Soft-hearted and whisper-voiced, Chicago singer-songwriter Jessica Viscius’ band reflects on loneliness and loss with no hint of resentment.

One Million Love Songs

There is a special ache that sets in after any big ending. It doesn’t need to be a breakup; it could be a death, moving out of an apartment, or settling in for bedtime at the end of an especially perfect day. Throughout their seven-year career, Chicago soft rockers Bnny have sat in this wounded sadness like a frog on a pond. Their second album, One Million Love Songs, finds power in it, using rough-hewn layers of guitar to break open singer-songwriter Jessica Viscius’ teary-eyed world.
Viscius’ grief-struck 2021 debut, Everything, excavated some of her pain following the 2017 death of her partner, the musician Trey Gruber. (Viscius is also a former graphic designer for Pitchfork.) It was slow and frostbitten, with Viscius’ voice interrupting cold silences like dust, but One Million Love Songs furnishes the abandoned house with a more delirious form of acceptance. Constant disappointment is okay, or at least tolerable, because it proves you’re alive. “I’m just born blue,” Viscius sings on the anthemic “Crazy, Baby,” dripping with Angel Olsen’s melted ice cream inflection.
Bnny’s sorrow flows from a breakup, this time. Wednesday producer Alex Farrar helps make it brighter with little rhinestone details, like the heartbeat thump of the drums on “Get It Right” that propels Viscius’ promise that “I’m trying, I’m trying, I’m trying.” “Good Stuff” sparkles like a ruby slipper, spinning out into a Sheryl Crow chorus: “I’m hanging on/To the sunshine,” Viscius sings with abandon, like she turned up the car radio, “I’m hanging on/To my big love.”
But, unlike comparable breakup music—“burn it down and pack it into a lipstick tube” albums like Jagged Little Pill or, more recently, Sour—One Million Love Songs is never indignant. It doesn’t imagine keying anyone’s pickup truck. Bnny’s music feels more like surrendering to the “million” disappointing outcomes of love, the introverted antithesis to the Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs: the urgent need to acknowledge that you could end up alone. The firefly blink of the acoustic closing track, “No One,” makes this abundantly clear. “Burned some bridges/And burned some doors/Now no one loves me anymore,” sings Viscius, resigned. So, what should you do—lash out? No, you savor the mystery.
Sometimes, the lyrics on One Million Love Songs unhelpfully pull you from your seat just when it’s just starting to get good. Lines like “trying to walk straight/But I’m stumbling/Trying to forget you/But I’m struggling” feel more like getting lost in RhymeZone than in Viscius’ otherwise lovely garden. But the album masters melancholy anyway, using careful guitar and vocal flourishes to make the music’s embryonic self-consciousness feel urgent, like it’s yours. There’s power in reclaiming unhappiness, allowing it to become a piece of your heart instead of a weight on your back.


The Buffalo rapper’s new project is another serving of glamorous beat loops and gaudy raps delivered with the confidence of someone who believes that all of their thoughts belong in the MoMA.

Who Made the Sunshine

No Westside Gunn project stands alone. Each release is like a Marvel movie, made to raise the profile of his Griselda Records brand and introduce new rappers into his tight-knit community of collaborators. If it happens to be really good, that’s a bonus. A Westside Gunn project has both a floor and a ceiling: The worst are not so bad, and the best are exciting, but just a notch below great. Most importantly though, they’re reliable, like a Toyota that’s good on gas and only has to go to the shop once a year.
Westside Gunn’s new album, Who Made the Sunshine, is exactly what you would expect: glamorous beat loops and gaudy raps delivered with the confidence of someone who believes that all of their thoughts belong in the MoMA. His standout solo moment is “Big Basha’s,” where Gunn weaves between grimy and swanky bars. “Glock next to my nuts, Balenciagas oversized,” he says, on Daringer and Beat Butcha production that would suit dinner on a yacht. But outside of “Big Basha’s” the album is less a showcase for Westside Gunn, than for his favorite rising emcees, underground stalwarts, and hip-hop legends.
If you were to rank the top five verses on Who Made the Sunshine, I’m not sure any of them would belong to Westside Gunn. On the eight-minute posse cut “Frank Murphy,” for instance, five guests leave their mark on a soothing Conductor Williams beat. Most notably, the Syracuse native Stove God Cooks mentions that his plug resembles Razor Ramon, compares an act of violence to the Rocky training montage, and offers possibly the first Bruce Bowen name-drop in at least a decade, all in one unforgettable minute. Similarly, “All Praises” overcomes unnecessary Westside Gunn crooning through mellow Alchemist production, a radiant Boldy James verse, and Jadakiss, who never fails to be timely: “Everybody woke now, they want us to vote now/COVID-19 is the stamp on the dope now.”
But Westside Gunn deserves credit for his Kanye-like ability to seamlessly work anyone into his world. The best example of this is a pair of Slick Rick features, which Gunn treats carefully. Each verse is slotted at the end of their respective tracks, for maximum reverence. On “Ocean Prime,” following an overly intense Busta Rhymes, the beat becomes slightly less busy and draws you in, as if Gunn’s afraid you’ll miss a word of Rick’s verse. On both songs, Rick sounds ageless and sly; “Goodnight” is like the moment when a wrestling forefather makes their long-awaited return to Monday Night Raw.
Yet, as far as Westside Gunn projects go, the loops here are less memorable and consistent than his better records (see: Pray for Paris and Flygod). Tracks like Daringer and Beat Butcha’s “The Butcher and the Blade” and “Ishkabibble’s” are fine, but they sound like leftovers from Kool G Rap’s 4,5,6 that have been cleaned up and polished—they could use some mud. Daringer and Beat Butcha are responsible for seven of the 11 tracks, and they make up for the few misfires with splashes of greatness, like “Lessie,” which includes a nostalgia-invoking sample resembling an ice-cream truck jingle. But it’s these slight inconsistencies that separate the more successful Westside Gunn projects from the forgettable ones. Who Made the Sunshine falls somewhere in the middle, and doesn’t feel like it was devised to be anything more than what it is: another step toward the expansion of the Griselda Records brand.

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Josh Davis' third album is an odd mélange of exotica, hyphy, and alt-rock, featuring guest spots by both David Banner and Christina Carter. No, really.

The Outsider

On his first two albums, DJ Shadow-- mired in memories of Eric B., Brian Eno, and the Meters-- seemed worlds away from the conceits of mainstream rap. But underneath his detached exterior lies all the egoism and paranoia of the best hip-hop stars: "There are songs on [The Outsider] that I think blow away almost anything else I've ever done. One thing’s for sure-- it's going to make it very difficult for people to imitate my sound," Shadow posted on his website. It wasn't just talk. His new album slyly sabotages the biters: Who'd be dumb enough to copycat all this watered-down exotica and epileptic hyphy?
It'd be impossible to "sound" like Shadow anyway, since there's no consistency (or any distinctive elements, really) to be found here. In fact, The Outsider may be one of the least cohesive records this year. Its total incoherence is actually kind of impressive: It's somehow even less structured than both the motley singles comp Preemptive Strike, and UNKLE's Psyence Fiction, which managed to begin with Kool G Rap and end with Metallica's bassist.
So then, The Outsider makes a pretty apt title: This album should alienate virtually everyone who's ever been a Shadow fan. Trance divas won't tolerate its madcap hyphy collaborations, cratediggers will shun its middling alt-rock tributes, and everyone else will wonder why samples and breaks are replaced by lukewarm synth washes. Nearly every track seems like a rote genre exercise, as if Shadow spent the past four years perfecting a parlor trick. Granted, The Outsider's hip-hop tracks are better than its rock-influenced ones, but that's a backhanded compliment: Shadow's tracks are so dense and claustrophobic that even the most manic MCs-- Keak Da Sneak, the Federation, and David Banner-- falter amidst the onslaught.
That said, the production is sometimes engrossing, and occasionally more: Both "3 Freaks" and "Turf Dancing" at times flirt with something close to genius, popping with burped blips, convulsive beats, and synthesized froth. The grinding mixes echo everything from Too $hort to Computer World, and the psychotically dour "Keep 'Em Close" spreads coked-out cant over submarine sonar and icy department-store piano. But all these songs succumb to lazy speak-sing choruses that dull the clinical anger of their verses.
The record peaks with David Banner's elegy to New Orleans. Part séance, part TV-movie, Banner's performance perversely resembles Katrina itself: Everything gets a hell of a lot whiter when it's over. Suddenly, the high-adrenaline hip-hop bids us adieu, to be replaced mostly by monotonous alt-rock instrumentals that play like a tour through mid-90s KROQ playlists. The Martin Denny vibe (complete with birdcalls!) of "The Tiger" is completely insufferable; the Southeast Asian strings of "Triplicate/Something Happened That Day" are littered with amateur field recordings; and while "You Made It" (featuring Charalambides' Christina Carter) is patently ridiculous, at least its ostentatious spoken-word will be familiar to Shadow fans. The same can't be said of "Erase You"'s insipid Britpop bullshit. The only rock-tinged success here is "Artifact"-- and its smoldering acceleration, funk synths, and pent-up thrash might as well be a mash-up of the Count Five and Bad Brains.
Again, most listeners won't have the luxury of praising or penalizing Shadow for his efforts. It's difficult to even discern whether his recent interest in pop production might prove rewarding with the benefit of hindsight. Nearly everything this record offers-- from the garbled hyphy to the Private Press soundalikes-- is lackluster, if not downright disappointing. Incoherence is not necessarily a fatal flaw, but accompanied by tedium and confusion, The Outsider sounds like a chore-- to record, to listen to, and to review.


In the early 1980s, the Glasgow pop duo Strawberry Switchblade were a band with many possible futures. This raw three-song demo catches a glimpse of the group they could have become.

