Ty Segall and Tim Presley lock into a psychedelic hive mind again for an exciting, wildly varied album made to be combed through and prodded.

Joy

It seemed preordained that the two giants of West Coast rock’n’roll would work together at some point. In 2012, Ty Segall and Tim Presley were both in the middle of a hot streak. Segall was putting out new music at a clip, oscillating between the low-key garage rock of Goodbye Bread and the obliterating punk wildness of Slaughterhouse. As White Fence, Presley was overflowing with psychedelic pop ideas, putting out over six dozen songs between 2010 and 2013. Segall approached Presley at a show, as one does, and they decided to make a split album. But when they got in the studio together, the plan quickly changed and their shred-heavy jam sessions became stoner opus Hair—a high point in each man’s long discography.
Even with both men playing on every song, in certain places Hair still sounded like a split. The fuzzed-out and glammy Marc Bolan worship of Segall’s “Crybaby” is obviously the work of the guy who made a tribute album called Ty Rex, and the Presley-penned “(I Can’t) Get Around You” sounds like a White Fence song with a boilerplate Segall guitar solo. As a team, however, they were instantly soluble. Especially on “Scissor People” and “Time,” their voices glommed together in unison as their guitars—occasionally gentle but also mega-burly—intertwined. More than a vanity team-up, this was the work of two people who wrote in a shared sunbaked, psychedelic language.
Six years and so many records later, they’ve locked into their hive mind once again. Every song on the second Ty and White Fence album Joy is a co-write, and there’s never a moment where one guy overpowers the other. There’s an introduction to “Please Don’t Leave This Town” that shares similarities to several of Presley’s more reserved moments, but it’s balanced by a vocal harmony and guitar solo that carry Segall’s distinct influence. When they start singing, an abstract narrative takes form—something murky about being made of dough and being asked to leave town forever.
Their patchwork psychedelic lyrics are a staple of the album, and so is their tendency to ride the peaks and valleys of songs—letting withdrawn and reserved moments linger before sending them off with a big climactic release. After establishing 48 seconds of calm with a quiet and stripped-back pairing of electric and acoustic guitars on their interstitial song “Room Connector,” they ramp up the energy for a dramatic, loud, fast-strummed flourish that sets the stage for one of the album’s punchiest tracks, “Body Behavior.” It happens again when the minimal percussion of “She Is Gold” gives way to a big scuzzy Blue Cheer groove.
Joy is undeniably more ambitious than Hair. Every track brings a new energy or explores a different vibe. They transition from speed punk (“Prettiest Dog”) into upbeat power pop (“Do Your Hair”). Songs pack both ethereal harmonies and the high-speed clatter of electric guitars (“Good Boy”). There’s not much in the way of screaming—not compared to some of Segall’s most intense work, that’s for sure—but these two spend the entire album swinging wildly between subdued songwriting and all-beef guitars. Their mysterious instincts lead them to repeatedly sing the words “rock is dead”—accompanied by some electric guitar noodling, of course—before offering 30 seconds of squawking noise and titling that song “Rock Flute.” Later, on the song featuring the growls of Segall’s actual dog Fanny, they reference Bryan Ferry’s right-wing politics. That could be a lighthearted throwaway moment, but then Segall and Presley call the listener’s own political complacency into question.
If their tone shifts and coded lyrics make Joy sound chaotic or elusive, a few earnest moments give the album focus and clarity. Sometimes, in the fever dream heap, you hear them offering affirmations of self-love: “I want to believe in me,” they sing in unison on “A Nod.” On “My Friend,” Segall and Presley weave a gorgeous acoustic ballad with a simple message—that they’re there for the person they love. But Segall and Presley didn’t set out to offer tidy narratives or an easily defined aesthetic. Joy is an album to be combed through and prodded. It’s a testament to their shorthand with each other, which somehow ties all the fraying, crusty, silken, wiener dog, kitty cat threads so seamlessly together.


The London producer loosens the reins for a guest-heavy, party-starting album that doesn’t feel pressured to do or say too much

demon time

Move over Calvin Harris, it’s Alex Crossan’s shot at a breezy, good vibes record with high-flying collaborators paging in from around the globe. Whereas the precocious British producer’s 2017 debut as Mura Masa was a tropical-sounding homage to the London underground, and his 2020 follow-up was a collection of scruffy guitar anthems that proclaimed his generation’s disaffectedness, his third album, demon time, skips out on a big concept. Dejected during lockdown, the 26-year-old Crossan made some contemplative, inward-looking songs that he wasn’t quite happy with. Then a 2000s UK garage hit steered him toward revelation: “I started remembering what it felt like to be excited about music where the essence of it is just [having] a good time, that doesn’t have to say something remarkable about the human condition.”
So drink up and let loose. Guests like the Jamaican dancehall artist Skillibeng, Japanese rapper Tohji, and reggaeton princess Isabella Lovestory convene for an album that strives to be flirty and feral; as Crossan explains in an interview, “I wanted to soundtrack the weird 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. time when you’re up to no good.” Contributing to the irreverence, titles are written in textspeak; pre-touchscreen cell phones bleep at the beginning of songs, like you just got a “heyyy” from your homegirl.“Go demon! Go demon!” newcomer BAYLI chants over dribbling, 2000s pop-rap production on the title track, as if she’s egging her friends to get a little nasty at the block party. It’s proof of how delightful the project is when it really commits to unseriousness. “I know I’ve been a really bad girl/I’m just trying to birth a King like Coretta,” BAYLI raps with a smirk.
demon time’s main offerings are fizzy, lowkey numbers about romantic misalignment. PinkPantheress, Shygirl, and Lil Uzi Vert trade off duties on “bbycakes,” a pastel-hued song with steel drums and a subtle drill beat, inspired by the 3 of a Kind smash that shook Crossan out of his creative slump. It’s cute, if a bit inert—and the same goes for the minimal reggaeton track “tonto,” featuring Isabella Lovestory. The silky UK garage of “e-motions” fares much better, with Erika de Casier accusing a love interest of carelessness over digital harp and funky turntable scratches. “I crossed the ocean/You wouldn’t even jump puddles for me,” she sings—and while there’s turbulence in the lyrics, the track sails along oh-so smoothly.
demon time hits a low at “2gether,” a too-moody guitar anthem about love troubles that includes chiptuned vocal snippets and a wobbly, unnecessary EDM breakdown. It’s like having your mood killed at the club by the presence of Mr. Polo Shirt. The songs surrounding it are not as heavy-handed, but still tonally off: “slomo”’s future bass production and Auto-Tuned murmuring makes it two steps away from a Jane Remover song. “up all week” sounds like a pump-up anthem for the gay club—but instead of Cakes da Killa or Azealia Banks, there’s slowthai delivering social critique. “Brain like mush, always staring at screens/They’re selling us dreams/Mouse with some cheese,” he shouts, a dial tone sounding as if signaling a conversational dead-end.
Mura Masa is best when he sticks to the script and cranks up the heat. Pa Salieu and Skillibeng are a great pairing on the squeaky, horned-up collaboration “blessing me,” but by far the standout on the album is the house and R&B-inflected “hollaback bitch,” on which Shygirl refuses to be at someone else’s beck and call. “Backyard bully in bed/Don’t give a fuck about giving no head/Take what comes ‘til a rudeboy dead,” she raps cooly—and surprisingly, the lyrics weren’t written by the master of smut herself but the more PC-presenting Crossan. After the snap of a whip, a saxophone melody wafts in as if you’ve opened the window to a live band and a courtyard of people swaying their hips. The song swelters like the last days of summer, glorious enough to shake the next young producer out of creative torpor.


In 1969, Elvis Presley went to Las Vegas to reboot his career. With a half-century of hindsight, the performances feel both bittersweet and anticlimactic.

Live 1969

In the summer of 1972, Elvis Presley released “Burning Love,” a soaring number written by Dennis Linde. Despite the song’s frisky sensibility, the supposed King of Rock and Roll sounds exhausted as he strains to hit the notes. The song was his last Top 10 single in the United States. Nearly five years to the day from its release, Presley was expiring alone on a bathroom floor.
But before “Burning Love” lit up the charts for the King one last time, Presley re-launched his music career with 29 shows at the Las Vegas International Hotel in the swelter of August 1969. Recordings of 11 consecutive performances from the tail end of that run are stitched together in a new 50th anniversary box set, Live 1969. With Woodstock, the Beatles, the Kinks, the Doors, and David Bowie also receiving the golden-anniversary treatment this year, the 11-disc Presley collection only adds to the nostalgic bloat. But it also offers a peculiar opportunity to put one of pop music’s all-time megastars under the microscope.
As Presley explains every night, the Vegas appearances were his first live shows in nearly nine years, having occupied the previous decade with his film career and Army draft obligation. Throughout the run, he was backed by a massive ensemble that included his core five-piece band, a full orchestra, and two groups of backup vocalists: the Imperials and the Sweet Inspirations. In a brief August 1969 essay about the spectacle, rock critic Ellen Willis described Presley as “a grown man in black bell-bottoms, tunic, and neckerchief, devoid of pout and baby fat, skinny, sexy, totally alert, nervous, but smiling easily.” He was ready to reign again, and 2,000 people a night were ready to receive him.
Listening to all 13 hours of Live 1969 is ridiculous thing to do, but the time investment exposes the collection’s biggest shortcoming. The most magical live recordings highlight moment-to-moment chemistry between a band’s players, with each new arrangement shaped by circumstances of space and time—not to mention the sobriety and moods of the personnel and their audiences. Spontaneity can unspool hidden nuances in a deep cut or inject fresh energy into an old favorite. But the strategic nature of a nothing-but-hits Vegas show leaves little room for any of the non-Presley performers to show off their own impressive chops. Still, the band consistently rallies for the then-unreleased “Suspicious Minds,” which Willis reported as a late-set highlight.
The kinds of delights that stand out on most bootlegs are buried on Live 1969. They’re there: the haunting operatic filigrees a backup singer adds to each edition of “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” an especially hard-boogieing dinner-show iteration of “Suspicious Minds,” the way the drummer pummels the floor toms on every “Mystery Train/Tiger Man” medley, some fine honky-tonk piano in a midnight kickoff of “Blue Suede Shoes.” Though he’d issued plenty of hit records by 1969, Presley sticks to near-identical set lists of guaranteed crowd-pleasers, plus a nightly nod to the Beatles with a medley of “Yesterday” and the coda from “Hey Jude.” Listening to every performance in order feels like a game of Spot the Difference for dedicated Elvis obsessives.
While his band may have been seasoned professionals, Presley’s moods range from lovable scamp to frazzled kook, making for a colorful display of the singer’s profoundly weird character. One need not go far to get an idea of Presley’s eccentricities, but it’s still surprising to hear them fall from his curled lips. Like most busy performers, he repeats his yarns from one show to the next. He marvels at the Showroom’s “li’l funky angels” and “weirdo dolls on the walls” and makes liberal use of the phrase “woolly booger” to describe everything from his bandmates to actual boogers. All the while, Presley snorts and sniffles an alarming amount of phlegm, peppering in urgent hisses of “Back! Back!” and “Whassat?” amid clicking noises and requests for “wawa.”
Some of Presley’s ad-libbed asides, however, can be laugh-out-loud funny. Noting Las Vegas’ desert conditions, Presley remarks that he’s so parched it feels like “Bob Dylan slep’ in ya mouth”; at another show, he informs the audience of “a little bitty dead lizard” sharing his stage. He distributes innumerable cartoonish wet smacks to ecstatic women demanding kisses. He tweaks the memorable refrain of “Heartbreak Hotel” into an even more memorable, “I get so horny I could die.” Whether these outbursts are a result of drugs or just Presley’s natural state is indiscernible.
Aside from the extemporaneous musings, Live 1969’s sprawl offers little new insight about Presley’s life, mind, or music. According to the fine print in the liner notes, most of this material has already been issued piecemeal in some form already, some as recently as 2013. Presley’s Vegas residency was designed to propel his career into a new era, but the show-by-show repetition of the Live 1969 recordings stalls their momentum. Presley had no way of knowing that his comeback would fail within a decade; with a half-century of hindsight, listening to Live 1969 feels both bittersweet and anticlimactic.
Despite their length, the interchangeable sets of Live 1969 merely skim the surface of Presley’s odd inner life and taxing career, the twin engines that would hurtle him toward disaster. In 2019, Presley has been dead for 42 years—the same number he spent alive—and his shadow still looms over the world’s models of pop stardom. What remains to learn from Elvis? What’s left to parse in the ten thousandth recording of “Don’t Be Cruel,” in his career-long marriage of lust and loneliness, in the way he pontificates on li’l funky angels and woolly boogers? In a way, consuming Live 1969 in its entirety feels like a hint of what it might’ve been like to be Elvis Presley: intemperate, self-indulgent, and more than a little surreal.

