his meticulous studio approach for a quickly recorded album with orchestral arrangements.

White Wilderness

John Vanderslice is a known and avowed tinkerer. He operates Tiny Telephone Studio, so if he wants to take his time making a record, he certainly can. All of his albums to date have been meticulously assembled things, full of carefully layered sounds, tweaked and prodded into shape over months. I guess everybody needs a change of pace now and then, because White Wilderness was recorded in three days with a live band, outside of Tiny Telephone. The live band in question is something called the Magik*Magik Orchestra, led by Minna Choi. They're not strictly a chamber orchestra in the sense you might expect. Yes, Choi has arranged these songs with strings and woodwinds, but the orchestra members also contribute things like piano, drums, and pedal steel.
So he got out of the studio and stretched his legs a little with a small orchestra. What kind of record does that make? Well, take away the tinkering and you get a record that still fits quite comfortably into Vanderslice's discography-- it's not that different, stylistically, from anything else he's done. The meticulous studio layering missing here is largely covered up by the orchestration. If there's any significant difference, it's in Vanderslice himself. His voice sounds much more vulnerable and fragile in this setting. I think back in particular to 2009's Romanian Names, where he seemed to be growing more comfortable with building himself into a small choir and was really putting his vocals out front; here, he recedes into the band a bit more, occasionally bolstered by a harmony from Choi or a few fluttering "ah ahs" from some of the orchestra.
He gets some of those "ahs" on "The Piano Lesson", a song literally about learning to play piano that Choi uses as an orchestral playground. Vanderslice's wandering vocal melody is anchored by an ominous sax figure, the strings play racing pizzicato patterns, brass and flutes swell queasily, and the overall effect is strikingly dark. There's a subtle tension at play on the album, almost a tug of war between Vanderslice and Choi, and one or the other typically winds up dominating each song, but there are a few where they strike a real balance. Up-tempo standout "Overcoat" is one of those songs. Vanderslice isn't so much a verse/chorus songwriter, but he can craft a memorable melody, and this one is great. It keeps the moaning woodwinds and shivering strings at bay until the second half of the song, when the complexity of the arrangement increases, leaving him to carefully pick his way through shards of orchestration.
One thing that working with an orchestra didn't disrupt is Vanderslice's commitment to concision. It must have been tempting to make something sprawling and try to live up to the orchestral scope of the project, but White Wilderness is just over a half hour long, like most of Vanderslice's albums. This has always served him well-- none of his records wear out their welcome. Neither does this one, but I do get the feeling there's a reason he usually spends so much time agonizing over his records-- all that tweaking really brings out the details of his songwriting, which are sometimes lost in the orchestration and less polished vocals here. Still, these types of projects can help a songwriter refocus and between them Vanderslice and Choi have made a memorable album that successfully adds a new twist to Vanderslice's catalog.


The Southern California rocker cobbles together a pastiche of 1950s rockabilly, 1960s pop, and old-school soul. At its best, it’s a shot of pure joy, but it never quite transcends its inspirations.

Nick Waterhouse

“What I do has no theatricality in it,” Nick Waterhouse says in a recent fashion video for men’s fashion site Mr. Porter. It’s a curious statement to end a clip in which he wanders around a set-decorated house and explains his sartorial style as “Pacific Coast Americana,” which I think is based on the preppy kids who always got beaten up in 1960s biker flicks—the culture instead of the counterculture. That insistence that he’s not staging anything is even more curious coming from an artist who specializes in midcentury-modern rock’n’roll, a studious collision of 1950s rockabilly, ’60s pop, and old-school R&B from Memphis, New Orleans, and New York. Like JD McPherson and Eli “Paperboy” Reed, Waterhouse is a revivalist who insists he’s not a revivalist, a contradiction that extends beyond his dress code to his music.
Superficially, the Southern California native gets everything just so. Waterhouse recorded his fourth album exclusively in analog, of course, and he knows how to assemble a song so that it sounds just slightly uprooted from any one historical scene or style. “Song for Winners” opens with a Duane Eddy guitar lick before launching into a swaggering Nuggets garage rocker, with Waterhouse slightly sneering his vocals to sound a little bit like the Standells’ Larry Tamblyn. There’s a gronky sax solo and a spy-surf guitar solo. The song is pan-nostalgic: crammed with all sorts of old, familiar sounds, yet they all make sense in this assemblage, more or less. Waterhouse scrambles our expectations of old-school musical styles while underscoring how much pure listening joy can be found in these elements.
Yet Nick Waterhouse can’t really make them add up to much beyond themselves. His references remain references. When he plays a rock instrumental, it’s so close to the Champs’ biggest hit that you might find yourself reflexively yelling, “Tequila!” Maybe he’s too good as his job—or, as he sings on opener “By Heart,” “Never learn something you can do by heart/Soon as you do it comes apart.” Most everything here sounds precise to the point of fussy, even fetishistic: the tasteful distortion in his vocals, the buzzy roominess of the production, the self-conscious elegance of slower tunes like “Thought & Act.” On “Wreck the Rod” he has the backing vocalists shout “Love!” at us on the beat, which gives a distinctive, neat-o hook but distracts from Waterhouse’s conflicted ode to masochistic love. At heart these songs sound clever, and clever is the enemy of soul, the clogger of grooves. Perhaps that aspect of the music diminishes onstage, when Waterhouse and his band can cut loose and shed some of that rock-historical baggage, but it makes for an album that’s a little too shirt-and-pants.


