Tame Impala's second full-length, Lonerism, will once again be compared to albums from the late 1960s and early 70s. But the project is exciting because, by maximizing the use of the available technology, it taps into the progressive and experimental spirit of psychedelic rock, and not just the sound.

Lonerism

If their debut was any indication, Tame Impala's second full-length, Lonerism, will once again be compared to albums from the late 1960s and early 70s. But if their intent was to make a record that sounds like it came from that era, they've failed and ended up with something more fascinating. Sure, there's merit to the countless groups and scenes that seek out the right tube amps and compressors and microphones in order to create flawless period pieces. They're often called "revivalists," even though the actual term is wasted on them. Are they really breathing new life into this form by keeping it cryogenically frozen in ideas nearly a half-century old? Tame Impala prove far more exciting because, by maximizing the use of the available technology, they tap into the progressive and experimental spirit of psychedelic rock, and not just the sound.
Tame Impala did something similar on 2010's Innerspeaker, and they might be open to "Same Impala"-type jokes if the expanse of psychedelic rock were something you'd be expected to move on from after one record. Lonerism does make the kind of tune-ups that typically generate a lot of second LP plaudits: It's leaner, more propulsive, more confident, and less beholden to its influences. But Lonerism's genius manifests itself in Tame Impala's ability to figure out a way to integrate the concepts of electronic music-making without resorting to ripping off the breakbeat/Beatles template of "Setting Sun".
Leader Kevin Parker doesn't sound like an electronic producer, he just thinks like one. He sees his songs as blank canvases rather than boxed-in verse/chorus structures while emphasizing fluidity, constant motion, and textural evolution. You could spend the entirety of opener "Be Above It" letting your ears luxuriate in the diversity of tactile sensations-- the subliminal whisper of the title becomes a rhythm track, a barreling drum break is severely tweaked to sound like an oncoming rush of bison, a flanged guitar wobbles like neon Jello, and Parker's laconic, slightly echoed vocals pulls the whole thing together. Lonerism could go anywhere from that point, which is confirmed by the majestic song that follows, "Endors Toi". Follow the regal path of the lead synth or tilt your ears towards the righteously loud drum rolls that sound like masterfully chopped Bonham/Moon samples. I'm reminded of Radiohead's stated goal on "Airbag", which was to recreate Endtroducing..... in real time, or what DJ Shadow himself has been trying to do ever since in terms of merging the rarest vinyl grooves with your stony older brother's record collection.
Those are the first two songs on Lonerism, and it's bold to lead off with seven minutes of mostly instrumentals. Yet for all of the sonic trickery, Tame Impala are anchored by the righteous aspects of classic rock. They're throwbacks in the sense that they operate from a pre-punk perspective where each musician has the chops and confidence to be capable of soloing, and the singer and the drummer were cranked loud as hell. Yes, Parker does sound like John Lennon. Many athletes pattern their golf swings after Tiger Woods, their batting stance on Barry Bonds, or stick out their tongue while taking a jump shot like Michael Jordan. It means little if you don't have the skills to connect and perform.
More important is how Parker writes melodies that are instantly memorable, that rise and fall with beautiful simplicity and give what are fairly basic and relatable sentiments heft. Lonerism lacks a chorus that instantly pops like "Solitude Is Bliss", which is an issue only if you think the best melodies necessarily need to appear in the middle of the song. You'd be hard-pressed to find hooks as catchy as the verses during the run that spans "Music to Walk Home By" through "Elephant", and while none initially stands out as the kind of hit that might push Tame Impala to bigger festival stages, the cumulative effect means Lonerism might.
So, the above is all well and good for the people who might use Lonerism to EQ their hi-fis. Does it make you feel anything? On Innerspeaker, Parker sang, "You will never come close to how I feel," so what's the emotional component to Lonerism? Though Parker's lyrics are plainspoken and occasionally a little elusive, Tame Impala's two records are called Innerspeaker and Lonerism, some of their songs go by titles like "Solitude Is Bliss", "Why Won't They Talk to Me?", "Island Walking", and "Mind Mischief". You get the idea of where Parker's head is at, or more to the point, that Parker's head is where he's at.
That's a fairly common concern in this realm. You think about most of the technophile, prog-rock opuses of recent decades and most sound like spiritual heirs of King Crimson, Pink Floyd, or Black Sabbath; records like Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Kid A, and The Moon & Antarctica tell the listener that their state of being is forced upon them, by shadowy governments, by heartless technology, by an uncaring god. It justifies the headphones-bound quarantine. What distinguishes Tame Impala is how they are able to explore the emotional difference between being alone and being isolated. Jayson Greene described Parker's voice vividly as "like someone trapped John Lennon's vocal take from 'A Day in the Life' in a jar and taught it to sing new songs." In terms of a mentality, to me it's more along the lines of "I'm Only Sleeping", embodying and advocating a wakeful and passive state of psychedelia.
Lonerism derives much of its philosophical and musical pleasure from this interaction of micro and macro. Tame Impala stack vocal and guitar harmonies on the loveably hungover "Mind Mischief", and then Parker and co-producer Dave Fridmann take control of the mixing consoles and shake the whole thing up like a snowglobe. A similarly fun trick happens on "Apocalypse Dreams", which builds the momentum of a bouncy Northern Soul groove up to a peak before the mix abruptly cuts off and spits them back into a panoramic, HD jam.
All these rich sounds serve as an alternate take on anticipating technological encroachment, that humanity and technology aren't necessarily at war. You feel small while listening to Lonerism, but in a way that makes you appreciate how man, machine, and Mother Nature can harmonize. Lonerism is portable and joyous in an unforced way, a soundtrack for the times when you're walking downtown and look up at a collection of skyscrapers, or driving through a mountain pass on an interstate or even looking at a Ferris wheel next to an ocean thinking, "Holy shit, how did this all get here?"


From its opening notes, Kacey Musgraves' Pageant Material sounds like a sigh of relief. Her major-label debut, 2013's Same Trailer Different Park, positioned her as something akin to the country Kendrick Lamar, and her ascendance does feel corrective at a time when bro-country's red cup runneth over with EDM's structural dynamics, NRA talking points, and "rapping."

Pageant Material

From its opening notes, Kacey Musgraves' Pageant Material sounds like a sigh of relief. Musgraves' voice is largely unadorned, her sound analog and organic—she is backed by a small band, sweetened by pedal steel and the occasional string section. The songs are not overworked: the choruses do not explode, they merely unfurl. Her near-perfect major-label debut, 2013's Same Trailer Different Park, positioned her as something akin to the country Kendrick Lamar—the hyperbole was that she could save country music from itself. Musgraves stands in comically stark relief to some of her CMA-hoisting peers, and her ascendance does certainly feel corrective at a time when bro-country's red cup runneth over with EDM's structural dynamics, NRA talking points, and "rapping." She's hailed as a new model, one seemingly reverse-engineered from Nashville's Top 40: a perpetually stoned real girl, fixating on fine '70s countrypolitan flourishes and focusing on self-acceptance.
Musgraves grew up rural and working class in East Texas and firmly orients herself as someone not-that-far removed from a small town fate. Country, historically, espouses nothin'-fancy humility, but in 2015, these qualities are often illustrated by naming things—cheap beer, old trucks—that signify one's down-homeness. Mainstream country is currently a few years deep into a circa-2004 hip-hop problem, where recitation of the familiar nouns of late-stage capitalism stand as totems, or replace narrative altogether (instead of "I slang in my white tee," it's "White picket fence house on this dirt.") The exactitude of purchasing power and status is being GPS'd at all times. The lone examples of this behavior on Pageant Material are a citation of Willie Nelson (who duets on his own lovely "Are You Sure"), the invocation of a room shared with Gram Parsons' ghost on "Dime Store Cowgirl", and the title track double-entendre of "the only Crown is in my glass." When Musgraves sings "Just 'cause it don't cost a lot/ Don't mean it's cheap," on "Dime Store Cowgirl" it's as much a personal thesis about simple values as a repudiation of the economy around her.
Musgraves' "not"-ness is the pivot point of her artistic identity. Her songs exude a relaxed resonance because they have a lot less to prove. They feel personal, and you can locate Musgraves the artist in them ("And if I end up goin' down in flames/ Well, at least I know I did it my own way"). Mainstream country often poses an Us vs. Them chasm meant to alienate those who cannot identify with the lifestyle or values represented; for Musgraves, openness and acceptance are the paradigm. She rejects the mandates of Top 40, but maintains the hallmarks of country tradition, which makes liking her work easy and exacting critique tricky. A lot of country is about singing about what you aren't (or rather "ain't")—which she does often here, and most potently on the title track. One of the remarkable things about Musgraves is not how much she has deviated from country norms, but the way she expands them.
The most obvious way, and the one that press and the public have latched onto, is the feminist-at-her-liberty narratives with songs (most of which are co-written by her producers, Luke Laird and Shane McAnally, who were also behind the boards on Same Trailer). While this is worth noting and celebrating, in Musgraves' case it's overstated simplification, one that continually pits her as a straw(wo)man against the easy villainy of bro country™, instead of within a canon that spans from Kitty Wells' "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels" to Loretta Lynn's "Fist City" to Miranda Lambert's "Kerosene". With Pageant Material there is less good-for-the-gander agenda than anticipated. Musgraves is confident and self-contained, but she's not measuring herself against anyone's standards but her own (the Big Machine-subtweeting "Good 'Ol Boys Club", and its chaser, "Cup of Tea"), an idea that she references on most every song on the album. But under the microscope it's more than confidence, it's more than self-help self-love maxims. It's a disregard of the system; it's shrugging off the mantle of Southern Girlhood ("I'd rather lose for what I am/ Than win for what I ain't" she sings on the title track).
And unlike many in her cohort, Musgraves doesn't hoist herself up as a bad girl. Not because she isn't one, but because in her world that dichotomy doesn't exist. Instead she spends much of the record refusing the obligation to a good reputation ("Biscuits", "Late to the Party", or boasting "I'm always higher than my hair" on "Pageant Material"). She celebrates an authentic self expression above all—Musgraves' tendentious realness is what lends the album its quiet politics.
Tussling with her persona is fun and engaging work, but it's Musgraves' songcraft that provides the whoa moments. She has the ability to shift a phrase—like "family is family" or "you can take me out of the country, but you can't take the country out of me"—out of cliche and into poignancy, or hell, even into something deep. She can pin 10 of these plainspoken lines back-to-back, without ever straining the song or its narrative or appearing to do any hard work at all. Her ability to pair song to sentiment is fairly flawless.
Pageant Material is a bit smoother than Same Trailer and musically there is less to grab on to. The album's maudlin center—the triptych of "Somebody to Love", "Miserable", and "Die Fun"—gives it some gravitas. Her voice on these world-weary bits, especially the impeccably crafted "Miserable", give the album some of the heft it could use a little more of. It's an easy listen that clocks its 14 tracks swiftly, and can feel a little lightweight on repeated listens.
The binary of "good" country vs. "bad" is one we'd be wise to retire, and is the wrong narrative to frame a songwriter of Musgraves' caliber. She remixes all that we might call corny and shopworn in other, less deft hands. She's making gold records in service to small-town DGAF burner girls who managed to half get their shit together. Which is a truly strange universe for a pop star to be working in—nestling in with the ex-Swiftie fuck-up fringe, young women imagining beyond the dead ends and expectations set before them. While much of women's work in mainstream pop is hung up on pleasure (still important!) and what disposable income nets them (ditto), Musgraves is musing in a more quotidian slog of struggle and acceptance—the work of the self. It's a strange and forgiving album, less toothsome than the ones that preceded it, but Musgraves' resistance makes this album important, even when it's imperfect.


