Brooklyn experimentalist Taja Cheek adopted the stage name L’Rain in 2014, and her debut is a beautiful, untidy conduit of her grieving. The album’s unconventional structures lend it a pastoral feel.

L’Rain

Taja Cheek was already recording an album about grief when her mother Lorraine died. “It’s almost like I caused her death in some way—the feeling is absurd, bigger than myself, a premonition,” she told Afropunk. In 2014, Cheek adopted L’Rain as a stage name and has just finally released her self-titled debut as a beautiful, untidy conduit for the absurd synchronicity of her grieving. The album isn’t so much about Lorraine the person as it is about the crater her death imprinted on Cheek.
A lifelong Brooklynite, Cheek is a DIY artist and noise musician who glides around several scenes. She has a background in classical cello and piano, and throughout L’Rain she’s playing keyboards, synthesizers, and guitar, as well as manning tape delay effects and samples. She’s not alone; together with a small cast of session instrumentalists, Cheek builds swelling mounds of vaguely spiritual free jazz and ambient sound. L’Rain is a perilously busy record that’s open but not begging to be parsed. Sometimes it feels too cerebrally insular, like a barely-curated diary with all the scribbles and rough drafts springing out from the margins.
Most of the album seems to hover in a haze levitated by the haunt of Cheek’s voice, whether it’s manipulated to sound removed and choral, or delayed and reversed as a noise element. Either way, the effects often render her lyrics murky and the entire album can slip by without a discernible phrase. “Heavy (But Not in Wait)” opens the record with a clean swell that grows into soulful folk once it’s crescendoed to final form. Here and throughout, L’Rain’s songs seem to softly wander and change shape. There isn’t a single track with a straightforward structure, so the nine songs on L’Rain meander to the point of feeling more like a dozen.
Cheek and company often seem possessed by repetitive guitar riffs and churn them into meditative motifs that lend the entire record a pastoral feel. “Stay, Go (Go, Stay)” has a twinkle at its heart, and while it sounds like L’Rain is singing about love, it’s obviously just slipped through her fingers. “Bat,” a yearningly nostalgic track about a bat trapped indoors, chugs along like a sleepy lullaby. “Benediction” is a chanting, ambient intermission that sounds like Cheek walking around in a heartbroken daze. Skittering saxophone darts across the tracklist to dizzying effect. “Which Fork/I’ll Be” is the most rambunctious track here, taking a gentle ode and giving it a softly pulsating disco vibe that almost seems goofy alongside the serenity of the rest of the album.
Several shorter tracks—conversational field recordings, a voicemail that’s borderline uncomfortable to listen to in its intimacy—break up larger ideas. It’s rarely a pained sadness that pierces through L’Rain, but rather a wistful fog hovering over every moment. The whole thing feels like bouncing around Cheek’s head. She hums, whispers, coos, and chants so hushedly that she renders many of these moments as scattered background noise. Certainly, these things mean something to her, but it can be difficult to find their meaning from the outside. It sounds like she’s recorded this album for herself as a personal offering for the world to try untangling. Of course, all art is meant for this type of prodding. But L’Rain sounds first and foremost like self-therapy, and even from the outside, it’s convincingly cathartic.


The sheer strength and breadth of Mary J. Blige’s voice is like comfort food. Her 14th studio album mixes soaring, soulful affirmations with some confusing collaborations.

Good Morning Gorgeous

Last Sunday, Mary J. Blige performed in front of 112 million viewers and seemed to leave part of her soul onstage. Blige’s brief segment during this year’s Super Bowl halftime show, where she sang “Family Affair” and “No More Drama” dressed like a glamorous, leopard-print mirrorball, reflects the R&B and hip-hop icon’s current place in pop culture. Capable of reducing listeners to tears with a single vocal run since the 1990s, Blige is an unimpeachable talent who’s now evolving into a legacy act. That’s not a knock—her stage presence is unmatched. By the time she finished “No More Drama,” she had collapsed to the floor, arms and legs outstretched, a dramatically triumphant moment captured in a swooping aerial shot.
Blige’s appearance at the halftime show coincides with the release of Good Morning Gorgeous, the singer’s 14th studio album. Though it’s easy to peg as a commercial tie-in, Blige’s latest LP stands on its own as a celebratory record that mixes uplifting, soulful affirmations with exercises in contemporary rap and R&B. Blige succeeds in the former category, with plenty of pathos and technical bravado. But her collaborations with a wide cast of stars, including DJ Khaled, Fivio Foreign, and Anderson .Paak, come across as scattered, an unfortunate side effect that hinders the album’s invigorating self-empowerment.
Good Morning Gorgeous picks up on the other side of Blige’s divorce, a seismic life event the singer used as a conduit for self-discovery on 2017’s stellar Strength of a Woman. Now she’s ready to get back in the saddle. The title track, a torchy cut co-produced by H.E.R. and longtime Blige collaborator D’Mile, is quintessential Mary: an anthem of self-love to lift yourself out of the darkness, gilded with fingersnaps, leisurely guitar melodies, and dynamic backing vocals. The song recasts a personal low as a vulnerable, revitalizing pep talk to herself and thus everyone else: “All the times that I should’ve been careful with me,” she laments, “Why did I hate myself?” Opener “No Idea” is another standout, with a thick bassline, energetic drum patterns, and one of her best lines in years: “I ain’t never been the type to talk about some shit I never really been through,” she sings, laying out her ethos as an artist in one fabulous swoop.
The album’s assorted collaborations range from solid to baffling. For every strong team-up, like the silky throwback R&B she whips up with Usher on “Need Love,” there’s something like “Amazing,” a DJ Khaled production that blows up a sample of Dawn Penn’s “You Don’t Love Me (No, No, No)” to garish proportions. When Blige dabbles in drill, the effect is similarly awkward: “On Top” is a boastful victory lap at its core, but the staid production makes both Blige and Fivio Foreign sound bored by the time it’s over.
Nonetheless, Blige draws poignancy from Good Morning Gorgeous’ highlights. The sexy grit she adds to “Come See About Me,” the way she casually finds the pocket on the sumptuous “Love Without the Heartbreak,” the full minute and a half when she simply riffs over drums and cinematic strings during the title track’s climax—the sheer strength and breadth of her voice is like comfort food. Even with a side of arena-sized bombast, it remains a pleasure to hear Blige effortlessly rise above the drama.

Buy: Rough Trade


Dark Bird Is Home is Kristian Matsson's most personal record as Tallest Man on Earth, but not because it's bare and raw, but because it's surreal and dreamlike. He flits between our reality and his own, a world of only dreamers and travelers, flickering lights of towns, shadows and ghosts, birds and trees.

The Tallest Man on Earth: Dark Bird Is Home

Dark Bird Is Home

The music of Kristian Matsson (who records as the Tallest Man on Earth) doesn't carry the same loneliness of other heartbroken folkies; Matsson's music, instead, has solitude. Loneliness is a condition, a place you end up and from which you are eager to leave, but solitude is a choice. Like Henry James or Emily Dickinson, who best detail the workings of their mind when they are cloistered away from the world, Matsson is more concerned with a wellspring of autonomous thought rather than the chirpings of modern society. His voice and his guitar jig around some distant forest maypole, out of touch and out of sync with everything 21st-century. Instead, he's loosely moored to his dreams, his wanderlust, and all the other broad stuff of poetry that glows brightest in total seclusion.
It used to be easy to hear this solitude in Matsson's music. His first few albums featured only his rich, bleating voice and his acoustic guitar, and listening to his early records can feel like hearing someone rediscover the unfettered joy of playing music in real time. Naturally, for the last few albums, Matsson has been adding tiny layers of instrumentation behind him and the fire of his early days has dwindled into the mist of the songs' arrangements. Dark Bird Is Home, his first album since 2012's There's No Leaving Now, continues in this vein, and Matsson's persona fades even more into the tapestry he's made with his music.
Matsson handles most of the performances, including keyboards and drums. He has some extra players—most notably background vocals and strings from Bon Iver's Mike Noyce—to fill the songs out, but the majority of the starry musical textures are Matsson's. He recorded the album in odd places in his native Sweden and surrounding countries, and the dusting of synths, pedal steel, french horns and trumpets on the album say a lot by saying very little. "Timothy" turns on a winsome clarinet figure played by Matsson, and it's the perfect amount of simplicity to ornament his songs without upsetting the whole equation. Matsson still hasn't "gone electric," and blessedly still avoids the MOR folk-rock tropes of stomping and big-ticket whoa-oh'ing. Behind all the arrangements, front and center on every track, is still his voice.
That voice undersells nothing: There are no wanly delivered lines, no flat and dour stretches of singing. His voice is prismatic, used like an old-guard storyteller who hews his words to any kind of feeling he wants. He does bittersweet reassurance on the stunning title track, and the way he tip-toes down the phrase "Still we're in the light of day" is hypnotic. He does sockless campfire guy on "Beginners", a song so whimsical it could land a three-movie deal with Disney. He even does the soft-rocking-through-the-sadness on "Sagres", where whispers for the audience to "come on" at the end of the chorus feel like the coyest Bruce Springsteen impression in history. Words come out of his mouth brimming with so much emotion, they land just shy of over-singing.
Matsson has always been a little obtuse with his lyrics, and that can be charming or intriguing: The ballad "Little Nowhere Towns" is Matsson half-drunkenly retelling a tale of heartbreak, languishing in the imagery, nearly impossible to pin down. There's some bitterness about his own songwriting, perhaps: "And I'm racing through my pockets now/ 'Cause I'm starting to believe/ Selling emptiness to strangers/ A little bit warmer than my dreams."
Elsewhere he's more inscrutable. The chorus of "Singers" goes "But we're only gone like singers are till springtime/ Let them out, if they should let them out," which never opens up on repeated listens to reveal more than a tangle of words. The big choruses feel undercut by the sometimes-tangled poetry of the words, which get lost in metaphor en route to making their point. On "Sagres", he cuts through all the artifice with a striking moment: "It's just all this fucking doubt," he sings, barely squeezing out the line. It feels like everything he's been trying and failing to say elsewhere.
Which is why Matsson seems like someone who writes songs for himself alone. There's plenty of second-person on the record—a "you" who he walked some trails with, a "you" he's letting go of—but these are songs too caustic and bittersweet to be odes. If his last record was about putting down roots, here he's picking them back up again. It is his most personal record, but not because it's bare and raw, but because it's surreal and dreamlike. He flits between our reality and his own, a world of only dreamers and travelers, flickering lights of towns, shadows and ghosts, birds and trees. It's his way finding joy in his solitude.


