Elbow's fourth album doesn't rock the boat so much as steadily alter the waves, with surprisingly good results.

The Seldom Seen Kid

Guy Garvey's got a great voice, and good thing, too. As Elbow have morphed from ambitious but sterile art-rockers to something slightly more visceral, his singing-- equal parts Peter Gabriel and Talk Talk's Mark Hollis-- has been one of the few elements linking the Manchester band's varied output. It's also what's helped Elbow stick out a bit from the choirboy pack of Chris Martin, guy from Keane, et al. At the same time it's not a very rock'n'roll voice, which perhaps explains how, despite some degree of hype, Elbow have always fallen just shy of expectations.
Fitting, then, that "Starlings"-- the first track on Elbow's fourth album The Seldom Seen Kid-- is all about expectations, or at least subverting them. The track begins with an intense cacophony before settling into a vaguely Polynesian groove; a sole orchestral stab blasts out as quickly as it disappears once again. It's a full two minutes before Garvey even sings, and by then one would be forgiven for thinking that, modest melody aside, expectation is all the suspensefully static track has to offer. Yet Elbow are album artists, first and foremost, and in that context it's hard to come up with a better way to ease into The Seldom Seen Kid. Indeed, the similarly exotic second track "The Bones of You", with its flamenco underpinnings and Gershwin coda, stands in stark contrast to its predecessor, and it's here that the benefits of Garvey's voice really come into play. Were he to rise to a pained falsetto, "The Bones of You" would invite endless comparisons to other, slightly more conspicuous British art-rock bands. That Garvey sounds so comfortable in his skin even as his band sheds its own from track to track helps thread the self-produced disc, suite-like.
There are no roman numerals to be found in The Seldom Seen Kid's song titles, nor is there particularly dexterous playing to be heard from track to track, but that's not to discount the disc's mildly proggy vibe. The ebb and flow of the disc feels like it's advancing some unknowable plot, always the sign of a well sequenced disc but also the bridge between songs like the lovely "Mirrorball" and the bluesy (in the get-the-Led-out sense) "Grounds for Divorce". There, the song's lyrical and musical reputation are in keeping with the band's exploration of the static as well as blues traditions. It's a tragic drinking song where the protagonist loses himself in "a hole in my neighborhood down which of late I cannot help but fall." Less fancy-pants lyricists would have just said "bar," but Garvey knows the value of a poetic line or two. In typically ornate Garvey fashion, he's called "An Audience with the Pope" "a Bond theme if Bond was from Bury and a recovering Catholic," but he could have just described it as Tom Waits doing 007.
The song is a rare autopilot moment on a disc that otherwise makes so much effort to skirt cliché. Anyone expecting "Some Riot" to reflect it's title is headed for disappointment-- the song could easily explode, but follows a different, more moving path instead-- and "Weather to Fly" is almost mantra-like in its simplicity. Yet while "The Loneliness of a Tower Crane Driver" begins much the same, it gives way to some subtle twists, turns, and escalations that push the track into dramatically fresh territory. On "The Fix", the twist is that guest Richard Hawley's croon vies with Garvey's voice as guide through the jazzy song, vaguely film score in its menace but pretty cool despite its half-familiarity.
The single "One Day Like This" sounds like just that-- a single-- with its faster gait and sunnier demeanor, buoyed by strings and massed vocals despite a deceptive but welcome surfeit of space in the mix, but per Elbow's own downbeat reputation, the album doesn't end there. That would be too easy. Instead, The Seldom Seen Kid ends with a bonus tribute to the title's inspiration, Manchester songwriter/troubadour/busker Bryan Glancy. Track down and browse the website dedicated to his memory and you'll likely wish you knew him. Listen to this absolutely beautiful tribute and you'll miss him like a best friend.


On his first solo album that exists not because he’s in the habit of making records but because he has something to say, the UGK cofounder finally sounds confident by himself.

Return of the Trill

In the decade since the death of Bun B’s UGK partner and best friend, Pimp C, hip-hop’s A-list has handled him like a widowed, respected elder. They sat Shiva with him to share his grief, subsequently turning out in droves for his solo projects and to memorialize Pimp C and preach UGK’s greatness. But they never spoke what many must have thought: Creatively, Bun B’s best years were almost certainly behind him. From their dueling temperaments to the way Pimp’s wily sneer complemented Bun’s bassy rumble, the two had been perfectly matched. Nothing could replace that chemistry.
It’s a testament to Bun B’s herculean presence and the enduring appeal of UGK’s woozy country-rap that his solo records have been so solid. Still, by the early ’10s, even he was losing interest. “Trying to do music after Pimp C passed away was not necessarily hard to do, but I didn’t really enjoy it,” he admitted. Bun B’s 2013 album, Trill O.G.: The Epilogue, ended with a song titled “Bye!” He soon reduced his torrent of guest features to a trickle and settled into a new job teaching a hip-hop course at Houston’s Rice University. He seemed ready, if not for retirement, then at least the next stage of his career.
What a difference a sabbatical can make. Return of the Trill is Bun B’s first project in five years and his first solo album that exists not because he’s in the habit of making records, but because he has something worth saying. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey decimated his Texas hometown of Port Arthur, a refinery city struggling even before the storm flooded its businesses. “I tried to make an album that’s representative of the mentality of people in Port Arthur post-Hurricane Harvey, and really after any kind of traumatic experience,” he told The Texas Observer. “No matter what happens, you’ve gotta bounce back.” His verses don’t address the storm directly, but if any rapper is qualified to speak on regrouping after tragedy, it’s Bun B.
Throughout Return, Bun mounts a spirited case for continued relevance while preaching resilience, the importance of acting your age, and, as ever, the satisfaction of a well-maintained car. Perhaps all that time on a college campus rubbed off, too, as he engages with politics more than ever. “They don’t care about the cure/They just wanna sell a treatment,” he raps on On “U A Bitch,” an indictment of the prison-industrial complex and big pharma. “Keep you alive while keepin’ you high/Now that’s some street shit.”
Most surprising of all is “Blood on the Dash,” possibly the most sympathetic depiction of law enforcement ever recorded by a marquee rapper. Bun narrates a traffic stop from the perspective of both a pistol-toting driver who has been pulled over and the officer, characterized not as a trigger-happy racist but an idealist who joined the force out of concern for his community. He’s planning on letting the driver off with a warning until he sees him reach under his seat. Neither wants to use their firearm, but both have reason for mistrust. “What if he’s a killer cop like I’ve seen on the news?” the driver worries as he considers his options, all shitty.
Bun is less beholden to the help of gracious A-listers this time around. Instead, he surrounds himself with artists who fit naturally inside his orbit, mostly fellow Southern-rap veterans too far removed from their 20s to care about trends, emcees like Slim Thug, Killa Kyleon, and 8Ball & MJG. Fellow icons of middle-aged hardness Run the Jewels join for “Myself,” and Bun sounds every bit at home over El-P’s ’80s action-movie synths as Killer Mike.
Credit executive producer Big K.R.I.T. for making Return of the Trill hold together. In K.R.I.T., who directly produced half of these tracks, Bun has found a cheerleader and UGK disciple who’s fully internalized Pimp C’s playbook, from the bubbling bass to the churchy organs. And while K.R.I.T. isn’t the first rap producer to recruit bluesman Gary Clark Jr., he becomes the first to put him alongside soul singer Leon Bridges. An elegant Pimp C eulogy, their “Gone Away” ends Return on a graceful note of remorseful guitar and tender horns. Pimp C’s memory looms over this record, not his absence. Bun B never wanted to be a solo artist, but he’s never sounded more comfortable in the role.

II Trill Enterprises / Double Dose Entertainment / Empire


This Heat were many things, but popular was never one of them. It's almost funny to see this record ...