Strawberry Switchblade: 1982 4-Piece Demo

1982 4-Piece Demo

The story of Strawberry Switchblade is a reminder of just how small the alternative music scene was in the early 1980s, and how deeply its subcultures intertwined. Formed in 1980 in Glasgow by Jill Bryson and Rose McDowall, the pair’s eye-catching look—gothic Geisha in polka dot dresses and black lace gloves—set them apart from their immediate peers, the buttoned-up young men of the Postcard Records scene. Their early live performances caught the attention of John Peel, for whom they recorded a BBC session. But with renegade A&R man Bill Drummond—later to form pop terrorists the KLF—installed as the group’s manager, Strawberry Switchblade turned to face the mainstream.
Their 1984 single “Since Yesterday” was a breezily nostalgic electronic pop song that McDowall later claimed was about nuclear war. It broached the UK Top 10, propelled the duo onto the cover of Smash Hits, and made them officially big in Japan—screaming fans, limousines, the works. Strawberry Switchblade split acrimoniously two years later. By now, though, McDowall was a face on the post-industrial scene, singing with Psychic TV, Coil, and the neofolk groups Current 93 and Death in June. She was also hanging out with a young Björk, then part of Icelandic anarcho-punk band Kukl.
For a group that lasted just one album, this is a long and tangled history, and one that Glasgow label Night School have made it their task to unknot. In 2015, Night School released McDowall’s lost post-Switchblade LP Cut With the Cake Knife, and they follow now with this—a seven-inch of previously unreleased music from Switchblade’s earliest days. 4-Piece Demo lines up three songs in 10 minutes, and it passes quick. Captured while the group was briefly a quartet, completed by bassist Janice Goodlett and drummer Carole McGowan, this recording captures a Strawberry Switchblade only hinted at by their existing recordings: a cutie garage group hiding something desperate and nihilistic beneath their gently shambolic exterior.
The sweet-savage juxtaposition of Strawberry Switchblade’s name found echo in their music. Bryson and McDowall wrote songs that sounded winsome and naive, but spoke of an emotional desolation that was anything but contrived. In interviews, McDowall has spoken of her hard-knock upbringing in a Glasgow sink estate, where violence was rife and she watched her six-year-old brother die following a beating. Bryson, meanwhile, suffered from extreme agoraphobia, writing about her condition on Strawberry Switchblade’s debut single “Trees and Flowers.” The version here, pared down to droning guitar and clumpy drums, is some of the sweetest fear and loathing that you ever heard. “I hate the trees/And I hate the flowers/And I hate the buildings/And the way they tower over me,” sings McDowall. The song closes with a lament: “Can’t you see/I get so frightened/No one else seems frightened/Only me, only me…”
One song here is wholly new. With its hopscotch rhythms, keening harmonies, and squirming bass, “Spanish Song (Don’t Go)” would sound like textbook C86 were it not for the mariachi guitar outro that starts out halting and ends close to joyous. Meanwhile, “Go Away” offers another glimpse of how Strawberry Switchblade’s debut album might have sounded. The version that appeared two years later is a high-gloss thing, all breathy synths and pseudo-oriental melodies—but this take, with its wispy Velvets jangle and gently deflating chorus, arguably captures the song’s lyric of sorrowful abandonment all the more keenly.
Completing the package is liner notes written by Stephen Pastel, a friend of Strawberry Switchblade who, around the time these songs were recorded, was busy prepping the debut single by his own young group, the Pastels. Their music was, like that found on 4-Piece Demo, a little primitive and rough around the edges, but full of creativity and life. The Pastels would kickstart a whole new indie-pop fanzine culture, though, and prove extraordinarily resilient, remaining an ongoing concern today. Strawberry Switchblade were a band with many possible futures, and this demo offers just a fleeting glimpse of the group they could have become.


Bloc Party’s serene fifth LP observes the void of evangelism in present pop culture, and tries to fill it. But there’s an awkward sense that frontman Kele Okereke is clutching at spiritual straws, rather than relating an honest-to-God epiphany.

Hymns

Shortly before Arctic Monkeys came along, you could divide UK indie into three camps: It started with the Libertines, then came Franz Ferdinand, and finally Bloc Party, a four-piece from London's New Cross. Each songwriter commanded his own archetype—back-alley dreamers Pete and Carl, suave epicure Alex Kapranos, misfit idealogue Kele Okereke—and took a unique grab-bag of influences from the British canon*.* Alex Turner once said he walked "the lyrical tightrope between Jarvis Cocker and Mike Skinner," and while it’s fair to say Okereke, a clumsier wordsmith, is not a lyrical tightrope-walker, he’s a master of the shallow dive. His grand proclamations ("I am trying to be heroic/ In an age of modernity," began A Weekend in the City) scale queasy heights, plummet theatrically, and manage improbable landings.
Bloc Party's last record, 2012’s Four, was billed as a return to form but lacked the cool menace of the early stuff, which channeled Manic Street Preachers as much as Wire or Joy Division. Silent Alarm, their 2005 debut, wasn’t the best UK indie record of its era, but it was one of the savviest, and maybe the angriest. On follow up A Weekend in the City, Okereke wrote boldly about subjects he took seriously—the isolation of modernity, upper-crust London's coke-fueled opulence, the absurdity of MTV, the disappointing political views of teenagers in shopping malls, the selfishness of ex-lovers, and, perhaps underpinning it all, the "2nd generation blues" of a black twenty-something living in a city that wanted to destroy him. Despite occasional misfires, Okereke won us over because he embodied a role his contemporaries wouldn’t touch: that of the outsider genius making sense of a corrupt world through music—music he believed, or refused not to believe, would improve it.
Inspired by a Hanif Kureishi talk Okereke saw in London, Bloc Party’s serene fifth LP observes the void of evangelism in present pop culture, and tries to fill it. But the notion that our jaded generation needs nothing more than a dose of devotional art is tired, and while last-ditch religion per se isn’t Okereke’s ticket here, there’s an awkward sense that the 34 year old is clutching at spiritual straws, rather than relating an honest-to-God epiphany.
The good news is that "The Love Within," Bloc Party’s comeback track, an indie disco-pop hybrid that is somehow both garish and bland, is comfortably the worst song on Hymns. A little better is "So Real," which trails a Silent Alarm throwback riff over low-key soul and hangover-soothing deep house; on "The Good News," a similarly midtempo Blur pastiche, a down-and-out narrator trudges from "the Gospels of St. John" to the "bottom of a shot glass."
That Okereke writes clunky lines by choice is conceivable, and you see why he might: a ruthless commitment to writing economically; overcompensation for the tryhard smartassery of youth; or a self-fulfilling paranoia that jarring sincerity is Bloc Party’s redeeming gimmick, and fixing the leaky roof would require tearing the whole thing down and starting over. It's more likely, though, that between long band hiatuses and sporadic immersion in DJ culture, the songwriter in Okereke has been displaced by some other existential component. "These words will fall short/ But I must try," he sings earnestly on "Exes," and you scratch your head, wondering if that’s what trying sounds like.
In fairness, that song—borne along by sighing chords and a gospel choir—is enjoyably soothing, a highlight on an album that, "The Love Within" aside, hangs together well enough and is never unpleasant. As ever, Okereke’s lyrically inspired moments are not perfect but richly specific and poignant. On "Living Lux," a shattering post-breakup lament, he sings, "I want to spend my money on you." It's a nicely judged line, the kind of faintly pathetic confession you'd expect from the vanquished high-roller we met on A Weekend in the City. Sadly, nine years on, that seems to be the only character he can play with conviction.


Originally released in 1986, the reissue of High Rise II shines a light on an important and fiery document of Japanese psych rock.

High Rise II

Western listeners have long been drawn to underground Japanese music that falls between genres. Once the domain of pricey imports and fanzine pages, this decade has seen compilations such as Chee Shimizu’s More Better Days gather off-beat pop that draws from all over the global map, while labels like Palto Flats and WRWTFWW Records get rarities back into Western rotation. One of the most ambitious reissues projects comes from Black Editions, which is bringing out-of-print gems from Hideo Ikezumi’s psych-rock-leaning PSF label. Their latest is a fixture of Japanese underground rock, the second album from the Tokyo band High Rise. It’s a frantic set of blow-out garage rock that lives at their stylized intersection of psych, free jazz, and punk—a fiery testament to these Japanese artists’ ability to sever themselves from existing music communities to create something all their own, and capture a singular, high-energy moment in their careers.
High Rise officially came together in 1982, centered around bassist and vocalist Asahito Nanjo and guitarist Munehiro Narita. Both grew up listening to imported Western music—Nanjo obsessed with any soundtrack he could find, Narita exposed to the Doors, Pink Floyd and Wilson Pickett among others via an uncle—before venturing into even more eclectic territory, developing a playing style heavily shaped by groups like Grand Funk Railroad and Blue Cheer. Punk, free jazz, and no wave caught both of their attention, as did domestic projects such as early Keiji Haino outfit Lost Aaraaff and the band Friction (featuring Reck, an early member of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks). The pair found themselves briefly playing in the same shadowy psych band, Kosokuya, but soon grew restless. “I decided to do something ‘hard’ with the people I got on best with,” Nanjo said in an interview.
The pair started playing as Psychedelic Speed Freaks, a name obvious about that Tokyo record store owner Hideo Ikeezumi asked them to change it before he put out their debut album on his label because it was too direct. They renamed themselves High Rise—after J.G. Ballard's 1975 novel—and in 1984 put out Psychedelic Speed Freaks, their first album and the accidental namesake of Ikeezumi’s fledgling label. High Rise, though, set the template for future PSF groups, if not sonically than at least in attitude. Their feedback-stained improvised rock drew from the wild jazz and avant-garde communities dotting Japan, but with a rock backbone provided by Narita’s guitar playing. “We didn’t have a position,” Najo says of their place in the Japanese music world, and they’ve never sounded like they lamented it.
High Rise II marked the crest of the band’s fried-out psych, partially because they found Yuro Ujiie, a drummer who could actually keep up with Najo and Narita. High Rise have cycled through drummers at a quick clip over the last few decades, but Ujiie was the only one to push the central pair into their most fertile territory. It’s not just about swiftness, although cuts like “Last Rites” and “Turn You Cry” are among their quickest salvos. Just as important was Ujiie’s ability to hang with two players ready to veer off in different directions at any second, lending II a more manic energy than their locked-in debut.
Not that you would notice, at least right away. Critical to II’s atmosphere is how the drums get mixed lower, putting the emphasis on the fuzz-soaked bass and guitar. Ujiie provided propulsion, but it’s more subtle across High Rise’s second full-length, pushing songs forward but staying just out of the spotlight. Same goes for Nanjo’s vocals, coated in distortion and tough to make out. “They’re just various bits of English junky slang strung together. They just say that if you want to take drugs, you’re going to have to be prepared to die,” Nanjo has said of his lyrics, pointing to the group’s foundational theme of being anti-drugs (“The concept was to save the junkies”). Still, every word gets obscured by sound, rendering Nanjo’s singing as an unnerving (and, frequently, catchy) detail rather than something to really dwell on.
High Rise created a cult because of the way the guitar and bass tore off across their songs. As relayed in interviews, the group didn’t create songs as much as they made concepts, improvisations that sounded focused. Narita’s guitar playing goes a long way here, tearing apart the heavy groove of “Cotton Top” and darting across “Wipe Out’s” rush of bass and drum fills. If Nanjo and Ujiie were more in sync and creating a constricting squall, Narita added the rush of on-the-edge oblivion that gives II such a dizzying vibe. Comparing faster cuts like “Turn You Cry” and “Last Rites” to hellacious motorcycle chases works well—the guitarist described High Rise’s music as “like seeing a traffic accident happen right in front of you.” The same reckless plunge forward even comes through on II’s one extended jam, the 13-minute whirlwind “Pop Sicle,” a number bringing to mind the slow-burn dirges of Les Rallizes Denudes sped up and frayed.
Black Editions reissue presents what they call the “definitive version” of II, mixed and mastered by Nanjo. He makes sure the guitars come to the fore of this 2018 version, maintaining the wild energy of the original. Two bonus songs originally found on a PSF CD version released in 1993 also appear here—the chug-a-lug of “Monster a Go Go” is as close as High Rise came to sounding like a conventional rock band, and earns its status as an extra. Far better is “Induced Depression,” a psych blast more in line with the shorter numbers on II featuring some particularly busy solos courtesy of Narita.
II caught High Rise at their most confident and adventurous—future releases would find Nanjo, Narita and whoever could handle the kit slowing down, or with the singing and drums coming through more clearly, while all involved would venture off into multiple other groups, like the more structured Mainliner or Musica Transonic. It’s on this 1986 release, though, where they are most eager to blaze their own path, not just far removed from the glitzy sounds of mainstream Japanese music during the bubble years but from other underground artists. II holds nothing back, but it also features catchier elements separating it from the pure bludgeoning of Merzbow and other “Japanoise” acts, while also being more muscular than the dramatic sounds of labelmate Haino. No shortage of niche acts popping up in Tokyo’s live-houses sound like High Rise, but the real legacy to glean from II is that of a band embracing their independence and going their own way.