Van Lear Rose

Like so many honky-tonk singers of her own and previous generations, Loretta Lynn was always a little country-come-to-town, a rural-raised girl in the big city whose pre-fame struggles lent her music grit and authenticity. Born in a Kentucky mining town called Butcher Hollow, a teenage bride and a mother several times over before she even arrived in Nashville, Lynn sang with a hill-country accent (notably different from typical Music Row stars) and with the unchecked candor of her toughening experiences. In this smoothly defiant voice, she sang of her man's and her own cheating ways, as well as the hardships of motherhood, wifehood, and celebrity as if each were one and the same-- and they probably were.
In Nashville, she was a rough in the diamond: Her hard-edged songs like "Fist City" and "Rated X" were backed by pristine countrypolitan production-- mostly courtesy of Owen Bradley-- which helped sell her to a wide audience. At the same time, the disparity between her voice and her accompaniment created a fascinating rural/urban friction that never let listeners forget that she was less a superstar than a small-town girl at heart. Crucial to her image and her success, the depth of Lynn's noncelebrity is perhaps why her old material still bristles and burrs even today.
On her new album, Van Lear Rose, producer and admirer Jack White (who dedicated White Blood Cells to Lynn in 2001) immediately erases that friction with a rawer, in-one-take live sound that adds texture to her songs without overpowering her voice. White's intention isn't to update or revise Lynn's music or her persona, but simply to recast her voice in a new setting, to make her sound like she's right back in Butcher Hollow.
To this end, White has corralled a backing band that consists not of Nashville veterans, but of young 'uns from the decidedly non-rural locales of Detroit and Cincinnati. Dubbed the Do Whaters by Lynn ("I named them that because they got in there and did whatever we needed them to!" she explains in the liner notes), the group consists of The Greenhornes' rhythm section Jack Lawrence and Patrick Keeler, with Blanche's Dave Feeny adding elegant pedal steel and slide guitar flourishes. Together, they prove a dynamic backing band, able to set a warm country atmosphere but not afraid to make some rock noise.
And they do just that on the first single, "Portland, Oregon". Lynn and White exchange verses about sloe gin fizzes and drunk lovin', recalling her adultery duets with Conway Twitty but with more of a boisterous sound, courtesy of White's Zep blues riffs. On "Mrs. Leroy Brown", the band bang out a bar-stormer to match Lynn's adventures riding around town in a pink limousine. Even bigger than that limo, though, is the unmistakable smile on her face as she disses her man and his floozy: "I just drawed all your money out of the bank today/ Honey, you don't have no mo'."
If Van Lear Rose recasts Lynn's sound, it also revisits the subject matter of her earlier hits, following her stories through to their sometimes dire ends in songs like "Women's Prison" and "Family Tree". But on the album's most memorable songs, Lynn tells her own story, singing in no other voice but her own, and it still soars with surprising grace and with all the sass and intimacy of her younger self. Most of Van Lear Rose is autobiographical, relating her life in both Butcher Hollow and Nashville with evocative detail and steady candor. The title track, for example, recalls her father's stories about her mother and "how her beauty ran deep down to her soul." Her voice trembles with a tender, nostalgic wistfulness, especially when she remembers how the miners teased her dad: "You're dreamin', boy, she'll never look your way/ You'll never ever hold the Van Lear Rose."
After the spoken-word reminiscence "Little Red Shoes" and the devastating widow's lament "Miss Being Mrs.", Van Lear Rose ends with "Story of My Life", which is exactly what its title purports. The coal miner's daughter happily relates the events of her life-- early marriage, motherhood, stardom-- leading up to the present, but instead of dwelling on hardship and tragedy, she sounds satisfied, even joyful. It's perhaps a testament to her modesty that she winds up this autobiography in less than three minutes, but by song's end, her contentment feels undeniably hard-won and admirable: "I have to say that I've been blessed/ Not bad for a country girl, I guess."
Lynn's triumphant return on Van Lear Rose isn't exactly unprecedented: Ten years ago, Johnny Cash won a younger audience with the Rick Rubin-produced American Recordings, and George Jones, Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton, and Willie Nelson have all released strong albums late in their careers. Nor is it surprising that fans would flock to such sturdy music, that critics would celebrate such a comeback or pursue such a great story. But the rating above does not reflect critical sentiment as much as it does critical amazement: Van Lear Rose is remarkably bold, celebratory and honest. It's a homecoming for a small-town musician gifted with poise, humor and compassion, but at its very heart, it's happy to be just a kick-ass country record.


The Los Angeles singer-songwriter’s music gets a beat-oriented makeover in a collection of remixes from Skrillex, Omar S, Lafawndah, and other club producers.

Blood Transfusion

Singer-songwriter Kelsey Lu makes dense, baroque music that seamlessly fuses pop, electronic, and R&B. Her earliest work was built from mournful cello loops and vocals that crackled with electricity, making it feel like you were discovering her music in a dimly lit living room every time. But on her debut album this year, she filled out her sound with guitar, piano, and touches of synthesizer. She has pushed even further outward with Blood Transfusion, an EP in which a diverse cast of remixers brightens and accelerates her songs, most of them from her debut album.
These six producers take vastly different approaches to Lu’s music. From German DJ Dixon’s deep house to Omar S’ techno to two distinct takes on “Due West,” the songs establish an array of sounds and moods. A club mix of “Shades of Blue,” Lil M (aka frequent Fade to Mind designer Miles Martinez), fragments and repeats staccato, glittery slivers of words and exclamations, gleaning new textures rather than meaning from them. Lafawndah’s remix of “Due West” similarly layers fragments of phrases, albeit longer snippets, as sonic building blocks, focusing largely on the soaring titular phrase. By repeating the most intense moments of the song, the remix magnifies and extends the euphoria that was previously reserved for the chorus. By contrast, Skrillex’s remix of the same track builds upon much of the song’s structural integrity—unsurprising, as Skrillex produced the original as well. It’s a new look for the former EDM troublemaker: The song leans into Lu’s sedated croons with a murky mix of sparse percussion and churning synth that’s more hypnotic than frantic.
These remixes generally cut to the chase faster than the originals. Curved, elongated choruses transform into chants that stomp through your brain, immediate and unrelenting. On Detroit producer Omar S’s remix of “Poor Fake,” the contrast feels productive and exciting. Where earlier, the song was buoyed primarily by strings, on the remix, Lu’s chopped vocals thrillingly trip and sputter over grating synths. The slight electronic flourishes that already existed in the song transition seamlessly here.
On her debut, Lu’s husky, symphonic vocals and dramatic lyricism imbued her music with a mythological quality, as if plucked from a fairy tale. But the details of Lu’s voice and the stories she tells are often lost in these remixes. Though her falsetto peeks through on Omar S’s “Poor Fake” rework and Dixon’s “Why Knock for You” remix, her expansive, exploratory crooning and quaint production flourishes—like the fluttering bird calls sampled on “Due West” and “Kindred”—are largely buried under layers of distorted percussion and synth. Though Lil M’s “Shades of Blue” remix is exciting as a standalone piece, it’s hard not to miss the original’s gorgeous lyrics about love and longing.
More than anything, Blood Transfusion exhibits the range and potential of Lu’s sound. Some of these songs lack the vulnerability and immediacy of her earlier, stripped-down pieces, and it would be nice to see more of that emotional weight brought to these fast-paced, rhythm-heavy tracks. Nonetheless, it’s remarkable hearing her work stretched from hushed string arrangements to synth-forward mixes, from your living room to the club. And it’s exciting to think of the doors this EP opens up—the spaces and sounds she has yet to occupy.


Scottish post-rock band embraces restraint and shorter song lengths on its economical yet still sometimes powerful new album.

Mr. Beast

The longest song on Mr. Beast, Mogwai's fifth studio album, runs 5:46. The entire LP clocks under 45 minutes. Ordinarily, this isn't the kind of thing you'd bother pointing out in a record review, but it bears mentioning because Mogwai are typically at their best when they let their music breathe, ebb, flow, and stretch, rather than constrict it or force it into smaller boxes. Their first and still greatest album, Young Team, showed no compunction regarding songs that extended beyond 10 minutes to make their point, and on that scale, they made the best points of their career. Last year's phenomenal BBC Sessions disc drove this home even further. Simply put, restraint does not become them.
Unfortunately, restraint is a major point of order on Mr. Beast, as it has been to varying degrees on their past few studio efforts. Though the record is at no loss for power, it mostly stores it as unrealized potential: This doesn't sound like the same Mogwai that flattens audiences and then asks if the show was loud enough. Opener "Auto Rock" begins with a quiet piano that gains intensity as other instruments join in, phaser and distorted guitar rising like dust as the volume grows. The drumbeat verges on childlike-- a simple whack on every beat and no embellishment of any kind. But after building for just over four minutes, and then coming to an unremarkable close, it fails to leave much of an impression.
The album recovers somewhat with "Glasgow Mega-Snake", which economically distills the essence of the band's crushing live show into three-and-a-half minutes of gut-punching nastiness. Its buildup pays off with a wrenching tempo shift and vicious guitar riff that leaves behind a weightless groove, proving it's possible for Mogwai to sustain their intensity in bite-size packages. Penultimate song "I Chose Horses" gets a lot of mileage out of the juxtaposition of an evenly spoken Japanese dialogue (courtesy Tetsuya Fukagawa of Japanese hardcore band Envy) against a fluctuating, mournful backdrop whose guitars are nearly indistinguishable from its synths; the primary asset of closer "We're No Here" is its sheer deafening loudness.
The other vocal tracks switch things up nicely: "Acid Food" offers one of the album's most unexpectedly beautiful moments when a pedal steel enters after the second chorus, which is sung through a vocoder. But that song's aesthetic partner, "Travel Is Dangerous", is considerably more unruly, with two-part harmonies being doused by a wall of screaming guitar in the chorus. In combination, the two songs serve to remind that post-rock can come across as more sketched than fleshed when not properly unleashed.
Mr. Beast's shortcomings lie not with what's present, but with what's missing. Mogwai are capable of tremendous beauty, poignant gloom, and ear-splitting sonic pyrotechnics, but only transcend when they combine each of these elements. Here, they rarely give themselves enough building room to conjoin these moods and styles. Resultantly, despite its peaks, the album is no match for Mogwai's best work.


Baltimore musician Michael Collins had to give up his Run DMT moniker to a dubstep crew of the same name, but the music he's creating as Salvia Plath is suited to the change: On The Bardo Story, he's shed his early chillwave tendencies, bringing his 60s psych influences into sharper focus.

