Kaytranada and Aminé team up for a set of sunny, funky party tracks best experienced with a Mai Tai in hand.

Kaytraminé / Aminé / Kaytranada: Kaytraminé

Kaytraminé

In 2014, the 20-year-old Aminé was just another college dropout with a mixtape, trawling for beats on SoundCloud. But rapping over Kaytranada’s single “At All,” his nimble flow served as the perfect foil to the Montreal producer’s funky, uptempo take on neo-soul. Kaytra—in the process of assembling his debut EP for XL—heard his remix “Not at All” and reached out to offer the beats that would go on to highlight Aminé’s 2015 mixtape Calling Brio. Despite their clear chemistry, their only other collaboration would come on Rejjie Snow’s 2018 single “Egyptian Luvr.” Then, in 2021, the pair rented a luxe beach house in Malibu and got to work. After two weeks of recording, they debuted the results to a party full of friends.
Enter Kaytraminé, the duo’s self-titled collaborative album. The 11-track LP—featuring heavy hitters like Pharrell, Snoop Dogg, and the ascendant Ghanaian singer Amaarae—is a buoyant summer jaunt that artfully meshes the two artists’ styles and sensibilities. As a producer, Kaytranada is a svengali of samples, stacking tracks like building blocks to craft fresh beats with a vintage feel. Aminé—not unlike Anderson .Paak, another Kaytra collaborator—is a goofy yet technically proficient MC with singing chops who doesn’t shy away from a twerk-friendly dance record or a crude joke.
Kaytranada’s first two albums flowed like seamless mixes, his house-adjacent style bending and shifting to suit the personalities of the guest vocalists. But his production discography is evidence of his innate ability to adapt to other artists’ styles, whether it’s Kelela, Cadence Weapon, or Freddie Gibbs. The funk-influenced tropical house of Kaytraminé wouldn’t feel out of place on Bubba or 99.9%. But there are tonal shifts that seem designed to showcase Aminé’s range as a singer and a rapper, like the strings swirling around his stop-and-go flow on “Westside” or the sparse arrangement of the latest entry in his series of “STFU” tracks.
Aminé’s two most recent solo albums balanced wistful optimism with sneering swagger, presenting him as a party boy who occasionally paused for self-reflection or a critique of consumer capitalism. That Aminé appears long gone, giving way to a hedonist whose favorite boast is his Delta Medallion status. As a party record, Kaytraminé has no skips—provided that party is loud enough to camouflage some of the cornier lyrics. Aminé’s oral (sex) fixation gets old fast, and a few lines are groan-worthy enough to distract from the fun (“Just popped an X bitch I feel like I’m Malcolm,” he raps on “Who He Iz”).
A carefully curated guest list helps prevent Kaytraminé from tumbling into an abyss of lighthearted braggadocio. Pharrell adds a sprinkle of his ageless pop perfection to lead single “4EVA,” contributing both the hook and co-production, and Amaarae manages to match Aminé’s smooth-singing dick-swinging in her own high register on “Sossaup.” But it’s hard to hear what Uncle Snoop on “Eye” or Big Sean on “Master P” add beyond bankable names; I have to imagine “Big Sean” [ft. Master P] would’ve been a more interesting song. The standout feature belongs to Freddie Gibbs, who sounds right at home on “letstalkaboutit,” wielding a rapid-fire flow as smooth as Kaytra’s plunging bassline. Gibbs doesn’t have Aminé’s vocal breadth, but the way he delivers questionable lines with caddish confidence—“Two girls suckin’ dick, I had my own Verzuz”—illustrates a fluency in the “money, clothes, and hoes” schtick that his host lacks.
If you’d like to hear a cerebral wordsmith rhyming over Kaytra beats, you’re better off seeking out his collaborations with Wiki or Mach-Hommy. Kaytraminé is a soundtrack for the young, dumb, and full of cum, a record produced by the kind of goofball who gets a kick out of being princess-carried by a woman bodybuilder and rapped by a guy whose debut LP pictured him on the toilet with his pants around his ankles. Their star-crossed bromance birthed an album best consumed in direct sun, drink in hand, with minimal clothing and even less inhibition.


Now reissued with bonus material, this album is now best rememberd for birthing the Postal Service, via the Jimmy Tamborello and Ben Gibbard collaboration "The Dream of Evan and Chan". A decade on, it offers a vision of how "experimental" met "catchy" in 2001.

Life Is Full of Possibilities

Ten years ago, this sounded like the future. The combination of pop songcraft and electronic texture that Jimmy Tamborello conjured on Dntel's Life Is Full of Possibilities seemed to achieve one of the implicit cardinal goals of independent music: to strike a seamless balance between "catchy" and "experimental." It was a coup for those of us who had both Squarepusher and Promise Ring discs in our CD changers, a promise that the exhilarating high-budget sonics of Radiohead's Kid A could be brought down to the more human scale of bedroom indie pop. In a certain, ineffable way it just sounded right for its time, much in the way that Dirty Projectors' Bitte Orca and tUnE-yArDs' w h o k i l l have in recent years.
In the decade since Life Is Full of Possibilities was first released on the Plug Research label, we've realigned our perceptions of both "catchy" and "experimental." The sweet, straightforward melodies on Life Is Full of Possibilities now seem almost embarrassingly earnest, the electronic manipulations cold and procedural. While Tamborello's mastery is undeniable, there's a staggering sense of openness to Life Is Full of Possibilities in both its content and its execution. There is no mystery here; you can see the gears turning, both emotionally and sonically. For all its skittery beats and overdriven synthesizers, Life Is Full of Possibilities often feels less like an "intelligent dance music" record than a straight-up 1990s emo record, with the muscle of a traditional rock band proxied by Tamborello's smart, dynamic arrangements.
Though Tamborello's instrumentals are the only constant on an album studded with guest vocalists, Life Is Full of Possibilities feels more like the product of a disciplined, rotating collective than a solo album with one-off collaborators. Each song is particularly well-suited to its respective singer, and each singer fully engages with Tamborello's instrumental tracks. An air of melancholy hangs over most of this album, but Tamborello understands that Mia Doi Todd's flat, confident vocals on "Anywhere Anyone" evoke a very different kind of melancholy from Beachwood Sparks singer Chris Gunst's fragile, unsteady vocals on "Umbrella". Tamborello foregos a more manipulated vocal treatment and lets a tuneful vocal from Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard anchor the swirling, overdriven "(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan", setting the stage for the bajillion-selling full-length collaboration the two would release as the Postal Service. (Music theory geek aside: there's a certain magic to Gibbard's voice when he sings a perfect fifth up followed by a minor third down, as he does in nearly all of his best songs.)
Four remixes of "Evan and Chan" are far and away the drabbest bonus material on Sub Pop's deluxe reissue; removed from the original song's arc, the individual sonic elements here just aren't that interesting. An alternate version of "Umbrella" shows what a more half-assed version of this album might have sounded like, with Chris Gunst's voice locked into a repetitive pattern and bolstered by obvious, heavy-handed swells of distortion. "Evan and Chan" B-side "Your Hill" is the strongest non-album cut here, culling its primary melody from a loud monophonic synthesizer while using vocals as abstract, poetic ornamentation. Broadly speaking, the bonus material here veers more toward the conventional IDM of its time, falling short of the original album but also making a case for its unique strengths.
The best thing about this reissue has nothing to do with its bonus material, though; a solid remastering job pushes both treble and the bass beyond the relatively thin, high-mid-leaning sonic footprint of many late-90s and early-00s computer-recorded albums. Digital conversion technology, much like music itself, has changed a lot in the last 10 years-- which seems like a fairly short time between release and reissue, but also a really long time to have passed since this particular album came out. For a record fixated on personal nostalgia, Life Is Full of Possibilities still feels bright-eyed and forward-thinking. That Tamborello's ambition and optimism now seem slightly distant and idealistic probably says more about us now than it does about this album. This may not be the future we chose, but it remains a beautiful future to imagine.


The Chicago cellist duets with scraps of radio and field recordings on her bold and strangely moving second record.

The Ceiling Reposes

What is it about a scratchy radio broadcast, encountered out of context, that captivates the senses? Woven into the ambient fabric of a song (this is a nice example, and of course this, and this, and even this), even the dullest, most quotidian transmission takes on an almost oracular gravity. Traffic update, weather forecast, stock-market report: All these humdrum sounds become charged with the possibility of meaning, even when their actual significance is elusive. They are small, cloudy windows thrown open onto another world, like a whiff of air that zaps you back to a specific beach, perhaps even a specific afternoon, from your childhood.
Chicago cellist Lia Kohl’s second album, The Ceiling Reposes, exploits this uncanny mode of transport by weaving scraps of radio and field recordings into improvisations on her instrument, along with a haphazard jumble of synthesizers, piano, bells, kazoo, and concertina. The overall effect is like a bird’s nest outside a yarn factory: a tidy cluster of chaos interwoven with brightly discordant tendrils of color.
Jamming with found sounds is, in effect, a form of collaboration for Kohl, who was born in New York and grew up in San Francisco. She began playing cello in third grade and soon dedicated her life to the instrument: youth orchestra, music camp, summertime master classes in Europe, post-college moves to Berlin and New York. All this time, though, she felt like a practitioner rather than a creator. It was only in Chicago, where in 2013 she moved to study under a performer in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, that she found her own voice. She collaborated with dancers; played on records by Steve Gunn, Whitney, and Makaya McCraven, among others; and released duo projects with Ohmme’s Macie Stewart and reed player Zachary Good. By her debut solo album, 2022’s Too Small to Be a Plain, she had developed the searching, abstract sensibility that also distinguishes the new album. Collaging together studio experiments and bits of incidental sound, she approaches the recording process almost as though it were a bonsai or zen garden, cultivating suggestive shapes from aleatory arrays of objects and forms.
The Ceiling Reposes is similar in spirit to Too Small to Be a Plain, but it marks a major step forward. Its tonal sensibilities are bolder and more fully developed, its juxtapositions more provocative; its fortuitous collisions and slippages testify to a steadfast belief in musical freedom. “in a specific room” opens the album with staticky fizz and the tinny digital chimes of a doorbell on the fritz. Kohl bows broad, assertive chords in the low end, multi-tracked beneath the sound of her fingers scraping against strings. Out of a cloud of eerie, Theremin-like tones bursts a jaunty passage of drive-time radio banter. Halfway through, she pivots to what feels like a whole new piece, pairing new-age synth arpeggios with needling cello tones and a passing nod to the falling NASDAQ; the piece fades out in a quiet delirium of birdsong.
There are no real “songs” here, but each track has a much stronger identity than those on her previous album. In “when glass is there, and water,” an elegiac melody emerges out of engine throb and Gregorian chant; “or things maybe dropping” uses dubby rhythm as a backdrop for splashing oars, free-jazz saxophone, and what sounds like someone idly trying out the drum kits at Guitar Center. There are traces of her classical upbringing in the airy lines of “the moment a zipper,” which briefly hint at Bach’s cello suites, and in her most melodic passages, like the pensive “sit on the floor and wait for storms,” her flashing attack faintly evokes Mabe Fratti. Mostly, though, pieces simply swirl like seagrass, a pointillist matrix of rainfall, rustles, and softly seesawing strings.
The most affecting moments have an enigmatic pull. At the end of “sit on the floor and wait for storms,” as bowed cello bubbles up into a roiling foam of grain delay, a man’s voice cuts through, and even though he is speaking, his tone nearly harmonizes with Kohl’s instrument: “All things, all things,” he sighs, and then, after pausing, repeats: “all things.” He sounds like he’s shrugging; he sounds apologetic, slightly regretful, maybe fatalistic. You may find yourself asking, All things what? The sample gestures at unknowable mystery; it could be an entry in a six-word-story contest.
It’s just one of many moments where a piece of broadcast shrapnel pierces the mix, to jarring and sometimes profound effect. There are snippets of classic rock and jocular shock jocks, weather reports and blasts of distorted bluegrass. Sometimes Kohl harmonizes with what she eavesdrops over the airwaves, and sometimes she lets the dial tilt toward chaos. In the most exhilarating moments, it sounds like standing outside La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s Dream House while a neighbor tunes a busted AM radio, an enveloping cocoon of drone and static. It sounds like summer in the city when all the windows are open and all the sounds in the world are playing at once and passing through you—as though you, too, were made of air, just one more vibration in a cosmic web of buzz.