On her elegant and complex fifth album, Lana Del Rey sings exquisitely of freedom and transformation and the wreckage of being alive. It establishes her as one of America’s greatest living songwriters.

Norman Fucking Rockwell!

In 2017, Lana Del Rey stopped performing in front of the American flag. Where the singer-songwriter born Elizabeth Grant had once stood onstage before a wavering projection of stars and stripes, charged by a brash apple-pie and blue-jeans patriotism, she now deemed the flag “inappropriate,” preferring a screen of static instead. For a woman whose songs are like miniature syllabi in American Studies—saturated in references to jazz, girl groups, heavy metal, Springsteen; Hemingway and Fitzgerald; money, power, glory; excess and loss; Whitmanian multitudes—it felt like an act of defiance.
Norman Fucking Rockwell! is Lana at her deepest, and it arrives at a time when the history of America as we know it is being rewritten. Norman Rockwell himself illustrated idyllic images of American life and its history, spending 50 years with the Americana propagandists at the weekly Saturday Evening Post. His best-known works used a wondrous narrative style to center comfort and simplicity: A pastoral idea, painted and personified, of the American Dream. Lana neatly cuts through that outmoded fantasy with an emphatic fucking hyphen mark of irreverence, or enthusiasm, or both. As Lana revives American myths, with an empty deadpan that would make Lou Reed proud, she also exposes them. Like the Beach Boys, she’s looking for America; like Elvis, she’s discomfiting; like Dylan, she’s a trickster, and we are all potentially fooled.
Lana is one of our most complicated stars, a constantly unresolvable puzzle—someone who once called her own work “more of a psychological music endeavor” than pop. But on Norman Fucking Rockwell! that ground-swelling complexity coheres to reveal an indisputable fact: She is the next best American songwriter, period. Trading much of her hardboiled trap-pop and trip-hop malaise for baroque piano ballads and dazzling folk—equal parts Brill Building precision, windswept Laurel Canyon, and 2019 parlances—Lana has begun a dynamic second act in profundity. “I really do believe that words are one of the last forms of magic,” Lana once said, and she exalts each syllable more than ever here. Where her elegant wordplay once made her the Patron Saint of Internet Feelings, she now sounds like a millennial troubadour—singing tales of beloved bartenders and broken men, of fast cars and all of the senses, of freedom and transformation and the wreckage of being alive. The stakes have never been higher.
Sometimes Jack Antonoff productions seem to fly because they have been given a trampoline or a children’s bouncing castle. But here, with delicacy and grace, he and Lana find new wings in minimalism, fresh air to breathe, a structural relief. From its cascade of opening piano notes—“God damn, man child” are felicitous first words and the national mood—Norman Fucking Rockwell! achieves levity, tension, and a disarming self-awareness. The languor of Mazzy Star and downbeat skitter of Portishead meet the easy pop-rock breeze of Carole King on 1971’s Tapestry, or the searching resilience of Joni Mitchell on 1972’s For the Roses. It feels like a wall has come down, like Norman Fucking Rockwell! is less to do with camp, and more to do with real life; less to do with scripting the incandescent character of Lana Del Rey and more to do with human complexity; less about aesthetics than being. You can hear the room everywhere, and for all the spectral harmonies and cinematic splendor, it sounds like Lana alone, embracing classic Angeleno isolation.
Lana’s pillars are intact before you even hit play: glamour, eccentricity, the absurd, wit. “Your poetry’s bad and you blame the news,” she proclaims on the title track, with a raised eyebrow, and this forthright song grows more savage from there. On a nine-and-a-half-minute lullaby called “Venice Bitch,” she sings the line “fresh out of fucks forever” like a lilting lady of the canyon—in pop tradition, Lana treats California like a conceptual promised land, and here is the smoggy sprawl, stretching into a neo-psychedelic ballad for a new age of acid festival jams. She curses like the sailors on the cover. She employs old-school lingo on the one hand (“Catch ya on the flipside”) and a narcotic slur on the other. And there is no other pop star who could palatably cover Sublime’s “Doin’ Time” and turn its mall-reggae into something so balmy and sweet.
Above all, Norman Fucking Rockwell! is the sound of a heart shattering and reforming just to shatter again—of troubled people attempting to navigate the mess of love. Her ache is from empathy: for our crumbling world, for the down and out, for lovers at war with their minds. “If he’s a serial killer/Then what’s the worst that can happen to a girl that’s already hurt?” she sings like a crime novelist on “Happiness Is a Butterfly,” which is to say it is fleeting, setting herself up for a kind of heartbreak so torturous it should be possible to have it surgically removed. Many of these exquisitely narrated songs contain reminders that the trappings of masculinity—breaches in communication, emotional stiltedness, fear of vulnerability—come from the same toxic status quo as systemic patriarchy. On the wrenching “California,” Lana processes as much: “You don’t ever have to be stronger than you really are,” confessing in a tumbling rush that “I shouldn’t have done it but I read it in your letter/You said to a friend that you wished you were doing better.” Each word is on a pedestal; the song exists to amplify them. Her faint country warble wells more with each verse, and it’s devastating.
Radiating new dimensions of sensitivity and eloquence, “Mariners Apartment Complex” is a towering peak on Norman Fuckng Rockwell!, a four-minute drama about fateful potential romantic energy. But its turbulent grandeur could speak to the whole Lana Del Rey story. “You took my sadness out of context” and “They mistook my kindness for weakness” are bold refusals to be misunderstood. Referencing Elton John with her pristine declaration “I ain’t no candle in the wind,” a phrase originally inspired by the early deaths of Marilyn Monroe and Janis Joplin, is a patent embrace of life from a woman who once wrote, “I wish I was dead.” When she sings, “I fucked up, I know that, but Jesus/Can’t a girl just do the best she can?” it could be a mic-dropping rebuttal to the ludicrous standards she faced from the start (and the overblown, Internet-engineered Lana outrage that now seems sexist and pathetic). The Hollywood author Eve Babitz once wrote, “Once it is established you are you and everyone else is merely perfect, ordinarily factory-like perfect… you can wreak all the havoc you want.” Lana’s evolution follows suit. “Mariners Apartment Complex” is the sort of ballad that makes teens want to bang on pianos and spill their souls.
Lana zooms out to find her zenith. A piano ballad to close down the bar at the end of the world, “The greatest” collapses time, as if Lana is writing the zeitgeist on a typewriter, her lines raving up with fevered reference to rock’n’roll and depression and a proverbial “Kokomo.” Turning the weight of a generation into light, her words crest like the white of a tidal wave—“L.A.’s in flames, it’s a getting hot/Kanye West is blonde and gone/‘Life On Mars’ ain’t just a song/Oh, the livestream’s almost on”—and they feel on arrival to have existed forever. As ever, Lana regards the despondency of existence as a realist, offering a funhouse reflection of the way we live.
Call her Doris Doomsday: “The culture is lit/And if this is it/I had a ball,” she resolves with ecstasy and fire, a lightning rod of humor, sadness, and perception; flip jadedness and abiding love. Fanning the flames of a culture ablaze, Lana sings each word like a prayer, finessed with conviction and smoke, chaos and control. “The greatest” is a galaxy-brain moment in the pantheon of pop, and it belongs to a generation fully aware we are at risk of being distracted into oblivion, Juuling towards early death while watching Earth burn.
But hope does not elude us yet. And Lana has an anthem for that, too. The title of Norman Fucking Rockwell!’s grand finale is itself a doomy 16-word poem called “Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but I have it.” Whatever it was that brought Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen together half a century ago, that middle ground is in the solemn mood, hollowed space, and spiritual fortitude of this haunting song. In the muted resignation of her voice you can see her “trust no one” tattoo. She rejects a world of luxury, rejects happiness and sadness both, calls herself “24/7 Sylvia Plath.” And in this slow, glowering procession, she points more directly to her own personal history than ever—“spilling my guts with the Bowery bums” as a volunteer, FaceTiming her father “from beyond the grave”—and soberly she sings: “Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman with my past.” In the vacant spaces between her dark phrases is the unassailable fact that people bury their pasts in order to endure them.
Norman Fucking Rockwell! is the apotheosis of Lana Del Rey, songs of curiosity and of consequence, darkness and light, a time capsule of 2019, proof that a person cannot escape herself but she can change. Lana has said hope is dangerous because of her own experience, because in Hollywood she “knows so much.” Hope is dangerous because women are rarely taken seriously, from matters of authenticity to cases of assault. Hope is dangerous because the world fails women, and the bigotry to which American power is currently pitched ensures it. Lana calls herself “a modern-day woman with a weak constitution,” witnessing “a new revolution,” with “monsters still under my bed that I never could fight off.” What makes this final song of survival so cutting is the palpable difficulty in her delivery. When she lands on “a gatekeeper carelessly dropping the keys on my nights off,” it sounds like an oblique image of corrupted power, as upsetting as it ought to be, one to finally drain her of hope. But she still has it. In a piercing falsetto we rarely if ever hear from Lana, perhaps saved for her most pressing truth, she touches the sky: “I have it, I have it, I have it.” And when she does, you believe her.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Chicago R&B poet and singer doesn’t just write about losing or finding love: Her tender and curious new album is all about the transformative potential of the journey.

