The DIY fixtures behind Silkies, Dee-Parts, and Mini Dresses turn their attention to scuzzy, no-fi ’80s punk overflowing with pop hooks.

Sweeping Promises: Good Living Is Coming for You

Good Living Is Coming for You

Over more than a decade and a half dozen aliases, Lira Mondal and Caufield Schnug have bled the past dry, mining just about every vein of indie rock down to the bedrock. As fixtures of Boston’s DIY scene, the collaborators carved out a wide niche by reshaping nostalgia into various formulae: beachy garage rock (Silkies), gothic minimalism (Dee-Parts), and, in their longest-lasting project, Mini Dresses, girl-group-adjacent dream pop. Their latest, Sweeping Promises, emerged from a converted Boston laboratory to seize the indie-rock science-fair trophy, this time with painstakingly scuzzy ’80s punk that’s convincing enough to sound beamed in from an episode of New Wave Theatre. Hypothesis confirmed: Dial in the right ratio of reverb to fuzz, age the tapes to perfection, and the recording studio can spit you back into any decade.

Now based in Kansas and convinced—whether by monomaniacal obsession or the unexpected support of Sub Pop—to linger in the Reagan years a while longer, Mondal and Schnug buckle down in the workshop (now a former nude painting studio) to sharpen their thesis. Having broken ground on their new direction with 2020’s Hunger for a Way Out, Sweeping Promises now widen it into a crowded highway on Good Living Is Coming for You, swerving through a bumper-to-bumper sprawl of pop hooks.
Time proving its endlessly flat-circle nature, Sweeping Promises arrive at a moment when the bookish rage of post-punk once again feels perfectly suited to pierce the malaise of supposedly “late” capitalism. But rather than tangle themselves up in its noisy machinery with dense instrumentals, a la Squid, or ponder its nauseating surrealism via dense wordplay, as Dry Cleaning might, Mondal and Schnug smoothly pluck out the anxious splinters in their minds like toys from a claw machine. Drawing on an impulse to write what Mondal calls “the parts of songs that I always loved singing really loud at the top of my lungs in the cars,” Good Living Is Coming for You plays like a lost compilation of bubblegum road-trip rock. Think the B-52’s’ “Roam” if the masters were left to cook in an attic for the last 40 years, or Kleenex’s secret soundtrack to a Saturday-morning cartoon.
One by one, the album’s 10 tracks tumble off the Sweeping Promises assembly line, their thrills vacuum sealed almost immediately by a first-thought-best-thought songwriting philosophy. Crack open lead single “Eraser” and you’re hit with a streamlined barrage of crunchy guitar, bargain-bin synths, snappy drums, and, most critically, Lira Mondal’s titanic vocals. Her acrobatic, ear-shattering wail pirouettes to perfection across Good Living Is Coming for You, all the while uncovering new tricks that stretch the album’s monophonic lo-fi to its limits. Take her snarling cries on the title track, gnashing and hissing at the frustrations of tumbling through declining standards of living, or the gritty alt-rock crooning of “Can’t Hide It,” headbanging its way through block after block of featureless gentrified housing. Multi-tracked, her voice is unstoppable, elongating the title of “Throw of the Dice” into a glittering cascade of descending harmonies and punching the lights out of a hated foe with an army of herself at her back on the gritty “You Shatter.” Mondal’s bold, uncanny knack for convertible-ready shout-alongs bends the lyrics’ sloganeering into mouth-watering neon signs of blinding intensity, sparkling across your retinas and imagination for hours afterwards.
Matching this glorious lack of subtlety blow for blow, the mangled, lo-fi instrumentation prizes melody over texture, piling hooks on top of hooks. Schnug’s guitar stabs and slashes instead of strumming, circling Mondal like a shark with biting two- or three-note vamps and even solos. On the powerful one-two punch of “Connoisseur of Salt” and “Walk in Place,” the confident economy of his playing opens up room for synthesizer and saxophone to add warmth to the grimy background; on the latter, an unexpectedly beautiful pre-chorus bed of calmly pulsing horns slides into place to smooth over its deja vu nightmare. It’s a fitting moment of reprieve and growth: For all its cracked nerves, Good Living Is Coming for You is a record of triumph and gathering strength, of harnessing self-awareness to break out of toxic cycles.
On the closing “Ideal No,” the relentless tick-tock chop of Schnug’s guitar heightens the anxiety of an aging body slipping into disrepair, bludgeoned further by woozy synths. But even as they tally up the damage, Mondal and Schnug are content to shrug it off. Their chirping refrain of “This isn’t ideal” isn’t quite the battle cry of “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” but it feels sturdier and more grounded, a soft cry of defiance from DIY veterans pulling on rusty armor to stay in the fight. The guillotine might not be rolling out quite yet, but Sweeping Promises will have you swearing that you can hear it rumbling into view.


On their second album, this quartet featuring Ty Segall and Ex-Cult’s Chris Shaw prod and pull at their militaristic punk with psychedelic tricks and brief detours.

Pre Strike Sweep

Of the innumerable albums, backing-band permutations, and side projects that form the Ty Segall ecosystem, GØGGS are the most singular. Though Segall again teams with longtime bandmate Charles Moothart in the group, their fusion of skate-punk and space-rock on GØGGS’ self-titled 2016 debut marked a clear aesthetic detour from the continuum of British Invasion rock and proto-metal that connects most of Segall’s releases (and his work with Moothart in Fuzz). GØGGS, after all, is ultimately less a vehicle for Segall’s wandering whimsy than a platform for the hectoring, hardcore-schooled bark of Ex-Cult shouter Chris Shaw. He is the fearsome drill sergeant whipping Segall and Moothart’s fuzzy offensive into militaristic shape, a role he embraces with Sergeant Hartman-style zeal on their second record, Pre Strike Sweep.
As Segall’s own catalog has turned increasingly eclectic and elegant, GØGGS is less an extracurricular indulgence for him than a necessary outlet for aggressive impulses. Even when he’s not behind the microphone, he makes his presence clear with tinfoil-chewing guitar spasms, the quality that best distinguishes GØGGS from Ex-Cult’s equally pulverizing punk. Opener “Killing Time” teases at radical reinvention with a brittle acoustic intro, but the band batters it into a warped piece of psych-metal within a minute. Bassist Michael Anderson then introduces a Black Flag rumble, setting the unrelentingly caustic tone of the next half hour.
GØGGS don’t exactly redraft their battle plan on Pre Strike Sweep, but they at least consider new ways to work within it. Like cats trapped in a bag, they poke, prod, and stretch without compromising established parameters. On the title track, Shaw plays shout-and-response with a convulsive riff, but halfway through, the song comes to a halt, only for Segall to revive it with crossfading noise swirls and snake-charmer guitar squiggles. The Paranoid-powered “Funeral Relief” shows just how much detail they can pack into two minutes, offsetting a raised-fist chorus with acoustic-propelled verses and dramatic arpeggios. Even when they adopt the cheeky sneer and sing-along sloganeering of late-1970s British street-punk on “CTA,” arrhythmic shocks of noise swoop in, throwing the song off balance.
While a sense of mischief lurks beneath the menace on Pre Strike Sweep, Shaw’s voice remains a proudly inflexible instrument, like the concrete walls of a burning skyscraper. Shaw is at once GØGGS’ most prominent feature and their most elusive—a loud, agitated, but obfuscating mouthpiece who sounds like he’s screaming down the empty hallway that leads to the practice space. Often, the only lyrics you’ll be able to make out are the song titles, though sometimes you don’t need much more. Amid the marauding metallic punk of “Vanity,” he spits out “Vanity/Your vanity” with enough disgust to make you feel like you've been caught striking a Blue Steel pose for a selfie.
There are times here where GØGGS can’t quite reconcile their hardcore DNA with their latent experimental impulses. The moody “Ruptured Line” feels less like a song than an excerpt from an extended avant-punk jam, and its improvised chaos leaves the normally authoritative Shaw sounding unmoored. But there’s equal evidence that GØGGS are becoming more adept at crafting hard-hitting songs that offer more than cathartic aggression for its own sake. The finale, “Morning Reaper,” sounds like vintage power-pop being torn apart inside a circle pit before GØGGS lock into some hard-rock riffage. Even in this marginally more melodic context, it’s still hard to decipher what exactly Shaw is railing against. But when most every aspect of life seems to be a source of chronic anxiety and rage, does it really matter?


The latest project from L.A.-based rapper is a fascinating, seemingly unfinished collage of spoken interludes, gorgeous beats, and low-fi snippets that reckons with a life of gold and faith.

ensley

This record, from a peripatetic, multi-talented twentysomething who uses several stage names, is both so accomplished and so incomplete. The strands used to create it point toward a completely unfamiliar artistic lane for many listeners. That the entire project is as good as it is while remaining defiantly “unfinished” and coming from a little-known artist is a reminder of all the artistic galaxies out there on the web, just beyond reach. It’s enough to bring a digital crate-digger to the point of existential crisis.
Pink Siifu, born Livingston Matthews and based in Los Angeles, has made music under many other names, most prominently Iiye. He’s a kind of a personification of the streaming’s counterculture, all the difficult-to-monetize music that has been passed around among smaller groups of listeners, beneath the SoundCloud rappers whose streaming numbers inflate their names to the point that major labels take notice. Matthews’ music weaves a web between various pillars of neo-soul, and sun-dried California hip-hop—Isaiah Rashad, D’Angelo, J-Dee, Flying Lotus—but at the center, there is a comprehensible Siifu. His persona is fully fleshed out: an earnest poet dependent on prayer but too shy to scan as self-serious, speaking his thoughts through the voices of others and disguising his own in crooked, glinting bars. Pro-black at every turn and implicitly anticapitalist, ensley is a portrait of the artist in fragments that refract Matthews’s image, splitting and tossing it every which way, forming a more complete picture than a traditional album might.
ensley is the latest of the more than three-dozen projects posted on Siifu’s Bandcamp page. Its 25 songs are shot through with spoken interludes, gorgeous beats, and low-fi snippets that reflect the heavy influence of veteran producer Knxwledge. The decaying loops shimmer like the gold that Siifu mentions throughout the songs here, almost as often as he brings up the power of prayer. Add to those two motifs the mysterious, insidious element identified on “tht bag” and you’ll begin to understand the struggle that defines the album. Gold and prayer are the weapons at Siifu’s disposal, the first granting a sense of aesthetic well-being (not economic) and the second a sense of spiritual well-being. The “bag” is figurative, standing for any element that threatens to rob a subject of those senses: the weight of alcoholism, racism, all forms of moral turpitude.
That none of this is immediately clear is a blessing. ensley is not pedantic. Its lessons have been hastily shoved into corners and wallpapered over with a wonderful selection of beats that make use of everything from classic hip-hop to ballads and old technicolor movie scores, shredding many of the samples beyond recognition. Those disguised sources are just one of the record’s many secrets. If you listen closely, the prospect of death is raised frequently: it’s there on “birmingham skies,” an ode to Matthews’ hometown on which he describes a friend who tells him, candidly, that she’s tired of breathing. He echoes her several songs later on the gorgeous “stay sane,” which turns a sampled dirge into high art. Siifu raps that he’s pacing on a tightrope, trying to ward off the devil and receiving encouragement from loved ones long gone. Faith, far more than technical ability, is the tool that he’s interested in sharpening. To evaluate Siifu’s rapping ability seems beside the point: He’s as scrutable as he wants to be from song to song, and he switches frequently from mumbling and muttering to clear pointed verses and back again.
The songs on ensley often arrive paired or tripled, reflecting each other in various ways, with other tracks slipped in-between those that are too closely related. The frayed horns of “outlet” only help that song shine more brightly, but its inverse arrives in the form of “set out.” The beat that set “outlet” aflame is hollowed-out and Siifu mutters about his father being “drunk as hell,” praying that he puts the bottle down. A more cheerful pairing comes at the end of the record in two comic skits, “Black Woman is God” and “No Mo Fux” that are entirely given over to the voices of black women. ensley is filled with women, from the pride Matthews expresses in his sister throughout to the fire mid-album verse on “Golds and Smiles” from the rapper Maassai.
ensley is long and occasionally repetitive. But even on its more challenging tracks, the album seems like a natural next step, a work in motion like The Life of Pablo, a set of collaborations midwived by the web and positively bursting with soul like Anderson .Paak’s Yes Lawd! It would be tempting to label it a proclamation, the introduction of an “important new voice,” but Siifu has been here for a minute and ensley feels more like it’s supposed to be passed around in private. The whole thing is hush-hush. The features, the samples, there’s so much to be recognized in Pink Siifu’s new world that stretches from the heavens down to the worst things on earth.