Rot Forever, the debut double album from Portland band Sioux Falls, swells from indie rock into six- or seven-minute epics, like early Modest Mouse or Built to Spill. At 72 minutes, the album is too long, but they have the energy and gravity to support this kind of cinematic ambition; the band plays as if they are trying very hard to pull something up through the earth.

Rot Forever

In its more expansive moments, Rot Forever, the debut double album from Portland band Sioux Falls, seems to test its own capacity for decay. The songs often stretch until they start to dislocate, swelling from indie rock into six- or seven-minute epics. In this way Sioux Falls can resemble early Built to Spill or Modest Mouse, though their songwriting is less tangential than either; Sioux Falls songs tend to cycle through at most two or three related ideas, just at different volumes.
At its best, this effect can be hypnotic and stirring. At its worst it can be exhausting. The songs build geologically, morphing from pebbles into mountains and then crumbling back into their constituent parts. "Chain of Lakes," "San Francisco Earthquake," "Dinosaur Dying"—the song titles and their uncoiling inner structures seem to imply something about geology and archeology, destruction and creation. To their credit, Sioux Falls have the energy and gravity to support this kind of cinematic ambition; the band plays as if they are trying very hard to pull something up through the earth.
For all of its attempts at colossal scale, Rot Forever also feels very intimate. The album’s length—72 minutes—contributes to this relaxed, almost yawning aura; it occasionally feels like listening to one lone, faintly edited practice session. It can feel arbitrary, but its arbitrariness is part of the charm; songs like "Your Name’s Not Ned" take their shape through an application of instinct and aggression that seems more rooted in mood than method.
Unfortunately, the album is simply too long, and it digresses through similar ideas more than it advances. Eiger seems to faint through his vocal melodies; he sings at the kind of aggressively bored frequency at which vowels tend to morph into yawns. At a certain point the album's dynamics become routine, all of the energies produced by the band hit the ear neutrally, and Rot Forever begins to rot itself, softly melting into a background, not of its own accord but by something built into its nature.

Broken World Media / Standard Brickhouse


Chicago producer Larry Heard set the template for house, techno, deep house, and more for generations of electronic music producers. Slowly, portions of his back catalog are finally getting reissued such as Alien, Heard’s third full-length under his own name, originally released in 1996.

Alien

Dabbling in 1970s rock, R&B, and reggae when not holding down the throne in a Yes cover band, the Chicago-based drummer-for-hire Larry Heard must’ve caught director Ridley Scott’s Alien at his local Cineplex at some point in 1979. While the influence of that claustrophobic horror film about the dread of deepest space didn’t quite manifest itself doing nightly covers of “And You and I,” when Heard invested in new-fangled synthesizers and drum machines in the early '80s and struck out on his own, his love of sci-fi moved to the fore in his own music.
With tracks like “Distant Planet", “Mystery of Love", “Washing Machine", and “Can U Feel it", released under monikers like Mr. Fingers, Gherkin Jerks, Disco-D, The It, Blakk Society, Fingers, Inc., and more, Heard set the template for house, techno, deep house, and more for generations of electronic music producers—be they in Chicago or Detroit, or overseas in London and Berlin. Heard’s fundamental house music blueprints like Fingers, Inc.’s Another Side and Mr. Fingers’s Ammnesia are agonizingly long out of print, but slowly, portions of his back catalog are finally getting reissued. Last year brought about a reissue of his incredibly rare Gherkin Jerks’ EPs and now follows Alien, Heard’s third full-length under his own name, originally released in 1996.
While the two volumes of Heard’s Sceneries Not Songs, released in the early '90s, retained their deep house music underpinnings, with Alien, Heard ventured into unknown sonic terrain, fusing together styles that had long influenced him while largely jettisoning his telltale house beat. Wielding sci-fi soundtracks, slippery jazz fusion, progressive rock cues taken from personal favorites like Gentle Giant and Return to Forever, Heard ended up with an amalgam that in the hands of a lesser musician would be disastrous, if not tedious.
Alien is not quite a house album with its beats scrubbed off, nor is it exclusively a chill-out soundtrack, and this reissue asks the question of just who the album was originally intended for. The sophisticated club kid wanting bachelor loft music? Adult-oriented jazz for househeads? Fusion for fusion aficionados? People who want the relaxing ambient version of the film Alien? Eighteen years after its original release, it remains a singular entry in Heard’s influential catalog, with the man composing the entire album on a Korg O1/W workstation keyboard, a Roland d550 and Oberheim Matrix 1000.
Opener “Faint Object Detection” is the album’s most menacing and dramatic track, reveling in the peculiarly juxtaposed ominous and relaxing moods conjured by Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells. The ten-minute “Micro-Gravity” is the first of three expansive, suite-like epics contained on the album that blatantly evoke Heard’s prog-rock fixation; the opening two minutes of the track are full of dread before a pinging melody arises, leading into an bossanova-eque middle section, buoyant and melodic before swerving back into darkness near the track's end. Another double-digit excursion, “Galactic Travels Suite”, moves from space age musing to New Age meditation to downtempo nod, carefully avoiding the sonic trappings of all three.
You could mistake other album tracks for lite-jazz, while elsewhere, there are abstract electronic musings that could get mistaken for something off of Oneohtrix Point Never’s latest album, last year's R Plus Seven. The album only feels dated on the hip-hop moves of closer “The Beauty of Celeste”. Overall, the fact that Heard, one of the most important electronic musicians of the 20th century, could step away from the genre he built his legacy on while exploring the outermost reaches remains a remarkable feat. A Red Bull Music Academy lecture esteemed Heard for “[putting] deepness into house music and [teaching] the machines some soul", but on Alien, Heard also sent house music into deepest, darkest space.


The story of Ryan Adams' artistic decline is currently approaching epic, a long, complicated tale of public cockiness, big mouth ...

Rock N Roll

The story of Ryan Adams' artistic decline is currently approaching epic, a long, complicated tale of public cockiness, big mouth bravado, and exasperated recordings: his churlish, fuck-off swagger was silly from the start, but Adams' self-satisfied smirk has got nothing on his newfound capacity to eschew every last one of his songwriter's instincts. Now, with a discography that's wiggling towards infamy, Adams shoots up one last middle finger to the slowly dispersing crowd.
It's admittedly unfair that Ryan Adams has been forced to spend most of his songwriting career cowering in the shadow of his much-beloved solo debut, enduring loads of (unfavorable) critical comparisons to his younger, more inspired self. Adams' spiral into self-indulgence has triggered plenty of sputtering, red-faced indignation, and if it weren't for the lingering resonance of 2000's Heartbreaker, chances are nobody would care that each of Adams' subsequent efforts has lacked a certain quiet grace. Ultimately, the problem isn't knee-jerk alt-country purists getting pissed about Adams' penchant for electric guitars, or cred-obsessed indie kids hollering about Gap commercials, it's Adams' newfound incapacity (or refusal) to write a song with any acceptable degree of sincerity-- and knowing that he probably could really stings.
Adams' latest, Rock N Roll, feels sloppy and stupidly rushed; recorded in less than two weeks, the record is so blatantly dismissive of both itself and its audience that it insults nearly everyone who attempts to interact with it. Adams' original scheduled-for-2003 release, the largely anticipated Love Is Hell, was clumsily manhandled by Lost Highway labelheads before finally being split into two separate EPs (respectively subtitled Part I and Part II; Part I was released simultaneously with this album), leaving Adams a comparably small window of time in which to record the proper follow-up to 2001's bloated-but-redeemable Gold. Still: it didn't have to be this way.
Here, Adams stuffs the contemporary radio-rock cannon with more overblown, riff-heavy regurgitation, most of which is either painfully generic or preposterously derivative (the buoyant "Anybody Wanna Take Me Home" cops loosely from The Smiths; "So Alive" is karaoke U2; "1974" is an uncomfortable Bon-Jovi-meets-The-Stooges homage). The entire record reeks of late new-wave/80s rock cribbing, and consequently, it's difficult to write about without duly repeating a laundry list of influences: Adams' muses range from predictable (see Joy Division, Paul Westerberg) to bizarre (Adams quasi-mimics the prog diddlings of Rush on the forensically titled "Luminol", and ends up with a song that sounds a lot like rehashed Oasis). Suddenly, the record's opening couplet-- "Let me sing a song for you/ That's never been sung before"-- seems vaguely humiliating.
It's not so much that Rock N Roll is incorrigibly written as that the record is unforgivably careless, unwilling to commit to anything including itself. Each phoned-in track boasts a new kind of lame production (including plenty of weird vocal echoes), tired lyrics ("You're taking me higher than I've been before"), overstated guitar-rock noodling, and unbearably repetitive amp assaults-- combined, they successfully obscure any kernels of ingenuity that might have been buried beneath the buzz. Adams' definition of rock and roll has always been cartoonish (jean jackets, American flags, bar flitting, surly public appearances), but Rock N Roll's interpretation of its namesake officially approaches ridiculous.
In all likelihood, Adams would like for you to think his flippancy is intentional, and for everybody to grin and chalk up his cocky half-assing to more authentic rock and roll behavior. In this, Adams is insistent: just as he did with Gold, Adams includes liner note photos of tattoos and cigarettes to remind us that he's badass, confirming the characterization with a handful of lazily sprung expletives (including the unconvincing "It's all a bunch of shit.../ It's totally fucked up" of "Wish You Were Here"), some clever allusions to chemical abuse ("And if I could have my way/ We'd take some drugs"), and an embarrassingly obvious I'm-friends-with-The-Strokes aside (booming opener "This Is It"). Possibly the best thing about "Rock N Roll" is how girlfriend Parker Posey is credited in the liner notes as "Exe'cute'ive Producer," appearing "courtesy of her bad self." At least being precious is being honest.
There are some curious guest turns (Billie Joe Armstrong inexplicably pops up, and Melissa Auf Der Maur provides background vocals on a handful of tracks, as does Posey), but Adams is almost always at his best when he's on his own and thinks no one else is looking: the album's title track is a sweet piano ballad, his plaintive wail layered nicely over fuzzy snippets of found sound. Lasting less than two minutes, "Rock N Roll" is (check the glaring irony!) also the record's least self-conscious song, a flash of earnestness that disappears almost before you notice its arrival.
You have to angle Rock N Roll up to a mirror in order to read the cover text properly, and, in a way, the inherent fallacy of a mirror image is also the very best metaphor for this record: Rock N Roll is backwards Ryan Adams, one-dimensional, vain, and entirely lifeless.