On his first proper full-length in three years, the Japanese electronic musician collages tiny sounds into intricate grooves that harness the wonder of everyday life.

Yasuragi Land

Foodman’s music assembles tiny sounds into intricate grooves. Short clicks and pops, clipped gurgles and swishes, and miniscule snippets of synth arrange themselves into tangled rhythms that reference different types of electronic music, from house and footwork to classic video-game soundtracks, but always feel skewed and toylike. Often it sounds like a miniature approximation of dance music, as if he’s built a club out of a colorful assortment of Legos, just waiting for the tiny figurines to come alive and find their groove. It is a swirl of joy and creative energy, leaving an unmistakable impression of the Japanese producer’s wonder as he discovers the answer to the question “What happens if I do this?” over and over again. No matter how tricky or obtuse the beats become, a sense of gleeful exploration is self-evident.
The Lilliputian scale of the music highlights its warm playfulness. “I want to make music out of these fun little moments in our daily lives,” Foodman, aka Takahide Higuchi, said several years back. “I really value those psychedelic feelings that you can sometimes get from small things, like totally forgetting yourself while taking a bath because it feels so good, or while you’re eating curry at home....I want to transpose what I feel at those moments into music.” On Yasuragi Land, Foodman’s first proper full-length in three years, he digs further into this side of his music, leaning into the intimate familiarity of the acoustic guitar and scooping out any stray remnants of low-end from the mix. Yasuragi translates to “peace of mind” or “serenity”; it’s also the name of a Japanese bathhouse in Sweden, which might not be coincidental, given Higuchi’s documented affinity for saunas and spas. Though the music on Yasuragi Land isn’t new age by any stretch of the imagination, it reveals a calm and focused mind nimbly assembling hundreds of different sounds and textures just so.
Yasuragi Land has more in common with the whimsical cut-and-paste style Foodman perfected on 2018’s Aru Otoko No Densetsu than with the more straight-ahead, nearly club-ready EPs he’s released for Mad Decent and Highball in the past two years. It tends towards an omnivorous, throw-everything-at-the-wall approach, and though nearly every track has a loose groove tethering it to terra firma, syncopated hits and stray added beats can make it feel immeasurably complex. One of the album’s defining features is its very sparse use of bass, a technique that enhances the crispness of the sound. Endless kicks and heavy low-end throb can be exhilarating but also exhausting; at the end of each listen through Yasuragi Land I’ve felt rejuvenated and light, having experienced the music’s unencumbered energy and motion as a purely uplifting force.
The muted twang of digitally rendered acoustic guitar is a pervasive, but subtle, presence throughout. It often emerges as a counterpoint to the synth blips and intricate percussive taps, either wildly strummed, as on “Shiboritate,” or existing on the fringes, buried among sampled flutes, squeaks, and knocking claves, like on “Food Court.” Several years ago Higuchi relocated back to his hometown of Nagoya, and has spoken about the rush of nostalgia that came in the wake of his return, including memories of playing guitar and busking outside of train stations. His music has always existed just beyond the grid, but the guitar’s loose, untamed nature makes the album feel like the haphazard effervescence of the real world is worming its way into the vivid yet ordered digital environment. Those happy memories of first playing music for others seem to be a potent source of inspiration, adding to the album’s impression of gentle euphoria.
Whether it’s losing yourself in the gooey umami of a shoyu tamago—as the name Foodman suggests, eating has been a major influence on Higuchi—or feeling your body slowly being enveloped by steam, the experiences he draws on for inspiration are moments when the self dissolves into pure sensory experience. Yasuragi Land, with all its bizarre nooks and silly tangents, doesn’t attempt to replicate the stillness of those moments, but instead serves as a reminder of the spirit of curiosity that makes them possible. The album’s intricacy is an invitation to listen closer and decipher all his little sleight-of-hand details, letting the music’s simple joy excite its own small moment of everyday bliss.

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On his striking new LP, the pop-ambient composer Matthew Cooper, aka Eluvium, marshals his sound into sweeping maximalist splendor.

False Readings On

Matthew Cooper is one of our definitive contemporary pop-ambient artists, and he never goes too long without issuing Eluvium music in some fashion. He tends to release an LP about every three years, as though his creativity runs on the same long natural cycles that inform his songs. Though his albums blend into a timeless stasis in memory, going back over his discography—without even getting into collaborations with the likes of Explosions in the Sky’s Mark T. Smith—reveals a process of deliberate change, and then assimilating the changes back into the whole.
Cooper began by coaxing drones from guitars in the manner of Stars of the Lid and playing misty-eyed piano études. He then came into his own on 2007’s polyglot Copia, where added strings and winds glowed from within. The 2010 Similes LP made room for (and was diluted by) Cooper’s wan vocals. But he corrected course on 2013’s Nightmare Ending, where he fell silent again, ginning up dark clouds of distortion for a dense, nocturnal experience.
False Readings On is a logical follow-up, marshaling Eluvium’s arsenal into sweeping maximalist splendor. And perhaps it’s that sense of a logical conclusion that makes it sometimes feel more impressive than genuinely transporting. To be sure, Cooper is operating with persuasive confidence. With hardly a shadow to be found, the music is bright, loud, and physical. The stated theme is “cognitive dissonance in modern society.” One often scoffs at ambient artists who put too fine a point on the heady themes of their sparse chord changes, but you can actually hear how the concept structures the compositions, as drastically different speeds and timbres play against one another, unleashing turbulent energies.
That’s clearest in “Fugue State,” where nervy tootles that sound ripped from the madder regions of Philip Glass’ Music in Twelve Parts are held in check by a grand, slow harmonic apparatus. The funnels of distortion from Nightmare Ending are back, all but blotting out the inner dynamics of “Washer Logistics.” There are glorious organ chords, like the wind-beaten surface of sun-slicked water. Screaming quasi-operatic vocals telegraph some afterlife feeling beyond pleasure and distress; they do the orchestral heavy-lifting. Lustrous acoustic guitar strums and pianos glint here and there. And it’s all pillowed in the softest harmonies, shot through with the long revolutions of simple intervals in the bass or a recessive synth tone.
Each track is either very short or very long. The long ones build and break with magisterial resolve, sometimes to a fault: “Beyond the Moon for Someone in Reverse” and “Rorschach Pavan,” though very different in tone, have almost identical arcs. The album’s thick relentlessness flatters the soft space of “Movie Night Revisited,” where acoustic swells evoke Arvo Pärt by way of the Caretaker—sacred music gone benignly mad. The Messiaen-like wind line that enters in the middle is a welcome surprise on an album where tracks are more likely to gather and repeat without changing direction.
It’s a reminder of the more reticent Eluvium of Copia, still his best album. For the most part, those elegant, eloquent miniatures are gone. Instead, we must be drenched in distortion, buffeted by mezzo-soprano gales, swallowed by keyboard chords, drowned in drones. The effect is certainly striking. Album closer “Posturing Through Metaphysical Collapse” accounts for a quarter of the album’s length, and luckily, it’s a keeper, drawing all the album’s motifs into a climactic tour de force. And yet the sense persists that the more Eluvium piles on, the less unique he sounds. False Readings On is awesome while it’s playing, and when it stops, it’s gone. But the small, chiming whorls of “Radio Ballet,” you won't soon forget.


Unlike some of R&B’s showier personalities, the Chicago singer makes do with a great voice, laid-back vibes, and a classic sound that’s neither brazenly modern nor self-consciously retro.

