Led by young oracle Nate Garrett, the second album from the Arizona heavy metal band carries the torch of their forebears and revives the genre with impressive songwriting and ambition.

Divided by Darkness

Spirit Adrift is Arizona musician Nate Garrett’s vehicle for metal obsession, burning through thrash, doom, NWOBHM, melodic metal, and anything that’ll throw you out a window if you speak ill of Phil Lynott. He is not here for a nostalgia trip; he’s exploring the power within, approaching a unified theory of metal. Spirit Adrift’s second record, Cursed By Conception, is where he found his voice through forging a shared power in doom and thrash. Now, Divided By Darkness shows he has the vision for the greater pantheon.
Metal shouldn’t be measured like a recipe, but for Spirit Adrift, balance is key. No one element dominates over another: The rhythms are as mean as the solos are joyous as the cleans are beautiful. It’s how a track like “Born Into Fire” splices ripping leads and more Euro-style mournful cleans into something coherent. A thrashy jaunt like “Hear Her” can live right next to the more ambitious “Living Light,” where Garrett gets an assist from Witch Mountain’s Kayla Dixon for some vocal harmonies. Even though these sounds are well-established and defined, Garrett’s songwriting breathes new life into them. Darkness understands metal not as just a mash of distortion sounds, but as a continuous, living tradition that has meaning. He talked about Conception as a return to childhood loves of classic metal, and Darkness turns that pure love into mastery.
Even with Garrett’s expanded palette and a full band behind him, there are still shades of melancholy that have carried over from his early writing. “Tortured By Time” is the most classic doom track here, adding a modern sheen to end-time gloom. “Angel & Abyss,” though, is Darkness’ centerpiece for its reconciliation of Spirit Adrift’s past and future. It’s Metallica’s “Fade to Black” where death isn’t the exit, where it doesn’t end in self-destruction but in lead-centric renewal. Garrett channels young James Hetfield’s hopeless voice for most of the song, and ends with an Ozzy-like maniacal cackle, conquering the despair (or at least living with the madness.) It almost acts as the totality of ’80s metal majesty, a tour of hesher emotions. More than anything else on the album, it captures the me-against-the-world vibe that has informed many a metal classic.
There’s plenty of old school revival bands, yet most of them operate as if metal stopped in 1989. Though it pays much reverence to ’80s classics, Darkness also reaches into the early ’90s, when metal was in the midst of a fundamental transformation: Guns n’ Roses and Metallica proved tougher, un-glam looks was bankable, and Alice in Chains and Pantera previewed the sea change to come in their somewhat slower, markedly darker sounds. It’s an important sliver in metal history to which Darkness pays homage.
Two of Darkness’ biggest touchstones are Metallica’s Black Album and Ozzy Osbourne’s No More Tears, transitional records, both from 1991, that ultimately ended up massive commercial successes. There are few patterns more satisfying than the detuned stomp of  Metallica’s “Sad But True,” and Spirit Adrift milk everything out that crunch on the title track. Garrett clearly worships Metallica, and Hetfield in his prime was an untouchable rhythm guitarist. Some keyboards sound lifted from Tears, particularly in the title track and instrumental closer “The Way of the Return,” and like Ozzy, goopy keys somehow make them sound even tougher. Darkness is old school, though not chained to one institution, more accessible but not commercial, deeper but not more complicated, a lunge forward without compromise. Garrett is a younger oracle to carry on the torch of heavy metal. Sounds like an unchill role, but he’s got the chops.


On the sultry new EP from anonymous R&B singer H.E.R., mystery lends itself to relatability.

H.E.R. Vol. 2 EP

In the time of oversharing and overbranding, mystery markets itself. For singer-songwriter H.E.R.—the irony, of course, is the letters stand for Having Everything Revealed—obscurity is about more than strategy or privacy. By rendering herself faceless, she’s looking to create a space for her listeners to fill in the blanks and take what they need, as the chilly blues of H.E.R. Vol. 1 thaw into sultry warmth on H.E.R. Vol. 2.
Speaking to the L.A. Times last year, she said her goal was for “women to really feel how honest and vulnerable I am and to understand that they are not alone and that these are all human emotions.” Vol. 2 adds to that palette in its search for both indulgence and clarity. The EP opens into confident seduction rather than the ambivalence of its predecessor. “Every Kind of Way” and “Say It Again” find H.E.R. owning her sexuality, first in affectionate lovemaking—her voice delicate and airy—then in fiery red demands. She achieves all the ambiance of grown-and-sexy throwback R&B and modernizes it with the help of her mainstay producer DJ Camper (Mary J. Blige, Tamar Braxton, Jay-Z).
While the many shades of love and heartbreak exist here, there’s also agency and self-empowerment. The slow-burning “I Won’t” stares down the notion that love has to be reciprocated simply because it’s being offered—a pressure women bear and find reinforced with “good guy” narratives. She offers no explanations because she doesn’t have to, and the bluntness of her lyrics further drives the point. On “Changes,” she balances vulnerability with assertiveness. When she sings, “Everybody got somebody that they mess with on the low/But I just want you to save me,” it’s as if she’s acknowledging her autonomy while simultaneously letting her lover decide. With songs rarely topping the three-and-a-half-minute mark (on either Vol. 1 or Vol. 2), the music of H.E.R. to date encapsulates a complete spectrum of experiences with remarkable concision.
Vol. 2 toys with common insecurities and ultimately resolves to own them. It’s about questions, not assumptions, like on “Still Down,” when she sing-raps, “When I ain’t there and you get the urge/Who you hitting up first? Is it me or it’s her?” The possibility of other women shows up often, but she never gives in to bitterness despite the trials depicted in her lyrics. At her most melancholic, she sounds like a person who still loves love—naive, perhaps, but always willing to give it a chance. Even “Gone Away,” which captures that moment of feeling intangibly separated from a lover, is rooted in nostalgia and acceptance accented by Chris McClenney’s elegant piano. H.E.R. uses her music to process in the open rather than quietly stew, and in doing so she writes in familiar but unspoken languages.
There have been theories that H.E.R. is Gabi Wilson, a singer who saw her first big break at the age of 10, but at the end of the day, does it matter? The preoccupation reveals a need to assign faces to narratives in hopes they match expectations, but this music can stand up on its own. H.E.R.’s private-public musings become all the more universal as her anonymity allows women to picture their own faces on the silhouette.


Still fascinated by old R&B, gospel, and world music, the legendary songwriter here blends them into a laidback, spry pop sound.

So Beautiful or So What

On Graceland, "the bomb in the baby carriage was wired to the radio"; it's a "bomb in the marketplace" on So Beautiful or So What. The shift in strategy is minor, but those rhyming images speak to the 25 years separating these two albums: 1986 could be eons ago, or it could be yesterday. Those were the days of miracles and wonder, as Paul Simon entered his forties with humor and curiosity intact. These days, however, haven't been too kind: Even as his influence has grown, his output has suffered. After opening the millennium with the dull-by-obligation You're the One, he hired Brian Eno for 2006's Surprise, whose true surprise was that one of the most careful and rigid pop songwriters of the last 50 years could be just as rambling and self-indulgent as any other aging Baby Boomer.
To his considerable credit, however, Simon has never succumbed to a record with Rick Rubin or a Great American Songbook album, perhaps because his standards aren't pre-rock pop tunes. While there was a period when his South African and Brazilian excursions in the late 1980s were derided as exploitative, both Graceland and The Rhythm of the Saints have proved enormously influential to a new generation of indie-pop songwriters from the Shins' James Mercer to Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig. Simon, who turns 70 this year, is still forging his own path even this deep into his career and remains devoted to and fascinated by old R&B, gospel, and world music. So Beautiful or So What blends them all into a pop sound that's simultaneously laidback and spry, almost self-consciously alluding to his past triumphs.
Replacing Brian Eno, long-time cohort Phil Ramone co-produces, and the pairing is comfortable, if not complacent. They've corralled a small band to suggest a live-in-the-room intimacy and spontaneity, and "Rewrite" and "Love Is an Eternal Sacred Light" crackle with energy. Some of the ambient elements from Surprise remain, but they're couched in the earthy rhythms of the percussion and the spidery guitars. His voice still strong, Simon shows off his own fretwork more prominently, especially on the short, sweet instrumental "Amulet". Only the sampled sermon on "Getting Ready for Christmas Day" sounds out of place; contemporary listeners may be more likely to connect it to Moby's pre-millennial techno-folk than to its true source material, a 1941 sermon by Reverend J.M. Gates.
Even as his band gets smaller, Simon's ideas grow larger. He's addressing enormous spiritual matters, specifically the nature of God. In "Love and Hard Times", He and Jesus show up for a surprise inspection of Earth, and it's a bit too precious until Simon interrupts and turns it into a sweet love song about love songs. God Himself narrates "Love Is an Eternal Sacred Light", bemoaning that humanity doesn't get his jokes, and Simon sounds more at home in His head than in those of the various New Yorkers who narrate "Getting Ready for Christmas Day" and "Rewrite".
So Beautiful or So What can be stodgy in its emotions and a bit too devoted to its motifs, but there's something humanizing about the album's shortcomings. It is, thank God, no attempt to get his affairs in order, an approach that turns so many older artists' albums into solemn, end-of-life affairs. Simon's not worrying over redemption on these spiritual inquests; he's much more concerned about what he'll do in heaven once he gets there. Turns out, he'll be listening to his favorite American tunes. In "The Afterlife", "Be-Bop-a-Lula" and "Ooo Poo Pah Doo" form a celestial language, which may be the album's most satisfying revelation.
Those reference points-- Gene Vincent and Jessie Hill, not to mention Ramone, Graceland, and King's assassination on the title track-- all well predate Y2K, which is not unexpected for an artist who spent half of the previous century making music. Simon's too preoccupied with the 20th century to settle into the 21st, but here's the thing: It suits him. After foundering when he tried to sound new and modern, Simon comes across as much more at ease and compelling in this familiar setting. He's like a novelist revisiting the particulars of his youth; like Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, he wants to take in his times, and like John Updike, Simon cherishes small epiphanies, which resound like bombs in the marketplace. So perhaps the epiphany of So Beautiful or So What is that Paul Simon turns out to be a character in a Paul Simon song: An aging songwriter still struggling to connect, still figuring it all out, and still cranking the Dixie Hummingbirds.


On his first album with a proper band, the Swedish singer-songwriter sounds great, even as he says so very little.

Henry St.