Deceit

This Heat were many things, but popular was never one of them. It's almost funny to see this record getting so much deserved attention recently due to its reissue, because before now, I only knew a few people who had even heard of the thing. It's especially strange to see all the praise in light of Gareth Williams' death on Christmas Eve last year. He wasn't a person who ever really wanted to be famous or even known as a musician, and yet will doubtlessly be better known henceforth than he'd ever been during This Heat's existence.
English drummer/vocalist Charles Hayward (fresh from working with Brian Eno and Phil Manzanera in the avant-prog/fusion outfit Quiet Sun) formed This Heat with Charles Bullen (guitar, clarinet, viola, etc.) and Williams (bass, keyboards, tape manipulation, etc.) around 1975. Hayward had worked with a fairly broad array of jazz and prog bands (and post-This Heat, would continue to do so), though Bullen and Williams were much less traveled, even as they were accomplished musicians. Hayward and Bullen had been playing together as a duo for a few years prior to This Heat, and began playing with Williams only after Hayward completed his duties with Quiet Sun. Williams would actually leave the band before this album, Deceit, was released, and maintain a very busy career as an engineer for John Barry and various symphonic recordings. His interest in recording techniques may have provided the impetus for This Heat to experiment with tape loops and editing, which would play very large roles in their studio output.
This Heat's sound was something like a confrontation of prog, free-jazz and contemporary electronic music (think early Stockhausen, not Kraftwerk). They often get lumped into the post-punk (or even just "punk") camp, for no better reason other than they started at the same time. They certainly sounded as if they were angry about something, and taking a glance at the lyric sheet for this album (and you'd better, as often the vocals seem more musical element than communicative force), they had fairly intense political/social statements to make-- though pinning down their position is often as hard as pinning down their sound. In any case, they were "progressive" in the literal sense of the word, and though they came up with the first wave of punk, they didn't really sound like anyone else of the time (save a few other English radicals like Henry Cow or Art Bears, occasionally).
Deceit was the band's second and final album (not counting posthumous releases, including the excellent BBC session release Made Available). As odd as it sounds on the surface, it's actually the more immediately appealing of their two albums, at least partially because of a greater emphasis on drive and something like song structure (though the music here is quite a ways from typical "songs"). The vocals-- mostly handled by Hayward-- were probably the weakest link for This Heat, though they don't really take away from the music so much as push it into yet a stranger realm.
"Sleep," the first track, is actually an atypically calm song, almost like a fractured lullaby. Layers of what sound like African percussion, and a simple piano line support a very low-key melody, wherein lines like, "Softness is a thing called comfort/ Doesn't cost much to keep in touch/ We never forget you have a choice," make me wonder if there isn't some kind of subversive commentary about consumer ethics and advertising at work. This shortly leads to the rave-up "Paper Hats" with its brawny, pouncing rhythms and subtly acrobatic guitar lines. This is a piece with several sections, none of them having too much to do with each other. Some, like the lengthy outro, sound like archetypical math-rock, with repetitive, complicated rhythmic patterns, while the brief middle section is more viscerally dynamic, or perhaps even "noisy." Lyrically, the band was as eclectic: "Well, what do we expect?/ Paper hats?/ Or maybe even roses?/ The sound of explosions?/ Oh no." I'd like to know what they expected, but I'm not sure what they got instead, and am certainly in the dark about to whom they protested.
"Triumph" is a Dadaist collage of various noises, musical and otherwise. There's a brief accordion intro, leading to what sounds like a kazoo lament accompanied by someone scraping a few pieces of metal and wood together. Then, Hayward mentions something about the angles being reversed, and the garbage symphony makes its grand conclusion-- all in less than three minutes. Perhaps this was a prologue for "S.P.Q.R.," which throws out any ideas of abstract noodling in favor of pure rock expression. The high-speed beat threatens to overpower a droning duo vocal line ("We organize via property as power/ Slavehood and freedom imperial purple/ Pax Romana!"). This track doesn't run through a myriad of stylistic changes; it makes its case via sheer persistence.
Hayward's interest in all manner of world rhythms and percussion manifested itself in tracks like "Shrink Wrap" and "Independence" (words provided by one Thomas Jefferson), where kinetic drum orchestras and ancient rain forest flutes and strings lent the music an otherworldly quality which further removed it from recordings by This Heat's angry peers. "Radio Prague" features more electronic trickery, and what sounds like someone actually tuning in and out of a Czech radio broadcast. There's a steady pitter-patter underneath, and some rather dark drones in the background (along with a haunting cello), and though I'm tempted to say this could have influenced Godspeed You Black Emperor!, it's more likely an isolated vignette. In a way, the entire album seems removed from typical musical happenings-- even the underground. Maybe that's why it's taken so long for This Heat to start receiving their due.
The band got its digs in once more for "A New Kind of Water," expressing the rage that seems to have been implied throughout the record, though rarely shown directly. Phrases like, "We were told to expect more/ And now that we've got more/ We want more, we want more," offer some of the only clear ideas about the feelings behind Deceit, and the music is appropriately insistent (crashing drums, wailing group vocals, very precise, discordant guitar lines). Over the years, there have been bands to play as aggressively, or even as strangely, but very few have been able to rise from their collective influences and histories to create music so singularly distinctive and inspiring. I don't know that Hayward, Bullen and Williams were trying to inspire (and that they debated over whether to release their music at all could be evidence to support that they weren't), but the overall feeling I take away from this album is that of revolution and a very creative form of protest. That's what I call punk.


The fourth LP from this mostly instrumental Chicago trio swings from exceedingly beautiful to punishingly physical in seconds flat. Russian Circles' ever-more-legit metal chops and well-realized compositional ambitions leave Empros feeling bigger and stranger than its predecessor.

Empros

A balancing act on a cosmic scale, Empros-- the fourth LP from mostly instrumental Chicago trio Russian Circles-- marries light to dark, order to chaos. Empros swings from the exceedingly beautiful to the punishingly physical in seconds flat. Every note on Empros is its right place, every surface scraped-up just so; a recent Decibel writeup found bassist Brian Cook claiming he'd never make another record "from the ground up" like the meticulously constructed Empros. Shame, that; as on 2009's swarmed-with-strings Geneva, the expanse charted by the grandiose Empros is very vast indeed.
Building on the strides they made on Geneva's adventurous first half, Russian Circles complicate the drift-and-build of most post-rock, injecting craggy climaxes, letting the low end take the lead. Highlight "Mlàdek" finds a rousing, almost Broken Social Scene-style guitar chug careening headlong into a patch of black metal-inspired ballast; the shift in tone's a bit jarring, but considering the disparity of styles at play, the transition's pretty flawless. Empros' best moments-- the snowdrift strings that blow across the end of "Schiphol" and into "Atackla", the patch cord static and drums that open "Batu," the aforementioned "Mlàdek" assault-- find some little sliver of gorgeousness overwhelmed by some orbit-upsetting rumble from Cook or some out-from-nowhere turnaround from drummer Dave Turncrantz.
Complexity for its own sake muddled the Circles' first few LPs a bit; Empros, like Geneva before it, is less prone to wriggle, more likely to lunge, each move bigger than its last. That increased compositional confidence gives each move they make that much more heft, songs charging eagerly towards their second acts, then dizzyingly doubling back. Still, with most of these tunes hinging around some staggeringly huge mid-song wallop, once you've traveled Empros' strangeways a few times, you'll start to see the landmarks coming from a few miles off.
Bigger, stranger, and just plain heavier than any Circles disc before it, the first 35 minutes of Empros' empyrean, oblong alien-prog finds the band once again wrestling their grand ambitions into impossible shapes. And then there's "Praise Be Man", a searching, Spiritualized-nodding folk-gospel featuring a rare vocal turn from Cook. On a record with less scope than Empros, "Praise" would prove the sorest of thumbs, an out-of-character overreach from a band who oughta stick with what they're good at. Arriving at end of all that interstellar overdrive, "Praise" proves an especially lovely comedown, one last burst of light to offset all that darkness.


D’Angelo’s debut was a sudden shock to ’90s R&B. The deluxe, expanded version of Brown Sugar reveals the extent to which it was grown folks music made by a 21-year-old genius.

Brown Sugar

The allure of D’Angelo began in 1995 on his debut single “Brown Sugar,” where he emerged as a nostalgic figure in modern soul. Armed with a honeyed voice and hip-hop swagger, D’Angelo was equal parts Marvin Gaye and LL Cool J, the consummate musician and the coolest guy in the room. It’s like he’d been here before and knew how to do it right this time. His blend of 1970s R&B and hip-hop felt uniquely vintage and modern. He appealed to wide swaths of listeners and helped usher in a new strain of black music.
Brown Sugar, D’Angelo’s debut, became an important forebear of what’s now called neo-soul. Released before Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite (1996) and Erykah Badu’s Baduizm (1997), D’Angelo changed the sound of R&B while paying homage to its pioneers: Stevie Wonder, Donny Hathaway, Curtis Mayfield and the like. The success of Brown Sugar paved the way for artists like Anthony Hamilton, Jill Scott, and Alicia Keys to break into the mainstream and achieve their own levels of fame. “Maxwell told me Brown Sugar’s success got his Urban Hang Suite off of Columbia’s shelf,” writer Nelson George penned in an essay for Brown Sugar’s deluxe edition. And to think, the album was essentially a small-scale event compared to its follow-ups—the groundbreaking Voodoo and the eruption of Black Messiah. No, Brown Sugar was truly bedroom soul: “I wrote … the majority of that record in my bedroom in Richmond,” D’Angelo recalled in 2014. “And all of the demos for it were done on a four-track [there].”
The son of a Pentecostal minister, D’Angelo grew up playing piano and won three amateur competitions as a teenager at the famed Apollo Theater. He signed a publishing deal with EMI in 1991, and prior to Brown Sugar’s release, the singer co-wrote and co-produced a gospel-infused song that appeared in 1994 film Jason’s Lyric. The song, “U Will Know,” featured a who’s who of prominent R&B singers at the time—Gerald Levert, Keith Sweat, Usher and Tevin Campbell, among many others—and earned D’Angelo his first bit of recognition. That buzz helped lay the framework for the musician’s first ever solo release.
Brown Sugar arrived during the peak of hip-hop’s golden era, when rappers like Nas and The Notorious B.I.G., and groups like Wu-Tang Clan and A Tribe Called Quest were at the height of their powers. D’Angelo instantly fit the mold. With his straight-back cornrow braids and baggy clothes, he looked like a rapper of that period, yet his music countered that which dominated the airwaves. Until Brown Sugar arrived, Top 40 R&B skewed very much toward hip-hop, from the upbeat tick of its beats to the guest rap verses that felt obligatory for almost every single. Songs like Monica’s “Don’t Take It Personal,” Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It” and Adina Howard’s “Freak Like Me” seemed influenced by Teddy Riley’s New Jack Swing-style production, which dominated urban music in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
D’Angelo was different, the perfect amalgamation of modern rap and old soul, and Brown Sugar was a masterclass in this alchemy. It was as if, from the very beginning, he wasn’t trying to go against the grain, he just wanted to keep things low-key. For instance, in the video for “Brown Sugar,” the scene unfolds in a smoky jazz club on what looks to be open mic night. It harkened back to the essence of soul and jazz music, live records cut at the Village Vanguard or Five Spot. The title track and the album felt honest and organic; you could feel the lush instrumentation, the sincerity in the lyrics, the warmth of the keys. This wasn’t R&B purposely intended for younger ears; Brown Sugar was grown folks music, it just so happened that a 21-year-old created it.
All these years later, Brown Sugar is still just as resonant, emitting a strong vintage quality that works in any era. It had everything: “Shit, Damn, Motherfucker,” a dark tale about death and infidelity, became a gritty street anthem that soundtracked a pivotal scene in 1999 film The Best Man. With its upbeat gospel sway, “When We Get By” was an uplifting tune in the vein of Ray Charles, as a track that meshed the genre’s traditional and contemporary aspects. On “Cruisin’,” the Smokey Robinson classic of the same name, D’Angelo kept the integrity of the original—the fluid guitar riff and wafting strings—yet he quickened the pace just slightly, and added weight to the drum kick. The finished product paid rightful homage to Smokey and might be a little better than the 1979 cut. The two-disc deluxe edition of Brown Sugar includes four remixes of D’Angelo’s “Cruisin’,” one apiece from producers King Tech and Dallas Austin, and two others labeled “Wet Remix” and “God Made Me Funky Remix.” Of the “Cruisin’” renditions, Austin’s is closest to D’Angelo’s portrayal; canned drums give it a distinct ’90s knock, but the strings and vocal arrangements are unchanged. The title track, “Lady” and “Me and Those Dreamin’ Eyes of Mine” also get a few different a capellas, instrumentals, and remixes here.
Listening to Brown Sugar’s deluxe edition is like walking through the mid-90s. The record feels like an artifact in that way, capturing D’Angelo at a nascent stage in his creative development while dusting off rhymes from Kool G. Rap (who originally appeared on King Tech’s remix of “Brown Sugar”), Redman (featured on the Def Squad remix of “Me and Those Dreamin’ Eyes of Mine”) and AZ (himself a featured rapper on DJ Premier’s “Lady” remix). Where Voodoo and Black Messiah felt especially grainy and dark, Brown Sugar feels especially lush and radiant, an outcome of Bob Power’s and Russell Elevado’s masterful engineering work. (Conversely, for Voodoo, Elevado and D’Angelo recorded everything on tape, which gave the record its lo-fi sound). Brown Sugar shifted modern soul, not only putting pressure on himself to exceed expectations moving forward, but it opened a door for a new movement in black music.