1123

BJ the Chicago Kid has spent his career straddling the line between sideman and star attraction. The Chicago crooner guested on singles from Kanye West and Schoolboy Q and recorded with many of the most distinguished artists of his generation—Kendrick Lamar, Chance the Rapper, and Solange among them, in addition to Dr. Dre, Freddie Gibbs, Vic Mensa, A$AP Rocky, Lil Durk, and dozens more. He performed at Barack Obama’s 2017 farewell address and earned three Grammy nominations for his 2016 Motown debut, In My Mind. Yet for all that exposure, he still hasn’t had a charting single of his own.
It seems the industry loves BJ the Chicago Kid’s voice but doesn’t have much of an opinion one way or the other about him as an artist. For all his obvious talent, he’s a deceptively hard sell. He doesn’t have the voice-of-his-generation allure of Khalid or the tortured-poet mystique of Frank Ocean. He idolizes artists like Marvin Gaye and D’Angelo, complicated figures who carry an aura of importance, but his own records are more in the lineage of Musiq Soulchild and Dwele, singers with great voices and pleasant dispositions but considerably humbler ambitions. The marketplace never quite knows what to do with acts like that.
It’s to his advantage that BJ never tries to be anything that he’s not. His fetching sophomore album for Motown, 1123, doubles down on the laid-back, creature-comfort vibe of In My Mind. The Anderson .Paak feature “Feel the Vibe” kicks off the record on an especially charming note, welcoming the listener to a family gathering filled with music, spirited conversation, and generous spreads of soul food (“Don’t forget the cornbread”). From there, nearly every track offers some combination of good times, good drink, good company, and good sex.
The closest the record comes to conflict is when BJ wonders whether things are too comfortable. “Real men get scared sometimes because it’s too good,” he laments on the Donny Hathaway-esque relationship study “Too Good.” The album’s other great dilemma: On “Champagne,” a spontaneous roll in the hay threatens to make him late for a pre-existing commitment—though he doesn’t make those plans sound especially important anyway. BJ has never been one to manufacture high stakes.
Like all of neo soul’s greats, BJ seamlessly blurs R&B’s past and present, but 1123 tends to sidestep the most obvious tropes, both modern and retro. Save for its Rick Ross verse, the bumping Marvin Gaye update “Playa’s Ball” sounds like it could have been recorded at any point over the last quarter century. In its final stretch, though, 1123 does toss out a few of-the-moment tracks that radio might be able to work with. The hater-smiting “Worryin’ Bout Me” dabbles in trap, with a verse from Offset, and “Reach” casts BJ opposite some contemporary house from Dutch DJ Afrojack.
The most conspicuous departure is “Rather Be With You,” the album’s Khalid moment: a big, sappy ballad that wallows in the artificial drama that BJ otherwise almost pointedly resists. It’s the one moment on 1123 where the production upstages BJ’s voice, and the one moment where he sounds anything less than completely comfortable. When a singer proves this good at small statements, there’s no need to try to force a grand one.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Muse records are largely blockbuster action flicks centered around a cryptocratic nightmare that can be explained on a billboard. Drones, their latest, proves no more capable of altering U.S. military strategy than The 2nd Law managed to singlehandedly end global warming. Mutt Lange produces.

Drones

Like their prog-pop predecessors Rush, Queensrÿche, and Pink Floyd, Muse will never be cool, but their subject matter will always be relevant—they only deal in current events that speak to timeless pathologies of the human condition. The Resistance raged against any and all machines while the environmentally conscious The 2nd Law made global warming appear to be yet another shadow government conspiracy rather than scientific fact. Likewise, Drones is not a critique of American military strategy, but rather, "the journey of a human, from their abandonment and loss of hope, to their indoctrination by the system to be a human drone, to their eventual defection from their oppressors." Really, what are Muse records but blockbuster action flicks centered around a cryptocratic nightmare that can be explained on a billboard?
Then again, you do not listen to Muse records for nuance. Muse have to hit the stadium cheap seats and the back row in any given 8th-grade history class. This is how they end up with songs like "Mercy" and "Revolt"—wherein lead singer Matt Bellamy commands tens of thousands to shout down the brainwash tactics of diabolical plutocrats while wearing Bad Boy circa-'98 shiny suits that should warrant a name change to Mu$e.
And while even the big singles are supposed to hew to Drones’ concept, Bellamy never gets too specific. Lyrics like, "Don’t leave me out to die/ I gave you everything" led many to assume opener "Dead Inside" was about Bellamy’s ex-fiancée Kate Hudson, when it’s actually the protagonist’s blue-pill indoctrination into an army of murderbots. "Defector" probably wasn’t made with the intention of mirroring Taco Bell’s latest ad campaign, but it’s way more fun to hear, "Yeah, I’m free/ From society/ You can’t control me/ I’m a defector!", as Bellamy waxing ecstatic about the A.M. Crunchwrap.
Even Muse seem to have thought their most recent work was getting too convoluted, so they’ve played up Drones as "by our standards...back to basics". At their most humble, Muse were the most histrionic of the post-OK Computer world, so Drones represents a chance to reflect on what Muse consider to be their "basics". For starters, Drones is "basic" in the sense that Hail to the Thief would be way too subtle of a pun to fit here. In both sound and its refusal to speak in anything other than the most literal, explanatory terms, Drones is somewhere between "Iron Man" and "Mr. Roboto". A "[Drill Sergeant]" interlude ends with its subject yelling "ARE YOU A HUMAN DRONE?", which leads into the chorus of "Psycho"—"I could use someone like you/ Someone who’ll kill on my command/ And ask no questions." "Psycho" itself splices Metallica’s boogie "2x4" and the first half of Full Metal Jacket, although think of Marilyn Manson playing the role of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman.
Musically, they've ditched the influence of industrial and festival EDM that resulted in the most ludicrous parts of The Resistance and The 2nd Law, which were also the best parts. While "Dead Inside" recalls the phallic funk thrust of 2nd Law highlight "Panic Station", everything here is otherwise locked and loaded for Rock Band 4. On some level, it’s heartening to know this stuff can still exist in 2015—the marathon tapping solo on "Reapers" or the 720-hp revving of "The Handler" are almost thrilling in their commitment. But even Muse's down-and-dirty rock record includes a 10-minute suite, and the very next song is an a cappella chorale of a thousand Matt Bellamys. Moreover, Drones is produced by Mutt Lange and boasts cover art from Matt Mahurin, who spent the early '90s slathering Bush, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, and even Lou Reed in the grunge-glam sludge. The last time Lange and Mahurin collaborated on the same record, Def Leppard was asking us to stand up and kick love into motion.
Whatever pleasure can be generated from Bellamy’s admirable melodic sense and overblown hooks is negated by Muse’s insistence that they’re profound rather than fun. They’re too humorless to be camp, unwilling to explore the obvious homoerotic subtext of the plot (I mean, just read the lyrics to "Psycho") and unshakable in their errant belief they’re tearing down a power structure rather than solidifying it. Drones might as well be overlain with Entourage, à la Wizard of Oz/Dark Side of the Moon, for the ultimate in critical hate-consumption. Muse’s operatic vocal runs, tablature-bustin’ riffs, and CGI'd production feel unmistakably similar to the way Doug Ellin brandishes yachts, celebrity cameos, and bared breasts. If it’s luxury porn, just own up—we know it when we see it.


On their debut album, the Lahore band blends the free-form improvisation of Hindustani classical and jazz with sample-heavy production creating a musical dialogue about faith, spirituality, and the self.

Nafs at Peace

In 2016, Pakistani instrumental quartet Jaubi marked the tenth anniversary of J Dilla’s death by releasing an Indian classical take on the Detroit rapper-producer’s “Time: The Donut of the Heart.” Zohaib Hassan Khan’s sarangi reimagines the original’s jaunty melody (itself sampled from a Jackson 5 track) as a wistful, almost plaintive refrain, backed by minimal acoustic guitar chords. The star of the show is tabla player Kashif Ali Dhani, who treats Dilla’s dynamic, behind-the-beat rhythm as a taal—a percussive framework within which to improvise. In a thrilling display of virtuosity, he traces and re-traces increasingly complex rhythmic patterns on the tabla, building up to a metronomic tattoo that somehow still swings with the original’s fluid grace.
The minute-long cover serves as a perfect introduction to the Lahore band’s musical philosophy, one that marries the free-form improvisation of Hindustani classical and jazz with sampling’s whatever-works approach to composition. This philosophy finds its fullest expression yet on their debut full-length Nafs at Peace, a suite of seven largely instrumental pieces that incorporate Indian classical ragas, the spiritual jazz of Yusuf Lateef and John Coltrane, hip-hop and funk. Tradition and modernity march in lockstep on the record—sarangi melodies vamp over clattering Moog rhythms, space-age synths doodle around the tabla, each instrument adding its own voice to a musical debate about faith, spirituality, and the self.
Nafs at Peace was composed and recorded over two short sessions at studios in Lahore and Oslo with UK multi-instrumentalist Ed “Tenderlonious” Cawthorne and Polish composer Marek “Latarnik” Pędziwiatr (the sessions also yielded Tenderlonious’s 2020 release Ragas From Lahore: Improvisations with Jaubi). Hindustani classical ragas provide the initial jumping-off point, but the compositions here are almost completely improvised, guided by little more than a shared commitment to finding catharsis and transcendence through music.
Thematically, the album draws from the Qur’anic concept of the nafs (Arabic for “self/soul”). In Islam—especially in Sufi and Shia traditions—there are three stages in the development of the nafs. There’s the inciting nafs, which pushes us to indulge in our base instincts. The self-accusing nafs represents the struggle to master the ego, while nafs at peace represents self-actualization, a self that has untangled itself from material and worldly concerns and found true peace. Drawing from their own experiences of bereavement, divorce, drug addiction and crises of faith, Nafs at Peace is Jaubi’s attempt to chart a musical path to the final nafs, each track a different destination on this spiritual journey.
Opener “Seek Refuge” sets the scene with elegiac sarangi and Ali Riaz Baqar’s delicately plucked guitar, backed by the seraphic chorus of a chamber choir. On “Raga Gujri Todi,” the sarangi sketches a mournful lament over an ominous drone, a slow build-up of tension that explodes into an industrial maelstrom of drums and synths that evoke the organized chaos of life on the subcontinent.
“Straight Path” is the album’s thematic and musical centerpiece, its title a reference to a verse in the first chapter of the Qu’ran. If “Raga Gujri Todi” embodied the internal dissonance of the struggle against the ego, “Straight Path” offers a tantalizing glimpse of what lies on the other side. Sarangi and flute take turns tracing a raga melody over Latarnik’s ambient synths, before Dhani’s dense tabla percussion takes center stage, allowing the flute and synths to trade increasingly complex and frantic solos. The track ends with an ecstatic showdown between percussion and sarangi, one last counter-attack by the ego.
The closing title track, lead composer Ali Riaz Baqar’s response to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, is a “spiritual jazz raga” that serves as an elongated moment of catharsis. The most conventionally jazz piece on the record, the track features a blistering sax solo by Tenderlonious, who leads the rest of the band into a series of incendiary crescendos, each member pushing the other to even more stratospheric heights. The mind has been purified, the soul purged, and all that’s left is tranquility.
On Nafs at Peace, Jaubi pick up the baton passed to them by ’60s and ’70s trailblazers like Don Cherry and Mahavishnu Orchestra, pushing the boundaries of South Asian classical music into new and exciting spaces. They represent a new generation of South Asian musicians who are neither tied down by the traditional conservatism of classical music, nor burdened by the expectations of rebellion. Instead, they offer a new path that side-steps such debates in favor of something more visceral, more essential: the sheer, blessed joy of creation.