A little more than a dozen years ago, Kristian Matsson—the Swedish singer-songwriter better known as the Tallest Man on Earth—was so captivating it has become his retroactive curse. Onstage alone, with so much room to roam, Matsson was a baying young wolf, shouting his hymns of hopeful despair and existential reckoning above galloping acoustic figures. He was pure magnetism, a tangle of charisma and candor not unlike Bob Dylan or Jonathan Richman. What’s more, his atavistic early albums actually captured that crackle, direct-to-tape studio wonders that suggested he was forever at your command. His career since those youthful days, though, has involved a difficult trick. As Matsson has documented divorce, isolation, and professional tedium in subsequent albums, he’s incorporated horns and strings, drums and electronics into his strident approach. But how do you maintain that singular verve while expanding your musical palette? Or how do you mature without stiffening?
Recorded at the edge of 40, Henry St. is Matsson’s most robust answer to that question yet. At the very least, it sounds terrific. With imaginative production from Sylvan Esso’s Nick Sanborn and accompaniment from a sterling cast of (largely) North Carolina ringers, Matsson has never before enjoyed such a sprawl of musical settings. He bounds through a scrim of diaphanous static and assuring piano on “Looking for Love,” his nylon strings dancing like the old days. Drummer TJ Maiani shapes a deep country-soul pocket for Matsson’s heartsick croon during “Goodbye.” And his sublime piano duet with Phil Cook on the title track feels like waking from a bittersweet dream to rub the sleep from your eyes and ponder what you’re doing here, alive and aging while still full of wonder. Emerging from pandemic isolation on his farm in Sweden, Matsson desired the comradeship of collaboration; this crew, in turn, responded with thoughtful circumstances for his idiosyncratic voice.
But across the 42 minutes of Henry St., Matsson rarely responds to them in kind. To put it plainly, the writing is just bad, as though it were some slapdash afterthought to the strong instrumentals already in place. Matsson loves a nature metaphor, but they don’t love him back here. They’re either so hackneyed your eyes glaze over upon hearing them (“You’ll be the rolling cloud/I’ll be the endless sky,” etcetera) or so messy and inchoate you miss the music’s pleasure while trying to work your way through them. “I’ve found rain for my burning pain/I’ve found the dry grass for my burning love,” he sings at one point, interrupting the easy canter of “Goodbye” with what sounds like a cure for … pubic lice? He confronts “the river of time”; he hurls unnamed things “into the fire”; he pursues some “light at the end of the world.” If you find yourself laughing, consider it a service, levity from texts that offer little else. As the music has grown, the writing at its center has withered into a rumple.
In the second half of “Slowly Rivers Turn,” Matsson stumbles into a perspicacious moment of self-diagnosis. It’s another warm country-soul number, with electric guitars cutting a jagged path between Terry Allen and Studio One. In one of the record’s lone bits of evocative imagery, Matsson watches his old self float downstream as he contemplates who he might become. “I don’t want to be the yeller of my longings/I don’t want to be the sailor of my past,” he sings in the grandly swiveling bridge, falsetto cracking with honest concern on that last bit.
But this ham-fisted imitation of himself is exactly what he seems to be on Henry St.—the confused and divorced dude waking up to someone new on opener “Bless You,” the restless mortal seeking the typical comforts of companionship on the subsequent “Looking for Love,” the permanently heartbroken guy considering how he might taste to vultures on closer “Foothills.” He puts a bow around what he doesn’t want to be, then fails to write anything that goes beyond it. “I never found a way around myself,” he mutters at the same song’s end, a self-rebuke that defines Henry St.’s dead-end.
Matsson once suggested new energy and possibility inside a field pronounced dead only slightly less than jazz—the guy with the acoustic guitar, bleating his feelings like they were breaking news. The writing ferried that same urgency, the sense that he was trying to transmit something crucial before we were all out of time. That frisson, at least for now, is gone. Instead, Matsson muddles through a mess of word salad that, charitably, feels cautionary. For so long, Matsson has been, as he sings at one point, “a little dude in the scape of songs.” In the prolonged quest to become something bigger, to expand that scape, he has forsaken the tiny core that once made him so compelling.


Electroclash holdover's latest both points to new directions and recalls the strengths displayed on debut LP The Teaches of Peaches.

I Feel Cream

Peaches is the sort of artist who is so defined by the fully formed, distinct aesthetic of her debut album that her subsequent releases cannot help but seem like sequels in a film series. As such, her last two records were clear cases of diminishing returns-- Fatherfucker seemed lazy and rushed; Impeach My Bush was better, but inconsistent in its inspiration. Both albums expanded upon the gleefully pervy, button-pushing persona established on The Teaches of Peaches, but broke little ground in their own right, and mostly presented a more extreme and gratingly puerile variation on her brand of sexually confrontational performance art. This was unfortunate, as the raw power of songs like "Fuck the Pain Away" and "Lovertits" came just as much from their bawdiness as their well-crafted tunefulness and expression of complicated, conflicted emotions. As she drifted toward intellectualized vulgarity, she lost touch with the wounded humanity that made The Teaches of Peaches so engaging. I Feel Cream finds Peaches reversing that trend, and reconnecting with the muse that produced her early classics. At the same time, its songs point in new directions for her aesthetic and offer her a future beyond endless retreads on a tired formula.
Though it feels strange to describe an album with such unapologetically filthy lyrics as "mature," the word certainly applies here, and not just in the way Peaches foregrounds and embraces her advancing age in many of the songs. Several tracks delve deep into what Stephen Malkmus might refer to as "real emotional trash," and allow her to reveal a vulnerability that had only been hinted at on previous efforts. "Talk To Me", one of the best songs of Peaches' career to date, has her confronting problems with a partner head-on without pulling any punches, and singing her heart out with the aggrieved intensity of Tina Turner. "Lose You", the atypically ethereal track that follows in the sequence, flips the mood with her voice taking on a demure affect as she frets about driving her lover away over a low key yet bass-heavy groove. Both cuts cast aside the baggage of the Peaches persona and are better for it, and the variation in vocal technique broadens the range of the record considerably.
When Peaches returns to her default position of sexually explicit rapping, her performances are more focused and gracefully composed than in the past, perhaps a direct result of the superior quality beats provided by guest producers Simian Mobile Disco and Digitalism. "Billionaire", the record's most overtly hip-hop oriented track, is a genuine banger with rhymes recalling Beck circa Midnite Vultures, and stands out as another all-time high in the Peaches songbook. The remainder of the selections favor a more European approach to keyboard tones and dance beats, which in turn brings her deeper into a modern club sound beyond her origins in electroclash. Intriguingly, the record's final quarter slips into a woozy, down-tempo minimalism that feels sexy as opposed to sexual, and comes across like an update on the freakishly calm funkiness of Missy Elliott and Timbaland's early-00s collaborations.
Depsite the number of collaborators on board for I Feel Cream-- Gonzalez, Soulwax, and Drums of Death also contribute-- Peaches still produced the lion's share of the album on her own, and her sensibility as a musician has clearly evolved along with her approach to lyrics. Ultimately, even when she veers into previously unexplored aesthetic territory, every track feels just like Peaches, which is rather remarkable given how rigid and predictable she had been in the recent past. Whereas it was beginning to seem that Peaches' shtick was an artistic dead end, there is now plenty of reason to believe that she may have the skills and vision necessary to produce interesting, emotionally affecting work well beyond menopause.


The gruff Detroit rapper Guilty Simpson relies on monotone real talk that, when paired with the right blend of cinematic soul, resembles *4,5,6-*era Kool G Rap. On his latest album, produced by Katalyst, he sounds unsatisfied despite a robust discography, still pushing for a breakthrough.

Detroit's Son

You can't mention Guilty Simpson without thinking of Detroit. The gruff rapper embodies the city's resilient spirit and, much like fellow lyricists Redman and Black Thought, he shouts out his hometown of "the D" every chance he gets. So while his new album, Detroit's Son, is an ode to the Motor City, it's also a chest-thumping salute to himself and a reminder of what he still hopes to accomplish. Because despite a robust discography, Guilty sounds unsatisfied on his new album, still pushing for a breakthrough.
Detroit's Son follows last year's Simpson Tape EP, produced entirely by California composer Oh No, whose stampeding drum breaks worked well for Guilty's menacing flows. Guilty is more straight-laced than his contemporaries: He relies on monotone real talk that, when paired with the right blend of cinematic soul, resembles 4,5,6 era Kool G Rap without the suit-and-tie crime bravado. His style is distinctly blue-collar, correlating with his hometown's hardworking ethos. At his best, he stands apart as a low-key yeoman with a penchant for street narratives.
Yet for all the work he's done in his career—his debut Ode to the Ghetto, 2010's O.J. Simpson produced by Madlib, 2011's Random Axe project with Black Milk and Sean Price, and 2012's Dice Game with producer Apollo Brown—Guilty is only as good as the beats he receives. His bars tend to recede into the music and there's no 'wow' factor with his approach. Instead, he becomes an accessory; you find yourself more interested in the instrumentals than what he's actually saying. There's no denying Guilty's intense work ethic, but 12 years after his debut on Jaylib song "Strapped", he still doesn't sound fully comfortable as a lyricist.
D**etroit's Son was produced entirely by Katalyst, an Australian member of the Quakers collective, and his patchwork funk sets a frenetic pace. The music resembles Madlib and Paul White in a way: It sorta plods along without much structure, and the kaleidoscopic sound feels influenced by the likes of George Clinton and Sun Ra. For Detroit's Son, Katalyst applies a dark sheen that reflects Guilty's home city's gritty reputation. The layered, slow-moving "The D" stands out, and "Dirty Glove" features an excellent verse from fellow Detroit rapper Phat Kat, and the driving rhythm conveys civic despair.
But like the album's other featured rappers, Kat outshines Guilty, simply because he's more energetic and lyrically nimble. On "Blue Collar", Guilty sounds stilted alongside Elzhi, whose complex wordplay fits more naturally with Katalyst's spacey composition. As it plays, Detroit's Son feels like a collection of songs relying too heavily on well-worn themes ("Blunts in the Air", "Smoking", "Money"). Quick tracks like "Ghetto", "The Music", and "Beautiful Death" seem out of place and disrupt Detroit's sequencing. "Power Outage"—a salacious sex romp—brings the album to an awkward and abrupt ending. The album feels a bit hastily assembled and packaged, a widget in a long line of solid, dependable products. Detroit's Son is another line on Guilty's ever-growing resume, not a highlight.


Their entire recorded output is less than an hour long, but it became the blueprint of wired, New York dance rock. Incomparable and otherworldly, Liquid Liquid were just in search of the “big beat.”