Sam Beam's sixth Iron & Wine album Ghost on Ghost is packed with ideas and features musical flourishes that nod to 1970s lite rock, jazz, and the blues.

Ghost on Ghost

“Winter Prayers”, a standout on Iron & Wine’s sixth album, Ghost on Ghost, begins quietly and disarmingly. Following the short, breezy instrumental coda of “Sundown (Back in the Briars)”, with its soft eddies of violin, “Winter Prayers” features only Sam Beam’s voice and guitar, with a sympathetic piano gently reinforcing the song’s delicate melody. What makes the moment so notable is how closely it resembles the Iron & Wine of yore, when Beam was recording albums in his living room and smuggling dark thoughts via comfort-food folk. Is the song just a means of offsetting some of the fuller and louder passages that make up the bulk of Ghost on Ghost? Or is it something slyer and more self-aware, a wink and a nod to the old self he’s left behind? Is Beam trying to remind us just how far he’s come since he calculated Our Endless, Numbered Days?
He has, in fact, come very far. In an effort not to play the sad strummer covering the Postal Service for the rest of his life, Beam has spent the last decade engaged in an arms race with himself. With each album he has seriously and self-consciously expanded his range, indulging new musical modes while locating finer grains of emotion. When he’s at his best, it can be bracing to watch a man whose repertoire once seemed so limited perform new tricks: In 2005 the Woman King EP slyly fitted his low-key folk with rustic percussion and sharp country-blues riffs, and two years later The Shepherd’s Dog (still his finest effort) revealed new full-band ambitions and arrangements as unruly as cowlicks. That pair of releases argued persuasively that Iron & Wine was more than just a guy, a guitar, and a beard.
What was truly remarkable about The Shepherd’s Dog was how quickly, confidently, and gracefully Beam shifted from folk minimalist to roots maximalist. However, 2011’s Kiss Each Other Clean sounded like a step backwards, toggling between the seemingly effortless (the affectionately nostalgic “Tree by the River”) to the turgidly effortful (the strained Dylanisms of “Walking Far form Home”). It plays like the transitional album that should have preceded, not followed Dog. Unfortunately, Ghost on Ghost is haunted by that same sense of in-between-ness: Beam is obviously excited about playing with new sounds and ideas, but he seems as yet unsure how to piece them together.
“Winter Prayers” is one of the quietest moments on the album, but it’s also one of the least fussy songs. Working again with Tin Hat Trio’s Rob Burger, who provides horn and string arrangements, Beam has recorded an album dense with ideas and busy with musical flourishes that distract as often than they cohere. Opener “Caught in the Briars” catches you off guard with its low thrum of horns and reed instruments bolstering one of Beam’s sunniest melodies. Soon the rattletrap percussion comes in, a little stodgy in this context. Then comes piano, adding nothing. The backing vocals insert persistent oohs and aahs, and the whole thing takes on a sequiny sparkle before the song falls down a flight of stairs on the coda.
Of course it’s admirable that Beam wants to push himself, to constantly redefine himself, to continually redraw the boundaries of his art. The fact that he’s willing to include some blues riffs and jazz combos on Ghost on Ghost-- hell, just the fact that he’s interested in rhythm at all-- suggests that he has a broadminded view of Americana that transcends folk and country. But Beam doesn’t do all those styles equally well. His nods to 1970s lite rock on “The Desert Babbler” and the Carpenters-slick “Grass Windows” more than pay off, but “Joy” is sickly sweet, and Iron & Wine-as-jazz-combo is disastrous: “Lovers’ Revolution” is a hot mess of overwrought druggy lyrics and underthought Beat rhythms, and when the song breaks for its instrumental interlude-- too gentle to evoke the havoc of a bad high, too rhythmless to be a New Orleans funeral parade-- it accommodates one of the most awkward musical passages of the year.
The inconsistency frustrates: One minute the arrangements sound crowded with sonic bric-a-brac, the next minute Beam turns on his inner editor, settles into an easy melody, or drops an imaginative turn of phrase. He’s an inventive songwriter with an idiosyncratic lyrical style, and most of the songs on Ghost on Ghost convey a sense of travel and transience with their place names and concrete details. The American Southwest figures prominently in his lyrics, as Beam evokes that specific quality of California light on “The Desert Babbler” and “New Mexico’s No Breeze”. His postcard impressionism gives the album its own distinct personality within his catalog, which comes through despite the cluttered production. In other words, Ghost on Ghost is best when it’s most straightforward and worst when the experimentalism becomes desperate rather than bold. Too often it sounds as though Beam is less interested in defining a new sound and more concerned with distancing himself from an old one.


The late-career renaissance of a great American troubadour continues with an eclectic album featuring Jamila Woods, James Mercer, Vernon Reid, and others.

Non-Secure Connection

Few contemporary music men have embraced the role of American troubadour like Bruce Hornsby. He cracks jokes, shakes his head in bewilderment at days gone by, and—judging by his broad roster of famous collaborators—is equally comfortable lending favors as calling them in. Since the 1991 breakup of his first band the Range, he’s played keys for the Grateful Dead, played jazz with Jack DeJohnette and bluegrass with Ricky Skaggs, and released a dulcimer album. (He also, legend has it, beat Allen Iverson in a game of one-on-one.)
Hornsby’s spent the last decade scoring Spike Lee Joints, and cinematic cues enlivened 2019’s Absolute Zero as well as its quick follow-up Non-Secure Connection. Non-Secure Connection’s arresting opener “Cleopatra Drones” showcases Hornsby’s ability to wrest resonant imagery from childlike turns of phrase, his layered vocals evoking a desert apocalypse of marching animals and “shoebox satellites.” Percussion sneaks in around the track’s halfway point, building a head of steam en route to a climactic keyboard solo. Similarly atmospheric production buoys “Time, the Thief,” on which Hornsby’s piano sails atop a symphonic horn arrangement.
As ever, Hornsby’s wistful, elegant melodies are the main attraction. A winding sitar and stand-up bass grab your attention on the unearthed Leon Russell collaboration “Anything Can Happen,” but it’s the earnest piano chords that make it such a winning ballad. Like much of the album, the James Mercer vocal duet “My Resolve” is grounded in cataclysmic themes; each verse and instrumental solo is its own roiling descent, each chorus an oasis of reprieve. And while Jamila Woods’s guest spot is the big-tent draw on “Bright Star Cast,” it’s driven by Hornsby and Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid’s thick electro-funk. The engineering is crisp and capacious, their playing loose and lively.
Of the dozens of character sketches scattered across Hornsby’s 35-year recording career, the most infamous are from Reagan’s second term. In the Range’s 1986 FM-radio breakthrough “The Way It Is,” a song about the insufficiency of the Civil Rights Act, a silk-suited businessman harrasses a woman waiting in a welfare line. This was followed in 1988 by “Look Out Any Window,” a Mellencamp-ian survey of farmers and fishermen casting weary eyes at the decade’s horizon. Rather than oppositional forces, Hornsby cast the urban poor and the red state/blue-collar demo as brothers of a widening underclass, sharing interests (organized labor) and antagonists (politicos, slick salesmen, small towns and small-mindedness).
But Hornsby’s writing actually improved when he became less of a prognosticator. By 2004’s Halcyon Days, a middle-aged manifesto of a piece with Billy Joel’s The Bridge and Mellencamp’s Key West records, he narrowed his focus to subtler narrative intersections, the sort of generational divides which tend to come up more in passing and less at the Thanksgiving dinner table. Shortly before Warren Zevon’s death, Hornsby began performing Zevon’s “Play It All Night Long,” a portrait of rural patriarchy gone to seed, in concerts; Non-Secure Connection’s “Shit’s Crazy Out Here” adds a layer of post-modern paranoia to the woebegone flippancy of Zevon’s “My Shit’s Fucked Up.”
For all his hip affiliations and progressive politics, Hornsby acknowledges his old soul happily enough. As on Halcyon Days, Non-Secure Connection’s characters are compromised less by the objective state of things than by their struggles to keep up. On the title track, a hacker likens himself to a Trojan warrior, yet can’t quite articulate the joy he finds in sowing chaos online. Later, on “Porn Hour,” an internet porn addict considers the onward trudge of technology: “The innovation of the internet was driven by a couple on a film set/We thank the hard boys and the naked girls, for the coming of our beautiful cyberworld.” I’m not sure I ever needed to hear the “Mandolin Rain” guy marvel aloud at the wonders of PornHub, but now that I have I’m not even mad about it.

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The Swedish electronic musician Peder Mannerfelt, who has  produced groups like Fever Ray and Blonde Redhead, evokes a gothic energy in his own music. In his hands, electronic music's habitual futurism looks a lot more like horror.