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Zhu first gained attention with massive 2014 last-call club hit “Faded,” but his debut album is bloated with bland, often downright bad dance music.

Generationwhy

In 2014, a shadowy song called “Faded” was released in Australia and began slithering through pitch-black hot spots from Los Angeles to Berlin. Zhu, its creator, kept his identity a mystery, which naturally piqued curiosity, but the track is interesting enough without any manufactured drama. Over spidery keys with a belly-rumbling synth bass line, Zhu thinned out his voice to a high warble and offered the battle cry of club-goers at last call across the world: “Baby, I’m wasted, all I wanna do is drive home to you/Baby, I’m faded, all I wanna do is take you downtown.” Of course it was a hit.
Since then, Zhu has revealed himself to be Steven Zhu, a 27-year-old Chinese-American who studied music business at the University of Southern California. He’s continued his formula of juxtaposing dark production with sparse lyrics sung in his breathy, high-pitched voice, but he’s also been successful when he’s ventured away from that—the star-smeared “Cocaine Model” is as bright and glittery as the sky in Joshua Tree and the jittery “Paradise Awaits” positively struts. Unfortunately, nothing so charming is found on *Generationwhy, *Zhu’s debut album, which is bloated with bland, often-awful dance music.
There are a few pleasantly innocuous tracks to be found. “In the Morning” is a good companion piece to “Faded;” “Cold Blooded” settles into a loungey groove, and the skittery “Electrify Me” holds a few surprises, suddenly opening up to a billowy sonic expanse. The title track, the album’s poppiest and most radio-friendly, is catchy enough, although Zhu’s wispy, delicate-winged vocals—which so often have flitted perfectly across his gauzier songs—sound flimsy. No surprise that Generationwhy’s final song, a bonus track titled “Working for It,” bodies the rest of the album—Skrillex and THEY. assist. As usual, Skrillex strides in all business, and his deft, decisive additions, combined with THEY.’s earthy vocals, are grounding. Still, it’s the kind of song you hope ends before your roll kicks in.
The rest of the album is a blend of insipid lyrics, faded vocals that quickly grow irritating, and self-parodying thirdhand ’80s nostalgia: The police sirens and tortured guitar riffs of “Palm of My Hand” could either soundtrack Crockett and Tubbs’ anguish at letting a coke kingpin escape or at having spilled ketchup on their linen blazers when their speedboat hits a wave. “Secret Weapon” might also be mistaken for parody if it weren’t so earnest: Lyrics like “You’re my secret weapon, my sexy piece of heaven/Girl you make me better, I swear we’ll be together” are one thing, but then Zhu lets loose a majestically corny electric guitar solo, and uncontrollable giggling becomes unavoidable.
Yet those pale in comparison to “Money.” Taken together, the pitched squealing, the sax solo, and the fake-deep chorus of “Moneyyyyyy! No I don’t need no moneyyyyyy! I mean, it’s just moneyyyyy! And it don’t mean nothin’ without you” are almost physically repulsive. Then, in “One Minute to Midnight,” plucking an acoustic guitar, Zhu sings, “All you needa know baby girl I’m drunk … tell me if you came to party, tell me or you got somebody,” in what must be the worst Aaliyah flip of all time.
Maya Angelou (and a sax) opens the album: “Everyone in the world has gone to bed one night or another with fear or pain or loss or disappointment. Yet each of us has awakened arisen. It’s amazing, wherever that abides in the human being, there is the nobleness of the human spirit.” If that lofty intro is an indication, perhaps Zhu was attempting to make an album that explored the emptiness of nightlife and the salvation many find in music. But as it stands, Generationwhy should’ve just been named* Why. *


A slight and unwaveringly safe 30 minutes, Yeasayer’s latest goes down easier than anything the band has ever done, while making less of an impression.

Erotic Reruns

For a band that sounded so far out at the time, there was a lot of precedent for Yeasayer’s eccentricities. With their first two albums, 2007’s All Cymbals Hour and 2010’s Odd Blood, the band charted a Venn Diagram of nearly every major indie rock trend of the era, shading their art rock with Animal Collective’s hippie splatter, MGMT’s burnt-out party psych, and TV on the Radio’s dark plays on Peter Gabriel, while touching on R&B, African music, and just about anything else that was music-blogger catnip during those years. Did I mention they were from Brooklyn? Do I need to mention they were from Brooklyn?
It was almost uncanny, Yeasayer’s ability to embrace all the right sounds at exactly the right time, yet they pieced these styles together so inventively that they rarely came across as opportunistic. Whatever they may have lacked in originality they made up for with creativity, and their records were so generous with leftfield surprises that you could forget how of-the-moment they were. They could dole out pop pleasures but they could just as easily make your skin crawl. Odd Blood is most remembered for the euphoric delights of “O.N.E.” and “Ambling Alp,” but it opened with “The Children,” a skeevy number that played like the imagined soundtrack to an alien ritual sacrifice. The band was always most exciting when they were kind of a mind fuck.
The trio's fifth album Erotic Reruns begs for some of that old interdimensional weirdness. A slight and unwaveringly safe 30 minutes, it goes down easier than anything the band has ever done, while making less of an impression. Pivoting hard from the heady psychedelia of 2016's Amen & Goodbye, Yeasayer fall back on the same good-times and falsetto formula of Portugal. The Man or every other similarly punctuated alternative band that’s learned to crib just enough from Maroon 5 to secure some licensing deals.
The most shocking thing about the record is its pep. With its Emotional Rescue strut, opener “People I Love” could easily dance its way into Spotify’s crossover playlists. The album’s big attempt at an earworm, “Ecstatic Baby” is a slaphappy serving of Midnite Vultures-style funk. They're both “fun:” in the way that pre-show movie theater trivia or gas-pump infotainment segments are, diversions pitched so nondescript to its hard to imagine anybody gleaning meaningful enjoyment from them.
Only the occasional shot of bitter politics offsets the album’s pervading syrupy sweetness. “Blue Skies Dandelions,” ostensibly about James Comey’s firing and Donald Trump’s ego, rides an easy groove that disguises its subject matter. “24-Hour Hateful Live!” comes closer to drawing blood, with lyrics that rhyme "Steven Miller" with “child killer” and “Sarah Sanders” with “propagandist.” “Goebbels might be her true Pa,” Chris Keating sings, pulling no punches, but the music itself is too staged and tasteful to rile any real emotion or capture the misery and chaos of the modern news cycle. Even with a layer of blustery saxophones amplifying its message, the song has all the anger of a high school musical.
I wonder what Odd Blood-era Yeasayer could have done with the outrages of Trump administration as an animating muse. At their peak they could have made music almost as unnerving as the headlines, but it’s been albums since they’ve conjured that intensity. Somewhere over the last decade they exhausted their imagination. There’s a danger in over-romanticizing Yeasayer’s early records just because they felt so fresh—in truth these guys have never been especially deep songwriters or distinguished lyricists, and they’ve always struggled to match their style with substance. The difference, though, is those records could genuinely thrill. Erotic Reruns never does.


The debut solo album from Beth Ditto finds the former Gossip singer reconnecting with her southern roots. Despite some thin lyrics and odd production choices, it has a few excellent moments.

Fake Sugar

It makes perfect sense and no sense at all that Beth Ditto’s debut solo album is a pastichey southern rock record. It works because her voice, that raunchy Arkansas holler, was made to embellish Muscle Shoals grooves and electrify honky-tonk barnstormers—a combination that she never quite pulled off with her old band Gossip on their early garage rock albums. But it doesn’t work because why is Beth Ditto, one of the most radical bandleaders of the last decade, turning her hand to a genre safely lagged in schmaltz? That was apparently the point. “I did not wanna make a cool record!” she told DIY. “I always call it a riot grrrl proverb, but it was a slogan: dork equals cool. That changed my fucking life.”
The songs on Fake Sugar were originally intended for another Gossip album, until Ditto’s bandmate Nathan Howdeshell moved back to Arkansas, to her surprise, and she decided to go it alone. Following the demise of her band, the death of her father, and a rocky patch with her wife, she also reconnected with her southern roots. Heading south is a well-worn trope for artists in strife; completing the image, Ditto became obsessed with Graceland on her travels. After auditioning a host of potential producers, she found her match in Grammy-nominated Jennifer Decilveo, who’s mostly worked on pop and R&B records, and a band of session musicians (plus Queens of the Stone Age bassist Michael Shuman).
It’s a shame that Fake Sugar is so slick and professional. It’s often stately where it should bleed, and hokey where it should shred. There are odd production choices: like the noodly British indie guitar parts that cascade through “Savoir Faire” (as if Two Door Cinema Club turned up at the saloon), and total outliers like “Do You Want Me To,” which sounds like a Depeche Mode tribute from a completely different record. “Oo La La” is a lazy, leering garage jam. But soul rock revivalism has been done to death, and despite its predictable structures (tense builds; ripping choruses) Fake Sugar has a few excellent moments. “Fire” is Peggy Lee’s “Fever” with more grit and less patience. “In and Out” pits a mighty verse about being fine with compromising in long-term relationships against a softer chorus where Ditto tries to affirm whether her partner feels the same: “I, I do it for you/You, you do it for me/And we go in and out of love,” she sings anxiously.
Unsurprisingly, it’s Ditto’s boozy yell that lets her pull off this material. She puts poison in the twangy kiss-offs of “Savoir Faire,” and has the charisma to get away with singing lines like “I get so tired of feeling sick and tired” on the title track. There are a few too many power ballads that trade on stretching the word “love” as thin as it goes (“Lover,” “Love in Real Life”), but considering Ditto’s only true vocal competition is probably Adele, you can’t blame her for giving it a shot. She pulls it off on “We Could Run,” the record’s finest moment. It’s a copper-bottomed stadium ballad that builds on cavernous, chiming guitar, and then bursts into an enormous chorus that streaks like lights on a highway.
It’s rare that you get to hear a woman artist lean into such a brawny, fearless song, and Ditto’s perspective elevates Fake Sugar massively. Not only does she use heartland rock to deal with the breakdown of her marriage to a woman, which feels somewhat radical, but the distance she establishes between her self-image and the mess a seemingly unfaithful partner makes of it is quite heartbreaking. Ditto sings proudly about her too-muchness—how she comes on like a storm, this obsessive “firecracker” who “don’t care what anybody thinks of me”—but then in desperation, pledges to hold back. “I’ll never ask too much from you/But oh, I’ll do whatever you want me to,” she promises on “Do You Want Me To.” “Was I not enough?” she worries on “Lover.”
Overlooking the gory betrayals and specifics of identity, Ditto is great at singing about the nuanced trials of long-term love. It makes the album’s direction a little bit easier to comprehend: Fake Sugar is happily middle-aged. It’s hard to know where it fits on U.S. radio, but in the UK, Ditto is almost a household name—she recently appeared on one of the country’s biggest, blandest breakfast radio shows to talk about the record. For all its carefree, uncool origins, it’s hard not to see it as a huge commercial stab—and to wish it well. Ditto’s non-traditional view down a well-trodden path is welcome, but you do wish she’d kick up the dust a bit more.


