The Drive-By Truckers co-founder's new solo album was inspired by the bleakest part of his personal history. The songs here survey lives marked by alcoholism, loneliness, loss of loved ones, and lessons learned the hard way.

Patterson Hood: Heat Lightning Rumbles in the Distance

Heat Lightning Rumbles in the Distance

Even when he's exhausted, Patterson Hood can't relax. Between tours and album cycles for the last two Drive-By Truckers records, 2010's The Big To-Do and 2011's Go-Go Boots, Hood decided to spend his down time writing a novel. Conceived while he was on the road for To-Do, the book was supposed to be a semi-autobiographical novel about a deeply troubled period in his life back in the early 90s. "I was 27, my band broke up, I got divorced and left my hometown to live in Memphis," Hood writes in the promotional materials for Heat Lightning Rumbles in the Distance. "My car got stolen, our band's truck got stripped and I fell in love. I fell out with my family (who I was very, very close to) and had my heart broken. I seriously pondered killing myself several times but instead wrote literally over 500 songs in a three-year period."
Considering Hood's songwriting prolificacy, it shouldn't come as a surprise that his plans for a book eventually turned into an album. But the songs on Heat Lightning aren't otherwise typical for Hood, as they're drawn more directly from his own life than the character studies and southern noir tales of petty crime and drunken malfeasance that he's known for. Heat Lightning is also more hopeful than much of his work, including his previous solo record, 2009's Murdering Oscar (And Other Love Songs). The songs might be inspired by the bleakest part of Hood's personal history, but he's looking at it from a safe distance, with the perspective of a family man with a much improved station in life.
The album's titular metaphor is reminiscent of "Tornadoes" from 2004's The Dirty South, one of Hood's most unsettling and evocative songs about a twister literally tearing families apart. But the sense of foreboding that exists in the title track is an echo from a far-off past; it exists in a different reality from where the song's protagonist currently stands with his wife and their "babies at our feet" as "the warm summer wind blows" like a salve. And so it goes for many of the low-key rumblers on Heat Lightning: Hood's songs survey lives (or perhaps just "life") marked by alcoholism, loneliness, loss of loved ones, and lessons learned the hard way. But any sadness or desperation on this record is filtered through the reassuring knowledge that these hard times eventually passed.
Heat Lightning, then, is a life-affirming album disguised as a depressing song cycle, with the gut-level power of Hood's best work cut back significantly. It is very much a "home" record by a man who typically makes "road" records, with the noticeable lack of urgency that suggests. Even though Hood recruits several of his cohorts in Drive-By Truckers as backing musicians, and adds ringers like Kelly Hogan and Centro-matic's Will Johnson, there's no mistaking Heat Lightning for anything other than a solo album, and a relatively low-stakes one at that. Hood has assembled a loose narrative connecting the songs, but many of them still sound like unfinished demos, with their rough edges and occasionally under-developed arrangements. "Leaving Time" is a customary guitar strum and clomping drum beat hastily fastened together, which actually works fairly well considering the song is about shoving off from home for a tour. ("Hush little baby, have no fear/ I'm six more tours 'til the end of the year," Hood sings, like he's said it many times before.) The straight-ahead anti-love song "Better Off Without" is more of a throwaway, though it does feature the album's most memorably chunky guitar riff, while "Better Than the Truth" is a jaunty folk-country number that sounds like a mid-afternoon jam concocted over beers and barbecue.
Even the best songs on Heat Lightning-- the pained late-night soul ballad "After the Damage" and the cinematic "12:01", which has a wonderful line about "zombies" crossing county lines to buy liquor in the wee hours of the night-- don't quite measure up to the high standard that Hood established with the Truckers or even the underrated, often brilliant Oscar. It's a placeholder album from a man who has already written 20 songs that are better than the ones here.


Drawing upon her background as a choreographer, the Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter explores the mind-body connection in her serene and dramatic synth music.

The Tipping Scale

A crucial bit of Sarah Kinlaw biography is that she’s a choreographer with an operatically trained voice. She’s become a fixture of the Brooklyn art scene; her best-known project to date is Authority Figure, an interactive dance-performance piece co-created with Monica Mirabile (of experimental dance duo FlucT with Sigrid Lauren), which cemented her as somewhat of a luminary in the milieu. Kinlaw exercised her vocals and songwriting in an art-pop band she had for many years called SOFTSPOT, with Bambara’s Blaze Bateh and Bryan Keller Jr. But when the small experimental tape label Soap Library released her 2017 debut EP as Kinlaw, a trigger for every body—which came with a lemon-jasmine aromatherapy sniffer—it was clear she was much more striking as a solo performer, her sound somewhere between Jenny Hval, FKA twigs, and Cate le Bon.
On Kinlaw’s debut album, The Tipping Scale, she’s incorporated all this experience. As any artist deeply in tune with their body, she’s clearly aware of the ways in which sound has a physical effect, as well as the many sounds our corporeal selves can produce. Kinlaw has a keen ear for texture, which grounds this record. And along with all the humming synths and stuttering beats, she stretches her vocals to great impact.
The way she refers to the creation of this record is almost philosophical: she speaks of vowels and consonants the same way she does melodies and key changes, and calls the making of The Tipping Scale a construction of gestures. She turned the writing of “Permissions” into a “game,” only allowing herself to work on it while she was physically moving: every lyric and melody written “on a bus, in the back of a car, on a plane...while walking or running.” In the song’s excellent video, directed by longtime collaborator and fellow dancer Kathleen Dycaico, she crawls from the wreck of an overturned car and bounds down the middle of the street, as though reclaiming her body, her story, her right to shift and change. This is what The Tipping Scale is about.
If The Tipping Scale is constructed of gestures, shaped and honed from spurts of sound, then it makes sense to think of it as choreography, architecture, and story, all at once. Each song feels like a room on wheels, especially “Haircut” and “Home,” the album’s softest moments, with twinkles, sighs, and echoes giving them a chamber-like quality. “Home is where we put things together,” sings Kinlaw on the latter. The concept of storytelling through the body is key. It is only through memory—intrinsically attached to bodily experience—that one can form a narrative of self. As she intones on “Oleander,” a feathery-crunchy choice cut, “This episode is a new memory collection/A tapestry/The lines weave in and through me/Remembering the time in my house.” She’s on par with Austra, a like-minded operatic synth whiz. It feels like the record’s core, especially when Kinlaw says: “I feel like I’ve got five bodies in mine.” That sense of self is in constant flux, and that’s a beautiful thing.
It’s “Oleander,” “Permissions,” and “Potential Control Freak” that sound most like that somatic, constructed movement Kinlaw describes. On “Potential Control Freak,” Kinlaw sings about time opening wider, obsession, picking at skin, getting “caught in the moment,” with a very misty tone. But the far-away pulsing canter of the beat makes it feel like we are going somewhere, making the motion the point. Because of the force of most of The Tipping Scale, there are a couple of moments (namely “Blindspot” and “There She Is”) that don’t really take us anywhere meaningful. And, though it may be part of Kinlaw’s argument of the nature of the self, evoked through her transportive lyrics and pliable voice, on the whole the album feels like it hasn’t fully reached into its own depths. I’m left craving more variance in structure, more viscera—mostly because I can hear it hiding.

Buy: Rough Trade
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In her latest transformation, Kristin Welchez leaves behind Dee Dee and the Dum Dum Girls for new alter ego Kristin Kontrol, foregoing DDG's garage-band cool for sleek synth pop.

X-Communicate

Up until now, Kristin Welchez was most commonly known as Dee Dee Penny, the alter-ego she adopted to front garage band Dum Dum Girls, who formed in 2008 amidst an ongoing revival of '60s-inspired, wall-of-sound rock groups. While embodying Dee Dee, Welchez's cool was effortless, as all cool should be; she could have been born with crimson lipstick and a glossy pair of Ray-Bans sitting perfectly parallel to her incredible black bangs. Now, she has re-reinvented herself as Kristin Kontrol, and her first solo record *X-Communicate *is a total 180 from her work with DDG, eschewing guitar music for the sleekest synthpop imaginable.
Saying that X-Communicate only takes its strongest moments from '80s pop would be pigeonholing, but it's undeniable that shades of that decade permeate the record from start to finish. The chorus to “Skin Shed” could almost be a lost Kylie Minogue classic, even down to Welchez's vocal delivery, and the backing harmonies on tracks like “Drive the Night” are straight out of Go-Go's/Bangles/Bananarama territory. If Kristin Kontrol ever does truly hit the mainstream, it could be with “What Is Love,” a song that makes use of the trickiest and most show-stopping of '80s songwriting staples—the power ballad—to tremendous effect. Every single moment is accounted for and brought to completion, from the simple piano melodies of the song's beginning to the stadium-anthem finish.
Luckily, X-Communicate avoids superficiality and mimicry by also adding liberal doses of '70s rock and '90s indie and alt-rock, like on “Face 2 Face,” a mid-tempo number that would have easily fit into 120 Minutes rotation circa '96. There are even tinges of contemporary pop where necessary (the saxophones on the impeccable “White Street” could conceivably be described as “Jepsen-esque”). Other than Welchez, there are two notable creative forces behind X-Communicate: producers Kurt Feldman (who fronts synth band Ice Choir and used to be a member of both the Depreciation Guild and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart) and Andrew Miller, who was the Dum Dum Girls' final guitarist. The pair's extensive knowledge of pop production is an instrument in itself, and one that, along with Welchez's well-honed songwriting, lifts X-Communicate far beyond mere revivalism.
The album's title track is the culmination of all these elements, a polished four minutes full of bleating keyboards and driving drum machines that conjure a midnight drive through L.A. It does what pop songs do best: Take a moment and blow it up to its largest possible size for all to enjoy. In any genre, it’s a difficult task to make music for an informed audience that is both referential without being derivative, exciting without cloyness. Yes, X-Communicate could be a better record: It could reach further beyond the sound that defines it; it could work harder to analyze and skewer some of the tropes that end up supporting it. However, sticking the landing on a musical pivot this total is an impressive feat, and ultimately, the album’s minor shortcomings become admissible next to its higher moments. The clear ambition of X-Communicate is to leave Welchez’s old persona behind and emerge, fresh and new, as something completely different, and by and large, that objective is achieved.