Liquid Liquid: Liquid Liquid EP/ Successive Reflexes EP/ Optimo EP

Three EPs. Forty-two minutes of music. The four guys who made it all began as Liquid Idiot, a band looking for a sound in 1979 at Rutgers. Relocated to Manhattan, they became Liquid Liquid, one of several minor inversions that yielded major results. By 1981, bassist Richard McGuire, singer Sal Principato, drummer Scott Hartley, and percussionist Dennis Young were sitting in the gulch between worlds.
The no wave bands of the late ’70s were changing shape, moving toward an end that was still years away. If you went with DNA, New York rock was going to be sharp, small, and fractured. If you went with Sonic Youth, the next thing was guitars, and lots of them, none tuned in a familiar way. New York radio was entering a glory day of dance music fed by sources both commercial and loose, the synthetic update of ’70s funk played by live bands. Secret Weapon’s “Must Be The Music,” D Train’s “You’re The One For Me.” At night, rap was finding its first home at WHBI, in Newark, with “Mr. Magic’s Rap Attack.” DJs at clubs like Danceteria and Mudd Club were playing all of these records.
Meanwhile, Liquid Liquid belonged to the downtown rock scene only by virtue of being a live band. They certainly didn’t play rock’n’roll. Self-taught, they were seeking what McGuire called “the big beat,” short, repetitive songs related to rhythm-based artists like James Brown and the rap emerging from his songbook. But Liquid Liquid was too oblique to be mistaken for anything with a known name like funk. By the end of their career, the band had recorded one of the most important songs to come out of New York in the ‘80s. They never had to decide who they were. New York decided what the band was.
At first, though, it was up to a man named Ed Bahlman. He owned a record store at 99 MacDougal St. out of which he ran a label called 99 Records. In four years, he put out 15 records, the bulk of them essential. Though Bahlman’s taste ended up much more on the “big beat” side of things, his first release was from the other side of downtown: Glenn Branca’s Lesson No. 1. By 1981, Branca’s band would feature Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth, and his first full-length, The Ascension, would be released on 99 Records. This music was after real bigness. The resemblance to detuned symphonic music became explicit when Branca enlarged his ensembles and started naming his pieces “Symphony [X],” going up the ordinal ladder as the records came out.
Branca’s use of massed strings and volume made clear that there was irony in the Liquid Liquid approach. Their bigness wasn’t about amplitude or volume. The 99 bands that favored rhythm—Liquid Liquid, ESG, Y Pants, Bush Tetras—built big records from small pieces. A 99 band sounded more or less like McGuire’s cover for the first Liquid Liquid EP: a human figure suggested as an explosion of curves, not all of them there. Looking back at the turn of the century, the strain of guitar music that ran from Branca into Sonic Youth seemed like the most significant contribution to American independent music. Seventeen years later, history has flipped and it’s now a toss-up. When LCD Soundsystem launched in 2001, one of their direct inspirations was Liquid Liquid. The big storm of guitars had happened, so Murphy went back to the small big beat, filled in the missing pieces, and finished a draft of New York begun twenty years earlier.
If you love the Liquid Liquid EPs, it is tempting to view them as lost scriptures, examples of a magical, lesser-known way to render rhythm. If you lean on them, though, that’s not how it works. Liquid Liquid was deft and basic, as good as untutored music gets. Any wise choice was qualified to replace any learned move. Liquid Liquid songs foreground beat, but at least half of them are a step too soft for the dancefloor. The would share bills with ESG, sisters from the Bronx who managed to reduce James Brown from three elements to two, and Konk, a party band with a horn section that was unabashedly after the dancing.
But if Liquid Liquid showed any undeniable influence, it was DNA, the one band any musician of that era—jazz, noise, DJ culture—will cite. Arto Lindsay sang in English while making it sound like another language. His guitar playing had no truck with known tunings, opting for small noises nothing like the Hoover Dams Branca built. Bassist Tim Wright played elegant and melodic lines, the most songlike aspect of songs that avoided songs. Drummer Ikue Mori played in her own orbit and time. DNA sounded like they had recovered recordings from a country that has yet to be found. In four years, they were gone.
Like Lindsay, Principato sang nominally in English. He mangled his lyrics with echo and pronunciation, leaving behind a few decipherable words: time, out, better, phenomenon. Because of no money, the first Liquid Liquid EP featured two studio tracks and three live tracks recorded at Hurrahs in February of 1981. The low fidelity of the live recording brings out the precision of motif in “Bell Head,” a conversation between an agogô, an alarm bell, and a marimba. The tuned metal and wood are backed by a rudimentary beat, something you’d learn in the second weekend of drum camp. Principato sings one word every two bars: “Here!” “Heart!” (Then, ramping up the excitement: “Would be! Stick man!”) The digital delay keeps the tail of his voice in the game, and you end up being able to hum a song that has no bassline, no guitar part, and no traditional singing. This was about framing. Tying Liquid Liquid to the swollen bursts of no wave fails. They weren’t big beat. They were proper patterns.
Liquid Liquid’s second EP, Successive Reflexes, released later in 1981, was done in a studio and emphasized their refusal to make anything obvious. Of everything they put out, this is their most slippery stuff. This is the haze of dub without any overt reference to reggae. McGuire plays harmonics on his bass as often as he plays notes. Principato drags out his syllables and hints at quiet ecstasy. If you dropped this record onto another continent and stripped out the names, someone might think it was Satie pieces rearranged for percussion.
The big beat becomes itself on their third EP, Optimo, recorded at Radio City Music Hall Studios. (This was not as spacious as the name suggests.) Of the four immaculate songs, one secured Liquid Liquid a permanent place in the pop songbook. “Cavern” is rooted to McGuire toggling between the notes A and C on his bass, playing the kind of hitched, self-fading line that no trained player would ever be able to write. It is as much the sound of being unable to play as it is some kind of clever phrasing. It is beyond clever when paired with the drumming, percussion, and vocals. “Cavern” is always there, already rotating and coming at you from behind the sun and under the earth.
“Cavern” found its way onto late night FM radio. It played on the new “Zulu Beat” show hosted by Afrika Islam on WHBI, popping up between improvised raps and snippets of old Dazz and Mandrill records. It was another effortless and inexplicable New York groove, but no obvious smash until Sugar Hill Records got their hands on it. The Sugar Hill house band replayed the song, and Melle Mel rapped about the dangers of cocaine over it. “White Lines (Don't Do It)” was initially credited to Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five, but Flash took his name off of it, since the only person involved other than the band was Melle Mel. On future pressings, Mel became Grandmaster Melle Mel. One name was still missing, though: Liquid Liquid.
“Cavern” had already been included on volume nine of Lenny Roberts’ biblical series of bootlegs, Ultimate Breaks & Beats. “White Lines” eclipsed that, going from regional to national hit in a month. People who don’t know Liquid Liquid from a frog will say “White lines!” if you hum the bassline from “Cavern.” In 1995, “White Lines” was the rap song Duran Duran decided to record. God bless them—in the twelve years before their cover, the publishing had not been sorted out. Duran Duran’s version of “White Lines” triggered a legal balancing after millions of copies of “White Lines” had been sold.
The story of what happened between 99 and Sugar Hill is as much rumor as fact. Nobody in the band knows exactly what happened between Sugar Hill’s Sylvia Robinson and Bahlman. McGuire remembers Bahlman being asked by Sugar Hill to “take a ride” and sort out the publishing dispute. Another 99 Records employee, Terry Tolkin, recalls a brick thrown through the front window of the MacDougal street shop, though no band members (or anyone else) is on record as having seen this happen. “White Lines” made the band famous, though it made them no money until a band from England decided they wanted to warn everybody about cocaine all over again.
So come for “Cavern,” a wonder of nested movements and elastic power. Stay for the most understated dance music downtown ever produced. Or the most overstated stencils. Something. Maybe a phenomenon.


In Hayden Anhedönia’s moody, gothic soundscapes, the ageless persona of Ethel Cain confronts the religion, sex, and violence lurking within the confines of small-town America.

Inbred EP

In the earliest forms of Gregorian chant, church singers would scale multiple notes in melismatic syllables. The effect is hypnotic; a single word undulates until its original meaning blends with its sound—in some cases, it was thought to induce a trance-like state in its audience. For Hayden Anhedönia, who performs as an invented persona named Ethel Cain, those consecrated refrains were a part of daily life since childhood. Raised in an insular Southern Baptist community along the Florida panhandle, Anhedönia recalls her mother, with whom she sang in church choir, playing hymns and Gregorian chant CDs while she cooked. On Inbred, her third EP as Ethel Cain, Anhedönia leans into her restrictive religious childhood, carrying her voice across the melismas of her youth to reveal its murkiness.
To hear Anhedönia describe it, Ethel Cain is both a specific character and a more mutable representation of a woman throughout American history. She chose the surname because of its Biblical origins; “Ethel,” though, just “smells like mothballs.” In her most concise form, Ethel Cain is a preacher’s wife in the simmering stress of the Eisenhower era—she is a vacant stare and hollowed cheekbones; she’s the decrepit old woman sitting in the first pew, silently judging, embodying what it means to bear witness.
Her vision of gothic piety rings clearest on “God’s Country.” Anhedönia belts multi-note incantations over glassy synths reminiscent of a church organ, her voice echoing as if in an empty cathedral. Swapping verses with witchy emo rapper Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, she evokes the rise and fall of liturgical chant as she sings about drinking blood and prays, “Take care of me, God.” It’s a coming-of-age tale told through Kierkegaardian leaps of faith, effortlessly blending tropes of teenage angst—highways to nowhere, first love—with imagery from her Christian upbringing. “There but for the grace of God go I,” she whispers gently in the song’s plaintive coda. The proverb represents human humility, but the resolve in her voice, gravelly and low, suggests that the balance of power is blurrier. Inbred, in its strongest moments, questions established hierarchies to reveal their contradictory messages of strength and powerlessness.
Elsewhere on the album, we get more secular glimpses of Ethel Cain; on “Crush,” backed by reverberating guitar, she’s an introspective and moody teenager fawning over a boy with a violent streak. It’s not only the guns in his locker—the death drive tracks throughout Inbred: Rapper and producer lil aaron muses about dying in a car crash on “Michelle Pfeiffer”’s Thelma and Louise-esque journey West. “Unpunishable” paints Ethel Cain as a “used and abused” woman of the night, covered in bruises and numb after years of pain. These vignettes of Anhedönia’s invented persona don’t exactly coalesce into a single, coherent image—she claims that a forthcoming, two-hour-plus LP will reveal the full narrative of Ethel Cain. But at least on this EP, her protagonists share a pining for a brighter future, while simultaneously languishing in the confines of small-town, Southern womanhood.
Inbred is the culmination of a half-decade of releases under various pseudonyms; it follows her dreamier pop project White Silas and two 2019 EPs as Ethel Cain, Carpet Bed and Golden Age (after which she signed to Prescription Songs, the publishing house helmed by disgraced producer Dr. Luke). This latest EP adds nuance and depth to both her sound and her character: The bolder guitar hooks she introduced on Golden Age return more defiantly; her light sketches of Christian themes are shaded in with more legible metaphors and visual language.
When she wasn’t listening to stoic plainchants in her childhood home, Anhedönia was surrounded by the searing, overtly masculine sounds of blues rock—Lynyrd Skynyrd, Johnny Cash—blasting from her dad’s truck. On Inbred, she incorporates those influences into guitar solos and howls, which break up the restrained, almost haunted soundscapes of her piano-backed ballads. As guitars whine in the final seconds of “Two-Headed Mother,” the power of her character finally snaps into view. Ethel Cain, the Janus-like matriarch, is defined by duality—victim and predator, follower and leader, a preacher’s wife and a rock god.