On an album generous in both spirit and proportion, the Montreal-based musician fuses traditional Algonquin influences from her upbringing with synth pop, strings, and experimental vocal techniques.

Tidibàbide / Turn

Kìzis’ music takes its shape from life’s sprawling contours. Kìzis was raised in an intensely religious home to a white mother and an indigenous father in Southern Ontario. She belongs to the Ardoch Algonquin First Nation, and attending pow wows as a child formed a significant part of her early inspiration. She later moved to Montreal and formed the indie-pop band Archery Guild. As a trans Two-Spirit person, she says, “Sometimes it’s difficult to show who I am, but I use my music and performance to help elaborate my essence.”
Her solo work, first as Mìch Cota and now as Kìzis, weaves the deeply personal with a desire to reach outwards. On her 2018 album Kijà / Care, she fleshed out lush synth pop with strings and experimental vocal processing, offering self-love and interpersonal connection as means of moving beyond trauma. Clocking in at 36 tracks and three and a half hours long, her newest album, Tidibàbide / Turn, is a joyful proclamation of presence. Kìzis takes the lessons in vulnerability from Kijà / Care and spins them into a record that stretches and sustains itself with Kìzis’ tenderness and the musical support of some 60-odd collaborators.
Tidibàbide / Turn drifts fluidly between genres. Molding traditional Algonquin influences into techno, synth pop, and heart-swelling strings, Kìzis lets the music meander where it likes. Tracks like “Dawemà,” “Nika,” “Okàdeniganàtig,” and “Moswa” feature Algonquin drumming accompanying a chorus of voices that move between Algonquin and English. Kìzis rewrites the Canadian national anthem in “No Canada,” singing mournfully over a steady drumbeat: “No Canada/No home on Native land/Your patriot lust/expecting us to bend.../Your way is killing me.” Elsewhere, the defiant techno of “Amanda” and meandering electro pop of cuts like “PERSONALITY!” and “That’s My Dream (FAMILY = COMMUNITY)” pay tribute to the sense of community Kìzis has found in queer party spaces. Her music can be dissonant and amorphous, but she can also be intimate and conversational, slipping into spoken-word cadences to share secrets in such a way that it sounds like she’s revealing them for the first time.
There’s a defiant spirit in Tidibàbide / Turn’s colossal proportions and ever-changing nature. It emerges in force in the sprawling, four-part “Sister Flower,” which she has described as “an audible dissertation on empowerment.” “Sister Flower (One Comes to Us)” is held together by a forceful 4/4 beat but moves gracefully through grandiose strings, electro pop, and spoken word; “Sister Flower 2 (4 Spirit)” accelerates and decelerates at will, changing the terms of the game as it plays. On the 16-minute “Sister Flower (Honor and Celebration),” Kìzis’ voice comes in and out of focus amidst a patchwork of muttering and whispering. As she reels off impressionistic images (“Slide off my shoes/Lay on my back/And let a lizard play with you”), a hissed chant emerges from the mix: “a cacophonic symphony.”
But it’s a gentle cacophony. The for-us-by-us ethos—prominent Canada-based trans musicians like Elle Barbara and Beverly Glenn-Copeland are among the album’s collaborators—forges a feeling of tender togetherness, a charm against inhospitable surroundings. Despite its length, Tidibàbide / Turn isn’t a forbidding listen. Throughout its many transmutations, Kìzis’ voice is a guiding light. Her music feels both formally adventurous and spiritually nourishing. As she intones in “Brianna,” “I’m moving forward/How do I move forward now?/I climb/I run I sing.”

Buy: Rough Trade
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Although their Warp Records peers—Aphex Twin, Autechre, LFO—are regarded as the vanguard of "intelligent dance music," the Black Dog were as equally deft, playful, and rambunctious through the early half of the '90s. Since rescuscitating the name in 2005, they've issued a slew of releases, and as Neither/ Neither reveals, they've gotten far darker and more negative with time.

Neither/Neither

Although their Warp Records peers—Aphex Twin, Autechre, LFO—are regarded as the vanguard of "intelligent dance music," the Black Dog were as equally deft, playful, and rambunctious through the early half of the '90s. A track like "Techno Playtime", which kicked off their 1990 EP of the same name, was truth in advertising, its sleek drum programming overtaken midway by a gnarly thump like Donkey Kong let loose. But by 1995, the trio, comprised of Ken Downie, Ed Handley, and Andy Turner, split, with Handley and Turner taking the more lighthearted aspects of their sound with them when they formed Plaid.
But after a decade, Downie resuscitated the Black Dog with 2005's Drexciya-inspired Silenced, teaming up with Martin and Richard Dust. Since then, there has been a slew of Black Dog albums, nearly twice as many releases as in its original incarnation. But as Stephen King's Pet Sematary once warned, a revived dog isn't necessarily the same dog. As their seventh post-Handley and Turner album, Neither/ Neither, reveals, they've gotten far darker and more negative. Or as the press release puts it: "We are all proles now; all are expected to maintain a mental state…of uncertainty and inaction."
It makes sense that the Black Dog would grow more dour, in that both have roots in Psychick Warriors ov Gaia and Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, which trace back to early industrialists Psychic TV. The first few times through Neither/ Neither, I was also reminded of fellow '90s acts like Portishead and Boards of Canada, who returned after a decade away to far sourer times, their music reflecting a heightened sense of paranoia, anxiety, and pessimism about the world. The downtempo title track here, with its skittering hi-hats and lurching heartbeat pulse, could definitely have come off of Tomorrow's Harvest, especially when—some two minutes in—its slow-moving analog melody crests and breaks.
The tricky cymbals of "Them (Everyone Is a Liar But)" suggest a balance between early and present Black Dog, while "Self Organising Sealed Systems" is bracing, visceral techno that's au courant in Berlin. But ambient tracks like "B.O.O.K.S." mistake aimlessness for eeriness, and the interludes neither heighten the tension nor cast more shadow over the proceedings. As a result, most of the album drifts by without much to distinguish it from its field. Tracks like "Control Needs Time" and "Shut Eye" are indistinct to the point of anonymity, making Neither/ Neither an all too-perfect soundtrack for uncertainty and inaction.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit Bobbie Gentry’s 1968 album, a daring, atmospheric, and oft-overshadowed Southern classic.

