The latest in Mike Volpe’s series of boutique beats and remixes shows the producer in a new light. It sounds top-shelf, produced and engineered with a meticulousness that puts the new kids to shame.

Instrumental Mixtape 4

It was 2013 when Mike Volpe last released a volume of his instrumental tapes series and he was near the most visible point of his influence. The dense, thumping beats he created as the producer Clams Casino had, in the previous five years, become an undeniable part of the hip-hop mainstream. Each instrumental was a nebulous ecosystem, enveloping the accompanying rap verses in a cloud of weed smoke. The style was so influential that it birthed a subgenre, cloud-rap, and spawned a universe of imitators.
Volpe’s contributions—his skittering layers of drums and bass thump, his oozing samples—have changed the genre for good. But the intervening years have pushed the producer into a different lane. He’s a veteran now, and instead of continuing to innovate, he’s chosen to step into the background and refine his sound, collaborating with favorites like Vince Staples and A$AP Ferg, contributing to a diverse array of pop albums, and furthering his own solo career with last year’s debut 32 Levels. To hear a full collection of his recent work, on Instrumental Mixtape 4, is to consider Clams Casino in a new light, as an architect contributing new designs in a city whose skyline he helped shape.
The 13 beats here—two of them original, the others culled from various projects—are, for the most part, in the mold that made Casino’s name with gaseous, disembodied vocal samples, deep pockets of negative space. Three come from Staples’ Summertime ’06 and two others debuted as Ferg tracks. “Elastic Heart” is a remix of the Sia record of the same name; “Stem/Long Stem” is a DJ Shadow remix. Given the time that’s passed and in comparison to the Soundcloud offerings that have followed, the work on the new tape sounds more top-shelf, produced and engineered with a meticulousness that puts the new kids to shame.
If anything has changed, it seems to be the producer’s recognition of his own importance to the venture; his beats in recent years have been bolder, with their own outsize personalities. The beats for “Norf Norf” and “Worth It” were always obvious gems. Here, it takes several listens to shed the memories of Vince Staples and Danny Brown respectively, both of whom scribbled compellingly in the blank space of those tracks with their typical hyperactive bars. But with no voices present, attention is drawn to the flick of the snare that interrupts the drawn out synths of the “Norf Norf” beat, the gasps of air pulsating within the latticework of “Worth It.” “Wavey,” one of the original tracks, stands as one of the best offerings here, as Clams colors with the same palette as “Norf Norf,” but allows his vocal samples the space to play. Distorted beyond all recognition, they nonetheless sound alive, and the track is startlingly emotional and touching in its vulnerability. The same is true of the “Stem/Long Stem” remix, which immediately follows. With its twinkling, almost tender profundity, it sounds about as close as Volpe could get to creating a lullaby.
The beats here generally fall into two separate categories based on their momentum. The Staples’ and Ferg beats, along with the original opener “Say Your Prayers” and the quick-hit Kali Yuga (originally a beat for Ghostmane) drive forward with more muscle, a sense of internal momentum. The remixes, on the other hand, tend to drift by, their countervailing rhythms confusing the passage of time. Combining both modes is “Time,” which is about the most danceable track that Casino has ever made, its wistful samples more solid than his usual work and its surprising structure giving it a gasp of momentum even as it fades out. (The track was included on the enormous #savefrabic compilation cobbled together last year on behalf of the shuttered London club.)
Casino’s style, as much as anyone else’s, helped to define the sound of rap online in the early 2010s, giving artists from a wide variety of backgrounds a shared vocabulary. There was a time when hitmakers like Drake, A$AP Rocky, and The Weeknd flocked to that sound—now, all have moved on to brighter, sharper things. Volpe could have gambled on a reinvention, a new signature that could recreate the influence he wielded a couple years earlier. Instrumental Tape 4 demonstrates that he’s made a wiser, safer choice, perfecting his skills, growing his ego, working with the right people and finding new pockets in his sound. All the while, he’s continued to turn out raw, melodramatic beats that remain remarkably powerful, even if their ingredients have grown familiar.


The latest from the re-reformed post-punk superstars shows the band's vigor, melodic prowess, and capacity to surprise remain undiminished.

Red Barked Tree

Wire always seem to be ahead of their time, no matter what time they choose to exist in. Their legendary three-album evolutionary run from 1977 to 1979 predicted punk's gradual mutation into synth-pop; their second incarnation (circa 1985-1990), as a textural electro-rock outfit, anticipated the late-80s vogue for industrialized funk and dream-pop. And even their most recent reunion in 2000 was an uncannily prophetic move-- after seeing their currency rise throughout the Britpopped 90s, Wire resurfaced just as indie rock was about to be revitalized by a post-punk craze that eventually also lured first-wave peers like Gang of Four and Public Image Ltd out of retirement.
But if a second Wire reunion was inevitable, its outcome has been refreshingly less predictable: Not only has the band avoided the easy nostalgia trend of playing its classic albums live in their entirety, Wire Mk III have proven to be more prolific and long-lasting than the band's two storied previous phases put together. Sure, founding guitarist Bruce Gilbert checked out of the current campaign back in 2004, but the band's momentum has continued apace. And there's no reason to suggest this won't continue: The new Red Barked Tree shows the band's vigor, melodic prowess, and capacity to surprise remain undiminished.
That album title is the first brow-raiser: Amid a discography filled with cryptic names (154, A Bell Is a Cup... Until It Is Struck, Object 47), Red Barked Tree presents a disarmingly simple image that's reflected in the album's surprisingly relaxed, pastoral turns (acoustic guitars! on three songs!) and a lyrical framework addressing the emotional and environmental costs of modernity run amok. Red Barked Tree is a shrewdly sequenced album, and it has to be, given that its impulsive stylistic shifts-- from mechanized thrash to psychedelic folk to nervy power-pop-- mirror the "age of fragmentation" that Colin Newman is railing against. But its 11 songs are more or less positioned along a logical arc, where a sense of ominous unease gives way to violent release before simmering into a peaceful comedown.
With their 2002 Read & Burn EP series, Wire already proved that a band of fiftysomethings could handily out-thrash all of Williamsburg, and on Red Barked Tree, that hot-blooded energy is still in bountiful, if more rationed, supply. But the most remarkable thing about Red Barked Tree is how, 34 years into their career, Wire are still eager to redefine their essence, whether in the form of shimmering, shoegazed sea shanties ("Adapt") or a campy suave-rocker that sounds like it sauntered in off the first Roxy Music album (Graham Lewis' "Bad Worn Thing").
Even when Wire directly invoke their past work, it's subject to savvy recontextualtion: "Clay" puts the bouncing synth-bass frequencies of "I Am the Fly" to less caustic use, while "Two Minutes" applies the full-torque velocity of "Too Late" to a disaffected spoken-word commentary about modern necessities and addictions. By the time we reach the slow-burning title-track closer-- a quiet plea for eco-sanity propelled by tense, tightly coiled acoustic strums-- Wire have successfully reinvented themselves once again, this time as wise elder statesmen cautioning against a world where over-reliance on GPS systems has replaced the basic survivalist skill of knowing your map references.


On its latest release, the Swedish band that has previously blended death metal, folk, and progressive rock has moved into a more measured sound that puts less emphasis on dynamics.

Heritage

In a review of the special edition reissue of Opeth's 2005 collection Ghost Reveries, I quoted band leader Mikael Åkerfeldt as saying that what his group does is "more than metal." At the time, the forward-thinking Swedish group was still very much performing within the metal tradition. On their 10th album, Heritage, they aren't. For longtime fans, the shift from progressive death metal to full-on progressive rock won't be a surprise: 2003's Damnation gave a good idea of what Åkerfeldt sounded like doing clean vocals sans death growls, and since 1995's debut, Orchid, he's never been afraid to stretch the templates of all the genres they incorporate. (Åkerfeldt's used his airier croon for ages-- here, more confident in that angle, he removed the heavier stuff and expanded upon the airier bridges.) What might surprise you, though, is the intense completeness of the transition: Heritage's 1970s-inspired prog feels more like the follow-up to fellow countrymen Dungen's 2004 opus Ta Det Lugnt than Opeth's own Watershed.
The 10-song collection is another collaboration with Porcupine Tree's Steven Wilson, who mixed the record with Åkerfeldt-- it has a warm, analog feel, something that lives up to the colors of the cover painting. The brief opening title track is a plaintive, scene-setting piano piece Åkerfeldt says was inspired by Swedish jazz pianist Jan Johansson and the folk music of his country. Elsewhere, guest spots from Swedish flautist Björn J:son Lindh and Weather Report percussionist Alex Acuña (both on eight-minute loud-quiet-loud standout "Famine"), give Heritage a mystical, pastoral feel. If you've heard only the King Crimson-nodding lead track, "The Devil's Orchard", you have a good idea what to expect: an exuberant, forward rushing blend of bell-bottomed jazziness and Deep Purple, Camel, and Jethro Tull love made more complex with quick tempo shifts, stop-on-a-dime implosions, and breezy, racing, drifting, and other sorts of atmospheric, psychedelic flourishes.
Another track, the muscular "Slither", is appropriately dedicated to Ronnie James Dio. The 37-year-old Åkerfeldt, who says Heritage is an album he's been "building up to write for and participate on" since he was 19, has also mentioned listening to Alice Cooper frequently over the past year. You won't necessarily detect the latter in any obvious way, but you'll feel it in the album's appropriation of the texture and atmosphere of an era. Åkerfeldt and co. do offer a convincing take-- it's a pretty, well-thought out collection-- but for all the ideas and layers, Heritage feels somewhat empty. It's the group's most genre-melding, but it's also the most obvious, largely because much of it sounds like things we've heard before. The lifelessness may also be the result of the singularity of the vision: Heritage lacks the usual shift and pull between heavy and soft that they've managed to weave into their music for the past two decades. It feels a bit listless and emotionally distant. When it comes down to it, Åkerfeldt's death growl is more memorable than his rock singing (and both work best when you get them together). There are dynamics here, but not the kind that create unexpected chills.
The story behind Travis Smith's colorful cover painting is instructive. We're told Åkerfeldt gave the artist a number of references including Pieter Bruegel's "The Triumph of Death", Hieronymus Bosch (in general), and the Beatles' Yellow Submarine. The final picture depicts a tree sprouting the heads of each Opeth member with the noggin of ex-keyboardist and backing vocalist Per Wiberg, who left the band after recording his parts for the new record, toppling into "a pile of ex-members' skulls." Beneath those skulls? The roots of the tree that point to the band's devilish roots in death metal. We're also told the nine stars in the sky represent Opeth's nine past albums, the sun representing Heritage. Then comes the line of people "want[ing] a piece" of the band, etc. It's fine to get conceptual, of course, but the forced, overripe symbolism of this image and its fussiness point to a problem with the record: Åkerfeldt remembered to include everything here except space for his songs to breathe. He refers to Opeth records as "observations" and, ultimately, for all its considerable beauty, Heritage too often feels like a passive, backward glance.