The Bardo Story

Michael Collins is a Baltimore musician with a fondness for making pun-happy drug references in the names he assumes for his recording projects. He had to give up his last moniker, Run DMT, to a dubstep crew of the same name, so now he's trying Salvia Plath on for size. The music is suited to a new name-- Collins has shed some of the chillwave tendencies that made Run DMT sink into a gauze-y morass of bands around the time of his Bong Voyage in 2009. Instead, he's chosen to bring his 60s psych influences into sharper focus, making everything just a little leaner, although low production values and sloppy playing are still key tenets of his sound. Underneath it all is a sharpening of Collins' songwriting skills, not quite turning The Bardo Story into the parent-friendly record he hoped for in a recent interview, but certainly lending a feeling that he's getting somewhere, one bong hit at a time.
Something that's immediately apparent from listening to this album is how well versed Collins is in 60s pop, both of the psychedelic variety and beyond. Initially it's hard to hear certain songs as anything other than pastiche, as so often happens when someone is deeply immersed in a particular era. Collins is the kind of guy who probably thinks that Lenny Kaye didn't dig hard enough when researching the Nuggets compilations. But, to be fair, he's not adverse to rooting around in the mainstream, finding plenty of room for inspiration in John Lennon's Beatles songs, pinching a sigh or two from the Beach Boys, even heading into the 70s to steal a few tricks from Randy Newman. He does it so well that it's hard not to be swayed in his direction, taking an approach reminiscent of another Newman acolyte, Chicago musician Liam Hayes (aka Plush), whose songwriting is so strong that he transcends the music he's so transparently sourcing.
Of course there are flaws, too. The Bardo Story is a messy album, riddled with a looseness that's either there on purpose or happens to be the consequence of Collins' admittedly limited skills. When he gets it to work, on the sunny foot-stomper "This American Life", for example, it's extremely endearing, coming off as the work of someone with a vision far beyond the audience this record is likely to attract. Collins might not be aspirational in that way, but there's a sense here that the grainy production values are becoming a hindrance rather than a valuable part of the picture, especially as he appears to have put a great deal of thought into the overall sound he's trying to express. He covers a decent swathe of ground, but the transitions are rarely jarring, even when he passes the baton from the swirling Olivia Tremor Control moves of "House of Leaves" to the spaghetti western whistle of "Stranded".
"Bardo" is a Tibetan word meaning "intermediate state," which provides a less-than subtle nudge toward the idea that this is a transitory album for Collins. It's a new name, a refinement of his vision. The great leaps it takes sometimes feel less like an aesthetic choice and more like the work of someone figuring out where they want to go. It's a cut above most public attempts to undertake such a journey, if indeed that's what Collins is doing. In among it all is a superior songwriter trying not to be wrestled out of the frame by all the limitations imposed upon him, including some spectacularly awful sub-Dali cover art. But even that's fitting in its way, a low rent imitation of Surrealism housing a collection of scuzzy sub-psych songs, all of which probably sounded like a great idea when conceptualized through a billow of weed smoke. Fortunately, it still sounds pretty good when the fog clears.


Reverb is the sole ingredient on the German-Bulgarian artist’s latest conceptual record, in which vintage pedals and digital processors are used to mimic the properties of sound in impossible spaces.

Call and Response

In 1947, Bill Putnam discovered the future of music in the men’s room of Chicago’s Civic Opera Building. Putnam, a World War II veteran, was an electrical engineer and a born tinkerer, and he had recently set up a cutting-edge recording studio on the top floor of the Art Deco office tower. Searching for a way to add lifelike echo to a harmonica quartet’s rendition of the 1912 standard “Peg o’ My Heart,” he set up a loudspeaker in one of the building’s marble-walled bathrooms. Piped in from down the hall, and subsequently picked up by an auxiliary microphone, the band’s instruments were bathed in an eerie shimmer, like wraiths in an enchanted cave. Artificial reverb was born, and popular music has never been the same since.
Reverb’s psychoacoustic properties are as old as humans’ connection with the supernatural itself; they are engineered into Byzantine churches, Mayan pyramids, and Neolithic burial chambers. But Putnam’s gambit was a development befitting the coming Space Age. To add artificial reverb to a recording is to bend the rules of spacetime—to abduct the listener from the room they inhabit and deposit them in a cathedral or a canyon or a catacombs, while slowing or even freezing the ticking of the clock, smearing milliseconds into the illusion of infinity.
Echo chambers such as Putnam’s soon gave way to plate and spring units capable of sculpting even more dynamic effects. By 1976, $20,000 could buy you a digital gizmo armed with real-time controls; two decades later, Sony made it possible to “sample” real-world spaces, applying mathematical models of the way that sound travels through a bounded set of dimensions. Today, wildly inventive plugins for DAWs such as Logic and Ableton do everything from mimicking Motown’s legendary echo chambers to allowing producers to invent perpetually shifting spaces, turning caverns into tin cans and back again.
Stefan Goldmann’s Call and Response is a tribute to this evolution of space as an instrument in its own right. Plenty of contemporary electronic music uses reverb as seasoning, but Goldmann’s album might be the only record in which reverb is the sole ingredient. Across nine tracks bearing titles like “Brick and Mortar” and “Glowing Walls,” Goldmann deploys a range of techniques on vintage and contemporary devices, “playing” the reverb as he adjusts parameters like density, damping, diffusion, and decay. There are no conventionally musical tones; the only inputs are short, neutral clicks deployed to trigger the resulting reverb, and even these are often rendered inaudible, smothered by the charcoal puffs of dust kicked up around them.
The record’s subtitle—Nine works for reverberation devices, impulse signals and feedback—carries the faint whiff of a laboratory experiment, and the music is correspondingly ascetic. The German-Bulgarian artist frequently works along similarly conceptual lines: On one album, he cut up dozens of canonical recordings of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps; for another, he utilized only factory presets from obsolete Japanese workstation synthesizers from the 1990s. But Call and Response is by far his most austere undertaking. Philosophically, the idea is similar to no-input music, a Japanese noise subgenre in which performers route a mixing desk’s output back into its input, sculpting the resulting feedback into stark filaments. If no-input music attempts to capture the sound of nothingness, Call and Response might be an answer to the question, “What is the sound of nothing turning itself inside out?”
Still, this is not a clinical study but a fantastical journey; its purpose is not didactic but psychedelic. The opening “Quarry” lays out the palette utilized across the entire album: one thousand shades of gray. Short clacks are stretched into the caws of robotic crows. The crunch of metal turns into a gunshot booming across a valley. For all its yawning sense of absence, Call and Response is often vividly imagistic; in the absence of musical cues, your brain struggles to fill in the blanks. You imagine thunderclaps, artillery shells whizzing overhead, slow-motion avalanches dissolving into wispy plumes. Extended passages of white noise are stretched into long, thin wires; deep inside the asphalt-colored churn, train whistles sing.
The preponderance of gray sometimes makes Call and Response feel aggressively drab; it’s not a very fun exercise, despite artificial reverb’s potential to evoke purely imaginary spaces. The music is at its most engrossing when feedback chains create steady rhythms. In “Traction,” what sounds like the dull throb of a boat engine is followed by what might be a foghorn tapping out Morse code, while “Two Shelves” begins with elastic undulations that sound like kneading metal. And in a few places, bizarre acousmatic effects may make you doubt your own perception: There’s a quick flicker of buzz in “Quarry” that briefly sounds like it’s emanating from inside your own skull, and in “Relic,” I could have sworn that the music was vibrating the pull tab on the Coke can sitting on my desk. (It wasn’t.) But by and large, there’s little opportunity to get comfortable in these renderings of what Goldmann calls “impossible architecture”: The halls may be enormous, but the abiding sensation is overwhelmingly claustrophobic.


On their new record, the California group remain deliriously unhinged but indulge in prog-metal fantasies.

Smote Reverser

For the past half decade or so, we’ve seen the great unravelling of (Thee) Oh Sees. That is less a comment on the band’s sudden dissolution in 2013 than the aesthetic disintegration that’s transpired ever since ringleader John Dwyer started rebuilding his group in 2014 around bassist Tim Hellman and a double-drummer tandem (now made up of Dan Rincon and Paul Quattrone). But even as recent Oh Sees albums fell under the spell of Afrobeat, cosmic jazz, and proggy synth soundtracks, Dwyer seemingly recognizes that each new record needs to include its fair share of warp-speed rock-outs to keep his circle-pit faithful satisfied. As such, the band’s post-2015 output has been an ongoing game of tug-of-war between the Oh Sees’ desire to satisfy their audience and their desire to satisfy themselves.
With Smote Reverser, they make their most concerted attempt to reconcile those diverging impulses. The album is a predictably loud reaction to last fall’s Memory of a Cut Off Head, a stripped-down psych-folk pastorale (released under the OCS handle) that saw Dwyer sharing harmonies with singer Brigid Dawson. She lends her voice to this record as well, but don’t expect a return to the adrenalized corkers that defined the band during her previous 2010-2013 tenure with the group. Smote Reverser rocks out in a decidedly different manner than the band’s usual fuzz-pedal freakouts. There are no motorik rippers, no brain-zapping guitar blitzkriegs, no routine deployment of Dwyer’s signature, echo-drenched “Wooooo!” Instead, we discover that the fantastical medieval elements of Dwyer’s previous full-band release, 2017’s Orc, were the actual seeds that have allowed Oh Sees to blossom into a bona fide prog-metal outfit—complete with album art just begging to be airbrushed on the side of a van.
Oh Sees albums have long reveled in the tension between the band’s aggression and Dwyer’s frisky, mischievous vocal style, but on Orc, it became evident just how well his voice sincerely lent it itself to the theatrical exposition of prog. On Smote Reverser’s opener “Sentient Oona,” he continues to blur the line between singer and narrator, weaving a tale of sleeping spells and all-seeing eyes atop a coolly rumbling drumbeat; you can practically picture him communing with a crystal ball. But even as the song erupts into jolts of organ (courtesy of Memory alum Tom Dolas) and burning arpeggios, the production feels dryer and more chiseled. The heaviness is not in the volume and distortion, but rather in the force with which hands are hitting the instruments.
“Sentient Oona” also finds Oh Sees continuing to develop their double-drummer dynamic in exciting ways, with Rincon and Quattrone laying down interwoven patterns that both propel and disrupt the momentum. For a band once content to lock into a pulsating groove and blaze out for the horizon, Oh Sees have become adept in the art of the curveball; Just as the dreamy Dwyer/Dawson duet “Last Peace” seems like it’s going to dissolve into a hookah-bar haze, it blasts off into an exhilarating space-bound jam. And sounding not unlike the wiggy breakdown in Edgar Winter’s 1972 prog-funk novelty “Frankenstein” stretched out to 12  minutes, “Anthemic Aggressor” is Oh Sees at their most deliriously unhinged, all solar-flare synths, short-circuiting guitar twitches, and furious jumpy-jazz rhythm.
These epic odysseys are counterbalanced by brief shocks like “Overthrown,” where Dwyer’s gnashed-teeth growl teeters toward thrash metal. But even as he seems more comfortable bringing his childhood love of Dungeons & Dragons and latent love of Rush-worthy guitar solos to the fore, Smote Reverser remains unmistakably Oh Sees by virtue of Dwyer’s clockwork, chorus-resistant songwriting style—you can always count on each verse to tee up another berserker instrumental break. Like Orc before it, Smote Reverser can’t help but lose some of its power as it approaches the hour-long mark—the wandering Floydian instrumental “Flies Bump Against the Glass” and whimsical, Wakeman-esque synthphony “Beat Quest” don’t quite deliver the grand finale this castle-storming record deserves. But by that point, Oh Sees have put forth more than enough Progasaurus gusto to rightfully earn their capes.