Controlling Body

You might not recognize Peder Mannerfelt by name, but over the past decade, the Swedish electronic musician has had a hand in plenty of projects with a higher profile than his own. He and his frequent collaborator Henrik von Sivers co-produced much of Fever Ray's debut album; they also produced Blonde Redhead's Penny Sparkle and some of Glasser's debut. Mannerfelt used to make stark, charcoal-dusted techno as the Subliminal Kid, and with another Swedish producer, Malcolm Pardon, he peddles burbling cosmic synth jams in the duo Roll the Dice. But the key to understanding his work under his own name lies in "Evening Redness in the West," a strange and harrowing song from his 2014 debut album that borrows its title from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. Over flickering drones, a computerized voice intones a succession of disconnected words that might be ripped straight from McCarthy's pages: "barren," "horizon," "filth," "Bowie knife," "blood." It sounds a little bit like HAL, the on-board computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, having a fatal meltdown in the dry Texas chaparral—an unlikely juxtaposition that goes to the heart of Mannerfelt's vivid, unconventional approach. He's no goth, exactly, but his work is deeply informed by gothic literary tropes, and in his hands, electronic music's habitual futurism looks a lot more like horror.
Mannerfelt's last album, 2015's The Swedish Congo Record, used coldwave and techno as a roundabout way of examining African percussion and European colonialism. Although the themes underlying his new record, Controlling Body, are less explicit, we can get a sense for what's on his mind from titles like "Abysmal," "The Confidence of Ignorance," and "Limits to Growth." This is chilly, forbidding stuff, setting disassembled techno rhythms against a backdrop of queasy synths and industrial clang. The ambiguity of the album title bleeds into a series of questions. What constitutes a body, for instance? What do our bodies control, and what forces control us? Is it possible that the computers are really in charge?
Controlling Body opens with "Building of the Mountain," in which Glasser's Cameron Mesirow, whose voice is threaded throughout the album—sometimes speaking, sometimes singing, and often just providing throaty color—sings long, clear tones that quiver against filament-bright sine waves. There's no rhythm to speak of, just a gloomy "Mentasm" stab that comes hurtling across the stereo field at regular intervals. The overall impression is of Joan La Barbara leading a funeral march across the outskirts of a Belgian rave, and that bleak tone persists across the rest of the album. A few tracks are ominously atmospheric: "Coast to Coast" suggests sighing train whistles, and "Abysmal," an ambient acid sketch, enlists a chorus of the damned to drive its apocalyptic point home. Those quieter cuts help cushion full-bore tracks like "Limits to Growth" and "Perspectives," in which the word "subject" stutters and loops over punishing, shuddering rhythms. It's as through the Singularity had finally arrived, but due to insufficient bandwidth, all those uploading souls were left endlessly buffering, stuck in a kind of data purgatory.
Given linguistic cues like these, it's not hard to find all manner of possible interpretations for the ideas that give Controlling Body its substance; it's about as literary as instrumental electronic music gets. But Mannerfelt also keeps things wonderfully open-ended: The patient, glassy pings of "The Confidence of Ignorance" climax in a slow, rhythmic fusillade of gunshots and distant shouts, and if the source is what I think it is, that almost certainly makes this the finest album this year that samples skeet shooting. And on the closing "I Love You," Glasser sings a scratchy ballad that's as foreboding as it is tender. Her presence—hushed, vulnerable, but also defiant and at times intimidating—helps emphasize the imposing scale of Mannerfelt's sweeping electronic architectures. Both breathy and carnal, she is the ghost in the machine and the body in the cloud, a specter haunting a dystopian landscape of electrical hum and binary code, the human point of reference that brings his gothic panorama thrillingly to life.


As Stereolab take a hiatus, they leave us with a new LP of material recorded during the same sessions that produced Chemical Chords.

Not Music

When Stereolab announced plans to take an indefinite hiatus in April of last year, they also mentioned that a parting gift was in the works: Chemical Chords 2, a second record of material from the 2007 sessions that spawned the concise, horn-studded Chemical Chords. At the time, Tim Gane told Pitchfork it would "make an interesting kind of sibling or companion to [Chemical Chords]," and that they were hoping to get it out quickly "because it's too similar, it's from the same sort of sessions." Laetitia Sadier described it as having "31 songs, which are split into two halves. One is the day side, and one is the nighttime side."
Over the past year and a half, Not Music was pared back considerably: The final version features 13 songs, including two extended remixes of Chemical Chords songs by the Emperor Machine and Atlas Sound. This turns out to have been an effective approach. The careful song selection and sequencing of this mix is intended to play like a proper studio album, and mostly, it does, even with the 8-minute-plus remixes acting as centerpieces. And while obviously similar in sound to Chemical Chords, the record is suffused with as much joyous synth experimentation, astral effects and flourishes, and buzzy motorik rhythms as Stereolab's mid-career efforts.
Needless to say, if you're hoping for a career-defining endcap, this is not that record. The new, non-remix tracks on Not Music ignore much of Stereolab's omnivorous career-- there's no space-age bachelor pad music, no bossa nova flourishes, and no sign of the rawer avant-garde leanings that shaped their earliest records. Instead, the set continues in the taut, propulsive pop vein of their more recent releases.
Album opener "Everybody's Weird Except Me" is sweet yet dry, using the richness of Laetitia Sadier's nonchalant alto to cut the cuteness of the melody. The track plays off the dichotomies Stereolab have come to love-- old-fashioned pop tropes delivered by whirring, futuristic instruments, with cold detachment rubbing up against whimsical lushness and cerebral orchestrations played with charm. "Sun Demon" opens by deconstructing a garage-rock melody (there's a trace of the Castaways' "Liar, Liar" organ line in there) with splashes of videogame bleeps, then throws its back into an unrelenting rhythmic chug. And "Two Finger Symphony" explicitly answers the last record's "One Finger Symphony" with its slightly altered repetitive keyboard vamp.
Stereolab's last effort was among the most concise and tightly focused of the band's career, distilling their baroque, buzzing aesthetic into breathless, three-minute pop songs. Not Music mostly echoes that change, but also sprawls like vintage Stereolab when it needs to, as on the 10-plus-minute centerpiece "Silver Sands [Emperor Machine Mix]", which turns the xylophone melody of the Chemical Chords original into a sparse, mechanized krautrock throb.
The Stereolab story for the last five years has been, "Yep, they still sound like Stereolab." And if we're disappointed that the band's ever-experimental drive feels stifled by the brevity of this newer material, perhaps this hiatus is well-timed. While we learn to finally miss the quirky, stylish synth-pop that we've begun to take for granted, we'll have to content ourselves with Not Music as the band's final hurrah-- at least for now. I suspect it won't be long before we realize that the leftovers of a band like Stereolab are still better than main dishes offered up by many of their peers. And maybe by then, they'll be back to recording.


For the first time in his brief career, the triple-threat singer is running on more than just potential. On his latest project, he brings youthful charm, optimism, and curiosity to his most fully realized work yet.

Apolonio

For music that drips with adolescent, hormone-fueled infatuation, Omar Apollo’s songs are notably free of the melodrama of teenagehood. “And you said I was your soulmate, but that was just a lie,” he bemoans on “Useless”—a highlight from his latest project Apolonio—before pivoting with a shrug: “It’s all right, we’re too young to be giving out advice.” Playful yet self-aware, Apollo, 23, knows how to navigate the peaks and valleys of youthful angst, lust, and carefree fun without ever taking himself too seriously.
Apollo’s triple-threat potential has always been part of the conversation surrounding his music: handsome and stylish, equipped with a malleable, multi-octave vocal range that scrapes Miguel-level heights, he’s nearly as talented a producer as he is a singer-songwriter. Apolonio’s sound, like that of 2018’s Stereo and 2019’s Friends, bridges the vulnerable funk of Daniel Caesar, the seductive atmosphere of Kali Uchis (who steals the show on Apolonio’s “Hey Boy”), and the warm solitude of Nostalgia, Ultra-era Frank Ocean. It’s not a new sound, nor is it particularly balanced, but across these nine songs, aided by Apollo’s undeniable charisma, Apolonio melts into something perfectly suited for the butterflies of a long-awaited kiss or the nostalgia of an old yearbook.
Like much of Apollo’s music, Apolonio pulses with yearning; what’s different here is Apollo’s comfort in directing it to men as well as women. His songwriting has opened up as a result. “Drive through Georgia 19 hours on vacation/I ain’t never left the state, man, I been waiting/and that pretty boy still hit me up on strange occasions,” he sings on “Kamikaze,” a piercing reflection on teenage heartbreak. But then the humor peeks through. “I ain’t really know you was freaky, though,” he sings moments later, his voice poking out of its monotone. “Ass round like Cheerios.”
Apollo’s take on queerness has always been sly and understated; there’s no doubt that questions about his sexuality, which he’s avoided addressing directly since he broke out, have made him more beguiling. But there’s no right way for a queer person to be queer—and hearing Apollo, on “Kamikaze,” remembering being hurt by a boy who moved on, or singing about boys, girls, and a crush on a boy who’s with a girl now on the bouncy bilingual opener “I’m Amazing,” it all feels honest and vulnerable, like moments of self-actualization that reduce the exhausting public obsession with other people’s sexuality to dust.
This isn’t to say he has it all figured out. Apolonio feels more like a collection of disparate sketches than a cohesive vision—jumping from Parliament-style funk and muted pop to rapping and Mexican corrido (on the exuberant origin story “Dos Uno Nueve,” sung in Spanish), it’s a reflection of Apollo’s own unbound energy, both giddy and unsure. He’s most in his comfort zone when he deepens an already established sound, like on lead single “Stayback,” a wet and sticky slow jam that has Apollo reaching for a Curtis Mayfield falsetto, over-enunciating and dramatically scrunching his voice up like George Clinton (the knockout remix even features Bootsy Collins). He strikes gold on “Useless,” which features guitar and songwriting from Strokes guitarist Albert Hammond Jr; Apollo does his best Julian Casablancas impression on the verses before flooding the chorus with thwacking bass and flawless harmonies. It’s a clear homage to the Strokes that nonetheless feels distinctly new, and it works.
Apollo and his occasional co-producers (including Frank Ocean collaborator Michael Uzowuru, 21-year-old wunderkind Teo Halm, and hip-hop iconoclast DJ Dahi) sometimes struggle to keep that same level of focus throughout the project. “Want U Around,” featuring singer Ruel, is the type of flat funk imitation that “Stayback” manages to avoid. One of two tracks not at least co-produced by Apollo himself, “Bi Fren” forces Apollo into sounding like a groaning clone of Post Malone and Khalid over an anonymous beat, stripping him of his trademark quirk and taking the punch out of his wrenching vulnerability.
The more you listen to Apolonio, the more its unevenness comes to feel like an extension of Apollo himself, still growing, still curious. Yet for the first time in Apollo’s brief career, it’s not his potential that feels most thrilling, but rather the glimpses we’re getting of what’s already there; Apolonio undoubtedly stands on its own as his most fully realized work. Apollo’s music celebrates what was and what is, not what could be, and in a moment when the future feels catastrophic at best, there’s comfort in knowing that a few years ago, in a different reality, a teenaged Omar Apollo drove 19 hours to Georgia to see his crush for the last time.