The London multi-instrumentalist and producer’s debut solo LP is subtle and oblique, rejecting the ordering logics of containment by melding house, jazz, classical, and electronic music.

Glass Effect

In 2020, as part of a “Classic Album Sundays” night at Camden Town’s Jazz Café, Ben Marc joined a suite of jazz musicians and collaborators to perform a live reimagining of DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing....., the groundbreaking 1996 instrumental hip-hop project comprised almost entirely of samples from funk, psychedelia, rock, and ambient vinyl. Marc, who was a music student at Trinity College London at the time of its release, remembered the album from his work upstairs at the Trocadero HMV, seeing in its innovative patchworks—Metallica, Marlena Shaw, Pekka Pohjola, Tangerine Dream, Björk—some of the formal structures of jazz.
Two years later, Marc’s debut solo LP Glass Effect is similarly oblique, hypnotic, and unresolved, rejecting the ordering logics of containment by melding house, jazz, classical, and electronic music. In different hands, attempts at genre experimentation can present at once as insecure skill showcase or rejectionist muddle, but Marc evinces a heads-down collection that is evocative and maintains its integrity. Glass Effect is a subtle record, filled with electronic drifts and rushes atop signature bass, in which Marc tries to find calm.
Raised in Birmingham and the Caribbean, Marc (né Neil Charles) has worked with Barbadian-British saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, Ethio-jazz multi-instrumentalist Mulatu Astatke (with whom Marc toured for over 10 years), and grime MC Dizzee Rascal, who joined Marc on the 2020 EP Wait. Marc seems comfortable marshaling transdisciplinary textures, with stated influences including J Dilla’s instrumental hip-hop, Machinedrum’s electronic layering, and Sun Ra’s interplanetary jazz assemblages.
Marc’s sort of anti-primitivist Jon Hassell formation combines highly globalized, capitalist stimuli—travels in Ibiza, London, and Japan are cited in the album notes—without granting them profundity. There is a bit of Mount Kimbie’s debut Crooks & Lovers in the record, its lack of ego or anxiety, but also a tenseness, best seen in “Jaw Bone,” the distortion-heavy, alto-sax medley. How these experiences and affects collide with a declared theme of Black male “resilience” is not clarified by the presence of ideology or through a subversion of form. Instead, it seems Marc is seeking answers in the feeling that emerges from a creative practice, in the comfort of work as a grace that protects the besieged subject and opens them up to kindred others in turn. This is perhaps clearest in the title track, a bouncy street lullaby of piano, synths, and guitar, too propulsive to be bedroom air space, but too soothing to let Marc’s demons out.
Yet the energy simmers, expressed through telegraphed build-ups: xylophone and echoey yelps cascading into synths and electric guitar in “Sometimes Slow”; clappity steps and birdsong giving way to guitar, cello, and strings in “Mustard.” There is an edge here, too. In “Dark Clouds,” Marc and Nigerian-British poet Joshua Idehen play “buccaneer,” navigating stormy waters and throwing all of England aboard—frumpy parliamentarians, Kensington pearl-clutchers, and an elitist London jazz scene confronted by the anti-colonial politics of its new wave. Idehen huffs over brassy broken-beat: “Check me bringing the summer to your borough/…Check me in a hoodie/Shokoto and boba/Check me in my Sunday best and trainers/Street scholar/Chirsping on your sons and daughters.” This narrative is played straight and playfully, its end result somehow heartening, not despairing.
It is the classical, though, that Marc returns to in this collaboration and the others on the album, citing a training that folds virtuoso tendencies into a larger whole. In a recent interview, he describes working with vocal soloists as an orchestral effort, recalling labors late into the morning hours with Judi Jackson to co-design the soaring “Give Me Time.” (“Healing ain’t over night,” she insists.) This particular vision yields the standout “Keep Moving,” where the gorgeous trilling of Attica Blues vocalist MidnightRoba is buttressed by Luigi Grasso on flute and by Marijus Aleksa, the Lithuanian drummer who plays on most of Glass Effect.
With the Endtroducing..... set, as with this record, Marc shows that jazz conjunctures are met outside the individual, an artist’s self-effacement becoming an eddy for contemporary collaborators and their historical influences. There is an empiricism behind this, as if Marc were testing the harmonies and polyrhythms, improvising and refining to better understand their formal complements. He is not tepid in doing so, and the result is assured—the pensiveness forming an emotional tissue that connects the strands. The record’s complexity reveals itself over several listens, its slow-motion quietude opening up into a not-quite-happiness; what might be described as flow, or else, focus.


The LA-based electronic duo that gave Kanye’s The Life of Pablo its gospel-house sheen embraces pop on an album featuring guest vocals by Amber Mark, Khalid, and The-Dream.

Big Wave More Fire

Last year, Los Angeles electronic duo DJDS shared a sprawling playlist titled “BIG WAVE MORE FIRE,” which they described as a “soundtrack to a TV show that doesn’t exist.” The semi-regularly updated, genre-agnostic collection of songs highlights Jerome LOL and Samo Sound Boy’s curatorial abilities, imagining a pool party where Arthur Russell rubs shoulders with dancehall dons and Lana Del Rey alike. Given their discerning taste and ear for cherry-picking vintage sounds, it’s no wonder Kanye West recruited DJDS to help give The Life of Pablo a gospel-house sheen.
On the pair’s third album, which shares the playlist’s title, it’s clear that their all-night studio sessions with West, as well as subsequent production work for artists like Khalid, The-Dream, and Kacy Hill, have brought their creative goals into sharper focus. Big Wave More Fire is not only their most pop-oriented and guest-packed effort to date—it’s also their most ambitious. While 2016’s Stand Up and Speak saw the duo move away from their sample-based early material, going so far as to hire anonymous, uncredited vocalists off Craigslist, here the tracklist is stacked with big-name veterans and new talents alike. DJDS frequently document their creative process by sharing photos and videos of their guests in the studio, and there’s an intimacy to these 14 songs that couldn’t have been achieved solely by bouncing stems back and forth to artists over email.
Many of these collaborations look puzzling on paper, but the producers’ pristine melodies and uncluttered beats reveal how inspired the pairings really are. Canadian indie mainstays Broken Social Scene and Brooklyn alt-R&B trio Wet don’t have much in common stylistically, yet “New Grave,” a ghostly duet between the group’s respective leaders, Kevin Drew and Kelly Zutrau, works by digitally altering both singers’ voices until they echo one another. Two-part suite “I Heard” and “I Heard (Pt. 2)” places rumbling basslines and organ swells underneath The-Dream and newcomer Vory’s lovesick tales, before passing the baton to West’s G.O.O.D. Music affiliate Hill. The most ambitious crossover event is “No Pain,” which assembles Khalid, Charlotte Day Wilson, and Charlie Wilson (who previously appeared on the duo’s 2016 song “You Don’t Have To Be Alone”) into an unlikely R&B group, fusing each artist’s brand of gravitas into a deeply soulful lament.
Although DJDS cut their teeth playing underground warehouse parties, several tracks on Big Wave feel built for peak-time festival sets. The horn-heavy “Pick Me Up” and “Why Don’t You Come On” are feel-good, hands-in-the-air dance-pop jams, both capable of knocking off all flower crowns in their immediate radius. With two contributions, the springy “I Get By” and the dark-horse “song of the summer” contender “Trees on Fire,” Amber Mark narrowly takes the title of the album’s most valuable vocalist. On the latter track, a euphoric anthem about desire, her husky voice perfectly complements rookie Marco McKinnis’ butter-smooth crooning.
As if to underline the duo’s new embrace of pop, Big Wave More Fire includes DJDS and Empress Of’s uptempo cover of Lana Del Rey’s Lust for Life standout “Love.” It’s easy to see what drew them to the single’s Beach Boys-indebted noir: Like the best songs that have come out of this new phase of the pair’s career, it’s romantic, nostalgic without being cloying, and feels equally suited to sing-alongs in the car and the amphitheater.


The singer-songwriter’s second album is a well-curated coming-of-age tale. Full of summery R&B and glitzy amapiano, it moves beyond feel-good anthems and thoughtfully tackles the insecurities of young adulthood.

The Year I Turned 21

Before Ayra Starr even turned 21, she had already graduated college, signed with the powerhouse West African label Mavin, and dropped her debut album, 19 & Dangerous. Her second LP, The Year I Turned 21, is the next chapter in her pop stardom storybook. While 19 & Dangerous spotlit an angsty Ayra jaded by toxic, past relationships, TYIT21 captures a Grammy-nominated Starr fixated on getting the bag. This new Ayra might be dripping in designer, but there’s an underlying vulnerability that grounds her. Not straying far from her signature sound, Starr’s well-curated album explores introspective depths and thankfully journeys beyond feel-good anthems.
In the lead single “Commas,” the Beninese Nigerian singer-songwriter credits her success to God, radiating a gracious spirituality that floats through the album. Money is a recurring motif: “To be real I’m still eating off my last hit,” she raps breathlessly, then lets the words settle into the gospel-tinged choir of “Bad Vibes.” What initially sounds like a flex suddenly feels existential. Starr’s reflections on money bounce between moments of gratitude, reminders of the hustle, and an insatiable desire for more, painting a far richer picture of a young woman grappling with adulthood. On “1942,” she stammers, “I don’t wanna lose”; the worry feels especially palpable when Milar, Ayra’s brother, interjects that he’s scared he might “lose it all” one day. The line hints at insecurities Starr might hesitate to voice herself. Here lies the driving force of TYIT21: the fear of everything you’ve worked for suddenly vanishing into thin air.
Turning 21 is both a milestone and trope, but Starr’s portrayal across the record feels refreshingly complicated, filled with contradictions and uncertainties. She sparkles on “21,” a heartfelt meditation that wrestles with the weight of self-definition. The woozy ballad thrives in its dreamy simplicity, allowing Starr to explore the lush textures of her voice; breathy croons and spoken word morph into full-bodied belts. Her musical alchemy makes R&B’s flow and Afrobeats’ rhythmic pulse groove in unison, rendering her voice a natural fit for more traditional ballads. It’s an internal monologue between youthful optimism and being comfortable not knowing it all. “21” fades on the soft refrain of the word “22,” a chilling lullaby turned cosmic nightmare.
Despite her undeniable growth over the last two years, Starr’s words still read like a diary. This album basks in the greenness of youth. From the violin-guided opener “Birds Sing of Money,” Starr puts up an IDGAF front, spitting, “I don’t watch my tone cause I like how it sound bitch,” a cheeky swerve from her softer, rose-colored lyrics. “Lagos Love Story” is an Afropop sugar rush that revels in the thrill of a young romance—the kind of love that leads to impulsive promises after a day of smoking weed at the beach (“Let’s make babies, we’re still young but I dey ready,” she proposes). Three tracks later, Starr has prematurely declared her “Last Heartbreak Song” in a duet with Giveon. Who’s going to break it to her that this is only the beginning?
There is a palpable maturity, however, in the production of her sound. While staying true to her earlier Afro-fusion works, TYIT21 taps into dancehall, Nigerian highlife, and amapiano, demonstrating an expanded range, restraint, and purpose for Starr. She tones down the Afro trap and EDM beats of her debut, opting instead for summery melodies, log drums, and acoustic guitar licks, even as she navigates more serious themes. Nigerian Pidgin and Yoruba are sprinkled throughout, alongside her love of proverbs, a mission to popularize Nigerian culture for Gen Z’ers across Africa. The features are also well-matched, with Starr’s buttery vocals melting into those of her collaborators, like Asake and Seyi Vibez. In the sabi girl bounce “Woman Commando,” Anitta and Coco Jones adapt to complement her alté style, rather than outshine her. On the bonus track “Santa,” with Rauw Alejandro and producer Rvssian, Starr contributes to a growing movement of Afrobeats and reggaeton collabs. The invited guests here feel like intentional curatorial choices, showcasing her versatility as an international star.
Turning 21 is weird. You’re not a kid anymore, but being an adult feels like playing pretend. With your twenties also comes a lingering twinge of regret, in which you doubt whether you’ve done enough before hitting this “landmark occasion.” It’s a clumsy era of navigating newfound changes while dealing with the pressure to be somebody. Closer “The Kids Are Alright”—dedicated to her late father—opens with a voice note from Starr’s mother: “I want you to be happy…Enjoy what you worked for. Don’t save, save, save…because your dad did not really enjoy what he worked for. He was always pleasing people.” The Year I Turned 21 suggests holding onto the freedom of your salad days isn’t so bad. Maybe adulthood can afford a touch of teen spirit.