Brooklyn band sings lo-fi campfire serenades and gentle, nocturnal pysch-folk.

Horn of Plenty

Considering their name, Brooklyn address, and penchant for lo-fi campfire serenades, there's a powerful temptation to put Grizzly Bear in the same pen as those other charismatic megafauna, the Animal Collective, and be finished zookeeping for the night. But Horn of Plenty proves that categorization would be neither fair nor accurate. The gentlemen of Grizzly Bear paw around in wholly distinct regions of gentle, nocturnal psych-folk, conjuring visions of an imagined bedroom collaboration between the Doug Yule-era Velvet Underground, Nick Drake, and a pajama-clad Pooh with his head jammed in a honey jar.
Originally conceived by multi-talented singer-songwriter Edward Droste as solo demos, the recordings that became Horn of Plenty were later augmented by the additional vocals and instrumentation of Christopher Bear, and after hearing the off-handed cohesion of the duo's dreamy harmonies and their seemingly effortless musical interplay it's difficult to imagine these songs achieving such heights of hushed majesty in any other format. And the extra set of hands ensures the flow of enough fresh oxygen to allow the album to avoid complete descent into the troubled, myopic solitude of such similarly toned homespun constructions as Skip Spence's Oar or Syd Barrett's The Madcap Laughs.
The album opens with the appropriately submerged sounds of "Deep Sea Diver", which gradually climbs through currents of chiming, bell-like keys and guitars before finally surfacing into golden falsetto rays of sunlight. "Disappearing Act" marries its autumnal folk choruses to gauzy smears of vinyl hiss, handbells, and remote martial snares, while the clattering pocket symphony of "Showcase" eventually dissolves into the wordless vocalizing of felines on distant fire escapes. On nearly every track a previously unheard element, such as the mournful violin that shivers up the spine of "Eavesdropping", makes a brief spectral appearance before once again vanishing, leaving the listener to wonder at what hidden treasures further scrutiny might unearth.
Given the heady depth of Horn of Plenty's hazy musical swoon, Grizzly Bear's lyrics somewhat surprisingly strike a pleasant counterbalance by residing more often than not in the familiar realm of day-to-day reality. It's not unusual to hear Droste and Bear singing relatively mundane pronouncements like "My chest hurts a lot tonight" or "It's amazing I can still sing this song so simply about you," with such matter-of-fact nonchalance that as a result these songs collectively sound as unforced and natural as a series of quiet exhalations, capable of transferring the beguiling, intoxicating atmospheres of Grizzly Bear's bedroom directly into your own.


On Last Year Was Complicated, Nick Jonas follows in the tried-and-true “I'm having sex now, guys” footsteps of boybanders past.

Last Year Was Complicated

Toward the close of 2014, Nick Jonas was thrusted pelvis-first back into the pop stratosphere. His eponymous second album introduced a rebooted youngest Jonas brother, with comeback singles “Chains,” “Levels,” and “Jealous” offering a “blue-eyed soul with brown eyes” aesthetic steeped in a sexy “tossing the purity ring” sound. With his third studio album, Nick Jonas keeps the pace going. But as the shock and awe of his suddenly-bared pecs fade, does he still stand out in pop's crowd of vaguely soulful, sorta-bad boys?
It’s a format both created and perfected by Justin Timberlake moons ago, where the shedding of the boy-band skin is supposedly everything the artist needed to locate his truest creativity. We saw a similar “Guys, I’m having sex now” pivot from One Direction alum Zayn Malik, whose slightly awkward album nonetheless debuted at number one. After all, no one leaves a success story behind for the pop equivalent of a hippie commune: The motive is to prove success without other bandmates*.* On Last Year Was Complicated, you can feel Jonas striving to hit his marks.
Jonas enlists Jason Evigan (responsible for co-penning “Chains” as well as Demi Lovato’s “Heart Attack”) for much of the tracks' production and songwriting. While the result is a 12-track standard edition full of potential hits, the brunt of it rests on interchangeable tempos from existing, already-charting singles. “Champagne Problems” could easily be sung over Mike Posner's “I Took A Pill In Ibiza”; “Chainsaw” and “Under You” slot seamlessly over Jonas’ other hit “Jealous,” and with a shift in octave or two, “Don't Make Me Choose” could be a song by the Weeknd.
It's not that he doesn’t stretch out from time to time here. “Touch” is a skirting folktronica track, shifting from guitars and dubs as Jonas smoothly whispers sweet nothings (some flaccid, like “I wanna get inside your brain”). “Unhinged” showcasese Jonas’ ability to craft a solid ballad once the 808s and synths are stripped away. Other experiments, like the Timbaland-lite production of __“__Voodoo” and Miguel-nodding electro-funk  of “The Difference” come across as clunky, trying on styles that aren’t a perfect fit. Still, the experimentation shows some promise.
The eyebrow-raising inclusion of the last album’s hits (“Jealous,” “Chains,” “Levels”) on the deluxe edition serve as a stark reminder: Nick Jonas might have talent and chops, but he’s playing a pure numbers game here, one without much room for big risks or rewards. Perhaps that’s the biggest takeaway from Last Year Was Complicated. We are dealing with a star whose looks and talent became mutually exclusive, and the package is so perfect that it has to live on every shelf, in every store, in every city, in every country. It's a little disappointing for fans who thought he might actually let things get a little, well—complicated.


EARS, the rich and rewarding new album from composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, is hard-to-pin-down music for the spaces in-between. In her hands, acoustic instruments sound like electronic ones, synthetic sounds reference nature, and human voices sound like the creation of machines.

EARS

In 1980, the trumpeter Jon Hassell partnered with Brian Eno on an album called Fourth World Vol. 1: Possible Musics. The record’s title gives away its m.o.; they were trying to imagine a music that was native to a place that didn’t exist. Hassell had a background in jazz, Indian music, and classical minimalism; Eno had a background in art rock and ambient music and using the recording studio as instrument. On Fourth World they took their interests in texture and unusual structures and created music that was hard to pigeonhole. You could draw lines from certain genres to individual elements, but the sound of the whole and the way it all came together felt unique to this project. EARS, the rich and rewarding new album from composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, owes some of its sound and more of its spirit to Fourth World: this is hard-to-pin-down music for the spaces in between.
Many of the warm, bubbling textures on EARS can be traced to Smith’s obsession with a rare analog synthesizer by Buchla, but the real secret of the album’s aesthetic owes more to the fact that it’s hard to make out the sources. In her hands, acoustic instruments sound like electronic ones, synthetic sounds reference nature, and human voices sound like the creation of machines. The defining characteristics of each instrument—in addition to analog synths, the album features woodwinds and flute from Bitchin Bajas member Rob Frye along with Smith’s singing—are turned inside out and re-defined, giving the record a pleasingly alien mood that also feels oddly familiar.
Smith is prolific and her Bandcamp has nine releases, many of which are quite good. But many of her earlier records are "experimental" in the most literal sense, where she gives herself certain limitations and parameters and sees what she can create within those strictures. EARS has more to offer as an album-length experience. And while this sort of ambient music is often associated with lengthy side-long compositions, Smith’s pieces are relative miniatures, mostly of pop-song length.
Each track it filled competing approaches that clash in delicate ways. "Arthropoda" is like a new age rainforest recording made on a distant planet, with buzzing insects and liquid gurgles, but it also sounds human, as Smith’s layered voice repeats an unidentifiable phrase with a deadpan insistence that brings to mind Philip Glass or Laurie Anderson. "Wetlands" finds Smith taking voice processing even further, as syllables blur into unearthly whooshes of noise that seems to be moving through a medium thicker than water. Tracks like "First Flight" have a more conventional spacey drift and these bring to mind the earlier synth music of Oneohtrix Point Never, but Smith’s work never feels particularly referential. Even though many parts of this record sound like they could have been made in the ’70s or ’80s, you never get the sense that the technology is the point.
Though tracks are easy to distinguish by shifts in melody, they all work together as a sort of suite, and EARS almost feels like a concept album. For a technically sophisticated record that doesn’t have a great deal of dynamic range, EARS has a surprisingly strong emotional tug. Smith focuses on a narrow band of feeling—wonder, curiosity, disorientation, bliss—and constructs a gleaming sonic world to house them, a place where the lines between thoughts and feelings and styles are porous.


The enigmatic rapper’s debut LP is an honest and optimistic coming-of-age story about overcoming pain with the guidance of loved ones.

