The last album from Virginia-born band Turnover found a sweet spot between pop-punk and dream pop, but their influences are more sedate and smooth this time.

Good Nature

Pop-punk and lush, lovelorn indie rock were enjoying a slow and steady undercover flirtation long before Turnover released their second LP in 2015, but Peripheral Vision was the one that took it public. Awkward reminders of their Warped Tour-friendly formative phase occasionally popped up, but that was OK: Peripheral Vision became a surprise hit because there were apparently plenty of other pop-punk kids who were transitioning towards shoegaze and dream pop, and they now had a band of this ilk to call their own. But on Turnover’s new album, Good Nature, getting on frontman Austin Getz’s level requires more than an updated vinyl collection. He turned vegan, moved with his girlfriend from Virginia Beach to California wine country, and made a record that sounds like he’d been there all along.
“I found my religion/When nothing was ahead of us/That week in California,” Getz sighs on the starlit carousel ride “Super Natural.” It’s an extremely low-key way to begin an album, but it’s still a bold introduction if only in contrast to where he was two years ago with Peripheral Vision’s thrilling streaks of self-loathing, “Cutting My Fingers Off” and “New Scream.” Regardless of his current location, Good Nature is SoCal to the core, a warm embrace of the area’s soft-focus spirituality and the optimism of young, beautiful creatives without much to worry about.
The flaws of Peripheral Vision derived almost entirely from the times Getz’s aggrieved point of view clashed with the newfound, sleek elegance of Turnover’s music. But there are zero moments on Good Nature that have to be enjoyed through gritted teeth, and plenty that can be paired with your favorite Sonoma Valley grape. The influences are more sedate and smooth this time out, Getz’s softened take on life accompanied by Tango in the Night harmonizing and brisk Brit-pop. With its limpid jazz chords, “Pure Devotion” is the first Turnover song that could work at a poolside cocktail party.
Therein lies the conundrum for Turnover: though Peripheral Vision likely broadened the horizons of people who caught them opening for The Story So Far or New Found Glory, it was also uniquely appealing to seasoned indie rock listeners who found Real Estate a little too complacent or wished Wild Nothing could really kick out the jams. But the perfectly lovely and interchangeable shimmers of “What Got in the Way” and “Curiosity” threaten to define Good Nature by passing without incident or much impact. So what exactly distinguishes Turnover now?
Well, for one, none of their indie peers could write a song like “Breeze.” Taking advantage of Will Yip’s most verdant production, Turnover revisit the rhythmic propulsion and harmonized guitar sparkles that defined Peripheral Vision. Catch a few stray lines from the chorus—“I can’t stop you running through my head,” “it just makes me wanna go away, I’ll do it”—and it captures a perfect moment of dizzying infatuation between Bleed American’s summer swelter and the back-to-school wistfulness of American Football. And then there’s the last line that ties it all together, “Let you keep eating my heart out with your silver spoon,” which could very well be an admission of defeat from a guy who’s way out of his league. The hooks might need more massaging to emerge this time out, but the twist on “Breeze” reveals that Turnover are still the same band, talking about how to quantify success, how we get in the way of our own happiness, and of course, the way romantic fortunes can make the future seem as vast as the California coastline or as small as the room in your parent’s house.


Ahhh, if I only had a Latin Grammy for every time some hot air-bloated rock pundit wrote that Bob Dylan ...

When I Was Cruel

Ahhh, if I only had a Latin Grammy for every time some hot air-bloated rock pundit wrote that Bob Dylan's "still got it," that Bruce Springsteen's late-90s social posturing is any more convincing than his Reagan-era material, that the small army of background singers and synthesizers required to create Brian Wilson's Imagination really sound any fresher than, say, "Kokomo." For the last seven or eight years, Elvis Costello fans have had great reason for concern.
After a stellar showing with the reunited Attractions on 1994's Brutal Youth, Costello released a trio of disappointing releases. 1996's All This Useless Beauty barely used the Attractions, wandering in several different directions at once and recycling material originally written for other artists. 1998's Burt Bacharach collaboration Painted from Memory seemingly aged Costello an extra twenty years, with its preponderance of crooning ballads and arrangements that might as well have been recorded for a Dionne Warwick comeback. And last year's pairing with Anne Sofie von Otter, For the Stars, barely qualified as a Costello release at all, with a predilection for Costello's iffiest material ("Shamed into Love," anyone?) and a pair of Tom Waits' more forgettable castoffs.
When I Was Cruel, happily, finds Costello tuning his compass with two excellent reference points: his 1986 masterwork Blood and Chocolate and the eclectic showmanship of 1989's Spike. Once again, Costello drafts Attractions Steve Nieve and Pete Thomas into the fold, but with a breath of fresh air in the form of Cracker's Davey Faragher on bass. Costello harnesses some of his Useless Beauty period's greatest strengths-- the wet percussion from Tricky's remix of "Little Atoms," for instance, and the tremolo guitar that dominated "Complicated Shadows"-- to give his new compositions a contemporary edge while anchoring the music to the ragged, rough-edged guitar sound that's been the signature of Costello's best work.
The result is an immediately engrossing and challenging collection of moody, evocative songs-- an entire album of "I Want You" and "Watching the Detectives" for those so inclined. The cinematic noir of "When I Was Cruel No. 2," with its point-of-view narration and looped female vocal, plays like the torch song from some as-yet unmade David Lynch film-- Twin Peaks meets Portishead in a smoky Italian nightclub. The faux-Beat rhythms of "Dust" and outright scat on the jazz-damaged "Episode of Blonde" succeed both as prose and dramatic bits of music, easily upstaging Tom Waits' hit-and-miss homages to Kerouac and Ginsberg.
The balls-out rock textures of Blood and Chocolate are re-explored on "Tear Off Your Own Head (It's a Doll Revolution)," with its thick guitar hooks and powerful blasts of cleverly flanged bass, and "My Blue Window," a cheeky nod to Blood and Chocolate's "Blue Chair." The guitar-driven "Daddy Can I Turn This" and the meaty, dissonant "Dissolve" are Costello-by-the-numbers, tightly wound pop gems that seem to spring painlessly from Costello's loins when he's on a roll.
But it's the more experimental pieces on When I Was Cruel that are the most consistently rewarding. The percolating rhythms and locomotive bass on "Spooky Girlfriend," augmented by horns and tight background harmonies, almost sound like Costello backed by Oranges and Lemons-era XTC. Likewise with the complicated pastiche of programmed beats, organ and horns on "15 Petals," a confident and infectious detour into Latin rhythms (think Tito Puente, not Ricky Martin). The measured swells of backwards guitar and deep bass hits on closer "Radio Silence" send When I Was Cruel out on an optimistic note-- for the future of music and for Costello's own relevance in the post-modern blipscape of Kid A and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
Perhaps When I Was Cruel's sweetest punch is that, at 47, Costello sounds pretty much exactly as he did at 27. Unlike Dylan, Springsteen, Wilson, or Waits-- or, god knows, Lou Reed-- he hasn't had to compromise his music to fit his aging pipes. Costello's at his most entertaining when he cleverly sidesteps an issue rather than confronting it head on, as on the slight misfire of "45," which makes the trite connection between Costello's age and the number of revolutions per minute made by a hit record.
Faragher's hyperactive bass proves a savvy addition to Nieve's blasting organ and noodling piano, Thomas' busy rhythms, and Costello's spy-film guitar riffs. Some of Costello's most interesting work has been fatally injured by poor chemistry; When I Was Cruel is a self-confident return to form-- sharp, solid and, though Costello should have nothing to prove-- completely relevant.


On their second album since founding member Edgar Froese’s death in 2015, the German electronic maestros continue to supersize their signature brand of cosmic synth music.

Raum

Tangerine Dream are a vast, elemental force, an electronic music group whose grandiloquent synthesizer soundscapes tower over the pithiness of pop convention. Wherever you look, Tangerine Dream operate at scale: They have released more than 100 albums since forming in Germany in 1967, surround themselves with prodigious racks of synths on stage, and their songs routinely nudge the 20-minute mark. They are, in many ways, the Grateful Dead of electronic music: a hippy band of brothers, eternal and somehow always themselves, their music an endlessly extending ray of cosmic light.
Even the death of founding member Edgar Froese in 2015 could not stop a band as enduring as Tangerine Dream. Raum is the second album the group has released since Froese’s passing, and he features in both spirit and sound. According to Thorsten Quaeschning, who has been with Tangerine Dream since 2005, Froese and his wife Bianca made plans for the band to continue after his death, and Raum was produced with access to Froese’s Cubase arrangements and tape archive of recordings from 1977 to 2013.
Like the Dead, Tangerine Dream were once innovators, a kind of proto-Kraftwerk best enjoyed semi-horizontally while ensconced in a bean-bag chair. Their first studio album, 1970’s Electronic Meditation, featured eerie found sounds among more conventional rock instruments, and from 1971’s Alpha Centauri onward—three years before Kraftwerk’s Autobahn—Tangerine Dream threw themselves into electronic instrumentation. In the late ’70s and early ’80s their sound became slicker and more cinematic, soundtracking films like Sorcerer, Thief, and even Risky Business. Raum doesn’t really break any barriers, but nor was it intended to. After 2014’s Phaedra Farewell Tour, Froese decided that the group should return to the formula of synths, sequencers, and electric violin that Tangerine Dream employed in the ’70s and ’80s, “not copying it but recreating that style with present technology,” said Quaeschning.
Raum’s 15-minute title track, in particular, is a throwback to the omniscient ambience of 1972’s Zeit, a shimmering Moog bassline summoning forth synth sweeps as potent as rocket fuel, slowly tapering off into the elegant, dreamy drones of Hoshiko Yamane’s electric violin, before the Moog returns to guide the listener home. Tangerine Dream are grandmasters of space and melody, and “Raum” shows them at their architectural best, their work as airily palatial as a castle made of cloud.
“You’re Always On Time” makes up for its weakling eight-minute runtime with one of the album’s strongest melodies, a mournful synthesizer riff that is just unpredictable enough to keep it from lapsing into parody, while “Along the Canal” combines a gloomy chord sequence with a synth effect that patters like rain along a gutter, a mixture of form and function so emotively epic it could paint the Grand Canyon blue. By contrast, the opening “Continuum” sounds almost hemmed in by the conventions of percussion, its rather strait-laced drum-machine beats unworthy of the synth sprawl they sheepishly try to rally into place. And “In 256 Zeichen” spreads its melodic ideas too thin; the song’s mammoth stretch is an indulgence that soon grates.
For a band as endlessly prolific as Tangerine Dream, it’s hard to argue that Raum is in any way essential; it’s essentially a recreation of past glories that never quite hits those heights. As a piece of the Tangerine Dream continuum, however, Raum satisfies: Its unashamed drift and scale pay a tribute to a world where music is huge, omnipresent, and never ending.