Buy: Rough Trade
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In their latest joint release, Kanye producer Sinjin Hawke and Jlin collaborator Zora Jones combine human voices and digital processing to manifest a seamless fusion of flesh and code.

Sinjin Hawke / Zora Jones: Vicious Circles EP

Vicious Circles EP

In Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, the transhuman takes many forms, but it often begins as light: a glowing presence detected deep inside one’s own person or a shimmering apparition that comes twitching across the sky. Something similar happens in the work of Sinjin Hawke and Zora Jones, which combines human voices and digital processing in a seamless fusion of flesh and code. In the silvery edges of their sound, you can feel something manifesting itself—a shape-shifting entity, a cybernetic skin wrapped around a molten core.
Hawke and Jones have been pursuing their mercurial instincts for a few years now, across a number of different configurations—solo, as a duo, and in various one-off collaborations (Jones with Jlin, Murlo, and La Zowi; Hawke with DJ Rashad, Just Blaze, and Mike Q). Jones’ edits of artists like Sasha Go Hard and E-40 catch drops of inspiration from regional rap styles and distill them into her own brittle and glistening brand of club music, while Hawke’s production work for Kanye has helped his trademark choral leads to bubble up into the mainstream.
This is the duo’s first long-form collaboration outside Fractal Fantasy, the audiovisual project that doubles as a research unit into sound, image, and technology. The fruits of that labor were on view in a striking performance at Barcelona’s Sónar festival this summer in which their avatars, projected on a screen over their heads, rippled like CGI phosphorescence. Jones’ gestures, captured by a video camera, allowed her to manipulate synth leads as though playing an invisible theremin. There is no visual component to Vicious Circles beyond its blue-lit, sweat-slicked cover image, but the music is imbued with a similarly spectral energy, as though she and Hawke were plucking vibrations out of thin air.
While many electronic producers fetishize bass, it’s the treble register that preoccupies Hawke and Jones. Vicious Circles swims in high-end riffs that move like beads of quicksilver: digitized flutes, chirping roto-toms, streaky lightning-bolt synths. The eponymous opener balances plunging sub-bass with percussion that flashes—and disorients—like strobe lights; built on a technique long present in Hawke and Jones’ work, the melody suggests a cyborg castrato. “Lurk 101” is folded around a blippy son clave pattern that gets spun into increasingly convoluted permutations. In “God,” a Bulgarian choir sample is chopped to ribbons over shuddering drums and synth blasts, but what sounds almost bombastic at first quickly flips into a surprisingly slinky, dancehall-inflected rhythm. Hawke and Jones are maximalists who delight in pulling the rug out from beneath the monoliths they build.
They like their tracks short—nothing here runs much longer than three minutes—and they have a mischievous way of teasing listeners’ expectations, building tension by stacking crescendo upon crescendo and then switching course without ever offering anything like a release. The resulting constructions feel a bit like one of Escher’s staircases, constantly ascending, constantly building toward a climax that never comes. The technique can occasionally be frustrating. The two-and-a-half-minute “Baby Boy Sosa,” in which rave stabs and processed voices are smeared in gelatinous textures over staccato trap drums, refuses to fully take shape; there’s a glimmer of something bigger there, but it remains obscured behind the streaks and curlicues.
But this disinclination to indulge any instinctive craving for resolution sets up the closing “And You Were One” to sound even bigger and more triumphant than it already is. Here, at last, they pull out all the stops, bringing all their tricks—the chimes, the zigzagging synth leads, the hiccuping robots—to bear on a song you could almost imagine playing on pop radio. “Would you feel better?” chirps an Auto-Tuned voice, and that small gesture toward intimacy works wonders. The strangeness of their approach takes an almost feel-good form; the cold, clinical light that suffuses the EP softens into a warm, rosy glow. Despite the hard angles and unfamiliar textures that are at the forefront of all their work, Hawke and Jones seem to say, there’s nothing to fear in these artificial worlds: The alien was inside us all along.


Sam Smith remains a bit of a pop paradox, a trailblazing figure who often settles into well-trodden songwriting.

Gloria

It’s awards season, so I’d like to nominate Sam Smith for 2022’s Best Celebrity Cameo in a Magazine Profile. The publication was New York Magazine; the subject was Joel Kim Booster, the writer and star of last year’s tender-hearted Pride and Prejudice flip Fire Island. Booster and his friends are returning home from a Silver Lake gay bar when he ducks into the bathroom and emerges to announce, “Sam Smith is coming.” Smith is introduced to the reader as “the first gay person to think they were the first gay person to win an Oscar during an acceptance speech,” and upon their arrival, they tell the party about their plans to visit Anne Boleyn’s grave at the Tower of London as a little birthday treat. This unexpected appearance in Booster’s world also articulates Smith’s strange blend of genuine trailblazing and cultural conservatism. They’re a proud, unapologetic non-binary pop star and an old soul with a taste for the maudlin. Who else would “stick up for the girls of English history” while partying with queer Hollywood royalty?
You can hear both the freedom and the fustiness on Gloria, an album that feels assertive and diverse when held up against a career that’s hewed so closely to pop’s middle of the road. Smith has described Gloria as being defined by “emotional, sexual, and spiritual liberation,” and if you’ve followed Smith for the last decade, you understand this kind of unrepentant self-love has been hard-won. The histrionic powerhouse who once begged a one-night stand to stick around has transformed into a playful lover and a student of queer history, sampling RuPaul, Divine, Paris Is Burning, and soundbites from early Pride parades. But these authentic expressions of self share space with a closing track that’s basically Ed Sheeran’s “Same Love,” and that’s the puzzle of their career: Smith’s taste level and writing haven’t kept pace with their comfort in their own skin.
Gloria does offer plenty of the one fundamental pleasure you can expect on any Sam Smith album: the thrill of a gifted vocalist exploring and subverting their material on a phrase-by-phrase basis. Here it’s the confidence of Smith’s delivery that place the album into a slightly higher echelon within their catalog. Sometimes it’s a chorus or a verse that knocks you back on your heels: the graceful, fluid runs closing out the subdued “No God,” or the viscous and husky pre-chorus on single “Gimme.” In other spots, you’re given the same jolt you might feel hearing a singer like Adele turn her talents to lovers’ rock or chanson: “Who knew they could do that?” Gloria flips between hyperpop, country, dancehall, disco, 2-step, and intimate, Kehlani-esque R&B, though the range covered by the material ends up more notable than any sparkling example of genre tourism.
Smith weaves the disparate threads tying Gloria together with surprising versatility, though it’s the songs in the latter categories—the ones suitable for a lounge or a club—that are strongest. “Lose You” is a pulsing, urgent spin on a Smith breakup anthem, channeling their desperation into dancefloor euphoria. The molasses-thick “Six Shots” elevates a standard alcohol metaphor with languid, mood-lit sensuality. Best of all is “I’m Not Here to Make Friends,” a whirlwind of grown-up lust that evokes George Michael—a clear predecessor—circa “Fastlove” and “Outside.” It also suggests that between this song and the sinewy 2018 single “Promises,” the collaborator who best understands Smith’s talents might be vanilla club-pop king Calvin Harris.
The question of collaboration is an interesting one for Smith, because Gloria’s saggy moments largely involve other voices. The barrier-smashing single “Unholy”—the first song by openly non-binary and trans artists to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100—flips a critical cliché by sounding worse in an album-length context, its transgressive glee scanning as shallow and theatrical up against more grounded, mature material. Smith clearly feels a kinship with Canadian singer-songwriter Jessie Reyez, but her two features on Gloria—the aforementioned “Gimme” and the drab, mid-tempo “Perfect”—are anodyne at best and grating at worst. Ending the album with the Sheeran duet “Who We Love” feels like a step back after Smith’s most nuanced dispatches from a queer life to date. The album’s interludes and line-to-line writing suggest a perspective more nuanced than trite scenes like “Holding hands in the street/No need to be discreet,” and yet that’s the final note sounded on Gloria.
It’s remarkable we’ve reached this point at all: an artist whose writing has long tended toward the bland and impersonal has grown into a vision and identity that can be compromised by mediocre features. Wanting to hear more from Smith and Smith alone is one of their strongest arguments yet for true stardom. We’re now familiar with Sam Smith as an emotionally generous diva who likes to dance, loves out loud, and can’t resist a gratuitous string section or a gospel choir. It’s a coherent identity, and it leaves the Gloria listener with mixed emotions. Recent hit single aside, Smith has somehow never felt further from pop’s molten core. It’s still a pleasure to watch a singer who once consigned themselves to lovesick, gender-neutral ballads spread their wings.