Àdá Irin

Last December, rapper Navy Blue graced the stage for a rare live performance at a small venue in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Gripping the microphone, he paced the stage in snow white Stone Island sweats, rapping over tense, jazz-infused loops with his eyes shut, only opening them to glance over at his friends following along. By the end of his set, I couldn’t tell if he was holding back tears. It felt uncomfortable, like eavesdropping, but that discomfort is integral to Navy Blue’s music.
Born Sage Elsesser, Navy Blue is a former skating phenom turned recording artist who began posting his music to Soundcloud in 2015 without disclosing his identity. This wound up being wise, since his earliest raps were raw, incomplete, and bordered on spoken-word. But through sporadic EPs, guest verses, and producing beats for frequent collaborators, he got to polish his style without the pressure of scrutiny from fans who knew him as their favorite skateboarder or style guru.
Àdá Irin, the 23-year-old’s debut album, is the result of his earnest labors. It’s an honest and optimistic coming-of-age story about overcoming pain with the guidance of loved ones, and there’s a starry-eyed passion ingrained in every line, even the ones that are hard to interpret. Several track titles end in exclamation points (“Crash!” and “22!”), and his urgent need to communicate comes through even when his message is abstract. Compared to his older music, Àdá Irin is more straightforward; he’s less likely to use poetic language, which makes it special when he does: “Plummet in the earth, my body’s underneath/My papa in the wall, my worries in the creek,” he says on “Hari Kari.”
Even when he’s baring his soul, Navy Blue remains elusive. “Trickle-down effect, my mother made a soldier/Shoulders ain’t for crying on, my brother know/Hold ’em close, privately we cope,” he murmurs on “Simultaneously Bleeding.” The snapshots are blurry but their intimacy is clear. Songs will often feature muffled drums and lyrics that stream past, but occasionally something piercing emerges from the fog: “Another face like mine on the news,” he says somberly on “Life’s Riddle,” freezing you in place.
Most songs run under three minutes; if they were any longer they might have sounded like monologues over woozy loops. The exception, the self-produced “Hari Kari,” is a moment when he connects to his roots, as he blends a jazzy piano with funky percussion; it feels like a tribute to his father, who he describes in a 2017 interview as “a rastafarian drummer who’s initiated in Santeria.”
Navy Blue strings a sense of fragile hope through the album, even as he grapples with feelings that would defeat most of us—pain, anxiety, fear. “22!” is the high-energy centerpiece, with rattling hi-hats and a pounding bass. His optimism shines through: “Bleed and I replenish/Demons on my Achilles/I give more than I am given,” he says, realizing that his pain has purpose. “To Give Praise!” ends the project like a fairytale. As the horns blare and a graceful melody settles in, he gives thanks to his family and friends, who guided him so he could grow and make an album like Àdá Irin. “If you got ’em both, you better check your mom and dad/Tell ’em that you love ’em, some would kill for what we have,” he states, breaking through the gloom. It feels like a hand on your shoulder.


Gentle but full of motion, the Portland, Oregon producer’s seemingly uncomplicated music brings the language of left-field ’90s dance to the great outdoors.

Echo Earth

House music is often thought to belong indoors: in nightclubs, warehouses, dingy basements where sweat drips from the walls. But in Akasha System’s music, the sounds of classic house are oriented outward. The Portland, Oregon producer, aka Hunter P. Thompson, favors titles like “Hawk Country” and “Rain Theme,” and he cites back-country hikes and mossy tree trunks as inspiration for his airy melodies and sturdy basslines.
The Pacific Northwest frequently seems to inspire this tendency to infuse electronic textures with a sense of place. Vancouver ambient musician Loscil routinely invokes the local geography in both his titles and his moody, rain-slicked tones; Grouper’s work is inextricable from the fogbanks of the Oregon coast; Portland modular synthesist Ann Annie films her devices in front of picturesque outdoor backdrops. It’s less common to find these kinds of inspirations in dance music of the sort that Thompson makes, in which the steady beat is inextricable from decades of association with the act of dancing—triggering, in effect, a kind of muscle memory.
But Echo Earth, much like previous Akasha System albums Vague Response and Temple Images, isn’t really club music, at least not exclusively. One of Thompson’s chief models is Chicago house pioneer Larry Heard, who drew up the blueprint for canonical deep house but also understood that four-to-the-floor pulses weren’t limited to the dancefloor. That was particularly true on albums like 1996’s Alien or 1994’s Sceneries Not Songs, Volume 1, in which placid tracks like “Dolphin Dream” and “Tahiti Dusk” were keyed to new-age frequencies. Echo Earth utilizes a similar palette of softly rounded synths and unadorned drum machines, to similarly wistful ends.
Another contemporaneous touchstone is Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92, in which bold drums and riffs dissolved into pure atmosphere. Akasha System has a similar way of enveloping muscular drum programming in buoyant, jewel-toned chords and synthetic choirs. The Portland musician clearly has an affinity for that era’s left-field dance music: In the opalescent synth tones and flickering micro-rhythms triggered by dub delay, there are also echoes of Sun Electric’s 1996 album Present, which, like Aphex Twin’s record, abandoned rave’s muddy fields for airier, more spacious climes.
But if revivalism can be boring, Echo Earth is decidedly not. For all its gentleness, it’s full of motion: His synthesizers are forever in flux, constantly changing timbre and tone color, and his drums are particularly inspired. His kick drums never simply follow the expected path; they jog and leap, dodging the downbeat like a trail runner jumping fallen logs, and his claps and hi-hats are similarly nimble as they pan across the stereo field or ricochet down the delay chain. What appears on the surface to be a simple, unfussy sound—and his tendency to reuse the same palette from track to track lends to that impression—turns out to be remarkably nuanced. Contrast is the secret ingredient: A bright arpeggio trips up the scale, offsetting sustained chords that barely waver; a cowbell clatters across a field of hush, punctuating the stillness like a woodpecker’s insistent staccato. Crisp, cutting textures balance out the soft, wispy tones, keeping them from becoming too diffuse, and vice versa. The closer you peer, the more Akasha System’s seemingly uncomplicated music turns out to be something like an interdependent system, a dynamic landscape of give and take.
It can be tricky, of course, when the artist sets the terms like this: Would you have detected the presence of old-growth forests and mountain streams in the music if Thompson hadn’t titled these tracks things like “Meadow Walk” and “Spirits of the Lake”? Maybe not, but it hardly matters. Like a walk in the woods, Echo Earth clears the head and sharpens the senses.

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Erika Anderson's second full-length as EMA finds her working in a loosely conceptual zone, with songs about surveillance and the difficulties of navigating plugged-in digital culture. It's a risky and uneven album with its share of brilliant moments.

The Future's Void

A line on a short a capella song called “Coda”, from EMA’s 2011 album Past Life Martyred Saints, goes like this: “I looked on the computer/ And it just was an emptiness that/ Made me want to throw up on the spot.” On Past Life, Erika M. Anderson sings noise-drenched songs about grey ships and blue scars and red pants that hide menstrual blood and drugs that make her so sad that she can’t stop taking them, but that brief moment is slightly jarring because you don't necessarily picture the narrator in these visceral and harrowing scenes sitting in front of a computer. But the line is that much more striking because of the contrast; in hidden bedrooms where goth kids cut their arms with butterfly knives, there’s also, of course, a laptop. And even an act as banal as cracking it open and browsing the web might lead you to confront loss and take stock, and that moment could actually make you ill. On an album with many great images, “Coda”’s moment of digitally-invoked despair stood out, and that anomalous line effectively serves as a portal into another world, the one of EMA’s second album, The Future’s Void.
The key track on Past Life Martyred Saints, and the one that gave the album its name, was its first single, “California”. On it, Anderson sang-spoke lines about splitting from her home in South Dakota and leaving behind friends, who we assume are still there, in order to make her mark as an artist out West. However much of the impressionistic “California” was literally true, it certainly felt like autobiography, and it was emblematic of a record packed with details both personal and universal. The Future’s Void is presented as a different kind of record, one that’s about things and issues instead of people. One of those things is the state of our lives as lived online, with thoughts about Big Data, and, yes, the spiritual vacuum of media-saturated culture. There’s more to the record than that, but given the title, the Oculus Rift headset on the cover, and the content of the two lead singles, “Satellites” and “3Jane”, the initial encounter with it happens within this framework.
Digital culture is tricky to write about, because so much of what we’re used to hearing is delivered as a polemic without complexity. On one side you have people talking about disconnect and loneliness and the deterioration of human interaction, basically saying we’ve changed for the worse, and it’s hopeless. On the other, you have the digital utopians—most of whom make their living from the online world, not coincidentally—and they’re telling us that people are more connected because of technology. Writing about what is almost certainly the truth—that contemporary life is a messy, ever-shifting mix of good and bad, and that generalizations about large groups of people are impossible—is hard enough to do in an essay, never mind a four-minute pop song. So you have to hand it to Anderson for addressing such a difficult subject.
Even the songs here that are not about the media per se have it lurking somewhere in the background. There are lines like “when you click on the link” and “makin a living off of takin selfies” and “feel like I blew my soul out across the interwebs and streams,” and it’s hard not to cringe just a little, because they seem so on-the-nose. I sense judgement in these lyrics, and even if the judgement feels accurate, it’s a point of view we're bombarded with every day, one that is hard to say something new about. Anderson has indicated in interviews that she's aware that she was taking a risk writing about technology, knowingly using phrases that could seem clumsy as a way to push against limtations. But for me, when the record falters, it’s often because these moments take me out of it; they come over as too easy.
Which is not to say that they aren't also used in songs that resonate. “3Jane” is the perfect representation how the album’s awkwardly delivered details can take on serious power when considered whole, and it also seems like the successor to the pairing of “Coda” and “Marked” on Past Life Martyred Saints. The first thing to note about “3Jane” is that the arrangement and melody are absolutely gorgeous, the delicate piano and ghosted synths and thumping tom-toms and shimmering cymbals combine into a ballad that moves with tremendously emotional force. And while lyrics like “it’s all just a big advertising campaign” and “it doesn’t seem like it was only yesterday when you wandered out on superhighway” are iffy, the song ultimately comes over as honest and moving. “It left a hole so big inside of me,” recalls the fantasy of trepanation from “Marked”, and the way Anderson sells it, you feel what she’s feeling.
The aching beauty of “3Jane” is found elsewhere on The Future’s Void, on the sing-song organ that half-quotes the melody from “Taps” (Anderson is a genius at making obvious musical references sound strange) in “Dead Celebrity” and on the mid-tempo acoustic lilt of “When She Comes”—the easiest song on the album, catchy and instantly appealing, with lyrics that feel like an evocative puzzle you don’t need to solve. “100 Years”, a song about history and industrialization, is striking most because of the nakedness of Anderson’s vocal, both fragile and strong; after years of being subjected to Auto-Tune and processing and reverb, hearing a flawed human voice this close to the microphone, outlining a melody and cracking subtly here and there, is so real it’s an almost psychedelic experience. “So Blonde”, the album’s most obviously personal song, crackles with memorably imagery (“her pills are shakin in her bag”) and evokes the alt-rock 90s and the era’s interrogation of cultural iconography, with Anderson’s Courtney Love-like scream on the title refrain driving it home. There are moments of brilliance here.
There are also songs that are easy to skip. Anderson in industrial rock mode just doesn’t work for me this time, and some of that might be up to the production. The album was recorded simply, in her basement, often alone, and sometimes, especially during its quieter moments, that works to its advantage. But the noisy “Cthulu”, “Smoulder”, and “Neuromancer” never hit the intensity they’re going for, and these three songs in sequence in the middle of the record drag it down big time. There are no memorable hooks during this run, and the pinched filter applied to Anderson’s voice wants to evoke a Nine Inch Nails-style blown-out intensity, but it never reaches that pitch.
Still, despite the lyrical clunkers and ill-advised production choices, The Future’s Void has the feel of a real statement, of an artist trying for something new even if she doesn’t always get there. And the EMA project is antithetical to the idea of perfection anyway, so combing through the messy whole to find the places of clarity and insight feels somehow appropriate.