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This lovingly compiled 4xCD, 120-track box is a near-perfect combination of quality, necessity, song selection, sequencing, informative liner notes, and packaging.

Various Artists: One Kiss Can Lead to Another

One Kiss Can Lead to Another

Utilitarian and condescendingly named, compartmentalized in its construction, and mostly voiced by supposedly interchangeable sets of teenagers, girl-group music has long been relegated to a footnote in rock's back pages. A large number of its songs are widely loved, of course, but to many critics and listeners, the peak of girl-group music (roughly 1962-65) is considered an era of frivolity and disposability, a manufactured post-Payola placeholder rightfully eradicated from the airwaves by the British Invasion.
Granted, the girl-group sound was cynically designed to be ephemeral, the work of highly competitive yet mostly faceless songwriters working out of Brill Building cubicles. Little concern was given to artist development, and the singers themselves-- many of whom were black-- were rarely promoted as vigorously as their rock'n'roll progenitors, partially due to labels' fears that television performances would reveal their skin color and thus alienate potential listeners. The music, however, has persevered, even proving itself massively important and influential, despite its marginalization by an industry that mythologizes and profits from the past by lionizing larger-than-life personalities and/or album-oriented artists rather than pop singles.
Rhino does its part to make amends for some of that marginalization with its lovingly compiled 4xCD, 120-track girl-group box One Kiss Can Lead to Another, a near-perfect combination of quality, necessity, song selection, sequencing, informative liner notes, and packaging. Crucially, the compilers were liberal with their definition of girl-group music, incorporating not just doo-wop- and/or gospel-influenced female vocal teams such as the Chiffons, the Shirelles, the Cookies, and the Shangri-La's but also combos and solo artists from a variety of musical styles, including R&B, garage rock, country, proto-psych, and Northern and blue-eyed soul. British singers such as Petula Clark, Sandie Shaw, Cilla Black, and Dusty Springfield are afforded places here-- as are, ironically, tracks made popular by Brit Invasion artists such as the Beatles, Hollies, Moody Blues, and Herman's Hermits. Familiar artists such as Cher and Dolly Parton appear in atypical guises, but most of the widely recognizable names are working behind the scenes: Keith Richards, Jimmy Page, Brian Wilson, Neil Diamond, Jimmy Webb, Randy Newman, and Cat Stevens all feature in the liner notes, alongside Brill Building songwriting staples such as Goffin/King, Mann/Weil, and Barry/Greenwich.
The most notable absence is Phil Spector, whose dense Wall of Sound production style and proclivity for melodramatic lyrics were the benchmarks and templates for much of girl-group music. But then, that's just as well, since anyone willing to purchase this affordable set will also want to own Spector's Back to Mono box, which includes the major hits by artists like the Crystals, the Ronettes, Darlene Love, and others. Of course, the inability to license Spector's tracks made it impossible for the set's creators to compile a definitive genre box; wisely, they instead cast a wide net and included mostly non-hits, unearthing a collection of tracks that will appeal to both girl-group neophytes and acolytes.
Unsurprisingly, the most common subject matter on a set of girl-group songs is boys-- boys who lie and cheat, boys who drive a wedge between girls and their parents or friends, boys who feed off of dependency and low self-esteem, boys who trick girls into thinking it's love when it's lust. As the title implies, one kiss leads to two, two kisses can lead to three, and eventually it can lead to doing more than a good girl should. On One Kiss, it can also lead to rationalizing distress (the uncommon diet advice on the Fabulettes' "Try the Worryin' Way"), long-lasting emotional scars (P.P. Arnold's "The First Cut Is the Deepest"), becoming trapped in cycles of emotional abuse and dependency (Lesley Gore's "What Am I Gonna Do With You?", on which she guesses "I'm just the girl you stay with/ To see what you can get away with"), and heartache (the Flirtations' Northern soul classic "Nothing But a Heartache", among many others). At its most extreme, one kiss can also lead to unwanted pregnancy (the Lovelites' "How Can I Tell My Mom and Dad?") and even murderous jealousy (the Whyte Boots' vicious girlfight in "Nightmare").
Crushes entail risk, like an emotional choose your own adventure, but risks can also pay off, and it's that belief that colors many of the tracks. The heartache of the set's most melodramatic tracks is balanced by happy endings, improbably joyous and exuberant music, and the power of self-actualization and empowerment. It sounds quaint today, but a teenage girl building an identity, making her own choices, and gaining measures of self-respect were still largely new ideas in the 1960s. The protagonists here might make a lot of wrong decisions-- from the Shangri-La's lamenting their bad boy gone good in "Out in the Streets" to Evie Sands offering herself mind, soul, but mostly body on "Take Me For a Little While"-- but simply having the opportunity to voice their thoughts or follow their hearts and minds are things their mothers couldn't sometimes do. This spirit is reflected in songs like the Chiffons' psych-tinged anthem "Nobody Knows What's Going On (In My Mind But Me)", the pent-up struggle between lust and loyalty in Elle Greenwich's "You Don't Know", Twinkle's death ballad "Terry", the What Four's sex-as-a-weapon track "I'm Gonna Destroy That Boy", and Wanda Jackson's sexually charged "Funnel of Love", each of which are revolutionary in their own quiet way.
In the past 40 years the music featured on One Kiss has served as a touchstone for a wide variety of artists, most notably 1970s New Yorkers (the Ramones, Bruce Springsteen, New York Dolls, Blondie, Martin Scorsese), 1980s Brits (the Smiths, Jesus & Mary Chain, the Field Mice, the Cocteau Twins), and contemporary indie stars (Saint Etienne, Magnetic Fields, the Avalanches, the Concretes). We've even enjoyed a lengthy post-Spice Girls/Aaliyah resurgence of girl-group music via hip-hop/R&B, dance- and electro-pop, teen pop vets, and UK chart acts such as Girls Aloud and Sugababes.
One of the saddest quirks of rock criticism is that the hopes, dreams, and fears of teen girls are frequently considered frolicsome fluff while the rage and defiance of teen boys is miscast as the articulation of free thinkers. And yet, it's the girls-- in part, because they're more likely to function as mouthpieces for adult songwriters-- who examine universal subjects such as love, romance, self-actualization, self-confidence, and personal politics, while young rock bands often simply reject growing up, fight responsibility, and wear that struggle as a badge of pride. Both approaches can work, of course, but unlike a sneer, a kiss never goes out of style.


The first collaborative full-length by producers Machinedrum and Jimmy Edgar bounces across genres and eras, but the real magic comes from the guest vocalists.

ZOOSPA

At the top of the 2010s, when Machinedrum’s Travis Stewart and Jimmy Edgar were releasing projects on the UK label Hotflush, they started a collaborative duo under the moniker J-E-T-S. It was the latest addition to a long list of individual and collaborative pseudonyms: Edgar previously contributed to X District, Her Bad Habit, and Plus Device, while Stewart has issued material as Syndrone, Tstewart, and Sepalcure. J-E-T-S released an EP in 2012 and another in 2015, each offering a handful of soul-inflected DayGlo house and techno tracks. Now, almost seven years after their inception, they’ve returned with their debut full-length Zoospa, a futuristic patchwork of bass, hip-hop, and R&B.
Zoospa plays as if Stewart and Edgar tossed their favorite bits of American pop in a blender, printed them on a floppy disk, used it for a game of hopscotch, and then scanned it back into Ableton. In a recent interview, the duo highlighted the influence of ’90s gospel and noted their use of a chord voicing called quartal harmony, a technique popular in synthesizer music of the early ’70s. They were also adamant that Zoospa should not sound too “throwback,” creating a new sound pack through Edgar’s “super complex modular system” in a bid to avoid unwelcome familiarity.
As a result, Zoospa’s musical elements feel cohesive, even as they bounce across genres and eras, often within the same song. The instrumental “Hyper Hibernate” evokes Steve Reich as a vaporwave artist, with marimba-esque synths that fall into a serene, orderly pattern, like a digitally rendered Ikebana arrangement. The intense squelches and trap hi-hats of “Team Effort” sound like the type of beat SOPHIE would produce for Charli XCX. Zoospa takes a more outwardly R&B turn on the Dawn Richard-featuring “Potions,” where pumping, respirating synths call to mind Nao’s collaborations with British producer Mura Masa. The frenzied amalgamation of genres is a natural progression for both Stewart and Edgar; the former enlisted versatile R&B vocalists like Richard and Jesse Boykins III for his 2016 Machinedrum record Human Energy, and the latter co-produced “745” on Vince Staples’ 2017 avant-garde dance rap opus Big Fish Theory.
But the real magic comes from the guest vocalists, who both match the bouncy dynamism of Stewart and Edgar’s productions and bring their own refreshingly weird energy. Mykki Blanco is in his element on “Play,” punching out some words with tenacity and morphing the pronunciation of others. “Get down with doggies, bet you got fleasies/Opp bitches lurkin’, they not my species,” he says, teasing sass from the final syllable of each bar. The standout “Real Truth” features rising Australian artist Tkay Maidza, who raps with a breezy candor. “I ain’t scared of a dude with a suit baggy,” she says, lending her own quirky flair to the inverted grammatical structure. Stewart and Edgar digitize her vocals until she sounds robotic, becoming one with the track’s synthetic elements.
Besides Big Fish Theory, Zoospa is also reminiscent of Flume’s latest Hi This Is Flume mixtape, which similarly weaves elaborately arranged instrumentals with appearances from inflammatory MCs slowthai and JPEGMAFIA. On both projects, the vocalists serve as inspiration and instrument, yet another reference point for their respective producers to chop up, mess with, and resituate. J-E-T-S play with elements from the past, but their take on future-pop aligns perfectly with today’s forward-thinking trends.