While still pointedly political, Neil Young’s latest with Promise of the Real takes a more freewheeling, macro look at the world and becomes more centered than his recent albums.

Neil Young / Promise of the Real: The Visitor

The Visitor

At the age of 72, Neil Young has forgone most of his contemporaries’ chosen tenures. For the most part, he still operates exactly how he has since the 1970s, with new work arriving constantly and chaotically in bursts of inspiration, with little logic dictating what gets released and what doesn’t. Over the last decade, reuniting with Crazy Horse has proven as likely to inspire new music as, say, buying a new car, or hanging out for an afternoon in Jack White’s recording booth. Even if his hit-or-miss ratio has tipped, it’s hard to think of an artist who’s stayed truer to their muse for so long. When visualizing the span of his career, Young landed on the image a messy filing cabinet—cluttered and spilling over with information.
The Visitor, Neil Young’s 39th record, is a sprawling and boundless project. Teaming again with Willie Nelson’s sons Lukas and Micah and their band Promise of the Real, it harkens back to records like 1989’s Freedom, when Young’s wandering interests stood proudly in defiance of cohesion. As evidenced by its first single—the artfully awkward cut-and-paste stomp “Already Great”—The Visitor often plays like Young’s impassioned response to the first year of the Trump administration. The president’s slogans and catchphrases are lobbed back at him in songs like “Already Great” and “When Bad Got Good,” while “Stand Tall” takes aim at a “boy king” who refutes scientific fact to spew hate.
While its topical lyrics stand out, The Visitor isn’t so easily summarized. This is not simply a collection of protest songs, and even its more pointed tracks tend to zoom out, incorporating political observations as stray thoughts, not thesis statements. In the lapping “Almost Always,” Young addresses a “game show host who has to brag and has to boast ’bout tearin’ down the things that I hold dear.” But the mood passes; by the end of the song, he’s urging us to consider instead the mating pattern of birds. If Young’s recent work has felt like a series of hard-headed dives into his pet obsessions—more interesting for simply existing than for actually listening to—then The Visitor is more all-encompassing, and as a result, more centered.
After backing him on 2015’s The Monsanto Years and its semi-live companion album Earth, the members of Promise of the Real seem palpably relieved to no longer be dealing with songs exclusively about food justice. Despite their tendency to ham up every song (contrast Neil’s recent solo rendition of “Stand Tall” with the album version, where his bandmates resort to chanting along with him after certain words), it’s clear that they have a deep reverence for and understanding of his work. One can imagine these twentysomethings are to thank for deep cuts like “Winterlong” and “Western Hero” appearing on recent setlists.
While Young remains hell-bent on moving forward, Promise of the Real are happy to revisit his past glories. They bring back the opening riff from Harvest Moon’s “Unknown Legend” periodically through “Almost Always.” And in the excellent closing track, “Forever,” they transport the haunted chill of his 1974 classic On the Beach to Neil’s current worldview—one that depicts our planet as a “church without a preacher,” where “the people have to pray for themselves.”
That particular song spans ten weary, heart-worn minutes, gliding by with a gentle pulse. That patience lasts the entire record, flowing at an effortless, even pace despite its varying moods. With the exception of a strange meandering vamp about the circus called “Carnival,” genre pastiches—like the bluesy “Diggin’ a Hole”—are mercifully brief, while more fruitful ideas like “Forever” get the space they deserve. Its freewheeling energy highlights two of Young’s greatest strengths: his continuing restlessness and the wisdom that grounds it. The Visitor might not offer any definitive answers to the questions it raises about our planet or our country, but Young seems okay with that. “I’m not gonna work it out right here and right now,” he admits in “Almost Always,” “But I’ll get back to it.” No matter what he returns with, it’s comforting to know we’ve still got him on the case.


John Roberts' pristine and absorbing third LP finds the avant-garde techno producer speaking the language of dance music without actually making much music to dance to.

Plum

In a dance-music scene that regularly churns through phenoms and fads, John Roberts exists as almost a meditative presence. He was once one of those phenoms himself: his 2010 debut, Glass Eights, on the respected and fad-allergic label Dial, was a master class in elegiac deep house. His releases since—including a slept-on follow up, Fences, in 2013—have been sparse. He helped found, and helps run, The Travel Almanac, one of those highfalutin (“the first true post-tourism publication”) but worthwhile periodicals you find at upscale design shops. Last year he opened Brunette Editions, a new label, with the masterful “Orah,” a tricky rhythmic composition that doubled as an exploration of Roberts’ sampler. All of this is to say that Roberts operates with a sense of personal and artistic style that can make it seem like his peers are just out there peddling 12”s.
From this springs Plum, Roberts’ third LP. Like Fences before it, Plum finds Roberts speaking the language of dance music without actually making much music to dance to. You can disassemble these tracks into their constituent synth leads, bass burps, and samples, but the grooves and structures never really come into full view. The sounds pirouette around one another, like polite shoppers trying to dodge one another only to awkwardly mirror movements.
Roberts has evolved from an artist who expertly organized familiar sounds—the staccato piano riffs and boomy kicks of Glass Eights—into an artist whose sounds are uncommon and complex. The origin story of “Orah”—which was stubbornly composed using two MPC 2000 samplers—suggests many of these sounds are borrowed and processed, but Plum never sounds like an album woven out of disparate sources. There is a rich harmonic character to it, but not one you would ever describe as alien or experimental. The whole album just has a pervasive, gentle weirdness to it.
The tracks themselves flap and swing and wig-wag. “Plastic Rash” sounds like someone bought Black Dice a really nice spa package. Tracks like “Dye Tones” and “Glue” are reminiscent of the reinvigorated instrumental grime scene: vague Eastern tonalities, lurching half-time beats. Where those young Londoners sound like they've smoked plenty of plants, Roberts sounds like he's merely pruned them with a bonsai-like intensity. Album opener “Six” is somehow more texture than noise, just a sandy stretch of melody. “Wade,” the most intense moment on an untroubled album, is bright, pulsing synth hurrying through carbonated noise, rushed but not rude.
Roberts wisely keeps these somewhat busy tracks short, but it results in occasional bauble-like frivolity. These pieces are just there, suspended, and then not. To note that Roberts’ other creative endeavor (The Travel Almanac) is also an attractive and considered article without clear utility might unfair, but the thought occurred to me. Sometimes, though, it’s satisfying just to surround yourself with nice things—the unspoken mission statement of those upscale design shops—and Plum is eight nice things whose craftsmanship and ungraspable foreignness function as ends unto themselves.


The bilingual underground New York rapper with the gift of gab has put out many tapes in the last five years, but this might be his goofiest and most affable—it suits him well.

YDFWC?

After dropping 10 records in half as many years, Crimeapple has managed to stay on his grind in hip-hop’s underground without making it seem like a struggle. And while the central premise of his latest LP YDFWC? (You Don’t Fuck With Crime?) suggests an incredulousness at the idea that one might sleep on him—and spends much of its runtime stating his case—he seems genuinely unbothered, as quick to crack a joke at his own expense as he is to flex his rhyming prowess.
Crimeapple’s prolific run kicked off in earnest with a much-buzzed-about “freestyle” on Statik Selektah’s Shade 45 show, a nearly 10-minute lyrical barrage that dissolved any doubts in the room. His sartorial style—loose-fitting hoodies, bald head, and a loud, red beard—is quick to draw skepticism. But those doubts are quickly put to rest the moment he opens his mouth, his smooth delivery and nimble flow honed at countless rap battles, spitting verses peppered with clever one-liners designed to stop you in your tracks.
Born to Colombian parents and raised in northern New Jersey, Crimeapple finds himself, like many Latinos, between worlds. He made a bilingual rap record in Medellín with DJ Muggs (Medallo) but is still seen as an outsider in the country of his birth. Crime knows he’s a gringo (“I’m not Latino enough for Telemundo,” he raps on “Carrington Event”) but still spits in Spanglish. He remains independent—with a distribution deal through the Orchard—and generally seems unconcerned with breaking into the overground, let alone the mainstream. The man just raps really well, and somehow, that’s enough.
That confidence informs a lighthearted air that keeps YDFWC? record from becoming too self-serious. He sticks with some of his go-to producers (Buck Dudley, Brown13), but he mostly avoids the dark and sinister mood of his screed against greed that was Viridi Panem in favor of a smoothed-out vintage R&B vibe. This is Crime at his goofiest and most affable, somehow managing to puff out his chest (“I let you breathe the same air as me/That’s philanthropy”) even when he’s the butt of his own joke (“Chicks on my vas deferens/But I’m no Zac Efron”).
The prime example of Crime’s self-deprecating braggadocio is “Gambler’s Fallacy,” a light romp chock full of sex flexes that opens with a recitation of a mean tweet: “The least believable narrative in underground hip-hop is that Crimeapple is pulling chicks like that.” Amid boasts about dating a Victoria’s Secret model with an eating disorder and a bisexual woman that “rock flannels” and “got the same haircut as Rachel Maddow,” he admits that he wants a woman who will “run her fingers through my back hair” and still loves him even though he wears sweats covered in cat hair.
YDFWC? is not the best Crimeapple record; that honor likely goes to his paean to the Colombian spirit Aguardiente. But it does find the rapper at his most self-assured, a bilingual wordsmith with the gift of gab that’s not above cracking a joke at his own expense. Five years into the game, Crime remains unsigned and unbothered.

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With appearances from MF Doom, Jay Electronica, Madlib, and DJ Premier, the full-length collaborative debut from the rapper and producer is a nostalgic ode to druggy hedonism and classic boom-bap.