On their debut EP, the Washington, DC post-punk trio Flasher offer seven impressively-honed songs that speak to selfhood and sublimation.

Flasher EP

Washington, DC exists in a constant ominous haze. It’s no secret that this environment has given rise to absolutely vital punk through grassroots oppositional music scenes, from Dischord post-hardcore forebears like Rites of Spring and Fugazi to the feminist Positive Force collective that fostered the East coast wing of riot grrrl. Sister Polygon, an eclectic record label run by the members of Priests, is helping to set up infrastructure for the latest wave. Their bands deploy many tactics: the confrontational urgency of Downtown Boys and Priests themselves, the tongue-in-cheek minimalism of Sneaks, the giddy polyphonics of Gauche. They all paint sonic critiques of broken systems and create effective models of resistance.
Flasher, made up of Taylor Mulitz (bassist in Priests), Emma Baker, and Daniel Saperstein, is the latest to emerge. They take a moody post-punk approach, crafting introspective songs that speak to selfhood and sublimation. “What happens when the continuity of self and the worlds you come to depend on shatter?” Flasher told The Media in April upon releasing their debut self-titled cassette, which is now being re-released on vinyl. “We’re trying to explore new forms of resistance, where being yourself ceases to be a matter of reliability and instead leans into emerging, shifting, and unsustainable senses of self.” The trio’s previous project, Young Trynas, addressed some of these themes on their 2013 EP Probably Music, but on Flasher they’re silkier, more stylized, well-honed.
Flasher’s airy melodic vocal hooks, layered over grungy instrumentation, earn comparisons to Goo-era Sonic Youth. The more relentless tracks, meanwhile, like “All Over,” recall the overdriven shoegaze of A Place to Bury Strangers. Call-and-response singing and classically ominous synths round out full, rich songs; each part sits perfectly in the mix. On the standout opener, “Tense,” a languid, taunting lead vocal faces off with another voice, which rattles out a laundry list of concerns: “The backseat/The answer/To society/Something greater/The body/Distant achievements/Further growth/Empty gesture.” Crashing waves of guitar nearly drown it out, but the bite of the words is persistent. “Tense” luxuriates in the tension between desire and responsibility.
From there, the tracks are more high-octane, built around mantras of being and nothingness. “I’ll erase myself/To release myself” vows the chorus of “Erase Myself”; “Is this becoming/Or am I succumbing?” asks “Make Out.” The object of immersion is never named; it could be society, or coupling, or the scene. Instead, the focus is on the lure of being consumed, its dark seduction. Closer “Destroy” can be read as a display of sweetly heartsick longing—the chorus crooning, “Starting to realize/I just want to be your boy”—or as a self-conscious critique of that form of desire. “Go destroy your feelings,” Mulitz sings, “Make a little room for me.”
Across Flasher, dissociative existential questions are countered by the visceral physicality of the songs. This places the trio squarely in the tradition of punk that articulates how politics imprint on the body. “Throw It Away” shakes with every drum kick and guitar screech, recalling the angst of other Polygon projects with the repetition of lines like, “With god as my witness/This world is a sickness” and “Why should I be thankful?” But for all the tension and darkness, there’s a real joy to Flasher—a knowing smile, a dream-pop slippage. It’s a fun listen that sounds like it was equally fun to make, which, after all the soul-searching, is a source of relief.


On the fourth album from their reunited lineup, the alt-rock lifers choose to embrace the slowing of their step.

Doggerel

Doggerel marks an important milestone for Pixies, the pioneering alternative rockers who swapped their mercurial charms for dogged reliability as they aged: It is the fourth album from the reunited lineup, matching the number of full-lengths the band released at its youthful peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Nothing about Doggerel sounds youthful. The band relies on chops instead of accidents to thrill, favoring production that’s clean, burly, and without a lick of grit—a sound that moves with the weight and deliberateness of middle age. Pixies choose to embrace the slowing of their step, using it to accentuate the way leader Black Francis chose refinement over exploration as he learned to sneak his idiosyncrasies into familiar song forms.
The seeds of Doggerel lie in a genre exercise. Francis had been stockpiling original tunes written in the vein of 1950s country music with the intention of cutting an Americana album with Bobby Bare Jr., a latter-day member of Guided by Voices who once toured with his own Pixies tribute group. Tom Dalgety, the producer and engineer who has been behind the band’s boards since Head Carrier, plucked “Human Crime” from the stash and had Pixies transform it into a bouncy little number that felt looser than Beneath the Eyrie, the 2019 album in which the Kim Deal-less incarnation of the band finally found its footing in the recording studio.

“Human Crime” doesn’t appear on Doggerel, yet it served its purpose: It freed Black Francis from the idea that there was a division between the songs he wrote for himself and those he penned for Pixies. He followed this notion throughout the entire first decade of the Pixies reunion, releasing six albums during a period where Kim Deal held firm to her stance that the band shouldn’t record new material. Once she left, eventually to be replaced on bass and vocals by Paz Lenchantin, Pixies immediately started making records that suggested maybe Deal was right to believe the band should’ve stuck to oldies. Indie Cindy and, to a lesser extent, Head Carrier buckled under the weight of a band attempting to live within the confines of its legacy: They spent their time hitting marks, pretending to be the group they once were.
There may be no surprises on Doggerel but, crucially, there’s no pandering, either. The band sounds at ease, even agreeable, as middle-aged rockers. Black Francis never attempts to strain to replicate his trademark wail; Joey Santiago’s guitar squalls are controlled and colorful. David Lovering lays down a thick backbeat that allows Lenchantin just enough elasticity to suggest a hint of a groove. It’s recognizably Pixies music but it’s broader, bigger, and slicker: It’s the alt-rock Voodoo Lounge, the record the Rolling Stones released some 30 years after their debut.
Like the Stones, Pixies survive because they’re road warriors, playing old favorites for audiences who consider themselves lucky to finally hear “Where Is My Mind?” performed live. Pixies operate at a much smaller scale than the Rolling Stones, of course, and modesty is also crucial to Doggerel. Once purveyors of dadaist rock, Pixies now opt for craft, constructing sturdy songs whose appeal lies in their directness. There’s little hidden here: “There’s a Moon On” gallops forth with nocturnal urgency, and “Who’s More Sorry Now?” has the vaguest hint of melancholy to its titular phrase. Black Francis—who, in a first on a Pixies album, is joined by Joey Santiago as a co-writer on two songs, the shimmering, jangly “Pagan Man” and churning “Dregs of the Wine"—writes simply and cleanly, skills honed over the years where he was leading the workaday combo Frank Black & the Catholics. As much as those first fumbling Pixies reunion records, those journeyman Catholics albums demystified the image of Black Francis the yelping madman as he resolutely settled into the limits of a working band. That same sensibility is evident on Doggerel yet the very presence of the rest of Pixies brings the album color and a bit of verve, elements that give the songs a bit of a lift. Nevertheless, there’s no denying that Pixies are now an outfit built for comfort, not speed—a group that’s found its personal sweet spot and is content to linger there.


This new archival set documents an all-star tribute to Ornette Coleman held in 2014—at which the saxophonist gave his last public performance—as well as recordings from his 2015 funeral.