After 2014’s plodding Sunn O))) collaboration Terrestrials, the black metal outfit Ulver have sprung back to life with a krautrock-leaning collection derived from several live improvisational pieces the band performed at various shows two years ago.

ATGCLVLSSCAP

There will always be a strong contingent of fans imploring Ulver mastermind Kristoffer Rygg to stay sequestered in some dark, Norwegian wood, blessing his acolytes with abundant black metal masterpieces. And who could blame them? After all, the chameleonic outfit are responsible for two of metal’s greatest albums: 1995’s folk-steeped, hellish Bergtatt, and 1997’s *Nattens Madrigal: atte hymn til ulven i manden—*a searing, lo-fi suite devoted wholly to the mighty Canis lupus ("Sopranos" fans might recognize its cover art from a poster in Meadow’s room). By the end of the '90s, the band moved on from black metal to albums influenced by Wagner, Massive Attack, prog futurism, and modern classical, belying their sole stylistic constant: inconsistency. Rygg’s restless, morbid creative spirit has enabled Ulver to expand their dark horizons outward and mine sorrow from any style they choose, teaming up with such disparate collaborators as Mysticum and Norway's Tromsø Chamber Orchestra along the way.
Ulver's 16th album, ATGCKVLSSCAP, provides proof of their initial ferocity, even after countless incarnations. After 2014’s plodding Sunn O))) collaboration Terrestrials, Ulver have sprung back to life with a krautrock-leaning collection derived from several live improvisational pieces the band performed at various shows two years ago. Gone are the classically-inspired arrangements and sound effects resembling dying flies; in their stead stand waterlogged bells, torrential percussion, and frog noises. Spiritual energy abounds; the album’s centerpiece, "Om Hanumate Namah," pays tribute to a powerful Hindu monkey god with a meditative structure that becomes more and more animated with each recitation of its mantra.
With plenty of thrills tucked away inside ATGCKVLSSCAP’s Can-y first half—"Glammer Hammer"’s cinematic crescendoes and anxious keyboards; the metallic, clanging drums that stamp out "Moody Stix"; and the rugged psychedelic freak-outs of "Crogmagnosis," to name a few—it’s a shame that the album’s static, drone-intensive second half wipes out the guitars, bass, and drums that made the first six tracks so rich-sounding. "Desert/Dawn," "D-Day Drone," and "Gold Beach" make for nice background music, but seem weak and uninspired when compared to the record's energetic upswing.
Over the last decade, Rygg’s taken on a more prominent vocal presence in Ulver, showcased most recently on 2011’s War on the Roses. His impressive bass register and haunting tone work well within the band’s grim palette—and yet, he’s got but two opportunities to show off his pipes on ATGCKVLSSCAP, just as the album nears its conclusion. "Nowhere (Sweet Sixteen)" marks the closest the band’s come to pop so far: a seething ballad peppered with spoken-word passages and trembling guitar chords. On the following song, "Ecclesiastes (A Vernal Catnip)," Rygg surrounds his tenor with bongos, pianos, and synths, but without a clear structure, the frontman's left to wander about aimlessly. As a result, the late-album arrangement of these two outliers feels unnecessary and out-of-place. Two steps forward, one step back: such is the dance of courting other genres, even if the risks have helped keep Ulver vital.


The British duo Slow Club traveled to Virginia’s Spacebomb Studios to record their latest LP. The songs are dressed in easy listening costumes, but they seethe with disconnect and sorrow.

Slow Club: One Day All of This Won't Matter Any More

Like Slow Club’s previous albums, One Day All of This Won’t Matter Anymore finds the British duo of Rebecca Taylor and Charles Watson trying on new sounds. This time, they traveled to Spacebomb Studios in Richmond, VA., where producer Matthew E. White enlisted the studio’s house band to provide the template. The core of the Spacebomb house band also helped give Natalie Prass her slow-burning variation on classic soul for her 2015 self-titled debut. But Slow Club have already done soul, with 2014’s Complete Surrender. The sound they ended up capturing here is more akin to soft rock of the ’70s and ’80s. Taylor often channels the likes of Sheena Easton and Linda Ronstadt, while Watson can sound like the singer from America or Walter Egan (the guy who sang “Magnet and Steel”).
Slow Club present these songs in easy listening costumes, but below the surface, One Day is seething with disconnect and sorrow. The pair sing in unison less than on any of their previous releases—or at least Taylor’s voice is lower in the mix than usual when she helps augment Watson’s melodies. Though they aren’t singing together as much, it sounds like they might be singing to each other more than ever. Taylor sings lines like “I’m finding it too hard to accept your help” in “Champion;” Watson sings lines like “you’ve got your battles and they rage like an ancient rolling sea” in the lead single, “Ancient Rolling Sea.”
Whether or not the latter song is actually about her, Taylor’s lyrics do evoke raging battles. She sings of being awful to lovers in several songs, and of “turning up at parties like a hurricane” on “In Waves,” the album’s second single. The latter track boasts a brilliant video, in which Taylor uses a GoPro head strap mount to capture a dizzying day of her boozing and brooding. The video also includes a shot where Watson is slouched into a seat across from Taylor in a coffee shop, playing up the rigmarole of talking on the phone to the press: “We were kinda aware it’s not like a load of bangers,” he says, “but it’s what we enjoy doing.”
While he’s right that there aren’t a load of bangers on here, there are several stellar songs, the best of which showcase the duo’s adaptability, especially in surrendering musical control to the Spacebomb house band. Songs like “Where the Light Gets Lost” and “Give Me Some Peace” reach transcendence in their final minutes, as the full band stretches the tunes into unexpected shapes. “Sweetest Grape on the Vine” effortlessly floats along the “sunny day highway” that Alex Chilton was singing about in Big Star’s “Big Black Car.” “Come on Poet” allows Taylor to belt out hard emotional phrases that seem like necessary exorcisms.
The biggest issue with One Day is the sequencing. Two Watson-led songs kick off the album, so it takes about 10 minutes before Taylor steps into the spotlight. This wouldn’t be so jarring if their songwriting styles didn’t seem to be growing apart. Slow Club identified as a Sheffield duo for several years, but now they live in separate cities, he in London and she in Margate, about two hours away. The Spacebomb house band do a decent job of keeping the instrumental shades consistent, but the songs Watson sings often have comparatively lighter stories—given the heaviness of Taylor’s lyrics, it feels odd to postpone her entrance for so long. For example, on “Tattoo,” Watson sings against a breezy disco-lite rhythm of saving up money to get some ink, only for it all to be ruined by scars resulting from a double bypass. Watson’s nonchalant narrative and dark humor are a stark foil to Taylor’s writing, which feels deeply personal; “Tattoo” rather inappropriately precedes a track where Taylor sings, “my hunger, it struck, we succumbed to our fuck.” You might call this uneasy listening.


Juice WRLD’s emo-rap debut is an adolescent breakup record that is equal parts endearing and grating.