He really went ahead and did it: Lil Wayne finally releases his unlikely, unqualified, and quite unbelievable rock album.

Rebirth

It could be worse. "Everybody say they just do it, well, I just don't," claims Lil Wayne on Rebirth, his unlikely, unqualified, and quite unbelievable rock album. And he's speaking the truth: This album is not the logical official follow-up to 2008's best-selling Tha Carter III. At all. In any way. For that, he deserves credit. Considering Wayne is a man whose artistic aims apparently involve 1) Collecting oil-tycoon cash, 2) Having sex with several women at once, and 3) Concocting the world's finest excrement-related rhymes, Rebirth is most definitely a flop, terribly unsexy, and contains surprisingly few shit jokes. Wayne is playing against type here. "When I play sick, I'm Jordan with the flu," he boasts on the album, referring to Jordan's classic game against the Jazz. And in general, that's true; but here Wayne is like Mike with pneumonia and a broken leg... playing baseball.
In the mid 1980s, Run-D.M.C. used distorted guitars and stadium-rock drums to help break hip-hop into the mainstream. Now, one of the world's biggest rappers is using the same tools to make a niche record only a diehard could truly love. That flip says as much about hip-hop's current state of evolution (shaky) as it does about Lil Wayne's current commercial predicament. Although his recent mixtape was dubbed No Ceilings, the pressure of success and the idea that he'll never top the million-in-a-week phenomenon that was Tha Carter III is naturally weighing on Wayne. He may never have a single as big as "Lollipop" or reach the level of universal relevancy to warrant another prime time interview with Katie Couric. He seems to realize this on Rebirth.
"Call me crazy, I've been called worse/ It's like I have it all, but what's it all worth?" asks Wayne on "Paradice", a Miltonian epic about the trappings of super stardom that aims for Axl Rose, Use Your Illusion-style heights. The closest he comes to an answer to that question is on "Drop the World", where he combats paranoia by threatening to "pick the world up and drop it on your fuckin' head!" It's a hilarious image that would serve as an incredible exaggerated parody of Linkin Park angst if the song wasn't dead serious-- a fact confirmed by a martyr-me guest shot from Eminem, who himself still sounds like he's coming to grips with the fact that he'll never be as famous as he once was.
"Drop the World" also contains another key lyric from Wayne: "The spot get smaller and I get bigger/ Tryin' to get in where I fit in, no room for a nigga." The lines hint at the notion of Rebirth being something of a cop-out, i.e., if he can't top himself, he's just going to scratch away everything that makes him great. So instead of rapping we get gurgled Auto-Tune chirps and squeals that often nullify his one-in-a-billion elastic croak. Instead of next-level clever punchlines-inside-of-punchlines we get pure high-school inanity or swear parades deserving of a soapy mouthwash. According to Wayne, rock music combines the coked-out idiocy of Sunset Strip hair metal with the processed rage of Bizkit-ed headbanging. Understandably, the combination can be abhorrent. The choice to cannibalize two of rock's least respectable styles against each other makes zero sense, and is especially surprising from someone obsessed with André 3000, whose similarly risky 2003 genre switch up, The Love Below, wisely borrowed from Prince more than Evanescence.
But even with Rebirth's crushing lows-- and Wayne's imminent jail sentence thanks to a guilty plea on attempted gun possession charges-- there is little reason to doubt the 27-year-old's future as an enterprising, Grammy-highlighting superstar of the most esteemed set. "Confidence is the stain they can't wipe off," he says on the record, and he's right. A big part of his magnetism relies on unpredictability and his willingness to reside in a personal realm where trends, gimmicks, and gravity are of little concern. In that more ideological and less critical mindset, Rebirth is an oddball win. His still-impressive productivity rate also cushions the blow-- thanks to No Ceilings, we know the guy's rapping abilities are still sharp. And, on the same day Rebirth saw release, Wayne also put out a brand new non-album cut called "Fuck Today" that combines rap and rock with more aplomb than anything on the new LP. The track is diabolical and political, recalling Ice Cube in his early-90s prime. And it makes you think the proposition of a Rebirth II might not be so awful. I mean, it could be better.

Cash Money / Universal Motown / Young Money Entertainment


Led by the indomitable Patrick Stickles, the band’s fifth album shifts towards a more stripped down, barroom rock feel. But for all its musical freedom, A Productive Cough is still a laborious record.

A Productive Cough

Midway through a documentary about the making of Titus Andronicus’ fifth album A Productive Cough, lead singer Patrick Stickles seems to question everything his epic New Jersey punk band has done until now. “In my music, it’s like I ask for understanding for myself, and I know that in doing that I’m doing it on behalf of certain members of my audience,” the frontman tells his dad. “But I also push these people away with a lot of screaming sometimes!” Maybe, he reasons, there’s a way he can communicate that understanding more directly, without the barrier of anger and amplifiers, or the threat to snap at any moment. There will still be some screaming, “But really, I’m trying to put the communicating first,” he insists.
Being understood is a reasonable concern for a songwriter who once couched his personal anguish deep in an album-length metaphor for the Civil War on their most storied album, The Monitor. For Titus Andronicus’ last LP, the colossal 2015 rock opera The Most Lamentable Tragedy, Stickles went so far as to annotate his own songs on Genius, but that gesture of comprehension seems slight compared to the fundamental recalibration of the band’s sound he attempts on A Productive Cough. The record tames the band’s usual, roiling rock with looser, jauntier grooves pitched somewhere between the Stones’ rangy early ’70s LPs and Van Morrison’s homages to New Orleans R&B. Where its predecessors played out in sickeningly tense eruptions of guitar, their latest takes the edge off, leaving the band room to kick back and unwind.
Of course, the album’s easygoing musical approach may also reflect the practical necessity for a band like this to scale back from time to time. Titus Andronicus has a pattern of following a massive event album with a smaller one that doesn’t quite scratch the same itch, and A Productive Cough is more focused than The Most Lamentable Tragedy. But even this band’s minor works are an undertaking, and with its 46-minute runtime spread across just seven songs—one of them a first-person reinterpretation of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” that runs a numbing nine minutes—there’s a burdensome heaviness to the record that belies what was presumably meant to be a cheerier, more inviting sound. The music’s supposed to be an escape, yet the album always feels like it’s on the clock.
A Productive Cough sets an odd tone by opening with its most labored, tightly wound track, “Number One (In New York),” an eight-minute address about the State of Titus Andronicus. The gist: The band is still kicking, but nothing’s ever easy. “Declare myself president of the emptiness, say I’m Rembrandt of dancing on the precipice,” Stickles scours in a tattered voice that seems to age a decade between each album, “Eleven years in and trying to stay relevant.” His wordplay is as sharp and generous as ever, but the song unspools at such a torrid pace, toiling so hard for such a modest payoff, that it leaves the listener exhausted before the album even really begins.
And for a band that’s always encouraged deep reads, there isn’t a lot going on under the surface of many of these songs. All boozy Memphis horns and barroom pep, “Above the Bodega (Local Business)” charms out of the gate, but its lyrical conceit amounts to little more than “the guy at the corner store sure must see a lot,” a quaint observation about city life that it stretches very thin. “Crass Tattoo,” about a literal Crass tattoo, is more cleverly literary in its riff on music fandom as a higher calling (“My right arm, I dedicated to that noble cause/To dismantle authority and nullify all laws,” sings Brooklyn musician Megg Farrell, breezily) but its funereal tempo drags down an album that’s already plagued by languid pacing.
The promotional campaign for A Productive Cough has been preemptively defensive, overstating the degree to which the band has shed their punk ties and working from the assumption that a lot of fans are going to hate it; one press release even throws in a jab about infuriating “the black-denim-and-PBR set.” But blaming the album’s reception on straw-man rock fans—the same fans, presumably, that Stickles vows to preach understanding for—is strangely contradictory, especially when the album’s faults are so self-evident. Stickles is a fundamentally bad match for these sounds, and his brusque demeanor clashes with, and sometimes outright deflates, any uplift in this music. His churlish persona can be a blast when his grievances soar past like billboards on a highway, but it’s not nearly so entertaining when you’re locked in close proximity with it for long, ambling exposures. For all its promises of a leisurely, good time, A Productive Cough plays like a quarantine.


Contemporary rock's top chameleon gives the people what they want, drafting in the Dust Brothers to try to recapture his Odelay persona and sound.

Guero

PATIENT PROGRESS ASSESSMENT: MARCH 2005
Subject: Beck Hansen, 35 years old, Caucasian
Medical History: Physically, subject's health is good; no major or chronic issues, although voice suggests persistent sinusitis. Psychologically, Mr. Hansen shows a history of Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), diagnosed in 1995 and treated intermittently via analysis and hypnosis. Subject's recorded personalities include:

Dust Bowl-era folk singer, prone to wearing flannel, acoustic guitar always present, unable to leave house without harmonica clip (see attached materials, One Foot in the Grave).

Ardent practitioner of "hip-hop," exhibits "word salad" symptomology characteristic of schizophrenics (see Mellow Gold).

Self-described "space cowboy." Similar to personality #1, except with claimed origin in future, rather than past. Also known to dabble in bossa nova. (see Mutations).

Smooth-talking sexaholic, race indeterminate. Causes subject to wear small outfits with big collars. Frequently does "the splits." Earnestness of personality questionable. (see Midnite Vultures).

Depressive, excessively self-reflective middle-aged man. Moves at very slow pace, exhibits fetish for exotic string arrangements, and shows delusional belief that he's Blood on the Tracks-era Bob Dylan. By far his least enjoyable persona; friends report being "really bummed out" in his presence when these traits are dominant (see Sea Change).