Celebrate Ornette

Ornette Coleman was not scheduled to perform at the all-star concert held in his honor, back in the summer of 2014. That celebration, at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, was chiefly organized as a way for fans and associates to pay tribute to the saxophonist’s legacy as an American composer and innovator. The lineup—including talents like Henry Threadgill and Ravi Coltrane—suggested Coleman’s towering influence over multiple generations of jazz players. And the bill also promised elite musicians from other stylistic zones, such as Laurie Anderson and Patti Smith.
There aren’t too many artists capable of drawing Flea and Branford Marsalis into the same orbit. Though it’s easy to understand how Coleman’s boisterous catalog does this. Once you strip away all the baggage associated with “free jazz” (never Coleman’s preferred term), you’re left with the joyful idiosyncrasy of that sound. Many of his melodies and solos channel traditional song styles, while his arrangements and harmonies are frequently unexpected—and inspired. Coleman’s interest in collaboration, whether with Jerry Garcia or the Master Musicians of Jajouka, also sets a high standard for risk-taking that can appeal to artistic seekers working in any genre.
On the night of the 2014 Prospect Park gig, Coleman took his final risk on a public stage. He hadn’t performed for a crowd in several years; his last official recording was 2006’s Pulitzer prize-winning Sound Grammar. In the interim, journalists and fans passed on rumors regarding the genius’ failing health. So when the 84-year-old Coleman emerged from the wings of the Prospect Park bandshell, mid-concert, with his white alto saxophone in hand, it was a modest surprise even to his son and longtime drummer, Denardo.
After walking out carefully and taking a seat near the other saxophonists, Ornette simply listened for a bit. Soon after, he delivered 20 minutes of playing: a stretch that drew on two of his early compositions (“Ramblin’” and “Turnaround”). Within a year, he would be dead.
Heard now, on an archival release from Denardo Coleman’s new Song X imprint, it’s clear that Coleman’s technique in 2014 was more fragile than at any other point in his immortal career. His phrases flow more slowly. Sometimes Coleman reaches for a note with audible difficulty. While his reduced physical capabilities are obvious, the spiritual intensity communicated by his playing is equally apparent—and all the more remarkable for the context. Every elderly body confronts decline. But some veteran spirits can discover new strategies for persisting, recognizable to the last.
There’s a frailty in Coleman’s tone, early on, during “Ramblin’.” Despite the occasional tremor of timbre, there’s no desire to hide from his limitations. And Coleman’s way of following up a long-held, bluesy tone with a sprightly flourish of notes remains forceful, unmistakable. When Denardo’s funk-influenced backing group comes in, a saxophone section also joins. (Their ranks include Threadgill and David Murray.) The extra players help thicken out the sound and lift Ornette up—with the icon eventually contributing some ecstatic, piercing notes that cut through the group texture. After finishing up with his playing for the night, the saxophonist hung around on stage for a portion of the rest of the gig. What he took in was a jammy, consistently potent tribute to his catalog, and his spirit of creativity.
It’s thrilling to hear Threadgill’s alto sound—one conscious of Ornette’s style, but not overly indebted to it—during a performance of “Blues Connotation.” (And Flea holds his own, on bass!) A powerhouse ensemble that includes Branford Marsalis, the Master Musicians of Jajouka, and Bruce Hornsby gathers for a fiery take of “Song X.” On “Peace,” Ravi Coltrane’s soprano sax leaps create an excitable feel alongside the spiky blues playing of guitarist James Blood Ulmer. And Geri Allen, the pianist with perhaps the best track record of collaborating with Coleman and his mysterious “harmolodic” theory, turns in imaginative supporting lines throughout a performance of “The Sphinx.”
The less-canonical tributes also work. Guitarist Nels Cline handles the melody of “Sadness” while Thurston Moore lays down a din of expressionistic noise in the background. Laurie Anderson’s group—which includes avant-saxophonist John Zorn and bassist Bill Laswell—creates a lyrical squall that feels fully appropriate (in part, because it often references Coleman’s famous composition “Lonely Woman”). Patti Smith plays a pair of tunes from her then-recent album Banga; the way she switches between vocals and stray blasts of clarinet comes across as a tribute to Coleman’s own multi-instrumental practice.
By the time the concert closes—with a cathartic, all-hands-on-deck rendition of “Lonely Woman”—it seems as though few aspects of the artist’s vast playbook have been ignored. What’s particularly touching is the knowledge that everyone thought to pull this gig together in time for Ornette to experience their love for his work.
Performances from Coleman’s public funeral are also included in this new archival set. The mood of that 2015 concert is necessarily more somber than that of the the Prospect Park show, but the results are similarly intriguing, and no less star-studded. Pharoah Sanders’ brief tenor sax solo carries an affecting tenderness. The last living member of free jazz’s inaugural class drops by to pay his respects, as well: Cecil Taylor’s eight-minute tribute encompasses poetry (to the confusion of some in the audience), stark-but-stately piano motifs, and one swirl of atonal density at its midpoint. It’s a stunner.
As a multimedia package, Celebrate Ornette provides fans a wide range of perspectives on both shows. Its three CDs give a complete account of the Prospect Park blowout and the performances from the Riverside Church funeral. The Prospect Park discs stray from a chronological presentation, in order to create a more ideal flow for home listening. (And yes, Ornette’s own appearances are queued up first.) A pair of DVDs also gives you visual representation of each event—though some performances from Prospect Park are omitted, in favor of some backstage commentary from key participants. The DVD of the Riverside service also includes all eulogies and remembrances, which the audio disc breezes past. This lavish, pricey artifact isn’t an ideal first port of entry to Coleman’s art. But the way the set explores the cumulative impact of his work makes it a deeply rewarding experience for devoted admirers.


On their third full-length, the Temper Trap capture some of the crowd-pleasing sound of their debut, unleashing likable enough pop-rock with a bright electronic sheen.

Thick as Thieves

Australia’s the Temper Trap exists in a lineage of perfectly acceptable rock bands. There is a template to these acts. U2 is invariably somewhere in their genetic code, or if not them, Coldplay. (In the Temper Trap’s case, they opened on the Mylo Xyloto tour.) They tend to hit during the summer, not the winter. Every single comes with an electronic sheen and a volume of wordless vocals to rival any Gregorian chant troupe or wilderness masculinity junket. They are charming enough in short enough bursts to be made for the rock milieu of interchangeable syncs, snippets heard over festival noise, and crossovers to adult-contemporary radio. More people genuinely enjoy and connect to them than people—especially music critics—give them credit for. They are easy to love. They’re also, perhaps, easier to forget.
The Temper Trap’s distinguishing assets from this set are a falsetto by Dougy Mandagi that suggests he’s studied, if nowhere near mastered, Freddie Mercury, and has done so in the time since their last self-titled album, as difficult a sophomore work as this sort of band can muster. On Thick as Thieves, unsurprisingly, the group returns to the crowd-pleasing likes of Conditions, adding a couple of pop producers—Pascal Gabriel (Marina and the Diamonds, Goldfrapp) and Damian Taylor (the Killers, Björk) and every pop-rock trick in the arsenal. Everything is an anthem. The “Be My Baby” drums show up by track three; a “Boys of Summer” rip by track eight. “Fall Together” adds a drizzle of electronic pitter-patter, but nothing too obtrusive. A generation ago, bands like this might have affected angst, but 2016 calls for a sound far more bright-sided. Even when “Alive” threatens to sully the vibes with talk of taxes and “staring at a screen” (like everyone who deploys this cliché, Temper Trap doesn’t account for the possibility that those screens might transmit something worthwhile), it does so via soaring chorus of “so good to be alive.” It works as irony; it presumably works even better soaked in by sweaty outdoor crowds, its true intended use.
But just like last time around, the Temper Trap are better than all this invariably sounds. It’s easy to be cynical about a record like this, but the Temper Trap are nothing but not earnest; Thick as Thieves never comes off as anything but the exact record the band wants to make, which just happens to fit squarely into alt-rock trends. At their best, they achieve late-’90s VH1 rock heights, which is not such a bad target to hit; the title track is robust and genuinely wistful, and “So Much Sky,” if you ignore the obligatory stadium chant, is optimistic enough to hush any cynic. At their worst, they’re affected and not in an interesting way. (Mangi’s falsetto works more often than it doesn’t, especially when part of arrangement, but left unadorned, as on “Lost,” the vocal timbre suggests someone you wouldn’t ever want to get lost with, at least not alone.) But these are both extremes, on a record otherwise scrupulous to never sound at all extreme.


On his debut mixtape, the British-Gambian rising star breaks away from the UK rap mold and establishes himself as a voice for the marginalized.

Send Them to Coventry

To “send someone to Coventry” is to ostracize them, cast them out, and cut them off. The origins of the phrase are unclear: Most date it to the English Civil War of the 1600s; one writer suggests it’s a reference to being “hanged from a covin tree.” Either way, the gist that lingers is of the post-industrial West Midlands city as an unwelcoming, unforgiving place. On his debut mixtape, Pa Salieu draws a more nuanced picture of his hometown—a place of violence, but light and hope also—and takes his stand for a generation of marginalized young people.
Last October, the British-Gambian 23-year-old had 20 shotgun pellets picked from the back of his head after a drive-by shooting put him in hospital. Three months later, defiant, he unleashed “Frontline,” a taut, wiry slice of UK rap that detailed his brushes with violence growing up in the Hillfields suburb of Coventry. The track promptly blew up—and the industry cogs spun into motion. Salieu toured the UK’s rap radio shows, laid down freestyles, and saw his name appear on line-up after festival line-up.
Send Them to Coventry was originally penciled for early summer, just in time for the live dates. What happened next is, by now, a familiar tale: a delayed release, canceled bookings, and months hunkered down in the studio. The pause, Salieu has since said, was a welcome one. He took the time to develop his craft and to consider new ways of blending his love of Gambian folk music (he frequently cites his auntie, who performs as Chuche Njie and is sampled on “B***K”, as an influence) with his regular teenage rotations of Tupac and Vybz Kartel.
Salieu’s Gambian heritage and embrace of the West African inflections in his speech have made for comparisons with J Hus, but the more relevant association would be the way he’s emerged with his own distinct mode of expression. Salieu flows in the space left by scattered drums and is acutely attentive to not only the meaning of his words, but the sound of them, too. On “My Family,” he trades punchlines and plosives with fellow breakout star Backroad Gee; the track pops and fizzes with a menacing, stop-start energy. Seemingly throwaway lines like “Chitty chitty, bang bang, four-door dinger/Ting go ‘clap’ tryna hit them figures,” manage to squeeze cartoonish references, paper-stacking aspirations, and Salieu’s own real-life trauma into a tight handful of rhythmic syllables. It’s in these deft moments, and his broader artistic flourishes, that Salieu releases himself from the UK rap mold that early admirers have squeezed him into.
Combining elements of dancehall, Afrobeats, hip-hop, and grime are now par for the course in the UK’s saturated rap scene, which can make it difficult to innovate. Pa Salieu makes it look easy. On “Over There,” he bends the pitch of his voice to inhabit a cast of characters and skips from trap trills to baile breakdowns without missing a beat. “Betty” packs all the lyrical braggadocio of road rap, but the track’s lean, skittish drum rolls, and Salieu’s playful delivery—dancing between a half-sung flow and full-throated proclamation—round off the sharp edges and transform it into something else entirely. On “More Paper,” he mourns the death of his best friend over gentle rimshots and a synth line that could have been lifted from Clint Mansell’s score for Black Mirror’s “San Junipero.” He channels Youssou N’Dour’s rich harmonies on “Flip, Repeat”; the offbeat stabs of “No Warnin’” and picked guitar on “Block Boy” nod to canonical West African pop.
This is an extraordinarily assured first offering from a young artist capable of surprising at every turn. The result is not so much a foreboding portrait of a forgotten, boom-and-bust city, but an invitation to a place and people unduly ignored—and an introduction to an artist who won’t be. Not so much sent to Coventry, then, as visiting voluntarily.

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The Chicago musician celebrates idealism on an album of vivid, jubilant art pop that refuses to be pinned down.