Though his music sometimes exhibits the romantic sweep of chamber music and can be marked with skittering beats, Venezuela-born producer Alejandro Ghersi’s work as Arca is defined above all by its fluidity and flexibility. Mutant builds on his 2014 album Xen to create a hypnotic and eveloping world.

Mutant

Though his music sometimes exhibits the romantic sweep of chamber music and can be marked with skittering beats, Venezuela-born producer Alejandro Ghersi’s work as Arca is defined above all by its fluidity and flexibility. You can hear conventional musicality inside of his tracks—melodies, chord changes—but rather than being fixed on paper, they are always in flux. Individual notes twitch and vibrate, refusing to stay with a single pitch; rapidly shifting clusters hint at proper chords without ever quite committing to them; tempos speed up and slow down according to whims rather than the grid of a timeline. Arca’s deeply organic machine music is defined by Ghersi’s ability to find grace in imperfection.
Ghersi has come a long way in a short time, his career the sort of underground/mainstream hybrid that could only happen in the digital era, when producers rapidly move from sharing home-recorded beats online to working with stars. Though his music has varied greatly, you’ve always been able to hear his voice inside of it. The first music heard from Ghersi was a series of three low-profile releases in 2012 that made small waves among electronic music heads but were little heard outside of that circle. But among that group was someone working on Kanye West’s 2013 album Yeezus, and Arca wound up contributing to four tracks, including "Blood on the Leaves" and "I’m in It". That same year, he also produced for FKA twigs, helping to create a futuristic pop that was simultaneously dense and spare and defined by its elusiveness. Xen, Arca’s 2014 full-length debut, expanded Ghersi’s range further, sounding like a bent version of modern classical music crumpled into a ball with a post-dubstep beat tape. Music created for a fashion show  in Italy earlier this year spoke further to Ghersi’s ability to move between genres, scenes, and high/low art boundaries, and his continued collaboration with artist Jesse Kanda on the visual aspects of his work make Arca a project with a rare thematic integrity. He’s developing quickly but building on a clear foundation.
If Aphex Twin took the playful communal energy of early-'90s rave and turned it to highly personal art, and producers of the early '00s like Fennesz and Tim Hecker showed how emerging software could be used to create new worlds, Arca is making the abstract electronic music of our current moment, music for an idea of humanity that exists outside of binaries. "Xen is a genderless being," he told The Guardian last year. "It’s about resisting labels and integrating different sides of ourselves." Accordingly, Arca tracks are never one fixed thing: Conventional beauty is swirled together with ugliness, aggressiveness exists alongside serenity, chaos and form fail to cancel each other out. Mutant is an album of contrasts, and Ghersi has an uncanny ability to let extremes interact with each other to create something new.
The 20 tracks here stretch for over an hour, but lines between them are unclear, and when heard at once the record can seem like one long suite, treating us to an array of sounds and moods. You can imagine "Vanity" as a piano solo, so pretty and memorable are the central melodic motifs, but Ghersi’s production on the track is essentially a series of controlled explosions, the sound of a song breaking into a million pieces and re-assembling itself. "Alive"’s drones are positively cavernous, sounding like a memory of an ancient civilization bubbling up through a hole in the earth, and he breaks up the static drift with splattering breaks that jolt the song at irregular intervals. The repeated vocal loop on "Umbilical" is one of the few sounds on the record connected to life on planet Earth, but it’s mixed in with some of the album’s harshest and coldest electronics. As the tracks tick off and you lose track of how far into the album you actually are, the clarity of Ghersi’s vision comes into focus. The broken-ness of the music takes on an empowering energy, as oblong fragments bind together into gorgeously weird shapes and dynamic shifts that shouldn’t make sense feel perfectly logical.
Compared to Xen, Mutant feels less composed and less indebted to classical music. With many tracks on the former album you could squint a little bit and imagine them being performed by a daring new music ensemble, à la Aphex Twin with Alarm Will Sound. But Mutant leans toward soundscape, avoiding proper songs. There are moments in the back half, particularly on "Enveloped", where beats crop up and you can imagine them being used to back a pop production of some kind, but even here the warped instrumental patch used for the melody is too strange and otherworldly for an artist that has ever been on the radio. It’s not an easy listen; this is glorious music that sounds like a living thing, and it can be hard to connect the album to anything outside of itself. Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí said that the straight line belongs to man and the curved to God; on Mutant, Ghersi turns a fixation on porousness and instability into a kind of spiritual pursuit.


Informed by their study of Zen Buddhism, Danielle L. Davis and Steven Whiteley create spacious, playful synthesizer melodies that push at the boundaries of what “meditative” music can be.

Soundness of Mind

It was a photograph of a synthesizer that first caught Steven Whiteley’s eye. In 2018, Whiteley, a composer living at New Mexico’s Upaya Zen Center, came across an unusual Instagram post from the Bay Area’s Green Gulch Farm Zen Center: Danielle L. Davis’ modular synthesizer, sitting on the porch of a yurt. Before long, Whiteley traded life in Santa Fe for a residency at the Marin County retreat, bringing along little more than a laptop, MIDI controller, and classical guitar. There, the two musicians bonded over Pauline Oliveros’ philosophy of Deep Listening, which posits drone music as a path to heightened states of consciousness, and jammed in their free time. Eventually, both left Green Gulch for Oregon’s Great Vow Zen Monastery, on the banks of the Columbia River; granted time to pursue creative practice, they zeroed in on their sound, performing free-flowing improvisatory music on piano and electronics for monks and fellow students. In 2019, after their respective residencies ended, Davis and Whiteley moved to Portland, where they used a wealth of acoustic and electronic instruments to bring to fruition ideas that had germinated in the monastic environment.
Despite its genesis, the music on Soundness of Mind, Liila’s debut album, isn’t always serene. Placid electronic tones are offset with pinwheeling synthesizer melodies; thrumming xylophone patterns punctuate breathy choral pads reminiscent of 1980s sampler presets. They summon a rich, unpredictable, and often surprisingly lively sound. On “Nazīr,” a spindly beat of sticks, harp, and bells approximates an arte povera take on a hip-hop rhythm. Whatever the layperson might assume that electronic music grounded in Zen practices ought to sound like, this 28-minute album frequently upends expectations; it is as playful as it is reverent, and the heady results push at the limits of what “meditative” music can be.
New-age sensibilities are at the heart of two of the record’s most captivating tracks. “Not One Not Two” twines droning synth pads with a long, meandering piano fantasia against a chattering backdrop of birdsong. It’s difficult to discern exactly how many elements are in play—synthesizers bleed into bird calls; the piano might be the work of two hands or four. Perhaps that’s the reason for the title, which paraphrases a principle that the influential Sōtō Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki Roshi described as “the oneness of duality”: The track teems with disparate yet complementary elements, flickering between buzzing union and gentle discord. “Whale Song for No One” is similarly drifting and even more complex, flecked with robot chirps, virtual choir, and cicada-like buzz. With its pulsing marimba and bells, it feels like a response to Visible Cloaks’ take on Japanese ambient traditions, while the title suggests a winking awareness of new-age cliché.
A few tracks are particularly energetic. A kinetic blast reminiscent of Oneohtrix Point Never’s hyperreal environments, “Osha” is a rock tumbler full of small, staccato sounds—choppy voices, claps, castanets, laser-like rototoms—buffed by reverb to a dull gleam. “Frozen Islands,” one of the album’s highlights, again resembles Visible Cloaks’ pastiches of Eastern electronic styles. What makes the song feel fresh is its sprightly sense of motion, with airy pads, pentatonic scales, and plucky percussive details all firing like the pistons of a cartoon engine.
The opening “Appa Wú Wéi” is the album’s best and most enveloping song, laying out the mesh of chimes, marimba, wordless voices, and spiraling synth leads that give much of the record its billowing shape. The reference points are not particularly new; the rippling mallets recall Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, while the gradually expanding layers suggest a tradition of cosmic electronic music running from the Berlin school through Emeralds. The magic is in the way the music moves: at once calm and invigorating, with animated arpeggios spinning over a measured andante beat. There’s a sense of clarity in its bright harmonics and brisk forward glide. The “wú wéi” of the title is a reference to the principle of “effortless action,” and the song’s development mimics the movements of natural forces like wind and water; it’s easy to envision the landscape of the Marin Headlands, the fog burning off rolling green hills that slope down to the Pacific Ocean, where waves wear away at the rock. The song is radiant and full of joy: the sound of two minds flowing in sync with each other, and with everything around them.

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On their latest, this Brooklyn dance-noise quintet finds crazy colors while tearing loose from the axis.