Mr. Hansen has experienced one distinct period of personality cohesion, which is widely considered to be his most healthy and agreeable time (see attached materials, Odelay). Since this psychological peak, the patient has experienced pressure to return to this state, wherein all of the above personae peacefully co-exist to create a unique and well-balanced whole. However, Mr. Hansen has appeared unable or unwilling to bend to these outside demands, instead spending periods of 1-2 years at various extremes of the above stated categories.
Current Session: Lately, Mr. Hansen has shown an increased willingness to accept the advice of his peers and doctors, mounting a highly motivated and publicized effort to return to the behavioral cohesion of his Odelay period. Reuniting with his therapists of that era, the Dust Brothers (Drs. M. Simpson and J. King, M.D, Ph.D), he has made a lot of progress towards this goal, exhibiting behavior (see attached media, Guero) that appears to resemble his healthier days. But whether this restoration of character balance is merely superficial, and, furthermore, whether it is the proper attitude for the patient, remains to be determined.
Note the resemblance of Guero opener "E-Pro" to Odelay's "Devil's Haircut", both tracks assembled from guitar-driven riff-loops and Mr. Hansen's drowsy talking-blues delivery. Notice that the twangy-acoustic vs. turntable-scratch paradoxes of "Jackass" are repeated on "Earthquake Weather" and "Farewell Ride". Further antecedent is seen in the quirk collage (sonar blips, harmonica, Christina Ricci) of "Hell Yes", which can be directly traced back to the earlier period's "High 5 (Rock the Catskills)".
That the patient is re-visiting past combinations of his constituent personalities is not in itself a cause for worry; after all, it is what most of his support system has been suggesting for many years. But one wonders whether Mr. Hansen's heart is in the proceedings, as many of the songs appear to be little more than weak echoes of their similar predecessors. Furthermore, stray remnants of individual personality types, particularly the most recently-seen "mope" character, pop up on "Missing" and "Broken Drum," in the form of slow tempos and "Blue Jay Way" strings.
Other areas give indications of new, healthy ways of rectifying the contradictions within Mr. Hansen's torrid mind. "Girl" uses an NES symphony prologue to introduce a Cali-rock pastiche, the sweetness of which overcomes its serial killer lyrics and "Hey Ya" biting. "Black Tambourine" finds the patient stripping down his usual methods, concentrating on foreboding rhythms and gimmick economy, while "Earthquake Weather" is similarly sparse, and sees Mr. Hansen using his falsetto for a purpose other than adding a musical wink to his less serious efforts.
All in all, my assessment of the patient's recent advances is a mixed one. Mr. Hansen has certainly attempted to follow the regimen recommended to him, and has done his best to recapture earlier moments of lucidity and unity, but in many ways the final result feels rote and calculated. It seems likely that what worked for the subject almost ten years ago may not be appropriate at this later stage; in today's landscape, the methods seem a bit obsolete and over-prescribed. Mr. Hansen may have given us what we demanded, but, at this juncture, we should consider that his personalities have drifted so far apart that they are better left that way.


Nite Jewel and Dâm-Funk have been teasing a collaboration for years, and their long-awaited EP, they capture lightning in a bottle. More, please.

Nite-Funk

When combined, Nite Jewel and Dâm-Funk can arguably be considered a supergroup, as both artists have forged their own solid paths in the underbelly of the electronic music scene. It was only a matter of time before the pair joined forces on a real project: They've been teasing that union for close to a decade now through one decent collaboration and several loose associations. On their long-awaited collaborative release Nite-Funk, we get a glimpse of what these two can do when their creative forces unite on an EP, and it’s lightning in a bottle.
In September of 2015, Nite Jewel and Dâm-Funk dropped off what was presumed to be their Nite-Funk lead single “Can U Read Me?” The track was woozy and arguably less aggressive than their previous 2009 collaboration “Am I Gonna Make It,” which was more upbeat but underproduced. While “Can U Read Me?” didn’t make the EP (though it definitely should have), the song signified the direction the duo would be taking on Nite-Funk. At four tight tracks, Nite-Funk is merely an appetizer for a dinner we’ve been craving for years. Both Nite Jewel and Dâm-Funk bring their best selves to the project, channeling vibes of more recent duo successes like AlunaGeorge, only less syrupy and blippy and more soulful and funky.
The breezy opener “Don’t Play Games” delivers melodic hums from Nite Jewel with Dâm-Funk adding playful keys and delicate synths. “Let Me Be Me” follows, carrying a darker, Hall and Oates-esque vibe, with Nite Jewel singing crisply and chanting “I’ve gotta get out and be free.”  The slower-simering “Love x2” sounds eerily like a Janet Jackson deep cut, and Nite Jewel travels along that same vein on the mid-tempo “U Can Make Me.” If there is one critique to offer (outside of the exclusion of “Can U Read Me?”) it’s that Nite-Funk could easily be regarded as a Nite Jewel project featuring Dâm-Funk. While his presence is certainly felt through the intoxicating production, it still leans in Nite Jewel’s favor, especially when her ethereal vocals are inserted into the beat. This could have easily been tacked onto her latest solo album Liquid Cool. But even judged on those terms—a Nite Jewel solo EP that happens to feature Dâm-Funk—it sounds like a success. "
*Nite-Funk *was more than likely the result of a seven-year conversation between Nite Jewel and Dâm-Funk playing the “should we or shouldn’t we?” game. Four tracks is only so much to go on, but if this short-but-sweet project was their litmus test, then they should race back to the studio and cut a full-length project. More, please.


The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records: Vol. 1 (1917–1932), released on Jack White's Third Man imprint and Revenant, is a 22-pound set that comes in a thick cardboard box. At the center of the collection is a drive containing 800 songs from Paramount’s first decade, a period that shaped the landscape for the rise of a recording industry anchored on jazz, rock'n'roll, and country music.

Various Artists: The Rise & Fall of Paramount Records, Volume One (1917-1932)