Sonnyjim / The Purist: White Girl Wasted

White Girl Wasted

As debut albums go, White Girl Wasted has a particularly auspicious origin story. Brighton-based producer and Daupe! label owner the Purist (Lawrence Lord) and London-via-Birmingham rapper-producer Sonnyjim (Sonny Sathi) had just spent the second weekend of September 2018 completely off their heads at Croatia’s Outlook Festival. Returning home after four days of debauchery in a 19th-century fort, they hit the studio and came up with a doozy of a beat: an airy lo-fi flute sample gliding gently over smooth blaxploitation funk. Sonnyjim laid a verse and nailed it in one take. They thought it sounded like an MF Doom joint, so they sent it over on a whim. Doom responded with a full verse, so they popped a bottle of champagne and sent it to Jay Electronica. In came another verse. By the time Doom got back in touch to licence the track for an Adult Swim compilation, they figured they were sitting on gold. So they kept the track and got to work channelling their creative chemistry into a full-length album.
Four years later we get the duo’s collaborative debut: a nostalgic ode to druggy hedonism and classic boom-bap, set in a gritty ’80s fantasyland populated by St. Tropez models, New York gangsters, Russian boxers, and a bevy of East Coast rap legends. Sonnyjim raps about cooking, dealing, and consuming drugs with laid-back delivery and single-minded devotion. The debauchery is sometimes sinister, sometimes cartoonish, but it provides the perfect backdrop for him to showcase his eye for quotables and his lethal nonchalance. “I’m Rick James rockin’ Slick Rick chains,” he raps on “Doc Ellis.” Elsewhere, he breezes through clever tongue-twisters about boxing (“The one hit will Kostya Tszyu ya like Zab Judah”) and showboats his way through a bar referencing Anna Kournikova, Casanova, and Gorgonzola.
The real star of the show, however, is the Purist, whose lush, sample-heavy production infuses this drug-hazed world with psychedelic color and energy. The producer, who has collaborated with Action Bronson, Freddie Gibbs, and Danny Brown, spent his early years buying and flipping rare records to producers looking for fresh samples. He brings that same crate-digging approach to White Girl Wasted, pulling samples from a string of ultra-obscure and ungooglable songs spanning genres and continents. The woozy funk beat on lead single “Barz Simpson” conjures a seamy, smoky, post-disco world where Sonnyjim, MF Doom, and Jay Electronica can run wild. Doom’s posthumous verse is deservedly the main draw, his throaty bars packing philosophical insight and street violence into dense little rhymes. But the other two don’t pull any punches, stacking up rhymes and references like it’s the Jenga World Championship.
Other high-profile collaborators add their charms. “Doc Ellis”—which features production by DJ Premier—keeps the nostalgia going with record scratches and shoutouts to “authentic hip-hop” set to thrusting bass notes and an ominous piano line that recalls the work of DJ Shadow. The hallucinatory dazzle of “Does Mushrooms Once” comes via a Madlib beat, itself sourced on a four-day, shrooms-fueled excursion through Madlib’s hard drive.
The clever interstitial samples throughout the record—a snippet of Paris Hilton’s court confession, Leo DiCaprio’s quaaludes sales pitch from The Wolf of Wall Street, a Joey Diaz spoken word piece about hunting for cocaine in a hotel toilet bowl—tie everything together into one contiguous pop-culture drug binge. Even the weakest cut—“999,” featuring Lee Scott and Milkaveli—has some memorable rhymes (“I turn up in a MAGA hat and Kaepernick sweat”) to go with the Purist’s slinky, irascible flute-and-drums beat.
The album’s 20-minute runtime keeps things from flagging, and the occasional lyrical clunker (“Life’s a bitch I ain’t have no rubber but I stuck my dick in”) barely registers. It would have been tempting, especially with the high-profile collabs, to cram in as much material as possible, illustrating the depth and breadth of these prolific UK rap veterans’ work over the past decade. But, like the dealers who populate their music, the Purist and Sonnyjim recognize the value of giving you just enough of the good stuff to leave you wanting more.


200 Years is comprised of Six Organs of Admittance's Ben Chasny and Magik Markers' Elisa Ambrogio. Together they draw on the quieter echoes of their other projects to create a charming new hybrid.

200 Years

Music fans like to engage in speculative match-making, imagining what one distinctive artist might sound like in collaboration with another. In real life, of course, such collaborations have a notoriously checkered history. Yet there are still instances when the artists in question present a match too tantalizing to resist, and 200 Years is one such example. The duo is comprised of Six Organs of Admittance's Ben Chasny and Magik Markers' Elisa Ambrogio, and together they draw on the quieter echoes of their other projects to create a charming new hybrid.
It helps that Chasny is an old hand at just this sort of collaboration, and a bit of a chameleon besides. In addition to his gigantic Six Organs of Admittance catalog, he has been a member of noise rock troupe Comets on Fire and improv units Rangda and Badgerlore, and his endlessly creative guitar work has been a welcome presence everywhere it has turned up. Each has served as a touring musician for the others' main gig, and Chasny and Ambrogio previously collaborated with Mouthus' Brian Sullivan in the noise-drone Basalt Fingers, but there is nothing from that trio that anticipated the hushed, song-based style of 200 Years.
The biggest surprise on 200 Years is Ambrogio and the gentle, almost demure performances that she delivers throughout the album. Though her work with Magik Markers has usually been distinguished by the wide-ranging ferocity of her vocals, there have been glimmers of her quieter side on such studio albums as BOSS and Balf Quarry. Still, it is unexpected to hear her sing so softly at such length, with her voice providing a natural foil for Chasny's predominantly acoustic guitars. At times she recalls the solo work of Barbara Manning or Lois Maffeo, a fact that would be astonishing to anyone only familiar with Ambrogio via one of Magik Markers' feral live recordings.
Consisting almost entirely of voices and guitars, there is an ageless quality to 200 Years. The album is bookended by its two most immediately mesmeric songs, "Wild White" and "More Than Alive", both of which are sturdy, melodic gems that could seemingly translate into any idiom. Here they are given the simplest possible treatment, riding along only on the interplay of Ambrogio's voice and Chasny's expertly filigreed guitar lines, the production so intimate that it feels like eavesdropping on a private conversation.
Elsewhere, as on "Partin Wayz" or "Thread", the duo adds discreet electric guitar effects or a quietly droning harmonium to the mix, always with the lightest of touch. None of these effects will shock those familiar with Chasny's previous work, and in its drowsier patches 200 Years can seem to be merely a Six Organs of Admittance tape with female vocals placed overhead. Which is hardly a bad formula in itself, but it might disappoint those hoping for more in the way of improvisational fireworks. On "Bees" Ambrogio does deliver what sounds like a front porch version of her Magik Marker lyrical cascade, with her words casually spilling out just as quickly as she can enunciate them.
The most impressive aspect of 200 Years, especially considering it as the debut of a new collaboration, is its overall aura of cool confidence. Chasny and Ambrogio are clearly two talented musicians with a wide variety of tools at their disposal, yet to their credit they don't feel the need to try and show every trick at once. Instead they show an innate sense of trust in one another and in this resonant collection of songs, secure in the knowledge that this should be plenty.


The art-pop musician’s latest EP is a bleary, semiconscious rush that invites you to get lost inside it.

QWERTY EP

According to the credits, Saya Gray recorded the bulk of her new EP, QWERTY, on her floor. It's easy enough to imagine: Gray sprawled in a tangle of machinery, plucking strings and smashing buttons, funneled into a pinpoint focus that opens back up into deep, irreverent play. On her 2022 debut LP, 19 Masters, Gray embraced the gloss of pop while letting many of its rules soften. She played inside a soft-focus field that called to mind Nilüfer Yanya’s PAINLESS or Frank Ocean’s Blonde, scattered pieces occasionally congealing into patterns and then disintegrating again. On this 17-minute follow-up, she zeroes in on disintegration. The broad strokes of verse and chorus, anticipation and pleasure and denouement, seem to bore the hell out of Gray by this point. Rather than tensing and releasing in a recognizable narrative flow, QWERTY’s delights wash over you in currents. Forms crystallize and dissolve without fanfare. QWERTY lets the bottom drop out of an already loose songwriting approach, defecting from convention in favor of a bleary, semiconscious rush.
Across QWERTY, Gray dials up the harsher edges of her bricolage. She sends agile drum and bass breakbeats skittering across dusty piano loops on “;),”  while a driving post-punk drumbeat spikes the adrenaline behind her lithe, cascading vocals on “PREYING MANTIS !” Gray’s brother Lucian steps in to play guitar solos throughout the EP, and on certain tracks, like “ok FURIKAKE,” he steps firmly into nu-metal territory, playing the kind of hot, distorted riffs that sound like they spill out of a dinged six-string held in place by a flame-pattern strap. These blunt gestures abrade the light touch of Gray’s vocals in thrilling contrasts that spur the music forward. Instead of drawing momentum from lyrical narrative or recognizable song structures, which are all but absent except in gasps, Gray runs the engine of her music on the friction between unlike elements. Those System of a Down fretboard chugs crash into a gossamer R&B line delivery and launch the whole absurdist machine toward the horizon.
Even at its brisk length, QWERTY contains enough space for you to get lost inside it. And for Gray, lost is one of the most fun places you can be. Even her voice shakes loose from its center. Rather than play narrator or act as a guiding thread through the chaos, Gray takes the opportunity of the whirlwind to try on new selves. The voices that fly through “PREYING MANTIS !” are manipulated to the point where it sounds like Gray might have invited another singer or two onto the record, but it’s all her, trying on different personas atop one of the record’s only graspable grooves. “I can make your dust turn to sparkles,” she promises in what could be a mission statement for this whole thing: scraping up refuse, making it shine.
That's not to say it's all fun. The psychedelic meditation “ANNIE, I SING FOR..” offsets the more whimsical freefalls with some gravity. “This song was like my bargain with grief,” Gray explained, and the weight comes through in glimpses: the spare acoustic guitar flickering over a bruised bass tone, the devastating slices of lyrical clarity. “Beg the bullet to make an exception,” Gray sings in an airy register, and then the song peels away to just the guitar, and her voice returns coarsened and corroded: “Is there another side to suicide now? I think I’m finding out.”
QWERTY skips through moments of bewildered levity and dives into opaque, numbing despair, and Gray never balks at the distance between the two. The further you get from yourself, the more that chasm between extremes narrows into a hairline crack. That seems to be the spot Gray vaults toward: the displacement of herself as singular authority, the obliteration of the ego driving the train. From a high enough vantage, all the proportions that govern the ground go out the window. With QWERTY, Gray climbs a little higher still.