Hersh's latest solo album is a typically personal and idiosyncratic affair, rich with dense but frank allusions to the dissolution of her 25-year marriage.

Kristin Hersh: Wyatt at the Coyote Palace

Wyatt at the Coyote Palace

Listening to a Kristin Hersh album is like receiving, unfiltered, a direct feed of someone’s thoughts, with all the internal symbols, memories, private jokes intact before they apply all the translation and explanation and interpretation to the outside world. One gets the sense she’s still trying to sort through it all herself. For this reason, her music inevitably is called “abstract”; it’s an understandable reaction, but totally inaccurate. Kristin Hersh writes in specifics. Her memoir Rat Girl—alternately titled Paradoxical Undressing, a typically allegorical reference to hypothermia patients stripping off their clothes even as they freeze to death—sheds light on a couple dozen of her and Throwing Muses’ tracks. Her songs are full of references to her own material,anecdotes that slip out in interviews and on stage, blunt and hyper-specific wisecracks. Singer-songwriters, particularly women, are often accused of writing confessional material even (especially?) when they’re not, but Hersh’s material generally is. “I haven’t got the kind of brain to invent anything, so I just write the stuff down that happens,” she told Soundblab. “The things that happened are so bizarre, you can’t make those things up.”
Wyatt at the Coyote Palace (named for one of her sons) is a typically personal and idiosyncratic affair. Like all her solo and Throwing Muses studio releases since 2010’s Crooked, Wyatt at the Coyote Palace is accompanied by a book of essays and artwork: less commentary on the tracks, and more another set of puzzle pieces to put together. (As well as a recipe for “hooker gazpacho.”) Like 1999’s Sky Motel, the sonics are rich; in addition to acoustic guitar, Hersh plays bass, drums, piano, horns, and cello, and engineer Steve Rizzo helps make it among her slickest-sounding recordings. After five years of tweaking results, she builds many of the arrangements to the beefiness of a typical Muses track; others are interspersed with muffled field recordings, an effect like hearing songs through mental fog. Like the Throwing Muses comeback album Purgatory/Paradise, the album is fragmentary and self-referential; songs reappear throughout the album in reprises, or reworks of and callbacks to past material.
And like her 2001 solo effort Sunny Border Blue, the album is viscerally preoccupied with loss: “I’m so fucking tired of dissolution,” Hersh says in “Sun Blown.” Sometimes it’s general loss—the running joke throughout the album’s accompanying essays is Hersh and her bandmates’ brushes with death, both funny and sneakily serious (a fair amount of essays end in the hospital). A few years ago Hersh divorced from her husband of 25 years. It’s crept into all her work since—last year’s book Don’t Suck Don’t Die started out as a eulogy for singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt but became a concurrent eulogy for the two songwriters’ marriages. But “Sun Blown” is perhaps the most explicit she's been: “The bailing mate dance, failing patience, fool's silver...” Like most of Hersh’s imagery, it’s not oblique at all when you get the reference: in this case, silver being the traditional 25th anniversary gift. The verse appears as a refrain throughout the album: leading into “Green Screen” and its descending counterpoint of a melody: “Red skin blackening, what is happening? The Art of Kissing, the heart of missing you.”
Unsurprisingly, this is heavy listening. “Shaky Blue Can,” “Shotgun” (reminiscent of “Terra Nova”) and “Secret Codes” are up there with “Listerine” and “Flooding” as among the most fragile material Hersh has recorded. But her work is always threaded through with levity; these songs resist easy classification. “Detox” breaks through into anger—confrontational lyrics, distorted guitar solo—but the almost poppy “Wonderland” recalls the Muses’ midcareer singles; “Hemingway’s Tell” could easily be adapted into one. For every bracing line like “everyone like me’s a dead man,” there’s a gnomic one-liner like “Incense, strawberry candles and soap—way to butcher a street.” The former track, “Killing Two Birds,” is deceptively cheery—the essay accompanying it sets it during a teenage coke-fueled jog. The latter, “Between Piety and Desire” (like Purgatory/Paradise, a play on street names) becomes a “we don’t like the shit, ‘cause we belong in it.” The “we” is key. As memoirs, her albums are so intensely personal it’s little wonder she’s amassed a cult fanbase (and cadre of crowdfunders); as art, they’re arguments for the value of unapologetic individuality.


On their debut album Tempest, the Oakland death doom quartet Lycus sand down the rough edges of their 2011 demo and embrace a unique take on European funeral doom. The quartet refrain from histrionic, death-worshipping self-hatred and instead embrace a more cosmic, organic take on sorrow.

Tempest

There's an immense sense of satisfaction that comes with watching a band progress. It’s exhilarating to see talented, hardworking people take those first steps out of the practice room and into the world armed with only a handful of riffs and ambition. Sometimes it takes awhile, and sometimes the rewards come fast. The excellent Oakland death doom quartet Lycus have taken the latter path. Their first release, 2011’s Demo MMXI, made the rounds quietly, catching underground attention with three gutted paeans simmering beneath a stark, skeletal Bryan Proteau cover. It felt raw and honest, and captured the imagination in a way that’s rarely seen from metal’s extreme outliers. On Tempest, their first proper album, and first for 20 Buck Spin, the rough edges have been sanded down, and the light shines through.
Often used interchangeably with "death doom," funeral doom is more accessible than the most perverse, impenetrable corners of black metal, death, and grind, but don’t be fooled-- the punishing lengths, torturously slow tempos, and disquieting emotional heft it offers still inflict plenty of damage. Those who enter into the darkest depths of this suicidal subsect are asked to abandon all hope, and given little choice in the matter. Lycus approach the void carefully. Though they’ve had the funeral doom tag lobbed at them already, it’s not entirely accurate: 11 minute songs do not a funeral doom band make, and Lycus show no interest in following genre conventions. They refrain from histrionic, death-worshipping self-hatred and instead embrace a more cosmic, organic take on sorrow. Given their Bay Area lineage, it’s not hard to connect the dots and see that their proximity to like-minded acts Asunder, Graves At Sea, and Noothgrush has made an impact.
Their approach eschews the classic European emphasis on keyboards and overly flowery gothic influence, focusing instead on the sludgier, more straightforward sound that American bands often gravitate towards. Think Samothrace, not Skepticism. Opening dirge “Coma Burn” sets the tone down low, with rumbling vocals and ominous chords. Their penchant for tremolo (as heard on the effortlessly, engagingly dynamic “Engravings”) speaks of a faint black metal influence, one that intensifies into mania during the epic closing track.  After the listener is taken through peaks and valleys of howling black metal, slavering sludge, and contemplative doom, “Tempest” lets us down gently, fading out in a gentle blur of noise. Punctuated by mournful violins, each of the album’s three compositions flows beautifully into the next, allowing for a force of movement seldom seen within the style. Melancholia reigns, yet there is no gnashing of teeth or soot-smeared wails permeating the monolithic riffs. They are better than that. Lycus have entered the next stage of mourning with this release, and their early stages of grief have matured into dignified resignation and graceful acceptance.


The glorious third album from the Swedish metal band Tribulation is a sprawling, compulsory tale that doesn’t turn dull. Psych, prog, thrash, and classic rock commingle, bearing echoes of not just Mercyful Fate and At the Gates but Led Zeppelin and Hawkwind, the Doors and dub.

The Children of the Night

The Children of the Night, the glorious third album from Swedish metal charmers Tribulation, begins with an invitation. A backdrop of cello, church organ and piano gives way to a midtempo full-band rumble, and then Johannes Andersson grunts like a mad old man curling a finger and commanding you to come along. "Beckoning the children of the night, the spirits of the undead and the lesser lights," he sings on "Strange Gateways Beckon". These first two minutes suggest the beginning of some grand adventure—a Tolkien-like walk through the woods, a Dante-like descent into depravity. And they are: A heavy metal record that wanders beyond any comfort zone, the hour-long The Children of the Night is a sprawling, compulsory tale that doesn’t turn dull.
Tribulation have never made an album quite like this: More than a decade ago, most of the band played adolescent, hair-whipping trash as Hazard. Five years after a name change, they re-emerged with The Horror, a claustrophobic mixture of death metal, black metal and thrash, intertwined by arty interludes that suggested major ambition. They pursued it unapologetically and even to excess on 2013’s The Formulas of Death, which began with a tambura drone and ended with a shape-shifting 13-minute mess called "Apparitions".
On The Children of the Night, Tribulation push all those influences and ideas toward the center. It’s as if they’ve pondered the relatively populist successes of their fellow countrymen—Ghost B.C., In Flames, even Watain—and rediscovered the value of concision and motion. Psych rock and prog metal, thrash and classic rock commingle in three-to-seven-minute songs, bearing echoes of not just Mercyful Fate and At the Gates but Led Zeppelin and Hawkwind, the Doors and dub. Led by brilliant guitarists Jonathan Hultén and Adam Zaars, these ten incisive songs cut away tangents and bristle with urgency. “Holy Libations”  is heroic and surging, with one seeming crescendo and dashing solo piled atop another. The racing “Melancholia” powers through death metal before cresting with a rock-god solo that feels forever on the verge of falling apart.
By and large, though, it’s the band that makes these songs so stunning, not Andersson. He sings in a perpetually gruff monotone, offering morose observations and dramatic revelations. During "Holy Libations", he delivers a dense verse about the solidarity of misery and then tries his best to break his typical pace with a sort of staccato half-rap. He stumbles around the beat, straining with effort. Tribulation, then, are a little like metal’s the Hold Steady—a righteous rock band burnished by high-flying guitars and big keyboards but led by a singer who seems to have shown up late for practice with a notebook full of quips and a belly full of booze.
Tribulation let Andersson’s thorny vocals stand alone, backing him only occasionally with harmonies; for a band that composes with near-classical rigor, he remains the scratch that can’t be buffed. This tension becomes apparent when it disappears. Mid-album instrumental “Själaflykt” moves from doom-like dirge to mid-tempo boogie, like The Ventures penning a summertime special for the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. But by song’s end, the action feels bloated and defanged. When his growl bullies its way into “The Motherhood of God,” the friction is newly welcome.
Metal critics sometimes snipe at each other for preferring extreme or arty metal to the sort of music to which actually raise beers and fists. There is no way to arrive at a consensus artist who will satisfy everyone, of course, but The Children of the Night comes close.  On one hand, the irascible Andersson sounds like the kind of bandleader who hopes to follow you into an alley with a lead pipe. But the organ-loaded, solo-bejeweled “Strains of Horror” is an anthem. The hook of “Strange Gateways Beckon” just begs to be shouted back at the band. Sure, Andersson is a bit too brusque for complete crossover success, but the exceptional The Children of the Nightextends an open invitation to a very wide audience.