The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records: Vol. 1 (1917–1932) arrives like a family of nested matryoshka dolls. Sent by post, the 22-pound compendium comes in a wide and thick cardboard box, with the name and address of Paramount’s parent enterprise, the long-extinct Wisconsin Chair Company, branded on the side for the sake of authentic anachronism. Inside, two-inch walls of Styrofoam and a plastic sheath protect what Third Man and Revenant Records, the project’s operational partners, call The Cabinet of Wonder.
The hinged-and-clasped oak Cabinet bears Paramount’s iconic medallion on the outside, an eagle with its wings spread and head cocked, talons locked into the label’s name and positioned in front of a grooved record that suggests a morning’s rising sun. The set smells of varnish and glue and furniture—sweet but a little sour, too. Clasp popped, five distinct layers of wonder follow: a batch of six marbled brown LPs housed in an old-fashioned wooden binder; a velum envelope containing replications of ephemera from the earliest days of the recording industry; a hard-cover volume that tells the story of that troublesome start and its biggest stars; and a phone-book sized catalogue that does its best to detail nearly every performer included and, for the first time ever, name each of the thousands of records Paramount released in its two-decade lifespan.
The littlest doll, wedged into a specially cut hole in the green felt platform that lines the box, is a tarnished brass flash drive, playfully dubbed a Jobber-Luxe. The contraption is crafted to look like the reproducer-and-needle assembly of one of the Wisconsin Chair Company’s Vista Talking Machines, the reason they got into the nebulous and uncertain business of selling records, anyway. It is the ultimate fulfillment of the set’s creative anachronism. The drive contains 800 songs culled from Paramount’s first decade, a fitful and suddenly fertile period that, in many ways, shaped the landscape for the rise of a recording industry anchored on jazz, rock ’n’ roll, and country music. Taken together, these recordings are no less than one blueprint of what has become American music.
Through scrupulous research, audacious design, and ostentatious packaging, this two-volume collection’s first installment does precisely what the best box sets intend to do—add proper deference and context to music that remains vital and significant. Retailing for $400, The Rise and Fall is no doubt expensive, especially considering that there’s a second and complementary volume forthcoming. But at once, it’s a history lesson, a dance hall, a bandstand, and a smoky blues parlor, all tucked neatly into one sturdy box. This is the Cabinet of Wonder, indeed.
The Paramount Records story is one of American entertainment’s great musical curiosities and catalysts. The label started slowly and without certainty, publishing cheap singles so that the people buying monolithic turntables from the Wisconsin Chair Company would actually have something to hear. The label operated with eternal economy, using talent scouts instead of investing in field recording equipment, forgoing demos, and working in cheap studios where even some of the best takes were of mediocre quality.
But the real jolt to the company—and the reason this set so closely mirrors the sound at the start of its country’s music industry—came with the arrival of Mayo Williams. A proud and cunning black man and former professional football player, Williams had gone to Brown and worked a stint as a salesman for the blues-and-jazz-heavy record label Black Swan. When Paramount purchased Black Swan, he traveled to Wisconsin from Chicago in 1923 to ask for a job; he emerged as a talent scout, a talent manager, and the true pioneer of the short-lived empire that pushed Paramount toward the front of the emerging “race records” industry—that is, recording black music to sell to black listeners.
“There’s 14 million Negroes in our great country and they will buy records if recorded by one of their own, because we are the only folks that can sing and interpret hot jazz songs just off the griddle,” Mamie Smith’s impresario, Perry Bradford, had said in 1920. Mamie had happened upon a hit for Okeh; the year Williams arrived in Wisconsin, Bessie Smith had done the same at Columbia. Williams’ professed specialty had become a suddenly hot commodity and his subsequent discovery, advocacy, and management of his artists made stars that, in turn, made movements. With Blind Blake and Blind Lemon Jefferson, Ma Rainey and Ethel Waters, Williams turned Paramount into an artistic institution if only by sheer commercial willpower. Williams left the company in 1927, the year that this volume—which documents the rise of Paramount just before its Depression-abetted fall—ends.
The structure and sound of many of the songs found throughout The Rise and Fall and within the archives of Paramount’s peers proved foundational to the shape of modern music. But pondering the historical implications of Papa Charlie Jackson’s acrid wit and aggressive playing or the twinkling roar of Jimmy Blythe’s piano runs the risk of ignoring this set’s most incredible invitation: to let these songs simply play (on vinyl, in iTunes, or through the customized and customizable playlists included on the Jobber-Luxe) and to immerse oneself in some incredible, make-or-break performances. It’s tempting to get lost in the high-design grandeur of the Cabinet of Wonder, but this music—gathered piecemeal from the collections of enthusiasts all over the world, fighting always through a scrim of static on these remastered recordings—is the raison d’être, the heart of a box alive with history.
When these songs were made, they existed on the bleeding edge of entertainment and society, with black suddenly meeting white, farm suddenly meeting city, sound suddenly meeting cylinder. Indeed, many of the performers here, such as Ma Rainey, represent the coming senescence of their chosen forms, while folks like blues patriarch Blind Lemon Jefferson, plainspoken country singer Ernest Stoneman and the incredibly versatile pianist Lovie Austin, all included here, represent the development of their own respective frontiers. Rise and Fall lets you slip back into that moment, to pretend that these blues and sermons and silly songs are your vernacular, too.
Allow that, and the Wonders come quickly. Jelly Roll Morton and Ma Rainey, James P. Johnson and Blind Blake, the North Carolina Ramblers and Fletcher Henderson: They’re among the popular standbys represented here. But the real joy of these 800 tracks comes with the personal discoveries. Alabama bluesman Ed Bell recorded only four songs for Paramount in 1927. All included in this box, they share a childlike sense of rhythm, with Bell starting and stopping and bounding between tinny notes in fits of whimsy. His voice is not as heavy or as haunting as those of his Southern contemporaries, giving it a singsong approachability. There are two 1924 tunes from Ukulele “Bob” Williams, where social provocation supporting the then-jailed Marcus Garvey and Republican public policy takes the guise of jaunty little numbers for four strings and a jubilant voice. The Norfolk Jubilee Quartette delivers wonderfully woozy harmonies, particularly on the stepwise and springy “Pleading Blues” or their torpid and bass-anchored “Swing Low Sweet Chariot”. Over swiveling horns and simple piano, Baltimore’s Viola Bartlette winks and smiles as she sings of the archetypal dilemma between welcoming a new lover and not disappointing old dad, either. Trixie Smith takes a decidedly less reserved approach on “My Man Rocks Me (With One Steady Roll)”, a salacious tune about sex that lasts for the better part of a day (13 hours!) and treats double entendre and suggestive rhymes as conscripts. “There’s no slippin’ when he once takes hold,” she purrs, pointing a direct arrow toward the radio dial nearly a century later.
But The Rise and Fall is not just a glob of music. One of the most carefully considered sets I’ve ever seen, it puts these 800 tunes and the entire Paramount picture into a multidimensional context. Due to a lack of proper record-keeping, many of these sessions, songs, and musicians still hover in a cloud of mystery. Who played what on a session? When were they recorded? What songs are still left to be discovered? Thanks to an encyclopedic ream of research done by some of the most dedicated names in this particular act of audio archeology, The Rise and Fall works in earnest to tell the stories behind it all. The set includes hundreds of advertisements rescued from the era and recreates in toto a 1924 Paramount catalogue and The Paramount Book of Blues, a 1927 guide to the label that featured several laughable dossiers of the artists and bunches of sheet music.
Aside from hours of intrigue, such materials also make it clear that not much has changed during 90 years of the music industry: Just as Third Man proprietor Jack White and Black Keys singer Dan Auerbach feud in public now, so did diametric vixens Alberta Hunter and Ethel Waters then. Just as big labels seek the next trend on which to turn a fast dime now, Paramount’s pursuit of black musicians stemmed from surprise hits on other labels then. And just as social media now attempts to lure listeners via must-click-here promotion, Paramount’s illustrated advertisements in the Chicago Defender and its insistence that it had discovered singers then practically demanded that regular folks spend more on their records than anything else in life. “Race’s Favorite Stars on Paramount,” read one 1923 promotion. “Every Christian home will prize this record,” read another, stopping just short of suggesting that not buying that particular Norfolk Jubilee Quartette single would guarantee eternal damnation. The music industry, it seems, always begot high stakes.
In the beginning and, really, throughout most of the label’s history, the executives at Paramount and its parent company did not seem to understand the important trove they were building. During half of the era covered in this volume, for instance, the label released lots of baubles and bores, patriotic songs and symphonic recordings that simply didn’t excite like what came later. The possibility of music hadn’t occurred to them. And even when Williams was leading the race record series to dizzying sales and helping fuel the sound of a nation now suddenly listening, he wasn’t on salary. Otto Moeser, the president of the whole operation, once instructed Williams to take the freight elevator to a meeting in a lavish Chicago hotel. This was the 20s, after all, and Williams was a black man marketing records to black customers. That same oblivion resulted in the incomplete records and the destruction of the label’s archives when it went belly-up, a scene vividly limned by Scott Blackwood in the wondrous liner notes. Such retrospective ignorance makes the trove of The Rise and Fall that much more remarkable, valuable, and edifying. This is almost-lost history, faithfully restored.
But Third Man and Revenant seem to have the opposite—if notably less problematic—quandary: They truly understand the cultural and historical cachet of what they have gathered, and they present it with a clear respect. That’s something that Paramount itself, with its budget materials and condescending advertisements that played fast and loose with social stereotypes, certainly did not. But now, the riches come tucked away in a new oak box, lavishly packaged and highly priced so that mostly only the rich old men who already have an enthusiasm for this stuff will have access to it. It’s a reissue cycle that seems to push the music only another decade or so away from extinction. These Cabinets of Wonder, however impressive, will slowly but almost certainly become Coffins of Disuse, limited to the 5,000 people who hoard them.
“If people only want the songs, there are probably are other sources for most of it,” Dean Blackwood, who co-founded Revenant with his management client and friend John Fahey in the mid 90s, told me recently. “This is more about people with a fascination for the tactile and sensory world. That just can’t be replicated in the digital realm.”
But it doesn’t need to be that way. With a sigh, Blackwood adds that selling the 5,000 manufactured copies of each volume will essentially make The Rise and Fall effort a break-even enterprise, despite the decade of work and global contributions that went into it. Why, then, not pad the income a bit by making the music accessible to those who can’t plunk down a car payment on a box set, perhaps by selling the USB drives for $100 or streaming the assets through a subscription service, such as the one provided to the press for this release? If the point of this labor is to give the music included both reverence and eternal life, as its mere existence suggests, is there any better end than making sure as many people as possible hear it? Why save something only to let it sink into sure atrophy?
Almost a century ago, the miserly folks at Paramount would have found a way to make sure more people heard these tunes, if only to make yet another dollar. There’s something commendable about not doing that, but you can’t really hear that, can you?


An artist turned musician, Temple seemingly discovered that a four-track layers audio the same way an artist slathers paint, though the former offered him endless chances for reconfiguration.

Snowbeast

Luke Temple's biography mentions his job at a candy shop in California, a time when he slept in the forest for a year, and painting murals on apartment walls for rich New Yorkers. An artist turned musician, Luke Temple discovered that a four-track layers audio the same way an artist slathers paint, though the former offered him endless chances for reconfiguration. His story, and even this easy equation ("music is painting"), builds the gentle naiveté that runs throughout Temple's second LP.
"Saturday People" leads off Snowbeast and it's easily Temple's strongest song and showcases everything that's good about the singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist. Temple's banjo carries the brisk waltz through dynamic shifts that move him from a easy lope to a section of harmonies straight out of an early CSNY record. In fact the lines "People/ Looking-glass people/ Saturday people/ Will live one final time," when sung in that harmony (and perhaps coupled with the over-the-top "A mescaline freak-out in an off-Broadway show in the morning") invoke a variety of romanticized and alienated imagery that's snatched straight from a time when squares were there to be looked at and made strange. In that sense, "Saturday People" is a period piece, or maybe a period triptych. Aside from the outro, the song's three parts are miniature gems grouped by time signature and quasi-pyschedelic inflections; they refract and reflect each others' brilliance.
"Saturday People" is solid through and through, and it's really no surprise that Temple can't keep up the momentum through the rest of the record, the song really is twice as good as anything that follows. Most of the rest of the songs seem to hinge on one melodic idea that comes and goes. Consequently, I spent most of my time waiting for those moments to crop up. In "Medicine" an almost-dramatic minor-key melody lends the opening line ("Better take your medicine") a paternalistic threat that simply peters out as the song progresses, only to revive itself when the hook returns. But it dies away again as it turns out, "your medicine was love." Oh. It's always disappointing when a songwriter tries to decode his music for the listener, but when it turns out that the equation is "x=love," there's no hope for redemption.
Yet it's no surprise that the "answer" to the question "What is 'medicine'?" is "love." It's a totally conventional answer, and "Medicine" is a conventional song by design. Another acoustic slow-poke, "People Do", follows similar constraints. Though it showcases Temple's strange, lovely voice and those harmonies again, there is little to listen for besides the sheer pleasure of hearing his vocal turn miraculously from bloodless to soulful with just the slightest application of vibrato.
The acoustic tracks are few and far between, though. For the most part Temple favors a melange of tinkling synths and keyboards. When he uses them for their rhythmic qualities, as on "Family Vacation", he's on firm footing, threading his melodies through a Timbaland-ish tom beat until the frenetic releases that serve as choruses. "Family Vacation" is a fun track, and it's woefully brief. More often, though, Temple uses his keyboards as texturing devices, and he tends to favor sounds somewhere in the range of his voice. This means that a song like "Serious", though it's a fine song, suffers from treble overload. The lone bass cannot support the layers and layers of high-end piled upon it.
Temple is a relatively young songwriter and this, his second full-length, shows promise. Its unevenness seems like a result of his struggle with ideas, rather than a lack of ideas worth filling out. The fuller the palette he works with, the better the result. Such a frail, pretty voice needs something to support it, and in songs like "Saturday People" where it finds itself in a niche carved out especially for it, rather than adrift on a see of aimless synths, Temple's various gifts amplify each other.


The ferocious Leeds trio treat post-punk like a game of Tetris, joyfully flipping and rearranging the elements into new patterns.

Useless Coordinates

As we all know from that junk-science email your mom forwarded you back in 2003, our brains recognize the overall shape of a word as much as its proper letter sequence, allowing us to read sentences even if the words cnoaitn a bcunh of typos. The music of Drahla inspires a similar game of mental gymnastics. On the one hand, the Leeds trio embraces the brevity and ferocity you’d expect from self-professed Wire fans. But within those parameters, all bets are off. Singer/guitarist Luciel Brown, bassist Rob Riggs, and drummer Mike Ainsley treat songwriting as a game of Tetris—the playing field might be narrow, but there’s a palpable joy in the way they flip and rearrange the elements into new interlocking patterns.
Useless Coordinates touches on the big issues of the day—environmental degradation, gender nonconformity, wealth concentration—but minus the admonishing tone of much topical post-punk. Brown’s the sort of singer who’s starting a new sentence before finishing the previous one, and she seems less interested in our apocalyptic headlines themselves than in how we receive them—as jolts that quickly dissolve into the slipstream while we get stoned on information overload. On “Twelve Divisions of the Day,” her thoughts cohere just long enough to call out “narcissism on the net,” but the reference whips by like an ad on a speeding bus, while the accompanying machine-gunned drum break serves as the cold black puddle that douses your legs. On “React/Revolt,” Brown rifles through cryptic, dour images (“Wool on woman/Flies on food/Capitalize/Status signs/Sovereign sector/Burn the oil/Recognize/Lucrative signs/Blood enamel/Ripened peach/Acid on/Glistening teeth”) as if she were fronting Parquet Goths.
At their most focused and fierce—like the needling “Stimulus for Living”—Drahla resemble Sonic Youth’s early no-wave and MTV-baiting phases folded into one another (a trait compounded by the fact Brown often sings to you the way Kim Gordon sang to [Chuck D](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDTSUwIZdMk)). But during the breakneck roller-coaster plummet of “Serenity,” Drahla unveil a powerful new weapon in the form of guest saxophonist Chris Duffin (of avant-drone outfit XAM Duo), who maintains an imposing enough presence to earn unofficial fourth-member status. He wields his sax like a flamethrower, blasting open portals into unrestrained psych-jazz chaos. But he can also alter the band’s chemistry in more subtle ways—after hovering in the background of the frantic “Serotonin Level,” he leads the song into its murky, bass-battered coda like a lion tamer luring his beast into a cage.
It’s a rare moment of inertia on an otherwise convulsive record, yet a necessary one. On Useless Coordinates, Duffin’s sax isn’t just some decorative noisemaker, but a crucial corrupting influence. For a genre once defined by limitless possibility, post-punk has codified into a familiar formula of discordant guitars, propulsive bass, and melody-averse sing-speak. But if Useless Coordinates embraces post-punk as a received language, Drahla remind us there’s still freedom and joy to be had when speaking in tongues.