This 26-song compilation surveys the brief period, between 2007 and 2009, when the Harlem rapper remolded rap in his wavy image.

Wave Pack

Max B grew up in a Harlem apartment building, a few floors beneath Cam’ron. When he was still a teenager, he was locked up on a robbery charge. He came home eight years later, in 2005, to a Harlem that Cam had refitted with after-market Range Rover paint and furs that looked like Easter decorations. Cam hooked Max up with Jim Jones; Max rapped with Jones and wrote for him; his own music quickly emerged as some of the strangest and most irresistible rap that New York had produced in the new century.
On September 21, 2006, a man was shot and killed during a botched robbery in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Max was alleged to have helped plan the heist and was charged with murder. He sat in jail for months until the summer of 2007, when Max sold his publishing to Jones to pay his bail. Once out, he began writing and recording at a delirious clip. Two summers later, in 2009, he was found guilty on nine of 11 counts. In September of that year, he was sentenced to 75 years in prison.
Wave Pack, a 26-song compilation released by EMG last week, functions mostly as a survey of Max’s work in the period between his release on bail and his 2009 conviction, songs which he had released nearly as soon as they were recorded. (Five of the tracks compiled here are taken from Vigilante Season, the album Amalgam Digital issued in 2011.) The effect is to create an immersive 101-minute block that includes none of Max’s formative work, inasmuch as Max has formative work: more than any of his New York contemporaries, he seemed to have been beamed in fully formed, from a wavier place. Most of the songs here have been smartly remastered, in a way that makes them clearer and more punishing but retains the atonal muddiness that’s central to his aesthetic.
As Guru said, it’s mostly the voice: Max’s vocals are often drowned in distortion and/or doubled until they sound like he’s singing through a breathing machine. Together with the producer Dame Grease, he built a style that imagines lullabies filtered through hell, or at least through a cell block.  There are hints in Max’s catalog of the Auto-Tuned pop-rap that dominated radio in the late ’00s (for an example, see Vigilante Season’s “Baby I Need More,” which is not included here) but for most of this 2007-09 period, he was mutating the sounds of early-’00s New York street rappers like 50 Cent into something both grimier and poppier. Listening to Max feels like being on downers in your most expensive clothes. Everything is pained; he sounds as mournful recalling “very nice girls” on “Porno Muzik” as he does lamenting the injustice of his verdict (from “Lord Is Tryin’ To Tell You Something”: “I’m innocent! Wasn’t even there”).
While it skews toward songs from the latter half of his brief period of freedom, Wave Pack still functions as a near-comprehensive primer on Max’s sound. There are the acidic hits from his beloved San Diego sessions (“Try Me,” “Blow Me a Dub”) and playful taunts from his series of Public Domain tapes. And save for one verse from Mak Mustard, Wave Pack smartly eschews features. Max was a prolific collaborator—his mixtapes with French Montana are famous, and even those pale in comparison to his work with the late Stack Bundles—but the best road into his world is exposure therapy, letting the wave wash over you.
Wave Pack opens with two new songs: a shimmering bit of funk called ”Phenomenon” and “Run Homeboy Run,” which under different circumstances might play as a defiant first-day-out dispatch. (It is an unbelievable feat of tonal control to describe a 75-year sentence as a judge throwing you an elbow, and then to rap that line cockily through a jail phone.) Last summer, Max announced that his sentence has been reduced, and that he could be released some time in 2021. He’ll return to a rap industry that has never successfully recreated him, despite the traces of his DNA that can be found in many rappers who have debuted in his absence. But in revisiting Max’s music, you find that it’s harder to draw direct lines of influence than it is to see his work as something mostly alien, ahead of its time but mostly unconcerned with time in the first place.


After a decade-long pause, Jaime Brooks revives her Elite Gymnastics project. The record feels like an elegy for a time when the internet provided refuge for misfit kids seeking out like-minded souls.

snow flakes 2022

“Things change.” That’s one of the first refrains on snow flakes 2022, the debut album from Jaime Brooks’ experimentally minded pop project Elite Gymnastics, and while it’s delivered with bleary-eyed sincerity, there’s an additional layer of winking meta-commentary. Like a few others on the album, the heartrending breakbeat-pop opener, “(i always cry at) regenerations,” is a reworked version of a much older recording, which Brooks and collaborator Viri Char have given new life and brought into a new context.
Things have changed a lot since the last time Elite Gymnastics was regularly releasing music. Ten years is a long time even if you aren’t grappling with the dissolution of a close creative relationship, as Brooks was after the departure of the group’s original member Josh Clancy; it’s a lot of time to reconfigure your orientation to yourself and the world around you. That snow flakes 2022 begins with “(i always cry at) regenerations” feels purposeful. Elite Gymnastics’ music—even at its most frenetic—was always reflective. Returning to the project, she looks inward again, mulling what it means for time to relentlessly march on.
What Brooks has maintained over the years is the willingness to dig deep and share all of herself over the most colorful pop songs. At turns self-lacerating, hopeful, fragile, and poignantly nostalgic, the songs on snow flakes 2022 are intimate and earnest. Splatter-painting imagistic memories and dizzying inner monologues, songs like “tutti in bagno” reflect on human relationships and the vulnerability required for even the most basic connections. Over vaporous synth arrangements and slow-motion breakbeats, Brooks sings fragmented thoughts that one might utter in thrall to a new crush. At points, the album feels like an inventive update of the genre-blurring freneticism that powered Elite Gymnastics the first time around, deliberately echoing the teetering chaos of the sample-laden early songs. But part of what makes snow flakes 2022 so affecting is the way she peels back the layers: On “here, in heaven,” she and Conrad Tao look back to a series of fuzzy shoegaze-pop tracks and crack them open, foregrounding a gentle piano line and a vocal line about the painful interpersonal dynamics involved in love. It’s simple and direct but packed with real emotion—the sort of economy and incisiveness that the best pop music strives for.
The record’s five-and-a-half-minute centerpiece, “snow flakes,” condenses the spirit of Elite Gymnastics into a devastating meditation on both the value and the pitfalls of nostalgia, looking back on the past but never too fondly. Over shape-shifting dance beats, Brooks sings of listless days lying in a basement, smoking bad weed, and listening to records by fellow artists who inhabit the netherworlds between pop music and grandiose ideas, like Jim O’Rourke, Xiu Xiu, DJ Sprinkles, and more. On Twitter, she said the explicit references to those records were meant to “conjure an image of the file-sharing era,” a time when boundaries between musical forms felt blurry and the music internet was roiling with potential energy. There was a sense that anything could happen—that new, unheard sounds could emerge any day from somebody cloistered in their bedroom in a far-flung corner of the world. Those were the circumstances that produced Elite Gymnastics in the first place, and these new songs and versions are in part a response to the feeling that that era is long gone. Due to the samples woven into much of Brooks’ early work under the Elite Gymnastics moniker, she wrote on Tumblr, it’s likely that she’ll never be able to upload some of those songs to DSPs.
As a result, “snow flakes” and the record as a whole function as an elegy for a time long passed, as well as a fond memory of it, when the internet was a refuge for kids stuck at home, finding their people through listening to weird music on the internet. It’s always easy to look back and dream of better days—which snow flakes 2022 does in places—but the beauty of the record is that its very existence proves that these spaces still exist. On the record’s closing track, “chloe 4-ever,” the Cincinnati-based artist Chloe Hotline sings about the virtues of perseverance and slowly becoming the person you want to be, her voice weighed down by the knowledge that such a process takes a lifetime. And while yes, things change, there will always be an audience for this kind of music for seekers and lonely dreamers, made up of listeners who feel the same way.


Indie rock vets follow the disappointing Summer Sun with an expansive, ambitious record exploring every style in their repertoire, and a few new ones, too.

Yo La Tengo: I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass

Many Yo La Tengo fans suspected the band's best days were behind them after Summer Sun. Even the title was a bummer. In my mind I saw it as Setting Sun, and later thought of Around the Sun, both of which brought to mind autumn twilight, a slow fade into darkness, and the onset of a deadening winter. And while the music wasn't terrible (and had at least an enjoyable ambience), it sounded like it came from a band that was locked into something-- like Yo La Tengo had found a measured style they could tweak until they got bored of the band and called it quits. "If this is truly the next step in Yo La Tengo's move toward some abstract concept like artistic maturity," Eric Carr wrote in his Pitchfork review, "I don't think I want to stick around for the conclusion."
Hearing their newest record, I'm hoping Eric hasn't left the building. From the opening bass growl of "Pass the Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind", it's a new morning on planet YLT. Right off, Georgia Hubley and James McNew are thriving on a riff and Ira Kaplan has his meanest distortion pedal out of hock kicking up clouds of noise because he can. And I'd forgotten how cool he can sound when singing. Here he's Joe Walsh bragging about a fully stocked medicine cabinet and the processing of his voice is perfect, with flanged midrange to accentuate his knowing calm. But Yo La Tengo wouldn't truly be back if they stayed in one place, and the following "Beanbag Chair" is a complete 180, a cuddly piano-driven ditty with velvety harmonies that wants nothing more than to find its way onto a prospective girlfriend's mixtape.
And that's the story here. Yo La Tengo have always sounded more in love with music than pretty much any indie band going, and they've let their diverse interests settle into a comfortable and productive place conducive to growing good songs. Everything they've done well in the past is found on here somewhere, even a couple of the gossamer mood pieces that previously threatened to smother their career like a damp wool blanket. An album of songs like "I Feel Like Going Home" might be trouble, but here it sounds just fine: There's lovely and subtle processing behind the piano and violin, and Georgia Hubley's voice has become a remarkably supple instrument. It's a real trick when you have her limited range to avoid sounding distant and bored, but completely inhabits her leads. The jaunty "The Weakest Part" hits the same sweet spot. It could be a nice Belle & Sebastian song, with its bouncy piano, easy harmonies, and taut construction.
The production is simple but not minimal. It feels overtly "classic" more than anything, with arrangements and instrumentation deliberately plucked from a wide range of rock and r&b sides from the past half-century. The horns backing James McNew's and Kaplan's falsettos on "Mr. Tough" are ladled from Memphis soul stew, punctuating the playfully phrased dancefloor challenge to a bully. "The Room Got Heavy", with its bongos and Martin Rev organ, is part skuzzy 70s-NYC racket, but Hubley humanizes and prettifies the drone and turns it into something approaching a song. The long instrumental "Daphnia", probably inspired by Yo La Tengo's now substantial movie-scoring side career, is more engaging than it has any right to be. It's just a guitar plucking a couple notes over and over while some crackly sound effects rustle in the background, and a creepy piano line ghosted from a John Carpenter score. And then, the scrappy "Watch out for Me Ronnie", with Kaplan half-yelling through a busted microphone, sounds like a lost Nuggets classic having a drink with the closing theme from "WKRP in Cincinnati".
Yes, "Black Flowers" is underwritten and drab, and "Songs for Mahila" is pretty enough but just sort of floats out the window, but hey, there are 15 songs and 77 minutes of music here, and it's not a perfect record. But rather than sounding overstuffed, I Am Not Afraid of You... sounds like a double album in the 70s sense, a chance for the band to stretch out and try everything in their repertoire even if the end result is a little shaggy. Really, this kind of committed and sincere musical sampler is the most natural place in the world for Yo La Tengo to be, but it wasn't clear if they'd ever find their way back.