Drakeo’s fifth full-length release in eight months is brooding and entertaining. The lesser cuts can’t help but bleed together, but there’s just enough new variations to keep things fresh.

Ain’t That the Truth

The past five years of Drakeo the Ruler’s life are a compressed tale of pain and triumph. On his  2017 breakout Cold Devil, he emerged as an emissary of Los Angeles rap’s new wave, blanketing the city with his menacing croak and choppy flow. He spent the 10 months before that album’s release embroiled in a firearms case that put him behind bars and was a free man that November. Yet by March 2018, he was facing a separate life sentence for racist conspiracy charges filed against him and his Stinc Team affiliates. As the case dragged on for nearly three years, Drakeo continued to record and drop new music from jail while his status as an L.A. folk hero grew.
Drakeo beat the case and has been out of jail since November 2020, and he’s wasted no time capitalizing on his growing profile. Songs with fellow Los Angeles up-and-comer Blxst, current Bay Area queen Saweetie, and professional wave rider Drake materialized quickly. He’s also dropped five new full-lengths between then and now, an uncharacteristically prolific streak on the heels of his and producer JoogSZN’s excellent prison-recorded project Thank You For Using GTL. For all the good energy his freedom has brought him, Drakeo’s latest, Ain’t That the Truth, is the first of his post-prison albums to yield diminishing returns. There’s nothing particularly wrong with it—Drakeo is as brooding and entertaining as ever, for the most part—but also little to distinguish it from the other four albums he’s released in the past eight months.
Lyrically, he’s in the same headspace as he was on this February’s The Truth Hurts: Balancing his newer, more lavish lifestyle with the grislier one he’s always known. Opener “Just Dance” includes bars about disarming a perp while eating steak and lobster and drive-bys conducted in Rolls Royce sedans. On “Way Before the Fame,” he reminisces about where the L.A. district attorney claims he hid his guns before listing off his recent jewelry purchases. Obscure slang (calling a gun clip a “stiffer”) and menacing threats delivered in his trademark raspy deadpan (“Oh, that’s your friend? You don’t care, start a GoFundMe”) are Drakeo’s stock-in-trade, and there are just enough new variations to keep things from sounding rehashed.
Whenever a song leans too far toward the familiar, like “Flu Flam a Op” nearly does, Drakeo’s voice slinks through the synths and drums to find the perfect pocket to talk about a “silly op” who “wrestle shots like Vince McMahon.” Others, like “Boogieman” and penultimate track “She’s a Roller,” are vintage Drakeo to a fault, serviceable but hardly unique. Ain’t That the Truth is a 17-track, nearly hour-long release in a line of similarly lengthy recent releases, and the lesser cuts can’t help but bleed together in a sea of faceless ops and whispered chest-thumping.
A handful of guests attempt to keep the momentum steady. Drakeo’s brother and frequent collaborator Ralfy the Plug appears on five tracks, though none match the madcap menace of their recent collaborative project A Cold Day in Hell. Kentucky upstart EST Gee shines on “Tricky Ball Play,” barreling through producer Fizzle’s twinkling piano keys. California and Michigan connect again on standout “Should I Kill Him,” Drakeo and Detroit rapper Peezy feeding on each other’s paranoia as they bob and weave through producer Al B Smoov’s guitar licks. These songs crackle with personality and flair, and the album could’ve used more like them.
Drakeo the Ruler, a newly free man with more eyes on him than ever before, has earned the right to drop as much music as he wants. But, as he makes up for time lost in jail, he’s oversaturating the market and unwittingly diluting the appeal of his laid-back swagger. Ain’t That the Truth is a workmanlike album that will surely satisfy Stinc Team lifers, but Drakeo’s style isn’t conducive to the maximal release schedule of artists like Griselda or even his L.A. contemporary 03 Greedo. Sometimes, there’s value in slowing down and basking in your own image.

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Lexxi worked on Elysia Crampton's excellent July release Demon City. Where Demon City stretched to encompass both past and future, the producer's debut EP* *takes place in a single wide-eyed moment.

5TARB01

London-based producer Lexxi’s “Red Eyez” served as the closer on Elysia Crampton’s excellent July release Demon City. Crisp and determined, the track did the tough work of providing resolution to Crampton’s thematically and sonically sprawling album, setting the listener in a dark-but-hopeful present. A version of “Red Eyez” reappears on Lexxi’s debut EP 5STARBOI—this time, weighted down by the introduction of blown-out bass—linking the two projects; Crampton herself tweeted that Demon City “is really just an advertisement for Lexxi’s *5TARBO1 *EP, a poem and captivating accomplishment in its own right.”
The succinctness of “Red Eyez” carries throughout the five tracks that comprise 5STARBOI. Where their collaborations on Demon City embraced collage, Lexxi’s solo material is notably direct. “Pared-down” might be an overstatement, as his compositions are still generously adorned, hissing and crackling at the seams, but if Demon City stretched to encompass both past and future, *5TARBOI *takes place in a single wide-eyed moment.
The EP opens with an anarchic deluge of synth noise, which swiftly gives way to the sort of icy, winding phrase Lexxi is particularly skilled at making. His melodies, which are generally quite simple and will reiterate for the length of a track, bring to mind a less-elastic Arca. Bookended by squalls of texture and undergirded by stuttering grime-inflected beats, this music is certainly aggressive (angry, even) but by no means relentless. On “$ever0” (whose title references severo, a style pioneered by Lexxi, Crampton, and their friends: “an accumulation or accretion, an ongoing process of becoming-with,” as Crampton recently described it to Resident Advisor), a creeping rhythm is met with ambient tones and metallic echoes—pacing that’s far from the club. It brings to mind a somewhat-more-contemporary version of the sort of affected London sound in Zomby and Burial’s saddest tracks; similarly, this is music that is very much marked by urban space.
What differentiates this set of tracks from such UK forebears, and draws it even closer to associates like Chino Amobi, Lotic, and Crampton, is its nuanced emotional tenor. *5TARBOI *feels balefully of-the-moment, acutely aware of its surroundings. At its heart, it’s a statement of youth, a coming-of-age record, even. And, tinged with sadness, this coming-of-age can be as much a mourning as it is a celebration. Any moody restraint sustained elsewhere on the release is cast aside on closer “Up Top,” an anthem with both crushing and delicate elements. Its melancholic climax winds across octaves, while an errant synth screeches uncomfortably close to atonal territory; the track finishes on an unresolved note. Lexxi captures a feeling of cathartic dissolution, a moment when coming into being means coming undone.


The sharp wit of veteran songwriter Stephin Merritt thrives in brevity across a collection of short songs that range from 12 seconds to an epic two-and-a-half minutes.

Quickies

At the end of an onstage interview three years ago, I asked Stephin Merritt about the Magnetic Fields’ song “The Book of Love” becoming a staple at weddings, including my own. After some characteristic quips, he turned suddenly serious, recalling how for all of the many marriages at which he’d been asked to perform the song, he’d recently been pressed into delivering the tune at the funeral of his longtime friend. He almost couldn’t get through it, he said, and has associated the song with that somber occasion ever since.
Merritt knows how context can deepen music’s meaning. “The Book of Love” benefits from appearing alongside 68 other witty yet tender tracks on the Magnetic Fields’ 1999 landmark album, 69 Love Songs. For more than three decades as a songwriter, Merritt has relished in presenting projects within discrete frameworks, whether group names (The 6ths, The Gothic Archies, Future Bible Heroes) or album concepts (the first person, the Jesus and Mary Chain, “folk”). This process seemingly culminated with another massive collection, 2017’s quasi-autobiographical 50 Song Memoir. After so much history, the brevity-oriented Quickies is a welcome reset.
These are short songs, from 12 seconds to an epic two-and-a-half minutes, sparsely arranged. Merritt was inspired by the ultra-short fiction of author Lydia Davis, as well as working on his own 2014 Scrabble poetry book, and, as he cheekily implied in an interview with Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker, “record label preferences.” But short, even radically short songs are already the norm for the Magnetic Fields. Low-key production is also in character. And at 28 songs running 48 minutes, this album is not especially quick or lightweight. This is, blessedly, not the indie-pop laureate version of Twitter, let alone TikTok, let alone Quibi. It’s another Magnetic Fields album, and a fine one, freed from the baggage of a grandiose concept.
Because it’s a Magnetic Fields album, Quickies delights in subversion. Its first single, “The Day the Politicians Died,” is a macabre, one-hand-piano sort of party anthem, sung by the Magnetic Fields’ manager and longtime member Claudia Gonson, who deadpans, “We’ve got a taste for blood/So let’s eat all the priests.” On “My Stupid Boyfriend,” a duet between Merritt and another longtime member, Shirley Simms, sung over a whimsical instrument called a banjolele, a laundry list of gender-swapping complaints about their respective partners culminates in a darkly comedic death wish. In the barely-a-jingle “Death Pact (Let’s Make A)” or the autoharp-backed “Love Gone Wrong,” an almost goth-country dirge in which Merritt’s booming baritone recounts gruesome real-life examples of, um, strange love, Quickies finds humor in bleak morbidity.
Not all of the laughter on Quickies depends on maiming or death. The sole reference to the album title, the 45-second romp “Bathroom Quickie,” sung by Simms over accordion and celeste, juxtaposes Tin Pan Alley wordcraft and toilet-adjacent fucking. “Let’s Get Drunk Again (And Get Divorced),” which Merritt has said was inspired by his distaste for the Las Vegas wedding scene in the 1977 Martin Scorcese film New York, New York, is even more fun, and flips the classic Magnetic Fields wedding-dance format on its giddy head. Some songs, like synth-pop bad-boy embrace “(I Want to Join a) Biker Gang,” could easily have fit on 69 Love Songs.
The Magnetic Fields resonate so deeply for a devoted group of fans, though, because Merritt also manages to subvert his own detached artifice. Quickies, too, cuts to moments of real (“real”?) feeling. “She Says Hello,” another chiming, concise duet, presents an unexpectedly touching, slice-of-life anecdote about a tearful, intoxicated woman’s greeting. “Come, Life, Shaker Life!” is Merritt’s reworking of a Shaker hymn, joined by both Gonson and Simms, and on an album that’s gleefully filthy, its banjo-flecked prayer for purity is oddly stirring, like accidentally clicking over to Sufjan Stevens in the middle of listening to a CupcakKe playlist.
As with other Magnetic Fields projects, some deeper cuts succeed more than others. Still, any lows aren’t particularly low, though I could live without the cutesy rhymes on “Evil Rhythm” (“hypno-tithm,” “commun-ithm”) or the trippy first-person zombie-ant fungus tale “Song of the Ant.” The vinyl release, packaged as five 7-inch records, sounds exhausting, but it makes sense for diehard fans. And Quickies is the type of album that’s packed with little details for the particularly devoted, while also brimming with enough of the Magnetic Fields’ familiar charms to welcome those who haven’t yet found an entry point into Merritt’s increasingly vast discography.
Merritt typically writes his songs alone in a bar, but see him in person and there’s a palpable sense of community. To promote Quickies, the Magnetic Fields were scheduled to play residencies at smaller venues in seven cities. “Kraftwerk in a Blackout,” with its top-shelf Merritt pop-cultural references (not just Kraftwerk, but Star Trek, too), and inescapable melancholy, might have ranked among the Magnetic Fields’ best songs whatever crisis happened to be in the headlines—certainly, if there had been a blackout. As the song fades, Simms repeats, “Will we ever dance again?” The tour, of course, has been postponed. Brevity might be the soul of wit, but life is short, and, sooner or later, all things must end. From weddings to funerals. In this or any time, there’s something to be said for less context.