Goodbye & Good Riddance

The 19-year-old Illinois rapper Jared Higgins (aka Juice WRLD) arrived suddenly and fully formed on the Billboard charts over the last few months. First it was with a song called “All Girls Are the Same,” which is obviously bratty and stupid, but also sneakily catchy and endearing in the way it casts Higgins as a bit of a heartbroken doofus. “Tell me what's the secret to love, I don't get it,” he sings in a monotonous drone. Another single quickly followed, and Juice WRLD’s first official album, Goodbye & Good Riddance, fell out of the sky just months after news he’d signed a deal with a major label. As a result, Higgins feels a bit like a ringer who has been hidden from view and unveiled all at once.
It’s possible Higgins has enjoyed such a rapid climb due to the familiarity of the emo-rap he trades in. But that same familiarity can nag at the ear and force comparisons. He can sound warbly and frustrated—one part Lil Yachty and one part Post Malone—or depressed and histrionic, like Lil Peep and nothing,nowhere. To be sure, Higgins has latched onto this wave of emo-rap in both sound and lyrics, and Interscope has invested in his timely recipe of weepy trap because he’s such a convincing aggregate of the sound. If there’s an urgency to Goodbye & Good Riddance it’s not so much what is inside the album, but the timing of its delivery.
Goodbye & Good Riddance is an adolescent breakup record, and it’s accordingly cathartic, petty, and clumsy in its emotional processing. It’s as hard to like Higgins as it is easy to pity him. The album cover signals some of this schtick with a campy anime drawing of Higgins doing a burnout, sticking his middle finger out the window, and literally leaving a woman in his dust. It’s a small-minded, juvenile gesture that fits hand-in-hand with that lead single and the general sulkiness of the rest of the album. Higgins sings at a persistent “you” throughout Goodbye & Good Riddance, but he’s clearly self-obsessed in a moment of torment, paralyzed by heartbreak but not to the point that he can’t crawl in front of a mirror to glance at himself fall apart. For Higgins, heartbreak is performative and despondency is chic.
Thankfully, there’s an emotional immediacy to the music and Higgins is doing more than just spinning his wheels. He sings often in weepy groans and emo snarls that match the blunt rawness of his lyrics, even if he’s in the habit of telling instead of showing his feelings (“Who am I kiddin’?/All this jealousy and agony that I sit in”). He also often grimaces through vapid clunkers like “I take prescriptions to make me feel a-okay/I know it's all in my head.” These aren’t lyrics that can be delivered with tact, and Higgins hams it up at every turn. What he lacks in narrative, he makes up for in moody hooks, to the point that the nursery-rhyme simplicity of his singsong couplets can wash away the groaning melodrama of a line like, “I’m on the drugs way too much” and needle it into your skull. The tragic upshot of the album—love sucks, drugs help—is as productively communicated by song titles like “I”ll Be Fine,” “Scared of Love,” and “Hurt Me” as the lyrics inside of them.
The more pressing accomplishment on Goodbye & Good Riddance is that Higgins has crystallized the sonic footprint of this emo-rap moment. The production is handled mostly by Higgins’ frequent collaborator Nick Mira, who encourages the maudlin effect of Higgins’ writing with mawkish synth atmospheres and fidgeting trap snares; the same current runs through the whole tracklist like a wet blanket.
Other than the cringey voicemail skits peppered throughout, Higgins stands alone on the album without a single feature to accompany him. Even if his draw is relatability, it could have scanned awkward to hear Higgins share this space with anyone else. Throughout Goodbye & Good Riddance, his heart-on-his-sleeve coping sounds both ingratiating and grating. In that way at least, he’s bottled up sad sap adolescence remarkably well.


Before Power Trip released Manifest Decimation, they were one of those groups people said you needed to see live to understand. However, the new eight-song LP, Manifest Decimation, their first release for Southern Lord, is such a strong collection that you could never see the Dallas crossover thrash band live and still understand what makes them special.

Manifest Decimation

Before Manifest Decimation, Power Trip were one of those groups people said you needed to see live to understand. This isn’t to take away from the EPs and singles they released before this LP, because they contained good songs. It’s just that they were still eclipsed by frontman Riley Gale and company’s whirling dervish stage presence. There’s a reason they’ve toured plenty with their west coast pals, Trash Talk: They play bridge shows, they make liberal use of gang vocals, their fans are very into circle pits, and, hell, they shout out straightedge hardcore bands on their Facebook page. But this debut eight-song collection, their first release for Southern Lord, is such a strong record that you could never see Power Trip live and still understand what makes them special.
The Dallas, Texas, quintet play crossover, i.e., thrash that draws from hardcore punk. The guitars, placed up front, are clean, dexterous, and fast; the vocals and drums, in the back, are draped in sludge and reverb. Those elements will, at times, remind you of the darker side of the old-school thrash spectrum (Slayer), but the spirit of this stuff pulls more from the hardcore scene, like their Astoria forebears Leeway or, on the burlier side, Cro-Mags. Unlike other contemporary thrash bands, Power Trip create a legitimately violent atmosphere, and don’t go around wearing sleeveless jean jackets with the front of their baseball caps turned up. They sound less like they’re here to party, and more like they want to kick your ass.
You could safely say Power Trip are a punk band. Their whiplash fight song, “Power Trip,” includes the lines “We ride as one/We’re ruled by none,” and you believe them. Manifest closer, “The Hammer of Doubt,” was originally out, in different form, on a 2010 compilation called America’s Hardcore. They’ve covered Prong. They could easily cover Black Flag. They remind me of my early days in high school when I was coming out of a steady diet of hardcore and getting into bands like Metallica, D.R.I., Suicidal Tendencies, and Anthrax.
The music on Manifest Decimation is bleak, dirty, heavy. It’s also very catchy. At any given moment, Gale can sound like Lemmy fronting Cro-Mags, Discharge, or Exodus. At other times, he locates a grizzlier tone that evokes guys wearing corpsepaint. There are samples about death and Texas from movies like Robocop 2 and Blood Simple. The Italian artist Paolo “Madman” Girardi offers detailed old school apocalyptic metal cover art. The lyrics deal with government and religious suppression like so: “Histories trapped in illusion, who sees through who?/For every mindless vision of who owns the truth/For every one who spoke out, thousands were slain/Torture and bloodshed in the sake of some holy name.” That’s the classic side of things, but while Manifest Decimation does sounds vintage (the chug-chug-chug, the whammy-bar abusing solos), these guys aren’t stuck in 1986.
What helps makes this album great, outside of the excellent riffs and choruses, is the way Power Trip mix in flourishes that place Manifest Decimation firmly in the present. (In that sense, you’ll also think about another Texas band, the now-defunct Iron Age.) There's nothing obvious; it’s little touches, like the weirdo echo effect on Gale’s voice throughout. The album opens with a blast of swirling feedback and ominous synth tones, something threaded throughout the album via brief, almost industrial snippets. The feeling’s picked up in some of those headier vocal effects, too—the phased pan on “Conditioned to Death” (which features some great early Metallica riffing), the disembodied backing vocals on the frantic “Murderer’s Row” (complete with some Slayer-like soloing). It adds to the urgency and intensity, and also sets them apart. That said, none of it would matter if they weren’t writing songs like the swarming title track or the Motörhead-banging “Heretic’s Fork.”
Recently, people who take metal seriously have spent some time talking about whether or not thrash is dead, or if we’re actually in the midst of a thrash revival. Power Trip have found a way to create something new by pulling from the past. In that way, it feels like they exist on both sides of the argument without giving a shit either way.


When the Velvet Underground's second album descended on the world in January, 1968, nobody was ready for it. As the story goes, it was a relentless, screeching, thudding, scoffing assault on the pop sensibilities of its time. For its 45th anniversary it's been reissued in expanded, remastered form, and listening to White Light/White Heat now, it doesn't quite fit the template of its legend.

The Velvet Underground: White Light/White Heat

White Light/White Heat

When the Velvet Underground's second album descended on the world in January, 1968, nobody was ready for it. The Velvet Underground and Nico, the year before, had had Andy Warhol's imprimatur to promise that its passages of bleeding-raw chaos were art; it had also had the complicated but unmistakable beauty of the songs Nico sang as a lifeline for the tiny mainstream audience that caught on to it at the time. White Light/White Heat didn't have either.
By the time they released it, the Velvets were downplaying the art-world connection (despite the very arty slash in the album's title, and the fact that its black-on-black sleeve was designed by the Factory's Billy Name). Nico was out of the band, although bassist John Cale would continue to work with her for years. And the album was a relentless, screeching, thudding, scoffing assault on the pop sensibilities of its time: six songs with lyrics designed to horrify the bourgeoisie (not that they'd have listened to the Velvet Underground in the first place), ending with a one-take, two-chord, 17-minute speedfreakout. It clung to the bottom of the album chart for two weeks, disappeared, and went on to become the glorious, tainted fountain from which all scuzz flows.
That's the White Light/White Heat of legend, anyway. For its 45th anniversary—closer to its 46th, but keeping time was never their strong point—it's been reissued in expanded, remastered form, as if what this pinnacle of sloppy noise needed was remastering. As always, the title track, which seems like it should start cold with Cale and Sterling Morrison's backing vocals, sounds like it's had a little trimmed off the top to remove an extraneous sound—although, of course, extraneous sounds are kind of the whole point of this album.
Listening to White Light/White Heat now, it doesn't quite fit the template of its legend. For one thing, Lou Reed's songwriting is often a lot more conventional than it's reputed to be. Strip away the noise and flash and references to illicit drugs and sex, and "White Light/White Heat", "Here She Comes Now", and "I Heard Her Call My Name" are all the sort of simple rock'n'roll readymades that Reed had been cranking out at Pickwick Records a couple of years earlier. (So is "Guess I'm Falling In Love", recorded in scorching instrumental form at the White Light sessions, which is practically the same song as the Rutles' "I Must Be In Love".)
For another, the live disc appended to this edition is a reminder that the Velvet Underground were radical in a totally acceptable way for their time—that, professionally speaking, they were a party band with an audience of hippies, who appeared on bills with the likes of Sly & the Family Stone, Canned Heat, Iron Butterfly, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Chicago Transit Authority the year White Light/White Heat came out. The performance, apparently from John Cale's collection, was recorded at the Gymnasium in New York in April, 1967 (two of its songs previously appeared on the 1995 Peel Slowly and See box set). It presents the Velvets as a full-on boogie band, whose set is bookended by the instrumental grooves "Booker T." and "The Gift"—turns out they're slightly different songs, contrary to what VU fans have assumed for the past few decades. The rest of the gig includes what might or might not have been the first public performance of "Sister Ray" (it was still a very new song, at any rate), and one legit addition to the canon: "I'm Not a Young Man Anymore", a chugging electric blues that wouldn't have been out of place in Creedence Clearwater Revival's early repertoire.
So once this mysterious black-on-black artifact is demystified, what's left of it? More mystery, it turns out. What possessed Cale to start playing an out-of-time, two-note bass part louder than anything else at the end of "White Light/White Heat", and how could he have guessed that that was a great idea? Was the famous split-second pause before Reed's splatterbomb solo on "I Heard Her Call My Name" intentional? What the fuck was up with Reed filling in words—"SWEETLY!"—in the middle of Cale's vocal on "Lady Godiva's Operation", and why is it still hilarious? Speaking of that song, might lyrics about a delicate hypersexual creature interacting with "another curly-headed boy," directly followed by a medical horror-show, have anything to do with a curly-headed songwriter who was given electroconvulsive therapy to "cure" his bisexuality as a teenager? Why is "Sister Ray" way, way more potent than any other extended jam on a simple riff by an American band of the 60s?
It's surprising to hear anything besides the universe catching its breath after "Sister Ray" ends, but the first disc of this reissue is filled out with other previously released evidence of John Cale's final months in the Velvet Underground: the instrumental "Guess I'm Falling In Love", both versions of the electric-viola showcase "Hey Mr. Rain", and the band's thoroughly charming stab at making a commercially viable single, "Temptation Inside Your Heart"/"Stephanie Says". There's also a previously unheard alternate take of "I Heard Her Call My Name" (not quite as good as the official one, and mostly interesting to hear which of Reed's apparent ad-libs weren't), and one fascinating curio: an early version of "Beginning to See the Light", recorded at the "Temptation Inside Your Heart" session. By the time the song appeared on The Velvet Underground in 1969, it had become lither and wittier, and Reed had sharpened a few of its lyrics; this broad-shouldered, clomping version is distinctly not there yet, but everything the Velvets released on their official albums is so canonical that it's strange and heartening to realize that their songs didn't just spring into existence already perfect.