The fourth LP from the tireless, master technician from Long Island stays making the case for Marciano as a vicious, creative, and vastly underrated MC.

Rosebudd’s Revenge

In professional terms, Roc Marciano comes from nowhere. This website’s review for his staggering 2010 debut, Marcberg, refers to him as “a rapper associated with Busta Rhymes’ Flipmode Squad,” a descriptor that was barely reductive at the time. Roc Marciano the person—that would be the 39-year-old Rakeem Calief Myer—comes from Ed Koch’s New York, a place that informs his work by way of syntax, slang, and a catalog of grainy samples that sound like they were lifted out of rainwater. It gave him train-rattling drums, too, but lately he’s been stripping those away.
The character that Marci has created on wax, the one with Isaac Hayes shades and Kevin McHale-colored fishscale, has been everywhere: Burkina Faso, Venezuela in his best dress clothes, chubby on a sunny beach, his gun in reach. Rosebudd’s Revenge, the long-awaited proper follow-up to 2012’s Reloaded, carries each piece of his style toward the extreme, which makes this his most confounding, and maybe his most singular work to date.
Impressive as it is on a formal level, Rosebudd’s Revenge also raises interesting questions about the inner workings of Marci’s mind. On “Gunsense,” he raps: “Motherfucker, this is art, you can’t just pick this apart/This not a hobby, this is therapy.” Those lines, defiant as they are, would be unremarkable coming from any number of rappers. But Roc Marciano records seldom feel like confessionals, at least in any recognizable sense; you don’t picture a pimp slumping into his therapist’s couch to talk about how flying in shooters from Jamaica makes him feel.
Marci’s trafficking in something more circuitous than a linear line from trauma to psychic baggage. Unlike his longtime collaborator, Ka—who appears here on the excellent “Marksmen,” and whose own solo work also explores just how lean New York can sound—Marci doesn’t write in monologue. Instead, he tends to stack images on top of one another, building it higher and higher until it can scrub blood off of Nikes or get the mink out of storage. See “Already,” where he raps, “Mahogany woodgrain all in the five-speed/Silk lay on me, pray for me/Eight million stories in the naked city/The humidity—it made the titties oil.” Later on the same song, he says that his jeans fit him like Springsteen, that his shoes cost as much as an MF DOOM verse, and “Fans demand new work, but I’m a man of few words.”
In each and every case, the point of view is slippery enough that you’re never quite sure who the speaker is, how literally a line should be taken, and whether its connection to subsequent lines is superficial, deeply important, or altogether non-existent. You don’t need to answer any of these questions to appreciate Marci’s Technicolor virtuosity, to follow him to murder scenes in Wichita (“Pimp Arrest”) or to Israeli hotel rooms (“Better Know”). But answering them might help to bridge the gap between Rakeem Myer and Roc Marciano—to see which of his too-vivid details are things he aspires to and which he sees as necessary evils.
As a writer, Marci’s gift is his ability to make evil seem impossibly slick; on “Burkina Faso,” he ends an armed robbery by telling his victim, “Keep the Dunks, I’m not a hipster,” then heads home and listens to Michael Bolton in the jacuzzi. Rosebudd’s Revenge isn’t as seamless as Marcberg or Reloaded, suffering from some fidelity issues and perhaps being a bit back-loaded, but it’s endlessly, almost impossibly entertaining. Even as he approaches middle age, Marci remains one of rap’s most brilliant stylists, the kind of artist who can make you wear out your rewind button despite being old enough to remember when you could wear out a rewind button.
Maybe the most aspirational line on the record is: “I’m just having fun with this, I live in comfort.” For all the death threats, all the cartoon luxury that Marci rattles off with a sneer, the underlying truth is that he’s a master technician who’s worked tirelessly, for years on end to hone an unmistakable style as a rapper, producer, and auteur. Maybe the most peaceful thing he can imagine—the beach where he can get chubby, as it were—would be fading back into the ether, content to know that after years of obscurity, he became one of the greatest, most influential rappers of the decade.


Gwenno Saunders used to front the girl-group the Pipettes. Y Dydd Olaf, her solo debut, is a record about the importance of preserving cultural identity in order to resist corporate death, and on it she establishes herself as a visionary of synth-pop moods and textures.

Y Dydd Olaf

Back in 2000, Super Furry Animals' Mwng became the first Welsh-language album to get into the UK Top 20. It's still the only one to ever dent the charts' upper reaches. There are almost a million Welsh speakers in the UK, but Welsh-language music struggles for recognition outside of Wales. At worst, it's treated as a novelty, a fate that you can only hope doesn't befall Cardiff-born Gwenno Saunders' debut solo album, reissued this week on Heavenly after its initial appearance on local label Peski last year.
Y Dydd Olaf is named for Welsh author Owain Owain's 1976 sci-fi novel in which world-conquering robots turn humans into clones. Nine of its songs are in Welsh while the closing track is in Cornish, which is supposedly the primary language of around 600 people. Saunders used to front kitsch girl-group the Pipettes, which she recently dismissed as "playing a role that had already been written." Y Dydd Olaf also plays into an entrenched role—the gentle Welsh-language pop revolutionary set out by the likes of SFAs and Gorky's Zygotic Mynci—but it's a natural fit for Saunders, who establishes herself as a visionary of synth-pop moods and textures.
Owain's original story is confined to the title track and "Fratolish Hiang Perpeshki", which isn't Welsh, but the nonsense words that his characters start spouting when cyborg forces corrupt their minds. Owain's protagonist, however, retains his individualism by writing diary entries in Welsh, which stops the robots from getting inside his head. Saunders uses that concept to underpin a record about the importance of preserving cultural identity in order to resist corporate death—which in turn, only a relatively tiny audience will actually be able to understand. English notes accompanying the album translate songs that explore the artist's role in a downtrodden society, and the way that technology gives misogyny yet another platform, which compounds the problem of sexism in minority cultures that still promote traditional gender roles. Saunders confronts Cardiff's unimaginative civic planning and highlights the dependable march of nature, weighing up the clash between old and new worlds.
For those without crib notes or a native ear, the idea of language-as-protector shines through in the intimate soundscape that Saunders creates along with her producer husband (and Peski boss) Rhys Edwards. Her palette is kosmische, recalling the likes of Stereolab and Can, but her soft-edged synths, intermingling with field recordings from Cardiff Bay, makes her evocation of space domestic and comforting, like a transmission from a house party on the moon. She has a tendency to stick to one song structure: her languid take on that gorgeously hushed language sits atop an insistent guitar or synth part that spirals somewhere heavenly in the chorus.
The magic, though, is in the spellbinding tones she weaves throughout. The piano on opener "Chwyldro" (revolution) sounds bent and worn, and guides out Cornish closer "Amser" (time). "Fratolish Hiang Perpeshki" sounds like a forlorn death disco for Owain's doomed population. "Stwff" starts with a bright piano recalling the swirl of a French carousel, or Nino Rota's sweeter film scores, though it comes to feel as disquieting as the drowned lounge band swing that underpins "Calon Peiriant" (the heart of the machine).
On "Stwff", a song about growing up and learning how to fit in, Saunders sings (in Welsh): "I can only apologize for feeling the frustration/ Young and ambitious in a minority culture/ I joined the middle but it didn't really impress me." Her treatise on the importance of staying true to your identity finds extra weight in the fact that she tried to live another way and came back, shaken up by the loss she felt during her pop outing. Y Dydd Olaf is a crucial minority language record, but Saunders' beguiling melodies and execution also make it one of the best British debuts of 2015.


Though its many guest vocalists can be distracting, the Houston-born musician’s debut album presents a strong argument for the drummer as a modern bandleader.