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His first two records were lousy, but Rick Ross has found his niche by presiding over a luxurious rap fantasy out of step with the current moment.

Teflon Don

If you came up as a rap fan in the 1990s, it's hard to come to grips with the fact that the Illmatic/Doggystyle/Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) ideal has become outmoded. Rappers rarely start with a fully-formed classic right off the bat. And sometimes, a guy who was underrated, underappreciated, or even considered a joke earlier in their career actually generates so much momentum that they eventually become undeniable.
Still, even the most patient and forgiving listener would've had trouble imagining that Rick Ross would ever be taken seriously. His first two Def Jam albums sold well, but his bumbling performances on the mic did little to combat the view of him as merely Jay-Z's get-rich-quick scheme, someone to piggyback on the commercial momentum of dudes from the South rapping about hustling. And when 50 Cent "outed" him as a former corrections officer, it could've been a career-killing PR disaster. But instead of filling his 2009 album Deeper Than Rap with a compendium of explanations and mea culpas, Ross did the exact opposite, exaggerating the most outrageous and ostentatious aspects of his music and persona to summer-blockbuster proportions. He threw the burden of believability out so fast that you could just sit back and cheer as shit blew up.
Ross knows his lane and stays in it on Teflon Don. If this album initially lacks the wallop of Deeper Than Rap, it's only because there's no longer the shock value in realizing that Rick Ross is making one of the better rap records of the year. But Teflon Don also lacks the concessions to sensitive thuggery that bogged down Deeper, and it's also remarkably lean at just 11 tracks. Ross defiantly announces on opener "I'm Not A Star", "If I die today remember me like John Lennon/ Buried in Louis I'm talkin' all brown linen/ Make all of my bitches tattoo my logo on they titty/ Put a statue of a nigga in the middle of the city," and things really don't get any more modest from there.
Ross' greatest gift is the ability to conjure a fully-formed Planet Boss, a refuge from the dwindling fortunes of gansta rap and the general economic downturn, where rappers can and do film videos with as many speedboats as possible. It's obviously a place where A-list rappers are in their comfort zone to do whatever the hell they want. Here, Jay-Z can refute possible ties to the Illuminati, Kanye is at his most aw-shucks disarming since 2007, and the third iteration of "Maybach Music" features none other than Erykah Badu on the hook. The only times Teflon stumbles is when interlopers can't figure the lay of the land. Diddy would've catered more to the spirit of this record if he went in character as Sergio Roma instead of hyping up the overamped, ill-fitting rock moves of "No. 1", and while Drake proved every bit as capable of having rappers meet him on his own terms, his redux of "The Resistance" on "Aston Martin Music" is the awkward sound of two worlds colliding.
While Teflon Don is fun to talk about conceptually, it would be a shame if Ross' growth as an artist went overlooked. Just because Ross and his producers rarely work in nuance doesn't mean they're not craftsmen. It's fitting that his franchise is called "Maybach Music": J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League, No I.D., and Kanye West create beats that really do sound like they're fantastically out of reach to anyone but the financial elite, and you can hear every dollar that went into the record. There are still plenty of villainous synth vamps that cater to Ross' halting, self-satisfied delivery. But the real fun is hearing Teflon at its most indulgent. Just listen to how the Disney strings modulate to a new key to herald the arrival of Ross on "Maybach Music III", the way a Bobby Seale speech adds high drama on "Tears of Joy", or how "Live Fast, Die Young" takes a Kid Dynamite sample back from "Nuthin' But a G Thang" for six minutes of bottle-popping. Even the drum rolls on "MC Hammer" suspiciously conjure an ATM dispensing cash.
Ross won't ever be confused for a Scribble Jam participant, but compare his incongruously meek rapping on 2006 single "Push It" to anything on Teflon Don, and you hear someone who's come into his own. Lyrics that might look clumsy on paper turn into grand pronouncements through pure self-belief. And like a great action hero, Ross never lets cleverness get in the way of saying something memorable. Understandably, money is about the only tie Planet Boss has to reality, and nearly every interaction can be broken down as a financial transaction. He uses luxury autos as a pricing scale for his donations to Haiti, his fatalism is manifested in having his jewelry go uninsured, he reps Emmett Till and Rolexes in the span of two lines, and the only way he can express his grief over his dead father is by turning down "All the Money in the World".
So, yeah-- the tide's pretty much turned for Ross, but if Deeper Than Rap didn't change your mind, I'm not sure Teflon Don will either. At this point, you can find a piece bemoaning the likes of Lil Wayne, Cam'ron, or Gucci Mane becoming critical favorites and fill in Ross' name, since it's a common theme that hip-hop heads would rather miss out on new royalty than admit they might've been wrong about a rapper. And yet, those who are stuck on New York in the late 90s as might actually be most likely to appreciate Teflon Don. It's every bit the throwback, embracing an aura of dominance in a landscape where vulnerability has become a rapper's greatest asset. But more importantly, Ross has proven to be among the last of dying breed. His studio albums feel like events that demand the ears and opinions of rap fans.


Dirty Projectors bassist and co-vocalist strikes out on her own with a five-song EP of slow, droning, R&B-influenced folk.

Mind Raft

For the sake of transparency, let me start by saying that I'm reviewing Angel Deradoorian's debut EP, Mind Raft, because Angel Deradoorian is the bassist and co-vocalist in Dirty Projectors. I'm guessing she takes this as a mixed blessing: On the one hand, it's probably a little disheartening to consider that the bulk of her audience are DP fans curious about what else the band members might be up to. On the other hand, she's probably fine with the attention, considering that a near-heartbreaking number of albums just as passionate and lovingly crafted as Mind Raft go totally ignored because of time and space limitations.
Deradoorian's sound is almost the opposite of the Projectors'-- slow, droning, R&B-influenced folk splattered with blue notes and big drums. (Her own flippant but apt description of Mind Raft is "An EP with five gothed-out psych tracks for you to do drugs to, or something." Or something. Listening to the Projectors' convulsive, pointillistic music, it doesn't take a feat of empathy to imagine she needs a breather.) Though the instrumentals are heavy, it's her voice that anchors-- a waxy, seductive instrument that, along with Amber Coffman's, has come to define the Dirty Projectors' sound as much as Dave Longstreth's convulsive squawk. And here, she gets even more room to flaunt its range and character: The sheepish demurrals of indie with the muscle and flutter of genuine R&B; the near-operatic countermelodies of "Weed Jam" unfurling into steamy murmurs on "High Road"; the backing vocals on "Moon" that sound like dissonant Bosnian folk. The lyrics are, to my sensibilities, slight, but that's basically irrelevant-- her voice is often so intoxicating that stepping back from my stoked and thoughtless lizard brain to parse her English feels like a waste of concentration (not to mention insulting to her voice). But the songs wander and churn when it feels like they could develop, and ultimately, it's a record that I'll never mind having on but probably rarely reach for. (Oddly, for all the EP's quiet eclecticism, it's the relatively straightforward blues dirge "Holding Pattern" that I find stickiest.)
Isn't there some cute aphorism about how napkin sketches by innately talented artists are more fascinating than the dedicated brushwork of someone who, on some inaccessible and deep spiritual level, will just never get it? If not, imagine that there is, because I'm going to need for you consider it now. Mind Raft, for its probably good intentions, sounds like sketches from a young musician with obvious talent who hasn't exerted herself just yet. I realize I'm doing some rhetorical hand-wringing here: For all I know, these five songs required a huge amount of effort and will be the closest Deradoorian gets to the godhead-- but I just don't think that's the case. She's 22, very capable, and her stylistic blend is more interesting and unusual than that of plenty of her peers. If you need a hand reconciling the numerical score with that bit of clinical gloss, I'll just say that if I had to review Dave Longstreth's first solo album, 2002's The Graceful Fallen Mango, I don't know that I could confidently say it's all that much better than Deradoorian's is. To the future.


Hip-hop supergroup comprising Brooklyn's Sean Price, Detroit's Guilty Simpson, and Black Milk finally releases its long-gestating debut.