On her debut album, the British singer-songwriter Amber Bain lets go of her self-consciousness and, with some help from the 1975, makes the transformation from hesitant outsider to unlikely pop star.

Good at Falling

When Amber Bain began releasing music as the Japanese House in 2015, the British singer-songwriter kept her identity a mystery. She avoided photos and interviews, maintained a low social-media profile, and let her distorted, androgynous vocals fuel the rumor mill. The tactic generated plenty of hype—many wondered if the songs were a secret side project of The 1975’s Matt Healy—but Bain wasn’t fully committed. After a few months, she ditched the gimmick and pulled back the curtain. Behind it was a soft-spoken, queer 19-year-old girl with Kurt Cobain hair and boyish style who played guitar left-handed and upside down, and who used rich, romantic production to fill out her timid voice. She was an indie ideal.
Bain offered a variety of reasons for the stunt—she wanted to avoid gender classifications, she hated having her picture taken—but in the end, withholding her identity made it the only thing anyone wanted to talk about. “It just became this thing,” she told NME. In the years since, Bain, now 23, has kept a steady foot on the gas, releasing three more spellbinding EPs that established and expanded her sound: a mix of sumptuous synths and vocals with muted drums that sound like they’ve been wrapped in felt. Each release felt bigger and brighter than the last, and marked a gradual progression from glitchy, off-kilter electro-folk (Clean) to mournful synth-pop rooted in mainstream structures (Saw You in a Dream). On her confident and intoxicating first full-length, Good at Falling, she lets go of any lingering self-consciousness and makes the transformation from hesitant outsider to unlikely pop star.
There are many technical reasons this spacious, unfussy record excels, but it’s Bain’s unrelenting heartache that lifts it from bedroom pop into something bigger. The songs are profoundly personal, detailing the tragic and tumultuous experiences that shaped her recent past: the death of her first love, the grieving that followed, the relationship that saved her (with musician Marika Hackman) and its eventual dissolution, and the ultimate realization that she’ll be okay. “Lilo,” a graceful ode to Hackman that has a perfectly floating melody, finds Bain on the other side of suffering, looking back. “It’s a reminder to me that I’m good at falling in love,” she told i-D, “and I can survive falling out of it.”
Hope powers the album with playful synths and vivacious rhythms, but a heavy sense of existential gloom is always looming. In a tone that’s tender but frustratingly detached, Bain throws questions into the cosmos (“Now tell me something/Is there a point to this?”) and seems to give up before they’re answered (“Sometimes I stop believing in things that are real,” she sings, and later, “All these things don’t matter/All these things don’t matter”). There’s something about her resignation that feels at home in 2019: It’s the ultimate nihilist canvas for Trump-era fatigue. Even her confession about a lukewarm relationship sounds numb and deflated: “We don’t fuck anymore/But we talk all the time so it’s fine,” she sings. “Can somebody tell me what I want? Cause I keep changing my mind.”
Such sunken, Gen Z listlessness can get exasperating—you almost want to shake her awake—but it shouldn’t be confused with surrender. Nobody ever said breakup records have to be confrontational. Bain’s approach is more introspective and brooding; she doesn’t march right up to pain so much as circle it, admiring its scrapes and bruises as though they were works of sculpture.
Much like avant-pop peers Robyn and Christine and the Queens, Bain uses dancefloor rhythms to loosen up her emotional muscles. But these aren’t cry-in-the-club anthems, they’re lullabies. With a voice so soft and low that it feels like she’s whispering in your ear, she nudges you to stay home, take a breath, and get lost in the dreamy glimmer of a Mellotron.
The album, recorded partly at Bon Iver’s Fall Creek Studio, was produced by BJ Burton (Bon Iver, Francis and the Lights) and George Daniel (the 1975), and “f a r a w a y” features Healy on backing vocals. It’s impossible not to hear his band’s influence—the soaring melodies, schlocky 1980s nostalgia, and sudden bursts into stadium-sized drums or growling electric guitar. Bain attributes this largesse to playing bigger shows; after Healy signed her to his home label, Dirty Hit, he invited her on their arena tours as the opening act. Still, even with huge, lush arrangements and a growing toolkit of instruments, the songs never sound cluttered or overwrought. “Follow My Girl,” an ethereal yet pummeling song about forgetting what it feels like to feel good, blurs synths and vocals together like light trails in a nighttime photograph.
Bain is not a powerhouse singer, and she often beefs up her vocals with Auto-Tune or thick harmonic layers. But on “Saw You in a Dream,” a stripped-back version of the previously released single, she peels off the flotation devices and jumps in. A strummy, surfy tribute to her late first love, the track was recorded in two teary takes. Her voice quivers and cracks along as she wrestles with conflicting feelings of agony and acceptance. “It isn’t the same but it is enough,” she sings, the perfect epilogue to a project about life after grief.


Halsey is the stage name of Ashley Nicolette Frangipane, a 20-year-old New Jersey native who has cultivated a dedicated following with just one EP to her name. Her debut LP Badlands arrives with undeniable momentum, but it is weighed down by trite lyrics and stale production, so that the details of her story wind up far more interesting than the music itself.

Badlands

Halsey is the stage name of Ashley Nicolette Frangipane, a 20-year-old New Jersey native who has cultivated a dedicated following with just one EP to her name, last year's Room 93. With a shock of blue hair and vocal control beyond her years, Halsey arrived with just five songs and a buzzed-about live show. Since then she became the most tweeted-about artist at SXSW, toured with Imagine Dragons, and was the subject of a fascinating New York Times profile that explored her identity as a "biracial, bisexual and bipolar" artist. To boot, Halsey's debut album, Badlands' latest single, "New Americana", recently premiered on Apple Music's Beats 1 with an enthusiastic endorsement from Zane Lowe: "There’s a new icon there," he said, possibly making it so by fiat.
The momentum behind Halsey is undeniable, but Badlands mostly falls flat. At its best, the record plays like a conflagration of a half-decade's worth of alt-R&B—catchy, dark, spottily engaging. But it is weighed down by trite lyrics and stale production: The details of her story wind up far more interesting than the music itself, which is a weird place to be for a superstar-in-the-making.
Badlands opens with "Castle", an unhurried track with a trip-hop backbone that serves as a meditation on Halsey's growing fame. "Sick of all these people talking, sick of all this noise," she sings, ready to reject celebrity like an industry pro from the get-go. "And there's an old man sitting on the throne that's saying that I probably shouldn't be so mean," she sings, taking a jab at the patriarchy; it's one of the occasional moments on Badlands where Halsey's personality emerges and the knives come out. But sonically, "Castle" is dull; a misguided plainchant interlude threatens to derail the track early on and the soupy production never quite congeals.
Elsewhere, Halsey's choices are even clunkier. "New Americana" reconstitutes Lana Del Rey's Hollywood Babylon-isms and Lorde's tongue-in-cheekiness as a millennial call-to-arms: "Viral mess, turned dreams into an empire/ Self-made success, now she rolls with Rockafellas," Halsey sings, piling on the Gen Y bromides. She runs down a "big issues" checklist, from social media fame (good? bad? maybe both!) to wealth inequality (a problem, no doubt!), and her concerns come across as plasticky and surface-level.
"New Americana" isn't the only time Halsey evokes Del Rey. "Drive" hews close to the Lizzy Grant playbook, with saccharine strings and West Coast anhedonia that has Ultraviolence written all over it. The more successful tracks tend to be the ones that feel personal and specific. "Ghost", which also appeared on Halsey's EP, gives you a sense of what she can do when the scale is smaller. The track is a sinuous synth-pop love song whose economical runtime plays in its favor; one can almost forgive the music video for being yet another Enter the Void knockoff. "Hurricane", a bonus track that doubled as an early single, also has a striking specificity to its unusually bleak lyrics: "He's got an eye for girls of eighteen/ And he turns them out like tricks," Halsey sings, painting a troubling picture of a traumatic youth.
Reading interviews with Halsey or scrolling through her Twitter feed, you get the sense of a canny and talented performer, one who legitimately wants to connect with fans. But the public persona only comes through on Badlands in fits and starts, and there isn't a single subversive or original second on the album. "We are the new Americana/ High on legal marijuana/ Raised on Biggie and Nirvana," goes the chorus on "New Americana." Like most of Badlands, it's calculated, defiant, and, ultimately, hollow.


Nas executive-produced the film and soundtrack The Land, the sort of coming-of-age tale that hip-hop once produced in abundance. The soundtrack features Nas, Erykah Badu, Kanye, Pusha T, and more.