Hamilton, Ontario vocalist Jessy Lanza works with Jeremy Greenspan of Junior Boys on a collection of glacial electro-R&B. Pull My Hair Back rings with a level of confidence surprising for a first record.

Pull My Hair Back

Situated on the southwestern corner of Lake Ontario, the midsize industrial city of Hamilton, Ontario, has a grittiness that stands in stark contrast to the diverse cosmopolitanism of its northern neighbor, Toronto. While Hamilton may lack the cultural cachet of Canada's largest city, Steeltown served as a creative incubator for singer Jessy Lanza: she fell into a collaborative role with a local acquaintance, Junior Boys member Jeremy Greenspan, that led to studio sessions and a deal with the UK electronic label Hyperdub. The result of Lanza and Greenspan's work together is Pull My Hair Back, Lanza's debut collection of glacial electro-R&B.
Pull My Hair Back rings with a level of confidence surprising for a first record: Lanza experiments with bold minimalism, and frequently employs her voice to meet melodic and rhythmic ends in nontraditional ways. Hiccupping lead single "Kathy Lee" is ultra-stark, with Lanza's breathy vocal backed by little more than tiny percussive shakes and snaps; on "Fuck Diamond" she becomes a percussive tool herself, her casual readings of "Fuck that" and other wordless bits strung together and made part of a burbling tapestry that's reminiscent of the work of Jamie xx. Lanza's willingness to play a supporting role on her own songs, and to give those songs room to breathe, suggests an admirable level of restraint and a good ear for the larger sonic picture.
With all that restraint and space, Lanza's showier gestures stand out. There are several such moments on standout track "5785021," including a featherlight, fluttering vocal in the chorus and a beautifully textured, rippling synth that unfolds over the song's back half. The remainder of the album has its share of turns in the spotlight, from a wickedly funky synth drop on the stellar "Against the Wall" that's straight out of a 1980s playbook to the thrilling closing section of "Keep Moving", surely the album's peak in terms of sonic density.
While Greenspan's production choices and craftsmanship are integral to the album's success, Lanza is more than just a producer's pawn. One of her strengths as a vocalist is her ability to convey personality in small but definite ways, even if it's just through a word or short phrase. When she coos "You know my address" on "5785021," it glows with heat and intelligence and control, just enough to paper over the oddity of its existence in a song that's ostensibly about calling someone. It may be a stretch to say Lanza is creating characters within these songs, but she's certainly injecting personality.
It's tempting to imagine how these songs would transform if Lanza unleashed the considerable chops that occasionally shine on Pull My Hair Back. While this record's sense of self and attention to detail deserve to be praised, a small shift in Lanza's positioning and prominence could be the change that takes her next project from good to great.


On his third album, the influential R&B singer/songwriter comes into his own as an album artist, getting over on his impeccable sense of craft.

Love King

The-Dream earned his respect as a songwriter who co-wrote larger-than-life pop anthems, penning "Umbrella" for Rihanna and "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)" for Beyoncé, as well as less-known but evocative tracks for everyone from Usher ("Trading Places") to Rick Ross ("All I Really Want"). His solo debut, 2007's Love/Hate, broke through with minor hits "Shawty Is Da Shit" and "Falsetto", whose wildly addictive hooks papered over his slight persona. The rest of that record created a constellation of characteristics that laid out his aesthetic-- the lush production courtesy of beatmakers L.O.S. and Tricky Stewart, songs that wash into each other in the mode of a DJ mix to create a miniature suite with precision sequencing.
On Love vs. Money, The-Dream's second LP, he tried to replicate this effect. Although the epic sweep of the second album's final third was The-Dream at a songwriting peak, the front-loaded pop songs-- particularly "Walking on the Moon"'s thin attempt at literal transcendence-- felt like shadows of past achievements. Even so, it was another vital chapter in an unusual career, as The-Dream has balanced the mercenary hit-making obsessions of his peers with the tender loving care of an auteur working out a unified statement.
Love King, the alleged final chapter in his Love Trilogy, is the thrilling conclusion to his three-album arc. If you've been charmed by The-Dream's strengths-- Tin Pan Alley song concepts and an unceasing sense of musical craft-- then you'll be immensely satisfied with the music here. The record argues for The-Dream's identity as an album artist whose tics and stylistic effects have created a self-sustaining world of distinctive R&B, and in a style that proudly wears its influences on its sleeve.
As a debut single, "Love King" felt like a cobbled-together collection of these attributes: the expected "radio killa" ad-libs, self-mythologizing, and hooks with familiar insistence. But it turned out to be a pump fake, because here it makes for a great table-setting opener. Love King builds on Love/Hate and Love vs. Money by indulging in emotional and melodic excess. The-Dream knows where to find the sweet spot, and he has an uncanny knack for how pieces of music fit together. When a song would be best served by space, he gives it plenty. Every piano chord and finger snap and bass hit is in its right place. He sweats every detail but never loses sight of how the album works as a whole.
"Yamaha", the most immediately powerful track on the record, is one example of what he does so well. It pushes The-Dream's earlier Prince nod "Fast Car" even further in the direction of outright imitation, with searing hooks, nakedly lustful appeals, and an arrangement and instrumentation that pay homage to the R&B of the early 1980s. As the song unwinds, you feel like you're sharing the songwriter's love of this music, and marveling at the way that he absorbs it into his own aesthetic. The following "Nikki Part 2", emerging from the twinkling synths of "Yamaha", keeps the run going, the melancholy of the verses ultimately finding transcendent emotional recognition when the song opens on the chorus. And then the urgent drama of "Abyss", a perfect title for a song that feels like an emotional freefall, completes the mid-album triptych, its epic chorus evoking a cold-water plunge of claustrophobic betrayal. These highly charged moments are balanced by more understated tracks. "Turnt Out" is The-Dream at his easiest and most likable, and it's one of the album's few moments of restraint. Meanwhile, "February Love" turns Love vs. Money fan favorite "Fancy" from a grandiose statement to a more intimate memory.
The-Dream's debut had the advantage of appearing in a vacuum, enabling him to balance his traditional songwriting impulses with a unique creative approach. Once it became apparent that the latter direction had garnered him a loyal following, the pressure to give more generously to that audience led to an imbalance on Love vs. Money. With Love King, it no longer feels as if he's splitting the difference between his pop star ambition and a large cult of admirers. By breaking down the detachment that made him such a popular songwriter to follow his personal musical vision, and it's taken him to a place only he could find.


On her alluring and unnerving new album, the Melbourne singer-songwriter adopts a digital alter-ego to explore real-life human strife.

Losing, Linda

The idea of human consciousness existing outside the body has been the focus of dystopian sci-fi from Blade Runner to Westworld, and it’s embedded in the new album from Melbourne art-pop auteur Becky Freeman—a.k.a. Sui Zhen. But unlike those works, Losing, Linda isn’t consumed by apocalyptic visions of robots taking over. Rather, the record suggests there’s something inherently flawed about attempting to live in a perfect world, and that there are certain problems for which there is no app.
Freeman's sublime sophomore effort, 2015’s Secretly Susan, explored a life lived through avatars. On Losing, Linda, Freeman sings from the perspective of the titular AI Linda. The lyrics examine the possibility of artificially reconstructing a human life through the digital detritus we leave behind on social media—an idea that became all-consuming when Freeman’s mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer just as recording commenced.  And like the latex-mask replica of her face that she wears on the cover, the results are equally alluring and unnerving—this is a record where pristine facades can never conceal the distressed soul underneath.
Losing, Linda hits the same big pleasure points as Secretly Susan—neon-hued ’80s pop, DIY digital dub, bossa-nova balladry—but the mood hovers between ecstasy and unease. Freeman’s voice loses the post-Grimes avant-R&B smear of Secretly Susan, adopting an eerily calm and crystal-clear diction that sounds very much like an AI learning to convincingly imitate us. The drum-machine stutters of “Natural Progression” suggest a robot coming to life and getting used to its mechanical limbs, before asking itself questions like: “I’m growing hair/Do I need it anymore?”
On the centerpiece “Being a Woman,” Freeman’s concerns move beyond physical characteristics to the gender expectations accompanying them. The song is both celebratory and cautionary, a proud declaration of womanhood on one’s own terms (“Redefine sexuality, that’s how I’ll find my way!”) whose chorus (“Being a woman/You have to hold yourself ... before you hold someone else”) suggests self-determination is much easier wished for than achieved. Freeman recently admitted that she was only able to be open about her sexuality after her mother passed, so when she sings “When I grew up, I thought I had to be/Somebody’s mother, or somebody’s daughter,” she hints at the unshakable familial forces that can constrain even the most empowered, free-thinking souls.
On Losing, Linda, her mother's loss isn’t so much addressed as felt. You can hear it in the ghostly chorus to the space-age bachelor-pad sway of “I Could Be There,” in the eerie Dark Side of the Moon Safari atmosphere of “Another Life,” or in the equally desolate and divine dream-pop of “Mountain Song.” The latter track was inspired a treacherous hike that left Freeman stranded for a night atop a Japanese mountain, though with lines like “Can you let go and just be comfortable with the fear you have for the unknown/What could be out there that’s scarier than your own mind,” she seems to be preparing herself for the even greater challenge that awaits her once she returns to her mother’s bedside. But on “Different Places,” she seems to make peace with the fact that her life will henceforth be haunted by absence: “We’re just in different places,” she sings, before adding, “but I’m with you.”
As Losing, Linda reminds us, the cruel irony about technology is that we crave its synthetic pleasures in those moments when life gets too real. But with the immaculate “Perfect Place”—a sensuous swirl of Neal Tennant sing-speak, Kraftwerk keyboards, and rubbery funk bass—Freeman suggests that utopia can be ours not with the push of a button, but with a boost in motivation and change of scene. “Now look toward the river/A new point of view/Past the industry/A little further still/ And it’s the perfect place—get to know it,” she sings, like an enlightened Waze app. ”Things you can’t put off, do it now, do it now.” By adopting a robotic persona to examine real-life strife, she reinforces the notion that a life is more than just an accumulation of data.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Two weeks ago came the surprise announcement of a new album by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, their first in 10 years. If they felt like a band of the moment around the turn of the millennium, now, in a time of rapid cultural turnover and bite-sized music consumption, Godspeed feel out of step in a very necessary way.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!

Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!