The Delta Sweete

Bobbie Gentry turned 25 in July 1967, the month she was swept up in one of the great how-on-Earth stories in pop history. Back in the winter, she was just another unknown songwriter who recorded a demo for Capitol Records. With her acoustic guitar and thick alto, she narrated her suicide-mystery story-song, “Ode to Billie Joe,” thinking it might be a good fit for Lou Rawls. Instead, Capitol added some strings and released the record as-is. It spent four weeks at No.1 and Gentry won Grammys for Best New Artist, Best Pop Vocal, and Best Solo Vocal. “Ode to Billie Joe” was covered by Tammy Wynette, Diana Ross, the Ventures, and dozens of others, translated to French and German, then adapted as a movie. The song’s tragic setting is the Tallahatchie Bridge, a real structure near Greenwood, Mississippi, which was soon overrun by visitors who wanted to jump in tribute.
Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe LP was quickly assembled and released in August, and by October it overtook Sgt. Pepper’s atop the Billboard album chart. Its cover was the precise opposite of that modern art monument. It showed her as a barefoot country gal in jeans and a t-shirt, sitting on a rural bridge with an acoustic guitar. This was accurate enough, since Gentry, born Roberta Lee Streeter, grew up near Woodland, Mississippi, a town of barely 100 people. But as “Ode to Billie Joe” became a global phenomenon, the song that will inevitably appear in every headline of Gentry’s eventual obituaries, that image hid more than it revealed. Only the singer’s trademark bouffant gestured at her worldliness: she left Woodland for California at age 13, spent years as a singing partner with her mother, then had additional stints as a philosophy major, model, and conservatory student.
The song and the record were both mature statements and recognized as such. As a piece of writing, “Billie Joe” is evocative and mysterious, and its central mystery is left unresolved. Gentry’s singing was a marvel as well. She had a husky, nearby voice and total expressive control of it. She was perfectly suited to story songs, and much of her debut album sounded pleasingly like the big hit: Gentry’s sensuous rasp narrating Southern scenes above her herk-and-jerk rhythmic patterns as a delicate swirl of chamber strings, hand percussion, brass, and rock backing tracks come and go. Ode to Billie Joe was nominated for Album of the Year, but by the time of the ceremony in February 1968, Gentry was already finished with her follow-up, a statement of artistic and personal purpose that was a self-conscious turn away from bare feet and a t-shirt.
It's clear just from the title that Bobbie Gentry Performs the Delta Sweete is a more complex thing. It presents a cohesive work with a name that suggests “an evening with,” a sort of audio tour of Gentry’s home territory through covers, folk tunes, and originals. There’s the pun, too, as Gentry announces a suite of songs and a new glammed-up style that jettisoned everything about her previous image except the bouffant. She appeared on the cover as a forlorn reverse silhouette, framing a picture of her grandparents’ dilapidated Mississippi shack, and for the next decade she presented herself in bell-bottom jumpsuits, cat’s-eye makeup, and towering hair.
The Delta Sweete was released about six months after Ode to Billie Joe, which itself was rushed to completion in the wake of the single’s runaway success. Since the follow-up record lacked a hit song and never rose higher than No. 132, the easy assumption was artistic overreach: Gentry tried something too pretentious and audiences wouldn’t follow. That seemed to be the attitude of her record labels in the U.S. and UK, who renamed, resequenced, and reissued the album only a few years later before letting it go out of print for decades. It also seemed to be Gentry’s own attitude, since she took a decisive pop-oriented turn in response. But that narrative overlooks the strangeness of Ode to Billie Joe, both in its beguiling content and its wild unlikeliness as a pop culture phenomenon. And it dismisses the astounding depth and range of talent that it took for Gentry to create these statements within months of each other. She never made an album like her first two ever again, but in retrospect they seem more alike than they must have at the time, and equally unlike anything that came before.
Delta Sweete opens with its lead single, “Okolona River Bottom Band,” just as Billie Joe opened with its most up-tempo moment, “Mississippi Delta.” Both function as an unofficial overture, introducing her voice and the scope of instrumentation, though in “Okolona,” Gentry’s butterscotch vocal tone slips into a dark cackle, like she’s compelling listeners to join her group in the underworld. From there, both records move into gentler, more textured moods. Billie Joe presented each song in its own customized standalone arrangement, whereas on Delta Sweete they overlap and bleed into one another. The first side proceeds to the Jimmy Reed blues tune “Big Boss Man,” which sounds almost like a field recording, with only a tinny-sounding acoustic guitar and near-spoken vocals. She then moves into her own stunning “Reunion,” reenacting a family picnic through an overlapping sampled chorus of antic in-character voices and chants in the round.
After a devilish cover of the Bukka White prison song “Parchman Farm,” Gentry’s own “Mornin’ Glory,” sung to a lover as if they are still in bed, showcases her voice’s disarming intimacy. When she hits her lowest notes here, on the line “Where’d you spend the night?” the sound is closer to an ASMR exercise than a country croon. And with its blend of strings, nylon guitar, melodica, and glimmering bells, this gorgeous love song evokes Os Mutantes’ “Baby” or Dusty Springfield’s “Breakfast in Bed” more than Loretta Lynn. The side closes with another original, “Sermon,” with Gentry rapid-fire preaching over a hopping gospel track. Delta Sweete doesn’t have a narrative, it has a flow, an almost DJ-like movement across ideas and feelings.
The record’s second side leans even more heavily into atmospherics. Two covers, “Tobacco Road” and the geographical outlier “Louisiana Man,” are the sole feints toward pop. (The latter is performed in a marvelous uptempo Cajun-flavored arrangement that I would swear influenced Harry Nilsson’s “Coconut.”) But the rest of these songs are mere wisps of melody and hazy atmosphere. The dreamlike sequence of “Penduli Pendulum,” “Jessye ‘Lizabeth,” and “Refractions” is an orchestral pop achievement to match the Left Banke or Love. The closing song, “Courtyard,” resembles the mystical contemporary folk that Fairport Convention were making four-thousand miles away. It is a story song, yes, but in the Astral Weeks sense, not “Harper Valley P.T.A.”
But consider: Bobbie Gentry was writing songs to match Van Morrison and Tom T. Hall when those men were making the music that defined their careers. She was a nobody in the spring of 1967, and by Christmas, she had recorded two divergent but equally visionary musical-literary statements about the South. That would be accomplishment enough even if the first one didn’t become a cultural touchstone.
“Ode to Billie Joe” anticipated late-’60s Southern-story hits like Tony Joe White’s “Polk Salad Annie,” the Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” and about half of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s output. All those acts specialized in their unique brand of twangy funk-country, which became the lingua franca of mainstream rock in the early 1970s. But Gentry’s Latin-accented signature guitar rhythm prefigured them all, just as her enormous fame made her the face of crossover country-rock before the Byrds adopted a pedal steel or the Stones heard Gram Parsons.
If The Delta Sweete made less of an obvious or visible impact, it’s worth noting that the scruffier end of the country world became a landscape of concept albums in the ’70s, starting with Willie Nelson’s Yesterday’s Wine and encompassing Merle Haggard’s prolific run of tribute LPs, Kenny Rogers’ The Ballad of Calico, Terry Allen’s Lubbock (On Everything), and the Waylon Jennings-led Civil War operetta White Mansions. Theme records were already a tradition in the genre going back at least as far as Marty Robbins’s 1959 Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs, but these new records, as well as Dolly Parton’s My Tennessee Mountain Home, were often feats of storytelling, not only song curation. They were works of reminiscence and imagination about a vanished South, suffused with mythic imagery and audio-theatrical production flourishes.
Gentry followed her theatrical muse but never made such an overtly thematic album again. Within the next three years she recorded four more solo albums for Capitol plus a duet record with Glen Campbell. Her LP output stopped in 1971, but as foremost Gentry expert Tara Murtha describes it, her record-making “was only the beginning of her pioneering career” as a broadcaster (hosting variety shows on the BBC and CBS), Armed Forces Radio DJ, and a decade-long song-and-dance attraction in Vegas.
What thrills most about The Delta Sweete now is that sense of adventurousness. Gentry’s chord and rhythms voicings are rarely obvious, and her voice sounds almost uncomfortably close in the mix and low in her range. The quiet moments are whispered and meditative, the busy ones are alive with a dozen voices. She recorded this album as she was in the process of becoming an enormous star, but it doesn’t feel indulgent. Instead, it is the slightly more experiential back half of a shockingly prolific and influential year’s work, as if Ode to Billie Joe were Side A of Abbey Road and The Delta Sweete was the Sun King medley. She made her own Southern Hounds of Love in just a few months.
Gentry is alive today, though it seems relevant to say that few people know where. She hasn’t released music or made any public appearances since the early 1980s, not even as country music has come to an attempted overdue reckoning for its gender imbalances. Not even as other “lost” or legendary musicians of her era have found second or third lives as documentary subjects and memoirists. Not even as Mercury Rev released an album-length cover of The Delta Sweete a few years ago featuring vocals from Lucinda Williams, Margo Price, and other contemporary singer-songwriters. Few artists have had such an outsize effect on the shape of “Americana” music in such a short period of time, and few have paid so little heed to the restrictions of that lineage. The Delta Sweete is her least restricted statement of all.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake” rapper’s major label debut showcases her versatility but loses some of the vibrant personality that made her breakout hit so appealing.

she / her / black bitch EP

Doechii’s independent 2020 single “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake” unfolds like a magical girl transformation. Speaking as a nervous new student introducing herself to a classroom, the Tampa-raised rapper begins with a meekness that sharpens into steely resolve as the track builds, girlhood crises of confidence giving way to adult conviction. “I am a black girl who beat the statistics,” she raps with a mix of relief, pride, and vexation. Doechii’s cadences and vocal tics on the song suggest Nicki Minaj, but the origin story at its center is wholly hers. When “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake” went viral the next year on TikTok, soundtracking then-versus-now reveals including gender transitions, weight loss stories, and makeovers, the song’s themes of self-discovery and overcoming adolescent angst drove the trend.
Doechii’s perspective is significantly muted on she / her / black bitch, the 5-song EP that marks her major label debut. She’s been more visible since moving to Los Angeles and signing a joint deal with Top Dawg Entertainment and Capitol, scream-rapping on The Tonight Show, literally snatching a wig on stage at the BET Awards, and landing a spot in XXL’s 2022 Freshman Class (she hits an impeccable rap squat on the magazine’s cover). But her most recent music feels less rooted in her experiences and identity, growing awash in empty flexes and filler.
The title she / her / black bitch nods to Doechii’s social media bio, reclaiming an insult lobbed at her growing up as a dark-skinned Black woman, but the writing on the EP rarely inhabits a point of view or sets a scene. “What should I do today, do today?/Who should I be, be today?” she ponders on the diaristic “This Bitch Matters,” capturing the aimless mood. Doechii’s nimble rapping and svelte singing work on a technical level, but she’s more often showing her skills than applying them. Though Doechii manages about six flows in three verses on opener “Swamp Bitches,” Rico Nasty lands the slickest lines in half the time. On “Persuasive,” Doechii’s even-keeled melodies are steamrolled by SZA’s impassioned vocal runs, which actually embrace the song's account of intoxicating seduction.
The EP has been billed as a stopgap as Doechii completes her debut album, but these songs don’t capture a moment of transition or experimentation. Doechii still traces lines drawn by muses like Minaj and Azealia Banks, and she’s not yet honed her core sound. Though the production is helmed by TDE producer Kal Banx (the secret weapon of Isaiah Rashad’s comeback album The House Is Burning), none of the beats feel as well matched to her writing as the tinny, homebrewed instrumental on “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake.” As she / her / black bitch swings from bar fests to R&B to soul, Doechii seems so intent on proving her versatility that she obscures her personality.


Mike Scott takes his long-running Irish/Scottish folk rock band the Waterboys into new terrain on his latest LP—incorporating four-four disco stomp, a heavy dose of hip-hop, and romantic love.