Diagnosis

When Sen Morimoto tried to swallow the sobering realities of pursuing music as a full-time job, he almost quit songwriting entirely. The Chicago multi-instrumentalist was keenly aware that the industry thrives on exploitation—of trauma, identity, and naivete, to start—to sell records. Loath to conform to capitalist models but aware that concessions must be made, Morimoto found himself overwhelmed and undervalued, navigating a confusing balancing act of caring deeply and learning when not to. On his third album, Diagnosis, he abandons that tightrope walk with one big trust fall—into the arms of his collaborators, his ideals, and, ultimately, a more unguarded version of himself.
Diagnosis sounds both liberated and stressed—but then, Morimoto’s music has never been reducible to a single sound or mood. Born in Kyoto and raised in Massachusetts, he grew up studying jazz before trying out hip-hop and playing in punk bands. In his solo music, he alternates between crooning and rapping while juggling guitar, saxophone, synths, drum programming, and Wurlitzer, among other instruments. Previously, he dreamed up songs with acid jazz, doo-wop harmonies, and lo-fi beats while scrubbing plates as a dishwasher. Now, after quitting that job to focus on music, Morimoto restructures those impulses into breathable grooves with jazz flourishes and slow songs built around romantic rhythm sections.
For a self-proclaimed anti-capitalist like Morimoto, the hardest part of pursuing a music career is accepting the need to play the game. He’s found new ways to rethink his values without sacrificing intent, like starting a podcast to confront “industry bullshit”; after five years of self-releasing on his own label, Sooper Records, he has partnered with City Slang to bring out Diagnosis. He works through his ambivalence on “Diagnosis,” a mutating pop-rap ode to the Catch-22 of participating in a system you’re fighting against. Facing down the businesses and politicians that offer a false choice between money or life, he shouts a warning loud enough to wake someone from a daze: “Don’t let them choose/They won’t think twice.”
And when he tries to go with the flow, the doubt sinks in anyway. “When it was real, how did you know?” Morimoto asks in “Pressure on the Pulse,” imposter syndrome biting at his heels. He rifles through trash cans for an established artist’s checklist to success: Which pen did they use? How do they tie lyrics into a bow? Most importantly, what transforms a person who makes art into an artist? In “Surrender,” he manipulates moods to illustrate the battle of head versus heart. Morimoto spits out each word in the phrase, “Please don’t give up now,” while manic keys spiral out of control. When backup vocalists coo, “It’s killing me,” their voices warm and satiny, a single saxophone note oozes seductively beneath like a siren song.
As on his self-titled album from 2020, Morimoto navigates the growth process best when he rotates his anxieties and paranoia until they lock into place as upbeat songs. Lines that could read as scolding or resigned become downright jovial in the context of “Bad State,” a burst of light guitar and sparse funk rhythms, like an indie Bruno Mars. He sounds cozy lamenting his numbness on the stripped-down “Feel Change,” with its autumnal guitar and angelic vocals; “What You Say” uses tight drumming and Radiohead-esque guitar arpeggios to regulate his compulsive overthinking. Friends and collaborators from Chicago’s local music scene—drummer Ryan Person, bassist Michael Cantella, and vocalists KAINA and NNAMDÏ, among others—offer a sense of security; their presence suggests that while there’s no easy answer to ethically navigating a career, staying grounded in your community is the next best bet for sanity.
Morimoto’s strongest skill is his meticulous production, which makes commonplace instruments like synthesizers or saxophone sound unique to him. Throughout his discography, he’s carved out a distinctly plumy sound—one that pulses softly and hypnotically, like an LED light strip rotating through the color spectrum. When “If the Answer Isn’t Love” swerves through blown-out horns and thick grooves, you immediately recognize it as Morimoto’s work, the same way a fellow overlooked producer, Sufjan Stevens, uses hyper-soft banjo plucks or fluttering piano to make familiar instruments sound like one-of-a-kind models reserved for his inventory. The strength of Morimoto’s production on Diagnosis speaks to the fact that while surrendering control is a worthwhile exercise for self-growth, so is refusing to abandon the gut instincts that got you this far.


The art-sleaze of Alex Cameron’s second album transcends its surface-level smarm to become a biting piece of commentary. Thankfully, the songs are as effortlessly catchy as they are eminently creepy.

Forced Witness

Alex Cameron is a sleazeball. Or rather, “Alex Cameron” is a sleazeball. On his 2016 debut, Jumping the Shark, the Australian raconteur presented himself as a lounge-lizard lecher best described by a line from the song “Real Bad Lookin’”: “I am the dumbest richest guy at the bar.” He was a Neil Hamburger who delivered skeezy synth-pop come-ons, instead of bad one-liners, a one-man Suicide playing for the passed-out drunks under the flickering neon beer-logo signage at Trader Vic’s. The fake wrinkles Cameron applied to his face to get into character effectively put the air quotes around the enterprise.
But on his second album, Forced Witness, Cameron has cleaned up his act—aesthetically, at least. He’s no longer reaching for the makeup kit or hiding behind a masquerade. With the help of his sax-wielding accomplice Roy Molloy, producer Jonathan Rado, and a collaboration with Brandon Flowers, he’s upgraded his sound from chintzy pawn-shop synth presets to a luxurious, widescreen presentation that channels the plushest ’80s pop. And we’re not talking eternally fashionable influences like New Order and Depeche Mode, but the sort of slick MOR schlock you might hear between John Waite’s “Missing You” and John Parr’s “St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion)” on a dentist’s office playlist.
He’s also raising his voice beyond above the first album’s disaffected, dead-cool murmur, investing it with chest-pumping passion, and projecting it to the cheap seats. Where Cameron once played a ham, now he’s practically Meat Loaf—and in its most resplendent, sax-smoothed moments, Forced Witness comes on like Destroyer’s Kaputt if its guiding light was Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell instead of Roxy Music’s Avalon. But all that surface radiance ultimately serves to shine a harsh, unforgiving light on the ugliest of creatures: the modern, macho alpha male—and, by extension, the desperate, delusional dudes who aspire to that ideal.
There are ten songs on Forced Witness, and each of them is sung by a complete asshole. These guys casually refer to women as “pussy” and adopt usernames like “Studmuffin96,” while the instant availability of internet porn has rendered them incapable of sustaining actual IRL romantic relationships. As such, Cameron’s cocaine-dusted musical arrangements inflate these losers with so much false bravado, they’re liable to burst. When your hear his shameless characters engage in dick-swinging contests over the glistening electric-piano chords of “Country Figs” or the bongo-powered disco of “The Chihuahua,” it’s almost like Patrick Bateman’s Phil Collins fetish in American Psycho: shiny, plastic pop that holds a mirror up to its subjects’ empty souls.
Like the internet-porn addictions that afflict many of its inhabitants the cheap thrills of Forced Witness can spiral into discomfiting despair (particularly when one computer-bound Romeo says, “I’m waiting for my lover, she’s almost 17!”). But the album displays a pop prowess that Cameron’s debut only hinted at—these songs are as effortlessly catchy as they are eminently creepy. And Cameron’s songwriting has only turned more acerbic and outrageous. He didn’t need to adopt any costumed persona to deliver these songs; the awful behavior chronicled within speaks for itself. The couch-surfing cad on “Country Figs” blithely declares, “The worst part about being homeless is waking up from a dirty wet dream/ With a lap full of cum and a head full of steam.” And while his dazzling duet with Angel Olsen on “Stranger’s Kiss” assumes the form of a soft-focus, heart-pounding, ’80s-soundtrack ballad, it’s ultimately a love song populated by a guy whose idea of pillow talk is: “I got shat on by an eagle, baby/Now I’m king of the neighbourhood, and it feels like I could/Just peel the gym pants off a single mother.”
But Cameron saves his most damning caricature for the sprightly, synth-jabbed “Marlon Brando,” whose narrator spots the woman of his dreams with another guy—and can barely suppress his desire to kick the shit out of him. “I tell you something sister, I’m feeling mighty fine,” Cameron sings to her, “You tell that little faggot, ‘Call me “faggot” one more time…’” It’s a line that would seem wantonly hateful if it wasn’t coming through the voice of a man who is so cowardly and insecure, he has to deliver his threats through a third party. In the end, he reveals, he just wants someone “to say that my hair looks nice and my face has a Beckham-like quality.”
In moments like that, the line between Cameron and his characters can start to blur—after all, the singer’s face actually has a Beckham-like quality. And more importantly, they illustrate that these people aren’t lacking for self-awareness—like the subject of “True Lies” who’s in a happy, committed relationship, yet admits he’d rather jerk off to “this woman on the internet/Even if she’s some Nigerian guy.” But rather than invest these sad creatures with sympathy and humanity, these confessional turns ultimately render them more monstrous. As Forced Witness forces us to see, the most despicable thing about these bros isn’t that they’re total pigs—it’s that they know it and refuse to do anything about it.


Matador and Pavement follow their 2xCD expanded reissues of Slanted and Enchanted and Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain with a deluxe Wowee Zowee package that includes B-sides rounding out the first disc, and a second CD of outtakes, radio shots, live songs, and compilation tracks.