After years of mostly solo projects, the indie legend releases his first LP under his own name.

Emoh

Given the amount of material that Lou Barlow has issued under sometimes misleading monikers (Sebadoh, Sentridoh, The Folk Implosion, The New Folk Implosion, Lou's Wasted Pieces...), it's sort of odd to consider this record-- the first released under his full name-- his solo debut. Barlow has recorded countless songs at a prolifc rate, paying little attention to recording (and, arguably, any other kind of) quality. Barlow writes songs like some people smoke cigarettes or pick their nose: Compulsively, and without regard to who's paying attention. However, Emoh is the most consistently strong record he's released since The Folk Implosion's One Part Lullaby-- and it could be his most melodic: There's no tape hiss, awkward count-off's, dialogue, or noise experiments here. Even if much of it was recorded at home, Emoh's 14 unassuming folk songs sound like they were created in a professional setting.
The album moves in whiter shades of pale lullabies, between acoustic grunge-lite ("Caterpillar Girl"), private backroom square-dances ("Holding Back the Year", "If I Could"), and traditional story songs like "Mary", a clever jibe at Christian folklore ("Immaculate conception/ Yeah, right") written from the POV of the real babydaddy-- he and Mary saved from retribution by history's (supposedly) most infamous lie. As melancholy or as victimized as Barlow has painted himself in the past, it's possible that all this time he just wanted to write campfire sing-alongs about his cats (see "The Ballad of Daykitty"). Sounding as direct and spontaneous as a living-room rehearsal for friends, these songs don't pretend to be much more.
The instrument that gets the most attention is Barlow's own voice. Whether it's the recording quality or just increased confidence, his voice is stronger and deeper here than on any of his earlier work, and self-harmonizing occurs frequently-- even dominating many of these songs. There are a few holdovers from his lo-fi past: "Holding Back the Year" closes with some sloppy vibrato from a lead guitar, and a Casio keyboard blurts out a solo in "Monkey Begun". But along with the occasional use of drum loops, these touches are used clinically and sparingly, only to add a bit of color to the otherwise spartan arrangements. For better or for worse, we're left with a little acoustic guitar and a whole lotta Lou.
Perhaps then that's why most of these songs never seem to rise above a whisper. The bubbling electro-folk of "Home" manages to stand above the rest, but while this new batch of songs is pleasant and often charming, they're not as memorable or passionate as Barlow's best. Emoh is a record that will please longtime fans-- and maybe bring back a few he's lost.


Recording with John Agnello (Dinosaur Jr., Kurt Vile), the British punks clean up their sound a bit on their latest Sub Pop LP.

Endless Now

From an early age, boys are taught to avoid wearing their hearts on their sleeves. The more you open yourself up, the greater the chance that you'll get yourself hurt. Male Bonding like to explore the tension between TMI and musical aggression. They kick up dust and make a lot of noise but then write of pain, jealousy, depression, and loss. The title of their fine Sub Pop debut, Nothing Hurts, was a succinct summary of their contradictions.
It took some time to get the whole picture on Nothing Hurts-- for one, you had to get past the heavy British accents (to say nothing of the album's trashcan production values). The band's songwriter, John Arthur Webb, and co-singer/bassist Kevin Hendrick had problems with speaking up, too, obscuring some of their scattered thoughts. Some have cited this unintelligibility as a telltale sign of Male Bonding's lack of personality; while that's an understandable conclusion to reach, their distance ultimately comes across as a self-defense mechanism-- emotional armor, if you will.
Considering the circumstances that surround Male Bonding's second album, Endless Now, you'd assume the stage for this self-hatred and confusion would be a little more well-lit. The record was produced by 1990s-throwback-indie producer du jour John Agnello (Dinosaur Jr., Kurt Vile) and recorded in Woodstock, New York's Dreamland Recording Studio, a converted 19th-century church. The results are (slightly) more polished, with more room for the band's bashing guitars to stretch their legs. As a songwriter, though, Webb hasn't changed-- if anything, the new sonic spread just provides more hiding places, the dense thickets of melodic hum that drive "Can't Dream" and early single "Bones" functioning as curtains to sing behind. His cloudy outlook is still noticeable-- despite its title, "Tame the Sun" is about not being able to tame the sun-- but it takes some digging through the sheets of noise in "Bones" to unearth its futile core: "Be careful what you dream about/ There's not always ways out."
Lest you think Endless Now sounds like one big pity party, it's not. Nothing Hurts had a big, beating pop heart underneath its scrapes and bruises, and here the hooks are plentiful, to the point where touring guitarist Nathan Hewitt was enlisted to handle the overflow of sweet, sticky stuff. The phrase "pop-punk" has been thrown around with these guys, and with good reason (besides those Rivers Cuomo recording sessions, that is); if you took the swaying chorus on "Seems to Notice Now" and plunked it in the middle of a pre-misery-and-maturity Blink-182 album, I'm not sure how many would know the difference. A possibly more apt comparison would be Thirteen-era Teenage Fanclub or even vintage Fountains of Wayne in terms of sparkly power-pop goodness, with just a little grit (fittingly, the band's been known to do a cover of FoW's "Radiation Vibe" every now and then).
Comparisons to such bastions of relative "uncoolness" is a surefire way to break out of the "lo-fi" holding cell that the band complained to Pitchfork about earlier this year. Although the outgoing sonics of Endless Now represent a considerable leap in sound, it's those same qualities that could very well repel those drawn in by the burnt-ends glory of Nothing Hurts-- not because that previous record is necessarily better, though. It's just... different. And there's nothing wrong with that if you approach Endless Now with an open mind. Bands grow and evolve, and that means shedding some old habits for new ones-- even if they're not ready to drop all of their defense mechanisms just yet.


Beneath its sharp edges and heavy drums, the producers’ second collaboration takes a gentle, humanistic approach.

Body of Carbon

Loke Rahbek has always thought a lot about vulnerability. In 2014, the Copenhagen-based musician released an album under his Croatian Amor moniker that could only be purchased by sending him a nude self-portrait. A year earlier, his band Vår—a collaboration with Iceage’s Elias Bender Rønnenfelt—released a record with a mirror for a cover; picking it up off the shelf meant implicating yourself in the music, the listener implicitly becoming part of the product. These sorts of gestures can seem like marketing gimmicks, but there’s a sincerity in the message behind them. He’s willing to bare his soul to you if you’ll do the same.
With the exception of some noisier releases early in the project’s lifespan, Croatian Amor’s music has largely mirrored that warmth. Consider his 2016 album Love Means Taking Action, which he’s said was about “a quest to love strangers so that they stop being strangers,” and consisted mostly of glittering ambient instrumentals and heavenly vocal samples. It glowed with surprising humanity, and it has been a tone-setter for much of his work since. Body of Water, his 2018 collaboration with the Swedish producer Varg2TM, was the furthest he’d pursued his more tranquil interests. Its four tracks were misty and abstract, not unlike the cosmic excursions of Steve Roach or the synth-led naivete of ’80s new age labels like Valley of the Sun.
The sequel, Body of Carbon, appears quite dissimilar on the surface. Like its predecessor, it’s driven by abstract synth work, but the mood is different—more inky and earthy. The title track opens with squealing synth work, which on its own is enough to separate it from the wispy pieces on Body of Water, but the track quickly tacks on gnarled layers until it reaches a freakish approximation of a grime beat—replete with a barking kick drum that might otherwise echo through Thunderdome.
Heavier music isn’t unfamiliar territory for the duo, though. Rahbek’s other projects often include tortured industrial excursions, and Varg2TM’s catalog is frequently dancefloor-adjacent—even if he holds some reservations about that whole scene. So when their wheezing ambiance is accompanied by kick drum punishment, like on “Tell Your Tale to the River,” it’s not necessarily so unexpected. They know how to rage when the occasion calls for it.
But the stylistic left turn is ultimately an act of deception. Despite its sharper edges, Body of Carbon finds a way to further explore the gentle, humanistic approach demonstrated on Body of Water. You can hear this guiding principle in even its most twisted tracks. Outside of the hopscotching bass drum, the gasping synths and soaring trance leads of “Tell Your Tale to the River” feel full of air and light. In approach, if not in sound, it recalls some of Coil’s best records, in which tenderness and torment lock in embrace.
The record’s most striking moments come in the delirious haze of the second track, “God’s Face in the Water.” The foggy instrumental echoes all kinds of emotional electronic music—from Slowdive’s windswept ambient work on Pygmalion to the devotional miniatures on PAN’s Mono No Aware compilation—as a digital voice murmurs mantra-esque phrases about finding miracles in the mundane. “I see God in the water in my water bottle,” the voice says. “God in the strobe lights.” It underscores the same point Rahbek was making with those idiosyncratic releases earlier this decade. Even in a harsh, cold world, there’s beauty if you’re open to finding it.


If Bristol-based songwriter Ellis Jones’ witty yet melancholy final album as Trust Fund has an overarching theme, it’s how deeply disenchanted he feels with making music.