Around the turn of the millennium, Godspeed You! Black Emperor were the right band at the right time. They arrived with their debut album, F#A#∞, in 1997, when the speed of technology was accelerating, genres were being shuffled, and people were thinking about where music might go. Godspeed, a loose and mysterious collective from Canada (guitarist Efrim Menuck seemed like the leader, but they preferred to be received as a unit) with an anarchist political bent who fused Ennio Morricone, minimalism, found sound, and metal-inflected noise, presented one intriguing possibility.
The group stayed busy during its initial run-- by 2002, when they released Yanqui U.X.O., they had put out three expansive full-lengths and a long EP-- and then they put Godspeed on the shelf and went away for a while. If they'd never gotten back together and had never released another note of music, it wouldn't have mattered. Their legacy was secure. But Godspeed started playing live again in 2010 and, just as it was when they first came on the scene, they filled a hole in music that we either didn't know existed or had forgotten about. Then, two weeks ago, came the surprise announcement of a new album, Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!, their first in exactly 10 years. Once again, their timing is impeccable. If Godspeed around the turn of the millennium felt like a band of the moment, now, in a time of rapid cultural turnover and bite-sized music consumption, they feel out of step in a very necessary way.
It's tempting to look at Allelujah! through the lens of politics, especially since Godspeed themselves have so often encouraged this viewpoint. When we last heard from them on record, it was a year after 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan was well underway, and the war in Iraq was just around the corner. We were settling into a decade that was, from an American perspective, defined by two wars started by an increasingly unpopular president and an inflating economic bubble that would pop just as he was leaving office. Their music and presentation drew some of its energy from this anxiety. So listening to new music from Godspeed now-- during an election season, when the wars and the aftermath of that economy are still being argued every day by two presidential candidates grappling with the legacy of the early 2000s-- you can't help but allow the political moment to shape how it's heard.
But the focus on the band's politics obscures something important: Godspeed You! Black Emperor are making art, not writing editorials. And the fact that they are making art gives them leeway to do things that wouldn't work in the context of pure rhetoric. It allows them to find magnificence in destruction and build an aesthetic out of decay and loss. So for all their political slogans, pointed titles, and references to global doom, engagement with Godspeed's music can feel exceedingly personal. When listening to their music, I'm not necessarily thinking about the downtrodden transcending their place in the capitalist hierarchy or the end of the world; I'm thinking about the idea of transcendence, the raw grace of noise, and the tragedy of endings. Godspeed's music works so brilliantly because it can be abstracted and scaled, blown up into an edifice that towers over a continent or shrunk down to something that feels at home in a bedroom. So mapping the contours of their grand music onto your own ordinary life can feel both natural and inspiring.
The two lengthy tracks on Allelujah!, "Mladic" and "We Drift Like Worried Fire", have been part of the band's live repertoire since 2003. So the record feels in one sense like Godspeed taking care of unfinished business, presenting existing music from their influential run in a context that showcases its full force and power. Taken together, those tracks serve as a 40-minute summary of everything that made this band great. "Mladic" is all gloom and menace, building from an opening vocal snippet, adding pings of guitar, strings that saw away in a Middle Eastern mode, and dark clouds of feedback. This is the Godspeed that learned so much from the pummeling repetition of Swans and the fiendish drama of metal. There's not exactly hope in a track like "Mladic", but there is a kind of darkly shaded catharsis. Godspeed have never sounded quite this heavy, and it's especially impressive in how far it can veer from the themes that hold it together without losing the thread.
"We Drift Like Worried Fire" is the flip-side of "Mladic", both literally and figuratively. For all their grim black-and-white roadside imagery and scenes of destruction, it can be easy to overlook just how joyful Godspeed's music can be. Built around a simple guitar motif consisting of just a few notes, "Worried Fire" is one of those accruing pieces that gathers one element after another for 10 minutes until it's so gorgeous you almost can't take it. And at exactly that moment, Godspeed pause and then push the music over the top with an explosion of guitar that snaps everything that came before into focus. "Worried Fire" is music that makes you forget about politics and the machinations of the record business and the bullshit of internet chatter and brings you into singularity with the sheer beauty of their sound, music to make you cry with a smile on your face. When it's playing, the rest of the world goes away for 20 minutes.
"Worried Fire" is also the kind of song that Godspeed's early peers (Mogwai, Dirty Three) as well as the bands that followed (Explosions in the Sky, Mono) write with some regularity, but they never quite hit these heights. Godspeed have always been about more than volume, more than just addition and subtraction. And if Yanqui found them getting a little too close to their descendants, Allelujah! makes clear that Godspeed will always own this sound. Few can match their feel for arrangement or sense of structure. And the two shorter tracks on this album, "Their Helicopters' Sing" and "Strung Like Lights at Thee Printemps Erable", are evidence of their infallible ear for texture. They're both rich, dense drones, "Helicopter" an especially thick mix of feedback and accordion while "Strung Like Lights" is airier and more unstable, not unlike the locked groove that came at the second side of their debut F#A#∞.
In one of the many inserts that came with the vinyl version of that debut, there's a diagram that takes the form of an architectural blueprint. It's called "Faulty Schematics of Ruined Machine [to Scale]" and it contains a drawing with four axes marked as Fear, Hope, Desire, and Regret and text describing elements of the diagram in cryptic and desperate language. One paragraph highlights a drawing of a tape loop connected between a distant satellite and a broken tape machine, a loop "so long it was rocketed thru atmosphere by wigged-out Soviet Cosmonaut... it will take three lifetimes to hear in its entirety." Godspeed use tape loops, both live and on record, and the key visual element of their shows involves the projection of 16mm film loops by collective member Karl Lemieux. For this band, there's always been something appealing about repeating cycles and rituals-- sounds and images that vanish over the horizon and then come back around again, like the trains that roll by their practice space at Hotel 2 Tango. Planets orbit, people are born and die, and music has a moment and then vanishes before returning again. And so it goes with Allelujah!, an album of music that is both new and old from a band that we thought we might never hear from again, one we should appreciate while we can.


An acoustic-leaning covers collection in the vein of 1990’s Fakebook, Stuff Like That There finds Yo La Tengo tackling songs by the Cure and Hank Williams along with a number of obscurities, and also finds them re-working some of their own material.

Stuff Like That There

Yo La Tengo were essentially the first on-demand music-streaming service. Through the eclectic all-request sets they used to perform for WFMU’s annual fundraising drive and, more recently, their annual Hanukkah shows at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, the band has amassed an infinite jukebox of cover songs spanning golden oldies to underground oddities. It’s almost as if Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley started this band so that they could one day be the sort of tastemaking entity that can rescue forgotten songs from dollar-bin obscurity or subject popular ones to a critical reassessment.
But while it’s customary for indie-rock acts to approach bygone pop hits with subversive intent, Yo La Tengo never sound like they’re taking the piss, preferring to acclimatize themselves to the original material’s natural habitat rather than try to radically change the song’s context. And yet, whether they’re covering Sun Ra or Sonny Bono, Yo La Tengo covers sound unmistakably like Yo La Tengo songs, because they serve the exact same function as the band’s best originals: they’re intimate exchanges, the sound of secrets being revealed. And as Yo La Tengo’s latest covers-heavy set attests, that quality becomes all the more amplified when those exchanges are rendered as whispers.
Given Yo La Tengo’s well-established karaoke-machine rep, the arrival of acoustic-oriented covers collection Stuff Like That There isn’t as revelatory as their previous acoustic-oriented covers collection, 1990’s Fakebook, which opened up a new dimension to what had then been a pretty straight-forward, scrappy rock band (a primitive state they revisited on 2009’s all-electric complement, Fuckbook, credited to their garage-punk alter ego, the Condo Fucks.) But Stuff Like That There makes perfect sense in the wake of 2009’s Popular Songs and 2013’s Fade, which displayed a gradual drift away from the band’s feedback-blasted extendo-jams toward succinct, small-scale statements.
Though the album's sources range from '40s country to '60s soul to '90s alt-rock, the execution here is uniform, all brushed-snare rhythms, tasteful twang, and gentle acoustic strums that permeate the air like a late-afternoon drizzle. The readings are low-key and reverential, but the spirit is loose and playful. The Hubley-led versions of Darlena McCrea’s swooning 1964 single “My Heart’s Not In It”, Hank Williams’ tear-in-beer standard “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”, and The Parliaments’ psych-soul serenade “I Can Feel the Ice Melting” manage to feel on point and off the cuff at the same time, as if the band were pulling precious seven-inches from their protective sleeves and not giving a fuck if they get scratched.
But Stuff Like That There is not just another excuse for Yo La Tengo to show off their encyclopedic knowledge of pop history. At this stage of their career, it also serves as a poignant reminder of the ’80s and ’90s indie-rock peers who never achieved the same level of success, like Louisville contemporaries/collaborators Antietam (a faithfully reproduced “Naples”), Hoboken hero the Special Pillow (the charming, harmony-rich “Automatic Doom”), and R.E.M.-esque Ohio outfit Great Plains, whose jagged ‘n’ jangly anthem “Before We Stop to Think” is given a beautifully wounded reading by Kaplan. By contrast, the album’s lone concession to popular taste—Hubley’s wistful take on the Cure’s atypically sunny 1992 single “Friday I’m in Love”—feels out of place amid the record-collector finds and personal connections that inform the bulk of the tracklist, coming off instead like a novelty that just isn’t novel enough (not to mention a distant second in the pantheon of Cure covers by A-list American indie-rock power trios).
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Yo La Tengo covers album without the band covering themselves. But while the trio is notorious for radically redressing its droning noise-rock odysseys as lilting lullabies and vice versa (often trading Kaplan’s voice for Hubley’s in the process), the rustic redrafts of Popular Songs’ “All Your Secrets” and Electr-o-Pura deep cut “The Ballad of Red Buckets” don’t differ all that much from their official takes—the amplifier settings may be adjusted a touch downward, but the essential vibe remains. The major exception is a tiptoed pass through I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One’s swirling centerpiece “Deeper Into the Movies”, though unlike Yo La’s previous loud-to-quiet transitions (like the ambient “Big Day Coming” that opens Painful, or Camp Yo La Tengo’s skiffled take on “Tom Courtenay”) it feels less like a wholesale rethink than a rough sketch that makes you long for the surging force of the original. Thankfully, Yo La Tengo compensate for the superfluousness of these self-covers with two top-notch new tracks: The excellent “Rickety” continues the motorik momentum of Fade standout “Stupid Things”, with the band sounding like buskers on the shoulder lane of the Autobahn, while Kaplan’s “Awhileaway” is a gorgeous moonlit stroll of a ballad.
Stuff Like That There may not always intrigue on a track-by-track basis, but, taken as a whole, the record stands as a loving portrait of Yo La Tengo’s vast musical and social universe condensed into a small wooden frame. And at a time when the full-album experience is giving way to the almighty playlist, Stuff Like That There handily reasserts Yo La Tengo’s reputation as indie rock’s consummate curators. Your music subscription service of choice may present you with a hundred different mood-based mixes to complement Sunday-morning sloth, but Stuff Like That There is really the only one you need for a day spent lazing away in your little corner of the world.