GT Ultra

On GT Ultra, Guerilla Toss continue to play at the mystical meeting point of DIY punk-jazz skronk, jamband festival populism, and the clanging dance music befitting their spot on the DFA label. In practice, it’s a collision that sometimes suggests a neon-splattered version of the rolling grooves surfed by Talking Heads and Brian Eno on Remain in Light. If GT Ultra doesn’t quite have a “Once in a Lifetime” moment, it does have the band’s most nuanced work yet. Capturing the group’s assault with a depth unheard on their previous releases, GT Ultra condenses their garish colors and considerable charms.
Perhaps the opposite of timeless, GT Ultra is so completely in the technological and aesthetic present it’s hard to fathom what this music might sound like in a decade, riding proud for the only time is now/no future hippie-punk ethos. And with an album cover depicting a sheet of LSD blotter and a title referencing the CIA’s MKULTRA program, in which unwitting subjects were dosed with acid, psychedelia and psychedelics are central throughout. Rooting in the Boston experimental scene before relocating to Brooklyn, Guerilla Toss practice musical psychonautics of a most forceful variety, the aural equivalent of flooding the eyes with strobe lights. Live, they’ve been a trigger for enveloping set-long mosh pits, and GT Ultra acts as a carrier for almost unceasing voltage.
Fading in on a synth wash, they get right to the frenzy with the opening “Betty Dreams of Green Men,” in which insistent congas carry a massive groove meant for far larger spaces than the DIY venues the band usually play. Held together by Kassie Carlson’s spoken/sung/shouted surrealisms and drummer Peter Negroponte’s drive, the propulsive music obscures the far-out textures hovering lower in the mix. On “Skull Pop,” a throat-singing hum sets up stereo-spun drum fills, while layers of crossing synths seem ready to burst into the foreground, leaving the rhythm (and body) behind. The band’s methodical escalations also serve them in surprising ways, on “Crystal Run” twice climbing ladders to ecstasy as Carlson finds her most ineffable melody yet on a short, arresting bridge.
If Guerilla Toss’ particular combination of sounds suggests a clear formula in places, GT Ultra also demonstrates enough resourcefulness that the band might already have some alternate pathways in sight. On the LP, both sides end with slight outliers, places where the moshing might slow when played live. “The String Game” pulls another page from Remain in Light, beginning with a haunted recitation similar to “The Overload” before establishing (for Guerilla Toss) a slow-motion churn. But the album's closer, “Dose Rate,” offers perhaps the most alluring coordinates for where Guerilla Toss might point themselves. As lyrics shout out Orange Sunshine LSD and a big summer chorus mentions “Lucy level,” “Dose Rate” glides like an introspective crowd-surfer at sunset.
GT Ultra is anything but monochromatic, but its energy also feels occasionally constrained by its own parameters, with Carlson’s lyrics and the band's arrangements pogoing at the edge of total freedom, and perhaps total chaos. “Dose Rate” visualizes something else, a dream inside a dream. And if most of the album is perhaps best enjoyed when in need of a certain rush, it’s a heady approach that seems ready for festivals of all stripes, equally prepared to both get weird and make a big, big beat.


Golem, the second full-length from Los Angeles-based psych-rock quartet Wand, draws from the old-school prog/psych sourcebook, but the songs often wander away from the script in a way that is refreshing.

Golem

The heavies of glam and garage rock past loom large over Golem, the second full-length from Los Angeles-based psych-rock quartet Wand. It’s not a nostalgia-driven record, but you can definitely catch a whiff of David Bowie, T. Rex, and eyeliner-era Brian Eno wafting through the band’s heavy riffs and stoned melodies.
However, Wand’s most obvious touchstone is a little more contemporary: Ty Segall. Over the last couple of years, Segall and his close-knit crew—bands like Thee Oh Sees and White Fence— have established a headier and heavier take on dinosaur rock by amping up the tempo and coating familiar-sounding riffs in a layer of lo-fi psychedelic grime. From the double-tracked falsetto vocals to the alien guitar tones, their influence is clear and present on Golem. Wand aren’t sound-alikes, but they also aren’t shy about appropriating moves from the other bands in their scene.
And they’re pretty good at those moves. Evidently there are no hard feelings: Wand has opened for Ty Segall and the band’s singer/guitarist Cory Hanson has also accompanied Segall comrade Mikal Cronin on the road. Wand’s debut album, Ganglion Reef, was released on Segall’s Drag City imprint, GOD? It’s a bit like the Beatles releasing Badfinger on Apple—an act that took heavy inspiration from their more well-known mentor/producers, but also delivered independently memorable material on their own in a similar style.
There are some notable differences, though. Where their peers might ground stoney riffs in personal and real-life inspired subject matter, Wand’s tunes tend to dwell in the wizard candle-lit realms of the fantastic. Some of Hanson’s lyrics ("The forest is soft and the spiders are dead") sound like they might have first been uttered in the midst of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. And who knows, maybe they were; the members of Wand have been known to play the game.
Fantastic imagery aside, D&D is not a bad platform for understanding Wand. The game makes use of established ground rules, but the tone and setting can be embellished to suit the tastes and interests of the players. Wand’s foundation lies in the old-school prog/psych sourcebook, but the songs often wander away from the script in a way that is refreshing. Glimpses of pop nostalgia are regularly smeared over with anachronistic synthesizer squiggles or blotted out with heavy rock riffs reminiscent of the Melvins. These are the record's best moments—when a Marc Bolan vocal seamlessly blends into the kind of tape-collage weirdness that might have been at home on a Butthole Surfers LP. Still, listening to *Golem—*which arrives via Los Angeles garage and weirdo-rock standby In the Red—it’s hard to shake the been-there-done-that feeling. Wand excels at delivering heavy and murky sounds, but they're a bit late to a conversation that their peers have already dominated.


On his new Drone Logic, Daniel Avery schews the hyper-rhythmic minimalism and throwback New Jersey garage sound that currently power UK club music in favor of soupy, riff-driven compositions that borrow from UK fetishes past: burbling acid house, elegant Detroit techno, big beat.

Drone Logic

Daniel Avery occupies an odd spot amongst underground dance producers: he values largesse. Aspiring to the kind of big-room, anthem-wielding sound the Chemical Brothers perfected in the mid 90s—and, one presumes, their career trajectory—Avery eschews the hyper-rhythmic minimalism and throwback New Jersey garage sound that currently power UK club music in favor of soupy, riff-driven compositions that borrow from UK fetishes past: burbling acid house, elegant Detroit techno, big beat.
Don't mistake Avery's ambition with that of big-tent super-producers. With the blessing of UK legend Andrew Weatherall—who once summed Avery's sound as "gimmick-free machine-funk of the highest order"—Avery cut his teeth as a resident DJ at London's Fabric, an epic, expertly tuned soundsystem whose main floor is outfitted with bass transducers for a more immersive experience. The tracks on his debut LP Drone Logic feel tailored to this kind of high-end environment: crisp, thrumming tunes that proudly prance over a wide spectrum of frequencies. The album feels decadent, like one-percenter techno: rave music made for the best systems, to be played by the most talented DJs, drawing only from the purest eras of British dance exceptionalism.
Avery keeps his rhythmic patterns simple, drawing most of his drum sounds from pre-approved house and techno palates, and he does this to better showcase his big, groovy synth riffs. Drone Logic is overlong at nearly 70 minutes, but at no point does Avery want for melodic ideas. He loads the tracks full of acid-dusted basslines and stabbing synths, occasionally punctuating key moments with short vocal samples. Tracks like "All I Need" can feel a little cluttered, not because Avery overstuffs them but because they he never just lays in the groove; ideas and melodies are constantly being advanced. Drone Logic smartly reprises successes from Avery's early EPs, opening things up with an "album version" of the deep, hypnotic "Water Jump" and later delving into the springy sci-fi of "Need Electric".
Avery's avoidance of breakbeats and his heavily melodic approach means there's a lot of Detroit in his sound, especially second-wave stalwarts like Anthony "Shake" Shakir and Carl Craig, the first generation of producers with the luxury of building on a template already defined for them. Avery's at his best at his most tuneful and romantic. "These Nights Never End" compliments a roiling 303 bassline with a lapping, progressive synth melody and hissy strings, occasionally pulling back to allow the bassline room to tickle your hips. The crisp, sugary closer "Knowing We'll Be Here" drops a candied vocal sample among fizzing keyboards and a simple, hypnotic chord progression. Avery's lush psychedelics flirt with trance music, and Drone Logic often plays like a more urban version of James Holden and Nathan Fake's pastoral sprawl.
It's not hard to spot Avery's influences, and while his sound is by no means modern, it's a different kind of retro than that being proffered by his peers. Add to that its pristine production and Drone Logic feels modern, but miles away from the zeitgeist. Avery owns this space, and there's a refreshing self-assuredness to Drone Logic, which, combined with Avery's careful hand and his connections, can come off as predestined. You might find it too retro, or just not hip enough, but there is zero second-guessing on Avery's part: never does he glance over his shoulder with a nod to UK bass culture or a capitulate to a straight house track. Avery's singular vision might've left him a man without a country, but Drone Logic's undeniable heft and silky craft ensure he'll have plenty of takers.


I remember being particularly excited to hear Tujiko Noriko when Shojo Toshi was released a year\n\ and a half ...

Make Me Hard

I remember being particularly excited to hear Tujiko Noriko when Shojo Toshi was released a year and a half ago. At first, there was a certain novelty in knowing that the somewhat unclassifiable Austrian Mego label, often responsible for a blend of heavy noise processing with a sweet undercurrent, would be introducing a wholehearted pop album. "100% nerdy glitch-boy free," read the press release. Upon finally hearing the album, the novelty was completely irrelevant. Shojo Toshi seemed to shed the antisocial shield and intrinsic self-aware cynicism of our rich lineage of electronic music. A welcome contrast to tongue-in-cheek hip-hop references (obsessively aiming at a mundane form of subversion), those who think the vibraphone is the end-all and be-all of exciting music, and the token group of run-of-the-mill noisemongers. Aesthetically moving and impervious to inane musical politics, Tujiko Noriko had the potential to appeal to more than just elitist art snobs.
The collage cover of Shojo Toshi, designed by Noriko's visual art team, SlideLab, explains the music better than I can. On the left side, a soldier sits atop a skyscraper, further down a businessman talks on a cellphone, and on the right, Noriko hides under a mushroom, shooting a baguette in their direction. The images are comical, inviting, and full of pathos, but perhaps what's most striking is SlideLab's restraint. A good portion of the cover is left to a monochromatic cream tint, allowing plenty of space for the drama to unfold within. Noriko's music is achingly similar, a singular, monochromatic chord progression or beat is spread over the length of each song, often pushing around six minutes, and is punctuated by masterful arrangements of sound borrowed from the surrounding world, be it a businessman on a cellphone or a tape-recorded orchestra.
Make Me Hard is a refinement of these ideas. The interjections of found melodies, concrete noise, affecting sense of disparate elements matched together, and the real selling point, Noriko's extremely emotive voice, are all placed in the expansive background of repetition. Noriko seems to narrate the surreal environment of her album, and the encompassing sense of autobiography adds to the unique allure of the work.
The songs seem colossal in duration, even more sonically dense than before, and yet somehow restricted in scope. There are many different textural, cultural, and personal ideas at play on Make Me Hard, and Noriko has built what seems like a much-too rigid form for their display. The songs, while often achieving breathtaking eloquence, occasionally rely too heavily on Noriko's well-explored ethereal and repetitive modes. The strengths and weaknesses of the album fit clearly into this design. If Noriko's work didn't expand small fragments of life into broad, encompassing, and passionate epics, it would lose much of its charm, yet the music, in its far-reaching and complex toggling through thousands of pieces of aural detritus, throbs for a next step.
There is a sense that this album might've been better served as either an epic, single piece, with attention paid to an overall sense of unity, or shortened by about 20 minutes, tightening the ends of the songs as they stand. Yet, this in no way undermines the great strides Noriko has taken with Make Me Hard. Despite comparisons to Phew, Haco, and even Björk, Noriko's style and personality seem without obvious precedent. Make Me Hard, while imperfect, is full of color and obsessed with the joy of observation. And, oh yeah, it's all in Japanese. Good luck.