Bringing the Backline

How witty is Ellis Jones? Here is how the Bristol-based songwriter describes Bringing the Backline, his latest album as Trust Fund, in a wry effort to mitigate the “risk inherent in committing to the purchase of a somewhat unknown quantity,” while exhorting fans to pre-order: It contains “details specific enough to feel frank and confessional, yet non-specific enough to allow for the listener to substitute in their own life experiences.” This is a succinct and accurate description of, well, art. A pithy bon mot that both touches on some essential truth and self-deprecatingly trivializes it is Trust Fund’s trademark. Ellis Jones is very witty—perhaps too witty for his own good.
Like Art Brut and to some extent Weezer, Trust Fund is a pop-rock band too self-aware and self-reflexive to ever seem entirely in earnest. This is not a shortcoming; it’s what makes the music droll and amusing, and what endears Jones as a comedian eager to invite you in on the joke. He shares with Rivers Cuomo the inclination to play against frontman type, dwelling on his weaknesses instead of adopting the traditional rock-star swagger as he exaggerates his dweebiness for ironic effect. Fond of recherche constructions (“Essay not upon the self uncovered/But document the work of others”) and naming songs after lauded novelists (“Carson McCullers”), he has the literary zeal of an unapologetic intellectual like Colin Meloy. Trust Fund is highbrow comic rock meant to make you feel clever and discerning.
Jones likes a good quip—his lyrics often turn on a witticism or humorous observation—but his writing tends toward the dry and is rarely what you would call jokey. He has a strong command of tone; his eye for detail is almost novelistic in its keenness. “I was boastful, I was boring, we were queuing for the toilet/In the cramped corridor of your friend’s house,” he sings on “King of CM.” “You took a picture of me for your girls in the group chat/And now I want to tell all my secrets to you.” The same group chat reappears, with more urgency, elsewhere: “All her messages I would read aloud/But the girls in the group chat, they alone can help her now.” It’s just as Jones promised: equal parts confessional and nonspecific.
A shadow of melancholy hangs over the droll vignettes on Bringing the Backline—a certain low-level distress or anguish about which Jones remains characteristically sardonic. “Got that sad Sunday suicidal ideation eight days a week,” he sings with a kind of mordant gaiety on album opener “Blue X.” “And listening to your band/Crying at the back/Made me think about my band/How boring is that?” A song called “Embarrassing!,” meanwhile, is a rousing, Pavement-ish indie rock anthem about depression. Breakups are lamented, until they aren’t: “I can’t remember why we broke up… Oh yeah/Of course I do.” Feelings verge on the sentimental, until irony cuts in: “One thing a song can do/Is tell you with a terrible sureness/Exactly who your heart belongs to… Not that it can belong to anyone.”
Shortly after Bringing the Backline’s release, Jones announced that “for various non-dramatic reasons” it would be Trust Fund’s final record. For anyone who’d listened to the album, the news would hardly be surprising. If these songs have an overarching theme, it’s how deeply disenchanted Jones feels with making music. Sometimes this sentiment has the wistful quality of reminiscence. Other times, he sounds as if he’s accepting defeat. Occasionally his lyrics convey nothing short of despair.
In the end, though, he can’t help but reflect on his time as Trust Fund with wit and good humor: “The best thing about touring is a week in a van with your friends,” he kids on “King of CM.” “The worst thing about touring is a week in a van with your best friends.” You get the sense that however badly Jones may miss life in the studio and on the road, he will miss these opportunities for dry punchlines and trenchant witticisms more than anything.


On her debut album, Montreal visual artist-turned-electronic pop provocateur Alexandra Mackenzie makes vital protest music that summons collective strength to overcome existential fear.

This Trip

There have been no lack of colorful terms used to describe life in a post-Trump world. Take your pick: “horror show,” “shit show,” “nightmare,” “dumpster fire,” “end times,” and so on. The debut album from Montreal-based visual artist-turned-electronic-pop provocateur Alexandra Mackenzie—a.k.a. Petra Glynt—offers a different take: To her, it’s all a trip. (And judging by the phantasmagoric nature of both her illustrations and music, it’s safe to assume the hallucinogenic interpretation applies here.) “Trip” is a word that hits with the same visceral impact as those mentioned above, yet it doesn’t quite carry the same apocalyptic connotations. Trips can certainly be frightening and traumatic, rendering the world before your eyes as something horrible and grotesque. But, if you can keep your shit together, they ultimately do come to an end, and their most turbulent stretches can be more easily navigated with a supportive guide at your side looking out for your well-being.
Throughout This Trip, Mackenize assumes the mantle of Pied Piper, leading us through this waking nightmare toward the light. It’s a role she’s accustomed to—activism and community have always been central to her music and art. A product of the same experimental Toronto scene that yielded fellow avant-pop radical Lido Pimienta, Mackenzie approaches performance as if preparing for war—against patriarchy, against environmental neglect, against austerity economics. Bathed in intensely psychedelic projections, she’ll lay down thundering rhythm tracks using a floor tom and loop them through pedals, before layering on distorted, disorienting electronics in rhythmic swells. And then she unleashes her most powerful weapon of all: a striking, sonorous, opera-schooled voice that’s part stern school headmaster, part veteran soul diva. On strident early tracks like “Sour Paradise” and “Of This Land,” that voice had to bust through the surrounding clamor with the force of a battering ram in order to get their eco-conscious invectives across. They were the sort of songs that, 40 years ago, you could imagine being belted out by a hippie busker trying to get the attention of aloof white-collared businessmen on their way to work. But Mackenzie’s music can’t help but reflect the manic, sensory-overloaded nature of 21st-century life, and her voice is the blaring megaphone that modern protest music requires.
This Trip’s title-track centerpiece actually dates back a few years, long before Trumpism became an American epidemic. However, at the time, Canada was being weighed down by its own political albatross. Sure, these days, Canada’s universal healthcare system, copious arts funding, and hunky prime minister can make the place seem like a socialist utopia compared to the U.S. But from 2006 to 2015, the country was headed by Stephen Harper, a staunch conservative whose divisive rhetoric, disregard for the marginalized, and single-minded belief in economy over environment provided a sort of soft-launch/focus-group teaser of the turmoil currently infecting the U.S. During Harper’s final year in office, Mackenzie released “Murder,” a slow-burning cauldron of bilious spite and barely contained rage directed at the prime minister. But “This Trip,” written around the same time, feels like the response track where dispiriting anger gives way to tangible action. Atop a vibrating bed of bass, Mackenzie admits, “It’s easy to wander, to waver under thunder/Sink further underwater.” So she uses everything at her disposal—from intensifying 808 clatter to gospelized call-and-response refrains to heart-throttling techno—to ensure that doesn’t happen.
The fact that “This Trip” can now be easily applied to the political strife festering beyond her country’s border is oddly emblematic of Mackenzie’s own burgeoning ambitions. The new album complements Mackenzie’s DIY productions with mixes by Damian Taylor, whose credits include the Killers, Björk, and the Prodigy (as well as some acts closer to Mackenzie’s immediate circle, like Austra and Doldrums). Though built from her trusty toolkit of drums and drones, the recordings rebuild Mackenzie’s wall of sound as a three-dimensional space, bringing greater definition to her melodies and encouraging more subtly soulful vocal performances to better harness the juddering energy of rattling bangers like “Fell in a Hole.” A handful of these tracks surfaced in rawer form on Bandcamp or on label compilations over the past couple of years, and the differences are substantial. In its original form, “This You Need” drowned its tropical thrust in waves of disembodied voices, with Glynt frantically reading out a list of demands (“I don’t want to just with anyone/But with everyone!”) as if she were about to get swept up in the tide. On the finely chiseled, beat-heavy version that closes out This Trip, those words become the song’s climactic, rabble-rousing mantra.
The production here also emphasizes a quality that could sometimes get obscured in Mackenzie’s sonic assault: joy. Through the R&B-rubbed “Propaganda” and finger-snapped, heart-racing rush of “Up to the People,” Mackenzie envisions her protests as street parties: “How many of us are scared shitless?” she asks on the latter track, not to amplify our anxieties, but alleviate them, by summoning collective strength to overcome existential fear. And nowhere is that process more explicit than on the album’s most epic, dramatic track, “The Cold.” Over the course of almost six slow-roiling minutes, Mackenzie uses her breathy vocals to thaw the song’s icy surface and her jittering drum sticks to break the pieces away, revealing the beating proletariat heart that’s been frozen by the numbing despair these times engender. As the song’s blood-pumping beat gets harder and stronger, we’re hearing more than a simple quiet-to-loud crescendo—it’s the sound of Mackenzie mobilizing her army one thump at a time.


A box set of the UK pop/punk quartet’s 12 7" singles comprehensively documents the band’s rapid evolution, capturing the group’s energy in short, controlled bursts.

Buzzcocks: Complete UA Singles 1977-1980

Complete UA Singles 1977-1980

Over the past few years, Domino Records has put welcome effort into the continued canonization of UK pop/punk quartet Buzzcocks. The label has lovingly reissued the group’s studio output from its inception in 1976 to its initial split in 1981, including a formerly bootlegged collection of demos, the self-released debut EP, Spiral Scratch (both featuring original vocalist Howard Devoto), and three studio albums.
To kick off 2021, Domino returns to the well with Complete UA Singles 1977-1980, a set of 12 7"s—all the singles that the group released on United Artists—packaged in a handsome red box. It’s an archival effort redolent of a period in which booming vinyl sales have led labels big and small to mine the past for deluxe reissues in formats that are often as inconvenient as they are attractive.
The aesthetic appeal of this collection is easy to grasp. Each disc is a recreation of the original 7" release, including reproductions of the eye-catching sleeves created by graphic designer Malcolm Garrett. Whether anybody actually needs this set is another matter entirely. Domino Records’ 2019 reissue of the 1979 anthology Singles Going Steady is still readily available, with nearly all the same material on one LP. And in the playlist era, is anyone going to be happy hurrying to the turntable every three minutes to flip over the record or swap in the next disc?
Contextually, though, Complete UA Singles is a perfect document of the band’s dizzying creative output and rapid evolution. During the short span of time that the set covers, Buzzcocks released these dozen singles as well as their three full-lengths (Love Bites and Another Music in a Different Kitchen, both from 1978, and 1979’s A Different Kind of Tension). When they weren’t in the studio, they promoted each release heavily, touring and making multiple appearances on Top of the Pops as their singles stormed the UK charts.
During that stretch, Buzzcocks went from the horny agit-punk of debut UA single “Orgasm Addict” to the power pop (complete with brass section!) of “What Do You Know?,” their final release for the label. What happened in between those bookending singles is where the band made its most lasting mark. The quartet—singer/guitarists Pete Shelley and Steve Diggle, bassist Steve Garvey, and drummer John Maher—harnessed the energy of punk and applied it to the pure pop and glitter rock they loved. Their irresistibly catchy music slashed, spurted, and jangled—and provided a suitably squirmy backdrop for Shelley and Diggle’s lyrics, which picked through personal and societal frustrations.
Buzzcocks’ UA tenure produced indelible classics of punk’s first era. “What Do I Get?” perfectly embodies the restless sensations of loneliness and jealousy with each pleading line (“I’m not on the make/I just need a break”) and shaky drum fill. “Promises” and its B-side, “Lipstick,” are paired laments about a relationship gone sour, taken to hysteric levels by their fleet tempos. “Autonomy,” written by Diggle, sets a tumbling guitar melody against anthemic lyrics of self-reliance. And the band’s creative and commercial peak, “Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve?)” pairs the jagged and sweet of romantic torment like rock candy.
Keep in mind: All of those singles mentioned in the previous paragraph came out in 1978, the same year Buzzcocks recorded and released their first two albums. Everyone involved with the band knew they were on a creative hot streak, and capitalized on it. They reaped the benefits, too, as all the ’78 singles charted, with “Ever Fallen in Love” getting as high as No. 12.
This also gave Buzzcocks the leeway to stretch themselves creatively during the next two years. Their first single of 1979, “Everybody’s Happy Nowadays,” felt more lyrically and musically open, with Shelley wondering aloud about his lack of personal contentment. The B-side, “Why Can’t I Touch It?,” was an even bolder departure. Apparently inspired by the liquid groove of the Rolling Stones’ “Fingerprint File,” the band settled into a similar mode, with Maher and Garvey locking into a slippery yet firm rhythm and Diggle and Shelley sawing through it with each guitar chord.
By 1980, Buzzcocks seemed hungry to upend everything they had built up to that point. As Shelley told an interviewer a few years later, “We… took a lot more risks that we’d done before. I was beyond concern about the commercial side of things.” That meant deciding to link their final three UA singles by labeling them “Part 1,” “Part 2,” and “Part 3,” as well as using random symbols to differentiate the sides rather than using A and B. “We’d… leave it up to the radio DJs to play the side they liked the best,” Diggle wrote in his 2003 memoir Harmony in the Head. “Looking back, I realize it was fucking commercial suicide.”
Buzzcocks didn’t help their sales much by choosing Martin Hannett as the producer for their final sessions. Until then, they had recorded everything with Martin Rushent, who perfectly captured the clean, urgent snap of the band’s sound. Hannett, best known for his work with Joy Division, stained the music with a thin layer of reverb that seemed to approximate the feel of the acid that both he and the band were gobbling at the time. Synths began to creep into the mix of “Airwaves Dream” and “Running Free”—a precursor, perhaps, of the synth-pop turn that Shelley would take in his early solo work.
Beneath the fevered tension of the previous three years, exhaustion was audibly setting in, as borne out by lyrics like “I’ve had enough of the day job/I can see farther than that,” from “Running Free.” Little wonder, then, that the band decided to part ways in 1981. (The original lineup would reunite for a tour in 1989 and three shows in 2012; Shelley and Diggle played off and on with different rhythm sections as Buzzcocks until Shelley’s passing in 2018.)
The possible annoyance at having to wrestle with so many individual singles with this set may end up being a net positive. Like many bands of this period, Buzzcocks had its greatest impact in short, controlled bursts. As good as the band’s studio albums from this period were, they didn’t pack the same wallop in a half hour as they did in the 2:19 of “I Don’t Mind” or even the generous six and a half minutes of “Why Can’t I Touch It?” These 24 tracks are like concentrated elixirs—sometimes one shot is all you need.