Out of All This Blue

Mike Scott has never been one for small gestures. It takes some measure of chutzpah to describe your art as “big music,” which is precisely what Scott did on a 1984 single by his Scottish/Irish folk rock band, the Waterboys. “Big music”—like an earnest, echoing fusion of Bruce Springsteen and Van Morrison—was a term amorphous enough that not even indie stalwart Alan McGee could explain it. But the very name conveyed ambition, or arrogance, and those are the two qualities that have been constants in Scott’s work, no matter who is in the Waterboys or what kind of music they’re playing.
Take Out of All This Blue, the new album from the Waterboys that marks a clear departure from their best-known records: the galvanizing 1985 LP This Is the Sea and 1988’s ramshackle Fisherman’s Blues. In its simplest incarnation, it’s a 23-track double album running 96 minutes, but add the 11-track bonus disc to the mix and Out of All This Blue balloons to two hours and 16 minutes. What spurred Mike Scott to indulge in his loquacious tendencies? A new love, naturally. Between 2015’s Modern Blues and Out of All This Blue, he fell in love and married the Japanese artist Megumi Igarashi—better known as Rokudenashiko—and the couple had a child. All this joy informs the songs and spirit of Out of All This Blue, whose very title, if viewed from a certain angle, suggests a triumphant emergence from sadness.
Along with a new romance comes a new set of influences for Scott. He accentuates the R&B that lurked on the edges of Modern Blues, insisting his “soul is in Memphis” even if “his ass is in Nashville, Tennessee” on a song named for the latter city. He hauls out a glitter ball for the four-four disco stomp “Monument” and adds a heavy dose of hip-hop. Scott realizes he is a few decades late to this game, but he maintains hip-hop is “still a changing frontier” of “reckless freedom.” These admirable sentiments are somewhat undermined by “Yamaben,” which sounds like the ghost of the Stereo MC’s, and how Scott thought it was wise to call an interlude “Hiphopstrumental 4 (Scatman),” a title that is pretty much the walking definition of a dad joke.
Such misses may be inevitable on an album as long as Out of All This Blue, but as the record crawls to its conclusion, these absurdities—which find companions in all manner of music and words—are ingratiating because they stem from Scott’s inherent pomp. Nearly 35 years after the Waterboys’ full-length debut, he’s still besotted by poets and idols, as apt to churn out purple prose as crack a wry aside. He’s the kind of guy who places equal weight on the questions “can you live with a man without becoming his mother” and “can you tell me the last six books you read” when courting a potential paramour (“If the answer is yeah,” he sings, then he’s into you).
If anything, Scott’s romantic instincts are accentuated in an unprecedented way on Out of All This Blue because so much of this lengthy album is devoted to love songs. Scott may ponder the question “Do We Choose Who We Love” on the track of the same name, but he doesn’t hesitate to single out Rokudenashiko or nod to her via a song named after a Japanese term of endearment (“Payo Payo Chin”). Coming from a singer/songwriter who used to strive to write for the world at large, such specificity is endearing—endearing enough that it can often excuse the dorky dance beats and other gauche production decisions. After all, part of Scott’s charm is his willingness to risk embarrassment, so it seems only right that an unfettered and smitten Scott feels free to let it all hang out on Out of All This Blue, both for good and ill.


This south London rapper and King Krule associate evokes the carefree heyday of ’90s UK garage.

Midnight Moods

Before grime, there was UK garage, a party-starting genre that treated its rappers more like hype men than storytellers. UK garage MCs were typically more concerned with getting the party started than documenting adversity, and Pinty, a south London artist and King Krule associate, grew up wanting to be just this kind of garage MC. His playful flow brings to mind the halcyon days of the late ’90s, when MC Neat and Craig David lit up the UK charts.
Pinty’s no straight-out copycat, though: while most garage MCs were hyped to the point of explosion, Midnight Moods was recorded at night, and you can hear the nocturnal ooze in Pinty’s voice, his laconic tone caught somewhere between going to bed and recording just one more vocal. The production shares this nonchalant, itchy feel. King Krule produced the tracks “It’s Just Life” and “Fresher” (plus the 56-second “Pint’s Lullaby” on the vinyl) under his DJ JD Sports guise, and he brings his lush musicality to bear: The shadowy, guitar-lined “It’s Just Life” recalls The Streets’ Mike Skinner if he grew up on jazz in bohemian South London. Meanwhile, the central trio of “E’s”, “Moonlit Duty” and “All Nightly” suggest a meandering strain of chill-out garage, their production not far off from a young Burial.
The mixtape’s most disquieting production is also its best. If the majority of Midnight Moods has the easy warmth of a packed bedroom studio, then “Go To Bed Pt. 2” brings the intoxicating delirium of a head cold, a warped synth line wrapping itself around nervous lo-fi house beats. Sadly, the mood dims when Pinty shows up, his one-paced flow suggesting a lack of confidence and finesse. Pinty’s vocals are genial enough when they fit to the beat, but a more versatile rapper would have switched up his style. But in the modest environment of Midnight Moods, this lack of personality is almost fitting. Garage MCs were rarely the stars of the show,  and Pinty’s vocals contribute to the ambience of this charmingly understated mixtape, rather than dominate them.


On her least country album to date, the Nashville songwriter flattens out the twang and borrows from pop and hip-hop, to mixed results.

Rosegold

From her earliest singles in the mid-2000s, Ashley Monroe bent country music to her will. Whether she was singing about grief over her father’s death, the complicated joy of motherhood, or just a simple crush, she took old, familiar sounds and gussied them up to express something particular and deeply personal. As a result, her music often feels as meaningful and as confessional as her lyrics. Her songs about weed and sex sound all the more radical for being packaged in a style more commonly associated—rightly or wrongly—with conservatism. There’s poignancy in hearing her address rocky relationships with her parents through songs steeped in the classic twang they impressed on her as a child. Her intimate connection to the genre has made her one of the most compelling—not to mention one of the most sneakily subversive—artists in Nashville, albeit not among the most popular: She’s an outlaw of sorts, but not the easily marketable kind.
From the lush countrypolitan sound of The Blade to the gentle twang of the Dave Cobb-produced Sparrow, Monroe’s records each have a distinctive palette, suggesting an artist constantly rethinking her relationship to country music. Her latest, Rosegold, is more blatant and calculated in its sound, and it is steadfastly not a country album—it’s more Lana Del Rey than Dolly Parton. Working with a familiar crew of songwriters and producers, Monroe borrows from pop and hip-hop, flattens out the twang and distorts her vocals, and drenches everything in twilit colors meant to accentuate the songs’ melancholy.
But once you get past the gutsiness of an artist willing to jettison her comfort zone, what you’re left with is muddled and unsatisfying. Many of these songs are rooted in country songwriting and harmonizing, in particular “Silk” and “The New Me,” but her efforts to move away from these familiar elements create a tension that more often than not emphasizes the songs’ shortcomings. Rosegold asks you to calculate its precarious successes against its noble failures. There are plenty of the former, because Monroe knows how to put a song together: She piles the strings high on “Gold,” so that they tower over her voice—a monument to the way a certain someone makes her feel. “See” marches to a slow-moving chorus that recalls the National’s “Pink Rabbits,” highlighting the delicate breaks in her voice and the way she can twist a syllable to catch the light. But there are just as many moments when Monroe overreaches, such as the awkwardly insinuated reggae rhythm on “Groove” or the loudly ticking drums that open “I Mean It.”
Especially for an artist so steeped in country music—a genre that prizes tradition more than practices it—this kind of musical boldness can be compelling even when the stunts don’t land. What ultimately sinks Rosegold is the songwriting, which is where Monroe typically excels. This might be her least distinguished set of songs to date, relying too heavily on cliché (“I’m flying without even trying”) and vague, pat sentiment (“Sometimes it doesn’t come together ’til it breaks”). Even a title like “I Mean It” seems to nod to the suspicion that there’s less of her in these songs than we’ve come to expect. By the time she gives herself a pep talk at the end of “The New Me,” it’s clear that she’s serving these arrangements more than they serve her.

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Flatland is the debut full-length by TJ Hertz's dark techno project Objekt. Flatland is experimental to its core, but it never considers polish and passion to be mutually exclusive.

Flatland

We've come to a strange chapter in the story of electronic music. Sounds that were long considered niche are now mainstream. It's an exciting space to be in, as the possibilities of electronic music's history are basically endless, but it's also somewhat confusing. Who and what do we talk about when we talk about electronic music? Where do we draw the line between what electronic music was and what it has become? And why, if at all, is it important to make these distinctions?
No surprise, then, that 2014 has given us more questions about "proper" electronic music than answers. Young producers like Sophie and the PC Music camp contextualized contemporary dance and pop permutations in their own high-gloss chicken-or-the-egg scenarios; Aphex Twin reinvigorated his career with an album that bucks current trends (many of which he's at least partially responsible for) by ignoring them altogether; and hardworking elder statesman Brian Eno released two records with Underworld's Karl Hyde that expressly contradicted each other's sounds, styles, and creative processes. Thankfully, much of this has made for thrilling, provocative music, and in ways that reward open-mindedness and conservatism in equal measure.
This is the context surrounding Flatland, the debut LP by TJ Hertz as Objekt, and he seems keenly aware of it. Maybe that's because he's been a leader in the electronic music conversation since 2011, when his first solo 12" snuck up behind dubstep and yanked the rug out from under it. Though "The Goose That Got Away" and "Tinderbox" have very little to do with the sleek, weighty tracks Hertz produces in his Berlin studio these days, the deep technical knowledge that helped make them possible is still central to Objekt's musical identity. Here is an artist who studied electronic and information engineering at University of Oxford, has developed software both personally and professionally (for tech giant Native Instruments), readily and openly shares tips, tricks, and advice with other producers, and only further hones his craft with each intermittent release. Nevermind if Objekt has any solutions for the state of electronic music, we have more to gain from knowing what he ponders and hearing how he manifests those thoughts.
Though his approach to techno may appear clinical or overly academic, Objekt's productions always feel animated and impulsive; Flatland is experimental to its core, but it never considers polish and passion to be mutually exclusive. It's because Hertz can fashion fiercely tactile and resilient elements with textbook precision that the basslines in his menacing "Dogma" use your backbone like a seismometer. And it's how "Ratchet" projects Cybotron's Detroit electro-isms from cathode tube monitors into a 3-D virtual environment. As an intro, "Agnes Revenge" dazzles with hi-def depictions of cryonized steel shattering ice blocks in ultra slow-mo, which Objekt inverts and further details during the noxious seepage of "Agnes Apparatus". No matter if it's functioning as soundsystem armament or headphone oddity, Flatland won't hesitate to travel down every avenue uncovered by the refined programming, ingenious sound theory, and liberal stylistic influences it was mapped with.
Which is why the record sounds rooted in electronic music's history even as it carves out an alternate future. Learned perfectionist that he is, Hertz knows the secrets of Drexciyan history, Autechre's essential deep cuts, Speedy J's trusty drum patterns, and what makes Richard D. James a legendary producer—using such seminal influences not to revive the past, but to reinvent it for his own purposes. The chugging thump in "Strays" may not have been made with an actual Roland TR-909, nor the acid sequences of "One Fell Swoop" or "Interlude (Whodunnit?)" with a 303, but Objekt can nonetheless capture each machine's warm, gritty soul with his own digitial approximation. Hertz remains dedicated to his icons while subverting their methods because he does so with the avant-garde spirit passed down through their work.
Throughout Flatland, Objekt reclaims his genre's all-too-familiar affectations by making us hear them for the first time all over again. It's a rare album that sounds so vivid and transparent despite its densely intricate constructions. Stranger still, it's one largely devoid of apparent melodies and climactic structures, instead using pristine sound design and dynamically expressive arrangements in the way an expert orchestra plays a symphony's fluid notation. Flatland isn't remarkable for answering any of electronic music's questions, it's remarkable because it lets us consider them from a completely new perspective.