Pavement: Wowee Zowee: Sordid Sentinels Edition

Wowee Zowee: Sordid Sentinels Edition

Stephen Malkmus writes in the liner notes of the expanded 2xCD reissue of Wowee Zowee that many of his friends like this Pavement record best. In 2006, that's not a crazy notion: Wowee Zowee was Pavement's White Album, a little bit of everything thrown together, and as with the Beatles' double, its adherents prefer the band at its loosest, funniest, and most willing to do whatever pops into their heads.
But I wonder what S.M.'s friends thought when WZ was released in April 1995. Press reviews at the time were mixed, and a lot of Pavement fans were disappointed. After the faintly commercial move of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, with its alt-rock hit single and coherent set of fully realized songs, Wowee Zowee seemed a retreat, a record that took the slacker ethos to heart and didn't bother much with songwriting. It possessed none of the key virtues of their first two full-lengths. Slanted and Enchanted, like the singles that preceded it, was unfocused but filled with mystery, a cloudy shape outlining a great band in the process of becoming. And CR, CR was clear and direct, bursting with melody, the sound of vast potential and supreme confidence fully realized. But Wowee Zowee was scattered, jokey, maybe even trivial; the band had tipped its hand and some were seeing a bluff.
But further listens and passing time improved the sound of Wowee Zowee. The original A, stretching from "We Dance" to "Serpentine Pad", may be the best album side they ever managed. And the strangely effective construction of Malkmus' songs bring to mind a question that wasn't asked the first time around: What if he wasn't screwing around, but instead was bored with where he'd been and looking for a new songwriting language? He found one, at any rate, and it all centered on his guitar. Malkmus never played better than he did here, though he didn't solo much. Instead, he let the guitar serve as the duet partner that Spiral Stairs never was, using breathtakingly melodic lines to serve as a chorus of sorts on "Black Out", "Grounded", "Pueblo", and "Flux=Rad"; all have a guitar part at their center in a place where another songwriter might have put a vocal hook.
The best songs on Wowee Zowee are slower and more meandering than what came before, and only give a passing glance to things like chorus, bridge, or meaning. As far as the latter, Malkmus was obviously picking words mostly by how they sounded, which by and large worked out great. An occasional line pops out and you're not sure if it's great or terrible-- "Pick out some Brazilian nuts for your engagement/ Check the expiration date, man, it's later than you think" from "We Dance" springs to mind, sung in a faux-Brit accent reminiscent of the Frogs-- but you wind up remembering those phrases, and the melodies in which they're wedged.
There are a few throwaways-- don't have much use for "Extradition", "Fight this Generation", and "Western Homes"-- but such goofs were part and parcel with Pavement, at least up to this point. Their final two records would contain only fleshed-out songs and are accordingly less favored by fans. Wowee Zowee was also the first and only time Spiral Stairs had a song ("Kennel District") that, though much more conventional, was every bit as good as anything Malkmus managed.
As with the reissues of their first two records, this edition of Wowee Zowee comes with non-album B-sides rounding out the first disc, and a second CD of outtakes, radio shots, live songs, and compilation tracks. With the main album including an additional half-dozen songs compared to its predecessors, the quality of the B-sides is suspect compared to previous Pavement reissues-- though "Kriss Kraft" and "Mussle Rock (Is a Horse in Transition)" (the second best song Spiral Stairs ever wrote) are easily good enough to fit on the album proper, and the entire Pacific Trim EP borders on great.
Disc 2 is a tougher slog. Some of the compilation tracks are good-- "Sensitive Euro Man" from the I Shot Andy Warhol soundtrack has an easy tunefulness, and "No More Kings" from the Schoolhouse Rock! Rocks compilation reveals Pavement as the primo interpreters of Generation X arcana, making the educational cartoon song sound like something the band wrote, thick with a playful sense of nostalgia. But I can't imagine why anyone would prefer alternative versions of songs like "Kris Kraft", "I Love Perth" (both live in BBC studios), "Heaven Is a Truck", or "Best Friend's Arm" (live in Australia). But these misses are keeping, I suppose, with the spirit of Matador's ambitious reissue project, so we have to take the bad with the good. And when you're talking Pavement in 1995 and 1996, there's no question, you're talking very, very good.


Black Lips are no strangers to A-list producers, having worked with Mark Ronson on Arabia Mountain. Here they team with Patrick Carney of Black Keys for over half the tracks, with decidedly mixed results.

Underneath the Rainbow

Black Lips defined themselves early on with riveting music that breathed new life into garage rock. So let’s just get this out of the way: 2005’s Let It Bloom is still their best album. That’s not meant as a slight to their later work, but rather an acknowledgement of just how thrilling the early, ragged material could be: the way they screamed just after the intro of “Not a Problem”; their hypnotizing, fluid cover of Jacques Dutronc’s “Hippie, Hippie, Hoorah”; the swooning, filth-caked ballad “Dirty Hands”. Everything on that LP was well-written and performed in a way that was exciting and distinctive. Before they had crowds freaking out to “Bad Kids” and “O Katrina!”, these songs anchored their shows (as captured on their great live album Los Valientes del Mundo Nuevo).
Even as they cleaned up their sound, Black Lips’ best records since have kept the same grit, glam, and grime they had at the beginning. Mark Ronson’s production on Arabia Mountain‘s “Family Tree”, for example, had a vintage, musty record store atmosphere to it, with saxophones and arrangements that made them sound like they were auditioning to be Rufus Thomas’ backing band. With Ronson, they proved that their unrefined songs could still hit with an A-list producer. So the fact that they recorded in Nashville with the Black Keys’ Patrick Carney on seven of Underneath the Rainbow’s 12 tracks isn’t something to dismiss out of hand.
But another producer is responsible for the album’s best songs. Four tracks were recorded in New York with Tom Brenneck, who worked with the band on Arabia Mountain and played guitar for Sharon Jones, Amy Winehouse, Cee-Lo Green, and others. “Smiling”, a song about spending the night in jail, is the first in a run of Brenneck-recorded highlights. It was originally intended to be about Gucci Mane, but, thankfully, Jared Swilley had the sense to to base it on his own experience behind bars. He sings about pissing in a cup, not being able to sleep because of the fluorescent lights, and sharing old Newports, and the details, when added to the song’s sunny and catchy melody, lend a grinning, toothless charm, not unlike what they exuded on “Dirty Hands”. Brenneck also oversees “Make You Mine”, the expertly crafted power pop song co-written with Mastodon’s Brent Hinds, and “Funny”, which features what are probably the album’s dumbest lyrics (“come suck some milk from my titties”) and a careeningly tenuous vocal performance from Cole Alexander. Here, the band find their old fire, juvenile as it may be.
The Carney material, by contrast, is hit and miss, to say the least. The twee romp “I Don’t Wanna Go Home”, co-written by soul singer Curtis Harding, and “Dog Years”, which was penned with Bradford Cox, are highlights. But other Carney-helmed tracks are utterly faceless, which, for a band with Black Lips’ reputation, is unacceptable. The vocals in “Dorner Party”, “Justice After All”, and “Waiting” are stiff and generic, aiming for a sort of new wave affectation that doesn’t work. Individuality has been sanded away. Since the the lyrics are uncharacteristically tepid, blame can't be solely attributed to Carney, but it is worth noting that until the Lips’ vocals come in, the stomp of “Dandelion Dust” could easily be mistaken for a Keys track.
The album’s centerpiece “Boys in the Wood”, a slow, Southern-rock-tinged song recorded with Brenneck, was the record’s first single. Heard in isolation, it didn’t work, but it sounds great in the context of Underneath the Rainbow. Coming after a dull patch, it’s a sudden injection of life, with a thoughtful and well-paced arrangement. Unlike the Steve Mackay-style sax on Arabia Mountain’s “Mad Dog”, the Budos Band’s horns on this one recall Allen Toussaint’s arrangements for the Band’s Rock of Ages—Southern rock songs emboldened by soulful brass. Counter to the album as a whole, it’s proof that Black Lips can step outside their comfort zone, craft an ambitious song, and still sound like themselves.


This vinyl release compiles the germinal recordings of D.C. punks Priests, originally out on tape via their own Sister Polygon label. It shows the band’s sense of purpose was intact from the start.

Early Recordings

A mere week after forming, the Washington D.C. band Priests sought physical proof of their existence. The group was a trio then—drummer Daniele Daniele, vocalist Katie Alice Greer, guitarist G.L. Jaguar—and they headed to a basement in Maryland to record their first four songs, which would become 2011’s Tape 1. “I was very eager to have evidence of the band exist for myself, because I didn’t know how long it would last, and I wanted to make music more than anything,” Greer explained. Six years later, now a quartet, Priests have come a long way. Following 2014’s overtly political Bodies and Control and Money and Power EP, they released their debut LP earlier this year and it was a huge achievement, exploring new sounds (R&B, glam pop, classical) as well as personal vulnerability. The road has been rocky, but Priests have survived.
Their sound has expanded, but the newly-released Early Recordings, compiling their first two cassettes, shows that Priests’ sense of purpose was intact from the start. Their proximity to their influences cannot be overlooked. Jaguar grew up embedded in the D.C. scene where he saw influential punk bands like Fugazi, Black Eyes, and Quixotic and attended political actions against the Bush presidency. Greer has played in the legendary Ian Svenonius’ Chain and the Gang, who insert a kitschy playfulness onto a punk philosophy. All of these elements come into play as Priests infuse the hardcore pummel and DIY ethics of their city with new life.
Priests’ first ever song was “Diet Coke,” a shrieking satirization of product placement. Greer sounds like an over-caffeinated cheerleader as she chants the names of products, while Jaguar coins his soon-to-be signature chordless rockabilly riff and Daniele threatens to splinter the floor with her drumming. The venomous guitar in “Cobra” sounds ready to bite your head off, as does Greer’s spiteful sneer. “Talking,” on the other hand, resembles Nothing Feels Natural’s contemplative title track thanks to its pensive beginning. But when Daniele’s sticks count off and Greer’s vocals kick in, the song suddenly evokes a wistful Beat Happening track. “Let’s talk about the nature of a classroom/Let’s talk about rewarding complicity,” Greer wails, weaving together conceptual and visceral collaboration; “The world is not so black and white,” she sings later on “The World.”
In 2012, while Greer was on tour with Chain and the Gang, Daniele and Jaguar befriended Taylor Mulitz, who became the band’s bassist. That same year, the members of Priests formed a label called Sister Polygon to put out their own records and those of their extended network (Snail Mail, Downtown Boys, and Sneaks among them). 2013’s Tape Two was the fourth of these releases. After two years of touring and the addition of Mulitz, Priests’ ideas coalesced. Jaguar made an effort to distance his playing from that of the bands he had grown up seeing—on Tape Two, he avoids traditional chords in exchange for minimal, single notes that sounds angular, twangy, and surfy.
Tape Two opens with the fiery “Leave Me Alone,” a callout track inspired by Bush Tetras’ “Too Many Creeps.” “You wanna know what I think? I think you look like a creep!” Greer barks, the scratch in her voice revealing just the slightest trace of fatigue. The bouncy Daniele-led “Say No” exudes sensuality, punctuated by shouts and groans. In the penultimate track “Twelve,” chants of “talking protesting demonstrating” turns a subdued meditation into a one liner: “But then someone said ‘We can’t have a revolution that responds to any of these things.’” The spoken-word piece “USA (Incantations)” exposes an inherent inequality in the U.S. that goes all the way back to the signing of the Constitution. “Unless you are a rich, land-owning, cisgender, heterosexual white man-man-man through and through, things were always bad for you here,” Greer chirps.
Greer speaks often on the use of pop culture as a weapon, as a means of subversion, and as a pervasive form of communication. The brilliant “Lana” uses the Born to Die singer as a means of examining the perception of female celebrity, beauty, and performativity. “Women who are beautiful by societal standards in a place of power often elicit that kind of backlash,” Greer said, referring to the constant criticism of Del Rey’s relationship with the male gaze. The Daniele-penned and sung “Watch You (Alternate Mix)” further continues to explore gender and objectification. We tend to consider scopophilia, or the pleasure gained from the gaze, in terms of the subject; “Watch You” explores the spectator or performer’s pleasure in looking at the audience. “I’m a pervert, I’ve got the gaze,” Daniele taunts, all exaggerated braggadocio. The song sounds purposefully creepy thanks to slick strings, a greasy riff, and drums that sound metallic.
Although they waited six years to release a full-length, Early Recordings illustrates that even in their earliest days, Priests were pushing themselves and the audience they earned. It was only with Nothing Feels Natural that Priests found emotional harmony in their discord, but on tapes 1 and Two, they were beginning to examine and searingly critique the social and political systems around them. “Time waits for no one,” playwright and intellectual Lillian Hellman is quoted as saying in a Tape Two song named for her. Early Recordings proves that Priests took the sentiment to heart.