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On their first duo recording together, the veteran guitar improvisers find a shared language in slanted melodies and clouds of dissonance.

Alan Courtis / David Grubbs: Braintrust of Fiends and Werewolves

Braintrust of Fiends and Werewolves

Alan Courtis and Davis Grubbs’ dual guitar record Braintrust of Fiends and Werewolves zigzags between blown-out riffs and sunny strumming, spiraling and breaking into spiky shards. Exploration is second nature here, as it is across the two artists’ practices. Courtis’ band Reynols, active since 1993, is known for frenzied noise, while his improvisations with artists like Pauline Oliveros grow from heady, static-infused drones. In the genre-hopping post-rock ensemble Gastr del Sol, with Jim O’Rourke, and his numerous solo and collaborative endeavors, Grubbs has taken a winding approach, letting phrases spin out and meander. As a duo, the two improvisers traverse a variety of styles, sculpting Courtis’ looming squalls and Grubbs’ sloping melodies into songs that balance frenetic and balmy moments.
The two guitarists recorded Braintrust of Fiends and Werewolves during a once-in-a-blue-moon meeting in Brooklyn, while Courtis, who hails from Buenos Aires, was visiting New York. According to the album’s liner notes, the matchup was seamless and fruitful. “Each time we stopped and started again it was a different gig, a different situation,” marvels Grubbs. “Even after laying down a couple of hours of recordings, it felt like we could have kept going and going.” That ease comes through in their music—the two artists bounce off of each other’s ideas like they’re deep in conversation.
Yet Courtis and Grubbs’ songs are often rocky, juxtaposing clashing textures. One guitarist will play a razor-sharp chord that slices through the other’s rounded and delicate shapes, or one will pluck a simple, bluesy tune as the other makes a swarm of buzzing noise. These unexpected pairings create turbulence, driving the album’s drastic shifts from gentle ruminations to foreboding howls.
Despite such contrasts, the music moves fluidly. Even the most jagged refrain is pleasing to the touch, and the dense fuzz that swirls around each rhythm and riff feels organic. The forlorn strumming of “Hinterhalt” simmers amid feverish feedback and psychedelic fraying and devolves into a raspy, spun-out drone. On “Room Tone of One’s Own,” each guitarist picks a sunny theme, weaving them together into a buoyant, lyrical instrumental. “Varsovia y Esparta” darkens the bright-hued thrums of “Room Tone of One’s Own” and morphs them into an eerie lullaby fit for a horror film.
But the apex comes when Courtis and Grubbs stretch out. The sprawling, 16-minute closer “Airborne Particles of the California Central Valley” unites the fragmented ideas that appear throughout. It opens with spooky scratches and menacing, wobbling plucks, grows into a web of blues riffs cloaked in cloudy noise, and falls away with lightning-bolt chords. The song sputters and spurts, revs up and puts on the brakes. And in all those twists and turns, Courtis and Grubbs find a hypnotic groove, letting their guitars lead them to whatever comes next.


SOB X RBE is already a compelling rap machine, a potential powerhouse in waiting. But this solo outing suggests that there’s plenty of life outside the group, too.

Trust Issues

There’s a touch of the Wu-Tang Clan’s careerism to SOB X RBE’s unfolding ascendance. Early in the Wu’s saga, RZA artfully strategized a five-year plan to establish clan members as solo stars. SOB X RBE’s blueprint might not be quite so clear, but even in the infancy of their careers, the Vallejo rappers have dropped a number of solo projects and started to establish themselves as viable individual artists. If there’s any justice in The Bay—dubious, as local stars from regional godhead Mac Dre to young showman Nef the Pharaoh have never received the fame they deserved—the four young vocalists could be a kind of reverse rap supergroup. Call them the anti-Slaughterhouse.
It’s Yhung T.O., though, who has always always seemed like “the one.” With distinct Bay Area swagger, he’s as fluid a vocalist as T-Pain or Ty Dolla $ign, his polished, catchy voice adding a pop sheen to his group’s bounce. Had he pursued his recent assertions that he was leaving the collective, it would have been a disaster for his fellow comrades. Released as part of a solo deal he inked with Interscope earlier this year, Trust Issues makes it clear T.O. can thrive on his own. A successful distillation of his strengths, it’s a melodic West Coast party record thanks to production that complements his tuneful style. With hooks for days, T.O. foregoes guests on these largely three-minutes-or-less showcases, delivering the melodious performances of a potential breakout star.
Still, he has a tendency to stud his writing with references to internal pain and external conflict—even the title of this ostensibly fun diversion seems barbed. On “Fuck the Opps,” HollaTheTruth’s fat, funky beat scores tales from the neighborhood, shrouded in dread. T.O.’s oblique shout-outs to homies, smack-downs for unnamed enemies, and vicious yells of “Middle finger to the Feds/Nigga it’s still fuck the cops” sit right next to jubilant declarations about the new Maserati he’ll be riding this weekend. “No Time,” a catchy highpoint, aims scorn at fake friends.
T.O. named a recent mixtape Lamont “Young L” Davis for his late uncle, and he reflected on family deaths often on the comparatively somber release. Trust Issues is less shrouded by the gloaming, but his voice retains a warmth that makes everything sound personal. During “Grandma’s Lincoln,” an ode to the car he used to drive, T.O. thinks about his old life and the former flame who probably rode shotgun. It’s a real pity, though, that “Anxiety” was cut from the final product; included on an unreleased early version of the album, T.O. details the drugs he used to self-medicate, the regrets of ignoring medical advice, and the strains it put on his family, including an incident when he held a gun to his head in front of his mother. Such trenchant depictions of mental illness are rare but necessary in rap; let’s hope “Anxiety” finds its own life.
There are moments of levity, too, as when “Diamonds” channels Young Thug at his most pop-focused. A few skillfully deployed verses from Yhung T.O.’s group-mates would have added even more slants to Trust Issues—though perhaps at the expense of establishing his solo strength. This is T.O’s showcase, after all, his harmonious performance and fiery writing rounding out our understanding of SOB X RBE’s hook machine. By extension, the group now feels more than ever like a hip-hop superpower in waiting.


The first thing that comes to mind when considering Tim Hecker's work is his sense of scale. The Montreal-based drone composer has, over the course of the decade, built oceans of ambient noise capable of submerging his listener. His last album, 2006's *Harmony in Ultraviolet*, took this large-canvas technique to its logical end, so for his latest project, Hecker focuses instead on shorter individual pieces-- albeit with the same deliberateness and meticulous detail we've come to expect from him.

*An Imaginary Country* is, as its title suggests, an otherworldly landscape. Serving as our tour guide, Hecker uses each track to dream

An Imaginary Country

The first thing that comes to mind when considering Tim Hecker's work is his sense of scale. The Montreal-based drone composer has, over the course of the decade, built oceans of ambient noise capable of submerging his listener. His last album, 2006's Harmony in Ultraviolet, took this large-canvas technique to its logical end, so for his latest project, Hecker focuses instead on shorter individual pieces-- albeit with the same deliberateness and meticulous detail we've come to expect from him.
An Imaginary Country is, as its title suggests, an otherworldly landscape. Serving as our tour guide, Hecker uses each track to dream up one of its distinct regions, necessitating his more tightly focused approach. Take this journey with Hecker and you'll be introduced to the coastal tide ebb and flow on "The Inner Shore", the track's synths inhaling and exhaling to mirror the current's natural rhythm. On "A Stop at the Chord Cascades", a wall of descending chimes recalls the titular waterfall. And while there isn't much human life on this predominantly instrumental voyage, "Utropics" brings you closest to Hecker's imagined natives: A choir of haunted voices far off in the distance. Hecker is able to achieve this transportive quality because he paints these portraits in painstaking three-dimensional detail; the music is strikingly colorful. That said, An Imaginary Country isn't purely concept-driven or a kind of ambient-techno pop-up book. Like all worthwhile atmospheric music, there's a sense of choose-your-own-adventure here that allows the listener to build his own interpretations.
Alongside his more vivid storytelling, Hecker also wisely brings a broadened emotional palette to the record. A primary criticism of his prior work was that, while gorgeous and immense, his compositions often came across as studied and technical to the point of feeling impersonal. (See Harmony in Ultraviolet's academic "Harmony in Blue" suite.) With An Imaginary Country, though, Hecker appears willing to address those concerns and more eager to convey drama. On "Paragon Point", he juxtaposes dissonant shoegaze chords with feathery choral synths to create a poignant, hopeful heartache. Like stepping into the sunlight after a long, depressive stretch indoors, the song expresses regret at time lost but also a sense of optimism for a new day.
Together with these displays of deeper sentiment, Hecker also showcases here a capacity for coaxing natural textures out of his electronic arrangements. Album centerpiece "Borderlands" demonstrates it best, where he establishes a plane of twinkling, piano-like synths and lets gentle gusts of organic noise drift above it. The digitally rendered effect feels remarkably untreated, somehow indistinguishable from the earthly gust of wind it mimics. This naturalism, combined with Hecker's sense of fantasy and mirage, is part of what makes the album such a satisfying listen. Most impressive, though, is that Hecker has built for us this make-believe area to inhabit, to explore with him. While there's a bit less room in this space than those he's constructed before, it's still very much an achievement, and one to be celebrated.