Random Axe

Random Axe, a hip-hop supergroup teaming Brooklyn's Sean Price with Detroit's Guilty Simpson and Black Milk, was announced in 2008. When Pitchfork spoke to Milk two years ago, he said Random Axe's debut album was 80% complete, which means either a) the group left a number of old tunes on the cutting floor and started nearly from scratch or b) it really took them 24 months to hash out one-fifth of an album. Random Axe is officially here, but it doesn't sound like the kind of product sprung from years of work.
The group addresses its mission statement early on, as Price rhymes, "No love-letter rhymes and raps about chicks/ Just whole lot of druggin' and thuggin', that's it." Single-mindedness aside, all three rappers are very good at what they do here. Simpson, with his no-frills wordplay, makes for an exceptional supporting player, and even sounds inspired on "Never Back Down". Milk brings his skill as a producer over to his rapping, applying a percussive flow. As for Price, he's already well-noted for a wickedly dark sense of humor, using tricky internal rhyme patterns to levy his hilarious threats.
Milk makes all the album's beats, which range from fair to excellent. He chops and flips samples with a studious flair, while drums, no matter how dirty and muffled, all thump like kicks to the chest. The visceral "The Hex" is interrupted by live drum fills, while an eerie twinkle floats over the staccato drums of "The Karate Kid". But a producer's job is more than making beats and recording vocals. It's also about drawing the best performances from all of the album's participants, and Random Axe feels carelessly phoned in at times.
Most of the songs on Random Axe follow an uncomplicated template: Spit 16 bars and get the fuck out of the way. The only track that deviates from this formula is "Everybody Nobody Somebody", where each rapper takes a word from the song's title and uses it as the root of their verse on the song, with limp results. In fact, the most surprising lyrical moments on the album come when Price, notorious for his thug persona, says both that he's happily married and no longer smokes weed. The members of another rap supergroup, Slaughterhouse, sound like four solo rappers on the same song-- clearly failing to grasp the concept of the word "group"-- but at least they make a concentrated effort to out-rap each other. On Random Axe, the verses are reliably good, but the tedium of clock punching replaces the spirit of competition.
The quality improves in every category when the album's two biggest guest stars join the proceedings. Over the high-pitched West Coast gangsta-rap synths of "Jahphy Joe", Random Axe is joined by recent Fool's Gold signee Danny Brown, whose pill-popping lunacy is infectious. The album's shining moment, "Chewbacca", is heightened by the appearance of New York rap phenomenon Roc Marciano, whose economical rhyming shakes both Simpson and Price into focus with their own verses, while Milk's beat manages to render a glittery synth sample into a threatening clarion call. It makes you wonder what would have happened if all of Random Axe carried this same sense of urgency. For one, the album probably wouldn't have taken Milk, Price, and Simpson nearly three years to complete. But more importantly, it might have ended up being the classic fans were waiting so long for.


The Berlin-based musician reconceives ambient music as an urgent, deeply embodied project interrogating the experiences of black Africans in the West.

Black Metamorphosis

The first album in a proposed trilogy, Black Metamorphosis is rooted in Lamin Fofana’s experience as a black African in Berlin. The music is a wash of tone, infused with both grace and unease, at once elegiac and ambivalent. It is intended as the answer to a question Fofana posed in a recent interview: “What happens when African people… find ourselves in the West, in America or Europe? We are often in the margins, in the outskirts, or in the in-between spaces, where things are always in flux, nothing is permanent, and we are forced to improvise, come up with new ways to relate to ourselves, to each other, and to the surrounding world.”
If Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports proposed ambient music as the ideal soundtrack for global citizens passing through the stateless non-places that serve as the hubs of modern air travel—still a relatively novel concept in 1978, when the album was released—Fofana suggests a different interpretation of ambient, one that is deeply embodied. Music for Airports lent tranquility to places that monotony had rendered meaningless. But Fofana’s album reinvests interstitial spaces with meaning by re-centering the experience of migrants, for whom freedom of movement is often an unimaginable luxury.
The album takes its title from the Jamaican post-colonial theorist Sylvia Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World, an unpublished, 900-page manuscript, written in the 1970s, that challenged Western constructions of race and subjectivity. Fofana grew up in Freetown, Sierra Leone; in the 1990s, he fled the country’s civil war with his family before eventually relocating to the United States and, in 2016, Berlin. This is not the first time Fofana has addressed the experience of displacement in his work. In 2015, the Another World EP used churning dub techno and oceanic sound effects to address the plight of migrants crossing the Mediterranean; the lead track, “Lampedusa,” was named after the Italian island, a contested transit point for refugees entering Europe, where hundreds of migrants have perished in shipwrecks over the past decade. Fofana’s 2018 album Brancusi Sculpting Beyoncé borrowed its title from a song on Mike Ladd’s Negrophilia, drawing links between the Modernist avant-garde’s appropriation of African art and contemporary fetishism of black popular culture.
Black Metamorphosis’ underlying themes of displacement and alienation are not always obvious in the music, although a video by the Franco-Congolese artist Nicolas Premiere teases out an implicit Afro-diasporic thread. “Dawn” is a gentle swirl of hand drums and rosy synthesizer pads whose detuned chords faintly recall Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II. “Cosmic Injuries” stretches a layer of hiss over deep exhalations of bass; the held tones and birdsong of “Sono” and “Enchantment” are contemplative and perhaps nostalgic, conjuring a distant sense of place. The album turns darker in its back half, as the shape of the music dissolves into ominous rumbling and low drones.
Fofana makes the album’s theme explicit on the opening track, “I’m Your Question,” burying an almost inaudible voice beneath a swirl of viscous tones. The snippet of speech is intended as the answer to a question that people of color in Europe and North America are frequently confronted with: Where are you from, and why are you here? “I am here because you were there,” is Fofana’s answer. It’s a formulation as elegant as it is cryptic, neatly demolishing the logic of margin and center, colonizer and colonized. That the words are so hard to make out is intentional, Fofana says. To blur the answer is a way of underscoring the imbalance of power implicit in the question; it is a defense of the fundamental right to be private, unknowable.
In its opacity, Black Metamorphosis does something similar. For all its expressiveness, it guards its secrets. I sometimes find myself wishing that the album was more direct, less veiled. But perhaps that desire is itself an expression of privilege, a stubborn refusal to allow Fofana to reclaim ambient music for his own purposes, in his own way. Eno declared that ambient music should be as ignorable as it is interesting. But ignoring—ignorance—comes from a position of power. Fofana’s Black Metamorphosis asks instead: Who gets to zone out—and at what cost?


The Baltimore/Philadelphia duo builds on the harmonious folk-pop of its debut with proggy synths, maze-like arrangements, and a newfound sense of mischief.

Are You There God? It’s Me, @ EP

There’s a scene in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret., the recent film adaptation of Judy Blume’s 1970 novel for middle schoolers, where four girls try an exercise that’s rumored to help breasts grow faster. In the privacy of one girl’s frilly bedroom, they thrust their elbows back and forth aggressively, like doing the backstroke with chicken wings, while chanting, “We must, we must, we must increase our bust!” That slice of adolescent desperation is ludicrous and awkward, both to viewers and the girls themselves. While Victoria Rose and Stone Filipczak are more than twice the age of those protagonists, the two musicians—known together as the duo @—revel in a similar mix of strange and endearing growing pains on the cheekily titled Are You There God? It’s Me, @, which contrasts the harmonious folk-pop of their debut album, Mind Palace Music, with an endless scrapbook of glitchy psychedelia. Across five new songs, that mixture produces a colorful spread that occasionally clashes.
During the lockdown phases of the pandemic, Rose and Filipczak made their music from a distance, and they continued that approach on Are You There God? It’s Me, @, passing drafts back and forth between Philadelphia and Baltimore. However, they did change their production methods in order to challenge their writing. Software instrumentation and processed vocals push the humanness of @’s warm, acoustic sound in a more robotic, but equally stirring, direction. Songs like “Processional” and “Webcrawler” turn the duo’s hypnotic voices into trance-like screensavers over proggy keys, mutating rhythms, and hyperpop production touches. Sometimes, though, their enthusiasm gets the better of them; beholding the searing classic-rock guitar solo and coordinated rah rahs of “Webcrawler” are a little like watching a preteen trying on ill-advised outfits.
Rose has always had a striking voice that’s pure and direct, both in @ and and her solo project Brittle Brian, and her soothing tones inject some welcome naturalism back into the fold. On the title track, she sings choral harmonies about struggling to touch a loved one who’s hiding, looping her vocals into fractured rounds. Filipczak begins weaving his own voice into the a cappella mix until, at the halfway mark, the audio abruptly stutters and the song snaps into a totally different shape. The band goes full twee—complete with flute, rock-steady drumming, and a thin, bouncy bassline—in a move that’s daring in its simplicity. Bookended with proggier songs, the title track feels doubly refreshing, making @’s knack for ’70s-indebted harmonies and warm hooks all the more obvious.
Although Are You There God? It’s Me, @ feels like the musical equivalent of an adolescent growth spurt, the duo still finds enlightenment in screeching synths and data scraping. @ perfect the awkward-to-confident transformation on “Soul Hole.” The song pulses with a quantized beat of spliced drums, looped choir, and droning electronica. Right when it begins to nag, the music bursts euphorically open. Where some people look to religion for answers, @ turn to a different all-seeing arbiter of truth: search engines. “I’m going to the soul hole and I’m never coming back,” sings Rose, staring the internet dead on. It’s a fitting closer for the EP in its brief, vibrant arc: @ may be in a state of unexpected change, but like any good coming-of-age story, the record has you rooting for them.


Jonny Nash draws on the otherworldly sounds of the Baschet brothers’ experimental instruments to sculpt a gently haphazard ambient mirage.

Make a Wilderness

“The world is supposedly a big place, but that’s not so when you travel with a guitar,” François Baschet observed. In the years following World War II, eager to circumnavigate the globe with his instrument, the French musician came up with a solution: an inflatable guitar with a balloon for a body and a foldable wooden neck. That humble invention was the origin of what Baschet and his older brother, Bernard, an engineer, would make their life’s work: sonorous objects that blurred the line between sculpture and musical instrument. The otherworldly sounds generated by the Baschet brothers’ sound structures, as they called their devices—like the Cristal Baschet, an array of glass rods played with wet fingers—have inspired musicians from Tom Waits to Jean-Michel Jarre. Now, the instruments form the basis of Make a Wilderness, the first solo album in two years from the ambient musician Jonny Nash.
It’s easy to see why Nash would be attracted to the Baschet brothers’ objects, with their rich, resonant timbres, which suggest electronic sounds produced using non-electronic means. Whether solo, in collaboration with Suzanne Kraft, or as a member of Gaussian Curve, Nash tends to pursue the ineffable in his music. An early EP, Phantom Actors, invoked his ambient forebears—Jon Hassell, Mark Isham, Wally Badarou—in tones and textures evocative of tropical sunsets, ripe peaches, a lover’s sigh. His music has only become more diffuse from there, the edges between synthesizer, piano, and standup bass steadily softening, as though worn away by erosion.
Make a Wilderness is his most ethereal effort yet: a modest set of instrumental sketches that feel cloaked in mystery. The glassy timbres and microtonal harmonies of the Baschet brothers’ objects lend to the desert-mirage air, though it’s impossible to discern how any of these songs were made, or even whether they were composed at all. Their movements are as gently haphazard as the clanking of wind chimes. Studies in stillness, they suggest a winter breeze whistling through a scrapyard, or the creak and murmur of a boat harbor at night.
There are no melodies to speak of, though the album’s ephemeral meanderings are not at the expense of more consonant pleasures. A minute and a half into “Shell,” a rich, reassuring piano chord rings out, and it is repeated throughout the course of the piece, regular as a beacon in heavy fog. Nash’s minimalist tendencies suggest that he has taken to heart the late Mark Hollis’ advice: “Before you play two notes, learn how to play one note. And don’t play one note unless you’ve got a reason to play it.” Nash’s touch is distinguished by its patience: He layers his tones with exceptional finesse, taking care not to waste a single sound. Each note feels earned.
Much of the album, in fact, draws its inspiration from the quietest, most secretive corners of Hollis’ and his group Talk Talk’s discographies. That’s particularly true of “Shell,” with its ruminative piano, and “Language Collapsed,” the 10-minute centerpiece of the B-side, where vibraphone paints broad strokes across a blurry backdrop in which flickers of brass and woodwinds flash out from the darkness and disappear just as swiftly. Those ephemeral appearances mark Make a Wilderness’ defining characteristic: Gorgeous while it plays, it’s almost impossible to remember once the needle has hit the run-out groove. But that transience only makes Nash’s mood music that much more alluring. Make a Wilderness makes good on François Baschet’s youthful desire to find a sound that travels well. It’s not just portable; it dissolves into thin air.