Water Made Us

How much would you let love change you? That’s the dare that singer and songwriter Jamila Woods tosses inside the circle on her sprawling new album Water Made Us. Across 17 songs, she considers love as a cell that can mutate and multiply, and she asks us to celebrate as she revels in its changes. It’s been four years since LEGACY! LEGACY!, an impatient bullhorn lofted by an artist urgent to set right historical slights. Since then Woods has been preoccupied by an inward metamorphosis, telling Them that she sought “to represent different stages of my life or relationships as a cycle.” While her earlier work sought to be definitive, here she’s fluid, tethered only to a personal philosophy of contentment and surrender. The musical inclinations and existential inquiries are curious and voracious, yet Woods keeps them sprightly and agile.
“Bugs,” the opener, is deceptively nonchalant in its pursuit of love. “Why not have pleasure on your way to the one/Or the second one?” Woods asks. Searching for “the one” can feel futile; she makes the task appear worthy, almost noble, less about finding and more about savoring. She also advises us to chill out: “Why so much pressure?” Jasminfire’s soaring violin gives the song a nursery rhyme quality that quickly turns hymnal, while drummer Homer Steinweiss turns the latter part of the song into a jazz session, trading fours to wind down the night. “Send a Dove” is smooth and melodic, in the vein of R&B heavyweights Mtume, and samples Nikki Giovanni’s far-reaching SOUL! conversation with James Baldwin. Giovanni talked to Baldwin about love, relationships, and the responsibility to show up for each other with gentleness, even when it’s difficult or untrue in the moment. “Fake it with me,” she implored. Woods continues that potent plea, singing, “Don’t save your worst for me/I’m not your leather Everlast… Lie to me still.” In conversation with her inspirations and contemporaries, particularly Kelela on Raven, Woods asks if her paramours are strong enough to do what love requires.
Songs like “Wreckage Room,” “Thermostat,” and “I Miss All My Exes” are candid with a hint of play. Woods speaks from her soul and makes life’s virtues—trust, faith, hope, memory—seem not just aspirational but necessary. Julian Reed’s piano lends an ominous air to the naked grief of the former two songs, while siblings Ayanna and Kamaria Woods’ choral harmonies on “Wreckage Room” evoke the familiarity and comfort of those we trust to carry us at our lowest: our family. The humor emerges as Woods revisits the quirks that made every past relationship similar yet different, remembering how it felt to be cared for by exes who “cook veggie burgers with Lawry’s, lemon pepper everything,” or those “who talk to God in a different language.”
Woods holds her own. Even better, she holds the team, ceding space to duendita and her Anita Baker tone on the triumphant “Tiny Garden” and to frequent collaborator Saba’s virtuosic rapping on “Practice.” Interludes—“let the cards fall,” “out of the doldrums” and “the best thing”—play like snippets of consciousness from the children on The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, now grown up and ready to balance naivete with rational thinking. Standout “Wolfsheep” is a country-inflected ballad for the coconut oil kind of woman: Black girls who hike trails with Timbs and laid edges, remembering Sonia Sanchez and humming Summer Walker.
Woods brings irreverence, flexibility, and discipline to her writing, taking her time with each phrase and word placement. As a poet she needs to be clear, even if the lessons are uncertain. The steadfast quality of her lyricism brings to mind the pen games of others who have looked love squarely in the face and admitted it changed them: Carolyn Franklin, Stevie Nicks, SZA. This lineage of songwriters shares a fascination with the immediate aftermath of love—the morning after the breakup or the seconds following the revelation of infidelity. It’s not the sweeping emotions that compel them, but the moment in between separation and starting over.
Water Made Us is dextrous and steady. It conjures a profound sweetness from ordinary musings and takes the guile out of relationships. Woods gives herself over to a state of ease that is neither well-earned nor hard-fought, simply possible. Life will do as life does; all we can do is continue on until we arrive where we need to be. This is Woods’ realization on Water Made Us, and throughout, she sounds like she’s skipping: like she’s meeting love, time and again in various formations, and each time meeting herself anew.


Dub pioneer Adrian Sherwood reteams with dubstep pioneer Rob Ellis (aka Pinch) for a more refined and surprising album that falls just short of its desired concept.

Man Vs. Sofa

Thankfully, the past few years have brought the exhilarating and acerbic production work of Adrian Sherwood back into earshot. In the midst of early ’80s London, he helped a slew of punks—the Fall, Judy Nylon, and Maximum Joy—find their inner dub sound, and he gave rastas like Bim Sherman and Prince Far I a heavily psychedelic bass tone that made them stand apart from their dreadlocked brethren. A tireless work ethic and decades of production work make it near impossible to keep a handle on the man, but a spate of reissues in the past few years, especially Sherwood at the Controls, show just how his sound anticipated the wooly electronic experimentation that now runs through the likes of Arca, the Fade to Mind crew and dubstep itself.
So having Sherwood team with dubstep pioneer Rob Ellis, aka Pinch, was surely inspired. But too often on their 2015 debut, Late Night Endless, felt cluttered and claustrophobic. And when they did take their foot off the gas, they wound up wallowing in a downtempo rut. The tempos remain quickened on their follow-up Man Vs. Sofa, but the two let the tracks breathe a bit more and there’s a sense of refinement throughout. A jittery thump opens “Roll Call,” and while there’s all manner of machine-gun handclaps, echoing hi-hats and arroyos of bass, there’s also flecks of Blaxploitation guitar and cinematic strings. It might read like a laundry list of elements, but Pinch and Sherwood move deftly between it all.
“Itchy Face” bears quick electro bass pulses and snare rolls. So when they introduce a graceful piano line and just let it luxuriate, it's like a sonic speedball. The two are so nimble and compatible now that they easily swing into echo chambers and white noise while keeping the speed up. That piano crosses over to the dubstep/classic dub stylings of “Midnight Mindset,” though it’s not the same easy blend they displayed earlier. And the title track has piano and drums flicker in and out of darkness, but it doesn’t move so much as get swallowed up by static. And when the piano rises up again on the next track, the novelty of it in their mix wears thin.
The best surprise comes when they bring Lee “Scratch” Perry in for a guest vocal turn on “Lies.” Despite decades of dub pedigree, Sherwood and Pinch forego it to instead put a tricky 2-step under him, a welcome shift in strategy. A furious lyric adds menace to the industrial haze of “Gun Law,” showing the duo moving into noisier terrain that brings to mind Sherwood’s gnarled mid-’80s output.
Things get baffling when the duo throw in a cover of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s evocative ’80s classic, “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence.” The first time through, they pay their respects to Sakamoto’s sterling piano melody, one of the loveliest soundtrack themes of the era. But after establishing the motif, Sherwood and Pinch don’t seem to know quite where to take it. A downtempo beat gets thrown underneath it, before the two grind the track to a complete halt and instead add squalls of digital glitch and some electric guitar noodling. It then goes up into the stratosphere for a moment before they bring it back down with a needlessly busy IDM drum line. Respectable as it is for both men to avoid falling back into their bag of dub tricks, a few of Man Vs. Sofa’s attempts to expand their reach fall just a bit short.


This compilation is an ideal introduction to a defining voice of the ’60s: a sweeping survey of pop songs as prayers for compassion, consolation, and commitment

Dionne Warwick: The Complete Scepter Singles 1962-1973

The Complete Scepter Singles 1962-1973

Dionne Warwick had a rocky start at Scepter Records. As a child in New Jersey, she sang with her family’s gospel band, which also included her aunt, Cissy Houston; as a teenager, she recorded back-up vocals for Brook Benton, Solomon Burke, and Ben E. King. During a session for the Drifters’ “Mexican Divorce,” she impressed the song’s co-writer Burt Bacharach enough that he hired her to sing demos to shop around to other artists. “Forget the song, get the singer,” marveled the head of Scepter, Florence Greenberg. But the newcomer had to fight to get good material, and when she heard someone on the radio singing a song that was promised to her, she exploded. She recounts the scene in her 2010 memoir, My Life, As I See It: “I reminded them of the promise they made to me. ‘We have a problem here. You want me to record with you? I am who I am. Don’t make me over, man!’ In other words, don’t lie to me or tell me one thing and do something else.”
That choice of words—don’t make me over, man!—inspired Bacharach and Hal David to pen what would become her first single, 1962’s “Don’t Make Me Over.” It’s an anthem of self-determination, with pleading lyrics from David and an arrangement from Bacharach that balances drama and sophistication. But it’s Warwick who makes the song: Just 21 at the time, she delivers a measured performance, drawing on her gospel background when she gets to the big finish: “Accept me for what I am!” A rousing introduction to an artist whose eloquent vocals would define the 1960s, the song was a hit, peaking at number 21 on the charts. But there was a problem: Her name was misspelled on the label of the 45. Ironically, the woman born Dionne Warrick was made over into Dionne Warwick.
Thus began her decade-long run on Scepter, during which she recorded mostly songs written, arranged, and produced by Bacharach and David. The Complete Scepter Singles, which gathers 74 A- and B-sides from this era, is an ideal starting point with Warwick and with ’60s pop in general. Her songwriters already had a reputation for sophisticated pop fare, and this young woman from New Jersey was, with apologies to Dusty Springfield and Elvis Costello and others, the best voice for those songs. Warwick gracefully navigates Bacharach’s tricky melodies and progressions and brings life to David’s lyrics of yearning and doubt. Her performances marry technical precision with artistic flair, always hinting at massive currents of emotion running just under the surface. While not an actor per se, she embodies a sense of character, with the understanding that the song is just one scene in a larger story: a snapshot of a moment of uncertainty or a swell of love within a larger life.
The Complete Scepter Singles plays like a guide on how to sing a song. Warwick obviously has the power to deliver the big moments, but it’s the smaller, quieter turns that stand out, when she is considering the implications of the lyrics and testing how much weight the song can bear. Listen to her wild 1965 deconstruction of “You Can Have Him,” which had already been a hit for Roy Hamilton. A small army of drummers and percussionists pound out intricately overlapped rhythms, but she measures her vocals carefully, steadying the song even as she injects a sly sarcasm to its famous kiss-off. She opens the 1966 B-side “In Between the Heartaches” in a delicate, almost brittle falsetto before shifting down to her lower register, and she tempers her phrasing to flirt with the meter and push back against the arrangement. She reveals the enormity of the emotions that wash over her while also suggesting that her heartbreak doesn’t end with the song’s final notes. Her pain comes in waves; she is always bracing herself.
Not every song on The Complete Scepter Singles is a Bacharach-David tune, but such is the nature of their collaboration—its intimacy, its longevity, its success—that every track sounds like it flows from the same wellspring. Bacharach arranges her voice like it’s another instrument in the orchestra, and David pens lyrics like prayers. That might be the unifying theme of her time at Scepter: pop songs as prayers for compassion, consolation, and commitment. There’s “Wishin’ and Hopin’” and “I Say a Little Prayer,” of course, but there’s also “What the World Needs Now” and even “Walk On By.” “In the chapel of my heart, I pray that we will not be parted,” she sings on the 1963 B-side “Please Make Him Love Me,” which isn’t among Bacharach and David’s most inspired compositions. It’s a songwriting gambit for them, a theme to be unspooled in a few verses and a bridge, but Warwick digs deeper into the idea and manages to convey the sense of being swallowed up by love and fear both.
How much of yourself should you give over when you’re in love? How much should you hold in reserve? Can you be made over and still keep some part of yourself? These are the crucial questions Warwick is posing on The Complete Scepter Singles, and each song justifies itself by offering a slightly different answer. But those were also questions facing women during that decade, when they were enjoying more freedom away from the home—in offices, in clubs, on the pop charts—and were constantly chastised for it. That dilemma makes her 1964 single “A House Is Not a Home” both an artifact of its time and a song that feels timeless. David writes some heartbreaking lyrics and Bacharach provides some grand orchestral swells, but you only sense their presence subliminally. Warwick dominates every measure, investing each plea with gravity and despair. “When I climb the stairs and turn the key,” she sings in one of those moments that forces you to stop everything else you might be doing, “Oh please be there, still in love with me.” She understands the tragedy behind these negotiations: To love and be loved is to invite uncertainty and trouble into your life, but not loving and especially not being loved is to not exist at all.