Chris Dave and the Drumhedz: Chris Dave and the Drumhedz

Chris Dave and the Drumhedz

The final two songs on Chris Dave’s debut album present a vivid argument for the drummer as modern bandleader. After a couple of minutes of the psychedelic “Lady Jane,” the Houston-born musician’s stickwork explodes, scattering percussive shrapnel all over the track before he takes command and slows the song to a stuttering halt. And on the space-jazz-influenced “Trippy Tipsy,” Dave’s rocket-fuel drumming lends momentum to celestial sax riffs. Together, they showcase the man behind the drum kit as the lead musical voice. But it’s telling that those two songs are instrumental affairs, because the 13 tracks that precede them are heavy on guest vocalists, to the point where Dave becomes cast as a backseat presence on what should be his journey.
Make no mistake, Dave’s credentials are fully in check. Drumming since the age of three, he’s subsequently played with D’Angelo and John Legend, while in the recording studio he’s contributed to Grammy-winning albums by the Robert Glasper Experiment (Black Radio) and Adele (21). Dave’s connections and reputation have allowed him to pack his self-titled debut with guests who roll with Kendrick Lamar (Top Dawg Entertainment’s Inglewood connection SiR and the singer Anna Wise), hip-hop turntable icon Jazzy Jeff, renowned underground MCs Phonte Coleman and Elzhi, and even former Timbaland collaborator Tweet. But the relationship between guests and hosts isn’t even. The sheer number of voices, which is around 50 once you factor in musicians, threatens to muffle Dave’s smart and soulful playing.
When the vibe is stripped down, the project works best, but it often feels like slogging through molasses to get there. Track six, “Spread Her Wings,” is exquisite: Bilal and Tweet’s sweet vocals are thoughtfully matched with Dave’s shimmering cymbals. “Who better than me to spend your whole lifetime?” croons Bilal at the song’s apex, before Dave’s drum kit erupts into a kaleidoscope of percussion. Crucially, as the song settles, you realize that it’s the drum work conveying the emotion.
That’s not to say the artists on the oversized roster of guests are clunkers. Anderson .Paak brings superfly swagger to “Black Hole” as he sings suavely about how “the cops gon’ bust me if my money too husky.” Phonte and Elzhi drop smart couplets over the clipped funk of “Destiny N Stereo.” Mint Condition’s Stokley Williams adds sultry slow-jam vocals to “Cosmic Intercourse.” (There is an overarching interstellar theme to the album.) But as each new voice emerges, Dave’s own role seems to minimize. It’s like a hip-hop producer’s solo album that ends up becoming defined by one or two stand-out guest turns—think of the way “Tru Master,” featuring Inspectah Deck and Kurupt, dominates Pete Rock’s Soul Survivor—rather than something that gels into a successful top-to-toe listening experience.
Curiously, the album almost seems to end with “Job Well Done,” which hooks onto Anna Wise and SiR’s back-and-forth over a dreamy groove embellished with lilting acoustic guitar. But as the track ends, the glorious “Lady Jane” and “Trippy Tipsy” emerge, sounding less like poignant codas than a hint of what might have been. Chris Dave’s accomplished chops demand that he should be the star of his debut—but too often he’s lost in the firmament.


Eight years after “Ima Read,” the club rapper’s debut album channels the ferocity of that breakout single across a maelstrom of different styles while keeping his central shit-talking identity intact.

LESS IS MOOR

The seed for Less Is Moor, the razor-sharp debut album from rapper Zebra Katz, was planted over a decade ago. The Jamaican-American artist born Ojay Morgan studied liberal arts at Eugene Lang College in New York, where he took drama classes, and, as one of the few black people ever in the room, was consistently typecast for roles. Morgan designed a rebuke in the form of his 2007 senior thesis, “Moor Contradictions,” a brashly playful and incisive commentary on the Moorish characters in Shakespeare works, delivered as a one-man performance through different black identities.
One of them was the sharp-witted Zebra Katz, a character who would create funny, off-the-cuff raps out of any subject the audience tossed out at him. After footage of the character picked up traction online, Morgan kept Katz alive by self-producing low-end-driven backdrops for his deep, hypnotizing flow. By 2012, Morgan had perfected the formula and forged a full-on queer cultural moment with “Ima Read,” a deadly ballroom cut picked up by Diplo’s Mad Decent label that remains the clearest vision of the Zebra Katz persona: club-ready, tongue-in-cheek, and perpetually willing and able to cut you down to size.
After a minimalist mixtape in 2013 and a collaboration and tour with Gorillaz in 2017, Morgan hunkered down in Berlin to reflect on the Zebra Katz character five years after his breakout, and to plot his debut album. The resulting, independently released Less Is Moor is an unflagging statement on the complexities of Katz’ personality, arriving on a maelstrom of industrial, drum’n’bass, and noise production. The club remains Katz’ sanctum, but here he relishes different styles, whether emotively singing over an acoustic guitar on the wistful “Necklace” or slowing his breakneck pace down to match an unnerving metronomic rhythm on the spacious “Lousy.” The restless ethos, winding between high-energy club gems and sawtoothed electronic interludes, seems to rid Morgan of inhibitions, allowing him to experiment with free rein.
Hearing Zebra Katz in his shit-talking element drives Less Is Moor’s most dynamic moments. On standout “In In In,” he traipses through his fashion credentials before adopting a Missy Elliott-style flow to make demands to the dancefloor, while sinister air horns and rolling drums from producer Tony Quattro feed his fire. The eerie, perfectly arrogant “Ish” injects Katz’s venom with humor: “Go off, fuck bitch/You don’t really know ish,” he raps in monotone over swells of distorted bass and anxious sirens. “First thing, own it/I’m the shit, you the piss.” It’s quintessential Zebra Katz: flexing, fanged, ready to throw clubgoers into delirium. Later he recruits London rapper Shygirl for the batshit “Lick It N Split,” where the two trade increasingly demented sex raps over gut-punching drums and carnivalesque synths from Sega Bodega. It sounds like a panic attack, but the giddy sense of humor throughout is like catching a buzz from a pair of extremely stoned friends.
With back-to-back club songs, Less Is Moor can fall into a routine even as it explores the varying extremes of Katz’ persona. He spits over a keening whistle on the repetitive deep cut “Sleepn,” and stays on a similar autopilot for “Been Known” despite its delightfully screwy, bass-heavy backdrop. But the album’s highs far outnumber its lows. Katz reels off a merciless freestyle on “Zad Drums,” a highlight with pummeling subterranean drums and an echoing horror-movie vocal. “I got so fuckin’ high last night I kicked myself out of Berghain,” he growls, like he’s telling a story at an after-the-club house party where anything feels possible.
That unbridled energy carries Less Is Moor and allows Katz to move wherever his curiosities allow, even in the direction of an indie ballad on “Necklace,” the album’s hushed centerpiece. “I keep on wishin’ I was next,” he sings in a gentle rasp, “Suffer through all of your sweet neglect/Took all my lovin’ for innocence.” It’s a bracing moment of respite between stark club tracks, revealing a vulnerability to the image of Zebra Katz that is both earned and unexpected.


Although the veteran metal quintet sounded newly invigorated on its last two albums, T**he Violent Sleep of Reason is easily the most organic-sounding Meshuggah album in over 20 years.

The Violent Sleep of Reason

Meshuggah’s first album in four years begins with a hushed one-two-three-four hi-hat count courtesy of drummer Tomas Haake. Unless you’re listening on headphones, you’re likely to miss it—the first subtle-but-tangible indicator of the human element Meshuggah made a conscious effort to recapture this time out. Although the veteran metal quintet sounded newly invigorated on its last two albums, 2008’s obZen and 2012’s Koloss, The Violent Sleep of Reason is easily the most organic-sounding Meshuggah album in over 20 years.
For the first time since the 1994 EP None, Meshuggah opted to record as a band, tracking all guitars, bass, and drums more or less simultaneously. For proper perspective on the significance of this decision, one has to understand how comically anal-retentive Meshuggah’s writing and recording process had become. For the majority of the band’s catalog, each member has worked separately at computer work stations located in adjacent rooms in the studio. Of course, that approach weighted the focus towards digital editing and composition while band chemistry took a backseat.
Over time, it even became customary for Meshuggah to enter the studio without having rehearsed, and with each member hearing the other members’ songs for the first time. Given the heightened energy of the last two albums, one would expect the shift to a traditional recording approach to pay off on Violent Sleep. Metal bands, alas, inevitably lose vitality as they age. Which means that Meshuggah are unlikely to ever match the unbridled thrashing passion of classic titles like 1995’s Destroy Erase Improve and 1998’s Chaosphere. They manage to come close this time—at least in spots.
On second track “Born in Dissonance,” for example, Meshuggah bring the song’s galloping groove to life so convincingly that it’s virtually impossible to listen without doing something physical—pumping your fist, banging your head, getting behind the wheel of a car. Unfortunately, “Dissonance” is one of only two songs on the whole album that are built out of driving grooves. The rest of Violent Sleep bears more of a resemblance to the stiff, plodding material on Meshuggah’s middle-period albums, 2002’s Nothing and 2005’s Catch Thirtythree.
After an encouraging start, Violent Sleep begins to get mired in tentative rhythms that hover and even grate rather than achieve the kind of acceleration that Meshuggah excel at when they choose to pick up the pace. At times, the bare-bones immediacy of the production even clashes with the downtempo vibe of the songs, some of which could have benefited from more of obZen’s ambience.
Haake, the band's chief lyricist, avoids explicit references to terrorism or religious fanaticism. But one doesn't have to read far between the lines to discern the contempt behind a staunchly atheistic song like “Stifled”—or to locate its context in current events when vocalist Jens Kidman barks about “Your self-avowed murderous God.../Your commands unheard underground/Where your voice will never resonate.../Your sleep no longer impermanent/Decaying matter now sums you up/Like all the lives you’ve taken/Now so are you retreating to dust.”
Haake’s point (and point of view) remains vague throughout the album. But the album title positions humanity at a point of collective spasm, as if “reason” and the forces that oppose it—blind religious fervor, most obviously—continue to lock in a deadly contest that leaves mass casualties in its wake.  The Violent Sleep of Reason galvanizes most when Meshuggah rise to the challenge of writing music that matches the urgency and global scope of its subjects. All too often, though, even as they’re captured playing together in a room for the first time in ages, Meshuggah sound a tad more comfortable than agitated.


The Russian electronic musician Kate NV’s sonic portrait of her native Moscow is surreal, otherworldly, and playfully inscrutable.