On a sequel to 2009’s covers collection Tribute To, the My Morning Jacket singer imbues a set of classics and standards with a distinctly contemporary melancholy.

Tribute To 2

In his story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” Jorge Luis Borges imagines a literary critic in thrall to an exact modern facsimile of the Cervantes epic—a book “verbally identical” to the original yet, in the critic’s estimation, “infinitely richer” for the new meanings its duplicated pages have accrued in the 20th century compared to the “mere” 17th. There is a distinctly Pierre Mendardish aspect to Jim James’ take on the cover album. When the My Morning Jacket singer elects to record a compilation of songs mostly from the 1960s and 1970s in 2017, what stands out, aside from his interpretive choices, is primarily the question of differing vantage. How do the sentiments of the Beach Boys or Sonny and Cher sound in the 21st century compared to the 20th? What new riches of meaning might Willie Nelson gain?
Tribute To 2 is not, confusingly, a paean to the number two, but rather a sort of sequel to 2009’s EP of George Harrison covers, Tribute To. This suite of unmistakably Jamesian tracks comprises a range of material derived from diverse styles, periods, and genres, all of it filtered through the man’s quite singular sensibility. One can well imagine in advance what he might do with standards like, say, “Blue Skies” or “Crying in the Chapel”: How that reverb-laden, inimitably alien voice handles familiar melodies is no surprise. The vocals on Bob Dylan’s “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” sound like they were recorded in a grain silo. His howls and warbles on Ray Noble and Al Bowlly’s “Midnight, the Stars and You” sound like dispatches from another world. Tribute To 2 sounds, in short, like Jim James. What proves more intriguing is the matter of perspective.
Differences in the mood and character of the eras in question, then and now, seem very much the crux of James’ interest in this project. His previous solo album, last year’s Eternally Even, found the ordinarily abstract singer/songwriter confronting post-election American turmoil, and much was made of the fact that it represented the most overtly political statement of his long career. As that record’s immediate successor, Tribute To 2 is perhaps most fruitfully read in conversation with it. If Eternally Even was James’ aggrieved effort to engage directly with a world in unrest, Tribute To 2 is an attempt to offer succor. It’s a little glimpse of the past James hopes will soothe and reassure us.
“It’s a really crazy time in the world right now, a lot of negative energy in the air,” James told Billboard recently. “A lot of the songs I feel are dealing with that, reflecting on the sadness of that. But also, a part of me likes to remember that life can also be beautiful.” The album is “dealing with that” more explicitly at times than at others: James imparts Abbey Lincoln’s world-weary ballad “The World Is Falling Down,” with its lamentations that “the news is really very sad,” with an urgent sorrow. And when he finds a plausible affinity with Brian Wilson on “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” the sense of alienation is amplified by how fed up James seems with what he sees all around him. The language here is identical to the the source material. But in James’ hands, in times like these, the covers can’t help but sound different.


This unlikely comeback album strikes a fairly comfortable balance between the spare, spritely Meat Puppets of yore and the more polished and forceful Meat Puppets of the mid-1990s.

Rise to Your Knees

Along with friends and contemporaries the Minutemen, the Meat Puppets remain one of the most interesting and inspiring anomalies to emerge from the U.S. hardcore scene. The band's crooked path to alternative rock almost-stardom is well-documented, but their stylistic singularity and influence still remain largely underacknowledged. No other records before or since sound exactly like II or Up on the Sun; hazy and laid back but staggeringly tight and impeccably arranged. Guitarist Curt Kirkwood's intricate, handpicked style can be heard today in the multilayered playing of Oxford Collapse's Mike Pace, among many others.
Unfortunately, the Meat Puppets have been best known as of late for the tragic misadventures of erstwhile Kirkwood brother Cris. The fact that this record was made at all is pretty amazing; the fact that it's not half bad even more so. The Meat Puppets have never been a band to stray too far from what they do best; with the exception of the sea change between their eponymous debut and their masterpiece II, the band's stylistic development has been gradual, sometimes to the point of stagnation. Rise to Your Knees strikes a fairly comfortable balance between the spare, spritely Meat Puppets of yore and the more polished and forceful Meat Puppets of the mid-1990s.
The most pleasing moments on Rise to Your Knees often arise from the simple charm of its melodies; the instrumentation here is far from the propulsive intricacy of the Puppets' best work. Generally speaking, the choruses on Rise far outshine the meandering verses, as the band snaps into a more simple and straightforward groove that highlights the trademark Kirkwood drawl. And sure enough, time has proven surprisingly flattering to the brothers' voices, which come through rich and satisfying throughout. By the first chorus of standout track "On the Rise", it's clear that the Puppets' charms have remained intact, even if their new songs come up a bit short.
With the exception of the baffling 311-esque "Enemy Love Song", there are very clunkers to be found here. On songs like the excellent "Disappear", the brothers Kirkwood actually find their way back some of the tight and propulsive guitar and bass interplay that marks the Puppets' best work. For the most part, though, the songs on Rise are hazy and unremarkable. As with most of the Meat Puppets' lesser records, this one is easy to space out to-- all dense harmonies, psychedelic guitars and unwavering drum beats-- but often fails to really capitalize on the band's unique strengths.
As was the case with Dinosaur Jr's recent Beyond, Rise to Your Knees is an interesting reminder that the specific musical thread started by this band hasn't been fully picked up since; though a far cry from their strongest records, Rise finds the Meat Puppets thereofre sounding somewhat fresh. It follows, then, that this doesn't quite come off as a "comeback" album, but rather a middling addition to a prolific and distinctive catalog. As the title suggests, Rise to Your Knees isn't so much a glorious resurgence as a humble but definitive step towards recovery.


Synth-rich and emotionally ambiguous, the producer’s new instrumental LP meditates on nostalgia for the sound of terrestrial radio in the 1980s.

Action Adventure

It was an eBay purchase that pulled DJ Shadow out of a pandemic slump: a trove of some 200 tapes’ worth of broadcasts recorded from a Baltimore and Washington, D.C.-area radio station in the 1980s. Novel yet stuck in time, their blend of dance, R&B, and early hip-hop triggered nostalgia without feeling overly familiar. On his latest LP, Action Adventure, Shadow homes in on a related aesthetic, importing an underground hip-hop ethos into the most expensive studio money could buy—in 1983. Whether with an MPC or a DAW, he remains a world-class drum programmer, and the beats here balance vintage luxury with slick modern production value. The synth space lasers and electronic drums on “Time and Space” sound clean and classic; the drums and melody on “Ozone Scraper” are basic but richly textured. The total effect is like a 4K remaster of an old film’s 35mm print, its fine grain beautifully rendered in high resolution.
The art and business of sampling have evolved significantly in the 30-plus years since DJ Shadow started making music. By the time of his first releases in the early ’90s, cratediggers were already starting to chop up and manipulate samples beyond recognition; by the end of the decade they had perfected the art of burying them in the mix, layering dozens of pieces of audio like camouflage. Shadow’s 1996 masterpiece Endtroducing… carries the distinction of being recognized by Guinness as the first album constructed completely from samples. But in 2023, the landscape looks much different; digital tools make identifying samples easier than ever, and publishing unlicensed material can create a legal time bomb.
The samples on Action Adventure, rather than providing a wealth of material from which to create a collage, feel like calculated choices, hyper-specific triggers that help set the tone for the songs. The rambling riff and scream from Dust’s 1971 hard rock jam “Loose Goose” provides the jump-off for the high-octane “Free for All,” a raucous bruiser that could easily pass for a Run the Jewels instrumental. A line from Loudon Wainwright III’s 1986 folk ballad “Expatriot,” about a man leaving home, becomes the centerpiece of “All My,” a blistering ode to crate-digging that would feel right at home at a Chicago footwork party. And he’s still capable of finding salvation in the stacks, pulling an inspired vocal performance from Jan Jerome’s obscure 1990 R&B B-side “Baby, Got Me Goin” to build the stunning new jack swing track “You Played Me,” with a bassline that could give a twentysomething Teddy Riley a run for his money.
In a statement, Shadow explained the album’s lack of features by saying he didn’t want to “write music to give someone else a runway.” But some of the beats—“Craig, Ingles, & Wrightson,” “Witches vs. Warlocks”—feel hollow without a charismatic rapper to float over them. Much of the album’s early runtime builds towards a climax that never comes; the final tracks (“Forever Changed,” “She’s Evolving”) only hint at an opaque sense of resolution. But the drums are captivating enough to save more than one song from sleeping at the wheel, and when Shadow shifts gears on the ambient exercise “Fleeting Youth (An Audible Life),” his mastery of texture and layering gives the track a gravitational pull, even if it’s too short to be immersive.
Operating largely without words, Action Adventure captures broad feelings of nostalgia from a POV enriched by decades of hindsight and experience; it’s a testament to DJ Shadow’s production skill and human touch. But where his last album used pointed commentary to communicate a clear concept, the new album’s instrumental abstraction is more elusive. If nothing else, it’s a reminder that even if he never makes another record as singular as Endtroducing…, artists will be banging down his door until he hangs up the MPC.


On Awake, Scott Hansen, the San Francisco-based visual artist who records colorful techno as Tycho, expands his sound. It's the first Tycho album recorded as a three-piece band, and his previous albums now sound like mere dreams of the luminous world he was trying to create.