The more willfully ugly the music of rapper/producer Black Milk becomes, the better he gets. No Poison No Paradise, his latest, features some of the ugliest- sounding, and therefore best and most fully-realized, music of his career.

No Poison, No Paradise

Detroit producer/rapper Black Milk favors sounds that hurt just a little—drums tweaked sideways so they check you in the shoulder instead of landing straight, synth sounds with big gaps in the frequencies. He has a diehard golden-age revivalist fan base, but the farther away from Native Tongues revivalism his music travels, the more willfuly ugly it becomes, the better he gets—the waveform of his best beats would look like a grin full of broken teeth. No Poison No Paradise, his latest, features some of the ugliest- sounding, and therefore best and most fully-realized, music of his career. It's a serrated, mud-caked album, one that rattles and bangs like a box full of old machine parts.
Black Milk opens it with a quick feint, almost a joke: nine seconds of murmuring jazz organ suspiciously similar  "Electric Relaxation" breeze by before a blurt of static cuts through and"Interpret Sabotage", a rusted tanker crunching its treads over Reagan-era synth equipment, rolls through. "Fell in love with a certain era of music, never thought it would've came with a curse," he raps grimly, in tight, martial 6/8, the music nipping gamely at his heels.
The album is easily Black Milk's darkest. Even 2010's Album of the Year, which wrestled with a series of devastating losses and setbacks, was light-hearted by comparison, its colorful tumble of live instruments and loops keeping a semblance of a party going. On No Poison No Paradise, despair rots all the way into the hull. The terrifically dark "Codes and Cab Fare" turns a Hammond organ and a sliding bass pitch into a  sustained moan, a slow plummet in free space. "Dismal"'s woodblock knock recalls OutKast's "Elevators," but the atmosphere is minor key and uneasy,  gas fumes rising off an evaporated Neptunes production. The knock on "Black Sabbath" is hard enough to send furniture tipping over, and suggests Milk could have been a meaningful contributor in the room where Yeezus was hashed out.
There are a few wistful moments on No Poison that recall Milk's spiritual father figure Dilla. He reminisces about squirming uncomfortably in church pews on "Sunday's Best", a song that fades cleverly into "Monday's Worst", both songs breezing by on late-summer-light soul loops. Dreamlike sequencing touches like this are the only obvious marks of the concept behind No Poison, which, Black Milk tells us, functions as series of dreams inside the head of a character named Sonny, Jr.
There's a reason reason this conceptual framework feels vague and mushy, and it's Black Milk's career-long elephant in the room: He's a technically strong rapper, someone who writes vividly and honestly, who continually shuffles complex rhyme patterns, who audibly pops veins with his desire to say something. But his vocal tone is grit, sawdust, completely lacking in character. He suffers from a severe case of what Andrew Noz years ago dubbed "Black Thought Syndrome," wherein a rapper with a surplus of substance suffers from a severe lack of style. For a guy with such a golden ear, you'd think he would have figured out a way to weave his vocals more musically, or more distinctively, into the richly tactile music he produces in the studio.
Nonetheless, he seethes impressively here, performing with the determination of someone who has weathered a career's worth of these sorts of dispiriting notices. A few of his lines burst through via a sheer force of iron will, like on"Black Sabbath": "You know them slums where them slugs hum past your wig."  His near-military focus and conviction carries the day. And he stretches out here and there—he hasn't always been the guy you think of when you think of "baby-making music," but he sounds relaxed on the convincingly slinky and unzipped "Parallels," like someone who is not only about to have sex, but conceivably enjoy it. On "Sonny, Jr.," he brings in Robert Glasper, a vital jazz pianist and producer who has been working double-time to complicate that resume with hip-hop and R&B collaborations, for an extended workout that could itself be diced up for five or six different loops. The album is full of ear-snagging textures like this, and its most compelling moments are career highlights.


Leaving behind the beats of his previous work, the Bristol producer takes up chamber instruments, choral arrangements, and digital mayhem on a dizzying album about the nature of the self.

Queen of Golden Dogs

Vessel is not the kind of artist who progresses in straight lines. “I have to move about very quickly, or I become too familiar,” he’s said of his methods. Six years on from his debut album, Sebastian Gainsborough’s music is virtually unrecognizable from its former self. Since emerging from the aftershocks of dubstep, he’s been busily deprogramming himself from the familiar codes of club music, and on Queen of Golden Dogs, he slashes the ropes and soars into the stratosphere, pulling off an extraordinary fusion of chamber music, choral quintets, poetry, surrealism, mysticism, and, not least, rubble-making electronic epics.
After the sinister, dub-informed atmospheres of 2012’s Order of Noise, an album that aligned the Bristol producer with the low-end frequencies of his Young Echo crew, Gainsborough drew a chalk line around his own little corner of not-so-danceable sound-system music. On 2014’s Punish, Honey, he assembled his own orchestra out of shonky homemade instruments, got inspired by bawdy Middle English literature, and came up with an album of shunting, grunting tracks with titles like “Red Sex.” Four years later, he’s on a different plane entirely.
Queen of Golden Dogs, as far as I can scry, is about embracing mystery and ambivalence and junking the whole illusion of “self.” It’s about the uncomfortable realization that your mind is a cluttered cabinet of secret compartments; a contradictory mess of thoughts and feelings that cannot be squashed down into an “I” or “me.” It’s an album of lofty ideas, for sure. It also, thank god, absolutely bangs—harder than anything Gainsborough has touched before, and on a level rarely attempted, let alone reached, by the kind of artist who’s also busy with composing string quartets and adapting Portuguese poems into choral spectaculars.
This time, he’s brought in a fleet of classical instruments to tangle with his already tactile electronics. The album lurches between pensive passages of strings and harpsichords, sometimes recalling These New Puritans’ skeletal experiments on Field of Reeds, and sky-scraping walls of electronic mayhem occupying the same universe as James Holden circa The Inheritors. The juxtaposition of electronic and acoustic, postmodern and baroque, obviously brings to mind Oneohtrix Point Never; moments from “Zahir (For Eleanor)” could slot straight into Age Of.
The album opens with a flourish of strings, as if we’ve walked in on a rehearsal; the ensemble loses momentum, subsumed by a writhing mass of drums and sawn-off machine-melodies. That interrupted dynamic is a trailer for the action to come, which segues from ecclesiastical splendor on “Good Animal (For Hannah)”—with the ghostly trails of a soprano voice introducing us to Olivia Chaney, who sings on most of the remaining tracks—to the chaos and crunch of “Argo (For Maggie),” where strings swoop in like sparrowhawks with their talons outstretched, echoing Bernard Parmegiani in terrorist mode. The softness of “Zahir (For Eleanor)” gives way to the pilled-up bonanza of “Glory Glory (For Tippi),” a gurgling neo-trance wind-up that shoves Lorenzo Senni into an industrial shredder with slap bass, half a scrapyard, and what might be the delicate tap of fork against wine glass. The transitions often surprise, but there’s a cumulative logic—ideas reappear in familiar but unexpected forms, like catching sight of yourself in a mirror maze.
Almost every track on the record is dedicated to an individual; the Maggie of “Argo” is Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts. The dedication is one of several clues to the album’s themes. As Pitchfork’s Nathan Reese pointed out, The Argonauts adapts the paradox of Jason’s Argo—a ship which replaced each of its parts, yet remained the same—to explore how the same paradox can occur in human bodies. Another clue is in the album’s artwork, a painting by the mid-century surrealist Remedios Varo showing a flame-haired woman receiving a ball of wool from a shadowy figure whose chest seems to be a door into a labyrinth. Varo’s paintings are windows into other worlds; she often depicted mysterious machines and androgynous figures. Her work is also a gateway into the philosophical, political and spiritual foundations of a countercultural identity that persists to this day; her reading list included Carl Jung, the I-Ching, and Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi stories, and she was deeply invested in witchcraft. There are theories for what her paintings represent, but never answers.
That sense of uncertainty folded into recognition is made explicit in “Torno-me eles e nao eu (For Remedios),” the first half of a grand central diptych that encapsulates Queen of Golden Dogs’ genius. In multi-tracked harmony, Chaney sings Fernando Pessoa’s 1930 poem, “Não sei quantas almas tenho” (“I don’t know how many souls I have”). Pessoa, one of Portugal’s most revered 20th-century poets, wrote under dozens of aliases he called “heteronyms,” lots of them variations of the word for “anonymous” in various languages. Coincidentally or not, Pessoa is Portuguese for “person”—what a status to be born into. No wonder he always felt “estranho,” as he laments in this poem: a stranger even to himself. Pessoa’s obsession with his multiple personas apparently bordered on the pathological; he reported seeing the faces of his heteronyms in the mirror. Perhaps he suffered from dissociations that would these days be diagnosed as a disorder; perhaps, through his interest in spiritualism and the occult (Aleister Crowley was a pen pal), he had a gift for seeing beyond the visible and rational. Chaney’s laminated harmonies are similarly resistant to unification, growing purposely distorted as they gather towards a crescendo.
“Torno-me” never resolves, but instead leads us into other half of the frame: “Paplu (Love That Moves the Sun),” a nearly 10-minute, white-knuckle spectacular that’s among the greatest slabs of prog electronics made this century: polyrhythmic clutter and melismatic voices hurtling along at high speed, elements thrown out into new constellations with every twist and turn, contracting and expanding like a whole universe seen from infinity. Over and over, “Paplu” finds a foothold and climbs higher, closer to something like ecstasy, or oblivion. It’s been two months since I first heard it, and I’ve never gotten all the way through without shaking my head and laughing. It’s so alien it forces you to reach for absurd metaphors. Like the blind man and the elephant, you can’t grasp it as a whole; you just  feel your way through and hope you don’t get trampled. We’re left with the gloomy echoes of “Sand Tar Man Star (For Aurellia),” an ascending lattice of crumpled metal and wordless voices. It feels like the beginning of the next story rather than the end of this one.
There’s a line from an old NME review: “It’s like opening your bedroom curtains one morning and discovering that some fucker’s built the Taj Mahal in your back garden.” Fitting, probably, that the writer chose a puffed-up mausoleum to describe Oasis’ Definitely Maybe. But it comes to me again as I listen to Queen of Golden Dogs, and instead I imagine waking up to the sparkling towers of the Emerald City, in the Land of Oz: The view is radiant, even blinding—but those are your own green-tinted glasses filling in the color. It’s self-evidently splendid, but what you make of it is up to you.