As Irish black metal aesthetes Altar of Plagues reached their career peak, it was clear that frontman James Kelly had other interests. The first full-length to emerge out of his bass-focused solo project WIFE draws from the same barren palette as his past work, but it attempts to approach that darkness through uplifting synth swells and dead-eyed vocalizations rather than screeches and squalls.

What's Between

As Irish black metal aesthetes Altar of Plagues reached their career peak, it was clear that frontman James Kelly had other interests. After 2013's electronic-focused Teethed Glory and Injury, he called an end to that band's aggression and physical brutality in favor of the morose atmospherics of his bass-focused solo project WIFE; the first full-length to emerge out of Kelly's fractured electronic inclinations, What's Between, draws from the same barren palette as his past work, but it attempts to approach that darkness through uplifting synth swells and dead-eyed vocalizations rather than screeches and squalls.
At his most focused, Kelly's work recalls the beat-driven bleakness of Ross Tones' Throwing Snow (whose Left_Blank label released WIFE's first missive, 2012's Stoic EP) or his new Tri Angle labelmates. In particular, "Dans Ce" batters Kelly's saccharine vocal with abrasive percussion scrapes and pointillist synth parts, warping his pop predilections into something less easy to apprehend. Because Kelly is given to flighty genre exercises, though, What's Between often feels fragmented and mangled; the leftfield house banger "Living Joy" sidles right next to the creeping Burial-isms of "A Nature Shards", and the brooding vocals and distant clinks that finish off the moody closer "Further Not Better" couldn't be further away from the sunny-eyed emoting of the record's opening salvo "Like Chrome."
That sonic inconsistency can work in Kelly's favor—check the nearly-nauseating transition from the skulking ooze of "Tongue" and the vacant, reconstructed R&B of "Heart Is A Far Light"—but his lack of focus robs What's Between of a definite collective identity. Gone are Altar of Plagues' high-minded ideas and 18-minute movements, and in their place are disfigured attempts at inky beat-pop. Kelly is, as ever, able to conjure disaffection and gloom from his expansive instrumentation, but he hasn't quite figured out how to turn digital desolation into something that matches the emotional and narrative force of his influences. What's Between provides some compelling glimpses at Kelly's cimmerian headspace, but knowing that he possesses the ability and the vision to flesh out his own ideas, it's hard not to be left wanting more.


Pavement’s swan song finally gets the full reissue treatment, with various demos, alternate versions, and a new track sequence. It remains a fascinatingly ambivalent note to finish on for one of the most influential indie rock bands of their era.

Pavement: Terror Twilight: Farewell Horizontal

Terror Twilight: Farewell Horizontal

As they prepared to record their fifth and final LP, Terror Twilight, Pavement was a band pulled in different directions. Having scattered to various parts of the country following a long tour to promote 1997’s Brighten the Corners, the members spent the better part of the following year hardly interacting at all. It was an understandable reassertion of boundaries after the unnaturally close quarters of the promotional cycle, but also an indication of diverging interests and priorities. The scrappy young noise merchants of Slay Tracks and Slanted and Enchanted were now in their early 30s. The band had been on the verge of a mainstream breakthrough that it was never entirely clear they actually wanted. Approaching the 10-year mark, they reconvened in frontman Stephen Malkmus’ adopted hometown of Portland, Oregon in July 1998 to see what more they had to say.
Rock groups are frequently a redoubt of passive-aggressive behavior, none more so than Pavement. Long the unchallenged creative force behind the band, Malkmus was not only one of the finest songwriters of his generation but a visionary guitarist—the best instrumentalist in the group by far. No one in Pavement disputes this then or now, and it was commonplace during recording sessions for Malkmus to play many of the others’ parts in the interest of time, or efficiently realizing his frazzled perfectionism. After months of not playing together during which time certain other members had not picked up their instruments at all, Malkmus decided he wanted to make a “band record” that would feature plenty of live tracking, improvisational embellishment, and relatively few overdubs. This was the brief when the group showed up at Jackpot! Studios and were handed demos of the frontman’s thorny compositions, which were increasingly veering into the complex terrain of English folk acts like Fairport Convention and the zany prog of Frank Zappa. Unsurprisingly, the band struggled.
Malkmus was unhappy, but it’s difficult to understand what he expected. In the liner notes for the new and expanded edition, Terror Twilight: Farewell Horizontal, multi-instrumentalist Bob Nastanovich recalls: “Stephen was very frustrated because we had tried to play a handful of songs that were in their larval form and we hadn’t advanced them at all. And he was kind of irritated, seemingly with all of us. And he went up to the microphone and he’s like, ‘Here. I wrote one so easy that all of you should be able to play it.’” Several illuminating Malkmus demos are included on Matador’s sprawling 45-song reissue of the album, but only one track survives from the Portland misadventure, a highly tentative run-through of “You Are a Light” that certainly sounds like a struggle. Sessions were abandoned and rescheduled for New York a period of weeks later. In the interim, Nigel Godrich entered the picture.
Fresh off recording Radiohead’s OK Computer and Beck’s Mutations, Godrich had established himself as a generational talent, deservedly feted for alchemizing a contemporary sound drawn from the canonical psychedelic and garage records of the ’60s and ’70s. He loved Pavement—Wowee Zowee in particular—and let it be known through channels that he would be eager to record the group. For a floundering band in search of a confidence boost and a path forward, Godrich was an intriguing proposition. Sotto voce negotiations ensued between Malkmus and the band’s UK label Domino, and then, just like that, Nigel Godrich was producing Pavement. It was a boom or bust proposition that would ultimately prove to be a little of both.
Terror Twilight’s second attempt at actualization began at Sonic Youth’s Lower East Side studio/practice space Echo Canyon, rented out to the band at friends’ rates. The manageable budget was the main attraction but within a couple days it became apparent that the studio’s sundry idiosyncrasies were a bridge too far for Godrich. Acceptable headphone mixes were nearly impossible to achieve and the faders were upside down. Godrich wanted to make a Pavement album, but unaccustomed to both the setting and the band’s musical fault lines he implored them to upgrade the circumstances.
For their own purposes, the Echo Canyon recordings on the reissue are fascinating, simultaneously ratifying Godrich’s concerns and providing a glimpse of what Terror Twilight might have evolved into under more pacific circumstances. Early, more anarchic takes of “Ann Don’t Cry” and “Cream of Gold” benefit from first-thought-best-thought momentum, but suffer from cavernous sonics. The winsome, eventual outtake “The Porpoise and the Hand Grenade” swings along agreeably in the band’s accustomed three-legged-race groove. Whatever caused the misfire in Portland seems to have worked itself out.
Godrich prevailed upon Pavement to relocate to a studio he found more legible, eventually landing on the pricey RPM near Washington Square Park. Now they were on the clock, spending money beyond their budget on a half-formed record, festering with internal contretemps, and hoping the third time proved a charm. At RPM, the tension between a top-level producer accustomed to the benefit of a lengthy gestational process and an indie-band on a shoestring began to inform the deeply anxious and bizarre character of the finished Terror Twilight. Pavement had five or six days to complete the majority of the LP. In the liner notes bassist Mark Ibold paints a befuddled picture: “All I remember is that whenever we were in the studio together, almost every studio experience we’ve ever had, I am just nervous, and I don’t like it.”
Uneasily, but perhaps inevitably, much of Terror Twilight became the Malkmus and Godrich show, with the producer and frontman huddled together in an attempt at achieving a shared vision. In Pavement’s initial incarnation, co-founder and guitarist Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg had been second among equals to Malkmus. Now, an evolving trendline that found him estranged further and further from the group’s creative locus reached its peak. For the first time, he would not contribute a single composition to a Pavement record, although the reissue includes a few Kannberg songs recorded later, two of which would eventually serve as B-sides. In a curious essay featuring many, many exclamation points which Kannberg penned for the reissue he characterizes his frustration as short-lived: “Although I was kind of pissed initially, not getting to record a couple songs, it mattered more to move forward. I did record a couple songs later… and doing those all by myself helped me realize I could move past Pavement and do my own music one day!”
Estimates vary as to how much of Terror Twilight was finished in the New York frenzy—Nastanovich suggests somewhere between 50% and 80%—so while the sessions had been productive, much work remained. That work took place a few weeks later at RAK studios in London, a storied (and once again pricey) setting where they encountered Chrissie Hynde and Suede’s Bernard Butler recording in RAK’s other two rooms. There they tracked vocals, added various overdubs, and completed the LP’s final mix. Not every member made the trip overseas, and for at least some of them Terror Twilight became a bit of a mystery. Having been unable to solve his parts in New York, Steve West was replaced on drums by Dominic Murcott of the High Llamas on new recordings of the majestic ballad “Major Leagues” and the ribald novelty “Carrot Rope.” Nastanovich claims to have never heard the finished “Major Leagues” until receiving an advance CD some months later.
As the lengthy process of rendering Terror Twilight finally approached its conclusion, one last point of contention remained. Godrich had long envisioned a running order which would foreground the LPs more digressive, challenging material, beginning with the bonkers freakout “Platform Blues” (tellingly known in a previous incarnation as “Ground Beefheart”) and the menacing bad-trip vibes of “The Hexx,” essentially creating a 10-minute barrier of entry for anyone tuning in with the hopes of hearing the next “Shady Lane” or “Gold Soundz.” It was a bold plan, and one which speaks again to the conflicted nature of the project. Pavement had hired a hot producer and spent over $100,000, or $85,000 more than they’d paid to record the enduring classic Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain five years previous. Now, with his plan to split the album into a “weird” A-side and a more approachable, hook-oriented B-side, Godrich's well-intentioned gambit threatened to torpedo whatever commercial prospects the album possessed. The band was concerned.
Eventually, a compromise was reached with Kannberg leading the way on a revised running order that toggles between the outré and the confectionary—beginning with the Beatles-esque majesty of “Spit on a Stranger” before segueing into the banjo-driven, stoner-Beat poetry of “Folk Jam” and then returning to the austere and moving balladry of “You Are a Light.” This has been Terror Twilight as we’ve known it for 22 years: a strange admixture of the catchiest and most unsettling music of Pavement’s career, culminating appropriately enough with the lovely and ludicrous “Carrot Rope,” the indie-rock sequel to “My Ding-A-Ling” that nobody but Stephen Malkmus recognized we needed.
The vinyl edition of the new reissue restores Godrich’s original running order, and it certainly makes for a different experience: One side Hawkwind and one side E.L.O. The counterfactual sequencing of old LPs has become a trope of the reissue industry and makes for a diverting thought exercise, but this rearrangement does not amount to an improvement. As much as Malkmus and Godrich had become a creative quorum of two on the Terror Twilight sessions, it may have been Spiral Stairs who was, in that moment, seeing the appeal of the fractious group most clearly of all. “I was always to try to make the best Pavement record possible,” he writes in his essay. And so he did.
Save for periodic reunion shows, Terror Twilight signaled the end. The band toured the LP relentlessly and live versions on the reissue find the band in fine form on rip-throughs of everything from the group-oldie “Frontwards” to CCR’s “Sinister Purpose.” But Malkmus was done with Pavement as a dynamic creative force. As Steve West says in the liner notes: “I think Stephen got to that point where he wanted to move on to a different bunch of people and be able to play with people who were much more confident musicians. I think he did the right thing for him creatively and more power to him. And I know it was a hard thing for him to do. Maybe he could have been more like huggy-huggy about it, but he was really honest about it, and I respect him for that. It was the right time to exit because this album is still creative and different.”
Too creative and different as it turned out to make Pavement the American Radiohead. Alternately diffident and insinuating, Terror Twilight was reviewed with genial confusion and peaked at No. 95 on the Billboard Charts, far from the breakthrough which would have justified the budget. Kannberg compares the record to the Replacements’ polarizing, desultory final LP All Shook Down, when Paul Westerberg consolidated his agency while functionally breaking up his band. That comparison holds true as far as it goes, though musically, it’s closer to Combat Rock, the final Clash album which found Joe Strummer and Mick Jones gloriously and fatally marooned between their most experimental and star-making impulses. It remains a fascinatingly ambivalent note to finish on for one of the most influential indie rock bands of their era, and this reissue, while not necessarily better than the original 1999 release, provides enough context to understand its odd bathos in a new way. It was the album that brought Pavement full circle: dressed for success, but never quite sure if they wanted the job.