для FOR

The city of Moscow is 871 years old. Its first entry in the annals of history is as a minor outpost on the western edge of what would become Russia. Perhaps all great cities start as backwaters, but Moscow in particular has lived many lives, from “Third Rome” to workers’ paradise to late-capitalist playground. The contemporary version of Moscow—with its opulent cathedrals and enormous underground shopping malls—is a weird and wondrous historical crossroad. The Western imagination, at least the one informed by the wreckage of the Cold War, may not necessarily think of the Russian metropolis as magical or otherworldly. But listening to the Russian electronic musician Kate NV’s sophomore album, для FOR, an eccentric sonic love letter to her hometown, one gets the sense that the ambient rumble of a city can be made to seem, from the right angle, marvellously strange.
With для FOR, Kate NV (aka Kate Shilonosova) said her goal was to provide a score to her local stomping ground. That mission statement might suggest soundscapes or field recordings, but the album’s 10 songs are made of unusual materials—wet, fleshy bleeps; bubbly, liquid noise; a whole palette of supernatural synths—that make для FOR the most surreal album of electronic music I’ve heard this year. The entirety of the record was recorded in Shilonosova’s Moscow apartment, and however she sourced the sounds she used, a certain playful inscrutability informs all of для FOR: These songs don’t provide answers, just questions.
The very first noises of the album, on opener “yxo EAR,” elude conventional description: Viscous synthesizer notes floats alongside what might be arpeggiated whoopee cushions and human hums lacerated into sharp, angular shapes. There is a sense that the music is formed from a bewildering mixture of organic and synthetic parts. But для FOR never feels like a dip into the uncanny valley; its cyborgian aesthetic is surprisingly cuddly and comforting. This is especially clear on songs like “двa TWO,” where woodblock percussion intermingles with contorted human voices that are played like keys on  piano. What that sounds like is baffling and beautiful in equal measure: Burps, sighs, exclamations, and unclassifiable vocal utterances are blasted apart and stitched together into a rippling, freewheeling chord progression. There’s an uncommon sense of reverence and lightness to the album, too: On “кто WHO” robotic bird chirps are bathed in gorgeous sunbeams of synth, creating a pleasing blanket of alien sound.
The album’s cornucopia of outré instrumentation is only one part of what makes it feel special: There’s a warm, ambulatory flow that encourages not just relaxation but a curious imagination. Listening to it, I wondered what Shilonosova was seeing and hearing in Moscow as she crafted these unusual compositions: Was she wandering between the city’s noisy and baroque metro stations as she created the bleeps of “жук BUG”; did the chimes, whooshes of air, and chattering voices that populate the album come from a day at Gorky Park?
There is almost a painterly way to how Shilonosova organizes sound. More than that, each track feels like a self-contained world—an intimate and deeply odd cul-de-sac of noise. In 1975, the Portland, Oregon, musician Ernest Hood’s private-press album Neighborhoods attempted to capture the nuances of daily life in a familiar place. для FOR gives a similar peek into the richness of the everyday. Shilonosova’s corner of Moscow is bubbly and fantastical—a place where you want to live and explore every nook and cranny.


On the second album to result from a three-year collaboration between late electronic pioneer Mika Vainio and French composer Franck Vigroux, the most striking moments are also the most elemental.

Ignis EP

Between 2012 and 2014, French composer Franck Vigroux and the late electronic pioneer Mika Vainio generated a wealth of collaborative material. In live sessions and at Vigroux’s studio in the South of France, Vigroux’s electroacoustic experiments (which sometimes expand into other mediums, including performance) and Vainio’s relentless electronics intersected in a searing place. In 2015, two years before Vainio passed away, they released a collection of these tracks as Peau froide, léger soleil, a blistering album that conjured an atmosphere similar to the dystopian aesthetic Vigroux was concurrently exploring in his solo work.
Ignis is the second, and perhaps not the last, compilation of material from this two-year project. Some of the heaviness of Peau froide has dispersed on this release, but even where the sounds the pair generates have shed some weight, a resolute intensity remains. Its compositions move toward experiments in dynamic and presence that ultimately reconfigure the listener’s relationship to the basic sonic building blocks of that intensity.
The six tracks comprising Ignis are largely without traditional structure, and they vary in the textures and sounds they incorporate such that there’s never quite a unifying palette. In the case of so many other experiments based in live collaboration, a sense of the participants’ curiosity will provide a structureless outing with its internal logic. But the assertiveness with which Vainio and Vigroux navigate leaps in frequency, or from claustrophobic hiss to echoing expanse, indicates that these artists already know their way around this uneven ground—or at least are coolly unsurprised when the floor gives way beneath them.
The album’s opening track, “Brume,” introduces relatively gentle modulating tones that form a sound somewhere on the outskirts of minimal techno. Dread-suffused drones swirl in, trailing long shadows behind them. “Ne te retourne pas” follows a similar path of submersion, beginning with a pairing of high and low frequencies, then slowly filling the chasm between them with a churning mix of crackling and razor-edged prismatic sounds. Though the record goes on to incorporate more conspicuously harsh textures (on “Luxure,” for example, there’s a measured onslaught of violent mechanical noise), the silences that open up are just as essential and intentional here as the pulses of sound they punctuate.
These studies in absence allow detail to come to the fore; many of the most striking moments on Ignis are the most elemental (it’s fitting that the album’s title is the Latin word for “fire”). Delicate—but never precious—microtones feel like nothing more than dry wisps of electricity. A heavily vocoded vocal on “Un peu après le soleil” is a jarring, if illegible, evocation of language amid a field of near-total abstraction. When a melodic string sound enters at the tail end of “Luceat lux,” a faint hint of color threading in among grayscale texture, it feels like a revelation.
Concerned as it is with fundamental components and the spatial presence of sound, Ignis moves with ease between its emotional and sculptural impulses. As is often my experience with Vainio’s solo work, I find it impossible to listen to music that sounds this cold without reading dread, anger, negativity—and perhaps without experiencing fear at the strangeness of it all, something I’m fairly certain neither Vainio nor Vigroux, who produce and sustain these sounds at a deliberate, exploratory pace, felt.
Though they’re hardly the point, those dark sensations aren’t necessarily irrelevant; rather, they’re another set of elemental components among the many at play on Ignis. And over the course of these six tracks, a reshaping of our associations with such pieces occurs. This transformation coalesces in closer “Feux,” an epic that feels deliriously full after the experiments in restraint that precede it. Vainio and Vigroux’s path to maximalism is an uncommon one, a glowing flame aware of the singe left in its wake.


Turning toward improvisation and meditative minimalism, the Los Angeles singer and songwriter’s latest album seeks a release from rational thought. It sounds fluid, sonorous, and free.

Julia Holter: Something in the Room She Moves

Something in the Room She Moves

In early 2020, while Julia Holter worked on a relatively swift follow-up to her 2018 opus, Aviary, two complications arose. The first, a pandemic, you know all about; the second, a lockdown pregnancy—well, just imagine. The shift flung this once prolific singer-songwriter into a period of stops and starts. She stopped performing, of course, and mostly stopped writing songs; perhaps most gravely of all, she stopped reading medieval texts. She started preparing for motherhood, then stopped preparing—motherhood was here! When she finally started recording, exhausted, things often went awry: She would stop singing and start yawning, occasionally dozing at the controls. This was no reflection of the music, though it is true that Something in the Room She Moves dispenses with her usual song and dance, distilling its vexed creation into one long, languorous thought. Stop talking, it suggests, and start listening.
In the 13 years since Tragedy, her audacious, Euripidean debut, Holter has made contrasting demands of listeners. On one hand, her oeuvre has swung toward pop and back again. At the same time, she and her ensemble have charted a broader arc from intention to intuition. After the high-concept early entries—drawn from Hippolytus, from Gigi, the process she calls “remixing texts”—improvisation meandered to the core of Holter’s practice, shepherded by collaborators like bassist Devin Hoff and multi-instrumentalist Tashi Wada.
The Holter of Something in the Room She Moves sounds more determined than ever to renounce conscious authorship. The music—bubbly, nebulous, free—seems to have a mind of its own. The concept, if there is one, borrows the key principle of meditative minimalism: Reduce, reduce, and reduce to lift your spirit higher. Opener “Sun Girl” is the model in miniature, a sprightly little odyssey that could beguile a conservatory crowd but just as easily reduce—or indeed lift—a child to awestruck giggles.
As well as her own daughter, Holter dedicates the album to her late nephew, “a beautiful young human who loved to make art, to debate ideas, and was passionate about socialist politics.” On “Talking to the Whisper,” a moment of devastating brilliance, she draws out distraught pleas—“Heaven can’t take my love”; “Love can be shattering”—but the true climax is a cosmic, wordless breakdown summoning the ecstatic grief of Alice Coltrane’s Universal Consciousness. In her recent live score for Carl Theodor Dreyer’s film The Passion of Joan of Arc, Holter sought a language of unintelligible chants, including “syllables decapitated from their word context,” to reflect lead actor Renée Jeanne Falconetti’s fidelity to the inexplicable. “Talking to the Whisper,” and Something in the Room She Moves at large, employ a similar lyricism that, like Falconetti’s Joan, evades literal explanation in favor of communion with the sublime.
More readily apparent than any possible themes—motherhood, grief, love, early cognition—is Holter’s wish to evoke the “body’s internal sound world.” The music is fluid, sonorous, and unpredictable; in the middle of several songs, it briefly shuts down altogether. Pitch-bending synths, sparing percussion, and vaporous reverb suspend the songs in a sort of amniotic sac. Yet they pulse with such serene familiarity that, from inside, it feels odd to find them odd. We think of visceral music as gutsy and brash, but Holter has less interest in jolting your system than listening to it with a stethoscope: Hear the cellular rush; the mysterious currents; in “Evening Mood,” a genuine ultrasound heartbeat. Only on “Spinning,” the blissfully adrenalized nerve center, does she reach out to the world and absorb its electric energy.
This record’s closest relative in Holter’s catalog is the 2017 live album In the Same Room, which smelted brassy numbers like “Horns Surrounding Me” into a loungey, jazzy ooze. Casting off theatrical fineries, Holter set her melodies to music that offered questions rather than answers. Though crafted and produced with her usual perfectionism, Something in the Room She Moves feels similarly open-ended, as if preserved in its own potential. A song, in this setting, is not a final document but something to be dredged and excavated like an ancient ruin. The broodier style of composition, or decomposition, conspires with her tone of sing-songy dissociation to emphasize the disconnect between sound, meaning, observation, and whatever bewildering reality might lie underneath.
The longing that runs through all of Holter’s music is, in some sense, a desire to be liberated from the rational. Something in the Room She Moves luxuriates in that spirit of uncertainty; the title track, a magisterial highlight, uses the melisma of a Hindu devotional to evoke a sensation of hovering on the cusp of ecstasy. She has a knack for pinpointing pop melodies in the ether, then playing the vowels like slide whistles, rummaging deep in a word like “around” as if for a missing set of keys.
Having zigzagged between order and disorder, from operatic refinement to clamor and hubbub, Holter sounds happier now to present heady musings with childlike mystification. It’s a contented ambiguity reflected in her attempt to channel oxytocin, the love chemical, through continuous-pitch instruments: The Vangelis-style synths, portamento vocals, and fretless bass, from an agile Hoff, conjure the stuff of the in-between. Rather than choose the black or white keys, Something in the Room She Moves lets us flutter between the notes.