Built to Spill arrest their 2000s slide with the unexpected There Is No Enemy, their best album in years.

There Is No Enemy

In the 1990s, they produced some of the most ambitious and resonant indie rock ever made, but in the 2000s, Built to Spill seemed content with merely existing. Following the high-water marks of Perfect From Now On and Keep It Like a Secret, they went into a sort of low-grade creative hibernation, issuing records every three or four years containing a few flashes of genuine inspiration ("Strange", "Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss", "Goin' Against Your Mind") surrounded by increasingly aimless jamming. Doug Martsch, the lead singer, guitarist, and creative force behind the band, was beginning to sound like a guy with nothing particularly important left to tell us-- we could stick around, if we wanted, to hear him play his guitar, but the lack of purpose was disconcerting. "Something is wrong/ Something invisible is gone," Martsch crooned on Ancient Melodies of the Future's "The Host", and with each successive release, it was hard not to revisit their earlier work in attempts to puzzle out anew what that "something" was.
On the unexpectedly terrific There Is No Enemy, it becomes immediately clear what had been missing, and sure enough, it was invisible: While Enemy technically sounds just like every Built to Spill record since Keep It Like a Secret-- the pinwheeling guitar fantasias, the ambling tempos, and the wayward vocal lines are all here-- it is buoyed by a fresh sense of emotional stakes, an urgency that puts wind back in the band's sails. For the first time in almost 10 years, it seems that Martsch might actually have something he wants to say.
"Saying something," of course, is always a loaded concept with regard to Doug Martsch: He has spent years telling every interviewer who asks that his lyrics contain no personal meaning, that they are chosen more for their meter and suggestiveness than anything else. Ironically, he often seems to be pondering the impossibility of clear communication: "This strange sound you said I said/ You're not listening or I'm not saying it right," he fretted on "Strange". "If there's a word for you, it doesn't mean anything," he insisted on Perfect From Now On's "Velvet Waltz".
All of this misdirection only makes the disarmingly candid, even open-hearted tone of There Is No Enemy more startling. Whether or not the words carry personal weight, Martsch is singing convincingly from the perspective of someone thoroughly humbled by loss. "Like anyone assuming they know what makes us tick, I was just as wrong as I could be," he shrugs on "Tomorrow". His shit-eating grin is almost visible when he sings "Finally decided, and by decide I mean accept/ I won't need all those other chances I won't get" on "Life's a Dream". The loss, of course, remains unspecified-- the only clue we get is "Pat", which eulogizes a lost friend-- but its impact can be felt everywhere on Enemy. "Good Ol' Boredom" celebrates the arrival of its titular emotional state as a sign that life is returning to normal, a place where "not so bad/ Seems so great." On the wounded, fragile ballad "Things Fall Apart", meanwhile, Martsch sings "Stay out of my nightmares, stay out of my dreams/ You're not even welcome in my memories" in a subdued mutter before delivering a simple, devastating clincher: "It doesn't matter if you're good or smart-- goddammit, things fall apart." The inspiration for this sentiment could have come from any number of places-- in the press run-up to this album, Martsch mentioned being influenced by soul music, for example-- but it rings with powerful truth regardless, and produces very real goosebumps.
In this context, even their well-worn and comfortable indie jamming feels revitalized. The core lineup of Martsch, Brett Nelson, and Scott Plouf remains unchanged, and they produce the same sound: a majestic, heavy-footed thud, held aloft by Martsch's transcendent guitar work and weightless tenor. But within this framework, they are pushing harder than ever before: witness the cooing "ooh-la-la" backup harmonies in "Life's a Dream", or the outbreak of horn charts at the song's bridge. Three-quarters of the way into "Things Fall Apart", a mariachi trumpet wanders in, seemingly from a Calexico album. "Pat", meanwhile, is a blistering, two-and-a-half-minute burst of anger that hearkens back to Martsch's days in Treepeople. But even the straightforward Built to Spill songs are some of the best ones we've heard in a long time: "Nowhere Lullabye" and "Life's a Dream" are two of the most gorgeously dreamy ballads Martsch has written since "Else" or "Kicked It in the Sun", and on "Good Ol' Boredom", when Martsch finally fires up his shimmering, multihued guitar, the following extended solo workout feels both thrilling and earned. The end result is easily the best Built to Spill album of the decade-- an improbable late-career reawakening and heartening evidence that becoming dependable doesn't mean having to settle for being predictable.


Using a soft instrumental palette of Mellotron and keyboards, Canadian minimalist composer Sarah Davachi welcomes listeners into her fortress of solitude.

Antiphonals

Sarah Davachi builds temples out of tone. Throughout the past decade, the prolific Canadian minimalist composer has used repetition, silence, and duration to create secular drone music imbued with feelings of religious reverence. Antiphonals’ soft instrumental palette of Mellotron, synthesizer, organs, piano, and harpsichord offers a restrained counterpart to Davachi’s previous release, the towering 80-minute Cantus, Descant, recorded on ancient church organs during her international travels. Yet no matter what tools are at her disposal, every project treats music as a space to become comfortably suspended inside. “I just like to be cocooned by sound,” Davachi has said.
After studying piano into her late teenage years, Davachi developed an approach to composition that continues to shape the mournful medieval drones of Antiphonals. Her earliest works created new pieces out of abstracted elements of Frédéric Chopin’s music, isolating what she called “the most lachrymose harmonies or chord progressions.” During her studies at Oakland’s Mills College several years later, Davachi discovered the music of minimalist godfather La Monte Young, whose 90-minute piece The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer opened her to the possibilities of sound that demands total immersion. Traces of Young’s influence can still be heard in Antiphonals’ most patient passages, such as “Magdalena” or “Border of Mind.” Yet compared to the blaring intensity of The Second Dream’s eight muted trumpets, Davachi’s Mellotron French horn and oboe are positively soothing.
Throughout Antiphonals, Davachi smooths out recognizable elements until they blur into the sonic landscape. Compared to the orchestral ensemble recordings of earlier albums like 2018’s Gave in Rest, these eight songs sound subdued and solitary. However, there are moments when individual instruments receive a moment in the spotlight. “Chorus Scene” uses harpsichord tuned to meantone temperament to suggest time traveling to a 16th century concert hall. The sparse piano of “Abeyant” could initially be mistaken for what Erik Satie described as “furniture music,” but it eventually evaporates from a solid form into a shimmering vapor. “Gradual of Image” begins with beautiful nylon-string guitar sounds from the Mellotron, then introduces a haunting melody reminiscent of “Chant for Your Dragon King” by Syrinx, a fellow Canadian group who conjured musical fantasias with a regal grace.
While every one of Davachi’s albums is constructed from different instrumental building blocks, she considers Antiphonals to be a spiritual sequel to 2018’s Let Night Come on Bells End the Day. Both releases were recorded primarily on Mellotron and electric organ, and both display a meditative approach that contrasts with some of her more majestic compositions. There is nothing like Cantus, Descant’s “Play the Ghost,” a song inspired by Black Sabbath’s “Planet Caravan”; fans will have to keep waiting to hear the full album in that style she has teased in interviews. For now, Davachi welcomes listeners into her quiet fortress of solitude, where they can cast aside the stresses of a chaotic world and worship at the altar of pure vibration.

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On his latest album, the Canadian psych-pop auteur expresses something deeply solitary in his music, a textured and overgrown world of the mind.

Sundry Rock Song Stock

Across Sundry Rock Song Stock, Yves Jarvis’ voice rarely if ever appears alone. The 23-year-old psych-pop auteur almost always layers his vocal takes, appearing in double, triple, sextuple, nonuple, it’s hard to say. These are not immaculate choir-of-one harmonies in the mold of Brian Wilson, but slurry, unpredictable masses, drifting in and out of verbal intelligibility and strict meter, clinging like kudzu to the trunks and branches of the songs they populate. Despite their multifarious abundance and the breezy amiability of the musical settings, these voices do not give Sundry Rock Song Stock the feeling of a communal affair. Instead, they suggest that Jarvis—who performed every instrument on the album, mixed it, and painted the fractured self-portrait on the cover—is expressing something deeply solitary, an overgrown world of the mind that we are invited to visit for the length of 10 brief songs before moving on.
Sundry Rock Song Stock is presented as Jarvis’ third album, but the truth is a bit more complicated. Born Jean-Sebastian Audet and raised between Montreal and Calgary, he began street busking in his pre-teens, and releasing self-recorded albums under the name Un Blonde a few years later. On 2014’s Tenet, the first Un Blonde album, Audet sometimes channeled the icy post-punk guitar work of Calgary hometown heroes Women; by 2016’s Good Will Come to You, the last one, he’d arrived at a version of the sensibility he continues to explore today. (Judging by the positioning of Sundry Rock Song Stock as the third Yves Jarvis album, Audet now seems to view Good Will Come to You as the project’s debut.) The album applied post-punk’s deconstructive impulse to the warmhearted sounds of 1970s R&B, folk-rock, and gospel; one 30-second song consists of a single lyric—“I’ve been on my grind so long, it’s hard to know just who I am anymore”—delivered via the rich and mournful sound of a Black church choir, while a lo-fi recording of children playing runs in the background. Naturally, Jarvis sang all the parts himself.
Sundry Rock Song Stock packs a remarkable variety of sounds into its 33 minutes, opening with the percolating cymbals and chime-like Rhodes patterns of Miles Davis circa In a Silent Way and closing with a whispery doo-wop devotional, always dissolving into a pool of bioluminescent synth ambiance or erupting into a racket of clattering samples just as you expect it to gear up for the next chorus. Still, the album retains a sense of holism, refining the collagelike quality of Good Will Come to You and its somber follow-up, last year’s The Same but by Different Means, by foregrounding Jarvis’s softly strummed acoustic guitar and committing thoroughly to his singular vocal approach. At times, Sundry Rock Song Stock recalls the hallucinatory hymns of David Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name or Animal Collective’s Sung Tongs, with the freewheeling ensemble nature of those albums replaced by Jarvis’ painterly top-down vision.
In Jarvis’ vocal arrangements, one version of a particular word or note might slightly outlast another that happens at essentially the same time, creating an uncanny sense of permeability at the borders of the whole. Occasionally, a line emerges with piercing clarity for a few words before plunging back into the tangled vines, as when Jarvis describes himself as “A victim of/the same old stuff/my father was” on “Victim.” His delivery is striking in its languor and offhandedness, a casual reminder of the cold reality that lies just beyond the daydream. “Notch in Your Belt” and “For Props” both seem to address people who align themselves with struggles against oppression for superficial reasons. “Your earned fortune makes you depraved/You can’t empathize or reciprocate/I’m sure your heart’s in the right place/But that’s the way it comes across, like you’re pandering for props,” he sings on the latter, the album’s biggest and brightest song.
Plenty of albums are described as dreamy for the way they drape otherwise conventional songs in pillowy textures and arrangements; Jarvis is the rare songwriter who also follows the logic of dreams within the structures of his compositions. “Epitome,” Sundry Rock Song Stock’s opening track, collapses on itself soon after Jarvis delivers one of the album’s most rousing melodies, never to be repeated. “In Every Mountain,” the following track, builds patiently toward a majestic windswept vista, then falls almost immediately back to the bottom of the hill, and begins the process again, and again, and then it’s over. “Emerald” subjects its own sweetly ascending melody to disorienting reharmonizations as it fades out, like viewing the tune through a kaleidoscope. The effect of these misdirections is often wondrous, but they can also give the sense of the album retreating from its own pleasures.
Jarvis has said that he sees himself as a producer primarily, and cited the influence of prog rock bands like Yes and King Crimson on Sundry Rock Song Stock, for the way their music is “not really songwriting,” but more like “a room that you can walk into and then out of.” If Sundry Rock Song Stock falls just short of being a masterwork, it’s because Jarvis occasionally seems to undermine his own songwriting ability—evident in the quiet compositional heft of “For Props,” “Victim,” and “Semula”—avoiding traditional development in favor of tugging you from one hallucinatory tableau to the next. But such a critique feels practically beside the point for an album so profusely inventive, so alive to the possibilities of sound itself.