The Masculin Féminin box set is a scrapbook made from early records that already felt like scrapbooks, but collectively they form a rich and vibrant portrait of the ’90s indie rock icons.

Masculin Féminin

As the band that convinced Nirvana to sign to DGC Records, Sonic Youth were one of the immediate beneficiaries of Nevermind’s game-changing success. They may not have received an official finder’s fee, but the spillover spoils were undeniable: heavier MTV rotation, six-figure record sales, and enough Letterman appearances to usurp Paul Shaffer as the house band. But, at the same time, Sonic Youth’s talent-scout acumen wasn’t just a boon to the DGC A&R department. In 1992, drummer Steve Shelley launched his own imprint out of his Hoboken home to nurture the next sedimentary layer of the underground. With tongue planted somewhat in cheek, he gave his label a name—Smells Like Records—that honored the very phenomenon that allowed him to wield his kingmaking powers.
But if the Smells Like name was a bit of a joke, then Blonde Redhead seemed to be the punchline, given that their music exuded a pungent whiff of Shelley’s main gig. If Sonic Youth had come to view Nirvana as their baby band, Blonde Redhead were the NYC-bound foreign-exchange students—two Japanese women and a pair of Italian twins—who had their own peculiar interpretation of the host culture. Revisiting the two albums Blonde Redhead released on Smells Like, it’s easy to hear why Shelley was drawn to the band—and the reasons go beyond imitation-as-flattery. Where Nirvana showed how Sonic Youth’s sturm-and-clang could be streamlined for mainstream rock audiences, Blonde Redhead made it seem oblique and exotic once again, rendering post-no-wave squall with a European art-house sophistication.
Masculin Féminin compiles Blonde Redhead’s Smells Like catalogue—1994’s self-titled debut and 1995’s La Mia Vita Violenta—along with associated singles, outtakes, and radio sessions. And the box set arrives via Numero Group, a reissue label best known for its archival digs through regional ’70s soul scenes from Ohio to Belize. But these days, the ’90s New York indie rock era feels equally remote. The Big Apple sounds of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s have been thoroughly canonized in books, documentaries, fictional biopics, and ill-fated TV shows. But while contemporary music—from indie rock to R&B—is now awash in ’90s nostalgia, the trend has mostly passed over the vibrant activity happening in New York at the time.
Through the 1980s, indie rock was built on American infrastructure: interstates and college towns and community-radio stations and Kinko’s. But by the mid-’90s, it had become something more cosmopolitan, and New York, naturally, served as the primary melting pot. The Beastie Boys were its most eager ambassadors, with a multi-cultural messthetic that filtered down to peers like Luscious Jackson, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Soul Coughing, and Cibo Matto, while their *Grand Royal *magazine packed a whole internet’s worth of global esoterica into its handsomely bound pages. At the same time, Matador Records were less interested in looking for the next Pavement than scooping up Japanese pastiche-pop acts like Pizzicato Five and Cornelius.
Blonde Redhead weren’t as outwardly irreverent as the aforementioned artists—after all, they took their name from a song by no-wave iconoclasts DNA. And their standard four-piece rock-band lineup seemed traditional compared to the prevailing genre-hopping cut-and-paste style. But even on their 1995 debut, they were severing the abrasive sound of indie rock from its hardcore roots and refashioning it into something more impressionistic and enigmatic.
In discussing the band’s early years with the* Big Takeover* in 2011, singer Kazu Makino said, “I never thought we were violent or angry or post punk.” But you might get a different impression from their debut’s caterwauling opener “I Don’t Want U,” a he-scream/she-scream anti-love song scrawled with a bloody razor blade. While the deceptively calm mise-en-scène bears evidence of brothers Simone and Amedeo Pace’s jazz-schooled backgrounds, it’s soon vandalized by the former’s strangulated verse vocals and a frenzied climax where Makino unleashes a voice like a squawking saxophone.
The rest of *Blonde Redhead *is likewise built from serrated shards and sudden expulsions, with Kazu and Amadeao prodding and jousting one another in an attempt to figure out how their voices can interlock. There are touches of the melodic finesse that would flourish on later releases, but on songs like “Mama Cita” and “Astro Boy,” the staccato, circular singing often mirrors the needling guitar lines. Tellingly, the album’s most transfixing song is its most atypical, both in the context of this record and everything Blonde Redhead did after. On the eerily propulsive “Sciuri Sciura,” Kazu’s funhouse-mirrored voice refracts atop a hypnotic bass groove from long departed bassist Maki Takahashi (who only stuck around for this one album).
Given the lushness of their post-millennium output, the stern-faced severity of* Blonde Redhead* seems even more jarring today than it did in ’95. But the singles and outtakes compiled here hint at a more gentle, playful side: “Big Song” bears the shoegazing glide of late-’80s My Bloody Valentine; “Vague” is a stab at hooky, Pixies-esque fuzz-pop. And it’s funny how much Blonde Redhead’s most radical attempts to draw outside the lines mirror Sonic Youth’s efforts at the same. In the drum-machined scuzz-hop experiments “This Is the Number of Times I Said I Will But Didn’t” and “Woody,” Blonde Redhead essentially adopt their own Ciccone Youth alter ego, right down to the latter track’s “Lucky Star” references. But while 29-second drum-loop snippet “Slogan Attempt” initially seems like a superfluous throwaway, its brief quote of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin’s “La Décadanse” drops the tiniest bread-crumb clue pointing to the band’s future.
*La Mia Vita Violenta *yielded the first real evidence of Blonde Redhead’s art-pop aspirations—the guitars still buzz and drone, but the hooks are sharper, the bee-swarm onslaught more focussed. The difference is immediately apparent on the album’s exhilarating opener “(I Am Taking Out My Eurotrash) I Still Get My Rocks Off,” where Kazu’s restless verses and Amadeao’s melodic counter-vocal provide a perfect balance of tension and release. On the whole, the two singers sound more complementary than combative, with the soothing influence of ’60s Franco-pop loosening up the discordant tangle of songs like “Bean” and non-album A-side “Flying Douglas.” And with “Violent Life,” Amadeao tapped into the perpetually yearning singing style that would become his signature.
The seams are still showing here: the cool maraca rhythm of “U.F.O.” abruptly gives way to a thundering drum coda that you wish the band had explored further. And the record’s transitory nature sees distorto-pop blurts like “I Am There While You Choke on Me” and “10 Feet High” collide with the clock-melting sitar odyssey “Harmony” (also presented here in its shorter, more unsettled seven-inch version) and the creepily whispered lullaby “Jewel.” The outtakes here venture even further afield, with tentative toe-dips into sad-eyed electro-pop (“Not Too Late”) and lonesome-cowboy blues (“Country Song”).
But that unorthodox approach is what liberates this music from the realm of ’90s time capsules. Taken as a whole, Masculin Féminin is a scrapbook made of records that already felt like scrapbooks, but collectively they form a portrait of a band more multi-dimensional than their Sonic Youth Jr. rep suggested. Listening now, the differences between the two bands seem as pronounced as the similarities. Compared to Sonic Youth’s tightly coiled art-punk epics, early Blonde Redhead were far more scrappy and impulsive, and they were more willing to exploit the frisson between their male and female leads (compared to Thurston and Kim’s often segregated vocal turns). And when you consider the kind of music Sonic Youth were making at the time and thereafter, it’s not a stretch to suggest the influence was mutual.
Blonde Redhead recorded La Mia Vita Violenta around the same time Sonic Youth were finishing up Washing Machine, and the records share a disquieting nocturnal atmosphere infused with ghostly echoes of pre-psychedelic pop. In hindsight, both albums were also situated at the same crossroads: La Mia Vita Violenta saw Blonde Redhead starting to shed their scabrous skin en route to a more expansive sound, while Washing Machine served as Sonic Youth’s gateway from their Lollapalooza-headliner halcyon days into their more experimental SYR EPs phase. And where Sonic Youth once fixated on American icons from Madonna to Manson, from this point on, they started giving songs titles like “Contre le Sexisme” and “Slaapkamers Met Slagroom,” while packaging records to look like European library music. It’s hard to say if Blonde Redhead were responsible for stoking the Youth’s internationalist affectations. But the great strides they made on La Mia Vita Violenta at least instilled Blonde Redhead with enough confidence to title their next record Fake Can Be Just As Good.


The acclaimed South African pianist meets Los Angeles’ ambient-jazz ringleader for a session that shuttles between atmospheric studio experiments and gorgeously unadorned solo takes.