The Land OST

Steven Caple Jr.’s t**he Land is the kind of movie that hip-hop once produced in abundance, but has shied away from in its corporate and commercial expansion. It’s a small and intimate coming-of-age story: four friends, avid skateboarders with dreams of going pro, get caught in the sights of a local drug baron after taking a risk they probably should have left alone. There’s not much original to the premise, but what makes it worth consideration are the small visual touches: a multi-chromatic cast that feels like real life as opposed to “diversity;” Caple’s eye, which lingers on small details and zooms out for moments of moving portraiture; and the setting—Cleveland, OH, a city pop culture forgot from the time Bone Thugs-N-Harmony left Uncle Charles at the crossroads up until LeBron James took his talents and a championship back to the city.
The Land tells the type of story hip-hop was made for—Cleveland itself is a character, neither antagonist or protagonist, judge nor accomplice. The city just is—an unfeeling but not disconnected observer. It’s important to keep all this in mind when approaching the soundtrack to the film. Both were executive-produced by Nas—who is still making an argument for mature, textured rap a quarter century after being let out of a cage by the Main Source—and there’s a sense of nostalgia to everything here that treats the internal forces at play during life decisions with care and youthful wonder. In line with the movie’s meaning and ethos, these songs are incredibly topical and on-the-nose. Most play like cinematic scores—if their inclusion on a soundtrack didn’t announce these offerings as movie numbers, they’d still come off as backdrops to a larger tale, and the contributions seem happy to be bit players, never calling too much attention to themselves.
Machine Gun Kelly’s rock-powered “Dopeman” is the adrenaline rush of copping drugs for resale; Stalley’s “Frequency High” is an interstitial moment of happiness that feels like the last sunny day before a storm; Nas and Erykah Badu’s “This Bitter Land” is a requiem for hope and a dirge for innocence with mournful strings that’s overly dramatic in another context, but understandable as a motion picture accompaniment. “Paid,” by Pusha T and Jeremih isn’t the sinister and abrasive coke talk that Pusha’s known for, but rather the kind of cautious social uplift he breaks into every once in a while to justify his choices. “The treasure’s inside of the trunk/Help momma with the first of the month/Baby mama get to buy what she want/Baby sister get to buy the free lunch/It goes down when the poverty’s up/See the difference is had to get it, no privilege,” he raps.
There’s much thematic and personnel overlap here—contributors Stalley, MGK, and Fly Union’s Jerreau have never been shy about alleging themselves with their Ohio hometowns; relative newcomer and Clevelander Ezzy, who gained some notice for Sway in the Morning freestyle last year, has two appearances on the soundtrack, as well as supporting role in the movie (as does MGK); Badu serves as a co-executive producer. But, even with all this skin in the game, nothing on the Land emerges as fresh or novel. It’s enjoyable, but not essential, as no one seems willing to contribute their best efforts to an independent film soundtrack. The highest profile song here—“Figure It Out” by French Montana with Nas and Kanye West—was released earlier this Spring as an appetizer to French’s upcoming MC4; the video featured product place for headphones, energy drinks, vodka, vaporizers, and possibly at least one airline, but no reference to the movie.
In many senses, listening to t**he Land is like a trip back to simpler times. But so much here feels like a retread and much of it lacks boldness to contribute to or invigorate the conversations that it aims to be a part of. It’s coming-of-age music for a genre that’s generations deep. Just weeks ago, downtown Cleveland hosted the Republican National Convention at the 3rd largest arena in the NBA (which happens to be named after a mortgage company). The RNC was a convergence of cynicism and naked ambition that was garish, even by the standards of electoral politics. That may not be the Cleveland that the Land wants to depict, but it’s the world in which we live. The innocence has long been lost, and the world feels to be running out of time. To ignore that comes off as hopeful, but also out of touch.


On his third solo LP, the Cologne producer Michael Mayer collaborates with a different artist on each track. The album plays to his strengths, balancing strict grooves with faint hints of mischief.

The founders of Cologne’s Kompakt label have grown into their established characters: The silver-haired co-founder Wolfgang Voigt is the stern but affectionate paterfamilias. Reinhard Voigt, his younger brother, will forever be the excitable teen. Superpitcher, with his scarves and propensity for torch songs, is the dandy with Romantic leanings, prone to locking himself in his room with a copy of Baudelaire. Michael Mayer, on the other hand, has always seemed like the sociable, comparatively well-adjusted one—outgoing, generous (he specializes in marathon sets of eight hours or more), sensitive, fundamentally upbeat, plays well with others. The good son, in other words, the golden boy.
He has never been the most prolific artist—&, released on the long-running electronic clearing-house !K7, is only his third solo album in 13 years—but his easy charm offers a crucial counterbalance to the more difficult tendencies of Kompakt, the label he co-founded. While Wolfgang Voigt has sampled Kafka audiobooks and foraged glumly through the German Wald, Mayer specializes in self-evident anthems like “Good Times” and the no-frills “Speaker” (with its so-brainless-it’s-brilliant refrain, “I am your speaker/Speaker, speaking to you/I am not talking/I’m speaking, speaking to you”). Above all, he has endeavored to remind techno fans of the centrality of pop and disco, even at the humorless height of the minimal techno craze.
I don’t think it’s any coincidence that while many producers thrive on solitude, Mayer tends to draw his energy from other people. It’s part of what makes him such a sharp DJ and such a talented producer of euphoric, good-natured fare. Much of his earliest work was collaborative. He, Reinhard Voigt, and Tobias Thomas used to record as Forever Sweet, while he and Thomas comprised the short-lived Friends Experiment. In 2007, after a considerable spell in which it seemed he’d never get around to following up his debut LP, Touch, he and Superpitcher teamed up for the gonzo, not entirely satisfying SuperMayer project. His new album translates that round-robin approach to the studio, as Mayer teams up with a different artist on every song.
The album plays to his strengths. It is more playful than his last LP, and also more finessed. The opening “We Like to Party,” a collaboration with Roman Flügel, is among the best things he’s  produced. Goofy name notwithstanding, the track offers the perfect blend of over-the-top thrills and subtle details. This is the kind of craftsmanship that doesn’t show its hand: A funny little ersatz sax riff goes sailing over artfully layered percussion that fills up every available space without ever feeling cluttered. There are snippets of vinyl scratching and crowd-stoking shouts reminiscent of hip-house’s heyday. It is joyous, faintly ridiculous, and versatile: It would work wonders on a festival stage, but it’s clearly made with 200-capacity rooms in mind, for parties where everyone knows everyone else and the floor is sticky with prosecco.
The rest of the album follows in similar fashion. “Disco Dancers,” a reunion with core labelmates Jörg Burger and Wolfgang and Reinhard Voigt, balances loose-limbed, good-times disco with a gently unhinged clarinet solo in the psychedelic breakdown. “State of the Nation,” with the trance-leaning Brazilian producer Gui Boratto, tips into the latter musician’s rich, creamy chord progressions with a delirious grin; if you could bronze a sunset, it’d appear something like this. “Gemination,” with Kompakt labelmate Kölsch, does an admirable job of translating Depeche Mode’s sweeping dramatic gestures via punchy, precision-engineered techno. (If “We Like to Party” is aimed at small rooms, this one’s meant to be supersized.) And the Agoria collaboration “Blackbird Has Spoken” might top them all. The chord progression feels simple at first—just sumptuous strings, slathered on liberally. But the longer you listen, the more it feels like a riddle, in which ascending and descending voices leave you twisting in midair. It’s ecstatic and not a little dizzying, like the feeling of coming up on a drug, but it’s also comforting. You want to stay inside it and linger. As new harmonies keep piling up, the sense of physicality intensifies, like a dream of running underwater.
Sometimes the craftsmanship outstrips the expression. “Voyage Interieur,” a throwback electro jam featuring Miss Kittin, is a note-perfect period piece, but its cool is so studied you find yourself checking for a pulse. At the same time, even though Joe Goddard’s voice is full of quirk and character, it isn’t quite enough to make his song interesting. “Comfort Me,” a Prins Thomas co-production featuring husky vocals from Irene Kalisvaart, aims for Fleetwood Mac, but from the Spanish guitar to the vocal harmonies, it’s an uphill slog. And while the Hauschka collaboration, a freestyle/chamber-music fusion, is clever enough—Fairlight orchestra hits meet actual orchestra—it doesn’t feel as necessary as the album’s best material.
Mayer is far better working alongside Barnt on “Und Da Stehen Fremde Menschen” (“And There Stand Strangers”), which folds a folky sample of what sounds like a German Nick Drake into a tough, moody swirl. Dissonant organs mash and hits of helium tilt toward the stratosphere, but the crisp beat never falters and the doleful vocals keep us grounded. It goes to the crux of what Mayer does best, balancing a strict, buttoned-up groove with the faintest hint of mischief.


As the instrumental guitarist’s work develops, it has moved further away from something resembling instrumental Americana and toward ambient soundscape.

New Vanitas

During the late Renaissance period, a style arose among Dutch and Flemish painters called the “vanitas,” a sort of memento mori that foregrounds the inevitability and absurdity of human mortality. Usually still lifes, these paintings sardonically collapse symbols of decadent lives and grim deaths into a single, grotesque image: a skull surrounded by precious jewels and goblets of wine, flowers that will eventually decay among human remains that already have.
The idea of life and death, co-existing as one experience, is the defining principle of New Vanitas, a new EP released with minimal fanfare by instrumental guitarist William Tyler in September. Vanitas as a concept speaks directly to 2020, a year defined by the collective whiplash of attempting to process staggering death and unforeseen catastrophe while still being forced to carry on with much of life “as usual.” Though not a quarantine album per se, New Vanitas was shaped by and inevitably reflects the uncertain conditions of the times.
The project is the result of Tyler’s return home to his native Nashville during the pandemic, of looking inward, sifting through childhood memories, and stripping back to essentials. The musical vocabulary he pulls from—both stylistically and sometimes literally, with samples of radio monologues broadcast to no one in particular and intense feedback on tracks like “With News From Heaven”—owes more to avant-garde esoterica than his previous records. His inspirations are as much about the materiality and texture of sound as the actual content: He cites “old cassettes, slightly warped records, nature recordings, southern Protestant hymns of childhood, homemade music.” As Tyler’s work complicates and develops, it has moved further away from something resembling instrumental Americana and toward ambient soundscape, closer to the KLF’s Chill Out than the post-country noodlings of Lambchop.
Tyler has long been a confident and skilled multi-instrumentalist, but with New Vanitas he comes into his own as a composer and designer of sound. This year’s Music From First Cow was Tyler’s most Spartan effort, a work defined by silence and pauses as much as by notes, and New Vanitas continues to explore sparseness. In Tyler’s hands, it’s not just the guitar that lives and breathes, but every string; his playing imbues each strum on songs like “Big Sky Waltz” with a unique interiority.
There are still traces of melody, like the light percussive pattern on “Four Corners” that turns it into a shuffling slow dance, but New Vanitas is Tyler at his most meditative. The EP reaches an apex with “Slow Night’s Static,” a 12-minute tone poem that dissolves sustained notes and snatches of radio chatter into a single, swirling pool of sound. “Pisces Backroads,” the final track, is a purifying, euphoric drone, a ceaseless build of sensation. Static seeps out of the margins of the composition and soon envelops the whole.
In a written reflection accompanying the EP’s release, Tyler credits filmmaker Kelly Reichardt as an essential component of his artistic evolution. During their collaboration on the First Cow soundtrack, Tyler writes, “She challenged me to confront some of my own melodic and compositional tendencies towards, as she put it, sentimentality: ‘Don’t tell people how to feel with this. Be open to the moment.’” Though Tyler’s music reaches beyond clear boundaries of genre or traditional songwriting, his music has in the past been undergirded by a sense of sweeping melodrama—an emotional narrative expressed even in the absence of lyrics. The songs on New Vanitas don’t tell stories as much as they mutate and unfold naturally.
Vanitas paintings express the impermanence and temporality of human existence, a theme Tyler explores in his turn away from standard melodies: No note is stable, because each fluctuates and abstracts itself the longer you hold it, constantly becoming something new. When life may feel more unsteady than ever, New Vanitas seeks peace in uncertainty, drawing a blurry horizon line by which to anchor yourself.