The country singer-songwriter’s sharp and conversational third album transforms everyday pathos into widescreen dramas.

Your Life Is a Record

Plenty of songwriters could find pathos in a pawn shop. A small-town staple full of other people’s heirlooms, hawked at bargain prices—it’s an easy vessel for tugging heartstrings. Brandy Clark understands this. “No one goes into a pawn shop on the best day of their life,” she joked while introducing a new song, called “Pawn Shop,” at a recent concert. And yet, her ballad pleasantly averts expectations. It’s at once tragic and kind of pathetic, filled with conversational asides to remind you that this isn’t just any pawn shop: it’s a specific one, with a specific address (Charlotte Avenue) where her characters—a recent divorcee and a failed musician—choose to unload their well-loved possessions. “Someone told me it costs a lot,” she sings. “Man, ain’t that the truth.”
A dejected mumble turned into a sweeping chorus, it’s a prime example of the Washington-born country songwriter’s gifts. Her lyrics are so sharp and conversational that it often takes a minute to realize just how much she’s saying. Take, for example, her 2013 song “Stripes,” where a woman assures her cheating partner that she’d risk spending the rest of her life behind bars to enact her revenge—only thing is, she’s not crazy about the wardrobe change: “I hate stripes,” she muses, “and orange ain’t my color.” Clark’s characters often find themselves in these situations, caught between fantasy and humdrum reality, rehearsing their comebacks as they study their own disappointed expression in the mirror.  Even when she worked behind the scenes, penning songs with artists like Miranda Lambert and Kacey Musgraves, her distinct voice always came through: “This ain’t my mama’s broken heart” went the chorus to Lambert’s hit single co-written with Clark, and the message was clear: that song had already been written. It was her turn now.
Clark’s third album as a solo artist, Your Life Is a Record, furthers her search for new stories, even if the emotional territory is more familiar. It’s a break-up album, less focused on wordplay and punchlines than universal truths. And while her songwriting continues to avoid the obvious path, her arrangements decidedly do not. Produced by Jay Joyce, an in-demand Nashville figure who’s worked with Eric Church and Keith Urban among many others, the album bursts with orchestral flourishes and horn sections, swelling to symphonic extremes that can feel distracting during the ballads and pointedly ironic on the lighter fare. The latter approach suggests the ornate, tragicomic work of Randy Newman, and indeed, the man himself lends vocals to a song called “Bigger Boat” that would fit seamlessly in his own repertoire. For Clark, it’s more of a stretch, especially considering the way her two previous albums—2013’s 12 Stories and 2016’s Big Day in a Small Town—paired intimate stories with textures to match. She now challenges herself to locate her characters in more dramatic settings, where their small-town worries feel colossal and cinematic.
It’s a goal she alludes to in the opening “I’ll Be the Sad Song,” where she introduces the metaphor of life as a long but purposefully structured album. In that context, many of these songs might represent those moments when you just need to lose yourself in the sound. Even more than the attempts to soundtrack those helpless feelings (“Love Is a Fire,” “Apologies”), the best moments are when Clark fights through the heartbreak to find her own footing again. In a standout called “Can We Be Strangers” (as in, “We struck out as lovers/We struck out as friends”), she sings over a lush, easygoing groove about the perspective that comes once you’ve moved past missing the good times and you’re just trudging through the bad ones. Clear-eyed and defiant, it’s a breakup song for when you’ve worn out all the old breakup songs and you’re just ready to get moving again.
A similar epiphany takes place in “Who You Thought I Was,” the album’s glowing centerpiece and one of Clark’s finest songs to date. It was inspired by an award-show speech from John Prine—another idiomatic writer concerned with our least romantic types of tragedies. When the 73-year-old icon found himself faced with a standing ovation, he addressed the crowd: “Well, I’m John Prine…but I’d like to go back to being who you thought I was.” His joke suggested a career-long discomfort with acclaim, but Clark sings of a more intimate dynamic. In the verses, she unfolds a lifetime’s worth of aspirations—to be a rock star, to stay young forever—and realizes that the closest she came was simply being in the presence of somebody who saw the best in her. It’s a sad realization, sung in the aftermath of a breakup, but she pairs it with the record’s most surprising and uplifting arrangement. Even when the words sound like the end of the road, the music pushes her to believe that maybe next time, she’ll get it right.

Buy: Rough Trade
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What happens when an introvert becomes an extrovert? Alessia Cara is finding out, after she signed with Def Jam and her loner's anthem "Here" crashed airwaves. Four Pink Walls strays from those solitary songs that gave Cara her start, and that's not a good thing.

Four Pink Walls EP

Alessia Cara struck an introvert’s pose on her April debut, "Here", and found herself famous. The single’s sound perfectly matched the attitude of its lyrics: a minor-key piano loop anchored a surprisingly powerful series of verses about a miserable party experience. "Really, I would rather be at home by myself," Cara sang, demonstrating a well-defined personality and no small amount of self-assuredness. People noticed. "Here" debuted at #4 on the Billboard/Twitter Emerging Artists Chart. Lorde, Taylor Swift, and Drake co-signed her. The New York Times profiled her.
Less than six months later, she's made a fast transition from ostensible outsider to insider. An "antisocial pessimist" who’d rather not have been invited to the party in the first place is quite suddenly the toast of the pop scene, her songs in heavy rotation on Beats 1. Cara finds herself a priority for Def Jam. They’ve quickly capitalized on her success with an EP, Four Pink Walls, which packages "Here" next to four other songs, three of which are very different from that first hit.
Cara has a strong voice but lacks the power of an Ariana Grande, let alone a Mariah or a Whitney. Nevertheless, the label seems to think she’s best off belting anthems on the familiar subjects of teenage-dom. "Seventeen" kicks off the record with a vocal loop, a simulated handclap, and stirring chords that build into a hook about listening to your parents and appreciating your youth. Sometimes you can hear Cara’s spiky attitude poke through the sweet, pop polish. For instance, in response to her mother’s earnest advice about staying grounded, Cara rolls her eyes: "Yeah, I guess that sounded nice when I was 10."
But—spoiler alert—she accepts the advice, and it becomes the song's focus. This sense of giving in to conventionality is also present on the record’s other anthem, the even catchier "I’m Yours", which, with its fluttery melodies and earthshaking chorus, could have fit in nicely on the Haim album. Some of "I'm Yours" is seemingly meant to reflect an antisocial pose—this time toward a guy—but it's more poutily flirtatious than anything else. "Oh how rude of you, to ruin my miserable, and tell me I’m beautiful," she sings. "I'm mad at you for being so cute."
There’s no reason to expect Cara to be permanently frozen into a charmingly grouchy position. But the specificity of "Here" has given way to blander, faux-outcast posing. "Seventeen" and "I’m Yours" are both well-constructed pop songs, sugary lyrics and all, and it’s easy to imagine them as huge hits. The worst track here, as its name suggests, is "Outlaws". Its cheerful, burping horn and tinkling keys don’t seem to do anything for Cara, as she croons that her partner is "the shine into her star." She sounds properly Stepford-ized, almost completely without her personality.
That leaves us with the title track, a boom-bap, neo-soul closer that shares more musical DNA with "Here" than anything else on the EP. And suddenly, the girl with her own opinions and feelings is back. She sounds comfortable vocally, and you can hear shades of Lauryn Hill (who Cara has said she admires) and Erykah Badu. This is also the track where Cara lets us back into her shyness. She tells the story of her sudden fame, going "from ‘when boredom strikes’ to ‘Ms. Star on the Rise,’" she sings. "But those four pink walls, I kind of miss them, man."
The four pink walls are her bedroom, where she was first discovered posting clips to YouTube, before she was snatched up by Universal Music Group. Early fans of those raw recordings may be less than happy that she's given into the customary tropes of bubblegum pop. And Cara herself sounds a little unsure about leaving behind the walls she knew so well for ones that may end up holding her back.


Shackleton, who has made himself a genre of one with his dark, dramatic dub-inspired work, takes a turn toward the operatic.