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After four years, Broken Social scenester Emily Haines' primary band finally releases a set of new material.

Fantasies

It's been close to four years since Emily Haines' Metric released a new album-- their 2007 effort was actually just the long-delayed release of their shelved 2001 debut. In the meantime, Broken Social Scenester Haines, the baby-voiced heart and soul of the band, recorded and released an intimate solo album and its companion EP. Those solemn, torch song-like collections stripped her of Metric's new wave gloss, exposing raw nerves and more seasoned vocals. Guitarist James Shaw toured with BSS, allowing him to stretch his riffs beyond Metric's rudimentary pop chug. (He also expanded his sonic palette by producing the Lovely Feathers' debut.) And Metric's rhythm section became Bang Lime, a dance-y post-punk duo that picked up where Metric left off on Live It Out, leaving behind keyboards to mine rock riffage from candy-coated confections. So when the foursome finally reunited last year, they had grown beyond the charming borders of their pop sound, and their fourth album is all the better for it.
Though Shaw's more nuanced guitars have supplanted synthesizers as the focal instrument, the change in aesthetic still seems credited to Haines. The newfound vulnerability and gravitas she explored on her solo work has found its way onto Fantasies, though instead of dark, death-obsessed sentiments, there is a dreamy quality here that eschews the vague, easy rhymes and lyrical polemics of past Metric records in favor of romance and sex.
Metric are often compared to fellow BSS satellite Stars, but while that band's Amy Millan and Torquil Campbell get soggy on their slower moments, Haines embraces more personal sentiments on ballads "Blindness" and "Collect Call", whose stripped-down, twinkly arrangements keep Metric's glam side intact yet cut the inessential sugar and bombast. Further embracing their moody, minimal instincts on "Twilight Galaxy" created one of Fantasies' standouts.
In the end however, Fantasies' other crowd-pleasers are, unsurprisingly, songs with big hooks, bursting choruses, and slick synths-- "Help I'm Alive" and "Sick Muse". The story here though is the album's simmering, intimate moments-- and despite the fanbase-building qualities of their new-wave past, the more the group embraces an inky, ambient future, the better it  could get.


These two brief EPs from ambient-leaning producer Matthew Cooper are a mix of old and new tracks, remixes, and video.

Eluvium: Leaves Eclipse the Light / The Motion Makes Me Last

A lot of Eluvium's music is really good, especially the album Copia, where he struck a majestic balance between his ambient and quasi-classical styles-- a mixture he'd been perfecting over nearly a decade's worth of releases. And it's not hard to sympathize with the modern musician's need to monetize everything to get by. But with such a slight amount of material to consider on these two new EPs, which are really closer to what used to be called maxi singles, it's natural to pause and consider what our eight dollars plus shipping (each) is actually paying for.
On Leaves Eclipse the Light, it's one standout track from last year's uneven Similes, one lackluster instrumental on ambient autopilot, one capably bloggable Four Tet remix of "The Motion Makes Me Last" that freshens up the original's drizzly climate, and a watch-once video for the same track where buildings and overpasses scroll by slowly against a big sky. Slim pickings indeed. It is a frankly unimaginative package-- it seems like we're mainly subsidizing the pretty cardstock-with-cutouts slipcover, or just financially supporting Eluvium's ongoing career. That's a perfectly valid, even admirable, reason to buy something! But if you come at this strictly as a consumer, there's not much to recommend it.
The Motion Makes Me Last EP is also slight, but features more engaging music and is worth a listen for anyone. The title track was another Similes highlight where Eluvium's bleary singing was perked up by a memorable melody, and Nick Zammuto's very Books-y remix/cover is the most striking thing on either disc. The vocal part gets even hookier in his clear, precise voice, which he places at the very center of the song, breaking down the instrumentation into little whirring mechanisms around it. The two new tracks in between don't innovate, but they deliver the goods. "Crash Deconstructed" serves up a big juicy piano theme, while "Remnant Signals" does something similar in watercolor strokes. Together, they nicely sum up the two modes covered on Copia.
Still, "remnant" seems like it might be a key word here. It's not like Eluvium is out of tricks: Similes, for better and worse, introduced a much poppier feel to his music, and his new Static Nocturne album amplifies nature sounds into something noisier and more violent than we're accustomed to from him, albeit still rooted in sweeping sentimentality. The leftovers and holdbacks on these tarted-up singles aren't charmless, but it's unclear for whom they're intended besides the most ardent supporters and strict completists.


On her second studio album, Dawn Richard proves her mettle as a fiercely independent force in a world dominated by name-dropping and endless collaborations. Goldenheart was largely produced by just one guy, Druski, leaving Richard's epic portrayal of love as war to flourish.

Goldenheart

"Get ready for war," Dawn Richard repeatedly intones on the intro to Goldenheart. She takes love very seriously: For Richard, love has been religion, scripture, an all-changing force to be lamented and celebrated at the same time. On her long-awaited second album, it's full-blown warfare. Goldenheart is the culmination of a fruitful few years for the former Danity Kane and Dirty Money singer: She helped to make Diddy's Last Train to Paris fascinating, released one of last year's most stunning R&B records with the Armor On EP, and worked with Israeli house producer Guy Gerber. Since leaving Diddy's watchful eye in 2010, Richard has proven a fiercely independent force in a world dominated by name-dropping and endless collaboration. Goldenheart is the jewel in her crown.
Richard is the kind of artist who believes in statements, so naturally, she uses the album format as a vehicle for a 16-song, hour-plus opus about the trials of relationships. Real stuff: doubt, power struggles, insurmountable obstacles, and hopeless, life-saving devotion. Richard's subjects are simultaneously mundane and grandiose, transcending usual pop fluff and turning her deeply personal subjects into epic tales of battle and salvation. If that sounds like a bit much, well, it is. But Richard has the personality to prop it all up. Her voice is a ghostly wail halfway between a howl and modern R&B melancholy, effortlessly melismatic (check the Bollywood flourishes on "Return of a Queen"), and capable of making her complex melodies glisten like an iridescent oil slick. On "Gleaux", her processed voice shines as luminous as the sparkling stars the lyrics describe.
Her shimmering vocals are paired with appropriately futuristic-sounding production from close working partner Andrew "Druski" Scott: tight and impressive, yet rarely showy. She's always foregrounded, occasionally leaning on the drums for emphasis as on "Tug of War", (produced by the Fisticuffs), but more often using them as a canvas for her holographic paintings. And, as with most R&B of the past half-decade, Goldenheart heavily incorporates dance music, though Richard's restrained aesthetic holds these tracks back from becoming overblown bangers; "In Your Eyes" folds in the cyan hues of trance without indulging the genre's excesses, resulting in an unusually smooth house track. Even Richard's inevitable attempt at dubstep strikes gold with "Pretty Wicked Things", a pounding industrial foray that literalizes the corruption and deception described in Dawn's lyrics. Though still landing on the more aggro side of the genre, her flirtation with dubstep is more natural than the pop industry's usual taste for the stuff.
Of course, all that "restraint" has an effect-- Goldenheart feels about twice as long as it really is. A collection of 16 mostly midtempo tracks is going to turn tepid any way you look at it. Once you learn your way around the record's labyrinthine path, it's an addictive world, but one that you're more likely to pick and choose highlights from than sit all the way through. If you can, however, it's a grand journey through personal trials and tribulations. Relationships and emotions are presented with striking sagacity-- the incredible "Tug of War" wraps up the conflicted quest for dominance at the expense of another's power in a strident four minutes. Richard's flair for theatricality is unparalleled, and almost exhausting by the end of the album, with at least three possible elegiac endings: the peaceful "Ode To You" and "Break of Dawn" both hint towards resolution.
In the intro to "Warfaire," a hushed Richard mutters "I fight a battle every day, against discouragement and fear... I must forever be on guard." It's a little hammy, sure, but her earnest personality both endears and empowers her work. And Goldenheart is definitively, completely her work; no guest stars and no flashy producers, mostly her and Druski crafting her vision. It's not perfect, but it's closer than you'd expect from someone who just a few years ago was a member of a C-list girl group.