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As West Coast hip-hop renegotiates its past through party-driven nostalgia and cerebral critique, Sacramento underdog Mozzy offers a blunt style of gangster rap that feels shockingly new and alarmingly bleak.

Yellow Tape Activities

From blockbuster biopic Straight Outta Compton to the Game's latest throwback, Documentary 2, California hip-hop history is big business nowadays. YG adapted LA gangster rap tradition to a modern production palette on My Krazy Life, while Kendrick Lamar and Vince Staples deconstruct the genre’s tropes and ideologies. Yet far from Southern California's party-driven nostalgia and cerebral critique, a Sacramento-based underdog on a shoestring budget has exploded underground, offering a bleak, confrontational take on street rap that’s at once urgent and unsettling. Yellow Tape Activities is Mozzy's third solo full-length this year, and his snowballing fanbase suggests grim realism still speaks to present conditions.
Although young, Mozzy didn't arrive overnight; he's been recording for half a decade. As far back as 2010 tape Mozzarella Fella, he displayed the skills of a gifted writer, latching onto vivid imagery: "Pour the Patron in the Ocean Spray cran-grape/ I'm well-buttered like a Grand Slam pancake." But over the past two years his style really snapped into focus, becoming leaner and more direct. Along with producer June on the Beat, he cultivated a sound defined mainly by narrative style rather than melody or sonic technique.
And this focus is one perpetually shaped by violence—think of Chicago's drill scene, although Sacramento has a long history of its own brutal reality rap. Yet Mozzy takes his own path. His rapid evolution over the past few years reached an apotheosis with 2014's "Next Body on You", on which Mozzy’s disconcerting lyrics insistently pressure the listener into the role of a crew hitman: "Next body on you, 'cause you don't never do it." June's production, a canned loop that sounds like a forgotten arcade game theme, sounds worlds away from the booming maximalism of Lex Luger; the song's teeth are entirely lyrical, not musical, and this juxtaposition backlights Mozzy's unflinching audacity. His unprecedented directness makes murder less abstract, an absurdity transformed, seen through the more familiar lenses of peer pressure and shared burdens.
Yellow Tape Activities lacks the immediate highs of previous Mozzy tapes Bladadah and Gangland Landscape, but the album retains the rare consistency for which the rapper is known. There are no Mozzy filler verses. Nothing here seems aimed at the pop charts, although Mozzy's gift for a potent chorus suggests this isn't far from his reach. Opener "Property of the Ave" epitomizes his gift for morbid hooks, tossing off sticky lyrics with unbothered ease: "He ain't never bodied nobody on our behalf."
The darkness of his world is one brought to life by its unapologetic, almost ascetic discipline, focusing on a few major themes: loyalty, purposeless murder, and drug abuse. All are linked by an ever-present pain which can be spoken of in art but never expressed in reality. This comes through on the fatalism of "Ain't Shit Happen" ("You don't slide for your niggas like I do for mine/ Living on the borderline of suicide") and the way he considers his mother's concern as just another threat ("I don't care about my life like my momma care"). These are strict parental-advisory raps. The very visual and ever-present violence is disturbing, an art form pressed to its limit. He pushes gangster rap tropes in your face, placing them in unexpected, discomforting formulations.
That this remains gut-wrenching despite years of gangster cliches is one aspect of his artfulness; that we keep listening despite the shock is another. In part, this is owed to the musicality of his flow, the particular way in which he packs in syllables and slant rhymes in memorable patterns. The stitching is wholly unique and feels brand new. It's present in the density of his slang, which adapts nearby Bay Area terms and Chicago street slang but submerges them in a local dialect that takes time to decipher. Mozzy slides, slithers, wiggles; his illas will wolf on 'em, back door 'em, breathe on 'em; guns become drum sticks, chop stixx, yop sticks. This isn't simple decoration. Every verse is written with bar-to-bar purposefulness that leaves listeners hanging onto each line. Its as if his ideas were carved from cliche with a straight razor.
Mozzy’s art is at once shockingly new and alarmingly bleak. Or really, the situations he describes are bleak, as Mozzy is an artist whose feet may still be intertwined with the world that shaped him. Rather than a glorification of violence, the unremitting effect of his music is ceaselessly dire—the upsetting vision of one man from Sacramento's tough Oak Park neighborhood.


Given all the recent shoegaze reunions—My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive—it makes sense Lush would make a comeback. Rather than simply embark on a nostalgia tour, Lush recorded this 4-song EP.

Blind Spot EP

In his review of Still in a Dream: A Story of Shoegaze 1988-1995—the recently released 5xCD box set that strives to illuminate/explain the so-called “Scene That Celebrates Itself”—Simon Reynolds describes the experience of hearing Lush’s 1991 single “De-Luxe” as something akin to “being buffeted by flower petals in a wind-tunnel.” It’s an apt description for a band that, over the course of four full-length albums, managed to strike a delicate balance between shimmery guitar squalls and jangly pop hooks. Though they were often unfairly regarded as sonic lightweights in regards to their peers—perhaps due to their airy vocal harmonies—Lush were always a formidable live act, capable of delivering sweetness and noise in equal measure. And while so many of their shoegazing brethren wrote lyrics that were as amorphous as their guitar effects (and then buried them deep in the mix), Lush traded in emotional intelligence, crafting songs that were as lyrically sharp as they were sonically adventurous.
Given the recent spate of shoegaze-era reunions—My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Slowdive—it’s something of a no-brainer that Lush would finally be making a comeback. Rather than simply embark on a cash-grabbing nostalgia tour, the band recorded Blind Spot—a sparkling 4-song EP that marks their first new output in two decades. Hewing closely to the ephemeral vibe of 1990’s Gala and the more plaintive tracks sprinkled across 1994’s Split, these new Lush songs are instantly unmistakable—the pairing of co-frontwomen Miki Berenyi and Emma Anderson’s voices and chiming guitar tones sounding every bit as diaphanous as they did over 20 years ago.
“Out of Control”—the EP’s first single—offers the kind of romantic yearning that made old songs like “Last Night” and “Desire Lines” such compelling listens. “I can’t understand why you won’t take my hand,” sings Berenyi throughout the track, “Out of control but I love you so much.” Elsewhere, “Burnham Beeches” bubbles with the same kind of lovelorn effervescence of Spooky’s “Untogether” (“I’m so shy, I never speak a word till we’re on our own,” admits Berenyi. “That’s just fine, as long as everybody leaves us alone.”) Closing track “Rosebud” is an oddly beguiling take on a Grimm "Sleeping Beauty" narrative in which the threat of eternal slumber is both ominous and strangely tantalizing: “Goodnight my baby girl and dream of Paradise/ My thorns will cradle you with love.” It would sound more sinister if the song itself wasn’t so lovely—all gently strummed rhythm guitar, gently shaken tambourine, and quietly employed strings.
It’s important to note that while many of the Lush’s dreampoppy peers and 4AD labelmates either dramatically crashed and burned or simply fizzled into obscurity, Lush ended their first career run on a tragically bittersweet note. The band’s last full-length, 1996’s Lovelife, was a commercial and critical high—a razor sharp feminist kiss off and hook-filled antidote to the laddish mentality of late '90s Britpop. At a moment when they might have parlayed the success of songs like “Single Girl” and “Ladykillers” into even bigger mainstream success, drummer and founding member Chris Acland took his own life. It proved to be a loss so profound that it appeared as though it would essentially silence the band forever. It’s hard not to think of Acland when listening to “Lost Boy,” the EP’s simplest and most haunting track. “I should have never let you out of my sight,” sings Berenyi. “Desperate to be beside you, I didn’t know I’d never see you again.” Whether or not the song is an oblique reference to Acland’s passing, it hints at the kind of abject heartbreak that is often impossible to overcome, making the band’s poised return all the more remarkable.
If there’s a weakness with Blind Spot it might simply be its brevity, or perhaps the marked absence of the kind of swaggering sonic guitar bombast the band unleashed in old songs like “Sweetness and Light” or “Superblast!.” Regardless, Blind Spot feels like an assured—albeit somewhat tentative—way for the band to dip their toes back in the water. It would be great if  the EP served as something more than just a primer for the band’s forthcoming reunion tour. Hopefully it will provide the kind of emotional throat-clearing they need in order to set about recording another full-length record. Clearly, they still have plenty to say.


In a year in which Frog Eyes leader Casey Mercer has already delivered a solo record and his band's acoustic LP, Ego Scriptor, the Canadian foursome have now harnessed the power of their live show and delivered their most anarchic statement to date.

The Folded Palm

It's too late for Frog Eyes to change their name to Wolf Eyes, but in the past year, the band's frontman, Carey Mercer, has turned spitty, snarly, and lupine. Where he once sounded like David Bowie, he now seems to channel Tim Buckley-- he's no longer a singer so much as a yelping, rasping, contorting spectacle.
Mercer's throaty kabuki made both Frog Eyes' limited, acoustic LP Ego Scriptor and his solo album, Light Flows the Putrid Dawn, so thoroughly spooky that few listeners could digest them without a seventh-track stretch. Unsurprisingly, Xiu Xiu comparisons have steadily surfaced. While Jamie Stewart has become subtler, more musical and less vaudevillian, Mercer is becoming flashier, extra-musical, and terrifically affected. They're moving in opposite directions, but both men have arrived at the same crossroad-- expect a Frog Eyes/Xiu Xiu seven-inch split any day now.
The rest of Frog Eyes have always proved an excellent supporting cast to Mercer's Lear. Their buggy leader has the hooks and crazy headshake thing, so the band simply focuses on dutiful playing, giving both The Bloody Hand and The Golden River an unearthed lost-scrolls-of-Gallus glow which never would have materialized had the Frog Eyes worker bees left Queen Mercer and squirreled up their own private honey pots.
And yet, there now seems to have been a bit of a revolt. Frog Eyes' newest effort, The Folded Palm, is at times complete anarchy: Mercer chews up his own melodies and spits them out with nary a tone left, drummer Melanie Campbell plays her most violent set to date, piano man Grayson Walker insists on spelling out chords that mirror the band leader's, and bassist Michael Rak is either transgressing well into guitar and key ranges or competing with their volume. That's not to say the band isn't playing together-- as usual, they're tight as hell. What they're doing is matching Mercer bite for bite and catcall for caterwaul, like a four-headed dog feasting on the same coin-eyed meal. As a result, The Folded Palm is the band at its loudest and most menacing.
To say the album "starts off strong" is only half the story-- the opening three-song suite is a fucking firebomb. Campbell calls the band to arms with a tricky stomp and a crack at her trashcan cymbal, and a barrage of sound named "The Fence Feels Its Post" follows her command. Mercer's howls barely break through the mix, and when they do, they tend to the frantic and imagistic. The song bleeds into "The Akhian Press", a more musical, less theatrical return to past Frog Eyes tracks such as The Golden River's "World's Greatest Concertos". "I Like Dot Dot Dot" is the shortest of the opening three tracks (which is saying something when you consider that the longest is only 1:52), and the closest Frog Eyes come to punk on this album-- it's all fast strums, headless chicken deliveries, and Mercer's gorgeous chorus-pedal lick. "The Akhian Press" and "I Like Dot Dot Dot" debuted earlier this year on Ego Scriptor, but the fuller The Folded Palm recordings make those versions seem like mere footnotes.
The rest of The Folded Palm shares in the tri-partite opener's fury-- the best songs smartly stay short of the three-minute line, and some don't even stretch over two. It's a shame that, since the band has diffused song emphasis from the Mercer core and kicked up the energy, the truly memorable melodies that made each of The Golden River and The Hand a success have trouble finding their place amidst the new jitter. Whereas substance used to take precedence over style, Mercer's theatrics now often obscure potentially beautiful lines. "New Soft Motherhood Alliance"-- one of the most successful songs on Mercer's solo album-- now drowns in its own cheap make-up and gaudy Meat Loaf melodrama.
Frog Eyes have played live more often in 2004 than in years past, and The Folded Palm benefits from the band's wealth of on-stage energy. Naturally, their yelps and instrumental overloads work better when they are not only heard but also seen and felt; yet it will be exciting to discover how Frog Eyes makes good on the implicit commitment they make on The Folded Palm to mirroring their live and recorded personas. For the time being, three solid records in one year will more than suffice.