Garden of Delete is unlike anything that Daniel Lopatin has done, in terms of technique, mood, or scope. It is denser than his previous albums, by several orders of magnitude. It is more varied, and it is funnier—scarier, too. The album carries with it a risk of whiplash that's as potent on the 15th listen as on the first.

Garden of Delete

"Frameworks of taste rely on dumb and great things to exist in concert with one another," Daniel Lopatin wrote earlier this year in an essay about the easy-listening saxophonist Kenny G. Reflecting on his own work as Oneohtrix Point Never, he noted, "I tolerate dumb things sometimes in a kitschy way, but mostly in a sort of zen way, wherein stuff is suspended in a myopic ooze of raw nowness that is beautiful and gross at the same time."
Ooze seeps from every pore of his new album, Garden of Delete: It is slathered all over the video for "Sticky Drama", and it erupts from the pustules of the adolescent humanoid alien, Ezra, who is the album's hero. The project spills over the limits of the album format, too, into rivulets of related texts—an array of videos, blogs, and Twitter accounts packed with surrealist Easter eggs that enhance the experience of the music in unusual ways. Ooze is formless, yet this album is deeply invested in questions of form. What invests music with value? Who creates hierarchical systems of taste? (I don't think it's a coincidence that the album title, abbreviated, alludes to the Supreme Being.)
The way Garden of Delete makes us question the assumptions behind all of our high/low binaries is part of its brilliance. OPN's music is generally understood to exist somewhere between nostalgia and irony, its vaporwave fantasias and unlikely redemptions of '80s schlock-meisters like Chris DeBurgh suggestive of late-night trips down YouTube rabbit holes. But we're not in "Chrome Country" any more. Garden of Delete is unlike anything that Lopatin has done, in terms of technique, mood, or scope. It is denser than his previous albums, by several orders of magnitude. It is more varied, and it is funnier—scarier, too. So much beauty is crosscut with so much ugliness, and so much sincerity interwoven with so many deeply nested layers of kitsch, that the album carries with it a serious risk of whiplash, and that's as true on the 15th listen as on the first.
The album's base notes will be familiar from his previous work; they consist of cool, frictionless pads, airy choral presets, and, especially, synthesized sounds that mimic acoustic instruments and revel in their own plasticity, like the tinny player piano of "Sticky Drama", or the jazz guitar noodling of "I Bite Through It". This time out, he ventures even deeper into the uncanny valley separating "real" sounds from mimetic ones. The references pile up in enormous slag heaps, and a few in particular stand out: the growls, chugging guitars, and blast beats of death metal; the flanged riffs of nu metal; and the garish synth stabs and grotesque vocal processing of contemporary commercial electronic music. Two years ago, after a bout of touring, he told Pitchfork, "I feel like I better understand the tropes and guises of EDM now," and you can hear that familiarity at various points in Garden of Delete.
That's not to say the album is a collection of big-room bangers. But certain techniques common on the Electric Daisy circuit have wormed their way into the music: Elastic trance riffs, vertiginous glissandi that zip upward like space elevators, and, especially, the highly processed and contoured voices of which Skrillex is so fond. Nothing in G.o.D. follows the usual Pavlovian dictates of mainstream rave: There are builds and drops, but they're always deployed in ways that throw the listener off balance. Instead of EDM's predictable roller coaster, he's constructed something more like Monument Valley's non-Euclidean architecture, where 2D and 3D spaces collapse into one another, and trapdoors open at the turn of a hidden dial.
Garden of Delete is the first OPN album to come with a lyric sheet—no, really—which is nice, because the processed and distorted-to-hell "singing" on the album is mostly indecipherable. But even as a novelty, the lyrics sheet helps tease out the loose, extra-musical narrative developed across a range of apocrypha that orbit the album: a cryptic PDF of a crumpled sheet of paper in which Lopatin recounts, in the manner of a Joseph Conrad introduction, his encounter with a humanoid alien who gave him the USB containing the album's files; a Blogspot account for said alien (with posts dated as far back as 1994) stuffed with aesthetic theory, jokes, flyers for prog-rockers Rush, and musings on a style called "hypergrunge"; a website for the (invented) hypergrunge band Kaoss Edge; a host of (active) Twitter accounts for all these characters; and various mind-bending videos. (Various phone numbers referenced are, alas, red herrings; one is for Spotify's support line, another the Winthrop, Mass., police department.) This may all seem, from the outside, like so much masturbatory energy spillage, but dig deep enough, and they all become part of the larger work. When, in an interview, Ezra asks Lopatin what hypergrunge represents to him, Lopatin answers, "It's nihilist/formalist. Kaoss/Edge." You couldn't ask for a more succinct summary of his music's underlying principles.
None of this would matter if the music weren't absolutely gripping—strange, moving, hilarious, sometimes pushing the limits of good taste, but always in a way that makes you want to hear more. It is more songful than anything Lopatin has done. In "Freaky Eyes", minimalist organs give way to high-pitched voices in the style of Jack Ü; "Ezra" flits between the synth arpeggios of Rustie or Hudson Mohawke, Korn's nu-metal chug, and Japanese ambient; formally, it just kind of writhes in place, neither rising nor falling. "SDFK" interrupts graceful bells and strings with a crushing death-metal interlude that abruptly falls silent. And if Trevor Horn ever produced Slayer, it might sound something like "Sticky Drama". Your favorites will probably change over time, but the apocalyptic trance of "I Bite Through It" is a good candidate for the album's highlight, the vantage point from which all the surrounding chaos begins to make sense.
It all clicked for me one Sunday morning in the pre-dawn stillness of the city. Returning from seeing off a family member at the airport at an ungodly hour, I listened to G.o.D. on headphones for the duration of the ride back to the city center. Descending from the bus, I found myself standing in front of a Hard Rock Cafe where two enormous video screens flashed senselessly away above the sidewalk, their pixelated images moving almost in time with the album's throbbing synthesizers. As Lopatin's textures stretched and spasmed in my ears, artificial light poured out onto the empty street in ungainly bursts, like tiny droplets of the ongoing heat death of the universe. It was garish and gorgeous all at once, a vision of capitalism at its tackiest accompanied by a soundtrack at once cutting and strangely empathic, and for several minutes I just stood there, transfixed by the raw, oozing nowness of it all.


The Louisville rock band refines its major-label sound on a brief but charming new album: It hits hardest when you don’t think too much about it.

Asking for a Ride

White Reaper have been one album away from their big break for a while. Since the early 2010s, they’ve paid their dues as a punk-adjacent band with indie rock credibility, a glorified Iron Maiden T-shirt that decided to try taking on the world. You could hear their love for Van Halen and Cheap Trick on their teeth-kicking debut EP and Polyvinyl LPs, as frontman Tony Esposito fine-tuned his voice to be more melodic, and the band honed their ability to incorporate riffs as a song’s central hook. Standout 2017 single “Judy French” marked the point when White Reaper started embracing larger ambitions; they now wanted to be Cheap Trick. Tours with fellow arena-via-garage rockers Weezer and Billy Idol and an Elektra deal followed.
Even with these markers of success, White Reaper are still White Reaper. Asking for a Ride is their second major label release and, like its predecessor, 2019’s slick-but-fun You Deserve Love, it’s not a clear step up or back. It’s a refinement of the Major Label White Reaper Sound, where the hooks and melodies are undeniable and now include some Kiss-sized muscle. At its best, Asking for a Ride confirms that they have evolved from writing songs daydreaming of playing stadiums to writing songs that would sound huge in one. But at 29 minutes, this is their shortest album, and for the first time, there’s some filler. The van is a lot nicer, but the destination feels unclear.
Explaining a riff is like explaining a joke, so it’s easier to take the music and lyrics of Asking for a Ride at face value. Opening tracks “Asking for a Ride” and “Bozo” sound less inspired by Iron Maiden and more like sleepy karaoke, trying to recapture some of that “Make Me Wanna Die” snottiness like a 30-year-old heading back to college for homecoming week. Album closer “Pages” includes the first prominent use of acoustic guitar in a White Reaper song, but it feels like just another box to check for a band that maybe wants to write its own “If You Want My Love.” For the first time, I can’t tell if White Reaper even likes these songs—which used to be the whole point.
There are more successful attempts at power ballads elsewhere on the record. White Reaper have never been terrific at slower tempos, yet “Heaven or Not” and its sway-inducing, Pretenders-like melodies feel like a suggestion of what a Monster Ballads-worthy White Reaper song could be. It’s a rare step forward. Otherwise, Asking for a Ride works best when they stick to the old playbook. Like “Judy French,” “Fog Machine” can out-riff (and out-finger tap!) anyone west of Turnstile, and Ryan Hater’s heroically cartoonish synth entrance into the chorus would make Wayne and Garth blush. The lyrics are appropriately nonsense (“Blowing out those candles…like a fog machine”) and I want to sing along as loud as possible while air guitaring. “We knew we loved playing it together,” Esposito said of the song. “We got it together at the last minute before we went into the studio and now it’s our favorite song to play live.” In a sense, this casual observation summarizes the charm of Asking for a Ride: At its simplest and most carefree, it’s a blast. Stop to think about it too much, and the road gets rocky.