MIKE’s place in the vanguard of New York underground rap has invigorated him. It would be a stretch to call this album happy, but the atmosphere is undeniably warmer and more hopeful.

Disco!

MIKE likes to share new music on June 21 of any given year: Of the seven projects the New York rapper has released since his 2017 breakthrough May God Bless Your Hustle, four were released on the first day of summer. It’s unclear exactly what significance the date holds, but it marks MIKE as a creature of habit. He’s spent the past four years excavating his mind, using raps and soupy beats to sift through trauma and grief, particularly the loss of his mother a couple years ago. It’s as if each new drop is a timestamp of his emotional state, another ring on his tree. On his latest album, Disco!, MIKE finds something that’s eluded him for quite some time: acceptance. It would be a stretch to call this album happy, but the atmosphere is undeniably warmer and more hopeful. He’s no longer drowning in his emotions and wishing for a better tomorrow, as he was on 2020’s weight of the world and 2019’s Tears of Joy; he’s swimming toward the light on the horizon.
Getting there is still work. MIKE’s understanding of this delicate tug-of-war stretches deep into his catalog, but Disco! stands out by being his most confident album yet. Though the beats are another batch of layered sample collages, this time fully self-produced under his dj blackpower pseudonym, they soar more often than they seethe. Many of these songs bask in full-bodied arrangements: shimmering organs on “Aww (Zaza),” twinkling guitar strums and horn stabs fit for a family barbecue on “Leaders of Tomorrow (Intro)” and “Crystal Ball.” Some, like the winding “Endgame,” coax MIKE out of his usual mid-tempo flow to glide over piano keys and a muted drum loop. The beat feels determined to run him off the road, but he maintains his pace while balancing thoughts both sunny and bleak: “My obligation to the rhythm till my chest break.”
Some of these songs feel steeped in the same murky ambience as past projects (“alarmed!” is one of the most arresting songs he’s ever made), but MIKE’s rhythmic passion manifests in a firm self-awareness absent from his earlier work. He hasn’t exactly outrun his demons, but his place in the vanguard of New York’s underground rap scene has invigorated him. He’s as open about his hunger for respect (“You flexing just to stick out, I flex because of great genes”) as he is about his resolution to call his sister more often. The raps about his mother that close out opening track “Evil Eye” are delivered with a conviction that powers through the blurry vocal mixing. On “Aww (Zaza),” you can hear his smile as he declares, “Struggling? Hmm, nah, but I’m recovering.” His gains as a lyricist on Disco! represent the difference between conceptualizing a plan and executing it.
Even with the new steps he’s taken, MIKE still has a few emotional gut punches in store. Some happen so quickly that they don’t register until well after they’ve landed. “Sometimes I thought to take the losses as a gift/’Cause only death will show you how to live, right?” he says without breaking a sweat on “Leaders of Tomorrow.” It isn’t quite as pithy a bar as May God Bless Your Hustle’s “Hunger make you eat your words instead,” but it harnesses the blunt energy of MIKE’s earlier work to illustrate his perspective changing in real time. He’s not living in the past anymore.
“Endgame” opens with a vocal sample that neatly ties up the themes of the album: “How does one illuminate a dark, muddy sky? There’s only one thing left to do; you gotta ram at the darkness with your rhyme,” a woman’s voice says. MIKE’s sky has been overcast for a long time. Like frequent collaborator Navy Blue, he knows there are no shortcuts through the labyrinths of familial trauma and deteriorating mental health. But knowing when to punch through the fog instead of letting it settle around you is key to making it out the other side. In this sense, Disco! is a triumph. It’s less a singing-and-dancing, public reclamation of self than it is a silent disco, a reminder that introspection and consistency can break any curse.

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On this live album, based from a 2014 concert film, you can hear the Postal Service transform from an idea to a band.

The Postal Service: Everything Will Change

Everything Will Change

They might pal around with Huey Lewis now, but the Postal Service were once considered ahead of their time. Their collaboration, in which they sent each other digital files, is routine today but felt futuristic then, even though they relied on snail mail and not the cloud. Songs from their one and only studio album, 2003’s Give Up, were used by countless commercials and indie films striving to seem hip, lending an imprimatur of subcultural currency for a few years when, no kidding, bookish tenderness could seem almost radical. Nine years later, the album officially went platinum.
When Sub Pop reissued Give Up as an expanded, 10th-anniversary edition, the record’s winsome twinkle was undimmed, and the reunited trio—Death Cab for Cutie singer-songwriter Ben Gibbard, Rilo Kiley leader Jenny Lewis, and glitchy electronic producer Jimmy Tamborello— headed out to play in front of the adoring crowds that had swelled during their long absence. A concert film from that tour, 2014’s Everything Will Change, showed that far from being Friendster-age relics, these songs still resonated deeply, and they had more to say.
Everything Will Change, the live album that recently landed on streaming services, is an audio version of that concert film, captured over two nights at Berkeley, California’s outdoor Greek Theatre. The 2014 film, interspersed with lighthearted if mostly unrevealing interview footage, demonstrated that a decade-old band anchored by a guy on a laptop had turned, improbable though it may once have seemed, into a consummate live act. You can’t see Lewis playing electric guitar with her teeth here, and the goofy interludes with Gibbard shooting hoops at Barclays Center are definitely kaputt. But these 17-year-old songs have time-traveled again, coming back to us during an age of silent performance spaces. A belated afterthought of a live album can’t compete with a concert film, any more than a concert film can live up to the real deal, but as a document of transformation, the record more than succeeds.
The Postal Service’s most joyful song, “Such Great Heights,” is in a sense about the impossibility of capturing the moment, and then trying through technology to defy those limits. Gibbard attempts “to leave this all on your machine” and ends up being unsatisfied with the low fidelity; at the same time, computer wizardry allows Gibbard to sing the song’s breathlessly overlapping verses without pausing for air. Live shows, like live albums, also rely on technical sleight-of-hand, but the presumed presence of an audience, gathered in real time, is transformative. When the Postal Service do “Such Great Heights” on Everything Will Change, near end of their main set, Gibbard relies on pre-recorded backing vocal, but the interplay between fans and band—feverish handclaps, round of applause for the stabbing guitar solo—has an almost alchemical effect. “Up until now, it’s just been a number of records sold and this potential to be a real band that we never really achieved,” Gibbard says in the concert film. Everything Will Change documents the Postal Service being made real onstage.
What little evidence remains of their early gigs suggests that the rudiments of the Postal Service’s compelling live show were already in place during their months-long initial run through small venues. Lewis ramps up the drama with her screen-kid star quality —in the film, she refers to herself as Gibbard’s “foil”—while his regular mid-song moves behind the drum kit brings needed dynamism. Fast-forward to the shows presented on Everything Will Change, and both players were seasoned festival warriors. Tamborello, along with working his trusty laptop, also rifles between melodica and Vocoder-style singing; when his unprocessed vocal makes a rare, bashful entrance, on climate-change reverie “Sleeping In,” there are wild cheers. Touring multi-instrumentalist Laura Burhenn, of Omaha indie-folk band the Mynabirds, rounds out the mix with keys, vibraphone, and backing vocals, particularly crucial for the multi-part call-and-response of songs like the weirdly romantic prepper fantasy “We Will Become Silhouettes.” Each well-known song is punched up, reinvigorated, and stretched out for wider spaces.
These accomplished performances give new life to recordings that for so long lived mainly in headphones. Melancholy, uptempo songs like “The District Sleeps Alone” or “Clark Gable”—the latter is the one where Gibbard unforgettably sings that he wants “life in every word/To the extent that it’s absurd”—grow into noise-streaked dance parties, as if fellow sentimental robots Hot Chip crashed a New Order show. A slower, more textured song like “Recycled Air” turns gorgeously lush, Yo La Tengo ba-ba-bas draped in Stereolab electro-frippery. Best of all is the self-aware back-and-forth of “Nothing Better.” Gibbard, as the besotted lover who can’t admit that he’s been dumped, might be positioned as the protagonist here—“Who here has had their heart taken out of their chest and stomped on?” he asks, by way of introduction—but Lewis’s nonchalant delivery as she shreds his oppressive wedding-bell delusions is simply exquisite. Gibbard can’t help but break down, laughing.
A clever setlist helps. The lone cover, a masterful Postal Service-ization of Beat Happening’s “Our Secret”—described by Gibbard here as “the greatest band in the world,” with Lewis on drums—draws a connection to the Pacific Northwest indie-pop legends’ deceptively simple, conversational yet suggestive pop storytelling and the Postal Service’s own. The encore begins with a “‘Heroes’”ed-out take on what true fans know is the original Postal Service song, “(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan,” a collaboration between Gibbard and Tamborello’s Dntel project that foreshadowed their band.
Everything Will Change’s title phrase, the final refrain from utopian love song “Brand New Colony,” might’ve lodged itself in fewer heads than other Give Up lines, like “everything looks perfect from far away” or “your heart won’t heal right/If you keep tearing out the sutures.” But it hits hard as an encore-concluding, 8,500-strong audience singalong. Crowd participation can be cheesy, but listening to these en masse, near-a cappella voices, all holding forth about the inevitability of transience, it doesn’t feel that way.

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