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 look back at a 1984 album that exemplifies the best of Italo disco, in all its joyfully eccentric glory.

Tonight

Savage spends the first few seconds of his 1984 national television debut frozen stiff. As the intro of his first single, “Don’t Cry Tonight,” begins to play, he poses in a half-kneel, his right hand resting on his leg in front of him, his left around his neck. A fedora covers his entire face, like an off-brand Bob Fosse impersonator. Behind Savage (real name: Roberto Zanetti) spin the neon blue lights of the futuristic set of Discoring, a show airing on Italy’s Rai 1 network that regularly features acts from the country’s burgeoning dance scene.
After eight motionless bars, Zanetti raises his head and looks into the camera. Suddenly, a jolt: His right hand pounds the ground and his left points behind him to 8 o’clock. He rises slowly, arms outstretched at his sides, index fingers pointed, then drawing them together in front of his chin. He balls his hands into fists and hides his face again, only to re-emerge when, about 75 seconds into his song, he begins lip-synching lyrics that have the syntactical incoherence but emotional clarity of someone talking in his sleep: “When you find the light to an upset shade away/If you’ll never, never let me go with every melody…” Zanetti, though, is very much awake, his eyes wide open and barely blinking. His expression, sometimes punctuated by a grimace, is so intense, its projected passion feels potentially murderous, like that of a chronically misunderstood loner in a giallo.
Zanetti’s performance elicits the same response as the best songs in Italo disco, the genre that Savage would come to exemplify. Heard the first or the fiftieth time, an effective Italo song makes you wonder, What’s going on here? What’s going to happen next? This is a style so reliant on novelty, it can shock from measure to measure. In his memoir, Italo Disco: History of Dance Music in Italy from 1975 to 1988, producer Raff Todesco (Time’s “Shaker Shake”) enumerates the elements to a successful Italo song, including synths, a lack of guitars, an embrace of technology, and, perhaps most notably, a “catch,” by which he means “something that was unique”—a vocalization, a strange sound, a weird way of singing. The result is a genre that is a true neophile’s delight, a smorgasbord of idiosyncrasies.
It has been posited that for all its garish futurism, bald-faced hokeyness, and earnest expressions in limp English, Italo is “the most amazingly uncool genre ever created,” but Savage wasn’t necessarily trying to be cool. He was trying to be different. Like the disco that preceded it and the house that would follow in its wake, the Italo hits of the early ’80s generally landed around 120 BPM, like ‘Lectric Workers’ “Robot Is Systematic,” Gary Low’s “You Are a Danger” and “I Want You,” and Klein & M.B.O.’s “Dirty Talk.” To stand out from the pack, Savage deliberately paced his first single at a slower-than-typical 104 BPM. In a conversation with Pitchfork, Zanetti said that when clubs would play his song—and it was met with such fervor upon release that this sometimes happened three or four times over the course of a night—DJs would have to stop the music to make way for the lumbering strut of “Don’t Cry Tonight.” From the jump, Savage was, simply, unmatchable.
Italo disco filled the booming club scene of ’80s Italy. Many of these spots—like Rimini’s notorious Altromondo Studios, decked out with a spaceship and robots—were coastal. As sociologist Ivo Stefano Germano puts it in the documentary Italo Disco: The Sparkling Sound of the 80s, tourists who acquired the songs they heard in the club while on vacation could bring home a souvenir of the Italian “summer that never ended.” Of the Italo labels—all indies—Severo Lombardoni’s Discomagic was the biggest, but even it struggled to cough up money for adequate promotion. Songs spread out from warehouses, where hungry DJs were invited to sample the latest productions to take back to their clubs. The local DJ culture at the time was about as intense as it got, outside hotspots like New York or Chicago, and created a preview of the decades to come for much of the rest of the globe. The songs that went on to regional, national, and occasionally international fame were generally voted through by the people and their dancing feet.
Todesco writes that the big Italo labels and distribution houses (Discomagic, Il Discotto, Many Records) were hardly choosy and “would give free access to everyone: producers, improvisers, off-key singers obsessed with the stage;” it was “chaos in search of glory.” This was, to some degree, crucial to the genre’s appeal, as it created Bizarro World versions of pop stars (get a load of O’Gar). People who had no business in the music biz, at least per conventional ideals, were now in business. Granted, eccentricity flourished in the ’80s even on relatively conservative U.S. airwaves, but Italy took it to another level. The world of Italo was one in which Tarzan loved the summer nights, penguins invaded, ah-liens attacked with their lah-sers, and whatever was going on in Sylvi Foster’s indecipherable “Hookey” was more than OK. The music was often put together as though it were made on an assembly line—there were producers, there were singers, and there were sometimes public faces who lip-synched vocals (a preview of the Milli Vanilli scandal that would grip the U.S. pop scene in the late ’80s and early ’90s).
Before he picked up the mic, Zanetti worked behind the boards in the Italo scene. Under the name Robyx (after a superstar musician character he’d written comics about in his youth), he wrote, produced, and co-produced some future Italo classics: Stargo’s ode to peppers, “Capsicum”; G.A.N.G.’s heavy and sleazy “Incantations” (a face-numbing 10-minute, 89 BPM medley of covers of Mike Oldfield’s “Incantations — Part One” and “Foreign Affair”); and Rose’s defiantly shrill “Magic Carillon” (released after “Don’t Cry Tonight,” in 1984). He says that he chose the name Savage because it “sounded better” to go with an English name, though he happened to pronounce it like the French “sauvage.” (Other Italo artists selected their English monikers to winkingly reflect phonetic double entendres in Italian—Den Harrow sounded like “denaro,” or Italian for “money,” and Joe Yellow like “gioiello,” or “jewel.”) As Todesco writes: “The Italian melodic taste, which had always been excluded from the dance world, culturally and technologically took possession of the new musical process by confronting the American and English musical domination with their own weapon... the English language.”
In Savage, Zanetti played all roles and virtually every instrument. He was Italo’s true auteur. His studio virtuosity—writing, producing, playing, and singing—was initially the result of economic concerns. He rented the synths and drum machines he played on “Don’t Cry Tonight” and the album that followed in 1984, Tonight. But much like his distinctive gesticulations, devised because he couldn’t dance and needed something to do to fill his first single’s interminable intro, he used limitations to his advantage on his album. He eventually liked having full artistic control of his tortured image. It made him unique in a genre that prized uniqueness—a multi-threat in Italo was rare, which meant Savage occupied a singular raft in a sea of novelty.
It also made his full-length more consistent and cohesive than most Italo LPs; few of the style’s artists evinced the vision that Zanetti did with Savage. (He even had a few logos, as seen on a computer screen in the “Don’t Cry Tonight” video: a digital drawing of his trademark crouch, and another of his head behind his fists.) Tonight never crawls past 108 bpm, and the song that pushes it that far is Zanetti’s similar-sounding follow-up to “Don’t Cry Tonight,” “Only You.” (“Don’t let me go/Don’t cry tonight,” goes the imperative chorus of his first hit; “Don’t push me aside/Don’t leave me to die,” he pleads on “Only You.”)
Zanetti was hardly the first dance musician who didn’t feel like fixing what wasn’t broken on his second single. By the time he recorded the “Only You,” he had upgraded his drum machine from the LM-1 to the versatile and au courant LinnDrum, but the track has a similar spare sound—the puncturing drums, the classical-inflected organ, the octave bassline, which is perhaps the distinguishing characteristic of Italo (though certainly not present in all examples). Zanetti said the bobbing basslines, which gave the songs a chunky, pixelated, quintessentially ’80s feel, resulted from his lack of access to a sequencer. Once again, making do, when done elegantly enough, came off as style.
Zanetti wrote and recorded Tonight between January and May of 1984, after the success of “Don’t Cry Tonight” created a demand for a full-length. Italo was very much a singles genre, though it did yield some notable albums: Scotch’s Evolution, Radiorama’s The 2nd Album, Kano’s Another Life, Azoto’s Disco Fizz, and, perhaps most prized among Italo enthusiasts, Nemesy’s self-titled LP. On Tonight, Zanetti walks the line between eking out a style and repeating himself. The man loved humanoid gurgling (courtesy of an Emulator) as atmosphere, four-on-the-floor beats, and the aforementioned octave basslines, but beyond those broad strokes, the songs are simply too eccentric to carbon copy. “Don’t Cry Tonight” features a high-pitched synth line—the type that would come to be most closely associated with G-funk—that bends like a slide whistle. “Radio,” per its video, opens with the sound of an atomic bomb and then a menacing metronome; its edgy tick-tick-tick reimagines Alan Parson Project’s “Eye in the Sky” with a much firmer bottom end. It climaxes in a scream. The chorus of “Fugitive” is blessed with a chirp that sounds like a dot matrix printer. It’s an embarrassment of catches, to borrow Todesco’s term.
The album is an exercise in contrasting minor chords—“A Love Again” trots in at 84 BPM and immediately sounds like it wants to take a nosedive into a pit before brightening considerably during the chorus. The decaying synth in the chorus of “Fugitive,” a song about hiding from one’s lover’s lover, gives way to a breakdown that is the spitting image of “Underground Theme” from Super Mario Bros. (though Savage’s song predated the video game’s release by about a year). The only partially beatless track, “Turn Around,” is sentimental even for the would-be New Romantic Savage, but its initial piano-ballad gloopiness is redeemed when the song is subsequently fried in a blast of synths.
Zanetti had a basic grasp of English when he wrote “Don’t Cry Tonight,” and, like Thom Yorke on Kid A, he assembled the song’s words “like a puzzle,” which helps explain inexplicable lines like, “For a thunder is as past a path we’re human been/And you rather like to feel what is my life.” Credit where it’s due: He stumbled on brilliance with the opening of the song’s third verse: “Just the random access memories of dreams.” For the record, he thinks it was a coincidence that Daft Punk named their fourth album Random Access Memories. After “Don’t Cry Tonight,” Zanetti enlisted his English-proficient engineer, Paul Jeffery, to help him make sense. As a result, Zanetti’s brooding is rendered occasionally poetic: “Radio” contains the litany, “Have you ever seen my heart in love?/Have you ever seen my eyes on you?/Have you ever reckoned with my world?/Have you ever figured with my heart?” Elsewhere in that track: “Your fantasy is my memory,” which sounds like a cool brag in a been-there-done-that kind of way. He follows it up with, “Your destiny has time to be.” So that’s a relief, at least.
The words are second, though, to the singing, which is so melancholy it sounds like Zanetti is savoring the bad taste in his mouth. His voice is clear and self-consciously suave, like Dracula with reverb. He’s more convincingly romantic than most of his contemporaries and his singing is more conventionally attractive. It wasn’t always that way within Italo’s menagerie of odd voices, though the pull of the genre can make what initially seems abject strangely alluring. Italo can take some getting used to—a song that may at first strike you as unlistenably absurd may dig its way into your brain and compel you to return again and again. In the words of Italo remixer and enthusiast Flemming Dalum in Italo Disco: The Sparkling Sound of the 80s, “Italo disco is a virus. A magical virus.”
In a 1985 issue of Record Mirror, the Pet Shop Boys rhapsodized about Italo, with Neil Tennant calling it “fantastically unfashionable, dead naff.” He noted that the banality of the genre’s lyrics “often makes them strangely moving somehow,” and praised the “boom clap boom clap boom clap — clap clap” beat. The perceived cheapness of the genre, Tennant said, was its appeal. He singled out “Don’t Cry Tonight” in particular for being “very sweet” and “very sad.” Twenty years later, on the Pet Shop Boys’ two-disc Back to Mine compilation, “Don’t Cry Tonight” was the first song on Disc 1.
What the Pet Shop Boys’ early praise of Italo gets at is its multivalence—songs can be simultaneously goofy and sentimental, incomprehensible yet moving, pop aberrations that are nonetheless utter jams. There is often, certainly, a camp appeal, but the earworms, low-end propulsion, and sheer technological euphoria rescue Italo from purely ironic listening. It’s too sophisticated for that. A single chord sequence can contain both beauty and decay. There’s real joy in the verbiage: “You’re my really disco band”; “Stop to you!”; “Nobody else than you!”; “Hey, you, take a look at you!”; “So you think you can pull my leg?” As producer and Toy Tonics founder Mathias Modica says in Italo Disco: The Sparkling Sound of the 80s: “Italo disco is part the most incredible trash and part the most total genius.” Listeners might have a difficult time deciding which part they prefer. There’s so much going on, so much to love and laugh at, that Italo achieves a rare vitality, full of the contradictions and multitudes of life itself. Perhaps it’s no surprise that over 40 years later, the genre lives on via a rabid cult of fans.
Zanetti continued to release Savage singles throughout the ’80s and early ’90s (he circled back and released a full album in 2020, Love and Rain). He found even greater success as a Eurobeat producer and label head. His DWA label put out ’90s smashes from Double You, Corona, Alexia, and Ice MC, whose “Think About the Way” features prominently in Trainspotting. Again, occupying a fairly unique space, Zanetti was able to outlive the genre and reach the masses through more frenetic (albeit less eccentric) material. At 66, he still plays as Savage, and when he performs “Only You,” he still does his trademark hand motions. What was devised to compensate for a dancing deficit just looks like dancing if you watch it enough.