The post-modern music maker limits his contextual sampling to a single subject: himself.

One One

While Matthew Herbert's methods of recording audio samples are inspiring and outlandish, he always captures a bit of the human element. It's not just because his discography includes a noisy digestive tract turned into a euphoric house melody; there's an appreciation for randomness, mistakes, and chaos that runs through his work. On his new solo album, One One, an artist who weaves multiple meanings into his music through contextual sampling strips down to a single source: himself.
At first, it seems like a playful volley in Herbert's game of dissecting music, politics, and theory. The first of a trio of conceptual releases, including One Pig (composed strictly of sounds from one pig) and One Club (sampled crowd noise from a club), One One focuses more on instruments and is 100% Herbert, including his own intimate vocals. It's a solo record simple and straightforward, less of a concept than we're used to from someone who can turn a rhythm track into an arch-consumerist critique. What then is the difficulty, statement, or challenge when an acclaimed producer makes his own album?
As with many things Herbert, it's not that easy or simple. A quieter, stripped-down approach to his typically tight rhythms and rich tones, One One has a deceptively relaxed vibe. It may be the rural studio that it was recorded in, or it may be Herbert being more introspective (just listen to him sing about home on "Berlin"). He knows how to get the most out of his source material, and when that happens to be his own voice, he plays it cool or sticks to gentle, simple melodies. He doesn't showcase substantial range or a hidden talent, but Herbert does demonstrate a lack of artifice, self-awareness, and variety."Singapore" shines with a bright, folksy vibe and retro vocal harmonies. On the slow-burning single "Leipzig", his detached storytelling style fits the song's slinky, clubland theme.
While it's conceptually all about one man, by the end of the ten heartfelt tracks, it doesn't feel as personally revealing as it does poignant. Maybe it's because the self-contained solo project is more subtle overall, with poetic, yet still political, lyrics ("And with the rising of the seas/ Mouths will be open/ And with the drying of the fields/ Everything will be gone"). Herbert met the challenge of ditching some experimental baggage and being more straightforward; he doesn't always need an elaborate platform or sonic ruse to say something worth hearing.


Despite its newfound musical relevance, the influential duo struggles to evolve beyond its signature template of empowering pop hooks and overdriven arrangements.

Texis

In 2016, Demi Lovato and Sleigh Bells were opponents in a copyright infringement lawsuit, despite struggling with the same basic problem: How do you recreate the bold, bleacher-stomping jolt of the band’s 2010 debut Treats without ripping it off completely? Nowadays, that sound is virtually public domain: The term “hyperpop” once described the duo of Alexis Krauss and Derek Miller before it became a dominant genre. The charts are filled with ascendant acts blowing bubblegum melodies over razored guitars, while squabbles over cheerleading outfits, prom dresses, and pilfered pop-punk hooks span generations. As it turns out, four years of silence have accomplished what the band’s last few releases—Bitter Rivals, Jessica Rabbit, and Kid Kruschev—could not: make Sleigh Bells sound like a part of indie rock’s present. More than anything, it’s this wave of goodwill that makes Texis feel like the most legitimately inspired Sleigh Bells album in nearly a decade, despite it not being altogether different from what preceded it.
The duo’s trajectory to this point is a familiar one: immediately perfecting an audiovisual aesthetic, a “more of the same, but slightly less” follow-up, and a much longer and intermittently successful stretch that stopped shy of a total teardown or reinvention. Texis reaches a new stage where Sleigh Bells acknowledge what worked in the first place without admitting defeat or slumping back to their old tricks. Opener “SWEET75” promises a victory big enough to amplify any mundane achievement, and whether it’s the first new Sleigh Bells song you’ve heard since 2017 or 2010, it reaffirms their vision: riffs from an era of stuffed trousers and hockey-stick guitars, overdriven drum machines, and lyrics set within the spectrum of cheerleader to motivational speaker. It also reestablishes the relationship between Krauss and Miller that’s served the band far longer than their method of brickwalling every single element, one resembling that of an R&B powerhouse and their tinkering, savant producer.
Sleigh Bells were hardly the only band at the turn of the 2010s trying to subvert classic forms of pop with a chain of distortion pedals, but unlike their scuzzier, sloppier peers, their music always threatened the possibility of becoming the real thing. Yet no matter how much command and charisma Krauss brings to Texis, it still sounds quaint, not necessarily catchier than any number of contemporary bands who don’t face the same hang-ups from indie listeners. Sleigh Bells still know a good hook when they hear one, and when they do, they repeat it as much as possible—to the point where it sounds like ad copy. Whenever Krauss shouts “I feel like dynamite!” throughout “Locust Laced,” the music doesn’t conjure a specific feeling so much as the tone of an empowering rom-com on Netflix, trying to create a vibe where none previously existed.
Texis embodies a modern approach to music consumption by recognizing that only 20 seconds of a song really need to stick. Isolate that much time from just about anywhere on the album and there’s something invigorating going on: the horror-show keys and punchy vocal samples of “An Acre Lost,” the way “Justine Go Genesis” runs the drum-n-bass/nu-metal hybrids of Art Angels through a Big Muff, or the chorus of “I’m Not Down” beating their synthy, festival-pop successors at their own game.
Nearly all of these fleeting moments of crackling energy call for a greater, unifying purpose. And yet, it is difficult to trace any emotional throughline in the music. What motivates Sleigh Bells at this point? Even if Pom Pom Squad, Illuminati Hotties, or Turnstile could not exist without Treats, they’ve all advanced on its template by imprinting their own personality on everything they touch. While Sleigh Bells have made significant evolutions since their auspicious beginning, they haven’t been able to displace the original. The most emblematic moment of Texis happens at the end of “SWEET75.” “Aren’t you a little too old for rock and roll?,” Krauss sings, and it’s a rhetorical question: Sleigh Bells might hint at changing their own narrative but the old one still works fine.

Buy: Rough Trade
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A World Lit Only by Fire is Godflesh’s first album in 13 years. As a whole, the record represents music converted into motion—kinetic and mechanical, inexorable and inhuman. Godflesh, never a forgiving band, has never sounded so relentless.

A World Lit Only By Fire

“Have you ever participated in genocide?” When I interviewed Justin Broadrick in 2007, he said he was asked that question while applying for a trip to the United States for the first time after 9/11. His anecdote was good for a sick laugh; Broadrick can be funny, despite his reputation as a poker-faced purveyor of extreme metal, shoegaze, and industrial music as a former or current member of the British groups Napalm Death, Jesu, and the resurrected Godflesh, among others. But his silly story about genocide is also indicative of the way absurdity and security can go hand in hand, especially in a world where safety is, at best, a collective hallucination. Its guarantors can’t even keep knife-wielding maniacs from sprinting into the White House, let alone regular people from being beheaded. Existence, even with all its modern safeguards, is fragile, and rarely does it feel more so than when you’re listening to Broadrick’s music.
A World Lit Only by Fire is Godflesh’s first album in 13 years. Their last, 2001’s Hymns, effectively disassembled itself in order for Broadrick to scavenge its chassis for scraps, which he then used to build Jesu. Most obviously, the final track of Hymns is titled “Jesu”— but instead of being a swansong, it was a two-part, 13-minute premonition of what was to come. Jesu went on to indulge Broadrick’s latent love of shoegaze and melody, but it retained every milligram of Godflesh’s heaviness; when Broadrick issued Godflesh’s comeback EP, Decline and Fall, earlier this year, it wasn’t so much a return to form as a transference of force. But where Decline and Fall unlocked the door, A World Lit Only by Fire knocks down the entire wall surrounding it. “New Dark Ages” is the record’s method of entry, and it’s accordingly annihilative: A spindly beat pulls back the skin to reveal sleek, minimalist musculature, and those riffs crush Broadrick’s windpipe as he gets biblical with his opening warning: “Don’t look back/ We’ll dissolve”. The resurgence of fundamentalist medievalism have been a concern of industrial music ever since SPK’s 1983 classic “Another Dark Age”— and “New Dark Ages” casts that creeping fear in a coat of millennial chrome.
Much of the album doggedly refuses to deviate from the template of “New Dark Ages”, which itself isn’t that much of a departure from what Godflesh laid down on their 1989 debut album, Streetcleaner. The roboticized crust of the Godflesh of old, though, has been trimmed to fit an even bleaker era. Instead of being discreet compositions, these songs are segments of a single continuum, amputated from each other. “Shut Me Down”,“Curse Us All”, and “Carrion” flow into each other—inasmuch as anything on such a tense, brittle album could be said to flow—with an almost martial uniformity. The distinctions are in the shades of texture and syncopation. In some places, bassist G.C. Green evokes the corroded-carburetor clang of Big Black; elsewhere, Broadrick’s righteous roar gets caught in the gears of the album’s drum-machine march, if not the hopelessness of its protests.
Broadrick first flexed his skills as a slightly more conventional singer/songwriter in Jesu, but he’d begun exploring tunefulness toward the end of Godflesh’s first run. That eerie blend of ugliness and melody doesn’t crop up often on A World Lit Only by Fire; when it does, it’s for terrific effect. “Life Giver Life Taker” and “Imperator” mix wailing echoes and spectral chants with chiseled riffs and insectoid rhythms, while “Towers of Emptiness” and “Forgive Our Fathers” trail off the same way—with Broadrick’s voice, naked and human, hovering over ghostly drones and incanting the title of the track like it’s a faded memory. “Forgive Our Fathers” is particularly gorgeous; ditching his cyborg-barbarian howl halfway through, he switches to the melancholy coo of Jesu just long enough to trap and loop the song’s lingering anguish in an apocalyptic fugue. As a whole, A World Lit Only by Fire represents music converted into motion—kinetic and mechanical, inexorable and inhuman. Godflesh, never a forgiving band, has never sounded so relentless.


Quelle Chris' production has always been unorthodox, but Lullabies for the Broken Brain is a step further for the rapper/producer. This isn’t your average beat tape: Lullabies is made of divergent sounds, loosely built to set a pensive vibe shaded with desperation and hopelessness.