Thandi Ntuli / Carlos Niño: Rainbow Revisited

Rainbow Revisited

Pianist-singer Thandi Ntuli is not the only South African artist reinventing a modern music that some critics want to keep locked in a box called “jazz.” The sound of contemporary South Africa is a global beacon for potential musical futures precisely because so many artists entrenched in the country’s great improvised tradition, with its beautiful Xhosa and Zulu melodies, keep pushing beyond the accepted meaning of that four-letter word.
Ntuli, a 36-year-old emissary of a Johannesburg scene gone global, is a standard-bearer for experiments at jazz’s margins. A classical piano prodigy who turned down a Berklee scholarship to study at University of Cape Town, she has collaborated with house producers and joined London saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings’ Ancestors group for a spell. Ntuli’s previous studio albums as leader—The Offering (2014), Exiled (2018), and Blk Elijah & the Children of Meroë (2022)—exhibited visionary scope: piles of instruments and musicians, arrangements that took advantage of their broad tonal and harmonic ranges, and compositions that veered between pop standards, spiritual thought bubbles, and theatrical narratives, plus a voice and musical leadership to carry them all.
Rainbow Revisited edits down such big-budget ambitions. It is primarily a solo piano-and-voice session, recorded one Venice Beach afternoon with percussionist/vibes’n’chimes orchestrater Carlos Niño lightly guiding and participating, at times bringing minor overdubs and post-production into the mix. The music is spare, laser focused on those incandescent gospel melodies that feel like a Mzansi jazz birthright, and on ways to minimally ornament them for a broader, internationalist (Anthem and otherwise) audience.
Such embellishment doesn’t obscure Ntuli’s expansiveness. It shows her power in a different light—in this case, bathed in the Golden State’s sunrises and sunsets. Ntuli must have been all in, because she named new original tracks after both. The opening “Sunrise (in California)” is a crisp take for piano and voice, abstracting those gorgeous melodies into cubes; later “Sunset (in California)” focuses on folky, melancholy vocal improvisations that draw a direct line between Ntuli’s approach and that of her onetime employer, the great singer Thandiswa “King Tha” Mazwai. On the other side of the spectrum, there are studio experiments whose titles nod to their construction: “Breath and Synth” and “Voice and Tongo.” These airy, atonal rhythm miniatures, straight out of the Carlos Niño & Friends almanac, allow for playful exhalation. In all this newfound space, Ntuli seems unencumbered, free from the constraints often imposed by jazz’s institutional trappings.
Yet despite the very different context in which she’s presented on Rainbow Revisited, this Thandi Ntuli is no different than the South African jazz star in the making. Experimenting using traditional tools is at the core of her practice. The title track is a testament to such a strategy. It’s an emotional strip-down of “Rainbow (Skit),” from the sprawling Exiled, rethinking electric bassist Benjamin Jephta’s dexterous runs, along with her own synths, drum-machine programming, and, especially, lyrical literalism. The revisit is a slowed-down acoustic-piano reading that foregrounds the song’s core melody, modally improvising on its chords, akin to Abdullah Ibrahim’s forceful solo-piano turns. Here, the vocal is almost completely wordless, save for a yearning, twisting expression of the titular refraction (the “rainbow” being South Africa’s national post-Apartheid metaphor).
There is also “Nomoyoyo,” a gorgeous kwela-like melody written by Ntuli’s grandfather, Levi Godlib Ntuli, that is her family’s anthem. In Ntuli’s hands and throat, the song exudes heritage, and age, but also simple harmonic beauty. It is a sonic reflection of the past century, and one wonders at the associations a song like that might bring when publicly performed in South Africa. Here, in between two edit collages—full of synths, samples of waves lapping a shore, piano, and backwards percussion—“Nomoyoyo” feels like an immovable rock, definitively more “jazz” than most sounds here, but unwilling to be bound to it.


In the late ’90s, two art students in Detroit formed the heavily Kraftwerk-inspired electro/techno group Le Car. This new compilation from Clone Records surveys their curio of a catalog.

Auto-Reverse

Adam Lee Miller and Ian Clarke met as art students in Detroit in the late 1990s, and from ’96 to ’98, they released four projects as the electro/techno group Le Car. The titles of those releases betrayed their vehicular interest: Auto-Fuel, Auto-Graph, Automatic, and Auto-Motif. Le Car’s entrance into the city’s nightlife came a full decade after the Belleville Three (Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, Derrick May) invented Detroit techno, which May once colorfully described as “like George Clinton and Kraftwerk caught in an elevator with only a sequencer to keep them company.” In that sense, Clarke and Miller (later of the electronic duo ADULT.) draw influence from this local lineage. Le Car, if it is not obvious in their choice of names, are heavily inspired by the sleek, robot automation and cybernetic tendencies of Kraftwerk.
In practice, Le Car’s work demonstrates an almost endearingly uncool attempt to reinterpret “The Robots,” if they were reborn in the bodies of Detroit area art students. And if that either sounds bad or good to you, both the worst and best outcomes are available in Clone Records’ new compilation and survey of their discography, Auto-Reverse.
The opening track, “Car Scene One,” begins with a question. A helium-inflected voice pulls up to a stranger and asks if they’d like a ride. The stranger, with a deeper, metallic, but equally inhuman baritone, cheerfully agrees. Then they turn on the radio, and a brief gurgle of electric noise plays. It’s percussive, vaguely groovy, but rigid: the kind of music the robot overlords in The Matrix might play at parties. The car stalls, the radio stops—barely a minute and half in, it is immediately clear things are not what they seem to be. This gesture of artistic malfunction makes their connection to Kraftwerk even more apparent. It recalls the German group’s own 1970s electronic epiphany: During one show, Ralf Hütter put so much weight down on his keyboard that the wild crowd just kept on dancing “to the machine.”
The compilers of this collection cleverly recognize that so much of Le Car’s music feels like the afterglow of such a moment. The cheeky loops of “Aluminum Rectangles” or “Warm Humans” conjure up seconds of late-night sound that unintentionally hang in the air, playing out when no one is behind the board. That’s not to say that Le Car’s songs are shapeless, but they are in so many ways formulaic. There is something about the music of Le Car that is distinctly campy, simple, and repetitive in the way arcade games are. Even though their synthesizer loops sometimes lose steam, and some of the tracks feel more like fragmentary studies than club-oriented experiences, their music represents an earnest attempt to make real life feel virtual. But as the endless march of technology can attest, their experiments feel hilariously anachronistic in the light of the present day.
While there are a number of standouts in the 20 tracks—including the triumphant early chiptune of “Malice,” and the acidic beat of “Audiofile 10”—the compilation presents Le Car in an incidentally satirical light, like a caricature of techno. But the exuberance of Miller and Clarke is undeniable. There is a relentlessly cheery aspect to their music that makes it hard to hate. Even if Auto-Reverse might just be a curio, it documents a brief pocket of time that feels feels quaint, fun, and fresh today, like that pair JNCO jeans hidden deep in your closet.


Some music begs to be explored. Promising fascination and intrigue beyond your wildest dreams, its distant melodies beckon you towards ...

...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead: Source Tags and Codes

Source Tags and Codes

Some music begs to be explored. Promising fascination and intrigue beyond your wildest dreams, its distant melodies beckon you towards it while you try your very best to discern every distinct element that presents itself to you. As you get closer and closer, you begin to relax, letting yourself become completely enveloped by the entrancing tones.
Of course, it's all a trap. Just as you begin to lose yourself, you become vaguely aware that the sound that soothingly beckoned you has now transformed into something vastly different-- something powerful, dangerous, and merciless. What was so beautiful at a safe distance is still beautiful, but what was once tranquil and peaceful has metamorphosed into a vicious, violent glory. Before you can even respond, you're flat on your back, pulverized by its sheer force.
Making music that is both delicate and dangerous requires a level of skill that most musicians can barely even fathom. While some bands, like the Microphones, succeed at capturing the simultaneous beauty and rage of nature, what And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead have encapsulated on their third full-length, Source Tags and Codes, is something distinctly human. Anger has always played a central role in the band's music, but with this record, they've finally managed to capture all the subtle shades of disappointment, melancholy, frustration and hope that often accompany it.
Of course, capturing all this with music is no small feat. Source Tags and Codes is massive in its execution, bursting with layered percussion, deftly arranged strings and, most importantly, songs that are simply epic. "It Was There That I Saw You" opens the album with squealing static and a clean guitar playing a simple, tickling figure. There's a palpable sense of excitement as the song suddenly explodes into a frenetic blast of crashing cymbals, screeching guitars, and thumping bass. Amidst the swell of sound, Conrad Keely's voice takes on a sharp, almost crystalline quality that cuts through the mix with biting force.
"Another Morning Stoner" mimics "It Was There That I Saw You" in its opening moments, but rather than exploding with pure energy, it builds slowly and deliberately to an absolutely astonishing finale. Melodic guitar lines ricochet back and forth, brought to new sonic elevations by soaring string arrangements. The call-and-response section that finishes the song, in which two members of the band exchange the phrases, "What is forgiveness?/ It's just a dream/ What is forgiveness?/ It's everything," is one of many absolutely indelible moments on Source Tags and Codes.
"Baudelaire" follows the haunting "Another Morning Stoner" with a blast of pure rock and roll. Catchy and incredibly sinister, "Baudelaire" builds upon a central, immensely powerful guitar and trumpet riff with handclaps, driving percussion, and barely audible voices engaged in conversation. Eventually, the song trails off into a single submerged guitar line accentuated by reverb-soaked bells.
Just as the hypnotic ending to "Baudelaire" pulls you into a trance, "Homage" picks you up by the hair, smacks you around, spits in your face, and leaves you gasping for breath, before imploding into a symphony of static. "How Near How Far" and "Heart in the Hand of the Matter" are the highlights of Source Tags and Codes' center, utterly alive with energy and texture. "How Near How Far" uses vocal harmonies and strings to reinforce a sense of violent melancholy, and the unforgettable chorus to "Heart in the Hand of the Matter" ("I'm so damned, I can't win") is enlivened by the contrast between gritty guitars and clear, ringing piano.
After another expertly produced segue, "Monsoon" pulls together the rock swagger of "Baudelaire" and the sentimentality of "Heart in the Hand of the Matter" to wonderful effect. The songwriting on Source Tags and Codes is inconceivably elegant-- never predictable, but never gratuitously dissonant. Parts of songs wind seamlessly into each other, each one full of brilliant sonic nuances that are every bit as compelling when taken as part of the entire song as when examined individually. Fragmented feedback heralds the arrival of "Days of Being Wild," a song that hosts some of the most creative instrumental interplay to grace this album, before building to yet another utterly awe-inspiring finale.
Source Tags and Codes is an album big on finales-- thus, it makes sense that its three final tracks are quite possibly its best. "Relative Ways," which was released earlier this year as a single, is the most exquisitely constructed song here. Conrad Keely's voice breaks and spits as he pleads, "It's okay/ I'm a saint/ I forgave/ Your mistakes." An unexpected chord shift heightens the dramatic tension of the song just in time for it to return to its original theme and fade into "After the Laughter," the only segue on Source Tags and Codes to be given its own track. A stunning concoction of dreamy vocal harmonies, radio noises, pianos and strings, "After the Laughter" is wonderful in its own right, but taking into account the fact that the song perfectly bridges the melodies of "Relative Ways" and the album's closer, "Source Tags and Codes," it seems utterly brilliant.
As with any epic album, Source Tags and Codes demands an epic closer, and the record's title track delivers masterfully. Both a lyrical and melodic high point, "Source Tags and Codes" captures the complex emotions of the album in a brief glimpse of pure paradoxical beauty. A perfect arrangement of the guitars, piano, strings, bells, and percussion that help make this record so intricate and powerful, the song sounds almost like a bittersweet reunion with old friends. A few seconds after last guitar has faded, a string ensemble plays a brief, gorgeous piece that is at once hopeful and somber. The strings end in unison on a single note, which is sustained for a few moments before fading out. The impact is immediate: you know without a moment's doubt that you have just heard something that is absolutely classic.
And while Source Tags and Codes does seem to carry with it a certain knowledge of its own brilliance, it never tries to cheaply impress. Simply put, it doesn't need to. Dense, beautiful, intricate, haunting, explosive, and dangerous, this is everything rock music aspires to be: intense, incredible songs arranged perfectly and performed with skill and passion. Source Tags and Codes will take you in, rip you to shreds, piece you together, lick your wounds clean, and send you back into the world with a concurrent sense of loss and hope. And you will never, ever be the same.