Adopting a new alias, the EDM producer Porter Robinson sets aside Worlds’ electro-pop crossover and embraces early-2000s trance and video-game music.

Virtual Self EP

Porter Robinson has spent much of his career trying to escape his own shadow. The North Carolina native released his first record, a pounding trance anthem, when he was a 15-year-old denizen of online production forums, and his career since then has followed a zigzag path away from the cruder hallmarks of youthful ebullience. The brash, buzzing electro-house and dubstep of his 2011 debut for Skrillex’s OWSLA label gave way to the more plangent melodies of “Language” and “Easy”; his 2014 album Worlds largely jettisoned rave bombast in favor of wistful electro pop and Vocaloid balladry. In early 2017, he explicitly disavowed much of his own work, winnowing down his catalog to a slim list of keepers: “i’ve been making music for 12 years and i only wrote 11 songs, wow.” He was 24 years old at the time.
These sorts of evasive maneuvers may be increasingly familiar to digital natives eager to divert attention from early traces of their public selves. But with his latest project, Robinson not only changes course once again; he also re-engages with the sounds of his youth. The debut EP from his Virtual Self alias makes a headlong plunge into an aesthetic rooted in the late 1990s and early 2000s: hard trance and Eurodance crosscut with sparkling keygen melodies and the high-velocity soundtracks of video games like “Dance Dance Revolution” and “Beatmania IIDX.”
The EP’s neon onslaught couldn’t be further from Worlds’ delicate textures and crossover inclinations, which found common cause with electro-pop acts like Chvrches and M83. “Particle Arts” is a 175-BPM juggernaut of trance stabs and happy-hardcore breaks; “EON BREAK” deals in hardstyle cadences and machine-gun snares. Where Worlds’ aggressive moments were tempered by wispy atmospheres, Virtual Self opts for a more unvarnished palette, and its funkless, hyperactive rhythms are evocative of “DDR”’s relentless acrobatics.
Not everything is a copy of vintage sounds. Despite the rushing snare rolls and classic “Reese” bass of “Ghost Voices,” the song’s lithe vocal flips and slinky air peg it to the post-Disclosure era; it’s the record’s most contemporary-sounding cut. And the carefully sculpted vocal synths of “a.i.ngel (Become God)” aren’t terribly far off from the sound of Oneohtrix Point Never’s Garden of Delete. There are other similarities with that album, too: Just like digital breadcrumbs that OPN used to construct Garden of Delete’s elaborate backstory, Robinson created an array of Twitter accounts to lend mystery to the Virtual Self rollout. Much like OPN’s invented genre of “hypergrunge,” Virtual Self’s “neotrance” is a way of tackling ideas of nostalgia, adolescence, and, crucially, the contingent nature and arbitrary standards of taste.
In its saccharine overdrive, much of the EP is distinctly, unabashedly unfashionable—corny, even. Unlike someone like Lone, whose rave revivalism views its inspirations through tastefully rose-tinted lenses, Virtual Self hones in on the most garish aspects of Robinson’s influences, burning away any possibility of subtlety beneath a billion-watt gleam. Halfway through “Key,” he even indulges in an honest-to-goodness key change—pop music’s hokiest trope.
A number of self-consciously underground artists have been playing with similar ideas for a while; Lorenzo Senni and Evian Christ have both tackled trance from a position of tongue-in-cheek plausible deniability. Robinson, though, is known and loved for his sincerity and his sensitivity, which makes the Virtual Self project feel different—more like an embrace, rather than a nudge and a wink. As it happens, December 31, 2017 marked a remarkable historical footnote: On that day, every living adult had been born in the 20th century; everyone not yet 18 had been born in the 21st. The notion of a generational divide couldn’t be rendered in starker terms. No matter which side you were born on, Virtual Self’s trance revamp reminds us that the boundaries of taste are always in flux—and that ultimately, nostalgia will rehabilitate even the shaggiest underdogs.


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 Sigur Rós’ elemental 1999 breakthrough.

Ágætis byrjun

With their second album, Ágætis byrjun, Sigur Rós knew only that they wanted to make things bigger. Their first record, 1997’s Von, was dark and, by the standards of what they became famous for, positively screechy: Back then, they were inspired by the hurtling propulsion of Smashing Pumpkins and My Bloody Valentine, bands that generated soothing textures from cacophony. Von sold 300 copies in Iceland. But the dismal showing left no seeming dent on young Jónsi Birgisson’s confidence. The singer posted a salvo on the band’s website prior to Agaetis’ release: “We are simply gonna change music forever, and the way people think about music.”
It’s alarming to consider, from the vantage of 2019, the degree to which he seems to have accomplished his mission. If we now live in a world of small, soft drones, a pruned garden of “Lush Lofi” and “Ambient Chill” and “Ethereal Vibes” Spotify playlists, we can blame this condition, at least in part, on the impact of Ágætis byrjun. It is an album that has terraformed our landscape—so much of our lives now sounds like it, from Nissan commercials to “Planet Earth” documentaries to the long trail of ads that could not procure Sigur Rós’ approval and went about constructing benign replicas of Sigur Rós songs instead.
Before Ágætis, post-rock was a niche concern, a tiny sub-sub-genre centered around a dozen or so bands in England and North America—Stereolab, Bark Psychosis and a few others in London; Tortoise and Gastr del Sol in Chicago; Godspeed You! Black Emperor in Montreal. After Ágætis, the sound—massive, surging, triumphal; melancholic and soothing and mostly major-key; wreathed in strings and horns and ripe with melodrama and headlocking you into transcendence—is a global phenomenon. They opened for Radiohead; they turned down a slot on “Letterman” because the host wouldn’t give them enough time. They even appeared on “The Simpsons.” Twenty years into their career, they tour arenas and command a massive following. They are a cultural institution.
It’s hard to know if Ágætis byrjun catalyzed the massive shifts that unfolded in its wake, or if those shifts were already brewing, in search of a seaworthy vessel to carry us wherever it was going. Today, Sigur Rós’ career seems like a natural and desirable trajectory: Get your music into the ears of some important people (in Sigur Rós’ case, it was celebrities like Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow); from there, your music might shoot outward into some large-scale and modestly experimental commercial film (Tom Cruise and Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky); and then it can rain down into dozens and dozens of television shows via the diligent work of music supervisors. But when it all happened to Sigur Rós, it was all pretty new, and it was all happening to the music industry at the same time.
To make the album itself, they recruited a keyboardist named Kjartan Sveinsson, who knew a lot more than they did about the things they were interested in—arrangements, composition, songs that sounded like cavernous day spas. They enlisted producer Ken Thomas, who started out as an assistant working on Queen albums before moving on to early industrial acts like Throbbing Gristle and Einstürzende Neubauten. He also mixed the first record by Björk’s early band the Sugarcubes, which is what led him to Sigur Rós.
With Thomas, they built a record that felt like being stuck inside a church bell. Their enormous sound came not from size, but from scale. The distance between the quietest noises—the little cymbals ticking the eight notes on “Svefn-g-englar,” Birgisson’s falsetto—and the loudest ones—say, the drums and organ that land like Thor’s hammer about six minutes into the same track—feels measurable only in miles. It is a long, liquid sound, devoid of sharp points: Even the most massive dynamic shifts happen with rounded edges. The drums are nested inside so much reverb that you can nearly hear the air gathering around the snare head before impact. Birgisson played his electric guitar with a cello bow, which offered the sonorous tones of feedback without the disturbance of picks. It is thunderous and dreamy, soothing and stirring—a big, frosted wedding cake of mallet percussion and pianos and strings and piping, cooing vocals. It is a sound designed to overwhelm, and it does, which is probably how British critics ended up gasping that the music was “like God weeping tears of gold in heaven.” Music of this scale is never kind on the higher faculties.
The album is a triumph, above all, of arrangement and engineering. When the piano kicks in on “Starálfur” (the same one that accompanies the discovery of the mythical jaguar shark in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou), I still have to suppress a delighted giggle of wonder. It’s like watching an invasion of CGI superheroes, or (I imagine) revving a high-performance car and watching the speedometer float. It isn’t so much a sound as a special effect, and it communicates with your brain solely in dopamine floods.
If you are inclined to sniff suspiciously around grandiose music, examining it for kitsch, you probably reeled away staggering from Sigur Rós, who proudly stink of it. This was another part of their appeal and their strength: The music is texturally complex, for sure, but the emotional framework is deliberately simple and clear. They are gloriously unafraid of blast-off. The piping melody that ends “Olsen Olsen,” doubled up with horns and a choir, is straight out of a Mannheim Steamroller Christmas album.
Live, they maintained this communal feeling without sacrificing clarity. You can hear this in the live recording included in a generous and fulsome new 20th-anniversary reissue. The gig was June 12, 1999 at Reykjavík’s Íslenska Óperan—an album-release celebration. They were brand new to this material, but somehow they sounded as commanding then as they do now. The box set also includes reams of demos and half-finished versions of Ágætis byrjun—they provide a nice glimpse into the band’s working method, which was open-ended and involved multiple versions of the same song, some with or without vocals or at different speeds. Spending time with all of these raw tracks is a bit like opening up a “version history” in Google Docs—you learn a little bit about how the final product came to be, but it only serves to heighten your appreciation that you were spared the editing process.
Parsing the re-release, I was drawn back to the album itself again. It doesn’t really require elaboration, or added context. It’s entire appeal lay in the sense that it dropped, immaculate and mysterious, from the sky. Unless you were Icelandic, you didn’t know what they were saying—and often not even then. On Ágætis, Birgisson famously dabbled in an invented language called Hopelandic—some on “Olsen Olsen,” and some lightly sprinkled throughout. This might have spurred some listeners on to discover “what he was saying,” but for most of us, he was saying whatever we heard. His words were not messages, they were bird calls. The single most indelible word Birgisson has ever sung—“tju”—is a gibberish syllable, a refrain from “Svefn-g-nglar” that sounded then and will always sound just like “It’s you.” There were no other meanings within to parse or contemplate—just a pretty sound. We heard ourselves in it.