Quelle Chris: Lullabies for the Broken Brain

Lullabies for the Broken Brain

We’ve all felt alone at some point or another. In those moments, it seems the world passes by while you sit in painful silence. It’s a common emotion, really; one you’re ashamed to admit, one that needs time to run its course. It seems rapper/producer Quelle Chris is going through something similar, if his recent work is an indicator: Last year’s Innocent Country briefly touched on his perceived personal insecurities, and his new instrumental album, Lullabies for the Broken Brain, carefully walks us through that despair using lo-fi drum breaks and spacious beat construction. Quelle’s production has always been unorthodox, yet Lullabies finds him pushing for something rooted in hip-hop, though it registers further away. This isn’t your average beat tape. Lullabies is made of divergent sounds, loosely built to set a pensive vibe shaded with desperation and hopelessness.
As the title suggests, Lullabies is overtly nocturnal, full of dark, disjointed sounds and cosmic clatter. It comes together like a Madlib instrumental project in the way certain songs aren’t fully formed, but they work well within the scope of the LP, making for a coherent suite to be played all at once. Many of these tracks don’t go much beyond a minute—except for "M-39," "Peace and Pain," "I’m the Bridge You Must Burn," and a few others, which serve as some of the best work on Quelle’s album. Compared with 2012’s Jock Sin Six Beat Tape, an edgy conceptual EP dealing with societal angst, Lullabies is a slow burn designed to soundtrack what the mind endures when loneliness sets in. The melodies are cavernous and somewhat distant, emitting a gritty resonance that affirms Quelle’s premise.
At certain points on the album, we hear positive affirmations blended into the mix—like the 1970s "Most Important Person" commercial spot—offering brief glimmers of hope amongst an otherwise bleak soundscape. Lullabies is the album you play when you’re going through serious shit. At just the right length and tempo, Quelle skillfully blends genres, showing his great range as a composer and creative visionary. He opts for jazz fusion on "Desire to Be," "Red Buttons," and "Sickum," sprinkling light keys and horns into the fray; the aforementioned "Peace and Pain" is a seething electro-rock hybrid similar to the work of OPN or Trent Reznor. This is easy listening, but it has all the psychedelic grit you’d expect from a Quelle release. He’s pushed beyond his usual arc, leading to a wonderfully ambient release that should be mentioned with the genre’s trendsetters.
Then again, this isn’t surprising if you’ve followed Quelle so far. The Detroit native has long pushed his music to weird places, crafting art that’s equally genuine and peculiar. In recent years, though, Quelle has discussed his career path with the same level of angst we’ve all expressed in our respective fields. He ponders the road ahead and choices he’s made along the way. He's wondered why he's slept on and what it'll take to move past those doldrums. Over several projects, Quelle has always been someone you can relate to, and his music comes off as such. If Innocent Country trailed off without clear resolutions, Lullabies signals Quelle’s uncertain trek to the light. Many of us have taken that journey, or will do so eventually.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Elliott Smith’s self-titled solo album, a darkly beautiful record whose spare arrangements conceal worlds.

Elliott Smith

In a 2000 interview with Melody Maker, Elliott Smith told a story from his childhood. He is three years old—Steven Paul Smith, born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1969—and he is messing around with his mother’s television set. Immediately, he is transfixed by the power of the remote control: This button makes the sound burst from the speaker and this one silences it. This button makes the screen change, each time reopening to a new world, while this one shuts it off entirely. It’s a lot of power for a child. He is delighted by the collage of faces and voices and sound and possibility until the inevitable happens: the TV breaks.
He soon learned to seek the same thrill in music. Smith’s first love was the Beatles, a band whose career lasted less than 10 years, so their every move carried immense weight and meaning for those discovering it in retrospect. His favorite song was the multi-part “A Day in the Life,” which he might have heard like a television constantly changing channels, each one landing on the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. When he started writing his own music, he followed this blueprint, accidentally stumbling upon the avant-garde. He described his earliest compositions as more like transitions than actual songs; as he reflected to Under the Radar in one of his last interviews, he didn’t understand why every part couldn’t be the best part.
From Omaha, Smith and his mother moved to Dallas. He left as a teenager, a decision he attributed to a town full of bullies and an abusive step-father. His next stops were Portland, Oregon, where he lived with his father—a preacher turned Air Force pilot turned psychiatrist—and Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. At college, Smith studied political science and philosophy and was so affected by feminist texts that he momentarily wanted to become a fireman to offset some of the damage he did to the world simply by being a straight white man. He also met like-minded artists, including classmate Neil Gust, who helped him feel useful in a different way—trading punk 7"s and collaborating on music.
After graduation, Gust and Smith returned to Portland, where they formed the grungy alt-rock band Heatmiser. The rise of Smith’s spare, self-recorded solo material and Heatmiser’s blistering rock songs are often held in contrast. But the truth is his solo work bloomed alongside their music, which had softened and matured by 1996’s extraordinary swansong Mic City Sons. So while Smith hated straining his voice to be heard over the noise (“I’ve had enough of people yelling,” he told Rolling Stone) and the way their audience reminded him of the dudes who gave him hell back in Texas, it did bring him closer to the sound he heard in his head. Rock music was always Smith’s guiding light. When interviewers compared him to folk singers like Paul Simon or Nick Drake, you could feel his eyes roll into his head. And when it came time to flesh out his solo sets with cover songs, he turned to rock radio staples: the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, the Kinks.
He felt a particular kindred spirit with Big Star, the cult band whose 1972 ballad “Thirteen” would become a standard in his hands. The initial connection wasn’t because of their hard-luck story or the unspeakable loneliness of records like Third. Instead, Smith admired how Alex Chilton and the band rallied for a style of music that was unfashionable in their scene, following their intuition as opposed to trends. So just as Big Star performed their charging take on British Invasion power-pop to half-empty rooms through Memphis, Smith abandoned his Portland alt-rock band—their growing acclaim, their major label deal, their “next Nirvana” buzz—to strike out on his own.
Released while Heatmiser was still gaining momentum, his 1994 solo debut Roman Candle was less a complete statement than a collection of demos, compiled in the hopes that a label would pick the best songs for a 7" single. The following year’s Elliott Smith, then, can be seen as his first official solo album, issued on the buzzy indie label Kill Rock Stars. Like Roman Candle, it was recorded in the homes of friends—Heatmiser drummer Tony Lash and Leslie Uppinghouse, who toured with the band and mixed their live sound. Uppinghouse remembers setting Smith up in her basement, off in the corner with an eight-track Tascam tape recorder. Her dog, Anna, would sometimes press her nose against the door to listen in. Uppinghouse claims she can hear her in a few songs.
Smith described a preference for writing distractedly—at crowded bars, at home watching Xena: Warrior Princess, anywhere he could take his mind off the idea of being a serious songwriter doing serious work. But he was devoted to his process. He wrote and recorded constantly, in a stream of interconnected ideas. The 12 songs he selected for Elliott Smith reflect that spirit. Phrases and images reoccur. The theme of addiction is constant, and his euphemisms are abundant and clear: white lady, white brother, death in your arms, getting good marks. His tone is often resigned, the perspective of someone who sees what’s going on but knows better than to fight. In the bridge of “Alphabet Town,” he sings, “I know what you are/I just don’t mind.” The chorus of “Good to Go” distills it even further: “You can do it if you want to.”
Thematically, it’s the darkest album he’d complete in his lifetime, but it’s also one of his most beautiful. Think of how much happens in these songs before he even starts singing. The lonesome harmonica-accompanied intro of “Alphabet Town” sets the scene like blinds opening in a dim apartment, letting in the gray light from the street. The queasy blues riff that precedes “Clementine” is the sound of stumbling to your feet, realizing how late it is and how many drinks you’ve had. And of course there’s the opening “Needle in the Hay,” led by an ominous riff whose abrupt chord changes can induce a sense of paranoia: Smith’s meticulous, lo-fi rendering of two warring impulses. It makes sense his earliest supporters were fellow artists like Lou Barlow and Mary Lou Lord: If you listened closely, you could hear entire worlds in his arrangements.
So while Elliott Smith serves as a stark blueprint for his 1997 masterpiece Either/Or, it also creates a bridge from the heavier music he played with Heatmiser. In songs like “Christian Brothers,” his voice is tougher and lower than it would ever sound again, as he growls that “no bad dream fucker’s gonna boss me around.” When he eventually performed these songs live with a full band, his accompanists re-enacted them as pointed, vicious things; he’d raise his delivery a full octave to seethe through “Needle in the Hay.” As presented here, the music is spare but deceptively layered. Note the muted drum part in “Coming Up Roses” that seems to drag his words along with it; how the droning strings in “The White Lady Loves You More” turn it into a doomed romance; how the frenzied strumming of “Southern Belle” seems poised to attack at any moment as Smith envisions a way out of the childhood memories that still raged in his mind.
This kind of songwriting—tied with the dark path his own life would go down, through addiction and hospitalizations and suicide attempts—can lead fans to look for clues in his songs, as if he laid them out like a cry for help. But he described his music more like dreaming: less in the interpretive, Freudian sense than the mysterious way you wake up feeling fragile and uneasy and inexplicably pissed at someone you haven’t spoken to in years. And for all of the addiction talk in the lyrics, Smith explained to journalists that it simply felt like a potent metaphor, a conduit toward bigger questions: Why do we turn self-destructive? How does it affect the people who love us? Where does it lead?
This insistence on not being taken literally is why Smith dismissed the idea of being a folk singer, someone who showed up on stage with a story to tell and a moral at the end. As soon as he was given the budget, he turned his records into expensive, symphonic opuses that seemed hell-bent on erasing the image of a quiet kid in his friend’s basement with an old acoustic guitar and tape recorder. Revisiting “The Biggest Lie,” the closing track on the record and one of his most heartbreaking songs, it’s almost jarring to hear him refer to “a crushed credit card/Registered to Smith.” It’s a classic trope of folk music: turning himself into a character, one whose future seemed as hopeless as the guy we imagine to be singing it.
The following years confirmed these premonitions. For his final record, From a Basement on the Hill, Smith experimented with switching his songs from mono to stereo halfway through, which might be the logical endpoint of staying up for days smoking crack in the studio but also of wanting to find new ways to burst through the speakers and make a connection: to make every part the best part. The music industry does not take kindly to these excitable, sensitive minds. He fractured more with every step, leaving Portland to seek refuge in New York and eventually Los Angeles. Pressure built; expectations grew. Late in life, he became so frustrated with projections about his future that he carved the word “NOW” into his arm and wrote a song as he bled onto the piano.
This pain eventually consumed him. But there was always some levity. During most of his live performances—a constant stressor that he once compared to a bullfight—Smith would turn to the crowd and ask for requests: “Do you want to hear a happy song or a sad song?” In his bruised, shaky voice, it always sounded kind of like a joke. After all, the magic of the girl in Either/Or’s “Say Yes” who was still in love the morning after was that, through her eyes, Smith could pretend that any sense of joy in this world might last. He claimed to have written this song in just five minutes and I wonder if we’d have gotten to hear it if he let it sit any longer.
Instead of “Say Yes,” I’d point to this album’s “St. Ides Heaven” as his most purely optimistic moment—the one I’d come closest to calling “happy.” Granted, the guy singing it is high on speed, drunk on malt liquor, and wandering around a parking lot, resenting every person who ever tried to help him. “Everyone is a fucking pro,” he laughs, because he knows, sooner or later, they’ll end up in the same place he’s at right now. Smith seems at peace knowing this. On the front cover of Elliott Smith are two bodies free-falling from apartment windows; on the back cover, tucked in the corner like a postage stamp, is Elliott Smith with dyed-blond hair, stopping to smell a flower.
Another bright moment: hearing the harmony vocals in “St. Ides Heaven” from the Spinanes’ Rebecca Gates. It’s a subtle performance that makes me consider how accustomed I am to hearing Elliott Smith singing by himself: in tight double-tracked vocals, in uncanny ribbons of harmony, as his own ghostly choir. With Gates next to him, he sounds different, maybe lighter. She wrote a little about the sessions in the liner notes for New Moon, a posthumous collection released in 2007. She remembers feeling shy but having fun, doing a few takes then going home. She also writes about a night, some time later, wandering around Portland with Smith. At one point they’re commiserating about the music industry; she remembers him being moody, wearing a raggedy old raincoat. Then somewhere along the way, they burst into laughter. It’s the kind of vague, half-remembered scene that always comes to mind when I hear these songs. You can see the rain on the street, the moon in the sky. It’s getting dark. They have the whole night ahead of them.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Compton rapper’s second album occasionally showcases the magic he can make, but the music is largely static, a rollercoaster operating on a straight track.