After last year’s Feel Infinite, the Canadian producer expands and refines his arsenal of club tools, folding touches of acid and ambient into tracks that build on his melodic sensibilities.

Fever Focus EP

This past summer, Jacques Greene launched his party series Beau Travail with a simple premise: the Toronto-based producer going back to back all night with some of his favorite selectors. Guests so far have included Project Pablo, Eclair Fifi, and Martyn Bootyspoon; the anything-goes format recalls Philippe Aubin-Dionne’s Montreal club beginnings, allowing him the chance to test out new material in an intimate setting.
Much like those nights, which might feature anything from ghettotech to deep house, there’s a
delightful sense of informality to his latest EP, Fever Focus. Following his 2017 debut album, Feel Infinite, these six tracks began as “fun loops and ideas” that the producer then sculpted and played in DJ and live sets over the past year. Some songs, like the throbbing endorphin rush “Convex Mirror,” first surfaced as demos on Aubin-Dionne’s 48-minute mixtape shared on NTS Radio in May, but here, they’re fully fleshed out and given the space to breathe. Rather than a stopgap between releases, it’s his most high-definition collection to date, building on familiar forms and expanding his melodic sensibilities.
These tracks skew warmer and gauzier than his previous output, and they showcase an encyclopedic knowledge of his rave forebears. Whereas it’s commonplace for today’s electronic producers to have one album cut that’s explicitly “acid” or “ambient,” Aubin-Dionne opts to fold these influences into the mélange. The latter reference point rears its head on the aforementioned “Convex Mirror” with a whirring synth line evoking a babbling forest brook, backdropped by minimalist drums. Longtime followers will be pleased to find he hasn’t abandoned mesmerizing vocal chops, though here they’re dubbed and spun until they’re ghosts in his machines, like on the rattling jacker “Perlant” and the twitchy title track.
The two biggest highlights are the two longest songs, where the producer takes the time to let his ideas gently unspool. “Nordschleife”—named after the infamous German racing track known for testing the mettle of even the most skilled drivers—samples Los Angeles singer-songwriter Kelsey Belkin, whose melancholic refrain (“You make me cry”) is looped and laid over airy synths and jungle breaks. The EP culminates with the sensual mid-tempo house cut “Avatar Beach,” where Aubin-Dionne deftly balances driving percussion and feathery trance pads like a digital illustrator finding new colors.
Describing the making of Feel Infinite last year, the producer said, “I love the club as social microcosm. You get snapshots of people's true colors and I love that for the good and the bad.”  While Fever Focus is deliberately less conceptual, it taps into a wide array of moods and textures while expanding the arsenal of dancefloor anthems at his disposal. For proof of its effectiveness, look no further than the recording of Aubin-Dionne’s four-and-a-half hour B2B set with Scottish DJ and LuckyMe labelmate Eclair Fifi this past summer. At the midway point, “Convex Mirror” is dropped, and you can practically feel the energy in the sweaty Toronto venue rise as the dancers cheer. Almost a decade since he released his first EP, he’s still finding new paths to euphoria.