Ride’s reunion album is the British group’s first since returning to stages in 2015. It’s promising but never quite satisfying, with modern production touches courtesy of DJ Erol Alkan.

Weather Diaries

Reunion albums, by definition, mark a new chapter in a band’s life—when nostalgic critical acclaim is superseded by a rather more discerning eye. Rarely, though, do these albums mark a genuinely new musical chapter. That makes Weather Diaries, the first album by Ride since they returned to the live scene in 2015, a rarity. It’s new but also different for Ride, with occasional moments of retrospection—like the harmonies that introduce “Charm Assault” or the kaleidoscopic chorus to “All I Want.” Ride mostly sounds like another beast on Weather Diaries—one that, for better or worse, exists firmly in the present.
Modern production touches adorn Weather Diaries courtesy of DJ and producer Erol Alkan. At times, these fit well with Ride’s dreamy appeal of the old, with the swirling synth lines on kraut-y album opener “Lannoy Point” underpinning the band’s airy guitar like a well-pegged tent. At others, notably the glitchy vocal effect that introduces “All I Want,” they prove a distraction, verging on an annoyance. Earlier this year, Dirty Projectors showed that modern pop production can work with what is ostensibly guitar music, but the intro to “All I Want” lacks any electronic finesse. The result sounds tacked on and frankly unnecessary.
As “Lannoy Point” demonstrates, 2017 model Ride are also willing to dip their toes into new genres, with occasionally impressive results. “Integration Tape” is two and a half minutes of My Bloody Valentine-indebted guitar drones and echoing vocals—a logical extension of Ride’s more cottony guitar moments—while album closer “White Sands” throws the doomed harmonies of 1970s Beach Boys and staccato jazz rhythms into the mix. These are solid songs in themselves, though they could possibly better suit Mark Gardener and Andy Bell’s post-Ride careers.
Elsewhere, the band’s experimental tendencies run the risk of suffocating the beautiful harmonic bombast that made Ride so special in the first place. These are the moments when Weather Diaries proves most frustrating. “Cali,” for example, squanders a soaring verse, complete with a brilliantly nagging guitar line, on a curiously understated, half-spoken chorus that feels naked without the band’s characteristic harmonies. “Rocket Silver Symphony,” meanwhile, is exactly half a great Ride song, a wonderfully strident chorus sharing space with a weakling verse that lays bare the underwhelming melody.
Ride, famously, have a history of reinvention. Their second album, 1992’s Going Blank Again, saw the band sharpen the sound of their 1990 debut Nowhere into a guitar pop titan that reeked of self-assurance. Their third and fourth albums, 1994’s Carnival of Light and 1996’s Tarantula, dropped the guitar wash in favor of a more psychedelic—and dare we say Britpop?—sound. In the end, this proved their undoing: Ride ended up referring to their overlong (if actually pretty listenable) third album as “Carnival of Shite,” according to David Cavanagh’s Creation Records’ history My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry for the Prize. Tarantula was deleted from Creation’s catalog one week after its release, to the dismay of approximately no one.
With this ignominious history behind them, you can only salute Ride’s bravery in trying to reinvent themselves once again. And Weather Diaries actually has enough individual moments over its 11 tracks to suggest that new Ride could work. But these are sadly surrounded by too many wobbles, missteps, and poor decisions to make the case for Weather Diaries as a great comeback album. Weather Diaries is no Tarantula-sized affront to Ride’s legacy, but neither is it a Going Blank Again-style triumph of reinvention and focus. Weather-wise, it is an overcast day with a hint of sun: promising but never quite satisfying.


In its day, this 2007 album felt like a response to turbulent times. Revisiting the newly reissued LP, its songs feel untethered to any political moment: protest songs delivered as solemn premonitions.

Shine

In the summer of 2005, Joni Mitchell was at peace. She was 61 years old, three years into retirement, and leading a life that, in her words, consisted mostly of “being a granny and watching a lot of television.” One particular day, she was sitting outside the Vancouver home where she wrote ’70s masterpieces like For the Roses and Court and Spark. She watched the Pacific Ocean sprawl in the distance. Herons flew overhead; roses bloomed in the garden. When she came back inside, she sat at the piano and translated the view into a serene, sentimental melody. It was her first new composition in years. She wanted to call it “Gratitude.”
She ended up going with “One Week Last Summer” and placing it as the opening track on 2007’s Shine, her first collection of new songs in over a decade and her last album to date. At the time of release, it was largely perceived as a response to turbulent times: the Bush administration, the Iraq War, the deterioration of our planet. Revisiting it now upon its first vinyl release, its songs still feel urgent, but they also sound untethered to any political moment. “I did a lot of weeping for what’s happening to the Earth when I was in my twenties,” Mitchell said at the time. “I could see a lot of things coming.” Even at its most hopeless, Shine observes chaos from a distance that feels centered and assured; these are protest songs delivered as solemn premonitions.
Recorded mostly alone with engineer Dan Marnien, Shine has its own distinct atmosphere. Mitchell’s ’80s work was defined by a busy, glossy pop sound that purposefully contrasted with her darker worldview, while her ’90s albums returned her to the soft, sophisticated arrangements of her most celebrated era. With flourishes of MIDI orchestras and droning synth pads, peculiar jazz phrasings and muted horns, Shine feels akin to late-career work by her peers—somewhere between Leonard Cohen’s synthetic hymnals and Van Morrison’s smooth-jazz vision quests. Its most adventurous moment (“Hana”) lurches and grinds to skittering percussion, while its ballads feature little more than her worn-out vocals and downcast piano playing. Often Mitchell uses textures from throughout her catalog like Ghosts of Christmas Past: “When this place looks like a moonscape,” she sings over the acoustic coffeehouse strum of “This Place,” “Don’t say I didn’t warn ya.”
The themes that dominate this album are ones that Mitchell had turned to over and over throughout her catalog. To prove her point that these modern worries are nothing new, she includes a revamped rendition of her 1970 hit “Big Yellow Taxi,” reorchestrating it with bursts of accordion and saxophone. Even if it’s one of the less essential inclusions on the record, its placement showcases the consistency and self-contained philosophy of her songbook. It also draws attention to what’s changed. Mitchell’s voice on Shine is a fascinating instrument: a yellowed photograph, frayed and fading. On Both Sides Now and Travelogue, early-’00s albums that felt like epilogues, Mitchell was backed by an orchestra, revisiting old songs in elegant settings. On Shine, she’s accompanied by sparse atmospheres that bring her strained, ghostly delivery into focus. This was by design: “I am closer to the singers I love,” she explained. “I never imagined I’d be able to sing like Edith Piaf.” It makes sense that she was thrilled by her transformation, by challenging expectations with each breath.
By the time Mitchell released Shine in the fall of 2007, she had completed two equally ambitious artistic projects: an exhibit of her recent, apocalyptic photography and a sprawling narrative dance piece with the Alberta Ballet Company. She had originally been asked to collaborate on a biographical show soundtracked by her hits. She said no: “I’m not interested in escapist entertainment when the planet is at red alert.” She speaks to a similar desire in the album’s title track, where, over the span of seven and a half minutes, she casts a light on all corners of the earth, calling out people by name and profession, forecasting great destruction and confusion ahead. At times it sounds like a list of grievances, her tone purposefully unpoetic. But the implied message is that it’s not too late to turn around. “When the world becomes a massive mess with nobody at the helm,” she said, “It’s time for artists to make their mark.” On Shine, Mitchell sings with wisdom and grace, sadness and compassion. Her mark is indelible.

Buy: Rough Trade
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When an album starts off with each member of the band announcing "I am ____, and this is my heart ...