On her debut LP, British producer Nabihah Iqbal—fka Throwing Shade—has a rare touch with inky new wave synths and drum machines, emerging as a songwriter of impressive emotional heft.

Weighing of the Heart

On May 3, 1993, New Order released Republic, their long-awaited sixth studio album. A month later, it was joined in the stores by Souvlaki, the second long player from Reading shoegazers Slowdive. The British producer and DJ Nabihah Iqbal was a child at the time, but her debut album sits on a stylistic shelf between them. Weighing of the Heart is first full-length from Iqbal to not bear her former moniker, Throwing Shade, the modish alter ego that she inhabited from 2009 to mid-2017.
Iqbal has explained that the decision to do away with the Throwing Shade alias was driven by a desire to stand as a British-Asian artist making music. But the move also feels appropriate on an album where Iqbal rolls back the fashionable club production of her previous work in favor of a sound that is more personal and emotive. Gone are the bleeding-edge electronic beats and globe-trotting influences that Iqbal previously preferred on tracks like “hashtag IRL.” In a recent interview, Iqbal said she avoided listening to new music while working on this album, reflecting instead on the music of her teenage years. She mentions Joy Division and Bauhaus as influences as well as "Sowt ‘Leiko Kamam Bian Tara Lod Biaran’" by R & R Zangeshahi, the latter not so much as a sonic marker as for the emotional response it brings from the listener.
The inky hands of Joy Division’s later incarnation as New Order are all over Weighing of the Heart. Album highlight “Saw U Twice” is a hugely satisfying retread of the early New Order sound, when the band bolted on synths to add dashes of color to their Mancunian morosity. “Saw U Twice” sees sparse guitar lines meet melodic bass counterpoint, airy electronic washes and drums that vacillate between post-punk dungeon and New York disco, each perfectly weighed. This combination, repeated on the album’s best tracks, may not appear particularly original in late 2017, when New Order’s influence is evident in bands from LCD Soundsystem to The Killers. But Iqbal lifts her music into rather more original territory thanks to vocals that borrow from the chiffon singing style of shoegaze acts like Slowdive or The Telescopes, her fusion of two popular musical influences creating something greater than the sum of its parts.
It helps that Iqbal is a frequently fantastic songwriter. The spaces and separation inherent in the New Order sound mean that there is no room to hide your dirty musical laundry; every component must be finely tuned to work, both individually and as part of the whole. Iqbal pulls off this delicate balancing act with aplomb, packing the album with wonderful instrumental touches, from the chiming guitar intro to “Something More” to the luminescent bassline that lifts the midsection of “Eternal Passion” to the dramatic cymbal crashes on “Saw U Twice.” To this, she adds vocal lines that combine earworm melodies with a road-worn melancholy, transforming lyrics such as  “Saw you on the train/Will I see you again?” (from “Saw U Twice”) into the kind of quotidian lament that is inherent in the most relatable pop music.
Iqbal’s lyrical skills are particularly prominent on “Zone 1 to 6000,” a song that takes the influence of English poets William Blake and Matthew Arnold into the drudgery and release of 21st-century London. The combination of Iqbal’s deadpan delivery, brilliantly evocative synth chords, and lines like, “We wander through each other's lives/Just like the river's constant flow” make the song a dead ringer for a 2017 “West End Girls.”
When this combination of hooky, relatable songwriting works, Weighing of the Heart delivers some of the finest, most viscerally satisfying electronic pop music of the year. At times, though, Iqbal seems to let her winning formula get away from her. “In Visions” feels like two entirely separate songs meeting up and not getting along, the vocal sitting on top of the musical bed like a misconstrued mix you wish the DJ would put out of its agony. “Eden Piece,” which opens the album, foregoes a proper vocal melody in favor of rather formless “oohs” and “aahs” and a wandering piano line. “Slowly,” meanwhile, relies almost entirely on the vocal line, supported only by mopey synth chords and the kind of off-putting, twiddling guitar that might adorn a Scorpions B side. It’s a drag, in all senses of the word.
Weighing of the Heart is not perfect, then, but most New Order albums also contain their fair share of imperfections and missteps (and somehow it makes us love them more). As Throwing Shade, Iqbal was already one of electronic music’s most engaging polymaths, thanks to a resumé that included everything from vocalist on SOPHIE’s “Lemonade” to a stint as a human rights lawyer. With Weighing of the Heart, Iqbal adds another couple of strings to her bow, emerging as a pop auteur and songwriter of impressive emotional heft.


Darren Cunningham is a dance producer who references extroverted, populist music to create a meditative, introverted, immersive experience.

R.I.P.

Darren Cunningham is one of those dance music producers who has spent most of his career moving away from the dancefloor. The London-based artist's first two albums as Actress, 2008's Hazyville and 2010's Splazsh, sounded like mid-1980s house and techno collaged together and played on a radio from under the freeway. Half of his newest, R.I.P., doesn't even have beats. Listening to him discuss his process making it-- which included reading John Milton, philosophizing about death, and smoking weed-- you'd think he was a PhD candidate.
"I want to make cool, classical stuff for a modern generation," he said in a recent interview. The phrase "classical stuff" alone will probably disqualify him from the academy. Good. It's not where he belongs. Like Oneohtrix Point Never, what makes Cunningham special is that he's an artist capable of referencing extroverted, populist music like house and rap in order to create a meditative, introverted experience.
In general, his productions are less about their build-and-release than their atmosphere, which hovers over the bones of the music like some sick gas cloud. The innovation on R.I.P. is to put as much effort into making things clean as making them dirty, and the result is a sense of contrast: Fog gives way to clarity; fat, puffy synthesizer sounds play off pinprick-sharp ones. Like all good contrasts, it's simple and eureka-like: By bringing the acidic sounds to the surface and keeping the air-conditioner hum somewhere in the depths, Cunningham takes the monolithic sound of his earlier productions and breaks them into layers-- compared to Splazsh, it's practically prismatic.
It's not the sound that makes the music, though, but the structure of it. R.I.P. is a deliberately uncoordinated album. Rhythms, basslines, and melodies slip in and out of line with each other. Comparatively straightforward, house-oriented tracks like "Shadow From Tartarus" are situated next to murk and ambience like "Tree of Knowledge". The emphasis here, though, is on "comparative": Even R.I.P.'s steady 4/4 tracks sound grimy and deconstructed. But there's something almost flirtatious in the way he lets the sounds worm around in the dark, looking to hook up with something firm. When they do, it's both mechanical and mystical, like watching a sculpture cut from raw stone.
The thick crud over Cunningham's earlier albums mimicked a sense of loss and erosion, as though he'd found the music abandoned in an alleyway and brought it back to something resembling life. The disparate sounds on R.I.P don't need resuscitation, just room to breathe. Given that room, they arrange themselves. If the album could be called intimate, it's paradoxically because there's so much distance and disconnect to it. Listening to it can be like seeing the city you live in from a plane: You can't reach out and touch it but you're comforted by how manageable and well-planned it all looks.
Cunningham's scope is already wider than producers like Burial or Zomby, who tend to keep dance music's vocabulary intact, even at their most abstract. When Splazsh first started going around, Cunningham called it "R&B concrete," which, as marketing speak, was terrific, but as self-description was mostly aspirational. On R.I.P., the blending between the traditions of techno and the traditions of ambient and minimalist music are more apparent. Until he comes up with something better (or it ends up being used for a soda campaign), "cool, classical stuff for a modern generation" will have to work. As for his shift in focus, he confesses to not getting quite as stoned as he used to. The fresh air has done him good.


The latest album from this L.A. session player to the stars reveals him to be a fascinatingly expressive keyboardist who doesn’t take himself too seriously.

Blowout

To immerse yourself in John Carroll Kirby’s mischievous amalgam of jazz, funk, and Herbie Hancock-indebted synth-soul is to enter a world of endless iteration. The songs on the Los Angeles-based pianist’s studio albums often feel like they’ve sprung from a plot of seemingly infinite permutations and potential melodic detours. With each solo project, Kirby creates a new aesthetic, adopting a specific conceit to anchor his and his bandmates’ limber jamming. Past projects have foregrounded ambient (2018’s Meditations in Music), dusty piano beats (2020’s My Garden), and ambling synth jazz (last year’s Dance Ancestral), but regardless of the genre, Kirby’s work is never rigid or fixed in place; it’s easy to imagine his pieces being completely reborn each time they’re performed. A lead piano or synth melody might hold steady, and flute, Minimoog, and percussion might carry from song to song, but Kirby’s work revels in play—the intuitive pleasure of wiggling into new shapes within otherwise steady structures.
Kirby’s latest record, Blowout, is his most energetic and immediately enjoyable release yet. He has earned a reputation as an artist’s artist, a beloved, if-you-know-you-know session player and producer who’s worked with some of pop’s biggest names (Harry Styles, Frank Ocean, Steve Lacy) and left-of-center stars (Liv.e, Blood Orange, Solange), but Blowout feels like Kirby’s first solo album capable of expanding his audience beyond jazz aficionados and study-playlist listeners. It’s an endlessly vibey, psychedelically tropical eruption of new-age electro funk and jazz. At its most affecting, it’s irresistibly fun, an impeccably arranged entanglement of soulful melodies and ecstatic synths and flutes; at its least convincing, it’s aimless and too winkingly cheeky. Yet Blowout still affirms Kirby’s status as a fascinatingly expressive keyboardist who doesn’t take himself too seriously.
The opening “Oropendola,” named after a bird whose call woke Kirby early in the morning during a stay in Costa Rica, establishes the album’s palette. Aqueous synths, tight drums, and sprightly flute mesh into a euphoric, hummable refrain before giving way to two fantastic solos. Kirby’s chops dazzle, and Sam KS’s drums and David Leach’s percussion add vibrant character to the record’s spare yet robust instrumentation. But it’s Logan Hone’s flute playing that steals the show throughout the album; there’s a palpable exuberance to his style that makes these pieces feel like more than mere mood music. Mid-album highlight “So So So” embodies many of Blowout’s best qualities. It’s a sturdy, simply structured song that grants Kirby and Hone the freedom to wiggle and warble over dubby percussion. Where some of Kirby’s work has tended to drift without purpose, on Blowout he and his collaborators construct tastefully breezy beats that encourage inspired improvisation around memorable melodies.
Kirby’s whimsical songs often strike a delightful balance between childlike wonder and elegant flair, but Blowout wobbles when the balance breaks. The campy “Vertigo” feels like a scrapped soundtrack cue that lacks the ambition or humor to offset its overwrought writing. Conversely, the minimal, meandering “Gecko Sound” can’t quite muster the energy or definition to assert itself as anything beyond a slightly more refined cousin of call-center hold music.
Still, as Kirby’s ninth studio album in six years, Blowout signals a compositional maturation: He’s tightening his skills and daring to experiment while also making more accessible, pleasure-packed pieces. Thrown on at a barbecue, dinner party, or drab commute, Blowout is sure to enliven the mood. Yet Kirby’s work also rewards careful listening, sprinkled with moments that jolt you to attention as surely as they soothe.