After two decades of tinkering, the art-rocker’s first album since 2002 arrives in an array of different mixes. Yet the songs are refreshingly uncomplicated, reconnecting with Gabriel’s pop instincts.

i/o

If you are someone who struggles with perfectionist tendencies, then you can maybe understand how Peter Gabriel is feeling right now. He has been working on an album called i/o for more than 20 years—and teasing it in the press for even longer—and, as of today, it is finally available to hear in full. But before we listen, we must decide which version of the 12-song album we want to play: the “Bright-Side” or the “Dark-Side” mix, each containing the same tracks in the same order, but featuring small adjustments. And if you check out both and enjoy them well enough, but decide that neither is quite right, then you can opt for the “In-Side” mix, available separately and on the three-disc deluxe edition.
It’s a funny way to place listeners in the shoes of the artist, asking you to consider the tiny tweaks that build a song’s atmosphere and identity. Listening to i/o, you might find yourself asking: Is the trumpet in “Live and Let Live” a crucial component to its climax or a subtle texture in the background? Do the guitars in “Road to Joy” need to blast from the mix or ride alongside the bass groove? You may become frustrated. And Gabriel is right there with you. There he is on the cover—“one of life’s ummer and ahhers,” as his Genesis bandmate Phil Collins once put it—with his head in his hands, fading into a grim, colorless mass.
To even reach this point, the 73-year-old artist had to take some baby steps. First was releasing a new song on each full moon of 2023: a recurring, self-imposed deadline that drip-fed the album steadily to his ever-patient audience. He also booked himself a world tour, where he performed nearly every song from the as-yet-unreleased record each night. Delivered between long monologues about the state of the modern world and the potential benefits of artificial intelligence—and, of course, in between the select hits from his back catalog—Gabriel asked fans to confront this work-in-progress material as a living, breathing art project before encountering it a long-awaited entry in his discography.
Beyond the fact that it actually exists, one of the big surprises of i/o is how uncomplicated it is. His last batch of original songs, 2002’s Up, was dense and depressive, and his orchestral diversions—2010’s covers album Scratch My Back and 2011’s reimagining-the-classics set New Blood—transformed their source material into the kinds of melodramatic slow-burns you hear in trailers for big-budget action films. But i/o reconnects with Gabriel’s pop instincts. For the first time in a long time, he is singing big choruses, writing in simple verse about human nature, and trying to uplift. From the sparse balladry of “So Much” to the horn-accompanied bounce of “Olive Tree,” the music reflects little of its arduous recording process. It sounds natural, intuitive.
Back in 2002, Gabriel introduced the themes of the record as “birth and death and a little bit of in and out activity in between,” which is kind of like saying, “For dinner I’d like something available and edible and tasty.” But he does have a knack for articulating universal experiences in novel ways. “So Much” portrays the scope of our life’s work with two warring sentiments—“So much to aim for” and “Only so much can be done”—while the funky “Road to Joy” offers insight into a raging existential battle: “Just when you think it can’t get worse/The mind reveals the universe.” Other songs tell their story through the arrangements themselves, like the starry, Eno-assisted “Four Kind of Horses” and the steady march of “This Is Home.” With nuanced performances from trusted accompanists like bassist Tony Levin and drummer Manu Katché, you can understand why Gabriel treated these recordings with so much care and attention.
Of course, the long wait and intricate presentation open Gabriel up to some criticism. A lot of the weaknesses come down to the lyrics. When reaching the chorus of the anthemic title track of an album he’s been tinkering away at for so long, could he really not think of a more elegant refrain than “Stuff coming out/Stuff going in”? And in “Live and Let Live,” an empathetic protest song that’s less about world peace than forgiving ourselves, does he really need to invoke an old chestnut about what happens when the whole world takes an eye for an eye? Usually critics hear these types of lyrics and suggest the solution is to spend a little more time in the oven. i/o offers a strong counterargument.
With so much context to consider, it can be easy to take for granted a quality as simple as Gabriel’s voice, which sounds brilliant and remains his defining strength as an artist. What other singer could be equally authoritative delivering one of prog rock’s most notoriously complex concept albums, a couple of the sweetest love songs in rom-com history, the wordless vocal incantations in a Scorsese Bible epic, and angsty Y2K industrial music warranting a Trent Reznor remix? And while many artists Gabriel’s age wind up pivoting to new genres or coating their voice in unearthly effects to accommodate their loss of range, his singing is the most unaffected element of these new songs: bold and melodic, equally clear and prominent in each edition. (For what it’s worth, I prefer the “Dark-Side” mix, which seems more suited to the cohesive full-album experience versus the “Bright-Side,” which caters more to each individual song.)
As history leaves the long rollout in the dust, I imagine his singing will be the quality that distinguishes i/o: a reminder that, for all the endless stress, our simple emotional connections are what perseveres. And, what do you know, this is precisely the subject of the best song on the record, which is called “Playing for Time.” A piano ballad inspired by Randy Newman, it squarely addresses the aging process, how our race against the clock gives us both an increased sense of urgency and a stronger appreciation of the present. Gabriel sings from a zoomed-out perspective about our time on Earth (“There’s a planet spinning slowly/We call it ours”) and the shifting relationships among family members (“The young move to the center/The mom and dad, the frame”). The arrangement is beautiful and precise and a little heavy-handed after the drums come in, but it’s easy to forgive once you lock into the earnest beauty of the words, the tender pull of his delivery. “Any moment that we bring to life—ridiculous, sublime,” he sings, first bellowing then softening his delivery, as if to only remind himself.


The Brooklyn post-punk band’s latest is a novella-like EP whose shoegaze blur and metallic twang animate a dreamlike world of seedy characters and half-forgotten pasts.

Love on My Mind

Bambara sit at the heart of an American triangulation—birthplace in Athens, Georgia, operations in Brooklyn, punk blues worthy of 1970s California. Appropriately, the band’s conceit encompasses a wide-spanning, grotesque vision of Americana. Their stories are self-contained, recursive gothic narratives with butterfly-effect surreality: 2018’s Shadow on Everything explored the fallout of an accidental disembowelment in a fictional Western town, and 2020’s Stray traced the supernatural, generational scars left in the wake of a long-dead Southern eunuch. The fiction of Bambara’s latest EP, Love on My Mind, strikes closer to home—set within New York City, its violent heart takes the form of a bloodless breakup narrated with bitter omnipotence.
Since 2008, Bambara have reined nigh-unintelligible noise into something more artfully restrained, but the wildness remains intact, and it buoys frontman Reid Bateh’s dark storytelling. When the band reaches for a shoegaze tone, it acts more as physical weight than airy padding—tangibly metallic, like Preoccupations’ “Continental Shelf.” Skillful discordance washes over closer “Little Wars,” drenching the tortured duet between Bateh and Drew Citron, bassist of fellow Brooklyn post-punks Public Practice. Across their discography, Bambara have seemed to understand the power of the female voice to counterbalance Bateh’s scowls: When Citron sings, her falsetto delicately pleading, “Wash this filthy city from your skin with me/We’ll cut our hair and burn our things and leave by spring,” you can feel something wordlessly waver. Bateh’s resentful narrator seems to hesitate, and by its denouement, the song no longer feels so hostile. Lead single “Mythic Love,” which pairs Bateh with FRIGS’ Bria Salmena, follows the same formula: The duo’s impassioned exchange invokes the rawness of a duet between Peter Peter and Lydia Lunch, but carries itself with a cowpunk suavity, the same swaying coolness that threads together opener “Slither in the Rain” and closer “Little Wars.”
Bateh approaches his work with the formality of an author—even his lyric sheets are formatted in the style of a novel, rather than poetry. Recurring elements bleed across the tracklist and confer a dreamlike continuity: doves with broken necks, the camera at the heart of “Point and Shoot,” the scattered photographs it produces. Similarly, a series of bizarre, O’Connor-esque characters litter the pages. The memory of an old friend sleepwalks through parties like a “junkie Lady Macbeth”; the narrator snaps a picture of a homeless man wreathed in a crown of MetroCards and derisively dubs him the “King of New York.” Most scenes play out in abstract flashback: Love on My Mind itself opens long after the chronological events of the EP conclude, its narrator reduced to a pathetic “godhead of the two-step” as he drunkenly dances alone, trapped in a city that mocks him. His long-lost love interest is hidden behind the protective lens of her camera, and though he proclaims his affection for her, when he recalls her speaking, it’s always in the context of death: the quiet confession of, “‘When you’re asleep, sometimes I check your pulse,’” or the callous observation in, “One night, we saw a Boeing trailing flames/And you said, ‘They make it or they don’t.’”
Post-punk seems to draw a particularly verbose kind of confession: the close-teethed anthology of the Birthday Party’s Rowland S. Howard and Nick Cave, the sprechgesang of the Fall’s Mark E. Smith and his manifold imitators, Bambara’s fellow revelers in the profane and grotesque like Protomartyr and Diät. But while Bateh’s storytelling sounds as vivid as if he’d lived it, Love on My Mind remains grounded in narrative. The ugliness isn’t only misanthropic; the author’s care for his subjects shines through every word. The EP’s narrator, after all, returns to approach that vagabond King of New York, begging for forgiveness and wisdom. When Bambara hold out a story at arm’s length, they weave something more mythically admissive.

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