Rather than delving further into experimentation or exploring their strengths, the world's most well-loved prog-metal band has made an...A Perfect Circle record.

10,000 Days

Like most progressive rock and heavy metal-- hell, maybe most popular music in general-- suspension of disbelief is key with Tool. Taken at face value, with their song suites, meat puppet videos, and histrionic singer, they're pretty goofy. People make fun of Tool fans because they assume they take the band seriously-- these spotty, greasy kids with bad shoes and worse hair who already wear an insult on their T-shirts. At 28, I'd feel funny mocking 15-year-olds still finding their place in the world. And as for taking them seriously-- well, I take Tool about as seriously as I do black metal or Lil Jon or the films of Tsui Hark. Which is to say, not very.
A Pitchfork-friendly analogy: Tool are the Radiohead of xFC-metal. Both bands predate scenes they later became avatars for; both were more creative and inspirational than their followers; both were incredibly pretentious; and both still managed to sell an ass-load of records. Tool didn't release an album between 1996 and 2001. They missed xFC-metal's entire rise and fall, an era of whiteboy dreads, bonsai facial hair, funk bass poppin', and constipated balladry. And much like Radiohead when they dropped the Kid A/Amnesiac doubleshot, Tool released Lateralus early in this decade to radio silence and huge numbers.
Like a mall-friendly King Crimson, Lateralus had a starless and bible black sound that actually rocked rather than wittering on, converting complex, mathematic passages into visceral rock. Also like King Crimson, the lyrics were mostly garbage, but goddamn did that rhythm section pummel the shit out of its instruments. As with the Mars Volta's debut, the drums were the lead voice on Lateralus, and Danny Carey was his instrument's Minnie Ripperton.
Five years later, Tool return with *10,000 Days. But rather than delving further into experimentation or exploring their strengths, Tool have made an...A Perfect Circle record. Like singer Maynard James Keenan's side project, 10,000 Days is considerably less punishing and much more ethereal. Songs like "Lost Keys" and "Vigniti Tires" are dark ambient soundscrapes that just make you wonder where the drums went. And when they are there, they're decidedly less brutal than on Lateralus. On "Right in Two" they sound more like bongos. The title track features sitar and tabla. Listening to this album, you get the sinking feeling that Tool have made an art-rock, rather than art-metal, album. And yes, the difference is considerable.
Keenan's vocals are no less powerful here, but your appreciation of his style still depends largely on your feelings towards quasi-operatic hard rock (you know, like emo, except they actually hit the notes they're going for). People who enjoy voices that sound like they're singing into their overcoats to ward off a night chill will probably find it embarrassing. (The white dude version of melisma?) The lyrics-- the usual mix of drug references, conspiracy theories, tortured declarations of vague emotional trauma, and general doom-mongering-- won't do much to convince non-believers. And with most songs stretching from the seven- to 12-minute range-- and without the stop-start whiplash that was the previous albums' definition of rhythm-- it's unlikely that most listeners will possess the patience or fortitude to make the pilgrimage more than a couple of times.
10,000 Days is supposedly named for the amount of time between Keenan's mother becoming paralyzed and when she died, so it's sort of a "Death Disco" for suburban teenage potheads. If only the music had one-tenth of the Public Image Limited song's power. Instead I find myself in the awkward position of trying to sell you on the merits of a deeply uncool band by telling you to go buy their last album instead. But hey, the next time you're sneering at someone in a Tool shirt, just remember how you look walking down the street with the words "The Boy Least Likely To" or "Clap Your Hands Say Yeah" across your chest.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article contained language that was offensive. It has been removed.


The tactile and heartfelt fifth album by the instrumental Austrian trio Radian doesn’t simply reward repeated listens, it demands them.

On Dark Silent Off

Over the course of their first four albums, Radian perfected a painterly approach to sound construction. What makes the instrumental Austrian trio exceptional is its ability to wrest seemingly endless possibilities by fine-tuning the grain of every sound. On their fifth album On Dark Silent Off, Radian take the tactile dimension of their music even further while also introducing groove and drama basically for the first time. On Dark Silent Off bristles with a passion that you don't hear on their back catalog. It's not like past Radian records are stiff, but the band always sounded slightly removed as it supplied you with a constant flow of sensory input. This time, they connect with your heart too.
On Dark Silent Off begins much as Radian's other albums do, with two minutes of instrumental textures building into a half-organic, half-synthetic hybrid: electric guitar chords strained through an amplifier, a bleeping electronic pulse, and drum sticks establishing a pattern on snare. As usual for them, the overall tone feels, if not cold, then at least impersonal, an exercise in modernist architecture that privileges audacity of form over comfort. This time, the band relied heavily on transducers to project sounds onto various surfaces, a process not unlike replaying tracks through an amp or studio monitor to increase the feeling of spatial dimension. When new guitarist Martin Siewert plays guitar chords, it feels like you can reach out and touch the grill covering on his amplifier. You can hear air moving behind Siewert and Brandlmayr's array of electronic noises. If the music on On Dark Silent Off had been painted on a canvas, you'd notice the detail in the brush strokes from twenty feet away.
But right around the two-minute mark of album opener “Pickup Pickout,” Radian switch into an actual groove, like a post-rock interpretation of a techno banger. Out of nowhere, the music starts to pant, sweat, and move. The sudden rush of humanity is startling. The song ends with a repetitive, pulsing digital loop, and by that point Radian have covered more ground in one piece than they have on some of their entire past albums. In the same vein, a piece like “Recreate Loved Objects” unfolds like a suite, almost a mini-album unto itself, as its somber single-note guitar line traverses a shifting landscape of sounds. Suffice it to say the album doesn’t simply reward repeated listens, it demands them.
Radian's brand of art rock has always gone down surprisingly smooth in whole-album servings, but they've outdone themselves on every level here. More limber and fiery than ever, the band has risen out the experimental cul-de-sac with a riveting work that should appeal to both its expected audience and to new fans who might have otherwise dismissed this style of music as too antiseptic for their liking.


Another year, another indispensable Miles Davis box. This season's gift from Columbia/Legacy is a 6xCD set of every track put to tape by Davis' revolving cast of players bewteen 1972-75.

Miles Davis: The Complete On the Corner Sessions

The Complete On the Corner Sessions

Miles Davis dropped jazz for good in late 1971-- not that he'd been keeping up many appearances for the genre in several years. Though his band would still occasionally play old standards live, his main show in the early 70s was free-ish funk, openly indebted to Sly Stone and James Brown (and I still wonder what Davis would have made of Funkadelic). Of course, the maligned genre in question-- jazz-- was mostly the property of people writing about Davis, and in some cases, his still-jazz-oriented peers, so it's no surprise to read his bandmates of the time (percussionist Mtume, bassist Michael Henderson, guitarists Pete Cosey and Reggie Lucas, drummer Al Foster, saxophonist Dave Liebman) refer back to those days with no small amount of pride, and scorn towards the ever-present "critics". The records Davis made during this time sounded raw (but weren't), hard (and were) and not the kind of thing that was going to fit into any particular canon, even as their maker adopted conscious efforts to position his music for younger, blacker audiences. And he might have dropped jazz, but he picked up something a lot more important: the future of music.

On the Corner* was released in October 1972, followed by Big Fun and Get Up With It, both in 1974. All of these records contained (at least partially) music recorded during sessions in 1972-75, the period represented on Columbia Legacy's latest extravagant box-set treatment for Davis, The Complete On the Corner Sessions. Over six discs, we get every track put to tape during the period by Davis' revolving cast of players (in addition to the core of his touring band, luminous Davis alums like Chick Corea, Jack DeJohnette, John McLaughlin, Herbie Hancock, Don Alias, and Bennie Maupin drop by), and though I don't anticipate many all-night OtC listening parties in the near future, it's arguably the greatest collection of Davis' post-Bitches Brew studio music in one set. The thing is, this is thick, sticky stuff; 20-minute jams like "Ife" or the unedited take of "On the Corner" are amazingly gripping despite their lengths, but process a few in a row, and you risk experiencing dizzy spells. In retrospect, maybe it's not surprising that Davis retired in 1975, resurfacing half a decade later playing music that was a lot more easily digestible.