Spoon stay in their well-earned lane but tweak the formula just enough on their ninth album, keeping their reliably great songwriting and adding new, electronic textures.

Hot Thoughts

Despite remaining perennial indie rock favorites over the last decade, Spoon have always been about that small-stakes life. They aren’t going to alter the course of your existence—frontman Britt Daniel would probably smirk at such a claim—but occasionally Daniel’s hyper-specific details will creep into your mind unexpectedly. Is Dorian’s a real place? What’s the corner by Sound Exchange in Austin look like anyway? And why don’t more people talk about how much Garden State actually sucked?
This is not to say that Spoon’s songs don’t often overflow with sound, as they increasingly have. But there is no tortured myth surrounding the whole ordeal, no idealistic aims to be anything more than career band making themselves happy. Every few years, they put out a record that sounds like Spoon but offers some new little twist, they tour for long stretches after that, and then they go away for a while. Their last album, 2014’s They Want My Soul, was one of their best—soulful and swirling, with just enough teeth showing between the hooks. Their ninth album, Hot Thoughts, picks up that thread and takes it in a funkier and freer direction. There are loads of drum beats that sound indebted to hip-hop and dance music throughout, downbeat electronics, and two five-minute instrumentals, including a moody jazz coda that closes the record.
But Spoon also know their lane quite well: punchy, inconspicuously catchy songs, with choruses just vague enough to make them applicable outside of whatever stylized vignette Daniel has yelped out; bonus points if there’s a brief jam session that runs intoxicatingly off the rails for just a moment towards the song’s end. This dichotomy can make Hot Thoughts a little uneven, unsure if it’s trying to be arty or poppy while playing around with the drum machines.
There are the hit attempts: The repetitive title track, whose jittery energy is practically killed by its surface-level “hot thoughts” about a sexy girl, nary a hint of clever winking to be found. And there are the clear hits: “Can I Sit Next to You,” which proves they’re almost as adept as Phoenix at infectiously anxious dance-rock, and “Do I Have to Talk You Into It,” an instant classic that could only come from this band. Jim Eno’s swaggering drums—a key element of Spoon’s sound since the start—and Alex Fischel’s descending piano chords drive the song boundlessly forward, punctuated by Daniel’s selective rasp. It takes a certain kind of 45-year-old frontman to sing the phrase “knock knock” and still sound at least moderately cool, not like some phony in his first pair of Ray-Bans.
Eno and Fischel also shine on “First Caress,” a toe-tapping tune about one of those ghosts that linger in Daniel’s head. He shoehorns in one of his Britticisms, a dry parenthetical that somehow captures the whole life of a character: “Coconut milk, coconut water/You still like to tell me they’re the same/And who am I to say?” On “Pink Up” he mumbles about taking a train to Marrakesh while the production—via indie-psych go-to Dave Fridmann—grows hazy and primal. By the end, the looping piano line, eerie strings, and bleeps of gibberish leave Spoon sounding a little like Radiohead. If anything, “Pink Up” tees up the final track, “Us,” which returns to the same motif after dark via saxophone and bells.
All this is a far cry from the band who wrote clever little classic-rock paeans to their fathers’ fitted shirts, but even then they were throwing in touches of harpsichord. That’s the trick with Spoon: They make it seem more straightforward than it actually is. Over time, their slowly accumulated sonic excess has led them here, to what could be considered their electronic album. But they’re caught just slightly between who they used to be and where they’re going, and the songs don’t always find a musical common ground. There’s one point in particular where their maximalism serves their attempt at an anthem—“Tear It Down”—but what’s funny is that the song’s sweeping whoa-oh climax is reminiscent of Arcade Fire, not Spoon. The tinkering of the trim Spoon attitude has become the most engaging part of their latter-day career. For a band that seems built on a reliable formula, they remain full of possibilities.


GoldLink is a 20-year-old rapper with a sound all his own. Brightly colored, hyper, and upbeat, the Virginia native's music featured on his first mixtape draws openly from genres that street rap usually has no time for: bachata, go-go, classic house.

The God Complex

GoldLink is a 20-year-old rapper with a name that recalls a securities firm (he used be to be Gold Link James, but dropped the surname to avoid any Trinidad James comparisons) and a sound all his own. Brightly colored, hyper, and upbeat, the Virginia native's music draws openly from genres that street rap usually has no time for: bachata, go-go, classic house. When Diddy's Revolt.TV asked him to describe his style, he responded thoughtfully: "Rick James meets Justin Timberlake (*NSYNC days) with Backstreet Boys and a little D12 and Tupac." GoldLink is a unique creature in rap right now and he knows it.
He doesn't have much music to his name yet*—The God Complex*, his debut mixtape, is only 26 minutes and nine tracks long. Prior to that, there were six songs on his Soundcloud. But his sound is distinct and unusual enough to have snagged the attention of local tastemakers: Peter Parker, nighttime DJ at D.C. urban radio station WPGC, named him one of the DMV's artists to watch last year, and several of those early songs of his have surpassed 100k plays on Soundcloud. He's struck a nerve, even if no one knows exactly where that nerve is just yet.
There is a lot of information to parse on The God Complex, all of it happening at once. The BPMs are nearly twice as fast as current street rap allows, and glitzy house synths flutter everywhere. Louie Lastic, one of GoldLink's main collaborators and an architect of the sound that they've dubbed "Future Bounce", handles most of the production here; the resulting sound is wet and lubricious—there is a lot of audible licking and jiggling, both in the lyrics and the music.  The Ronnie Foster sample behind A Tribe Called Quest's "Electric Relaxation" peeks out furtively behind strobe lights and '90s R&B keyboards on "Bedtime Story". A slowed-down playback of Britney Spears' "Toxic" surfaces near the end of "How It's Done". You can imagine Azealia Banks wishing she'd corralled production from this crew.
And yet, GoldLink tramples through the music, his rhymes as hard as a shoulder check. This is one of the most fascinating pieces of GoldLink's sound—he skips through the minefield separating rap's ideas of "hard" and "soft". On "Bedtime Story", he calls out wearers of tight jeans and waves box-cutters at us. On "Hip-Hop (Interlude)" he reminisces about "masturbating to them porno flicks my brother gave me" and "popping guns" at age 11. His voice is high, hyper, and excitable, no one's idea of a tough-guy stereotype, but he keeps one foot firmly planted in street rap and the other in the club, tangling all the music's reference points and intentions like kite strings. The surfaces of his music are slick and slippery, and gaining purchase on what he's doing is like trying to hug a dolphin.
This confusion, and the endorphins it loosens, is presumably why people have been losing their shit about GoldLink. His music doesn't just make you hold two opposing ideas in your mind--it opens twelve tabs in one browser window.  On "Planet Paradise", he raps in triple-time, allowing a single pinhole gulp of air to open between "everyday we pray to-" and "God" in the exact same place every time. His mind moves at a thousand miles an hour, as does the music. Nine tracks is more than enough to digest for now.


The Ohio rock band’s bleak, heavy, and ambitious third LP is a subtle signal that they’re a band their fans can grow up with rather than out of.

As You Please

Citizen announced their sleek, roaring, and aerodynamic rebrand with a song appropriately called “Jet.” It’s just about 2017’s most authentic simulacra of 1996; if it landed on MTV and rock radio back then, all kinds of hand-wringing from pop-punk diehards would surely ensue. But this is 2017: “TRL” is back and it doesn’t even play videos, while alt-rock radio playlists are created in the image of Imagine Dragons—they don’t go anywhere near young and loud guitar bands without major-label backing. This puts Citizen in a situation almost identical to that of their labelmates and colleagues in Balance and Composure, Tigers Jaw, Turnover, Basement or just about anyone else called “soft grunge” and/or produced by Will Yip in the past decade. Perhaps they’d try to “level up” in the past, but those elevated platforms are gone—their newfound ambitions on their third LP As You Please aren’t a matter of expanding their demographic reach, but a more subtle signaling that they’re a band their fans can grow up with rather than out of.
Citizen’s evolution isn’t quite as drastic of those of their peers. Since the diaristic days of their 2013 debut Youth, Mat Kerekes’ lyrics have taken on a protective layer of bulk (see: “Winsome through the void/Resound my everything”), but his moments of clarity match the relentlessly grim outlook of Citizen’s music. There’s also far more instrumental and textural frill to the prevailing, concrete-sky ambience—a psych-rock organ on “Ugly Luck,” a howling chorus of the damned on “I Forgive No One,” a wheezing drone on the title track—but their go-to move remains Kerekes gritting his teeth through a chorus that ratchets up the tension rather than releasing it.
This can work to Citizen’s advantage since most of Kerekes’ narrators find life to be one kind of resistance after another, struggling against the pull of drugs and despair that seem like the only things the economically depressed cities of America have to offer anymore. But with 12 songs of nearly equal tone, volume, and length, the nearly hour-long As You Please becomes its own endurance test. When As You Please is taken in smaller chunks, the minor variations between the songs where Citizen churn and the ones where they steamroll ever forward become more discernible. Taken as a whole, Yip’s sleek production flattens out the individual contouring of each track; the piano-led “Discrete Routine” and “Jet” have far different intentions but equal dynamic range, while the vocals and riffs that should lunge out of the speakers seem to be at the same volume as the verses.
It’s fair to ask whether the fatigue generated by As You Please is the entire point. Like many indie rock bands from the Rust Belt, Citizen spent most of the past year looking at their hometown and seeing little hope for redemption—beset by socioeconomic problems far beyond their control, while being scapegoated for the current state of American politics. How could As You Please speak truthfully on its surroundings without merely compounding the misery? It’s a question that’s inspired some of the most compelling indie rock of 2017, as previously apolitical bands have been forced into action—on Always Foreign, the World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die reinvented themselves as a vigilante posse, Cloakroom took solace in a cloud of weed smoke, Thunder Dreamer and Greet Death found bleak beauty in the urban ruins of Evansville and Flint.
While the honesty of Citizen’s dour outlook is commendable, the glimmer of light provided by “In the Middle of It All” is more compelling. This is the one that allows them to truthfully namecheck Queen as an influence, manifested entirely by Kerekes’ pitched-up falsetto harmony that serves as the most unconventional and catchy earworm on As You Please. It also contains Kerekes’ sharpest lyrics—a scrapbook of lost souls futilely hoping for a brighter tomorrow or living in the darkness of the past, all of it captured with clarity and empathy. It’s by far the best song Citizen have ever written, one that speaks directly to their unglamorous environs while transcending them all the same.