Live Life Fast

Roddy Ricch’s uncanny ability to blend in with almost any style of rap is his calling card, for better or worse. Being able to get in where you fit in is great for variety. But there’s always the risk of the music becoming indistinct, another identity flashing briefly in the scramble suit before being quickly replaced. At its best, like on his chart-topping single “The Box,” his vocal range can make a song crackle with unpredictable energy. At its worst—“Faces” from his 2018 mixtape Feed Tha Streets II or “Boom Boom Room” from his 2019 debut Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial—his music is grist for the same playlist mill churning out Future and Young Thug clones. When his personality and versatility work hand-in-hand, it’s easy to see why he’s become one of the biggest rappers on the planet.
But Roddy’s second album LIVE LIFE FAST lacks the spark that once helped him block a certain pop star from a No. 1 Billboard spot. Antisocial was a chance for him to find his place within contemporary rap. LIVE feels more like an obligation, an 18-track checklist of tropes to ensure maximum streamability. The Flex Anthems (“thailand,” “hibachi”) slot comfortably next to the Introspective Ballads (“crash the party”); the Trendy Features serve the same purpose as the Glorified Celebrity Cameo. It’s all perfectly serviceable, but competency is the problem. At least when artists like Trippie Redd try and fail to diversify their sound, they take bigger and more interesting swings. LIVE LIFE FAST is static, a rollercoaster operating on a straight track.
It doesn’t help that so many of the scenarios Roddy recreates are dull retreads. Some barely evolve past basic clichés. “Gotta watch out for these snitches, gotta watch out for these bitches/Gotta whisper to you niggas ’cause all the hatin’ niggas might just hear me,” he says on “crash the party,” sounding only half-committed. The hook for “all good” is a rundown of all the positive things in his life, delivered like a hastily written grocery list. The malleability of Roddy’s voice backfires when he settles into this faceless posturing. His attempt at Brooklyn drill on “murda one” is hollow compared to guest Fivio Foreign’s effortless verse on the backend. He channels Juice WRLD’s wails on “more than a trend” and Young Thug on several songs that sound more like the Great Value brand versions of other artists’ styles.
The missteps are frustrating because a handful of moments on LIVE showcase the magic Roddy can make. The occasionally clever turn of phrase (“I got some niggas that go by Murder, why they sip red rum?” from “rollercoastin”) or catchy melody (“late at night”) work overtime to hold the record together. The voiceless drum and bass interlude that starts off “moved to miami”—produced by Lexx Deathstar and Lucas Padulo—deserved a verse to compliment it. Second track “thailand” is the closest the album comes to having a hit as undeniable as “The Box”: the bars aren’t great (“Open up her tonsils like she at the dentist”), but the melody is bouncy, the flows are erratic, and Roddy fits into the pockets of Southside’s beat like water filling an ice cube tray.
Yet the isolated moments of greatness across LIVE LIFE FAST only call attention to how flavorless the rest of the project feels. At the end of “no way,” Jamie Foxx shows up to congratulate Roddy on his success. It would be a touching move if the actor-musician didn’t follow it up by asking Roddy to slow down the tempo, quoting his own hook from Kanye West and Twista’s 2003 hit “Slow Jamz”: “I don’t think these motherfuckers know about Marvin Gaye, Luther Vandross, or a little Anita.” Roddy follows the request with a 54-second interlude called—what else—“slow it down.” Most of LIVE LIFE FAST plays out with this kind of energy: forced, obvious, its best ideas obscured in a haze of self-satisfaction.

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Already among the decade's most vital artists, Animal Collective cement their status with the spectacular Strawberry Jam. On its first true pop record, the band masters its distinctive experimental approach to songwriting, folding celebration, longing, doubt, loss, and acceptance into complex hooks and choruses.

Strawberry Jam

In March, Animal Collective's Panda Bear (aka Noah Lennox) had his breakout moment with the release of Person Pitch. It was his first solo album that didn't sound like what we'd previously heard from Animal Collective; sample-heavy and based on loops, the album's songwriting devices favored expansion and contraction over conventional chord changes. Person Pitch reflected Panda's interest in dance music-- even when it veered toward the angelic pop innocence forever associated with the harmony-drenched hits of the 1960s and 70s. Both the album and its transcendent centerpiece, "Bros", are deservedly being widely considered among the year's best.
On Strawberry Jam, the new album from Animal Collective, it's Avey Tare's turn. It's not that Strawberry Jam resembles a solo album, or that Avey (aka Dave Portner) seems to dominate to an unusual degree-- Panda Bear is unmistakably present too, along with sound processor Geologist (aka Brian Weitz) and guitarist Deakin (aka Josh Dibb). But the specifics of who's doing what have been shuffled, and the members' respective contributions-- including who's singing at any given moment-- aren't always easy to single out. The story of this record for me, though, is the strength of Avey Tare's voice, and how his singing anchors these songs, invigorates the band's idiosyncratic melodies, and offers a clear portal into Animal Collective's utopian dreamworld.
Avey Tare's tone has never been as aching and pure as Panda Bear's, but his is the more versatile instrument. Wild intervallic leaps-- jumping up and down full octaves, or going from a full-throated howl to a piercing shriek-- have long been his trademark, and it's something that bugs a lot of people. That makes sense: His vocal style is peculiar, and could easily strike some as affected. But the way he negotiates a song like the fourth track here, "For Reverend Green", shows just how well he can adapt his singing to fit the needs of the song.
Over a repeating guitar delay that sounds a little like the Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?" and an organ seemingly pulled from the midway of a county fair, Avey follows the contours of "For Revered Green"'s sing-song melody but never seems bound by it. He explodes with a scream every line or two for emphasis-- not to highlight a word, but to convey the idea of feelings spilling over the edges of the song's expansive container. It's a sound and point-of-view associated now with only one band. A backing of "whoo-oo-oo" vocals working in counterpart to the main melody only reinforce how distinctive Animal Collective's sound has become. Here, more than on any record yet, they own that sound completely.
"For Reverend Green" fades into the structurally similar but tonally different "Fireworks", arguably forming the greatest back-to-back in the Animal Collective's catalog. "Fireworks" is about the pleasure of simple things, but also about how hard they can be to appreciate: "A sacred night where we'll watch the fireworks/ The frightened babies poo/ They've got two flashing eyes and they're colored why/ They make me feel that I'm only all I see sometimes."
Animal Collective are never a band I listened to for lyrics-- on those early records, they were pretty hard to make out-- but the words in "Fireworks" match perfectly the song's complex mood: There's a romantic sense of longing, an air of celebration, but also tinges of doubt, loss, and acceptance. That it's all rendered so beautifully, with tempered banshee vocals, some spacey dub elements to kick off the middle break, and one of the band's best melodies-- and layered and varied enough to have had two or three good songs built from it-- reveals the band's mastery of complex, experimental pop songcraft.
The galloping opener "Peacebone" sets the scene; Animal Collective don't seem exactly like a rock band on Strawberry Jam. There are odd sounds of indeterminate origin, and textures vaguely associated with circus music crop up regularly. Here, the melodic buoyancy and junk-shop keyboards stomping along behind Avey Tare's voice create a ramshackle backdrop for a story of a monster in a maze, strange fossils in a natural history museum, and plenty of other stuff (when Avey gets rolling, he's pretty verbose).
The only thing expected from an Animal Collective record that's never quite delivered on Strawberry Jam is the long, dreamy, droney builder. The album's second half is slightly more abstract than the catchy pop that precedes it, but these moments are tempered, causing the record to feel more focused. "#1" opens with a repeating Terry Riley-esque pattern on what sounds like an early-70s synth, but this is a cleaner, simpler sort of experiment for Animal Collective. The lead vocal is pitched down and vaguely eerie, but Panda's bright backing vocals really carry the piece, which seems happy to drift along without going any place in particular. The track's lack of momentum differentiates it from, say, the songs on the looser second half of Feels, but it's got its own vibe and it works.
The record culminates with the thunderous "Cuckoo Cuckoo", its most explosive track, shifting between lyrical piano bits (not a lot of those on past Animal Collective records) to in-the-red surges of drums, guitar, and noisemakers. And then, after so many great Avey-fronted songs, Strawberry Jam closes with the folk-like "Derek", sung by Panda. The song begins with some lightly strummed guitar and water sounds and ends with crashing percussion and a refrain that sounds like a West African pop tune (a quality also present on the Panda-sung "Chores") merging with a Phil Spector-produced instrumental single. The sound is huge, but the song is a simple ode to being needed, about the pleasure in caring for something, whether a child or family pet ("Derek never woke up at night/ And in the morning he's ready to go/ And he never had a voice like you/ To scream when he wanted something"). In other words, it's about accepting responsibility and most of all about growing up, which is something Animal Collective seem to be doing brilliantly, with their creativity and adventurous spirit intact.