Heart

When an album starts off with each member of the band announcing "I am ____, and this is my heart," you should probably know straight off what you're getting into. The key word here would be "heart" (not coincidentally the name of the album), as in "wears on his sleeve" or "in her mouth" or "-shaped candies with cute little phrases on them." Stars have come to rock the master of your cardiovascular system, and if you're not prepared to accommodate a healthy serving of lyrical earnestness, you should probably just Remove All from your Winamp and go play some street hockey, you manly man you.
Fortunately for whoever remains, that leadoff track ("What the Snowman Learned About Love"-- see what I'm saying?) then supernovas into a synthy planetarium soundtrack worthy of M83 before scaling back to a delicate sing-song in the vein of Broken Social Scene's "Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl". It's a fitting overture to a strong pop album that effortlessly shifts from bombastic chamber to plink-plink twee over eleven songs, blissfully unburdened by the ambition to sound particularly new or different. In fact, I doubt the band would even mind much being referred to as a Canadian Belle & Sebastian, albeit a B&S; with more 80s synth-- which, come to think of it, might just be what the new Trevor Horn-mentored Belles will sound like.
But one song form Belle & Sebastian were never real strong with was the boy/girl conversational duet (think "Don't You Want Me?"), and Stars are happy to fill the void. "Elevator Love Letter" puts a jangly frame around urban shyness-- she's a rich girl, he's hot for the rich girl, both have spent too much time under florescent lights. "Romantic Comedy" is a domestic disintegration dialogue set to perky acoustic guitar runs and accordion. If the subject matter sounds a bit Hallmark, well, it is, but it's so persistently romantic that it should just about reach the level of excusably cornball for emotion-arbiters, like the video for Air's "All I Need" or the final scene from Field of Dreams.
Meanwhile, the group coasts on a good amount of orchestral carpets: "Time Can Never Kill the True Heart" juxtaposes the quartet with very-very-lite techno programming; "Look Up" is plausible Delgados forgery, thanks to smoky Amy Millan vocals. But even when stripped of symphonic accouterments the act doesn't wilt; the polite high range of part-time actor Torquil Campbell works wonders in "The Woods" with just a french horn and an answering machine message for company. Only when the group tries to develop some sort of awkward dark edge (the uncomfortably dreary lyrics of "Death to Death") or the sound gets nudged off the MOR cliff (greasy-slick "The Life Effect") does Heart skip a beat, become clogged, or experience any other negative heart pun of your choice.
Chalk it up perhaps to another case of Pitchfork Canuckophilia, but Stars comes as yet another Montreal act to keep the indie pop dream alive in '03. Less all over the map than the Voltron-like Broken Social Scene, and without the fetishist spice that off-kilters the otherwise straight-shooting pop of The Hidden Cameras, Stars could very easily be overlooked, or avoided like a couple prone to PDA. But as of yet we don't have immigration quotas on music from the Great White North, and Heart is a valuable pop record for those of us whose cardiac muscle hasn't stained completely black like that of, I dunno, Chris Ott.


Ukrainian pianist and composer Lubomyr Melnyk has spent his career developing a method of performance called "continuous music," one that splits the difference between Minimalism and New Age. His shifting chords and rising crescendos will click easily for those who follow post-rock bands like Godspeed You! Black Emperor or Explosions in the Sky.

Rivers and Streams

Ukrainian pianist and composer Lubomyr Melnyk has spent his career developing a method of performance called "continuous music." In pieces that stretch anywhere from 10 minutes to nearly an hour in length, Melnyk delivers a sustained flurry of high-speed arpeggiated notes. By holding down the sustain pedal, he allows tones to ring out indefinitely, creating droning ambience and phantom melodies.
The pursuit of continuous music has brought Melnyk impressive chops—his website boasts that he is the fastest pianist in the world—but little in the way of critical recognition or financial reward. In interviews, he has expressed some disappointment at falling through the music industry's cracks, his playing too unorthodox for the classical establishment and too traditional for the experimental music community. However, in the last several years, Melnyk has begun to connect with a larger audience through releases on small labels like Unseen Worlds and Erased Tapes, which concentrate on modern classical and electronic music.
Rivers and Streams is Melnyk's third release for Erased Tapes. In execution, it's not too different from his previous works for the label. The music is busy and technique-intensive, but tuneful and meditative. As Melnyk plays, his melodies meld together, shifting in tone and volume. Because he allows the piano to resonate, the sound blurs, turning concise and complex patterns into aural fog. According to the composer, the album is a meditation on water—not a huge stretch given the steady, trickling, ambient nature of Melnyk's style. The performances are enhanced via co-production from label founder Robert Raths and London-based composer, Jamie Perera, who modestly augment Melnyk's arrangements with guitar.
Informed by the work of American minimalists like Steve Reich and Terry Riley, Melnyk's music draws on repetition and also a certain degree of impromptu inspiration. However, those composers—Riley in particular—often employed alternate tunings and distinctive harmonies that helped to distance their compositions from Western classical music. Melnyk's music is just as expansive, but more conservative in its approach to harmony. He's more overtly romantic. Listening to the plaintive minor key melodies on "Parasol", you can understand how, for some, the pianist's sensibility might have crossed the sometimes-thin line that divides minimalist classical and new age.
However, this is less of a liability than it might have been in the past. New age is no longer the reviled genre it once was. And there are other, more appropriate modern parallels. Melnyk's shifting chords and rising crescendos will click easily for those who follow post-rock bands like Godspeed You! Black Emperor or Explosions in the Sky. And in continuous playing, sustained repetition, and simple harmony you can also hear him as a more organic cousin to the burbling synthesizer music of '70s groups like Tangerine Dream or Ashra. This is not machine music, though. It's very human—serenity delivered through sustained concentration and ecstatic energy, via a lifetime of practice and perfection rather than the twist of a knob.


The North Carolina singer-songwriter has a voice that attracts metaphors about hypnotism. Her second album reveals a subtle, complex staging of femininity that resists easy resolutions.

Cinema

Skylar Gudasz’s 2016 debut, Oleander, was North Carolina’s best-kept secret. Her follow-up, Cinema, is already attracting national attention. It’s not hard to see why this might be Gudasz’s moment: She’s a gifted singer-songwriter with a voice that attracts metaphors about hypnotism, and she’s wound her rhythm section like a swinging silver watch. Cinema is as dark and groovy as Oleander was bright and wafting; it’s more imperative and solidly formed. It also adds enough breadth to her discography to glimpse, beyond the individual beautiful songs, the outline of a holistic artistic persona, distinguished by Gudasz’s subtle, complex staging of femininity.
Cinema’s multitude of genres are all tuned to the storm-cloud key of majestic opener “Femme Fatale.” “Rider” is country, “Animal” is folk, “Actress” is garage-psych, and “Go Away” is piano pop, but the album’s well-developed throughlines make the variation discreet. Gudasz’s band of North Carolina ringers sail at a measured pace, just like how she sings, and the scratchy snarl of her guitar keeps the organs and strings down to earth. The fountaining run of her voice recalls Joni Mitchell, while her classic yet chameleonic songwriting suggests Leonard Cohen, another student of ambiguity with the nerve to put his own name in a song, as Gudasz does on “Animal.” But her developing conceptual persona adds something new to the mix: the enigmatic self-performance of someone like Lana Del Rey.
Individually, the songs impress with the poetry and grace of their sensory details, like the “waist inside the crook of my arm” from the back of a motorcycle on “Rider.” Cumulatively, they bring the razor-edged meaning of certain recurring traits into sharp focus. That “Rider” verse proceeds with such delicacy that it’s easy to miss the bloody crash at the end, and it’s indicative of the way Gudasz ironizes images of love without cheapening them.
Her songs almost invariably contain an “I” and a “you,” though Gudasz might be either, neither, or both. She addresses women characters with tenderness, and men with amused contempt veiled by sweetness. (Any time you hear her call someone “babe,” watch out.) She slips, blank-faced, into masculine pronouns, a device that runs from Oleander’s “I’ll Be Your Man” to her stunning recent cover of “Wichita Lineman.” Iconic images of feminine glamour—in press photos, she reclines on the hood of a classic car or stands on a dune wearing fur—are Trojan horses for songs that undermine them from within, as Gudasz deconstructs male projections through pantomime and denunciation. “I ain’t no silent doll, and I ain’t that sweet,” she warns on “Play Nice,” lest anyone is having trouble telling the sugar from the salt.
Cinema revolves around two archetypes: the star and the server, the one who is only seen and the one who never is. The former is writ large in the album’s title and film-noir tint, the latter in “Waitress” and the video for “Rider.” The two characters blur together in “Actress,” the purest expression of Gudasz’s resistance to resolving multiple exposures into one pat image. The overlapping, shifting edges between personal and projected desire are the contested zone she’s exploring. Instead of evading projections such as bad girl, sweet girl, tough girl—any kind of girl, really—Gudasz tries them on for size, humanizing them, only to fling back the empty costumes with a potent question for the culture that created them: So, this is what you want? Are you sure?


Katherine Paul’s third album of patient, cinematic indie rock surveys a return trip to her ancestral lands in the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community—and the hard-won peace she found once she arrived.

Black Belt Eagle Scout: The Land, the Water, the Sky

The Land, the Water, the Sky

Katherine Paul, who performs under the moniker Black Belt Eagle Scout, first learned to drum from her family’s drum group, the Skagit Valley Singers. Years later, her dynamic percussion infuses her third album, the intimate The Land, the Water, the Sky, with frictionless momentum. Sometimes, Paul attacks her kit with abandon; elsewhere, a steady beat slowly builds into a rolling boil. All at once or slow and steady: Both approaches evoke urgency and a need to escape. It’s time for Paul to head home. The Land, the Water, the Sky, is an intimate survey of Paul’s rocky, COVID-era return trip from Portland to her ancestral lands in the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community and the hard-won peace she found once she arrived.
If home is where the heart is, then each song on The Land, the Water, the Sky—which is carved out of the same cinematic, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink-style of indie rock that Built to Spill perfected a generation ago—is a variation of a heartbeat. There is the galloping pace of “Nobody,” a charged but breezy track in which Paul, sounding more self-assured than ever, boils the lack of Indigenous representation in the arts down to a simple, earnest declaration: “Nobody sang it for me like I wanna sing it to you.” The pulse quickens on “Fancy Dance,” a brisk, cheeky song featuring a racing guitar melody that sounds like a crush on the brink of reciprocation. “Last night/I’ll always remember you,” Paul practically sighs, before getting to the kicker: “Lying there in the nude.” If this is flirting, she’s very good at it.
Paul is at her most vulnerable on “My Blood Runs Through This Land.” The album opener pays homage to her ancestors by recording the feelings she encounters when she wanders through her homeland, dipping her toes in the water at Snee Oosh Beach and paddling through Similk Bay: “We like to see our futures bright and/I know you speak through me I/Feel it in the sound of water/Touching all the rocks I feel.” There is horror in her people’s history, which Paul brings to life with distorted guitars and ominous, aggressive drums, recalling the biting sound of the Cranberries’ “Zombie.” (That song was also, in part, about crimes committed against a country’s people.) But there is peace and beauty too, and all that fuzz and buzz still cannot drown out Paul’s bright, delicate vocals.
A faint echo of pow wow singing, twined with violin, forms the backdrop of the lilting “Spaces.” Paul’s reverberant, wide-open sound suggests a sense of possibility and the broad sweep of history, while songs like the gentle, gorgeous “Salmon Stinta” and the sprawling “Sedna” ground her music in specific locations. But The Land, the Water, the Sky is more than just a portrait of a place. During a period of collective trauma, Paul searched for healing and found it in the many connections she forged at home: with her ancestors, her parents (who lend their powerful voices to the chorus of “Spaces”), and nature. These are love songs to a community and a lineage that taught Paul how to survive.