Awake

Awake is the album where Scott Hansen, the San Francisco-based visual artist and musician who records as Tycho, expands into a far-reaching space. He's made gorgeously constructed techno under this name for over a decade, ultimately gaining traction with the sunny Dive in 2011. In the context of Awake—the first Tycho record recorded as a three-piece band—his previous albums now sound like mere dreams of the luminous world he was trying so hard to connect to. Here, Hansen gains a skip in his step and strides right into that place, largely due to a shedding of the muddied beats and wistful synth tones that positioned him a little too close to Boards of Canada's retro-futuristic notions. There's more air here, lending a greater expanse of room to move around in than before, like travelling from a rundown seaside resort to vast scoops of desert plane. It's still recognizable as a Tycho recording, with a familiar sense of melancholy and the embers of sundown burning through it, but with the ambition clearly heightened right from the first few notes.
Not for nothing does the echoey guitar clang that opens a couple of these tracks (notably "Awake" and "See") sound like the Edge's long-familiar tones in U2. It's not exactly stadium-leaning, but if what came before felt more like bedroom creations, then here the Tycho sound is taken into a different area entirely, where everything glistens so brightly it feels like the work of someone who thinks the Beatles' career began and ended with the ultra clean lines of "Here Comes the Sun". Something it shares with Dive is the feeling of journey, where tracks heard in isolation won’t make as much sense as picking up the long thread from beginning to end. "Montana" may reach a greater point of euphoria than the moodier "Dye", but watching how Hansen and his band arrive there is part of the thrill, with disparate moods slowly slotting into one another in a perfectly natural flow.
The sense of build Hansen possesses—knowing when to add and subtract, when to fade and zoom right back into focus—was a central tenet of the Dive sound, and it's a sensibility he retains here, although it doesn't always stop his work from circling perilously close to redundancy. "Apogee" is clearly supposed to be born from a moment of discordance, but it's an all-too brief divergence that makes it feel like the ideas are running dry when he returns to his tastefully constructed loops for the bulk of the track. Fortunately, Hansen keeps things brief, cutting Awake dead around the 35-minute mark after eight tracks. A common problem with bringing live instrumentation into techno is the heavy handedness that can set in—a dilemma the Field's live-band incarnation often grapples with—although that's rarely an issue here. Only on "Spectre" does the subtlety loosen, but even there it offers release from the strong sense of control that can feel suffocating when the Tycho sound is so thoroughly pinned down.
Where all this leads Hansen and his creation is into a great pool of reflective thought, typified by the introspective guitar strum of "Plains". It feels like this is Tycho mining an older strain of music than the more contemporary references of Dive. There are nods to post-rock, but this feels like it's reaching further toward the sources of that genre than the acts themselves, with Tortoise's aping of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells on TNT emerging as a strong reference point. Lessons have been learned from Dive here—this is a much leaner record that feels skillfully edited, with less use for indulgence and circular routes that don't lead anywhere. It could use a break from the pensive train of thought at times, and the tentative branches away from that mode suggest it's under consideration, if still not quite there yet. But the strong feeling of movement Hansen creates, as he quietly creeps through shades of orangey color, comes packed with dualling strains of sorrow and empathy.


The synth-pop group aches with boy-band sincerity over sugary arrangements and even a little pedal steel on their anodyne new album.

mama’s boy

Their obscure band name or moody group photos might convey some mystery, but “LANY” simply means “Los Angeles New York,” and frontman Paul Jason Klein is just a 32-year-old babyface whose heart was very publicly torn out by Dua Lipa. Malibu Nights, the band’s sophomore album, documented the breakup in excruciating detail, solidifying LANY as a group of attractive, sensitive boys who know their way around a synth pad. This is still true on their latest album mama’s boy, which is occasionally monotonous and—in a development only partially related to said monotony—vaguely Jesus-centric.
The inclusion of contemporary Christian music conventions is half surprise and half natural extension of LANY’s asexual, boyband-adjacent appeal. If the neon cowboy on the album cover wasn’t enough to tip you off, there’s a pretty clear attempt on mama’s boy to reroute LANY from a quirky coastal band to a “traditional values”-based southern one. This version of LANY is a bit closer to the truth — the band formed in Nashville, and Klein was born and raised in Oklahoma. On some songs, he slips somewhat amusingly into a southern accent that doesn’t appear in his speaking voice. Nestled between the expected tracks about complicated love and heartache, Klein assures us that although he has a “past more stained than glass,” he still “[talks] to Jesus,” and is just a “cowboy in L.A.”
Along with the hamfistedly titled, gospel choir-featuring “i still talk to jesus,” “you!” is probably the song on this album with the most explicitly contemporary Christian feel, and also acts as a case study on what makes this album so disappointingly dull. It’s just too clean—too uninventive, too insistent on generalized emotion without committing to a particular one. The guitars are crisp but lack passion, the drums are restrained, and Klein sings in anodyne, youth-group-leader metaphors: “You’re the sun to the moon/You’re my ocean painted blue,” and so on.
The love songs, however, are much better, full of sugary synth lines and even a little steel guitar. “bad news” has a level of sex appeal comparable to going apple picking with your high school crush, but it still inspires very specific butterfly feelings. Klein’s voice warms and softens with his fake southern accent, lamenting that he’s not “good for you/baby, I’m bad news,” and boom—suddenly you’re you’re 16, you have pimples, and popular kid Paul Jason Klein just told you that he likes you.
Such is the transformative power of emotional hot boys. As bizarre as LANY’s pivot to country pop is, they still manage to infuse it with enough charm where it doesn’t fall flat. Most exciting are the moments where Klein tweaks the image of the stereotypical southern gentleman he’s imitating. On the album, Klein is nonchalant about going to hell, and in the music video for “you!,” he’s wearing a dress with his dirty blonde hair long, holding hands with his bandmates as they walk into a blue desert night. Admittedly, as Klein is a cis white man, this image isn’t necessarily the most groundbreaking or transgressive, but like his music, it doesn’t have to be. Sometimes a little earnest mediocrity is enough.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Brooklyn-based Aye Nako puts a unique spin on the sound of classic pop punk, creating relentlessly catchy riff-based music with strong political undertones.

Unleash Yourself

The Brooklyn-based Aye Nako have built their reputation by purposefully keeping to D.I.Y. circles that specifically promote their own community-oriented, anti-capitalist, LGBTQ-friendly ideology. Bassist Joe McCann, vocalist/guitarist Mars Ganito, guitarist Jade Payne, and drummer Angie Boylan have stressed repeatedly that their politics are essential to their standing as queer, multi-racial, multi-gendered musicians. Yet the pop punk style they've perfected over the past few years has, historically, run contrary to that identity. Especially as the genre was enjoying its peak commercial successes in the early 2000s, pop punk's social conservatism helped market an innocuous breed of suburban, digestible rebellion to as wide an American population as possible.
Aye Nako, a band that is anything but macho, say they've attempted to distance themselves from that world, but their self-released, full-length debut Unleash Yourself maintains those ties. Its riffs and melodies barely diverge from traditional pop punk; the sugar rush arrives with an archetypal, Blink-182-like sweep within the first 10 seconds of opener "Start Talking", and gives way only selectively throughout the record's 35-minute cartwheel. Considering that the grittier, more hardcore-influenced tracks from the band's 2010 demo didn't make the LP cut, it seems that Aye Nako's aesthetic has indulged more deeply into its pop punk tendencies than ever.
Fortunately, Aye Nako's greatest strength is their ability to bend the once-rigid constraints of pop punk style to better reflect their unique experiences. They inject new life into the genre by redefining it as the outsider space it was intended as in the first place, using it to explore subjects like love that's complicated by questions of gender identity and sexuality. Still, that juxtaposition of wisdom and childishness sometimes gets the better of them: "Cut it Off"'s deep-digging lyrics, "Break your own legs/ What this condition may reveal/ Is how you only take a sip when it’s watered down" fit awkwardly and indistinctly among Ganito and Payne's stricter, more decisive chord progressions. But as all four Nakos erupt like Lost Boys into puppyish yowls at the end of the fittingly titled "Howl", you can't help but be thankful for that precarious young-old balance, whether or not it always comes off.
As for whether Unleash Yourself will hit home with the audience Aye Nako hopes to reach, that depends on what its members choose to do with it. The band has said in interviews that that its raison d'etre is to make the music they didn't have as queer teenagers, to provide empowerment for younger generations. Unleash Yourself succeeds on that level. But like many albums whose makers staunchly maintain D.I.Y. values, often to the point of self-exile, Aye Nako's debut runs the risk of flying under the radars of less-plugged-in kids who could benefit from their empowering messages. Whether or not Unleash Yourself finds its way into the hands of those teenagers, though, its universally charming launch pad resurrects a strained and tired world as something new, urgent, and far more substantive.


The major-label debut from the Atlanta R&B singer offers a layered, mesmerizing portrait of modern romance.

Master

Mariah the Scientist’s boyfriend was tripping on drugs at 7 a.m. when she realized she loved him, maybe. On her major-label debut, Master, the Atlanta R&B singer staggers away from something equally as reckless, struggling not to be re-hypnotized by nostalgia. “The idea of love and who I was with—they’ve become my master of some sort,” she explained, “when I should have just been myself.” As she writhes against the vice-grip of a toxic relationship, she paints an image of modern romance that’s impressively refined, vivid, and unblinkingly honest. The album is a powerful presentation of her attempt to reclaim control over herself.
Mariah may only be 21, but Master is imbued with the wearied maturity of someone much older: a veteran of love dragged five miles past hell and back, robbed of everything but her own dignity and defiance. While most of the album renders her misery vibrantly, it falters slightly at the start: In “Note to Self,” Mariah tediously spells out her worst tendency: “S-E-L-F-D-E-S-T-R-U-C-T-I-V-E, I need help,” she sings flatly, as if reciting self-help mantras in her bedroom.
But as the album progresses, it plunges forcefully into the messiness of desire. The shards of her past love assemble, offering glints of clarity. “You left me for a bitch in a city full of palm trees,” she announces on “Note to You,” “I never knew that it would haunt me.” Veering from sneering to sad, indignant to wistful, as if negotiating emotions in real-time, Mariah is unflinching about the after-effects of letting go. In the tortured “Thanks 4 Nothing,” she reveals that she left her boyfriend on her birthday, and yet she stayed up, hurting. “Why you never call me?” she cries out on more than one song.
Like SZA before her, Mariah sings in a colloquial style that hovers somewhere in between plain speech and melody, her gravelly voice foregrounded over sparse instrumentals. With the exception of “Hotel,” a gorgeous vocoder interlude, the strongest tracks are backed only by guitar and light drums. This stark arrangement heightens the urgency of her deeply personal accounts: On “Beetlejuice,” a slick, withering remembrance of her lover’s deception, Mariah recalls how she was lied to, guilted into forgiveness, then seduced to Frank Ocean’s Blonde. It’s a scathing drag of a “sensitive” man who is only sensitive to the needs of himself.
But it also implicates Mariah as a woman who’s been played before: Master grapples with its heroine’s self-delusion and insecurity as much as the misconduct of the person who wronged her. It’s haunted by the persistent reminder that she should have known. This indictment, the constant seesawing between self-reprobation and longing, weaves much-needed complexity into a story of heartbreak that could easily feel one-dimensional. Combined with the unvarnished quality of her voice, the cumulative effect is mesmerizing.