Mixing technical death metal and thundering jazz fusion, the Florida band Cynic's 1993 debut, Focus, still sounds like future music, and their post-reunion LP, 2008’s Traced in Air, thrived on a similarly ambitious mix of power and prowess. But did they really need to make a third record?

Kindly Bent to Free Us

Did Cynic really have to make a third album? In 2006, the Florida progressive metal paragons returned to the stage after a decade away from both recording and performing (plus a short stint under another name). The first phase of Cynic’s existence had been short but crucial; in only five years, they evolved from an atavistic thrash band to a frame-breaking alloy of technical death metal and thundering jazz fusion, crystallized on their wonderfully vexing 1993 debut, Focus. Two decades later, Focus still sounds like future music, an impossibly complex rush of disparate parts and unseen twists that maintains its momentum in spite of its bewildering mechanics. It’s righteous and affirming, too, and not just for its instrumental heroics; with his voice floating in a web of electronics and his head in a cloud of self-made mysticism, Paul Masvidal extolled the infinity of the mind and the sovereignty of the individual.
Their post-reunion LP, 2008’s Traced in Air, thrived on a similarly ambitious mix of power and prowess, though the aging members Cynic had tempered the ambitious parts. The metal, jazz, and math seemed partly pulled apart, strands that no longer held one another so closely. It was a worthy successor and proof that their legacy could live beyond one 15-year-old benchmark. It was also a chance for graceful closure. Instead, Cynic have made Kindly Bent to Free Us, a debacle that scraps not only that exit opportunity but also a chunk of what made them interesting at all.
As if to prevent the perception that they, after a quarter century, simply became just another band aiming to issue a new record every several years, Cynic drastically shift their approach for Kindly Bent to Free Us. In fact, on album three, they leave approximately half of their sound behind. Though Kindly Bent to Free Us does get dense and loud, with the occasional viscous march and tempestuous drum burst, they slough off much of their metal persona for eight tepid tracks. These pieces bend toward post-rock (mawkish closer “Endlessly Bountiful”) and prog (the swiveling “Moon Heart Sun Head”). Brighter production and fewer moving parts dovetail to give Masvidal’s computerized vocals a broader spotlight, too. At their best, that choice offers a pop-like gleam. At worst, it shapes the songs into the unintentional comedy album of the year. Lyrics lifted from the cereal Rice Krispies float above ceremoniously solemn guitars. The plea “Oh mercy, radiate your grace on me” lingers as the grand, laughable conclusion of a particularly knotty span. And that’s just before Masvidal, singing with a choir composed only of himself, informs us repeatedly that “There will be holy fallout.” His tone is clear, clean, and garish. Without the frisson afforded by their more aggressive portion, Cynic’s music becomes a string of unfortified punchlines.
The mere deletion of Cynic’s metal side isn’t itself a satisfactory condition for the failure of Kindly Bent to Free Us; some of these hooks are among the most radiant moments in the band’s catalogue, and some of the instrumental interplay ranks among their most fascinating. It’s not pedestrian, either. These guitar solos remain knots of notes that seem to start and stop time. Cynic also relishes in the daunting task of dividing melodies across every instrument, as they do at the start of the interesting “Gitanjali.”
But the omitted ingredients make Cynic too predictable—not only for the rote order in which things happen here but also for the things that never have the chance to happen. Focus might be impossibly complex, but at least on a structural level, these new songs seem flatly simple, as though the trio plugged parts into an algorithm and played to the resulting script. They favor short, vaguely threatening intros followed by full-band bursts, as that’s how three of the first four songs begin. By the time opener “True Hallucination Speak” reaches its second chorus, its routine movement between quiet and loud, full tempo and no tempo has already become a bore. “Moon Heart Sun Head” seesaws between marching, drum-led verses and lulling, bass-heavy impasses. Even a hyperkinetic solo and a lengthy sample of philosopher Alan Watts reading from his The Nature of Consciousness can’t excite that back and forth. If you get the feeling that you know what’s coming next while listening to Kindly Bent to Free Us, your premonition is most likely correct. In losing a chunk of their identity, Cynic also lost their ability to do the entirely unexpected. They once launched the listener into a sense of wonder and kept them there for minutes on end. Not here.
In the past several years, the bands of peoples’ dreams have reunited. Some have cashed in with high-profile gigs but (at least to date) recorded little else, while others have dazzled with new material that made you mourn their initial hiatus once again. Still others have embarrassed themselves with endless cash grabs and new recordings that amounted to debacles, and a few have made new material that sounds more or less like what they left behind. Cynic is a most peculiar case, though: They got back together to play the old stuff and ended up enjoying the experience so much that they wrote a copacetic follow-up to the only album they’d ever made. And now, after the reunion buzz has had time to dissipate, they’ve embarrassed themselves with a record that fails because it divides their legacy in half. Kindly Bent to Free Us works as a sort of retroactive insult: It resurrects many of the misgivings people have always had about Cynic—the overindulgent vocals, for instance, or the ponderous new-age musings—and runs wild with them. In fact, when I listened back to Focus after hearing Kindly Bent to Free Us, those traits felt like strangely fresh faults, where they’d once been part of Cynic’s unlikely sui generis appeal. It’s a shame that the present now haunts this band’s peerless past.


On her debut full-length, the Hanoi conceptualist sings of youthful heartache over glitched-out, sub-rattling beats.

Tapetumlucidum<3

Aprxel (pronounced “april”) might be your favorite drainer’s favorite drainer. On her debut full-length tapetumlucidum<3, the Hanoi singer-songwriter’s voice bleeds into distorted, collage-like productions by Pilgrim Raid (aka Long Trần). Both are members of Mona Evie, a collective of young artists flourishing in the city’s underground music scene. The album is also a showcase of fellow Hanoian conceptualists, like noise wrangler Tran Uy Duc and sound artist Lý Trang, who produced Aprxel’s first EP AM, PM. While the sample-based, deep-fried maximalism of peers like Jane Remover and Rắn Cạp Đuôi often approaches hyperactivity, Trần’s productions saunter through glitched-out cyberspace as Aprxel’s smoky voice floats above the din. Amid the overstimulation and memey undertones of the current landscape, tapetumlucidum<3 is refreshingly heartfelt and grounded.
While post-TikTok attention spans have encouraged many bedroom artists to shorten the runtime of their tracks, Aprxel sings over instrumentals that meander and unravel into oblivion. “va’ng9999” begins with a dreamy interpolation of Little River Band’s “Reminiscing” that gradually gets chopped and screwed, eventually surrendering to a wall of fuzz laid down by Lưu Thanh Duy of shoegaze outfit Nam Thế Giới. The noisy four-on-the-floor of “two” takes a left turn into swingy 2-step garage, while on “planet hollywood,” Aprxel sings over JPEGMAFIA-type beats that disintegrate into spiraling sax lines. When a minimalist dembow riddim edges its way in, you have to check whether you’re still listening to the same song.
These experiments can be hit-or-miss, but the record’s more straightforward plugg’n’b middle section is a smooth synthesis of Raid’s low-bitrate SoundCloud beats and the midnight melancholy of Aprxel’s harmonies. “cbd” blends grim Memphis stylings with limpid synths, fusing a loop from Gimsim Family’s “Fear No Evil” with saccharine Vietnamese pop balladry. And while she’s rapped for Mona Evie before, Aprxel’s staccato bars on “inanna” feel more self-assured, cutting through Jersey-club bed squeaks.
Between the harsh noise of “terrorizers” and the angelic strings of “escape 2 farewell,” only Aprxel’s vocal performance holds Raid’s concoctions together. At times, her voice battles a flood of samples that threaten to drown her out. “cbd” is discordant, akin to Kelela’s infamous detuned 808 on “Closure.” But on “never can say goodbye,” Aprxel’s voice pierces through with startling clarity; on the following track, she puts a little Björk in it, the strings swelling to a poignant peak. Her voice fractures into shard-like vocables in the final section of “escape 2 farewell,” flitting alongside an extended sample of a demo by Kyoto glitch artist sora. Alone in a digital cacophony, Aprxel sings to ease the pain, hoping someone out there is listening. With a knack for adapting to the musical chaos that characterizes her hometown, Aprxel’s voice carries beyond the city; it’s only a matter of time before it’s heard.