Since its 72 release, On the Corner (featured in full on the last disc in the box) has attained a level of infamy outmatching any of Davis' other records, though not really for the right reasons. Downbeat's equally infamous calling-out of its tunes as "repetitious boredom" unfortunately summed up the feeling of many folks who would have preferred to only remember Davis' music from the 50s and 60s. However, rock and experimental music fans weren't quite so dismissive-- in fact, today, OtC is one of the easiest Davis records to recommend to a non-convert, especially if they're down with the wtf production and uber-grooved-out beats. Teo Macero's editing/splicing/midwifing of the myriad sessions that comprised the record were no less significant to its sound than Davis' pieces, and considering how records are made today, perhaps more so. Still, it's the avant-funk and druggy ambience that lingers longest. There's a reason people compare this stuff to Can.
Disc one features unedited takes of "On the Corner", "One and One", and "Helen Butte/Mr. Freedom X", all of which would appear in messed-with form on the 1972 LP. And though *OtC'*s edits are a considerable part of its magic, the surprising thing with these tracks is how well they work as just jams (greatly assisted by the fact that in most cases, their signature hooks are intact, such as the hi-hat pulse in "On the Corner", or the classic sing-song melody in "Helen Butte"). "Jabali" is a previously unissued track, featuring a slow, lurching bassline from Henderson, and gradually picks up steam while simultaneously becoming more psychedelic (anyone order three extra keyboards?). The second disc begins with "Ife" (originally issued on Big Fun), and adds Paul Buckmaster on electric cello. Buckmaster's contribution to Davis' music at that time was considerable, especially via turning the trumpeter onto Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose use of recorded and electric sound had a big impact on the recording of OtC. "Chieftan" is a previously unissued, agitated vamp, featuring an insistent hi-hat + rim shot beat, augmented (like many tracks from this era) by tabla and sitar. "Turnaround" and "U-Turnaround" are also new tracks, but whose slow, heavy grooves would have sounded very at home on, say, Live-Evil or Dark Magus. "Rated X" (later on Get Up With It) is just a badass funk track that features some seriously distorted production, and should probably be sampled by all crate-digging, rare-grooves DJs ASAP.
Disc three begins with another track from Get Up With It ("Billy Preston"-- not featuring Billy Preston btw), and several unissued tracks: the somewhat raucous, wah-wah guitar-powered "The Hen", two HUGE mixes of "Big Fun/Holly-wuud" (which would later be severed to make both sides of a 74 single), the skeletal, relatively restrained "Peace", and the funk dirge "Mr. Foster", which takes the basic groove of "Big Fun", and stretches it across 15 minutes of mournful vamping and uncharacteristically solemn solos from Liebman and Davis. Disc four contains the two epic-length tracks from Get Up With It, "Calypso Frelimo" and the Duke Ellington tribute, "He Loved Him Madly". The first piece begins as reverb-drenched, frantic funk, and moves into molasses-paced death groove (though still laced with reverb, as if recorded in a subway tunnel). I've never been a huge fan of "He Loved Him Madly", though its extended (30+ minutes) calm is a welcome respite from the otherwise merciless pace of the rest of the box.
"Maiysha" (also from Get Up With It) begins disc five, and though its major-key, curiously sprightly guitar figure seems a little out of place with generally darker (or more cynical) music on the other discs, it still retains the exotic flavor of the box's music. "Mtume" begins with-- you guessed it-- a conga solo by Davis' permanent conga player Mtume, and soon turns into an up-tempo Afro-Cuban groove with cool triple-guitar wah-ing from Lucas, Cosey and Dominique Gaumont. (A shorter outtake of the same track features a good soprano sax solo from Sonny Fortune.) The 19-minute blues-shuffle "Hip Skip" (with a pretty bizarre organ solo by Davis), frantic "What They Do" (reminiscent of the faster stuff on Dark Magus) and brief, strangely loungy "Minnie"-- notable mostly for being recorded at Davis' last session in 1975 before his five-year retirement -- are all previously unissued. The final disc of the box contains all of the OtC LP, in addition to a fairly straight blues on "Red China Blues" (from Get Up With It, and featuring the only harmonica solo I can remember hearing on a Davis track), and both sides of the "Big Fun"/"Holly-wuud" single.
So, here we are again, near the end of another year, with another indispensable Miles Davis box to purchase (which Columbia doubtlessly realizes, as the lofty $120+ price tag might indicate). Do you need it? If you're a die-hard, it's obvious: you do. If you've never heard On the Corner, it's obvious: you don't. However, you do need to buy OtC sooner than yesterday. Perhaps in six months or a year, after you've stopped annoying all your friends by telling them how great it is, then you can go back and order the box-- by which time, should be available for about half of what is now. Davis saw the future with this music. Be smart, do the same.


Sarah Lee Guthrie, Woody's granddaughter, and her husband Johnny Irion have been singing together for 13 years and recording for eight. Jeff Tweedy and Wilco's Patrick Sansone co-produced the pop-friendly Americana duo's sugary new album, Wassiac Way.

Sarah Lee Guthrie / Johnny Irion: Wassiac Way

Wassiac Way

Sarah Lee Guthrie and her husband Johnny Irion have been singing together for 13 years and recording for eight. In that time, they’ve released three studio albums that have been generally lumped in with the Americana set, thanks primarily to their folksy harmonies and acoustic-based sound. Yet they’ve often bristled against the strictures of the roots scene, and the duo have indulged their taste for unabashedly pop hooks and moody soundscapes. In other words, they ought to be a perfect match for producer Jeff Tweedy: As frontman for Wilco, he certainly knows a thing or two about screwing around with folk-rock conventions, and as a helmer for Low and Mavis Staples, he has devised a recognizable sound that is playful yet artful, ambitious yet restrained. Furthermore, he has a long history with the Guthrie family, starting back in 1998 when he worked with Nora Guthrie to put music to some of her father Woody’s unrecorded lyrics. That incredibly fruitful project produced three LPs’ worth of strong material and launched a cottage industry of sorts. Sarah Lee is Nora’s niece and Woody’s granddaughter, which makes her the third generation of Guthries, living or dead, to work with Tweedy in some capacity.
With Wilco’s Patrick Sansone he co-produced Guthrie and Irion’s new record, Wassaic Way, but any expectations that artists and producers are well matched are immediately dispelled on the very first song, which is called “Chairman Meow”. Seriously. It’s a slice of tooth-decay meme-pop about a girl with a crib in Koreatown, a movie in production, and a cat with a clever name. Never mind that it’s impossible to determine if the song is parody or paean: it just sounds bad. Tweedy and Sansone turn the treble all the way up and the bass all the way down, which renders everything tinny and shrill. The drums plod along, the fuzz guitar fizzes like a child’s toy, the voices take on a pre-adolescent pitch. It all sounds juvenile.
Wassaic Way could be a sequel to Guthrie's 2009 children's album, Go Waggaloo. While there's nothing wrong with targeting the pre-K set (check out Tweedy's version of Woody's "Hoodoo Voodoo" for proof), there is something alienating about treating adult listeners like children. Whether attempting upbeat power pop or nestling into a saccharine ballad, these songs are persistently coy and cloying, with lyrics about butterflies and trick-or-treat that habitually mistake platitudes for insights. "How are we here? What are we made of?" Guthrie asks on "Circle of Souls. "Now the dream is clear, so what are we afraid of?" It sounds lofty and portentous, but ultimately sacrifices meaning for rhyme.
Despite-- or, perhaps, due to-- Guthrie and Irion’s long history as bandmates and spouses, their voices go together all too well. One is cake, the other icing: both are uniformly sugary, but they do the same thing, set the same tone, and convey the same emotions in exactly the same way. There’s no contrast between them, therefore no tension or conflicts in these songs. Surprisingly, they sound better when they sing solo, as on “Circle of Souls” or “Not Probably Gone”. Even more surprisingly, they sound best at their most conservative, when they settle into songs modestly rooted in a quaint country sound, like “Still Dreaming” or the harmonica-drenched title track. It's pleasant enough-- not exactly memorable but also not actively off-putting to a grown-up listener.


The singer-songwriter’s second album sharpens the darkness of a romantic estrangement into glittering pop gems. Apollo is still full of longing, but he’s ready to show his claws.

God Said No

On his second album, God Said No, Omar Apollo wields his heartbreak like a butterfly knife. On “Done With You,” an airy, brass-assisted pop song, he cloaks moments of devastating vulnerability with a protective layer of detached cool. In the shrugged-off chorus, he insists that he’s done with his lover—a toughness that stands in stark contrast to his earlier, velvety pleas for them to let him go. The video matches this energy, depicting the star as he alternates between waving blades at the viewer and running them painfully along his jawline. It’s a fitting visual representation of a record where Apollo sharpens some of his darkest moments into glinting pop gems.
God Said No originated from three months Apollo spent in London in 2023. Following the release of his debut full-length Ivory in 2022, tours with SZA and Billie Eilish, and a nomination for Best New Artist at the 2023 Grammys, the Mexican American singer-songwriter was riding a professional high, but privately nursing a broken heart as he surveyed the wreckage of a relationship. Working with familiar collaborators Teo Halm (here as executive producer), Carter Lang, and Blake Slatkin, Apollo first sketched out the 14 songs in the prestigious Abbey Road Studios, later finishing the album in the U.S. With his biggest hit to date being the gut-wrenching “Evergreen (You Didn’t Deserve Me at All),” Apollo already has something of a reputation as a heartbreak aficionado—as he recently told Complex, “my natural state is always longing.” But on this record, he paints that emotion with every shade on his palette. God Said No stretches far beyond downbeat balladeering; Apollo weaves his sadness, anger, and self-doubt through a collection of anthemic choruses and disco-tinged pop tracks.
On “Less of You” and “Drifting,” Apollo recalls Robyn’s style of tearful dancefloor anthem, the former combining Giorgio Moroder-esque vocoder melodies with a eulogy for a relationship that’s slowly evanescing, and the latter sprinkling Apollo’s romantic disillusionment over a breezy, Balearic-type beat. These shades of understated Europop are a new element of Apollo’s sound, brooding where once he might have belted. But his voice remains the star of the show, particularly when he’s trading gorgeous, tumbling melodies with Sudanese Canadian singer-songwriter Mustafa on the plaintive “Plane Trees.”
While they are often luxurious to listen to, Apollo’s ballads represent the album’s least compelling moments. “Empty” and “Dispose of Me” meander drowsily, doing little to distinguish this record from his previous bedroom R&B releases. A meditative voice note about grief from Pedro Pascal also wears thin on repeat listens. The album is more arresting when Apollo knowingly leans into the more unhinged aspects of heartbreak. Take the rousing lead single, “Spite,” where, with a hook that bristles with delicious fury, Apollo walks a razor-thin line between loving and hating the partner who’s keeping him hanging on. Over sulky licks of guitar, he brings the confusing loneliness of a situationship to life through bittersweet vignettes of dying flowers, unread text messages, and long flights taken alone. Elsewhere, he howls an embittered and desperate hook on the expansive “How,” his anger as coldly insistent as the drum machine that backs it.
These wild-eyed moments hint at more complex and ambitious possibilities for Apollo as a storyteller and as a pop star. On “Life’s Unfair,” a strutting funk-pop song, Apollo coolly admits to doing “something real bad” to someone he once wanted to marry. The trap-inflected standout “Against Me” takes a kind of hyper-masculine, posturing response to being dumped. On these songs, Apollo may be full of longing, but he’s also flawed, fired-up, and the self-proclaimed “baddest bitch.” God Said No stands apart from Apollo’s previous releases not only because of its genre experimentation and its stickier choruses, but for its willingness to get ugly. Here, Apollo has been knocked down, but he doesn’t play the victim. Instead, he bares his teeth.