Devotional Songs

When Sam Shackleton moved to Berlin in 2008, it was easy to assume that, trading one scene for another, he was abandoning dubstep for techno. There was plenty of cross-pollination between the two genres at the time, much of it ascribed to Shackleton and his own Skull Disco label. The British artist came from the darkest, dankest corners of the bass music scene, yet Ricardo Villalobos was playing out his tracks; indeed, Villalobos even remixed “Blood on My Hands” into a hair-raising after-hours anthem, paving the way for Shackleton to release his debut album on Perlon, the iconic minimal techno label.
In retrospect, though, it looks more like Shackleton, true to his name, was setting off for points unknown, points that can't be found on any of the usual techno-tourist maps of the German capital. Holed up in Neukölln in a kind of self-imposed exile, Shackleton has progressively estranged himself from established sounds. Instead, he has invented his own tonal and textural language, turning into a genre of one in the process. Since 2010, when he launched his Woe to the Septic Heart! label, he has channeled his dub bass lines and vaguely Middle Eastern percussion into an increasingly complex and porous weave of deep hues, glistening timbres, smeared echo, and rippling polyrhythms, dappled with shadow and overlaid with spoken-word vocals that read like scraps of dream logic.
His masterpiece so far has been 2012's Music for the Quiet Hour / The Drawbar Organ EPs, a box set combining tense rhythm studies and ambient sketches with a sprawling, psychedelic suite in the vein of Coil’s Musick to Play in the Dark. That set ran nearly two-and-a-half hours long, but with 2014's Freezing Opening Thawing, he proved that he could say just as much in more concise formats: The three-track, 24-minute EP was his most rhythmically and timbrally dazzling work to date.
Devotional Songs follows seamlessly from his past half-decade’s worth of releases. Featuring the bright colors and staccato attack of mallet player Raphael Meinhart and the fluid lines of keyboardist/accordionist Takumi Motokawa, it is his most compositionally ambitious work yet: four long tracks, three of them between 10 and 13 minutes long, full of cycling arpeggios and intricate counterpoints and wild cadenzas throwing off harmonic sparks. It is the least obviously electronic thing he has ever done: For long stretches, acoustic and electric timbres dominate, with Shackleton’s synthesizers and effects frequently relegated to a background role, and much of the time, there's no percussion at all, save for Meinhart’s vibraphone and marimba. Elsewhere, Shackleton’s drums have never sounded less like machines. It’s easy to imagine these songs, suffused as they are in bells and chimes, being performed in some misty clearing high on a Japanese mountaintop, with nary a power strip in sight.
But the album breaks from the rest of Shackleton’s catalog in one very important way. This isn’t the first time he’s worked with vocals; much of his early work featured gravelly dub poetry from his frequent collaborator Vengeance Tenfold. But this is the first time he has ever worked with a singer. And Devotional Songs’ featured performer is not just any vocalist; it’s Ernesto Tomasini, a four-octave opera singer from Palermo whose CV includes both classical opera and collaborations with Coil’s Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson and Nurse With Wound’s Andrew Liles; For a time, he performed in clubs as the Electro Castrato. It’s his voice that gives Devotional Songs its unmistakable character, less opera than British progressive rock of the ’70s. His melodies often resemble virtuosic updates to This Heat’s incantations; occasionally, his open-ended melodies suggest a more sinister version of Dead Can Dance’s Brendan Perry.
Shackleton has always had a flair for the dramatic—his label is, after all, called Woe to the Septic Heart!—but Devotional Songs is orders of magnitude more theatrical, beginning with Tomasini’s booming voice and extravagant enunciation. The lyrics are goth bordering on camp. “Don’t look behind, don’t look back/All signs point to our untimely death,” runs the refrain of “Twelve Shared Addictions,” an abject listicle (“Twelve shared addictions/eleven filthy thoughts/ten relentless traumas,” etc.) that splits the difference between “The Twelve Days of Christmas” and Swans’ fetishism of failure. The droning, birdsong-laced “Rinse Out All Contaminants” is visited by “the pounding fist of malcontent”; in the spooky “You Are the One,” Tomasini sings of plagues and boiling blood in a querulous voice, while the ominous chants of “Father, You Have Left Me” make James Blake’s take on filial abandonment look like a Hallmark movie in comparison.
Devotional Songs is occasionally—often, even—heavy going. It possesses a certain Janus-faced quality, to use a metaphor I’m sure Shackleton and Tomasini would appreciate, flitting from cool, hypnotic instrumental passages into full-on breast-beating mode. But the album is also possessed of a sly sense of humor. Its excesses have a cartoonish aspect that are in keeping with the Zeke Clough’s gory cover art for Skull Disco and Woe to the Septic Heart!; they render Shackleton's bathetic tendencies—let’s not forget that he once wrote a song about watching the Twin Towers fall on 9/11—with a welcome nudge and wink. Devotional Songs is an album that no one but Shackleton could have made, and its unexpected turn to the operatic suggests that Shackleton’s own septic heart may be sweeter than anyone had previously thought—and that, in any case, it certainly hasn’t run out of surprises.


The Vancouver singer-songwriter lays everything bare on his latest record.

“Ouch”

“You learn that so much of the fear and anxiety that exists about letting people know what’s going on with you is so much your own thing,” Nicholas Krgovich said in a recent interview with Discorder magazine, a realization borne of a “newfound interest in clarity and transparency.” From this he has derived a lesson: “No one cares, basically.” This well-fuck-it attitude helps account for Krogvich’s extraordinary candor. On his latest album “Ouch”, the Vancouver singer-songwriter lays everything bare, divulging private pains without a shadow of reserve or self-consciousness.
“Ouch” was a provoked by a breakup—Krgovich’s first, despite being 35 at the time of the album’s writing. Over the course of 12 grief-stricken, heavy-hearted songs, he relays the anguish of being left by a man he loved a great deal. The aftermath seethes with dejection and despondency, torments that seem in the moment permanent, with no prospect of relief. “I wake up and I hate this room/And I hate this coffee/And I hate this food,” he laments with grim conviction on “Goofy,” coming off as almost childishly inconsolable. “It’s hard to imagine a time when I won’t at least feel a shade this way.” At no point on “Ouch” does this hurt ease up.
The juvenile quality of Krgovich’s heartache, miserable in the most self-pitying way, is not a shortcoming. Instead, it captures truthfully the experience of being dumped—in all its callow, hair-pulling, feet-stomping injustice. “No amount of Jonathan Richman, Hafiz and Alain de Botton is stopping me/From screaming ‘fuck you’ into the air,” Krgovich croons blithely on “Spa.” “No amount of going out and spending time with friends pretending that you don’t exist/Is doing anything.” It hardly flatters Krgovich to sound this sullen and resentful. Yet he never downplays the pettiness he’s feeling, for the sake of tact or dignity, instead embracing the part of the bitterly jilted.
Risking embarrassment in this way is a brave gambit, and it works on “Ouch” because Krgovich fully commits to the truth, or at least his side of it. When he confides the particulars of the relationship and its strange, uneven dynamics on “Guilt,” his reflections feel like the product of someone unflinchingly honest with his own weaknesses. “I spent all my 20s/Atrophied, barely alive,” he sings. “Thought that might even the playing field/A nice thought, but a lie.” Krgovich is honest enough about his anger to direct rancor at his ex but he is smart—and given the circumstances, gallant—enough to share the blame.
Even at his most overtly forlorn Krgovich keeps things jaunty: “Everything’s fine I guess/But I wish I were dead,” he sings on “Hinoki,” but the tone is distinctly sunny, his delicate voice awash in twangy acoustic guitar and some ethereal backing “oohs” and “ahhs.” An occasional saxophone solo whisks “Ouch” into rosy yacht rock territory, or perhaps into the realm of Destroyer’s Kaputt, with which this album shares an affinity for a retro smooth-jazz and soft-rock aesthetic. And on a half-dozen tracks he makes use of analog drum loops courtesy of Owen Ashworth, whose project Casiotone for the Painfully Alone practically trademarked this kind of intimate-ebullient melancholy.
In a kind of introductory essay to the album published on his Bandcamp page, Krgovich writes effusively about a “WTF With Marc Maron” podcast featuring Lorde. “She had just put out a breakup album and said something like she didn’t write about the specifics of the relationship because she didn’t want to build a totem to this one particular person,” Krgovich explains. “What I had just made with “Ouch” was all specificity.” It’s an instructive comparison. While Melodrama has the universal scope of not just a breakup but the breakup, about all breakups, “Ouch” is utterly, unapologetically about Krgovich’s own, an album of unvarnished particulars and graphic details. That doesn’t make “Ouch” less relatable. It has the opposite effect. Its specificity is what makes it ring true.


The ambient composer turns his attention to the skies, sourcing an epic, heart-stirring sound from gravitational waves emanated by two massive black holes that collided 1.3 billion years ago.

On Time Out of Time

William Basinski’s oeuvre stretches back to the 1980s, but only in the 21st century was he finally recognized and exalted for his work. Even if the Twin Towers hadn’t fallen, Basinski’s profound music might eventually have found an audience, but within a year of its release, The Disintegration Loops—a fragile ambient set, recorded from crumbling magnetic tapes shortly before 9/11, that he paired with haunting video of Manhattan’s damaged skyline, shot from his Brooklyn rooftop—went from being a music archivist’s worst nightmare to a profound meditation on death, loss, and decay, earning Basinski his long-overdue accolades. (He’s even become meme-worthy.) In the stream of music that has followed, Basinski continues to strike a singular balance between past and present, beauty and noise, signal and silence.
The title On Time Out of Time would fit virtually any of Basinski’s releases, since most of his music is based on encounters between the past and the present, be they recordings sourced from shortwave radio or old lo-fi piano loops, both drawn from tapes that had lain dormant in his archives for decades. But On Time reaches a little bit further into the past. As part of a collaboration with artists Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand, working under the aegis of the MIT- and Caltech-operated Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (or LIGO), Basinski utilized deep-space recordings captured by LIGO’s interferometers. Two decades of decay informed the tapes behind The Disintegration Loops, but the sounds of On Time Out of Time date from 1.3 billion years ago, when two massive black holes merged and the resultant gravitational waves rippled across our universe. Or, as Basinski glibly put it when presenting the piece live, it’s what it sounds like “when two black holes fuck.”
The 39-minute composition may draw from deep in the universe, but it retains the telltale intimacy of all Basinski’s work. There are spectral drones, the warm crackle of static, the squiggle of radio frequencies in the night air. “It was just coming from the sky,” Basinski used to say of his culling method, one hand on the dial of his shortwave radio. As much as the use of space recordings is aligned with Basinski’s method, it also harks back to his own childhood, growing up in Houston, where his father worked for NASA in the early 1970s.
There’s nothing inherently warm about the signals that LIGO picked up. Considered separately, most of the sounds here convey all the chilly eeriness of the void of deep space. It’s a buzz that brings to mind inhuman things: microwaves, quasars, the fluorescent lights at Office Depot. But Basinski weaves these transmissions into something far more evocative. A small, quivering high frequency resonates some four minutes in, adding a brief glimpse of warmth before vanishing back out of range. Bass thuds like cannons fired from a distant galaxy boom from deep within the mix. Something luminous and large emerges, lingering like the Carina Nebula. Time seems to disappear from consideration.
Basinski leads us to drift for a good 24 minutes before a slow fade overtakes the piece, nearing silence and complete blackness. But, ever so carefully, the otherworldly tones return and Basinski draws us back in. Way out here, in a corner of the universe that humans will presumably never reach, Basinski employs the most inhuman of elements to find and amplify the mournful heart in the middle of a black hole. Just as The Disintegration Loops conjured the elegiac out of the encroaching abyss, On Time Out of Time makes the billion-year-old buzz of two neutron stars into something heart-stirring.
The CD and digital-only piece “4(E+D)4(ER=EPR)” is also culled from the 2017 installations that yielded “On Time Out of Time.” It clocks in at under 10 minutes and features similar elements, but arranged with more momentum, the loops closer in spirit to the placid moments of Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS project. It feels slight in comparison to the main event here. But the epic title track looms large, up with the other heavenly bodies—be they floating or fucking—in Basinski’s night sky.