The multi-hyphenate singer-songwriter’s second album, densely packed but light as a feather, explores life and the many leaps of faith required to truly live it.

Lahai

Richard Bach’s popular 1970 allegorical novel Jonathan Livingston Seagull tells the story of a seagull cast out from his flock for daring to challenge their worldview by flying beyond the clouds. Along his solitary journey, he finds ways to channel his sense of isolation into self-actualization; he eventually ascends to another realm, one where ostracized gulls like himself soar across the sky in peace and serenity.
“Jonathan L. Seagull,” a standout track on singer, songwriter, and producer Sampha’s second album, the meditative Lahai, ponders the forces that keep us tethered to the reality of life on Earth. “Seasons grow and seasons die/How high can a bird ever fly?” he sings, as if to literally uplift the listener. The production becomes airy and buoyant as Sampha alternates between his usual rich tenor and a breathy, piercing falsetto.
There has always been something transcendent, almost spiritual about Sampha’s music, like listening to someone invent their own type of prayer. He name-checks our avian protagonist once more on “Spirit 2.0”, Lahai’s lead single and its crown jewel, where honey-toned synths and skittering drumbeats craft an ambiance halfway between Erykah Badu’s R&B mysticism and the pop experimentation of mid-career Björk. “Just like Jonathan Livingston Seagull/Try catch the clouds as I free fall,” he sings, until realizing that he is ripe for salvation: “Love gonna catch you/Spirit gonna catch you, yeah.” In comparison to the rest of the album, the production on “Spirit 2.0” is sparser, more intentional in its empty space, mirroring the resignation that comes before having to take a leap of faith.
Transcendental seabirds aside, it’s no wonder that Sampha relates to these themes of alienation, individuality, and transformation. His 2017 debut album, Process—which won him the Mercury Prize and made him an R&B powerhouse after years of collaborating with superstars like Kanye West, Drake, and Solange—was written and recorded in the wake of losing both his parents to cancer. On the other side of the type of world-shattering grief encapsulated in Process songs like “(No One Knows Me) Like the Piano” lies an emotional expansion, a psychological release when those heavy emotions finally give way to something new; Lahai celebrates that transition.
Another major factor between Process and Lahai is the birth of Sampha’s daughter in the spring of 2020. The newfound optimism deftly woven into this record clearly comes from an artist who has recently and suddenly shifted their perspective on life and love. “Can’t Go Back” is built upon a hypnotic loop of Sampha singing the song’s title, punctuating driving breakbeats that push the track into quasi-IDM territory. Amid the pulsing beat, Sampha is aware that his daughter is “heaven-sent,” and that whatever the circumstance, he now has no choice but to move forward, never looking behind him.
While both Sampha’s lyrical style and vocal prowess are exceptional, it’s really as a producer where he is able to express the full breadth of his talent. Lahai is jam-packed with ideas: whether it’s the way he continuously layers his vocals to create texture through harmony, or how he’s able to slightly bend pianos and guitars around complicated beats until they sound warped, warm, and welcoming; every track has dozens of little nooks and crannies itching to be explored. If anything, if the record has a fault, it’s that sometimes the non-stop restlessness can distract from the subtler aspects of the songwriting, but generally, Sampha is able to deploy the intricacies of his production style to great effect.
Thematically dense, but never heavy, Lahai is peppered with references to flying, the sky, and lightness: the album art features Sampha against a background of a blue sky dotted with clouds, staring at the camera as if looking down from the heavens; in the video for “Only”, the second single and probably the most pop-influenced moment on the record, Sampha grabs a handful of air before it transforms into a songbird in his fist. On “Suspended”, he floats joyously through his life as a new father, as he croons “I am lifted by her love/I am lifted from above.” If Process was the act of wading through the muck of healing, Lahai is the cleansing shower that comes when it’s finally time to wash all the dirt off, shedding layer after layer until all that’s left is air.


With his band SQÜRL, the legendary filmmaker Jim Jarmusch makes drone-oriented music that’s more about texture than motion. Their latest EP is uniquely physical.

EP #260

Jim Jarmusch’s films are often about patience and deliberation, as if rushing through anything would be sinful. Think of Johnny Depp’s zombified journey in Jarmusch’s surreal Western Dead Man, Bill Murray’s gradual road trip through his romantic history in Broken Flowers, or Adam Driver’s contemplative bus driving in Paterson. Whatever story he’s telling, Jarmusch likes to give his characters—and his audience—ample time to think about it.
Jarmusch’s group SQÜRL takes a similar approach to music, which makes sense since the band came together (initially under the name Bad Rabbit) for the soundtrack to Jarmusch’s sedate assassin film The Limits of Control. SQÜRL’s songs are usually static and drone-leaning, more about texture than motion. Some don’t even have a beat, and the ones that do are less about timekeeping than added emphasis. Once your mind tunes into the group’s dense sound, rhythm becomes just another catalyst for meditation.
Though their music seems ripe for a longform release, thus far SQÜRL has only issued EPs. EP #260 is their fourth such mini-album, and it is perhaps their shortest original work yet, considering that two of its five tracks are remixes by other artists. The trio nearly make up for that brevity during the opening “Solstice,” a mini-symphony of guitar feedback that’s so full of overtones it would be easy to put on repeat and get mentally lost for days. The song’s heavy whirr shares the spooky ambience of Sonic Youth’s farther-out experiments. But there’s something uniquely physical about listening to SQÜRL’s ringing hum, as if the band has inserted a tuning fork inside your rib cage.
That miles-deep density is maintained throughout the other two original songs on EP #260, with Carter Logan’s lumbering drums added for all of “The Dark Rift” and part of “Equinox.” In the past, his playing has given SQÜRL’s songs the dusty march of late-era Earth, but here he plays faster and sharper, steering toward more classic metal. That shift works for the most part, but the magnetism of EP #260 comes from the mammoth guitar sounds erected by Jarmusch and Shane Stoneback.
Those sounds shrink a bit in the hands of EP #260’s remixers. Anton Newcombe of the Brian Jonestown Massacre adds an electronic beat and whispery female vocals to “Equinox,” morphing it into sultry but generic techno under the new name “Gates of Ishtar.” Föllakzoid fare better with their take on “The Dark Rift,” keeping the original’s shadowy mystery intact, but their throbbing pulse doesn’t entrance like Logan’s calmer drumming. Both remixes are far from failures, but they feel trivial compared to SQÜRL’s distinctive sonic signature. Jarmusch’s group are onto something for sure, and the main flaw in their work so far is that there’s not more of it.


The hardcore band’s sixth album is short, fast, and misanthropically funny, full of scuzz-punk tantrums about the indignities of modern life.

Half Divorced

There was a time when every mundane indignity of adult life had a corresponding Seinfeld episode. Now those indignities inspire grimly funny Pissed Jeans songs. Demoralized about our dehumanizing healthcare industry? There’s a Pissed Jeans song for that. Depressed about going bald in early adulthood? There’s a Pissed Jeans song ranting about that. Fantasizing about your blowhard project manager’s death? These freaks have a song for you, too.
Two decades into their career, the Pennsylvania-bred punks are the poets laureate of pathetic men flailing against their own obsolescence. (That’s a compliment—to portray a character is not to concern yourself with the character’s likability.) On Half Divorced, their first album in seven years, Pissed Jeans haven’t overhauled their sound or reinvented themselves or “matured” as artists so much as they have amassed a new inventory of modern miseries to turn into scuzz-punk tantrums, from catalytic converter theft (“[Stolen] Catalytic Converter”) to crippling medical debt ("Sixty-Two Thousand Dollars in Debt").
Let other bands address the political and structural causes of late-capitalist decline; with his guttural howl, vocalist Matt Korvette has always been better at sweating the small stuff. He’s in fine form on “Helicopter Parent,” yowling about the micromanaging tendencies of bougie parents (“Why ya breathing down the back of their neck!?”) over a sludge-metal riff that oozes like overflowing sewage. It may be the funniest song about parenting since Randy Newman’s “Love Story (You and Me).” The band further indulges its comedic side on “Everywhere Is Bad,” an amusingly specific travelogue of ills. The playful call-and-response segment—enumerating different cities and the reasons they suck (“Philadelphia/Trashy streets/San Francisco/There’s no more freaks!”)—evokes the humor-infused punk of the Dead Milkmen more than any hardcore reference points.
If Half Divorced has a claim at being Pissed Jeans’ funniest album, it’s not their most musically stimulating. “Helicopter Parent” and “Junktime,” a half-spoken yarn about toxic waste fallout, are exceptions—sludgy, slow-burning eruptions that showcase the band’s talent for tension and release, goaded by Korvette’s throat-scraping anti-charisma. The rest of the record plays it relatively straight, with quick and dirty hardcore outbursts like “Killing All the Wrong People” and “Alive With Hate” that summon plenty of bludgeoning energy but little in the way of memorable riffs or refrains.
The last two tracks evoke a kind of aggro pop-punk: a cover of “Monsters” by undersung Florida punks Pink Lincolns and an uncharacteristically anthemic original, “Moving On.” The latter sounds like it could be a straightforward divorce song until you read the lyrics and realize it’s about a guy swearing off selling his used underwear online. Maybe that’s the album’s unifying theme—trying to cling to your dignity in the world that capitalism has wrought.
Pissed Jeans are fortysomethings now, with day jobs and families of their own. Presumably, any glamour associated with playing in a moderately successful punk band has long since evaporated; they’re still doing it because they still mean it. On “Cling to a Poisoned Dream,” Korvette satirizes the self-delusions of the creative class, people sabotaging their mental and financial health in hopes of making it big. “I know you never got yours/Maybe one day I’ll get mine,” he shouts over pummeling power chords. “Yeah, I’m still clinging to this poisoned dream.” It’s quintessential Pissed Jeans: acerbic and untempered, mocking the masochism it takes to keep a punk band going in 2024, even as they do exactly that.